#189 - The Hidden Billion-Dollar Opportunity in Mining | Beau Turner Explains
What does it take to build real, lasting wealth in industries most people don’t understand?
In this episode of The Necessary Entrepreneur, host Mark Perkins sits down with Beau Turner, Co-Founder and CEO of Abundant Mines, to explore how entrepreneurs can think differently about opportunity, risk, and long-term value creation.
Beau breaks down the realities of the mining industry, one of the most misunderstood sectors in business, and explains how strategic thinking, patience, and disciplined execution can unlock massive opportunities. He shares lessons from building in a capital-intensive, high-risk environment and how those principles translate to entrepreneurship across any industry.
This conversation dives into what it really means to play the long game, how to identify overlooked opportunities, and why resilience and conviction are essential for building something meaningful. Beau also discusses leadership, decision-making under uncertainty, and how to navigate industries where timing and strategy matter more than hype.
If you are an entrepreneur, investor, or business leader looking to expand your thinking beyond traditional paths and build long-term wealth, this episode will challenge and sharpen your perspective.
What You’ll Learn:
- How to identify opportunities in overlooked or misunderstood industries
- The fundamentals of building in capital-intensive businesses
- Why long-term thinking separates great entrepreneurs from average ones
- How to manage risk and uncertainty in high-stakes environments
- The mindset required to build sustainable wealth
- Lessons from the mining industry that apply to any business
Key Topics Covered:
- Mining and natural resource entrepreneurship
- Long-term investing and wealth creation
- Risk management and capital allocation
- Leadership in complex industries
- Strategic decision-making under uncertainty
- Building businesses in unconventional markets
- Entrepreneurial mindset and resilience
Actionable Takeaways:
- Look where others are not paying attention for opportunity
- Focus on long-term value instead of short-term wins
- Build conviction through research and experience
- Develop the discipline to operate in uncertain environments
- Prioritize strategy over hype when making decisions
Who this is for:
Entrepreneurs and leaders who want to build something meaningful, sustainable, and built to last.
📌 Connect With Us:
Website: https://www.thenecessaryentrepreneur.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thenecessaryentrepreneur
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenecessaryentrepreneur/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheNecessaryEntrepreneurPod
X (Formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/MPerkinsTNE
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tnepod/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tneclips
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6xhGUE1yzy2N0AemUOlJPx?si=d1c5c316af404f15
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/the-necessary-entrepreneur/id1547181167
📌 Find Out More About Beau Turner & Abundant Mines
Website: https://abundantmines.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/beau-turner-445732251/ ;
https://www.linkedin.com/company/abundant-mines/
X: https://x.com/Beau_Turner21
https://x.com/AbundantMines
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/abundantmines#
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/abundantmines/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AbundantMines/
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People have been trying for 16 years, as long as it's existed, to come up with the next
Bitcoin.
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The reality is this is not like a tech company.
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It is a protocol, in fact.
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And protocols tend to take the entire market if they are right.
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you
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All right, you all welcome back for another fantastic episode.
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I'm allowed to make those adjectives in the beginning, what I think and feel it's going to
be.
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So today's guest is an entrepreneur who redefined his career and built something that
bridges technology, finance and long-term wealth creation.
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After success in real estate, which y'all know I love talking about, and a painful
$500,000 plus loss with other providers, he turned that setback into purpose by founding
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Abundant Mines.
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It's a Bitcoin mining infrastructure company.
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focused on transparency, sustainability, and making mining accessible to everyday
investors.
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He's an educator, operator, and strategist who believes in long-term thinking, resilience,
and turning hard lessons into opportunity.
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Wow, please welcome Beau Turner,
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Thanks, Mark.
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That was an incredible intro.
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I have a good team.
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they left it to me, I don't think that my grammar and my ability and knowledge would come
up with that.
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So thank you, team.
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Thank you, AI.
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Thank you, great guests.
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So Abundant Minds, man, what a heck of a name.
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And we're all looking for these really fascinating and hard-hitting names to our companies
and our brands that we build that just tell us this is what we're doing.
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Abundant Minds, if we didn't know it was Bitcoin, it's like, okay, we mine them for gold,
we mine them for
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crystals we mined for diamonds but we're in a new age here in 2026 and it seems like the
most valuable thing people can mine now is this thing based in technology called Bitcoin
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and so tell us Abundant Mines kind of what it is why you named it that and why you're
sitting here today
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Absolutely.
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Well, the main thing that I'll say is that what we do is we help investors get into
Bitcoin mining without experiencing the operational headaches and really the pitfalls that
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led me and my wife to lose that sickening amount of money, which was very painful at the
time.
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I'm really glad that we were able to recover from that and build the business that we did.
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Cause I know that that would probably scare most people away from, trying to do the second
try in an industry that they had gotten burned that badly in.
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But what we do is essentially set up data centers right now, all in Oregon.
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So we've got six data center facilities and two more in construction.
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And what we're doing is building these facilities purpose-built for Bitcoin miners to live
in, and then making that space available to other people.
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So they can come to us, purchase a miner through us, and then have it set up and running
in one of our facilities, making Bitcoin passively for them.
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And since most of our investors or clients or business owners
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They're taking that 100 % bonus depreciation deduction on what they purchase, the cost of
those miners, and using it as not just a way to accumulate Bitcoin, but a tax strategy as
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well.
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And since you're in the real estate space, you would know very well, one of the most
wonderful things about having a real estate portfolio is if you do it right, you might be
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making money, but on paper, on your tax return, you are not making enough money to own any
taxes.
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So very similar strategy in that sense.
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I would say it's
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probably the most analogous thing in the digital asset space to a real estate investment.
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So that's part of why it called to me after being a landlord and, you know, creative
financier and owner finance note holder.
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I was just really drawn to this idea that I could have something physical that was
essentially a computer working for me 24 seven that would output what I believe is the
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best money on the, on the face of the earth.
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Why do you think it's the best money?
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Well, if you go back to gold, why gold was good money for 5,000 years or so, it shares a
lot of the characteristics that made gold a really good form of money.
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there's, depending on who you ask and what framework you use, seven to 10 different
properties of money that make it good.
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And those are scarcity, fungibility, divisibility, transportability.
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Longevity, you know, how long it's been treated as a form of money, all these different
criteria.
