TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #263: The Bitcoin Mining Council and ESG with Michael Saylor, Darin Feinstein, and Austin Storms

Episode Date: July 14, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Michael Saylor, Darin Feinstein, and Austin Storms to have a discussion about the Bitcoin Mining Council and the ESG movement. Follow Michael on Twitter Follow Darin on Twitter Follow Austin 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 when you download the app. Lend at Hodl Hodl is a new non-custodial bitcoin backed lending platform, that allows peer to peer lending and borrowing between users, globally, anonymously & on your own terms. Create you offers & set your own terms on lend.hodlhodl.com Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator.

What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I sat down with Michael Saylor from MicroStrategy, Darren Feinstein from BlockCap, Austin Storms is our head engineer at Great American Mining. We sat down to talk about the Bitcoin Mining Council and ESG. Big back and forth. What's going on here? You guys are going to listen to the conversation. You may have listened to it already during the live stream. We had a live stream for this last night. Yeah, my mind's racing after it too. I guess one thing I'd like to comment on before we jump into this episode is a comment made by Michael Saylor. towards the end of the conversation about picking battles and i think it's a i agree we have to pick our battles wisely uh and should we be battling with the esg narrative right is this a wise battle to choose is it uh distracting from lower hanging fruit that could be taken care of

in the meantime i would argue i i do think i do think this is a battle worth picking because if we don't pick it now it's just going to be much harder to fight in the future if esg is successful and using the trillions and trillions of dollars of capital in its war chest to co-opt a section of the bitcoin industry not even just mining you can extend esg to a bunch of other companies including one of the sponsors cash app square is publicly traded they have shareholders as well They could be beholden to ESG at some point. Unwillingly. So therefore, is this a battle worth picking?

I would argue yes. You're going to listen to the debate. I don't know if it was a debate. There's no moderator. Conversation back and forth. Understanding why the mining council exists, what it's trying to achieve, and whether or not it makes sense to appease ESG investors.

As mentioned, this report was brought to you by our good friends at the motherfucking cash app cash apps help you stack sets and sets receive sets and sell sets if you so please we're saying sets sets sets sets sets because that's the standard 100 million sets in one a whole bitcoin you don't have to buy a whole bitcoin you don't have to buy a fraction of a bitcoin you can stack whole stats instead cash that makes it extremely easy you can dca into sets that's dollar cost average cash app can be your bank account they're offering account numbers and routing numbers get your paychecks direct deposit into the app to help you dca into sats you can dca i didn't

mention it daily weekly or bi-weekly set it and forget it uh they also have their boost program when they give you a debit card it's accepted anywhere the visa is accepted cash app if you haven't downloaded yet make sure you use the code stacking sasses s-t-a-c-k-i-n-g-s-a-t-s you're gonna get ten dollars and ten dollars gonna go to our good friends at owls lacrosse that's owls lacrosse owls lacrosse this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at hodl hodl hodl hodl is here to bring you freaks a lending platform again a lending platform that is non-custodial it's available to u.s clients u.s customers as well one of the few hodl hodl products available to us u.s citizens who are bogged down by over regulation in the

financial sector uh how does it work how does it work you ask well you put your bitcoin up as collateral and a two or three multi-sig escrow you hold one key your counterparty in the loan holds one key and huddle huddle holds the third key uh use that collateral to get stable coin liquidity and you can go use that liquidity as you see fit as long as you're paying back the loan you're going to get your sats back at the at the end of the loan once that's all paid back plus interest uh the beauty of the the non-custodial two or three multi-sig escrow that your collateral is held in throughout the duration of the loan is that you have the ability to see that wallet since you have one key and you can have confidence that your stats aren't being rehypothecated. So

you can check in on that multi-sig escrow and say, hey, my stats are here, hodl, hodl, and my counterparty aren't taking risks with those stats. So I have confidence I'm going to get it back when I pay that loan back. So if you're short of funds, you don't need to sell your Bitcoin. Again, get some liquidity by borrowing using your bitcoin as collateral uh no kyc no aml uh you can use this globally anonymously on your own terms if you have some stable coins laying around you want to get some yield on those you can enter the other side of that order book book and put your stable coins up to be lent out to get interest back on that so create your offers and set your own terms today on lend.hodlhodl.com that's lend.hodlhodl.com this rip is also brought to you by our good

friends at compass mining compass mining is here to get more individuals into the mining game and the way they do this is they have very good relationships with asic manufacturers they allow you to go to compass mining.io which is their website you can buy an asic you can have it sent to you at home and just plug it in wherever you want or if you want to compass mining also has very strong relationships with hosting facilities with very competitive electricity costs so you can buy a miner uh via compass and then pick a hosting facility to plug it in on uh compass will get that miner send it to the hosting facility have it plugged in then you'll have your sats sent to a wallet of your choice if at any time during that uh hosting agreement if you somehow find

cheaper electricity at your own home or in your neighborhood or in your office building compass will send you the miner you can have it unplugged from the hosting facility and then sent back to you uh go check it all this out at compass mining.io c-o-m-p-a-s-s-m-i-n-i-n-g.io we also have a very special link in the show notes a ref link if you will just be honest about it if you want to support the show that is one way that you can do so compass mining again trying to get more individuals into the mining game more individuals hashing it's a beautiful mission last but not At least this rip was brought to you by our good friends at Brains. Brains is the team behind Slush Pool and the Brains OS Plus firmware.

It allows you to stack more sats with your hash. Again, we've been saying this from middle of July. Wednesday, July 14th. Brains team tells me that Slush Pool update is planned for July. They are just triple and quadruple checking everything in simulations to make sure it's as silky smooth as possible, the transition when the update goes live. Meanwhile, the latest Brains OS Plus firmware update

includes full support for Antminer S17e and T17e as well as some significant improvements to the auto-tuning for all X17 devices, and it's available now at Brains.com slash OS slash plus. That's Brains with two I's. B-R-A-I-I-N-S dot com slash OS slash plus. Brains OS Plus is compatible with any mining pool. Public service announcement.

I mean, there's a lot of misconceptions out there. People think that if you use the Brains OS Plus firmware, you need to point your hash at SlushPool. This is not true. You do not need to mine with SlushPool to use the firmware. But if you do mine with SlushPool, you're going to get 0% pool fees. That's their incentive to point your Brains OS Plus firmware hash at SlushPool is 0% pool fees. Since network hash rate is at one-year lows due to the China crackdown,

now is a great time for miners to juice up their ASIC with auto-tuning firmware stack even more sats for those that don't know how it works it mostly comes down to the silicon of the hashing chips there are small variations in the silicon quality for every chip in an asic typically stock firmwares that come with machines treat the entire device as a uniform unit sending the same frequencies and voltages through the hash boards brains os plus boosts performance by experimenting with different frequencies and voltages on each individual chip to learn which chips are higher quality than the others and it calibrates to send more work to the higher quality chips and less work to the lower quality ones the end result is a per chip tuning the end result of

this per chip tuning excuse me is more hash and thus more sats per watt of power consumed currently supported devices are the amp monitor s9 s9i s9j as well as the s17 s17 plus s17 pro t17 t17 plus and the ones just added the s17e and t17e next up are the watts miners of course i'll believe it when i see it along with the s19s from bitmain stay tuned tm for more updates on the firmware in slash pool and check out insights i n s i g t that's not right i n s i g h t s dot brains dot com again that's brains with two i's b r a i i n s dot com if you go to insights.brains.com you're going to get content stats charts and mining profitability tools to stay on top of everything happening in the mining industry mining industry big topic of this discussion

let me know what you freaks think uh after a live stream it seems like uh there's there's a lot of division on this topic but i think this is a healthy topic uh to continue discussing and again like i said picking battles i agree i have to be wise with it i think it's important to fight this battle early and often because we let it metastasize uh it could be a bigger battle down the road maybe i'm wrong we'll see enjoy freaks you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to

devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be court what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here for a very exciting conversation a very uh timely conversation i'm joined with michael saylor from micro strategy darren feinstein from block cap and my co-worker at great american mining austin storms gentlemen how you guys doing tonight awesome doing great Good to be here. I'm sure you guys are aware of my particular thoughts on the Bitcoin Mining Council. That's what we're here to talk about. The Bitcoin Mining Council is a coercive. Why

