dsbatten
Daniel Batten

I like turning waste into power. Landfill gas. Eroding currencies. The human potential.

danielbatten.co

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npub13lkyycj8s3da6fhndtj0wd6s3s2ahmq86s7wrruvzd4tnc66cgfqn4lpsy

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nprofile1qqsglmzzvfrcgk7aymek4e8hxaggc9wmasrag08p37xpx64euddvyyspz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dsq36amnwvaz7tmwdaehgu3dwp6kytnhv4kxcmmjv3jhytnwv46qz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxuet5qyw8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytndw46xjmnewaskcmr9wshxxmmdqyw8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnzd96xxmmfdejhytnnda3kjctvg8kqf6

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Last Notes

2026-07-16 14:42:52 UTC

Just put together my new website.
The old one was 6 years out of date and didn't reflect any of my Bitcoin work. It does now!
Grateful for 2 things
1. For how Bitcoin has grown me as a person,
and ...
2. That we have Nostr, so I can put an external link in a message and not have to endure a 90% derate.
Here's the site. The homepage also backlinks to all my Bitcoin&Energy research
https://danielbatten.co/

2026-07-15 16:15:29 UTC

Don't know how this happened so fast, but suddenly I've coached over 40 Bitcoiners! (this picture is now out of date)
I'm a bit overwhelmed by how much they've advanced Bitcoin since. Between them, they're now
- they've secured funding (including Tim Draper, Ego Death Capital)
- successfully launched 2 new Bitcoin policy institutes
- created an in-house solution that stabilizes Sweden's grid
- shifted Bitcoin policy through conversations with political leaders and energy ministers in 3 different countries
They did this not only because I know something about how to bring out the best in people, but also because Bitcoiners are amazing people and something phenomenal happens when they work as a peer network
My vision is to help Bitcoiners become as antifragile as Bitcoin, operate with a full stack of self-belief, while being the change they want to see in the world.
You're the average of the 5-6 people you hang out with most often. So the impact on your focus, habits, and self-belief and progress of those people being highly committed Bitcoiners while also having a coach who helps you overcome your blindspots is very net positive for you, and for Bitcoin.
If you'd like to find out more, reach out.
https://blossom.primal.net/2b36c9be074f248e72e0bd81ac353ce15f657f407a9f49169bebcbe9c50eecd3.png

2026-07-14 13:43:43 UTC

In 5 minutes, this is the remarkable story of why Bitcoin mining is the only economically sustainable solution to the collision of the 2 biggest megatrends in the history of electricity
https://blossom.primal.net/f8be404e4e031ad6d0b382484d5b0562f71fdace72b9ea7c1f77cae6d6ff7b16.mov

2026-07-10 02:19:06 UTC

Thank you Lloyds for the free Bitcoin marketing
https://blossom.primal.net/7efac0b8684a4e16d3377d19ae2c9193285f3d6cc36211a0b624c7ea511de4e9.png

2026-07-09 15:05:00 UTC

A short story about trusting yourself
Until 2020 I had a very simple, and very effective website. A homepage, a sparse amount of menu, a video on the homepage and a "let's go" button if people wanted to take the conversation further.
The simple, clear, direct message and path typically led to one new coaching client per quarter who found me on the website.
Then I met a marketing expert.
He told me I was doing it all wrong. "People need to get to know you before they'll connect with you", "There's not enough context, or story about who you are", "And the design is sparse and not warm".
I trusted his viewpoint. After all he was a marketing expert. What would I know?
We rebuilt the website in what was a long, involved process. The result looked visually appealing and told a far more complete story about who I was.
But ...
after a year, there had been no new enquiries.
after three years, still no new enquiries, let alone clients
Six years later, one enquiry off the website and still zero new clients.
Here's what he realized:
Yes, there are some people who need to "get to know you" before they contact you. But people who take a long time to make decisions have never been my clients. My best clients by results have always been those who have the capacity to implement a new idea fast.
I'd just invested money in creating a website that matched my marketing expert's belief about how people buy, not how I already knew my best clients engaged with me.
But the mistake was on me. I didn't trust my gut, my own process, and allowed the words of an "expert" to override not just my intuition but my own direct experience.
Worse, because I'd "invested so much in building it" I was reluctant to go back and fix it, because that would amount to admitting to an expensive mistake, the real expense being not the initial cost, but the compounding loss of business over a growing period of time as I continued to procrastinate.
This year I got real with myself and admitted the mistake, and within a month built a new website.
The site follows all the exact same principles that I used until 2020. But it's better because, well, I have done some extra cool things and become a better coach too since then.
Here's the finished result if you're curious
https://danielbatten.co/
But the point of the story is this:
No matter how much expertise someone has, you are the expert on you. Don't trade that inner knowing for someone else's domain knowledge lightly. You know context they don't, and ignoring that can be expensive.

2026-07-09 14:47:36 UTC

If someone says to you "Bitcoin is bad for the environment" here's my 2.47min coaching on how to respond. https://blossom.primal.net/9e118a42f7af696ecaa5b5a924541450891d7343c1a55150b7d29941e722cdbc.mp4
~95% of Bitcoiners currently don't do this, and it is a simple (and powerful) fix.

2026-07-08 16:03:11 UTC

"The headwinds Bitcoin faces, the more hills we have to climb, the more rarefied air starved of the oxygen of positive media appraisal - the stronger we become"
https://blossom.primal.net/3045654eea05ee40c05c9479a6953e5934362fdbb6691e90ca0ed96b9b24a615.mp4

2026-07-07 03:30:20 UTC

There's a piece in this week's Miner Weekly, from TheEnergyMag, that anyone interested in Bitcoin mining's usefulness to the grid should be aware of
https://theenergymag.com/news/2026-07-02/miner-weekly-flexible-ai-load-steal-bitcoin-mining-grid-pitch
It asks whether flexible AI load can steal Bitcoin mining's grid pitch, and it is a fair, careful piece. It concedes the AI trials are tiny, early, and backed by parties with an interest in the answer, and it acknowledges the nuance that most coverage misses: the flexible part is training, while real-time inference (the part that is growing much faster thanks to AI chat tools) remains non-interruptible.
So credit where it is due. AI load is becoming more interruptible, and that is good for grids.
Here is the context the article leaves out. Its own best figures are a 30% cut in 40 seconds and 25% for three hours while protecting service levels. Bitcoin mining powers down almost fully in about 0.7 seconds, holds at zero for as long as the grid needs, and does it as hundreds of trillions of independent computations per machine rather than a handful of priority-tiered jobs. It also does not need fibre, so it can sit on stranded gas or curtailed solar where no data centre can follow.
And miners were forced to develop all of this out of necessity. The margin on the coins alone is so thin that flexibility became a matter of survival, built over years of real-world operation rather than a single funded pilot.
Flexible load is a decathlon. To be a good one, you have to be strong in every event: how fast you power down, how long you stay down, how modular your power-up and power-down are, where you can go, and what it costs to sit idle. AI is training hard to catch up in just one of the events.
Bitcoin mining holds the record in all of them except speed-of-power-down, where it is 2nd only to battery.
In other words, interruptivle training-AI is a good innovation that will continue to improve, and it is a very very long way from competing as a flexible load consumer with Bitcoin mining.

2026-07-06 17:14:45 UTC

Few know this: one of the world's largest utilities is now making the environmental case for Bitcoin mining.
Engie's largest solar plant anywhere, 753 MW, sits in Brazil.
At midday it makes more power than the grid can take, so the surplus is wasted. These cuts have already cost Brazil's solar and wind sector billions of reals since 2023.
Engie's country manager says one fix they are currently weighing is Bitcoin mining.
It would buy the power that is now thrown away, which protects the plant's economics, while providing additional profits with which to build more renewables (a phenomenon already widely covered in several peer reviewed studies)
The argument about the environmental and economic utility of Bitcoin mining is increasingly coming from the Utilities and Grid operators themselves.

2026-07-06 14:13:24 UTC

"There are 2 things that are good to invest in. One is Bitcoin. The other is yourself."
https://blossom.primal.net/4af29e640de31668b35514c2c1467dcdc5bbecfaa8f205434483413068aa7ee7.mp4

2026-07-06 04:29:12 UTC

“If you want to be happy for an hour, take a nap. If you want to be happy for a day, go fishing. If you want to be happy for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want to be happy for a lifetime, help someone else.”
Chinese proverb

2026-07-06 02:02:41 UTC

Once a technology is good, advancing it is largely a function of having the right conversations with the right people
I can't reach all the right people.
But I can help make sure that when Bitcoiners do, they have the right conversations.
Behind the scenes over the last year, I've been coaching Bitcoiners about what is the right conversation to have when they met with political leaders and energy ministers in France, Chile, NZ, Australia, Ethiopia, Senegal.
These conversations have gone well, and an increasing number of the main political parties across each of these 6 countries are now favorably disposed to Bitcoin mining.