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And what you find is that Bitcoin essentially improves upon every one of those criteria
except for one, which is longevity.
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How long people have been familiar with it and accepted it as money.
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So if you believe in all of the other technical aspects, you believe that those other
properties are important and you can get over the fact that not that many people have used
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it for very long,
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you can actually see that as an opportunity that this is technically the best solution.
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But as far as market adoption, it hasn't gotten there yet.
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We're still less than 1 % of all the capital in the world.
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Gold is still 10x the market cap of Bitcoin, actually maybe even 15 or 20 at this point,
because it's really gone on a run and Bitcoin hasn't caught up.
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So you can think of it as the most technically sound upstart money that we've ever come up
with and really the first financial innovation and
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probably 500 years that we've ever seen.
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There's so much more that I could unpack about it, but suffice it to say, it's just better
money technology.
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So I remember being the naysayer and here's the thing, I may still be, you may still be
talking to one today, but I try not to naysay on things I don't know about.
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I'll go back to maybe seven or eight years ago and I'm sitting and talking to one of the
realtors at my company.
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He's like, man, I'm buying some of this stuff.
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It might've been, yeah, seven or eight years ago.
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And I said, hey man, here's the problem I have with it.
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And maybe this is the real world and you can say, Hey, this is the guy I've been trying to
convince for all these years.
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I just told him, said, it doesn't make sense to my brain.
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Not, not hating on it.
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Not as I'm to miss out.
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I might miss out on the greatest wealth building ever, but it just doesn't make sense to
my brain because I can't hold it.
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And, I can hold paper money.
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I can hold gold.
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There's gold.
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use it for things.
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Money, we know we have the system where I can go out and buy things consistently with it.
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It's easy.
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So all the problems with all those things, I just looked at him and said, hey, I don't see
any value to it.
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I know it's what people are talking about now, but I was really saying this.
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It's like, how is it valued?
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How will this thing be valued?
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It seems like it's only valued if somebody else is willing to pay me more for it.
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It doesn't seem like it has a tangible value other than that idea.
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And so
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I'm not sitting here being judgmental and critical about it, but I think a lot of normal
human beings where I come from, I think we feel this way.
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Totally.
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No, there's nothing wrong with feeling that way.
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And in fact, it is so profoundly different than what most people are familiar with and
have lived their whole lives navigating that unless you really spend a good bit of time
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studying it, you're probably not gonna get it.
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And it's part of why I'm so passionate about education.
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And it's a huge part of what we do because most people that we work with in our company
are not hardcore Bitcoiners.
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They're curious, they're investors.
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They wanna learn.
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They don't want to miss out, but they're not coming in as experts.
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so education is one of the most important things that I do and that we do.
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And I try to use as many analogies as possible when I'm describing why it matters, how it
works, because most of us don't have computer science degrees.
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Most of us don't have engineering degrees and just don't have the mental model that we can
use to understand this.
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so analogies are super important.
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It's why I lean on real estate analogies and gold analogies and other commodity analogies.
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all the time is because unless you have that learning tool, you're probably not going to
get it.
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It's going to be just unapproachable, too technical.
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You're not going to understand why it matters.
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And to your point about like, you know, I'm comfortable with these other things that I've
grown up with.
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I use paper money.
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I understand why people like gold.
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The thing that I like to bring up is, you know, probably most of your net worth isn't
dollar bills sitting in a wallet.
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It's probably in a bank account of some sort.
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And
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That is not physical.
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Those are ones and zeros in a database, and those can be changed pretty quickly by anybody
with sufficient clearance.
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And what I don't think people appreciate is that Bitcoin is the same as what you currently
use, except improved upon in pretty much every technical way.
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It's just a database.
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It's a worldwide database that nobody can tamper with, where there's no central point of
control.
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And most of us, even if we don't think about it, we're already very comfortable with
digital money.
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I mean, we've probably only used digital money practically in our day-to-day lives.
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I'd say 90, probably 95 % of transactions at this point are digital.
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They never touch a physical dollar bill.
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And so if you can get comfortable with that idea that money is just a shared database, an
allocation of resources that somebody has to keep track of somewhere, Bitcoin is just a
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different way of keeping track of it that's meant to be designed in a way that is
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totally honest to every participant and doesn't give anybody power over anybody else.
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Okay, you're making arguments to spend more time with you at abundant minds to learn.
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You mentioned before you have six data centers.
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Are these this idea of this big data center?
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Because what I always like to do and what's great is us just meeting today.
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I never am interested in like gotcha questions.
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I'm just interested in unpacking the questions we all have.
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This data center thing with me being in real estate, there's a lot of communities rising
up against these.
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are your, let's, let's really talk about what they are and correct me.
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I'm good to come from the layman perspective to say, this is the average way we think
about it.
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There we're building these physical things that look like industrial warehouses that are
going to draw more resources under that square footage than anything else we consistently
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see with the same square footage in the country.
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and people are up in arms on how's that gonna change their infrastructure, their models,
power, water systems.
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And again, whether it's good or bad, it's tough to be educated on something we don't know.
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So when you say data center, do you have a piece inside of one of those data centers and
you have racks and all that, or do you have the actual full physical data center?
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So we have the full physical data center and we, in most cases, built them from the ground
up, some we acquired from other operators.
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But what's interesting about this, and I think most people don't understand, you're
totally right, is that a Bitcoin mining facility, a Bitcoin mining data center, is very
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different than what you would think of when you think of like what Meta or Google or
OpenAI or any of these very large hyperscalers you're building.
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On the one hand, at least the ones that we build are
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you know, a fraction of the size.
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I mean, think like one hundredth or maybe one twentieth of the size of what most people
would think of when they think of a data center.
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It means that we can put them in places where usually you can't put other things.
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And in fact, it's one of our greatest benefits is that we can put these in places where
they often don't have other economic opportunities that make much sense, but they have
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enough stranded power capacity on their system for us to come in, monetize it, bring some
additional revenue to those communities.
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and actually add some tech jobs in places where people, frankly, the only opportunities
they have in general are food service or farming or some sort of supporting industry.
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So it's a way in the ideal sense of actually bringing more opportunity to rural America
than currently exists.
