Sovereign funds AUM is $35Trillion

A 1% deployment into Bitcoin at today’s “Market Cap Gain Per Dollar Invested” of $4.54 would revalue Bitcoin at $148,400 per coin.

Their only blocker has been their ESG Investment committees

Probably nothing

The time has come for the silent Bitcoiners in the cubicles of corporate life, in the halls of academia, in the office blocks, in the news media rooms, and in the corridors of power to show your colors.

Today, Troy Cross and Andrew Perkins published a seminal report showing us beyond doubt that Bitcoin cuts right across the political spectrum. It is a tool for everyone.

Why did this surprise us? Perhaps because some have remained silent. Silent through fear of what showing their true (orange) colors would mean.

I faced a similar fear years ago. I almost stayed silent too. And it almost cost me my freedom.

I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. But I got married early, and in my early 20s while I was doing postgraduate study I had kids. It was like a switch flicked in my brain. I suddenly started thinking about “earning a living” for the first time in my life. I had an Arts Degree and a Diploma in Drama, yet I ended up as a software developer for an early Internet startup.

The whole time I was in the IT industry I felt like a fraud. I felt I was only there because I needed to support a family, but my real passion remained acting.

Years later I started my own tech company which did quite well, then after that I left to start coaching technology entrepreneurs. I wasn’t working directly with technology, but I wasn’t following my passion either.

My coach picked up on it and asked “what do you really want to do this next retreat you’re running for these CEOs?”

I sheepishly admitted “I’d like to do theatre improvisation with them” then quickly added “But I know that I could never do that.”

“Why?” he challenged, as any good coach should

“Come on coach” I said “These are highly left brain analytical engineers and tech gurus. There’s no way they’ll be into improv. They’ll think its weird. It’s a super high risk move, and it could ruin my credibility with a bunch of people I’ve been slowly building up respect with”

He paused and said “What if that’s what everyone has been assuming, but their being left brain dominant is exactly why they need improv?

"Daniel, they trust you. That’s why they’re part of your group. If you love it, they will love it. And I bet its exactly what they’ve been crying out for.

"Besides, you’re encouraging them to take bold moves as entrepreneurs right?"

“Absolutely” I replied

“Well what sort of chance have they got if their leader doesn’t role model to them what that looks like?”

He had me. So, nervously I started planning to do theatre improv with them. Not “give them a book on improv” like some Silicon Valley companies do, but actually do full on body-contact improv like crazy acting students do.

I never forget our first session. We could not stop laughing. I saw a whole new side of them. They saw a new side of themselves. Even the wife of one of them thanked me for the change in her husband.

Not only did we have outrageous fun, but the results of the creative exercises we did flowed directly and measurably into the boldness and creativity of their subsequent business decisions and conversations.

Still to this day, the one thing past entrepreneurs say is “Man I miss improv”.

And … I had a blast too. For the first time I’d found a way to integrate my love of acting into my work as a coach, in a way that enriched the lives of others beyond entertainment.

A part of me would have remained forever unexpressed, unintegrated had it not been for the encouragement of my coach to come forth and declare my true colors.

I'm forever grateful to him.

Today, I encourage you as a Bitcoiner to do the same, as my coach once did. Not because it will help Bitcoin. But because it will help you. It will help you feel more full, more authentic. It will be like a deep outbreath you've been longing to take. And like me, the fear you feel is proportional to the breakthrough on the other side.

Fear is an acronym for “False evidence appearing real”. All those fears I had of how people would react were completely unfounded. The truth was, it was my ego that would scared of “what would people think of me” that was keeping me playing safe and playing small. As a result it was denying both others, and me of growth, and of joy.

I was at the decision point where I could listen to my ego … or I could grow. I could only choose one path.

So those fears of how people will judge you declaring you are a Bitcoiner, how do you know? If people judge, so what? Look back to other times you’ve spoken up for what you believed in. How many times did others thank you for your leadership? And even if they don’t - so what?

As Bitcoiners we talk a lot about freedom. But Bitcoin cannot free you. No technology can. Bitcoin is merely the catalyst that brings you to the point where freedom is possible. But the act to choose freedom is yours and yours alone. If you live in fear of what others may think, you are not free. Conversely, the moment you decide to step forth and bring forth what you believe in, whether it is improv … or Bitcoin - you become free.

The stage is waiting.

The time is ripe.

Show your true colors.

Speak your truth.

And then share with others how you can’t believe you waited so long.

