Key Takeaways

This episode traces Bitcoin mining’s journey from scrappy experimentation to a global energy industry: early Stanford/“homebrew-style” meetups birthed unconventional Bitfury ASICs that outmaneuvered legacy chip methods; founders bet on brilliance over pedigree while surviving DRAM-like boom/bust cycles, liquidity crunches, and Operation Chokepoint; the network scaled from ~1 PH/s to >1 ZH as miners professionalized and learned ruthless efficiency; lessons from GHash’s 55–60% share catalyzed market-driven decentralization; and today mining acts as flexible demand, soaking up stranded power, stabilizing grids, and bridging to AI/data-center buildouts, confirming a decade-old thesis that Bitcoin would intertwine with energy systems as fiat debt swells and institutional adoption normalizes the tech.

Best Quotes

“It was an industry that was effectively printing money, but a different kind of money. And you needed fiat capital to make it.”

“I’m betting on the highest IQ there is.”

“Back then, we mined 2,000 bitcoins a day. Now the network is over a zetahash. The magnitude of change is incomprehensible.”

“The Bitcoin space in 2010 felt like Silicon Valley in 1983, a bunch of weird, brilliant misfits who knew they were building something that would change the world.”

“Instead of trusting fallible humans, trust math and distributed systems.”

“Bitcoin mining is the most ruthlessly competitive industry on Earth, zero tolerance for bullshit.”

“We were talking to wind farms in 2013 about using Bitcoin miners as batteries. It just took the world ten years to catch up.”

“Bitcoin has made it because fiat has failed. It was clear in 2013. It’s clear now in 2025.”

Conclusion

What began as a ragtag movement of misfits evolved into an industrial backbone: custom silicon, immersion cooling, containerized “energy hunters,” and behind-the-meter deployments turned miners into programmable load that strengthens grids and finances new generation while AI demands explode. The same conviction that carried builders through $200 bitcoin, hostile banks, and regulatory choke points now underpins a broader reality, fiat systems are overstretched, institutions are converging on verifiable scarcity, and Bitcoin’s role as incorruptible collateral and energy-market shock absorber looks less like a bet and more like the operating system for the next era.

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:45 - SPAC launch
7:29 - Digitization of captial
13:42 - Three pillars of bitcoin treasury strategy
19:10 - Creating wealth for everyone
21:20 - Bitkey & SLNT
23:09 - Bitcoin’s brand recognition
27:55 - Saylor shifted the narrative
32:48 - CrowdHealth & Unchained
34:06 - Cohen Circle
38:56 - Convergent incentives
45:17 - Merge, don’t sell

