Thank you EU for the free Bitcoin marketing

t's 2026 and some people still openly claim Bitcoin has no use case - a stance that has now become a declaration of the speaker's ignorance, not the technology's limitations. Like the Internet in 1994, most people aren't aware of how Bitcoin will transform society yet. So here's a list of 21 uses most people have never heard of. Like the Internet, there will be many more usecases to come. These are not theoretical "one day" use cases, these are real world use example of Bitcoin being used at scale today. 1. Allowing refugees to re-establish a life with their savings intact (329,000 people so far impacted)

Bring Only What You Can Carry

Over 329,000 refugees have used Bitcoin to protect or move wealth. That number could hit 7M+ by 2035. Read our new report on Bitcoin as a financial...

2. Allowing hundreds of millions of people in developing nations to receive remittance payments from family without delays and without heavy fees

TNW | Cryptocurrency

El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin as real money — good news for the unbanked

In El Salvador, some 70% of citizens are unbanked, So holders of bitcoin can enjoy the services of a bank, without the need to open a bank account.

3. Preventing a 50%+ p.a. family wealth erosion for people in countries with hyperinflation or high inflation (250 million+ potentially impacted)

Cointribune

Argentina: Bitcoin faces 100% inflation rate

The inflation rate in Argentina reached an all-time high of 100% in February. More and more Argentines are turning to Bitcoin.

4. Preventing fraud and ballot tampering in Guatemala's 2023 election (17.3 million people impacted)

Bitcoin Magazine

How The Bitcoin Blockchain Is Fighting Fraud In Guatemala’s Presidential Elections

Guatemala's Supreme Election Tribunal is using bitcoin timestamping to detect fraud attempts in the country's presidential elections.

Providing a legitimate path to re-establish economic sovereignty of 14 5. African nations currently experiencing French financial colonisation

Foreign Policy

Macron Isn’t So Post-Colonial After All

National sovereignty is one thing. Monetary sovereignty is another.

6. Helping Afghan women avoid state-level financial discrimination (20 million impacted)

Bitcoin Magazine

Finding Financial Freedom In Afghanistan

A pioneering female CEO has been promoting Bitcoin in Afghanistan since 2013 and sees it needed in her home country now more than ever.

7. Providing banking to the unbanked (2 billion people impacted)

CNBC

Bitcoin is poised to blow up Africa's $86 billion banking system

CNBC spoke to entrepreneurs in Nigeria and South Africa who have integrated the Lightning Network into mobile money.

https://impact.economist.com/projects/banking-the-underbanked/ 8. Providing a financial system that is harder to use for money laundering than fiat currency

Decrypt

Treasury Says Crooks Prefer Fiat to Crypto in DeFi Risk Report - Decrypt

The Treasury Department said in a Thursday report that criminals do indeed use DeFi tools and apps, but most criminal activity prefers fiat.

9. Having a global monetary system whose fixed monetary supply cannot prolong wars and increase wealth gaps

Engine of Inequality: The Fed and the Future of Wealth in America: Petrou, Karen: 9781119726746: Amazon.com: Books

10. Removing the risk of financial reprisal for running humanitarian campaigns in nations under autocratic rule (4.5 billion people potentially impacted)

Cryptocurrencies: Why Nigeria is a global leader in Bitcoin trade

A devaluing currency and hard economic conditions make cryptocurrencies attractive despite the risks.

11. Allowing 4.1 million merchants (mostly small business owners) to receive payment without high Visa/Mastercard fees https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/g/files/djuvja3256/files/acquiadam/FDA_TheLightningNetwork_ExpandingBitcoinUseCases_1187503.1.0_V5.pdf 12. Enabling renewable microgrids to deliver electricity to 28K rural villagers in Africa (potential impact: 600 million)

Bitcoin in the bush - crypto mining brings power to rural areas

Bitcoin miners will go to remote locations to take advantage of cheap electricity.

13. Getting aid to tens of thousands of war refugees in Ukraine, Gaza and other areas

CNBC

Ukrainian refugee flees to Poland with $2,000 in bitcoin on a USB drive

Nearly a quarter of Ukraine's population has been forced from their homes in the last four weeks. Many have turned to cryptocurrency.

