Thomas Hunt's Output, By the Numbers

Only The Bitcoin Group carries duration data in the current ingest. Of 492 TBG videos with duration recorded, the totals are:

Cadence eras roughly align with the six Twitter eras already documented at @MadBitcoins archive. The brief is:

• Origin (2013). Mad Bitcoins is the only show on air. Daily-news show cadence — by year-end he's posting nearly every weekday.
• Breakout (2014–2016). WCN comes online (Feb 2014); TBG launches as a weekly (Oct 2013, picks up steam in 2014). Three-show overlap. Peak per-day output. Most ≥2-eps days date from this window.
• Curio + WCN Co-Host (2017–2018). The Curio Cards project lands. WCN channel turns into a high-volume content firehose; MB cadence cools but doesn't break.
• TBG + Pandemic (2019–2021). TBG hits its long-tenure stride. 2020 spike: lockdown drives a content explosion across all three shows.
• Pivot (2022–2024). All three shows slow. MB largely quiet. TBG continues weekly. WCN diversifies into shorts.
• Recent (2025–2026). TBG weekly cadence holds. MB occasional. WCN absorbs most channel activity.

Mad Bitcoins ran as a work-week daily news show. World Crypto Network was channel-wide output with no claimed weekday cadence. The Bitcoin Group landed weekly. The bars below show how the actual capture record matches — or doesn't.

Counted from yt-dlp .info.json sidecars on the /Volumes/20TB-FOUND archive. Live means the video was broadcast as a YouTube livestream (appointment viewing on a schedule). Uploaded means it was published as a finished recording. The Bitcoin Group is overwhelmingly live; Mad Bitcoins is overwhelmingly uploaded; WCN sits in the middle.

Some calendar days saw episodes land on more than one of the three shows. These are candidate marker days — usually a Friday TBG live taping that also got an MB clip cut or a WCN post-roll. Counted here from the union of brain.db dates (MB, WCN) and the canonical TBG episode list.

TBG runs weekly, so the natural cadence unit is the ISO week, not the calendar day. A weekly streak is a maximal run of consecutive ISO weeks (Mon–Sun) in which at least one TBG episode was captured.

MB is the work-week daily. A perfect work-week is an ISO week where every weekday — Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri — has at least one captured episode. The M–R (Mon–Thu) variant is shown for weeks that hit the four-day target but skipped Friday.

Conservative estimate: 3,110 hours of solo production over 13 years.

The raw on-air runtime across all three shows — counting only the files for which a duration is recorded on the 20TB archive — totals 1,387.0 hours. That alone is the equivalent of running a 24-hour television station for 58 days, or 1 full work-years at a 40-hour week, just for the finished output.

Production work isn't only the broadcast minute. Live episodes need a chair-ready prep block, the show itself, and a light post pass; uploaded episodes need cuts, edits, thumbnails, and a publish. We apply two conservative multipliers — 1.5× runtime for live broadcasts and 3.0× for post-produced uploads — to estimate person-hours. They are deliberately on the low side of what a working producer would book.

At an eight-hour workday, that's roughly 78 full work-weeks of production — about 1.6 work-years at fifty work-weeks each. Spread over thirteen calendar years, it is, on average, a half-time job that never took a quarter off.

No one was assigned to do this. It got done anyway.

All numbers on this page are computed by streaks/_build/build.py against the items table of ~/brain/brain.db (the household capture database).

Source filters

Two kinds of count

For each show we surface both the curator count (Thomas's confirmed live+video-only totals from ~/brain/_research/site_audit_20260517.md: MB 594, WCN 1,568, TIB 234, TBG 482) and the brain.db ingested row count. They differ because the items table captures channel-wide YouTube output — shorts, podcast cross-posts, reuploads, and collaborator videos — while the curator count is live + long-form video only. The streak and cadence math below is computed against the brain.db row set, so heavy-output days reflect total channel activity, not just live episodes.

Date field

Episode date is json_extract(details_json, '$.date') on each row — this is the YouTube upload date the ingest pipeline recorded. For the early TBG run (eps 1–~30) WCN-channel upload dates are 2021 reuploads, not the original 2013–2014 air dates. That artefact is visible in the TBG yearly chart as a 2021 bump.

Runtime data

Episode duration is only available for The Bitcoin Group, sourced from the yt-dlp .info.json files in /Volumes/20TB-FOUND/AI-DATA/backups/bitcoingroup-audio/video/ (492 files with duration field). Mad Bitcoins audio files and the WCN channel ingest do not carry duration metadata in the current pipeline, so runtime totals for those shows are not reported.

Streak math

A streak is a maximal run of consecutive calendar days on which at least one episode was captured. The current streak is considered live if the most recent capture date is today or yesterday; otherwise it's reported as zero, and the most recent run is shown as "latest run". Longest dry spell is the largest gap in days between two consecutive episode dates.

Refresh

Re-run python3 streaks/_build/build.py to recompute. A launchd job com.1n2.streaks-rebuild may refresh every six hours; see plist in _build/.

Built 2026-06-08.