We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC173: Bitcoin Energy Survey and the Speculative Attack w/ Pierre Rochard (Bitcoin Podcast)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. Today's guest needs no introduction because it's Bitcoin OG Pierre Rochard. During the show, we talk about the trials and tribulations of the recent energy information survey in the mining community getting the judicial system to put a stop to everything for the time being. Later, Pierre and I talk about his decade-old article about the Bitcoin speculative attack, And then finally, we talk about the implications of Wall Street derivatives being stood up on top of the ETFs.

Starting point is 00:00:34 This is one you won't want to miss. So without further delay, here's my chat with the one and only Pierre Rochard. Celebrating 10 years. You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with the one of the only, the only. Pierre Rochard, we've been doing this for, I don't know how many years at this point, but welcome back to the show, Pierre. About seven years. Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's been a while. Almost a decade. Yeah, yeah, we're coming up on it. All right. I've actually have not been paying too much attention to this. I've seen some of the articles

Starting point is 00:01:23 we're obviously talking about everything happening with the U.S. government, reaching out and causing the miners to start reporting their energy consumption and information and all of this stuff. Where should we start with all of this? I think usually we start with 1971. That's when we went off the gold standard. And that was an inflationary period in American history. And that inflation included the price of energy, right? And that was compounded by the 1973 oil crisis. that's also very timely given world events. But in any case, what transpired with the price increases was price controls. And then when you get price controls, then you get shortages.

Starting point is 00:02:09 And then when you have shortages, they want to ration and to ration. They need data. They need to know who's consuming, what energy. And so that really is what led to the creation of the Department of Energy, or as it's known today. and that's where we could start. Now, since then, we've had the invention of Bitcoin. And this is where we can also talk about Elizabeth Warren's career, Senator Warren from Massachusetts. Something that I find interesting about her background is that she used to be a Republican.

Starting point is 00:02:46 And she used to have, yeah, I didn't know that. More of a free market take. She had a change of heart at some point, or maybe she's a double agent. I don't know. When did that happen? Like, when did she flip from Republican to Democrat? I didn't know this. I don't really pay attention to these politicians like at all.

Starting point is 00:03:04 So this is interesting to me. I think that her academic work led her to kind of see some, let's call them market failures or perceive some market failures. And that, you know, she felt like government could do better. And that might have sent her down a trajectory of, you know, consumer financial protection bureau type thinking. And I take it that she genuinely has had kind of a change of views. But I also find it fascinating that she is somewhat flexible about her own

Starting point is 00:03:37 perspectives on topics anytime that they intersect with Bitcoin. For example, she's never really been a bulldog law and order type when it comes to any subject. She's never written about anti-money laundering as an academic or I've searched, you know, kind of her records. But once Bitcoin came along, suddenly she was like an expert on anti-money laundering and was very adamant about bringing Bitcoin within the framework that exists for the fiat system. And likewise, is she the main driver? So again, like zooming out this And what's the official name of the order? Is there like really kind of give us the macro?

Starting point is 00:04:22 The energy information agency is a part of the Department of Energy. And so they sent out a survey, a mandatory survey in January that was essentially a form that you have to fill out as a now. There were lots of issues with this form, including kind of definitional issues. So, you know, they call it cryptocurrency mining. Personally, I reject the terminology of cryptocurrency. So, you know, I'm like, well, this doesn't apply to Bitcoin because, you know, it's Bitcoin, not crypto. But the form that was sent out, it's actually rather similar to other forms that the EIA sends out to, like, for example, a power generator that is, you know, on the grid. And I'd say that, first of all, in principle, Bitcoin, I think that if you're connecting,

Starting point is 00:05:14 to the grid and that you are an industrial scale participant on the grid, then it is reasonable that folks are going to ask you for information. We can have lots of philosophical debates about it, but I think as a practical matter, it's reasonable. The problem was really that the form that they proposed was very lopsided of let's only ask one major question, which is, how much electricity are you consuming? They didn't really ask about when are you consuming it. And that's critical for discussing the topic of, is Bitcoin mining good or bad for the grid? Because it really depends on when is Bitcoin mining consuming electricity? Because the grid, ultimately, the grid is not a uniform, homogenous entity that is always in one particular stable state. The grid is always changing.

Starting point is 00:06:11 In Texas, in particular, it has transformed kind of every level of granularity, whether you're looking at it year to year. It had massive growth in solar wind and batteries in Texas. So I think that Elizabeth Warren should be congratulating the state of Texas over the growth of renewables, you know, largely driven by production tax credits in the federal tax code and just the natural abundance of wind and sun in Texas. but it's also changing on a hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second level of depending on how hot it is outside, people will turn on their AC or if it's really cold, they'll turn on their furnace or their electric heaters. And then, of course, on the renewable side, they're intermittent generation. So sometimes the wind is not blowing and it's nighttime. but in Texas, it can still be 110 degrees outside in the evening in the summer at 9 p.m.

Starting point is 00:07:11 And so people still have their AC on, but there's no way to produce electricity in that scenario unless you have batteries, but batteries are very expensive. And what has really picked up the slack in Texas is a combination of natural gas speaker plants and flexible loads like Bitcoin miners who are able to turn off to offset kind of the lack of wind or solar generation. In order to have kind of that fulsome picture of how Bitcoin mining integrates with the grid, you would have to ask for some pretty granular data, or at least maybe some questions about when you're consuming electricity,

Starting point is 00:07:53 do you respond to prices, for example? You know, just ask general questions. Yeah. Yeah. They didn't ask those kinds of questions. Instead, they asked for the total consumption, and then they asked for really granular data about how many Bitcoin mining rigs you have, what specific model they are, you know, what efficiency they have. And those are questions where it seemed to me that really it's a combination of they want to ask the really straightforward question when it comes to evaluating the cost. But then when it comes to the benefit, they're not really going to ask pointing questions about what are the benefits of my money?

