Stephen Perrenod

Stephen Perrenod is a physicist, author, and Bitcoin researcher with deep expertise spanning astronomy, enterprise computing, and cryptocurrency economics. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard, and has published two books on cosmology and extragalactic astronomy.

His work in Bitcoin builds on a long career in high-performance computing — with senior roles at Cray, SGI, and Sun Microsystems — which provides an unusually grounded perspective on mining, network dynamics, and the computational physics of proof-of-work. Stephen has contributed original analyses of the Power Law in gold terms, the stability of the scaling relationships across regimes, the differentiation between Bitcoin's laminar and turbulent phases, and portfolio allocation through the Kelly optimization framework.

He is the author of a freely available semiannual report comparing the Bitcoin mining industry to the HPC/supercomputer sector, and co-hosts the weekly Physics of Bitcoin livestream with Giovanni Santostasi.