Largest Bitcoin Miner Explains Why Bitcoin Will Explode

Transcripts are autogenerated. May contain typos.

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the one unique thing that Bitcoin has that equities don't have is that finite number of Bitcoin right in the equity markets companies can always issue more stock they can dilute and you know the Bitcoin miners are famous for that right and with the having happening in April the increase in the supply of Bitcoin will now be less than the increase in the supply of gold in the gold market you could expect that Bitcoin should Trend at a higher appreciation rate than gold does and be more stable in down markets than gold and gold is the

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proverbial inflation heads risk hedge that you know you won't see these huge swings of 2 300% up and you know 75% down I think you'll see more moderated swings and that's going to make it even more attractive to institutional investors all right guys bang bang I got Fred here uh I thought a great place to start the conversation is all throughout Q4 uh miners were generating uh the Bitcoin block reward just like they normally do but in subcriptions and transaction fees were exploding and it seems like maybe the public markets

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don't understand this uh a lot of investors in the private markets don't understand this even some bitcoiners don't understand can you help us understand from a minor standpoint the block subsidy the transaction fees and why it's such a Tailwind for a business like yours when the transaction fees explode sure so the revenue that a minor gets for doing what they do which is essentially processing transaction assembling them into blocks and then um getting those blocks validated consists of two things the block subsid this is

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what the Bitcoin blockchain pays the minor and this is the amount that gets haved every four years which is all part of the grand plan that miners will eventually have to live off of transaction fees and so over the years every four years the subsidy part has dropped and the um transaction fee portion has grown slowly but surely but with the Advent of ordinals and inscriptions and specifically really the brc2 tokens what started happening is people started recording things on the Bitcoin blockchain that were not just uh

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transfers from one wallet to another and that takes a certain amount of block space and you pay for that block space and the way the Bitcoin blockchain operates is it's like a funnel all the transactions go in the top and you as a transactor can decide do I want to have a high priority on this transaction or do I just want it to clear whenever it clears and there's a standard kind of expression in the Bitcoin world where you're going to wait for six blocks before you validate the the transaction

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has gone through well if the M Pool which is this funnel gets backed up it may take longer than that and so what do you do you bid up a higher transaction fee and ordinals inscriptions brc2 tokens um they can take up more of this space and so therefore they're competing against Financial transactions and what that does is bids up the transaction fees and at a period of time twice last year in the May area there was an initial surge when BRC to brc2 tokens were first launched where at one point we were earning more in transaction fees

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per block than the block subsidy right so we were getting paid 6 and a quarter Bitcoin in a block subsidy and then we were getting paid seven Bitcoin in a transaction fee then there was a l and at the end of um sort of mid Q4 really November it came rushing back and it was the same thing again and so the ideal goal I think of Satoshi when he wrote the white paper and designed the uh structure of the algorithm around the having was that miners would eventually earn more from transaction fees than the block subsidies and you

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combine that with appreciation in the price of Bitcoin and you get this virtuous Rising tide and so um in an environment today where Bitcoins at you know 42 43 um we're getting six and a quarter Bitcoin per block plus transaction fees and lately the transaction fees have been averaging anywhere from kind of 7 Bitcoin to two Bitcoin sometimes three Bitcoin um now fast forward to the having in April and we'll go from 6 and A4 Bitcoin in Block subsidy to 3 and an eth now the transaction fees aren't going to change

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so if we're still getting two three Bitcoin in transaction fees plus the three and an eigh Bitcoin we get in subsidies it's almost like we were earning the same block subsidy we were getting before with much lower transaction fees because at the beginning of last year the transaction fees were 0.

