WBD463 Audio Transcription

Can Bitcoin Mining Save the Environment? with Troy Cross

Interview date: Thursday 17th February

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Troy Cross. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

In this interview, I talk to Troy Cross, a Fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute. We discuss his personal journey of reconciling Bitcoin’s energy footprint, the environmental FUD used against Bitcoin, how Bitcoin mining mitigates climate change, and the game-changing idea to incentivise sustainable Bitcoin mining.

“Bitcoin is a perfect match for renewable energy, it helps monetize the build-out of renewable energy, it helps monetize the operation of renewable energy, it helps to stabilise the grid; and we need it to happen at a massive scale, a massive scale.”

— Troy Cross

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Morning, Troy.

Troy Cross: Morning, Peter.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for flying in.

Troy Cross: Thank you for having me on the show.

Peter McCormack: It's not a problem.  If Nic Carter gets in touch and he says, "You have to talk to this person", it's never going to be a no.

Troy Cross: Well, that's pressure.

Peter McCormack: Well, Danny, is Nic the person who's been on the show the most?

Danny Knowles: Outside of the regular people, probably.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think Nic's done 10 or 12 appearances, he's a regular, smashes it every time.  But Nic's a good friend, so if he says, "Talk to Troy", then we're going to talk to Troy, talking over dinner last night thinking we might trigger a few people today.

Troy Cross: Hopefully.

Peter McCormack: But this is a subject I do care about, well we're going to talk about a few things, but we're definitely going to talk about the environment, which I care about, and I'm also a massive fucking hypocrite, but we'll get into that.  But you're an old bitcoiner.  Did you tell me 2011, you got into it first?

Troy Cross: 2011 is when I started in Bitcoin, yeah.  I think it was the end of school year.  I'm a Professor of Philosophy at Reed College, and when the batch of papers comes in at the end of the semester, all of us effectively freak out and look for something else to do, and for me I found Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: How?

Troy Cross: My girlfriend then, wife now, pointed me to some article and she was just, "This is an interesting thing", and I found, with a quick Google search, found the whitepaper, and didn't understand everything in the whitepaper, but then I found the Bitcoin talk forums, and it's the same story everybody has really.  Everything else in the world disappears and you think this is the coolest thing you've ever seen.  Maybe not everyone has that story, but a lot of bitcoiners have that story; just a cool idea.  And I got absorbed, and of course I had lots of questions and objections, and cycled through all of those in two to three weeks, and wasn't satisfied with the answers I got from the Bitcoin community, but it was enough to pull me in.

Peter McCormack: Do you remember the kinds of things you were questioning?

Troy Cross: Yeah.  I mean, first of all I didn't understand the basic concepts, proof of work, difficulty adjustment.  It was just all new to me.  But I was worried about a 51% attack, I thought that would be super-easy to pull off at the time.  It would have cost the price of one bonus from a senior VP at Goldman or something, so I didn't see why the banks weren't already doing it, why a country like China wasn't already doing it.

Peter McCormack: Well, if you think about it, we had Bill Barhydt in here yesterday telling us how he gave away 1,000 Bitcoin, because he loved Bitcoin, but at the same time I don't think he'd thought, "Well, in eight years' time, that's going to be $40 million, that's going to be $42 million", and I think probably Goldman Sachs, if anyone did see it, just dismissed it and thought, "Yeah, all right, nerds, you're never going to get this through, this will never take off".

Troy Cross: It's just amazing.  It's incredible that Bitcoin made it.  I mean, I thought at the time that the probability of it succeeding was very low, but it happened.  I mean, we're already on the Moon, it's already happened.  I'm not saying there isn't farther to go, but from my perspective in 2011, this was less than 2% likely that we would be here talking about this, that Bitcoin would still be functionable and valuable.  Maybe I should share my socks!

Peter McCormack: Hold on, are these $2 million socks?

Troy Cross: Hold on, were these $2 million socks?

Peter McCormack: $200,000 socks?

Troy Cross: Yeah.  These are socks that cost me 5 Bitcoin per pair, and I have at least a couple dozen pairs.  I still have a drawerful of these socks; I wear them almost every day in the winter.  They're very nice socks, they're made of alpaca, they were sold by some alpaca farmer in New Hampshire, who has over 100 of my Bitcoin!

Peter McCormack: If he still has it.

Troy Cross: If he still has it, right!

Peter McCormack: Hold on, they were 5 Bitcoin a pair, and you bought 20 pairs?

Troy Cross: Yeah, more than that!  I bought them over a period of a couple of years.  Some I bought for more than 5, some I bought for less than 5, depending on the price of Bitcoin.  But there just weren't a lot of things you could buy in the early days with Bitcoin, and alpaca socks was one of them.  They're darn nice socks, I don't know if you can see that.

Peter McCormack: I saw them last night.

Troy Cross: You saw them last night, yeah, that was a different pair.  I've got a whole drawerful, like I said.  I gave them away as gifts.  I should have given away Bitcoin, right, give somebody 5 Bitcoin; that's a heck of a gift.

Peter McCormack: They might have lost the Bitcoin, they'd still have the socks!

Troy Cross: It's true.  Some people I gave Bitcoin in the form of, I don't know if you remember this company, Blockchain.info?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Troy Cross: But now it's Blockchain.com, and I talk with people who don't even -- I think Andreas was working for them for a while.  They had a really nice site, and they had a way you could give people Bitcoin, send an email.  There was like a voucher for Bitcoin.  So, I sent that to a lot of people.  Some people created a wallet and cashed in their voucher by taking their keys and taking custody.  Other people just left it in voucher form.

Recently, some of those people reached out to me, "Can you help me get that Bitcoin that you sent me?", whatever it was at the time.

Peter McCormack: Like a paper wallet?

Troy Cross: No, it was just an email with a hyperlink to something on Blockchain.info's site, which if you went there, they would help you set up a wallet and you would have some Bitcoin in it.  So, I was giving people small amounts, like $10 worth of Bitcoin; this is 2013.  Yeah!  So anyway, those hyperlinks don't work anymore.  It's Blockchain.com, they're all just 404s.  Of course, I wrote to the people at Blockchain.com, they're like, "We don't have those, whatever that was, it's gone".  So, half the people I gave stuff to have some Bitcoin, half of them got nothing.

Peter McCormack: Nothing.

Troy Cross: Not your keys, not your coin.  Hard lesson.

Peter McCormack: Some got socks!

Troy Cross: Some got socks.

Peter McCormack: I owe Danny for the socks I'm wearing today.  Do you want me to pay you in Bitcoin?!

Troy Cross: Yeah, I gave someone Bitcoin in my family, who recently sold it to start a plant business, they started their own business selling exotic plants.  It's cool.  I wish I'd given everybody Bitcoin.  I don't regret any giving.  Of course, I gave Bitcoin to the EFF, of course I gave it, I donated where I could.  My travel, Expedia, used to take Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Did they?

Troy Cross: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: I regret not keeping my Bitcoin.  Tim Draper's got some of my Bitcoin.

Troy Cross: Nice!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, he's got some of my Silk Road Bitcoin.

Troy Cross: Anyway, we all have those stories, right, we all do.  I just have a more painful version than most.

Peter McCormack: So, you started investigating, you started mining?

Troy Cross: I started mining 2011.  I fell down the rabbit hole, it was fascinating.  I'm a philosopher, my interest in Bitcoin really was just the idea itself was awesome and cool, and that's what philosophers are all about, that's why we get out of bed in the morning.  But also, I lived through the 2008 Financial Crisis, and I was as angry as anyone else about that.

Peter McCormack: Were you exposed to it?

Troy Cross: Well, a lot of my students went to work for the banks, and I saw students on the incoming side as freshmen, very idealistic, wanted to make the world a better place.  I saw them all being funnelled into finance.  Finance is a fine profession, but it's not for 80%.

Peter McCormack: It's not philosophy.

Troy Cross: It's not philosophy, and it's not for 80% of elite students, or whatever.  So, I just saw this talent drain, but also narrowing of human possibility.  I grew up in rural Michigan, I didn't know anything about the world of finance.  The whole world kind of creeped me out and then eventually pissed me off.  I did peer-to-peer lending.  I realised I wasn't a bank, I didn't have access to the Federal Reserve discount window, I couldn't fractional lend.  I used eGold, saw eGold fail!  So, I was primed for this idea, and then I fell in love with it, and then yeah, I wanted to mine.  I'm not a technical person, I didn't even know how to use Linux, I couldn't do anything.

Peter McCormack: I hear you!

Troy Cross: So, it was a lot of work to set up miners and figure this stuff out.  I was tipping people in Bitcoin to help me, a significant amount of Bitcoin; don't really regret that.

Peter McCormack: Was it mainly command line back then?

Troy Cross: It was all command line, yeah.  For mining, yeah, and I was using Bitcoin QT software, which was pretty user friendly; that was user friendly.  But I had two towers running in my basement with graphics cards, four graphics cards each, for about a month, not because I wanted to make a ton of money, I didn't see this happening; but just because I wanted to be a part of it.  I sensed there was a historical movement and even if it all failed, which I thought it would, it was thrilling, the idea that we could disintermediate this entire industry of finance, which was predatory and limiting and parasitic, that we could disintermediate it with just some code in an open-source community that would open financial possibilities and freedom to everyone in the world. 