was it started? How does the ESG movement fit into this discussion? Does it have a coercive force on the Bitcoin mining industry in North America and miners that don't participate in of counsel? And what are the long-term effects of appeasing what I would deem a communistic terroristic movement in the ESG movement that is trying to, I would argue, control industries top-down via the control of capital and influence overboard. So I guess we'll start, we'll throw it to Darren and Michael, two members of the Bitcoin Mining Council. How would you describe the intentions behind the mining council why you guys decided to start it and what your your state of goals are moving forward darren you want to start or you want me to yeah i think i think uh

i could start and then and then uh i'll yield over to uh michael to to help out i think what the genesis of really what what's going on is that and and i've been in the space for a decade I started mining in 2012 and have been really a big proponent of the Bitcoin network's fundamental ideals of censorship resistant money and bringing private property to billions of people on the planet. And I think what we've seen happen over the course of the history of this technology is very similar trajectory that happens when all analog systems become digital, in that the legacy systems that are attached to the analog systems, they put up a misinformation campaign. And it's really the same every time. When mail went from the postmaster general delivering packages and letters to all the homes, when mail went to email the postmaster general, he went before Congress and he said, you know, mail is the best and most efficient way to deliver information. And that email uses too much energy because of all the servers that need to exist in order to transmit one email from me to another person. And he actually got a lot of support to thwart email and put forth regulations that didn't succeed, thankfully, to tax a stamp tax on every email. You saw the same thing happen when movies went from Blockbuster to Netflix. You saw lobbyists come out and say, movies that are on networks use too much energy. We need to stop this.

You saw the same thing 100 years ago when elevators went from human run to electrical. And they came out and said, these electrical elevators use too much energy. So it's really the same arguments over and over again when you lose the advantage of an analog system to a digital system. And so being in the industry and dealing with the constant reverbations of how much energy this network uses, I think you look towards how do we solve the misinformation campaign that's going on globally and very well-coordinated against a better monetary technology and better system of private property rights and bringing basic human rights to 8 billion humans on the planet. And so when you're in the midst of basically a marketing war,

which is what we're in, and we're the subject of every newscast on the mainstream media, the amount of energy the Bitcoin network uses, You start to see that really the facts are being lost and the facts are really simple and they're on our side. And so when you have a marketing campaign, sometimes the facts get lost. And so really the basic premise for me, and you have lots of different Bitcoin Mining Council members that have their own opinions on what they want to do. But for me, what's really important is to educate the public on the actual statistics involved in our industry. And there's one statistic that I think Michael Saylor's heard me say 8,000 times, but I'm going to say it again, is that the problem is every, as I said, mainstream media every day, every article, how much energy is being consumed by this system.

And it's all false. It's misleading. And the people that bring it up are being intellectually dishonest if they've done any kind of research on the topic at all. And the facts are this. And this statistic is the most important one. The world, the planet Earth, generates 160,000 terawatt hours of energy a year. And a terawatt hour of energy is a trillion watts. And so that's a massive amount of power generated on the world, in the world, annualized every year. The Bitcoin network, which is the subject of probably more environmental concern than any network I've ever seen in my lifetime, uses over the 160,000 terawatt hours of energy. It uses 189 terawatt hours of energy, a negligible amount. It's equivalent to 0.1% of the energy generated on the planet Earth. And when you look at the sources of that energy that are used by the Bitcoin miners, and I happen to be one of them, I know what our energy sources are. And we've located our facilities off-grid, outside of population centers, near majority renewable energy sources. Our first location is up in the Appalachian Mountains.

It's in North Carolina. It's in the midst of several hydroelectric dams that were built by the United States government as critical infrastructure in the 1940s. And they've been repurposed over the years. But you have a massive amount of stranded hydroelectric power that's renewable that exists at a very inexpensive cost because if they don't use it or sell it, it dissipates and it's wasted into nothing. And so a majority of the power that's used at that facility is emissionless. It emits nothing into the atmosphere. And so knowing the statistic that the Bitcoin mining industry uses very little of the world's power and knowing that my company, at least, and some of the other companies that I'm familiar with, too, all gravitate towards renewable and sustainable energy sources because the price of renewable or sustainable energy that's stranded, that will dissipate is inexpensive because they're looking to create a market for it. knowing those facts and then reading on a daily basis how bad this system is for the environment

is extremely frustrating and so when i've watched what's happened over the last decade and because this is a decentralized network and we're really all proponents of decentralization you've seen a very uh disorganized method of dealing with the misinformation and it's this is i steal this quote from michael saylor uh so but michael says just because we're decentralized doesn't mean we need to be disorganized and so while we're decentralized and we're all proponents of the fundamentals for the for the bitcoin network as it's as it is uh portrayed in in the white paper the the messaging that needs to happen to the world has to be simplified in a manner where people can see what the actual facts are

and so the problem on top of the fact that the messaging gets distorted and it's it's disjointed from so many different people is the fact that people like us on this zoom we're very well versed in what bitcoin is and what the mining entails and we can talk about terawatt hours of energy or kilowatt hours of energy and renewable versus sustainable versus hydroelectric power but most people on the planet don't know what we're talking about and so we're we're really almost in an echo chamber talking to each other when we really need to be bringing this message to the eight billion people that are on the planet earth and only a hundred million of them are on this network right now and so that the network uh for the people in the united states where we value

freedoms and individuality and property. And if you look at people like Alex Gladstein points out that 87% of the people that are born on the planet do not have those freedoms. And so while we're bickering with each other over metrics and the specific ideals, there's 7 billion people on the planet that don't have access to the system. And so I think what my goal is, and I certainly can't speak for everybody, but I want to bring that message forth to the 7 billion plus people on the planet that could utilize this to access basic human rights. and and really that's that's why i'm involved that's why i spend a lot of time with michael and preparing uh the information that we distribute and disseminate uh through the council and we have no and if i could speak to the coercion you know you don't have to join it's

a voluntary organization we don't have any teeth we're not making proclamations uh we're we're just putting forth information that hopefully benefits humanity and people that lack basic freedoms. And so that would be my response to that. And so Marty, I think Darren expresses the frustration of a lot of Bitcoin miners. I didn't really know that many Bitcoin miners before a few months ago, but they've been coming out of the woodwork. And the message generally is we work very hard. We're doing good for the world. And we're getting beat up on by mainstream media and other randoms for unfair reasons. And we need to come together in order to protect ourselves and advocate our interests. And so Bitcoin Mining Council, I think we should start just with the

assumption that everybody believes in Bitcoin. Job number one is to sell Bitcoin. We can't afford to alienate anybody while we're trying to actually sell bitcoin we need supportive jurisdictions that means i mean we need to be legal in countries they can outlaw you i mean they can they can put you out of business we need supportive agencies like you know the tax agencies the sec the regulators you know if we have a hostile regulator they can shut you down so we need supportive agencies we need supportive states we need supportive cities we need supportive politicians We need supportive platforms, even people that don't buy into Bitcoin like Apple and Google. If they turn off the apps in the App Store, if you can't download a lightning wallet, there's no lightning coming, right? So we need to actually garner the political support of the Twitters, the Googles, the

Facebooks, the Apples, the Amazons, et cetera, everywhere we can. We also need supportive vendors, even the vendors we don't agree with. I mean, there are vendors that trade non-Bitcoin, but we still need them. You know, we need the exchanges. We need the traders. We need the academics. We need derivatives of Bitcoin because a lot of people can't buy the underlying Bitcoin. We need applications of Bitcoin. We need investors. We can't really afford to alienate anybody. I would say what we want to do generally is save our hostility for those that are attacking the core principles of the network.

