Why Everything You Know About Bitcoin Mining is WRONG with Matt Schultz

go to. And they support a variety of coins, all your top crypto tokens, your bitcoins, your x rpe Ethereum, Solana and much more, and even new coins, even black Rock's Biddle token. So they support coins on the institutional side where you have tokenization of different assets and much more. And they even offer a great service that helps you to get your treasure device set up. You get one on one customer support from their team, so you can check that out as well. So once again, I'm a

big fan of this hardware wallet. So if you'd like to learn more, visit the link in the description. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward and joining me today is Matt Schulz, who is the co founder, executive chairman, and CEO of clean Spark Now. Clean Spark is one of the largest and most recognizable bitcoin mining companies in North America. Matt, it is great to have.

your professional background? And how did you discover bitcoin?

and a number of different endeavors. And how I how I came to find bitcoin is is a bit of a convoluted story, but it's kind of interesting. I was. I was involved in the traditional energy space, oil and gas and putting together project finance, and as a father, you know, I was. I was fortunate to have six kids. And some of these oil and gas property that we bought had been poorly maintained. There was poor containment on

wastewater handling. There were a number of issues, and I recognized that we were doing a pretty bad job as far as stewardship of the planet. So I made a pivot in my career to start focusing on more alternative sources of power, renewable energy. We had some you know, as we worked over and improved some of these projects, the wastewater handling trucks that we operated had a big logo on the back and it said, we didn't inherit the planet from our parents, We've borrowed it from our children.

So kind of gave me the drive to do better. And so we developed a portfolio of technology regarding energy generation and the conversion of carbonaceous speedstock into a clean

sind gas, so the convert waste energy. And then we were deploying those solutions in a number of different applications and we ended up partnering with and then subsequently acquiring a micro grid technology company, so we were building you know, you think about the US energy grid as the macro grid, well micro grid would be a campus based or you know, a smaller version of that grid, so you have energy generation, distribution, controls,

and storage. So we were building mission critical microgrids at places like Marine Corps based Camp Pendleton and at embassies

around the world. And then we started to deploy those solutions in data centers and we could model those solutions around a number of different vectors, so cost avoidance, resiliency, or greenhouse gas avoidance, and so you know, at the military basis, the mission was to make sure that NAVI gation, guidance and communications always stayed live regardless of what was going on with the San Diego Gas and Electric grid. So through that process, we then developed a communications protocol.

So if you in the state of California, as an example, if you produce solar at your facility, there are opportunities push some of that power back to the grid for revenue. It's called demand response, and so we were we owned the virtual top node and virtual endode communications protocol that will allow a private business to sell power back to

a public utility. So through that process we developed a really healthy understanding of the interaction with the utility grid and how delicate the balance is because you you know, the grid has to produce enough power such that the demands are met at peak demand, but then not overbuild capacity, so you're running power to ground when demand wanes, and so you know, understanding that their periods of time that their surplus power and there are periods of time that

the grid is somewhat constrained. The idea behind a flexible load started to really present itself as an obvious solution to fix the grid instability and the challenges we have with the domestic power grid. In conjunction with that, we were working with the Minister of Energy in South Africa to put community based microgrids in play to assist in

areas that there were energy poverty. And the challenge was we designed and presented a solution for half a dozen community based microgrids, but even the World Bank wouldn't touch that without a flexible off take. And so it prompted this spirited discussion between our leadership team and our board of directors, and that was what kind of customer can be a flexible load that can buy power from a grid when it's available, but then when there's demand elsewhere

can shut off. And the answer is it's it's not a traditional data center, and it's not a manufacturing facility, and it's not you know, any number of different applications. But what it is is bitcoin mining. So bitcoin mining became kind of the panacea for grid stabilization and load balancing because these machines have no memory. You can ramp them up, ramp them down over clock, under clock, and you can do that based on you know, economic conditions that are driven by you know, the the the UH,

