TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #480: Bitcoin Mining State Of The Union with Harry Sudock

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Marty sits down with Harry Sudock to discuss Griid's Nasdaq listing, Harry joining Ten31 as an advisor, and talk about the mining industry as a whole. Harry on Twitter: https://twitter.com/harry_sudock Griid: https://griid.com/ 0:00 - Intro 7:26 - Big week for Griid 11:21 - State of the mining industry 15:46 - Industrial adoption 19:43 - Demand response 23:46 - Energy FUD from the parasitic class 31:44 - Future of mining 36:06 - Technical innovation 37:27 - ASIC manufacturers 45:02 - Halvening 51:59 - Political influence and pencil making 58:27 - ETF and stocks 1:02:54 - Ten31 advisor 1:08:56 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Zaprite ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bitcoin Talent Co⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Sote⁠⁠⁠⁠ 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

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Enjoy this rip. Tiki. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. You talk about a Fed just gone nuts. 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 probably should be i'm good for like 90 all right you're good for 90 now the freaks know that we have 90 minutes we're recording harry we were just trying to determine how long it's been since we last sat down here on tftc to have a a discussion for for this audience obviously we've had many conversations outside of tftc between now and the last time we recorded here but but did it really happen if the freaks can't hear it i don't know i don't know well luckily i have a puppy that's pepper pepper here we can get a little oh what's up pepper you look warm yeah not a winter dog needs a winter outfit yeah um so a lot has happened big week i mean maybe we should start there it's been a big week big seven days big last couple big last couple of

months grid getting through the SPAC process finally live in the public markets we announced last week that you joined 1031 as an advisor and again a lot has happened since the last time recorded and today I guess let's start there what has the week been like and what was the uh the build-up to the last yeah I mean the the you know it's the it's the old saying like You know, there are weeks when a decade happens and decades when when a week happens. And, you know, for us, you know, we didn't we didn't start the business expecting to be a public company in 2018. But that's kind of the road that we ended up on for a lot of reasons. And, you know, the reasons why we felt that the public market was the right place for us was was really just, you know, around sort of our Bitcoin ideology and goals,

which is that being able to put shares into lots of people's hands and make them available serves as another vector around getting, you know, Bitcoin and hash rate decentralized on an ownership basis. And also it's obviously a high capital intensive business and we're better to do that than in the American public markets. So we're thrilled to be on the other side of the deal. We're thrilled to be NASDAQ listed. And, you know, more than anything on my mind is let's get back to work we got a business to grow yeah yeah we all do it's and it feels like the timing is perfect a few months before the having the winds of a potential bull market seem to be blowing in the distance getting closer i wake up every day and bitcoin is more useful than it was the

day before you know other people are catching on um you know pete mccormick and i talked about this a bunch, but like, we're sort of at the, you know, the end of the beginning feels like ETF land took us to the end of the beginning, or maybe the beginning of the middle. And that kind of makes sense, right? Like the internet 15 years in was at the end of the beginning, the big killer apps hadn't sort of emerged, you know, we weren't on 3 billion smartphones yet. But, you know, but all of that was sort of yet to come. And I think, you know, in our Bitcoin journey, we're at a similar point where, you know, it's not niche and early anymore. Uh, it might be early in terms of price, but it's not early in terms of, of mindshare. Um, you know, Bitcoin's a household name and it's a

word that everybody recognizes at this point. Um, you know, for good or for bad, they might have their own, you know, positive or negative association with it, but, you know, but we're not a shadowy corner of the internet anymore. Um, and that's exciting. No, it really is. And we just had the energy and mining summit in nashville and which was hyper focused on the mining industry and where it is in its maturation phase and where it may be going in the future and since we have you on and your deep knowledge of the mining sector particularly here in the united states i think maybe you don't have to talk about bitcoin too broadly let's but hone in on bitcoin mining as an industry what has happened over the last two years since we last spoke

where are we now and where may may we be going uh in the next two to three years yeah i mean the the the really great part about what's happened in bitcoin mining is that the business model the size and the scale all of those uh types of dynamics have gone through maybe an even more aggressive maturation process than bitcoin has you know we're seeing you know home miners are doing all sorts of new kinds of things. We had a panel about, you know, what we call Citadel mining, which is, you know, everything from one miner in the garage to, you know, one of Steve Barber's hash huts on your property, you know, anything, anything that is sort of the homesteading version of mining. And that panel was, was fascinating, a ton of

discussion around process heat and other sort of integrated use cases. You know, we've seen, you know, the senator from Tennessee, both senators from Tennessee actually have engaged really aggressively on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. We had the CEO of TVA at the event, giving what I found to be, you know, truly a profound discussion of where he thinks energy is going and immediately understood that the role of a flexible consumer and the role of the miner is really a catalyst for change and towards the maturation of our electric system. You know, that's not a static thing, right? We didn't wake up with the grid that we had 90 years ago. We've been iterating and improving components of that system all along the way. And

so seeing the translation layer between some of the most senior business experts on the energy side, grokking Bitcoin basically at face value now, getting him in a room with miners. There's a ton of his customers in that room. Grid is one of them, but there are many others. And seeing the clarity that incredible energy professionals are viewing the mining sector with was hugely refreshing. So all of that is super, super encouraging. I think the other macro topic that needs um acknowledgement is just that you know bitcoin's you know installed hash rate base has gotten escape velocity right the whole bitcoin network is running you know somewhere between 15 and 20 gigawatts it's running north of 500x a hash you know we're probably sniffing 600

