Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexor.io and BitStamp and produced and distributed by CoinDes.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, May 26th, and today we're talking about what's really

behind China's Bitcoin mining ban, or at least a different way to look at it.

There has been so much happening so fast that you can expect a lot of these shows to be

checking in on some things that we've discussed just a day or two before, and today is definitely

an example of that. I'm going to first do an update on the discussion around the Bitcoin

Mining Council. Michael Saylor spoke at Consensus yesterday, and I thought there were a couple

interesting points that came out of it. The first is the extent to which the impetus for this mining meeting

was from Elon himself, rather than Sailor dragging Elon along. Saylor said, quote,

I think Elon's first order ask was, hey, can we come up with a way to publish or boost transparency

for Bitcoin mining energy usage? I think the first step is let's come up with a way to publish or boost transparency for Bitcoin mining energy usage?

I think the first step is let's come up with a protocol for us to publish energy information

in a way that we can share it with the world, and then work together to make sure that we

pursue sustainable energy goals. Sailor argued basically that in the absence of there being a standard

model for energy use reporting, critics come up with their own

models for estimating how much energy mining is using, many of which end up painting a much bleaker

picture than the reality. If this is the case, it's a solvable information problem, and

frankly, it's also one which does benefit from some amount of coordination from a critical

massive parties to agree to the type of disclosures they're going

to make and the standards for how they're going to report things to make them comparable.

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