What Bitcoin Did - Bitcoin Treasury Companies, Mining & The Slow Grind to $1 Million | Mitchell Askew

Episode Date: July 14, 2025

Mitchell Askew is Head of Research at Blockware and author of The Conservative Case for Bitcoin. In this episode, we discuss the growing role of Bitcoin treasury companies, how miners are evolving into treasury plays, and why Blockware is betting on mining as a tool for institutional Bitcoin accumulation. We get into companies choosing ASICs over spot Bitcoin, how tax incentives and cash flow denominated in Bitcoin are changing the landscape, and the emergence of global copycats of MicroStrategy. We also get into the dynamics of hash rate, Bitcoin price, and the impact of ETFs on volatility. Finally, we cover the generational gap in Bitcoin adoption, why Gen Z isn’t saving, and why Mitchell believes the four-year Bitcoin cycle is dead - and that Bitcoin will now “stair-step” its way to $1 million. THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/ BLOCKWARE: https://mining.blockwaresolutions.com/wbd LEDN: https://learn.ledn.io/wbd Follow: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles or https://primal.net/danny Mitchell Askew: https://x.com/MitchellHODL

Do you think the Bitcoin price will increase faster than we can build new data centers? Personally, I do. So I'm long mining. People are having families later. They're getting married later. Having kids later, that's because the money's broken. Global M2 is on an up trend. We see a record amount of Bitcoin being held by long-term holders right now.

I think Bitcoin's going to go much higher between now and the rest of the year. We stair step kind of to a new price level. Go to a million dollars over the next 15 years. believe that, but I think it will bore everyone to death and it's going to be a slow grind. And anybody who sells Bitcoin under the impression that there's going to be a 75% dip and they can come in and buy it back, I think they're going to get burned. Mitchell, thank you for coming on the show, man. You've not been on before.

So give everyone a bit of an intro. Who are you and why on earth you here? Yeah. So I'm Mitchell Ask You. I work for Blockware. So I lead our market research and social media and all of our, any type of content used to come out of blockware. I'm behind that. And we've sponsored your show for a couple weeks now. And I'm a long-time

listener. So for me, it's a pleasure and honor to be here, Danny. No, thank you, man. So we're going to get into a bunch of stuff today. I've been reading through some of the reports that you've put out recently. One of the most interesting ones, to me at least, for what's happening in Bitcoin at the moment, this is a Bitcoin Treasury Company podcast now. Like, I feel like I talk about in every fucking show. But you've got kind of a different take on the Bitcoin Treasury company stuff. you're working on some new ideas. Do you want to kind of lay that out and explain what it is that you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. So Bitcoin Treasury companies, they get a bad rap because most people say, well, why don't you just buy spot Bitcoin, which you should, right? Bitcoin Treasury companies

aren't perfectly sovereign, 24-7, 365, like, permissionless, like, for sure, buy and hold Bitcoin, but 99% of the capital in the world can't do that. They have, logistical, technical, legal restrictions as to why they can't just buy and hold Bitcoin. And so Bitcoin treasury companies are bridging the Fiat capital into the Bitcoin world. Bitcoiners have been talking for a long time about hyper-bitcoinization and Bitcoin demonetizing the equity in the treasury markets. This is the vehicle through which they do that. So I'm super bullish on Bitcoin Treasury companies as a concept.

And you can nitpick on which ones will be successful. I think some will be wildly successful, like, strategy has already been, Metaplanet has already been. But I also think there's a lot of room to compete and you're going to have some dudge. You're going to have some winners. But part of the Bitcoin Treasury idea is almost diversification, which is kind of a laughable meme in the Bitcoin world, like not 6040 portfolio diversification, but Bitcoinized diversification. So the same 99% of capital that I mentioned that can't buy direct Bitcoin for whatever reason, maybe it's too volatile, maybe they just don't have the resources to custody it, whatever. They want diversified

exposure because they, usually it's people managing other people's money. So for you and I, we can buy Bitcoin and we can eat a 75% drawdown. We don't have any fiduciaries. We don't have anybody to report to. But other like capital managers, they can't do that. So they need diversified Bitcoin exposure with less volatility to the downside, but still maintaining some of that upside. And so with this, I think you're going to see a lot of Bitcoin treasury companies take kind of different approaches offering different levels of risk and reward. So this is like the sailor, strike, strive, and strike, whatever. Exactly. So that's like native to the strategy ecosystem, but I think you're going to see this across the entire spectrum. And so something we've been

pushing forward at Blockware recently is Bitcoin Treasury, but with mining. So you're getting, with mining, you're producing Bitcoin at a discount. So you have Bitcoin upside. You're also, you have tax benefits. You're getting Sats flow. So it's a term basically mean Bitcoin denominated cash flow. So with other businesses, if your cash flows are fiat denominated, the Bitcoin price goes up.

Your Bitcoin denominated cash flow shrink. But with mining or any type of Bitcoin denominated cash flow business, Bitcoin price goes up. Bitcoin denominated, your cash flows might actually increase. Okay. Before we get into how that will actually work and like the benefits of doing that, Can we just first go into the Bitcoin mining companies that are doing this like treasury play? Right.

Because obviously like Blockware have done it. Sorry. Obviously Marathon have done it. They are now, I think, the second biggest holder of Bitcoin of a public company. But then are the companies like Iran who sponsor the show and CleanSpark, who instead of issuing a ton of debt to buy Bitcoin, they've issued debt to invest in the infrastructure, obviously knowing that they're like betting on themselves that they can mine a ton of Bitcoin way below spot at like 50. 60% discount spot or whatever it is. How do you kind of see that? Who do you think has the right track there? Do you think it's issued debt by Bitcoin now or issue debt, invest in infrastructure, mine Bitcoin in the future? So when you say invest in infrastructure, I don't necessarily think

the best play is to invest in mining physical infrastructure like the energy production assets, the racks, the land, et cetera. But investing into ASICs specifically, so just the Bitcoin denominated Bitcoin producing hard asset. I think that's a perfectly valid play. And this is what we're offering with blockware. So we recently partnered with, they're called crypto blockchain industries. They were like this Web 3 kind of zombie company out of Paris. All the buzzwords. All the buzzwords, right? Yeah. They IPOed in 2021 at the top and their stocks down like 90-something percent, had no volume. They partnered with blockware to not, they don't want to be a data center operator. You know, they don't want to go out and build and own and operate data centers. It's time

intensive. It's capital intensive. And it's a very hands-on business running mining facilities. They wanted the hands-off approach. So a block where we kind of call it CapEx Light. You're not buying the racks in the data centers. You're just buying the miners. We operate them on your behalf. So they're accumulating Bitcoin every single day at a discount. And it's more like targeted Bitcoin exposure, right? Because when your balance sheet is filled with data center assets, that's not necessarily Bitcoin exposure, which is why I believe a lot of the traditional mining stocks have underperformed Bitcoin over the last couple years. But when you're buying just the A6, you have long Bitcoin exposure. And even for this company, we've already seen this turn their story around.

