Training impulse control (via meditation, coaching, habit cultivation etc.) is one of the most direct ways to lower your effective time preference

There has never been an industry whose success has been determined by so few variables as Bitcoin mining Hashrate Bitcoin Price Electricity Price ASICS Price Block reward (and fees) Ancillary revenue That's it 6 factors Not in-store-spend Not Customer conversion rates Not market penetration Not demographic data And no sales and marketing campaign or customer outreach campaign will change this You're at the mercy of 6 variables, 4 of which you have no control over, save a small bit of wiggle-room that you can create by negotiation in the case of ASICS price. The only variables you can control is electricity price and ancillary revenue source. (More about this later) For this reason, we can do something we've never been able to do for any industry ever We can read the future non-speculatively, because it already exists today In Europe, electricity prices are astronomically high. So much so, that it effectively simulates a future reality where the economics are similar to a US-based mining company one halving into the future (with half the block reward). Yet, Bitcoin mining thrives in Europe: the most hostile electricity-price environment, regulatory, environment and tax environment in the world towards Bitcoin mining. You'd never know it, because it happens mostly under the radar, and it is (legitimately) called "datacenters", "grid stabilization services", and "heat reuse" to avoid regulatory hostility and taxation hostility. Bitcoin mining thrives here because of one factor alone: their ancillary revenue is very high compared to the rest of the world. So high in fact that many European mining companies are more profitable than their US counterparts This is why I have no fear about the future of Bitcoin mining This is why discussions about security budget are redundant: Bitcoin doesn't need one This is why we don't need to have speculative discussions about the direction of Bitcoin mining. Europe already ran that simulation, and the data is in. The future of Bitcoin mining is that it seeks out stranded energy at near zero marginal cost. The future of Bitcoin mining is that it stabilizes grids and recycles heat as a primary revenue source, with the blockreward and fees being the by-product The future of Bitcoin mining is that it solves hard problems the world desparately needs - keeping our grid safe and stable, making AI load flexible, reducing harmful methane pollution, stopping the wasteful practice of renewable energy curtailment in ways that benefit whole communities The future of Bitcoin mining is that it is the usecase of Bitcoin that the world sees and embraces first.

AI power demand is in mainstream news right now. The IEA has published on grid stress. Data centres are in an arms race for power. European energy prices are major news. Grid instability is real and being increasingly commented on around the world. Renewable energy subsidies are ending. This is the perfect storm into which Bitcoin mining has just entered the fray.

Bitcoin solves a monetary problem and ... and energy problem Blackouts are visible Inflation is arguable Bitcoin is a solution to both But the world will understand how it solves the energy problem first

To date, the area of Bitcoin and energy has been a niche With AI power demands, European blackouts, stalled energy transitions, global grid stress, and 12 months of accumulating evidence, the world is now walking inexorably toward that niche

Reading a lot at the moment about people who are using AI to 1. stealman both sides of an idea 2. witness a debate from the perspective of a physicist, historian etc 3. Generate agents, including a first principles thinker, a contrarian, etc to exchange views on a topic ... This is a great way to create the illusion that you have arrived at truth. But it is not and will never be a proxy for thinking. If you want evidence of this, just ask the question "Is Bitcoin mining good or bad for the environment" and watch the method get the wrong answer every time.

Benefit #5 of meditation: It makes you non-reactive to volatility I cannot think of a Bitcoiner to whom this is not relevant and important! Neuroscience research comparing long-term meditators with non-meditators found that meditators displayed greater emotional stability and significantly less emotional volatility across all affect types. The mechanism: meditation trains what researchers call "equanimity" - the ability to observe an experience without reacting to it. MRI studies show that experienced meditators achieve a decoupling of sensory and affective processing. They still perceive the stimulus (a price pullback, some uninformed FUD, a new regulatory threat) but the emotional charge doesn't hijack the response. Source: PMC - Mindfulness, Cognition, and Long-Term Meditators

Mindfulness, cognition, and long-term meditators: Toward a science of advanced meditation - PMC

Mindfulness meditation is a systematic training in equanimity, sensory clarity, and concentration rooted in ancient contemplative traditions. Here,...

People often ask me how I had such patience, replying to the same FUD 1000x over - now I know the answer, nothing unique about me... but I’d been unknowingly training my mind over time through meditation to treat negative Bitcoin comments as datapoints, not reasons to lose my calm.

