Bitcoin: An Upgrade to 700 Year Old Accounting Tech

Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and fifty-six, Darren Feinstein of Core Scientific joins me on the show, and we talk about Bitcoin and this grand update to seven hundred year old accounting technology. And so we talk about what Bitcoin enables, Bitcoin mine Training, obviously, and we talk about some of the different narratives, facts and FUD, as well as the pathway forward. Is it around lobbying? Is it around trying to build support for Bitcoin in the broader public? This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, and I'm working over at Swan now. Also, we launched Swan Private because we talked to so many people that had issues with the major exchanges. Some of them had their accounts locked, customer service couldn't help them, some couldn't onboard their accounts, many of them simply wanted To talk to an actual human being who could answer their Bitcoin questions. Swan Private is a one-on-one Bitcoin advisory service for high net worth investors and companies and other entity accounts. So this team is here to actually support you in your Bitcoin journey, whether that is expert guidance on choosing the right custody option for your assets, as well as exclusive access to the Swan Private Insight monthly research report. You get direct access to a dedicated Bitcoin expert by text, email or phone. Go to swan priva- Bit dot com to sign up. Now, in the world of Bitcoin mining, there's Brains dot com, that's Brains with two eyes. Now, Brains are a Bitcoin mining company. They do a range of products and services, and they also operate Slashpool, which is the first Bitcoin mining pool. Now, they are also driving forward adoption on Stratum v2, and if you were following, there was recently a report by Galaxy Digital talking about Bitcoin mining protocols and Stratum v2, and I think the time is right now to really start looking at this. Stratum v2 represents historical Improvements to security, profitability, and efficiency of pool Bitcoin mining, and with Brains, if you're using Brains OS Plus and you're pointing your hash rate towards Slashpool, you are getting zero percent pool fees, and you're helping drive forward this adoption. So make sure you go and check them out. The website is brains dot com, that's Brains with two eyes. Also in the mining world, CompuSt Mining. CompuSt is the world's first and largest online marketplace for Bitcoin mining hardware, hosting, and ASIC reselling. Bitcoin mining is getting bigger, and so is Com Mining, Combus is adding over two hundred and eighty megawatts worth of hosting capacity this year with more to come. Now, if you're in the US, you can order an ASIC machine to your home and you can mine from home. You also have the option To order a machine and have that sent to a hosted facility which has been vetted by the Compass Mining team. And there's different options here. You can purchase a new, mining machine, or you can use the online marketplace and purchase a secondhand machine, which you might be able to get that online faster. So if you're interested to learn more, check out the website compassmining dot io. And now onto the show with Darren. Darren, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Good to, good to finally be here. We, we kind of bounced around a little bit, but it, it's, my pleasure to be here.

Yeah, we got there in the end. Darren, you've got a really interesting background. You know, former accountant, lawyer, now building, you know, a, a huge Bitcoin mining, company, and, you've just got a really interesting background. So for, and as I understand, you might not have told your story as much, in the Bitcoin community as

Where you are now?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, yeah. It, and it is, a roundabout way, but, I did get in fairly early. The-- My background is, as you, as you pointed out, I was an accountant for a very short period of time, and, but that was my, my major was accounting. And after accounting, I was-- I went into, home loans. I was doing finance for residential mortgages, then ended up in commercial, and, decided I wanted to go to law school So while I was, still doing mortgages for three or four years, I ended up going to law school. I worked in mortgages the whole time, so I had a finance and accounting background. when I got out of law school, I practiced law also for a very short period of time. what-- I wasn't a great attorney for other people. My, bedside manner wasn't, desirable. And so I ended up just going into business for myself because of all the loans that I was a part of, over, Several years, I had a expertise somewhat in, and there's a certain type of loan, it's called an equity based loan, which is based off the, the value of the asset, not the borrower. And the problem with those loans is sometimes you run into mistakes there or problems with the lenders or the borrowers, and so there's a lot of unfortunately litigation with that. And so my area of expertise was in distressed financial situations. And so I started, we called it a boutique Investment banking company, but I'm not really certain what the proper category, categorization is. But we started a distressed equity debt company that specialized in foreclosures, receiverships, litigation, and stuff we could add value to. And so we, we, we got involved in a lot of operating businesses. on the West Coast, I ended up in a lot of real estate deals that had gone sideways or ended up in litigation. We, we also got involved 'cause I was much younger in, restaurants, in nightclubs. We, we did purchase some of those, and, I also started to finance shows. We put money up for, large residencies that would come through. A lot of them in the music festival area, and this was twenty years ago. And so we were financing large music festivals and, and some other activity to that extent, in Las Vegas specifically, I had a number of businesses, including a number of restaurants. I own several restaurants in Las Vegas and, and across the US, in, in an operating company. I also have an entertainment company, and the entertainment company does, ticketing, box office, and production. And so for instance, today at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, my company Controls the ticketing box office and production of almost all of the shows there, and if I don't own them, they're my tenant, they pay me rent, and they use my ticketing system. And so, we have some tribute shows. I own a Michael Jackson tribute show, we've had that for over a decade, and some other ancillary shows there. I also do shows, or I'll finance. So the shows at the Trop, I'm more of a, I own it, we produce it, and then the other shows that we'll do, for instance, MGM at the park or at, Zappos Theater, where I'm a partner, I think in every show there, only financially. So I'll put up money with Live Nation, Caesars, MGM or Venetian. And so that, I've been doing that a long time. And so all of that, all of those businesses have been ongoing in various ways for decades. In two thousand and eleven, which was the genesis of, of me getting into Bitcoin, in two thousand