Bob Burnett (Barefoot Mining): Off Grid Mining, Cost of Production, and BIP110

Hi everyone, thank you for joining us again on the Proof of Pain Podcast. I have my guest here at Bob Burnett. He is an evangelist, a founder CEO at Barefoot Mining, XCTO at Gateway, board member at Ocean, at Advisor, and I'm sure many more things we'll find out today. So I just wanted to thank you for coming on Bob. It's, uh, I've been following you for a very long time. And when I found out that you were actually one of the main people at Gateway computer that shocked me because I always wanted one. I always wanted one when I was a younger and I had to settle for a compact persario, but, uh, we had a story that wasn't too far away from us. And I would always wander in and, and just dream. So, um, I would love, I know you've, you constantly gave your background, but I would love to know your background, um, especially your time at, uh, I think it was Zeneath and then going into, uh, um, Gateway. Gateway, sure. Yeah. Well, thank you. Thanks for having me on Tony. Um, I, you know, pretty early in my life, um, was enamored with the sciences and engineering. And, and fact, part of the reason I, I'll even take a little divergence here is, you know, we're, we're, we're close to a lot of the SpaceX stuff. And I was very inspired by Apollo missions. Um, I was born in the early 60s. And so putting men on the moon and in this space was just an awe inspiring thing for me. And that kind of drew me into math and science and, you know, ultimately engineering. And we're going to be hopefully launching some folks and going back to the moon here shortly. And that, that's pretty cool. And, and I, uh, one of my earlier memories is of sitting in a classroom and watching the rockets take off. They used to, you know, when these have the big TVs and they would roll them in on the card and, you know, we got to watch, you know, these, uh, whether it was, you know, the, the, the take off or, you know, some of the shots of the guys out and outer space and all that. That left a big, big mark for me. So ultimately though, um, in the late 70s, um, we saw the early days of the personal computer start to emerge. I started to code initially. Um, did a lot of that in the late 70s. Ultimately decided to go to school for computer engineering. Um, then my first job out of school was with Zina, if you mentioned, and those that are younger might not know this, but the brand Zineth was a huge brand in America. It was really the last two American TV manufacturer. And the inventor of the remote control, by the way. Um, yeah. But before me, but, um, the inventor of the remote control, which was pretty cool thing. Well, um, they had a personal computer division and in the, in 1986, when I got out of school, the personal computer was just kind of showing its first legs, very expensive. And I was blessed enough to go to a company, an IBM was the king of the hill, by the way, at that point, they had invented the IBM PC and then what was called the IBM AT in 1984. The I, the, the P, the AT was kind of the pinnacle standard, um, for computing for several years, probably for two decades. And so we, we started building what we're called PC clones or PC compatible. It was back in that era, which was, you know, what we're trying to do was emulate that design. We had to do it in clean rooms to not violate patents, but make it so that the same software and the same hardware would run in our computer as was in there, as is in theirs. And so, um, I started out in that era, um, was fortunate enough to work in a, in a small role initially on some things like the world's first laptop computer, just, you know, a, a, a dream to be able to be on some of those teams. And I will say we knew what we were doing was important and, and would change the world, but even in the midst of it, we didn't probably understand the degree to which, for instance, you know, working on the first laptop, how big that would ultimately become. Right. Um, I was there for six years in similar capacities and product development and then left to do a start up with a couple other guys because we saw a path to push mobile computing really small, really thin, really light. And that might sound obvious right now, but at the time, like the typical laptop was like a 10 to 12 pound product that costs like $68,000. And so if you listened to just the market research groups, you would think that what we had to do was not make them smaller and lighter and more mobile, but to make them cheaper. And, but, you know, we, we had a different vision, which was there'll be a time later on for that. Right now, let's, we're not mobile enough. So we did that as a startup funded by Mitsui and Sanio in Japan. And ultimately created a product that was purchased by Gateway, it's called the Gateway Handbook. It was in 1991 there first, for a intemobile computing. I got to know the management team, including Ted Wade, who's the CEO and founder of Gateway. Through that and make kind of try to abbreviate the story a little bit. He, he liked the product. He liked me. So he, he kind of bought the company to, to do that. So I moved into Gateway, was put in charge of the mobile computing division there and built that to a billion dollar business unit. And then a few other changes, but then ultimately came the chief technical officer there. Uh, 2001. And, you know, at that point, you mentioned going into Gateway stores at one point, you know, and, and, uh, we had opened these retail stores, which ultimately got copied by Apple. So the Apple store is actually a copy of the Gateway store. We had, I think we peaked around 500 locations around the country at one point. And we, and while I was the CTO, we moved into plasma TVs, L, um, LCD TVs, MP3 players, digital cameras, this whole suite of consumer electronics products. So that, as an engineer, being able to touch and feel and kind of, you know, lead the company's direction in those areas was pretty exciting. And, uh, we, we ultimately, we peaked a right around that period around 2001 as a 10 billion dollar company, being 10 billion dollars a year in revenue. We were making a billion a year in profit. We had 25,000 employees. Um, we reached the fortune 200, 200 largest companies in the world in that period. And again, those are, those are 25 years ago numbers, right? So in today's terms, that would be like being probably a 30, 35 billion dollar company. This is an example. So it was a great ride. Um, I eventually left. Um, actually tried to retire. I found out that's not what it's all made out to be. Um, never, never retire. Um, you know, just seek financial independence and the ability to work on what you can, but don't, don't retire. It's a death sentence. Um, and, and I mean that in a literal sense, by the way, a literal sense is a death sentence. People, people that retire, especially that retire early don't live long lives statistically. I learned that later after trying to retire early. So I know I'm almost 62, but I have no, no retirement in sight and no plans for it. Anyway, um, I started an incubator in South Dakota. Did that for about 15 years. But in 2017, kind of overlapping with that, um, I got a phone call one day from an ex gateway person who was starting a Ethereum mining farm. So back then, again, for those maybe new Ethereum was a proof of work based protocol. And he called up because he was having difficulty finding professionally designed equipment. And he was, he needed 800, he needed 800 servers each with a GPUs. So, and he had two problems. One, he couldn't get them professionally designed and two, he couldn't get access to the Nvidia chips that he needed. So, um, I started a company to fulfill that order. So, which was about a $6 million order. It was an interesting kind of thing. I had no plans to make this company, but I got an opportunity for a $6 million order. Yeah, you got to take it. So, well, okay, I guess I'm, I guess I'm, and, and, you know, it was something. It was a reason to start designing computers again, right? So, that was like, hey, that's, that's what I'm good at, right? So, um, so it was, it was, you know, and I did it in just full transparency. I did it as a computer guy who had a, who had somebody wanted to buy a bunch of computers from me. That's how I looked at it initially. After that, um, fulfilling that order, we had the design. We had a very good relationship with Nvidia. Um, Gateway was the first company to design Nvidia, silicon into a computer. And