When a financial system fails, it can be disguised for years. When a grid fails, everyone knows Therefore the world encounters visceral, undeniable proof of Bitcoin's value through energy before it encounters it through money

Reason to meditate #4: It trains the low time preference muscle: delayed gratification As Bitcoiners, we often talk about low time preference as a virtue. But historically, we’ve implied that this is something you either have or do not have. The research says that a low time-preference disposition can be built, and meditation is how you build it. Basically, there are the two capacities that underpin the ability to delay gratification: attentional control and cognitive flexibility. Meditation has been shown to strengthen each of them. A study published in Consciousness and Cognition found that participants who completed mindfulness training showed significantly improved self-regulation and reduced impulsive responding. The mechanism is straightforward: delayed gratification is fundamentally an attention management problem. You don't resist the marshmallow by trying harder, you resist it by redirecting your attention. That's exactly what meditation trains you to do, thousands of times per session. Source: Consciousness and Cognition - Mindfulness Training Improves Self-Regulation

PubMed

Recovery of critical metals using biometallurgy - PubMed

The increased development of green low-carbon energy technologies that require platinum group metals (PGMs) and rare earth elements (REEs), togethe...

Every Bitcoiner understands the marshmallow test instinctively. The person who waits gets two. The person who buys Bitcoin and doesn’t look at the price chart for four years has never historically been disappointed. Simply treating and reading about patience as a moral virtue is ineffective. Building the neural hardware that makes patience possible through meditation is.

At the start of this year I asked “what else could I do to help bitcoin adoption?” One of the answers was “Prioritize appearing on non-bitcoin podcats that reach new audiences” Just jumped in a podcast run by 2 Aussies in the energy sector. Looking forward to more of these.

Reason to meditation #3: It eliminates the sunk-cost bias This one should matter to any Bitcoiner who's ever held an altcoin too long. Andrew Hafenbrack at INSEAD ran four studies - one correlational, three experimental. These studies showed that meditation reduces the tendency to let unrecoverable past costs influence current decisions. Fifteen minutes of focused-breathing meditation was enough to shift participants away from sunk-cost thinking. The mechanism: meditation reduces focus on the past and future, which reduces the negative emotion that drives the bias. Source: Hafenbrack et al. - Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation (Psychological Science, 2014) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797613503853 What this means is, meditation doesn't just help you HODL, it helps you make the decision to HODL or DCA based on what's in front of you now, rather than what you've already spent.

The world's leading energy authority just said this about demand flexibility and guess what the world's most flexible demand is? Bitcoin mining's time has come.

Reason to meditate #2: It improves your relationships - including with those closest to you Mindfulness-based parenting research using neural imaging found that parents who meditated showed increased activation in brain regions associated with empathy and emotional regulation. Their children - independently surveyed - reported the greatest improvements in the parent-child relationship.That’s important, because it’s not the parents filling out a survey subjectively appraising their parenting, it’s their kids evaluating them. Source: PMC - Mindful Parenting in Mental Health Care

Mindful Parenting in Mental Health Care - PMC

Mindfulness is a form of meditation based on the Buddhist tradition, which has been used over the last two decades to successfully treat a multitud...

Separate research showed that couples where one or both partners meditate report higher marital satisfaction, more empathy, better communication, and lower conflict. A meta-analysis of 600 research papers on transcendental meditation showed that subjects with the highest anxiety levels experienced the greatest and most sustained reduction. Source: Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy - Meditation, Marital Adjustment, and Relationship Quality https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332691.2019.1661323 Probably nothing

Here's an article I wrote yesterday on 13 little-known benefits of meditation, and how they apply specifically to Bitcoiners

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Proof of Work for the Mind

I wanted to take this a step further on Nostr though ... A common question I get "I've heard that meditation is something that would really benefit me, where should I start - try out an app?" Here's my take: an app is a better starting point than most people think, and ... a worse endpoint than most people realise ! Learning meditation from an app to learning to cook from YouTube. You'll produce edible meals and learn real techniques. Some people even become good cooks this way. But there are two things a video can never do - taste what you've made and tell you what's off. A teacher can read your experience in real time, adjust the instruction to what's actually happening for you, and introduce progression at the moment you're ready for it. An app delivers the same content to everyone regardless of where they are. My objective appraisal is that apps like Headspace and Waking Up have genuinely lowered the barrier to entry and that's something we should celebrate. Someone who meditates daily with an app is in a categorically better position than someone who intends to find a teacher and never starts. The risk isn't that apps teach badly (most teach the fundamentals accurately), the risk is that the early stages feel complete because you don't yet know what you're missing Three months in, the app feels like it's working. And it is. But a teacher doesn't just correct your posture - they recognise when you've hit a plateau you can't see from inside it, and they introduce the next thing at the right time. An app delivers the same content to everyone regardless of where they are. So, if the choice is app or nothing, then yes - the app wins every time If the choice is app or course, the course will take someone further, faster, with less risk of plateauing without knowing it