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Because otherwise, if you're smart, if you've got the ability to work in this space,
you're probably migrating to a major city to be a part of it or where one of these large
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facilities is.
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And they usually have to be.
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relatively close to a population center.
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That comes to another point, which is the AI data centers specifically, they need a ton of
bandwidth, network bandwidth.
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They need redundant power.
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They need typically water, at least a little bit, and all of these additional resources
that you mentioned that communities are up in arms about.
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And the unique part about Bitcoin mining data centers is there's several things.
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One, we really don't need very heavy networking.
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I mean, we can run
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sites off of a Starlink and that's about it.
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Just have a Starlink and a cell connection and you can pretty much run any Bitcoin mining
facility.
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We don't need redundant power, so we don't have to buy gensets or have multiple utility
hookups or anything like that.
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And then the last thing is that in most cases you use no water.
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So at least in Oregon we're fully air cooling.
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Most places that are hotter you can do closed loop hydro cooling.
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So you actually just fill it up once and then you're done.
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You don't have to consistently take water from anybody.
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So I love, I love developing these because I know that they're going in and actually
having a net positive impact on those communities.
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Even if they don't understand it at first, there's always an education barrier that we've
got to overcome.
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But these are, in my opinion, the lowest cost, highest flexibility, most important
resources that we can put in these communities and can actually have a
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pretty major impact, like you said, for a very small footprint as long as you've got
access to power, which in the Northwest, because we used to have a pretty booming lumber
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industry, there's a lot of old infrastructure that's not being used, that's kind of gotten
shuttered or mothballed or not really been utilized to its fullest extent for the last few
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decades.
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So we're coming in and making something of something that already exists in most cases.
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Also, what is the cap of how many Bitcoin will ever be produced?
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The total amount of Bitcoin that will ever exist is 21 million coins.
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And we're actually coming up on mining the 20 millionth.
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So for the next 115 years, we'll be mining the last million coins.
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And then after that, miners just get paid on transaction fees.
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When you and I send Bitcoin to each other, that's all that miners will get is the
transaction fees on sending those amounts across the network.
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So these miners will still need to be in existence and operating for the entire
infrastructure to work correctly.
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Is that right?
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Exactly.
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It's a core part of how the network functions.
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can think of it like the best analogy I have is like a mix between Visa and the military.
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They're doing two functions.
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Miners are moving transactions across the network and they're also protecting the network
from outside attackers.
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How many?
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servers right now around the world are connected to the network.
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millions, probably up to tens of millions at this point.
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We're at three to five million was the estimate in about 2020.
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So I'd say we're probably getting close to 10 million total connected devices.
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in this question, why is it going to take, how many years has it taken us to get to 20
million?
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It's taken us 16 years to mine the 20 million coins.
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The reason that it's going to take 115 to do the last million is because of the halving
cycle.
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Many people are familiar with how the Federal Reserve sets interest rates, essentially
setting the price of money, the availability of money.
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It's a form of monetary policy.
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The Bitcoin network has its own monetary policy, but instead of being decided by a group
of older gentlemen meeting every so often,
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It's just code.
197
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So it's just a software-based rule set that determines the issuance schedule, how much new
Bitcoin comes into circulation.
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And that gets monitored and then adjusted by something called the difficulty adjustment.
199
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So this is something people often say in the Bitcoin space, if someone can't tell you what
the difficulty adjustment is, they don't understand Bitcoin.
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The difficulty adjustment is this dynamic feedback loop that determines how much computing
power is being pointed at the network.
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and adjust the issuance of Bitcoin accordingly so that we keep that schedule, so that we
issue only the right amount of Bitcoin every 10 minutes when a new block is found and we
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don't go too fast or too slow and we keep the issuance schedule.
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So if I, you know, suddenly came up with 10 million more mining computers, I could speed
up the network and mine more Bitcoin for about two weeks until it had this regular
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check-in called the, you know, when the difficulty adjusts.
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And then it would see that and say,
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It's gotten too easy.
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There's too much computing power.
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We're going too fast.
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We're finding blocks too quickly and releasing too much Bitcoin.
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We're going to make this twice as hard.
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And the same thing happens in reverse.
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So recently we had a pretty large price decline.
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We also had a winter storm that swept across the U.S.
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That took a lot of miners offline because they act as flexible loads for these energy
grids.
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And so they actually turned off.
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And when that happened, about a third of the network just shuts down.
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So all of these miners come offline.
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the blocks start getting found much slower, which means that the network at that two week
mark says, they're not issuing it fast enough to keep with our 10 minute pace.
219
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So we're gonna make it easier on all the miners who are remaining, which means that
everybody who is still on the network actually was mining more Bitcoin for the same amount
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of computing power.
221
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And this dynamically adjusts all the time.
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And it's one of the most impressive feats of how this network was designed.
223
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Was it designed right in the beginning with it all?
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right in the beginning.
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Yeah, Bitcoin is an open source project that people are contributing to all the time, but
it was pretty much fully baked when it was first released.
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So in 2009, mean, everything that you think of when you think Bitcoin in terms of the core
functionality was baked in from day one.
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And everything since then has been extra functionality, know, little tweaks here and
there.
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I mean, I'm sure if you've tried to use the network before, like the user experience
was...
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was pretty challenging for people to navigate in the early years.
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We're still sort of crossing that chasm of it being very easy for the layman to be able to
own and operate and not feel like they have to ask for tech support every 10 minutes.
231
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So we're still crossing that and that's what most of the improvements have been over the
years is just user experience.
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What happens when we hear every so often, every year, every two or three years that
somebody lost 110 million in Bitcoin or lost 30 million in Bitcoin?
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How does that happen?
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So this is a really important distinction.
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People hear stories like that and think, Bitcoin is unsafe or Bitcoin is not secure.
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And the reality is the network itself has been flawless in terms of its security.
237
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The attack surfaces individuals, institutions, companies, their security practices can
leave them exposed to people stealing their coin.
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So if you properly self-custody Bitcoin, it is the most secure asset in the world.
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It's protected by math and code and physics in a way that frankly is just, it's a very
hard problem to solve.
240
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And there's a very big honeypot waiting for you.
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If you want to solve that and actually find that bug, you've got about a million coins in
Satoshi's wallets that you could find if you knew how to hack a wallet that is properly
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secured.