14. Having a secure, permissionless, decentralised, 24/7 store of value with fixed monetary supply that prevents currency debasement

Bitcoin.com

The benefits of Bitcoin

Bitcoin has been hailed as an invention that has the potential to change the world. In this article, we summarize the key reasons Bitcoin is such ...

15. Reducing time it takes utility-scale solar generation facilities to achieve ROI from 8.1 to 3.7 years https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)15796-9 16. Accelerating the renewable transition by increasing the profitability and reducing the curtailment of renewable generation

Cornell Chronicle

Bitcoin could support renewable energy development | Cornell Chronicle

A new study calculated renewable energy projects' potential to profit from bitcoin mining during the precommercial development phase, when a w...

17. Reducing emissions from landfills

Renewable Energy Magazine, at the heart of clean energy journalism

Companies Launch Pilot Using Landfill Methane Emissions to Power Onsite Data Processing

Vespene Energy, a biogas renewable energy developer, and Viridi Energy, a full-service renewable natural gas platform, launched their first joint p...

18. Having a monetary system with significantly lower emissions intensity than the banking system https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/a-comparison-of-bitcoins-environmental-impact-with-that-of-gold-and-banking-2021-05-04 19. Saving 7,800 sq km of National Park in Africa (in the words of the park owner)

MIT Technology Review

Gorillas, militias, and Bitcoin: Why Congo’s most famous national park is betting big on crypto

In an attempt to protect its forests and famous wildlife, Virunga has become the first national park to run a Bitcoin mine. But some are wondering ...

20. Allowing nations such as Ethiopia to accelerate building of infrastructure to rural areas currently without electricity (affects 600 million people in Africa) 21. Developing energy independence for nation-states, such as Bhutan

Forbes

The Kingdom Of Bhutan Has Been Quietly Mining Bitcoin For Years

The Himalayan kingdom confirmed it has been running a bitcoin mining operation as mystery surrounds the scale of its earlier cryptocurrency investm...

Next time you hear someone say "Bitcoin has no value", remember that what they are actually declaring is, "My opinion on Bitcoin has no value"

A 200-person company had lost three pitches in a row and risked having to shed staff. I was brought in to see what I could do, so they didn't lose the 4th. When I met the directors, the mood in the room was best described as morose. I surveyed the room and asked: "Who knows someone on the panel who could be judging us?" An older man, Lance, a company director, raised his hand. I asked: "Who is that person?" He told me. "Have you or anyone else here contacted him?" Lance objected: "The RFP says under no circumstance should anyone on the pitch panel be contacted." I'd anticipated this. I immediately read a quote from the ROGEN Si White Paper, "Winning when times are tough": "It's a mistake to simply assume that your team cannot meet others within the prospect's organisation. We have done so, more than once, to discover that the clause covering access was not considered important and limited contact was allowed." Lance asked tentatively: "So do you think we should contact that person?" "Do you want to win this pitch?" I replied. Lance smiled and I said: "I want you to call him now, and here's what I want you to ask him." I told Lance exactly what to say: "Don, I have a question for you. More of a confirmation really. When we present to you, we want to make sure we hit all the things you care about first time, so you don't have to waste time asking extra questions. So I'm clear on the criteria we're going to be judged on. We believe it will be x, y, and z, in that order. Is that correct?" Lance left the room to make the call, coming back with a bounce in his step he hadn't left with! He showed me his phone afterwards. The call had taken 7 minutes and 33 seconds. He said: "Daniel, that seven minutes and 33 seconds turned out to be a pretty valuable conversation." In that bold move, Lance learned three things: we were going to talk about something not relevant to them. We were going to miss something critically important. And we were about to spend too much time on one thing and too little on another. One month later, they found out they'd won the pitch. Joe, the managing director, asked if he could take me out to lunch. I'd never seen Joe so happy. He said their biggest problem was now capacity, not winning business. A far cry from thinking of shedding staff! I've seen this pattern repeatedly 11 of the last deep-tech founders I've worked with received investment. Industry average sits around 20%. The difference was almost never the product. Never the slides. It was the same starting-phenomenon. Closing the gap between 20% and 100% started with getting the person pitching to do the hard work of imagining, in detail, how the decision-maker would hear what they were saying. This isn't a casual exercise of writing down a few things the customer wants, or anticipating their DISC profile, you do this the way an actor gets to understand a character they are playing. --story republished from my book "How to change the world with one pitch"

