[00:01:56] Pierre Rochard: But in any case, what transpired with the price increases was price controls. And then when you get price controls, then you get shortages. And then when you have shortages, they want to ration. And to ration, they need data. They need to know who’s consuming what energy. And so that really is what led to the creation of the Department of Energy, or as it’s known today.

[00:02:21] Pierre Rochard: And that’s where we could start. Now, since then, the, you know, we’ve had the invention of Bitcoin, and this is where we can also talk about Elizabeth Warren’s career, Senator Warren from Massachusetts. Something that I find interesting about her background is that she used to be a Republican. And she used to have, yeah, more of a free market take she had a change of heart at some point or maybe she’s a double agent.

[00:02:49] Pierre Rochard: I don’t know.

[00:02:50] Preston Pysh: When did that happen? Like when when did she flip from Republican to Democrat? I didn’t know this. I don’t really pay attention to these politicians like at all. So this is interesting to me.

[00:03:01] Pierre Rochard: I think that her academic work led her to kind of see some, let’s call them market failures, or perceive some market failures.

[00:03:10] Pierre Rochard: And that you know, she felt like government could do better and that might’ve sent her down a trajectory of you know, consumer financial protection bureau type thinking. And I take it that she genuinely has had a kind of a change of views, but I also find it fascinating that she is somewhat flexible about her own perspectives on topics anytime that they intersect with Bitcoin.

[00:03:36] Pierre Rochard: For example, she’s never really been a bulldog law and order type when it comes to any subject. She’s never written about anti money laundering as an academic, or I’ve searched, you know, kind of her, her records and, but once Bitcoin came along, suddenly she was like an expert on anti money laundering and was very adamant about bringing Bitcoin within the framework that exists for the fiat system.

[00:04:04] Preston Pysh: Is she the main driver? So again, like zooming out this. And what’s the official name of the order? Is there like, really kind of give us the macro?

[00:04:17] Pierre Rochard: The Energy Information Agency is a part of the Department of Energy. And so they sent out a survey, a mandatory survey in January that was essentially a form that you have to fill out as a… now, there were lots of issues with this form, including kind of definitional issues.

[00:04:38] Pierre Rochard: So, you know, they call it cryptocurrency mining. Personally, I reject the terminology of cryptocurrency. So, you know, I’m like, well, this doesn’t apply to Bitcoin. Because you know, it’s Bitcoin, not crypto. But the form that was sent out, it’s actually rather similar to other forms that the EIA sends out to, like, for example, a power generator.

[00:04:59] Pierre Rochard: That is you know, on the grid. Bye. I’d say that first of all, in principle, Bitcoin, I think that if you’re connecting to the grid and that you are an industrial scale participant on the grid, then it is reasonable that folks are going to ask you for information. We can have lots of philosophical debates about it, but I think as a practical matter, It’s reasonable.

[00:05:23] Pierre Rochard: The problem was really that the form that they proposed was very lopsided of let’s only ask one major question, which is how much electricity are you consuming? They didn’t really ask about when are you consuming it? And that’s critical for discussing the topic of Is Bitcoin mining good or bad for the grid?

[00:05:47] Pierre Rochard: Because it really depends on when is Bitcoin mining consuming electricity? Because the grid, ultimately the grid is not a uniform, homogenous entity. That is always in one particular stable state. The grid is always changing. In Texas, in particular, it has transformed kind of every level of granularity, whether you’re looking at it year to year, you know, massive growth in solar, wind, and batteries in Texas, so I think that Elizabeth Warren should be congratulating the state of Texas over the growth of renewables, you know, largely driven by production tax credits and the federal tax code, And just the natural abundance of wind and sun in Texas.

[00:06:31] Pierre Rochard: But it’s also changing on a hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second level of depending on how hot it is outside, people will turn on their AC. Or if it’s really cold, they’ll turn on their furnace or their electric heaters. And then, of course, on the renewable side, they’re in intermittent generation, so sometimes the wind is not blowing, and it’s nighttime, but in Texas, it can still be 110 degrees outside in the evening in the summer at 9pm, and so people still have their AC on. But there’s no way to produce electricity in that scenario unless you have batteries, but batteries are very expensive. And what has really picked up the slack in Texas is a combination of natural gas beaker plants and flexible loads like Bitcoin miners who are able to turn off to offset kind of the, the lack of wind or solar generation.

[00:07:29] Pierre Rochard: In order to have kind of that fulsome picture of how Bitcoin mining integrates with the grid, you would have to ask for some pretty granular data, or at least maybe some questions about when you’re consuming electricity, do you respond to prices, for example, you know, you kind of just are you price and general question.

[00:07:48] Pierre Rochard: Yeah. Yeah. They didn’t ask those kinds of questions. Instead, they asked for the total consumption and then they asked for really granular data about how many Bitcoin mining rigs you have, what specific model they are, you know, what efficiency they have, and those are questions where it seemed to me that really it’s a combination of they want to ask the really straightforward question when it comes to evaluating the cost.

[00:08:14] Pierre Rochard: But then when it comes to the benefit, they’re not really going to ask poignant questions about what are the benefits of mining on the grid. But bigger picture, I think that the, the problem with the survey was that they didn’t ask for any feedback from the public before sending it out.

[00:08:31] Preston Pysh: And is that mandatory?

[00:08:33] Pierre Rochard: That is required by the Paperwork Reduction Act passed in 1980. And so what they did and said was they declared a federal emergency that if they waited a month for public feedback on this survey, there is a reasonable likelihood of public harm which to us, yeah, it was kind of an absurd violation of, of law, right?

[00:08:59] Pierre Rochard: They were, they’d gone rogue. And that they were putting out a form illegally and that there needed to be kind of a change of pace here because as a nation we can’t operate that way, but especially I think as an industry that it reflected not physical reality or science, it really reflected the political motivation of Elizabeth Warren.

[00:09:22] Pierre Rochard: And we’re going to see that here in this clip. Yeah.

[00:09:24] Preston Pysh: So, for people that are just listening here, I got about a five minute and 30 second clip. This is from when was this was 10 months ago that this clip hit YouTube at least. So kind of to give you an idea, when did you say that the, that the survey actually went out?

[00:09:39] Preston Pysh: Was it the start of 2024, Pierre?

[00:09:41] Pierre Rochard: That’s right. In January, end of January.

[00:09:43] Preston Pysh: So this was, this was about six months. Would you say prior to the survey actually hitting? And this, this is a pretty incredible clip. So here, here you go. I’m going to play it for everybody.