Like you want to change the frequency of the blocks. You want to change the block size. You should attack those. That's like a deathly thing. And I think you should be willing to fight to the death to protect the network itself, like the core principles of the network. but if a bunch of people come together to advocate bitcoin and meet to do so and there's a lot i think we should let everybody you know do their thing i think you you should be able to go out and have your podcast and say what you think helps bitcoin i think that the bitcoin miners should be able to say what they think helps bitcoin i i did a quick google search marty there are 92 000 trade associations in the united states that means there's a quarter million trade associations in the world okay none of them are coercive antitrust code in the u.s and by the way i had to hire lawyers and i got an antitrust uh antitrust policy i'll send it to you after this

podcast if you want to read it it basically says you can't coerce anybody you can't drive any business activity. You can't discuss any business activity. All the things that you might be afraid that the Bitcoin Mining Council would do are illegal to do under antitrust law. None of us are the least bit interested in coercing, driving, or mandating any business activity of anybody. What we want to do is defend ourselves. And when you're attacked, and it's a difficult world. it's a world with a lot of people with a lot of vested interests and most of them's vested interest is not to make bitcoin successful so you know you beat up on me a little bit over over bitcoin council okay so i get it council sounds like a scary word you know i ran for

student council in eighth grade i lost i wanted to be vice president but you know it occurred to me that student council doesn't run the student body and then i went and i checked out councils You know, Marty, there's a gold council, a silver council, a copper council, a platinum council. There's a medical council, a safety council, a dentistry council, an ophthalmology council. There's world art councils, foreign relations councils. There's a solar council, a wind council, a geothermal power council. there's an automobile council a pilot's council an aircraft owner's council a shipping council a shipbuilder's council there's an atlantic council an arctic council a pacific council and if you don't like that there's an african pan-african council there's corporate councils none of these councils run the organizations i found a whole grain council a u.s grains council and international grains council and my favorite the national bacon council which does not control

bacon but you know the message there you know by the way if you went to associations there's an association for everything you name it there's and in fact there's probably a hundred associations for everything every type of person every type of thing in the universe and every one of them is advocating their interest in front of politicians, regulators, the media, mayors, governors, you name it, Wall Street, all the time. So the fact that the Bitcoin Mining Council is going to actually form as a voluntary association to say, Bitcoin's good, and Bitcoin mining is good. I don't think it's an irrational or unreasonable thing to do. And I think politically, if we want to protect Bitcoin in the world, we can't afford to take the position that

we're offended that you questioned our energy use, or we're offended that you questioned Bitcoin's use by criminals or Bitcoin's use by whatever. I've been in business 30 years. I've had thousands, tens of thousands of employees. And I never had an employee that was persuaded if they if they had a concern, even if it was a wrong concern, if an employee said something stupid, blah, blah, blah, I heard that micro strategies boiling the oceans or whatever. they're never persuaded by hostility ridicule or contempt like i can't just say that's a stupid question investors are the same way if i hadn't if i go to an investor and say tell me what's micro strategy doing bitcoin i heard it's got an environmental issue i could say i'm offended you

asked you're obviously uninformed f you but if i did that the best that happens is they don't buy and the worst is they sell and the even worse thing is they short and then they tell everybody else to short and another approach is they ask me about the environmental issue i say well there's not an environmental issue bitcoin is 56 sustainable in fact the north american miners are 68 sustainable and it's getting more efficient and more sustainable every day don't worry and then they go okay you know and the same is true with customers if you go to your you know the customer's always right so the customer says oh i heard micro strategies like investing in bitcoin i can say well you're stupid to ask or you're you know i'm

if they say i heard this thing about bitcoin is used by criminals i can say i'm offended you even brought that up you know your stupid fiat is used by criminals blah blah blah well like i just got into a fight with them over nothing you know my customers aren't going to stop using dollars And they didn't ask the question because here's the big idea. They don't ask, 98% of the people, 99%, they're not our enemy. They're not asking the question because they believe it. They're asking the question because their boss convened a bunch of experts in a room and a random lawyer said, here are the 10 questions to ask them when you meet them.

And so some lawyer, and by the way, the lawyer wrote down the 10 questions to show how smart he was. It's like the CEO says, or the investors, I'm going to meet with Michael Saylor. I got to ask him stuff. What should I ask him? So the lawyer says, ask him about the Bitcoin energy thing and ask him about whether Bitcoin will be banned and then ask him about, you know, whether Bitcoin will be replaced by something else and then ask him, you know, whether they're taking too much leverage. Okay. And, and the lawyer did his job. He came up with five objection, five questions. Cause if the lawyer didn't come up with five objections, the lawyer gets fired. So the lawyer's got to come up with the five objections. The person's got to ask me the five things. I have to give an answer to the five things. If I give an answer to the five things, the investor says, okay, I asked the question, I'm comfortable with the answer, so we bought $100 million worth of the stock.

or I asked the question, I'm comfortable with the answer. So we bought 2 million worth of the software. So you see, they're not really hating us when they ask the question. They're simply going through the process of due diligence and employees do due diligence, investors do due diligence, customers, voters, and regulators and judges do due diligence. And we have to move through a world of all these people. And here's the big idea. The governor of Texas wants Bitcoin mining, but the governor of Texas might not be a Bitcoin maximalist. So when the governor of Texas meets with his cabinet, one of them says, I heard Bitcoin mining is energy intensive or not sustainable, or I heard Bitcoin is used by malefactors. And the governor of Texas has to

say something. And so we need to feed the governor of Texas the truth. At least we have to advocate our position. The governor of Texas can't stand up in front of the entire Texas legislative branch and say, I'm offended you asked me. I mean, he has to say, oh, I looked into it and it turns out that actually, you know, it turns out most Bitcoin mining sustainable. We didn't even know. Not a problem. Everybody's like, check. The person that's feeding the question, by the way, is probably an enemy of the governor maybe it's the political rival of the governor who just has to come up with something to say so if we um if we advocate our interest when we're attacked on an esg narrative um i don't think it's kowtowing to the esg haters or communists i by the way i think most of us

aren't communists i mean i don't i mean even the call it so no i think most of us are pretty much capitalist i know that issues so so let's clear up a few things here uh i don't think the bitcoin mining council is going to influence other miners i think the esg narrative so when you announced the bitcoin mounting council on the 24th of may you said we're present and decided to establish an organization to standardize energy reporting pursue industry esg goals so that's one thing we have to clear up what is the industry esg goals what are we catering to why are we uh catering to an esg movement that is completely ill it's an ill-considered tweet i would write it differently if i were doing it today but this is essentially so let's get into the meat of the conversation

this is what i would deem is a potential attack vector on bitcoin is this esg influence blackrock owns 15% of MicroStrategy stock. Capital Group just bought 12.12% of the outstanding stock in MicroStrategy as well. Riot has BlockRock in their top four holders. Susquehanna, Vanguard, Mara, same thing. All activist investors with an ESG tilt. They want to take over board rooms and push their ESG narrative on those board rooms and influence those companies to act in a certain way like this is reality like so the question is like well marty like there's nothing wrong with doing good things for society having good governance to doing good things for the environment right well but well like you're not going to get the majority of the people to say

they're not in favor of the environment they're not in favor of the society and they're not a fate of well favor of good governance so well that's that's what the esg movement painting this Well, that's what the ESG movement portrays itself as. But at the end of the day, they don't give a shit about the environment. They don't give a shit about governance. They give a shit about control, control over how industries act. This is evidenced by the fact that the same ESG movement has decommissioned extremely clean nuclear power plants all throughout the world. like they do not care about the environment they want to control how businesses in the public market act and they they dangle the capital over the companies and say hey if you want this capital act this way i got two two observations one there's hundreds and hundreds of battles in the world that are being fought hundreds of them right and you have an opinion on lots of them and I have an opinion on lots of them. I just choose not to express my opinion on most of them

because it takes a lot of energy to fight the battle over each of those 100 battles. If we sign up to 1,000 different battles and we fight each one of them with our energy, we're going to get distracted from the mission of making Bitcoin successful, right? That's the first observation. So yeah, I don't agree with everything on earth. But the issue is, do you have to convince everybody to change their mind on everything? Or can we simply do our best to make Bitcoin successful? And the second is, everything's an attack vector, Marty. Like, if you're married, and your wife doesn't like Bitcoin, and you buy Bitcoin, then your wife might convince you to sell the Bitcoin. So if you go down this path, eventually, the only people

that are going to own Bitcoin are going to be Bitcoin maximalists that are single and independently rich. Because you're sponsored by Square, and Square is a corporation. And if Square is ever influenced by an ESG activist, maybe they pull your funding. And that means that you're an attack vector for Bitcoin because you accept Square's promotion, right? So every company, every politician, every mayor, every institution, everybody everywhere. I mean, you can take the argument of, well, people in Texas are attack vectors because if the governor of Texas changes his view, then that puts Bitcoin at risk. I mean, the point is we can't really, we can't take the position that because a corporation has other constituents other than, but if you have any

