TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #133: Whit Gibbs

Episode Date: February 8, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Whit Gibbs, Co-Founder and CEO of Hashr8OS, to discuss: - Whit buying the 2017 top - Why he decided to focus on mining - Mining hardware + energy dynamics - What's going to happen after the halving? - Is the US turning into the USSR? - Social credit - much more Follow Whit on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app.

Hey there, freaks. Is this thing on? It's your boy Marty Ben here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. Getting this episode out a little bit late on a Saturday morning here. I had a busy, busy week. Recorded three podcasts in 24 hours between Thursday and Friday, with this one being the second of the three. Sat down with Whit Gibbs, co-founder of Hashrate OS and the co-host of the Hashrate podcast. Witt came across my

radar on Monday, actually. Somebody forwarded me the most recent episode of the Hashrate podcast from last week, and they were talking a lot about SHA-256 mining and ASICs and what's going to happen around the halving with S9s being moonlighted. Witt also mentioned that he

was going to be in New York later that week, so I DMed him and said, hey, I like the conversation you guys had on that podcast revolve revolving around uh asic miners uh i'd like to shoot the shit about mining because i think mining is something again that i'm infinitely fascinated by uh in this space i think it's something that's underscored and very underappreciated a lot of people overlook it for software i think uh this bitcoin revolution is as much as a hardware revolution as it is a software revolution and i don't think mining gets enough tick on this show uh so i invited wit in to talk about mining and what he's been doing hash rate os they create software to monitor mining

operations for miners so we talked a lot about the mining landscape different types of mining gpu mining asic mining there's a little bit of shit coin talk in this podcast trigger warning but it was an overall great conversation we also drifted into a bunch of other topics including freedom in the digital age how to create a social profile in the modern age it seems like social credit scores are already here in america it's just not as blatant as it is in china what has a very interesting story about that particularly so definitely make sure you listen to the whole episode to get a to get a really good conversation this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by the cash app you freaks already know all about them and if you

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Shout out to Heller Whiskey. Very good bourbon. What is up, freaks? Welcome back to Tales from the Crypt. It's your boy Marty Bent here on a Thursday night sipping on some... What are we drinking here? Weller. the original weeded bourbon special reserve brought to you by tonight's guest with gib

the co-founder and ceo of hash rate os and uh the host of the hash rate podcast i found him this week welcome to the podcast with thanks marty thanks for having me on thanks for coming by yeah this happened we threw this together in a few days somebody forwarded me your latest episode of the hash rate podcast i listened to it uh i've been coming more fascinated with mining uh by the day um and i don't think mining gets enough tick on this podcast i wanted to bring you in i really enjoyed the conversation that you had with your co-host who do you co-host that with so the show is with myself crypto chris walken mean hash and whale bear man yeah really a quick 30 minute rep uh and i really wanted to expand on some of the topics that you

guys talked about particularly phasing out of s9s with the s upcoming having um and the efficiency of the current a6 on the market and ones that will be coming on the market but first let's start like how what's your backstory this is tales from the crypt what's your tale how did you end up starting a mining business yeah so i bought the top in 2017 all in actually literally all in quit my day job the day i bought bitcoin and eth in december of 2017 you sent it all the way in what was your what was your what was going through your mind uh this better work because i had you know married with two kids when i told my wife hey look i'm gonna walk away from a lucrative sales job and and go full-time into crypto which i didn't know anything about neither did she

she just looked at me it's like all right well i've trusted you this far better work out so so so did like quote-unquote crypto just happen to your mind uh during the mania of 2017 or and like any touch points before that there were a few before that so i at one point in owned a business where i sold cartomizers for electronic cigarettes um this was in 2013 and uh somebody had tried to buy a big portion of those off of us in bitcoin and we turned them down so it was the first time i'd ever heard anything about it but it was fake money and no one knew what to do with it at that point in time. And then that was the last that I'd heard of it until the mania. And then once the mania hit and I started to see that, okay, this actually

has legs. And then I was having a conversation with one of my mentors and he mentioned to me that, you know, Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, it was like somebody hit the reset button on the economy. So if you really focused on an area, you could become the authority in that area in the next 10 years. And to me, that was exciting. As an entrepreneur, you're always looking for opportunity. And it just seemed to me like the best opportunity to apply, you know, what I'd worked towards my entire life to one focused area. So what, uh, what was your background before crypto sales? Yeah. Sales. I was in business development. I helped to rebuild a sales program for a website that it's called puppy spot.com. It's basically the largest online dog brokerage

in the, in the world. They do about $50 million in puppy sales a year. Yeah. So I was part of that team to to build that platform and then from there into crypto so what uh came in at the top what was your first move my first move was to go all in on ripple at about three dollars hey you touched the stove right away oh man sometimes it takes a bit of time i rode that one all the way down all the way down i remember we were so did brian kelly teach you how to buy it I, I fortunately was in before BK pitched it on CNBC. Uh, but the worst mistake I ever made was showing my wife our portfolio at the top, uh, and not selling. So, you know, my rule now is if I ever feel the need to show my portfolio to anyone, I immediately have to sell everything

because that's definitely the top. So wrote it all the way down. Um, literally lost almost everything that I put in and then, uh, got locked in with a couple of really good traders, learned from them was fortunate to build everything back up then i linked up with my my co-host of the show and my co-founders of hash rate at a conference in chicago and they started making fun of me for not not being very very good at mining so we you know worked towards building a platform that was simple enough that i could use it and okay so let's talk about uh hash rate os what what are what are we doing with hash rate os it's an operating system we were talking before I'm a little bit ignorant to the different operating systems I was

saying I know brains pretty well but that's more targeted towards firmware you're you were telling me hash rate is more focused on the on the software side correct yeah so hash rate is a linux-based operating system we built it custom to run on asics gpus fbga is coming soon and really it is designed to help you manage and operate your machinery as efficiently as possible so that you can maximize profitability. So we've started at a very base level, focused on GPU miners, and we've continued to scale adding more features and functionality so that it can be used by everyone. Linux is often looked at as the most complicated kind of operating system.

Most people gravitate towards Windows because they assume it's what's easiest. What we're seeing with Hashrate is people actually move away from Windows to Hashrate OS because it's not as complicated as it used to be. we also provide a high level of support so that anyone who needs that assistance, we will walk them through the entire process. So we have a discord set up where anyone can come in. We'll help them troubleshoot any problems that they have, get set up, get them set to mine efficiently, and then they're off to the races. So when you say help people mine as profitably as possible, are you talking about controlling fans from far away or switching

like in a nice hash like a situation from chains that are most profitable at any given time? Both. Yeah. So mining is complex. I mean, you've got your SHA-256, which there it's mostly tuning your machinery, making sure that you've got your overclock settings properly. When you go into the GPU realm, there's a whole nother bag of tricks. So we talk about which coins to mine, how to mine those most efficiently, what are your overclock settings, which pools are going to be the best for you, all of those things. It's all brought into one. And what was it like in the research phase, putting this product together? What was the learning curve like for you? fortunately i have partnered with some amazing people so my co-founders have years of experience

i mean mining since 2011 so my learning curve was great theirs you know they brought that skill set to the table already yeah um i'm mining since 2011 they uh crazy right and that's uh mining's gone through a lot of evolutions right so we've gone through from cpu to gpu to fpga with asics and bitcoin particularly um one person i follow on twitter has always like been an og miners not so fast and he's the man he's somebody from far away that i've always been watching and he seems like he has his process down pat so if you are only in this um sort of the mind for profit at gpu mining particularly what are would you recommend people just go out and do this or um do you think uh do you think it's for a very specific type of person so i think it can be for

anyone, but you do have to research. So mining is a business. I think there's a lot of people that look at it like a hobby. There's a lot of people that look at it like a get rich quick scheme. Both of those tend to not be profitable, but if you approach it like any other business owner would approach a normal business, you'll be fine. Start with research, start slow, get one card, figure out how to get one card set up to mine properly, and then scale. Learn how to roll your profits into more machinery and more equipment and learn how to sell at the right times, flip your machinery at the right time, your miners at the right time so that you can then ROI in different ways. Yeah. So do you find people that are mining professionally or mining

to accumulate tokens or accumulate Bitcoin or accumulate US dollars? So every miner has their own preferences, but usually there is a percentage of whatever they're mining that they'll hodl. And then of course they'll liquidate what they need to, to cover their costs. Now it just depends on their risk appetite. So some people are more speculative in the way that they mine so they'll find a shit coin that maybe is just launched and they will mine as much as they can until the difficulty increases and they'll hold that for the pump but then there's some people like asic miners specifically sha256 who are mining bitcoin they're running a business and they have overhead like most people couldn't imagine so they need to

make sure that they're getting rid of some of that bitcoin on a you know daily weekly monthly basis so they can cover power their you know opex and their capex all right let's focus on sha256 this a bitcoin podcast i'm probably gonna get some shit for for talking about even mining shit coins but i don't care if mining fascinates the fuck out of me and i want to learn more about it so that's why i brought you in we shot 256 with asics these days um let's talk about the evolution of them so they're getting more efficient over time um we have the s9 still running and they were launched what in june of 2016 yeah about four years ago yeah um so it's a four-year life cycle before that what was the life cycle the typical asic or or miner on the it was honestly before

my time uh but you know before when so when bitcoin first launched it was cpu mining right so you would you'd be able to make a substantial what we would consider a substantial amount of bitcoin now just using your computer yeah and then that gauged up to um gpus and then from there fpjs had a little place in history and then the asic started to come out and since the asics came on, which obviously ASICs do one thing very well, right? Application specific integrated circuits, they focus on Bitcoin. And I mean, they destroy that network and make a ton of money for the people who are using them. And that's just been the focus since then. So since those have launched, I think the S9s are really the, they're the granddaddy, they're the marquee, they're the one

that I think has, has proven to be the most efficient, the most profitable for the longest period of time and who knows with the way that hardware scaling they may go down as the like the cult favorite of all asics that were ever released like if you look back at you know sneakers and you think like the original jordans s9s might be the original jordans yeah i mean they're still it blows my mind that they're some are still operational after four years considering the short life cycles of mining uh hardware before that um and it's crazy basics didn't come on until after the first halving too. I actually did some research earlier this week

at PGA's where the dominant mining hardware, at least publicly, the dominant mining hardware in 2012 when we had the first halving. Do you see the advances in ASICs with like the M20Ss and the S17s continuing that sort of long life cycle? I think that the life cycle is going to shorten because the space is more competitive.