the capacity and the availability on the grid. So you know, we we decided to focus as America's bitcoin minor, on identifying pockets of power that are underutilized. And if you think back four or five decades ago in our country, there was an abundance of manufacturing and mining and sawmills and all different types of industry that's subsequently gone offshore. So you've got these little communities that many decades ago funded municipal bonds to acquire their participation in the utility

grid and the generation and the distribution. And then when when industry left, you got all these these beautiful little communities that have pockets of power that are underserved that you know, there there there's an opportunity that a company like us can go in. We can buy that power from the local utility, which in most instances is the city, and they can make a margin on that power, and so it makes a difference in those communities. And then we also bring high tech jobs. So we like to

tell the story. You know, as a father, one of one of my kids' favorite movies growing up was the movie Cars, and it's a story about that little town, Radiator Springs that was this bustling, happening metropolis until the freeway came by, and then that town was forgotten. And that's kind of the way that we look at our community partners. Many of these are, you know, the real world version of Radiator Springs and so's that's kind of my long answer to my bitcoin story and how we

got there. But what it's resulted in is a tremendous partnership with thirty three small towns across the United States, where we're securing the global blockchain. We're creating high paying jobs, We're pushing revenues and profits back to these small towns.

perspective than everybody else. In fact, when we when we acquired our second facility in Norcross, Georgia, Axios sent a journalist out to kind of talk about what we were doing. And at the time, Axios was, you know, kind of lukewarm on bitcoin. And the journalist wrote in his article that clean Spark is not a team of bitcoin bros trying to understand energy markets. Rather, it's a team of

energy professionals iterating in the bitcoin mining landscape. And so it was a contrast and a differentiation and I think it served us very well. Oh absolutely.

and the governments. It's it's very different. In twenty twenty five.

had surplus power. And in Georgia, just give you a quick example, they when Southern Company went through bankruptcy decades ago, forty nine small towns in Georgia formed a co op and they they partnered up and created MIAG, which is the Municipal Electricity Authority of Georgia, and they funded through municipal a stake in Plant Vogel, which is the largest nuclear power plant deployment in this country in the last

thirty years. And so these towns now own some of the generation, and the cities, through this co op, become the utility. So they've got power available, but nobody buying it. So Clean Spark goes in and we negotiate, we buy the power from the generation at cost, and then we allow them a small margin on every kiloot hour of power.

In this particular applications, it's primarily nuclear power. So it also kind of supports our mission of identifying supporting non carbon emitting sources of power, and that was really key early on, and it's evolved a bit to be more about grid stabilization and decreasing the reliance on coal fired

peaker plants rather than overemphasizing the single load. But anyway, the city is now our utility, so they're able to buy much more power, and in buying more power, it's the cost co effect, so it decreases the utility costs

for all the ratepayers in the jurisdiction. They then make a margin on every kilo what hour we buy, which is millions of dollars, and as a component of the Territorial Act in Georgia, those dollars are reallocated back to the community for you know, bike paths and splash pads and schools and infrastructure. Well then on top of that we pay sales tax, and the sales tax on the utility is designated to stay in the jurisdiction it was generated.

So in this small town, Sandersville, Georgian, there was an interview that was on WSBTV in Atlanta, and the mayor had talked about the fact that in forty years in public service, the city had never operated outside of a deficit until clean Spark was there. Now not only was the city and the green but that the surplus sales tax had created a burden that they had to redistribute that sales tax somewhere else, so they reallocated it to

property taxes in the community. So not only are we monetizing stranded power for this city, we're now also decreasing the cost per kiloot hour for the rate payers. And then where the sales tax is decreasing, the property tax exposure. So it becomes a win win win all the way along for these communities, and all the while we're incentivizing new, renewable and clean energy generation.

a story legis needs to get out there because a lot of people have the ole perception and the fact that you can monetize excess energy or energy that would have been wasted or blown off for what it may be and monetize it in bitcoin mining is a great opportunity. And then you know, you as a mining company being able to support a local committee in this way is pretty pretty amazing.

