The Wolf Of All Streets - Powell Comments | China FUD | US Bitcoin Mining Crackdown? | Crypto Town Hall

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

Crypto Town Hall is a daily X Spaces hosted by Scott Melker, Ran Neuner & Mario Nawfal. Every day we discuss the latest news in crypto and bring the biggest names in the space to share their insight. ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. USE CODE ‘2MONTHSOFF’ WHEN VISITING MY LINK.  👉 https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEK DAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/    ►► OKX Sign up for an OKX Trading Account then deposit & trade to unlock mystery box rewards of up to $10,000!  👉  https://www.okx.com/join/SCOTTMELKER ►►NGRAVE This is the coldest hardware wallet in the world and the only one that I personally use. 👉https://www.ngrave.io/?sca_ref=4531319.pgXuTYJlYd ►►THE DAILY CLOSE BRAND NEW NEWSLETTER! INSTITUTIONAL GRADE INDICATORS AND DATA DELIVERED DIRECTLY TO YOUR INBOX, EVERY DAY AT THE DAILY CLOSE. TRADE LIKE THE BIG BOYS. 👉 https://www.thedailyclose.io/   ►►NORD VPN  GET EXCLUSIVE NORDVPN DEAL  - 40% DISCOUNT! IT’S RISK-FREE WITH NORD’S 30-DAY MONEY-BACK GUARANTEE. PROTECT YOUR PRIVACY! 👉 https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets    Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io   Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor.  Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

hey guys how are you hey how's it going lawyer did you see that um the trailer for the for the killer whales you see that because i thought yeah i saw you engaged well it looks uh yeah you're you're you're looking badass on that mary the production you're uh i always look badass but i appreciate a compliment boy the production quality the production quality is impressive though yeah it's uh and they've created so much hype for it be keen yeah i was surprised it looks like you guys are really like you could be like you're taking on the the the name that i won't mention the i don't know if that show is still around anymore but like it looks like it's as high quality as what you'd expect to see on you know network are you talking about are you talking

about shark tank or another show yeah that's the one there was another one too dragons den i mean shark tank was the better one i think of the two yeah no dragons den was relatively boring the dragons then was the british and canadian one i've seen i used to be obsessed with shark tank and dragons then years and years ago but dragons den is relatively boring a bit more value based like it's more more interesting more realistic shark tank was more entertaining i prefer the entertaining one but yeah they uh yeah i don't know if i'd watch cuban now though yeah cuban we should get cuban on this one uh but maybe in the bull market in the bull market everyone cares in the bear market i made a post that i'm not sure if you saw the news as well there was uh apparently andrew tate who you know

i like andrew i like his team you know i've talked a lot to his team he's been on my show but he he was looking at launching a coin and he used to on crypto for a long time so i made a post saying in a bull market everyone cares it's not only andrew everyone cares about crypto in this bear market everyone starts even people in crypto start to criticize crypto it's like the same thing uh time and time again it's almost like a cycle it. It is. It is. It's the same cycle. Same, same. What is it? What did I say?

Same shit. Same shit, different cycle. But I think with the, with the, when this show, when the bull market kicks in, I think there'll be more high profile names that would want to come in as judges, which should be fun. But yeah, it should be. If anyone listening, there is a, let me probably pin it. There's, I think there's, I put my pinned my tweet, and it's a tag there.

And you can check them out. That's the Killer Whales show. It's a reality show that was filmed in L.A. We filmed it whenever the mutiny happened. So it was literally the day, two days or a day after the mutiny, the day hours after the mutiny, I took a flight to L.A. to go film it. So if the Russian mutiny took longer, I might have missed the filming. But you should definitely check it out, everyone.

I think it's going to be a killer show. I've seen the preview of, I think I've seen, no, I've seen the entire first episode and it beat my expectations. So congratulations to the team there. But I'm going to kick it off. Dennis and Ron, it's a pleasure to have you both because I will talk a bit about regulation today. And good to have Zach and William here as well. But before kicking that off, Jason, how are you? Jason, are you there?

Yeah, I'm good. I'm just driving along at the moment, so it takes me a second to get to the mic. All is well. How's it going? Good, good, mate. Good. I just want to kick it off with getting your thoughts on the market. It's been a while.

We haven't had you on the show um just getting your thoughts on the market you know what you know the halving coming in the the problems the the troubles we're seeing in china and equities you're seeing all-time records i would love to get your thoughts on what we could expect in crypto over the next few days and weeks or not days and weeks over the next few weeks and months it's hard enough doing a few hours yeah so i mean obviously i mainly follow the bitcoin uh story more than anything else and uh you know the whole thing right now of course is the etfs that's the main narrative that's stealing everything pretty much and overriding all other considerations.

Obviously, we've got this ruling on Friday about this, the Grayscale ruling with this extra potential sell pressure. This could be interesting to see how this is going to unfold. None of us know, of course, at the moment exactly what's going to happen. What ruling are you referring to? Sorry, i must have missed it go ahead this is the uh the the sale sell uh pressure on friday and you just read the details this morning i've been somewhat distracted i have to be honest by the um the craig wright case which i've been following live um on because the trial's happening right now so um it's quite interesting to watch um so this was the uh sorry not ftx it was genesis so um someone probably out there has listened to this and got the detail better than me because i

say i'm driving right now so i can't look at the numbers but there is uh considerable uh potential cell pressure here so uh the the effect of that is going to be interesting. I think it's $1.6 billion. Is there someone here who can just correct me? Yeah, we've got Zach, Lloyd, and Preston, or maybe Dennis. Anyone else could offer more context on this? No, I think no one's been following the story. I'll check it out. Yeah, I mean, I don't have the number, but I've got a tacit understanding of what's going on. He's got to sort of finally prove that he's Satoshi,

which is going to be tough, I think. Can you just give us... He has to prove... Craig Wright, for anyone that's relatively new in crypto, Craig Wright is a pretty controversial figure. He claims to be Satoshi. I can probably say that most people disagree with this

statement, but maybe, Laurie, give us a quick overview of what decision we're expecting over the next few days. Yeah, so I know there's a trial going on, and I only know generally that he's been sort of going around suing everybody for using and changing his software and for claiming that anything he can do that tries to attract some sort of settlement on the basis that he is Satoshi.

