Bitcoin Mining with North America's Largest Miner | Pomp Podcast #578
On this podcast, Fred Thiel, a seasoned technology executive with over 25 years of experience, discusses his background and his role as CEO of Marathon, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies. Thiel's expertise spans various sectors, including fintech, and he joined Marathon's board in 2018 to aid its transition into Bitcoin mining. He highlights the transformative potential of blockchain, drawing parallels to the democratization of information brought by the internet. He emphasizes the need for professionalization and good governance as Bitcoin mining operations evolve into billion-dollar revenue companies. Marathon's focus is on expanding its hash rate production, aiming to surpass 10 exahash by Q1 next year from its current 2 exahash. Thiel also discusses the company's journey towards carbon neutrality, initially seeking sustainable mining methods but pivoting to full carbon neutrality due to financial institutions' unwillingness to pay extra for sustainable Bitcoin. He envisions the Bitcoin ecosystem maturing and introducing financial products based on derivatives and hash rate, fostering a new asset class for institutional investors. Thiel's proactive approach towards industry collaboration and transparency shows his commitment to the responsible growth of both Marathon and the Bitcoin mining sector.
Transcripts are autogenerated. May contain typos.
[Music] all right guys bang bang got fred here thank you so much for doing this thank you great to be here absolutely let's just get started with marathon and kind of your background so uh marathon is one of the largest bitcoin miners in north america what did you do before you were on the board and then became the ceo so 25 plus years running technology companies across a variety of sectors fintech was a big one a matter of fact my first programming job was at a bank um so grew up really understanding the friction in
the financial markets um was had the good fortune of taking some companies public doing a lot of m a and then switched to the dark side became a private equity managing partner and did leverage buyouts of tech companies and then started advising really large funds and tech companies uh i had known the ceo marathon merrick um former ceo now executive chairman for many years socially our kids grew up together and um you know i joined the board in 2018 really to help him with kind of this transition to bitcoin mining and blockchain
i've always been fascinated by blockchain i think it's a great um leveler if you look at kind of how the internet developed and brought kind of the democratization of information i think people exposing data on the blockchain is going to change how businesses operate you can imagine companies like salesforce who effectively hold your crm data hostage if all that data were on the blockchain not only could you use salesforce to access it and gain benefit from it but you could use other applications so i think there's just a we're so early
in this blockchain development bitcoin cryptocurrencies are just one part of it i'm a big believer in the bitcoin blockchain being a foundation for financial institutions very secure fully decentralized network you know you can say other things about ethereum i think it has some great benefits but it still is less decentralized than the bitcoin blockchain and there's just so much you can do so i was very excited to have the opportunity to step into more of an operating role at marathon and i think now is the time
where you'll see the miners become more professional companies you know we're real enterprises uh if you just look at the build-out plans most of us have you know we'll be billion-dollar revenue companies within the next year and a half to two years and those become big companies and they need to be run in a proper way with good governance give us an overview of marathon in terms of just staff revenue uh kind of footprint globally or in north america just kind of when somebody says to you hey you know tell me more about kind of progress
of marathon how do you describe the progress sure so progress to date we just published an update um at the beginning of the month and so we're at the point where we've rolled out close to uh about 20 000 miners at this point of the 103 000 we're rolling out over the course of this year uh into q1 of next year uh so revenues are beginning to ramp um and uh we went in in january bought about 150 million dollars of bitcoin to put on our balance sheet uh you know we're very well capitalized company we have no debt uh
close to a little over 400 million dollars of liquid assets today and we're very focused on just building out our production um so we'll be at about uh little over 10 extra hash of hash rate and come q1 of next year we're a little over just hitting two right now so i think you know the growth rate's happening nicely we're seeing great production of bitcoin in our pool uh which has been great and we're not kind of cross this threshold where we're producing over 10 bitcoin a day which is great and uh marching forward
so we're super excited about our progress and uh geographically everything's in north america one facility multiple facilities multiple facilities so we have uh current facility we're building out mostly from is in hardin montana and that'll have about 100 megawatts a little over 30 000 miners and then uh we recently announced uh the new facility in texas which will be about 70 000 miners uh predominantly mostly carbon neutral renewable energy got it um let's just jump into there's basically three main
topics i think that everyone's talking about marathon in uh i always caveat these conversations with the following uh one most people immediately jump to conclusions right before hearing uh uh kind of the other side of the story uh two is that um when there's controversy people always think that it's negative impact on a business so i look at a robin hood right everyone was like you know drop robin hood and everyone's yelling scream about gamestop and then the halting of trading and stocks user acquisition for them went up more