And I say that cautiously because it's not proven that the, although you get, you hear a lot about the next release of Antminers and the Canons, and you hear that they're going to be rushing out their next batch of ASICs, who knows how fast they'll actually be able to produce those. So I think that we're looking at more of a two-year life cycle from here on with ASICs. I don't know that we'll see another run like we're seeing with the S9s. Interesting. Do you see like an ASIC modification point like where sort of we hit a plateau where there's not many more improvements that can be made?

Some would say that there is a level of diminishing returns that we'll see with the ASICs. I think it's just too early to call. You know, we're coming off of a period where Bitcoin's price action has been a little weird. You know, 2018 was a pretty nasty correction. and 2019 was was what it was there were a lot of people who were still mining profitably but it wasn't necessarily the the easiest for some of the bitcoin miners that were out there but now you know it's it's just too hard to tell there's so much more competition coming online with the asic so many more asic manufacturers that want to get in the mix that i think the

space is going to get more and more competitive and hopefully like with all all areas of competition in business that will make the conditions more favorable for the consumer for the end user and hopefully will you know increase the efficiency of the machines and potentially drive down the cost yeah now it's again infinitely fascinating to me because in especially 11 years in to bitcoin uh obviously china dominating mine mining has been the narrative And it seems that, um, things may be shifting away from China. Uh, but like how imperative do you think it is that mining shifts away from China? Bitcoin specifically? Yeah. It's, it's important that we try. It seems to be a losing battle.

Why do you think that? Right now, because of the logistics of it all, uh, to get ASICs from anywhere or for, from China to anywhere else in the world, it takes a quite a long time, whereas the Chinese miners can get them quickly, so quickly, in fact, that they can actually buy them mine profitably, and then sell them to the Western world. And, you know, a much more extended period of time. Now, there are people who I think would like to produce ASICs elsewhere. But realistically, like with everything else, when it comes to electronics, I mean, just imagine if like, what would the price of your iPhone be if Apple manufactured all the parts in the States? Yeah,

you know, then it's just not, it's not efficient. It's not, you know, cost-wise. Yeah. No, that, that brings up the question of foundries, right? There's four foundries in the world, maybe two where the, uh, efficient ASIC production makes sense. And T T S C M or T C S T S M C. I always get my, uh, I always get my acronyms messed up. Um, and then another one in South Korea, correct. That T S M C is in Taiwan, correct? Yeah. And then you have global foundries you have samsung um and that's like so that's been something i've been talking on this podcast every once in a while is we need to get a fucking foundry here in the states uh if we want to be competitive in the long run and it's i mean it's an open-ended question like what is going to

incentivize that to happen is bitcoin gonna have to be the impetus that uh makes that happen i don't know i think that it's it's a great concept it would be awesome to see those other foundries though this is you know asic chips are one or bitcoin specific asics are one of their products right if you think about how big samsung is to think that they would devote more attention than they already are to just producing something for bitcoin when the market is is really still so small it's not justifiable for them for something to start in the states i think bitcoin's total market cap would need to get to a place where it would justify the spend because it does i mean it's it's a lot of money to get one of those things started yeah uh and i know that there

have been there have been some players that have tried i think intel gave a good run at it and i don't think that that panned out well for them but who knows i mean innovation can continue to to occur we're in a disruptive era where people are always looking to disrupt existing businesses existing technology i'm hopeful i think it would be great no i did too no like do you think mining bitcoin mining particularly is a is something i tweeted out earlier is a issue of national security in the long run if bitcoin is to be successful with that assumption in mind i think that if the united states doesn't get their shit together pretty quick and start to pay more attention to it and really incentivize bitcoin mining facilities to come here they will get

left in the dust whether it's a national security issue i wouldn't say that yet but i do think that from an economic standpoint, we're losing the race. And we don't seem, our government doesn't seem to care. But it's all part and parcel with the way that the government has viewed tech to an extent for the last 10 years, right? If you think about it, a lot of the tech talent in the United States now comes from elsewhere. You know, if you look at a lot of the Silicon Valley startups that are huge, multi-billion dollar companies, a lot of their talent is from Russia or India or china you know there's just not enough focus on that here yet yeah yeah are we losing our grip is rome falling man man so with my my in-laws are uh i mean my wife was born in into the soviet

union right and we have these conversations all the time around the dinner table about america and how we're headed in this really weird direction. And it's a total crapshoot right now. Who knows what could happen? It's going to take basically a new generation of people to make the push for these things, which always brings the questions, are there enough innovators left?

Are there enough people who really want to do something like this, who want to take that horse by the reins and actually drive it? No, you've got to feel the same exact way. god i hope so but very similarly uh the reason i what my aha like wake up moment uh with america going down a bad path was actually uh caused by soviet as well my cio at the firm i used to work for freaks have heard this story a bunch of times on this podcast but i'm not sure if you've heard this yet i used to work for um a russian man who who grew up in the ussr and immigrated to the us in 1994 and in 2012 we were having like a portfolio meeting just talking about investment ideas and

stuff and we got on like dystopian futures and he looked at me he was like marty when i moved here in 94 i cried when i walked through the airport like i had tears coming down to my eyes the natural feeling of freedom i never felt in my life ever since 2001 america's slowly turning into the soviet union i ran away from and that there that one conversation changed my life forever i think i was like what the fuck dimitri what's going on uh and that's part of why i've been so dedicated to bitcoin for the last however many years because i think this is an opportunity to sort of take the the power back and curb the state a bit and curb the encroaching soviet union esque uh government that's coming to america after the patriots patriot act specifically

You know, it's funny that you mentioned that. I'm the oldest of four. And over the holidays, having a conversation with my two sisters and my brother, I posed the thought that they actually are more communist than they would imagine. And I laid out, because most people talk about socialism, they don't realize that communism is the ideal form of socialism. I think they're interchangeable in my mind. Well, I mean, if you think about it, if there's a, if there's a governmental system where everything is equal and the state provides for everyone that, I mean, that really is communism. It's just never worked anywhere ever before. And I think that we're still naive to say that, oh, it could work here. But you know, I mean, it just, it doesn't.

And, and, you know, I, I agree with you in saying that Bitcoin is a way to take that back that is one of the most exciting things about it is it does level the playing field in a way that i mean the the power for the ability for people to regain power in their life is if it's not grabbed now it's going to be gone no and we are at a critical junction in human history are you optimistic pessimistic i'm an optimist eternally yeah probably to a fault yeah i am as well yeah i mean what if you're not what's the sense you know what i mean like what's it's not like why why be oh excuse me i'm sorry uh somebody just broke into the studio it's all good maybe we're joined yeah they were trying

nobody ever uses this room so she's probably like who the fuck is this um was that a rude excuse me was that just too brash there no i think it was fine okay excuse me we're just drinking bourbon and talking about bitcoin come on do you guys want to come learn um yeah no it is like do you think i know we're optimist sometimes i look out though and i i like want to shake people like wake the fuck up like uh and i don't want to make this too political yeah political bitcoins inherently like drives people to talk about politics true at the end of the day like it's true bitcoin is an apolitical tool but it drives people and it draws in people with political thoughts yeah um yeah so what do you think about that so when you

look at the bitcoin community um i think most would say most would say that uh they lean libertarian would you agree with that i mean see that's what i don't like being labeled like i probably like have some thoughts that libertarians would agree with definitely impartial to the the austrian business cycle um but i do recognize that at some level um centralization is inevitable in these in these systems uh like i don't think i don't think you're just gonna have fucking like a libertarian utopia ever yeah i don't think that's realistic um but yeah it definitely does i think oh yeah i think uh the libertarians definitely caught the bug first right uh the first people to talk about bitcoin was what the free state radio new hampshire um first people to price bitcoin were new liberty

dot com uh libertarian driven so i definitely think it hooked them in first but i would argue that bitcoin is for anybody agreed yeah so what are your thoughts on and i know we talked a little wrote about this before what are your thoughts on the the state of the people that are currently servicing the bitcoin and the crypto community i know my last podcast i went on a little bit of a rant but let's throw that to you so i don't have to start this off what do you what do you think of that like get more specific so my personal belief is that bitcoin has attracted a lot of really great people with with solid ideals but it's also brought the leeches and the opportunists oh yeah oh yeah yeah so you know my last year was basically spent going to conferences

to learn because i dove in i wanted to figure this out and what i realized from a lot of these conferences is that most of the people don't give a shit about anything but money and given enough time i think they turn everything back into the current system just surrounded by in there and with with them at the helm yeah exactly right yeah no that definitely agree and it depends on conference you go to i would argue agreed like the north american bitcoin conference is the uh the epitome of that uh that mentality i had the pleasure or the displeasure of going last year um and i was just like oh my god brock pierce is here fucking jeffrey tucker's on stage like like fuck fuck all these people um yeah that's a it's a double-edged sword right you get you get

the the good people in my opinion then you get some of the worst as well um which is like yeah how do you like like and that's what you were talking about in the podcast you dropped last friday was uh like scammers and how do we self-police them yeah and that's that's important you know we've a lot of people think you only vote in november but you vote every day with your spending dollar right you vote with your attention you vote with your likes you vote with all of these things that you can dedicate to either something that's going to move things in a positive direction or in a negative direction. And we get baited into doing a lot of dumb shit and I'm guilty of it too. Right? Like you'll, you'll catch yourself, you know,

watching something that is, you know, giving credence to, you know, a content creator that maybe doesn't deserve it. Um, or shit, I've, I've been guilty of buying a shit coin and flipping it for bitcoin uh even though i know there's no merit to the coin itself no yeah no that's the uh yeah there's that and then you were talking about like particularly people bring john mcafee on their fucking podcast for for clicks we will never bring john mcafee on tales from the crib don't worry i would never like use him to pump the podcast and you know listen if they're and for for me it was specifically about bringing him on a mining podcast right like he's he's built a very successful brand for himself and once upon a time i mean shit like 90 of the computers that i've

