Bitcoin Treasury Companies, Mining & The Slow Grind to $1 Million | Mitchell Askew

25:33So like if you have an S19, you can't mine profitably at 10 cent per kilowatt hour, but you can mine profitably at four cent per kilowatt hour. And so it gives you, as someone who owns the ASIC, a non-zero resale value into the future. So you can buy a miner, mine it for a few years, and then resell it later. Or what, and this is kind of tangential to it, but with Blockware, you can actually capitalize on volatility in ASIC prices. So for example, in 2020 to 2021, S19 prices increased by 10x. Now, there's a lot of dynamics at play. You had the Bitcoin price going in absolute tear. You had kind of COVID supply chain constraints.

26:12You had the China mining ban. All of this put a supply squeeze on miners themselves. But there was no market to sell that into. It was highly illiquid. And there was no centralized hub to do that. And so at Blockware, we saw that problem. and we built a marketplace to solve it. So all of our hosted mining clients, they have access to our marketplace where they can sell their miner at any time, any price. And when they sell that miner, are they selling the energy contract along with it? Yes, sir, exactly. So you're not committed, you know, you're not marrying the miner, right? You're not stuck in a three to four year hosting contract.

26:47Now, if you want to mine over the longterm, I think that's a great play. But if we see Bitcoin go from 100K to 150K before the end of the year, I think ASIC prices will go up as well. And so now there's actually an option to get liquidity into those kind of ASIC bull markets. Okay, interesting. And how liquid is that market? Because like, especially with the public companies, like a few years ago, we saw them all take liens out on their ASICs and that ended up not being a very good idea. Cause like you say, they're volatile. They're more volatile than Bitcoin. And like in a bear market, ASIC prices can really drop.

27:18So like how liquid is that marketplace? Like how much demand can you kind of fill? Well, it's the liquidity is growing, right? We're still early in the world of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin mining is kind of a niche within a niche. But our goal is to add every high quality data center operator Bitcoin mining facility into the marketplace and create kind of one centralized trading platform for miners. And so just within the last six months, we've added four or five new mining sites to the marketplace. So increasing the supply side and, you know, through all of our marketing efforts, increasing the demand side, more users on the platform, we're trying to be the ultimate market maker there.

27:58That's very cool. It's exciting. So just back to the hash rate and the price dynamic, which leads which? This is a great question. It's kind of a chicken or the egg. I actually, my thoughts on this have evolved over the years. I think I think hash rate growth is mostly agnostic to price growth. Okay. But there are some short-term dynamics. So, for example, if the Bitcoin price drops, we're at$100K now. If it was$75K two weeks from now, you would see a drop in difficulty because those miners that are tinkering on the edge of profitability, maybe their break-even is around$80K to$90K, you're going to see them unplug in the short term.

28:39Yeah. Now, in the other direction, I think there's a longer time between price increase and hash rate increase. So it's easier to unplug a miner than it is to build a new data center and plug new machines in. So let's take the scenario where we're at$100K and we're at$150K by the end of the year. Well, it's not until we're at$125K,$130K that you're going to see new investment capital rotate kind of away from Bitcoin and into mining. because those profit margins expand, they become more juicy. Someone who's sitting there thinking, I might buy Bitcoin. Well, when the Bitcoin price is at$150K, they're like, actually, I'm going to buy miners instead.

29:18But then it takes X amount of months for them to build a data center. And so you see this lag between the Bitcoin price bull market and growth and hash rate. In the last cycle is a great example of this. Bitcoin price peaked in November of 2021. But it was 2022 and 2023 where we saw a massive bull market and hash rate. And that was in in spite of the Bitcoin price going down. Because all that capital that was poured into building new data centers, buying ASICs, having them imported from China, that capital was input after the Bitcoin price increased, but it takes months to actually develop and manifest into new hash rates.

