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BTC225: Bitcoin Revolutionizing Renewable Energy w/ Daniel Batten (Bitcoin Podcast)
01:01:48
Daniel Batten shares how Bitcoin is reshaping the renewable energy sector, mining decentralization, heat reuse innovations, and the future of AI in Bitcoin.
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- [00:01]
Preston Pysh
You're listening to tip.
- [00:03]
Daniel Batten
Hey everyone. Welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have energy expert and investor Daniel Batten on the show to talk about some of the amazing things happening in the merging of bitcoin mining and energy. Daniel comes with some amazing stories of things he's seen from all over the world and in unique use cases of harnessing wasted and stranded energy. He's an outstanding communicator and has a way of making this topic extremely interesting. So without further delay, here's my chat with Daniel.
- [00:35]
Preston Pysh
Celebrating 10 years. You are listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pysh.
- [00:53]
Daniel Batten
Hey everyone. Welcome to the show. I'm here with Daniel Batten. And Daniel, I'm thrilled to get into some of these areas that you're an expert in which as bitcoin and energy. Welcome to the show.
- [01:03]
Thanks, Priest. And great to be here.
- [01:05]
All right, so I guess let's start here. Just give people a little bit of a background on yourself so that they kind of know where you're coming from and maybe a little bit of your bitcoin story and how you got into it.
- [01:15]
Sure. Well, I am a late comer to this party. I only really started writing about Bitcoin in 2022. Before that I was a technology entrepreneur. Started up companies, exited companies, then moved into investing in technology companies. And then I found that we were investing in some technology companies that were solving some real world challenges around energy. For example, one company which did zinc recycling, and they'd found a way to do it which was less energy intensive and less emission intensive than any existing technique and got rid of coal furnaces. That was good. We invested in that. We invested in some other companies, similar. And after a little while I thought, well, how much impact are we really having? There's some pretty major challenges around right now. Did some research, found out that methane is a huge issue. It is responsible for around a million premature deaths every year. I didn't know that. And I just started to ask the question, who's paying attention to methane emissions? And the answer was, well, not enough people. And that led me to realize that some of the major sources of methane were landfills. And I really had no knowledge of bitcoin or bitcoin mining at that time at all. So I was approaching it purely as an investor looking to solve a problem. And then someone said, what about this crazy thing called bitcoin mining? And I'll be honest, my first reaction was skeptical. I was like, well, that doesn't sound good for the environment. Because I'd read the same FUD that a lot of people had, and they said, no, no, no. You don't go to mainstream media for investment advice, do you? And I say, no. And they said, well, why should you go to mainstream media for energy advice? And I said, good point. And they said, look, you're an investor. Why don't you just do due diligence on the technology the same way you would with anything? So I did. And very quickly, I came to the understanding that everything I had read about bitcoin mining was nonsense in terms of its environmental impact being negative. And very quickly, I realized that, in fact, it had massive potential to be very net positive to the environment, but also to solve a lot of really big energy issues as well. So that excited me to the point that the third fund that we raised is actually a specialist bitcoin mining infrastructure fund for helping to get some of that stranded energy from landfills and using it specifically to do bitcoin mining on. And so I had an interesting bitcoin story, which was I knew nothing really about bitcoin itself at that point, so I knew much more about bitcoin mining. And my knowledge of bitcoin only really came a lot later on.
- [03:39]
Yeah. For the listener, help them understand how there's methane in a landfill. Walk us through just kind of like that whole process, and then how bitcoin kind of steps in to solve this is absolutely fascinating.
- [03:50]
Whenever you have waste which rots without the presence of air, so that's any landfill, because it gets heavily compressed, there's no air around, it produces methane. And methane is wonderful as a fuel. It's terrible as something that goes straight into the air. And it's a little bit like if you have a gas stove at home, you don't want to leave the gas stove on unlit all day. It's going to be dangerous to your health, and you're wasting a humongous amount of energy. You want to light that light and use it to do something useful. Now, there's two things you could do. You could either light the light and not have anything on it, in which case, okay, you're stopping it from leaching methane into the environment. So that's a little bit better, but you're not utilizing it. You're just wasting that. And that's what a lot of landfills do. They simply flare it. They simply burn it like they do in oil fields, which is a tremendous waste of Energy. And so a better solution is you turn it into power. And so you send that landfill gas, you capture it, you scrub it out of some of the things you don't want going into a generator, you send it to a generator and you use that to generate power. You sell that power to the grid. But the problem is if your landfills are never in the right place, normally they're not either not near a grid or the grid cannot handle the amount of power that you're suddenly going to send to it. Or in some countries, such as where I live in Costa Rica, government bureaucracy and regulations actually prevent you from selling power to the grid. So for all of those landfills, the only option left is you have to use that power on site. Now, who's going to want to spend a whole lot of money in capital on generators and gas extraction systems simply to chase cheap power? Well, there's no one on the planet who'd be willing to do that unless your cost, your proportion of your operating costs, which is energy, is really high. And now who do we know who spends a lot of money on energy as a total proportion of their total operating budget? Bitcoin mining companies. So that's why these bitcoin mining companies have been really chasing what to other companies would be too capital intensive to chase this cheap energy in these places like oil fields or landfills around the world.
- [05:57]
So I guess the number that's thrown around within the community is if you can get the cost down to like 4 cents per kilowatt hour, you can be really competitive as a bitcoin miner. So when we look at landfills after you have this capex expense, I'm kind of just trying to wrap my head around the numbers for the incentive to really kind of make these capital investments. Is it there? Does it push the price after you make these capital investments? And then you look at the depreciation of the capex on this, that you can kind of push the price down to those levels to make it competitive.