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So there's a very big...
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almost $100 billion bug bounty sitting out there waiting for somebody who can hack the
network itself.
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What's happened in history is individuals get hacked.
246
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They either don't properly self-custody, there's a security leak, there's a data breach,
something that happens to an individual or an institution that leads them exposed to
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someone stealing their coins.
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And unfortunately for them, that has happened quite a bit.
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And fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, the network is
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so decentralized and so encouraging of individual responsibility that there's nobody to
come and save you and retrieve those coins for you.
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There's no Bitcoin equivalent of the FBI to go and recover everything for you and give it
back.
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are very much in sovereign control of your assets.
253
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And if you lose that, you don't properly custody, you might lose everything.
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That's scary.
255
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It encourages a very high level of self-responsibility.
256
00:20:33,864 --> 00:20:35,843
This sounds very libertarian.
257
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It's definitely, especially in the early years, was very much a libertarian oriented type
of movement.
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And there are pros and cons to that, but I think ultimately it was, the network was
released in 2009.
259
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So the actual software was released on January 3rd, 2009 in the wake of the 2008 financial
crisis.
260
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It was really a response to central planning.
261
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and systems that no longer serve their users.
262
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So it feels like a very libertarian movement.
263
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It's really just an anti-centralization movement in a sense.
264
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This is before we get onto abundant minds and you talk about the investment piece and all
this.
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What creeps in my brain?
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I'm glad I'm from the outside looking in the way maybe a normal human brain works that
doesn't understand all the science and the operation behind Bitcoin.
267
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It's, probably understand a half of a percent of what you guys know, but what keeps
someone else from just building another one?
268
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and someone in the world being like, oh, this is like that too, so we'll just do this one.
269
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That's a great question.
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And honestly, nothing keeps anybody from just copying the code base and launching another
one.
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It's been tried probably at this point thousands of times, and you can see all of those
attempts.
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There were multiple times in history where people tried to launch slight variations of
Bitcoin to solve different problems.
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And each time, you know, they were just outcompeted in terms of design, utility.
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critical mass.
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mean, there's something very special to the founding story of Bitcoin.
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There's no individual that we can put a name on other than the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
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And so it's got a very unique founding story that almost nothing else has.
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And then by the time you've got, you know, sufficient enough user base and assets and
energy, I mean, there's hundreds of billions now of actual physical infrastructure
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powering the Bitcoin network.
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of people like us all around the world doing exactly what we do.
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And it's very challenging to replicate that.
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So you could copy the code base, you could copy the software, so to speak, and do a
launch.
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But we've already sort of gotten critical mass.
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There's no real reason to compete with it and no easy or obvious improvement that you
could make to make it better.
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I mean, if there were a better Bitcoin, we would know about it, we would be talking about
it, we would be thinking about it.
286
00:23:03,984 --> 00:23:13,090
But the honest answer is just that nothing else has come even close in terms of the
ability to get people to adopt it and trust it and put wealth in it.
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I mean, by a wide margin, it's a trillion and a half, maybe a $2 trillion asset at this
point.
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The nearest competitor is a couple hundred billion, and it's a completely different
network design.
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That's Ethereum.
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And everything behind that, there might be a couple that are sort of these like
291
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Bitcoin copies you could think of them as that get to a couple billion and then sort of
stall out.
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So people have been trying for 16 years, as long as it's existed, to come up with the next
Bitcoin.
293
00:23:43,024 --> 00:23:51,438
And the reality is this is not like a tech company where you can get out competed because
somebody innovates better than you.
294
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It's more like a protocol.
295
00:23:53,389 --> 00:23:56,421
It is a protocol, in fact, and protocols
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tend to take the entire market if they are right.
297
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Think of something like HTTPS or TCPIP.
298
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These are not things that people are trying to disrupt because it's a protocol layer of
cooperation between people across the world and it's working very well and there's no
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reason to try and change it.
300
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And Bitcoin occupies the same thing.
301
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It's not competing necessarily in the market as a tech.
302
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piece of technology, it's competing as a protocol layer for how people coordinate,
communicate, and cooperate.
303
00:24:26,895 --> 00:24:36,442
I just know that humans, you know, be me being in the, there's multiple businesses now,
but the foundation of the lot of things I've built and started was just a traditional, not
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what we, to the public that didn't know us a traditional real estate brokerage, but we
founded it on doing things completely different.
305
00:24:45,068 --> 00:24:49,291
Not for the sake of being different because I felt they needed to be different and I still
do.
306
00:24:49,552 --> 00:24:54,745
But what's happened ever since then, there's a lot of these MLM companies in our space.
307
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And there's a new one that rolls out.
308
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What happens is I'm not going to name any of them and get in trouble.
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Right.
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I'll say that off camera.
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Anybody in real estate knows space knows them now there's hundreds of thousands of
realtors that are always changing and going to the next MLM.
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The next one.
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And it's all about recruiting.
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And if you can get in at the top and recruit a lot of people in it, you know,
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in your down funnel or whatever the hell they call it.
316
00:25:20,705 --> 00:25:21,566
not about real estate.
317
00:25:21,566 --> 00:25:24,728
It's about making money off of recruiting other people.
318
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They even go to the next one.
319
00:25:28,052 --> 00:25:32,035
And because what they're doing is they're chasing their financial windfall.
320
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Mm-hmm.
321
00:25:34,391 --> 00:25:41,562
I'm just seeing how with human behavior how this is going to be different because if
there's a lot of money to be made there are humans out here trying to create the thing to
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make it.
323
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Absolutely.
324
00:25:44,023 --> 00:25:46,504
That's just where the question comes from about the next one.
325
00:25:46,504 --> 00:25:53,838
It's not that, cause what I see is these companies, I actually believe now, I'm not like
the guy that when you throw the ball over the fence, like I'm an old guy now and I won't
326
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throw it back.
327
00:25:54,749 --> 00:25:58,731
I actually see how they're actually harming consumers now by these being created.
328
00:25:58,731 --> 00:26:00,912
There's nothing being improved by them.
329
00:26:00,912 --> 00:26:04,874
It's actually reducing the level of realtor, the level of agent.
330
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It's reducing the quality of them because the only thing they're doing is saying, let me
give you a little bit more margin.
331
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come and do my thing.