so the, the, and they have the same management, by the way, it's phenomenal. Like they're, most of their executive team back from the early 90s is still in place in Nvidia. Even though they, which by the way, goes back to like, never retire thing. Like you talk about guys that could have retired, but, you know, continue on. You look at like Jensen leads Nvidia now and he clearly, you know, he has a purpose and a mission in life. And he's doing something that's changing the world. Um, I don't think it, it's obviously not about money anymore for him. So, um, we started to go to other people to say, hey, would you, would you like one? And we had some success. But this time, as we were asking people if they wanted these computers, a fair amount of the people didn't know how to run them. They were, they were intrigued by this. They wanted to mine Ethereum, but they didn't want to run a server like that. And so they, it became necessary for us to start a hosting operation in order to sell the computers. Like if we didn't have the hosting operation, we couldn't sell the computer. So, okay, I guess we're in the hosting business. And then we kind of realized how profitable these things were. Very, very profitable. Again, in 2017, we just studied the history of cryptocurrency and, you know, Ethereum and Bitcoin, you know, it was ripping back then. Yeah. So, we started taking the profits and started to mine for ourselves. At some point in 2018, though, I started to look seriously at really what is Ethereum. And so, like I say, I backdoored my way into Bitcoin because I looked at Ethereum and I started to have concerns. The first one was the leader of Ethereum, which would be a scary statement in of itself, the talent buterin, had set a mission to eliminate proof of work and go to proof of stake. He's like, "Oh, you're trying to put me out of business, the talent?" That's nice. And then, of course, realized that my fate was controlled by one person. And then realized, well, if my fate is controlled by one person, everybody's fate is controlled by one person. Then learn things like, hey, the money supply isn't fixed, the issuances isn't fixed, Ethereum Foundation had pre-mined a whole bunch of Ethereum. There were all these kind of awards. And that forced me to look harder at other ones and ultimately found Bitcoin. And so, we've had a pivot as our company to wean ourselves off of the Ethereum and toward Bitcoin. And so, um, barefoot mining became what it is today, probably in the 2019-2020 period, as we completely divested of all the Ethereum stuff and made Bitcoin our sole mission. Awesome. The going back to the beginning of barefoot mining, can you explain a little bit more of the design part of it? Because what exactly were you designing? Well, when we looked at what would happen, so back then, getting into a little more detail, a lot of those folks, number one, they used what they used to call open-air or wire frame designs. Meaning, yeah, the metal frame. Yeah. So, I mean, in simple terms, they would go by a metal rack, like a little shoe rack or something like that from Walmart. And they would zip tie the motherboard and the other components. Well, yeah. If you're running one machine in your garage, that might work okay. But if you think about it from having dozens or hundreds in a tight space, what you've just done is created Airflow Chaos. So, what you want, and it goes back to my laptop days, you probably people don't think about it today, but cooling a laptop is not a simple thing. And you had to control the airflow. Most of the early notebooks had fans, and ultimately they became pretty passive cooling, but what you had to do is you had to have a defined place where the air enters the unit and a defined place where the air exits the unit. And you have to make sure that the cool air that's coming into the unit properly flows over all the hotspots. And doesn't pull because air is much like a river. You know, when you have an eddy and a river, I mean, it's not bad for a river, but it's really bad if that eddy happens to be hot air. So, imagine that, right? Hot air. So, what we had to do is we had a client initially who wanted to put 800 of these in one facility. So, what we did was working on. So, a lot of the design was the chassis, the airflow. We obviously were very careful with the power supply, but we also ended up. We worked with NVIDIA and a company in China, but we also ultimately didn't use graphics cards. So, what we did was we used the chips, but we designed specific cards that had no connectors. So, we were just mining Ethereum, right? So, we were. And by the way, that made NVIDIA comfortable that we weren't creating a gray market for video cards, too, that would have disrupted them, that even made them more apt to give us chips, because we had a special card that all it could do was mine. And it could mine Ethereum or, God, only know, Ravencoyne, Mimblewimble, there were all these bullshit coins, but. We could use those. So, really, that's what it was about Tony, was creating a chassis and system that had proper airflow for enterprise kind of applications, and then matching the GPU card. It wasn't a video card, it was a GPU card. It could crunch numbers, but it didn't drive any video output. Are you implementing any of these designs and this chassis and this custom system were you able to transition that into the Bitcoin mining? So, what happened was, again, reverse the clock, it's 2018, 2019, we're getting less enamored with Ethereum. Our first thought was, yeah, let's design our own thing, but unfortunately, that requires the design of an ASIC. And one thing, again, for those people, I'm very particular about using Word. So, an ASIC is an application-specific integrated circuit. It is the chip. It is not a system. So, people have a tendency to use the term ASIC to refer to, let's say, an S19 or an M30 or something like that. Those are not ASICs. Those are mining systems, mining rigs. I'm okay if you want to, I actually still call them servers, compute servers, but I think all those are applicable. Do not call them ASICs. It's sloppy language. But designing an ASIC, which is the chip of the complexity required to my Bitcoin is a big job. Now, I am involved in one now, interestingly, maybe we can talk about that later. But it costs ultimately, it costs tens of millions of dollars to bring an ASIC, the chip to market. And we didn't have that kind of money, or do we have that time? So, what we did was, we, at that time, of course, Bitmain and What's Minor were prominent in the market, but there was another player of BitFury. BitFury was a European-based company, and they did not have a U.S. distributor. So, we met with BitFury and we signed an agreement to become the U.S. distributor of BitFury equipment. And so, we couldn't design our own, but we had access to it. Now, unfortunately, you don't hear the name BitFury, although they still produce a small amount. They still have ASICs, and they still produce a small amount. But they fell behind the curve. They had an ASIC design that was coming out in 2021, or supposed to come out in 2021, that would have competed with which at the time would have been the S19s. And they screwed up. They got six months, eight months behind the development curve, and they've never been able to catch up. So, but anyway, that gave us access to equipment, and we, so we started selling that equipment to our customers, to other mining companies, and we started sprouting up our own mining operations at a little more scale at that point. And so, barefoot, what barefoot does, by the way, barefoot, we have kind of the technical expertise for mining, a lot of the administrative functions, but sitting underneath barefoot, I'm not sure of the exact count, or something like 18 or 19 other mining organizations with other names. And we have a financial interest in all of them, but we have outside investors in each one as well. So, we work as a kind of, each of these companies, we are the general partner, so we are in owner, we manage the business, operate the business, but other people are investors. Part of our value proposition to them is, instead of buying mining rigs, what you can buy are essentially shares in a mining company. And at that point, you are now entitled to distributions of the profits of the company. So, what barefoot mining does now is we manage, we are an umbrella company, so barefoot sits at the top of the pyramid, so to say. And we have the, we have mining