Your Bitcoin Story

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In this episode, I chat with Kent Halliburton, the CEO and co-founder of SazMining, about how Bitcoin mining can actually help the environment. We dive into his unconventional path from rooftop solar to hydro-powered Bitcoin mining, the misaligned incentives in today’s mining industry, and why mining your own Bitcoin might be the most sovereign way to stack sats.

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00:00 - Intro
00:43 - Mining to Heal the Planet: Meet Kent Halliburton
07:23 - What is SazMining? Rethinking Bitcoin Mining as a Service
13:44 - Hydro, Solar & Clean Power: Building a Green Hashrate
18:41 - The Fiat Problem in Bitcoin Mining
24:26 - Why Retail Bitcoin Mining Was “Impossible”
29:19 - Pricing, Cycles & When to Buy ASICs
34:52 - Building a High-Trust Bitcoin Business
38:07 - The Roadmap Ahead for SazMining
41:00 - Hardware Lifespans & Efficiency Limits
45:46 - What Happens After Your Miner “Dies”?
48:40 - Final Thoughts & Where to Find Kent

Block height: 906966

#Bitcoin #Mining #BTC #Sazmining #Hydro #Freedom

G G (00:02.946)
What if mining Bitcoin could actually help the environment? What if it could turn waste energy into economic freedom and align incentives between everyday people and the planet? Tonight's guest believes it can and he's building a company to prove it. Welcome to Your Bitcoin Story podcast with your host Gigi. And on this episode, I'm joined by Kent Halliburth, the CEO and co-founder of SazMining, a company pioneering sustainable Bitcoin mining.

by connecting retail investors directly to hydro-powered mining in Paraguay. Kent's background is anything but traditional. From solar energy to building mission-driven Bitcoin businesses, he's seen firsthand how Bitcoin can reshape the global energy landscape. Under his leadership, SaaS mining is challenging the narrative that Bitcoin harms the environment and replaces it with one of the regeneration, empowerment, and sovereignty. Kent, welcome to the show.

Kent Halliburton (01:01.122)
Thank you. It's an absolute pleasure to be here.

G G (01:03.992)
Thank you for taking the time. as I mentioned to you just before we clicked record, I'm really looking forward to this one because mining is not a particularly deep topic that we go to on this podcast. But yeah, after Bob Burnett, I thought there would be no one better than Kent himself to come on and share some of your experiences. But before we dive deeper into mining and what SaaS mining is doing, can you share with us essentially how did you first discover Bitcoin?

Kent Halliburton (01:33.297)
yeah, it's a fun story. Well, I think to go back...

A lot of the areas of the sovereign individual sort of resonate with me as an individual. I grew up on a farm on the West Coast, being independent and having freedom was just part of my family DNA, let's say. And then in college, I did computer engineering with a focus on networking. I promptly abandoned that right after college and went into rooftop solar, which is focused on electricity sovereignty, right?

to produce your own energy off your roof. So it was, I think, I was predisposed to understanding Bitcoin when I finally gave it the time of day. I was living in the Bay Area actually from like 2008 to 2012 and during that time frame I definitely heard the name Bitcoin but never gave it the time of day, unfortunately, you common sob story that a lot of us have. But

G G (02:29.39)
Yep.

Kent Halliburton (02:32.141)
It wasn't until I was traveling, so I worked as an executive in the rooftop solar sector, publicly traded company, had a lot of responsibility, nine figure revenue, accountability, software accountability. We were acquiring companies and I was accountable for integrating them and got a bit burnt out and had saved enough money to fulfill a dream that I'd had as a child, which is to go

the world so I threw on a backpack for a couple years and traveled and I had some spare time I was in the sacred valley of Peru of all places sharing a house with a few other people and just you know following my nose down various curiosities on the internet and discovered Bitcoin and I could have quite grok it right away like I just had never studied money like the whole idea like what is money was just so foreign to me that it took me a very long time to really get my

G G (03:29.345)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (03:31.998)
head wrapped around it, I knew there was something there. And so by the end of 2015, I'd picked up my first Bitcoin and was well on my way. Although, you know, I had to do the typical stupid, go through the shitcoin mirror, house of mirrors, before finally making my way out and stumbled out and realized, no, this is all about Bitcoin. am I doing? So that was a bit of my Bitcoin story. So I got the 2017 bull run and the 2021 bull run. And it was during that timeframe that I joined up with

with SAS mining and now here we are another cycle later and SAS mining is starting to take off.

G G (04:08.211)
Yeah, no, amazing. We share the common shit coinery, like unfortunately a lot of people do, where we think there's going to be the next big Bitcoin and Bitcoin is a few hundred or a few thousand dollars and there's all these tokens which are like a fraction of a cent and always the greed kicking in, maybe I can make some more money than that. But then with the proof of work, and it takes a few years for me.

personally, it took like three close to four years for it to really click in and kind of differentiate the Bitcoin sovereign money with the shit coinery casino, which I think today it's kind of a little bit of a different landscape people. Like Bitcoin is the dominant force. Like people just go straight into Bitcoin and hopefully stick to Bitcoin. It's not like the 2017 cycle where it was ICOs left, right and center. But I guess like in all facts, they come and they go. But leaving that painful and very expensive

aspect of our lives in the background. So essentially with SADS mining, you mentioned you joined it. you weren't, this wasn't your brainchild, right?