So they went from buzzword salad to now they're accumulating Bitcoin on their balance sheet, their stocks up almost 10x, their trading volumes up 10x. And it's held throughout the last sort of month and a half since they made this announcement. That's interesting that you say that's why you think the mining companies have like not perform the way they did say less cycle. Right. They're energy companies essentially. But I've kind of put that underperformance down to the fact that we now have like

ETFs and then all these treasury companies, which are like alternative vehicles to get Bitcoin exposure. Sure. And like obviously the treasury companies are like the hype cycle at the moment. But you think maybe that trend continues. use for the mining companies. Yes. And I think the reasons you gave there, too, are also applicable, right? It's kind of a combination of factors. I mean, you had the halving for one. You had the competition from the ETFs and then strategy popping off and then slowly but surely all the copycats emerging,

plus the fact that many of these traditional Bitcoin mining companies, they have a lot of energy assets. I view them as more so energy plays. And also, many of them are not married to their stack. So they'll post, you know, we hold X amount of Bitcoin, but they haven't demonstrated transparency to their shareholders that, hey, we're going to hold this and continue to accumulate. Many of them, you know, they'll sell if the opportunity, you know, if they see fit, which is not what Bitcoiners want. Bitcoiners want a treasury company that's going to accumulate more Bitcoin over the long term.

Well, I think their perspective on that would be instead of being like a Bitcoin holding company, they just want to be a cash flow positive, like very successful business. And then, like, Bitcoin is obviously, they're all long Bitcoin in the sense that they're all mining Bitcoin. I think it's kind of like a different value prop to be a Bitcoin miner who also holds Bitcoin. And now I know most of them do, and I think that's positive. But, like, I do understand the idea of just wanting to run a successful business and not have the volatility of Bitcoin in that. Yeah, for sure. So, like, on these Bitcoin Treasury companies, how many do you think can exist?

Because, like, I've been potentially, like, mid-curving this a little bit, where I'm pretty skeptical. I think strategy is kind of out on its own in a different realm because it's just huge. They've crushed it for a long time. And they've obviously structured that business really well where I think they can handle any kind of downside in Bitcoin. But my kind of long-term view on this is that potentially we're going to have these treasury companies like copycat, say the companies basically pop up, hoover up a ton of coins and then have unfavorable terms on their debt or for whatever reason eventually have to spit those

back out. And like that is to me what I see the next. bare market being. Yeah. Like how much space do you think there is in this world? I think hundreds or potentially thousands. So right now,

I don't know of any treasury company who has taken on very short-term, high-rate, unfavorable debt. But when that comes, I'll be the first to say, hey, this is very suspicious. I think you can have a strategy in every market.

So, for example, you know, strategy to take Sailor's own quote, there is no second best. If we're looking at the Bitcoin Treasury world, I kind of think that's applicable in a way. I agree. Like no other company will have the same stack as strategy, the most liquid options market, liquid convertible note market. And the investors buying strike and strife and stride and micro strategy convertible notes, they want a liquid options market. And so nobody's going to be able to catch them in that

regard in the United States market. But I think you can have copycats in every single other market as well. And then kind of beneath strategy. So if you have like, hey, this is like the lowest risk, highest upside, most kind of pure play Bitcoin Treasury company, investors, they still want diversified exposure. They're not going to buy these kind of institutional capital allocators. They don't like buying single stocks necessarily. They, of course, want a diversified portfolio.

And so they're going to look at the Bitcoin Treasury industry, and they're going to allocate capital to all of them. Some of them will win and some will lose. But I, you know, I'm pretty confident saying strategy is not going to be a throughout all of this. Yeah, I totally agree with that. So you see this like these popping up in different jurisdictions as like a positive, like the one that just launched in the UK, I think is the most successful IPO of all time. And I think the UK stock market is maybe the oldest in the world, amongst the oldest in the world, which is pretty fucking incredible. So you're doing this with this

company in Paris, right? Paris, right. Okay, so tell me about this. Like, are they the first public minor to, sorry, first public company to actually like dip into the mining industry? In Paris, as far as I know, yeah. Outside of obviously the public mine is in the U.S. Yeah, yeah, they are. And it's really, the narrative for them is they're accumulating a Bitcoin treasury at a discount. So every Monday morning, Sailor Tweet Strategy bought, you know, X thousands of Bitcoin at 100K or whatever. For them, it's like, we acquired, you know, not thousands of Bitcoin, but dozens or a couple hundred Bitcoin, but at 55K or 50K, depending on um and constantly and constantly right every single day you don't have to question whether or not

oh are they going to announce a buy this week like you don't have to do that strategy either because they've been so consistent but the transparency is kind of the name of the game in the bitcoin treasure world like take game stop for example they were very opaque people were speculating are they going to be fully girthed in or not and they only took 25% of their capital right and bought bitcoin in the market and the market punish them for that so the market this bitcoin treasure market rewards transparency and mining as a Bitcoin treasury play is a good way to be transparent in that because you know these ASICs are running 24-7. They're always accumulating Bitcoin. Yeah. With GameStop, what actually happened there? They did 25% into Bitcoin. What happened

with the 75% remaining? Are the, is there potential they still put that into Bitcoin? It's just not yet. I'm sure it's possible. Yeah, I think they're just sitting in cash for the time being. But the market, as soon as it was funny, like when they announced the actual buy, the price tanked, because people were, and myself included, were hoping they would ape 100% of those proceeds into Bitcoin. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero fee recurring buys, making stacking stats effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outforms most high-yield savings accounts.

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Okay, so let's go through the benefit. You mentioned like tax benefits before. What are the other benefits that come from doing this through mining? Well, I'll elaborate on the tax benefits first because Trump's big, beautiful tax bill currently in limbo. I don't follow politics too much, but I know that it's likely to pass. There's a lot of other bull crap in there. They make these 10,000 page bills. But one of the things in there is 100% accelerated depreciation.

So if you purchase A6 in 2020, 25 for this tax year, you'll be able to write off 100% of the capital in one year. And is that for people as well? Yeah, individuals in the United States would be able to do that as well. Now, consult with your tax advisor or tax attorney or an accountant because I'm not an accountant. But I think as long as you do it through an LLC, you can do that. So if you have $100,000 in capital gains at the end of the year, if you buy $100,000 of miners, you can write it all off.

