 Well, as of the latest metrics, I would say Bitcoin is about $700 billion secure. How do I know? Well, $700 billion sitting on the table, well, it's actually $800 today, waiting for someone to steal if they break Bitcoin. The fact that they can't tells us that Bitcoin is at least, at minimum, $800 billion worth secure. Bitcoin, although certainly maturing with age, is still very much the Wild West. Today, we're taking a look at a story that takes that view a bit more literally than most. In a hunt for cheaper energy, one Bitcoin miner built and operated a power plant, at least until they got caught. It's an interesting story, and on this episode, we'll talk about it. But before that, introductions. My name is Adam B. Levine, and this is Speaking of Bitcoin. This time, as always, I'm joined by the other host of the show, Stephanie Murphy. Hi. Jonathan Mohan. Hey, hey. And Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Hello. Okay, folks, so this is a bit of a strange one. Jonathan, you've been following this one pretty closely. What the heck is going on here? Oh, this story gives me hope for humanity. Can I explain that? Yeah, it is my favorite Bitcoin story of last year. And basically, what happened was a company noticed that they had in their property natural gas that was just there on their property that wasn't being tapped into. So they just decided to buy four 1.25 megawatt transformers to turn natural gas into electricity, just bought them, hooked them up, and then had five megawatts of power. For context, Americans use 25 times more energy than the average human on Earth. And one megawatt is, I believe, 1600 homes worth of electricity. So they just decided to build a five megawatt power plant in their backyard of a plot of land that they owned. And then we're mining Bitcoin on it for about a year and a half until someone was complaining about the noise that they heard. Like, why is the forest humming, daddy? They didn't expect it to be coming from that, from these giant generators. That, my son, is the sound of Bitcoin. It doesn't go to Qing. It goes... It's money printer Go B... Yeah. That's the free market version of that. And so they eventually called, like, a regulator. Wait, the complaining neighbor is called a regulator, right? Basically, yeah. They ended up complaining, called the cops, the cops looked at it, And then a government official came out and was shocked at a gas at the horror of them not filing the proper paperwork to do what they did. And so they ended up finding them five and a half million dollars, although it's Canadian, so it's not real money. Is any of it real money? Except the Bitcoin, excuse me. Their sin wasn't that they stole the power because it was theirs. It wasn't that they didn't have rights to do it because they did. It was just that the government didn't give them a piece of paper that said they were going to do it. Okay, hang on a second here. In all fairness, though, there's a reason why we have environmental regulations around power generation because if you can simply externalize the costs in the form of pollution and then keep the profits, then that creates a tragedy of the market scenario, right? So markets don't account for that. So is it okay? Like, is it just they didn't have a piece of paper? Are you saying that their power generation based on gas was 100% compliant and minimally polluting to the environment? Well, I'm saying that the state is going to state and the only thing they were charged with that they settled for was a failure to submit proper documentation. Right. But the reason that documentation is required primarily has to do with environmental protection, right? Is that the real reason, though? You know what this reminds me of? In the medieval times, you know, the king used to claim the entire domain of the land and any animals that you hunted on that land, if you were not one of the lords or in the royal family were considered poached because the king owns all of the natural resources in that kingdom. Stephanie, that's actually where the term comes from. It's fracking under consent of the king. Are you kidding me? Yeah, you didn't know back in the 1400s they had fracking and you had to get permission from the king in order to engage in it. Oh, we're going off the rails. He's kidding. He's kidding. Okay. Well, I fell for it. But anyway, this reminds me of a petty fiefdom. Is the government so benevolent that they really just want to protect the environment or are they trying to get their piece of the pie and have their power over the natural resources that these people utilized on their own property? But I also think just taking a higher level at what this is, one of my favorite books is Childhood End. It's a Arthur C. Clark novel. And in it, there's a little boy who basically gets psychic powers. And then you find out that it's not that he got psychic powers. It's that all of humanity reached this phase of consciousness that we were evolving. And the aliens said to the child, you're no more special than the first atom in a nuclear bomb that, you