Take a look at these two insects. Pretty similar right? Both flying insects, both yellow and black. Both have stingers. But to a gardener they could not be more different. The image on the left is a honey-bee. They are critical to the pollination of many plants, especially those that produce nuts and fruits. In a world without the honey-bee we'd still have food because grains and other plant-based food is often wind/self pollinated. But we'd have less variety, growing food would be harder, and prices would be a lot more. The image on the right is a yellow-legged hornet. They stress your gardens: they chew bark, damage fruit and - most importantly - hunt other pollinators. A garden without them is a healthier garden. But the point is, if you don't know your insects, haven't researched how each impact the garden and have a "no flying insects" policy for your garden, your garden will grow more slowly, and garden by garden - you create a world where food is more expensive, and less bountiful. Lumping bees and hornets under "flying insects" is like lumping bitcoin mining operations and AI data centres under "data centres": technically accurate, useless for policy, and dangerous for the grid. Yet that is exactly what happened in Cedar Falls yesterday. The city council voted unanimously to block a Bitcoin mining facility from its 60% wind-powered industrial park - an operation that would have monetised surplus energy, and balanced the intermittency of that wind energy, without competing with a single resident for electricity. Source:

KWWL

No crypto mining in Cedar Falls after unanimous council vote

CEDAR FALLS, Iowa — Cedar Falls will not be home to a new cryptocurrency mining facility after the city council voted against zoning changes.

They banned the bee. Because here is the nuance most people miss: the gardener who sprays pesticide on all flying insects does not get a pest-free garden. They get an unpollinated one. The fruit costs more. The garden grows more slowly. And the pests still find a way in. That's what Cedar Falls just did. A grid with flexible load has a shock absorber. When demand spikes, the miner steps aside in less than a second, freeing capacity without anyone building a new power plant. A grid without Bitcoin Mining has no buffer. No surplus buyer. No way to balance supply and demand in real time without firing up gas peaker plants that cost more and sit idle most of the year. The gardener who knows the difference between the bee and the hornet has a healthier, more balanced, more resilient garden. The grid operator who knows the difference between Bitcoin mining and AI datacenters has a healthier, more balanced, more resilient grid. The word 'data centre' is doing the same work as 'flying insect.' It collapses two fundamentally different things into one category so that people can avoid understanding the difference. The resilience of the grid suffers - and consumers get higher prices.

Meditation makes you smarter. Pass it on. Specifically, your brain physically changes (for the better) in 8 weeks. Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar put people with zero meditation experience through an 8-week program. MRI scans showed measurable increases in grey matter density in regions associated with learning, memory, and emotional regulation - and measurable shrinkage of the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fear, anxiety, and the fight-or-flight response. Eight weeks, not eight years. Seems like something worth doing/ Source: Harvard Gazette - Eight Weeks to a Better Brain

Harvard Gazette

Eight weeks to a better brain — Harvard Gazette

Harvard researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital find that participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measu...

Sara Lazar's work showed that even 8 weeks meditation measurably improved brain function across a variety of brain regions. Source: https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/brain-researcher-sara-lazar-visits-mu-to-share-research-on-meditation-yoga/article_74fa1129-1634-531c-acd7-b5995dbc7b49.html One implication of this study is that in a bear market, the part of your brain that panics during a 50% drawdown is physically smaller. Probably nothing.

