Probably nothing

"The first rule in the adoption of Bitcoin is you don't talk about Bitcoin" To give context, this is not a theory, but rather a conclusion that I've slowly arrived at, as have others who are at the forefront of adoption. On our Bitcoiners' mastermind call a couple of days ago, one of our people from the mining sector said "If I talk about Bitcoin mining, the walls go up, but if I talk about helping monetize wasted energy, or stabilizing the grid, or removing a methane problem - people lean in and really want to talk to me." Another member of the Mastermind said "It's the same onboarding businesses. We've found that if we talk about Bitcoin, we get resistence, but if we simply go in wanting to serve them and help them have more autonomy, freedom, and do business in a cleaner way that helps their family and reduces fees and friction at the same time - then they are very open"

There's a giant skull on display in the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. It was created in 2023 for GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin mining, and its job was to make the world see Bitcoin as an environmental villain. So how did it end up in a museum built by the people it was designed to shame? I was close to most of what happened next. But it took me until this year to see what the story was actually about. Early 2023 was the high-water mark of the environmental case against Bitcoin. Tesla had stopped accepting Bitcoin payments, citing environmental concerns. Most press on mining was hostile. And GreenpeaceUSA's "Change the Code" campaign, funded with $5 million from Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen, had just unveiled its centrepiece: the Skull of Satoshi, a striking sculpture by the artist Ben Von Wong. Troy Cross (environmentalist, philosopher, Bitcoiner) saw a different way in. Troy's insight was and always had been to turn a public debate into a 1:1 conversation fast. He did that much better than was ever my nature, and he did it with Ben. It was Troy who invited Ben to talk to him: environmentalist to environmentalist, peer to peer. The conversation ended up lasting four days. Troy made the case most of us would have made: how mining soaks up wasted renewable energy, how it can stabilise grids. And it worked, for hours at a time. Ben would shift. Then he'd check in with GreenpeaceUSA, and the campaign would pull him back to the script. At one point they brought in Alex de Vries, the central-bank employee whose since-debunked research the campaign was largely built on, to talk to Ben directly. Two steps forward, two steps back. Then Troy stopped. He told me later that the breakthrough came "when I stopped trying to spell out the case for Bitcoin and just said, 'OK, let me lay out all the reasons why I think you're opposed to it.'" Read that again. The turning point in the most public fight over Bitcoin's environmental story was a man offering to argue his opponent's case. I've coached founders and CEOs for twenty years, and I recognised the move the moment Troy described it. When a person is defending a position, their mind is occupied with protection, and almost nothing you say gets processed. Data bounces off a defended mind. When you lay out someone's case better than they've articulated it themselves, the defence has nothing left to push against - you've proven you understand them before asking to be understood (Aristotle noticed the same thing about character twenty-three centuries ago). And those first days of arguing weren't wasted. They showed Ben who he was dealing with: an environmentalist who knew the data cold and never once raised his voice. By the time Troy held up the mirror, Ben trusted the man holding it. The order matters. People accept evidence from a messenger they trust, inside a conversation that feels safe, and at no other time. What happened next is on the public record. Ben wrote a thread that has stayed pinned to his profile for three years: "I made the Skull believing that Bitcoin Mining was a simple black-and-white issue. I've spent my entire career trying to reduce real-world physical waste, and PoW felt intuitively wasteful. Of course, I was wrong. Few things in the world are black and white. Dumb me." The "Dumb me" included - his words, on his profile, by his choice, for three years now. Ben never became a Bitcoin advocate. His position is neither for nor against: he let better information redraw the picture in shades of gray, publicly, which takes more intellectual honesty than switching teams. Then Ben did something nobody asked of him. He set up meetings between the campaign's director, Josh Archer, and four of us: Troy, Margot Paez, Trey Walsh and me. What was said in those rooms stays private, and that's how it should be. What I can share is that I found Josh genuinely interested. A few months later, he left the campaign. Then he left GreenpeaceUSA altogether. The campaign wound down. Not one node owner changed the code. In April last year, I reached out to Ben to ask whether we could procure the skull, so it could have a second life somewhere better than a warehouse. The reply never came. Six weeks later I found out why: Ripple, the company whose co-founder had funded the campaign, had already bought it under NDA, to unveil at the Bitcoin Conference and gift to the Bitcoin Museum in Nashville. The sculpture commissioned to bury Bitcoin's reputation was donated to Bitcoin's museum by the campaign's own funder. You couldnt script it. At the Bitcoin Conference, Ben got back to me with a message: "I think you were right in some ways in that Bitcoin really has been the fastest greening technology out of all the other ones. And looking at how other technologies have gone backwards, Bitcoin hasn't ... yet, anyways." I asked whether I could share it publicly. He replied: "Sure thing go for it. Thanks for asking I appreciate the transparency." That "yet, anyways" at the end is what intellectual honesty sounds like in two words: the verdict stays open, and the evidence keeps the casting vote. Few things in the world are black and white - and Ben writes like a man who means it. The skull arrived in Nashville exactly as Ben built it. What moved was everything around it: the artist, the director, the funder, the story. And all of it moved one conversation at a time, human to human. And Troy's four days were one thread of many. Nobody appointed him to talk to Ben. Nobody appointed Margot, Trey or me to sit down with Josh. Nobody coordinated the Bitcoiners who met every campaign post with their own data, day after day, in numbers no press office could match. The campaign ran on $5 million, a media plan and the brand of a well known NGO. The defence was a group of decentralized individuals with no budget, no leader, and no titles, where one key person decided without needing to ask anyone's permission to talk to another human being directly. Satoshi's whitepaper described electronic cash that needed no intermediaries. It turned out the defence of his network needed none either. That's what the skull means to me now. A network designed peer to peer was defended peer to peer.

