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For a few years now, I have had a theory about how and why bitcoin mining would stop growing in terms of capital and electricity expenditure. I expected this dynamic to play out over many years and thus never got round to writing it clearly, but a few interesting developments over the past year suggest to me that this transition may be taking place now.

Bitcoin electricity consumption may have peaked, and bitcoin may never consume as much electricity as it did in 2024-2025. Even if that were not the case, I expect this dynamic to materialize at some point over the coming years because of mining economics and the halving. This piece presents the argument as a testable hypothesis, provides the data that would test it, and discusses the implications for the mining industry and bitcoin.

The Keynesian scammers of the fiat cartel told Nayib Bukele that eliminating crime would reduce GDP. Yet in reality, it raised GDP. This is because crime is destructive rather than productive. Crime doesn’t create economic goods; it just takes them from those who created them and gives them to those who commit crimes. Locking up criminals does not reduce production, but for Keynesian fiat scammers, it seems to reduce spending because criminals are no longer spending while locked in prison, and the Keynesian scammers only care about spending because they do not understand the concept of production. In the real world, spending is not actually reduced, because the productive victims of crime now get to keep their money and spend it themselves. The criminal goes to jail, and the tomato seller he extorted gets to keep his money and spend it on things he likes.

IMPORTANT SECURITY UPDATE:

COLDCARD users who relied solely on device-generated randomness may be at risk from a security vulnerability that may steal your coins. Users who followed best practices and generated their seed with 100 fair, independent, and private dice rolls are not considered at risk. 50+ rolls seems to also be safe. If you generated your seed on a coldcard without 100 dice rolls, you should: Alternatively, and if any of this is confusing or feels uncertain, move your funds to an exchange custodian temporarily while you figure out how to set up a new seed safely. Anyone uncertain about the firmware used, the number of dice rolls, or whether those rolls remained private should assume the seed may be affected and migrate. The bug prevented the hardware random-number generator from contributing the intended amount of entropy during seed generation, substantially reducing the effective seed-search space.

Edmund “Ned” Phelps, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, died in Manhattan on May 15, at the age of 92. The world has lost one of its most consequential economists. I have lost a friend and mentor who was pivotal to my professional and intellectual development.

I first came to know Ned in 2008 at Columbia University, where he had taught for decades as McVickar Professor of Political Economy. I was in the final year of my PhD and increasingly disaffected by my growing disagreement with much of what I was being taught. He was a Nobel laureate at the height of his fame, only two years after Stockholm had called. I attended one of his talks and enjoyed his perspective. We chatted briefly afterward, and I followed up by email.

As a libertarian anarchist and Austrian school economist, I was interested in following the election of the first president in the world who professed to share my ideas. He said a lot of the right things on TV, and his radical policies seemed similar to what I would want implemented. After 30 months of close observation, I can confidently say Javier Milei’s policies bear no resemblance to what an Austrian economist would do, and he has used Austrian economics as a cover to run one of the most inflationary presidencies in Argentina’s highly inflationary history. Predictably, and in light of the most recent inflation and growth data, it is now safe to call Milei’s presidency a failure on all the important questions.

Tangible assets constitute the following percentage of the Mag7 market caps:

Nvidia: 0.66% Apple: 1.38% Tesla: 4.06% Microsoft: 7.29% Alphabet: 8.39% Meta: 9.56% Amazon: 16.28% Combined weighted average: 5.79% If you liquidated all of these companies’ physical assets, they wouldn’t amount to 6% of their valuation. There have been days in which the market caps of these companies have moved by more than the total value of their physical assets. If 94% of the value of the most valuable companies on earth is non-physical, then value does not have to be physical. If digital things have no value, then you should have no problem with giving me your computer to erase all the data from it. I will return your computer to you in the same exact physical form.

When Israel and the US launched their war on Iran, they claimed it would last a few days. A few days later, they said it would last 3 to 4 weeks. As the fourth week ends, it is a good time to take stock of what has happened and the war’s scoreboard, and the political and economic implications. Military matters are unpredictable, and everything can change quickly in battlefields, so this analysis is tentative, but there are clear changes in the facts on the ground so far that indicate the US has suffered a significant setback with important ramifications, and if the US chooses to double down, it may exacerbate it, with momentous political, economic, and military implications for the Middle East, the US, and the world at large.

