Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten podcast.
Apologies once more because the audio in this little segment just of my intro and my outro
is going to be slightly less of a slightly less quality to the actual body of the interview just
because I'm away from my recording equipment at the moment. This one is with Daniel
If you're not familiar with Daniel's work, don't worry, you're about to get up to speed.
We go into all of the details as to how he found Bitcoin.
More importantly, how the Bitcoiners found him, because that's a truly interesting story.
There's a reason that the Bitcoiners were attracted to Daniel, Daniel's work, and he just came out of nowhere.
And it's tied to the climate change narrative.
and Daniel's take on that as a businessman in that space and an investor.
So yeah, I hope you enjoy it and I hope you reach out to Daniel after this
and it inspires you and not only actually inspire you
to start talking about Bitcoin and the environment in a positive way,
but it's going to give you the tools to do that
and it's going to give you real life examples of what is going on
and how businesses are being built around mitigating waste
in either whether it be landfills or oil and gas, drilling operations and fields.
Yeah, you're going to be up to speed.
So thank you for coming on, Daniel.
Before we get into this one, please make sure you are checking out the show sponsors.
The first thing I want to say first and foremost is please self-custody your Bitcoin.
yes you should be stacking and you can stack with bitcoin uh with with companies that are
bitcoin only relay for example across europe r-e-l-a-i dot ch forward slash bitten you can
check out swan bitcoin if you are in the u.s these links are in the show notes but i want to drill
down on the importance of self-custody and not getting trapped into leaving your funds on an
exchange not taking complete ownership of them or giving your bitcoin up maybe you've held bitcoin
for a long time now and you're thinking i just want to chase some yield or i just need to get
some fiat giving it up to one of these long products or yield chasing products this is a bad
idea just sit on your hands as long as you can do not trade your bitcoin do not swap it for fiat
to buy Bitcoin treasury company stocks.
Just sit with Bitcoin in cold storage.
Use it.
Use it via the Lightning Network.
Use it to pay for things when you can
and support those businesses that are coming online
and asking for the support of the Bitcoin community.
Now, Fountain App is one of those.
If you're listening to this podcast right now on Apple or Spotify,
what are you doing?
If not you, then who?
We need to help the builders.
And Fountain have been around a long time now,
providing services for Bitcoiners built by Bitcoiners.
So get over to Fountain app and start listening to the show there.
But please self-custody your Bitcoin.
Now, there's plenty of different wallets out there at this stage,
but long-standing show sponsor have been the Bitbox team.
They've been around for a very long time.
They know what they're doing when it comes to security.
They've built the Bitbox O2 and the Bitbox Nova,
which are Bitcoin-only hardware wallets.
And you can go and get yourself a 5% discount
if you just get to the link in the show notes,
bitbox.swiss forward slash bitten.
They also have steel plates on there.
If you don't want a steel plate,
we have the C-door guys have given you a discount as well,
or the crypto steel guys.
There's a lot of links in the show notes
that I don't shill all the time
because I don't have the time,
but because these companies do want to offer you discounts, it's all there.
Go and check them out.
Get to a conference.
We just had the one in Bulgaria.
We've now got the one coming up next.
BitFest in Manchester, 21st to the 23rd of November.
At the same kind of time, if you're over in Asia,
get yourself 23rd of November over to Tokyo for BTC Japan.
You can use the code BITTON for a discount at checkout for both of those conferences.
paywithflash.com
have you gone over to paywithflash.com
and checked out how easy it is now
for you to start accepting bitcoin
for your goods and services
if not why not go and check it out
and orange pill app
is the place for you to go
and start meeting your local bitcoiners
getting out to events
getting over to the conferences
or just meeting your nearest bitcoiner
for a coffee
use it when you're out traveling
find the local places that are accepting Bitcoin.
There's 19,000 members there now, so come and join us.
Yeah, we're looking forward to hosting you over on Orange Pill app
and getting to know everybody.
And finally, quick shout out for Basalto Fund.
Go back and listen to my episode with Andre Olojar
if you are interested in flag theory second passports.
Now, sit back and relax.
Enjoy this one with Daniel Batten.
All right, we've got Daniel Batten on the show.
After many years, Daniel, nice to have you.
Great to be here.
All right, Lauren, I told you before we come on this call what Daniel does,
how he writes about Bitcoin and the environment.
And we did a little experiment here.
So just tell Daniel what you Googled in your browser there.
So I Googled is Bitcoin bad for the environment.
and it has come up with many many articles about saying like the large environmental
consequences of bitcoin mining and that that what that is by the london school of economics
must be true yeah and that was 8th of november 2024 thank you yep right okay what else do we have
line.
UN.
Yep.
Diversity.
Study reveals the hidden environmental impacts of Bitcoin.
Yeah.
October 2023.
And then there's the Harvard.
Yeah.
Bitcoin mining increases levels of air pollution harmful to,
I actually don't know what that says again.
Harmful to the environment.
Yeah.
Yep.
Wow.
Then.
When was that released?
24.
2025.
April 2025 from Harvard.
So Britannica, is Bitcoin bad for the environment?
Crypto and ESG investing.
What else do we have here?
David at Top hits.
And then it just goes on and on and on.
It's also tiresome.
Yeah, that's what we have to contend with.
So Lauren, what's your question?
So this might be a bit of a silly question,
but is Bitcoin bad for the environment?
In a word, no, not at all. If you were to look at the photovoltaic industry, for the first 57 years, it had a tremendous carbon footprint. In other words, it was creating vastly more emissions than it was evading.
And the reason for that was that it required these big coal furnaces to melt silicon to 1,414 degrees.
And the efficiency of solar panels was such that it was nowhere near efficient enough to offset those very high emissions.
And there were actually debates in the environmental movement as late as the 1990s about whether solar technology was good for the environment or not.
That was 40 years after it was created.
So these debates raged.
But it's the wrong question. The right question is, does it have the potential to be net emission reducing?
Can it reach that point fast?
And if you look at it through that lens, the same lens that you would have judged solar by,
Bitcoin is actually trending extremely well.
Emissions are, there's a lot of emission negative sources every year.
The emissions are static over four years, despite rising hash rate, that's computational power.
and also despite price going up about eight times over that period,
there's no other industry in the world which, as it's scaled,
has managed to keep emissions the same.
And what those articles don't say is that there's the vast bulk
of scientific literature, in fact, there's about five
in the last two and a half years that have been negative.
They're the ones that get picked up by the press.
But there's been 22 that have not been picked up by the press
that have showed very strong environmental positive externalities,
such as mitigating methane, stabilizing the grid, accelerating the renewable energy transition, obviating gas pica plants, heat recycling.
Heat is one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions in the world, and recycled heat from Bitcoin and mining rigs can abate that.
So those are the stories that you don't hear so much.
There's a truism in the media, which is that negative events, shock, tends to sell headlines much better.
So in case in point, there were in 2018, that's when all the reporting on Bitcoin is bad for the environment really started in earnest.
And it was based on one article.
There were 400 papers, 400 articles the very next year, just citing that one bit of research, which has now been debunked, by the way.
then later on cambridge this is just this year published a report which which didn't appear
in your search engine the reason it didn't appear is again it didn't get picked up by the media
which showed that bitcoin is now 52 percent sustainable energy backed only 8.9 percent of
it is backed by coal so that's that's a quarter of what the grid is there's not an industry in the
world, which is predominantly sustainably powered, a global industry. So Bitcoin's the only one and
it's getting more sustainably powered every year. They also found that Bitcoin had a tremendously
important role in terms of stabilizing the grid and also in accelerating the renewable energy
transition. Crickets in the media. One media outlet picked it up. So 400 picked up a non-peer
reviewed commentary back in 2018 that had a negative claimed effect of Bitcoin mining,
which has now been debunked. One news outlet picked up the positive story. So what you're
seeing in those results is reflective of what gets reported, not what the scientific community
actually believe Okay we get into all of that in a second I just want to make sure Lauren do you have any further questions about Bitcoin mining and its impact on the environment
Why do you think this thing is bad for the environment if it's not?
