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Blockspace: AI & Bitcoin
Iran’s Hormuz Safe BTC Insurance, Prime Trust’s Swan Lawsuit, Hive’s 320 MW AI Data Center
01:08:40
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A
Foreign.
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B
What is up, y'?
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All?
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Welcome back to block space live, brought to you by CleanSpark. We are back for another week covering all of the most important news in AI and bitcoin. And today, Charlie, we've got a lot to talk about. Over the weekend, reports leaked from Iranian media that, no, no, no, the Iranian regime is not going to take a toll in bitcoin for tankers trapped in the Strait of Hormuz. This they're going to offer insurance because, Charlie, they're just really nice guys like that. That will be our top story for today. And after that, we have Francis Corvino of Lygos Finance on to talk about why he thinks this is one of the greatest threats to the bitcoin network since the China mining ban. We're also going to touch on digital credit vis a vis Strike or, excuse me, Stretch and SATA. After that, we have got a bombshell story where the Prime Trust Bankruptcy Trust is seeking to claw back nearly a billion dollars in assets from Swan bitcoin that it says were transferred in the days leading up to the bankruptcy or amid the bankruptcy. And how the larger story here is actually Prime Trust is trying to claw back a decent amount of bitcoin and cash from a number of crypto companies, including Strike and Circle. We'll get to that for our second story and then for our third story. Not so much a news item as much as a vibe feeler. Everyone hates data centers. Now. This is a seemingly bipartisan thing. And over the weekend everyone was losing their minds on the Internet about this data center 9 gigawatt proposed in Utah and its potential effects on the local environment, including this claim that the heat exhaust from the data center and the power needed to furnish it would be equivalent to like 23 Nagasaki bombs. More on that later. We will also wrap up with the latest disclosures from Situational Awareness and the hedge fund's AI exposure, as well as iron purchasing, Awakened Media and its most recent move to try to up its marketing efforts. And we will close on Hive's 2.55 billion USD proposed AI data center in Canada.
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Block Space goes live Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon Eastern featuring quick hits on the latest in AI mining, bitcoin emerging tech. Make sure to hit subscribe hit that notification bell on YouTube to get the push notification. And if you like this but don't catch the live stream, it turns into a podcast shortly thereafter. Make sure to subscribe to Spotify, Apple RSS feed of your choice. It's everywhere and our newsletter drops on Fridays. Newsletter.blogspace media.com and if you're listening on CoinDesk right now, make sure to migrate your feed to the blockspace feeds. Again. You can find that wherever podcasts are streamed. This show is brought to you by CleanSpark. Nasdaq listed ticker CLSK. More on them later on the show. Let's kick it off, Colin. We have, we have Francis here coming on a little bit to talk about Iran, but we're going to do a little like fun fluff because this topic has not just some fun serious takes, but also like a lot of just wild stuff happening around it.
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This is the news item that keeps on giving or if you're, you know, reeling from oil price shock, that keeps on taking away. But this hit over the weekend and it's so far the main source for this has been Iranian media. And so a caveat here is this hasn't been necessarily confirmed yet from US Media. Perhaps that's changing as we record. But I'm reading from an CoinDesk article here. Headline Iran may be turning the Strait of Hormuz into a Bitcoin based insurance market. Local reports saying, so what's happening here? If you recall, a few weeks ago or maybe a month ago at this point, we covered a story where Iran was allegedly going to accept Bitcoin as a toll to navigate the Strait of Hormuz. Obviously this creates a headache for a lot of the companies that are trying to ship out of the Strait of Hormuz. They're not sending oil abroad from Iran, they're sending it from other Gulf states like Qatar and the uae. And this creates a conundrum for them because they're trapped in the Strait and they're saying, hey, you can leave if you send us Bitcoin, but that would violate international sanctions. So now it seems like they're flipping the script on this and saying actually no, it's not going to be a toll, it's going to be an insurance policy. So quoting here from CoinDesk, Iran is exploring a Bitcoin settled maritime insurance platform called Hormuz Safe, keep that oil seifu to manage shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and nearby waterways. The state linked proposal would let cargo owners buy cryptographically verified insurance and financial responsibility certificates instead of paying explicit tolls for passage. Because the payments the Iranian saying entities can trigger sanctions exposure. Any use of the Hormu Safe would pose significant compliance risk for ship owners, traders and insurers. And the platform's operational status remains unverified. It's unclear Whether or not this is actually happening right now, it doesn't seem like we have not had any reports of anyone actually taking advantage of this. Again, the sanctions hiccup, it's going to be a huge barrier for a lot of people. But Iranian state media, Fars said the model could generate more than 10 billion for Iran. Did not explain how that figure was calculated. Just wanted to go to Fars News. Apparently Google Translate would not, you know, wouldn't translate this for us. But you can see right here, apparently there is a screenshot for maybe what this portal for this, and it says, request insurance payment. So, you know, the Iranian regime not letting a crisis go to waste. Charlie, what do you think about this?
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Yeah, this is. First of all, this is just a difficult subject to cover because I'm not sure what we might accidentally say or show that we can't say or show because, like, half. Half the entities and things, you know, that we're talking about are very edgy and dicey. Like, I will. I'll even, like, take an attempt here. Here is apparently the official account of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority from Iran. Iran basically just launched a Strait of Hormuz Twitter account.
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Now
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they're tweeting, you know,
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things in the name. They're tweeting in the name of God.
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Official ex account of the Persian Gulf Strait Authority is now live. So this is, I believe, a real Twitter account. So, you know, as we cover this, it's the story that just keeps on giving. It never gets old, at least to me. It's always a, you know, good viral on Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, I have to share this tweet from Steven Lupka. Quote, an amazing name for an Iranian Hormuz insurance service would be anchor watch this goes out. This, this becomes tweet of the month for me. If you don't know anger watches. You know, Rob Hamilton's Bitcoin insurance company, a fully vetted and legal insurance company in the United States.
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B
Yeah. You know, backed by Lloyd's of London insurance policies. It's of the gold standard, I think now for bitcoin insurance. And as much as we would love to give you some more primary reporting from this, we don't read or speak Farsi. I know that comes as a shock to most of you here. But this, to your point, Charlie, this is one of those where it reminds me of the east west divide with China coverage in tech or Bitcoin. There's a lot that gets lost in translation and it's really hard to vet sources. But per what Charlie Said with that X account, this seems to be something that they are rolling out again. I don't know how useful this is going to be. I mean who's going to actually run that gauntlet, pay for that insurance and potentially embroil their company in a sanctions violation that could derail it? I don't have answers to that. I think we'll have indication as to whether or not this is actually successful over the coming months.