Starting point is 00:08:31 on the grid. But bigger picture, I think that the problem with the survey was that they didn't ask for any feedback from the public before sending it out. And is that mandatory? Is that mandatory? That is required by the Paperwork Reduction Act passed in 1980. And so what they did instead was they declared a federal emergency that if they waited a month for public feedback on this survey, there is a reasonable likelihood of public harm, which to us, yeah, it was kind of an absurd violation of law, right? They were, they'd gone rogue and that they were putting out a form illegally. And that there needed to be kind of a change of pace here because as a nation, we can't operate that way. But especially, I think as an industry, that it reflected not physical

Starting point is 00:09:28 reality or science, it really reflected the political motivation of Elizabeth Horn. And we're going to see that here in this clip. Yeah. So for people that are just listening here, I got about a five minute and 30 second clip. This is from, when was it? This was 10 months ago that this clip hit YouTube at least. So kind of to give you an idea, when did you say that the survey actually went out? Was it the start of 2024, Pierre? That's right in January. Yeah. End of January. So this was about six months, would you say, prior to the survey actually hitting. And this is a pretty incredible clip. So here you go.

Starting point is 00:10:09 I'm going to play it for everybody. Now, as you know, Bitcoin mining involves companies using powerful computers to verify transactions to win a Bitcoin reward. You may remember that at this same hearing a year ago, I asked you about the immense energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. Since then, the issue has aroused more public concern. A recent New York Times investigation found that just 34 Bitcoin mines in the U.S. are using as much electricity as 3 million households. That is the equivalent of the entire state of Arizona or the entire state of Tennessee. You know, that is a lot of energy. most of it is dirty.

Starting point is 00:11:00 Fully 85% of this power comes from coal or natural gas plants. That causes as much carbon pollution as 3.5 million gasoline-powered cars. So for every one new electric vehicle sold in the U.S. last

Starting point is 00:11:18 year, these Bitcoin miners did the climate equivalent of putting four additional gasoline powered cars right back on the road. Now, I should note that my own investigation shows there are more mines than just the 34

Starting point is 00:11:35 that the New York Times analyzed. So the problem is even worse than reported. Secretary Granholm, when you came before this committee last year, I asked you if the federal government knew how many crypto miners are operating in the United States and how much energy they're consuming. And you said that wasn't being tracked and that more data would be needed.

Starting point is 00:11:58 So here we are, a year later, is the Department of Energy formally tracking crypto miners yet? Great. First of all, thank you so much for your leadership in this, because I do think that you have unearthed a massive problem. And so we don't know how many miners there are. We don't know where they are. All of them, I mean, some of them you do, but many of them you don't. A lot of them are just underground. some of them are small operators.

Starting point is 00:12:28 So as you and I have discussed, we have charged our energy information administration with... Here, I had to pause the tape. Did they actually mean like underground, or are they meaning like in like figurative sense? Well, I mean, just real real fast. I want to keep it playing. Okay, so we don't know.

Starting point is 00:12:51 Okay. Figuring out how to mandate a reporting of these entities. Now, that's complicated, as you know, because many of them are underground. And even the utilities may not know where the draw is coming from. So let's talk about that. Given that crypto mining undermines all of our other climate work, we can't afford to delay on this. There's a lot of urgency around this. So I want to talk for just a second about the authority you have to gather information

Starting point is 00:13:26 on this. Let me ask, Secretary Granholm, do you have the authority to mandate that crypto miners disclose information about their energy consumption? We have the mandate authority. Good. So in your response to a letter I sent you in February, you indicated that the Energy Information Administration will first need to develop a new survey program to begin collecting information from crypto miners. By when do you expect to field this survey and use it to gather data from crypto miners on a mandatory basis? We are, first of all, are looking at creating the survey from a regular report that is an electricity gathering report that we have now asked to include crypto as part of it. That report from NREL will be completed by the end of this year. on which the energy information administration can base its survey.

Starting point is 00:14:28 So it's going to take some time for them to be able to craft the survey from the information that they receive from the NREL report, but know that that is happening. And we are pushing to accelerate the timelines because it is. So by the end of this year, you will have a report on mandatory reporting, putting a, we'll have a, I want to make sure I know what we're going to win. No, no, we'll have a report that will have, gathered not fully but enough information to be able to craft the framework for the survey. All right. I can't take this anymore, Pierre. This is brutal. So there you go. So the middle of

Starting point is 00:15:07 2023, they have this exchange. She's saying get the data, then get the survey sent out. Immediately this is, she didn't say the word emergency, but she did say urgent, urgent, urgent all through there. And then the reason why you're saying that they pumped out the survey without public notice is because they ran it under this emergency clause that gave them the authority to do it, right? That's right. Okay. So you guys take this to court. Who was, I know you work for riot, but was it the collective mining community that like all got together? What was the orchestrating body that was used to basically take?

Starting point is 00:15:50 this to court? Or was it just riot that took him to court? No, it was a Texas blockchain council with Lee Bratcher's leadership. He really was the tip of the spear on this and immediately put together a legal team to challenge this in federal court. Because first of all, we'd rather have just a constructive working relationship with the Department of Energy with any regulators who are interested in our industry. And that we would have happily participated in a public notice and comment and, you know, submitted comments and provided feedback to the survey. And I think that if they had not taken our feedback into account,

Starting point is 00:16:30 then perhaps we would have had to go to court anyway. But they, they kind of, I think that they kind of shot themselves in the foot here, because in all of this urgency, in all of this emergency, by doing it this way, they actually delayed themselves.