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3 Bitcoin so think about that and here we are with transaction fees around three Bitcoin right it's a h hundredfold increase in transaction fees and that is not negatively impacted by the having whereas the block subsidy for miners is you can argue for an investors perspective in Bitcoin does the having really have an impact is there a supply shock Etc it really impacts the miners more than anybody else what is that impact to the miners well essentially your revenue is haved when you think about it on a pure block subsidy perspective now

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historically every time there's a having price of Bitcoin runs up more than compensates the minor for the drop in revenues um I think that we are in a slightly different world today institutional investors with Bitcoin ETFs we're going to see a lot of derivative products on these ETFs you know you've already seen people applying for uh short versions of the ETF leveraged versions of the ETF all sorts of things like that um so you're going to have all these ways for people to play Bitcoin and spot Bitcoin will form

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a part of it and I think what we'll start to see is less volatility in the price of Bitcoin because the liquidity in the market will increase and as you know when you increase liquidity in the market it actually becomes more stable becomes more attractive to institutional investors and more money comes in it's a virtuous cycle and so we're very positive about the Outlook um now I'm not going to be the one calling for $1 million Bitcoin at the end of the year um you know I'm thinking it's going to

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be a much more modest number but what I do think is that we're going to after this initial kind of excitement around the ETF uh we'll start seeing institutional money start coming in slowly but surely and um not the similar to other ETFs you know the volumes transaction volumes and inflows will grow over time which is all going to be good for Bitcoin so when there is dampened volatility I think that uh there's a lot of folks who um they've gotten deeper and deeper into the religion of Bitcoin you know hold

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bitcoin's going to go to the Moon um I actually think that there's a less likelihood of that today than there was pre ETF right it sounds like you know very similarly you're saying it and I think that it's important to call out that doesn't mean that capital is not going to flow in and the price is going to go up like that is going to happen it's just not going to be thousands of percent very quickly it is much more likely to kind of trend over time closer to you know maybe the stock market times

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two or something where where it is something that's more manageable and so it'll still be an outperformer it's just not going to be what we've seen in the past but also on the downside like there's less likelihood of a you know 80% draw down moving forward as well absolutely um you know the one unique thing that Bitcoin has that equities don't have uh is that finite number of Bitcoin right in the equity markets companies can always issue more stock they can dilute and you know the Bitcoin

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miners are famous for that right that's how we've grown most of us so because of the finite number um and with the having happening in April the increase in the supply of Bitcoin will now be less than the increase in the supply of gold in the gold market and so you could expect hopefully um and again this is not Financial advice but you could expect that Bitcoin should Trend at a higher appreciation rate than gold does and be more stable in down markets than gold and gold is the proverbial inflation

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heads risk hedge so I I agree with you I think it's going to you know you won't see these huge swings of two 300% up and you know 75% down I think you'll see more moderated swings and that's going to make it even more attractive to institutional investors we've already seen liquidity in the market increase right so you typically would see on an average day somewhere around one and a half to two million Bitcoin will actually trade um now you're starting to see that number grow because of the ETF

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and you're also starting to see trading around the ETFs right so what does that mean well you're seeing people exiting grayscale and then putting money into Invesco or one of the other ones that has lower fees well when that happens Bitcoin actually has to change hands it causes transactions it causes liquidity in the marketplace and so all of that is very virtuous for the industry because more liquidity you have more ability for larger investors to come in there's less risk you know it's the whole reason why

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people like to invest in stocks or indexes that have a lot of liquidity there's less risk you can get in and out guaranteed right um and so I think that's the biggest benefit to bitcoin is this increased liquidity that's going to happen and then the options you have of investing you you miners you have Micro strategy you have you can hold your own spot Bitcoin now you have ETFs then you're going to have the Futures Market continues to grow um and then you're going to have all these other options to

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be able to short long leverage Etc using other ETF products and you're going to start seeing baskets um of ETFs where you may have exposure to bitcoin you may have exposure to Gold you may have exposure to other things in this basket ETF and you know all of this starts soaking up Bitcoin and again limited Supply 21 million we're you know pushing on hitting 20 million here soon and um it's very exciting times for the IND it's a time of major maturity I think which is the most important part speaking of

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maturity uh a lot of the miners as you said they've grown very quickly they've been able to build out tons of infrastructure uh but now they are uh all optimizing for different things everyone kind of has a different strategy one of the things that you all are doing at Marathon is this energy harvesting uh effort talk a little bit about what is energy harvesting and kind of what's the ultimate goal this episode is brought to you by bet online do you like making a profit from sports betting well set yourself up to take home the