at this point um the ability for the network to go up you know 10 on a difficulty or a hash rate basis from here, you know, the base that we're building off of is now so large that each of these incremental components of growth, you know, we're just talking really big numbers. And that's exciting. It means that the security model for Bitcoin is incredibly strong. It means that the value proposition for sound money that can be transacted on a permissionless and censorship resistant basis, um, is stronger than ever. And the level of professionalism that I get to see, you know, both within our company, but also across our peers, um, it's just really high. I'm really, I'm really proud to call them, you know, members of the same, you know, the same

business community. So I think all of those things are significantly more mature than they were even the last time we had a conversation on the show. Yeah. And it was extremely refreshing, uh, the energy and mining summit the president ceo of the tva coming really i was extremely impressed by him we can't talk about specifics of what was said but i will say that his presentation and his earnest curiosity was refreshing from somebody in a position of that type of power where you'd expect them just to be a politician like figurehead of his business and just read the script essentially he was very engaging uh and again genuinely curious which i was extremely encouraged to find and then another thing with this whole theme that we're talking

about here it's like one of the questions we get at 1031 quite a bit from prospective investors as well like nobody's adopting bitcoin like when are people going to start spending it at the store when am i going to be able to go and buy groceries with bitcoin um you have to answer like yeah obviously it's not there not everybody has bitcoin but i think it's important to realize different types of adoption and the order of operations through which we'll get to bitcoin's end state of full success which is yes not everybody's able to spend and receive bitcoin at the grocery store however on the earlier side of the order of operations is this this mining this distribution of hash rate this growth of hash rate and this integration

with the energy sector and the energy sector i believe has reached a critical tipping point of adoption that is not recognized by the people who just view bitcoin adoption as where can i spend it who's accepting it yeah i think you know bitcoin the currency is it's like saying where can i spend a barrel of oil or where can i spend a t-bill right like that's not the metric that i think is meaningful today i think all of those you know transaction based um number you know numbers and graphs like all of that matters over a longer time scale for sure but at the point where we are today you know it's about getting bitcoin onto balance sheets um whether that's household balance sheets or corporate balance sheets or state and government

balance sheets you know that's the first um beachhead that bitcoin really is um is crossing and i think you know we we we got a little bit sort of twisted up in the weeds of it all you know earlier on in you know in this great shared history of ours but you know the ability to spend bitcoin is not the same as the ability to send bitcoin and and those are different ideas um And so I think we're climbing the store of value adoption curve incredibly constructively. And so it's it's great for us to be able to see that. And I think you're exactly right. The market penetration that Bitcoin mining, you know, is accomplishing today, you know, along the lowest sort of strata of energy cost sources, you know, whether that's here in the US or it's abroad. you know the penetration at those low cost high opportunity points is enormous um you know if

you're if you're not thinking about where does bitcoin mining represent value accrual if you're you know an intermittent generator or if you're a steady baseload generator that needs to manage uptime anybody who cares about power and uptime should be having a conversation with a bitcoin miner or be thinking about how do i design a rate class that gets bitcoin miners the prices that they need, which are, you know, transparently the bottom of the barrel. But the trade off there is that, you know, my father, lifelong CFO, would always tell me that in any negotiation, you have to pick between price and terms. And I can tell you that on the mining side, we're very firmly in the camp of picking price and taking terms. And that's reared its head in the demand response

adoption that we've represented already. We do it in the TVA version of that reality. The folks in ERCOT are doing that. And the folks in every power market in the US that has programs that offer a demand response compensation kind of rate class or tariff, everybody wants that. So the really interesting thing is to see the ability to deliver on the technical requirements of an actual demand response program and then the desire to expand those programs to increase reliability and lower costs for the average user yeah just digging into this demand response use case in and of itself you can already see bitcoin miners beginning to affect change across different um sort of power providers across the country ercot obviously

here in texas very advanced from the pricing signal perspective there's apis that are connecting to mining firmware that mining firmware is reading the pricing signals and adjusting hash rate with those pricing signals almost immediately whereas if you zoom up to the tva it's a bit more manual you get a call from the tva a day or two before they expect you to turn down dorm peaks or peaks of demand where they need electricity sent back to the grid and you have somebody go and turn down the operation or do that from a back-end software solution. You can see there, like you can imagine the TVAs looking at ERCOT

and be like, oh man, look at how advanced this demand response system is with all these pricing signals. Maybe if we could build an API pricing service like that for the miners up here, we could be much more efficient. Yeah. Efficiency is the name of the game, right? These are assets that are already bought and paid for. All the transmission lines are bought and paid for. All the substations are bought and paid for. And so now that the CapEx is out the door for all of these electric systems, how do we get to a place where utilization is able to climb even just a few percentage points? Because at the end

of the day, if you think about the, you know, I think of sort of the world in terms of a nexus of contracts. There's a contract that your power provider signs with you, the rate payer. I'm sitting in my house. I, you know, use Nashville Electric. And, you know, their commitment to me is really around power availability. So let's say the system gets super stressed and they've got to import power from MISO. Those megawatt hours are incredibly, incredibly expensive. And the price of those megawatt hours would be better, you know, as a as a rebate to their flexible load customers rather than a forced import during the time when things are tightest. And so there's a really compelling economic case around why demand response is accretive, you know, both to the power provider as well as to the individual rate payers at the household level, as well as to the demand response program participants at the industrial scale level. That's found money for everybody involved, right? The power provider is lowering their cost. The rate payer at the household level is raising their uptime and potentially lowering their cost. And the flexible customer is able to lower their costs as well.