I just wanted to be a part of it, like when you travel to the Holy Land, and you just want to grab a rock from the temple or something!  It was like this religious desire to participate in and collect something, almost, more than getting rich.  I didn't really think that would happen.  So, I wanted to mine just to be a part of it and see how it went.

Peter McCormack: And you were mining 1 Bitcoin a day?

Troy Cross: I was mining a lot more than that.  I was mining 1 Bitcoin a day when I quit.  So, I don't know how long I mined exactly, one to two months, something like that.  I started on my MacBook Air.  Then, all of the laptops we had in the house, my wife was running one on her machine, and any machine I could find.  I ran one on my machine at work.

Peter McCormack: But were there pools back then?

Troy Cross: Yeah, there were pools.

Peter McCormack: And were you mining in a pool?

Troy Cross: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Troy Cross: Solo mining was already --

Peter McCormack: Done.

Troy Cross: Yeah, done.  And so really was CPU mining, it was very quickly done, and hashrate was spiking madly as people switched over to GPUs.  And in fact, even just getting GPUs, there were charts of the most efficient GPUs, and the most efficient ones were always sold out.  So, a lot of people were doing what I was doing.

I bought some AMD stock at the time too, the graphics cards, and then after about a month and a half, I stopped mining Bitcoin for reasons that I want to talk about, because I did some back-of-the-envelope maths, and the block rate was 50 Bitcoin per block at the time.  I realised that if Bitcoin's market cap ever reached the market cap of gold, or if it did right away, that basically the amount of energy we were consuming as a network would be astronomical, and devastating to the energy markets and to the planet.  Basically, I had an Elizabeth Warren moment in 2011.

Peter McCormack: That's not an Elizabeth Warren moment; you actually did the work.

Troy Cross: I actually did the maths.

Peter McCormack: You did the maths, and maybe the maths was wrong, but you did the maths and you came to a different conclusion.  Elizabeth Warren doesn't do the maths, most likely has people in her ear, influential people, and she just wants to spout shit as she usually does, and attacks things as she does without any basis of fact or reason.  So, you didn't have an Elizabeth Warren moment, because she's a dick.

Troy Cross: I stand corrected.

Peter McCormack: You are.

Troy Cross: Elizabeth Warren is very disturbing to me.  Here's someone who's very smart, someone who's been inside the academy, someone who has the same suspicions of banks exploiting people that I do, someone who's in a way primed for Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: I know, man.

Troy Cross: And what you're saying is exactly right.  Someone got in her ear, and the facts are irrelevant.  It's like we're in this post-modern reality where what Bitcoin is actually doing to the environment and for the energy system doesn't matter.

Peter McCormack: Well, I've brought it up on the show a few times.  There was a moment a few years ago.  We'd made a four-part documentary series about Steve Mnuchin, who is another vulture, vile human being.  And during that process, I watched the Senate hearings where, whatever it is, where he has to be approved, you know, they get questioned to take their role up.

Troy Cross: Confirmation hearings?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, something like.  And she went after Mnuchin, and she went after how the White House had become a wing of Wall Street.  And I was like, "Yeah, she gets it.  Okay, I like Elizabeth Warren", and I mentioned this to other people and they said, "No, she's fucking crazy, forget her".  But I was like, "No, this bit here, I like this.  This is somebody who gets it", but obviously clearly she doesn't, or doesn't want to.

Troy Cross: I think Elizabeth Warren is gone, I think she's lost, I think she's committed already.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, get out of here!

Troy Cross: That's the problem.  People make up their mind and commit, and then they double down.  And Bitcoin is surprising.  This rabbit hole experience that I had, it was intensive, energy intensive, intellectually intensive; and guess what?  I got it wrong.  My back-of-the-envelope map was wrong.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what was wrong with it; do you remember the maths?

Troy Cross: Yeah, I mean first of all I wasn't thinking about the halving and the rate at which Bitcoin's price would grow.  We're at 6.25 Bitcoin per block right now.  I was calculating at 50 Bitcoin per block.

Peter McCormack: The whole way?

Troy Cross: Yeah, I wasn't really projecting out in the future.  I was just, "What if we hit --" you've got to put yourself back in the 2011 mindset.  It was such a crazy space to be in.  You had Dennis Porter-style bulls, who were like, "We're going to hit the market cap of gold in six months".  Of course, that was crazy, but it only seems crazy in hindsight.  I mean, the whole thing is crazy, Bitcoin is crazy.  It's just crazy that we've spun up this currency out of nothing, and it's worth almost $1 trillion today.  So, what's so much crazier about it becoming, whatever, five times that ten years ago?  It's not actually crazy.

But of course, it didn't happen.  I mean, Satoshi programmed the halving just right.  We've had adoption and the halving coordinated perfectly so we don't have -- we didn't have the market cap of gold at 50 Bitcoin per block, right.

Peter McCormack: Let's just make the point that David Zhao is here watching and being a noisy bastard in the background!  You're all right, David, don't worry.

Troy Cross: Anyway, what else was wrong with the maths?  Well, I didn't think at all about Bitcoin mining's role in renewable energy, and what kind of consumer of energy Bitcoin would be.  I just thought it would be the average consumer of power.  So, whatever the mix of power was back then, which was much less green than today, I just thought Bitcoin mining was going to use that.  And in fact, if the price goes to, whatever, $5 million per Bitcoin, I just thought people were going to mine with whatever machines they had with whatever energy is available.  Whereas in fact, Bitcoin miners, and Nic Carter makes this point all the time, are non-rival consumers of energy in a standard market. 

I heard this Canadian miner call miners the "dung beetle of energy", and I love this.  They go down into these price crevices and find the cheapest energy in the world, and that energy is energy that other people don't want, it's stranded, it's wasted, it's produced in the wrong place, or at the wrong time.  So mostly, they're not adding to the energy load, but they're using power that would otherwise be wasted anyway, and I hadn't appreciated that at all.  I hadn't appreciated what that pattern of dung beetle use of energy would do for renewables, which is make them profitable.

The main problem for renewables is that they have fluctuating, intermittent supply that doesn't match when we need that power, and so they have excess power much of the time, when the sun is shining, when the wind is blowing and when the grid is not at max demand.  And, Bitcoin miners come and use that power and pay for it.  Even though they're paying very low rates for that power, it makes it profitable to build renewable plants.  And of course, you can build renewable plants in advance of grid connection, because now there's something to do with that power while you wait for the grid to hook up, and I didn't realise what a very, very long waiting line there is to get hooked up to the grid.  I didn't know any of this stuff about the energy markets.  I just did this back-of-the-envelope maths calculation.

Peter McCormack: How did you think it would fail; did you just think it would be regulated out?

Troy Cross: Oh, I didn't stop mining because I thought it would fail, I stopped mining because I didn't want to be a part of it, I didn't want to be part of the mining.  I actually care about the consequence.  So, it was like a dystopian vision, and I think this dystopian vision is what freaks people out, people like Elizabeth Warren. 

What you imagine is the people like us, speculators, desk jockeys, trading and we don't even see the distal effects of what we're doing.  But somewhere in Inner Mongolia, there is a jerry-rigged mining setup next to a dirty coal plant, and it's a dangerous miner that catches on fire, and smoke from coal is being belched into the air; and this is happening because of our desire to get rich.  This is the view from the left.  A bunch of desk jockeys, trading, trying to beat the capitalist system, not seeing the effects of what they're doing, actually leading to massive emissions.  And if you look at the ridiculous projections more the paper on nature climate change, Bitcoin alone will push us over 2° where we might hit tipping points.  And all of this happens unconsciously, no one even intends it.

That's the kind of nightmare vision that I also had in 2011, six or seven years before that paper was written, and I didn't want to be a part of it.  Go back to the reason I'm in Bitcoin in the first place, it's a beautiful vision of the future, it's utopian, it's freedom money, it's empowering, it's disempowering of the predatory institutions.  And all that gets spoilt for me if it means I'm going to be Nic Carter boiling the oceans!  And I thought, "Yeah, this could happen if it's successful".  I mean, at the time of course, it's using almost no energy.  But if our wildest dreams came true as bitcoiners, and this became the global reserve asset, then it would boil the oceans; that was my calculation, and I was like, "I don't want to be a part of that.  That just takes the joy out of it".

Peter McCormack: Did you run this by anyone, or was this just on your own, you'd made this choice; you were like, "I'm done"?

Troy Cross: Entirely on my own.  I was not out as a bitcoiner until 2013, and then I came out to a few friends.  You've got to understand how Bitcoin is in the academy.  My being on the show right now automatically associates me with disreputable people.

Peter McCormack: The alt-right.

Troy Cross: The alt-right, exactly.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's only happening in a few places, and every time one of those articles comes out that it's, "Bitcoin is used by the right.  Bitcoin is used by white supremacists", we all just laugh and dismiss it.  No one's really properly managed to attach Bitcoin to that successfully.

Troy Cross: It's a garbage narrative.  It wasn't alt-right in 2011 and 2013, that's not how people thought about it back then.  It was terrorism, drugs, assassination market.  It was just generally illegal stuff.  So, when I did tell people, friends, that I was into Bitcoin in 2013, they were like, "Troy, I didn't know you were into drugs?"  I was like, "Well, I'm not really.  I mean, Bitcoin kind of is my drug, philosophy is my drug; I'm sort of on drugs all the time!  I like ideas and they give me a high".  They were like, "But then, why would you be into this?" and I even had a very prominent, celebrated economist tell me, "Well, Troy, just sell it right away, sell it already, you've done really well since 2011.  Get rid of it".

