Every outlet covered them the same way: another miner pivots to AI that is good for shareholders (it is).

What I have not seen anyone price is what the grid gives up. A Bitcoin miner can power down in seconds. An AI data centre cannot power down at all without breaking its contracts. So every megawatt that converts is a megawatt the grid loses as a shock absorber, at the moment grid operators have started paying for exactly that flexibility.

That tension runs underneath everything I am watching in this industry. Only one of the four paths open to miners makes the news, and it is the one that sells the flexibility away.

AI is the single biggest megatrend in the world right now, and it has a problem that money alone can’t solve. It needs expertise. It needs people who already know how to secure power at scale, procure and permit sites, build them quickly, manage energy contracts, stabilize the grids they draw from, and keep hundreds of megawatts of dense computing cool.

Where does that expertise live? Turns out, mostly in Bitcoin mining. Miners have spent a decade solving exactly these problems, under conditions AI companies have never faced: brutal margins, hostile media, and a block reward that halves every 4 years. When your survival depends on finding the world’s cheapest electron, you get very good at energy.

AI companies know this, and they are prepared to throw money at it. Requests in ERCOT’s connection queue have grown almost 300% in a year, nearly all of it data centers. MARA’s CEO Fred Thiel, announcing a $1.5 billion power acquisition in April: “Power is the scarce input in AI.”

So opportunities are flowing to people in Bitcoin mining in abundance right now. Only 1 of the paths makes the news: the complete pivot. Underneath it, I’m watching at least 4 distinct ways miners are winning:

1. The complete pivot. The TeraWulf and CleanSpark path: become an AI data center company. It brings the headline deals and the headline multiples, and there is no way back to Bitcoin mining once the leases are signed. It is also the only one of the four that converts a flexible load into a firm one, which is what the grid loses in the trade.

2. The service provider. An AI data center is a firm load: it can’t switch off without breaking contracts. Bitcoin mining is the only large load that can power down in seconds. That makes flexibility a sellable service, in 2 directions. To the grid, which needs shock absorbers (Denmark has begun rewarding flexible consumption rather than merely tolerating it). And to the AI operators themselves: co-locate flexible mining behind the meter, and the data center can promise the grid a steadiness it couldn’t otherwise offer.

3. The expertise provider. Cooling, heat dissipation and reuse, site procurement and site builds, energy management: every one of these is a niche where mining teams are selling hard-won knowledge to AI developers, mostly in deals you’ll never read about.

4. The hedge. MARA’s path: it just agreed to pay up to $600 million for a Texas site with permitted grid rights approaching 2 GW - mine Bitcoin when it pays best, serve AI load otherwise. The optionality itself is the asset.

What I’m seeing is simple: Bitcoin mining spent 10 years doing proof of work on the hardest problems in energy, and a 2nd industry just started verifying it.

Industry Convergence = Exit Liquidity

The rest of this letter covers information relevant to investors including why we think Bitcoin mining companies now have stronger valuation uplift potential, and why we’re reconsidering our 2022 decision not to take equity positions in Bitcoin mining companies.

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The country now wastes 20.6% of its wind and solar. When the sun is high or the wind strong, the plants make more than the grid can carry, and the surplus is curtailed. Take one plant. Engie’s Assú Sol is the largest solar farm in its global fleet: 753 MW, online since February, and already being curtailed. Its country manager says Engie is weighing Bitcoin mining to soak up the waste. Over a year it averages a little over a quarter of its rated power, an estimated 1.8 TWh. Curtail that at the national rate and an estimated 370 GWh is lost. Mine that power at today’s rates, near a multi-year low, and it earns 20 to 25 million dollars a year in gross revenue, on electricity that now earns nothing.

Against that, the mining actually running in Brazil is a rounding error. On the curtailed wind of Axia, its partner Radius Mining runs one 6 MW pilot of 1,064 machines, earning an estimated 3 million dollars a year. One Engie plant is worth 20 to 25 million; the country’s live mining captures 3.

This is bigger than one company, and further along than an experiment. A cluster of Brazil’s biggest power producers, one of them already mining, are converging on the same move in the same year, in a pattern I have not found anywhere else in the world.

Subscribe to read why those who run the grid are now making Bitcoin’s case for it.

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Three conversations are happening right now about the future of electricity grids. They’re happening in parallel swinlanes, without awareness of each other. This lack of awareness won’t last forever. When these three conversations intersect (and for reasons I’ll go into in my letter it is a “when” not an “if”), it will change how the world understands what Bitcoin is for.