Starting point is 00:16:47 Because the out of the out. come of the lawsuit. Now, the judge immediately saw right through what was going on, which is that you have Senator Elizabeth Warren bullying an executive branch agency that is supposed to be

Starting point is 00:17:03 nonpartisan, by the way, the EIA is supposed to just be like, you know, the military, right? They're supposed to not be in politics. They're supposed to be independent in some regards. But here she was really browbeating the Secretary of Energy into

Starting point is 00:17:19 to really what's a niche topic. I mean, it sounded completely scripted. Like the whole back and forth, it sounded totally scripted, sounded like they had already hashed out exactly who was going to say what, how they were going to say it, when they were going to say it,

Starting point is 00:17:34 like, I mean, I think anybody that listened to that, especially when you watch the clip and you see like their facial reaction is really obvious. Yeah. And I think that if they had just done it the right way, they would be further ahead than they currently are.

Starting point is 00:17:48 but I think that they saw an opportunity of, hey, maybe the Bitcoin miners won't push back on this. And maybe they're thinking was that it doesn't look good to sue the government and to, you know, it kind of signals the lack of transparency. If you're not up on the topic on the issue and deep in the weeds

Starting point is 00:18:09 of the Administrative Procedure Act or the Paperwork Reduction Act, that, you know, it looks like we're resisting transparency when really the opposite. is true. The Bitcoin mining is the most transparent industry in the world, thanks to the Bitcoin blockchain, right? And furthermore, that it's not that we don't want to provide this information. It's actually more so that we want to provide additional information, that there's not enough context being put into this form to correctly explain the role that Bitcoin mining has on the grid. Instead, it's an oversimplification because at the end of the day, Senator Warren's only goal here is to have

Starting point is 00:18:48 a stepping stone towards banning Bitcoin mining. She's trying to find some kind of leverage, some kind of ammo to use against Bitcoin miners by weaponizing a federal agency, or the very least to harass the Bitcoin miners by imposing this requirement on them. Because really, what they could do, and I think would make a lot more sense, is that you just add Bitcoin mining as a category to an existing survey, just as Secretary Granholm was talking about that there's other surveys out there that, so you don't necessarily need to send it to a Bitcoin miner.

Starting point is 00:19:25 You could just send it to Erkot and say, hey, how many Bitcoin miners do you have? Urqu I would say, well, we have 2.5 gigawatts. Like we know exactly that number because we're the grid operator. And this also touches on the emergency point, which is that Erkot already has all this data. If there's a grid emergency, the EIA doesn't, they don't have a role in that at all.

Starting point is 00:19:46 So furthermore, Urquat would not connect Bitcoin miners to the grid if there was a risk of public harm. It would be negligence for them to do that. Not to mention a grid is reliability. Not to mention a grid emergency would happen where there's no Bitcoin miners. Well, yeah, I mean, that to me is the other incredible point. And that with all this talk of renewables, Bitcoin miners are giving more revenue. to renewables than Elizabeth Warren, certainly, right? I mean, I can't imagine she's given more than $100 to renewables,

Starting point is 00:20:19 while Bitcoin miners have given millions and millions of dollars to wind and solar and battery. But I think that it's just part of her overall attack on Bitcoin that she's trying to find every angle of, oh, Hamas is using Bitcoin. I mean, look, if she's going to pick aside on that conflict, she's probably more pro Hamas than anything else. So, you know, that didn't really get any traction because. she also got debunked on that point. But every thread that she can find, she's going to pull on because ultimately what she wants, my perception of it, based on her statements,

Starting point is 00:20:51 is that she wants a CBDC. She wants her, it's interesting, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is technically funded by the Federal Reserve. So I think that she wants her entourage, you know, her mentees to be leading the way in terms of micromanaging America's finances. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right, I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is.

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Starting point is 00:25:27 on. She had, I can't even remember the number, but she had a lot of senators and a lot of representatives, co-sign the document that she sent off to the White House that had that Wall Street Journal article that was completely debunked by coin analysis. I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but she was saying it was $100 million plus dollars in buying power through crypto going to Hamas and it ended up being like $450K or something in that ballpark. So it was just dramatically off and different. But I wonder if all of those cohorts that co-signed that FinCEN document that she sent over to the White House.

Starting point is 00:26:06 If she lost some of them because of all of the proof that she was using being debunked, like heavily debunked, Wall Street Journal went back on their report and who they were referencing and all of that. Have we seen any of that, or does it seem like they're just still kind of all in the same camp that had co-signed the FinCEN piece? And I'm assuming they're all the same actors that are on board for this. EIA report and survey that went out? Perhaps.

Starting point is 00:26:36 I mean, I think that most of them just have so many issues going on at the same time that, you know, with the government having its finger in every pie, that for them co-signing a letter is just, you know, it takes less than, you know,

Starting point is 00:26:50 a couple minutes of whatever. Okay, sure. And I think that the, the problem, though, is that she is spending political capital. and that there's only so much political capital that she can spend. And the consequences might be felt at the ballot box that if she continues in this direction

Starting point is 00:27:13 and Bitcoin continues to increase in adoption, as it has been over the past couple months, she's going to have electoral consequences and the people who affiliate with her are as well. Not to mention Wall Street, I think is really opening up in kind of like, hey, maybe this Bitcoin thing ain't so bad after the performance of the ETF and they're seeing the fees that they're starting to collect off these ETFs. It's almost like they're leaning into it. And I would think that she would wake up really fast in that who's going to fund her if she continues to get on this path? And it's kind of starting to work out for a whole lot of people that are involving themselves in it. It doesn't make any sense. I think that's right.

Starting point is 00:27:58 Ultimately, I think that she'll fail, but we still have to stand up to it. And, you know, this story to me has really highlighted why it makes sense to be mining Bitcoin in the United States. It's because we have a great system of government, right? Of checks and balances and the separate branches of government that, and I got to applaud the judiciary on this one because this was in a lot of other countries, you can't just go to the government. If you do, you might end up in jail, right?