expertise, we have administrative functions, we have the people that do the books, all that sort of stuff. And what we do is we go out and seek advantageous power situations. That we start with the power. If we find one, we'll just take a simple example, we find three megawatts of power at three cents per kilowatt hour, just as an example. We'll then form a unique company of which barefoot owns some, if we could fund it all ourselves, wonderful we do. But these tend to get expensive. So, typically what will happen is we act as the general partner of this new company. So, we operate it, we do everything necessary, but then we bring in outside investors who have equity in that specific site. So, and it's not just in the compute servers, it's in the entire thing. So, if it's off grid, they're buying the generators, they're on the containers, they own the networking equipment, they're owning the whole thing. And we operate the company. Every month, we take the free cash flow from the company, whatever that is. And we distribute it in Bitcoin to the investors. So, it's a way for investors to actually own part of a mining company, but still get cash flow in Bitcoin. And they also get the tax advantages and things like that. So, like bonus depreciation and those sort of things flow through. Now, we do also have a branch that does do traditional hosting. So, if somebody, usually the minimum investment required to be in one of those will be $50 to $100,000. And for obvious reasons, not everybody wants to do that. And so, people that have, maybe they have $5,000 they want to deploy, we do still have a hosting arm and perform that function for people as well. But most of what we do is in the other side of creating these mining companies. And we have 18 or not, I'm not sure these account, 18 or 19 of those sites scattered across the country right now. What we've also kind of merged to is realizing that consistently available low cost power is getting harder and harder to find. And we also have learned that being dependent on a third party utility company is a dangerous proposition. So, we've largely moved off grid. We're not excluding on grid forever, but the last 10 projects or so have all been off grid because we're able to consistently produce power very inexpensively. We are sovereign, which should resonate with Bitcoiners. Because if you're on grid, there are risks that I think get rarely talked about. One is you're dependent on the competency of a third party to provide the power. No, the US grid is pretty good, but you're dependent on their competency. Two, you're dependent that they don't change the rules. And that can happen because the utility company wants. And even if you have a PPA, a power purchase agreement or something like that, you're really in an inferior position if they want to change the rules. Like in the region, we have a lot of our on grid stuff is in South Dakota. And our power provider is Mid-American energy primarily, which is a Warren Buffett company. So, I probably shouldn't say this publicly, but I will. Like if we ended up in a dispute with them that went legal, we don't have the pockets, the fight them. We're going to lose. And so they really can do whatever they want. Now maybe if you're marathon or riot, you'd feel comfortable that you could battle them, but for most anybody else, you couldn't. But beyond that, you have to worry about legislators and regulators who can change rules. There's Bitcoin mining has as I think a lot of people know been kind of the black sheep and an unwanted entity in a lot of places. There are a lot of places that we're not welcome. It's kind of even gotten worse now because AI and data centers are now becoming something that even a lot of communities don't like. Now, and so whether it's direct attempts to ban this type of business, again, I think are probably unconstitutional, but can you fight it? I don't know. And the second part is, are they, are they going to use some other form like some a weird noise ordinance or something like that to try to effectively enforce a ban, even if they can't directly ban what you're doing? So these are all risks that are lesser off-grid than they are on grid and not 100% eliminated. And in the worst case, though, I think if you're on grid, you have a greater risk of, especially at a like a federal level of something happening. Now, I'm not here to say, let's say, Trump is the greatest thing since sliced bread, I have issues, but as I wear my barefoot mining hat, it has been phenomenal to have an administration that is not our enemy because the previous administration was horrible. And a lot of the fears that I talk about, you know, Biden, Joe Biden in the 2023 and 2024 budgets that he proposed for the country attempted to create a 30% federal tax on Bitcoin mining electricity usage. So it got defeated, but it got seriously laid into the budget process before it got cut. So these risks are real. And we don't know what happens in three years. We don't know who's going to be there. And so, you know, if, if AOC is president Elizabeth Warren is the secretary of energy, well, we're going to be in for some pain, right? They call this proof of pain. Well, we're going to, we're going to have some pain. And I even tell some of the folks that I work with in Texas. There's a lot, I don't have anything in Texas by the way, but not that I'm opposed to it, but there's a lot of companies that are just in Texas. And I, and I will tell them, like, hey, I think you're taking in an ordinary risk being so dependent on Texas because if let's say at the federal level, we had that sort of thing happen. AOC's president and Elizabeth Warren is secretary of energy. If at the same time in Texas, Beto, or York, uh, becomes governor. That's the kind of the leading democratic guy there. You're going to have issues. They're, they're going to come hard at you. So, um, uh, I'm probably way off the question that you ask, because I don't even remember what it is. I have a tendency to ramble, but, um, we, you asked me what barefoot does, right? So, but, but that's part of my job. I guess I kind of wrapped that back around. You know, part of my job is to identify these spots, find this advantageous power situation and it includes things like we call it jurisdictional risk. What is the risk in this community, in this state, in this country of, um, community resistance, but it doesn't even have to be laws and regulations. It can just be, we don't want to be in a place where people are, are standing outside our fence with signs and blowing whistles all day. Like, that's just not appealing to me. Yeah, I think that's happened to, I think Riot has, uh, has experienced that. Uh, what do you, what would you say is the hardest part of making your own power and being off grid? Well, I mean, there is no backup, right? So, when a generator goes down and that's going to happen, um, we, for instance, lost a generator at our, we have a site in Indiana working off of anaerobic digestion, a couple one megawatt generators and we've lost one of them, alternator failed. Um, when an alternator fails on a one megawatt generator, you don't go down to auto zone and get a new one and slap it in there. Like, it's, you know, a 70 to a hundred thousand dollar repair and it takes several weeks to get the part because they, they've not, there's no such thing as an off the shelf. Yeah, you can't Amazon that piece. Yeah. So, um, so yeah, so, you know, and that over a course of time that will happen, there are things you can do, to minimize the risk that we must try to do. We're very responsible about when we do maintenance and rebuilds and those sort of things, but these are mechanical devices that we're out. Um, so, so that's the hard thing is operational. It's just keeping it going. We, we, we are bringing up quite a bit of new capacity as we speak in Pennsylvania. We have been for the last several weeks. And, uh, we've been fighting this weather. Like, it's hard. I know, try to, try to bring in a, uh, like we, in, in Pennsylvania, we use some upstream data products and they come with a, um, 325 kilowatt gen set, the Mesa, the Mesa engine integrated into an upstream container. So it's a, it's a V12 engine, um, 22 liters. It's a monster, you know, it's just an absolute beast. And in this, the, the container is divided into two, one half holds the engine. The other half holds roughly 90 servers and weighs several tons and we're going into remote sites. This is off of a natural gas