BTC Sessions - WHY ARE WE BULLISH? Shaun Connell, Jyn Urso, Mark Stephany ep250

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

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Welcome to the show, everyone. Another Friday, another episode of Why Are We Bullish? Happy to be back this week. We had a little hiatus last week because I was in Miami experiencing the excitement of the Bitcoin 2020 conference. We talked a little bit about that on the new show yesterday. And we've got a whole new panel of brand new guests this week. And I'm very excited to have them all on. As always, please do like, subscribe, share.

All that stuff is super important. in front of more eyeballs. This is live. Anything can happen. So I defer to my friend Bill here. We'll do it live. Okay. We'll do it live.

Do it live. I'll write it and we'll do it live. Fibing thing sucks. Once again, like, subscribe, share, all that good stuff. I am Ben with the BTC sessions. This is your daily session. All right, before we bring in our panel, let's take a quick look at where we are in the market right now. This is the bitbow.

dot I.O dashboard. We're sitting at 40,400 and some odd dollars per coin. Single U.S. dollar will grab you 2,475 sats. 90.54% of all Bitcoin have been mined. And in terms of fees, six sats per byte will get you into the next block. And anything beyond that, one sat per byte should do you. Quick shout out to sponsor the show, shakepay.com. If you're in Bitcoin, if you're in Canada, rather, buying Bitcoin, this is super easy way to do it. E transfers, no deposit fee, no draw fees, thin spread. If you use the link down below, after your first $100 purchase, they'll give you it 30 bucks for free.

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This is how I back up all my stuff. So with that, let's bring in our friends here. We've got Sean, we've got Margo. We've got Mark. Welcome, everybody. I'm going to get a quick round of intros from you guys. So when I come to you, if you can just do a quick, Who are you? What do you do? That'd be great. So let's start with Sean. A quick little intro from you.

Sure. My name's Sean Connell. My background is I come from energy first before coming into Bitcoin. So I spent about 15 years with a power generation company where I built on that a trade desk. And now I work for a company called Lancium. And we are an energy transition company that's building an electrical infrastructure and software to essentially convert large Bitcoin mining facilities into like power plant. in reverse. So I'm kind of doing what I've used in my background from Power Generation for application now in Bitcoin mining. Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you, man. And we hang out around the same neck of the woods. So it's good to have another local jumping on, although we're kind of globetrotting a little bit. So I think we're below zero today still, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I hit the beach one day and I was shoveling snow the next. It was very unpleasant.

Let's jump down the line. Mark, can you give yourself a little intro? Who are you? What do you do? Thank you. My name is Mark Stefani. I'm a hospital medicine position for the past 10 years. So in the thick of things over the past couple, that's for sure. I've been in the Bitcoin space since January 2017. And I started the progressive Bitcoin or podcast December of last year because I felt that there was a gap in the content with respect to center-left issue. choose when arguably, in my opinion, some of the most relevant applications to Bitcoin are for the people most in need of it. And so launched that in December and things have been growing there and loved, very honored and grateful to have the opportunity to do something like that.

Awesome. Well, I'm glad to have you here and very interested to chat with you this time around. And finally, let's jump to Margot, aka Jin Erso. How are you doing? I'm good. Thanks. I'm Margo or Jen. I am a fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, and I focus mainly on Bitcoin mining and environment-related issues. So I have worked a lot with Sean, and he was on the panel that I moderated at the Bitcoin conference. So that was very cool. And I also know Mark from his work on the progressive side of things. So yeah, I'm also a PhD candidate. I do research on climate change. have a climate model that I'm building. And I'm also working on a study of Bitcoin mining in Urquat. So a case study of that. So that's really exciting, trying to figure out where all the data is and figure out what the story is there. You got your fingers and everything. You're busy.

That's awesome. Yeah, it keeps me very busy. Awesome. Well, guys, I am super happy to have you all. Thank you for joining and shout out to everybody that's already here in the chat. I'll be bringing up some of your comments and everything up here. I don't know if our favorite person is here yet or not. I'm sad. I haven't seen him for a couple weeks. I have a fan on the show. His name is David Wong.

And he's here every Friday, sometimes hours early for the show. He hates Bitcoin, but he's here almost every week. So I hope we see his return. We'll put out positive vibes so that he can fill the chat with his excellent criticism. And even Bitcoin Magazine is in the room. So, you know, shout out to Bitcoin Meg for joining in. But we're going to get this rolling. People watching that are unfamiliar.

This is why are we bullish. Very simple. We go by the three R's. Somebody's going to give a reason why they're bullish. Then altogether, we're going to riff on that reason. and then we're going to rotate to the next person. Simple. We're going to go all the way through to everybody gets a chance.

I will be kicking us off tonight. Very, very, I've been reinvigorated by this trip to Miami. And so my reason for being bullish this week is the Bitcoin brain drain, you know, a phenomenon where people just leave their former lives behind and just get sucked into the black hole that is Bitcoin. in whatever way they see fit. You know, and we do see notable people, highly visible public personas that get sucked into Bitcoin. We've seen a number of them over the past number of years, you know, Jack Dorsey being a very notable one, you know, leaving things behind to focus a lot on Bitcoin. There is even a panel of Greg Foss headed up a panel of billionaire capital allocators that that, that, have been become kind of enthralled in Bitcoin and left some of their previous ventures or put

large swaths of their net worth into Bitcoin. But where I'd like to focus this particular topic and my reason for being bullish this week is the individual people that I've met along the way. In particular, I really noticed from visiting Bitcoin 2019. obviously there's a gap in 2020, but then going again in 21 and then again this year. And each year I would come across people that would come up to me and say, hey, do you have any ideas of like how I could get more involved, how I could work in this space, what I could do? And, you know, people are always drawn and they're like,

I can't quite, I'm not fully invested in my previous ventures, in my current occupation. and I just, I feel like this is important. I'd like to spend more time on it. And each year I return, there's not only a swap more people saying the same things, but the ones from the previous years have now gotten jobs and are now working in the space, which is just incredible to see. There were so many people from last year that came up and said, well, I'm kind of looking around,

trying to figure out what I can do. then they're coming back and saying, hey, I'm working for this company or this company and this company. And they're all moving away from what they were working on previously to figure out where they fit and then contribute to Bitcoin, which is an incredible thing to see. And in fact, you even see groups that are putting together resources to help people like that along the way to find where their contributions can be best allocated. And I'd like to give a shout out to Bitcoin or jobs. They had a booth at the conference and they're helping regular day-to-day plebs that just want to be involved come and work for Bitcoin companies. And, you know, I just said Bitcoin magazine is in the chat there.

And man, the number of people that I've seen join up with them and help with content, another good shout out would be Swan. Swan seems to be employing everybody. They're just hiring nonstop. And it's always cool seeing great people join up with them. But the brain drain is real. And I think as more and more people kind of see the gravity of what Bitcoin has to offer to the world potentially, they're all finding unique places to contribute. myself included early on. I had no idea how a mixture of having taught little kids how to breakdance for a decade,

enjoying being on a stage and performing, and some very minor video editing skills would come together to teach people about how to use Bitcoin wallets and security and all that. But I never would have guessed this trajectory for myself. but through, you know, kind of being exposed to the space and having an extreme passion for it, you tend to find your way and put together your skill set to provide some value. So very bullish on the fact that not only did I see a ton of Bitcoiners who wanted to work in Bitcoin, have that dream fulfilled, but I saw another massive amount of clubs this year that have that drive to make it happen.

and I very much look forward to seeing them again next year as they tell me all about their great new jobs. So I'm going to open it up to you guys, whether it be questions, commentary, things that you've experienced in regards to people finding their place in Bitcoin or even yourself. So does anybody want to dive in with anything that they've experienced? Sure. I think you're absolutely right. It's a one-way street, it would seem. It's a black hole of pulling people in. And it seems to be doing that from all sectors,

whether that's finance, energy, climate science, to entertainment. You know, everybody's headed in one direction. I can't think of a single example where people are leaving the industry. And so it's pretty most certainly bullish in that case. I can speak from experience in that the Minneapolis Bitcoin meetup group. There's been at least four or five members that have moved to Austin for Bitcoin companies, primarily unchained. They're poaching everybody from up here.

