TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #415: Coal Is The Future with Steve Barbour

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

Marty sits down with Steve Barbour before the first Nakamoto Forum debate to talk about energy, mining, and replacing the US Dollar. Steve on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SGBarbour Upstream Data: https://blog.upstreamdata.ca/ 7:30 - Bitcoin dev conflict of interest 19:18 - Bitcoin reaching maturity 21:01 - Russian mining 25:37 - Fiat IOUs 28:30 - The state of US mining 34:25 - Will "Coal" Cole 38:09 - Upstream's progress since Steve's last pod 47:06 - Hydro is better for portability 55:31 - New design 59:53 - Is coal the future? 1:04:48 - Hydrocarbons debate 1:08:33 - Lizard men 1:10:57 - Mock the rulers 1:19:03 - Fiat dying 1:25:01 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠CrowdHealth⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠

I'm loving it this rip is brought to you by McDonald's just kidding we wouldn't recommend that poison to you stay away from the seed oils freaks great rip with Steve Barber we've got a growing crowd here at the Bitcoin Commons for

the first ever Nakamoto debate forum debate Nakamoto debate forum between Steve barber jesse pelton gonna be a hell of a night just had a hell of a conversation with steve again gotta get going here so we'll read the top four boosts from rip 414 palindrome rip the dollar end game theory with peruvian bull great rip if you haven't listened to it yet at eric 99 50 000 sats keep up the great work eric from the bottom of my heart thank you for supporting the show

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if 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. Steve, we will not be hitting bongs. You have a big debate tonight. Yeah, we'll wait till after.

Pull that closer to you. Oh, my bad. The Ordinals. Okay. Do you have any? I got one, yeah. You have your Greta Ordinal. Yeah, my Greta Ordinal.

She's harvesting coal. She's harvesting coal. She's got a bowl of coal in her hand. She's woken up and learned to call Greta, Greta Thunberg. Yeah, it's an ordinal. When that scene sort of warped onto the stage in January, I got a buddy to inscribe her. Is are you like one of the first 100,000 inscriptions? I'm number 464.

Oh, shit. You're early. And you got a palindrome inscription. What's that? 464 palindrome oh fuck yeah so i mean i'm planning on dumping that at the top so i'm just waiting to wreck somebody well apparently they just broke the whole ordinal theory yeah i heard yeah i heard yeah yeah i've been pulled into these uh i'm in a few ordinal like chat groups um i'm i'm not even like against them i just like they're just bitcoin transaction data so if people want to do it do it

And I made sure to inscribe that Greta in high res as a troll, primarily a troll. To Greta or just to the? More to the Bitcoin court of devs, frankly. Because, you know, some of them weren't liking it at the time. Like, well, you guys are the ones coding this and this is free market. And I don't really, I've always been a little critical. You're a big stop funding devs, guys. Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm, I wouldn't say big into stop funding them.

I think that there needs to be a little more concern on just general, general concern and paranoia around, around the Bitcoin debt process. Because, you know, I mean, if they're going to react, a lot of them say at the time, like when the Ornals thing came out, people were spamming, you know, quote unquote, spamming the blockchain. I mean, this is just valid behavior. So why do you upset? and if you're going to act that way and be upset about it, I feel like you're not quite understanding what it is you're building. Yeah, and that was another valid thing that was brought up. Like, could you, did you not foresee this being a possibility?

And if so, what does that mean about everything going on in the development process more broadly? I would say so, yeah, yeah. So, I don't know. I mean, I'm not like, I have advocated, like, you know, at least beware of funding devs, because I got a lot of shit from a lot of devs when I was saying this a few months ago

because I was basically pointing out that if you're... Because people were talking about, well, I'm a paid... There was something going on. I can't remember who it was. I won't name names. Some people were losing funding just because the market's bad, right? Yeah. We're all struggling.

All Bitcoiners are in a worse place than they were. And yeah, so there's some dev jobs, roles, that were not getting refunded and and some of these people are really good people that do good work um but i was just pointing out like you know being the that i am like you know first of all i feel for you i've had to lay a bunch of people off uh our business isn't you know doing as well as we were there's all kinds of pain we're all feeling but you know like being paid to develop bitcoin is a conflict of interest like in my opinion why uh because your interest isn't towards well your interest is towards your employer so it's i won't say it is explicitly a

conflict of interest but it's a potentially a conflict of interest and uh if you're being paid to develop bitcoin and sure a lot of these guys they get paid it's like you know um they have free reign on what they contribute to but at the end of the day no one bites the hand that feeds them and uh if there's um it's just it's it's not so much like i don't think there's like explicitly individuals like trying to attack bitcoin through development but i think that uh when you get paid to do it and it's it's a different incentive model than if you're doing something uh only only looking to make things like more efficient you there's like uh uh you're partially motivated to execute and do things

and things that might not actually be making Bitcoin better. One thing I don't like about, at least in socials, you certainly can't speak for what all devs are like, but there seems to be a lot of blissful ignorance about who the enemies are and what they're willing to do to us. and uh i see i feel like sometimes there's a lot of there's a lot of naive um just yeah yeah just sort of like so i it's not so much like i don't want anyone getting funded i think that's fine but i do think it's worth pointing out that it can introduce conflicts of interest

and also um uh you know it's just better to act with paranoia on the matter yeah especially yeah and so some people take it like you know they get insulted by it um by like you know you criticize that like like you're a paid dev you're you have a bias like that's just i i've already worked now with uh in my current company and in the past companies um when there is like any kind of conflict like you know you might have a side gig or whatever um it does even when it gets disclosed like which is obviously really important like to the employer that we all know what the conflict is but it still creates friction and i i've seen it a number of times now in my own business in my own past employer uh like for myself for example when i was starting upstream

and i worked for someone else like it um it can be interesting to navigate and the conflict exists and it can push um yeah push things in a different direction yeah what the what maybe the market needs yeah i could say it and to be clear i think the devs are extremely important they're doing good work but i do agree with you we should be as paranoid as possible because the stakes are really high we fuck up bitcoin it's not gonna be good yeah i don't and i don't even think the devs have the power to like fuck up bitcoin like uh like literally like ruin it i don't think they have that power uh i think most people would agree with me like they can they can push for changes and, you know, it might get committed,

but you still get to choose the code you run, right? So it's like, it does go back to the users have power, but what they can do is lead the market astray. A lot of companies and call it, you know, the market nodes, like the economic nodes, like just sort of follow the Bitcoin core dev consensus, which is good and bad. But what can happen is there can be like an economic split.

Like, they can just be, they can keep pushing down a path and, you know, I've always said, like, even when people were, like, attacking Bitcoin maxis, like, this divisive rhetoric is bad for Bitcoin. You can, you know, you blame the toxic maxis at the time, you know. What is a toxic maxi? Am I a toxic maxi? I think you'd be defined as a toxic maxi. Would I? Yeah, I probably would too, actually. Yeah, I think so.

i've been blocked by so many people that are always talking about toxic maxis so but i was always kind of you know back it was like a year ago whenever like it was always on like everyone you know a bunch of nerds are like you know whining about toxic maximalism and how it's bad for bitcoin but the very behavior they're doing is bad for bitcoin it's divisive and uh it's a bit of projection yeah yeah and i mean it's the opposite of us like it's like divided where the bitcoin community is weak um obviously chain splitting weakens us significantly uh and if if like devs get enough influence if there's enough you know say conflicts of interest i mean you see in academia all the time like these brilliant people have a career in academia and by the end of it

they're just like uh like like they cannot deal with uh new information um turning the table like you know like turning the table on their their work their life's work and they just they get into this you know i'm just like i don't know like krugman you know that in the bitcoin world the bikini economic economists like they can't understand bitcoin and they won't they won't accept that their reality might actually be wrong and they just keep doubling down and i think that same social it's a social thing right it's like a social um pressure it's a social like uh it's it's a human thing and i think like there's no dev there's no one working on bitcoin core that's immune to it and uh the more momentum it gains where you know the say bitcoin core um contributors

like sort of the social side of things like that's where there's social issues that can happen but But again, it can't really ruin Bitcoin in any way, but it can sort of temporarily make it weaker and less valuable to the men and women around the world that use it. Yeah. Like the Krugman analog is like the Udis, Eric Walls, Nick Carters in Bitcoin, and they just get butt hurt because people don't view this thing the same way they do and just say, hey, I think what you're doing is stupid.