owned have come with mcafee pre-installed so i can't knock the guy he's he's clearly built something successful for his life um but when it comes to mining my qualm was where's the value add there like where yes he's smart yes he's done very well for himself but is that someone that you want to put on a pedestal for potentially new people that are coming into the space to look up to i think no um but you know i'm one person with one opinion uh i think many people have that same opinion fuck john mcafee man like who who like yeah cool mcafee antivirus is cool made in the fucking authority of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies especially after he's fucking pumping it he was getting like charging people like 100 grand to pump their coin he got a sky

tattoo you got a sky coin tattoo right like there's only there's only one person that i respect on twitter that has shit coin tattoos and that's bit lord and that's only because he's hilarious i could fucking i i do not fuck with bit lord he's just funny he's funny i'm not taking his trading advice no but i think he's a he's a it's a comical i don't fuck with bit lord other than like i actually have appreciated his and i have been sharing his videos from beijing uh as he's in china as coronavirus is going around like uh that's actually he's been a good source for for that that story at least um but when it comes to yeah his advice in the crypto realm i'm not uh yeah like anybody who gets he's got tattoos of everything it's like him and ken

boswick have like uh tattoos of all that shit yeah oh man i've got some funny ken stories ken's a character i hope you're doing well ken i know you had a rough patch there yeah Ken's a good guy. He's from Philly. I grew up in the town next to you. You don't know it, though. Yeah, no, it's a, yeah, there's so many fucking characters in this space. How do you try to filter?

So when it comes to, now that I have kids, this has always been, since the kids were born, my filter has always been, is this someone that I would leave alone with my children? That's a very good filter. If the answer is no, then I don't want to spend time around you either. And the reason is just, it's your association. You hear it all the time and it's cliche, but you become your association. And if I wouldn't trust you to imprint on my, you know, my five and my two year old, I mean, mentally I'm only 12.

So why would I want to, you know, risk my adolescent brain around you? I'm going to say I'm still a kid in my mind. Oh man, stay young. That's it. Yeah. That's what it's all about. Um, no, I like that heuristic though. would I leave this person with my kid?

And as somebody who's about to be a father, I think that'll become more present in my mind. Yeah, man. This is like the most exciting time to be honest. Like I'm one of those guys that totally geeks out on being a dad, you know, like now that I've,

I've got kids when we first had, and we had our first child, I was just wishing that I'd done it sooner, you know, because it's such a cool experience and it's totally vain because you're like, you now have a little copy of yourself. and you know everything they do right it's up you know i i help with that that's half that's me that's me yeah yeah no i'm pumped i'm pumped i'm very pumped i kept it on the dl for a while

freaks i've only recently been talking about it um because again the whole privacy thing in this space too still is important um but it's inevitable there's no way i'm gonna have it i got to a point where i was like yeah i'm gonna have this kid never talk about it good luck is that gonna be possible good luck you're totally gonna be the dad that whips out the phone whenever you go to meetings check this out we've been talking about social media policy it's like a weird weird conversation to have never post them no no you can't well so our co-founder mean hash uh you know his day job is is i mean he manages a lot of uh very important data and he has some great insights on personal security and and protection of your data and he

shared a lot of tips um what we have basically done as a family is we've created our perfect persona profiles which you create the ideal version of yourself on the social media platforms that you know are going to get scraped by marketers and your insurance companies and things of that nature and it will actually help you keep your rates low uh yeah social credit scores are coming people and they're already here it's true well so he had an example of his brother-in-law call us somebody he had it he had an example of his brother-in-law who had purchased some mountain climbing gear for a friend and because he purchased it on his credit card and it was like extreme mountain climbing gear they canceled his life insurance oh my god

yeah what the fuck so that for me is i mean it really highlights the importance of cryptocurrency specifically the privacy coin aspect to shield your transactions because that's coming in a very big way it's already here but i think that we're going to start to see it and it's going to be less transparent over time yes that's actually what i wrote about in the bent today in the newsletter i write um was there was an article on cnet uh that was published earlier this week it explained how teenagers how zoomers are basically creating shared accounts on instagram to fuck with the tracking algorithms nice so they'll have like 20 using one account and the algorithm thinks they're in 40 different places across across the world and so they can't really track their metadata but

that was very cool but what i gleaned from that was like holy shit we have teenagers scared of being tracked like what world are we building for our children right now and what world do we want to fucking live in like where you have fucking 16 and 17 year olds having to fucking create unique ways to evade tracking uh like tracking algorithms on these apps like they weren't told to do this they like just got creeped out and did it innately how terrible i just thinking about being a teenager and living in that world scares the crap out of me imagine but like they weren't told like you're being tracked oh they just they just know yeah yeah they just know the level of paranoia there well and that's like it now in schools in the states

um and you know five years from now you'll you'll witness this as early as kindergarten they start doing active shooter drills in schools and it's fucking disgusting yeah man and that was baffling to me and you know my daughter was going to a christian school in florida and it was private and gated police on staff there and they're still doing these drills and to me that was just mind-blowing imagine what must go through a five-year-old's head when you're when the teacher is talking about like traumatizing finding exits like hiding under your desk you know it reminded me of when i was in elementary school we had bomb drills you know yeah and you'd hide under your desk and we would always joke about like if a bomb hits the school this this wooden desk isn't

gonna do anything you know but i can't imagine i can't imagine what kids must go through now it's crazy it's like your youth is stolen that and like how ass backwards is it like you're just mentally preparing them for that instead of like focusing on mental health of the people that would like cause that act right it's uh it's lazy number one i think uh is it very effective questionable well and what causes that you know what leads to what leads a kid to to be in such a tough spot it's i mean it exactly it's just one of those one of those things that are we too far gone is is the problem is the problem too advanced to be able to fix it or do we need to stay in a reactive state like the schools are doing and just teach the active shooter

drills uh i don't know that's that's a question for somebody smarter than me right yeah i'm pretty dumb too all right not too i'm not calling you dumb i'm dumb i don't know the answer to these questions either um but it does it just off the bat it's like ah this doesn't seem like the right way to go about it to scare the fuck out of everybody it's true i mean yeah just conditioning yep well now we have our oldest in school in in europe she's in latvia in kindergarten and it's like i remember school you know it's easy going there's no no thought of any violence there's no i mean it's just it's different it's different i i don't know i don't know if it's just the the way that society is now i don't who knows who knows but it reminds me so much of my

childhood growing up the way that they have it now over there well it's fucking pervasive here like go back to miami actually when i was coming back for the north american bitcoin conference in miami last year i was coming back to new york in the airport and miami-dade and going through to tsa there was like it was bifurcated you know like the first half and then there was like a sniffing dog and then you had the second half that was going to go through the scanners you had to go through the scanners after the fucking dog sniffed you but in front of me was like a six-year-old with a backpack and he wasn't allowed to walk with his parents as the dog sniffed him and he was like scared shitless so this german shepherd like came up in his grill sniffing his

face and i'm standing there like are we really putting up with this right now crazy do you do you have to sniff the six-year-old like are you fucking kidding me does bitcoin fix this though yes i don't know i don't know i don't know if it fixes that yeah it fixes that if if uh if it is uh uh an earnest way to starve the state and they can't pay tsa workers maybe is that possible i don't know so to that end what do you think about the and i don't want to get too far into the the wuhan virus but how do you feel that this crisis may benefit bitcoin do you think it will i think it well actually i would turn the table seriously my podcast i'm gonna ask you that question do you think it'll affect the mining

supply chain that's what i've been thinking of like i i think that it may lead to some over trading in the asian markets because just like us if they're sitting at home with their computer and they're not allowed to leave their house they may is that why tesla hit 905 they may be trading a little bit more i don't i saw an article today about the state seizing a mining facility in china but i need to go back and do a little fact fact checking on that it doesn't make much sense considering that all of the state i mean from what i've i know from the the interviews that we've done all of the state agencies are aware of all the mining facilities that exist so it's not like any of them are you know done covertly yeah venezuela was able to target and

target bitcoin miners and seize them i would imagine china might be better equipped to do that as well yeah well my understanding is they're all being paid under the table so the the miners are all paying people or paying off the the appropriate agencies and i think it's it's okay the way that it's being done i don't think there's any any grief being given from beijing that these people need to need to be shut down um i have a sneaking suspicion that the chinese government is is pretty happy that the majority of the bitcoin mining is being done in china um you think they're hoarding any i mean shit if i was a government it's a nice hedge you know what i mean no that's a topic i've been covering on this podcast and my newsletter a lot

too is the uh the long con of trying to get oil contracts priced in anything but the u.s dollar and China and Russia have been leading the way in that and denominating oil contracts in their native currencies. And the petrodollar is truly the reserve currency of the world and you have this apolitical currency in Bitcoin that can completely let you bypass that. It would make sense, right? Well, and you've got the initiative out of China.

Is it the One Road? Yeah, where they're dumping like $4 trillion in Africa or something like that. Everywhere. So in Europe too, they're going to... 5G. Yeah. Well, they're going to all of these different countries and they're saying, we'll help you rebuild your infrastructure. And it's a tit for tat, right? We'll help you do this.

