{ "episodeId": "SLP374", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "adam_o_denverbitcoin": { "name": "Adam O (DenverBitcoin)", "role": "guest", "tag": "ADAM" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:06", "start": 6.2, "text": "Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today, Adam O of Upstream Data re-joins me on the show, and we're talking about the ESG mafia and combating them, because there are these people who are throwing all this nonsense out there about the energy usage of Bitcoin, the carbon emissions of Bitcoin, and Adam and I chat a little bit about About strategy and how best to respond to this, as well as Bitcoin mining, obviously, and we talk about the carbon accounting dishonesty, as well as some of these ideas like, is placating them even a good strategy? So we explore some of these in this episode today. Now, the show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. 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With Lend at HodlHodl, you can put some Bitcoin up as collateral into an overcollateralized loan and borrow stablecoins against it. And then at the end, you pay back the stablecoins and you receive your Bitcoin back. So with Lend at HodlHodl, it works based on putting up an offer or accepting an offer from the website terms and the interest rate that you are looking to pay or that you are looking for if you are on the other side, if you're holding stablecoins, and you may find it useful to avoid capital gains tax on disposal. So that website is lent dot h o d l h o d l dot com. Adam, welcome back to the show." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "03:10", "start": 189.84, "text": "Stephan, thanks so much for having me, man. It's great to be back. You're one of my favorite podcasters, so this is, this is always a treat." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:15", "start": 195.05, "text": "Fantastic. Well, yeah, I love hearing your insights and chatting to you about energy and mining, and, wanted to chat again about- All this stuff that's going on, obviously there are different views around ESG, and I think in many cases, many people in the Bitcoin camp really, they actually are anti-this stuff. It's just that maybe there are different approaches on how to go about it. And so let's start with a little bit of your view on where we are in the Bitcoin community dealing with some of these things, like the proof-of-work fud that's coming, the ESG narrative. Where are we as a community, and what, what's your overall take on? How the community is, the community, and when I say the community, I also mean Bitcoin mining businesses as well, how are they responding to this?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "04:02", "start": 242.29, "text": "Yeah, I mean, that's a, that's a great question. So I'll, I'll give a little background too, just for those who don't know, right? I mean, again, 'cause I'm biased, right? Like, e-everyone's biased, so I'll, I'm happy to share mine. And my bias is, you know, I'm in, I'm in the oil and gas industry Because I think that at the end of the day, what we have is, is a world where the leveraging of technology allows for a better quality of life, and without electricity, without cheap and reliable power and abundant power, there are many, many cultures, many, you know, maybe micro-societies and in places in the world where people are left behind, right? They're, they're truly left in like a different century simply because of-- and it all boils down to electricity. And so I think that empowering the world with, with hydrocarbons, right? is, is a good thing. This ESG, gosh, it's, you know, it's-- I spent a lot of time looking at the ESG and, and the ESG kind of development, right" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "05:04", "start": 303.51, "text": "Acronym that came out relatively recently, like I wanna say in the last eight years, like I couldn't really find anything about ESG like pre two thousand and nine, nobody, the acronym hadn't been invented yet, right? because I guess BlackRock and hedge funds hadn't come up with this, this scheme yet, in my opinion. so what, what I see, what I see ESG as is, I, I see it as a, as a objectively falsifiable movement to quantify and separate good and bad behavior based upon this arbitrary measurement of carbon And consumption and/or emissions. and when they say carbon, they really mean carbon dioxide, right? They really mean CO2. They say it's a carbon credit, or it's really not carbon. Like, and sometimes in people's mind, they think carbon, I don't know about you, but like, I think carbon, I think of like a bag of charcoal or something, right? Like, but carbon dioxide, I mean, that's plant food. That's like what I'm breathing out right now as I, as I talk on this podcast, right? And so I think it's Hey, I wanna make a product, but the cost to make that product and the market for that product, the willingness of a consumer to pay for that product, I don't really like the numbers, right? Like maybe my product is something like a really, really badass golf cart, like one with a roof, and it's gonna have, you know, I'll name it after a guy that used to do stuff with electricity, like Tesla or something, and like maybe it's a badass, giant battery golf cart, right? Now, manufacturing a Tesla You can't fucking do it for what somebody wants to pay for a Tesla or what they can go pay for like a Toyota Corolla. So what Elon did, and what many, many others before even and after him have done, is they say, \"Hey, look, so like our, our accounting book is such that we're spending this much, we're only making this much, so we're losing, but we're gonna enter in this new column called carbon dioxide slash virtue. And if we, if we sub-- you know, subtract carbon from the total of the world Well, we ought to get paid for that by the government, 'cause look, government, we're gonna save the planet by doing this. And, and so it's all predicated on this, this doomsday feudal save mankind, right? And if it's, if it's for the sake of the human race, there's no means that are too abhorrent to execute, right? Well, if it's like, well, unless we do this, everyone dies. Well, then any amount of tyranny, any amount of like control can be justified because it's like, well, they're, Love to live under the control of the government, otherwise we'd all be dead and on fire anyway. and I just think it's a, I think it's a large fallacy. The nuts and bolts behind why I think it's a large fallacy, it's not only that 'cause on the surface it looks like it, and it's somewhat identifiable as a, as an arbitrary accounting scam, but when you get down into the numbers of it, it seems to me that there's pretty much blatant fraud occurring, right? And I, I think that, I don't think anybody would stand here Right, I bet you anybody that's participated in the carbon sequestration market would say that like it's pretty shady and it's kind of a big bag of like just everybody's getting rich and nobody really knows why you get all these credits. because I spent the time and I've talked to these guys, 'cause in the, in the oil and gas industry, a lot of the oil and gas producers will get carbon sequestration credits for either mining Bitcoin, you know, which is what we do at Upstream Data and, and help oil and gas producers maximize their revenue. But They're also gonna look for ways in which they can maximize this carbon accounting scam. Like they're in a world where there's this carbon accounting scam as a business, it's almost foolish if they don't look into it, even if they don't believe in it, which by the way, they don't. they know that not only do they have to do that because it's a means by which to be profitable, but even more so. The reason a lot of oil and gas producers are starting-- I mean, they're doing it because of profit, but one of the nice cherries on top" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "08:47", "start": 527.4, "text": "We get to go out and talk to all these investors about how we're gonna be the greenest of, the most ESG of any oil and gas company, because right now, you know, big hedge funds, guys with big money, they don't wanna-- they, they can't invest outside of their corporate ESG strategy. So if they wanna invest in a, in a company that's gonna go, you know, produce crude oil and natural gas, well, it better be the absolute, you know, most ESG clean oil and gas company. And so then every single oil and gas company" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "09:17", "start": 557.3, "text": "I don't need to go drill, right? I mean, I know guys right now that could, that could have proven it fifty times over before, that you give them two hundred grand, they'll go drill, they'll go drill five wells for forty grand each, and, and they'll ROI in like, you know, a hundred days at, at a hundred dollar oil. But these guys, they've done it before, they've got a proven track record, people won't give them money, even though they know they'll get their money back, simply because of this ESG, this kind of puppet And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:48", "start": 587.98, "text": "so- Yeah. Actually, sorry, Adam, just on that, before, as you mentioned this idea that there are certain people who, you know, on a rational basis, they-- you really could just invest with them. And you know how historically there have been some of these so-called ethical investment funds who, you know, they'd say, \"Oh, look, we're gonna do investment, but no guns or no whatever certain industries.\" Right. Isn't there an argument then for an opposite of that, like a, like a specific, like, \"Yeah, we're gonna go invest Or is there something else at play?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "10:19", "start": 619.2, "text": "Well, I mean, I think, you know, it's, it's, it's a combination, right? There's a lot of moving pieces here, you know, one of it is just the concentration of capital, where, you know, up, up to today, even, even those who have rental agreements are more or less in the retirement phase of their life. If you, if you went back forty years ago and you looked at those who were retiring and their nest eggs that they had, that accumulated, right, that would be, you know, generations above Just in like a fund, like ev- like everyone's either like with Fidelity or like they're, you know, it's, it's all their retirement accounts, BlackRock," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:53", "start": 652.7, "text": "Fidelity, Vanguard. It's BlackRock, Vanguard," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "10:55", "start": 655.14, "text": "yeah. It's, it's literally, it's like, you know, I mean, what I was reading was like Van- or Vanguard or Fidelity or Vanguard or BlackRock, they've got like six point eight trillion. So between Vanguard, BlackRock, and one other, there's like twenty-three trillion. It's something insane like that, right? And" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "11:17", "start": 677.32, "text": "They build up a massive portfolio of, quote unquote, ESG companies, companies that are primed to be rewarded these ESG credits, this, this virtuous score, which then translates to lower operating ca- you know, costs and higher, higher margins. They, they've got that portfolio locked, and then they have to just keep pushing that agenda because it's, it's- Their portfolio, right? So like they need to push ESG, and that's why I think part of it is, is, you know, when they saw-- It's a weird world when Elon Musk, the prince, damn near the creator of such a frickin' ESG concept, is out there saying that corporate ESG governance is, what did he say? It's, it's the devil incarnate, I think was his words directly, right? So when Elon Musk is saying that, I mean, there's only reason that he's worth what he's worth is because of the Like at least the end part of it, like the second half of that, the honesty, right? Yeah, the, the honesty, at least he obviously, he's so fed up with how nonsensical it is. And one of the things I wanna talk about is this, is You know, like I'm not an anti- you know, a lot of people come up to me and they're like, \"Well, you don't like wind power, you don't like solar,\" and, and it's kind of true. I don't really like wind. I don't, I don't really see where it makes any fucking sense. I, I ca- I run the numbers so many times, and wind just... There are very specific applications for wind, not very many of them. But they're like, \"You don't like solar and stuff,\" and, and that's just" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "12:40", "start": 759.97, "text": "Sovereign production of power is amazing. That's why I, I love solar. I mean, I'll own tons of solar because literally you could grab the sun and generate electricity. It's a beautiful thing. But I'm not kidding myself. I'm not gonna be the smug guy on my front porch with my solar, like looking down on my bare-roofed neighbors, because they're dirtier than me. No, I, I actually feel like they should look at me as, like, the rich snob that wasted so much money on such a carbon-intensive process as making a phot" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "13:10", "start": 789.79, "text": "Petroleum product, a wind turbine is a petroleum product, it's made of epoxy resin. You know, they're, they are literally subject to the petroleum industry. And here's the thing, oil