332
00:26:12,010 --> 00:26:14,641
And so they're saying, me put more money back in your pocket.
333
00:26:14,641 --> 00:26:23,404
What's happening is now it's gotten to a point where these brokerages don't have any money
to develop, train brand to actually run a company.
334
00:26:23,405 --> 00:26:29,197
So now you have a hundred thousand individuals out here that don't have any brand behind
them and they don't stand for anything.
335
00:26:29,197 --> 00:26:30,407
And it's a wild, wild West.
336
00:26:30,407 --> 00:26:32,308
So the opposite is happening.
337
00:26:32,308 --> 00:26:33,168
So
338
00:26:33,168 --> 00:26:45,765
I love that you say that because I didn't explicitly say this, but so many people get
pulled into the quote crypto space and it's a huge disservice to, I think, most investors
339
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and most people who are curious.
340
00:26:47,096 --> 00:26:56,130
I am very explicitly a Bitcoin person and a Bitcoin miner and that's all that I teach
about and talk about because the issue in the crypto space is exactly what you just
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defined.
342
00:26:56,961 --> 00:26:58,851
There's no clear benefit.
343
00:26:58,851 --> 00:27:00,579
There's no clear improvement.
344
00:27:00,579 --> 00:27:10,773
In many cases, these projects are done to enrich one person or a small group of people,
and people are lured into it by some sort of hype marketing or, you know, promise of
345
00:27:10,773 --> 00:27:15,505
faster transactions or better this or better that, and improvement on X or Y.
346
00:27:15,846 --> 00:27:19,101
And it's usually just fluff and marketing and...
347
00:27:19,101 --> 00:27:25,713
distracts people from seeing what I think is a truly world-changing innovation and a gift
to humanity.
348
00:27:25,713 --> 00:27:32,855
And if we just spent more of our time, energy, focus, and attention thinking about it and
ignoring everything else, we would all be better off.
349
00:27:32,855 --> 00:27:42,090
But unfortunately, there's millions of these other coins and plenty of people who would
like to enrich their lives at the expense of people being able to learn about what I think
350
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is a
351
00:27:43,297 --> 00:27:51,161
very profound asset and really should occupy the place of a real estate or, you know,
store of value asset like gold.
352
00:27:51,161 --> 00:27:59,345
It should be a major part of people's portfolios if they understood it, but most people
get distracted by everything else going on in the space.
353
00:27:59,345 --> 00:28:00,911
And it's a huge disservice.
354
00:28:00,911 --> 00:28:09,307
It's something that I work very hard to make sure that people understand is that you can
choose to spend your time and your money and your resources however you want.
355
00:28:09,307 --> 00:28:13,795
But if it were me, I would ignore everything else and just focus on this one thing.
356
00:28:14,385 --> 00:28:16,086
because that's what you're doing.
357
00:28:18,681 --> 00:28:22,164
I like to put my money, my time, my energy where my mouth is.
358
00:28:22,164 --> 00:28:25,746
So I wouldn't encourage someone to do something that I'm not.
359
00:28:25,766 --> 00:28:36,385
I mean, I'm, I'm very invested in this space and that by its own nature blinds me in some
way, you know, you never ask a guy to, to what's the phrase, never ask a man to argue for
360
00:28:36,385 --> 00:28:38,656
something that threatens a salary.
361
00:28:39,618 --> 00:28:44,651
So there's, there's a very clear alignment of incentives for me to be talking about
Bitcoin, but it's.
362
00:28:45,985 --> 00:28:56,416
I mean, I can say this and nobody has to believe it, but it is truly because I arrived at
the premise that this is the most important technological and societal change that we have
363
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the ability to work in.
364
00:28:58,118 --> 00:29:00,660
And I think that too few people understand it.
365
00:29:00,660 --> 00:29:04,974
And it's just as much a mission motivation as it is a profit motivation.
366
00:29:04,974 --> 00:29:09,228
And in fact, I think that life is better when those two things are very highly aligned.
367
00:29:09,391 --> 00:29:10,162
Hmm.
368
00:29:10,384 --> 00:29:15,197
So why is your constitution so aligned with maybe the constitution of Bitcoin?
369
00:29:16,441 --> 00:29:18,082
Well, you touched on it a little bit.
370
00:29:18,082 --> 00:29:19,863
I've definitely got a libertarian bent.
371
00:29:19,863 --> 00:29:22,045
I'm very much pro freedom for people.
372
00:29:22,045 --> 00:29:32,990
I think that this technology gives freedom to billions of people that otherwise have
essentially no access to financial services.
373
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mean, we in the US especially take for granted how easy it is for us to have.
374
00:29:41,320 --> 00:29:46,326
good banking services, a good currency, a relatively well-running financial system.
375
00:29:46,326 --> 00:29:48,247
I say relatively because it's not very well-run.
376
00:29:48,247 --> 00:29:50,569
It's just better than most of the world.
377
00:29:50,750 --> 00:30:00,928
But people take for granted that there are billions of human beings that have no access to
financial services whatsoever, live under oppressive regimes, have no stable currency
378
00:30:00,928 --> 00:30:02,019
whatsoever.
379
00:30:02,019 --> 00:30:07,044
And in many cases, all they want is access to the dollar system, but they can't get it.
380
00:30:07,044 --> 00:30:07,674
And so...
381
00:30:07,674 --> 00:30:17,506
Bitcoin is this alternative where they don't have to have all of the paperwork and things
that are required to get onboarded to a dollar-based system, and they can participate
382
00:30:17,506 --> 00:30:21,700
openly, freely, without censorship, without gatekeepers.
383
00:30:21,740 --> 00:30:32,800
It really is bringing back the power of money and value transfer to the individual and
taking it out of institutions that honestly have abused that power for many decades.
384
00:30:33,814 --> 00:30:41,250
Why do you think that you're spending your time, your good years here professionally, and
you had that moment that you lost a ton.
385
00:30:41,250 --> 00:30:48,566
We don't have to talk about it, but anytime somebody loses that amount of money, that's
devastating, as you said in the beginning, to almost every person.
386
00:30:48,566 --> 00:30:50,933
You hear when people are swindled, they make this
387
00:30:50,933 --> 00:30:55,906
huge big investment and believed in a person, a thing, and it turned out to be a Ponzi
scheme.