You give us that. And the United States has a lot of their power because they have NATO bases all over the world, right? We go in and we say, okay, we're going to build a base here. We'll staff it with troops. We'll protect you. And in exchange for that protection, you will base your currency on USD, right? Now what happens if those bases get kicked out and Chinese bases are put in? now would that happen who knows could it happen for sure if it does happen though like who's going to trust you on when they were nimby a lot of the people who would trust it or a lot of the countries that would trust it their currency is so devalued anyway it doesn't matter china's no better i don't think oh well china doesn't care i mean just like we i mean it's kind of an

indiscriminate thing you know it's kind of bored it's um pieces on a board it's monopoly just on a global scale like you just want to get you want to get the right pieces in the right places and as long as you've got those the other ones are just kind of gravy you know like i mean i don't want to shout on any specific countries but there's definitely places in europe that are less than or viewed as less than because maybe they're landlocked maybe they don't have very good gdp maybe they don't really bring a lot of quote-unquote value to the table there's kind of there i think those would be the first that would shift from the u.s to china but why would you shift from the u.s dollar to china when bitcoin exists would you so so i think bitcoin there's a whole wrench in a

long-term game a lot of these countries have been playing agreed and i think we're starting to see that with the stands there's a lot of the what the stands the the former soviet union countries uzbekistan kazakhstan we're seeing them gravitate towards bitcoin uzbekistan said that they were launching their own mining pool we've had belarus come out and say that they would like to build state-owned mining facilities georgia led the way georgia it's not a stand but led the way it's it's in that same it's in the stan region and kazakhstan has been i mean it is the hub now for that area of the world where people are are looking to build mining facilities there apparently the government's very easy to work with uh power is incredibly cheap do you uh believe the conspiracy theory

that borat was a like a psyop to make kazakhstan look worse than it is and it's actually a paradise that that would be hilarious i will say i did work with uh i did work with someone from kazakhstan and she was the nicest person ever. So who knows? Who knows? It wasn't his sister, was it? No, it wasn't his sister. It may have been his wife.

But no, it's going to be a very interesting thing over the next decade to see who adopts Bitcoin because we already know Russia is big on it. You know, Russia has devoted a considerable amount of their capital reserves to buying Bitcoin. Really? Yeah, well, they announced that, I think, a couple of years ago.

At Martic on Twitter. Is he the source? No, no, no, no. Okay. No, this is a legitimate source. And it's, I mean, it's to get around U.S. sanctions. You know, anytime there's sanctions that are posed. I mean, the rumors that Venezuela has been buying medical supplies from Russia with Bitcoin.

I've had some pretty critical sources say that it's probably going on. I don't doubt it. I mean, we've already shown that we're behind the times on how to track these kinds of things. so if you were going to do something like that why not why not go with bitcoin why not you know iran is stacking it so i mean it appears to be that all of the people that we would least like to be paying attention to this currency are paying far more attention than we are is it bad that that makes me like excited yeah not excited but it's also like it's so conflicting right because i'm an american and i love the ideals that america was founded on i think we've gotten far away from

those ideals i would like to get back to them oh man am i gonna get in trouble for saying this but like it's like i don't like the sanction i don't like using weaponizing the u.s dollar i think it's fucking terrible uh and when i see and again it's not like the government of iran i don't want the government iran mining bitcoin i like seeing individual iranians i've met iranians i like the iranians i met they're good people like if they're able to benefit from bitcoin i'm happy is that is that treasonous it's not i don't think the people of iran are benefiting to be fair but i do i do agree 100 with what you're saying as far as it being an exciting exciting value proposition the and you know the weird thing is that i mean i can't speak for iran i've never

been there but the other places aren't that bad like we we we think that a lot of like russia is the evil empire because we're raised to be indoctrinated with that and it's just not the case it's not the case i mean there's stereotypes in every culture right you hear you go elsewhere in the world i mean the stereotypes that they paint of americans are not great um i will say that iran and venezuela are two terrible places that i'd never wish upon anyone but i think that their adoption of bitcoin shouldn't it shouldn't be a positive or a negative it should just be a catalyst catalyst for the u.s to get their head out of their ass because i mean it's here it's not going to be stopped you've got billionaires across the united states that are investing in

bitcoin at some point in time somebody has to pay attention well maybe that is the u.s paying attention just the individuals the individual billionaires potentially some oil companies potentially uh software companies people like jack dorsey maybe that's how america gets in maybe we don't even fucking need trump to be like all right we're going in fidelity fidelity you know fidelity just retweeted parker lewis's uh bitcoin obsoletes all other other monies i was like what the yeah let's go but it's uh no it's a fascinating question maybe that's the way america does get into bitcoin just i mean well the bit license sucks we're talking we're speaking in uh a city with probably the most draconian bitcoin laws in the world um so that might be uh that might be a

little contradictory but i do think um when it comes to bitcoin particularly i know the icos and all the tokens have problems with the sec but um bitcoin businesses in america like river financial unchained capital this is disclaimer their sponsors cash app disclaimer sponsor uh like in the states like that's bullish to me and i like seeing stuff like that are you saying that the united states is built on business i like to think so it is i mean it is and that's that's absolutely the case the the minute that changes we're all fucked yeah um and that's i don't think that's a bad thing i don't think that we should look at the demonization of business of late is problematic yes there are some businesses that are too big i can buy into that i think that

facebook should certainly go away yes um i think i mean antitrust laws are in place for a reason we should exercise them more laborly than we have in the last decade i would argue i will agree with that but there are some very good companies that are doing great things that america is built on and it just it is the way that it is and it's worked you know to to bucket now can we do this in like five generations when i'm dead and gone and my kids are dead and gone like that that's all i would ask if we're gonna if we're gonna go down this crazy rabbit hole where shit falls apart can we just like wait three or four hundred years right wait till my families had had lived happy lives no that's the thing going back to like we are at this junction

this crossroads if you will in my opinion like we were talking about the social credit like we either have chinese the chinese state digital panopticon exported to the rest of the world or we break free and and move to a more sovereign uh world where you control your data that's that's a thing like and that's another topic we talk a lot about on this podcast like did we fuck up the internet with the first iteration the way uh data is siloed into server farms and stuff like that so and would it be possible to have the internet in its current uh form without that shit and if so what's the fucking solution i think it's too far gone to to backtrack at this point i i think that the way that it's the way that it's already established is not easily walked back could it be

sure. But I think that would take decades. Now, I do think that in the next 50 years, we will see everything shift towards public blockchains, where all of these processes we're seeing routed through central servers will be distributed on, I mean, in my opinion, proof of work algorithms that are on distributed blockchains across the United States or on a state level. In one of our conversations with the state of Ohio, I was talking with someone about building a mining farm there. And we just, you know, we were just brainstorming and shooting the shit and having a very loose conversation about what if, you know, what if all state licenses, birth certificates, death certificates, were all on public blockchains that were run

through mining facilities that were independently owned, and you had miners competing over the ability to secure those networks and they were paid in fiat like forget paying in bitcoin what if what if you paid in fiat hear me out how would you do that i don't know but we were just we were just you know spitballing just trying to figure it out because i think that it's we're starting with such an obscure concept and we're trying to to pitch it to people who it's just too it's too obscure right like they don't understand transacting anything anything other than dollars that's what that was the point i made in the bed today let's stop let's stop thinking about the institutional money and the boomers let's go after the zoomers and just like have them rise up with

it yep then we got 20 years right so in 20 years this will all be this will all be in place it's the same as when i was in high school it was the legalize it campaign everyone wanted legal weed right you know 20 years later it's it's legal everywhere or it's going to be legal everywhere it's pretty much it's not socially frowned upon anymore no and that's all it is if we can get the 15 to 20 year olds now really buying in and talking about this and i would argue that all of those people are on twitter right now posing as 18 year olds on crypto twitter is a twitter tiktok or twitch like that's what i'm like where should where should we start like propagandizing this stuff yeah and that's what it's gonna be man 20 years from now everyone's gonna be doing

everything on the blockchain um you know everything on the blockchain everything on the blockchain to a fault probably i mean there's already do you think so like i'm i'm like under the belief i'm under like i believe strongly that blockchains only work for very specific use cases money being uh the most important and maybe like an app like open timestamps proving that data existed at a certain point in time like that is that is like the very like the two use cases of blockchain that i can think of that actually makes sense in the long run yep you're right but we'll have a lot of failures that come up and i think a big lesson that we're going to see is people will try to do everything on the blockchain one of the big failures is going to be social media on the

blockchain and that is something that will become nightmarish twitch bro oh you had to do it i went there there you go yo dude it's come to twitch that's uh yeah man we talk so that's that's our biggest qualm with twitch is that what what is culturally acceptable changes so quickly like what there's things that if 10 years ago i would have said them now i would be labeled as all kinds of god-awful things and it's just the times change now imagine if i had sent a tweet 10 years ago and it was on a blockchain and i could never delete it i could never walk it back in any way shape or form i think those are you know blockchain examples that will fail well and it will be shown to fail i'll push back there i started talking like i had andrew torbo on the podcast okay ceo gab

and he like he would push back against this and and i'm sort of in the middle right now i'm like do i want to like leave that on the internet would i uh would i not care and his argument is like don't ever say sorry like hey you may have fucked up in the past you may have been a different person you probably were a different person if you didn't agree with it um and if people try to go back in your history and paint you as a certain type of person in the in the current times like you shouldn't let them weaponize that that data right yeah i think there's a lot of power in changing your mind though so exactly and and i also think that to to kind of buy into the not and i get where he's coming from so i i am a person that you know i believe if you're wrong

you should apologize quickly be swift about it and then right your wrongs um i don't think you should ever go back and apologize for for behavior that you believe strongly in in the past um the question is when you're in your let's say early 20s and you don't really know what you believe strongly in but you're buying into herd mentality or saying something stupid or drunk tweeting right still guilty of that so i mean like then what like then is it not okay to say you're sorry then like you know it's those situations that i think are are where you would need to be able to walk them back no i agree i mean yeah i think like when andrew said that i was like oh fuck god like i was a completely like delete your tweets like got a lot of respect

for him though man what he's built is i mean that platform is amazing yeah it's um and i think the way twitter's going right now man the zero edge thing was that was a tough one dude did they really ban project veritas or is that like a false rumor i heard i don't i don't i haven't I heard that rumor today. I haven't like jumped in, jumped in. I haven't jumped in. Yeah, I haven't jumped in to like see if it's a... Well, it's so arbitrary.