be true. But in reality, the water doesn't disappear, it spins a turbine. It's not consumed, it's not used, it's not polluted. This is this is hydro electric power generation. So you know, the media had an agenda and you know certainly don't want to let don't want to let the facts get in the way of a good story. So you know, you you create these narratives about how bad bitcoin is and how how harmful it is for the environment and the emissions that these computers put off,

none of which are true. So you know, we work in partnership with the grid. We can build out faster than our colleagues in high performance compute. So Yenne, Wyoming, for example, clean Spark has one hundred megawats there and

the other bidder for that power is Microsoft. I mean they're driver nine to Iron away from our facility, and we prevailed, not because clean Spark's a better credit risk than Microsoft, but because to build a proper HPCAI data center that Microsoft expect it's a four to five year endeavor. We were able to take that same property and monetize those megawats for the benefit of the community and the utility in less than six months. The beauty in that

process is it's duplicatable. We can run in, monetize the power, support the blockchain, build a bitcoin mining facility, and in that particular instance, it's a fully modular immersion cool deployment, so ultra high efficiency, less this sound emission than an air cooled facility, and completely modular and portable. So we go in bringing the electrical infrastructure, put in helical piers, mount the pods, fill the tanks, put the machines in, and we start hashing, and then we can start building

a proper data center behind that. So when that data center is complete over the next three four years, we can then pivot those megawatts to high performance compute. We can take that bitcoin mining deployment and duplicate that again in another location. So we're building ahead of AI to

stabilize the demand curve. In fact, about eighteen months ago, I was invited to go to mar A Lago, and this was when President Trump was candidate Trump, and he asked half a dozen bitcoin miners to join him in a round table, and he talked about the fact he had previously not been an advocate for bitcoin and for bitcoin mining, but what he understood is there's a demographic of a voter base that a very passionate about bitcoin,

and maybe he didn't have all the proper information. So we worked with their campaign to help kind of line out their digital digital currency plan, I guess, so to speak. And in that meeting, we talked about how fast we could deploy and how we would enable we're kind of plowing the road for AI in HPC. And he grabbed his assistant. He said, his Bill still here, and she said,

I think he is, and go grab him. So, you know, thirty seconds later in walk Senator Haggarty from Tennessee and you know Tennessee TVA, the largest federally owned public utility.

Sits down at the table and President Trump said, Bill, is it correct that what these guys are telling me that bitcoin mining actually stabilized the grid and it shaves the peaks and the valleys, and it's a load balancing tool, but it also paves the way for AI and he said it absolutely is, and he talked about, you know, clean Spark specific operations within Tennessee and so to to have played a role in guiding the digital asset kind of strategy for the administration and to change the narrative

for bitcoin and bitcoin mining has been a huge honor for myself and our team here at clean Spark to be able to kind of evangelize how valuable bitcoin mining is and then you know, to take it to another level. You know, when when the Russia Ukraine War started, we used o FAC sanctions to kind of shut down Russia's access to global financial networks. Well, when we met with the Biden administration and we talked about the value bitcoin mining,

their feedback was, we don't want bitcoin mining. We don't want anywhere in the United States. We want it out of here. Well, the challenge becomes what happens when there's no block space for companies like Michael Sailors or US investors that maybe have a bitcoin on coinbase. What happens if there's kind of a reverse o fact impact and you can't access block space to buy, sell, transfer bitcoin.

So we look at bitcoin mining domestically, and now the President and many members of Congress agree bitcoin miners, domestic bitcoin miners are really a national security there.