Everybody knows that he's not. I'd be willing is Satoshi. Everybody knows that he's not. I'd be willing to bet everything that I have that he's not. It doesn't make any sense. But I think, you know, this put up or shut up will be nice to see. I unfortunately don't have more detail about what exactly it looks like in the case right now. Well, I can tell you it's live now. I've been given core to to the live link and i've been uh you know i'm supposed to dip in and have it on in the background but it's become like a netflix

series that you can't stop binge watching um so it's quite an incredible thing to see but yeah the the basic principle is that satoshi's kind of sorry that's a terrible slip craig wright has kind of put himself into a bit of a corner here because he's been using the law backed by Calvin Ayer, you know, his billions to threaten anyone who uses the Bitcoin white paper or his intellectual property. You know, the whole Bitcoin, you know, system essentially he claims is his. And all the way through, he's been able to crush people with this vast financial backing he has but this time he's got a problem because he actually has to now prove he is satoshi and that's the kind of twist here and of course this is extraordinarily difficult for anyone to do but especially craig right because it turns out all the evidence he submitted to court is in fact has in fact been manipulated and even his own side

agrees this as well so we're now in a rather bizarre situation where this trial is starting today actually starts today in London and he has now got really no documentation to rely on whatsoever and really no witnesses so it is a bizarre situation always as bizarre as the offer he made via the times that's the uk times last week where we offered to settle out of court to copa um by uh saying that he would grant a license in perpetuity um for the bitcoin protocol if everyone agreed that he was Satoshi. I'm not making this up. You haven't seen this. It's just incredible. This is going to make an amazing film. But that's where we are right now. I strongly recommend keeping an eye on this, guys, because it's

fascinating. Yes. And before going to premise, just get your first premise, first time on stage, general market update david joe i'm mainly you david actually joe as well i think you both could come up and discuss the china situation as well just give us a bit more insight into this and whether we should be worried you know we're seeing equities i come up with the figure is a big chunk of the the tops talks uh trading was halted today i'm not sure if that's true but if you can come on just give us a quick overview there but premise um just give us an update on how the charts are looking and what we'd expect to see yeah man i appreciate you having me up here mario uh love a chance to come up here i hope everyone's doing all right you know bitcoin

opened the year 42 so that's kind of what we're watching you know above 42 you're good below it you got to sweep yearly low so you know that's kind of where you got to look at it i think the most important thing is the on-chain metrics uh solana has been booming. Every time I check on-chain metrics for Solana every day, 24-hour volume NFT is up 66 percent. I think about 60, 80 percent today. So a lot of people see price and they're hating it. But on-chain metrics are flying. You're seeing a lot of activity on-chain. I can't wait till we get better metrics to determine which blockchains are best based off those type of transactions versus, hey, where's price today? So I like the market, man. I know a lot of people scared. Everyone says Bitcoin go to 400K, but they're scared because it drops four or 5K. I mean, what are we doing, guys? We've been in this market for a while now. So yeah, above 42, you're good to go. But you see, we're dancing right on that level. So do not get it twisted. This is a key level. You leave this and you reject 42. I think we're puking and sweeping that yearly low, though. That'd be the next target.

And what do you expect to see in the next few months prior to the halving and post-halving? I mean, you're going to see – I was watching Rand's show. He's talking about a consolidation period. Again, I'm not a charts guy, and predicting what the markets will do is probably one of my biggest weaknesses. He's talking about consolidation during that period. You wouldn't expect know, obviously the market is pretty much steady, but you'd expect certain tokens to do well based on different narratives. What can we expect when it comes to Bitcoin and altcoins over the next few months? Well, you know, you got the Chinese New Year coming up, man, that's big. Asia is huge when it comes to trading volume. So that's why I could see that little sweep if we were to do a sell-off,

but I'm going to come on as having guys. I'm pretty sure we're going to see a massive, massive spike once they come back here. The dragon, I think Asia is going to pound it. I think America is going to pound it. So I'm not too worried. I think you could see that sell off from Chinese New Year. Other than that, this looks more like a broadening channel. Anyone who trades, if you look at Bitcoin, you zoom out. This is the exact same move we did last January, February, a broadening channel.

You make higher highs and lower lows. So I call it the FU pattern, right? Because everyone's thinking, oh, it's the new high. I'll short here. And it makes a new high and takes your stop. Then it makes a new low and takes that stop. And no one knows what's happening until it rips up. But it is a bullish continuation form from what I see from here, which fits the perfect

narrative of you go on Chinese New Year, you come back, and we send this thing. Talking about Chinese New Year, David, Joa, thanks for coming up. David, how worried should we be? So right now, we're not in full panic mode, but certainly concerning. I mean, clearly, there is substantial weakness in the Chinese markets. China essentially suspended trading in its lesser important equities. Shorting restrictions exist. We've seen things like this before, but certainly not at times of peace and tranquility. So there's clearly problems in China. You've got two of the three largest property developers in the country in liquidation, effectively, in terms of Country Garden and Evergrande. You've got numbers out of China that in terms of unemployment, certainly amongst the youth that we no longer know of because, or the exact statistics currently because they're so bad.