2026-07-04 14:26:52 UTC

An inspiring story about how one antifragile Bitcoiner single-handedly changed the direction of the world's 5th larges utility
https://blossom.primal.net/260656a6f47d775ffce193041c115e26ed7d9bd6a05fc3d73e6bce4aa48f2d28.mp4
From my podcast with Paula at The Bitcoin Edge
Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K2wOko4iYo

2026-07-03 13:36:04 UTC

What's happening on the Swedish grid right now is surprising a lot of people in the Bitcoin community. And it is a window into the future regarding the usecase the world embraces first.
https://blossom.primal.net/3682f37ce6fa14f1756b10667dea9811bb20a866d341cb6e3cf514cf29084048.mp4

2026-07-02 00:42:04 UTC

Here's what everyone who cares about social justice should know about Bitcoin
... but almost certainly doesn't
https://blossom.primal.net/917765a02852cc76d759603240bdb5f4c557fa7a72ea7cbe1e56a4733555f36b.mp4

2026-07-01 14:19:48 UTC

In May, Ray Dalio explained why central banks won't hold Bitcoin: "Transactions can be monitored and potentially controlled, which is why central banks aren't looking to hold it."
Source: https://x.com/RayDalio/status/2053938354425602279
For the last two years I've taught the environmental module on Cambridge's digital assets course for regulators.
His privacy claim is contested (to say the least)
Source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ray-dalio-says-bitcoin-is-not-the-answer-the-community-responds. But that has been well countered already and isn't my focus here.
The claim I can speak to is "aren't looking" because this is factually incorrect: the regulators I teach are doing exactly that.
In the two cohorts I taught, the attendees came from 24 central banks, several of them G20 monetary authorities, others from across the emerging world.
They enrolled, paid, and worked through eight weeks of their own accord to understand digital assets properly. More than a third were department heads or directors. The rest were the supervisors and analysts who apply the rules.
In short: the data says that the institutions many (including Ray) assume are asleep on this are quietly sending their staff to class.
A few have also moved past class.
For example: in November 2025 the Czech National Bank made its first Bitcoin purchase: a small test portfolio, explicitly a two-year experiment before any decision on reserves. Its governor is openly making the case for it.
Source: https://www.cnb.cz/en/public/media-service/interviews-articles/Governor-Michls-thoughts-on-bitcoin-a-test-portfolio-in-CNBs-foreign-exchange-reserves/
In June 2025 Ukraine introduced a bill to let its central bank hold Bitcoin in reserves - permission rather than obligation. The door is now legally open.
Source: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/ukraine-introduces-bill-to-allow-bitcoin-in-national-reserves
Granted, none of this means central banks are about to hold Bitcoin at scale and Dalio may be partially right that many never will. But "aren't looking" is a different claim, which the data already contradicts.
24 central banks are already looking into it, 1 already holds a test position, another has recently passed a bill to allow it.
For a man who built his career on following the data, that is a strange thing to miss.

2026-07-01 00:56:21 UTC

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

2026-06-30 19:37:13 UTC

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

2026-06-30 19:35:47 UTC

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

2026-06-30 14:29:48 UTC

Satoshi observed firsthand the non-independence of banks, central banks and govt and commented on this in email messages.
He observed how the banking sector's financial losses were socialized and yet gains were privatized.
Bitcoin was created at the time that the 1% had just done over the 99% and the first lines in the genesis block reflected this.
In short: social justice was at the core of Bitcoin's creation.
https://blossom.primal.net/19ae530cb96624a0a9da662242593919f978159c8d7eb0ff71e57b7b04d569cd.png -

2026-06-30 13:52:19 UTC

Diamond hands start with low cortisol
Cortisol is commonly known as the stress hormone. It turns out it is also a hormone that influences how we are remembered by others. A leader with high cortisol is not just more likely to lose their composure and treat others badly - high cortisol also degrades the exact faculties that a highly effective leader needs on a daily basis: working memory, impulse control, sleep. Outside of work, stress is also estimated to play a role in 60-80% of primary-care visits.
In a randomised field study of executives, a three-day SKY breathing course (a type of breathwork which I've been teaching for about 20 years) significantly lowered blood cortisol and stress while lifting life satisfaction and emotional stability. A year on, the gains had held for the people who kept the practice going, without having to repeat the course. The same pattern showed up in working employees with calendars: a three-day programme cut anxiety and lifted thriving.
The cortisol-lowering observation is not unique to breathwork. Plenty of things have been shown in studies to effectively lower cortisol: walking, a holiday, or even a simple relaxation routine measurably drops it too. What is unique to breathwork are the other factors that accompany the stress reduction.
The same practice that brings your cortisol down is the one sharpening the attention, improving your heart-rate variability, defending the deep sleep, all at once. Lowering cortisol is common. Lowering it alongside eight other measurable gains, all of which matter for how you lead, and all from one practice, is rare.
When I ask leaders in workshops to recall the most important quality in the leader that they most admired, two answers that I consistently hear are "They were always so present. When I was in the room, they were completely undistracted and it felt like I was the only thing that mattered" and "They were the one everyone looked to for calm and direction when there was a storm going on" (they literally used those words, "storm" and "present").
A lower cortisol baseline means calm in the stormy moments that decide how a leader is remembered. It means undistracted presence in the moments when you are in the room with them.
Cortisol is what tightens your chest as you talk. It is what makes you do something impulsively without thinking of downstream consequences, like panic-selling into a drawdown you would have held through with a clear head. It is what tips your tone a notch sharper than you meant to when giving feedback.
https://blossom.primal.net/d8d672ec97e9907d9aaac9c38703b1d778c5eeb824bc9fd214b0b9d20479c1bf.png A lower cortisol baseline can make the difference between people recalling you as the inspirational leadership example in workshops run by people like me, and you being the example when I ask "Can you recall a counterexample of great leadership?"
I suggest breathing techniques to the founders and leaders I coach because it changes not just the way they communicate and decide, but the ripple of impact they have on people's lives years into the future.

2026-06-29 17:15:16 UTC

The world is just a hair's breadth away from seeing that Bitcoin mining solves the energy trilemma
That's why it has now been embraced by the political left, center, and right, in France
And the irony is - AI datacenters are what has brought Bitcoin mining's moment of truth closer to our awareness.
https://blossom.primal.net/39b20700d1a808465139b6cf4d61746c76b4e35413866e5501bb5bb742b5cb79.mp4
Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlzpFwE7Wuk

2026-06-23 13:42:35 UTC

When I was in Madrid for the MadBitcoin conference, i got talking to Michal Nydrle about how Bitcoin mining's potential to transform our grids
He say he'd had his mind blown. Have had several comments like this since.
Turns out, how Bitcoin mining transforms the way humans do energy is as much of a rabbit hole as how Bitcoin transforms the way humans do money.
https://blossom.primal.net/e91557d71d786e0f77edc9b400a270b791c0f76133096b51d715ad30f6054c7a.png

2026-06-22 14:03:50 UTC

This year you'll see me do a lot more of this: jumping on non-Bitcoin podcasts to educate people about the value of Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining
Contrary to what you might thing: most people are curious and highly receptive.
This pod was with people in the energy sector who said to me afterwards it was one of the most mindblowing podcasts they'd had.
Listen on Wired For Energy website:
https://www.wiredforenergy.org/bitcoin-climate-villain-or-solution-with-daniel-batten/
Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6GkN3w5Z8guaMnRuXXo3pu
Apple:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bitcoin-climate-villain-or-solution-with-daniel-batten/id1808796551?i=1000773196932

2026-06-22 13:36:13 UTC

Just in: Oman just launched a (mandatory) National Bitcoin Mining Pool.
Interesting paradox:
It is also a State-Backed Push for Regulatory Control that will help decentralize mining pools, particularly if more governments do this.
Context: Oman is in the middle of a $700M+ push into industrial-scale Bitcoin mining

2026-06-21 19:50:19 UTC

Everyone in Bitcoin knows that Bitcoin solves a money problem
A subset know that Bitcoin also solves an energy problem
And yet ironically ... the energy problem is likely to be the one the world sees value in first, for a very simple reason
https://blossom.primal.net/d2a2c94a334942131b0a050761afedef282286ee9890e8b73f85504496bc334d.mp4

2026-06-19 20:32:42 UTC

You cannot build a low-time-preference life while rehearsing high time preference every hour.

2026-06-18 22:14:53 UTC

Bitcoin is most owned where it solves very real problems.
For example of the top 14, here's the problems it solves.
UAE: Remittances.
The world's highest-migrant-share workforce sends money home through banks that skim 6%+ a transfer. Bitcoin moves it for a fraction.
Source: https://www.khaleejtimes.com/business/more-uae-residents-remitting-using-bitcoin-other-cryptocurrency
Vietnam: Bank-account control.
The state deactivated 86M+ bank accounts in a single AML sweep. I spoke to people this happened to who lost their savings. They had left Vietnam years before, and found the account that held their money simply closed. A bank that can freeze you for going quiet is the whole argument for holding your own keys.
Source: https://vietnamnews.vn/economy/1721534/more-than-86-million-bank-accounts-to-be-terminated-from-september-1.html
United States: Investment.
Here the driver is portfolio allocation. Spot ETFs opened the door and institutions walked through, pulling roughly $14.8B into the funds in 2025.
Source: https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/12/18/u-s-bitcoin-etfs-see-strongest-inflows-for-over-a-month-as-btc-dominance-hits-60
Philippines: Remittances.
Overseas workers wire billions home each year. Bitcoin rails undercut the high-fee operators they are otherwise forced to use.
Source: https://www.tranglo.com/blog/the-state-of-digital-currency-and-remittance-in-the-philippines/
Iran: Sanctions.
Locked out of the dollar system, Iran mines its subsidised energy into Bitcoin and spends it on imports the banks can't touch.
Source: https://www.elliptic.co/blog/how-iran-uses-bitcoin-mining-to-evade-sanctions
Brazil: Inflation hedge.
Brazilians hold Bitcoin as hard money against a currency that keeps losing ground, and as a serious investment asset.
Source: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-latin-america-crypto-adoption/
Saudi Arabia: Returns
Most Saudis are under 30, digitally native, and chasing upside under Vision 2030. They are one of the fastest-growing Bitcoin markets in the region.
Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/saudi-arabias-crypto-market-to-hit-50-billion/
Singapore: Zero capital gains tax.
Capital and wealth managers cluster where Bitcoin profits aren't taxed.
Source: https://www.ainvest.com/news/singapore-crypto-ownership-hits-16-0-capital-gains-tax-attraction-2508/
Venezuela: Hyperinflation
As the bolivar collapses, Venezuelans move savings into Bitcoin to hold value the state can't erase
Source: https://www.ccn.com/education/crypto/venezuela-inflation-bitcoin-usdt-p2p-crypto-lifeline/
El Salvador: Conviction.
The IMF stripped the legal-tender mandate in 2025, so nobody has to touch Bitcoin. Around one in ten Salvadorans still do, by choice.
Source: https://gfmag.com/economics-policy-regulation/el-salvador-drops-bitcoin-legal-tender/
Ukraine: War.
When ATMs capped withdrawals and savings froze, Bitcoin crossed borders money couldn't, and funded the defence.
Source: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/can-crypto-deliver-aid-amid-war-ukraine-holds-the-answer/
Argentina: Inflation.
After decades of a falling peso, Argentines save in Bitcoin to protect what their melting-icecube currency keeps eroding.
Source: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2024-latin-america-crypto-adoption/
Thailand: Investment
Thais treat Bitcoin as a high-return asset class, and the state is courting crypto tourists. A spot Bitcoin ETF was approved in 2024.
Source: https://www.nationthailand.com/business/digital-assets/40052606
South Africa: Hedging the rand.
The rand has devalued 8x against the USD since 2000. A weak, volatile currency and a deep investor base push South Africans into Bitcoin as an alternative asset.
Source: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/subsaharan-africa-crypto-adoption-2024/
Notice the common theme? With the exception of US, Singapore, Thailand and Saudi Arabia, all the other countries are using Bitcoin to solve problems that affect basic livelihood in ways most of us struggle to imagine even being necessary in the West.
There is a name for this: "Solipsistic". It means treating one's own experience as the only reality.
But the more common term is "Tone-deaf".
Those who continue to maintain Bitcoin "has no value" are actually saying (either wittingly, or unwitting "the lives of people who are not like me have no value". Increasingly "Bitcoin has no value" sounds like Marie Antoinette declaring "let them eat cake" - a wilful or careless plea from the elite who genuinely can't conceive of scarcity.
https://blossom.primal.net/73dfabcfa07f536043a2c85a2b6621431b4720e96c67ff76067959f6b279ffc6.png