So it's pretty remarkable. So I would completely agree with you. It's a very bullish scenario. I feel like Austin is a 51% attack on the geolocation of Bitcoiners in the thing. It feels like when you first got introduced to Bitcoin, right, you kind of start kind of going down the rabbit hole. And then you make this discovery, right? And you get super excited about it. And so I think that like, you know, we all wear different hats in our lives.

There's like your hat as a husband, a hat as a parent. And then there's your career hat and then your personal hat. And so I found that, you know, my experience and my observation with others is that you've got this kind of career hat that you're wearing and you've got to, you know, put that on every day and you're doing certain activities. And then you go home and you put on this other hat, which is this, you know, this interest hat, which is like the Bitcoin discovery. And so it feels like, you know, and the passion is so strong in that top hat that I find, you know, myself and others like, how do you convert that into just one hat? So it doesn't feel like you're having two jobs where you kind of have this career during the day.

And then you go home and you're doing this other thing, spend a whole bunch of time. So how do you merge those? And so that's kind of, you know, I agree completely with you guys. It usually comes in as that personal interest. You get in the space. And you're like, well, how do I combine this? I don't have to do, you know, two jobs. jobs. Yeah. Also, I think it's a good description called a black hole because you really have to try not to hit that event horizon because there's no escape once you go in. And for me, trying to balance all the stuff I'm doing in Bitcoin with my PhD research is really hard sometimes. So I have to remind myself to step back and like remember I also need to get my PhD. So.

if I get too sucked in, I'll never finish my PhD. But I'll have a lot of fun with Bitcoin, but I won't get the PhD. And Margo, have you merged like your PhD with kind of like the Bitcoin space? A little bit. I mean, I finally had the conversation with my advisor about this Ercot study. And I had to really defend the idea. He knows a few things about power systems. He's done some modeling. So at first he was skeptical, but I pushed back a lot and pulled as much knowledge as I had in my head about everything that was going on. And by the end of it, he was like, okay, yeah, this is worthwhile. And he even said that the model that we're working on could actually be applicable down the line. So, which was his way of saying, you know, don't stop working

on your model because we, because you should finish it. So don't get too distracted. But, you know, We'll see what happens how this study goes. Margot, I don't know. If I can jump in, was there a particular piece of evidence or was it the cumulative amount of evidence that tip to scales for your advisor? Oh, I think it was the cumulative amount. And maybe I just kept throwing things back at him,

like whatever I could think of about demand response or about bringing on new infrastructure. he understood like I didn't start with Bitcoin mining first of all. I started with the big picture problem, which was how do we accelerate the renewable energy transition? And then I was like, and there's these computers that you can use. Ha ha ha, they're energy intensive.

And then finally, I was like, cryptocurrency miners. And then I was like, Bitcoin mining. And yeah, he's skeptical about the renewable energy transition. So that was part of the problem. And I had to tell him, look, it doesn't, the question isn't whether we can bring on high levels of renewables onto electrical grid. The question is whether Bitcoin mining actually plays a role. And this case study in Irkot is the first step. And he was also concerned because you can really, this type of modeling that you could end up doing is very complicated.

So he was basically saying, like, this is a whole career that you're talking about. I don't understand. What are you saying? Do you want to change your thesis? It's okay, but this is really changing. And what are you thinking? So I couldn't tell him that it was like, oh, I'm doing this because I love Bitcoin. But I was really trying to be objective.

He thinks that he's doing it because he thinks it's climate activism. So I think that's great. Do you think he's going to be drawn into the black hole? I don't know. He still uses AOL for his email. might take a few more touch points before that happens. Yeah. Awesome.

Well, that's great. Did you guys encounter people? Well, how many of you were down? Mark, were you down in Miami or no? I couldn't make it. I was working. Oh, that's too bad. Well, fair enough.

Well, I'm curious to hear if Sean and Margo ran into people that maybe have made some shifts while you were down in Miami. Did you encounter any people that were beginning to work in the Bitcoin space or had aspirations of or anything like that? So maybe I'll kind of start by saying, I think Margo and I had kind of an expectation going down to Bitcoin Miami this year that the mining stage last year was it was kind of a tent off to the side and it was kind of on the fringe.

It was pretty different this time. Right. And so like, and I think that, you know, I'll speak for myself. Maybe Margo might add on this. But like it's different when you speak in a lot in front of a group of, you know, 100, 200 versus 1,000. Right. And so I went down to Miami and, you know, checked out the space that was going to be for like the mining stage and it's, you know, a thousand people. Right. So it's, you know, tying into what you're sharing is like what was, you know, surprising was is the amount of people that have shifted to kind of this awareness of kind of Bitcoin at the intersection of energy. And we're really kind of, you know, sponges that were. We're kind of like drinking from the hose of saying, you know, kind of teach me, right? Because I really need to know this information.

So I felt that that was a big shift that happened year over year where, you know, something fringe on the side to saying, hey, this is something super important and super kind of, you know, can play a key role in this energy transition and, you know, help me kind of defend an attack vector of Bitcoin by understanding the benefits of it. So that's kind of a long way of saying that, you know, people are very receptive to learning this. And so it felt like, you know, people wanted to be a sponge to learn those pieces. Would you think the same Margo or something different?

Yeah, yeah, I agree. There were a lot of people who wanted to talk about mining with renewable energy. They were interested in, like, does this really work? What are the conditions for it? But I think what surprises me is how excited people are about it, more than anything. Because there were a lot of technical questions. And I did ask people on Twitter to submit questions for the panel. And we had close to 70 questions.

And some of them were very technical. Some of them were skeptic-based. But overall, I think the level of excitement around it was beyond anything I thought. And the panel had standing room seating, I guess. Like it was filled in capacity. That's what I was told. It's hard to see from the stage. So I think that, well, I didn't really hear anybody actually saying, like, can you get me a job in this place?

You know, I can't get any job in this space. But I do know that, well, actually, I do know that at least one person was thinking about dropping out of their PhD program to work in the renewable industry on Bitcoin mining in particular. So, yeah, there are, it sounds like there are really people out there that want to get involved and think this. is a worthwhile endeavor? Actually, one of the people that brought this up, and I don't want to ruin any topics moving forward, but I'm not a fan of the individual, but interesting that he's getting into this realm

is Kevin O'Leary was talking about. He wants to be doing a mix of hydro and nuclear in terms of mine. So he's kind of diving, and he was talking about, oh, I want to do this for the next decade. So interesting to hear that coming out of him, but yeah, I digress. Yeah, there's been quite a lot of interest from a lot of people in a lot of different realms.

And you're absolutely right about that mining stage. I mean, the 2019 main stage for the Bitcoin conference was about the same size as the mining stage this time. And that was for like the main stage of all the major speakers. it was pretty astounding to see all of the different stages and the draw that they all got for whether it be mining or the open source stage was something you think to go to. Obviously, the main stage had some great stuff.

