 Construing an energy consumption is becoming a big issue every day. Do you think it's possible to have a blockchain that has five pillars of a fair currency, but has no mining? Has no mining possibly? Has no energy consumption? No. The reason for that is because people misunderstand the energy consumption of systems like Bitcoin. First of all, people say it's a waste to use that energy, which is a subjective perspective. It's like it's a waste to you, but obviously the people who are using that energy and actually paying for it, for them it's not a waste. They call it an investment. What you're trying to say is, I'm going to substitute my decision of what a market should do for that market. There's a dangerous path there, because what we're talking about is not energy generation, we're talking about energy consumption, which are two very different things. Energy isn't a bad thing. Energy produced from polluting sources is a bad thing, but consumption of energy from solar is a wonderful thing. You just invested in all of these solar panels that can be used for other purposes. You reduced the unit cost of solar energy. That's magnanimously wonderful. It matters where that energy is coming from. If we have a problem with where that energy is coming from, let's address that problem. Let's start deciding that some forms of energy production are harmful and some are not. That means taking the externalities of carbon and pricing them. Depending on how your political leanings lie, it's either the worst form of communism, or it's the libertarian solution of creating markets for carbon. It doesn't matter. The bottom line is, if the problem is carbon and climate change, address the problem, not bitcoin. It's a bit ironic to say that this form of energy consumption, which I'm not using, is wasteful. But Christmas lights are pretty. Christmas lights actually consume a significant percentage of U.S. energy every year. For what? For what? I remember this funny movie where the guy finally builds his entire thing, and he takes these two very high-voltage cables, and he goes, and the whole neighborhood lights up, and then the camera zooms out, and there's this guy on the ISS, and they're like, what's that? They can see the house from space. Americans do this every year, right? Okay, maybe Christmas is sacred, and we shouldn't really bash Christmas because the lights are pretty. I have a few other ones for you. How about war? How about the greatest polluter on the planet is the U.S. Department of Defense? By far. How about capitalism? How about all of the amount of junk we dump into rivers in order to extract cobalt for your fancy iPhone, or lithium, or gold, or all of the other things that we're doing to our planet? So, we have to decide, are we going to start prescribing to markets what is good and what is bad use of energy, and the problem is, the real problem is, at that point, who decides? I'm not even going to go to the fact that printing and shipping and guarding paper money, and handling the data frauds, implications of credit cards, consume a far greater amount of energy than Bitcoin, and at the same time eat away at our democracy. I'm not even going to go there. The real problem is, who decides? If you say, this use of energy is bad, this use of energy is good, you're a dictator. That's a decision that markets should make. For the person consuming the energy, it's all good. Now, if you want to tell me that there are externalities that have not been accounted for in the price, and the market isn't working, great, let's price those externalities. Let's bill for carbon. In which case, Bitcoin mining, as the most fungible and transportable form of consumption, would immediately migrate to the low-cost alternatives. At that point, what you're doing is using energy that would otherwise be wasted. You're scavenging waste energy that cannot be transported effectively to other locations. In doing so, especially in alternative forms of energy, what you're doing is depreciating the capital cost of building that plant in the first place. You put a bunch of solar here, and you say, I have a bunch of solar that delivers 15 megawatts, but there's a small community that only needs 5 megawatts. It's going to take me five years to pay for that by sending it to this community. I can't ship it too far, because it gets all lost in the high-voltage cables. Then some guy comes along and says, I'm going to park five Bitcoin miners right next to you. We're going to plug them in. We're going to use all 15 megawatts right now, and we will pay for this plant in a year. What do you do? You build two plants, and then you build three plants. Now we're stopping burning dinosaurs, where no longer burning fossil fuels. The least transportable energy that is at least matched with demand is alternative energy. Before you go blaming Bitcoin mining for the end of civilization, do the math properly. The other problem you have is the extrapolation. We are using this much energy for Bitcoin. It has this many transactions. Divide the amount of energy by the number of the transactions. Therefore, if Bitcoin grows by this much, we will use bullshit. That's not the real math. That's not a valid extrapolation. The amount of energy used in mining has no bearing on the number of transactions you can process. That is exactly the same math as saying, my 14-year-old has grown four inches so far this year. By the time he's 25, he will be 45 feet tall. That kind of shoddy math just got published in Forbes, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC, all over the place, with gloating, gleeful analysts going, see, I told you Bitcoin is going to destroy the planet. There's one last thing I'd like to say. They said the same thing about the internet. A lot of the things they say about Bitcoin, they said the same things about the internet. A haven of terrorists, pornographers, and pedophiles, of course. But also, they went and did the math. They're like, Google uses X-many data centers to process X-many search queries. Therefore, by the year 2020, the internet will consume 30% of U.S. energy. The actual percentage has now dropped to less than 2%, and it's delivered a level of productivity and life improvement for us that far, far outweighs that consumption of energy. They did the math wrong. Or they lied in order to make sure that their parasitic bosses could keep sucking on that central pipe.