#578: Bitcoin Mining with North America's Largest Miner

Fred Thiel is the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest bitcoin miners in North America. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin mining, ESG bitcoin, OFAC compliant blocks, Taproot, and what Marathon plans to do moving forward. ======================= Revolut is a finance app in the US and UK, that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. Sign up today at Revolut.com/pomp and make 3 card transactions to get $15, which you can exchange for any tokens Revolut supports. As usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto your capital is at risk. See T&C's for details. Revolut is a financial technology company. Banking services provided by Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Member FDIC. Cryptocurrency services provided directly by Paxos Trust Company, LLC. ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.com/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today. ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast. Simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Fred Teal is the CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings, one of the largest Bitcoin miners in North America. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin mining, ESG Bitcoin, OFAC compliant blocks, Taproot, and what Marathon plans to do moving forward. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Fred, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Revolut. Back to the basics for a second. I've partnered with Revolut, a finance app in the US and the UK that say they're the simplest way to access crypto. They're putting their money where their mouth is.

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  You can sign up, make three card transactions, and they'll give you $15. That's right, $15 for free. Literally for free. What can you do with $15? You can exchange for Bitcoin or any of the other tokens, the token that Revolut supports. Yes, they are crypto-enabled. These guys have made it easier to get some skin in the game. And as usual, when you move your money from fiat to crypto, capital's at risk. So go check out Revolut today. They're a brand-new entrant to the US market from Europe, and they've got what they claim is the simplest way to access crypto. Go check it out. You can download the app. Go to revolut.com/pomp to get a $15 reward and put them to the test. Revolut.com/pomp. Next up are my friends at Exodus.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:15Anthony Pompliano?

  or the Play Store. Last but not least is crypto.com, the easiest place to buy and sell 100-plus cryptocurrencies. They've got 10-plus million users. They've got a Visa card that gives you up to 8% back instantly and a ton back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, crypto.com lets you earn high rates of interest on various cryptocurrencies as well. You can get $25 when you download the crypto.com app using code POMP today. Again, go download their app. You get $25 if you use code POMP. Go download the link to the app by clicking on the link in the description. I'm sorry, go download the app by clicking on the link in the description. They confused me there. Download the app, click on the link in the description. Go check them out. Let me know what you think. All right, let's get into this episode with Fred. I hope you enjoy this one.

• 3:00Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 3:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. Got Fred here. Thank you so much for doing this.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Thank you. Great to be here.

• 3:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. Let's just get started with Marathon and kind of your background. So Marathon is one of the largest Bitcoin miners in North America. What did you do before you were on the board and then became the CEO?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  So 25-plus years running technology companies across a variety of sectors. Fintech was a big one. Matter of fact, my first programming job was at a bank. So grew up really understanding the friction in the financial markets. Was had the good fortune of taking some companies public, doing a lot of M&A, and then switched to the dark side, became a private equity managing partner and did leveraged buyouts of tech companies. And then started advising really large funds and tech companies. I had known the CEO of Marathon, Merrick, former CEO, now executive chairman, for many years socially. Our kids grew up together and

• 4:24Speaker 02

  You know, I joined the board in 2018 really to help him with kind of this transition to Bitcoin mining and blockchain. Always been fascinated by blockchain. I think it's a great leveler. If you look at kind of how the internet developed and brought kind of the democratization of information, I think people exposing data on the blockchain is going to change how businesses operate. You can imagine companies like Salesforce who effectively hold your CRM data hostage. If all that data were on the blockchain, not only could you use Salesforce to access it and gain benefit from it, but you could use other applications. But I think there's just a, we're so early in this blockchain development. Bitcoin cryptocurrencies are just one part of it. I'm a big believer in the Bitcoin blockchain being a foundation

• 5:07Speaker 02

  for financial institutions, very secure, fully decentralized network. You know, you can say other things about Ethereum. I think it has some great benefits, but it still is less decentralized than the Bitcoin blockchain. And there's just so much you can do. So I was very excited to have the opportunity to step into more of an operating role at Marathon. And I think now's the time where you'll see the miners become more professional companies. You know, we're real enterprises. If you just look at the build out plans most of us have, you know, we'll be billion dollar revenue companies within the next year and a half to two years. And those become big companies and they need to be run in a proper way with good governance.