[00:09:55] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Now, as you know, Bitcoin mining involves companies using powerful computers to verify transactions to win a Bitcoin reward.

[00:10:05] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: You may remember that at this same hearing a year ago, I asked you about the immense energy consumption of Bitcoin mining. Since then, the issue has aroused more public concern. A recent New York Times investigation found that just 34 Bitcoin mines in the US are using as much electricity as 3 million households.

[00:10:32] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: That is the equivalent of the entire state of Arizona or the entire state of Tennessee. You know, that is a lot of energy. And most of it is dirty. Fully 85 percent of this power comes from coal or natural gas plants. That causes as much carbon pollution as 3. 5 million gasoline powered cars. So for every one new electric vehicle sold in the US last year, These Bitcoin miners did the climate equivalent of putting four additional gasoline powered cars right back on the road. Now, I should note that my own investigation shows there are more mines. than just the 34 that the New York Times analyzed. So the problem is even worse than reported.

[00:11:26] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Secretary Granholm, when you came before this committee last year, I asked you if the federal government knew how many crypto miners are operating in the United States and how much energy they’re consuming. And you said that wasn’t being tracked and that more data would be needed. So, here we are, a year later, Is the Department of Energy formal, formally tracking crypto miners yet?

[00:11:51] Secretary Granholm: Great. First of all, thank you so much for your leadership in this because I do think that you have unearthed a massive problem. And so we don’t know how many miners there are. We don’t know where they are. We all, all of them. I mean, some of them you do, but some of them, many of them, you don’t, a lot of them are just underground.

[00:12:10] Secretary Granholm: Some of them are small operators. So as you and I have discussed, we have charged our energy information administration with.

[00:12:19] Preston Pysh: Here, I had to pause the tape. Did they actually mean like underground or are they meaning like in, in like figurative sense?

[00:12:27] Pierre Rochard: Well, I mean, just real, real fast, it’s hard to tell.

[00:12:30] Preston Pysh: I want to keep it plain.

[00:12:32] Preston Pysh: Okay. So we don’t know. Okay.

[00:12:35] Secretary Granholm: Figuring out how to mandate a reporting of these entities. Now that’s complicated, as you know, because they are, many of them are underground and even the utilities may not know where the draw is coming from.

[00:12:52] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: So let’s talk about that. Yeah. Given that crypto mining undermines all of our other climate work.

[00:13:00] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: We can’t afford to delay on this. There’s a lot of urgency around this. So I want to talk for just a second about the authority you have to gather information on this. Let me ask, Secretary Granholm, do you have the authority to mandate that crypto miners disclose information about their energy consumption.

[00:13:19] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: We have the mandate authority. Good. So, in your response to a letter I sent you in February, you indicated that the Energy Information Administration will first need to develop a new survey program to begin collecting information from crypto miners. By when do you expect to field this survey and use it to gather data from crypto miners on a mandatory basis?

[00:13:44] Secretary Granholm: We are, we first of all are looking at creating the survey from a regular report that is an electricity gathering report that we have now asked to include crypto as part of it. That report from NREL will be completed by the end of this year, on which the Energy Information Administration can base its survey.

[00:14:09] Secretary Granholm: So it’s going to take some time for them to be able to craft the survey from the information that they received from the NREL report, but know that that is happening and we are pushing to accelerate the timelines.

[00:14:21] Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Okay, so, so by the end of this year you will have a report on mandatory reporting, putting a, we’ll have, I want to make sure I know what, yeah, yeah, no, no, we’ll have a report that will have gathered not fully, but enough information to be able to craft the framework for the survey.

[00:14:40] Preston Pysh: All right. I can’t take this anymore, Pierre. This is brutal. So there you go. So the middle of 2023, they have this exchange. She’s saying, get the data, then get the survey sent out immediately. This is, she didn’t say the word emergency, but she did say urgent, urgent, urgent, all through there. And then the reason why you’re saying that they pumped out the survey without public notice is because they ran it under this emergency clause that gave them the authority to do it, right?

[00:15:12] Pierre Rochard: That’s right.

[00:15:14] Preston Pysh: Okay, so you, so you guys take this to court. Who was, I know you work for Riot, but was it the collective mining community that like all got together? What was the orchestrating body that, that was used to basically take this to court? Or was it just Riot that took them to court?

[00:15:32] Pierre Rochard: No, it was Texas Blockchain Council with Lee Bratcher’s leadership.

[00:15:36] Pierre Rochard: He really was the tip of the spear on this and immediately put together a legal team to challenge this in federal court because, first of all, we’d rather have a, just a constructive working relationship with the Department of Energy, with any regulators who are interested in our industry. And we would have happily participated in a public notice and comment and, you know, submitted comments and provided feedback to the survey.

[00:16:04] Pierre Rochard: And I think that if they had not taken our feedback into account, then perhaps we would have had to go to court anyway, but they, they kind of, I think that they kind of shot themselves in the foot here because in all of this urgency, in all of this emergency, by doing it this way, they actually delayed themselves because the outcome of the lawsuit Now, the judge immediately saw right through what was going on, which is that you have Senator Elizabeth Warren bullying an executive branch agency that is supposed to be nonpartisan, by the way, the EIA is supposed to just be Like, you know, the military, right?

[00:16:44] Pierre Rochard: They’re supposed to not be in politics. They’re supposed to be independent in some regards, but here she was really browbeating the secretary of energy into a really, what’s a niche topic.

[00:16:57] Preston Pysh: I mean, it sounded completely scripted, like the whole back and forth, this sounded totally scripted. Sounded like they had already hashed out exactly who was going to say what, how they were going to say it, when they were going to say it, where they were going to say it.

[00:17:10] Preston Pysh: Like, I mean, I think anybody that listened to that, especially when you watch the clip and you see like their facial reactions, it’s really obvious.

[00:17:17] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, and I think that if they had just done it the right way, they would be further ahead than they currently are. But I think that they, they saw an opportunity of, hey, maybe the Bitcoin miners won’t push back on this.

[00:17:31] Pierre Rochard: And maybe their thinking was that it doesn’t look good to sue the government and to, you know, it kind of signals a lack of transparency. If, if you’re not. Up on the topic on the issue and deep in the weeds of the Administrative Procedure Act or the Paperwork Reduction Act that, you know, it looks like we’re resisting transparency when really the opposite is true.