well, right? Well, we got to, we got to get a truck and a crane up this hill, um, in 14 inches of snow in 10 degree weather and it's a miserable, difficult, difficult job. Um, so, so those are, those are some of the things that we struggle with. But, you know, what we get is tower that's, you know, let's just say, you know, well under three cents per kilowatt hour. We can keep our uptimes well over 90 percent. All, you know, and, um, and we plan, we budget, I told you about the alternative, you know, we generally have budgets and reserves for when those sort of things happen. The bad thing is we don't have a way to operate those units so that capital tied up in the compute servers at that point is, um, is not giving us an ROI. But all the sites that we have, generally like this one, we're doing in Pennsylvania off of one well head. We'll have 15 of these gen sets. So we, we may be doing maintenance on one at a given point in time. One may have a mechanical problem, but we're never, that's kind of the model we've moved to is lots of smaller gen sets that add up to a bigger footprint instead of like one big gen set because now it's not all or nothing. So it, you know, the likelihood that we're always doing something is, I would assume that most of your nine to five, I guess you would say, is spent searching for these sites or are people actually seeking you and saying, I have this property. Is it, is it you seeking people out at this point or is it people seeking you? Um, it's some of both. We've, we've become known for this now. So that helps a lot. So we do, it's a lot easier than it was five years ago. It's, it's probably more people finding us. And then, you know, we have to evaluate probably 10 of them for every one that actually ends up being viable. There's a billion reasons why it could not be viable, right? So there's a lot of work that goes into that. Of course, I do a lot of work with my investors, those who have already invested in those who are interested investing. I spend a lot of time with those folks, um, as well. Yeah. You've mentioned before the, the horse class. Can you explain that a little bit better? So for those interested in a deeper dive of this, I wrote an article. I just looked it up recently. It's five years old now. I'm amazed. It was five years ago, but for Bitcoin magazine. And this was the time period in which the, we started to really see the emergence of the public mining companies. That was when that really started to go. And we started to see mining really move from smaller sites or individuals to, to corporate. Right. And it scared me because um Bitcoin, if it's all big guys is bad. Talk about why that is second, but I call the big ones elephants. And let's just let's say it's a little bit of a foggy line, but let's just say it's 20 megawatts. If you have 20 megawatts or more at one site, that's an elephant site. And the thing about elephants are, you know, just like the animal, they're big and powerful. But they also take a long time to get up and running. Um, usually a year or more by the time you raise the money, get the permits, go through all the rigor or mole. Um, it takes a long time. Um, they are very easy to find and identify. They're all, and they're almost all grid connected. Right. So, um, because producing that much power is, is very rare off grid. So, um, so I, I, one of the things I say because we've kind of talked about some of the political stuff is it makes them easy to hunt as well. They're, they're very exposed. So, a lot easier to hunt an elephant and at the other end of the spectrum. Um, if you own a bidax or an S19 as an individual, you run it in your garage or have it in your office, you're what I call a rabbit. You're individually not really significant. But collectively, you can be material. If, if a, if a farmer has one rabbit in his cabbage field, right, doesn't care. But if he gets 500 rabbits in his cabbage field, he's got a problem. And the problem with rabbits additionally, oh, it's good in the case of Bitcoin is if you shoot one rabbit or you start trying to eliminate them, they scatter. Like, and they hide. So, you can't ever kill all the rabbits. You can think of them as cockroaches too, right? You know, like, you just, you're never going to get them all. So, they're a very important part of the Bitcoin ecosystem because they're this like base layer that that just um, is immune to to this. And, and, and as long as we have a reasonable number of rabbits, then our ecosystem is in a good spot. But the problem with rabbits is that at least right now there aren't enough people willing to be rabbits. And the elephants have been growing way faster than the rabbits. Because it's pretty hard if, if you have 20 megawatts that goes up, it's a quick math. 20 megawatts. That would be pretty 90. You know, that might be um, 20,000 systems. And they tend, if they go in, they're 20,000 higher end systems, right? Like they're S21 to 70s, let's say. So, you get 20,000 of those. Well, it takes a lot of freaking bid access to offset that hash rate. So, very, very difficult to do. But the horses are where I specialize. I think you could think of them as small to medium-sized commercial operations. It might be a few hundred kilowatts to several megawatts. More off-grid than on-grid. Very easy to hide. I give this example. This is an on-grid one. I have two megawatts in South Dakota. And they're two containers. And they're, they're painted to look right next to the building. They sit next to which is a burrito factory. And it just so happened, we're right close to a, a substation. And there was two megawatts of extra power right there. So, we rented some space from the burrito company and plopped our containers on the backside of the building. Anybody driving by would never know that, you know, inside there are, you know, several hundred servers mining Bitcoin. And the same in the, in the off-grid stuff, you know, typically we're in the middle of nowhere. Our, our, the facility I talked about where we had the generator go down. That's, that's inside a dairy farm in Indiana. We have, and we use the, the common-nure anaerobic desert, jession from the common-nure as the methane source. We have a hydroelectric facility in South Carolina. We have natural gas sites. It's several locations in Pennsylvania, all very rural, very remote. And, you know, probably two dozen people that know exactly where we are. So, it creates this immunity. And, you know, part of, part of my, there's actually two articles, if you read them, that there's the one on, it's called wild mining. So, wild mining, by the way, means that you, you, you mine in a way where you're sovereign, like you're free. And there's captive mining. So, most elephants are captive. Most rabbits are captive too, although they're captive and the, they're captur. The power company doesn't probably even know that they're mining. They can only see that there's power being sent to this location. The horses are kind of a mix of captive and wild, but kind of moving more toward the wild side. I think as a network, it's very important for us to keep balance. We want those elephants to not get bigger. Now, goodness is they're shrinking. Because they were, they were pushing 40% of network ash rate at one point. And I'd say they're down more in the, or low 30s now. And the horses have picked up and the rabbits are starting to do a little better too. And that gives me comfort. Because there's a second article probably don't have time for today, but, but if it's a very interesting exercise I went through, the article's called Satoshi's Heel. And it, it envisions a situation in which we've let the network get too concentrated on elephants. And then we get an AOC type come a person in charge politically and they shut down the network. And all we have left are a tiny amount of rabbits and horses. I'll tell you the summary, the summary of the story is it's where the difficulty adjustment works against us. So if, if that were to happen, and it were to happen at exactly the point of a difficulty adjustment, well, the difficulty adjustment, which most people think it works at two weeks is not two weeks. It's 2016 blocks. So if you lost 99% of the hash rate instantly, that makes sense. But the protocol thinks it's there. You have to get through 2016 blocks. Well, if you lost 99% of the hash rate, I'm going off the top of my head, it's detailed in the article, but I think it's something like three years to get to, because it's, because