Transcript

(00:00) It was an industry that was effectively printing money. Bit Fury OGs mined a lot of bitcoins back then. I mean, we would have days we would be mining 2,000 bitcoins every day. There were actually apps in the iPhone app store where you could buy and send Bitcoin to each other.
(00:16) And then, you know, 2013, Operation Chokepoint happened. At the end of the day, I'm betting on the highest IQ there is. I'm going to Texas actually in a couple weeks. I'm meeting with Governor Abbott. You know, the the guy is a visionary. We realize that it was clear in 2013. It was clear in 2016. It's clear now in 2025. This is the trajectory.
(00:34) A lot of the institutional managers now are saying, you know what, technology's been around for 15 years. It looks very solid. Has Bitcoin made it yet? I think uh this is a a mly crew we got here, gentlemen. This is uh I'm I'm very excited for this conversation. We've been going back and forth on email for a week.
(00:59) George, I've been uh following you on Twitter for over a decade now at this point and followed your journey through Bit Fury. You're about to release a book telling the story of Bit Fury. We have Bill Tai joining us as well cuz he went along on that journey with you and it's a story of resilience and building like we were just saying before we hit record that we're early to Bitcoin. We believe I I I truly believe that we're right.
(01:26) And despite that, we've had to build with many doubters in the background and many obstacles to overcome considering we're trying to scale this distributed network and the infrastructure around it. So I think George if you're comfortable to start it off I actually want to start with Bill because we were chatting before you hopped on about the story about how we got connected with you and I think Bill considering your storied career in investing and spotting many startups in the early days. Uh before we get into Bitfury the story of Bitfury specifically let's back up um
(02:04) and and talk about your journey to Bitcoin. I know you just told me it over over the course of about five minutes, but I think it's would be very valuable for the audience to hear as well. Yeah. So to uh give a little background, my original training is in Silicon chip design.
(02:22) I uh came out to the valley in the 80s when Silicon Valley was forming and joined uh a startup led by the CEO of Fairchild. That startup was called LSI Logic. Among my teammates was Jensen Wang. um he was an applications engineer and I was a technical marketing guy. Uh I went on to uh help the government of Taiwan start uh uh Taiwan Semiconductor.
(02:42) I got a weird little badge A001 in that project before it was incorporated. That went on to become a trillion dollar giant. Moved into venture capital around 1991 and started off funding silicon chips and then comm equipment and then internet networks uh and then later applications on that and some machine learning stuff.
(03:06) But uh along the way in year 2000 uh a couple of friends of mine and I set out to build a peer-to-peer file storage system that uh was called irog spelled efr.com. There's still a little site up. Um that technology evolved to become the functional equivalent of iCloud or Nokia who bought the company. It was launched with all their web phones in uh uh 2006.
(03:31) And uh one other vector was uh uh Philip Rosedale who had started Second Life. And I were contemplating how to increase engagement in Second Life. And I took the avatar name and still have the avatar Alan Greenspan Gollum. And Philip launched the Linen Dollar and created a dashboard that would measure GDP and economic activity.
(03:54) we had universal basic income all running 200345. So when the Bitcoin white paper came out and was sent to me, I it just I just lit up and by 2010 I was tweeting a little bit about it and then eventually ran into uh some folks that became part of the founding team of Bitfury including George. That's how I uh got involved.
(04:17) And then George, turning to you as somebody who's found Bitcoin early, why don't we talk a little bit about your early journey and how you decided to how you land on the idea of Bitfury and decided infrastructure was what you wanted to focus on. Yeah.
(04:41) I mean the the story is crazy because um you know I grew up in a Soviet Union uh family of doctors and you know at that age 15 I I saw all their life savings basically evaporate you know all the Burbank holdings in rubles was gone and um you know that left a profound um sort of an impact on me. So um you know you you kind of grow uh and go in life through these experiences and I think that was uh the first major experience u you know to appreciate not to trust central governments and u you know things happen for a reason and you know somehow I ended up in uh Ukraine doing agriculture investing and um you know while I was
(05:26) doing it there's this this fella his name is Marat who is one of our dear friends. He kept pestering me about Bitcoin and Val and Bitfury and I'm like what is this? And and then when I started um at some point the if you remember the Cypress uh you know banking crisis happened and that was I don't know how big it was in US but in Europe that was massive because you know many of my friends had accounts there and all of a sudden there's this big issue and um I started digging in and I started exploring I started uh reading about uh Bitcoin and Khan Academy was one of the
(06:05) first sources and I started kind of diving into it and I'm like, "Oh my god, even even if 10% of this is going to come to fruition, this is just going to be massive." Um so you know life is all about seeing the signs and connecting the dots you know and I think uh you know for me it was kind of uh serendipitous that my first call was to my uh you know business school network on the west coast and one of the first people that I got connected was wises of Zapo and you know I I had the conversations with Wes and you know I
(06:44) just connected to him here's a guy from Argentina We never met but I connected with him on so many levels that the past that we had, the history we had was so profound and um so uh conducive to uh the concept of Bitcoin.
(07:08) And when I kind of connected all these dots um you know I realized that okay this can be something really big and maybe it's a it's a sign to u go after it. I mean 21 million bitcoins you know I'm I'm born on 21st uh my nickname you know as a kid was uh uh bua uh bitcoin so be was very important thing in my life so I don't know it was just uh on a on a very kind of uh astrological or you know god feel you know I just it felt that this this was the sign from above and that's that's that's when it all happened and and Plus, you know, when you meet Val for the first time, these piercing blue
(07:48) eyes are like a laser. And uh I mean, something about those blue eyes and that uh energy that sort of that kind of uh gave me another sign, you know, to trust that person and to trust the process and u you know, the rest is history. You know, it's it's funny you mentioned USSR and W's experience growing up in Argentina because actually right around when you start building Bitfury, that's when I'm really beginning to lean into Bitcoin.
(08:18) And what pushed me over the edge was I was working at a managed futures fund at the time. We index commodity trading advisors into a fund of funds. It was a great learning experience. But the my chief investment officer at that firm uh his name was Dmitri Alexive and he had immigrated to the United States from Russia in the 90s. And I'll never forget one Monday morning portfolio management meeting we had.
(08:43) It was right around QE2 uh operation twist when the Fed was engaging in those uh monetary stimulus and policy programs. And I'll never forget it was just me and him in the room. He turned around, he was like, "Marty, the United States is turning into the Soviets." Russia I ran away from. And uh at the time I was studying Bitcoin and learning about distributed systems and the corruption of central authorities and and just systems generally. And I think that really pushed me over to edge be like, "Okay, maybe I should look further into this
(09:14) Bitcoin thing." And so that was me in 2013, uh, end of 2013, but you're already, uh, a bit ahead of me beginning to build a company in the space. And I think it's hard for people today to really put themselves in the shoes of a founder in the Bitcoin space 12 years ago. What was it like? What was the environment like uh, during this period? Bitcoin's 5 years old at this point.
(09:41) Yeah, maybe I'll I'll let Bill uh kind of lay the foundation for because he was really instrumental. Bill is probably one of the most humble person um you know I've met and person that can seize the waves ahead of many and I mean we'll get to it all all our kind of uh escapades and discussions with all the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley that could have invested in bitury and ended up with hundreds of thousands of bitcoins on a balance but I mean he saw he connected the dots in 2010 and he was one of the people involved with the
(10:19) Stanford Bitcoin Club kind of shephering the guys like Vitalik. So I'll uh I'll let Bill to kind of lay lay ground for that and I'll chime in. Yeah. So uh you know obviously the Bitcoin space at the time was full of all these weird interesting eccentric mostly very technical people and uh it reminded me a lot of coming out to Silicon Valley in 1983 you know.
(10:50) So if you think about the valley at that time um it was uh kind of a land of uh agriculture and misfits you know. So when I first came out, I lived in a little apartment at the back of a cherry orchard. Um it was very agrarian here, you know. So all the companies that you know of today that came out of Silicon Valley, they didn't exist.
(11:13) This was the era of shockly semiconductor, Fairchild, and startups relatively speaking like Intel and National and AMD and our company LSI Logic that was a couple years old. And uh a lot of the people that came to the valley at that time were people that had training in things like semiconductor physics because uh that you know nothing else existed.
(11:37) And so um so people would come out here to find community and find other people that they could actually talk to about stuff they were interested in. And uh and back at that era, there was this little group at the Homebrew Computer Club that had these attendees that nobody knew at the time, but they were basically kids, you know, like uh Steve Jobs, Steve Waznjak, Bill Gates, Paul Allen would come to show pieces of wood with parts on them and build community and get feedback on products.
