#758: Strategy Is A Time Bomb with Jamie McAvity

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

**Jamie McCavity** (0:10)
When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

**Marty Bent** (0:36)
Jamie McCavity, welcome back to the show, sir.

**Jamie McCavity** (0:40)
Thank you.

**Marty Bent** (0:42)
Get hydrated, get caffeinated. We got a tight hour.

**Jamie McCavity** (0:46)
Yeah. I just did a workout and I got a protein shake.

**Marty Bent** (0:51)
A protein shake. What's your workout routine?

**Jamie McCavity** (0:54)
I'll have my best takes for you.

**Marty Bent** (0:58)
Well, Freaks, we're sitting now with the most profitable Bitcoin miner in the world. Is that how you would define yourself?

**Jamie McCavity** (1:05)
I would say the lowest cost producer of hashes. Lowest cost producer of hashes.
What?

**Marty Bent** (1:14)
How does that feel?

**Jamie McCavity** (1:17)
Um, do you want me to give my honest opinion?

**Marty Bent** (1:20)
Yes.

**Jamie McCavity** (1:22)
It feels like we have won.
Like a fencing competition. It feels like we won something that not many people really care about. Well, let me put it this way. There's a very unique dichotomy about being a Bitcoin miner, where people who love Bitcoin and who have this big ideological alignment and feel a passion about it for one reason or another. They have this distrust of the state. They're a sovereign individual. They have anti-monetary debasement, whatever it is. Those kind of people are like, you're the best. You're the most badass person around. And high five. Like I'm a bazaar celebrity in maybe two rooms, three times a year.
And that's nice. Like it is nice. And I was that person before I built this business. And it's, you know, it's cool to realize your dreams. And then there's like investors and, you know, employees and the mark, the general market and the market does not care. The market didn't really care that much that we built an amazing Bitcoin mining business. And that's, that's a little deflating because at the end of the day, you want to make money. And if you want to retain really, really smart people who helped you build a great business, they want to make money too. And they have a lot of opportunity.

**Marty Bent** (2:57)
Yeah, especially these days with the, the AI boom, the gold rush that we're experiencing there.

**Jamie McCavity** (3:04)
Yeah, we actually had both kind of employees in the company. There's people who sort of would, would not want to be a part of the company if it weren't focused on Bitcoin. And there's people who would probably leave the company if, if it's not focused on AI. So we're sort of caught in the middle a little bit.

**Marty Bent** (3:22)
I feel like every Bitcoin miner is these days. Big theme last 12 months accelerating to the first two quarters of this year is this transition away from Bitcoin mining towards GPU compute.

**Jamie McCavity** (3:37)
Yeah, to a certain extent, the crowding of the Bitcoin mining market accelerated the eventual transition to AI just because you had difficulty increase in a way that was unconstrained by economic reality for a long period of time. And so that that just made the returns in the past performance that would be used to justify further investment and growth into Bitcoin mining. It just made those economic cases bleak. And there's an irony about it almost, which is that now that nobody is investing in Bitcoin mining of all of the US Pub Co's for the most part. And the market is kind of weak and unsexy.
It's the best time to invest in Bitcoin mining, hands down, of the last maybe five years.

**Marty Bent** (4:38)
That's what I'm pulling up. Men pulled out space here. Looks like in 31 hours, we're going to have a negative 10 percent difficulty adjustment.

**Jamie McCavity** (4:46)
Yeah.

**Marty Bent** (4:48)
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's the one thing I've been saying behind the scenes too. Because if you think about it, especially for these miners that are transitioning to GPU, compute, there's a relative lack of investment in Bitcoin miners in general. But you're just thinking about the hardware that they're offloading. I have to imagine. All right. I mean, you don't have to imagine. I think it's pretty clear that ASICs are going to be goodbye, I think, throughout the summer, maybe through the end of the year.