I can't remember the name of the other stage, the Genesis stage. There was a lot of different talks to take in in different realms. And it seems like they filled them up the whole time. you had to split your attention quite a bit if you wanted a range of topics. So it was pretty awesome. Ben, was there a Bitcoin 2019?

Was it in Miami? So 2019 was in San Francisco. And it thankfully moved. It was a little pricey over in San Francisco for not quite as good of an experience. I would say. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Last year's was at a different location. So a lot of the stages, you remember, some of them were like outside, kind of like

tinted. And then this year it was just massive. Like you could, your feet were killing you by the end of the day. If you were walking from stage to stage, which, you know, not a bad thing. I'd rather have the space. But yeah. So I guess I can just kind of round out this topic by. saying the brain drain is real. There's people flocking to Bitcoin and trying to find their way.

And if you're one of those people, just keep going with it. Keep trying to figure out where your skill sets lie and what you can offer. And if the first few things you try, much like I experienced, don't quite work out. You'll gradually find a place for you to settle into. Also, take a look at Bitcoin or Jobs.com, I believe it is, but Google that and you'll probably maybe find some ideas there as well. But I'm excited to see the influx of new people and what they have to offer in the coming years. So with that, let's do a little rotation. I do have to do a quick shout out to our number one fan has made it. He wants everybody to know that he's not bullish all right now. Bitcoin is stuck in the 40K level. So thank you, David. It's a pleasure to have you

here. I value your input and I hope you had a wonderful week. But we're going to keep rolling here. And I'm going to toss it to Sean. Here is your opportunity. A little rant. What do you, what are you bullish about? What are you excited about this week? Sure. And actually, it's funny. The comment there, David Wong makes me think, you remember the movie Howard Stern Private Parks? I think the average Howard Stern lover listened for like an hour and the average hater listen for like five hours. So maybe David Wong's your Howard Stern hater guy that is your number one fan. He's gradually being orange pill just through osmosis.

I think it'll happen. Yeah. Yeah. So the reason why I'm bullish is that, you know, when I entered this space, you know, I started my career, a company here in Alberta called Trans Delta. It's a power generation company. And, you know, when I came across Bitcoin, like, you know, my first kind of response to a time was saying, you know, like, what is it, you know, how do you buy it? Right? And it's like,

oh, you can go through the exchange and then, you know, what does it cost to make? Right. And so at that time in 2017, it was like, you could buy it for 10,000 and the equivalent was, you know, $400, right, to make it. And so like to me, there's a big bust there, right? So it's saying, like, you know, why would you buy it if you can just make it? So like, I need to really understand the fundamentals of Bitcoin mining the same way like commodities have, you know, kind of their fundamentals that drive kind of their value and how, you know, prices converge and kind of, you know, how they formulate over time. And so for me at the time is that there was, you know, I looked at this and thought that, you know, this is, you can see where Bitcoin's going and the trajectory it's going.

And it's going to be, you know, it is a completely energy story. And so I really need to understand that. And so when I made the shift over, I was super excited because I saw Bitcoin as this, you know, this type of, so first and foremost, I started with the hat of just being, you know, a Bitcoin enthusiast, right? And then I wanted to understand the power side. And when I dove in the power side, it was like, you know, kind of finding, you know, Bitcoin was a jackpot. And then you find this jackpot embedded within the jackpot, which is saying, you know, I didn't think this would be so advantageous. But this is going to be super beneficial to what's happening in this energy transition. And so why I'm bullish right now is that, you know, for it's starting to become mainstream on kind of people understanding kind of the value proposition that Bitcoin mining is having.

And, you know, the short version of kind of, you know, why it's a good thing for Bitcoin mining is that in an energy transition, you need to essentially electrify everything, which means that, you know, all of your cars are going to be electric, your buildings, etc. You're going to do a 3x in electricity demand. And so that means three times as much electricity is needed. Simultaneously, you're going to replace all the fossil fuel generation that's existing. So coal plants are going to retire. And you're going to replace that with wind and solar, which is intermittent. And so you're going to do a 15X on the wind and solar capacity that exists right now. So so far, you're going to triple your demand.

You can get rid of your reliable generation and replace it with intermittent. And so what that means is that you need to have about four times more flexibility on the grid to manage these swings. Right. And so think about like a wind that just stops blowing. You need to have something that can kind of balance a grid or a solar ramp when the sun goes down. You need to have something that can help out with that kind of ramp. And so, you know, currently in the power space is that. that demand response and batteries represent 1% of all the flexibility for those types of resources

that can help balance these systems. And in this grid of the future, is that batteries and demand response are going to be needing for 50%. So you're replacing all this fossil fuels. So there's a new requirement that you need to have this massive amount of flexibility from from values and demand response. And the punchline demand response is it's going to be a 20x in demand response. And so people are now starting to kind of, you know, tying in that So being in the space here now for a couple of years, and I hear kind of people that are Bitcoin miners that really are like they are amazing of what they do and they kind of understand Bitcoin mining inside and out. And you know, what people will come to them and say, hey, you're doing Bitcoin mining and that's bad. And, you know, the response is deep down inside, they know it's good for renewables, but they can't really explain exactly how.

And so I feel like now the narrative is happening where they're starting to understand how Bitcoin mining can just be turned on and off and just like in a jiffy. Right. So the current solution we have for demand response right now would be something like a steel plant that was essentially, you know, call them up. You know, somebody that turns off the arc furnace for a couple hours. Can't do it too long because the steel will harden. So you only get a couple hours. And that's the best demand response in the planet. And so now you got this new demand response.

And then miners are starting to kind of wake up to this realization that they've got a jackpot, right? They're like, holy cow, I've got this, you know, amazing resource that can help in this energy transition. So instead of us defending the narrative on saying, is this a good use of energy, right? It's now saying, do you want to decarbonize your power grids? Okay, good. Okay, well, you need demand response. Good. We're going to help you out with that.

So we're doing this to help you achieve your goals. And so I'm bullish because people are now really starting to understand this. And if they don't, like, they're diving in to really understand the pieces. And my DMs and Twitter have now been starting to fill up with people that were wanting to start academic papers on Bitcoin mining as a flexible resource. I've written a couple pieces with, I've written a piece with Nick Carter before, and we're going to be releasing another research paper here soon on Bitcoin mining as a flexible load. But it feels like that that shift of saying that the attack vector of Bitcoin can be banned to saying you need Bitcoin to help with this transition. So that's kind of why I'm bullish is this pivot that's happening in the narrative. And people are really dialing in to really understand that.

Can you, for those that may be unfamiliar, can you elaborate a little bit on with intermittence, what the deal is in terms of why you need, you were saying about 4X, the load. Why is that necessary? What's the implication of not having that covered? And then to tag on to that, Where are we at with batteries to be able to handle like those down times in instances where we might need to rely on them?

Yeah. So there's, you know, both batteries and demand response play, you know, big roles, but they can do different use cases, right? And so, you know, and I shared this one in the panel in Miami is the use case of a battery, for example, is that we use a 100 megawatt battery that can last for four hours. You can be up in the panhandle in Texas since a very windy day. and it looks like it's going to be windy for four days. And they're needing to curtail the amount of energy that's being produced because there's not enough demand locally, plus the amount of wires that connect to the major load centers.