Like they took down the Bitcoin 2020 conference Twitter handle. Yeah. Well, why? I mean, I don't know the reasons behind it. But we were, you know, I was talking to them and that happened. And it's just like, they don't say anything. they don't say anything that's that's offensive or rude or threatening or racist or that would fit in any of those terms of service items and they're just arbitrarily taking down they've got

a conference in two months yeah how bad does that hurt i mean if i mean they got it back but what if they wouldn't have that would have impacted their business significantly and there's nothing you can do about it you can't sue twitter for that i mean you could but it's not gonna work and people like to fall back on the argument like they're a private company they can do what they want but again network effects all that stuff that we talk about in bitcoin and cryptocurrency like twitter has built up a network effect where it is in my mind at least a public square there's a lot of reputation with zero hedge in particular um uh michael krieger from liberty blitzkrieg wrote a piece earlier this week and he made a very good point like you can't even go back

even though they're banned into perpetuity going forward you can't go back and look at their tweets in the past and twitter that's what i use for my news that's my number one source of the newsletter He used it as a source for history, right? And now Zero Hedge's Twitter has been wiped from history. Like, it's just whitewashing over it. Like, even if you disagree with it, you can't even go cite it. Like, it's not there anymore. And that's a shame because they put out a lot of great articles.

You know, it's funny. When I used to mentor people and I always would cite a Zero Hedge article. And this is when I was mentoring for a group that, I mean, they were fairly, I mean, fairly the opposite of crypto Twitter, right? What is that? It was helping young people figure out how to get out of debt and get on the right track.

Well, that's crypto Twitter. Bitcoin Twitter, I would argue, was on that track too. Yeah, but it was just, we would use Zero Hedge. They had a lot of really great articles that they came out with that were apropos, were important for the times um and it was a shame when i saw that that was i was sad because ultimately what is journalism if not just people's opinions that are you know rooted in some fact that's the most fucked up part is like and that's a slippery slope right i think when you have

one entity in this case twitter acting as the arbiter of truth yeah and they changed her like francis paulette from bull bitcoin in canada tweeted out two days ago he looked at their their new policies and they are going to try to highlight truth and uh uh hide what they deem to be not the truth just like ah and who controls it that's the hardest part is the people the people that are going to be controlling it are like the last people that you would want to control a narrative exactly it's twitter's gonna be so woke bro it's gonna be so woke so like i saw you tweet that earlier if i'm calling you woke i'm making fun of you it's so woke ah yeah but like i'm not gonna fucking leave until i get kicked off i'm sorry you're gonna end up on twitch oh god no

i'll never end up on twitch i'll end up on gab i'm not gonna end up on twitch you don't need to fucking put your social media company on a blockchain you're an idiot if you think that sorry so god man it's i hope that i hope that it doesn't go the way that we think we think it's going to go or the way that it seems that it's going to go i hope that discourse can still continue um and that's a fucked up thing i we i just recorded a podcast and posted it before you walked in here or weekly i do a weekly show of man o'dell or a rabbit hole recap and we'll talk about this at the end like i don't think jack dorsey wants this to happen like i've interviewed him too i've looked him in the eyes like i think he is actually down for the cause and is nostalgic

for what twitter originally was when i sat down with him he was like twitter when we first started it was a communications protocol in my mind it was just something where people could put messages out to out to the world and that's like he didn't say uh he didn't say directly but like again like of a big big like look people in the eyes and can can read them and like i felt like he had this nostalgia for what twitter used to be and again he was like steve jobs he got kicked out was asked to come back and maybe when he was gone the people in charge fucked up the app that he built and that's why i think him funding open source developers for an open source social network protocol is sort of like a signal like hey i know this isn't what i wanted it to be and i'd like it

to get back to this and disclaimer jack dorsey's other company sponsors the podcast you know it's jack is i mean i have a lot of respect for him and i can't imagine what must be going through someone's head like that when their company gets so big so fast right you know you start something when you're a young person government's approaching you like you got to do this you got to do that i mean if you think about it his platform is the chosen method of communication for the president of the united states right like our president chooses twitter by the way trump had the greatest troll of all time last night which i didn't see it it's like the time magazine cover of him like trump 2020 20 24 20 28 20 32 20 forever

but i mean so that's it i mean like this is that's his platform and imagine imagine now the burden on jack when i mean let's face it he started this as a cool thing to get an idea out there he could not have imagined it would become what it is no way i don't think any of them could have i don't like i don't think mark zuckerberg could have looked at the original facebook and imagined that it would be no the original facebook was was pigeonholed to harvard.edu email addresses like he's just thinking about his college not anything outside of it i mean dude i was a party promoter when we first got access to facebook and i remember it was the best thing ever because you could literally i mean that's all it was used for we thought we were innovative because

we could put a party flyer on there and send it to all of the girls on campus and now i mean it's everything i've i've since i mean i'm still on whatsapp and instagram unfortunately but i've not been on facebook in years i only use facebook to keep in touch with relatives um i don't do instagram and i mean whatsapp on occasion but we're moving everything over to signal now as a family yeah yeah i'm only on whatsapp for my college friends and instagram i only use to keep up with my family okay i don't like post much i just look at what my family's posting all right yeah your family's on instagram they're with it man i'm hey i'm trying here there you go i'm trying

we were supposed to talk about mining this whole podcast but i told you we would drift and other topics good this is what bourbon will do to you exactly this is a great bourbon by the way you like it man we're uh what what makes this bourbon uh so why are you particular about this bourbon i rarely see weller um but weller is the original recipe that spun off into pappy van winkle oh yeah so it's it's really good i think now it's actually made by buffalo trace but it is it's just it's really smooth and you know considering i've been in latvia drinking irish whiskey for the last three months it's nice to it's nice to come back to something with a little little more sugar content the uh the latvia bitcoin scenes popping a good friend

of mine maddie magentius uh the crypto voices podcast he's that he's there in riga too um i love the huddle huddle conference um rigas i fucking love i mean i've only experienced riga in Latvia um I loved it when I was there I did it four days in Latvia and Riga particularly um great small fucking city yeah walkable yeah uh good vibes good food surprisingly good food there's good steakhouses in Riga yeah for sure yeah for sure it's uh it's a little hidden gem for sure we've so my wife's family's from there we've been going back and forth for the last 10 years and you know we've got a little place that's about an hour outside of Riga but everything is just clean there the air is clean we live out in the country there's a huge garden and when I say

when I say huge garden I mean that aside from the winter months if we don't kill it or pick it we don't eat it so I mean elk deer they have ray buck which are smaller deer really lean and then there's wild boar so basically our entire rotation is just boar deer elk and clean veggies it's great yeah if you come this year for for hodl hodl we'll have you out we'll do a barbecue for sure i would love to do that yeah that's what i loved about hodl hodl is the uh like on the excuse me burping um outside the conference they were doing like the lafayette style barbecues yeah which is something i've never seen wait did you go this year no i didn't go this year i was there last year i saw matt matt was there yeah i saw matt and this year we so i've been trying to cut back

on my bitcoin conferences smart i think they're jumping the shark a little bit yeah the so we'll go back we will do um huddle huddle this year we'll do baltic honey badger um and then we may do a couple of others but me too i think in 2019 i did eight conferences uh this year i'll do five um i count new york blockchain week as one conference instead of like 14 different ones but no that's uh that's um i'm i say i'm cutting it down to two now that you mentioned blockchain week i'm not officially going to consensus but i live in new york but i'll be like poaching people um from the conference to do podcasts and actually we'll be doing haven't announced this yet and haven't locked it down yet but i'm pretty sure we're going to be able to lock it down we'll be

doing a live rabbit hole recap at the subculture theater in soho during blockchain week nice awesome that'll be our mini conference drag people away from the shitty conferences um but so i want to say something on that though because coming from traditional businesses consensus is the only traditional conference like you would experience in other industries so i know people give consensus a lot of shit but if you're in any other industry that is what a conference looks like um and they've they do it pretty well i'm not gonna lie like it's it's a well-produced conference yes it's a lot of icos but no i talk shit to like matt and i may be leading uh a workshop at consensus

i'm gonna get in trouble bailey i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm excited this will be my first year at consensus usually i've just come and gone to all of the events around consensus that's the best i mean if you're in new york that's the only thing like why drop three grand yeah i mean i snuck in last year but boss yeah it's crypto we're degens that's just hey we're not all degenerates all right i'm not anymore i'm here trying to to instill good hodl values right to save your hodl values i just made that up on the go that's good that's good no i mean honestly like you said like crypto's full of scammers i do think like if you do go full circle and you come like you realize that's the thing i've come to realize and what i believe wholeheartedly is that a lot of the

quote-unquote crypto people who are spinning up new um blockchains and using complexity to sell that stuff don't realize the beauty in bitcoin simplicity could agree bitcoin needs to do very like if a blockchain is to be successful and i would argue like if bitcoin was to ever be flippant or something was to overtake bitcoin quote-unquote which i don't think will happen but if it ever did happen it would destroy the space for quite a while because the whole value proposition is that this is supposed to be a store of bitcoin the first initial cryptocurrency that was successful supposed to be a store of value into perpetuity and if you destroy that possibility within the first two decades like why would anything else be able to attain that

right that's true the more the longer i'm in crypto the more i see the the the value of bitcoin so i've got this theory that everyone starts as you know on this broad spectrum where everything is cool and then they'll go through their different shit coin phases where they're like oh there's this one that's going to do this and there's this one that's going to do that and then given a little bit of time you realize that you know bitcoin is pretty damn awesome just by itself and seeing the dedication and the tribalism around bitcoin is but it's inspiring i don't think tribalism is bad i think that the reason that eth is falling apart right now is because they're destroying their tribe ah let's dive into this fuck eth uh i'm sorry did i say

that loud say it louder no it's so look so nothing is nothing is more disheartening as a miner then prog pow dude it's coming it was listen i'm i'm a fan of prog pow are you i am why because that will at least save eth for the miners what's happening now is you have eth saying that they're going to go to staking you got vitalik coming out and basically you can't have one point x and 2.0 at the same time well you can't i mean you can't have anything with these because they don't they don't do anything like constanta never is a very real thing right like oh that's my most famous twitter thread on twitter i've uh i've been in the scene to lab in the black swan has a passage uh the uh the more you wait the longer you'll be expected to wait so if you're expected to

transition to proof of stake within 18 months which was their initial um which was their initial goal uh if you get to 18 months and it's not there yet you'll be expected to wait another three months and three months after that if you're not there you'll be expected to wait another six months and then if you get there you'll be expected to wait another year and i've been collecting a thread of ethereum pos transition deadlines since august of 2017 and they just added another one today it's not happening in q2 to 2020 they're pushing it to q4 it's not happening it's it's not it's it's not happening because to dream up a scenario where anyone in that community can get on the same page long enough to make one concerted effort is ludicrous