388
00:30:55,906 --> 00:30:59,949
And they're sitting here a decade later, getting back 10 % of their money and their life
is devastated.
389
00:30:59,949 --> 00:31:10,996
So for you to still be in it, but why does this strictly other than strictly believing in
the technology and in Bitcoin and the infrastructure and what it can do for society.
390
00:31:11,037 --> 00:31:15,042
You're still in this from a capitalistic perspective about making money.
391
00:31:15,042 --> 00:31:16,500
Cause that's what we're talking about here.
392
00:31:16,500 --> 00:31:19,045
Cause you're helping other people create minds.
393
00:31:19,045 --> 00:31:24,060
Bitcoining so We all want to make investments based upon what's an ROI?
394
00:31:24,060 --> 00:31:33,819
Mm-hmm, I'm sure you got to be careful not to dip your toes in the guarantees and all this
stuff and what but we could have like what a white what a likely outcome is can't we how
395
00:31:33,819 --> 00:31:36,471
can we have the legal conversation around?
396
00:31:38,651 --> 00:31:45,323
why this makes sense financially versus a real estate investment versus a gold investment
versus just buying Bitcoin.
397
00:31:45,433 --> 00:31:46,253
Yeah.
398
00:31:46,934 --> 00:31:56,984
So the main point here is let's assume you already believe that Bitcoin is worth having,
that you don't think that Bitcoin is worthless.
399
00:31:57,124 --> 00:32:02,830
If you would like to get a position in Bitcoin, then the question is how can I do that
most efficiently?
400
00:32:02,830 --> 00:32:07,174
And for most people, the easiest way is I'm going to go to an exchange, I'm going to
purchase it.
401
00:32:07,174 --> 00:32:08,965
It's going to probably live on that exchange.
402
00:32:08,965 --> 00:32:11,617
Unfortunately, I'm not going to take self custody.
403
00:32:11,878 --> 00:32:14,099
That's the easiest way that most people get in.
404
00:32:14,421 --> 00:32:17,764
Mining takes a lot of work, at least on our side.
405
00:32:17,764 --> 00:32:22,097
I mean, our clients don't have to do a lot of work, but it is operationally intense.
406
00:32:22,097 --> 00:32:24,219
There are logistics to think of.
407
00:32:24,219 --> 00:32:25,390
There's energy to think about.
408
00:32:25,390 --> 00:32:26,161
There's networking.
409
00:32:26,161 --> 00:32:28,442
There's all this technology that goes into it.
410
00:32:28,442 --> 00:32:31,725
So why would you take on that operational burden?
411
00:32:31,725 --> 00:32:40,193
The answer is one, if you do it appropriately, you've got good energy procurement, you've
got efficient equipment, it's well run, you have good uptime.
412
00:32:40,193 --> 00:32:43,926
You can outperform just buying Bitcoin with the same amount of capital.
413
00:32:44,016 --> 00:32:51,482
So that's one is I think that if I do this well, I can actually make more Bitcoin over
time than if I just bought on day one on an exchange.
414
00:32:51,543 --> 00:32:59,950
The second is specifically for business owners and people who are actually high earners
and don't have a business but could set up a business.
415
00:33:00,311 --> 00:33:09,930
You have this intangible asset Bitcoin that if you just purchase on an exchange, if you
buy and sell it, all you're doing is getting capital gains and capital losses from a tax
416
00:33:09,930 --> 00:33:10,910
perspective.
417
00:33:11,216 --> 00:33:14,616
When you actually set up a Bitcoin mine, you have something physical.
418
00:33:14,616 --> 00:33:25,316
And we had the big, beautiful bill passed last year that brought back 100 % bonus
depreciation, which is a huge tool in the pocket of investors to be able to lower their
419
00:33:25,316 --> 00:33:27,016
tax liabilities.
420
00:33:27,096 --> 00:33:33,196
So when you get into mining, you're not purchasing an asset, you're actually starting an
operating business.
421
00:33:33,196 --> 00:33:40,516
And that operating business produces a discounted asset 24 seven and gives you these tax
benefits.
422
00:33:40,728 --> 00:33:49,797
So for my money coming from real estate, I know how much the tax piece matters when you're
thinking about structuring investments, especially when you're talking about large dollar
423
00:33:49,797 --> 00:33:52,699
amounts for people who have high income liabilities.
424
00:33:52,699 --> 00:34:02,268
That piece alone usually makes it a very obvious yes for people and gets them essentially
Bitcoin at 30 to 50 % off versus taking some other strategy.
425
00:34:02,429 --> 00:34:05,587
The other thing it does is psychologically,
426
00:34:05,587 --> 00:34:14,004
You know, this, market is known for being very volatile and people making very bad
decisions because of that volatility and them not managing their emotions.
427
00:34:14,004 --> 00:34:15,205
And I'm no exception to that.
428
00:34:15,205 --> 00:34:16,906
I'm not a skilled trader.
429
00:34:16,906 --> 00:34:18,528
I don't claim to be, I don't like it.
430
00:34:18,528 --> 00:34:20,269
It messes with my head.
431
00:34:20,409 --> 00:34:31,228
And so the ability to set up an operating business that's constantly giving you this asset
at a discount, you've got a margin of safety as well, is a huge psychological tool to help
432
00:34:31,228 --> 00:34:35,005
people spread out their time horizon and really think long-term.
433
00:34:35,005 --> 00:34:39,185
Because you aren't worried, oh, did I buy it at 120 and now it's down to 70?
434
00:34:39,185 --> 00:34:40,785
That's a horrible feeling.
435
00:34:40,925 --> 00:34:49,005
Versus I started mining at 120 and my cost basis or my cost of production is 50, we're
down to 70, whoop-de-doo.
436
00:34:49,005 --> 00:34:52,205
You my margins went from 60 to 25%.
437
00:34:52,205 --> 00:34:53,565
I'm still making money though.
438
00:34:53,565 --> 00:34:57,345
This is not, comparatively not a bad place to be.
439
00:34:57,345 --> 00:34:59,925
And so those are the main reasons.
440
00:34:59,965 --> 00:35:04,285
But for me personally, you know, that...
441
00:35:04,285 --> 00:35:08,905
half million dollar loss was a huge mile marker in my life, my wife's life.
