Here is the current state of the global SMR market. See the readiness state of technologies across 6 key metrics: licensing, siting, financing, supply chains, engagement, and fuel. oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_90816/t…

The key to saving the environment is not looking backward, it’s moving forward. I realized this the first time I visited Italy twenty years ago. Everything was clean and green. The rivers sparkled. The lesson for me was obvious: the answer is not underdevelopment. The answer is progress. When China was poor, the air was so polluted that people could barely see the blue sky. Today, blue skies have returned to their cities. Development does not only create wealth, it also provides the resources needed to restore and protect the environment. Some environmentalists want us to preserve every aspect of our biodiversity, including the mosquitoes for example, so that researchers can fly in once every ten years from their universities (which build particle accelerators and billion-dollar laboratories with their pocket money), study our ecosystems, and count how many people died from dengue outbreaks. They want to buy our air through carbon credits. If carbon credits were such a great deal, they would be selling them to us, not the other way around. Cleaning every river, lake, and water source in El Salvador, and ensuring they remain clean and sparkling, would cost roughly $12 billion. Where is that money supposed to come from without economic development? Carbon credits? The path forward for our country is the path of Japan and Singapore, not the path of the Congo.

A particular thank you to my brilliant panellists @MiningMunich, @NuclearBitcoinr, @JesslovesMJK and @alexneumueller for helping us explore how Bitcoin mining could become genuine energy infrastructure through flexible demand, waste-energy use, heat reuse and grid balancing.

As you probably know, 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 already 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. Source: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… Troy Cross (who became not just a comrade in arms but a friend during this chapter of Bitcoin's history) 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. At last year's Bitcoin conference, Troy told me something I didn't know at the time: the conversation had lasted for 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. Source: x.com/DSBatten/status/186725… 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). Source: classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/r… 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 was the tide turned. Ben adopted a new position around Bitcoin, not pro-Bitcoin, but definitely no longer anti-Bitcoin either. He was now in the middle ground of uncertainty, redefining the meaning of his own art and expressing hope of both sides engaging in dialog. His beautiful tweet where he announced this shift was not only public, it has remained his pinned post ever since: "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. Source: x.com/thevonwong/status/1639… He let better information redraw the picture in shades of gray, publicly, which takes more intellectual honesty than either defending one's original position or "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 from him, 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. Ben was prepared to give time, data and evidence 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 as it should have: unaltered - the same immutable monument Ben has built. What had changed was everything surrounding it: the art's meaning, the story around it, the zeitgeist, the artist himself. All that had changed because of the simple acts of one human talking to another human, repeated over time. And Troy's four days were one thread of many. Nobody appointed him to talk to Ben. Nobody appointed Margot, Trey or me to defend Bitcoin. No campaign manager set us weekly KPIs for number of GreenpeaceUSA ratios. 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 a famous brand. The defence ran on individuals with no budget, no leader and no title, each deciding alone 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.

First a trickle, then a torrent There have now been 30 papers since 2021 showing Bitcoin solving all three aspects of the energy trilemma: ♻️energy sustainability 🔐energy security (including grid stability) and 💳energy equity No other technology can address all three concurrently In fact, many energy experts believed this was impossible (Source link to all 30 papers with a summary of they says in comments)

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: cell.com/heliyon/fulltext/S2…) The recent paper "Techno-economic Assessments of Large-Scale Solar PV and Bitcoin Mining" (Keshavarzfard & Zinati Yazdi 2025) was published in Solar Energy. Source: sciencedirect.com/science/ar… The journal has an impact factor of 6.6 (top 6% of academic journals)

Large levels of flexible load is a non-negotiable requirement for tomorrow's grids Bitcoin mining is best in class across 3 of the 4 dimensions of flexible load that matter most Probably nothing

Finally figured-out air filtration for these slim units. Anyone want to turn their hashrate heater into an air-purifier?

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.

Did you know a quarter of global energy is used just for "comfort heat"? Imagine if we generated all that warm air and water using Bitcoin miners instead. I had an incredibly fun chat with Tyler Stevens about the hashrate heating movement and what happens to Bitcoin's security budget when normal people start heating their homes with ASICs. Catch the full conversation below.

Vor genau einem Jahr habe ich einen Raspberry Zero2 W in Paraffinöl versenkt. Das Öl sorgt dafür, dass der Prozessor auch unter Höchstlast kaum wärmer wird als Zimmertemperatur. Seitdem berechnet er mit einem BOINC-Client für die Mathematisch-Physikalische Fakultät in Prag 24/7 Asteroidendaten. So ermitteln wir die Umlaufbahnen aller Asteroiden und wissen, wo die ihre Bahnen ziehen und auch, ob wir uns Sorgen machen müssen, dass uns einer in Zukunft trifft. Ein genau baugleicher Zero2 W mit genau der gleichen Software führt genau die gleiche Aufgabe ungekühlt aus. Und jetzt stellt sich die Frage: Macht perfekte Kühlung einen Leistungsunterschied aus? Und die Antwort ist: Ja! Und zwar signifikant! – 5,97 % So das wäre auch geklärt. 😀

Iceland, in 2010, proposed the idea of electrical columns in the form of walking iron giants.

More people would be pro datacenter if every one had a beautiful open-to-the-public heated pool.

PROJECT ASCENSION This is where it all comes together. This is our full-power, commercial-scale unit at 10 MWe of output (30 MWth). Nuclear fueled heat to final electrical output. There will be a co-located data center, to prove out the coupling of these systems. We believe it will be the first time in history these two pieces of infrastructure have been built side by side.

Age of Empires II

A 15-pound honey badger can survive a cobra bite that would kill a full-grown man in under two hours. Then it finishes eating the snake. A biology grad student at the University of Minnesota wanted to know how. She needed badger blood to find out, and the only samples she could get were from two American zoos in San Diego and Indiana. What she found in the DNA was one tiny change. There's a small socket on your muscle cells that your nerves plug into to tell your muscles to move. Cobra venom kills you by jamming that socket shut, so your lungs stop working. The honey badger's socket has a swapped-out amino acid that gives it a positive electrical charge. Cobra venom is also positively charged. Like magnets pointing the wrong way, the venom gets pushed off before it can lock in, and the muscles keep firing. The same workaround showed up separately in hedgehogs and pigs. Mongooses got there too, with a slightly different molecular trick. Four different animals with no shared ancestor all arrived at the same solution because venomous snakes kept biting them for millions of years. That only covers snakes like cobras and mambas. Puff adders work differently, destroying tissue instead of paralyzing muscle, and the DNA trick doesn't help there. So when a puff adder lands a solid bite, the badger collapses into a kind of coma for two or three hours. Then it wakes up groggy and eats the snake anyway. The skin is maybe the unfairest part of all this. It's about a quarter inch thick, rubbery, and so loose it fits like a wetsuit two sizes too big. A lion can clamp its jaws on a honey badger and the badger will twist halfway around inside its own skin and start clawing the lion's face while still in its mouth. Bee stingers barely get through. Porcupine quills don't either. Which brings us back to the bees in that photo. They're annoying. A few sneak through to the face, and enough stings have killed honey badgers in the wild. Honey badgers still die. But they're running three different defense systems at the same time, and one of them is a genetic lottery ticket evolution has pulled four times.

Indeed

bitcoin’s lightning network also works exactly like this when making a payment

I used to believe three things about energy. I was wrong on all three. • Using less energy is good • Wind and solar are the best solution • And that believing this made me a good person Here’s what changed my mind: