The best thing about (finally) updating my website was reconnecting with some clients I hadn't coached for five years and asking them to simply say whether there had been an ongoing benefit after the coaching ended and if so what. I was humbled by some of the things that came back, like this one. The exit is nice, but its not the thing that moved me the most. Whatever you do in life, I encourage you to choose a path that minimizes regret and maximizes for legacy you'd be proud of years later.

For 2 years I've run the environmental module on Cambridge's course for digital-asset regulators. Which means the supervisors from 11 G20 economies now know that, by a climate investor's own framework, the no-energy coins - Ethereum, Solana, Cardano - are not climate tech. Bitcoin is the only one that can be.

The research is clear: the intention behind your goal matters more than you think. The surprise is where it lands - it has some bearing on whether you hit the goal, and a much stronger one on what happens next. Let's imagine two people set the same goal: lose 15 kilos. The goal could be anything, but weight loss is so measurable and visible that I'll use it as the example. One motivation is running away from something you don't like in yourself. "I'm lazy. I look terrible. I'm a disgrace." The other is running toward something that inspires you as a latent potential within you. "I want to be strong, and present for my kids in twenty years." In weight-loss trials, autonomous motivation - the "toward" kind - predicted the initial loss and, more tellingly, whether the goal stuck 2 years on. The controlling kind, the drive to fix a flaw, causes adherence to goal for a short time, but here's the kicker: maintenance of the goal once achieved was almost nil. (source:

Client Challenge

It goes deeper. Self-criticism can spark a short burst, then it gives you back shame, and shame produces avoidance (source: https://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/publications/selfimp.motivation.pdf). And as an aside, when the goal is about appearance, even if you reach it, it tends not to make you feel better - the people who feel better are the ones whose intention was to do with health or connection (source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167296223006 ). Even "be there for my family" can be pressure in disguise, if guilt sits underneath it. So don't trust the words of the goal. Instead, notice whether holding it feels like choice or coercion.

A short story about trusting yourself Until 2020 I had a very simple, and very effective website. A homepage, a sparse amount of menu, a video on the homepage and a "let's go" button if people wanted to take the conversation further. The simple, clear, direct message and path typically led to one new coaching client per quarter who found me on the website. Then I met a marketing expert. He told me I was doing it all wrong. "People need to get to know you before they'll connect with you", "There's not enough context, or story about who you are", "And the design is sparse and not warm". I trusted his viewpoint. After all he was a marketing expert. What would I know? We rebuilt the website in what was a long, involved process. The result looked visually appealing and told a far more complete story about who I was. But ... after a year, there had been no new enquiries. after three years, still no new enquiries, let alone clients Six years later, one enquiry off the website and still zero new clients. Here's what he realized: Yes, there are some people who need to "get to know you" before they contact you. But people who take a long time to make decisions have never been my clients. My best clients by results have always been those who have the capacity to implement a new idea fast. I'd just invested money in creating a website that matched my marketing expert's belief about how people buy, not how I already knew my best clients engaged with me. But the mistake was on me. I didn't trust my gut, my own process, and allowed the words of an "expert" to override not just my intuition but my own direct experience. Worse, because I'd "invested so much in building it" I was reluctant to go back and fix it, because that would amount to admitting to an expensive mistake, the real expense being not the initial cost, but the compounding loss of business over a growing period of time as I continued to procrastinate. This year I got real with myself and admitted the mistake, and within a month built a new website. The site follows all the exact same principles that I used until 2020. But it's better because, well, I have done some extra cool things and become a better coach too since then. Here's the finished result if you're curious

Daniel Batten

HOME - DanielBatten.co

Coaching for founders, leaders and Bitcoiners who are hitting the ceiling that ability alone cannot break. The work is subtractive: remove internal...

But the point of the story is this: No matter how much expertise someone has, you are the expert on you. Don't trade that inner knowing for someone else's domain knowledge lightly. You know context they don't, and ignoring that can be expensive.

If someone says to you "Bitcoin is bad for the environment" here's my 2.47min coaching on how to respond. ~95% of Bitcoiners currently don't do this, and it is a simple (and powerful) fix.

"The headwinds Bitcoin faces, the more hills we have to climb, the more rarefied air starved of the oxygen of positive media appraisal - the stronger we become"

Whatever you think about most, you become like that, which is why most revolutions fail. For this reason, be motivated by love of the world you want to create, not hatred of the fiat world which has gone before.

There's a piece in this week's Miner Weekly, from TheEnergyMag, that anyone interested in Bitcoin mining's usefulness to the grid should be aware of

TheEnergyMag

Miner Weekly: Can Flexible AI Load Steal Bitcoin Mining’s Grid Pitch?

Flexible AI load could challenge bitcoin miners’ grid pitch, as early GPU cluster trials show AI data centers may be able to curtail power use, s...