442
00:35:08,905 --> 00:35:13,125
We got engaged like a couple weeks before this all started to fall apart.
443
00:35:13,125 --> 00:35:18,605
So it was a very trying time in what should have been like the happiest period of both of
our lives.
444
00:35:19,125 --> 00:35:28,045
And so as painful as it was, what I really wanted and what was really frustrating was I
already believed in this asset.
445
00:35:28,045 --> 00:35:32,446
I believed in the mission of the asset and to have that
446
00:35:32,446 --> 00:35:41,171
betrayed by an individual, not the network itself, not the technology, but an individual
working in the industry, really lit a fire under me.
447
00:35:41,171 --> 00:35:48,476
And I think most people, your purpose lies somewhere next to the worst thing that's ever
happened to you.
448
00:35:48,476 --> 00:35:55,280
And many of the best businesses that have ever been started have come from solving a
personal problem that the founder had.
449
00:35:55,280 --> 00:35:58,361
And I just didn't have that problem before that experience.
450
00:35:58,361 --> 00:35:59,574
And so in a way I'm...
451
00:35:59,574 --> 00:36:09,690
I'm extremely grateful for it because it gave me exactly the experience, exactly the
mirror held up to my life to let me know what I needed to build and how I needed to build
452
00:36:09,690 --> 00:36:12,981
it to improve upon something that I care deeply about.
453
00:36:12,981 --> 00:36:19,145
And at the time that we were first building the company as well, you know, there's so much
misinformation about Bitcoin mining.
454
00:36:19,145 --> 00:36:26,510
I mean, if you talk to someone on the street, they probably think that it's boiling the
oceans and it's using too much energy and it's a worthless network and why are people
455
00:36:26,510 --> 00:36:27,310
doing this?
456
00:36:27,310 --> 00:36:28,779
And I knew
457
00:36:28,779 --> 00:36:31,262
pretty much all of those to be untrue.
458
00:36:31,262 --> 00:36:40,599
And there's something about the rebellious libertarian contrarian in me that said, you
know what, let's go right this wrong in the market and start educating people on what's
459
00:36:40,599 --> 00:36:47,753
really going on and giving them a way to participate that aligns their moral and ethical
interest with the profit interest.
460
00:36:47,753 --> 00:36:56,249
And that to me is how we unlock a wave of people that not only understand the network, but
have been positively impacted by it personally.
461
00:36:56,861 --> 00:37:01,858
So what's the best way for me or anybody listening?
462
00:37:02,520 --> 00:37:09,751
What's the best way for us to become as educated as we need to, to decide to make an
investment or not?
463
00:37:11,815 --> 00:37:15,879
I think everybody's threshold is different and this is...
464
00:37:17,735 --> 00:37:19,977
There's two competing ways to think about this.
465
00:37:19,977 --> 00:37:23,140
One is learn enough to be comfortable and then start.
466
00:37:23,140 --> 00:37:26,862
And then the other is start so that you have an incentive to learn.
467
00:37:26,862 --> 00:37:29,784
I mean, I think you probably would agree with this.
468
00:37:29,784 --> 00:37:32,445
You pay attention more when you've paid.
469
00:37:32,906 --> 00:37:34,447
Someone gives you free coaching.
470
00:37:34,447 --> 00:37:36,728
May or may not take any of their advice.
471
00:37:36,828 --> 00:37:39,090
You pay 10 grand for coaching.
472
00:37:39,090 --> 00:37:40,931
You're probably going to listen very intently.
473
00:37:40,931 --> 00:37:44,292
You pay a million dollars for coaching from somebody.
474
00:37:44,292 --> 00:37:45,334
You're going to go and
475
00:37:45,334 --> 00:37:48,076
move mountains to implement what that person tells you.
476
00:37:48,076 --> 00:37:54,801
So there's an aspect to this where the more that you commit yourself to it, the more you
are going to learn.
477
00:37:54,801 --> 00:38:03,737
And I don't say that so that people get reckless and go overextend themselves to get into
mining, but it is an important point that most of us don't have really an incentive to
478
00:38:03,737 --> 00:38:11,552
look at things unless we've either paid upfront or we've had a painful experience that
causes us to re-examine some of our beliefs.
479
00:38:11,572 --> 00:38:13,319
So we do have a YouTube channel.
480
00:38:13,319 --> 00:38:15,801
tons of free education, don't have to pay for it.
481
00:38:15,801 --> 00:38:18,422
I think that that can cover most people's basis.
482
00:38:18,422 --> 00:38:22,364
If you just search Abundant Minds on YouTube, we've got a lot of free education.
483
00:38:22,364 --> 00:38:30,468
But for me at least, I am the kind of person that once I make a financial commitment to
something, then the learning journey really starts in earnest.
484
00:38:30,468 --> 00:38:35,130
I may have done some research beforehand, but after that commitment, I am bought in.
485
00:38:35,130 --> 00:38:37,961
I am ready to make sure that I get my money's worth.
486
00:38:38,455 --> 00:38:42,237
think that's alternative to how most humans think.
487
00:38:42,278 --> 00:38:48,182
I think most humans, wait to take action even in things they need to do in their life, not
just investments.
488
00:38:48,182 --> 00:38:52,165
They wait to take action until they feel like they fully understand something.
489
00:38:52,165 --> 00:38:57,418
That's the reason why most people never do the things that they set out to do or they have
dreams and visions of doing so.
490
00:38:57,418 --> 00:38:59,290
That's not making an argument for an investment.
491
00:38:59,290 --> 00:39:04,564
I know nothing about this to be able to support the idea if somebody should invest or if
they shouldn't.
492
00:39:04,564 --> 00:39:06,975
That's why we have you on and have these conversations.
493
00:39:07,093 --> 00:39:20,937
Is the right question to ask to stay with legalities to say if if Beau had a hundred
thousand dollars and you were going to invest another hundred thousand liquid that wasn't
494
00:39:20,937 --> 00:39:28,049
in Bitcoin that was cash or gold you were going to take cash from somewhere else and
invest it in Bitcoin.
495
00:39:28,049 --> 00:39:33,737
What would right now what we you're expected return for you be not for me not advice for
anybody else.