More about that in our Main story section below. But first, here’s an update on what’s been happening in the last couple of weeks that we think is advancing Bitcoin adoption.

Top Picks

Energy surplus is a challenge several countries now face, even as a majority of nations don’t produce enough power for their own consumption. In Brazil, solar companies are routinely forced to switch off their power stations when the grid cannot absorb their output. Companies such as Thopen already turned to Bitcoin mining to put that stranded energy to work. Colombia faces the same abundance problem: a 2024 World Bank report found the country generates 75% of its electricity from renewables — more than twice the global average.

Now Colombian President Gustavo Petro, borrowing a leaf from his neighbors, has begun promoting Colombia’s Caribbean cities as Bitcoin mining hubs powered by the country’s surplus renewable energy. Notably, Petro has also floated giving the Wayúu community, Colombia’s largest Indigenous group, co-ownership of any mining projects that emerge. When an environmentalist head of state champions Bitcoin mining as both a solution to his country’s energy surplus and a tool for Indigenous economic empowerment, the old “Bitcoin vs. the environment” narrative loses yet more ground.

Trailblazers

Besides being an energy-surplus country, Brazil is also the world’s largest producer of sugar and second-largest producer of ethanol, both products of sugarcane processing. In sugarcane factories, the most significant byproduct is bagasse, the fibrous residue left over after the crushing of sugarcane stalks. Mills routinely burn bagasse to generate steam and electricity for their own operations, and often the energy produced exceeds what they can use. So what happens to the surplus?

Well, Adecoagro is launching a Bitcoin mining operation aimed at putting this otherwise wasted energy to work. The pilot, a 10 MW facility based in Ivinhema with roughly 1,280 mining machines, will serve as a commercial test of whether mining can scale as a complement to existing power sales across the company’s entire platform, which holds more than 230 MW of renewable generation capacity across South America. In addition, the company is weighing adding mined Bitcoin to its balance sheet alongside farmland as a long-term store of value. Farm waste in, sound money out.

Meanwhile in Wheatland County, Alberta, a 750 kW solar installation paired with a Bitcoin mining operation housed in a single 40-foot container is moving ahead after the county council voted in support of the development. The solar facility is intended to offset the mine’s energy consumption, with the potential to supply surplus energy back to the grid.

What’s most exciting about this project is its demonstration of what distributed mining is all about. It’s not only large companies and nation-state projects that can capture Bitcoin mining’s energy and economic externalities, even small installations backed by rural county councils can make mining’s benefits attainable to anyone willing to give it a chance.

Features

Watch my opening remarks at the FREE Energy Summit in Lisbon, kicking off an event dedicated to the real-world projects proving how Bitcoin mining can power Europe’s energy transition. Watch (~10 min).

At the MadBitcoin Summit in Madrid, I gave a keynote on why Bitcoin mining is the “almighty shock absorber” our increasingly fragile grids need and what last year’s Iberian Peninsula blackout revealed about the bee, the hornet, and the future of energy. Watch (~16 min).

On The Bitcoin Layer, Nik and I unpack the collision between AI, the power grid, and Bitcoin mining: including the Swedish miner getting paid at negative two cents per kWh and why Bitcoin may solve an energy problem before the world realizes it solves a monetary one. Watch (~36 min).

I also joined Ricky Zhang on his new podcast, Age of Abundance, to explore how Bitcoin mining serves as a uniquely flexible load balancer for grids strained by renewable energy, and why reaching the mainstream requires leading with local utility rather than ideology.

Lastly, and most recently, I sat down with Paula on The Bitcoin Edge to dismantle the $6 billion anti-Bitcoin campaign. We break down why every major attack against the network doesn’t just fail, it actually makes Bitcoin stronger.

Main story

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First, a big thank you for being a founding subscriber. You are doing a lot to make this newsletter possible. I wanted to give a bit of Bitcoin-adoption information back to you by way of saying “thanks”. I’ll share it more publicly a little down the track, but sharing it here first. This newsletter is a bit different in form - sh…

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While I was at the (amazing) Free Energy Summit in Lisbon last month, I had the chance to finally ask Kenji Tateiwa some questions I’d always wanted to know the answers to.