Damn, that's cool. So that's a massive incentive for you, like for people to use you at Blockwell. Oh, absolutely. We've had clients in the past where it wasn't always 100% write off, but 40, 60, 80%, and they're sitting there thinking, man, we need to buy like a jet or like an ocean liner or something we can write off. And it's like, why don't you just buy this machine that prints Bitcoin at a discount? And they're like, oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So even if that doesn't pass, you can still do 40% under the current laws for the 2025 tax year, but 100% will be, that'll be nice. That's insane.

Okay, cool. And then, so tax benefits being one, what else do we have? Bitcoin denominated cash flows I mentioned earlier. So elaborate on that. So the idea, especially for retail investors with the Bitcoin treasury companies, is you want to outperform spot Bitcoin. So institutional investors look at them as like an alternative to spot Bitcoin versus I think retail investors look at as kind of a complement.

So you obviously want spot Bitcoin, censorship, resistance, self-custody is kind of your savings. But then if you want to speculate with some capital and Bitcoin is your hurdle rate, you have the Bitcoin treasury companies, you can play options games with Ibit or you can mine Bitcoin yourself. So these are all Bitcoin denominated. But I personally don't know a lot of people where they may, let's say they crush it on a Bitcoin treasury company. They make two to three X. They outperform Bitcoin over a shorter period of time. I don't know a lot of people that sell, take the cash, wire it to an exchange, buy Bitcoin. and take that Bitcoin into self-custody because as a Bitcoin, I view that as taking profits. It's Bitcoin in self-custody. But with mining, you're getting the best of both worlds. So you're taking a long Bitcoin approach, right? If the Bitcoin price, it's $100,000 today. If it's $150 by the end of the year, you're going to crush it with mining. Your cash flows are going to increase. The value of your ASICs could even increase. There's a good chance you'll outperform just buying Bitcoin directly. But at the same time, you're always taking Bitcoin

into cold storage every single day. So it's the outperformance of Bitcoin potential plus the kind of profit-taking Bitcoin and cold storage at the same time. Yeah, that's interesting. So do you see these as like a more competitive vehicle for these Treasury companies in the sense that, like they are getting Bitcoin way under spot?

Is this a way of like, I agree that Saylor is kind of out there on his own, there is no second best? But is this a more competitive route to get way more Bitcoin on the balance sheet more quickly? potentially, I see it more as a diversification tool. So we're talking about, you know, hundreds of different Bitcoin treasury companies. Is there enough room for them? Well, if you're kind of a penny stock, low market cap, and you're trying to do exactly what

sailors doing, you're not going to be able to do it because you're not going to be able to issue all these preferred. And so one way you could differentiate yourself is by using mining to get your Bitcoin treasury. Another way is proof of reserves. I think Jacks, you had him on the show. very shortly after he made his proof of reserves announcement. I think that's a way to differentiate yourself from strategy and sailor.

Going into different jurisdictions is a way to differentiate yourself. And so I view mining as another way as like, hey, there's now 150 publicly traded companies that have Bitcoin on the balance sheet. How can you stand out using mining to get your treasury is one way to do that? So the sailor proof of reserves thing, you were at the very middle of like, like you asked the question. Yeah. So tell me your take on that.

Because personally, I think he's just wrong. I don't think this is like an added security risk. Like, River clearly do this very successfully. They do it every month, I think. So, like, what's your take on that? I do agree he's wrong. But I think by having this conversation, and this is why I asked a question, we can shift the Overton window enough where he will eventually do it.

So his reasons didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. He gave two primary reasons. One was a big four audit of your liabilities is just as important, which that makes sense, right? You know, FDX could have been publishing proof of reserves, but if they didn't have audited liabilities, we wouldn't have known. There's so many more outstanding claims on the Bitcoin. That part makes sense. But then his part about it being a security risk obviously doesn't make sense.

And people smarter than myself at River and 21, they seem to agree with that. Even Bitwise, the kind of the funny thing about that event, it was BitWise sponsored. and they publish proof of reserves for their ETF, and here, you know, the flagship name at their event is going against proof of reserves. So a little ironic, but I think we'll shift the Overton window enough. One simple thing I think Saylor could do to ease the minds of shareholders is to acquire a custodian or build in-house custody at strategy. They're positioning themselves as the Bitcoin company. I mentioned earlier transparency is huge for these Bitcoin Treasury companies. And that's not me saying it. That's Saler.

position. Unfortunately, I don't think that that event was filmed anywhere, but for like five or 10 minutes right before I asked him that question, he was talking on and on about transparency. Because you know strategy is committed to buying Bitcoin every single week and we have these KPIs, Bitcoin per share, Bitcoin yield, whether you want a long strategy, short it, buy options, sell options, no matter how you want to interact with the equity, you know, he's not going to rug pull and say, actually, you know, we're not buying Bitcoin or we're selling Bitcoin. So adding, proof of reserves is the ultimate form of transparency. And I think there's plenty of ways to do it in a very secure, not risky way. Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm not one of the domas that

think Saylor isn't holding the coins that he says to it is. Like I fully believe him, but it would be nice to have some on-chain transparency of that. So you think that Saylor is going to maybe potentially like either in-house custody Bitcoin or create a, or buy a custody company essentially. Like I think it's pretty common that people think that Saylor's eventually going to turn into some kind of Bitcoin bank. And I know Odell thinks he's going to launch stable coin. We'll see. I mean, I could see it. Yeah. But so why do you think that is the likely path forward? Because he needs to be like the Bitcoin treasury company. I don't necessarily think it's likely. I just think that's what he should do. Okay. So if I actually, I am a strategy shareholder,

so I ask the question to him. I respect him. I think they have the Bitcoin, but they don't hold it themselves. They outsource the custody to Coinbase, probably fidelity, probably a few others. And so there's just a third party in between strategy and the Bitcoin. And so minimizing third party risk, minimizing counterparty risk, even if they don't publish the on-chain addresses, like, hey, our Bitcoin's right here, if just knowing that they actually hold it and they're not outsourcing custody would go a long way and be a step in the right direction for transparency's sake. Yeah, I totally agree with that.

Okay, so let's get more into like the mining side of things. Maybe just start with like a general take on where the mining industry is. that right now. So I view mining through obviously four-year windows from halving to having. I think that's the best way to approach the market. Right now we have three years until the next having, more or less. It's going to be around March or April of 2008. So my thesis for mining is, do you think the Bitcoin price will increase faster than we can build new data centers? Personally, I do. So I'm long mining because the, The profit margins of Bitcoin mining are based on primarily two inputs to Bitcoin price and the network difficulty or hash rate.