(12:09) And so when the Bitcoin space started to emerge, it was like a flashback back to that era. And I started I could just tell that there was because of the uh the network element around this technology that there was going to be something that came out of this. And so I started hunting around in 2010 for other people that I could talk to about all this stuff.
(12:36) And um eventually ran into a young man named Danny Yang who had started the Stanford Bitcoin Meetup groups. And uh just like the homebrew computer club, he'd borrow rooms and people would show up and guys like Wes or Adam Back or uh Antonopoulos or all those people would come to Vitalic came when he was still with BTC magazine trying to raise money for uh Namecoin at the time. And uh people would come and show their projects.
(13:04) You know, I remember seeing the founders of BitGo and, you know, Zappo and all these companies would come to just express their vision and talk about what they wanted to see happen. And at the same time I was hunting uh for companies to fund and I was looking and I don't remember the timing of these things but I remember looking at teams uh like butterfly labs and uh there are three or four companies that were trying to migrate the horsepower of Bitcoin mining from what had been software on regular desktops and laptops to groups using uh GPUs.
(13:44) to then groups programming FPGAAS and a handful of people trying to do AS6 but the market was not big enough you know so for silicon companies unless you have a very high volume market you're not going to make money on your chips and so uh there were teams that had come out of uh Intel and Sun Micros systemystems and other places like that that had traditional tooling and very expensive design design methodology to produce these big honking expensive AS6 but uh the fixed cost was very high for those and the volume wasn't there. So I I I the approach was just not right and I
(14:23) kept looking and looking and the business models are crazy then because never before would you have people that could take massive pre-orders for silicon that didn't exist and equipment that didn't exist um and then take that money and design things.
(14:44) So they were all on the hook if they couldn't deliver and many of them hit the wall because they couldn't deliver and they went bankrupt. But uh uh so in the journey like meeting with all these companies uh I end up meeting this um young man named Niko Punin who was heating his apartment in Finland with machines and he had met over the internet uh uh George and Val and some other people that would end up forming Bitfury.
(15:18) And uh uh I I met him through um some trips on Neker Island, you know, cuz I I uh had always been trying to build community with my kiteboarding crew. I some people know I I took some time off after I had a bunch of companies go public and I became a sponsored athlete in kiteboarding. So I would throw these kite trips off of Richard Branson's Island.
(15:36) And uh I convinced Nico to come out uh because there was a friend named of his named Auntie Penan that was part of our crew and I was talking to him about Bitcoin. Bitcoin. I got to find something in Bitcoin. He says, "I know this kid." And so so Nico came out and told me what he was working on and I got to know him over several a couple of years because he would uh tell me about what he was working on and we were looking at applications and things and he told me about these guys he was working with and he said yeah we were always ahead. We
(16:06) were a little bit ahead in GPUs and everyone caught up. We were we taught each other how to program FPGAAS and everyone caught up and now we need to design a silicon chip. I was like, "You can't do that. What? You you've no training. Like, who are these guys?" He goes, "Well, there's this brilliant mathematician and he's he's got this design for a chip.
(16:30) " And I was like, "No." I said, "Yeah, this is this is something that takes decades of training and millions of dollars of tooling, and unless you've done this a couple times before, it's just going to fail, Nico. There's no way you guys can do this." And then eventually he was just so um so convincing uh in his belief.
(16:53) I agreed to meet all the other guys and then I started to dig in around the silica chip and I w and because I had a background in designing silicon chips I was astounded. I looked at, you know, generally what they were doing. I was like, "Wow, this is a totally different approach." Because the the original Bitfury chip wasn't this pure like million gate uh honking digital high-speed processor on advanced process.
(17:24) It was a mixed signal implementation that uh did a lot of things in a very um common sense way that you wouldn't have thought of if you were stuck in the old regime of licensing synopsis and cadence and working with you know big heavy fabs and paying millions of dollars for standard methodology. So I think because they had to be creative, they were and I thought this could actually work and and it was such a gamecher in terms of cost structure and the ability to make it in a fab that was uh not you know um 10 nanometer at the time you know cuz the first Bitfury chips were at 55 nanometer and 28 nanometer and they were highly productive and able to be used in what I
(18:11) consider uh dirty electricity environments where the electricity was not stable and you could stack them. So if you had different voltages you it didn't matter you know so you could basically a very flexible approach that could be run pretty much anywhere and at much lower cost. So I thought I think this could actually work. And so that it took about a year.
(18:36) I don't know if it was a year or six months, but we eventually gathered up all this capital from my circle of friends to fund that chip. And away we went and it worked. Sup freaks. This rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. Bit Key makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multisig.
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(20:52) George, what was your your perspective on the Bitcoin mining industry? I mean, obviously we're talking heavily about the hardware, but what was it like from what I understand, Wild West days? We mentioned CPU to GPU, FPGA. I think those machines hit the market for like six months and then we quickly went to AS6. As the price of Bitcoin went up, as hash rate rose, difficulty rose, it became more competitive.
(21:17) How what was the state of Bitcoin mining at that point and how did it evolve? Yeah, I mean um I joined Bitfury when the whole ecosystem was at one pahash. Okay, that's where we all started and at that time one of the part of uh joining Bitfury and backing them was to meet these guys. You know I was in Ukraine um you know we had this uh venture with eventually got sort of uh uh bought out by Cargill and I wanted to meet these guys and when I met these guys I mean they were talking astrophysics you know these guys were so freaking brilliant
(22:06) they were speaking I could understand maybe 5% what they were talking about but I knew they were probably the most smartest people I've met and you know I thought going also through all these Ivy League institute initutions and stuff, you know, I' I've seen it all. They were just brilliant. They were just sharp.
(22:31) And I just realized, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I'm betting on the highest IQ there is. I mean, Ukraine was famous in Soviet Union for few things and one of the few things was uh computer science, mathematics, physics and uh I mean frankly you you can see that on the battlefield. I mean that's what's holding Ukraine up you know that that sort of a brain power and that raw brain power was just so amazing and at that time already um uh Bill Val has already met with Nico over u Skype you know they were doing dealings and you know Bitfury was developed but Bitfury at that time was extremely angry because
(23:12) butterfly Labs promised people the first ASIC which failed And uh that derailed the Bitfury trajectory. So Bitfury came with an advertising. Bitfury back then was a tiger. I don't know if you remember the logo was a tiger. And uh it's actually funny when we hired a million-doll uh PR agency later on in 2017 18 after all the PR and work they rebranded Tiger into a Calibri.
(23:44) And Val's like what the [ __ ] We they brought us from a tiger to a calibri, but that's another story. Um I guess calibbras move fast. But the advertising of Bitfury was tiger chewing on a butterfly and the blood spitting down. That was the that was the ad of Bitfury because they were so pissed that those guys lied to the market and they derailed Bitfury.
(24:10) that ex uh val the other val he just went in locked himself in and he worked extra hard to design that full custom chip. So when I was joining that was basically happening and the 55 nanometer was out there and Marty I don't know if you remember there was something called Gash IO which was basically Bitfury chips and you know sometimes you know there was a big freaking issue because Gashio was like 60% of the market you know and here we go talk about decentralization I'm like guys you hello you know you guys realize that you know
(24:45) this is like you know But like yeah that that was that was one of the early issues you know. So when I came there was all of this thing happening. So you have this battle with butterfly labs you have this one paash you have uh Cyprus you have uh full custom design you have Bobby Lee on BTC China kind of that was a big China sort of a thing happening back then.
(25:13) So I'm like joining it and then you have this Maidan revolution in Ukraine where there is this overthrow of the government. So you know we kind of going at night to stand with the protesters during the day we're sort of working. So it was just one uh cluster [ __ ] of things and I was like oh my god this is this is this is really creative disruption. Something big is going to come out.
(25:43) And then you know people send you angels and um Bill was one of those angels. You know when we connected and we spoke we realized that okay th this is the uh guider of ours that will translate this raw intelligence power will kind of digest in his language and will bring it out to to the investors and uh you know god knows we tried I mean we we probably I don't know like 80 100 VCs in Silicon Al we came out power packed with our new chip you know 60% market share beautiful slides unfortunately Val the CTO the the you know the brilliant designer he was in a helicop in a helicopter or a you know