And the Evergrande and Country Garden spillover falls into banks there and institutional investors there. There's going to be shoring up of liquidity there, stimulus that will come in exactly what form, we don't know. There was a report out about a week and a half ago that offshore holdings of China-controlled state companies was going to be used to buy equities in the Chinese market, so effectively propping up their market. Anything is possible if China wants to go ahead and take out a bazooka in order to go ahead and throw liquidity at their market. But clearly, there's problems there. It's not at the highest level of concern. As I said, we're talking about lesser important companies than the, you know, the hundred largest Chinese companies. But nevertheless, there is reason for concern. I would have thought that, you know, Bitcoin would react very positively off this. It had a good morning early on, but now it's started to wane. And maybe that's in sympathy with the broader markets here in the U.S. You had Powell

on 60 Minutes last night talking about the U.S. economy. He made it very clear that we're not getting a recut here in March, but certainly it seems like we're going to get recuts in the second half of the year. There are a minority of Fed members that do not want to cut at all in 2024, but it seems the majority overwhelmingly wants to go ahead and make more than one cut. Powell raised concerns about the long-term balance sheet of the United States, the deficit. That's not really his area of expertise or sorry, it's not his area of effectiveness. He needs lawmakers to go ahead and make a difference there. So I think he was going ahead and calling out Congress in front of a national audience to go ahead and start to get their act together because it's going to become a great problem for a generation or two from now. But in terms of the market, you know, it seems like this market, this stock market is in a very good place, poised to go higher. Even if if Biden gets reelected and

if Trump gets elected, I expect that Trump will do things that will make this market go even higher than it would under Biden. The only kind of dark spot in the U.S. economy right now seems to be commercial real estate, office space, you know, higher rates, anything interest rate sensitive, where it seems that interest rates are going to remain higher for longer in the real estate industry. You know, the saying now is stay alive till 25 because people think that by 2025 rates should start to come down and we'll start to see a thaw in the real estate market, commercial real estate, office space, even housing. We'll start to trade trade hands more readily. If there are cracks in those markets before then and there's forced selling, then we will go ahead and see more disruption, more messy restructurings of those balance sheets. Oh, the last thing I'll go ahead and mention is what has happened at New York Commercial Bank and just the concern around the real estate holdings of small and regional

banks, and maybe consolidation and restructurings that need to go on there. Powell at this point, at least with respect to his comments on 60 Minutes, and I generally agree, I don't think any of that, the real estate issue, the interest rate issue, is going to cause a crisis in this country of any stretch. I think all of those losses will be taken in stride because of, you know, I think generally otherwise a very unlevered market right now. And so therefore, those losses, although be at large, will be absorbed. You did say something that I don't understand, so I just want to get behind your thinking. You said that although the halting of like 30% of the Shanghai index happened, you expected Bitcoin to rip just to bring it back to crypto. Why would you expect Bitcoin to rip, just to bring it back to crypto. Why would you expect Bitcoin to rip? Because if this happened in the US, I would expect there to be initially a dip

before it went up. Oh, I mean, I'm talking about the narrative on Bitcoin that it's digital gold, flight to safety, ownerless, you know, not controlled by a sovereign. I mean, this shows China, China's weakness right now shows the weakness of sovereigns that have human beings, you know, running those countries. And so therefore, you know, there should be considerable weakness in the Chinese yuan. And therefore, I believe the corollary to that is that there's strength in things that are not controlled by sovereigns. Just for the audience, I want to get your thoughts on China. So we've got the CSA 1000 is down 8% today, it's down about 30 something percent in January so far and over, not so far, in January, so last month, and over the last month, it dropped by exactly 21%.

And that's despite the various measures to ban short selling. You've also got Algorand getting liquidated as well. Joe, before you respond, I assume your point is there's so much Bitcoin holding in China that there is selling going on by Chinese holders. Is that your point? Yeah. I mean, if they're scared, they're going to... I agree with that. They could flee the Bitcoin. Initially, I would expect a downturn before an upturn. No, no. Then I totally agree with you. If the, if the weakness here is based on of is based on Chinese investors

liquidating what they can because they can't sell their stocks right now writ large, then sure, we should all be distressed buyers. Those are forced sellers. And frankly, you know, that's a technical correction that's going on and we should rebound. So this is a good opportunity, you know, based on that, you know, explanation, it's a good opportunity to go ahead and average down and accumulate. Yeah. I mean, my big worry, Mario, with this, with this is, are we, is this a foretelling of what will happen with U.S. commercial real estate? And I think, I do think that is a risk. And I think it would impact us, but it would be if whether it happens in China or happens in US, I do think short term, it would be negative. But, you know, the cycle is a cycle

and people will look at Bitcoin like a store of value and a way to escape the system, as we're seeing that change happen over the last year, year and a half. Simon? Yeah, I was just going to cover some of the China mining Bitcoin plays. So by far the biggest cryptocurrency in China, from my experience, is Tether. So a lot of people use Tether in China as a way of transacting internationally. A lot of people have, you can't really get an exchange account in China anymore. So a lot of people have overseas exchange accounts and they have to VPN in. And a lot of countries kind of play the regulatory arbitrage where they don't see overseas enforcement of China Bitcoin laws as a major threat.

So a lot of the exchanges were still on board, China customers. And it's a big demographic, but they've obviously, you can't, the general investing public in China are very much, you know, the Chinese stock market is very retail driven rather than institutional driven. So it tends to be more subject to ebbs and flows and short termism and volatility is what you see. There's still a very buoyant underground Bitcoin mining industry in China, where if you can get yourself connected to, you know, a province or

a region where the governor allows you to execute or continue to do Bitcoin mining, then many operators are actually getting access to incredibly cheap electricity through those types of things. But yeah, Tether is one of the most popular units of account in China with those that are a bit more tech savvy as well. Yeah, and I want to go talking about Bitcoin mining. Not sure if you guys have been keeping up with the... Let me open up the article by Coindesk.

