BTC Sessions - Environmental Impacts: Bitcoin vs Gold - With Hass McCook EP017

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

Today’s guest Hass McCook discusses the environmental impacts of Bitcoin vs Gold.    Hass’s articles on Coindesk  https://www.coindesk.com/author/hass-mccook Hass’s Medium  https://medium.com/@hassmccook/the-economic-environmental-cost-of-bitcoin-part-i-ac162067721d Hass on Twitter  https://twitter.com/FriarHass SUPPORT THE SHOW: Visit LEDN to check out getting a bitcoin-backed loan https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Wasabi Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQHAzSckK0 Check out Rise Wallet – the easiest way to onboard your pre-coiner friends to Bitcoin! https://www.risewallet.com/ Rise tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2VUjj6wPM0 Get NORDVPN to protect your online privacy. 75% off a 3 year https://nordvpn.org/btcsessions Check out my website for private bookings: http://btcsessions.ca/ Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions

Wasabby wallet. I'm fairly private. Hottle their Bitcoin. What's up everyone? Ben with the BTC Sessions here. I am still on vacation. This is next up in my video series. Now I am away, but I've got some interviews for you. And if I could please enlist your help while I'm away, I am promising my wife to stay away from social media for a couple weeks

and kind of turn off the brain for a little while. So if you guys could do me a favor, and share these videos out across all your social media. It helps in my absence, and I really do appreciate it. Now, today I've got an awesome guest. His name is Hass McCook. He is a civil engineer. He was a presenter at Baltic Honey Badger in Riga Lapia that I attended,

and he's got some incredible insights when it comes to gold and Bitcoin and other assets and how they stack up and what their impact is on society in the environment. So we dive into that. I really enjoyed speaking with Haas. I should apologize a bit in advance. There were a couple moments where my internet got spotty. So if you notice that the conversation jumps a little bit, it's because I've clipped apart where it dropped out. I'm sure you guys will be able to piece it together. No problem. It's not too many spots like that. Now outside of this, of course, if you want to help out the show, you can hit up any of the people that I'm working with. Of course, leaden.a.o where you can use your Bitcoin for a couple of services.

few services now, you can check out, of course, their Bitcoin backed loans where you can obtain Canadian or US dollars using your Bitcoin as collateral. They have Bitcoin savings account where you can earn interest on your Bitcoin paid in Bitcoin. And they also have a program called B2X now where you can gain double exposure to Bitcoin, basically long Bitcoin if you're a Super Bowl. So be sure to check them out. Also, NORVPN, if you want to use a VPN service to hide your IP address and encrypt your browsing data, there's a link below to check them out for 3rd.

three bucks a month. And of course, always coin join my friends, wasabi wallet, check them out and maintain privacy with your Bitcoin. And with that, we're going to dive into the interview. Let me know what you think. And please enjoy, share, like, subscribe, and I will see you for the next one. Hello everyone. Welcome to the BTC sessions. I have got a wonderful guest with me today. I got to meet this gentleman over at the Baltic Honey Badger Conference in Riga, Latvia, Just recently, I think about a week, week and a half ago now, and I really enjoyed his talk. He had a great talk there, and I just had to have him on the show.

So, Hass McCook, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm fantastic. Great to be here. Man, wild to meet you and the rest of the community out in Riga. So we're a bit isolated here in Australia. So don't get me wrong. I love my brothers and sisters here in Australia,

but sometimes nice to see the cousins too. So great to get out and see all you guys. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome to meet everybody there. I really enjoyed all the presentations. I really enjoyed yours. And it was like the side conversations that you get to have at an event like that are pretty priceless as well. So thanks for agreeing to come on.

I got to briefly interview you there for like a one-off question in kind of a clip together mix, but I figured it was better to expand upon some of your knowledge here. So maybe what I'll do is I'll toss it to you. I'll let you explain who you are, what you do, kind of, I guess, what brought you to Bitcoin? What was your rabbit hole trajectory of getting into the space? All right.

I'm not going to go into a life story here. I'll let everyone here piece it together. But basically, I find myself in a very weird niche in this community. So I'm a civil engineer. So I speak in sound bites. So here's a sound bite for you. You know, when it comes to engineering the digital world, I wouldn't know shit from shoe polish.

but I would and I will claim to be an expert on engineering the physical world. So I've got a very, very great and deep connection to the physical world. So I started, I went into university quite young. I went in at 16, so effectively I had to choose my life path at 14. You know, so when you're 14, you've got a big heart, idealistic. So the best thing I can do, like, for civilization, is build civil infrastructure. So going through the career, big infrastructure mega projects, whenever you've got a big project, you've got to ask for money from, you know, generally bad, bad people, completely disillusioned.

and after after doing my my MBA at Oxford in 2012, 2013, I developed a state of mind that the only infrastructure in the world worth caring about and building is Bitcoin. Wow, this bold claim there, bold assertion. Yeah. Since I've done a lot of tunneling, one of the one of the topics I kept not. noticing, you know, I had a very, like, spiritual and emotional connection to Bitcoin. And, you know, preceding the crash, there was a lot of FUD going around, you know, trying to stab the knife even deeper and twist it.

And one of the big pieces of FUD was about environmental impact. Obviously, there's a million other things. I did an analysis of the environmental, social, and economic impacts of gold. and be compared to Bitcoin. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. So we're going to be kind of diving in to a lot of that stuff.

Sorry, Hassar. Are you getting me okay here? I'm getting you perfect, loud and clear. Okay, perfect. Just making sure that internet connection is all good. So we're going to dive into a little bit of your research. So let's kind of, I guess, dissect first in regards to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, what were some of the narratives that you noticed?

And once you dove into your research, what did you turn up? What's the reality? So when people ask me about Bitcoin, I asked them to suspend disbelief, teleport yourself to the year 2050. All energy is going to be clean and carbon free. It will be because it must. And if it's all carbon-free, you cares about energy. But it's apparently not carbon-free, unfortunately.

So it does emit a bit of carbon. So I figured, you know what, let me figure out how much it does and compare it to gold and whatnot. In 2013, 2014, when I originally published my research, it was a little dwarf. So I didn't really use that much energy. but now becoming a big boy

and you know using quite a bit it'll keep using more but I posit as energy gets cleaner and much cheaper and typically the cleaner ones are becoming the cheapest

will use a lot of energy no emissions, who cares? Yeah so in your research you just said essentially that the cleaner options are becoming the cheaper options. And so you're positing that essentially because Bitcoin miners, their bottom line is dictated by their energy costs,

they're going to start migrating by and large to these cleaner options. And I mean, there has been some studies in regards to kind of guesstimating where a lot of Bitcoin mining is done and the energy sources that are used. Did you kind of dive into any of that? I know it's tough to for sure say, but did you dive into any of that in your research then? I took the 2050 approach,

that there will be like max competition and like max, just on average, the global grid wouldn't be as random. But for now I had no choice but to use, global average grid settings, just everything's so anonymous. It's just hard to pick out where everything is. And, you know, there's some places, you know, where electricity is super cheap, many places actually, where you can just, like, you know, I'll be straight and honest where, you know, someone with a lot of black money that needs to be clean could set up a couple