Bitcoin Turns Trash Into Treasure (Literally) - Daniel Batten (Bitcoin Talk on THE Bitcoin Podcast)

It's now becoming so untenable to continue to believe that Bitcoin is gonna be negatively environment. It's really like a heterocentricity argument. Sometimes people say, well, you know, you're just a Bitcoin and that's the reason you believe what you do. You're some Bitcoin maxi, that's why you believe it. And I say, Bitcoin maxi, nonsense. Do you have this phrase, I'm an iPhone maxi? Am I an internet using maxi?

No, I just saw the positive utility of the internet over newspapers and so I use the internet. I saw the positive utility of an iPhone over what I was using. So I use that. I see the positive utility of Bitcoin over a broken currency. I see the positive utility of Bitcoin mining over other uses of energy and the social benefits it creates that it's an obviously superior technology. And so I'm looking at it based on the data. I'm agnostic.

If you go back to the heterocentricity debate, you know, sometimes these media articles will say, well, getting this balanced perspective on Bitcoin. Well, what are you balancing? You're balancing truth and lie. Some cases in life, one side is wrong and the other side is right. And I'm very clear on this. The arguments upon which it's based that Bitcoin is bad for the environment are just fundamentally wrong. They fail to zoom out. They fail to see the trend lines.

And the moment we start to do adequate due diligence and exercise intellectual curiosity with skepticism on both sides, the conclusion is very obvious. And anyone who's spent the intellectually honest energy to understand how that works has came to the same conclusions. That guest is Daniel Batten. Daniel is a managing partner at CH4 Capital, a fund whose mission is to accelerate humanity's response to removing methane from our atmosphere. How do they do it?

By financing Bitcoin mining operations on landfills. Yes, landfills. Using methane to power the Bitcoin miners and quite literally turning trash into treasure. Daniel and I go deep into how Bitcoin mining using landfill methane actually works. But we also talk about the changing narratives around Bitcoin mining and why it's becoming increasingly impossible to keep spreading the lie that Bitcoin is bad for the environment.

We also dig into Greenpeace USA's anti-Bitcoin propaganda campaign and why it failed. If you're a Bitcoiner, you're going to love this talk. And if you're still one of those people who thinks Bitcoin is burning the planet, then I encourage you to listen. You might just learn something new. Before we dive in, I'm pleased to announce a new partner for the Bitcoin podcast, Cloaked Wireless, a privacy and security focused 5G wireless service built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners.

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Finally, if you are a Bitcoin only company interested in sponsoring another fucking Bitcoin podcast, hit me up on social media or through the website, bitcoinpodcast.net. Without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Daniel Batten. I like to keep these things fairly casual because that's just my style. And so, you know, I'm still very new with this podcasting game. So for me, it's a... Oh, you wouldn't know it. Your podcast is great. Well, I appreciate that a lot, genuinely.

It's a nice thing is, you know, I started this being like, oh, you know, jokingly like another fucking Bitcoin podcast, you know, and like it was actually gonna be... It was a great tagline. It was gonna be a whole bit. Like it was just gonna be a satirical thing. And then I was like, well, maybe I should just actually do the podcast thing and give that a try. So now here we sit today. But it's great. It's great to have you on, Daniel. Yeah, good to be here.

And I think it's an opportune time to be talking to you because I have loved seeing the massive narrative shifts that we've, I think in like the past year, I mean, even in the past six months, there's been like a palpable shift in the narrative around Bitcoin mining. And yes, you still have some people saying that, oh, well, you know, it's, you're draining a swimming pool every time you send a transaction or whatever kind of baloney they're coming up with these days.

You know, the Digiconimist style of research. But there's a lot of genuinely great research coming out, not just from Bitcoiners, but from people who enjoy fax-based approach to analysis and say, oh, maybe there's something here. And I think maybe that's a good place to start is just to go with your background a little bit. I'd love to just kick us off because I think this is your story transitions well into that conversation is who are you and how did you get here today?

Yeah, thanks so much, Walker. You're right, there's been a tremendous narrative shift. And I just feel really privileged because often you're watching history, but I think one thing we all enjoy here as Bitcoiners is we are part of creating it and you're doing that. And if I can do some small part to help create it as well, then my time's been well spent. So my background, I got interested in Bitcoin mining before I got interested in Bitcoin.

And everyone, if you, it's a great question to ask because everyone has their own entry point. And I heard about Bitcoin first from my friend, Willie Wu back in 2013. And I thought, nonsense. And then I heard again in 2017 and I thought, not nonsense, but I'm just not interested speculative asset. And I have my wife to thank as we often do as men. She had way more intelligence than I did and said, no, no, this looks good. Let's get some.

And so we did and I think we got three quarters of Bitcoin for about $3,000 in 2017. And for me, it was just set and forget. And I kind of forgot I had it. Fortunately, didn't forget the past phrase. And then around 2020, I was talking to Willie again and he was like, hey, you know, you might want to get some more. I think it's quite set up for some good price exposure. We got a little bit more then.

And in parallel to that, I'd been running climate tech funds, clean tech funds, so specifically investing in technology, which is going to have a positive ESG profile. And ESG in terms of, you know, real ESG, not in terms of the way it's been weaponized as a tour for the state. Just stuff that's generally good for people on planet. And so I was interested in that. And someone said to me, you should have a look at Bitcoin because it has a lot of potential.

It could be part, something you could look at. And that was different to what I'd heard at the time. And this is just about the time when Elon Musk's thought about Bitcoin basically took the oxygen out of the bull run and drove price down $17,000. And the China mining ban was officially around a mission reduction as well. So I was thinking, wow, on one hand, I asked the question, do I actually feel comfortable holding this asset if it's that bad for the environment?

And on the other hand, I had people from the Bitcoin ecosystem telling me, no, no, no, it's all fun, you got it totally wrong. It's good for the environment. And of course I had greenie friends and I had orange-pilling friends. I said, well, you can't both be right. I'm just gonna say shut up to both of you for now. I'm gonna do my own research.

And I think that's where a lot of people's journey start is doing your own research, not believing anyone, being skeptical of the claims that it's good for the environment, but also being skeptical of the counterclaims that it's bad for the environment, believing no one and doing your own research. As soon as I made that decision, very quickly it became apparent to me that the arguments that it was a negatively environment were myopic. They were using old data.

Sometimes they were using bad data. Often the models were fundamentally flawed. They were based on studies that had already been debunked, such as Mora et al. And it's the bullshit asymmetry principle in play, which is that it takes 10 times more effort to counteract bullshit than to create it. And as someone who has, my backstory was I was a technology entrepreneur and we had a disruptive product.

So I was familiar with what happens when you have a disruptive technology, which is someone doesn't wanna be disrupted. And someone is gonna protect their turf and someone is gonna make up fud against you to protect your turf. And we had that done against us by an incumbent. So when I saw this again about Bitcoin, I was like, oh, I get where this comes from. What's the root source of this? And the root source was competing altcoins in central bankers.

And I'm like, who gets disrupted by Bitcoin, central bankers? Well, okay. Now that doesn't mean what they're saying is ipso facto false, but it should make us very skeptical of any claims. And I just found that they didn't survive the first phase of due diligence, because I approached it from a due diligence standpoint, which is let's do due diligence and the ideas could be good for the environment, the ideas that it couldn't.

The ideas that it could be good for the environment, that she was stood a lot of due diligence. And in fact, some cases I came to realize they were true. Some cases they were theoretical truths. They hadn't been realized, but that was really my whole backstory. And then I became fascinated and I thought, hang on, this thing is amazing. It's not just that it's not environmentally harmful. We actually need this technology.

Whether you believe that a renewable transition is a good idea or not, I get that not everyone does. But it definitely enables that. It definitely makes variable renewable energy much more viable than it would be without Bitcoin mining because it's ability to uniquely counterbalance those load requirements that it places on a grid. It produces a way to be able to use stranded energy that otherwise would be completely wasted.

And it was actually on a podcast that I met my business partner, someone who reached out to me when I was talking about Bitcoin and landfill. So we've never actually met in person. This is a crazy thing. He's based in the States. I'm based in New Zealand right now. But I got a sense of how just through this Bitcoin community, you end up meeting these other people who think outside the box, who question received wisdom, who look at first principles.

And I found a community of kindred spirits who are prepared to come up with some non-obvious conclusions and who question things deeply. So that was my backstory. And that's how I kind of got into this crazy area of landfill-based powered Bitcoin mining. I love the journey because I think that that is one of, honestly, the strengths about Bitcoin because what gives Bitcoin its power?

I mean, besides like actual power, actual energy, but it's the network of people that are using Bitcoin, that are proponents of Bitcoin, that are advocating for sound money and for what we believe is the best form of sound money that has ever been discovered to this point. Perhaps somebody will invent a better one, but Satoshi really figured out something pretty incredible here.

And I'm glad you touched on the point of, in the Bitcoin space, it's obviously a very contentious issue about, okay, why are we even talking about carbon emissions at all? This is all a huge scam, it's a government scythe, it is literally just meant to create more matrices of control above you. And carbon literally doesn't matter, climate change isn't real or yes, climate change is real, but humans have absolutely no part in it. With among Bitcoiners, you get the complete spectrum.