Well, the first thing is that negative stories tend to sell much better, right?
So that's what gets reported.
So that's true of anything. It's not unique to Bitcoin.
Second thing is that if you look through history, if you look at how any disruptive technology, and by disruptive I mean something that will disrupt another industry.
So Bitcoin disrupts central banks. It disrupts the banking system.
But it's not the first disruptive technology we've ever had.
Radio, for example, disrupted live entertainment, disrupted print media, disrupted the record industry.
Bicycles before that disrupted public transit, disrupted the horse and buggy industry, disrupted
the riding apparel industry.
And you can see exactly the same trends in the media, where if you read some of the articles
on the radio or on the bicycle, a bicycle was said to be responsible for insanity.
It was held by physicians that it made women cruel.
Radio was blamed for snowstorms, for jailbreaks, for poor behavior in public, for declining
educational standards.
So it's a very strong trend and it's not unique to Bitcoin.
So you will always see, whenever you have a disruptive technology, you'll always have
that'll be attacked, at least for the first 10 or 15 years.
So Bitcoin is part of that tradition.
But the other reason is that people just don't have good energy literacy.
And so most people believe that more energy consumption is bad and less energy consumption is good.
But it's not as straightforward as that.
It's a little bit like in the 1990s and 80s.
You probably remember this, Daniel.
We were all told eat less fat because it'll give you cholesterol.
Everyone believed that.
Doctors would tell you that.
And then they realized, actually, well, it's not as simple as that, actually.
It depends on the type of fat.
If you eat trans fats, then, yeah, that's really bad.
That'll give you not only high cholesterol, but a whole lot of other things, including cardiovascular disease.
If you're eating saturated fats, they're kind of a little bit bad, a little bit good, depending on the concentration of what you're having.
But they're a bit of a mix.
But if you're having unsaturated fats, such as salmon or avocado, for example, those are net cholesterol reducing.
So it's very similar with energy.
Not all energy consumption is bad.
Not all energy consumption will contribute to emissions.
In fact, some energy consumption reduces emissions.
If you use landfill gas, for example, as your source of energy, you're taking pollution and you're turning it into energy.
In other words, you're taking something that would have gone into the atmosphere in the form of methane, which is 84 times more warming than carbon dioxide, and you're stopping it from going to the atmosphere.
You're putting it into a generator, turning it into electricity, using that for Bitcoin mining.
that energy is doing environmental good.
It's literally stopping emissions going into the atmosphere.
If you're using solar or wind or hydro,
which most Bitcoin is using some form of sustainable energy,
that's going to have no direct impact on emissions.
And in fact, it's net supportive of the energy transition
because you're net supportive of moving away from fossil fuels.
So part of the problem is, yeah, we don't have good energy literacy.
We were probably all brought up, as we should have been, by our parents saying, turn off the light, turn off the stove when you're not using it, conserve electricity, which is true on a household level.
Absolutely, you should conserve electricity.
Don't be wasteful with it.
But the nuance is that not all forms of electricity consumption are necessarily bad.
And with Bitcoin, not only can it reduce emissions, but some of that electricity consumption, because it's flexible, has a lot of really useful uses, such as stabilizing grids, which we can get into a bit later on.
Yeah. So one quick example that I think you could probably leave Lauren with, I think it'd probably make quite a big impression.
we've seen i mean how many times have you seen the the windmills uh around either france or
england or spain wherever we go right there's always a windmill farm somewhere and sometimes
you know the wind's blowing but they're not moving right so do you want to ask daniel what's going on
there like why why is that yeah well i think i was gonna say he's got the question i'm not sure
Yeah, why are the winds blowing? Are the windmills not moving? Why are they not producing electricity? Or why is that electricity not being used? It's a great question. We live in a wired world when it comes to electricity. Now, when it comes to communication, we live in a wireless world. Whereabouts are you today?
In the UK.
You're in the UK?
I'm in Costa Rica.
So we don't need a wire connecting us.
This communication is happening wirelessly.
If I pick up my phone and call someone, there's no wires attached to it.
I communicate wirelessly.
That's not the case with energy.
I can't say to you, hey, I've got a gift for you.
I want to give you 500 kilowatt hours of energy.
I'm going to send it to you.
I can't do that.
I need wires to transmit it.
And so for a long time, a lot of these renewable energy projects, they were given money by the government to just build a renewable energy project.
And so if you get a lot of money from the government and you're told, hey, go build a wind farm, where do you think you're going to build it?
Where would you say?
I would say the sea or near the end of the sea.
Yeah, and why would you, a lot of them are,
why would you build it there?
Because a lot of wind comes off from the sea.
Absolutely.
Do you think you'd build it right near a city?
I wouldn't say so.
One, because it's going to be ugly,
and two, I don't know, it's just not much wind.
Depends how inland the city is.
Land's going to be pretty expensive there too, isn't it,
if it's near a city?
So, yeah, you're absolutely right.
You're going to go where it's obviously there's some wind or there's some sun, but it's solar.
But you're also going to go where the land is cheap and you're also going to go where
fewest people will complain.
So that's typically where there's not many people, which is great if your goal is to
build something which has energy.
But here's the problem.
There's not many people.
So how do you get it to where the people are?
And well, the answer is, well, you just hook it up to the grid and the grid will deliver
that electricity.
Yes, it will to a point, but a grid's a little bit like a highway.
Now, it doesn't have literal lanes which get congested, but it does have wires that get congested.
It can only transmit so much electricity.
So if you have a really windy day or maybe three days or four days in the north of Scotland,
where in the UK you've got a lot of wind energy and it gets pretty windy sometimes, you get gale force wind.
That's fantastic.
But you cannot transport that wind through the existing wires to people who are using it.
It gets congested in the same way that a highway gets congested.
So what happens to it?
Well, nothing.
It just gets wasted.
So you get tremendous amounts of wasted energy around the world.
And part of the reason for that is that governments never incentivize the use of electricity, the use of renewable electricity.
They subsidized the building of these wind farms and solar farms.
So the incentive was on to build it, not to have it used.
So people built them where land was cheap, where there was wind, but often not with consideration
about how much would get wasted.
And they didn't have to, because here's the other wonderful thing.
The government will pay them to what's called curtail that energy.
So in other words, if the grid can't take that energy, you as a wind farm operator actually
get paid for the wind that the grid operator cannot use. So you win both ways. You win because
you get a subsidy, and then you win again because even if you can't use that electricity, you still
get paid for it. But who picks up the burden? Well, it's the person who's paying the taxes
through the tremendous subsidies. And then again, the second time where there's more money paid to
use that electricity. And then the third time, which is you have to fire up often a fossil fuel
station to deliver that power, which also costs money. So there's waste throughout the entire
system. So wind farms and solar farms are great. We need more of them. That's not the issue. The
issue has been how we've built them, where we've built them, how we've incentivized them.
And so now you have the situation, we have tremendous wasted energy. And so what do people
say? They say, well, we just need more batteries. Okay, so we need batteries, so we can store that
energy. Well, that's a great idea. The problem is that batteries cost a lot of money. And so often
the price you pay for those batteries is more than the energy you can store. But if you have a
combination where you're not using it all to store, but you're using some of that for Bitcoin mining.
