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.

At the end of 2023 I met the person who ran GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin.

 I expected it to be tense. It wasn't.

 He told me he'd read every response to every post I'd made on Twitter.

"I wish we'd engaged with you and people like you from the outset," he said.
 Two months later he left Greenpeace. A few months after that they ended the campaign entirely. It was the most well-funded, yet the worst result in their history.

I keep coming back to that phrase. "People like you." Not me. A whole group. Troy Cross, Margot Paez, Elliot David, Susie Violet Ward and many others. We were working independently, with no budget and no coordination. We just shared data and conviction.

 It is a great story of a decentralized response beating a multi-million dollar centralized campaign, not by being louder but by a combination of being right and expressing that truth in such a way that reasonable people could see. And it is a recipe we can use again and again.

Why a high standard of clarity and communication is required when talking about Bitcoin: Misinformation travels 10x further than the truth, and gets 10x the coverage - so anyone articulating the truth need to state it 100x more clearly, just to reach parity.

Imagine if I said to you "Earth is an uninhabitable place to live" You look at me sideways and say "Ah... why?" I reply "Planets are awful bad. Pluto/Uranus/Neptune, you'd freeze. Mercury, you'd burn. Venus, you'd be poisoned. Jupiter and Saturn, you'd be crushed. Mars: nothing to breath. It's true. Most of the planets, including over 5700 exoplanets, are really really bad places to live. The conclusion that this means earth is uninhabitable is a basic logic fail. Now imagine some self-proclaimed crypto-commentator tells you "Bitcoin is a scam" Again, you look at him sideways and say "Ah... why?" He replies "Most crypto has gone to zero. VCs dump on retail. Memecoins are complete rugpulls. Pre-mined tokens, you get diluted to oblivian. ICOs, you're the exit-liquidity for founders and early investors. It's true. Most of the thousands of cryptocurrencies launched since 2009 are complete scams. But again, the conclusion that this makes Bitcoin a scam is equally a basic logic 101 fail. Earth is the only planet with a breathable atmosphere, the right temperature band, and liquid water. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with the combination of no insider enrichment, a fixed supply that nobody can change, and a 17-year unhacked decentralised ledger. In both cases, some very special and unique features make the general rule inapplicable to the one obvious exception. This logical fallacy has been around long enough to have a name. Aristotle spotted it about 2,300 years ago and called it the "Fallacy of Accident" - taking a pattern that's true for a category and forcing it onto the one member where evidence shows it obviously doesn't hold. A few days ago, Ben McKenzie sat on Jon Stewart's podcast and committed this exact logic-fail: citing crypto's failures as his evidence against Bitcoin. He's not the only one to fail in this way. Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde all conflated Bitcoin with all crypto for years. Many journalists still fail to distinguish Bitcoin from all other crypto (though the better ones are starting to). In fact, this fallacy has been deployed for years with impunity by people who either don't know, or forgot to mention that Bitcoin has unique features making it materially different from all other crypto. The irony is that Bitcoiners and crypto-critics are on the same page: the rugpulls, the insider enrichment, the tokens engineered to extract value from retail investors are all things that Bitcoiners like @CorySwan and other have been vocally calling out for over a decade, long before category-conflating journalists and actors from teen dramas decided they had an opinion about it. It's not that hard Unless you have the attention-span of a gnat-fly, you can easily do 5 mins research (AI-assisted if you really want) and discover either what the core differences are between Earth and all other planets, between Bitcoin and all other crypto. Earth is an incredibly, uniquely habitable planet for humans to live. Bitcoin is an incredible, uniquely suitable form of currency for humans to use.

Apparently I've now done 7,090 FUD-busting related tweets about Bitcoin across 5 categories (Environmental, Criminal/Terrorist, Ponzi/Scam/Bubble, Political/Partisan, Technical FUD). 🤣 Unsurprisingly, 4,318 of them (61%) were on environmental FUD and benefits of Bitcoin, but surprisingly the best performing rebuttals or pre-emptive positive messages about Bitcoin have been when I've been responding to the nonsense message "Bitcoin is used by criminals"

