Bitcoin is useless 🙄

Here’s what I share with people who say “Bitcoin has not valid use other than speculative asset”

My first assessment of Bitcoin was "Speculative asset that does nothing useful but uses lots of energy."

Sound familiar?

What I learnt was that it was only my ignorance combined with me inability to imagine the lives of others living outside the West that had me believe this.

The reality is that Bitcoin is in the same pantheon as the smartphone and the Internet itself in terms of its utility. But unlike its predecessors, it helps people in the global South first - the West last.

That's probably why most people (like me) in the West initially fail to see its utility TO THEM, and therefore assume it has no utility TO ANYONE.

Bitcoin analyst Willy Woo estimates there are 100Million+ users of Bitcoin, rising exponentially. Here's a demographic snapshot of who they are and why they use it:

There are 1.2Billion people who are unbanked - 57% of them are women, 90% are people of color.

There are 4Billion people living under autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes, where the financial system can be used against them (eg: state freezing of bank accounts, censoring and surveillance of how you spend money)

There are 8.1M adult women in Afghanistan who are prohibited by law from opening a bank account, starting a business or receiving an income because of their gender

There are >300M people who's economies are experiencing hyperinflation (including Turkey, Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela)

These are the people who see the utility of Bitcoin first. Not us in the West who take for granted our privilege, human rights, functioning banking system, 99%+ access to banking, and relatively low inflation.

You may be thinking "so what - how does Bitcoin help these people?"

It helps the unbanked, because you don't need a bank. A feature-phone (yes, like the one you had in 1999) plus some basic Bitcoin education is all you need to receive, save and pay. There's a financial revolution happening in Africa right now: the poorest in the world are leapfrogging the banking sector and going directly to Internet-native money (Bitcoin). This is why the continent of Africa is adopting Bitcoin faster than any other continent.

It helps people in autocratic regimes because they cannot be surveilled, censored, de-platformed or frozen by the State. This is why Nigeria is one of the biggest adopters of Bitcoin. It's driven by human rights activism.

It helps women in Afghanistan, because they can (and do) adopt bitcoin Lightening Wallets, which means state discrimination cannot deny them financial equity.

It helps those living with hyperinflation because it allows them to avoid 10 years of life saving being reduced to 1/2 its value inside a year.

That's why of the top 10 nations adopting Bitcoin

1. Top 2 nations are experiencing hyperinflation

2. 7 or the top 8 countries were colonised + have heavy IMF/World Bank loans

3. 8/10 are autocratic or semi-autocratic regimes

4. 7/10 from Africa, Latin America or SE Asia

To more than 1/2 the world, Bitcoin is the most useful technology in a generation.

Just launched my newsletter

You can subscribe here

https://danielbatten.substack.com/

Congrats on hitting the milestone!

Central bankers are really good at printing things that are not backed by anything

De Vries’ latest study on bitcoin mining water usage continues this tradition.

What will drive the next bull run?

My new article just up on Bitcoin Magazine

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/why-the-new-esg-narrative-about-bitcoin-will-power-the-next-bull-run

So BBCNews wants to get into a water-fight ?

OK by me

Your move BBC.

👇

Rebuttal: https://batcoinz.com/2484-2/

Great point Mags. Bitcoin can help bring water abundance to the world.

This personal story is about the surprising impact on results of dropping your attachment to results!

India played a vital role in my entrepreneurial journey. Only I didn't go to India, "India came to me".

One of the key reasons most Western approaches to sales, influence and pitching are incomplete and ineffective is that they are only just starting to grapple with something that has been understood in the East for millennia: Do not attach to the fruit of your actions.

Steve Jobs, the CEO of what became the largest company in the world by market capitalization, Apple, attributed much of his success to what he learned about influencing others, and himself, on an extended trip to India. When a young Mark Zuckerburg turned to Steve for advice when his company was going through tough times, Steve encouraged Mark to travel to India to spend time in an ashram. That trip proved pivotal to Mark’s success.

In early 2004, after months of trying, I’d finally turned a presentation to investors into a decision to enter due diligence.

I’d never even heard of due diligence before. It sounded serious and rigorous. It was. In terms of skillset, I was wholly unprepared for the specificity, directness and sharpness of the questions that a team of four investors would ask me during that meeting two weeks after our pitch. Fortunately, at the level of mindset, I’d undergone the perfect preparation.