So I'll give an example. So say you have a wind farm and it has 15 megawatts of energy. So that's
enough to power about 15,000 households. So a small town. So pretty big wind farm. And like a
lot of wind farms, you can't always transport all the power. Well, what are your choices? You could
pay about $15 million for a whole bunch of batteries to store that power. Okay. Now that
would have a problem because even if you have a big wind event, so maybe you have three days of
really strong wind. Now, batteries have limited storage. They can only store about four hours
worth. So once you pass that first four hours, a lot of that will still get wasted.
If instead of spending 15 million on batteries, you say, well, we'll get 3 million in batteries,
but we'll spend 2 million on Bitcoin mining. Number one, it's only going to cost you a third
as much. But number two, if you have some really windy period for a long time, you're not wasting
that energy. You can use it for Bitcoin mining. And now you've got choices. It's like, okay,
do we use this energy for storing in batteries? Do we use it to mine Bitcoin? And then when you
want to mine Bitcoin, you've got a choice. Do we use the grid power or do we use the stored energy
from a battery? So you've just got a lot more options. And so it's cheaper, it's less wasteful,
and you're going to end up as a renewable operator more profitable as well.
And what do you do with that profit?
You do what any good business owner will do.
You pour that profit into growing your business,
which means you put up more wind turbines.
So now you've actually incentivized building out renewable energy
because you had Bitcoin mining as part of the solution.
And I noticed, I think it was one of your recent tweets or recent articles
that you had some stats on the UK,
how much money they missed in one day.
Was that right?
It's like 13 million rings a bell or something.
Yeah 13 million pounds recently It not always quite that high We can actually check the site right now tell you what it got up to for the year It called wasted So we have a little look
It's a really good site. Okay, what is it up to now? It's wastedwind.energy. So far in 2025,
Britain has wasted £976,000,73,461 pounds.
So that's almost a billion dollars.
Switching off wind turbines and paying gas plants to switch on.
There we go.
So it's fairly large.
Almost a billion dollars this year has been wasted in energy.
Yeah, total cost.
Now, as I say, batteries and Bitcoin can't solve all of that because the fundamental issue is that, well, they were built in the wrong place with the wrong incentives and you would need to upgrade the grid infrastructure to take it so you could use it all.
But that's just going to be prohibitively expensive.
So the next best option is combination of batteries and Bitcoin.
So that can't stop all that money because you've still got to pay the fossil fuel plants to come online when you can't use the wind.
But it could take away about a third of that cost, which is still significant.
And it means that that wind energy is no longer getting wasted.
And you have no idea on the upside if it's mining Bitcoin.
Yeah, exactly.
And it also means that it's going to be saving taxpayers money.
It's going to be bringing the cost of energy down because the government doesn't have to pay.
The grid operator doesn't have to pay money to the renewable operators to switch off that energy.
But I think another important thing is it's going to stop.
There's a lot of backlash against a lot of these projects at the moment because people are starting to say,
hey, why are we subsidizing all these projects that aren't delivering energy to people?
Number one.
And number two, why are we paying all this money for them not to be delivering energy?
And people are rightly asking questions.
And unfortunately, what's happening now is there's been a bit of a backlash against renewable
energy generally.
As I say, renewable energy isn't the problem, but how we've deployed it has been.
But if we're able to better use renewable energy and we take that circumstance where
a lot of it is getting wasted and it's not wasted because we're using it to mine Bitcoin,
then you actually prevent a lot of that backlash as well.
So there's a lot of really good reasons to start doing it.
Right.
Okay.
Any further questions?
No.
No?
All right.
Cool.
Was that useful?
Did that make sense?
Did I do a good job explaining it?
Yeah, it's a bit complicated to get in my head, but I think I do understand most of it.
You have some good questions.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Have a good day.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Yeah, there's plenty more to get into, actually, Daniel.
But I'd like to take it back to kind of like your personal journey
and your personal story into Bitcoin.
For those people that aren't exactly aware of where you came from,
how you first come to look at Bitcoin
and how it kind of started shaping your thoughts.
So do you want to take us back to what you were doing
in the fiat world, in New Zealand?
Where were you in New Zealand?
I was in New Zealand in Auckland.
And I'd run a technology company
and then I'd started investing in other technology companies.
So I'd been through that whole phase of running a startup,
which had an exit, investing in other technology companies,
coaching other technology company founders,
and then formed two different investment funds.
And I thought, well, let's make them impact investment funds so I can invest in technologies that I think the world needs more of.
So things which had environmental or social benefits.
And so we invested in a few companies which were called climate tech companies.
So we had to learn a lot about how you measure the impact of climate tech.
So one company was taking the zinc recycling process and making it carbon neutral.
It's traditionally very carbon intensive.
You use big coal furnaces to smelt zinc.
and another company we invested in was turning the global greenhouse industry so these are the
big industrial scale greenhouses like the ones you have in holland which grow tomatoes for example
which use a lot of gas and replacing that with a carbon neutral source so using biomass to burn
so it's part of the natural carbon cycle so we invested in those companies and then i asked a
dangerous question, which was how much impact are we having? And the honest answer was, well,
not nearly as much as we would like to think we did. And there was a few reasons for that. Number
one, we're investing in high-risk technologies. So technologies, when you're investing in startups,
the traditional metric is about one out of five might succeed. That's if you're lucky as a fund.
Actually, it's not to do with luck, but that's another whole conversation.
but most will not see the light of day as technologies statistically second issue is
even the ones that would would take a long time because these processes like how you scale up
something which is a new way to smelt zinc and recycle it it goes through a number of phases and
it takes about a decade to go from the lab right through to industrial scale so you're talking about
like early 2030s. And the third thing is we were only reducing CO2 emissions and we learned
that methane emissions are, according to the United Nations, even more urgent. And we were
doing nothing. So we said, OK, what if we started to look at methane? What if we looked at technologies
which already exist so they're not high risk about whether they succeed? And what if we do something
that has an impact before 2030 or 2035? Made a whole lot of sense. The only problem was
that was taking me away from venture capital into the world of infrastructure finance,
which I didn't know a lot about. In fact, I knew nothing about. So I thought, okay, well,
I'm going to go into this area if I'm serious about it. We need to have a team. So then the
process of getting a team together started. I started to research what are the best ways to
mitigate methane. We found that there are three big sources. Farms is one, oil and gas is another,
and waste, particularly landfills is the third. And it's often thought to be a distant third,
but we found that some recent studies of actual satellite emissions, satellite readings from
landfills showed that it was about twice what anyone had thought. So it was almost as large
as each of agricultural oil and gas. It was a massive source. And I asked the question, well,
why aren't we doing something about it? And there was a whole bunch of reasons.
landfills are never in the right place.
So that same issue of transporting energy applies.
So transitioning it into natural gas is really expensive,
involves a lot of energy, a lot of purification.
You've got to compress it, purify it.
Very strong environmental permitting, often not economical.
Sometimes it is, but you need a really big landfill.
What generally is a better idea is you turn that landfall gas,
You purify it, and it becomes methane, a combination of methane and carbon dioxide, and you send that into a generator and turn that into electricity.
And this has been done a lot throughout the world.
But again, it's only been done where the landfill was either near the grid or where the grid could handle that power without a big substation upgrade and where the government permitted the sale of energy.
I live in Costa Rica now.
the government doesn't let you sell electricity to the grid same in mexico it's almost impossible
so what do you do for those sites well the answer is for the most part well if it's in europe you'll
just flare it which means it just gets wasted okay it destroys 90 percent of the methane 91
so that's most of the problem kind of dealt with but very wastefully but in the rest of the world
which doesn't have the money for flare stacks that have no business case for them,
and there's no government incentives or regulations,
the answer is it just goes into the air.