29:53So I think there's some correlation, but to the downside, it's very tight and kind of related. And then to the upside, there's a lag there. Interesting. Okay, so if someone was to go out and use Blockware now, what is their kind of floor price? Like I know it depends on which machine they get, but let's just say they go for like S21 XP or whatever. Yeah, if they go for the newest miner, the S21 XP at the blockware rate, it's around$50 ,000. Oh, wow. So every day that, yeah. And people think, oh, it's, you know, I'm too late to mining because you can't plug a machine in your mom's basement. It's like nobody can mine the GPUs anymore at your house.

30:27It's a very institutionalized kind of industry, but by using a partner like blockware, you get access to those industrial electricity prices without having to operate a data center yourself. So 50K every day is your effective Bitcoin buy price versus you can buy it spot at 100K. That's very cool. And so what kind of size are you at now in terms of like the miners that you host? Collectively, we have, I want to say around 2X a hash on the blogger pool. Yeah. And that's spread all over the US, I assume. Yeah, we have eight different sites in six or seven different states. Yeah, okay. And which states are they in?

31:03I assume like Texas. Yeah, Texas, Iowa, North Dakota, Kentucky, Georgia, and Oklahoma. Okay, very cool. And one of the things that I say in my ads is like, would you rather have one Bitcoin today or two in the future? So maybe explain that dynamic and how that actually works. Yeah, so this is a catchphrase. Mark Moss actually helped us coin this. He's been brainstorming some stuff with us at Blockware. I think it's a great phrase because with Bitcoin, the optimal approach is a low time preference, long time horizon. You don't want to buy and hodl for a month. You want to buy and hodl for multiple years.

31:43And so if you're already in the mindset of this is a long term play, well, then you become more open to the idea of why don't I buy a miner and accumulate that Bitcoin over a long period of time? So one Bitcoin today or two Bitcoin tomorrow is kind of hyperbolic. Really, it's more like, would you rather have one Bitcoin today or 1.2 Bitcoin in three or four years? That's kind of the less hyperbolic version of it. But the same principle applies. It's because you're producing Bitcoin every day at a discount, in spite of the upfront cost of the miner over a two, three, four year period, historically miners have accumulated more Bitcoin than just buying directly.

32:21And we've done a lot of analysis on this. So if you started mining at the 2020 halving, you outperformed buying Bitcoin at the 2020 halving or dollar cost averaging throughout the epoch. So whether you're lump summing in or you're DCAing into Bitcoin, historically, we've seen mining outperform over a longer period of time. Okay. And who are sort of the target customers here? Because I assume you would say everyone should just buy and hold self-custody Bitcoin first and then maybe look at things like this. I would say that because, like I said, mining is a niche within a niche. And so if you don't understand Bitcoin, you're going to have a harder time understanding the Bitcoin mining thesis.

32:59But at the same time, if you're, you know, a little more emotional and you are uncomfortable with Bitcoin price volatility, mining can be a great way to kind of force yourself to accumulate. Because instead of sitting here sweating like, oh, should I buy Bitcoin now or tomorrow? What should I do? It's like, just buy a miner and it'll accumulate it every single day for you. But we have a few different target personas. people who we specifically think should mine. The first is just the Bitcoiner. The pleb, the mom and pop should get two or three miners to get themselves exposure to that Bitcoin, the spread between the Bitcoin price and hash rate slash network difficulty.

33:39Because Bitcoiners are bullish on Bitcoin, myself included, I do think the price will outpace hash rate over the next three years. So I have some miners to get that exposure while also getting Bitcoin every single day at a discount. The second persona is kind of the one I mentioned before, which is people aren't super comfortable with Bitcoin, but they're kind of a tech savvy investor, but they don't know, you know, should I buy Bitcoin now or should I wait? They're kind of less hardened in their convictions. So mining is a great way for them to just get their feet wet, accumulate every single day and not have to think about it.

34:13And then the third is larger capital allocators. So a family office or a public company that's looking to turn around their balance sheet and acquire Bitcoin at a discount. Okay. Interesting. I mean, I think it's a very cool business. I'm after some alpha from you here. What do you think is going to happen with hash rate over the next 12 months? Because I don't know how much you kind of used to listen to the show, but when I was doing this with Peter, we had a bet over a year long timeframe. He said it would go over as a hash. I went under. I've won that bet recently. So what's the next bet? Right now, I think we're sitting around 900.