For context: Kenji was no less than the nuclear safety engineer who expertly coordinated the American and Japanese nuclear engineers’ response teams after the Fukushima meltdown. But it wasn’t nuclear energy I wanted to know about this time, it was how he convinced the world's 5th largest utility to create a Bitcoin mining subsidiary (something that’s never happened before at this scale), why 300 of India’s top IIT graduates applied for 6 positions at his Bitcoin mining subsidiary, and what he did differently to almost everyone else in Bitcoin who tries to orange-pill people.

During our 20-min trip to the venue, we shared the back seat of a taxi together, and that 20 minutes changed my opinion on Bitcoin adoption.

Kenji related a story to me he didn’t tell in the presentation. Several years ago he’d brought a Bitcoin mining ASIC to the senior management of TEPCO, where he worked - Japan’s largest utility and the world’s 5th largest utility.

He sat it on the desk in front of TEPCO’s executive management team. And he walked them through why this device was the most flexible load resource in the world, how it could consume electricity and stop consuming electricity in under a second, how it solved the exact grid stability problem they’d been trying to solve for years.

By the end of the conversation, the executives told him: “Kenji, you’re a genius. This is indeed the most flexible load resource that exists.”

And then they did nothing!

This story is not about Bitcoin mining, it is about psychology and human behavior. Nor is it the first time in history the truth has not been enough

In Vincenzo Viviani’s 1654 biography (Racconto istorico della vita di Galileo), written after Galileo’s death, Viviani described Galileo climbing the Tower of Pisa around 1589 and dropping two balls of different masses in front of assembled professors and students of the University of Pisa. Both hit the ground at essentially the same time, disproving Aristotle’s claim that heavier objects fall proportionally faster.

According to Viviani, the professors watched, were impressed, and then went right back to teaching Aristotle. The professors couldn’t deny what they saw, but the institutional commitment to Aristotelian physics was so deep that the demonstration changed nothing in the curriculum.

To affect change: truth is necessary, but not sufficient. Even when the right people understand the facts, even when they can see the solution sitting on their desk - it doesn’t mean they’ll act. Indeed it is naïve for us to expect this.

Large organisations such as universities and utilities don’t acts like Bitcoiners or startups. They tend to function more like a series of fiefdoms, each of which care about something different. If any one of them says no, it’s a no. You don’t need to convince one person, you need five out of five. So truth by itself isn’t enough. You need truth plus patience plus the willingness to reframe the same truth five different ways.

That’s exactly what Kenji did.

Until now, Kenji’s story has been virtually unknown outside Japan. Yet it is one of the most blueprintable stories in Bitcoin mining about how Bitcoin wins - not by the protocol being anti-fragile (it already is), but by Bitcoiners themselves becoming anti-fragile. Kenji is the clearest case study I’ve seen of what that looks like in practice.

From Fukushima to anti-fragility

Kenji’s day job in 2011 was nuclear safety. When the Fukushima accident happened, he went into the site three weeks after the meltdown. There’s even a hazy photograph of him standing in front of the crippled Unit 3 reactor (that’s him on the far left).

As a nuclear safety engineer, his question afterwards was simple: how do you prevent something like this from recurring? The honest answer is that you can’t predict black swan events. But you can design systems that get stronger when they come. Nassim Taleb called this anti-fragility, and it gave Kenji the concept that would redirect his career.

He started applying that lens to Japan’s energy infrastructure. And the picture wasn’t encouraging. Japan’s energy self-sufficiency ratio is 15%. The country is almost entirely dependent on imported fossil fuel. After Fukushima, the government pushed hard into solar, which created a different problem: curtailment. Too much solar during the day, not enough demand to absorb it. Curtailment started in 2018 and has been growing every year since.

At the same time in 2018, the Bitcoin bubble burst. Japanese media was calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme and saying mining was an environmental disaster. Kenji’s first instinct was to stay away.

It’s worth pausing on what Kenji was not. He was not a Bitcoiner. He had no ideological attachment to Bitcoin, no position to defend. He was a nuclear safety engineer who came to Bitcoin because it solved an energy problem he’d observed firsthand. Critics often assume the opposite - that Bitcoin miners work backwards from a conclusion, defending a technology they were already committed to. Kenji’s path ran the other direction entirely.

Then he had the thought that changed everything. Japan is wasting renewable energy. This Bitcoin mining machine is a power guzzler. What if the “power guzzler” consumed the wasted energy?