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Yeah, and we'll have Francis from Lygos here in a second to actually give some more inside commentary on this. But I think I also want to show this crazy thing. So this is. So there's an Iran affiliated media outlet called like Explosive Media which has been making Lego AI Lego videos of basically Iranian propaganda. Now I don't think I can show any of those videos as they feature incendiary topics that I think YouTube and other social media may ban. But this is a, I think less salacious video. Again promoting Bitcoin to pay the toll through the Strait of Hormuz, unverified. Whether this is a production from that same media company at this time I was not able to verify. But you viewer can see the type of thing that this is very on brand for. I'm gonna play like 20 seconds of it. America tired of fe pain.
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C
I think a rising, breaking every chain
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the old system losing his rain.
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C
Now the tankers make a new lane
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Straight is open, straight is closed, Straight is open. Okay. I mean this could have been posted by Michael Sailor. Honestly, like this type of video kind of slaps. It's very bitcoiner coded. It. It starts off hating on fiat. What's not to love?
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B
Yeah, maybe the happy looking Iranians in the streets who are actually subject to an authoritarian theocracy and being executed on mast for protesting. But I, I wonder what went into the dark story.
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It is a really dark.
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I know, I'm not saying that to you. I just, you know, we, we are not sycophants of the Iranian regime, in case anyone's wondering. But I just. The last thing I have to say about this, I'm just wondering what Iranian government PR guy was like. Legos, the whites love them. This will land home in the west, you know.
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Yeah, and he's not wrong. I mean these are very popular videos in Western media and I think as people find the whole story ridiculous of the straight being open and closed and why are we even over there in the first place? It does resonate. So I think if you want to monitor the situation, you want to at least monitor it in style.
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And this story dropped over the weekend. We worked on it and then broke the news this morning. And it is a familiar cast of characters for those who have followed our coverage for a while. And that is prime trust estate demands 970 million in digital assets and cash from Swan in Bankruptcy court, brought to
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you by Block Space. This is a story that Block Space Commander in Chief William Foxley worked on over the weekend as the as the files dropped. We've been covering this for a long time. Please refer to previous publications and commentary. You can just, you know, search it on our website. Search for Swan. You can find the previous four or five different articles on it. But this is the latest in the story.
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C
Yeah.
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And so we've covered Swan from a number of angles here. And in this one, they are unfortunately ensnared in this bankruptcy proceeding for Prime Trust. It was a custodian that went belly up in 2023. And there's a larger story here that I will touch on at the end. I want to make it clear Swan is not the only company that Prime Trust is trying to claw back assets from. There are a number of crypto companies that used Prime Trust that are now under the scrutiny of the Prime Trust Bankruptcy Trust to try to claw back assets as they settle the matter of the bankruptcy. So the TLDR here, reading directly from Block Space PCT Litigation Trust, a trust pursuing the litigation efforts of debtors to Prime Core Technologies, also known as Prime Trust, filed a complaint on Friday in the U.S. bankruptcy Court of the for the District of Delaware against electric solidus known as Swan Bitcoin, seeking to recover nearly 1 billion in Bitcoin and other assets. The suit alleges that Swan withdrew 11,994 BTC worth 938 million at the publication time, 24.66 million in cash, and roughly 5 million in stablecoins. And curveball. 91,144 XRP worth 30. Yeah, slay your heroes, guys. There is no true Bitcoin maxi, just like there are no true Scotsmans. So this total amount that they're trying to recover totals to 970 million. And the reason why they are trying to claw this back is the suit alleges that Swan had access to insider information about Prime's financial distress and use that to withdraw assets from Prime. Specifically, the suit alleges that a senior executive at Prime Trust, who is also a paid Swan advisor, contacted Swan Bitcoin CEO Corey Klipstein four days before the company met with Nevada regulators and that allegedly the executive tipped off Clipstein about Prime Trust deteriorate deteriorating financial conditions. Quoting directly from the court document, on May 22, 2023, four days before the meeting with Nevada, the Nevada regulator's senior executive. The senior executive initiated a chat thread with Mr. Klipstein on an encrypted messaging platform and immediately set the chat to auto delete messages after 24 hours. The next notification still available between the Senior Executive and Mr. Klipstein was from May 27, 2023, the day after the Nevada FID meeting and the same day Swan transferred 10,000 plus Bitcoin from Prime. That notification shows that the senior executive turned off the auto delete feature. It continues. So the, the lawsuit insinuates that and it is claiming that Corey was talking to Mr. Clipstein, was talking to this executive, and that potentially that is what led him to move assets out of Prime Trust in the days leading up to the, or in the, you know, time leading up to the bankruptcy. Now, one last thing here before we close this out, Charlie, and toss it to you for second takes. I want to reiterate. Swan is not the only target of a clawback like this. There are actually a number of companies. I believe it's roughly a dozen or so. I only have a few picked out here because I didn't want to go through all the court filings. But there are clawbacks in place for Circle, for Zap Solutions, which is the parent company of Strike, Jack Maller's Strike, huobi and even sfox. There's a 13 million cash clawback targeted at Strike. I couldn't find a number on Huobi, the exhibit document that would have shown that was sealed for some reason and it was not included in the initial court document. And for circle, it's nearly 6,005,995,000. So clearly the Prime Trust bankruptcy trust is going after any companies they can to try to get money that was moved out of Prime Trust before the bankruptcy happened. And this is going to be, I would imagine, a very messy and very long court battle across all these different fronts to see what they can actually recover for the bankruptcy.
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A
Yeah, I mean, if you remember, Celsius had clawbacks. We're talking a lot of clawbacks. And those were, I believe, successfully clawed. A lot of them were successfully clawed back. So this has like precedent as being an effective strategy post bankruptcy in this category. You know, it's interesting because we've, there's like multiple things going on here. One which is the story of Swan versus Tether, which is relating to their mining or electron, their electron energy mining subsidiary. This is the Swan financial side of the business. So this is not their mining. This is a separate, like event here. You're muted. You're muted. You are muted.
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B
Thank you, Charlie. Yeah, that's good context because ultimately the majority of our coverage of SWAN over the past few years has been involved in their former mining team leaving and then establishing electronic for to manage mining assets with tether that were formerly into JV for Swan. We won't get into that in this show, but if you want to read up on our coverage, go to our website. Keyword swan, keyword electron, keyword tether. And you'll see there are a number of legal battles that have been waged between all of these three entities. But I think we'll leave that there. We've got Francis's audio fixed. Again, apologies for that. So we're going to bring him back up and ask him why Iran could kill the bitcoin network. I'm just kidding. That's.
