Twitter Spaces Transcript: Bitcoin Mining as the Solution to Methane Emissions with Troy Cross

‍Synopsis: 

Philosopher, environmentalist, and Bitcoin advocate Troy Cross joins Will Szamosszegi and Kent Halliburton on Twitter Spaces to discuss the emerging narrative that Bitcoin is actually a net positive for humanity's relationship with energy and the environment, how governments may respond to the public's growing awareness of this, and why methane is a problem to solve in the first place.

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Link to Audio: 

‍https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1lDGLnWvDLwxm?s=20

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Transcript:

Kent Halliburton (00:11:30):

Troy, you ready to get started here or should we give it a couple more minutes for folks to gather?

Troy Cross (00:12:02):

Anytime.

Kent Halliburton (00:12:03):

All right. Well I think just to go through the agenda, what we're gonna chat about here today and start off with intros myself, Troy, and Logan who is our moderator talk about methane emissions and bitcoin mining and what that looks like in the narratives that it's causing to shift in this space and see what sort of conversation we can have. So please would love to make this interactive and we'll do our best to moderate her to Logan will and appreciate everyone's patience as we're learning this technology. Inform ourselves from the hosting side, like Troy, I've been on a lot of these, but first time on the hosting end of things. So to jump into it, I'll introduce myself and then turn it over here to Troy. So my name's Ken Halliburton and am the president and COO here at SA Mining. And I run basically the internal operations for the organization is the ceo and he runs sort of the big relationships, investors and evangelize evangelizing side for mining through the podcast and other media opportunities.

Kent Halliburton (00:13:36):

And my background is I think, a bit unique in this space. I've only come across one other person so far in the Bitcoin mining space. Justin I'm forgetting his last name off the top of my head. That also comes from a rooftop solar background. So I did that and helped to scale a couple of businesses primarily retail facing businesses, doing rooftop solar across nine different states. We were publicly traded and I had an organization of about a hundred in total that I managed. But the organizations I was a part of, we were pushing nine figures in revenue and a lot of the dog fight with the utilities about power. So it's quite interesting to make the shift into Bitcoin mining. And I did so because I really just saw the cost curves of solar and bitcoin mining were gonna collide in a pretty spectacular way.

Kent Halliburton (00:14:34):

And I don't think the puck is quite gotten there yet, but I wanted to be a part of that because I saw Bitcoin mining is really being advantageous to the grid and to renewable energy in general. And I know it's a point in the Bitcoin space about climate change that is, we're not all on the same page with, but that is my background and don't not an advocate of top down changes very much believe in free market forces to drive any transition that seems very practical to utilize Bitcoin mining to do that. So anyway, that's how I got to where I'm at here today. And Troy, I'll let you introduce yourself a bit.

Troy Cross (00:15:22):

Yeah thanks Kent, and thanks for having me on the space. It's cool that you guys are launching a series of these discussions. My understanding is this is the inaugural one and you guys are gonna be continue doing that, is it right? That's right, yes sir. Okay. So I'm honored to be the first guest. Great. And like you said, Kent, I hope this will be interactive. What I've learned talking about methane is that it's a very complex technical issue and we have a lot of oil and gas people in the Bitcoin community and they tend to have experience working with mitigating methane flaring, et cetera. And if you're here and you're in oil and gas and you have that kind of real world experience, I hope you ask some questions, maybe come up on stage, whatever. I don't know, we're limited in time, but I hope we can tap some of that expertise.

Troy Cross (00:16:13):

Yeah, I'm a professor of philosophy, not an energy person, not a methane person but Bitcoin, I'm also a coiner from I guess 2011 and Bitcoin makes you an expert in whatever it touches and that's a lot of things. So I've been pulled into down the energy rabbit hole in the last couple of years. I had an idea about how to hold Bitcoin in a carbon neutral way just by doing some mining. And if you mine, my thesis, which I've developed and published with Andrew Bailey other philosopher, is that if you mine the same percentage of all mining as you own of all Bitcoin, your holdings can be net carbon neutral because you are increasing difficulty for other miners while you're holding Bitcoin and your Bitcoin holding causes them to mine and emit carbon. But your mining of Bitcoin with carbon neutral sources or carbon negative sources, disincentivizes other miners and those incentives can balance out and render you carbon neutral. And actually that's how I met Kent SA Mining is a hosted mining company. They're opening their first facility very soon running a hydro. And so you know, can implement my idea one way you can implement it is by buying a minor and hosting it with them in proportion to your holdings. So we figured this out, Ken figured out the confluence of our ideas and I'm in on the advisory board for SA mining. So that's probably how I ended up here. I'm also a fellow with the Bitcoin policies, dude. Okay. That's enough about me.

Kent Halliburton (00:18:07):

Yeah, I was kind of a magical moment when Troy and I first got on a call together. We were like two kids in a candy store, excited that we'd kind of come to a very similar conclusion from different routes. But realizing that having a retail focus and allowing anybody anywhere to begin Bitcoin mining in a sovereign fashion where we are just providing the picks and shovels and the individual retail investors are receiving all the gold was kind of a net win win win across the board. And I discovered Troy's work via kind of his initial podcast circuit, and it was just incredible to hear his strategy that he and his fellow philosopher companion came up with to offset and take personal responsibility for any carbon emissions by holding your Bitcoin through renewable energy, bitcoin mining. So that's what key things off. But I think the bulk of the call today we really wanna focus in on the methane and mission side of things. And I think one of the things that is really quite important to understand, and I'm really proud to see Troy participate in, is the discussion at the policy level. The Office of Science and Technology a few weeks ago just issued their findings that the White House did and including the Office of Science and Technologies recommendations, and Troy participated in that, had a seat at the table. So maybe we can first start with the problem of methane Troy and work from there backwards into how Bitcoin mining can be part of the solution.

Troy Cross (00:20:03):

Thanks, Kent. Yeah, I think that the focus in a focus on global warming has been on carbon dioxide, CO2 measured in Hawaii, we see this number ticking up. We know how CO2 acts as a kind of blanket as a warming gas, trapping gas in the planet. And we know this is kind of how Venus warmed and so on. But there are other warming gases other than co2. Methane is the leading gas after co2. It's responsible for about 20% of warming according to the epa, according to the un it's a third, but according to some more recent studies it's up to 50% and rising. We have the largest rises ever in methane emissions in the last two years, setting the record for the rate of increase in methane emissions. So it's a fast rising gas that's responsible for, I don't know, maybe a third of all warming, but pretty soon it's gonna flip in CO2 if it hasn't already and be the most irresponsible for the most warming of any gas.

Troy Cross (00:21:13):

About half of that methane is due to human use and about half of it is just wetlands forest fires, decomposition and so on. And methane is a different kind of trap. Heat trapping gas than co2, it's about 25 times more potent over a hundred year period, about 80 times or 84 times as potent over a hundred year period. It's a warmer blanket than co2, but it breaks down a lot faster. And about half of it is admitted by just a handful of countries like China, the us, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria. And most of the sources for human caused methane emission are livestock, landfills, natural gas production, oil production, coal manure, and then a bunch of other smaller ones. But the big ones are farming landfills and waste water treatment facilities and oil and gas. And it's not just that it's a very potent warming gas like the UN says.