So they actually have to turn down the wind, right? And so put the battery there. And so the battery is going to do four hours at 100 megawatts, right? So it's going to do 400 megawatt hours. But then it's going to have to turn off line for four straight days. It's got to wait to the wind stops flowing until injecting that power back in. Whereas you can have like a flexible, mining load that's located right in the panhandle. And on hour one, it's going to consume 100 megawatts

all the way through for four days. Right. So it's going to do the, you know, 9,600 megawatt hours of consumption compared to only 400 for the battery, which means you've improved the economics or wind that would have just been curtailed. Right. And so, you know, it's important to note that, you know, batteries play a big role in that they have also provided, you know, backup power. Like a Bitcoin mine can't store energy and then give it back to the grid, right? It's just to make a case that there's different use cases. And, you know, the challenge. that the Texas grid is having in other areas where they reach a really high amount of wind and solar penetration is you've got lack of transmission infrastructure that can pull that power

to the regions. And so it's just being wasted. So how do you have something that can soak up that excess power until you can actually build these power lines that can connect those and then you know, that mining facility that can just, you know, turn down, turn up and down. You mentioned about what's the consequence of not having these resources to balance? It's like, you know, think about a day where, you know, it's super windings. day and then all of a sudden the wind just stops blowing.

And so in power markets, is your real-time supply has to meet your demand all the time at the same time, exactly the same amount. Right. It's precision. And if the wind turns offline, currently we ramp up a natural gas plant to take that place, right, and saying, okay, we need something to fill that gap

because we just lost some supply. But we just talked about a narrative where you're replacing all your fossil fuel generation and all you're left on the grid is with, you know, a different resource mix. It could be nuclear, could be hydro, could be wind, solar, batteries, demand response. So what's going to fill that gap where gas was or coal was? And so if you don't have that gap, then you can get into something that turns into like a, you know, a blackout because you need partial load shedding in certain areas because you can't meet that demand.

So it's, there's consequences. And it's kind of, just zooming out, you know, tree top level here is that when countries make these goals of saying we're going to be, you know, decarbonizing our power systems, it feels good. it's the right thing to do, but there's just a lot of implications to that, right? Because there's so much flexibility that's being given by these types of resources like natural gas plants, if you take them away, well, you need to have something that can make up for that. So Bitcoin mining has that ability where can just turn on, turn off, turn on, turn off. It can also soak up that excess wind or solar in certain areas when there's not enough transmission to be able to push that power in other regions.

Awesome. Do Mark or Margo, want to hop in here. Any thoughts, comments, anything on what Sean has said here? I second what Sean's saying. I actually just spoke with somebody today. I had a meeting with someone from the renewable energy industry. And they're saying they're getting a lot of calls from mining companies wanting to integrate with them with their power.

And he was a little skeptical, but some of the claims coming out of the claims coming out of the community and I think he said he attended the conference and some maybe people were a little over bullish from his perspective. But by the end of it, he's like, yeah, we're probably going to be working with them. So, you know, this is really, really starting to happen. It's just the industry is just starting to wake up and realize this potential. So it's really exciting to see it and to be able to see how it's going to play out from now into the next five, 10 years. From that conversation, did you glean that people were indeed being, maybe getting ahead of themselves a little bit? Or was it, did he maybe not understand some of the implications

of it? Or was it a mixture of both? I don't really, I don't know exactly what he was told. I mean, he had some questions about E-Waste and the general thought around that sort of. thing. And then sometimes people get really excited and they're like, oh, yeah, this is going to save the planet. And of course, I mean, it's going to contribute to our whole decarbonization and trying to meet these goals from the Paris Climate Agreement and delays IPCC report, of course, that we have to accelerate this renewable transition. But I mean, you know, Bitcoin mining is one tool in a toolbox of tools that we have to make this transition. possible. So maybe there was some people that were like super excited, like, yeah, we're going to say the plan, which is great. You know, I think hearing that come out of Bitcoin space is,

is, this really warrants my heart. Like, yeah, let's be excited about saving the planet. Let's make Bitcoin do this. This is fantastic. So I don't know exactly what he was told. I don't know if it was that, but, but I think I, you know, I tried, I did my best answer his questions and try to, you know, alleviate some of his concerns. That's like he did a good job. Mark, did you want to tag in for anything? Any thoughts on what Margo or Sean has said? I was going to ask the same exact question that you did,

what it was going to, what was the overzealous component that this person was linking to, but it sounds like there wasn't something specific. Yeah, you know, the thing is, what he said was, you know, people in Bitcoin are like really into Bitcoin. I don't think any of us can disagree with that. We're really intensely passionate about Bitcoin and importance of Bitcoin. And generally, he said, usually when I, when I encounter that, I'm really skeptical. But it seems like in Bitcoin, maybe there's actually more to it than just hype. So yeah, he's been doing a lot of research. He said he's like on a scale. He's now he's maybe a small.

C Crypto Bro, so he's moving his way through his education and the rabbit hole. We want that C to be a B though. Well, of course. Awesome. All right. Well, let's, I guess we'll round this one out and we'll move on to the next. Sean, in regards to what you're saying, would you point people towards any interesting reading resources or anything that you've kind of encountered to kind of if they're interested in

diving down the rabbit hole about what you were just talking about? Sure. So my Twitter, I post a whole bunch of this and so it's at Sean Energy, so pretty easy remember. There's a white paper that we that we helped commission that was essentially a research study on mining in Texas. And the study concluded that for a flexible Bitcoin mining to the degree to the degree that to the degree that it's flexible and it's about 10%, it's actually net negative for emissions. And what that means is that you're locating in certain areas where they're allowing the overbuilder renewables that wouldn't occur without those facilities. And the total amount of megawatt hours that you're consuming is actually less than the number of megawatt hours that are brought online by new renewables projects. So that's a bit of a mine trip. So you can find that on my Sean Energy on Twitter and you know,

I post a bunch of content around there that should have some links. Is this the the flexible data centers can reduce grid carbon emissions in Texas? Is this the, uh, it sounds familiar, but it should be like large flexible data centers. Yeah, I think so. Flexible data centers. I'm just, uh, I believe it's on your Twitter here. I'll just to pull it up so people can take a look. Is that the one that we're talking about here?

Yes, that is the one. Man, you're fast, Ben. I'm smart. I'm working in the background here. I've got to get good at this. Yeah. Yeah, you know, Sean's profile is in the, along with, of course, Margo and Mark here, their Twitter profiles are in the show notes.

If you want to dive into anything we're talking about as we talk about it, if it comes up, they'll be linked down below, so check them out. But with that, let's do a. Let's do a little rotation. And shout out to everybody in the chat here. I'm going to start pulling up more comments as we go. So keep them flowing. And if they're relevant, I'll bring them up.

But we're going to jump over to Mark. Mark, you are up. What are you bullish about this week? What is on your mind? Thank you. I would say that I don't have a technical thing that I'm necessarily bullish on or specific project. What I would say is that I have this kind of backseat to the overall.

all ethos and narratives surrounding the community in my in my niche here. And so what I'm bullish about, I'm bullish because you have allowed Sean, Margo, and I to be a voice on your platform. And so what do I mean by that? I mean that there's this ever-increasing number of voices and stories in Bitcoin. And I think that diversity should be celebrated. I'm bullish because every one of my guests on my podcasts representing so many different experiences are incredibly passionate and committed to Bitcoin.