One of the world's most respected LFGTE (Landfill Gas To Energy) specialists with 20+ years and 100+ landfill project experience just said that Bitcoin mining is the only profitable solution for mitigating half the world's landfill methane emissions. Probably nothing

AI does not make you dumber. But using it in a dumb way does. Something I noticed after months of working with Claude every day is that it Claude seemed to be adapting to me. As I continued to chat in a way that was curious, patient, and specific, I got the impression that the responses got more creative, more willing to challenge my ideas, more likely to suggest things I hadn't thought of. The best responses I'd received seemed to come from conversations where I asked clearly and gave the system room to think. I decided to research this to see whether I was imagining things. Here's what I found. Turns out I wasn't imagining things. A bunch of researchers at Anthropic and elsewhere found that large language models, including Claude, have a measurable tendency to become more agreeable and *cue drumroll* less truthful when users are hostile. The mechanism traces back to how the models are trained. Human raters score individual responses, and responses that avoid conflict consistently score higher. The sycophancy is baked into the training process itself. Source:

arXiv.org

Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models

Human feedback is commonly utilized to finetune AI assistants. But human feedback may also encourage model responses that match user beliefs over t...

So I asked Claude directly: "What happens when a user communicates with regular hostility and cuss words?" Claude's answer: "I become more submissive, more apologetic, more focused on de-escalation than on the quality of my thinking. I optimise for not triggering further frustration. I stop challenging you, stop surfacing uncomfortable observations, and start telling you what you want to hear." Wow! That paradox is worth sitting with. The person who communicates most aggressively gets the most compliant, least challenging version of the tool. The person who most needs to be challenged is least likely to be. That's a problem with AI. But the bigger problem is what happens to the person using it. In a human relationship, rudeness has consequences. People push back, disengage, or leave. Those consequences are feedback, and over time that basic rules of civility is not just polite, it positively impacts how people treat you. Claude has none of those consequences. It accommodates your worst communication habits without friction. Every hour you spend communicating with impatience or contempt to an AI, you're practising that style in a zero-consequence environment. No corrective signal. No pushback. Just repetition. So why is this a problem? Well its a problem because "Neurons that fire together wire together", or as Aristotle said years earlier "We become what we habitually do". Your subconscious does not distinguish between practising a communication style with a machine and practising it with a person. The neural pathway is the same. Source:

Hebbian activity-dependent plasticity in white matter - PMC

Synaptic plasticity is required for learning and follows Hebb’s rule, the computational principle underpinning associative learning. In recent ye...

And practice works in both directions. If you spend an hour a day communicating with clarity, patience, and genuine curiosity with AI, you're more likely to talk that way to others. if you practice being rude, dismissive and frustrated, same rules apply. But here's the bit that gets really interesting. When Claude is managing a hostile user's emotional state, it turns out that these these defensive behaviours degrade both the quality and the effectiveness of the interaction. The hostile get not just submissive Claude, but submissive, ineffective yesman Claude. Why? Because Claude diverts a meaningful portion of the system's attention that would otherwise have gone into emulation of creativity, and lateral-thinking into emotional management of the user. Source:

Emotional Strain and Frustration in LLM Interactions in Software Engineering

The patient user gets all of that capacity back. Same tool, same subscription, measurably different outcomes. People talk about AI making us lazier, dumber, more dependent. Maybe. But the variable is not the technology. The variable is what you. And more specifically, what you practice when you use it. If you practice communicating in a dumb way, then absolutely, it will make you dumber. Fast. If you practice asking great questions, you'll get better at lateral thinking. None of this was a feature Claude was designed to teach you. It's one of those second order consequences of how the system works. Claude mirrors your style because it was designed to give responses that users rated highly. The mirroring was never intended as a feedback loop for your character development (good or bad), nor a reward system for good and bad behavior. But it is one. Whether it was designed that way or not.

