The Pomp Podcast - #1116 Matt Lohstroh On Why Every Oil & Gas Company Will Mine Bitcoin

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Matt Lohstroh is the Co-Founder Of Giga Energy. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin mining, flare mining, fracking, how major oil & gas companies are getting involved, which countries are min...ing Bitcoin, the battle over clean energy, and what Matt & his company are doing to get more companies involved with flare mining. ======================= Bullish is a digital asset exchange that offers industry-leading order depth, consistently tight spreads, and new ways to earn, with world-class security. Combining innovations of DeFi with the performance of a traditional, centralized order book, Bullish lets you trade with certainty across variable market conditions. All in a regulated environment. Learn more at Bullish.com and follow @Bullish on Twitter today. ======================= Amberdata provides the critical data infrastructure enabling financial institutions to participate in the digital asset class. We deliver comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance. Download our Digital Asset Data Guide at https://www.amberdata.io/pomp ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: <Your Name.Blockchain> Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ================== With a Messari Pro subscription, you gain access to exclusive industry-leading long-form daily research reports, daily crypto news & insights in your inbox, advanced asset screeners, curated sets of charts and metrics and so much more. Try Messari Pro today! Get up to 25% off their Messari Pro membership by visiting www.messari.io/pro and entering promo code "POMP" at checkout. ======================= Arculus is the next generation crypto & NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world’s strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app. Arculus requires 3-Factor Authentication to ensure only you have access to your digital assets – something you know – a PIN, something you have – the Arculus Key Card, and biometrics. Learn more and buy it now on getarculus.com. Use promo code POMP to save 15%. Remember, with Arculus, it’s your keys, your crypto. =======================

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Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Matt Loschro is the co-founder of Giga Energy. In this conversation, we talk about flared gas, fracking, Bitcoin mining, and what exactly is going on at the intersection of oil and gas companies and the Bitcoin mining industry. I really enjoyed this conversation with Matt and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I first want to talk about our sponsors.
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Starting point is 00:02:10 for institutions across crypto trading and custodial services. LMAX Digital, secure, liquid, and trusted. Go learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. Again, that's lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Matt here with me. Everyone wants to know about flared gas Bitcoin mining. They hear about it. It's supposed to be, you know, the grace thinks it's sliced bread. But I've got this theory. Nobody actually knows what the hell
Starting point is 00:02:59 it means. So I thought a great place to start would just be like flared gas itself is obviously a huge problem people understand, but they don't know how it works. Can you explain flared gas from kind of a one-on-one standpoint in terms of why is it being created and what's kind of the problem with this? Yeah, absolutely. So when the industry is called oil and gas, it's because when you drill a well, oil and gas flow out of the ground. And it's often referred sometimes to when these guys are going after oil associated gas. So to get to the oil, you have to get rid of the gas. Oil is in a liquid form. Natural gas is in a gaseous form. Oil is often trucked off on locations. Natural gas, because of the sheer amount of volume it has, has to go through pipelines. Pipelines take really long times. They have a lot of regulatory things going on in the place. And so just as an actual byproduct,
Starting point is 00:03:50 when you have these massive wells come online, you don't have a market to get rid of the gas, but you still want to get to the oil. So what these guys do and all these oil producers is they flare the gas. And what I mean by that is they literally light a torch and a flame on the oil well and burn the gas off because it's so much more economical to go after the oil.
Starting point is 00:04:09 So I dig a hole, and when I dig the hole, there's oil and gas. The oil I know what to do with. I can bring it up to the surface. I put it into barrels or whatever, and I get it onto a truck, and I take it away. And I'm going to go sell it, and I'm going to get rich. But the gas, the only thing I can do with it because it's in this specific gas form is to build basically entire pipelines. Billion dollars. And if I do that, I could make money with it, but it takes too long, and it's too expensive.
Starting point is 00:04:37 So I'm much better off just saying, screw it. I know I dig this hole and there's two assets that are in there, but really I can make enough money on just one of them that I can just burn the other one and kind of throw it out. Exactly. All right. When they burn it, that's when bad shit happens. Yes.
Starting point is 00:04:51 What is going on in that process? Yeah. So flares, the flame or the torch on the oil well site, they do not have 100% combustion. And what I mean by that is when you burn methane, CH4, it combusts into CO2, but you're not burning all of it. you're burning around 91% of it. And methane CH4 as a greenhouse gas is about 25 times worse for the environment than CO2. Yes. So 9% of what is going into the air is really, really bad shit.
Starting point is 00:05:23 91% of it maybe isn't the best thing, but it's way better than if it was the CH4 or the methane. Exactly. Okay. I'm not a scientist, so I'm going to call that out to start. Uh, cause I'm saying a lot of dumb shit probably today. Um, but as this process is happening, how much is gas flaring contributing to the folks who believe that climate change is explicitly due to human involvement or human action? Like if we went and stopped all gas flaring, could we solve the climate crisis or is it a small percentage or somewhere in between? Um, I'd say for the relative amount of natural gas out there that's being flared, if you were to mitigate that, it would take a small amount of effort to have a massively outsized impact on the environment just because of how
Starting point is 00:06:13 potent methane is, 25 times worse. Every dollar you put in, you're getting 25x on your return and mitigating that. So it wouldn't solve the climate change issue by any means at all, but it would have a significant impact dollar for dollar. and what are people doing now before the whole bitcoin mining stuff like are there things that people are trying to do to solve the gas flaring problem are they like i'm assuming uh lobbying telling the oil companies to stop is probably step one uh but like what else are people trying to do to solve this problem so the world bank has set out a goal to ban world flaring all around the world by 2030 so it's in everyone's minds that it needs to be done okay now you have people
Starting point is 00:06:52 like russia in there a lot of people in the middle east right they're not going to be as open to that but like that's where a mass amount of flaring is going on and so for everyone kind of agrees it's a waste old producers don't want to lose revenue and people don't want to have you go to midland you don't even need to drive with headlights at night because there's so many flames lighting up the highway really yes that's how like prevalent it is wow yeah that that is like literally probably the craziest thing anyone's told me about this entire industry is that there is so much flaring happening that it almost acts as streetlights yes jesus okay so if the producer does not flare the gas is this when we see like russia's got you know 15 of all natural gas exports and things like this
Starting point is 00:07:34 through all these pipelines like that's basically what is going on uh where they're not flaring and actually using the natural gas and sending it somewhere else in the united states do we have a big network of pipelines for natural gas or like we get like a b minus grade like how would you kind of think about the United States' infrastructure for moving natural gas around? Yeah, so it's sticky, right? So there's massive amount of infrastructure and pipelines all throughout East Texas, Louisiana area, and going all the way up to the East Coast. But when we discover a new basin, for instance, over in Pennsylvania, they discovered all this new natural gas not too long ago. There's no market to get it from Pennsylvania to New York.