So it's this incredible, you know, three party positive sum equation that the power providers are able to offer once they've had the introduction of a truly innovative business model, you know, which all the mining community believes and rightly so that they represent with this flexible load type of profile. And in addition to that, it's better for the generating assets. You don't want to turn those things up and down, you know, as much as as you might have to. And so, you know, there's there's this other net benefit over the longer term as you continue into the useful life for some of these plants, which is that operating in an environment with a flexible customer is actually better for all of the hard assets that are being used to generate the electricity in the first place. So we're in this incredible virtuous cycle as symbiotic partners being the power provider, the Bitcoin miner, and then the households and businesses that that power provider serves outside of the flexible customer. So I'm incredibly motivated to keep working on what it means to reinvigorate some of these electric systems in a way that really benefits the entire kind of nexus of parties. wait harry where's systemic risk to these systems did you not hear what the department of energy and the eia had to say last week i understand that that was an interpretation that was floated to the community i happen to

strongly disagree with that interpretation you know i think i think that um you know there's there's sort of a i said this many years ago but um you know bitcoin you know demonetizes the political class and remonetizes the productive class and you know in in keeping with that theme you know the the engineers will inherit the earth um and so that means the power engineers that work on these systems the people with their boots on the ground you know there's uh i just found this out i looked at like what are some of the highest compensated roles that you could have in america because i was just i was just curious what are the weird ones i don't know about that maybe I should have gone to school for. One of them is there's a guy whose job is or woman

whose job is to hang out of a helicopter on, you know, basically a tether with a chainsaw to manage trees on the high voltage lines, super high up in the air. They make like 400 grand a year. And so those are the people who I think we're building, you know, Bitcoin mining for, because we make all of those roles easier. You know, if that takes an education process in Washington in order to make that value proposition clear, you know, so be it. But I think that, you know, once you put the hard data, you know, to these folks, I think the case for Bitcoin is really quite an obvious one. You know, the ideological challenge that we might face is the sort of baseline assumption, which is that, you know, nobody likes our pet rock.

um and and i think we're really facing more of that perspective than any sort of legitimate concern around electric reliability yeah bitcoin has no no value it's just a ponzi scheme a pet rock if you will it's not helping seems like a lot of market participants who are willing to pay 43 000 a coin right now yeah you think they think it's valuable they're parting dollars to get parting with dollars to get bitcoin but it is like a we discussed this too on our panel on the first day of the summit but it is like you said we have this sort of pull between the productive class and the unproductive class the parasitic class probably more descriptive what they actually are right now and it's not just specific to bitcoin i mean we zoom out and just

focus on energy more broadly like we talked about the example of this wasn't on our panel this is on the what bitcoin did episode the live episode on day one in germany it's like over 20 years they decommissioned i think 20 gigawatts worth of nuclear power generation more than doubled their overall capacity uh generation capacity over the first 20 years of the century but they doubled their capacity with wind and solar predominantly turns out the sun doesn't shine that much in germany and the wind doesn't blow as much as they like it to and so you had a situation in 2002 where nuclear coal natural gas were a 86 percent of the overall generation capacity today it's something like 34 percent and germany's got a systemic energy crisis because

they don't have reliable power because they refuse to for some reason or another lean into reliable energy sources and say what you will about coal and natural gas and whether or not think hydrocarbons are here to stay or on the way out i mean nuclear is a very obvious answer to a lot of these energy stability problems that the governments of the world seem to be neglecting for some reason or another you can't you can't virtue signal your way out of physics right it just you can't um and and you know that's that's just for you know for the the climate folks out there like that's the that's the bitter pill right you're not gonna you're not gonna build enough wind and solar to solve this um in any kind of meaningful way and and you know the

the the the cohort that drives me kind of the craziest are the ones who are who are staunch climate supporters who believe in the decommissioning of nuclear plants right the these are assets that are fully bought and paid for they're operating really really well they have incredible safety track record it's an american technology nonetheless that that we were able to innovate on and and you know the willing the willing sort of voluntary shut off of of these plants it's just it's despicable um you know there's there's really there's really no argument for it so you know the playbook that we expect to see and i'm thrilled to say that the canadian um the canadian folks uh have are committing to extending useful life at some of their plants um

there's folks at opg who are committed to building smrs um and they're they're going to do that in tva that's public knowledge so you know we are seeing you know in california we were able to avoid you know the shutdown of their nuke that's in in the uh in the los angeles area you know so we're we're starting to turn this tide a little bit but you know anytime you got to turn an aircraft carrier, which is, you know, really the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, you know, it's it's a it's a challenge, but but, you know, by gosh, we're going to do it. So I think there is some daylight and some hope on this. But you know, the the argument that we should shutter nuclear plants is like, the single most asinine policy perspective I can think of.

That's literally suicidal, especially if you're gonna virtue signal about transitioning away from hydrocarbons and at the same time decommission which to to be fair like we're we're we're in favor of building a positive sum electric system for us that's meant a huge allocation to hydro electric assets and raising the revenue profile that they're able to offer um it's it's a huge focus on nuclear which we love and and you know and and there's there's really a you can do well and do good at the same time. You don't have to, you don't have to not have it both ways, but unless you're investing in the baseload profile of the electric system, you know, you're going to create instability and tail risk that, that really will, um, that really will be,

you know, significantly detrimental at some point down the road. Yes. Oh God, I'm getting triggered. Just thinking of the, uh, the LNG export ban or construction of new LNG export facility ban that came out a couple of weeks ago. It's nonsensical. And let's put our carbon accounting hats on, right? If you're replacing a coal asset with a natural gas asset, your carbon intensity of that transition is incredibly positive. It just happens to run on another hydrocarbon, but a much better one from the carbon accounting perspective. So I think, you know, we need to be very, very realistic about the physics. We need to create the demand for these types of flexible load consumers, which

