You're listening to Teip. Hey, everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the show where we're talking about Bitcoin. Today's show is super exciting because we're covering everything related to energy and Bitcoin mining. Now, this is a really hot topic because there's a lot of controversy around Bitcoin consumption of energy. And additionally, there's a lot of debate around people talking about how much hashing power and mining is taking place in China. Well, I have two incredible experts in this space.

We got Marty Bennett and Harry Sutta to discuss these ideas and much, much more detail. So sit back, hold tight and get ready for a massive amount of information on energy and Bitcoin mining.

You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network now for your host, Christine. All right, so everyone, welcome to the show, we got Marty Bennett Harris out of here. And guys, I'm excited to have this conversation because you guys are the experts on this topic. And welcome to the show. Thank you for having us. Thank you for having me. I'd like to speak for Harry Kress, an expert, maybe a bit of a stretch.

But no, I'm hearing you guys in clubhouse and I'm just like, whoa, we need to have a chat with these two. And I mean, I've been I've been following you guys for years now, and this is exciting. So what I'm going to do to start this off, I just want to pitch a couple underhand pitches for you guys. I want you to crank them out of the ballpark so far that people can't even see the ball. It's going to be like the natural where the cover comes off the ball as you guys are hitting these these two underhand pitches.

The first one I got for you. China controls all the hashing power. Therefore, they can make Bitcoin do whatever they want. Boss, I mean, they don't control all the all the hashing power, historically, they've controlled a significant amount, but that that amount has been waiting. And even though all that hashing power does exist within the borders of China, they can't really control the Bitcoin network. At the end of the day, the Bitcoin network is controlled by full nodes who dictate the consensus rules and validate the consensus rules with those full nodes.

And if the miners within China or anywhere in the world for that matter, attempt to to fall outside of those consensus rules for nodes, will reject the blocks or transactions that they attempt to put in those blocks. So in terms of being able to control Bitcoin, the mining industry in China, that is a bit of a stretch.

I believe the worst that could happen, which is also a bit of a stretch, is is all the mining equipment within the borders could be turned off and slow down block production for some time. But that's why we have the difficulty adjustment. I don't know if you want to add anything to that, Harry. I do I want to reframe the question of fifty one percent attack in the Bitcoin network is not the same as a fifty one percent attack on an election.

This is not majority rule. This is not flip the party. This is not a deep change to the behavior of the network. What it would involve is a challenge to process and confirm net new blocs. There may be a very, very shallow reorgs. Those are the kind of scope of the problems that could arise from that type of behavior. And exactly like Marty said, the network is unbelievably, unbelievably antiviral and white blood cell driven. And so what that means is that you've got tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people all over the planet with their eyes on the asset that Bitcoin delivers, which is the other side.

So the history of the fidelity of the transactions over the last 13 years has been driven to this tip of the block chain. At this point in time, that incredibly high fidelity transaction set across history is the asset that Bitcoin delivers. And right now, it's delivering it to the tune of nine hundred and seventy five billion dollars in market cap. And so if we were to see something that was going to try to erode this historical value, transfer, this transfer log, there are hundreds of thousands of people with all of their eyes on proper behavior and proper game theoretic design.

And so if we begin to see or smell the first instance of this, which would emerge from a very, very small point in time, fifty one percent attack. The ability for the network to out around that type of bad behavior is instantaneous. And the negative impact for the participants in an attack like that would be catastrophic economically and socially. And even coordinating the individual miners within China to attempt a 51 percent attack like that would be logistically a nightmare, potentially impossible, especially when you consider the amount of miners that are doing stuff off grid.

That's the one thing that is really ironic about the first 12, 13 years of Bitcoin is that some of the most capitalistic activity has come from the mining industry within China. If you speak with some miners in China, you'll find that they their profit driven as well. And they don't want any of this stuff to happen. And actually spoken to some that are looking to relocate equipment in different geographical regions just to to mitigate risk from the CCP. They're individuals running.

These businesses are pretty capitalistic. It's not like the CCP controls everything that's going on in the mining industry or anything, for that matter, from what I can tell. I want to jump in on two more data points that are really important when you think about this mental model. One is that the largest Bitcoin mine in the world that I'm aware of is about two hundred and fifty to three hundred megawatts in size and represents somewhere between three and five percent of the network, depending on the rigs that they're running.

So you need to have if every farm in China was that size, you would need to get your hands on 15 to 20 of the largest. So what that really means when you look at sort of the power law across how large those farms really are, you need to find your way to get your hands on 50 to 100 different warehouses at the same time and get them all to behave in the same way that a massive coordination problem, assuming you can even locate the second data point is that is exactly what Marty said.

The migration of hash out of China over time by existing players is very, very rapid and they're very motivated. So if you're operating on any of those hydro facilities in China, there's significant seasonality. You're already moving cash in between locations. And so they're incentivized to avoid those switching costs to migrate to regions where there is stable access to power, which by and large, is in Eastern Europe right now. I've heard of some South American migration among a couple of other locations.

So the trend is moving actively away of the miners that are there currently, not to mention the net new hash that Marty and myself represent, among others, migrating elsewhere. And explain why they're moving elsewhere. Political risk. Exactly, it's power, availability and political risk. So they do not live under a stable regulatory regime by any stretch, and they don't always have high uptime, high availability of power because they're very beholden to the to the wet and dry seasonality of China's hydro environment.

What is the cause, I know the current hashing is less than 50 percent there. What's the number that we're seeing today and what was it, five years ago? The most common stat that was thrown out, at least, was in the last three years with 60 percent, pretty sure that's Wayne to around 40 percent of recent estimates. It's been high 80 percent. I would imagine at some point if China was going to control the Bitcoin network, the best chance to do so was probably five or six years ago.

Perry, you have any other comments on on the amount that's there right now? Yeah, the estimates I've seen are similarly 40 to 60, sixty sixty five percent, and we tend to think it's the lower end of that range because you can see between pre split and I guess now they're main post split. The Gihan for they located has shown us they've got multiple facilities running in the US. And so even sort of the crown jewel of the Chinese mining industry is locating cash in the US right now.

So we've seen that progression over time happen. And like with anything, I think it's going to continue. I think that when you think about why Hesh wants to leave, it's about a regulatory regime that's uncertain in favor of a regulatory regime that's that's at least more certain and legally is significantly more certain. That really surprises me that you're seeing the move into the into the U.S., I would think that the the power expense here would not be optimal for them.

How are you guys seeing that? It means big operation was done in Texas, correct? I believe they bought a substation down there for that substation, I think drive your boss to power production down very low. I can't speak to exact sources of energy production for for these Chinese miners that are looking to distribute their operations to North America. But I mean, just from what we see in the field of great American mining, there's abundant, cheap energy here all across North America, not even just the United States.