Starting point is 00:08:14 and we discovered a new basin in north dakota there's no network out there and these pipelines are at complete capacity 100 and so they say even though you have a pipeline here we it literally can't hold any more gas and so there's this delayed effect of finding a basin and then not being able to monetize that gas okay uh i'm going to really venture into things i don't know about a keystone pipeline was being built get shut down what is that that was an oil pipeline Okay, so that's oil, that's not natural gas. Are there natural gas pipelines that are controversial or people have tried to either build or shut down and there ends up being kind of like, I guess, maybe intellectual battles over them or political battles? I mean, whenever you build a pipeline, you have to get right of ways. You have to have massive amounts of capital to do so. There's the administrations in recent years, bipartisan, have been like cracking down on it because there's a lot of old pipelines out there that are leaking methane. And so from an operating standpoint, a regulatory standpoint, there's a very high barrier to entry to build a pipeline. Okay, so we talked about dig a hole, oil and gas. Then we're now talking about transportation of both oil and gas. But ultimately, the transportation is going somewhere. Like the point is not just to like drive around in a truck. It is to get it eventually somewhere. And so the consumers of oil are pretty well understood. The consumers of natural gas, who are they normally?
Starting point is 00:09:35 Yeah. So, uh, for instance, fertilizer, massive amount of natural gas, uh, is used to create fertilizer, um, heating, uh, home heating devices. Now we're moving away towards electrifying all of that, uh, and then natural gas power plants. So I think a massive amount, uh, like 40, 50% of Texas is powered off natural gas. It's super efficient, super clean relative to all the other fossil fuels. Uh, and so that's where a massive amount of power comes from on that side of things. And is it fair to think about – so take Texas as an example. They're going to drill for the oil. There's economic incentives to do it.
Starting point is 00:10:07 The world runs on oil, right? And so rather than flare this asset by being able to consume it, you're really just allowing the oil and gas companies to understand they're turning what would be trash, right, or kind of waste into a revenue stream, which they're incentivized to do. but you almost need the oil and gas and the infrastructure to fit into the consumption and like the local economy as well is that like a fair framework to you yeah that's good what we kind of trying to we try and make a lot of analogies with these old producers uh the first one we start off is calling it a digital midstream or a digital pipeline there's a market for your gas and we can sell it here's the amount of revenue per unit of gas you would make got it now the flared gas problem bad news uh you all show up and uh you all being the mining industry in
Starting point is 00:10:59 general but also obviously uh gig energy uh as well and the idea is hey don't burn the gas don't transport it away like we will consume it right here so rather than try to get it to a fertilizer plant try to get it to homes or whatever you're going to go on site you're going to consume it for bitcoin mining that sounds like ah like the holy grail uh what is that actually entailing what's going on when you show up like maybe start with you go to an oil and gas company you say hey you got gas we want it yep walk me through the process actually getting infrastructure in place so you can consume it on site yeah so the biggest thing because everyone's going after the cheapest form of energy that's why we go after flare gas the drawback with flare bitcoin mining is the fact
Starting point is 00:11:42 that's so capital-intensive up front. You have to buy a natural gas generator, so a reciprocating engine or a turbine that takes in gas, combusts it, turns a generator, and puts out electricity. Then you have to put in the modular data centers. The nice thing is you don't have to have any sort of transformers
Starting point is 00:11:56 because you're creating your own voltage. You don't have these massive voltage outputs. How much is the machine to make the electricity? Usually ranges from $250,000 to half a million a megawatt. Okay, so these are compared to setting up a restaurant that's way more expensive than most of the machinery that goes into that. All right. And then the modular data center, how big are they? How much do those usually cost?
Starting point is 00:12:16 Yeah. So, and to preface this, so we have a manufacturing facility. We have about 20,000 square feet of manufacturing in Texas. We manufacture the natural gas generators in-house and we manufacture the containers in-house. Not necessarily because we can do it so much cheaper, but because we don't have the COVID excuse of timelines. So, we are in charge of our own deployment schedules and we're not relying on other people. The data centers themselves, they're usually around 60,000 to 100,000 a megawatt so those are actually oh per megawatt okay all right and when you set these up can you set up uh one of these combustion engines uh and like one data center and you just make it as big as you want or is it something where there's like
Starting point is 00:12:55 a ratio that you need a certain amount of uh the modular data centers per engine or whatever yeah usually what we do is we do one-to-one one generator powers one data center um there's a lot of things that go on the electrical engineering side of stuff and the fuel input and then all these variables and so that if you have one-to-one ratio that's usually best how many machines can go in the modular data center usually we do anywhere from 320 to 400 okay and given current prices now let's just do a little math exercise it's public math forgive us if we make mistakes uh let's call 400 machines given current difficulty and price sitting around twenty thousand dollars what are two grand per day it's about sixty thousand i'm sorry two grand for a computer you're asking
Starting point is 00:13:36 revenue okay so the the uh the price of the machine is about two grand so really you're in two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the engine you're in about let's call it sixty to a hundred k for the actual data center itself and then you're in about eight hundred thousand dollars for all the machinery so if we add all that up public math call it 1.2 1.3 million dollars somewhere in that ballpark yep how much revenue can it drive today so right now with specific bitcoin prices you're gonna be generating 30 petahash market rate it's gonna be 72 bucks so right around sometimes yeah so like around 200 like two grand a day two thousand yeah about two thousand twenty five hundred a day okay so it's like sixty thousand dollars uh every single
Starting point is 00:14:15 month yep and so year and a half give or take basically kind of payback period but that's with bitcoin at a twenty thousand dollar price point and most of these guys uh being the oil and gas companies do they understand uh hold the bitcoin on the balance sheet or are they basically trying to mine bitcoin at the oil uh kind of head uh oil head i think is the right terminology i don't know maybe not uh or and they're trying to sell it for cash flow so it is very hard to get oil and gas companies comfortable with bitcoin sometimes they're comfortable with it sometimes low level management is but then some like usually goes up the chain and then some cc guy shoots it down the old people yeah the old people yeah um experience is how we like to call it around here so there's
Starting point is 00:14:57 two ways we structure bitcoin mining getting on right i'm sure you saw exxon getting into oil and gas on the bitcoin mining side they did not actually mine the bitcoin themselves they just had a gas purchasing agreement so they sold the gas to a bitcoin miner for a certain amount that was below market rate why is that controversial and and let me give some context here i saw the news uh i may or may not have known that uh there was a pilot going on previously uh but i thought it was like one machine you know like i didn't put a lot of kind of weight behind it i saw the news and i was like oh obviously everyone's gonna be like duh this is so smart the reaction was like very controversial the bitcoiners loved it and there's a bunch of people who were basically like
Starting point is 00:15:38 exxon is the devil and like why are they doing this if they're just selling the gas it almost felt like maybe like there was a morality being assigned to like who the consumer was yeah i think it's somewhere along those lines and then you have the generalized like bitcoin uses too much energy right debate and i think it just comes from lack of education personally okay is it controversial that they were doing this i i the echo chamber i'm in with bitcoiners and oil and gas guys it was not controversial okay so all they're doing is they're just selling gas that they may have otherwise flared or sold to another customer to a bitcoin miner and the miner is mining uh but they're keeping the bitcoin being the miner not excellent and the thing is these publicly traded