So that's what's happening in Africa.
That's what's happening in India, in Pakistan, Southeast Asia,
in most of Latin America.
So in other words, most of the landfills in the world,
the landfill gas just goes into the air.
And in vast quantities.
And it's not just 84 times more warming to the planet than carbon dioxide.
methane is also responsible for a million premature deaths every year because it's
it's a toxin which you will know if you've ever been next to a gas stove which has been unlit it's
not something you want going into the atmosphere it's something you want to use as fuel so i looked
into different sources for what we could do with that and was asking the question well who could
use that power well they'd have to actually be located on the landfill and who could that possibly
be. And pretty soon we realized no one in their right minds, for the most part, would want to set
up a business on a landfill. You're not going to set up a hospital there or a retail storefront on
a landfill. We thought, what about edge data centers? We looked into them. It was like, nah,
even them, not really, because whilst they don't need the same, have the same latency requirements as
some of the other data centers, they still, there wasn't enough incentive, like cost money to
do the projects to, you've got to buy generators, you've got to buy pipes, you've got to buy
purification equipment. And it really wasn't worth their while because only about 30% of their
budget tops was electricity. And then we thought, okay, what about someone suggested Bitcoin mining?
And I looked at that and I realized that 80% of their operational costs were electricity.
And suddenly this light bulb went off and I went, hang on, that changes the equation completely.
and ran some spreadsheets, did some calculations and realized this actually makes a lot of sense
to Bitcoin mining companies because, yes, whilst they've got the added cost of the generator and
the gas purification, the payoff is they get electricity at one cent per kilowatt hour rather
than four cents per kilowatt hour. So that's worth their while. Now you've actually got,
for the first time ever, a business which is economically incentivized to set up on a landfill
in the middle of nowhere, pay that extra capital cost because it's worth it to get that cheap
power because cheap power is everything as a Bitcoin mining company.
So it's not because Bitcoin mining companies are particularly environmentally minded.
They're not environmentally minded.
They're just the same as any other business.
They want to source electricity cheaply.
It just so happens that because of these unique quirks of Bitcoin mining, it makes sense to
them to set up on these out of the way places.
It could be a solar farm or a wind farm taking stranded wasted energy.
But in our case, we were particularly interested in landfills because it's solving that chronic methane emission issue.
So where were the landfills that you were looking?
Actually, more of a basic question.
How big are these things?
How do you even create a landfill?
How deep is that hole?
How vast of an area?
Obviously I know it going to be different wherever you are but the ones that you been working with I mean for a dummy like me you get a bunch of diggers in or an old quarry or something and that the site And you just tip all the city waste But there must be more regulations and it got to be But what are we dealing with here
What is exactly the land?
Well, it depends what part of the world you're in.
If you're in a lot of the world, that's exactly what you do.
You just clear a site, you dump it all,
and it leaches into the groundwater and into the soil
and all sorts of horrible things.
That's wild.
In the West, that doesn't happen anymore.
So in Europe, in the States, in South Africa, in Australia and New Zealand, you have since the 1970s, you've had these modern sanitary landfills where they have to be lined so you don't get leakage into the soil.
So they're very well contained.
Lined?
How on earth do they line these things?
Wow.
yeah just just material which is going to withstand uh you know vast amounts of
leachate which is the waste which gets created from landfills so they line the entire area so
they cannot leach into the groundwater into the soil uh and then a modern landfill rather than
being a sprawling mass which goes a long way like football fields they'll be relatively more compact
in terms of the area but they'll be much deeper so they dig much deeper holes they might go
So it depends, 30 meters, even 60 meters in some cases, deep in the earth.
And so for the local environment, they're a lot better than the old tips.
And everyone's like, this is progress.
We're winning.
We're doing well.
And it doesn't take up so much land mass.
It's a smaller land footprint.
You get better compacting.
But here's a problem that no one realized back in the 1970s at the time.
Because it's so well compacted, you get rotting of organic waste without air.
And when you get stuff that rots without air, you don't get carbon dioxide, you get methane.
And so what we'd actually created in tidying up the local environment, we'd introduced a massive problem for the global environment, which was huge spikes in methane emissions coming from landfills compared to what we'd done in the past, which still would get some methane, but not quite as much.
So we've actually worsened the methane emissions problem.
And these landfills are typically located.
You have these transfer stations where your garbage will get delivered to one of them and then they go from there into the landfill and most people never set foot on them in their life.
It's just some big mystery, a little bit like you flick a switch, electricity comes on.
It's like you put some waste in the garbage and someone picks it up and then it's out of mind, out of sight.
I'm trying to find some information on...
I've never really, I always could picture in my mind
what a landfill might look like.
But the fact you just said they might be 30 to 60 metres deep
and they've got to line it.
It's like the biggest, deepest swimming pool.
Swimming pool of trash.
Yeah.
That can't be cheap in the first place.
No, they're incredibly expensive.
If you look at the...
Who pays for that?
Well, you do.
Comes out of your rates.
because that's what i was expecting you to say yeah of course it does wow do you have any idea
on the cost that to to build a landfill because obviously if the government's paying there's going
to be an incredible amount of slippage it's hundreds of millions absolutely and it's not
even that it's it's the building of it is only part of the issue then you've got the maintenance
of it you've got all the the garbage trucks which are going around almost 24 7 collecting trash
if you look at your local government bill where their money goes waste management will
always be one of the biggest single line items and typically it'll be in the billions
for a reasonably sized city that's in the west so billions of dollars has been spent on the
building of them of the maintaining of them then the closing of them and then of course you've got
the permitting of them, then of course you've, and in the meantime, you're creating this massive
issue for the environment at the same time. I can't imagine the shady deals that are going on
as well in the council offices with the contractors to get the jobs.
Yeah, that absolutely happens throughout the world. Yeah. And a lot of places in the world,
they're actually run by either the mafia or some cartel because there's so much money in it yeah
and they here's and they i mean do they care what happens to the trash did they like i mean
obviously we can talk about unintended consequences like you mentioned in the 70s
the unintended consequence was uh the methane uh well i think to be fair in europe the answer is
yes. In some parts of the world, the answer is yes, because there have been, once the problem
was recognized of methane, then it's like, hang on, we've got to do something about it. But again,
the do something about it was, again, let's print more money, let's put more taxes onto people,
let's create these, not how do we deal with this profitably, but how do we use government money in
order to seemingly take this problem away so they would spend more money to destroy the problem by
simply wasting it, which is burning it. So you put up these big flare stacks, which might cost
a million dollars. So it's not too bad. You'll still get waste from it though, because they don't
burn the whole time they go out. The latest study says they burn about 91% of the methane. So you
still get a lot of residual waste as well from there. But it's a lot better than doing nothing,
which is what happens in most of the world. So was that your first touch point then? Bitcoin
mining as a solution to landfill.
So that's your entrance to the rabbit hole.
That was the entrance point.
And then around the same time, Greenpeace USA launched a campaign about how terrible
Bitcoin was supposedly for the environment.
And of course, I've done some research on it.
And we hadn't just done research on landfills.
I'd also ask the question, well, where else could Bitcoin be used?
Can it use stranded energy in other places?
I knew a little bit about energy.
I knew that solar and wind energy and hydro energy also gets wasted.
And the answer was, yes, it could.
It could absolutely use.
In fact, it was what Troy Cross calls the dung beetle, where it's just really good at
mopping up these little patches of energy that no one else can use, no one else wants,
and it uses them.
So a lot of this debate about Bitcoin uses a lot of energy, it's like, well, that's like
saying ants eat a lot of food.
It's like, yeah, they do.