You can check out DARI www.da-ri.org, batcoinz.com. DARI has a science hub which has all the latest peer reviewed research. Also my latest LinkedIn Articles document the charts showing why even mainstream media has now moved on from bashing bitcoin over energy concerns.

I was there last week and popped in to the office to meet Lee and Frances.

Doing great work !

Thanks Evan. Glad it resonates strongly

I’m the same! Thanks for appreciating this detail.

Your reply makes the time invested to write this down worthwhile by itself. 🙏

Thanks for your commitment to yourself.

Great reflections. Sounds like an experiment that’s worth running!

Tim Ferris says that at these decision-points, simply asking “what’s the worst that can happen?” And “what’s the best that can happen?” Can guide us to the right option for us.

A short story about letting go, Bitcoin, and fate.

How did this happen ???

Today, I'm living in Costa Rica, consulting to some of the world's top Bitcoin companies, asked to speak at conferences around the world on Bitcoin mining, and regarded as one of the key forces behind the narrative shift on Bitcoin and the environment.

Til now, I've not shared the story of how this happened.

My ego would love to say "I planned it", or say it was because of some special unique qualities in me. Neither are true. Sure I'm pretty good at analysing data. I'm also pretty good at communicating it back to people in a way that's meaningful.

But there are people much better at both of those things than me. So here's what really happened.

It was lock-down 3.0, 2020. Unable to go anywhere or do much, I went on an online meditation retreat. During that retreat I got an insight "reconnect with your friend Willy".

I did. It turned out in the 5 years since we'd chatted, he'd become a globally respected Bitcoin analyst. We chatted like no time had passed. I asked how he'd made the shift from running tech companies to researching Bitcoin. He shared his story "I had 2 months spare, and a burning question about Bitcoin, and I just kept researching it until I got the answer."

Because of that, this happened. It was early 2022. Bitcoin was getting hammered in the press for its environmental impact. It was reported to have been banned in China, and Telsa had ditched it, both citing environmental concerns. I held a small amount, and was on the point of ditching it too.

But just before I did, I had a chance conversation with Vlatko, an environmentalist entrepreneur who'd started a climatetech company I'd invested in. He suggested I research it deeper before making the decision.

As I sat down to meditate that evening, Willy's words invaded my tranquility "I had 2 months spare, and a burning question about Bitcoin, and I just kept researching it until I got the answer."

That's when the second insight came: I needed to do the same.

I cleared my diary and did something I'd never done: I researched for no other purpose than to get an answer. I worked long hours. I didn't eat much. I lost weight. I hunted down every piece of data I could about renewable energy, how grids worked, climate change, methane mitigation, Bitcoin mining, Bitcoin mining economics. I read the articles for and against Bitcoin.

Then I spoke to renewable energy engineers, people actually doing Bitcoin mining, climate scientists, and grid experts. I extrapolated trendlines. I drew charts. I tested theories. I questioned sources.

Everything led to the same conclusion: Bitcoin mining, as with other disruptive technologies in their first years, had been poorly understood (and on occasions gaslit), yet it would likely follow the same trend as solar to become a net positive to the environment.

In fact not only that, it had the potential to become the most fast-acting form of climatetech the world had seen. All the other technologies we were investing in would have an impact after 2030. But this could have a substantial positive impact immediately on reducing methane emissions and building out the grid renewably.

Then something unexpected happened: the week after I finished my research, GreenpeaceUSA kicked off an environmental campaign against Bitcoin.

As a subscriber to Greenpeace, and someone who'd participated in actions with them shoulder to shoulder I was surprised. So I read the logic behind their campaign to see what they had discovered that I might have missed.

My heart sank.

They quoted studies that had been debunked, and were taking a one-sided view. It was clear they had not done even 5% of the research I just had, but rather had relied for the most part on some questionable accounts written by mainstream journalists, and the work of a certain central bank employee who’s models I had found lacked scientific integrity.

I felt this strong intuitive voice inside me say “you should write a response”. Logically I didn’t see any point. I had no active followers to speak of. And the last time I’d used Twitter was a decade ago where I would regularly get one “like” per ten tweets if I was lucky.

So I wrote a response on Twitter. I pointing out the errors in GreenpeaceUSA’s messaging. That one tweet changed everything. The post received over 600,000 views. I was asked to appear on two podcasts, and I was instantly connected to a global community of environmentalists, climate scientists, philosophers and renewable energy experts I didn’t know existed who, like me, had researched Bitcoin really thoroughly and realized it was an environmental net-positive.

