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Broke to Bitcoin Miner: The Energy Secret Nobody Tells You · To The Moon With The Luna's Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: I started reading The Creature from Jekyll Island, understanding the monetary system, and I realized, man, I don't know a ton about Bitcoin, but I know the dollar is broke.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so if Bitcoin can't save us nothing can, then the connection really happened when I realized Bitcoin is probably the best way we've ever had to monetize energy at a global scale without any other extra work, right?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can just compute right there where the energy is and turn it into money.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: And that blew me away.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh every other kind of form of energy we use has to be transported somewhere and used somewhere else, but all of that transport costs so much of its value and it becomes very inefficient the further you have to carry it.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact that you can auditize it right there was just a game changer.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_03: Hello everyone.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to To the Moon with the Lunas.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: The Bitcoin price today is 83,000.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: Today we are joined by David Branskum, whose journey took him from financial struggles to building large-scale Bitcoin mining and energy infrastructure.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: We'll dive into a story, his conviction in Bitcoin, and the future of mining and energy.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: David, welcome to the show.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Glad to be here.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for uh for having me.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: Dude, thank you so much, David.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I want to just kind of dive into this.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I heard you on another podcast, 2019, you were going through some financial struggles, and then all of a sudden you're working at Domino's and you're making like six grand a month, like delivering pizzas.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, what is going on here?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I had been, my boys were so much younger.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this was like 14 years ago.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I got laid off in 2012 from a job, and uh, you know, the kids are younger.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: We were chatting just right before starting, right?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's like life is simpler when kids are smaller.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, it can feel expensive, but honestly, it gets much more expensive the older they get, or it can be.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: So, um, but like uh life was simple.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I didn't have to hop into a job.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: The wife was working, our budgets were okay, you know, we're smaller, all that stuff.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so um took a little bit of time and was kind of working with um kind of an entrepreneurial direction, right, with a startup.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then uh a guy I used to work with got laid off also, and he said, Hey, we talked about going out and doing this on our own.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do it.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna it's time to do it.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so he was the first one to kind of drag me, push me into being more entrepreneurial, looking for, you know, taking bigger risks uh financially with uh work and things like that, and and not being necessarily like a W-2 employee, you know.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that was a um so I owe him a lot, actually.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I work really well with others, I don't work well for others.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of what I've that's kind of what I've learned.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh they say Bitcoin makes you unemployable.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I've been unemployable my whole life, so it's um it's kind of it's kind of interesting, but um so uh worked with those two companies on and off.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: The company I started with him was like a business of business collections, and we did really well for about five or six years, 17, 18, something like that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I was doing this other company, but it was uh very slow, not a lot happening, uh really didn't kick into gear until uh really about 2020 or so.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: But um in 2018, we lost a couple of big contracts, and um he was not in a position to take much of a pay cut.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: He was in a really hard spot.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh his he didn't have uh, you know, uh any other income.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so I gave him basically 80% of the profits, even though I was technically the owner of the company, gave him 80% of the profits.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: I took 20%.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so 2018 was, you know, a little stressful, a little difficult.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then in um, or uh sorry, that was more like 2017, and then 2018, I signed up a new client and he called me and said he'd been talking with some other people.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime someone starts this place, like I've been speaking to another group, you know that it's about to be a bad conversation.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: He said, uh, I was talking to them, and based because I do all of the work, all the day-to-day stuff, I feel like I should have 90% of the profit.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, you know what, why don't you just take a hundred percent?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you take what you have and you go, I'll let you have the business, that's fine.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll take this new client that I didn't even tell him about yet, really, that I'd signed.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_00: And that one was actually ended up being the largest contract we'd ever had.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: So it was weird timing, but anytime someone like I had already given up so much for him, I was just like, we can't really trust each other anymore.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: You should just we should go separate ways.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: So I still love him.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: He's a friend, right?
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I won't work with him again.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then I did really well for 2018, but then there was some regulatory changes regarding like uh collections services and things like that.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the big companies could kind of make those changes.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't do it.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So I lost that contract in about March of uh, I think it was 2019, maybe may have lasted through February or March, something like that.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And uh didn't kind of face the reality of the situation.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: And long story short, I woke up, you know, and I was just like, yeah, everything's fine, everything's fine, I'll get another job, or there'll be other income or whatever.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And in uh October of 2019, I looked up and I had credit card debt.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: It felt like a bunch.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: It really wasn't that much at the time, but it felt like a ton.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I had uh not just credit card debt, but it had run out of like basically all of the cash savings I had.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh couldn't figure out what to do.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so finally had to sit down, tell my wife the situation.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I had not been honest with her for six, seven, eight months.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I'd been trying to find a job, couldn't find a job.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So that was very, very stressful.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I was and I would had been on interviews and couldn't get anything.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd I'd worked at Dell, I'd worked at big companies, you know, had a lot of experience.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: I just was like, I just need to earn some money.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it was hurting, like I it didn't even really matter how much money, or you know, I just want I needed some income to feel like I was providing value and and taking care of my family.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I went across town.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I knew a guy at church who owned a few uh Domino's pizza franchises kind of thing.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just drove across town to the one where I felt like I wouldn't run into as many people I knew, right?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because I wasn't super proud of it.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I worked for ended up working for about a year and a half, close two years over there.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: I started in October of 2019.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: So about six months in, the boys were home for a week for um spring break, and then they never went back to school for COVID.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was like, man, this is I was like, I don't know what is happening.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody else was like stuck at home, and I was having to get up and go to work.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so my wife would go to work in the during the day, um, and then I'd go usually a little later, about you know, 11, and I'd work till as as much as I could they would let me work.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um but when the pandemic hit, everything closed down, I was still going and I felt bad because the boys were still young, I was having to leave them at home, you know, for long hours in the middle of the day.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't like that.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um uh but then Domino's at the time was really the only place that like delivered.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: And people got scared to even go to the grocery store.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: There were people that I would see every day at lunch.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like even there were multiple people delivering working at the store, there were people that were scared to go, so they'd ordered like the same thing from Domino's every single day.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was crazy.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and because we were the only ones delivering, I mean, I worked a ton those first few months.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: I made like between six and seven grand between just tits and everything.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was like non-stop.