And if you look historically, the growth rate and hash rate has really tapered off. So in the early days when ASICs first came out, each new ASIC was 100 times more efficient, more powerful than the previous. So hash rate just went parabolic. But in 2020 to 2024, that having epoch, hash rate only increased by about like 500%. And year to date, I think I checked before we started recording, it's been about 12 to 15%. And so the bottleneck for increasing the hash rate of the network is building new data centers. It's not BitMane, R&D on new machines and making something that's wildly more efficient. They still do that.

And new machines come out slowly but surely. but they're only 10 to 15% more efficient than the old model. So it makes the bottleneck physical energy production and data centers to house all of these miners. And so my thesis is that the Bitcoin price, because it's traded 24-7, 365, it has these kind of supply and elasticity dynamics where at the margin there's no more sellers. The Bitcoin price goes from, it went from 60K to 90K in like two weeks. That's a 50% increase. You can't see a 50% increase in hash rate.

in two weeks. That increase would take at this point, probably a year at least, to build that much new mining infrastructure. So I think between now and the next having, price will increase faster than difficulty, and Bitcoin miners will benefit significantly. Okay, so that actually takes me back, and we're going back a little bit here to the Treasury companies, because you're saying that efficiency gains are way less on the new generation machines than they used to be. But is there some risk for the companies doing the Treasury play with mining in the sense that their machines get deprecated over time. Like, they do get worse and worse.

Potentially, but yeah, I'll say, yes, that is a risk, but it's less of a risk than it used to be. Because the efficiency gains are so marginal now, the lifespan of these miners is increasing, right? S-9s after the 2020 having were not really profitable. Yeah. But if you have a low enough electricity rate, you can still mine with an S-19.

And so from that generation to the next, you see an increased lifespan. So machines coming out, you know, within the last year, the S21 line, the S-21 XP, I think they'll be profitable beyond the 2028 having. And they'll maintain some amount of resale value. So typically what you see is A6 flow to kind of the lowest source of power or the lowest power cost. So like if you have an S-19, you can't mind profitably at 10 cent per kilowatt hour, but you can mind profitably at $0.4 per kilowatt hour. And so it gives you as someone who owns the ASIC a non-zero resale value into the future. So you can buy a miner, mine it for a few years, and then resell it later.

Or what, and this is kind of tangential to it, but with blockware, you can actually capitalize on volatility in ASIC prices. So for example, in 2020 to 2021, S-19 price is increased by 10x. Now, there's a lot of dynamics at play. You had the Bitcoin price going in an absolute tear. You had kind of COVID supply chain constraints. You had the China mining ban. All of this put a supply squeeze on miners themselves, but there was no market to sell that into.

It was highly illiquid. And there was no centralized hub to do that. And so a block where we saw that problem and we built a marketplace to solve it. So all of our hosted mining clients, they have access to our marketplace where they can sell their miner at any time, any price. And when they sell that minor, are they selling the energy contract along with it? Yes, sir, exactly. So they're not locked, you're not committed, you know, you're not marrying the minor, right? You're not stuck in a three to four year hosting contract. Now, if you want to mine over the long term, I think that's a great play. But if we see Bitcoin go from 100K to 150K before the end of the year, I think ASIC prices will go up as well. And so now there's actually an option to get liquidity into those kind of ASIC bull markets. Okay, interesting. And how liquid is that market? Because like, especially with the public companies, like a few years ago, we saw them all take liens out on their ASICs. and that ended up not being a very good idea

because like you say, they're volatile, they're more volatile than Bitcoin. And in a bare market, ASIC prices can really drop. So like how liquid is that marketplace? Like how much demand can you kind of fill? It's the liquidity is growing, right? We're still early in the world of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining.

And Bitcoin mining is kind of a niche within a niche. But our goal is to add every high quality data center operator, Bitcoin mining facility into the marketplace and create kind of ones, centralized trading platform for miners. And so just within the last six months, we've added four or five new mining sites to the marketplace. So increasing the supply side and, you know, through all of our marketing efforts, increasing the demand side, more users on the platform. We're trying to be the ultimate market maker there. That's very cool. It's exciting.

So just back to the hash rate and the price dynamic, which leads which? This is a great question. It's kind of a chicken or the egg. I actually, my thoughts on this have evolved over the years. I think hash rate growth is mostly agnostic to price growth. But there is, there are some short-term dynamics. So for example, if the Bitcoin price drops, we're at 100K now. If it was 75K, 2 weeks from now, you would see a drop in difficulty because those miners that are tinkering on the edge of profitability, maybe their break-evens around 80s. to 90K, you're going to see them unplug in the short term. Yeah. Now, in the other direction, I think there's a longer time between price increase and hash rate increase. So it's easier to unplug a miner than it is to build a new data center and plug new machines in.

So let's take the scenario where we're at 100K and we're at 150K by the end of the year. Well, it's not until we're at 125, 130 that you're going to see new investment capital rotate kind of away from Bitcoin and into mining because those profit margins expand, they become more juicy, someone who's sitting there thinking, I might buy Bitcoin, well, when the Bitcoin price is that 150K, like actually, I'm going to buy miners instead, but then it takes X amount of months for them to build a data center. And so you see this lag between the Bitcoin price bull market and growth and hash rate. In the last cycle is a great example of this. Bitcoin price peaked in November of 2021. But it was 2022 and 2023, where we

a massive bull market and hash rate. And that was in spite of the Bitcoin price going down. Because all that capital that was poured into building new data centers, buying ASICs, having them imported from China, that capital was input after the Bitcoin price increased, but it takes months to actually develop and manifest into new hash rates. So I think there's some correlation, but to the downside, it's very tight and kind of related. And then to the upside, there's a lag there. Interesting. Okay. So if someone was to like go out and use blockware now, what is their kind of floor price? Like, I know it depends on which machine they get,

but let's just say they go for like S-21 XP or what. Yeah, if they go for the newest miner, the S-21XP at the blockware rate, it's around $50,000. Oh, wow. So every day that, yeah, and people think, oh, it's, you know, I'm too late to mining because you can't plug a machine in your mom's basement.

It's like nobody can mine the GPUs anymore at your house. It's a very institutionalized kind of industry, but by using a partner like Blockware, you get access to those industrial electricity prices, without having to operate a data center yourself. So 50K, every day is your effective Bitcoin buy price versus you can buy it spot at 100K. That's very cool. And so what kind of size are you at now in terms of like the miners that you host?

Collectively we have, I want to say around 2X a hash on the blogware pool. Yeah. And that's spread all over the US, I assume. Yeah, we have eight different sites in six or seven different states. Yeah, okay. And which states are they in? I assume like Texas. Yeah, Texas.