• 5:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Give us an overview of Marathon in terms of just staff, revenue, kind of footprint globally or in North America. Just kind of when somebody says to you, hey, you know, tell me more about kind of the progress of Marathon. How do you describe the progress?

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Sure. So progress to date, we just published an update at the beginning of the month. And so we're at the point where we've rolled out close to about 20,000 miners at this point of the 103,000 we're rolling out over the course of this year into Q1 of next year. So revenues are beginning to ramp. And we went in in January, bought about $150 million of Bitcoin to put on our balance sheet. You know, we're a very well capitalized company. We have no debt, close to a little over $400 million of liquid assets today. And we're very focused on just building out our production. So we'll be at About a little over 10 X a hash of hash rate come Q1 of next year. We're a little over just hitting two right now.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  So I think, you know, the growth rate's happening nicely. We're seeing great production of Bitcoin in our pool, which has been great. And we're now kind of crossed this threshold where we're producing over 10 Bitcoin a day, which is great and marching forward. So we're super excited about our progress.

• 6:57Anthony Pompliano?

  And geographically, everything's in North America, one facility, multiple facilities?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Multiple facilities. So we have a current facility we're building out mostly from is in Harden, Montana. And that'll have about 100 megawatts, a little over 30,000 miners. And then we recently announced the new facility in Texas, which will be about 70,000 miners, predominantly mostly carbon neutral renewable energy.

• 7:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Let's just jump into, there's basically three main topics, I think, that everyone's talking about Marathon. And I always caveat these conversations with the following. One, most people immediately jump to conclusions right before hearing kind of the other side of the story. Two is that when there's controversy, people always think that it's negative impact on a business. So I look at a Robin Hood, right? Everyone was like, you know, drop Robin Hood and everyone was yelling and screaming about GameStop and then the halting of trading of stocks. User acquisition for them went up more than ever, right? So like there's this like Streisand effect that occurs. And then three is there can be a separation between the kind of philosophy and then the actual application, right?

• 8:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think it's most important just like, hey, here's three questions. Like what is the answers? So let's start with ESG Bitcoin, right? There's some people who believe every Bitcoin is a Bitcoin. It doesn't matter where it's mined, how it's mined, a Bitcoin's Bitcoin and they're completely fungible. There is this kind of new conversation around separating or creating premium for maybe a country that it's mined in or a specific energy mix that it's used to mine the Bitcoin. Kind of what's happened so far for you guys from this perspective? And then like, where are you guys going or how do you think about this moving forward?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Sure. Great question. So. We listen to two audiences, the Bitcoin community and the institutional investor community, being a public company. The institutional investors, when asked, you know, "Do you want a Bitcoin that is green?" They say, "Yes." "Do you want a Bitcoin that is OFIC compliant?" And they say, "Yes." So, based on that, we developed plans to try and develop virgin coins that would be environmentally sustained, mined using environmental methods, and that would be OFIC compliant. What we quickly learned, however, was that the financial institutions weren't willing to pay extra for that Bitcoin. So, it's kind of like saying, "All Bitcoin really are the same, but, you know, we'd like

• 9:22Speaker 02

  to be able to say, 'This is the financial institutions, that the Bitcoin we buy are sustainably mined and that they're, you know, fully OFIC compliant.'" But if they're not willing to pay for that, there's no reason to do it. And so, we then reversed our stance, and quite publicly, on Memorial Day weekend, you know, I put out a video saying, you know, "We're going back to the vanilla node, we're going to develop and mine Bitcoin just like everybody else, the exact same Bitcoin, no different." And, yes, we hold all our Bitcoin on our balance sheet, and, you know, we're somebody to come along and say, "I'll pay you extra for Bitcoin that hasn't been put in any other wallets." You know, I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, but, you know, that could happen down in the future. But I think, really, the community believes in the fungibility of Bitcoin, all Bitcoin are the same.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  I'm a believer in that as well. I think that the, you know, the financial institutions, from a regulatory perspective, need to answer to their investors and to the regulators, and I think that's all going to sort itself out. I think the miners are going to become more transparent about ESG, we're going to become more transparent about what are our commitments, you know? We've already made a commitment that, you know, our next deployment of 70,000 miners will be fully carbon neutral, and we'll take the existing fleet that we have, make that carbon neutral over the course of next year. So, we'll be 100% carbon neutral, and, you know, we'll be tracked and held accountable to that by the public markets over the course of the next year. And then, I think it's really going to be a question of how the market develops with

• 10:49Speaker 02

  what sort of financial instruments people develop. You know, a fund, for example, could say, "I'm only going to buy sustainably mined Bitcoin and put it in my fund." And then, they could sell shares of that fund to institutional investors. And that's a way to kind of get at the differentiation on behalf of financial institutions, without the miners having to do anything other than, "We're just going to keep carrying on mining our Bitcoin just like everybody else."