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And for somebody that had gone six, eight months without any kind of income, I was ecstatic.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I was on my feet all day.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was running to and from, you know, the car to the to drop it off.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: I was losing weight, I was making money.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: I was like in a weird, and it was a huge reset for me uh and my ego.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And it was it in a weird way, it was exactly what I needed.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody else was staying home and I was having to work, but then I was getting rewarded for it.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I had borrowed some money to pay off the credit card just so it wouldn't eat me alive.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: I I was able to pay that off pretty quickly.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because of this, I I couldn't believe, you know, just the timing, God's timing and everything.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: It was just, it was incredible.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, but it was still a very difficult life, very stressful for about a year and a half.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: My wife was finally like, you know what, you're not even making that much anymore.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: You know, eventually that kind of died down.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it was funny, the stimulus check hit, and then there was a bump again, right?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Like all the tips were fantastic because everybody's like, oh yeah, we got it.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: They got money.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so it's it's it was a very fiat um, you know, kind of mindset to just order dominoes every day, obviously, right?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, most Bitcoiners are too smart to do that.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I guess I did that for about a year and a half, and then um my uh wife was just like, look, we can't keep doing this schedule, it's really rough.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_00: And the boys still weren't like back at school full, full time, I don't think.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I said uh so I kind of backed down and just did like two or three nights a week.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the entire time I'm doing this, I I tried to kind of um stay busy, improve myself a little bit.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I remember listening to Mandarin while I was like I was learning to speak other languages and stuff.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I I don't I'm not fluent at any others really, but I know just enough to be a problem.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um in in Texas I know quite a bit of Spanish.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: It you just you just have to kind of live in here.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: But I I like other languages too.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So I would like listen to that or I'd listen to, you know, uh Audible while I was delivering and stuff like that.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but I was I was really stressed and staying up, I wasn't sleeping well.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: I was staying up super late at night, you know, watching YouTube videos and stuff like that.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um the house we're in has a small koi pond in the backyard, and I'll post a lot of pictures online in my pond.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love sitting out there for coffee in the morning and stuff like that.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And um I had seen a lot of aquaculture videos on YouTube on those late nights, just on the internet doing nothing, and I was like, I'm gonna build a raised grow bed just for fun.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna do vegetables or something, you know, I'm gonna do something.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started digging into it and I realized um I hadn't really done anything creative or challenging.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: I hadn't built anything with my hands.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like when we first got married in our first house and moved in, it was like I was always doing projects to improve the house and stuff, and I I hadn't done that in probably, you know, 10, 11, 12 years.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it just felt really good.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: I went and bought a lot of stuff that I really shouldn't have, like I couldn't have afforded it at the time.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: But I bought wood, I bought pumps, I bought pipes, I bought uh a pond liner, all this stuff, and I built this grow bed, and I used online tools to, you know, it was right before AI, right?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: So use online tools to calculate the water flow.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then I learned about a bell siphon, which is creates a flood and a drain, it's like a vacuum, and then the venturi effect for water aeration and all this like weird stuff.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started building.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Like I had the design in my head, but I had no real plan.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I just started building and kind of you know faffoed it, figured it out as I went along.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And my neighbor across the street, and I wasn't really working.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and my neighbor across the street came over.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, You've been messing around in your garage for like the last two weeks.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: What are you doing?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I told him, he's like, Oh, you bought a kit?
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, No, I'm just making it.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: He's like, Well, show me.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: So he walks in the back, um, asking me about it.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: I tell him about it.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out he was, at the time, he was a CEO of a company in Austin that developed an immersion cooling um uh, I guess, system for uh cooling it's supposed to be any kind of electronic equipment, but the only ones really buying at the time were Bitcoin miners.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: They were using it to overclock their ASIC miners because it's so much more efficient than air.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um but they had just sold 200 megawatts of this stuff to the publicly traded miner Riot.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so I didn't close that deal or anything, but I came on afterwards uh to do business development for them, and I my first experience was 200 megawatts of immersion cooling mining at a site that was 500 megawatts of mining total.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I just thought I was getting a regular, you know, job.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'd heard a little bit about Bitcoin, but I wasn't a Bitcoiner at all.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just thought I was getting a regular job to work with data centers and stuff like that, but the only ones buying were Bitcoiners.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: So I ended up spending all this time with Bitcoiners.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: They would talk, I'd be on site helping them deploy stuff, they'd mention something, and I'd be like, oh yeah, you know, they'd be like, oh man, did you see the mempool today?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh, what about it?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, seven sats for B-Bite, can you believe it?
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, yeah.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then I'd like go to the bathroom and like, what's a sat for B-Bite?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I was like, I don't know.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And everybody just assumed I was a Bitcoiner because I was working in that job.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just learned kind of through osmosis and with them and what it was.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, man, they're these people are dumping millions of dollars of equipment.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought everybody that mined Bitcoin was mining with like massive, huge data centers, right?
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: Which is not not the case, right?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: The bulk of the mining that happens is probably smaller, you know, scale mines or even people at home and things like that.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: So it was a good education there.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they wanted me to focus on traditional data centers.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: No, I was like, they're not ever going to buy immersion, they're probably gonna kind of bypass that technology completely and go to liquid at the chip cooling.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: I knew that at the time.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I left um and just got lucky enough.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, went to a conference, someone was put me on an immersion cooling like panel, and these nice guys from Miami, young guys who were getting into mining, liked what I had to say.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: They hired me and to help them build a 16 megawatt facility.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: It was eight megawatts of immersion, eight megawatts of air.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: That was just a budget thing.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um, that was my intro into building um building data centers.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um I I guess I'd worked on maybe a couple of like kind of smaller projects, you know, just helping people out, um, maybe for a few months before that.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: But when that happened, it was like, oh man, this is what I want to do.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I like this.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: I like the energy development, I like putting the puzzle pieces together, I like kind of the project management of it.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I very quickly realized, even when I first got that job, I was like, oh none of this stuff works if you don't have a place to plug it in.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, energy is the it's the final, it's the it's the key to all of this.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then over time, as I started kind of really diving into and understanding Bitcoin, um, you know, I was listening to like Michael Saylor and um Breed Love, um, their first you know podcast that they did, talking on the what is money thing.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: And I started reading The Creature from Jekyll Island, understanding you know, the monetary system, and I realized, man, uh I don't know a ton about Bitcoin, but I know the dollar is broke.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so if Bitcoin can't save us, nothing can.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the connection really happened when I realized Bitcoin is probably the best way we've ever had to monetize energy at a global scale without any other extra work, right?