know, physics, right? It's like, you're the first thing to this domino effect. You are not a special snowflake. Well, it's not just that you are not special. It's just that you are special in that you are the first, but you're no more special than being the first. And the thing I find exciting about this story is I'm super bullish on this idea that Bitcoin is going to create the financial incentive to look at all of the unutilized power that the earth can generate that's in the middle of nowhere that has no incentive of ever being put on the grid that can now be monetized and used and contributed to the ecosystem. And then once it starts becoming monetized, you know, in the beginning, it's like every single civilization is set up next to the cross section of an ocean and a river. And it's because that's where all the kinetic energy was that you could commercialize with a boat. And then we ended up building power plants next to those cities just because that's where the people were. And we're in this catch 21 of only building power where people already are. And so the thing I think that's great about what this is like the first of is imagine a waterfall or a volcano in the middle of nowhere, you could make in theory a gigawatt, a half a gigawatt power plant that's in the middle of nowhere that isn't on grid, that's just mining Bitcoin. And then eventually, if there's nothing around you for 100 miles, people might actually migrate to you because you now have the power plant there. I honestly think that this idea of like air quotes rogue power that's not on the grid might become a large, if not predominant amount of the power generation of our society on the back of Bitcoin that then will turn into what allows people to move away from the cities and move out to the middle of nowhere because now there are just these massive power infrastructure that's just built where there was no one before. It's a PPP, a pirate power plant. Well, I mean, the fact that this one was done without fiat permission is novel and fun. But I think that looking at countries like Ecuador with their Bitcoin bond for their volcano, I just think that there's so much power that's in the middle of nowhere that never needs to be on the grid. I honestly think that 100 years from now, basically the entire energy grid will be run by Bitcoin mining. Yeah, this is interesting because you could argue that this is a decentralizing force that gets us away from power grids, which are inefficient and prone to problems that shut the whole grid down and they're moving in the direction anyway of breaking them apart into more micro grids so that the whole grid doesn't go down if there's a stress or a shortage or something. So I think it's really interesting how this could be an incentive to get creative and to get more efficient with mechanisms of energy use and to decentralize the provision of energy. And I think that as energy gets used in stuff like Bitcoin mining and also powering cities and settlements and stuff like that and even towns, it's going to improve. It's going to get more efficient, cleaner, greener, better, and that's just part of the process. Yeah. And I'll have you know, Andreas, the EU has just decided that since none of them are going to hit the Paris Climate Accord agreement, they're just going to redefine natural gas and nuclear as environmentally friendly and green investments. And so this power plant was just ahead of the curve in doubling down in green investments and natural gas. Well, there we go. I think it plays into kind of the narrative that Bitcoin is an environmental disaster. And I certainly don't like that aspect of it because we have seen, in fact, the majority of power generation for Bitcoin move towards renewable sources for economic reasons, exactly because it's not where the people are. And the recent ban by China has had the kind of ironic side effect of improving the environmental footprint of Bitcoin because it reduced the coal-fired power plant need. So I think it's a funny story. It's a cute story. And I love the idea of decentralized power generation and rogue power plants. But I don't think it's completely irrational to say that there are good reasons why you can't just dump pollution to your neighbors, whether that's sound pollution or air pollution or river pollution or water pollution, and just be okay with that. What pollution are you saying that they're creating other than CO2? And in which case, how does your neighbor determine that the CO2 is bothering them? Well, it was sound pollution, right? Well, sound pollution was how they got caught, right? That was the reason someone called someone is because it was making noise. That is the form of pollution, and it is damaging to people's health. Sure. But to be clear, in this example, they were operating for almost two years. The sound pollution was someone saying, huh, what's that discreet noise that I kind of didn't notice until just now? Maybe I should actually look into it after two years of saying it. We're going to take a quick break now. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the sort of broader energy picture and security picture. Kind of those are two very interrelated things when it comes to the Bitcoin network right after this break. We'll be right back. Before the break, we were talking about this kind of rogue power plant story that had some kind of funny libertarian Wild Westy characteristics, which we like to dig into. That sort of became a little bit of a conversation about sort of the environmental impact of Bitcoin and of this type of proof-of-work mining. Right now, I'm looking at Marty Betts' newsletter issue number 1138 from January 3rd, titled The Network is Very Secure. And he quotes in there a tweet from Jameson Lopp, who shows a chart of the Bitcoin network proof-of-work equivalent days, which you can find on bitcoin.sipa.be, if you would like to look at these live stats yourself. And the point that Jameson Lopp makes is that the Bitcoin proof-of-work equivalent days is at an all-time high. And that an attacker who has 100% of the network hash rate, right? So 100% of the entirety of the power going into mining right now, if that was controlled by a single bad actor, it would take that bad actor two years of continuously surreptitiously mining in order to actually rewrite the history of Bitcoin. And this is not the only metric that's at an all-time high. There are plenty of them. Bitcoin mining has been something that people have been optimizing around, getting better at, getting better at, getting better at, where they are consuming more and more electricity, but they're providing effectively more and more specialized proof-of-work back to the system, which then makes it that much more difficult. So that was really what the last story made me think about is that the fact that we have a company that literally created an unregulated power plant because they simply had access to it, we look at the internet blackout that happened in Kazakhstan earlier this month. And Kazakhstan has become a really big hub for mining, and we saw a pretty significant drop to the Bitcoin hash rate. But pretty significant today is a lot different than pretty significant a couple of years ago. And that dip in hash rate didn't actually do anything. And now we've pretty much already recovered from it. So although there are certainly a lot of controversial elements about the fact that Bitcoin does use energy, its use of that energy, we've talked about this before in the past, and I think it's worth talking about again, that energy is being used for a very specific purpose, which is to create finality in a system that is distributed, which then makes it available to people as a neutral layer, but they don't have to be concerned about somebody rewriting history or changing the way that things were. And they also don't have to be concerned about being blocked from the network because they're doing something that people don't like. Neutrality is that thing. And although we may disagree with certain elements or certain ways that that security is achieved, I think it is worth noting that the security is very high and that that creates the conditions for a lot of the stuff that we think will happen over the course of the next number of years with Bitcoin, and with Ethereum and other blockchains too. But Bitcoin, again, is sort of that ground layer asset that is only about store value and only about finality. Seems like it's particularly important there. So I'll open it up, but that's what I'm thinking about when I hear about this story. Yeah, we saw very much the same thing as I mentioned with the banning of mining in China. It took, I think, seven or eight months for the hash rate to bounce back to where it was before the ban. Yeah, it was a big one. Yeah, I mean, that was by some estimate somewhere between 55 and 65% of all of the hash rates in Bitcoin was in China. And it didn't all disappear overnight. Of course, the ban took a while to take effect, but gradually miners shut down, migrated, sold, moved all of the equipment, and it basically relocated to other parts of the world. And seven months later, the hash rate was back to where it was. And really, the interim drop wasn't much. The interim drop set Bitcoin back to where it had been about a year before the ban, because it grows so fast. And it was a blip. Interestingly, the theory was that if China ever banned mining or banned Bitcoin or tried to take over mining, they would succeed and destroy Bitcoin. That was always brought up as a fear point to discredit Bitcoin. And in practice, it happened. It was a nothing burger. And now, in terms of mining at least, China is not a player in Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, really. China has removed itself from Bitcoin and has failed to remove Bitcoin from itself, which is the slogan, you can take your country out of Bitcoin, but you can't take Bitcoin out of your country. That's basically just got proven. I think we're going to see that again and again and again. Turns out, many of the big fears and scary stories about how Bitcoin will imminently die