Starting point is 00:28:29 They'll send you to Siberia or whatever it is. So in this case, it was a big win. How long did it take to get overturned, Pierre? Like, once you guys were like, hey, you can't do this. We're going to take this to court. How long did that process take? Days. Days.

Starting point is 00:28:44 Yeah, it was very fast. And then what the judge ruled, is it temporary? Is it like, what was the actual ramifications and like what's changing? The first ruling was a temporary. straining order. And in that ruling, the judge was very clear that he thought, you know, we were completely in the right here. And this judge is a really, I think he's a really balanced judge in the sense that he's ruled on some issues that essentially cross-partisan lines, right? Sometimes he does things that upset Republicans. Sometimes he does things that upset Democrats. And so it's not like he's

Starting point is 00:29:21 a hyper-partisan judge. He just wants the government to follow the law. That was his contention here. Now, what ended up happening afterwards is that the, so we scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, a couple weeks ago now, and I was all set to go, you know, testify in Waco on behalf of Bitcoin mining, and they canceled the hearing because they wanted to negotiate an agreement, a settlement to avoid moving forward here because they didn't really see a path to victory. And so not only did they concede on every point that we asked for, i.e. destroying the data that they had received and restarting the entire process from zero. They also paid attorney's fees because essentially, you know, they created this problem that was of their own doing.

Starting point is 00:30:16 It's not like, you know, it would be one thing if it was kind of a gray area, then maybe they would not have paid the attorney's fees. but when it's pretty egregious, they realize that they've kind of got to bury the hatchet and make peace. Now, maybe it's my own ego, but I also have to imagine that they probably didn't want to have me on the witness stand talking about how great Bitcoin mining is in federal court. So that might have been an element. You would have murdered it. Oh, my God. Yes. That's a great point.

Starting point is 00:30:48 Because would you have been the guy that was sent up? Yeah, Lee Batcher and I were all suited up, ready to go. You guys would have melted their faces. Oh my gosh. It would have been fun. We were denied that opportunity, but we were granted a victory. Yeah, it sounds like they got scared. Wow.

Starting point is 00:31:10 So what's the path forward now? So what comes next? They have to open up comment period. and I think that this is where it's really important for everybody who is a stakeholder to provide comments on what they think is good about the survey and what they think can be improved about it. I think that there is a threshold question of, is this useful data? Because arguably it's not useful in the sense that the data already exists. Urquhart already has it. The EIA already has it as well because the EIA already tracks consumer.

Starting point is 00:31:47 of electricity. They just, they track it at residential, commercial, industrial. Those are kind of the three categories. Yeah. And it would be bizarre to add a fourth category that is like a subcategory of industrial, a sub subcategory because you're saying data centers and then specifically within that Bitcoin miners, oh, we're going to carve that out into a special group. There would have to be some kind of underlying justification for that that would not apply equally to any other industry. And when you look at every other industry, you could come up with reasons why, oh, the EIA needs to know about steel mills or, you know, they need to know about check cashing places, right? How much electricity are they using to exploit the public?

Starting point is 00:32:33 So the argument for why there needs to be a separate form, I think that that argument, they they haven't really made it. I mean, they've made the argument for why there is an emergency, and that fell flat that immediately got debunked in the legal filings. But basically, their point was that the Bitcoin price is going up. That's what they started with. At the time, they said Bitcoin's up 50%. Now it's more like 100%. And the natural consequence of the Bitcoin price being up is that Bitcoin mining is going to grow. And that's certainly the case with Riot. Riot is developing a one gigawatt facility in Corsicana, and we're going to be energizing that starting in the coming weeks. We're going to be energizing Corsicana. And the other

Starting point is 00:33:25 part of it, too, is that, or we're going to start, right? I mean, you don't get to one gigawatt overnight, but we're going to be phasing that in. And we're also upgrading mining rigs in Rockdale. So it is absolutely the case that with the Bitcoin price being up, we're going to be consuming more electricity. But at the same time, we're going to continue to execute on the strategy that really every Bitcoin miner in ERCOT does is responding to the price. That is that if the electricity price is high, we turn off. If it's low, we stay on. One of the things that she said in the video, she says that 85% of the energy being used is dirty energy. My understanding was that it has some of the highest, what is that, the carbon credits that are produced out of like almost any

Starting point is 00:34:14 energy consuming industry. Is that correct? What is the actual talking point that you guys have? And what's the data for that? At this point, over 50% of the electricity in Texas comes from wind and solar. And her argument is particularly egregious because she brings up the worst possible comparison, which is internal combustion engine cars, gas cars versus electric cars. I mean, it's not even the same category. It's not even the same category, right? Right. And her argument is, oh, because of Bitcoin miners, the carbon emissions that were reduced

Starting point is 00:34:50 with electric vehicles are now increased with electric miners. And it's like, well, hold on. First of all, there's no internal combustion engine for mining rigs, right? Like, I haven't seen one yet. But if anybody wants to build that, I'm sure Steve Barber would say that, you know, you know, that's what he's building. But the point being there, though, is that Bitcoin mining is already electrified. It's already decarbonized in the sense that it doesn't emit any CO2. Now, to her point about increasing the use of renewables, frankly, the Biden administration as well

Starting point is 00:35:26 have a very extreme position on Bitcoin mining, which is that even if you are using 100% renewable electricity on your own land, with your own solar panels, with your own windmills, not touching the grid, not doing any, you know, that's still not okay. Because that electricity should be going towards curing cancer, right? Or something that they want you to point it to and not what you want to point it to. Right, exactly. And so that's a very extreme position. This is madness.