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can just compute right there where the energy is and turn it into money.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that blew me away.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um every other kind of form of energy we use has to be transported somewhere and used somewhere else, but all of that transport costs so much of its value and and it becomes um very inefficient the further you have to carry it.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the fact that you can auditize it right there was just a game changer.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I know I updated my LinkedIn, I can't remember if it's on X2 or whatever, but like someone's kind of gave me this tagline.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's um, you know, energy copper compute repeat, right?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's like the digital assets fall under the compute also, AI falls under the compute.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of other automation that happens that makes our lives easier and better happens through compute.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: So it just it kind of all falls that way.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when people ask me what I do now, I just say I help, you know, people get access to energy.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um we'll go buy real estate that we think is close to power or close to natural gas or something like that, and then we'll actually produce power.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: The current focus is just selling it to, you know, kind of whoever the highest bidder is.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: But I think who but and you're starting to see these data centers move closer and closer.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, they want to own the power source, which is way different than it's been in the past.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's all been segmented.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I'm gonna produce power, okay, and then somebody else transfers it, and then somebody else uses it.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's all getting pressed, and Bitcoin and AI and energy are all intersecting now and getting closer and closer together.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um but when they do that, cutting out all that middle ground just means it's more efficient, more things are gonna happen, uh, more innovation is gonna happen faster.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just we're we're clearly living in a very exciting time when it comes to technology and energy.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's kind of what my focus is.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um I'm just a little obsessed with it.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I just try to live in it every yeah.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: It it's it's kind of wild how it all started with a koi-pond.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's just like a koi pond literally changed your life and like put you on this like journey.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: I it's not just it's not the koi-pond specifically, right?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: For me it was.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: I had given up learning things, you know what I mean?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I hadn't learned or done anything or built anything in like 20 years, and my brain and my soul was just stagnant.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's really it.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: So when I got excited about learning something new, and I and I, you know, we also like to say Bitcoiners say, you know, you can just do things, right?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to like I if you look at my finances and my situation, the logical thing to do would be to just, you know, invest my money, not do anything, just kind of keep on the same path and try to find another job.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but taking that risk and just going and doing something changed everything, changed my path.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I think that's really it, that was really the catalyst was just the fact that I was using my brain and excited about learning and doing something again.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, most people, I think they stop learning after school.
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's no one telling them what to do.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, what happens is you get into this cycle, right?
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: The fiat cycle, you go to work, go home, go to work, go home, go to work, go home.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's so easy to um not learn anything anymore, not find anything interesting, uh, because now you're like trapped in this cycle.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I like to add too, like our system does that, you know, like they they don't they don't want us to really explore and you know, learn new things because they're like, as long as we can kind of, you know, keep this carrot in front of them as long as possible, you know, that's gonna be easier to control, right?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that's the the cool thing about Bitcoiners is that everyone in the space is really trying to expand themselves and like build their capacity and and learning new things and doing new things.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: And um I just think it's it's really refreshing.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's it's it's great.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: It is uh yeah, when when I was going through that time and I read the book Creature from Jekyll Island, and here's a here's an interesting little uh kind of backstory uh that I like to tell.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize it at the time, but one of those secondary companies I worked with was an infection control, infection prevention company.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: They had some patented devices that would like clean or sanitize things, right?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um very simple.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: One was like a pen cleaner, it would clean styluses, pins, pencils.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one was like a hand sanitizer belt clip so you could just reach down and you know spray when you're at a conference shaking hands or whatever.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um so during the 2020 election, you know, everybody got this crazy, like all these election administrators uh, you know, that were conducting the elections, the in-person voting, uh got crazy PPE, you know, budgets, right?
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's like, okay, give all of our blue tears all this stuff.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we did okay.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't do crazy well, but we sold quite a few.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Georgia was a big one.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like we ended up one or two of them hear about it, and then in the state they talk to each other.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Most of the counties in Georgia happened to buy our little clean pen thing that we had because you know, a lot of The voting, depending on what you use as a pencil or a pen, and they try to reuse them.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if you used it, you would put the pen in, and then it was sanitized by the time the next person came to get it.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: It was just a little sponge with like a antibacterial thing, right?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing fancy.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: So Georgia election administrators had a conference and they they said you should, you guys should come.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's like not very expensive to sponsor, and you could come and show your stuff, maybe sell something.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like, okay, let's go do that.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we went to do that.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: We drove from Texas to Georgia.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: The event was actually on Jekyll Island in Georgia.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I had no idea about the history of it at all.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm at that conference, and this one little, you know, blonde intern hops up and she's like, Hey, you guys are new.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, Yeah, hi.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're glad to be here.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, Well, listen, I'm going to introduce you to, I think his name is uh Rafflesburg or Rafflesburg.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, he was a Secretary of State for Georgia.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: So he runs all the elections.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I chat with him a little bit, and then he said, Hey, um, do you do you know these folks over here?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm shaking hands, just you know, chatting.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't even ask them who they were.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And they're like, hey, we're having a happy hour.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: Come on down after the thing.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: So I just walked down there with them and I'm having drinks and we're just chatting.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this is this guy's like, hey, how do you know these guys?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, Oh, I just met them.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: They just asked me if I wanted to come, you know, have a drink.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he said, You know who that is, don't you?
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: I said, No.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, that guy right there is the uh president of public relations for Dominion Voting Services.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just take a step back.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now that I know about Jekyll Island, the creation of the Federal Reserve, how it was built as a system to keep people um on that wheel, right?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: On that hamster wheel, behind debt, always struggling.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: And now as a Bitcoiner, I'm also looking at the voting systems and the two-party system in the United States and how I really feel it's a uniparty.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really, there's not really a choice.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's our turn, your turn, our turn, your turn, our turn, your turn.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you see no, you you start to see things for how they really are.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: As a Bitcoiner, you're seeking truth and stuff.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: Looking back, it's like I'm on Jekyll Island, where the Federal Reserve was created and set up, and I'm having drinks with one of the purveyors of that uniparty system that probably cooked numbers during the 2020 election.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: Dominion voting was all over the news for all kinds of stuff.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Georgia happened to be one of the worst states, right?
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, especially that Atlanta County, right?