Kent Halliburton (05:12.366)
No, no, it was not. the company had been around for about three years before I joined it. But it was a lot of, I think of it now as sort of a waltz through the wilderness where the founder at that time knew he wanted to be in mining, but didn't know what that meant. And so it started a podcast and networked and built a brand. And when I joined in 2021, the beginning of that year,

G G (05:23.203)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (05:40.576)
we were looking to raise some capital during the bull market conditions. And so that wound up being pre-seed capital because it wasn't enough for us to actually go build the self-mining operations that we were pitching to our investors. So as a result, the company made a pivot. He and I became the founders or I became the co-founder at that point. And we built what we now have delivered to the market. So very, very different direction the company was going in. mean, still mining related, but a very different

G G (05:46.403)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Halliburton (06:10.48)
niche in the mining sector.

G G (06:13.688)
Sure. So I guess some of the listeners now, they've been hearing SaaS mining, SaaS mining, but they're probably thinking, what is SaaS mining? So maybe can you kind of explain like TLDR about what is SaaS mining and essentially maybe how does it differ from traditional mining operations and others, so to say, outsource mining, which is out there, which I think there's quite a few options, a lot more than there were certainly a few years ago, maybe when you joined in 2021.

Kent Halliburton (06:40.972)
Yeah, yeah, think, well, the simple way I describe it is, know, taxis are kind of like what the hosted business model is, if you're familiar with that. And we've just brought Uber to the market. That's the simplest way of describing it. And what I mean by that is, in essence, we're software forward.

G G (06:52.344)
Yep.

Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (07:01.89)
business that is offering mining as a service. And so we do that by allowing people to purchase traditional Web2 style.

mining rig from our website, which we get shipped, deployed, and hashing to your account and your Bitcoin goes directly to your wallet. And that's all managed through a highly seamless UX experience so that people have that general web-to feel. And what's interesting about the approach is if you look at how much it costs to run a mining rig combined with how many sats it generates, we're offering clients about a 30

35 % discount to buying those sats on an exchange. our argument, and also clean powered, right? So I took that as a focus coming from my rooftop solar days as, hey, why not tie to clean energy here since it's the cheapest? And that's cheapest because it's often produced when people don't want it or in a location that they can't use it. So we tied ourselves to that as part of our brand promise. But if you look at it just purely economically, what we offer

G G (07:45.699)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (08:11.676)
is the ability for people to get more sats for their dollar. And what I see is we're building an alternative and Bitcoin native on-ramp for people to avoid the exchanges. And the exchanges are really our competition. And by the way, it winds up just being a better experience if you acquire sats the way Satoshi designed the network.

G G (08:15.223)
Hmm.

G G (08:32.59)
No, for sure. And I wanted to add when you were essentially listing the benefits, to me, the biggest benefit is not even just the discount, it's the, well, that is a good benefit. But I mean, the KYC free aspect, you're not like submitting your documents and tying your identity to those sats. Those essentially are free KYC sats. And of course, discount plays a nice role. So you mentioned, Kent, you kind of like to compare it to Uber. So my follow up question would be...

Like in Uber's case, Uber doesn't own the taxis, do you own, I mean the vehicles, but do you own the ASIC miners and the hardware or you connect miners with people that want to be essentially mining through their rigs? How does that work?

Kent Halliburton (09:15.308)
Yeah, the second.

Yeah, so it's your hardware, your serial numbers, your Bitcoin all the way through. And so how it actually works is you buy a mining rig from our website. We don't add any profit on those. It's just cost pass through. You sign up with a service fee plan to pay for your electricity and maintenance. And that's all baked into it. A dollar per kilowatt hour price that again is cost pass through. And then all the Bitcoin, when it's sent out, just a small

G G (09:21.271)
Mm-hmm.

G G (09:31.426)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Halliburton (09:46.322)
portion of that is split off for us for our management fee. So in essence, we take all the risk on the front end. We go source a site, find the rack space, make sure it's a compelling offer to our clients, and then we list and sell the hardware to our clients and get them racked and mining. So you can do all the things. You basically free up more time in your life. You don't have to go through that process yourself, which if you've ever tried to mine from home, we have many clients

G G (10:16.022)
You

Kent Halliburton (10:16.176)
that did and they're just like, oh man, just get rid of this equipment and let's go through SAS mining. It's worth it to pay this management fee so I can not have to deal with the headaches of my wife screaming at me because it's making too much noise in the basement or my electricity's too expensive or that I don't have to write a wire and almost burnt my house down. These are all things that genuinely we've heard from our clients.

G G (10:27.502)
You

G G (10:35.681)
Yeah.

No, for sure. some people think that Bitcoin mining is pretty simple. It's a plug and play like running a node or running one of the bit axes, but it's far off it. There are so many things. And then if a chip goes out and you need to change and replace it, it's lot of hassle and you constantly got to maintain them. And it's a very intensive thing. yeah, definitely that's something that I think a lot of people going into mining, they think, I'll save some money on.

maintenance fees and I'll do it myself. And then they quickly realized, wow, I bid off a little bit too much that I can chew off. So yeah, so I guess my next question would be Ken, how come Paraguay out of all places in the world, I guess you mentioned in the pre-recording that you are operating in other countries, but I think sales mining started off from Paraguay and then you kind of expanded to other regions. Is that correct?

Kent Halliburton (11:32.884)
Well, somewhat. That's really where we got off the ground was in Paraguay, but our first operation is in Wisconsin and we still have that. That was kind of our proof of concept that our business model was going to work.

G G (11:38.51)
Mm.