I'm not going to try and validate it just because you want me to. yeah i mean those guys are all hypocrites from what i've seen uh like but yeah they're they're part of like you know they're like uh i mean i don't think i mean yeah like there's we don't have to talk about personally but it's yeah there's just there's just a lot of uh people just ignore that like because you know there there does seem to be more of a i don't know if you want to say like, uh, coordinated, but like, there's, there's more tougher things sort of regular regulatory wise, like coming out, uh, especially on like financial services side of Bitcoin. And of course the alt coins, like the shit coins. Uh, but, um, you know, we're going

to see more tougher mining regs, right? Like we're sort of already seeing all that stuff sort of happen and it's all going to happen. It's like, nothing's going to stop it anyway. But like, while when it's happening like people a lot of people i think are just ignorant to the fact that they think like you know these things they can stop it like which they can't really and and then they uh you might be able to delay it i guess but you know like the divisive rhetoric is sort of just terrible like if uh in no matter how that might you know come out like it could be the toxic maxis being divisive or it could be the people attacking different factions yeah i mean it's just like bitcoin is uh gains its power through its network effect and people syncing

together right synchronize synchronization so divisive rhetoric from any in any way is uh is a negative on the on the network right so yeah and the value of the network yeah completely agree that's why I try to like stay away from those fights like the toxic maxi stuff I used to push back and I'm like I just don't care yeah I've sort of for a while I got pissed me off because it's like man like what are you talking about and a lot of it was

just nonsense and hypocritical but yeah it just gets old and I mean all this stuff's gonna happen no matter what like it's just human human beings being human but you know there is a bigger Bitcoin sort of like going into this

uh, uh, I, I like using, um, that the phrase, like it's out of its sort of like infancy, like it's, it's out of its honeymoon period where everything is good. It's technically a teenager now. Yeah. Yeah. It is a teenager. And now it's like, it's really only starting to shake the fabric of, uh, fiat society. Uh, like it's starting to, you know, reverberate like to, um you know like like if bitcoin keeps going up in value it's seriously gonna cause major problems in the in the financial system and the more people that decide to just park some money in bitcoin for a while as it as that and that effect is continuing to grow it's just going to compound things and it's going to incite you know it's going to inflame the regulators and the fiat maxis the

anti-Bitcoiners to hurry up and beat up on Bitcoin and censor people that use it and make examples of people. And I think we are seeing the signs of that now. And so I think we're going into this phase of Bitcoin becoming more mature and being what it is, like what it really is which is it's a tool that uh you know it's it's sort of like uh it's a tool to escape uh fiat slavery right to like uh um and in the eyes of the law uh that's can be it could be against the law like you know off the table trade like not trading through the banking system yeah we're all going to be terrorists soon yeah yeah it could be seriously yeah no this is something i've been writing and talking about like the seems like that then they fight you stages upon us

whether it be elizabeth warren or about the environment and now it's becoming clear that russia is probably mining bitcoin i don't know if you've heard this but i tweeted out yesterday a bunch of people like source source was like the manufacturers at least one of them i won't name which one yeah has more sales volume in russia in the us right now with their asics And the source is brokers. If you're in the mining industry, you talk to a lot of brokers, you get pricing on ASICs, and you talk to them and say, hey, what are you seeing out there?

Some of these brokers have loose lips. They're like, yeah, we're selling a lot more product in Russia right now than the U.S. Yeah, and that rumor's been going around for a while, too. If you look at the hash rate growth over the last three months, it would make some sense. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember I got a lot of comments on a tweet I made

When the Nord Stream pipeline went down, like, got blown up, apparently by the U.S. government, I guess. Like, you know, it's funny because I don't think that, I don't know, like, I haven't looked into it. It sounds like that was made a fact by that journalist or whatever. Yeah, Seymour Hersh. Seymour Hersh. Now, you know, other than, like, reading the headline and skimming it,

that's all I got into. So I don't know exactly what happened there. But, I mean, when that happened, regardless of why it happened, it doesn't matter. What did they do to Russia? They just stranded a lot of their gas. And what happens when you create artificial choke points on energy and devalue it artificially?

Well, you just make an incentive to mine Bitcoin. So presumably, Russian gas prices domestically would drop with that oversupply. They don't have that sales point, at least until it gets repaired. And just supply and demand, and you have an oversupply, you should see a price drop at least domestically and there's going to be incentives for the private russian market to come in and arbitrage that yeah so yeah private or it could be like it could be like putin behind it you know but it doesn't matter right it's just economics so like if it's and of course the sanctions uh economic sanctions uh yes but i was gonna say they come off from the

monetary system yeah half before that and then boom they chopped off they they cut off uh their monetary pipelines with the economic sanctions and the getting off swift and whatever else happened there like before the pipeline seizing their reserve assets seizing their assets and then and then of course the pipeline like severing their actual physical pipelines i mean it uh that's sort of what bitcoin's good at it's uh it's bypassing uh fiscal barriers of course that's what it's designed to do but bitcoin mining in the physical realm bypasses energy uh bottlenecks transmission whatever yeah yeah so it's fully natural for that and i know in uh back in october i think i was i was like russia is going to be mining a lot of bitcoin soon and and a lot of

people don't like that narrative because you know like if i don't know like uh might be really pro america or something and you don't want to hear that but i mean that's just what happens if like And if, I mean, Russia's a big power and if they have a lot of energy, so they're going to be doing it anyway, even if they could sell all their stuff, they haven't just like, you know, uh, they have a lot of energy base and they're going to have a lot of energy waste and, uh, arbitrage to come in and turn some of that into money. yeah no it is scary there's a lot of bitcoiners like stop saying that like we don't want russia to be buying bitcoin the government here is gonna say like bitcoin sanctioned now but it's happening you have to come to grips with the fact that it's happening it's a good thing that's happening hash rate's decentralizing geographically bitcoin works it's a validation of the protocol actually doing what we believe it can do like russia whether it's trying to monetize their stranded

gas assets or route around the financial sanctions that have been thrust on them or a combination of both like that is a validation of Bitcoin working and then the onus is on us not to be like oh don't pump this Russia narrative because they're gonna

like bring the hammer down here it's like no Russia's using it and we really have to engender a sense of urgency in the people who want to kill Bitcoin here like if you fuck this up now they're gonna have such an advantage over the next decade that you're really going to set us back yeah i don't think there's any need to like sugarcoat what bitcoin is capable of doing like even if it's for your

enemies like what do they say like money for enemies right like uh you know um people don't like people like to sugarcoat the fact that it is really useful uh for people that do want to circumvent like tax law and stuff like if you really if you're into that um bitcoin does that and people don't like you don't see any of the main bitcoin promoters like uh influencers like the sailor kind of people talk too much about that because it's sensitive and it's like you don't want to shed light on uh aspects of the technology that people are taking like using Bitcoin and the dollar are going to exist together. What's that?