well the most devs dude it's all about the devs they add more devs you add more community you add more voices you have more confusion and like so let's talk about it like they are actively saying we're going to move to a system that makes your miners obsolete what does that mean from a miner's perspective i mean shit think of all the capital that has been deployed to support that network how would you feel if you had spent millions of dollars on anything and someone immediately with the flip of a switch made all of it obsolete now you have millions of dollars worth of paper works exactly it's it's so short well and and it doesn't make any sense the move doesn't make any sense so the claim that mining is bad for the environment is false it's dumb it's it's like

it's like calling someone a racist because you don't have something intelligent to say right like you got to think something better it's it's unsubstantiated and you can claim whatever you want to claim but there's nothing to back up those claims a lot of the miners that are there like you look at the people who are mining eath they're you know they've got all these gpus that are not really consuming enough power that's going to damage an environment and a lot of the power that they're drawing from is renewable anyway it's not like they're burning coal to mine eth you know it's it's just the it's like the eth community makes it seem like miners are burning dead children that's fuel that's that's i mean that was the whole fucking

selling point i was like originally and that's what pisses me off is the whole changing in the narrative of what ethereum was meant to be and it was a it was a virtue signal chain like we're going to be the environmentally friendly chain we're going to we're going to bring proof of stake internet the world computer we're gonna be turing complete all that is a red herring like it's like bullshit it's like yeah eth was a platform to launch icos yes and i and now that hester pierce has had did you see that you got three years you got three years to make a viable product you better go all in on it that's gonna pump that's definitely pumping that shit coin it's definitely gonna that's the thing that pisses me off like a lot of this shit's gonna pump too it's gonna

it confuses the fuck out of people well okay so what people have to understand is if if you're gonna go down that rabbit hole you have to look at alt coins as leverage trading for bitcoin right if you're going to buy an alt the only purpose you would ever buy an alt is to flip it for more btc later but i i don't like i don't want to incentivize this because this might not be the right podcast for that no no no you can say that and i agree with that but like most people aren't going to be good traders like like coming from a fund background like you can't just get into the shit and trade like you're not gonna know what to do it's true you're gonna get your dick pushed in like and the the siren called to do it is loud and it's appeasing and it sounds good

and it's easy for a lot of people to get into if you're out there thinking ah i'm gonna game the rest of the people go fuck yourself you're not going to do it it's probably true yeah i mean i lost my all my money at first i can't i can't be the person to say that you're going to jump in and make a ton of money yeah yeah so tread carefully tread carefully i mean and and i am an honest like i honestly earnestly believe that like in the long run bitcoin will be winner take most at least if not like 98 99 of this total addressable market cap agreed um you're just better off dollar cost average again agreed agreed yeah i mean that's the so i put out a tweet i guess it was a year ago august where i said that we were going to put 10 of our household earnings towards

bitcoin every month and we have and we just treat it like a savings account it's been really cool to you know get my wife involved in that as well um but we just we put it into savings you know and i did that this month as well um i think that's what that's what i do and it doesn't matter what what it costs like we just you know 10 of whatever we have goes to bitcoin and what it costs it costs um you know in the long run we're going to be up i mean right now we're up because of when we've been buying but it it's funny how people forget it everyone assumes that when you buy it now you're a trader when if you think of your 401k you don't trade your form like maybe you have someone managing it for you but you're not actively trading your 401k if

you are you're an idiot you know yeah and this is not to say that like trading you can't be successful trading and to say that you are unlikely to be successful trading because very few people are you gotta know yourself yeah you gotta know like the first opportunity i had to move out of trading i would it's it's super stressful that's like it's so much easier dca i'm like oh my god because i can't like staring at charts i don't have the attention span and people who are good at it like scott melker i have a lot of respect for him he he's the guy and he'll put it out there he's like yeah i looked at charts for five minutes today and to me that's like he's like rain man you're like i can't do that and good for him i'm glad he can that's just not me yeah you know

know yourself gifted like that know yourself yeah it's uh especially in this space because there's again the siren calls are loud man a lot of people make it seem like it's easy it's a quick buck yeah and there will come a time when and it will seem very very easy yes um and i think we're nearing that time but you won't know when to get out nope nope it's and some of my favorite quote-unquote crypto personalities are traders i fucking love jabez i fucking love kobe i love like those are like those are ogs like that that's who like made me cognizant of bitcoin like they were the early bitcoin twitter people like jabez and crypto cobain and uh not so fast not a trader but like not so fast as like a shitcoin expert yeah um minor as well and he's just he's

just a wealth of knowledge every time i have a conversation with him i come away feeling more intelligent uh just you know he's one of those people like you get around him you can just borrow some of his smarts for a period of time yeah really really good guy hey if you're listening let's talk to you oh i'm sure he would come on no problem yeah not so fast as the man yeah um no no and that's but like freaks if you're listening out there and i mean and then if you're listening out there you're probably a bitcoin or it doesn't give a shit about trading but if you're not like if you're not a professional trader just don't fucking run into trading it's not going to work out for you it's not worth it no it's not worth it enjoy your life enjoy your

life seriously it'll age you five years in three months it's just it was uh tough lessons learned 2019 2019 was by far i think the most challenging year of my life um see that was my 2015 yeah yeah loving every minute of it though man i wouldn't take a moment of it back there's been a lot of lessons i've been learned made a lot of great friends too that too like how great are the people that you meet in the space i love it it's great meeting people that are i mean like this conversation this you know what i mean there's not there's not another industry where you could get together with someone this quickly and have a have like an intelligent conversation that isn't totally built around some kind of pretense or what can i get from you what can

you get from me here it's just it's genuine you know like i i sent out a tweet that i'm coming in new york city and i've got a bunch of random people on twitter that i've never met before saying hey let's meet up and grab a drink um and i know that when i get together with them we've got one thing in common chances are we're gonna we're gonna hit it off we're gonna be good friends and we'll always have that one thing in common you know so it's it's been it's been awesome man i wouldn't i wouldn't trade this time for anything no anything i'm so it gives you i don't want to speak for you but like it gives me confidence that this is worthwhile right yeah well and the network that's the network effect of all of this is incredible because the space is so small people

who are listening to this podcast right now just like do something like get active in some way shape or form everyone is six degrees of separation from literally everyone in the space yeah and it's the coolest thing you can you can literally do anything leverage the network yeah and that's that's the crazy thing you'll come to learn too like you dm people and they'll respond yep and i'll be like hey you're interested in this thank god i can't fucking talk to my brother about this but you're asking me something that i would love to talk about yeah and it it's it's so new and most people that are listening to this podcast are light years ahead of the majority of the population to where you know like the small town that i

moved into where i moved to in ohio for a little a little time after i moved out of florida they had gotten attacked by hackers who had held them for ransom what was the the harp lead one i don't know they they couldn't explain it to me so i went there to try to help them build a tech maker space for the youth near it's a disadvantaged area we were trying to help them raise some money so that they could get kids in after-school programs get them in it workshops and things of that nature and when we were doing our initial you know presentation for the community um one of their commissioners came up and told me about this this hack that they'd had and they paid eight bitcoin in ransom to get all of the sensitive information back and i was

explaining to him that like they still have it all you know like they just sent you a copy he was like what do you mean no they gave it all back i'm like no that's not how this works and so you get the opportunity to share some of this information with people and like next time they'll be aware next time they'll understand how to how to handle those situations better and everyone has the ability to just like it's one or two phone calls then you can become i'd hate to use the word authority but you can become someone within your community that others will look to for for guidance on situations and who knows where that can go yeah we call him uh the uncle jim uncle jim is running the node that you connect to and uh you can you can make sure that you're

not running your node through a centralized service and your centralized service will be uncle jim and not uh some company that you don't know dude i was talking to somebody today that has developed uh software that scans his network for his miners to it's like an anti-fuckery device so it scans his network it can tell if pools are doing anything shady if any of his firmware software is doing anything shady with his his hash rate and we had this great conversation and he built this on himself i was so impressed well this is a great learning experience like how could these people fuck with you and how would you notice so there's a lot of a lot of comments that people will make about hidden fees with pools right um when you're mining you have

to make sure that you are actually mining to your wallet most people understand that by now but there's the ability for people to get in and change the wallet address so you pay for power you pay for all the equipment all the bitcoin goes to somebody else right and there's no way get that back obviously so he had developed a system to just make sure that that wasn't happening and then the to be honest when he was explaining it to me the way that he scans the hash rate is complex beyond my level of technical understanding but he's got it down we're gonna we're running tests right now with hash rate os to see how this will work but if it does work it will force a level of integrity on all operators that will be incredible um we've we've really been pushing this

idea of transparency and integrity uh you know when we started hash rate we were getting just everyone tends to fuck with the mining community it's a very competitive space fuck with the mining community the mining community fucks with no they fuck with the mining community the service providers in general the the so you've got ant miner who has their practices for how they release their equipment you have the amp lead which was a thing oh yeah well you've got you've got the firmware providers who also they they provide this this firmware that has fees that are sometimes transparent there's sometimes uh a little bit of discrepancy between what they say they're charging what they'll actually charge you have various software providers that will do bait and switches

and say that, you know, you're getting software for free, but in reality, whenever you mine through a certain pool, you're actually paying way more than you would otherwise. So, you know, when we came into this, we were like, all right, profit is important. Yes, we have to operate a business, but let's not focus on profit. We started our business with the understanding, like we were minors, we hated what we had to deal with. So let's figure out how to avoid that kind of shit so that other people don't have to deal with it.