constituents right then you have to please them right your your family is a constituency right that's that's my point here so the corporations have constituents but they're not all just because like let's take an example just because you're a public company doesn't mean that you're not in favor of bitcoin like don't you think that the bitcoin miners are the most committed companies in the world to bitcoin they stake their their fortunes their reputations their livelihoods on the success of bitcoin there's nobody that's fighting for bitcoin harder than bitcoin miners they're like the path of they're the line of first defense of bitcoin right i mean i agree i don't i think you're conflating uh the fact that the esg movement is the attack vector

not the miners again i don't i don't believe that anybody on the mining council has any nefarious intentions. I believe the mining council is really naive to think that by appeasing the ESG narrative, anything or attempting to appease them will be successful in the long run. They don't care about Bitcoin's energy mix. They care that they cannot control Bitcoin and they'll just keep moving the goalposts as they have throughout the history of Bitcoin. And I think it's pretty disingenuous. Marty, I think you're getting paranoid here. The ESG people don't care about bitcoin at all the people feeding this narrative aren't the esg organizations they're actually alt coiners pushing proof of stake that that are actually pushing the entire thing into the

narrative i would argue against that the eu parliament has a proposal on the table to ban proof of work citing the esg compliance put it into the parliament marty the politicians maybe maybe they're bought off by ripple or whatever but the point is maybe an organized lobbyist supporting an anti-bitcoin organization potentially who knows but again but you want to look here's the point if if i wanted to destroy bitcoin and i was one person then i would pick some particular attack vector maybe it's it uses energy and then i would go find a politician and i would say hey it turns out that bitcoin uses you know energy and boils the ocean and the politician might buy

into that and if they if they bring that to the forefront then i think it's our job to point out that bitcoin doesn't boil the ocean and it's a good use of energy but if we're constructive and we do that then then we can move forward but if we again we start to get paranoid and assume that the entire world is against us and we get hostile or or we we ridicule them then we're going to actually lose the political fight uh i would disagree with that like the and i think it's disingenuous you understand marty you've you're taking the position that you can't trust any corporation or any politician on earth because all against you right i'm taking the position that's where your line leads to no i'm taking the position that the esg movement is real

and they want to control industries this is there's evidence by the action of this movement and again it's just the facts are out there these esg activist funds and blackrock capital group own a significant amount of public shares of publicly traded bitcoin companies and mining companies specifically and they actively say on their website with their esg uh mandates that they they talk to boardrooms to influence the decisions of those companies that that's why they buy so much of this stock and in terms of bitcoin mining again i think this is their investors they're they're actually investment companies and and their number one mission is to make successful investments. ESG activists would be NGOs that have no economic motive other than to pursue

whatever they pursue. But even then, the term is so broad. Like, tell me exactly who is the I think we're going down. No, I think I think we're going down a rabbit hole that the ESG has a spectrum, right? So you have some NGOs, you have some for-profit companies that have different mandates, and they're all individually tailored to the companies that are pursuing them. And they're not the same. They're unique. And they all have different mandates. And I think there's like, there's 250,000 different organizations out there. And there's probably 37,000 that would take some line where they would say we're promoting ESG. There's no one. Today, everybody is involved to some extent, and there are environmental problems.

I mean, there's pollution. There's waterways that are polluted. There are problems in the environment. There's air that you can't breathe properly. There are people that are subject to poor conditions in the geographic areas that they live. I mean, nobody could argue that there aren't real life real world environmental problems all over the world that just exists and and as as as an industry and as individuals we look towards how do we how do we fix the footprint of some of the wrongs that have been done and and there have been and i think putting forth the message and we're not we're not creating industry standards we're not we're just letting people know that what's happening today on this network is is friendly and it's a neck it for two things one

it's a negligible use of power the bitcoin mining network globally it uses a negligible amount of power and and people don't understand that that's the very first fact that is misconstrued globally so an important point is we need to defend bitcoin right isn't that the important point I mean, regardless of what you feel about ESG, we need to defend Bitcoin. Our choice is either to defend Bitcoin or not. I mean, I guess you've got these two thoughts. One is, if we assume that the Bitcoin Mining Council is okay to advocate for Bitcoin, then this other concern is you're concerned that the corporation shouldn't own Bitcoin?

Is it you're against companies, Marty, or you're against public companies? No, I'm against I'm against institutional capital with a mandate to force an ESG movement on industries like this. I think we're all I think I think now you're not in favor of Bitcoin. Now you've just changed to like you just are on a crusade against hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of capital. there's nothing to do with bitcoin and you're characterizing but you're characterizing what their agenda is when i don't think they would characterize it that way you're taking you just had you just had an activist fund take over three boardroom seats of exxon to push them towards renewable energy like you they went out they had the capital they bought the shares necessary to

get the board seats and now they are forcing exxon to operate its company in a certain way that otherwise may not happen if those activist investors didn't buy those shares. Would you say that this is not possible with similar ESG funds with Bitcoin-related companies? You can't control the Bitcoin network like you can control Exxon. No, but you can control...

Exxon has a lot of problems. Let me be clear. Let me be clear. The Bitcoin network will be fine. I'm worried about the mining industry in North America. As somebody with equity in a mining company, uh like this is scary as hell because you're pushing us toward it again it's really difficult

difficult and it's stretched to compare bitcoin miners to exxon and i think that's the narrative they want i'm not comparing bitcoin miners to exxon i'm saying is that activist investor attack vector is that replicable replicable with bitcoin companies on a corporate level possibly right so on a corporate level but again the bitcoin network doesn't care just like we all know i guess the question is what are you worried about someone's going to take over a bitcoin miner and have them stop mining bitcoin no i'm worried that they're gonna they're gonna basically force certain practices on the industry in north america like if you don't have this type of energy mix if you don't point at this mining pool if you don't act in this way you have to pay a certain tax

but real quick the mining council that that's not what we're so we all agree on that so i listen i think i and i'm listening to everybody kind of go in a circuitous route we all agree with that i me and me michael and all the rest of the bitcoin mining council we that's not our purpose that's not what we're trying to do and if that happens just like what just happened in china the Bitcoin network will move to the geographic regions that have the most freedoms. Again, I don't think anybody has bad intentions. But the question is, is that activist investor action possible with Bitcoin companies? Yes or no?

I'm not sure if it is, but I have a question, Michael, because you are a pretty forward-looking CEO of a publicly traded company. Do you foresee an ESG-compliant Bitcoin mining entity having access to easier capital than one who doesn't have ESG compliance standards? Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think that if we've moved off the BMC topic, if we've established that the BMC is just a trade association to advocate the interest of Bitcoin and we can move on,

now we're discussing whether or not there should be publicly traded Bitcoin miners and uh and then what's the impact of being publicly traded and i think the answer marty is that if you're a publicly traded bitcoin miner and and other entities invest in you it's just going to make you more successful and if someone wants to buy the entire bitcoin miner or they want to take control of the bitcoin miner invest huge billions of dollars of it and they would like for it to mine with sustainable energy it wouldn't be a fate worse than death it turns out that just about every publicly traded Bitcoin miner I know of is already mining with sustainable energy. So I think you're worrying about nothing. I don't think there's any risk. I don't know of any

publicly traded Bitcoin miner that isn't already mining Bitcoin with sustainable energy. But Bitcoin is a decentralized network. So everybody can mine Bitcoin however they want. Isn't the whole point that nobody controls it? And if you're going to mine Bitcoin with cheap energy, then that's good. And if it's expensive energy, that's bad. And I think that the ESG movement isn't really a... The challenge is not that they're all going to buy into publicly traded Bitcoin miners. The challenge is that we don't respond to concerns that legitimate... uh legitimate um uh why is why is bitcoin forced to respond to all this and no other industry is so i think why every other industry is marty not in the way that bitcoin is nobody cares you just

pointed out how exxon mobile we're unsettling legacy banking systems i mean so right now we're we're the topic du jour everybody is focused on how do we stop or thwart this network and so you know and and i think i want if if we're if we are past you know and just on to the topic of how do we uh put the message out to the to the billions of people on the planet that that the first thing they hear so you're you're one of the seven and a half billion people marty on the planet earth that doesn't know what the Bitcoin network is yet. And the first thing you read about in whatever paper you have or whatever mainstream media in your geographic area is that there's this new network and it uses a massive amount of power. In your whole life, you've been trained to believe that