But it was disreputable.  Of course, economists hated it, because it doesn't fit anybody's theory of money, which of course made me like it.  It's like, "How is it here?  The existence of this thing is a problem for your theory".  To me, that's exciting.  When scientists find problems with their theory, that's the moment of discovery.  You don't double down in defensiveness there; that's the moment where a physicist finds something they didn't predict, like the orbit of Mercury's a little bit off and you're like, "Maybe that's an effect of relativistic influence", you know. 

Anytime you find something that doesn't fit your theory, that's joyful, that's the time where you're ready.  So for me, the fact that this didn't fit anyone's theory of money was thrilling; but for economists, not so much!  Anyway, it's just disreputable across a number of dimensions, and the white supremacy thing is new.  I was just really dismayed to see The Economist run with this story. 

Southern Poverty Law Center ran released a report, it's pretty cool, they're tracking wallets.  In a way, it shows how easy it is to track Bitcoin wallets.  If people post their own identity with a Bitcoin wallet, then it's easy to set up a spreadsheet watching that wallet and linking it to that identity, and several of these alt-right groups did that.  So, it's an open ledger, we can track that.  It's 600 wallets, it's $10 million, maybe less than that.  A lot of it, when I've looked through the actual addresses, it's Stefan Molyneux, right.  A lot of it's one guy. 

It's just like, how many wallets in existence?  I mean, most of them aren't active, but it's like 200 million or something wallets that have had coin, and you're looking at 600?  So yeah, I wrote a piece in Bitcoin Magazine just saying, "This is insane, trying to smear this entire currency and this community with 600 wallets, especially given the dollar is the ultimate white supremacy coin founded on conquest, then slavery, then Jim Crow, then redlining, and then systemic incarceration.  This is white supremacy coin, it's in your wallet".

Peter McCormack: Well, you can add global oppression to that as well.

Troy Cross: Colonialism and global oppression as well.  It's just weird that given the left's constant critique of that, that suddenly when it comes to Bitcoin, just forget all about it, and it's 600 wallets.  This is what Bitcoin is about?  That is bullshit.

Peter McCormack: But this is a symptom of America.  Whatever is the issue of the day, one side takes one position, one goes the opposite.  We don't have it to such extremes in the UK and Europe, which is why it's always surprising to me when I come here.  It's like, "Okay, this is going to be the left.  Okay, this is the position of the right".  Whereas, I don't see any scenario where Bitcoin is even considered conservative or liberal in the UK, I just don't see that happening. 

But here, I know one's going to take a side, and then the other are going to go against them, and it's probably just because a few Republican politicians picked it up first, but it's not working.  The people who are trying to make it a conservative right movement is failing, because there are Democrat politicians, and there are people on the left who are also recognising the value of Bitcoin.  So, while it has a right lean at the moment, I don't think they're going to work, they're not going to manage to do this, thankfully.

Troy Cross: I really hope you're right.  I'm a fellow with a Bitcoin Policy Institute, which is a newly formed thinktank, and our loyalty is to the truth.  I think in the end, Bitcoin is going to be like the internet, and it will be utterly absurd when we look back and see the attempt to politicise it.  Everyone's going to be using it, it's going to be part of life.  And what we need is the truth, we need information that is not spun, in order to make wise policy decisions.

Peter McCormack: And also because, if someone like Elizabeth Warren is going to be putting democratic voters at a disadvantage, who may agree with her or see her point of view and choose not to invest or adopt Bitcoin, it just puts these people at a disadvantage.

Troy Cross: This just kills me, because one of the most recent Krugman rants --

Peter McCormack: That guy.

Troy Cross: That guy -- is that Bitcoin is disproportionately represented by marginalised groups, so it's twice as many black Americans as white Americans own cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and also it's more represented by Hispanic American investors.  You'd think this is a good thing, that Bitcoin's not for just white dudes, but it's actually, even in the US, not even looking at the global picture, even in the US I s very, very diverse, much more than traditional finance, and it's not an accident.  It's because traditional finance has been exclusive of these populations, they don't trust it.

But what do you make of this story?  What Krugman thinks is that they're at risk of getting wiped out when the bubble pops, so he sees the downside risk.  He doesn't see the upside gain, that Bitcoin, as the most successful asset in existence, has lifted the welfare of the communities that have invested in it, and that has been a diverse group of people; that's wonderful.  And if it still has a lot of headroom, which I think it does, then those communities also stand to benefit disproportionately right now, unless they get talked out of it by their politicians.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Troy Cross: I think it's so patronising and so insulting that Krugman wants to guard basically plebs against risk and reward.  Only the VCs, only the people that live here should have access to this massive upside of capitalism.  Capitalism comes with a huge upside, which capitalists participate in.  But if you only let credited investors into it, or people like Krugman, you're going to exacerbate inequality, because guess who's represented among accredited investors?  That is the global rich, by definition.

Peter McCormack: You have to be in the club to partake.

Troy Cross: Yeah.  I just can't believe he's doing this.  It's both insulting, it's racist, it's systemically racist.  Think about what racism is; it's promoting inequality.  That's what he's doing.  He's like, "We're guarding against downside risk", yeah, but we get to take risk, it's a free country, this is America.  We get to evaluate and take risks.  That's part of self-sovereignty, that's part of what draws you to Bitcoin. 

Some of the joy of Bitcoin, some of the joy of touching the rock at the temple mound, or whatever, is your own hardware wallet, or for me early on was paper wallets, and just holding this number and saying, "This is a key which I can use to sign transactions and nobody can stop me in this censorship resistant, permissionless network.  Awesome.  I can transfer value, but also I can put my labour into it, and nobody can stop me".  That's part of my humanity, that's part of everybody's humanity, the ability to do that.  To exclude marginalised populations from that, given our history in this country, is disgusting and immoral.  So, yeah, it's vile.

Peter McCormack: There's no role for Krugman in the Bitcoin world though, because he doesn't understand it, everything will have changed and he won't have re-evaluated his position.

Troy Cross: It's so beautiful.  This is someone who's won the Nobel Prize in Economics.  As an academic, we don't have Nobel Prizes in Philosophy, that doesn't exist, and it's a good thing too, because it's political.  But it's like, okay, he's really bright, you don't win the Nobel Prize in Economics without being very, very smart.  But he's talking completely out of his speciality.  Economists have no business speculating on the prices of assets; that's not his training, that's not his expertise.  And when people hear him do that, he's discredited himself over a decade.  He's been wrong at everything.  Has he apologised to all the people he's made poor?

Peter McCormack: Well, he was wrong about the internet as well.

Troy Cross: Has he ever owned up to his responsibility?  As a scientist, if you make a prediction and it's wrong, you fix your theory, you don't double down and try to make your theory true by leaning on levers of power to make it illegal.  How weird is that?  So, if you're biologist and stuff is happening that you don't predict, it would be weird to go out there and try to change nature to make your theory.  That's kind of what's happening in econ; it's the weirdest thing.

Peter McCormack: Well, I asked somebody about this, because Ray Dalio did shift his position a little bit.

Troy Cross: Yes, he did.

Peter McCormack: And I asked somebody about this.  I was like, "It feels like Ray Dalio's the only one", and I can't remember who told me, but he said, "It's not just Ray Dalio.  But what you have to understand is, what is their basis of decision-making?"

Troy Cross: Skin in the game.

Peter McCormack: Well, Ray Dalio's managing money.  If he's wrong about this, he's accountable in terms of the money he's managing for other people, and they're going to be, "Why were you wrong?" so he has to evaluate in a different way.  Krugman is about reputation and when it's your reputation, it's slightly different.

Troy Cross: I mean, you've got to give Taleb credit for this general insight about economics versus investors; he's right.  Skin in the game makes for a different kind of cognition.  You think differently when you have something at stake.  Do I hold Bitcoin in full disclosure?  Yes, I do.  And would I know the same things that I know about Bitcoin if I hadn't?  No.  That getting involved with it, mining it, holding it made me learn more, because I was motivated.  I didn't want to risk capital.  I'm not rich, I didn't want to risk what little capital I had on something utterly ridiculous.  And, yeah, buying something when you're studying it is a good idea, because it gets the juices flowing.

Krugman is doing this detached thing, which gives him objectivity.  It also makes him, like you say, what is his upside?  His upside is everybody saying, "You were right, Professor Krugman".  His upside is not helping the world, making things better for other people, that's not his upside; his upside's not even getting rich.  So, yeah, the world of finance, people react to prices and re-evaluate.  I think in 2011, Bitcoin was risky bet.  It's not 2011 anymore.  It's 2022, this thing has survived 13 years of attacks.

Peter McCormack: Not holding Bitcoin is now a risky bet.

Troy Cross: There you go.  I agree.

Peter McCormack: So, okay, but you stopped, you made this decision?

Troy Cross: I did.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you're like, "I don't want to be part of this dystopian future", you stopped the mining.  Did you keep the Bitcoin, did you sell the Bitcoin, what did you do?

Troy Cross: I frittered a lot of it away, it's painful to revisit this!  But yeah, I bought all these socks, on my travel I used Expedia to book all my academic conferences, hotels and flights.  You can imagine, if you pay for all that out of your Bitcoin stash in 2013, it's a lot of Bitcoin, it cost a lot more than socks.  So, I kind of frittered it away, and I withdrew a little bit from the Bitcoin community.  I have a busy life.  I had two kids in that time, I got married, I moved twice, I had life expenses.  Life is complicated, right.  Bitcoin was just this one thing for me.

