TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #677: How Bitfury Survived the Early Bitcoin Wars with George Kikvadze & Bill Tai

Episode Date: October 31, 2025

Marty sits down with George Kikvadze and Bill Tai to discuss the early days of building Bitfury, the resilience required to scale Bitcoin infrastructure when the industry was full of doubters, and why Bitcoin remains the ultimate insurance against inevitable government fiscal collapse. George on Twitter: https://x.com/BitfuryGeorge Bill on Twitter: https://x.com/KiteVC Bitfury: https://bitfury.com/ And Then You Win: https://www.amazon.com/Then-You-Win-Start-Ups-Untold-ebook/dp/B0F94Q8RFS STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free 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. This is a motley crew we got here, gentlemen. I'm very excited for this conversation. We've been going back and forth on email for a week. George, I've been following you on Twitter for over a decade now at this point and followed your journey through Bitfury. You're about to release a book

telling the story of Bitfury. We have Bill Tai joining us as well because he went along on that journey with you. And it's a story of resilience and building, like we were just saying before, we hit record and we're early to Bitcoin. We believe, I truly believe that we're right. And despite that, we've had to build

with many doubters in the background and many obstacles to overcome considering we're trying to scale this distributed network and the infrastructure around it so i think george if you're comfortable to start it off i actually want to start with bill because we were chatting before you hopped on about the story about how we got connected with you i think bill considering your storied career in investing and spotting many startups in the early days uh before we get into bitfury this story bit fury specifically let's back up um and and talk about your journey to bitcoin i know

you just told me it over over the course of about five minutes but i think it would be very valuable for the audience to hear as well yeah so to uh give a little background my original training is in silicon chip design i uh came out to the valley in the 80s when silicon valley was forming and joined a startup led by the ceo of fairchild that startup was called lsi logic among my teammates was jensen wang he was an applications engineer and i was a technical marketing guy i went on to help the government of taiwan start taiwan semiconductor i got a weird little badge a001 in that project before it was incorporated that went on to become a trillion dollar giant moved into venture capital around 1991 and started off funding silicon chips and then

com equipment and then internet networks and then later applications on that and some machine learning stuff but uh along the way in year 2000 a couple of friends of mine and i set out to build a peer-to-peer file storage system that uh was called ifrog spelled e-y-e-f-r-o-g.com there's still a little site up that technology evolved to become the functional equivalent of icloud for Nokia, who bought the company. It was launched with all their web phones in 2006. And one other vector was Philip Rosedale, who had started Second Life, and I were contemplating how to increase engagement in Second Life. And I took the avatar name and still have the avatar, Alan Greenspan Gollum. And Philip launched the Linden Dollar and created a dashboard that would

measured GDP and economic activity. We had universal basic income all running 2003, 4, 5. So when the Bitcoin white paper came out and was sent to me, I just lit up. And by 2010, I was tweeting a little bit about it and then eventually ran into some folks that became part of the founding team of Bitfury, including George. That's how I got involved. And then, George, turning to you, somebody who's found Bitcoin early, why don't we talk a little bit about your early journey and how you decided to, you know, how you land on the idea of Bitfury and decided infrastructure is what you wanted to focus on. yeah i mean the the story is crazy because um you know i grew up in a soviet union uh family of doctors and you know at that age 15 i i saw all their life savings basically evaporate you know all the sberbank holdings in rubles was gone and um you know that left a profound

significant sort of an impact on me. So, you know, you kind of grow and go in life through these experiences. And I think that was the first major experience, you know, to appreciate not to trust central governments. And, you know, things happen for a reason. And, you know, somehow I ended up in Ukraine doing agriculture investing. And, you know, while I was doing it, There's this fella, his name is Marat, who is one of our dear friends. He kept pestering me about Bitcoin and Val and Bitfury. And I'm like, what is this? And then when I started, at some point, if you remember the Cyprus banking crisis happened.

And that was, I don't know how big it was in US, but in Europe, that was massive. Because many of my friends had accounts there. And all of a sudden, there's this big issue. and um i started digging in and i started exploring i started uh reading about uh bitcoin and hand academy was one of the first sources and i started kind of diving into it and i'm like oh my god even even if 10 of this is gonna come to fruition this is just gonna be massive um so you know life is all about seeing the signs and connecting the dots you know and i think uh you know for me it was kind of uh serendipitous that my first call was to my uh you know business

school network on the west coast and one of the first people that i got connected was wences hessaris of zappo and you know i i had the conversations with wences and you know i just connected to him here's a guy from argentina we never met but i connected with him on so many levels that the past that we had, the history we had was so profound and so conducive to the concept of Bitcoin. And when I kind of connected all these dots, you know, I realized that, OK, this can be something really big and maybe it's a sign to go after it. I mean, 21 million bitcoins, you know, I'm, I'm born on 21st.

Uh, my nickname, you know, as a kid was, uh, uh, Buka, uh, Bitcoin. So B was very important thing in my life. So I don't know, it was just, uh, on a, on a very kind of, uh, astrological or, uh, you know, God feel, you know, I just, it felt that this, this was the sign from above and that's, that's, that's when it all happened. And plus, you know, when you meet Val for the first time, these piercing blue eyes are like a laser. And I mean, something about those blue eyes and that energy, that sort of, that kind of gave me another sign, you know, to trust that person and to trust the process. And, you know, the rest is history.

now it's funny you mentioned ussr and wentz's experience growing up in argentina because actually right around when you start building bitfury that's when i'm really beginning to lean into bitcoin and what pushed me over the edge was i was working at a managed futures fund at the time we index commodity trading advisors into a fund of funds it was a great learning experience but my chief investment officer at that firm uh his name was dimitri alexiev and he had immigrated to the United States from Russia in the 90s. And I'll never forget one Monday morning portfolio management meeting we had. It was right around QE2, Operation Twist, when the Fed was engaging

in those Mark Perry stimulus and policy programs. And I'll never forget, it was just me and him in the room. He turned around, he was like, Marty, the United States is turning into the Soviets Russia I ran away from. And at the time I was studying Bitcoin and learning about distributed systems and the corruption of central authorities and just systems generally. And I think that really pushed me over the edge, be like, OK, maybe I should look further into this Bitcoin thing. And so that was me in 2013, end of 2013. But you're already a bit ahead of me beginning to build a company in the space.

And I think it's hard for people today to really put themselves in the shoes of a founder in the Bitcoin space 12 years ago. What was it like? What was the environment like during this period? Bitcoin's five years old at this point. Yeah, maybe I'll let Bill kind of lay the foundation for it because he was really instrumental. Bill is probably one of the most humble person I've met and person that can seize the waves ahead of many. And I mean, we'll get to it, all our kind of escapades and discussions with all the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley that could have invested in Bitfury and ended up

with hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins on a balance. But, I mean, he connected the dots in 2010, and he was one of the people involved with the Stanford Bitcoin Club, kind of chaperoning the guys like Vitalik. So I'll let Bill to kind of lay ground for that, and I'll chime in. Yeah, so, you know, obviously, the Bitcoin space at the time was full of all these weird, interesting, eccentric, mostly very technical people. And it reminded me a lot of coming out to Silicon Valley in 1983. So if you think about the valley at that time, it was kind of a land of agriculture and misfits. So when I first came out, I lived in a little apartment at the back of a cherry orchard. It was very agrarian here.