Starting point is 00:35:59 This is madness. So if you go out and perform work, she's saying, I know how to point it to what I want it to go to better than you do. even though you're the one generating it and producing it. That's right. And she's also overlooking the point that quite often solar and wind in Texas are overproducing electricity. The electricity price is negative. So it's not like there's any kind of shortage.

Starting point is 00:36:26 Texas is the energy capital of the world. I mean, there's an abundance of energy here. Natural gas prices are at all time lows. And so from every angle, now I know that she doesn't like natural gas that's neither here nor there because as far as Texas is concerned, oil and gas are here to stay. They're not being phased out contrary to what some ideologues might argue. And the other part about natural gas is that when we're in those situations where we don't have any wind or sun and we do need capacity from natural gas power plants, well, if those natural

Starting point is 00:37:04 natural gas power plants are not earning any revenue, they won't be there when we need them. They will shut down or they will leave the state and then we won't have any capacity when we need it. And this is something that is a recognized issue at the political level in Texas where the Texas legislature, the House and the Senate and the governor signed a bill to increase the state subsidies for natural gas power plants so that we don't. don't lose that capacity that we need in extreme circumstances. And so really what I would say is that the push towards subsidizing solar and wind to the detriment of every other power generation technology is actually potentially

Starting point is 00:37:52 creating an emergency. I think that is creating a risk of public harm of a blackout, where we just don't have enough power generation for every situation that we find ourselves in. The weather is very uncertain. I think that's people look at, at least the sun is a little, has a little more certainty. But even there, when we look at day to day, if there's some cloud coverage, well, suddenly, you've got 20, 30, 40 percent less sun output. And then, of course, when the sun sets, you're at zero.

Starting point is 00:38:24 The wind comes and goes very quickly. So if the conversation is very dogmatic about, oh, we only want wind and solar, then you have to go to residential consumers and explain to them that their power is going to be out 20% of the time. Wow. And that's probably not an acceptable view. And Texas voters, they voted on that bill. They actually went to referendum. And so they've all passed the referendum.

Starting point is 00:38:54 And so to me, it's a question of, do we want taxpayers to have to subsidize natural gas in order to offset the subsidies from solar and end? Or do we just increase overall demand in a flexible way so that we're increasing the utilization of the grid outside of peak hours? And then in peak hours, Bitcoin miners turn off and the system works. I think that she's really barking up the wrong tree. And to me, the other astonishing part of this is that she's in the habit of sending letters. So she'll send letters on official Senate, you know, letterhead. And so she's sent letters to riot. We got one letter from her. We got one letter from her counterpart in the house.

Starting point is 00:39:37 And they were asking for our energy or electricity consumption data. We provided that data to her and never heard back from her, right? Because we also explained the benefits of Bitcoin and how, you know, flexible loads function and curtailment and demand response. We never heard back from her after sending that letter. She also sent a letter to Ercot and asking, hey, hey, why is Urquot paying the Bitcoin miners? And to his credit, the CEO of Irkot personally responded to her letter. And he explained that Bitcoin miners are really a small percentage of demand response

Starting point is 00:40:15 and the demand response is good and that we should want more demand response. There's not really any kind of problems here. She never replied to that either. So she is very loud, but then doesn't listen to anyone who is explaining reality. to her. And I think that's problematic. So hopefully she listens to this podcast. I want to shift gears a little bit. I'm sure she's listening by the way here. I'm sure. Many years ago, I would say, what, 2014, 2013, you and Michael Goldstein wrote about this speculative attack. Do you remember writing this? Do you remember what year you wrote this? Yeah, I think it was 2014. 14. Okay.

Starting point is 00:41:02 There was a paper that was written about Bitcoin and a speculative attack that I read that I felt like got the causal mechanism wrong. And so I essentially wrote my version of it that I felt like would be more predictive and accurate of how it would work. And yeah, that was the initial impetus for writing that article. The reason I bring this up is because we've been watching micro strategy implement this miraculous treasury with their common stock riding at a higher price per share than what the treasury per share is. And as they're doing this, Michael's just issuing more common stock,

Starting point is 00:41:45 which you think would be dilutive. And then buying Bitcoin with the proceeds of doing this. And what we're finding is that he's ending up with more Bitcoin per share by implementing this approach. And so I think you, wrote about it more from like a central bank kind of standpoint. But now that we see a company that has been implementing it pretty heavily, what are some of your thoughts? And I also want to throw out one other really interesting point. Recently, he did, when he first started doing this, he was not doing it as a common to cash to Bitcoin-type maneuver. He did it with convertible debt. He took that the funding, the cash that he raised from the convertible debt, and then he

Starting point is 00:42:28 bought Bitcoin with it. And that was the play. But then he's, slowly migrated it over to this common share issuance to Bitcoin play. And what I find interesting about the convertible debt piece that I didn't know, and I think many others until just recently I started thinking about this and seeing this, that because he's tapping into the fixed income market, he's creating this enormous amount of derivative interest on top of not only the fixed income, But because of the way that they're covering themselves in these markets, they're also owning a lot of common stock, which is creating a ton, massive amount of volume and liquidity on the common stock, which then makes this even easier for him to implement by going and issue more common stock and buying Bitcoin with it. So it's like a PhD in financial engineering and maneuvering where you're issuing stock and it's not

Starting point is 00:43:30 dilutive and it's actually like anti-delutive. But you were talking about this for years. I'm really curious your thoughts on everything that he's doing right now because it's just miraculous. I do find it fascinating. So despite updating the causal mechanism, I still kind of got it wrong in the sense that I didn't realize there would be like a gift. a good genius like a sailor to come along.