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ag head to the website sign up with promo code pomp 100 to get 100% bonus on your crypto deposit today if you go and you deposit they'll give you 100% bonus if you use promo code pomp 100 bet online go where the game starts betonline.ag go check them out today sure so um you know most miners are constantly chasing what we call utility scale mining you go you get 100 megawatts of power locked up you're either behind the meter or in front of the meter and you're doing energy Arbitrage um that is viewed somewhat parasitically right because you're uh

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some people think you're taking power away from others in reality you're helping stabilize the grid if you work well with your grid operator um but it's still View kind of in in a less positive light energy harvesting is really focused on trying to harness energy that otherwise is completely stranded so think methane from oil fields think methane from landfills think methane from um agricultural waste so not just cow manure but all of the agricultural products that are harvested and processed in some way for the food we

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eat or what we drink so think of corn think of sugar sugar can is burnt normally after it's been processed right causes huge amounts of pollution you could take that sugar cane put it in a biodigestor turn it into methane use methane to generate electricity the other thing we do it's not just con generating electricity from these products or um these biomaterials it's also then taking the heat we produce Bitcoin mining is an ideal way of creating heat because about 95% of the energy that goes into a minor comes

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out as heat and if you use immersion technology you can capture that heat at about 50 degrees Centigrade which is very hot water it's enough to heat a building it's enough to you know launder clothes it's enough to shower Etc and so you can sell that heat back into an industrial process so food processing you could take the food waste coming out of a food processing plant turn that into methane turn it into energy mine Bitcoin and then pump hot water back into the process that lowers their energy cost because now they don't have

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to pay to heat whatever it is they're heating uh we're talking to people in Scandinavia where they use centralized um high heat systems which spread steam around the city to heat it about taking our dual phase immersion technology which are kind of think of them as micro miners almost um which you could deploy to heat a building it's a self-contained box um you plug it in you pay for power and they pay you for heat and it's about a wash on the cost and what happens is you get Bitcoin for free that way so we

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view a Marketplace down the road where Bitcoin mining really becomes more like micro grids compared to utilities lots of miners in small sites spread all over the place taking advantage of all this wasted truly stranded energy and then have the ability to potentially sell that energy into the grid when it's needed so you're a net generator versus a net consumer and I think that that's really the future of where this goes because that gets you to Zer cost Bitcoin mining and if you're a zeroc cost Bitcoin miner

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you'll always be able to mine no matter what the price of Bitcoin is and at the end of the day one of the biggest debates happening amongst the Maxis um and the core developers is this concept of oh do we want to alter the Bitcoin blockchain to provide for the security budget of the Bitcoin blockchain because EV Bitcoin there'll be so many Bitcoin miners that it won't be profitable mine well that's the whole point you have to get to a place where it doesn't cost you anything to mine Bitcoin and at that point Bitcoin will

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be the absolutely most secure network in the world because there's no way to attack it how far out are we from getting there so I think um what you're going to see is over the next fouryear period between this having and the next uh at least From marathon's perspective this becomes a a larger and larger part of our business these projects take longer to execute but what's exciting about this is it opens the opportunities to work with Partners right the for example we can build and deploy a building

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heating system we don't have to go sell it building to building we can go to people who sell HVAC systems and say hey here's the system right you plug it in you're going to get monthly recurring revenues for deploying this and your customer is going to get heat and so you know we believe there's a channel play on all this which is why we're very focused on our technology business where we've developed these very unique dual phase immersion systems that can scale from a one cubic yard box that can heat

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a building or a greenhouse or a shrimp farm all the way up to you know multi- megawatt size systems that can um you know heat major factories and Factory processes and so we're super excited about kind of the future there and we're really morphing more from just a Bitcoin miner to a that leverages energy to do things and uh I think that's something that very much differentiates us plus I think also our Global footprint you know we're of the miners out there we're one of the few people that mine not just in