So all the companies that you know of today that came out of Silicon Valley, they didn't exist. This is the era of Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild and startups, relatively speaking, like Intel and National and AMD and our company, LSI Logic, that was a couple of years old. And a lot of the people that came to the Valley at that time were people that had training in things like semiconductor physics because, you know, nothing else existed. And so people would come out here to find community and find other people that they could actually talk to about stuff they were interested in. And back at that era, there was this little group at the Homebrew Computer Club that had these attendees that nobody knew at the time, but they were basically kids. like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen would come to show pieces of wood with parts on them and build community and get feedback on products. And so when the Bitcoin space started to emerge, it was like a flashback back to that era. And I started, I could just tell that there

was because of the network element around this technology, that there was going to be something that came out of this. And so I started hunting around in 2010 for other people that I could talk to about all this stuff and eventually ran into a young man named Danny Yang, who had started the Stanford Bitcoin meetup groups. And just like the Homebrew Computer Club, he'd borrow rooms and people would show up and guys like Wences or Adam Back or Antonopoulos or all those people would come to Vitalik came when he was still with BTC magazine, trying to raise money for a name coin at the time. And, uh, people would come and show their projects. You know, I remember seeing the founders of BitGo and, you know, Zappo and all these companies would come to just express their

vision and talk about what they wanted to see happen. And at the same time I was hunting, uh, for companies to fund. And I was looking and I don't remember the timing of these things, but I remember looking at teams like Butterfly Labs and there are three or four companies that were trying to migrate the horsepower of Bitcoin mining from what had been software on regular desktops and laptops, to groups using GPUs, to then groups programming FPGAs, and a handful of people trying to do ASICs. But the market was not big enough. So for silicon companies, unless you have a very high volume market, you're not going to make money on your chips. And so there were teams that had come out of Intel and Sun Microsystems and other places like that, that

had traditional tooling and very expensive design design methodology to produce these big honking expensive asics but uh the fixed cost was very high for those and the volume wasn't there so i i the approach was just not right and i kept looking and looking and the business models are crazy then because never before would you have people that could take massive pre-orders for silicon that didn't exist and equipment that didn't exist. Um, and then take that money and design things. So they were all on the hook if they couldn't deliver. And many of them hit the wall because they couldn't deliver and they went bankrupt. But, uh, uh, so in that journey, like meeting with all these companies, uh, I ended up meeting this, um, young man named Nico Poonen who was

heating his apartment in Finland with machines. And he had met over the internet, uh, uh, George and Val and some other people that would end up forming Bitfury. And, uh, uh, I, I met him through, um, some trips on Necker Island, you know, cause I, I, uh, had always been trying to build community with my kiteboarding crew. I, some people know I, I took some time off after I had a bunch of companies go public. And I became a sponsored athlete in kiteboarding. So I would throw these kite trips off of Richard Branson's Island. And I convinced Nico to come out because there was a friend of his named Antti Pananen that was part of our crew. And I was talking to him about Bitcoin, Bitcoin. I got to find something in Bitcoin. He says, I know this kid. And so Nico

came out and told me what he's working on. And I got to know him over several, a couple of years because he would tell me about what he was working on and we were looking at applications and things and he told me about these guys he was working with and he said yeah we were always ahead we were a little bit ahead in gpus and everyone caught up we were we taught each other how to program fpgas and everyone caught up and now we need to design a silicon chip i was like you can't do that what you you have no training like who are these guys he goes well there's this brilliant mathematician and he's he's got this design for a chip and i was like no i said this is this is something that takes decades of training and millions of dollars of tooling and

unless you've done this a couple times before it's just gonna fail nico there's no way you guys can do this and then eventually he was just so um so convincing uh in his belief i agreed to meet all the other guys and then i started to dig in around the silicon chip and i would and because i had a background in designing silicon chips i was astounded i looked at you know generally what they were doing i was like wow this is a totally different approach because the the original bitfury chip wasn't this pure like million gate uh honking digital high speed processor on advanced process. It was a mixed signal implementation that did a lot of things in a very common sense way that you wouldn't have thought of if you were stuck in the

old regime of licensing synopsis and cadence and working with, you know, big heavy fabs and paying millions of dollars for standard methodology. So I think because they had to be creative, they were and i thought this could actually work and and it was such a game changer in terms of cost structure and the ability to make it in a fab that was uh not you know um 10 nanometer at the time you know because the first bitfury chips were at 55 nanometer 28 nanometer and they were highly productive and able to be used in what I would consider dirty electricity environments where the electricity was not stable and you could stack them. So if you had different voltages, it didn't matter. So you could basically a very flexible approach that could be run

pretty much anywhere and at much lower cost. So I thought, I think this could actually work. And so that it took about a year, I don't know if it was a year or six months, but we eventually gathered up all this capital from my circle of friends to fund that chip and away we went and it worked. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you.

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and it's more imperative that you use the right vpn a vpn that cannot log because of the way that is designed and that's why we have partnered with obscura that is our official vpn here at tftc built by a bitcoiner carl dong for bitcoiners focused on privacy you can pay in bitcoin over the lightning so not only are you private while you're perusing the web with obscura but when you actually set up an account you can acquire that account privately by paying in bitcoin over the Lightning Network. Do not be complacent when it comes to protecting your privacy on the internet. Go to Obscura.net, set up an Obscura account, use the code TFTC for 25% off. When I say account, you just get a token. It's a string of token. It's not connected to your identity at

all. Token sign up, pay with Bitcoin, completely private, turn on Obscura, surf the web privately. Obscura.net, use the code TFTC for 25% off. George, what was your perspective on the mining industry i mean obviously we're talking heavily about the hardware but what was it like from what i understand wild west days we mentioned cpu to gpu fpga i think those machines hit the market for like six months and then we quickly went to a6 as the price of bitcoin went up as hash rate rose difficulty rose it became more competitive how what was the state of bitcoin mining at that point and how did it evolve yeah i mean um i joined bitfury when the whole ecosystem was at one petahash

okay that's where we all started and at that time one of the part of uh joining bitfury and backing then was to meet these guys. You know, I was in Ukraine. You know, we had this venture which eventually got sort of bought out by Cargill. And I wanted to meet these guys. And when I met these guys, I mean, they were talking astrophysics. You know, these guys were so freaking brilliant. They were speaking, I could understand maybe 5% what they were talking about. but i knew they were probably the most smartest people i've met and you know i thought going through all these ivy league institutions and stuff you know i've seen it all they were just brilliant they were just sharp and i just realized you know at the end of the day you know i'm betting

on the highest iq there is i mean ukraine was famous in soviet union for a few things and one of the few things was uh computer science mathematics physics and uh i mean frankly you you can see that on the battlefield i mean that's what's holding ukraine up you know that that's sort of a brain power and that raw brain power was just so amazing and at that time already um uh bill val has already met with nico over uh skype you know they were doing dealings and And, you know, Bitfury was the old, but Bitfury at that time was extremely angry because Butterfly Labs promised people the first ASIC, which failed and that derailed the Bitfury trajectory. So Bitfury came with an advertising. Bitfury back then was a tiger.