Troy Cross (00:22:31):

Basically we can't avoid crossing 1.5 degrees with the current levels of methane. Basically whatever happens on the CO2 side we can't avoid it. And so we have to cut it by 40 to 45% by 2030 if we're to avoid 1.5 degree increase over pre-industrial times by the 2040s. And that means we have to look at each one of these segments of our economy like fossil fuels, waste and agriculture for where we can mitigate the methane. And it's not just warming, but it also causes other health issues. It actually increases low level ozone in the atmosphere. And I did a calculation this morning on basically the death premature deaths due to methane and it's like one death per thousand tons of methane basically, or 1.4 deaths per thousand ton of methane roughly. So it causes kind of air pollution problems too, particularly close to the source where the methane is being emitted.

Troy Cross (00:23:47):

So while the climate community is largely focused on co2 the the epa the various kind of scientific bodies, the I PCC are starting to realize that as one person put it in the literature if CO2 is putting the planet on a slow boil over time, methane is like a blow torch <laugh>, it acts fast and it breaks down fast to the atmosphere. So taking action on the methane front mitigates warming very, very quickly compared to co2. And this is why the UN calls it the strongest lever that we have right now to fight climate change.

Kent Halliburton (00:24:36):

Yeah, Troy, I mean it's unbelievable and it's such new information right now. One of the things that I went looking for and spoke to folks like yourself and several others that are actively trying to pursue this in the bitcoin mining community was looking for a good book on the topic and it just doesn't even exist yet. That's how new the data is. And it's primarily in scientific reports at this point so that the narrative hasn't filtered its way out. And it's somewhat ironic that it seems like the bitcoin and bitcoin mining community are sort the first to latch on and popularize that narrative in the common space, at least within the Bitcoin community. And so I find that just the fact that we're on the avantgarde for methane emissions quite compelling. And one of the points that I've discovered in my journey learning about methane emissions is there's a bit of a feedback loop too.

Kent Halliburton (00:25:43):

There's the pollution side of things that we have control of, but there's also the natural side that we don't have much control of. And there's a big risk as the climate does warm, that permafrost areas begin to thaw more and those permafrost areas begin to emit methane in those natural wetland, they become natural wetlands as they thought and that becomes an even bigger risk. So there's this upward cycle that we can potentially find ourselves in if we're not able to slow the rate of change that we're experiencing. And that part I find extremely worrisome from where I sit. And I love the fact that bitcoin mining has the ability to address that. But do you have any more data or statistics on that sort of permafrost issue?

Troy Cross (00:26:38):

Well, yeah, this is complicated. Like you said, it's fast changing. And the EPA site really seems to me quite out of date with the latest stuff coming in. The satellite imagery on the Permian Basin shows that we're off, we were off by 3.5 x in our estimation of methane there. And you don't know how well that generalizes. But also we can analyze and are analyzing the breakdown of types of methane. Either methane comes from oil and gas or coal or it comes from it comes from other sources like wetlands and farms and so on. And that balance has changed and it's looking like it's more natural non-human caused methane, which has got some of the researchers worried about the feedback loop. The interviews with the researchers are kind of scary because yeah, you get more forest fires, you get more the mechanisms they don't understand. I think maybe the weather is changing and we get more rain in the wetland areas and that creates more decomposition.

Troy Cross (00:27:55):

But there's always the concern that we melt permafrost, that we create more methane and then that it accelerates the change. And it's one of these feedback loops. One of the good pieces of news here is that the satellite imagery showing that there's more methane coming from landfills than we thought is actually great news because the kind of methane from the landfills matches the right isotope for the naturally caused methane. And that means that some of it is coming from landfills. Some of that increases that we're underestimating the breakdown in landfills and that means it's human cause. But that means maybe we're not thrown into the feedback loop. The feedback loop is just something we want to avoid <laugh>, right? It's the reason why, it's part of the basic precautionary principle. There are feedback loops out there, we don't know where they are. The science of feedback loops is chaotic. You know, don't know exactly where that tipping point lies when you trigger it, how hard it would be to stop it. So in that face of that uncertainty you do, you can stay below thresholds where those probabilities are higher. But yeah, that's kind of why it's really important to get after it right now.

Kent Halliburton (00:29:10):

Absolutely. Troy and I'm, I'm gonna make one quick comment and then move on to talking about why this problem actually hasn't been solved yet. And I think within the Bitcoin community there's a large group that is not bought into the idea of climate change and so be it. But I think that there's still a very practical argument why even if you're not bought into climate change that methane emissions are an impact. And it comes down to pollution. So I used to drive in on the central California I five corridor just south of Modesto, and there's a major cow farm there that when you pass it, it takes about 10 miles of driving before the smell leaves your nose. And if we take and actually solve the methane problem, we're actually removing that smell from our nostrils and making more land habitable for human beings because it's quite something the methane breakdown from the cow and big feces that gathers in these large animal farms. So just wanted to mention that from a nonbeliever in climate change standpoint, why we should still care about it helps us clean up our environment and live a little bit better on

Troy Cross (00:30:31):

This planet. And if I can just jump in right on that point, I mean this is what I love about Bitcoin as a tool for addressing methane. It's completely voluntary and I'm looking through the government recommendations and they put a cost on it. They put $600 a ton as a low cost debate for the low cost abatement methods of dealing with meth methane across the board on average. And they calculate the global benefits market and non-market impacts of methane. That's $4,300 a ton. So that's a good public investment that presumes some of that presumes warming. But bitcoiners see methane in a different way. It is actually for a source of energy. So it's not just something to be mitigated that you have to pay $600 a ton to remove, but it's actually fuel which pays you in the form of Bitcoin once you combust it, drive a generator, create electricity and use that electricity to hash <laugh>.

Troy Cross (00:31:38):

So it's kind of like, yeah, you don't have to care about climate change, you don't have to believe in it. Nothing is being required of you. Let us bitcoiners just take care of the problem because that very same molecule, CH four which vibrates at a certain frequency trapping heat, also combusts into CO2 and water and creates energy for us. So you can view it from climate change lens as a warming gas, you can view it through the Bitcoin or lens as sat, There's like literally sat that you're driving past in that cow farm and you're smelling SATs just like dissipating into the atmosphere. You know what I mean? Instead into your Bitcoin wallet.