The dinosaur and the ASIC

He proposed the idea to TEPCO management through an internal innovation programme. Nobody understood what he was saying. Everyone thought he was crazy. They politely suggested he go back to his nuclear day job

He said thank you very much … and pushed the idea for two more years.

In 2020, he convinced them to let him transfer from the nuclear division to TEPCO’s transmission and distribution arm. His full-time job became Bitcoin mining. He started small - a dozen miners in an office where nobody was watching - and gradually demonstrated to the technical management that this wasn’t a Ponzi scheme. It was a device that converts electricity into digital money, while solving critical grid problems.

By 2022 he had a 1.5-megawatt facility running 300 Bitcoin miners, within TEPCO. For the first time in the history of a Japanese utility, there was Bitcoin on the balance sheet. The corporate headquarters told him they didn’t want Bitcoin on the balance sheet. He told them it was perfectly legal.

Then came the question that would have stopped most people. The management asked: how certain are you that Bitcoin mining solves the grid issue? Kenji said “pretty certain”. They replied “Pretty certain is not enough. How many nines after 99.99%?”

His answer was to propose setting up a separate subsidiary - because inside the big TEPCO organisation, there were too many constraints. In August 2022, TEPCO allowed him to create Agile Energy X, a wholly-owned subsidiary using Bitcoin mining as one of its core solutions.

The largest utility in Japan, the company that operated Fukushima, created a Bitcoin mining subsidiary. Because one engineer wouldn’t stop.

Diamonds from thin air

What Kenji built next is where the story gets genuinely strange.

He calls it the “ultimate circular economy.” It starts with stranded renewable energy that can’t connect to the grid because of congestion. Bitcoin miners consume that energy. But instead of venting the waste heat, it gets piped into greenhouses running aquaponics - a circular agriculture system where fish waste feeds vegetables, the vegetables purify the water, and insect larvae decompose food waste into fish food. The whole system loops.

Then there’s a second use for the waste heat: powering direct air capture to pull CO2 from the atmosphere. Most direct air capture projects bury the carbon underground. Kenji doesn’t bury it. He dissolves the CO2 in molten salt and electrolyses it. The output is oxygen gas and solid carbon.

And here is where I had to check his sources. Under certain electrode conditions, the solid carbon forms as micro-diamonds. Published in a peer-reviewed paper from Kyoto University. Kenji’s own specialty, when he was at Kyoto, was molten salt electrolysis. He didn’t know you could make diamonds from it until he read his former colleague’s paper.

So the chain runs: wasted renewable energy → Bitcoin → waste heat → food production + captured CO2 → diamonds. From energy nobody wanted to a gemstone.

This may sound like science fiction, but the Japanese government’s own R&D organisation has written that Bitcoin mining is an effective tool to solve grid congestion. The proof-of-concept facilities exist. One is in a town hall in Saitama Prefecture where the mayor liked the concept so much he invited Kenji to build it.

Another is being developed in Toyotomi, a town in Hokkaido with stranded natural gas and an aging population, where the mayor sees Bitcoin mining as a way to bring young people back.

Kenji told me that the gas was previously venting into the air, so Bitcoin mining is also preventing a greenhouse gas (methane) which is 84x times more warming than CO2 over a 20-year period from entering our atmosphere.

Then there’s the eel farm.

In Hokkaido, an eel farmer was burning kerosene to heat his pools. Kenji suggested replacing the kerosene boilers with Bitcoin miners. The primary output is heat for the eels. The secondary output is a small amount of Bitcoin. The farmer is spending less on fuel and earning Bitcoin as a byproduct of keeping his eels warm.

Here’s what we can all learn

300 students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) applied for six summer internship positions at Agile Energy X last year. Yes, 300 elite graduates wanting to work for a Bitcoin mining company. This year they already have 250 applications. Why? The answer is, the students aren’t attracted by Bitcoin mining alone. They’re attracted by the unique integration of solutions that only Bitcoin mining enables: energy, agriculture, carbon capture, community development - with Bitcoin mining as the connecting thread.

That’s anti-fragility in practice: not one fragile revenue stream but a system where each component strengthens the others. Where a shock to any one part - a Bitcoin price drop, a regulatory change, a shift in energy markets - doesn’t collapse the whole. Where the system gets stronger under stress because it was designed to.

Which brings me back to that taxi ride.

Kenji stood in front of a crippled nuclear reactor in 2011 and asked how to make a system that doesn’t break. Fourteen years later, he’s built a company that turns waste into food, CO2 into diamonds, and methane pollution into Bitcoin.