it's almost one block per day is essentially the, if we lost 99%, the 1% would continue on the network would be alive, but we'd get one block a day. And so it would take us three years to get to the difficulty adjustment. Now, I don't think that's going to happen at least in our lifetimes, but that's, I wrote the article as a warning, because I don't think the average Bitcoiner understands all the implications of mining centralization and of large elephants being involved. Generally, there are bad things. I'm generally quite critical of the public mining companies. I won't call any specifically, but they tend to be very fiat mindset. I think they are forced to be fiat mindset organizations. They really aren't miners. Remember, I talked earlier about my specificity. I'm being generous when I call them a miner, because they're really not. They're hashing companies with the exception of marathon. So to be a miner requires running a node, creating block templates, receiving coin based transactions and hashing, a few other things to actually involve signaling for soft forks, which I don't know what path you want to go down here in the conversation, but that's kind of on the table again. So what's happened is in today's world, almost all those things are done by the pool and almost all of the big companies, even though they would be very effective solo miners, they don't do it. They abdicate all that responsibility to the pool and they're essentially leasing their hash rate to the pool and abdicating all the responsibility of mining to the pool. Therefore, they're not miners. They're mercenary, leased, hashing organizations. I wanted to shift a little bit to it's still in the mining sphere. So cost of production right now, I think is very timely because we've had a dip in previous interviews. I've heard you say that average cost of production should be about 88,000. You can go as low, I'm assuming because of the off-site grids. You can go as low as maybe 50,000 per Bitcoin. Now that the Bitcoin price is actually dipping, we're like in the mid-75, give or take 75,000. How does that affect not only you but other miners and is that one of the reasons why the elephants are shrinking just in general, what's your opinion on Bitcoin price and how it affects cost of production or vice versa? Yeah, there's a lot going on there. So first, cost of production contrary to what often gets talked about is way more than electricity costs. Obviously, that is a major input. But maybe it's 60%, 65% of the cost of being, but there's a whole bunch of other ones, labor and insurance and rent and depreciation. These are all very real costs that must be factored in. I believe, as you've accurately stated, that the current cost of production on average across the entire network is about 88,000 dollars. There are plenty of organizations way over that and plenty of organizations way over that. That's a mean, not a median. The cheapest, I think, anybody being honest and truly counting properly can mine Bitcoin for, it's probably in the high 40s to, it was just caught, 50,000 dollars though. So that's probably the best you can do if you're counting everything. The public miners are almost all way over that 88,000 dollar number. Now, the truth of the matter is they've rarely mined profitably in their entire history. So the world of public mining for the last five years, which they've existed for five years, has been massively read over the, if they call the companies over that entire period, it's massively read. However, they continue to exist even with high market caps because the market, for whatever reason, I think it's idiotic, but for whatever reason, hasn't demanded profitability from them. They have rewarded growth over profitability. And I think it's a mistake of the investment community because they treat the public mining companies kind of like a tech stock, whereas is I'm sure you most people are familiar. Tech stocks often get a pass, like the market rewards growth. And the belief is that at some point they will reach an economy of scale and the tables will turn and they'll become massively profitable as has happened to some tech companies. But Bitcoin mining is not like that. Bitcoin mining, we are a commodity producer, you have to look at us more like you would look at a farmer or a gold miner than as a tech company. And so it requires operational excellence to be successful. But the problem has been and the reason that the elephants have gotten to be a problem, there's still a problem even though it's lesson, is that if the market rewarded growth, not profitability and operational excellence, what was happening was mining company would would invest, let's say, a hundred million dollars in expansion and get rewarded with 200 million in market cap. And then they could almost kind of like microstrategy in a way or strategy, they could kind of issue new shares against that higher market cap and see massive amounts of capital come in. And often what they would do is then retain the BIC. So the business model is kind of like, hey, let's kind of always be a treasury company, most of them. Now let's use that cash that came in to offset our operating costs and use that cash for operating costs instead of the Bitcoin will huddle the Bitcoin. And we know we're going to bet that the Bitcoin is going to go up, right? So that, what that means though, then going back to your question is that a lot of these guys have production cost it like 110 or 120 thousand dollars per Bitcoin, but they get away with it because they're actually not selling the Bitcoin. They don't have to use the sale of Bitcoin to fuel it. And so I view it as a fiat infection. Like I think it's a virus, blood over from the fiat world that has infected the mining community as well as Bitcoin in general. So that's why I said I'm largely critical of them because that actually meant that the mining network itself got too big too fast, right? Because it wasn't projections of profitability. It was projections of market cap. Now they're getting bailed out to a certain degree by AI. They're shifting to AI and they're monetizing their asset of low cost power in a different way. And then we're seeing the hash rates come down a lot, right? I mean, thank God because with this price dip, if we hadn't seen the collapse in hash rate, we would have seen a bunch of bankruptcies. Or we, you know, and even now it's risky. I mean, I think we still run the risk of a lot of people getting hurt, especially in the privately held small medium-sized mining organizations. You know, like mine, I mean, it's a hard, I'm not going to go out of business by the way, but it it it's it'd be very easy for somebody to get themselves upside. Somebody that actually put together a good business plan and was well-meaning and a good operator could easily go out of business with the way some of these conditions have played out. Yeah, some of the investors don't really in Bitcoin. It could be Bitcoin miners or it could just be the Bitcoin treasury companies. They don't look at profit. To me, at least it doesn't seem that way. They just, I think they look at it kind of like exactly like you said, like a tech company. It's more growth, which works great when the numbers are, you know, when number go up. But in general, you want a healthy company to have profits without profit. I mean, I just can't see how you function. When you bring up the concept production, that to me seems like such an obvious again, bringing back gold miners. That just seems so obvious like the price can go below that for too long because it should at least it should equalize there somehow. So the price of the company you're referring to, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, so right now you're saying between 48 and 50,000 would be the, I guess the forest. The best in the world. That's correct. Which it's funny because I think Alex Thorn from a, I forget, from Galaxy, he just recently posted that he could see us going to it's a 200 week moving average, which is about 60 or a little bit under 60. So there's a little bit of alignment there. Hopefully it doesn't go there. But if it does, how do you see Bitcoin miners being affected if we're there for a couple of months? If we saw, if we hit 60 and we stayed there for $60,000 and we stayed there for 60 days, my back, you know, just real quick guesstimate would be, you know, we'll lose another 100 exahashes in the network on top of what we've already lost. It sustains for 120. Probably