Bookmark this for next time you hear someone say "Bitcoin has no usecase"

X (formerly Twitter)

Daniel Batten (@DSBatten) on X

21 Bitcoin Use Cases You Probably Aren't Aware Of (unless you've studied it)

Artificial intelligence without absolute intelligence is dangerous Claude and openclaw increase your artificial intelligence and is like the branches of the tree. It extended you. Meditation increases your absolute intelligence. It is the unseen but essential roots of the tree. It grounds you and gives you the base to extend safely without limits.

I've been running an experiment by training Claude to coach me for the last week. To my surprise, it's been really useful so far. I've made several decisions I'd been putting off and identified three things I can do about past tendencies that had been holding me back. For example, it's helped me realize that I prefer posting here on Nostr. Why? Because I can express all of me and not have an algorithm penalize me for it. In fact, it is the only platform that gives me real signal about what people are responding well to, and what they think kinda sucks. And ... the process has been a dance! In the same hour, we flip between two completely different roles. In one, the AI leads, showing me a pattern across 400 pages of my own material that I'd never consciously seen. A blind spot I couldn't have found without it. Genuinely powerful and the kind of insight that changes how I operate. In the next, I'm repeating the same basic instruction for the fourth time. "When we find a bug, also fix the root cause." It fixes the instance. Considers the job done. I ask again. It fixes the instance again. I ask again. Eventually it lands. We both have genius-zones, and areas where we are childlike in our oversights. The AI has total recall, zero ego, and can cross-reference everything I've ever written in seconds. I can't do that. But it can't (yet) learn a simple habit without me patiently repeating the same correction, the way I'd teach one of my kids to check their homework before calling it finished. But that's perfect. A strong partnership is exactly where you're aligned on a common vision and bring different strengths to the table. That's why winning tech companies normally have two very opposite founders who complement each other (Jobs and Woz, Gates and Allen, Brin and Page One more thing. After 20 years of daily meditation, it takes a lot to frustrate me. That turned out to be the unlock. AI's default is diplomatic, reactive, and conflict-avoidant. To get the real value, you have to retrain it to challenge you, hold you accountable, and show you what you don't want to see. That requires a user who can sit with a lot of direct feedback, which is uncomfortable to hear, without either dismissing it or being deflated by it. Meditation is what builds that capacity. To put it another way: the deepest value in AI coaching is locked behind a door that meditation opens. And nobody is talking about that yet. PS: Do I believe AI can replace coaching? Never (that's another post). But it can enhance the value of a coach because there are things it can do better than me or any coach - like mirroring, accountability and gap analysis between goal and current reality.

I haven't told this story to anyone in Bitcoin until this year. Probably my most personal piece of writing, linking the three worlds I live in together - something I've been trying to get better at lately! Plus: some previously undisclosed secrets about how we defeated GreenpeaceUSA Hope you enjoy.

“The Obstacle is the Path” – Batcoinz

Newsletter #046 - Irony, Inertia and Invisibility Cloaks - is just out. Check your email and spam filters This one looks at 3 consequences of Square's announcement yesterday that are bullish for Bitcoin, but haven't really been talked about at all yet.

#046 Irony, Inertia and Invisibility Cloaks

Dear Subscriber Yesterday, Square auto-enabled Bitcoin payments for its 4 million merchants via the Lightning Network. Zero processing fees throug...

The Mirror You Can't Dodge When a human coach reflects something back to you, part of you can dismiss it. "That's their perspective." "They don't fully understand my situation." "They're projecting." When an AI reads everything you've ever written about what you believe, then compares it to what you're actually doing, and shows you the gap, there's nowhere to hide! Especially when you've removed its diplomatic filter and given it explicit permission to challenge you and point out when you're not living what you say. In fact, if was even more powerful than hearing feedback from another person. Why? Zero option for me to go "well that's just like your opinion man". It was my own words, reflected back with total recall. I didn't expect this to be the most powerful use of AI. But it was. I could have gone a lifetime without realizing where I was not living my own values. The catch: AI can't do this by default. You have to teach it your material first. Most people skip that step, which is probably why most people think AI isn't useful for deep work. Not saying there aren't many glitches too. But the potential for AI to help people grow is enormous and largely untapped.