Starting point is 00:16:18 oil and gas companies especially exxon right they have esg mandates where like people are taking their revenues and dividing it by the amount of flare gas you have right and looking all these different metrics and then scoring them and docking these guys and so they are under very specific mandates to come down and like get rid of all flaring volumes we know publicly traded companies that like one one particular project we're able to come out and service they dug a pit in the ground and flared the gas like below surface and then covered it up with all this technology wait wait rewind this hold on hold on in an effort to still continue to flare the gas but not let anyone know they were doing it they basically built an underground bunker and were flaring it
Starting point is 00:16:59 under the ground not like but it wasn't covered but yeah i mean they dug like a big old pit in the ground and so it was exposed but it was below the surface so that sunlight in and everything like because they're in a really small town and so they didn't want all these people around there everyone knows who the company is they didn't want to get a bad rap and like they're under a very strict mandate from execs and so where did the gas go they flared it they're flaring it but it's into the sky yeah but it's just you can't see it you can't see the flare so like it's kind of like if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it did they did it really fall jesus yeah uh is that a common practice that i was very surprised when i heard that okay so and keep in mind i don't come
Starting point is 00:17:34 from the oil and gas industry my business partner he's third generation oil and gas so any um knowledge of oil and gas that i seem to have i just learned it from him that's fair i'm gonna learn from you so like that's like i'm fifth generation oil and gas i guess um if uh if you think about the flaring component if they have to get rid of flaring being the oil and gas companies uh and there is this solution why have we not seen every single oil and gas company like rush out and get as many of these contracts signed as possible and then turn around the public markets back oh look we're like these eco-friendly warriors and look at how smart we are we've figured out a plan to get rid of all of our flooded gas?
Starting point is 00:18:10 Most, I'd say like 60 to 80% of oil and gas, like publicly traded oil and gas companies have had some sort of Bitcoin mining pilot project. They will not talk about it though. Why? I don't know. There's some sort of perception with Bitcoin, whether it's the supposed criminality of it,
Starting point is 00:18:28 the energy consumption, fake money, like there's all this stigma surrounding it and they don't want to deal with it. Are you allowed to say the other companies who have pilots? i can't no okay well see now you won't say it either uh let's just jump to the big dog aramco uh i keep seeing everyone's talking about that and they're like aramco is going to do bitcoin mining my understanding uh again this is a rumor because they're already piloting stuff they're
Starting point is 00:18:54 already trying stuff uh but let's say hypothetically they came out and they publicly said we are going to do this they i believe are the largest oil and gas kind of energy company They're the largest company in the world. Okay. What would be the impact if they publicly kind of stood behind doing this type of effort? I think from the American side, it wouldn't have a lot of impact. It would not. Yeah, from the oil and gas companies because it's just different cultures.
Starting point is 00:19:16 You have Vision, like 2030, I think it is, where they're trying to diversify out of their oil and gas assets. What better way than to take your oil and gas assets and get Bitcoin into the kingdom from my personal perspective, from a financial side of things. but uh internationally though i think it would have some like pretty cool implications if they're doing that at scale why would the american companies not care if a romco said they were doing it um like it doesn't provide like uh i think when paul tudor jones and stanley druckenmiller were like we're buying bitcoin there's like career risk removed for wall street would a romco you think because it's just not an american company yeah i think it's yeah more along the american company line of things it's just not within the culture subset now i
Starting point is 00:19:55 might be wrong but like to me it wouldn't be like that's not the equivalent of like apple coming out and saying like we think bitcoin is good publicly right like the same amount of implications that would have is there a oil and gas company in america that you think would have the like paul tudor jones stanley druckenmiller effect if they came out and said they were doing it yeah i think if exxon mobil would like owned it and was like no no we're not selling the gas we're using it here's the operations here's what it is and like publicly pushing it i think that would have a lot of people like going huh yeah but they're kind of like hesitant yeah yeah but it seems like the open secret in the oil and gas industries everyone's trying it you cannot have a conversation
Starting point is 00:20:28 today about natural gas without talking about bitcoin yeah do we think russia's doing this like as a nation but just they got a lot of natural gas they're exporting right like and again i am not an expert on oil or natural gas uh but i would think that if you are a surplus or if you have a surplus when you're exporting a lot uh sure you can make money doing that and they have the pipelines all stuff but like if you figure out a way to very profitably consume it on site you probably will at least like run the math oh yeah and the thing is too russia and uh has some of the most largest amount of flare gas in the world they have these massive um natural gas treatment facilities so that's where you take the methane and you strip out because
Starting point is 00:21:09 it's natural gas so it's not pure methane there's propane ethane butane and so in these processes there's just so much extra waste and so they're flaring like hundreds of megawatts centralized facilities in russia and you can see it like one satellite now when you say centralized uh they're going in there drilling in all these places they're getting the natural gas they're bringing it to a central facility and they're lighting it on fire they're treating it and then they have this extra amount of gas that they don't really want because they're going after another subsect of the gas and they just have these massive flares going on and so rather than flare mine and like you're rich and and that's the biggest like drawback and complaint about
Starting point is 00:21:47 flare gas bitcoin mining is it's fragmented you have all these different like one or five megawatt ten megawatt locations all over the place you can't have a centralized 100 megawatt facility like you could on grid and like that would be an instance of having massive scale so russia has this centralized component does america do we not have these centralized facilities no we don't we're pretty efficient on in terms of treating the gas and making sure we pick up every drop got it and so if this became more prevalent in the oil and gas industry do you think people would be incentivized to build the centralized facilities absolutely it just well so no so we have the centralized facilities it's just when we're treating the gas we take up everything we're
Starting point is 00:22:25 super efficient with oh got it so we're not we don't actually at the centralized facilities we don't need to burn it because we're using everything yeah we're extremely efficient russia everything like that they're kind of lackadaisical got it and so the only reason why we're flaring is because we don't want to move it at all it's not we don't get something out of the process yeah okay uh all of the miners that are publicly traded right now they all do not use flared gas or there's some that actually have flared gas facilities as well i don't know of any publicly traded bitcoin mining companies that use flared gas okay is there a size constraint you mentioned earlier 100 megawatts if there's only one to five megawatts like they are trying to go
Starting point is 00:23:07 bigger facilities is it a public market won't like this like what why do you think um there's this like very interesting thing that's happening in the mining space but the publicly traded miners aren't doing it yet i think it'll happen um it's just on the side it's so technically engineering intensive like it's super easy for an oil and gas guy to get into bitcoin mining but it is near impossible for a bitcoin miner to get into oil and gas why there's there's so different world like they're completely different you have safety concerns you have um like fr like fire resistant materials you have to wear on locations you have a natural gas generator that has 250 moving parts that will break and you have to maintain at all times it's not like driving your toyota camry
Starting point is 00:23:49 like there's so much that goes into it on the engineering side safety you're working with fuel systems that have a thousand psi of pressure that could kill you uh and so a bitcoin miner on grid all they do is they just plug into an outlet and negotiate a power contract like it's very different type of that's like the asset light it's not really asset light but it's the equivalent of like uber owns no cars yeah it feels like uh if you're not doing the actual oil and gas work then you kind of are just you know you're freeloading exactly yeah exactly you're still i'm joking your energy comes from natural gas you're just downstream of it um when you think of these facilities what is the maintenance like so you've gone out you you've got the uh generator you've