I don't know if you remember. The logo was a tiger. And it's actually funny when we hired a million dollar PR agency later on in 2017, 18. after all the pr and work they rebranded tiger into a calibri and val is like what the fuck we they brought us from a tiger to a calibri but that's another story um i guess calibri's move fast but the advertising of bitfury was tiger chewing on a butterfly and the blood spitting down that was the that was the ad of bitfury because they were so pissed that those guys lights to the market and they derailed bitfury that x uh valve the other valve he just went in

locked himself in and he worked extra hard to design that full custom chip so when i was joining that was basically happening and the 55 nanometer was out there and marty i don't know if you remember there was something called g hash io which was basically bitfury chips and you know sometimes, you know, there was a big freaking issue because GHIO was like 60% of the market, you know? And here we go talking about decentralization. I'm like, guys, hello, you know, you guys realize that, you know, this is like,

you know, but like, yeah, that was one of the early issues, you know? So when I came, there was all of this thing happening. So you have this battle with butterfly labs. You have this one petahash. you have uh cyprus you have a full custom design you have bobby lee on btc china kind of that was a big china sort of a thing happening back then so i'm like joining it and then you have this maidan revolution in ukraine where there is this overthrow of the government so

you know we're kind of going at night to stand with the protesters during the day we're sort of working so it was just one uh clusterfuck of things you know and i was like oh my god this is this is this is really creative disruption something big is going to come out and then you know people send you angels and um bill was one of those angels you know when we connected and we spoke we realized that okay this is the uh guider of ours that will translate this raw intelligence power will kind of digest in his language and will bring it out to to the investors and uh you know god knows we tried i mean we we probably i don't know like 80 100 vcs in silicon valley we came out power packed with our new chip you know 60 market share beautiful slides

unfortunately val the cto the the you know the brilliant designer he was in a helicopter you know in a helicopter or a um you know bicycle helmet so he wasn't very presentable he was in a motorcycle let me interject motorcycle one of the issues you know i sent i sent the deck for example to some friends that i had worked with for 20 years at sequoia and they take me seriously at least the older generation that knew me and they looked at the deck and one of the guys is like who who's this dude in the motorcycle helmet you know and i hadn't looked in detail at the deck and uh mr x uh refused to have his identity known so all we had for the cto was a picture of a guy in a motorcycle helmet so it looked like you know our cto was daft punk or something like

that and no name no identity just this is the guy that's our cto and he's committed to the project but no one can know who he is and my friend was like are you serious dude like who's the dude in the motorcycle helmet i said he doesn't want his identity revealed you know after i checked with the team but anyway so that that was one of the hurdles to raising institutional money for bitfury back in the day that is incredible truly cypherpunk too yeah i mean we thought that you know let the results speak for itself and you know um x at that time you know he was um he just didn't want to reveal himself you know and you know obviously for a guy that was early on and you know bitcoiners back then in a way were persecuted.

And, you know, Bitfury mined and Bitfury sort of OGs mined a lot of Bitcoins back then. I mean, we would have days we would be mining 2000 Bitcoins every day. So for whatever reason, he just wanted to be in a stealth mode. Unfortunately, we miscalculated that, you know, X didn't go to Stanford or MIT or, you know, he wasn't brought up in a boarding school. But, you know, that's how the majority of the, you know, lemmings on Silicon Valley operate. You know, he wasn't one of the boys. And it didn't matter that, you know, he designed this brilliant chip that kind of screwed everybody.

But, you know, he probably should have maybe was, you know, not okay for him to be wearing the motorcycle helmet. But things happen for a reason. We're happy. well there's a few things really to pick up here for anybody listening in who's relatively new to bitcoin and just to put things in context like one petahash of hash rate on the network is two orders of magnitude lower we're currently sitting at 1.1 zeta hash zeta hash uh which is a thousand x a hash we just crossed as at a hash earlier this year not too long ago and it's already added another 10 i checked this morning it's at 1.11 zeta hash which is insane when you think of the

orders of magnitude and george to your point about g hash i remember i remember that event very well got 55 to 60 percent of the network hash rate as a pool and you had people freaking out i mean this is public peter todd famously sold half his bitcoin because he thought that there was too much centralization at the mining pool layer but it was an incredibly important lesson at the time it was extremely scary but now you're looking at i believe nine years i think that happened in 2015 or 2016 9 10 years later we're able to look back and point at that and say this was actually incredible that this happened at this point in time because the free market of miners reacted to seeing what happened to g hash getting that much hash rate and they moved off the pool proving

that you could quickly route around any centralization pressure at the mine i think that It was Bitfairy moving some of their machines outside so it didn't look like there was 50%. Well, GHash wound up being a victim of its own success. People got so freaked out that it aggregated so much hash rate because they ran a good pool that ultimately it had to wind down the business, I believe, 18 months after that event. But these are just really diving into not only the early days of a company, of a startup, but the early days of an industry that's budding. And Bill, I think what are some parallels in other industries that you've worked in over the last few decades that you noticed around this time in Bitcoin? Because it was, I mean, that time in Bitcoin, particularly post 2014, 2015, 2016, I vividly remember I was adamantly obsessed with it, extremely obsessed with it, focusing on it every day. In the summer of 2015, July 2015, people were worried that Bitcoin was going to die.