The executives who told him he was a genius and then did nothing - they eventually did something. Not because the truth changed. Because Kenji didn’t stop.

The take-out for us all:

1. The first rule of Bitcoin is don’t lead with Bitcoin

2. Bitcoin solves a monetary problem most people can’t see, but an energy problem that can’t be hidden.

3. When a critical mass of Bitcoiners become as antifragile as Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin will have won.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna: “You have a right to perform your actions, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.” Kenji proposed Bitcoin mining to TEPCO management and was told to go back to his day job. He proposed it again. And again. For two years. Not because he was guaranteed a result, but because the action was right. The fruit came later.

As the line in the song Big Yellow Taxi goes "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Texas is about to find out just how true that is.

Because Texas just ran an experiment that nobody designed, and the results should raise the eyebrows of anyone who cares about grid reliability, no matter where y…

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Yesterday, Square auto-enabled Bitcoin payments for its 4 million merchants via the Lightning Network. Zero processing fees through 2026.

Everyone’s covering the headline. Here are three things almost nobody is covering about what it means for Bitcoin adoption.

1. The irony

In the early days, Bitcoin was called the dirty payment network. 24 peer reviewed papers proved that to be factually incorrect, but it was once the dominant narrative anyway. Here’s the irony: because the payment networks nobody questions use mostly fossil fuel, Bitcoin is doing for payments what EVs did for transport: obviating coal and gas based electricity generation with a cleaner alternative. Let’s unpack how.

Visa and Mastercard run on the electrical grid. In the US and around the world, that grid is roughly 60% fossil fuel, which means every swipe, every tap, every contactless payment is powered predominantly by coal and gas.

Bitcoin’s Lightning Network draws from a very different energy mix. According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, 52.4% of Bitcoin mining now runs on sustainable energy, up from 37.6% in 2022, with coal dropping from 36.6% to just 8.9% over the same period. That makes the Bitcoin network a net promoter of sustainable energy. Equally importantly, close to 30% of Bitcoin mining operates off-grid, forming direct relationships with renewable operators whose energy would otherwise be wasted.

So when a customer pays via Lightning at a Square terminal, they’re settling on the lowest-emission payment network in existence. And as of today, that’s the default for 4 million merchants.

2. The inertia

This is the part the adoption trackers are missing.

When Square first unveiled “Square Bitcoin“ in October 2025, it was opt-in. Merchants had to find it, enable it and configure it. Adoption was predictably slow. Five months later, they flipped the default. Every Square merchant now has Bitcoin payments enabled unless they actively choose to turn it off.

This is the first time any major payment processor has done this. PayPal’s crypto features are opt-in. Stripe’s Bitcoin payouts are opt-in. Coinbase’s crypto payment option is opt-in. Shopify’s Bitcoin option is opt-in. Every single one requires the merchant to go looking for it. Square just reversed the polarity.

If you know anything about default settings in technology, you know what happens next.

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One hundred years later, another “What would the world look like if…” question is quietly transforming the world of charity. An incredible 50 charities are already onboard, Bitcoin is at the core of the transformation, and yet hardly anyone knew about it (until now).

For example, did you know that charities including Amnesty International, Make-A-Wish Foundation, Orphans in Need, Human Relief Foundation, Save the Children are now accepting Bitcoin?

Few do. Yet one of the most incredible untold stories in Bitcoin is how Bitcoin is already starting to transform the charitable sector.

It’s unknown because the Bitcoiner at the heart of it is not jumping on podcasts, or doing a lot of PR about it. Instead, he is doing the proof of work: building a team and a project that is revolutionizing the industry from the inside out. But he happens to be a coaching client of mine too, so I put it to him that his story is too inspiring not to share, and he gracefully agreed.

Here then is the story of why charities have started accepting Bitcoin, and how this is already introducing tens of thousands of new people to using Bitcoin as money.

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Bitcoin’s future is bright, and this too will pass. But what’s clear is that for us to re-energize Bitcoin adoption, an earnest review of our past game footage are required.

This letter looks at three core issues that must be resolved in order for adoption to accelerate again.

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Have you ever thought about the paradoxical nature of truth? Of Bitcoin? Of decentralization itself?

Bitcoin is a decentralized monetary protocol. Yet the biggest adopter of Bitcoin is UAE. The biggest nation state adopter of Bitcoin mining is Bhutan. Both are centralized monarchies! In a conversation I had with Prince Filip of…

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Last week’s panel was good … but what we talked about backstage was 10-100x better!