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: So looking back on it, it's just you you learn these things, Danielle, like you're talking about, right?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: You just start to connect those things, and then it all makes sense.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you're like, well, no wonder when I had younger kids and I before Bitcoin, I was struggling so much to make budget.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: No wonder every year I would look up and be like, hey, my emergency fund isn't going to cover six months anymore.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: I better add to it.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, and you stop realizing or you realize the inflation is not caused by supply and demand.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not caused by, you know, economic factors from this and that and the all that stuff.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally just the Federal Reserve issuing more debt.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: And when they issue debt, you owe them money back, and you can't get the money back to them unless they issue more debt and put more money in the system.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: And then it just grows and grows and grows and grows and grows.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's just one big Ponzi, you know?
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you it's looking back on it now, it's like, man, all that now that I know, all that makes sense.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it just makes you it just makes you angry that I had to deal with it for so long.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: You're like, especially when you discover Bitcoin and you're going down the rabbit hole and you're learning, you're like, how does no one know about this?
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do my parents not know about this?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: Why is no one talking about this?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: Like we all are just getting finessed and everyone's okay with it.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's just very interesting.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but then and then I get very upset, and I do this every time I read a book, watch a podcast, or anything like that.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'm just like, I just make a huge Bitcoin buy.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, this just makes me so mad.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just gonna just make a huge Bitcoin.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: That river smash buy button has been like I'm addicted to it.
• 26:31
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• 26:33
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• 26:39
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• 26:42
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• 26:45
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• 26:51
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• 26:53
  SPEAKER_03: Go to microc.io and use code Luna, L-U-N-A, for a discount, or check the link in the description below.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's really bad.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you saw that I post online the other day.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: I accidentally hit the button twice and I was like, eh, whatever,$1,000 Bitcoin twice in a row, that's fine.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then my bank account went negative$1,000.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sorry, that's gonna get kicked back, right?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like when I was kind of going through that learning it, um it's helped me think much more logically and take the emotion out of like most of the things in my life that, you know, and that would cause me, that emotion would cause me to make bad decisions, right?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um it hit me one day, I was like, okay, there's a hundred percent chance that the dollar is my dollars are gonna buy less next year than they're buying right now.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: If there's even a 1% chance that Bitcoin is gonna go up in value, that's a 101% swing.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why would you not take that?
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's like you know the dollar is losing.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and at that time I was still kind of looking at it more as an investment, right?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: But but as I really started to understand, you know, the scarcity of it and stuff like that, um, it just, you know, started to understand it more.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: It was just so much easier to go all in.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: I slept better.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: Even when Bitcoin went down, you know, I would I would not look at the price.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: I would look at my balance and be like, oh, I that's the same amount of Bitcoin.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Bitcoin hasn't changed.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um David, when and mining was a big part of kind of understanding that and stuff like that.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: And you mentioned you um you wanted to ask me about mining.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: What was it?
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to ask you, uh, thanks for sharing all that too, by the way.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: That was really good.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and there's stuff I want to uh circle back to that.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: But real quick, so like with mining, uh, if you can explain mining for for our audience, um, a lot of people talk about Bitcoin mining.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people I really feel like don't understand it.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like, why do we need Bitcoin mining?
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: So if you can kind of share, like like as if we're all 10 years old and give us an everyday example of like what Bitcoin mining is and why do we need it.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: That should be easy for me.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think like I'm 10 or 12 years old all the time.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So uh it should be pretty easy to communicate that way.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: It all goes back to energy and what we now refer to as proof of work, right?
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh when you get up in the morning, you know, you can't get out of the bed unless you expend energy.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you can't stand up and you know, go to the bathroom for the first time in the morning, you can't go get your cup of coffee.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing happens in the universe without energy.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: Energy is everywhere, it's very abundant, but um it's either, you know, stored energy waiting to be expelled, or it's kinetic energy and something is actually happening, right?
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: So I kind of consider energy to be the currency of like the universe, right?
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you actually spend to do work.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the universe follows certain rules.
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was coded.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you want to think about it, you know, I'm I'm a Christian, so I think about God creating the universe.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think he, if he you want to kind of think of it as code, he coded it using physics and mathematics, right?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's the language of of how the universe works.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: What's crazy is even in the 20s and 30s, Henry Ford talked about monetizing energy in a way that it's tied directly to the output of energy, right?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin is the first, maybe not the first, but it's definitely the best digital way we've had of monetizing a certain amount of energy that's expended over a certain period of time.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: And the Bitcoin mining, I guess uh we they call it mining, it's not really mining, it's actually issuance.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: So kind of like the Federal Reserve hands out, creates money on a spreadsheet and hands it out.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin is also doing the same thing, but the Federal Reserve doesn't follow any rules.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: There's no mathematics to it.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, hey, I'm emotional and I'm the president and we're gonna go to war, and you need to give me a bunch of money to do it, you know, kind of thing.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some it's it's literally like that.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: They dress it up and try to make it look, you know, with pomp and circumstance, and try to, and the government tries to make it feel like it's oh, it's a it's a good economic reason, right?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_00: We need this.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: But really, they just do it whenever they want, right?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: And but with Bitcoin, because it is a essentially a giant, giant computer program that runs on a certain set of mathematical rules, um, and everyone on the network has to play by those rules, or you don't get to play on the network, um, then it has to follow that math.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And the math equation is in math what we call a logarithmic function.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you've heard the term half-life.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's how long you know something exists before it's no longer um shows its own properties, right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: So um something has a hundred-year half-life, they talk about that with radiation and stuff, right?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Each year that amount gets cut in half until it basically becomes so small and and and tiny that it it really doesn't matter anymore.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's not doing what it's supposed to do.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's how the Bitcoin network is programmed.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_00: And so every 10 minutes, new Bitcoin is released into the wild, and it started out at 25 and then 12.5, and then or higher than that.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, it started like 100 and then 50 and then 25 and then 12.5 and then 6.25.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and even low, it's even low, whatever that I can't divide it without a calculator.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it gets low.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, 3.125, right?