Starting point is 00:24:30 got the um data center you got the machines in there do you all have to have like a full-time person how many people per machine like how do you think about the maintenance of these to make sure that they're always producing capital yeah so we have a minimum threshold for our facilities and we always have two full-time staff per facility we have a full-time mechanic and we have a full-time um asic technician per se uh the mechanic is in charge of regularly checking up on the generators daily making sure everything's running smooth there's no smoke coming out right there's a lot of stuff that goes into it and we have a lot of data analytics that we read digitally making sure that we have a lot of preventative maintenance going into place there's so many
Starting point is 00:25:10 different like kpis and metrics that you need to pay attention to on this side of things to make sure you have consistent power production what's the smallest facility you all have built and what's the largest not by name but just like size wise like how many generators maybe um yeah generator wise it'd probably be around um one facility we have has about uh eight generators within a 10 square mile radius yeah i mean it's pretty big right yeah yeah so you're you're basically uh able to generate what sixteen thousand dollars a day give or take through eight generators yeah i mean it depends i mean we have varying amounts of generators based on the natural gas sizes but yeah i mean it's up there okay uh this is a side note but important um have you seen the viral video
Starting point is 00:25:50 of the guys uh drilling for oil and they've got the chain and they keep throwing it around yeah and people are like oh this is actually what like mastery and hard work looks like compared to like the laptop class. Uh, what, what is that just like a normal oil well? And like, that's what goes on in these, uh, facilities all the time. Yeah. I mean, I mean, um, again, I'm not all professional by any means, but, uh, you are taking pipe that's five, six inches in diameter and sticking it like 10,000 feet down into the earth, divvying it at an angle, going after a very specific pinpoint in the earth and hitting that. And now when you put these pipes together, like it's not one big piece right they're 20 foot long so then you got to twist them together
Starting point is 00:26:30 and now if you're going to be 10 000 feet in the air they got to make sure they're really twisted together so like there's all this stuff of like you got to use these massive chains uh it's like a very dangerous labor intensive process okay i wanted to uh elicit the visual of that specific video because the natural gas side is the same danger kind of griminess and and all that that you see in that video what are they doing there same thing just putting together the pipes or something else so in that video that you're referencing um they're they're they're twisting together these pieces of pipe that are going down in the earth like 10 000 feet deep and so they're taking these chains and it's called throwing chains and so you start
Starting point is 00:27:07 on that just sounds fucking cool it's wild it's wild uh it's super dangerous i mean like if you let the chain slip it'll break it back wow i mean you got like i mean these chains are like 300 pounds yeah yeah yeah so yeah they're called throwing chains you throw them up and then that you basically you walk the chain up and it twists it in a fashion that that cinches it together and it's like one last cinch on top of it of the and then and then you take the pipe and you stick it down the earth and you do it all over again and that and so what it's really doing is it's pulling the pipe down into the earth and there's another pipe that comes over you put you throw the chains right and then you just keep continue doing that process all the way 10 000
Starting point is 00:27:41 feet yeah jesus christ um we are all such and that's how your t-shirts made yeah this we're all such fucking losers that don't do that every day. Um, all right. So in that process, as the pipe is going down, is the oil coming up in just the one pipe or is oil and gas both coming up in the same pipes? Oh, now you're getting out of my league. I don't want to, Brent's watching this right now. Um, my business partner, from what I know, the oil there there's, there's kind of sections of pipe within each other. So oil flows through one and then like the outside of the gas flows up okay that makes sense um once we get up in uh uh i don't know reality yeah outside of the ground is there a world where people will start to use the oil on site to mine bitcoin or is it
Starting point is 00:28:26 just the gas just yes okay explain why uh i mean the the opportunity cost of using oil on economic basis for all these other purposes is far outweighed than like the marginal revenue you could make mining bitcoin really yeah so actually the gas is valuable because it's burn it and make nothing and destroy the environment uh or mine bitcoin so like that's a no-brainer it's like revenue versus essentially lost revenue um but the oil even if you were to be able to mine on site it's still more profitable to direct the oil to other use cases correct and i'm not even aware of like power production that's like powered off of raw crude oil like it has to be refined and go through all these massive facilities and so yeah there's there's too much opportunity and so i'm
Starting point is 00:29:09 assuming that means that there aren't like modular refining slash power production type things that they're putting at the wellheads no no oil refinery is like multi-billion dollar national security like pumping out it's like andrew carnegie like uh you know rockefeller jp morgan shit like wild i remember watching a documentary and being like wow it is amazing that uh rockefeller literally became a equivalent of a billionaire because he was like oh you don't want to put my oil on your train i will create pipelines and that was like a groundbreaking idea and that was a three dollar oil yeah whatever that was back then yeah but like that is really how so much of this industry has been built is like somebody faced a problem they had to figure out how to solve it so if we
Starting point is 00:29:50 fast forward to today one of the problems is the gas flaring what is your all's view in terms of how this plays out so like we know now kind of again uh i just got my crash course on like how it works if we look forward do we expect that every single oil and gas company will eventually not flare gas and they'll mine bitcoin will they just figure out something else to do with the gas like what does this look like going forward this episode is brought to you by unstoppable domains they've partnered with blockchain.com to create nft domain names ending in dot blockchain it's the perfect ending to show that you're a believer in a decentralized future the blockchain.com community can join a short wait list to get one for free at blockchain.com slash wait list slash
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Starting point is 00:31:12 of charts and protocol metrics. You can try Masari Pro today and listeners of this podcast will get 25% off the Masari Pro membership by visiting www.masari.io backslash pro and entering promo code POMP. Again, that's masari.io backslash pro and use promo code POMP. Navigate the market with confidence with Masari Pro. This episode is brought to you by Arculus. Arculus is the next generation crypto and NFT cold storage wallet that combines one of the world's strongest security protocols with the easiest to use form factor and app they have three-factor authentication and you can use your pin and arculus keycard along with biometrics they don't compromise your holdings by requiring a usb port charging or browser connections with arculus you're protected
Starting point is 00:31:59 from hackers and institutions freezing your access learn more today and buy it now at get GetArculus.com. You can use promo code POMP to save 15%. GetArculus.com. Use promo. GetArculus.com. Use promo code POMP. And remember, with Arculus, it's your keys, your crypto. The first part of that question to answer is the price of natural gas. So prior to 12 months ago, natural gas was at super depressed prices. It was at $2 per unit of gas, which is like basically nothing. Sometimes in the summers when there's not much demand, it was around a dollar. What was the Putin gas hike? What did it go to? Uh, up to like 10, $10. Yeah. 500%. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so I think we're sitting right now in six,
Starting point is 00:32:41 six to $8 and to have like a dollar price swing in this day and age was like wild back then it was 50%. And so a lot of the, so oil and gas, natural gas production and flaring started skyrocketing because of two reasons, more, more, more and more drilling and to depress natural gas prices. So basically we're, we're uncovering more natural gas through the drilling process, But we also can't make tons of money with it because it's so cheap. So therefore, it doesn't make sense for us to build the pipelines to get it. Exactly. Okay.