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North America but also in places like the Middle East places like South America and we're continuing to grow that because there are lots of opportunities both in the utility scale Mining and the energy harvesting side part of the world um all over so he you talk a little bit more about this new uh mind that you acquired yeah so um generate Capital was a financial investor who had uh financed for compute North A couple of years ago um the build out of two sites uh one is um in Texas and one is in Nebraska a

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total of about 390 megawatts and um compute North went bankrupt to generate Capital took possession of the sites um and has operated the sites and we have a small number of miners operating at U one of the sites today already and they had decided that they wanted to exit those sites and so we entered into negotiations with them to acquire the sites um it's 290 megawatts in Texas 100 megawatts in Nebraska with the ability to expand it considerably the benefit to us is its predominantly additional capacity uh we're very focused on

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achieving 50x hash of hash rate by the end of uh 2025 and this brings us you know almost all the way there um with the capacity that we'll be able to gain as the people who are being hosted there as their contracts burn off and as the exit um this will also increase our owned and operated capacity to about 44% of our total Global capacity and so um as you may remember we started in this business with an asset light model we're going to grow as fast as we can using thirdparty hosting and now we have a portfolio

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approach we have some thirdparty hosting some self-owned and operated um and then we also do JVS um especially outside of the US to kind of uh lower the risk in what we're doing and so we found that to be a great model for growth and we're going to continue to iterate on now one other aspect of uh this power conversation is how much is coming from Renewables and I think that the renewable energy percentage uh just hit another all-time high it's like 58 59% now um there's no other industry in

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America for sure probably nowhere that has anywhere near you know 2third of the energy consumption coming from Renewables is that going to just continue to go up over time as you see the energy harvesting and a number of other kind of initiatives that people are going after absolutely um yeah there's a chart that I looked at the other day that somebody had put out which showed the exponential growth of solar and wind energy over the past 100 years compared to Coal um and other sources and you know solar and wind have now surpassed coal as a

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source of energy generation and you know the big challenge with solar and wind is they're they're intermittent right you know in Texas the big issue right now with the cold is if you have wind and you have rain then you get ice on the windmills and so the windmills don't operate um and if you have cloudy weather you don't get as much sun um geothermal is an area that we are very excited about uh why well geothermal uh can be used in um old oil sites so you can leverage these Wells that essentially are think of them as dry

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Wells and use them for geothermal energy production that is a 247 365 energy source that is totally clean um there is also geothermal energy available in places like Wyoming where you have a lot of volcanic activity all around the world and then there is great Hy resources available uh in the third world look at why we're in Paraguay you have a dam that was built 40 50 years ago it produces 14 gwatt of power split equally between Brazil and Paraguay Paraguay's total electrical use is less than three gws and this Dam only supplies them a

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portion of that so they have to sell the rest of the electricity at a loss back to Brazil and so by bringing in Bitcoin miners now all the this Hydro energy which runs you know 24 hours a day 365 can be used for Bitcoin mining and the state of the utility in Paraguay now has an ability to generate a profit on the electricity it makes so it could continue to invest in and build out the infrastructure in the country as opposed to having to finance and subsidize this power generation so we're seeing similar

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things like that in Kya we're seeing similar things like that in other places where we can leverage renewable energy sources and get our elves is close to that 100% goal that you know all miners are looking to get to now speaking of kind of going parabolic or continuing to grow hash rate seems to be doing the exact same thing and and can't be slowed down I'm assuming that uh you expect that to continue but what are some of the nuances there and what potentially could reverse or slow down the growth of

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hash rate yeah great question so the um you have a handful of things driving the growth in global hash rate one thing that most people don't talk about is Sovereign miners why are sovereign miners important well countries who do not want to be on the wrong side of the US in a financial conflict so think for example if you're um an oil producing country and uh you don't want to hold dollars because the us could if you're in a conflict with them restrict your use of access to those dollars now you can only

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hold so much gold in your Treasury and so these countries are starting to look at Bitcoin the problem is they look at Bitcoin they say you know it's great but if the us through their ofac process essentially prohibits our wallets from Trading our Bitcoin gets locked up so how do we avoid that from happening well we do our own mining because if we're doing our own mining we can process our own transactions and if we operate our own pool we can process our own transactions and so you're starting to