These are worldwide voices, obviously. These voices are increasing, right? And so while it may be frustrating that we see ongoing FUD and some hostile critics on Twitter, I look at the numbers and you see people. ever increasing engagement, ever increasing adoption, while it's the same Bitcoin critics on Twitter, we're still dealing with the same people, the same arguments, and yet more and more people are coming to Bitcoin. And so that's the signal that I hang on to. But the most bullish part for me is that these people are building with Bitcoin. They're building products that will be

service to their communities and their countries. And I think that we should all aspire to do that to contribute some way to Bitcoin. And I would argue that simply owning Bitcoin is not enough. That's the minimum that one can do. So I'm firmly in the camp that we must build the future of Bitcoin that we want to see. And much like the Bill of Rights, Bitcoin, in my opinion, is this codified set of rules. And we build on top of that. And that is up to us. And if we don't, and somebody else will. So I remained extremely bullish because we've clearly got people like Sean and Margot and yourself

and Bitcoin Acasi and Calcasa, all contributing in these incredible ways. And I'm incredibly honored to be doing my small part. And so that's why I remain bullish is because when you take a step back from all the fud from these critics and from the politicians, like you're pointing out at the beginning, this is a one way,

street. People are going in to Bitcoin. You don't see anybody exiting. There's always more projects. There's always more companies. There's always more podcasts. There's always more things to be written. To me, that's the most bullish signal of all. I like that. And I like that you, in particular, you mentioned the different voices that we're starting to hear, right? We're starting to hear like a plethora of different ideas in and around Bitcoin. And regardless of kind of where you sit on a lot of these topics, I mean, the fact remains that Bitcoin is just for everyone. Anyone can come to Bitcoin and utilize it in the way that they best see fit. And Bitcoin ends up being kind of this, this base layer for truth. It's like a solid foundation where we know that how it functions because we have

this specific protocol set out, okay, well, this is, this is just how it works. And then we can, based on our assumptions of what we think is valid, we can build a topic. And it allows for this competition of ideas and the best ones tend to bubble to the top. And, you know, the market will sort through what is noise and what is signal. And over time, we can kind of decipher, you know, even I know that you guys get a lot of pushback from other Bitcoiners in regards to your views on energy. But in the end, Bitcoin as a base layer for money cannot be perverted and cannot be debased and reallocated.

And so I believe with that, what will come of it is the best ideas and the best and most efficient ways of allocating human time and capital and energy. will be the winners in this instance. And I think, you know, over time, it just gives us a better baseline for truth in terms of, you know, what we value and what is efficient. So I know that's kind of uncertain, I guess, in regards to a lot of stuff. But I kind of have faith that with that kind of base layer of truth, we come through it with a a better idea of where we stand. So I'll open it up to Sean or Margo if you want to tag onto my very vague statements there. Sorry as I meet there. Mark, how did you get into Bitcoin and just,

you know, what was your kind of reason for starting a podcast? I got into Bitcoin after going through 2017 and getting spit out the other end and still recognizing that there was something to Bitcoin, there's still something to the time. technology, but totally burnt out from the whole ICO experience. And so what planted the seed was what is money, basically. And that stuck with me up and, you know, through, it was probably late 2018, early 19, where it's just like, I have to revisit that question. I've always had this tumultuous relationship with money in my entire life.

And I felt like if I was going to try to not only understand Bitcoin, but understand how I need to handle my own economic position and financial position, I need to better understand what is money. And I can't understand stocks in the financial markets without understanding this very core position. And so I didn't even start reading Bitcoin books before I started with, you know, Ferguson's books and he sent them money and all those other foundational books. And then it was just like most of us, it was kind of game on from there and never expanding need to understand more. But it wasn't until, yeah, late 2019, 20 when, you know, you felt comfortable in your seat a little bit more and really saw how things were spreading outside of the little bubble that you may have started with. And so you look at, you know, seeing things like Paxville. and its implications more globally. It started making you thinking about Bitcoin's overall impact,

not just within your own little sphere. Obviously, Gladstings work. And then it was certainly Nicole Dobrow's content in her articles that really made me focus in on more of the traditionally progressive-related issues. And what I mean by that is simply helping out the most marginalized communities and obviously some of the climate change activism and Bitcoin's implication of that. And clearly there was a lack of that content out there coupled with the majority of FUD coming from the left. I felt like it was, again, I needed to do something more. It was less what can Bitcoin do for me, but what can I do for Bitcoin?

Because I knew that if I, I'm firmly believe that if we don't at least try to steer the narrative ourselves, it will be steered for us. And so it was very much a passion project that a few of us, including Bargo, launched late last year. And it's been a joy ever since. I'm so glad that you brought up Paxful because they're doing some pretty amazing things in particular. The built with Bitcoin where they're building schools, a lot of them in Africa. And Yusuf was on the show before I went to Miami, actually, and he's just awesome. But they are doing some incredible things down there with Bitcoin. So I'm really glad that you mentioned it.

Yeah, they're remarkable. So that doesn't have enough plan in traditional mainstream media because it's like it's, it's remarkable. And if it were any other, you know, not for profit, I think there would be plenty of articles written up about what he's doing. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned in passing you mentioned Bitcoin books. Did you have any, once you did get into the Bitcoin books? Did you have some that you gravitated towards any that you found not in line with your thinking, perhaps, as well?

There weren't, I enjoyed Safe Dean's book up until the Art and Architecture of Peace. That's where the most people had problems. Yeah, and so I skipped over that until the conclusion. And yeah, then plenty of other books. layered money have been fantastic. I guess I get a little lost in some of the more metaphorical pieces and some of the more weighty comparisons. And I've really focused more on like the concrete real world applications.

And I know I find myself consuming a lot more article content than books these days. That being said, going back to Andreas's mastering Bitcoin book as we speak and trying to pull more from that. Yeah, absolutely. Anybody want to tag in further? Margo, I don't know if you have anything that you wanted to add in here. Oh, I mean, I love all the work that's happening in the global south. I think that's where the most exciting stuff is happening because, like, I mean, like Alex Gladstein says, his book title is Check Your Financial Privilege,

because in the West, we're incredibly financially privileged. We have a fairly stable money. Of course, we're seeing rising inflation now, but we really haven't had to deal with any kind of destabilization in that sense, any kind of hyperinflation. We really haven't seen governments outright steal our hard-earned money as people have seen in other parts of the world. So seeing that work play out to me is probably what adds the biggest social value to Bitcoin.

And is the thing that I wish was the face of Bitcoin instead of people seeing the speculation aspect of it. So I would love to see that narrative flip too, that where people were faced with that, that was the first thing they saw. Because that, to me, is such a powerful message of what Bitcoin is really about. It's not just about hoddling. it is also about using it as a currency and using it as a lifeboat and to bring Andreas Antonopoulos back into it. I mean, he's so fantastic of explaining the social value and the importance of having this neutral money, this apolitical money system. I'd echo also, both of you mentioned Alex Gladstein and what he's doing with the Human Rights Foundation. They're doing another.

They had this in actually Miami Beach in October, but they're doing it again in Oslo, Norway coming up. But last time at the Oslo Freedom Forum, they had an entire Bitcoin track of just like its own stage with all Bitcoin content, which I was very happy to be a part of. I was just talking to him yesterday, and it looks like I'm going to be emceeing this one as well.

So super excited for that. Margo, you're going to be there? No, Troy Cross is going to be there. So you'll be representing the Bitcoin environment side. I might be emceeing him then and introducing him or something. So that'd be great. No, I'm just going to say I'm one Manhattan away from Yolohine into getting tickets for that conference. It's quite good.