And everything that we've done since then is we've just been on this search to find good people that really want to help and to try to leverage whatever kind of like, call it clout, call it, you know, social capital, whatever you want to call it, whatever we have, we want to pass it on to people who are doing really good stuff that can provide that stuff to the mining community, either for free or for a discount in a way that will benefit them greatly. And it's just like the conversations that we've had over the last three months have been amazing. There's some really cool people with great initiatives um mauricio de bartolomeo og yeah been on the podcast before yeah shout out to uh lead and io yeah so he's he's been he was one of my favorite

interviews on our podcast um but his proof of reserves i'm like i want to see that take off it's a hard problem to solve yeah i want to see that take off no no and it should and that's something nick carter's been pushing too like if you like we have the ability to do this in some capacity like it should be done right you shouldn't have quadrigaxes or melgoxes anywhere i always so i'm going to be transparent here i nick carter always strikes me as someone who's too smart for me to talk to like every time i walk up to him like he just seems he just seems too intelligent like and that's not that's not an insult that's like the highest compliment like i always walk up to him like there's nothing that i'm going to say that's that that's going to add

value to this guy um and it's only because you'd be surprised but he's he's so sharp and everything that I read of his um you know the times that I've heard him at conferences uh he's he is an incredibly sharp guy um but yeah I agree him and Mauricio with this proof of reserves it's a it is where the space needs to go yeah but that's like it's like how do you solve that like Eric Voskiel has very strong thoughts on proof of reserve as well like is it really possible like could you just move coins into wallets sign it and move them out and pretend like you have the reserves but they're like ephemeral right there's always gaming yeah someone will always find a way to game it for sure but the question then is you know from a game theory perspective

is the gamification still an improvement on the way that the system currently operates like even if it's gamified and people are still you know moving them in and out quickly it's like yo you had these one minute yeah you can bring them back right it's that extra step like will the scammers actually go through that extra step and let's not say anyone that doesn't participate is a scammer um but again it's the opportunists in the space yeah no and i think it's a very emblematic of where we are like we're 11 years in like yeah and these are alien technologies right literally an alien technology was dropped on us by somebody we it could be a fucking alien or an ai at the end of the day we have no idea i've just dropped on us right cool if i was still

smoking pot we'd smoke a joint talking about what if what if McAfee is Satoshi I don't think he could be but yeah that's like it is literally alien technology we have no idea who created it could be the NSA too uh we had yeah there's I don't remember his name but yeah no when the NSA is brought up I always fall back on it's like open source like everybody can audit it hopefully there are people much smarter than me they were like all right this of the NSA. It's...

God, man, what if it is? Are you listening, Ron? They definitely are. Hey, my NSA supervisor, we're going to check in next week. You're definitely going to get a call about Iran. Yo, I fuck with Iranians. Iranian citizens.

The Iranian citizens I've met, I like. Sina, what up? yeah i i've i have no qualms with them i'd love to be able to service the country but you know it's them and belarus it's they're they're on i don't agree with like the autocratic like government i do like the people of iran for sure yeah yeah yeah i'm sorry for doxing you cena probably has no idea who i am at this point it's been years since we've talked but we were supposed to talk about mining and one thing i do want to talk about is the transition like what do you think how do you think hash rate is affected at the having this year so having has

been pushed up to like late april now it's not even in may anymore yeah this they say that it's going to be late april um who knows who knows when it'll actually fall um i mean last i checked the bitcoin block is still 10 minutes so what's that it's like averaging like 9.07 i think that we're gonna i think that you know if it's if it's late seven seconds if it's late april or if it's early may um there's going to be a correction in the hash rate at some point in time we are going to i mean the exponential increase that we've been experiencing since god who knows when you know it seems like forever now uh i think we will see a pretty big correction and i had a conversation with matt de souza you said 30 percent you said 30 on your podcast last week isn't it yeah i think

i think we could see more than that uh yeah i think we could see more than that it's it's all going to be dependent on uh i mean when that reward gets cut in half you got to think that A lot of people's production costs are going to double. So it's not a great situation for people to be in who are FOMOing into S17 pluses right now because they're going to be in not a good place depending on the cost of power. So what's more important in your mind,

getting low-cost energy or getting the miners at a low cost? A low-cost energy. Because if you've got that, you can always buy miners. you know it doesn't it doesn't have to be one or the other but if you have a low cost a low energy cost you can always you know fork over the money for for miners later so when the halving happens what is the price ceiling on the energy in your opinion four cents four cents yeah that seems pretty expensive yeah the ceiling though yeah yeah the ceiling i think the the biggest miners are going to be at two cents um you know we're going to see i mean in kazakhstan right now i've

heard reports that people are getting a cent or slightly under but it's going to be like everything you depending on the government that you're a part of and the people that you know your costs will vary vary right yeah so let's for my audience who may not be abreast of the dynamics of the mining industry let's talk about getting energy uh that's on the grid versus off the grid like what are the differences what are the pros what are the cons so on the grid is i think something that people are familiar with it's constant and there tends to be less variability um when you're saying off the grid i assume you mean straight from the source okay so if you know straight from the source is is good if you can afford the infrastructure that goes along with that

but you know straight from the source if you're referring to like natural gas let's say um there there are other costs that are associated so you've got to buy gen sets generators that that run and then can process and obviously convert that natural gas into the electricity that runs the mining equipment those deteriorate over time so you bring in other variables like the quality of the gas that you're bringing up there's upstream which is you know from from the well in the ground and then there's midstream which means it's already been brought out of the ground texas has a lot of midstream gas and that midstream gas will run your generators for much longer without deteriorating them as much because they don't need to there's just it's it's

like if you bring unrefined oil out right um but yeah those are those are the two you know when it comes to the gas i think those are the two ways that it's it's being done right now and there's a big there's a big draw for that as you know you know the these oil and gas companies are really looking to move to a way that they can extract that gas so that they can keep drilling for oil yeah no that's what i've heard is the uh the biggest uh hurdle for them is their alternatives right now what like liquefying the gas and then trying to transport that or flaring or flaring which is frowned upon giving the giving the eath heads a chubby well all right let's dive into this like fuck the eath heads is bitcoin bad for the environment if

it is used correctly in the long run or is it actually good for the environment if you're able to curtail that flare well i mean if you can curtail flare and you can you can filter the natural gas through a generator that's going to then produce bitcoin it's good for the environment i would say that 100 of the time bitcoin in general i think is indifferent for the environment i think that you know the majority of the mining is done for renewable resources that uh you know is being it would be consumed otherwise or it would be wasted which in my opinion wasted energy hurts our economy because now you have someone who has spent the money to actually you know produce that power that now has to do nothing with it and bitcoin miners that can

step in and use that i mean they're feeding money into the economy there's i don't see a bad a bad situation there now and it all comes down to price at the end of the day too i'm like what is the cheapest energy source that wasted energy or yeah stranded renewables right yeah stranded gas is definitely the the way to go um finding those reserves which are plentiful uh is becoming easier and easier and yeah there are a lot of solutions that are being established that can help to turn that gas into bitcoin over the next couple of years the strides that will be made in that specific area of bitcoin mining are some of the most exciting i think yeah i think it's just a a matter of convincing the oil and gas companies that it's worthwhile right like hey this is an

alternative to your current uh flare bent mitigation system like maybe you should look at this and for sure like and these oil and gas companies what do they care about they just care about the oil right like it's the most profitable thing in their business or like oh well but what's the what's the like what's their biggest pain point when it comes to that so if i'm an oil and a gas company, you know, one of the things that I fear the most is environmental backlash. So if I have the ability to do something that can mitigate the damage caused by flaring or by however, I have to get rid of that natural gas. And I can generate revenue in the process. It's a no brainer. You know, it's it's just the it's the the learning curve, the educational process, there is the

cumbersome challenge, because you're tackling behemoth that are, you know, multi billion dollar companies in most cases that know what they know and don't really care to figure out what they don't know. But it's a process like everything. It takes a while to drill down, but headway will be made. So you're saying proof of stake systems will never run the world? Why do you do this to me? I mean, let me just put it this way. Because I have to. Because I have to win. Because I have to. If I thought proof of stake was worth a damn, I wouldn't have dedicated all of my Bitcoin to building a mining software system proof of stake has been proven not to work way die b money didn't work listen mixed mixed mixed nets can work if there's a proof of stake and

proof of work component don't show decredit on my podcast i won't i won't don't show decredit it can it can work however i'm proof of stake or a proof of work fan did you see what you did to me there did you see what that just happened wickib is a proof of stake fan oh my god i'm gonna clip it clip it and put it on the internet and for me i'm a dumb i'm a dumb person you're not i think i'm a dumb person it just makes sense to me like hard work like proof of work like makes sense like you have to expend energy and value to prove to embed these transactions on this blockchain like that's the only fair way in my opinion like prove the stake being able to buy a bunch of capital and throw it at a staking mechanism.

Not as fair, in my opinion. So you know who's being very smart about this is Layer 1. So if you followed anything that Layer 1 has done, they are no longer calling them mining facilities. They're calling them Bitcoin production factories. Because again, it's taking the obscure and it's making it palatable. So they're putting this in terms that people can understand.

And I think that they are going to be far and away the leader in North American Bitcoin production. and in ASIC hardware in due time because they understand not only the narrative, but also, well, not only the Bitcoin aspect, but also the narrative. And as more people understand that, it will move away from the argument

that proof of stake could potentially compete with proof of work. It's always been a virtue signal. It's always been a virtue signal. Yeah, I mean, it's like communism. Just show me a situation where it works, and then I'll believe you. Right.

You know what I mean? Like, just show me. show me like bitcoin works it works like 11 years if it wasn't for bitcoin none of the other shit would exist like show me that your system works and then i'll buy into it but if all we're going to do is argue for four years about how you might do something i mean you're like my friends in high school who couldn't get laid you know what i mean that's oh six months away dude it's always six hey man prom's coming up it's always six months are we gonna sign a we're gonna sign an agreement this is american pie no but it's like cock so many people get hung up on that though dude

what can you do i am hopeful for prog pal though like that is something why gpu miners man like okay how can you be like if they change it to prog pal what confidence you can have that they won't change it to something else in the future if they if they do implement prog pal it will take them so long time i mean it's already going to take them so long to implement anything um but i think the definitive action on prog pal would basically eliminate the the thought of proof of stake um and the funny thing is before they ever that would destroy ethereum though like how you're assuming right now it's not already destroyed though that's true that's that's the only thing is like right now all of this is and i have friends that are going to give me shit about

this but fuck your friends um but it's sorry no man but it's like i i've been the biggest person the biggest proponent of saying that ETH is just a platform to launch ICOs. It's still mineable, but when Vitalik started to demonize miners and I had to watch all of my friends take a bath on their GPUs that are no longer profitable in mining ETH, it was rough. It was rough. So I hope that ETH implements something that will still favor GPU miners. If they don't, I hope they die a slow and painful death.