(26:33) bicycle helmet so he wasn't very presentable he was in a stealth motorcycle let me motorcycle one of the issue you know I sent I sent the deck for example, to some friends that I had worked with for 20 years at Sequoia, and they take me seriously, at least the older generation that knew me, and they looked at the deck, and one of the guys was like, "Who who's this dude in the motorcycle helmet, you know, and I hadn't looked in detail at the deck?" And uh Mr. X um refused to have his identity known. So all we had for the
(27:10) CTO was a picture of a guy in a motorcycle helmet. So it looked like, you know, our CTO was Da Punk or something like that. And no name, no identity, just this is the guy that's our CTO and he's committed to the project, but no one can know who he is. And my friend was like, are you serious, dude? Like who's the dude in the motorcycle helmet? said he doesn't want his identity revealed, you know, after I checked with the team. But anyway, so that that was one of the hurdles to raising institutional money for Bitfury
(27:44) back in the day. That is incredible. Truly cippher punk, too. Yeah. I mean, we we thought that, you know, let the results speak for itself. and you know um ex at that time you know he was um he just didn't want to reveal himself you know and you know obviously for a guy that was early on and you know Bitcoiners back then in a way were uh persecuted and uh you know Bitfury min and Bitfury uh sort of OGs mined a lot of bitcoins back then I mean we would have days we would be mining 2,000 bitcoins every day you So for whatever reason, he just wanted
(28:27) to be in a stealth mode. Unfortunately, we miscalculated that, you know, X didn't go to Stanford or MIT or, you know, he he wasn't brought up in a boarding school. But, you know, that's how the majority of the, you know, lemmings on Silicon Valley operate. You know, he wasn't one of the boys.
(28:51) And it didn't matter that, you know, he he designed this brilliant chip that kind of uh screwed everybody, but you know, they he probably should have u maybe was uh you know, not uh okay for him to be wearing the motorcycle helmet, but things happen for a reason. We're happy. Well, there's a few things really to pick up here for anybody listening in who's relatively new to Bitcoin.
(29:16) And just to put things in context, like one pedash of hash rate on the network is two orders of magnitude lower. We're currently sitting at 1.1 zetahash or zetahash, uh, which is a,000 xahash. We just crossed a zeta earlier this year, not too long ago, and it's already added another 10%. I checked this morning, it's at 1.11 zeta, which is insane when you think of the orders of magnitude.
(29:41) And George, to your point about Gash, I remember I remember that event very well. Got 55 to 60% of the network hash rate as a pool. And you had people freaking out. I mean, this is public. Peter Todd famously sold half his Bitcoin cuz he thought that there was too much centralization at the mining pool layer, but it was an incredibly important lesson.
(29:58) At the time, it was extremely scary. But now you're looking at, I believe, 9 years. I think that happened in 2015 or 2016, 9 10 years later. We're able to look back and point at that and say this was actually incredible that this happened at this point in time because the free market of miners reacted to seeing what happened to to Gash getting that much hash rate and they moved off the pool proving that you could quickly route around any centralization pressure at the mining. I think that was Bit moving some of their machines outside so it didn't look
(30:30) like there was 50% Well, Gash wound up being a victim of its own success. People got so freaked out that it aggregated so much hash rate because they ran a good pool that ultimately it had to wind down the business. I believe 18 months after that event. But these are just really diving into not only the early days of a company of a startup, but the early days of an industry that's budding.
(30:54) And Bill, I I I think what are some parallels and uh other industries that you've you've worked in uh over the last few decades that that you noticed around this time in Bitcoin because it was I mean that time in Bitcoin particularly post 2014 2015 2016 I vividly remember I was adamantly obsessed with it extremely obsessed with it focusing on it every day and the summer 2015 July 2015 people were worried that Bitcoin was going to die. was hovering around $200, $180 after having been at $1,200.
(31:28) And there wasn't a lot of attention on the space. And yeah, you know, it reminded me a little bit. It's it's uh not really a super close analogy cuz honestly there was nothing in the world like the Bitcoin ecosystem ever, ever that I can think of, but it was a little bit like the beginning of the the DRAM business.
(31:51) And if you think about commodity memory, um the the economic structure of the industry was very similar. So if you go back to like the early 80s uh and everybody probably that invests knows Micron technology ticker mu but uh I remember in 1983 I think it was Micron went public because uh all of a sudden there were all these things that used DRAM and because you had a fixed cost in your factory and marginal cost was really low because you're really just using molten sand in the wafers the the unfinished wafers um the costs were low, but because of the shortage, the prices would move like 500 or a,000%.
(32:32) Because, you know, people are trying to ship these computers that are $20,000. And if you can't ship them because you're missing a dollar memory chip, you'll pay 25 bucks for that memory chip, you know. So DRAM would go through these insane cycles where uh you'd have these companies that were literally like printing money one year and then all of a sudden five fabs would come up in Japan and then the prices would crash and the whole industry was losing money because if you've got a big factory going with fixed costs, you don't want to turn it
(33:03) off. So you'll sell below cost just to keep the lines running. And so you had these massive swings where companies looked like they were going out of business all the time and then a few would go out of business, the production capacity would shrink, prices would go up, and all of a sudden the survivors would be printing money again.
(33:27) And this could happen within like uh 18 months to 2 and 1/2 years. And so the price cycles were very similar because a very similar uh but distributed uh cost structure of high fix cost. You buy all these machines, you spend millions and millions of dollars putting up this building and sucking electricity and you just don't want to turn it off, but sometimes you have to, you know, if it fell fell below the marginal cost of electricity.
(33:51) So you would see chunks of capacity come on and then too much capacity and off, you know. So just incredibly insanely hard to navigate the wild swings. But uh but Bit Fury, you know, lived through many of those cycles cuz we we we I I can't remember how many of those cycles we had, but at least three, you know, but they were life or death cycles. Just insanely difficult.
(34:16) And and the other issue was this is an industry. It's was weird because it was an industry that was effectively printing money but a different kind of money and you needed fiat capital to make this alternative money. Right? So, I still remember the first official board meeting we had where uh we're in a room in a building in Embaradero Center, I think it was in San Francisco, and we're we're trying to get capital to fund servers and more silicon orders. And here we are producing and I don't remember the number but you know it was
(34:57) that era where it was you know thou maybe thousand bitcoins a day you know we're just putting out all this bitcoin but it was illquid and so our CFO runs into the room and he says I have a buyer I think I can I I I can get a million dollars of cash and I think Bitcoin was maybe two or three hundred bucks. He goes I I've got somebody that will buy some.
(35:21) You know, and it was so exciting because we had a million dollars of cash that was badly needed, you know. So, it was basically ma hundreds of days in a row like that where we were constantly out of fiat cash to keep the engine going to print other cash that we all believed would get to 100,000 a coin.
(35:43) Even in that era, I think we we had this calculus of take all the gold in the world, take 10% of that, divide by 21 million units, it's going to be around $100,000, you know. So, we were like, one day, one day, one day, but it's at 200 now, you know? So, how do we get to that 100,000? And we just had to keep raising money to keep going. What's up, freaks? This rep is brought to you by our good friends at Silent.
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(37:04) How are you doing it? Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more. Trying to get my swell on. trying to be a good example for my young sons, a fit, healthy dad. But part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated, making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body. That is why I use salt of the earth.
(37:24) I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt of the earth. I'm liking the pink lemonade right now. It's my flavor of choice. Uh this is their creatine. I've added this to my regimen. They have it in these packets as well. uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling.
(37:42) You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder and going through TSA. It's very, very uh nerve-wracking at times. You have to explain, "Hey, it's it's not what you think it is. It's creatine. I'm trying to get my swell on." Um, make sure you're staying hydrated. I have become addicted to these. It's made my life a lot better. I can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away. I can supplement. I can bring the creatine wherever I need to.
(38:07) Just put a couple packets in here before I head to the gym. Bring this to the gym. Drink out of a glass bottle. Make sure I'm not injecting any microplastics into my body. Go to drinksotay.com. Use the code TFTC and you'll get 15% off anything in the store. That's drinks.com. Code TFTC. And George, what was it like during that period 2015 2016 working in a company? Yeah.
(38:36) 16th 16 got, you know, got got a little bit uh uh better, you know, things started moving sort of towards 600 700. I mean, that was kind of 2014 uh 15 when it kind of dropped and stayed uh you remember that's when Bitfinex, you know, you had Mount Gaus, you had Bitfinex hack and uh you know, things dropped to 170. Um, you know, I remember they uh come up to like 220 and he just stayed at 220, 220, 250, 210, 250 and it was just painful.
(39:15) It was like a grind and it was just like 18 months of a grind and grind and grind and you know at that time we we had our major data centers in Iceland and in Georgia you know it's three cents and uh we were not switching them off because the technology was uh superb and the cost of electricity was low. So we're like, you know, we got to grind it out.