And then to folks who are on the complete other side and I'm sure yourself you fall kind of somewhere on the middle towards that other side, which is, look, we can see that there are some changes happening. Whether or not CO2 is the most, and come, you know, driving down our CO2 production is the most effective way of combating that climate change, perhaps is up for debate, but what you're choosing to focus on is methane emissions or methane as you and the British folks call it.

I'll stick to my American pronunciation, but I think regardless of what you believe, and this is the beautiful thing, regardless of whether you believe that there's a climate emergency or climate hoax or you fall somewhere in the middle, the beauty of this is that it's all good for Bitcoin. Either way, any way you slice it, it is good for Bitcoin.

And it's good that we have people approaching it, that, you know, Bitcoiners are not a monolith and we have people approaching it from complete opposite ends of the spectrum. And I think that actual diversity, like the true diversity of opinion is one of the strengths of Bitcoin and Bitcoiners, and we should lean into that. Let's have more arguments and debates about it. That's good. It's all good for Bitcoin in the end. It's all amazing for Bitcoin.

And I agree it's a tremendous strength because you're constantly rubbing up against people who challenge your viewpoints, which is fantastic. That's what you want.

And sometimes we have vigorous debates, sometimes we agree to differ, but we all are united by one common goal, which is this incredible gift that Satoshi has bestowed upon the world called sound money, and the ancillary discovery that Bitcoin mining in itself could be the secondary gift, which is incredible because that's never really happened in any industry before, which is the means of producing the product, if you want to call it that, is valuable in and of itself.

You don't get that with a Nike shoe. A Nike shoe has value and utility in itself, but the Nike... What would you want to call it? A sweatshirt? I wanted to find another term. The place where that shoe is manufactured does not have value to society in and of itself, whereas Bitcoin mining does.

It has these incredible values to society to help counterbalance grids, to help to source out stranded renewable energy, to help to recycle heat, that we just could never have imagined in their case completely accidental benefits of this technology that just happens to have 80% of its operational costs be electricity, which means the incentive is on to get really innovative about where you can sniff out these cheap sources of electricity.

I was in Australia recently, and one of the guys on the panel, he's very pro-col, that's slightly different to my perspective on things, and it was great because we could be on stage and we say, look, we don't agree on this, that's fine, but we all agree that finding landfills to do Bitcoin mining on is a really good idea.

And whether you think it's a good idea because it reduces methane emissions, whether it reduces climate change, whether it's just hunting out cheap stranded energy, whether it's decentralizing the mining network, whether it's because methane is a health hazard and a million people a per year die prematurely because of methane exposure.

There's just so many things we can all agree are a good idea that we don't have to rub up and try and convince ourselves of things which we're never gonna convince ourselves of anyway around fundamental core beliefs. We can all say, well, that's fine, we can tolerate differences of opinion. Let's focus on the things that unite us, not the things that divide us, and that's always been my approach.

Amen, and I wanted to put that out there to start this conversation because I think, again, like you said, some people, we become very entrenched in our beliefs, right? And at a certain point, you reach a position where perhaps no amount of information is gonna sway that, but that's okay in Bitcoin, because again, all of this is good for Bitcoin at the end of the day. And so I wanted to just kind of start off the conversation with that.

And since you're mentioning kind of the methane side of things, let's dive right into that because I would love for you to talk a little bit about what you're doing now, what your focus is now because I think it's incredible. And what was your aha moment to reaching that conclusion to say, I wanna focus on capturing methane from landfills, literally turning garbage, turning trash into treasure. Like it's this incredible thing. How did you get to that?

And can you talk about what you're working on now? Yeah, so it happened for a number of different reasons. There were, I was asking about how much impact that what I was doing was having came to the conclusion. It wasn't a great deal. We started to read some of the literature about methane emissions and started to realize, wow, this is not good stuff that you want going into the air. It's not good commercially, because it's wasted power.

It's not good for health because it causes premature deaths. And it's contributing to emissions way faster than carbon dioxide is. And it's the one thing that most people agree is actually, it's not good for health, the planet, and it's not good commercially. So it kind of ticks all three boxes. So if you can do something that will reduce methane emissions, it should be a no-brainer. So why hasn't it happened?

Well, the reason it hasn't happened is we've tried to solve it by using government incentive structures and subsidies. And so that doesn't fundamentally work because you create these asymmetries where you're trying to make something which is fundamentally unprofitable, profitable, and profiting up with subsidies. That may work to a point, but how can that possibly work across the globe? You've got to get every government in unison to create the same incentive structures and subsidies.

But you might just be propagating a technology which is fundamentally unviable. Whereas we have this technology that is a very viable way to profitably mitigate methane that doesn't require any government subsidies, doesn't require any government intervention at all, in fact, other than the municipality. And that's called bitcoin mining because it just so happens that because 80% of your operational costs as a bitcoin miner are electricity, you will do crazy things that no one else will do.

You will invest capital expenditure and building gas capturing collection systems, putting gensets on these landfills in the middle of nowhere, simply to chase cheap power. Traditional data centers aren't going to do that. Not when 30% of your power cost is electricity because it's too much of a lead time before you get a return on that capital expenditure. It's going to take more than a decade. Well, you can get a return on three years, inside three years, with bitcoin mining companies.

So it actually pencils out economically. And so I went into my nerdy space and I did some spreadsheets and I ran some numbers and I went, this is great. This has got to happen. And then I found out that VSB and Energy was already doing it. I think that's cool. It's always good when you find out there's another person who's just as crazy as you are in the world. That's like, great, I'm not the only person who's had this idea. In fact, they are much further along than me.

But I thought, well, what can we contribute? And running funds, I thought, well, I'm not going to do bitcoin mining. There's people who know how to do that way better than I do. And that's not a rabbit hole I want to go down. I can find out about the economics of it. I can talk to bitcoin miners, but where we can get involved is financing them because that involves running a fund. And that's something I feel more comfortable with.

So I thought, well, it looks like a lot of these bitcoin mining companies, they could be decentralized in the network much faster, they could be getting more sources of stranded energy faster. But there's this funding gap where there's not enough novel intellectual property that a traditional VC will come in and throw some money into it, for the most part. And it's too early stage and too small for traditional private equity to throw money into it.

So I thought, well, how about we be that broker in the middle who can provide that financing, find out why they haven't invested and it's always because of risk, let's see if we can take that risk off the table to the point we get comfortable with it. And it took a little while, but we got there and we've got a team now who've pretty experienced in underwriting and pretty experienced in de-risking these sorts of propositions.

So then it just was a matter of making this a venture which made economic sense to everyone else. Also investors, the Bitcoin mining company and the landfill operator. And once we got to those magic numbers starting to work out, it was like, well, let's pull the trigger and go for it. We've now got the capital in place and out, it's a matter of finding more sites. So we're on this global hunt, where we're sniffing out trash.

I've been joked to be when I say, look, my job is to do two things, find cash and find trash. We found the cash, we found the capital investment, now we need to find the trash. And that's proving not as simple as it would seem because there's a very particular type of landfill that we're targeting to start with. Because like a lot of things, you wanna cut your teeth on something which is as simple a proposition as possible.

Now, Bitcoin mining on landfills is not simple, but there are degrees of complexity. You don't wanna start on an open dump. You wanna start on a modern landfill, for example. And so there's a particular profile we're looking for for that first site so we can really prove the model. And from there, we can scale out fast.

But like a lot of things, getting that first one can take a little longer and we're being patient rather than rushing in there and trying to convince ourselves we can make it work when it's the numbers are telling us it can't. I just, I love this idea because it's such a difficult, okay, you are gonna be taking methane that is produced through the natural process of decomposition in these landfill sites. And you are gonna, I'm assuming clean that a little bit.

Maybe we can get into like the actual technicals of how that works, but you're gonna clean it a little bit. You're gonna run it through a generator. You gotta complete it. And then you're running through a generator, you're turning it into electricity and you are pumping that electricity into Bitcoin miners who are hashing. Now, it's really hard to try and steelman the opposite case of like, okay, how could this be bad?

Like how could somebody come and say, well, actually, this is somebody else, because nobody else is gonna be mining, or excuse me, not mining. Nobody else is gonna be wanting to set up their operations on top of a landfill. Only Bitcoin miners are crazy enough to say, well, the power's cheap, so yeah, I'll do it. So there's no other, well, this electricity could go elsewhere. Right now it's pretty much going nowhere.

I know there are some landfills that exist now that are capturing that methane and they're turning into electricity. And maybe if they're hooked up to the grid, they're able to sell some of that into the grid. But I think that's probably the exception, not the rule. So, you know, yeah. So you're absolutely right. You captured it perfectly.

Some will be able to sell to the grid, and when they can, that's probably their better option, because they'll get paid more by selling it to the grid and selling it to a Bitcoin miner. The problem is, you're absolutely right. And many options, that's not possible, because the grid's not set up to handle that amount of megawatts coming onto the grid. It's gonna need a major substation upgrade. It's gonna cost maybe 10 million, 20 million plus to do it. And there goes your project viability.

So it really is stranded energy. And that's at least half the landfills in the world. That's a lot of landfills. So what are you gonna do with them? Well, there's been no other use, apart from you could turn it into renewable natural gas and you could try and ship it somewhere. But again, unless you've got an incentive, and you do in America, so that does make it artificially viable, but in most places in the world, you don't. And so it's not.