I can get down with that, But like they have, they have two visions and they either stay on proof of work or they're like transition to prove it's like, and that pisses me off. Right. Cause they like create this perceived optionality, like, Oh, it could work one way or the other. But it's like, if it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Yeah. And you know, right now you've got a lot of people saying that it works great as it is.

I heard someone put out the argument that it works awesome as a privacy coin. Oh my God. But it's, so ETH is slowly moving into Ripple. Like they're just, like the people who bag hold ETH are just becoming the Zerp crowd. Yeah, God bless, God bless. God bless. Alex never, Vitalik never should have given up

Bitcoin magazine. Right, that's the saddest part about this is he was writing some of the best content. That's like the biggest, going back to siren calls, like that's the biggest flaw of a lot of the big personalities in this space in my opinion is like you see the success of bitcoin you're like i could do better but it's like could you really like i'm a huge believer in the timing of bitcoin the immaculate conception

i don't think it's replicable and if you do replicate it you destroy the underlying uh value prop of the whole asset class like it is bitcoin or nothing where you just like basically hit this like holy shit it works yeah and if it fails everything fails in my opinion um yeah and you know the the cliche is that the first one through the door always gets shot i think bitcoin has proven that that's not the case so i mean it's it's really hard to knock it right now you've got huge financial backers you've got tons of people spending millions of to deploy you know hardware to support this network um i'm gonna stop you there and that's one thing i believe too like i've been writing about this i think there's an order of operations

to all this if like we want these systems to be successful in the long run like you actually need like a lot of people think of it as solely a software revolution but there's hard like as we know we're talking about mining tonight like we need the mining infrastructure to be sufficiently distributed and uh sophisticated for the software to succeed i think a lot of like the eth the defi crowd severely discounts that yeah i can't speak to the defi crowd but definitely eth um that fact that is the defi crowd are they are they all the yes they're all have to get lumped into defi yeah isn't leaden defi well yes uh leaden is a form but they're using die dies are stablecoin but i think true i think defy but again order of operations right you can't have an assurance for

decentralized like whatever like i i only want a savings account i only want bitcoin yes if you want to go get loans and some distributed app go for it but i do wholeheartedly believe you need this infrastructure build out first to it to make sure that the assurances of that decentralized financial system will actually uh come to fruition like that you'll actually be able to depend on it at the end of the day true the hardware infrastructure is important i think a lot of people are discounting the hardware infrastructure i would agree with that i would agree with that that's that's something that as we move forward the the most valuable assets in this space will be backed by significant amounts of hardware you know if you were going to i mean

just look at anything look at any commodity you know if if you were going yeah i mean it just kind of, it paints its own picture. As we move forward, especially through the halving, I think that yes, a lot of capital is being deployed now into mining. There may be a little bit of a stall as we approach the halving. I think that we will see a level of capitulation after the halving. And when that capitulation occurs, I think we will see an unprecedented amount of capital get deployed to buy that capitulated mining equipment. So capitulation solely in hash rate or price when i say capitulation i mean of mining hardware okay so i think that we're going to see people who have either bought for stupid prices their hardware for stupid prices or they're paying

more than they should be for electricity because they wanted to fomo in before the having they are going to capitulate and sell their equipment and at that time we will see capital that's been sitting on the sidelines get deployed in a massive way to buy those miners at discounted prices and then we will see an exponential rise in bitcoin i don't do price targets but i'm gonna keep buying i'm as well and that's that's the other thing like uh like talking about minor capitulation fuck the bourbon's got me the um what was i gonna go into the um give me a second where we're putting some work on this bourbon man 130 143 10 fuck i completely forgot about what is it like i had something perfect to say to

let me write this down 143 10 oh that's so that's the thing like the timing of when you buy the minors is so important and as a minor like when do you when do you figure that out and how do you Because the hardware price is very reflexive to the price of Bitcoin, right? As soon as Bitcoin goes up, hashrate goes up, the underlying hardware price is very reflexive to that, correct? Yeah. So in spring 2019, when we saw the pump at that time, the hardware was going up about 30% week to week. and when we see a decline in price it well the bitcoin facilities can mine at a loss for a period

of time right but if it becomes clear that that's not sustainable they will start to liquidate assets and when they liquidate they usually have to do it in a fairly fast time frame so you're able to mine or you're able to monitor a lot of the telegram channels that will help to liquidate and you'll see it you'll see the the prices go from you know 1500 to 1200 to a thousand to 900 to 600 and then you know people are just buying all the way down just like they would with with bitcoin their dollar cost averaging their miners which of course helps with your their roi you know right now a lot of people are projecting if they're buying an s17 that their roi is i mean depending on the cost of power 11 to 14 months um you know i mean which is totally reasonable

considering current prices after the halving if you're buying mining equipment and you're paying let's say you know four cents per kilowatt hour but you're getting your s17s at 50 of what they're selling for now you can basically even get pretty close to that yeah yeah it's fascinating man it's so dynamic yep so dynamic so many variables at play like so many things right well i mean that What are the four variables? I really can't believe I said that out loud. Caught you. Yeah, you did.

So you got your OPEX, your CAPEX, your power, and your land. But after those four variables, that's basically it. There's nothing. Just managing the risk management within those variables. You plug those in and that's it. So it's a very formulaic situation. and after that it's just numbers and there's always dumb money coming in right or will there always be i'm hoping that the dumb money will be invested in smart companies that will then deploy

that capital okay so you know i think there would have been a time in the past where people would have looked at uh you know a fidelity even though you know they're massive and they would have considered them to be a dumb money fund but fidelity being as smart as they actually are jumped out in front of the blockchain and the bitcoin trend and it's like created a huge like a department dedicated to this so now a lot of these what would otherwise be considered big cumbersome financial institutions are cognizant and aware enough to create these you know these little sects within their their operations to where the what would otherwise be dumb money is now actually pretty smart you know amanda fabiano and the team there i have so we talked about a lot

of shit conferences that i that we went to in the past the mining summit that they did in boston last year was my favorite thing that i've been to ever in crypto i learned more in that one day like i couldn't even stay for the after party so i'm like i we finished i went downstairs and i'm like all right i've got to like i need to go get this out so like i have this process where after i like if i sit through something where it's intense learning i got to go write stuff down or i'll forget it you know so i i like i bolted out of there started taking notes and that was just like that was the most impactful day of probably of 2019 for me you're not the first person who's told me that um i've heard that conference in particular is like very dense and

very high quality yeah for sure and that's how crazy it is to see fidelity like abby johnson and crew like just take big and that's the beauty of fidelity too right they're still private it still blows my mind right they have like two trillion assets under management 7.2 7.2 excuse me off by an order magazine 7.2 trillion dollars and they're private dude and they're thinking about bitcoin smart people are thinking about bitcoin yeah is that where we ended on are we done here can we keep going i could but i don't know if we should i think we should i don't want to force you to do it we're an hour and 50 minutes in all this i mean i'm here i'm in new york until tomorrow we can talk for a while what's your least favorite part of new york

my least favorite part of new york i don't know that i have one right now so this may sound terrible but right now with everything that's going on with the the coronavirus i'm kind of in this like let's dodge people thing so my least favorite place is anywhere crowded yeah and you're in the most crowded city i know yes that's terrible but we're drinking whiskey so i sent you the article yes we got to get some honey and it was it was cured by honey and honey and whiskey so hot toddies as they're called hot toddies yes uh i don't want to trigger anybody just go listen to dave collin podcast we talk about this shit that was a great podcast there's we don't know what's like it's freaking me out that i'm in one of the economic hubs of the world and there's apparently

a pandemic where we've been letting uh people fly into the city from where the virus is yeah and we don't have many cases here yeah it may be targeting a particular type of person that's what i'm going to try to say so two of my founders are my co-founders are obsessed with this so every morning i've been in europe they've been in the states so i would wake up to like you know a laundry list of comments and like tweets and videos of what's going on in wuhan and it's it's the more you plug into it the more worried you get um my wife thinks i'm crazy every time i bring it up she's like just shut up about it already uh and it's true i think that it's it's something we need to be cognizant of but i don't know that it's a necessary thing to worry about we've been

through this many times ebola SARS swine flu if it's your time it's your time you're gonna go you could get hit by a bus yes that's a big quote here on tales from the crypt enjoy it freaks just enjoy it you're gonna be here for a short amount of time you never know when it's gonna fucking happen it could happen to you right now like hey embrace that's actually once you embrace the fact thinking like whenever i get on a plane i'm like hey this could be it this could be it like i used to be afraid of flying and then once you confine yourself to like hey this could be it life actually gets like a little a little more refreshing yep yeah it's true confine yourself to that um getting way too drunk right now you're welcome thank you we we crushed half this bottle

been doing good man been doing good swallows yeah hopefully you edit this podcast there is no editing there is no editing i hope you know that i hope you knew that before you came there we go do you hope for my sake or you're saying i'm good i i have no filter and neither do i i think life is more fun this way i do as well do you uh before we part here do you have any parting notes for the freaks any anything you want to get out there you're awesome man keep doing what you're doing thank you so much for having me on thank you for answering my dm dude it's a great time uh yeah we'll have to do it again sometime yeah go check out uh go check out the hash rate podcast number one and then hash rate os if you're a minor honestly dude uh somebody i was embarrassed

that i your podcast had not been on my radar until monday this week and i listened to it and i had to immediately reach out to you like you're in town this week we need to fucking talk well thanks man i appreciate that yeah we uh we're a a good mix of completely irreverent not suitable for work content and a little bit of mining mixed in um next show we'll have john mcafee on no and you know anyone who's into mining we'd love for you to check out os.hashrate.com let us know what you think you know we're building this for miners so love it or hate it you let us know hashrate.com is h-a-s-h-8 h-a-s-h-r-8.com yeah on there you'll get the website you'll get the operating system some of our articles as well we'll link to it in the show notes perfect man

wait i really appreciate coming by dude thanks for having me dude peace and love freaks