New interview with Nik Bhatia just dropped with a whole bunch of new content on something i've been researching for the last quarter Comments include "Oooooooof…. Nik I just listed to your podcast about bitcoin stabilizing the power grid from AI demand. I definitely learned something new. Thanks for putting that out!" "refreshing change", "brilliant" and "This is the marriage of two powerful technologies and makes me even more bullish on BTC!"

Yes I am using AI while I write. But I'm not "getting AI to write for me." Think of it like two ways an employer uses AI. A. to make people redundant and improve efficiency B. to do things that otherwise never would have been possible The way i write is not about "AI making it faster" it still takes just as long for me to write an article. But it allows me to write things on subjects that would otherwise have been impossible to the level of precision that I demand of myself. It makes the standard of precision affordable, by absorbing the iteration cost so precision can run all the way through an article, rather than being rationed. My highest-ever viewed article was one I recently wrote on Bitcoin and meditation. Over 120K views, and continuing to rise - unlike others that tend to fade after 2-3 days. It was only possible because of AI combined with the very strong direction about what I set off agents to hunt for and draft (before I rewrote it extensively or iterated more than 10 times on). The extensiveness and speed of the research-phase and amount of editorial iterations is the real benefit - not so much the writing itself which is more like a placeholder to build my own voice on top of.

This morning I went looking at how the press covered 2 moves by Strategy a week apart. What the coverage showed is worth naming. Late in May as we all know, Strategy sold 32 bitcoin (~$2.5 M) to cover a preferred dividend. The sale was mechanical and disclosed beforehand. It was a line item in a financing structure, the kind of thing they had said previously they would do. The media (including cryptomedia) did not read that way. CryptoSlate reported that traders blamed the 32 BTC sale for the week's selling. Source:

CryptoSlate

Bitcoin traders blamed Saylor’s 32 BTC sale but larger selling pressure built elsewhere

Strategy’s tiny sale was not big enough to explain Bitcoin’s correction by itself, but it raised a bigger fear of whether corporate Bitcoin tre...

Cointelegraph ran "Nobody told Saylor 'never sell.'" Source:

Cointelegraph

Crypto Biz: Strategy’s Bitcoin Sale Shakes Treasury Trade Assumptions

Strategy’s first Bitcoin sale rattles investors as JPMorgan targets CLARITY and Capital B seeks approval for a massive Bitcoin buying war chest.

The frame was about "decline", "doubt" and "the first crack in the edifice". A week later Strategy bought 1,550 bitcoin (~$101 million) - 48x the size of the sale. Source:

Saylor buys $101M worth Bitcoin as price crashes

CoinDesk's headline: "Strategy's bitcoin purchase fails to stir BTC price." Source:

Strategy's (MSTR) bitcoin purchase fails to stir BTC price: Crypto Markets Today

Bitcoin is little changed despite a new purchase by Strategy as risk-averse investors await U.S. inflation data and next week’s Fed meeting.

The Financial Times asked whether the company had lost its strategic nerve. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a3f2bddf-b1b0-45c2-b800-401b9540a2c9 The larger and more confident action was filed as a non-event. Picture a business that records a $32 expense, and in the same stretch books revenue 48 times larger. Now picture the financial press writing only about the $32, and running it as a warning sign. You would conclude the reporters had already decided the story, and were hunting for the line item that fit it. As I say, this was not only the legacy press. Crypto-native outlets ran the same angle. The honest caveat: the week was a broad market drawdown, and a first sale since 2022 carries real novelty, so some asymmetry is fair. But 48:1 in dollars, matched with a 1:4 reporting bias is what FUD dressed as news smells like. H/t to BTCPerceptions for the data.

It is impossible not to be bullish on Bitcoin once you've seen how Bitcoin mining is the only solution to the world's current problem of balancing a grid, while putting more VRE and AI datacenters on it simultaneously.

The gap between these bars is the largest asymmetry in Bitcoin right now

Bitcoin mining will never be unprofitable because you can mine for -2c/kWh in an increasing number of places. Increasingly, grids are paying for flexibility as a service, and this need will only increase with more renewables and AI load coming onto grids in parallel.

Media acknowledging what the industry has widely known since 2021: AI datacenters and Bitcoin mining datacenters have a diametrically different impact on grids ~5 years behind actually being "news", but got there in the end

I've made this newsletter edition a special free edition, because 1. It's inspiring story about a guy no-one's heard of, who's achieved something no other Bitcoin has yet achieved 2. There are more useful things to pay attention to right now than the price. 3. There's an important lesson in it that I believe can help Bitcoin adoption

The truth is not enough

Dear Subscriber, While I was at the (amazing) Free Energy Summit in Lisbon last month, I had the chance to finally ask Kenji Tateiwa some question...