There was one thing that sat uncomfortably with me though. Bitcoin was, or seemed to be, using a disproportionately high amount of fossil fuel. This made me reluctant to advocate too strongly for Bitcoin mining. But then, another intuition came: a very precise intuition “The Cambridge model that everyone relies on is not factoring in offgrid mining. That’s causing it to overstate how much fossil fuel Bitcoin uses.”

Yes, it wasn’t brilliant analysis, or research. It was a simple intuition I had that I followed. I still remember sharing “the Cambridge model does not factor in offgrid mining” with a twitter group I was part of. It was an out-of-character thing for me to say.

I had no evidence for this statement. But I shared it nonetheless. And thank goodness I did. A day later, a member of that group said “You’re right”.

He’d trawled through the Cambridge website and found in the fineprint of their methodology section an acknowledgement that offgrid mining was excluded. But not only that, they also excluded “methane mitigation”.

I was amazed. Buoyed by the fact my intuition had been accurate, I decided to do something crazy, that I never would have done if I’d known how much work was involved.

I decided to build a ground-up transparent model of Bitcoin mining, which used their data as a starting point, but addressed their inaccuracies.

This work required me to hunt down as many bitcoin mining companies as I could and validate their hashrate, power consumption and renewable energy mix. There was no shortcut, just a huge amount of phonecalls, surveys, emails and cross-validation.

Along the way, I made other discoveries about Bitcoin mining, how it was helping stabilize grids, reducing electricity costs through monetizing wasted renewable energy and just how much methane it was mitigating too.

I spent the bulk of each day for two years building the model and publishing what I was finding on Twitter. The response was overwhelming.

I was invited to speak at conferences and write articles. Michael Saylor started quoting my research. Leaders in the industry invited me to their podcasts. I had to start turning down ⅔ of all conference invitations, and podcast invitations. It was amazing, yet at the same time it meant that for two years I received very little income.

This was supposed to take two months, not two years. This was crazy. While I was flattered by the level of outreach, I couldn’t feed a family on podcast invites. And I hadn’t been looking for new coaching clients for ages, so while the work I was doing was some of my best ever, that lack of new outreach meant my business naturally started to atrophy. What was I supposed to do? My intellect was screaming "stop working for free". Yet I kept on doing more unpaid work, with most of my time split between Bitcoin research, and running volunteer breathing and meditation programs and followups for the The Art of Living.

Again my intuition, which was virtually yelling at me so as to be heard above my intellect, kept cajoling and encouraging: “Keep going. Don’t stop”

Eventually I finished, and to my great surprise, the model is now used in preference to Cambridge’s model by most institutions now, including numerous AI engines!

The shock is not that people find merits in the model: I know it is a more accurate model to Cambridge’s. My surprise is that so many other people would adopt it over such an established institution. I still don’t know how this happened.

Along the way, I’d also realized that my third climate tech fund had to involve Bitcoin mining on landfills: my research was showing me that the emissions mitigated per dollar invested were crazy: 45x more emission reducing than investing in solar infrastructure, and capable of good yields for wholesale investors also.

Problem was, I was in the wrong country for international business. With my business partners in the States, and landfill projects in LATAM, it was time to move. My wife was incredibly supportive, and my daughters were up for the adventure, so we relocated to Costa Rica.

Then the miraculous happened: my two worlds started to collide. A single tweet asking for some advice from the community on twitter led to the unintended, yet much appreciated, consequence of work offers within the bitcoin ecosystem.

I was offered an advisory role at a large publicly listed mining company, a research role at another company, and a job helping create a Bitcoin mining video to be sent to regulators the world round. Then Lisa Hough said to me “you’ve got a gift coaching people. Have you thought of coaching Bitcoin companies?” Remarkably I hadn’t. Yet it was so obvious.

One tweet later, a number of founders of Bitcoin companies enrolled to get coaching on gaining investment, growing their company, or navigating the challenges that come with running your own tech firm.

I don’t know what will happen next. I had no plan when I started all this, and I still don’t - other than to keep listening to the intuitive pull, and to keep meditating so that the stray messages get filtered out so I can hear that voice clearly.

But I have felt another intuition: “Bitcoin price is being suppressed because Sovereign Wealth Funds can’t adopt it. They can’t adopt it because their ESG investment committees are blocking it. You should talk to them and help them change their minds.”

Again I did some research, and again this intuition was right. A youtube video of Kevin O’Leary on What Bitcoin Did randomly appeared on my Youtube list that same night. I watched in awe as Kevin O’Leary confirmed every word of this intuition, and then some.

