Latest / Simply Bitcoin / The Wall Street Bitcoin suppression continues: PAY ATTENTION | EP 1420

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The Wall Street Bitcoin suppression continues: PAY ATTENTION | EP 1420 · Simply Bitcoin

• 0:00
  Yo, just as Bitcoin moved to $98,000 look to defeat all of
• 0:06
  the FUD, a new attack was just released.
• 0:09
  That's right, you heard that after months of Jamie Dimon
• 0:13
  attacks on MSTR being officially put to bed last week, Jamie
• 0:18
  Dimon just launched his newest attack on Michael Saylor through
• 0:23
  you guys know this, our favorite journalist, a newspaper, the
• 0:28
  newspaper of record with so much integrity, The New York Times
• 0:33
  released a hit piece on Michael Saylor.
• 0:36
  Make no mistake, this isn't just about Michael Saylor.
• 0:40
  This is about suppressing bitcoins price under $100,000.
• 0:45
  This was a coordinated attack. Make no mistake.
• 0:49
  Let's take a look at the article and most importantly, let's take
• 0:53
  a look at the author who authored the article because
• 0:57
  again, it's it's not rocket science with the incentives.
• 1:02
  Anyways, joining me on the show today, we got the one and only
• 1:06
  we got Nacho, CMO of ocean. You guys know ocean, the ocean
• 1:11
  mining pool. It's my favorite mining pool.
• 1:14
  It's a mining pool that's helping decentralized the
• 1:17
  Bitcoin network. Nacho, thank you so much for
• 1:19
  joining me today. So we're gonna talk about all
• 1:22
  things ocean in just a little bit.
• 1:23
  But first, let's dive deep into this article.
• 1:26
  I mean, take a look at the artwork.
• 1:28
  It's, it's hilarious. It's, it's, I mean, it's like
• 1:33
  Michael Saylor with laser eyes. I mean, I think it's pretty
• 1:36
  cool. Like if I posted that on X, it
• 1:38
  would be effing badass. Opti's not here for to stop me
• 1:42
  from using the soundboard, so I'm going to use it excessively
• 1:45
  on today's show to make up for the fact that Opti's not here
• 1:49
  today. But we do have a picture of Opti
• 1:50
  behind us as a memory. Anyways.
• 1:53
  Is this billionaire a financial genius or a fraudster?
• 1:57
  The headline from the New York Times article says Michael
• 2:00
  Saylor's financial alchemy thrust an ordinary software
• 2:04
  company strategy into the center of the crypto frenzy.
• 2:09
  It all works. Spectacular, particularly until
• 2:11
  now. So before we jump into the
• 2:14
  article, I do want to take a look at who the author of the
• 2:18
  article is. So we got someone by the name of
• 2:21
  Rob Cope Lind. And, but anyhow, I, I tried to
• 2:27
  make a little bit of a, a dad joke on that.
• 2:30
  But if you take a look at what Rob Koch, Rob Cope is, it's
• 2:37
  quite interesting. Let's let's take a look at his
• 2:39
  role. So Rob Copeland is a New York
• 2:43
  Times financial reporter covering Wall Street and banks.
• 2:46
  Oh, who could have known? And let's take a look at his his
• 2:50
  description or how he describes himself as the Times primary
• 2:55
  reporter on banks. I'm especially plugged into that
• 2:59
  sector. OK, so the New York Times, who
• 3:02
  has released multiple hit pieces on the Bitcoin mining industry,
• 3:07
  has also coincidentally released a hit piece on Bitcoin and
• 3:13
  Michael Saylor, cause Michael Saylor really acts as like a, a
• 3:16
  proxy. Like if you're if you're
• 3:18
  attacking strategy, you know the legitimacy of strategy.
• 3:22
  You're attacking Bitcoin, you're attacking Bitcoin's price.
• 3:25
  Strategy plays such a big role, at least in the institutional
• 3:28
  adoption of Bitcoin. So now we know that the.
• 3:33
  The author behind the hit piece is someone who covers the the
• 3:38
  banking industry. And then take a look at this.
• 3:40
  Banks are central to nearly everyone's economic life.
• 3:44
  My interests run the garment from corporate deal makers to
• 3:48
  ordinary depositors to the regulators and policymakers
• 3:52
  tasked with overseeing it all. So the person who wrote the hit
• 3:56
  piece is the New York Times primary reporter for banking,
• 4:01
  right? And we all know how we feel
• 4:03
  about the New York Times here. It's simply Bitcoin.
• 4:05
  But take a look how he starts the article, because it's effing
• 4:09
  hilarious. Had you glanced too quickly at
• 4:12
  the crowd packed into Michael Saylor's Tuscan style compound,
• 4:17
  you might have assumed it was just another rich dudes party.
• 4:21
  There was all you can eat Hamoni Verico, an ample Versailles
• 4:25
  Versailles style ballroom where a DJ spun electronic music and a
• 4:29
  row of friendly attendants collecting shoes at the entry to
• 4:33
  a docked yacht, one of at least three that Michael Saylor owns.
• 4:37
  Matters got considerably weirder at dinner winter time, however,
• 4:42
  when fluorescent green later, lasers shot out of the host's
• 4:46
  eyeballs, or so it appeared to hundreds of guests seated around
• 4:50
  giant screens erected on the billionaire's lawn on New Year's
• 4:54
  Eve 2024. I'm going to stop it there.
• 4:57
  That party was fucking awesome. I had a great time.
• 5:01
  But it definitely marked the top.
• 5:03
  Like looking back, I know it wasn't the price top, but it was
• 5:07
  the euphoric top. Like if you if you think about
• 5:09
  it like in hindsight, I was talking to Pete Russo about this
• 5:12
  the other day. You were at a billionaires mega
• 5:17
  mansion on Miami Beach celebrating Bitcoin hitting
• 5:20
  $100,000 and you have the best food on the planet being served
• 5:25
  up and we're partying on his yacht with the biggest Bitcoin
• 5:29
  influencers and CEOs and all of that.
• 5:32
  Yeah, bro, that was probably the top.
• 5:34
  Like that was probably the top. That was probably the top.
• 5:36
  And it was the top because a month after Trump got
• 5:39
  inaugurated and then the year of 2025, which was like a bear
• 5:43
  market year, I know we hit a top.
• 5:45
  But the euphoric top, I've been saying this for quite a while,
• 5:48
  was the end of 2024, beginning of 2025.
• 5:51
  Anyways, it goes on to say the screens plopped Michael Mr.
• 5:56
  Saylor's visage into famous films such as Gladiators and The
• 6:00
  Lord of the Rings. He was edited into the action as
• 6:03
  a hero whose eyes blasted wealthy cryptocurrency skeptics,
• 6:07
  including Bill Gates and Jamie Dimon, the bank executive.
• 6:12
  Right. So the head New York Times
• 6:14
  reporter who covers the banking industry, who says that banking
• 6:18
  is an integral part of people's lives, even though the banking
• 6:21
  industry, depending on what country you happen to be born
• 6:24
  in, basically says we can't even bank you that banking industry,
• 6:30
  you know, so he's he's he's he's saying some things anyways by
• 6:35
  cried Michael Saylor's avatar as opponents were vaporized.
• 6:40
  Absolutely hilarious. And this guy clearly doesn't
• 6:42
  understand memes. Most bankers don't understand
• 6:45
  memes. Anyways, I do want to go towards
• 6:47
  the end of the article where he really goes into kind of like
• 6:52
  the negative pessimism of this whole ordeal.
• 6:55
  And it says the pessimistic view on Mr. Sailor and strategy is
• 7:02
  not exactly hard to unearth. For one, investors are skeptical
• 7:07
  of Mr. Sailor's checkered resume.
• 7:10
  Checkered resume in 2024. Remember, I told you guys that
• 7:14
  this fine was political. In 2024, he agreed to pay $40
• 7:19
  million to settle lawsuits by the District of Columbia that
• 7:23
  accused him of evading local income taxes, bragging about it
• 7:28
  predominant investors. I told you guys, I remember when
• 7:30
  he was sued, and this was during the remember, this was during
• 7:32
  the Biden administration, who was completely responsible for
• 7:36
  Operation Choke .2 Point O. And where was this lawsuit
• 7:40
  coming from? It was coming from Washington
• 7:42
  DC. So is it too far?
• 7:45
  Is it too far of a stretch to say that the people that were
• 7:49
  behind Operation Choke .2 point O use this fine to go after
• 7:54
  basically the head honcho, the head public figure of the
• 7:58
  Bitcoin industry of the Bitcoin movement during an
• 8:01
  administration that was very hostile towards the industry.
• 8:06
  So again, but this is what the New York Times does.
• 8:08
  It sets up these narratives. It sets up these frameworks for
• 8:11
  you to look at the world in a certain light, right?
• 8:14
  It's telling you, look at all this opulence.
• 8:16
  Look at all this excessiveness. Like Michael Saylor celebrating
• 8:19
  at this party. Like, how, how dare he?
• 8:22
  How could he? You know, it's all coming down.
• 8:24
  The ponzi's done, it's collapsing, it's over.
• 8:27
  Like this is what they're doing. This is exactly what they did
• 8:30
  two or three years ago where they took an image of a mining
• 8:34
  farm in the middle of Texas. They doctored the image to make
• 8:39
  it seem like the, you know, the the sky was all muddy and dark
• 8:43
  and all of that to try to make the case that somehow Bitcoin
• 8:46
  miners are releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
• 8:50
  And then they did a hit piece on Bitcoin mining under the
• 8:52
  previous administration. And make no mistakes, perhaps it
• 8:56
  isn't the administration that's putting pressure on The New York
• 8:59
  Times to do this. Perhaps it's Jamie Dimon again,
• 9:02
  you know, trying to FUD Bitcoin a little bit so that he could
• 9:08
  pack his bags. Perhaps, maybe predominant
• 9:11
  again, all these hit pieces always come out at such a
• 9:14
  convenient time. Like Bitcoin starts to recover
• 9:17
  and starts to RIP a little bit and then boom, something drops.
• 9:20
  Predominant investors and short sellers, including James Chanos,
• 9:24
  famed for spotting Enron. Oh, so now they're connecting
• 9:27
  strategy with Enron at this point have repeatedly rung the
• 9:31
  alarm. Among their concerns are that
• 9:34
  Strategies market Worth, which peaked above $120 billion last
• 9:39
  year, has regularly been higher than the sum of its Bitcoin.
• 9:43
  That suggests that even if it liquidated all of its holdings,
• 9:47
  it would be short of paying back shareholders, let alone the
• 9:51
  debt. SNP, the Standard and Poor's the
• 9:54
  credit agency in December reassigned Strategy, a junk
• 9:58
  rating. SNP has pointed out that in the
• 10:01
  first half of 2025, Strategies $8.1 billion in earnings was
• 10:06
  entirely composed of rough price appreciation on paper of its
• 10:12
  Bitcoin, rather than traditional corporate earnings.
• 10:15
  If Bitcoin goes to 0 tomorrow, Mr. Sealer said at a December
• 10:19
  event in Miami, it doesn't matter whether there I own 1% or
• 10:23
  2% or 3% or half a percent. It's irrelevant.
• 10:27
  Further pressure, again, like picking and choosing what quotes
• 10:31
  like, I don't know. I think it's a dishonest form of
• 10:33
  journalism, in my opinion. Further pressure is forming.
• 10:37
  The company's stock is down by half since early October, when
• 10:41
  President Trump trade tussle with China set off a 2024%
• 10:46
  spiral for Bitcoin. The value of Strategies Bitcoin
• 10:49
  Holdings dropped $17 billion in the fourth quarter, according to
• 10:53
  the company's disclosures. As of this month, Strategy owns
• 10:58
  21 billion to its lenders and preferred shareholders.