G G (11:43.554)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Halliburton (11:44.718)
just a single megawatt facility. And now we've got 12 megawatts expanded to 15 in Paraguay. We've got three megawatts, a little less than three megawatts in Norway. And actually we're scouting out an opportunity at the moment in Ethiopia. Not something that we're certain that we're going to do, but at the end of the day, our business model is highly scalable. What I mean by that is because we play a matchmaker role, we put a lot of emphasis on the opportunities we source for our clients. But once

G G (12:10.478)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (12:14.732)
bring those to market, our team is all remote and capable of interfacing with data centers all over the planet. Bitcoin being a global network really aligns well with our ability to work remotely in this fashion.

G G (12:32.43)
No, for sure. as you said, know, adaptability is key in this market, not being static and tied into one site or one country. And I guess do you use different renewable energy sources at different locations or it's all hydro or you're using, I don't know, with your background, maybe solar or I don't know, flared gas. I know in the US there's a lot of like mining sites that use that. What do you guys use? Do you stick to one renewable energy source?

Kent Halliburton (13:01.95)
Not intentionally, so because it really comes down to the data center operators that we partner with, what their power and their mining rigs with, what our promise to our clients is we're going to always be 20 % better than the network.

G G (13:08.59)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Halliburton (13:14.668)
That way, you know, if you're mining with us, you're helping to improve the carbon footprint of the network itself. But thus far, it's been all hydro. There's a smattering of wind and biogas on the grid up in northern Norway where we're mining. But that has just come about because hydro is a baseload renewable. You know, it doesn't have the uptime issues that solar and wind have. So it's easiest to partner with. And I do believe we'll be doing more with solar and wind in the future.

G G (13:39.874)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (13:44.622)
just right now there's just still so much low-cost hydro out there that it makes sense to focus on that at the moment and you know again Ethiopia what's pulling us there is also low-cost hydro.

G G (13:58.254)
With regards to hydro, you utilizing hydro dams or you're setting up your own hydro energy generation units on river streams? How does that go?

Kent Halliburton (14:13.196)
Yeah, so we're not doing the power generation or even constructing the data centers ourselves. What we go out and do is find somebody else that's done that, that basically wants to make a margin selling electricity and operating the hardware. A lot of times that turns out to be somebody that, let's say, they've gone out and generated 10 megawatts worth of consistent power from a hydro source. Well, maybe they've only got the capital to fill five megawatts of their facility with their own equipment.

G G (14:26.456)
Mm-hmm.

Kent Halliburton (14:43.12)
So they need somebody like us to be able to sell power to to monetize the extra power that they've got. Otherwise, it's just going to waste. So we play a pretty vital role there. So we don't own the infrastructure and we don't own the power generation, but we're very cautious about the data center operators that we partner with and the type of power that they use. So trust in the data center operators kind of the first thing that we make sure to validate before we go any further and considering an opportunity for.

G G (14:43.97)
Hmm.

G G (14:52.514)
Got it.

G G (15:14.412)
Yeah, no, of course. you know, it's kind of a very green foot, green. How do you call it? Basically, like a carbon neutral footprint where you're not going and building new stuff, but you're going to existing sites that either have excess energy or, you know, don't use up the full capacity and then you bring in and basically it's a win win situation for everyone for the hydro operators, for you guys and of course your clients.

Kent Halliburton (15:29.88)
Mm-hmm.

G G (15:43.372)
So it sounds very logical in a sense, kind of your approach that you do.

Kent Halliburton (15:46.542)
Yeah, let me just tie onto that because I think that there's something actually really important here that I didn't realize when I first got into this. So first of all, our ability to aggregate...

client demand, right? Whether it's a client that is a pleb want a single mining rig to have that experience of mining or somebody that's got several hundred, you know, our ability to aggregate that demand and manage that relationship without the data center operator doing that is a huge value add because if you're running a data center, that's a very different skill set than managing customer relations. And so that's really our value proposition is being able to manage those customer relations. And what

G G (16:09.006)
Hmm.

G G (16:25.087)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (16:30.234)
I didn't realize when I started out that this business model is what the impact of the centralization of mining would have on the network itself. I mean, we are very worried, as are the other Bitcoiners out there, about the impacts of the pools all being centralized, right? And big fans of Ocean were working to integrate and bring that to market by the beginning of next month as our internal target right now. So we'll be able to offer that to clients. We want to offer our clients the ability to run their own

G G (16:47.288)
Yeah.

Kent Halliburton (17:00.184)
data servers so that they can build their own block templates. know, all the things that good Bitcoiners should do. But what I've realized in running this business model is actually, as mining is solving what I believe is the fundamental problem that all the mining centralization is downstream from. And this is going to sound kind of silly when I say this, but what I've realized is most people haven't totally got it through their heads that Bitcoin mining is a zero to one innovation too, just like Bitcoin itself is. What I mean by that

is Bitcoin mining is the only way to generate new Bitcoin. And I'll say that again just because it sounds really stupid but it took me two years to realize this. Bitcoin mining is the only way to generate Bitcoin. Right? Now if you have that mindset where you realize that this is the only way to generate Bitcoin and Bitcoin is money then the whole idea of considering I put dollars in and how long does it take for me to get my dollars that doesn't make any sense. What makes sense is

G G (17:35.05)
Yep.

G G (17:43.491)
Yeah.

G G (17:56.941)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (17:58.966)
what's the cost of the Bitcoin I'm getting as compared to if I went and bought them? Right? Like that's the Bitcoin or idea. And when you actually break it down in that fashion.