So the US government seems to be closing in on Bitcoin mining i'm not sure if you guys saw that piece so i'll read out the the first couple of sentences the u.s department of energy is taking a closer look at bitcoin mining so they're wondering whether this is a cause of alarm so the energy information administration will survey the electricity use of selected u.s-based miners over the coming six months starting next week after putting out, an emergency collection of data requests. So given the phrasing of an, quote, emergency order and the current administration's crypto-critical stance, many are worrying that the information collected will be used to inform potentially harmful policies to the mining industry.

David, Ron, Dennis, Simon as well would love any comments on this. Yeah, this is just, I'm going to assume, I don't think it's a big assumption that this is politically motivated. You know, the lawmakers who are not happy about crypto generally have now lost the fight on the Bitcoin ETF. They're probably going to lose the fight on forthcoming ETFs for ETH and maybe some, you know, they'll try their best to muck up laws relating to, you know, clarity and regulating the crypto industry. And this is just their, you know, further salvo in wasting taxpayer dollars to go ahead. And I

don't even know what, because at the end of the day, collect all the information you want. You'll spin it one way. The industry. You'll spin it one way. The industry is going to spin it another way. There's nothing going to come of this. There's going to be no, I don't believe that there's going to be enough support to go ahead and somehow regulate the industry or hurt the industry. Going ahead and pushing Bitcoin mining outside of the United States, frankly, I don't think helps anybody. And, you know, it's just this is an awful waste of time and waste of resources. And, you know, it seems to be incredibly politically driven. Last point, I think there are a number of miners in the United States that are carbon negative. They only use hydro. They don't use any

fossil fuels. Again, this is not what this is aimed at. This is aimed at all electricity uses, but in any, and they want to just go ahead and throw superlatives at the use of energy by the industry. But at the end of the day, I really think that this is just inappropriate what they're doing. Can I just, I want to go to Simon with this question, but last time I read, I think it was 45% of all Bitcoin mining in the US was using green energy, like David was suggesting. Isn't this just going to be another stain on the US's attempt to end crypto? Yeah, really, really bad idea. The innovation and the industry that's built in Texas is really quite stunning to watch and grow.

Obviously, China made a series of bad moves and America capitalized. And so to bring out the innovation that's been happening around like, you know, the ERCOT grid and being able to really make efficient markets around Bitcoin mining, you know, excess electricity and being able to, you know, get the innovation of where the Bitcoin mining actually goes to its most efficient rates based upon an ESG score or some type of thing. It's actually, it's, yeah, it would be a really bad move. And I kind of agree that it would just be an attack that goes nowhere. It's brought in a lot of jobs and industry. When you say it goes nowhere, you don't think it will have much impact on the markets? Because the article is pretty alarming. I was going through it as you were speaking, Simon.

So I want to get your thoughts, Ron and Zach. How much of an impact do you think this could have on the market? Are we overreacting? I mean, look, I wouldn't say that this is overreacting. This is kind of the first step into making regulations, at least within the admin here. To the upside is that at least we're having the agency ask for this information as opposed to, you know, we've seen some agencies, especially the SEC, just go with whatever narrative is out there in the public space and use that as a rational for implementing rules. Whereas here, at least, they're just more data collection, but obviously that builds off to probably eventual regulation. But is it – that's what I initially thought, but is it common for them to call it, quote, emergency collection of data requests?

Why is it so emergency? No, it's not. I'll say also, like, back to David's point earlier, this is very heavily politically motivated. Actually, a year from tomorrow will be a year ago when Liz Warren, as well as several other more progressive senators and House members, sent a letter to the EPA, as well as the Department of Energy, asking them to make this kind of a rule. So this is where it's coming from. And again, this isn't the first time we've seen Elizabeth Warren's, you know, at least the way that she pontificated,

become kind of the norm for the admin, at least with the Biden administration, because she does have a lot of alumni within the administration at all levels. She does a really good job with that. But I will say, yeah, this is definitely politically motivated. We've seen this before with other groups. I mean, for example, office buildings that had data centers, they did a study on this in 2016. It didn't really lead to hard rules here, but this does lead to policy down the road and is probably, in this case, not going to be positive, especially how they're framing it. But Dennis also, I know Dennis is heavily engaged in this.

Tom Mapes, I see he's one of the listeners here, but he's also one of the guys in D.C. heavily engaged. So there's a decent cohort of folks on the lobbying side, advocacy side, state and federal engaged on this. Yeah, Tom, I'd love you to send a request to come up. We'd love to have you on stage. Dennis, Zach, your thoughts? And more, Zach, and the question, like, how much of an impact do you think we'll have on the industry if it goes down that path? Yeah, for sure. So echoing what a lot of people have said, I think this is politically motivated.

This is not just a good faith inquiry into like, oh, let's understand the energy inputs. Look, I do think this is an area where there are lots of people doing good work. Like I work with the Bitcoin Policy Institute. We've been trying to do a lot of work educating legislators about the actual effect that Bitcoin mining has. And, you know, we've seen that both reflected in a lot of especially Republican lawmakers platforms, but also even in the White House report that came out last year, they mentioned some of the positive impacts that Bitcoin mining can have on stabilizing the grid. And so, you know, I think there is some room for optimism on the policy side, when the results results come back that this is actually a much greener economy.

And that's a fight we're going to need to have. In terms of the impact on the market, I mean, I think this is like a narrative item. I think it's likely to be a negative narrative item. But the market only reacts to narrative when it wants to, right? Broader, secular narrative. I think in a bear market, this could make things worse. In a bull market, this probably doesn't have a big impact.

But yeah, you'd expect to see some negative headlines, if not some sort of regulation that comes out from this. Can I just add something? I'm happy to jump in here. I'll just add something to that. I'm a mom.

