 What's the real truth about Bitcoin's mining usage of renewable and non-renewable energy? Lucia, interestingly enough, I don't think we have the truth. One of the things about Bitcoin's mining that both critics and supporters try to ignore is the fact that miners are anonymous. And they try to draw conclusions about where miners are based on where mining pools are, even though those are two completely different things. You could have a mining pool in China and it could have miners from Texas participating in it. In fact, that happens. We don't really know where the miners are. We also don't know what electricity they use. There have been a number of informal surveys asking miners or mining companies that have self-identified that have said, hey, we are doing mining. We are doing mining in this region. And there have been some surveys of those kinds of things. But here's the thing, there's no way to verify either that the survey data is correct or incorrect if the miners are telling the truth or not. What we do know is that Bitcoin mining can happen anywhere that you have electricity. And so the primary driver is how much that electricity costs. If the electricity is cheap, then miners will be attracted to it. The cheapest form of electricity is waste energy. That means energy that is produced but is not consumed. There is no consumption in the area. Or the amount of energy that is being produced cannot be reduced. You can't produce less. And at the same time, the demand isn't there to consume it. So let me give you an example. If you have solar power, you don't turn that off. So if you're producing five megawatts of solar power on a massive solar farm and you only have two megawatts of demand in the area, that means you're producing an extra three megawatts of waste energy. And the marginal cost of that is zero. That energy would otherwise be completely wasted. It doesn't go anywhere. But the solar panels are still producing it. And the cost of installing those solar panels has already been incurred. So if you plant a Bitcoin miner next to that, you can get very cheap electricity that was otherwise going to be wasted. And that's going to subsidize the production of more solar panels and solar energy. So from that scenario, we can see the waste energy, whether that's flaring of gas that would otherwise be wasted, because the gas fields are too far away from areas of demand. Whether it's hydroelectric, solar, or wind, all of those forms of energy tend to have a mismatch between where the energy is produced and where it's consumed. And they also tend to have situations where, if you don't use the energy, it's wasted, like it's sitting there. So there's good reason to use that energy and produce it, sorry, provide it at a very low cost. Bitcoin is uniquely suited to pursuing that type of waste energy and low cost energy. Now, if you have a government that is unconcerned about climate change and carbon output, and they do not either regulate the production of energy, so as to prevent harmful production and polluting production, or they don't tax the production of carbon, and therefore allow something like a coal burning factory to not only produce energy cheaply, but also not taxing the external factor of the carbon damage that's being done, then yes, Bitcoin miners will locate there and try to consume that energy too. So the problem there isn't that Bitcoin miners are producing demands. The problem you have there is that you have governments that are unconcerned about the damage they're doing to the environment and are not taxing carbon emissions. If you tax carbon emissions, then things that are polluting are financially unprofitable for miners. The electricity cost is too high for miners, and they will migrate to places where you get renewable energy. If you produce cheap energy that is dirty, then miners will go there. And so the real issue with the environmental footprint of Bitcoin has to do with the willingness of governments to regulate the production of harmful carbon into the atmosphere, regulate pollution, to tax pollution and carbon. It's really not about demand. It's about the quality of energy production. In fact, if governments regulate and tax carbon, then Bitcoin demand actually supports and incentivizes and in a way subsidizes the installation of renewable energy. It creates the kind of demand and economy that is very portable, that makes it very easy to deploy large amounts of solar panels, wind farms and hydro, and can accelerate the transition of the entire world to renewable energy. So Bitcoin is neither good nor bad. Bitcoin is simply a demand for energy, and if it's matched with politics that are environmentally friendly and policies and tax structures that are not subsidizing fossil fuels and carbon positive polluting production, then Bitcoin is very green. If governments are unconcerned with climate and the environment, then Bitcoin simply provides one more source of demand for factories that are producing energy with a lot of pollution. We shouldn't be worried about how we consume energy. We should be worried about having the political will to reduce pollution and damage to the environment. Bitcoin isn't the villain here. It's the same thing ironically with electric cars. If you have an electric car, all you've done is you've shifted the place where the energy is being consumed, and you've decentralized it's a lot more, which means that if you then put solar panels on your roof and charge overnight, your carbon footprint goes to zero. Not quite zero because the solar panels themselves have production carbon footprint, but very, very close. If on the other hand, you're plugging in your Tesla into a grid where the political will for environmental protection doesn't exist and there is fossil fuel burning factory that's producing that energy, then your electrically powered environmentally friendly Tesla is burning coal. It's just burning coal at a distance from where the car is. What it does is it shifts a lot of the fossil fuel damage to a single place, one factory that can be more easily regulated rather than trying to measure the emissions from a million tailpipes of a million cars. Bitcoin is very much the same thing. Rather than worrying about a million little generators producing fumes all around the place, Bitcoin tends to concentrate energy demand and energy production so you can then focus on a couple of specific energy producers and regulate them and control their carbon emissions. If there is the political will, it makes the enforcement of pollution and carbon controls much easier. Please consider subscribing to my channel and supporting me on patreon.com.