I have to admit, when we had a bull run, I would get interested again.  So, 2013, I became very interested as we ran up to, whatever it was, $1,000 a coin, $1,200 maybe we touched.  And then 2017, of course, I got interested again.  I was so busy in 2017, I didn't have time to really get into it.  But my interest waxed and waned, but I kept a toe in it.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's what happens, right.  Mine was 2012, 2013, but just using the Silk Road, watched it go up in 2013 to $1,200, watched it drop, and I was like, "It's done, this thing's over".  And I used to go back occasionally and, "What's the price?  It's $500, it's $400.  This thing's dead".  And I remember it bottomed out and then started to go back up and I was like, "Oh, okay, but it's going to drop again.  It's not dropping, it's going back up", and it went back up and up and up. 

It was a trigger for me.  I don't want to say lucky, because what happened was truly dreadful, but my mum getting sick, wanting to get cannabis oil, turning around to my dad and saying, "You remember I used to buy stuff on the internet?"  So, yeah, that was a trigger to get back in, and then I was back in.  What was your trigger to get back in?  Because I would say now, because you're sat here, you're back in, and you wrote to Nic; you're back in.  And you've written your paper; you're back in.  But what was your trigger?

Troy Cross: Well, it was really my partner in writing a lot of these things, Andrew Bailey.  He posted something on Facebook about Bitcoin.  And he's a philosopher at Yale-NUS in Singapore.  And I knew Andrew from some metaphysics conferences, but I saw this post where he had a Casascius coin, or something.

Peter McCormack: Casascius coin, yeah.

Troy Cross: I never know how to pronounce it.

Peter McCormack: I think it's Casascius.  I hadn't even heard of them.  Dan Held introduced me to them.

Troy Cross: Yeah, I didn't buy them at the time, because I thought, "That's the most insane security risk.  How would you trust somebody not to have just copied that key before they wrapped it in this coin-shaped thing?"  It seemed to be utterly absurd.  But now, of course, they're collectors' items.  I think it was that coin, or something that looked it, he had on his porch, and I was like, "Woah, so that means Andrew was in Bitcoin for a while.  He's a philosopher, I've never talked to a philosopher about Bitcoin".

Then I found out Andrew's two partners, Bradley Rettler and Craig Warmke, both of whom I also kind of know through philosophy, and then they have a research collective, called Resistance Money, resistance.money.  If you want to look it up, they've written a bunch of papers, they've written some philosophy papers, and I was like, "This is amazing.  These are two worlds that I'm into that are meeting".

Peter McCormack: When was this?

Troy Cross: This was maybe a year and a half ago, or something.

Peter McCormack: Okay, start of the pandemic, kind of time.

Troy Cross: Yeah, it was a little bit into the pandemic, and then I started talking to Andrew about my worries about energy and emissions and diving deeper into that, because Andrew's thought very deeply about Bitcoin for a long time.  He's been in since 2013, but he didn't just dip his toe in, he's been in the whole time seriously, and thinking deeply about it.  They have a book forthcoming with Routledge, under contract, The Philosophy of Bitcoin.  It's a sort of comprehensive politics, philosophy, economics, interdisciplinary approach to Bitcoin as an intellectual subject matter, and they're building something in the academic sphere, and that was exciting to me. 

I would like to be a part of that thing they're building.  I think the academy eventually is going to be studying Bitcoin very, very seriously, and blockchain generally.  And there are going to be centres, interdisciplinary centres, which have economists, philosophers, political scientists, computer scientists that are devoted to studying Bitcoin, blockchain, through all of their disciplinary lenses.  It's going to flip.  Some of it is price-related, but if we stick around for another decade and this becomes the base layer of finance, the academy will come along.  They say that science progresses one funeral at a time, but it will happen a little bit faster than that.  And there's going to be money coming in to pay for these kinds of things. 

Anyway, I just this as where philosophers need to be thinking about this, economists need to be thinking about it.  And then thinking about the energy issue, what really triggered me was watching Kevin O'Leary at Bitcoin Miami last year.  I saw this presentation and I just flipped out.  He had something like my orientation of thinking, "How can I own Bitcoin, how can I hold it without contributing to the climate crisis, contributing to carbon output?"

Peter McCormack: But there is no climate crisis.

Troy Cross: Thanks, Peter.

Peter McCormack: We should touch on that.

Troy Cross: We should.

Peter McCormack: I put out a tweet once that I said, "You're an idiot if you don't believe in global warming, you're an idiot", etc, and it wasn't very popular with some of my Bitcoin friends, associates, people in my cohort.  I interviewed Katharine Hayhoe, who's a climate scientist in Lubbock, Texas.  She's at Texas Tech and a fascinating interview, really eye-opening.  But what followed were the experts in climate from the Bitcoin community who disagreed with her and disagreed with my statement.  And I am a hypocrite, I am probably one of the larger emitters of emissions from the amounts of flights I might, and I fully declare myself.

Troy Cross: We're all hypocrites on this issue.

Peter McCormack: But I do believe there is a climate issue, I don't know how serious it is, when it hits us, but I think there's enough evidence out there that points to an issue.  I don't know if it's solvable, and I suspect part of the reticence from some people to believe in it is, they worry about centralised governments' roles in trying to fix this, which we can fully understand because of the shitshow of the last two years.  But there are people out there who, Troy, if you say, "I'm worried about climate change", they're going to argue about that point, whether it's real or something we need to think about.  They might even say, "We should burn more fossil fuels".  I think Steve Barbour wants us to burn all the coal.

Troy Cross: Yeah.  I think we have to separate out different issues that get pushed together.  One is just a matter of atmosphere chemistry, like does CO­­2 and Methane lead to a warmer planet?  That's a closed book.  When Exxon figured that out 40 years ago and hit it and they're now fully on board, if you're fighting against that, you've lost.  Exxon's own scientists figured this out a long time ago.  And when I say it's something like, who's this conservative commentator?  Ben Shapiro, who says, "The facts don't care about your feelings", or whatever.  Atmosphere chemistry doesn't care about your feelings, it's chemistry.

Peter McCormack: Well, there was a time when the execs and the scientists of the oil companies were in consensus that burning fossil fuels would warm up the planet.  Who was that guy we interviewed? 

Danny Knowles: Nathaniel Rich?

Peter McCormack: Nathaniel Rich.  He wrote a book, look up the book he wrote?  He wrote this really good book, something like The Decade we Lost the Argument, talking about there was consensus, back in the 1970s.

Troy Cross: Absolutely, it's so weird to me.  I mean, I'm old, so I remember politicians of all stripes talking about climate change and global warming and its potential.  It's weird to see it become now a partisan issue.  I don't see climate change as a partisan issue.  Chemistry isn't partisan.  Again, it doesn’t care about your feelings, it also doesn't care about your ideology or political affiliation; it's chemistry.

Peter McCormack: Well, is there a reason for that?  Because, like I say, there was consensus, there was general agreement.

Troy Cross: Yeah, I mean the book I would recommend is Naomi Oreskes' Merchants of Doubt.  There was a conservative effort, well financed, to sew doubt and confusion about the science.

Peter McCormack: Have you found the book?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it's just Losing Earth, by Nathaniel Rich.

Peter McCormack: What's the subline, there's a subline?

Danny Knowles: The subline's, The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so there was consensus, and I can't remember the exact details.  But it then became politicised.  My suspicion is because the people who most would have been impacted would have been perhaps Conservative states, because that's where perhaps more of the oil production was.  And then you get the special interest groups, the lobbying groups, etc, and it became politicised.  But the consensus was there with the scientists who were working for the oil companies.

Troy Cross: I mean, we had a consensus about other kinds of science that were environmentally related, like refrigerants, and we've made international treaties and dealt with it.  The ozone hole is no longer growing because of the actions we've taken collectively.  Obviously, carbon's a bigger issue and harder to tackle, but we had a model of total consensus across all parties and all senators voting for that stuff, all representatives voting for it.

Peter McCormack: I think also some of the predictions, there were predictions that have been made.

Troy Cross: There were ridiculous predictions.  But if you look at the models, there were also predictions that were right on the money, even from 100 years ago when we first figured this out, the predictions are kind of on the money.  So, yeah, certain individual outliers will make a prediction that's off.  I mean, modelling is hard, modelling something as complex as the climate is extremely hard.  It's a chaotic system, so your models are always going to be imperfect, but the general trend is dead on.

But let's just separate out the issue of, is climate change real; is it caused by humans?  I think yes.  A lot of people in this community are going to think no.  What I have to say doesn't depend on what you think on this, and in fact I think whether you own Bitcoin or whether you like Bitcoin shouldn't depend on it at all.  And I also want to say just that the climate change FUD around Bitcoin is utterly misguided, apart from my idea that I want to talk about today. 

The new CoinShares report that came out, they estimate global emissions of the Bitcoin Network of 0.08% of all emissions, 0.08%.  So, if you eliminated the Bitcoin Network, you wouldn't make a difference at all to climate change.  Meanwhile, we have trillions of dollars of subsidies falling in the direction of fossil fuel companies.  That is unquestionable.  Political attention is on the greatest instrument of freedom in finance that's ever been created. 