And the purity that's required of that natural gas is a lot. And you gotta transport it somewhere. And in most cases, you're better turning it into electrons, in other words, electricity, than in having it as molecules. And that's where Bitcoin mining companies come into their own. But you're right. To try and steal man the opposite point of view.

Yeah, I have a lot of environmentalists NGOs will say, well, surely there must be someone else who can use it, as if Bitcoin mining companies are automatically the worst possible user and the last possible resort that you grumpily begrudgingly accept if no one else can do anything with it. And people believe that because they've never had the use of Bitcoin presented to them, and they haven't yet shown the intellectual curiosity to ask what it might be.

And that's a function of what they've read in the mainstream media, which is not only not presented the news case, but is explicitly told everyone that there isn't one, apart from speculative asset. And for the people who believe that as their source of wisdom, that's their conclusion. And so all they know is number one, it has no use. Number two, it's bad for the environment, because that's what they've been told. And so it's natural they'd try anything possible to try and find another user.

Now, of course, that's false. It is incredibly useful when it's good for the environment. But putting that to one side, even if that went true, there is no other potential user of that electricity on side. There really is. I mean, it's this beautiful kind of superpower that Bitcoin miners have where it's just, they want cheap electricity.

And they are willing to and can set up without all the additional infrastructure that's required to be able to sell to the grid or to be able to set up any other sort of operations there. They are uniquely positioned to gobble up that electricity that probably wasn't gonna be converted to electricity without them.

It was probably just gonna be either vented or flared and burned off, both of which are not ideal, flaring it slightly better than just letting it pump into the atmosphere, but I love this approach. And maybe could you walk through just a little bit for anyone that would like to nerd out on this slightly? How does the actual process work? You mentioned you're looking for certain types of more modern landfills.

Can you talk a little bit more about the specifics of what that looks like and what you look for? Yeah, totally. In terms of learning out, if you like engineering and chemistry and physics, go and see a power generation operation on a landfill, it is a joy. I took my 15-year-old daughter there to a landfill and she just loved it. She was studying environmental science and she said, well, I learned much more from that visit than I did in a day of school. I said, well, of course you did.

I talked to the meeting where we're talking to the landfill owner and she was on site, just lapping in everything because you're seeing, it's incredible to see this garbage heap. And then, as you say, decomposition of matter without the presence of air, organic matter will cause methane. And then you have these things called vertical well shafts. So what happens in a modern landfill that doesn't happen on a trash heap?

An open dump is you have, if you've ever seen a landfill being built, the first thing you'll see is these big structures going straight up in the air vertically and they're well shafts. And there may be 20, 30 meters and what they'll be doing is they will be letting the methane get out of the landfill.

And the reason you got to get the methane out of the landfill is health and safety because if you're driving heavy equipment over the top of the landfill and suddenly there's a methane bubble and it normalizes, then that's dangerous. Secondly, as you know, methane can explode. So it's not good to have these things catching on fire.

So for health and safety, on a modern landfill, you always have these perforated vertical well shafts that take the landfill gas and get it out of the landfill into the air and then it's like, right, great, problem solved, it's in the air. Well, no, it's not solved because it's a horrendous emission. 85 times more warming than carbon dioxide, over a 20 year period, 84 times more warming.

Anyone on a six mile radius has been exposed to elevated levels of methane, which cause upper and lower respiratory illnesses. And the poor sods who work on that landfill, of course, are getting exposed to it chronically. So what we do is we say, okay, we will literally like put a lid on the jar, we'll cap those perforated vertical well shafts and there might be hundreds of them on a large landfill. And then we'll pipe it.

And then as you said, we'll clean it, purify it, take out some of the nasties such as the siloxane. So they don't go through into the generator. And then you have to compress it because unlike natural gas that comes out of an oil well or a gas well, it doesn't come out with any great pressure. So you've got to create some pressure before we can send it to the generator. And you've also got to take up the moisture because generators don't like moisture. Moisture stops things burning.

So you've got to dehydrate it. You have these things called chillers that will take that out. So you've got three pieces of equipment, plus your pipes. Then you're ready to send it to a generator. And those generators, they're big, often they're caterpillars or genbucker generators. They're about a megawatt plus of power, which is enough to power about 1,000 homes. And we talk about megawatts. So a small landfill might be two megawatts.

A large one or a medium sized one might be four to eight megawatts. A really large one might be 30 megawatts. So you could have a whole array of generators sitting on this landfill generating electricity. And then next to these generators, you've got your Bitcoin mining units in these mobile hash hearts or in these things that look like shipping containers or our shipping containers. And then it's soaking up that electricity that's been provided at a super low cost. So it's incredible.

You're literally, as you say, you're seeing trash being turned into digital gold on site. And it's all been fueled by the consumption fueled malinvestment of the feared economy. Because that's where all our waste in our consumption goes and we're turning into Bitcoin. It's poetic. I love it so much.

And I think this is one of those things again where no matter where you fall on the climate debate, we can all agree that if you are a Bitcoiner, I'm sure you would agree with the statement that fiat money incentivizes over consumption of a bunch of shit that we don't need. And where does all that shit end up? It ends up in landfills. It ends up in landfills. We know once you see it and it's out of mind, out of sight. Yeah, it's pushing those landfills.

And so I think we can all agree on that no matter where you fall. And we can all also agree that you don't want to be breathing in methane. If you do, please go and stand on a uncapped, near an uncapped vent and breathe it in deeply if you think it's fine. But no matter what you think about CO2 and its effect, I think we can again all come to an agreement that the methane is really not desirable to be breathing in for anyone.

So again, you're at this beautiful intersection where we all agree on multiple parts of this problem, no matter where you fall in this debate. And now it's like nobody else is going to do this. And nobody else is going to especially do it economically. Like again, without massive subsidies, which as I completely agree with you, subsidies are just distortions of natural price signals. They will create overinvestment in certain areas, malinvestment.

And we can see this throughout the relatively short but getting longer history of fiat. Anytime we subsidize things, look, I was talking to someone the other day, corn as an example in the US in the 1970s, we subsidized the heck out of it. And then we had tons of extra corn. And we ended up creating beautiful things like high fructose corn syrup and all these other things.

So there's these ripple effects from subsidies as well, because all that malinvestment creates bad incentives that propagate through the system in unforeseen ways. This is pure free market Bitcoin miners saying we want cheap power. And a landfill can give it to us. And nobody else wants it. So if I can ask, what is the typical price? Because obviously the landfill operators are probably pretty happy about this too, I would assume, because they're going to be getting paid.

What are you typically paying for the electricity at these sites? You're seeing around about $10 per megawatt hour, rather. So in other words, one penny per kilowatt hour. So very cheap, about the cheapest you can ever get. Now, of course, to the Bitcoin miner, that's not the real cost, because we've also got the generators. They've got the gas capture and collection. So the real cost is more like $0.3.9 per kilowatt hour, or $39 per megawatt hour.

But that's still at the bottom third of what Bitcoin mining companies are paying. So again, it's a great deal all around. You've got happy Bitcoin miners getting cheap electricity. They're getting to monetize an asset, which basically turned pollution into an asset, which is completely stranded, which they had no other user for. Bitcoin mining company wins, because they get cheap power. The Bitcoin mining network wins, because it becomes more distributed and more resilient.

And we win because we finance the Bitcoin mining companies to bring more hash power into the network. Speaking of hash power, Bitcoin miners around the world are steadily hashing toward the Bitcoin halving. So now is a great time to get your Bitcoin off exchanges and into your own self custody. Head to bitbox.swiss. Slash Walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source, Bitcoin only, Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.

Then again, get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self custody. The Bitbox O2 is easy as hell to use, whether you are new to Bitcoin or a seasoned psychopath. It's Bitcoin only, and it's fully open source. You can head to their GitHub and verify for yourself. There is no need to trust me. Plus, when you go to bitbox.swiss. Slash Walker and use promo code Walker, not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this fucking podcast. So thank you. I absolutely love it.

And for anyone, I don't know if we actually said the name of your fund, but it's CH4 Capital at CH4 Capital. And CH4Capital.com I think is the URL right for anyone who wants to go check it out. It's very cool. And I think again, these are the types of initiatives that help to completely shift the narrative around Bitcoin mining in such a way that it's inarguable.

And one thing that Alex Gladstein said in his recent stranded piece, which was really excellent, and he was looking at Malawi and different places in Africa, but he made the point that if you are not mining Bitcoin, you're wasting energy. And I love that framing of it because it's true. We waste so much energy. We waste so much raw energy through flaring or through stranded energy that could be captured like at landfills.

We waste so much electricity through curtailment because there's nowhere for it to go and because there's intermittent power that's provided by wind and solar.

There is so much waste in this system and Bitcoin miners seem really naturally positioned to not only benefit from the waste in the system by buying up that waste, but also to help stabilize the system overall and to help again, as his whole piece was about stranded energy, to harness stranded energy in places that would never get the investment otherwise. And I think that that's just such a, it's such a beautiful thing.

And this brings me to another point, which I think you and I will both enjoy talking about, which is one of the biggest critics of Bitcoin mining of late, which has been Greenpeace USA. And I wanna clarify Greenpeace USA, not Greenpeace overall. It is the USA division that took $5 million in lobbying money from Ripple executive chairman, Chris Larson, and used it to create the cleanup Bitcoin, hashtag change the code campaign.