As luck would have it, during that two-week gap between our successful pitch and the follow-up due diligence meeting, I was booked to spend two weeks organizing a tour and flying around the country with none other than Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (Sri Sri as he’s affectionately known). Sri Sri is a multiple nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and according to Forbes magazine, is one of the most powerful influencers in India. He’s what’s known in the East as a fully realized master. I was excited at the opportunity. I’d never been up close to a living master before, let alone had the chance to travel with one, talk to one and observe one offstage.

What I learned during that time was the power of presence and the power of non-attachment to the fruits of your labors, and about how to set strong intentions that were likely to come to pass. But more than that, I simply learned more about how to be.

On one occasion, I was in the kitchen preparing breakfast at the homestead where Sri Sri and his travelling entourage, including me, were staying. I suddenly became aware that someone was cooking next to me. I turned to my left, and it was Sri Sri himself

35 completely focused on frying up some zucchinis with spices. Another time he walked into the living area where a grand piano was stationed. He seated himself at the piano and began playing. And I mean playing, being playful with the piano – dancing his fingers like a mischievous cat – in a way that had us all laughing and wanting more.

What on earth does this experience have to do with pitching? Everything. By the time due diligence came, I felt happy for no reason. I wanted investment, but I trusted that whatever happened was for the best, and I simply wanted to do my best. I still remember vividly to this day being asked some of the bluntest questions I’d ever been asked about why I believed our company could succeed.

I remember knowing that as a rookie entrepreneur, I had no experience and no logical basis on which to give the investors an assurance that we would succeed. And yet, in that state of complete non-attachment, I seemed intuitively to know exactly what to say to every single investor present.

At the end – which only took 45 minutes – there was silence. I recall the look of surprise on the face of one of the investors as though he’d expected a knock-out in minutes. But the underdog was not only still standing, but ready to go another 12 rounds.

The lead investor paused, and said, “Well, it looks like you’ve given us no reason not to invest. Let’s have a final meeting in another two weeks where we’ll make our decision.”

That meeting went well. We got investment, created www.geneious.com and the company sold a few years back.

~~

Questions for you:

Do you notice it when someone who is trying to influence you is attached to a particular outcome?

Have you ever failed to influence someone because you were too attached to the outcome?

A short personal story about the human potential (Nostr only)

Back when legwarmers were fashionable, Sony Walkmans were new, and “Chariots of Fire” was top of the charts, I was a nervous twelve year old who dreaded school. I didn’t dread all of school, just one part that happened once a month, without fail and without escape.

As part of the uncommonly high emphasis our school placed on ‘oral language’ we had to prepare and recite a universally loathed three-minute speech to the class.

I reviled this day with all my thumping heart, stammering lips and clammy palms. Contracting a “rare illness” did not work - we simply had to do it upon our return; failing to rehearse didn't work – we were made to do it unprepared.

After three woeful speeches, something strange happened. In recounting it to other people today, it feels about as sophisticated as Thomas the Tank Engine achieving his dreams by pumping out “I know I can” – but this is the way it happened, so this is the way I’ll tell it.

Something inside me said, “The only reason you speak badly is because you fear speaking badly. But the reverse is also true. If you expect to speak well – you will.”

Spurred on by this mysterious message, for the next three days, I practiced sounding courageous with my unbroken voice, and practiced looking confident in front of my mum’s full-length mirror until I was out of time.

Speech day arrived.

I opened my mouth, made a joke and waited for the groans. A few people laughed. I was staggered. I’d never told a joke that someone had laughed at before in my life. My confidence grew.

Was my strategy working? Spontaneously, my voice started incorporating what I’d practiced. I noticed the audience smiling and listening attentively. That was a new experience!

This became like a virtuous upward spiral. Every time I noticed the connection with the audience deepen, my confidence in turn would go up, till by the end, the teacher could not believe that I was the same timid 11-year old.

One year later, despite overwhelming shyness, I had just spoken in front of 500 of my peers. In a state of post-speech calm, I heard with disbelief the words “Winner of the speech competition: Daniel Batten!”