• 11:02
  It is on the hook to pay more than $844,000,000 to investors
• 11:07
  in the next year. Bigger payout loom.
• 11:10
  As soon as next year, Strategies convertible debt, the ones who
• 11:14
  lent money for as little as 0% interest, will expect to swap
• 11:18
  into stock that Strategy has promised would be worth as much
• 11:22
  as $672 per share, if that. If that doesn't trade at that
• 11:27
  level, it is currently around 171 dollars.
• 11:30
  Strategy will have to find money to bridge the difference in the
• 11:34
  next three years. 5 billions of such loans are due.
• 11:38
  Mr. Saylor is already backing off his die hard before selling
• 11:43
  Bitcoin ways. Last month, Strategy announced
• 11:45
  that had issued more stock again, but in a turnabout use
• 11:49
  the money to begin to stockpile more than $2 billion in cash as
• 11:54
  a safeguard. Its chief executive, Fong Lee
• 11:57
  said on a crypto podcast that quote, we would sell Bitcoin if
• 12:01
  we were needed to, if we needed to.
• 12:03
  A move that Mister Sailor separately described as
• 12:05
  rational. Some are sticking by Mr. Sailor.
• 12:09
  At Mr. Sailors villa on New Year's Eve 2025, there was no
• 12:14
  Big Bash to equal the last. One of the previous year's
• 12:17
  attendees recalled that Mister Sailor had told a group that he
• 12:21
  would hold the next festivity only when Bitcoin reached $1
• 12:24
  million. That party's going to be fucking
• 12:27
  fantastic. It recently traded around 95,000
• 12:31
  Mr. Sailors long term addiction is $13 million per coin by 2025.
• 12:37
  If you want to talk about a hit piece, this is literally a hit
• 12:41
  piece. This isn't an article about
• 12:43
  Bitcoin. It's an article about why you
• 12:45
  shouldn't trust a guy who dislikes Bitcoin.
• 12:49
  That's, that's what I got to say.
• 12:51
  That's what I got to say about this.
• 12:53
  Like I, I don't even I don't even consider this a form of
• 12:55
  journalism. Like this is just, you know, a
• 12:58
  guy that has a bone to pick that could potentially be compromised
• 13:02
  by the banking industry. I mean, it says it in his bio
• 13:05
  himself, right? So anyways, Nacho, you've been
• 13:08
  in the, you've been in the trenches with me, my friend.
• 13:11
  2025 was a crazy year. What's your take on that New
• 13:15
  York Times article, man? Because you work in the mining
• 13:18
  industry. They've gone after the mining
• 13:20
  industry like crazy. They've called, you know, this
• 13:23
  mining is boiling the oceans. Mining's doing this, mining's
• 13:26
  doing that. And another thing I'll say to
• 13:28
  you before I pass it on to you is people forget Michael Saylor
• 13:33
  bought in 2021 heading into in the 20, sorry, bought in 2020
• 13:39
  heading into the 2021 bull market.
• 13:42
  And then he experienced the 2022 bear market and his stock
• 13:47
  crashed like no other. Like it was down to $13 a share.
• 13:52
  So what this person forgot to leave out of the article is that
• 13:56
  his stock went from $13 a share. Even though it's down right now.
• 14:01
  I understand that I could take that argument.
• 14:04
  It's still up 166 dollars, so from $13 a share to 160.
• 14:09
  He 10X his stock despite Bitcoin being down.
• 14:14
  That is literally the definition of Aceo doing a good job, right?
• 14:18
  That is literally what he's doing, right?
• 14:20
  So again, this article nitpicked, you know, it brought
• 14:23
  up the party. This guy clearly felt salty that
• 14:26
  he wasn't invited. That's what I'm getting from the
• 14:29
  article. So anyways, Nacho, what's your
• 14:31
  take? 100% and I've been biting my
• 14:33
  sorry. Give me a second.
• 14:36
  I've been biting my tongue when you were talking because that's
• 14:39
  what we know what Bitcoin is. We know how it behaves and
• 14:44
  everything is, you know, correlated.
• 14:45
  Like we're complaining because it said what 90 it was 125.
• 14:50
  We, we were very early in like when we were in Bitcoin was
• 14:53
  worth 100 bucks, 1000 bucks. Of course we sold everybody.
• 14:59
  Did we all have that story? But what I don't like is people
• 15:02
  that don't understand their industry writing with intent.
• 15:06
  That's not journalism, that's opinions.
• 15:09
  And yeah, well, you have a platform.
• 15:11
  You can say whatever you want. Thank God for you guys, by the
• 15:13
  way, because we get all those guys are talking, you know, BS
• 15:17
  all, all day. And then we get you guys that
• 15:19
  can clear the air and bring some actual news that are real into
• 15:23
  our world. It's insane, really.
• 15:25
  They asked, they they said we were the devil.
• 15:27
  They say we pay money. They say we make more money than
• 15:31
  anybody else. That's not the truth.
• 15:33
  To mine. It's extremely complex.
• 15:35
  You get high prices of energy. Infrastructure is very
• 15:39
  expensive. To actually start mining, you
• 15:41
  need $1.5 million worth per MW you mine.
• 15:45
  That's a lot of money, guys. We don't print money.
• 15:48
  Our margins are very, very small.
• 15:50
  We need to be excellent. I will, and I mean excellent and
• 15:52
  what we do just to make and meet ends meet.
• 15:54
  And don't get me started. Of course, we try to keep our
• 15:56
  Bitcoin and don't sell it, but that infrastructure needs to be
• 15:59
  upkeeped that that bill comes every month.
• 16:02
  So these guys don't understand it.
• 16:04
  Never been to it. I trust me.
• 16:06
  He never set foot on a mine ever.
• 16:08
  Like, you know, on, on a data center on a on a farm, ever.
• 16:12
  So if you want to write about it and have an opinion about it,
• 16:15
  you know, at least put an effort like go there, sit down, you
• 16:18
  know, see what we're doing every day and get informed and then
• 16:22
  you can have you an opinion with actual data.
• 16:25
  That's pure BS. 100% And one of the things also too that I've
• 16:30
  learned, you know, doing this for a couple years now is like,
• 16:36
  and again, it's kind of disappointing, but it's also the
• 16:38
  reason that we even have a job in the 1st place is that what
• 16:42
  we've learned doing simply Bitcoin throughout these years,
• 16:45
  Opti and I, is that legacy media really is not in the business of
• 16:52
  actually reporting the news. I think that's the reason that
• 16:55
  independent content creators have gotten so popular because
• 16:58
  it's like we're fulfilling a need in the market that they're
• 17:02
  not doing. They should be doing like that
• 17:04
  thing with Nick Shirley where he exposed the daycares.
• 17:08
  Like you have these media conglomerates that have budgets
• 17:13
  of billions of dollars, billions of dollars.
• 17:16
  And no one had any idea to like go to these daycare centers and
• 17:20
  like do some type of investigative journalism.
• 17:23
  Like the one the one CNN clip that I saw was the CNN reporter
• 17:27
  calling the the daycare centers. Six out of seven didn't pick up.
• 17:31
  And the one that did pick up was like, of course we're not doing
• 17:33
  any fraud. Like, yeah, like, as if they
• 17:35
  would tell you that over the phone.
• 17:36
  Like, it's so ridiculous, you know?
• 17:39
  But again, these institutions are riding on the coattails of
• 17:43
  legitimacy that they've built over the decades that they've
• 17:46
  been around. Like the New York Times, it's
• 17:48
  called the paper of record. Like this is a paper that's been
• 17:51
  around for like 100, more than 100 years at this point.
• 17:55
  So when The New York Times write something like this, it holds
• 17:58
  weight, right? Because all the boomers that are
• 18:01
  reading these papers and the boomers hold the majority of the
• 18:04
  world's wealth. Like that's the reality.
• 18:05
  They're reading these papers and they're like, look at this
• 18:08
  Michael Saylor guy. Like this guy's a clown.
• 18:11
  Like, what do you mean? He he had a screen in his mega
• 18:14
  mansion, Miami villa, where he was literally showing videos of
• 18:20
  him as a hero and Lord of the Rings and Gladiator, you know,
• 18:25
  exterminating his opponents. Like who the hell does this guy
• 18:29
  think he is? Oh, and they were handing out
• 18:31
  Hamongi Verico, like all the excesses.
• 18:34
  Like this guy's crazy. Like that's what they're trying
• 18:37
  to paint this guy guy to be, right?
• 18:39
  It's so obvious a hit piece. And again, the, the timing here
• 18:44
  is so coincidental. Bitcoin has this amazing run up.
• 18:47
  It goes from 86K86K runs up to 90, seven, $98,000 and then
• 18:54
  boom, a hit piece drops at the perfect time and then Bitcoin
• 18:58
  starts to correct again. I mean, this is like kind of
• 19:01
  like the forces that we're up against.
• 19:03
  And for a lot of you guys that don't remember this, like the
• 19:05
  New York Times was instrumental in Senate selling the American
• 19:11
  public that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction back in the
• 19:15
  day. Like they they were the
• 19:17
  newspaper that dropped that article.
• 19:19
  Like people forget about that, right?
• 19:21
  And I don't even want to go back into its history, but let's just
• 19:25
  say they don't have the best track record of reporting,
• 19:29
  right? They've had to eat their, you
• 19:31
  know, they, they, they've had their fair share of, of, of fuck
• 19:35
  ups right over the time. And the worst part is, unlike
• 19:38
  the rest of us on X where if we fuck up, we'll go out publicly
• 19:41
  and we'll say, hey, you know what, like I got this wrong.
• 19:46
  The New York Times double s down, you know, like they, they
• 19:49
  don't, they don't admit they're wrong.
• 19:51
  Maybe they offer a correction, but the, but the article already
• 19:54
  went out. And if they do offer a
• 19:56
  corrections, it's just tiny little bit that says, oh, you
• 19:58
  know what? Here's some additional context
• 20:02
  they don't actually admit to. They don't admit to wrongdoing.
• 20:07
  And let me quote a little bit a hero that neck of the woods.
• 20:11
  With great power comes great responsibility.
• 20:13
  So they need to own what they say.
• 20:15
  And if they make a mistake or they are talking about something
• 20:18
  that they don't understand, they need to refrain from doing it.
• 20:21
  That's simple and basic. And again, going back to why you
• 20:25
  guys have a platform and why we listen to you is whenever you
• 20:29
  say something, I have the record that you always go with the
• 20:34
  truth. Like there's no massage in it.
• 20:36
  There's no nothing you can see now they, they told us that
• 20:39
  we're costing, you know, global warmth, data centers and
• 20:42
  everything. Look at Norway, they're mining
• 20:44
  and they're using the heat from the mines to actually heat a
• 20:47
  whole town. Like we're bringing not only the
• 20:50
  most valuable asset ever, that's Bitcoin, that's going to be
• 20:53
  forever. That's for our kids, kids, kids.
• 20:57
  But now we're using everything, the infrastructure, everything
• 21:00
  we're doing, and we're using it to hit a town and nobody writes
• 21:05
  about that because that's not cool or that's not not bringing
• 21:08
  any value to their plan, which is of course talking shit about
• 21:13
  us, the industry and Bitcoin. So let's talk about that for a
• 21:17
  second, right, Like what what do you think their motivations are?
• 21:21
  And I really don't want to kind of go down this like
• 21:24
  conspiratorial route, but like again, like they they
• 21:27
  conveniently what I disliked about that articles.
• 21:30
  They conveniently left out certain they conveniently left
• 21:34
  out certain data points and certain facts, right?
• 21:38
  They were nitpicking sailors quotes again to build like kind
• 21:41
  of like this frame like this narrative.
• 21:45
  They they did that to mining for a very, very long time.
• 21:49
  I know it changed since the Trump administration coming into
• 21:52
  power and then being inaugurated.
