Stephan Livera: An Upgrade to 700-Year-Old Accounting Tech

March 20, 2022

Home » Podcast » Stephan Livera: An Upgrade to 700-Year-Old Accounting Tech

Darin Feinstein, Founder of Core Scientific (Bitcoin Mining) joins me on the show to talk about Bitcoin as an upgrade on some very old accounting technology and what it could mean for our future. We get into:

Learning about Bitcoin
Bitcoin mining narratives – FUD and facts
Bitcoin’s importance for liberty
Challenges to Bitcoin fungibility
Bitcoin for human rights
EU Proof of Work ban?
The path forward

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Sponsors:

Stephan Livera links:

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Darin, welcome to the show.

Darin Feinstein:

Thank you very much. Good to finally be here. We bounced around a little bit, but it’s my pleasure to be here.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, we got there in the end. Darin, you’ve got a really interesting background: former accountant lawyer, now building a huge Bitcoin mining company—you’ve just got a really interesting background. And as I understand, you might not have told your story as much in the Bitcoin community as publicly, so do you want to just tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are now?

Darin Feinstein:

Yeah, absolutely. It is a roundabout way, but I did get in fairly early. My background, as you pointed out—I was an accountant for a very short period of time, but that was my major—was accounting. And after accounting, I went into home loans. I was doing finance for residential mortgages that ended up in commercial. And I decided I wanted to go to law school. So while I was still doing mortgages for 3 or 4 years, I ended up going to law school. I worked in mortgages the whole time. So I had a finance and accounting background. When I got out of law school—I practiced law also for a very short period of time—I wasn’t a great attorney for other people. My bedside manner was not desirable. And so I ended up just going into business for myself. Because of all the loans that I was a part of over several years—there’s a certain type of loan. It’s called an equity-based loan, which is based off the value of the asset, not the borrower. And the problem with those loans is sometimes you run into mistakes or problems with the lenders or the borrowers. And so there’s a lot of—unfortunately—litigation with that. And so my area of expertise was in distressed financial situations. We called it a boutique investment banking company, but I’m not really certain what the proper categorization is. But we started a distressed equity debt company that specialized in foreclosures, receiverships, litigation—stuff we could add value to. And so we got involved in a lot of operating businesses on the West Coast, I ended up in a lot of real estate deals that had gone sideways or ended up in litigation. We also got involved—because I was much younger—in restaurants and nightclubs. We did purchase some of those. And I also started to finance shows. We put money up for large residencies that would come through—a lot of them in the music festival area. This was 20 years ago. And so we were financing large music festivals and some other activity to that extent. In Las Vegas, specifically, I had a number of businesses, including a number of restaurants. I own several restaurants in Las Vegas and across the US in an operating company, and also I have an entertainment company. And the entertainment company does ticketing, box office, and production. So, for instance, today at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas, my company controls the ticketing box office and production of almost all of the shows there. And if I don’t own them, they’re my tenant—they pay me rent and they use my ticketing system. We have some tribute shows. I own a Michael Jackson tribute show—we’ve had that for over a decade, and some other ancillary shows there. I’ll also finance—so the shows at the Trop, I’m more of a, I own it, we produce it. And then the other shows that we’ll do, for instance, at the Venetian or at MGM at the Park or at Zappos Theater where I’m a partner I think in every show there—only financially. So I’ll put up money with Live Nation, Caesar’s, MGM, or Venetian. I’ve been doing that a long time. And so all of those businesses have been ongoing in various ways for decades. In 2011—which was the genesis of me getting into Bitcoin—in 2011, these message boards popped up that told the people that went to my shows how to get full refunds if they used a credit card to go see one of my shows. And so people were calling up Visa and MasterCard and American Express, and they were saying whatever the message board told them to say—I sat behind a pillar, or, There was a mean usher that said something bad—and they would implement a chargeback and, instantaneously, Visa would take the money out of my account and give it back to them right away. Like, You lose, and if you want to contest, business owner, write us a letter and spend 6 months contesting this thing. And so it became a nuisance, and so we looked at all methods of payment. How can I get paid where people won’t be scumbags and try to do bad things after they paid us? And we looked at Bitcoin. Some of my programmers brought it up in 2011, because we had a ticketing platform. And when I Googled it myself—I’m an accountant, I’m a lawyer, I have privileged licenses, I have restricted gaming licenses and liquor licenses and banking licenses, law license—and so I have to be careful about what I do. And I think my reaction when I looked up Bitcoin in 2011 mirrors the same reaction that almost everybody has, some kind of consummate professional in whatever industry they are. My reaction initially was: I Googled it and I said, Wow, this looks like digital video game money, first, and second, it looks like people just use it to buy drugs on the Internet. And so I was like, You know—probably a good idea not to get involved in that. And I passed on it early ’11, and I think towards the middle of the year, I accidentally stumbled on more Bitcoin articles—and now I’m cognizant of it, so I have no understanding of it, but I know the word. And I read an article that really made me question what I read, and as an accountant, I look at everything as a ledger. And I don’t think people understand, generally, because it’s such a boring topic. People are like, Oh, accounting. And they tune right out and their eyes roll back. But everything on the planet Earth runs on accounting, right? If you don’t have ledgers that you can trust, you have nothing. There’s nothing. All your assets are meaningless. The bank, the government, every business that you’re in, if you can’t accurately track what you’re doing, what you’re selling, what you own—you have nothing. You have nothing, because people could just take it from you. And so there’s always been this overwhelming desire to fix accounting, because the accounting systems that we utilize right now leave a lot to be desired. And so the article I read said that this new technology created an immutable ledger. And I remember reading that and I was like, That’s impossible—there’s no way to create an immutable ledger. And so I started reading about the ledger technology of Bitcoin and it all of a sudden—over like a 1-day period I remember I was reading this—I was like, Wow, this is not digital video game money. This is an accounting technology. This changes how people will keep records forever. And it took me months. I read everything you could read. I consumed all of the information you can consume. And I geek out on history—I like to get granular on a lot of different businesses that I’m involved in. And I realized this: if you break down accounting, which people have to somehow pay attention to, because if you can’t pay attention to the accounting implications, there’s no way to respect the technological innovation that is Bitcoin, because all of it revolves around accounting. And so you have to understand the history of accounting in order to understand the Bitcoin innovation—it’s imperative. And so what I realized was that the history of accounting is really, really simple. It’s really simple. So it’s a boring story, but it’s really fast: there’s been two accounting innovations in the history of humanity. 10,000 years ago, Stephan went to a market and bought 5 sheep and you write down, I have 5 sheep on a clay tablet. And you use a clay tablet and then you bake it in the sun so no other humans change the numbers that you wrote down—and that’s the birth of single-entry accounting. Here’s a bunch of assets that I bought. Here’s a timeline of the purchases and the assets that I own. And at any given time, over time, you could look down and see over 6 months, 12 months, 3 years, how many sheep you own. And so that was it. That’s accounting for 10,000 years up until the 1400’s. And in the 1400’s, because there’s lots of trading going on—and lots of people take credit for it so it’s really difficult to ascribe it to some one person—but the textbooks started to come up with a new way to handle the records of a transaction, and they went from single-entry accounting—I bought 5 sheep at a market—to double-entry accounting. And so now Stephan goes to a market, he buys 5 sheep—and he paid $5. So now we have our debit and our credit, and you put this down on your ledger. And so you have double-entry accounting, and it remembers what you bought, the assets that you own, and what went out to buy it. That accounting system, double-entry accounting, that system was created in the 15th century. So 700 years ago: double-entry accounting. Today, 700 years later, every single bank, every single corporation, every single government, everything in the world runs on 700-year old analog, antiquated, double-entry counting. Now it was an innovation in the 1400s, but it’s not an innovation anymore. And everybody still uses it. And because it’s an analog system, it’s terrible. It’s terrible for a number of reasons, mostly because it’s not immutable—you can change the books and records. It’s a private system. And whoever controls the books and records, they can just change the books and records. And so for the last 700 years—centuries—we’ve seen devastating fraud in every industry, in every government, because humans, they make their own records privately, and then they can change their own records privately. And guess the only way to figure out if somebody’s committed a fraud on a double-entry ledger accounting technology? You have to have other humans come in and audit it. And that’s really, really difficult, because people are really smart about hiding bad things that they do. And so we’ve seen devastating fraud in every industry because we have an old antiquated accounting technology created 700 years ago that runs the entire world. The world runs on this technology. Stephan, can you name another technology so important to humanity that has not been changed or innovated in 700 years?