and gas isn't a perfect process. There is an environmental impact to, to drilling oil wells, and it can be really bad if it's done, you know, with, with terrible stewardship, and it can be very minimal, right? It can be almost nonexistent. Same thing with solar panels, same thing with wind turbines, everything has an impact, every action has a reaction. Let's have an honest conversation about it. And the only way that I feel like I can get the pendulum back to where any type of conversation of normalcy can occur is to mock and absolutely obliterate the far end of the pendulum that's, that's championing this like, if you, if you're getting electricity from a battery You're a, you're going to heaven. If, you know what I mean? If, if it's from natural gas, you're going to hell. Like it's this weird shaming, similar to the mask shaming, similar to the vac-- you know, vaccine shaming that takes place of this just kind of like, you know, you should feel like you're looked down upon. And, and I think it should be the opposite. I think a, a Tesla should be like, that should, in my mind, that should be the image of the wealthy, the like- unnecessary technological advancement, my opinion, it's, it's, you know, less efficient power, but the performance of a Tesla is fucking amazing, like, like it's, it's beautiful. I love driving one, it's so much fun. But It shouldn't, I mean, to try to make that thing cost twenty-seven or thirty thousand dollars, impossible, impossible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:32", "start": 871.56, "text": "Yeah, and so it just comes down to this weird inability to accept reality. So, for example, these, Tesla and battery users not being cognizant of where the energy is even coming from, like if you look at the overall grid. And I think someone like Alex Epstein, and I can see you've got his book there in the background there as well, I am also quite influenced by his thought. I think he really helped put things in over- overall context, because what we've had is this whole media and propaganda thrown at everyone about, \"Oh, look how great wind and solar is,\" and they sell this message as though the world is transitioning to wind and solar and it's all gonna be clean and it's gonna be fairies and flowers and, \"Oh, isn't how amazing the world is gonna be?\"" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "15:16", "start": 915.77, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:16", "start": 916.19, "text": "But then you actually look at the real numbers of how much of the world is powered by wind and solar right now, and the world is still very much fossil fuel powered, and we, we should accept The benefits of that and the costs of that." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "15:29", "start": 928.78, "text": "Yeah, and I think, and plus, when it comes to that accounting, right? Like, you know, a lot of people will, will talk about the numbers. People love getting the numbers. Well, yeah, if I, you know, within eighty miles, my Tesla, you know, rids enough carbon that it pays for itself or some bullshit like that, right? I mean, whatever it is. And nobody ever breaks down the numbers in plain English with like specific attributions to, you know, what they're speaking about. But the, the States, what's the guy, Richard Branson from Virgin Mobile, yeah, Virgin Mobile, I think they're all invested like massive amounts of money in some, you know, lithium-ion, platinum, nickel mining expedition in Greenland, right? And I just think to myself, okay, let's just start, let's just start there, let's not even talk about the amount of meetings that Bezos had about this project and the amount of miles he flew in order to- Have those meetings on his private jet. Like, let's not even go that far down the line, but let's just start where like the, the project gets approved and they get to break ground. Well, how do you break ground? Because you don't have a solar powered bulldozer, right? You don't have any land movers that are run on renewable energy. So the bottom line is you can't move earth, you can't extract raw mineral without internal combustion engines. The economics of trying to use some other type of a machine other than an internal combustion engine, an electronic, an electric bulldo Apologies, go fuck yourself. Like, that's just absolutely-- like, they're not even there yet, but, but we still have people talking and parroting that type of crazy idea, 'cause Biden comes out and talks about how the military's gonna go all green, like all the- All the military vehicles are gonna be better for the environment, and then I'm not even kidding you, did you see the post by Raytheon where they came out with the environmentally friendly surface-to-air missiles? You haven't seen this," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:14", "start": 1033.55, "text": "right? I'm not kidding you, no. You, you shared it, right? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "17:17", "start": 1036.83, "text": "Yeah, I shared it. They actually, fucking, posted environmentally-- These are our most environmentally friendly yet. Surface to air missiles. I mean, what a joke. What are we talking? You're talking about that plane you're blowing up that's gonna land in the ocean full of rocket fuel and steel. Like, what are you talking about? Like the environmentally friendly nature of it? The environmentally friendly nature of war? I mean, that's what we're talking about. We're literally at a point now where we're getting fed environmentally friendly weapons of war. And, you know, when I see posts like that, I finally get so fed up, and what bothers me the most The reason I was so happy when you, when, when you reached out and, and so happy to come up on, on this podcast to talk about this is, you know, I think a lot of people out there just need to think at night, what do they want their legacy to be? 'Cause they-- 'cause we all get one life, right? And here's the thing about our lives that's different from people of the past, is, is we have fuck you money. Right? We truly have money. We can't be cut off from the financial game. We can't be just, you know, financially castrated from afar by 'cause some algorithm picked up that, you know, we might be a fraud alert or something like that, right? So- We truly have a world today where, in my opinion, billionaires like, like Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, both members of the mine, you know, the Bitcoin Mining Council, even if they burned all their bridges And created enemies out of everyone they know. None of their enemies could take their, their, their wealth from them. None of their enemies could take that, those billions of dollars of potential financial power out of their pocket. So if they're not gonna stand up for what's right, if people in this world don't stand up for what's right, it's merely a sign of cowardice, it's merely a sign of priority, or it's a sign of You know, someone being compromised, someone not having the, the compass to, to look through, you know, good and evil, right? Right and wrong. And at the end of the day, ESG is wrong. The amount of dead weight loss and pain that the, you know, so-environmental social governance causes, the amount of, you know, people impacted, and ultimately the amount of poor that will be kept in an energy poor situation, unable to escape poverty, will be immeasurable. And so, you know, there are true consequences to dishonesty, and ESG is one of Honest accounting slash social scams I've seen. And even if you wanna take them at their, at their nuts and bolts, well, they focus only on the E of the environmental social governance, right? They, they don't even wanna step into the S hardly, because their, their argument already starts to fall apart when it comes to oil and gas and petroleum. Because you have things like, like modern day healthcare, right? I looked it up because I was, you know, I was ranting one night on Twitter and I was just so fueled by this, the nonsense I'm seeing, right? It Sometimes to not, you know, get baited in. And so I started doing a lot of research, and I looked, I, I, you know, the way that I wanted to make a stark comparison, or I wanted to ask some hard questions to, to those who promote the abolition of fossil fuels, getting rid of petroleum altogether, is I wanted to ask them like, okay, so say you get in a car accident, God forbid, and you're gonna be on life support, you want that hospital to just be run on wind and solar, right? Or do you want a hospital that maybe has That run on just green energy. And I found one in, in Europe that is, is, is claiming that it's, it's building up to be purely renewable, but then in big ass bold letters, the administrator of the hospital says like, \"We will never be detached from the grid and reliable power because of our, you know, life-saving equipment.\" And I said, \"Well, duh! Like, I mean, what does that mean? Why, why do you have to put that asterisk in there?\" Well, what he's really saying is, \"By the way, we're always This ship, you know, doesn't always work. And the-- By the way, they spent fourteen, I think it was fourteen million dollars, ten or fourteen million dollars on their first project, and the first project was enough solar panels so that they could light up all of the street lamps on their hospital campus. Right? So they spent fourteen-- God forbid they spent fourteen million dollars trying to cure my pancreatic cancer. All right, let's do it. Let's, let's, let's fix the street lamps and, and put out an article about how we're the greenest hospital in the world because our Being laughed out of the room as some sophomoric, you know, oil and gas zealot. but at the end of the day, I kind of wanna say to the, to, you know, the Bitcoin Mining Council, like, find your balls! Stand up for what is true, and if you're a rocket scientist, Michael Sailor, take a look at the carbon accounting scam and tell me what you see, or, or is your portfolio too fucked up that you can't be honest, right? Like, at what point? Do we have, do we have to just say like this is absurd? Let's set a new standard, right? And that's where I wanted to go, is hey, let's set, let's, let's come up with our own metrics. Let's talk about the amount of waste we're mitigating. Let's talk about the amount of, the amount of industrial hardware, the industrial inventory that's not being degraded because maybe a Bitcoin mine came in and allowed for a more efficient power generation process that's wearing less on this turbine engine. 'Cause now instead of running this turbine at this forty percent or They can run it at its absolute optimal of like seventy-five to eighty-five percent, where it's perfectly efficient, you know, you ought to get X amount more hours out of it, less maintenance, I mean, it actually burns cleaner, like there's just There's a, there's a handful of, of examples I can bring to you where Bitcoin mining lowers the time preference of the consumer who's, who's behaving with, with the market Lowers their time preference and gets them to behave in a way that ends up being more environmentally friendly, and you don't even need to regulate them because they're just incentivized to naturally behave this way 'cause they'll make more money. and that's That's a beautiful thing. That's something we should talk about as Bitcoiners. We shouldn't come every week with a, \"Hey, hey, please say that Bitcoin's green.\" Look, these are the numbers you guys told us to give you, and, and Bitcoin's numbers are good, right? Say they're good. Like, we're, we're, we're begging. We're, we're not just placating, we're, we're brown nosing to the, you know, to the, to the Ivy League nonsense. And then, what the second that we give in to their Play a new game, and that's why Bitcoin works, is because trying to destroy the dollar would require tons of violence, and it's, you, you would have to become the monsters you're trying to destroy in order to destroy the dollar. But with Bitcoin, you can just opt out and you obsolete them. Purely through abstinence. and that's a beautiful thing, that's a non-violent revolution. That's kind of what I was hoping, that was my-- I did a podcast about the Bitcoin Mining Council. I wasn't a big fan of it from the beginning because I think it's just, again, I, I saw it going this way. It's a slippery slope. You start getting into their game, you start reporting how green Bitcoin is, next thing you know, you're out there saying, \"Yeah, you know, the, the Federal Bitcoin Mining Regulation Committee, you know," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "24:10", "start": 1450.1, "text": "Like how did we even get here? Like we shouldn't even have that regulated committee. We shouldn't even have people thinking, you know, coming and telling you, like, \"Yeah, you can mine Bitcoin, but only if it's with, you know, an ion that was generated via this process, not this process.