 Peter Huckvist sent me this great suggestion on Patreon, and I want to read it to you because it's going to be the start of a new feature we call falling down the rabbit hole. I really like the topical Q&A, gets things going in depth, and I learn a lot. Just an idea, would be interesting to have you go down the rabbit hole for 10 minutes about something you don't see in the question, but feels important to you. Always love to hear your thoughts. What a great suggestion, Peter, and thank you so much for asking. I'm going to do my very first down the rabbit hole segment right now, and this is the first time it's been done. I hope you like the idea. We'll try it out. So the idea is really simple. I ask myself a question, and then I answer it. So it's not a question from the audience. It's not a question from the community builders. It's not a question from the chat. It's a question from me. So I'm going to be both question and answer, and I'll ask the question you didn't ask me this week that I really want to answer. So let's start by asking the question first. Hey, Andreas, love your work. Thank you so much, man. By the way, I really like your hairstyle right now. It's looking particularly fierce. Here's my question. Do you think the recent drop in oil prices is going to have a material impact on bitcoin mining? We've seen over the past several weeks a dramatic, and in some cases, catastrophic collapse in oil prices. In fact, at some point, WTI futures were treating negative, which means the oil producers would have to pay you to take their oil. And the reason for this is because the sudden collapse in demand for oil and the increase in supply caused by a cartel conflict between oil producing nations created a dramatic imbalance in supply and demand. Right now, there are literally hundreds of container ships that are absolutely, sorry, of oil ships that are tanker ships that are full and are sitting off the coasts of major refineries in places like Texas and California, in the Gulf around, I'm sure, various parts of the Middle East and Asia. And essentially what they're doing is they're using these tankers as buckets to store oil that continues to be produced at record levels for which there is absolutely no demand. Refineries have shut down or have curtailed operations and there's nowhere for this oil to go, so oil is very cheap. And at the same time, this is now filtering through to oil pumps. For the first time last week, we saw prices under a dollar a gallon for gasoline, refined gasoline at the gasoline pump or gas station or petrol station, as it's called in England, for automotive gasoline. So under a dollar a gallon, a dollar a gallon just to make the conversion is about three shekels in a giraffe per liter. I have no idea. Anyway, the bottom line is that this is going to have an impact and I find it very interesting that no one has asked what the impact is going to be on mining. If you think about it, mining is dominated by the cost of electricity and electricity cost is dominated by the fuel or mechanism with which that electricity is produced. Now in China where most of the mining is concentrated now, most of that electricity is produced by coal. Because energy and electricity is a fungible commodity, if you are connected to a coal-fired power plant and somewhere else, a gas-fired or oil-fired power plant has half the cost of energy because its oil is much cheaper, it's going to cost less to get electricity from your coal plant surprisingly enough because they're going to have to compete and operate at the loss at least temporarily. So you are going to see, especially because of electricity distribution networks, the price of electricity you're going to drop as a result of this probably worldwide, but not equally worldwide. In fact, I think this is going to have a very interesting effect because one of the biggest new mining operations opens in the United States, in the state of Texas, and I can't imagine that that is a coincidence. It opened long before this crisis and changed in the oil price, but I can't imagine that it was in order to get the beautiful weather of Texas or because of Tex-Mex cuisine. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that the US at 12,000 barrels per day is the largest oil producer in the world because of fracking. And so therefore, there may be really good opportunities for cheap power, which would suddenly make US-based miners much, much more competitive and profitable. In the past, one of the big gating factors for mining was availability of ASIC devices. Because those ASIC devices were moving so fast, moving from, for example, 60 nanometers down to 30, down to 20, et cetera, et cetera, moving much faster than the speed of Moore's Law, these ASICs went essentially out of profitability in a number of months. Unless you were within a few hundred kilometers from the fabrication plant where the ASICs are made, you couldn't really profitably use them and you certainly couldn't chip them to customers overseas. That all changed in 2016 when the front end of ASIC development hit the wall of Moore's Law and everything slowed down. At that point, new developments in ASIC started happening at the traditional pace of less than twice the improvement in efficiency every 18 months. That is glacial compared to the past and that means that most ASIC equipment today is still good for one to two years after it's manufactured, sometimes even longer potentially. And that means that the competition is no longer over how you get ASICs. If you can get ASICs, the real competition between miners is on the unit cost of electricity, which is dominated in some places by the cost of oil. And that was my fall down the rabbit hole. I hope you enjoyed that segment. We're gonna do more of these. It's gonna be a permanent feature. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, like and share. All my work is shared for free. So if you wanna support it, join me on Patreon.