And you have been a harsh critic of them, of again, Greenpeace USA, and because you are a self-proclaimed environmentalist, I think perhaps you'd, I don't know if you did some work with Greenpeace in the past, but you just, you see, so I'd love your perspective on that. I read your excellent rebuttal to Greenpeace's, I think it was July 2023. You did a great rebuttal like point by point of this report they issued. I read that on the show because I just thought people should hear this.

I hope you can feel my pain. I could be good. But look, it's hard and people like Troy Cross or Margot Paez or myself, we don't enjoy doing this. It's like, oh really, again, but it's necessary. It's proof of work. And you get so many things coming in, it's the same old stuff. It's not even particularly intellectually stimulating. At least if they were good, I often say Bitcoin deserves better critics because the arguments are, they're not intelligible arguments.

They are so anchored in bad data, old data, basic misapprehensions or misunderstandings. And what do you find out when you go down this Bitcoin mining rabbit hole, well, backup, when you go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, you realize one thing very fast and that is the population at large is financially illiterate. And I don't mean financial literacy in terms of Robert Kiyosaki understanding where to put passive income. I mean, basic, what is money?

And then you go down the Bitcoin mining rabbit hole and you realize that not only is the population financially illiterate, they're also energy illiterate. And so you're dealing with these two forms of illiteracy. And then you're arguing, it's like arguing, I mean, this will sound very insulting and patronizing, but it's the best analogy that I can think of. It's like arguing with five year olds.

Because you don't have that base level of literacy in terms of how energy works that you can actually have an intelligible debate. So it's exhausting, it's tiring and it's necessary. And so yes, GreenPCUSA talk it upon themselves to launch this campaign to try to tidy up Bitcoin. Their hearts are in the right place. I'll give them that. They really sincerely believe that they're doing something great for the world. Unfortunately, it's anchored in ignorance.

It's been fueled by, as we know, central bank FUD and altcoin FUD in concept. And so the irony is you now have this, GreenPCUSA used to be where Bitcoin is today. They were the challenges, they were the mavericks, they were the rule breakers. You think back to the 1980s and I'm odd enough to remember them.

You think of these intrepid activists on these tiny little boats stopping wailing from occurring in the South Pacific or trying to stop the French from doing nuclear testing in the South Pacific. I'm not talking about using nuclear energy. I don't have a problem with that, but I did have a big problem with the French choosing to test atomic bombs and atolls in New Zealand's backyard in the 1980s. And a lot of Kiwis said, well, if it's that safe, why don't you do it in Paris then?

And so GreenPCUSA was really leading the charge in stopping a lot of these activities and did some fantastic work over a long period of time.

What's happened more recently with particularly GreenPCUSA, which is really unfortunate, is it's being captured by a need to bring in more financing and has chosen to do that, not through grassroots activism, but through basically corporate sponsorship, which it says, when you become a member of GreenPCUSA, it says, we will not, it's funded by people like you. It's funded by grassroots. We don't take on corporate sponsorship. So there's an integrity gap there.

And then in terms of the source material for this campaign, if you dig into it, I did a post a little while ago that talked about derivatives. And one of the problems in the global financial crisis is you had all these derivatives, which were linked to these toxic assets, mortgage-based backed securities. And then you get derivatives of these securities and derivatives of the derivatives.

And in information exchange, the same thing happens, where you look at the sources and it looks like you got maybe 15 sources saying Bitcoin's bad for the environment, but you look at the original source, the original piece of knowledge, comes back to the same place, Mora et al, or Alex DeVries, every time, every time. So you think you have 15 independent sources of information. Actually, you have one source of misinformation.

And the incredible thing is that the central bankers in their belief in their own almighty power have not even bothered to cover their tracks. I mean, they haven't even bothered to make it opaque that Alex DeVries is an employee of a central bank. I mean, if that is an arrogance, I don't know what is. I mean, I'll see, if I was this central banker, I would at least try to make that a little bit more opaque. Right, add a couple layers of abstraction or something.

Exactly, about where the funding source is coming from. So that is the origin. So it's funded by the Ripple executive chair and that's where the economic fuel comes from. And the information fuel comes from central banks. And so you have this, again, what started off as a grassroots organization who now has been completely captured by large vested financial interests, launching a campaign against Bitcoin, get out of here. So I smelled a rat pretty early.

And as someone who likes to geek out on the maths, I was affronted by the appalling quality of just numeracy. You can add mathematical literacy to that as well. Andrew Bailey points out, when he looked at the Morro-Et or study, that they, on one of the access, they'd accidentally put gigawatts rather than megawatts or terrawatts rather than gigawatts. So it was like a 1,000 level mistake. So that's what we're up against. We're not up against good, robust science.

We're up against stuff that has been widely debunked, that is infantile or so steeped in vested interest, it's just not even funny. Using metrics that have been designed on purpose to try and make something look bad. One of the things that gets me the most, and this is one that Greenpeace USA have recycled constantly, but not only them, but all the mainstream news media, is this idea, you mentioned swimming pools.

Every time you mine a Bitcoin, you've drained 15 swimming pools or whatever your latest number is. And okay, this is the way it works. This is the way, if you're wanting to create misinformation, then this is how you do it. First of all, you look to see whether there's some genuine legitimate cause for saying it's bad for the environment. When you find out that's no longer the case, then you've got to invent metrics.

And so what you do in this case is you say, okay, well, how many transactions is Bitcoin processing? Okay, and what's its energy? Okay, so if we divide the amount of energy by the number of transactions, we've come up with a metric, which is the energy use per transaction. Okay, and now let's do the same thing for water and do the same thing.

Now you ignore, of course, the layer two network completely, which can process billions of transactions because that would fly in the face of being able to say nasty things against Bitcoin. So ignore that. You let people believe that the only way to do a transaction is on the blockchain itself. And you also lead people to believe that the energy consumption comes from the transactions, which of course it does not, comes from mining. And then you can create all these sorts of funny metrics.

It's a little bit like, say I wanted to further the argument that New Zealand should have more sheep to grow its economy. Then what I'd do is I'd find out, okay, how many sheep does New Zealand have? Okay, it's 30 million sheep, why is 50 million sheep? Great, what's its GDP? Well, it's $100 billion, okay, whatever it is. Okay, so let's divide the GDP of the country by the number of sheep and come up with the GDP per sheep. It was a few thousand dollars.

Then I say, great, so now that we've worked out how much GDP it has per sheep, then if we double the amount of sheep, we'll double the size of the economy. Well, no you won't because these two variables are in no way connected. And it's the same way with energy usage and transactions. You've just divided one number by another. There are no way connected whatsoever to try and make out the appearance that what?

That as Bitcoin processes more transactions, the amount of energy will exponentially grow. That is the fear that it's designed to create. And it's all anchored on basic mathematical fud. So yeah, go ahead. Oh, sorry, I was just gonna say, the other piece to that is that it completely ignores the amount of value transferred, of course. You're breaking it down just in this per transaction metric, failing to mention that of course, block space is scarce also.

So you can't model that out into the future as if it will, transactions will continue to grow exponentially. It's just flawed on so many levels, but it ultimately comes down to just emotional propaganda. It's giving just enough little tidbits of numeric data to be able to say, to give the semblance of legitimacy. And then the rest of it is just emotional propaganda. Oh, and the comparisons too. Well, it's using more than an entire country. That can't be right.

And it's like, well, okay, if you wanna play that game, let's look at Christmas lights, let's look at video games, let's look at the entire massive porn industry. We can look at anything you want. You wanna really play, let's look at the military industrial complex. Let's look at how much we pump into that. But of course that's not the game they're trying to play. It's, as you said, they want to just mislead to steer the conversation the direction they want. They're not concerned with facts.

And I think that's been the most frustrating thing I'm sure for you as somebody who is actually an environmentalist who has worked with Greenpeace in the past, but for all Bitcoiners who see these campaigns come out and say, well, come on, we're doing this again. I thought we were past this. I thought we were over this. It's not even new FUD. It's just old recycled FUD. That's the same old FUD. Yeah. It's zombie FUD. It's like the transactions per metric has come up as a zombie form.

It used to be energy per transaction. That didn't work out so well. It got debunked, so now it's water use per transaction, which has flawed for exactly the same reason. But it gets headlines. It got into about 10 different mainstream news articles at the end of last year, well done, Alex DeVries. And one thing they've done very well, credit where credit's due, is got a fantastic publicity machine behind them.

So every time that one of these, they're not even peer-reviewed scientific publications. They're commentaries. But every time there's a whole PR machine, of course, the headlines are so great, right? Which headline is going to sell better? Bitcoin is cleaning up landfills, or Bitcoin uses a swimming pool of water every time you process a transaction. It's the one that creates a greater moral outrage that will fit the business model of the click-based, mainstream news media.

So they love this stuff. And it also fits into the, in some cases, and we know, because we've talked to people, journalists who work there, or used to work there, you may only write negative articles about Bitcoin philosophy of that particular form of corporate media. Are there actually publications that have that stated policy like you cannot write a positive? It's not stated in writing, but it's implicit because, OK, so I can tell the story now.