34:46I know it got way closer than I thought. It's grown a lot. Yeah, yeah, it has. But people always look at it like raw hash rate data. So, you know, you get five blocks back to back to back. It's going to make it look like hash rate jumped. You have to look at it under a 14 or 30 day moving average. Okay. And so when you do, because it smooths out the variance and random block times. So that's why we have seen like, if you go on like some of the charts, it'll show it's gone above a Zeta hash for like a moment. Yeah, for a minute. And that's just because a bunch of blocks randomly happen to get mined very fast.

35:16Because fundamentally, Bitcoin miners are just guessing and checking. They're looking for the right amount of leading zeros on the hash. So you have to look at a moving average. When you look at a moving average, we're at about 900. So a jump to 1 ,000 Zeta hash would be, what, like a 10 % increase, 10 % to 12%. So I think we do hit a Zeta hash this year, barely. Like, I think we'll close the year around 1 ,000x a hash. But I think it'll be a long time before we go from 1 ,000 to 2 ,000 because we have to double the amount of energy production and data centers effectively, which is a lot. A lot of work goes into that.

35:56For any listeners who haven't actually been to a Bitcoin mine, have you been to a mine? I have, yeah. I'm sure you have. They're insane. It's very powerful. You've got all these loud, hot, dusty computers. It's really a marvelous spectacle. I've been to a few myself, and I think everyone should go if they get a chance, because it makes Bitcoin far more tangible. But you can't just pop these things up overnight now. So it's going to take some effort to get to 2000 exahash. The coolest one I've been to when we were out in Africa, this was end of 23, I think, we went to a few places. We went to Malawi and saw Gridless's mining operation there.

36:32And it is by far the coolest one I've seen. It was in the most beautiful place, It's like on a mountain, there's a river. They just have like a little hydro plant and they've got miners running in there. And like, that's the thing that's securing the Bitcoin network. It's like one of the most mind-blowing things I've ever seen. Cause like you can go to these mega data centers and it's like noisy and huge and it's like industrial scale, but you go out to the middle of nowhere in Africa and you see like people mining Bitcoin there. It's very, very cool. That's epic. Yeah. Those are the stories that kind of warm my heart.

36:58At Blocker, we have two sites in Eastern Kentucky that this area was hammered by the bad energy policy in the United States. Old, like, refurbished coal mining plants, essentially, is where we're mining Bitcoin. But we're coming into this area that's been run down. There's no good jobs. Like, if you live there, you can be, like, a teacher or a nurse. Those are kind of your best jobs. And we're providing, like, a forward-looking tech job. Now, it's blue-collar work working at a Bitcoin mining facility. But these people, they don't have any other great options, right? And so we're kind of revitalizing a very rundown, remote part of the country.

37:37And I think that's one of the coolest things about Bitcoin, because historically, new industries, they benefit very specific urban centers. So for example, like the tech boom benefited the Silicon Valley area. But if you live in the middle of rural North Dakota or Kentucky or somewhere, you didn't get a new job from the tech boom. the automobile boom in the 1920s. If you lived in Detroit, that was a good place for it. But I love Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining because it brings jobs to rural America. I grew up in the rural South. Like I know these types of people, it's my tribe. And so seeing Bitcoin miners come to these very remote locations and provide high paying, very nice, like high tech jobs, it's very exciting to see.

38:18Yeah, it's really cool. And I've told this story before on the podcast, but I think it's worth telling again, like when we were in Malawi, they have, so what people don't understand about these places in Africa is that they have very high electricity costs because it's essentially just so hard to get. And so there's this town that's, well, it's not even a town. It's like a tiny village on this mountainside that has benefited. The grid was originally donated by, I think, a Scottish charity. And it ran at a loss its entire life cycle until Bitcoin mining came in, which then meant they could just sweep up all the excess energy and then pass on some power cost reduction to this village.