Yeah, so I think two people are speaking at the same time. I think, Dennis, you were going first. Jason, I don't think you can hear Dennis. I'm going to bring you down, Jason, and bring you back up. Dennis, go ahead. Yeah, I mean, let's just be very clear that everything in Washington, D.C. is politically motivated to some degree or another. We are very interested in this topic of what's going on with the EIA and this emergency request for information,

simply for the fact that when we launched Satoshi Action Fund, we launched as the premier Bitcoin mining advocacy organization. There really is no other organization on the planet that has been fighting harder or doing more for Bitcoin miners in the United States than Satoshi Action. And I say that with confidence and a sense of pride. Satoshi Action, we've been going around the country passing laws to protect Bitcoin mining. In fact, our laws have actually ended up protecting Bitcoin miners in federal court. And so we're very concerned about this emergency order. That being said, there's a lot of people running around kind of saying like, oh my gosh, this is just so out of norm that we need to be doing everything to oppose it,

that we should dump all of our resources into lawsuits. Maybe those people should do that. Maybe that's in their best interest to do that. But for us as Satoshi Action, I don't really see the ROI on this. The juice really just isn't worth the squeeze to get involved in a lawsuit, which ultimately will really just play into the hand of Elizabeth Warren and those that really don't like the industry. At the end of the day, Elizabeth Warren wants to paint us as wild, wild west, non-transparent people that are not willing or able to participate in the sort of normal operations of the legal process. And so by creating a lawsuit where we say, hell no, we're not going to share information with you. You can't you can't get it from us.

I think just really ultimately plays into her hand and really sort of just shows to the public that we seem to be non-transparent. When in fact, Satoshi Action and many others in the mining space have been fighting for transparency for a very, very long time. We go as far as to say that we actually wish they would ask more questions. We wish there would be more transparency because at the end of the day, when you are fully transparent around Bitcoin mining, you will realize that this industry has so much to give to the electrical infrastructure in this country. Bitcoin miners in Texas during the winter storm, Elliot gave back 1500 megawatts of power to the grid during that emergency, when everybody else was using more electricity, when they were trying to keep

their families warm, Bitcoin miners wound down 1500 megawatts of power, delivered it back to the grid, which is a non-trivial amount of power. 1500 megawatts of power is enough power to heat 1.5 million small homes. It's enough power to energize 300 large hospitals. But the problem is that Washington DC isn't asking those questions. Washington DC isn't saying, hey, how many hours of Curttailment are you involved with? How many hours of negative power pricing are you buying up in West Texas where wind is sort of overproducing energy? These are the questions that we really fundamentally need to be asked in the Bitcoin space. And so we won't be opposing, although we sort of fundamentally oppose the idea of an

emergency order, we aren't opposing the idea of getting this information out there. Also, just to keep in mind, we run around as Bitcoin miners and we say, Bitcoin mining is energy infrastructure. It's going to be a part of the grid. It's a big deal. Well, just take a look around and you'll see that every single energy asset in this country goes through this same process. Go look at the data.

You can see that every wind farm, every solar farm, every energy generator, every battery is geolocated in this country. And now, listen, I don't like the idea of everything being geolocated and tracked down. I sort of prefer there to be a little bit more anonymity. But this is just something that fundamentally all energy companies go through. And so what's the what is the juice worth the squeeze? I know there are others in the space who probably disagree with me think that we should go to war over this. But we won't be going to war over it at Satoshi Action. We did a space.

I hope some folks listen into it. We had our co-founder, Mandy Gunasekar, come up and talk about her experience in Washington, D.C. She was in the Trump administration. She worked at the EPA. And her sort of notes were the same as mine, that as an energy regulation guru, that we really don't want to be going to war over this, that we don't like it, that we sort of don't like the idea of this emergency order. But at the end of the day, fighting it is worse for us than complying. And also, it's only 82 companies. This is not every single company in the United States.

It's 82 companies, which is probably a very large percentage of the hash rate. But yeah, I'll pause there. I just think that it's sort of – Dennis, about the hash rate. But yeah, I'll pause there. I just think that it's sort of- Dennis, about the hash rate before you go. The juice is not worth the squeeze on sort of violently opposing this emergency order. And it's unlikely and probably questionable that we would even win if we did so.

How much, what is the percentage of the computing power that is these companies to blockchain as a whole? I'm just trying to see the worst case scenario. I said, yeah, I don't know. I said it's probably a large percentage of the hash rate is what I mentioned earlier. Of the total of all Bitcoin? Yeah, yeah. Think about every publicly traded mining company.

Think about all these companies that are mining Bitcoin that are large at scale. I mean, if you put together 82 companies, you probably have a large percentage or at least a majority of hash rate. If I ask, okay, majority of hash rate. It's best estimated at about 40%, I think, across the whole of America. But Dennis, as these are all public reporting companies anyway, what data are they actually going to ask for? Because isn't this just an opportunity to give more transparency to investors to kind of analyze these public reporting companies anyway? Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, especially if you're a public company, you're already reporting a lot of the information that they're asking for. So I just again, an emergency order and do it anyways. I mean, they're going to get this information. Fighting over it and fighting over the speed of it is just, to me, just doesn't really help us in the long run. It ultimately makes us look like we're non-compliant, wild, wild west, which ultimately plays into the hand of those that really don't like this industry. But listen, there are people that really disagree with me, and I appreciate their points. I wish them luck. It's just not a fight that we're going to be engaged in. In fact, we're really just not engaged in Washington, D.C. in general. We ultimately view Washington, D.C. as a hyper-political place to be, and that Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining just really is not in a position to win wars in D.C.

It's really all defense at the end of the day there. And so we are hyper-eng defense at the end of the day there. And so we'll, we are hyper engaged at the state level. We really want to follow the same trajectory as like the cannabis industry. The cannabis industry started in 2010 to change your advocacy approach to the state level. They, instead of trying to fight in Washington, DC, and that was a successful strategy. Now, as of 2012, there's two states that pass pro cannabis law. And then, you know, a decade later, you got 75% of the country passing pro-cannabis law. But none of this was done in Washington, D.C.

