Schedule

Welcome Announcement

Proof of Flexibility: What 21 Mining Facilities Reveal About Load, Emissions, and Market Design

Bitcoin miners have long claimed to be the most flexible large-scale loads on any power grid. This keynote presents the first empirical proof from 21 real facilities across North America, matching hourly consumption against locational marginal emissions. The data confirms that miners curtail meaningfully during high-carbon hours — but flexibility varies dramatically across facilities and market structures. ERCOT's real-time pricing produces the most effective curtailment behavior of any grid in the study. Paez introduces a diagnostic for identifying flexible facilities from standard metering data and a model forecasting hashrate, energy demand, and miner revenue under multiple scenarios.

Shovels in the Ground: Texas's Fast Lane for Energy Infrastructure

While other states stall in multi-year environmental reviews and interconnection queues, Texas has built a permitting environment where large-scale energy projects move from concept to construction in months — not decades. This panel pulls back the curtain on the regulatory architecture and field tradecraft behind that velocity: how developers thread county-level approvals, how transmission and utility advisors navigate ERCOT interconnection studies in a queue measuring tens of gigawatts, how behind-the-meter and modular generation configurations energize load before the grid catches up, and how scaled operators underwrite siting decisions against a moving target of AI demand and policy risk. The conversation moves from the consultant's permit checklist to the transmission engineer's one-line, from the BTM developer's gas-and-flare math to the operator's capital stack — mapping the real reasons capital keeps choosing Texas, and where the fast lane is starting to congest.

Powering Places: Service and Community Development Through Compute

Compute is rewiring the economics of small-town Texas. In counties where the nearest stoplight is twenty miles away and the tax base rests on a handful of wells or a cotton gin, mining sheds and modular data centers are quietly becoming the new anchor tenant — buying stranded gas, firming up the grid, funding the volunteer fire department, and giving local kids a reason to stay. This panel gathers operators who have actually broken ground in those places: building hyperscale campuses on raw West Texas land, monetizing flared gas behind the meter, and bolting payments rails onto local commerce. They will trade hard-won lessons on what it takes to be a good neighbor — landowner deals that hold up, hiring from the county instead of importing crews, and structuring upside so the community sees real money, not just a ribbon-cutting photo. Powering places, one substation at a time.

Afternoon Announcements

Energy Sovereignty: Policy Frameworks for Computational Independence

Texas has staked its claim as a regulatory haven for energy-intensive computing, but the policy landscape is shifting beneath operators' feet. This panel dissects the legislative frameworks that made the Lone Star State the global capital of Bitcoin mining and evaluates emerging regulatory pressures from federal agencies and competing jurisdictions. Panelists assess how Texas can maintain its competitive edge while establishing governance models that other states and nations seek to replicate. The conversation explores the delicate balance between welcoming innovation and safeguarding grid reliability as computational loads scale toward unprecedented levels.

Open Source Mining: Firmware, Pools, and the Decentralization Imperative

Enterprise-scale operations command the hashrate charts, but Bitcoin's security model depends on mining remaining distributed and permissionless. This panel convenes the builders working at the grassroots layer — open-source firmware developers, decentralized pool architects, and DIY hardware creators — to examine how their work counterbalances centralization pressures. Panelists discuss the technical and governance challenges of running transparent mining pools, the viability of open-source ASIC designs, and how firmware freedom gives individual operators control over their machines. The session makes the case that decentralized mining infrastructure is not a niche pursuit but a systemic necessity.

How Low Can We Go? Controlling Costs in a Hyper-Competitive Market

Hashprice compression and rising difficulty have made cost discipline the single most important variable separating viable mining operations from those headed toward capitulation. This panel brings together operators and energy advisors who have built their businesses around relentless cost optimization to dissect the levers that actually move the needle — from power contract structuring and curtailment strategy to site-level operational efficiency and maintenance economics. Panelists share hard-won lessons on managing all-in cost per kilowatt-hour, navigating ERCOT's real-time pricing volatility, and building operational frameworks that protect margins through market cycles.

The Dirt Is Already Yours: A Fireside on Heritage, Stewardship, and Hashrate

Most mining stories start at the substation. This one starts at the cattle guard. A multigenerational West Texas rancher whose family has worked oil, gas, and livestock on the same land for generations, and who now runs Bitcoin miners alongside the wells and the herd — sits down with one of Bitcoin's most experienced journalist-operators: a longtime podcaster, publicly-traded-miner director, and venture capitalist who has spent years chronicling the people who actually live with the infrastructure they build. The two trade notes on what it really takes to put compute on working ranch land: how surface-use agreements get written when the landowner is your neighbor, how heat and noise become features instead of complaints, and why the most durable mining sites in Texas look less like data centers and more like another piece of the ranch. A conversation about heritage, stewardship, and the quiet economics of building Bitcoin where the dirt is already yours.