38:54And so we went out for dinner, maybe, I don't know, 10 miles from the mountain. And it was in this like beautiful garden, but it was lit by candlelight because they just didn't have electricity. And so while we were sat around having dinner with these like torches lighting the place, everywhere was completely pitch black, apart from this tiny little village, which was, I can't explain how poor this village was, like on a mountainside that was lit up. They had like, they could use a microwave, they could watch TV, they could do their homework under like a real light. And all of that in this tiny village in rural Africa was because of Bitcoin mining.

39:23It's like the coolest thing I've ever seen. So I'm totally with you. I think that is one of the massive benefits of Bitcoin mining. It doesn't really matter where it is. As long as electricity is cheap, like people will plug in an ASIC. Yeah, that's so cool to hear because energy is how we have quantity and quality of life. One of my favorite charts to look at is just energy production and then life expectancy. They go straight up, kind of went up into the right in the early 1900s, 1800s. And so we need more ways to incentivize energy production. Energy's gotten a terrible rap for no good reason.

39:57But Bitcoin miners are the ultimate bait to get energy production, right? Because like you said, they'll buy any energy. They don't care about the source. They just want it to be low cost. And they don't care about the location. Other large energy consumers are like hospitals and grocery stores. These have to be in urban centers because you can't have a grocery store in the middle of nowhere. But Bitcoin miners can go anywhere in the world. They can go to rural Africa. They can go to rural Kentucky. and they give energy producers the confidence that, hey, if nobody else will buy my power, at least these Bitcoin miners will, so they can invest into energy production assets in the most remote places of the world.

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41:47That's anchorwatch.com. This episode is brought to you by Ledin, the global leader in Bitcoin-backed loans. Since 2018, Ledin have issued over$9 billion in loans and were the first lending platform to do proof of reserves. With Ledin, you get full custody loans with no credit checks, no monthly repayments, just easy access to dollars without selling a single sat. And as of July 1st, Ledin is now Bitcoin only, which means they exclusively offer Bitcoin-backed loans or collateral is held by Ledin directly or with their funding partners and your Bitcoin is never let out to generate interest. I recently took out a loan with Ledin.

42:22The whole process was super easy. It took me less than 15 minutes to apply and I had the dollars in my account in just a couple of hours. It was super smooth. So if you need cash but you don't want to sell your Bitcoin, head over to ledin.io which is L-E-D-N dot I-O. Where do you think we are in this kind of narrative? Like obviously Bitcoin mining got a load of heat in sort of from, well kind of forever until very relatively recently. Like, do you think we've completely shifted that narrative now and people are starting to understand it? I think we've made a ton of progress with the people that matter.

42:54So I think energy companies are starting to understand it more. I think politicians are starting to understand it more. But the average normie, for example, they aren't. But they also aren't the ones who make decisions and allocate capital and really influence the world. Like the average normie still doesn't understand Bitcoin itself. So they're not going understand Bitcoin mining and its kind of atypical energy consumption profile. It's kind of a niche subject, but I think with all things, number go up is Bitcoin's biggest marketing tool. So the more Bitcoin gets adopted as a financial asset, the more incentive there is going to be for people to create Bitcoin educational content for politicians and energy producers to look into Bitcoin mining as kind of a grid stabilizer.

43:37One of the really frustrating ones recently is, Did you see Norway came out and said they might ban Bitcoin mining? No, I didn't see that. Okay, so they've come out pretty recently and said this. And the reason it's really frustrating is I've spoken to a company, I forget their name, and I actually forget where they operate, but it's one of the Scandinavian companies. I'm pretty sure it's Sweden, but I could be wrong on that. And they're doing Bitcoin mining on like a municipality level. Obviously, these are very cold countries. And what they're doing is they're doing like the first part of heating up the water for the municipality.