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see sovereigns who are interested in getting into the mining of Bitcoin initially for monetary reason but really for cash reserve and treasury reasons and those are people who are willing to mine at potentially lower profits than businesses whose focus is generating a profit from Bitcoin mining so that is a large portion of global hash rate growth that we've been seeing recently you know certainly our partners in the Middle East are very focused on doing this uh that's why they're in the business uh

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with us you have the kingdom of bhon who is doing this now you have other parts of the world Russia um you know is the second largest country by mining capacity and growing very rapidly because they have tons of nuclear energy that's not used they built a lot of nuclear power plants for factories that were never built um and they view the positive uh aspects of this and um then you have uh you know because of the Resurgence of the price of Bitcoin in the back half of last year all of a sudden miners were able to have access

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to Capital you know miners suffer from three constraints one is access to Capital One is access to capacity to plug miners in and one is miners um most of our colleagues in the industry have been focused on buying miners I think that's great but they have to have places to plug those in and the longest lead time item in the mining industry is capacity and so we're very focused on consolidating capacity in the industry even if it's more than we need because we'll eventually use it and meanwhile

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there are other people who are going to want to use it and pay us for it and so while we don't want to be a hosting company this is a way for us to dramatically grow our capacity and then we can be very opportunistic about buying miners at the right time we luckily haven't been suffering from the capital constraints you know we have over a billion dollars of cash and Bitcoin in our balance sheet today we paid down um the majority of our debt last year so we're in a very strong position to be a consolidator and if you

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look at this transaction we did for buying these last sites you know we paid around $470,000 a megawatt for that capacity and it's online today usable today and so um you know we think that consolidating existing sites is a great use of our Capital um and it'll allow us to lower our costs substantially in operating our operations and so we're very excited about that when you think about um this industry in general it seems like there is uh tons of focus on energy and on what I'll call um kind of

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the the strategy but there's also a lot of innovation that's happening with the hardware as well what are you guys excited about there and maybe what are you not excited about when it comes to the actual Hardware that you're installing these facilities sure so we're excited about kind of two things one is the shift to um very economically viable immersion technology so if you look at the technology we put into our UAE site in Abu Dhabi it's state-of-the-art singlephase immersion uh the pilot ran for a 100

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days before an engineer had to open the container to look inside to see if there was a problem so it's highly reliable runs in extreme temperatures you know in the summertime the temperature there is 115 120 degrees um with 95% humidity and these sites run with perfect uptime you know 99 point something perc up time very few machine failures also because it's immersion and that also means you have to have fewer operators on site so when you can run sites with low head count it means you can run smaller sites

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in more um stranded and isolated places so it opens up power options to you um the other thing we're very excited about is these new generations of machines coming not from bitmain not necessarily from micro BT and Kanan but from people like oradine and you know full disclosure Marathon um was very involved in the founding of Bodine you know I have a seat on the board of orine and we're an investor in the company but we were able to get some of the top semiconductor designers in Silicon Valley who came from paloalto networks

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um and backing from high-end VCS like Mayfield fund and celestica to build uh a team that was going to build the Next Generation Bitcoin mining as6 in nine months from concept to first gen product um they were able to build a 4 nanometer part they have since announce their three n apart which will have an energy efficiency of stated 15 jws per ter hash which is industry leading that'll be available later this year um most importantly though they designed a minor for miners right all miners that bit man and these guys typically make are shoe

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boxes that go on shelves you plug a bunch of them into a network we connect them to a pool every minor can operate as a standalone minor you know one one shoe box fits all right what oradine has built are miners designed for industrial use uh the aircooled miners have a similar form factor to the air cooled miners but as you get to the immersion miners they're designed for high density immersion in the Dual phase immersion version of the minor that is kind of specific to us today because we've focused a lot on building dual phase