• 11:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's fascinating to me that the financial institutions do this, right? And I think this is why the Bitcoin community kind of revolts so heavily against this, right? Is almost this belief that like the ESG conversation is just pure virtue signaling, right? So if you're demanding ESG Bitcoin, which frankly isn't a thing, right? It's almost saying, hey, I have a Bitcoin and like, where did it come from? Where was it sourced from, right? To some degree, but it's acknowledging that all the Bitcoin is the same. It's just the, the production process is different.

• 11:41Anthony Pompliano?

  But I'm not willing to pay more for it. Means that actually they don't put more value on it. It's pure virtue signaling, right? And then I think the second piece is when you get to like the OFAC compliance stuff, right? The Bitcoin community believes, well, the whole point of Bitcoin is you don't censor any transactions. The financial system is built on literally censoring transactions. And actually they weaponize the dollar and you know, all that stuff. But they're not willing to pay more for that either, right? And so again, it's kind of all virtue signaling. It's all conversation. It's all, I want you to think I'm a good person, but when it comes down to it, we actually see no difference in value between any of this stuff. And so do you think that the conversation goes away? Or do you think that actually the financial institutions like kind of make financial products?

• 12:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Or like, like, how does this play out in terms of? We've been able to decipher like, don't listen to what they say, watch what they do with their money.

• 12:32Anthony Pompliano?

  But does that necessarily mean that they won't go after this? Or do you think that this is only going to get louder? It's going to become more of kind of a mainstream conversation?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  I think part of it is very much virtue signaling by the institutions because they're activist investors are holding them to the, to that mandate.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  So I think it's not going to blow over and just the conversation will continue to be there. Miners really have an incentive of becoming more environmentally sustainable. It's the right thing to do, not just for the planet, but for the industry. And what's great about mining in North America is that we have a very good grid system, generally speaking, where you can really purchase electricity based on a blend of power sources. And so you have that ability to be, you know, predominantly renewable. You can use carbon offsets for certain things. You can use REX. There are lots of ways to kind of mitigate the impact you're having on.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  The climate from that perspective and the environment. However, you know, Bitcoin miners and the industry plays a key role for power because we enable a renewable wind farm or solar farm to get into business and provide baseload for us and then build out their just power distribution network. You know, the biggest problem in power today is not that there isn't enough of it that's green. It's it can't get to the right places. And that's a grid and distribution issue. And you know, 200 gigawatts of power is lost a year in this country just by heat in distribution lines. And you know, you could mine a lot of Bitcoin if you just put that baseload on a facility where they're doing solar or or wind. And until battery storage technology gets there, I think you're going to find Bitcoin

• 14:11Speaker 02

  miners are the key drivers of investment in renewable energy.

• 14:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I've continued to say this, and literally, I've had everyone from the climate change folks come after me to the mainstream media folks come after me, etc. Bitcoin is probably the greatest incentive for renewable energy R and D at this point.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 14:27Anthony Pompliano?

  It's just the financial incentive to get the cheapest power is literally, as you stated, you know, you guys are mining 10 Bitcoin a day. That's, you know, almost a quarter or half a million bucks a day of revenue for just you, right? Not the whole industry. And so you just kind of keep going through. And I think today, you know, 35, 40 million dollars a day in mining rewards around the world, and that's only going to continue to appreciate. Like, there's nothing else that has that kind of pure free market capitalistic perspective.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the there's some great analogies around Bitcoin being a store for energy, right? When you think about it. So we produce Bitcoin. It's a store of value. You can take that store of value and go buy energy somewhere else if you want. You can go buy whatever it is you want with it. So it's a great store. It's a great conversion of value into dollars. And when you compare Bitcoin to other industries, actually, and you look at the energy inputs and the cost inputs, carbon inputs even, for what they get out the other end of economic value creation, the Bitcoin mining industry is by far one of the most profitable and efficient at converting energy into

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Profits. So I think it's going to continue to be a key part of the electrical power grid question going forward. And I think it's going to grow in importance. But the other thing that's happening in the industry is we're also seeing a huge push for hardware to get more energy efficient. So now you're starting to see the joules or the watts per terahash come down and it's going to continue to shrink, which means we use less electricity for every terahash that we produce. So I think you're going to find that the power consumption of the Bitcoin mining industry is actually going to level off and eventually start declining as the efficiencies kick in.