\" And so that's where I, I feel like there's a level of cowardice out there and maybe a fear of, you know, not being accepted by the mainstream. We don't wanna be accepted by the ESG mainstream. That, that's a failure. If we're accepted" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "24:40", "start": 1479.8, "text": "We're impacting society and, and what that looks like going forward and why, you know, we're doing it the right way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:45", "start": 1485.02, "text": "Yeah. Okay, so I wanna, I guess, let me, for the sake of a discussion, right? let me steelman a little bit, right? So let's say, you know, the recent Bitcoin mining, council report. So here I'm looking at the Q1 2022 report, and they've got basically three, the executive summary here, summary here has three points, so I'm just gonna read them out for the listeners" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:10", "start": 1509.82, "text": "As an approach. So step one or point one is uses an inconsequential amount of global energy, sixteen bips, so point one six percent, and generates negligible carbon emissions, eight bips, so point o eight percent. And then the second point is around Bitcoin mining hash rate is up twenty-three percent year on year and energy usage is down because of the increase in efficiency. And three, that Bitcoin is the industry leader in sustainability with a fifty-eight percent, what they call sustainable energy mix. So, yeah. In your view, why is that fundamentally flawed?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "25:43", "start": 1542.72, "text": "Alright, so let's, let's start with point one. Point one is a, is a terrible-- the nominal amount of energy that Bitcoin is consuming, just as a number, is arbitrary as a first point, but the second point is it's going to go up greatly, right? It's-- I mean, if Bitcoin truly is what I think it is, the amount of wasted, effectively free-like power that's out there that takes, you know, really all it is is the upfront capital of the infrastructure, the marginal ongoing revenue is Pretty much just holy profit. the amount of that type of energy sort, those types of energy sources that are out there in the world, immeasurable. And so I don't see why that number doesn't grow, you know, percentage-wise, relative percentage-wise, greatly. Because what I would say is, okay, what if Bitcoin was using three percent of the world's energy? Would it be bad then? Okay, what about six? About nine? Twelve? Fourteen? Where is it bad? Because what you're telling me is this number's okay. Okay, well, that-- what Right. So what you're telling me is that, you know, this needs to be controlled and monitored, and we need to keep this number between, but no, no, that's irrelevant. Like the market will solve how much energy gets put to Bitcoin because if people are doing it at a loss, then, you know, it's futile, it's unsustainable. So it's moot. It's like saying, it's like, it's like talking about, you know, how many transactions are sent, honestly. I mean, that's, I mean, Bitcoin, Bitcoin miners don't mind Bitcoin to process transactions, right? And they mind Bitcoin to earn Bitcoin, right? They're, they're capitalists. This, I mean, maybe they have some ideological behavior in there, maybe there's somebody that would, I mean, like myself, I'd mine at a loss only because I think that there's, you know, a value, a premium to having that kind of access to, to new Bitcoin without having to give a bunch of my private information, and stuff like that. So, but I wouldn For a massive loss, I wouldn't spend a, five hundred dollars just to buy three dollars of Bitcoin or something. So there's a line for me. So even then, at some point, we just have to be honest and Bitcoin's relative percentage of power generation, I think it'll go up in the mid to longest term, but then on a long time horizon, a fifty-year time horizon, what I hope is Bitcoin will, you know, Bitcoin will be that point zero one percent of every- Watt that gets generated, a piece of it will go to Bitcoin because it's very hard to, to get every bit of energy that a, that is produced to a downstream market, which is a human, right? If, if it's not Bitcoin. And so, Bitcoin is a beautiful thing that way. So first point, the amount of energy Bitcoin can produce as a total nominal energy or as a percentage of total electricity on Earth, which by the way, how do we really get that number? I, I just, why? Okay, so like, let's, let's look at other things." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "28:21", "start": 1701.36, "text": "Here, are we-- what we're saying is, we're saying energy usage is bad. That's what we're saying, right? We're talking about how more energy usage is bad, less energy usage is good. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that energy consumption is the number one indicator of increased quality of life. and so I actually see energy consumption as a good thing. I hope it goes up. So I, I'm sitting here wishing for different numbers than these people. Obviously, there's, there's a disconnect. Obviously, we, we have fundamental disagreements on what's right and I think, I mean, I think even most ESG proponents, those, those really stark advocates out there, I think they would tell you like, \"Yeah, you should switch to solar, but, you know, really just try to use less, try to consume less.\" Like they would advocate for that, and I'm sitting here like, \"Why? Why would--\" You understand what consuming less power means? Do you know how much power is required to have open heart surgery? Like, it's a lot. Like, usually a heart is flown on a plane, like on, in a freezer. Life save. Do you want to be able to have somebody put a heart in you and save your life, or do you want to live in a world where, like, you know, you have a heart attack, it's over, guaranteed? so one of the biggest ones that I've, I've recently come across, one of the biggest points is, is medical care, and that's where I'd like to compare. So, but back to your point, the second one is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:37", "start": 1777.15, "text": "basically this one's around the increase of efficiency in the Bitcoin mining machines. Just refresher" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "29:44", "start": 1783.99, "text": "for the listeners, go on Right, Amazon and Microsoft's billion-dollar data centers that they have, and the efficiency is, you know, Bitcoin's efficiency is like, it's, it's so laughably higher than, than any other anything out there. I mean, an S9, a six-year-old Bitcoin ASIC is Still like a thousand times more efficient than, you know, Apple's brand new M1 Max Pro chip. it's like a joke, right, when it comes to computational power per watt And like we, we're already like at the industry edge of, of computational efficiency. And so, like, again, I say that only allows us to, to have a greater impact, but it actually is, it's something that kind of is, it's a obstruction for any person that's looking to come and mine Bitcoin at really big scale, because The sheer amount of power that you end up needing, right? Even though you're using less, it's, we're still at this place where to make a nominal impact on a two hundred and twenty million tera hash network, like to try to, you know, go-- like right now, if you- Stefan, if you wanted to be, you know, a Bitcoin miner that had one percent of the network, you had one percent of all hash rate, you'd have to come in with like two point two exa hash, right? And even using the absolute latest and greatest S nineteen X Pro hydro crap at twenty five watt per tera hash, you would need like sixty megawatts of power And that's the issue, is like we're gonna need to consume a lot more power if we're gonna sit here and start talking about how Bitcoin's becoming more efficient. Okay, yeah, well, it might become two, three X more efficient, but there's gonna be like fifty X more miners. So why are we even setting ourselves up for failure here? Because these numbers are gonna kick us in the teeth later, right? So I, I don't know, I, that's, again, I fundamentally disagree with just that supposition that consuming" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:31", "start": 1891.05, "text": "energy- That way I'm thinking. Okay. So obviously I, I can imagine someone on the Bitcoin mining council, and they might be saying, \"Well, look, there's all these big pools of capital out there, massive pools of capital, that can come into Bitcoin, and potentially once they start buying into Bitcoin, they may then become more orange-pilled, and maybe they'll, they could sort of change their mind, because for a lot of people right now, it's this tick-box exercise, right? We just need to sort of tick this box for now, in the next few years, and this will dramatically increase the number of people people in Bitcoin, the number of people mining in Bitcoin, the number of companies at a company level willing to invest or funds willing to put money in because they've, they've managed to check their box. Because a lot of these people, they're only, they're only gonna go at a very high level, they're not gonna go deep into the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And so you just need to give them an answer that they can tick their box and then they can proceed. So what do you think is wrong with that approach?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "32:31", "start": 1951.22, "text": "No, I think, I think that's, that's a great question. I think what's wrong with that approach is just at a fundamental level, it's, it's dishonest means to achieve an honest outcome. I mean, every politician in the world will give you a similar line of BS, right? It's, \"Oh, no, no, no, we just-- Like, listen, we just have to bomb them so that everyone can be, you know, happy later. Like, we just-- You know, it's the, the thing we have to do.\" And, and you even said This is kind of a way to almost like, you know, get them to, to take a look at Bitcoin because before they were just gonna disregard it from its energy use, get them to take a better, a, a deeper look, and then upon that deeper look, our hope is that they will have an epiphanic realization that- Actually, consuming energy is a good thing. and I just, not only is that just like an incredibly dangerous game, what I would say is that all boils down to someone's, that that, that's not somebody acting in the best interest of Bitcoin, right? That, that, that's what they might say, like, \"Oh, well, it'll give us access to these pools of capital.\" Like, no, no, it's gonna give you access to those pools of capital. You want the, you want that ESG money, you wanna stick your finger in that beautiful, sweet tax" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "33:40", "start": 2020.29, "text": "You get your hand on any kind of taxpayer money, right? And because it doesn't take much, it takes, you know, just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of that three hundred billion dollar fund, and you're set for life. And so, it sounds to me more like, I want their money, but they won't give it to me unless I agree to their bullshit. So I'm gonna agree to their bullshit, and then I hope to trick them later. Like that, that strategy sounds like nonsense to me. To me, my argument is, be patient," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "34:10", "start": 2050.35, "text": "The pain of sitting on the sidelines because of that dirty thing. I mean, I don't know if you've seen it, because it's kind of got, it got lost in the news, it's kind of been gone. But there's about, it's about six months ago, end of twenty twenty-one and, and into, you know, January of this year, there was all these articles, and I throw on Bloomberg every now and then, just have it in the background, because I like, one, if they, Bitcoin pops up, I'll always go love to look what the mainstream's talking But what I was listening to was Bloom, an analyst come on, talk about how, and I think, I think the caption was like, \"Are ESG investors missing out on beta in the oil and gas industry?\" And the whole entire thing was about how all these people are pulling their money out of some companies and going into oil and gas because, like, I don't know if you've looked at oil and gas stocks, I own- My, the only stocks I own are Bitcoin mining, like a Bitcoin mining stock, I own, I own some BitFarms, and then oil and gas. it's the only equities I'll ever touch, I don't own much. But the last sixteen months of oil and gas has been sweet to the, to shareholders, like there's companies out there four, five hundred percent up, three hundred fifty percent up, so p- absolutely crushed it in the oil and gas game. So then Wall Street has to sit there and they have to have a, a moral council with themselves, Of, well, are they really in the, in the ESG because they wanna change the world, or is this really just about like getting a return on your money? Because at the end of the day, that's what it's really about. People aren't out there, you know, maybe there's some, but these massive funds are really looking for a return. The second that their ESG story starts to be unprofitable, it will vanish with every other piece of propaganda that's ever existed in the past, and that's what I hope for, right? I hope it blows up, I hope" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "35:55", "start": 2154.56, "text": "Capitalistic anarchy out there, right? Like, I don't want guys just like, you know, dynamiting the earth and, you know, mining minerals that way and just destroying things. Like, not at all, right? I think the concept of a, let's hold each other accountable, right? An environmentally or environmental social governance kind of a concept doesn't sound like a horrible idea to me. Centralizing powers To regulate and to, or to, to give insight for regulators into an industry sounds like a poison pill to me. It sounds like we're gonna, we're gonna show them how green Bitcoin is, right? How green it is, and- The problem is what green means to them isn't the same as what it means to us. And what they're gonna do is they're gonna sweep across the United States and say that, \"Yeah, you can mine Bitcoin, but only if it's, you know, with what we designate as green.