than ever right so like there's this like streisand effect that occurs uh and then three is um there can be a separation between the uh kind of philosophy and the actual application right and so i think it's most important just like hey here's three questions like what what is the answers uh so let's start with esg bitcoin right um there's some people who believe uh every bitcoin is a bitcoin it doesn't matter where it's mined how it's mined a bitcoin's bitcoin and they're completely fungible
uh there is this kind of new conversation around uh separating or creating premium for uh maybe a country that it's mined in or a specific energy mix that it's used to mine the bitcoin kind of what's happened so far for you guys from uh this perspective and then like where are you guys going or how do you think about this moving forward sure great question so um we listen to two audiences the bitcoin community and the institutional investor community being a public company the institutional investors when
asked you know do you want a bitcoin that is green they say yes do you want a bitcoin that is ofac compliant and they say yes so based on that we developed plans to try and develop virgin coins that would be environmentally sustained with mind using environmental methods and that would be ofac compliant what we quickly learned however was that the financial institutions weren't willing to pay extra for that bitcoin so it's kind of like saying all bitcoin really are the same but you know we'd like to be able to say
this is the financial institutions that the bitcoin we buy are sustainably mined and that they're you know fully fat compliant but if they're not willing to pay for that there's no reason to do it and so we then reversed our stance um and quite publicly on memorial day weekend you know i put out a video saying you know we're going back to the vanilla node uh we're going to develop and uh mine bitcoin just like everybody else the exact same bitcoin no different and uh yes we hold all our bitcoin on
our balance sheet and you know we're somebody to come along and say i'll pay you extra for bitcoin that hasn't been put in any other wallets you know i don't think that's going to happen anytime soon but um you know that could happen down in the future but i think really the community believes in the fungibility of bitcoin all bitcoin are the same um i'm a believer in that as well i think that the you know the financial institutions from a regulatory perspective need to answer to their investors and to the regulators and i
think that's all going to sort itself out i think the miners are going to become more transparent about esg we're going to become more transparent about what are our commitments you know we've already made a commitment that uh you know our next deployment of 70 000 miners will be fully carbon neutral and we'll take the existing fleet that we have make that carbon neutral over the course of next year so we'll be 100 carbon neutral and you know we'll be tracked and held accountable to that by
the public markets over the course of the next year um and then i think it's really going to be a question of how the market develops with what sort of financial instruments people develop um you know a fund for example could say i'm only going to buy sustainably mined bitcoin and put it in my fund and then they could sell shares of that fund to institutional investors that's a way to kind of get at the differentiation on behalf of financial institutions without the miners having to do anything other than we're just
going to keep carrying on mining our bitcoin just like everybody else so it's fascinating to me that the financial institutions did this right and i think this is why the bitcoin community kind of revolts so heavily against this right it's almost this belief that like the esg conversation is just pure virtue signaling right so if you're demanding esg bitcoin which frankly isn't a thing right it's it's almost saying hey i have a bitcoin and like where did it come from where was it sourced from right
to some degree uh but it's acknowledging that all the bitcoin is the same it's just the the production process is different um but i'm not willing to pay more for it means that actually they don't put more value on it it's pure virtue signal yeah right and then i think the second piece is when you get to like the ofac compliance stuff right uh the bitcoin community believes well the whole point of bitcoin is you don't censor any transactions uh the financial system is built on literally censoring
transactions uh and actually they weaponize the dollar and you know all that stuff but they're not willing to pay more for that either right and so again it it's kind of all virtue signal it's all conversation it's all uh i want you to think i'm a good person but when it comes down to it we actually see no difference in value between any of this stuff and so do you think that uh the conversation goes away or do you think that actually the financial institutions like kind of make uh financial products
or like like how does this play out in terms of we've been able to decipher like don't listen to what they say watch what they do with their money uh but does that necessarily mean that they won't go after this or do you think that this is only going to get louder it's going to become more of kind of a mainstream conversation i think part of it is very much virtue signaling by the institutions because they're activist investors are holding them to the to that mandate um so i think it's not going to blow
over just the conversation will continue to be there um miners really have an incentive of becoming more environmentally sustainable it's the right thing to do not just for the planet but for the industry and what's great about mining in north america is that we have a very good grid system generally speaking where you can really purchase electricity based on a blend of power sources and so you have that ability to be you know predominantly renewable you can use carbon offsets for certain things you can use wrecks there