President Trump signed it an executive order to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The first phase is using the bitcoin they've confiscated over the year, some bad actors and so forth. But I saw you were at a meeting recently with Michael Sailor and other industry leaders to try to explore how the United States can now purchase bitcoin. Tell us about that meeting and what were some of the takeaways for you.

and in all of those different cities. For example, I got to spend a great deal of time on September tenth with President Bush and to have him recap what was going on that morning in Sarasota when he was reading to those students, and what happened when the towers were attacked and when when so to have that interaction, you know, it's a kind of a pinch me moment to go from you know, here here you are as America's bitcoin minor, which enter prior administration is a completely

villainized concept, to now having an opportunity to sit with the former president of the United States and the current president of the United States and to talk about what our industry means for the nation. And so that was a that was a blessing. And then we went to we went to Washington, d C. And there were a number of meetings we had. We had an opportunity to speak to French Hill, to Tom Cotton, to Mike Johnson,

hosted the meeting, very gracious guy. I first got to know Mike Johnson at the Crypto Ball during the inauguration. And the cool thing about all of these relationships is that they genuinely care about and are interested in bitcoin and compute and how that becomes something that that strengthens the US energy policy, but also the adoption of bitcoin in the Strategic Reserve. So that was a separate meeting.

The picture that we posted on Twitter where I was next to Tom Lee from Funstratt and then Sailor was was there. We actually had the opportunity to speak to a number of representatives and senators and Bernie Moreno was there, and Marshall Blackburn was there, and there were there were a number of very vocal proponents of bitcoin in attendance at the meeting. And you know, Senator Moreno, I think

I think bitcoin got Bernie Moreno elected. I mean, the the Bitcoin Voter Project and and Bitcoin voters in general put a lot of resources behind Bernie Moreno's campaign and he has done just a phenomenal job in being an advocate for US there. And he made a statement in this session and this isn't something that's you know, introduced as policy and it's not pending a vote, but just

his his assessment. And you know, Michael Saylor made a statement about Seward's folly and about how the United States has made decisions acquiring Alaska or Texas, so whatever the case may be, that we're you know, not well received and everybody thought we were we were silly to do these things. And you know in retrospect that you know, the what's created the amazing country that we call home

today is were these decisions. And he said, bitcoin is that next decision Gate, and Senator Moreno in that meeting said, you know the challenge, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, the challenge that I have is that, you know, since nineteen seventy one, our currency has been decoupled from gold, and the gold that we own is in Fort Knox, but nobody really knows what's there. And Senator Moreno, to his credit said with bitcoin, the entire network is audited

publicly every ten minutes. So he said, I could walk in Fort Knox and I could tour it, but I have no idea about the purity of the gold. I have no idea which gold is what, and what the value of it is. It's all held there at forty four dollars and twenty two cents an ounce. You know. He suggested that they revalue the portfolio of gold, hypothetically speaking, sell a percentage of the gold in Fort Knox and replace that with bitcoin. And that was that was something

that was literally spoken out loud in this session. So to know that there are some real strategic thinkers that are looking to find a way, because I think what we're starting to recognize is that the United States is falling behind. You know, when you look at the nations around the world that have created strategic reserves that are actively buying bitcoin. The United States is on its back foot.

And while we have a strategic reserve based on seizures, one of the things that some of the members of Congress said to us was there are a lot of entities that when they seize assets as a result of nefarious activity, those assets are then sold to fund those organizations. And so to say that, you know, we're going to take all the bitcoin that we see is and put it in the reserve takes away from the budgets of a lot of these places, a lot of these agencies

they are fighting bad actors. So there's this sensitivity to

make sure that we accomplish the right goal. And so to have the opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with the Whip and with the Speaker of the House and with you know, I had an opportunity two days after we were in DC, there was the Imagine If conference that was hosted by Bitcoin Park in Nashville, and we got to launch the conference and I had the privilege of opening the conference on stage with Senator Blackburn, and we talked about first principles, and we talked about bitcoin,

and we talked about energy, and we talked about the things that matter in this country and how bitcoin is really this patriotic American libertarian concept that really empowers people. We're no longer holding on to a devalued currency that you know, we teach our kids to save ten percent of everything, and the end of the day, it's bad advice because we're out printing any any potential gains that they could be saving. Yeah.