• 21:54
  But regardless, what's your take on that Nacho?
• 21:58
  Because like, you know, the mining industry was attacked for
• 22:03
  so long. And what were some of the, what
• 22:06
  do you think were some of the biggest misconceptions?
• 22:08
  Because one of the things too that like, aggravates me is this
• 22:11
  idea like someone in the chat saying New York Times bought and
• 22:14
  paid for a propaganda fund for real.
• 22:16
  Like, I mean, I completely agree to that, but what were some of
• 22:21
  the, what are the, some of the misconceptions that people have
• 22:25
  about Bitcoin mining? Like the the what the legacy
• 22:29
  media? I don't even give them the honor
• 22:32
  of calling the mainstream media anymore because we're the
• 22:34
  mainstream media. All right, social media is the
• 22:37
  mainstream media nowadays, but what are some of the what are
• 22:41
  some misconceptions about the mining industry that the legacy
• 22:46
  media convince the public on that you'd want to clear up?
• 22:50
  That's that's, that's one that's really up there.
• 22:53
  We are consuming all the electricity and then households
• 22:57
  and hospitals and schools don't get enough.
• 22:59
  So because mining is there, that's a ton of bullshit.
• 23:03
  We're consuming a lot of electricity, yes, for the fact
• 23:08
  that we need to mine in order to, to do so.
• 23:11
  So we bring in massive bills, we bring massive investment.
• 23:16
  We help build transmission in countries, for instance,
• 23:18
  Paraguay, Ethiopia, what you're seeing right now, some other
• 23:21
  African countries. You can talk to the guys from
• 23:23
  Gridless. They're doing it in Kenya,
• 23:24
  they're doing in in, in Congo, They're doing it in in a lot of
• 23:28
  places where there's no infrastructure.
• 23:30
  And we as miners come in with a massive investment.
• 23:32
  We consume a lot of electricity. But when that entails work, so
• 23:37
  people are getting, you know, new jobs, we build
• 23:39
  infrastructure that then can be used for whatever.
• 23:42
  If it's any other industry, we're not there forever.
• 23:45
  We'll, we will be able to mine for in my opinion, the next 1520
• 23:49
  years. And then we'll see what's what's
• 23:51
  going on and, and you know, how things and you know, performance
• 23:54
  of equipment and so on. And so far, but all that
• 23:56
  infrastructure is going to be there for the next 50-60 years.
• 23:59
  So we're bringing in something that countries are not able to
• 24:02
  do. I'm talking about these conflict
• 24:03
  countries. And then you see ERCOT, for
• 24:05
  instance, you said Texas, all the, all the, all the miners are
• 24:10
  there now the, the, the HPC guys are joining the, the round.
• 24:14
  All that is bringing a market that was really interesting.
• 24:17
  And then growing up. And the same thing is happening
• 24:19
  because they copy paste the, the, the system.
• 24:22
  Peru, for instance, in Peru right now, it's a decentralized
• 24:25
  energy market. Most people don't know about
• 24:27
  that. So you can go up there, you can
• 24:29
  curtail, you can come to a price that makes mining efficient.
• 24:32
  That money that we invest, we're talking millions and millions of
• 24:35
  dollars worth of electricity go to the electricity companies
• 24:38
  that in countries like Paraguay and Peru are owned by the state
• 24:42
  and that investment goes into infrastructure for actually
• 24:44
  improvement of the people that are living there.
• 24:47
  They're paying us like we're the devil that would go there.
• 24:49
  We take your electricity, we take your AC, we take your.
• 24:53
  That's not the case. We bring massive investment
• 24:55
  where we're fast to deploy and and with very, very big CAPEC
• 25:00
  intensive in we're very big CapEx intensive industry.
• 25:03
  So as a matter of fact, we're bringing in something that no
• 25:07
  other industry would. If you want to steel mill, it'll
• 25:10
  take 5-6 years just to build it. And then how many, how much
• 25:14
  labor would it bring? How much we consume?
• 25:16
  We don't know. We know exactly what we're going
• 25:18
  to do for the next 5 to 10 years to the, to the tiniest
• 25:22
  percentage. So all, all this, let's call it,
• 25:27
  you know, BS media or, or you know, regular media, what
• 25:32
  they're doing is bringing fear and, and, and ignorance is
• 25:35
  pleased. So they want to control the
• 25:37
  boomers that hold the money. So we're going to tell them that
• 25:39
  Bitcoin is the worst, the mining industry destroying the the
• 25:43
  environment that all these data centers are, you know, very
• 25:46
  noisy and causing a lot of trouble.
• 25:48
  And they never said anything about what just said about
• 25:51
  Norway, about Paraguay, about Ethiopia.
• 25:53
  About why? Because it's not sexy.
• 25:56
  Hell no. It's really interesting.
• 25:58
  We're using everything, even the heat, in order to improve
• 26:02
  lifestyle. So why are they writing about
• 26:05
  that? Tell me.
• 26:06
  I think, I think again, it's, it's all about narratives,
• 26:09
  right? It's all about controlling the
• 26:11
  narratives. And it is an inconvenient
• 26:13
  narrative. It isn't a convenient narrative
• 26:15
  to them, to their to their end goals.
• 26:18
  And I think what we've learned since the pandemic is that
• 26:23
  legacy media is part of this control system.
• 26:28
  And it it's not in the business of telling the news.
• 26:32
  It's in the business of selling the public on certain beliefs
• 26:36
  and certain narratives so that they can go along with it.
• 26:39
  I think that's really what the pandemic exposed.
• 26:42
  And then with social media coming in and again,
• 26:46
  democratizing access to information and the ability for
• 26:50
  people to broadcast information, legacy media doesn't even have a
• 26:54
  response to that like what they wanted to do.
• 26:56
  You see this with certain countries.
• 26:58
  They want to ban X all together. Like they don't want people
• 27:01
  speaking freely and speaking their minds.
• 27:04
  And because it's an it's inconvenient truths, right?
• 27:07
  It's inconvenient truths to them.
• 27:09
  And like, ultimately what I think it boils down to is it
• 27:12
  boils down to control. And I think that if they don't
• 27:15
  have a control over the monopoly on information, I think it's
• 27:19
  going to be difficult as time progresses.
• 27:21
  And I think This is why they're so against Bitcoin and Bitcoin
• 27:24
  mining and they're trying to FUD Sailor.
• 27:27
  And like for example, the Clarity Act bill yesterday that
• 27:30
  we covered how it failed like it out basically got it grinded to
• 27:34
  a halt. Ultimately what it comes down to
• 27:36
  is these banks, they want to continue to control people's
• 27:41
  money. They they want to be able to
• 27:43
  keep their monopoly on the issuance of money and the
• 27:46
  control of money. I think the source of power for
• 27:49
  a lot of these Western governments comes from that
• 27:52
  ability. And again, what happens when
• 27:56
  people start critical thinking on a massive scale?
• 27:59
  What happens when people start taking self custody?
• 28:03
  So I think it's like this kind of knee jerk reaction where
• 28:07
  they're doing this not to actually do their jobs as
• 28:11
  journalists and reporters, but they're doing this to protect
• 28:15
  the system of control. That's like, I can't, I'm sorry
• 28:19
  if that sounds conspiratorial, whatever, but I just can't come
• 28:23
  to another conclusion at this point.
• 28:25
  Nacho, what do you think? Yeah, Nico, you are to media
• 28:28
  what Bitcoin is to the financial institutions.
• 28:31
  Like that's the, the simplest, most clear way to put it.
• 28:36
  If they, they manage to muscle you, the only thing that people
• 28:39
  are going to read is this posture that we just discussed
• 28:41
  before. So you having access to this
• 28:43
  platform and people listening to you and you growing and growing
• 28:46
  and growing and, and you know, this is the the same thing
• 28:50
  that's happening on the financial side of things with
• 28:52
  Bitcoin and what Bitcoin represents.
• 28:53
  And we know what's going on. Like they don't want us to mine
• 28:56
  more. They don't want us to grow more.
• 28:57
  So what we do, what should we do?
• 28:59
  Muscle the industry, constrain them, put taxes like what they
• 29:03
  did in Europe. You, you get taxed because
• 29:06
  you're, you're mining locally. So what you do, you don't mind,
• 29:11
  you just host the machines there and then use the mining abroad,
• 29:14
  the Bitcoin mining abroad. So we, we can be creative, but
• 29:18
  if they keep cornering us, we're going to keep spraying and, and,
• 29:21
  and running away. And this is not the way to do
• 29:23
  it. Like we're again, a very, very
• 29:25
  big industry that has a lot of liquidity and have a lot of
• 29:27
  money to invest. Why push us away?
• 29:29
  Because it's not on their terms. Absolutely, absolutely.
• 29:33
  All right, everybody. It's going to be an incredible
• 29:36
  show. We have Nacho joining us in the
• 29:39
  house today, Ladies and gentlemen, very excited to talk
• 29:43
  to Nacho. Nacho and I had this incredible
• 29:47
  panel together at the Mining Disrupt conference in Texas.
• 29:51
  It's a lot of fun. We we got to know each other.
• 29:54
  Nacho is the chief commercial officer of Ocean.
• 29:59
  Ocean is a company focus on Bitcoin mining infrastructure
• 30:02
  and services. Again, they have one of the best
• 30:05
  mining pools and we're going to be talking about that because I
• 30:08
  think Ocean is solving potentially a, a, a, a, a very,
• 30:13
  very difficult issue in the Bitcoin mining industry.
• 30:17
  So very happy to have Ocean. I mean, not Ocean Nacho on
• 30:21
  today's show to talk about Ocean.
• 30:23
  And then later on today's show, we actually have Aiden Killick,
• 30:28
  the CEO and president of Hive Digital Technologies, and we're
• 30:31
  gonna be talking about Hive. So today's show is gonna be
• 30:34
  talking about all things mining. You guys are gonna wanna stay
• 30:36
  tuned. We're gonna be right back in
• 30:39
  just a bit after this commercial break.
• 30:43
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  All right everybody, we are back.
• 32:55
  We're going to be talking about all things Ocean.
• 32:58
  Ocean had a huge announcement yesterday.
• 33:01
  The data is in on a 12 month rolling basis, corroborated by
• 33:06
  multiple miners. Ocean earns you more 3.6% more
• 33:11
  earned on TIDES versus FPPS, meaning every one XA hash on
• 33:18
  Ocean earned 6.27 BTC more than FPPS.
• 33:24
  Real numbers, real value delivered more for the miners.
• 33:28
  So big announcement. And of course, I, I got Nacho
• 33:33
  from Ocean joining us on today's show.
• 33:36
  So I, I just want to unpack it for the audience.
• 33:38
  Perhaps they don't know what ocean is.
• 33:41
  Could you walk us through that Nacho?
• 33:42
  What is ocean? Why is it such a big deal?
• 33:46
  I was actually at the christening event where Luke
• 33:50
  Dash, which I'm going to be doing a fireside with him
• 33:52
  tomorrow at Bitcoin Day in Naples, where you guys broke the
• 33:57
  champagne bottle. It was this sighting like it was
• 33:59
  like South Carolina, I don't know, it was like South Carolina
• 34:02
  or something like that, but it was really, really special.
• 34:05
  Jack Dorsey was there. It was really cool.
• 34:08
  What is OCEAN, Why is it such a big deal?
• 34:11
  You know what? What issue does Ocean aim to
• 34:16
  solve within Bitcoin mining? In the Bitcoin ecosystem as a
• 34:20
  whole? So first is decentralization
• 34:24
  like again everything is shifting and if you go.
• 34:28
  Let me play the devil's advocate.
• 34:30
  Isn't Bitcoin already decentralized?
• 34:31
  It is, but on the mining side, on the pool side, it's not.