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Welcome back, Francis.
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C
Thank you. Guys, Guys, great to see you. Very sorry about that brief little interlude there.
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B
All good, man.
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A
Look, we're the podcasters, you're the actual builder, so.
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C
Yeah, well, we tried to build our own little podcast set up here and things went a little south, so we went back to the original mic. But yeah, so I think that
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this
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C
is the biggest and most dangerous moment for bitcoin since probably the Chinese mining ban, just from the standpoint of potential disruptions to the network with Iran and North Korea. Now you have the world's two largest pariah states running their economies on essentially a bitcoin standard. And to me, I think that harkens back to something that I read maybe in 2019, former Bitcoin maximalist Nick Carter had a seminal paper. It was called its Settlement Assurances Stupid. And his argument was essentially the only thing that matters about bitcoin is the costliness of the ledger and the economic weight behind that costliness. When a pariah state adopts Bitcoin, there's an additional sort of costliness that they are incurring on the network because they're going to start to accrue their own hash rate. Right? And that's where you start to differentiate between North Korea, who's just stealing bitcoin, and Iran, who is now actually earning and participating in the bitcoin network where they have, behind the meter, government subsidized bitcoin mining. And now they're doing actual trade final settlement operations for large shipments on the bitcoin network with the hash rate to sort of back it up and be sure that those, those transactions do get mined. So to me, this is a really, really big moment. I know, you know, Charlie and Colin sort of touched on briefly the idea that maybe people wouldn't go through the difficulty of actually sending a bitcoin payment and the potential, you know, financial fallout. But I think that sort of conflates a bit of a western centric viewpoint. Like Iran and North Korea are the two biggest pariah states in the world for sure, but they're on different levels. Iran and Iranians continue to have bank accounts throughout the Middle east and even throughout Europe. Just they find ways to hide them. And we are already seeing people who are willing to take their ships and, and risk going through minefields, turning off sort of like their location services in order to get through the straight of four moves. So I think it's already quite clear that people are willing to risk it to sort of secure the goods and get them to where they need to go. So to me, this is a really, really big moment. As Colin said, this is much bigger than El Salvador. El Salvador is on a dollar standard, right? And bitcoin, ultimately, if you go back to its roots, it's about the ability to opt out a government monetary policy. And right now the US Dollar is the predominant monetary policy of the world. And for the first time, North Korea is opting out of it. And not just, you know, where we're going to steal Bitcoin or something like that. They're got the entire supply chain. They have the ability to mine transactions and get their blocks included. They have the ability to accept payment in bitcoin and they have sort of the, the goods to force people to actually make payments in bitcoin. Yeah, I mean, I think the next big question though is will, will Iran be forced to treat the bitcoin that they do receive in the same way that North Korea does? Right. When North Korea takes bitcoin on or whatever crypto asset they choose to hack, generally speaking, you know, in the case of some of the biggest hacks, right, they'll, they'll push it through like Hydra, which is a Russian dark web, and then they'll send it to like various different exchanges and you can essentially discount that bitco to say, okay, we're going to get some of it seized by these exchanges who catch us funneling money through, and that's a loss. Now if you're able to find a trade partner who is willing to accept bitcoin on the other side of this for final settlement. Now you have sort of the true full loop and what I would consider the ultimate paradigm shift where you don't just have a pariah state who's actively stealing Bitcoin, you have a pariah state who is using Bitcoin at every single level of their economy. So this is to some extent an exciting but terrifying development for Bitcoin because there's just going to be a lot more attention if this, if this scales in the way that I.
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B
So wait, sorry, Charlie, I just cut in for like a follow on. So what, what do you see as the threat specifically is like delegitimizing Bitcoin, creating warped incentives for one or a couple of, like, you know, you said pariah states, their use of the network versus the wider network. What do you see as the most salient risks involved in this?
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C
Yeah, I think it's when the government of the United States and the world realizes that the claim of Bitcoin is for enemies is absolutely true. I think this administration has obviously been extremely positive towards Bitcoin, but this is something that if we're actively fighting a war against someone whose economy is dependent on Bitcoin, that could change quickly. And you see an already deep understanding of the mining side of the industry by the Trump administration. His sons are actively involved in, I believe it's USBTC or some derivative of that.
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B
American Bitcoin.
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C
American Bitcoin, yeah. Run by Canadians, hilariously. But all the same, you know, they understand the network and they're able to participate in it in a way that we wouldn't have participated or expected, sort of like governments in the past to have this level of sophistication. So if we see. If we see the US Government tell American bitcoin miners that they can't mine transactions which, assuming that they can find them, are made by an Iranian entity, then that's one thing. Those transactions will just increase their fees. And then other miners will come online and they'll mine those transactions. Where things start to get a little tricky is if the US Government says you can't mine on top of blocks which include these types of transactions, and if that threshold reaches 70% of an OFAC compliant register of not mining these specific transactions, and additionally, they're not just not willing to mine those transactions, they're not willing to mine on top of those transactions, creating a fork in the network between those who are willing to continue the bitcoin database forward with whatever transaction is able to make it in there. And another which says no, in fact, I'm going to orphan those blocks, which included transactions I don't like. And I know that I'm not going to lose my opportunity cost of mining that I paid for with electricity, because I know the rest of the network, greater than 70% is going to continue to mine on top of my chain, rather than this other chain, which, while valid, includes transactions which we no longer agree on, should be part of the bitcoin history. So this is the highest the stakes can possibly be.
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A
You already speed ran through a couple of my questions. I mean, I guess, like, how does Bitcoin survive this? I mean, the scenario you described is precarious. I can totally imagine a scenario where the government says you can't include Iranian transactions. I am skeptical that the US Government understands, can understand the institutional level sophisticatedly enough to say, don't build on top of Iranian blocks. But that could change really quickly. How do you think bitcoin survives this and is it strong enough to survive it right now?
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C
Well, I think it's interesting to look back at history and think about where we are from, the different levels of decentralization. On the mining front, I would consider there to be three levels. You have a hash rate, the actual physical machine. I have an ASIC over here. You can't see it. That is performing the hashing, right? That is one level that is the easiest to move. So if you are in a region like China which says you can no longer do bitcoin mining, or they're putting specific, you know, specific, very prohibitive laws on the transactions that you're able to mine and you want to move, very easy to do mining pools, even easier to move. Right? But we do have a very large degree of centralization among bitcoin mining pools. Hashrate itself, though, is quite decentralized. The US does not have greater than 50% of hashrate last I checked, and I would imagine it's not even close. And hash rate is actually quite distributed right now. Now, in 2026, compared to 2020, when the vast majority of bitcoin hash rate was in China, we're in a better spot from a pure hash rate standpoint. From a pure pool perspective, we're in slightly worse to about the same perspective, but that can change quickly if specific pools decide to start censoring. And then last and sort of tertiary to this subject is the hardware level. The vast majority of hardware is not produced in the United States. There's, you know, Erdyne and a couple other incumbents, but the majority of hardware is produced in, you know, throughout Asia.