So, I don't mean in any way, by expressing concern about climate, to be endorsing what gets called in the Bitcoin community the ESG narrative.  I also don't mean to be endorsing any regulations thrown Bitcoin's way.  I think Bitcoin is an extremely powerful tool for helping us transition to a renewably based and sustainably based economy.

Peter McCormack: Also, it's funny, I'm with you, I agree on the science that's been agreed amongst those atmospheric scientists, climate scientists, that global warming is an issue, it is caused by humans.  But I also think, what was it, 0.8%?

Troy Cross: 0.08%.

Peter McCormack: 0.08% is a small amount to fix a large --

Troy Cross: 8 parts in 10,000.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's an acceptable cost to fix the money which has so many beneficial consequences to the world.  And even, I think it was Abby Martin, who's made a documentary regarding the US Military.  I think they're the largest pollutant.

Troy Cross: I think it's 4.6 billion gallons of gas burnt daily by the US Military, 4.6 billion per day.

Peter McCormack: And that doesn't account for all the other things.

Troy Cross: That's not their electricity, that's just gas; I think that's right.  And it's just nuts.  The S&P is twice as carbon-intensive as Bitcoin right now.  If you're like, "I don't want to own Bitcoin, I'm going to just buy SPX", okay, you just doubled your carbon output.  And I'm happy to throw in the show notes reference to an academic paper with that conclusion, that we can reduce the carbon intensity of our investments by substituting Bitcoin for a portion of S&P portfolio, significantly reduce it.

It's so frustrating being in this position I'm in.  I think climate change is real, I think it's human caused, I think it's a crisis.  And I don't think Bitcoin is where we should be looking to solve it at all.  It's like the hundredth thing on the list of things that you would look to to solve it.  At the same time, I think Bitcoin is, in a way -- I've just written an op-ed with one of the other fellows at the BPI, Margot Paez, arguing that we -- it's a response to Elizabeth Warren, and Elizabeth Warren is worried that Bitcoin mining uses too much energy.  She should be worried that it uses too little.  We need Bitcoin mining to use more energy.

The reason we do is because, here's how we solve climate change, the only way we have a chance at it.  We have to electrify everything.  Saul Griffith has this book, called Electrify.  She says, "The first step is to basically swap out all of the ways in which we use fossil fuels in the economy", not in generating electricity, but like internal combustion engine in your car, like oil heaters, gas and water heaters, gas heating in your home.  All of that stuff has to stop, it has to be shifted to electrical power.  So imagine, that's a major, major overhaul on an economy.  That has to happen.

What happens when you do that?  You create tremendous demand for electricity, because now you've got to run cars with electricity, you've got to heat homes with electricity, you've got to heat water with electricity.  Where does all that electricity come from?  Well, you can't burn coal to produce it, or you've just undone all of your progress.  You have to make it with sustainable means of production.  So, what is that?  Well, it's wind, solar, hydro, nuclear. 

Can it all be nuclear?  No.  Nuclear is too expensive and is the most centralised form of energy production.  It requires the most permitting.  I'm sorry, the US does not mine backyard stuff.  We're not going to build a gazillion nuclear plants.  Yeah, maybe when we get the small reactors, it will happen, but not right away.  It's very expensive, it's very centralised, it's not going to happen at scale.

We're going to need wind and solar to carry the brunt of it.  They're cheap and they're getting cheaper by the day.

Peter McCormack: But they're not reliable enough.  We've seen what's happened in Germany where they've been reliant on a combination of, historically, and I stand to be corrected on this, but they have a mix.  They had nuclear, but they also had renewables.  They started to decommission their nuclear plants and now they're having energy difficulties.

Troy Cross: Okay, this is where Bitcoin comes in and fixes it.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Troy Cross: Okay.  So, first of all, the people who care about this cannot shut off fossil fuel production or use before they have provided a robust alternative.  That's freezing people out of their homes, that means energy prices skyrocket and people are hurt.  So, it's just immoral to do what's being done, where environmental groups will just go after fossil fuels directly.  And here, yeah, I'm with Marty Bent and Steve Barbour, yeah, we need to keep burning fossil fuels, because I don't want to freeze people out of their homes.  The system that we need to build up to replace it, we have to build that first, before turning off the fossil fuel pipe, not after; I mean, that's insane, that's inhuman. 

So, what do we do; how do we solve the problem of robustness, because renewables are intermittent?  We overbuild, we build a shit ton of renewable production.  And then we need batteries, that's part of the plan.  So, you fill up the battery banks and then you empty them, but batteries are expensive and it's hard to do at scale.  We need baseload generation, and that's going to come from nuclear, which is going to be on all the time.  And then we need Bitcoin mining.

How do we incentivise a massive overbuild of our power infrastructure?  How do we make that massive overbuild so that it's robust; how do we make that pay, because there isn't demand for that much power?

Peter McCormack: We make Bitcoin the standard for the world.

Troy Cross: Yes, we do.  We mine Bitcoin with all the excess power that comes from the overbuild.

Peter McCormack: I see what you're getting at here.  Right, okay, because if Bitcoin accelerates its growth in value, miners are incentivised to build out their mining plants, therefore we're incentivised to build out the energy generation.

Troy Cross: That's it.  And if Bitcoin doesn't grow fast enough, this doesn't happen at the scale we need.  International Energy Association says -- we're going to need to triple to quadruple our electricity production when we electrify everything.  And then IEA says, "In order for that to work with renewables as the bulk of power production, we need to multiply our flexible load, it's called flexible load, on the grid by tenfold in order for that to function.  Because, wind power's only there when the wind's blowing, solar power's only there when the sun is shining.  We need consumers of energy that can monetise that excess energy and make it pay to build out these new facilities in overbuild, so that we don't run into energy scarcity.

So, we need to multiple by tenfold the flexible demand, flexible load demand on the grid from where it is now by 2050.  That's not bitcoiner numbers, that's IEA numbers.  And, Nic Carter's made this point really well, Sean Connell too, that Bitcoin mining is the best flexible load, it is the most flexible.  It can turn off.  In a way, it's because of the way Bitcoin works.  The search that mining is, it's a search for a certain kind of number.  It's perfectly random, so you know how it is, when you're five minutes into a block search, what's the expected time before the next block when you're five minutes in?

Peter McCormack: Ten minutes.

Troy Cross: Ten minutes.

Peter McCormack: It's a trick question.  I know that because I think it was Charlie Lee put out the question on Twitter.  I think he did it as nine minutes, and he put it as a multiple choice, "How long until the next block?"

Troy Cross: Ten minutes.

Peter McCormack: And I think he put, "One minute or ten minutes?" and I, being an idiot, when for one minute, but it's always ten minutes.

Troy Cross: So, if you think about it as a miner, if you haven't found a block and you're nine minutes in and you turn off your machine because there's demand on the grid, and you want to -- I haven't even said what flexible load is.  It means that you can respond to grid demand.  This is happening in Texas right now.  There's a winter storm, the miners turned off their mining machines so that the grid would have enough electricity.  That's their flexibility.  And of course, they sign contracts with the utilities that pay them for this kind of flexibility.

But suppose you're nine minutes into looking for a block and you need to turn off.  Are you synching the first nine minutes of your searching?  No, because the probability that you'll find a block in the next minute is exactly the same as the minute before.  You're not nine-tenths of the way into a process which you now have to cut off.  But other forms of energy use are all process-based, so if you want to shut it down, you could lose everything that you've done up to that point.

So, it's a fundamental feature of the protocol that makes Bitcoin flexible, it's the total randomness of that search.  So, Bitcoin miners attenuable, they're interruptable, attenuable meaning you can turn them down like a dial.  This means that utilities can use them too to synch their frequency to exactly 60 Hz, whatever the grid needs.  So, they sell these ancillary services back to the grid.  Bitcoin is a perfect match for renewable energy.  It helps monetise the buildout of renewable energy, it helps monetise the operation of renewable energy, it helps to stabilise the grid.  And we need it to happen at massive scale. 

I mean, go to the total energy use right now; I checked it this morning, Cambridge's estimate, and there's a sixfold range in how much energy Bitcoin is using.  But 0.29% of all primary energy was the number this morning from Cambridge.  That's just not big enough for what we need.  We're going to have to make it a tenfold increase in flexible load.  Not all of that will come from Bitcoin mining, but we're not going to get much increase at all in flexible load from Bitcoin mining if it's 0.29%.  We need it to be much, much bigger.  So, I think Bitcoin mining, this is quite apart from my own idea, I think Elizabeth Warren is wrong that it's using too much energy; it's using too little.

Peter McCormack: It's so funny, it's the exact opposite.

Troy Cross: Yeah.  None of this is intuitive.  This isn't stuff I knew about in 2011, I had to research and read and talk to people.  None of this is obvious.  It's like forest management.  You think we've got to stop forest fires; no, you've got to start them so that we have a controlled burn.  Or another analogy I have is, Bitcoin is like, I've already used dung beetle, but another one is possums.  So, I grew up in rural Michigan, possums would eat chickens.  And they're gross-looking, they're like large rats.  I mean, some people say they're cute, but a lot of people think they're disgusting.

So, people just kill possums, and I think this is what's going on on the left right now.  Bitcoin is like a possum, people just want to stab it with a pitchfork and kill it.  It's gross, it's associated with tech pros, it's associated with crime, it's associated with all the kind of riffraff they don't want to be associated with.  But what we know now about possums is that they eat ticks, they eat gazillions of ticks, and we've got a serious tick problem in this country.  We've got all these tick-borne illnesses like Lyme's spreading across the country and it's a serious health problem now.  They're on the West Coast now these ticks. 