The sequence of strategies I practiced back in 1982, however formative, had worked.

Nothing much had changed on the outside. I didn't have any more skills as a speaker. I hadn't learnt delivery. I hadn't learnt how to structure a compelling talk. That stuff is all the UI, important, but not as important as optimizing the underlying code. What I'd done all those years ago was to change a bit of internal coding architecture, so that I could operate without constraints.

Decades later, this would inform how I coached leaders, CEOs and founders of technology companies, and how I coached myself. Yes, we do a bit of work on the UI. But the most effective and immediate work is done refactoring our inner algorithms.

~~~

Question:

Where have you assumed you have a fixed potential based on previous experiences, whereas a small internal tweak in your internal coding (a tweak to a mindset, pattern of belief or intention for example) could allow you to experience new experiences?

Came up with a hosting error when I clicked the link

🔥JUST IN: New article 🔥

How critics use "Greenwash" as a slur to discourage critical thinking about Bitcoin

https://batcoinz.com/bitcoin-and-the-greenwash-accusation/

Q: What's the only industry in the world where 20% is regarded as a pass.

A: Venture Capitalism

Would you expect that by getting a group of educators, coaches and leadership experts together then asking them to sit down at a computer and start coding your latest killer App you’d end up with a great result?

Would you imagine that by getting a group of computer scientists, engineers and financial experts together then asking them to teach leadership, you’d help people become great leaders, in great mental health reach its potential ?

The latter is what the Technology Ecosystem has done for the last 70s years.

In this ecosystem, a 20% success rate is seen as good. The reason given it’s not higher “this industry is just inherently competitive and really hard”

But what if this were an abdication of responsibility, and a reflection of the industry's collective lack of self-awareness?

We already know 65% of technology companies fail due to lack of senior management skills (Sahlman and Gorman)

That means the true potential pass rate is 72%

This is enough to 5x commercial returns to investors in a fund, or angel investors,

In other words, the return of VC companies and angel investment groups globally are 1/5 of their potential.

That means 99% of fund managers the world over are failing their fiduciary duty to maximize LP returns.

“Growing the founder” does not mean mentoring and governance. If we denied elite sports teams elite coaching and replaced it with mentoring and governance, would a decline in win rate to 20% really surprise us?

Most VC firms talk the talk when it comes to “growing the founders”. Yet in my experience it’s the last item on the agenda when during economic tailwinds, the first line-item to be cut in a headwind.

This is next-quarter thinking at its finest.

Statistically, with 20 companies in your portfolio, right now unknown to you

- 1 founder is about to leave

- 1 is not being transparent to the board

- 2 are no longer innovating due to stress

- 1 is about to have a falling out with their CEO or co-founders

- 10 have not grown the next generation of leadership. As a result, come SeriesA raise, it’ll have cost a year’s lost momentum. 5 will not recover

- 5 will limp to exit. In 3 cases, the founder will be in poor mental health

This is your biggest risk. Board meetings once a month is not enough to uncover this risk. Even if you did uncover this risk, you'd have neither the knowledge nor the bandwidth to help them. Nor should you. It's not your job.

But it's someone’s job. And by not finding that person - most of your founder's will preventably fail, and experience a precipitous decline in their mental health. On your watch.

But of course, that's not your problem right? After all, you're doing 5% better than the industry average, and investing in tech companies is just an inherently risky business right?

Or you could take responsibility and get your founders the best standard of elite coach available.

Bitcoin is now the top ESG Asset across 6 metrics.

Yes, ESG is oft-most a scam. It’s also the next rite of passage.

With 33Trillion in ESG funds by 2026, a 1% deployment into BTC triggers a 3x increase in market cap

That’s inspiring to hear!

Education: a personal story

(Nostr only)