It was hovering around $200, $180 after having been at $1,200, and there wasn't a lot of attention on the space. Yeah, so it reminded me a little bit. It's not really a super close analogy because honestly there was nothing in the world like the Bitcoin ecosystem ever, ever that I can think of. But it was a little bit like the beginning of the DRAM business. And if you think about commodity memory, the economic structure of the industry was very similar. So if you go back to like the early 80s, and everybody probably that invests knows Micron technology, ticker MU. But I remember in 1983, I think it was, Micron went public because all of a sudden, there were all these things that use DRAM. And because you had a fixed cost

in your factory and marginal cost was really low because you're really just using molten sand in the wafers, the unfinished wafers. The costs were low, but because of the shortage, the prices would move like 500 or 1,000% because people are trying to ship these computers that are $20,000. And if you can't ship them because you're missing a dollar memory chip, you'll pay 25 bucks for that memory chip you know so DRAM would go through these insane cycles where you'd have these companies that were literally like printing money one year and then all of a sudden five fabs would come up in Japan and then the prices would crash and the whole industry was losing money because if you've got a big factory going with fixed costs you don't want to turn it

off so you'll sell below cost just to keep the lines running and so you had these massive swings where companies look like they were going out of business all the time and then a few would go out of business the production capacity would shrink prices would go up and all of a sudden the survivors would be printing money again and that this could happen within like 18 months to two and a half years and so the price cycles were very similar because a very similar uh but distributed cost structure of high fixed costs. You buy all these machines, you spend millions and millions of dollars putting up this building and sucking electricity, and you just don't want to turn it off. But sometimes you have to, you know, if it fell below the marginal cost of electricity. So

you would see chunks of capacity come on, and then too much capacity and off, you know, so just incredibly insanely hard to navigate the wild swings but uh but bit fury you know lived through many of those cycles because we we i can't remember how many of those cycles we had but at least three you know but there were life or death cycles just insanely difficult and and the other issue was this is an industry it's was weird because it was an industry that was effectively printing money but a different kind of money and you needed fiat capital to make this alternative money right so i still remember the first official board meeting we had where uh we're in a room in a building in embarcadero center i think it was in san francisco and we're we're trying to get

capital to fund servers and more silicon orders and here we are producing and i don't remember the number but you know it was that era where it was you know thou maybe a thousand bitcoins a day you know we're just putting out all this bitcoin but it was illiquid and so our cfo runs into the room and he says i have a buyer i think i can i i can get a million dollars of cash and i think Bitcoin was maybe $200 or $300. He goes, I've got somebody that will buy some. And it was so exciting because we had a million dollars of cash that was badly needed. So it was basically hundreds of days in a row like that where we were constantly out of fiat cash to keep the engine going to print other cash that we all believed would get to $100,000 a coin, even in

that era. I think we had this calculus of take all the gold in the world, take 10% of that, divide by 21 million units, it's going to be around $100,000. So we're like one day, one day, one day, but it's at 200 now. So how do we get to that 100,000? And we just had to keep raising money to keep going. Sup freaks, this rep is brought to you by good friends at Silent. Silent creates everyday, fair day gear that protects your hardware. We're in Bitcoin. We have a lot of hardware that we need to secure your wallet emit signals that can leave you vulnerable you want to pick up silence gear put your hardware in that i have a tap signer right here i got the silent card holder replaced my wallet i was using ridge wallet because it secured against rfid signal

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how are you doing it well number one i'm going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good regimen particularly staying hydrated making sure i have the right electrolytes and salts in my body that is why i use salt of the earth i drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth i'm liking the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at

times you have to explain hates it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated i have become addicted to these it's made my life a lot better i can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drinking out of a glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc and george what was it like during that period 2015 2016 working in a company yeah 16 16 got you know got got a little bit uh uh better

you know things started moving sort of towards 6 700 i mean that was kind of 2014 uh 15 when it kind of dropped and stayed you remember that's when bitfinex you know you had mount gox you had bitfinex hack and uh you know things dropped to 170 you know i remember they uh come up to like 220 and he just stayed at 220 220 to 50 to 10 to 50 and it was just painful it was like a grind and it was just like 18 months of a grind and grind and grind and And, you know, at that time, we had our major data centers in Iceland and in Georgia. You know, it's three cents. And we were not switching them off because the technology was superb and the cost of electricity was low.

So we're like, you know, we're going to grind it out. And at the time, it was also very obvious that you got to start educating people and you got to start orange peeling sort of the Congress and the decision makers. And we spent a lot of time and effort and energy going to Washington, D.C., going to Brussels, meeting with all these congressmen, senators, various committees, setting up the sort of task forces with law enforcement that would kind of feed into that establishment. And there was a lot of education being done back then. So it was a lot of building. I mean, I don't know how much time I was looking the other day, Bill. I was just like, I was in Washington, D.C. probably every other month with Jim Newsom, who was the former chairman of Commodity Future Trade Commission. He was instrumental in terms of educating, as well as Jason Weinstein, the former head of DOJ Cybercrime.

And, you know, we needed those stalwarts to go and push. So it was 214, 215 was really, really tough. I mean, people talk about the bear markets of subsequently when the price dropped to 4,000 or the price dropped to, I don't know, 50,000 or now, you know, it's kind of at 100,000 people are complaining, but we were at 200, you know, and good thing was that it just wiped out a lot of, you know, a lot of coin tariffs, KNCs of the world. and basically positioned us for the next chapter. And I often say, because having been in the mining industry personally,

founding a company that was doing flare gas mitigation in the Bakken using Bitcoin mining, and now at 1031 investing in mining infrastructure companies, mining is the most ruthlessly competitive market potentially ever in the world because you have these machines that can print money as long as you have electricity. The ASICs now at this point are somewhat commoditized. They do one thing, one thing only. They produce hash-cash-shot-256 hashes that potentially could help you find a block to win some Bitcoin. And you don't know exactly who your competition is at any given point in time.

And you just have to pull up your pants, take the plunge, and hope that you're executing better than your competition, that you don't really have a good sense of who exactly it is. yeah absolutely i sent you a link by the way by email marty that has some market share stats that i had saved from 2015 and i don't know if you want to share them now or just use them later when you edit the podcast but pretty cool that i still have those i can pull these up now yeah i have those saved up as well yeah there was something i wish i could bitcoin yeah i know i I have them somewhere, but I can't find them right now. But I had a share picture that had Bitfury and GHash separately, and together they were way over 50%. And it, yeah, so these are, oh, sorry, I sent the wrong, that's, I sent the wrong thing.

I should have checked before I put it up. Oh, boy, okay. Keep going, and I'm going to resend it. But the point of bringing this up is I think it's incredibly impressive that you were able to not only survive through that era of Bitcoin, but continue to compete ultimately to the point of doing deals with Cypher, Putty, and successfully making sure that Bitfury was a success at the end of the day. And again, the most ruthlessly competitive market in the world. You know, what I loved about it, it's the industry where it's complete self-reliance and it's an industry that has a zero tolerance for bullshit. You know, this is where you basically have to perform and there are specs and you need to deploy. And, you know, there is one equation in terms of sort of efficiency of a chip.

And another equation is in terms of, you know, the power cost. And listen, I mean, we have teams that have scoured every part of the world. You know, we've done anything from geothermal to nat gas to hydro to flare gas, anywhere from Mongolia to Tajikistan to Trinidad and Tobago to Paraguay to Canada, U.S. And, you know, you're always hunting for this optimal sort of a setup. and that's the beauty of it you know at the end of the day what what we have seen that bit fury and the trajectory of mining is gravitating towards ruthlessly towards the most efficient sort of energy setup and uh you cannot bullshit you know you you uh you are really kind of tied to these basic parameters that you need to take into consideration.