The the follow-on thing that I've realized is that my gosh the majority of hashrate on the network right now is here to actually acquire fiat they're just using Bitcoin as a proxy and That's the actual issue with the network right now is a misalignment of incentives And so this is my my my pet peeve with all the mining centralization conversation is that nobody's actually talking about the root problem

G G (18:17.88)
Yeah.

Kent Halliburton (18:32.962)
And the root problem is a misalignment of incentives. And it's come because we as a Bitcoin community have decided it's easier to go to an exchange. We've traded convenience to go buy our Bitcoin on exchange than to do the actual work and mine and acquire our Bitcoin. And as a result, we as the Bitcoin community have ceded the network to fiat hashers. And if we took the network back and use this as our primary vehicle for acquiring Bitcoin, then naturally the mining centralization issues would

G G (18:33.705)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (19:03.092)
magically go away because we wouldn't allow them to happen. So I see a misalignment of incentives is actually the core thing that SAS mining has the opportunity to help solve.

G G (19:13.326)
Yeah, you touched upon a very important aspect there. I totally agree with you, that largely, especially the big mining companies, not to name drop, but like the Maras of the world and Foundry, they're all fiat mindsets. They're all just here to see how much money they can print, how much Bitcoin they can acquire, dump it, and then move on to the next thing. actually, as you said, the

putting dollars in and getting Sats and keeping those Sats and either saving or using those Sats to pay for services or goods or whatever is the key with Bitcoin. Bitcoin, as I tell people, it's a one-way exit. Like the door should go one way. It's not a revolving door. don't nip in, check it out. It's not for me or the price is high. I'm getting out of it. No, if you really understand it, it's a one-way door. yeah, and to a certain extent, it's very scary.

how centralized these mining pools are today and how all the hashing is just distributed to, know, and pool and co. And, and, you know, the fact that everybody's mining the same block templates. And, as I mentioned, we had Bob Burnett on a few months ago and he really kind of opened up, the, the, the idea of me with, you know, having the ability with Datum to build your own block templates and, know, having your, your full choice on that. I think that's something super important and something

really under discussed in the community. And one thing is having that opportunity to plug in that software. But then the second aspect is the hardware aspect. Because as you said, it's not a piece of cake. You just go on a website or there's some ASICs miners and you can't even plug them into your electricity socket. You need to get an electrician and sort everything out and see where the power grids and everything is. It's such a hassle. So most people, give up before they even place that ASIC order. So

you're bringing into the market. And as you said, if it picks up, we could really decentralize it through sustainable and ethical way and bring back Bitcoin mining to what Satoshi envisioned where individuals are mining, know, sats instead of the big corporations just chasing the fiat gains, which at the end of the day, fiat's devaluing forever while Bitcoin is appreciating forever. So it's a bit stupid to be selling your sats.

G G (21:33.046)
at a mega discount from a future price where you could be a lot more wealthy by keeping those sats in your own possession.

Kent Halliburton (21:41.804)
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I I think of mining as the best way to earn your sats. And there is, it's funny how I feel like that's how the early OGs got their sats.

G G (21:56.334)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (21:57.324)
then we're living in this era of exchange-based acquisition for Sats. And it's my belief that the Bitcoin community is going to come around to mining and owning the mining sector over the long term. And hopefully, we're one of those companies that's holding the door open and welcoming the Bitcoin.

community back into the mining pool because I think that we're missing the boat without that and we're not protecting the network as we should and so what I love about it though is you've got both reasons you've got both this moralistic reason of yeah you should probably mine at least what your your bag is you know that percentage of the network just so you know that you're protecting your own personal stash but then also you're able to acquire more sats and do it at a discount test compared to what you'd be buying them for an exchange and you put those two

G G (22:35.522)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (22:43.054)
reasons together. And I think that the only reason why it hasn't happened yet is because nobody's cracked the nut on making this a viable, easy way to acquire your sats. And I think that as Bitcoiners, as much as we may say we're in for the proof of work, most of us still aren't willing to go through, hire the electrician in the garage and figure it all out and risk fire and marital disputes and all the fun stuff that come along with trying to mine from home. And so it's just been missing. There's like this big hole in the marketplace.

And it's funny because as we set out to solve this particular issue, I can't tell you how many people just said, God, retail is too hard to deal with. He can't do it. Genuinely big mining companies, right? And also on top of that, having the other side, investors say, well, there's no money to be made there with retail. here we are, like, grew 350 % last year. We're on track to do the same this year. I'm like, wait, we've built a scalable business.

G G (23:34.743)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (23:43.004)
bottle and I had both sides of the marketplace telling me this was impossible but yet the clients keep showing up and keep saying yeah I want to stack sats this way I'm like okay well we'll listen to you Mr. Markut because you you're who's buttering my bread here

G G (23:47.502)
You

G G (23:54.414)
You

G G (23:58.2)
That's true. the market dictates the supply and demand. mean, speculators can speculate all they want, but if there's demand, essentially, someone needs to cater to it. Ken, I want to go back to what you mentioned about acquiring Bitcoin for a discount, give or take. You threw in a number of 30%. Doesn't have to be 30%, but just generally acquiring it for a better price. How much does the stage of the cycle of

bull or the bear cycle dictate on this discount of Bitcoin because let's say everybody's expecting kind of the peak to go out in the current bull market by the end of the year. We're going to be in this kind of already now we're at the 12 month mark since the last halving and usually the peak is between 12 to 18 months. Historically, this time a lot of things are different. We hit all time high before the halving, which never happened before. There's a lot of demand. There's

Very different dynamics, national states, corporations. Not that I'm a fan of that, but they are here. I can't do nothing about them. So I've got a stoic approach. I just focus on stacking my own sats. But the question is, what I'm trying to get through is what if you acquire like this mining equipment at the peak of the bull market where usually, from my understanding also, the prices of the mining equipment, it ranges during the bull markets. They're more expensive. They go at a premium during bear markets, of course, with the demand being lower.

they go lower. How does that dictate your kind of investment into, let's say, going down with with sales mining?