[00:17:54] Pierre Rochard: The Bitcoin mining is the most transparent industry in the world. Thanks to the Bitcoin blockchain, right? And furthermore that it’s not that we don’t want to provide this information. It’s actually more so that we want to provide additional information that there’s not enough context being put into this form to correctly explain the role that Bitcoin mining has on the grid.

[00:18:16] Pierre Rochard: Instead, it’s an oversimplification because at the end of the day, Senator Warren’s only goal here is to have a stepping stone towards banning Bitcoin mining as she’s trying to find some kind of leverage, some kind of ammo. To use against Bitcoin miners by weaponizing a federal agency, or at the very least to harass the Bitcoin miners by imposing this, this requirement on them, because really what, what they could do, and I think would make a lot more sense is that, You just add Bitcoin mining as a category to an existing survey.

[00:18:51] Pierre Rochard: Just as Secretary Granholm was talking about, that there’s other surveys out there, that, so you don’t necessarily need to send it to a Bitcoin miner. You can just send it to ERCOT and say, hey, how many Bitcoin miners do you have? ERCOT would say, well, we have 2. 5 gigawatts. Like, we know exactly that number because we’re the grid operator.

[00:19:08] Pierre Rochard: And, this also touches on the emergency point, which is that, ERCOT already has all this data. If there’s a grid emergency, the EIA doesn’t, they don’t have a role in that at all. They, you know, so furthermore, ERCOT would not connect Bitcoin miners to the grid if there was a risk of public harm. It would be negligence for them to do that.

[00:19:30] Preston Pysh: Not to mention, its reliability. Not to mention a grid emergency would happen where there’s no Bitcoin miners.

[00:19:36] Pierre Rochard: Well, yeah, I mean, that, that, that to me is the other incredible point, and that with all this talk of renewables, Bitcoin miners are giving more revenue to renewables than Elizabeth Warren, certainly, right?

[00:19:50] Pierre Rochard: I mean, I can’t imagine she’s given more than 100 to renewables, while Bitcoin miners have given millions and millions of dollars to wind and solar and battery. But I think that it’s just part of her overall attack on Bitcoin that she’s trying to find every angle of, Oh, Hamas is using Bitcoin. I mean, look, if she’s going to pick a side on that conflict, she’s probably more pro Hamas than anything else.

[00:20:13] Pierre Rochard: So, you know, that didn’t really get any traction because she also got debunked on that point, but every thread that she can find, she’s going to pull on because ultimately what she wants my perception of it based on her statements is that she wants a CBDC. She wants. Her, it’s interesting, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is technically funded by the Federal Reserve.

[00:20:35] Pierre Rochard: So I think that she wants her entourage you know, her mentees to be leading the way in terms of micromanaging America’s finances.

[00:20:45] Preston Pysh: So she had a ton of people in, this is kind of going back to the FinCEN thing that I was working on. She had, I can’t even remember the number, but she had a lot of senators and a lot of representatives, co sign The document that she sent off to the White House that had that Wall Street Journal article that was completely debunked by coin analysis I want to I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head but she was saying it was a hundred million plus dollars and buying power through crypto going to Hamas and it ended up being like 450 K or something in that ballpark.

[00:21:19] Preston Pysh: So it was just dramatically off and different But I wonder if all of those cohorts that co signed that FinCEN document that she sent over to the White House If she lost some of them because of all of the proof that she was using being debunked, like heavily debunked Wall Street Journal went back on their report and who they were referencing and all of that.

[00:21:42] Preston Pysh: Have we seen any of that? Or does it seem like they’re just still kind of all in the same camp that had co signed the FinCEN piece? And I’m assuming they’re all the same actors that are on board for this eIA report and survey that, that went out.

[00:21:58] Pierre Rochard: Perhaps. I mean, I think that most of them just have so many issues going on at the same time that, you know, with the government having its finger in every pie that for them, co signing a letter is just, you know, it takes less than, you know, a couple of minutes of whatever.

[00:22:14] Pierre Rochard: Okay, sure. And I think that the, the problem though, is that she is spending political capital. Okay. And that there’s only so much political capital that she can spend and the consequences might be felt at the ballot box that if she continues on in this direction and Bitcoin continues to increase in adoption, as it has been over the past couple of months, yeah, she’s going to have electoral consequences and the people who affiliate with her are as well.

[00:22:50] Preston Pysh: Not to mention Wall Street, I think is really opening up and kind of like, Hey maybe this Bitcoin thing ain’t so bad after the performance of the ETF and they’re seeing the fees that they’re starting to collect off these ETFs. It’s almost like they’re like leaning into it. And I would think that she would wake up really fast in that who’s going to fund her if she continues to get on this path.

[00:23:13] Preston Pysh: And it’s kind of starting to work out for a whole lot of people that are involving themselves in it. It doesn’t make any sense.

[00:23:19] Pierre Rochard: I think that’s right. Ultimately, I think that she’ll fail, but we still have to stand up to it. And, you know, this story to me has really highlighted it. Why it makes sense to be mining Bitcoin in the United States.

[00:23:33] Pierre Rochard: It’s because we have a great system of government, right? Of checks and balances and the separate branches of government that, and I got to applaud the judiciary on this one because this, this was. In a lot of other countries, you can’t just go sue the government. If you do, you might end up in jail, right?

[00:23:50] Pierre Rochard: They’ll send you to Siberia or whatever it is. So in this case, it was a big win.

[00:23:54] Preston Pysh: How long did it take to get overturned Pierre? Like once you guys were like, Hey, you can’t do this. We’re going to take this to court. How long did that process take?

[00:24:02] Pierre Rochard: Days. Days. Yeah. It was very fast.

[00:24:05] Preston Pysh: And then what the judge ruled, is it temporary?

[00:24:09] Preston Pysh: Is it like, what was the actual ramifications and like, what’s changing?

[00:24:14] Pierre Rochard: The first ruling was a temporary restraining order, and in that ruling, the judge was very clear that he thought, you know, we were completely in the right here. And this judge is a really, I think he’s a really balanced judge in the sense that he’s ruled on some issues that essentially cross partisan lines, right?

[00:24:34] Pierre Rochard: Sometimes he does things that upset Republicans. Sometimes he does things that upset Democrats. And so it’s not like he’s a hyper partisan judge he just wants the government to follow the law. That was his contention here. Now, what ended up happening afterwards is that the, so we scheduled a hearing for Wednesday, a couple weeks ago now, And I was all set to go you know, testify in Waco on behalf of Bitcoin mining.