I grew up in an old “bach” (a small, modest home) nestled into a lush hillside of native New Zealand bush in the wild isolated coastal township of Bethells Beach, We were 45 minutes away from the main city of Auckland. Our nearest neighbour was a few minutes walk away. And the township was made up of a handful of alternative lifestylers, farmers, and fourth generation locals.

Life was rustic yet charming. We had a long drop toilet. I was bathed in the evenings in a tin bath. There was no running hot water. Instead we boiled rainwater from the tank on an ancient Atlas electric stove. There was 2 rooms, a small one for me, and a slightly larger one for mum. The rich native bush and cadence of birdlife was everywhere. For a child the setting was solitary and idyllic: rich in natural beauty – sparse in people.

Growing up with not so many other kids around – the landscape became my playground; the birds, sand dunes and the beach my playmates. I would wander for hours from a young age in perfect safety, free to explore my world. The environment provided a safe haven for all of my senses to engage. For better or worse, it forged in me a rigorous resourcefulness and a lack of need for the company of others.

My mother went out of her way to nurture the creative impulse in me. From the age of 4 each morning she would lay out a puzzle One in particular was called The Soma Cube. It was a wooden puzzle made out of 8 different pieces, which you had to make into a cube. It was not an easy puzzle and many adults would venture to “help” me. But my mother would pounce on them and fiercely forbid them as though they were threatening the life of her young. In a way, they were – the creative life of her young anyway.

My mother’s parenting had been heavily influence by her own mum who in turn read a book which I found out years later was written in the 1920’s by an educator called Charles Batt. One particular book called “Hands Off The Child” had changed everything for my grandmother, the impact had rippled down the generations. Now today a book with a title like that would be of one particular meaning. But in those days it was a metaphor for not intervening too much in the child’s development. The philosophy of Charles Batt was that a child has inherent creativity and most parents and educators leap in there to “help” and stunt the creativity of the child unwittingly in the process.

Years later I read some research suggesting that a neural pathway is set up if a child has to work out for themselves where the breast is immediately after birth. But when the mother attaches them to the breast, this neural pathway does not start to form. In other words, the very first act of life after birth will define whether the parent is over-parenting, or allowing the child to explore and immediately form new neural connections. It seemed to validate what Batt had said close to 100 years ago.

Anyway, my mother would put this cube out. But never as a cube. She would always take it out of the box and dismantled it first.

I'd never seen the cube fully or inside the box. So I would simply play with these eight fascinating wooden pieces as any child would. I would make buildings, animals, furniture or whatever came into my mind. Or else I would just seen how they fitted together with no goal to create any bigger shape at all. I did this happily for around about 3 weeks. Then one morning I made a shape I hadn’t made before. Something adults called a cube.

Later that morning, mum came over to give me a good morning kiss, but she never made it that far. She froze in her tracks – her eyes fixed on the cube.

“Did you do this?” she ventured. As though there was another explanation of how the cube could have formed during the night.

“Yes” I remember neutrally replying – neither expecting adulation nor feeling any particular sense of occasion. It was just “one more thing that you could make with eight pieces of wood.”

She looked stunned. Perhaps she felt she needed to see this cube appear one more time before she could fully believe what had happened.

So the next night she again deconstructed the cube and removed its box. The next morning a cube again emerged.

What had occurred was my complete freedom to play with these shapes without any sense of objective, had allowed me to reach the objective without a sense of whether this was success and failure, but also make many other things in the process.

I didn't realise that at the time of course, but she was teaching me a principle, which I would find invaluable in later life many times, including when I started and ran my first technology company.