- [06:30]
3.9 cents. So yes it is. That's the all in cost. That's factoring depreciation on the assets, the generators, the cost of the generators, the interest repayments, all in cost. And also factoring in that because you're doing this, you can actually earn carbon credits. So you subtract that as a cost and the net down is you're paying around about 3.9 cents. Now that'll vary sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, depending on a range of factors. But generally you're in that ballpark. So it does actually pan out economically.
- [06:57]
Yeah. Wow. You had made the comment to me that a lot of people, when they think about bitcoin, they think about the disruption or the dematerialization of the finance sector. But you're of the opinion that it's just as profound in the energy sector as it is to finance. And I'm just, I guess I'm just curious to hear. I know you just gave us an example with respect to methane and landfills. Are there any other examples that you have or something else to kind of put more meat on this idea that it's disrupting energy just like it is the finance sector.
- [07:28]
What we're starting to see around the world is early signs of convergence of the energy sector and bitcoin mining. You've got companies such as Mara, for example, who are now positioning themselves as an energy company, not simply as a bitcoin mining company, but also as a technology innovation company where a lot of the innovations that are coming out of the bitcoin mining sector, such as two phase immersion technology, they're starting to realize, hang on, this doesn't just solve a problem for bitcoin mining. This solves a massive looming problem for the entire AI data center industry. Because what's happening in AI, for example, is that right now the amount of heat that's discharged them is relatively small. But that's going to ramp up very fast, very quickly over the next five years, even the next two years, where suddenly you go from 30 kilowatts per rack to 200 kilowatts per rack. Now you've got a heating dissipation problem. And then they're going to turn around and say, well, how do we dissipate heat? Do we have to space them out more? And then someone like Mar will come along and say, well, we solved that problem five years ago. Why don't we give you our two phase immersion calling solution? And so it's starting to drive innovations in other sectors. We're seeing companies like Lancium, who invented this method of called suspended animation for different data center processes. They did this back in 2021. And now AI companies are starting to say, well, we don't just want to be relentlessly using power because that makes us very inflexible and not so attractive to grid operators. So we're able to dial up and dial down, such as bitcoin mining companies can. That makes us a much more benevolent citizen on the grid and much more attractive to these grid operators. And so they're starting to turn to companies like Lancium, who pioneered bitcoin mining, for some of these different processes to make themselves more interruptible. And then you look at oil companies who are starting to realize that wherever you have oil, you strike gas. And whenever you have gas, if you can't transport it through a pipeline, it makes no sense to flare it. It's a waste economically. You can use it for bitcoin mining. And they're starting to pivot into bitcoin mining. Exxon, Shell, other companies, big oil companies. And then you look at companies such as tepco in Japan, which is the largest utility in Japan, who has now started pioneering bitcoin mining. Why are they doing that? Because they have a lot of renewable energy, a lot of intermittent energy. And they realize that, like a lot of renewable energy that's intermittent around the world, a lot of it gets curtailed because it's produced at a time of day that people cannot use it, or a part of the country that people can't use it. And so they're using bitcoin mining to make their renewable division much more profitable. And then with that profit, they can expand and they can create more energy, which is great. It's a wonderful story because you get proliferation of energy, and it's wonderful for the profitability of the company. And then another story I'll give you is tether just recently took a 51% stake in an agriculture company. Now, why would a bitcoin mining company buy a stake in an agriculture company? Well, the reason is that that agriculture company has already started to move into energy production. Because wherever you have sugarcane, you have a lot of organic rotting material. When you have organic rotting material, you get methane. And they've already started to do bio waste energy projects, maybe 100 megawatt operations. And they have the same problem that landfill owners have, which is, well, what do you do with that power? If you're not near the grid? What happens if where you're producing sugarcane is nowhere near the grid or the grid can't handle it? And they've realized, well, hang on, we can now set up our sugar canes, or we can do energy production in places which are nowhere near a grid connection or where we cannot sell to the grid because we can use it for. We send it to an anaerobic digester, we have a generator, and then we use it to mine bitcoin. So they're turning sugar into methane, into electricity, into bitcoin. And so these incredible convergences are starting to happen all around the world. And they're starting to happen at scale. One other example I'll give you is in finland where now 2% of all of Finland's district heating comes from bitcoin mining. Exhaust heat, 2% of the entire population. And that's been. There's a number of companies there. Mara has recently done a project where an entire town, 80,000 people are now getting their heat delivered through the exhaust heat from bitcoin mining.
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Talk, talk us through the engineering on that. So how are they capturing that and then distributing it to use it as heat?
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Finland, like other Scandinavian countries, has this thing called district heating which works really well if two things are true. Your a compact country. So it wouldn't work so well for Canada. You're compact in your population density and you're really cold. So Finland, Sweden, Denmark. And so it's a system of pipes where at the moment they will burn could be biomass, could be coal, could be peat, any number of things could be oil. And they will use that to create heat. And that heat then heats up hot water. And that hot water is used to for their district heating. But that's just an the heat system input. So if you input, you can input heat from anywhere. And if you can capture the heat from bitcoin mining units, you can send that and use that to heat up your residential heating. And so Mara, for example, they have hydro based cooling, which is great because when you have a hydro cooling you can overclock your bitcoin mining units, which means they create even more heat. And also because it's in the form of a liquid already, it's easier to transport that so it's more cost effective. And so that's why as you get more innovation in terms of how you cool bitcoin mining units, you can easily and more easily deploy that heat to other problems or just to create other solutions.