Get your copy of The Gold Standard from Saifedean.com or Amazon .

[This part of the book is based on real history, and events here are real.] Friends Today Friends in Future Friends Forever —Message from King George V to Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II, delivered on June 30, 1914, by the commander of the British squadron taking part in the Kiel Regatta Week celebrations in Germany, which were cut short by the news of the assassination of the Austrian crown prince. The relative stability of the monetary order from 1873 coincided with the stability of the political order. As the world traded one money, it also approached an ideal of one economic unit, with declining restrictions on trade and reductions in military conflicts. Relations between the major powers continued to improve over time, and the prospect of war became increasingly less likely.

[This part of the book is based on real history, and events here are real.]

Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants, and debt is the money of slaves. To understand the economic history of the twentieth century, we must first examine the monetary system that dominated at its inception. The classical gold standard era, from 1873 to 1914, represented the first time since antiquity that Western civilization was using the same monetary standard. And given European industrial and economic advancement over the rest of the world, by the end of the nineteenth century, the classical gold standard had arguably extended to the whole planet, as most of the world was now using gold as money, or gold-backed currencies, while only a few governments still clung…

For a preview of what to expect from my new book, The Gold Standard , here is the introduction:

The invention of bitcoin has kindled interest in monetary history, offering people a historically unparalleled opportunity to experience firsthand the transformative potential of upgrading monetary technology. In 2018, I published The Bitcoin Standard, a book that focused on monetary history and monetary economics, explaining the problem of money over millennia in order to illustrate bitcoin’s true potential and historical significance. In 2021, I published The Fiat Standard, which also focused on monetary history and economics to explain the functioning of fiat money and its far-reaching implications. In 2023, I published Principles of Economics, a book that explained the economics of human action and detailed how civilization emerges from the cooperation of individuals.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the inevitable result of the destruction of a centuries-old system of private property rights and its replacement by race-based state ownership. Since 1947, property rights in Palestine have been replaced by a government agency that owns the majority of land, constantly steals more, never sells, and only leases land to one racial group. Religious and racial conflict are not destined in Palestine; they are historically rare occurrences, but this system of property rights would create violent conflict anywhere.

In 1945, the British mandate government surveyed land ownership in Palestine and found that Jews owned 5.67% of the total land, while Muslims, Christians & other denominations owned 48.31% of the land. The remaining 46.02% was public land, mainly in the sparsely inhabited desert in the south, most of which was de facto owned by the Bedouins who herded there.

My new book, The Gold Standard , will be out on November 14!!

You can get your high-quality cloth hardcovers from saifedean.com , or a paperback from Amazon . Audiobooks and ebooks will be available, too! What would the twentieth century have looked like on a gold standard? What would have happened to the state without its money printer? What would have happened to prices, wages, living standards, capital markets, politics, energy production, technology, and education? In The Gold Standard, I answer these questions with a unique alternative history that is one-third history, one-third novel, and one-third economic analysis. In 1911, French aviation pioneer Louis Blériot partners with the Wright brothers to build the Blériot Transport Corporation (BTC), an airplane-based decentralized peer-to-peer gold-settlement network.

Bitcoin is a better investment than Swiss hotels or restaurants or car factories because bitcoin is offering a far more valuable product to the world: a replacement for central banks. Since central banks are the absolute worst, most criminal and most destructive thing on earth, there is an enormous market reward for anyone that can put offer people an alternative. When you buy bitcoin, you are growing the bitcoin pool of liquidity and offering people a money better than central bank slavery. You’re making bitcoin better and the market rewards you for your investment. The world needs a central bank replacement a lot more than Switzerland needs another hotel.

But this is a transitory phase that cannot last forever. Bitcoin can’t keep replacing central banks forever. Eventually it replaces them all and when they and all their shitcoins are dead, bitcoin won’t be making enormous returns anymore.