(39:43) And um at that time it was also very obvious that you got to you got to start educating people and you got to start orange peeling sort of the uh Congress and uh the decision makers and we spend a lot of time and effort and energy going to Washington DC going to Brussels you know meeting with uh all these congressmen senator managers, uh, various committees, um, you know, setting up, uh, the sort of, uh, task forces with law enforcements that would kind of feed into the that establishment.
(40:20) And there was a lot of education being done back then. So it was a lot of building and I don't know how much time I was looking the other day, Bill. I was just like I was in Washington DC probably every other month with um Jim Jim Newsome who was the former chairman of commodity future trade commission.
(40:39) He was instrumental in in terms of educating um as well as Jason Weinstein the former head of DOJ cyber crime. Um and uh you know we needed those stalwarts to go and push. So it was 21 214 215 was really really tough. I mean people talk about the bare markets of subsequently when the price dropped to 4,000 or the price dropped to I don't know 50,000 or now you know it's kind of at 100,000 people are complaining but we were at 200 you know and and good thing was that it just wiped out a lot of uh you know a lot of coin terrors
(41:18) KNC's uh of the world and uh basically positioned us to for the next chapter. Yeah. And I often say because having been in the mining industry personally, founding a company that was doing flare gas mitigation in the Bakan using Bitcoin mining and now 1031 investing in mining infrastructure companies.
(41:41) Mining is the most ruthlessly competitive market potentially ever in the world because you have these machines that can print money uh as long as you have electricity. The AS6 now at this point are somewhat commoditized. They do one thing, one thing only. They produce hash cash shot 256 hashes that potentially could help you find a block to win some Bitcoin.
(42:05) And you don't know exactly who your competition is at any given point in time. And you just have to pull up your pants, take the plunge, and hope that you're executing better than your competition that you don't really have a good sense of who exactly it is. Yeah, absolutely. by the way by email Marty that has some market share stats that I had saved from 2015 and I don't know if you want to share them now or just use them later when you edit the podcast but pretty cool that I still have those I can pull these up now. Yeah, I have those saved up as well.
(42:41) Yeah, there was some Bitcoin. Yeah, I know I have them somewhere but I can't find them right now. But there I I had a share picture that had Bitfury and Gash separately and together they were way over 50%. And it uh Yeah. So these are Oh, sorry. I sent the wrong That's I sent the wrong link. I should have checked before I put it up. Oh boy. Okay, keep going. And I'm going to I'm going to resend it.
(43:10) But the point the point of bringing this up is I think it's incredibly impressive that you were able to not only survive through that era of Bitcoin, but continue to compete ultimately to the point of doing deals with Cipher Putty um and successfully like making sure that Bitfury was a success at the end of the day and and again the most ruthlessly competitive market in the world.
(43:41) You know what I loved about it? It's it's it's the industry uh where it's complete self-reliance and uh it's the industry that uh has a zero tolerance for [ __ ] You know this is where you basically have to perform and there are specs and you need to deploy and u you know there's one equation in terms of sort of a efficiency of a chip and another equation is in terms of you know the uh power cost and listen I mean we have teams that have scarred every part of the world you know we've done anything from geothermal to nad gas to hydro through flare gas anywhere from Mongolia to Tajikistan to Trinidad
(44:28) Tobago to Paraguay to Canada US and you know you're always hunting for this optimal sort of a setup and that's the beauty of it you know at the end of the day what what we have seen that Bitfury and the trajectory of mining is gravitating towards ruthlessly towards the most efficient um sort of a energy setup and uh you cannot [ __ ] You know, you you uh you are really kind of tied to this uh basic parameters that you need to take into consideration.
(45:07) So having built sort of a thousands of megawws and you know having built into into the system now the the game is is very different right it has been sort of institutionalized where you need a lot of capital but that's the beauty of this inventure right you basically were able to bootstrap this protocol by private capital and yeah right here you know Bill shows one of their early uh uh shots of uh the pool distribution 21 Inc.
(45:39) remember that computer? It's hilarious. They even made the chart. 21 considering how small they are. They raised a lot of capital to get to that little share. That was my uh that was my most expensive Bitcoin lesson was buying one of those 21 machines back in the day. Listen, great. Heads off to Balaji and the guys that did their best, but at the end of the day, you know, you talk about the ruthless ruthlessness.
(46:07) you really needed to push down and uh optimize the chip and optimize the setup and u you know it's difficult when you're at 5 cents when you're you know your compet competitors are set up at two and a half three cents you know and where you need uh you know couple months to set up where your competition can set it up in three weeks you know so u yeah that that's uh that's a beauty of it that's why you know at Hopkins I started this I'm a big fan Austrian school of econ economics and um individual empowerment.
(46:39) So this this was real pure kind of focusing on effort and ruthless execution that really mattered at the end of the day. Well, to that point, having been in the industry then when it was relatively unknown where it was going, uh, very hard to raise capital and now seeing where the mining industry is today, where chips, I mean, Bitmain, I believe they're marketing a 2 nmter chip now, uh, Bitcoin mining is quickly becoming an integral part of energy systems. I just moved from Austin, Texas back to my hometown of Philadelphia, but
(47:17) I was in Texas for 4 years and it's very apparent that Urkott Ot is leaning into Bitcoin mining operations particularly to help with demand response. Uh you mentioned uh one of the early BitFury co-founders heating a house in Finland. I believe Finland, many cities in Finland are actually heating multiple houses with with Bitcoin mining operations now.
(47:41) has completely gone from this fringe industry with a bunch of crazy people really trying to tinker and try to find any energy they can convince any capital allocator they can to to back them what they're doing to what I would deem to be a foregone conclusion that Bitcoin mining is going to be an integral part of energy systems moving forward.
(48:04) And when you were working at Bitfury a decade ago, did you ever imagine it would get to this point? Absolutely we did. I think Yeah, for sure. Yes. Yeah. We were sitting with that wind farm company uh in Amsterdam. Do you remember that? And talking to them about how we could use Bitcoin mining machines as an alternative to batteries, right? So, you know, there there were some grid operators that would offer uh because uh electrical grids, they're like um think of a water system where you've got a big water tower and you've got uh water in
(48:38) this tower. If you're putting a lot of water in and there's no offtake, eventually the water tower will explode, right? So, grids are the same way. You get too much voltage, they pop. So people would actually offer to pay Bitfury in some cases 1.5 cents a kilowatt hour to run the machines at at night when the wind farms had too much energy, you know, and it wasn't efficient use because they weren't on 24 by7. So we never did that.
(49:09) But uh we were in talks with huge wind farm offshore and onshore to provide effectively an alternative to a battery where we would just burn energy for them and the electricity effectively was stored in bitcoins and then if you wanted electricity later you could sell the bitcoins and buy electricity.
(49:29) So it's totally interesting concept an alternative to bloom energy with bitcoin mining machines. Yeah, absolutely. I mean if you look back in 20161717 we sort of came to conclusion that okay aircooled mining u you know is is okay but there is a next level in terms of efficiency and enter immersion cooling. So in 2016, we opened the world's first uh and largest immersion cooling two-phase immersion cooling data center uh 40 megawatt with 3M NOVX solution, you know, completely recycling and PUF 1.
(50:09) 02 um you know at that time. So we were looking at uh uh Bitcoin mining as in a way like a Ferrari in race car driving where you kind of take all these innovations whether it's a low voltage whether it's the designs of systems whether it's immersion cooling and kind of implementing.
(50:34) So part of the uh puzzle was always you know listen at the end of a day there's a lot of wasted energy you know there's just a lot of wasted energy you know you have these planners sort of uh build out a certain projection of uh demand or you have this u kind of inefficiency in terms of tax credits which is in air in in Texas and there's just a lot of stranded energy because the transmission lines are there or the you know demand is not there so Why have this wasted energy where you can plug in uh the mining at the source and you can be sort of a uh making uh digital uh coin and uh you know making your returns
(51:13) and to many in 2017 18 that was like you know wow they they sort of it was a novel idea but we saw that this would be the future and come now you're looking at uh Bitcoin miners going in for these stranded energy whether whether it's you know wind farms or whether it is flare gas you know that going in and placing it behind the meter and the beauty of uh Bitcoin mining is you know this this is not like a aluminum plant or a banking data center where you have to run 100%. It's okay. You can turn it off and you know give that power to the grid for the
(51:48) peak and it's a perfect uh rebalancer. You know that's why I'm going to Texas actually in a couple weeks and meeting with Governor Abbott. You know the the guy is a visionary. He realized that this can be a fantastic way to bring in a lot of business to the state of Texas as well as help with uh you know its uh big demands during the winter and and summer. And u you know these that's what you want.