So having built sort of a thousands of megawatts and, you know, having built into the system, now the game is very different, right? It has been sort of institutionalized where you need a lot of capital. But that's the beauty of this invention, right? You basically were able to bootstrap this protocol by private capital. and yeah right here you know bill shows one of the early uh uh shots of uh the pool distribution 21 inc remember that computer it's hilarious they even made the chart they raised a lot of capital to get to that little share

that was my uh that was my most expensive bitcoin lesson was buying one of those 21 machines back in the day this is great heads off to balaji and the guys that did their best but at the end of the day you know you talk about the ruthless ruthlessness you really needed to push down and optimize the chip and optimize the setup and you know it's difficult when you're at five cents when you're you know your competitors are set up at two and a half three cents you know And where you need, you know, a couple of months to set up where your competition can set it up in three weeks, you know. So, yeah, that's, that's a beauty. That's why, you know, at Hopkins, I started this, I'm a big fan of Austrian School of Economics and individual empowerment. So this, this was real pure kind of focusing on effort and ruthless execution that really mattered at the end of the day. well to that point having been in the industry then when it was relatively unknown where it was going uh very hard to raise capital and now seeing where the mining industry is today

where chips i mean bitmain i believe they're marketing a two nanometer chip now uh bitcoin mining is quickly becoming an integral part of energy systems i just moved from austin texas back to my hometown of Philadelphia, but I was in Texas for four years, and it's very apparent that ERCOT is leaning into Bitcoin mining operations, particularly to help with demand response. You mentioned one of the early Bitfury co-founders heating a house in Finland. I believe Finland, many cities in Finland are actually heating multiple houses with Bitcoin mining operations now. It's completely gone from this fringe industry with a bunch of crazy people really trying to tinker and try to find any energy they can, convince any

capital allocator they can to back them what they're doing, to what I would deem to be a foregone conclusion that Bitcoin mining is going to be an integral part of energy systems moving forward. And when you were working at Bitfury a decade ago, did you ever imagine it would get to this point absolutely we did i think yeah for sure yes yeah we were sitting with that wind farm company uh in amsterdam do you remember that and talking to them about how we could use bitcoin mining machines as an alternative to batteries right so you know there there were some grid operators that would offer uh because uh electrical grids they're like um think of a water system where you've got a big water tower and you've got uh water in this tower if you're

putting a lot of water in and there's no offtake eventually the water tower will explode right so grids are the same way you get too much voltage they pop so people would actually offer to pay bitfury in some cases one and a half cents a kilowatt hour to run the machines at night when the wind farms had too much energy you know and it wasn't efficient use because they weren't on 24 by seven. So we never did that. But we were in talks with huge wind farm offshore and onshore to provide effectively an alternative to a battery where we would just burn energy for them. And the electricity effectively was stored in bitcoins. And then if you wanted electricity later, you could sell the bitcoins and buy electricity. So it's totally interesting concept,

an alternative to gloom energy with Bitcoin mining machines. yeah absolutely i mean if you look back in 2016-17 we sort of came to conclusion that okay air-cooled mining uh you know is is okay but there is a next level in terms of efficiency and enter immersion cooling so in 2016 we opened the world's first and largest immersion cooling two-phase immersion cooling data center uh 40 megawatts with 3m novex solution you know completely recycling and puf 1.02 um you know at that time so we were looking at uh a bitcoin mining as in a way like a ferrari and race car driving where you kind of take all these innovations whether it's a low voltage whether it's the designs of systems whether it's immersion

cooling and kind of implementing. So part of the puzzle was always, you know, listen, at the end of the day, there's a lot of wasted energy. You know, there's just a lot of wasted energy. You know, you have these planners sort of build out a certain projection of demand or you have this kind of inefficiency in terms of tax credits, which is in ERCOT in Texas. And there's just a lot of stranded energy because the transmission lines are there or the you know demand is not there so why have this wasted energy where you can plug in uh the mining at the source and you can be sort of uh making a digital coin and you know making your returns and to many in 2017-18 that was like you know wow they sort of it was a novel idea but we saw that this would

be the future. And come now, you're looking at Bitcoin miners going in for these stranded energy, whether it's wind farms or whether it is flare gas that going in and placing it behind the meter. And the beauty of Bitcoin mining is this is not like a aluminum plant or a banking data center where you have to run 100%. It's OK. You can turn it off and give that power to the grid for the peak and it's a perfect uh rebalancer you know that's why i'm going to texas actually a couple weeks of meeting with governor abbott you know the the guy is a visionary he realized that this can be a fantastic way to bring in a lot of business to the state of texas as well as help ercot with uh you know it's uh big demands during the winter and summer and uh you know these that's

what you want you kind of want to put this with these visionaries that understand that because when they connect the dots there can be a lot of positive development for their constituents yeah i think we're we're only scratching the surface of how far we can integrate bitcoin and energy systems obviously now ercot and many other parts of the country tva has bitcoins participating in demand response and that's really a bitcoin buyer of last resort right where it's like okay we have this extra energy we need somebody to soak it up what i what i think is relatively untapped and needs to be explored more as bitcoin miners as a buyer of first resort and particularly with the climate and the environment today where all the focus is on ai and the energy

that's going to be needed to service LLMs and agentic frameworks in inference, and understandably so, but you need to expand capacity and generation significantly to make sure that that future can manifest. And I think what is unexplored is going up, spinning up capacity and generation somewhere, but you have this time dilation problem of you can build the generation, but how do you build transmission lines to get it to the places it needs to go ultimately and if you have a generation asset sitting there with no revenue for 18 to 24 months it's it's hard to justify economically but now with bitcoin mining to your point george you just put it behind the meter and that's your buyer first resort where it's like okay you build out the transmission and we'll have the miners provide

you revenue while you're doing that and that's something i i think is relatively unexplored at this point, but will be a growing trend moving forward. It's exactly what we are doing with the Bitfury spinoff, HUT. So HUT8 Corp is now an energy infrastructure company. And we took our machines and dropped them down into a sub subsidiary with the Trump family, and that's American Bitcoin. But we now have optioned out, I forgot the exact number now, but I think we have optioned out There are 13 gigawatts of electricity, and we basically, as you said, we light it up as we open it with Bitcoin mining, and then we build data centers and try to transition them over to AI. And Cypher is doing similar things, but directly going right into the AI hyperscaler field. Well, Bill, building on this, do you think the participants in the AI industry understand this?

Obviously, they understand the need for power. Do you think there's a disconnect between the recognition of Bitcoin is a – Bitcoin miners are a friend that can help them get what they ultimately need? They're beginning to because of the shortage. And I think what's happening – okay, so I think the perspective is similar to how Bitfury entered the ASIC world where there was a traditional way of doing silicon that was bulletproof and extraordinarily expensive. And Bitfury came up with a creative solution that worked at a far lower cost. And so the Bitcoin mining guys, because it's so hyper competitive, as you said, it was a very scrappy industry where, you know, a lot of the early Bitcoin mining operations, like if you look at the ones in China, like, you know, dirt floors, a bunch of tin walls, you know, just like wires hung everywhere, just really low cost. And then you have the AI wave that came from a more traditional compute data center, bulletproof, raised floors before the racks became too heavy.