I want to go back to a point that you made early on there, Marty, about full nodes dictating what actually takes place on the network and that the miners are just providing a security service to secure the network. Harry, you had said the horn for explain to people who have no idea what that is and why this is such an important moment that happened in the summer of twenty seventeen that really kind of demonstrated to the world that running a full node is is really kind of calling the shots as to the direction of the network.

I think this is also important. Explain to people what the difference between running a full node in mining even is. This is great and this gets to the core of why Bitcoin, the software functions effectively, what mining does and what full nodes do is they they and we we validate the integrity of the transactions that are process and ensure that the behavior of the network is in compliance with the rules set that the participants in the network have agreed to. And so the job of the miner is to process the transactions.

What we basically do is say there's something called a member rule. So you've got thousands of people and now millions of people around the world sending Bitcoin back and forth. They are attaching a fee to their transaction in an attempt to get a miner to include that transaction in a block. So it's like an auction. What miners will do is pull the highest value transactions into blocks, sort of in cascading order from highest fee to lowest fee. And so once we've constructed a block, which is really just a set of transactions that are compliant within the rules that we find the block, which means discover the cryptographic signature of that set of transactions.

And we say to the network, look at me, I found it. And we show the completed block to all the nodes and the nodes. Look at the block and say, does this block sit within the compliant framework that the software that I'm running on my full node says is check or fail? So we think about it very much like a puzzle where a puzzle takes a really long time and a lot of effort to finish. But anybody walking by can tell you if the puzzle is done or not.

And so we're the puzzle solvers and the nodes of the puzzle checkers. But they have the power because if they say your puzzle ain't worth the pieces that are assembled, we don't get paid. So we have a tremendous incentive to behave properly within the rules set that the nodes dictate, because if we don't do that, we don't get paid. But we spend all that money on the electricity to solve the puzzle in the first place. So the game theory is such that the nodes have power over the miners and the miners are highly motivated to be compliant within the rules set defined by the nodes.

So how much does it cost to run a full node and how difficult is it? And I run one, I'm just asking this for the audience to hear how important this is. This piece, the person who's checking the puzzle to make sure that it's a completed puzzle. I love the analogy. How much do they got to spend and how much effort is involved and how much electricity are they burning to do this activity?

Pretty cheap. You can get a recipe and a couple other pieces, maybe one terabyte, two terabyte SD card and get a full node running for less than two hundred dollars. I think I've seen some set ups are less than one hundred dollars. There's even developers working on software, a core specifically one that comes to mind where you can actually run a full node on an Android phone or some Android devices as well. So it's relatively cheap. A lot of people can afford it.

I actually just spun up a full node two weekends ago, got a new Mac mini 16 hours to go from zero to setting it up. And it's pretty easy going to get hub dotcom, bitcoin, slash bitcoin. It follows some directions and you're able to spin that note up and download the rules set and block chain the history of the block chain and follow along as new blocks are produced and you're savvy enough, you'll actually use your phone to make sure that if you're actually taking possession of your Bitcoin, that you're validating the addresses of that Bitcoin is to on your node alone.

So you're not trusting anybody else's node, but but the node that you download it and have it in your possession. Would you guys look at it, is the governance structure of Bitcoin, is that a good way to describe it? It's very low cost to basically be a part of this voting in these this puzzle checker, the energy expenses is pretty much negligible. Like a person is not even going to notice the energy that it takes to run a full node.

Yeah, so and I want to be I want to be super cautious of the term governance, because Bitcoin is fundamentally an Opt-In system and an opt out system. So it's bidirectional. And so you hear the term like governance in a lot of other a lot of other projects that are out there. And I'm super wary of it because I think that the governance mechanism for Bitcoin is fully distributed and decentralized. And so what that means is that there's total autonomy to interact with the set independently.

And there's no way to sort of like the idea of a vote means that there is a majority rule, which is not the governance mechanism that functions for Bitcoin. It's different than that. So, like, Bitcoin is not a democracy. Bitcoin is a rough consensus. Yeah, exactly.

So I was going to say you only download a no. You're participating in the social consensus of the network and using that node to verify for yourself, at least in the way that it should be. So, Marty, if the three of us wanted to create our own ruleset, we want to take the Bitcoin full node that we're currently running, change it slightly in the three of us agree to run that ruleset. Now we're running our own hard fought version of Bitcoin.

Correct? It's a very small network effect. Yes, but then we don't have any miners that are willing to mine blocks on that that network of three nodes, correct? S would have to convince if we keep the hash out 256 mining algorithm for our three person Bitcoin Falke, we'd have to convince just a couple of miners to point their their hash rate and our work network.

So here you go, back to twenty seventeen now that we just had that mini example of forking bitcoin with three full nodes and explain what was attempted back in twenty seventeen and what the result was. In twenty, seventeen, and I'm sure Marty is going to have a lot to add to this as well, I was still in not in my Bitcoin infancy, but in my Bitcoin pre adolescence. But essentially there was a very contentious technical introduction into into Bitcoin, the software, which was the argument that there was a group of relatively centralized actors who were pushing an agenda to do something called increase the block size limit, where if you think of a block chain as a database, fundamentally each block has a certain amount of space within it in which you're able to include transactions.

And so what the argument that this group of people wanted to introduce was a bigger block size. So they wanted to double the amount of transactions that could be included in a block and they wanted to do so through a fork. And so what the Bitcoin network was able to prove through rejecting this was that the folks who wanted to do this were largely mining adjacent and mining related. It was it was Bettmann and it was others. And what happened was you had these sort of I don't want to say larger entities, but they were sort of larger corporate entities.

Coinbase was on that list having shapeshifters on the scale of. Greyscale is on that list, but a. I think that's important because you're showing how much firepower was coming to the table with this idea that they won the forecast to have larger blocks. I mean, it wasn't like you were dealing with a ragtag group of people in the space. This was a powerful minority decision. Attempted decision. The way it went down, so this goes all the way back, scaling debate, so it was a scale debate between users, the network stakeholders within the network, whether it be people building businesses, building mining operations or just using bitcoin and running full nodes and very passionate about the trajectory of bitcoin moving forward.

And, of course, the developers as well working on the protocol and the debate was right. How do we scale this? And as Harry mentioned, corporate entities wanted to double arbitrarily. So it's like an arbitrary doubling of the block size from one megabyte to two megabytes. And just a lot of the community, myself included, a lot of developer community and other stakeholders for this doesn't really make any sense, because if you double at once, what's to stop you from doubling again and so on and so forth into perpetuity?

