In this episode of POD256 (Episode 104), eco is joined by Scott and Tyler; new board members of the 256 Foundation for a live-streamed, sats-enabled chat that ranges from home mining and the biggest difficulty drop since the China ban to the realities of AI, surveillance tech, and the push for a fully open-source Bitcoin mining stack. We demo D++’s new livestream overlay and monitoring dashboard, shout out zaps, and talk practical ways to point hash to the Foundation while exploring why open, documented ASICs and reusable, modular tooling (Mujina firmware, LibreBoard, HydraPool) can help builders avoid reinventing the wheel. We revisit the home-mining glory days around the China mining ban, discuss the feasibility of open-source ASICs (and why truly competitive ones are out of reach today), FPGAs as an educational bridge, and how AI agents are already automating dashboards, tuning, and ops; along with the real risks of closed models, leaked skills, and data exposure. We end with practical security PSAs for running local agents, updates on our heat-pump/hot-tub mining experiments, and how to support the Foundation by pointing hash or self-hosting your own pool with HydraPool, because decentralizing mining infra is how we resist surveillance capitalism and keep Bitcoin open for everyone.