we built buildings, we signed power contracts. Now we have well over a gig out of power that we currently operate in thirty three different locations in four states. We're about to expand in another state. Be talking about that in the news in the next couple of weeks. But we have a pipeline of about one point seven gigawatts behind that. So in this race for AI and HPC compute,

the most valuable commodity there is land and power. So we've generated relationships based on keeping our promises with these communities. We go in, we build quickly, we use local trades, we employ local folks, We you know, we pay. We have high performing, high paying jobs, and we can then rotate that into higher value compute and then duplicate those bitcoin efforts. So we see bitcoin as a catalyst to

build out our compute portfolio. And we've been so fortunate that we've amassed a portfolio of critical IT capability that literally nobody else has. I mean major one hundred megawatts in metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, and massive infrastructure in Tennessee and in Mississippi and in Wyoming. Literally, like I said, you know, driver nine iron away from Microsoft, and we've built, We've

amassed this portfolio of incredible assets. And now what we're starting to do is build the team of people and develop the relationships that we can use that allowed us to become the best in class bitcoin miner in the world and then apply that now to other types of compute to maximize the value those MAGA wats for the benefit of the community.

bitcoin mining outputs. So how many bitcoin you're mining, let's say per month? And I know that that can fluctuate based on different factors. So also are you holding bitcoin on your balance sheet and things like.

minding it at less than half of that. So and yes, we do have a significant bitcoin treasury. In fact, if you go to bitcoin treasuriest net, we're in the top ten biggest in the world. We hold thirteen thousand bitcoin. What's important to note is that we mind all of those. So having mind all of those, we have significant gains on those bitcoin. So if we were to sell them, there'd be a tax impact, and the tax impact those lost SATs will be something we'll never get back because

of the taxes. So what we've chosen to do is we've got an institutional grade bitcoin treasury desk. We call it our Digital Asset Management team, led by our CFO and president, Gary Vacarelli and Rory Murray, and these guys have created strategies whereby we are writing derivative instruments very low risk against the assets that we have on our balance sheet. So thirteen thousand bitcoin approximately, I mean we're talking a billion and a half dollars worth of bitcoin.

Now we can write short dated covered calls. So say, for example, you know an important disclosure in our industry, A lot of bitcoin miners. In fact, all of them except us have an ATM, which is at the market offering where they can sell stock to fund their operations every day. Now, in Clevespark's case, once we hit critical mass on our bitcoin treasury, we went away from one hundred percent hoddle and we stopped using equity. We've not sold a single share of equity since November of last year,

not one share. We wanted to preserve shareholder value and the value of our equity during this kind of volatility phase of bitcoin mining. You know, as global hash rate has gone up, difficulty has gone up, there's volatility. There was a huge tailwind leading up to the election and then a bit of a fallof So what we decided to do a number of months ago is we're going to sell a portion of our production in that current

month to fund our operations. So we cover all of our opics by the sell a bitcoin, and then the

surplus we stack our balance sheet. So now we've got thirteen thousand bitcoin and the beauty of that is we're making seven figures a month return on the yield on the bitcoin that we have, and we're selling enough to cover all of our opics, So we're cash flowing the growth the acquisition of new land infrastructure, substation builds, equipment, et cetera, through the cash flows generated from being best in class bitcoin miner. So it's the best of both worlds.

And to that end, if we know we're going to sell bitcoin in order to pay sell some of the new production in order to pay our opics, then what we're doing is we're writing short term covered calls five day, seven day, ten day, and in exchange for writing those calls, we generate a premium, so those premiums stay with Clean Spark. If bitcoin goes up and the bitcoin gets called away,

we were going to sell it anyway. If it doesn't, we still straight the premiums off and then we can go back in and do market based orders when it makes sense. So we're managing this for the benefit of our shareholders, and we're now exploring using that digital asset

management function as kind of leverage, if you will. We put up two new announcements, one just this morning with two Prime, one a couple of days ago with Coinbase, and so it's two hundred million dollars in low single digit interest rates that allow us to borrow against that bitcoin on a revolver, So when an opportunity comes up, I can go get one hundred million dollars today back