- [12:57]
So when I have these conversations with people, particularly executives in the energy industry, and maybe some of my conversations are a little old that I'm basing this on, but there was just a lot of frustration that a lot of these executives have where maybe they deeply understand how this solves this problem. And you can get into the argument of it dampening the grid and all these other types of ideas, but they just cannot get the other executives, the decision makers, a lot of people that actually hold the authority to act on some of this stuff to move. I'm curious if you feel like that is still kind of the case if it's getting better, I guess. What's your read on where the energy community is at as far as really kind of embracing this technology and kind of leaning into some of it.
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Very similar to if you're going to have conversations with large publicly traded companies about a bitcoin strategic reserve, we're still very early. And so those same resistances exist, and they exist for the same reason. And that's misinformation about Bitcoin. So just as you get misinformation about Bitcoin being used for criminals and being a Ponzi scheme and all the rest of it, you take that to Bitcoin mining and you get a whole new set of misinformation that pertains to that energy as well, that it destabilizes grids, that raises prices, et cetera. In fact, the opposite is true. It stabilizes grids and it brings costs down to residential users for a whole number of different reasons, while offering incredible community benefits. But again, that's not what a lot of people have heard. So, yes, just like if you're going to be Michael Saylor walking in to have a conversation with the board of Microsoft, if I'm going to walk in and have a conversation with the board of an energy company and there's no plebs who are on that board, that's going to be a challenging conversation because you're not meeting people at ground zero, you're meeting people with a whole lot of re education that needs to be done before we can even start to have a conversation. A whole lot of myths to be debunked. And so a lot of my work, unfortunately, has had to deal with the misinformation first before you can ever have even have a conversation about how bitcoin mining could be utilized. So we're at a similar stage, do you find?
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I had people tell me this is kind of a pretty old argument. They'd be like, yeah, well, if the energy companies don't wake up, the miners are going to be the ones that start buying the energy companies and merging with them to kind of put some of these ideas into place because they make the energy company so much more lucrative when they embrace the technology. Do you see that merging happening from the miner side or do you think that the energy companies then. I know this is a very speculative kind of question, but do you find that the energy companies are eventually going to figure this out? Their behemoth? I mean, the really big ones are just absolute behemoths that then would start acquiring miners and mining companies in order to start leveraging the symbiosis that exists between these two industries?
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You're seeing it happen in both directions. As I say, Mara is positioning itself as an energy company. So moving into that sector, the moment you start to do bitcoin mining either on a landfill or in an oil field, then automatically you're an energy company as well as a bitcoin mining company. And you're also starting to see these companies like ExxonMobil who starting to move into bitcoin mining. So it'll happen in both directions. No matter how bullish you are on bitcoin, I think it's a bit of a stretch to imagine you're going to earn as much as a bitcoin mining company as you will ExxonMobil doing oil exploration. So you're talking about companies who have huge resources and for them they're doing it for a couple of reasons. One is that it's dealing with an environmental problem. If you flare it, it doesn't destroy all the methane, it only destroys 91%. There's still a lot that goes into the air. So that's a problem. And the second reason is that it's just wasteful. And if they found another way that they can get more revenue, then they will do so even though it's relatively little compared to their overall business model.
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Yeah, I think that that's another part too is where they're applying. It is such a small amount of revenue relative to the size of some of these, these income statements of these companies.
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Not a huge economic driver.
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Yeah.
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Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [16:46]
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- [19:57]
Daniel Batten
All right, back to the show.
- [19:59]
Hey, talk to us. You have a couple posts recently talking about how global hash rate is decentralizing. What are your thoughts on this? Because I think for people that look at bitcoin mining, they see all the publicly traded companies, they look at the big banks, the ones that are creating these ETF vehicles, and they're saying, oh my God, Bitcoin mining is getting centralized and owned by these large banking entities and that could potentially pose a risk on centralization. So what are some of your thoughts around this?
- [20:26]
First, let's give us some context. When we compare bitcoin mining to other industries, it's already much less decentralized. If you compare it to, for example, social media, you look at how centralized that is. Or search look how search centralized online searches and Then say, okay, well those are outliers. Okay, well let's pick the automotive industry. The top three automotive manufacturers in the world. I don't know exactly, but I imagine it's more than 30% of the total market share. But that's not the case in bitcoin mining. And the largest bitcoin mining company has around 6% of hash rate. The next one's around 5 and a half, next one's about 5. So it's already quite decentralized compared to other industries. And if you look at the trend over time, even though these large publicly traded companies are increasing their hash rate, there's also just this massive long tail all the way through to these micro hashing units you can get for your home as well. And there will always be opportunities for small to medium sized bitcoin mining companies because the large enterprise players, they're not going to chase 5 megawatts here, 6 megawatts there, 10 megawatts there. But there's massive pockets of energy around for other smaller companies to chase and to do in some cases very profitable bitcoin mining that solves other problems for communities, for the environment, for the grid at the same time. So it is trending towards greater decentralization, it's trending towards greater geographic decentralization. And the other trend that's happening is the first countries who leapt in and wanted to ban bitcoin mining, they're now unbanning it. Russia's unbanned it. Yeah, Morocco has unbanned it. China, never really banned, was reported to have been banned. But hashing continued quite happily at 20% and has done for the last three or four years. And so you're seeing this reversal of this early trend. And why are people unbanning it? They're unbanning it because they're realizing that it solves these problems for them. In China, for example, the reason there's a lot of mining, there's a whole lot of reasons. One of them is there's a lot being done in the Mongolian desert where there's a lot of solar, there's a lot of wind, and there was a downturn in the economy and a lot of heavy industry shut down. And suddenly they had two problems. They had the problem they always had, which was the intermittency of variable renewable energy. But then they had a second problem, it just wasn't a baseload user. And so what do they do? They said, okay, we're going to do bitcoin mining there because we've got all this capacity and we're wasting it at zero marginal cost. We should be doing something with it. There's mass scale bitcoin mining happening there. It solves two major problems for them. Russia, same thing. They're much more centrally controlled country. So they will do selective bans. They'll say, you're not allowed to do bitcoin mining here, but we want you to do more of it over here because that'll help us stabilize the grid.