and eleven, these message boards popped up that told the people People that went to my shows, how to get full refunds if they used a credit card to go see one of my shows. And so people were calling up Visa and Mastercard and American Express, and they were saying whatever the message board told them to say. I sat behind a pillar or there was a mean usher that said something bad, and they would get, so they would insta-- they would implement a chargeback, and instantaneously, Visa would take the money out of my account and give it back to them right away. Like You lose, and if you wanna contest, business owner, write us a letter and spend six months contesting this thing. And so it just-- it became a, it became a nuisance, and so we looked at alternative methods of payment. How, how can I get paid where people won't be scumbags and try to do bad things after they paid us? And we looked at Bitcoin. We looked at Bitcoin. Some of my programmers brought it up in two thousand and eleven, and 'cause we had a ticketing platform, and when I Googled it myself, right, I'm a I'm an accountant, I'm a lawyer, I have privilege licenses, I have, restricted gaming licenses and liquor licenses and banking licenses, and so I have to be careful, a law license, I have to be careful about what I do, and, and I think my reaction when I looked up Bitcoin in two thousand eleven mirrors the same reaction that almost everybody has, that's, some kind of consummate professional in whatever industry they are. my reaction initially was I googled it, and I said, "Wow, this looks like digital video game money, first, and second, it looks like people just use it to buy drugs on the internet, right?" And so I was like, "You know, probably a good idea not to get involved in that." And I, I passed on it early '11, and I think towards the middle of the year, I sh-- I accidentally stumbled on more Bitcoin articles, and now I'm cognizant of it. So I have s-- I have, you know, I have no understanding of it, but I I read an article that really made me question, what I read, and as an accountant, I look at everything as a ledger, and I don't think people understand generally, 'cause it's such a boring topic, people are like, "Oh, accounting," and they tune right out, and their eyes roll back. But everything on the planet Earth runs on accounting, right? If you don't have ledgers that you can trust, you have nothing. There's nothing. All your assets are meaningless, right? The bank, the government, every business that you, you're in, if you Track what you're doing, what you're selling, what you own. You have nothing, you have nothing, 'cause people could just take it from you. And so there's always been this overwhelming desire to fix accounting, because the accounting systems that we utilize right now leave a lot to be desired. And so the article I read said that this new technology created an immutable ledger, and I remember reading that, and I was like, "That's impossible. There's no way..." way to create an immutable ledger. And so I started reading about the ledger technology of Bitcoin, and it all of a sudden, over like a one day period, I remember I was reading this, I was like, "Wow, this isn't digital video game money. This is an accounting technology. This changes how people will keep records forever." And I, it took me months. I read everything you could read, I consumed all of the information you can consume, and I realized this. And I geek out on history, I like to get granular on a lot of different businesses that I'm involved in. And so if you break down accounting, which people have to like somehow pay attention to, because if you can't pay attention to the accounting implications, there's no way to respect the technological innovation that is Bitcoin, because it, all of it revolves Around accounting. And so you have to understand the history of accounting in order to understand the Bitcoin innovation. It's imperative. And so what I realized was that the history of accounting is really, really simple. It's really simple. So it's a boring story, but it's really fast. There's been two accounting innovations in the history of humanity, right? Ten thousand years ago, Stephen went to a market and bought five sheep, and you write down, "I have five sheep," on a clay tablet, right? And, and you use a clay tablet, and you bake it in the sun so no other humans change the, the numbers that you wrote down, and, and that's the birth of single entry accounting. Here's a bunch of assets that I bought. Here's a timeline of the purchases and the assets that I own, and at any given time over, over time, you could look down and see over six months, twelve months, three years, how many sheep you own, right? And so that was it That's accounting for ten thousand years up until the fourteen hundreds. And in the fourteen hundreds, because there's lots of trading going on, and lots of people take credit for it, so it's really difficult to, to ascribe it to some one person. But the textbooks starting, started to come up with a new way, right, to, to handle the records of a transaction, and they went from single entry accounting, "I bought five sheep at a market," to double entry accounting. And so now- Now, Steven goes to a market, he buys five sheep, and you pay five dollars, right? So now we have our, our debit and our credit, and you put this down on, on your ledger, and so you have double entry accounting, and it, and it remembers, right? It remembers what you bought, the assets that you own, and what went out to buy it. That system, right? That system, that accounting system, double entry accounting, that system was created in the fifteenth century, right? So seven hundred years ago, double entry accounting. Today, seven hundred years later, every single bank, every single corporation, every single government, everything in the world runs on 700 year old analog, antiquated double entry accounting. Now, it was an innovation in the 1400s, but it's not an innovation anymore, and everybody still uses it. And because it's an analog system It's terrible. It's terrible for a number of reasons, mostly because it's not immutable, right? You can change the books and records. It's a private system, and whoever controls the books and records, they can just change the books and records. And so for the last seven hundred years, right, centuries, we've seen devastating fraud in every industry, in every government, because humans, they make their own records privately. Right? And, and then they could change their own records privately. And guess the only way to figure out if somebody's committed a fraud on a double entry ledger accounting technology, you have to have other humans come in and audit it, right? And that's really, really difficult because people are really smart about hiding bad things that they do. And so we've seen devastating fraud in every industry because we have an old, antiquated accounting technology created seven hundred years ago that runs the entire world Right? The world runs on this technology. Stephen, can you name another technology so important to humanity that hasn't been changed or innovated in seven hundred years?