• 34:35
  If you see now going to go to the map pool and find all the
• 34:38
  all the blocks that are found right now, most of them are
• 34:42
  ample and Foundry or Ample proxies.
• 34:45
  So other companies that are mining with a different name
• 34:48
  that are supported by Ample. So we're doing it by the book as
• 34:53
  Sebastian intended and Luke and Jason, who were the original,
• 34:57
  you know, creators of, but not what's now ocean and used to be
• 35:01
  religious. That that one of the first
• 35:02
  mining pools that was relaunched as ocean.
• 35:08
  The the plan that we that we have and, and what we represent
• 35:11
  is just decentralized. Like, I want you to have your
• 35:13
  own note. I want you just to build your
• 35:15
  own blocks. Do it as it was intended.
• 35:18
  We share and we reduce the variance when we share the load
• 35:21
  with everybody else. That's what pools do for those
• 35:24
  who don't know what an actual pool does.
• 35:27
  But what we're going to do is you having control over
• 35:31
  everything. And again, full transparency, we
• 35:33
  don't do KYC, We don't take us to your Bitcoin.
• 35:37
  We do it by the book as it was intended.
• 35:40
  Let's talk about the kind of mining pool situation, 'cause I
• 35:45
  don't think people understand this.
• 35:47
  I remember one of the firesides that I had with Luke, he's and
• 35:51
  this was I think mining disrupt in, in Fort Lauderdale, but he
• 35:55
  was basically like, look like mining Bitcoin.
• 36:00
  I put Bitcoin's success right now at less than.
• 36:05
  I put Bitcoin's success right now at less than 3% and it
• 36:11
  startled me. I was like, what do you mean
• 36:13
  like that? That's crazy that you know that
• 36:16
  that you would even say that. And it was due to again, the
• 36:20
  mining centralization. I have the the chart pulled up
• 36:23
  here. You have Foundry USA, you have
• 36:26
  Ant pool and you have F2 pool and they already have more than
• 36:31
  51% of the hash rate. How dangerous is that?
• 36:35
  Is that is that a big deal, Nacho?
• 36:38
  Let's paint a picture. If these three companies decide
• 36:43
  to go their way or do whatever they want.
• 36:48
  Now we have control over the network.
• 36:50
  So what we do is whoever you are, wherever you are in the
• 36:55
  world, you can mine on us. You can build your own, block
• 36:59
  your notes, sorry, brand your own blocks and do it properly.
• 37:03
  So we would love to be 100% of the network because how we do
• 37:08
  it, we're not risking anything. We're not centralizing.
• 37:10
  We have no control on who's doing what with their note.
• 37:13
  That's the way you should do it. It should be if you if the F to
• 37:16
  pull, let's or or and pull keep growing.
• 37:19
  I'm not going to name countries, but you know very well for where
• 37:22
  they are from, even if if it's AUS pull, whatever happens with
• 37:27
  the government now we're we're a great government with a
• 37:31
  president that's pro Bitcoin and pro our industry and it's much
• 37:36
  better than the former president.
• 37:40
  But if that changes and foundry is 5060% of the of the network,
• 37:47
  we are more than open to be taxed attack.
• 37:51
  And that's exactly what we're trying to prevent.
• 37:55
  That's why we're mining everywhere.
• 37:57
  You can see now there's projects all around the world.
• 38:00
  There's projects is in America, there's projects in South
• 38:02
  America, there's projects in the Nordics, there's projects in
• 38:05
  Africa. We don't know what's going on in
• 38:07
  Bolder Moreland, let's call it that way.
• 38:09
  We don't know what's going on. Well, China, it's supposedly not
• 38:12
  mining, but we know very well that they are mining.
• 38:15
  So what we try to do is decentralize and and give you
• 38:20
  complete autonomy on your mining.
• 38:24
  Could we talk about how like you would think that you as a miner,
• 38:29
  like if you have the hardware to do this, you would think that
• 38:33
  that's how it works now, that's not how it works.
• 38:36
  Could you talk about how Ocean does it and how the rest of the
• 38:42
  industry does it? So if you're mining with an FPPS
• 38:47
  pool, what's going, what's going on is you're sending your hash
• 38:50
  it to them, they take your work, they calculate your work and
• 38:55
  they pay you the reward according to the work of set
• 38:59
  calculation. The problem is there's no
• 39:01
  visibility into that. And what we do is complete the
• 39:04
  transparent, transparent in order for you to actually see
• 39:08
  exactly how much work you put in and what you're getting out.
• 39:12
  That's it. Other pools are not doing that
• 39:14
  because it's not convenient. Again, the same thing we're
• 39:17
  talking about media and having total control and having the
• 39:19
  legacy and having the years behind you is people tend to
• 39:23
  trust you because you're the biggest one in the in the big
• 39:25
  kid in block. You're you know, so we're
• 39:29
  growing very fast because people started realizing it.
• 39:31
  And then you know very well that our industry is very complex.
• 39:34
  You need to deal with electricity infrastructure,
• 39:37
  mining rigs up time the the team that's running it.
• 39:40
  We work 24/7, 365 S. The pool is the final nail on
• 39:44
  the on the mining road. And then most miners don't even
• 39:50
  know how a pool works. So what we're trying to do is
• 39:53
  give you complete autonomy. You're getting your Bitcoin from
• 39:57
  us. So you do very well.
• 39:58
  We're, we're the most important part of the drill.
• 40:00
  You, you spend $150 million, you build a site, you're mining 100
• 40:05
  megawatts, you have between 4:00 and 7:00 X or whatever,
• 40:08
  depending on the equipment, depending on a lot of stuff.
• 40:11
  All that investment needs to be returned in Bitcoin at the end
• 40:14
  of the, of the road. So.
• 40:16
  They are, they are paying attention on the big things on
• 40:18
  the, on the, on the, on the infrastructure and app time and
• 40:21
  everything. But they're forgetting about
• 40:23
  that. How are how they're getting
• 40:24
  paid, how their Bitcoin is going to their wallets?
• 40:27
  Is it being counted properly? Those sets are legit like, So
• 40:33
  what we're going to do is bring light to something that for now
• 40:36
  is being kind of, you know, dark.
• 40:38
  There's nothing wrong with it. We do it differently.
• 40:40
  That's it. And again, I'm, I'm OK, so when
• 40:46
  you say you give people autonomy to build the blocks and and
• 40:50
  stuff like that, how do, how do most mining pools function
• 40:55
  today? And if Ocean rewards people more
• 41:00
  in terms of how much Bitcoin they get to keep after they
• 41:03
  mine, and if they have more autonomy, how come most miners
• 41:10
  still choose to still choose to use some of these larger poles?
• 41:16
  So let's put it this way. FPPS payments is daily payouts
• 41:20
  no matter what. We know very well that you don't
• 41:23
  hit blocks every day. It doesn't matter the size you
• 41:25
  are, you can hit it. At ocean, we got like 9 in a day
• 41:30
  and then we got another couple days with no blocks.
• 41:34
  That's how you actually mine. That's what every miner goes
• 41:38
  through. If there's no block, there's no
• 41:41
  Bitcoin. How are they paying you?
• 41:45
  Is there the concept of free money?
• 41:47
  Like no, if if you're getting paid, there needs to be a block
• 41:51
  and there needs to be Bitcoin to pay you daily.
• 41:53
  If you didn't hit it as a pool or the enough amount of Bitcoin,
• 41:57
  I don't want to get technical, but if you don't have enough
• 41:59
  Bitcoin to pay your your your pool members, the miners are on
• 42:02
  your pool, you need to pay out of pocket.
• 42:05
  That payment out of pocket comes as a price because that's that
• 42:07
  needs to be funded or financed either if it's Fiat, Bitcoin or
• 42:11
  whatever, if it's your treasury, it's coming up from outside, it
• 42:14
  doesn't matter. So those are hidden fees, small
• 42:17
  hidden fees that nobody talks about and nobody was looking
• 42:20
  into. And we don't have that.
• 42:22
  We hit a block. You get paid no matter what.
• 42:25
  If you're 60% of of of the hash rate on Ocean, you get 60% of
• 42:29
  the reward no matter what. So that's how we turn it around.
• 42:32
  So I don't go in depth on the technical side.
• 42:34
  It will bored the audience, but that's the main difference.
• 42:39
  If there's a block, you get paid.
• 42:40
  If there's no block, you don't get paid.
• 42:41
  Period. So, so let's talk about the pros
• 42:44
  and the cons of that, right? So like the what the FFPPS pulls
• 42:51
  do is that in a way they kind of subsidized that, right?
• 42:54
  They give you this like continued reward, right?
• 43:00
  And if you're not a really well capitalized miner or perhaps you
• 43:04
  don't have a lot of hash rate and but you want that at least
• 43:08
  you want a a consistent cash flow coming in, I could see why
• 43:14
  you would want to choose that payoff.
• 43:16
  But if you're a much larger miner or you don't even have to
• 43:20
  be that big of a miner, I don't see a reason as to why you
• 43:28
  wouldn't want to mine with Ocean, especially if you're
• 43:30
  going to get rewarded more. And not only that, like from an
• 43:33
  ideological perspective, again, mining's a business, but from an
• 43:36
  ideological perspective, you are helping the Bitcoin, you are
• 43:41
  helping the Bitcoin ecosystem, right?
• 43:43
  You're helping it tremendously by mining with Ocean.
• 43:46
  So I want to get your opinion on that.
• 43:49
  Yeah, so let's paint a picture. You have 50 PETA hash and you
• 43:52
  need to get paid because every Friday you need to pay the pay
• 43:55
  the bill, the energy bill at the size we are right now at ocean,
• 44:00
  you will get paid daily probably.
• 44:03
  We're not guaranteeing it. We have we have been 100% lack
• 44:06
  since inception and we have the math to support it.
• 44:09
  And then what we can guarantee you is we cannot stop you from
• 44:12
  mining on us and you cannot stop us from paying.
• 44:15
  And with the results and that result that you named when we
• 44:19
  started this conversation is against the better performing
• 44:22
  FPPS pool in the market right now.
• 44:25
  We have cases where they're bringing in five, 7% more
• 44:28
  Bitcoin. And I'm talking miners are
• 44:31
  really, really big like, and I'm allowed to say it because they
• 44:34
  already announced it. Tether gave us their results.
• 44:36
  They're mining on us and they, they are bringing 5% more.
• 44:41
  And then there are other miners are bringing more.
• 44:44
  And again, this is, this is nothing crazy.
• 44:47
  This is just pure transparency. We're not taking blocks from
• 44:50
  you. We're not scheming on
• 44:52
  transactions and we're just paying you for the work you put
• 44:55
  in. That's it.
• 44:55
  We don't do anything crazy. There's nothing.
• 44:59
  Again, if I'm taking custody of that Bitcoin and then giving it
• 45:01
  to you, when you bring the work to me, I take custody and I pay
• 45:04
  to you. That's transactions.
• 45:06
  That's that has a cost. And when, when we're talking,
• 45:09
  you know, apples to apples with us is different.
• 45:11
  There's no apples to apples here because you're mining A notion.
• 45:15
  You're getting what the work you put in and we're not taking any
• 45:18
  extra, you know, money to finance you or support that or
• 45:22
  whatever. So if you do the math, that's
• 45:24
  where the gap comes from because most people ask.
• 45:26
  If you're a small minor and you want to try and ask test, don't
• 45:30
  bring all your hash rate on ask. Test.
• 45:34
  So you guys have been able to reach a significant level of
• 45:39
  hash rate at this point. I think you guys make up 1 to
• 45:41
  2%. Yeah, we are 26 ball ballpark
• 45:45
  2%, yeah. So 2%, so and I love what you
• 45:49
  were saying in terms of now it's at least a daily guaranteed.