Starting point is 00:33:09 And now the pipelines. It's funny. Supply and demand. They call it the Permian Highway. So the Permian Highway is coming in. Everyone's trying to get these pipelines here because they want to get more for their gas. What is the Permian Highway? So the Permian Basin is Midland, Texas.
Starting point is 00:33:20 That's where that big region. Friday Night Lights. Exactly. And so that's where all the dinosaurs are hanging out back then. Is that real? Is that really what people think? No. No.
Starting point is 00:33:30 No, it's all from plants. It's all organic. So the actual – I lost my train of thought. Permian Highway. Permian Highway. Off the Permian – or through the Permian Basin? Permian Basin, yes. So everyone's trying to get pipelines in there.
Starting point is 00:33:44 And so there's localized – so natural gas in the Permian Basin goes for less than other places just because there's too much supply and not enough demand. And they can't get out of it. And so there's also another part of oil and gas where there's this low-hanging fruit. so you could have a drill a well and it may produce 90% oil and 10% gas everyone obviously went after that first well it's been like 10-15 years since all the fracking started and so now there's more and more the low hanging fruit's gone so there's more higher percentage of natural gas being produced
Starting point is 00:34:15 fracking the 30 second explanation fracking is the process of pumping sand to fracture rock that holds oil before fracking was invented we just went to sand formations and it flowed on its own the reason why saudi arabia is so rich is because they need no fracking they can drill a thousand feet into the ground which is super shallow for an oil well hit oil have no gas and like no water oh so these dudes are rich because not only do they have oil yeah but they don't
Starting point is 00:34:53 have the other stuff so they're like pure oil super pure super good yeah no they have gas but like the like we so we toured some people from saudi um at one of our sites and they were saudi's are interested in this yes they are um interesting we'll get to that in a second and they were fascinated by pump jack and so pump jack if you know is like a plunger it sucks the oil and gas out of the earth because it's using science and pressure to correct so then so there's not enough natural pressure for it to free flow so you have to get a plunger to suck it out in texas and they don't have they don't they were fascinated they're like oh we've seen these in the movies like it's just you just drill a hole well and it comes out on its own like and there's so much
Starting point is 00:35:31 built up pressure when they drill that it flows freely naturally there's almost none or very little natural gas or water or anything else and then going back to this fracking thing uh be i'm not an expert on saudi but like it looks like there's sand a lot of places so they don't have to go through rock as well correct so it's called shale formations and so there there's would be in sand formations in in american a lot of the bases that we found it's in shale or rock and so you split the rock open and the oil flows out why is it so controversial uh it's super energy intensive um there's a lot on the environmental fracking side with the water off take because you're pumping this water in it has to come back out and it's so we're using water to bust it or we're using sand
Starting point is 00:36:13 You're using sand and water and then blasting it in. Got it. Like almost like little bullets. Exactly. Yes. And so it's a very specific type of sand. So the oil men are at war with rocks to get to oil. That is, yes, factually correct.
Starting point is 00:36:26 Yes. No wonder the politicians hate it. I got it. They like to be at war. Yeah. Not to let other people fight wars. All right. So if the fracking process, once you get past the rock, it's the same thing though.