\" And we're gonna have trapped ourselves, right? And the oil and gas industry is gonna- Gonna take that in the teeth, right? I mean, I'm, I'm personally would be severely affected, right? Our business at Upstream Data is, is helping oil and gas producers mine Bitcoin. What's funny is we help them mitigate emissions. And so, you know, I, I feel like it would kick them out, like they can't mine because they're using natural gas. Could you imagine that? Like, in oil and gas, and this isn't a crazy thing, in the oil and gas industry, there's, and not just that, not that just that industry, but specifically" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "37:12", "start": 2231.9, "text": "environmental end up making it worse. One of the examples is like, you know, with flare gas, where they will literally, in New Mexico, they got to a point where, and here in Colorado as well, you can't flare a single MCF of gas. And now they do allow some flaring, but it's not about the amount that you flare, it's the reason as to why you flared. So the reason that you can flare is if the, the pipeline doesn't have any capacity for you, well, then you can flare, right? Because that's like a uncont" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "37:42", "start": 2261.84, "text": "The reason is, is like accidental or incidental, and then you report volume, and if it's over a certain amount, you can be fined, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, even if you have one single MCF of gas that just come-- and, and let me just for those who don't know, there are maybe a handful, less than a hundred oil wells in the United States that have zero gas production. Okay? Anytime you find crude oil, you find some gas, right? This is just- It's just natural, right? It's just part of hydrocarbon, production. Is gas is everywhere. There's maybe a couple of pure oil plays. So this affects every single well in the state. And in this instance in New Mexico, a cust-- a customer I know, they have a well where it doesn't produce much oil, but like, like every six days or so They'll have to flare some gas 'cause some gas builds up in the tank battery, right? where they're storing the oil, it just builds up at the top. Well, now they can't produce that oil anymore because they have no way to mitigate that flare, and so they literally have to shut the well in, even though they could produce oil out of that thing for another decade, right? And, and supply the market. It's already been drilled, but they're gonna flare like a thousand cubic feet a week, and so what the government decided to do was fine them. Twenty-five hundred dollars a day that they don't report on what they're doing with a well that has any flare. And so these guys didn't figure it out until a month later, so they've already been, you know, the well only makes twelve hundred dollars a day, so you're getting fined twenty-five hundred dollars a day, you gotta shut the thing down. And it's almost not even enough to come in with a Bitcoin mine. One MCF isn't, you can't power an enough engine to really make it worthwhile. So literally, that well is no longer viable, even though it's perfectly" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "39:12", "start": 2351.62, "text": "Like, tell me that they're trying to get the price of oil down. Yeah, right. Right? They would, they would remove this, this type of regulation immediately, wells would open up, price of gasoline would drop within five days. But no, we're in a world where it's, it's more important that you have a good excuse to flare some gas. And flaring methane is truly just CO2 and H2O. so that's, that's one of those things too that's like, wow, I, I'm perplexed by, by the lack of logical regulation." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "39:41", "start": 2381.36, "text": "Centralized powers can, through policy and taxation, you know, correct the atmospheric composition of a planet. I mean, how many sovereign nations are there? Two hundred and eight. How many people? Seven billion. Are they gonna be able to do this through regulation to where they can get the atmosphere to exactly how much carbon, you know, how much nitrogen, how much that, that, that they think is perfect for human life? Like, and, and even if they're able to achieve that, what's the timeline? What's the cost? What's the human cost? All of it just sounds to me" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:12", "start": 2411.52, "text": "I think it's not that you disagree with the existence of a council, because I think the point of the council is that they are doing education and communication, right? And so I think that's not the issue. I think perhaps the issue then that you're, you're taking is more around the strategy or the particular metrics. So I guess in the spirit of being constructive, then, what would be better? What would be some better metrics to talk about and parade as an industry to say, \"Look, these are the things the Bitcoin mining industry is doing.\" So in your view, what would some of those" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "40:41", "start": 2441.44, "text": "That's a great question. It wouldn't be funny if I just had nothing to say, like I was just here bitching and I had no, like, no, no, nothing, nothing to offer. no, I thought about this a lot, right? And, and there's a lot of metrics that I look at just as an individual because I'm, I'm curious in industry, I'm always curious to know how mining in the oil field is different than maybe just flaring gas or, you know, there's guys that just do, just combust gas in the oil field to mitigate their" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "41:11", "start": 2471.34, "text": "costly, so mining is much, much better. Shouldn't, honestly, nobody should be doing that anymore, they should be mining Bitcoin. but what are some metrics? Well, one of them that, that I-- the metric that I love the most is waste mitigated, right? Waste mi- like mi- what, I mean, you can do that in tons, like you can talk about emissions mitigated, like in CO2 tons, things like that, or you can talk about in true, like, nominal dollar amounts of waste. one place where waste is being mitigated" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "41:41", "start": 2501.28, "text": "A lot of gas that was just being burned into the air or in Canada, vented into the air, which is from a air emissions point of view, is much more substantial than CO2, CH4. So that's one area where there's waste mitigation that is measurable, and let me tell you how measurable it is. Well, my dad and I invested in this, you know, people are, so many people are, are knowledgeable of this. My dad and I invested a very small Bitcoin mine back in twenty eighteen, a little fifty kilowatt kind of operation, right? Bought You know, we invested, I think, to start, I think we invested something like, like thirty grand. it was like, it was not big, right? with that thirty thousand dollars and a sequential like eleven thousand dollars in operating over the next two years, twenty-four months, we were able to mitigate like twenty-two million cubic feet of CH4 emissions. And so what I do is I like to go, \"Hey, what did, what did one dollar get me? How many, how much gas did I mitigate per dollar?\" Right? Because by the way, tomorrow it's gonna You know, still consuming gas, and I'm still spending money, but it's, you know, marginally, where am I at? And what you find is per dollar invested, investing in Bitcoin mining the oil field might be the greenest Most environmentally friendly investment that's ever existed in the history of fucking Earth, okay? Per dollar invested. When you, I mean, there are, are many green environmental initiatives out there, and a lot of what they do when you-- a lot of what they advertise and what they, I guess, kind of brag about these, a lot of these projects is what their carbon sequestration per dollar invested is, right? So like, you know, your impact, the bang for your buck, and how much you really saved the planet. then you get to get on stage and say, like, \" It's an absolute joke. I wish I had the numbers in front of me. I, I should have pulled them up for tonight, but it's, from what I remember, I mean, we're talking like fifteen, twenty five times better, bare minimum, right? And that's like-- and that's their numbers where they don't even really report the true cost, like they don't report the carbon they're emitting at the same time that they're sequestering it, 'cause, you know, some of these causes aren't very logical in my mind. Same thing with solar" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "43:51", "start": 2631.41, "text": "They're erecting and their maintenance, right? like let's be honest about it, let's actually take a look, and let's not look at the subsidized numbers, I want the raw numbers, right? If there's slave labor involved, we need to frickin' put a different number on that, okay? Because that's-- there's a human capital cost there that is abhorrent and honestly should be a non-starter, but apparently, you know, some people think saving the pla-- again, for saving mankind, what's a few slaves? You know, honestly, what's That's the, that's the slip we're headed toward. And this, this isn't something that can be stopped by, by sheer, you know, by sheer will or by sheer force, right? This isn't, this is a, this is a battle of the minds, this is a battle of education, and how do people think about things? And we're way behind, right? The, the vilification of- Of fossil fuels has gone on for like two and a half decades, and it's in like every mainstream movie, like cartoons. You know, the oil guys are the bad guys in the suits with dark glasses and, you know, black stuffs coming out of the ground and they're ruining everything. And it's like, it's that-- I mean, even I feel it, right? Like, yeah, and I'm somebody that I admire petroleum engineers. Way more than I admire NASA scientists and those guys. Like, the people that truly make this world go round are the people that, that really power every other industry, which is the energy industry. And I'm just really so ready to have an honest discussion, and what bothers me so much, what gets me so-- where I got upset was I don't feel like I can have an honest discussion with the Bitcoin mining guys. I don't feel like they wanna take my questions and my inquiries seriously. I don't think they even wanna-- I mean, what's funny is that a lot of them will retweet" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "45:29", "start": 2728.92, "text": "I want Bitcoin to consume ten percent of the whole world, like they'll do that, but then the report comes out and they sound just like everybody else, and they're, and they're, they're defending Bitcoin's energy use instead of celebrating it And that's where I'm, I'm lost. So waste mitigation, let's compare per dollar invested in mining in the oil field to per dollar invested solar panel in wherever, right? Or per dollar invested wind turbine. And then the second part of that, ultimately, is there's a massive amount of just waste electricity and then bio-waste, right? Bio-waste is a huge factor, heat waste is a huge market where Bitcoin mining is going to infiltrate, but bio-waste is one. You know, I don't know if you've had him on the- on the podcast, but there's a, there's an awesome Bitcoin club out there who's been mining on, he's out in Mexico, I believe, he's mining on, you know, animal biofuel, in other words, animal waste, right? Animal shit. and I think it's either hogs or cattle, but, you know, these hog lagoons, they have methane digesters. There's these really expensive, quite intricate machines that re- like, like churn through that waste and they generate electricity. Well, a lot of these biofuel facilities, they They spend all this money, and what they're doing is they're selling power back to the grid for like maybe a penny and a half, two pennies, is what they're getting, when they could be mining Bitcoin for twenty-four cents per kilowatt hour, right? They could be making twelve times that money, but instead they're hooked up to the grid. So a lot of those guys are waking up and realizing, like, \"Oh, wow, like we have a v-- a really valuable thing known as electricity.\" well, they're mitigating waste. Where's that in the envi Energy consumption and, and like, what's the efficiency of that, right? 