44:06So they'll take it from close to zero degrees Celsius. especially during winter, it'll be basically zero degrees Celsius. And they're doing like the first lift there. So they're getting it from like zero to, I don't know what they get it to, let's say 40 degrees Celsius. And then it goes to like a boiler who then boil the temperature to the temperature people need it in their house. But like they're doing a lot of that heavy lifting, taking the strain off the municipality and like they're still not seeing the benefit of that. And they're monetizing it while they're doing it. Like it makes no sense to me, but there's still people out there that wanna ban this thing.

44:36It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, Maybe they're just getting paid off by Ripple and all those guys to be anti-Bitcoin mining because it's literally like hand in glove, perfect fit Bitcoin miners and energy grids. Yeah, it's super frustrating. Okay, so like with all of this in mind, do you think that miners and like the mining industry is undervalued right now in the sense that so much money is going into these treasury companies, not into necessarily the mining companies? Do you think there's kind of a gap in the market there? Going back to what I said before, I don't think a lot of the mining companies are Bitcoin long, per se.

45:13They kind of are, because if you build a data center and Bitcoin pumps, there's going to be more potential Bitcoin miners to host. But I think most of the mining companies, they're not married to their HODL stack. They own a lot of their balance sheet is tied up in energy production and less so ASICs. So I don't necessarily view them as long-term Bitcoin place. Now, there are a handful that stick out, but I think the best way to get mining exposure, if you're an investor, is to be a miner yourself. Just buy ASICs yourself. You don't have to worry about, is this company going to dilute their stock and give their executive team a huge compensation package?

45:52Are they going to dilute ineffectively? Are they going to not buy new generation ASICs? How are they going to operate their balance sheet during a bear market? you can take out a lot of the counterparty risk and just get direct exposure to Bitcoin mining when you own the ASICs yourself. And because of service providers like Blockware, you don't have to be a data center professional, but you get access to top tier data centers, low cost power, and it's very hands off. But at the same time, you're getting all the benefits of Bitcoin mining, producing at a discount, Bitcoin denominated cash flows, tax write-offs, all that sort of thing.

46:25Yeah. Okay. And then in terms of like, I think that it's really interesting how So Bitcoin miners are moving more and more into AI compute as well. What do you think of that? Do you think that's sort of smart? I mean, it definitely helps with the narrative, I think, because no one's shouting at AI compute as like boiling the ocean. But what do you think of that as a move? I think it's inevitable. Now, hosting AI servers is, it's not Bitcoin exposure. So, but it does minimize the impact on these mining companies during drawdowns. So I think it's a very effective tool at that because it's more of a cash cow, like consistent cash flow play.

47:05And it also, the same way Bitcoin mining incentivizes more energy production, so does AI and high performance computing. So I think it's a very good thing for humanity that we're seeing this shift. And it's kind of inevitable because if you're a Bitcoin mining company, maybe you don't want to be hyper long Bitcoin as an investor. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the double, triple maxi, like pimp out my Bitcoin long exposure. But that's obviously not for everyone. And that's why strategy has been so successful because they've issued convertible notes and preferred stock that have muted Bitcoin exposure, but with way less downside.

47:41So Bitcoin mining companies that are diversifying into AI as well, they're kind of following a similar playbook. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, and then in terms of like drawdowns, you mentioned like a hedge against the kind of Bitcoin four-year cycle. Do you think that's still likely? No, I actually think the Bitcoin four-year cycle is dead. I think it's over. Interesting. Why do you think that? Because I did think that, but these Bitcoin treasury plays have made me kind of reconsider that and think maybe at some point, they're the ones that are just spitting coins into the market, and we have a similar cycle.

48:13It could happen, and I'm always open to change my mind as data reveals itself. But historically, so the 2017 cycle was driven by retail adoption. It became far easier to buy Bitcoin directly. Plus, you had all the shitcoin ICOs going off at the same time. Now we've got shitcoin, Bitcoin treasury companies. We'll see how it shakes out. But the 2021 cycle is driven by a massive wave of money printing. They increased the money supply by 50 % in 12 months. And so obviously, this is going to create massive booms followed by massive busts. But a fun fact, since the launch of the ETF, Bitcoin ETF in 2024 of January that year, you haven't seen Bitcoin draw down by more than 30%.