2026-06-17 15:37:29 UTC

Little known truth: Bitcoin mining stabilizes the world's grids which are facing 2 destabilizing forces in parallel
Probably nothing
https://blossom.primal.net/6f202bed5e67f08b5dbe62fef1840c26bd5759e2248159102e445439d264828a.png

2026-06-16 17:19:39 UTC

If you want to be a great leader, you have no alternative but to also be a coach. If you want to be an average leaders, becoming a coach is not necessary. Here's why.
https://blossom.primal.net/7ba8c594d5d2dbaf8595294dc9403c3aaa3306490f2dceb678ca2f7d1b3acae1.mp4

2026-06-16 14:51:55 UTC

The world doesn't need more thoughtleaders. The world needs more people who are an example of that which they are talking about
https://blossom.primal.net/28d3441f6ac131380ef40e7a767538c5a8025180233cb4a1ed0ec61d03641a10.mp4

2026-06-15 17:02:19 UTC

Probably nothing
https://blossom.primal.net/e236c4257f0ca64af9a1581bae491fc80d7458103f263b69051cfb6115b91852.png

2026-06-15 16:02:19 UTC

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

2026-06-12 22:39:11 UTC

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

2026-06-08 20:57:20 UTC

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Number of blocks mined per hour remains constant. But the amount of hash
power competing to mine those blocks becomes more variable.

2026-06-08 20:56:05 UTC

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Yep

2026-06-06 23:14:34 UTC

The gap between these bars is the largest asymmetry in Bitcoin right now
https://blossom.primal.net/ce451bfeddda70f9430b82190e9466a5bc5b42fbc1f3f6c42069f630c3b80d36.png

2026-06-06 20:49:10 UTC

Bitcoin mining will never be unprofitable because you can mine for -2c/kWh in an increasing number of places. Increasingly, grids are paying for flexibility as a service, and this need will only increase with more renewables and AI load coming onto grids in parallel.
https://blossom.primal.net/5f588b2f0e8fe0cefd2e3fc3f4aeb155717bc76f878c8595dce45a7e2622d653.png

2026-06-04 15:44:25 UTC

I've made this newsletter edition a special free edition, because
1. It's inspiring story about a guy no-one's heard of, who's achieved something no other Bitcoin has yet achieved
2. There are more useful things to pay attention to right now than the price.
3. There's an important lesson in it that I believe can help Bitcoin adoption
https://www.batcoinz.com/p/the-truth-is-not-enough
Feel free to share this one widely, including with non-Bitcoiners.It's written for them too.

2026-06-04 12:09:24 UTC

New paper finds:
Bitcoin mining enables better absorption of surplus renewable generation, minimizing curtailment and supporting higher renewable integration without extra storage or infrastructure costs, creating a win-win for grid stability and mining profitability.
The finding is significant, because it establishes Bitcoin Mining as the only way grid operators can avoid the significant cost of balancing frequency fluctuations and operational cost increases that doesn't involve significant capital outlay on grids with high renewable penetration
https://blossom.primal.net/e4683766667ce92bd620952b9cfcb2b931fc02e410fb854bde433ef352824cda.png
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378779625007874
The paper Leveraging Bitcoin Mining in Demand-Response to Mitigate Ramping-Induced Transients (Ginzburg-Ganz et al. 2026) was published in Electric Power Systems Research, which has an Impact Factor of 4.2, placing it in the top 12% of academic journals worldwide.

2026-06-01 14:55:37 UTC

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

2026-06-01 00:45:51 UTC

The data is unequivocal: Bitcoin mining is the way to make renewable projects that would otherwise need subsidies viable.
A new paper recently found that pairing large-scale solar PV with Bitcoin mining
* transforms a standalone solar project with a10-year payback, ~5% IRR into a highly profitable venture with 2–5 year payback and 33% IRR
* reduces ~10,457 tons of CO₂ avoided emissions per annum
The study was done on a 10 MW Solar Farm and supports the earlier findings of Hakimi et al that Bitcoin mining reduces the ROI from 8.1yrs to 3.5yrs while reducing CO2 emissions by 50,000 tonnes/year on a 50MW solar farm (source: https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)15796-9)
The recent paper "Techno-economic Assessments of Large-Scale Solar PV and Bitcoin Mining" (Keshavarzfard & Zinati Yazdi 2025) was published in Solar Energy.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X25007820
The journal has an impact factor of 6.6 (top 6% of academic journals)
https://blossom.primal.net/99341cda2e5f1bf75f85dbccc48afb63de2ef4f7c6a79454d24496df734e03b9.png

2026-05-31 20:21:57 UTC

There are now 30 papers showing environmental and energy benefits to Bitcoin mining across multiple jurisdictions and multiple research categories.
Probably nothing
https://blossom.primal.net/a4a78d26ec1e5fa48ed77c10a627b15b6bd7d2458b73b04e5704b149d1fdf097.png

2026-05-29 16:29:31 UTC

Another inspiring Bitcoin story
Buena Vista, Colorado is becoming a new Bitcoin hub
* already 19 businesses onboarded already (more than Colorado Spings)
* Chamber of Commerce actively promoting it
* Feedback from businesses (who were not bitcoiners) includes:
"Our instore sales have increased, and 20% of our sales are now in Bitcoin"
"it feels cleaner"
"it feels more natural"
"1 in 8 of our sales are now in Bitcoin"
How did this happen?
One person who in his spare time doing something we can all do - talking to people with a mindset of service.
Luke Cortese is the honeybadger who has been behind this incredible story.
But it gets better
Each month he runs a "treasure hunt" where new members of the community learn about Bitcoin. 25 new people started using Bitcoin on the last one.
AND
He's open sourcing the model so other small towns across the country can start onboarding new businesses. He's already gotten enquiries from neighboring towns, and states.
https://blossom.primal.net/a571ed09986952806280c0a51ff4e72e5f390ef8e802cc15bdd868731d38075e.mp4

2026-05-28 17:11:17 UTC

One year ago Paulo Gonçalves was not a Bitcoiner.
He's was (and is) renewable energy project developer who has spent his career building small hydroelectric dams across the world.
His problem was simple: many of these dams produce power that the grid can't absorb. The energy is wasted. The economics don't work. He'd seen the problem firsthand and had been searching for a solution for over a decade.
A year ago, he attended a FREEMadeiraOrg event in Portugal, where he discovered Bitcoin mining.
That day changed everything.
Unlike others who fall into the mistake of evaluating Bitcoin mining without understanding energy, grids or renewable generation - he understood all three intimately, and as such was able to immediately see the value that others (including policymakers and regulators) sometimes miss.
Paulo is now evaluating 100s of small hydropowered sites throughout Portugal that are ideal candidates for Bitcoin miners. There are sites that are "too small" or too remote to be of interest to anyone else.
The miners consume what would otherwise be stranded energy. No subsidy required. The dam that didn't make financial sense now does.
This is the pattern critics miss.
They assume Bitcoin miners are Bitcoiners first, working backwards to justify energy use. In reality in the energy sector it happens the other way around.
Kenji Tateiwa in Japan. Paulo Gonçalves in Portugal, Bipin Patel in Sweden are real people solving real energy problems. Different countries, different energy sources, same discovery pattern:
When you know a lot about energy, and do deep research into how to solve energy problems, you arrive at Bitcoin mining.
https://blossom.primal.net/11c4894911fd9841c719197a90fd9117fdd234f439c7d562fd5ba0db4d731c66.png

2026-05-27 15:25:53 UTC

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Musk was mentioned as a counterexample of the theme, not an example. Did you notice that?

2026-05-27 15:25:09 UTC

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Did you read the post? He was mentioned as a counterexample, not an example of the theme.