Bitcoin and the dollar are going to coexist together. For a while. I don't know. Well, I've always thought the dollar is going to go back to a gold reserve in reaction to Bitcoin because they'll have no choice. And so, yeah, I mean, fiat money, if it's reserved by something, it has its purpose. like uh you know there's there's need i i think there's need for fiat reserved by bitcoin like uh maybe more in the future like when it's more stable stable uh price level wise but fiat has a like a note an iou note has a purpose um that's useful um so i use them all the time i lose bets

to my buddies and i just say i owe you 50 bucks and then i just text them i owe you 50 bucks and then when i get around to it i pay him 50 bucks right so that's a fiat note in a way yeah just that text message a barber buck if you will yeah and i owe you i owe you 50 well i was on for yeah i was on uh on this thing for a while i was tweeting about it years ago i wanted to create a shit coin called soy coin and it was called ethereum it's yeah it's better than ethereum it would be it would be it was soy for because steve owes you uh acronym and the shit coin was going to be a google spreadsheet and you give me bitcoin then i owe you bitcoin and then you can trade your spreadsheet line items with other people actually sounds pretty scalable compared

to other shit it is yeah and it's it's just me being a bitcoin bank and i'd take a fee like i'd take like two percent fee and uh but in theory that kind of thing works like that was obviously a joke like i'm not interested in actually being the guy doing that thing but um in theory that kind of thing does work it's that's what banking is yeah it's like hold my gold i'll save it i'll keep it safe and i'm gonna hire the man with guns and uh you don't have to do that yeah yeah yeah so that you know it does make sense in theory yeah yeah it's gonna be very interesting i mean we're here you're here for a debate tonight with jesse pelton about the most sustainable way to mine bitcoin is it hydrocarbons or not wind and solar um but again i want to jump into like

mining more generally obviously we have a lot of stuff going on in the states elizabeth warren and others saying it's bad for the environment we need to stop it uh state laws here in texas legislators got some bills on the floor that would not be good for is that going to go through i've been seeing people tweet about it but i don't know i don't think it's going to go through i think it passed the senate's not going to pass the house or vice versa um it doesn't look like it's going to go through it's not like encouraging to see that type of thing get passed not in texas say yeah right but this is something very interesting to talk about geographic concentration or excuse me the yeah geographic concentration of hash rate in texas with megamines particularly which

that you have particular thoughts on? And then the centralization of mining pools. What are your views on the state of geographic centralization, concentration of hash rate here in the United States, particularly Texas, and then what we're seeing on at the mining pool level as well? Because mining pools are arguably the biggest attack vector, and then after them, probably like the megamines

are just huge targets. yeah i mean i think the mega mines are uh a natural um it's natural for bitcoin mining to have gone you know uh this route of a lot of massive mining operations it's it's for not that it's easy to do uh to execute um it is uh um for people that have a lot of fiat to invest and that want a vehicle maybe they're actually bitcoiners a lot of them i think are just you know uh fiat maxis that just want to put their money somewhere and and going going this big mega mining route makes a lot of sense it's sort of a it's a really easy way to scale capital yeah with a predictable linear pretty much linear you know return on investment

as you scale it which very few industries offer texas is an amazing place for it pro business big energy availability a lot of wasted resources in west texas wind that need uh need to go somewhere stuff like that a lot of flaring right and a lot of uh associated natural gas that um has had for quite a long time now just because of the shale call it the shale revolution like the new tech and oil field has seen uh low gas prices so like texas is a great place for all this and we've got reliable coal too reliable coal yeah um a lot of good coal and i think i'm not an expert like you know i don't i've i've done a little bit of work through my with my clients learning through my clients like i've never really approached a right like a utility and like

tried to get a deal done or uh you know i've never looked for on-grid projects but i mean texas seems like it's a of all the different you know uh utility jurisdictions across the us like those those groupings i forget what they're called um texas is a good one like there's a lot of private power generation and so i i think texas has got a good future and you know the power plants themselves mining bitcoin which is sort of what i've always advocated for i think the generators should be mining bitcoin it makes the most sense because it's physically capable of just being at the generator why would you go downstream right um Um, which, you know, you said that maybe, or you sort of alluded to that.

I have opinions on mega mining, which more so, uh, relate to that. I think they're like a symptom of, uh, this early phase of Bitcoin in, in like industrial Bitcoin mining maturity. And that I think they're going to keep moving upstream, like towards, uh, the power plants over time. That's the name of your company. Yeah, pretty much. uh upstream oil and gas upstream data um but yeah mining moving upstream is uh is a big thing that

we're trying to invest in our products like i i don't know it's already happening but like you know we want to be prepared and have the product suite for them um like uh i'm finally doing like a bigger load center like a two megawatt version and like that that version is for mega miners so I mean like I we've my company's never really gone after them like in terms of a supplier like we want your business but personally that's something I'm switching to within my company is like starting to talk to these big companies and saying like you know let's try one of our products I think it'll outperform like you know the other stuff you're using and generally speaking like i think we're going to see more power plants do it um even when you know behind the meter wind

like which people like are doing projects there but but i'm more interested personally in behind the meter thermal like coal natural gas um and nuclear but anyway but anywhere it is like it doesn't i'm i'm really agnostic like if if my product works and it's going to make you money i'm happy to i want i want that job like i want that i want to work with that uh power producer i mean we have uh we had some cool installations of our little uh black boxes on like solar firms and greenhouses and stuff so you know we support our customers wherever they are even though i might troll online as i'll be trolling in this debate later about what i my thoughts on wind and solar and the like so yeah it won't get to your pitch on coal but speaking coal to will coal

yeah c-o-l-e i told him to change the name to c-o-a-l but we've been talking i mean obviously um you have very big connections in wyoming and they have this problem where wyoming's coal country in the west um and they for years have been producing electricity at their coal factories and transporting it to california and other states uh california since said hey we don't want your your electricity produced by coal we're going to shut that down allow the rolling brown outs to happen over here yeah but we're not going to take it but as it has created we want chinese coal yes in the form of solar panels yeah cooler panels absolutely yeah um but in wyoming have all the stranded coal uh power plants that don't have end customers in california anymore they're like

do we do no just my bitcoin yeah i mean coal is cheap um ignoring like obviously there's always going to be the emissions uh concerns but from a pure economic standpoint coal is a good um candidate and and the other thing people don't talk about very much is uh if you have a if you have a coal fired power plant or any really any thermal power plant like running well under name plate load like under loaded uh they they they are less efficient uh their heat rates go up so in the example of a coal plant if you're running it at i don't know 50 you end up burning more coal per kilowatt hour so the by low by having a bitcoin mine co-located there like ideally the coal owner coal plant owner owns the bitcoin mine and is self-mining

to maintain a load balance on his plant which is sort of what we do already at a mic at a micro level with oil companies right we we sell generators and with bitcoin mines and they manage their load on their generator all the time and then the mining load will switch on or off or overclock underclock based on what they need to sell power or not sell power in their case like to use power for the well site because their well site might demand more power or it might have less fuel supply and so the bitcoin mining load will shed or ramp up in response to that and that's what power plants should be doing um and i think for a lot of them it's uh it's still a bit of voodoo magic this bitcoin thing uh but there's enough third parties now that are willing to put