Stephan Livera:

I don’t know. Here I’m thinking like some Taleb example where he’ll say, Oh, look, people are using spoons or knives and forks still, or the wheel, because why reinvent the wheel? But I mean—look, the more serious answer: I think with Bitcoin, hypothetically, people could say, Well, even on a Bitcoin standard, there might still be people who are doing fraud or not repaying back if not everything is happening on-chain, per se. Or if the pathway that we go down, maybe there’s not as much of a proof-of-reserves aspect of it. Nevertheless, I think we’ve got to bring it back, though. I think the important point that you do rightly raise—and I think as an accountant, there’s definitely an insight there—is around this whole triple-entry accounting aspect of it. That’s certainly the interesting part. That’s what you’re keying into, right?

Darin Feinstein:

Yeah—I’m getting there, I’m getting there. Sometimes I go too long. Stop me if I start talking about accounting for too much. Yeah, so what you have now, what the Bitcoin network fixes—so in 2008 we have the third innovation to accounting, and as you just said, it’s the triple-entry. So what you have is you have a debit and a credit, and now what the Bitcoin network’s innovation is, is you have a series of nodes and servers that are distributed globally and they’re running the network. And so you have a debit and a credit—it goes through the nodes and servers, which audit every transaction as it’s written—and once it gets confirmed by the network, it’s then written to the triple-entry. So you have a debit and a credit, you have a digital system self-audit—after the self-audit is completed, it’s written to a public and immutable ledger. Now what that does is it eliminates all on-chain fraud. The books and the records—yeah, you always have a human trust risk, but you can bank on the fact that the ledger has been self-audited in real-time. Every transaction. And so that ability to audit transactions in real-time through this proof-of-work network, that is the innovation of Bitcoin. For the first time in human history, we have an immutable, self-audited, chain of transactions. That’s never existed before. What people don’t realize most of the time is that this proof-of-work network that runs the Bitcoin transactions and then audits it and then writes it to the triple-entry—that is the innovation. And that will change the world. Because as you change accounting—how people conduct transactions and how they record them and how then they rely on them—you change the audit process, you change the ancillary products that come with it, because there’s no more fraud on-chain. It’s impossible. And so that’s the innovation. And so I realized that the word blockchain—it’s a silly word for an accounting ledger. And more importantly, I learned that the word miners, which I still dislike to this day, denotes just a computer server. All it is, is a server in a data center that acts as the accountant to the network between two parties. And so in 2011, when I realized that this was a real technology—it’s not just digital video game money, it’s not just used to buy drugs on the Internet—there’s an underlying importance of it, and the innovation of that importance is the first accounting innovation in 700 years. And here’s where I was wrong. I thought the accounting innovation would take foot before the commodity innovation. And I was wrong on that. But I did say in 2011 that I want to participate in this network as a hobby, as an accountant. And so I said, I’m going to help protect and grow the network. And we started mining. I started a mining business in 2012, and we were mining in a closet in Las Vegas. And then over the next several years, I bought everything you could buy. Most of it didn’t work, and half the time it didn’t show up. But I would buy whatever manufacturers popped up with, whatever new equipment you could buy. And we—me and and the kids that were working for me—we really, I was enthralled by the industry. I was really curious to see where it went, and because you know it’s real and how important it is, I knew it was just going to keep growing. And so I would talk to my friends about it or people that I had investments with, or people that I was in—I’m in this YPO group, and my buddies in YPO would call me an idiot. I’d tell them, Oh, you’ve got to buy Bitcoin in 2012—when it was $40. And they’re like, You’re an idiot—it’s a scam. And I’m like, No, it isn’t, let’s talk about accounting. And they’re like, No more accounting talk. So I spent a long time talking about it. In 2016, I just saw how the world was going, and we had a lot of problems everywhere in messaging. And so I decided that I wanted to work on blockchain infrastructure full-time. At the time I had 3 or 4 different data centers that I was sending—I had outgrown my closet in this building we were in, and we had started to send equipment to data centers around the US. There wasn’t very many available, but they would all fail. They all failed for a variety of different reasons. I sent equipment to upstate Washington. I sent that equipment all over the East Coast. I sent equipment to Tier 3 data centers, some of them in Georgia. And the one thing they all had in common was: I had a problem anywhere I sent equipment to. And so in 2016, I decided that, really, in the world, there was no enterprise-grade level infrastructure facility to