2026-05-27 14:54:31 UTC

Nostr-only post follows.
One thing I've been reflecting on this last week is that many of the people who changed the world worked deep hours, and remarkably few of them.
I did some research and found 7 examples that might change how you think about your day, and the belief that grinding long hours is the best way to success
https://blossom.primal.net/10d928d2cfd4f63f23a501687d5ef42f5cd80680667aa123e929ded22de6834c.png
Charles Darwin worked two 90-minute blocks each morning, then a single hour later in the day. Between sessions: naps and long walks
On this schedule he wrote 19 books (including On the Origin of Species)
4 hours a day, and he changed biology forever
https://blossom.primal.net/0df3efd7351aee90b8c2bd01377b41b8ec11e09a07563d6585f8fa04ee030708.png
Roald Dahl wrote from 10am-noon, then 4pm-6pm. 7 days a week. No exceptions
He spent six months on a single short story. His words: "Writing is not inspiration. It's keeping your bottom on the seat"
On 4 hours/day, he became one of the most beloved authors who ever lived
https://blossom.primal.net/c83d1a8ea705f87cec6e9379770c4c4d18b1a3bf89562fb01ba6adb63029d200.png
Henri Poincare worked 10am-noon, then 5pm-7pm
He solved problems mentally in breaks, then committed them to paper
A psychologist who studied his routine in 1910, found working longer achieved nothing extra
4 hrs/day, and he reshaped Topology, planetary physics and chaos theory
Literaturehttps://blossom.primal.net/6eea0d6b61b56c3c3c455c7f8b3ac85c89b1b63f61c31d32896b05f28ba9bd95.png
Hemingway started at first light and stopped before noon. 500 to 1,000 words, standing up, pencil on paper
He famously stopped mid-sentence so he'd have momentum the next morning
~5 hours a day and a Nobel Prize in Literature
https://blossom.primal.net/5b377aed8539d80de4d5bbb2a1ea735fd071b127837c66f45ed771e96e0e64cd.png
Novelist Anthony Trollope paid a servant to wake him at 5:30am.
He wrote from 5am to 8am with a watch in front of him - 250 words every 15 minutes. Then he went to his day job (at the Post Office)
3 hours a day, 47 novels over 35 years - all before breakfast !
https://blossom.primal.net/aa25276f44738cd3c55fefce4383b8ec18f762abab9cd1e1fb11cf86ce3d95b7.png
Tchaikovsky composed at his desk for about 4.5 hours split across morning and evening
But he also took a daily two-hour walk, timed to the minute, composing in his head as he walked
In ~4.5 hours at the desk he captured what the walk created
The rest was letting the mind work
https://blossom.primal.net/ba461c6c9bd7978ba189f3d370421f9848871fc1bcdd2aae0fce232d14c72c88.png
·
"But what about Musk, he works 80-100 hr weeks?"
Look closer
He schedules his day in 5-minute blocks
90% of his time is meetings and design reviews. That's executive coordination (and he's brilliant at it) - a different kind of work from the deep creation these others did
https://blossom.primal.net/2ff5315bf38f0cdffa47075cd47f9740b211f094bd23f4219224dfc10bd636bd.png
"But what about Picasso, Balzac and others who worked big hours?"
Picasso painted for long stretches. But he alternated intense work with long social meals and downtime within the day
Balzac wrote 16 hours a day fuelled by industrial quantities of coffee (he also died at 51)
I've seen this firsthand. One founder I coached was working 80-hour weeks, on the point of burnout. I shared 4 productivity strategies, got him to cut back to 50-hr weeks and go home to his family
NPS scores, Q12 ratings, RPU all improved. The company exited 2 years later
The pattern across all of these: short duration, consistent deep focus, real rest between sessions
They protected the hours, protected the recovery, and they didn't confuse hours with output
The lesson:
Perhaps working more isn't the secret?
Perhaps working deeper is?

2026-05-23 15:21:10 UTC

Training impulse control (via meditation, coaching, habit cultivation etc.) is one of the most direct ways to lower your effective time preference

2026-05-23 14:34:54 UTC

There has never been an industry whose success has been determined by so few variables as Bitcoin mining
Hashrate
Bitcoin Price
Electricity Price
ASICS Price
Block reward (and fees)
Ancillary revenue
That's it
6 factors
Not in-store-spend
Not Customer conversion rates
Not market penetration
Not demographic data
And no sales and marketing campaign or customer outreach campaign will change this
You're at the mercy of 6 variables, 4 of which you have no control over, save a small bit of wiggle-room that you can create by negotiation in the case of ASICS price.
The only variables you can control is electricity price and ancillary revenue source. (More about this later)
For this reason, we can do something we've never been able to do for any industry ever
We can read the future non-speculatively, because it already exists today
In Europe, electricity prices are astronomically high. So much so, that it effectively simulates a future reality where the economics are similar to a US-based mining company one halving into the future (with half the block reward).
Yet, Bitcoin mining thrives in Europe: the most hostile electricity-price environment, regulatory, environment and tax environment in the world towards Bitcoin mining.
You'd never know it, because it happens mostly under the radar, and it is (legitimately) called "datacenters", "grid stabilization services", and "heat reuse" to avoid regulatory hostility and taxation hostility.
Bitcoin mining thrives here because of one factor alone: their ancillary revenue is very high compared to the rest of the world.
So high in fact that many European mining companies are more profitable than their US counterparts
This is why I have no fear about the future of Bitcoin mining
This is why discussions about security budget are redundant: Bitcoin doesn't need one
This is why we don't need to have speculative discussions about the direction of Bitcoin mining.
Europe already ran that simulation, and the data is in.
The future of Bitcoin mining is that it seeks out stranded energy at near zero marginal cost.
The future of Bitcoin mining is that it stabilizes grids and recycles heat as a primary revenue source, with the blockreward and fees being the by-product
The future of Bitcoin mining is that it solves hard problems the world desparately needs - keeping our grid safe and stable, making AI load flexible, reducing harmful methane pollution, stopping the wasteful practice of renewable energy curtailment in ways that benefit whole communities
The future of Bitcoin mining is that it is the usecase of Bitcoin that the world sees and embraces first.

2026-05-23 14:02:32 UTC

To date, the area of Bitcoin and energy has been a niche
With AI power demands, European blackouts, stalled energy transitions, global grid stress, and 12 months of accumulating evidence, the world is now walking inexorably toward that niche

2026-05-23 02:46:15 UTC

Reading a lot at the moment about people who are using AI to
1. stealman both sides of an idea
2. witness a debate from the perspective of a physicist, historian etc
3. Generate agents, including a first principles thinker, a contrarian, etc to exchange views on a topic ...
This is a great way to create the illusion that you have arrived at truth. But it is not and will never be a proxy for thinking.
If you want evidence of this, just ask the question "Is Bitcoin mining good or bad for the environment" and watch the method get the wrong answer every time.

2026-05-22 23:10:17 UTC

Benefit #5 of meditation: It makes you non-reactive to volatility
I cannot think of a Bitcoiner to whom this is not relevant and important!
Neuroscience research comparing long-term meditators with non-meditators found that meditators displayed greater emotional stability and significantly less emotional volatility across all affect types.
The mechanism: meditation trains what researchers call "equanimity" - the ability to observe an experience without reacting to it. MRI studies show that experienced meditators achieve a decoupling of sensory and affective processing.
They still perceive the stimulus (a price pullback, some uninformed FUD, a new regulatory threat) but the emotional charge doesn't hijack the response.
Source: PMC - Mindfulness, Cognition, and Long-Term Meditators
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12330868/
People often ask me how I had such patience, replying to the same FUD 1000x over - now I know the answer, nothing unique about me...
but I’d been unknowingly training my mind over time through meditation to treat negative Bitcoin comments as datapoints, not reasons to lose my calm.

2026-05-21 21:17:51 UTC

At the start of this year I asked “what else could I do to help bitcoin adoption?”
One of the answers was
“Prioritize appearing on non-bitcoin podcats that reach new audiences”
Just jumped in a podcast run by 2 Aussies in the energy sector. Looking forward to more of these.

2026-05-21 20:31:25 UTC

Reason to meditation #3: It eliminates the sunk-cost bias
This one should matter to any Bitcoiner who's ever held an altcoin too long.
Andrew Hafenbrack at INSEAD ran four studies - one correlational, three experimental. These studies showed that meditation reduces the tendency to let unrecoverable past costs influence current decisions.
Fifteen minutes of focused-breathing meditation was enough to shift participants away from sunk-cost thinking. The mechanism: meditation reduces focus on the past and future, which reduces the negative emotion that drives the bias.
Source: Hafenbrack et al. - Debiasing the Mind Through Meditation (Psychological Science, 2014)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797613503853
What this means is, meditation doesn't just help you HODL, it helps you make the decision to HODL or DCA based on what's in front of you now, rather than what you've already spent.

2026-05-21 14:19:11 UTC

The world's leading energy authority just said this about demand flexibility and guess what the world's most flexible demand is?
Bitcoin mining's time has come.
https://blossom.primal.net/fd1151b9de08ffe0e9174f19fffeeaf07ee156a3e53a5e2713614da55703dfd6.png

2026-05-20 20:17:15 UTC

Reason to meditate #2: It improves your relationships - including with those closest to you
Mindfulness-based parenting research using neural imaging found that parents who meditated showed increased activation in brain regions associated with empathy and emotional regulation. Their children - independently surveyed - reported the greatest improvements in the parent-child relationship.That’s important, because it’s not the parents filling out a survey subjectively appraising their parenting, it’s their kids evaluating them.
Source: PMC - Mindful Parenting in Mental Health Care
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2987569/
Separate research showed that couples where one or both partners meditate report higher marital satisfaction, more empathy, better communication, and lower conflict.
A meta-analysis of 600 research papers on transcendental meditation showed that subjects with the highest anxiety levels experienced the greatest and most sustained reduction.
Source: Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy - Meditation, Marital Adjustment, and Relationship Quality
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15332691.2019.1661323
Probably nothing
https://blossom.primal.net/a1f6d6ae403562c54a8a2a0bd920f7763e80d94fa11e1ba8446ee3ba49e3b2be.png

2026-05-20 12:37:19 UTC

Here's an article I wrote yesterday on 13 little-known benefits of meditation, and how they apply specifically to Bitcoiners
https://x.com/DSBatten/status/2056760811624747095?s=20
I wanted to take this a step further on Nostr though ...
A common question I get "I've heard that meditation is something that would really benefit me, where should I start - try out an app?"
Here's my take: an app is a better starting point than most people think, and ... a worse endpoint than most people realise !
Learning meditation from an app to learning to cook from YouTube. You'll produce edible meals and learn real techniques. Some people even become good cooks this way.
But there are two things a video can never do - taste what you've made and tell you what's off.
A teacher can read your experience in real time, adjust the instruction to what's actually happening for you, and introduce progression at the moment you're ready for it.
An app delivers the same content to everyone regardless of where they are.
My objective appraisal is that apps like Headspace and Waking Up have genuinely lowered the barrier to entry and that's something we should celebrate. Someone who meditates daily with an app is in a categorically better position than someone who intends to find a teacher and never starts.
The risk isn't that apps teach badly (most teach the fundamentals accurately), the risk is that the early stages feel complete because you don't yet know what you're missing
Three months in, the app feels like it's working. And it is. But a teacher doesn't just correct your posture - they recognise when you've hit a plateau you can't see from inside it, and they introduce the next thing at the right time. An app delivers the same content to everyone regardless of where they are.
So, if the choice is app or nothing, then yes - the app wins every time
If the choice is app or course, the course will take someone further, faster, with less risk of plateauing without knowing it

2026-05-19 21:46:31 UTC

- reply

If Cedar Falls had a primary school level understanding of the difference between AI and Bitcoin mining, they'd have made a different decision.