their capital uh risk it and do some kind of revenue capital risk allocation split yeah um is sort of what i'm my company like i want to push into in terms of working with these groups to supply them what they need because our systems already do all this and so you just transform the power to the operating voltage put it at the coal plant like literally right next door in the parking lot yeah yeah wherever you want yeah and just run out you have a base load all the time and uh you're always going to want to sell power to the grid because the grid should in theory in in a free market uh demand more for the power than a bitcoin miner will so you'll always sell what you have that the grid wants and the rest just send it to a bitcoin mine keep your heat

rates optimal you know keep your coal consumption rate per kilowatt hour optimal coal or you know if you're natural gas or whatever any thermal power plant so yeah there's i i think there that's going to be huge like that's going to be a huge part of it of the american mining experience over the next decade yeah and it's been a couple years since you were on it was during lockdowns i was still in jersey what has the appetite for bitcoin mining across the energy sector been whether it be at the power facility uh or upstream oil and gas what are you seeing right now more people getting it intuitively obviously upstream flare gas mining godfather flare gas mining sitting right here uh that became a big meme like 2020 2021 died down a bit chris has been in news

recently like from your perspective are more of these producers starting to get it or we still have some education to do i think most of them get it like uh our struggle like we don't like my company for example we don't like go finance everything and make it give them a silver platter because I know the numbers, and it doesn't scale well because most of these guys that do that, like Crusoe and others, they'll put all the capital into the deployment or just about all of it, and there might be some risk share on operating or installation or whatever, and then they'll pay them for gas that's being burned.

It's worthless gas, right? So, uh, our, our business model is we, we only work with, uh, companies that take risk. So they have to buy either supply their own or buy our generators and then we'll work with them. Like we'll give them the rest of the equipment and do some kind of, it could be done a million different ways, but it's some kind of effectively some revenue split. Yeah. I'm a very happy customer myself.

Yeah. You've got good engines, sir. They're only getting better. Um, I mean, since the last time I was on this, like, I don't know what date that was, but it was probably sometime in the bull market ish, but COVID like our companies changed a lot. And like, uh, struggle I have with our company is like when you start out and you're not, we never started like well funded. And like, I basically built it from my piggy bank and, uh, just slowly and surely sold stuff and grew it. and we and so we never really had the ability or didn't go leverage so that i could just go do things like to go fix some issues i'd like to fix like for example one of the biggest issues i've

had and resolved is uh the supply like i had a subcontractor for engines and uh you know that that's when you get an engine that's like rebuilt from them and then it doesn't work like or it'll work but like it has a premature failure like heads burn out maybe there's an oil leak something like on the rear seal or you know whatever and then the customer's dealing with that and now I got to go warranty it and you know you're you're trying to beg your supplier for assistance and it's just it's just a nightmare and so early days that's what I had to do I had I had no one on staff that could do it and so that's part of our growth is we now have a whole staff and we just have a set up a machine shop uh to support uh not just our own builds but like third-party builds

like guys that need engine work done so we're sort of built i'm building an oil field service business around power generation and the uh obviously for us upstream data like folks on bitcoin mining but we also will do the peripheral stuff as well so we have a broad business like in oil field and in bitcoin mining and on for grid you know we manufacture for grid based bitcoin mines and stuff so yeah i mean there's been a a lot of changes in our product and our staff and our company size and our facilities like it's been crazy a couple years yeah you guys have been pushing out a lot of product one thing i'm excited about excited to talk about pick your brain about right now is the hydro units water cooled units yeah yeah we got our hydro hash generators yeah

Yeah, I mean, I'm really interested in the mining tech side, like what the big boys are doing for developing new product, right? Like I'm personally a big fan of MicroBT. Same. Yeah. And, you know, Bitmain, I know that from my own customer base, like we've seen better performance out of MicroBT units. They're not nameplate maybe as efficient,

but you also see problems with bit main units on thermal management, which de-rates their efficiency and stuff. You know, on Twitter recently it was shown that like the new S19s just went back to an S9 style hash board. So not to knock bit main, but like they, they clearly had reasons they had to go do that because they're trying to solve some problem they're having. I think it had something to do with their aluminum substrate on their hash board causing problems. I'm not sure. Don't quote me on that, but.

Can you, can you point to what that would be on this? yeah what do you got there that's one oh wow yeah um that's vintage man yeah well they got individual heat sinks in every chip right and i think that's a big step backwards for tech yeah i'm gonna like rip my shirt if i stand up this shirt's so tight on the s1 look how fat these heat sinks oh that's pretty cool well i mean that's cool because they have a slab style heat sink on one end and which is like the right way to go from uh you know you're in hard especially with us we're like in harsh environments you you don't you want to you want to you know you don't want to expose the pcb like the circuit board to the elements as air is blowing through and stuff

because if there was a failure and there's like snow or something in there you'll short them out yeah that's one thing we've seen with like micro bt like the boards because they have the slab heat sinks they they operate at high temps they have higher thermal differential like heat differential um so they can operate in hotter weather yeah they're beasts yeah i'm sort of just shilling micro bt and sitting on bitmain but i mean the hydro like they both came out with hydro like scalable hydro units um i think the market consensus from what i've seen is that from anyone like looking at the tech side of things like the micro bt racks system and server system is way better and i know for us like for how i build our product it's way better they're

also more willing to work with you like work on a cabinet design with you to fit your you know like like us to them like we're a system integrator like i build their systems into our systems and sell the package and they seem to be willing to work that kind of business model that's why i like micro bt um bitmain seems to always try to do everything and uh so they build all their own containers and package it all and they don't seem to build a system like i can't go integrate their hydro cooling system into our builds it doesn't make it's just not set up that way yeah and then then there's the whole like operationally which is superior i believe uh i like the micro bt version so yeah it's a newer product for us i like it because uh hardest thing even now that we have

control on our engines and like we don't have to deal with engine quality concerns anymore because it's our engine we built it and we know exactly what goes into it and if we do screw it up we make sure we never like we fix it like we had some hoses that burst on the coolant and you know they're faulty from suppliers so we you know things like that but we have full control over and so we can go warranty it so like you know when we're building these systems which are sort complex systems or micro power plants with a bitcoin mine with maybe some low control hvac control in the middle of nowhere on a farmer's field and like we're selling them to people who have varying capability in actually managing it like some of them don't have a lot but they're

interested in learning and they're awesome to work with some people uh don't want to do a damn thing like they don't want to change the engine oil even like they're they're just didn't know what they're getting into i guess or they don't they weren't set up for it so the one thing i like about the water cooling units that we're building um they're in theory like we're still i wouldn't say we are commercializing them but like we're it's still early like we haven't run through a full summer yet so we're not like really pushing them yet because i want to be i want to make sure like things are going to run really nice um but overall the system is a lot more dummy proof because air cooling you do need to maybe a little more active management sometimes like on like by the end here

the water stuff is so far i'm pretty impressed with yeah it's really just slick yeah and then so that's another thing so to dive into and for any of the freaks who may not be aware of the nuance of the differences between air cool immersion cooled and then water cold hydro which you're building why hydro over immersion and then what are the trade-offs with hydro versus air-cooled specifically yeah sort of like there's like crossover right between them like immersion immersion and water cooling i mean the difference is the in immersion you're literally immersing the pcb the hash board in the fluid like the whole thing's enveloped in the fluid and transferring heat directly to the fluid and while the fluid itself is a weaker conductor and weaker on heat