So, Joe Hall, who formerly, Coin Telegraph, formerly Bloomberg. Love Joe. Yep, fantastic work. He tried to publish a number of articles about looking at the social and environmental merits of Bitcoin every single time Stonewalled. And basically, the answer that he got was, you wouldn't, reading between the lines, you will never be able to publish one of these articles here. Forget it. That's why he left and started working for a Coin Telegraph and now he's doing his own thing. Good on him.

But a lot of people, a lot of journalists, don't do that. A lot of journalists will stay there because they need that paycheck. And we'll continue to either not write articles or they'll write articles which fit the narrative. Or they'll write them, but they'll get edited so they're totally different to what they started out writing. The headline will change. The takeouts will change. They'll insert some, but we all know Bitcoin is really bad for the environment.

But here's some slight and mediating caveat, which is completely different to what they tried to write in the first place. So we're up against it. Now, having said that, there is good news. The good news is Financial Times has started writing positive pieces on Bitcoin, even environmentally. The Independent has started writing positive articles on Bitcoin. Forbes Magazine has started writing a lot of positive stuff environmentally. On Bitcoin.

And a lot of these mainstream media sources are now starting to go balanced in terms of some fud, balanced with some truths. Or they've actually started to go completely the other direction, publish a lot of the real social and environmental positive stories about Bitcoin, which is fantastic. And Forbes has been one of them. They've been really leading the way.

But not only that, we've also had environmental magazines like Anthropocene or Renewable Energy Magazine or Recharge or Sustainability Magazine. One Green Planet. Four different environmental magazines or renewable energy magazines have now published positive stories on Bitcoin and the environment. And the reason this is happening is because the narrative is also shifting immensely in the scientific literature.

The early junk science that was written has now been thoroughly debunked in peer reviewed publications and rebuttals. And in the last 18 months, there were only two scientific publications that looked at the negative aspects of Bitcoin. There were six that looked at the positive environmental externalities. That's huge.

In addition to which we've had three independent reports, Institute of Risk Management, KPMG, Te Kura Foundation, that have come out saying Bitcoin helps to bring online stranded renewable energy. Bitcoin helps to stabilize grids. Bitcoin helps to make variable renewable operators more profitable because they can get money for their operations where otherwise it would be wasted and put into the ground. So this is happening in large volumes and large quantities now.

So the reason the narrative is shifted is the ground is shifted. People are waking up to the truth. But also because since the China ban, that did bring about a lot of changes in terms of how Bitcoin was fueled. And the reality was pre-China ban, yeah, a lot of Bitcoin was fueled by coal. Whereas now, that's no longer the case. It's predominantly powered by falling water, by hydro. And so that's a complete flip. And that's happened within a period of 2 and 1 half to three years.

And so now the only way that you can continue to have one of those two scientific publications was put out by UN University. I didn't know there was a UN University, apparently there is. It's about the 7,500th ranked university in the world. And they put out a paper which claims that Bitcoin was using 60-something percent fossil fuel. Well, guess what? It was in the study period they mentioned, which was 2020 to 2021.

So these articles have had to use really old data in order to try and prop up this failing narrative that is predominantly powered by fossil fuels. The other thing is that it brings new, breathes life into new fossil fuel, into old fossil fuel plants. That brings them back online. Nonsense. I looked into that in detail. I contacted the people. I looked at the original security filings of that.

This power station, Green Energy it was, in Lake Seneca, I'm sure you know about this, but for those of you who don't. So this is one that a lot of the environmental NGOs love to use as example of how these dinosaur fossil fuel plants that Bitcoin is breathing life back into, and they're coming back onto the grid. That came back on the grid, not to mine Bitcoin. It came back onto the grid because Green Energy wanted to provide services to the grid.

They wanted to help stabilize it, and they wanted to bring on some baseload gas energy. And that was done three years before they even had the idea of doing any form of Bitcoin mining. After having done that for a little while, they said, you know what? It doesn't really make sense for us to always be selling to the power of the grid. Sometimes we don't get very much for it. Sometimes it's negatively priced. Well, what if we mined Bitcoin?

So that when it's negatively priced, we mined Bitcoin with it instead. So they used it to do energy arbitrage. But it was never brought back onto the grid to mine Bitcoin in the first place. And the last large coal-based off-grid supplier, that was Hardin, Montana, which was delivering 100 megawatts of power to Marathon, that went offline in 2022. That's old news. So again, a lot of these narratives are based on things which may have been true at a point in time.

They may have a seed of truth, heavily distorted, but they're no longer true. The world has moved on, but the narrative has not completely caught up yet. And certainly a lot of the environmental NGOs have not caught up with the shift in the narrative, but also the shift in the data. And I think time moves in a very strange way in the Bitcoin world, right? Things are seemingly very accelerated. Although we Bitcoiners, we have this low time preference, things seem to move really quickly.

The technology cycle within Bitcoin is very rapid. And the media cycles and let's say the activist cycles are just quite a bit behind that. But you get to this point, which is what you're describing now, where in order to write something negative about Bitcoin mining, you are forced to cherry pick. You have to cherry pick and you have to use old data. Because if you don't cherry pick, if you take a holistic view, and if you look at current data, well, then the conclusion is very clear.

Doft. Like you're done. You've got to change your thesis to be, wow, Bitcoin mining is actually good for the planet, is good for stabilizing electricity grids. Okay, well, I lost my clickbait, but maybe we can make positive clickbait fashionable again, headlines that say something good instead of just all this doom porn. But I wanted to touch on one other thing that you mentioned a little while ago with just the water usage thing.

Because I was on your website recently and I saw that you actually had an article titled, How Bitcoin Can Help Nations Out of Water Scarcity. Now this flies in the face of these claims that Bitcoin is going to dry up every swimming pool in the world or whatever they're saying. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think that's a fascinating angle as well. And not directly with what CH4 Capital is working on, but a really fascinating idea for people to think about.

So one of the big issues that you have with countries which have water poverty is it's expensive to try to gain access to water. How are you going to do it? And in a lot of these particularly Arab countries, African countries, the answer is it's going to be desalination. A desalination is really expensive and it's very energy intensive. Well, this is something which Bitcoin mining can really help. Now what's the form of energy you need for desalination? You need a lot of heat.

What else produces heat, I wonder? 95% of the energy that is used in Bitcoin mining is converted into heat. And this is an incredible area, which again, it's not related to CH4 Capital, but it's related to me as a proponent of Bitcoin, which I just find fascinating, which again is this accidental benefit. From one point of view, a Bitcoin mining rig is just this big resistance heater that happens to mine Bitcoin.

And if you look at it that way and you go, well, most energy usage in industrial processes, anywhere in the world, is to produce heat. And what if we used the exhaust heat of something which is profitable in and of itself, i.e. ASICs, and we recycled that heat and got a secondary benefit of lowering our heating bill, which is also going to lower emissions, which is also going to make the operation more profitable.

And in the case of desalination, so what you can do there is you can use the exhaust heat that comes from the Bitcoin mining rigs and you can use that to provide the heat, which is required for a lot of the desalination effort. Now, in addition to that, Bitcoin mining companies are not stopping there. And there is a, I can't say much about it, but there's a project going on right now, which is looking to create more innovation within the very way that desalination is done.

And this is a Bitcoin mining company who is actually sponsoring that R&D, which is incredible. So much in the same way that the original accelerant that solar panels got was from NASA, it was from the space industry. Remember, the space industry was supposed to be terrible for the environment, right? What turns out the space industry is what gave us photovoltaic industry.

We wouldn't have had it without the space industry because they drove 30 years of innovation to get the cost down to the point where it actually made sense for residential users and commercial users on planet Earth. And in the same way, Bitcoin mining companies are driving innovation in these incredible areas such as desalination to see how we can do it fundamentally more effectively.

And then if you look at other uses of heat as well, I was speaking to a person who's doing a 13 megawatt operation in China right now. Yeah, mining in China still occurs apparently. Back to about 15% of global hash rate comes from China still. So like a lot of things, you can't ban Bitcoin, you just can't. And the reason that it's still happening is that the provincial governments love it. I'll give you an example. So there is a lot of fish farms in China to feed a huge population and love fish.

So to do that, you need to heat up the water to grow a certain sort of fish and that requires electricity. So provincial governments have worked out that, okay, officially it's banned. So what can we provide to a Bitcoin mining company that's valuable? We can provide them a guarantee that we won't dox them to central government and we'll sign them its paper and we'll give them the assurance that it's not in our interest to do that because we're actually benefiting from you financially.

And what do we get in return? Well, rather than having to spend our own money to heat up the water for fish farms, we'll have in the contract that we are allowed to use free all of your exhaust heat to heat up our fish farms. And again, 95% efficiency, it's basically removed their entire electricity bill from the equation. So fish farmers love it, provincial government loves it, Bitcoin mining companies love it.

And again, it's one of these novel cases where the heat exhaust from Bitcoin has been used for desalination, timber drying, fish farms, heating New York bathhouses, residential heating, residential hot water heating. I mean, the cases just go on and they're extraordinary and we're still discovering more and more cases. But when you think that so much of the world's energy is industrial heating and Bitcoin provides a solution to that, which is much more economically viable, fully electrified.

We're only just starting to scratch the surface in what will become possible. But if you can imagine a future, I wouldn't be surprised if in the future, wherever you have any industrial process that requires heat, you have Bitcoin mining going on. It's a future that I would like to see.

