You're the Voice

📚️ PDF⏳️ 5 min 📖 6

Yotta

It was July 2021. Moneybits covered the decline in the bitcoin mining hash rate that resulted from the Chinese mining ban. The hash rate dropped towards 100m TH/s. Today, just over four years later, that enormous number is 10x as large. 

We had this to say at the time: 

That is exactly what did happen. Texas mopped up bitcoin miners and embedded them in their ERCOT system. They are now an essential part of system resilience, since the miners can be powered down during times of peak demand. The US is now the dominant nation in bitcoin mining, with over 40% of the hash rate originating there. 

Bitcoin’s total hash rate this week reached 1.1 billion TH/s which is this many calculations per second 1,100,000,000,000,000,000,000. 

We are long past the time where the Tera hash is relevant. After Tera comes Peta, then Exa, then Zetta and finally the Yotta, 10^24. Currently bitcoin operates at 0.0011 YH/s, I think that’s the better scale, one that should see us through the next decade. In 2014, there were celebrations when the entire history of bitcoin mining passed the cumulative 1 yottahash point, something that is achieved now every 15 minutes. 

Does it really matter though? The answer is at the heart of the value proposition. It is not free to mine bitcoin. The creation of new coins is extremely costly, huge amounts of compute and energy are required to participate in the network as a miner. Critically then, unlike fiat, bitcoin is extremely expensive to produce. 

Today, bitcoin miners compete for power and compute with the vogue product of the moment, AI. They are more than holding their own and as our graphic from 2021 (Zeitgeist) demonstrated, bitcoin sits at the intersection of computer use, power generation and money. 

You’re The Voice

“In Australia my voice identifies me”. That was the repeatable phrase to use for identification with the Australian Tax Office. At the time it made me laugh, you couldn’t come up with anything more dystopian if you tried. They obviously thought about it; the person has to feel what they are saying has relevance to the outcome. We need to say “Australia”, we need to say “identifies” and what they came up with simultaneously made total sense and was just horrendous. 

Now, in the era of AI, who trusts that your voice cannot be cloned? It very clearly can be.

Something similar is happening in Vietnam this week with biometric requirements for opening (and keeping open) bank accounts. The deadline for adding biometrics to accounts has passed and 86 million accounts have now been suspended. Will it stop fraud? Yes. 113 million accounts did provide biometrics though. Is there now a database in Vietnam with the biometric details of 113 million people? Yes. Is that valuable? Yes. Will it be hacked? Yes. 

The Vietnamese government is celebrating real success on this. 86 million ‘potentially fraudulent’ accounts is huge. The question really is will it come back and bite them? Are they that good at IT security?  Even the absolute basics of security are being breached here. Like people tell their children “whatever you put on the internet stays there forever”. So be careful what you put on there. Spraying biometrics around as if it is a good thing is going to be a disaster. 

Remember 23andMe? The DNA service. Hacked. There is a healthy market in these hacked data sets on the internet, particularly for calculating insurance premiums. 

In the UK they have done something similar but less draconian. All company directors (and persons with significant control) must now verify themselves. The simple process is not that simple, webcams, passports and if they fail, personal visits to the verifier. 

All the time the honeypot gets bigger. It feeds on itself, the black market in stolen ID gets larger and it will never end because technology will never stop getting better. Hackers will get better every year. My question remains:

Why do I need to “prove” who I am? 

High trust societies are extremely desirable and promote growth at every level, but you can never build one with KYC.

A good summary here of the top Australian data breaches over the last few years. Medibank probably still takes the top spot in my view. 9.7 million medical records stolen. 

In Australia then, your voice does indeed identify you. Along with every other piece of information you have been asked to upload about yourself over the years. 

Stargate

This rather dull looking location is Albilene, Texas. Home of the Open AI Stargate datacentre. It opened this week ahead of schedule. Earlier this year they announced a 5GW target for data centre capacity, raised to 10GW with new locations across the US now announced.

To put that in context, 10GW of capacity is 2.2% of US annual power consumption. The BBC was on hand to call “boom and bust” and remind us that there must be a return on investment. Larry Page of Google disagrees. 

There are two options I suppose. The first is that the BBC is right, the second is that something is happening that we have not seen before which is that intelligence is growing at an exponential rate (the scaling laws referred to above). I accept a lot of people do not believe this either is, or could be. This article remains the best articulation of why it might be. We also do not know what models are internally available at places like Google. Do they have something far superior internally to what they share with us? Almost certainly. 

From a personal perspective, when I use the latest AI models, I’m in the camp where I feel limited by hardware. I wish the LLMs were faster, I wish I wasn’t rate limited each day. If I could set the AI’s complex tasks and just leave them running for days in the background I would. From that experience I think there just is not enough compute or energy to entertain the demand. I’m glad the Americans are building it, I think Larry Page is right.

2033

Some new features on the US Debt Clock since we last visited. $37.5 trillion currently. You can now front run the number at current rates, so 2033 is predicted to be $57 trillion which would be 153% of GDP.

Current national rankings of debt/GDP are below. Likely the US moves from position five to a podium spot. It’s not a global issue if Venezuela does it, or Greece does it but the open question is what happens if (when) the US does it?

Euro-Trash

Meanwhile in Germany. The spending continues.

A recently approved €500bn infrastructure fund permits the government to raise and spend that amount primarily on defense, among other things like road and rail. It has kept German borrowing at Covid levels.  

The impact is starting to show in the numbers. Germany’s car manufacturers used to dominate their stock exchange, with over 20% of the DAX being cars and parts. Now it’s less than 10%. 

Rather ominous times. Europe’s best engineers were once engaged in building us cars we all wanted, now they are building us weapons. I would not underestimate the ingenuity of Germany to do so either. There’s a reason we have politely asked them not to do so for the past 75 years, mainly that they are very good at it. 

In a speech in Paris last week, Christine Lagarde laid out the path of European spending. 

Firstly, “Economic Influence”. It hasn’t really worked, the Euro-area has halved in size since launch relative to its supposed number one competitor the US. Second, “Regulatory Leadership”, in large part that is the reason they are so far behind. Europe absolutely does lead in regulation, first to Big Tech, then to crypto, then to AI. Every mega-growth sector in the world, they killed before it got going. 

So what's left? Apparently they need an army. “The full range of instruments of a unified state”. People don’t listen to our economy, or our regulations, perhaps they will listen to our guns. 

Further Information

Our August 2025 report to investors can be found here.