by my bitcoin. I can deploy that capital right now for whatever the use case is, and then we can use the production to pay down that bitcoin line of credit and we can avoid equity dilution until it makes

more sense. So it's it's really strategic for us. We're not idealistic about bitcoin, but we do understand and recognize that, you know, bitcoin is the perfect you know, decentralized, hardcap, non sovereign money, and it's really the value protection for the future, and so you know, to have to be able to pull on both of those strings. I mean, a lot of our peers sell all of their bitcoin,

so they have no exposure to bitcoin. They don't have that certainty, and they're heavily reliant on debt and equity dilution, which we've done neither. So we like our strategy. We've fallen behind the market because people kind of grew a bit weary about well, you know, you're mining seven hundred bitcoin a month. We can kind of extrapolate what our value is going to be. And so the only speculative

nature on your stock is does bitcoin go up or not? Now, by monetizing megawatts through other types of compute, we're creating greater value for communities that maybe have a higher cost basis of their power. And it doesn't make sense to mind bitcoin, but it makes perfect sense to use for high performance compute. We have those relationships nobody else does. And so to have that opportunity and pair that with as again and I'm going to beat this at like

until I can't. We absolutely have the best in class bitcoin mining in the world. We have the best teams, the highest uptime, the greatest efficiency, the lowest cost perretza hash of anybody in the space. We've been very disciplined and we've kind of, you know, we're forgotten about a little bit in the space because we weren't chasing shiny keys.

You know, Mara talked about buying a wind farm and mining CASPA and you know, shrimp farming, and you know, Riot was trying to buy bit farms, and you know, they were making a hostile run at them, and and you know, trying to figure out what they're doing with megawatts, and you know, Iris Energy Iron sold all of their Bitcoin. Now they're focusing exclusively on HPC, which has worked out

really well. What we've done is we've just sold and steady and in a very disciplined capacity, We've built this network, in these relationships, the land and power that will allow us to be the best in class at bitcoin at high performance compute, just like we were at Bitcoin. And just as a last reminder on my long winded thought, when we entered the bitcoin mining space in December of twenty twenty, was on a panel and one of the peers from a major company talked about the fact that

we were too late to the party. Well, now here we are and we're the most efficient. We have more hash rate inside the United States than anybody else, and so we're we liked the last mover advantage because the folks that have sold out leases on HPC for whatever the revenue number was on the GPU rentals on hoppers are now stressing that had they invested in Blackwells and built their own cloud, the returns would have been ten x from where it was. And Fox Business News came

out this morning and they did a story. There was an analyst on there that talked about clean Spark and put a fifty seven dollars price target on our stock because he likes the strategy. How we're using the extra megawats beyond bitcoin mining to support HPC and AI.

hash rates at an all time high, to difficulties increasing. There's so much demand for bitcoin from countries, Wall Street, and it's happening across the globe.

existed just back then. So what I see for the future of bitcoin is a closer relationship with a chip supply chain, focusing on efficiencies, deeper integration into power systems as a load balancing entity, in fact, maybe even partnering with utilities whereby you take you know, some of our proprietary technology and plant that behind the fence at a power plant and have it automatically deployed power to bitcoin mining when they're surplus power, and then have the utility

curtailed away. I mean, this is theoretical, but can you imagine a world where you take a six megawatt container and put it behind the fence at a utility and they then provides power free. Bitcoin minor provides the systems and infrastructure as their contribution, and every single day the mining pool settles both with the utility and the miner to pay for that transaction to give their pro rat a share of that. I believe that that's my vision

of the future. I think it's much more closely aligned as a load balancing entity and a focus on efficiency and coming out of the microgrid business, it was all about peak shaving, load balancing, identifying areas of efficiency, and that's core in our DNA and our team led by Scott Garrison, Taylor Monag and their teams are really the best in the world.