Kent Halliburton (00:32:22):

Absolutely. And I think I'm just looking at the clock and realizing how quickly the time is melting by here. And I think you touched on it, but just to highlight the point, the reason why this hasn't been addressed so far is because there's not been a for-profit incentive to do so. It's just been a cost for people and Bitcoin flips that on its head and becomes an economic input for a viable economic output. And as just brilliant, and I've been speaking, we've been in the fundraising process and we've been talking to ESG focused funds and while they're not particularly warm to the idea of Bitcoin, I find it ironic when we speak to them that they really struggle to find any other way of going about turning that methane into a useful economic product. So quite funny to see that even folks in the EFG community that have warmed up to Bitcoin are sort of begrudgingly embracing it for the mining side of things. So I think we've sort of highlighted the economic opportunity here and rather than monopolize in the last nine minutes of what we've got scheduled, it probably makes sense to just open up the floor to have a more engaged conversation. Now

Speaker 1 (00:33:50):

If anyone has any questions, feel free raise your hand.

Kent Halliburton (00:34:04):

We're waiting for folks to raise their hand here. It seems like we're being rushed on the stage. Do you have any breakdown? I think I've seen some pretty fascinating work between yourself and Daniel Batten on what percentage of the Bitcoin network needs to be mined using methane mitigation before we're actually carbon negative or equivalent carbon negative.

Troy Cross (00:34:30):

So my calculations start with the numbers from the coin shares report on the carbon intensity of the network as it is, and then basically calculate the amount of carbon savings you get from for a given amount of amount of hash rate. And I come up with a number of one 30th. I think if one 30th of the network is run on vented methane that would be enough to create neutrality. That would be the tipping point given where the network's at right now it would be a much, much higher number for flared methane. Methane that's currently flared because laring already is on average 92% efficient as opposed to 99% efficient for bitcoin mining. So the gain is much smaller. But for instance, in the US right now there are 1400 landfills with no gas capture whatsoever. That's about 27,000 acres. That's all venting. That's not an oil and gas that's pure landfill.

Troy Cross (00:35:43):

That would cost about a billion dollars to capture all of that gas and also cost about a hundred million dollars annually in maintenance. That's all methane. That is as simply venting. There's an open question. I see Alex is up here. I really hope Alex gives us the breakdown on the availability of methane on oil and gas sites, which I think is often overstated. There's sort of two numerical questions here. One is how much methane do we need to reach carbon neutrality? I think it's about one 30th of Bitcoin network total. And I think we can reach that on a fraction of the landfills in the US actually, and you could even see it on the latest Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance page. They've got a little circle for landfills in the us, how much warming they have and how much warming the Bitcoin network has. And the landfills are responsible for a lot more warming just in the US than the entire Bitcoin network. But I think there's another question which is can Bitcoin address the methane problem in oil and gas more broadly? And that's a question I think it could easy to overestimate. I'm interested to hear Alex's perspective on how much methane is actually available and practical for Bitcoin minors to capture.

Speaker 4 (00:37:04):

Hey guys. Hey Troy. Thanks for having me up here. I just really just wanted to come up and say hello and love what you guys are all doing. That is actually a good question though on the availability. And really it comes down to how much hash rate can we put on with and have it remain economically viable. We're already, we're at the lower bound right now. We've kind of estimated that the global hash price floor is roughly 7 cents before the network starts to reflexively adjust difficulty. And there's a variety of assumptions baked in there. And so when I see people on Twitter that are like, Yep, Bitcoin mining is gonna take care of all of the flared invented methane from the oil and gas industry that's where I, I question cuz you can load up a bunch of minors, but even if you're at zero or next to zero variable costs, you still have to pay for the minors. And so you start to bump up against economic realities that right now I don't think that bitcoin spot price or network cash rates supports much.

Speaker 4 (00:38:21):

It wouldn't support a material amount of the overall global oil and gas methane emissions. I know that that's a popular meme, but I think we actually heard ourselves when we start to make those blanket claims. But I think that to what you were speaking about earlier with respect to landfill stuff. So I do think that we can make a reasonable dent in LA in the landfill method, particularly if you structure the deals. And I know that vests being is really moving forward on that. And I think a lot of the success of this strategy is gonna be at the boardroom tables as these deals get structured and these transactions get the either M and a or JV activity gets done because if you structure them, you align the incentives and you allow for really low operating costs. But I think that the oil and gas stuff is a little bit overblown. Folks like Ryan Leachman and others that are really experienced in the Bitcoin and oil and gas space is kind of are like, yeah, well maybe this is a little bit overstepping and getting over our skis.

Troy Cross (00:39:34):

I think it's over our skis in two ways. One in way is just look at the Cambridge site oil and the just flared gas alone. What's currently flared uses seven times as much energy as the entire Bitcoin network. So even if Bitcoin network were exclusively powered by flared gas in the oil fields, we would be one seventh of the flaring. So that's way too small. And of course flaring is actually more like 3% or something of a flared gas mining is something like 3%. So you can see how we're off by orders of magnitude from having that kind of impact even though it's sort of directionally. And that's the one kind of hype I worry about. And the other kind of hype I worry about is how much of that gas, and this is something I'm taking from Ryan Leachman and others, how much of that gas is really usable for a minor and some of the gas is in the first 30 days and you can't capture that.

Troy Cross (00:40:34):

Some of these profiles are really, profiles of production are really volatile and some of the gas is just not insufficient quantity as we're seeing what the problem is. It's like these little leaks in millions of wells around the world and pipelines everywhere. You're not gonna go stick your S nine on some leak in a remote region. So there's complications in getting after it and the question that remains. And then of course there's also gas that's close enough to build a pipeline that's about pipeline is about 5 million a mile to build or gas that's close enough to electrical load that it would make sense to build a generator in transmission which costs about 3 million a mile. So there's those kinds of considerations and considerations on timing and dynamic. And I what I don't have yet and what I would really like to have is a kind of the total amount of methane that's being flared right now. How much of it is practically available for mining if we had the market cap? If we had the market cap.

Speaker 4 (00:41:45):

And I think that, so I don't wanna poo this love line of research and development here either because I do think that the market cap will be there, the cyclical nature of Bitcoin and the nature of where we're at on the adoption curve, we suspect that the market cap will be there eventually. And so having a framework built out and having propagated this understanding throughout the oil and gas industry and throughout the waste management industry and any other industry that can capture and monetize excess methane, this building, this knowledge base and inching up the learning curve is where I think that the work that you're doing and Batten and the rest of the folks that it really kind of banging this drum, I think is super invaluable because it, it'll shorten the flash to bang for when we do have a run up and we go through a bull cycle, a hash price bull cycle anyway.

Speaker 4 (00:42:45):

It'll allow for this to be deployed quickly and to really make the environmental impact that we're, we're seeing claims being made right now. So don't take my conservatism for skepticism around the efforts that you guys are making. I just think that certain proclamations around how it's gonna consume everything, it just makes us all look like fools. And I think we all know who the folks are that tend to go that route. And I wanna maintain our credibility as an industry. And part of that credibility comes from making reasonable claims around the true benefit of what Bitcoin can fix and how

Kent Halliburton (00:43:27):

Alex, I think you're highlighting a number a critical point here. And I agree that that framework needs the first put in place ahead of the price moving up. But at the end of the day the price has to move up to provide the profit margin to incent people to come into the market and actually develop these energy sources for bitcoin mining. And it's actually interesting to see that it is putting some of the ESG community into an interesting position because as they invest into this kind of like we saw DCS investing into the token space during the last bull run they led to that their vested interest led to creating narratives actually would not be surprised to see a similar occurrence in the next cycle. As we see more capital from ESG funds coming into the space they're actually gonna be driving the narrative to adopt Bitcoin to help the price go up to actually help their investments have greater return.