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B
Yeah, even Auradyne. Right. Like they're, the IP is us but all of their factories are in Southeast Asia. I mean you have like one Bitmain facility here I think, and you have a micro BTE facility facility. And I don't even know what the capacity is compared to the stuff that they have in Malaysia, Indonesia, etc.
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C
Yeah, and, and I, I think ultimately Bitcoin is in a strong point from a standpoint of decentralization, which it actually hasn't been in the past. Now I, I want to add one more thing which is it's not about just pure decentralization. It's also about sort of incentives of the, the individuals who are hashing. Right. If for example, you had a network that said 50% is in the US and 50% is in Iran, if the US does not want certain transactions to be added and Iran does, as long as they continue to not want to sort of bifurcate and lose the network which does become popular, each having sort of a real stake in the network and continuing to mine the transactions that the others won't sort of prohibits Bitcoin from being censored in and of itself. So the game theory here is as long as you have enough actors who are mining, hashing and broadcasting blocks who do not and will not ever agree on what a valid Bitcoin transaction should look like, you will continue to have censorship free Bitcoin because the other who has a real stake in the network will continue to mine those transactions. And this is a particularly important point in this case because you have a Iran who is already mining. You know, I think they have about 427,000 miners throughout, throughout the country. We've seen during power outages that hash rate has dropped significantly. So we know that they're mining and we also know that some of their allies, and this is partly speculative, but like if China decided that they wanted to flip the script on bitcoin again, they are more than, it's more than in their, you know, past history that this is something that they would do if they decide to flip the, flip the script again, they can also be mining transactions. So this becomes a network which is being pulled in two different directions. But ultimately the network being pulled in two different directions allows it to sort of maintain its censorship resistant capacity.
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B
Well and then you have, sorry, just to build on that, the game theory. This is really fascinating to me because you have Russia as well. Russia has, you know, anywhere from maybe 10, 15% of hash rate. According to the most recent update from Hash Rate Index, it might even be a little bit north of that. And so like, let's just say in a world going back to your orphan block, your orphan block scenario. So for those of you who don't know, when a block gets orphaned, it is a block that ends up being on the minority chain because pools end up mining on another block that ends up becoming the majority chain. So you could theoretically have Iran, China and Russia with their own bucket of hash rate and then the US and maybe some of its allies, I mean, I don't know, maybe they go to South America and talk to the, the Paraguay miners in Canada. But if, if you look at it from the perspective of the US where you don't want those coins to be economically viable for Iran, you want them to be on a dead chain, then you're going to try to reorg or, or orphan those blocks and get the majority chain. But then the axis of powers in Russia, China and Iran are going to be doing the same thing. So you create this world where maybe Jason Lowry's soft power thesis, convoluted as it is, ultimately does have a point in the sense that if Bitcoin does become one of the neutral settlement assets globally over a long enough time frame, there is an argument to be made that you want more hash rate in your jurisdiction than not if you want to control those levers as a government. And to me that just creates a really kooky scenario where Lord only knows what that means for purist bitcoiners and deciding which chain is the real Bitcoin. And also just last point, I'll say on this, going back to the fear of the US government stepping in and saying you can't mine these transactions from Iran. The closest we've gotten that has come from kind of self censoring from the private sector. Mara introduced OFAC compliant blocks back in 2021 I believe it was. They didn't do it for very long, it was only a few months because their revenue took a huge hit. But the US government hitherto has not actually enforced anything like that. But it would be trivial for them to do so specifically with the pool concentration that you mentioned. Francis?
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A
Yeah, I'm doing some back of the napkin math and if we take the, say the Iranian or non western world of like Russia, China, Iran, you know, that's probably close to half the hash rate on the network compared to the western hash rate which would be, you know, North America, South America, some Europe. And this is pretty interesting because like a fork would mean that you immediately have slower blocks and like a 50% drop in hash rate. That's pretty significant. That would basically be like an even worse China mining ban event. So it's kind of interesting to the game theory this out. I'll throw a question to you, Francis, which is there's the mining side which is various levels of decentralized or less decentralized. But then you have the capital concentration. The majority of the bitcoin buying has happened in the west through American financial institutions. We're talking your BlackRock, your strategy. You do, I assume, have some, what you might call them, OG Chinese whales, but I don't think that they are as like nationally aligned. Perhaps this is my, my subjective assessment. What do you think? How do you consider this from a capital structure, an institutional like where. Who actually owns the bitcoin standpoint? How do you think about this?
- [32:11]
C
Yeah, I mean you say Chinese, but those individuals generally live in, you know, Hong Kong at this point. Yeah, generally. Yeah. So it's, it's a different, it's. It's a little bit of a different situation. I. The ultimately the network is run by economic nodes, I would say. So the. Yes, that makes a, that makes a massive difference. At the end of the day, I would, I would completely agree that the economic buying of bitcoin from what would be the U.S. network is, you know, a significant sort of force behind having it be defined as the real bitcoin. That being said, if bitcoin were to even consider a fork or something like that was to be hypothecated on, that does not stop China from deciding now we're going to start buying bitcoin as an economy. And I think again, people are dramatically underestimating how big this is. People talk about, you know, Trump buying bitcoin being a game changer, right? Trump's buying bitcoin not because he's just, you know, it's a Trump thing, right? He's going to buy bitcoin. Everything he does is. It's so insane at this point that it sort of gets muted. So the idea that people will follow Trump because he's the US President and buying a ton of bitcoin, I think is a little bit over overstated. But when someone, a real nation state of significant size and caliber is trying to opt out of the government monetary policy of the U.S. i do think that that can create sort of a chain of events which goes beyond just the US and could dramatically shift the buying power towards whether it be the east or, you know, somewhere else. I think that there's a real possibility that this is a big enough story that it can change things. And I again, just think this is being massively, massively underrated by the market in terms of its potential for both chaos, but also just like increased adoption of Bitcoin, ultimately not in the way that maybe we hoped, but this is the reality. Bitcoin is for enemies. And we're seeing that.
- [34:27]
A
Right, you're saying that the existential threat to the network is not JPEGs, but rather pariah nation state adoption, as everyone has always assumed was.
- [34:39]
C
I mean, 40% of the North Korean economy runs on stolen cryptocurrency. You don't think that the US Government has taken notice of that? That is pro. And, and to be honest, they. They mostly steal Ethereum. So I think US regulators behind the scenes are actually, from what I've heard, much more interested in the Ethereum network than the bitcoin network because of North Korea's proclivity to steal Ethereum rather than Bitcoin. But at the same time, yeah, this is a big deal and the US Government is going to be a lot more interested. And they are ultimately, you know, someone who can change the way that bitcoin functions, or hypothetically could. Could present the potential to change the way bitcoin works. That's much more terrifying than Casey Rodham podcasting from his bed.
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A
Okay, we got to switch gears. We got a. Enough about Iran and Casey Rodimore. We gotta, we gotta close on a little bit of the news the day because the. Look the. The degens, or shall I say the suits or the retail investors.
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B
They only suit gens.
- [35:44]
A
Yeah. The only thing they care about is strategy. Like the. The male mind cannot comprehend anything but yeeting your entire net worth into stretch. And as strategy tweeted today, I believe. Yeah, this. No, yesterday, I think a bit as a feather in its cap. Quote, 80% of stretches held by retail investors. This amendment is for you referring to their vote to pay stretch monthly. Semi. Monthly dividends. Francis, how do you. What's your read on this tweet that 80% of stretch is held by retail investors. Is that a good thing?
- [36:23]
C
So actually I've been thinking through it and I think the way that a retail investor is defined, exogenous to the bitcoin industry is a bit different than the way that we define them internally. But I think that the sort of emotions are pretty much the same. So what. I mean, there is bitcoin investors generally, as retail investors, have more money than the average investor simply because they invested oftentimes in a concentrated way into an asset class has performed really, really well. However, they still have sort of the animus spirit of I can panic quickly and try and exit this position rapidly that a traditional retail investor has. So just because you've made a lot of money via a good concentrated bet doesn't mean that you've suddenly become a much more sophisticated investor. So I do think that that's a bit of a concern for Strata or, sorry for Stretch. However, I think that the biggest thing going on there is Stretch going from semi monthly or going into, like, semi monthly yield. And it is going to, I believe, become a bit of a frequency war. And I think that they may actually lose it because SATA is going daily. And it's not about the 1.5% spread so much. It's that a daily dividend turns Bitcoin from an asset that you hold into, like, true income that you can see hitting your bank account every day. And there's a real psychological principle from Richard Thaler called the segregation effect. It's tens of gains of $100 feels better than one gain of $1,000. So I think when that psychology starts to sort of embed itself in investors who are seeing these daily gains, they're going to start to say, hey, maybe I want to start moving over from Stretch to SATA. So I think that this is also a pretty big deal.
- [38:04]
B
Yeah, and I'm glad that you brought up SATA, because that strives preferred equity pays out 13%. So going back to the frequency war,
- [38:12]
C
there's even daily compounding too. Right. So It's. It's about 13.88. So there's like a 2% yield gap there.
- [38:18]
A
Right.
- [38:18]
B
I mean, and that's significant. Now, obviously, different risk profiles. I think, like, if you can say it at all, if you can use blue chip for strategy, you know. Right. Some investors might be a little more comfortable with strategy, given their track record. Strive is still relatively new, but I wanted to bring up this tweet from Nakamoto CEO David Bailey, because this has been in a conversation. Strata or SATA, and Stretch have been in conversation with each other, obviously in the news recently. And he says here on a tweet quote, I heard a crazy anecdote from one of the major IB's, investment banks about how hard their different desks are shilling. Stretch and SATA are in demand. Sounds very strong. Imo. Digital credit is going to be a lot, lot bigger. 100. 100 billion issued before 2028. What do you think of that? 100 billion number because that sounds absurd to me, but maybe I'm just mid
- [39:04]
C
curve that, I mean, at this point I would say I discount a lot of the stuff that David Bailey says just because it hasn't really come true over the last couple months. He is sort of shilling his bags pretty hard. So I, I would, I would say that I take everything he says at this point with a little bit of a grain of Salt, unfortunately. And 100 billion does sound absurd. Like you have to talk your book at this point. Like, you know, but what do you
- [39:28]
B
think about the, the market for these products in general? I mean, you know, just like how much appetite do you think there is for this? Because one thing I did want to point out, sorry, before you answer, Francis was like with the retail thing, a lot of people were dunking on strategy but they've never really pretended any differently with stretch. Like institutional investors are not going to be comfortable with a risk profile or something like this. They also have ways to make money on strategy outside of that.
- [39:56]
C
So this is where sort of that weird bitcoin high net worth individual investor component starts to come into play. There are quite a few individuals out there who have made a good amount of money off of bitcoin but they haven't worked a job in like 10 years. Right. Fannie and Freddie say that if you collect dividends for two straight years then that can count as a source of income if you want to get a mortgage or something like that. So to whatever extent that group of individuals becomes tapped out, I think that's probably when you start to see the class of folks who are willing and interested in allocating to this sort of start to degrade.
- [40:40]
A
I think that probably does it. We touched on the hot button issues of the week. Iran stretch SATA. Francis, we're going to run this back because we know this straight up remove story is absolutely not over. No, nor is the stretch story. So I look forward to talking to you again next time that comes up. Thanks for coming on the show.
- [41:04]
C
Awesome. Thank you guys for having me. Cheers.
- [41:06]
B
Thanks Francis.
- [41:07]
A
Cheers. All right, we are going to keep rolling. We got some mining equity stories but before that a word from our sponsor, CleanSpark.
- [41:19]
B
We are CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin miner. A publicly traded company with the largest
- [41:25]
C
outcome operating hash rate powered entirely by
- [41:30]
B
self operated infrastructure across four states. This is our proof of work.
- [41:38]
C
We are setting the standard for what's next.
- [41:40]
B
A lot of learn more about the intersection of energy and bitcoin@cleanspark.com all right Charlie, how should we kick off the data center hate corner? Should we just play this? Quick thoughts, Guy. Rebuttal to the Utah thing. Just a few minutes of it, kind of set. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [41:59]
A
Just do Quick thoughts, Guy. You have a guy. He's been blowing up on TikTok lately. He looks basically like Peter Willa, if you know Bitcoin developer.
- [42:07]
B
Bitcoin developer. So for some context for this, there is a proposed data center in Utah that will carve out 40,000 acres. It's not the entire data center. That's the land that you need for it. It has access to water rights as a result of this, and the projected gigawatt capacity, if the entire extensions are exercised for it, would be 9 gigawatts, which I believe would make it the largest data center in the United States. But people are freaking out about this as they're freaking out about data centers all over the US And. Quick thoughts. Guy here has some rebuttals. I'm going to play just a minute or two of this to kind of set the stage.
- [42:42]
D
A lot of people are complaining about data centers. Her video, for example, is a million views. Complaining about a giant data center in Utah. And I'm kind of confused by that because I would think that an uninhabited desert valley in Utah is the perfect place to build a giant data center.
- [43:00]
C
I've been following really closely what's happening in Box Elder County, Utah, where Canadian billionaire Kevin o' Leary is trying to build the world's largest Data Center, a $100 billion project. Okay, this would be the largest data center in the world at over 40,000 acres and at full capacity. The data center, which is called the Stratos project, is set to use 9 gigawatts of electric, more than double the entire amount of electricity used by Utah as a whole.
- [43:29]
D
First, the data center is built on 40,000 acres. The project area is 40,000 acres. It's not a single 40,000 acre building. This is the area where they're building their own power plant and data center and whatever buildings they need. Most of the acres remain undeveloped. One reason the project area is so large is because they are buying water rights of the current property owners. So the current property owners are using water for agricultural irrigation. The data center project buys that land, buys a huge amount of land, 40,000 acres, where water is being used for agricultural irrigation, and repurposes that water to cool their data center. He says the data center is going to use 9 gigawatts of power, more than double Utah's electricity consumption.
- [44:15]
B
Well, we'll leave it there because he kind of goes on to debunk a few other things. And he does point out that they're bringing, they're building their own power plant on site. I would assume it's nat gas.
- [44:25]
D
Right.
- [44:26]
B
And so this shouldn't impact the grid asterisk on that because I haven't looked into exactly what their plans are for powering the data center, but that sounds right to me. The other really absurd claim made in this is that the energy, the thermal output from the data center, according to one physicist professor at Utah, would be equivalent to like 20 something nuclear bombs, specifically the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of World War II. And there is a rebuttal to this on a blog by one Andy Massley, who is a physics teacher or used to be.
- [45:08]
A
Andy, come on the show.
- [45:10]
B
Andy, if you're listening to this, come on. But he makes this point that, okay, so that math checks out. But if we're going to use that math, then you could use that for the thermal load for like every single data center and every single power plant in the United States. And that would equate to like thousands of nuclear bombs detonated every day. And I think the most crucial point he makes in this is that quote, a data center spreads its heat exhaust evenly across the day. Data centers run at basically constant loads 24. 7. There aren't really peaks or low points in comparison. The Trinity test released heat in less than a second and then it all dissipated. The Trinity test concentrated the energy of a gigawatt data center from a full day to a second. It was at least 86,000 times as concentrated as the data center. So this kind of gets into like the pop math that we see for a lot of these things where you can kind of make these absurd claims and oh, we need to make a data center sound really scary. Let's compare it to nuclear weapons. I mean, the propaganda is pretty naked, but it definitely works on a lot of people. Now there are also some heat island effects here that I don't want to totally hand wave, but I'll toss it to you, Charlie, for second takes here.
- [46:23]
A
Yeah, man. This is one of those topics where I'm a talking head. This is data centers in my own community. If this show gets big and things go viral, I'm going to be eviscerated. I'm going to get a lot of hate from. This is where it gets personal for me because a lot of people are going to hate me for even talking about this or having given credence to pro data center commentary. I mean a couple things. One, this is thermal output, not like radiation. So if you look at the like the thing that is really harmful, like it's not really the thermal output of these things. And to criticize thermal output, it's is really just a secular critique of industry. So I would say that is the Ted Kaczynski mindset, which to be fair might be a little valid, but you're really just criticizing all of like production and industry. Look at the heat generated from where humans live, from cars and traffic and heating your home. So you know, I, I don't really think that's a very good, that is a salacious like over overexcited comparison. It's purposely provocative and, and so and then the other one is I think that the, one of the problems here is that we now live in a sound bite, in a sound bite society sound bite regime where even if you have a minute long video of a quick talking person on both sides, it's very difficult to inject nuance into this discussion because there will be adverse effects from this explosion of data centers in the United States. And so it's not a simple cut and dry topic. I think it's very important where these things go, how they're structured, the effects on the electrical grid and the consumer prices, consumer power rates. Then this also needs to be considered in the context of the US's role and like geopolitical influence. Because this is not necessarily a thing that is just happening in your backyard, but rather this is a world stage upon which the future of compute and the future of like geopolitical influence is being, is playing out. So I'll toss it back to you.
- [48:48]
B
Colin. Yeah, just wanted to cap it off with this claim from the Utah State University physics professor, Dr. Rob Davies. To quote here, he estimates that the proposed Stratos campus and its associated natural gas power plant, again as we covered, could dump the energy equivalent of 23 atomic bombs per day into the surrounding Hansel Valley. He also has some preliminary analysis that says this could raise daytime temperatures in the valley by 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit and nighttime temperatures to 8 to 12 degrees Fahrenheit due to the heat island effect from all of this thermal output. Part of the reason for that, oh Charlie, you're muted.
- [49:28]
A
There's a localized temperatures and then those that you'll see the exact same effect. If you just look at the city of Dallas compared to 50 miles outside of Dallas, like it's the same thing,
- [49:37]
B
just more concentrated right and you know, part of the reason too that this heat island effect would be worse in this valley is because of the way that the air circulation would trap it in the valley and it would have hard time releasing into the atmosphere. But you know, I saw this and 2 to 5 and then 8 to 12 in nighttime degrees Fahrenheit bump seems really big to me.
- [49:59]
A
That seems really big.
- [50:01]
B
It hasn't been peer reviewed. That's just back of the napkin math. All those caveats. But I don't want to hand weigh this entirely because there is probably some truth to the fact that this does happen. There are a few studies, mostly in Oregon. Also a caveat on that. Oregon's a very crunchy area.
- [50:16]
A
Yeah. So the universe give me some Oklahoma, man.
- [50:20]
B
Yeah, I was about to say, and we've got one from Texas. But so like Oregon universities are probably going to be biased more towards that. This is exacerbating climate change. So keep that in mind. But There was a 2021 paper in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology that found a facility in the Dales area in Oregon, one of Google's huge facilities in the area, contributed to localized warming of approximately 0.5 to 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit. There was another study that was done similarly for a Pinesville, Oregon data center that found a 1 to 3 degree Fahrenheit increase. Now the real question I have for that is how much of that is in the margin of error where you can't really make correlation causation. And that could be fluctuations in temperature year to year. There also was a study in 2024 from UT Austin's Energy Institute that examined bitcoin mining facilities in West Texas, in Midland, Odessa, in the Permian Basin and found a measurable but small surface temperature anomaly of 0.4 to 0.8 Celsius in the immediate vicinity of large mining operations during peak summer months. Also a correlation causation thing that the study points out, how much of that is due to the bitcoin mining. How did you control if we're looking at oil and gas in the Permian basin. Right. And so yeah, it's really hard talking
- [51:38]
A
about the mass amount of methane leak from decaying oil and gas infrastructure.
- [51:42]
B
Right.
- [51:42]
A
That possibly be contributing to it.
- [51:45]
B
Right. I mean, that's a great point, Charlie. Right. And that's kind of why I want to bring up the correlation causation thing, because this is almost seems like impossible to track. The other thing I would note about that, that's not really an apples To Apples, Bitcoin mines are much less energy intensive per unit of compute than data centers. They require much less infrastructure. So, like, maybe that's not the best comparison. And.
- [52:05]
A
But I will pause you there and kind of just remark on the fact that we say Bitcoin mines are comparatively less energy int. That's a sentence I thought I would never utter.
- [52:15]
B
Yeah, pure play. Bitcoin miners are actually super happy because now they're not the worst guy on the block in the climate change crowd.
- [52:22]
A
As I said, we walked in trips so that AI could stumble and run into a brick wall. So it's. It's kind of. You know, I got to bring up one now because I know you love my oil and gas analogies here to try to inject some nuance into this. I use the term inject because
- [52:38]
C
do
- [52:38]
A
you remember the whole fracking an earthquake thing? So this is a thing where the oil and gas industry pushed back really hard. Fracking does not cause earthquakes. And all the progressives saying they do. And the reality is that everybody was wrong and it was actually pretty clear what was happening. There's a process called water injection. When you drill a well, you produce like an order of magnitude more water than you do oil, depending on where you drill. And convention is that you put that water pressurized back into a different hole nearby, you inject that water at high pressures at vast volumes, and surprise, that's what was largely causing these earthquakes. Depending on the region. I'm speaking mainly to Oklahoma, but then also the Northeast, where we saw this. And so, like, I look at this and I. And it's kind of frustrating because I like this, like this, this water injection and earthquake linkage was like, very well known. And then after it was tied and kind of banged in everybody's heads that this is actually happening, then regulators were able to regulate the specific pressure at which you were able to inject water into these reservoirs, therefore significantly reducing earthquake activity. So I look at this and I see really similar parallels to the data center story where you have. Where I see, like, sides building up, where you have perhaps corporate denial of, like, simple things which are not really probably that harmful if you just approach it honestly and tactfully. And then delusion from the critics who hand wave away the fact that they're using TikTok and software to criticize data centers themselves and order doordash to their homes, which rely entirely upon.
- [54:28]
B
I mean, there is an element of hypocrisy to this, right? It's like, yeah, okay, let's just like, let's extrapolate this anti data center stuff to its most logical extreme. Let's go turtles all the way down with it. If you really are worried about data centers, get rid of your computer, get rid of your phone, do not use AI, don't use anything.
- [54:46]
A
Move to a cabin in the woods, paint it red.
- [54:49]
B
Yeah, go build a cabin in the woods. Go homestead. Right. And you know, to, to a certain extent I don't want to downplay every concern because clearly there will be negative externalities from any technology being adopted. But the level of fear mongering in like for this topic is kind of by far and away anything that I can remember except for maybe Covid and climate change. That's part of the reason why it's wrapped up in the climate change narrative. And unfortunately I don't think we've seen the last of it. And then if we move this to its most logical extreme, I don't know, all the data centers are going to be built in the southeast and in Texas. Is that the future that we want? And then you just basically like, you know, you ensure a future where those states capture the vast majority of economic productivity in the U.S. i don't know man. But we'll be keeping track of this. We'll probably have more data center hate corners.
- [55:42]
A
Honestly, this could be, this will be a regular segment. I will just remark. My subjective observation is that the data center critics are far outclassed by the data center defenders. So I would say data center critics need to get good because there's better ways to criticize them and you're not doing it. I still think I don't foregone conclusion. You're going to get a data center nearby and you're going to have to live with it, unfortunately. Okay, let's go on. We have more, we got more stories to do. But before that, a word from our sponsor, Luxor.
- [56:20]
B
This episode is brought to you by Luxor's Commander Bitcoin miner management software built for enterprise solutions. Commander gives you real time fleet monitoring, bulk remote commands across your fleet. And intelligent Miner, that's an automated profitability engine that runs every five minutes adjusting power settings to live hash rate markets and energy markets. Ercot back tests show over 10 more profitability with Intelligent Mining versus Binary Mining. Commander Pro is a hundred dollars per megawatt or a 25 basis point pool fee adder which is roughly half the price of competitors. And you can try it free for 60 days. To get started go to Luxor Tech
- [56:56]
A
forward slash Commander, are you feeling situationally aware Colin, because I am.
- [57:02]
B
Except I don't know how to. I don't know how to pronounce his last name.
- [57:05]
A
Leopold Ashenbrenner, the Aschenberger, Ashton Brunner, the West co wonderkind who wrote a seminal thought piece on the future of AI and data center growth called Situational Awareness. Not thought piece, a whole dang essay, 120 plus pages which basically became the bible for like the insider group of AI over the past two or three years. Leopold launched a fund called Situational Awareness named after the paper and made buku billions to the point where I myself, Colin, do copy trade him. So he just dropped. They just dropped their latest filing disclosing some basic. Basically just position rotating within the former bitcoin miner, now AIHPC focused entities. Colin, I'll tag you in to explain which of those they are.
- [58:03]
B
Yeah. So the largest reported positions, I'm quoting here, directly from Brock space were put exposures 2.04 billion in Vanex semiconductor conductor ETF, 1.57 billion in Nvidia, 1.07 billion in Oracle, 1.1.01 billion in Broadcom and 969 million in advanced Micro Devices Fund also reported put positions in Taiwan semiconductors worth 500 TSM. TSM, TSMC. Excuse me. Worth 535 million. Micron Technology at 584 million and intel at 159 million. So he's going very chip heavy, it looks like.
- [58:41]
A
No, no, he's. He's selling chips.
- [58:42]
B
He's. He's right, thank you. He's selling chips. Thank you.
- [58:45]
A
He's selling semiconductors and he's buying kind of a next rotation. Yeah, it's the ihpc.
- [58:53]
B
Yeah, and also infrastructure. So the fund's long largest long holding was Bloom Energy at 879 million across 6.49 million shares plus further call options. They held 724 million in SanDisk and Coreweave totaled 556 million in common shares with 141 million in calls. Other long positions include Iron at 401 million, Core Scientific at 389 million, Applied Digital at 320 million, Riot at 142 million and CleanSpark at 104 million. One last thing to note here before I toss it over to you to close, Charlie. Quarter over quarter changes in share counts show the fund increase its exposure to Bitcoin miners. CleanSpark, we mentioned that bit farms now known as Keel infrastructure increased to 19.88 million shares. And Riot, Bit Deer, et cetera, Iron also all grew so the one thing he did drop, they did drop their core weave position. The call position dropped to 1.81 million shares from 10.81 million. While the common stock holdings grew, Core Scientific was trimmed to 26.01 million shares from 28.76 million.
- [60:06]
A
Yeah, so I would just say this is a massive portfolio rotation, short, semis long, AIHPC kind of rotated within that category. Long a couple concentrated energy and infrastructure. And also he was like very, very long Intel I think as of last summer. And that thesis has absolutely played out. I'm certain that positions up significantly. Intel ripped over the past month. Now he's I think slightly short intel. So I don't know if that's a long term temporary position, whatever anyway. But basically if you've been copy trading Leopold Ashenbrenner's situational awareness fund, you've absolutely printed every quarter for like eight plus quarters or something like that. So will this be the one that flounders or falters? I don't know. I wouldn't bet against him though. Yeah.
- [61:01]
B
And going back to the intel thing, you know the US government holds almost 10% equity stake in Intel.
- [61:06]
A
Yeah.
- [61:06]
B
You know it seems, it seems like. How should we put it? I'm not going to say what I'm going to say. I just really almost, I almost stepped into it. But you know, this kind of top down, you know, federally directed economic works or sorry, federally directed investment and this kind of national stake in critical infrastructure in the U.S. it's something that J.D. vance is really big on. He believes that the government should be used to, you know, kind of bootstrap, you know, economic interest in the United States. But all that being said, we'll leave that there. And just one quick note on IRON since they're mentioned in the situational awareness. Most recent disclosures Iron recently purchased a, recently purchased a media company called Awaken Media. And I think this kind of confused a lot of people because they were kind of asking if you actually look at the tweet from Iron, a lot of supposed investors kind of asking like why would you buy this media company? Like this doesn't make any sense. You're an infrastructure provider. Why would you buy a media company? And IRON has been working with Awaken Media on their media and PR and content strategy for some years. And my read on this, I could be totally wrong. Is the same reason why public bitcoin miners sponsor the bitcoin conference. Because you're trying to get your name out there for investors to make you a so that you will be in investors minds, a household name. And that's where a lot of the PR and marketing spend comes for these companies. Like I could be wrong. I don't think Ayran needs necessarily a marketing team to generate leads for its business development team to sign deals. Right. I don't think that that would be the hang up there. I think a lot of it is to amplify your brand name so that people will invest in your stock.
- [63:05]
C
Right.
- [63:05]
B
You're basically trying to pump the stock.
- [63:08]
A
Yeah, I mean look, I dropped a couple Bitcoin miner now AIHPC factory ticker names at the neighborhood block party last night and I did not get empty stairs back. There were a couple people who recognized a couple of those names so. So it's working. Whatever they're doing. Awaken media. I always thought that sounded like a faith based media company. Anyway, that's my last take for that. Let's. We got one more story. We got Hive Digital but. But before that, a word from our sponsor. Lygos.
- [63:48]
B
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- [64:40]
A
Last story. Hive Digital
- [64:45]
B
announces a 2.5 billion AI Gigafactory. Yeah,
- [64:53]
A
yeah. Whoops. There we go. Canadians are just continue to do big deals.
- [64:59]
B
So Hive today announced a 320 megawatt AI factory in the Greater Toronto area on Monday via its subsidiary Buzz High Performance Compute project carries a Canadian dollar 3.5 billion, approximately 2.5 billion capital investment and is expected to go online in the second half of 2027. Hive shares surged roughly 27% on the news. As a part of the deal, Hive has acquired 25 acres of land between Toronto and Waterloo, which is designed to host more than 100,000 GPUs at full build out. They also acquired two contiguous parcels for a combined consideration of 42 million. According to the company, the site already has a 32 megawatt power allocation. There's not really much more to add to this, but I will say I was in a group chat and a CEO of another data center provider company said the density for this site in terms of how many acres they have seems a little bit too cramped. This executive seemed to think that they would need more land to actually make this happen. I don't know if that's true, but I will say 320 megawatts is a lot and 100,000 GPUs is a huge build out. So for all the infrastructure in place, they might need to expand their footprint. In terms of acreage here, I'll echo that.
- [66:19]
A
25 acres does not seem big enough, especially if you want to consider egress, storage, maintenance. I know if they got to like drop, you know, little substations, redundant power,
- [66:31]
B
like if you're going to run through.
- [66:32]
A
We're not. Yeah. So I mean, yeah. Pow. As we said, AI is denser than Bitcoin mining. But 25 acres does not seem that big. Again, weird to say out loud that I'm like, oh, it's only 25 acres for a 320 megawatt site, man, the
- [66:55]
B
numbers don't mean anything anymore. They're all just huge.
- [66:59]
A
And it's also weird, it's a $2.5 billion campus supposedly, which again, it feels, it reminds me of when like we, we talk about like the COVID stimulus and comparing it to the great financial crisis backstop and, you know, the great, the gfc, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars. And we're like, oh my God, this is in unbelievably, you know, massive amounts of money. And then we're like, okay, Covid, let's throw another trillion at it. Let's throw like 2 or 3 trillion at it. See if that does anything. And everybody's kind of like in 12 years, just kind of like normalized it. And that's how AI, that's how the scale of things is going. I don't expect it to stop. A year from now, we'll be 10x where we are. So that's my opinion. Not financial advice again. Everything you hear on the show is us commentating and not necessarily financial advice.
- [67:55]
B
Do not go lose your shirt or mortgage your house and ape into AI stocks. We didn't tell you to do that. Someone on Twitter did.
- [68:02]
A
But we someone on Twitter, not us. Anyway, that wraps up all the news for today. Thanks for sticking with us. Make sure to hit up Blockspace Media for all of our content and news. Tag who you want to see on the show in the comments. So, yeah, we want to interview the people that you want to hear, talk about your AI HBC stocks, and maybe even still cover some bitcoin. Thank you so much for listening to Blockspace Media. I'm Charlie.
- [68:31]
B
I'm Colin.
- [68:32]
A
And we are Blockspace Live. Cheers.