This is the very first podcast that I listened to twice. It's that good. Daniel Batten delivers an exceptionally crisp and compelling rebuttal to three key areas of Bitcoin FUD. I provide a synopsis here for two reasons: The first, to share with those who may have missed this excellent podcast, and the second, to help me better internalize and counter these points that we have all heard before:

All of these are false narratives. With regard to the first, the U.S. Treasury themselves said that fiat is preferred by cyber criminals to Bitcoin. Full stop.

The second false narrative alleges that Bitcoin consumes too much electricity taking away from more important consumers of it such as e.g. hospitals. In fact, Bitcoin miners seek stranded energy resources close to the source and removed from high energy demand centers for the simple reason that high demand increases energy prices and makes Bitcoin mining less profitable and in some cases, a net revenue loss. So the natural inclination is for miners to position their rigs where demand and cost are the lowest. There is an inbuilt economic incentive for Bitcoin miners NOT to compete when wholesale energy prices are high. Additionally, Bitcoin mining operations help stabilize the grid. If power supply is strained, the grid operators can ask Bitcoin miners to reduce their load, freeing it up for others in an emergency. The grid operators cannot ask a hospital to do this because people on ventilators e.g. will die. A steel mill may be able to pause operations for a few hours at most, because longer than that and molten steel will harden breaking the steel mills industrial equipment. Bitcoin miners provide the perfect "dial" for grid flexibility.

The third false narrative stems from a Central Bank funded report that essentially only looked at the net negative environmental aspects of Bitcoin. And indeed, there are negative aspects of Bitcoin mining. Without accounting for the net positive aspects, you get a highly lopsided view. Manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels require heavy industrial mining and also consume huge amounts of heat and electricity, which have environmentally detrimental aspects, but these must be counterbalanced with the net positives to get the complete picture. Additionally, pointing out detriments at a single point in time produces a skewed outlook as well. The solar panel industry for example has recently surged in levels of efficiency and those gains appear to be continuing. But there was a point in time when efficiency was much lower and manufacturing panels outweighed the positives of renewable energy and if the verdict was that solar is net negative, which it was in the 1990's, we would never have let the industry evolve to where it is today: massively net positive and trending in this direction. With any new technology, you have to look at both sides of the ledger, and also it's trajectory. Where is the technology trending?

30% of the Bitcoin mining network is off-grid with the vast majority of that stemming from sustainable/renewable energy. Looking at off-grid and on-grid, 50% of Bitcoin's energy comes from sustainable/renewable sources. This makes Bitcoin the largest consumer of sustainable energy use on a percentage basis for any industry in the world, by FAR. Also, Bitcoin miners are increasingly the first off-takers of renewable energy suppliers. Renewable energy sources are often far from the grid and connecting to the grid is a capital intensive expenditure. Bitcoin mining operations set up alongside sustainable sources creates a mutually beneficial flywheel of sustainable energy expansion.

Bitcoin energy usage is categorically trending in the right direction: using stranded energy, using more wasted energy, using more sustainable energy, and reducing emissions. Bitcoin has no emissions itself, but stems from the emissions of the underlying energy source, which is an important point. If Electric Vehicles are zero emissions, then Bitcoin is zero-emissions as well because both are supported by a fully electrified network. You can't have it both ways.

Bitcoin is disrupting central banks, perhaps the most powerful group of people and institutions in the world. If Bitcoin is labeled as "harmful" in Europe and elsewhere, there will be massive headwinds to investment and adoption.