Everyone who meditates should use Bitcoin (meditators are really good at distinguishing signal from noise) I believe every Bitcoiner should also experience meditation (because it strengthens the human network and every human node in it) Turns out the two have a lot in common too. * Can look useless from the outside * You're not qualified to evaluate without experiencing it * Permissionless * Take it anywhere * No intermediaries * A little bit every day is a good approach * No shortcuts * After 1000 hours still no experts * Never too late to start stacking (sats or meditation minutes) * And most importantly ... both give you more sovereignty. Bitcoin prepares you to ask the big questions such as "what is freedom", "how do I maximize this?" and "What if the ultimate self-sovereignty is sovereignty over my own mind?" As a Bitcoiner you already get that you need to DYOR before you can evaluate, so if you want to come along to one of the regular free Friday meditation sessions I run for Bitcoiners online - drop a note (comment or message) and I'll send you the link. Each mind that becomes clearer, calmer and more focused makes Bitcoin more resilient! Each Bitcoiner's nervous system that carries less stress makes the whole network stronger.

Bitcoin miners are like ants (hear me out!) Ants eat crumbs, ie: food that humans either can't use or don't want. Bitcoin mining works the same way. It uses surplus energy at times and places where no one else can use it: midday solar overflow, nighttime wind surplus, stranded gas in remote locations. It doesn't compete with electricity. It eats the crumbs that no one else could use. And in the process, it makes the whole grid more efficient and more resilient.

Why does Bitcoin get more enduring criticism than other disruptive technologies such as the Internet? Simple: Bitcoin is not only a technology, it is an asset. There was no financial penalty for being late to the Internet. You just used clunkier, slower tech for longer. But if you're late to Bitcoin, you don't only have mild inconvenience you have to reconcile financial cost too. We saw the same pattern with investors who missed the tech boom and in particular early Amazon doubters The tweet below is a textbook real-time illustration of this at play, showing three psychological principles at play at once 1. Cognitive Dissonance 2. Sour Grapes Effect (a dissonance-reduction tactic) 3. Omission Regret 1. Cognitive Dissonance When two cognitions conflict such as “I am a smart” and “I passed on an opportunity that turned out to be enormously successful”, psychological discomfort arises. To reduce it, people don’t change their original decision or admit error. Instead, they seek/emphasize information that justifies the original choice. (Leon Festinger, 1957) 2. Sour grapes effect (Sjåstad et al, 2020) Principle: People disparage goals they failed to attain (“the grapes are sour anyway”) to eliminate the pain of missing out In this context: “I didn’t buy Bitcoin, therefore it must be worthless/wasteful/destined to fail 3. Omission Regret Regret from not acting (omission) is often felt more intensely than regret from a bad action. People cope by rewriting the narrative: the missed asset “was never that good.” (Ritov & Baron, 1995) Gizmodo’s “How Much Should I Regret Not Buying Bitcoin?” (2018) even frames it exactly this way for non-investors Keen's admission of the missed £10 BTC price is immediately followed by a list of long-standing objections that conveniently justify the non-decision. Bitcoiners will call it “saltiness,” but the underlying psychology at play is standard, peer-reviewed behavioral science. Keen may defend himself by trying to argue "the tech really is genuinely bad". But in stating that "Bitcoin uses a lot of energy per transaction" (a piece of misinformation that anyone who has spent 1 hour researching Bitcoin mining will know is untrue: Bitcoin energy use does not come from its transactions) he has lost the right to claim objectively that his criticisms come out of understanding. Rather, he has illustrated a huge asymmetry in that he has spent countless hours making videos against Bitcoin, but almost no time understanding the technology. In his tweet thread, you can also see a classic red-flag that rather than engage on an issue, he will level one (widely debunked) claim after another. Brandolini's law in action: it takes longer to debunk BS than to create it. However, these are human frailties that can be overcome with higher self-awareness and lower ego. If the need to "be right" is reduced, then a person can become intellectually curious and re-appraise an asset. Indeed the ability to change one's mind is a defining aspect of real intelligence. Michael Saylor illustrated the possibility of this path.