send the equipment to. And so I looked around the US for an ideal location to build an enterprise-grade level facility. And I found the facility after looking at a lot: in North Carolina in the Appalachian Mountains. And the Appalachian Mountains are special because the United States government in the 1940s—as critical infrastructure—they built a series of hydroelectric plants to power the Manhattan Project. So up in that Tennessee Valley, they built the Manhattan Project. In order to create a nuclear bomb, you need a lot of energy, and so they created dozens of these hydroelectric plants. And after the Manhattan Project was over, they had all this stranded renewable energy up in the Appalachian mountains, and manufacturing businesses found that area. So you saw Levi Strauss, American Thread—all these old-school manufacturing and textile industries moved up into the Appalachian Mountains. And after all these big manufacturing facilities moved to the Appalachian Mountains, in America they enacted NAFTA. And what NAFTA did was it encouraged all of these factories to close down and move to Mexico. And so they all closed down—all of them. So these burgeoning communities that had been around for decades went from 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 people, to when I got to Marble, North Carolina—which is where our first facility is—the population was 400 or 500 people. It had decimated this town. And under Obama, he labeled all of these areas opportunity zones that were distraught or devastated over some policies that took place several years before he was there, and people spent a lot of money trying to build out these opportunity zones. In 2017, I believe, we formed Core [Scientific]—me and a gentleman named Mike Levitt, who’s currently the CEO. We formed Core, he became the chairman, and I literally moved into a cabin in Marble, North Carolina in the Appalachian Mountains and started hiring thermodynamic engineers from NASA and Google to build out this facility. And we quickly realized that the traditional engineers—these guys that went to MIT and had PhDs—I would fly them out and it was really difficult to get people to Marble, because besides the fact that it’s very remote, there’s no hotels, really. And so we had to find little houses to put them in. Sometimes they’d come stay with me. And so what would happen was these thermodynamic engineers would come up and they’d look at the building with their other team and they’d say, We can’t build in this—we need a Google box. We need the billion-dollar box that was in my MIT textbook. And we’re like, That’s not what you get. You get this building. This is the building. And the building that I bought was 230,000-250,000 square foot building on 70 acres up in Marble, North Carolina. And so it had some challenging aspects of it. It had these water-cooled towers that circled water as the way to use air cooling through the water tower to cool the buildings—and that’s what they used 40 years ago. So eventually what we realized after going through several independent bid companies trying to hire third-party contractors, we realized we had to do this in-house. So we hired all those people in-house, and we all just lived up there until we built it out. And that facility I think at the time in 2017 was the first large-scale infrastructure building in the US. We filled it up, and then we ended up building in 6 other states. We’re public now—traded under the ticker sign, $CORZ. And since the 2017 birth of that first building in North Carolina, we’re now also located—we have buildings in Georgia, we’re in Kentucky, we’re in North Dakota, we’re in Texas. And we just announced in Oklahoma. And so we have a number of states that we’re conducting business in, and that was the genesis of Core. Just also to clarify: today, I have no operating position at Core. I am on the board, I’m a co-chairman of the board, and I am also what they call the Chief Vision Officer. And so I think they like me just talking about accounting outside of the operations, but that’s really what we’re focused on, is protecting against overregulation. I think regulation’s going to happen no matter what, and some of it is probably good. But if you overregulate this industry, you will chill the technology. And as we saw what happened in China, right? One of the biggest governments on the planet Earth—they banned Bitcoin. And what happened, Stephan? Nothing, nothing—Bitcoin just moved to geographic locations that had greater freedom, and now here we are. They gave America a trillion-dollar present. And I think it’s a good warning to all governments that if you ban it, nothing happens—it’ll just move. The technology just moves to jurisdictions that create greater protections and have better freedoms within their constitutions. And so that’s where we are right now. That’s my genesis story. I tried to do it quickly, but I don’t think I did.

Stephan Livera:

No, no, I think that’s all valuable perspective. And as you mentioned, Bitcoin and freedom, and Bitcoin as a liberty-enhancing technology, I think this is something you’ve also spoken about, and it comes across at least in some of what I was reading about you on Twitter and so on. So if you could tell us a little bit about that aspect of it? Why do you believe Bitcoin is important for liberty? What kind of impacts do you see coming from further adoption of Bitcoin?

Darin Feinstein:

Again, I’m going to go right back to the accounting aspect of this. The proof-of-work network, which is this decentralized distributed node system—in order to hack, like a traditional hack of the Bitcoin network, you would have to hack all of the nodes, which is different than a 51% attack. In order to hack the system, you would have to hack everything simultaneously, which is impossible. And so hacking the Bitcoin network—it’s impossible. Well, so now what does that mean? All the assets that you have now—if it’s not on the Bitcoin network—they’re held in a centralized repository. So you have assets in a bank, or you have assets at a stock house, clearing house. If somebody wants to, they can access that and confiscate your assets at any time. On the Bitcoin network, because it can’t be hacked—the only reason it’s unhackable is because it lives on a proof-of-work network—nobody can seize your assets. And so when Stephan downloads a digital wallet and puts a Bitcoin on it, it doesn’t matter where you live—you have private property. And it doesn’t matter what your government says about private property—you have private property, because nobody can seize your asset. Well, in America, that doesn’t seem like such a big concern. I mean, maybe now, after we see everybody seizing everything if you don’t like their political views, but historically, we’re not concerned that the banks are just going to start seizing our assets, or the government will without due process. And so you start thinking in terms of on a global basis, and you realize that in America, where most of the people that I talk to about this live, we only represent 350 million people out of 8 billion people, which is roughly 4% of the population on the planet Earth. The other 96%, they have different problems than us. And the statistic I always use is Alex Gladstein—because I love what he writes—he has a great statistic that, in the world, 87% of the humans that live in the world live in autocratic or authoritarian regimes with double- or triple-digit inflation. And so that number represents about 7 billion people that go to sleep at night not knowing if their assets are going to be still where they left them so they can feed their children. And so you have 7 billion people that have a private property problem in that it’s not respected where they live. Well now, if you have a digital asset on a digital wallet in any one of these territories, it doesn’t matter what your government says—you have private property. And so for over half the population, there is no private property. And then when you look at double- or triple-digit inflation, you get up to 7 billion people with all those problems. So the first thing it does is it creates private property for 8 billion people on the planet Earth. There’s never been a network that’s been created that’s allowed 8 billion people to have private property. And the reason is—and this is what gets overlooked—because of the proof-of-work network. That’s it—that’s the innovation. The second part to that is: the other big problem in the world is most humans are not banked. And what that means is they can’t store value, they can’t remit payments, they can’t payment process. They live outside outside of the norms of the traditional banking system. They don’t qualify. They can’t get in. And so even in America where we feel we’re financially privileged, somewhere around 60 million people, they call it underbanked. I don’t really know what that means—there’s a lot of different definitions for it—but they’re underbanked. And I think almost 6-10 million people are estimated to be unbanked. And so you have this banking problem. The banking problem is solved in the same manner as the private property problem is solved: if you have a digital asset on a digital wallet and it’s Bitcoin, you can now store value without fear of seizure or confiscation, you can remit money anywhere in the world without being censored, and you can payment process. You can transact anywhere on the globe with nobody being able to stop you. So what does Bitcoin do? Well, it provides private property to 8 billion people, and it provides banking to 8 billion people on the planet Earth. Both of those are massively important. They fix a lot of problems. And as we’re seeing every day, all over the world, there are going to be legacy institutions that don’t like this because now they don’t get to control everybody within their borders. They can’t just seize their property or make them use the legacy systems that they set up. And so we’ll see this problem forever, for a long time—and again it’s accounting, and Stephan stop me if I get too boring on the accounting side—but there’s never been a manner in which two people can conduct business over geographic space and time. So Stephan and I, if we don’t know each other, and I’m in Asia and you’re in Europe, there’s no way for you to send me value. And that’s a super-complicated thought problem called the Byzantine Generals Problem. I summarize it really shortly: it’s that, if you’re going to send me value over space and time and we don’t know each other, if you sent me value and I didn’t get it, and I don’t know you, I feel like you didn’t send it. So, bad actors on the side of you. If I tell you that I didn’t get it and you sent it, you’d say, I know you got it—I sent it. You’re a bad actor. And so, because there’s no way for us to do that, there’s been no way, over centuries, for humans to conduct peer-to-peer business over geographic space. And so what happened to allow us to conduct business with each other? Well, a third-party verification system popped up. So now there’s party C. Me and Stephan are party A and B. And now Stephan sends his value to party C, I send my value to party C, they independently verify, they say, Okay, Stephan, Darin, we got the value—transaction culminated. And they took a fee for doing that—a transaction verification fee. Well, what did those transaction verifiers turn into? They turned into banks. Those are the first banks. All banks’ primary function historically has been to confirm a transaction between two parties and charge a fee. What happened next to banks? Well, if you sent a million dollars to the bank, I don’t want them to send that to my house. They ask me if I want to custodian my money there. And I say, Yes, I’ll custodian my money there. And so the second thing with banks popped up—their second business line—custodianship of assets. So transaction fees first, custodian of assets second. Because transactions are flowing through them. It’s natural they would start custodianship of money. Well guess what their next revenue generation became? Lending. They want to lend. They have all these assets on their books—Why can’t we lend them out? And so they went to various governments on the planet. In America, we let them lend out 10 times the amount of assets on their books. So they take the million dollars that you gave me in our transaction, and they lend out 9 million more to whoever they want, and now they take a big fee in interest because they borrow that money for a quarter percent or zero, and they’re lending it out at 7%. And so banks make a big fee on their third business line. Now, that all is predicated on the fact that two humans cannot conduct business with each other over geographic time and space—until now. So for the first time ever, Stephan sends me value, I see his wallet, I send Stephan value, he could see my wallet—and we both see it get self-audited on the network, and it’s written to an immutable blockchain where it can never be rescinded, and it’s recorded forever. Transaction over. We didn’t need a bank. You didn’t need a third-party verification system. And so this whole legacy system that’s existed forever just lost their primary functionality of verifying two transactions between two parties. And now if we’re not verifying the transaction through them, we don’t need them to custodian our money.

Stephan Livera:

It is a real game changer in that way. And as you said, it’s like understanding a little bit or enough about history, about why fiat money came about the way it did now, and how the system can be abused or set up in such a way to benefit certain individuals at the expense of the everyday individuals. And so I think the point you were making as well that’s really important to hammer on is that point that let’s say you and I transact using the Bitcoin network—we can now both provably say, Hey, I sent you that money. So there’s no more, Oh, it must be stuck in the mail. No, it’s either unconfirmed or it has been confirmed. And now it’s in my wallet or it’s in your wallet and that’s it. And that’s the crucial point. I think that is that step forward, the triple-entry accounting step forward. And for people who are listening, I think the common questions that are coming now are these questions around, Is it going to be banned? And of course, that might seem like, Okay, that’s not going to happen, but as we record this right now, it’s the 14th of March, and there was just recently this vote in the EU relating to this MICA, Markets in Crypto Assets, basically a regulation that was essentially going to ban proof-of-work mining, and was effectively going to ban Bitcoin in the EU. And so I think that to me brings that question of, How exactly is this technology going to be adopted? Do you see it like it’s about growing a group of individuals and having some kind of political voting base about it? Or do you see some other way that the technology is adopted and also essentially defended against other people who don’t necessarily like it for one reason or another?

Darin Feinstein:

Great questions. A few different topics. I think the first one is the growth of this new network. And what we’re really dealing with is an unstoppable force. This thing is—you can’t stop it. China couldn’t stop it. So countries that have different governing systems should look at the most authoritarian government on the planet Earth and realize they couldn’t stop it. And so how are you going to stop it if there are greater freedoms protecting your citizens? So the ability to stop it exists jurisdictionally. You could try to stop it within your borders, but that’s it, because it’s global, it lives decentralized and distributed everywhere all over the planet, even on satellites. And so you have to shut off everything, and this really still exists without the Internet. So there’s no way to turn it off, which means that it’s going to continue to grow. In 2017, when I decided to move to the Appalachian Mountains, I think there were somewhere around two-point-something million people that were estimated to be Bitcoin holders—only a little bit over 2 million. And today it’s estimated that it’s over 100 [million]. And so we 50Xed in the last several years. And we’re still early, because people still don’t understand what this technology is. I think an interesting parallel is the Internet. The Internet was created a long time ago, but moved on to civilians I think in the early 80’s it was estimated. Maybe ’83, ’84, civilians started to use it. In 1999, 15 years after people were utilizing the Internet, they said—whoever it was—it was a well-known magazine. They said that the Internet, it’s a passing fad and it’s going to go away. And they do that with all new technology. The Internet democratized information, and the people—the gate holders of information—they didn’t like that. They didn’t like everybody having access to that much information that they couldn’t control. And really—and again, I hate to just keep talking about accounting—this new Bitcoin network democratizes accounting. It takes accounting out of the shadows, out of the back rooms, out of these private insulated corporations and governments, and it puts it on the Internet available publicly 24 hours a day—and it’s completely audited. So you can trust whatever you see. There’s no human element in it. And so you get these brand new technologies that are just starting, and people always have your own time zone and you say, Oh, this is going too slow—it’s going really fast. It’s going really fast. There’s 100 million users. Governments all over the planet have legislation in front of them talking about it. The FUD has changed over the years. Most of my questions were on the United States banning Bitcoin, and by executive order the other day, they just said, they’re going to protect the innovation of Bitcoin. Now, how that plays out over the next administration and the process to regulate it with all of these different agencies—we don’t know—but we do know that the lobbying groups for Bitcoin have grown massively and are making themselves known. As you just said, this EU vote, you really had 100 million Bitcoin voters, in my opinion, all over the world, trying to figure out why the EU would ban proof-of-work mining when it’s such a negligible footprint. If you looked at—and I could talk about energy for a while, but I’m going to try not to—but I will tell you one statistic: in the EU, they generate over 15,000 terawatt-hours of energy every year. That’s how much energy they generate. The Bitcoin network there uses 30 of it. It’s an inconsequential number. It means nothing. It’s less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent. And so when you utilize energy as your argument to stop a network, you better have your facts right that it uses a lot of energy. I think the Chinese did the same thing. They said, We’re turning it off because it uses too much energy and releases too much carbon. Well, we know the numbers for how much energy is generated in China from coal. We do—we know that number. It’s 22,000 terawatt-hours a year of coal energy generation. 22,000 terawatt-hours a year. They turned off the Bitcoin network within its border—even if you ascribed 60% of the network to China, it was less than 100 terawatt-hours of energy a year. So a nation that uses somewhere between 22,000-25,000 terawatt-hours of coal energy just turned off 100 terawatt-hours of coal energy—if all of it was used in the regions that were coal-energized—but they weren’t. In South China, in the Sichuan region, that was mostly hydroelectric power, and was very seasonal depending on the rainy season in China, which is a whole other discussion. But you can determine very easily how much energy a nation generates and how much energy that nation uses to run proof-of-work networks within its border. And I do remember who said these: in 2017, when I was building out the first facility in Marble, North Carolina, Newsweek and the World Economic Forum—I know you’ve seen these articles, too—they both came out and they said the same thing, coincidentally. Oh, by accident, they both said the same thing: they said the Bitcoin network’s so bad, environmentally. We need you to turn off right now. And if we don’t turn it off, in 3 years, in 2020, the Bitcoin network—and this is amazing, but they both said it so it must be true—World Economic Forum and Newsweek both said the Bitcoin network will consume all of the world’s energy by 2020. All of it. Every last piece of every watt, every volt—it’s all gone. Everyone’s gonna die. And guess what happened? They were wrong. They were wrong, because we’re on the Internet right now using electricity, and so we must not have destroyed the world. But were they close to being correct? Was the World Economic Forum—who has giant think tanks and really smart people there—were they close to being right? Well, we know the answer: they’re not even in the ballpark. We know how much energy is generated globally on an annualized basis from all energy sources, because everybody posts it: British Petroleum, Exxon, all of the energy generators, they all post how much energy they create. Every year, there’s about 160,000 terawatt-hours of energy generation that’s created, and of that, we know the Bitcoin network is somewhere around 200 terawatt-hours. You can fluctuate up or down from 150-250 depending on what you read. But whatever that is—today, we’re two years after this prediction of the world ending because the Bitcoin network uses all the energy, and we’re using 0.0015% of the world’s energy—it’s an inconsequential number. Most other heavy industries, when they figure out how much energy they use on a global basis, they round off that number by 1-2%. And so the Bitcoin network is literally a rounding error to other major industries. So on a global basis, all these predictions were intellectually dishonest. You don’t see anybody coming out and apologizing. You know, I’m really sorry Darin Feinstein had to answer 10,000 questions in 2017. The mayor would call me, the people in these towns were like, You’re destroying the planet—I don’t know if this is a good industry for us. And so I had figure out how to rebuttal that.

Stephan Livera:

And I’m curious as well to get your perspective here, because obviously we’re all bullish on Bitcoin here, and we think it’s going up a lot more. And over time that will necessitate—it’s extremely likely that the network is going to keep growing. And so while the Bitcoin network today may be a rounding error, fast forward 10, 15, 20 years, and it may not be. What would the argument be then? And of course I have on my own ideas on how I would answer this, but how would you answer that?

Darin Feinstein:

Good, I want to hear your answer when I’m done. So there’s two different ways to look at the growth of the Bitcoin network. The first are on a transaction basis, and additional transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain, they don’t create any additional use or need for energy—they’re all within each block. And so anybody who tries to equate energy growth of this network to additional transactions has no idea how the Bitcoin network works because, a block is a block. Whatever’s in the block is in the block. And so the only way you can measure the growth of this network is on the security of the network. How much equipment will get plugged in to run the network? As the accountants and as security for the network, how much gets plugged in? And you can look at that through how efficient the equipment is. And this part of the equation is where people just get it wrong. And so you see a lot of people say, Okay, in 2017, before S9s came out, S3s, or something that was the very inefficient—I think the first ASIC came out in 2013, it was like a 1 terahash piece of equipment. And so whenever they take into account future energy for the protection and security of the network, they look at the equipment that’s in existence now, and then they linearly drive it up through however they decide they’re gonna run it up. And it always comes into some insanely—some kind of Armageddon, right? Like, Oh, this will consume all the energy in the solar system. Like, the Sun can’t even provide enough energy. And so what they’re doing wrong is they’re not accounting for the efficiencies in the chips. The first ASICs that were produced were literally 40,000% less efficient than the ASICs that are plugged in right now. The current ASICs are 400 times faster, and what that means is: for the same amount of energy. So the metric really is joules per terahash. How many joules do you need to run a terahash? And that has exponentially increased in efficiencies throughout the entire history of this network. And so people don’t take into account these efficiencies. And so you have to first understand that the transaction volume doesn’t matter. That’s not gonna give you an increase in energy. But the security and the accountants of the network, those will increase. But how are they gonna increase? Is it linear? Or is it a factor of what’s the efficiencies for chips? Which we’ve seen are monumental changes just globally in every industry. And so the best guesses are gonna take into account that [the Bitcoin network is] a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the world’s energy right now, and as the chips keep increasing in efficiencies, we’re going to maintain a level somewhere around here, and so I’m not personally concerned with that footprint. I think the metric that people like to inflate is that. And so they have to understand, to look back at the history of this network to see that the efficiencies of the chips is what creates a demand way below what anybody predicts the network will use in terms of global energy use. And on a global energy use—we’ve already talked about it. It’s an inconsequential number. It’s not an inconsequential number on a regional or local use. And so people confuse all those things. They’re like, Oh, this is really bad in this one small town. It’s like, Well, that’s true. That’s true because they maybe didn’t account for proper grid structures and transmission lines and grid stability, but that doesn’t affect the global energy use. And so we’re seeing now—and all of our Core Scientific’s contracts, and it’s publicly stated—they all have curtailment programs, so we help to protect the local grids. And we work very closely in all types of circumstances and situations where we may need to curtail quickly. I think that the three reasons to curtail energy would be: emergency—some kind of weather event or something really bad happens to the grid. We’ll shut off within seconds. Core Scientific will shut off and we’ll redirect that power to wherever they need it to go. There’s controlled load circumstances where we’ll shut off. And then there’s economic reasons, if they call us up and ask us for an economic reason—we’ll power down too. So we work with all of the local grids to provide that baseload energy back to the transmission lines, back to people and citizens and companies that need that energy. And because we’re that first source of extra energy, we’re literally—and I mean, it’s an actual fact that if you have Bitcoin miners on your grid and you have an emergency event—we make your grid stronger because we’ll shut off first. Other industries can’t do that, right? Traditional data centers, an AWS data center, they can’t power down. They’re running traffic lights and air traffic control and hospitals. If they down power, people are gonna die. And so our industry truly does, on a local level, make grids stronger. And so I know I kind of got a little bit off topic on your question on the future energy use of the network, but hopefully that answered your question. I also want to hear, Stephan, your answer.

Stephan Livera:

Well, I mean—I think you gave a great answer. Fundamentally, it is confusion. I think many listeners of this podcast tend to understand a bit of that nuance. They know that the incremental transaction on the Bitcoin network is not adding some massive new amount in terms of energy usage. The broader answer from my point of view is that Bitcoin is worth it. Even if it was 100% fossil fuel powered, even if it was taking up massively more—because you really have to zoom out and think, What does Bitcoin replace? And if you think about it as replacing the gold standard or the fiat standard, where we’ve seen this century of massive warfare between nations, what we’re really talking about with Bitcoin is an easier way to come to consensus on what is the correct state of the property ownership. We’re doing that rather than going to war. We’re doing that rather than all of this other infrastructure that is out there. And so when you really zoom out, it’s gonna be worth it. But of course, that takes time to prosecute that argument for people. And for some people, they need an easier way to get started with Bitcoin, and then eventually later on figure out, Wow, really? This is where this thing is going longer term? So I’m also curious as well, because certain qualities like the permissionless nature of Bitcoin, how much of that is important—to give an example to make it a little more concrete: fungibility—is that going to become an issue further down the line? If say as an example, there’s whitelisted coins and blacklisted coins, or if there’s green coins and “dirty” coins, will that be an impact further down the line? And would that actually challenge the value of Bitcoin for all of us?

Darin Feinstein:

Listen, there’s several fundamental principles of Bitcoin. If not the most important—is fungibility. People that play around with the fungibility of Bitcoin don’t understand what the technology is—the uncensored nature of it, the ability to have private property because it can’t be seized. So within a jurisdiction, there’s probably ways to do these weird things to certain addresses, but on a global basis there’s no way to do any of that. And most of the people that I’ve talked to that were concerned about this, if it was illicit activity—so there’s either an environmental or illicit activity problem if you get down to the granular level why they want this. On an illicit activity level, it makes no sense, because historically, how did people commit crimes? They used cash. And if somebody gives cash to another party, that cash can never be tracked. They can just go do whatever they want to do with that cash. If you give that party a Bitcoin, it lives on an immutable accounting ledger forever that’s been audited, tracked, and then it can be tracked and traced forever. And so it’s literally the worst methodology to commit a crime. If you’re gonna commit a crime, you don’t want to do it on a network that’s gonna track and trace you on its own forever. It’s a really bad idea. What you want is to use cash, because cash has been used for centuries to evade laws. And I’m familiar with a lot of these agencies that track this, and they prefer criminal activity on a Bitcoin blockchain because it’s tracked—that’s why you saw the ransomware people, it stupidly asked for Bitcoin, and then as soon as they off-ramped the Bitcoin with a centralized exchange, it got seized immediately. So the illicit activity narrative doesn’t really hold up in my opinion. And then on the energy and the nation side, most of the people—they don’t understand. They’re like, Well, we don’t want to do business with China—theoretically. And I’m like, Okay, so you’re gonna somehow have a Bitcoin that you’re gonna label like it hasn’t touched China? And they’re like, Yeah. And I’m like, How do you think it was mined? What equipment do you think was used to mine that Bitcoin? It’s all Chinese. It was made in China, or some other Asian country. And the firmware most of this equipment runs on is also made in China. Or Malaysia or wherever it comes from—you can’t control that. And so it really, again, makes no sense there. But if you look at the UN statistics on the illicit activity side, somewhere around $2 trillion a year is laundered through traditional banking systems. And I don’t want to go into specific banks, but if you look back over the history of the Bitcoin network in the last 10 or 12 or 13 years, certain banks, some of the top 5, top 10 banks on the planet Earth, they paid their entire market value in fines for illicit illegal activity that occurred at the bank. And so there’s a lot of problems in the world. This network is not any of the top problems that we face globally. So the limitations that some people—lots of people like to be relevant, right? They want to create some new company. If you’re gonna create a startup in Bitcoin and try to eliminate fungibility, you have no idea what you’re doing. It’s like the whole nature of the technology.

Stephan Livera:

I think that’s an excellent answer. And one other question and area to chat about: obviously as a US-based miner you probably have some views on this, but should it be seen as an issue if lots of the hashrate is going into America? Or is that seen as like, That’s a good thing because America first? Or do you see it more like, The more the hashrate is distributed around the world, the better? Because maybe it’s harder to shut down the Bitcoin network, or at least to try to control it or capture it.