There's a decision-making method gaining traction in AI circles right now. You spin up five AI agents, each with a distinct thinking role: first-principles thinker, contrarian, systems thinker, domain expert, pragmatist. Plus a chairman who runs the process. Each agent drafts an answer independently. The chairman strips the names off and circulates them anonymously. Each agent critiques the others without knowing who wrote what. Then the chairman synthesises the best answer. The anonymity is the genuinely good part. It forces evaluation on content, not on who said it. Ego gets removed from the room. That alone makes it better than most boardroom decisions. But it's still modelled on a boardroom. And a boardroom is not where the best decisions get made. Here's what's missing. 1. No real iteration. Ideas develop the same way people develop: through feedback and iteration. In this model, the iteration is perfunctory. Ideas get assessed, not evolved. 2. No brainstorming. Effective brainstorming deliberately separates "divergent thinking" (the process of imagining all possibilities, including crazy ones) from convergent thinking (the process of whittling them down to what's possible within the constraints of time, space and budgets). The best discussions with the best ideas happen when you go wide first, then narrow. This protocol puts a convergent black-hat thinker in the room at the same time as the divergent thinkers. That collapses the exploration phase before it even starts. 3. Optimised for evaluation, not ideation. It's designed to select the best existing idea rather than generate one that's better than any individual agent could produce. 4. The chairman selects rather than facilitates. There's a difference between choosing the best idea in the room and facilitating the development of the best collective idea. A chairman does the first. A facilitator does the second. Different function entirely. The first is optimized for efficacy of process and efficiency of outcome, the second is optimized for the quality and robustness of the decision. 5. Swimlane identities. Each agent operates within a narrow role. "Domain expert." "Contrarian." Knowledge seldom comes from people locked into narrow identities. It comes from the collision between them. The net result: no ideation, a marginally better selection process, and a high risk that an underdeveloped idea gets chosen. Worse, because the process looks robust and complex, the output runs the risk of getting acted on with more confidence than it deserves. I studied this exact problem during my thesis. I had groups communicating anonymously, analysing a poem (I was an English major), exchanging ideas across rounds. The quality of analysis improved dramatically in the second round - not because the evaluation got sharper, but because people were building on each other's thinking, measurably. They were interchanging ideas, not just ranking them. I've seen the same thing running mastermind groups since. When different minds get in a room and start sparring and introducing ideas, a network effect kicks in. Ideas emerge that no single person in the room could ever have produced. That process creates ideas through a principle that we call "advance and extend". And it's what this five-agent model doesn't have. The fix isn't complicated. Let agents build on each other's drafts across multiple rounds instead of just critiquing them. Replace the chairman with a facilitator agent whose job is synthesis, not selection. Separate the divergent phase from the convergent phase. And stop assigning swimlane identities that constrain what each agent is allowed to think. The five-agent idea is a step forward. But it's a step from a bad process to a less bad process. The leap - to a process that produces genuinely emergent thinking - requires a different model entirely. And that model already exists. It just hasn't been applied to AI ... yet.

One Bitcoiner has just onboarded15 new businesses in his local town (in his spare time). How? A few things but, a key component was getting comfortable leaving things undone, focusing on needle-moving actions and getting better at identifying what those needle-moving actions were (and then taking them)! You can do this too. accebli

Yet to find a single Bitcoiner who has not noticed this same effect. One of the biggest environmental benefits of Bitcoin is how it reduces overconsumption.

It is my duty to remind you that Bitcion will use all the world's power by 2020.

In The Netherlands there is a a limit of €3000 for cash purchases on goods. There is no spending limit on Bitcoin.

BREAKING: Bitcoin CEO issues statement "Unlike Bitcoin, the electricity that powers Telsas is still derived mostly from fossil fuels. When Tesla can show measurable progress on this important issue, we will allow Telsa to start accepting Bitcoin payments again."

Thank you EU for the free Bitcoin marketing

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.

Just gave an online talk on Bitcoin and ESG to 200+ regulators from Securities Commissions, Banks, Central Banks from around the world including... Nigeria, Canada, El Salvador, Indonesia, Ukraine, New York, NZ, South Africa It's the second talk like this I've given. Over 350 regulators in total reached., including heads of banks, Central Banks and Securities Commissions. Each time we engage with regulators and policymakers is a chance to put misinformation to bed permanently, and (re)educate them about why Bitcoin ticks the right boxes for them. This in turn helps smooth the road for more nation state Bitcoin adoption, better ability to allow Bitcoin as a medium of exchange and more Bitcoin mining harvesting stranded energy on and off grids. Onwards!