Starting point is 00:36:39 It's oil, gas, whatever's in there. um is there a difference in how much natural gas is found in shale versus uh good question so uh and that's that's why so shale uh when you frack it it there's something called a decline curve okay so there's a massive amount of gas that comes out in the first 18 months and then over that 18 months it's going to decline by about 90 does this have anything to do with like oil and vinegar separates so like oil and gas separates or something no uh it's just it's just purely on like uh like you open a carbonated drink it's super fizzy when you drink it and then by 24 hours later it's like pretty much gone got it and you can just tell me that was a dumb question
Starting point is 00:37:17 all right so you have that decline do you have the same decline in uh the rock when you're doing fracking so you know yeah so the decline curves happen from rock from sand it's usually much much less got it because it's not kind of pent up and built around okay and so so naturally if you're like okay we're gonna drill these old wells we're gonna have a massive amount of natural gas come on but then we know in 18 months it's going to be cut down by 90 we're not going to build the capacity for that mass amount of gas we're just going to flare it anyway yeah and just burn it and that's where a lot of this comes from okay um but i'm actually learning a lot here so this is very helpful uh you mentioned that the saudis came and checked this out i don't even know what to ask so
Starting point is 00:37:55 like what are the saudis doing why aren't they doing this not saying they're not um they're not not not saying yeah uh they're very very sophisticated i mean they have the largest oil and gas company in the world um they have a ton of flared gas they're um very economically incentivized too and then of course from mitigating the flaring side yeah is there a world where saudi says we are going to stop all gas flaring because we're going to mine bitcoin and we're going to beat the united states to being the environmentally friendly drillers i mean is that is that a race like space race like do we have like a uh stop environmental gas flaring race yeah i mean everyone's collectively so the world bank everyone is like working right now so the world bank like
Starting point is 00:38:37 puts out a ton of stuff on flare data i mean like they have satellites tracking the flares like i mean you can see volumes that's interesting why is the world bank so interested in this um i don't know that's good supposed to be a bank good question i don't know but they are very um very focused on that from an environmental perspective but but the general scientific community like consensus everyone agrees flare gas is bad okay yes yeah there's like that is not a controversial thing whatsoever okay and so like fossil fuel usage how much energy like all that stuff's up for debate but like everyone agrees that the flaring thing's bad and the i'm assuming the oil companies are just like yo dude like figure something out for us or like we have to do this
Starting point is 00:39:15 to get to the oil uh like what's their defense like i'm sitting there like if i'm an exxon executive and you know right now we have people who literally are like gluing themselves to concrete and you know using tomato juice or whatever on the artwork uh they're like stop oil you know stop drilling for oil like what is the defense of the oil industry as to why the gas flaring is happening or maybe like they haven't stopped doing it because they have to do it for to get to the oil yeah they have to get to the oil yeah and so they're so um yeah it's just they have to do it and there's not it's not illegal so there but there's some so well colorado flaring is illegal oh in colorado they said no flaring no flaring yes what this is very fascinating
Starting point is 00:39:51 so like when they said that what changed in the oil and gas industry you couldn't drill some wells interesting so or you have to delay the process for well for a pipeline to come in to suck up all the natural resources got it so this is like classic uh government intervention in a free market because they have other like ancillary interest in terms of the environmental stuff whatever uh did some companies just pull out from drilling at all or they're like no we'll lay the pipelines it'll just take us yeah it just takes way longer yeah so i mean but it messed up a lot of projects some people saw it come in um and then there's like a varying amount of regulation so for instance in north dakota they're like you can flare but you have to gather it all to one location and then
Starting point is 00:40:28 flare 20 wells on one site so like don't burn a hole in like the entire ozone just like put that bitch right up in one area it's from like a life perspective i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding i'm just imagining like the conversation between politicians who are not experts in oil and gas and the oil and gas executives and some politicians like literally like hey let's not burn the whole ozone let's just put it all in one area and we'll just put one hole like that's obviously better Yeah, that's funny. That's the first thing that comes to your mind. There's some politician on DM me on Twitter. Actually, that is exactly how the law came together.
Starting point is 00:41:00 All right. So let's talk about the Bitcoin mining component of this. Is there anything different outside of like the modular data centers and obviously the ability to take the natural gas and turn it into electricity? Is there anything different on the Bitcoin mining if it's flared gas or kind of mitigating flared gas? Or if I was just like in a normal data center or power plant or whatever? so the biggest thing is lead times and no need for transformers so big constraint in bitcoin mining community is you need transformer uh when you have your own generator you get to create your
Starting point is 00:41:32 own voltage and bitcoin mining uses a very specific voltage because all the computers are chinese it's 415 the other component of that is timelines you have these massive schedules with these public utilities to get connected you got to negotiate on the power pricing bitcoin mining on olwell like chuck it out you can turn on in two days like and you're in there's no one to adhere to you just turn it on make sure you have the air permit you're ready to go so it's the thing that i always tell people is it's a lot quicker and um a lot less nuanced in terms of the supply chains yeah and so what's the downside like if you were to argue there's a bunch of credits i've been no there's a lot of downsides obviously uh i think people know where i stand on this but to uh be
Starting point is 00:42:13 clear uh i think that mitigating flared gas with bitcoin mining is a good thing yes um but i have seen a lot of critics online who are yelling and screaming about all kinds of crazy stuff like what do you think are the fair critiques or the things that you're like no actually that's like a good point and there's trade-offs here and so we think it's a net positive to go do this but like we do agree that that's like a downside or a risk yeah i mean our goal is to reduce the emissions for the marginal barrels of oil we need during the energy transition so the how can somebody hate that exactly like you're like that's a good thing the side from that people often complain about is you're propping up the oil companies you're allowed you're giving them another stream of
Starting point is 00:42:50 revenue um that's one point i hear i don't necessarily agree with that because the amount of money you're making off this like flared gas relative to like a thousand barrels of oil is minute it's not going to move the needle for them at all how much like just ballpark a thousand barrels of oil that they're selling at like a hundred bucks to 80 bucks whatever it is and then you're doing that per day yep and then on the flared gas the flared gas or the non-flared gas that would have been flared yeah how much could they make off that maybe a thousand dollars a day uh so it's literally nothing like pennies yeah yeah it's the equivalent of like 12 barrels exactly and and and on the side from like methane like the big part of this is methane like every
Starting point is 00:43:31 like point of methane you mitigate it has 25 times the output impact just because it's so much more potent of a greenhouse gas so what's your guys like game plan you go to the companies you say like buy our equipment from us and like we'll help manage this and like we'll get you we'll get you in the mining game or do you show up and you're like hey uh you geniuses like just sell us the power at really cheap prices or sell us the gas at really cheap prices and then like well don't worry about what we're doing like we're just going to go over here and do our thing and then you're making a bunch of money so yeah we have two streams both of what you described so the first one is we will buy your gas
Starting point is 00:44:06 below market rate we'll be fully transparent with what you're doing because oil and gas guys are really smart so I know several people that were approached by Bitcoin mining guys
Starting point is 00:44:15 they thought it was such a good idea but the Bitcoin mining guys are trying to be secretive and they spun off their own companies and did it themselves I think I know
Starting point is 00:44:21 exactly the people you know so oil and gas guys are really really smart and clever and they're capitalists yes and they have access to a lot of capital they're used to
Starting point is 00:44:30 up and down markets so they get it so we're very transparent redneck rich is like the perfect sophisticated woman out there yeah yeah yeah rednecks are very sophisticated have you have you ever gone to like somebody lives in the country or redneck and he's got like traps and everything like do not fuck around but they but they have capital and they and also i think what's important is like they're also very business savvy as well like to your point about the sophistication and i talked to like guys all the time in the long guess
Starting point is 00:44:57 the the the very successful ones within two to three minutes of me explaining it sitting down for like 30 minutes like you they reiterate it back to me and they understand all the levers yeah of how to pull and how much is weird question but like uh when people think of oil and gas industry as they do most industries like oh they all believe the same type of things they all you know vote politically the same way they all have the same values and ethos obviously that's not true but there are generalizations is there something to do with like the ethos of bitcoin overlays very well with like the oil and gas community or is that uh an ignorant external view and like they don't care about that shit they're just like can i make money or not i would
Starting point is 00:45:32 say based on stereotypes with bitcoin and stereotypes of oil and gas folks there is like pretty significant overlap got there okay uh and to be clear like i've had many many conversations over the years uh firemen right even police officers like there's a there's a whole bunch of people who have certain generalizations about their profession uh and it tends to align very well with bitcoin and therefore they tend to be sympathetic to it and so oil and gas being one okay exactly um so you guys go you're like hey let's work together what do customers normally do do they want to have you guys do the operations and maybe just get like a revenue share or do they just want to sell you the gas and like they don't want to ever hear the word bitcoin correct
Starting point is 00:46:11 there's two so some like are like we don't want to mess with it it's too much money we don't trust it blah blah awesome great we'll buy your gas we'll buy it for this amount we'll have a gas purchasing agreement no different than you would sign with a midstream so we structure everything very familiar okay and then we manage everything put up all the capital take the gas mine the bitcoin and they never hear from us so in that scenario there's no upside for them outside of what they signed on the contract correct okay well but keep in mind there is significant upside on reducing emissions reducing their carbon footprint from wall street perspective like i mean it has a lot of implication we've talked to oil and gas companies they don't even care if they make money
Starting point is 00:46:45 sometimes because they need to get rid of the black eye of course of course yeah uh do you know who Vivek Ramaswamy is? I don't. The Strive Asset Management. He writes letters to Exxon, to the shareholders, and he'll be like, I am one of your shareholders.
