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ePIC's Jim Seto on Custom, Reusable Mining Hardware
The ePIC Blockchain CEO argued that miners now write their infrastructure into hardware requirements, and that reuse decides which systems last.
Jim Seto spent about 30 years in semiconductors before he came to Bitcoin mining, and he expected the industry to move as fast as phones and PCs. It did not. Seto, CEO of ePIC Blockchain, spoke at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024, held June 24 to 26, 2024. Bitcoin was at $61,272 then.
On October 17, 2026, it was at $81,502. Seto said the slow pace surprised him. In his words, "there was an actual, call it an inertial resistance to it." He blamed politics around a decentralized monetary system and the heavy investment that mining infrastructure needs. His talk was about inflection points, and how often people miss them.
He gave the example of a company with a plan to move books around the world. He guessed 90% of people who saw it thought it would fail. He also pointed to phone makers who held on to keyboards or grayscale screens while customers wanted a full display. Then he turned to mining.
Early photos of mining sites look rough, he said, but the new facilities his team has visited are built with care for the whole system. At some, he said, you could almost eat off the floor. ePIC began as a designer of blockchain chips. Today it has three lines of business: helping clients assess chips, fleet enhancement with control boards and firmware for miners it did not design, and complete systems of its own.
Seto said chips are close to a level playing field, so the difference now comes from the system, the firmware and the integration. The biggest change, he said, is in what customers ask for. Instead of the air-cooled shoe box, they want larger custom miners with unique features, built around the sites they already run. As efficiency moves from 34 joules per terahash to 30 and 26, he said, "the fact that you could actually reuse the infrastructure really starts to matter." Seto also brought up AI.
He showed NVIDIA, Bitcoin and gold over five years, and said an integrator, Supermicro, had done even better than NVIDIA. His point was that integrators can capture value that people overlook. ePIC, he said, would stay focused on hardware for Bitcoin mining. He closed by saying his company is in a fast growth phase, and that customers now ask it to help define what the future data center looks like.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.