And that's, you know, I love all of those examples because I think for people who are, if you're listening to this and you're maybe just starting your journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and maybe you're still skeptical and you think that you've read some articles that say Bitcoin is bad for the environment and it's used by criminals and all of these other things, I hope some of these examples that you've just given Daniel give people a little bit of pause to say, well, if this is true

and these are things that are possible in Bitcoin, well, what else have they been lying about with Bitcoin? I think that's the journey a lot of Bitcoiners go down. The deeper you go down that Bitcoin rabbit hole, the more you start to understand about what Bitcoin enables, both at the mining level, at the monetary level, at the censorship resistant transaction level, at all of these different tiers where Bitcoin operates. And then it starts to make you question so many things.

And you start to realize that, you know, there's a lot of Gell-Man amnesia in the world today. You know, you're reading the paper and you read an article about something that you say, well, that's just, I'm an expert on this topic. And I know that that journalist is laying out a bunch of bullshit here. Then you flip the page to something you're not an expert on. And you say, oh, well, I don't know much about this. I'll just have to take their word for it. It's a pervasive problem, I think.

And it's one of the things that I love about Bitcoiners, is that they're willing to go on these multidisciplinary, separate, but kind of connected rabbit hole journeys into Bitcoin mining, into energy, into all of these other things. And energy is a fascinating rabbit hole that I've only begun to peer into. And it's, I think that you're right about the illiteracy piece too.

That not only are we most people monetarily and financially illiterate, or maybe they're financially illiterate, but monetarily illiterate, because money is harder to understand than finance in many ways. But energy, they are certainly illiterate. People think that, oh, well, I just plug in something into the wall, and that's, I'm getting good clean electricity. They don't begin to think, where does that come from? What are the sources of that?

When you're charging up your electric vehicle, how was that electricity generated? Also, how was that electric vehicle made? What were the sources that went into that? What does the make up of the grid that produced all that energy, all that electricity that was used? What were its inputs? And so I hope that this conversation makes people think a little bit deeper and start to question some of those things, start to go down some of these rabbit holes, because I think it's just fascinating.

And I'm so glad there are folks like you who are looking at these really hard to argue with use cases of Bitcoin mining. Because again, when you come back to trash, that's just wonderful. Like we can all agree we would like to not have methane bubbling out of our giant pits of fiat trash. So let's turn that into digital gold. I just, I think it's fantastic.

And you know, I was kind of curious if you can indulge me, because you obviously, you have conversations with a lot of folks across the spectrum of environmental beliefs. When you're talking to somebody, maybe an old colleague, you know, an old comrade in arms who is, you would say, very far to the, I don't want to sound at all draugatory, let's say like a very, very tree hugger type. And I mean that with the, I love trees. That's okay. I identify as a tree hugger. So no, thanks.

You know, and I'm so sad that the New York Times is deciding to cut so many of them down just to print paper as a sidebar. I believe that. Yeah, I was looking at the Cambridge Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index and one of the comparisons they make is to the pulp and paper industry, which consumes something like two and a half or three times as much energy as Bitcoin mining. And we live in a digital age. It's time to stop printing those newspapers and murdering trees. But that's beside the point.

What is your, your, your pitch about Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining when you're having conversations with people who are hardcore tree huggers? Like how do you start to bring them around and, and, and change their perception a little bit? How does that conversation go? Yeah, it's a great question. The first thing is that I let go of my attachment that I'm going to create any change at all. And which is important. And also I am prepared to walk away from the conversation early.

Because if you work out that someone is just so entrenched, it's like, think of it like some baking you put in the oven. You know, are there beliefs? Are they still in the mixing bowl or have they baked the cookies? Are they in the oven? Are they hard baked? At that point, if you say to someone, hey, you actually missed out one of the ingredients in that cookie, they're going to do everything possible to tell you, no, I didn't. The cookies, please just find, eat them.

Whereas if they're still in the bowl, they might be a little bit more open to that suggestion because the cost of them challenging their mistake is much less at that point. So once you've invested a lot of your life essence, a lot of your time, discretionary time into fighting Bitcoin for two years, the cookies are hard baked. And so you've got a high vested interest in not believing that the, your opponent's view is correct. So that's hard.

So the first thing is to really just some awesome questions. And I might start off just by not saying anything, but just being curious and saying, okay, that's interesting. I can understand why you'd think that. And in my case, I say, and I can say this quite authentically, because there was a point in my journey when I believed that Bitcoin was bad for the environment. So I share that. And I say, hey, look, that's actually the starting point that I had myself.

I've since spent some time researching that and have come up with some different conclusions. Are you interested to hear what I've learned? And depending on how they answer that will show me whether there's genuine intellectual curiosity or not. If there's not, then it's like, okay, well, let's agree to differ next. That's fine.

But if there is curiosity and often there is, because it scrambles people's brains and they go, what you're saying that you care about the environment and you agree with Bitcoin. I didn't think that was possible. I thought the two are mutually exclusive. And now you have a warm bodied human being in front of front that's proven that you can no longer believe that you can either be pro environment or pro Bitcoin, but not both. So that scrambles people's brains a little bit to start with.

And I say, yeah, I actually used to campaign for Greenpeace, in fact, and they're like, what? And I say, yeah, and and I ran two climate tech funds and they're like, what? And I say, yeah, and it's because of that that I'm looking at Bitcoin and now their brains totally scrambled. And this is all true. This is exactly how I came to Bitcoin.

And now in that state of brain scrambling, I say, look, if you're interested, I can tell you the journey that I walked through and how I concluded, categorically, this is net positive environmentally and socially. If you're interested, if you're not, that's fine. Not attached. And then by the stage, you're kind of generally pretty curious and I'd say, well, often I start with the social benefits, not the environmental ones. And that's important.

Because a lot of the objection to Bitcoin is that, look, if we think something has utility, we kind of turn a blind eye to how much energy it uses, right? It's like Christmas lights, they use energy, but they give joy to children and family. So that's OK. You tumble dryers, they use a lot of energy, but it really sucks to hang out your clothes when it's the middle of winter in Auckland. So that's OK. So I'll kind of pretend that's.

But Bitcoin mining, clearly, that's not good for anything, clearly, that doesn't benefit my life, clearly, that's just a speculative asset. I miss the bubble. Other people are benefiting. They're bad. So it's easy to point your finger and say, that's bad. Not because it's using more energy or it's any better or worse for the environment, but simply because you do not see the utility of it. Now, the moment you see the utility of it, you'll tend to have a very different outlook.

And so if the person is on the more the left side of the spectrum, then I'll tend to look at the social utilities more. I'll tend to highlight what's happening in the global south more. If they're more at the other side of the continuum, then I'll tend to look at how it can be used as a form of sound money about all the things we talk about. That happens when you put your wealth into a fiat currency. So it really depends person by person.

But a lot of the people, I think the next big wave of people that will ultimately end up embracing Bitcoin, Michael Saylor says they're not our enemies. They are future friends who haven't yet realized that they need Bitcoin is the political left who shut themselves off from getting access to it. And as a result, is shut themselves off to the financial and the investment and the savings benefits because they believe that it has no social utility and it has environmentally negative utility.

So if you can speak to those people and not force them to change their belief system about things, OK, but to meet them where they're at, OK, you care about the environment, you care about emissions, you care about doing good things in the global south. Well, can I show you how Bitcoin achieves all three of those things? And if you can reach them with those sorts of examples, legitimate examples backed up by peer reviewed studies, then there's hope you can actually reach those people.

The problem is, as you identified earlier, it's when you you're convincing someone requires them to change their worldview or to fundamentally change their belief system. They're not going to work. So in the same way, I'm not going to try and convince someone that Bitcoin mining on a landfill is good if they don't believe in climate change by telling them about emissions. I'm not going to go down that path. I'm going to say, Hey, forget about whether you believe in climate change or not.

It doesn't matter. It's really good for these reasons here and we agree on that. So it's the same. It's looking for areas where we can have commonality, not butting our heads against our differences. And I really believe that as Michael Saylor says that Bitcoin is great for everyone and the people we seem like our opponents, they just don't realize they need Bitcoin yet.

So if we can be patient with them, then we can on board a lot more people and help a lot more people to see the utility that really and truly does have. I love that perspective and I think that it's so true that Bitcoin is something that everyone needs. They just don't know it yet.

And it's also something that because it is so uniquely adaptable, both in terms of its usage, either as a store of value or a medium of exchange, and also the way in which it is produced, the process of mining, that is so adaptable in and of itself. It can also adapt to world views. And that's why we see Bitcoiners on all different ends of the socioeconomic, political, every possible spectrum, environmentalist spectrum you could imagine.

And again, that comes back to something that is our strength because people are willing to make a case for Bitcoin or for Bitcoin mining to their peers in their group using the arguments that are going to resonate with that group. Because that's what they themselves believe and they have created a case for Bitcoin that follows with that.

And you can't think of, well, off the top of my head, I can't think of any other things that really fit that bill in that way that are waiting for you to discover it and see how it will positively impact you. But it's clearly not self-evident to the vast majority of people. And a lot of that, I think, is that a lot of people get their news and their information from sources that are less than stellar, let's just say.

