Bitcoin Mining Helps People in Africa – Bitcoin Magazine
This is a transcribed excerpt of the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode they are joined by Marshall Long to talk about surviving the bear market as a bitcoin miner and how the current political scene will not be able to beat bitcoin miners into submission.
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Q: I want to continue mining, but I want to bring the World Economic Forum into the equation for many different reasons that may or may not be true. The idea and concept of bitcoin mining seems to be one of the most triggering things for climate activists, for shitcoiners, for anyone who is just against bitcoin. In particular, both energy use and proof-of-work mining have been put on the stand. I’d like your thoughts from conversations around proof-of-work from the early days before Mt. Gox. What was the rationale/reasons for the work certificate. And if someone discussed proof-of-stake (PoS), how much did you bully them into eventually becoming the supervillain known as Vitalik Buterin.
Marshall Long: So early days, anyone who says they knew Bitcoin was going to be a big, big hit is a fucking liar. When I first started mining bitcoin, I thought, “Oh, I could pay off my CPUs and GPUs by mining the nerd money. That’s cool.” I knew nothing about economics or financial inclusion or any of the good things we now know and love about Bitcoin.
So early, early it was. As for PoS, people just used it as a way to trade shitcoins. Early days on Gox or BTC-e or some of these other exchanges – it was like NXT was like one of the first PoS coins – it was just like a thing to try to arbitrage bitcoin against.
There was nothing beyond that. And then papers started coming out where people said, “It’s less certain, blah, blah, blah.” And then Vitalik didn’t get his way and had the code pushed through Bitcoin, which is a whole can of worms, and here we are today. Now that the golden boy has given up the proof-of-work dragon, we find ourselves where they are trying to get us on ESG. It failed miserably because most miners actually use a huge amount of green power.
BlackRock tried to put out all these ESG mandates, so all the other vigilante capitalists said, “Oh, we have to follow this ESG score crap.” It did not work. Then you got the war, then BlackRock stepped back on their ESG, then everyone else stepped back on their ESG, and now everything is bitcoin mining is the devil because “Look at Ethereum, look at what they did, why can’t you do it?” And the general answer is “Because we’re not stupid.” There isn’t much else to say about it.
P: Yes. It’s quite annoying, at least for me. I keep expecting to be desensitized to the lies and blatant misrepresentation of reality and facts to push the baggage of a very specific group of people – i.e. people pushing ESG and anti-Bitcoin narratives – but it just pisses me off every damn time .
Lang: Almost all Bitcoins I know, they don’t have problems with ESG or green. We like to go outside. We like to breathe fresh air. There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with treating people nicely[ly]. And the management part of running a company and not being a crap boss, all that is good. But when you try to leverage that to force people to invest in things you want them to invest in, that’s the damn problem. No one is going to say, “Oh yeah, I’d rather melt the ice caps and mine bitcoin.” Everyone would probably prefer to be warm in winter.
There’s no reason we can’t do it all and not be complete badasses about it. The fiat, woke nation incentives are completely distorting their messaging and it’s just sloppy at this point. The White House report was a fucking joke. They didn’t even try, they didn’t even try.
They even interviewed Nic Carter and didn’t use any of his stuff. He just did a great podcast with Peter [McCormack] and was quite interested to hear how they interviewed many other Bitcoin people and did not use anyone’s information.
They don’t even try to hide it now. It is a clear, targeted attack. It doesn’t really have any scientific basis, and the best thing is that when it gets cold in Europe, this is the part of the story where it’s a screw around and find out type of situation.
P: It’s annoying. As you say, it has no basis in reality. The specific talking points are so divorced from what is actually happening and they are so insane. I feel like that’s a trap that’s really hard for me not to fall into, which is when people say, “Oh, Bitcoin uses 0.5% (or whatever the hell it is) of the world’s energy.” It is very difficult for me not to debate that claim. Do you drive Christmas lights? Do you dry your own clothes in a tumble dryer? Did you leave the lights on? Do you drive a car? All of these things use a lot more energy than Bitcoin does, just in the US. But it is actually the wrong frame. If you get down in the mud, you’ve already lost. The real framework is: If someone pays for electricity, if they pay for electricity or if they generate it themselves from a product that is considered waste from another industry, you should be able to do whatever you want. with that current.
We give that right to every person in America when they buy electricity from the meter, but for some reason with Bitcoin we try to moralize it. It’s because of moralizing things, people love to get so bent out of shape about issues that have a moral bent, even when it’s completely wrong.
Lang: If you zoom out and look at the rest of the globe, it’s much easier to see how none of this actually happens [matters]. I heard that Pornhub uses eight times the energy of bitcoin miners. I would buy it; I would definitely buy it.
The rest of the world does not have such problems. I recently went to Africa and started looking at how mining can help communities and things like that. The reality is that the problems of the Western world are not Africa’s problems. If the entire global financial sector melts down and Russia bombs the US or whatever, Africa will just keep doing its thing and will barely skip a beat.
When people start talking about this, I will bring up the story of people in Africa [who] don’t use so much power because it’s too expensive, not because they don’t necessarily have access to it. It’s just because it’s a Catch-22 cycle where the generators only sell power for four to five hours a day because people are just turning on the lights and charging their cellphones.
Because of that they have to charge $0.050, $0.60 per kWh. Because it’s so high, society doesn’t spend enough, and it’s like this circle of terrible incentives. Mining can step in and really adjust those incentives back because there is no central grid in Africa, so you can’t sell your power anytime like a generator, but if you tie a mining operation to it, now people start getting cheaper, more reliable power, and instead of cooking with kerosene or cooking food with kerosene, which is a very dangerous damn thing to do – the number of people who like to be caught on fire for cooking with kerosene, children who have lung problems from being around kerosene lamps and kerosene fires, it’s very loud – now these people who are connected to mini-grids doing mining are seeing their electricity bills go down a lot and are now cooking with hot plates, electric hot plates and things like that. Mining affects people’s quality of life directly without a filter. It’s just the right incentive. Everyone makes money. Society saves money. Not many people are going to say, “Oh, that’s bad,” because most of the power is hydro anyway, so now it is. When you tell that story, people shut up pretty quickly.