means innovating on the contract structure in many of the jurisdictions that are, you know, that are currently not set up to compensate flexible loads as fully as maybe they should be. You know, but these are the tough, you know, the tough questions and the hard steps that have to be taken. And environmental stewardship and strong business performance are not at odds with each other. We just need sane, cool engineering heads to come together and design solutions that are as future-proof as possible. And shuttering nuclear reactors is the lowest thing you could possibly do on that list. Yeah. Yeah. Very Malthusian when you think about it. But on this tip, I mean, we had this discussion and it was really interesting to see

people from different parts of the world come to nashville to talk about the future of mining where it may proliferate moving forward what are your views like obviously the united states texas tennessee tva kentucky other parts georgia have really benefited from the the chinese mining exodus that happened a few years ago two and a half years ago now at this point rack space is tight uh it seems that bitcoin in the mind of institutions is now go we got the the black rocks of the world saying it's a good thing and what i've been able to glean is that there are people in other parts of the world that are looking at bitcoin mining specifically and saying all right it's time for us to develop a strategy deploy some capital and get some hash rate spinning up within

our borders how do you see this international competition for hash rate playing out moving forward yeah i think you know to to win in the mining business you need to have a structural defensible advantage um and that that can come in many forms i think in america we've got two great structural advantages one of which are our capital markets which are the best in the world the other is that our energy assets are also world class um and so one of the two key ingredients to a great mining business is well capitalized access to energy um and so i think the us you know has has taken a leadership role on the heels of the China, on the China ban, you know, several years ago. I don't expect us to slow down, you know, maybe on a percentage share basis, we're going

to lose ground, but I don't think we're going to, you know, I don't think we're going to slow whatsoever. You know, I'm very curious to see what's going to happen in some of these, you know, really sort of oil state, you know, wealth environments where there's obviously a huge amount of capital available to them because they've, you know, they've made so much money over the past years and they're starting to look down this diversity path for their portfolios. And additionally, they've got access to a huge amount of incredibly cost-effective generation. The UAE is turning on nuclear reactors and a multi-gigawatt solar plant co-located with them.

So that's a huge opportunity to monetize via the deployment of hash rate. We've seen what Marathon's doing over there, obviously. We've heard the news out of Oman. heard the news, you know, in Dubai and elsewhere. So, you know, I think and then none of that's to say anything about South America, which has been involved in this both, you know, above board and below board. There's sort of a gray market environment, you know, historically in Venezuela. We're seeing large scaled operators operating, you know, out of Paraguay now. We're seeing, you know, the Africa trend that gridless is really spearheading take root. So I think,

You know, the exciting part is that the decentralization of mining, you know, that narrative is very strong because there are structural opportunities to monetize energy in each of these regions. There's an opportunity to, you know, to deploy capital in each of these regions. And there's going to be companies and individuals with a very broad range of risk appetite and operating model appetite to deploy across all of this. And so, you know, all of it, all of it means that, you know, we're, we're probably going to see hash rate go up over time. Yeah. And then you combine this with the fact that you have hydro boxes and, um, uh, liquid cooling immersion systems becoming more advanced and you have the ability for the first time at

scale to deploy hash rate in areas of the world, like the middle East, where it was simply impossible due to the physical environment, the heat specifically, even down here in Texas, some extent like obviously we have a dust a lot of hash right here and a lot of heat a lot of dust um but the the industry the picks and shovels part of the industry building these facilities that allow you to mine in harsh environments has reached a point of maturation as well where it's really going to open up markets that were previously unaccessible inaccessible totally yeah there's there's a technology trend that sits underneath all of this and you know on the one hand it's the efficiency all right we're still recording so

little uh audio troubles there back at it what were we talking about yes um there's there's two layers of technical innovation that are happening that i think are going to facilitate broader availability of deployment environments one of them is that the chips are getting more efficient And so that just means the units of energy per units of hash rate produced over time, you're able to produce more hashes per unit of energy. The second is all of the technology that's wrapped around that, which includes things like immersion and things like hydro and filtration and all the different tools that are available to a mining operator in order to deploy in a harsher environment makes more sources of generation and more environments available. It means that there's more, you know, economic viability of places that weren't from an operational perspective, but maybe were from a power cost perspective historically. So all of this kind of rolls into the idea, you know, that I think is the tailwind that we're all riding, you know, across Bitcoin, which is more decentralization is likely because, you know, more remote operations are viable. But then secondarily, just the gross hash rate, securing the network is going to go up as well. yeah let's let's lean into the asic manufacturers what are your thoughts on the duopoly the dominated duopoly by bitmain obviously they've got the s21 series coming

to market their pricing out of the gate with those machines was very aggressive many saw it as an attempt to leverage their economies of scale to box potential competitors out of the market But MicroBT is obviously the second largest player in the market, and they have a lot of happy customers. How do you see this playing out moving into the future? Does Bitmain just use their economies of scale to box people out? Is MicroBT beginning to make inroads with larger customers? Do we see Intel come back to the market?