are lots of way to kind of mitigate the impact you're having on the climate from that perspective in the environment however you know bitcoin miners and the industry plays a key role for power because we enable a renewable wind farm or solar farm to get into business and provide base load for us and then build out their just power distribution network you know the biggest problem in power today is not that there isn't enough of it that's green it's it can't get to the right places and that's a grid and distribution issue
and you know 200 gigawatts of power is lost a year in this country just by heat and distribution lines and you know you could mine a lot of bitcoin if you just put that base load on a facility where they're doing solar or or wind and until battery storage technology gets there i think you're going to find bitcoin miners are the key drivers of investment in renewable energy i've continued to say this and literally i've had everyone from the climate change folks come after me to the mainstream media folks from et
cetera bitcoin is probably the greatest incentive for renewable energy r d at this point absolutely right it's just the financial incentive to get the cheapest power is literally as you stated you know you guys are minding 10 bitcoin a day that's you know almost a quarter or half a million bucks a day of uh revenue for just you right not the whole industry and so you just kind of keep going through and i think today you know 35 40 million dollars a day in mining rewards around the world and that's only going to continue to
appreciate like there's nothing else that has that kind of pure free market capitalistic perspective yeah absolutely i mean the there's some great analogies around bitcoin being a store for energy right when you think about it so we produce bitcoin it's a store of value you can take that store of value and go buy energy somewhere else if you want you can go buy whatever it is you want with it so it's a great store it's a great conversion of value into dollars and when you compare bitcoin to other industries
actually and you look at the energy inputs and the cost inputs uh carbon inputs even for what they get out the other end of economic value creation the bitcoin mining industry is by far one of the most profitable and efficient at converting energy into profits so i think it's going to continue to be a key part of the electrical power grid question going forward and i think it's going to grow in importance but the other thing that's happening in the industry is we're also seeing a huge push for hardware to get more energy efficient
so now you're starting to see the joules or the watts per kilo per terra hash come down and it's going to continue to shrink which means we use less electricity for every terra hash that we produce so i think you're going to find that the power consumption of the bitcoin mining industry is actually going to level off and eventually start declining as the efficiencies kick in yeah and the other piece and you know i've written about it i'm sure you guys have plenty of people at this point it's just
like the legacy financial system has a very linear relationship between uh serving more users more transactions and the energy consumption so if i want more users then i need more energy or more transactions i need more energy bitcoin not necessarily right in terms of just the ability to stuff tons of economic value into a single block uh and increase the economic value but not necessarily increase that energy consumption and so uh a lot of the analysis that's done in terms of you know bitcoin is going to do whatever in the future it's just
built off a premise that they just don't understand that one simple fact talk a little bit about geographic distribution in the mining industry right you guys are all focused uh within north america um there's tons of hash rate elsewhere in the world uh is there a belief in your mind that it will stay you know pretty decentralized do you think more and more of it will kind of coalesce into the united states how do you just think about where we are today and how that evolves over time yeah i think the there's obviously a shift going on in
china where inner mongolia is shutting down mining i think the jury's still out as to how much mining will actually leave china certain percentage will we're already seeing that um but as the hash rate in china starts dropping below 50 of the global hash rate in north america grows i think you're going to find that you'll have kind of a 30 40 percent in asia 30 40 in north america and then the balance in europe and other rows so to say um there's some great opportunities for bitcoin mining in the middle east for
example you know imagine the solar power capability so you know bitcoin can be mined anywhere you can get renewable energy you don't need infrastructure that's the beauty of the industry and so i think you're going to see a pretty good decentralization going forward it feels like uh in some crazy way the way that the bitcoin system is built ends up with a globally distributed and decentralized system uh and the free market does work in this sense right like we live in a world where every market is manipulated and we
argue all day long over should be more or less manipulated whatever but this is kind of the last free market and it's working absolutely you know it's kind of like um economics is a bit like water running downhill it'll always find its way downhill right and the bitcoin market you know when you think about anytime friction is introduced into the market it moves around it somehow and so i think you know there's always going to be the search for the cheapest power there's always going to be the search
for highest efficiency and the market's just going to continue to develop and get better and better more mature and people are going to get just more used to dealing with these very decentralized businesses that are created on the blockchain so i'm super excited about you know the future i think it's the equivalent of kind of 1997 in the internet is where we are today in bitcoin let's talk about taproot i know that uh there were some of this was related to kind of the ofac compliance and all that so maybe just talk a little bit