And that is a bad trade off to make. I think it's important to highlight, Marty, as you're saying, that the bigger that we make these blocks, the less or the harder it is for a full node operator who's checking the puzzle pieces to do that independently at two hundred dollars with no electrical costs and all that kind of stuff. Like because we've kept the block small, anybody in their kid sister can go out there and stand up a full node and become a checker of the puzzles that are being constructed in a low cost way.

So that we have I mean, I don't know what the number is. I've heard anywhere from 10 to one hundred thousand full node operators. I'd be curious to hear what you guys think the numbers are, but to keep the block small, we're able to keep the protocol decentralized at the end of the day. So I'm sorry to interrupt. You keep going with what you were saying there. A perfectly you want to be able to make sure that as many individuals as possible and download the block chain, which is filled with data right now, I believe the elections I haven't looked in a while.

It's probably around like three hundred fifty gigabytes, I would imagine. And so, like, if that gets too big, if you allowed to make a block, megabyte blocks or megabyte blocks, so on and so forth, blocks are produced every 10 minutes in those blocks lined up, getting pretty full. That's a pretty significant burden on individuals trying to download the block chain, especially when you take into consideration bandwidth around the world and how fickle that can be in some areas.

So taking these trade offs into consideration, the stakeholders, particularly from the developer community and Bitcoin users that rallied on Twitter and other social networks, that this doesn't make much sense. No. One, because you're just arbitrarily doubling it. And then two, you're actually hard working to do this. And so when you hired for there's a chance that people get forked off the network and in Bitcoin, you want to be backward compatible when you're making these updates.

So you tend to rely on what's called a software, which allows you to get these upgrades, but also make sure people running earlier versions of the software are not out of consensus, like the man in a coma, man who falls in a coma for three years and has his node running at home be able to wake up from that coma and go to his node and still interact with the Bitcoin network three years later. No change is going to make it so he's out of consensus.

And that's how the Bitcoin software project sort of approaches the development of the protocols. Very conservative and want to make it so anybody through at any point in Bitcoin's history can interact with some network no matter what version software, the running or as early of the software version as possible. Let's take a quick break and hear from his sponsor.

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This is such an important point around these trade offs to highlight again and to be incredibly, incredibly clear, this is about time preference. This is about what features and facets of bitcoin are valuable over a over a 20 to 50 to 100 year time scale and prioritizing those now when things are still not fully ossified, still malleable. We as a community need to continue to prove that this is a multi century project and take those priorities to heart today in the development decisions that get made on an ongoing basis.

And so the argument that we need to double the transaction throughput in exchange for compromising on the broadness of the distribution of the validator is an unbelievable sort of in retrospect decision to have been proposed. Whether it's seven transactions, a second or fourteen doesn't matter. Getting that validation set into as wide a set of hands as possible is such an order of magnitude more important to the longevity and viability of this project. That's the decision that got made through through the broader community.

But I want to go back to exactly what Marty said at the end there about backward compatibility. This is the key that what we the choices that we make on an opt in basis, not the choices we have make for the network, the opt in choices that we make can be projected. Over such a long time scale and we can have such a high degree of confidence that the Bitcoin that we've talked about, it sits in a wallet or sits in an address over an incredibly long period of time, untouched, will have the the same amount of validity and inclusion within the choices that get made by the development community over these multi decade timescales.

This is why we are building harder sound or money that can scale over time. Precedents matter, like arguably we could have ruined the network if the contingent of powerbrokers that wanted to arbitrarily double the block size could have destroyed Bitcoin right then and there. But luckily, it didn't work for validators prove that that they run the network. And here we are today, four years later. And that's really kind of the point of this entire part that we're talking about is the full node operators sided with smaller blocks, with a sacred update opposed to going in a different direction.

That was just, hey, let's just keep increasing the block size, which would lead to this centralization of of nodes. And so the full node operators, the consensus of the whole node operators led to smaller blocks is what will be validated. For the context of this conversation that we're having, particularly tonight, ninety five percent of the hash rate was signaling or a doubling of the block size to. Which is the opposite of what the full node operators had signaled.

It's final proof that we are subservient to the to the will of the note, we as minors are subservient to the will of the node's and that is the correct path forward. All right, so let's go to this second softball question that I have. We went almost twenty five minutes on the first softball. OK, so this next one, my God, have I heard this one? Bitcoin mining uses so much energy, it will boil the oceans.

That's our goal. What we got into this industry for really just trying to increase the temperature of the world's oceans, not to start this particular topic, I think it has to be laid bare that the Bitcoin, where's its energy consumption to a certain degree on its sleeve, like anybody can point at the network due to the fact that it's an open protocol and open source protocol, all the data about what's happening in the blocks and the amount of computing power dedicated to to bringing those blocks to market, the amount of hash rate dedicated to that which is estimated based on how fast or slow blocks are coming in every 20, 16 blocks, you can sort of ballpark how much energy is being consumed to produce the amount of hashes that are being produced to secure the network and add blocks to the bitcoin blocks.

And so right off the bat, Bitcoin has essentially the same unfair advantage. It is easy to pick on and point at and say, hey, look at how much energy Bitcoin networks are consuming. Whereas if you had to get a measurement of the amount of energy that is used to back the US dollar reserve system, and that includes things like the military industrial complex, all the buildings that run the Federal Reserve banks and the commercial banks in the US banking system, all the commutes to and from work at the people that work in those buildings, the amount of paper expended in those buildings, the amount of energy and air conditioner and heating consumed in those buildings, that number just isn't public.

The extent to which you'd have to go actually get that information to compare to Bitcoin is extremely hard and it's not easy to find that information. So Bitcoin sort of at a disadvantage right off the bat with this particular argument that it can't really be compared truly compared to to its competitors because they don't where their energy consumption on their sleeve, just like the Bitcoin network does. And then which is what Harry and I sort of know very intimately to what we're doing specifically in the field with Bitcoin mining is if people came to understand the sources of energy that is being converted into electricity to mine, Bitcoin paints a bit of a different picture where you're not really creating net new energy to to mine Bitcoin and not going out drilling a hole in the earth to pull out oil to mine, bitcoin, specifically Bitcoin miners again, because they are incentivized to drive their cost of power production down as low as possible.

They go and seek out extremely cheap sources of energy, which tend to be strand of renewables or fossil fuels like natural gas and oil and gas fields that would otherwise be wasted via flaring or venting in some cases. So no water, whereas its energy consumption on its sleeve. And number two, due to the just the pure incentives that drive cost down as low as possible, Bitcoin miners are going to desperate and to find wasted and stranded energy. Preston, I have three assumptions I want to challenge in this as a very good sort of baseline thing for this whole discussion, the first is that energy consumption is not a bad thing.