because of factor X, and then factor X happens and nothing. Well, I just think it's honestly one of the single greatest fears that I've had of Bitcoin for a decade was whether or not Bitcoin would be corrupted by the CCP or if the CCP would be corrupted by Bitcoin. And I think it's just beautiful that this year, or last year rather, that they banned all mining and told all the exchanges to shut down because that's a position of weakness. That's a position of fear. That's them saying we think we will lose. We're not the snake that will eat the smaller snake, we're the thing that will be eaten. And so them banning it doesn't affect the ability for anyone in China to get it materially. But what it does do is show that they do not see a path forward to corrupting Bitcoin because if they could, they would have belt and wrote it like they do every other part of the planet Earth. And so I've never been more bullish to what I think Bitcoin will achieve in relation to human prosperity than seeing its exodus from China. Well, it's the same thing with other countries that are doing central bank digital currencies. It's not necessarily that they were scared of Bitcoin, but I think when they looked into the future and they looked at the launch of their central bank digital currency, competing against Bitcoin with the central bank digital currency on a level playing field just didn't seem very palatable, much easier to tilt the playing field by banning Bitcoin at the same time as launching the central bank digital currency. And that's the theme I think that has become very evident. The countries that have been first to ban and most forceful in banning Bitcoin, mining, cryptocurrency, other associated activities have all been countries that are also very far ahead on the past to doing a central bank digital currency and usually because they have significant challenges with their sovereign monetary policy. So it's not so much of the scared of Bitcoin. I think they just know that their central bank digital currency wouldn't compete very well. Yeah, I think competition broadly is really the thing that this all comes back to. When you look at monopoly type systems, the one thing that you're not allowed to do, of course, because there's monopoly is compete. Because if you compete with something, again, a monopoly system has to compete, and it has to actually prove why it's valuable and why it's better. And that's something that's difficult to do, again, in a competitive circumstance, but especially if you've created something in a non competitive circumstance, and you're used to not competing around that, it's just kind of a foreign urge that just seems like that's terrifying, right? That's kind of what I see with all of this is this attempt to get out and preempt a lot of this stuff, like there's no question that banning these things isn't actually going to change whether people access them. What it does is it slows down the adoption curve, it makes it more difficult, it makes it more dangerous. And so in that way, they buy themselves some time. But fundamentally, the question isn't whether central bank digital currency is will succeed. The question is, will anyone be able to figure out a way to stop Bitcoin from competing with them? And so far, we haven't seen that. The main competition, of course, isn't the day to day use of the currency. I don't think Bitcoin really competes in that area against any national currency at the moment. It doesn't, nobody really prefers it for that, unless that currency has collapsed, in which case it's competing against the vacuum, not against a working national currency. I think the thing that China was most concerned with, and many of the other countries that are following these paths, is that if they have, or when they have some kind of currency crisis, devaluation, inflation, exchange rate risk, the need to impose currency controls, embargo sanctions, whatever the hell it might be. At that moment, all of those people who are squeezed by that event will use Bitcoin and potentially other cryptocurrencies, but mostly Bitcoin, to exit, to reach a safe haven. When it comes to sound money, of course, it's Bitcoin, there's no other currency. But for some other applications like moving money across borders when your government doesn't want you to do that or things like that, there may be other cryptocurrencies that would serve the purpose to, or even offer privacy better. So I think that's what they're afraid of. It's not so much that, oh, we're going to put our digital yuan up, and then people are going to decide to use Bitcoin instead for buying things, because that's not really an issue. Mobile payments dominate in China. Billions of people use them every single day. They already have digital money to a degree that nobody in the West does. But I think if there is a currency crisis, if there is an inflation crisis, a big chunk, especially if the wealthier class are simply going to stash all of their wealth away in some form in more sound or more untraceable money to get it out of the hands of the