management than water is it is a direct contact with the chips so it has that advantage whereas a water cooled you have an interface like a cold plate like a aluminum plate basically interface so you have that conductive layer before you the heat escapes so there is some arguing argument that um immersion system is better for thermal management on a hash board the problem is with uh with immersion i would say there's a bunch of things i don't like about it um sort of like one one one simple one is like when you're building mobile modular systems that you can our stuff is designed like all the same parts basically it repeats i can build like the smallest unit you know we can build like 90 kilowatt up to like two megawatts and i'm using all the same

components i just keep building modularly and uh we're always building portable systems i believe in portable mining infrastructure just because of what we see constantly by politicians like attacking us like i really think it's silly like i mean not to say it's a bad idea because there's a lot of reasons why it's still a good idea but like you know when you build these massive mega firms and you can't move them you're at risk of sinking a lot of capital never to be recovered yeah if someone inks gets the ink out it says you're done like which can happen and it doesn't even have to be that one other way i guess you could get the ink out maybe you'll touch on this tonight but like another thing like wind and solar megabytes particularly

look at those subsidies run out those operations become unprofitable overnight it may not even be like a regulation like you can't mind here just like oh we the government went poor we don't have any more subsidy money you're fucked yeah yeah and the subsidies are um i mean it could be that's the thing whether it's like regulation that puts you out of business or market puts you out of business like something in the market changes yeah and upstream oil and gas the flare you'd be done drilling the well you have no flare you gotta fucking move the container yeah yeah i i've always advocated and it's sort of self-interested because we build these systems but like i build them because i think it's the reason i never got into engineering and doing retrofits of like

warehouses which there is a market for that i'm just i just don't see it scaling so i wanted to build a product that you could put anywhere and we do that i think we do that really well because we have all kinds of products that go at every level of bitcoin mining like even the little ones like our 12 minor black box like it's a little eight foot box that you can just sit in your yard and not not cut apart your walls you're building right like there's little things like that we're trying to go after every aspect of the bitcoin market but yeah i've always advocated for portable uh because you know i i just am ultra paranoid on what the politicians are going to do and then of course there's also the market you can't control the market and the prices might

fall out all of a sudden you've invested you know x percent of your capital on your project into your brick and mortar facility which is now you know a warehouse like it's good for nothing whereas at least when you invest in portable infrastructure like the container side of things like our load centers like they can be you know you can just liquidate them even if you take a loss like uh off nominal purchase price like it's not hard to do yeah so yeah i mean that's like the back to the immersion though like the moving things around with these bathtubs like uh these bathtubs of fluid um it's not like it's rocket science but it's just like a pain in the ass and if you have a spill it doesn't matter if it's like if it's uh you know it's a msds sheet

like if it's like not a toxic fluid if you spill that on an oil well in canada at any big oil company it's tech it doesn't matter what it is it's a reportable spill and the ceo hears about it so like you know it's just one of those things like hydro i like the hydro uh tech because it's isolated. It's just distilled water. It's a closed loop and closed. You can spill the whole damn thing. Um, and really it's no big deal. Um, if the whole damn thing leaks, um, closed loop system, it's, it's pretty slick setup. Um, everything about it makes sense to me. Uh, and I don't think, um, while, while immersion has certain advantages, I don't think it overcomes its disadvantages relative to what you know water can do for you in the same situation

like even the heat a lot of the people that do it like the overclocking aspect which maybe immersion's best at because it arguably is the best thermals but thermal management but um overclocking is sort of a bull market activity first of all it's not like it's not a long-term activity you don't run things inefficiently you do it at peak efficiency which is not overclocking and uh so long term it doesn't make a whole lot of sense like that you care to overclock um like like as a routine and then water cooling can sort of do that now pretty much as well anyway so it's like yeah i don't know yeah that's what i was gonna get what are like the advantages of bringing like water cooling versus air cooling what are the

advantages better efficiency at the machine does it elongate the life cycle of the machine well Well, air-cooling is still one reason why most of my personal time has been constantly improving our air-cooling systems is because I think there's still lots of room for them to improve, and I want to have the best product in the world. And two, I think the industry of air-cooled mining is still going to dominate all the way into the future. A lot of people have thought maybe immersion is going to dominate.

Now some people that love water think water is going to dominate. I've even seen MicroBT's sub heat core, the company that sells that equipment, say that. Of course, they're selling it. But I don't agree. I think air cooling is still the future because it's, I think there's a lot, like you just showed that S1 hash board. It's got certain aspects to it that are pretty good, but you can keep improving on how that is enclosed. like that pcb completely make it you know um free from damage risk and all of a sudden you have an air-cooled unit that can operate the same efficiency as a water-cooled unit so you still

get the same energy input and revenue output like peak like peak efficiency um but at the lowest capex yeah and uh everything's cool by air on earth anyway like it all goes it all goes back air somewhere it's just like how many steps do you need to get to the air and direct from heat sink to air that's why like i said this is why i keep building air products because i think it's just the way to go yeah i'm i'm honestly quite happy to see um people shift their focus to other other products because i just want to leapfrog everyone on on the performance and take the market well i can have ouch disclaimer upstream customer upstream investor too um via 1031 but i mean they work like i've had my hash up plugged in for well over a year now and the only downtime we have is

the the oil changes yeah you got a hash generator an older version yeah we have like uh just sort have brought in these like industrial motors that were um we like i also started the company on small projects because that was the most widely you know wide customer base now of course you get one big mega mining customer and that's all you need right but but uh i also want to build a suite of products you know um build a really great product um get ip on that product and and just like you know have a great product in the market for a long long time and i always felt like if i can't build for the all the little applications you know someone's got to do it and i want to be the best at it like that's not that we have been i mean we've made a lot of mistakes but we're

always trying to improve so you know even like we started with little engines now we're getting up to bigger ones we're up to 22 liter engines now oh yeah so it's 360 odd kilowatt anyway anyway it'll run anywhere between 300 to 360 kilowatt um that's all i plan on in the very near term but like past that will go bigger uh when it makes sense if it makes sense yeah no it's um it's been cool to see the the progress the progress that you guys have made in the iterations and it's fun yeah i'm really my new my newest version i'm super pumped about i'm just trying to get the word out there and get people to see it um you know i know i'm just shilling my product now but just chill it chill it's uh it's badass like uh i sort of i don't know what i was thinking like

because i'm the principal designer i come up with the main concepts and i work with my team on it like i'm not um saying it's all me but i i'm i'm the most motivated so i'm always thinking about improving it and i just sort of realized one day i'm like why am i building uh buildings in a eight foot footprint like container sort of style like i can build anything because we we do self self-framing metal buildings whereas you know a lot of guys are building retrofitting c cans and stuff they're limited to that size and i was like man why am i like all this widen you know there's because i was having some issues i'm i honestly fucked up on uh fan choice for one of our product lines which ended up being a big deal because we built a lot of them but when i was redesigning

i'm like man i gotta i wanna put the fan on the intake so it's never in the heat i want a booster fan i want it to be actively you can turn it on or turn it off so it's passive cooling or active boost um i want the best filters i have like a two-layer filter system now i pass this through two uh filter systems um and then you know when i was designing this i'm like man i can't fit it all in i gotta do something and then i'm like why don't i just widen the building it's the stupidest thing ever but you get stuck in this mindset like oh i have to build it compact has to be eight foot wide i'm like uh for shipping right and for other reasons and i'm like man what am i doing like it's good that's it's good i'm happy i have some really good guys my team too