I don't know. Here I'm thinking to, you know, like some Taleb, Taleb example where he'll say, "Oh, look, people are using like spoons or knives and forks still, or, you know, the wheel. Because why reinvent the wheel?" Right? but I mean, look, the more serious answer, I think with Bitcoin, I mean, hypothetically Pe-people could say, "Well, even on a Bitcoin standard, there might still be people who are, you know, doing fraud, or let's, say, not repaying back." If, let's say, the ledger isn't all, you know, is, is not, not everything is happening on chain per se, or if, let's say, the, the pathway that we go down, maybe there's not as much of a, like a proof of reserves aspect of it. but I mean, nevertheless, I think we've got to bring it back though. I think- The important point that you do rightly raise, and I think as an accountant, there's definitely a, an insight there, is around this whole, triple entry accounting aspect of it. And I think that's, that's certainly the interesting part. And I think that's, I think that's what you're keying into, right?

Yeah, I'm, I'm getting there, I'm getting there. So I start-- sometimes I go too long, it stop me if I start talking about accounting for too much. but, but, yeah. So, so what you have 2008, we have the third innovation to accounting, and, and as you just said, it's, it's the triple entry. So what you have is, you have a debit and a credit, and now what the Bitcoin network's innovation is, is you have a series of nodes and servers that are distributed globally, and they're running the network, and, and so you have a debit and a credit, it goes through the nodes and servers, which audit every transaction as it's written, and once it gets confirmed by the network, it's then written to the triple entry, right Debit and a credit, you have a system, you have a digital system self audited. After the self audit is completed, it's written to a public and immutable ledger. Now, what that does is it eliminates all on-chain fraud, the books and the records. Yeah, human, you always have a human trust risk, but you can, you can bank on the fact that the ledger has been self audited in real time every transaction. And so that, that ability to audit transactions in real time through this proof of work network, that is the innovation of Bitcoin. For the first time in human history, we have an immutable, self audited chain of transactions that's never existed before. So what people don't realize most of the time is that this proof of work network that runs the Bitcoin transactions and then audits it, audits them, and then writes it to the triple entry That is the innovation, and that will change the world, because as you change accounting, how people conduct transactions and, and how they record them, and how then they rely on them, and you change the audit process, you change the ancillary products that come with it, because there's no more fraud on chain. It's impossible. And so that's the innovation. And so I realized that this-- the word blockchain, right? It's a silly word for an accounting ledger. And more importantly, I learned that the word miners, which I still dislike to this day, denotes just a computer server All it is is a server in a data center that acts as the accountant to the network between two parties. And so in 2011 When I realized that this was a real technology, it's not just digital video game money, it's not just used to buy drugs on the internet, there's an underlying importance of it, and the innovation of that importance is the first accounting innovation in seven hundred years. And here's where I was wrong. I thought the accounting innovation would take foot before the commodity innovation. And I was wrong on that, but I did say in two thousand eleven that I wanna participate in this network as a hobby, as an accountant. And so I, I said I'm gonna, I'm gonna def-- help protect and, you know, grow the network. And we started mine. I started a, a mining business in two thousand twelve, and we were mining in a closet in Las Vegas. And then over the next several years, I bought everything you could buy and- most of it didn't work, and, half the time it didn't show up. But I would buy whatever manufacturers popped up with whatever new equipment you could buy. And we, me and, and, and, and the kids that were working for me, we, we really, I, I just, I was enthralled by, by the industry. I was, I was really, curious to see where it went, and I wanted-- and, and because you know it's real You know that it's, and how important it is? I knew it was just gonna keep growing. And so I, I would talk to my friends about it or people that I had investments with or people that I was in, I'm in this YPO group and my buddies in YPO w-would call me an idiot, you know? I'd tell them, "Oh, you gotta buy Bitcoin in two thousand twelve, you know, when it was forty dollars." And they're like, "You're an idiot, it's a scam." And I'm like, "No, it isn So I spent a long time talking about it. In twenty sixteen, I just saw how the world was going and, and, we had a lot of problems everywhere in messaging. And so, I decided that I wanted to work on blockchain infrastructure full time. At the time, I had three or four different data centers that I was sending a-- I, I had outgrown my closet, in, in this building we were in, and we had started to send- Equipment to data centers around the US, and there wasn't very many available, but they would all fail. They all failed for a variety of different reasons. W- I sent equipment to upstate Washington, I sent that equipment all over the East Coast, I sent equipment to tier three data centers, some of 'em in Georgia, and the one thing they all had in common was I had a problem anywhere I sent equipment to. And so in 2016, I decided that really in the world there was no enterprise grade level infrastructure facility to send the equipment to. And so I looked around the US For an ideal location to build a enterprise grade level facility, and I found the facility after looking at a lot in North Carolina in the Appalachian Mountains. And the Appalachian Mountains are special because the United States government in the nineteen forties, as critical infrastructure, they built a series of hydroelectric plants to power the Manhattan Project. So up in that Tennessee Valley, they, they built the Manhattan Project in, in, in order to create- To create a nuclear bomb, you need a lot of energy, and so they created dozens of these hydroelectric plants. And after, after the Manhattan Project was over, they had all this stranded renewable energy up in the Appalachian Mountains, and manufacturing businesses found that area. So you saw Levi Strauss, American Thread, all these old-school manufacturing and textile industries moved up into the Appalachian Mountains. And, after- After that, after all these big manufacturing facilities moved to the Appalachian Mountains in America, they enacted NAFTA, and what, and what NAFTA did was it encouraged all of these factories to close down and move to Mexico. And so they all closed down All of them. And so these burgeoning communities that had been around for decades went from fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand people to when I got to Marble, North Carolina, which is where our first facility is, the population was four hundred or five hundred people. It had decimated this town, and under Obama, he labeled all of these areas, opportunity zones that were distraught or devastated over, over some policies that took place, several years before he was there, and, and, and people spent a lot of money trying to build out these opportunity zones. in twenty seventeen, I believe. we formed Core, me and a gentleman named Mike Levitt, who's currently the CEO, we formed Core, he became the chairman, and I, I literally moved into a cabin in Marble, North Carolina, in the Appalachian Mountains, and started hiring thermodynamic engineers from NASA and Google to build out this facility, and we quickly realized that the traditional engineers, these, these guys that went to MIT and had PhDs, they would-- I would fly them out and was- It's really difficult to get people to marvel, 'cause besides the fact it's very remote, there's no hotels really, and so we had to find like little houses to put them in. You know, sometimes they'd come stay with me. And so what would happen was these, these thermodynamic engineers would come up and they'd look at the building with their other team, and they'd say, "We can't build in this." We need a Google box. We need, we need the billion dollar box that was in my MIT, you know, textbook, right? And we're like, "That's not what you get. You get this building. This is the building." And the building that I bought was, two hundred thirty, two hundred fifty thousand square foot building on seventy acres up in Marble, North Carolina. And so it had some challenging aspects of it. It had these water cooled towers that circled water as the way to cool, use air cooling through the water. Hot tower to, to cool the buildings, and that's what they used forty years ago. And so eventually, what we realized after going through several independent, bid companies, hi-- trying to hire third party contractors, we realized we had to do this in-house, so we hired all those people in-house, and, and we all just lived up there until we built it out, and that facility I, was, I think it's the, the, at the time in 2017, it was the first large scale infrastructure building in the US. we've, we filled it up, and then we ended up building, in six other states. I think that's what we've- we're public now, traded under the, the cost ticker sign C O R Z. and, and since that, since the 2017 birth of that first building in North Carolina, we're now also located-- we have buildings in Georgia, we're in Kentucky, we're in North Dakota, we're in Texas. And I think we just announced, yeah, it was announced in Oklahoma. And so, we have a number of states that we're conducting business in, and, and that was the genesis of, of Core. just also to clarify, today, I have no operating position at Core. I am on the board, I'm a co-chairman of the board, and I am also, what they, what they call the, chief vision officer. And so I think, I think they like me just talking about accounting outside of the operations. But, that's really what we're focused on is protecting against over-regulation. I think regulation's gonna happen no matter what, and some of it is probably good, but if you over-regulate this industry, you will chill the technology, and as we saw what happened in China, right? One of the biggest governments on the planet Earth. Right? They, they banned Bitcoin, and what happened, Stephan? Nothing. Nothing. Bitcoin just moved, just moved to geographic locations that had greater freedom. And now here we are, you know, they gave America a trillion dollar present, and I think it's a good warning to all governments that if you ban it, nothing happens, it'll just move, the technology just moves to jurisdictions that create greater protections and have better freedoms within their, constitution. Institutions. And, and so that's where we are right now. That's kind of my genesis story. I tried to do it quickly, but I don't think I did.

No, no, that's, that's, I think that's all valuable perspective. And I think, as you mentioned, Bitcoin and freedom and Bitcoin as a liberty, enhancing technology, I think this is something you've also spoken about, and I think it's, it comes across at least in, in some of what I was reading about you on your, on Twitter and so on. So if you could tell Bitcoin is important for Liberty. What kind of impacts are, do you see coming from further adoption of Bitcoin?