government, and that's the risk. And that's why they have to ban it. So that's actually brought up an article that I was reading a couple of days ago, which is billionaire investor Bill Miller now has 50% of his personal wealth in Bitcoin. That's the largest single number from a percentage perspective. Again, we don't typically care what traditional investors do, except as indications of what is coming. And Bill Miller is an interesting person because he is quite influential. And this move I think is something unlike anything I've ever seen. We've looked at the Michael Saylor type of situations where it's a company that's choosing to store assets that they hold in this because they have a firm thesis about Bitcoin. But again, if we start to see some of these Uber rich people who are like, yeah, I have 50% of my net worth in Bitcoin and you should probably have 1% of your net worth in Bitcoin, which is what he said in this article, which we'll link in the show notes. Then I mean, that's kind of game over about a lot of this stuff because these are really influential people for people who are interested in protecting their money. They aren't really thinking too deeply about this. They just tend to kind of follow these bigger influential figures. And again, this is an outlier at this point, just a single data point. No, but it's important to look at what they do, not what they say. We've seen a lot of wealthy individuals talking about how Bitcoin is terrible and it's bad and meanwhile they're buying it. So it's very interesting that Bill Miller has 50% of his personal wealth in Bitcoin. And yeah, I read the same article, Adam. And I also thought that was interesting. I guess the critics were right. I mean, organized crime is used in Bitcoin. When you guys were talking about China and the attitude of the CCP towards Bitcoin, I was thinking contrast a strategy like this with what El Salvador did. They're just embracing it. We're not afraid. Welcome in. Come on. Let's use it. I think we're still waiting to see what happens with El Salvador. I'm waiting to see too. I don't know if it's ready to declare it a success, but it certainly appears on the surface anyway. It appears a little bit more, I don't know, governments who try to ban Bitcoin and then also are issuing their own central bank digital currencies. It does reek of this insecurity where they're afraid of competition. They don't want any competition, but with El Salvador, it has an air of confidence about it. Yeah, they definitely use an air of confidence because they didn't need consensus in order to pull it off. They were just able to do it through control of the government and they might wind up being a great decision and might wind up being a terrible decision. We're going to wait and see and figure out what actually happens in real life. But again, it's just to say that we're going to talk about this in another show real soon. First examples aren't necessarily best examples even when they do work. Sometimes they're just outliers. As it stands right now, like I mentioned up front on this segment, it would take somewhere over two years for somebody who was acting maliciously within the network and had 100% of the hash rate that is currently being used to secure Bitcoin, which is a whole lot of energy and a whole lot of equipment in order to get from here to there. Andreas mentioned in the last segment that it is using a lot of energy and that there are people who have legitimate concerns about that and that there are certain situations where that's like a real thing. The question is, is there a point in time at which Bitcoin is secured enough? Is two years a sufficient level of security? I think I expect the hash rate to continue to go up no matter what happens just because of the way that the incentives are set up. I can tell you definitively and exactly when the Bitcoin network is secured enough and that is when the difficulty chooses to not go up for an epoch and then the difficulty chooses to not go up for another epoch. There's this thing called an invisible hand. It's a brilliant dynamic algorithm and I think it's worth really looking at this from a slightly different perspective, which is what exactly is the metric that we shall use in order to say secure enough? What does secure enough mean? The way I always look at security is security is very much a risk reward scenario. It's about risk versus reward. When you attack something like Bitcoin, you're going to have to take a risk and that risk needs to be commensurate to the rewards you can get. If you can make the risk not worth the reward, then you don't attack it and then it's secure. That's how security works always. There's no such thing as it is secure or insecure. The only question is, is it secure enough to protect the value that you're trying to protect? How secure is Bitcoin today? Well, as of the latest metrics, I would say Bitcoin is about $700 billion secure. How do I know? Well, $700 billion sitting on the table, well, it's actually $800 today, waiting for someone to steal if they break Bitcoin. The