Starting point is 00:43:53 Because traditionally the way that speculative attacks are thought of, and this is a term coined by our good friend Paul Krugman. You know, people say, hey, speculative attack sounds really negative. It's like, yeah, because Paul Krugman came up with it. I mean, just like Vitalik came up with Bitcoin Maximilist, right? Like our haters are ultimately the ones who are going to come up with the best things that we can appropriate. Bitcoin Psychopaths.

Starting point is 00:44:17 Remember that one? Yeah. Yeah. Bitcoin psychopaths. I use that one all the time. Clebes. With a traditional speculative attack, what happens is that the speculator borrows the weak local currency and then sells it for a stronger currency.

Starting point is 00:44:37 And so they're essentially short selling the weak currency. Now, what makes this a really, let's call it like a positive feedback loop, although central bankers would probably consider it to be a negative feedback loop, is that when they borrow that weak local currency, if they are borrowing it from the commercial banking system, they're actually creating more of the weak currency. And so they are increasing the supply of the weak currency and then driving its value down.

Starting point is 00:45:06 And then they repay the loan by buying back the weak currency at a lower rate and having a nice profit from that. And so the way that a central bank counteracts this is by raising interest rates, so that it is more expensive to borrow the weak currency, and that will strengthen that currency and undo the attack. What the Federal Reserve would have to do to stop Michael Saylor would be to raise interest rates such that if he's issuing a convertible bond,

Starting point is 00:45:34 because that's easier to think about than stock, although the principle is the same, because we're talking about cost to capital and money is fungible and all of that. But the idea being that they would have to raise interest rates to be greater than the expected value the, you know, we think Bitcoin's going to appreciate by. And so if we look at Bitcoin's, you know, the Kager, right? The, what are the returns for Bitcoin? Well, they're at least, let's say conservatively like 30%, 50%, right?

Starting point is 00:46:02 That's the number I think it is. I think you're like between 30 to 50% annualized. So they would have to raise interest rates to be greater than 30 to 50% in order to stop Michael sailor. Now, that would destroy the financial system, right? The entire fiat system would collapse if they raised interest rates to 30 or 50%. They're not even, yeah, they weren't even like raising them hardly at all. And they had to step in and backstop Silicon Valley Bank. I mean, yeah. The alternative they have is capital controls. And so they have effectively implemented capital controls for the commercial banking system by saying that the banks cannot hold Bitcoin, right? The banks cannot participate by lending dollars against Bitcoin,

Starting point is 00:46:48 collateralized lending or anything like that. But now they're trying to overturn that. I'm seeing movement that the banks are coming together. What do you know about that, Pierre? Saab 121. I think that the whole idea around reserve requirements and Basel 3 and all of this stuff is just completely ludicrous because the banking system is already insolvent. So it's really, Bitcoin's their best.

Starting point is 00:47:12 hope for getting out of insolvency. Do you think they're going to get it overturned? Do you think that they're going to allow to them? Yeah. Go ahead. I do because what the Fed would have to do in order to tighten things up would be to apply the same rules, not just to banks, but to everyone. Otherwise, right, it just creates regulatory arbitrage, which Michael Saylor is

Starting point is 00:47:36 effectively using, right, which is that micro strategy does not have capital controls. They can put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. and they can go out in the bond market and raise funds to buy more Bitcoin and issue more equity to buy more Bitcoin. So as long as there are sectors of the financial system that are not subject to the capital controls, then everybody in the banking system is kind of looking over the fence saying, hey, we'd like to participate in that. If you're not going to stop him, why are you stopping us?

Starting point is 00:48:06 It's unfair. And they're right. It would be unpalatable for the government to apply capital controls to everyone. Maybe they'll try in an emergency, but I think a federal judge would overturn it, given that they can't get a survey out. More emergencies. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination.

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Starting point is 00:51:55 sure it's probably the same reason you've got, but surely, surely they have to be waking up. I mean, if Bitcoin, let's say Bitcoin goes 100,000 and we're looking at Michael's balance sheet, I think it goes up by a billion every $5,000 that the price of Bitcoin moves. I mean, we're talking billions upon billions that his company is going to move. People have to start waking up to this. This is absurd, absurd what's taking place. Is it happening in 2024? Like, what's your feeling?

Starting point is 00:52:25 What's your sentiment? I had the same thought about, you know, we would have liked to have more co-plaintiffs on our lawsuit against the federal government. It would have been nice to have more the big Bitcoin miners on the lawsuit with their names on it. So Riot, you know, stuck its neck out, just like micro strategy is doing as a matter of leadership, right? That ultimately it does take courage to do what we're doing. and I used to think that we would see more imitations of Michael Saylor back in the previous cycle, for that matter. We did see Elon dip his toes and then, you know, he, I don't know quite what happened there, but. So did you hear my conversation with him when I was on Spaces with Elon?

Starting point is 00:53:15 Yeah, so I was on a Spaces with Kathy Wood when Ark launched their EF and Elon joined. And Elon made the comment that he had to sell the Bitcoin out of Tesla for working capital reasons. Okay, that was the quote. So I've provided my opinion, as an accountant and financier, what does that translate that for the audience when Elon said that he had to sell his Bitcoin at Tesla? He still had it. He goes, but I still have it at SpaceX, but I had to sell it at Tesla for working capital reasons. So what does that mean translate for us? Well, I mean, I think it means he needs to work with

Starting point is 00:53:59 my wife Morgan, a financial planner, because he overbought Bitcoin. There you go. He, given his circumstances, everybody has different circumstances. So Michael Saylor's circumstances are different than Elons. Pierre, this goes to this point. I keep beating this drum, right? It's a drum that you have to like continually say, Bitcoin flows to the net producers. You can't accumulate and you can't continue to hold it if you're a net consumer. And so like when we look at Tesla and we look at where he was at and like how much he could buy based on the free cash flows of the business, he bought too much. That's why he quote unquote had working capital concerns. It's just so obvious.