Starting point is 00:47:00 I do not think that you should be worried about these ESG bullshit. I think your job and your responsibility to shareholders is to make money, right? And so supposedly, him and I spent almost four hours together. The executives love that type of approach
Starting point is 00:47:17 because now they say, hey all these big financial organizations we get it you guys want us to do this esg thing we also have other investors who do not care about that they just want us to make money and so what it does is it provides like a balance and again they're not going to do all one or the other but like it provides for more of kind of a rational view it seems like what you guys are doing here is like you're almost providing a a solution that they can then go brag about to wall street and be like hey we have actually found a way to mitigate our flaring of gas like we're good correct right We try to be very pragmatic ESG of like, we will handle it.
Starting point is 00:47:51 We'll reduce carbon emissions by this amount and we'll help you and we'll make money at the same time. Like, so if you just buy the gas, that's clear. What about this other option? Like I'm assuming this is like more like a partnership where like you guys are going to do the operations, but then give them some of the Bitcoin or the profits. Correct.
Starting point is 00:48:06 So we have a full scale manufacturing facility where we manufacture all this in-house specific to Bitcoin mining and oil and gas. Sometimes we have oil and gas producers just flat out buy all of our equipment and do it themselves like they are smart enough to figure it out i say like bitcoin mining like you don't like want a teenager on site we could have a 20 year old on site like oh yeah me and i don't know if you know jason williams like yeah we figured it out we're dumb like it's not that hard like it's very easy you plug a power cord in an ethernet cord in and then like type in an ip address like you're done yeah like it's not that hard by the way the typing part
Starting point is 00:48:37 that was kind of confusing at first but the plugging in like we figured that out and so like like the problem is is like it's so like new yeah like anyone who mines bitcoin sounds like they're a genius yeah yeah yeah and they're not i mean i felt like a genius you feel like a genius your grandma's so proud of you but like in reality you're plugging in the ethernet power cord so when you do uh more of this like partnership thing are you guys mining bitcoin like giving them a percentage of it sometimes the contracts are structured such would you give them bitcoin or cash it depends we're open to either um usually they probably want cash yeah usually it's cash yeah um it's interesting because uh if they get into the game the oil and gas producers
Starting point is 00:49:16 and they start to mine themselves then they will be forced with the question of do we keep it in bitcoin or do we put it in cash and one of the things we know is if you can remain solvent for long periods of time putting it on the balance sheet in bitcoin usually ends up being a pretty good decision correct and michael saylor's done a good job of helping out with like on the publicly traded companies like there's a lot that goes into owning that bitcoin asset and so he's kind of created the framework um no i've tried to present to some of these oil and gas companies they're publicly traded and like it just is never really well received um yeah you're you're you're like the worst person in the world to go talk to them you're like hey so this esg thing which most
Starting point is 00:49:53 of them i don't think you even really enjoy talking about like we have a potential solution but we're going to introduce this new issue that you're gonna have to answer questions about and i could see them just being like all right like can you just buy our gas and oil and gas too is very um seniority based oh interesting it's not like tech anything like that so it's like very much like it's like the ceo is like been around for a while oh yeah these are all like and it's very much like top down like so the fact that you would have something like a 20 year old in the space talking about something to work with it is like very a hard hump to get over in the first place are there oil and gas companies that are being started by young people with this
Starting point is 00:50:26 specific purpose to mine bitcoin yeah no so like the vertical integration really is what you guys have done which is like uh we're miners but we will on the manufacturing side do it that's the vertical integration nobody has yet been able to connect like we own the power plants and we own the mining uh and like we want to be the boss correct yeah exxon mobil has not like manufactured something yourself and done in-house yeah well i wouldn't expect them to do it but the opposite like have miners gone and tried to buy the power plants yet like by like are you so so Are you referencing on-grid or off-grid right now? Either one, right?
Starting point is 00:51:03 I'm pretty sure that I've seen miners go and buy on-grid power plants. But have we seen miners go try to get the actual like oil operations, oil and natural gas operations control? I know a couple of Bitcoin miners that have a P5 operating license in the state of Texas, which is what you need.
Starting point is 00:51:20 What is P5? It's your driver's license to operate a oil well in Texas. Interesting. I've seen that. And they are actively operating them? or they just have i know guys that like are bitcoin centric that got a license they're drilling for a while and and using it to mine bitcoin that's fucking cool yeah wow it's a little bit different than our mission but like it is like crazy on the vertical integration
Starting point is 00:51:43 side like what people are yeah because there's monetization to make you know of course um when you think about what you all are doing tell me more about like the business and kind of what you guys think is your specific or like unique value to kind of keep pushing forward so to date we've mitigated a quarter billion cubic feet of natural gas that would have been flared or vented. Our goal is to go in with, because have the highest amount of uptime, because having good uptime on off-grid
Starting point is 00:52:10 is extremely hard and difficult. We've managed to really show that we're very competent on that side from operating and then continue to expand on the international front. So we have a JV down in Argentina that we're going to be kicking off pretty soon and then some other international plays where it's the Permian Basin,
Starting point is 00:52:29 but all the more there's a ton of gas and then less and less infrastructure just because of less capital in the space. Yeah, so really what you all want is you want areas with huge pockets of oil and natural gas. You want very little infrastructure in place. You want people who are sophisticated and intelligent and have capital.