48:58It went from 74K to like 49K, which is like right around 30%, but it barely spent any time at those price levels. And we're seeing institutions and like more savvy, less emotional investors just back the truck up on dips. And so if you think of like an investor profile, the retail guy is looking for 2x to 20x. That's why they gamble on Schick coins or, you know, go on Robinhood and buy a bunch of options. But the institutional investor, they're used to the S &P 500 where a good year for them is 7%, 8 % returns. So if they're buying Bitcoin at 60K, we pump to 100K, that's a 50 % plus return for them.

49:41That is huge. And so you're gonna see less explosive moves to the upside because they're gonna be quicker to take profits, but you're also gonna see less nasty drawdowns because they're more savvy, and plus they have passive flows into these funds, so they're always accumulating assets, but they're not gonna unnecessarily panic sell on a 30 % drop, make it go even further. And since ETFs have launched, we've seen this behavior in Bitcoin where we stair step kind of to a new price level, range there for a while while coins shift around, long term holders start buying coins again. But then we'll pump some more, but you'll see sell pressure into those pumps.

50:19So I think we're going to, I think Cosmonaut on Twitter coined this phrase, like stairway to heaven. We're going to stairway and go to a million dollars over the next 15 years. I truly believe that, but I think it will bore everyone to death and it's going to be a slow grind. and anybody who sells Bitcoin under the impression that there's going to be a 75 % dip and they can come in and buy it back, I think they're going to get burned. Yeah, I had Joe Calisari on the podcast recently and he said we'll bore our way to a million dollars. What do you think then the biggest kind of drawdown we may see is?

50:49It would be... I'm setting up a bet here, by the way. Okay, okay. My, see, it does depend on the Bitcoin treasury thing, right? If we see a bunch of these companies really emerge out of nowhere and borrow on a one-year note at 12 % interest rates to buy Bitcoin, yeah, we could get burned. And also, if we see a huge wave of money printing that sends Bitcoin to$1 million, yeah, we'll probably come crashing down to$250. That's a 75 % drawdown. So I think it's very dependent on how far up Bitcoin goes. But my base case is we won't see a drawdown more than 30 % to 35%. Are you a betting man? Potentially.

51:26I could be swayed. What about if we say more than 40 % drawdown by the end of 26? I'll take that. 100K sats? 100K sats, deal. Done. There you go. Okay. Anything else on like Bitcoin markets, mining that you want to talk about? I've got something else I want to talk to you about, but before we move on. No, I don't think I've got anything else. I mean, I'm super bullish on here to the end of the year. So when I say I think the cycle's over, I don't mean like, oh, we're not going to see, you know, a year and a half after the halving Bitcoin make new highs. I definitely think we breached kind of 150-ish maybe by the end of the year.

52:03It depends on, you know, obviously this war thing going on or whatever. I don't really pay attention to it, but that could be a catalyst for some money printing. Global M2 is on an uptrend. We see a record amount of Bitcoin being held by long-term holders right now. So 69 % of the coins haven't moved in at least six months. So there's certainly a bullish dynamic at play. And I think Bitcoin goes a lot higher over the next six months. One of the coolest things, like maybe rephrase, it's not cool that we're at war or essentially at war. It's not cool that there's all this like disruption in the Middle East, but one of the interesting things from it is that Bitcoin's kind of done pretty well in it.

52:38Like obviously this happened over the weekend as these things always do where markets can't react straight away. And Bitcoin is the only 24-7 free market in the world. So you're always going to see Bitcoin move on these events, but it didn't really drop that much. And I see that as a massively bullish thing for Bitcoin. Oh, absolutely. I remember in 2022 when Ukraine and Russia, that situation broke out. Bitcoin dropped from like some 40K to 30K or something like that in a similar dynamic, right? It's over the weekend. The stock market's closed. Investors, when they're uncertain, they want dollars.