(52:16) You kind of want to put this with these visionaries that understand that because when they connect the dots, there can be a lot of uh positive development for their constituents. Mhm. Yeah. I think we're we're only scratching the surface of how far we can integrate Bitcoin and energy systems. Obviously now and many other parts of the country TVA has bitcoins participating in demand response and that's really a bitcoin buyer of last resort right where it's like okay we have this excess energy need somebody to soak it up what I what I think is relatively untapped and needs to be
(52:52) explored more as bitcoin miners is a buyer of first resort and when particularly with the climate and the environment today where all the focus is on AI and the energy that's going to be needed ed to service LLM and agentic frameworks in inference and understandably so but you need to expand capacity and generation significantly to make sure that that future can manifest and I think what is unexplored is going up spinning up capacity generation somewhere um but you have this time dilation problem of you can build the generation but how do you
(53:29) build the transmission lines to get it to the places it needs to go ultimately And if you have a generation asset sitting there with no revenue for 18 to 24 months, it's it's hard to uh justify economically.
(53:46) But now with Bitcoin mining, to your point, George, you just put it behind the meter and that's your buyer first resort where it's like, okay, you build out the transmission and we'll have the miners provide you revenue while you're doing that. And that's something I I think is relatively unexplored at this point, but we'll be a go growing trend moving forward. It's exactly what we are doing with the Bitfury spin-off HUT.
(54:06) So, Hut 8 uh Corp is now an energy infrastructure company and we took our machines and dropped them down into a sub subsidiary with the Trump family and that's American Bitcoin. But we now have optioned out I forgot the exact number now but I think we have optioned out 13 gawatts of electricity and we basically as you said we light it up as we open it with Bitcoin mining and then we build data centers and try to transition them over to AI and ciphers uh doing similar things but you know directly going like right into the AI hyperscaler field.
(54:38) Well, Bill, building on this, do do you think the uh participants in the AI industry understand this? Obviously, they understand the need for power. Do you think there's a disconnect between the recognition of Bitcoin is a Bitcoin are a friend that can help them get what they getting to because of the shortage and I think what's happening. Okay.
(54:59) So I think the perspective is similar to how uh Bitfury entered the ASIC world where there was a traditional way of doing silicon that was bulletproof and extraordinarily expensive and Bitfury came with a creative solution that worked at a far lower cost. And so the Bitcoin mining guys because it's so hyper competitive as you said it was a very scrappy industry where you know a lot of the early Bitcoin mining operations like if you look at the ones in China like you know dirt floors a bunch of tin walls you know just like
(55:33) wires hung everywhere just really low cost and then you have the AI wave that came from a more traditional compute data center bulletproof raised floors before the racks became too heavy but you know like had a raised floor, mega air conditioning, lots of redundancy, beautiful cabling everywhere.
(55:58) So, you had these two extremes just like the Bitfury chip versus AS6 of from, you know, Sun and Intel type people. And so, I think over time the the uh mining centers have gotten, you know, a little bit better on the infrastructure and the hyperscalers stayed where they were. But I think now that there's no more space at all in the big big AI data centers and the costs of building to in some cases specifications for 300 to 500 kilowatts per rack which are mind it's mind-blowing to me.
(56:36) um the the Bitcoin miners were delivering um much higher energy density with much lower cost in buildings that had maybe some air conditioning but maybe not you know and Bitfury had these insanely creative solutions. If you've ever seen a block box do you know what those are? Mhm.
(56:58) So, you know, so containers, right? So, Bitfury B uh uh leased to buy an island in Finland that used to be a steel factory, built out a data center, and then found out that it was like a toxic waste uh re uh site, like a super fund site. So, they're like, [ __ ] now we got to deconstruct all this stuff. And Val and George didn't want to be in that position ever again.
(57:18) So, they came up with the idea of containerizing units. some mini data centers one. Yeah, we call them energy energy hunters. One megawatt energy hunters. So after that they could literally just get a truck or fly it on a plane, drive it to a site maybe in Alberta, Canada in a remote area, have a transformer in, plug it in and go.
(57:38) Right? So the uh the data center operators now because they cannot get uh the lead time to build an uh a tier one data center for AI could be 3 to 5 years or more now because all the space if they could find the land and the power and the telco in the same place. So a lot of bitcoin miners have come up with u strategies that get you up there but not to the full extent of the cost of the tier one. So there's new terms like tier 2.
(58:08) 5 or tier, you know, whatever it is that maybe you take out a little of redundancy, maybe you don't have air conditioning, you know, but you can run these things. And so all of the hyperscalers, they're talking to all the Bitcoin the the professional Bitcoin miners like Cipher and Hut and Iris Energy to complete the deployments that they need.
(58:32) Yeah. I mean, right right now, you have this kind of scramble for the last mile. No matter how amazing your Nvidia chips are or no matter how um amazing your foundational model is, at the end of a day, you need to go and deploy. And what we're finding right now, those uh companies that have come to the game early and they have secured the energy and they have energized power This is right now, I mean, gold.
(59:08) I mean, this is right now uh unbelievably valuable. And u you know, I had lunch with Tyler, CEO of Cipher a couple of weeks ago in New York. The demand from all these sort of a big shot hyperscalers is unbelievable. I mean he has people coming up uh basically with uh you know metering positions kind of like meing out how many you know acres they have because they need to deploy the race to AGI is on and you don't want to be lost.
(59:42) That's why Zach and all these guys are spending tens of billions of dollars because you just cannot get this wrong. And uh you know companies like cipher, companies like hot, companies like iron that have secured these positions um you know I think they have extremely valuable asset that they have and uh you know this is going to shine.
(1:00:05) It really is profound what uh what's going to happen next 12 to 18 months. Yeah. And it was um watching what XAI did, what Elon did in Memphis with the buildout of that site in the short amount of time. It was funny watching me do it in Elon. If you're listening, I know you listen to the show.
(1:00:24) Uh it was funny how they built the site cuz they they they acted like a Bitcoin miner would. They didn't have enough capacity on the substation to pull from. So they they daisy chained a bunch of gen sets and they're pulling power um from those to to run uh the GPUs.
(1:00:43) But then inside they have these Tesla wall batteries which obviously you got to dog food your own product if you're Elon Musk. But however it's like if you have excess capacity pulling off from there maybe you should use Bitcoin miners. And you can you can see a scenario where you have Bitcoin miners as this sort of load manager that that makes it more profitable than just storing it in a Tesla wall battery.
(1:01:07) uh I don't think they were able to sell that wall battery electricity back to market. So it's sort of a sunk cost at the end of the day. But there I have been looking at this sort of convergence of AI and Bitcoin in the physical uh world and it just intuitively makes sense to me that there is going to be some sort of symbiosis between the two functions moving forward.
(1:01:31) With that, I mean we're we're brushing up on an hour. I want to be respectful of your time and we have to talk about the book. We we can we can go on you know I I have uh you know I'm in Abu Dhabi. I have uh Gabriel Z and our friend Shake Zed and Shik Ali and uh folks I'm going to be meeting later on and uh you know these are the OGs that uh have been with us for many many years but uh uh I'd love to continue. Yeah. Well let's let's get to the book.
(1:02:04) And then you win. Why why did you decide to write it? Well, listen, writing the book was always kind of internal Bitfury joke, you know, like one day we going to write a book. this the stories are so unbelievable, you know, from, you know, these crazy uh kind of uh uh Russian oligarchs, you know, and thank God, you know, they they they wanted to come in and invest in Bitfury, but thank God nothing happened in there.
(1:02:35) And uh you know we had hex and we had you know the encounters with uh Alejandro Castro in Cuba and uh you know we had these encounters with you know various uh shady personalities and uh we had encounters with angels. So it's it's just it's a story of uh Bitcoin itself you know it's a story of u a mowgi growing up in a jungle you know when the mowi was very little and you know they had uh you know the bera and uh the bear protect you know and the mowi has grown up it was like that you know and uh there are so many parallels bit fury growing and bit fury you know had
(1:03:21) probably two moment moments where it would it could have been just thrown under a bus and you know we just we would have been to uh oblivion. It was just like it would have been gone. Uh but it was just like a lot about uh what you learn about people and what you learn about yourself.
(1:03:44) You know it's a journey where you uh kind of what doesn't kill you make you stronger. you kind of leave all this kind of Roomie and you know James Allen and you know all all these sort of Anichi all these Shopopenha all these guys that um have lived you kind of live through it. It's it's really the journey and it has been such an awesome journey and it has been such an awesome privilege to have guys like Bill join us in the journey and you just learn a lot about people. You learn about a lot about life and you learn a lot more importantly about yourself what you can