• 45:56
  Again, it's not statistically speaking you you'll get paid
• 46:02
  daily, right? And and that wasn't the case in
• 46:04
  the beginning. Oh no, no, no.
• 46:07
  When when Ocean started and and and.
• 46:09
  So shout out to Bob Burnett for Yeah, dude, shout out to Bob
• 46:13
  Burnett. Bob is the best but other than
• 46:16
  Bob when I joined the work and the brand was always there.
• 46:21
  Ocean did a great did the heavy lifting on branding and
• 46:27
  explaining and bringing light to a topic that was again lost in
• 46:31
  most miners head and then delivered on the technical side
• 46:35
  of things. So Datum and all the
• 46:38
  infrastructure that we have and the people that are running it,
• 46:41
  the company has one of the most intense, smart and delivered
• 46:49
  technical teams working behind the whole infrastructure.
• 46:53
  So we are so consistent and we the growth went so fast.
• 46:58
  If you see, you know, beginning of 25 where we were 3X hash and
• 47:02
  we're 26. And trust me, my goal is to end
• 47:06
  up the year at 150. That will put every minor on
• 47:08
  ocean at a daily payout for sure.
• 47:11
  And again, I'm not guaranteeing anything.
• 47:12
  That's simple math, you know, like slack volatility.
• 47:15
  Volatility, that's how it was intended.
• 47:18
  But. But it's, it's statistically,
• 47:20
  it's like probability. It's statistically speaking, you
• 47:22
  guys, you know if you reach a certain level of exit hashes,
• 47:26
  you know the chances are on your side rather than against you,
• 47:33
  right, 100. Percent and 100%.
• 47:36
  And not only that, we're keeping this space up because we want
• 47:41
  everybody to again, have their own node, have breathe level
• 47:44
  blocks decentralized as much as possible.
• 47:46
  We would love to see that chart that you just showed with all
• 47:49
  these tiny lines and this guy that's had like 2 minors at home
• 47:54
  turn on during the winter is bringing, you know, another line
• 47:58
  into that. And then Mara, Hive, Tether,
• 48:04
  whatever NF and a whatever Bob, everybody else also have their
• 48:08
  state, their thing. Bob did it from the get go and
• 48:11
  got it from the get go. He took a a big risk because
• 48:13
  back then it was the pool was was small.
• 48:16
  That reward has been repaid in fold.
• 48:19
  He's you can see he starts from inception until until today, and
• 48:23
  they're impressive. Dude you have some super fans in
• 48:27
  the chat. Just want to read some of this.
• 48:29
  Already have 200 Tera hashes on ocean.
• 48:34
  Building a solar farm to put more on it.
• 48:37
  Sooner or later we'll have 5000 Tera hashes on ocean.
• 48:42
  That's pretty cool dude, good for you.
• 48:44
  And I saw someone else in the chat as well.
• 48:47
  Where is it? I think it was opting maybe if
• 48:50
  you can find it on your end. But anyways guys we're going to
• 48:54
  be right back after this commercial break.
• 48:56
  Also Willie Wes says I'm mining on ocean with datum also helped
• 49:02
  to centralized. So again, people, people are on
• 49:05
  the mission. I love it, guys.
• 49:07
  We're going to be right back in just a little bit.
• 49:09
  We're going to be talking about the next frontier of mining,
• 49:12
  hunting, energy, the infrastructure side of things,
• 49:15
  manufacturing, all things mining.
• 49:17
  That's going to be today's episode, all things mining.
• 49:19
  We have Nacho from Ocean joining on today's show.
• 49:24
  And then a little bit later, we're going to have Hayden
• 49:26
  Killick, the CEO and President of Hive Digital Technologies.
• 49:30
  This is going to be a great show.
• 49:31
  You guys are going to stay tuned.
• 49:33
  We're going to be right back after the commercial break.
• 49:35
  We have tons to get to. Stay tuned.
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  code simply to get 20% off. I do want to open up the
• 52:47
  conversation once again, ladies and gentlemen, got Nacho in the
• 52:52
  house from ocean ocean mining pool ocean dot XYZ Nacho and I
• 52:57
  hit it off at the mining disrupt conference in Texas.
• 53:02
  We had this great panel. It was like an hour long and it
• 53:05
  was like people that were for core, people that were against
• 53:10
  against core, pro nods, pro core.
• 53:13
  It was it was AI really enjoyed the panel.
• 53:16
  It was a good time. It was a good time.
• 53:17
  And me and Nacho hit it off and he's the 2nd guest at the Simply
• 53:21
  Bitcoin studio. We had Mark Moss here yesterday.
• 53:25
  We're going to be dropping that episode a little bit later.
• 53:27
  But anyways, I want to take advantage of the fact that
• 53:29
  Nacho's here to talk about some more things on mining.
• 53:32
  So Nacho, before we went on air, you're talking about the next
• 53:36
  frontier of mining. What does that mean?
• 53:39
  Well, we need to get creative right now because you know,
• 53:44
  there's Texas is flooded, there's not that many energy
• 53:48
  opportunities left. So miners need to go and find
• 53:52
  the price of energy that will will make them survive the
• 53:55
  halving. If you're anything over 4 cents
• 53:57
  or $40 a MW after 28, you're going to have a hard time making
• 54:01
  a profit. So now we're getting created
• 54:03
  that that now you see Mara going into energy generation.
• 54:08
  That's not because they are trying to stop growing is the
• 54:12
  other way. The only way to grow is to
• 54:14
  improve that infrastructure and improve those numbers like you.
• 54:17
  You see Canada is blowing up because they have a lot of
• 54:19
  stranded gas. You see stranded gas in Texas
• 54:22
  that was, you know, untapped or unused.
• 54:25
  Now being interesting, you see what happened in Ethiopia and
• 54:29
  all the issues that are there, like people went there because
• 54:31
  the price of energy was extremely sexy.
• 54:32
  Now they're having prices racing through the roof and they're
• 54:36
  going through a lot of trouble. So we have to get creative in
• 54:39
  order to survive the housing. And I'm not being dramatic.
• 54:42
  This is again, simple math. You know, we need to make that
• 54:46
  investment back and we need to keep growing the, the, and you
• 54:49
  need to keep up with the growth of the, of the, of the network.
• 54:53
  That's another factor that's very important.
• 54:55
  If you see now we're at a set of hash and what change?
• 54:58
  I don't know exactly right now today, but we need to keep up
• 55:02
  with it. So you need to go to these,
• 55:05
  these places where energy is available.
• 55:07
  There's not that many people that, you know, demanded or
• 55:11
  there's, there's energy opportunities like gas, again,
• 55:15
  combining different types of energy like wind, solar and the
• 55:20
  end. We need to keep that up time up.
• 55:22
  So we need energy that's 100 and 100% or as close as 100% as
• 55:26
  possible. So that's why you need to go
• 55:29
  further off, off of their regular plants and of greed and
• 55:34
  and to these crazy places in order to find these
• 55:37
  opportunities. So let's talk about that that
• 55:41
  could you name one of the craziest locations that you have
• 55:46
  found so far? Oh dude Albania gas stranded in
• 55:52
  Albania like. Do you need like security and
• 55:56
  stuff? Is it like a movie?
• 55:59
  It's not like the movies and I don't.
• 56:01
  I never buy. You go in there with like a
• 56:03
  helicopter, you know, with your shirt ripped off, you know, with
• 56:06
  an AK47, with a bunch of a six, you know a.
• 56:09
  Golden One. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:12
  I put my chains on. I put a lot of gel in my hair,
• 56:16
  you know, open my shirt, a lot of bling.
• 56:19
  And then I came in swinging and nobody, you know, cared about
• 56:21
  me. I'm big, so I'm not afraid.
• 56:23
  But yeah, Albania was one place. Canada is a great place to to
• 56:28
  work. It's not as dangerous and and
• 56:31
  there's a lot of stranded gas. Alberta now it's a super probic
• 56:34
  place. The premier or mayor of Alberta.
• 56:37
  It's really pro Bitcoin and they're helping miners and it's
• 56:42
  a very interesting place. There's Alaska.
• 56:44
  If you can handle the the cold and and dealing with with
• 56:49
  natives and everything, it's a great place to do it.
• 56:52
  There's also a bunch of of places right now in the US,
• 56:56
  Ohio, Texas that we know of, Pennsylvania, there's Missouri.
• 57:02
  And then if you go further out, you can see what happening.
• 57:06
  What's happening in Europe now, like the UK was impossible
• 57:09
  because the price of energy was too expensive.
• 57:11
  And now they they over invested in generation and there's
• 57:15
  pockets, small pockets where you can get a price that's really
• 57:18
  competitive. Same with Spain, they went on a
• 57:20
  blackout because they were running only on on the the green
• 57:25
  infrastructure and you know like Bitcoin, everything else were to
• 57:28
  devil. Now they realise they need to
• 57:30
  balance the grid, they realise they need data centers in order
• 57:33
  to keep that up time and the load balance another plus that
• 57:37
  we bring as an industry. So now you're opening up and
• 57:40
  prices are extremely competitive and you can go from there.
• 57:43
  Like you can see what two years ago I told everybody, don't go
• 57:47
  to Ethiopia. I come from the future.
• 57:49
  I'm Argentinian. I know what's going to happen.
• 57:51
  You're going to go in there, you're going to drop a lot of
• 57:53
  money. And then once you're there,
• 57:54
  you're done. They're going to start raising
• 57:56
  prices. The ones who listened stayed
• 57:57
  away. The ones who didn't are
• 57:59
  struggling right now. But you get opportunities in
• 58:01
  Africa, like the North Turkey has solar and wind to, you know,
• 58:08
  feed three or four times the size of the country.
• 58:11
  We cannot mine on solar and wind, but if there's a
• 58:14
  connection to the grid, there's a way to be creative and do it.
• 58:18
  Could you talk a little bit about how Bitcoin really becomes
• 58:23
  this like buyer of last resort? It like it, it really looks at,
• 58:28
  you know, otherwise wasted energy and it and it monetizes
• 58:32
  it. Before Bitcoin, there really
• 58:35
  wasn't. That really was impossible and a
• 58:39
  lot of misconceptions that people have, right, Which is
• 58:43
  when there's a energy source, right?
• 58:48
  If you transport energy over long distances, it loses
• 58:52
  efficiency. If you store energy in a
• 58:55
  battery, it loses efficiency. So you kind of have to use it,
• 59:00
  you know, as close to the source as possible, and you kind of
• 59:04
  have to use it when it's right there.
• 59:06
  The problem is that sometimes there's just an excess demand or
• 59:12
  sorry, an excess supply and that energy like really kind of just
• 59:17
  goes to waste. This is where Bitcoin miners
• 59:19
  really provide the stability for grids because they, they become
• 59:23
  this buyer of last resort, Do they not Nacho like it's like
• 59:26
  they know, especially like the, the, you know, the grid operate
• 59:31
  like like Texas is fantastic because they understand this
• 59:34
  right? So it provides stability for the
• 59:36
  grid it actually makes. And this is the the ironic part.
• 59:41
  Like I find this ironic as hell. It actually makes these
• 59:45
  so-called renewable energy sources economically viable
• 59:49
  without the need for government subsidy, right.
• 59:52
  So it's, it's ironic because it's like the New York Times is
• 59:55
  dropping articles and they get the, the giant skull like trying
• 59:58
  to demonize the the mining industry.
• 1:00:00
  And they're all about renewable energies.
• 1:00:02
  And it's like Bitcoin mining is like literally one of the only
• 1:00:06
  things on the face of the planet that makes renewable energy
• 1:00:09
  sources viable. Because, you know, if we talk
• 1:00:12
  about wind or if we talk about solar, you know, solar works for
• 1:00:15
  half the day until it's night time.