'Cause I don't even think that that's energy usage that could be classified as bad, 'cause without that energy usage, we have a ton of methane emissions in the air, and when we run it, when we run that methane through an engine and combust it, well, now we have CO2 and H2O, and they go, \"Oh, carbon dioxide is gonna kill the planet,\" and I'm like- Well, I'm breathing carbon dioxide. You want me to die? And their honest answer would be, \"Yes,\" right? Like, I'm as much, I'm as much of a problem as, as an internal combustion engine is in their mind, 'cause I'm exhaling CO2. And so it's, I feel, I feel personal attack. I, I emit CO2 personally all the time, right? like, I, I wish they would have that conversation, right? Like, let's have that. I mean, maybe I'm, maybe I'm too far one way, We have an honest conversation, and like I said, I'm, I'm not an enemy to, you know, quote unquote renewable energy, which by the way, a better word, the language, language is a huge part of this, maybe a majority of the, of the marketing and, you know, the mind game that, that's gone on is the language, and I would like to see people push back and just, just to say, hey, let's not call it green or renewable, let's call it intermittent power generation, right? Let's call it intermittent power, 'cause It's synonymous with good, right? And that's, and that's the problem, is that really what they're saying is good energy, and which leaves you to believe all this other energy is bad. And that's, man, we, we, we need to have an honest conversation because I, I get the, the mining council report, and I just feel like we're losing the battle, like we're just, we're just one step closer to just getting taken over by, you know, carbon nazis." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:44", "start": 2924.06, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Are you involved in Bitcoin mining? Well, make sure you check out Brains. Brains dot com is the website there, and they have Brains OS Plus. This is aftermarket custom firmware that you can install on your ASIC machine to use auto-tuning, and so this will optimize your performance and get you more hash rate for your electricity bill. So check out the website, and you can see which models are supported, but you may find a really big efficiency gain, and so it's well worth your time to explore this if your model is supported. Supported by Brains. Also, Brains have an analytics and insights dashboard that you can use to keep track of the industry, as well as understand profitability. And so I did a recent episode with Daniel Fromkin from the team, so you can check that out. The website is brains dot com, that's brains with two i's. And finally, Unchained Capital. Now, Unchained Capital can help you with multi-signature in their collaborative custody model that allows them to hold one key and you to hold two keys, and this can easily smooth you into going Up to multi-signature level security, you are removing single points of failure in your setup, and it might help you sleep at night more easily knowing that you're not going to lose all your coins with one mistake. With Unchained, they've got a concierge onboarding program which you can find on their website. You pay upfront, receive hardware wallets, they will do a call with you and teach you how to do it, and deposit a thousand dollars of Bitcoin in your vault. And don't forget, Unchained also offer a range of other services, so for example, they've also got loans" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:14", "start": 3013.8, "text": "To avoid a capital gains tax disposal, because they are borrowing against their coins rather than selling them. So that website is Unchained dot com. And now back to the show with Adam. And the challenge in today's world is that because of the deep connections between these, industries and the government, that, it-- there's a risk then that the government then comes out and sort of regulates in a certain way, or the, the challenge as well is around getting funded, as you were saying, right? Getting debt. It's a challenge. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "50:44", "start": 3044.36, "text": "not a risk, it's a guarantee." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:46", "start": 3045.72, "text": "Yeah. So if you can't, if you can't get, if you can't get funding, well then your project is gone, skis, and then, you know, we're, we're reliant then. And the really weird thing is that the world has sort of forgotten about what the point of reliable energy is, right? Like they will talk about all day about the virtue signaling of the gre- you know, the green power, but then realize, oh, wait, actually, yeah, we need a backup generator just in case our" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:14", "start": 3074.04, "text": "A generator here, and they're not gonna think about what's the, what's powering that generator? How does that generator run, right?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "51:21", "start": 3081.49, "text": "Exactly. No, exactly. And they're not gonna think about like, what's that generator made out of? Is that steel? I, I've never seen steel get, get smelted without petroleum. I just, sorry, I just never seen it happen. what about concrete? What about asphalt, right? Like, I mean, what about every piece of a Tesla? Like literally everything from the plastic, the tubing. Ever, the gas capped everything. For the most part, it was, petroleum touched it, and even, even if it's not a direct petroleum product, it was likely manufactured in a facility that was electrified by natural gas, coal. Or, you know, some other hydrocarbon, right? It's, I mean, and even if it had a mix, it would be like ninety percent natural gas, maybe ten percent intermittent power. So what we're, like, I can't, I, I wouldn't be able to go buy a bag of dog food for twenty dollars at the grocery store without hydrocarbons, right? I mean, just the cost to get it there, everything, the cost of everything goes through the roof, and people forget that People forget that hydrocarbons displace living hydrocarbons. Like, like fossil fuels displace living fuels. And the living-- we used to use living fuels. I don't know if-- people obviously forgot, and many people still do. The number one cause of death in children under the age of thirteen is upper respiratory airborn illness, right? Upper respiratory infection. They get sick, they die. Where are they getting these upper res- respiratory infections? From cooking food, because they're burning wood. And they're burning wood, it's got- Nasty particles in it, maybe like, you know, fungus or whatever, and there's particles in the air, and they're breathing it in, they're sitting in their kitchen, you know, whatever, and they get an upper respiratory illness. You give them a bag of coal, clean as could be, all of that goes away. Everyone under the age, all these, and literally it's millions of kids per year, millions of kids per year stop dying, you give them coal. And guess what? You don't have to chop down forests anymore. This is, this is what's really fun, Stefan. There's this thing going on in Canada that I've been enlightened to, where these coal plants, these coal fire power generation plants are shutting down And these new green, virtuous investments are coming in, and what they call themselves is they call themselves biofuels, what they say. They say they're a bio-biofuel or bioelectric generator They're, what they're doing is wood gasification. They're burning trees. They're literally burning wood, generating heat, generating electricity. Like burning wood, spinning a turbine of burning wood, reciprocating motion. They literally just turned a coal plant effectively into like a timber combustion plant, and they, and they're getting carbon sequestration credits. I mean, beyond me, it's beyond me. And by the way, I figured out if anybody wants a really sweet opportunity, you involved, you, you included. There's places in the United States you can go, buy a plot of land, And they'll have particular growth, right? So it's like, okay, well, I have this, you know, many acreage of trees at this density, and they're this type of tree that grows this much per year. So every year I have, you know, a, a total of this much tree growth in my, you know, my acreage. Well, if I go plant three trees or twenty trees per year, and I only consume five trees per year to run my Bitcoin mine, well, I can get credits too, because at the end of the year, my forest will have grown The planted trees on the net, so I'm sequestering carbon via planted trees. You need to pay me for the cost of planting the trees, and you need to give me carbon sequestration credits while I'm sitting here rolling in Bitcoin, and then I'm using my Bitcoin miners and their hot air to dry the wood before I put it into the damn thing to, to, to gasify it and, and generate electricity, right? It's like- So like they're incentivizing me to go burn forests, and they'll give me, they'll give me taxpayer dollars to do it. I mean, that's, that's how ESG friendly this, this stuff has become. And so I feel like we've lost sight of what it means to negatively impact the environment. Because I think if we cut, if we allow them to make it just a carbon dioxide metric, that how the hell do they even calculate that, by the way? I mean, because I've done a lot of, I've, I've attempted to do a lot of carbon accounting myself. What a nightmare, and what a-- there's so much room for error, and it's a joke, but, you know, if we allow ourselves to play that game, there is no winning. I'll tell you how that game ends. The nationalization of energy production. That's how that ends. With one person generating electricity, the United States government, and that's the only place you can get it, is from them. And that's, and that's where that game is. So it's incompatible with, with the Bitcoin standard, it's incompatible with the Bitcoin world. The, the heads are gonna meet, let's get ahead of it. Let's, let's start setting a new standard today. Let's give them metrics like infrastructure, like I said, with engines. There's a lot of turbines, a lot of, generators out there that are having unnecessary wear and tear, or if Great piece of infrastructure that just sat there for the last three years, like, well, you could actually put this to use. Well, does that offer any good to anybody? Well, does Bitcoin offer any good to anybody? Not to mention it would be generating profit for whoever's, you know, the owner of that thing. So there's a lot of just, what I feel like, almost common sense, you know, discussion to be had as to why the current system is a joke. We shouldn't participate in it, right? I mean, we're, we're, we're more honest than that" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:19", "start": 3379.01, "text": "Infrastructure, unused infrastructure point a little bit. What are some of the ways that Bitcoin could be used in that, and what are we talking about he-here in terms of unused infrastructure? Like, what, what does that story look like?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "56:32", "start": 3391.99, "text": "Well, I mean, just think about the, the sheer amount of unused- Like the idle power generation infrastructure in the world right now? I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is just the amount of, you know, sheer internal combustion engines that are sitting idle in, you know, rental car parking lots and, you know, all across the world, there's just, there's- So much internal combustion engines, I mean, it's practically a commodity. Like the five point seven liter V8 Chevy V8 GM motor, that thing is like, it's like as common as, you know, like a, like a toilet paper roll holder, you know what I mean? It's like, it's, they're everywhere. There's, there's literally, I think, like more five point seven liter V8s than people in the United States, like it's, there's tons. And so in terms of how much idle infrastructure there is A lot. There's also underutilized infrastructure where there's these, you know, I, I know companies that have massive turbine engines, but they don't have any use for like, you know, eight megawatts, right? Maybe they need like a few hundred kilowatts on site, and so they're like, they're running that engine at, at its lowest load, which means like, you know, they're running it at its lowest speed, its lowest kind of generation point, and even then, they, they're generating more electricity than they need, so a lot of it, they A lot of utilities do it, a lot of grid operators are either familiar with load banks, which I think Bitcoin, a Bitcoin mine kind of comes in and acts as a load bank, where now instead of running that engine at thirty, you know, twenty-five, thirty percent load, well, they can kick it up to that efficiency, they increase the life, you know, lifespan of it. And these are mat-- these are like very, very capital-intensive, low turnover specialty pieces of infrastructure that take years to, to make, and design. And so, you know, this If you had two and a half, three megawatts of Bitcoin mining going on right now, like, I mean, my God, like, what are you earning per kilowatt hour? Would I say like twenty-one cents per kilowatt hour right now? I mean, my God, like, you, you-- if you're consuming megawatts, that's a massive amount of capital that's, that's not being made, right? Not being generated from that infrastructure. and then in many situations- In, in many of the exact situations, what they're doing with the gas that they could be running through the engine, they're just like flaring it, right? They're just either, you know, trying to, trying to mitigate that waste. So that's one, that's one aspect. But another aspect, and, you know, a better person to talk to about this would maybe be like, Harry from Grid, right? Where I know at-- and I'm not an engineer, but I know at the, at the utility, the power distribution level, the cost to electrical waste and" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "58:58", "start": 3538.45, "text": "Demand trough and peak, nonsense that utility grid providers have to deal with on, you know, a yearly basis and a seasonal basis, right? 