about your understanding of what taproot is and then uh kind of the decision-making process that goes into uh signaling adoption or not adoption sure marathon um so taproot enables a couple of things one it's an underlying change that will enable the creation of smart contracts on uh the bitcoin blockchain this is a really important thing i think it's undersold because um one of the key developments on the ethereum platform is smart contracts it lets you do these d5 businesses that lets you do really take bitcoin and the blockchain
to the next level so between what people like stacks are doing and other companies taproot is really going to enable the ability to do the smart contract and the ability to have a contract that is gradually exposed as it's executed which i think is a key part of that it also allows for multi-sig uh functions which is going to be critical going forward um why it took us longer to signal we had to migrate all our systems back to the vanilla core and then we had to slowly bring all those systems up and start signaling for tap roots so i
believe actually today as we're recording this we're mostly signaling the first blocks today most probably um so it'll be either today or tomorrow most probably based on you know you have to win a block um but uh we've fully deployed it and now it's just a question of winning a block got it um what's up guys bang bang i hope you're enjoying this conversation but before we go any further i want to quickly tell you about today's sponsor blockfy blockfy's got four different financial products for crypto investors
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com pomp again blockfy.com pomp go check it out and let me know what you think all right let's get back into this conversation i hope you enjoy it it feels like marathon is uh the quintessential example of uh a business that was started goes after bitcoin uh in terms of the mining uh by every measure is a bitcoin company right from the philosophy behind it to the team to the business you're actually in the revenue driven holding bitcoin on the balance sheet converting your cash into bitcoin like i mean literally you go and check all the
boxes and then this esg thing pops up ofac and taproot and it feels like almost overnight the bitcoin community went from like that's awesome to like you know i mean literally marathon right and like just like dump the stock and like absolute uh i say only bitcoin community can do like the chaos you know by flipping a switch what is the thought process inside the company when all this is happening like how much of that uh is like noise and sense of like hey we have a plan we're gonna continue with the plan versus like
no we're listening to the community and we're trying to understand you know how much of it is like constructive feedback versus uh just you know people being idiots on the internet right like how do you think through that so great question um initially we were very focused on who are the buyers of bitcoin institutions who do we really want to support what do we think they want not unlike any company that's a startup right you know you make your assumptions about what your clients are going to want um when push came to shove we realized
they weren't willing to pay as we were talking about before for that value and the community was very vocal and uh i'm a big believer that in these decentralized networks you really have to do what's right for the community because they do have a loud voice and it's important to listen to that voice because we all need to collaborate to make this really work in the long run and i think you know every bitcoin has to be as fungible as every other bitcoin and it's just a question of really trying to balance
running a business with the right governance and right compliance with doing what's right for the community and the overall growth of you know the crypto industry and the network it's hard to speculate on what you would have done you know uh offer situations that didn't occur but if the institutions had said hey we are willing to pay more for this do you think that you would have stuck to the guns and kind of continued on that path or do you think that the community kind of trumps revenue right and it's a weird question
because you get into this like revenue is the point of a capitalistic you know for-profit business is literally to get profit uh but then there's like the community aspect to it which isn't necessarily revenue driving but could be beneficial or hurt the business as well and so what what's the trade-off there i guess or the framework so i think one of the key aspects most people don't think about um is that there isn't a infinite supply bitcoin right there are 900 a day and if one miner starts doing
uh full of fat compliance for example and filters bitcoin how many bitcoin are they really going to create a day and is that even enough to feed financial institutions it's not by any practical means so the economic value institutions could provide to minors for a differentiated bitcoin that equation doesn't really pencil today it's a different story i think if um a fund were to basically go to all the miners and say listen we want to buy only virgin coin and here are the terms and conditions and we'll pay you this much more
miners will then make the economic decision themselves as to what they're going to do but i think still unlike the oil and gold industry where you can decide to turn on or turn off your reserves and you know grow volume uh that way we don't have that luxury in the bitcoin industry we cannot buy more hardware and then you know what a lot of people don't realize is there's a lot of luck in mining bitcoin it's not just you're going to do it um you know you've got to be really good at what you're doing and then
you've got to win the block so you've got to have scale and i think if anything what we're going to see is kind of the market turning into there'll be a group of you know a number of large volume miners you'll have a bunch of mid-tier miners who work very closely with hosting facilities they do kind of rev share deals that's how they kind of capitalize their capex and then you'll have small miners who are really just doing arbitrage on buying hashrate and i think there's some really interesting markets that are