I just got back from the Bitcoin Energy Summit in Lisbon and I have a question that won't leave me alone. First some context: Bitcoin mining is now stabilizing the grids of 7 nations, 4 agencies (including the Spanish Govt and the World's largest energy policy association) just called for more flexible demand being critical to the resilience of the grids of the future - and Bitcoin mining is the world's most flexible load resource by an order of magnitude. So in light of this my question is this: why is 95% of the Bitcoin adoption conversation about Bitcoin-as-money when Bitcoin-as-energy is already deployed on grids across three continents? Is it possible that energy is the Bitcoin usecase that paves the road for mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin in the West? I've been in this space for four years now. When I started, the conversation was "bitcoin mining wastes energy." A group of Bitcoiners including Troy Cross changed that. Then it became "ok maybe it doesn't waste energy, but it's not useful." @gladstein , @jack and others changed that too. But here's what I noticed in Lisbon. Three separate European organisations - the European Bitcoin Energy Association, Free Madeira, and the Institut National de Bitcoin in France - are all independently converging on the same conclusion. Rachel Geyer, Chair of EBEA said energy is what will move the needle for Bitcoin in Europe. André Loja at Free Madeira said energy is the most topical issue in Europe right now. Bastien Desteuque, directeur général at INBi (Bitcoin Policy Insitute of France) said they're focusing on mining because France has spare nuclear capacity and that's where the biggest opportunity is. Three organisations. Same conclusion. And that's before you get to what's actually being built. In Sweden, a man I coach runs ASIC hardware that earns almost two-thirds of its revenue from frequency regulation - keeping the lights on, responding in seconds to the need of the grid operator, and helping to stabilize the grid an incredible11,247 times last year alone. (Yes, you read that sentence right). In Lisbon, I watched Kenji Tateiwa present a circular economy where bitcoin mining heat grows tropical fish and the CO2 gets converted to charcoal and micro diamonds. Bastian outlined how France's surplus nuclear energy could be absorbed by bitcoin mining by 2027. The conversation has quietly moved from "does bitcoin mining help grids?" to "how many services can one machine provide?" We've been thinking about this like monoculture - one machine, one function. What I saw in Lisbon is permaculture. The same hardware doing frequency regulation, heat capture, Sats-minting ... and potentially in the near future - voltage regulation (something that would have prevented the 28 April 2025 Iberian Peninsular Blackout. I talked to Bitcoin founders after the keynote who told me the energy thesis had opened their eyes. These are people who worked to advance Bitcoin payment infrastructure, and they hadn't fully grasped this. So here's my question. If energy is already Bitcoin's most mature real-world use case in the West - more deployed than payments, more proven than store-of-value at institutional scale - why are we still treating it as a footnote? What other Bitcoin use case is this far along ... at least in the West? Excited to see what happens next.

Issue #47 of The Bitcoin Adoption Forecast is out Check your email and spam filters. This one is about the real issue which no one in the media is covering relating to Bitcoin companies converting to AI companies.

The Grid’s Best Friend Just Left the Building

Dear Subscriber, As the line in the song Big Yellow Taxi goes "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Te...