Professor Jesus Huerta de Soto, Professor of Political Economy, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, has graciously written an introduction to my Principles of Economics book, which will be included in future printings. I am publishing it here for the first time.

Principles of Economics: An Introduction to Economic Foundations Professor Saifedean Ammous is among the most talented young economists of the Austrian School. His brilliance and clarity of explanation were evident in his first book, The Bitcoin Standard , which quickly became a worldwide bestseller. He now offers this introductory manual on the foundations of economics, helping to fill the shortage of quality introductory texts that make the surrounding world comprehensible to young students encountering the discipline for the first time through the basic postulates of the Austrian School of Economics.

In my previous piece on Milei[1] 18 days ago, I argued that the Milei administration is running a debt and inflation ponzi that is coming near its end, and that the only concrete achievement of his administration so far is that it destroyed the currency and created a shitcoin casino making bond and foreign exchange speculation the only path to financial security in Argentina. Since I wrote that piece:

-The Argentine peso is down another 10% against the US dollar, and has already breached the top of the band in which the Administration said it aims to keep the peso.[ 2] -This decline in the peso comes in spite of Milei's administration officially announcing it is intervening in the foreign exchange market by buying pesos with the very few borrowed dollars it has. It's estimated they blew $540m just last week.

Just because bitcoin went up a lot does not mean it cannot go up a lot more. On the contrary, the more it goes up, the more it demonstrates product-market fit, the more likely it is to go up.

Bitcoin is different from stocks, bonds, and commodities because it has a much, much larger addressable market. Let's compare: Apple's total addressable market is 8 billion people who can own an iphone and laptop. A lot of them already do, and a lot of them are too poor, so there's just not much more room for growth. Maybe Apple can increase by 5x, or 10x, but it would need to introduce new products that are wildly popular to do so, which is very difficult.

My publishing house, The Saif House, has recently published The Bitcoin Enlightenment by Mexican entrepreneur, billionaire, and bitcoiner Ricardo Salinas Pliego, and co-authors, Pascal Hügli and Daniel Jungen. I am sharing today the introduction I wrote for this fascinating book, and I hope you enjoy it. You can get your English copy from TheSaifHouse.com or Amazon , and the Spanish copy from Amazon US or Amazon Mexico .

As a publisher at The Saif House, it is a true pleasure and privilege to be publishing The Bitcoin Enlightenment , a fantastic book that distills the wisdom of centuries of hard money civilization into terms that are easily understandable for the modern reader. Mr. Ricardo Salinas Pliego comes from a long line of successful businessmen and entrepreneurs who have developed and communicated this wisdom over generations, and we…

Last week Argentina’s Javier Milei regime tried to roll over bonds by offering investors an insane 69% interest rate, and only succeeded in rolling over 61% of them. Even a 69% annual interest rate isn’t enough to tempt investors to risk lending to the Milei ponzi, which means they either expect a default very soon, or they expect price inflation to exceed 69% over the next year. This was an ice-cold bucket of reality poured on the delusional talk of an economic miracle by the clown who plays a free market economist on TV and has been placed in the presidency to revive Argentina’s largest industry: sovereign bond pump-and-dumps.

Even if the bond auction had succeeded, it is difficult to see how Argentina could possibly avoid default and/or very high inflation in the rest of Milei’s term.

Hisham Saifedean Rashid Ammous was born in the village of Atteel in Palestine on September 1, 1944. After finishing high school in nearby Fadiliya school in Tulkarem, he moved to Saudi Arabia to work as a school teacher, then to Kuwait to work in the electric company. Unsatisfied with his career, he decided to become a doctor, and applied for a scholarship from the Jordanian government to the University of Madrid in Spain, through the Spanish embassy in Jordan. He moved to Madrid without speaking a word of Spanish, but graduated as a surgeon with distinction in 1976. After that scholarship, he practically never needed, asked for, or took anything from anyone until his last day.

In his five decades as a surgeon, Dr. Ammous must have performed over 20,000 surgeries across Spain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Palestine, Brazil, Lebanon, and Libya.