If you look over the long arc of history, the best societal biomarkers for sort of societal advancement and maturity and quality are all extremely correlated to energy consumption, per capita health care, education, nutrition, infant mortality, all of the things that you would look at and say, wow, we're moving in the right direction also correlate incredibly tightly to energy density at the population level. So that's sort of the first level setting that I think is important in a discussion like this is like it's not like the energy is being used to spin a whirlpool in the ocean that never gets that never touches anything.

This energy that that gets consumed by us as a society delivers utility and delivers good outcomes. So that's the first the first piece. The second is that I think energy in the context of Bitcoin is really discussed as waste. And I just challenge that premise. First and foremost, the Bitcoin network is directly tied to the laws of thermodynamics, as I'm sure we're going to get into in more detail. But that tight relationship between thermodynamic laws and the value proposition of the Bitcoin network, the Bitcoin network, delivers incredible value to millions of people all over the world so that energy is not wasted, that energy is properly utilized for positive economic outcomes for people.

So I immediately challenge the assumption that that it's going to get wasted as if it's not being used for something of value. It's absolutely being used for something of value. The quality of the Bitcoin network delivers tremendous value. And then third, this is another kind of foundational assumption around this. This argument set is that when I plug a new miner in, I'm not generating another marginal kilowatt hour. That kilowatt hour already exists and it's being consumed by me.

But me plugging in a new miner doesn't make the coal turbine spin one more time around the axle or the or the nuclear turbine heat the steam one iota more or the the nat gas pipeline pump in one more unit. That's not how we the energy grid is designed. It's not how the energy generation and transmission system, certainly in the United States and not elsewhere as well. It's not how that works. And so we need to go back to a bit more of a first principle understanding of how energy gets generated, transmitted and consumed for us to have this discussion in a substantive way.

And I think the really important part is you now have an incentive structure for the entire planet to figure out a way to harness the energy, like you're saying, that's already being created, whether it's wind, some type of water turbine or whatever. I don't care what it is or flaring. And I'm sure we're going to get into a lot of that with Marty. It's almost like if you're on a sailboat, you're capturing the wind that's already there.

You can harness it or you can put your sail down and complain about somebody harnessing it. But you now have one of the biggest incentive structures that has ever been put in place in the world for trying to capture zero cost energy, which I think is a really exciting part to all of this. So I first want to just dive into this idea. Do you guys see more from a from a future standpoint, from where we are at today, in five years from now, are you going to see people that have like heating elements or whom water heaters and furnaces, things like that that are actually mining rigs people in some areas are doing is very much right now.

I know Jesse Pelton from Hono Ranch down in Texas. He has a hot tub that he made out of us that he's warming with and S9 Minori, he calls it to fifty six to some of these some of these African and in Siberia, I think there's been many cases of people using miners to mine Bitcoin and then heat their homes to save save on electricity costs. There's some Do-It-Yourself Guides out there that you can find. I believe Cono Alchemist is one that you can go and he's got a guide on how you can create a home miner and use some waste from that miner to heat your house.

Whether or not that's commercial in five years, I can't say confidently that it will or won't be, but certainly possible. I just look at it from let's just say this does become global money, everyone now has an incentive to take this thing around their house. It's just naturally just wasted energy. And you would think that there would be such an incentive for market participants to start designing ways to capture anything and everything, to start doing these activities, to secure the network, but also participate in some type of mining pool so that they're collecting money from this.

It just seems like an obvious next step that I guess wouldn't be real obvious today. It all comes down to the cost of power and the cost of power is low enough. I mean, and people are looking to profit off of mining. I think it will happen. Like I said, it's happening a little bit. But whether or not that will be widespread in five years, again, I can't say confidently. Again, the opportunities that exist with these stranded energy sources is so large and so vast.

It's going to take a couple of decades to to begin building out, plugging in the infrastructure to to take advantage of these sources and be as efficient as possible with those commercial use case may come on the back end of the curve. I go actually pretty hard the other way, I think that I think it is going to be pretty approachable to have this happen house by house. I think that it's been a pretty good bet over the last 50, 60 years that having Moore's Law at your back is a good spot to be in, which is where we're at right now with with solar and with semiconductors.

And so you get some of the solar stuff cheap enough. It's going to make all the sense in the world to throw a couple of rigs on the back of that. Why waste selling it back to your grid when you can just push it through some sacks? And so it's going to come down to the cost of the infrastructure. And I think that I think that's kind of the limiter there. But you get Moore's Law working on solar arrays well enough and you get you get some advancement there.

It's going to make all the sense in the world to have that on your home. And depending on how you finance the houses of the future, you're you're offsetting your mortgage to some degree with something like that, or you're offsetting your other utility bills, your water or your your other utility. You're offsetting it with with those sacks that are turning on the back side of an array. I can totally see that happening. 30, 40, 50 percent market penetration.

So, Marty, I want to get into great American mining and what it is that you guys are doing today, because I just find this so exciting and just so fascinating because everything we're talking about of harnessing energy that's already there, but it's not being put into any type of productive use. But now through what you guys are doing, it is so explain to this in a first principles kind of way for people just from start to finish to really kind of visualize what it is we're talking about and what it is you're doing, because it's fascinating.

It's great American mining story starts the search for cheap, abundant energy. Like I said earlier, the goal of miners, especially if you're running a mining business, is to drive your cost of power production down as low as possible. So on our journey to find cheap, abundant energy that will allow us to scale. We stumbled into the oil and gas industry. Our head engineer, Rietz, was at a county fair and Utah State Fair and Utah, just talking to a buddy of his in the oil and gas industry, was explaining our problem of what we were trying to do in regards to cheap energy and his buddies that have this water treatment facility.

And we're just flaring gas in the atmosphere. We have like 50 EMCDDA. If you want to come plug in a generator and hook up those miners, you can certainly make that happen. And that was basically the start of the journey that we went on. And so we went there. We got a generator plugged in, a pipeline that took the gas from where it would be flared and a flare like the stack that's behind me in this video, instead of piping it to the flare stack, just piped it to a generator that converted the energy into electricity and that was used to run our miners.

That was our first prototype. We said, hey, this works. So for the last three years or two and a half years, you've been going around the oil and gas industry, particularly in North Dakota, in the Bakken, because North Dakota has very strict flaring regulations. And based on our value prop to producers is, hey, we know that if you flare a certain amount, you're going to have to stop oil production. The regulators in North Dakota are very strict about drones flying over fields and really trying to measure how much each producer flaring after you flare a certain amount.