• 16:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and the other piece, and I've written about it, I'm sure you guys have, plenty of people at this point, is just like the legacy financial system has a very linear relationship between serving more users, more transactions, and the energy consumption. So if I want more users, then I need more energy. Or more transactions, I need more energy. Bitcoin, not necessarily, right? In terms of just the ability to stuff tons of economic value into a single block and increase the economic value, but not necessarily increase that energy consumption. And so a lot of the analysis that's done in terms of Bitcoin's going to do whatever in the future, it's just built off a premise that they just don't understand that one simple fact. Talk a little bit about geographic distribution in the mining industry, right? You guys are all focused within North America. There's tons of hash rate elsewhere in the world.

• 16:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a belief in your mind that it will stay pretty decentralized? Do you think more and more of it will kind of coalesce into the United States? How do you just think about where we are today and how that evolves over time?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's obviously a shift going on in China where Inner Mongolia is shutting down mining. I think the jury's still out as to how much mining will actually leave China. A certain percentage will, we're already seeing that. But as the hash rate in China starts dropping below 50% of the global hash rate in North America grows, I think you're going to find that you'll have kind of a 30, 40% in Asia, 30, 40% in North America, and then the balance in Europe and other R O Ws, so to say. There's some great opportunities for Bitcoin mining in the Middle East, for example. Imagine the solar power capability. So Bitcoin can be mined anywhere you can get renewable energy. You don't need infrastructure. That's the beauty of the industry.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  And so I think you're going to see a pretty good decentralization going forward.

• 17:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like in some crazy way, the way that the Bitcoin system is built, ends up with a globally distributed and decentralized system. And the free market does work in this sense, right? Like, we live in a world where every market is manipulated, and we argue all day long over should be more or less manipulated, whatever. But this is kind of the last free market, and it's working.

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's kind of like, economics is a bit like water running downhill. It'll always find its way downhill, right? And the Bitcoin market, when you think about it, anytime friction is introduced into the market, it moves around it somehow. And so I think there's always going to be the search for the cheapest power. There's always going to be the search for highest efficiency. And the market's just going to continue to develop and get better and better, more mature. And people are going to get just more used to dealing with these very decentralized businesses that are created on the blockchain. So I'm super excited about the future. I think it's the equivalent of 1997 in the internet is where we are today in Bitcoin.

• 18:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about Taproot. I know that some of this was related to the OFAC compliance and all of that. So maybe just talk a little bit about your understanding of what Taproot is, and then the decision-making process that goes into signaling adoption or not adoption.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Sure. So Taproot enables a couple of things. One, it's an underlying change that will enable the creation of smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is a really important thing. I think it's undersold because one of the key developments on the Ethereum platform is smart contracts. It lets you do these DeFi businesses. It lets you really take Bitcoin and the blockchain to the next level. So between what people like Stacks are doing and other companies, Taproot is really going to enable the ability to do the smart contract and the ability to have a contract that is gradually exposed as it's executed, which I think is a key part of that. It also allows for multi-sig functions, which is going to be critical going forward.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Why it took us longer to signal, we had to migrate all our systems back to the vanilla core and then we had to slowly bring all those systems up and start signaling for Taproot. So I believe actually today, as we're recording this, we're most probably signaling the first blocks today, most probably. So it'll be either today or tomorrow, most probably, based on, you know, you have to win a block. But we fully deployed it and now it's just a question of winning a block.