lose another 100 at least that we just don't have the, um, people been hurting since mid October already. Right? So we're already what rounded up were three months into an excruciating situation for miners. And most people have some buffer. But I think we'll start seeing that run out here pretty soon. And so now the good thing is for those that are still there, as you lose hash rate, assuming we were still at 60, hash price, increases for those who stick around. Right? So that's, that's the good news for those that survive. So it's a, it's a game of survival. So like in my site, not all my sites are at 48 to 50, but I've got several. So I know those are going to still be there. And I can be, I don't want to necessarily say be the last man standing because it's operationally I should be, but it depends on how willing the public miners are to dip into their Bitcoin holdings. Now that's the real danger though. The real danger is we'll play out this kind of game theory at a bit here Tony is there is a situation a non zero chance where we plummet. And at the end of it, all that's left are poorly managed elephant companies because they had the biggest stack. Right? Even though the worst operators, but with the biggest stack. So I'm not trying to scare anybody. And then then all we have left are elephants trying to explain you why that's bad. And then we have the shittiest ones on top of it. Right? There's there is that scenario. And I would say by the way, the least ethos centric folks in the industry as well that most of the rabbits and most of the horses, I'm not saying that I agree philosophically with all of them. Or that them with me in all cases. But I think most of us do have a calling that goes beyond just the sats that we earn from our operation. We're trying to be part of securing the network and building for you know, building this like in my case for my grandkids to have a better world. And like there's there's more to it than that. But if if all of us got chased out in the end, all we might have are the people running bid acts is in the elephants. I mean that that that is the Satoshi's heel situation. I talked about now laid out for you know, the right political environment. And you know, there's there's people that would say, oh well, even if that happens, don't worry because the market will eventually then allow new people to come in and be better operators and oh, and I go, well, maybe. But that's a huge risk. And it's we're probably talking about many, many years of downturn. And you know what's interesting is I'm a technology guy, right? And so when I look at technology, there are a lot of things that take off. And then something happens and they go away. They rarely come back. So so in other words like you if you're small and you have some success and then you have a failure and then you get better and better. But when you cross a certain line, when you've reached a certain level of market awareness and then you fail or you seemingly fail, it's really hard to come back. And I think if Bitcoin were to have that big failure, I'm not talking about the price. So I'm talking about let's say the mine, which I think it would be reflected in price eventually. But if the mining network kind of collapsed on itself, became highly centralized, highly vulnerable. I don't think we come back from it. I'm not saying Bitcoin's dead, but it never reenters the mainstream. It looks a lot closer to mineral than hyperbiclinization. It's just kind of this this nitchy thing. So but it's completely preventable. In other words, if it happens itself inflicted. And I think one of the pieces of advice I give to people if I'm speaking often is if you for instance are investing in a public mining company. I'm not telling you to do it or not do it, but ask yourself what your goal and objective is with it. Are you doing it because you want a fiat game that may or may not come true or are you trying to support the Bitcoin network? If you think you're supporting the Bitcoin network, then I think you really need to dig deep into this topic. Now, unfortunately, I don't think there's many people other than me that talk about this particular thing about how the public miners are bad for the ecosystem. And part of it is the whether it's a conference or the conference is sponsored by big mining companies. Now, I do appear on a lot of different podcasts and some of the bigger ones too, but were they sponsored by other sponsored often by the big mining companies? And maybe someday you will be too. And if you decide to, that's that's all well and good when you become the next Peter McCormick, but you know, it creates this thing where I think some people are resistance to be critical or to let too much negative narrative around that industry, that segment of the industry for obvious reasons. Yeah. Yeah, I think about that a decent amount. I mean, it's not specifically Bitcoin mining related, but going with the core versus nots, recently the bit 110. I wanted to get your, I guess we're drifting into that topic slowly. So if you're okay talking about that, I'd love your your perspective on it because I think a lot of people are talking. I think not enough people understand. I think there is a risk there. So I'd like to see from your perspective, you have a lot of experience in this. You actually run a mining company. So I think your your opinion is extremely valuable even though some people may not appreciate it. Not not taking your feedback seems extremely short-sighted and just it seems crazy to me to not take somebody like you serious in this topic. So I'd like for you to spend some time and dive into spam the the the template weather important. All right. Sure. Well, thank you for your kind words. First of all, this could be a bit of a ramble. So don't be afraid to interject and push me back a different direction. I think we need more of this. So okay. First is, well, often people categorize this as core versus nots. I I don't agree with that way of characterizing it. Okay. So first, I've been using nots inside my company for a couple years, predating all the filter controversy, opportunity, opportunity to turn all this stuff. Okay. So why why would I use nots? Okay. Well, the reason I use nots is that it is an easier to use client. It's an easier to configure client and it has more flexibility in how I set up my node. And in my case, my node, because I'm a minor, a real minor, it also helps determine what my templates look like. Now, so the template, if for those that don't know is, if we think of at this point in time, I don't know what the number is, but let's just pretend there's 100,000 unconfirmed transactions sitting in them pools of nodes all over the world. And let's even assume they're all basically the same. A block just got mined. So my my node, or one of my nodes, I have a bunch of them, one of my nodes says, oh, okay, here's a new block. Let me verify that it really is a valid block. Okay, it is. Well, I better start working on a different one. Okay. So let me pull the transactions that were in the valid block out of my mempool. Okay. Now I have 96,000 left. But I only have 4,000 I can put in my template. There's there's physical restrictions called the weight units dictated by what's called weight units. And it typically revolts in about 4,000. So I have to have some criteria by which from the 96,000 I pick 4,000. Okay. And this is where knots in my opinion has superiority to core because it's easy. I have more dials I can maneuver that help me pick the template I want. Okay. So and like I said, I've been doing this from well before. Okay. Um, I also, I think you mentioned in the intro, I'm on the board of directors at ocean. There's also been sometimes categorizes a core versus the ocean guys. Okay. Now, um, my mining operations primarily use ocean for two reasons. The first is it's the only pool that allows me to make my own templates. So I could solo mine. But for me, I'm not quite big enough. The solo mine might my if I was a little bigger, maybe I will be, um, I could solo mine, but I, but I, but I can't, I need a pool to have some more consistency in my cash flow. So I use the ocean pool, but I still get to exercise my right and take my responsibility as a real miner seriously. And ocean allows me to do that. So that's why I use ocean number one. Number two is I did a, a two year study from the beginning of ocean from day one all the way through the two year anniversary. And I've physically proven that I