I've had friends who've had Lyme's and suffered with Lyme Disease, and when I read about the life cycle of the tick, it's really complicated, "It lives on these small rodents, and then the chief predator, being the possum --" I was like, "That's amazing!"  I would never have guessed this just watching possums.  But then you realise that Bitcoin mining is like the possum of energy.  It's like, "Oh my God!", you see it eating a chicken.  You see somebody burning coal to mine Bitcoin, you're like, "Oh, Bitcoin's eating chickens, let's get the bitcoiners, let's get Bitcoin".  But then you don't realise it's also harvesting millions of ticks and solving a health crisis.  Or rather, we're creating a health crisis because we don't have enough possums!

So, I hear the same kind of shit with Bitcoin, it's a totally non-obvious thing, and I wish the democrats and the people who are right now ganging up on Bitcoin for its environmental reason would look at the whole ecosystem of energy and its environment, look at the whole picture, rather than just, "Here's how much energy it emits"; that's wrong.  We need to be thinking globally.  We're facing an existential crisis in climate change.  You all believe that, politicians, what do we do about it?  How do we fix it; and what is Bitcoin's role in either fixing it or making it worse? 

Start there with your frame, with the thing you believe in, and not looking at just how much CO2 is emitted.  It's a negligible amount, but also you're going to miss the forest for the trees.  Bitcoin could spawn a massive transformation of energy.  I mean, imagine we triple energy production in this country; we need to do this, quadruple.  Just imagine what that's going to look like.  We're going to have windfarms, solar farms or rooftop solar spread throughout, and we're going to have mining co-located with it.  What about heating?  I basically think there shouldn't be any heater that's not a miner.  Why are we heating with anything but miners?  You're going to use whatever power you already have and make heat with it. 

Think about methane.  Right now, a lot of global warming comes from Methane.  It's 80 times more potent than CO2 over a 20-year period.  CO2 lasts longer than Methane, but it's not nearly as potent.  Where's the methane coming from?  Farms, a lot of it comes from farms, but number one is oil and gas.  Is it permafrost melting?  A little bit.  It's mostly oil and gas.  Bitcoin fixes this, as you know.  Miners, the dung beetles setting up to burn methane onsite at oilwells, this biproduct that would ordinarily just be flared inefficiently, and turning it into a less harmful gas, that's really important for the climate.  And on and on. 

Bitcoin's total role in this ecosystem of energy and the environment is ill-understood, it's complicated, and that's the picture that we really need to paint for lawmakers, is to explore the total impact of this technology, not just one thing, "There happens to be a miner in Pennsylvania who's burning coal to mine Bitcoin".  Yeah, it turns out that that coal's actually waste coal that's already releasing CO2, it's a stronghold, and they're actually paid by the state to clean up, it's a more complicated story.  But we will hear isolated stories of energy use that puts pressure on a local market, or revives fossil fuel burning; we're going to hear isolated anecdotes like that.

The big picture is not those anecdotes, it's the role of Bitcoin in the energy ecosystem, and can it help us create a new world, a new economy that keeps us globally under 2°, where we might hit tipping points.  No one knows exactly where the tipping points are, it's uncertain, but it's kind of like Bitcoin mining, you're just gambling; we're gambling with the tipping points.  We might have already crossed them, we might not cross them until 3°, but a lot of climate scientists speculate they're around 2°.  So, if polar icecaps melt, sea levels rise, a lot of bad things happen, food chain issues arise, plants don't deal well with that kind of heat, you have water issues we've got, then climate migration we've got.

Of course, these things are already underway in some degree, but we're talking about a catastrophic kind of phase shift in how life goes.  How do we avoid that, what's Bitcoin's role in that; that's what I want to explore?

Peter McCormack: One of the things that interests me most in Bitcoin right now are all these unintended consequences of somebody trying to create decentralised money.  So, when I first discovered Bitcoin, it was peer-to-peer money, money you can't switch off, there's a censorship resistance.  I was like, "That is cool".  But out of that, we now have this -- I did this show with Jack Mallers the other day talking about the open monetary network, and what that means about the ability to move money around the world instantly and for free, the impact that has for people who are outside of the banking system, or living under authoritarian rule.

So, we've got all that, we've got everything to do with what a deflationary asset and putting yourself on a Bitcoin standard means, and what changing your time preference means, how that impacts investment or malinvestment.  We've now got this as a potential to fix issues with climate.  There are so many of these unintended consequences.  I believe they're unintended consequences.  I don't believe Satoshi, when he came up with Bitcoin mining on CPUs, thought eventually we would solve the climate crisis.

It is truly fucking incredible the amounts of things that are coming out of Bitcoin, and there will be more.  There are things that are going to be discovered in the future.  I almost feel like, Danny, we need to start cataloguing these sorts of things and make a show about this alone.

Troy Cross: Oh, it's awesome.  This is why, Bitcoin itself is a very simple thing in a way, it's a simple code.  You can read every line of it, it's not super-simple, but it's doable.  It's simpler than the banking system, it's a lot simpler, but its consequences are impossibly complex, because it interfaces with human beings, it interfaces with our economy, with the climate, in ways that could not be modelled or anticipated.  And, yeah, what happens when you give unstoppable, undebasable money the ability to move it around to everybody in the world?  It's like a sci-fi prompt; write your novel!  We're all speculating, this is what's part of what's so exciting to me about being in Bitcoin.  Nobody really knows what this will do, it's impossible for a human being to know it.

Peter McCormack: And for you as a philosopher, doubly exciting.

Troy Cross: Oh absolutely, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so where do we go with this then, because this isn't exactly what we spoke about last night?  It's almost like you kept this from me, because we didn't have a conversation about this, we had a conversation about me and my guilt about climate change and wanting to contribute, and you gave me some idea about how I can help make a contribution towards trending Bitcoin mining greener.

Troy Cross: Okay, so this is the idea that got me, and I'll try to keep it as brief as I can.  This is the idea that got me back into the scene.  It was talking to Andrew that led me back into thinking about Bitcoin; but why I actually came public as a bitcoiner and set up a Twitter account and started tweeting about this, I saw a way to hold Bitcoin with no carbon footprint, as an individual, as an institution, as a nation that people hadn't thought of yet, or weren't talking about.  And I saw other ways of other people trying to do it, like Kevin O'Leary, like this company, Viridian, and I think those ways are bad.

Peter McCormack: What are their ways and why are they bad?

Troy Cross: Okay, here's Kevin O'Leary's way, which is the thing that got me going at the Miami Bitcoin Conference last year.  He says that the coins that exist already, that were mined with coal or natural gas or just grid mix, he calls those "blood coins", an analogy with blood diamonds; unethically produced, contributing to climate change.  But the coins that are mined with green energy, like let's say something from Bitfarms, that are mined with hydroelectricity in Quebec, those are green coins.  Then, he's trying to arrange for green miners to sell green coins at a premium, for people who care about climate change and they don't want to hold coins that have a carbon footprint.

Peter McCormack: But that's fucking stupid.

Troy Cross: It is.  It's not only stupid, it's also an attack on Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it won't work.

Troy Cross: It won't work.

Peter McCormack: I'll buy the blood coins if they're cheaper!

Troy Cross: There you go.  But what struck me about it was that it was just bad -- first of all, it's an attack on the network, because it's an attack on fungibility, and fungibility is something we don't compromise on, because money is fungible.  If Bitcoin is money, it has to be fungible.  But also, it struck me as the wrong way to account for the carbon produced by Bitcoin miners.  So, here's three methods for accounting for the carbon of Bitcoin producers: one we'll call origin accounting; one we'll call transaction accounting; and the other one, maintenance accounting.

So, origin accounting says you take all the carbon that's produced by a block, and you assign responsibility for that carbon to the block reward at that time.  So, you produce a certain amount of carbon running Bitcoin miners during a ten-minute period.  All of that carbon gets assigned to the Bitcoin that are awarded in the coinbase transaction, the block subsidy reward, at the end of that ten minutes.  And then, responsibility for that carbon traces whatever the future of that Bitcoin is.  And all Bitcoin traces back to some coinbase event.

It's weird to think about this, but what is your Bitcoin right now?  It's just a history that connects an address to a coinbase transaction, or many coinbase transactions.

Peter McCormack: Just for people who don't know, a coinbase transaction is the block reward for a mined block.

Troy Cross: Yeah, the block reward is the reward that goes to the miner, but it's called a coinbase transaction.  People mess it up, because we have this company.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Troy Cross: Unfortunate name.

Peter McCormack: For those who don't know.

Troy Cross: Yeah.  So in a way, you can think of your coins as a genealogy.  So-and-so begat so-and-so, begat so-and-so.  That's what it is, it's a genealogy, although it's a curious genealogy, because you can't -- when coins come together and then come apart, you can't tell which coin now traces back to the pre-split.  So, it's not quite a genealogy, but it's kind of like that.  Anyway, that's carbon origin accounting; you assign the responsibility for carbon to a coin and then you trace the future of that.  And whoever holds that coin, they bear the responsibility for the carbon that --

Peter McCormack: How do you assign that?