Kent Halliburton (25:31.886)
you

Yeah, you're hitting it kind of one of the cores of Bitcoin mining is that the mining cycle itself, right? And so I wanna back up, because there's something really important that I didn't mention about your dollar cost averaging at a lower cost basis than the exchange. So first of all, I realize that so many people were getting confused about this idea, but what we said is, where is the confusion coming from? And let's just simplify this. And so when I say that 30 % discount, that's today, the worst I've seen that spread is about 20%.

G G (25:39.566)
Hmm.

G G (25:43.096)
sure.

G G (26:00.366)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (26:02.256)
But how we're calculating it is as simple as it possibly can which is just the optics So your your electricity price is basically your only expense when it comes to running The mining rigs you have a little bit of maintenance, but that's we make that into the electricity price So you've got how much does it cost to run a mining rig? How many sats does it does it deliver you just divide that and you've got your price per Bitcoin on a daily basis So that's what we show on our website and we caveat that by saying look you are gonna need

to buy the hardware and that's your ticket to get on this ride to DCA at this fixed price, but you're also going to be able to sell it at the end and what you find is exactly what you're touching on, which is that mining cycle really dictates what's the value of your ticket to get on the ride and what's the value of your ticket to get off and that analysis is very complicated. And to be fair, the...

G G (26:42.52)
Hmm.

G G (26:53.486)
Because when do you get out? Sorry for interrupting. When do you get out or do you even get out?

Kent Halliburton (26:58.432)
So yeah, exactly. Do you even get out? Now that whole complication in calculus, I was just like, okay, people are so confused. miners don't even, or Bitcoiners don't even realize that there's this opportunity. If you just take the electricity and divide by the stats, like you're getting a great value, right? Now, okay, once we educate the market on that bit, now let's start to talk about the capex. And I've got a way that I want to work on that with financing in the future so people can post Bitcoin only loans and start stacking using their

point is collateral because I think that's the right way to deal with the CapEx issue over the long term. But right now, historically speaking, you're absolutely right.

What I don't know is, does that cycle continue to play out? And the reason I say that is, so what's the cycle, just to recap for the audience, if you may have lost track now, which is typically price runs hard. And when that happens, the manufacturers increase the price of their equipment. And so you can be like a bottom, a top tick buyer of hardware in this market if that cycle continues to play out. And then during the bear market, shortly after the bottom is when the bottom is found in hardware as well. That's when you wanted to play.

I don't know that that continues to play out because there's starting to be more competition in mining. We see less of the ROI based pricing as we have this cycle as we have last cycle. So the idea of this may not be as big. Now that's right now. It depends on how hard the price runs, how fast and high that price goes up. But it says mining, I'm not exactly sure how we're gonna deal with that. Ideally, we have a finance product that

G G (28:19.49)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (28:36.452)
can bring to the market so people can be basically using their Bitcoin as collateral when the value of that is really high to pay for the mining rigs. That way that ratio is quite low. But if not, there's a chance that we may just stop selling hardware because what I don't want to be is one of the companies that I have heard are out there. I'm not going to mention any names, but there are some companies out there that strategically we're selling very high priced equipment to clients knowing that those clients

as soon as the bear market hit would walk away and they'd wind up in possession of those mining rigs. To me, that's something I just simply can't do and am unwilling to do to the marketplace. So we will see how things play out, but yeah, we've got some decisions. This is going to be our first time navigating that particular dynamic. And so I'm going to try to focus on creating a different value proposition to continue. But if not, we might just be out of capacity, you know, focus on optimizing our business internally.

and wait for the bull market to blow over before starting to grind higher again.

G G (29:40.398)
Got it. So in the case that you stop facilitating the purchases of the hardware, how would the business model go? Would then the client have to buy it themselves and ship it to one of your locations?

Kent Halliburton (29:54.794)
No, we would just probably be sold out of capacity. We just probably wouldn't have any capacity online. Yeah. Yeah. So we'd manage our existing fleet of clients and help them continue to acquire Bitcoin. we wouldn't be allowing any new clients to step into that position where they've gotten over their skis and would be upset at the outcome later.

G G (29:58.491)
Okay, no more new clients just stick to what you have.

G G (30:15.096)
Got it.

That sounds like the Ray Dalio playbook with Bridgewater who capped their clients like 20 years ago and just stayed to that and Kent will be the potential Ray Dalio of Bitcoin mining.

Kent Halliburton (30:32.494)
Well, I don't know if I go that far. mean, I respect Ray Dalio, but there's a certain point at which, yeah, there's a certain point at which, you know, I do have some asymmetric knowledge. I haven't been in this for a long time and I feel like I've got a...

G G (30:36.63)
In a sense of capping.