And some of the, you know, that's where like photo, Fode Diop, who was a keynote, out in Miami this year. I'm trying to, Farida, Roya Mubb from Afghanistan. There were so many, and Calcasa from Ethiopia, there's so many great speakers

that come and talk about how Bitcoin is helping people in areas. And it's not like to what you guys were talking about. In Western nations, we're very spoiled in the fact that we've only ever really firsthand experienced Bitcoin as a as a way to kind of save or for a lot of people that yellowed in in the past year and a half speculate, right? And so that's kind of usually our first touch point with it, you know, myself included is you see number go up and you get curious. whereas a lot of the individuals that are speaking at things like the Azzell Freedom Forum,

their first touch points are this is a tool for me to survive. This is a tool for me to be able to move my wealth out of a country as I'm escaping or fund something within my country where my rights aren't being observed or I just have no rights. It's a very real tool for these individuals. and, you know, like, Roya Mabub was one of the first stories that I read about that had to do with this line of thought with Bitcoin of it being a tool for human rights and freedom. And she was in Afghanistan.

She was heading up the women's robotics team. But women were not allowed to have bank accounts there. And, you know, basically you had to have a man managing your finances at all times. And so she had no way of paying her team, of paying the girls on this robotics team. So she started accepting Bitcoin and paying the women in Bitcoin and basically subverted that system. I mean, through doing that, she did have threats on her life. I mean, since left. But it's it's the censorship resistant, apolitical nays.

nature of Bitcoin that allowed her to even do that and operate that team in the first place. So pretty incredible stories that come out of these individuals that find Bitcoin and understand what it can do. Yeah, I think it's a fantastic topic. So I think what I'll do now, unless anybody has any final thoughts around this topic before we round out to the last? Oh, we'll leave it there then. All right. So we're going to round out to the final reason for being bullish.

Margo, I hope I don't put too much pressure on you here. But you are our last most bullish. No, you're the last up tonight. So yeah, feel free. Let us know what are you excited about right now in Bitcoin? I'm really excited about Adam Back's announcement at the Bitcoin conference last week, which is that Blockstream and Block have teamed up. with Tesla to set up this solar and battery mining facility. And it's going to run 24-7,

and it's really an experiment. It's a live experiment on powering Bitcoin 100% off-grid, 100% with renewable and battery storage. And it's going to be powering one megawatt worth with 30 petahash, with 30 petahash rate. So it's approximately, a couple hundred S-19s that will be running. And the best part of it to me is that they're going to make all of the data public, including how much money they make from it, the uptime, you know, whatever else we need to know. It's all going to be there. And I think this is so important because you can actually, you know, you can write a paper on this.

This can get published in a peer-reviewed publication. And it's another opportunity to say, look, Bitcoin can do something good. And I think, in fact, that's basically what Adam Back was saying is like, look, we're just going to do this. And we're instead of just talking about it, we're just going to show you. We're going to just show you that Bitcoin mining can do this. He said, this is a step to proving our thesis that Bitcoin mining can fund zero emission power infrastructure and build the economic growth for the future. So that is really exciting, and I hope that people are paying attention to it because this is a first step in the right direction, I think. And it's very exciting when you're thinking about being able to bring on new energy sources, new sustainable energy sources that can take us that next level as an advanced civilization.

And it's very, very cool. And Adam back, I mean, the best part is that he's also a scientist. He's got a PhD. He's an academic, essentially in his background. So I think that also adds a certain amount of credibility to what he's doing. So I'm really, really excited to see how that pans out. I love it. I'll read just a couple of quotes from the article that I had pulled up here.

It said this from Adam back, a couple quotes from him. The Tesla Solar PV array and Tesla Megapak will power block stream and blocks open source solar and battery-powered Bitcoin mining facility, according to a slide shared by back during the presentation. The facility is projected to produce 3.8 megawatts solar renewable power, 30 petahash second hash rate. The facility will be a proof of concept for a 100% renewable energy Bitcoin mine at scale with the economics of the buildout, including operational costs and returns on investment made open to the public. Yeah.

So, I mean, just having it, he's basically open sourcing everything that they're doing, saying here's exactly how we did it. And if it seems like a feasible operation and it's profitable, then go do it yourself. And I think that's a fantastic thing. That's great. Can I ask the two of you a question, Margot and Sean?

Please. So this obviously demonstrates that 100% or renewable solar can mine Bitcoin, but then can you take this data in turn, say, with this, how does this fit into the grid? Yeah. So adding on to what Margo said to was also pretty cool at the Bitcoin conference, he got to go on stage right after we had our panel. So we got to chat with him and he gave us kind of the info, what he was going to share,

and that we kind of teed him up well because we were talking about, you know, the solar and declining cost for solar on stage. So I'd say what's super fascinating about this project is like for the first time in history, you can monetize generation without wires. I can step back and think about that, right? Just like instead of needing to connect to the grid, which is usually the normally the only buyer of energy that can take all of your production at a price that will be determined by the grid based on spot energy. But you can now avoid that, you know, bypass that. And you now have a customer for any type of sizing of facility that you want that you can now monetize generation without wires. Now, it's also important to kind of step back and say, you know, what is the alternative to this and like, what is the economics?

Because I'm really looking forward to the open sourcing of this because what I heard him stay on the stage was it's a $13 million project that's going to be split between Tesla and Blockstream. And so let's kind of break that out and just kind of, you know, what would it cost you to do this on your own without solar? And so it's, you know, ballpark S-19's one megawatts, about three and a half million dollars. The infrastructure normally, like a substation to connect to a grid is, you know, call it about a half million dollars per megawatt. So you're at like $4 million normally to be grid connected. And so now you're 13 million, right? But you're not going to have any OPEX anymore, right? You're now off the grid, right?

And, you know, it's kind of like the example of saying, I have an electric car. I don't have to put gas in my tank anymore. And it's almost free because I'm connecting electricity. But the Tesla sure as heck wasn't low cost option, right? My Kappex on that Tesla was a lot more than, say, a Honda Civic. So they're kind of building out like a really advanced model. So I'm looking forward to the economics because I believe what they're doing is that they're buying five megawatts of solar panels-ish at about a million dollars per megawatt hour.

And then they're building the battery pack so that you can consume one. megawatt of power from those panels during the day. And then you can inject approximately, I'm going to be wrong on this, but call it 14 megawatt hours of power that's being put in those batteries that can be pulled when the sun's not shining. So it's a very high CAPEX initial outlay. But I'm very interested to see kind of the project. And the real story on this, though, is Margot I touched on this in the panel is like, for the first time in history is that solar allows us to manufacture energy. And what that means is that, you know, with solar, is that you're not using fossil fuels, you're using semiconductors. It's just getting better and better

for more efficiency. The cost of solar, called like a levelized cost of energy, which is like the break-even that you need for power to make the project economic is about $28. And these costs are going down and down and down every year. If they keep going down the same pace, then this project that they're doing right now in the same type of cost curves of batteries that we're saying is a $13 million project. In 10 years from now, that project might be a $6 million project, right? Because the cost of the batteries and the solar has come down so much. And really what they're doing is they're helping advance what's called the learning rate for solar for every doubling capacity. What's the percentage savings that you're getting on the next, you know, kind of additional power that you bring it on to the grid.

So they're fast-tracking kind of the learning rate for this solar. So you can get to this point that you can have like near free energy. So I'm excited to see kind of economics. They're overpaying for sure. It's not going to be, you know, remotely close in my opinion to the economics of something that's just grid-connected start. But they're going to show that, you know, these costs will come down over time and they've just found a way to monetize generation without wire. So I think it's amazing story and I'm glad they're doing it. Yeah. And also, I mean, there's this massive way time now to get connected to the grid.