that are like why are you doing this like this way like because they hated working on it it's too narrow and stuff and like i don't know why are we doing this like no let's let's make that better so anyway we went through a lot of a lot of uh like i spent a lot of last year testing this redesign and and uh doing something i didn't do enough on the prior version uh with the bad fans and uh yeah pretty pretty happy to get it out there because it's pretty pretty badass unit now you have to get wide load trucks no it's still uh well it's actually 10 foot so it it's technically a wide load but it's before the permitting point if you go over 10 feet you have to permit it you have to sorry not permitted you have to get a pilot vehicle uh and a lot of a lot of different

um you know different routes across the u.s so no that's like part of the whole design philosophy is like keep it easy to move and not an easy to set up and smart performing wise like it's all got heat recirc built in um we we definitely have the best heat recirc in the industry so for cold weather or stuff it's just badass um yeah all of our new stuff is pretty slick oh yeah is cold the future is what coal yeah it's called the future no you're instigating me now no i don't instigate you coal is uh right i do because we have to get the yeah we debate soon but what time i do want to touch on it because like the whole environmentalist debate like that and that's one thing i think we agree on but i've really been pushing for a

couple years now i was like like the mining industry like those who are like everybody needs to publicly disclose their emissions data and like give it to the government to prove that we're all using green energy or whatever we just need to reject the frame and like embrace coal embrace well coal is such a big part of like humanity right like we've it's been around for thousands of years uh it's just this weird cult that exists now that's like anti-useful things because under the perception that it's somehow a net negative when it's clearly a net positive um yeah coal i mean this cold is so much for us so much like these walls you know everything is me like everything's got bits of coal in it like uh even combusted coal that's one cool thing about

coal too is like you burn it and even the the the shit that gets burnt the fly ash and the bottom ash gets used for something right yeah that's like a derivative byproduct and uh and that's not that's ignoring all the upstream uses of the raw coal itself like in manufacturing and production of different goods i filter my water with coal yeah yeah well charcoal probably yeah but you make charcoal out of coal yeah um and a lot of charcoal is industrial industrially made in um refineries or upgraders like through the cracking process of crude oil and different coal processes but you know the thing is like this word in this weird cult where everyone's everyone's just concerned about carbon emissions and like you know coal coal oil and gas um you know um coal like

Like, these things, like, no other animal or organism uses them in any significant way. And, like, so why would we not want to use that? Like, it's just this dead matter molecule, like, hydrocarbon, alkane chain, and nothing else uses. And why do people want us to stop using this? Like, instead of using it, then we want to use our biosphere, harvest more trees, mine more earth. because you literally have to mine more earth to build roads if you don't burn coal because we use coal aggregate to build roads yeah as infill and so like the censorship of this stuff like in the media and tricking people into thinking it's bad when when it's like tricking

people think it's a net bad when it's clearly an overwhelming net positive with some bad aspects to it and are they even that bad i mean it's not really but there are certain things like coal mining like different forms you know there's different forms of coal mining you have a coal mine collapses well stuff like that yeah you'll have like tailings ponds and certain mining aspects like there's certain things that we have regulations in place for for a reason like so you don't go dump it into waterways and stuff so there's always going to be some negative you really can't actually use any of our environment without some negative consequence right so it's just really what's the ratio of positive to negative and and uh all this stuff

is overwhelmingly positive but it gets ignored because it says it's carbon emissions but are carbon emissions even bad well you know what i think which is no um it's it's not a the the biggest scam going on right now is this whole carbon accounting scam uh pure shards on it i'm happy to see him on it finally is that the best troll we've seen oh it's been the best troll one of the best trolls in Bitcoin history from one of the best meme trolls like Pierre like he's a legend at this

so I was happy to see that blow up especially with him because he's the perfect guy to be behind it oh yeah and his history of him and Goldstein and you know they have a history of great Bitcoin memes right so it's just perfect but

you know and he's brought attention to it and he can articulate it better because he's, like, got an accounting background. But this whole carbon thing is an accounting scam. Yeah, like, what is it, scope two, three emissions? Like, what the fuck are they? Yeah, and they don't, like, these accounting methodologies aren't applied appropriately to other industries.

Like, even if you're going to use it, which makes no sense against, like, I don't know, oil and gas or Bitcoin mining or whatever, you have to use the same methodology against, like, solar panel manufacturing, and they don't do that. They just ignore it. It's just not done properly.

yeah I could go on for hours on that but I guess that's part of what I have to debate here in a second can we get a little preview what's the inside scoop what's going to be your do you have a trump card I'm just sort of coming up here to wing it and

see what happens but well the debates for the people listening it's like I think the statement is like hydrocarbons are the most sustainable form of Bitcoin mining. That's the statement.

And I'm on the pro side. Like I'm on the yes, that's true side. And my opponent, Jesse, is on the no side. So I guess we are going to make our cases on why and try to sway the audience. What's your case? I mean, nobody outside these walls can hear us and this won't be published before the debate.

But what is the case for hydrocarbons being the most sustainable energy source for Bitcoin mining? Yeah, well, without trolling and getting into the mocking solar and wind, which I'm planning on doing up there. It really comes down to like economic. Do you hear that?

Yeah. Is that a bass? It's some consensus losers. That's probably. Oh, that's going on right now? Yeah. Oh, what a bunch of nerds, eh? Yeah.

Literally. Yeah. Well, we're talking about the sustainability. So I'm talking about the economic sustainability. of hydrocarbons generally and and the future of my you know mining as it relates to that versus like the opposite like nuclear wind and solar so there's the economic you know aspect of it the you know um more or less i'm gonna mainly illustrating why i like like uh there there's better allocation of resources with hydrocarbons uh generation because we're talking electricity

generation mainly not like the other uses of hydrocarbons so like for electricity generation there's better allocation of capital um in in natural gas coal generation um than there is and like wind and solar and so from a from an economic like capital allocation it's more efficient which relates to environmental efficiency because your capital um use is it's a direct has a direct impact on the environment you can't spend money without consuming the environment right you're paying for man hours and people are consuming things and you know they're transforming the earth into product right so so there's that aspect which i'm sort of getting into and then the other side is the human sustainability um which hydrocarbons

are better for human freedom uh generally i'm going into like why in the sense that they're low tech uh accessible to almost everybody um coal being the lowest of the tech it's just sitting on the ground and uh it's been used already for humans for a thousand years it's it's accessible to people the it's like low on the technology stack so like it's uh anyone can any country can like build coal power plants or has the means to do it in a reasonable fashion um and other you know other things to produce oil and gas if they have oil and gas but but even for countries that have nothing to generate reliable power off coal you know they have the capability to do that it's not a high tech and and it's also harder to censor um whereas like nuclear is extremely easy to

censor uh for the government um because it's so high up the tech stack to build a nuclear reactor so it's not like you can't just go startup and nuclear no it's like anti-small business nuclear is whereas like natural gas even is very pro small business there's a huge service industry around natural gas power generation like my company yeah right and even if uh if bill gates gets his way solar could be censored because he's going to seed the clouds and blot out the sun you're not gonna be able to produce electricity with those solar panels it seems like he wants to do that yeah isn't it very counterintuitive though he's like pushing solar and he's like i actually want to blot out the sun it's like why are you pushing us towards this and i don't know

trying to prevent it from actually working there's something going on with that guy man if there is a lizard person it's him who else who's on your top five lizard people people well you know i have to throw klaus in there um klaus schwab bill gates elon is absolutely a lizard you think so he's got a weird body yeah yeah it's the lizard trying to like adapt into the meat sack yeah his lizard form is a little he's probably a little bigger and harder to pack in you know yeah yeah fauci fauci is clearly a lizard person yeah um demonic cult right like Some of these people are in this man-hating cult. Yeah, Justin Trudeau.