They eat all your crumbs, but were you going to eat them?
Well, the answer is no, because they were too small.
It was too inconvenient placed.
And so in the same way, Bitcoin mining has been using all these pockets of energy that
other people couldn't use.
So I learned a lot about generally how it was just such a good dung beetle for stranded
energy.
And so then when Greenpeace USA launched their campaign and they said a lot of things that
actually showed a lack of basic understanding of how energy worked and that Bitcoin mining
and many times was not a rival for electricity,
I said, hey, actually, you're saying some things that aren't quite true.
And what happened then was I realized there was just this whole community
of people in Bitcoin who I think had been really attacked
and maligned for many years who just were like, thank you.
Not to say, I mean, of course, there were other people saying the same thing,
but really the uniqueness, I guess,
was that I hadn't come to that conclusion as a Bitcoiner.
I'd come to that conclusion as an environmentalist
and as someone who was running a climate tech fund
and who actually didn't know a lot about Bitcoin
as an asset at that stage.
I only knew about Bitcoin mining.
And it's interesting because you find
that there's a lot of people out there
who are real proponents of the environmental benefits
of Bitcoin mining,
who actually don't know anything about Bitcoin
or don't own Bitcoin.
So Brad Jones, for example, who ran the ERCOT grid, didn't own Bitcoin, didn't know about Bitcoin.
When someone suggested to him, said, I'm risk averse, I'm never going to touch it.
But he said, but I love what Bitcoin mining can do for stabilizing the grid and incentivizing renewable energy.
We've got a guy on our fund, his name is Nuno, doesn't own Bitcoin.
He's a little bit curious about it.
But he says, look, I just love the fact that now, for the first time, having been doing landfall gas to energy projects for 20 years and having seen firsthand all these landfills where you just couldn't do a project because you couldn't connect it to the grid.
Now, suddenly, we solve that problem and he's excited.
so i started to realize it had many many different applications as well as
landfall gas as well and that got me writing more generally about how bitcoin mining is
a net positive force for the environment not what we've been led to believe so what was the what was
the first piece that you wrote that just kind of all of a sudden you're getting like the bitcoiners
knocking at your door, putting their arm around you,
thank you so much, we need more of this.
And how did that feel?
How it felt was just really surprising.
The big piece was just after Greenpeace USA
launched their campaign, changed the code in 2022.
And I put out a tweet on Twitter, as it was then.
It was the first ever tweet thread I'd written in my life.
It was probably the first time I'd written anything
and Twitter for about 10 years.
I had a pretty stale, almost dead account.
But I reached out to someone who was writing some things on it
called Margot Paez, who was doing some great work.
And I said, hey, you're doing some great work.
I actually used to be a volunteer for Greenpeace,
and I'm a little bit concerned about the tack they've taken.
Can I quote some of the studies you've done?
And I've got some other information as well.
She said, very generously, she said, yeah, go for it.
and so I put out a tweet about it tweet thread and just put it up there and must have gone and
done something else come back half an hour later and then suddenly I had a hundred retweets and I
was like that that had never happened in my life I thought I can't remember the last time I'd had
any retweets um and then several hundred likes it was in New Zealand so I went to bed woke up the
next morning by which stage the US had kind of got involved and then it had over a thousand
or close to a thousand retweets.
And suddenly I had about a thousand extra followers.
And I was like, how did that happen?
And just all these comments,
the same thank you from the Bitcoin community.
So it's just really surprising.
I didn't do it for that reason.
I did it just because I wanted to correct
what I saw as some incorrect information.
And then from there, people said,
can I get you on my podcast?
Can you write an article of this?
Would you like to come and speak at this conference?
and that kick-started me as well doing more research and putting out what I realized we
didn't have a lot of at that point it's now being corrected was we didn't have a lot of data
so we had a lot of people saying correctly that bitcoin mining can stabilize the grid
incentivizes renewables but we didn't have a lot of data that had been quantified
we didn't have data that told us how much of bitcoin came from sustainable energy sources so
I started to compile that, publish that, and that also was greeted with a big thank you from the Bitcoin mining community and the Bitcoin community generally.
And so it was a fascinating time.
to be part of that history where you are seeing literally a lot of environmentalists and a lot of
so-called energy experts saying negative things about Bitcoin and being challenged based on data
and doing one of two things either in most cases they just stop writing but in some cases even
changing their opinion. Then I'm assuming all of this leads to you looking at Bitcoin
on the asset side of things.
You can't not.
I'm glad to hear that.
So once, and it was really about a year or so later
and I was saying, what is this Bitcoin thing anyway?
It was like that after a year of Bitcoin mining knowledge,
I started to get interested and people were very generous
and would explain from first principles what it was,
how it worked, why it solved problems.
I didn't get it to start with.
For a long time, my impression was still it's a speculative asset.
It doesn't seem to have any other uses.
But then I realized just Alex Gladstein and his work really reshaped my thinking there
when I was like, wow, I really was financially privileged.
I assumed because I don't see any immediate use for it for me.
I do now, but at the time I didn't.
Therefore, it has no use for anyone.
It was a complete surprise to find that unlike any other technologies I'd ever invested in,
where the West enjoys first and then it's kind of given to Africa and Latin America afterwards
after we've got our return on investment from it.
This is the opposite.
It was actually benefiting Latin America and Africa and Southeast Asia.
Almost always, countries in those areas are adopting Bitcoin much faster than the West.
US and the Netherlands is a bit of an anomaly, but most of the West hasn't adopted Bitcoin that fast,
But you've got like 20%, 30% adoption rates in places like Argentina or Nigeria because it solves these fundamental problems of hyperinflating currencies that erode your family's wealth or not having access to banking services at all or not being able to receive remittance payments.
So then the social utility of Bitcoin really started to get me excited and thinking, wow, this is just as amazing as the environmental benefits.
And then from there, I started to research more about what is sound money and what fundamental problems is it.
But it took me a long time to get to that point.
It wasn't my first foray into Bitcoin.
I get it.
It took a while.
Yeah.
It all takes us a little.
Yeah.
I mean, we all have the same story.
You know, you have several touch points and then why didn't I buy it straight away?
But yeah, whatever.
Here we are today.
Still so early.
Nice segue.
because you mentioned Gladstein and his work.
And I wanted to talk about one of the articles
that you've released recently about the IMF.
And more fun, it looks like you were on stage
with John Perkins.
Yeah.
Now, his book is incredible.
If nobody's read it, I think he's released
three or four iterations of it now.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman or New Confessions
or Updated Confessions.
But his backstory is incredible as, you know,
what being an economic hitman working within that industry and, you know,
forcing countries basically into debt.
So the IMF can come in,
give them a loan and then put them into perpetual debt rather than the nice
cozy story that we've been told about how, you know,
the IMF and the World Bank were created to help the developing nations.
Anybody that works in these places, I just can't,
when when they realize what they've been part of what they've been used for what their skills
and knowledge have been you know put towards i can't i can't imagine the darkness they're
going to have to face because what this institution is doing is crazy but you've written an article
do you want to uh talk us through that article like the links you make between imf and the loans
and the GDP and the Bitcoin adoption or lack thereof.
Yeah, it was fascinating meeting John Perkins
and chatting to him and hearing his stories firsthand.
And for those of you who aren't aware,
so John Perkins basically went around selling the idea
of taking on debt to third world countries for a long time,
believing he was doing something good.