Avalon, do any of these companies have a chance of competing? um look i think i think that we're still early days i think that you know the manufacturing landscape could change dramatically over time um you know i think right now bitmain is sort of winning the day as they have been for the last couple of years i think micro bt is doing a great job um the micro bt units you know are awesome um they continue to double down on on reliability and performance at the cost of some nominal efficiency which i think has been you know a great strategy from them. You know, you've obviously seen Riot roll into market with a huge amount of future order. And so I think that, you know, MicroBT is certainly earning

their scaled volumes as well. You know, do I think the duopoly is going to break in the next year? Not particularly. Do I hope that more competitive players enter the market? Always, right? I always want a more competitive market to be able to look at when I think about, you know, capital allocation and hash allocation. But I think that, you know, right now things, you know, are, you know, reasonably healthy and competitive. You know, what we're not seeing this cycle is kind of the price blowout that we saw in 2021 with units trading, you know, significantly ahead of kind of, you know, the future revenue profile. So I think, you know, we're certainly healthier than we were a few years ago but i'd always love to see additional players enter yeah yeah i would agree there yeah

it is crazy how efficient these machines are getting to it and just think through my mind like the whole concept of asic commodification like is that simply a natural catalyst for more competition when you get to a level where you can make an investment a capital outlay in building an asic because you're confident that it's not going to make a step function efficiency improvement like the the asics have in the past or does that simply allow the incumbents to just really dominate the market um yet to be seen but yeah yeah i think you know the good news is they don't let me program any of the chips at least at least not yet and if they do we have real problems um so you know i think i think there's i think there's sort of the mad scientists and deep

technical experts that are working on it you know i got to spend some time with scott from um from oh good lord i've lost the name of his project uh but he's doing the open source asic project um not future but future no they're not open service hold on i can find this um Yeah. So he's working on some open source pieces. You know, I don't think transparently that it's that it is any bit X. I apologize, Scott. You know, it's just cool to see people working on stuff and tinkering and innovating along this. You know, we aren't at the mature phase for this industry. You know, we don't have the, you know, we don't have the, you know, the Intel chip or the HP, you know, chip is an Intel chip that's in all of those units, but we haven't reached the full commodification layer. we might be at what I view as a long local maximum, which is really sort of the duopoly continuing to innovate. But we may see, you know, another really interesting, you know, breakthrough from a market dynamics perspective that attracts additional folks who want to build

down this development path. You know, but unlike software, you don't get to put a software release out every two weeks. You know, it's really, you know, six, 12, 18 month type of timescale to be able to innovate on hardware um and so you know i'm very curious to see what emerges you know really over the coming decade if i'm being honest about timeline yeah the hash wars are upon us who knows you know this could be always has been they have been since january 3rd 2009 but then you have just external factors geopolitical risk who knows what happens in taiwan with tsmc can they spin up foundry here in the united states fast enough to deter any systemic political risks that would come if china were to do something there then even then many people are like tsmc is one of

greatest revenue drivers within taiwan so to think that china would just come and prevent that company from accruing tax revenues by selling their goods to market is a bit crazy as well but these are unknowns that that can affect the market it's crazy to think the the range of effects while we were in nashville the weather was affecting bitcoin hash rate um cold weather down south produced a negative four percent difficulty adjustment 3.9 percent due to everybody engaging demand response and that's why i mean i'm sure i know that you feel this way too It's just I don't think there's a more exciting industry to be in than Bitcoin mining right now because of all these different variables you have to think about. It's certainly very masochistic as well, but it's never boring.

And it's honest, right? Like what I love most about mining is that, you know, I can't make my terahash hour. You know what I'm not going to do? I'm not going to outsell my, you know, competitor for the next software sales deal and, you know, sell $9 a seat for, you know, 12 months, you know, because I've got a better, you know, CRM product in market, right? Like, no, it's a pure, honest, capitalist endeavor to be able to generate hashes more efficiently than the next person. And that's a really refreshing environment to build a company into. Um, because you can see on a daily basis, if you're doing it the right way, you get a report card, you know, on a very, very frequent basis, which is fun.

Um, and, and it's very, very motivating. So I love that part of it. Um, I agree with you there, you know, there's no sector that, you know, I'd be more excited to be working in. It'll be my five-year anniversary at grid next week, uh, official start date anniversary. I was wrapping a consulting agreement, um, before I joined. So I really started, you know, three or four months before that. But, you know, but there, you know, this is what I've chosen to dedicate my life to, to building, you know, within, within a proof of work system and really couldn't be, couldn't be happier to get to work on this every day.

Yeah. God, there's many routes I want to take this on. I guess since this is a mining-focused podcast, obviously the halving is about 75 days away, which is not that much time. What should miners be doing? What are miners doing to prepare for the halving? How may it affect mining businesses? Well, you know, the known effect is that the block subsidy is going to get cut in half. I, you know, it's bittersweet, right? Like on the one hand, you know, we're going to earn less Bitcoin as miners unless fees do something quite dramatic. Then we did the day before the halving happens or the block before the halving happens as the case really is. You know, but that's the better that the suite is that Bitcoin's monetary policy gets proven every four years. So every two hundred and ten thousand blocks, you know, the the the Bitcoin Fed meets and agrees on a new issuance decision. And that issuance decision happens, you know, programmatically.