Kent Halliburton (00:44:29):

I am expecting to see that in the next bull cycle and that'll be a wind at the sales for Bitcoin adoption in general. But I think it's a positive feedback loop within the Bitcoin ecosystem. The methane emissions problem. And I have a question here from, let's see, green feminists that I did want to answer that was about if there's some sort of eco entrepreneur opportunity to mind Bitcoin to help out with these leaking methane sources and want to know if she could do that, or I'm assuming she to save the earth while stack and sat. And the answer is simply unless you're gonna go build your own projects right now, there's not an easy way to do this. However, it's SA mining the next facility we launch, we are intending to be addressing methane emissions and we're loosely targeting Q2 of next year. So there's an opportunity, yeah, this is a chill but there's an opportunity if you wanted to jump on the wait list and reserve a spot in line that say Q2 next year you could actually participate in exactly what you're looking for. I know we are coming up on the top of the hour, the time that we had allocated. I can go into another five minutes. I don't know if Troyer Logan can, but if there's other questions happy to stay on another five minutes and help answer and I don't mind dropping off and letting Troy and Alex have a conversation as well cause I'm greatly enjoying it.

Troy Cross (00:46:02):

I just wanna say a couple more things. One is yeah, I hope you guys get a facility. I mean, first of all, hydro Hydro is also a great source, especially existing hydro that's not disruptive to ecosystems as far as carbon. If you go to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finances page, they now have carbon estimates for Bitcoin. Bitcoin's whole network. This just came up in the last few days. And you can see the carbon estimate for a Bitcoin if the network were entirely coal and if the network were entirely hydro and the network as they estimate it to be. And the difference is a 50 to one ratio in power, in in emissions given the same power consumption. So hydro facility is a great place to start. That's what they picked as their bottom end at Cambridge. But I think yeah, there's hype around this and some Bitcoiners have said things that are over the top as they want to do, but the idea that the Bitcoin network could be met carbon negative equivalent is a really, really exciting thought.

Troy Cross (00:47:20):

A year ago when I came up with this general idea, or a year and a half ago, I thought you can make sort your contribution to Bitcoin as a minor and as a holder met neutral. And I was aware of mining on flared gas and cruso energy. If you're looking for people to follow on this issue, Cruso is by far the biggest kind of flare gas minor should follow them. You should follow Daniel Baton, you should follow us being energy should follow mining of course. And wasn't thinking was that we could ever get to zero. I thought, okay, you do your part as a member of this community, but a free is Bitcoin is a free mechanism of people organizing their ideals and names and ambitions. It, it's a coordination mechanism for humans and it's perfectly voluntary. So the great thing about Bitcoin is you can mine with whatever energy you want.

Troy Cross (00:48:18):

No one can stop you. No one controls. We have a lot of fights within the Bitcoin community about energy sources. We we've got nuclear bros, fossil bros, renewable bros, distributed bros, et cetera. They're all, I don't know why they're all bros, but they are anyway, but this is kinda silly because it's a perfectly voluntary network. And knowing that I thought, well, Bitcoin could never get to zero, but I wasn't thinking about when you burn CH four and you create CO2 of it, you know are reducing near term warming by 80, 80 fold and you're reducing 100 year warming, 25 fold. So that's a massive positive influence on the environment or negative warming equivalent. And like I said to Kent earlier, that means if one 30th of the network gets to mine on vented methane, which is a lot, but it's like doable, doable in a completely voluntary way just because maybe other people like me want to do that, care about that then we can get the whole network to neutrality or negative equivalent.

Troy Cross (00:49:27):

We would be baiting bating more warming gases than we're adding. And that would flip the narrative on Bitcoin in an incredibly powerful way, a hyper side. Imagine Bitcoin is net warming negative, and Daniel Baton projects this for like 20, 24. I think that's probably ambitious. I doubt things move that fast. But like Alex said, how fast it moves in part depends on us. It depends on getting a narrative, very clear, getting vehicles, you're offering people to, Well, if I had a way to put, put a minor on a landfill, I would do it just like a green feminist and it wouldn't take that many people to do it, to reach one 30th, the golden number. And then suddenly everybody who holds Bitcoin is making a net climate positive contribution just by holding it. Then the higher the price and the more energy Bitcoin uses, the better for the warming situation. And that would be unbelievable

Kent Halliburton (00:50:44):

And try, it's a beautiful vision and I think it's one that all of us can get behind and rally behind as it provides a level of security both for the climate and for the Bitcoin network itself, as well as just being a moral feel good. And as unfortunate as it is, I do have to jump and I wanna say thank you for all that you do in the space to help promote this idea and help us see how Bitcoin mining is a positive in the world. And Alex, I appreciate your sobering thoughts on the call and your efforts with the policy advocacy that you do. So thank you and please keep that up. Thanks for joining us today. We'll keep these rolling and certainly if you guys wanna stay on and continue to speak, please do so. But we will be having these occur pretty regularly here going forward. But Logan can speak more about that. Thanks so much again for joining our inaugural one and for dealing with our tech hiccups at the outset but looking forward to having more of these and learning more from our community. Cheers.

Speaker 1 (00:51:57):

Cheers. Thank you, Kent. Yes, as Kent was saying we at SAS Mining are looking to host these Twitter spaces pretty regularly, regularly moving forward. Ideally once a week especially as we build momentum, we'll start to do these once a week. So definitely be on the lookout. It's been a pleasure. I have a few minutes, so I'd be happy to continue hosting. If someone has a question or a thought or a disagreement that they'd like to air, you're more than welcome to.

Troy Cross (00:52:27):

Yes, I see Sergio say host down below. Sergio is a climate scientist, a NASA research scientist who studies the heat balance of the planet. Have anything to say? Sergio, you wanna come up?

Speaker 1 (00:52:51):

So I don't see a raised hand from Sergio, but we do have Nathan. Nathan. Hey, how are you? Hey

Speaker 5 (00:52:58):

Thanks for having me up. I just had a question for Troy for the calculations for the Bitcoin carbon footprint. How far up the supply chain do you go when making those calculations? Thanks.

Troy Cross (00:53:20):

Yeah <laugh>, this is tough. So when I used the calculation for Bitcoin the one I used for Cal to get the one 30th number was borrowed from the best one I could find at the time, which was coin shares, which already took into account some of the it already took into account actually methane mining as negative flaring, but it was based in part on industry supplied data, but it did not count renewable as zero because you're right, there's scope three emissions. Where did the materials come from? What is the footprint of that? And actually for my scheme as well, it matters because my scheme is like, do your share of Bitcoin mining? Do it in a carbon neutral way, But really apart from methane, there isn't a carbon neutral way because even something like hydro has inputs, it's concrete to build a dam that is pretty carbon intensive.