(1:04:22) do what price you are uh you're willing to pay to keep going you know when everything inside of you says you know okay you know this is this is not working out this is over and you just like get up you know you fall front on your face and you get up and you keep pushing and pushing and pushing and you know just like 12 years I in 12 years in a Chinese u sort of astrology it's a full cycle you know and uh I thought maybe it's a time to kind of put it down you know to uh discourage or maybe encourage the future generation of tech entrepreneurs that you know they're being entrepreneur
(1:05:04) is is not uh is not that glamorous you know there are a lot of sacrifices there's a lot of there's a lot of price to pay but if you're willing to uh go through the hell and keep going and going you and you are convicted with uh the right idea and you're surrounded with the uh band of brothers that it's it's a journey worth taking.
(1:05:29) So yeah I just came out that you know it's time to do this and that's what happened. You know, I'll chime in with one additional angle to that, which is, you know, having lived through a whole bunch of tech cycle waves where in what George described, you have this vision of how things are supposed to be, but they're not there yet.
(1:05:53) So, you commit yourself to that and you work on it and you know, eventually there's this like, wow, like the markets are adopting it. there's a sense of validation and like, oh, I was actually right when for maybe a decade I doubted myself. In the case of Bitfury and the Bitcoin industry in general, as opposed to regular tech, regular tech did not have the world's regulators pounding on you.
(1:06:24) And that was something I totally did not uh expect, you know, cuz I think in the early early days of I I can't remember the exact year, but I think even in maybe 2011 2012, there were actually apps in the iPhone app store where you could buy and sell uh and send Bitcoin to each other. And then, you know, 2013, Operation Chokepoint happened and uh it was uh it was so unnerving to me as a you know, regular venture dude building my companies and all of a sudden I have companies trying to hit the payroll pay payroll button and the bank accounts frozen and I'm like what? You know, and and we were having to do things that I
(1:07:07) just could never have expected. You know, I had one company where we we were, you know, choked and told we had to move our funds and then we created a new company name and opened an account at a different bank and then moved the money over and, you know, kind of hid everything that we were involved in crypto.
(1:07:33) It was like nothing public that we're working on anything crypto cuz how are we ever going to make payroll again you know and so so and with Bitfury I think because it had such a big presence big share in the industry powerful company um it it got the heat of regulators too and we had to really deal with that in a totally different way you know which is why George and I started what became the Neker blockchain summit because I remember that that era mount Gauss had gone down, you know, and then there was all this like when I first started working on this with these guys, it was all about this technology. It was cool. It was interesting. It was
(1:08:11) revolutionary. It would ease payments. There's so many great things about it, but everybody was threatened. And then all these criminals started coming into the business because they thought it was a place for hacking when they didn't realize that everything you do was traceable completely, you know.
(1:08:28) And so so we started this thing with uh Sir Richard Branson called the Necroer Blockchain Summit as a vehicle to have a sort of a multi-dimensional homebrew computer club uh which was the entity I described later with the young kids that would create the computer business where we would invite the former chairman of the CFTC and the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve and a US attorney general and the person that caught the uh federal uh agents blackmailing Ross Albert, you know, just really interesting people, some of the original Bitcoin developers, regulators to create this uh coales all of these people to
(1:09:07) try to chart the future for the industry. And I'll tell you that the relationships that we formed there, unbelievable and ongoing. And you know, all the people that George mentioned were people that came like uh Gabriel Abed who became obviously a very well-known person in the in the space.
(1:09:30) He was a young kid raising money for a multicurrency network to unite the Caribbean nations and he formed this little company. Yeah. And through our blockchain summit, he met folks and he got and he raised his money and then eventually became the ambassador to the UAE for Barbados, you know. But there's there's a dozen or maybe tens of stories of people that went on to form their careers around the network that we formed in these early early days with this high-powered group at Necro. And it's like when George said he joined Bitfury because the IQ's were so high, he just
(1:10:07) knew, right? That's half of half of life is picking who you're going to hang with. And I think we had the benefit and the luxury of bringing together some of the most important world players in all of the industries related to governance and monetary systems and technology in this little cluster that is and was the Neker Blockchain Summit.
(1:10:33) Yeah. I mean I I I would even not call it Neker blockchain. I mean it's it's it's really should have been called the Neker orange peeling summit you know that that that's what it was you know and every time uh you know we went on and to Japan or Tokyo or Mongolia or you know Cuba it was really at the end of a day if nothing came out it was all about orange filling and you know this whole thing like uh you know Val and I kind of uh getting this call to uh hey where are you guys at you know from a good friend
(1:11:09) of mine who ex McKenzie partner like come to Davos and we're like deciding to go to Davos I mean this is like 201516 when Davos was completely like off the radar but you know we went there with one mission we are going to be the Trojan horse we're going to infiltrate the establishment and guess what not many people know about all these Bitcoin signs around Davos it was sponsored by us every time Jamie Diamond was walking around and there were orange Bitcoin signs, you know. So our clandestine operation, you know. Yeah.
(1:11:46) And we were sitting there orange peeling prime ministers, orange peeling the leaders, you know, talking about Bitcoin and why this would be the future. And yeah, we started out setting up this whole, you know, blockchain central. you know, back then, you know, blockchain was okay, you know, because uh you know, that that was cool having a blockchain.
(1:12:10) So, you know, we kind of Trojan horse the Bitcoin under blockchain and we were like blockchain summit, you know, blockchain event. We even in Dallas it was called blockchain central and u you know with u met sorum of guns and roses like blasting in the middle of night but it was our Trojan horse into the establishment of taking bitcoin under the disguise of the blockchain and you know putting in and uh that was fun you know now I see Jack Mer's uh god bless the young generation carrying the torch and you need you know thousands of Jack Malers of this world but 2015 16 we you
(1:12:50) know we were those Trojan horses that were sitting this or and I know Matt you were also you know one of the uh early Trojan horses putting these uh you know the fires and orange pilling uh around the world but that's the beauty that's the beauty of the decentralized movement you know that's the beauty of this uh if you look at any technology or any shift anywhere in humanity, it was always a small committed group of individuals.
(1:13:24) That's that's that's always the case cuz that those are the ones that are always making the change. If you have this concentration, you know, you can take a magnifying glass and you can point at something, but you take a sun and you put under magnifying glass, it can burn freaking anything. And that that is the power of this movement.
(1:13:43) That is the power of these grassroots movements and that's uh I've been privileged part of it and I've been privileged to share with you guys this movement and I think we're on to something great and uh here's to here's to that. I only have a water but no it's funny you bring up Jack and you mentioned that it's not glamorous.
(1:14:11) Um, and it's funny because I think the public, the broader public has this view of people who go on to build successful companies as as being glamorous. And maybe the end end state is glamorous to a certain extent, but getting to that point is certainly not glamorous. And he mentioned Jack Mers, which is funny thinking of his journey with Strike.
(1:14:30) Uh, funnily enough, and right before COVID in 2019, he hit me and Matt Odell up. He was like, "Hey, I want to come on the podcast and announce something." We're like, "Okay." And he announced the launch of Strike the Company from my apartment in Brooklyn on the podcast, this little studio apartment. Uh, and it's been really cool to watch his journey progress from that point where he's like, "Hey, I'm thinking of launching this company, Strike, uh, and announcing it on this podcast to where they've gone today.
(1:14:58) " and we've been it's beenve been extremely fortunate to be along that journey with him from the 1031 perspective being the largest investor and he is uh an incredibly inspiring person to your point George it just takes these motivated convicted and somewhat crazy people to go do it and the journey is not glamorous I can promise you the studio apartment we recorded that that podcast in was not glamorous at all was like a 500 ft little box, but we came from that box and Jack is now crushing it at strike. And I I think this is a good segue to to
(1:15:34) the last question. You alluded to it a bit there, George, but where do you think we're going from here? Um, has Bitcoin made it yet? Has Bitcoin made it? I think uh Bitcoin has created u tremendous wealth for people that uh were early believers and I think from the DNA basis those people are committed to do good things and better the humanity and this generational transfer of wealth of this once again small committed group of people that really wants to make a positive impact that has an awesome power and I think uh
(1:16:27) the story of Bitcoin builders is just starting up. I think there's just going to be a lot of positive um impact and generation in terms of you know curing the world's biggest problems addressing the social injustices um making just life of humans better and I think we're just early on and things happen for a reason and Bitcoin came to this world for a reason to take our humanity to the next level of consciousness and it's not going to be easy.