Tom, I appreciate you coming up and thanks for what you do. I would love to get your thoughts on this. Yeah, I appreciate you having me. Yeah, I agree with a lot of things that were said previously. I mentioned this on other outlets. I mean, this wasn't unexpected. Last April. I'm not sure if you could improve your mic.

It's a bit of a feedback. Can you hear me any better? Yeah, it's just a bit of feedback. Not sure what it is. A very weird one. Using a Bluetooth headset, maybe you could disconnect that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm on that.

Cool. Maybe, yeah, try to disconnect that i think it's having some some issues um in the meantime i'll just go to how's that better jason good to have you back yeah that's much better go ahead yeah hey so um yeah no as i've mentioned on other outlets this isn't totally unexpected um you can go back to my twitter timeline back in may. You had Elizabeth Warren stand there and ask point blank to the Secretary of Energy, Secretary Granholm, if they have the authority to file this report and ultimately offer the survey the idea where it's it's when they're it's within their legal authority to do things like this has it come in at a bit of a publicly um is it publicly advantageous for the warrens of the world absolutely we do talk about her a lot but people kind of lose sight particularly on the mining and the energy piece, she has no jurisdiction over energy policy. She's not on any energy deciding committees, nor – I mean, she has an outsized voice within the administration.

But for this particular issue – sorry? Sorry. Just – there's a big thing I want to – a specific quote I want to get your thoughts on, and I'll read out the quote directly from the EIA. Given the emerging and rapidly changing nature of this issue, and because we cannot quantitatively assess the likelihood of public harm, EIA feels a sense of urgency to generate credible data that will provide insight into the unfolding issue. I've asked it earlier and I'll ask it again. How common is it for there to be emergency orders like this? It's not common. How I foresee this is there's not enough uh generation uh for bulk power use in the in the country in the world frankly period and they're kind of looking at us as an industry that they can kind of for some of their policy mistakes over the past

they kind of come at us and say here here's a big chunk of bulk power being used that maybe we can kind of get out of the way a little goes back to the generation we're about to have so much you know we're not even at the tip of the iceberg at the generation we need in this country and and and they're starting to pick kind of winners and losers here and that's where that's where the real argument the crux lies with this piece is is uh you know there are the real issue here is the information protection piece within the surveys and things like that. We need to make sure that the information is protected in terms of, so they can't use this as a political gain. They're asking for which utilities are buying

power off of. Do the warrants of the world take that information and start leaning on utilities and say, stop selling to these bulk power purchasers because- So what do you expect those regulations to do for the industry? So once they get the information, what do you expect them to do next and how much of an impact will it have? And I think that all depends. I think it goes back to ultimately what comes out of it, because there is a good story to tell for it. I think there's kind of a needle to thread here in terms of, we have a lot of great stories to tell. Let's tell some of these stories. It's where do some of these questions kind of go over that line of necessary information or

proprietary information for these companies to give out? As we mentioned, a lot of these are publicly already information out there. And frankly, utilities need this data for future planning. Like I said, this generation generation piece this ai's a lot of data centers a lot of ai's going on board i mean use the recent example in in the energy world there's built an offshore wind project for 800 megawatts we have miners going at 500 megawatts you know etc and even larger so we have to we have to be be transparent some some of this work we're doing, how we're fitting into this energy ecosystem. Dennis, Ron? So, yeah, I love what Tom is doing, by the way. Incredible job, by the way, Tom. And I love that you've expanded

your operations to talking about AI, something that's very tangential and very similar to the struggles that Bitcoin miners are dealing with as well. One thing that I wanted to note on that I talked about earlier is the idea around transparency. We really do want Bitcoin miners to be more transparent. And the skeptics, the people that believe that this industry is doing something wrong, think that I'm just saying that like it's lip service. But it is true and it is a fact that we are pushing miners to be more transparent with their data. It's why two weeks ago, before this news even came out, two weeks ago, we developed a survey for miners to be able to report their curtailment information. That is us trying to make sure that

Bitcoin miners are able to report how often they're delivering energy back to the grid for the sort of grid to be able to deliver that energy to rate payers during times of high demand. Whenever there is a lot of demand on the grid, it's really important to know, a lot of folks always have this question, why curtailment matters? Whenever there is a lot of demand on the grid and you don't have enough available supply, you have to find where you want to turn power off at or else the grid will collapse. You'll have brownouts, you'll have blackouts. So in order to prevent that from happening, you could do two things. Well, really three things. You can build additional infrastructure like peaker plants, batteries, both are very expensive. And then you don't really know, likely very carbon intensive,

but you don't know for sure. And then number three, you can ask people to shut down their power draw. You can ask people to curtail. That is by far and away the cheapest way to balance the grid. And it is by far and away the most guaranteed for sure way that you will not increase any sort of carbon emissions because by default, you are reducing your power demand, not increasing it. So when every time a Bitcoin miner curtails and delivers their energy back to the grid, they are doing something very, very positive. Grid operators love it. And in fact, Bitcoin miners get paid for it. Anyone else can compete to get paid for it, but Bitcoin miners are so good at it

that they get paid to do it. So we want miners to report how often they are doing that, be highly transparent with how often they're doing that, and combine that with the energy data that is delivered by the EIA request to show that Bitcoin miners are in fact having a very, very positive impact on the price of energy across the entire country. Can I disagree with you on that? Is that possible? Who wants to disagree with me? Go ahead. Preston Byrne here. So I took a look at the request. It's an emergency budget request, not an emergency data request. So anyone who receives, and it's directed at cryptocurrency businesses, not power utilities,

meaning that anyone who receives one of these requests is actually fully within their rights to just ignore it. When the government comes calling, you don't have to respond. In all likelihood, I can tell you, having represented other companies that have responded to data requests from Congress and things like that, given the political nature of the industry, I would actually say it's probably not a good idea to report because it doesn't matter what you say or what happens. What will happen is they'll take, you know, the folks at the Department of Energy will give that information to