the use of energy is bad. The use of massive amounts of energy is bad. And they don't understand people haven't been uh taught that just that use of energy has not the bitcoin servers they don't emit anything there's no carbon coming out of a bitcoin server there's no methane doesn't release anything into the atmosphere it only releases what the power generation source is and if it's plugged into the electrical grid the the emissions which is what people are concerned about from energy the emissions come from the electrical grid power generation source and so if you're not a novice right you don't understand what the bitcoin network is you don't understand the property rights that it can provide you and the first thing you read unabated

non-stop is that it's a massive use of energy and destroying the planet you're going to say you're going to join the collective group of people and say we don't want bitcoin here we already have enough problems and so in order to counteract that one thing that they're going to hear first we've trying to put out the the package of information that we put out and i put it out in slides and and the bitcoin mining council and it's available on sailor's website we're putting out slides that show that the minimus use of energy from this network it's just fake it's it's misleading it's intellectually dishonest information that the world's being presented with first and so like as we as we want this network to to increase the user base we need the users that

are not uh familiar with it to to really understand that this isn't destroying the planet and when i we have i have four we're in four different states uh one of the companies that i founded and when i i've walked into those factories and i speak to the employees and i ask them in small groups how many of you believe from what you watch on tv that what you're doing here is destroying the planet and and they raise their hand and and it and it's sad to see that and so i've come up with the way to explain to them that that's not what's going on here you're this is the most sustainable monetary technology that's ever been created in human history it's the first innovation on accounting front that that takes the the accounting system

out of the hands of the people that control uh the books and records for for companies and and governments and banks and it gives it to the decentralized distributed network and so what and and i gave you the statistic already so i walk i walk our employees through very carefully the use of energy that is going on inside this network and and what specifically the metrics are of it and and when we're done talking people that were not aware of the energy mixer are now aware of the energy mix and i'm not telling them they have to use a certain energy mix or i'm not chastising them and this goes to other conversations i've had with other people i i'm not we're not proclamating anything we just want to inform people that especially the people that don't

know what we're doing that we're not this is not an energy intensive business as everybody likes to frame it so marty do you do you think there's any do you need to any reason we shouldn't just educate the public on the benefits of bitcoin i mean people have been doing it for for quite a while there's been an immense amount of incredible can we agree on that that there's nothing wrong with educating the public on the benefits of bitcoin and pointing out that their fears are overblown no i completely agree with that okay so we're constructive then i think we should just focus on on the constructive issues i think that they're well so here's one issue i'd like to talk about like what is the correct offensive against this is it to say hey look at all the renewable

energy that bitcoin's using uh we're getting attacked by this movement that's like hey we have to transition to these unreliable uh renewable energy sources like is that like appeasing to them the the best strategy or should we be calling out the hypocrisy of the whole movement like there's many logical inconsistencies the fact that solar and wind those supply chains completely or those industries completely neglect the front end of their supply chains that take a lot of slave labor and hydrocarbons to produce the end product they uh when they're actually up and running they're very unreliable and intermittent they're not actually good sources of reliable energy, and then their lifespans aren't as long as they're advertised, and

then you have a whole recycling process that takes a lot of hydrocarbons and toxic chemicals. Again, the ESG movement is trying to force the world via capital into an unreliable energy mix world where we don't have reliable energy. And I think trying to cater to that movement is not the best offensive tactic. I would argue the best offensive tactic is to call out their hypocrisy and say, hey, we don't negotiate with terrorists. We don't need to listen to you. We are capitalists. We are going to do what we want. well so so i agree that we shouldn't appease but i i don't agree that we should attack i i think that we should be cheerful and constructive and educational and on one hand if we can educate the world that we actually are more sustainable than they thought that's a good fact on the other hand if we should if we should defend the use of bitcoin mining on all other

energy sources and point out the good that comes from Bitcoin mining on natural gas and other energy sources. I don't think there's any reason we shouldn't do that as well. I don't think that we should spend our energy attacking the premise of ESG because I think that's picking a battle unnecessarily with the majority and uh a lot of people you're not why do you want to win the battle of esg you've all of a sudden left the camp of bitcoin and now we're on a crusade because defend the interest of of 10 000 other you know organizations and it's dissipating our energy right calling people that and by the way if someone asks are you esg friendly they're not a terrorist we should we shouldn't be picking a fight with them they simply have a

checklist item they have to ask are we esg friendly so if our answer is we are then we move on to talk about the benefits of bitcoin then we're not picking another fight we're just constructively moving forward and are addressing their concerns so that they can support us. Because we do, there are plenty of people that we need. I mean, a lot of politicians, a lot of jurisdictions, a lot of platforms, we need them to be successful when they ask us, do we believe in ESG? If we say we're ESG friendly and we're good for the environment, good for the society, and we have good governance, then they can check the box, move on and support us, right? And so attacking the underlying premise of their question is creating friction and it's creating hostility

and it's distracting because we're not going you know if if you ridicule people that ask the question i think you could say it this way just creating we're all listen there's there's two there's two moving pieces here you have an esg moving piece and then you have bitcoin moving piece and and they they're not tied together uh bitcoin is its own not yet well but right now today bitcoin is its own issue and esg is its own issue as well what what we're formed the bitcoin mining council and what i am forget about the council what what really i'm concerned with is bitcoin's message that's it i can't fix all the world's problems and the bitcoin's message is despite your dislike of the esg movement the bitcoin network is esg friendly

it is environmentally friendly and so that's the message like that we're not kowtowing to any movements we're not appeasing anybody we're we actually are within the definition you literally you literally had a meeting with elon musk and then started the mining council like that to appease him you said hey we had this conversation and we agreed to help get better information we're going to create this council what's wrong with we're selling bitcoin we're meeting people to actually get support for bitcoin so meeting with people in order to convince them that they should support bitcoin and address any of their concerns it's just but at the end of the day marty at the end of the day bitcoin is environmentally friendly i mean it is it's it's a negligible power and it

uses lots of sustainable energy i completely agree that's the point is they don't care like they're not going like no energy mix is going like we've been educating the markets and individuals about this there's been a plethora of incredible content about this there's been data from cambridge on this there's been i want to talk about this point like there's you just said i would really like to discuss that because that's the crux here and so you have done an enormous amount of research and work on it so is cambridge and so is galaxy and multiple other institutions that are part of this bitcoin network they've all done it independently and they've all released this information independently to the wild and and we're losing we're losing every mainstream

media article every mainstream media article just you said in the eu they they're not listening they're not listening to us individually and so that the message is here's here's you can you can use this bitcoin mining council as they've put together the statistics here's a chart that shows 0.1 of the energy generated on the planet earth is used by this network which is going declining due to the efficiencies of the chips and the hardware and so here's the stat it's not this parabolic you know in 2017 uh these guys said the bitcoin network by 2020 will use all newsweek said the bitcoin network uses will use all of the world's energy by 2020 and they took the hash rate and the perceived increase in hash rate based off no efficiencies and chips and said

this is what the future is going to look like and thousands of people quoted that article and it spread to the regulators and i had to deal with multiple conversations asking about this article because there was no consensus response to that there were lots of individual responses so what What's Darren is saying is that we have a good answer. We need to just deliver the answer in a manner that will get the attention of the mainstream. The facts are on our – the facts – we couldn't have better facts. The statistics and the facts are on our side. I agree. I agree. I just don't think they care about the facts.

I think maybe one of the issues here is that's a different problem. No, if you're being defeatist now, I mean, like, if I give you 100 people, and they all have a concern, our choices, we cannot meet with them and say they don't get it. And we can object to the entire question, or we can meet with them and say, Bitcoin's environmentally friendly. and we've been to the world and and and it's likely that 98 out of the 100 will flip and they'll be like okay great i got the answer i needed see you use the word they and i just want to make the point use the word like they don't care but but there is no they marty like like if the governor of a state asked the question is bitcoin environmentally esg friendly that person's asking the question because a person that works for them said you got to ask this question maybe in response to someone else they don't have a strongly held opinion so we shouldn't take

offense nor should we assume they've actually they are even they everybody in the world's got their own complicated view we've just got a question that we just have to answer articulately So it's more articulate for us to say, we took a survey, 68% of the North American miners or 68% of North American mining energy is sustainable. The governor can say, look, 68% of North American mining is sustainable industry in the world or in the US, right? So now we check the box, and we don't have to fight that battle. We'll move on to the next battle. There'll be another one, right? I mean, and there'll be another one after that. What is your definition of sustainable energy?