I think if quantum computing is a threat to anything, it's the traditional world. We're going to have bigger problems than having to worry about bitcoin. But nevertheless, you know, there's talks about quantum computing be used to attack bitcoin miners or hack the blockchain right and break the cryptographic algorithm. But I'm assuming that along the lines, as quantum computing and technology is coming out, the mining rigs will be upgraded with quantum tech. What is your take on that.

I guess I can talk about it here. It's not a necessarily material, non public but clean Spark is working with some of our partners at Bitcoin Park to support an actually add to cordev in support of the Bitcoin core development. So I think that the core dev they have a range of proposals designed to mitigate risk, but I think trying to break the network is probably way down the list of fears beyond the nuclear codes. Sure.

growth Bitcoin obviously trading over one hundred thousand dollars now, And what are your thoughts on the cycle? Do you have a prediction for this cycle that you can share? Does it is the four year cycle broken? You know, what are your thoughts on all that?

just figuring it out. I think market access grows as other products become available, and so with the demand for bitcoin outpacing supply, I think the cycle is broken. I mean, you look, I read an article that cash app buys almost the full daily production of bitcoin just through cash app, and they've they've grown their their bitcoin business. You know, Jack Dorsey or mister Nakamoto, however you want to refer

to them, he's he. I think, you know, in our conversations, we had had an opportunity to spend some time with them at the proto launch event for their new bitcoin mining rig in North Georgia. And I think there's a there's a real risk and a real fear that losing domestic access to bitcoin is is problematic, and so I think you're going to see a more concerted effort to support bitcoin and not vilify it. And so given all those reasons, I really believe that the four year cycle

isn't expanded to a five year cycle. I think it's broken, and that, you know, my basis for that little redneck you know, Wyoming kid is but I do still remember the first day of econ one oh one, and supply versus demand, and if you're if you're producing four hundred and fifty bitcoin a day and the demand is in order of magnitude greater than that, I don't know how you start to see the price slip away.

you know you mentioned earlier a bitcoin being a national security issue, right, and the United States needs to be more in the driver's seat here. As more companies and countries and your sections adopt bitcoin and they're buying, eventually people are gonna want to steal as much bigcoin as they can and guess it's on the blockchain, but still you never know what bad actors can do. How are you securing the bitcoin that you're mining?

There really aren't a lot of counterparties that have that certainty when you're talking a multi billion dollar treasury.

United States you look at Kango and bit Main. I mean the nun letter was was introduced a couple of weeks ago where they suggested a Scifius investigation be undertaken because you know, these these companies that are controlled directly or has pardon me, or indirectly by the CCP. Not only do they have a huge footprint in the global blockchain, but they're also making a massive impact on US infrastructure.

They have hundreds and hundreds of megawatts that they control mining to a Chinese pool owned by the Chinese government, but mining here in the US. I think there's a lot of risk, and so I think nationalized support for what we do is going to be more critical. And listening to the way that Jamie Diamonds approached to bitcoin and his thesis has changed over time, and to sit next to a guy like Tom Lee and to you know, to have spirited discussions. Mike Saylor and I sat together

Monday or Tuesday night two weeks ago. One of our investment banks had Sting, the performer, come in for an industry event, and and you know, Michael and I sat together. We went backstage, got to meet Sting, We both got

to spend some time with President Bush. But to listen to a guy like Michael Sailor and talk about, you know, to hear his passion for the security and safety of a bitcoin and the bitcoin network, it only stands to reason that this massive focus on bitcoin treasury companies is going to shift and realize that what supports and strengthens and protects bitcoin treasury companies is the network, and that

network is the miners. So I think there's there's it's a pendulum, and I think it's going to come back. And I think you take Jamie Diamond's change in philosophy. Now you know JP Morgan Chase is going to be a custody provider. Well, I think you know, if JP Morgan Chase can't securely hold your bitcoin, we have a much greater problem.

wrap up questions for you. If you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?

to push them apart. And I think, you know, being a small town redneck kid, like I said, I think a return to family values, focusing on small communities, flourishing and living our world on a Bitcoin standard, would would be you know, first place for.