Darin Feinstein:

I think hashrate distribution globally is important. America has a history of protecting private property. So if you’re gonna have a large percentage of the network in any country, this is a pretty good one to have. But I also think it should be distributed globally. People should be creating businesses—and I think governments will too—in certain jurisdictions that may dwarf what we’re doing here in America. But I think everybody should build more infrastructure regardless of where you are. It’s good for the network at the end of the day. You saw 60% of the network was in China and then they shut it off. Who cares? The Bitcoin network doesn’t care. It’s just: what are the laws in every country, and how do you protect investments? Really. You don’t want to go to a jurisdiction, raise through debt or equity $100 million dollars for equipment and one day call up and say, How come our miners aren’t working? And they say, What miners? We don’t have any miners here. So I think there are some risks globally to private property or corporate property. And you just weigh that with the rest of it. But I think distribution’s important.

Stephan Livera:

Do you believe it would make sense for governments to mine Bitcoin? Obviously there’s El Salvador who’ve publicly mentioned this, but do you believe it makes sense for them to do that? Or do you actually think it makes more sense for it to be done by private companies and individuals?

Darin Feinstein:

I don’t think we get to choose who mines Bitcoin. Governments eventually will mine Bitcoin—that’s a certainty. It’ll be like a Bitcoin arms race, in my opinion, in the next decade. All of that just makes the network stronger. If you saw the events in the last few years, nobody could predict any of this stuff. So what’s gonna happen next on the Bitcoin network? It’ll be something that we didn’t even think about. Like, That’s crazy, but okay. But if I had to guess, governments would build their own Bitcoin network, they’re gonna print their own fiat currencies, they’re gonna buy Bitcoin network equipment and Bitcoin to protect their FX—their reserves.

Stephan Livera:

So going on that same idea, as I’m sure you saw even in the recent Biden executive order on the 9th of March, there was mention of central bank digital currencies. Do you see them as a threat to Bitcoin or just more like an orthogonal thing to Bitcoin? Or are they going to capture mind share of people—central bank digital currencies or surveillance control coins—whatever you wanna call them. Do you view them as like a, a way of co-opting Bitcoin? Or do you just see them as like, They’re just a separate thing?

Darin Feinstein:

I mean, it’s the opposite of Bitcoin, right? So I see them as a competitor product. It’s probably the scariest technology a government could force its citizens to use that’s ever been invented in the history of bad technologies. The central bank digital currencies that eventually will be issued by governments across the world include—I don’t really understand how it’s utilized in China. I know they have that digital yuan. I know they used it at the Olympics. What it is, is it’s programmable money. And what I’m always shocked at is: why are the banks and the credit card companies not going crazy? Because this eliminates all banks. You don’t need to store money at a bank anymore. You don’t need a credit card company to process payments. In China, Visa has an exclusive with the Olympics to process payments—except this year, I don’t know what percentage they used the digital yuan CBDC, in my opinion a violation of the exclusivity of Visa, and nothing happened. They just wiped out whatever that percentage of Visa was. You’re not gonna be able to fight to use Visa exclusively in China when the Chinese government wants you to use the digital yuan. But it disrupts all payment methods that exist today. Every single payment company, if a territory accepts a CBDC, you’re irrelevant. If you’re a bank and your territory or jurisdiction accepts a CBDC, you’re irrelevant, because the money now lives on a government server and it’s programmable—so they can do anything they want with it. They don’t like your political views? They just shut your account off. They don’t like a restaurant? They just shut it off. They can’t even accept your money. And so the government now gets to choose what doctors you go to, what websites you’re on, what car you buy, where you buy your gas, where your kids get to go to school. If you saw in the EU—they say some scary stuff. They said, We want to implement a CBDC so people only make sensible purchases. Whose definition of sensible? They said the word sensible and essential. Well what’s essential? What does that mean? I can’t spend the money the way I want? And Keynesians, they don’t believe in saving money. No saving money. It’s consumption, conspicuous-based consumption model. And so now Keynesian economics people are running the CBDCs and they don’t like you saving money. So they give you an expiration date. Your money goes poof if you don’t spend it. And now how do you secure your life? How do you have savings to protect you in bad times? So if you want to talk about something that’s Orwellian and dangerous, that’s the most dangerous thing that people don’t realize is dangerous. You don’t want your money programmed by an administration—the government—it would be catastrophic. It’s a catastrophic technology that’s just ripe for exploitation. It’s awful. It’s not a threat to Bitcoin—it’s a threat to humanity.

Stephan Livera:

I’m with you, Darin. And I broadly agree with you. They are a threat to most common sense, liberty-minded individuals out there, but the only point that I would maybe slightly disagree, or just maybe add something a little different, is: some companies will have an incentive to go with it because they want to be part of the in crowd. And from their perspective, they may argue, Oh, look, Mr. Central Banker, you don’t have the technological capacity to implement a CBDC—let me do that for you. And that’s going to be their in, that’s going to be their angle, and there will be a fight about it.

Darin Feinstein:

Oh, I fully agree that we will get a large percentage of businesses and people that—you’ll get the people that think they can benefit from it. So they’re gonna want to sign up. And then you’ll get the people that don’t even know what they’re doing, and they’re gonna sign up. And so it’s just a dangerous technology, and it will play out in levels across the world. I agree with you 100%. We will see lots of people sign up and say, CBDC’s are good. They’re gonna go out and cheerlead it on because they’re gonna think they could benefit by it. But at the end of the day, those companies and those people—the administrations are short—people are in power for short amounts of time. And those people eventually will reap the consequences. Or see the consequences of a new administration coming in and maybe not liking them. And so it’s just super dangerous technology. I do agree with you. I think we have a very uphill battle to see that it doesn’t get implemented. I think it’s a shame. I’m torn on whether it will be approved or not in America. I certainly hope it won’t be, but that’ll be a whole regulatory nightmare for how they do it. And the other problem is, name a centralized network that hasn’t been hacked? There aren’t any. They hack everything. So now they hack your country’s CBDC network—all the money’s gone? What, do they roll back the clock? How do they stop it? It will certainly get hacked. And so how do they deal with that?

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, there’s gonna be all kinds of privacy ramifications. As I recall, maybe even just a few years ago, I think it was a large percentage of Americans had their social security numbers doxxed, and Equifax had a big hack even a little while back as well, and a lot of people’s information was just doxxed out as part of that. And so the same kinds of things could happen with CBDCs also.