If the regulators come in and say, hey, it shut down production, you're contributing too much CO2 and methane to the atmosphere. And so we come in and we say, hey, instead of flaring that gas, why don't we do an off take and we'll buy that gas from you for very cheap. Instead of flaring, you'll be able to just pipe it to our generators, will consume. It hurts and we convert it to electricity. Using an EPA certified generator will mind Bitcoin with it.

That's how our pitch started. And it's sort of evolving as the producers sort of understand what's going on in the 20 and 40 foot shipping containers that we bring on to their well pads are producing. Talk to containers real fast, so you've got a 20 to 30 foot container that's filled up with mining rigs. It's pretty simple, right? The infrastructure on the well pad, you get a pipe that takes the gas and pipes it to your generator, we daisy chain a few generators together in case one goes down.

The whole container doesn't go down and keep hashing the energy from that generator to a power distribution unit that exists within the container. And then that PDU distributes the electricity to each individual miner and the 20 foot shipping container. We can fit, I believe, like one hundred and sixty and twenty S's. And as the models keep going up and down, you can get a little creative and fit more. You can get. That's the thing about these containers.

Harry mentioned power density earlier. These these these containers are extremely energy dense. And so about like a 20 foot container, depending on what model can produce anywhere from 750 kilowatts to one point two megawatts of energy on the oil field, depending on the BTU content of the gas. Let's assume it's clean gas at eleven hundred BTU and you're producing one hundred and twenty EMCDDA you can get to. That would be like a megawatt of a mining operation there. So we come on and that's the beauty of it.

These are very modular containers and modular solution to their problem takes a very little real estate on the well pad. Again we say sort of flaring that gas to our generators and plug it into this container. The infrastructure is pretty straightforward. And and we have some fans to help regulate airflow and some filters to make sure it doesn't get too dusty. If you understand the physics of what's going on, particularly around the airflow, you can get these boxes up and running and make sure that they have significant uptime.

One thing we're very proud of that we've had 90 percent uptime in the field, which is comparable to like warehouseman. So now is there funneling this gas to your rigs, to your generators that energize your rigs, they're able to keep doing their operations for longer because they're not flaring, is that correct?

Yes, they're able to extract more oil and push more to market specifically in North Dakota, but it seems that the posturing in the industry throughout the United States is moving towards the North Dakota model. Texas Railroad Commission is is posturing like they're going to get strict with flaring specifically. I want to just ground us in some in some framing how much cleaner is it to do it this way, to run the flair or the venting through a Genset or generator than it is relative to what they were doing previously?

Like like what's the Delta look like? It depends on where you are. It depends on the type of flair and depends on how windy it is in North Dakota, especially in the winter, it's very windy. And these flares, as you can see, this one behind me, is leaning a little bit. When it's windy, it makes the flare a little less efficient. So the flares burning methane at the end of the day, which is a greenhouse gas that's extremely heavy CO2.

It's 30 to 50 times heavier depending on the amount of time it spends in the atmosphere. And so when it's very windy and these flare sacs are blowing all around, very inefficient. Some studies say flares with wind that's higher than 10 miles per hour or 30, 30 percent efficient, you're having a significant amount of methane leak beyond that flare. And when you pipe that to an EPA certified generator combusted in there, that's ninety nine point ninety nine percent efficiency.

You're still creating CO2 emissions, but it's much more efficient compared to some flares and windy conditions. Then on top of that, which is more important, you're creating positive economic value of something. Again, like I said earlier, we're doing offtake agreements, but now we're getting into joint ventures with producers want to participate in the upside of Satz that are being produced and our mining containers. And so if flair is turning from a a drag on their balance sheets and income statements into like a positive revenue stream, significantly more resilient and profitable at the.

So how much if you if you procured one of these mining rigs to say the 20 to 30 foot size rig in a year, how much would that produce in value? Assuming that I know it's really hard because the price of Bitcoin keeps going up. I don't know how you could possibly estimate that based on the price moving up all the time, but give us a ballpark of like R y for something like that. I can tell you exactly how we actually built a gas to hash calculator.

That's what we call our container's gas to hash containers. We basically built this calculator, our engineering team. It takes your Macfie produced on a particular well pad. So the particular example I have up right now is five hundred emcdda. The BTU discovery is eleven hundred BTUs is very clean gas. The current netback for this producer is about 50 cents per EMCDDA and on our model we plugged in was the M 20 s, which is a couple of generations old from coming from what's minor compared.

And so this is all compared to Henry Hub prices. It's not even just flaring. We're assuming that this gas was able to be brought to market and sold at Henry Hub prices minus the marketing cost. So today, if you were to do that, the revenue produced per day with this particular set, it would be fifteen thousand eight hundred seventy eight dollars and monthly. That turns into four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars roughly, which is four hundred and twenty thousand dollars more profitable.

It would be able to be selling that gas to market at Henry Hub prices. And now that's if they were able to even get it to market. The multiples that you're making on this this waste gas are insane.

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All right, back to the show. This doesn't even get into their opportunity cost of not being able to perform their primary operations. How much time were they down for flaring like if they could normally produce it? Twenty four hours. They're down to 12 hours because of flaring. What do those numbers look like? I don't know the exact numbers of this shutdown for for a significant amount of time in some cases where where the well goes a little stale and getting it back up and running is is a bit of a burden and takes a lot of money.

So they're highly incentivized to reduce this flare. So they feel like they're getting close to the EPA targets or excuse me, the state regulator targets the shutdown themselves to sort of fall below that line so they can still revamp the well without having to be forced shutdown. If they're for shutdown and force the Stav shutdown for extended period of time, they may not be able to get that well back up and running very efficiently. All right, guys, I want to transition into some of the questions that we had from Twitter, I posted we were going to have this conversation and we got a ton of questions for both of you guys.

This one is, I think, a really common question that a lot of people have for an average guy. In your opinion, is it better to invest in mining or just straight up by Bitcoin?

I think buying Bitcoin is probably better, but if the execution risk is high, it's all set, right? You've got to be able to execute on actually plugging this in and doing it at a at a price that's profitable. Listen, you really need to think through very carefully if you have the chops to do it yourself, there's some service providers out there who do a good job of hosting your gear for you. But again, like unless you've properly allocated to Bitcoin within your perspective on the asset, I wouldn't start looking at mining on an individual level.

Because of the competition. There's a lot of mistakes that could be made along the way, and you wind up have the intent of getting into mining, that you're going to find all this bitcoin and it could take you a lot longer to plug in that machine. And it may not make as much money as you expected because your electricity costs are higher than you thought they would be. And then the actual servicing the machines, knowing when to replace fans and how to work with the hashing boards, that's not something you just jump into and understand right away.