But like at a raised floor, mega air conditioning, lots of redundancy, beautiful cabling everywhere. So you have these two extremes, just like the Bitfury chip versus ASIC from Sun and Intel-type people. And so I think over time, the mining centers have gotten a little bit better on the infrastructure, and the hyperscalers stayed where they were. But I think now that there's no more space at all in the big, big AI data centers and the cost of building to, in some cases, specifications for 300 to 500 kilowatts per rack, which are mind – it's mind-blowing to me. And the Bitcoin miners were delivering much higher energy density with much lower cost in buildings that had maybe some air conditioning, but maybe not. And Bitfury had these insanely creative solutions. If you've ever seen a block box, do you know what those are? So it's the containers, right?

So Bitfury leased to buy an island in Finland that used to be a steel factory. built out a data center and then found out that there was like a toxic waste uh site like a super fun site so they're like shit now we got to deconstruct all this stuff and val and george didn't want to be in that position ever again so they came up with the idea of containerizing units so many data centers we call them energy energy hunters one megawatt energy hunters so after that they could literally just get a truck or fly it on a plane drive it to a site maybe in alberta canada in a remote area have a transformer in plug it in and go right so the uh the data center operators now because they cannot get uh the lead time to build an uh a tier one

data center for ai could be three to five years or more now because all the space if they could find the land and the power and the telco in the same place so a lot of bitcoin miners have come up with uh strategies that get you up there but not to the full extent of the cost of the tier one so there's new terms like tier 2.5 or tier you know whatever it is that maybe you take out a little of redundancy maybe you don't have air conditioning you know but you can run these things and so all of the hyperscalers they're talking to all the bitcoin that the professional bitcoin miners like cypher and hut and iris energy to complete the deployments that they need yeah i mean right right now you have this kind of scramble for the last mile no matter how

amazing your nvidia chips are or no matter how amazing your foundational model is at the end of the day you need to go and deploy and what we're finding right now those companies that have come to the game early and they have secured the energy and they have energized power this is right now i mean gold i mean this is right now uh unbelievably valuable and uh you know i had lunch with tyler ceo cypher a couple weeks ago in new york the demand from all these sort of a big shot hyperscalers is unbelievable i mean he has people coming up basically with metering positions, kind of like metering how many acres they have because they need to deploy. The race to AGI is on. And you don't want to be lost.

That's why Zach and all these guys are spending tens of billions of dollars because you just cannot get this wrong. And companies like Cypher, companies like Hot, companies like Iron that have secure these positions uh you know i think they have extremely valuable asset that they have and uh you know this is going to shine it really is profound what uh what's going to happen next 12 to 18 month and it was um watching what xai did what elon did in memphis with the build out of that site in the short amount of time it was funny watching me doing elon if you're listening I know you listened to the show. It was funny how they built the site because they acted like a Bitcoin miner would.

They didn't have enough capacity on the substation to pull a front, so they daisy-chained a bunch of gen sets, and they were pulling power from those to run the GPUs. But then inside, they have these Tesla ball batteries, which obviously you're going to dog food your own product if you're Elon Musk. But however, it's like if you have excess capacity pulling off from there, maybe you should use Bitcoin miners. And you can see a scenario where you have Bitcoin miners as this sort of load manager that makes it more profitable than just storing it in a Tesla wall battery. I don't think they're able to sell that wall battery electricity back to market. So it's sort of a sunk cost at the end of the day. I have been looking at this sort of convergence of AI and Bitcoin in the physical world, and it just intuitively makes sense to me that there is going to be some sort of symbiosis between the two functions moving forward. With that, I mean, we're brushing up on an hour.

I want to be respectful of your time, and we have to talk about the book. We can go on. You know, I have, you know, I'm in Abu Dhabi. I have Gabriel Zayed and our friend Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Ali. And folks, I'm going to be meeting later on. And, you know, these are the OGs that have been with us for many, many years. But I'd love to continue. Yeah.

Well, let's get to the book. And then you win. Why did you decide to write it? well listen writing the book was always kind of internal bit theory joke you know like one day we're gonna write a book this the stories are so unbelievable you know from you know this crazy uh kind of uh russian oligarchs you know and thank god you know they they wanted to come in and invest in bit theory but thank god nothing happened in there And we had hacks, and we had the encounters with Alejandro Castro in Cuba, and we had these encounters with various shady personalities, and we had encounters with angels.

So it's just, it's a story of Bitcoin itself, you know, it's a story of a Mowgli growing up in a jungle, you know, when the Mowgli was very little and, you know, they had, you know, the Bagheera and the bear protect, you know, and the Mowgli has grown up. It was like that, you know, and there's so many parallels, Bitfury growing and Bitfury, you know, had probably two moments where it could have been just thrown under a bus and, you know, we just, we would have been to oblivion. It was just like, it would have been gone. But it was just like a lot about what you learn about people and what you learn about yourself. You know, it's a journey where you kind of what doesn't kill you, make you stronger. You kind of leave all this kind of roomy and, you know, James Allen and, you know, all these sort of a niche, all these guys that have lived, you kind of live through it. It's really the journey, and it has been such an awesome journey, and it has been such an awesome privilege to have guys like Bill

join us in the journey, and you just learn a lot about people. You learn a lot about life, and you learn a lot more importantly about yourself, what you can do, what price you're willing to pay to keep going, you know, when everything inside of you says, you know okay you know this is this is not working out this is over and you just like get up you know you fall front on your face and you get up and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing and you know just like 12 years i mean 12 years in a chinese uh sort of astrology it's a full cycle you know and uh i thought maybe it's a time to kind of put it down you know to

discourage or maybe encourage the future generation of tech entrepreneurs that you know the big entrepreneur is not uh is not that glamorous you know there are a lot of sacrifices there's a lot of there's a lot of price to pay but if you're willing to uh go through the hell and keep going and calling you and you are convicted with uh the right idea and you're around with here with the uh band of brothers that it's it's a journey worth taking so yeah i just came out that you know it's time to do this and that's what happened you know i'll chime in with one additional angle to that which is you know having lived through a whole bunch of tech cycle waves where in what george described you have this vision of how things are supposed to be but

they're not there yet. You commit yourself to that and you work on it. And, you know, eventually there's this like, wow, like the markets are adopting it. There's a sense of validation and like, oh, I was actually right when for maybe a decade I doubted myself. In the case of Bitfury and the Bitcoin industry in general, as opposed to regular tech, regular tech did not have the world's regulators pounding on you. And that was something I totally did not expect, you know, because I think in the early, early days of, I can't remember the exact year, but I think even in maybe 2011, 2012, there were actually apps in the iPhone app store where you could buy and sell uh and send bitcoin to each other and then you know 2013 operation choke point happened