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um I can't do after 3.125.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I can't do.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_00: So uh and every and it's built on a time, not a timeline per se, but an energy expenditure amount uh based on how much energy is being put into the network.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: If there's not much energy put into the network, then every 10 minutes those blocks stretch, and they may the Bitcoin gets released now, and then it may not get released in 10 minutes, it may get released in 15 or 20 minutes.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: If that happens, the mathematical problem fixes it and makes it easier for people to solve the block problem and then it adjusts back to 10 minutes.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a perfect system.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: If the energy goes up too much and the blocks come too fast, the algorithm fixes it and goes back to 10 and makes it harder for people to guess the special magic number and win that reward.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um so it's a perfect um, I guess really like capitalistic system, if you will.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: The more energy put in, right, the more profits you can you can get, but then it adjusts it to keep the balance, to keep the amount of Bitcoin issued at the 10 minute mark.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then every so many blocks, which is roughly about four years, um, that amount that's released every 10 minutes gets cut in half.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: So eventually it will go down to where there's so little Bitcoin being released, it's really irrelevant.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_00: But at that point, I believe that the value of the Bitcoin will be so great and so high that it will be worth it for Bitcoin miners to still be operating on the network just because the fees of what it costs to send some Bitcoin to someone, which they also get if they guess that block, is going to be worth it in and of itself.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that mathematical equation as the amount that's increased drops naturally creates a more scarce asset.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: So the more people that use it, the harder it is to get.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the harder something is to get, the higher the price typically goes, also in a true scarce system.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: We but we've never really had scarcity really.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: We've had stuff that looks scarce, like gold, but then somebody will find a few billion dollars worth of gold randomly in another country.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: We have no idea how much is really on the planet.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: The further down you go, there might be more, right?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so you have to trust the mathematics, right, in order to have digital scarcity, and Bitcoin only operates and works on that mathematics.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: So Bitcoin mining is uh getting access to that newly created Bitcoin.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um it is trying to verify, it is solving the block reward, but that muscle is what verifies the transactions that happen in each block.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_00: Someone asked me to describe it one time, and uh there's you can kind of do um like a body analogy, right?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: We're all pretty familiar with you know basic biology.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um the network is kind of like a um a central nervous system, and the bitcoin that you're but the bitcoin in your body never changes, right?
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_00: Your central nervous system is your central nervous system, but I'm transferring control of the Bitcoin from one spot to another, right?
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's a transaction.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the transaction is verified by work and energy, and the work and energy, the miners that are bringing that energy into the system are kind of like the muscles, they're actually doing the heavy lifting.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and then the transactions are like signals.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_00: Nodes are like literally like synapses in your brain.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're taking all the information in and they're verifying, yes, we do want David to not focus on this arm, we want him to focus on this arm.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm transferring the energy and power and control from this arm to the other arm, the same way that my Bitcoin doesn't actually move.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just giving, if I'm going to send it to I see.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling Anthony and Danielle, they can now control this Bitcoin.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_00: The Bitcoin doesn't actually move, right?
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_00: You're just controlling it.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of an easy way to kind of uh think about it.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the fact that they're called nodes, I mean your synapses in your brain are literally nodes, and that's also the part of the network, uh, that one of the parts of the network that can go up and down, as more nodes come on, the stronger your brain gets, the more synapses and you know connects in your brain, the smarter you get.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then also the muscle.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_00: If your body is um if your body is uh has too much energy or whatever, you need to expel it, right?
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well then um and then or you need to bring it, or you're you're not, you're too weak and you need more energy, you you know, your body sends a signal, we need more energy, right?
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the Bitcoin network keeps all of those things, they're all flux, but they always level out.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_00: It just keeps it where it needs to be.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: It might go up and down or whatever, the volatility, but the point of it, just like your body, is to always main if you're too high, hey, we need to calm down.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's calm down and get our heartbeat back where it needs to be.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: If you're if you're hungry and you don't you need energy, but you don't have it, you're like, hey, body, we need to eat some food, we need to get back.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's it keeps a balance.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's what makes it such a magical system.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, no one can manipulate that because you can't manipulate the laws of physics, you can't change mathematics.
• 39:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can lie to yourself about certain aspects of it, saying, uh, you know, this is not number two, this is three, right?
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, this is just two fingers, right?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not no matter what I say.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_00: So you either play by those rules or you don't get to play in the sandbox.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's a really interesting, and you can look once you realize this and think this way, you start seeing it in other things, you start seeing it in government, you start seeing it in religion, you start seeing it in um uh economics, you start seeing it all this, and you realize the more you screw with and ignore the rules, yes, the worse things get.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: Bad things happen because you can ignore the rules, but you can't ignore the effects of the rules.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_00: And so you see it in everything.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you ignore, your life gets worse.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: When you follow, your life gets better.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_03: And I I just was uh curious too.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_03: So the more nodes that are running, the better the mining.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_00: The more well, the more secure the network.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_00: So the uh people think that the miners, you know, are the ones that like decide the transactions and stuff like that.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: That's not really true.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but if you're spending all that money on mining, you should also be managing and running nodes, right?
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: You should if you're putting that much energy and time and effort and money into it, you should absolutely be running nodes.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um so there's been some interesting things in the past that have helped with that uh recently.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Ocean released their datum server, which made it very you could always do this, by the way, but typically the in the past, the pools that mine, so these miners put their energy together, and then if they just did it on their own, you know, like one uh Bid Axe miner at home, right, will eventually hit a block, but it might take 183 years, right?
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: You don't, you don't, it's it's all mathematics.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's all mathematics.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: So these people take their energy and time and they pool them together in these pools.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they submit shares to the pool, and then when anyone in the pool wins, they just all split it equally, right?
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and typically in the past, those pools are the ones that have decided what transactions are okay, what you can can and can include in a transaction.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's called a block template.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: And the template says, I'll accept this type of information or this amount of information in a block.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but now there's uh Ocean released something called Datum Server, which just basically gives the miner a very easy way to create their own block and things like that.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why we had the whole BIP 110, you know, thing.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, hey, can we, you know, they're we're trying to not include this type of information, but we are, but it's capitalistic, right?