Based on these conversations, in this newsletter I’ll be sharing

• Why nation-state adoption is going slower than expected (confirmed by Prince Filip), and how we can speed it up

• What many Bitcoin Treasuries Companies did wrong, and how we avoid a repeat

• Why Bitcoin adoption needs regulatory clarity everywhere (understood via a scary story)

• Why UAE’s incredible 30% crypto adoption is not a Bitcoin-adoption model we can replicate, and whose model we can replicate

This is ground-level reporting that comes from the people shaping policy and influencing decisions that affect Bitcoin adoption. Their actions directly determine where (and how fast) Bitcoin grows.

Understanding these forces isn't just about me satisfying your curiosity, it's about providing a necessary lens for anyone building, educating or influencing in this space.

PS: This work takes effort. I think it uniquely fills a vital gap in our Bitcoin adoption strategy: revealing blindspots. If you think it’s valuable too, please consider subscribing. It’s one of the simplest ways you can help me bust more FUD, orangepill more institutional investors and uncover more stories that help us speed up Bitcoin adoption.

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For years, it was widely known that you went to Bitcoin Twitter for the top analysis, not to Forbes and mainstream media.

But recently on Twitter we’ve seen a flood of influencers drawing false inferences from charts that have lost their meaning, and as a result giving poor guidance about chart action online. It would be nice to just dismiss this as noise, but this sort of thing actually creates headwinds for Bitcoin adoption.

In this letter we look at the three ways that use of charts that have lost signal is harmful to Bitcoin adoption, and which three (very) commonly-reported Bitcoin charts in particular you should no longer trust this cycle and why.

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After that was released, I got a message from a stranger saying “Thank you so much for your report. I’m one of them.” I asked if he would like his story to be shared in this newsletter and he generously agreed. Warning: what follows is the incredible, some…

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If you denominated that money in $1 bills, you would have enough money to stack from here to the moon 20.68 times. That’s rather a lot.

Right now, 99.997% of that capital is not invested into Bitcoin.

This year, I’ve been on a search for the world’s gatekeepers to that patient capital, the small handful of people who could influence how a lot more of that $72.8 trillion in assets flows into Bitcoin.

Last month I tracked down two of them! In this letter I’m sharing, exclusive to subscribers, their blueprint to orange-pill the world’s largest pools of institutional capital.

The number one blocker they pointed to shocked me, as it revealed a collective blindspot we’ve all had as Bitcoiners. It turns out we’ve been talking to the patient capital crowd all wrong for years. Yet, I was also surprised at how simple most of our past blindspots were to fix, and … the degree to which we can all help.

Hold on tight!

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Dear subscriber

Last month, we released some surprising new data about the accuracy of Mainstream media and Bitcoin Twitter’s takes on how Bitcoin adoption was going.

In this letter, we ask a deeper question:

Does Bitcoin Twitter provide a feel-good accelerant for bullish sentiment that translates into positive price movement?

Or is it unwittingly acting as a price suppressant?

Let’s see what the data it is telling us.

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The city-camp

Imagine a city 50 miles from the Kenya/Somalia border of over 420,000 people (about the size of Minneapolis), a city on no tourist maps, where homes are huts of sticks and cloth, and the struggle for daily survival is a universal reality. This is the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, one of the largest in the world, established in 1991 when refugees started fleeing across the Kenyan border during Somalia’s civil war.

For many, like Fatuma who arrived after her husband was killed in an explosion in Mogadishu, Dadaab is a last resort. She now lives with her family in a makeshift hut on the camp's outskirts, a structure patched together from branches and old clothes, where they sleep on dirt and pray the roof doesn't collapse when it rains.

Others, like Saruro (pictured below), have known no other home. She arrived in 1992 as a three-year-old and has since built an entire life here, going to school, getting married, and raising her nine children within the camp's confines. Many residents have spent decades here, with over half of the Somali refugees being under 18 and having spent their entire lives in Dadaab.

Life can be particularly hard if you are a woman. Women live in fear of rape, particularly when venturing out to find basic resources like firewood.

Theft and armed robberies are daily facts of life, with thieves often acting with impunity due to a lack of policing. In response, many refugees have become their own guardians. They organize night patrols, lock gates between camp subdivisions after dark, and use watchmen armed with machetes, sticks, and stones to defend against attackers who often carry AK-47s. As Wiilo Ibrahim (pictured below) explains “We are afraid of thieves. They rob houses, and girls are raped. It is trouble … at night, you have to be on alert.”