• 1:00:18
  And if you talk about wind, it's not, it's not, you know, blowing
• 1:00:21
  a 24/7. So what happens the, the, the
• 1:00:25
  peak energy usage for a society happens to be at night?
• 1:00:29
  Is it when usually when people come home, they turn on the
• 1:00:31
  lights, they turn on their TV's? When is the peak energy
• 1:00:34
  production for solar? It's during the day, right?
• 1:00:37
  So Bitcoin miners come in. It's like, hey, you know, you
• 1:00:39
  got that excess electricity, we'll buy it off of you.
• 1:00:42
  And then let's say there's a lot of demand on the grid.
• 1:00:44
  You know what the Bitcoin miners is like, you know what, we'll
• 1:00:46
  shut down. We'll shut down.
• 1:00:48
  It doesn't make sense for us to buy your electricity right now
• 1:00:50
  because it's too expensive. I don't think, Please correct me
• 1:00:53
  if I'm wrong here. I don't think that there's any
• 1:00:55
  other technology that's able to do that.
• 1:00:58
  Is that correct, Nacho? I don't know about our
• 1:01:00
  technology, but I'll talk about our industry and let's paint the
• 1:01:03
  better picture that I found in the world.
• 1:01:05
  Chile right now, they have gigawatts of solar up there
• 1:01:08
  better ready the best radiation in the world that gives you 32%
• 1:01:13
  up time that that means that of the 24 hours, you only get 32%
• 1:01:17
  of them where you get the energy.
• 1:01:19
  And then if you want to try and, and store it like you just said,
• 1:01:22
  but it is extremely expensive. It's nonsensical, makes no
• 1:01:25
  sense. And then there's no transmission
• 1:01:27
  in Chile. So all that energy is just
• 1:01:29
  sitting there wasted. So we are means to an end and
• 1:01:33
  everything. And this I was discussing this
• 1:01:36
  with a very big HPC or, or AI developer and I told him, guys,
• 1:01:41
  we're means to an end. It takes two to five years to
• 1:01:45
  build a data Center for AI. We can be mining in six months,
• 1:01:50
  so that we know of two years. Give me the room.
• 1:01:53
  I'll be there. I'll build the infrastructure
• 1:01:55
  for you. I'll do it faster, I'll deploy
• 1:01:58
  it. Then you can come in, in 2-3
• 1:02:00
  years when you're done doing your thing, we disconnect the
• 1:02:03
  containers and we move to the next site.
• 1:02:05
  So not only on the infrastructure side that you
• 1:02:08
  just said, but all those stranded opportunities of
• 1:02:10
  electricity are going nowhere and not used, but also on these
• 1:02:14
  big developments, we are the means to an end.
• 1:02:17
  We are the solution to that. That energy will be sitting
• 1:02:19
  there collecting dust, the guy that's generating.
• 1:02:21
  So I'm going to sell it to anybody because the HPC guys or
• 1:02:23
  the AI guys are sitting there building and they will guarantee
• 1:02:27
  100%. But in the meantime, what's
• 1:02:29
  going on, we can come in mind. There's a lot of things that we
• 1:02:32
  can do creatively as an industry that can get us to those places.
• 1:02:36
  But now also we need to be at a very high pace.
• 1:02:39
  If you curtail in Texas and you do too much curtailment, even
• 1:02:43
  you if you're getting your your money by not mining because
• 1:02:47
  you're getting paid the same thing, you're still not making
• 1:02:50
  the Bitcoin. We are making Bitcoin, remember,
• 1:02:52
  like that's our focus. So we need to be at a balance of
• 1:02:55
  how much can I, you know, shut down and contribute versus mine
• 1:03:01
  and make Bitcoin. And again, that's very complex,
• 1:03:06
  but our industry is well burst into it and we're very fast,
• 1:03:09
  very fast to react. I mean it, it's the kind of the
• 1:03:13
  incentive structure. Like what stuck out to me the
• 1:03:16
  most was, and I never forget this, it was, it was the 20, it
• 1:03:25
  was, it was the China mining ban, right?
• 1:03:27
  And it was like, I would say the second biggest stress test for
• 1:03:31
  the Bitcoin mining, the, the, just the, the Bitcoin network.
• 1:03:36
  And the reason I say that is like, of course, you had the
• 1:03:39
  block size wars, which I think was a huge stress test, right?
• 1:03:43
  And I'm super glad the community won that individuals run that
• 1:03:47
  and people that ran their own nodes, we run, we won that
• 1:03:50
  fight. But I would say the second
• 1:03:51
  biggest stress test in Bitcoin's history was when the CCP banned
• 1:03:57
  Bitcoin mining within their borders. 50% of the hash rate
• 1:04:00
  dropped instantaneously. I think they did it on purpose,
• 1:04:06
  by the way, to like cut the 2021 bull market short, but that's a
• 1:04:10
  different story. But what was fascinating about
• 1:04:13
  that is that within nine months, the Bitcoin hash rate recovered
• 1:04:19
  because of Bitcoins incentives. There was no like central CEO
• 1:04:25
  or, you know, a central body that was saying you got to plug
• 1:04:28
  in those miners. It was literally the, you know,
• 1:04:32
  50% of of the hash rate drops, that's 50% more profit for the
• 1:04:37
  miners that can can plug back in.
• 1:04:39
  So you had this giant decentralization of the hash
• 1:04:43
  rate to more favorable jurisdictions.
• 1:04:45
  The hash rate recovered within nine months organically just by
• 1:04:49
  the incentives alone. And now the hash rate's never
• 1:04:53
  been higher. And on top of that, you want to
• 1:04:56
  put the cherry on top. The last number that I saw, it's
• 1:04:59
  estimated that between 10 to 15% of the hash rate is still
• 1:05:03
  located in China where it's illegal to mine, right?
• 1:05:07
  So like, that is what I talk about.
• 1:05:09
  Like I've told you guys, so this so many times on the show, why
• 1:05:13
  I'm so confident that Bitcoin wins.
• 1:05:15
  I'm confident that Bitcoin wins is because it's a system.
• 1:05:18
  It's a protocol that is designed around incentives, right?
• 1:05:24
  And the what we're up against, which is like Fiat money and,
• 1:05:28
  and, and, and stuff like that. It's a system based on coercion,
• 1:05:31
  right? So my money is on incentives
• 1:05:34
  verse coercion. Not sure I want to get your
• 1:05:36
  thoughts on that because again, man, like the the China mining
• 1:05:40
  ban was that was crazy that that hash rate drop was brutal, but
• 1:05:45
  it also created an enormous opportunity for entrepreneurs to
• 1:05:49
  say, hey, you know what, like that there's 50% more profit on
• 1:05:53
  the table. Let's go buy more.
• 1:05:56
  So our industry is known for speed and resiliency.
• 1:06:00
  Whatever you can throw at us, we can you know pivot, change react
• 1:06:05
  and then all the improvements that are happening right now on
• 1:06:08
  infrastructure on manufacturers. You can see what you know the
• 1:06:12
  proto guys are doing they made the miners part of the part of
• 1:06:15
  the rig. So now you can pull out pull up
• 1:06:19
  pull them apart change a chip while they're running, you know
• 1:06:22
  change your board and this is easy easy as like plugging your
• 1:06:28
  phone. So although that that those
• 1:06:31
  issues that you just named for me were beneficial for the
• 1:06:34
  industry 100%, that pushed the centralization geographically
• 1:06:38
  and then that's pushing us all the time in order to come up
• 1:06:43
  with these improvements like what Proto's doing.
• 1:06:44
  That's a great example. The performance, brother, we had
• 1:06:48
  10 joules of Terahash. That's insane.
• 1:06:51
  That's insane. That's insane.
• 1:06:53
  And and this is tested running equipment.
• 1:06:56
  This is not claims that we're going to get delivery in, you
• 1:06:59
  know, mid 2026. That never happens.
• 1:07:02
  These are running, these are running minors that are online
• 1:07:05
  right now and you can see the growth.
• 1:07:08
  Everybody's saying Bitcoin will die.
• 1:07:09
  Everybody's going to AI is like, yeah, not so much.
• 1:07:12
  Look at the size of that network.
• 1:07:14
  It's great. No, the hash rate is is.
• 1:07:16
  It's literally gone parabolic, which is which is wild.
• 1:07:20
  And it's also a testament to how, because again, I think
• 1:07:24
  right now mining has become went back in my day, used to be able
• 1:07:28
  to plug in an S 9 in your garage and used to be able to make
• 1:07:32
  money off of that. Remember those days, but those
• 1:07:36
  days are long gone. It's a very capital intensive
• 1:07:38
  industry now. And when I see the hash rate
• 1:07:42
  going parabolic the way it's going parabolic, what I see is
• 1:07:46
  confidence in the future of the Bitcoin network because again,
• 1:07:50
  like it's a vote of confidence. You're obviously deploying
• 1:07:54
  capital. You wouldn't be doing that if
• 1:07:57
  you didn't think there is a future price appreciation in
• 1:08:00
  Bitcoin. That's my that's my base case.
• 1:08:03
  And look, at the end of the day, free markets do free markets
• 1:08:07
  are, are, are, right? And they're the definition of,
• 1:08:10
  of the signal, right? And what they're signaling to me
• 1:08:13
  is that, you know, the, the, the, the, the markets are very
• 1:08:17
  bullish on the future of, of mining going forward.
• 1:08:20
  And the hash rate is a testament, A testament to that.
• 1:08:23
  So, yeah, man, I'm, I'm, I'm very, very optimistic and it's,
• 1:08:29
  it's very, very exciting stuff. So anyways, before we move on, I
• 1:08:34
  do want to talk about kind of the manufacturing side because
• 1:08:38
  that's another aspect of this Nacho.
• 1:08:40
  Like I know that like I know that the majority right now of,
• 1:08:47
  of ASICS are, are manufactured in, are, are there, there's
• 1:08:54
  somewhat of a centralization of the manufacturing.
• 1:08:56
  Does that worry you at all? Yes, it does.
• 1:08:59
  But thank God. Now for instance, B Deer is
• 1:09:02
  manufacturing here in the US, Aurodyne is manufacturing here
• 1:09:05
  in the US, Proto is doing it here.
• 1:09:08
  You get other companies that are doing it in different countries
• 1:09:11
  now. Vietnam came a thing now.
• 1:09:14
  So getting all that, all those opportunities of actual rigs
• 1:09:21
  that are manufactured outside China, it's not only
• 1:09:24
  competitive, but also safe for the industry.
• 1:09:28
  We're not dependent on one single market.
• 1:09:32
  What what happened? And you can see big man's
• 1:09:34
  history. Big man was so, so big and we
• 1:09:36
  were all buying from them that they control everything.
• 1:09:39
  Prices, market, what was available or what what was, was
• 1:09:44
  not. Now that tables are turned and
• 1:09:47
  there's big players like BD are coming in proto that they're I
• 1:09:50
  hope they're they're delivering soon with a new different thing,
• 1:09:54
  big deer. What they're doing with their
• 1:09:56
  equipment and they're manufacturing here in the US.
• 1:09:59
  The factory is going to be right here US based.
• 1:10:01
  You can buy local US made mining mining rigs from one of the most
• 1:10:06
  smart guys in the industry, Jihan.
• 1:10:08
  So all this, what's the problem? I think we're going in the right
• 1:10:12
  direction with all this these new rigs.
• 1:10:14
  And then you have the other, the other layers, Canaan and the
• 1:10:17
  other companies, but with these guys on the market and doing it
• 1:10:21
  here in the US and and they are doing it in different countries
• 1:10:24
  not based out of China. That was a big problem.
• 1:10:26
  That's the same thing that was that was happening on the pool
• 1:10:28
  side of things. Guys, we're going to be right
• 1:10:32
  back after the break. We might have Aidan Killick, the
• 1:10:36
  CEO and President of Hive Digital Technologies.