[00:25:02] Pierre Rochard: And they canceled the hearing because they wanted to negotiate an agreement, a settlement to avoid moving forward here because they didn’t really see a path to victory. And so they, not only did they concede on every point that we asked for, i. e. destroying the data that they had received and restarting the entire process from zero.

[00:25:26] Pierre Rochard: They also paid attorney’s fees because essentially, you know, they created this problem that was of their own doing. It’s not like, you know, it would be one thing if it was kind of a gray area then maybe they would not have paid the attorney’s fees. But when it’s pretty egregious, they realize that they’ve kind of got to bury the hatchet and, and, and make peace.

[00:25:46] Pierre Rochard: Now maybe it’s my own ego, but I also have to imagine that they probably didn’t want to have me on the witness stand talking about how great Bitcoin mining is in federal court. So that might’ve been an element.

[00:25:58] Preston Pysh: You would have murdered it. Oh my God. Yes. That’s a great point. Cause would, would you have been the guy that was sent up?

[00:26:06] Pierre Rochard: Yeah Lee Bratcher and I were all suited up, ready to go.

[00:26:10] Preston Pysh: You guys would have melted their faces. Oh my gosh.

[00:26:13] Pierre Rochard: It would have been fun. We were denied that opportunity, but we were granted a victory.

[00:26:19] Preston Pysh: Yeah. It sounds like they got scared. Wow. So, so what’s the path forward now? So what comes next?

[00:26:26] Pierre Rochard: They have to open up a comment period.

[00:26:30] Pierre Rochard: And I think that this is where it’s really important for everybody who is a stakeholder to provide comments on what they think is good about the survey and what they think can be improved about it. I think that there is a threshold question of is this useful data because arguably it’s not useful in the sense that the data already exists, ERCOT already has it, the EIA already has it as well because the EIA already tracks consumption of electricity.

[00:27:01] Pierre Rochard: They just, they track it at residential, commercial, industrial. Those are kind of the three categories. And it would be bizarre to add a fourth category that is like a sub category of industrial, a sub sub category. Because you’re saying, data centers, and then specifically within that, bitcoin miners, Oh, we’re going to carve that out into a special group.

[00:27:23] Pierre Rochard: There would have to be some kind of underlying justification for that that would not apply equally to any other industry. And when you look at every other industry, you could come up with reasons why, oh, the EIA needs to know about steel mills, or, you know, they need to know about check cashing places, right?

[00:27:41] Pierre Rochard: How much electricity are they using to exploit the public? So, the argument for why there needs to be a separate form, I think that, that argument, they, they haven’t really made it. I mean, they’ve made the argument for why there is an emergency, and that fell flat. That immediately got debunked in the legal filings.

[00:28:01] Pierre Rochard: But basically their point was that the Bitcoin price is going up. That’s what they started with is at the time they said, Bitcoin’s up 50 percent now it’s more like a hundred percent. Right. And come on, the, the natural consequence of the Bitcoin price being up is that Bitcoin mining is going to grow.

[00:28:19] Pierre Rochard: And that’s certainly the case with riot. Raya is developing a one gigawatt facility in Corsicana, and we’re going to be energizing that starting in the coming weeks. We’re going to be energizing corsicana. And the other part of it too is that, or we’re going to start, right? I mean it. You don’t get to one gigawatt overnight, but we’re going to be phasing that in.

[00:28:42] Pierre Rochard: And we’re also upgrading mining rigs in Rockdale. So it is absolutely the case that with the Bitcoin price being up, we’re going to be consuming more electricity. But at the same time. We’re going to continue to execute on the strategy that really every Bitcoin miner in ERCOT does is responding to the price.

[00:29:03] Pierre Rochard: That is that if the electricity price is high, we turn off. If it’s low, we stay on.

[00:29:09] Preston Pysh: One of the things that she said in the video, she says that 85 percent of the energy being used is dirty energy. My understanding was that it has some of the highest, what is it? The carbon credits that are produced out of like almost any energy consuming industry, is that correct?

[00:29:27] Preston Pysh: What’s what, what is the actual talking point that you guys have and what’s the data for that?

[00:29:32] Pierre Rochard: At this point over 50% of electricity in Texas comes from wind and solar, and her argument is particularly egregious because she brings up the worst possible comparison, which is internal combustion engine cars, gas cars, versus electric cars. And I mean, it’s not even the same category, it’s not even the same category, right? Right. And her argument is, oh, because of Bitcoin miners. The carbon emissions that were reduced with electric vehicles are now increased with electric miners.

[00:30:04] Pierre Rochard: And it’s like, well, hold on. First of all, there’s no internal combustion engine for mining rigs, right? Like, I haven’t seen one yet. But if anybody wants to build that, I’m sure Steve Barber would say that, you know, that’s what he’s building. But the point being there, though, is that Bitcoin mining is already electrified.

[00:30:21] Pierre Rochard: It’s already decarbonized in the sense that it doesn’t emit any CO2. Now to her point about increasing the use of renewables, frankly, the Biden administration as well have a very extreme position on Bitcoin mining, which is that. Even if you are using 100 percent renewable electricity on your own land, with your own solar panels, with your own windmills, not touching the grid, not doing any, you know, that’s still not okay.

[00:30:50] Pierre Rochard: Because that electricity should be going towards curing cancer, right?

[00:30:55] Preston Pysh: Or something that they want you to point it to and not what you want it to point it to.

[00:31:00] Pierre Rochard: Right, exactly. And so that’s a very extreme position.

[00:31:04] Preston Pysh: This is madness. This is madness. So if you go out and perform work. She’s saying, I know how to point it to what I want it to go to better than you do, even though you’re the one generating it and producing it.

[00:31:18] Pierre Rochard: That’s right. And she’s also overlooking the point that quite often, solar and wind in Texas are overproducing electricity. The electricity price is negative. Yeah. So, it’s not like there’s any kind of shortage. Texas is the energy capital of the world. I mean, there’s an abundance of energy here. Yeah.

[00:31:38] Pierre Rochard: Natural gas prices are at all time lows, and so from every angle, now I know that she, she doesn’t like natural gas, that’s neither here nor there, because as far as Texas is concerned, oil and gas are here to stay, they’re not, you know, being phased out contrary to what, what some ideologues might argue, and the other part about natural gas is that when we’re in those situations where we don’t have any wind or sun, And we do need capacity from natural gas power plants.