That's my five. Oh, Trudeau, for sure. Actually, I don't think so. He's so stupid. Like, he's not. The lizard people are reasonably intelligent. Trudeau is a bimbo. Like, he's an idiot.

He can't even count. Like, the guy's so brutal. He's a theater kid. Yeah, he's incompetent at, you know, on every definition of the word like he's just he's just terrible what's it like having to put up with him i mean we have to put up with biden you have to put it up richard they're like yeah we're both uh we're in a terrible spot well i don't know i i put up with it by not paying attention at all that's like i just don't

you know i uh i try not to yeah i mean i i have to obviously there's certain things that could happen that affect our personal lives and businesses and stuff but yeah you can't dwell too much on it you just always be negative are you aware of the cuban nipple crisis no what what is that you know justin trudeau has brown nipples right oh that's why i know he's cuban yes justin castro he's very very clearly fidel castro's son yeah it's on the canny um yeah but that we're getting off the rails here that's a little off the rails but that's where i like it so yeah now that we need to ridicule these people that's another thing uh actually bring it back to some signal to get a message out there especially as it pertains to bitcoin

bitcoin mining and the battle we have with these carbon hysterics we just need to make fun of these people like that's why pierre's troll was incredible that's why and it's funny because a lot of people uh didn't get it and they should get it that was the best part like uh niraj i love the guys one of the best memers out there but he was like criticizing the meme and saying i i will take i will give consulting advice and i love the guy he's put out some amazing memes like he's a great meme guy and for him not to get it it was really weird to me because I'm like, you're one of the best meme guys in the industry and you don't get how good of a troll this was.

I think he was just jealous he didn't do it. Could be. I just, I think it was a deep troll that people, even like pro-Bitcoin people just didn't, like they just don't get it because they're part of the carbon cult, right? They think they're not rational thinkers. And so like taking him quite literally,

even though literally he's true it's true but also just not being able to see the sort of the sarcastic jab at the bullshit accounting system that they legitimize i think that's part of it right like these people refuse to believe or can't comprehend that this whole carbon accounting thing and is a complete scam yeah and it reveals them to be fools well exactly and it was the most effective troll i've seen in some time because again it was reaction to bitcoin miners being signaled out as electricity consumers versus anybody else consuming electricity me with these lights with these bikes uh the consensus conference pushing shit coins on people down the street like all electricity consumers for some reason or another whether it be in canada

here in the United States, other parts of the world, Bitcoin miners have been signaled out as consumers of electricity that do not deserve access to that electricity because they're harming the environment. And what Pierre's troll did was highly like, hey, Bitcoin miners don't produce emissions similar to how Teslas don't produce emissions

when they're being used. Obviously, there's a whole front end of both supply chains and whatnot. The emissions, if you care about them, are produced at the generation and it forced people to be like well obviously the bitcoin miners aren't producing like co2 like it's at like where the energy is being produced like idiots that's what we've been trying to tell you for literally like almost a decade now yeah thank you for recognizing now now let's have that conversation why is it bad for me to buy

electricity but um tesla well it's sort of like why why are people the a lot of those like academic nerds that came out of the woodworks to like mock appear over it like look at these dumb bitcoin miners and their stupid logic it's like well why like why why is the logic that he's putting forward which is really just stating facts like why is that not um applicable to the eb stuff um because most uh not all because i know like i know like even the new york times which he was trolling has at least put some decent uh nuance when they talk about evs and say that they're actually not zero carbon emissions like i've seen the new york times articles write a little bit about that which is good to see but like most the marketing on ebs is like zero emissions and

elon says they like or whoever says like these produce no carbon um and they get their subsidies and the like it's like well that's they do you know like they like it's upstream of them right and why are you why are you singling out bitcoin miners for saying the same thing yeah it's because like it just shows their bias like it shows their well it's really at the end end of the day they can't control bitcoin they don't like that yeah they're not they're not in on like they're they're in on the the subsidy and the carbon cult and the fiat cult yeah benefit like there's a lot of a lot of fake companies out there that make money basically just raising money through carbon larps and uh they all love the carbon larp and you know they don't when they

don't want to see like bitcoin get in on that carbon larp because it's it's uh at least right now anyway they haven't figured out how to make money like scam it i guess well that's apparently we were talking about that bill in the texas legislator um that could prevent miners from plugging in down here in texas particularly the demand response program it's big battery behind it apparently battery big battery doesn't want any competition battery yeah so you want they want the big batteries to like soak up electricity for wind and solar have excess capacity and then sell it back to the grid they've invested a lot of money a lot of subsidy money into that and in comes bitcoin miners a much better more profitable solution to the way more profitable

way more scalable yeah um and way more ethical uh frankly because uh i think that's something bitcoiners should lean into is that bitcoin is battery free and really start saying battery free as if having a battery is a negative which it technically is it's a capital it's a batteries are of course aren't objectively negative they're very useful things but like being battery free is pretty damn awesome knowing uh you know the ethical issues with the supply chains of batteries right now um uh but of course batteries are you know we need them for you know like my phone here but uh the fact that bitcoin mining machines don't need them is pretty badass um yeah not only they don't need again they're more profitable too that's like the other thing

Big battery is going to get blown the fuck out because anybody who's making a pure economic decision is like, I don't need you, big battery. I've got these miners here, and they make me a lot more money. Yeah, and you've got to realize the people that push the money into these projects, they get paid by deploying money. And so they're happy to deploy the money they don't own in these LARPs, these carbon LARPs.

They're doing it to get the carbon subsidies. But even if they break even but spend a billion dollars on battery larps um they their management fees and everything like are through the roof right they're getting filthy rich doing it it's actually something i was interested in hearing will cole you mentioned earlier he's been exploring this whole coal power plant thing in wyoming and apparently there's like limitations even in wyoming on how much profit a coal plant can make so there's like like they're they're killing the coal power gen industry through artificial regulation and uh and and that nobody was explaining to me which he would have to probably

come on here and explain because i'm i'm trying to get more out of them but he's basically saying like these these companies these finance the people with the money like don't want to invest in upkeeping and building more coal because they make more money because they're limited on profits right so they make more money just deploying the capital elsewhere elsewhere and they're getting those carbon subsidies on top of that and they're they're not limited on profit margin because it's not treated the same by the utilities so there's there's weird games going on like that um but i i do like what pierre did with the troll and i i think uh there's some room to talk about battery free bitcoin mining is i haven't heard it yet and i love it yeah bitcoin is battery free it's

battery free and i mean a battery like it battery does cost it costs a lot of resources to make like it really does it's a huge even if you say it's net benefit for the environment you know it doesn't matter it's it's one less major component and bitcoin mining doesn't need it and that's really really great um because it it's a huge resource cost not not to deal with right yeah with an industrial bitcoin mine yeah so are you optimistic that we can defeat the carbon hysterics in the narrative battle uh fiat has to collapse you think that's gonna happen yes uh of course i do i think it's a matter of time uh i just don't know when um it could be sort of sooner than we think and it's probably gonna be one of those things we look back and we don't know exactly when like we're

