Inside the Solar “Money Battery” That Turns 12V Solar Into Bitcoin w/ Erik Hersman

In this episode, recorded at the Africa Bitcoin Conference in Mauritius, Erik Hersman (CEO of Gridless) breaks down the newly announced open-source Jua Kali miner — a DC Bitcoin miner designed to run directly on 12V solar and turn excess energy into a scalable Solar “Money Battery.”

We discuss how Jua Kali repurposes old hashboards, solves the global stranded-solar problem for 5–100 kW sites, and enables farmers, workshops, and rural communities to monetize energy that would otherwise be wasted. In the second half of the conversation, Blaise from the Gridless engineering team opens the unit and explains the full hardware stack so anyone can build, adapt, and deploy it using off-the-shelf components.

Topics include decentralized mining, second-life ASIC hardware, rural electrification, small-scale solar economics, and how open-source hardware could spread Bitcoin mining across Africa and the world.

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