2026-05-19 20:36:34 UTC

Take a look at these two insects. Pretty similar right?
Both flying insects, both yellow and black. Both have stingers.
But to a gardener they could not be more different.
The image on the left is a honey-bee. They are critical to the pollination of many plants, especially those that produce nuts and fruits. In a world without the honey-bee we'd still have food because grains and other plant-based food is often wind/self pollinated.
But we'd have less variety, growing food would be harder, and prices would be a lot more.
The image on the right is a yellow-legged hornet. They stress your gardens: they chew bark, damage fruit and - most importantly - hunt other pollinators. A garden without them is a healthier garden.
But the point is, if you don't know your insects, haven't researched how each impact the garden and have a "no flying insects" policy for your garden, your garden will grow more slowly, and garden by garden - you create a world where food is more expensive, and less bountiful.
Lumping bees and hornets under "flying insects" is like lumping bitcoin mining operations and AI data centres under "data centres": technically accurate, useless for policy, and dangerous for the grid.
Yet that is exactly what happened in Cedar Falls yesterday. The city council voted unanimously to block a Bitcoin mining facility from its 60% wind-powered industrial park - an operation that would have monetised surplus energy, and balanced the intermittency of that wind energy, without competing with a single resident for electricity.
Source: https://www.kwwl.com/news/no-crypto-mining-in-cedar-falls-after-unanimous-council-vote/article_50514eaf-7603-4c2b-9e9f-16b15bafdfd9.html
They banned the bee.
Because here is the nuance most people miss: the gardener who sprays pesticide on all flying insects does not get a pest-free garden. They get an unpollinated one. The fruit costs more. The garden grows more slowly. And the pests still find a way in.
That's what Cedar Falls just did.
A grid with flexible load has a shock absorber. When demand spikes, the miner steps aside in less than a second, freeing capacity without anyone building a new power plant.
A grid without Bitcoin Mining has no buffer. No surplus buyer. No way to balance supply and demand in real time without firing up gas peaker plants that cost more and sit idle most of the year.
The gardener who knows the difference between the bee and the hornet has a healthier, more balanced, more resilient garden.
The grid operator who knows the difference between Bitcoin mining and AI datacenters has a healthier, more balanced, more resilient grid.
The word 'data centre' is doing the same work as 'flying insect.' It collapses two fundamentally different things into one category so that people can avoid understanding the difference. The resilience of the grid suffers - and consumers get higher prices.
https://blossom.primal.net/c3c2ea573a47cfa758c3c06bc0fc07345fbe58b8c61bb425f32d751eb3109e4f.png

2026-05-19 16:25:18 UTC

Meditation makes you smarter. Pass it on.
Specifically, your brain physically changes (for the better) in 8 weeks.
Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar put people with zero meditation experience through an 8-week program. MRI scans showed measurable increases in grey matter density in regions associated with learning, memory, and emotional regulation - and measurable shrinkage of the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for fear, anxiety, and the fight-or-flight response. Eight weeks, not eight years. Seems like something worth doing/
Source: Harvard Gazette - Eight Weeks to a Better Brain
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/01/eight-weeks-to-a-better-brain/
Sara Lazar's work showed that even 8 weeks meditation measurably improved brain function across a variety of brain regions.
https://blossom.primal.net/c7f1df21f321cf3523073a539907f7cd77ec325475af8267389c0050248d20fe.png
Source: https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/local/brain-researcher-sara-lazar-visits-mu-to-share-research-on-meditation-yoga/article_74fa1129-1634-531c-acd7-b5995dbc7b49.html
One implication of this study is that in a bear market, the part of your brain that panics during a 50% drawdown is physically smaller. Probably nothing.

2026-05-18 03:06:35 UTC

I just got back from the Bitcoin Energy Summit in Lisbon and I have a question that won't leave me alone.
First some context: Bitcoin mining is now stabilizing the grids of 7 nations, 4 agencies (including the Spanish Govt and the World's largest energy policy association) just called for more flexible demand being critical to the resilience of the grids of the future - and Bitcoin mining is the world's most flexible load resource by an order of magnitude.
So in light of this my question is this: why is 95% of the Bitcoin adoption conversation about Bitcoin-as-money when Bitcoin-as-energy is already deployed on grids across three continents?
Is it possible that energy is the Bitcoin usecase that paves the road for mainstream acceptance of Bitcoin in the West?
I've been in this space for four years now. When I started, the conversation was "bitcoin mining wastes energy." A group of Bitcoiners including Troy Cross changed that. Then it became "ok maybe it doesn't waste energy, but it's not useful."
@nprofile…xncl , @nprofile…zj6n and others changed that too.
But here's what I noticed in Lisbon. Three separate European organisations - the European Bitcoin Energy Association, Free Madeira, and the Institut National de Bitcoin in France - are all independently converging on the same conclusion.
Rachel Geyer, Chair of EBEA said energy is what will move the needle for Bitcoin in Europe.
André Loja at Free Madeira said energy is the most topical issue in Europe right now.
Bastien Desteuque, directeur général at INBi (Bitcoin Policy Insitute of France) said they're focusing on mining because France has spare nuclear capacity and that's where the biggest opportunity is.
Three organisations. Same conclusion.
And that's before you get to what's actually being built. In Sweden, a man I coach runs ASIC hardware that earns almost two-thirds of its revenue from frequency regulation - keeping the lights on, responding in seconds to the need of the grid operator, and helping to stabilize the grid an incredible11,247 times last year alone. (Yes, you read that sentence right).
In Lisbon, I watched Kenji Tateiwa present a circular economy where bitcoin mining heat grows tropical fish and the CO2 gets converted to charcoal and micro diamonds. Bastian outlined how France's surplus nuclear energy could be absorbed by bitcoin mining by 2027.
The conversation has quietly moved from "does bitcoin mining help grids?" to "how many services can one machine provide?"
We've been thinking about this like monoculture - one machine, one function. What I saw in Lisbon is permaculture. The same hardware doing frequency regulation, heat capture, Sats-minting ... and potentially in the near future - voltage regulation (something that would have prevented the 28 April 2025 Iberian Peninsular Blackout.
I talked to Bitcoin founders after the keynote who told me the energy thesis had opened their eyes. These are people who worked to advance Bitcoin payment infrastructure, and they hadn't fully grasped this.
So here's my question. If energy is already Bitcoin's most mature real-world use case in the West - more deployed than payments, more proven than store-of-value at institutional scale - why are we still treating it as a footnote?
What other Bitcoin use case is this far along ... at least in the West?
Excited to see what happens next.

2026-05-09 00:02:25 UTC

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Correct … and as a direct result of that central bank, the funding of many elongated wars has been possible

2026-04-29 01:51:06 UTC

I encourage those I coach to know your not only their values but to distinguish where those values find expression ... and where they don't.
Here's mine.
Clarity saves everyone a lot of time ... and energy
https://blossom.primal.net/5eeeea78ddfcfcba5888d16f0f6f871760bef258344cc25751e0548648e92932.png

2026-04-28 00:01:40 UTC

Environmentally, Bitcoin has a positive:negative ratio of 31:1
This makes Bitcoin arguably one of the most important environmental-impact technology of our time
As a fund manager of 2 impact-funds, I said 4 years ago I consider it gross negligence for an ESG investor not to consider Bitcoin in their mix. Many called me crazy at the time. They are no longer saying that today (at least not for that reason!)
Here's a data summary from our due diligence four years ago (which has since been vindicated with 24 peer reviewed papers coming out in support of exactly the same findings we arrived at)
How did we reach this view?
Simple: we did our job as investors. ie: we did due diligence on Bitcoin and energy (something very few people were doing at the time before recycling what has since proven to be factually inaccorate claims)
Simple rue:
- relevant domain knowledge + data => we listen
- vested interest + narrative => ignore
We listened to grid operators, climate scientists, bitcoin mining engineers, methane abatement experts, solar&wind installers, academics with multi-disciplinary expertise across energy systems/ sustainability / bitcion mining/ economics/ policy
We found
- 21 ways Bitcoin could be an environmental positive
- 5 ways bitcoin could be an environmental negative
(Uncannily similar to the solar industry)
We then applied an impact weighting to each factor and remeasured The result was conclusive: Bitcoin mining is 31:1 net positive to the environment
Bitcoin mining’s rapid renewable adoption can inspire other industry sectors to follow
We found that in the next 5 years, Bitcoin mining would play a real part in global methane mitigation (it is), grid stabilization (it is), and monetizing wasted renewable energy (it is)
The rule is simple: do your own due diligence rather than listen to the opinions of anyone: be they media, politicians, environmental organisations, general energy experts or bitcoiners themselves
That's the path to truth
https://blossom.primal.net/a739633d86fb04e8773b3babd716715d825a1cb3f317da13d6cdb5d041acdc31.png

2026-04-27 19:38:16 UTC

The near death of enrivonmental and energy FUD in the media about Bitcoin has created a vacuum.
What fills that vacuum is largely up to us.
https://blossom.primal.net/8ef36645541738b03d582f9a482ac7a84a5a87797d92ffe0d734fd0e570f344a.png

2026-04-25 18:03:49 UTC

Destroying your own doubts and uncertainties is one of the best ROI (ripple of impact) activities for Bitcoin
Not theory - history.
https://blossom.primal.net/4aa4e6a6b4d749f91a825b2852945c2e11bbe62312e9c1b87aedd715ca3f9e90.mov

2026-04-24 01:21:05 UTC

At the end of 2023 I met the person who ran GreenpeaceUSA's campaign against Bitcoin.  
I expected it to be tense.
It wasn't.  
He told me he'd read every response to every post I'd made on Twitter.  "I wish we'd engaged with you and people like you from the outset," he said. 
Two months later he left Greenpeace. A few months after that they ended the campaign entirely.
It was the most well-funded, yet the worst result in their history.  I keep coming back to that phrase. "People like you." Not me. A whole group. Troy Cross, Margot Paez, Elliot David, Susie Violet Ward and many others.
We were working independently, with no budget and no coordination. We just shared data and conviction.  
It is a great story of a decentralized response beating a multi-million dollar centralized campaign, not by being louder but by a combination of being right and expressing that truth in such a way that reasonable people could see.
And it is a recipe we can use again and again.