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_00: If you can make something work on Bitcoin, you can make it work on Bitcoin.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_00: As long as you're following the rules, you can do what you want.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um but uh but there are still plenty of incentives.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_00: The incentives on Bitcoin are already aligned with good and better behavior.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um and if there's one thing I've learned in life, it's you can't force anyone to make a good decision.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_00: You can influence them and you can, you know, live by example.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: But ultimately, if someone's going to be bad on you know Bitcoin, they're going to be bad on Bitcoin.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um But that doesn't change what Bitcoin is.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't change the value of Bitcoin.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: If I still want to use it for good, even if it's got some bad stuff attached to it, I can still use it for good.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I think um that's why I think it's kind of Bitcoin itself is kind of one of the great equalizers.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_00: So but yeah.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a it's a tool.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tool.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great tool.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can use it for good, you can use it for bad.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Money is a tool.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: A bat, you can hit somebody, you can hit home runs, right?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a tool.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I answered that question properly, but yeah, the the more nodes on on it, the more users on a network playing by the rules, the more secure that network gets over time.
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_00: And the the more when we say robust, meaning the odds of it disappearing and going away go down and down the more people that actually use it, right?
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, the more nodes on a network on the Bitcoin network, the better.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that was the the block wars went on because uh people said, Hey, we need more information.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: The true chain ended up winning, saying, No, we need less information, which I feel is good because the less information it is, the more easier and cheaper it is for more and more people to put a note on.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I I believe that no matter what, because of the incentives and stuff, it will always be right where it needs to be.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: The right kind of people will always be able to uh participate in Bitcoin um just because the incentives are there and lined up.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: So um David, so with Bitcoin mining right now, where do you see it going in 10 years?
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: Do you see it like being dominated by big corporations or can these smaller miners compete?
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I think you kind of shared it with you know in your answer.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I just kind of just want to make sure everyone kind of has a good pulse on this.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: What what are your thoughts on this?
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: So part of the magic of monetizing that energy right there, you know, you can global monetize the energy, but you can do it right there.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um you can still use the energy again if you do it properly, which is uh really interesting.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: So there's uh and it's getting really big.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's some uh guys in Denver, uh Tyler Stevens in Denver is doing a really cool um, he's got a company he's starting that's focused on utilizing the heat that's uh you know, comes out of a Bitcoin miner.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Any kind of compute, any kind of um circuit or anything is using energy, it's generating heat, right?
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: It has to release that energy in some w form.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so there's guys that are you know using it for hot water heaters, they're using it for radiant flooring, you know, all that stuff, the heat.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um but years ago, one of the first projects I worked on right after I left that that first company was a heat recapture project in Norway.
• 45:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um this small town was using, they still use boilers to heat most of like the district and you know, multifamily housing and things like that that they had in their town.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and if you are a heat producer in Europe, at least when I set that up at the time, you didn't pay taxes and fees.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: You could basically get electricity at cost, which was kind of cool.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so let's say I was buying hydroelectricity from a hydroelectric dam.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: I was buying it for about two cents.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: I was taking that electricity and I was creating the heat by mining Bitcoin.
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I did that in an immersion cooling tank, and then I would take the dielectric fluid, which is just like an oil-based fluid, right?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I would run it through a heat exchanger, and then I would run water line through that heat exchanger the other direction.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_00: So what it would do is the heat from that oil would pass on to the water, it would warm the water up, and then the water would go out and it was kind of preheated before it went to the boiler.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um they would pay me for that heat.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if I was buying electricity at, let's say, two cents per kilowatt hour, I was selling it at the equivalent of like, let's say, 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour.
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I was making 10% on my costs, right?
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I was doing that by mining Bitcoin.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: So all of the Bitcoin I kept I got to keep.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't have to liquidate any of it to pay bills because the the heat was the product.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: So there's some interesting opportunities there um to utilize heat as a secondary source.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: So what that means is there's a lot of opportunities for people to uh mine Bitcoin in these little weird spots of inefficiency.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're in a colder climate, more people die from cold than die from heat um globally.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: So in those colder, you know, part low places in like Europe and things like that, if you use Bitcoin mining to warm your house, it's like getting a rebate on your power costs, on your heating.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: So we're we're just now kind of scratching the surface of it, and there's some physics challenges to get there.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: Water doesn't boil until 100 degrees Celsius, and a Bitcoin mining chip does not do well over about 85, 90 degrees Celsius, it tends to shut off, it's too damaging.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: But um as hardware advances and there's new innovations on the hardware side and things like that, uh if if we get to like where a chip can operate at like 100, 110, well, then we can boil water.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: You can you you can mine Bitcoin with your hot water heater, right?
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can mine Bitcoin with your dishwasher.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you could mine Bitcoin.
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we would you like even in a refrigerator, um, how a refrigerator works, people don't realize it's essentially a heat pump.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't actually cool a lot of things.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: What it does is it pushes the heat out so the temperature actually drops.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: And um, yeah, you can't really you can get rid of heat.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_00: You can't actually make cold, which is interesting.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um so so you could there's opportunity for our washers, our dryers, our refrigerators, everything.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: You have a little Bitcoin mining in it, um, and then you and it's you're just basically getting a rebate back on the power that you're s you would spend anyway.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that Bitcoin is probably the best option.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of um inefficiencies in the way we manage energy.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um wind and solar are both very problematic.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't actually like either of them very well.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: They they work, but I don't like them that well because where the wind is, uh those turbines are terrible from an ecological perspective.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then when they make it, they usually have to put them out there where nobody lives.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you have how do you get the power to someone?
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: It can be it, you lose power whether you have to transfer energy.
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um solar sort of works, but it's only about 30%.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like if I have a 100 megawatt solar field, the sun only shows 60% of the time, and then I only uh catch about half of that on the solar field.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: So really it's like 30% effective, right?
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_00: But if I had Bitcoin, right, um, mining attached to these things, we can use the excess energy right there next to it and monetize it right there.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's actually being used on the Texas grid.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say a city at any given time during the hottest part of the summer in Texas needs like, let's just say, uh one gigawatt of power, right?
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to even know what a gigawatt is, just know that number.
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: Gigawatt.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_00: What's a gigawatt?
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, thank you.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: Gigawatt is a thousand megawatts.
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and a and a and a thousand kilowatts is a megawatt.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, and your your home is only using about thirty kilowatts per day, kilowatt hours per day.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very small you know, so a gigawatt's a lot, but it's probably enough for like a small town, right?
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and let's say during uh well, no, that's not true.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's enough for a big town.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_00: So a gigawatt of power during the hottest part of the day.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_00: So if you need all that power, you have to have a gigawatt available, right?
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_00: So nobody loses power, everybody can have their AC, uh, you know, schools go, people can charge their Teslas, all that kind of fun stuff.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when it the weather cools down and people's ACs turn off, you may only need half a gigawatt of power.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Well, where's the other half go?