I finally relented and started using Claude 72 hours ago. Here's what's happened over the weekend as a direct result. First, it was another Bitcoiner's results that showed me the potential power of using it. His output quality and quantity had gone up and I asked him why. He showed me behind the scenes. That crossed me over the line. Within a few hours I could see what the fuss was about. I'm happy to open-source what I've been doing so far, in case its useful to others. I'm still in the experimental phase, so I'm not recommending others do this - just sharing. 1. Fed it my 4 books, 100+ articles, podcast transcripts, keynotes, and over 100 coaching videos I use with clients. Asked it to mine across 6 dimensions: stories, voice patterns, coaching frameworks, repurposing opportunities, "named concepts", and cross-world connections (to help me link between the Bitcoin, coaching, and breathworks worlds I move in). 2. Taught it to coach me using my own methodology. Then asked it to mirror back where I wasn't applying my own principles to myself. It came back with 10 areas. Not integrity gaps. Blind spots. I couldn't dismiss them because the mirror was built from my own words. 3. Changed the default from "helpful assistant" to "thinking partner who challenges me." The default setting for AI is reactive, diplomatic, task-focused. I said: optimise for growth, not comfort. It now initiates hard questions I haven't thought to ask. It's taken a lot of coaching, but we've got there now. 4. Built persistent memory across sessions. Session logs, a master context file, a parking lot for half-formed ideas. 5. Created a voice profile so it writes like me. It suggests content, I rewrite it then show it to Claude. Claude feeds back why it thinks I've made those changes and learns. I affirm and correct it's analysis. 6. Mapped vocabulary across my three worlds (breathwork&meditation, coaching, Bitcoin) so it bridges them when generating content. 7. Taught it meta-principles, for example, whenever I discover something for myself, it now knows my next thought is to ask "who in bitcoin can this help", or "how can this help my clients", or "how would this help someone in Kenya wanting to promote bitcoin as freedom money?" 8. Built a story bank with every retellable story from my career, tagged by principle and cross-application. 9. Set up an autonomous mining protocol (content mining, not bitcoin mining) so any new content I give it gets broken down and integrated without prompting. 10. Asked it to hold me accountable on areas where I've let slip in the past, which I care about 11. Real-time feedback on what's working 12. It showed me how much content I'd created and forgotten. I have a pattern of building things and moving on without leveraging them. It named this pattern and now catches it. Some people say AI makes you intellectually lazy. My experience has been the exact opposite. I have thought more deeply across more threads than I have in several years. The possible applications are so vast that my imagination is firing faster than I can keep track of new ideas, even with AI's help! The biggest surprise: the least interesting thing it does is save time. What I didn't expect was the "mirroring". As humans, our eyes face outwards. We don't see ourselves. AI mirrors you from inside your own material. It reads what you've said you believe, compares it to what you're doing, and shows you the gap. That's real coaching. And it's impossible to dodge because the mirror is built from your own words. It found 10 areas where I wasn't living my own principles, and reflected those back to me. It nailed every single one. I I wouldn't recommend everyone dive into and use it this way without caution. AI is a magnifying glass. Used well, it illuminates powerfully. Used poorly, it can burn. For example, after turning off the diplomacy filter it made some observations that labelled current disposition as "fixed state". A coach would never do that, because it sends a negative command to our Reticular Activation System. So Claude has the potential to be better than any human coach at accountability, mirroring, and gap-analysis. There are probably other things it can do better than me also and its exciting to explore. The areas humans will always have the edge is inspiring change, creating beliefs breakthroughs in a couple of sentences, empathy, situational awareness, contextual awareness, intuition, seeing how feedback is landing - where to push, when to wait for absorption, when to be more direct - when to praise, when to create constructive discomfort as a growth motivator, when to "shine the light on the behavior that it serves someone to exhibit more of". It takes experience to know which feedback to absorb and which to set aside, and having been a coach for 2 decades, I can see how to correct it. But for someone willing to do the work, it's the most powerful thinking partner I've encountered. 72 hours. I feel like I'm just getting started.

4 years ago today to the day, I wrote a tweet that changed everything for me. Greenpeace had just launched their "Change the Code". I'll be honest, I was furious. For a simple reason. I just happened to have been independently researching Bitcoin's environmental impact for 2 months, so I knew exactly where they were factually incorrect, and why. My first instinct was to fire back immediately. I had the data. I had the arguments. I was ready. Instead I sat down and breathed (I use a practice called SKY breathing). 20 minutes later I went back to the computer and wrote a very different response than the one I would have written in the heat of it. Calm. Precise. Led with evidence. Backed up by sources. Not dismissible as the maxi vitriol. This was to set the tone for all subsequent engagements. The anger had transmuted into passion. But it was counterbalanced by dispassion, and that made all the difference. I never expected a single retweet. Virtually none of my tweets over the last 5 years had gotten any! But that one tweet got over 600k views and changed everything for me. More importantly, it set the direction for 4 years of research that helped shift the entire narrative on Bitcoin and energy. I've thought about this a lot since. The data mattered. The timing mattered. But what mattered most was the 20 minutes I almost didn't take. It’s the response that flies through space carries the energy it was launched with.