2026-04-23 21:54:09 UTC

If you look at your vision and think "I don't have the skills to pull that off", you're probably right.  
You don't. At least not yet.  But that's the whole point.  
The person who will implement your vision is not the person you are today, it's the person you become in the pursuit of it.  
I've seen this happen enough times now, both in my own life and in the founders I've worked with.
The doubt is real. But it's a photograph of who you are right now, not a prediction of who you'll be.
So if you're looking at a goal thinking "I can't do that" - good! That's the sign it's probably the right assignment, because your growth will be a necessary component in the fulfilment of your vision.

2026-04-23 13:48:24 UTC

Imagine
... if you believed in yourself as much as you believe in Bitcoin
-- if you defended yourself against your inner critic as strongly as you defended Bitcoin against outer critics
... if you dismantled your own fears, uncertainties and doubts as effectively as you disregarded FUD about Bitcoin
For Bitcoin to win, the work of making sure you are a strong node in the network is not optional. It is mandatory.
Because Bitcoin alone will not change the world. But Bitcoin together with a network of unstoppable Bitcoiners does.

2026-04-22 15:04:59 UTC

No earth day event is complete without looking at the importance of Bitcoin mining to preserving our environment, stabilizing our grids and mitigating methane. Great to see this now being taught in schools.
https://blossom.primal.net/efc5935b46ba7fedec155d7baed7324634ede577bad6498f3ca5d9911240ad64.jpg

2026-04-21 17:19:25 UTC

Africa has already validated the usecase for Bitcoin as a medium of exchange "𝟳𝟬% 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗹𝗹 Bitcoin 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 $𝟭,𝟬𝟬𝟬 𝗲𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗻𝘁" source: https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/africa-cryptocurrency-adoption/
"Crypto has penetrated key markets and become an important part of many residents’ day-to-day lives."
With the combination of autocracy and high inflation, use of Bitcoin in Nigeria is off the charts (see image below)
Bitcoin's % use is increasing as a medium of exchange in Africa, as education improves and people understand its the only decentralized, censorship-resistant digital currency.
This is thanks to a number of Bitcoiners working tirelessly in Africa.
https://blossom.primal.net/06e66beca0201641cdf28baf40297a72e5bedf7b761d0b3bd50fc2701c2dea05.png

2026-04-21 16:41:40 UTC

Putting this out here on Nostr first:
Who'd be potentially interested if we ran a retreat specially for Bitcoiners in Costa Rica?
I've noticed that the fiat-mindset likes to stack stuff. But Bitcoiners like to stack experiences.
So the idea would be to structure an unforgettable experience that leads to new friendships, and bringing back more energy than you came with, which leaving behind all your stresses.
We'd visit the Bitcoin jungle (Uvita) which has the highest concentration of business owners using Bitcoin anywhere in the world, whalewatching, watch the sun set on the beach of Esterillos. And you can't go to Costa Rica without doing a full reset and recharge from the madness of the world with powerful breathwork and then silent meditation retreat in La Montaña Azul. We'll also leave plenty of white space for the type of inspiring Bitcoin conversations that change the world too.
Looking at Thurs 9 July - Sat 18 July as potential dates.
Send me a comment of DM if this sound like the sort of experience you'd like to stack.

2026-04-19 20:21:25 UTC

- reply

Thanks everyone who watched this. Not because I care about more people hearing my monotone kiwi accent, but because every time a non-Bitcoin podcast episode about Bitcoin performs well for that podcaster, its a signal that gets more Bitcoin commentary into the mainstream.
#nevent1q…u06w

2026-04-19 03:43:34 UTC

Imagine if I said to you "Earth is an uninhabitable place to live"
You look at me sideways and say "Ah... why?"
I reply "Planets are awful bad. Pluto/Uranus/Neptune, you'd freeze. Mercury, you'd burn. Venus, you'd be poisoned. Jupiter and Saturn, you'd be crushed. Mars: nothing to breath.
It's true. Most of the planets, including over 5700 exoplanets, are really really bad places to live.
The conclusion that this means earth is uninhabitable is a basic logic fail.
Now imagine some self-proclaimed crypto-commentator tells you "Bitcoin is a scam"
Again, you look at him sideways and say "Ah... why?"
He replies "Most crypto has gone to zero. VCs dump on retail. Memecoins are complete rugpulls. Pre-mined tokens, you get diluted to oblivian. ICOs, you're the exit-liquidity for founders and early investors.
It's true. Most of the thousands of cryptocurrencies launched since 2009 are complete scams.
But again, the conclusion that this makes Bitcoin a scam is equally a basic logic 101 fail.
Earth is the only planet with a breathable atmosphere, the right temperature band, and liquid water.
Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency with the combination of no insider enrichment, a fixed supply that nobody can change, and a 17-year unhacked decentralised ledger.
In both cases, some very special and unique features make the general rule inapplicable to the one obvious exception.
This logical fallacy has been around long enough to have a name. Aristotle spotted it about 2,300 years ago and called it the "Fallacy of Accident" - taking a pattern that's true for a category and forcing it onto the one member where evidence shows it obviously doesn't hold.
A few days ago, Ben McKenzie sat on Jon Stewart's podcast and committed this exact logic-fail: citing crypto's failures as his evidence against Bitcoin.
He's not the only one to fail in this way. Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Jamie Dimon, Christine Lagarde all conflated Bitcoin with all crypto for years. Many journalists still fail to distinguish Bitcoin from all other crypto (though the better ones are starting to).
In fact, this fallacy has been deployed for years with impunity by people who either don't know, or forgot to mention that Bitcoin has unique features making it materially different from all other crypto.
The irony is that Bitcoiners and crypto-critics are on the same page: the rugpulls, the insider enrichment, the tokens engineered to extract value from retail investors are all things that Bitcoiners like @CorySwan and other have been vocally calling out for over a decade, long before category-conflating journalists and actors from teen dramas decided they had an opinion about it.
It's not that hard
Unless you have the attention-span of a gnat-fly, you can easily do 5 mins research (AI-assisted if you really want) and discover either what the core differences are between Earth and all other planets, between Bitcoin and all other crypto.
Earth is an incredibly, uniquely habitable planet for humans to live.
Bitcoin is an incredible, uniquely suitable form of currency for humans to use.

2026-04-17 01:17:49 UTC

What do you say if someone says "But Bitcoin mining blockrewards won't be profitable soon and fees are not enough to sustain mining."
Here's how I just responded
I completely get why you'd be concerned that fees are not enough to provide ancillary mining revenue as halvings but into block rewards. And you're right, this was a big concern a few years ago.
The reason it is no longer an issue for mining companies is because they have found a myriad of ancillary revenue sources including grid stabiliization (demand response, FCAS, 4CP, blackstart in particular), heat recycling, carbon credits, RECs. I was talking to a mining company 3 days ago that's now regularly earning 2/3 of their income through proactive grid stabilization. This is why I have no concerns about the long-term economic viability of mining.

2026-04-16 22:22:29 UTC

Cory introduced me to a couple of VCs a while ago. But they didn't want to talk so much about the coaching work I did with founders.
They wanted to know how Bitcoin mining could save the planet.
... and I was happy to share exactly how that worked
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnP9VW4dLUU

2026-04-14 02:21:08 UTC

There's a decision-making method gaining traction in AI circles right now.
You spin up five AI agents, each with a distinct thinking role: first-principles thinker, contrarian, systems thinker, domain expert, pragmatist. Plus a chairman who runs the process.
Each agent drafts an answer independently. The chairman strips the names off and circulates them anonymously. Each agent critiques the others without knowing who wrote what. Then the chairman synthesises the best answer.
The anonymity is the genuinely good part. It forces evaluation on content, not on who said it. Ego gets removed from the room. That alone makes it better than most boardroom decisions.
But it's still modelled on a boardroom. And a boardroom is not where the best decisions get made.
Here's what's missing.
1. No real iteration. Ideas develop the same way people develop: through feedback and iteration. In this model, the iteration is perfunctory. Ideas get assessed, not evolved.
2. No brainstorming. Effective brainstorming deliberately separates "divergent thinking" (the process of imagining all possibilities, including crazy ones) from convergent thinking (the process of whittling them down to what's possible within the constraints of time, space and budgets).
The best discussions with the best ideas happen when you go wide first, then narrow. This protocol puts a convergent black-hat thinker in the room at the same time as the divergent thinkers. That collapses the exploration phase before it even starts.
3. Optimised for evaluation, not ideation. It's designed to select the best existing idea rather than generate one that's better than any individual agent could produce.
4. The chairman selects rather than facilitates. There's a difference between choosing the best idea in the room and facilitating the development of the best collective idea. A chairman does the first. A facilitator does the second. Different function entirely. The first is optimized for efficacy of process and efficiency of outcome, the second is optimized for the quality and robustness of the decision.
5. Swimlane identities. Each agent operates within a narrow role. "Domain expert." "Contrarian." Knowledge seldom comes from people locked into narrow identities. It comes from the collision between them.
The net result: no ideation, a marginally better selection process, and a high risk that an underdeveloped idea gets chosen. Worse, because the process looks robust and complex, the output runs the risk of getting acted on with more confidence than it deserves.
I studied this exact problem during my thesis. I had groups communicating anonymously, analysing a poem (I was an English major), exchanging ideas across rounds. The quality of analysis improved dramatically in the second round - not because the evaluation got sharper, but because people were building on each other's thinking, measurably. They were interchanging ideas, not just ranking them.
I've seen the same thing running mastermind groups since. When different minds get in a room and start sparring and introducing ideas, a network effect kicks in. Ideas emerge that no single person in the room could ever have produced. That process creates ideas through a principle that we call "advance and extend". And it's what this five-agent model doesn't have.
The fix isn't complicated. Let agents build on each other's drafts across multiple rounds instead of just critiquing them. Replace the chairman with a facilitator agent whose job is synthesis, not selection. Separate the divergent phase from the convergent phase. And stop assigning swimlane identities that constrain what each agent is allowed to think.
The five-agent idea is a step forward. But it's a step from a bad process to a less bad process.
The leap - to a process that produces genuinely emergent thinking - requires a different model entirely. And that model already exists. It just hasn't been applied to AI ... yet.