Iowa, North Dakota, Kentucky, Georgia, and Oklahoma. Okay, very cool. And one of the things that I say in my ads is, like, would you rather have one Bitcoin's day or two in the future? So maybe explain that dynamic in how that actually works. Yeah. So this is a catchphrase. Mark Moss actually helped us coin this.

He's been brainstorming some stuff with those at Blockware. I think it's a great phrase because with Bitcoin, the optimal approach is a low time preference, long time horizon. You don't want to buy and huddle for a month. You want to buy and hoddle for multiple years. And so if you're already in the mindset of this is a long-term play, well, then you become more open to the idea of, why don't I buy a minor and accumulate that Bitcoin over a long period of time?

So one Bitcoin today or two Bitcoin tomorrow is kind of hyperbolic. Really, it's more like, would you rather have one Bitcoin today or 1.2 Bitcoin in three or four years? That's kind of the less hyperbolic version of it, but the same principle applies. It's because you're producing Bitcoin every day at a discount, in spite of the upfront cost of the miner over a two, three, four year period, historically miners have accumulated more Bitcoin than just buying directly. And we've done a lot of analysis on this.

So if you started mining at the 2020 halving, you outperformed, you know, buying Bitcoin at the 2020 having or, you know, dollar cost averaging throughout the epochs, or whether you're lump something in or your DCA into Bitcoin, historically, we've seen mining outperform over a longer period of time. Okay. And who are sort of the target customers here? Because I assume you would say everyone should just buy and hold self-custly Bitcoin first and then maybe look at things like this. I would say that because, like I said, mining's a niche within a niche. And so if you don't understand Bitcoin, you're going to have a harder time understanding the Bitcoin mining thesis. But at the same time, if you're a little more emotional and you are uncomfortable with Bitcoin

price volatility, mining can be a great way to kind of force yourself to accumulate. Because instead of sitting here sweating like, should I buy Bitcoin now or tomorrow, what should I do? It's like just buy a miner and it'll accumulate it every single day for you. But we have a few different target personas, people who we specifically think should mine. The first is just the Bitcoins. The Pleb, you know, the mom and pop should get two or three miners to get themselves exposure to that Bitcoin, the spread between the Bitcoin price and hash rate slash network difficulty. Because Bitcoiners are bullish on Bitcoin, myself included, I do think the price will outpace hash rate over the next three years.

So I have some miners to get that exposure while also getting Bitcoin every single day at a discount. The second persona is kind of the one I mentioned before, which is people aren't super comfortable with Bitcoin. Bitcoin, but they're kind of a tech savvy investor, but they don't know, you know, should I buy Bitcoin now or should I wait? They're kind of less hardened in their convictions. So mining's a great way for them to just get their feet wet, accumulate every single day and not have to think about it. And then the third is larger capital allocators. So a family office or a public company that's looking to turn around their balance sheet and acquire Bitcoin at a discount. Okay, interesting. I mean, I think it's a very cool business. I'm after some alpha from you here. What do you think's going to happen with hash rate over the next 12 months? Because I don't know how much you kind of used to listen to the show. But when I was doing this with Peter, we had a bet over a year-long time frame. He said it would go over as a hash.

I went under. I've won that bet recently. So what's the next bet? Right now, I think we're sitting around 900. I know it got way close than I thought. It's grown a lot. Yeah, yeah, it has. But people always look at it, like raw hash rate data.

So, you know, you get five blocks back to back to back. it's going to make it look like hash rate jumped. You have to look at it under a 14 or 30-day moving average. Okay. And so when you do, because it smooths out the variance in random block times. So that's why we have seen like if you go on like some of the charts, it'll show it's gone above a Zeta hash for like a moment. Yeah. Yeah.

For a minute. That's just because a bunch of blocks randomly happen to get mine very fast. Because fundamentally, Bitcoin miners are just guessing and checking. Yeah. They're looking for the right amount of leading zeros on the hash. So you have to look at a moving average. When you look at a moving average, we're at about 900. So a jump to a thousand Zeta hash would be, what, like a 10% increase, 10 to 12%.

So I think we do hit a Zeta hash this year, barely. Like I think we'll close the year around 1,000 X a hash. But I think it'll be a long time, but before we go from 1,000 to 2,000, because we have to double the amount of energy production and data centers effectively, which is a lot. A lot of work goes into that. for any listeners you haven't actually been to a Bitcoin mine. Have you been to a mic?

Yeah. I'm sure you have. They're insane. It's very powerful. You've got all these loud, hot, dusty computers. It's really a marvelous spectacle. I've been to a few myself. And I think everyone should get the chance if they get to go if they get a chance because it makes

Bitcoin far more tangible. But you can't just pop these things up overnight now. So it's going to take some effort to get to 2000 X hash. The coolest one I've been to, when we were out in Africa, this was end of 23, I think. We went to a few places, we went to Malawi and saw Gridless's mining operation there. And it is by far the coolest one I've seen.

Like it was in the most beautiful place, like on a mountain, there's a river. They just have like a little hydro plant and they've got miners running in there. And like that's the thing that's securing the Bitcoin network. It's like one of the most mind-blowing things I've ever seen. Because like you can go to these mega data centers and it's like noisy and huge and it's like industrial scale.

But you go out to the middle of nowhere in Africa and you see like people mining Bitcoin there. It's very, very cool. That's epic. Yeah. Those are the stories that kind of warm my heart. At Blocker, we have two sites in eastern Kentucky that this area was hammered by the bad energy policy in the United States. Old, like refurbished coal mining plants essentially is where we're mining Bitcoin.

But we're coming into this area that's been run down. There's no good jobs. Like if you live there, you can be like a teacher or a nurse. Those are kind of your best jobs. and we're providing like a forward-looking tech job. Now, it's blue-collar work working at a Bitcoin mining facility, but these people, they don't have any other great options, right? And so we're kind of revitalizing a very run-down remote part of the country.