This definition we've been using is renewables plus nuclear. So basically all the derivatives of solar radiation and then just nuclear on top of that? Yeah. Okay. Right. Because I think one of the important points that, you know, from an organizational perspective that might make sense is something that Nick Carter brought up last week, tweeting back and forth with me, is that Bitcoin mining, for the most part of the next decade, will use non-rival energy. And I think a lot of the assumptions in the mainstream media right now are that Bitcoin miners use rival energy sources, as in us using energy to mine Bitcoin somehow takes away from somebody else who can't power their air conditioner or heater in the winter. Does that make sense? I think there's 100 good points to be made about Bitcoin mining and why it's good for the world, right?

It's because it's rescuing stranded energy because it's recycling wasted energy because it's making, you know, energy grids more reliable because it's monetizing energy. You could go on and on and on. We need to be able to… Amplify. We want to amplify that. that's a great message i mean people don't understand the difference between rival and non-rival and i mean that's a very uh industry specific term that uh might sound different than what it is just you know so amplifying that message and giving it life to the public so

they could utilize it to understand what is being used to create this network is really the genesis of why we started talking because that you know we might have had you know whoever we meet with or whatever whatever we do uh together that doesn't represent what all of our individual opinions are and and really what's important is that message like rival versus nine rival energy or percentage of like i mean perfect example china just shut down right you know 90 plus percent of their bitcoin network right and they blamed it on the the the the power and energy use of the network well do you know how much energy china uses on a yearly basis china uses 40 000 terawatt hours of energy a year and they shut off a hundred terawatt hours it's a negligible amount or a

footprint in china and so what and so when you read all the articles they're like oh china's doing really good environmental stuff they shut the bitcoin network off it's like they just shot off a hundred of 40 000 terawatt hours of their energy that do you know how much coal they use coal china uses 20 about approximately 25 000 terawatt hours of coal a year of the bitcoin network, which was in Sichuan, like we've talked about before, and maybe 30% or 40% of that was hydroelectric power, not coal, how much of the 25,000 terawatt hours of coal energy was turned off? And so really just understanding the statistics and letting people know that if a country turns off their Bitcoin miners, which they can, we just saw it happen. There was an attack

on the network the network distributed and reallocated and and continued unabated it had no downtime no no bailouts uh and it just kept going and and it's a really good message that yeah you can turn it off and you can blame environmental reasons but if you look at statistically the percentage it it's it's a stretch to imagine that that's what it really was And so, but that's not, forget about China. That's any country, any nation, any geographic location that believes that this is a massive amount of power use. And so really, there's a lot of different, you know, we could all talk about 100 different points of the Bitcoin network. The depth and the knowledge of it is enormous, and we can talk about all this stuff forever. But the main driver of the most misinformation right now today starts at energy, then goes to illicit activity, and some of the other ones.

But the first one is energy, is energy. And if we could just corral that message together, this is not about the council. It's not about me. It's not about you guys. it's it's not about miners it's it's about the users and if we can corral the message to the users of the network that what they're using is it the minimus amount of energy then we're going to have more people that are going to have the benefit of accessing and learning about this network than if we didn't put those messages out i would agree but again i would i would argue

these messages have been getting out for for quite some time and in the mainstream media you have nick carter going on you have pomp going on you have plenty of people going on to to spread this message and again like i like should we be fighting that battle if it has proven over the last five six years as the energy fud has been popping up back up and back down throughout that period or should we be saying like are are these actually sustainable renewable energy sources do we want a significant portion of bitcoin mining operating on intermittent renewables like wind and solar is that advantageous for the network would that lead to hash rate volatility like does that make sense in the long run thinking adversarily as well with the esg movement and

capital that they have they are funded by the industry that bitcoin is set to disrupt most massively like if we're thinking adversarially as adversarially as we can is it crazy to think that that industry may have nefarious intentions with this capital allocation strategy and esg for the bitcoin industry specifically but i i think i i don't i don't think there is an esg industry i think esg is just framed there's 30 trillion dollars a day of aum dedicated to allocating capital with an esg mandate and they're allocating into bitcoin like some of those some of those companies are allocating into bitcoin so i listen we could go i i think the question really is uh how do we

all work together to message properly to the users and i and and that's really what the genesis of this is for us i mean i everybody has their own you know you have your own uh battles i have my battle sailor has his austin has his uh what what we what we're here today what i think is why we're all on this podcast with you you know on your podcast marty is how do we help right what's how do we benefit the network how do we how do we help get the message out and the and the message that i'm concerned with today and and and what we've been talking about is the energy footprint and the energy footprint is negligible so so i mean we're we've all been working to to convey that and it hasn't been working in the you know for the various methodologies that we've been

doing and so how do we do that in a manner that gets to the public and to the users that this network is not energy intensive it uses a negligible amount of energy and it's also even though you know it is what it is it does strive towards inexpensive stranded renewable energy because these these large renewable energy facilities have been built across the world that have been underutilized to some extent and if and if they exist and they're creating energy and that energy is stranded it goes away so they're looking for customers and those are the best platforms for for miners to just like austin's doing with with his with his stranded a natural gas flare and you guys are doing so i think that's the message do you guys think it's

wise to have a significant amount of the generation mix that bitcoin miners use to be intermittent or really non-dispatchable when the bitcoin network itself has been provably the most reliable network in the history of mankind like if we take it to its logical end right if we push for sustainable energy mixes, nuclear not included, because there's not really a clear path towards nuclear at this point. Wind, solar, hydroelectric, is it wise to base the majority of the baseload of this network, the most reliable in the history of mankind, on intermittent generation sources i i don't really think uh i don't think it's it's uh our job to figure it out like i mean it's a decentralized network right so if if we if we just come back to the big picture here

right the bmc is just formed to advocate for bitcoin uh and for bitcoin mining and answer questions people have. So there's just a, there's a lot of education to do. I mean, the decision as to how to mine Bitcoin is going to be made by individual miners everywhere in the world. And every, every, every country, every jurisdiction has different dynamics. There's different types of energy available. There's different laws, there's different regulatory regimes. There's some, there's some countries, they're not going to let you mine Bitcoin using fossil fuels. It has nothing to do with us. It has nothing to do with the ESG movement. It's a politician in the country. There are other countries that are going to allow you. I don't think we need to do anything

to Bitcoin. The goal of the BMC is not to drive any particular behavior. I think there is certain behavior being driven. For example, there's a lot more capital available for sustainable energy today in the capital markets, especially the U.S., if you were trying to bring a coal company public, you couldn't raise billions of dollars for a coal company. But it has nothing to do with you or me or my opinion or Bitcoin. It happens to be that third party investors happen to want to finance renewable or sustainable energy more than they want to finance fossil fuels right now in the united states and so why is that that's that's my because like the production and investment tax credits for renewable energy sources have existed for over a decade now

and congress just renewed them last year right and so like so you're asking the question why do people have feel what they feel but my point here is all we're trying to do is grow bitcoin we're not trying to fix the world you know there's that joke i'm here you know i heard about bitcoin i'm here to fix it. And everybody in Bitcoin knows that's very arrogant. Well, so I heard about the world. I'm here to fix it. That's more arrogant. Like the world is the way it is, right? And so I don't want to fix the world. And if someone wants to invest billions of dollars in solar power or wind power or geothermal power or whatever, that's what they're doing. If we're thinking about what's best for Bitcoin long-term, my point really is we have Wall Street. They have

trillions of dollars of capital. They're going to have questions. We need to answer their questions. You have politicians. They have power. They run states. They run cities. They run countries. They'll have questions. We need to answer their questions. You have platforms, technology platforms they have power they have questions answer their questions so i think every bitcoin miner should be free to do whatever they want to do and the answer in china would have been different six months ago than the answer in china today and it's different in kazakhstan and it's changing every single day i mean you guys know how fast it's changing so i i don't think that that um you know none of us at least at least me for certain but certainly not the bmc is gonna

it has a plan for bitcoin mining right we're not trying to change the way it is i think that um that the whole point of the decentralized network is let the network evolve like what tell me what country is going to tax bitcoin next or what country is going to eliminate taxes on bitcoin next i don't know bitcoin bitcoin will evolve and we should let it evolve but i do think that if if someone says an untruth about Bitcoin, then we should actually answer it. And I think most Bitcoin miners have said, hey, we'd like to have some kind of industry association where we can say the Bitcoin Mining Council or the BMC survey said we're 68% sustainable or 56% worldwide. That's just useful to 250 different companies to be able to answer that question. I mean,

We just all want to be able to answer it. And if we have a constructive answer, if I have a constructive answer, why not just give the constructive answer? We're just working to defend the interest of the Bitcoin network in the most articulate, effective way that we can. I don't think we're trying to divine where Bitcoin should head. I don't think anybody knows where Bitcoin should head. And there's that saying, you want to make the gods laugh, make a plan, right?