• 1:10:39
  We're going to be right back in just a bit.
• 1:10:42
  I want to give a shout out to our partner Hive Digital
• 1:10:44
  Technologies. Fueled by clean energy, Hive has
• 1:10:48
  quadrupled its global Bitcoin mining footprint and channels
• 1:10:52
  that same scale into high performance compute, where their
• 1:10:55
  AI cloud is now ranked number one in the world for network
• 1:11:00
  performance. At Hive, you've got dual
• 1:11:02
  engines, Bitcoin and AI humming, roaring, accelerating and
• 1:11:07
  unison. They're lean and mean.
• 1:11:08
  They're green and clean, and they're rewriting the playbook
• 1:11:12
  on sustainable digital infrastructure.
• 1:11:14
  You can catch the latest buzz at Hive Digital Tech or at Hive
• 1:11:18
  digitaltech.com. I want to give a shout out to
• 1:11:21
  our partner Bitcoin Ben dot IO. If you're into freedom Bitcoin
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• 1:11:56
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• 1:12:00
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  If you're interested in mining, what are you waiting for?
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  Head over to Bitcoin Ben dot IO. Join today where Bitcoin meets
• 1:12:32
  freedom. All right, everybody, we are
• 1:12:39
  back, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm here with Nacho from ocean
• 1:12:45
  waiting for I didn't I didn't should be joining us
• 1:12:47
  momentarily, but I just kind of want to continue this
• 1:12:50
  conversation. Today's Friday special is on
• 1:12:53
  mining. I I absolutely love it and it
• 1:12:57
  was really interesting. Kind of.
• 1:12:58
  Oh, seems like I didn't just joined.
• 1:13:01
  Let me bring them up. Aiden, can you hear us?
• 1:13:04
  Yeah, I can hear you guys loud and clear voice.
• 1:13:06
  I don't know why the camera is not working.
• 1:13:13
  I hit allow in the browser etcetera.
• 1:13:15
  So I wonder if this is just a Microsoft Edge.
• 1:13:20
  It's a terrible browser, so let's try to get in Chrome.
• 1:13:23
  We can. We can keep it.
• 1:13:25
  We can keep it rolling. Aiden, happy to have you guys.
• 1:13:28
  We have Aiden on air today joining us today.
• 1:13:32
  He's the CEO and president of Hive Digital Technologies.
• 1:13:37
  So, Aiden, thank you so much for joining us, man Appreciate it.
• 1:13:41
  Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm actually trying to dial in
• 1:13:44
  through Chrome as well. It says waiting for permission,
• 1:13:46
  so see if that works on your end, and if so, it'd be great to
• 1:13:53
  kind of have that, but if not we could just keep rolling.
• 1:13:59
  So Aidan, I got, I got, I got some questions for you aligned
• 1:14:03
  up regarding your one of the latest press releases coming
• 1:14:08
  from Hive and I do want to get to it.
• 1:14:12
  Let me see if we can pull you up here.
• 1:14:15
  Let me let's try that. How you doing, Aidan?
• 1:14:17
  Can you hear us? Oh, it seems like there's a bit
• 1:14:22
  of feedback. Aiden, could you hear us?
• 1:14:27
  Yeah, I could hear you guys that clear.
• 1:14:28
  OK, perfect. All right, Aiden.
• 1:14:31
  So dude, good to see you, man. I mean, good to hear from you.
• 1:14:34
  How you doing, bro? I'm super hyped.
• 1:14:36
  I'm going to be able to see you in El Salvador in the end of
• 1:14:40
  January. It was great to see you in
• 1:14:42
  Lugano. That was that was a great time.
• 1:14:45
  And the the documentary that we were able to produce together in
• 1:14:49
  Paraguay was fantastic. I think this is the first time
• 1:14:53
  that you're joining us on Simply Bitcoin.
• 1:14:55
  Man, I'm super hyped to have you.
• 1:14:58
  I mean we did interview in Vegas, we did interview at the
• 1:15:01
  NASDAQ in Midtown. You guys did a phenomenal setup
• 1:15:03
  at our four year go public anniversary at NASDAQ and Plan B
• 1:15:09
  was phenomenal. Tether always puts on a great
• 1:15:11
  intimate event, but very high caliber of attendees and
• 1:15:15
  presenters. And Plan B in El Salvador should
• 1:15:19
  be phenomenal as well. I'm looking forward to that and
• 1:15:21
  I'll see you down there. But yeah, it's been a good start
• 1:15:24
  to 262026. We've sort of had a remarkable
• 1:15:31
  year of growth in 2025, scaling the Bitcoin mining business from
• 1:15:34
  1 to 400 million revenue, as you know.
• 1:15:36
  And moreover, this year is going to be the year that we scaled
• 1:15:41
  the HPC business from 20 million ARR and our target is about 1/4
• 1:15:45
  billion. So I think it's helpful just to
• 1:15:48
  remind people that I, I mean, you know this intimately well,
• 1:15:53
  but people that are tuning in are new to the story has
• 1:15:55
  actually the first public you traded crypto mining company
• 1:15:58
  ever went public. September 2017 stars in Ethereum
• 1:16:02
  miner and ice and expanded to Sweden and then to Quebec and
• 1:16:05
  then to New Brunswick and then most recently Paraguay.
• 1:16:09
  And so 2025 was a landmark year. We scaled from 140 to 400 and
• 1:16:15
  four 440 megawatts of green energy, hydroelectric power
• 1:16:20
  globally powering our tier one data centers.
• 1:16:23
  And that really brought us to north of 2% of the global
• 1:16:25
  Bitcoin mining networks. We're mining almost 10 Bitcoin a
• 1:16:28
  day right now. We get 400 million ARR late
• 1:16:32
  2025. But the remarkable thing is we
• 1:16:33
  brought on that 300 megawatts of growth in six months.
• 1:16:38
  We were doing an exit hash a week.
• 1:16:40
  So that was pretty remarkable. And then moreover, we were the
• 1:16:45
  first company that was a crypto mining company to actually have
• 1:16:49
  HPC revenue on our income statement and that was in the
• 1:16:52
  first quarter of 2023 and that was post Etherium merge.
• 1:16:57
  So September 2022 ETH merge happened.
• 1:17:00
  We repurposed our NVIDIA GPU's, put them into super micro
• 1:17:04
  servers, move them to tier three data center and we get
• 1:17:07
  $1,000,000 ARR. In early 2023, we scaled that
• 1:17:11
  from four, it was only 400 GPS we got to million ARR.
• 1:17:14
  We scaled that to 4000 GPUs got to 10 million ARR, SO10X.
• 1:17:19
  And then since then we've doubled it to 20 million ARR by
• 1:17:22
  including H1 hundreds and H2 hundreds in our fleet.
• 1:17:25
  And to get to our quarter billion target this year, 2026,
• 1:17:29
  we have some Blackwells. We're we're doubling the size of
• 1:17:33
  our cloud from 5000 GPUs now to 11,000 by bringing on 6000
• 1:17:38
  Blackwells or data centers in Canada.
• 1:17:41
  And also we're converting one of our Bowden data centers to HPC.
• 1:17:44
  Super exciting. And then we've talked a lot
• 1:17:46
  about the conversion of New Brunswick to a Tier 3.
• 1:17:50
  It's currently a tier 170 MW Bitcoin mining facility.
• 1:17:54
  It was highest flag, it is highest flagship facility in
• 1:17:56
  Canada for Bitcoin mining. But we've realized that it is it
• 1:18:01
  is a venerable secondary market. Seemingly about $130.00 a
• 1:18:06
  kilowatt a month would yield you 80 million ARR with 50 megawatts
• 1:18:10
  of IT load. So that also is a very exciting
• 1:18:14
  lever for growth this year for us.
• 1:18:16
  And we bought 32 acres of land next to the site for that
• 1:18:20
  expansion into HPC. So a lot of a lot of cool stuff
• 1:18:23
  happening. And then I think the recent
• 1:18:25
  press release you were talking about was the expansion into
• 1:18:30
  Paraguay with HPC as well. So we're partnered with the
• 1:18:32
  country's largest telecom operator and we will be
• 1:18:38
  expanding our buzz cloud. So we're sending our NVIDIA GPUs
• 1:18:43
  to Paraguay. We're going to set them up in
• 1:18:45
  similarly to how we partner with Bell in Canada, We're partnering
• 1:18:49
  with the largest telecom operator in Paraguay and we'll
• 1:18:53
  be operating our GPUs in their tier three data centers is
• 1:18:56
  really quick because you've got the fiber, you've got, you've
• 1:18:59
  got every, it's tier 3, you've got everything you need.
• 1:19:02
  We're sending the notes. And of course there'll be some
• 1:19:03
  networking and storage stuff they'll be doing.
• 1:19:05
  But we're expecting this to go live in the first part of
• 1:19:09
  February and we'll put them on on our cloud, which recently
• 1:19:13
  won, got a silver, sorry, a bronze, A bronze ranking in semi
• 1:19:18
  analysis, cluster Max. And that's super exciting.
• 1:19:21
  So we are pioneering bringing AI cloud to Latin America.
• 1:19:27
  Fantastic. I I I have a question for you.
• 1:19:30
  So what is the difference between Tier 2 and tier 3?
• 1:19:35
  And you know how what is the, what is the, the, the required?
• 1:19:41
  What is the differences between Riot running a Bitcoin mining
• 1:19:46
  operation and an HPC operation? Again, this is just to educate
• 1:19:51
  the audience that perhaps don't understand the complexities of
• 1:19:54
  all the things that you guys do behind the scenes.
• 1:19:58
  So a Tier 1 is what we refer to as a Bitcoin mining data center.
• 1:20:02
  So all your all sorry, all of your electricity, all your
• 1:20:06
  power. Goes to compute.
• 1:20:08
  So you want to have as close to a PUEA power usage effectiveness
• 1:20:12
  ratio of close to 1 as possible. One is theoretical because
• 1:20:16
  you're going to have lights and other ancillary power draw that
• 1:20:19
  isn't the actual ASIC minors. But in a lot of our data like
• 1:20:25
  for New Brunswick, it's completely passively cooled.
• 1:20:27
  So aside from lights and of course you've got routers and
• 1:20:31
  networking equipment etcetera, the power all goes to the ASICS
• 1:20:37
  and we've got filter walls and it's the air draw through the
• 1:20:40
  fans of the ASICS that really passively cooled the building
• 1:20:45
  because it, it draws air in and you have these massive walls of
• 1:20:48
  ASICS and, and so you create this, this air current and then
• 1:20:52
  on the hot aisle it, it sort of exhausts through the roof where
• 1:20:56
  we have exhaust fence. You got a little bit of power
• 1:20:58
  draw on the fans in A and and you don't really need to have a
• 1:21:03
  battery backup for redundancy or anything like that because
• 1:21:07
  you've got AI mean in Bitcoin mining.
• 1:21:11
  If service go down, you reboot them and you won't be scoring in
• 1:21:15
  the pool for for that moment in time.
• 1:21:18
  But really best practices is just to ensure maximum compute
• 1:21:23
  for Bitcoin mining data centre at all times and then have a
• 1:21:26
  good team that will repair miners if they go down and, and
• 1:21:30
  they need like a hardware reboot or or whatever.
• 1:21:32
  And so basically the other pieces when you come to tier 3
• 1:21:40
  is it's you've got to have up time and you can't afford any
• 1:21:44
  down time. So you need you need redundancy.
• 1:21:47
  So you that could be so first of all, you have UPS is right,
• 1:21:50
  which are effectively high performance batteries to ensure
• 1:21:53
  if for whatever reason there's a power outage, you know that
• 1:21:58
  charge that power is, is preserved so your servers don't
• 1:22:01
  go down. And then moreover, you also have
• 1:22:05
  backup generators, diesel generators that will come on if
• 1:22:09
  your outage is longer than a certain amount of time.
