HIVE THRIVE— Show #72 —Guest: @solominer

Hive Thrive is back, and this week we're talking to a man who runs a hive witness off solar power.

📅 Tuesday | 6 PM UTC
🔗 Hive Discord General Voice Channel

About our guest, Solominer 🌟

Alright friends…@solominer is back for round two on Hive Thrive. He has been on chain since February 2018. Solo is a documentarian. He runs a farm in Virginia and he puts all of it on-chain, on a schedule, with receipts.

There's the grow journal — Desfrán, numbered day by day, now past day 161, four outdoor sativas tracked from seedling to flower. He posts the wins and the losses: the plant that didn't make it, the cold-snap yellowing, the fact that his plants got so big he can no longer fit a mower behind them, so next year the whole plot gets redesigned in single file.

There's the solar report — every single month since August 2024, unbroken. Three arrays, full component lists, panel counts, battery chemistry, kilowatt-hours per array. July's total was 3,297 kWh. The excess runs two Antminers that pulled in about $95 of Bitcoin that month.

And there's the garlic. A full acre of it, cleared with a skid steer, planted with a tow-behind planter, ventilated after harvest using his own solar power. The same power that irrigates his fields and keeps his Hive witness node signing blocks from a home server with the grid as backup.

He also zeroed his own witness's HBD interest rate as a signal, then wrote a proposal to phase HBD out of existence entirely. The comments on that post showed some backs up. 😎

Welcome to Hive Thrive Community Hour, Episode 72

Hive Thrive Community Hour is our weekly town hall for builders, critics, curators, and anyone still stubborn enough to care about where this chain is heading. No scripts. No talking points handed out in advance. Just open conversation.

🎙️ What we'll talk about:

• Two years of unbroken monthly solar reports. What happens the month you skip one

• 161 days of a public grow journal — what documenting something daily actually does to how you do it

• Panels power the irrigation, the garlic ventilation, the Bitcoin miners, and a Hive witness node. Which one gets cut first in a bad week

• The plants got too big to mow behind. This is apparently a real engineering constraint now

• Seven years on Hive, but only two as a witness. What took so long

• His actual proposal to kill HBD — 33.3% reward cut, treasury buyout, done by 2028 timed to the Bitcoin halving

• $95 of Bitcoin in a month from 7,800 watts of miners. Hobby, hedge, or spite

There may be hard truths.

There may be laughs.

There may be mild discomfort.

Come hang out with us
Hive Thrive isn't meant to be just another background podcast.
We treat it like a live town hall for the blockchain —

• a place where devs, witnesses, curators, creators, and critics can speak in the same room
• a space to explore the tools, tensions, and governance structures actually shaping Hive
• and a setting where honest conversation can replace years of silence, fear, or misunderstanding

We're here to —

✅ Help people understand what's actually happening behind the scenes
✅ Surface the real stories behind Hive's institutions and projects
✅ Talk openly about drama, governance friction, and systemic issues
✅ Look for ways forward that strengthen the network instead of dividing it

Meet Your Hosts

@meno
Legacy Hivian, luthier by trade, Herzogian by hobby, cheese oligarch by appetite. Master of ceremony and master of BBQ.

@buttcoins
Hive OG since 2017, community builder, musician, and all-around Butt who somehow keeps saying yes to more projects.

@shadowspub
Ten years strong on Hive, host of Pimp Your Post Thursdays, co-host of HiveSpaces on X, and long-time signal booster for emerging voices.

Hive Thrive's Aim 🎯

Hive Thrive aims to be a fair, information-based talk show, modeled after a town hall and built for the entire Hive ecosystem. Whether you are writing posts, building tools, securing the chain, or just trying to understand how it all fits together, this space is yours.

We keep things open, take questions from the audience, and when the interview ends, the real conversation often begins. So jump in, bring your voice, and help shape the future of Hive one chat at a time.

Looking for Past Episodes of Hive Thrive Community Hour?

We want to give a shout out to @ecoinstant. His enthusiasm has been the best kind of infectious and he has archived our past episodes. If you missed any of our shows, @ecoinstant has posted them on his Deep Web3 Secrets Hive Thrive playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3et84ivMbf3g26u7DF4VbT_pco2iF_lf&si=wXUciF4tJRZOXFQO