• 20:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. It feels like Marathon is the quintessential example of a business that was started, goes after Bitcoin in terms of the mining, by every measure is a Bitcoin company, right? From the philosophy behind it, to the team, to the business you're actually in, the revenue driven, holding Bitcoin on the balance sheet, converting your cash into Bitcoin. Like, I mean, literally, you go and check all the boxes. And then this ESG thing pops up, OFAC and Taproot, and it feels like almost overnight, the Bitcoin community went from like, that's awesome, to like, you know, I mean, literally, fuck Marathon, right? And like, just like, dump the stock and like, absolute, I say only Bitcoin community can do like the chaos,

• 21:08Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, by flipping a switch. What is the thought process inside the company when all this is happening? Like, how much of that is like noise and sense of like, hey, we have a plan, we're going to continue with the plan versus like, no, we're listening to the community and we're trying to understand, you know, how much of it is like constructive feedback versus just, you know, people being idiots on the internet, right? Like, how do you think through that?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  So, great question. Initially, we were very focused on who are the buyers of Bitcoin, institutions, who do we really want to support, what do we think they want? Not unlike any company that's a startup, right? You know, you make your assumptions about what your clients are going to want. When push came to shove, we realized they weren't willing to pay, as we were talking about before, for that value. And the community was very vocal. And I'm a big believer that in these decentralized networks, you really have to do what's right for the community, because they do have a loud voice, and it's important to listen to that voice, because we all need to collaborate to make this really work in the long run. And I think, you know, every Bitcoin has to be as fungible as every other Bitcoin.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  And it's just a question of really trying to balance. Running a business with the right governance and right compliance with doing what's right for the community and the overall growth of the crypto industry and the network.

• 22:28Anthony Pompliano?

  It's hard to speculate on what you would have done for situations that didn't occur. But if the institutions had said, hey, we are willing to pay more for this. Do you think that you would have stuck to the guns and kind of continued down that path? Or do you think that the community kind of trumps revenue, right? And it's a weird question because you get into this like revenue is the point of a capitalistic, you know, for profit business is literally to get profit. But then there's like the community aspect to it, which isn't necessarily revenue driving, but could be beneficial or hurt the business as well. And so what's the trade off there, I guess, or the framework to decide?

• 23:01Speaker 02

  So I think one of the key aspects most people don't think about is that there isn't an infinite supply of Bitcoin, right? There are 900 a day. And if one miner starts doing full OFIC compliance, for example, and filters Bitcoin, how many Bitcoin are they really going to create a day? And is that even enough to feed financial institutions? It's not by any practical means. So the economic value institutions could provide to miners for a differentiated Bitcoin, that equation doesn't really pencil today. It's a different story, I think, if a fund were to basically go to all the miners and say, listen, we want to buy only virgin coin. And here are the terms and conditions and we'll pay you this much more.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Miners will then make the economic decision themselves as to what they're going to do. But I think still, unlike the oil and gold industry where you can decide to turn on or turn off your reserves and grow volume that way, we don't have that luxury in the Bitcoin industry. We can only buy more hardware. And then, you know, what a lot of people don't realize is there's a lot of luck in mining Bitcoin. It's not just you're going to do it. You've got to be really good at what you're doing and then you've got to win the block. So you've got to have scale. And I think if anything, what we're going to see is kind of the market turning into, there'll be a group of, you know, a number of large volume miners. You'll have a bunch of mid tier miners.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Who work very closely with hosting facilities that do kind of rev share deals. That's how they kind of capitalize their capex. And then you'll have small miners who are really just doing arbitrage on buying hash rate. And I think there's some really interesting markets that are going to develop in this industry around essentially doing derivatives based on hash rate. So that, you know, I can decide to buy a couple of Terra hash on the open market. Almost like you do energy credits. And I think we're going to start seeing that develop. And that's going to create a whole different asset class for institutional investors. Cause now you can actually invest in the Bitcoin ecosystem. And, you know, do arbitrage on derivatives that way, which I think is going to be really exciting as more and more financial products around that come out.

• 25:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I think we're just getting started.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 25:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Two more things I want to talk about is when we talk about community. Most of us think of like the internet, right? And that's Twitter, Reddit, whatever else. But you guys sit in a unique position because you talk to the leadership of other mining companies. You talk to, you know, what I'll call the whales or other large players in the market. Was there a difference between the response from the executives at other mining companies or like some of the larger players in the market versus what I'll just call like the internet? Or did you hear kind of similar feedback across the entire ecosystem?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  We got similar feedback across the ecosystem. Our peers in the industry looked at us and said, you know, you guys aren't really playing by the good of the community.

