Monetizing the Megawatt with Robert Warren | SLP722

**Robert Warren** (0:00)
If you get 50 Bitcoin miners, and you get them sat down in a room, and you show them these metrics, they will all look at you like you are an insane person. Because what they understand is that there is no cost of producing a Bitcoin, but there are costs of producing a Bitcoin, and it's totally contingent on the individual who is actually producing the Bitcoin.

**Stephan Livera** (0:20)
Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera Podcast. Today, we're gonna be talking about Bitcoin mining and energy and monetizing the megawatt. Joining me today is Robert Warren. Robert is the head of research over at Bitcoin Park. I've known Robert around the Bitcoin scene for a little while, been meaning to get him on, just haven't had the chance to until recently, until just now. And I know you and the guys just recently hosted the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit 2026 So, yeah, first off, welcome to the show, and maybe just give us a quick overview on what happened at the Energy and Mining Summit.

**Robert Warren** (0:54)
Yeah, huge pleasure to be here. So, we just hosted the Nashville Energy and Mining Summit. This is now going on almost the fifth anniversary of Bitcoin Park is coming up in June. So, it's amazing because this has been kind of another sold out show, and it's only gotten bigger and bigger every year.
What we are talking about when we're talking about this energy and mining situation, if you're looking back two, three years, which seems like ancient times in the world of Bitcoin mining because things move so quickly, we were still figuring out a lot of the basic principles of just how to run these many machines and how do you build the control systems? How do you manage the heat? How do you manage the connectivity? We were still having conversations around various pool payout methodologies. And in a very, very short period of time, that conversation has been almost totally upended. And it's been totally upended by this explosion in demand for particularly AI data center loads, these kind of AI HPC loads, which has really changed the public market space. And then it has been radically changed from the explosion of folks that are finding very, very creative business models that allow them to mine Bitcoin very profitably under very, very unique conditions. And that's everything from reusing heat to going in monetizing stranded generation assets in the middle of Africa. So the world has expanded really, really intensely in the Bitcoin mining space. It has shifted in other ways. With that being said, it still feels like we're just at the beginning of the conversation. There's a lot of runway left to go in energy and mining.

**Stephan Livera** (2:37)
Yeah. Let's talk about one aspect from your report where you touch on just energy as human flourishing, right? I think people are now starting to understand that. So can you just explain that from your perspective? Why is energy human flourishing?

**Robert Warren** (2:51)
100%. So it's the core assumption and what you're referring to. We produce spotlight papers in conjunction with these summits that we facilitate. So the summits, they tend to sell out. Everybody wants to be there in the room. But what's really important is that you're sharing that message with people more broadly. So we produce these spotlight papers. This one was titled Monetizing the Megawatt. And the core assumption that we make, and we think it's a really simple assumption, because it's an assumption that you can make backed by hundreds of years of empirical data, which is that you don't have anywhere on Earth a high-performing, high GDP, low energy country. If you plot on an XY chart and you have the GDP and the energy consumption of any country on Earth, you will always find 100% of the time. That places that are more consumptive, that are consuming more energy, are necessarily wealthier. They're more successful. And this is a bit of an inversion of the way that a lot of us, you know, I'm in my 30s, and a lot of us millennials, we grew up kind of during the era of the peak energy efficiency, that we have to all switch to 100% renewables. And coinciding with that was this idea that it was sort of a good to use less energy, that there was some sort of moral imperative to not use energy. And what the data says in actuality is that this is actually the opposite of the way that we should be thinking about this. You know, renewables are great.
We should be coming up with more and creative ways to produce as much energy as possible. We should not be under any circumstances trying to get people to use less energy, because energy in and of itself is the basis for us being able to perform operations that were totally alien even 50, 60, 70 years ago. The amount of energy that we consume is directly related to our flourishing. Whether it's the things, the implements that you have in your kitchen, your dishwasher, your refrigerator, whether it's the vehicle that is parked outside in your lawn, whether it's a Tesla or it's an internal combustion engine, gasoline or diesel, the ability to harness and use energy is directly correlated to the quality of your life as a human being in the 21st century. So we really want to start with this initial inversion, which is get it out of your heads that we should be chasing less energy and get it into your head that human flourishing only continues to expand if we continue to generate and consume more energy. It allows us to be far more creative as human beings and produce really substantial outcomes.