Starting point is 00:54:49 You cannot hold on the Bitcoin unless you're actually making. and producing value for society at the rate that you are accumulating it. It's just so in your face, simple, stupid. Like, I don't know. It's a pet peeve of mine, but keep going. I interrupted you. Oh, no, not all. I mean, I think that, yeah, the same principle applies on a personal level, right?

Starting point is 00:55:13 For friends out there that, hey, if you're struggling with cash flow, like, don't go and buy Bitcoin. You'll have to sell it before you know it. and it might be at a loss, right? So given Bitcoin's volatility, it's not a short-term get-rich-quick thing. It is a long-term savings vehicle, and it works really well as a long-term savings vehicle if you have the balance sheet and the income statement in the cash flow to support holding it for the long-term. And I think that this is something that Sailor has to be applauded on as well. All of his critics were saying that he's going to get liquidated.

Starting point is 00:55:50 He bought too much. And they were not running the numbers because when you ran the numbers, like Bitcoin had to go to some ridiculously low dollar value for him to get liquidated. And it was pretty clear that, you know, he was going to weather the drawdowns, which can be like 90% in Bitcoin, right? And so he did. And then same thing for Bucheli in El Salvador. All of the critics were saying, well, look, he's in the red. He's got a loss. But that doesn't matter if you have the correct setup from a overall balance sheet perspective

Starting point is 00:56:25 that, you know, as a sovereign, his credit was improving and his underlying economy was improving. The GDP is growing. Now, I know that the libertarians don't like to hear about, you know, tax revenue being a cash flow, but from a government perspective, yes, that's what it is. From every level of corporate, sovereign, personal, all the same principles apply because You can't print more Bitcoin. And that's really, you know, and the volatility is the same for everyone.

Starting point is 00:56:54 It's interesting to me that the critics, they have not learned to be humble. During the bear market, they should realize that there have been bare markets before and that due to the fundamentals of Bitcoin that it will recover. But I think, you know, obviously as critics, they don't think Bitcoin has any fundamentals. And so they do think it's going to zero, which is elite system pretty disaster. of the players involved. Pierre, my last question for you. So you have experience working at a large exchange, Bitcoin Exchange.

Starting point is 00:57:29 When you were over at Cracken, you have experience working at a mining company. And now we get these ETFs. And there's a lot of people coming up with theories and like what OTC desks look like. Where are they getting all these coins from to even sell on the exchanges? we have 10,000 Bitcoin a day getting soaked up just in the ETFs alone and there's only 900 that are being mined in a day. So help us just wrap our head around these numbers because these numbers sound crazy. The number of Bitcoin that are about to be mined are going to go down the 450 a day.

Starting point is 00:58:06 Where are they getting these coins from? It seems that the price has moved aggressively. I guess I'm saying I think the price still has a lot of aggressive moves. yet to come because of what I would suspect is just a massive amount of supply suffocation taking place. Yeah, I mean, the coins come out of cold storage. And so Unchained has a great visualization of hoddle waves, which kind of looks at the blockchain data to show that during the bare market, people sit on their hands, right?

Starting point is 00:58:41 That they don't move the coins and that they turn into the age. And then in the bull market, they come out of cold storage and they come to market and they circulate at a higher price, right? And that's what incentivizes them to come out of cold storage. I think that there's probably some folks out there that, and I saw recently that there was somebody had done some blockchain analysis showing that there actually was a whale that from very early days, 2010, that had sold a big chunk at 60K. I think that psychological logically, maybe there's a lot of folks around this price that to them, they bought it 60K not so long ago.

Starting point is 00:59:22 And they're like, all right, I need to get out of this because they're exhausted, which it's unfortunate. But hopefully they read the Bitcoin standard and listen to your podcast and kind of strengthen their conviction. So, yeah, I think that between the folks who missed the opportunity to sell in 2021, who who intended to for rebalancing reasons, right? And this is what it comes down to in my mind is, hey, look, if you bought at $1,

Starting point is 00:59:50 it is probably a good idea to sell at $60,000 some percentage, whether it's to give to your favorite charity or to put your nieces and nephews through college or to pay off your parents' mortgage or to buy a Lambo. You know, there's lots of good and bad reasons to, or to just put some money like in a S&P 500 index fund, right? That you're just kind of just de-risking some percentage of your allocation because you want to rebalance and you want to to sleep at night, right? You just don't,

Starting point is 01:00:21 not everyone has the risk appetite to be 100% Bitcoin through the cycles. Some of us sleep at night better in different portfolio constructions, though. That's right. And so we have to respect that. And that's what it creates a market. Because without that, yeah, the price would immediately go to a million dollars or whatever it took to get people to move their coins to exchanges to sell them. In some ways, yeah, the price is what is going to cause the market to clear. You think we're... And we've... Yeah, where do you think this is going by the end of the year? Do you think we're going above six figures per Bitcoin? I do. I do. Yes. I think that it's just math, right? Yeah. As our friends say, the reality is that there

Starting point is 01:01:09 will be very big drawdowns throughout the bull market. So I'd really encourage folks to avoid leverage, you know, stay humble, stack sats, all the same principles apply. But yes, we are in a bull market. The catalysts are clear. Obviously, the ETFs are creating tremendous demand. The supply is going to get, or from Bitcoin miners, at least, not only is it going to get cut in half, arguably it's already gotten cut. We've seen a lot of miners announced that they, are not selling as much Bitcoin as they have in the past. And there's a very simple reason, which is that they don't need to sell as much Bitcoin in order to raise the same amount of dollars. And so just mechanically, they can more easily cover their OPEX and their CAPEX that they've