G G (30:43.555)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (30:45.152)
an obligation to the community not to allow people to hurt themselves in a way that I can see is coming. So we'll see. I'm not making any promises right now, but it's, you know, I'm being transparent about a couple of the thoughts that I've had about how to deal with that dynamic of very expensive priced mining machines.

G G (30:55.8)
Yeah.

G G (31:01.71)
Sure.

No, and now the aspect is also keeping, you know, as I'm sensing from you, you really value the customer service and the customer care that you do to your existing clients. It's not just a numbers game. Let's get the most clients in, but let's make sure our clients are happy and, you know, we're there for them. And I don't know how many clients you have, but let's say you have like a thousand clients, which is already a lot. Like you focus on keeping them happy instead of trying to get 10, 20, 30,000 clients when then they're just

a number in a spreadsheet and you know, like there is no personal touch with it, which I think is super important. A lot of businesses always kind of try to scale too hard and then they just fall off the bridge. But the other day, sometimes it's smarter to stick to a certain personal cap and make sure that your clients are happy and retain those clients instead of just constantly looking for new clients to come in. You burn them and then they leave and then there's who knows a three year bear market and no one comes through and you're like.

What do we do now? So I like the mindset and kind of your thinking about it for kind of the future of the company.

Kent Halliburton (32:11.01)
Yeah, I appreciate that. And it's true actually, and our clients have given a very positive reason for me to have this mindset. So we don't have a big marketing budget, simply couldn't afford it. And so we focused on, okay, let's give good customer service. And our clients have rewarded that with 80 % of our business coming in is from our existing clients. So only about 20 % has been coming from new buyers. And to me, that's like one of the biggest thank yous you can give to your

G G (32:31.905)
Yeah.

G G (32:39.502)
Of course.

Kent Halliburton (32:40.974)
Well, it's biggest thank you that our clients could give to us. It's like, hey, that's skin in the game, repeat business. It's not just, you know, giving us words. It's like, hey, I like what you're doing and I want more of it. And we see people growing fleets that we've noticed, hey, that's the same last name. We see about three or four of those. Is there a relation here? And people bring it in their families and like, okay, we're doing something right. But yeah, I very much value high integrity, high signal. And I just think, you know, for me, it was my first year of business with this model that I realized, my gosh,

G G (32:56.462)
You

Kent Halliburton (33:10.864)
If you simply lean into the Bitcoin ecosystem, it's going to lean into you back. so we just, as much as we possibly could, how do we do this business where I've got possession of something that you own? And that's a high trust relationship. There's no way you can get around that. That's a high trust relationship. So yeah.

G G (33:28.94)
And they're expensive units. They're not like a hundred bucks. They're like thousands of dollars, tens of thousands.

Kent Halliburton (33:33.438)
Exactly. So how do I magnify that trust and how do I optimize that trust between myself and our clients and just focusing on that to try to align incentives, have long-term thinking, like all the things that are Bitcoin values at their core, but just incorporating them as part of our business DNA. And so far it's working out, but that's another one of those where it's like, okay, well, as a Bitcoiner from one Bitcoiner to another, I can't see allowing you to go shoot yourself in the foot too well. here, let

just take that gun away from you during the point in time where everybody's trigger happy.

G G (34:05.345)
You

G G (34:09.464)
For sure. Well, I know personally one of your happy clients and he's a good friend of the show, Brian the Mint. He had nothing but good things to say about SESMINE. We didn't actually talk about it the two times he was on the show, but we talked offline and yeah, and I saw him. He was also happily promoting you guys on X being a longtime client of yours. So yeah, it's nice to kind of see people from the industry that I highly respect, know, being happy with the service.

Kent Halliburton (34:16.131)
Cool.

G G (34:36.942)
And know, mining was always something that was in the back of my mind. But then I was like, I lived in Cyprus, as I told you off the record, and most of the listeners know where it's so hot. that's like the worst place, unless you're doing like hydro submerged mining, but like having an ASIC in a garage just doesn't work because it's too hot. It's not Dubai style, but like it's a little bit less. It's still crazy. And then last year when I moved to Russia and I was like, oh, wow.

I mean, I'm so up north and like electricity is like $2 per kilowatt of electricity and kilowatt, you know, we're talking about megawatts, kilowatts. And I was like, maybe like I'll set up a few ASICs in my wife's grandparents country house. But then I got into the homework of, I need to get the electrician. I need to sort out the whole.

air intake, outtake this that I'm like, Oh my God, and it's like an hour's drive away and like, need to monitor this thing. And I was like, oh, I was like, I don't know, like, even though I had good energy conditions, I was still like, do I really want to like go down this? Like, I like how life is like, I don't want to be stressing out. So but then there's a lot of cloud mining out there and like companies, bogus companies where you just send some money and you have no idea what's happening and

I read some reviews, some terrible reviews, not to name drop again. But yeah, people were very happy and you know, people would pay for their for the rigs and they wouldn't go online for like three, six months. And like they lost so much of potential, you know, stacking of of sats. But SazMining was was one company that came on the radar, but I didn't do my homework. But definitely after the show, I will certainly and anyone listening, I would advise you to to check it, check out SazMining a little bit more, because as you said, you know,

The solution that you're bringing to the table is taking that gun away from that happy trigger person and actually don't want them to shoot themselves in the foot, actually enjoy their fruits of labor. So yeah, I really like what you guys are doing. Maybe potentially what you can share is what are your future plans with SazMine? We just discussed kind of you don't want to scale too big, but do you have anything on the horizon, please, for end of the year or maybe 2026?