[00:32:09] Pierre Rochard: Well, If those natural gas power plants are not earning any revenue, they won’t be there when we need them. They will shut down, or they will leave the state, and then we won’t have any capacity when we need it. And this is something that is a recognized issue at the political level in Texas, where the Texas legislature, the House and the Senate, and the governor, signed a bill to increase the state subsidies for natural gas power plants so that we don’t lose that capacity that we need in extreme circumstances.

[00:32:45] Pierre Rochard: And so, really what I would say is that the push towards subsidizing solar and wind to the detriment of every other power generation technology is actually potentially creating an emergency. I think that is creating a risk of public harm of a blackout where we just don’t have enough power generation for, you know, every situation that we find ourselves in.

[00:33:10] Pierre Rochard: The weather is very uncertain. I think that’s, people look at. At least the sun is a little, has a little more certainty, but even there, when we look at day to day, if there’s some cloud coverage, well, suddenly you’ve got 20, 30, 40 percent less sun output and then of course, when the sun sets, you’re at zero.

[00:33:30] Pierre Rochard: The wind comes and goes very quickly. So if the conversation is very dogmatic about, Oh, we only want wind and solar, then you have to go to residential consumers and explain to them that their power is going to be out 20 percent of the time. And that’s probably not an acceptable view. And Texas voters, they voted on that bill.

[00:33:54] Pierre Rochard: They, they’d actually went to referendum and so they’ve all, it passed the referendum. And so to me, it’s a question of, do we want taxpayers to have to subsidize natural gas in order to offset the subsidies from solar and wind, or do we just increase overall demand in a flexible way so that we’re increasing the utilization of the grid outside of peak hours, and then in peak hours, Bitcoin miners turn off.

[00:34:20] Pierre Rochard: And the system works. I think that she’s really barking up the wrong tree and maybe the other astonishing part of this is that she’s in the habit of sending letters. So she’ll send letters on official Senate, you know, letterhead. And so she sent letters to riot. We got 1 letter from her. We got 1 letter from her counterpart in the house and they were asking for our energy or electricity consumption data.

[00:34:46] Pierre Rochard: Yep. We provided that data to her and never heard back from her, right? Because we also explained the benefits of Bitcoin and how, you know, flexible loads function and curtailment and demand response. We never heard back from her after sending that letter. She also sent a letter to ERCOT and asking, Hey, why is ERCOT paying the Bitcoin miners?

[00:35:09] Pierre Rochard: And to his credit, the CEO of ERCOT personally responded to her letter, and he explained that Bitcoin miners are really a small percentage of demand response, and that demand response is good, and that we should want more demand response. There’s not really any kind of problems here. She never replied to that either.

[00:35:29] Pierre Rochard: So, she is very loud, but then doesn’t listen to anyone who is explaining reality to her. And I think that’s, that’s problematic. So, hopefully, she listens to this podcast.

[00:35:43] Preston Pysh: I want to shift gears a little bit. I’m sure she’s listening by the way, Pierre, I’m sure. Many years ago, I would say, what, 2014, 2013, you and Michael Goldstein wrote about the, this speculative attack.

[00:35:58] Preston Pysh: Do you, do you remember writing this? What, what, do you remember what year you wrote this?

[00:36:03] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, I think it was 2014. There was a paper that was written about Bitcoin and a speculative attack that I read that I felt like got the causal mechanism wrong. And so I essentially wrote my version of it that I felt like was, would be more predictive and accurate of how it would work.

[00:36:23] Pierre Rochard: And yeah, that was the initial impetus for writing that article.

[00:36:29] Preston Pysh: The reason I bring this up is because we’ve been watching micro strategy implement this miraculous treasury with their common stock riding at a higher price per share than what the treasury per share is. And as they’re doing this.

[00:36:45] Preston Pysh: Michael’s just issuing more common stock, which you think would be dilutive and then buying Bitcoin with the proceeds of, of doing this. And what we, what we’re finding is that he’s ending up with more Bitcoin per share by implementing this approach. And so I think you wrote about it more from like a central bank kind of standpoint, but now that we see a company that has been implementing it pretty heavily, what are some of your thoughts?

[00:37:12] Preston Pysh: And I, and I also want to throw out one other really interesting point. Recently he did when he first started doing this, he was not doing it as a common to cash to Bitcoin type maneuver. He did it with convertible debt. He took that, the funding, the cash that he raised from the convertible debt, and then he bought Bitcoin with it.

[00:37:31] Preston Pysh: And it was, that was the play, but then he slowly migrated it over to this common share issuance to Bitcoin play. And what I find interesting about the convertible debt piece that I didn’t know, and I think many others until just recently, I started thinking about this and seeing this, that because he’s tapping into the fixed income market, he’s creating this enormous amount of derivative interest On top of not only the, the fixed income, but because of the way that they’re covering themselves in these, in these markets, they’re also owning a lot of common stock, which is creating a ton, massive amount of volume and liquidity on the common stock, which then makes this even easier for him to implement by going and issue more common stock and buying Bitcoin with it.

[00:38:23] Preston Pysh: So it’s like a PhD in financial engineering and maneuvering where you’re issuing stock and it’s not dilutive and it’s actually like anti dilutive, but you were talking about this for years. I’m trying, I’m really curious your thoughts on everything that he’s doing right now.

[00:38:40] Preston Pysh: Cause it’s just miraculous.

[00:38:42] Pierre Rochard: I do find it fascinating. So despite updating the causal mechanism, I still kind of got it wrong in the sense that I didn’t realize there would be like a gigagenius like a sailor to come along because traditionally the way that speculative attacks are thought of, and this is a term coined by our good friend Paul Krugman.

[00:39:03] Pierre Rochard: You know, people say, Hey, a speculative attack sounds really negative. It’s like, yeah, because Paul Krugman came up with it. I mean, just like Vitalik came up with Bitcoin maximalist, right? Like our haters are ultimately the ones who are going to come up with the best things that we can appropriate.

[00:39:17] Pierre Rochard: Bitcoin psychopaths. Remember that one?

[00:39:20] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Bitcoin psychopaths. I use that one all the time.

[00:39:23] Pierre Rochard: With a traditional speculative attack, what happens is that the speculator borrows the weak local currency. and then sells it for a stronger currency. And so they’re essentially short selling the weak currency.