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immersion tanks and I'll go into what the differ between single phase and dual phases in a second we can pack four times as much hash rate into the same size box as you can with singlephase immersion and that means you get a lot more Miners and a lot less space with very very high power density um dual phase immersion is um essentially where the phase of the liquid changes from liquid to gas and then condenses again and becomes a liquid when a physical material changes state it either has to give up a lot of heat or

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absorb a lot of heat and to go from liquid to gas think of boiling water when it goes from water to steam there's no intermittent state right it's water and then all of a sudden it becomes steam when it becomes steam it sucks lots of heat out of the water think that's how a hurricane Works hurricane comes over the warm water it sucks up all that heat becomes this big engine right you then cool that Vapor just enough to get it to the point where it changes state back to liquid and now it cools the liquid in a singlephase

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immersion it's more like a car radiator right you have liquid it's pumped around and then it goes into a radi are the cool so dual phase immersion lets you operate with um much higher temperatures for one thing and um high density of Miners And so we're super excited about that and we'll be announcing products later um this year for the data center world where we're essentially taking this dual phase immersion technology and launching it for AI HPC all these other applications when we see um this

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Innovation we see kind of how aggressive you all are being on the expansion and and kind of the big 2025 Target um it's very insulated from Global macro uh you know Global liquidity uh interest rates quantitative easing many of the things that people I think in Bitcoin think about do those have an impact or is it just those impact bitcoin's price and bitcoin's price then impacts your business like how how attached or uh maybe susceptible are you to moves in the in the macro environment this episode is brought to you by frck

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when you think of bit Bitcoin uh mining the price of Bitcoin and Global hash rate are the two uncontrollables that you worry about the most right because they impact your ability to get Capital they impact the price of machines they imp impact all sorts of things um and then to a lesser extent the price of energy right and that's all about you can hedge around that you can do things to kind of solve for that but what drives the price of Bitcoin yeah Global liquidity the dollar um you know the US dollar uh is a has a huge correlation to

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the price of Bitcoin because most of us think of the price of Bitcoin in dollar denominated terms right if you're living in Turkey you're living in Argentina you're living in Venezuela you're living in other places like that with high high inflation you're not thinking about Bitcoin and dollar terms you're thinking about Bitcoin in your local currency terms right um but we as you know us miners think about Bitcoin in dollar terms and so what impacts the price of Bitcoin well High interest rates

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generate a high return for people that is very safe right so your risk-free rate of return in a high interest rate environment is very high which means higher risk high growth investment options are less attractive so that impacts potentially the price of our stock which impacts our ability to raise Capital it impacts the attractiveness of Bitcoin because you know risk adjusted Bitcoin is the best investment going back 10 15 years that anybody could have but the question is are you willing to put up with the risk that you may have

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these huge draw Downs um and so in a high risk free return environment you know people go risk off and they move to um things like bonds Etc as interest rates drop all of a sudden now you need to capture that yield that you wanted again so where you going to get it you have to then go up the risk curve and so you're going to go back into equities you're going to go back into growth stocks and you're going to go into Bitcoin and so we believe that Bitcoin unlike gold is not just a safe haven asset but it's an asset that generates a

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very positive return uh independent of the market conditions and again look at bitcoin's performance over its life look at Bitcoin over any kind of period um greater than two or three years and it's done very well and so I think that um the things that impact us liquidity dollar um global conflict you know risk impacts us you know today we are in a multi-polar world geopolitically there's a lot of um stuff going on that um impacts the dollar it impacts uh inflation right and what's going to control interest rates well it's this

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combination of inflation and the economy and the FED is caught right now in a position where inflation has been tamed but it's not fully tamed there are sectors of the economy that the FED can't control energy is one of them right glob global trade is another one and um with what's going on in the Red Sea global trade is being impacted shipping costs are going up Energy prices are going up that's not something the FED can control right so all of those things roll into uh things that make Bitcoin more or less attractive um

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as bitcoin price moves up and down Global hash rate moves up and down right so what are you looking forward to in 2024 maybe in the industry in general right we've got the having coming we just had the ETFs approved people think that there's going to be some uh quantitative easing that's going to occur what are you excited about or what Milestones are you looking for um so I may be a little contrarian in my belief um but uh uh you know I've been accused of that many times before so I actually look forward to bitcoin