And so being able to watch the monetary policy happen in real time and with and with near absolute certainty is one of the most high impact pieces of how Bitcoin works and getting to see it work in real time is is is a powerful and meaningful thing. Um, that, you know, that, that's my, that's my ideological answer, but, you know, tactically, I think we've seen a lot of miners across the industry start to roll into higher efficiency machines. I think that's one way to sort of have improved your, you know, your operation is to continue to, to invest into the fleet's efficiency. Um, beyond that, you know, we, we at least think all the time about, you know, the best way to be prepared for the having is to be cost conscious. And that starts with the power cost, but it really rolls across everything the business spends money on. And so being, you know, laser focused on downside risk and cost is the best tool, you know, available in conjunction with, you know, managing the fleet's efficiency in order to be resilient across a reduction in potential revenue. now the purchasing power under the last epoch was greater from a mining revenue perspective than

you know the purchasing power in the 12.5 bitcoin block epoch and so you know we may see a similar dynamic play out across the four years after 75 days from now so you know i think there's there's still a lot of you know dynamic components of the market we haven't even gotten into the expected fee revenues that we might see with additional adoption, um, or additional JPEG degeneracy. Uh, however, however you, however you might, however you might think of it. Um, but at the end of the day, block space is scarce and Bitcoin is an incredible asset to move from point A to point B. Um, and so the fees that folks are willing to pay to move their UTXO, uh, I think is a place where, you know, a huge amount of value is provided by miners securing the movement.

and the availability of that scarce block space. So, you know, it's a simple topic because the monetary policy is dead simple, thanks to Satoshi, not Craig. And it's also a very complex business operating environment because there's a bunch of moving variables. So it really is a three-body problem between fees, Bitcoin price, and network cash rate.

So you're managing a lot of uncertainty around that period of time, but you know we pride ourselves to sort of always be having um and so you know we'll start preparing for the having after this one the moment this one happens always be having sage advice that is the environment leading up to this having is different than the two that i've been a part of since i've been following bitcoin because you have this fee pressure from the jpegs and all that and It's nothing too crazy right now, but it did get crazier a little under a year ago and at times throughout the last year.

It did provide significant revenues to mining operations. The price is up 150% since January of last year, and it seems like we're hovering in the low 40s. The GBTC bleeding seems to be coming to a slow, and the ETFs seem to be net buyers of Bitcoin. uh right now potentially into the future like is there a situation where fees are pumping the price is doing really well the halving comes and you have the situation where it's not as i don't think cataclysmics the right word but it's not as uh it's not an event that's detrimental to

as many operations as it has been in the past something that people should be thinking about yeah i mean look like we we had we basically had two halvings last time because we saw price go from whatever 6500 to 3500 a month and a half before the halving and then we bounce back up and then we have so you know you can you can kind of get to having economics multiple different ways um and so if you're not built to be resilient across those different cycles it's going to be challenging regardless of if it means price getting cut in half or block subsidy getting cut in half you know it's kind of all the same you know the same net net from you know the miners perspective so you know it's it's going to be dynamic it's going to be interesting there's

going to be a lot of conversation around it um it's critical to remember that it is beautiful to watch bitcoin's monetary policy happen algorithmically without you know without a central you know a central planner involved um and you know and and it's about it's about you know survival and and putting yourself in a position to be able to thrive you know during periods of really constructive mining economics yeah first having where bitcoin stock to flow will be higher than golds i wonder if that's some mimetic force red dot blue dot green dot is that the uh is that the one stat they're like oh people plan b is the plan b dots yes we're going all the way up to orange red dot no but is this something as simple as oh people are

like wait a second bitcoin is now officially more scarce than gold from a supply inflation rate that people are like oh man maybe i should get this there's 2024 is an interesting year another beautiful thing of the halvings they line up perfectly with u.s presidential election cycles and this one for now unless we have a lot of accelerating or decelerating difficulty adjustments we could fall out of whack but i don't think we are likely to no and that and this will be i mean we don't like to get political too much on this show but this seems like it could be a pivotal election for uh the bitcoin industry broadly but specifically the mining industry it seems like again the actions from eia last week were dictated down from elizabeth warren in a

certain capacity and it seems like this current administration really does not like bitcoin and i think that's what a lot of people are asking themselves behind closed doors is damn like do we need a new administration to just let this industry run then you think back to trump's first term if it does turn out to be trump first biden which seems like that is the case i mean he wasn't really uh supportive of bitcoin either he had steve moonshin as his treasury secretary who hated bitcoin um trump explicitly said that bitcoin was a threat to the u.s dollar reserve system and so even though we don't like having to deal with the political part of life here in the united states as an industry i think it is becoming abundantly clear that we do have to play the

game to some extent just so that they will leave us alone as much as possible my yeah i'm with you you know politics is definitely not my bag um but you know the the the goal that i have i'm always happy to engage with anyone and everyone uh on this stuff you know and and all i want to do is is you know tell them don't ask me the questions ask the people we buy the power from what do we do for the community are we good are we net benefit are you know are we an asset um i'll never forget the you know we had a quote from one of the ceos of the local utility that we you know have an operation at and it was right when inflation was was peaking at 10 percent um and he called us and he said you know when this kind of stuff happens i'm really left with

a couple of choices. I can sell bonds, raise debt. I can raise rates. I can lower quality of service, or I can go find a Bitcoin miner to bring to my area. Those are the only ways that he had in his mind to fight inflation. And he said of those four options, he would vastly, vastly prefer option four, where there's a differentiated customer that he can recruit to sell power to. And so it's telling stories like that as many times as we need to, to make people understand that we're not parasites that are suckling on the lifeblood of the American electric system and the economy. We're an asset that pays revenue and that generates flexible, sustainable load that is an asset to every electric system that we enter, so long as the

contracts are structured the right way. And so what that means for us is we just want more flexibility and more credit, both financial and social and political, for the flexibility that we offer. And I don't think that's an unreasonable perspective to take. And we're definitely seeing, you know, a lot of serious consideration around that value proposition taken up by the technocrats who run the actual you know generation transmission and delivery services that keep all of our lights on yeah sometimes you have to take a step back because it's so obvious to us it's like how do you not see this do you want to see this well marty how do you manufacture a pencil it takes many moving parts we no idea i have no idea when i go pick up a pencil i have no idea