So, and, and again, I'm gonna go right back to the, accounting aspect of this. The proof of work network, which is this decentralized distributed node system, right? In order to hack Like a traditional hack of the Bitcoin network, you would have to hack all of the nodes, now, which is different than a fifty-one percent attack. you, you would have to hack, in order to hack the system, you have to hack everything Simultaneously, which is impossible. And so hacking the Bitcoin network, it's impossible. Well, so now what does that mean? Well, all the assets that you have now, if it's not on the Bitcoin network, they're held in a centralized Repository. So there's, you, you have assets in this, in this, in a bank, or you have assets at a, at a stock house, clearing house. I-if somebody wants to, they can access that and confiscate your assets at any time. On the Bitcoin network, because you can't hack it, only because of the proof of work network. Okay? The only reason it's unhackable is 'cause it lives on a proof of work network. Because it can't be hacked, nobody can seize your assets. And so when Stephan downloads a digital wallet and puts a Bitcoin on it, it doesn't matter where you live, you have private property, and it doesn't matter what your government says about private property, you have private property because nobody can seize your asset. Well, in America, that doesn't seem like such a big concern. I mean, maybe now after, after we see everybody seizing everything if you don't like their political views, but historically, we don't con-- we're not concerned that the banks are just gonna start seizing our assets, or the government will without due process. And so you start thinking in terms of on a global basis, and you realize that in America, where most of the people that I talk to about this live, we- We only represent three hundred and fifty million people out of eight billion people, which is roughly four percent of the population on the planet Earth. The other ninety-six percent, they have different problems than us. And the statistic I always use is Alex Gladstein, because I, I love what he writes. He has a great statistic that in the world, eighty-seven percent of the humans that live in the world live in autocratic or authoritarian regimes with double or triple digit inflation. And so That number represents about seven billion people that go to sleep at night not knowing if their assets are gonna be still, is where they left them, so they can feed their children. And so you have seven billion people that have a private property problem in that it's not respected where they live. Well, now if you have a digital asset on a digital wallet in any one of these territories, doesn't matter what your government says, you have private property. And so for over half the population And that's, there is no private property. And then when you look at double or triple digit inflation, you get up to seven billion people with all those problems. So the first thing it does is it creates private property for eight billion people on the planet Earth. There's never been a network that's been created that's allowed eight billion people to have private property. And the reason is, and this is what gets overlooked, because of the proof of work network. That's it. That's the innovation. The second part to that is the other big problem problem in the world are most humans aren't banked, and what that means is they can't store value, they can't remit payments, they can't payment process. They live outside, outside of the norms of the traditional banking system. They don't qualify, they can't get in. And so even in America, where we feel we're financially privileged, somewhere around sixty million people, they call it underbanked. I don't really know what that means, there's a lot of different definitions for it, but they're underbanked, and I think almost ten Six to ten million people are estimated to be unbekind, and so you have this banking problem. The banking problem is solved in the same manner the private property problem is solved. If you have a digital asset on a digital wallet, and it's Bitcoin, you can now store value without fear of seizure or confiscation. You can remit money anywhere in the world without being censored, and you can payment process, you can transact anywhere on the globe with nobody being able to see Stop you. So what does Bitcoin do? Well, it provides private property to eight billion people, and it provides banking to eight billion people on the planet Earth. Both of those are massively important. They fix a lot of problems, and as we're seeing every day all over the world, there are going to be legacy institutions that don't like this because now they don't get, they don't get to control everybody within their borders. They can't just- Seize their property or make 'em use the legacy systems that they set up. And so we'll see this problem forever, for a long time, because the-- and again, this is accounting, and Stephan, stop me if I get too, too boring on the accounting side. But there's never been a manner in which two people can conduct business over geographic space and time. So Stephan and I, if we don't know each other And I'm in Asia and you're in Europe, there's no way for you to send me value, and that, that's a super complicated thought problem called the Byzantine general problem I summarize it really shortly, it's, it's that if you're gonna send me value over space and time, and we don't know each other, if you sent me value and I didn't get it And I don't know you, I feel like you didn't send it, right? So bad actors on the side of you. If I tell you that I didn't get it and you sent it, you'd say, "I know you got it, I sent it, you're a bad actor." And so because there's no way for us to do that, there's been no way over centuries for humans to conduct business, peer-to-peer business over geographic space. And so what happened? What happened to allow us to conduct business with each other? Well, a- A third party verification system popped up, right? So now there's party C, you know, me and Stefan are party A and B, and now Stefan sends his value to party C, I send my value to party C, they independently verify, they say, okay, Stefan, Darren, we got the value, transaction culminated, right? And, and they took a fee for doing that, a transaction verification fee. Well, what did those transaction verifiers turn into? They turned into banks. Those are the first banks. All banks' primary function historically has been, has been to confirm a transaction between two parties and charge a fee. What happened next to banks? Well, if you-- if I-- if you sent a million dollars to the bank I don't want them to send that to my house. They asked me if I want to custodian my money there, and I say, "Yes, I'll custodian my money there." And so the second, the second thing with banks popped up, their second business line, custodianship of assets. So transaction fees first, custodian of assets second, because transactions are flowing through them It's natural they would start custodianship of money. Well, guess what their next revenue generation became? Lending, right? They wanna lend, they have all these assets on their books, why can't we lend them out? And so they went to various governments on the planet, in America, we let them lend out ten times the amount of assets on their books. So they take the million dollars that you gave me in our transaction, and they lend out nine million more to whoever they want, and, and that- Now they take a big fee in interest because they borrow that money for, you know, a quarter percent or zero, and they're lending it out at seven. And so banks make a big fee on the third part, on their third business line. Now, that all is predicated on the fact that two humans cannot conduct business with each other over geographic time and space until now, right? Until now. So for the first time ever Stephon sends me value, I see his wallet, I send Stephon value, he can see my wallet, and we both see it get self audited on the network, and it's written to an immutable blockchain where it can never be rescinded, and it's recorded forever Transaction over, we didn't need a bank. You didn't need a third party verification system. And so this whole legacy system that's, that's existed forever just lost their primary functionality of verifying two transactions between two parties. And now if we're not verifying a transaction through them, we don't need them to custodian our money.