The end of Bitcoin mining gaslighting in mainstream media Litmaps, a powerful research tracking tool, reveals that patient zero for all junk science on Bitcoin's environmental impact was a single 6 page "commentary" by Alex de Vries. (A commentary in the context of an academic journal means a short opinion piece that does not to go through a full peer-review process and which does not use novel empirical data). The method he used to claim that Bitcoin's environmental damage was a growing concern was his fundamentally flawed "energy use per transactions" method (Bitcoin energy use does not come from its transactions, therefore it can scale transaction volume exponentially without increasing emissions). de Vries' metric was later debunked in no fewer than 4 separate academic journals as part of full length academic papers. *Masanet et al 2019 https://researchgate.net/publication/335456595_Implausible_projections_overestimate_near-term_Bitcoin_CO_2_emissions *Dittmar et al. 2019

Client Challenge

*Sedlmeir et al, 2020

Client Challenge

*Sai and Vraken 2023 https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2096720923000441#br0070 The entire body of de Vries' work was systematically debunked by Sai and Vranken in late 2023 source: https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2096720923000441#br0070 Immediately after Sai & Vranken's study, all mainstream media outlets stopped covering de Vries' Bitcoin "research" In fact, 22 mainstream media outlets have now flipped to covering Bitcoin's environmental benefits (source: https://x.com/DSBatten/status/2007095059963949217) which have been well established in 24 peer reviewed full length academic studies. (source:

The Changing Narrative on Bitcoin Mining

What

A further 15 sustainability media outlets are now also covering Bitcoin mining's environmental benefits: source:

The Changing Narrative on Bitcoin Mining

What

But just as years after the myth "all fats cause cholesterol" was debunked, many people are still unaware of the science, the same is true of Bitcoin mining In both cases, the population was misinformed over many years. As a result, many people are still unaware that the contemporary academic literature, case studies and grid operators themselves all overwhelmingly support Bitcoin mining's environmental benefits source:

X (formerly Twitter)

Daniel Batten (@DSBatten) on X

Why the Green Energy Transition Needs Bitcoin Miners

It is only a matter of time before policymakers, regulators, political leaders and investment committees catch up. Once they do we will see mainstream adoption of Bitcoin, and mainstream adoption of Bitcoin mining as part of climate action (aka: what the peer reviewed research tells us it is) source: https://x.com/compose/articles/edit/2009351000952279040 While many media outlets are now objectively commenting on Bitcoin, others (Financial Times, The Economist, Verge, Wired, New Scientist) have simply pivoted to changing the type of Bitcoin misinformation they publish.

100th Monkey Effect One mindset shift, if applied by even 1% of Bitcoiners, can have a pronounced impact on Bitcoin adoption

3 March. RayDalio: "Central banks are not going to want to buy Bitcoin" 6 March... d

JUST IN: Paraguay has just followed the lead of Bhutan, using wasted hydro energy to mine Bitcoin, for a likely National Bitcoin Reserve. "Reports indicate mined Bitcoin will likely be held as a state asset or the national treasury, potentially used to fund infrastructure"

We're now 3 years in to Bhutan's Bitcoin experiment That means we now have robust data on how it has impacted the economy For context: Bhutan's economy was in dire shape in 2022 due to loss of all tourism income (it's #2 export earner) during the COVID period. It got so bad that Bhutan was 3 months away from defaulting on import payments. IMF was poised to step in to structure a loan which would have led to heavy debt repayments, but also ceding of economic sovereignty to a lender whose loan conditions permit them to dictate how to (re)structure an economy. Instead, Bhutan formed a large Bitcoin Strategic Reserve by using their surplus renewable hydropower to mine Bitcoin. The IMF has warned on numerous occasions that nations embracing Bitcoin would destabilize their economy, be less effective at attracting foreign direct investment, and endanger their decarbonizing and environmental initiatives. What does the data say (as reported by Wall St Journal, Al Jazeera and Forbes) 1. Bhutan was able to "use Bitcoin reserves to avert a crisis as foreign currency reserves dwindled to $689 million" 2. The bitcoin reserves have directly addressed pressing fiscal needs. "In June 2023, Bhutan allocated $72 million from its holdings to finance a 50% salary increase for civil servants" 3. Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay in an interview said that bitcoin also "supports free healthcare and environmental projects" 4. Tobgay also said their Bitcoin reserves helped in "stabilizing [the nation’s] $3.5 billion economy" 5. Independent analysts have now said that "this model could attract foreign investment, particularly for nations with untapped renewable resources" Considering that what transpired in Bhutan has helped stabilize an economy that the IMF warned Bitcoin would destabilize, it begs the question: what data was the IMF's predictions based on? For Bhutan, Bitcoin didn't just boost the economy, it allowed Bhutan to maintain economic independence and provided an example to other small nations of a path forward that did not require the IMF.

together, we fixed this statement