Troy Cross: Well, I think that's what Kevin O'Leary was doing.  He was sort of assigning greenness to any new coins that are mined in a certified green way, and then calling all other coins non-green.

Peter McCormack: Which would require those coins, in some ways, to be marked or flagged.

Troy Cross: That's right.  But every coin would actually be marked.

Peter McCormack: Okay, forget that, but are you talking about marking each coin with its carbon history?

Troy Cross: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: That's not going to be popular.

Troy Cross: I mean, the information is there, it's already there.

Peter McCormack: Okay, why do it?  I'll go with you for this.

Troy Cross: So, here's one problem with this approach.  My coins were mined in 2011 with very little energy.  So, if we're really doing carbon accounting by the origin of coins, my coins would be very, very clean and use very little energy.  But this doesn't reflect a reality of what's going on.  The fact that I have held these coins over a decade means that I have kept the price of Bitcoin higher than it would have been if I didn't hold, and that makes the block reward more appealing for miners right now.

Another way to think about this is, what's the function of price in Bitcoin mining?  How much of Bitcoin mining happens because of the price of Bitcoin?

Peter McCormack: Well, all of it.

Troy Cross: It's all of it, yeah.  Okay, who's responsible for price?  Why is price where it's at?

Peter McCormack: Hodlers.

Troy Cross: Hodlers, exactly.  It's the fact that we're holding and not selling.  So, we holders are responsible for basically all of the emissions that are happening right now in the Bitcoin mining network, because they happen in order to get that 6.25 Bitcoin reward, and that reward is worth something, because people are willing to trade Bitcoin for either US dollars or for electrical power, or whatever, at the rates they are, and that's because we're not selling.

Peter McCormack: We're not fucking selling!  Thank you, Max Keiser.

Troy Cross: Yeah!  So, the maintenance way of accounting says, if you own some certain percentage of Bitcoin, like if you own 1% of Bitcoin, then you're responsible, in an ongoing way, for 1% of all emissions right now, and that's my preferred method of accounting.

Peter McCormack: You aren't responsible, but I understand what you're saying.

Troy Cross: Right, but that's your footprint, just like when you buy any good or you take a flight, you have a carbon footprint.  You want to look at what your footprint is?  Don't look at where your coins came from, look at your percentage of ownership right now and the mining that's happening right now and in the future, that's happening because of what you own.

Think of it this way, every owner of Bitcoin, every hodler, is fungible with every other; any one of us could sell.  And of course, we have different amounts we could sell, but we all bear equal responsibility in proportion to our ownership.  So, maintenance accounting says, basically all the carbon gets mapped to hodlers in proportion to the amount of Bitcoin they own.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Troy Cross: And then finally, transaction accounting, this is what Alex de Vries uses, Digiconomist.  This is utterly absurd.  This maps all the carbon to transactions.  So, you look in the block, you say, "How much carbon was produced in mining this block?" and then you look at how many transactions there were in the block, and there could be ten, it could be very few transactions.  But you would divide that carbon by ten and assign a tenth of it to each transaction in the block.

Peter McCormack: But it misses the Lightning Network, which benefits from it.

Troy Cross: Yes, absolutely. 

Peter McCormack: Maintenance is the most obvious.

Troy Cross: Yes.  This is what leads Alex de Vries to these absurd, two-months-of-household-electricity use per Bitcoin transaction.  That's because he's got to map the carbon, all the carbon that's being produced by Bitcoin.  He's got to find transactions to be the bearer of that carbon.

Peter McCormack: Just fucking ignore him.

Troy Cross: Yes, but that's what Elizabeth Warren quotes, that's what these 70 environmental and social advocacy groups quoted, this per transaction number.  So, transaction accounting sucks, origin accounting sucks; it's maintenance accounting.

Peter McCormack: So, there will be people who are completely disagreeing and don't give a fuck, fine, but I do.  So, if I'm, "Troy, okay, I agree.  I want to ensure the maintenance of my coins is as green as possible, how do I do this?"

Troy Cross: Okay, good.  So, once you've realised that the way you incentivise, the way that you create carbon by holding Bitcoin is by keeping the price higher and then incentivising people to mine right now, and you know how much of that you're responsible for, which is your percentage, the same percentage you hold of Bitcoin, that's how much mining you're responsible for, the same percentage of all mining.

Peter McCormack: Okay, for the sake of maths, I don't own 1% of all Bitcoin, but just imagine that I did, what would I do?

Troy Cross: Here's the suggestion.  You would do 1% of all mining with sustainable methods, you would do it yourself.  So it's like, look at how much mining you're incentivising; do that much.

Peter McCormack: That's only going to work for people who can mine, or want to mine.

Troy Cross: Yes, okay.

Peter McCormack: Because, for example, we want to get Bitcoin into the hands of millions of people.  But and S19 Pro now is $15,000, or whatever.  It's not going to be easy for everybody to go out and do that.

Troy Cross: Let me just back up first of all and make sure I explain how this works, and then we'll come back to the question of how to do it.  But I first of all want to explain why this would be carbon neutral. 

So, here's the idea.  I have this image of a milkshake, and there's one milkshake.  That's the block reward.  I think of it in daily terms.  It's like 900 Bitcoin a day right now.  And then there's straws in that milkshake, and the straw diameter is proportional to the hashrate you have.  That 900 is fixed, this is what's cool.  It's a single market, it's perfectly competitive, it's like nothing that's ever existed, it's zero sum.  So, if you have, let's say, 1% of all Bitcoin and you start mining 1% of all mining, that's a certain sized straw that you stick into this milkshake.  I'm thinking of that Daniel Day Lewis, "There will be blood", have you seen the film?

Peter McCormack: I've of course seen that film.  We were debating him the other night.  We were having a question of a whole film Q&A between the three of us driving up from LA, and we were discussing favourite film, best film, film you've seen the most, favourite actor.  And I had a favourite actor, but I said, "He's not the best actor".  My favourite actor's Sean Penn, but I said, "He's not the best actor".  The best actor is Daniel Day Lewis, I think objectively.  I think anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

Troy Cross: I mean, it's crazy, and I'm not going to do an imitation of Daniel Day Lewis, but it's like my straw, as this green miner, goes all the way across the room and it drinks your milkshake.  And the milkshake is that one thing, it's that 900 Bitcoin per day.  So, the way that actually works out is that we find blocks faster than ten minutes when we add new hashrate, and then we have this difficulty adjustment, which happens periodically to bring us back on ten minutes. 

What happens is, because I add hashrate to the mining network, difficulty goes up, and then suddenly you have to spend more hashrate to get the same amount of Bitcoin as you were before.  But this isn't just true for me, this is true for any miner.  Any miner adding hashrate to the network makes it less profitable for every other miner in the network.

Peter McCormack: Hold on.  Am I connecting the start of this conversation with the end of this conversation, in that this will also accelerate the price, accelerate the investment in mining, therefore accelerate the investment into green mining; is this the trick?

Troy Cross: Yeah, this is the trick.  So, there's two goals of this thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Troy Cross: They're interrelated.  There's $16 trillion of capital right now that's locked up in ESG frameworks, Environmental, Social, Governance, whatever.  People who are sitting on the sidelines, and there are some big accounts that are sitting on the sidelines that would like to own Bitcoin, but they don't want the carbon footprint associated with it, and they're committed not to worsening the climate crisis.

So, one goal is to take that barrier to those investors in Bitcoin, whether it's retail investors or institutional investors, and eliminate it by giving them a way to own Bitcoin that is carbon neutral.  That would make number go way up.  And when number goes way up, then mining expands.  And when mining expands, not only is it going to expand, but if people are using this mechanism, it will expand in a green way, because that's the prescription.

So, there's two things that happen at once.  Number goes up, this capital is freed from being locked in ESG constraints; and the number two thing that happens is that we get massive buildout of mining infrastructure and green energy infrastructure, because we have people investing in it.

Peter McCormack: And these people are able to own Bitcoin, and it becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy.  It's a feedback loop.

Troy Cross: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Right, I'm not sure if you did this on purpose last night.  Either you explained it terribly, or you held back on the juice for how this works, because last night I was like, "I mean, Troy's cool and interesting.  This is going to be a great conversation, because he's a philosopher", but you need that whole front piece for this second bit to work, and you only explained the second bit.

Troy Cross: Yeah, well there are many ways in, right, it's complicated. 

Peter McCormack: This is the way in.

Troy Cross: Okay, I'll take your word for it!

Peter McCormack: No, because you were teaching me a way to make my Bitcoin green.  I was like, "Yeah, I could do, maybe I will, and I'll turn round to Compass and say, "Make sure my miners are in a green location", and cool, I make a small contribution to this, but not everyone's going to do it, not everyone can mine, and really with 0.08% anyway, it's negligible.

Troy Cross: Yeah, it's negligible.

Peter McCormack: But actually, when you tell the whole story of why we need to massively increase energy production for Bitcoin and why that solves climate issues, because it builds out infrastructure, and then you bring in Daniel Day Lewis and the straw, the whole thing makes sense.  Danny, back me up here, tell me, am I mad?  Are you on the same journey as me?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, we were speaking before the interview as well and cleared some stuff up, and I think you should try and get into that, because what you were explaining was why there are some corporations in the space already that are trying to offset their carbon footprint, but doing it in the wrong way.

Peter McCormack: Can they offset with Bitcoin, with green Bitcoin?

Troy Cross: Yes.

Danny Knowles: This is it.