(1:17:12) There's going to be challenges but I think the outlook is extremely positive and I think as a humanity uh we are moving in the right direction and Bitcoiners will play a major role in that. Bill, would you say Bitcoin has made it? What do what do you see moving forward for Bitcoin? uh you know so I you have to break that up into little pieces because there's so many uh elements to that question technology society monetarily so I think from a technology perspective the uh the the acceptance now of the underlying technology which is what drew me in the first place peer-to-peer blockchains
(1:17:59) uh that's undeniably taking root. You know, there's so many ecosystems of products and services getting built on that underlying technology because it's just a simply more efficient uh and transparent way to handle a database. And I so I think that coupled with the advent of AI that will work with databases uh and the automation of workflows and different things that can sit on a granular distributed database.
(1:18:32) There's that that confluence of blockchain AI is going to revolutionize a lot of things that people do every day. So, I think that's that's on its way and it's really just a flame that's about to really really go over the next couple of years. I think from a uh monetary perspective, it does seem like it's gaining acceptance uh as a an alternative to um things like gold.
(1:19:07) you know, I think it's it doesn't have the uh I guess the I don't know if you call the older crowd or the in the old institutional crowd. Um there's still I think a mixed opinion you see about that. There's still still a lot of gold bugs. Some of the people that would have been gold bugs in a modern era.
(1:19:27) I think the younger people too, you know, younger people, they want low friction and easily like low friction, easy to move just, you know, it's like everything's easy, right? So, I think uh the the thought of of buying gold bars and storing them in some place with high fees. Nobody that's below a certain age will ever consider that. And things like Bitcoin are so natural.
(1:19:50) So I think as we go through this generational change I think uh you know as the older people age out and the younger people take their place I think there's going to be growing acceptance and you're starting to see in the institutional world you know folks like um you know whether it's uh uh Warren Buffett or Nasim Talib used to say you know they're digital tulips or whatever there was so many negative things but uh folks that were regular institutional fund managers like a Ray Dalio for example who I had the pleasure in 2016 of having dinner with to try to explain to him what is Bitcoin. um you know he used to like
(1:20:30) Warren Buffett just poo poo the idea of even things like gold because they were not productive assets but now Ray's out there saying you should have a certain percentage in gold you know and I don't I actually don't know what his opinion is on Bitcoin but I think he he doesn't poo poo it anymore you know so I think uh a lot of the institutional managers now are saying you know what technology's been around for 15 years it looks very solid and it's a real alternative because you know in the end money and
(1:21:03) value is what people think it is you know so why why is a dollar worth a dollar relative to another currency what is it you know it's all just belief and so I think Bitcoin's technology is an underlying fortress that can actually be trusted and I think the longer it's around and the more uh people that get on to it um the more it's accepted because if other people are using it you want to transact or store or what what have you.
(1:21:40) So I think it's here to stay whether I call that you know success or not it's um you know it's going to be gradual. I think it's going to continue to unfold. Um, I don't I'm not really into price predictions, but I think it hit the price target that I had 10 or 15 years ago of the 100K a while back. And um I think relative to what I was thinking then one of the things that's happened is that the if I take the metric of all gold 10% divide by 21 million I think what's happened is the dollar has devalued relative to gold you know so gold is probably twice or three I don't know what fraction or
(1:22:22) multiple it is today versus 10 years ago but it's gone up a lot and so I think my number should have naturally adjusted to probably around 250 you know so I think it will get to 250 I don't know when and then I think based on the rate of the accumulation of the US deficit the growth of the US deficit which is mind-blowing to me um I don't see why it doesn't just keep going up so I would I be surprised if it's a million dollars a coin someday absolutely not it will get there. But it's really a question of how fast does the dollar lose its purchasing power. Uh not so
(1:23:05) much, you know, Bitcoin just climbing up relative to things. Yeah, correct. So, Bill just answered your question, Artis. U has fiat failed? Yes, fiat has failed and as a result, has Bitcoin succeeded? Yes, Bitcoin. So, you know, as I've told people, Bitcoin is going to go to 100,000.
(1:23:31) Bitcoin is going to go to a million, Bitcoin is going to go to 10 million, you know, because at the end of a day, you know, this is the onedirectional bet and there's going to be girrations and stuff, but because the governments, the central banks are printing more money because the governments are running the deficits globally. I mean this is inevitable at the end of the day.
(1:23:55) You know you are valuing Bitcoin in fiat and what is devaluing the other side is going to be appreciating. So I mean this is this is just so crystal clear. I mean I just you know it was clear in 2013, it was clear in 2016. It was clear in 2021. It's clear now in 2025. And we'll get on your podcast in 2035. that's going to be you know ingrained in a sort of a in a cyber space and we'll be talking with you know AI robots and agentics and all this talking yeah you know this this is the trajectory uh that we followed yeah yeah one thing that to point out you know if you look at uh so these stats
(1:24:39) are never completely accurate because they're really hard to get of course uh but world GDP is around 110 trillion now world debt is around 300 trillion. World 380 trillion. Last I checked, 380 trillion or something like this. You'll get different estimates depending on who you ask, but call it 380 because it's in that range.
(1:25:05) World GDP seems to be growing around 3% a year. World debt seems to be growing around 7 to 10% per year. Yeah, it's like every year. And it's been like that for 20 years. So you've got these two lines that are diverging that will never intersect, you know.
(1:25:32) So at some point and you look at what's happening uh you know the new the new prime minister of Japan the policy inflate you know absolutely and and you as a former hedge fund person you understand the carry trade and you understand what it meant to have the world fueled by low interest rates out of Japan for borrowing. If that gasket blows, what happens? Unknown, right? I mean, I I guess we could predict the outcome.
(1:26:00) We don't know when it will blow, but eventually if rates go high enough there, something will blow. And you look at the state of debt in the collection of banks that uh are the fabric for the EU and the relative discrepancy in terms of GDP per capita of you know certain nations versus others where they're basically but forget EU bill I mean you're talking about United States United States right over a trillion forget EU or Japan I mean you're talking of the world's biggest economy and you know over trillion dollar being paid just to maintain the interest payments. I mean, this is like ridiculous. And you know,
(1:26:39) when Elon came on a doge, you know, I had some hopes, but I was like 80% sure that he would be shut down by the establishment. And that's what happened. I mean, this is just a train wreck in a slow motion that is happening. And it's like when this train wreck is happening in existing rails, where do you want to be? You want to be outside of the system.
(1:27:03) Yeah, that is the Bitcoin bad. You know when the system is collapsing as we just like pointed out last two minutes. What is your best bet to be outside and that is has always been the bad of Bitcoin. I saw that in Soviet Union and now you have it in United States.
(1:27:23) You know, United States has been running massive budget deference whether it's Democrats or Republicans. It's all BS. It really is. And at some point there's going to be a reckoning. I mean Churchill said sooner or later you're going to face the consequence of banquet of consequences. And that's what's happening. So Bitcoin is your insurance against that. I mean it's really simple.
(1:27:48) Instead of trusting fallible humans, trust math and distributed systems. It's uh for sure it's an idea whose time has come. Gentlemen, I can't thank you enough for for joining me and walking me through your your war stories over the last decade plus. I think I think anybody particularly if you're a founder out there listening to this take these lessons to heart. Um, and I think it's an incredible story of writ.
(1:28:15) One thing I I don't think you guys I think you guys are too humble to say this, but it Bitcoin would not be where it is today if it wasn't for individuals like you who took the risk over a decade ago when Bitcoin was this crazy funny internet money that nobody was really taking seriously and took risk, capital, conviction to get us to this point.
(1:28:45) So, thank you gentlemen for displaying all three of those over a decade ago when Bitcoin was uh a joke to most people. Pleasure. Pleasure, Marty. It's a pleasure to come on your podcast. I've been following for many many years as a Bitcoin OG and you've done phenomenal uh work in terms of educating in terms of inspiring and you know for this book and for our journey uh it only made sense to come full circle and be on uh your show. Totally agree. Wonderful to be here.
(1:29:18) Yeah. Thank you guys. Go pick up the book and then you win. We'll make sure we link to it and uh hope I would love to do this again at some point in the future. Maybe not 2035, maybe. Hopefully uh before then, but this was an incredible conversation. I hope you too, George. Enjoy your night.
(1:29:36) Bill, enjoy your morning. And uh this was a pleasure that we win. We're going to win. Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there.
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