The Part I Didn't Tell You (Nostr first post) A couple of months ago my daughter and I had a conversation about drinking. My wife and I decided after researching the impacts of drinking on teenage brain development that we had a simple clear "no drinking" rule for our children. But I didn't just say the rule, we explained why "Because we love you, and part of loving you is keeping you safe. Your brain - particularly your cerebral cortex - is still developing. Alcohol interferes with that development. What you have is precious, and we want to protect it so you can reach your potential." Like her Dad, she's been brought up to challenge things that don't make sense - even if they come from me. She's scientific in her mindset and demands evidence for things. She looked at me for a moment, paused. Then she said, "OK. That makes sense" the way she only does when something has landed. That conversation with my daughter at our dinner table is the same thing I did with Greenpeace, with journalists, with policymakers, with central bankers - the same method, the same respect for the other person's autonomy, just at a different scale. I'll back up and explain what I mean by that. For the last four years, I've called myself different things at different times - an ESG analyst, a Bitcoin mining analyst, a climate activist, an environmentalist. All true, but none of them complete. I've correctly said that the Bitcoin narrative changed because we had good data, good collection of data, a good presentation of data, and the truth was coming out. And that's true. But it wasn't truth alone. Truth is like water - it needs a container. And there was a part of the container I wasn't telling anyone about. During the battle, I couldn't. If I'd said publicly that I was applying decades of influence methodology to every soundbite, every chart, every rebuttal - opponents would have said, "See? It's not about the evidence at all." So I kept quiet. And the data became the visible story. But the truth is that every single element was carefully contextualised, nuanced, framed for maximum impact. It was no coincidence that my rebuttals would regularly ratio accounts with ten times my following. It was no coincidence that the head of Greenpeace's anti-Bitcoin campaign sat across from me and said, "We monumentally failed. We should have engaged with people like you from the start." There was no randomness to journalists changing their editorial policies, or critics quietly deleting tweets they'd been posting for years. It was by design. There's a well-known rule that a lie will travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on. The research confirms it - lies spread ten times faster AND disperse ten times further. Which means that to reach parity, the truth doesn't just need to be correct - it needs to be a hundred times better. Truth is like gold. The gold is already there - buried under rock and stone. But without someone willing to chip away at the false layers, nobody sees it. That's what I focused on - not adding anything to the truth, but removing what was obscuring it. The data was real and essential. But data by itself was sitting in papers and spreadsheets that just got ignored. The influence craft - the framing, the sequencing, the story structure, the Socratic approach, the non-attachment to outcome - that's what made the data travel. Neither works without the other. The gold is real, but without the right extraction tools, it stays buried. Now here's where it gets interesting... Ten compliments and one insult - what do you remember? The insult right? What does the media prefer to cover - ten positive things about Bitcoin, or one negative? The negative off course. And when we look at our own capabilities versus our incapabilities - which do we doubt? We doubt our capabilities. We never doubt our incapabilities. The exact same dynamics that create false narratives about Bitcoin create false narratives inside people. The FUD-busting techniques I employed to help change the Bitcoin narrative - I have used for ~20 years to help people bust their own fears, their own uncertainties, their own doubts. I don't use the blunt instruments of positive affirmations or pop psychology. I use a much more deadly weapon against FUD: the sword of indisputable logic, expressed clearly. Used correctly, logic disarms fear, makes the uncertain clear, and turns doubt into certainty. Because fear (F.E.A.R) is false evidence appearing real. And that is true whether it's operating at the scale of a global disinformation campaign against Bitcoin, or inside the mind of a single person. When we present the real evidence to the masses about Bitcoin, people are able to embrace Bitcoin. When I present the real evidence to an individual about their own capabilities, their fears and doubts and uncertainties dispel. They start taking action. And the adoption of their vision imprints itself on the world. The method is the same, the chisel is the same - just different gold. So what am I actually doing now? I'm teaching other Bitcoiners influence. And influence has four applications. 1. You can use it to change narratives - useful for Bitcoin, but also for changing the narrative on your own company so you're more likely to get investment. 2. You can use it to lead effectively. 3. You can use it to coach people in your team. 4. And yes, you can use it to sell - not selling the way it's traditionally done, but selling as an act of service which enriches and empowers the other person. Whether it's through my work with HRF, through Bitcoin policy institutes around the world, or through key individuals who are now influencing at a nation-state level, my job is to work behind the scenes to train the people who are right now influencing investors, politicians, central bankers, national grid operators across four different continents to incorporate Bitcoin. It will never be my name on those conversations. These people already have the talent. Half the time my role is just removing the blindspots they can't see which all humans have - the things standing between them and their full potential when the stakes are highest. When someone walks into a room with a prime minister or a central banker and says exactly the right thing in exactly the right way - that's them. I'm the aanoying person they workshopped this conversation with for weeks become who asked the pointed questions before forcing them to practice before game day, like any good coach should who believes in their players and demands the best of their does: "What does this person already believe?", "What's the bridge between that belief and where you need them to get to?", "How show me how you're going to say it", "I'd say "no" if you said it like that, do that again but add this part in", "There, that's better." Sometimes the person that Bitcoiner is talking to is the president of Chile. Sometimes its the political left, centre, and right in France. Sometimes it is the Prime Minister of New Zealand Sometimes it's a central banker in Ethiopia Sometimes its the national grid operator of South Africa or Sweden. Sometimes it's a merchant banker who's about to fund a company listing at the intersection of HPC and Bitcoin mining onto the NASDAQ. On my book on influence, I wrote that truth is like gold. The stone needs to be chipped away so it can be seen. That chipping away is the art of influence, but influence (at least the type I coach) only works if there the gold, the truth, exists. That's the part I couldn't tell you at the time while we were in the middle of a war about Bitcoin and energy. But it's important I tell you now, because it affects what happens next. Yes, we won the energy narrative. But it's critical that we don't come out of that win thinking truth and data do the job by themselves. They were necessary ... but they were not sufficient. The next battles - nation-state adoption, regulatory frameworks, the conversations happening right now behind closed doors in rooms most Bitcoiners will never see - will not be won by better data alone. They'll be won by people who know how to carry truth into a room and put it down in front of someone in a way they can receive it. Because truth is like water - it needs a container in order to be absorbed and appreciated. And for as long as I'm here, because I care about truth and therefore Bitcoin I'll continue to coach those people to build the container to be their best and destroy their own inner FUD - for Bitcoin, for their companies, for the people they lead, for their families, and for themselves.

ANNOUNCEMENT: new tool in the enduring mission of correcting false claims about Bitcoin! Quantum, bubble, environment, and all your favorite Bitcoin myths of the last decade are there, with their fact-based counters - backed up by data and peer-review research This is the good work of Glenn Håvar Brottveit npub1yr5hh7frwcyh8w2p8jww0gtrck8e2e3xlk4tc95vjudllfxd6dzq8940dn Full thread --->

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1/n ANNOUNCEMENT: new tool in the enduring mission of correcting false claims about Bitcoin! Quantum, bubble, environment, and all your favorite ...

Enter some FUD for yourself and see what happens--->

The Bitcoin Evidence Base

Common claims about Bitcoin — and what peer-reviewed research actually shows.