And it's a shame that the media environment is such, but to what you said earlier, it is changing, right? We are seeing more positive acceptance and just acceptance of the truth. But for so long, the first thing someone hears about something is often what sticks with them. And for so many people, the first thing they heard about Bitcoin was either used by criminals, tulip mania, or burns the planet. And one of those three stuck in their head and stayed with them until today.

So you've got to shake them out of that a little bit. But everybody comes around to it eventually. Maybe everybody gets Bitcoin, not at the price they deserve, but at the hash rate they deserve. Maybe that's a way to think about it as well. I wanted to ask you something else because I think there's a misconception around environmentalism that every environmentalist is this massive de-grocer that wants to come, that does not believe that using more energy is good.

That every environmentalist believes that we should be, you know, humans are the pestilence that must be extinguished from this planet and that, you know, we should just let us go back to the Eden that very violent Eden that it once was. Talking with you, Daniel, I do not get the impression that you are a de-grocer.

I get the impression that you are somebody who wants to continue to have humanity harness more energy, but to do so in ways that you believe are going to be ultimately more beneficial for humanity and for this planet that we are inhabitants of. Is that a fair assumption on my part that you are not of the use less energy mentality, but of the capture more ways to use it? That's fair?

Yeah, let's find better ways to use energy. Let's find ways to use stranded energy that we're not. Let's find ways to be more efficient with what we're doing and let's create more energy because energy leads to abundance as long as it's forms of energy, which are going to be the right forms of energy for the right circumstances.

So in any movement, you get schisms within that movement and environmentalism is no different. And so you have within the environmental movement, you have wild debates with people who think that we should. Okay, so everyone agrees within the environmental movement that climate change is happening and that you want to have more renewable energy on the grid. So that's the same.

Now, how people want to go about doing that? Well, unfortunately, people who are D growthers, there's a there's a big challenge there because if your strategy for trying to create change is to reduce the supply. Then that's that's a big issue because how are you going to create more? How do you have a market for something if you have fewer customers? You're not.

And so you actually need to have more customers, you need to have more demand in order to create more of the sort of energy that you want to create. And so if your goal is to create more renewable energy, you have to create more people who want that renewable energy such you can get more of that onto the grid or onto micro grids. So that's one level of debate that you might have. I remember in the in the early days of solace is probably in the 90s.

Wild debate between environmentalists who thought solar panels were great and people who thought it was terrible. And the ones who thought it was terrible would look at it and they'd say, hey, it uses all these coal stations to create and it's highly carbon intensive and it has very little benefit. And the ones who said, no, no, no, it's good would say, well, yes, that's true. However, look at its trend line.

Look at what it could do. Look at how it's come down and its cost. Look at what could be possible. You're assuming that it is at this cost. It won't proliferate. But look at the cost curve. Look how much it's coming down. Look at what could be possible in five years and 10 years. We've got to give this technology a go. And that's more of a long term view of things and it proved out that the latter community people was right.

And we see the same debate in Bitcoin today where people look and say, it's bad. Why is it bad? Well, because it creates emissions. And he's like, well, hang on a minute. Let's look at the trend line here. Let's look at if we create more energy usage. But if that energy is coming from landfills, that's the emission negative. That means the more energy it uses, the more emissions it destroys.

That's isn't that what you want? And again, that scrambles people's brains, but you have to zoom out to be able to see it. So yeah, we have wild debates about things and I still have people with friends of mine who believe that Bitcoin is terrible and we just agree to differ on those things and talk about other things we can agree on. And that's all good. But I think it will become increasingly hard to latch onto that belief in much of the same way.

And I think this is the only analogy that now makes sense. It's now becoming so untenable to continue to believe that Bitcoin is going to be negatively environment. It's really like a heterocentricity argument. And sometimes people say, well, you know, you're just a Bitcoin. That's the reason you believe what you do. And it's like, you're some Bitcoin max max. That's why you believe it. And I say Bitcoin maxi nonsense. Do you have this phrase? I'm an iPhone maxi. Am I an internet using maxi?

No, I just saw the positive utility of the internet over newspapers. And so I use the internet. I saw the positive utility of an iPhone over what I was using. So I use that. I see the positive utility of Bitcoin over a broken currency. I see the positive utility of Bitcoin mining over other uses of energy and the social benefits it creates. It's an obviously superior technology. And so I'm looking at it based on the data. I'm agnostic.

And so again, it's like if you go back to the heterocentricity debate, you know, sometimes these media articles will say, we're getting this balanced perspective on Bitcoin. What are you balancing? You're balancing truth and lies. Is that your idea of balance? You want to balance, you know, new data, contemporary data, correct data and correct methodologies with old data, bad data, broken methodologies and FUD.

Is that the balance you want to achieve? So that's not balanced. That's like saying, well, we don't want to be, you know, raving, heterocentricity maximalists and believe that the sun, you know, is the center around which the Earth revolves. Can't we just have a balanced position and say, well, it resolves around at 50% of the time and then the other 50% that kind of we have geocentricity?

Well, no, because that's not how it works. Some cases in life, one side is wrong and the other side is right. And I'm very clear on this. The arguments upon which it's based that Bitcoin is bad for the environment are just fundamentally wrong. They fail to zoom out. They fail to see the trend lines. And the moment we start to do adequate due diligence and exercise intellectual curiosity with skepticism on both sides,

the conclusion is very obvious. And anyone who spent the intellectually honest energy to understand how that works has came to the same conclusions. Anyone who has read the literature of central bankers exclusively and mainstream media exclusively and then spent their time not researching Bitcoin, but running anti-Bitcoin campaigns has come to a different conclusion.

That right there is a pretty damn good argument to whomever may be listening to this, I've got to say. And I love to think about it. Your framing of it as truth and lies, I think is genuinely so important. And I like to say often that all they can do is lie about Bitcoin. That's all they have. They do not have the truth on their side. All we must do is tell the truth. And when you have the truth on your side, when you have the actual facts, actual data on your side,

well, it becomes very easy to hold that position because you don't have to make things up. You don't have to scramble to figure out how you're going to spin something. You just have to tell the objective truth. And that's a wonderfully powerful position for Bitcoiners to be in. We just have to keep telling the truth because these lies cannot live forever. They die off.

And to bring it back to the whole Greenpeace thing, I was thinking about this a little bit because I was doing some research into Greenpeace's fundraising practices and things like that, doing my little slew thing. And I found exactly what you said that they really say, oh, we're grassroots funded.

And I thought, wow, isn't it such a shame that they decided to take this $5 million Greenpeace USA again, not Greenpeace overall, but Greenpeace USA decided to take this $5 million in propaganda money from somebody with a vested interest in competition. Well, not real competition to Bitcoin, but what they believe is competition to Bitcoin, which is Ripple XRP.

And they decided to take that to create a just falsehood fueled propaganda campaign that admittedly created some great iconography for Bitcoiners. I mean, the skull of Satoshi, like, wow, what a beautiful piece of art, truly. But imagine if instead of doing that, imagine what a beautiful PR move and also ethical move and move for the truth that would have been. If Greenpeace said to Chris Larson, you know what, we're not going to take this.

Instead, we're going to do our due diligence on Bitcoin. And you know what, I would assume that they have enough smart people there that after doing that due diligence, they would have said, well, you know what, this is pretty nice. And why don't we accept Bitcoin donations? And why don't we also publicize the fact that we were approached with $5 million of hush money from a corporate donor and we turned that down?

And I have to imagine that if they said we turned down dirty corrupt Petra dollars from Chris Larson to fund a propaganda campaign and now we're accepting Bitcoin donations. I have to imagine they would have far exceeded his $5 million that he donated because Bitcoiners would have said, wow, that's amazing. You guys have some actual morals. You have an ethical backbone. So here's some sats. And they could have accepted donations via the Lightning Network, too.

They wouldn't even have to worry about draining swimming pools in the process. I mean, it could have been a beautiful moment. And to Greenpeace, I would say, if by some freak chance there's anyone from Greenpeace who listens to this later, you still have time. Greenpeace overall Greenpeace USA. I don't know if I don't know if you have time anymore. You seem a little bit too, too out over your skis. But Greenpeace as a global organization, you still have time.

And if you accept donations in Bitcoin, I will personally send you a donation. It may just be a few sats, but and you know, it may not be $5 million dirty Petra dollars like Chris Larson gave Greenpeace USA. But there's a lot of us Bitcoiners and there's a lot of Bitcoin companies who would probably be willing to donate to Greenpeace without the strings attached to Chris Larson required. So something to think about Greenpeace. It's never too late to admit that you're wrong until it is too late.

And you've run yourselves into the ground, but you're not there yet. I don't know. I have I have hope still. There are enough thinking individuals there and and it's legitimate hope because we know that there are and I've heard this from multiple sources. There are a number of people within Greenpeace who have questioned that campaign. Have questioned the ethics of taking that money who have questioned the accuracy of the information.

There are also people within Greenpeace USA who have questioned the legitimacy of that financial source who are uncomfortable with it and who are uncomfortable with the campaign itself. And that should come as no surprise because it's really from a funding perspective from Greenpeace USA. It's utterly foolish short term thinking. Go show they got $5 million today, but look at the pipeline that they've evaporated.