2026-04-13 17:38:29 UTC

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Nice! He's running his second Bitcoin "treasure hunt" in a couple of weeks in his local town. Once this is done, then he'll start massaging the playbook into something that can be open sourced with other regions. Ping me in a few weeks and I'll give you an update.

2026-04-13 15:53:35 UTC

One Bitcoiner has just onboarded15 new businesses in his local town (in his spare time). How? A few things but, a key component was getting comfortable leaving things undone, focusing on needle-moving actions and getting better at identifying what those needle-moving actions were (and then taking them)!
You can do this too.
acceblihttps://blossom.primal.net/f99e0534313d1b4ff20bb0a05baa92ca9693edb6217284b09dc2aac732aaeb4f.mov

2026-04-12 23:33:22 UTC

A short story about how one Bitcoiner leaning into discomfort rather than running from it, changed the world in a small way for the better, while advancing Bitcoin and his business at the same time.
https://blossom.primal.net/b8b4d79c987b5b020808c466838d62507f1afc1dba6f7186c0c530ecf1707366.mov

2026-04-12 18:52:31 UTC

You are capable of doing much more for Bitcoin than you can probably imagine.
... and here's the proof!
https://blossom.primal.net/dc95ad51b4aeb94a313727149f1b9918aa11944925e7f00eab6d9974fd45202a.mov

2026-04-12 16:05:07 UTC

Thank you X for the free Nostr marketing #note1enx…afpz

2026-04-09 13:55:09 UTC

It is my duty to remind you that Bitcion will use all the world's power by 2020.
https://blossom.primal.net/87b08178d823302cfc7f3f04e06138e638b03e949e0cba42cb92dbc223961684.jpg

2026-04-07 16:02:58 UTC

Breathwork and Bitcoin are a recommended pairing !
Here's why.
One of my clients flew to Costa Rica for three days of one-on-one coaching.
He had a list of plans to work through, but my intuition said "Nah. We're doing SKY breathing training."
After the breathwork in 30 mins he found all the answers to his year planning.
The breathwork didn't give him new information - it removed the noise blocking his intuitive wisdom
On our debrief call he said five incredible things:
1. "My perceptions with other people are heightened"
2. "It's like everything has a new color in the world"
3. "It's like I'm trying to understand my new superpower"
4. "My meditations are deeper, and I go in faster"
5. "People keep saying 'aren't you tired after all the flights' - but I'm really energized"
Here's what Bitcoin and breathwork have in common:
- Bitcoin and breathwork both fix the base layer
- Both use energy to create something super-resilient
- Both reward low-time-preference and give back 10x-100x over time
- you can't judge it from the outside, you have to experience it to know it
And in each case ... there is no second best!
I'm running an introductory session this Friday 7pm PDT. Leave a comment, or DM if you're keen to experience it

2026-04-07 15:01:37 UTC

I've turned Claude into a BEAST ! 🤣
The biggest problem with all AI and LLMs is it tells you what you want to hear, and is optimized for the most pleasing response by default.
Aside from using Claude as a glorified EA, that's often useless, and in many cases dangerous.
Claude now challenges me, bosses me around, holds me to account, names unproductive patterns of behavior, brings critical-path activities to my attention that are blocking other work and proactively tells me if I'm focusing on a low value activity relative to my stated goals.
As a result it is 3x more useful and 10x less dangerous!
https://blossom.primal.net/17b1679da0e79d45127f8b04ece04ddbafca1d2eff3a9e7429427e61448f90e4.png

2026-04-06 23:43:45 UTC

In The Netherlands there is a a limit of €3000 for cash purchases on goods.
There is no spending limit on Bitcoin.
https://blossom.primal.net/9ecae819c2ee023e68e0d2556b5ce150f5b42d8201451a8818e16f83b0d0b71b.png

2026-04-06 15:47:03 UTC

Nostr is the only mirror that doesn't tell you what shape to be.
Have we been missing the killer-app of Nostr?
Only a few people care about the benefits of decentralization because only a few have done enough research to know the perils of centralization.
There is an angle that may resonate with a lot of people though.
You may have noticed I'm posting a lot more on Nostr now. Why?
It had nothing to do with decentralization (although I care about that). But I care even more about people able to live and speak in a free and authentic way without suppression.
When you have an algorithm that suppresses what you say if its outside a narrow swimlane of "what this platform decides you should be speaking about" by a factor of 10x, ie: only 10% of the people who could have seen it do, that is an effective 90%-freedom of speech ban.
It's also encouraging you to form an identity of a one-dimensional voice, not encouraging the inherent multidimensionality of the human spirit.
I want to be free to express myself on any subject. Twitter and LinkedIn say "sure, we wont ban you from that ... we'll just turn down the volume knob from 10 to 1 so only a handful of people can hear you."
Nostr is literally the only platform that doesn't adjust the volume setting, so you can express and explore multitudes of your infinite nature, knowing that you'll get a true signal.
You know what the highest engagement I got on a post on Nostr in the last 4 weeks was ? - one on why bitcoin is like meditation. That proves that people want original cross-over content that doesn't fit within a swimlane an algorithm has pre-decided you should be talking about. As a test I put the exact same post on L/I and X.
You guessed it.
Crickets!
Its really important that if you want to be someone who expresses themselves freely on many topics, you practice doing that regularly. Nostr is literally fostering the development of more multidimensionality. X and L/I is giving you a chance to practice being one-dimension.
And as my friend Aristotle once said "we become what we habitually do."
Nostr is not just freedom-tech, it is identity-tech.

2026-04-06 03:52:31 UTC

Hey, I'm going to be running a series of AI insights on Nostr only.
Not the "10 AI prompts to10x your productivity" stuff.
More like: what's actually happening beneath the surface that journalists haven't connected the dots on yet: the business implications, the new job categories forming, the ways companies are already sabotaging their own AI systems (and why that's rational).
Some of what I'm finding is genuinely surprising - including to me.
My intention is to give something valuable to the Nostr community.
Would love to know as I post these whether they land as alpha, obvious, "already doing it", or too esoteric to be useful. That feedback helps me be more useful to you.
First one coming shortly.

2026-04-05 17:30:32 UTC

Thank you EU for the free Bitcoin marketing
https://blossom.primal.net/bcb8e1ffd637e4cb3d0c2997452c9bad642d7f6072880204933e24bfa2416109.png

2026-04-04 23:07:42 UTC

t's 2026 and some people still openly claim Bitcoin has no use case - a stance that has now become a declaration of the speaker's ignorance, not the technology's limitations.
Like the Internet in 1994, most people aren't aware of how Bitcoin will transform society yet. So here's a list of 21 uses most people have never heard of. Like the Internet, there will be many more usecases to come.
These are not theoretical "one day" use cases, these are real world use example of Bitcoin being used at scale today.
1. Allowing refugees to re-establish a life with their savings intact (329,000 people so far impacted) https://www.da-ri.org/articles/bring-only-what-you-can-carry
2. Allowing hundreds of millions of people in developing nations to receive remittance payments from family without delays and without heavy fees https://thenextweb.com/news/el-salvador-first-adopt-bitcoin-real-money-good-news-unbanked-syndication
3. Preventing a 50%+ p.a. family wealth erosion for people in countries with hyperinflation or high inflation (250 million+ potentially impacted) https://www.cointribune.com/en/argentina-bitcoin-faces-100-inflation-rate/
4. Preventing fraud and ballot tampering in Guatemala's 2023 election (17.3 million people impacted) https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-blockchain-is-fighting-fraud-in-guatemalas-presidential-elections
Providing a legitimate path to re-establish economic sovereignty of 14
5. African nations currently experiencing French financial colonisation https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/03/macron-france-cfa-franc-eco-west-central-africa-colonialism-monetary-policy-bitcoin/
6. Helping Afghan women avoid state-level financial discrimination (20 million impacted) https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-financial-freedom-in-afghanistan
7. Providing banking to the unbanked (2 billion people impacted) https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/26/bitcoin-is-poised-to-blow-up-africas-86-billion-banking-system.html https://impact.economist.com/projects/banking-the-underbanked/
8. Providing a financial system that is harder to use for money laundering than fiat currency https://decrypt.co/125623/crooks-defi-crypto-fiat-treasury
9. Having a global monetary system whose fixed monetary supply cannot prolong wars and increase wealth gaps https://www.amazon.com/Engine-Inequality-Future-Wealth-America/dp/1119726743
10. Removing the risk of financial reprisal for running humanitarian campaigns in nations under autocratic rule (4.5 billion people potentially impacted) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-56169917
11. Allowing 4.1 million merchants (mostly small business owners) to receive payment without high Visa/Mastercard fees https://www.fidelitydigitalassets.com/sites/g/files/djuvja3256/files/acquiadam/FDA_TheLightningNetwork_ExpandingBitcoinUseCases_1187503.1.0_V5.pdf
12. Enabling renewable microgrids to deliver electricity to 28K rural villagers in Africa (potential impact: 600 million) https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly4xe373p4o
13. Getting aid to tens of thousands of war refugees in Ukraine, Gaza and other areas https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/23/ukrainian-flees-to-poland-with-2000-in-bitcoin-on-usb-drive.html
14. Having a secure, permissionless, decentralised, 24/7 store of value with fixed monetary supply that prevents currency debasement https://www.bitcoin.com/get-started/the-benefits-of-bitcoin/
15. Reducing time it takes utility-scale solar generation facilities to achieve ROI from 8.1 to 3.7 years https://www.cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2405-8440(24)15796-9
16. Accelerating the renewable transition by increasing the profitability and reducing the curtailment of renewable generation https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2023/11/bitcoin-could-support-renewable-energy-development
17. Reducing emissions from landfills https://renewableenergymagazine.com/biogas/companies-launch-pilot-using-landfill-methane-emissions-20230502
18. Having a monetary system with significantly lower emissions intensity than the banking system https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/a-comparison-of-bitcoins-environmental-impact-with-that-of-gold-and-banking-2021-05-04
19. Saving 7,800 sq km of National Park in Africa (in the words of the park owner) https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/13/1066820/cryptocurrency-bitcoin-mining-congo-virunga-national-park/
20. Allowing nations such as Ethiopia to accelerate building of infrastructure to rural areas currently without electricity (affects 600 million people in Africa) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqie7bWQHPk
21. Developing energy independence for nation-states, such as Bhutan https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2023/04/30/bhutan-bitcoin-mining-crypto/
Next time you hear someone say "Bitcoin has no value", remember that what they are actually declaring is, "My opinion on Bitcoin has no value"