fact that they can't tells us that Bitcoin is at least, at minimum, $800 billion worth secure. When is it secure enough? Well, that's a moving target. If Bitcoin continues to increase in value over the longer term, then it will need to become commensurately more secure in order to protect that greater value that is sitting there. That's exactly what the dynamic difficulty algorithm does. Ultimately, the dynamic difficulty algorithm is driven by the entrance and exit of miners into the market. Those miners are motivated by the profitability. That profitability is driven 100% by the price of Bitcoin. Therefore, when the price goes up, the miners are more incentivized, more miners enter, difficulty goes up, and then it matches the amount needed to protect the new value of Bitcoin. It's also worth playing out the thought process of, is Bitcoin secure enough? Because I like to think, what's a belief you can hold that if you held it, what are the behaviors that that belief would inform? It's like believing in determinism, because it can inform nothing behaviorally. It's a meaningless concept, even if it is true to subscribe to. If you play out the idea, well, is Bitcoin secure enough? What performatively would you do with that belief to the Bitcoin network, even if you're correct, come to that belief conclusion? The thing that makes Bitcoin decentralized is that you can't form a cartel. The reason why you can't form a cartel is because of the permissionless nature of proof of work. Anytime someone tries to form a cartel or use other influence to stagnate the hash rate, a new entry comes online because it's permissionless. I do not foresee behaviorally any method of social consensus or non-protocol consensus-based method to reduce, mitigate, or diminish the creation of new hash rate that isn't literally just creating a cartel that then centralizes the one thing about Bitcoin we need to never be centralized. The question of whether Bitcoin is secure enough, it reminds me of, is it green enough? Is it using too much energy? It's not exactly the same, but it reminds me of it. I think we always have to keep in perspective and compare it to how much energy does the legacy financial system of the whole world use. Obviously, Bitcoin is downright green by comparison. It doesn't mean there's not room for improvement, but putting it in context is important. It's also in the context of what you think Bitcoin will ultimately become. I think Bitcoin is going to become the base load energy utilizer for every renewable and every natural resource that isn't monetizable currently and every nuclear power plant that turns off when peak load is needed, but is able to subsidize the creation of the system's variability and variance because it's just consistent base load that's always there. From that perspective, it's not only extremely green, but it's the only commercially viable way to make any of these high variance systems come online at an industrial scale. The question is, well, how much power should Bitcoin use? It's like a third of all of the power of humanity because if you want to bring online high variance power systems, you're going to need a framework for base load that's no environmental impact or you're defeating the whole goddamn purpose of going green and Bitcoin's the only system that uses an insane amount of money that's instantly monetizable and that you can turn off in 30 seconds and have no economic consequential impact that has a reinitialization cost. It's just an immediate off and immediate on and if you look at the Texas power grid, there were miners that were paid to turn off and became phenomenal case examples of how Bitcoin can create more robust power distribution for high variant systems. I think that's a really interesting perspective, Jonathan. I think it's definitely one that warrants a further episode. We've talked about it before. One thing that I think about when I look at this is it's like, okay, well, ultimately the reason why Bitcoin uses energy is that it creates proof of work, that proof of work then goes via the distributed network to then secure that network such that you would need as much power and actually more so as we discussed two years worth of power at the full rate right now in order to rewrite history. That's really what it's all about. As Andreas talked about extensively before, proof of work is a form of monument where it is collectively built over time and once it is built, it is quite difficult to unbuild it. Maybe the final end game in a 100-year scenario is actually that Bitcoin is using 51% of all the energy that's created in the world, which would at that point make it impossible, I think, to actually wind that back because you simply couldn't do it. The distributed network over here is using 51%. Even if you turn every single other source of electricity, created new ones, you still wouldn't be able to get past that because not only do you have to match the energy that's being put into it today, but you have to be able to unbuild that monument that's been built over so many years