If you make a plan, something will change tomorrow. You'll be wrong on that plan. What if the answer to the question about Bitcoin's energy mix that people are asking was, we actually use 70% fossil fuels and coal. Would that affect? We would still want a Bitcoin mining council to advocate why Bitcoin is good for the world. And we would develop an advocate position because the politicians are going to want us to say why Bitcoin is good for the world, and the media will, and the investors will. So when they ask,

we need to have the best answer. And we're better off, Marty, to develop a good answer and then arm 250 different companies with a good answer than for us to say, all of you have to figure it out on your own. Because all 250 companies, they all have to figure out an answer. They're all going to get the question regardless. So all we're doing is just organizing to help out. But the point is, like, what if the answer to the question was that way? How would they react? Arnie, there's a thousand questions that are coming and another thousand coming next week. But this one specifically.

We're getting focused on this one, but there'll be another one and another one and another one and another one and another one. So the whole, I think that there isn't one question and there isn't one answer. This is the one question. Are we going to advocate Bitcoin or not? This is the one question that the Bitcoin Mining Council is focused on is like, what is the energy mix? Like, what if the answer were different? How would these people asking the question react? And does that give us some insight into their intentions? We have a question before us right now. And we did our best to come up with the answer. And the answer is a constructive answer, right? Yeah, the answer is that whatever the answer. So, as miners, we know what I know what our energy metrics and matrix is, I know which types of energy that I look to locate facilities near. And I know that the peers in the industry also similarly do things in a manner to locate their facilities near the same types of power.

And so, just on its face, we know, I know, I know the responses are going to show that this network is highly sustainable, using highly sustainable energy, based on the fact that that's what we use. and so it makes sense to show that to the world and i think we're uh we're we're we're kind of going back into the same questions again but but i think your point is good marty i think you know your your battles are are you know important to you and i think that you do a good job of explaining them to to you do you do a good job explaining them and we we have our own battles uh and our and my battle you know lives and dies on on what the bitcoin network is and what we're doing as miners and the rest of the world like that you know there's other platforms that that I participate in trying to help society. But for this, this is this very simple issue. And the

facts are even simpler. The network uses a very small amount of energy from the world. And that's it. And that's what we're putting forth, that information. The rest of what people might think that we're trying to push out is just is just inaccurate i want to be clear i don't think you guys are trying to push out anything i think the people are asking the questions are trying to push things on the network that's on the industry and then potentially down the line the network um that that is i again i love you guys michael all of you the education you've done the the The fact that 10,000 people have taken your course, the media attention, positive media attention you've got in Bitcoin throughout the last year has been incredible. Darren as well, like I told you last night, like I respect the hell out of what you've built in the mining industry.

And again, like I don't think you guys have bad intentions at all. I think the people asking the questions do. Like that's where I come from. And we appreciate your perspective. And none of our positions are mutually exclusive. I've enjoyed reading what you and what Austin write for a long time. I think that on a very simplified basis, putting out snippets of information that are factually correct could help our narrative on a simplified way. I think it's a very complicated industry. And you need a lot of information and details about what the network is to understand it. And if we can help to simplify that together, or, you know, in any type of forum, then we're all for it. And that's really what the goal is for me. so yeah darren if i if i could follow up yeah martin we wouldn't be here if we didn't respect

you and didn't uh and didn't uh appreciate everything that's going on in the entire community and what you're doing for the community and i think we all have the same agenda which is we want bitcoin to be successful so my primary uh the primary point that i wanted to make coming on the show was was that um the world's very complicated place and there's lots of constituencies and i have noticed in my in my interactions a lot of times people ask these questions not because they believe uh or because they support the point of view though a lot of times they crowdsource the question and they ask it because their boss or their boss's boss said you have to ask a bunch these questions and so when um like i've had investors ask me a question when i was buying

bitcoin they said well tell me about bitcoin and i started to explain the benefits of bitcoin and they said you don't have to explain it i i already own it myself but i had to ask the question my boss told me to ask it and so i think that there are some people uh there are there are certain non-Bitcoin supporters, but I think that what you've got is a world which is one or two percent pro-Bitcoin and one or two percent anti, and 95 percent, they just don't know, right? And the 95 percent, we're not going to persuade all of them to be Bitcoin maximalists, but what we want to do is we want to build bridges with lots of them so that we'll get their support to do business in their jurisdiction. Like we want to operate on the Apple store. So if Tim Cook asks

me whether Bitcoin is ESG friendly, I'm going to say Bitcoin is ESG friendly, Tim. I'm not going to pick a fight, even if I disagree with the premise of the question. But I might agree with you. I might agree with you that I don't like the premise of the question, but that doesn't mean that the most constructive way for me to move forward is to dispute the premise. I would just think, what's the most constructive answer that I can come up with? You've got lots of constituencies here. You've got, for example, Wall Street analysts, and they're going to just analyze this stuff and they're going to form an opinion and their opinion will either be channeled constructively by us if we put forth the best arguments. And they're not just to focus on

ESG. We should be talking about digital property and human rights. And, you know, the ESG includes the S and the G and the S and the G means digital property for 8 billion people, human rights for 8 billion people you know and uh i would argue i would argue the sg is cultural marxism that wants to decide how you hire what you can do what you can interact with like that's like the like it's a top-down mandate if someone's got a billion dollar check and they're in front of you and they say i have esg concerns are you esg friendly you can either say we're good for the society you know we're decentralized and permissionless and fair and and it's a very efficient use of energy well and give you the billion dollars i'm happy i'm happy you said that

because it explains the backdrop ulysses tied to the mass as the sirens are trying to coax him into the water to eat him alive like that is what that billion dollar check is it's the siren saying hey my point is you could either just say that and get the billion dollars and it's true or you could choose to interpret the world differently and say, I'm offended that you asked the question and not get the billion. But at some point, are you fighting for Bitcoin? Are you just fighting over your interpretation of ESG?

Because I think you're allowing the ESG battle to distract you from the more important thing, which is make Bitcoin successful. Well, see, and this is why I'm so adamant about it because I think this is the best way to defend Bitcoin is because again that billion dollar check handed to you by the siren comes with strings to it that force you to operate i mean it doesn't okay we'll see if that plays out so one question i have but this very important point i want to make the person has the billion they simply want

you to point out whether or not you're good for the environment good for the society and well governed and now we're fighting over semantics most of the world thinks good government good good for society, and good for the environment is good. That's what most of the world thinks. I believe that as well. If we're going to pick that fight, we're against the majority, and there's no reason to fight over semantics. That's the point here.

I don't think we're fighting semantics. I think we're fighting intention. I think that's what we're disagreeing with here. I guess my point, again, is 95% of the world isn't like the esg monster that wants to eat you that's i mean that's not 95 in the world no it's the black rocks 95 in the world is just trying to do their job like for example there's a guy that serves you know hamburgers and he's got rules and someone that is behind him said blah blah blah if the person looks like a criminal you can't give him a hamburger so you go into the restaurant and

And the guy says, are you a law-abiding citizen? Because his boss told him he had to ask. And you can either say no, or I'm offended, or I'm good. Get the cheeseburger. And so what I'm saying is, it's not a black and white thing. These guys have checklists. And there's a question. If you're a politician, you've got constituents.

You've got to be able to answer your constituents with a constructive answer. sir so what what we're doing you should fight when you have to fight that's my opinion if your back is against the wall you have to fight then you fight but if you don't have to fight and and you can be constructive and cheerful and go along then you should most of the people that that we like like don't you fundamentally disagree with something about just about everybody marty like Like, for example, couldn't I find a position that Google, Apple, Twitter, Amazon, Facebook, every politician has taken that you might have disagreed with at some point in the past two years? Oh, definitely.