Baptism by fire. You've got to learn a lot of hard lessons to understand how to execute. Have the I mean, the goal is to have these bitcoin miners are essentially physical bitcoin options. You want up and running as long as possible. You want them to have the highest uptime that you can possibly get them to have. And if you've never done it before, there's just a learning curve that you're going to have to go through. You're looking to accumulate a certain amount of Bitcoin, like Harry said, probably better off buying so you can get in before the price runs up anymore.

The other intricacy to it is like exactly what Marty said about about I think about the rigs basically as as Bitcoin denominated assets and specifically options they kind of play with whether or not they're a bond or an option. But they do have this option component to them where there's this uncertain expiry. So you're constantly living through a period of time decay where Bitcoin price can go up and protect your margins for longer. But on average, cash rate goes up, machines get more efficient, people find cheaper power over time.

The number of stocks that your hash rate will produce is going to go down. And so you're living through this period of time decay where you hope that price continues to appreciate so that you can run at a profitable margin. But the sacks that get produced, it just isn't going to be there as long as you as long as you think. And that's a it's a total uncertain variable. So you have to be really thoughtful about sort of the dynamics at play within within the framework of how you think about it, because you really you really are spending quite a bit of thought to accumulate sort of this this decaying SAP revenue stream.

And then how do you integrate that into sort of your approach to fully allocating to Bitcoin in the way that you see fit for yourself? You need to think about it within that broader context before you make a decision like that. It's not like just starting a business.

I'll tell you the thing that I've just come to, the realization of talking with you guys right now is just how much of an incentive there is for the people that are doing this. They're getting energy for free or they have some type of incentive to like the flaring example that you provided for them to be able to do their primary operations, because now they don't have the flare because it's being sent through something like this. You can just see how it's it is just driving this type of work, this type of mining work into the hands of businesses that that have those opportunities to leverage.

And it's not like, hey, I'm going to plug this into my wall at my house and start using the electricity out of the wall like it's just not going to happen. Right? Like you're not going to survive for 10 seconds. No, I think particularly what we're doing with the waste gas change is the opportunity cost in the oil and gas industry completely now that this one variable, this one revenue stream has been entered into the equation, the producers start asking themselves questions like, should I even build a pipeline?

I need to drill as many wells next year. The oil and gas industry arguably one of the most terrible allocators of capital over the last two decades in the shale industry. Specifically, this is coming from shale players that I've been speaking to for the last couple of years will admit it. And they took out a bunch of loans, got a bunch of wells expecting the price of a barrel and oil to be between 80 and a hundred dollars. And that simply hasn't materialized.

And so to keep the status quo of profit, they have to drill more wells and get more volume to market to try to to make up that delta in the price they were expecting. And so now that you have this revenue stream and Bitcoin mining that's driven by completely different demand factors is providing a service as demanded. Twenty four seven three sixty five, which is adding blocks to the Bitcoin block chain, it just completely makes the oil and gas producers more resilient.

They don't have to depend on oil and gas only they now have this other option that's driven by completely different factors, allows them to take a step back, take a breather and be more efficient and think about what they're doing is a bit more peace of mind. These commodity producers need a two week difficulty adjustment in a four year having in their supply, right. It's the last chapter of this rather demand shock caused by the economic lockdown's and shale industry collapse in and of itself, and then the Make Futures contract go negative and the amount of mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcies that we've seen over the last 10 months, arguably due to a misallocation of capital and poor planning.

So talk to everyone. I'm sure everyone's dying to hear the answer on this one. And it relates to the supply chain for the chip manufacturing. This is becoming a huge headline, just not for this space, but for automotives and you name it. So my understanding is that these rigs are a year and a half. Like if you order a new rig right now, it's a year and a half from from delivery. What's the impact of this?

What are the real timelines that you guys are hearing? And just fill us in on all the inside scoop that you got.

I think what we've seen certainly during the Trump presidency and the relationship with China, that's kind of matured here and now what we're seeing in a pre during and post kind of Koven environment is I don't think it's that controversial right now to say that the most important company on the planet is TSMC. It's got the most components in the most physical infrastructure across every sector, whether that's an iPhone or a Ford F one fifty or an US server. You name the critical piece of of the American economy.

It touches that company in a critical path type of way. So the backdrop on sort of this piece of the conversation is that the supply chain constraints are not limited to Bitcoin. Exactly. Like you said, these are extremely broad constraints and the entire economy is feeling very specifically in our in our industry and in Bitcoin mining. Again, you're spot on. There are there are significantly delayed lead times. There are significant price elasticity at this point in time for for in stock units or for nearly in stock units.

When you're talking premiums, how much are you talking? Prices high, which tracks the price of Bitcoin pretty close. The price of Bitcoin starts dropping. So does the price of the hardware. So since the summer, Bitcoin's up five X, so the prices on these hardware rigs have gone up five X. Let's put it this way, like S9, which you're probably like the oldest models running on the market right now, selling for twenty dollars March of last year in some cases, and now they're selling for two hundred and fifty dollars.

Yeah, so you've got to think about it along a curve of of convexity where the lines go from marginally negative to marginally positive, the the first. And so with that first initial spike in Bitcoin price, they go from unprofitable to profitable, depending on your power cost. And so they receive the most kind of upward vol in the curve. The other machines that have higher efficiency, they are profitable longer and sooner. So they don't get the same spike as early in the price action.

But they do see that rising tide. So you'll see a more advanced unit go from twenty five hundred dollars to ten thousand dollars. So maybe it's only up three or four X relative to five x bitcoin. So yes, nine is a 10 plus X higher efficiency machine is a three to five X. So I'm curious, you had said the S9, which is a very old rig, and you said that the price today was around two hundred and fifty dollars.

So if a person purchased that today, plugged it and got into a mining pool, how much bitcoin are they mining in a year's time frame for something like that? I'm just trying to get an RSI based on that price that that that rig selling for. Just out of curiosity. I mean, using same metrics of five hundred Macfie, that would be like. And I know it comes down to the energy cost, but if you were the energy costs that you guys are getting with your methane operation.

I'm trying to think of how many nights I would take to consume that much energy on top of my head. I can tell you that at 10:00 is approximately 10 cents per hour, which is normal for a New York City apartment, not so normal for any minor on the planet. It's much higher. That's about a one year payback that generates in net of net of electricity about two hundred and sixty five dollars a year. Wow. And then last year, when it was it 20 dollars, you were you would have probably still been.