Because if you look at the data, there's undeniable links
that if you take on loans and you use it for infrastructure,
deployments, then it raises your GDP, which is true. What those metrics don't tell you is that
GDP is a really bad measure for a country's prosperity. So you can have a self-sufficient
country, which is feeding its population really well, and then you take on some debt to build some
highway, some airport, some dam, etc. And then what happens is that very fast, often,
you have to change your economy to an export-driven economy in order to create the revenue to pay off
your loan finance. So to do that, what happens? Well, you need to change what you're farming. You
can't just farm for your population. You need to grow cash crops that you can export. So coffee,
tobacco, cocoa, soybeans, et cetera, not stuff that your local people are going to be eating.
Okay. So a lot of your arable land is now going into producing that. And you've got to produce it
fast. So you then wheel in your pesticides, your herbicides, your chemical accelerants of growth,
which has devastating impacts on the soil over the long term, but short term, it'll
create an economic boon. And that'll help you to create the GDP. So it looks great on a chart.
But the problem is that in the meantime, the economy is no longer self-sufficient. They've
lost a lot of sovereignty. They've got into debt. For every dollar of aid, about $10 plus has gone
into paying the West in some interest repayments.
And then what will happen is if you default on your payment, then there will be all these
clauses.
So just like if you default on your bank mortgage, the bank has the ability to sell your property
to make good its loan.
The IMF has the ability to take certain remedies if you don't meet your obligations.
So they would include we're able to extract minerals cheaply, copper, cobalt, magnesium,
things used to build devices, smartphones, etc.
We're able to take oil cheaply.
Maybe it's to get a US military base installed.
Maybe it's to support some certain resolutions at the UN.
And they can also make adjustments to the economy.
They can dictate terms at this point,
because remember, they're the lender.
And once you're the lender,
you have any number of remedies to make yourself whole again.
So they could dictate that you've got to lower corporate tax rates.
You've got to reduce worker conditions so that they can work unlimited amounts.
Basic amenities and human rights, maybe child labor laws have got to be softened so that,
again, you can maximize the production.
So this has happened not just once, but if you look at where the World Bank and the IMF
have worked in concert, it's just time after time after time.
This pattern of indebtedness, what's called structural adjustments,
and large amounts of money being extracted repeats itself.
But it's a great business model because you get incredible geopolitical influence.
A lot of the money doesn't even go to the country.
It goes to the corporations who build the dams from overseas, right?
The big infrastructure projects, the airports, the highways, et cetera.
And of course, the amount of money that comes out is huge.
So then something like Bitcoin comes in.
And let's use Bhutan as an example.
So Bhutan doesn't produce a lot of its own food.
It's very dependent, but it has a lot of energy.
And a lot of that energy would get wasted or get sold to India very cheaply.
It comes from the glacial melt from the Himalayas.
So a lot of hydro energy.
So it was self-sufficient in energy.
Also, a lot of its money came from tourism.
Now, during COVID, they lost all that tourism industry money, and they were very close to their foreign exchange reserves dwindled, and they were very close to not being able to meet their ability to pay for imports.
They had a World Bank loan, and typically the World Bank comes in first.
If a country gets into strife, then the IMF comes in.
And so they were a few months away from having to get an IMF bailout, which would have had all of those, the slippery slope that you have to go down when you go down the IMF path.
But they didn't do that.
Someone there had the idea to utilize the wasted energy from those hydro dams and to use it to mine Bitcoin.
And they did that instead.
And because of that they were able to generate Bitcoin which created a source of revenue from an electricity source which was otherwise just getting wasted or as I say very cheaply sold to a neighboring country
So they started to become profitable and that started to raise their currency reserves.
They didn't need an IMF loan.
If we skip forward to today, now Bitcoin mining is 40% of their entire GDP.
they have also used that to so it would have been even higher but they've spent some of it would
have been about 50 but they've used a little bit saved most of it they've used some of it to
rebuild their airport they also put up the salaries of the government workers by 50 can you
imagine as a government worker in the uk coming in and saying hey we've been mining some bitcoin
on the side and we got some extra money, so you're going to give you a pay rise by 50%.
Never happens, right? Do not need an IMF loan. Stabilize their economy.
It's freed them from losing sovereignty. It's allowed them to take better care of their public
servants to refurbish their airport. And their economy is, that's only going to grow and increase
into the future. So that's a lot of countries are now realizing there are now 10 nation states that
are mining Bitcoin. So a lot of the strategic reserves around the world, we thought it would
be through purchasing Bitcoin. That hasn't been the predominant method. The predominant method
has been to mine Bitcoin as a nation state and to acquire Bitcoin that way, because that way you
don't have what sometimes can be hard to sell to your population, which is that you're going to use
government funds to purchase Bitcoin. In fact, that's exactly what Bhutan said. The government
said, we could not have done that politically, but we can absolutely use stranded energy and mine
Bitcoin and create it that way. Everyone's on board with that. So to the IMF, that's a big risk
because suddenly the IMF lost a customer. They would have had Bhutan as a customer.
Other countries that are starting to do it, like Pakistan, that are looking at Bitcoin. So who are
So El Salvador, Argentina, Pakistan, Central African Republic, all either made Bitcoin legal tender or were looking at making Bitcoin legal tender and were looking at very Bitcoin friendly rules and mining Bitcoin at a nation state level.
All four of them, IMF came in and said, we have some concerns.
and they would cite volatility, economic destabilization.
In other words, exactly the opposite of what happened to Bhutan
is their concerns had nothing to do with that.
If they were genuine concerns, Bhutan's economy would have been destabilized.
The opposite occurred.
The real concern is that suddenly you don't need the IMF anymore
and they could lose their customer base.
they could lose their geopolitical significance
because now you have a rival which can help that nation
to regain sovereignty or to keep sovereignty.
So that's the concern.
Always follow the money.
Always.
And you'll get to the root of the problem.
And yeah, that book really does lift the lid on it.
And so does Gladstein's article about the IMF and the World Bank.
And so does your article now about the stats on Argentina.
Blew my mind.
Did you have them at hand?
Can you rattle those off?
Like the amount that they owe?
They have the largest IMF loan of any nation in the world.
It's 50 billion, I think.
It's over 50 billion.
I think it's 58 billion now.
that is why argentina has not adopted bitcoin you remember all the campaign rhetoric don't you
i mean safety dean's been writing about mule and what a scam he's turned out to be
well the problem is that he was probably quite sincere he wanted to do all those things but
someone from the imf behind the scenes would have tapped him on the shoulder and said
we need to have a chat and this is where john perkins takes you like this is where it gets dark
and this is where people start talking about,
oh, it's just a conspiracy theory and whatever else.
But he talks about how you go through three stages.
He'd be like stage one,
and then stage two would be like the CIA would make a visit
and gently persuade the person in charge.
Steady escalation, yeah.
And again, steady escalation of encouragement, let's say.
And then the jackals would be the final piece of the puzzle where if somebody just needed to be removed or accidented in a plane, then it's just so vile, all of it.
Yeah. If you trace the history of what happened to every president of every African country who proposed an alternative to the Central African Franc, which is a vestige of French colonial financial imperialism, basically the currency gets printed in France and is controlled by France.
and the 14 African nations have been trying to get off it for decades but somehow just
coincidentally there'll be some coup or some unforeseen accident within months of this being
proposed and it's happened time and time and time again because such is the power of monetary
colonialism and this is the new force you don't need military anymore coming in it all looks great
on the surface that all these nations are independent.
But you're not independent if your currency is being printed overseas in France.
And France can devalue that currency 40% overnight so that it can extract uranium more cheaply
from your nation state.
That's not economic independence.
And it's not economic independence.
If the moment you try to create economic sovereignty by creating your own currency, then there'll
be some coup.
That's not economic independence either.