[00:39:40] Pierre Rochard: Now, what makes this a really, let’s call it like a positive feedback loop, although central bankers would probably consider it to be a negative feedback loop, is that when they borrow that weak local currency, if they are borrowing it from the commercial banking system, they’re actually creating more of the weak currency.

[00:40:00] Pierre Rochard: And so they are increasing the supply of the weak currency and then driving its value down and then they repay the loan by buying back the weak currency at a lower rate and Having a nice profit from that And so the way that a central bank counteracts this is by raising interest rates so that it is more expensive to borrow the weak currency and that will strengthen that currency and undo the attack.

[00:40:26] Pierre Rochard: What the Federal Reserve would have to do to stop Michael Saylor would be to raise interest rates such that if he’s issuing a convertible bond cause that’s easier to think about than stock. Although the principle is the same because we’re talking about cost of capital and money is fungible and all of that.

[00:40:41] Pierre Rochard: But the idea being that they would have to raise interest rates to be greater than the expected value that, you know, we think Bitcoin is going to appreciate by. And so if we look at Bitcoin’s, you know, the cagr, right? The, what are the returns for Bitcoin? Well, they’re at least, let’s say conservatively, like 30%, 50%, right?

[00:41:02] Preston Pysh: Those are the, that’s the number I think it is. I think you’re like between 30 to 50% annualized.

[00:41:07] Pierre Rochard: So they would have to raise interest rates to be greater than 30 to 50 percent in order to stop Michael Saylor. Now, that would destroy the financial system, right? The entire fiat system would collapse if they raised interest rates to 30 to 50%.

[00:41:22] Preston Pysh: They’re not even, yeah, they weren’t even, like, raising them hardly at all, and they had to step in and backstop Silicon Valley Bank, I mean, yeah.

[00:41:30] Pierre Rochard: The alternative they have is capital controls. And so they have effectively implemented capital controls for the commercial banking system by saying that the banks cannot hold Bitcoin, right?

[00:41:42] Pierre Rochard: The banks cannot participate by lending dollars against Bitcoin, collateralized lending or anything like that.

[00:41:49] Preston Pysh: But now there’s, but now they’re trying to overturn that. I’m seeing movement that the banks are coming together. What do you know about that, Pierre?

[00:41:56] Pierre Rochard: I think that the whole idea around, reserve requirements and Basel III and all this stuff, is just completely ludicrous because the banking system’s already insolvent.

[00:42:09] Pierre Rochard: So, it’s really, Bitcoin is their best hope for getting out of insolvency.

[00:42:16] Preston Pysh: Do you think they’re going to get it overturned? Do you think that they’re going to allow them?

[00:42:20] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, I do. Because what the Fed would have to do in order to tighten things up would be to apply the same rules, not just to banks, but to everyone.

[00:42:31] Pierre Rochard: Otherwise, right there, it just creates regulatory arbitrage, which Michael Saylor is effectively using, right? Which is that MicroStrategy does not have capital controls. They can put Bitcoin on their balance sheet. And they can go out in the bond market and raise funds to buy more Bitcoin and issue more equity to buy more Bitcoin.

[00:42:49] Pierre Rochard: So as long as there are sectors of the financial system that are not subject to the capital controls, then everybody in the banking system is kind of looking over the fence saying, Hey, we’d like to participate in that. If you’re not going to stop him, why are you stopping us? It’s unfair. And they’re right.

[00:43:08] Pierre Rochard: It would be unpalatable for the government to apply capital controls to everyone. Maybe they’ll try and in an emergency but I think a federal judge would overturn it. Given that they can’t get a survey out.

[00:43:23] Preston Pysh: More emergencies. So when are we going to start seeing some other companies do this? I mean, I’ve got my opinion on why we haven’t to date.

[00:43:31] Preston Pysh: I’m pretty sure it’s probably the same reason you’ve got, but. Surely, surely they have to be waking up. I mean, if Bitcoin, let’s just say Bitcoin goes 100, 000 and we’re looking at Michael’s balance sheet, I think it goes up by a billion every 5, 000 that the price of Bitcoin moves. I mean, we’re talking billions upon billions that his company is going to move.

[00:43:51] Preston Pysh: People have to start waking up to this. This is, this is absurd, absurd what’s taking place. Is it happening in 2024? Like what’s, what’s your feeling? What’s your sentiment?

[00:44:03] Pierre Rochard: I had the, the same thought about. You know, we, we would have liked to have more co plaintiffs on our lawsuit against the federal government.

[00:44:12] Pierre Rochard: It would have been nice to have more the big Bitcoin miners on the lawsuit with their names on it. So Riot, you know, stuck its neck out just like MicroStrategy is doing as a matter of leadership, right? That ultimately it does take courage to do what we’re doing. And I used to think that we would see more imitations of Michael Saylor back in the previous cycle for that matter.

[00:44:38] Pierre Rochard: We did see Elon dip his toes and then, you know, he I don’t know quite what happened there, but.

[00:44:44] Preston Pysh: So, did you hear the, did you hear my conversation with him when I was on Spaces with, with Elon? Yeah, so I was on a Spaces with Cathie Wood when ARK launched their ETF and Elon joined and Elon made the comment that he had to sell the, the Bitcoin out of Tesla for working capital reasons.

[00:45:06] Preston Pysh: Okay. That was the quote. So yeah, I’ve provided my opinion. What’s your, as an, as an accountant and financier, what does that translate that for the audience when Elon said that he had to sell his Bitcoin at Tesla? He still had it. He goes, but I still have it at SpaceX, but I had to sell it at Tesla for working capital reasons.

[00:45:26] Preston Pysh: So what does that mean? Translate for us.

[00:45:29] Pierre Rochard: Well, I mean, I think it means, it means that he, he needs to work with my wife, Morgan financial planner because. He overbought Bitcoin, right? There you go. He, given his circumstances. Everybody has different circumstances. So Michael Saylor’s circumstances are different than Elon’s.

[00:45:48] Preston Pysh: Pierre, this goes to this point. I keep beating this drum, right? It’s a drum that you have to like, continually say. Bitcoin flows to the net producers. You can’t accumulate and you can’t continue to hold it if you’re a net consumer. And so like, when we look at Tesla and we look at where he was at and like how much he could buy based on the free cash flows of the business, he bought too much.

[00:46:14] Preston Pysh: That’s why he quote unquote had working capital concerns, right? It’s just so obvious. You cannot hold onto Bitcoin. Unless you’re actually making and producing value for society at the rate that you are accumulating it. It’s just so in your face, simple, stupid, like, I don’t know. It’s a pet peeve of mine, but keep going.