53:12So they'll sell whatever they can to get dollars. But don't ask me why. I think dollars are the most uncertain thing in the world, right? Nobody knows what Jerome Powell is going to do, what he's going to say. One man can influence the dollar market so significantly. Bitcoin has nobody in control. It's mathematically certain, 21 million. To me, that's the least uncertain asset, but the market doesn't treat it as such right now. So they'll sell Bitcoin and buy dollars. But yeah, when no other market's closed, they're going to sell what they can. But Bitcoin has held up very well despite that. We briefly went to like 99K yesterday, I think.

53:45But all things considered, Bitcoin's doing very well. I think also one of the most interesting things is like Bitcoin is almost a prediction market in a lot of ways. Like I don't know if you saw, but Bitcoin price started tanking a little bit before the bombs had even dropped in Iran, which I think is super interesting. It's almost like your foresight on geopolitics at this point. Yeah. And we've seen it work in Bitcoin's favor on election night when Trump started to win. Epic night. I didn't vote. I really don't care about politics. but that was such a fun night to watch the Bitcoin price go up as Trump started winning these key battleground states because it went from, I think it started the day, like 65K, closed it 75K, made a new all-time high and nothing else was open to speculate on during the evening time on a weekday.

54:30So investors are like, man, let's just buy Bitcoin right now. 100%. Okay. I want to talk to you about, you're quite a young guy. I don't know if you want to say how old, but you're a Zoomer. Did you see recently that Matt and Marty on IHR had started doing like a Zuma series? And I'd had conversations with Marty about this in the past where it's like, if I look at the demographics of my audience, it's getting older, not younger. So like the biggest age range is between, let's say like 30 and 45. And it's not the younger generation that's growing in terms of listenership. It's actually the like 60 year olds.

55:04What is going on with like the Zuma generation? Like, do they care about Bitcoin? Like what's your overall take? Yeah. I don't mind how old I am. I'm 24. But yeah, the boomers don't care. Or sorry, the zoomers don't care. We've seen similar trends on Blockware's content. It's a heavy millennial audience, millennial and Gen X with the boomers growing. It's because in order to care about Bitcoin, you have to have capital you're willing to preserve. So Bitcoin is about, this is what I think Bitcoin's about. It's about preserving your purchasing power. being able to put your time and energy into an asset that's not going to get devalued by endless money printing.

55:44And Zoomers are broke. They ain't got no money. So when they don't have any money in there constantly, you know, there's a little spare income they do have. They blow it on consumption and nihilistic activities like sports betting. Because I had no money when I got into Bitcoin. Like when I first bought Bitcoin, it was like a hundred pounds of Bitcoin. Like it was not very much. And so like, why is that holding them back? Like, why is the nihilism so fucking real with Gen Z? I think there's little desire to save and start a family. Now, I don't think these are explicit thoughts people are having, but I think it's very implicit and subconscious.

56:19So just looking at the data, people are having families later, they're getting married later, having kids later, fewer kids, etc., etc. And my thesis is that's because the money's broken. And it's so much harder to provide for your family or even yourself on a single normal income. Because most people aren't, you know, by definition, most people are average or below average. And so average jobs, average wages are barely enough to support yourself. Like all the Zoomers I know, like 90 % of them still have two or three roommates well into their late 20s. And it's difficult enough for them to just feed themselves and pay rent.

56:58And so without a little surplus income or this ability to think long term, like, hey, I want to provide for a family and think 10, 20 years. It's hard to do that when you can barely make rent. And so to understand Bitcoin, you have to be able to have a low time preference and think over multiple years or generations. And because they're not doing that, Bitcoin doesn't really click for them. But just to stereotype kind of your peer group, I assume they're all sports betting and shit. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. 100%. So have you tried to talk to people about this and been like, instead of putting this bet on, just buy Bitcoin?