made more money mining with ocean than I made with other pools. So I did a controlled study. Okay. So I prove that. So that's why I mine with ocean. So it's not first and foremost, some philosophical thing, right? So I just want to, I want to start with that, that the whole debate about whether to use knots and core is not all about filters. And it's not all about BIP 110 or like these sorts of, yeah. Now that said, I guess we're approaching a year ago. We started to see that ore was preparing for version 30, probably nine months ago at this point, right? And at that point, there, we also started to really see concerns. They already had them, but like the whole inscriptions, the ordinals, what I think a lot of people would categorize as spam was finding its way into blocks. We saw that the template creation from the pools, sure again, most pools in specifically two, ant pool and foundry, which is 67% of all templates are created by them. Basically, didn't do anything to filter spam. They're just letting it all through, right? And just picking the transactions that in that particular block maximize their revenue. Now I do want to state that is their right, that is their right to do that. But it doesn't mean I have to like it or other people have to like it, but they're right. The thing that upsets me about it the most though is that those things were in abuse of the segway discount. So I don't like the spam. I'm not as vigilant as maybe some others about it, like it pisses me off. But what really pisses me off is when you put spam in and you get a 75% discount, that really pisses me off. So that, I should say we, I'll say me, it's kind of hoping that as we move toward version 30, what we would see is an attitude to plug the whole. And even if spam was going to exist, force it into a place where they had a pay full price for it, which would have been opportune. Yeah. Instead what we saw, first in kind of the beta and all that was, no, we're going to go the other way. We're going to, we're going to basically get rid of opportune. That was actually where we started. We're going to get rid of opportune. It was called, it's called deprecation. So in this version, what they were going to do was blow the default setting from 83 bytes to maximum. And then deprecate it, meaning that in the next release or one of the subsequent releases, it would go away entirely, not even be an option for people anymore. And with no intent to plug the segwit discount book. So I objected to that. A lot of other people objected to it. The core folks, I'm trying my best to steal man it and be fair to them said, well, we're doing it for the good of the miners because, and there's this whole thing that the way relay works and there's something called complex block and probably more than anybody wants to hear. But that we're, we're going to help the miners, especially the small guys. In essence, you should be, as a small, the medium size, you should be thankful because it's, it's not giving the big guys an advantage. And, you know, my response was, no, the things that you're talking about helping me with are truly trivial. The math doesn't play out. And I would rather see you plug the gap. Or at a minimum, and I still wouldn't like it, if you feel some reason to move, I'll return, move it to like 256 bytes, but set the policy at something that doesn't just say open invitation to spam. There was a lot of discussion and back and forth. I don't want to violate. There's a lot of chatroom rule discussions I was in. So I don't want to say who or what, but the only input that was taken was the deprecation of opportune went away, meaning that now officially they've, they haven't said that opportune is going to go away. But they've set the policy to wide open, and they haven't done anything to actually encourage people to use opportune over the, the taproot method, which essentially gives them the discount. And they've essentially given up on spam. Their mind filters don't work. And they've also said, you know, filters are censorship. But I don't even like the word filter, because what I say is, I have an algorithm that helps me decide what goes in my mempool, and even more importantly, what creates my templates. It's not a filter. It's a selection criteria, and I have an algorithm that dictates those things. Because I think filter, I mean, it may have been a, a wisely chosen word, but I think it, you know, it quickly got associated with censorship. And, and so I think that that caused a lot of the problems. Now then, fast forward. More recently, we've had BIP 110, get proposed, which is a user activated soft fork proposal that would greatly reduce the ability to put anything in beyond. There's a whole bunch of different settings, but it basically caps everything at 256 256 bytes. So no big stuff's going to come in, but, but the belief is that all the small stuff would still be able to get in if you were doing a bit VM, if you were a samurai wallet type application, there would be these disability to do this anchoring. And it would be what's a temporary soft fork, meaning it would activate on a specific block roughly in September in the last one year, and essentially buy us time to figure something else out. Because we are technically a divided community right now. And the animosity is very high, gotten very contentious. Has been disappointing to me, you know, frankly. And so I sit, I don't want to say I sit on the not side because I don't want to categorize it as core versus not. So I want to say it this way. I am signaling support for BIP 110. I am signaling support for BIP 110 because I want to get people back to the table to get a real solution. And I don't know of any other way to get the attention of core and the core supporters other than of movement, even if it fails. But that shows the seriousness with which a large group of us, maybe it's a vocal majority, minority, maybe it's a vocal majority. I don't know. It's hard to tell that things have to be done differently because I view the way core chooses what it works on, what it prioritizes. The communication that it has with the broader community is all very poor and broken. And I'm with Saylor, Michael Saylor, in what he said that I believe our biggest threat in Bitcoin is comes from that group. Like, like, he even, he'll say well meaning folks. I think he's being a little politically correct, but just say, you know, if, if core goes off the wrong path, down the wrong path, we have too many people that just follow. And it's, it's very dangerous. Now I do have faith in the nodes, the power of the node. We've seen that in the past. We don't have enough nodes though, like real node operators. It's one of the biggest other concerns in the community is as Bitcoin has grown in market cap, if you take the market growth of Bitcoin and you chart it against the node growth, it's a one's going straight up and one's going straight down. Like, it's not a good thing. And, you know, I said running a node, there's all the regular reasons, you know, self-custody verification, audit capability, you know, blah, blah, blah, if you're a minor ability to create templates. But the other one is to have a voice in something like this, like whether or not you're signaling. You know, and, and at least run a node if you don't want to signal for Bitcoin 10 because you don't like it fine, but we're still running a node and have a voice and signal, well, doing nothing is signaling against it, right? That's fine. But, but exercise your, you're right, right? I mean, that's, it's very much like in a democracy, you know, the people that don't vote don't have a voice. And, and at some point, if everybody's apathetic to the democratic process in nobody votes, then, you know, I, then it fails, right? It fails at that one. So, I know that's quite a ramble. So, yeah. No, but that's fine. And actually, you answered guess question. He was, that was his main question. He has, so what was your, your thoughts on the consensus limits with BIP 110? Should, would that be the solution BIP 110 or let prices right out? Let the fee prices right out. I think you answered that. Yeah. Well, let me answer it specifically because he, yes, that I appreciate it. I would say, I'd say the, this is what I think the right answer is. Opera Charn should be 256 bytes. And, and that's, that's by the way, me kind of acquiescing and compromising on the side. And we should patch the Segwit discount and make sure that and force, when I say, by the way, policy