Elizabeth Warren, right, because she's essentially running crypto policy for the White House. She will do some dishonest mathematics on it. And then they'll say, well, this Bitcoin facility in Texas. Yeah, so I'll just respond back. I feel like it's a little unfair given that he didn't finish his point. But just to go off of some of the points he made there. I mean, listen, I didn't say that it wasn't possible to stop them from getting They could stop the emergency order from happening. But even if you do stop the emergency order from happening, they will just go through the usual approach and get the information eventually. And in fact, if it was so bad to report this information, then why has every energy producer, every wind farm, every solar farm, and you go look at the data, it's just like endless sheets of energy producers, batteries, you name it, pieces of electrical infrastructure that have reported exactly where they are, exactly what their nameplate energy production is, exactly how much of that capacity is being used. It's very, very specific data. And so ultimately, it's really kind of a battle of where do your incentives lie?

Maybe, Preston, I'm not sure you're a lawyer, maybe you, you know, are, you know, interested in taking on this case. Like, for me, I'm interested in more transparency. I get that gut instinct that people don't like it. I certainly don't. I would prefer to go through the route of providing this information in a way that is a little bit more collaborative, right? Like they are trying to force us really quick. It doesn't feel good. But at the end of the day, more transparency helps this industry because the more transparent you are,

the more you can see how valuable Bitcoin mining is for balancing the grid, for mitigating methane emissions, for creating rule jobs. There's a whole host of benefits that need to be explored. And just looking at strict energy data isn't enough. So I think that instead of, at least for us, others are going to fight it. I already

know they are. There's a whole battle in the space of, should we, should we not fight it? Go ahead and fight it if you want. But for us at Satoshi Action, we are going to be asking Bitcoin miners to share their curtailment data with us to match alongside that energy data that they're being forced to give. And then what we want to do is combine that all together. We've already had publicly traded mining companies, multiple publicly traded mining companies agree to share this information with us. And so if you are interested in being a part of that survey, feel free to DM me. We aren't sharing it publicly for obvious reasons, but we want to make sure that every miner in the United States that participates in curtailment in the month of January, particularly when there were winter storms. We know there were curtailments taking place to reach out so that

they can fill out the survey. Ron, any just final quick thoughts on this before we go to Travis and William to get anything else we should focus on and their thoughts on the markets. And Ron, other than responding to this, anything else we should pay attention to on the regulatory front? Because the war isn't over. We've got a few wins under our belt, but I think the war is far from over. Yeah, I'll reiterate and say that, at least when it comes to this proposal, we've kind of seen this play out with Bitcoin mining fights, both at the state and federal level.

There's a wide variety of other industries involved. Like, for example, New York, like the winery coalition, you can say, the wineries are actually the ones, among other industries, really targeting Bitcoin mining. And again, it came morally down to like, hey, they're using more energy than we think they should be doing.

And again, we've seen this, you know, it's very political. We've seen Republicans make the same requests to the same agency regarding like marijuana energy usage for growing and stuff like that. So yeah, it's a very, you know,

it can get very targeted and also very political. So I think this fight's going to keep going for a while, but like, I don't think this is a red flag by any means in terms of like, this is going to be leading to some doomsday tomorrow or anytime soon, but like, this is the start of the process. So it is, to Des's point, political. Anything else we should focus on or worry about? Yeah, and at least uh may not relate to this directly but Secretary Yellen's gonna be in front of the House Ventures Committee tomorrow um as well as set in banking on Thursday uh you're gonna probably see some conversations a

little bit on stable coins uh most conversations at least talking to folks uh in both Chambers it seems like it's gonna be more on the election the economy status um but uh we probably will see some mentions of stable coins uh staff counts and bolts and 121 we've got we've got we've got trump saying uh i was reading it earlier saying stable coins and ai i think it was ai uh or a big danger or something along those lines not sure if you've heard that uh would not be shocked i mean there was a bill introduced what was it last week actually on the uh the energy usage of ai from more progressive centers actually some of them who were on the original letter i talked about with senator warren last year that kind of resulted in this uh proposal that came out last week so uh you know ai marijuana energy usage uh crypto bitcoin mining like there's a lot of targeted and, again, usually political to Dez's point.

Yeah, and Travis, I want to go to Powell's interview we were talking about earlier. So I'm not sure if you – I think it was a 60 Minutes interview. So he says – he's talking about the U.S. national debt, and he says we're on an unsustainable path that is growing faster than the economy and we're borrowing from future generations. Another reporter quoted – I'm going to read out two quotes here. I have a sense that this worries you very much. And Powell says, over the long run, of course it does.

Your thoughts on these comments? I don't think Powell's spoken about the debt at this level before, unless I'm wrong. Yeah, I mean, I would say it dovetails into my long-term investment thesis for Bitcoin, which is basically that people talk about the world reserve currency, but the global financial system is a heavily debt-laden financial system. There's turns and turns and turns of debt everywhere you look across the global financial system. US treasuries are the collateral foundation of this debt-laden global financial system.

And just objectively, when you look at U.S. treasuries as a financial instrument over a multi-decade period looking forward, that is a challenged investment thesis. There's no two ways to think about that. So then when you start thinking about, well, you know, what else could we use other than treasuries as the collateral foundation for the global financial system? You know, what else other than the dollar could we use as the world reserve currency? The way I like to frame this is that the U.S. monetary policy is the instrument that you could even take seriously as a competitor to treasuries and to the dollar. And in comes Bitcoin. And Bitcoin's not there right now, but it's like this moniker of pristine collateral, which is definitely one of my favorite nicknames for Bitcoin. And, you know, this is not the kind of thing that happens overnight or over a few years. But I think if you fast forward to the end of this decade and it looks like Bitcoin is kind of directionally making some progress towards chipping away at U.S. treasuries as the collateral foundation for the global financial system, you know, that that's that's that. I think that means that Bitcoin is probably in a pretty good spot. And then you fast forward another 10 years to 2040, and we'll see where it is.