Darin Feinstein:

100%. Every doctor I go to, you go to, anywhere you eat, where you go on vacation, what you spent at the hotel, that’s all on CBDC record, digitally recorded forever. And now anybody can access that, and anybody can dox it. All of it will get doxxed. Everything you’ll ever do on a CBDC you should just figure at one point is gonna get doxxed.

Stephan Livera:

And so I think then it comes down to what’s the right kind of counter? What’s the right way to help stop that kind of future and actually make it a better one? And perhaps it comes down to making that argument about why people who value liberty should be pro-Bitcoin, and why people should see Bitcoin as an innovation and as actually a very socially beneficial technology. So I think that probably brings me to that other question that I’m curious your views on that also is: whether you have any thoughts on the right kind of approach here. Is it lobbying? Is it trying to support Bitcoin-friendly political candidates? Is it education? What kinds of things do you see as being useful for those of us who are Bitcoin advocates, supporters, holders, et cetera?

Darin Feinstein:

You nailed it—it’s lobbying and education. That’s pretty much all I do these days, is I talk to people to educate them on the importance of the innovation of Bitcoin. Why is it important? Why can’t you just use some proof-of-stake coin to do the same thing? And I think there’s a lot of confusion on that. There’s a lot of confusion on why it’s important to provide liberty and freedom and private property rights and banking rights. And how does it it happen? How do they actually get that? And so some people like to get granular on that. And so we take a very active role in that. I think the infrastructure bill in America united a lot of proof-of-work Bitcoin people to say, Hey, who’s representing us? And so you’re seeing dozens of really smart people joining together in different ways to help educate Washington D.C. Out here—and I think it’s working. I think people are starting to understand what Bitcoin is and why it’s important, and that it’s not digital video game money that people buy drugs on the Internet with. They have to understand that it’s very complicated accounting technology that changes the world. And so it’s just a massive groundswell of everybody lobbying and educating the other people that do not understand the importance of this technology. I think it’s also important to point out that there’s 100 million Bitcoin users—and growing, as you said—this network continues to grow because of the benefits it provides to the users. And the most important people to advocate on behalf of this technology—it’s not me. You’re doing your part. But it’s really the users. That 100 million users, they need to go out and make sure that their representatives know how important this technology is to protect within their borders. Because at the end of the day, the Bitcoin network, it doesn’t care about a vote in Congress in the US. It doesn’t care at all. But the people that have to live subjugated to those rules—they care. And so the people have to get involved so the technology is not chilled in the jurisdictions that they’re in. And that’s what’s gonna be important to drive mass adoption, and then as a result of the adoption, you’re increasing the economic and financial liberties of those who participate in this network. And it disrupts lots of legacy networks. And those legacy networks, they’re really good at lobbying, and they’re really good at marketing. And so they’ve been united in providing a very clear, very negative, very false—but who cares? How do you know what’s true or not? Like, the fact checkers aren’t fact checking on behalf of Bitcoin. They’re providing this massively negative, very coordinated message about our industry. And the problem our industry’s had in messaging is that we’re all very big on decentralization and independence and free—just everybody has their own decentralized message. And the problem is we’re up against a united front that wants to spread misinformation, and so if I say something and then you say something and five other people say something, but it’s all a little bit different—but you have one united tsunami against us—we lose, because they’re more coordinated. And so Michael Saylor and I started the Bitcoin Mining Council with some other folks, and the purpose of it was to educate the regulators on the actual effects, not the fake Newsweek, World Economic Forum version of events, but the actual events and facts related to the energy use of the network. And initially it got a lot of kickback. People were like, You guys aren’t a council. It sounds like Harry Potter—like some of the comments were pretty funny, but the fact of the matter is, all we were trying to do—and it’s important—is to educate people together on what the facts are. Because in this industry, the facts are on our side—the facts on illicit activity, the facts on energy use—they’re all positive for us. We’re actually subsidizing the growth of renewable energy. You could just pick an area and the facts are positive, but what the legacy folks don’t want you to see is the truth, so they’re circumnavigating that. And so together with all of the users, we can make a big difference. And that’s what the Bitcoin Mining Council purpose is, and that’s why we still release quarterly numbers on the energy use, which has been very helpful to me. I talk to people in Washington all the time—it’s been very helpful. Michael Saylor has a great quote: “We can be decentralized, but we don’t need to be disorganized.” And so that’s what the Bitcoin Mining Council is. At Core Scientific, we’ve hired a gentleman named Colin Crowell. Colin was the head of GR, government relations, at Twitter. He put that department together. He’s now in charge of government relations for us. And so he’s got a team, and he’s talking to folks in DC all the time, so we’re spending a lot of money trying to educate people, not just here but around the world. I think what happened in the EU with this MICA bill was amazing. You saw Bitcoin users globally—groundswell—provide lots of information, get involved, and they denied this bill. And I think for the first time ever, we have this global and united community that’s going to lobby everywhere in the world, and I’m very bullish on Bitcoin users becoming one of the largest lobbying organizations globally. I think that you have a very active group of people that really care about how the world turns out, and they’re coming together nicely.

Stephan Livera:

Fantastic. Well, I think that’s an excellent spot to finish up there, Darin. I really enjoyed chatting with you. And if you had any closing thoughts out there for listeners or things that they should be thinking about or doing? If they’re out there looking for ways to educate. Maybe if you could leave them with any good points or arguments that you’ve found in your discussions that have really resonated with people?

Darin Feinstein:

So I think a lot of the material, if you have energy detractors, there’s a lot of material—it’s on hope.com. It’s Michael Saylor’s website. We have a 9-page presentation last quarter that I talked about the efficiency, joule per terahash—all of those metrics are there. We talked about how much energy is used globally and how much the global Bitcoin network used—that’s there. We talked about how much energy’s generated in America versus wasted energy. The argument that’s kind of hit the top level of FUD in our industry is the energy use. The Bitcoin Mining Council information is very dispositive, that this is a positive industry for the world, and that as the innovation continues and the users continue, it will bring greater freedom to everyone—8 billion people.

Stephan Livera:

That’s the hope. Darin, where can people find you and Core Scientific online?

Darin Feinstein:

I’m on Twitter, @DarinFeinstein. I had a lot of fake people asking for your information that wasn’t me, but now they tick-marked me so that’s happened a lot less. And @Core_Scientific is also on Twitter as well. That’s probably the best way to see updates on both.

Stephan Livera:

Fantastic. Well thank you for joining me, Darin.

Darin Feinstein:

Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a pleasure. It was good to finally talk to you.