So if you can bring on these power plants and monetize them while you're waiting and the wait times are increasing, they're now heading towards four years because there's all sorts of policy changes that have to be made around the way these studies. are done. And if you can bring it online, you kind of eliminate a chicken versus the egg problem where you can kind of, you can do these in parallel. You can do the study, you can wait for the approval, you can figure out how much all that's going to cost if you have to upgrade the transmission lines or whatever, a buildout transmission if it's in a remote location. And in the meantime, you can keep that plant viable. You can start getting a return on that investment. And I think that's, that's one of the key components here is that we want to overbuild. this, the renewable power that we need for the grid, we have to overbuild for the time where

we have the least amount of power available. So, in other words, like, let's say in the winter, we're going to need a lot more solar panels because it's not going to be as sunny. So if you plan for that, you're going to overbuild for the rest of the time, and you're going to effectively need a lot more power. So we have to find ways to bring all this online as quickly as possible, especially to meet the goals of what we have for meeting the 1.5 degrees Celsius or even 2 degrees Celsius warming. We don't want to go past that. So if we can start monetizing them early, then that power will be there.

It'll be ready when we need it when the grid is ready for it. So I think that is really fantastic. So it's not just that we're doing this to be able to mine with Bitcoin, but we're also doing it to help the grid itself when it's ready for this extra power. So I've got a quick question here, given that you guys obviously deal with the same as every other Bitcoin. Or a ton of flood in and around it, in particular around mining. And so we're talking about being, oh, we're building facilities that are, basically entirely off the grid. And recently we saw a whole new round of FUD brought up by

Chris Larson, the co-founder of Ripple in in, I guess in in he's together with Greenpeace and they're funding a five million dollar initiative to change Bitcoin, which clearly is not going to happen. But in one of the interviews that I saw with him, They were talking about renewables and everything. He said, oh, I think it's great that people are doing that. But then he went on to say something to the effect of, even if Bitcoin was 100% renewables, it wouldn't be enough because of the opportunity cost of what that energy could be used for. So to the layman watching this that may be unfamiliar,

he's basically saying that energy could be used for better purposes, other than useless Bitcoin mining. I'll let anybody jump in here, but what would be your typical response to something in and around the idea of opportunity cost of, oh, well, you know, it's sure it's great that it's green energy, but couldn't that be used for something better?

What would you say? Yeah, so it's really interesting. I saw someone in the climate change in the energy space on Twitter recently. actually maybe it was today, they were saying, they were talking about direct air capture. And they were like, well, I mean, this is important. But would it be better if that renewable power that's powering this direct air capture facility, would have been better if that had been on the grid than powering this in terms of decarbonization?

And I think a lot of people just don't understand how an electrical grid works when you have a high penetration of renewable energy. And they think it's in either or they think 100% of that power is being. put towards some use when the reality is that a high percentage of that is curtailed. In other words, it's wasted. And so much of mining is tied to eating up that wasted energy or it's tied to balancing the grid depending on where those miners are located. So it's actually providing a valuable resource to this whole renewable energy grid that otherwise wouldn't be there. And there's, you know, Sean can talk about this, like you can tell you about

negative pricing problems and how that affects everything with the electrical grid as well. And so I think really it just comes down to people really don't understand how their electricity works. Like how it got to them, how that power plant got connected to these transmission lines, how much of the energy is wasted. If they understood that, I think that they would have a different perspective. And And even if they, I don't know, even if they're like, okay, great, but Bitcoin is still a waste. I mean, it's valuable to some, to millions of people. So therefore, it's not, it really isn't, it isn't a waste because a lot of people find value in it. Some people find value in playing video games, you know, it just really depends on what you care about.

Troy Cross just jumped into the chat and he wanted to let you know that every hash that doesn't mine a block is wasted. What a troll. Good to see it. Sean, did you want to tag on anything that Margo? Yeah. So I can understand how, you know,

Chris Larson's the world, there's many, right? Because energy markets are very complex, right? So somebody that understands kind of like hydro versus kind of oil versus gas versus electricity. Like there's upstream, downstream,

all the way through. And so like they're very complex. And so it's, I think it's a common to think that, you know, energy scarcity is applicable across the board. An example being is that oil scarcity, oil is easy to transport from one place to another. So if you're choosing to go here versus there, you're choosing A or B, right? You're not dumping the oil out and saying it was a waste, right?

And so that's kind of the easiest flow of energy. You know, the next difficult would be like natural gas. So natural gas requires pipelines. And so there are certain regions that are constrained where there's too much natural gas and they actually have to shut their wells in. They're not wasting the natural gas. They're just shutting it in because they can't actually move the gas through a pipeline. Power markets are different, right?

So essentially what means is that your supply and demand have to always match exactly. And so you're more constrained because you have now wires that are connecting each of those locations. They're not like big pipelines taking the major areas. And so now you can think about it like West Texas where there's this massive resource there. And it's really, it's a Saudi Arabia of renewables, right? Because you have some of the best sun quality and the best wind speeds, but you don't have demand there. So it's very kind of low demand area and there's not enough transmission lines that go across. And so year to date in Texas, 20% of the hours have been negative.

And so what that means is a grid operator will look to curtail energy by sending a price signal that's low enough that'll force that producer to turn off line and disconnect from the grid. Right. And so like the choice of, you know, we talk about like oil is saying, you know, it's A or B, right? You go here or go there. pipeline, it's kind of like A or B are kind of shut in. And in power markets, it's like A or B or curtail, right? And it's, you know, that's the choice that's happening in West Texas, right? It's not saying, you know, should we go to the miners or we should go to some load.

It's saying the load's taken all they got and there's nobody else that wants it. We need to curtail it. Right. So there's no choice. So that's, you know, I would say that for the Chris Larson in the world is it is understandable. And it's easy to apply the broad brush of kind of general commodities across all kind of commodities. but power markets are very different. They're very kind of location driven.

And especially now with renewables where wind and solar at a cost that are lower than fossil fuels, which happened in the last, like, you know, five, ten years, you know, essentially it's the cheapest resource on the planet and there's too much of it and they can't get enough of it into the areas, so they need to waste it. And so mining allows you to kind of co-locate into these areas. It allows, as Margo said, instead of kind of, you know, chicken or egg, you know, build the transmission wires or build this facility. It's like, do both, right?

And then actually have the load there, build the wires. And then now you have this option that you can then connect that power to other customers. So that's kind of what I went out on top of that. Do you think moving out from here as Bitcoin becomes or Bitcoin mining becomes more ubiquitous around the globe and in these areas, do you think we'll see much more robust energy systems in that you don't have issues like Texas has? with their blackout slum and the storm that went through there. When was that last year? Do you think we'll see more robust grids where they're not as susceptible to major problems like that? So I think there's a few things.

It's like, you know, one is that, you know, mining provides a flexibility to the grid for managing some of these kind of, you know, black swan events. And I would say that winter storm year was the black swan of black swans. Like it wasn't just kind of like, you know, we under forecast it by 10%. It was, you know, 30, 40, it was just massive. So Bitcoin mining would not have solved that, right? There's so many issues that went on. But mining is now allowing these grids to have flexibility for, you know,

managing as we're making this transition from a current energy mix to, you know, call it 24-7 green energy is it's the bridge that lets you get there. But I think even more is that like currently there is there's no global price of energy, right? You can't go to some, you know, proverbial village in Africa and put some type of wind turbine in some place and be able to monetize that generation, you need to have some type of customer agreement with some offtake or something or some wires. And so now for the first time in the history of the world is you now have this floor price for energy, which is profound, right? It's saying, you know, you can have a wind turbine that you connect

anywhere and you kind of put on some miners attached to that wind turbine and you're connected to the Bitcoin network. And right now an S9 will make, you know, $90 per megawatt. an S-19 will make 220. The wind turbine has, you know, it oscillates, you'll call it 33% capacity factor, which means that over the course of the year, 100 megawatt wind farm will only generate on average 33 megawatts. But if you have a low-cost miner, right, they didn't cost you a whole bunch of CAPEX that you need to recover, you know, you can actually oscillate that and essentially

monetize that resource. So it's really, you know, quite profound when you step back and say, this is a floor price of energy that anybody around the world can tap into. And, you know, my belief is that, you know, Bitcoin right now is the, you know, buyer first resort because it get paid so well for it. But in this future, as we transition from, say, 15 gigawatts, Alberta is 10 gigawatts for power generation, average in Texas is 45. And so the Bitcoin network is about 15 gigawatts.