[00:46:38] Preston Pysh: I interrupted you.

[00:46:40] Pierre Rochard: Oh, no, no, no. I mean, I think that, yeah, the same principle applies on a personal level, right? Yes. For people out there that, hey, if you’re struggling with cash flow, like, don’t go and buy Bitcoin. You’ll have to sell it. Before you know it and it might be at a loss, right? So given Bitcoin’s volatility, it’s not a short term get rich quick thing.

[00:46:59] Pierre Rochard: It is a long term savings vehicle and it works really well as a long term savings vehicle if you have the balance sheet to and the income statement, the cash flow to support holding it for the long term. And I think that this is something that Saylor has to be applauded on as well. All of his critics were saying that he’s going to get liquidated.

[00:47:20] Pierre Rochard: He, he bought too much. And they were not running the numbers because when you ran the numbers, like Bitcoin had to go to some ridiculously low dollar value for him to get liquidated. And it was pretty clear that, you know, he was going to weather the drawdowns, which can be like 90 percent in Bitcoin, right?

[00:47:38] Pierre Rochard: And so he did. And then same thing for Bukele in, in El Salvador, all of the critics were saying, well, look, he’s, he’s in the red, he’s got a loss. But that doesn’t matter if you have the correct setup from a overall balance sheet perspective that, you know, as a sovereign that his credit was improving and his underlying economy was improving, right?

[00:48:01] Pierre Rochard: The GDP is growing. Now, I know that the libertarians don’t like to hear about, you know, tax revenue being a cash flow, but from a government perspective, yes, that’s what it is. From every level of corporate, sovereign, personal, all the same principles apply because you can’t print more Bitcoin. And that’s really, you know, and the volatility is the same for everyone.

[00:48:23] Pierre Rochard: It’s interesting to me that the critics, they have not learned to be humble during the bear market. They should realize that there have been bear markets before and that due to the fundamentals of Bitcoin that it will recover. But I think, you know, obviously as critics, they don’t think Bitcoin has any fundamentals.

[00:48:42] Pierre Rochard: And so they do think it’s going to zero which is leads to some pretty disastrous analysis of the players involved.

[00:48:50] Preston Pysh: Here, my last question for you. So you have experience working at a large exchange, Bitcoin exchange when you were over at Kraken, you have experience working at a mining company, And now we get these ETFs and there’s a lot of people coming up with theories and like what OTC desks look like.

[00:49:10] Preston Pysh: Where are they getting all these coins from to even sell on the exchanges? We have 10, 000 Bitcoin a day getting soaked up just in the ETFs alone, and there’s only 900 that are being mined in a day. So, help us just wrap our head around these numbers because these numbers sound crazy. The number of Bitcoin that are about to be mined are going to go down to 450 a day.

[00:49:33] Preston Pysh: Where are they getting these coins from? It seems that, you know, the price has moved aggressively. I guess I’m saying I think the price still has a lot of aggressive moves yet to come because of what I would suspect is just a massive amount of supply suffocation taking place.

[00:49:51] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, I mean the, the coins come out of cold storage, right?

[00:49:54] Pierre Rochard: And so, Unchained has a great visualization of HODL waves, which kind of looks at the, at the blockchain data to show that, you know, during the bear market, people sit on their hands, right? That they don’t move the coins and that they turn into the age. And then in the bull market, They come out of cold storage and they come to market and they circulate at a higher price, right?

[00:50:18] Pierre Rochard: And that’s what incentivizes them to, to come out of cold storage. I think that there’s probably some folks out there that, and I, I saw recently that there was somebody had done some blockchain analysis showing that there, there actually was a, a whale that from very early days 2010, that had sold a big chunk at 60K.

[00:50:38] Pierre Rochard: I think that psychologically, Maybe there’s a lot of folks around this price that to them, they bought at 60k not so long ago and they’re like, all right, I, I need to get out of this because they’re exhausted, which it’s unfortunate, but hopefully they read the Bitcoin standard and listen to your podcast and kind of strengthen their conviction.

[00:50:59] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, I think that between the folks who missed the opportunity to sell in 2021 who, who intended to for rebalancing reasons, right? Mm hmm. And this is what it comes down to in my mind is, hey, look, if you bought at 1, it is probably a good idea to sell at 60, 000 some percentage, whether it’s to give to your favorite charity or to put your nieces and nephews through college or to pay off your parents mortgage.

[00:51:28] Pierre Rochard: Or to Buy a Lambo. You know, there’s lots of good and bad reasons to, or to just put some money, like in a S& P 500 index fund, right? That you’re just kind of just derisking some percentage of your allocation because you want to rebalance and you want to sleep at night, right? You just don’t. Not everyone has the risk appetite to be 100 percent Bitcoin through the cycles.

[00:51:50] Preston Pysh: Some of us sleep, some of us sleep at night better in, in different portfolio constructions though.

[00:51:56] Pierre Rochard: That’s right. And so we have to respect that and that’s what creates a market. Because without that, yeah, the price would immediately go to a million dollars or whatever it took to get people to move their coins to exchanges to sell them.

[00:52:09] Pierre Rochard: In some ways, yeah, the price is what is going to cause the market to clear.

[00:52:14] Preston Pysh: Do you think, do you think we’re, yeah, where do you think this is going by the end of the year? Do you think we’re going above six figures per Bitcoin?

[00:52:22] Pierre Rochard: I do. I do. Yes. I, I think that it’s just math, right? As, as our friends say, the reality is that there will be very big drawdowns throughout the bull market.

[00:52:34] Pierre Rochard: So I’d really encourage folks to avoid leverage, you know, stay humble, stack stats, all the same principles apply, but the, yes, we are in a bull market. The catalysts are clear. Obviously the ETFs are creating tremendous demand. The supply is going to get from Bitcoin miners. So not only is it going to get cut in half, arguably, it’s already gotten cut.

[00:52:58] Pierre Rochard: We’ve seen a lot of miners announced that they are not selling as much Bitcoin as they have in the past. And there’s a very simple reason, which is that they don’t need to sell as much Bitcoin in order to raise the same amount of dollars. Right? Yeah. And so just mechanically, they, they can more easily cover their OpEx and their CapEx that they’ve budgeted for and sell fewer coins.