• 25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. And it's interesting to kind of think through there. Cause I think like some of that is unknown, right? Like, how do other miners feel about this? And, and I guess another piece of the analysis would be if all of a sudden, you know, an institution can be, hey, we'll pay you 10% more for that Bitcoin. How many of them would have called you up and said, hey, what's the criteria, right? Like fortunately, I think that didn't happen, but you know, we'll see how it plays out. Second thing is, I think it's called the Mining Council. The meeting with Elon that Michael Saylor put on, just whatever you can say about in terms of like going into it, kind of what was your thought process of like, we're going to participate in this. I think you guys participated. Were you hoping to get out of it? And then like at the meeting, I don't know how much you can talk about.

• 26:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Like what was actually discussed, but just like, what did you get out of it?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Right. So preface, I wasn't actually on the call.

• 26:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Our chairman, Merrick Okamoto was on the call. But going into it, what we really wanted to do was really work with Elon to help him understand kind of what we're doing. Uh, he put out a tweet that showed, you know, the carbon footprint. If it was all based on coal, et cetera, et cetera, uh, of what was happening with power consumption. And so we really wanted to, A, address that with him, let him know kind of what we're doing and that we are much greener than, um, you know, he put out to say. And then offer the opportunity to collaborate. And, um, you know, while I think he tweeted after the meeting, uh, a tweet that he was, uh, you know, going to collaborate with us.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll have to see kind of what he does. Uh, I put out an open invite to him yesterday on Fox, uh, you know, and said, hey, we'd love to work with you on the technology. And, you know, renewable energy is a technology that needs investment, continue to drive the cost down. Battery storage and utility scale storage is a huge opportunity. That will benefit every single consumer in North America and around the world. And the Bitcoin mining industry could fund a lot of that because it's helpful to what we're doing. So I would love to collaborate with them and any other technology providers in that space.

• 27:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Um, I forget who said it, but somebody said the use of the word counsel, right? Was probably too, uh, not thought out enough, right? And like, maybe association would have given a different inclination to it.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And so let's hold that constant of like, forget nomenclature for a second. What is your understanding of kind of like what this mining association council, whatever, uh, is going to do moving forward? Is it kind of like, hey, we're going to meet, you know, once a quarter and we're going to kind of just like help each other with best practices? Is it more of a, we're going to all publish the same report and with data? Do you guys have Elon's cell phone number and you're like, you know, text him whenever something happens? Like, like, how do you kind of just see this moving forward?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, I don't think we'll be texting him.

• 28:34Anthony Pompliano?

  He'll tweet it, you guys, don't worry.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  We'll, we'll copy him on a, on a tweet or two. We might DM him, but, um, So the goal is really to provide a forum, if you would, for any miner to basically come and learn and also for us all to educate the marketplace, not just the regulators, but also the general marketplace about what we're doing. And so part of that is going to be publishing commitments. Here's what we intend to do over the next year. We've publicly said that our next deployment will be fully carbon neutral and we'll achieve full carbon neutral over our whole fleet by the end of next year. And so we'll be held accountable to that. And even the small miners, to publish kind of, you know, here's our current power footprint, what the sources we're using, here's where we're going to be, and then reporting on

• 29:19Speaker 02

  a regular basis, whether that's monthly or quarterly, that's to be seen. But the mission is really of education and information sharing. It's not, you know, I think somebody tweeted, you know, oh, this is OPEC for mining. It's not. For one thing, the market share of the members is fairly small still, in the overall global hash rate. And it's open to anybody who wants to join. The good thing about this industry is every Bitcoin is the same. We don't control the price, the market controls the price. So there's no product differentiation, there's no pricing differentiation. So it's really operational excellence.

• 29:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And it feels like a big differentiation here is that, as far as I understood from what I've read and people I've talked to, there's no like, hey, we're going to come together and make decisions, right? It's more so, we're going to come together and what we're going to do is we're going to agree from a publishing standpoint, like what content, what data should be shared. And it's more so, almost like industry standards, more so than it was like, let's all make a decision on an action that we're going to take that has an effect on Bitcoin, the blockchain, the mining process, et cetera. And so in some way, if people can separate out, like... Hey, let's talk about what internal data we should share versus like,

• 30:35Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, some of the other meetings that have happened in Bitcoin that haven't turned out so uh so well.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Like 2017?