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Great questions. A, a few different, topics. I think the, the first one is the growth of it, of this new network, and what we're really dealing with is an unstoppable force, right? This thing is, you can't stop it. China couldn't stop it, right? So countries that have different governing systems should look at the most authoritarian government on the planet Earth and realize they couldn't stop it. And so how are you gonna stop it if, if they're greater freedoms? You know, protecting your citizens. So the, the ability to stop it exists jurisdictionally. You can try to stop it within your borders, but that's it, because it's global. It lives decentralized and distributed everywhere all over the planet, even on satellites. And so you'd have to shut off everything, and, and this really still exists without the internet. So there's no way to turn it off, which means that it's gonna continue to grow in twenty seventeen when I decided to, to move to the Apple. H Mountains, I think there were somewhere around two point something million people that were estimated to be Bitcoin holders, you know, only a little bit over two million, and today it's estimated that it's over a hundred, and so we fifty x'd In the last several years, and we're still early because people still don't understand what this technology is. I think an interesting parallel is the Internet. The Internet was created, you know, a long time ago, but moved on to civilians, I think in the early '80s. It was estimated maybe '83, '84 civilians started to use it. In 1999, fifteen years after people were utilizing the Internet, they said, "And it, whoever it was, it was a, it was a well-known magazine, they said the Internet, the Internet..." But it's a passing fad and it's gonna go away. And that just-- they, they do that with all new technology, internet, democratized information, and the people, the gateholders of information, they didn't like that. They didn't like everybody having access to that much information that they couldn't control. And really, and again, you know- No, I hate to just keep talking about it. Can't this new Bitcoin network democratizes accounting. It takes accounting out of the shadows, out of the back rooms, out of these private insulated corporations and governments, and it puts it on the internet, available publicly, twenty four hours a day, and it's completely audited, so you can trust whatever you see. There's no human element in it. And so you get like, you get these brand new technologies that are just starting. And, and, and people always have your kind of your own timezone and, and you say, "Oh, this is going too slow." It's going really fast. It's going really fast. There's a hundred million users, governments all over the planet have legislation in front of them talking about it. The Fed has changed over the years. most of my questions were on the United States banning Bitcoin, and by executive order the other day, they just said they're gonna protect the innovation of Bitcoin. Now, how that plays out over the- Over the next, you know, administration and, and, and process to, to regulate it with all of these different agencies, we don't know, but we do know that the lobbying groups for Bitcoin have grown massively and are, and are making themselves known, as you just said, this EU vote. You really had a hundred million Bitcoin voters, in my opinion, all over the world, trying to figure out why the EU would ban proof-of-work mining when it's such a negligible footprint. if you looked at, and, and, and I could talk about energy for a while, but I'm, I'm gonna try not to, but I will tell you one statistic. In the EU, they generate fifteen, over fifteen thousand terawatt hours of energy every year. That's how much energy they generate. The Bitcoin network there uses thirty of it. It's a inconsequential number, it means nothing, it's less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent. And so when you utilize energy as your argument to stop a network, you better have your Facts right, that it uses a lot of energy. I think the Chinese did the same thing. They said, "We're turning it off because it uses too much energy and releases too much carbon." Well, we know the numbers for how much energy is generated in China from coal. We do. We know that number. It's twenty-two thousand terawatt hours a year of coal energy generation. Twenty-two thousand terawatt hours a year. They turn off the Bitcoin network within its border? Even if you ascribed sixty percent of the network to China, it was less than a hundred terawatt hours of energy a year. So, a nation that uses twenty-five thousand, somewhere between twenty-two and twenty-five thousand terawatt hours of coal energy a year just turned off a hundred terawatt hours of coal energy if all of it was used in the regions that were coal energized, but they weren't. In the, in the South China and Sichuan region, that was mostly hydroelectric power and was very seasonal Well, depending on if how, you know, the rainy season in China, which is, a whole other discussion, but you can determine very easily how much energy a nation generates and how much energy that nation uses to run proof-of-work networks within its border. one other, and the-- I do remember who said these. In twenty seventeen, when I was building out the first facility in Marble, North Carolina, Newsweek and The World Economic Forum, I know you've seen the These articles too, they both came out and they said the same thing coincidentally, right? Oh, by accident, they both said the same thing. They said the Bitcoin network's so bad environmentally, we need to turn off right now, and if we don't turn it off in three years, in twenty twenty, the Bitcoin network, and this is amazing, but they both said it, so it must be true, World Economic Forum and Newsweek both said The Bitcoin network will consume all of the world's energy by 2020, all of it, every last piece of every watt, every volt, it's all gone. Everyone's gonna die. And, and guess what happened? They were wrong, they were wrong 'cause we're on the internet right now using electricity, and so we must not have destroyed the world, but were they close to being correct? Was the World Economic Forum, who has- Giant think tanks and really smart people there, were they close to being right?

Not even.

Well, we know the answer, right? We know the answer. They're not even, they're not even in the ballpark. We know how much energy is generated globally, right, on an annualized basis from all energy sources because everybody posts it. British Petroleum, Exxon, all of the energy generation, generators, they all post how much energy they create. And every year, there's about one hundred and sixty thousand terawatt hours of energy generated Generation that's, that's created, and of that, we know the Bitcoin network somewhere around two hundred terawatt hours, you can fluctuate up or down, you know, from one fifty to two fifty, depending on what you read, but whatever that is, it's today, we're two years after this prediction of the world ending because the Bitcoin network uses all the energy, and we're using point zero zero zero one five percent, or, you know, point one five percent of the world's energy. It's an inconsequential number Most other heavy industries, when they figure out how much energy they use on a global basis, they round off that number by one or two percent. And so the Bitcoin network is literally a rounding error to other major industries. And so on a global basis, all these predictions were intellectually dishonest. you don't see anybody coming out and, and apologizing, you know, really sorry. Darren Feinstein had to answer ten thousand questions in twenty seventeen. You know, the mayor would call me, you know? The people in these towns were like, "You're destroying the planet. I don't know if this is a good industry for us." And so I had to figure out how to rebuttle that.

And I'm curious as well to get your perspective here, because obviously we're, we're all bullish on Bitcoin here, and we think it's going up a lot more, and over time that will necessitate-- It's extremely likely that the network is going to keep growing. And so while the Bitcoin, Bitcoin network today may be around in error, fast forward ten, fifteen, twenty years, and it may

I have my own ideas on how I would answer this, but how would you answer that?

Good, I wanna hear your answer when I'm done. The trans-- So there's two different ways to look at the growth of the Bitcoin network. the first are on transaction basis, and additional transactions on the, on the Bitcoin blockchain, they don't create any additional use or need for energy. They're all within each block. And so the tran-- these tr-- anybody who tries to equate energy growth of this network to- Additional transactions, has no idea how the Bitcoin network works, because a block is a block, whatever's in the block is in the block. And so the next, the only way you can measure the growth of this network is on the security of the network. How much equipment will get plugged in to run the network as the accountants and as security for the network, how much gets plugged in. And you can look at that through the how efficient the equipment is, and that's- This part of the equation is where people just get it wrong. And so you see a lot of people say, "Okay, in twenty seventeen, they were using, you know, before S nines came out, you know, S threes or, you know, something that, that was very inefficient. I think the first ASIC came out in twenty thirteen, it was like a one tera hash piece of equipment." And so they, whenever they take into account future energy for the protection and security of the network, they look at the equipment that's, that's in existence now, and then they linearly drive it up through whatever re-- however they decide they're gonna run it up. And it always comes into like some insanely, some, some kind of Armageddon, right? Like, oh, this, this will consume all the energy on, in the solar system. Like, the sun can't even provide enough energy. And so what they're, what they're doing wrong? Is they're not accounting for the efficiencies in the chips, in the chips. And so the first ASICs that were produced were literally forty thousand percent less efficient than the ASICs that are being plugged in right now. They're, the, the current ASICs are four hundred times faster Which, and what that means is for the same amount of energy. So the metric really is joules per tera hash. How many joules do you need to run a tera hash? And that has exponentially increased in efficiencies throughout the entire history of this network. And so people don't take into account these efficiencies. And so you have to first understand that the transaction volume doesn't matter. that's not gonna give you an increase in, in energy, but the security And the accountants of the network, those will increase, but how are they gonna increase? Is it linear, right? Or is it a factor of what's the efficiencies for chips, which we've seen are, are monumental, changes on a, on a, just globally on, in every industry. And so the best, the best guesses, the best guesses are gonna take into account that we're a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the world's energy right now And as the chips keep increasing in efficiencies, we're going to maintain a level somewhere around here, and, and, and so I'm not personally concerned with the, that footprint. I think the, the metric that people like to inflate is that. And so they have to understand that the, the, to look back at the history of this network to see that the efficiencies of the chips is what creates a, demand way below what anybody predicts the, the network will, will use in terms of global energy use. And on a global energy use, we've already talked about it, it's an inconsequential number. It's not, it's not an inconsequential number on a regional or local use. And so people confuse all those things. They're like, "Oh, this is really bad in this one small town." It's like, "Well, that's true. That's true because they maybe didn't account for the proper grid structures and trans- Transmission lines and, and grid stability, but that doesn't affect the global energy use. And so we're seeing now, and all of our core scientifics contracts, it's publicly stated, they all have, curtailment programs on, so, so we help to protect the local grids and, and, and we work very closely in, in all types of circumstances and situations where we may need to curtail quickly. I think the, the three reasons to curtail energy would be Emergency, some kind of weather event or something really bad happens to the grid, we'll shut off within seconds. Of course, scientific, we'll shut off and we'll redirect that power to wherever they need it to go. There's controlled load circumstances where we'll shut off, and then there's economic reasons if they call us up and ask us for an economic reason, we'll, we'll, we'll power down too. So, we work with all of the local grids to provide that base load energy back to the, back to the transmission lines. Back to people and citizens and companies that need that energy, and we're really, because we're that first source of extra re-energy, we're, we're protect-- we're, we're literally, and I mean, it's, it's an actual fact that if you have Bitcoin miners on your grid and you have an emergency event, we make your grid stronger because we'll shut off first. Other industries can't do that, right? Traditional data centers, an AWS data center, they can't power down. They're running traffic lights and air- Traffic control and hospitals, right? If they down power, people are gonna die. And so our industry truly does on a local level make grids stronger. And so I know I kind of got a little bit off topic on your question on the future energy use of the network, but hopefully that answered your question. I also wanna hear Stephan your answer.