I mean, it was 20 bucks. So it's a two percent return on 20 bucks. I'm assuming you would have would you have even had it plugged in a year ago based on the competition in the Bitcoin price, or would you would have had that rig turned off at 10 cents? Not in New York City apartment. Yeah. So that's like theory is like a lot of these nine sold at like March or April last year, Harry, and then they got moved to to people with very low cost power production people is free to power between zero and one and a half to 70.

For me, it's just beyond fascinating to see that just naturally taking place in a free and open market where these rigs then I think at face value you might think, oh, well, now they're just going to throw all these rigs away that they manufactured from eight years ago. And that is not the case. These things are being repurposed, sold into areas that have no electrical cost or it's going to just pent up demand of energy that's just being burned off.

When the market runs again on the next cycle, it becomes a very profitable machine for somebody to run and it's providing security to the network. And then you can go on and on. It's fascinating stuff. Transparently, from just from for me in my career, this is what's so exciting about it, is I get to be in one of the absolute hardest, most cutthroat, most flagrantly capitalistic environments you can possibly find. To me, it's this trading desk.

Those are the only things where you're where you are kind of hip to hip and nice to nice with the person on the other side of the trade. Except for us, it's everybody else looking to start and run these businesses more efficiently and more cheaply at the power cost level and do better to integrate their supply chain and capture margin along other sort of naturally occurring avenue. It's such a game of inches, such a game of precision that's so exciting. And to bring this back to the chip manufacturing, to think it is pretty dire right now, or you have these foundries like four major ones, two of which TSMC, Taiwan and Samsung, South Korea are two, producing a chipset main and micro party which produces the world's miners are using in their devices.

But with that being said, both companies are looking to build foundries on US soil, which is a huge development. People are really stressed out about it now, but I'm actually extremely bullish on the diversity of the semiconductor industry into the future in the next decade. Samsung just announced they're filing for permits for a fab in Austin, Texas. That would be complete in twenty twenty three, which is actually quicker than I would ever imagine. TSMC is going to Brickland in Arizona later this year.

So this is the question I got for you, why are so many oil and gas companies and maybe they are maybe it's just my perception that they aren't, why aren't they seeing this? This seems like such a no brainer. They're starting to they're all dogs. It's hard to teach them new tricks, but but we're we're working hard to get America and other companies like Upstream Data and Crusoe are also doing a good job at helping to educate the producers in the oil and gas industry.

And they're coming around there in such a position where they're back in the quarter is an industry from a profitability standpoint and from a PR standpoint, with everybody worried about the climate that they need to put a very strong foot forward on both fronts to be more profitable and show the public that they're looking to eliminate waste and be more efficient with the fossil fuels they're pulling out of the ground. What's something that either one of you guys have heard or seen lately, particularly in this space that has just kind of blown your hair back like, oh, my God, I can't believe where this is going to go or this thing that's going to materialize out of what I just saw.

I think Ross Stevens interview with Michael Saylor actually surprising to hear him articulate a theory that I've had and many of us, a great American, might have had for some time now, which is that Bitcoin mining operations are going to be the impetus for for new sort of hubs to be built, areas where stranded energy exists. A Bitcoin miner is going to be sort of placing a flag down on new territory and attracting people and communities to build cities and small towns around these mining operations.

That's something I actually believe is going to happen. And the opportunity is so incredible. And when you think about the effects it will have on how that distributed society, it's pretty insane to think about and place through. Transparently, I totally agree with you, Marty, like what we work on a great infrastructure is basically we take the inefficiencies that are out there in the grid and we unlock them via Bitcoin mining. And that's exactly what Ross was talking about.

This is why we try to get adjacent to renewable providers who are either in distressed markets or they're working with sort of an overproduction or underconsumption of the asset that they've built. So we think about this really in terms of additionality, where this is not how the way to get people to develop 50 year energy assets is not by offering them a bunch of renewable energy credits. It just isn't the way to convince people to invest in the massive amount of energy infrastructure that's needed is to provide them a robust and thriving market solution.

And we believe that Bitcoin mining represents the best way to bootstrap energy additionality, especially through renewables, because it's really tough to convince people to invest in transmission. But it's a lot easier to get people to invest in the generation itself. So if you remove the need for the complexity and the size of the transmission, then you're able to sort of justify an entirely different suite of projects oftentimes that have better unit economics than previously thought. The last thing I want to cover, and this really doesn't relate to mining, this is more on the full node front and lightning.

And I'm kind of curious to hear some of your thoughts on how you see the lightning network growing, what that incentive structure is. I kind of suspect it has a lot to do with clearing immediate clearing and the demand for that moving forward. But I want to hear your thoughts on what you think is going to drive more and more people to use the lightning network. And then what are your thoughts also on the rates of plugging your Bitcoin into the Lightning Network, opening a channel on the Lightning Network via your full node and collecting fees on that?

How do you guys see that playing out, moving forward? I'm extremely bullish on the lightning network myself. I use it every day as my own podcast, and we hook up our website and our operations even to the Lightning Network. We use an app called Sphynx Chat where the app picks up our podcast via RSS feed. And we've actually plugged a lightning network public node into our RSS feed into the app automatically picks that up. And anybody that listens to Tales from the Crypt on Sphynx jet and they have a lightning network built into the cumulating wallet, built into the app.

And as they listen to my podcast, they stream me sets every minute. So depending on how much they want to stream me, individuals do anything from one set to one hundred sets. So let's use the example of 10 cents per minute. Right now it's five tenths of a penny. So that micro transaction is possible on the Lightning Network and that use case alone really gets my mind going where you can sort of fit this in across the Internet. And so I think Lightning Network, like you said, is going to be used for for clearing and remittance and moving money around the world, around the globe instantly.

But beyond that, I think the Lightning Network, specifically Bitcoin, did this, but I think the Lightning Network does it better solves a hole in the Internet stack that's been there since the beginning. So you have a A four when you don't get a Web page served to you from a server. There's also a for a two hour, which is a payments error. And so when they they architected the Internet and designed it from the beginning, they always thought there would be native payments later built in.

And that's evidenced by the for a two hour which is a payment. Then it goes through not until we had Bitcoin. And I think more specifically, the Lightning Network with technologies like L set at Lightning Labs is working on could you actually plug this this payment later into the Internet? So beyond clearing from a financial perspective, clearing where remittances and interbank transactions, I think when this gets applied to the Internet and used as a quasi communications network via the Internet as well, the potential for the network is massive in terms of running your own node, being a profitable routing node, I think that's going to be a business.