496
00:39:33,737 --> 00:39:38,289
Is that the right way to ask the question that if you did it, what would you expect for
yourself?
497
00:39:38,879 --> 00:39:48,579
I can say generally, it's important to qualify this because Bitcoin moves around quite,
quite frequently and in a very-
498
00:39:48,579 --> 00:39:53,099
Change in the past week, week and a half, I mean, it's October last year.
499
00:39:53,099 --> 00:39:54,773
It's halved since October.
500
00:39:54,773 --> 00:39:55,204
Right.
501
00:39:55,204 --> 00:39:59,128
So that changes the numbers pretty significantly.
502
00:39:59,128 --> 00:40:10,269
In most market conditions, most of the time, if I'm putting 100K into mining, I'm
expecting to net about 30K a year and essentially recoup my investment within the first
503
00:40:10,269 --> 00:40:19,801
two to three years, and then start to outperform in years three through five or three
through six, as that machine has paid for itself, but is now just, you know,
504
00:40:19,801 --> 00:40:22,353
accumulating the gravy train in those later years.
505
00:40:22,353 --> 00:40:33,944
So that's how I think of it from just a very simple, non-contextualized mental model
standpoint is that all things held equal if we're in a relatively calm and steady market,
506
00:40:33,944 --> 00:40:36,796
you've got two to three years to get your equipment paid back.
507
00:40:36,796 --> 00:40:38,468
At that point, it's paid off.
508
00:40:38,468 --> 00:40:42,331
And then you are just stacking additional Bitcoin for those future years.
509
00:40:42,991 --> 00:40:44,603
is what abundant minds what you guys are doing.
510
00:40:44,603 --> 00:40:53,323
You pretty much just leasing us space inside this huge piece of real estate so we can
house these minds that we've bought.
511
00:40:53,955 --> 00:40:54,496
Exactly.
512
00:40:54,496 --> 00:40:55,977
So people are coming to us.
513
00:40:55,977 --> 00:40:58,378
They're trusting us with procurement as well.
514
00:40:58,378 --> 00:41:04,965
I had a horrible experience getting the wrong kind of equipment in bad shape when I was
first getting into the space.
515
00:41:05,046 --> 00:41:06,497
And so we handle everything.
516
00:41:06,497 --> 00:41:10,710
You come to us, we've got options of what kind of miners people tend to buy.
517
00:41:10,710 --> 00:41:13,232
There's different reasons to get different ones.
518
00:41:13,232 --> 00:41:19,456
And then you'd actually purchase those through us and then actually have them run in one
of our facilities in Oregon.
519
00:41:19,456 --> 00:41:20,753
So you get to...
520
00:41:20,753 --> 00:41:28,513
see everything, you get to monitor it on dashboard, you can come out for site visits that
we have about every month because I love showing people mining sites.
521
00:41:28,513 --> 00:41:33,793
Most people have never seen them and it was a transformative experience for me the first
time I saw one.
522
00:41:33,793 --> 00:41:35,073
So love doing that.
523
00:41:35,073 --> 00:41:44,153
But essentially it's meant to be a hands-off income stream where you just buy the
equipment, you pay for those monthly energy and operating expenses, which is about $2.25 a
524
00:41:44,153 --> 00:41:47,081
month and collect all the Bitcoin and
525
00:41:47,289 --> 00:41:52,696
If you're following the guidance, I would say you're holding on to it as well and not
liquidating it immediately.
526
00:41:52,696 --> 00:41:57,500
The opportunity cost of selling Bitcoin when you mine it over the long term can be pretty
high.
527
00:41:57,500 --> 00:42:00,012
So treat it as an accumulation vehicle.
528
00:42:00,100 --> 00:42:04,554
And so you need to treat this the same way that people treat their stocks for long-term
investing.
529
00:42:04,814 --> 00:42:11,808
Yes, it's not like owning a rental property in the sense that you want to immediately
spend your cash flow, so to speak.
530
00:42:11,808 --> 00:42:15,859
This is a reframe in which asset matters.
531
00:42:15,859 --> 00:42:18,860
So in a rental property, the house is the asset.
532
00:42:18,981 --> 00:42:24,463
The income stream is just something that you can either live off of or accumulate and
reinvest.
533
00:42:24,483 --> 00:42:26,904
In mining, the miner is not your asset.
534
00:42:26,904 --> 00:42:30,496
The miner is a vehicle to produce Bitcoin, which is the asset.
535
00:42:30,496 --> 00:42:38,836
So it's a little bit of a flip-flop in that what you're producing in cash flow is actually
what you want to hold on to, not the actual production asset.
536
00:42:38,836 --> 00:42:42,751
You don't win if you have the most miners, you win if you accumulated the most Bitcoin.
537
00:42:42,751 --> 00:42:44,252
So that's the reframe.
538
00:42:44,962 --> 00:42:46,122
So good.
539
00:42:46,122 --> 00:42:46,802
All right.
540
00:42:46,802 --> 00:42:53,702
I think you have invested enough intelligence and knowledge about Bitcoin mining and
Bitcoin in our brains.
541
00:42:53,702 --> 00:42:54,922
We can handle for one day.
542
00:42:54,922 --> 00:42:57,182
That's why we don't keep going forever.
543
00:42:57,722 --> 00:43:04,194
So the best place is to go to YouTube to find abundant minds and just go deep into the
channel and connect with you guys that way.
544
00:43:04,194 --> 00:43:08,714
Yeah, you can find us on pretty much any social platform at Abundant Minds.
545
00:43:08,714 --> 00:43:15,054
Our website's got a fair amount of information as well, and that's probably the easiest
way to get directly in touch with me or a member of the team.
546
00:43:15,054 --> 00:43:17,174
That's AbundantMinds.com.
547
00:43:18,090 --> 00:43:21,524
Alright, Beau Turner, thanks for joining us,
548
00:43:21,565 --> 00:43:22,258
Appreciate you, Mark.
549
00:43:22,258 --> 00:43:23,180
This was fun.
550
00:43:23,180 --> 00:43:25,690
Thanks for leveling up our bitcoin brains.
551
00:43:26,019 --> 00:43:26,593
You got it.
552
00:43:26,593 --> 00:43:27,177
Anytime.
553
00:43:27,177 --> 00:43:27,989
you.