Troy Cross (00:54:24):

But certainly windmills, solar, they're all very, everything is carbon intensive. I mean, the fossil fuel bros are totally right that everything in our world is built on fossil. Even all the renewable stuff right now, that's just how it is. Yeah, when I've done it myself I've done calculations on how much carbon credits you would have to buy to offset that scope three, which you can't quite offset if you wanna be truly carbon neutral. And the frustrating part for me is that there's a lot of different sources on that scope three impact, the life cycle the life cycle analysis of different sources of power. And that's because there's a ton of variation. Not every windmill has the same life cycle impact or every solar installation or it varies a lot. So there's a range and there's an average, and I've used IPCC numbers for myself, but just to explode a myth here, even when you look at life cycle analysis, the difference between something like wind or solar or hydro or nuclear for that matter, and coal or natural gas is vast. It's massive. You can see that in the Cambridge report as well.

Speaker 5 (00:55:49):

Cool. Thanks

Speaker 1 (00:55:52):

Troy. Thanks Nathan for the question. I see we got Sergio up. Sergio, thanks for joining.

Speaker 6 (00:55:59):

Yes, well thank you Troy for the invite. I'm not at the best spot to really talk, but I will mention that I think the methane solution in terms of Bitcoin mining and how I could reduce the CO2 equivalent is a amazing idea and actual thing happening. So I'm all for it and I'm excited about it. And I guess the only thing I'll mention cuz I wasn't here for the whole space, so I don't know whether it was touched upon, is how do you think we deal with the issue of climate? People just insinuating that we're incentivizing this kind of polluting energy instead of promoting green energy because we have natural gas with methane and stuff. So I don't know if you've touched upon that, and also what do you think about the possibility of using Bitcoin mining as a way to fund maybe carbon removals technology and stuff like that, which could actually truly make us carbon negative by reducing the carbon emission, not just carbon emission, sorry, but the actual carbon concentration in the atmosphere. So anyways, that's all I'll say. Thanks Troy, and great conversation going on here. Thanks.

Troy Cross (00:57:19):

Yeah, so the first question is about, thanks, Sergio. First question is about does monetizing waste methane pay the wrong people? Does it because for landfills it's gonna pay the municipality? And this is one of the things I love about landfill mining, is that that revenue actually goes to those local communities, those municipalities, it helps them pay for the gas capture mechanisms. But once the gas capture is paid for, it's just gravy for paying for whatever they need, schools, roads, et cetera. But by the same token mining on flared gas is gonna pay fossil fuel companies for something that those companies would've had to pay for way. One way I think about Bitcoin mining is it's just a really great flares stack. It flares stacks can be very expensive. I've discovered in my research, they can be really complicated and Bitcoin is just like a flare stack.

Troy Cross (00:58:21):

It mitigates methane except it pays you for doing that. So from the bottom line of a fossil fuel company, they replace something where they had to pay to comply with regulations to something where they're being paid to comply with regulations. And doesn't that give them profit? Well, here's kind of where that point that Alex made earlier about hash price cuts in our favor, <laugh>, because the total mining revenue right now is less than 4 billion a year. That's total revenue. There's probably a billion of that. It's probably three and a half billion, something like that right now. Of that there's maybe a billion spent on energy worldwide that is our total budget. And just to give you just a sense of scale there's 450 billion annually in direct subsidies to fossil fuel industry. So it's like one out of 450 billion is our total energy budget, almost none of which is going to what I mean, very little of which is going to fossil fuel.

Troy Cross (00:59:15):

And very 3% of that's going to nothing. So basically, and that's just subsidies. Then there's like the revenue is many billions per day for this industry several billion per day. So the total revenue of the total energy spend of Bitcoin mining 1 billion is a fraction of daily revenue for oil and gas. So in short, I think it's sort of too small to make a difference. I on the margin, of course it's gonna make a difference, but I think the idea that it's gonna mitigating methane cheaply is bad. Is itself a bad idea? You could use the same argument to say for any advance in flare stacks, make a flare stack that burns with the same efficiency, but it's cheaper. Oh no, you've just helped oil and gas. So I think it's a data in line of argument. As for carbon capture, I mean that's really cool.

Troy Cross (01:00:14):

And I think we should think about for Bitcoin's social license and dealing with people like Austin Science and technology policy and the White House. Think about ways to profit share that are pro-social. So for instance, with oil and gas, I don't know how plausible this, I know Dennis Porter's working on it with his organization, but something that auctions off leaky wells to Bitcoin mins and then requires a profit share from the Bitcoin minor to basically, you know, put some coins into a coffer that is itself used to find leaks into cap them or to fix them or to plug wells. To cap wells. So states have these costs that one is much more efficient and cheaper than capturing carbon out of the atmosphere, given what we have today. But if you think about it long term, it's kind of the same. What Bitcoin mining does is build out new infrastructure for generating electricity and what do we need long term to capture carbon outta the air?

Troy Cross (01:01:29):

What all the solutions I've seen require power, They require electricity to convert to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, lots of power. And so if Bitcoin mining incentivizes the build out of generation and then carbon capture comes along as a competitor for buying those electrons, think about it. Carbon capture can happen anywhere as well. Also distributed. So if we've got 2,500 landfills in the US and they're all generating electricity, those are all potential sites where we could put carbon capture on a landfill and use ves beans generation facility that they've already built. But at that point, carbon capture might pay more than bitcoin mining. So this is the brand quims hypothesis of Bitcoin as pioneer species. Bitcoin's establishing electrical power. We need that, ironically, even to control the effects that electrical generation has already created. We put a bunch of carbon in the atmosphere from creating power, but now we need power to take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into solid form.

Speaker 5 (01:02:51):

So Troy, did you just say using methane to end up powering carbon capture?

Troy Cross (01:03:01):

Yeah, I mean, what vesting is doing is they're building electrical infrastructure that's powered by methane. And

Speaker 5 (01:03:09):

Yeah, I understand that, but just the, the idea that you'd get more CO2 pulled out from burning methane then you'd put in is just violates the first law of thermodynamics.

Troy Cross (01:03:23):

No, no, you wouldn't. You wouldn't. But think about it, the methane is going to be going into the atmosphere unless you capture it <laugh>, right? So it's not looking at the CO2 balance, you're looking at the warming balance, and then of all the things you can do with the electricity you've generated by converting converting it into co2 Yeah, your CO2 capture device. I mean, look, this is what's happening on the oil fields and in the coal too. They're trying to do carbon capture in storage. Wherever we create carbon, it's a lot easier than just trying to grasp, grab carbon outta the air to get it at a source. What's the sort of best and least avoidable form of carbon creation, methane, methane burning <laugh>. So yeah, I think what you're doing is building electrical infrastructure and then that's what we need for carbon capture, and it's gonna be any other electrical generation at that point sort of candidate for carbon capture. But yeah, of course.