and uh it was it was so unnerving to me as a you know regular venture dude building my companies and all of a sudden i have companies trying to hit the payroll pay payroll button and the bank accounts frozen and i'm like what you know and and we were having to do things that i just could never have expected. You know, I had one company where we, we were, you know, choked and told we had to move our funds. And then we created a new company name and opened an account at a different bank and then move the money over and, you know, kind of hit everything that we were involved in crypto. It was like nothing public that we're working on anything crypto because how are we ever going to make payroll again. And with Bitfury, I think because it had such a big presence,

big share in the industry, powerful company, it got the heat of regulators too. And we had to really deal with that in a totally different way, which is why George and I started what became the necker blockchain summit because i remember that that era mount gox had gone down yeah and then there was all this like when i first started working on this with these guys it was all about this technology it was cool it was interesting it was revolutionary it would ease payments there's so many great things about it but everybody was threatened and then all these criminals started coming into the business because they thought it was a place for hacking when they didn't realize that everything you do was traceable completely and so so we started this

thing with sir richard branson called the necker blockchain summit as a vehicle to have a sort of a multi-dimensional homebrew computer club uh which was the entity i described later with the young kids that would create the computer business where we would invite the former chairman of the cftc and the vice chairman of the federal reserve and a u.s attorney general and the person that caught the federal agents blackmailing Ross Ulbricht. Just really interesting people, some of the original Bitcoin developers, regulators to create this, coalesce all of these people to try to chart the future for the industry. And I'll tell you that the relationships that we formed there, unbelievable and ongoing. And all the people that George mentioned were

people that came like gabriel abed who became obviously a very well-known person in the in the space he was a young kid raising money for a multi-currency network to unite the caribbean nations and he formed this little company yeah and through our blockchain summit he met folks and he got and he raised his money and then eventually became the ambassador to the uae for Barbados you know but there's there's a dozen or maybe tens of stories of people that went on to form their careers around the network that we formed in these early early days with this high-powered group at Necrol and it's like when George said he joined Bitfury because the IQs were so high he just knew right that's half of half of life is picking who you're going to hang

with. And I think we had the benefit and the luxury of bringing together some of the most important world players in all of the industries related to governance and monetary systems and technology in this little cluster that is and was the Necker Blockchain Summit. Yeah, I mean, I would even not call it Necker Blockchain. I mean, it really should have been called the necker orange peeling summit you know that that's what it was you know and every time uh you know we went on and to japan or tokyo or mongolia or you know cuba it was really at the end of the day if nothing came out it was all about orange filling and you know this whole thing like uh you know val and i kind of uh getting this call to uh hey where are you guys at

you know from a good friend of mine who's ex mckinsey partner like come to davos and we're like deciding to go to davos i mean this is like 2015-16 when davos was completely like off the radar but you know we went there with one mission we are gonna be the trojan horse we're gonna infiltrate the establishment and guess what not many people know but all these bitcoin signs around davos it was sponsored by us every time jamie dynan was walking around and there were orange bitcoin signs our clandestine operation you know yeah and we were sitting there orange peeling prime ministers orange peeling the leaders you know talking about bitcoin and why this would be the future and yeah we started on the setting up this whole you know blockchain central you

know back then you know blockchain was okay you know because uh you know that that was cool having a blockchain so you know we kind of trojan horse the bitcoin under blockchain and we're like blockchain summit you know blockchain event we even in davos it was called blockchain central and with Matt Sorum of Guns N' Roses like blasting in the middle of the night. But it was our Trojan horse into the establishment of taking Bitcoin under the disguise of the blockchain and putting in.

And that was fun. Now I see Jack Mallers, God bless the young generation carrying the torch. And you need thousands of Jack Mallers of this world. But 2015, 16, we were those Trojan horses that were seeding this. And I know, Matt, you were also one of the early Trojan horses putting the fires and orange filling around the world. But that's the beauty. That's the beauty of the decentralized movement.

That's the beauty of this. If you look at any technology or any shift anywhere in humanity, it was always a small, committed group of individuals. That's always the case because those are the ones that are always making the change. If you have this concentration, you know, you can take a magnifying glass and you can point at something. But you take a sun and you put under magnifying glass, it can burn freaking anything. and that that is the power of this movement that is the power of these grassroots movements and that's uh i've been privileged part of it and i've been privileged to share with you guys this movement and i think we're on to something great and uh here's to that here's to that i only

have a water but no it's funny you bring up jack and you mentioned that it's not glamorous and it's funny because i think the public the broader public has this view of people who go on to build successful companies as as being glamorous and maybe the end end state is glamorous to a certain extent but getting to that point is certainly not glamorous and you mentioned jack mollers is just funny thinking of his journey with strike funnily enough and right before covid in 2019 he hit me and matt odell up he was like hey i want to come on the podcast and announce something really okay and he announced the launch of strike the company from my apartment in brooklyn on the podcast this little studio apartment uh and it's been really cool to watch

his journey progress from that point where he's like hey i'm thinking of launching this company strike uh and announcing it on this podcast to where they've gone today and we've been and it's been extremely fortunate to be along that journey with him from the 1031 perspective being the largest investor and he is uh an incredibly inspiring person to your point george it just takes these motivated convicted and somewhat crazy people to go do it and the journey is not glamorous i can promise you the studio apartment we recorded that that podcast and was not glamorous at all it was like a 500 square foot little box but we came from that box and jack is now crushing it at strike and i think this is a good segue to to the last question you alluded to it

a bit there george but where do you think we're going from here um has bitcoin made it yet has bitcoin made it i think uh bitcoin has created a tremendous wealth for people that were early believers and i think from the dna basis those people are committed to do good things and better the humanity and this generational transfer of wealth of this once again small committed group of people that really wants to make a positive impact that has an awesome power and i think the story of bitcoin builders is just starting up i think there's just going to be a lot of positive impact and generation in terms of, you know, curing the world's biggest problems, addressing the social injustices, making just life of

humans better. And I think we're just early on. And things happen for a reason. And Bitcoin came to this world for a reason, to take our humanity to the next level of consciousness. And it's not going to be easy. There's going to be challenges. But I think the outlook is extremely positive. And I think as a humanity, we are moving in the right direction.

