118. From Nairobi to Mugena: Teaching Bitcoin Mining With Open Hardware

In this episode, we sat down with Skot and Ryan to unpack Ryan’s trip to BTC++ Nairobi, where he represented the 256 Foundation and shared our open-source mining mission with builders from across Africa. Ryan talked about the incredible energy of the local Bitcoin community, the real-world use of Lightning and mobile payments across borders, and why Africa offers such a powerful glimpse into Bitcoin’s practical value. We also dug into the strong interest in open-source mining, from Ryan’s main-stage talk on the 256 Foundation’s mining stack to the many conversations he had with developers excited to contribute, experiment, and build without the barriers of closed hardware and firmware.We also went deep on Ryan’s hands-on mining workshop, where attendees learned Bitcoin mining from first principles, CPU-mined on a classroom Signet, assembled Bitaxes, and watched the network shift as ASICs came online. From there, we explored what Ryan saw at Gridless’s biomass-powered mining site in Kenya, the technical realities of balancing power generation with mining load, and promising local projects like BitShaka and Juakali. Throughout the conversation, one theme kept coming up: open-source mining is becoming a practical path for education, experimentation, decentralization, and entirely new energy use cases—and the momentum behind Mugena and the broader 256 Foundation mission is clearly growing.