how that was made. I assume that the vast majority of people I will ever talk to have the same level of understanding of how the manufacturing process for a pencil works that I that they do with what happens when you turn the light switch on. Yeah, right. It's a it's an unknown thing. You know, nobody, you know, I, you know, my dad believes that he's reducing, you know, the carbon intensity of our household by turning the thermostat down a degree or two in the summer, or in the winter right so like the level of understanding and the level of of trend you know transparency you know and he doesn't think that way anymore because i've you know locked him in a room and and yelled about it long enough um but you know but these are these are topics that are not taught

to us as young people they're they're topics that are wildly esoteric for the vast majority of people you know certainly in america if not on planet earth nobody knows what happens or why their light switch works. And so that's the, that's the fight that I, that I'm excited to take on, which is, I don't believe that the, look, I didn't go to school for electrical engineering. I went to school for Keynesian economics and I somehow shook loose of that, uh, of that horrible fate. And, and so if I can learn how the electric system works, I have no technical background whatsoever, but I read a bunch of books and asked a lot of dumb questions and, and arrived at something approximating a level one understanding of how electricity works in america it isn't that

hard no that i seriously been thinking about this recently like we need in terms of curriculum like people should know how money works and people should know how energy works like that should be high school classes mandatory know how your money works know how your energy systems work because they are the best base layer of the economy that you're going to go out in the world and try to be productive in the fact that i i swear i didn't set you up for this but uh but grid's mission statement is to to build a generational company at the intersection of energy and money yeah it's that's our goal our goal is to build a company that sits right on that street corner energy going this way money going that way right on the corner is grid and

bitcoin mining yeah it's happening it's going to be a long journey not for grid for all of us and you see this hairline it's uh it's not getting any it's not coming down to my eyebrows that's true it's true um one other topic i want to talk about with the emergence of the etfs how do you think that affects stocks like microstrategy and public mining stocks that have historically been used as a way to get exposure to bitcoin without direct exposure via public markets? I mean, look, I think that we have evidence now, right? We saw the ETF come out and we saw a bunch of those stocks, especially MicroStrategy, go down. I think MicroStrategy was viewed basically as a holding company for Bitcoin. Now, they deserve some premium because

they're able to lever into some Bitcoin. I forget who did this analysis on x.com, But they basically looked at the sats per share that you own if you own stock in MicroStrategy, and that number actually goes up based on the way that they've issued new stock and bought Bitcoin with it. So I think there's some interesting sort of deeper fundamental analysis that's going to go into the decision to own, you know, a stock like MicroStrategy versus a share of, we'll talk about the Bitwise folks. We like BitB and we like, you know, the ARK folks and have relationships across there. But I love that they're funding developers out of those management fees. um and you know i think we've seen you know we've seen the premium come out of micro strategies to a large degree and enter you know etf land um i think the miners are a more interesting case and i just look at them broadly but i think it's an operate it's an opportunity for differentiation

right you're you're taking sort of some of the market beta into a different vehicle but maybe that means there's more room for the market alpha for a differentiated operator to you know, to really show their chops or many of them to show different chops. You know, there's a lot of different kind of operating models across the different pubcos that are out there. But yeah, I mean, it's an opportunity to demonstrate differentiation and, you know, attract people to those names or explain to people why, you know, being able to generate revenue in Bitcoin terms and do so on a profitable or highly profitable basis is a compelling equity investment um and so maybe they can get looked at more like companies and less like bitcoin you

know holding companies yes i completely agree which is good for the market too that particularly the differentiation that's going to be necessary to set yourself apart in the world of public markets um underclocking strategies uh getting more ingrained with demand response systems becoming energy providers maybe getting acquired by an energy provider becoming part of that stack um people are gonna have to get creative which should be a forcing function for a more efficient mining industry and a more healthy bitcoin overall at the end of the day and and a more and a more fulfilled investment community right like i you know i think there's a lot of sort of well is the ETF, like bad for Bitcoin. I'm like, I don't know. I like when people have access to more choices.

Right. At the end of the day, like, I don't know somebody's personal situation. And maybe the ETF is the most, you know, obvious and greatest thing in the world for them. It's not how I would choose to get exposure to Bitcoin, you know, for me, because I can't, you know, engage in, in, you know, the self sovereign component of it. But, you know, but I'm sure there's lots of people out there who that's a much more constructive product and they want the price exposure to Bitcoin and that's really meaningful for them. And that's great. So I think anytime that, you know, the market's able to make better, more informed and broader choices across, you know, a broader range of vehicles, like I think that's net positive and is in keeping with sort of the, you know,

the libertarian on my shoulder, which says that, you know, people deserve more choices and more freedom to choose and that's positive and then ultimately the market um over time will will you know move away from being a voting machine and moving back towards a weighing machine uh and and you know that and that's where sort of the the truth gets to be um you know litigated which is which is in the market for ideas first and in the market for you know for financial outcomes second yeah which is a perfect segue into what we can end it on which is the fact that you joined 1031 as an advisor as well we've been talking behind the scenes for gosh feels like years now but it's official it has been years can confirm it's official now and

that is our our goal our aim our mission is to go out and find the entrepreneurs that are building out the critical Bitcoin infrastructure that will lead us to a Bitcoin standard, make it easier for people to access Bitcoin, to use Bitcoin, to leverage Bitcoin, to mine Bitcoin, whatever it may be, and to give the market more options at the end of the day. And we're extremely excited to officially have you on board. And I think the opportunity that lays before us at 1031 specifically is extremely exciting as well i said mining is the most exciting industry and i truly believe that um but having the luxury of getting a view into every other sector of the bitcoin economy is extremely rewarding as well and couldn't be happier to have you on board um to

advise i couldn't be happier i couldn't be happy no i think you know any any time you get to work with a market leader um you take it right you guys have done have done so much hard work you know john jonathan grant you know odell and you obviously um as well as as well as all the lps you know have just done a phenomenal job putting together a really thoughtful and mature you know investment platform obviously that's skewed significantly towards venture thus far because I think, you know, Bitcoin is still in, in venture land where, you know, the, the biggest companies are, are being built or yet to be built. Um, they haven't, you know, they haven't reached maturation by any stretch.