Speaker 5 (01:04:26):

Well, so I guess my question in terms of using electrical power for carbon captures is what are you converting the CO2 into? Because in terms of chemical reactions off the top of my head that I can think of the primary way to use electricity for carbon captures the sabbat a process which forms methane.

Troy Cross (01:04:58):

Well, that would obviously be disaster

Speaker 5 (01:05:00):

<laugh>. Yeah, I mean that's what I'm talking about with the first law of thermodynamics, you're essentially trying to get more energy out than you put in.

Troy Cross (01:05:10):

Yeah, no, no. Everything I've seen on carbon capture has been, it's extremely energy intensive. Mean, especially if you're going after carbon, that's just diffused. It's not in a higher concentration. If you go at it after, at the source, it's somewhat more efficient. But just trying to take air, blow it through a machine and use energy to transfer it into, transform it into a different form, whatever that is, compress the isolate and compress the gas or turn it into an ingredient for concrete or whatever. It's an incredibly energy intensive form, which is why it's a last resort. And actually it could be a huge environmental disaster to try to create enough power infrastructure to capture the carbon that we need to capture. This is why carbon capture is the last resort. Absolutely. But it's an ongoing project and it's something that actually is baked into the ipcc, right? It's like in order to hit our long term temperature targets some kind of tech like this has to work and it's gonna require a lot of energy. There isn't any energy free way to capture carbon.

Troy Cross (01:06:45):

But yeah, I mean, this is all way down the road. Look, the point of mining on methane is to mitigate the methane, it's carbon positive. And sergi and I have talked about this, it's weird to call it carbon negative because you're actually creating, you're emitting co2. So it's literally carbon positive is carbon equivalent negative only in the sense that Eric Bates more warming gas than would've happened if you didn't engage in the process. And then just to se question, the truth is, I have no idea. But whatever we do for carbon capture, it's going to require energy. And building out energy infrastructure cannot make that process any worse and may help it.

Speaker 6 (01:07:31):

And I completely agree with you, and I know I've seen this before, that essentially Bitcoin money on mye is called carbon capture in a way that makes sense because carbon capture is in something and it's carbon capture in another sense that it's capturing carbon, but in the sense that by converting it to carbon dioxide, we're reducing the amount of CO2 equivalent emissions, so therefore it's carbon capture. So great thing. And anyways, I'm leave you guys, but thank you so much. And Troy, I'm a big fan of what you guys do and Jen and so many more people, and I'm so happy you guys are doing it. I'm all for it. So thank you for inviting me up and continue the good work.

Speaker 1 (01:08:40):

I see we have questions from Elis and Will welcome, welcome

Will Szamosszegi (01:08:44):

Will. Yeah, thank you for having me up here. I, I've been listening in and I appreciate you helping put on the spaces here and I'm excited that Saman, we're gonna be running them on a weekly basis now. And Troy, thanks again for doing all the work that you do. Listening to that conversation was incredible and it only solidified the belief that I need to get you onto the podcast on time soon. <laugh>

Troy Cross (01:09:11):

Totally will. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:09:14):

I should say I should say to the audience this Twitter space is recorded there's also a transcript, so we'll be sharing that at some point once it's ready. But don't worry, I know there were kind of a lot of excellent talking points mostly by Troy, but also others I certainly personally am definitely going to need to jot those down at some point. So there will be a recording, so no need to worry if you missed anything in particular.

Speaker 8 (01:09:43):

Hey guys, thanks for the conversation, Troy. I just have a super quick question. Curious about the stat. You mentioned the 1400 landfills, that vent currently, I assume that presupposed, that someone's bearing the CapEx of first capping them to capture the methane, the then mind. How do you think about that CapEx and who is bearing that, shouldering that burden?

Troy Cross (01:10:07):

Yeah, great question. And I hear I'm reliant on Adam, right at Vest be, is this where I'm getting this data? I mean, he pointed me to the site, but here's what I know. So there's 2,600 landfills in the US and of that something like 500 are currently generating electricity. And then there's another there's another 1100 that are not generating electricity, but they're flaring, they're capturing and flaring their gas. And then there's 1400 that are completely not capturing their methane. And there's a law requiring them to capture their methane and I it kicks in another two years or so. So it be illegal. All of these landfills will be illegal, those 1400, but like I said, it's 30 to $50,000 per acre to put those facilities in to capture the gas. And there's also shades of gray here, like landfills can be more or less efficient in capturing the gas.

Troy Cross (01:11:18):

And basically you pay more for more efficiency. So even a lot of those landfills that are capturing gas are only capturing 75% of what they could capture. And they could spend more CapEx to capture that remaining 25%. And your question is exactly right, who's gonna pay for it? And if you hear the environmental groups talking about Bitcoin mining on methane, they'll say, Oh, landfills are all supposed to capture that methane anyway. It shouldn't exist anyway. But they don't have a mechanism to pay for that capture either in the 1400 landfills or that $40,000 an acre is over a billion dollars total and a hundred million in maintenance annually. Who's gonna pay for that? Where does it come from? And I think, like Alex said earlier, that structuring these deals is going to be key because the Bitcoin minor doesn't have that kind of capital upfront.

Troy Cross (01:12:17):

The municipal doesn't have that kind of capital upfront. The capital has to come from somewhere. But the way that mining can function is you have an offtaker of power that's guaranteed that can help the municipal pay for that CapEx right over a period of time. So the way that least ves be does it, and I know there are four or five other companies following ves Beans lead is they share the revenue. So they have a structured agreement that depends on Bitcoin's price, how much revenue gets shared and their minimum. And there are Maxima, but the idea is that the municipal has a guaranteed offtaker of power. They use that to get a loan to pay for the CapEx to be compliant, and then they share in the profits and that helps them pay off that loan over time. And that's essentially what's missing from the mandate from the EPA to capture all your gas and at least flare it.

Troy Cross (01:13:20):

Right? And then vest beans doing other stuff like they're looking at charging truck batteries because a lot of these landfills are actually located along the internet interstates. And if we're going to an electric truck fleet, that's a whole lot of electrical demand that doesn't exist. Now where there isn't supply, there isn't generation, there isn't transmission. So you could run a landfill generator and mine on it, and then when a truck comes through, you charge that truck and charge them 50 cents a kilo hour and then the truck leaves and you go back to mining, right? Ed <laugh> you or could if it gets grid connected, you could feed a grid, you could put batteries there, feed the batteries for grid balancing. There's a whole bunch of things that the municipal could do that might pay more than Bitcoin long term. But in the short term, Bitcoin is the best paying. And yeah, the, it's of course gonna be tricky. And I don't know, I'm a philosopher or not a financeer, I don't know how this is gonna go, but some offtaker of your power is better than none. And right now the plan according to Adam for a lot of these municipalities is just to be in violation of the EPA requirement, just ignore it because they can't afford to buy this GCCS system.