going to develop in this industry around essentially doing derivatives based on hashrate so that you know i can decide to buy a couple of tara hash on the open market almost like you do energy credits i think we're going to start seeing that develop and that's going to create a whole different asset class for institutional investors because now you can actually invest in the bitcoin ecosystem and you know do arbitrage on derivatives that way which i think is going to be really exciting as more and more financial products
around that come out i think we're just getting started uh two more things i want to talk about is uh when we talk about community um most of us think of like the internet right and that's twitter reddit uh whatever else um but you guys set a unique position because you talk to the leadership of other mining companies you talk to you know what i'll call the whales or other large players in the market was there a difference between the response from the executives at other mining companies or like some of the
larger players in the market versus what i'll just call like the internet uh or did you hear kind of similar feedback across the entire ecosystem we got similar feedback across the ecosystem our peers in the industry looked at us and said you know you guys aren't really playing by the good of the community got it yeah and and it's interesting to kind of think through there because i think that some of that is uh unknown right like how do other miners feel about this and and i guess another piece of the
analysis would be if all of a sudden you know an institution can be hey we'll pay you 10 more for that bitcoin how many of them would have called you up and said hey what's the criteria right like uh fortunately i think that didn't happen but um you know we'll see how it plays out second thing is uh i think it's called the mining council uh the meeting with elon uh that michael uh sailor put on just whatever you can say about in terms of like going into it kind of what was your thought process of like
uh we're going to participate in this i i think you guys are saying um were you hoping to get out of it and then like at the meeting i don't know how much you can talk about like what was actually discussed but just like what did you get out of it right so preface i wasn't actually on the call okay our chairman merrick uh okamoto was on the call but going into it what we really wanted to do was um really work with elon to help him understand kind of what we're doing uh you know he put out a tweet that
showed the carbon footprint if it was all based on coal et cetera et cetera of what was happening with power consumption and so we really wanted a address that with him let him know kind of what we're doing and that we are much greener than um you know he put out to say and then offer the opportunity to collaborate and um you know while i think he tweeted after the meeting uh a tweet that he was uh you know going to collaborate with us um yeah we'll have to see kind of what he does i put out an open invite to him yesterday on fox you
know and said hey we'd love to work with you on the technology right you know renewable energy is a technology that needs investment and continued to drive the cost down battery storage and utility scale storage is a huge opportunity that will benefit every single consumer in north america and around the world and the bitcoin mining industry could fund a lot of that because it's helpful to what we're doing so i would love to collaborate with them and any other technology providers in that space yeah um i forget who said it but
somebody said the use of the word counsel right was probably too uh not thought out enough right and like maybe association would have given a different uh inclination to it yeah and so let's hold that constant of like forget nomenclature for a second what is your understanding of kind of like what this mining association council whatever uh is gonna do moving forward is it kind of like hey we're gonna meet you know once a quarter and we're gonna kind of just like help each other best practices is it
more of uh we're going to all publish the same report and with data uh do you guys have elon's cell phone number and you're gonna like you know text whenever something happens like like how do you kind of just see us moving forward yeah uh i don't think we'll be texting him um he'll tweet it you guys don't yeah we'll copy him on a tweet or two we might dm him but um so you know the goal is uh really to um provide a forum if you would for any minor to basically come and learn and also for
us all to educate the marketplace not just the regulators but also the general marketplace about what we're doing and so part of that is going to be publishing commitments here's what we intend to do over the next year you know we've publicly said that our next deployment will be fully carbon neutral and we'll achieve a full carbon neutral over our whole fleet by the end of next year um and so we'll be held accountable to that and you know even the small miners uh to publish kind of you know here's
our current power footprint what the sources we're using here's where we're going to be and then reporting on a regular basis whether that's monthly or quarterly that's to be seen but the mission is really of education and information sharing um it's not uh you know i think somebody tweeted you know oh this is opec for mining it's not for one thing the market share of the members is fairly small still in the overall global hash rate um and it's open to anybody who wants to join uh you know the good thing about
this industry is every bitcoin is the same we don't control the price the market controls the price um so there's no product differentiation and there's no pricing differentiation so it's really operational excellence and it feels like uh a big differentiation here is that as far as i understood from what i've read and people i've talked to there's no like hey we're going to come together and make decisions right it's more so we're going to come together and what we're going to do is we're going to