[00:53:20] Pierre Rochard: So, arguably, the halving has already happened. It’s already priced in. But, I think the other part is on dollar monetary policy. That it does seem like we’re at the end of the tightening phase. And that going forward, it’s either going to be sideways or loosening, if, depending on what the, the data comes in.

[00:53:40] Pierre Rochard: But, that was a huge headwind in the previous cycle, was that, that inflation caused a you know, interest rates to go up, and to his credit, Jeremy Powell was pretty aggressive about raising interest rates. and arguably that kind of dampened the Bitcoin bull market. Because as I was saying with the speculative attacks, there’s one solution for central banks.

[00:54:01] Pierre Rochard: It’s to raise interest rates. If they’re not raising interest rates, then I do think that it creates tailwinds for Bitcoin. And we’re easily going in the six figures this year. And then if we zoom out and look at, okay, 18 months after the halving, where are we? Maybe we are touching a million dollars because there’s not anything stopping us from getting there.

[00:54:26] Pierre Rochard: And there’s lots of catalysts pushing us towards that, that, that price point.

[00:54:31] Preston Pysh: It really seems like the volatility is just going to continue to hang around from what we’ve seen in previous cycles. When I was out at the Bitcoin Atlantis last week I was asking the panel about their thoughts on the ETFs and like any advice for banks we’ve had all these examples of people that were basically re hypothecating holdings and what, how it ended for Mt. Gox and all these others. And Michael had the comment that he thinks things are going to get really spicy with respect to the price action after we start to see derivatives stood up on top of the ETFs, which haven’t even kicked into gear. which he’s thinking maybe he’s a year to a year and a half from now that some of that’s going to get the approval and then the construction on top of it.

[00:55:18] Preston Pysh: And he didn’t have too many concerns for wall street being able to kind of manage the risks of this. He’s he, he actually implied on stage that he thinks that they’re very well equipped to understand the risks and to position themselves and to deal with a lot of that, as opposed to what we’ve seen in a lot of the shadow banking to date with Bitcoin as it was growing up.

[00:55:37] Preston Pysh: So he didn’t seem to have too much concerns there. He just thinks that what people were totally underestimating is like how much more fiat is basically getting plugged into the Bitcoin network. Once they put derivatives on top of it, he thinks it’s, it’s going to be crazy. Any thoughts on that particular idea?

[00:55:55] Pierre Rochard: Yeah. I mean, I think that this is, this is an area where on one hand, the gold bug kind of conspiracy theorists folks are like, Hey, anytime you have a paper going around that that’s going to decrease demand for the underlying. I think that’s a cope on their part. You know, it’s just that gold has underperformed and they need something to hang their head on.

[00:56:19] Preston Pysh: I don’t think they have an appreciation for the number of coins outstanding that are sitting in the hands of individuals that are never putting like any sizable amount of those coins back on where, when you look at gold, it doesn’t have that set up. It has, it’s sitting in government hands, a majority of the outstanding stock.

[00:56:37] Pierre Rochard: Absolutely. And the other part is that I do think derivatives actually create demand for spot because there’s lots of trading strategies that rely on you actually holding the asset while, you know, if you’re writing a covered call, for example, you know, so there’s strategies where essentially you need to be capitalized with Bitcoin in order to be performing the strategy and arbitraging whatever it is.

[00:57:01] Pierre Rochard: I do think that is going to create demand.

[00:57:04] Preston Pysh: Plus it’s just pristine collateral. I mean, like, like we’ve never seen that can immediately settle. It can be sent anywhere in the world. It’s a 24, seven every day of the year. Like I, people just underestimate how powerful that is compared to anything else that’s out there.

[00:57:22] Pierre Rochard: And CME Futures have been trading on Bitcoin for a while now, and nothing crazy has happened there that they survived the bear market and in fact, they’ve got pretty good volume on CME Futures, so I think that it’s definitely going to be a further catalyst Pierre, it’s already been over an hour here.

[00:57:41] Preston Pysh: I really appreciate you coming on and talking about all the stuff that you’re doing there in Texas with the mining, raising awareness. If some of that conversation for the first half here has ticked you off, feel free to write. Feel free to put your representative on notice, especially if you’re up in Massachusetts.

[00:57:59] Preston Pysh: And by the way, it looks like she has one heck of a candidate coming up against her that’s going to give her a run for it. I’m seeing some of her tweets and it seems like she’s quite concerned about this guy. What real fast, what do you know anything else? Does he have a shot at beating her up there?

[00:58:14] Pierre Rochard: Yes. So, John Deaton has, has built quite a following, especially, I mean, I know the Bitcoin people won’t like this, but of litigating the XRP issue as, as a lawyer and pushing back on the SEC. Now, Whether, you know, it’s a security or not, I personally, I don’t care, but the legal arguments have certainly swung in the favor of Ripple and XRP to the surprise of many.

[00:58:38] Pierre Rochard: And so John Deaton is a folk hero within the XRP community, and I think within the wider crypto community as well. And so, obviously, he is the diametric opposite of Elizabeth Warren on this issue, and he also, I think, has a stronger way of talking about the challenges facing the working class in the United States, where Elizabeth Warren kind of comes off as lecturing professor, where he’s more of man of the people, salt of the earth.

[00:59:11] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, no doubt. And so I think he, he could have a good solid shot at taking that seat away from her. And I think that that would send a very clear signal to the political class that if they want to pick a fight with Bitcoin and the crypto community, that it’s just not going to end well. Better wake up.

[00:59:32] Pierre Rochard: Yeah. It’s better to join them than to fight them.

[00:59:34] Preston Pysh: Yes. Yes. Pierre, give people a hand off where they can learn more about you, or Riot, or whatever you want to highlight for us.

[00:59:43] Pierre Rochard: Yeah, absolutely. So, follow me on Twitter, at BitcoinPierre. I also host a weekly podcast so if you’re not getting enough podcasts with Preston, also subscribe to Riot’s podcast, Blocktime.

[00:59:55] Pierre Rochard: And Preston’s actually been our guest on Blocktime as well, so I’m really excited about what Riot’s up to in terms of expanding in Corsicana, so lots of great pictures, we just put out a monthly update. And yeah, looking forward to what else comes in 2024. I can’t believe it’s already March.

[01:00:13] Preston Pysh: It’s going to be an exciting year, man. Hang on, hang on, buckle up.

[01:00:18] Pierre Rochard: Thanks for having me on Preston.

[01:00:19] Preston Pysh: Yeah. Thanks for coming here.

[01:00:22] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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