like oh it happened then yeah but when it when it's happening we're not really sure you know i think it's gonna be weird like that but i i think the first signs are seeing uh you know i don't you know not to go down this rabbit hole right now um but like bricks and stuff like yeah let's go down let's go down dude well i don't know a lot about it but i know you know i really don't know much about it at all uh but like you know what i said earlier i i i believe i've said it a bunch and i i sort of hung my hat on the fact that on the idea that um bitcoin beyond like not just bitcoin but bitcoin being a better money and a bit comp the first competitor to fiat that's not been quashed right everything else has been stamped out it existing uh merely and and then also time

itself like the fiat ponzi's the pressure that's building for it to collapse combined it's going to happen probably within our lifetime and what i think is going to happen i think it's going to happen way sooner than anyone expects is like maybe the bricks organization maybe maybe they'll go to a precious metal reserve again i'm predicting a precious metal reserve i don't i don't believe governments like any of these big guys are going to go with a bitcoin reserve i think they're going to start with a precious metal reserve and bitcoin's more of a money for the people but i think that's going to happen and that'd be a great thing because that's going to be signal for the collapse of the unreserved fiat economy yeah and i'm rooting for it because i

I think it's, even though it's not as good as Bitcoin, it's way better than what we have. Yeah. And it holds them in check because they still have to have a bit of the reserve. If not full reserve, then fractional. Yeah, I agree. I think it's going to happen way faster than people expect.

I think it's happening right now. I think, like you said, I agree. Broadly speaking, the world will only look back in retrospect and be like, oh, yeah, it was then. I think it's happening right now. Yeah, they'll find something and say that was it. It'll be, we cut Russia off of Swift. I think that's what it's going to be.

And then you just have this slow matriculation of time. You have Russia, China. It's funny because they keep going back and forth. They've made multiple statements. Now Saudi Arabia is in the mix. Iran's in the mix. Brazil's in the mix. Mexico's thinking about getting in the mix.

And initially they wanted to do like a yuan slash gold slash ruble back currency. But now all these people are getting in the mix. And it's like, can you really trust the people's back in China to operate the yuan system appropriately? likewise do you trust the russian central bank to control rubles uh effectively no like at the end of the day these people are definitely sitting across the table from you like hey you're the enemy of my enemy like let's team up um but i don't trust you and they will try to go to gold but again i do think there's something about bitcoin it is once you use it once you fucking

send a bitcoin around the world like it is undeniably a step function improvement on gold and I do think that gold back reserve currency will be very short lived if it even happens yeah I see it as like they've gone off the sound money standard so far and now there's been a new one introduced right a better one that obsoleted their old one

the first natural step in my head is they're going to as things get weird for them they have to retreat back and they'll go back a step towards some kind of precious metal reserve just to try to be competitive and to like you know whether that's introducing a whole new currency that has a reserve or whatever however it happens i don't

know i just don't feel like you know you see you do see a lot of bitcoiners like hey the government's gonna adopt this and stuff and you know you see el salvador and like you know semi do that kind of thing but these these countries like there's that other one bahrain or wherever like some other smaller country butan yeah a lot of these countries though like they don't control a money printer and so it's not the same yeah um but when you see a major money printing machine say oh yeah we're done with this and we're going to go to bitcoin standard then i'll be okay i'll be i'll be amazed but if it happens i think first they're going to get torn down by the mob and then uh their new state whatever it is after the revolution um it's going to maybe maybe then they'll adopt some kind

of bitcoin thing but again i think bitcoin's more for people like people will adopt it like you have and i have and most of your listeners have and we're just going to keep using it uh in parallel with other things like i like gold i i do i got into bitcoin through gold and got some 24 karat gold right here i sympathize with peter schiff you know like i like the guy because he's just one of those guys stuck on his gold mantra right he can't get off it he can't like it's his thing too right he's probably doing it for fun yeah but you know guys you know people i sympathize with the gold lovers because that's how i even got into this space i was like i i we need a gold standard is is what i was thinking back then until i learned about the bitcoin standard right yeah but i still

buy a little bit of gold every year um because it's i just think a good thing to stack like he's a corner i'm a yeah it's yeah it's not um i do i would say it won't perform like bitcoin well over the long term but it's still a good thing like i i agree i just look forward to when i've given it you know you i you treat it like a rainy day thing like i'm never selling it i'm just stacking like one coin a year or something i'm gonna give it to my kids like it's gonna be fun yeah a little little bit of gold when i agree their inheritance right yeah i agree um yeah i do i do agree too that bitcoin is better if it's adopted by individuals like ourselves first i think we take the opportunity here before we wrap up it's getting loud out

there pre-debate vibes are rising right now steve came all the way from canada so i don't want to hog you in the studio all night hopefully i can put a coherent uh argument together i'm like super run down from traveling so we'll see well i think it's going to be broadcasted so i think you'll do a good job um what was he going to say oh yeah let's just declare a bitcoin standard like we're north american bitcoin standard we don't even need to wait for the politicians just like we're on a bitcoin standard now like let's just oh i agree i that's why i just don't you don't see me out there um like me personally like actively you know supporting like let's go talk to the politicians like like go do what you want like i'm already working on it like i'm already

on the standard yeah me personally i am my company is like we trade in bitcoin all the time trade goods like not trading like trade goods like we buy stuff with bitcoin we accept bitcoin and we manage bitcoin and fiat treasuries like we're already there like there's nothing left to wait for right we just want more people to come so we get more trading partners yeah and and uh more network effects so the value of our treasury goes up that's really all i'm doing right now is just waiting for that yeah come join us we do it here at tftc too we have a bitcoin treasury you guys are sending us that say say so the the bitcoin commons right like they i i said i want to pay for your food tonight like i'll sponsor it just let me shill my product when i'm you know

here right and then they send me an invoice and there's fiat and i was like no send me bitcoin invoice like come on come on but i mean they do it of course they accept bitcoin yeah but it's uh yeah i mean our invoices we we put in like accept bitcoin as payment or whatever i think that's all that matters like all all a person can do is accept bitcoin as payment you can't force anyone else you can't you can talk all day it doesn't matter uh if you if your business and your person will accept this payment you're growing the network that's more important than anything like running a node or any of the things people commonly say is just be willing to accept it when it's offered like at par value and you're doing your job i completely agree yeah and we

accept bitcoin here if you want to stream a sats while you're listening to this podcast we'll take a par value we'll accept it we'll give it back to others who accept it that's the thing we're on a bitcoin stand already freaks most people just don't know it yet i that's that's where i'm at yeah yeah let's we don't need to wait for the lobbyists to get washington on board or ottawa and canada on board like i couldn't care less i'm just hoping they don't stop like you know make it hard because they can really make it hard for businesses to operate like like, say, like, you're not allowed or tax it disproportionately or something, right?

Like, that can happen. That's the only thing I'm worried about is, like, the regulators are going to just be mean to us. Don't be mean. Discriminatory towards us, I should say. You guys are all six inches away from the grave. Just go die and leave us alone. Die in peace.

Is that too harsh to end it on? You'll break a leg tonight. Thanks, man. Let's end it on that, too. Die in peace. no this has been awesome this is the first time we've done this in person

oh yeah it is yeah yeah we'll do this more you gotta go to Texas headquarters and come hang out in the commons working on it man

working on it alright anything you wanna end no I'm good man alright let's go debate let's do it

peace and love freaks dicky