And I think that's one of the coolest things about Bitcoin. Because historically, new industries, they benefit, you know, very specific, like urban centers. So, for example, like the tech boom benefited the Silicon Valley area. you didn't, you know, if you live in the middle of rural North Dakota or Kentucky or somewhere, you didn't get a new job from the tech boom. Yeah. The automobile boom in the 1920s, if you lived in Detroit, that was a good place for it. But I love Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining because it brings jobs to rural America. I grew up in the rural South. Like I know, I know these

types of people. It's my tribe. And so seeing Bitcoin miners come to these very remote locations and provide high paying, very nice, like high tech jobs. It's very exciting to see. Yeah, it's really cool. And I've told this story before on the podcast, but I think it's worth telling again. Like when we were in Malawi, they have, so what people don't understand about these places in Africa is that like they have very high electricity costs because, like, it's essentially just so hard to get. And so there's this town that's, well, it's not even a town, it's like a tiny village on this mountain side that has benefited. The grid was originally donated by, I think, a Scottish charity. And it ran at a loss its entire life cycle until Bitcoin

mining came in, which then meant they could just sweep up all the excess energy and then pass on some like power cost reduction to this village. And so we went out for dinner, maybe, I don't know, 10 miles from the mountain. And it was in this like beautiful garden, but it was lit by candlelight because they just didn't have electricity. And so while we were sat around having dinner with these like torches lighting the place, everywhere was completely pitch black, apart from this tiny little village, which was, I can't explain how poor this village was, like on a mountain side that was lit up. They had like, they could use a microwave. They could watch TV. They could do their homework under like a real light. And all of that in this tiny village,

in rural Africa was because of Bitcoin mining. It's like the coolest thing I've ever seen. Yeah. So I'm totally with you. I think that is one of the massive benefits of Bitcoin mining. It doesn't really matter where it is. As long as electricity is cheap, like people will plug in an ASIC. Yeah, that's so cool to hear because energy is how we have quantity and quality of life. One of my favorite charts to look at is just energy production and then life expectancy.

They go straight up, kind of went up into the right and then early 1900s, 1800s. And so we need more ways to incentivize energy production. Energy's gotten a terrible rap for no good reason. But Bitcoin miners are the ultimate bait to get energy production, right? Because like you said, they'll buy any energy. They don't care about the source. They just want it to be low cost. And they don't care about the location.

Other large energy consumers are like hospitals and grocery stores. These have to be in urban centers because you can't have a grocery store in the middle of nowhere. But Bitcoin miners can go anywhere in the world. They can go to rural Africa. they can go to rural Kentucky, and they give energy producers the confidence that, hey, if nobody else will buy my power, at least these Bitcoin miners will, so they can invest into energy production assets in the most remote places of the world. This episode is also brought to you by Iron, the largest NASDAQ listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy. Iron are not just pairing the Bitcoin network. They also provide cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. We've been working with the founders Dan and Will for a long time now and have been really impressed with their values, especially when it comes to their commitment to local communities and sustainable computing power.

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and for more details about your security office. options and coverage over anchorwatch.com. That's anchorwatch.com. This episode is brought you by Ledden, the global leader in Bitcoin-backed loans. Since 2018, Leiden have issued over $9 billion in loans and with the first lending platform to do proof of reserves. With Leiden, you get full custody loans with no credit checks, no monthly repayments, just easy access to dollars without selling a single sat. And as of July 1, Lenin is now Bitcoin only, which means they exclusively offer Bitcoin back loans or collateral is held by Leiden directly or with their funding partners and your Bitcoin is never let out to generate interest. I recently took out a loan with Leiden.

The whole process was super easy. It took me less than 15 minutes to apply and I had the dollars in my account in just a couple of hours. It was super smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, head over to leaden.io, which is L-E-D-N dot I-O. Where do you think we are in this kind of narrative? Like obviously Bitcoin mining got a load of heat in sort of from, well, kind of forever until very relatively recently. Like, do you think we've completely shifted that narrative now and people are starting to understand it? I think we've made a ton of progress with the people that matter. So I think energy companies are starting to understand it more. I think politicians are starting to understand or understand

it more. But the average normie, for example, they aren't. But they also aren't the ones who make decisions and allocate capital and really influence the world. Like the average normie still doesn't understand Bitcoin itself. So they're not going to understand Bitcoin mining and it's kind of atypical energy consumption profile. It's kind of a niche subject. But I think with all things, number go up is Bitcoin's biggest marketing tool. So the more Bitcoin gets adopted as a financial asset, the more incentive there is going to be for people to create Bitcoin educational content for politicians and energy producers to look into Bitcoin mining as kind of a grid stabilizer. One of the really frustrating ones recently is, did you see Norway came out and said they might ban Bitcoin mining?

No, I didn't see that. Okay, so they've come out pretty recently and said this. And the reason it's really frustrating is I've spoken to a company, I forget their name, and I actually forget where they operate. But it's one of the Scandinavian companies. I'm pretty sure it's Sweden, but I could be wrong on that. And they're doing Bitcoin mining on like a municipality level. Obviously, these are very cold countries. And what they're doing is they're doing like the first part of heating up the water for the municipality.

So they'll take it from, you know, close to zero degrees Celsius, especially during winter, it'll be basically zero degrees Celsius. And they're doing like the first lift there. So they're getting it from like zero to, I don't know what they get it to. Let's say 40 degrees Celsius. And then it goes to like a boiler who then boil the temperature to the temperature people need it in their house. But like they're doing a lot of that heavy lifting,

taking the strain off the municipality, and like they're still not seeing the benefit of that. And they're monetizing it while they're doing it. Like it makes no sense to me, but there's still people out there that want to buy, ban this thing. It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, maybe they're just getting paid off by Ripple and all those guys to be anti-Bitcorn mining because it's literally like hand in glove, perfect fit Bitcoin miners and energy grids. Yeah, it's super frustrating.

Okay, so like with all of this in mind, do you think that miners and like the mining industry is undervalued right now in the sense that so much money is going into these treasury companies, not into necessarily the mining companies? Do you think there's kind of a gap in the market there? Going back to what I said before, is I don't think a lot of the mining companies are Bitcoin long per se. Like, they kind of are because if you build a data center and Bitcoin pumps, like there's going to be more potential Bitcoin miners to host. But I think most of the mining companies, you know, they're not married to their hoddle stack. They're not, they own a lot of, a lot of their balance sheet is tied up in energy production and less so ASICs. So I don't necessarily view them as long-term Bitcoin plays.

Now, they're a handful that stick out. think the best way to get mining exposure if you're an investor is to be a miner yourself. Just buy A6 yourself. You don't have to worry about, you know, what's, is this company going to dilute their stock and give their executive team a huge compensation package? Are they going to dilute ineffectively? Are they going to not buy new generation A6? Like, how are they going to operate their balance sheet during a bear market? You can take out a lot of the counterparty risk and just get direct exposure to Bitcoin mining when you own the ASICs yourself. And because of service providers like Blockware, you don't have to be a data center professional, but you get access to like top

to your data centers, low cost power, and it's very hands off. But at the same time, you're getting all the benefits of Bitcoin mining, producing at a discount, Bitcoin denominated cash flows, tax writeoffs, all that sort of thing. Yeah, okay. And then in terms of like, I think that it's really interesting how Bitcoin miners are moving more and more into AI compute as well. And what do you think of that? Do you think that's sort of smart? I mean, it definitely helps with the narrative, I think, because no one's shouting at AI computers like boiling the ocean. Right. But what do you think of that as a move? I think it's inevitable. Now, hosting AI servers is, it's not Bitcoin exposure. So, but it does minimize the impact on these mining companies