But you still got to get along with them. I would agree, but their decisions don't directly affect the industry. and they don't direct affect the allocation of capital in the industry either but i can see your point austin i know you wanted to jump in what were you going to say yeah i guess like my question is around what i perceive to be a fundamental misalignment of incentives between those who seem to be the impetus behind the esg movement and their position and disproportionate advantage because of how close they are to the money printer and the candle on effect right so you have have entities like BlackRock and Citadel and Vanguard and Renaissance and the whole slew of

them who seem to be pushing this narrative. And they're investing in companies. And they're also as close to the money printer as you can possibly be. In a world where Bitcoin and the US dollar can't coexist, they're totally mutually exclusive, which I don't think, Michael, is a belief that you have, but in a world where they are mutually exclusive, does that present a fundamental misalignment of incentives, like tying back to my previous question on the baseload of the network being run on intermittent, non-dispatchable generation? We should be constructive, I mean, and as opposed to being confrontational. If Bitcoin can grow to $100 trillion and be 200 times bigger than it is right now while the United States and the dollar continues to coexist. Isn't

that good enough? What if we can just all constructively move forward? I think that we don't need to construct win-lose scenarios. It's not really good for us to do that. We ought to look for win-win scenarios. Bitcoin is decentralized. The world is decentralized. There isn't any monolithic actor that's moving in an organized way. For example, Citadel is a supporter of Bitcoin. Citadel's put, they put half a billion dollars into Bitcoin or Bitcoin derivatives. So Citadel's not even one thing, right? I mean, all of these organizations are lots of different people,

lots of different organizations making lots of decisions all the time. and they have constraints and so if you look at it like that it's you know the right way to do is let everybody live and let live like like find a way for everyone to go about doing their job and and don't make it unnecessarily confrontational for them but that's what they're doing to us like they're confronting us like for no good reason as we've been pointing out for years maybe that that's just a matter of interpretation right i guess what i'm saying is you're interpreting certain things that way but but you can choose to interpret the world as a bunch of people moving against you or you can interpret the world as as they're a set of constraints and lots of people

are dealing with the constraints and they're no more in power they're no more in control than you of those things everybody is is trying to work their way through a very complicated thing called life at the same time like what if like like when you when you walk into like the like a walmart like who's in charge like every single person at walmart is there anybody that you interacted with that actually was able to dictate how that interaction took place and if so who is that one person with all the power it's complicated right like everybody's world is like you get the sense that there's there's no one person that's able to control but they're all reacting to forces that are one step removed from them like like marty here's a complicated thing

like i'll say to my attorney can i do this and the attorney says well i hired another attorney and the other attorney came up with a list of questions but what are those questions he's concerned about a third attorney you know and i'm like well who's making the decision and it's like a person worried about what another person would say about what a third person would say about what a fourth person would say and you get the if you trace back to the fourth person they didn't think they made the decision either it's almost like a cracking of a whip or some kind of like a shock wave moving through a very complicated fluid flow where everybody is driving everybody but nobody could really stop the flow of the entire thing it's inter interdependent i agree it's there's

a lot of interdependent variables and it's it's a dynamic ever-changing um i guess problem that we have to solve as an industry but at the same time kind of one of my guiding principles is to mind the incentives and i i just i can't differentiate between the incentives of of having the advantage of the Cantillon effect and being as close to the money printer as possible, but then still investing in something, even as a proxy in Bitcoin, that removes that advantage. But I think that's where fundamentally you and I, Michael, have a difference in whether we believe that the Bitcoin and the US dollar can coexist on a long enough timeline. And we'll figure that out, I'm sure. Yeah, if you're looking for Bitcoin to be most successful over the coming five years,

then you could just start from the premise that it's been deemed as property by the IRS, which makes it competitive with other types of property. So it's going to demonetize real estate and gold and silver and equity portfolios much faster. Whereas, you know, the designation that its currency would be that it's not taxable and transferable. So it's quite likely that the path of least resistance is simply for people to sell their gold and buy Bitcoin. And that's the path that we're on right now. One point that I want to make while I've got you guys here is the reason that corporations are beneficial and publicly traded companies are beneficial to Bitcoin is because there's like $100 trillion worth of these assets that are sitting in these

entities that by charter, they can't actually buy the underlying Bitcoin. It might be illegal for them, like there are literally laws where they can't buy the commodity or they spent 30 years to raise the money and they're governed by the constraints on their charter and they can only buy the securities. And so as all of these companies come public, like the Bitcoin miners, someone that wants to support Bitcoin, who's your friend, they can't buy the Bitcoin. They can't self-custody the Bitcoin. They can go buy an equity in a Bitcoin miner, or they could buy debt securities in a Bitcoin miner, and they can support Bitcoin. It won't be the same thing. But when they do it, of course, it's going to be a public company, and there's going to be public company issues and you're going to have to comply with those things and there are more, there's more political pressure in that regard so you have to learn how to address that.

And when you get political pressure, if you address it by constructively, cheerfully responding in a way that's acceptable to the person that asked the question, then you'll get that political support. And if you push back, they just push back harder and you lose their political support. So if what we're trying to do is to grow Bitcoin, the path of least resistance is just to grow it as digital property. that's it's it's not likely for example that a governor of a state in the united states is going to support something that's deemed to be a competitor to the u.s dollar right that's not a politically tenable position for a congressman a senator a governor a mayor and it's unnecessary so so i i guess you know if i if i had a pet peeve there's two there's two fights that we don't need to pick, right? We don't need to pick a fight with somebody's currency. And we don't really

need to pick a fight with the ESG movement. What we could just do is say, Bitcoin is great technology and digital property to build the 21st century economy. Here are all the good things about it. It turns out to be very efficient. It's getting more efficient. It's going to bring prosperity to your state, your city and your country. And if anybody ought to be, if anybody ought to be threatened by bitcoin it ought to be gold in the world gold council right i mean if gold went to zero and it was just used as jewelry i think the world would go on and and if i gave you a choice do you want to actually do you want to take 50 trillion dollars out of gold and sovereign and sovereign debt or or money markets or or say etf funds and put into bitcoin

or do you want to pick up a fight with the government? I think the answer is we'd probably rather just demonetize some other types of property. Why do we need to monetize our houses? Keep the focus on that. You'll get the support of every mayor, governor, senator, congressman, and government if what you're doing is making housing cheaper and doing it in a socially responsible way i mean that's a constructive message i don't think we need to fight the other battles so eat the hamburger eat the hamburger well the other question is is do we even have that decision did satoshi make for make it for us in the uh the onset of the network but we have a hard 90 minute stop on this has been incredible conversation uh thank you gentlemen

for joining us sorry if it got competitive at times we're obviously all passionate about bitcoin and its success in the long run. And again, I think we all have the best intentions in mind. I think this is a very constructive conversation that people are going to enjoy. So I want to thank you all for joining. And if any of you has a last word or note that you want to end it on, let's wrap this up.

Yeah, well, thanks for inviting us on the show, Marty. And I think you hear from Darren. Darren and I are both very enthusiastic about Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining, And we want to do what's best for Bitcoin. And number one issue is just how do we all work together and constructively channel the best advocacy messages? Because there's a world of people, 98% of the world just doesn't know the answer to the question. They don't have a strong opinion one way or the other. And so what we want to do is, I don't think we're going to convince

the haters. What we want to do is find the people in the middle that haven't formed an opinion. And we want to persuade them to our point of view. And so we're fighting for everybody in the center with everything that we put out there. And so anything constructive we can do that I think is helpful. Yeah, that's great. And I appreciate both you guys and what you guys are doing. And you guys are doing a really good job with your messaging and the companies that you're forming. And it's nice to be here. And both Saylor and I discussed coming on here and we respect and we've listened to your podcast in the past. And it was a pleasure to have a conversation with this stuff about you yeah thanks for having us darren i'm honored to be your first podcast this is uh i wasn't gonna bring it up but yes my very first the only the only one that i've accepted in my

first podcast is is with bent today so i had some help with sailor and austin but yeah again i'm honored thank you for joining us austin anything to wrap up with on your end i appreciate you guys coming on it's always great to hear uh kind of a differing perspective on something that we both have strong beliefs on so i appreciate it again thanks all right all right thank you guys have a great night peace and love freaks