Starting point is 00:52:46 And then because it's just the big- And we don't necessarily want that, right? But it is there, but that's what we're looking for. That's the entry point to the market, right? That's the entry point, yeah. So it's there and then we're here to fix the problem. Yeah, exactly. and and really if you were to overlay okay like the best places for you all to go in and get
Starting point is 00:53:00 started also happens to overlay with the exact areas where there's probably the most flaring on like a percentage basis and like where there's flares there's a lot of flares because they all have the same issue geographically man it almost is like bitcoiners are solving a real problem it is um what can people who listen to this or watch this um what can they do to help is it like an education thing is it like come work at these companies how can they participate um i think it would be generalized education in the space of like and you did a great job asking like very nuanced questions dumb questions but i mean but they're like like you you kind of intuitively understood like the client curves right those are like interesting things you know what i did this
Starting point is 00:53:38 morning yeah i googled oil and gas that's where i started and then i saw a diagram and i still don't understand how the pipes go in and then there's the angle it's crazy and i was like holy shit these people are smart and then like yeah bitcoin miners are like arrogant enough that they think they can't mind bitcoin it's like no they don't need you like i don't think people understand when i saw the diagram i literally was like so you put a straight pipe into the ground but somehow it ends up at an deviating it yeah and you're getting like a formation that's like not very big yeah i was very they do it perfect yeah all right so what can people do after they listen to this um it's a good question i i would recommend um looking i mean seeing flares in the areas people
Starting point is 00:54:25 reach out to all this time we've had great opportunities of saying hey oh my goodness i saw flare here like can you help me like mitigate it sometimes we can't sometimes we can um oh you got like flare hunters yeah yeah i have people all the time being like hey my grandparents they own they own the mineral lights for this they've had this flare they hate it like can you come help us oh interesting so even like individual families or whatever they've got some of these because they've got the land yeah they got the land mineral rights in texas yeah so it's like not uncommon for that to happen with us yeah uh and that's pretty fucking cool it is cool uh oh yeah my grandparents just have an oil drill and they're flaring gas they call it mailbox money
Starting point is 00:54:58 really yeah mailbox money so they're just selling it off and the oil company just sends them a check in the mail every month for the royalties that they own oh got it so they're not actually operating no no no no yeah it's just on their land got it uh yeah i mean that's probably pretty lucrative it is yeah it's a good yeah home studying was a good thing back then all right so if you uh no flare no flare reach out reach out where can we send people to do that uh you can go to our website gigenergy.com uh we have a submission form for just contacting we even have a phone number so uh someone will pick up uh it's like the ghost school there's hotline well we're yeah it's oil and gas so we try and be like super pragmatic down to earth easy to contact and like
Starting point is 00:55:39 We get it. How can we help? Yeah. All right. So you got Flare Hunters now. We're going to drastically increase the size of the Flare Hunter community. Is there anything else that people could do that could be helpful? Understand Bitcoin. Understand that energy usage is not necessarily a bad thing in general. Like the R-squared with GDP relative to energy consumption is very, very high.
Starting point is 00:56:00 And that's for a reason. So don't feel guilty about using energy. and then understand why Bitcoin using a relatively small amount of energy might be a good thing. I have yet to see any of the eco-friendly people advocate for stopping the use of refrigerators or washers and dryers.
Starting point is 00:56:22 But my favorite one a couple of years ago, I was trying to think to myself, what's something absurd that consumes more energy than we all think that you could basically sub out Bitcoin and put this in because they were like, oh, Bitcoin consumes more energy than like whatever country. And I remember like Googling around,
Starting point is 00:56:39 it took me like way longer than I want to admit. And then all of a sudden I came across this random article on a website that kind of looked like, I don't know if this is real or not. And they said Christmas lights. Yes. And so then I would like do some more research or whatever. And I was like, oh, Christmas lights use more energy
Starting point is 00:56:53 than some countries. Like we should stop Christmas. Yeah, just quit it. And I forget where I said it, the first time i said it the reaction i was like home run like for sure that is the one that like yeah like this sounds ridiculous right because uh that has no economic uh value or whatever it's entertainment yep but like but it's like it's just yeah there's nobody's arguing that like your life is better because of christmas lights you may be happier you may have and that's a good use of
Starting point is 00:57:22 energy you're willing to pay the bill and there you go i don't think that we should stop christmas lights you know another good one what hot water hot water so like you need for like washing dishes and stuff but like 30 of your electricity bill is usually because of hot water so just because you want to have a warm shower in the morning yeah that's where all the energy if you're soft yeah yeah i mean that's exactly what it is yeah we we should get rid of the soft people and then we'll have less energy as we joke though but like uh dryers that was that was the one i forget somebody who told me it but they were like yeah like you need the actually you don't even need the washer really right but like you could make an argument that uh dryers are simply consuming
Starting point is 00:58:01 energy because people are too lazy to be patient to just let the clothes dry outside yeah right like go to other countries like yeah people are whatever uh and really washing clothes as well but like okay we'll give you the washer but like no dryer type thing um and then refrigeration is the one that cracks me up right it's like just salt your food yeah what are you guys talking about you don't understand yeah we get it um but i i think that the narrative is changing like you know maybe the last thing is just like do you feel like the pendulum is kind of swinging in favor of uh there was a narrative that narrative probably is not rooted in as many facts and data points as originally it was perceived and so it's kind of swinging back towards uh what would be
Starting point is 00:58:42 maybe like a pro bitcoin mining argument or no oh no no i think it's gonna get worse and i think it's like because it's a very it's a it's a factual statement and it's hard to understand and so um yeah i think it's going to get worse and worse i think it's gonna be the number one narrative that bitcoin uses too much energy and like if you think something's like has zero intrinsic value of course you think any marginal amount of energy going towards it's going to be waste so the inherent problem is not that it should be using x amount of energy it's the fact that they don't see any value in it and that's okay i understand that they'll eventually come around to it but until like the majority of the population comes around to the fact that
Starting point is 00:59:15 they put some value into Bitcoin, there's always going to be the energy argument, in my opinion. It's been the single most disciplined monetary policy for sure over the last three years, over the last 14 years. I know. And it doesn't waver.
Starting point is 00:59:30 900 Bitcoin a day. All right. Where can we find you on the internet? I'm on Twitter at Lohstro, L-O-H-S-T-R-O-H. That's the easiest way to find me. I really appreciate this. I know I ask dumb questions, but I did learn a lot.
Starting point is 00:59:42 uh and my hope is that people who uh listen to this and understand now gas flaring uh shale versus fracking uh and many other shale versus sand sand yeah sorry i see like how stupid i am um but uh people who uh kind of learn about this stuff like this is uh i don't know this is like the um appetizer like go learn yes yeah this is just the surface yes and and uh as much as i joke around i started googling with oil and gas which i did uh very quickly i got pretty like in the weeds. And what was fascinating to me is how much good information there actually was. Like there's a lot of explainer content and things like that online, uh, that are pretty easy to consume for somebody who has very little knowledge about it. So, uh, hopefully people could do that.
Starting point is 01:00:24 And if not, then they can reach out to you and you can give them a individual crash course. Absolutely. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive
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Starting point is 01:01:12 and I'll see you all for the next episode.

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