So for a lot of these nations, that's why the Central African Republic was so keen to
get on Bitcoin because it represented a way out. They didn't have to go and try to create their own
currency. There's already currency that exists. It's called Bitcoin. It's the best currency in
the world. It's international. It's borderless. It's instantaneous. It's sound money. There's no
middlemen. There's no remittance payments, fees. You don't need a bank. You don't need traditional
banking rails. You don't even need a smartphone. You can do it on a $6 feature phone in Africa.
Refugees are using it.
So it's by far and away the superior money,
but that's not in the interests of a whole bunch of people.
And again, it's not conspiracy theory.
I mean, this plays out every single time you have a disruptive technology.
The disrupted will not stand idly by.
When the automobile came in, the horse and buggy industry
spend a lot of time and a lot of money
trying to create misinformation about the automobile
and to create regulations against it
and the bicycle too.
You probably remember the same
with telecommunication companies with the internet
trying to ban voice over IP.
So regulatory levers, the media,
whatever levers you have,
you don't have the superior technology anymore,
but you do have the superior reach,
you have the superior network
and you will use the tools at your disposal
to maintain your position of incumbency for as long as you possibly can.
And so that'll be the nation states which print their own currency,
which is used in former colonial regions.
That'll be the IMF and World Bank.
That'll be central banks.
And that'll be a lot of banks as well who...
Now, of course, the banks that are smart, they'll embrace it and they'll do well.
But there'll be a whole bunch who see it as something to attack
because it threatens the existing business model.
And rather than innovate the business model, they will attack the threat.
and we can pretty much predict how that'll turn out.
We'll have our Fujifilms, we'll have our Kodaks.
Kodak doesn't exist anymore for all intents and purposes.
Fujifilm actually evolved and does still exist.
So people have the opportunity to innovate.
It's not necessary that they'll become dinosaurs,
but if they try to attack it, then good luck.
Yeah, it's the SDR as well, right?
the special drawing rights, which is basically the currency which the IMF invented.
I didn't even realize it was a currency, but I think it's backed by five or six,
maybe seven other currencies.
And that's the kind of floating price of the average of those put together.
That's what people are literally borrowing.
And then, again, if you follow the money, if the central bank can print money at will
and to the government, say the government of New Zealand says we need 100 billion Kiwi
dollars to make this highway bridge this bridge to the North and South Island right You know the most retarded thing you could imagine but they will come up with something ridiculous like that And we need how many hundreds of
billions of Kiwi dollars can you give us? We'll give you 5% on government bonds if you and so the
central bank is Yeah, no problem. Here you go. Here's the money. Thank you very much. Now,
most people just consider well, of course, they do that because they can print the money and set
the interest rates, which is complete usury, by the way, because the money didn't exist in the
first place. Now, the people of New Zealand are on the hook to pay that back because the government
can't. They're not a producing entity. They have to tax. So the taxes will go up. But the darker
piece of this puzzle is if the government could, excuse me, if the central bank could just print
that in the first place, why would they ever want it back? They don't even need it back,
and certainly not with interest, if they can just print it. So what is it that they truly want? And
this is what you've pointed out here. Mineral rich lands. That's what this is always all about.
They want these countries to go into debt so they can be paid back with the copper, the tin,
the zinc, the minerals, the whatever, it could be water, oil, gold, silver, you name it.
It's just so bleak.
Yep. So that's why Bitcoin is hope. It really is. Because again, this is not speculation now.
And this is why we've seen the IMF become more public in their concerns about Bitcoin. Because
Bhutan has showed what's possible.
And it's provided a beacon of hope for other nations.
And other nations are going,
IMF debt, mine Bitcoin.
Hmm.
Pretty simple choice, really.
But it's not so simple when you already have an IMF loan.
Yes.
As Pakistan has found out.
That's why things have gone very quiet there.
because when you have an IMF loan, you've lost a lot of sovereignty
and the IMF have a lot of leverage, as El Salvador has found out.
Well, this is the case right now because they were plain sailing.
Bukele was saying all the right things.
He was sticking up the finger at the IMF.
He was smash buying from the toilet,
all of this kind of great fun stuff that was happening from 2021 onwards.
So then all of a sudden, IMF getting involved and, well, he took the loan.
Well, he knew what he was getting himself in for.
He knew what he was getting in for.
He took the loan, $1.4 billion.
He didn't have to because that was the interesting thing.
They were already in a pretty good state.
They had built up substantial Bitcoin reserves.
All of the things the IMF had predicted would happen did not happen.
They didn't destabilize the economy.
They stabilized it.
They bolstered their foreign exchange reserves.
They brought new industry to the country, more tourism, more prosperity generally.
But we took the loan, and in that IMF loan agreement, Bitcoin was mentioned 222 times.
So it's pretty obvious where their concern was, and that became the leverage for them to say, okay, we have some conditions.
Number one, no more new Bitcoin mining projects.
Number two, no longer compulsory legal tender.
Number three, stop Bitcoin purchases and a whole bunch of other ones as well.
So what you've seen is a direct result of what he accepted when he took on that loan,
knowing that those were the conditions which would be attached.
How closely are you following what's going on there?
because it's all going to be quiet.
Then we had the IMF talking about,
what did they say?
That they've only been,
they've been moving funds internally.
There's no buying.
So here's what I found out is that
it looks as though Bucali was still buying Bitcoin
every single day.
If you look at what the on-chain data suggests strongly,
it's that it is moving from one wallet to another
so that he can present the impression
that he is still sticking it to the IMF.
but he has not been purchasing new Bitcoin.
There is no evidence he's been purchasing new Bitcoin.
The IMF says he hasn't, which of course we can discount,
but put them to one side.
Two more reputable sources though,
his own finance minister and the own head of the central bank
has also said, we are no longer buying Bitcoin
and we have not bought Bitcoin since we've ever seen.
So you've got on-chain data, the minister of finance,
the head of the central bank and the IMF,
all saying, no, Bitcoin purchases have stopped.
Are they still mining? Because obviously we had the volcano mining bombs.
Yeah, the mining that they started is still going, but they're not doing any new mining, is my understanding.
Yeah. So look, the recipe here, what it really shows us is if you want to see Bitcoin adoption occur at a nation state, you better not have an IMF loan.
And fortunately, there's a whole lot of nation states around that don't have IMF loans who could become the next haven for Bitcoin mining.
So Kyrgyzstan, for example.
Ethiopia, I don't think, has an IMF loan.
I think they have a World Bank loan.
So there's a number of countries who really could start to take this to the next level and start to form strategic Bitcoin reserves.
I heard, I think I heard Kazakhstan just announced.
Kazakhstan is looking at it as well.
Yes, Kazakhstan is another one.
Let's just see.
Just doing a quick search.
News.
yeah 15 days ago joins global crypto race how significant are emerging market crypto reserves
um that's crypto stuff hmm
well a space to watch for sure and uh yeah be interesting to to see an infographic of
all those countries that do not have these loans um where should we be building our citadels
Daniel that's the question
basically it's anywhere that has
stranded hydro
in particular because that's often the best
source for Bitcoin mining because
you've got it all year round and it's baseload
it's not intermittent like
solar or wind so hydro is
a fantastic source
for Bitcoin and a lot
of the world has huge amounts of
hydro that's
number one and number two does not have an
IMF loan and fortunately
there's dozens of countries, maybe even over 100 countries
in that category.
All right.
There is hope.
There is a lot of hope.
Absolutely.
Are you okay to share where you live now and reasons for that?
Yeah, I'm in Costa Rica now, and the reasons for that is
there's a lot of landfills.
So I didn't move for the beaches.
I moved for the trash sheeps.
Don't put that in the magazine.
there's a lot of trash
that are going to be straight
on your door
there's two beautiful landfills
within about an hour of where I live
but there's a lot of landfills
all through Latin America
that fit our profile
in that they're big
they are modern landfills
and they are venting their emissions
straight into the air
so it was just a good place to locate
Costa Rica is a beautiful country.