It's not something that you're just going to be able to do willy nilly in an effort into it. It's going to take a lot of effort and already does. But I think things like lightning cool, which allow you to lend your your Bitcoin that you don't want to spend two lightning channels and get paid a premium or actually make get paid a fee for that, essentially creating a yield for Bitcoin you would not otherwise spend doing it. So where it's in the lightning channel and you actually have partial custody of that the whole way through.

I think that's also going to be massive for individuals to get their bitcoin without having to run a routing node persay. What's the yield if, say, you would plug in one Bitcoin into a channel unenlightening today in this pool? What would you get on an annualized yield for doing something like that? Would you estimate, Marty? Right now, it's a pretty illiquid market because it's all being handled without a guey or being handled at the command line level with these different lightning network implementations, specifically LNG.

But once you get to guey and you're able to have like a better market develop, I'm going to be surprised. You see anywhere from eight to 15 percent, depending on demand on the Lightning Network at any given point in time. I think early books are showing around that level right now. That's totally nuts. I mean, you don't run into the lender borrower type issues, too, because you're just plug it in your channel and I guess you would just change the fee in order to get all your coins back out of the channel again.

Is that how that would work? And if he's predetermined, I believe, to rewrite that into the transaction. You're it's like any lightning channel to two or two multi sig with your counterparty, you hold one key and they can never run away with your Bitcoin.

The worst they can do is tie it up. And if you have watchtowers watching your channel and they try to steal it, they get punished. So the worst that can happen at scale when this is all flushed out, is that the wait a little bit to get your your Bitcoin back to the address that you want to send to. You'll never lose your Bitcoin completely. I don't think the counterparty risk is significantly reduced. Talk to us about the streaming part, because I'm trying to understand the use case, I know you just described it with people streaming you Satz, but that's just out of their own goodwill to stream it.

Talk to us about how you could see a free and open market of streaming taking place of people receiving Satz over lightning. Well, it's like pay per minute, and so you pay for exactly what you consume and become more efficient if you say somebody spends 15 dollars a month on a Netflix subscription, but they only ever watch one show, arguably they're wasting money.

Imagine being able to watch that one show and just stream the amount of value that that show provided for you and nothing over that. That's the sort of efficiencies the streaming use case can can provide specifically. What if they listen to it on two X? It's the minutes we need to appreciate just how poorly served the financial use cases of the Internet are, why on Earth, why on earth is is straight? Thirty five billion dollar business, I think, is getting marked up to one hundred and fifty billion dollars before it ever talk the public market.

So if Stripe is worth all that and you just saw plaid pull out of the deal with Visa, they're going to now go public. Double digits of billions of dollars like these are not complex ideas. They're basically like, how can I tell different services my information and how can and how can I interact with a service? These are things that it should not have taken the Internet 40 years to figure, to start to figure out. And it's a massive under serving of sort of the commerce use cases and the financial use cases at the Internet, that lightning is immediately sort of an order of magnitude improvement, the same way that Bitcoin is an order of magnitude improvement on the hardness, money and the store value over time.

And so what you get to see when you have sort of a technology enabled level up is that the total addressable market for what what users actually want to do, turns out, was way bigger than we thought originally. And so we saw this very, very obviously with recently. Like if you told me in nineteen ninety five or nineteen ninety eight how often I'm going to use a car service, I would tell you two times a year to the airport and from the airport when I go visit my grandparents in Florida.

That's it. That's the use case for car services. I'll never use it anymore. What it turned out was I actually wanted a car service all the time. I just wanted it to be way cheaper, way easier to book, way lower friction on the payment side. And so it took a tech enabled layer to sit on top of an existing service to make it actually start to achieve a discovery of the of the addressable market and the demand structure for it.

Lightning is going to do the same thing across dozens and dozens of Internet commerce functionality because we are already seeing the type of premium that's being paid for fintech. I still think that Syntex are like in any one or two, and that lightning is how we get out of the bottom of the second and start to figure out that we we actually have so much creative white space on the commerce Internet that is just untouched because we were trying to paint on a canvas with a cudgel.

Mardie, I see you shaking your head. It looks like you completely agree with. It's insane, I think the incentive structures they can set up with so you can prevent spamming, you make a costly but very cheap, still costly. So like the Sphinx jet that I was mentioning earlier, not only can individual streamy SATs as they listen to my podcast with Chad up as well, and I can chat with my listeners and the chat app runs on the Lightning Network.

When you chat, you're literally sending a message Lightning Network for one set Lexia to send in one, set messages between each other. And if you think if you want to create like a social network that doesn't have the Twitter bots, like when you send your tweet out today, I noticed like a bunch of Twitter bots, like imagine if you had a social network that said, hey, if you want to reply to this tweet, you have to pay to Satz or whatever.

Very cheap for the individual at scale. For these bots, it gets costly. And so you just incentivize that type of activity right off the bat. My lord, I think we leave it there. This has been just an incredibly just dense conversation and I have enjoyed the hell out of this. I think it's my engineering roots to hear what you guys are solving on the energy side and how it's just creating these incentive structures. It's just insane. It's mind blowing.

I guess the thing that you see so many policymakers trying to get to, how can we save the planet with the way that we're creating incentives for clean and renewable energy? And I mean, my God, this is the biggest incentive structure you could ever imagine to unlock some of these innovations and discoveries in this space. It's just so exciting.

Guys give folks a hand off where they can learn more about you. And thank you so much for coming on and having this conversation. This is so much fun. And five minutes, Twitter, that's where I hang out mostly at Mardi Ben, great American mining, you can find us at game that I that's our website. Check out our guest, the hash calculator. We have a blog up. It's only got one blog, but we're writing more content.

Don't worry. You can find out why we believe there's a budding symbiotic relationship between Bitcoin miners in the oil and gas industry. And then you can find out information about podcast and newsletter Tales from the Crypt, already spent on my Twitter as well. You can find me at Harry Underscore Sudhakar on Twitter. That's easy to find me. I do a lot of I spend a lot of my time mining Bitcoin with grid infrastructure. We're hiring some DMV. It's going to blow up around.

We'll have that in the show notes for both of those links in Harry. Yep, I think you're going to have a bunch of people contacting you guys. Thank you tremendously. This was so much fun. Thank you very much. Thank you, Presson. Pleasure's all mine. Hey, so thanks for everybody listening to the show, if you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you're using. We really appreciate that.

And if you have time, leave us a review. So thanks for joining us this week and we'll catch you next Wednesday. Thank you for listening to TI IP to access our show notes, courses or forums, go to the Investors podcast Dotcom. This show is for entertainment purposes only before making any decisions, consult a professional. The show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network written permission must be granted before syndication or before casting.