The Pomp Podcast
JP Baric, Founder & CEO of Mining Store: The Renewable Super Powers Behind Crypto Mining
- JP Baric, founder and CEO of Mining Store, discusses his journey from running a robotics camp at 14 to building large-scale Bitcoin mining facilities by age 17–18.
- Mining Store is pivoting from direct hardware sales to building modular, turnkey mining facilities powered by renewable and stranded energy sources, with immersion cooling and custom firmware for optimal efficiency.
- The mining industry has historically relied entirely on equity capital with no credit market; introducing bonds and securitized products backed by Bitcoin collateral could unlock institutional investment and fundamentally transform the sector.
- Natural gas, solar, wind, and nuclear power are emerging as key energy sources for mining operations; the sector currently requires electricity at roughly $40/MWh or cheaper to remain profitable.
- Bitcoin mining acts as a "battery" for excess energy that would otherwise be wasted, including flare gas and stranded power; this creates demand for renewable and otherwise-unusable energy resources globally.
- FPGAs are expected to displace GPUs in crypto mining within two years due to superior performance (~10x hash rate increases) and broader applicability to enterprise use cases; ASICs will likely remain Bitcoin-specific but grow in scale and efficiency.