It's a safer country than a lot of places that we could have moved to in Latin America.
It's a good place to raise a family.
Wonderful.
So have you got projects on the go or is this a work in process?
It's a work in progress.
We're looking at a couple of different options.
I can't say which country they're in.
They are in Latin America.
They're looking very promising.
And we just can't wait to get our first one underway.
But it's like a lot of things because whilst it's been done before on flared sites, it's never been done on venting sites before.
And when you're doing it on a venting site, there's a bit of additional complexity because you don't have as much of the infrastructure already in place.
So it's about an extra 25% complexity, I'd say.
So whenever you're doing something for the first time, it takes a little bit longer to start with, as we've found.
So it's taken a long time even to find the right sites.
So we're at a stage now we have the capital and the fund.
We have the commitments.
That wasn't the issue.
There were plenty of Bitcoiners who were keen not only to support the project, but could
see that it was actually in some pretty good returns because you don't only get the infrastructure
financing revenue, but you also earn carbon credits on the top.
So you have this, it juices your returns.
And it also means that you get this uncorrelated return as well.
So that worked out pretty well.
Works out well for the landfill owner.
Works out well for the Bitcoin mining company.
But finding the sites that a big challenge for Bitcoin mining companies no matter what the energy source Finding the right sites is actually the most important thing Same in the gold or silver mining industry right You send the geologists out and they could be gone for years
It's really like that.
Yeah, this is what it feels like.
It's like you're prospecting.
It's like it looks like they're all there, but there's so many conditions that have to be met, particularly to do the first one.
Once we do the first one, because of the way that all landfill owners talk to each other,
there's going to be a lot of landfill owners wanting to do this.
So if anyone's actually interested in investing in the fund, what does that look like?
Well, basically, so we have a company, CH4 Capital.
and how we operate is that it's going to be a vehicle
where people can get a non-exceptional return, right?
So we're forecasting it'll be in the vicinity of 15% to 20%.
So non-exceptional relative to Bitcoin, but steady
and relatively much lower risk and much lower volatility
because you do get that combination of the money coming in
through the loan repayments, but also through the carbon credits.
Without the conditions that the IMF have attached.
So next time you open a fund, is there a minimum amount?
Can people invest in Bitcoin directly or has it got to be...
We would love to have taken Bitcoin directly.
Unfortunately, the amount of additional complexity it would have taken was huge.
So yeah, some people, they'll just have to put it into fiat first and then put in the fund.
so basically it's like a lot of funds
you have to be a sophisticated investor
meet the requirements of what that is
$100,000 minimum at best level into the fund
Right
Alright, people could be interested
so where should they reach out if they want to learn more?
Where can they go and learn more about these projects?
Oh, they can have a look at ch4capital.com
or just get in touch with me
and I can send our deck through
which talks about how the projects work
and how the return structure works as well.
Excellent.
All right.
Well, Daniel, I always end off on the same question.
So if you had one last orange pill left to give to somebody,
who would you give it to and why?
It's a great question.
I think I'd give it to the head of the United Nations
and the reason for that is that
the story of Bitcoin's social utility is so untold
it's not like the environmental story
where the wrong story's been told
the story hasn't been told at all
so no one knows it
and you get someone who's supposedly charged
with doing great humanitarian work around the world
and suddenly they can see its utility
and that flows through the organization,
then you start building some very, very different narratives.
There, as we know this now,
because the Digital Assets Research Institute
has done the report on it,
backed by the Human Rights Foundation, thank you,
which showed that there are over 300,000 refugees
who have used Bitcoin to be able to flee their homeland
and set up from scratch,
fiat currency got frozen,
but the Bitcoin,
they've been able to use it
to reestablish life
in a different country.
If the head of the UN knew that,
then those sorts of stories
would just find their way
through into popular consciousness
much more.
And I think a lot more people
would start to see,
particularly in the West,
that Bitcoin is way more
than just a speculative asset.
Yeah, love it.
Well, thank you for coming on.
Thank you for everything that you've done to educate as many people as you possibly can about Bitcoin in your own unique way, traveling around, doing the conferences, writing the articles.
Look forward to more of them.
Look forward to meeting you actually in person one day.
That'll be fun.
And yeah, congrats with the move.
And fingers crossed that you find that site and you can get up and running and that cascade, you know, the domino effect throughout Latin America.
and yeah, just like pulling methane out the air
to mine Bitcoin.
What a winner.
We're turning trash into digital gold.
Love it.
Well, well done.
Thank you again.
And yeah, I look forward to chatting again soon.
Been a pleasure.
Thank you.
See you, mate.
Well, there you go, everybody.
Thank you so much for listening and tuning in.
And like I said at the beginning here,
I truly hope this gives you now a lot of ammunition to just fight the FUD when you are faced down with it from your colleagues, your friends in the pub, your family, new people you might meet.
because it is all so tiresome like it here we are now in 2025 and you've still got these huge
university studies going on and just coming out with this absolute complete and utter total nonsense
and meanwhile you have all of this ai compute like ridiculous masses of energy and water being
used and that's all just fine bro because like that's you know technological advancement you know
we need that no like no one's pointing the fingers that way it's still all coming to the bitcoin way
now ask yourself why who is conducting this research not only that who is funding the research
always follow the money and in the case of universities it's always big lobby interest
groups or secret agencies or government funding always and they pay but they only release what
they want to release they and they are paying the wages of those people that are doing that
research now in the form of Daniel here he's completely private entity and he
goes out he looks at these sites he sees and you know the entrepreneurial spirit
he sees an absolute glaring opportunity here and blows the whole thing out the
water and we need more people like him obviously there are many out there
doing lots of this kind of work as well in in Bitcoin mining we have companies
that are trapping gas in oil fields.
We have companies that are trapping gas in farms.
And they're turning affluent waste into methane, into Bitcoin mining.
This is all going on.
And if you work in that area, if you work in the energy sector,
this is the next frontier.
This is where everything...
Skate to where the puck is going to be.
This is where it's going.
all energy or it's gonna go to where you Bitcoin mining is gonna go to that
source of energy stranded energy where they can make the the most impact the
most profit and they can stabilize the grids go back and listen I'd know about
10 shows ago I had a guy on the show talking about mining Bitcoin in space
this is crazy but they're gonna do it it's viable is a completely
it's completely possible uh so anyway enough rambling i hope you enjoyed this one if you've
got anything that uh you want to you know reach out to daniel for find him on twitter or come
through me whatever way you want to get in touch with him um make sure you're stacking your stats
like i said at the beginning please take self-custody very very seriously you are always
able to up your self-custody game don't do it just for the sake of it if you're comfortable
that's fine but if you've not done it you have to start get yourself a cold get yourself some
hardware wallets get your bitcoin into cold storage learn how to do all of that it's not
that hard there's so many tutorials out there now go and watch a btc sessions tutorial on one of the
wallets many out there you know where to go for the link in the show notes bitbox.swiss forward
slash bitten you'll get five percent discount off the bitbox o2 or off the bitbox nova both
excellent hardware wallets you can stack your sats across europe with relay and as i said at the
beginning with swan in the us paywithflash.com get over to the website go check it out if there's
if you want to start using your sats which you should get over to plebeian.market check out what's
for sale because that is a marketplace being built out by people that are happy to accept
Bitcoin for their goods and services.
And finally, come join us on Orange Pill App.
We are looking forward to interacting with as many more Bitcoiners as possible over there.
Already 19,000 members.
Catch you on the next show, guys.
Thank you so much for listening.