Kent Halliburton (36:54.616)
Well, we do want to scale big because we see that there's a lot of features that we can bring with scale that are difficult to bring and afford to bring to the market right now. So the whole idea is really, hey, how do we create this platform to where all the things that publicly traded miners have at their disposal? Like we can sort of turn that out inside out and democratize the access to those. So that's a marketplace to be able to buy and sell your hardware that's financing so that you can actually maintain your fleet.

G G (37:01.795)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (37:24.68)
That's the right metrics that you can make decisions about how you want to, how and when you want to buy and sell hardware as well as your Bitcoin itself. If you do, God forbid. what else? And then energy management tools, right? So being able to switch mining pools. Like we think that we already have a few clients that are this way that have just come to us and skipped the exchanges totally because it's a different way to acquire your Sats, right?

G G (37:54.061)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (37:54.472)
equivalent, let's say a mining rig costs $5,000, which is a typical price, know, plus or minus, but if you take $5,000 and go put it on the on an exchange and your dollar cost averaged that $5,000 for the next three years, that's the equivalent of mining.

And for a lot of people, they don't want to have the KYC aspects that come with an exchange, nor do they want to be able to actually look or deal with the risk of the exchange itself, the counterparty risk there, but also the price volatility. That keeps a lot of people off. In fact, what we discovered when we were testing our product, this is probably the most surprising thing before we came to market, was that women actually appreciated our product more than men.

G G (38:09.912)
Hmm.

G G (38:18.039)
risk.

G G (38:27.809)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (38:37.678)
And it took me a long time to get my head wrapped around that. What I realized is that there's a different risk appetite that women have than men generally, right? And I'm not gonna be, I'm paint with a broad brushstroke when I say this, but for a lot of women, that's why something that as a cash flowing asset, like a piece of real estate is more comfortable than going and trading stocks on the stock exchange. That's a more male driven thing. And what we're offering is more of the cash flowing piece of property option where the cash flows Bitcoin.

G G (38:46.318)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (39:07.682)
this case. So I actually think that we're going to bring more Bitcoiners into the community by offering a better, smoother experience. Because now suddenly you've purchased your property and it's just going to generate Bitcoin for you and until you decide like, hey, this is the end of its useful life. Because the useful life of a mining rig is actually not defined by when it stops working, but when it becomes non-competitive as compared to other hardware on the market.

So that's really something that is defined by the network itself and your own personal profit-taking tolerance. At what point is that squeezed too much? Because the unfortunate part about Bitcoin mining as a way to stack sats is you're always going to get more sats in the beginning than you do at the end. And that's just because network difficulty is going up against all of us all the time.

G G (39:35.287)
Hmm

G G (39:52.781)
Yeah, yeah.

G G (39:58.026)
And with your experience, like the average lifetime, I know there's different units with different hash powers, but like, what is the lifetime in the sense of not workability, but in the sense of feasibility of you using it to stack sats, is it like a five year window, less, more, or it really depends on the unit?

Kent Halliburton (40:17.966)
We used, it depends on the unit, yes. There's a couple ways to answer this question. So one way is.

what metric do we use internally? So for all of our analysis, we tell clients three years, that's the lower end of any range that I see being used. Most people use closer to four. Now, the other way you can look at this is to think back and look at historical data. Like the S9 is offline for the most part, except for in sort of heat applications in some places now. And now that's turned into like the, yeah, it's basically in the museum. But the time from,

G G (40:50.926)
It's in the museum.

Kent Halliburton (40:57.38)
It's initial launch in the market till being in the museum, that was more than six years, right? And so the S19 was really introduced about 2020. six years would be next year before there's zero applications for it. We're now on the S21. The S21 is introduced last year, right? So another six years. And is that increasing or decreasing? And the answer is it's been increasing that life cycle span of each mining rig.

G G (41:02.466)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (41:27.28)
I don't know if that'll continue to play out, but it does seem to me that there is some theoretical limits of just how small you can make your transistors and just how much efficiency you can get out of each one. I think there will continue to be incremental gains, but it does look like the curve is slowing down in terms of its efficiency, like it's reaching some aspartotic level that won't be able to be breached. You know, can't get down less than, you know, we're down sub 10 joules of tera hash right now, 10 watts.

G G (41:43.767)
Hmm.

Kent Halliburton (41:57.332)
per tera hash? Like how low can we push that? I don't know but it seems like it's been slowing down a bit to me.

G G (42:02.094)
You

It's like with the smartphones, like every year all these companies were trying to make it a little bit thinner, a little bit thinner. And then it's like, how thin are you going to bring it to like, I don't know if it was the latest iPhone or the iPhone before, like the titanium one where you could actually bend it with your fingers. Like you could actually snap the phone. Like there's limits with everything. It's physics. can't break physics. like, yeah, some things just, just have a hard cap. And, you know, it'd be interesting, as you said, you know, the leap from the S9 to the S21.

What was the hashing capacity of S9 in tera hash?

Kent Halliburton (42:37.294)
Oh geez, the S9 was before my era. I joined at the era where we were dealing with 90 terahertz, that's the S19s, was when I joined. And those were about 88 to 110 tera hash. And now we're dealing with units where I was just looking at the S21 plus hydros earlier today for reference, and those are nearly 400 tera hash.

G G (42:48.011)
Okay.

G G (42:55.307)
Okay.