• 30:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. Uh, you guys are basically doing the former, right? It's like, we have all this data, we understand our energy mix, we understand, um, you know, uh, so much of what each other's doing. Like, we should all come out and say it because it's gonna be overall good for the industry. And so, looking forward, you're a publicly traded company, there's not too, too much you can say. But how do you see maybe like the mining industry in North America evolving? It sounds like you think more hash rate's gonna come into North America, it's gonna get greener, and Bitcoin kinda continues to do its thing, and you guys are just better stewards of mining in, you know, in public markets? Or kinda, how do you think about what you guys?

• 31:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, yes, we're gonna see greater growth in hash rate in North America. Not necessarily because people are moving to North America, just the North American miners are now very well capitalized. You know, both Riot, ourselves, Hive and others, um, have now valuations that allow us to continue to deploy and grow. So, um, you'll see that grow. As we get bigger, we have to be better at operating our companies, right? The environmental footprint that we create is big, and it's important that we are good stewards of that. And we're, we have to be good stewards of our shareholders' capital. And so as fiduciaries, you know, public companies have a different responsibility than private companies in that, um, we have a broader shareholder base, different interests. And it's really important for us that we provide our shareholders with great exposure to Bitcoin

• 32:01Speaker 02

  and help develop the market, but also provide a really great return on their investment.

• 32:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the thing that you're most looking forward to moving forward? Are there's like a specific milestone or a certain development in, not necessarily even just the Bitcoin mining, but just Bitcoin in general, that you're like, hey, when this happens, like, that'll be the next kind of big inflection point in terms of interest or anything like that?

• 32:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, when we start seeing DeFi... Businesses launching on Bitcoin, when we start seeing identity management platforms launching on Bitcoin, when we start seeing tokenized ownership of assets launching on Bitcoin, that's when we're starting to see the real mainstream. If you go back to the internet analogy, late 90s, you had to buy Unix servers and write custom software to set up a website and it was a multi-multi-million dollar exercise. Today, you want to sell online, you go set up a Shopify store, it's super easy. And so I think the Bitcoin industry is moving there, the faster it moves there, the better. And I think we're still in that

• 33:03Speaker 02

  kind of honeymoon period with a lot of these startups in the DeFi world, where the concepts aren't fully crystallized. There's a lot of really cool startups working today, some really cool things. We need to make them a little bit more regulator-friendly. And then I think as we start seeing them deployed on the Bitcoin blockchain, that's when you'll start seeing mainstream really take over here.

• 33:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you have like a message to the Bitcoin community, just in terms of like, hey, there's all this nonsense that happened. It feels like now you guys are saying, okay, we're just gonna do what every other miner is doing. Is that like a fair categorization?

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a better way to say it maybe is, hey, we listened, right? We reacted, and we want to maintain a dialogue. Keep talking to us. I understand that if, when you're not happy, you want to complain. But, you know, personal attacks don't help necessarily. Let's have a dialogue. We have said to a number of influencers in the industry, hey, listen, we're more than happy to have a group of people sit down and talk with us and tell us what they think we should be doing. We want that input. So make it constructive. And I'm more than willing to sit down with any groups in the community and chat, because I think there's a lot we could do together.

• 34:21Anthony Pompliano?

  The people that you went and told that to, what was their response? Were they generally receptive?

• 34:24Speaker 02

  They were very glad. I think what's interesting is, on the one hand, you have the folks who say Marathon bent the knee, to use the Game of Thrones analogy, which is great, because we did, right? We listened to the community and we did react. But at the same time, we really want to work with the community, make Bitcoin everything it can be. And there's just so much still to be done in this industry. And I think there's just a lot of people who want to do it. And if we all work together, I think we're going to get there much faster.

• 34:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I couldn't agree more. All right, listen, a sign of intelligence is changing your mind, right? Like that, like that's not a bad thing, right? It's actually a very good thing. And I think that the world could probably benefit from people doing that more often, right? Listening to folks, getting more information, changing their mind. And I think you guys are serving as a great example. Maybe we can all work together and get Elon to change his mind. Who knows where his mind is today, but that would be the hope, right?

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Absolutely.

• 35:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people to find you on the internet or find more about Marathon?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm at Twitter F G T H I E L. And otherwise, go to Marathon's Twitter and just, you know, DM me on Twitter. I'm more than happy to chat with people that way.

• 35:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Well, listen, thank you so much for doing this. I hope you're enjoying the Bitcoin conference and anyone who's got questions, just go talk to them.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Great. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

• 35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.