Who are the people who are most likely to get behind Greenpeace Millennials and Gen Z? Who are the people who are most likely to adopt Bitcoin? Same. And these are not mutually exclusive communities. These are overlapping communities as they have found out to their detriment. And they have not only caused a lot of people to stop supporting Greenpeace USA. It's also had an effect on Greenpeace International. But it's more importantly, it's dried up their pipeline.

It was bad enough that they were having to cope as a global organization with a whole new generation of climate activists who are pro nuclear and anti the anti nuclear stance that Greenpeace has taken. But now you've doubled down. It's like rather than say, hey, look, maybe we got things wrong here and yes, maybe it is actually good and we should embrace nuclear in these circumstances. And it's a little different to how it used to be back in the day. And we're getting on board with that.

But rather than do that have now doubled down and intact another technology, which is net decarbonizing. It's like, come on guys. Idealism, independent of intellectual curiosity and research is not good enough. Idealism alone cannot bring positive change to the world. Idealism is good starting point, but then it's got to be matched with research. It's got to be matched with science.

It's got to be matched with doing your homework, doing your proof of work and finding out the little nuances of truth and not assuming that the truth sources you are reading are neutral, are accurate, are up to date. And that just simply hasn't occurred. And so it's a real shame on one hand, but you're right on another hand, it's an incredible opportunity. And we know there are really good people within greenpeace who are pro-Bitcoin, but they're terrified of speaking up.

I'd encourage you to start speaking up because you have to start creating change from the inside. And if you don't, it's not going to be comfortable. But if you don't do that, then the ship is sinking and the relevance of your organization is sinking with it. And your pipeline of people who get behind it is going down with it. The credibility is going down and history will show you to be wrong. So speak up now while you still have the chance. It's a good message.

And if that doesn't work out and you're still too scared to speak up, Bitcoiners, we're here to start orange peace with you. We're ready for a new organizational chapter that is pro-Bitcoin mining, pro-nuclear out of curiosity. I assume that you're also good with nuclear energy. I succumbed to it. It's been a long decade plus long process. Because again, you've got to remember, I was doing my environmental campaigning in the 80s. We just had Chernobyl.

We just had the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior being bombed by French secret agents because they were protesting against nuclear testing. So it had a very different feel to it back then. And it's taken, I've had to look at a lot of data and I've got to be honest, I haven't looked at enough data to be conclusive, but I'm leaning more on the, it sounds like it's more net positive than net negative at the moment. I could be wrong. I haven't looked at it hard enough to reach a conclusive viewpoint.

But it sounds net positive overall. Well, you know, I appreciate that you're somebody who's willing to say, I need to look at more data. If more people should adopt that position before forming very staunch beliefs, I think. But alas, that's a tough pill to swallow for many. But I'm of the same opinion with nuclear. I'm a bit younger. So I do not have as much of the, let's say, baggage that comes from nuclear energy being intertwined mentally with nuclear testing.

And I realized that that is the place that Greenpeace kind of started from was this anti nuclear testing. And then along with that, it got lumped in with nuclear energy. And we've seen, you know, you can look at Germany as a, as an example of this where they, they are really shooting themselves in the foot. It seems important wood on sea barges. It's insane. And it's got a nuclear power plant that you could just fire up. I mean, I don't understand it. Management. It's insane.

It's truly insane to me. That's another thing with wood that people are now like, oh, well, we'll just, we'll burn wood and we'll call that renewable. And it's like, so you're, hold on, we're back to literally chopping down trees to burn them. When you, you have nuclear energy and you have, I mean, you have so many different forms of energy, literally just anything, but chopping down trees to burn them seems like a good idea. But because that's considered green, we're okay with that.

It boggles the mind, the mental gymnastics that are required to support something like that when you again have these nuclear power plants, Germany that you decided just to, we'll just turn these off now when they still had plenty of runway ahead of them. It's insane to me, but that's, that's a whole, a whole different rabbit hole. And another issue is not used. I want to be conscious of your scarce time here and I really, really appreciate you coming on here and having this conversation.

And I hope for, for anyone who was listening to this who is skeptical about Bitcoin's environmental impact that this opened your eyes a little bit. I hope for anybody that has a view of environmentalists as being one particular thing that hearing from you, Daniel has opened their eyes a little bit. And remember that no group, no, no designation of people is a monolith.

And as long as you are willing to question, willing to keep your mind open and to look at data and to reevaluate your opinions when new facts emerge, you're going to be okay. And this is a reminder for myself as well. It's something we can all do better at, right? But I'd love to know just as something totally out of left field, is there anything you're reading right now that you'd recommend? I'm reading Layered Bitcoin by Nick Bardia, which is a great read.

That's the only Bitcoin book I've actually read. I tend to do most of my learning by watching podcasts and Twitter. I don't have a lot of time for reading these days, apart from honestly, not like a paper book. Anyway, as much as I do not like trees being chopped down for newspapers, New York Times, I do still very much enjoy a good old paper book in my hand. And perhaps that's a little archaic of me, but there's something about it.

And you know what? That's not just thrown away or used to blot up some sort of kitty litter like a New York Times paper is. I actually, I don't know, I wore my New York Times up shirt just for this today. I figured it was it was fitting. I need to reinvigorate that campaign. I've been a little bit occupied of late, but I think it's time to step back on it. Just change the code hasn't tweeted since January. So I've been, you know, usually they were my best material.

I don't know. Do you think are they done now? Do you think are they stopping that? They're reevaluating the effectiveness of their campaign that's put it that way. They probably had a little bit of legacy for what they needed to put out there. As I say, there's big questions that have been asked about that campaign internally. It has been divisive for them. It has been by any metric you want to throw at it. It's been a wildly unsuccessful campaign.

I cannot think of a form of activism that has had the worst economic input to political output ratio in the history of Greenpeace as this one. It's all it has exceeded in doing has been to galvanize an entire community of people who could have been sympathetic to Greenpeace, as you said, against Greenpeace USA. Not a single line of code has been changed. Not a single bit coiner has left Bitcoin to join Greenpeace.

A lot of people have left Greenpeace USA and a lot of people are questioning the relevance of that organization. It's been terrible for their brand. People have been leaving them on Twitter. People have been writing them and saying why they're leaving. People have written Greenpeace USA out of their will. So I think if they're not done, they've got two choices. Either they can have a mayor culper. Well, they've got three choices. They can have a public mayor culper.

That would be the best thing they can do. Whether they do that, it's up to them. But that would be great for them. Second thing is they could quietly just stop tweeting and stop the misinformation and pretend it never happened. That would be bad because bit coiners have long memories. The third thing they could do is they could just double down on more misinformation and start more attacks. We've seen the little evidence that they might want to do that with attacking Satoshi action.

And just change the angle of attack and start saying Bitcoin is bad because Bitcoin mining rigs are noisy and they disturb neighbors. Which of course they do if you do it wrong, like any industry. But again, cherry picking data to try and align an entire industry based on some carefully cherry picked spin. So they could do that. Those are the three options available to them. We wait and see and we're ready either way. Yeah, I hope they follow your advice though.

I hope that Bitcoin is for anyone who is willing to learn and to be open to new information. I'm trying to change my vernacular to Bitcoin is not for everyone. Bitcoin is for anyone who is open to it. Because you do have to be open to it and you have to be willing to challenge your preconceived notions about money, about energy. And not everyone is willing to make that leap yet. But for those of us that have, I think we can say it's an incredibly rewarding experience.

I'm sitting here talking to you today from opposite sides of the world. It's you're a day ahead of me right now. You're already living in the future. I'm currently living in the past, I guess. But what a beautiful thing that this invention of Satoshi has brought for us all. And I am really excited to continue following your work with CH4 Capital. I think that's an incredible initiative. Anywhere, so the website, ch4capital.com, your website is a batcoins, right?

Batcoins.com. I'll link it in the show notes, but anywhere else you want to send people or tell them to check something out. Yeah, the newsletter is also batcoins.com. That's where the Z, or Z as we say in New Zealand. So yeah, I've started a newsletter with the now it's just to briefly about the reason for that. Yeah, that that is basically so that we can do two things.

One is to introduce these ideas to people who don't, who aren't on Twitter, who are likely to care about the environment, who are likely to care about the social good of Bitcoin and want to be introduced to it in a way which is consistent with their values and belief systems. So that's the point of the newsletter. And the secondary intention is to help get large investment funds comfortable with the idea that Bitcoin is the best ASG investment they can possibly make,

because many of them will have an ASG boxed tick. So that's a good place to go to either for yourself, but also to give to other people who may not be. Bitcoin is yet to start to get them comfortable with some of those ideas. I love it. And I think we, we all have some people in our non Twitter, non Noester, non online lives that we can think of who may benefit from that. But Daniel, thank you so much for your time. This was really a pleasure. And looking forward to doing it again.

And hopefully at that point you will have just turned so much trash into treasure and it will be a beautiful thing to see. Well, thanks so much, Walker. And likewise been loving everything you've been doing and the ratios on Elizabeth Warren have been legendary and you deserve all the success you're having. Oh, I appreciate it. She deserves, she deserves the ratios. So we do what we can. And if you want to follow the Bitcoin podcast on Twitter, go to at TIT coin podcast and at Walker America.

You can also find the video version of this show at YouTube.com slash at Walker America and at Walker America on rumble. Bitcoin is scarce. There will only ever be 21 million. But Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast. Until next time, stay free.