during drawdowns. So I think it's a very effective tool at that because it's more of a cash cow, like consistent cash flow play. And it also, the same way Bitcoin mining incentivizes more energy production, so does AI and high performance computing. So I think it's a very good thing for humanity that we're seeing this shift. And it's kind of inevitable because if you're a Bitcoin mining company, maybe you don't want to be hyper long Bitcoin as an investor. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the double, triple maxi, like, pimp out my Bitcoin long exposure. But that's obviously not for everyone. And that's why strategy has been so successful because they've issued convertible notes and preferred stock that have muted Bitcoin exposure but with way less downside. So Bitcoin mining

companies that are diversifying into AI as well, they're kind of following a similar playbook. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And then in terms of like drawdowns, you mentioned like a hedge against the kind of Bitcoin four-year cycle. Do you think that's still likely? No, I actually think the Bitcoin four-year cycle is dead. I think it's over. Interesting. Why do you think that? Because I did think that, but these Bitcoin Treasury plays have made me kind of reconsider that and think maybe at some point they're the ones that are just spitting coins onto the market and we have a similar cycle. It could happen. And I'm always open to change my mind as data reveals itself. But historically, so the 2017 cycle was driven by retail adoption. It became far easier to buy Bitcoin directly. Plus, you had all the shit coin ICOs going off at the same time. I'm, you know, buy Bitcoin treasury companies. We'll see how it shakes out.

But the, um, the 2021 cycle is driven by a massive wave of money printing. They increased the money supply by 50% in 12 months. And so obviously this is going to create massive booms, followed by massive busts. But a fun fact, since the launch of the ETF, Bitcoin ETF in 2024 of January that year, you haven't seen Bitcoin draw down by more than 30%. It went from 72, 74K to, like 49K, which is like right around 30%, but it barely spent any time at those price levels. And we're seeing institutions and like more savvy, less emotional investors, just back the truck

up on dips. And so if you think of like an investor profile, the retail guy is looking for 2x to 20x. That's why they gamble on shit coins or, you know, go on Robin Hood and buy a bunch of options. But the institutional investor, they're used to the S&P 500. where a good year for them is 7, 8% returns. So if they're buying Bitcoin at 60K, we pumped to 100K, that's a 50% plus return for them. That is huge.

And so you're going to see less explosive moves to the upside because they're going to be quicker to take profits, but you're also going to see less nasty drawdowns because they're more savvy. And plus they have passive flows into these funds, so they're always accumulating assets. But they're not going to necessarily panic sell on a 30% drop, make it go even further.

And since the ETFs have launched, we've seen this behavior in Bitcoin where we stair step kind of to a new price level, range there for a while coins shift around, long-term holders start buying coins again. But then we'll pump some more, but you'll see sell pressure into those pumps. So I think we're going to,

I think Cosmonaut on Twitter coin this phrase, like stairway to heaven. We're going to stairway and go to a million dollars over the next 15 years. I truly believe that, but I think it will bore everyone to death it's going to be a slow grind. And anybody who sells Bitcoin under the impression

that there's going to be a 75% dip and they can come in and buy it back, I think they're going to get burned. Yeah, I had Joe Calaseri on the podcast recently, and he said, we'll bore our way to a million dollars. What do you think, then, the biggest kind of drawdown we may see is? It would be... I'm setting up a bet here, by the way.

It does depend on the Bitcoin Treasury thing, right? If we see a bunch of these companies really emerge out of nowhere, and borrow on a one-year note at 12% interest rates to buy Bitcoin, yeah, we could get burned. And also, we see a huge wave of money printing that sends Bitcoin to a million dollars. Yeah, we'll probably come crashing down to 250. That's a 75% drawdown. So I think it's very dependent on how far up Bitcoin goes. But my base case is we won't see a drawdown more than 30 to 35%.

Are you a betting, man? Potentially. I could be swayed. What about if we say more than 40% drawdown by the end of 20%? I'll take that. 100Ksats. 100Ksats, deal. There you go.

Okay, anything else on like Bitcoin markets, mining that you want to talk about? I've got something else I want to talk to you about. But before we move on, no, I don't think I've got anything else. I mean, I'm super bullish on here to the end of the year. So when I say, I think the cycle's over, I don't mean like, oh, we're not going to see, you know, a year and a half after the halving Bitcoin make new highs. I definitely think we breached kind of one, 50-ish maybe by the end of the year. It depends on, you know, obviously this war thing going on or

whatever. I don't really pay attention to it. But that could be a catalyst for some money printing. Global M2 is on an up trend. We see a record amount of Bitcoin being held by long-term holders right now. So 69% of the coins haven't moved in at least six months. So there's certainly a bullish dynamic at play. I think Bitcoin goes a lot higher over the next six months. One of the coolest things are like maybe rephrase, it's not cool that we're at war. Or, essentially at war. It's not cool that there's all this like disruption in the Middle East, but one of the interesting things from it is that Bitcoin's kind of done pretty well in it. And like obviously this happened over the weekend, as these things always do, where markets

can't react straight away. And Bitcoin is the only 24-7 free market in the world. So you're always going to see Bitcoin move on these events, but it didn't really drop that much. I see that as a massively bullish thing for Bitcoin. Oh, absolutely. I remember in 2022 when Ukraine and Russia, that situation broke out. Bitcoin dropped from like some 40K to 30K or something like that in a similar dynamic, right? It's over the weekend. The stock market's closed. Investors, when they're uncertain, they want dollars. So they'll sell whatever they can to get dollars. Don't ask me why. I think dollars are the most uncertain thing in the world, right? Nobody knows what Jerome Powell is going to do, what he's going to say. One man can influence the dollar market

so significantly. Bitcoin has nobody in control. It's mathematically certain $21 million. And to me, that's the least uncertain asset, but the market doesn't treat it as such right now. So they'll sell Bitcoin and buy dollars. But yeah, when no other market's closed, you're going to sell what they can. But Bitcoin has held up very well despite that. We briefly went to like 99K yesterday, I think. But all things considered, Bitcoin's doing very well. I think also one of the most interesting things is like Bitcoin is almost a prediction market in a lot of ways.

Like I don't know if you saw, but Bitcoin price started tanking a little bit before the bombs had even dropped in Iran, which I think is super. interesting. It's almost like your foresight on geopolitics at this point. Yeah. And we've seen it work in Bitcoin's favor on election night when Trump started to win. Epic night. I didn't vote. I really don't care about politics. But that was such a fun night to watch the Bitcoin price go up as Trump started winning these key battleground states because it's it went from, I think it's started the day like 65K closed it. 75K made a new all time high and nothing else was open to speculate on during, you know, the evening time on a weekday. So investors are like, man, let's just buy Bitcoin right now. 100%. Okay. I want to talk to you about, you're quite a young guy.