• 1:22:12
  And finally, of course, you want to have a a climate controlled
• 1:22:16
  environment. And so you've you've got cooling
• 1:22:19
  and it's all moving towards liquid cooling.
• 1:22:21
  So Frank likes to say a Bitcoin mine is rugged like a Ford F-150
• 1:22:27
  and the tier three data center is very refined like a Porsche
• 1:22:30
  or a Ferrari. And so one is super high
• 1:22:33
  performance and one is more rugged, rough and tumble.
• 1:22:36
  And so, you know, recently I was asked, oh, are you guys doing AI
• 1:22:41
  for Bitcoin mining? Are the GPUs doing AI to mine
• 1:22:44
  Bitcoin? Which of course, doesn't make
• 1:22:45
  any sense, but I don't blame people for not getting it.
• 1:22:48
  Like we're here to educate and help people understand.
• 1:22:51
  There are two different revenues.
• 1:22:53
  There are two different approaches, the ROI and Bitcoin
• 1:22:57
  mining's much quicker. You could ROI after electrical
• 1:23:00
  costs a year to year and a half on your ASICS.
• 1:23:03
  Yes, you upgrade your ASICS every three to four years and
• 1:23:07
  you know the you can, the longer, the lower your operating
• 1:23:11
  costs, the longer you can run your ASICS before you've got to
• 1:23:13
  upgrade them, right. So we kind of created a helpful
• 1:23:17
  graph in one of our investor presentations just to kind of
• 1:23:21
  visually demonstrate how crypto mining revenues really, really
• 1:23:26
  work. And I, I think that that that is
• 1:23:32
  very helpful. I wonder if I can almost pull it
• 1:23:35
  up for you guys. But any rate as as that, I hope
• 1:23:38
  that kind of answers your question about the difference
• 1:23:40
  between 2:00. And three, it absolutely does.
• 1:23:43
  And I love the analogy in terms of the, the, the ruggedness
• 1:23:49
  versus the high like the, the Porsche analogy and then the
• 1:23:53
  ruggedness of the Bitcoin miners.
• 1:23:55
  I think that analogy is, is great and our audience
• 1:23:59
  definitely appreciates that. Now I and how critical is
• 1:24:02
  national fiber ownership, ownership versus lease lines for
• 1:24:05
  AI workloads? And what advantages does this
• 1:24:08
  partner's fiber footprint give you inside Paraguay and
• 1:24:11
  regionally? Well, it's the fact that it
• 1:24:15
  exists. You've got that, that
• 1:24:17
  connectivity because when you're doing AI workloads, a lot of
• 1:24:21
  data is moving to and from the data center has to be very quick
• 1:24:25
  with low latency. And so this especially is
• 1:24:29
  applicable for inference based workloads where you've got to
• 1:24:31
  have your data moving on and off the GPUs quickly because people
• 1:24:36
  are prompting the LLM. And so when that prompt goes in,
• 1:24:41
  you know the LLM, first of all, it's got to travel to where the
• 1:24:47
  LLM is. And so if the LLM is operating
• 1:24:49
  on a Bank of GPUs, a cluster of GPUs in your data center, that
• 1:24:53
  prompt has to make it there. The inference occurs and then
• 1:24:56
  the response it needs to travel back very quickly.
• 1:25:00
  Less so in in a training setting where you're going to be sending
• 1:25:03
  a very, very, very large data set to the model and the
• 1:25:06
  training takes very long time, but still you can't afford any
• 1:25:10
  downtime. Like if anything goes wrong
• 1:25:12
  while you're training, you, you can, you can be Sol enough to
• 1:25:15
  start over. So you just like, you just don't
• 1:25:17
  want to even entertain the notion of having those kind of
• 1:25:19
  problems. So it's, it's very, it's very
• 1:25:25
  important just to have like a pristine operating environment
• 1:25:28
  with like excellent uptime. Those are almost not non
• 1:25:32
  negotiables. So from a from a cost
• 1:25:34
  perspective, Ivan, how does telecom pricing in Paraguay
• 1:25:37
  compare to mature markets like Texas?
• 1:25:40
  Is that a competitive advantage or a current limitation?
• 1:25:44
  It's not so much about that, it's that you have massive
• 1:25:49
  expenses of renewable hydroelectric power in Perigo,
• 1:25:52
  which is what led us there in the 1st place to expand our
• 1:25:55
  Bitcoin mining business. Moreover, it's about having
• 1:26:01
  pioneering really to to bring compute into Paraguay.
• 1:26:07
  And so as that models worked very well.
• 1:26:10
  By the way, stand by for updates on our partnership with Bell.
• 1:26:12
  A lot of exciting things in the pipeline, partnering with
• 1:26:15
  Telecos, which isn't easy. I mean, you, you have to be the
• 1:26:18
  preferred partner of choice. They have to realize that you've
• 1:26:20
  got the pedigree and the track record of building these GPU
• 1:26:24
  clusters, which we do. We're an NVIDIA cloud partner.
• 1:26:25
  And again, we've been running our own GPUs for the last two
• 1:26:31
  years and real more than that like 2 1/2 years.
• 1:26:36
  And that's very different than just building powered shells in
• 1:26:38
  Tier 3 colocation. So we've done it.
• 1:26:42
  We we earned that partnership with Bell and and now we want to
• 1:26:44
  bring that to Paraguay. And so this is a very exciting
• 1:26:47
  proof of concept. We plan on having researchers
• 1:26:51
  use the nodes operating a Paraguay and have international
• 1:26:55
  researchers really validate that proof of concept.
• 1:26:59
  And so we want to be the the highway, the circuit to ramp up
• 1:27:07
  AI and HPC in Paraguay and, and we're working some on some
• 1:27:11
  exciting things. But that's about all I could
• 1:27:12
  say. It was just the first press
• 1:27:15
  release. We just wanted to announce the
• 1:27:17
  nodes are on the way and everything is great.
• 1:27:20
  And so there's going to be a lot more exciting announcements on
• 1:27:23
  HPC in Paraguay. Fantastic.
• 1:27:25
  Aiden, I know that you have a hard stop.
• 1:27:27
  Final question, what has you the most excited about 2026 for Hive
• 1:27:33
  and for Bitcoin in general? I think that really, so we,
• 1:27:39
  we've got another 100 megawatts that we announced in Paraguay
• 1:27:43
  under our, we signed that PP late last year.
• 1:27:47
  Again, scaling our GPU cloud from 5000 to 11,000 GPUs is
• 1:27:54
  going to be a very exciting thing because that will drive
• 1:27:56
  our cloud revenue from roughly 20 million to 140 million
• 1:28:00
  because the black holes are very profit.
• 1:28:02
  And so the fact that we are successfully running a cloud of
• 1:28:06
  5000 GPUs between Sweden and Quebec and to 7X our revenue
• 1:28:11
  from 120 to 140 million is really just to bring on another
• 1:28:16
  6000 GPU. So going from 11, sorry 5000
• 1:28:19
  currently to 11,000 targets the end of the year you're in effect
• 1:28:23
  doubling. So it's it's very much
• 1:28:25
  actionable, right? And we plan to have quarterly
• 1:28:28
  Rams on that. So that's exciting.
• 1:28:29
  And then I think the conversion of New Brunswick, we're going
• 1:28:32
  through design development and again, we bought the land next
• 1:28:36
  to the site. So stay tuned for updates on
• 1:28:39
  that. If we if we get a hyperscaler
• 1:28:43
  contract signed on New Brunswick, it would be about
• 1:28:46
  again 80 million ARRSU take that plus you add the 140 million
• 1:28:50
  from the cloud business, it's 220 million of sort of end of
• 1:28:55
  year early 2027 targeted HPC revenue which really excited
• 1:28:59
  about and that's not even including Paraguay yet.
• 1:29:03
  So we've got some very cool stuff.
• 1:29:06
  I think that it would be really exciting being in El Salvador.
• 1:29:11
  So let's just consider this the, the, the trailer, the teaser
• 1:29:14
  and, and hopefully by the time I see you in El Salvador, I could
• 1:29:17
  speak a little bit more to some of the exciting things that
• 1:29:20
  we're working on. I love that, ladies and
• 1:29:22
  gentlemen, Aidan Killick, the CEO and President of Hive
• 1:29:25
  Digital Technologies, go check out the stock on the NASDAQ
• 1:29:29
  Hive. It's trading right now.
• 1:29:31
  Aidan, thank you so much for joining us on today's show.
• 1:29:34
  Really, really appreciate you calling in.
• 1:29:37
  Thank you man and have a great weekend.
• 1:29:39
  Thank you. Take care guys.
• 1:29:40
  Appreciate it. All right everybody.
• 1:29:43
  Well, that was the Friday show and of course I'm joined here
• 1:29:47
  with with my friend Nacho. Nacho, we have a we have a
• 1:29:52
  weekend in front of us. My friends, we have to drive
• 1:29:57
  across Alligator Alley and go to Bitcoin Day tomorrow.
• 1:30:03
  The work don't stop. And then after that we have naps
• 1:30:06
  and after that we have the Salvador.
• 1:30:08
  We have a full agenda. Yeah.
• 1:30:10
  So we have, you have the event, the National Energy Mining
• 1:30:15
  Summit, right. And then we have the Plan B
• 1:30:19
  conference in El Salvador, which one of my favorite conferences,
• 1:30:25
  the tether, the tether guys throw, they do an amazing job.
• 1:30:28
  Yeah, Lugano was amazing, and so last year was great and this
• 1:30:31
  year they got a pretty great lineup of people on stage.
• 1:30:35
  So I think it's going to be a fun one.
• 1:30:37
  And again, you're getting out of the, the, the cold weather, not
• 1:30:41
  you because you live in Miami, but the other guys on the US get
• 1:30:44
  to get a little bit of sun and, and good weather on on top of
• 1:30:47
  it. Absolutely, Nacho, before we
• 1:30:49
  wrap up, do you have any final messages for our audience
• 1:30:52
  regarding Ocean, regarding Bitcoin?
• 1:30:54
  What are you the most excited for?
• 1:30:57
  Guys, just if you need anything you wanna hear more about us,
• 1:31:00
  reach out. I usually don't talk shop when I
• 1:31:02
  go to podcast with friends. The idea is to get the word out
• 1:31:06
  there, tell you what importance has of you running your own node
• 1:31:10
  and running your own blogs and doing it again, Satoshi
• 1:31:14
  intended. So if you guys need anything,
• 1:31:16
  just reach out. You can find our website, you
• 1:31:17
  can find us. We're pretty easy to get a hold
• 1:31:21
  of and happily helping anybody. It doesn't matter if you're 100
• 1:31:24
  XA hash or 100 PETA hash, we'll take care of you.
• 1:31:28
  Absolutely love that Nacho. It's been a pleasure guys.
• 1:31:30
  If you guys enjoyed today's show, you know to do smash the
• 1:31:32
  like button, consider subscribing, enjoy the weekend,
• 1:31:35
  go outside, get some sun, touch some grass, enjoy your family,
• 1:31:38
  eat some steak, live well. Hope to see some of you guys in
• 1:31:42
  these upcoming events in Nashville in Naples tomorrow and
• 1:31:47
  El Salvador at the end of the at the end of the month.
• 1:31:49
  Hope to see you guys again. Love you and we'll see you next
• 1:31:52
  week for a brand new episode of simply Bitcoin live.
• 1:31:56
  We might be doing a special on Sunday, might be.
• 1:31:59
  I'll keep you guys updated. Anyways, take care everybody.
• 1:32:02
  Today's episode was brought to you by bitcoinwell.com, a
• 1:32:06
  Bitcoin only platform on a mission to enable financial
• 1:32:09
  independence.