The White House is Wrong about Bitcoin Mining with Nic Carter - WBD571
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2022
⏱️ 85 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nic Carter is a Partner at Castle Island Ventures and co-founder and Chairman of Coin Metrics. In this interview, we discuss the White House bitcoin mining research paper, regulation and the role of renewables in the energy mix.
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In September, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) published a study which looked into the climate impacts of bitcoin mining.
The report successfully acknowledged the differences between PoS and PoW, the contribution of bitcoin mining to grid flexibility & demand response and the potential to unlock stranded renewables, but the rest of the report offers little, if any merit.
Overall, the findings in this report were quite damning. The report relies on non-peer-reviewed and often totally flawed data from the likes of De Vries and Digiconomist and even cites the absurd 2018 Mora et al paper. As Nic says in his article, "The Mora reference is shocking. It's a bit like reading a scientific government report on the history of the moon landing and finding a reference to a conspiracy website claiming that the entire thing was faked."
With papers like this from the White House, the New York Mining Moratorium Bill and general growing disdain for Bitcoin mining, the US risks giving up its headstart. It is the country with the most to lose, and as we saw when China banned mining, Bitcoin is totally agnostic, and by banning, or overregulating, America won't hurt bitcoin, only itself. "If you ban it, you empower your enemies, like Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. If you embrace it, you directly hurt them, and give their citizens tools to free themselves from those oppressive regimes."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | My whole objective here was just to really meticulously go through their document and show that they |
| 0:06.4 | don't have a better command of the facts than we do. They're relying on bad data, they're relying |
| 0:10.9 | on bad sources and academics, and they should do better. |
| 0:15.0 | Hello there, how are you all? You're having a good week? |
| 0:18.0 | I have recently just returned from the UK Bitcoin Conference. |
| 0:21.0 | I just want to say Jim Duffy and the Bitcoin Collective did an amazing job. |
| 0:24.7 | I didn't know what to expect when I got there, but they've absolutely crushed it, so I'm looking forward to what they're doing next. |
| 0:29.6 | I'm also going to be heading over to Switzerland this week for the Plan B conference in Lugano. |
| 0:35.2 | Anyway, welcome to the What Bitcoin did podcast which is brought to you by Gemini, the only place I'm using for buying |
| 0:40.7 | Bitcoin. I'm your host, Peter McCormack, and today I've got one of my buying Bitcoin. I'm your host Peter McCormack and today I've got one of my |
| 0:44.2 | favorite Bitcoiners back on the show Nick Carter, somebody who has dedicated so |
| 0:49.1 | much of his time over the last few years for defending Bitcoin, promoting Bitcoin, so any chance I get to sit down |
| 0:54.4 | with Nick and discuss Bitcoin I will take it now back in September the White House Office |
| 1:00.0 | of Science and Technology Policy dropped a report on the climate and energy implications of |
| 1:05.2 | crypto assets. |
| 1:06.8 | Now as you might expect this report turned out to be quite anti proof of work, but what was perhaps a bit of a surprise was how poorly was put together. |
| 1:15.6 | Well, really, is it actually that much of a surprise? |
| 1:18.4 | Probably not for some of you. |
| 1:19.9 | It cited a whole bunch of sources that were utterly flawed like Defrees and the Mora et al paper, which we all know are absolute nonsense. |
| 1:29.0 | So Nick stepped up and wrote this brilliant article calling them out for their shoddy research and highlighting the flaws in the paper. |
| 1:35.3 | So Danny reached out to Nick and said, come on man, let's make a show about this. So when we were in Miami, we got Nick in, we ran through it, all their flaws, all the stupid shit they did in this report so |
| 1:44.3 | listen I hope you enjoy this one you got any questions about it you can reach out to me or |
... |
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