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You had mentioned this a little bit earlier about AI and kind of bitcoin mining being co located. You know, if we warped ourselves 10 years into the future, what do you think that this actually looks like? Because I hear this argument from people that there's this opportunity for them to kind of work together in a co located space. But talk to us about some of the incentives of doing this, which, you know, are the AI companies going to start becoming bitcoin mining companies as well? Is there some type of parallel there? Just help us understand the way that you see this kind of playing out.
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Yes, they will. We've seen it happen the other way around first, where bitcoin mining companies have moved into AI and their reasons for doing that are very simple. If you're a bitcoin mining company at an enterprise level, you don't want to have a sole source of revenue because you're too exposed. And we've seen a big trend recently since the minor liquidations of major companies in 2021, where large companies have now said, well, what's our secondary source of income? If bitcoin goes down in price, how do we get economic resilience? And so some have responded by saying, we're going to diversify, we're going to do AI because that's an uncorrelated revenue source. Others have said, well, we're going to sell ancillary services to the grid. We'll sell demand response. Riot's doing that in a huge way. Other companies are too. Iron is doing that. Other companies said, we're going to mine some other form of proof of work, cryptocurrency. Others have said we're going to earn Rex, we're going to earn carbon credits. Others have said we're going to do heat recycling. Some have said we're going to do a combination. But they're all starting to look at what's their secondary source of revenue as well as bitcoin. And that's positive because the more resilient the miners are, the less likely they are to get liquidated, the less likely they are to get liquidated the less you have bitcoin being dumped onto the market, which is in no one's interest who holds bitcoin. So I think this is extremely positive. Now, what's also going to be happening, it's not happening yet, but I predict it will, is exactly as you say, that AI companies will start to move into bitcoin mining. Now, why would they do that? It's not for revenue diversity. It's a completely different driver. The big challenge you have if you're a large AI hyperscaler is securing energy contracts. Particularly when grid operators are saying, well, what are you going to do for us as a grid? You don't solve a problem like bitcoin miners do. You're not a flexible user of energy. You're a very inflexible user of energy. And I've got too much intermittent power. My grid, I'm not sure that I can handle of baseload energy requirements. You give. You can't help me stabilize the grid. It's not going to drive down prices. So what do you do? And the only answer they've really got is, well, we'll pay you a good price of power. There was a case in Ireland recently where a large AI data center was turned down for this exact reason, that it was seen as being a parasite on the grid. Troy Cross describes it as a locus to the grid. Whereas the bitcoin mining companies are more like the dung beetle. They'll soak up energy, they'll solve problems, they'll turn waste other people don't want into something valuable. Which is a great analogy. So if you're an AI data center, what do you do? Well, the great news is you don't have to completely change and pivot 100% from AI to Bitcoin mining. You might only need to do 5% flexible load data centers and suddenly you've got enough flexibility that the reason you're doing bitcoin mining is not for the bitcoin you earn, although that's a benefit. It's because it gives you the shock absorber where now when the grid operator says, can you power down 5%? They say, yes, you can. We'll just shut off all our bitcoin mining units and now you're a flexible energy consumer and you're going to be welcomed onto the grid. So that'll change things completely and it'll allow them to chase power purchase agreements where otherwise they may have been less successful.
- [26:46]
Yeah, that's such a great point. And you know what? They're going to be incentivized to power down because the prices are going to blow out anyway. And it's not like the energy company even has to make that request. I would think that they're probably going to be financially incentivized to power down their bitcoin miners and keep the AI running. So, yeah, that's a really fascinating point and something. I mean, if you're in the AI business and you're standing up all these GPU farms, I would think that that would be a very strong consideration to get these types of contracts and just be in good graces with the local power production. This is where I wanted to get. So a person who'd be like listening to all of this and maybe they don't understand bitcoin, maybe they're looking at AI and just saying, hey, this is totally insane. The amount of energy we're talking about that's have to come online in the coming decade. And I think for some people, they've been so I'm going to use this word brainwashed into thinking that more energy equals bad. But I think anybody that's a bitcoiner or somebody that's looking at like, what the power of AI is bringing us, they're saying, this isn't bad, this is good for humanity. Talk to us about what your opinions are around this idea of more energy equals bad. And that narrative that's been spread pretty heavily. And then also, how do you see the grid kind of changing from a power production standpoint? Are we going to move to more nuclear? Are we going to move to more, you name it, energy production because of this demand for more energy.
- [28:10]
So I grew up believing more energy equals bad and believe that for a lot of my life, as a lot of people do, and somehow it seemed that if you're being conservative with energy, if you're switching off lights, you know, that's great. We're all from as young as I can remember, hey, switch off the light, turn off the stove, which is fine, which is great. At a national scale. Then of course we should use energy in a way which is useful as much as possible. But to find more ways to use energy is not necessarily a bad thing at all. What dictates whether it's useful or not is the type of energy user it is. So in the same way that you cannot just say carte blanche, if you eat more food, that's unhealthy. If you eat less, hey, you look a little bit unhealthy. I've got a solution. Why don't you eat less food? Well, that's a very unnuanced response. It depends on the sort of food you're consuming. If you're having three chocolate cakes a day, then the answer might not be to eat less, but to change the type of food you're consuming. And in the same way with energy. It's true not all consumers of energy are the same. So bitcoin mining has this advantage that it's a tremendously flexible consumer of energy. And we know from real world examples from Brad Jones, the former CEO of ERCOT in Texas, from numerous peer reviewed studies and white papers, that when you have more flexible uses of energy, that it allows the grid operator to stabilize the grid. It means that you can handle intermittent energy sources better. It means that you don't have to buy really expensive gas peaker plants, which in the case of Texas would have cost the taxpayers $18 billion just for those peak demand times. You can have a consumer of energy which powers down rather than gas peaker plants firing up. It's a tremendous saving of money. The grids that are trying to decarbonize, it helps them with those goals as well. It's not political, it doesn't care what your goals are as a grid. All grid owners want to keep the grid stable, no grid owner wants to black out. Everyone wants to keep power prices low. And flexible energy users help with all three. And they help to keep power prices low. Because now your intermittent power sources, rather than having to pay your renewable operators to curtail energy, you don't have those curtailment fees. And so there's a number of ways that it's going to keep the costs low as well. So it's a tremendous advantage to grid operators. So it's much more nuanced as a simple answer. Now, just in the same way that we have a population who doesn't really know a lot about money. You know, money is just something you get paid into your account. But no one for the most part really thinks about central bank money printing, etc. 95% of the population has probably never asked that question, right? It's the same with the grid. I would say 95% of the population does not have good energy literacy. And that's why you get these very unnuanced takes such as more energy consumption is bad, less energy consumption is good, whereas in fact more of the right type of energy consumption is fantastic. There is no such thing as an energy rich cash poor country, or vice versa. Using more energy and economic prosperity always go hand in hand. And the answer is to be more innovative and actually to consume more energy in ways which benefit humanity and I don't know technology that benefits it more than bitcoin. And at the same time if you can solve some problems for the energy proliferation and grid operators, even micro grids at the same time, then that's even better still. And Bitcoin ticks both boxes. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
- [31:38]
Sponsor
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- [35:00]
Daniel Batten
All right, back to the show.
- [35:02]
Your thoughts on nuclear. I'm kind of curious. Moving forward into the next 10 years, you hear a lot of bitcoiners say that that's the path forward and that what we really need to embrace. It seems like you're getting a lot of the big tech companies to also agree with that, I think because of their energy demands. With respect to AI, do you agree with that? Is this kind of a match where it's actually advantageous that the AI folks are coming on board and like all the lobbying from a political standpoint, that kind of comes with that. Whereas when bitcoiners, as long as I've been in the space, bitcoiners have been saying we need more nuclear, we need more nuclear. And it's kind of interesting now that AI is really taking off that you're hearing the same thing out of the big tech titans. I'm curious your thoughts on that. I'm assuming you agree, but maybe not. Let's hear it.
- [35:48]
It's definitely part of the mix. And if you look at like nuclear is not what it was as a technology back in the 1980s, it's advanced tremendously. Some of the fourth generation nuclear reactions reactors, they're modular, they can scale up faster, the safety is way better than it was in the 1980s. So there are tremendous advantages that have occurred there. And it delivers steady baseload energy, which is fantastic. And so it has to be part of the mix. Sometimes it takes a long time for regulatory and permitting reasons to get them onto the grid fast. And I'll give you an example. So in France right now, I think more than 70%, maybe 80% roughly of the country is run on nuclear energy. Now what else has happened in France is that suddenly they've got a lot more wind and solar. Okay. Now wind and solar and nuclear don't really mix that well together because nuclear is a baseload energy. But unlike coal or gas, which you can dial up or down quite fast, nuclear you can't, you can't really switch off a nuclear power plant. Very easy. The amount of processes you've got to go through are immense. There are safety concerns every time you do that. It's got to be done in a very well managed way. It's costly and it actually creates tremendous wear and tear on that whole nuclear facility. They're not designed to be switched off and switched on again. In France, that's exactly what they're doing. They're switching them off and switching them on again as wind and solar loads change, which makes no sense at all. They would be much better off to have huge amounts of shock absorption through bitcoin mining and dial up, and dial down the bitcoin mining to handle and counterbalance that intermittent energy sources. So they could just leave the nuclear facility alone to do what it does well and that's deliver continuous baseload electricity.
- [37:30]
Yeah.
- [37:31]
So it's clean. Why aren't they not doing that? Why are they not doing that? Because they were lobbied for a long time and fed a lot of spurious studies by certain central bankers that said that bitcoin was bad and we should ban it. And they're still coping with some of the consequences of that. So for them to now wrap their heads around the fact that it actually solves one of the major issues is going to scramble their brains a little.
- [37:51]
Bit to start with, I guess, really interesting to me, especially with this ESG crowd that's saying more energy is bad when we get into nuclear, it's clean energy. Right. This is a powerful energy source that's clean. And I think that people get caught up in the, you know, one or two scenarios throughout history and going back to like when these events happen and you address this idea that the safety is way different these days than it was back then. But I think it's just the word nuclear has been just so what's the word I'm looking for? Demonized through the years and it's just such a massive hurdle. The issues we have with education on bitcoin, I think you have a branding issue on the nuclear side that is insanely Difficult to overcome. Is that changing at all within the energy space, or is this just continues to persist?
- [38:39]
No, it is changing. And even within the ESG crowd, there's a lot of people who now widely embrace this. There are a lot of environmental activists who now embrace nuclear, who say, why on earth is Greenpeace still not coming out and saying, sorry, we got it wrong. We made a big mistake. We should have embraced this. One of the most insane images that I saw in the last five years was of Germany doing a controlled demolition of the cooling towers of the nuclear facility. It's just. It's madness.
- [39:07]
Yeah.
- [39:07]
It's one thing to not build nuclear, it's another thing to blow up the structure you already have and then to replace it with what? Coal?
- [39:14]
Yeah.
- [39:14]
And burning wood.
- [39:16]
That's crazy.
- [39:16]
So you've got some challenges there. And it's perceptions versus reality. And it's comforting, I think, to know, as in the bitcoin community, Bitcoin is not the first ever technology that's been maligned. It happened with nuclear, but it's happened with a lot of other technologies. Happened with the bicycle, happened with the automobile, happened with the radio. Wherever you get disruptive technologies, these technologies are always misunderstood and always portrayed negatively for at least the first 15 years of existence. And exactly the same thing has happened with bitcoin and with bitcoin mining. And part of the reason is that, well, they're disruptive. So do you imagine that the big institutions that get disrupted are just going to stand idly by and say, well, my time has come. I'll just go out to pasture now and usher in this new age? Of course they're not. They're going to attack with every means at their disposal, one of which is information misinformation, to hold onto their entrenched position. And the same has happened with bitcoin. And I think knowing that can help us to be less emotional sometimes in our responses and think was just to write a passage. It won't last forever. It's already starting to turn around. And the advantage is that it rewards free, independent thinking. So if you're someone who is predisposed to think for yourself, as opposed to copy and paste the opinions of other people, particularly in mainstream media, then you'll be rewarded. You'll be rewarded through the bitcoin that you invest in. But also, if you're in the energy sector, you'll be rewarded because you'll become more profitable than companies who reflexively dismiss bitcoin mining.
- [40:44]
Mm. You had mentioned that you had were talking With Troy Cross. I'm assuming this was down at the Heat Punk Summit. Were you at that?
- [40:51]
No, no. Troy and I've been talking a lot over the years. We were both in the trenches together when Greenpeace USA was launching its attack campaign against bitcoin. And so. So we're buddies for a few years back.
- [41:03]
Well, I saw that you had retweeted or shared this idea that Troy put out there, which is heat reuse is the future. Do you care to.
- [41:11]
100%.
- [41:12]
Yeah. What do you think about that?
- [41:13]
Absolutely. I wish I was at that conference because it looks amazing. And it's one of the areas of bitcoin mining that is, again, it's this completely accidental use. Who would have imagined that by creating sound money, the machines, as they went up and up and up in their ability to hash, would create more and more heat? And that heat could be useful to do something else just to show how crazy that is. I don't know of a single other industry in the world where the process of manufacturing or creating or extracting an asset has independent value to humanity. Think of a Nike shoe shop, shoe manufacturing shop. That doesn't have any value apart from creating shoes. Think about gold mining. That doesn't have any value to humanity. That has negative value to humanity other than to extract gold. But bitcoin mining, in the process of creating something valuable in bitcoin, it also creates these ancillary benefits through the process of mining itself, which are tremendously valuable to grid operators, to people who have stranded energy, and to people who want to have access to cheap heat. Now, if you look at the sources of how energy gets used around the world, more than 50% of it is for heating. More than 50%.
- [42:21]
Yeah.
- [42:22]
Now, when I say heating, I don't just mean heating up your house when it's cold. I mean heating up industrial processes. So to melt silicon or to melt steel. Now, obviously, the amount of heat that comes off the back of an S21 is not going to be enough to melt steel. At least we haven't figured out how to do that yet. But it will be enough to heat up water. It will be enough to heat up homes. It will be enough to dry timber, to heat tropical fish farms, New York bath houses. And so the applications are enormous. And the incredible thing is this is electrified heat. So everyone in the energy sector who's talking about the way we use heat is all saying, if we can find ways to electrify our heat sources, then we're on the right track. And bitcoin Heat is already coming from an electrified source. It's basically just like a big resistance heater that has this advantage that it creates sats. Now the challenge becomes how do you transport that heat? And again, when we talk about convergence, we're seeing convergence with AI in bitcoin, we're seeing convergence with energy companies in bitcoin. We're also going to see convergence in the future where a new this will be a few years off, but in the future it's not ridiculous to imagine that every single time you have a new timber drying yard you will always have bitcoin mining co located because some accountant has done the math and they've worked out that it's way more cost effective to mine bitcoin to earn sats and to recycle that heat to dry timber than to pay for that electricity to dry it off from the grid or to use natural gas to do it. It's always going to be cheaper with bitcoin because you get that revenue from mining bitcoin at the same time. So the applications are enormous. I'm tremendously excited by how we can use heat in China again. One of the reasons that it's not actually banned at all is that there's a lot of people who make good money out of tropical fish farming and they do the same thing. They will say, look, basically the deal works like this. They'll say, look, we will turn a blind eye to whatever Beijing says that you're supposed to do with bitcoin and we'll even give you a good price for electricity. All we want is we want to be able to use the heat you create for our tropical fish farm business. And bitcoin mining company says, yeah, that sounds like a good deal. We don't have to deal with central government, good rate of electricity and we weren't thinking about heat recycling anyway. So there's a natural marriage occurring and it's only going to get bigger because again, 50% of the world's energy is used for heating. We're moving towards greater supply of electric based heating anyway and it's only going to get more. And again, 2% of all Finland's heating is coming from. For district heating, it's coming from bitcoin mining already. It's already starting to scale.
- [45:01]
Yeah. You're also passionate about bitcoin being freedom money and you've made the comment that it plays a role in some autocratic regimes. Do you have any examples of this or areas that you want to kind of discuss with respect to this idea?
- [45:15]
Yeah, I'VE learned a huge amount through listening to Alex Gladstein and following the amazing work he's done. A little while ago, he and I were chatting and I said, you know what would be a really cool thing to do and that's to start quantifying how many people Bitcoin is actually helping. And he said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea, but how would you even start? And I said, yeah, you're right, it's hard. And I worked out. There's about 19 different humanitarian uses of Bitcoin. So an example would be using bitcoin. This is a very obvious one. In a country with hyperinflation to preserve families wealth. Very obvious one. A less obvious one might be a woman in Afghanistan who wants to set up a business. But because the nation state discriminates against women and says, you can only set up a business if you're a man, you can only hold a bank account if you're a man, you can only be paid wages if you're a man, or if you have the permission of your husband. For a woman who wants to work her way around the state trying to interfere with her freedom, she can do that if she has Bitcoin. So that's a tremendous application. And then another application might be, if you're a refugee and you're wanting to travel across borders, well, good luck strapping gold to you and keeping your family's wealth that way. That's not going to last long. Good luck trying to queue at an ATM and take out all your money. People tried to do that in Ukraine. There were queues hours long and they could only take out the equivalent of 100, $200. That's not going to work. If you want to take your entire family's wealth with you. And good luck transporting all that cash across borders and expecting it not to be lost or stolen along the way. But you can do it with bitcoin. So there's this incredible humanitarian benefit where any refugee anywhere in the world can use bitcoin and take it across borders. And I did some work recently to say, let's quantify that, because we know who the refugees are, we know which countries they come from, we know how many there are, there's millions of them. And we also know the bitcoin ownership rates for those countries. So from then we can come up with some approximation of how many people who are refugees are likely to have had Bitcoin and therefore would have been able to use that in a different country to set up from scratch rather than have to leave their money behind and it's already in the hundreds of thousands. So this is a massive number. So a lot of critics say, well these are just these incidental use cases and we can look at the data and say, well no they're not. They're affecting hundreds of thousands of people already. And if we project into the future as bitcoin ownership rates go up and the number of refugees is also going up, then it's going to go into the millions before the decades out.
- [47:39]
Daniel, you wrote this amazing piece recently where you lay out four different points as to why bitcoin mining is this indispensable climate action phenomenal article. Do you want to go through any of these four pieces? Or maybe the so what of the article that really kind of, that you took away from this process of. I mean you wrote a lot. There's a lot here. What would you say is your so what? And if you do want to get into all these four points, feel free to go ahead and throw it out there to everybody.
- [48:08]
Yeah, I'll go into why I wrote it. The big reason I wrote it is that rather than just continually be on the back foot trying to defend bitcoin from attack from the environmental vector, which has been the major attack vector, if you look at do a Google search and all the different ways that bitcoin has been attacked, energy and environment are 10 times more the nearest one. And the reason for that is that people care about it deeply and it's been so effective. And it's very easy to look at Bitcoin because its energy use is so transparent. What's harder to quantify to start with is its environmental benefits. So I really wanted to tell that story of how is it benefiting the environment. And when I'm talking about benefiting the environment, I'm not just talking about reducing emissions or stabilizing grids. I'm also talking about protecting biodiversity. For example, there was a park and when I say park, I don't mean like Central Park, I mean a national park which had a considerable amount of the biodiversity of all of Kenya in the Congo and Virunga National Park. And due to lack of ecotourism revenue during COVID it was facing shutdown. They were also a lot of the forests were being burnt down because people were using the wood for to turn into charcoal and use that for energy. And also the gamekeepers there, they were being shot because people wanted to poach from the area. So there are these major challenges. You know, it's life and death situation. They're also Facing bankruptcy as a park. And it was a meeting with Sebastian from, he's a French bitcoin miner who met with the park director. And they talked about using the hydro energy there to do bitcoin mining, because a lot of that hydro energy was contained. They couldn't do anything. You know, it rains a lot, it's very seasonal. And when it was the rainy season, it just all flowed over the side of the dam like it does in Bhutan, like it did in Ethiopia and a lot of in Paraguay, other parts of the world where they're also doing bitcoin mining. So they started doing bitcoin mining there. And long story short, it now is earning enough money to pay the gamekeeper's salary. It stopped the park from closure. The park director said if it wasn't for bitcoin mining, this park would have gone bankrupt. This is not from the bitcoin community. This is from the park director himself, who was not a bitcoiner, but he saw the value of bitcoin mining to protect biodiversity. So tremendous environmental advantage. And then if you look to some of the other usage, such as stabilizing grids. Texas's grid has not had another blackout since the proliferation of bitcoin mine.
- [50:34]
True.
- [50:35]
And it's not because there's fewer extreme weather events. There's been more. It's not because there's less energy use. There's more. People are moving to the state of Texas every year. The peak energy peak is higher than the year before. Why is it? It's because they have the most flexible user of energy in the world with bitcoin mining, who can power down within seconds and stabilize that grid to deliver power back. And at the same time, the amount of solar and wind has risen from 80 gigawatts up to 130 gigawatts. It's got more wind and solar than California. And it's doing it without government subsidies. It's doing it because these bitcoin mining operations are making these renewable facilities way more profitable than they otherwise would. And what does a solar and wind operator do with that additional money they're earning? Well, they do what any business owner does. They plow it back into expanding their operation, which means more solar, more wind power on the grid. But rather than creating what it does in some jurisdictions, which is as you get more solar and wind, the costs go up because you'll be having to transform your grid to hold that renewable energy, which is intermittent, and you're having to pay curtailment fees. You don't have to Upgrade the grid and you don't have to pay curtailment fees, which keeps the energy prices low. So that article I wrote was really saying let's stop just being defensive about saying Bitcoin isn't harmful. Bitcoin is positive to the environment. Let's proudly say so. But let's also be sophisticated and not just sound like we. Of course we say that because it's in our advantage. Let's back that up with data, let's back that up with case studies, let's back that up with the peer reviewed journals so that anyone, even if, and I think this is a big problem at the moment, a lot of people are still standing at the sidelines with Bitcoin because they don't believe it corresponds to their values. And it's been falsely portrayed in the media as a political instrument where if you're voting Republican or you like Donald Trump, then you like bitcoin. But if you don't, then you won't, which is complete nonsense. Again, Troy Cross has showed very clearly that bitcoin appeals across the political spectrum. That's not the story that's been told. But we've got the way to reach people across the political spectrum is that we've got to tell the story in ways which appeal to a diverse set of values. And not everyone will come will care about sound money to start with. Some people care about save this national park, some people care about it stabilize this grid, some people care about it counterbalance solar and wind intermittent energy. And the great thing is that bitcoin does all these things. So the more we can bolster up the set of stories about how it genuinely helps, the more people can find reasons to say yes to Bitcoin who are previously saying or thinking that it doesn't correspond to their values.
- [53:06]
Yeah, we're going to have a link to this article. I mean it is really done.
- [53:09]
Well, it's my unified field theory. It's a long article, goes into the details but it's, I've written it in a way where you don't have to be a, an energy expert to understand it.
- [53:18]
Yeah, well, and you bring the receipts, which I love. And I guess for me, when I'm looking at a lot of the ESG narrative, the thing that's most frustrating to me is the government is trying to incentivize energy production in a way that reduces carbon emissions. And they're in there holding all these carrots out there through policy. The thing that I think is the most ironic thing about Bitcoin is It's a real incentive. It's a real carrot that is a market force and not some policy that's written by some bureaucrat to try to create this incentive. And you talk about something, this is really frustrating to get across to anybody in the world to understand that a real free and open market force that is incentivizing the reduction of carbon emissions by using wasted energy. It's bitcoin. And, you know, we can say that and it's very easy to say it and somebody hears it and they probably roll their eyes. But that's what I love about articles. You go into a lot of detail explaining the why behind this natural market force incentive that, you know, I hope it gets a lot of readership. And again, we'll have that in the show Notes for people to read through. But bravo on the article. It is phenomenal.
- [54:28]
Thank you. And part of the reason I write them is for me, so I can then use that and synthesize it and then give presentations because there'll be a lot of people who will never read that. That's a reality. But then how do we get to those people? How do we get to people who are energy producers? Well, the way you do that is you have this wonderful bitcoin community and they find out that, hey, Daniel knows something about that, or Troy knows something about that. Let's get him to speak about this. Or Ali, who deals with solar energy and bitcoin coming together, knows about this. Let's get them together and let's create this event where we get them in front of a whole lot of energy companies, get them in front of some government officials, and we get these people to hear. And the wonderful thing is in April this year, I'm going to be in Paris speaking to journalists and investors about this. I'll be in Lisbon talking to energy companies and politicians and government officials about this. And then I'll be going up to Bedford and I'll be giving a talk.
- [55:21]
I'll see you there. I'm going to Bedford.
- [55:23]
Yeah. But the cool thing is that only one of those three events, I'll be talking to bitcoiners. The other two events, I'll be talking to people who are not bitcoiners about why bitcoin solves some of their energy problems or why, as a politician, it solves some of your problems about stabilizing grids or keeping power costs low. And the more that I can create these articles, then it's about saying, how can I synthesize and deliver that into a 10 minute message where someone who might be coming at it very anti Bitcoin, I can help them to see that it's not quite the evil that being led to believe and then very quickly start to tell the positive story so they can see how it solves some of their problems. And there's a lot of work to be done because a lot of misinformation was put out for a long time. So this is not a short game, this is a long game. But the encouraging thing is there are people setting up these events around the world all the time and more of these conversations are happening and perceptions will shift. And once they do, it'll be very fast to the point that in a few years time you could well see that every AI data center is a bitcoin mining company. Every oil extraction company is a bitcoin mining company, and most of the world's solar and wind operators are also bitcoin mining companies because they understand that to not do so would be a terrible waste of energy and money. Love it.
- [56:44]
Daniel, give people a handoff where they can learn more about you or anything else that you want to highlight.
- [56:50]
Yeah, the best way is on X. I'm also a Nostra and so my X handle is at DS Baden. Most of the tweets I go up there and sometimes I write long form articles and I always put links to them on my blog from that Twitter post as well.
- [57:05]
Amazing. We'll have links to that. We'll have links to the article that we were talking about earlier. And Daniel, thank you so much for your time. You are such a wealth of information and really enjoyed this.
- [57:14]
Thank you. It was a pleasure.
- [57:16]
Preston Pysh
Thank you for listening to tip. Make sure to follow Bitcoin fundamentals on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com this show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.