at 256, I wouldn't say even change the consensus limit from what it is today. So, you can still have a big opera turn. 256 bits is, bytes is the policy for core. And, but we got to fix the Segwit discount. So, you, if you're going to try to spam the network, put large data blocks in, anyone can call it spam. You're going to put large data blocks in, while you're going to pay full price. Yeah. That would make sense to me. And then to his question, then the fee market can take care of it. But when spamming the network is free, the fees don't take care of it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. I know that we're running up to your, to your time limit. So, when it comes to metrics, whether you're a Bitcoin Treasury company or a CFO of a company that's maybe trying to, because there's Bitcoin Treasury companies and then companies that are going to just tack on Bitcoin as part of their Treasury. What do you think are some metrics? Maybe like three metrics that they should be looking out for? Well, I think if you want to go down that route, you still need a business that owning Bitcoin and just holding it is not a business. You better do something. Strategy has a, you know, a data business. I think they're learning to monetize in other ways additionally, but you better have an operating business of some sort. Number two, it better be a positive cash flow operating business because you don't, so if we look at a mining company, if you want to invest in a mining company, fine. I would probably be supportive of it if they consistently had an operating profit. Yeah. Then, then, okay. I don't know if I got three for you, but those are those are the two. What's the best way to get into mining? Is it, in your opinion, is it even worth trying to do that or is it just better to buy Bitcoin itself and hold? Okay. So first, at whatever the level is now 850 exa-hashes or whatever, it's still so massive and even if we lose 50% of it for whatever reason, it's still ungodly massive. So there's no concerns about the network. What I will tell you, though, to be aware of is that as hash rate goes down, block times get longer. So do understand that instead of 10-minute block times, we might have 12 or 13-minute block times given the way things are going. And so if you are planning to do certain things, know it may take longer. And the longer it takes, it might actually start getting more expensive, which wouldn't be all bad, too, right? Because you may have to pay some higher fees to get into some of these blocks. I would encourage everybody to have some mining. A bid X is 100. You can buy a bid X class thing for $100 now. And learn how to do it. Think of it not from the perspective of making money, but from the perspective of one, you have an investment in Bitcoin, so you're helping secure the network. It's a small piece of that. And secondly, you're going to learn how mining actually works. So I think it's, when I talk to people, it's the biggest mystery. The knowledge of the way mining works. And people are intimidated by it. It's not that hard, especially the basics are not that hard. So do that. Also run a node. You know, but I think it might almost be easier. Go get a bid X, set it up, run it, see it work. Then go get a node if you don't have a node. Run that. When you get that going and you start feeling comfortable with it, go, well, okay, now I'm going to create my own templates. And so you can, if you were with ocean, you can download data and learn how to set up for template creation. I think that's it. But doing it a progression, you know, like that. I think that that would be important. If you start thinking about it economically, a lot depends on your personal situation. So say this, if you do invest in either servers of your own or you invest in companies like I do, it's generally better if, for instance, you're in a position where you need depreciation. Because what what happened is, you know, let's say somebody last year that put, let's say, $100,000 into one of my ventures or about $100,000 of equipment in a hosted solution. They got $100,000 of depreciation. So that's a massive out the door benefit. Second benefit of mining versus just buying is that you are, you could think of mining as your, your DCAing into Bitcoin as these payouts occur. So what's going to happen though is it's going to lift your cost basis. So let's just pretend you had a choice. You could put $100,000 into mining or $100,000 into Bitcoin when it, when it was one big, 100,000 per Bitcoin. Right. So you got in one scenario, you have one Bitcoin. Okay. And that's great. The other scenario, you have no Bitcoin. You get a, what effectively for most people in those situations, you get a $30,000 tax benefit right away. Okay. And now you're going to start accumulating Bitcoin. Let's say five years go by. At the end of that period, let's say you have a point eight Bitcoin, let's say point nine, let's say you have point nine Bitcoin that you mine and you have one Bitcoin that you bought. Now, if, if you look at it on the surface, you go, well, I'm, I'm worse off. But remember, you saved the 30 grand. Now if you had taken that 30 grand tax savings and put it into Bitcoin, that would have lifted that number one. But number two, you bought one Bitcoin for $100,000, your cost basis is a hundred. If you mined it along the way, let's say Bitcoin is 250,000. Your cost basis might be 180,000 in the point nine. So now you sell it. And you have a much bigger capital gain on the first, when you just bought the Bitcoin versus when you mined it. So, so you save a bunch of capital gains. Reality is you can do a little better, you can do a little worse. Kind of got to go through the math and your situation. In my mind, if you add in that you're also supporting the network and you're doing these other things like it's a win, but to each their own. The way you phrase it makes a lot of sense because when you do that depreciation, a lot of people don't think about that. Just like what real estate, sometimes people don't think about the depreciation of the tax benefits of that. And the last one, just this should be hopefully pretty quick. On the topic of maybe in five years, where do you think Bitcoin's price is going to be at? You know, it's it's a really difficult question. So I don't know where the, you know, how much money is going to get printed? And what what is the purchasing power of a dollar? But let's just say in today's dollar terms, I would be surprised if in five years Bitcoin isn't worth as a purchasing power of four or five times greater than today. So if you measure it in, you know, what is it cost to buy a house? Which I think is a good, you know, good way to do it. Like, oh, okay, you know, if it's, if it's for Bitcoin to buy a house today, then maybe it's one to buy a house in five years. I think that's yeah, average house. That makes a lot more sense. Yeah, yeah, because there's so many, there's so many things out there, like the power line. I don't know the power line actually tracks the money printing. I don't remember if it does or not. It doesn't, it doesn't. And you know, we, we, we use some of those models, honestly, and some of our, we have to in our projections. But, but I think a better way to look at it is what will it buy? What will it buy? Perfect. All right, Bob. Thank you so much for your time. I know that we're over the amount of time that you're a lot of for us. Can you tell people how to find you? I'm active on Twitter at Boomer_BTC. You can find my show that I do with Larry LaParte and Gary Leland called the Bitcoin Boomers. We are distributed through BTC sessions, through their, through their YouTube channel, but you find a sense Spotify and Apple and all those platforms. I have a show also called Old Man Yells, also available and all those. I learned a lot about Bitcoin mining there. Well, thank you. I'm over, I'm so behind. I have so many topics, it's been months, honestly, since I did an episode. But I think most of the, I try to do topics there that are not specific to a timeframe, like there, so hopefully they they have some lasting values. So I would, if you're looking for time to kill, they're usually half-hour segments for Old Man Yells. And it's just me rambling if you didn't get enough today. And so, anyway, and you can find out about my company BarefootMining at BarefootMining.com. Awesome. All right, Bob, thank you so much. Hope to see you again sometime soon. Thank you, Tony. Bye-bye. Thank you.