agree from a publishing standpoint like what con what content what data should be shared and it's more so um almost like industry standards more so than it was like let's all make a decision on an action that we're going to take that has an effect on bitcoin the blockchain the mining process etc uh and so in some way if people can separate out like hey let's talk about what internal data we should share versus like you know some of the other meetings that have happened to bitcoin that haven't
turned out so uh so well like 2017 yes uh you guys are basically doing the former right it's like we have all this data we understand our energy mix we understand um you know uh so much of what each other's doing like we should all come out and say it because it's gonna be overall good for the industry and so looking forward your publicly traded company there's not too too much you can say but how do you see maybe like the mining industry in north america evolving it sounds like you think more hashrate's
going to come into north america it's going to get greener and bitcoin kind of continues to do its thing and you guys are just better stewards of mining and you know in public markets or kind of how do you think about weak issues yeah i think yes we're going to see greater growth in hash rate in north america not necessarily because people are moving to north america just the north american miners are now very well capitalized in both riot ourselves hive and others um have now valuations that allow us to
continue to deploy and grow so um you'll see that grow as we get bigger we have to be better at operating our companies right the environmental footprint that we create is big and it's important that we are good stewards of that um and we're we have to be good stewards of our shareholders capital and so as fiduciaries you know public companies have a different responsibility than private companies in that we have a broader shareholder base different interests and it's really important for us that we provide
our shareholders with great exposure to bitcoin and help develop the market but also provide a really great return on their investment what's the thing that you're most looking forward to moving forward or there's like a specific milestone or a certain development in not necessarily even just the bitcoin mining but just bitcoin in general that you're like hey when this happens like that'll be the next kind of big inflection point in terms of interest or anything like that yeah i s when we start seeing d5 um
businesses launching on bitcoin when we start seeing identity management platforms launching on bitcoin when we start seeing um tokenized ownership of assets launching on bitcoin that's when we're starting to see the real mainstream you know if you go back to the internet analogy you know late 90s you had to buy unix servers and write custom software to set up a website and it was you know a multi-multi-million dollar exercise today you want to sell online you go set up a shopify store it's super easy
um and so i think the bitcoin industry is moving there the faster it moves there um the better and i think we're still in that kind of uh honeymoon period with a lot of these startups in the defy world um where the concepts aren't you know fully crystallized you know there's a lot of really cool um startups working today some really cool things we need to make them a little bit more regulator friendly um and then i think as we start seeing them deployed on the bitcoin blockchain that's when you'll start seeing
mainstream really take over here um do you have like a message to uh kind of a bitcoin community just in terms of like hey there's all this like nonsense that happened it feels like now you guys are saying okay we're just gonna do what every other miner's doing is that like a fair categorization yeah i think a better way to say it maybe is hey we listened right we reacted and we want to maintain a dialogue keep talking to us you know you know i understand that if when you're not happy you want to complain
but you know personal attacks uh don't help necessarily let's have a dialogue you know we have said um to a number of influencers in the industry hey listen you know we're more than happy to have a group of people sit down and talk with us and tell us what they think we should be doing you know we want that input um so make it constructive and you know i'm more than willing to sit down with any groups in the community and chat because i think there's a lot we could do together the people that you went and told that
to what was their response were they generally receptive they were very glad um you know i think what's interesting is on the one hand you have the folks who say marathon bent the knee teens the game of thrones analogy um which is great because we did right we listened to the community and we did react but at the same time we really want to work with the community to make bitcoin everything it can be and there's just so much still to be done in this industry and uh you know i think there's a lot of people
who want to do it and if we all work together i think we're going to get there much faster i couldn't agree more all right listen uh a sign of intelligence is changing your mind right like that like that's not a bad thing right it's actually a very good thing and i think that uh the world could probably benefit from people doing that more often right listening to folks getting more information changing their mind uh and uh i think you guys are serving as a great example um maybe we can all work together and
get elon to change his mind who knows where his mind is today but uh that would be the hope right absolutely so absolutely uh where can we send people to find you on the internet or find more about marathon yeah so i'm at twitter f g t h i e l um and otherwise go to marathons twitter um and just you know dm me on twitter more than happy to chat with people that way awesome well listen thank you so much for doing this i hope you're enjoying the bitcoin conference and uh anyone's got questions just go
talk to great thank you very much appreciate it of course