William? Maybe I'll add one more thing. Powell does say there's three rate cuts this year. We expect three rate cuts this year. Yeah, just quickly to reflect on this. I think the key thing that Pavel said was that the U.S. debt has been growing more than the actual growth from the economy. And that's the main thing, really. And obviously, we knew that, but he said it more succinctly. Yes, it is an

opportunity. We need to continue growing the Bitcoin pie before we can claim that Bitcoin is a better system than the one we have right now. I appreciate that. Simon, any final comments? And just for the audience,

before Simon gives us quick comments on this, just make sure you check out the Shark Tank, Cryptos Shark Tank. I've just pinned a tweet above. I tweeted about it today. They're launching TVs.

I'm not sure what channel, where they're launching first, but there's a link on their profile. So quick clip, and there's a trailer on their profile as well. Pretty highly anticipated. Incredible production.

Check them out. Me and Ran are there. Scott, probably next one. We'll see if he goes in on the next one. But I think you'll enjoy it. So check out the clip. I've just pinned it above and go to their profile as well. Simon. Yeah, it's obviously a pretty alarming comment. So, you know, the fact... Has he made comments like this before? I haven't come across comments like this. Normally, it's, you know, we've got a tool or it's very conservative. But this is certainly, you know, either something a little bit irresponsible or something actually admitting something preparing people for stuff so you know we it's a 27 america is a 27 trillion dollar economy on 34 trillion dollars of debt with the as williams said with those types of stats so you know this is the exponential growth phase of a debt cycle leading into incredible requests for military expenditure

that everyone's asking for right now. So it is, to me, a very concerning thing. And if people don't have an alibi towards Bitcoin, particularly given that these ETFs are here right now, I think it's a bit of an irresponsible strategy. It's a responsible thing to have an allocation to Bitcoin with all this going on. Just to hop in real fast, it was not new news that Powell said that the U.S. fiscal situation is on an unsustainable path. I mean, he's had this little soundbite that he's said periodically for a long time. Taking us from six cuts to three cuts, that was new news. And impressively, risk assets are hanging in fine with that, which a week ago, the market was expecting six cuts starting in March. He took March off the table last week at the press conference, and then he just took us from

six cuts to three cuts and stuff's hanging in pretty well, I would say. So yeah, I think that's impressive. Simon Ters? I'd say all doom aside, jobs and the economy, GDP looks pretty good in the U.S. right now. Of course, that is on the backs of massive quantitative easing, rate suppression, spending and so forth since 2008 for about 14 years. Last year was about the first time that they started tightening. But what I wanted to say was we all know that the debt is a big problem. What not enough people talk about is the fact that federal net outlays total kind of cash out after the tax revenues. That number as a percentage of GDP is actually about half or maybe 65% of what it was at the peak during World War II. And after World War II, what we did was, no, we did not pay the debt off. That's not how things work in the fiat world, unfortunately. But we did grow our way out of it so that the debt, the outlays as a percentage of GDP look pretty manageable. I'll post the chart

in the comments section to this. But yeah, we know it's a problem. The problem with doomers is they are always early. They've been early for 50 years. Yeah, they've been early for 50 years yeah they've been early for 50 years since we went off the gold standard we've been early early early about china's uh economy uh starting to crack early about this early about pretty much everything yes i agree yeah but i i do want to say yeah i mean never bet against the fed and you never know how long they can roll over a Ponzi. But do remember that this is the cycle of every fiat currency. They last an average of 27 years. There's been 775 of them. The longest standing one was 335 years with the British pound, but that was only because it

was backed by silver. As soon as it went off the silver standard, it didn't last more than 100 years. So just understand that with a fiat currency, you can never pay down debt. Paying down debt destroys the economy. Look what Volcker did when he tried to do that. It always gets reversed. It never works politically because you've got to get the four-year cycle and no one will vote for you. So every single fiat currency goes through this cycle and what a really extreme thought is an incredibly extreme thought is that this will be the first currency that doesn't follow the destiny of every single fiat currency in the history of humankind yeah just going through the comments as well more people than i expected are pretty concerned about the uh the emergency request for information from U.S. Bitcoin mining companies.

But I think we've covered everything pretty well. Jason, any final quick comments? Because I know you dropped out earlier. No, that's fine. I think actually your guys covered it really, really well, particularly around the Bitcoin mining and energy side, which is a particular interest of mine being a miner involved with the renewable energy side as well but the only thing i would add quickly is i mentioned at the top of the show uh about the potential outflow um from a gbtc and that just to confirm that because i was driving at the time and that was genesis trading filed a motion on friday asking a judge to approve the sale of 1.6 billion uh in bitcoin eth Classic in Crase Girls products. Now, that's just an application at this point. But obviously, I think about 1.3 billion of that is Bitcoin. And that might be something we need to keep an eye on.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Do jump in to give us an update on this and the Craig Reich story. And on the ETF side, I think the net inflows are $1.2 million for the last month, I think. And we'll do a deeper dive later this week. But the numbers are $1.2 million for last month, I think. But we'll do a deeper dive later this week. But the numbers are looking good. And we've covered it heavily pretty much every day last week. Otherwise, I think we've covered all the news today. It's not too much going on. The market's pretty sideways. I think the Bitcoin mining story is the most important in the Chinese economy. We'll probably dig into the Chinese economy and just a bit more macro news later this week.

But at this point, I think we've covered everything. Appreciate the panel. Scott will be back tomorrow, most likely, and Ryan will be back from Dubai in the next few days. Thanks a lot, everyone. We'll see you again tomorrow.