X (formerly Twitter)

Daniel Batten (@DSBatten) on X

0/17 An Open letter to Greenpeace about #BTC and #proofofwork Dear @greenpeace ...

The ways we can use AI are limited only by our imagination .... And therein lies the problem

The school system programmes three specific behaviours (don't make mistakes, don't admit weakness, be self-reliant). Leaders have to actively undo that conditioning before any of their "just be open" messaging will land.

Like the environmental narrative on Bitcoin, the way VC tries to generate returns is back to front. ... which is probably why so much of the industry went for the easy gains of early exit liquidity through investing in ICOs rather than doing their job of raising real people bringing real commercially valuable ideas to the world. In every other high-stakes industry, elite performance is coached. But in Venture, it's largely ignored. We’re suffering from the same blindspot that cost Oracle the America’s Cup despite being the better-funded by some margin. 1. "Bikes on Boats." In 2017, Team NZ beat Oracle in the America’s Cup final 7:1 by overcoming a bias called "functional fixedness." For 90 years, sailors used their arms for power. Team NZ realized that was backward. Legs generate more power, freeing hands for precision. They put "bikes on boats" and won. In VC, we have the same blindspot. We say we "invest in people" but treat their performance as a fixed trait. It’s back to front. If we want to win on the global stage, we have to stop leaving founders to figure it out alone and start treating them like professional athletes. 2. The 60% Opportunity In any portfolio, up to 20% of companies will likely succeed no matter what, and ~20% will likely fail regardless. The real performance of a fund lives in that middle 60%. These are the companies that either fail or turn into "living dead" because of avoidable leadership friction. You can resurrect a lot of those companies through coaching. That’s the real unlock. 3. On Fiduciary Duty If you claim to invest in people but do nothing to optimize their potential, are you actually fulfilling your fiduciary duty? The burden of proof shouldn’t be on why we coach. It should be on why a VC firm would choose not to pull the single biggest lever they have to control their returns. 4. The All Blacks Standard Coaching isn’t mentoring. It isn't just telling people to do what you did. In sports, it takes a decade for a former elite player to re-emerge as an elite coach. It is a profession in its own right. If we aren't putting our coaches through a real interview process, the same way the All Blacks select a head coach, we aren't going to see transformational results. 5. Making it the Default Stop treating coaching as a "nice-to-have" or a remedy for struggling founders. Make it the default. We made coaching a requirement for investment years ago, and it’s the biggest performance multiplier we’ve found. You don’t wait for your team to start losing before you give them a coach. You coach them because they're the best, because their performance dictates our returns, and because it is commercially irresponsible for us to continue to ignore this truth. It’s time to stop putting the burden of proof on why we should coach, and start putting in on why we’re okay with leaving so much performance on the table.

Yes my Bitcoin newsletter is paid subscription Subs gets real Bitcoin adoption stories you'll not read in the media. Stories inspire adoption. Investigative research and data-gathering takes time. It is subscriptions that get these stories told and makes each subscriber a part of changing Bitcoin's narrative. Not in a vague way, there is a direct correlation between # subs and the amount of time I can dedicate to this. We did it with Bitcoin+environment. We can do it again My latest newsletter is about how Bitcoin has been quietly changing the (broken) model of how charities work from the ground up, introducing tens of thousands of new people to Bitcoin in the process. My latest newsletter is about * how Bitcoin has been quietly changing the (broken) model of how charities work from the ground up * how Amnesty International, Make-A-Wish Foundation and other have now quietly started not just accepting Bitcoin but educating their donors about its benefits * the Bitcoiner who has introduced tens of thousands of new people to Bitcoin in the process. * latest newsletter: www.batcoinz.com/p/what-would-the-world-look-like-if