So apparently I’m going to start talking to Sovereign Funds and Pension Funds? I have no idea when and how. But that’s not my business to try and figure out. And any ideas I could figure out would be inferior to the divine plan.

I’m simply listening to a wisdom higher than my own, and beyond what I could have done through my intellect or my experiences. When president Nayib Bukele who has performed a social and economic miracle in El Salvador was interviewed recently he was asked about his economic plan for his country. With a twinkle in his eye he smiled and said “First, seek God’s wisdom”.

I found myself nodding my head. I knew what he meant. Whatever name we give to the power beyond us, we are not the doer, and knowing this opens us up to receive ideas beyond the conception of the rational mind.

So, content not knowing the path ahead but trusting it’ll be great, that’s what I try to do each day.

In case you missed it, edition #17 of the Bitcoin ESG Forecast is out.

Check your email and spam-filters

www.batcoinz.com/p/017-what-really-happens-to-old-miners

Can’t comment about US, but in NZ the govt made a couple of things better by getting involved.

1. The govt actually created a bank that worked called kiwibank.

What happened was that in the 80s a precious govt sold our last back to Australia and billions of dollars went offshore every year. Bank fees spiked too.

Kiwibank helped reduce fees simply by providing more competition and also stopped so much money going offshore.

2. The govt identified three growth areas for the economy in NZ: film, Biotech and IT. It got it wrong with biotech, but right with the other two.

Our startup benefitted by winning a grant of 100k before we had any Capital and that kickstarted our company, which otherwise would probably have stayed an idea among friends.

That motivated us, and also helped us bring on investment. The company (geneious.com) eventually changed how molecular biologists did research (happy scientists) and sold to an overseas buyer (happy investors)

Just heard “Nostr can connect to HTTPS without a DNS dependency”

I know what each acronym stands for and what it is, vaguely. But I not techie enough to know why this is significant. What does this mean is possible that wasn’t before?

Today, I'm publishing the results of 2 weeks research into the claim that Bitcoin mining has an e-waste issue

TL;DR: it's trash

Full story in the Bitcoin ESG Forecast 👇 www.batcoinz.com/p/017-what-really-happens-to-old-miners

The Bitcoin ESG Forecast #016 is out.

It analyzes the connection between bad Bitcoin ESG data and price crashes.

Check your spam filters and emails.

www.batcoinz.com/p/issue-016-better-data-longer-bullruns

Good question.

Tech companies can have some differences - like cap raising, and the focus on exit events. Depends a bit on what the product is and what some of the challenges and opportunities you’re facing are.

I’ll DM and we can chat a bit more.

I just write this on LinkedIn and i thought to share it here too.

A place had opened up on my one year mastermind group coaching program.

If you’re the founder of a tech company, you’ve already done at least your first raise, you’re looking to scale the next generation of leadership and you understand - not through ego but because it’s true - that you are both the most important asset and the biggest risk to the success of your company, and this asset can be greatly enhanced and derisked through the right coaching, then this may be a fit for you.

The group is for highly committed people who want to give to as well as receive from a group of other highly committed tech entrepreneurs who will inspire you.

To my knowledge, this program that’s currently unique in the world in that it’s not just about strategy and advice, but growing the habits, mindset and skillset technology company founders who can lead companies through exits in a state of optimal resilience, and happiness while enhancing relationships with those in your life who are not part of your company: no 100-hour weeks and sacrifice of personal well-being!

Reach out if you’re sincere about knowing more. I’ve run these groups for more than a decade, and have had the honor of leading several through to exit (and their exits have been happy ones, made more likely through what they learned in this group).

If you’re keen at the end of our call, I’ll also help you directly and honestly position this so it’s an easy “yes” for your board to sign off on.

Our first group coaching program for people working on Bitcoin projects is now full, but more people are still reaching out about it.

So we may start a second group in another 6 weeks or so. If you're interested, reach out.

JUST IN: ECB announce first progress report on the digital Euro

Features:

- easier to surveil you

- easier to deplatform you

- easier to freeze your account

- “just trust us bro” level privacy

- limits on how much you’re allowed to hold in your account

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/progress/html/ecb.deprp202406.en.html#/search/Security/1

Julian is free.

In tribute, so is this edition of the newsletter.

... with a story as remarkable as his release that every Bitcoiner should know, because it fulfils Julian's vision for Bitcoin.

👇

https://www.batcoinz.com/p/issue-015-the-assange-edition

Powerful framing.