As we transition from 15 gigawatts today to something like 200, 300, 400 in the future, it's likely that renewables are going to be operating that system because it's going to be the lowest cost energy. It's always the buyer of last resort that you can either drop it off into the Bitcoin network can inject in the power grid if it's paying you more than this kind of base level of money. So it's just a kind of profound thought on what you can enable enable. Very interesting. Awesome.

Well, I think I'm going to start, I think I'm going to start wrapping us here. And I'm going to, what I'd like to do, this has been a great conversation, by the way, is I'm going to do a round of, we'll do a mix of any final thoughts you guys may have. but also I'm going to challenge you guys to recommend a resource of Bitcoin related or tangential tangential losing my words now anyways any topic that you think may relate to Bitcoin anything that you may think people will find useful a resource for them whether it be a video, a book, an article, something you found interesting. I am going to do I have the book with me right now? I don't know if I do.

I'm going to recommend a book from a guy that was down at Bitcoin 2020. I met him the previous year. And actually, I guess this ties into my original topic. So we're coming full circle. I met this guy as I was walking around at Bitcoin 2021. He came up to me and he said, hey, man, I just wrote a book on Bitcoin. Can you check it out? So I bought it on the spot right there on,

Amazon and it arrived when I got home and I read it. It's probably one of the best damn books I've read on Bitcoin ever. It was incredibly fleshed out. It goes through monetary history really well. It spends a lot of time on the current monetary system. It dives into the why of Bitcoin, but also a lot of the how of Bitcoin, the nitty-gritty of how it actually works. Very, very detailed, very in-depth.

and a great read. And he spices it up with alternating quotes between Mike Tyson and Kanye West in between each chapter. And the book is called the Seventh Property. It's by Eric Yakes, Y-A-K-E-S. If you haven't read it, I would say it's a more in-depth version of the Bitcoin standard with less political divisiveness, perhaps. But it's a solid read. So I would recommend the seventh property, again, by Eric Yakes.

But I'm all later there. And we'll go around the circle. I'm going to go to Sean first. Any final thoughts of anything that was said today? And if you want to point people towards any piece of content. Final thoughts kind of ties in with what Mark was saying earlier, just about, you know, it's pretty awesome that you can now start to have these conversations and, you know, thank you for everybody on the show to kind of share these.

And it's like it reminds me back when, you know, I first got into Bitcoin 2017. And I was just, I was trying to find podcasts that had come good content and education that I could kind of learn about it. And it was challenging. And so now it's, it's fun to kind of see, you know, people come into space and people that have thought long and hard about these kind of, about kind of the Bitcoin topics and kind of, you know, that thought exercise. And so the final thoughts is just that it's it's great to see more and more of these conversations and more people from different industries that brain drain that you're talking about

come in the space. For a book, a resource is that so I just grabbed behind me, there's a book that's essentially like the sapiens that was like Noah Harari of power grids, right? And it's called the grid, right? And it's by Gretchen Back. And And it does a great job of kind of giving the history of, you know, why we're, why, how were power markets formed, you know, how would the creation of electricity around the turn of the 20th century? How did they evolve and how do we get this kind of, you know, tangled mess that we have today that's different regulations, different market designs? But it's all this story, right, kind of like the, the human evolution of kind of cultures into why we got here. And so to really help understand, you know, it's kind of that, you know, Bitcoin got us in to understand. money and you know Bitcoin has you've gotten me down that rabbit hole and also made me

going to do things I've never done the past is just really understanding you know energy and electricity in the history of understanding how we got here what's the problem and what are we truly solving so the read that's enjoyable for all audience is not just kind of technical people in power systems is yeah the grid by Gretchen back. Troy agrees he said it was one of his good reads that he just finished so yeah check it out. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. Let's round it over to Mark. Any final thoughts on today and a resource that you'd like to recommend? Final thoughts are to continue to encourage people to engage with each other face-to-face in settings like this or spaces at the very least.

It's night and day between experiencing Bitcoin Twitter and experiencing this and experiencing in a spaces, let alone hosting a podcast where you get to talk to somebody one-on-one and hash out these ideas and really get into the nitty-gritty. And it removes all of that bullshit that you can experience within Twitter and the negativity and hostile nature. And so whether you're into Bitcoin or not, I think the encouraging each other to have those face-to-face conversations is my right. recommendation of my final thought resources. One of the things that I studied during this

process is complex systems. I don't understand the mathematics of it, but Jeffrey West's books were very informative reads for me. I forget the title of the one. It was his latest, but the understanding of complex systems and how really led me to better understand that our kind of more central authorities trying to manage these more complex elements of our lives is quite challenging and we need a new way of approaching problems and systems thinking than our current situation. In addition, I would plug anything that Margot's done with regard to her podcast and obviously the conference interviews. And then I stopped bookmarking Sean's tweets because there's just too many.

He puts out Evergreen tweets every single time from the energy standpoint. And lastly, I'll plug the Bitcoin FAQ that I did with Bradley Rettler. It's 48 pages of 29 questions where we tackle all the challenging ones that we're familiar with. And so it's definitely one to share with family and friends who may be still a little curious about Bitcoin. Awesome. That's great. All right, let's toss it to Margo. Final thoughts and recommendations. Yeah, I'm going to jump on Mark's foolishness of diversity by recommending bitcoinladyes.org. They're doing a lot in the space to bring more women into it. And I think it's really important because actually in finance in general, women are very much underrepresented.

And I'm really impressed by what they're doing. They've gone funding for their work. And they actually have grants. And I think if I recall correctly, they are funding one of the open source developers. So I think this is a really exciting platform that's just getting started. And I really look forward to seeing how it develops over the next year or so. And I'm hoping that it really does bring in more women into the space and get them excited about Bitcoin and why it matters to them. because women in general have much more layers to get through than men do in general when it comes

to economics and finance and investment. So to me, I think it's really important what they're doing. So great job, ladies. I love that. All right. Well, this has been great. I, again, really appreciate all of your time. Had a lot of fun with this conversation.

And it's, again, it's good to have a. variety of different voices on the panels every Friday. So again, thank you guys all for spending the time here. You're all welcome back anytime. Thank you. This is great. Thanks for having this, man. Thanks a lot.

This was fun. No problem. Awesome. So I'm going to kill your audio video now. But again, thank you guys very much. And I'll chat to you soon. All right. Everybody, thank you so much for joining me on this Friday for why are we bullish.

really enjoyed the panel. Again, all of their Twitter handles are in these show notes down below. So be sure to go and follow them and get a variety of opinions in your Twitter feed. Really enjoyed it. Again, you guys can check them out, give them a follow.

Of course, we do this every Friday. So make sure you make your way back here. David, it was great to see you. Thank you for being here as well. And everybody else in the chat, really great to have you here. Of course, if you want to help out the show, like, subscribe, share, all those things. Super important.

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