57:32I used to try all the time. And for a while, I became known as the Bitcoin guy. But frankly, I gave up on it. I wrote a book about it. I go on podcasts like this. I put Bitcoin content out all the time. So if people ask me and they want to learn, I have somewhere to send them and guide them. But when I think about my Bitcoin journey, nobody orange pill to me. I had to orange pill myself. Same. There's a plethora of content out there. You know, the old phrase is you can take a horse to the water, but you can't make a drink. I view Bitcoin the same way. I don't, frankly, I don't care enough to like bang on someone's door every time I see them.

58:10Hey, you bought Bitcoin yet? You bought Bitcoin yet? There's like two or three people in my life that I care enough of, you know, I want, I really want them to get Bitcoin. They have. So like my mission's kind of complete with them, but loose acquaintances or even, you know, somewhat close friends. It's like, I can't make them understand it or care. And so they're going to have to do the work themselves. Yeah, to be fair, it's probably similar in my friendship group. There's a few that are into Bitcoin, one especially. But the rest of them, I just don't even try anymore. Eventually, they'll probably figure it out, maybe, maybe not.

58:37But I've given up trying. And I think actions speak louder than words. So my friends that have seen me, I don't want to be arrogant about it. Relative success for a 24-year-old. I'm getting married later this year. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Work in the Bitcoin industry. My friends have seen me, you know, take pictures with guys like Ben Askren and Tucker Carlson and go do like cool stuff. And my, you know, some of my friends don't get, have those opportunities. I feel very blessed, but part of it is because I save in Bitcoin. I work in, in the Bitcoin industry. I'm putting myself out there and I did the work to study the asset.

59:11And so I think my friends seeing me have some amount of success is more, uh, more likely to sway them to like, Hey, maybe he's onto something with this Bitcoin versus me just telling them or saying, hey, read this book. Yeah. I mean, total sidetrack here. Are you friendly with Ben Askren? Yes. How's he doing? He's not doing too well from what I know. Yeah, definitely got him in my prayers for sure. Yeah. Damn. That's incredible. Incredibly sad. Fingers crossed. So just back to your friends, like is the unit bias a big thing that's kind of holding them back? And like, are they interested in this kind of quote unquote crypto meme coin shit because they see it as like a potential 100 ,000 X rather than like the long time preference you have to take with Bitcoin.

59:52They were in 2021 during that hype cycle when, you know, you had the Superbowl crypto ads and it was kind of hip and popular, but they've long forgotten about that. Most consumers have the fish brain. I don't think, I also, I don't think unit bias is a real big problem because it takes, you know, two seconds to figure out, Hey, Bitcoin can be divided into sats like a divided into cents. Yeah, interesting. Okay, so let's close with just kind of overarching thoughts on Bitcoin. What do you think is going to happen through the rest of the year? Like where you at with everything? I think Bitcoin is going to go much higher between now and the rest of the year.

1:00:27I think it's going to be a good Thanksgiving, good Christmas where Bitcoin's sitting at a nice higher number, somewhere between maybe 125 and 150. And all these Zoomer friends or just family friends you see around the holidays could be like, hey, you know, I was right again. And maybe you should listen and start accumulating this. Love it. And obviously everyone will have heard the Blockware ad by now, but give it a bit of a shill, give it a shout out. Where can people go to learn more about Blockware? Yeah, you can go to blockwaresolutions.com. We've got a bunch of great resources on there. You can check out our marketplace.

1:01:01You can see which miners are online right now. There's zero lead time between buying a miner and hashing. So you can start stacking sats literally today with mining. That's blockwaresolutions.com. Very cool. I mean, that tax incentive is insane. I think that's going to play into your hands very favorably. Yeah, I think so too. It's the big, beautiful tax bill. Now there's some terrible stuff in there. There's something about like states can't defend against the federal government using AI to spy on the citizens, like a whole bunch of crap in there. But if it does pass, there's a nice incentive to mine Bitcoin.

1:01:31Yeah, let's go. All right. Thank you very much, Mitchell. This has been fun. I appreciate the time, man.

1:01:51Thank you.