Um, you know, thrilled to obviously be a portfolio company at grid, but, but for me, like what's most exciting is getting to work with, um, it's just to work with founders, right? The, the startup journey is, um, not like any, you know, nobody, nobody could have told me what it was going to be like on the way in. Um, and we're not done yet by any stretch, obviously. So getting to share, you know, the hard lessons, the good lessons, you know, what did we do right? What did we do wrong from along the way with other founders and being able to kind of take the, the, you know, the, the, the long, the long dark night of the soul type of call, you know, that, that's what was really

exciting to me because it's really hard and, and, you know, being, you know, founder or co-founder of an early stage company um can be extremely isolating and so having some you know folks in the bin there done that club who can sit alongside you and and hold your hand when when you're facing kind of the toughest pieces that's so so exciting to me getting to work with you guys on you know on fundraising uh and on and on allocations like all of that kind of stuff is something that you know that i'm tremendously passionate about along with you know working directly with founders um so you know couldn't couldn't be happier couldn't be a more symbiotic relationship you know between grid and 1031 and between me and 1031 so thrilled to be here yeah i think that's

another thing that is really unique about the position that we're in just as bitcoiners more broadly but 1031 specifically is yes we're a venture fund the portfolio portfolio of companies that we've allocated to um but in your incumbent venture space it's usually spray and pray across many different verticals many different um sub sectors of companies doing wildly different things but with the focus that we have at 1031 on bitcoin specifically it enables us to sort of enable the portfolio companies to help each other out where they can and to give that advice um obviously very small industry right now but we have a very large goal and very similar problems i mean last year at our bear claw portfolio retreat i mean the topic of the year was banking

relationships that's something that bitcoin companies have been targeted whether it's explicit or implicit is for for others to determine but wasn't isn't easy still for many companies to get banking banking relationships in the space and just having a focus and being able to have this cross-pollination of ideas and experiences among portfolio companies is something that um i think is unique to what we're doing here the the other and this is kitschy but i'll say it anyway which is like bitcoin is a social hack where when i meet other bitcoiners i'm like 90 percent of the way towards friends when i meet other bitcoin entrepreneurs i'm like 97 of the way towards friends so you

know be you know being able to kind of self-select into a group of people who are um convicted enough to be you know to be bitcoiners in the first place but then convicted enough to build companies around bitcoin it's just rarefied air um whether you're a portfolio company at 1031 or not i just think you know the the founders and employees at bitcoin companies um are a pretty special breed and and it's just it's just the most the most gratifying thing to get to be around those kinds of people all the time you got to be a little crazy which is good i like crazy it's uh you no yeah oh yeah yeah you couldn't tell that is this was a marty jones free episode I've got the white-collared shirt on.

You've got the button down on. I've got the button down on. I've got two buttons unbuttoned here. Getting a little loose, but that's it. It's Monday morning. It's Monday afternoon now. The morning flew by. Yeah, today ran away.

Keeping Marty Jones in the cage for this one. What haven't we talked about that's on top of your mind you think maybe we should cover? It doesn't have to be mining-related. It could be Bitcoin-related. I mean, I think, you know, I think this is this is a good kind of time to remember that, you know, lower your time preference. Bitcoin comes at you super fast. And so cherish these days of like quiet in the markets.

You know, you know, it's great to be bouncing between 38K and 45K or, you know, 42 and 43. Like these are these are calm waters that we're in right now. um and they won't stay calm forever so you know cherish the cherish the peace of mind that you get you know on these kinds of days and and you know remember that bitcoin is um the longest game we've ever gotten to play yeah it gets crazy when the price starts starting focus productivity down price up well anybody out there building a company just humbly stacking sets just prepare for the distractions mentally prepare especially if you're running a company let your employees know let your team know things are going to get crazy you're going to get the pull of distraction

pulling you day in and day out as we're getting large green candles large red candles up and to the right um buckle down and try to focus anticipate exactly that's what it comes because we got we got a lot to build we've got a lot to build harry future won't build itself it's not it takes individuals like you and you many other people out there we're doing it though we're winning we got people working out here in the commons working hard you're in nashville the park is full you're not there but i was on a call with somebody earlier at the park and i saw it was full um we're doing it i went in there i went in there um i had i had to do a little bit of stuff last night i got i got

to the park at like eight o'clock and there were like six cars there and there were like two conference rooms lit up people were working like the state of our network is strong this is what winning looks like it's bitcoiners who can't sleep on a sunday and have to grind on their next whether it's their next release or their next slide deck prep or whatever like they're grinding and our enemies aren't and so we're gonna outwork them the momentum is building it's gonna be a good year harry a good year thank you for joining me we can't wait two years for the next episode that is uh too long sir well we'll put it on the calendar less than two years yes less than two yours. You heard it here first. That's all we got today. Freaks. Peace of love.