Ingenuity

Despite these challenges, human ingenuity survives, and sometimes thrives. While earning money is extremely difficult, it is not impossible. Some, like Hawo Mohamed Abdi, a 29-year-old single mother, have found a lifeline through the digital economy. After taking online business courses, she now works as a translator from her hut in the camp, earning $500 a month, enough to achieve independence and renovate her hut.

Others, like Abdullahi Abdirahman Nur, use similar skills to support his family of eight, even saving enough to relocate his parents to a safer town. However, these stories are the outliers. Most residents rely on dwindling humanitarian aid, and storing money safely is a constant worry in an environment where theft is rampant.

Dadaab is a world of contradictions. It is a temporary refuge camp, that has lasted generations. It is a place where women like Fardowsa (pictured below) a journalist born in the camp, now work to amplify the voices of those within it. It is a camp, but also a city for those who have nowhere else to go.

Aisha

One of those contradictions is Aisha (not her real name). A refugee from the camp who unintentionally showed Bryon Bothun, a former American PeaceCorps worker, the value of Bitcoin - even though she never had the chance to own it herself.

Bryon and his wife Christine met in the PeaceCorps in 1989. Bryon and Christine are now retired, but at the time this story takes place Christine was an occupational therapist working with children with autism, and Bryon was the Director of Bilingual Services in Rochester Public Schools. In his job he helped refugees from over 80 countries, drawing on his own experience being an outsider. He says, “I look around the room and I see the one person who’s different.”

Married with two adult children, the Bothuns continue to live the lessons they learned abroad: that community requires no words, and that sometimes those who have the least, give the most.

This was certainly the case, when Aisha changed the direction of Bryon’s life.

The lightbulb moment

Bryon recalls “We had invited Aisha over one afternoon, and by accident we found ourselves watching Max Keiser when he was first talking about Bitcoin. I was skeptical and spoke my thoughts aloud, saying to Aisha “I don’t see how that could help at all”. Her response caused me to take note. She said “We would have loved to have had that in Dadaab.”

Intrigued, I asked her to tell me more. She explained “You couldn’t keep money. People would come into your hut and they would take it from you. But people had a cellphone and they guarded it with their life, and they overpaid their bill to Safaricom and those credits became M-Pesa.” She said

“If we could have had money that wasn’t dependent on us paying our money to Safaricom each month every single person in that refugee camp would’ve had it.”

That was the first time that I thought, “I hadn’t thought of that, maybe there is something to this.”

She turned on the lights for me, and it’s really thanks to her that I first saw the value of Bitcoin, started using it and started educating others about the value of it.”

Since Aisha’s experience, over 300,000 refugees now use Bitcoin - a number that could have been much higher with better education and understanding of what Bitcoin is. More aid workers knowing about Bitcoin, means more thefts can be prevented. The good news is, this number of refugees using Bitcoin is expected to grow to over 7 Million by 2035.

How you can help

Bitcoin isn't a company, it's a tool for people. It offers returns to a Wall Street Fund Manager, but safety to a refugee. It has no CEO and no ads. Its value is shown in human stories, like Aisha's.

But without a PR team, these stories are rarely told. Most people only hear the jargon, not the hope. They'll understand Bitcoin best through simple stories like this one.

If this story moved you, please pass it on to someone who needs to hear it.

Thanks to our supporters:

We recognize the help of the Human Rights Foundation in bringing you stories like this one.

Dear subscriber

In last month’s letter, we covered six factors that have caused adoption (and price) to slow down.

This month, I’m releasing some new data about where you can get a clear signal on what’s really happening with Bitcoin adoption.

Hint: Bitcoin Twitter isn’t it!

Knowing how Bitcoin adoption is really going is important because it shows you what you can do about it, helps you avoid both bull and bear traps, and gives you clues about how to orange-pill your community.

Let’s dive into the new data

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Dear subscriber

This month we zoom out to see how Bitcoin adoption is (really) going: an objective report-card that is neither the salty take of a Financial Times Columnist, nor the unquantified positive bias of a good section of Bitcoin Twitter.

Among the positives, there are some harsh truths we would do well to face in our quest for widespread adoption of Bitcoin. Then, our optimism will be grounded.

