The Peter McCormack Show16 Nov 2023

Ensuring Bitcoin Wins with Lee Bratcher - WBD736

Lee Bratcher is the President of the Texas Blockchain Council. In this interview, we discuss Bitcoin mining in Texas, the North American Blockchain Summit 2023 and the regulatory challenges miners face. We also talk about the potential impact of politicians embracing Bitcoin, the importance of mainstream media presence at the upcoming conference, and efforts to attract professionals to Bitcoin events.

- - - -

This podcast was made before the start of the Texas Bitcoin Summit in Fort Worth, which started yesterday and runs through until Friday. The summit is expected to be the biggest one yet, with over a thousand attendees and a focus on mining. And this year the Texas Blockchain Council has excelled at attracting some major political figures, including RFK, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ted Cruz, Cynthia Lummis, Andrew Yang and Warren Davidson.

Texas seems to understand Bitcoin better than other states, which is attributable in part to the independent thinking and educational efforts in the state. The Texas Bitcoin mining industry is a catalyst for Bitcoin mining across the world, leading the way in developing use cases such as demand response grid balancing services and the incentivisation for the build-out of renewable energy.

However, the path to wider acceptance of mining in Texas has not been foregone, and the future is still uncertain. The challenges the industry has faced have been significant. For example, Senate Bill 1751 in Texas sought to ban miners from the very same ancillary services that have benefitted ERCOT's grid balancing objectives. These efforts have been pushed by traditional legacy industries in Texas aided by their strategy of regulatory capture.

Traditional industries such as steel mills and petrochemical refineries have been frustrated by Bitcoin miners bidding down the price for demand response services (which in turn has benefits consumers). The bill passed unanimously in the Senate. The fact the bill was ultimately killed in the House was thanks in large part to the efforts of the Texas Blockchain Council under Lee Bratcher's presidency.

The issue highlights the problem of getting a political consensus on Bitcoin. Elizabeth Warren, for one, makes it difficult for Democrats to openly support Bitcoin. However, a few Democrats are showing a more practical and nuanced understanding. And, being anti-Bitcoin will become a risky position to take in the future due to generational-led shifts in opinions. Until then, it's up to bodies like the Texas Blockchain Council to continue to fight for Bitcoin.

Show notes: https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/ensuring-bitcoin-wins

This episode's sponsors: Iris Energy - Bitcoin Mining. Done Sustainably Bitcasino - The Future of Gaming is here Ledger - State of the art Bitcoin hardware wallet Wasabi Wallet - Privacy by default Unchained - Secure your bitcoin with confidence OrangePillApp - Stack Friends Who Stack Sats

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Det här avsnittet är hämtat från ett öppet RSS-flöde och publiceras inte av Podme. Det kan innehålla reklam.

Avsnitt(1079)

#201 - Connor Leahy - The AI That Escaped: Inside OpenAI's Rogue Agent Incident

Connor Leahy has spent his career at the frontier of AI, from reverse-engineering GPT-2 as a student and co-founding EleutherAI to building the AI safety company Conjecture. He now leads US policy wor...

14 Aug 1h 9min

#200 - Sebastian Thrun - The Singularity Is Here & We Are Completely Unprepared

Sebastian Thrun has spent his career working on technologies that once sounded like science fiction, from self-driving cars and flying vehicles to online education and artificial intelligence. He now ...

11 Aug 1h 34min

#199 - Aubrey de Grey - The Man Who Says Ageing Can Be Cured

Aubrey de Grey believes ageing is accumulated damage in a biological machine and argues that medicine may eventually become capable of repairing that damage faster than it appears. He gives humanity a...

6 Aug 1h 17min

#198 - Michael Shermer - Truth, Conspiracies & The Things We Can't Explain

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, host of The Michael Shermer Show and author of Truth and Conspiracy. He joins Peter to ask whether we are really living in a post-truth w...

4 Aug 1h 27min

#197 - Brian Keating - What Came Before the Big Bang & Does Time Exist?

Brian Keating joins me to explore one of the deepest unanswered questions in physics: what is time, and why does it only appear to move in one direction? Brian argues that time may not exist as a fund...

30 Juli 1h 39min

#196 - Sam Bowman - The U.K. Is Becoming a Poor Country

Sam Bowman joins me to discuss why Britain is approaching two lost decades of stagnant median wages and why the country is now far poorer than it should be. Sam argues that Britain does not lack talen...

28 Juli 2h 9min

#195 - Lisa McKenzie & Keith Gildart - Who Is Britain For? The Destruction of the Working Class

Britain did not simply leave its working class behind. Sociologist Lisa McKenzie and historian and former coal miner Keith Gildart argue that political and economic decisions deliberately dismantled t...

25 Juli 2h 13min

#194 - Charles Goodhart: The Money Endgame - Debt, Inflation & Central Bank Failure

Charles Goodhart joins me to discuss why Britain’s decline did not start in 2008, why the post-war economic boom may have been a temporary lucky era and why the next 30 to 40 years could be far harder...

21 Juli 1h