~~~~~~

My questions for you:

What does education mean to you? Is it finding the right answer, or the ability to ask the right question?

Do you think that if more people had the ability to ask the right questions, more people would be bitcoiners?

What I’ve noticed is that most social media penalises you for writing outside the swim lane it’s algorithm decides you swim in.

Whenever I attempted a post like this on Twitter - crickets !

Let the response here is saying that’s the algorithm pre-deciding what people want to hear.

Liking Nostr more and more.

Nah. They want it shared via their website not through YouTube so it increases their web traffic , which is fair enough , PlanB is a great Bitcoin conference.

A story about a turning point in my life.

Imagine how excited I was when the New Zealand Trade Development Board arranged for me to pitch at the University of California’s San Diego Connect program, one of the world’s most successful stages for marrying entrepreneurs with capital.

If you had been with me in San Diego on 3 September that year, you would have seen a life-changing sequence of events. I was suited and booted and I looked sharp. I opened the door and I saw everyone else was in Hawaiian shirts and board shorts.

My clothes were saying, “I’ve dressed to impress.” Their clothes were saying, “I no longer have to impress anyone.”

Inside those shirts and shorts were individuals who between them had witnessed more than a thousand investment pitches. The room contained probably well over US$1 billion of net worth from people who had led multiple successful companies, and who had the means to propel an entrepreneur’s company to the next level, if the pitch was good enough.

I’d read about the importance of visualizing the outcome you want. So, I had visualized these people saying “that was great” at the end of my pitch and deciding then and there to open their checkbooks.

To complete this visualization process, once I entered the room, I zoned in on the hardest-to-impress looking investor I could find, a poker-faced, bespectacled and bearded man named Jay Kunin. He looked like a hard-nosed version of the movie director Peter Jackson. In my mind’s eye, I visualized him fixing his eye on me at the end of my pitch. In my mind’s ear, I heard him say, “That was great” and committing to invest.

This is what happened next. I had just finished my pitch. There was pin-drop silence. My heart was pounding. I was roasting inside my jacket. Then Jay, exactly as I visualized, squinted at me, peered over his glasses and said three fateful words. “Was that it?”

That wasn’t the phrase I’d written for him in my visualization. He continued. “If your technology is as good as you say it is, what’s to stop a better-funded team here in California overtaking you in six months?”

I knew how to handle this. I looked him in the eye, and I said “Jay. That’s a good question. I don’t have an answer for you right now. But I’d be happy to get back to you in a couple of days with the answer you seek.” It’s the sort of evasive answer you give when you’re stumped and are trying to minimize damage.

Then the woman, a venture capitalist, sitting next to him, began. “Given that academics are notoriously hard to sell to, how do you know that your cost of sale won’t be more than your buy price?” I can’t even remember what I said. But it wasn’t good.

What followed was a 20-minute tag-team mauling by 12 dragons in Hawaiian shirts, where I learned that my product was one of the most problematic they had seen. I was a lot further from realizing my idea than I’d hoped.

They were friendly enough when I left, and even invited me back once I had more answers (something they did to everyone, no matter how bad their pitch was). I felt so crushed that by the time I’d stumbled back onto the plane, I’d already begun rationalizing to myself reasons to give up. Of course, I didn’t admit that to myself at the time. But that’s exactly what I had started doing.

Bad as that was, it was what happened next back in New Zealand that shocked me. I told Roger, my business coach, what had happened. He looked at me through his brown beady eyes and asked, “So, what’s next?”

I opened my mouth and started telling the lies that anyone starts telling themselves when they are starting to give up on their dream, lies that sound innocent, realistic and logical – but are in fact toxic to our growth and suffocating to our dreams.

“Well it’s just too hard to get investment. And without investment, I can’t fully commit right now. But it’ll still be on the slow burner.” What he said next changed the direction of my life.

He said, “Dan, in their feedback they gave you a recipe for success. You’re seeing it as an indictment of failure. You left your job for this idea. Ever since I’ve known you this is all you’ve talked about. This idea is your baby. If you stop feeding it, it’ll die. Your idea does not deserve to die!”

Most people think the number one thing that gets between them and their idea reaching its potential is an obstacle on the outside – the economy, lack of resources, lack of capital, lack of proximity to market. That’s not it. That’s the lies we tell ourselves. What stops our idea reaching its potential is when we decide to stop feeding it. Because when that baby called your idea needs feeding, sometimes even tomorrow is too late.

I said, “See that’s why you’re my coach – my idea does not deserve to die. I’m going back into the dragon’s den.” And I found another group to pitch to. And they also tore apart my pitch. But this time they didn’t find nearly as much at fault. This time, I heard their feedback as a recipe for change, not an indictment of failure.

I kept on pitching, until nine months later I was invited into a room of angel investors who had just completed one month of due diligence on our company after hearing my pitch. The lead investor opened his mouth and said, “We’re in.”

That group was called ICE Angels. As it turned out, they were making their first ever investment. Today they are New Zealand’s largest seed investment group. And today, the company they funded is one of New Zealand’s more successful high-tech companies, and exited in 2019. It changed the way that scientists do research into virus evolution and more around the world.

My questions for you:

What ideas have you put on the slowburner?

Do you have people in your like who love you enough to challenge you when you're about to lie to yourself (as I was)

Where have you taken feedback as an indictment of failure, rather than a recipe for success?