'Cause, you know, in December people use way more power, but then up until like the twentieth, then like they're all on vacation, you know, there's all this like crazy cyclical nature to electricity consumption, and Bitcoin just smoothes it all out and makes you able to better plan for the future and just be a better allocator of capital. So what kind of an impact, you know, from a fifty thousand foot view happens when you've In the, in the ecosystem, acting on a lower time preference and, and behaving in a, in a more stewardly way to their infrastructure, to their capital, to their resources, right? It's almost immeasurable. And the best case, the best example of that is in oil and gas, and I, you know, I haven't mentioned this yet, but a lot of oil and gas production, certainly when it's an oil play in a, in a remote area where there's no midstream, right? There's no pipeline access, so they're, they're just going for oil." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "59:58", "start": 3598.45, "text": "Well, and they'll inject shitloads of pressure into that well, and they'll blow off any of the gas, right? Like what you get first is gas. You gotta imagine drilling an oil well is kinda like you shook up a soda can, right? And then you just like, you tap, tap like a microscopic hole into it, right? Well, the first thing that would come out would be all the gas, right? And then you'd get to the liquids. And a lot of times what they do is they, you know, they, they drill another hole over here, drill another well over Mining into the equation, things change. Like, 'cause initially they would frac, they would go in there, they'd inject tons of pressure so that they'd blow off all that gas and they'd get to the crude fast, because, you know, time is money, and then they'd start bringing that crude to market and try to, try to get their bait back, try to get a return on their investment. Well, now they're gonna be incentivized to frac that well and slowly inject it, bleed off every cubic foot of gas Run it through an engine, mine Bitcoin, and then once they get to that oil, right? Then they'll, then they'll attack the oil and they'll, they'll inject more pressure into the well and, and go after that. And what you'll find is over the lifespan of the well You'll find less of an environmental impact because there was way less pressure in the well, you know, there was way less injection pressure needed, and what you'll find is a greater overall production. You'll get more oil and more gas because they took their time, they lowered their time preference, right? Oil and gas producers will lower their time preference, and not a regulator will have to sign a bill, right? They, they will become more stewardly because they're, they're driven by capital incentives. And so, you know, when you see something like that, that's something that people need to Learn about. That's something that people need to realize is a synergistic, you know, benefit, not a, you know, oh, well, it's, it's in the oil field, so bottom line, it's, it's dirty, right? Like that's, and that's the, you know, that second part is where we're, we're sitting today, where the New York moratorium on mining. I don't even know if this thing has passed yet. I know it got, it went to the full assembly floor. I think it's maybe going to the state senate." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:01:50", "start": 3710.76, "text": "Governor of New York or, or Mayor of New York City or whatever the hell, like, he's a Bitcoiner, and then now he's about to sign a bill that you said you don't mind Bitcoin on green energy. If that passes, that sets precedent, and if you're not in Texas, you should be worried. The good news is as a company we're in Canada, so that's a big part, I mean, but it'll, it could sweep up there too. and we've got a lot of Texas customers too, so I, I know Texas will probably be insulated Statewide BS, and I think Wyoming, I think North Dakota will, I mean, they would be damn fools, to, to follow suit. They would, you know, again, that would be a poison pill for them. And I think they're probably sitting in rooms, you know, I hope Cynthia Lummis is sitting in a room this week talking strategy on how this is bullshit and if this passes, what our plan is to make sure that it doesn't come to Wyoming, right? I hope so because- I hope at least some people out there are seeing through this nonsense." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:39", "start": 3759.09, "text": "Yeah, for sure. Okay, so we've spoken a bit about some of those things at a more broad level. Another area I'm keen to chat with you about is around home mining. Now, this is something I see you've been, you've been big on this. Of course. And I wanna also get your take because sometimes on Twitter there's this arguments back and forth around considering the upfront CapEx cost of the mining machine versus looking at the OpEx cost. The profitability, and as you, you know, as you, mentioned my recent episode with Daniel Fromkin from Brains, also, we, we went into this a little bit, but I'm curious to get your take, how should we think about the home mining question with CapEx versus OpEx?" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:03:20", "start": 3800.77, "text": "Yeah, no, I think I'm really glad you asked that question, because, you know, I constantly try to reiterate and, and clarify my, myself, you know, as people get excited and wanna participate, right? At the end of the day, your power cost is a" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:03:35", "start": 3815.9, "text": "I think that's important. It's not the only thing that should be considered, in my opinion, but it is the first consideration. And what's interesting is that United States, there's a lot, like the actual population, the number of human beings that are in a jurisdiction where their power's sub ten cents, per kilowatt hour, is a lot. Like it's a massive market, it's not, you know, just a few people. Like there's a lot of play. I mean, here in Colorado, I'm at like eleven cents, like ten point seven or Thirteen and a half, fourteen. so, you know, and then you got places in Kentucky, I mean, a guy just posted on Twitter, a home miner out there, I think he's got like seven point one cent out in Kentucky, just residential. I know farmers out in Kentucky that have our hash slots that are like five, five cents. And so this is, this is the question, right? So I would say that there is about-- there is a threshold, and I'd say it's somewhere around, you know, eight to eleven cents ish. Like if you're at" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:04:35", "start": 3875.92, "text": "machines, so long as you, you were below like forty watt per tera hash, so, you know, all, like any of the S nineteen, if they have the word Pro on them, or really any of the S nineteen, most of the, all the what's miner M thirty, M thirty ones, those are all forty four tera hash and better, but certainly like the S nineteen Pro, right? The hundred ten tera hash or hundred tera hash, those have been making like, I think they, they bottomed out at like eighteen or nineteen cents per kil Right, I was sitting there, even at ten cent power, it's like, \"Well, if I'm spending ten cents, eleven cents, I'm making forty-three, like my God, it's like I'm buying Bitcoin at a seventy-five percent discount.\" And so, power cost is a big thing to look at, and always just look at, \"Hey, what is this machine or like, what's the breakeven on this machine?\" That's why I love Brains Dashboard, where they have a section, you scroll down a little bit, they show you like all these machines, and you" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:05:35", "start": 3935.92, "text": "Like just as a pure, I'm ra-raising capital to do this. I look at Bitcoin mining, you know, one thing my, one thing my boss, Steve Barber said that, that I love so much, and we, we even made a GIF out of it, was, you know, an exchange is a thing that takes your fiat and turns it into Bitcoin, like, you know, Swan Bitcoins is one of the best at it. A Bitcoin miner is a thing that takes your electricity and turns it into Bitcoin, right? And so I look at it as this, it's, it's a them money happily. The majority of exchanges, I don't think, are acting in consumers' best interest on a lot of other fronts, and so I don't like funding them. but I like Bitcoin, I like saving my money in Bitcoin, and so I don't, I don't wanna fund them. But to take it a step further, what happens when tomorrow there's that legislation that comes out that says you need to fill out this new federal document and you can't withdraw from exchanges anymore? What does the price of an ASIC do? Right? Goes to the roof. The way I look at I'm an individual, I'm, I'm a sovereign individual extremist, and I think that people should have a sovereign way to store their wealth in Bitcoin, a way, an immutable means by which to save their value in Bitcoin, and a miner is a great tool for that. Because it takes a, an a hell of an extreme for the power company to cut you off and no longer give you electricity. And honestly, they're really happy if you're gonna consume more electricity. They're paying the customer. They're, they're totally cool with that, yeah. So like, and I, and I don't have to give them like all my, you know, crazy private information that, you know, these companies are so stewardly with. Obviously, none of them get hacked, and, you know, I, I should feel totally safe. But at the end of the day, Stops in place, it's the only thing we can really trust to not get hacked is Bitcoin. and so, you know, I, I like to think of a miner as, as a means by which to DCA, but it comes with some pains in the ass, right? Two of them are, it, it creates a lot of heat, so you need ventilation, and it creates a lot of noise. And so, you know, at Upstream, we came up with the Black Box, it's an awesome product. I've got two of them outside, as we speak" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:07:49", "start": 4069.32, "text": "I was going through saying, \"Hey, look, how many, you know, I tried to answer the question, how many people wanna mine Bitcoin at home? Like, it's a really tough question to try to quantify that market. It's hard to figure out, like, just on a bare basis, how many people own Bitcoin, right? Because you can look at on-chain analysis, but most people are exposed to it through an exchange or, you know, all this crap. So, you know, I tried to get an idea of that, and but what I found was there are a lot of people" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:08:19", "start": 4099.28, "text": "long amount of time. Like usually it's like maybe in July you're gonna have ten days where, you know, four hours a day it's gonna be over a hundred degrees, but for the most part, it's, it's not that hot. And these, these ASICs, these new gen ASICs, they run really hot. Like people say, you know, at the, at the Bitcoin conference, we had one of our black boxes there, right? And we had S9s running in it. We actually were, we were actually sharing the hash with random customers. It was really cool. But the everybody that came up there, they would come up and they'd say, \"How do you keep the ASICs cool?\" Or they would even say \"cold.