There was such a strong narrative around all of these ASICs leaving China and flowing into other places or entering the market, I’m just curious what your experience of that was, given the position that you’re in.
Fred Thiel: Yeah, we had a great tailwind that was counterweighted, if you would, by the fact that our hardened facility had continual operational issues. I don’t have to go into those because we’re now fully transitioned out of that site, but it was a coal-fired power plant that just kept breaking. So we got really optimistic, “Great. All this hash rate is coming down, we’re gonna be able to mine a huge ton of bitcoin,” and then all of a sudden, “Oh, the power plant is down again.”
For us personally, we experienced — when the plant was running — great rewards. On some days, we were mining four blocks with the small amount of hash rate that we had, which was excellent.
But eventually, the global hash rate caught up and here we are now, back on trend where we should have been. We’re at about 240 exahashes globally today and I think we’re gonna continue to see that hash rate grow as we continue to deploy, as other large miners continue to deploy.
I think we’ll eventually get back to a place where — potentially before the next halvening — we’ll see global hash rate, north of mid-300s, something like that. That’s gonna be really interesting for this industry. I think bitcoin price has to move a whole lot to compensate miners for the impact of the halving come early 2024.