I don't know if you want to say how old, but you're a Zuma. Did you see recently that Matt and Marty on H.R had started doing like a Zuma series? And I'd had conversations with Marty about this in the past where it's like, if I look at the demographics in my audience, it's getting older, not younger. So like the biggest age range is between, let's say, like, third, and 45. And it's not the younger generation that's growing in terms of listenership. It's actually the like 60 year olds.

What is going on with like the Zuma generation? Like do they care about Bitcoin? Like what's your overall take? Yeah. I don't mind how saying how old I am. I'm 24. But yeah, the boomers don't care. Sorry, the Zoomers don't care.

We've seen similar trends on blockware's content. It's a heavy millennial audience, millennial and Gen X with the boomer, boomers growing. it's because in order to care about Bitcoin, you have to have capital you're willing to preserve. So Bitcoin is about, this is what I think Bitcoin's about, it's about preserving your purchasing power.

Being able to put your time and energy into an asset that's not going to get devalued by endless money printing. And Zoomers are broke. They ain't got no money. So when they don't have any money in there constantly, there's a little spare income they do have, they blow it on consumption and nihilistic activities

like sports betting. Because I had no money. when I got into Bitcoin. Like, when I first bought Bitcoin, it was like a hundred pounds of Bitcoin. Like, it was not very much. And so, like, why is that holding them back? Like, why is the nihilism so fucking real with Gen Z? I think there's little desire to save and start a family. Now, I don't think these are explicit thoughts people are having, but I think it's very implicit and subconscious. So just looking at the data, people are having families later. They're getting married later, having kids later, fewer kids, et cetera, et cetera.

And my thesis is that's because the money's broken. It's so much harder to provide for your family or even yourself on a single normal income because most people aren't, by definition, most people are average or below average. And so average jobs, average wages, are barely enough to support yourself. Like all the zoomers I know, like 90% of them,

still have two or three roommates well into their late 20s. And it's difficult enough for them to just feed themselves and pay rent. And so without a little surplus income or this ability to think long term, like, hey, I want to provide for a family and think 10, 20 years. It's hard to do that when you can barely make rent. And so to understand Bitcoin, you have to be able to have a low time preference and think over multiple years or generations. And because they're not doing that, Bitcoin doesn't really click for them. But just as stereotype is kind of your pay group. I assume they're all sports betting and shit.

Oh yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. So have you tried to talk to people about this and been like instead of putting this bet on just buy Bitcoin? I used to try all the time. And for a while, I became known as the Bitcoin guy. But I frankly, I gave up on it. I wrote a book about it. I go on podcasts like this. I put Bitcoin content out all the time. So if people ask me and they want to learn, I have somewhere to send them and guide them. But when I think about my Bitcoin journey, nobody orange pill to me. I had to orange pill myself. Same.

There's a plethora of content out there, you know, the old phrases, you can take a horse to the water, but you can't make a drink. I view Bitcoin the same way. I don't, frankly, I don't care enough to like bang on someone's door every time I see him, hey, you bought Bitcoin yet? You bought Bitcoin yet? There's like two or three people in my life that I care enough. You know, I really want them to get Bitcoin.

They have. So, like, my mission's kind of complete with them. but loose acquaintances or even, you know, somewhat close friends. It's like, I can't make them understand it or care. And so they're going to have to do the work themselves. Yeah, to be fair, like it's probably similar in my friendship group. Like there's a few that are into Bitcoin, one especially. But like the rest of them I just don't even try anymore.

Like eventually they'll probably figure it out, maybe, maybe not. But I've given up trying. And I think actions speak louder than words. Yeah. So my friends that have seen me, you know, have, I want to be like, I don't want to be arrogant about, you know, relative success for a 24-year-old. You know, I'm getting married later this. year. I get, you know, working the Bitcoin. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Work in the Bitcoin industry. My friends

have seen me, you know, take pictures with guys like Ben Asker and Tucker Cross and do like cool stuff. And, you know, some of my friends don't get, have those opportunities. I feel very blessed. But part of it is because I save in Bitcoin. I work in the Bitcoin industry. I'm putting myself out there and I did the work to study the asset. And so I think my friends seeing me have some amount of success is more, more likely to sway them to like, hey, maybe he's on to something with this Bitcoin versus me just telling them or saying, hey, read this book. Yeah, I mean, total sidetrack here. Are you friendly with Ben Ascgrin? Yes.

How's he doing? He's not doing too well from what I know. Yeah, definitely got him in my prayers for sure. Yeah, damn, that's incredible, incredibly sad. Fingers crossed. So just back to your friends, like, is the unit bias a big thing that's kind of holding them back? And like, are they interested in as kind of quote unquote crypto meme coin shit? Because they see it as like a potential 100,000. than like the long time preference you have to take with Bitcoin. They were in 2021 during that hype cycle when, you know, you had the Super Bowl

crypto ads and it was kind of hip and popular, but they've long forgotten about that. Most consumers have the fish brain. I don't think, I also, I don't think unit bias is a real big problem because it takes, you know, two seconds to figure out, hey, Bitcoin can be divided into stats like a dollar is divided into cents. Yeah. Interesting. Okay.

So let's close with just kind of overarching thoughts on Bitcoin. What do you think is going to happen through the rest of the year? Like, where are you at with everything? I think Bitcoin's going to go much higher between now and the rest of the year. I think it's going to be a good Thanksgiving, good Christmas, where Bitcoin's sitting at a nice higher number somewhere between maybe 1, 25 and 150. And all these Zoomer friends or just family friends you see around the holidays, you'd be like, hey, you know, I was right again.

Maybe you should listen and start accumulating this. Love it. And obviously everyone will have heard the Blockware ad by now, but give it a bit of a chill, give it a shout out. Where can people go to learn more about Blockware? Yeah, you can go to Blockware Solutions.com. We've got a bunch of great resources on there. You can check out on Marketplace. You can see which miners are online right now. There's zero lead time between buying a miner and hashing. So you can start stacking sets literally today with mining at Blockware Solutions.com. Very cool. I mean, that tax incentive is insane. I think that's going to play into your hands very favorably. I think so too. It's the big, beautiful tax bill. Now, there's, there's some terrible stuff in there. There's something about, like, states can't defend against the federal government using AI to spy on the citizens. Like, a whole bunch of crap in there. But if it does pass, there's, you know, a nice incentive to mine Bitcoin. Yeah, let's go. All right. Thank you very much, Mitchell. This has been fun. I appreciate your time, man.