\" And I just was like, \"Wow, people, people have the wrong idea because of all this immersion and all this cooling going on, these cooling technologies. People think that these things need to be cold. They run really hot. They run between like sixty-nine and ninety degrees Celsius, so like one hundred fifty to two hundred degrees Fahrenheit. so if you, if you have something that's, you know, that's okay running" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:09:17", "start": 4157.12, "text": "at 35 degrees Celsius air, you just need good airflow. Like, that's enough of a beta that you're, you're drawing out a lot of BTUs, so you just need good airflow. These new gens, they fail around I think it's gonna be around like the, depending on your altitude and things, you know, ninety-four to a hundred degrees is where I think you'll start seeing them have a hard time keeping themselves cool enough. And what's beautiful about the guys at Brains is You know, they're, they're already working and releasing on the, on the nineteen and hopefully, you know, when what's miner, hopefully they'll release for the what's miner soon. But even the what's miner has, so the what's miners come with stock firmware that allow you to put the ASICs into low, normal, or high mode. And so like me, I'm running my ASICs, the, the ones I have in low, and they consume about twenty percent less power, eighteen, you know, fifteen to twenty percent less power. So truly, that's You know, what's mine or fail at ninety four, ninety five. If I put in low mode, maybe my threshold goes to one o three, and now there's only like one day a year where I have to maybe, maybe my machine's gonna go down from noon to four, but then it's back up and, you know, we're on. So what we found is, hey, if we can put this thing outside, most people could mine. But the problem is, it's not just about heat, there's rain and snow and shit. So we made, you know, an all- An air conditioning unit, right? If people have an air conditioning unit outside their house, it kicks on, a fan spins, it makes a noise. Well, those are about forty-five to fifty-five decibels, and that's what we aim to get our, our ASICS down to, and that's, that's what we were able to get to. So, you know, rather than be at eighty-five or ninety decibels, which is like an alarm, you know, these things scream, you have to get kind of right up to the box, and, yeah, then you A high pitched kind of, but it's faint, it's not annoying you to death, you know, and it's not something your, your neighbor's gonna call the HOA. So what I like about home mining is the numbers, right? And not necessarily the profitability numbers, 'cause those numbers are, they are what they are, right? And if, if you have, and if you're in Hawaii or you're in California and you got twenty-six cent power, like, I'm sorry, like what you're gonna do is, the more you learn about mining, the more you're" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:11:26", "start": 4286.51, "text": "gonna wanna I think, you know, that, that part of the discussion is, you know, there's, there's millions, millions of words that you could go read on, on, on such topics, but what I like to think about is the numbers are, are such that we're still so early, we're still in, in such an infantile stage of Bitcoin mining as an industry that gorilla mining, what I would call it, like home mining, that, that go- I call it gorilla mining, cause not necessarily at home, but it's like less than- 25 ASICs or less than maybe call it a hundred kilowatt scale, less than even fifty kilowatt scale. But even if you had a million, just a million people plug in one ASIC, one S19, you would increase the hash rate by fifty percent Fifty percent, that would be fucking huge, right? That'd be over a hundred million terra hashes, and just one, just, you know, a computer in my backyard, and all of a sudden, the government co-opting a massive gigawatt facility like a riot, in combination with, you know, all of a sudden, like a state attack becomes like absolutely out of the question, not even like a, well, it would be hard, like, no, no, this would be absolutely impossible if you've got- Hundred thousand to a million people spread all over, you know, the world. You can't, that's beyond regulate, yeah, that's unregulatable. And that's the goal, right? That's the goal is to help Bitcoin become unregulatable and help it be, help it be shielded and, and strong enough for a state attack. What I'm confident about is Bitcoin historically, it's got-- I, I wanna come up with a term for it. It's got this magic, there's this magic to it where it's like a magic provocation, where Bitcoin doesn" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:13:02", "start": 4382.77, "text": "Right? 'Cause like in two thousand twelve, the, the government could have shut Bitcoin down, right? They could have absolutely co-opted mining, like, was not very decentralized at all, even anything. They could have absolutely made that, but, but it was too small for them to give a shit. It wasn't a threat to them. But by the time it becomes a legitimate threat, Bitcoin has this way of being too big to deal with. And that's what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping, I'm, I'm trying to help that, even though I feel like it's a" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:13:32", "start": 4412.79, "text": "It isn't attack vector. I, I think, I think the number one attack vector for Bitcoin is this ESG narrative, this ESG mafia that, that exists in the world, this corporate ESG mafia. And I think, but I think the way that they actually get to, to threaten Bitcoin is through the political vector of development, not through, not through like physical co-opting of, of hardware, of machines and taking over hash rate. I think it's gonna be through the convincing people that consuming this energy is bad, and then we need to change the code, go proof of stake or some" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:02", "start": 4442.81, "text": "Right, yeah. And so it's really interesting that there are different allies and enemies in this world then, in, in that view, because those people who are pro fossil, pro energy usage are naturally more aligned with the cause of Bitcoin, because, hey, there's some common cause here. Like, we wanna use energy, we like your energy, like, let's all do the energy, you know? And then the more socialist-minded, ESG-minded sort of people tend to align against Bitcoin, right? Because their view is more like, \"Oh, you're being wasteful, and we can't leverage that same level of social control that we would like to, like the same kinds of people who want this kind of, you know, or who don't see an issue with the kind of social control agenda that's coming.\"" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:14:46", "start": 4486.3, "text": "Right. Right. Or they, they justify, it justifies the end, right? The end, it's okay because the end is saving humanity, even if they think that, like, that control's bad," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:14:54", "start": 4494.1, "text": "right? Yeah. So, yeah, it's, it's really interesting This is, it might not be pound for pound as profitable per se, but it might be seen as like a non-KYC acquisition of coins, and it might be seen as like a ideological defense of the permissionless nature of Bitcoin and the censorship-resistant aspect of Bitcoin, whereas, you know, o-others might believe that, let's say, just enough people holding Bitcoin and sort of stopping, that, that enough people who want Bitcoin is enough to sort of stop any political action, which I don't know, maybe that's also true. But But I think the argument on, on this side would be more like enough people mining makes Bitcoin more decentralized and thus harder to control." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:15:40", "start": 4540.83, "text": "Yeah, very lit-- there's no downside, and there's at least, you know, some measurable upside to having it more decentralized. And one thing I, I-- one thing I like to, to bring to the table is, you know, if we really want a world, if we're, if we're true in our complaints about the money printer, if we're truly disgusted with the infinite expansion of the money supply, and, and, you know, which" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:16:03", "start": 4563.03, "text": "Of, of savings and hourly wages, not to mention, you know, of other countries that are relying on the dollar, but if we're truly disgusted with that, we must, we must be professional and, and upstanding enough to offer a better money, right? And I think that's what we do, right? We offer Bitcoin, but we ought to know why it's a better money. And I think the reason Bitcoin's a better money is because it's a better representation of energy. The only currency in the universe is heat energy over time. That's it. Right, that's it. I mean, without the sun, it's over, right? We're gone, nothing is here. Without, I mean, what is food? Now, when I go to the gas station, I look at a Snickers bar and I look at a gallon of gas, and weirdly, the gallon of gas and the Snickers bar are like the same cost. How much potential energy is in this one? How much potential energy in this, is in this one? 'Cause they're both just energy. That's just what we're talking about. Caloric energy, kilojoules, it's all the same. Bitcoin is an unbelievably, or is, it is unbelievably tethered to energy, right? It is, it, it is as close to, a kilowatt hour in a pokeball or, or in a battery as we can get to, and, and we were able, and, you know, Satoshi Nakamoto was He, he was able to merge information and money and make them become the same thing. And energy is the key there. Without the energy input, there is nothing worthwhile There, there is nothing revolutionary, right? And so we can't lose sight of that. We c-- and, and, and that argument expands into a world where we say, \"Okay, well, if energy is the currency of the universe, if, if that's, you know, heat energy over time, then the means by which we generate that energy is-- it all just matters on efficiency, right? Efficiency is the number one- Should be the number one priority, and then environmental impact should maybe be right behind it, but efficiency usually goes in with, with environmental impact, and what we find is hydrocarbons, fossil fuels, I mean, natural gas specifically, natural gas is unbelievably clean, right? And, and- What you spoke about when it comes to, when, when it comes to home mining, Steve Barber, my, my boss and founder of Stream Data, he spoke at the Bitcoin mining conference about this, and I'd never heard him talk about it before. It's a really great idea where he said, \"There's, it's, you know, there's, there's these forces. There's a force, and if you're a Bitcoin miner, there's a force that's pushing you to expand because you get some economies of scale, right? So you, there's this force that want, that makes I think about like Riot and or these other massively publicly traded companies out there that are building these massive facilities, they've got, you know, tons of contractors, they're paying healthcare, all this kind of stuff. I mean, they have to be the government's friend, they are toast. They, the, effectively, they like have to play the game because they're too big to, you know- Like get away with it a while, like they would never, they would never break ground. Whereas miners like me, I mean, if you've got twelve S-nineteens and a few black boxes, like I'm really flexible Like I may have just decided to start mining last week, and I've got hash rate today. You can't want a megawatt facility and get it done in a week, right? I can get up and running right away. I can pick up and go move my hash rate right away. I, I don't even have to really talk to anybody, I can just get it done. Like, I can be quick, nimble, and I'm private. you know, there's, there's benefits to being small, just as much as there's benefits to being a bigger, bigger company" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:19:27", "start": 4767.64, "text": "Which Bitcoin mining parallels with a real estate investment is beautiful, right? I mean, I'm seeing guys go out and buy properties in low kilowatt hour jurisdictions, and instead of getting a renter to come in and, you know, for that passive income, they're just loading up the house with miners, they're just loading up the panel. I'm not kidding you, I'm not kidding you. Right? Well, think about it. It's like, okay, well, I buy this, I mean, and by the way, like a lot of these are crap houses, like a hundred and And soundproofing and cameras, you know? And instead of having a, you know, any counterparty risk, which having a renter sucks. Like, if they stop paying you, it could take you like six months to kick them out. They got squatters' rights, depends on where you are, all this stuff, right? They've got kids, you can't, you know, now you're, now you're putting kids on the street. Like, you want that on your conscience, man? Just for your, just 'cause you needed your passive income? Or you could have Bitcoin miners Mortgage, and you pay your power bill, you're just effectively investing in Bitcoin at a discount. And then once you de-risk that, that property enough, boom, you roll it over and you do it again. You go find and literally we'll arbitrage a kilowatt hour across the entire United States, anywhere where there's low power, we're coming. If you're afraid of Bitcoin miners raising your power rate, guess what? It's gonna happen because, because energy has been undervalued for way too long. It's been subsidized, it's been-- you know, there has been Over in a seven kilowatt hour jurisdiction, until now, with Bitcoin, I can consume anywhere there's cheap power, I can be a consumer of that market and be arbitraging that kilowatt hour. And what we should see around the globe is there should be become a global energy price, there should become that basis, and it'll become, it'll become the standard, it'll become the, the risk free rate of return where it's like, hey, do you wanna invest in a smoothie franchise shop? Like, well, why would I do that? Like, I could just take the" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:21:27", "start": 4887.64, "text": "Same return without all the bullshit. Like, unless my, unless I have an idea that's gonna beat Bitcoin mining, it's not a good idea. I should just take that capital and mine Bitcoin, right? It's gonna be, it's gonna be low reward, but it'll also be very low risk, right? Right, right now it's a lot higher reward, a lot higher risk, but over time, I think that's what we'll see is Bitcoin is a, is a mechanism that arbitrages a kilowatt hour anywhere it's undervalued." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:21:48", "start": 4908.65, "text": "Yeah. And I'm curious to get" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:21:57", "start": 4917.72, "text": "About, well, what about in fiat terms versus Bitcoin terms, right? Like, should I be buying a Bitcoin miner with Bitcoin, or should I be looking only to do it in the case where if I have fiat income, or let's say ideal case, I can access cheap fiat credit to, let's say, buy a cheap home, buy the cheap, buy the miners, get the setup going, that fiat or Bitcoin question, espe-especially for a home miner." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:22:20", "start": 4940.95, "text": "Yeah, that's a great question. That's, I mean, I have gotten myself in trouble, advocating one way or And so I would say, you know, that, that is, that's the key question. And so when, when you're outside of the educational realm, so I think, I think there's a, a, there's room for, if you're really curious to mining, I think there's room for like, hey, buy an S9, like a cheap miner, plug it in for the educational aspect, don't look at it as like a investment, that way look at it as like a, you paid for a class, right? So outside of that, always go try to borrow first is Right? If you can find debt that's at a reasonable rate, do that, right? Because, I mean, back in January, February of twenty eighteen, when I was running the numbers of, you know, I had a-- I had saved up about enough Bitcoin by like July of twenty eighteen, where I was getting ready to maybe start a company and go mine in the oil field, but every time I ran the numbers of using my Bitcoin to go mine Bitcoin, I was too much of a Bitcoin bull, right? Rightfully so, obviously, we, you know, we were at five thousand dollar coin Bitcoin's gonna go to the moon and I'm not gonna have any left. I'm not gonna have made any yet. And so I, I didn't like those numbers, because I was too bullish. However, you know, if, if you have, it all come-- again, that would come down to your power costs, where it's like, if your power cost is, you know, a great article I'd recommend to read is I, I came out with, something I coined as the Denver derivative, right? It's a, it's a mechanism-- You're out if an ASIC is properly priced or if it's cheap or if it's expensive, and it's all relative to Bitcoin's price, all relative to hash price, you know, its earnings. but what you find over time is these, these very interesting kind of situations where, like, for example, last year We fell off a cliff, hash rate fell off a cliff, I mean, competition fell off a cliff, and so did price, but price went from fifty-five K to like thirty K, competition went from like a hundred eighty to like seventy, like we went more in half. So actually, ASICs were more valuable, like they were making more Bitcoin and even more dollars per kilowatt hour at thirty-three thousand dollar Bitcoin right when the, you know, competition dropped, than they were at like fifty-five, right? And you're like, \"What? \" But then you looked at their upfront" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:24:34", "start": 5074.86, "text": "Than what the relative ratio is, so it was like, \"Oh, well, then that's a cheap miner, right?\" So there's these, it's crazy. Denver Derivative kind of walks through that, that process. Now that's denominated in dollars. I, I'm currently working on a Denver Derivative that's deno- instead of using the hash price, I'm using the hash value. Right? Which is the value of a single tera hash in, in sats, right, rather than in dollars. And the reason I went with dollars with the Denver derivative is because ASICs aren't priced in Bitcoin, they're really not, they're priced in dollars. Like, that's just, that's the world we live in. And so that's why I, I went there. But I, you need to use the hash price because it's-- using just Bitcoin's price is stupid, which is really what happens today. Bitcoin goes up ten percent, ASICs go up ten percent. It And you're like, \"What? Well, they're stupid.\" and then you look around and people are buying it, you're like, \"I can't, like, they must have not run the numbers.\" So I, I write an article, right? so I would say that. I would say, I'm, I've never been bearish enough that I say like, \"YOLO your Bitcoin into hardware,\" 'cause the price of machines will always trend downward, right? Unless Bitcoin is in the midst of ripping, the prices should be trending downward because, you know, it" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:25:49", "start": 5149.7, "text": "So hope more competition, great. Like, so those should trend downward. What's valuable is your access to power. So if you've got really cheap power, it might be worth spending your Bitcoin. Like, if I had two cent power, I'd be spending Bitcoin to buy assets. Two, three, four, five cent power, I'd, I'd probably be spending Bitcoin. Above five cent, I'm looking for death. If I, I mean, if I absolutely can't find debt, I just would probably keep looking. That's the way I would go, because I don't wanna, I don't like spending my Bitcoin to go try to mine more Bitcoin, right? I, I mean, I'll borrow cash and, and use Bitcoin to buy the stuff, but like, I'm not, I'm not taking my own personal- Right, yeah, you don't wanna take a net" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:26:20", "start": 5180.56, "text": "loss in your sat's position. Because and then that's the other question as well, is thinking about that, because let's say even" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:26:35", "start": 5195.79, "text": "No, that's a great point. Thank you, 'cause I, I wanna, I wanna follow it up with, like, so my, me personally in, you know, twenty eighteen, like I said, I did a small investment in a Bitcoin mine, like thirty grand, but I raised like a hundred and twenty grand. So we just, we just bought Bitcoin. So, and that, that's, that's a great point. I would say, I don't think I could ever, even, even if I had five cent power right now, right? Which I do in the oil field," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:27:05", "start": 5225.39, "text": "But I don't think I could spend more than, God, I don't think I could spend more than like five or ten percent of my Bitcoin holdings. You know what I mean? Like, like if you don't have a Bitcoin, if you don't have a whole coin, don't go buy an S19, right? Like, if an S19 co- right now they cost like, they're like maybe ninety-five hundred bucks or something, so quarter of a coin or a fifth of a coin, like, if you only have, you know, half of a Bitcoin, don't," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:27:32", "start": 5252.94, "text": "Like figure out what this is all about, like what, like, like run one for a month because your power bill might be like seven cents, but you might not realize that actually it's way higher than that because there's these hours that if you're consuming during these hours, then you're gonna get charged like twenty-five cents, and so your aggregate's gonna end up at like sixteen, and you're gonna get wrecked. Like, so I would say that there's a lot of risk that maybe people are thinking it's just like a guarantee, and it's not. Like, it is relative" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:28:03", "start": 5283.14, "text": "I, I don't think I could part with more than five or certainly not ten percent. That would be really reckless." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:28:08", "start": 5288.86, "text": "Gotcha." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:28:09", "start": 5289.42, "text": "unless Bitcoin was on like an obvious blow off top, like, I don't know, like we were so parabolic, I, even then, I probably, I, I don't think I would. I just, I, I think it'd be easier for me to go find debt, right? And that was, and that was my, that was one of my main theses in twenty eighteen was, you know, I was a twenty-some" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:28:29", "start": 5309.96, "text": "year" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:28:31", "start": 5311.4, "text": "old Debt to, to increase my personal Bitcoin exposure. But they would loan me money to go solve a stranded natural gas problem, and that was, that was a mechanism I could use to increase my personal position to this thing that I thought was going to appreciate. And so I went, you know, Boku for that, I was like, okay, well then mining makes total sense, 'cause without mining I have this much Bitcoin, with mining I should have this much Bitcoin, and this is more, so go, right? And I'm glad we did, I'm glad we borrowed, right? Because that Doesn't matter what your interest rate is, once you're at thirty thousand, you're fine, right? And so that's a great point. I would say, if I borrowed capital, I have a hard time putting more than half into mining. I, like, I always would say, build up a treasury." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:29:14", "start": 5354.65, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's, that's a really good, insight there for listeners out there who are thinking about their own Bitcoin mining journey as well as combating the ESG mafia. So, I think that's probably a good spot to finish" }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:29:33", "start": 5373.32, "text": "I'm on Twitter, denverbitcoin. You can find Upstream Data on Twitter, Upstream Data Inc. But we also have, you know, our website is, Upstream Data dot ca. we're a Canadian company out of Alberta. So, yeah, if you're, if you're interested in home mining, we've got a really cool product for it. That's, that's for the backyard. it's about as plug and play as you can get. You have to cut a hole, so you, you do need to take a drill and But that's about it, cut a hole and plug in the ASIC, set 'em in there. And also, you know, I just wanna, I just wanna give a caveat out there to, to folks that Bitcoin mining's really exciting. You know, it's one thing that I never thought it would become, or at least I didn't, I, I thought it would take a lot longer, is I never thought Bitcoin mining would become sexy, and it got sexy last year, right? Like when, when, when VAK was started talking about like mining on volcanoes, right? Like With his martini, like telling the girl about his volcano Bitcoin mining bond, you know, like he feels cool talking about it. So once Bitcoin mining became sexy, the, the downside was that people wanted to do it not necessarily for the return, but the, the social return of looking sexy because you're involved in this, right? And so what people wanted was to mine Bitcoin, but they didn't really wanna mine Bitcoin, they just wanted to throw money at Bitcoin. And so I, I'd say if you have this instinct to just throw money and have somebody else set up a mine for you So that you're mining, like, I'd say be cautious, right? Just be very cautious and understand that there are trade-offs in life that there-- it comes with counterparty risk, and Bitcoin is a tool, yeah, Bitcoin's a tool to remove counterparty risk in our lives, especially when it comes to money. And, I mean, we're living in a day and age where we can print our own money, Stefan. Like, I, I almost can't help myself but participate because it's the first time in history any, you know, average jackass like me can participate in the new money supply. I mean, what a time to be alive! What an invention, what a discovery, whichever it is, that we get a, that we get to live with, and not only just it's- Its existence, but the time that we're in, I mean, I-- if Bitcoin grows to be this multi-century long project, if you will, this multi-century long thing, people will talk at end about those first thirty years when there was actually a block subsidy that was like, you know, bigger than transaction fees." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:31:48", "start": 5508.36, "text": "Meaningful," }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:31:48", "start": 5508.64, "text": "yeah. Meaningful, you know, like, I mean, it's, it's like the way I even think about the idea of mining fifty Bitcoin per block, it's like, but it's gonna be at, at an exponentially more impactful- point of view when, when the block subsidy is, you know, a tenth of a bitcoin and the fees are a tenth of a bitcoin, and it's like, wow, this is-- we are, like, we are bringing megawatts to fight for scraps of this, of this currency. And so this is a very, very vital part of history where the future is going to be determined based upon, you know, the decisions of this decade, like the things that happen with Bitcoin this decade are gonna have massive implications going out. And that's why, you know, that's why we're Check out these ideas, you know? Yeah. Or Sunday, or Saturday morning, I guess." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:32:33", "start": 5553.33, "text": "Yeah, yeah, Saturday morning for me. But, yeah, look, it's, it's, it's great. I, I enjoyed chatting with you, and, I think you had a lot of interesting insights to share around, both around the ESG mafia as well as Bitcoin home mining and just Bitcoin mining in general. So thanks for joining me, Adam." }, { "speaker": "adam_o_denverbitcoin", "time": "01:32:48", "start": 5568.08, "text": "Hey, thanks for having me on here. I always, always love, going back and forth with you, That you guys are doing. I hope that, you know, this, the streaming of Sats is something that, that kind of becomes more mainstream and becomes, you know, more user friendly, because I think that's a really cool way to, to support guys, something I look forward to doing, you know, for you and Odell and all those guys. So keep up the good work, man. It's, it's not easy, I know it takes a lot of time behind the scenes, but appreciate you having me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:33:18", "start": 5598.81, "text": "Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the show. Get the show" } ] }