First, the good news: celebrating the wins

The institutional dam is cracking. For the first time in history, major capital allocators are treating Bitcoin not as a speculative toy, but as a strategic reserve asset.

• Hedge Fund Brevan Howard now holds $2.3 billion in Bitcoin. With total Assets Under Management of $35 billion, this represents a significant 6.6% of AUM Bitcoin exposure.

• Mubadala, Abu Dhabi’s $330 billion sovereign wealth fund, has allocated $681 million to Bitcoin. A modest 0.2%, but a seismic first step.

• Bhutan, a sovereign nation, has amassed $1.26 billion in bitcoin, acquired through mining, and representing a jaw-dropping 38% of GDP.

These watershed moments

• world’s first significant hedge-fund to have more than 5% of AUM in Bitcoin

• world’s first Sovereign Fund to have Bitcoin exposure of more than 1/2 Billion

have the potential to positively influence peers in the industry.

Meanwhile, wirehouses, and hedgefunds continue to quietly building positions via ETFs, Bitcoin treasury holdings and now, shares in mining companies. This is how adoption begins, not with a revolutionary bang but with a quiet 13F Filing.

The kick in the pants

The hard truth is that there’s also been three areas where adoption has slowed/stalled, and three areas where adoption has unwound in the last year.

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This month, we lift the lid on a buyer group that could have more impact on price action than either nation states or corporate treasury companies.

These buyers can move faster than nation states, while also contributing more sustained capital flows.

Because these buyers capture capital flows from TradFi, rather than divert finance from existing Bitcoiners as BTC treasury companies tend to, they can have a more explosive price impact.

The group: Sovereign Funds and Pension Funds.

Until recently, they have only dipped their toes in the water. However, based on our research—we believe Bitcoin is now poised for accelerated capital inflows from both these types of funds. We outline our thesis for this, and the impact we see this having on price, in this month’s newsletter.

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The Central African Republic (CAR) uses the CFA franc. The CFA isn’t just currency—it’s a geopolitical chain, backed by France and governed by the Bank of Central African States (BEAC). Of its 14 member nations, the 6 Central African nations (including CAR) must still deposit 50% of foreign reserves in Paris.

This control over reserves fosters economic dependency, while establishing export markets for French goods at favorable terms. In 1994 for example, the CFA was devalued by half, a policy that was influenced by Western pressure, particularly from the IMF. This caused the cost of imports to leap, leading to exporters (mainly EU based) being able to procure resources from CFA nations at half the cost. Locally the impact was devastating, leading to wage freezes, layoffs, and widespread social unrest across CFA countries

When Central African Republic (CAR) announced in 2022 it was adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, BEAC and its regulatory arm COBAC immediately voided the law, citing violations of the CEMAC Treaty. This wasn’t bureaucracy—it was a warning shot from the monetary guardians of la Françafrique.

Why it mattered: To this day, CAR’s economy relies heavily on IMF bailouts. With $1.7Billion in external debt (61% of GDP), defying BEAC meant risking financial isolation.

The IMF’s Silent Campaign

The IMF moved fast. Within two weeks (May 4, 2022), it publicly condemned CAR’s “risky experiment,” citing legal contradictions with CEMAC’s crypto ban. The move raised “major legal, transparency, and economic policy challenges,” the IMF said: similar the concerns the IMF raised about El Salvador’s Bitcoin adoption: risks to financial stability, consumer protection, and fiscal liabilities. (For context, none of those risks materialized in El Salvador).

But their real weapon was leverage. As CAR’s largest creditor, the IMF tied its new Extended Credit Facility (ECF)—a $191M lifeline—to policy compliance.

The Timeline That Tells All

This table traces the IMF’s shadow campaign:

Key to scuttling CAR’s Bitcoin ambitions was ensuring that the Sango project — a blockchain-hub initiative from the CAR government to sell “e-residency” and citizenship for $60K in Bitcoin — did not proceed.

The Sango Project - coincidence or collusion?

In July 2022, CAR launched the Sango Project. It aimed to raise $2.5B (100% of GDP).

It failed catastrophically. By January 2023, only $2M (0.2% of target) was raised. While IMF reports cite “Technical obstacles with 10% internet penetration” as the reason for the failure, our analysis shows a different picture. Two factors scuttled the project.

1. Investor flight

2. A Supreme Court ruling formally blocked the Sango project

However, on closer examination, both of these factors hint at IMF involvement.

Let’s take a closer look at the evidence.

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