And Bitcoiners will play a major role in that. Bill, what would you say? Bitcoin has made it. What do you see moving forward for Bitcoin? You know, so you have to break that up into little pieces because there's so many elements to that question, technology, societally, monetarily. So I think from a technology perspective, the acceptance now of the underlying technology, which is what drew me in the first place, peer-to-peer blockchains. that's undeniably taking root. You know, there's so many ecosystems of products and services getting built

on that underlying technology because it's just a simply more efficient and transparent way to handle a database. And so I think that coupled with the advent of AI that will work with databases and the automation of workflows and different things that can sit on a granular distributed database, that confluence of blockchain and AI is going to revolutionize a lot of things that people do every day. So I think that's on its way. And it's really just a flame that's about to really, really go over the next couple of years. I think from a monetary perspective, it does seem like it's gaining acceptance as an alternative to things like gold. I think it

doesn't have the, I guess, I don't know if you call it the older crowd or the old institutional crowd um there's still i think a mixed opinion do you see about that there's still a lot of gold bugs some of the people that would have been gold bugs in a modern era i think the younger people too you know younger people they want low friction and easily like low friction easy to move just you know it's like everything's easy right so i think uh that the thought of of buying gold bars and storing them in some place with high fees, nobody that's below a certain age will ever consider that. And things like Bitcoin are so natural. So I think as we go through this generational change, I think, you know, as the older people age out and the younger people take their place,

I think there's going to be growing acceptance. And you're starting to see in the institutional world, you know, folks like, you know, whether it's Warren Buffett or Nassim Tlaib used to say, you know their digital tulips or whatever there were so many negative things but uh folks that were regular institutional fund managers like a ray dalio for example who i had the pleasure in 2016 of having dinner with to try to explain to him what is bitcoin um you know he used to like warren buffett just poo-poo the idea of even things like gold because they were not productive assets. But now Ray's out there saying you should have a certain percentage in gold. And I actually don't know what his opinion is on Bitcoin, but I think he doesn't poo-poo it anymore.

So I think a lot of the institutional managers now are saying, you know what? Technology has been around for 15 years. It looks very solid. And it's a real alternative because in the end, money and value is what people think it is. So why is a dollar worth a dollar relative to another currency? What is it? It's all just belief. And so I think Bitcoin's technology is an underlying fortress that can actually be trusted. And I think the longer it's around and the more uh people that get on to it um the more it's accepted because if other people are using it you want to transact or store or what what have you so i think it's here to stay whether i call that you know success or not it's um you know it's going to be gradual

i think it's going to continue to unfold um i don't i'm not really into price predictions but i think it hit the price target that i had 10 or 15 years ago of the 100k a while back and i think relative to what i was thinking then one of the things that's happened is that the if i take the metric of all gold 10 percent divided by 21 million i think what's happened is the dollar has devalued relative to gold. So gold is probably twice or three times. I don't know what fraction or multiple it is today versus 10 years ago, but it's gone up a lot. And so I think my number should have naturally adjusted to probably around 250. So I think it will get to 250, I don't know when. And then I think based on the rate of the accumulation of the U.S. deficit,

the growth of the U.S. deficit, which is mind-blowing to me, I don't see why it doesn't just keep going up. So would I be surprised if it's a million dollars a coin someday? Absolutely not. It will get there. But it's really a question of how fast does the dollar lose its purchasing power uh not so much you know bitcoin just climbing up relative to things yeah correct so bill just answered your question already is uh has fiat failed yes fiat has failed and as a result has bitcoin succeeded yes bitcoin so you know as i've told people bitcoin is going to go to 100,000. Bitcoin is going to go to a million. Bitcoin is going to go to 10 million, you know, because at the end of the day, you know, this is the one directional bet and there's going

to be gyrations and stuff. But because the governments, the central banks are printing more money, because the governments are running the deficits globally, I mean, this is inevitable. at the end of the day, you know, you are valuing Bitcoin in fiat. And what is devaluing the other side is going to be appreciating. So, I mean, this is, this is just so crystal clear. I mean, I just, you know, it was clear in 2013, it was clear in 2016, it was clear in 2021. It's clear now in 2025. And we'll get on your podcast in 2035, that's going to be, you know, ingrained sort of in a cyberspace and we'll be talking with, you know, AI robots and agentics and all this talking. Yeah, you know, this is the trajectory that we followed. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that to

point out, you know, if you look at, so these stats are never completely accurate because they're really hard to get, of course, but world GDP is around $110 trillion now. world debt is around 300 trillion yeah 380 trillion last i checked 380 trillion or something like this you'll get different estimates depending on who you ask but call 380 because it's in that range world gdp seems to be growing around three percent a year world debt seems to be growing around seven to 10% per year every year. And it's been like that for 20 years. So you've got these two lines that are diverging that will never intersect. So at some point, and you look at what's happening, the new prime minister of Japan, the policy inflate, absolutely. And you as a

former hedge fund person, you understand the carry trade, and you understand what it means to have the world fueled by low interest rates out of Japan for borrowing. If that gasket blows, what happens? Unknown, right? I mean, I guess we could predict the outcome. We don't know when it will blow, but eventually, if rates go high enough there, something will blow. And you look at the state of debt in the collection of banks that are the fabric for the EU and the relative discrepancy in terms of GDP per capita of certain nations versus others, where they're basically- But forget EU, Bill.

I mean, you're talking about United States. United States right now is spending over a trillion. Forget EU or Japan. I mean, you're talking of the world's biggest economy and, you know, over a trillion dollars being paid just to maintain the interest payments. I mean, this is like ridiculous. And, you know, when Elon came on a doge, you know, I had some hopes, but I was like 80 percent sure that he would be shot down by the establishment. And that's what happened. I mean, this is just a train wreck in a slow motion that is happening.

and it's like when this train wreck is happening in existing rails where do you want to be you want to be outside of the system that is the bitcoin bad you know when the system is collapsing as we just like pointing out last two minutes what is your best bet to be outside and that is has always been the bed of bitcoin i saw that in soviet union and now you have it in united states United States has been running massive budget deference, whether it's Democrats or Republicans. It's all BS. It really is. And at some point, there's going to be a reckoning.

I mean, Churchill said, sooner or later, you're going to face the banquet of consequences. And that's what's happening. So Bitcoin is your insurance against that. I mean, it's really simple. instead of trusting fallible humans trust math and distributed systems it's uh for sure it's an idea whose time has come gentlemen i can't thank you enough for for joining me and walking me through your war stories over the last decade plus i think i think anybody particularly if you're a founder out there listening to this take these lessons to heart um and i think it's an

incredible story of written one thing i don't think you guys i think you guys are too humble to say this but it bitcoin would not be where it is today if it wasn't for individuals like you who took the risk over a decade ago when bitcoin was this crazy funny internet money that nobody was really taking seriously and took risk capital conviction to get us to this point so thank you gentlemen, for displaying all three of those over a decade ago when Bitcoin was a joke to most people. Pleasure. Pleasure, Marty.

It's a pleasure to come on your podcast. I've been following for many, many years as a Bitcoin OG, and you've done phenomenal work in terms of educating, in terms of inspiring. and you know for this book and for our journey uh it only made sense to come for soccer and be on your show awesome i'll agree wonderful to be here yeah thank you guys go pick up the book and then you win we'll make sure we link to it and uh i would love to do this again at some point in the future maybe not 2035 maybe hopefully uh before then but this was an incredible conversation i hope you too george enjoy your night bill enjoy your morning and uh this was a

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