Will Szamosszegi (01:14:46):

Yeah, super wise. Super. Going off of that I think that question that you just asked is one of the most important and fascinating parts. And Troy, you did a great job addressing that question. I actually also want to touch on it from very technical, like Bitcoin minor perspective now that Troy's touched on the philosophical side. So as a Bitcoin minor, as you're seeking out the cheapest power, and methane is a layup in the sense that it's already going to waste. So if you can find a way to finance the CapEx to be able to capture it, you can use it to power Bitcoin mining and you have an inherent competitive advantage because you're getting very, very cheap energy. And as Troy mentioned I actually just spoke with Adam, CEO of spen, but the episode hasn't been launched yet. What he explained to me was fascinating and how they've gone about solving that problem.

Will Szamosszegi (01:15:42):

What he explained was that the upfront cost to set up the power generation side is much more expensive than you would traditionally have from if you were just going and tapping into other sources of power. But the incentives are so strong between the municipality and with the actual cost of energy. Once your system is up and running that they have a profit and they've set it up as a profit share where the incentives are aligned. So when it's very expensive they can get costs of power down to I believe it's half a cent, half cent or 1 cent, something along those lines. So it's pretty much free energy at that point. But then when mining is extremely profitable, it'll go up to 4 cents per kilowatt hour. So what you're looking at is you're looking at in the times when things are very tough for minors and profitability is getting squeezed, these guys are the cheapest power source on the network pretty much.

Will Szamosszegi (01:16:49):

And then when things are great, miners are making a lot of money at that point, this wasted flow of energy is now being capitalized at 4 cents per kilowatt hour, which is just absolutely astounding for the landfill and for the municipality. And what he's explained is right now they're going through their pilot project, but later on after the pilot project they've got I think it's like 10 or 12 or 15, something like that. I don't remember the exact number, but they've got quite a few other municipalities that are ready to hop on board after they have this pilot planned out. So tying this all back to what Troy discussed and the future vision for the entire network, you can see that the incentives align for the cheapest energy in the protocol and the cheapest energy. In this case, we're talking about the wasted energy. And when you tie all of that together, the incentive is that the methane capture and the waste utilization to power Bitcoin mining is going to continue to grow and you're going to continue to see a larger part of the network being powered by this. And that's when that's how you get to those types of predictions and outcomes that Daniel Baton and some others are talking about is you have a lot of people that are believing that methane and these carbon negative sources will power the network and that will lead to proof of work. Not only tying Bitcoin and the value and sound money to real world energy, but to also actually combating the global warming issue and climate change and being a carbon negative lever for all of humanity.

Speaker 8 (01:18:43):

Helpful. Thanks guys.

Speaker 9 (01:18:49):

I just wanna say thank you. Can you hear me?

Will Szamosszegi (01:18:53):

Yep.

Speaker 9 (01:18:54):

I just wanna say thank you guys for this great conversation. And the question that I have is about the existing big publicly traded bitcoin mining companies and whether or not there's any conversation going on privately within them to engage in this kind of movement towards methane capture sites.

Troy Cross (01:19:19):

Well, if I were having those conversations, I wouldn't be talking about them on this space, but I think that pressure is on public minors to plot a path to carbon neutrality at some point, I don't know, 2050 or whatever or deal with the White House maybe some kind of executive order, probably an executive order that would be challenged in the courts. And I don't know that it would be enforceable, but the EPA is going to be leaning on publicly traded Bitcoin minors to well, this is what we see from the White House to show that their existence is compatible with the White House's goals for the country's emissions. And I've got some problems with what the White House is doing. I don't think they're treating this industry fairly. I think they should try to regulate energy use broadly. And any energy user should be treated like any other energy user.

Troy Cross (01:20:29):

Bitcoin's being targeted unfairly and I will be fighting that. But at the same time it is what it is. They're the administration and this is what they're planning to do is put the squeeze on until they get a plan from, I think it's impossible to regulate mining per se. Anybody can do it with any power anywhere in the world. But they do have a point of ingress in publicly traded minors because they are under the jurisdiction of the S C S C is about to make broad requirements of companies in general on ESG reporting. We'll see what that actually looks like. But they're gonna have to detail their scope one, scope two, scope three emissions. And the White House made it very clear that the number one thing they're looking for is information they want. Basically they wanna look inside the BMC data, they want to see from each publicly traded mining company, where's your power coming from?

Troy Cross (01:21:34):

What's your emissions profile? Are you doing stuff with the heat? They're gonna want to know all that. What were you buying renewable energy certificates? What's your flexibility? You participating in demand response and every publicly traded minor is gonna need a plan to deal with the feds epa, S E c, Department of Energy, et cetera. And one way they could deal with it is look at their overall carbon profile and look at what percentage of flared mining, flare based mining flare replacing mining or vent replaced mining they would need to do to hit carbon neutrality. And then they could just simply do that. So if they're an average minor, I think that's about one 30th. So a company like Marathon or a core Scientific could be like, yeah, we got a lot of different facilities we got, we're running on mostly behind meter at Wind Farm in West Texas, but we've also got natural gas plants in North Dakota, but we also have help to finance the gas capture for three landfills.

Troy Cross (01:22:56):

And this is the carbon negative equivalent of that activity. And it puts us at even or negative as a company. So it's what we're thinking about the network as a whole. Any minor could do this. And if I were a minor, a large minor, I would be doing the hard math on this right now. How much would it cost me to strike a deal with a landfill? How much gas could I capture? How much CO2 equivalent, negative equivalent would that be? And then can I just walk up to the EPA and say, Yeah, one 30th of my business is on this landfill and I've met carbon negative and leave me alone <laugh>. So I think that's kind of, that's the answer. So twofold answer, it's kind of like they're being unfairly treated and targeted as part of the fud. It's political. I think the White House offices science and technology policy is, I thought that was a really hopeful development actually relative to what we have seen from activist groups, from senators and Congress, congressional reps. Nevertheless, it's targeting our industry, but it's targeting industry in a way. I feel like we can actually meet and landfill is like, to me, one of the easiest ways of meeting it.

Speaker 5 (01:24:12):

But Troy, do you really think the EPA would leave us alone if we did that

Troy Cross (01:24:20):

We could make it really harmful?

Speaker 5 (01:24:22):

<laugh>? No. The situation in which the EPA ever leaves us alone. Yeah,

Troy Cross (01:24:28):

Of course I agree with that. But here's the thing, I think they're not our target. What you see in this political conversation is there's fundraising letters being written on the backs of Bitcoin mining as a target from at the congressional level and at the like NGO level or whatever. But we have to tell our own narrative. If our narrative is compelling, we undermine the political will and force. Right now, everyone's freaking out about bitcoin mining. They want to know what are you doing to stop these Bitcoin mins, right? We tell our own story. It's a true story. It's a way better story. And the political will is gone. And when the political will is gone, then the E EPA loses its teeth. Of course regulators gonna regulate, right? <laugh> regulators gonna regulate, they wanna do that. But if we tell our story and it's compelling and it's like, no, we're on a path to carbon neutrality, not by 2050 like you jokers, but by 2025, look at our trajectory that it's like, holy crap, this is the most fastest decarbonizing industry that exists. This is one of the greenest industries in the world. This is necessary in order for our new renewable grid to work. You're only gonna hit your targets if we exist because you need flexible loads like us Cetera, et cetera, right? So I think we can push back.