Well, I mean, I think you gave a great answer. I mean, fundamentally, it is confusion. I think many listeners of this podcast tend to understand a bit of that nuance. Once they know that the incremental transaction on the Bitcoin network isn't adding some massive new amount in terms of energy usage, I mean, the broader answer from my point of view is that Bitcoin is worth it, even if it was 100% fossil fuel powered, even if it was taking up, you know, massively more, because you really have to zoom out and think, what does Bitcoin replace? And if you think about it as replacing the gold standard or the fiat standard, where we've seen this, this century of mass- Massive warfare between nations, where what we're really talking about with Bitcoin is an easier way, easier way to come to consensus on what is the correct state of the property ownership. We're doing that rather than going to war, we're doing that rather than all of this other infrastructure that is out there. And so when you really zoom out, it's gonna be worth it. But of course That takes time to prosecute that argument for people, and of course, for some people, they, they need an easier way to get started with Bitcoin, and then eventually later on figure out, wow, really, like this is, like, this is where, that's where this thing is going longer term. So I, I'm also curious as well because things like certain qualities or permission, the permissionless nature of Bitcoin, how much of that, is important in, like, to give an example to make it a little more concrete, Fungibility. Is that going to become an issue further down the line if, let's say, as an example, there's, you know, there's whitelisted coins and blacklisted coins, or if there's, let's say, green coins and "quote unquote" dirty coins, will that be an impact further down the line and would that actually challenge the value of Bitcoin for all of us?

Listen, there's, there's several fundamental principles of Bitcoin. You know, if not the most important, is fungibility. People that play around with the fungibility of Bitcoin don't understand what the technology is. the uncen-- the uncensored nature of it, the, the ability to have private property 'cause it can't be seized. So within a jurisdiction, there's probably ways to do these weird things to certain addresses, but on a global basis, there's no way to do any of that. And most of the people that I've talked to- That we're concerned about this, if it was illicit activity, so there's either environmental illicit activity problem, if you, if you get down to the granular level, why they want this. On an illicit activity level, it makes no sense because historically, how did people commit crimes? They use cash, right? And if, if somebody gives, you know- Cash to another party, that cash can never be tracked. They can just go do whatever they wanna do with that cash. If, if you give that party a Bitcoin, it lives on an immutable accounting ledger forever, that's been audited, track, and they can be tracked and traced forever. And so it's literally the worst methodology to commit a crime. If you're gonna commit a crime, you don't wanna do it on a network that's gonna track and trace you on its own forever. It's a really bad idea. What you wanna use cash, 'cause cash Has been used for centuries to, to evade laws. And so I, I, you know, and I'm familiar with a lot of the, the, these agencies that track this, and they prefer criminal activity on a Bitcoin blockchain because it's tracked. That's why you saw the ransomware people, you know, it stupidly asked for Bitcoin, and then as soon as they off-ramped the Bitcoin to a centralized exchange, it got seized, you know, immediately. So, the illicit activity, narrative doesn't really hold up in my opinion. And then on the energy and the, and the nation side, most of the people, they don't understand. They're like, "Well, we don't wanna do business with China, theoretically." And I'm like, "Okay, so you're gonna somehow have a Bitcoin that has no-- that, that you're gonna label as like, and, you know, hasn't touched China?" And they're like, "Yeah." And I'm like, "How do you think it was mined? Right? What, what equipment do you think was used?" To mine that Bitcoin, right? It's all Chinese. It was made in China or, you know, some other Asian country, and the firmware most of this equipment runs on is also made in China, so, so, or, you know, or Malaysia or wherever it comes from. You can't control that. And so it really, again, makes no sense there. But if you look at the UN statistics, you know, on the illicit activity side, somewhere around two trillion dollars a year is laundered through traditional banking systems Systems, right? And I don't wanna go into specific banks, but if you look back over the history of the Bitcoin network in the last, you know, ten or twelve or thirteen years, a lot of banks, not a lot of banks, certain banks, some of the, some of the top five, top ten banks on the planet Earth, they paid their entire market value in fines for illicit, illegal activity that occurred at the bank. And so, you know, there's a lot of problems in the world. This isn't-- This network isn't any of the top problems problems that, that we face globally. So, you know, the, the limitations that some people, you know, a lot of people like to be relevant, right? They wanna create some new company. If you're a startup, if you're gonna, if you're gonna create a startup in Bitcoin and try to eliminate fungibility, you have no idea what you're doing. It's like the whole nature of the, of the technology.

I think that's an excellent answer. And, one other question An area to chat about, obviously as a US based miner, you probably have some views on this, but should it be seen as an issue if, let's say, lots of the hash rate is going into America or is that seen as like, that's a good thing because, you know, America first or is it seen more, do you see it more like? The more the hash rate is distributed around the world, the better, because maybe it's harder to shut down the Bitcoin network or at least to try to control it or capture it.

