"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.

In May, Ray Dalio explained why central banks won't hold Bitcoin: "Transactions can be monitored and potentially controlled, which is why central banks aren't looking to hold it." Source:

X (formerly Twitter)

Ray Dalio (@RayDalio) on X

While Bitcoin gets a lot of attention, it hasn’t played the safe-haven role many expected. In my view, there are a few reasons why. First, Bitco...

For the last two years I've taught the environmental module on Cambridge's digital assets course for regulators. His privacy claim is contested (to say the least) Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ray-dalio-says-bitcoin-is-not-the-answer-the-community-responds. But that has been well countered already and isn't my focus here. The claim I can speak to is "aren't looking" because this is factually incorrect: the regulators I teach are doing exactly that. In the two cohorts I taught, the attendees came from 24 central banks, several of them G20 monetary authorities, others from across the emerging world. They enrolled, paid, and worked through eight weeks of their own accord to understand digital assets properly. More than a third were department heads or directors. The rest were the supervisors and analysts who apply the rules. In short: the data says that the institutions many (including Ray) assume are asleep on this are quietly sending their staff to class. A few have also moved past class. For example: in November 2025 the Czech National Bank made its first Bitcoin purchase: a small test portfolio, explicitly a two-year experiment before any decision on reserves. Its governor is openly making the case for it. Source:

Governor Michl’s thoughts on bitcoin – a test portfolio in CNB’s foreign exchange reserves - Czech National Bank

In June 2025 Ukraine introduced a bill to let its central bank hold Bitcoin in reserves - permission rather than obligation. The door is now legally open. Source:

Bitcoin Magazine

Ukraine Introduces Bill To Allow Bitcoin In National Reserves

Ukraine has introduced a bill that would give its central bank the legal right to hold Bitcoin and other assets as part of its national reserves. T...

Granted, none of this means central banks are about to hold Bitcoin at scale and Dalio may be partially right that many never will. But "aren't looking" is a different claim, which the data already contradicts. 24 central banks are already looking into it, 1 already holds a test position, another has recently passed a bill to allow it. For a man who built his career on following the data, that is a strange thing to miss.

Charisma is something almost everyone seems to want more of and seek out in others. Yet remarkably, almost no one knows what it is, let alone how to increase it. It turns out it isn't one trait. When researchers actually measured it, it resolved into two halves: 1. influence, the ability to guide and lead people, and 2. affability, the ability to make them feel at ease (Tskhay, General Charisma Inventory, 2018). Most people only work on the first half. Status, authority, looking impressive. It matters, however ... it is the smaller of the two levers. The second half is quieter, and it is the one most people underrate. Charismatic people carry and express calm, positive emotion, and other people catch it. Follower moods track the leader's mood, a process called emotional contagion. Bono and Ilies measured it in 2006: a leader's positive emotion measurably lifts the mood of the people around them. So here is the working model I am testing on myself: the affable half of charisma is largely nervous-system regulation. Settle your own state and you settle the people around you, often without saying anything. This is leadership through presence. You cannot hold the first half for long if the second is missing. And you build the second the way you build anything steady in the body, through breathwork, meditation, and daily attention to your own state. Work on your nervous system and you are working on (at least) half of what makes you more charismatic, and ... the half most people ignore competely.

We're winning on one front! ... and this front can shed has some lessons in terms of how we win the other narratives too.

The first rule of growing Bitcoin is you doing talk about Bitcoin

France now has parties across the spectrum, from the far-right to the communist left to the center, adopting pro-Bitcoin-mining positions (with the Greens the notable exception). Probably nothing.