It asks whether flexible AI load can steal Bitcoin mining's grid pitch, and it is a fair, careful piece. It concedes the AI trials are tiny, early, and backed by parties with an interest in the answer, and it acknowledges the nuance that most coverage misses: the flexible part is training, while real-time inference (the part that is growing much faster thanks to AI chat tools) remains non-interruptible. So credit where it is due. AI load is becoming more interruptible, and that is good for grids. Here is the context the article leaves out. Its own best figures are a 30% cut in 40 seconds and 25% for three hours while protecting service levels. Bitcoin mining powers down almost fully in about 0.7 seconds, holds at zero for as long as the grid needs, and does it as hundreds of trillions of independent computations per machine rather than a handful of priority-tiered jobs. It also does not need fibre, so it can sit on stranded gas or curtailed solar where no data centre can follow. And miners were forced to develop all of this out of necessity. The margin on the coins alone is so thin that flexibility became a matter of survival, built over years of real-world operation rather than a single funded pilot. Flexible load is a decathlon. To be a good one, you have to be strong in every event: how fast you power down, how long you stay down, how modular your power-up and power-down are, where you can go, and what it costs to sit idle. AI is training hard to catch up in just one of the events. Bitcoin mining holds the record in all of them except speed-of-power-down, where it is 2nd only to battery. In other words, interruptivle training-AI is a good innovation that will continue to improve, and it is a very very long way from competing as a flexible load consumer with Bitcoin mining.

Big shout-out to Bitcoin Ekasi and Fedimint At the same time that Bitcoin was printing its worst month in four years, a township in Mossel Bay, South Africa was quietly building its own bank using Bitcoin. Bitcoin Ekasi has run a circular economy since 2021: 50 kids in its surf program, their coaches paid 100% in Bitcoin, spending it at local spaza shops. The piece that stayed unsolved was custody. Some members will never manage their own keys, and a custodial app means trusting a company that can freeze or lose their money. So they built community custody with Fedimint. 7 local guardians hold a 5-of-7 multisig and issue eCash that is instant, free, private, and simple enough for non-technical people to use. The people least served by banks now hold sound money with no bank, no exchange, and no key to lose. Why Bitcoin and nothing else? No bank will build rails for a poor township, and the rand keeps eroding what little people can save. Only open, permissionless, fixed-supply money let this community own its financial rails and run them itself. Adoption does not stop when the price falls. In fact, that's when the builders are easiest to see

Few know this: one of the world's largest utilities is now making the environmental case for Bitcoin mining. Engie's largest solar plant anywhere, 753 MW, sits in Brazil. At midday it makes more power than the grid can take, so the surplus is wasted. These cuts have already cost Brazil's solar and wind sector billions of reals since 2023. Engie's country manager says one fix they are currently weighing is Bitcoin mining. It would buy the power that is now thrown away, which protects the plant's economics, while providing additional profits with which to build more renewables (a phenomenon already widely covered in several peer reviewed studies) The argument about the environmental and economic utility of Bitcoin mining is increasingly coming from the Utilities and Grid operators themselves.

"There are 2 things that are good to invest in. One is Bitcoin. The other is yourself."

“If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. If you want to be happy for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, help someone else.” Chinese proverb

In 20 years of coaching here's the most regularly occurring beliefs I here that A: hold back early-stage tech companies - "I just need to meet the right investors." - "it's going to be a roller coaster" - "I'm going to have to work outrageous hours" - "it's hard to find the right people" - "I can't do due diligence on them, it'll look like the tail trying to wag the dog" B. hold back mid-stage tech companies - "it's rude/too forward to ask someone for their budget / to suggest next steps" - "we're not allowed to speak to them" - "it's margin or volume - you can't have both" - "referrals are not that important" - "silos is just one of the realities in any company above a certain size"

Once a technology is good, advancing it is largely a function of having the right conversations with the right people I can't reach all the right people. But I can help make sure that when Bitcoiners do, they have the right conversations. Behind the scenes over the last year, I've been coaching Bitcoiners about what is the right conversation to have when they met with political leaders and energy ministers in France, Chile, NZ, Australia, Ethiopia, Senegal. These conversations have gone well, and an increasing number of the main political parties across each of these 6 countries are now favorably disposed to Bitcoin mining.

An inspiring story about how one antifragile Bitcoiner single-handedly changed the direction of the world's 5th larges utility From my podcast with Paula at The Bitcoin Edge Full interview:

What's happening on the Swedish grid right now is surprising a lot of people in the Bitcoin community. And it is a window into the future regarding the usecase the world embraces first.

Issue #049 of The The Bitcoin Adoption Forecast is out. Check your email and spam filters

The $110 Billion blindspot

Dear Subscriber, Three conversations are happening right now about the future of electricity grids. They’re happening in parallel swinlanes, wit...

TL;DR: Three conversations are happening right now about the future of electricity grids. They’re happening in parallel swinlanes, without awareness of each other. This lack of awareness won’t last forever and all 3 paths point directly to Bitcoin mining.

Another 19 new business owners recently adopted Bitcoin Their assessment a month+ later - "This feels cleaner" - "This feels like a better form of money" - "Now 1 in 8 transactions is in Bitcoin" - "20% of my business income is in Bitcoin now." One couple created this in their spare time when they weren't running 3 businesses and 6 children!

Here's what everyone who cares about social justice should know about Bitcoin ... but almost certainly doesn't

For 2 years I've taught the environmental module on Cambridge's digital assets course for regulators. Which means 348 of the people who write the rules (1/3 were divisional heads) now know that Bitcoin mining is the flexible load that can absorb the grid stress AI is about to cause. Probably nothing.