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chewing along sideways at this level for a period of time beyond the having why because the amount of capital that miners have been throwing at expansion based on today's economics which will change marketly come to having is going to create a lot of wasted capital and I think that um everybody's trying to grow now while they can raise Capital because people are still looking at the current price of Bitcoin and the current um revenues of these companies based on the current um subsidy rate that they're getting um

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and they won't have that same opportunity come April and you can just see how mining stocks have come down since December uh today um so people have gone out and made huge commitments for machines they don't necessarily have places to plug them in and I think that what's going to happen is you're going to see a little bit of a repeat of 22 post the having where people have expanded a lot um now they don't have the capital to actually operate you one of the reasons we have so much cash and

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Bitcoin in our balance sheet is because we want to be sure that if there are three years of winter we can still operate one of the great things about the site we acquired in Texas and Nebraska is the way the power purchases work on those sites we don't have to take power we could just shut them down other miners don't have that type of optionality right so our whole business model is driven around resilience optionality and Agility and so we are actually looking forward to potentially tough times because it'll allow us to consolidate

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the industry and it'll allow us to really focus on optimizing the business if Bitcoin runs to 60 70,000 after the having then people are going to operate nonsensically and they're going to keep just pumping in more Capital Global hash rate's going to grow and there's going to be a comeuppance at some point more than likely you know after the New Year um when you know typically if you follow historical Cycles there'll be a peak six months after the having and then there'll be a drop and then you'll have

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this double Peak uh about a year after the prior Peak so you know I'm optimistic longterm for the price of Bitcoin I'm super optimistic about the industry and what's going on um I think that um caution um is important uh that people don't just grow I mean the now the amount of miners who have less than 10 xah hash who are now saying they're going to be at 25 or 30 or 40 x aash um sounds crazy uh and granted that was those were numbers we were stating last year year in the year before we went ahead and did it um and

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executed on it I think it's going to be a lot harder for other people to execute on it what is your price prediction for the end of this year and you're you're uh perfectly able to tell me to kick rocks and say you don't have one but do you have one my personal one so not the company one if you would my personal one is I think we're going to be somewhere we will hit the all-time high sometime in late Q3 early Q4 and then we'll see a selloff and it may come down to the mid-40s it may come

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down to the low 50s and then it's going to chug along there into early 2025 and then by the end of 25 you may see a new all-time high somewhere in the 120 range that's my personal belief um you know I think there are a lot of things that are going to impact it uh you know one thing may be all of these derivativ instruments around Bitcoin don't require Bitcoin to be bought or sold so does the majority of the market move to paper trading as opposed to actually trading Bitcoin and what does that do to the price of Bitcoin does

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Bitcoin just become like gold where it appreciates in a good year 10% still a good return but it's not 30 40 50% right so um I think as the asset matures the industry is going to have to mature and it's not unlike the oil industry where you wild catters and then you have the big oil companies you're going to have big Bitcoin miners who are very Diversified that have really tight operations own their technology vertically integrated and then you can have Wildcats who were out there oh god let's go add 50 megawatts here and do

39:41

this and you know they'll do well in the bull portion of the market um and then you know as the market tightens it'll get harder but over time Global hash rate will continue to grow it'll consolidate around bigger players and sovereigns the us will will have a lesser and lesser portion of the global hash rate uh you know you can already see the public miners percentage of the global hash rate is decreasing um just because hash rate's growing so much outside the US and it becomes a very Global Market with global

40:12

competitive pressures and um you know they'll likely be three or four large US miners um and then a handful of Boutique Miners and then you'll have a number of large Sovereign private and possibly public miners outside the US that um that doesn't sound crazy to me I think you uh you may be on to something there and I do agree that may be contrarian to some folks um where where can we send people to find you on the internet or find out more about Marathon so marathon is mar.

40:41

com m.com you can find me uh at Twitter um FG Tel uh same place on Telegram and uh really appreciate the opportunity to be here thanks so much we'll do it again

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