Speaker 10 (01:25:59):

Yeah, I completely agree. I'm

Troy Cross (01:26:01):

Sorry, go ahead. You got it Logan.

Will Szamosszegi (01:26:03):

No, you got it. Well,

Speaker 10 (01:26:04):

I was gonna say, so to go on Troy's point, the EPA and all these other regulating bodies, they can pretend that they're politically neutral, but as everyone here probably knows that's far from the case. So if the political wins, the ideological wins of the people change, then they're going to follow suit. And this is already the case because if the EPA was truly objective, they'd be looking at the awful waste of the boom and bus cycle caused by the Federal Reserve and easy money and the infamously energetic waste of the military industrial complex. And they'd be like, Yo government, you gotta curb your waste here. But of course they don't do that. They go after the new competitors. So all we have to do is change the ideological wins, save the money, and save the world. Go ahead, Will.

Will Szamosszegi (01:26:48):

Well, it it's tough to follow after that <laugh>. Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more Logan. Then I was just gonna make a quick comment on the original question you had asked there, Nathan talking about the public companies and how they're viewing it, right? And I've had the opportunity to speak with a lot of the different public companies CEOs and I can guarantee you that it's a topic of conversation within all their with in it's inevitably part of every single conversation because when you're leading an organization, there is some type of regulatory risk. When you go and you're communicating with your investors and trying to show how you're gonna protect their capital you just gotta make sure that you have a response to that because that we can all see is one of the massive attack vectors on the industry. And if you're positioning your company in a way where you can at least communicate the other side or show, hey, we're addressing this.

Will Szamosszegi (01:27:52):

We understand that it's a potential issue on the industry, but this is how we're responding to it, then it, it's something that is going to allow you to succeed as a company within this industry. So it's one of those things where it's a very unfortunate reality right now that the industry, our industry has to stand up against. But at the end of the day when you dig into it, conversations like this and when you dig into the actual facts, that's what's gonna put us on the right side of things. And just how you have the incentives aligning for capturing methane. I think the incentives align here for our industry to be able to really combat this narrative and show, hey, we're a very environmentally friendly industry and you can't use that narrative to shut us down.

Troy Cross (01:28:46):

I think it's kind of unprecedented that this is why it's so hard for people to grow that an energy user and a consumer could be a net benefit. When you look at these kind of cost estimates of how much abatement of mitigating methane or mitigating co2, how much is it gonna cost us? There are forms that actually save us money and those tend to be better insulation building practices, stuff like that. Passive homes where you both save money and you produce less warming gases, but they're all conservation except for methane burning. There isn't any other one of these activities that both combines like saving money and saving warming gases. There isn't one except for burning methane that actually uses electricity. So it's just a kind of shocker. And the White House actually gets this. They showed awareness and in cost of Samara's space yesterday he showed awareness that for instance, converting flared gas into Bitcoin or vented gas would be a net climate positive and also generate revenue and also displace other forms of mining since it's a limited pool.

Troy Cross (01:30:15):

So we have a big educational task ahead of us, but no other industry can say, Ah, yeah, yes, but we provide a flexible load and flexibility actually is required for you to reach carbon neutrality. No other industry can say, our business, Adam tweeted something like this after the White House report was Lee. He's like, This is my business model. It appears in a White House document in an administration document. So our narrative is actually really, really amazing and positive and we are getting recognition for that narrative even within the administration itself, which is in a party that's extremely hostile to bitcoin mining. So I think that's something to celebrate and I'm somewhat optimistic about it.

Speaker 4 (01:31:05):

I really agree with that. And I think that also, sorry before I ducked out onto a call and did not leave the room, so sorry for ghosting. I really just wanna highlight what Troy just said around, of all of the technologies that are designed that are kind of fall in the category of green tech, so all different types of storage carbon capture and sequestration, all everything that is applied other than Bitcoin is a technology that drastically increases capital expenditure. It makes it more and more difficult, more and more economically difficult to reduce. In this case, methane Bitcoin literally pays for itself. It makes business models more profitable and it does this while making these projects. So talking about wind incentivizing the build out of wind solar storage, it makes those projects, if you structure them correctly, more economically viable and easier to get off the ground. It does the same thing for flare mitigation. I think that's just one thing that as we kind of continue to fight this narrative or continuing to harp on, I love Troy that you reply to everyone and you reply thoughtfully and you hit the right points. So thank you for that service that you were providing.

Speaker 10 (01:32:40):

Do we have any other questions? I love that we've gone for a solid 50 minutes, longer than expected. So Troy, first of all, thank you very much for the extra 50 minutes. We all really appreciate it, but everyone's having a good time, everyone's learning. And man, thank goodness this is being recorded. There's too much here, there's too much here for I'm gonna wanna document later. But does anyone have any questions before we wrap it up here?

Will Szamosszegi (01:33:07):

Think we're good? We'll, Logan, I want to thank you for doing such a great job hosting this and for everyone out there who's listening during the spaces I was after Ken hopped off, I was texting Logan saying, after every single one of these Twitter spaces, whatever topic we touch on, I want us to leave time after. So I can just hear Logan lay out all of his incredible ideas. Cuz you guys will see in future episodes and Twitter spaces, we do Logan is one of the smartest people I've ever met in my entire life and he's got so many incredible ideas that are gonna be like a bonus to any future. One of these that you go to for size mining, there are, there's gonna be a lot of other topics aside from the one that we set up to actually discuss. So I just wanna put that out there and thank all you guys for coming onto this episode today.

Speaker 10 (01:34:05):

Thanks Will for the very kind words. Thanks again to everyone who came to join. Just to emphasize one more time. We'll be having these roughly once a week very soon. Thanks again to our first ever guest, Troy Cross. We all really appreciate your time and your valuable insights. All right everyone, we'll update, upload this recording once it's ready. But for now, have a great rest of your day, everyone. Take care.

Troy Cross (01:34:25):

Thanks for having me, Logan. Appreciate it. Thanks Will. And Kent and Alex and Nathan and Sergio. So it's a great conversation. I think the future is very bright for our industry, despite the fact that Mins are up against it right now. And I believe in Bitcoin and it's ultimate success. And I think the future of the network, just the future of Bitcoin is totally up to us. Plebs, <laugh> in our right, we make it this conversation. It's amazing. This community is highly educated on this really arcane niche topics, <laugh>, and people are incredibly thoughtful. So much so that you never know when you're gonna get get caught in a gotcha question up here because that's an incredibly knowledgeable group of people, but that's exactly what's gonna make Bitcoin continue to morph and become exactly what it takes for it to succeed and for mining to be the kind of thing that we want it to be. So thank you.

Speaker 10 (01:35:32):

Absolutely here. Well, thanks everyone. We'll talk to you soon.

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