I think hash rate distribution globally is important. I think that's important. I think America has a history of protecting private property, so if, if, if you're gonna have a large percentage of the network in any country, this is a pretty good one to have. But I also think it should be distributed globally, people should be- Creating businesses in, and I think governments will too, in certain jurisdictions that may dwarf what we're doing here in America. But I, I, I think everybody should build more infrastructure Regardless of where you are, I think it's good for the network. At the end of the day, you saw sixty percent of the network was in China, and then they, they shut it off. Who cares? The, the Bitcoin network doesn't care. It's just, you know, what, you know, what's the, what's, what are the laws in every country? And how do you protect investments really? I mean, you're looking at-- You don't wanna go to a jurisdiction, raise, you know, through debt or equity, a hundred million dollars for equipment, and, So how come our miners aren't working? And, and they say, "What miners? We don't have any miners here." So I think there are some risks globally to private property or corporate property, and those, you just weigh that with, with the rest of it, but I, I think distribution's important.

Do you believe it would make sense for governments to mine Bitcoin? I mean, obviously there's El Salvador who've publicly mentioned this, but do you believe it makes sense for them to do that, or do you actually think it makes more sense- For it to be done by private companies and, and individuals, of course.

I, I don't think we get to choose who mines Bitcoin, right? Governments eventually will mine Bitcoin, that's a certainty. And so, you know, it'll be like a Bitcoin arms race, in my opinion, in, in the next decade. and so all of that just makes the network stronger. It just makes the network stronger. I, I think we're not gonna be able to-- I mean, if you saw the events in the last few years, nobody could predict any of this stuff. So, Next on the Bitcoin network, I don't-- none of us, it'll be something that we didn't even think about. We'd be like, "That's crazy, but okay." but if I had to guess, governments would, would build their own Bitcoin network. They're gonna print their own fiat currencies, they're gonna buy Bitcoin network equipment and Bitcoin to protect their FX, their federal, their, their reserves.

So going on that same idea, as I'm sure you saw, even in the recent, Biden executive order on the ninth of March There was mention of central bank digital currencies. Do you see them as a threat to Bitcoin or just more like an orthogonal thing to Bitcoin, or are they going to capture mindshare of people? Central bank di-- digital currencies or, you know, surveillance coins, control coins, whatever you wanna call them, would you, do you view them as like a, a way of co-opting of Bitcoin, or do you just see them as like, they're just a separate thing?

I mean, it's the opposite of Bitcoin, right? So I don't, I don't think, I see them as a product. It's probably the scariest technology a government could, could force its citizens to use that's ever been invented in the history of bad technologies. The central bank digital currencies that eventually will be issued by governments ac-across the world include, I don't know, you know, I don't really understand how it's utilized in China. I know they have that digital yuan, I know they used it at the Olympics. What it is, is it's, it's programmable money, right? So the money lives And the whatever you-- I, I, and what I'm always shocked at is why are the banks and the credit card companies not going crazy? Because this eliminates all banks. You don't need to store money at a bank anymore. You don't need a credit card company to process payments. In China Visa has an exclusive with the Olympics to, to process payments. Except this year, this year, I don't know what percentage, they used the digital yuan, CBDC, in my opinion, a violation of the exclusivity of Visa, and nothing happened. Like, they just wiped out whatever that percentage of Visa was. You, you're not gonna be able to fight, you know, to use Visa exclusively in China when the Chinese government wants you to use the digital yuan. But it disrupts all payment methods methods that exist today. Every single payment company, if a territory accepts a CBDC, you're irrelevant. If you're a bank and your, and your territory or jurisdiction accepts a CBDC, you're irrelevant, because the money now lives on a government server, right? And it's programmable, so they can do anything they want with it. They don't like your political views, they just shut your account off, right? They don't like a restaurant, they just shut it off. They can't even accept your money. And so the government now gets to choose what doctors you go to. What websites you're on, what car you buy, where you buy your gas, you know, where your kids get to go to school. Every single, I mean, if you saw in the, in the EU, they, they say some scary stuff. They said, "We wanna implement a CBDC so people only make sensible purchases." Okay? Whose, whose definition of sensible, right? And so, and they said the words sensible and essential. Well, what's essential? What does that mean? I can't spend the money the way I want. And now- And I always say this guy's name wrong, and, and I've never, Keynesian economics, how do you say this guy's name? It's John Maynard

Keynes and Keynesian,

yeah, everyone always corrects me. So Keynesian, they don't believe in saving money, right? No saving money, it's consumption, conspicuous based consumption model, right? And so now Keynesian economics people are running the CBDCs, and they don't like you saving money. So they give you an expiration date, right? Your money goes poof if you don't spend it. And now, how do you secure your life? How do you have savings to protect you in bad times? So it just- It's or-- I mean, if you wanna talk about something that's Orwellian and dangerous, that's the most dangerous thing that people don't realize is dangerous. You don't want your money programmed by an administration, the government, and it, it would be catastrophic. It's, it's a catastrophic technology that's just ripe for exploitation, and it's, it's awful. I don't see it as a-- it's not a threat to Bitcoin, it's, it's a threat to-

I'm with you, Darren, and I think to-- I mean, I, I broadly agree with you, right? They, they are a threat to most common sense, liberty-minded individuals out there. But the only point that I would maybe slightly disagree, or just maybe so-- add something a little different is Some companies will have an incentive to go with it because they wanna be in, they wanna be part of the in crowd, and they may, from their perspective, they may argue, "Oh, look, central bank, look, Mr. Central banker, you don't have the technological capacity to implement a CBDC, let me do that for you." And that's going to be their in, that's gonna be their angle, and there'll be a fight about it, so-

Oh, I, I, I fully agree that we will get a large percentage of businesses and people that, you know From it, right? So they're gonna wanna sign up, and then you'll get the people that don't even know what they're doing, and they're gonna sign up. And so this'll be, this is a, it's just a dangerous technology, and it will play out in levels across the world. I'm, I agree with you, hundred percent. We will see lots of people sign up and, and, you know, CBDCs are good, you know, they're gonna go out and cheerlead it on because they're gonna think they can, they can benefit by it Right? People are in power for short amounts of time, and those people eventually will reap the consequences, right, or suffer the consequences of, of a new administration coming in and maybe not liking them. And so it's just dangerous, it's just d-- super dangerous technology. I do agree with you. I think we have a very uphill battle to see that it doesn't get implemented. I think it's a shame. I think it will-- I, I don't know. I mean, I, I'm torn on whether it will be approved or not in America. I, I certainly hope it won But, I don't think I, I, that'll be, that'll be a whole regulatory nightmare for how they do it. I mean, and the other problem is, name a centralized network that hasn't been hacked. There aren't any. Yeah. They hack everything. So now they hack your country's CBDC network. All the money's gone. Wait, what? How did they-- What did they roll back the clock? How did they stop? Like, it, it's, you know, it will get hacked. It will certainly get hacked. And so how- How do they deal with

that? Yeah, there's going to be all kinds of privacy ramifications, as I recall, maybe even just a few years ago, I think it was a large percentage of Americans had their social security numbers doxxed, and, you know, Equifax had a big hack even a little while back as well, and a lot of people's information was just doxxed out as part of that. And so the same kind of things could happen with CBDCs also.