Feel free to share this one widely, including with non-Bitcoiners.It's written for them too.

New paper finds: Bitcoin mining enables better absorption of surplus renewable generation, minimizing curtailment and supporting higher renewable integration without extra storage or infrastructure costs, creating a win-win for grid stability and mining profitability. The finding is significant, because it establishes Bitcoin Mining as the only way grid operators can avoid the significant cost of balancing frequency fluctuations and operational cost increases that doesn't involve significant capital outlay on grids with high renewable penetration Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378779625007874 The paper Leveraging Bitcoin Mining in Demand-Response to Mitigate Ramping-Induced Transients (Ginzburg-Ganz et al. 2026) was published in Electric Power Systems Research, which has an Impact Factor of 4.2, placing it in the top 12% of academic journals worldwide.

Fragile miners have one revenue stream. Antifragile miners have many. Antifragile miners are how antifragile money gets secured.

Just in: Agribusiness giant Adecoagro set to launch 10 MW Bitcoin mining operation in Brazil powered by renewable energy generated from sugarcane processing The convergence of Bitcoin mining and the energy sector continues Source:

Tether-Backed Adecoagro Launches Bitcoin Mining in Brazil

New paper on Bitcoin mining finds that Bitcoin mining operations are extremely flexible loads that supports renewable-led decarbonization by absorbing excess renewable generation The authors found that operations can curtail demand almost immediately, participate in demand response programs, and provide ancillary services which directly enhances grid stability while enabling higher renewable energy integration Read that last para again, and compare it to what most people still believe about Bitcoin mining. The asymmetry between what we now know about Bitcoin mining, and the actions of policymakers and regulators is simply enormous. Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590174525005458 Energy, Economic and Environmental Impacts of Cryptocurrency Mining: A Review (Jafari et al. 2026) Journal: Energy Conversion and Management: X Impact Factor 7.6 (top 4% of all journals worldwide)

I've been meaning to do this for some time. It's a compilation of free resources for anyone who is looking to - start a business - improve their influence skills (honestly and authentically) - break through habits - pitch better than the templated way of doing it Some of the links in the ebooks may be a little old, as I wrote them over a decade ago, but the concepts are still fresh. The ebooks are products that I used to sell, so they are written to a good standard and have proven useful to people. The pitching video contains a lot of things that I learn raising capital I was for my own startiup, as well as seeing hundreds of pitches as an investor, and hundreds more as a coach. Enjoy ... and put the ideas to use!

Free Resources Page – Batcoinz

As a kiwi, we have this thing called "Tall Poppy Syndrome" that makes me (still) reluctant even to repost what others say about me ... however, if you're doing something of value, its important people find out about it. A good coach from my experience is one of the biggest unlocks of your potential, and a coach who gets Bitcoin is rare. Apparently I'm quite good at this, so if you have a project or mission that can advance Bitcoin - reach out. Some recent unsolicited feedback from other Bitcoiners on coaching with me Kent Halliburton (CEO Sazmining)

X (formerly Twitter)

Kent Halliburton (@khalliburton) on X

If anyone in the Bitcoin community is looking for executive coaching, I can't recommend @DSBatten enough (his DMs are open). But why? As I watch...

Tim Niemeyer (Founder IBC)

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Tim Niemeyer (@tim_niemeyer_) on X

@DSBatten @ilbtccouncil I had a few #Bitcoin friends reach out to me after they saw this post. I wanted to give a little more insight into Daniel�...

Ismael Dainehine (CEO Evergive)

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Ismael Dainehine (@ishabisinia) on X

Last week I wrapped up a 10 week coaching course with @DSBatten Daniel Batten, and here is how it massively upgraded my leadership: Founders often...

Scott Offord (CEO Bitcoin Mining World)

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Daniel Batten (@DSBatten) on X

As a kiwi, we have this thing called "Tall Poppy Syndrome" that makes me (still) reluctant to post things like this ... However, if you're doing s...

Michele Morucci (Founder Geyserfund)

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Metamick / Geyser ⚡ (@metamick14) on X

Wanted to give a big shoutout to @DSBatten, who has advised us at Geyser on several occasions and has been a game-changer. He's been like a wise ...

There are now 30 peer reviewed articles showing the energy and environmental benefits to Bitcoin mining Yet most regulators, politicians, investors and members of the public have no knowledge of this - instead quoting first gen "research" on Bitcoin, not realizing it has long-since been debunked. This is one of the biggest information asymmetries of any technology, and any area of research, in history

First a trickle, then a torrent. There have now been 30 papers since 2021 showing Bitcoin solving all three aspects of the energy trilemma: energy sustainability, energy security (including grid stability) and energy equity. No other technology can address all three concurrently. In fact, many energy experts believed this was impossible.

There are now 30 papers showing environmental and energy benefits to Bitcoin mining across multiple jurisdictions and multiple research categories. Probably nothing