to get us to that point. I couldn't help but immediately think of Mayan pyramids. The way that a Mayan pyramid works is they build the pyramid and then the next time they have a robust economy, they actually create a bigger monument by building on top of the previous pyramid. These pyramids became massive because of over a couple hundred years, every time the civilization had excess monetary ability, they would put more economic input into the size of the pyramid and then keep growing it and growing it. If you were to think of Bitcoin as any form of monetary system, it would be like a Mesoamerican pyramid. I actually used the pyramids as the prime example in the talk I did called the Thermodynamic Monument of Proof of Work. Let me throw you for attention here because there's another aspect to Bitcoin mining that we don't often discuss. We say if somebody had the ability to bring as much energy as the current use of the network and get the hardware, it would still take them two years. It's really funny because for the first 12 years of Bitcoin and get the hardware was a little asterisk. It was the easy part. You could get the hardware, you just get the silicon, but the really hard thing is building the power plants. Well, it turns out, turns out we're in a global supply chain crisis where people can't get chips. Getting the hardware is no longer a thing. It hasn't been a thing for a while now. It started with GPUs. I don't know if you've read recently. I'm taking us on a bit of a tangent, but bear with me for a second. I think NVIDIA or AMD or one of the GPU manufacturers just put out a new model which is even more mining resistance than the previous version that wasn't mining resistance for very long. The way they've done this, by the way, is targeting specifically Ethereum and targeting specifically the fact that Ethereum requires a very big RAM footprint in the GPU in order to mine efficiently. What they've done is they've cut the RAM bus on the GPU from 128 or usually 256 bits down to 64. Wow. They basically block three out of the four lanes of traffic into and out of the graphic card RAM. They've cut it to overall size. They say, but they've increased clock speed and cores so that it's not a problem. They basically optimize the graphics card away from Ethereum deliberately. Now, will that make it suck for games? There's very good arguments as to why that will actually also make it suck for games because they're trying to kind of thread the needle here, right? There aren't that many things where you can throttle mining but not affect the game performance. Anyway, this is a whole funny backstory, but the cherry on top of everything was the recent story I read about Canon. Canon, the printer manufacturer who, like many other printer manufacturers, has chips in their ink cartridges so that the printer can either nag you or turn off if you don't insert an original printer cartridge or Apple. Yeah. So this is basically a form of digital rights management that uses some kind of chip in the print cartridge that presumably can easily be replicated and therefore tells you it's original. Now, HP is the worst of the printer companies because they actually prevent you from printing, whereas Canon just nags you. Well, here's the beauty of it. So they ran out of chips. So what they did is they started making ink cartridges without chips that are shipped with instructions on how to turn off the nagging of the printer when it tells you that it's not an original Canon cartridge even though it is because they can't get chips to put into their ink cartridges. The beautiful irony of that, all of that's just, mwah, chef's kiss. But as well, what this means in the bigger scheme is that that little asterisk that for 12 years we've been ignoring when we say you have to get all of the energy and the hardware, but mostly all of the energy to beat Bitcoin. Well, now the on the hardware part has suddenly become almost impossible. You can't get the hardware. You simply can't. You have to take it from people who already have it. You can't just go secretly and, I don't know, mobilize the entire island of Taiwan to print out A6 for you. So that's an interesting one, although maybe that's why China wants Taiwan. I mean, I think that there is a conversation to be had about supply chains because it certainly has become an important dynamic both in the world of Bitcoin and in the outside world. But I think that that is all the time that we have for today. Thank you very much, folks, for being here and for listening to this episode of Speaking of Bitcoin. Today's show featured Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Jonathan Mohan, Stephanie Murphy, and myself, Adam B. Levine. If you've got a Bitcoin adjacent or related topic that you'd like to hear us talk about, go ahead and send me an email at adamatspeakingofbitcoin.show with the subject topic suggestion. This episode featured music by Gertie Beatz and our theme is by Jared Rubins. Thanks very much for listening and we'll be back next week with another episode of Speaking of Bitcoin.