G G (43:04.344)
Wow

Kent Halliburton (43:04.916)
mining rig. Here's the thing that they don't tell you about that tera hash if you're a retail home miner. That unit draws 6,000 watts, right? That's six microwaves all plugged into the same socket. Most people, if they want to run that, yeah, running 24-7, right? Most microwaves run at about thousand watts. So yeah, you run in six of those all on the same socket. most people have had the experience of turning on a hairdryer, blowing a circuit, you you got to go flip the switch out in the garage and deal with all that.

G G (43:18.262)
All the time.

Kent Halliburton (43:34.752)
When you run at 6,000 watts, six hairdryers at the same time, you need to plumb bigger wires into your house and have a special type of connection. That is a non-trivial thing for most people to actually go do. And by the way, you may not actually have a big enough wire from the meter out to the utility. Maybe you need a bigger wire out there too. We are really getting into the area where, okay, 3,000 watts, you really could sort of figure this out at home. But now we're getting to the size

G G (43:43.928)
Yeah.

Kent Halliburton (44:04.726)
or no, you actually need to build electrical distribution specifically to mine.

G G (44:11.342)
Yeah, some people just look at the book cover and they're like, that's a nice book. But once you get reading the fine detail and getting into the story, you're like, wow, there's much more to this than a beautiful cover. So yeah, I'm glad I personally didn't go down the DIY. Let me be a miner and throw in some racks. I think that wouldn't have ended well. I know we are...

closing up on our allocated time. So I have one final question to you, which I think the listeners will appreciate. And personally, I'm interested as well. What happens to your clients after their mining rig comes, their lifespan is over? What do you do with it? Is there like a second market to sell it, but then who are you going to sell it to if they can't really utilize it? Like what happens with those rigs in your case?

Kent Halliburton (45:03.054)
you

Well, I mean, we're going to figure this out with our clients along the way. I don't think anybody in the industry has got a great solution for this. We have a variety of different options that we leave our clients and this is our first cycle being in the market. So we don't know really how to help navigate this fully until we have the experience. So one, yes, we right now offer bulletin board for our clients to post their hardware and buy and sell amongst themselves. And that's worked fairly well.

probably the more the option we see the most is actually clients just cycling out their fleet where they say hey I've got a slot right now I want to upgrade it to this hardware

you know, and letting your other hardware go. We've actually been surprised to see clients just letting go of equipment at times that that's occurred. So that's one option. If you want to let go of your equipment and just upgrade. Third is we'll recycle it for you. If you just want us to make sure it disappears, we can ship it to you. You know, you have to pay the price of shipping. Not trying to make any money there, but we can ship it to you. And then, did I say recycling already? Yeah, if you want to start your own mining museum

G G (46:11.458)
to put it in your own museum, right? Yeah.

Kent Halliburton (46:16.24)
and these are all the units that I've mined along the way, for whatever reason, we'll ship it to you. But those are the options that we've got right now. And I don't think there's a particularly graceful way to deal with this. I think the best clients out there sort of figure out how to grow fleets, and this becomes a way to stack sats. And they're smart about when they buy and when they sell. But at the end of the day, there's not really an elegant way to deal with it other than just walking away.

G G (46:27.363)
Mmm.

G G (46:47.0)
Got it. Got it. Well, we're still so early in Bitcoin in general and sustainable mining. So I'm sure as we progress in, yeah, another one.

Kent Halliburton (46:57.132)
Let me mention something that I just discovered actually at this last Bitcoin Vegas conference. So there are entities out there that will recycle these and we do plan on if people walk away from their equipment, we have no use for it, that we will recycle it. But in essence, even the PCB board can be recycled, which I was surprised to learn. So you've got the steel, the aluminum, the PCB board, and I believe there's a bit of copper in there too that can be recycled. So most of the machine can be ground up and chewed up and

G G (47:02.702)
Mm.

Kent Halliburton (47:27.237)
and separate into useful commodities.

G G (47:31.15)
That's really good to hear because yeah, you know, there's a plethora of these ASICs around the world that soon at some point will just, you you can't just dump them in the junkyard. So it would be nice to recycle them and find other uses with the raw materials. Ken, I don't want to take more of your time. I know we're rounding up right to our clock. Last question is where can we send our listeners who want to get in touch with you and follow more about what says mining is the way.

Kent Halliburton (47:57.922)
Yeah, well, I always keep my DMs open on Twitter, so at khaliburton on Twitter. And then sasmining.com. We've got agents that are standing by if you want to ask questions about how it works, get into the fine print. Happy to answer those for you. And then I am on Noster, but kind of hard to spell out my in-pub if you want to reach me there. But yeah, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. Gigi has been fun conversation and great to see somebody else living on the opposite side

G G (48:20.462)
You

Kent Halliburton (48:27.956)
the world for me. think pretty literally opposite that has such a similar story.

G G (48:28.942)
Literally. That's true. Now, Ken, thanks so much. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on. It's been an awesome conversation, very educational. And as I mentioned, I was seeking to get some more mining content on. So thanks so much for coming on, sharing your story and giving us a fresh perspective on sustainable mining. And also to everyone listening, if you found this episode valuable, make sure to like, share and subscribe it. It really helps spread the signal.

And if you're ready to take control of your Bitcoin and your future, check out my one-on-one self-custody mentorship, Become Unruggable. You'll learn how to hold your own keys with confidence and step aside from the middleman and stack those sacks for future generations. You can get in touch with me directly through my form link in my ex bio or send me an email at becomeunruggable at proton.me. I'll leave you with this energy is freedom and Bitcoin is how we store it. Thank you again for tuning in.

and see you in the next one.