Peter McCormack: So, they can fucking make money, they can hold Bitcoin, mine Bitcoin and offset?

Danny Knowles: And incentivise investment themselves.

Peter McCormack: Oh my God!

Troy Cross: Now you'll understand my frustration. 

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Troy Cross: So, I had this idea and of course, I had no voice, I had no way to reach anyone.

Peter McCormack: Well, you've got this now, whenever the fuck you like.

Troy Cross: This is seven months of work to get to this table for this idea, so this means a lot to me.  Gemini, it's one of your sponsors, I know.

Peter McCormack: One of my sponsors.

Troy Cross: Gemini did, I think, a wonderful thing.  I know they're going to take shit in the Bitcoin community for it, but I think it's wonderful.

Peter McCormack: I agree, sponsoring Bedford, my football team!

Troy Cross: That is a wonderful thing too!

Peter McCormack: Go on, tell me, what did they do?

Troy Cross: They bought carbon offsets to offset their holdings, and their calculation was the same as mine and Andrew's upfront, which is maintenance accounting.

Peter McCormack: What offsets did they buy though?  Did they plant trees and shit?

Troy Cross: Yeah, but they bought really high-quality offsets.  So, looking into this market of offsets, it's bullshit and scammy.  You think shitcoins are scammy?  Offsets are the worst shitcoin.  I mean, can I tell you a quick story about offsets?

Peter McCormack: Please do.

Troy Cross: Massachusetts Audubon Society, they own a large forest, a very large forest in Massachusetts.  They sold carbon credits to fossil fuel producers on the grounds that they would not chop down their forest.  Of course, it's the Audubon Society, right, they're there for the birds, they're not going to chop down their forest.  But they were able to say, "We're preventing chopping down the forest, and therefore we'll see you --" there's no carbon actually sequestered by that move at all.  But then fossil fuel companies get to claim that their ESG friendly and now they can get ESG investments.  That's bullshit. 

Gemini didn't do anything like that.  They bought high-quality credits that are a lot more expensive.  Here's what Gemini did.  They said, "This is how many coins", you can look it up on their website, they explain it beautifully, "This is how many Bitcoin we owned over this period.  This is how much carbon was produced over the same period.  This is our percentage of all Bitcoin".

Then they looked at how much carbon they were responsible for, their holding was responsible for, and it was the same proportion of all mining as their proportion of Bitcoin.  And then they looked at how renewable the mix was in all mining, and they took their percentage of non-renewable, and then they estimated coal versus natural gas and its carbon intensity, and they came up with a carbon footprint, all correct by my accounting, all correct.

Then, their solution was to offset that carbon by planting trees.  And it's like, "No, the last step is you shouldn't be planting trees.  I mean, that's fine.  You should be mining sustainably instead.  Take responsibility for your share of all mining.  Basically, you have 1% of all Bitcoin; do 1% of all mining, do it green".  And they own part of Crusoe Energy, which is already sustainable.  It's burning flared methane at oil sites. 

So, they just need to figure out how much hashrate they need.  Say Crusoe is doing twice the hashrate that they need and they own half of Crusoe, they're done.  And then they can say, "We're carbon neutral", and they don't spend a penny on carbon offsets.  So, of course I wrote to Gemini.

Peter McCormack: Did they reply?

Troy Cross: No, because who am I?  I'm just this philosophy professor, right.

Peter McCormack: All right, I'll text Cameron and Tyler later.

Troy Cross: I mean, once you see the accounting, and then you think you don't have to limit it to proportional, you could do double your share.  You could mine twice as much hashrate as you own of Bitcoin pretty easily, because I haven't told you the actual numbers yet.  So, here's how cheap it is right now to do your share of mining, and it's because Bitcoin, as a whole, is whatever it is, $850 billion, $900 billion, I don't know what it is right now, I can't do the maths in my head; but mining was only maybe $15 billion in revenue last year.

So, it takes very little mining to offset a lot of coin.  And right now, on a quarterly basis, about 0.5% of your total investment in Bitcoin, if it's spent on mining, 0.5% per quarter, is sufficient to green your Bitcoin.  So, you could do twice your share for only 1% of your total investment.

Peter McCormack: I need to get you in front of Cameron and Tyler to talk about this.

Troy Cross: Yes, and it's not just them, it's Barry Silbert.

Peter McCormack: I can do that as well.

Troy Cross: It's GBDC.  It's not just that, it's the Canadian ETF that's carbon negative.  They do this same thing that Gemini does.  They start by calculating the carbon footprint of the amount of Bitcoin they hold, in the maintenance way, in the right way, and then they buy offsets to make it carbon negative.  It's like, "No, you don't need to do that, just mine Bitcoin, just mine it".

Peter McCormack: This is amazing!

Troy Cross: One more thing.  Okay, this is hypothetical.  If everyone were to mine Bitcoin in proportion to their holdings, the whole network would be green.  As you say, retail people are not going to do that most of the time, because it's just a pain.

Peter McCormack: And some miners are still going to be mining and they don't care.

Troy Cross: And that's fine, I've got no problem with that.

Peter McCormack: But you squeeze them out.

Troy Cross: It's the straw.

Peter McCormack: It's the straw.  You're putting the straw in and you're squeezing them out.  Or, you're not even squeezing them, you're just changing the percentage. 

Troy Cross: That's right.

Peter McCormack: Michael Saylor would like this as well.

Troy Cross: Michael Saylor's another one I want to talk to.  It's like, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Leave it with me.

Troy Cross: So, El Salvador.  So, I've got a paper that I wrote on, "Is El Salvador's Bitcoin carbon neutral?" and I think it is.  So, how many Bitcoin do they have now?

Peter McCormack: A few hundred?  I don't know.

Troy Cross: I think it might be 1,800 now.

Peter McCormack: Oh, really?

Troy Cross: When I wrote the paper, it was 1,200.  So, when I figured out hashrate-wise, what they would need to mine the same proportion of all mining as they own of all Bitcoin, and it's basically for every 10 Bitcoin you own, you need one S19 Pro, it lines up pretty cool like that.  So, I basically was like, they needed at the time 120 or 140 S19 Pros.  Then I looked at what they actually have, and I can't see what miners they have, what model they have.  But they have well over 200 machines, and I assume they're close to the S19 Pro.

So, I think they're over, they're mining more of all mining with volcano power than they own of Bitcoin, so they are net carbon neutral and it doesn't interfere with their climate targets, or anything, their ownership of Bitcoin, and that's a model for other nation states.  So, yeah, not only do I want to talk to these people, I want to talk to sovereigns, right.

Peter McCormack: All right, I'll set up a dinner, I'll get Cameron and Tyler there, I'll get President Bukele, I'll get Barry Silbert, I'll get Michael Saylor.

Troy Cross: Bukele's already there, he's already doing it!

Peter McCormack: We'll get pupusas.  Okay, this is fascinating, this is fascinating.  We're going to have to talk again.  There was all this other shit I wanted to talk to you outside of this.  We're going to get Troy to Texas.  Troy, have we missed anything?

Troy Cross: No, I mean yes, everything.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  If people want to read more about this, is there a paper available; when's there a paper available?  I mean, this has blown my mind, but I want other people to read it and just confirm to me.  I'm going to literally get in the car and call Nic Carter and say, "Nic, is this legit?"

Troy Cross: Well, Nic wrote a really nice piece in CoinDesk about it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I need to talk to Nic.

Troy Cross: But yeah, we have a paper.  It's actually on Andrew Bailey's website.

Peter McCormack: We need to talk to him.

Troy Cross: You need to talk to Andrew.  Andrew's brilliant, and not only is he brilliant, he's good, he's a good person.  His friendship has been a big part of my Bitcoin journey. 

Peter McCormack: I think we'll get the two of you together.

Troy Cross: He's deep, he's a philosopher, and he's not just an academic philosopher, but he's a philosophical soul.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Troy Cross: So there's a paper that we originally wrote before really talking to anyone about this.  It's resistance.money/green.  You can find it there, it's just a Google Doc.  I also have a spreadsheet.  I have a Google Spreadsheet!

Peter McCormack: Can you get it and just email it to me, because I don't want to forget.

Troy Cross: I mean, this is an open-source idea.  I had this idea, I don't want to monetise it myself, I want to share it with the world.  Somebody's going to get rich from it, or maybe many people, because there's a product to be sold here.  Yes, this is one more thing before we go.

Someone like Fidelity, say, or Barry Silbert could make a bundled product, which is green mining in proportion to Bitcoin, wrapped into one thing, and then offer that as an ETF, or some other investment vehicle.  Then, people don't have to figure out how to match their hashrate to their holdings.  So, it could happen with a retail product like that.

Then the other thing that can happen, if you want perfect privacy and self-sovereignty, that you just use our calculator.  Some pleb, I don't know who he is, made a nice calculator out of my spreadsheet and some API feeds.  So, you can just calculate, "What kind of hashrate should I be producing right now if I want to hold carbon neutral Bitcoin?"

Peter McCormack: How do people follow you.

Troy Cross: I'm @thetrocro on Twitter, that's the place.

Peter McCormack: Okay.  Amazing, oh my God, I've loved this.  We're going to have to talk again very, very soon.

Troy Cross: Thanks so much.

Peter McCormack: No, thank you.  Yeah, I'm going to speak to some people and I will be back and talking to you again very soon.  Take care, Troy.

Troy Cross: Thank you, Peter.