Starting point is 01:01:57 budgeted for and sell fewer coins. So arguably, the halving has already happened. It's already priced in. But I think the other part is on dollar monetary policy that it does seem like we're at the end of the tightening phase and that going forward, it's either going to be sideways or loosening, if depending on what the data comes in. But that was a huge headwind in the previous cycle, was that that inflation caused a, you know, interest rates to go up. And to his credit, Jeremy Powell was pretty aggressive about raising interest rates. And arguably, that kind of dampened the Bitcoin bull market. Because as I was saying, with the speculative attempt, Max. There's one solution for central banks. It's to raise interest rates. If they're not

Starting point is 01:02:47 raising interest rates, then I do think that it creates tailwinds for Bitcoin. And we're easily going in the six figures this year. And then if we zoom out and look at, okay, 18 months after the having, where are we? Maybe we are touching a million dollars because there's not anything stopping us from getting there, and there's lots of catalysts pushing us towards that price point. It really seems like the volatility is just going to continue to hang around from what we've seen in previous cycles. When I was out at the Bitcoin Atlantis last week, I was asking the panel about their thoughts on the ETFs and like any advice for banks. We've had all these examples of people that were basically re-hypothicating holdings and how it ended for Mount

Starting point is 01:03:37 Gawks and all these others. And Michael had the comment that he thinks things are going to get really spicy with respect to the price action after we start to see derivatives stood up on top of the ETFs, which haven't even kicked into gear, which he's thinking maybe he's a year to a year and a half from now that some of that's going to get the approval and then the construction on top of it. And he didn't have too many concerns for Wall Street being able to kind of manage the risks of this. He actually implied on stage that he thinks that they're very well equipped to understand the risks and to position themselves and to deal with a lot of that as opposed to what we've seen

Starting point is 01:04:18 in a lot of the shadow banking to date with Bitcoin as it was growing up. So he didn't seem to have too much concerns there. He just thinks that what people were totally underestimating is like how much more Fiat is basically getting plugged into the Bitcoin network once they put derivatives on top of it. He thinks it's going to be crazy. Any thoughts on that particular idea? Yeah. I mean, I think that this is, this is an area where on one hand, the gold bug kind of conspiracy theorists folks are like, hey, anytime you have paper going around that that's going to decrease demand for the underlying, I think that's a cope on their part. You know, it's just that gold has underperformed and they need something to hang their head on.

Starting point is 01:05:04 I don't think they have an appreciation for the number of coins outstanding that are sitting in the hands of individuals that are never putting like any sizable amount of those coins back on, where when you look at gold, it doesn't have that setup. It has, it's sitting in government hands, a majority of the outstanding stock. Absolutely. And the other part is that I do think derivatives actually create demand for spot because there's, lots of trading strategies that rely on you actually holding the asset while, you know, if you're writing a covered call, for example. You know, so there's strategies where essentially you need to be capitalized with Bitcoin in order to be performing the strategy and arbitraging whatever it is.

Starting point is 01:05:47 I do think that is going to create demand. Now, plus it's just pristine collateral. I mean, like we've never seen that can immediately settle. It can be sent anywhere in the world. It's 24-7 every day of the year. Like, people just underestimate how powerful that is compared to anything else that's out there. And CME futures have been trading on Bitcoin for a while now, and nothing crazy has happened there that they survived the bigger market.

Starting point is 01:06:15 And in fact, they've got pretty good volume on CME futures. So I think that it's definitely going to be a further catalyst. Pierre, it's already been over an hour here. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about all the stuff that you're doing there in Texas with the mining, raising awareness. If some of that conversation for the first half here has ticked you off, feel free to write. Feel free to put your representative on notice, especially if you're up in Massachusetts. And by the way, it looks like she has one heck of a candidate coming up against her that's going to give her a run. I'm seeing some of her tweets and it seems like she's quite concerned about this guy.

Starting point is 01:06:56 Real fast, do you know anything else? Does he have a shot at beating her up there? Yes, so John Deden has built quite a following, especially, I mean, I know the Bitcoin people won't like this, but of litigating the XRP issue as a lawyer and pushing back on the SEC. Now, whether it's a security or not, personally, I don't care, but the legal arguments have certainly swung in the favor of Ripple and XRP to the surprise. of many. And so John Deaton is a folk hero within the XRP community and I think within the wider

Starting point is 01:07:34 crypto community as well. And so obviously he is the diametric opposite of Elizabeth Horn on this issue. And he also, I think, has a stronger way of talking about the challenges facing the working class in the United States where Elizabeth Horn kind of comes off as lecturing, professor where he's more of man of the people, salt of the earth. Yeah, no doubt. And so I think he could have a good solid shot and taking that seat away from her. And I think that that would send a very clear signal to the political class that if they want to pick a fight with Bitcoin and the crypto community, that it's just not going to end well.

Starting point is 01:08:20 And it's better to join them than to fight them. Yes. Yes. Pierre, give people a handoff where they can learn more about you or riot or whatever you want to highlight for us. Yeah, absolutely. So follow me on Twitter at Bitcoin Pierre. I also host a weekly podcast. So if you're not getting enough podcasts with Preston, also subscribe to riots podcast, Block Time.

Starting point is 01:08:47 And Preston's actually been on a guest on Block Time as well. So I'm really excited about what riots have to in terms of expanding in Korsakana. So lots of great pictures. We just put out a monthly update. And yeah, looking forward to what else comes in 2024. I can't believe it's already March. It's going to be an exciting year, man. Hang on.

Starting point is 01:09:08 Hang on. Buckle up. Thanks for having me on Fest. Yeah. Thanks for coming here. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires.

Starting point is 01:09:22 The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday. and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening. And I'll catch you again next week.

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We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC173: Bitcoin Energy Survey and the Speculative Attack w/ Pierre Rochard (Bitcoin Podcast)

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