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't go, it it doesn't go anywhere.
• 52:00
  SPEAKER_00: They're still producing that power.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_00: It just disappears off into the atmosphere via heat.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you're like, why are we wasting, but we're spending all this time and energy to create this power so we have it when we need it, but then we don't use it all the time.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: So Bitcoin miners figured out we can go set up next to this power, and when there's only half available, we will use all of that.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we will actually buy that power.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_00: We are called buyers of last resort.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we will buy all of that power and give the energy company another revenue source, making them more profitable.
• 52:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so but then during times of stress when the rest of the when the town's like, hey, it's super cold, we need to turn on our heat.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Bitcoin miners are like, okay, we'll turn off.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's not mission critical.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's gonna die if our data center stops.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_00: The Bitcoin network is so big, it's not gonna turn off.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll just turn off our little corner of the network temporarily.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_00: And if we do that in Texas, we get paid back for it.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: We get a rebate.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_00: So it lowers our overall cost, but then when power is plentiful and readily available and it's cheap, we'll take all of it.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: And what that does is that makes the infrastructure more sound, it gives the electric company more revenue and makes them more profitable.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what you'll find is places where Bitcoin mining is prevalent on a small area of the grid, you will find that the residential cost of electricity there is actually going down because it's like saying we produce one gigawatt, but we only get to charge for half of it.
• 53:55
  SPEAKER_00: Well, now you can produce one gigawatt and you can charge something for all of it.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_00: So it makes them overall more profitable.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of really interesting potential opportunities for that, which makes me think Bitcoin is, you know, it's it's gonna win, right?
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna go in.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_00: But that was a long circle.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: I apologize.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're a question, where's Bitcoin mining going?
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's where it will be.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_00: And again, there's some people that say safety actually, Amus said um posted uh an article the other day and I read it, and he's not wrong, but he said, you know, he thinks that the Bitcoin mining power consumption has peaked.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: I disagree.
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think because it is so uh capitalistic and balanced, if humanity uses more electricity, the value of Bitcoin will go up and the percentage of power we use will act accordingly, right?
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: So if humanity uses more power and energy and needs a better money, then the Bitcoin network will expand to meet that.
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_00: And to talk through it so people understand, you say, okay, well, right now, let's say there's 10 people mining Bitcoin across the planet.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the right number, right?
• 55:17
  SPEAKER_00: But let's just say there's 10 and the value of Bitcoin in dollar forms or whatever, the purchasing value of Bitcoin goes up.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then other people may see that and say, Oh, I want to mine Bitcoin.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so another two or three people hop on and do that, right?
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, then maybe they're not very smart and they're not very efficient, and they're trying to mine Bitcoin with too expensive a power or whatever, and their margins are really bad, and then Bitcoin drops back down, yeah.
• 55:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, oh, we screwed up.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and it drops back down to 10, right?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_00: That will work on a large scale as well over forever, as long as Bitcoin used as money.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the more electricity and power the energy that we use as people globally, because Bitcoin's tied into energy, it will just naturally go to wherever it needs to be.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe it will go up forever as long as we keep, you know, keep creating and using energy.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: You'll always need a way to quantify and monetize energy.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see unless it's you know just completely free and available everywhere.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you'll always have to harness it and figure out ways to use it.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_00: We'll do that in smarter ways, but I think you'll always need a way to monetize it and say, hey, I spent this amount of energy in this time at this second.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_00: And Bitcoin is so far the absolute best way we have to measure that and hold on to it for a long term.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I love that mindset too, and just you sharing so much of the, I guess, technicalities of mining too.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I appreciate it because coming into this space, you hear you kind of start surface level and then you dive deeper, and then there's so many layers to Bitcoin.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, I would say it's like an onion.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_03: You're just peeling back layers every time.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so I appreciate you know, you sharing that with us because it's it's still something that I'm going to have to uh learn even more about.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_03: We've heard from some people on our podcast too that they're really trying to like just really live off their own grid, you know, like their own energy source, their whole family.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_03: I think it was in um uh Cody.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_03: Cody.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: And um and it was just so cool to hear how Bitcoin is not just Bitcoin, it's like actually helping people live like on their own terms and how they want to do things.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_03: So I just think it's amazing.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but we gosh, the what you've been sharing is awesome.
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I love how Bitcoin has also changed your outlook on life too.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: And just if you could, just really quickly kind of be able to share about the the energy that the universe has brought and how has that whole idea, has that changed over time?
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_03: Has it evolved?
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_03: I just love to hear kind of your mindset around Bitcoin in that too.
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of like I mentioned earlier, there's really three pieces of the really the universe as a whole that you can tune yourself into and a lot of people ignore.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um I talked about that a little bit with the you know, the hamster wheel and stuff, right?
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's real easy to get distracted, but uh, one of those is is energy.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_00: Energy is everywhere and it's abundant.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_00: And if you take care of yourself, you can have as much of it as you want, right?
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: So when you realize that you start to focus on your health differently.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um I went full carnivore in 2023 during some of my Bitcoin journey and I lost like 40 pounds.
• 58:47
  SPEAKER_00: It was the lightest I'd been since like college, right?
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and that distraction in the fiat food and stuff, uh, I just I didn't I I I wasn't seeing things clearly, right?
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I had no energy, all that stuff, because I was letting the world and the, you know, and and other people take my energy, right?
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: So that changed.
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um the second thing that is tied into Bitcoin, obviously, is the math and the physics, right?
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: So like understanding what is real and what isn't can affect you both spiritually and physically.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_00: You don't attempt things you know are not good for you or impossible, or maybe you do attempt something that you think is almost impossible because you it's you realize it has that value for you, and so you're willing to expend the energy for that value.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_00: Bitcoin realigns your value with energy.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then the final thing that also ties into that, they all work together, is time.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, time is actually the most finite resource.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's much more finite than Bitcoin, it's much more finite than than mathematics, right?
• 1:00:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so it's uh there's kind of a this interesting dichotomy with Bitcoin.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: You have infinite possibilities, infinite energy, infinite addresses, infinite private keys, but it all operates within a confined space of rules, the same way our life does.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you have a confined life, but infinite possibilities.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_00: What do you want to do?
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_00: How do you want to live?
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: How do you want to spend your time?
