THE MINING POD: ASIC Border Seizures, Tencent’s BTC Mining Exposure, Miners Double Down on AI
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The CBP is seizing ASIC miners at the border, and Chinese tech giant Tencent adds to its bitcoin mining exposure.
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Welcome back to The Mining Pod! For this week’s news roundup, Colin and Matt talk about the big story Blockspace broke this week: the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency is seizing Antminer ASICs at ports of entry, and it’s also started to detain MicroBT and Canaan units. Plus, the $500 billion Chinese tech giant Tencent ups its stake in newly-christened public bitcoin miner Cango to 15.6%. They also touch on Bit Digital’s WhiteFiber AI rebrand, and why Riot’s newest board member signals that it’s getting increasingly serious about an AI pivot. The duo also welcomes Luxor Director of Energy Trading Haley Thomson to discuss what the AI boom means for Texas power prices. And for this week’s cry corner: bitcoin obituaries are dead – all hail number go up.
Notes:
• CBP Seizes Mining Equipment
• Texas Energy Market Changes
• Tencent Invests in Kango
• Data Center Power Demands
• Mining Hardware Challenges
• Energy Market Evolution
Timestamps
00:00 Start
01:20 Difficulty report
04:33 CBP crackdown on ASICs
12:08 Tencent owns 15% of Cango
18:05 Haley Thomson, Dir of Energy Trading @ Luxor
30:52 Bit Digital rebrands AI/HPC as WhiteFiber
32:24 Riot appoints Jamie Leverton to board among AI/HPC
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are you a retail or institutional investor interested in Bitcoin mining companies? |
| 0:03.7 | The Miner Mag brings you free data and analysis from all major NASDAQ listed Bitcoin mining operations |
| 0:08.4 | to know who stands out. Check out visualized metrics and data-dependent stories at |
| 0:12.9 | the MinerMag.com. Today's show is brought to you by Digital Shovel. Digital Shovel is a leading |
| 0:19.3 | manufacturer of modular mining pods as well as |
| 0:21.8 | PDUs and switch gears. Unlike many other competitors, their product is designed to manufacture |
| 0:26.5 | in North America with a complete UL inspection on the entire unit, not just individual components. |
| 0:32.6 | Additionally, Digital Shovel is one of the most vertically integrated manufacturers. |
| 0:36.6 | Of over 75,000 square feet of sheet metal shop, SMT and wave solder PCB assembly, |
| 0:42.6 | as well as final assembly all under one roof in Toronto, Canada. |
| 0:46.3 | Their price point leads the industry when compared to products with rates as low as $69,000 per megawatt for a complete data center with smart PDUs and switch gears to learn more |
| 0:55.2 | visit digital shovel.com what is going on y'all welcome back to the mining pod news roundup |
| 1:03.9 | edition double trouble this week with your boy colin and the matt kimball matt how you doing man |
| 1:10.1 | i'm doing excellent thanks for for having me, Colin. |
| 1:12.4 | Always. We always love having you. We want you every week, but sometimes you got to do your |
| 1:17.6 | real job. But speaking of a real job for today, we're going to kick it off with the |
| 1:22.6 | difficulty update presented by Hashrid Index and Luxor. Pretty interesting week for Bitcoin network data and difficulty hash rate and hash price, |
| 1:32.8 | Matt. |
| 1:33.0 | Tell us what's going on. |
| 1:34.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:35.2 | So we had an absolutely brutal rip up in difficulty this past week of over 5%. Over 5.5% call into everyone's dismay. |
| 1:48.1 | It looks like that's going to taper back a bit. |
... |
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