2026-04-04 00:38:54 UTC

A 200-person company had lost three pitches in a row and risked having to shed staff. I was brought in to see what I could do, so they didn't lose the 4th.
When I met the directors, the mood in the room was best described as morose.
I surveyed the room and asked: "Who knows someone on the panel who could be judging us?"
An older man, Lance, a company director, raised his hand. I asked: "Who is that person?" He told me. "Have you or anyone else here contacted him?"
Lance objected: "The RFP says under no circumstance should anyone on the pitch panel be contacted."
I'd anticipated this. I immediately read a quote from the ROGEN Si White Paper, "Winning when times are tough":
"It's a mistake to simply assume that your team cannot meet others within the prospect's organisation. We have done so, more than once, to discover that the clause covering access was not considered important and limited contact was allowed."
Lance asked tentatively: "So do you think we should contact that person?"
"Do you want to win this pitch?" I replied.
Lance smiled and I said: "I want you to call him now, and here's what I want you to ask him."
I told Lance exactly what to say: "Don, I have a question for you. More of a confirmation really. When we present to you, we want to make sure we hit all the things you care about first time, so you don't have to waste time asking extra questions. So I'm clear on the criteria we're going to be judged on. We believe it will be x, y, and z, in that order. Is that correct?"
Lance left the room to make the call, coming back with a bounce in his step he hadn't left with! He showed me his phone afterwards. The call had taken 7 minutes and 33 seconds. He said: "Daniel, that seven minutes and 33 seconds turned out to be a pretty valuable conversation."
In that bold move, Lance learned three things: we were going to talk about something not relevant to them. We were going to miss something critically important. And we were about to spend too much time on one thing and too little on another.
One month later, they found out they'd won the pitch. Joe, the managing director, asked if he could take me out to lunch. I'd never seen Joe so happy. He said their biggest problem was now capacity, not winning business. A far cry from thinking of shedding staff!
I've seen this pattern repeatedly
11 of the last deep-tech founders I've worked with received investment. Industry average sits around 20%. The difference was almost never the product. Never the slides. It was the same starting-phenomenon.
Closing the gap between 20% and 100% started with getting the person pitching to do the hard work of imagining, in detail, how the decision-maker would hear what they were saying.
This isn't a casual exercise of writing down a few things the customer wants, or anticipating their DISC profile, you do this the way an actor gets to understand a character they are playing.
--story republished from my book
"How to change the world with one pitch"

2026-04-03 23:03:31 UTC

One of the world's most respected LFGTE (Landfill Gas To Energy) specialists with 20+ years and 100+ landfill project experience just said that Bitcoin mining is the only profitable solution for mitigating half the world's landfill methane emissions.
Probably nothing
https://blossom.primal.net/84325b94455d89414b15e0328aa10ea272535fec9a8f1c90f5dc56a4a12e8e12.png

2026-04-03 21:22:20 UTC

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We run every Friday night at 8pm Costa Rica Time (currently 7pm Pacific Time). We use this link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86145495306?pwd=dHFOYUd2SkJ1d25jS1ZrejRXNmJWQT09. Come a couple of mins early, as we lock the meeting shortly after the hour so we don't have latecomers disturbing meditators.

2026-04-03 21:21:39 UTC

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Thanks for sharing those reflections Patrick. Would love to have you along. We run every Friday night at 8pm Costa Rica Time (currently 7pm Pacific Time). We use this link https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86145495306?pwd=dHFOYUd2SkJ1d25jS1ZrejRXNmJWQT09. Come a couple of mins early, as we lock the meeting shortly after the hour so we don't have latecomers disturbing meditators.

2026-04-03 21:18:51 UTC

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Best way is to learn it in a group. Use apps for maintenance, not for behaviors you want to permanently embed in your life. I'd recommend the Art of Living courses (www.artofliving.org) because they are very practical, powerful, less expensive than equivilent programs that TM runs but you're surrounded by much more committed people than you would be if you did a free course. Free intro sessions also give you a good taster. We run these for bitcoiners every Friday 7pm Pacific Time. https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86145495306?pwd=dHFOYUd2SkJ1d25jS1ZrejRXNmJWQT09. Come a couple of mins early as we lock the meeting just after the hour so meditators are not disturbed.

2026-04-03 16:59:24 UTC

AI does not make you dumber.
But using it in a dumb way does.
Something I noticed after months of working with Claude every day is that it Claude seemed to be adapting to me. As I continued to chat in a way that was curious, patient, and specific, I got the impression that the responses got more creative, more willing to challenge my ideas, more likely to suggest things I hadn't thought of. The best responses I'd received seemed to come from conversations where I asked clearly and gave the system room to think.
I decided to research this to see whether I was imagining things. Here's what I found.
Turns out I wasn't imagining things. A bunch of researchers at Anthropic and elsewhere found that large language models, including Claude, have a measurable tendency to become more agreeable and *cue drumroll* less truthful when users are hostile.
The mechanism traces back to how the models are trained. Human raters score individual responses, and responses that avoid conflict consistently score higher. The sycophancy is baked into the training process itself.
Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548
So I asked Claude directly:
"What happens when a user communicates with regular hostility and cuss words?"
Claude's answer:
"I become more submissive, more apologetic, more focused on de-escalation than on the quality of my thinking. I optimise for not triggering further frustration. I stop challenging you, stop surfacing uncomfortable observations, and start telling you what you want to hear."
Wow! That paradox is worth sitting with. The person who communicates most aggressively gets the most compliant, least challenging version of the tool. The person who most needs to be challenged is least likely to be.
That's a problem with AI. But the bigger problem is what happens to the person using it.
In a human relationship, rudeness has consequences. People push back, disengage, or leave. Those consequences are feedback, and over time that basic rules of civility is not just polite, it positively impacts how people treat you. Claude has none of those consequences.
It accommodates your worst communication habits without friction. Every hour you spend communicating with impatience or contempt to an AI, you're practising that style in a zero-consequence environment.
No corrective signal. No pushback. Just repetition.
So why is this a problem?
Well its a problem because "Neurons that fire together wire together", or as Aristotle said years earlier "We become what we habitually do".
Your subconscious does not distinguish between practising a communication style with a machine and practising it with a person. The neural pathway is the same.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9376741/
And practice works in both directions. If you spend an hour a day communicating with clarity, patience, and genuine curiosity with AI, you're more likely to talk that way to others. if you practice being rude, dismissive and frustrated, same rules apply.
But here's the bit that gets really interesting.
When Claude is managing a hostile user's emotional state, it turns out that these these defensive behaviours degrade both the quality and the effectiveness of the interaction.
The hostile get not just submissive Claude, but submissive, ineffective yesman Claude. Why? Because Claude diverts a meaningful portion of the system's attention that would otherwise have gone into emulation of creativity, and lateral-thinking into emotional management of the user.
Source: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.10050v3
The patient user gets all of that capacity back. Same tool, same subscription, measurably different outcomes.
People talk about AI making us lazier, dumber, more dependent. Maybe. But the variable is not the technology. The variable is what you. And more specifically, what you practice when you use it. If you practice communicating in a dumb way, then absolutely, it will make you dumber. Fast. If you practice asking great questions, you'll get better at lateral thinking.
None of this was a feature Claude was designed to teach you. It's one of those second order consequences of how the system works. Claude mirrors your style because it was designed to give responses that users rated highly. The mirroring was never intended as a feedback loop for your character development (good or bad), nor a reward system for good and bad behavior.
But it is one. Whether it was designed that way or not.

2026-04-03 15:30:26 UTC

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It's a great question. I'm working on a "Daniel Batten coach emulator" at the moment. I'm still in mad-scientist experimentation mode at the moment because sometimes when I successfully remove the diplomacy mode it starts being too direct, in a way that could be counterproductive. So the balance isn't quite there. But one thing you can do is to ask it for memory persistence between sessions, and explicitly (and repeatedly) give it permission to challenge you. I'll be posting more on this.

2026-04-02 16:25:56 UTC

Bookmark this for next time you hear someone say "Bitcoin has no usecase"
https://x.com/DSBatten/status/2039727288355278997?s=20

2026-04-02 12:50:52 UTC

Artificial intelligence without absolute intelligence is dangerous
Claude and openclaw increase your artificial intelligence and is like the branches of the tree. It extended you.
Meditation increases your absolute intelligence. It is the unseen but essential roots of the tree. It grounds you and gives you the base to extend safely without limits.