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: Who do you want to spend it with?
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_00: All of these things kind of, you know, and how do you want what kind of quality of that time do you want?
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's made me less anxious.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: I just try to enjoy every second.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you, Anthony, when you reached out, man, I was like, I get super excited when someone reaches out like that, you know, to say, it's hey, let's sit down and talk.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: And because these are the moments that uh I just, you know, you you live for.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_00: You live for the the real human connection.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: I try not to boom scroll too much.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_00: I still get on X and you know, post a bunch of stuff and you know, get my news and stuff, but I've been more intentional about using technology in a constructive way and not letting it control me, used money in a constructive way and not letting it control me, using time and energy in a constructive way and not letting it control me.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the magic of Bitcoin.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's also very much likened to, you know, finding Christ as well, right?
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's a certain freedom knowing how things are gonna work and how things are gonna end up.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have that understanding of he's like, I know I've already won, well then the pressure's kind of off.
• 1:01:49
  SPEAKER_00: You can you can just kind of live and be the way that you know you should.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um and the the all the fiat stuff, all the lies of the world, all the things that argue with all of those principles, you know, they just can't they don't have any hold on you anymore.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: It it can make some enemies.
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you lose some close friends because they don't see it the same way, right?
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like I mentioned earlier, you don't have to change everybody.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_00: You just change yourself for the better, and people notice and they start to follow and and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the same way, you know, with Christianity.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's just there's a lot of cool parallels there.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_00: Totally.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and you mentioned earlier, you know, Danielle, you gotta look in, you gotta dig down deeper.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so you don't have to do that.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_00: I still I didn't know hardly anything about mining at all when I went all in on Bitcoin.
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to know enough to understand what it is, know enough to feel confident that you're, you know, making the right decision, that you're you're ready to go in.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to go all in real fast or what you go in at whatever your comfort level is.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: All good things will allow you to partake as much as you feel comfortable with, and they're always there for more.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: So it's as you learn more and and things, there's some I think I like what Satoshi said when he's like, I've moved on to other things.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's like he chi, they, whoever it was, had figured out that, you know, had figured out what it was, they had done everything they could do to it, and then they had to let it go.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so I've moved on.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:03:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, same thing.
• 1:03:29
  SPEAKER_00: I I know enough about Bitcoin to go in and then move on.
• 1:03:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now I can just I can just kind of I can go build another row bed, right?
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: I can play with the coy pond, I can do whatever I want.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that is so good.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: We can end right there, but I'm not.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pick your brain one more question, David.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: No problem.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um so we end all of our episodes with what would you share with somebody entering the Bitcoin space right now?
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: They're listening to this podcast, they're getting into the Bitcoin space and trying to learn as much as possible.
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_01: What advice would you share with them?
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: Would you give them?
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um if there's something you're that's kind of caught your eye, just stay curious, right?
• 1:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: And keep learning.
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: If there's something that caught your eye that you're you're like, oh, that's really cool or interesting, but you're hesitant about, or you're like, I'm I'm, you know, that's over my head, or I'm not going to understand it, uh, that's that's the wrong attitude.
• 1:04:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, uh everything everything is open to you right now.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh AI is making it super easy to go research or learn about anything.
• 1:04:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there anywhere in anything you do, whether it's AI, Bitcoin finances, government, uh, you know, whatever, right?
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_00: You get to decide.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_00: All the stuff yelling at you, all the distractions, they don't decide for you.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, you get to decide.
• 1:04:53
  SPEAKER_00: So if you want to go do something or be I had no background at all in energy, right?
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I just became so obsessed with it.
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_00: I just kept saying it's like, well, I'm an energy developer until I looked up one day and I actually got paid for it.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_00: I actually, you know what I mean?
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_00: You don't you don't have to go to school for it.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_00: The knowledge is out there.
• 1:05:15
  SPEAKER_00: Just whatever it is you want to do, whatever you love to do, do it.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: Just do it.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_00: Get started now.
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um looking back the last five years, you know, uh I start to count it up, and I'm like, wow, it's like it kind of blows me away.
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_00: If I had started five years ago and said, I'm gonna do X, there's no way it would have happened.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_00: I just said small little things.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_00: I want to do this, and then consistency over time, you know, continuing to learn and push, and just when you can and don't freak out if you get off track, you know, you can always come back, but just you know, always go back to whatever, you know, brings you joy and excitement, and you're gonna be fine.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_03: Such great advice.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_03: We appreciate you, David, so much.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_03: And you have such so much great knowledge and wisdom and so much to share.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_03: And we're just so grateful that you took the time with us this morning.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but where can people connect with you, David?
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_00: The easiest is just on X.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm on LinkedIn and stuff, but I I'm totally doxxed on X.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at David Branscombe.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think my moniker right now is Rebel in Texas.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: The B is a Bitcoin.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_00: So some if you type in Rebel in Texas, there's a couple other impostors out there.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_00: But um just at David Branscombe gets to me.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I appreciate thanks very much for the the compliment, by the way, the kind words on the knowledge and stuff.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um I can tell you this if there's a mistake to make in Bitcoin, I've made it.
• 1:06:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's the only reason why I'm knowledgeable, right?
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is because I've I've I've I've tripped and fallen so many times.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so I guess that that might actually be even more important thing to leave with, right?
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's okay to fall down, just get back up, kind of thing.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: So but thank you so much for both of you guys.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um I love what you're doing.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: I love uh all the content.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_00: I always get excited when I see your your posts and stuff.
• 1:07:09
  SPEAKER_00: And putting the you know, the family out there and just kind of being that example of that community is just uh like I said, it's just so important to just continue to lead by example.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody sees that.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: People that don't have that, that want it, see it, and just seeing that emulated, it just gives them so much hope and and direction.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you to both of you guys for everything you do too.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_03: We appreciate that.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_03: That was really kind.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we hope that we're doing our best over here.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's all we can do.
• 1:07:39
  SPEAKER_01: That's all we can do.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_00: You got three small kids.
• 1:07:42
  SPEAKER_00: Your your best is all you could ask for.
• 1:07:44
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you everyone for tuning in to the moon with the lunas, and we'll see you all on the moon.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_01: Peace.
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks, guys.
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: You made it this far, so you might as well hit that subscribe button.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: You won't want to miss the conversations we got coming next.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for watching, and we'll see you on the moon.