Hundred percent, hundred percent. Every doctor you, you know, I go to, you go to, any, You spent it, the hotel, that's all on a CBDC record, digitally recorded forever, and now anybody can access that, and anybody can dox it. You know, they, they can dox it All of it will get doxed. Everything you'll ever do on a CBDC, you should just figure at what point is gonna get doxed.

And so I think then it comes down to, what's the right kind of counter? What's the right kind of way to help stop that kind of future and actually make it a better one? And perhaps it comes down to making that argument about why people who value liberty should be pro Bitcoin and why people should see Bitcoin as an innovation and as actually a very beneficial, socially beneficial technology. So I think that probably brings me to that other question, and I'm, I'm curious your views on that also, is whether you have any thoughts on the right kind of approach here. Is it lobbying? Is it trying to support Bitcoin friendly political candidates? Is it education? What kinds of things do you see as being useful for those of us who are Bitcoin advocates, supporters, holders, et cetera?

It's that, you, you nailed it. It's lobbying and education. and, and I'm very-- that, that's pretty much all I do these days is I talk to people to educate them on the importance of the innovation of Bitcoin. What, what, why is it important? Why can't you just use some proof-of-stake coin to do the same thing? And I think there's a lot of confusion on that. there's a Vision on why it's important to provide liberty and freedom and private property rights and banking rights and how does it happen? How, how do they actually get that? And so some people like to get granular on that. And so I per-- you know, we, we take a, a very active role in that. I think the infrastructure bill in America united a lot of proof-of-work Bitcoin people to say, "Hey, who's representing us?" And so you're seeing I, I mean, dozens, really smart people joining together in different ways to help educate Washington, D.C. out here, and I think it's working. I think people are starting to understand what Bitcoin is and why it's important, and that it's not digital video game money that people buy drugs on the internet with. It, they have to understand that it's very complicated accounting technology that changes the world, and so it's the, it's just a massive groundswell of- Of everybody lobbying and educating the other people that don't understand the importance of this technology. I think it's also important to point out that there's a hundred million Bitcoin users and growing, as you said, right? This network continues to grow because of the benefits it provides to the users. And the most important people to advocate on behalf of this technology, it's not me, it's not, you know, you're doing your part, but it's really the users. The hundred million users, they need to go out and make sure that their representatives know how important this technology is to protect within their borders, right? Because at the end of the day, the Bitcoin network, it doesn't care about a vote in, you know, Congress in US, doesn't care at all. But the people that have to live subjugated to those rules, they care, they care. And so the people have to get involved so the technology isn't-- the technology isn't chilled in the, in the jurisdictions that they're in, and that's what's gonna be important to drive mass adoption, right? And then as a result of the adoption, you're increasing the economic and financial liberties of those who participate in this network. And it disrupts lots of legacy networks, and those legacy networks, they're really good at lobbying, right? And they're really good at marketing, and so they've been united In providing a very clear, very negative, very false, but who cares, right? How do you know what's true and not? Like the fact checkers aren't fact checking on behalf of Bitcoin, they're providing this massively negative, very coordinated message about our industry. And the problem our industry's had messaging is that we're all very big on decentralization, right? And independence and free, you know, free, just Everybody has their own decentralized message, and the problem is we're up against a united front that, that wants to spread misinformation. And so if I say something, and then you say something, and five other people say something, but it's all a little bit different, but you have one united wave tsunami against us, we lose because they, they're more coordinated. And so Michael Saylor and I, I know you know this, started the Bitcoin Mining Council with some other folks. And the, the purpose of it was to educate the regulators on the actual effects, not the fake, Newsweek, World Economic Forum version of events, but the actual events and facts related to the energy use of the network. And initially we got a lot of kickback. People were like, "You guys aren't a c-council, sounds like Harry Potter." Like, some of the comments were pretty funny. But The, the fact of the matter is, all we are trying to do, and it's important, is to educate people together on what the facts are, because in this industry, the facts are on our side, the facts on illicit activity, the facts on energy use, they're all positive for us. We're, we're actually subsidizing the, the growth of renewable energy. You just, you can pick an area, and the facts are positive, but what the legacy folks don't want you to see are the truth, right? So they're, they're, they're circumnavigating that With all of the users, we can make a big difference, and, and that's what the-- and that's what the Bitcoin Mining Council purpose is, and that's why we still release quarterly numbers on the energy use every quarter, which has been very helpful to me. I talk to people in Washington all the time, it's been very helpful. Michael Saylor has a great, a, a great quote. His quote is, "We can be decentralized, but we don't need to be disorganized." And so that's what the Bitcoin Mining Council is. At, I hired a gentleman named Colin Crowell. Colin was the head of GR, government relations at Twitter, put that department together. He's now in charge of government relations for us, and so he's got a team and he's talking to folks in DC all the time. So we're spending, you know, we're spending a lot of money trying to educate people, not just here, but around the world. I think what happened in the EU with this micr-- Micah, Micah Bill, whatever this, whatever it is, was amazing. You saw Bitcoin Bitcoin, users globally groundswell, provide lots of information, get involved, and, and they denied this bill. And so I, I don't think-- I think for the first time ever, we have this global and united community that's going to lobby everywhere in the world, and, and I'm very bullish on Bitcoin users becoming one of the largest lobbying organizations globally. I think that you have a very active group of people that really- Care about how the world turns out, and, and they're coming together nicely.

Fantastic. Well, I think that's an excellent spot to finish up there, Darren. really enjoyed chatting with you. if you had any closing thoughts out there for listeners or things that they should be thinking about or doing, if they're out there looking for ways to educate, maybe if you could leave them with maybe if there are any good points or arguments that you've found in your discussions that have really resonated with people.

So on the, on the, so you have the, you have the I think a lot of the material, if you have energy detractors, there's a lot of material. It's on hope dot com, it's Michael Saylor's website. We present, we have a nine page presentation last quarter that I talked about the efficiency joule per tera hash, all of those metrics are there. We talked about how much energy is used globally and how much the global Bitcoin network use, that's there. We talk about how much energy's generated in America versus wasted energy. The argument that's kind of hit the- Top level of fud in our industry is the energy use. I would-- The Bitcoin Mining Council information is very dispositive that this is a positive industry for the world and that as the innovation continues and the users continue, it will bring greater freedom to everyone, eight billion people.

That's the hope. Darren, where can people find you and, Core Scientific online?

I'm on Twitter, Darren Feinstein. I, I had a lot of fake people asking for like your information, that wasn't me, so I, I find they've-- but now, but I, they, they tick marked me, so that's happened a lot less. And of course, Scientific is also on Twitter as well, that's probably the best way to see updates on both.

Fantastic. Well, thank you for joining me, Darren.

Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure. It's good to finally talk to you.

Get the show notes at stephanlivera dot com slash three five six. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels.