Welcome to the Afrinu podcast. My name is Mbazor Jeremiah and I am the host of Afrinu
podcast. On this podcast we make different kinds of contributions and deliberations and
different aspects of nuclear technology as it affects the continent of Africa and beyond.
So, for today's episode of the Afrinu podcast I will present you Brian Markyard who is from
Canada. I will speak about Bitcoin, my name is Benz and how it interface nuclear power.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself Brian? Hi, thanks for having me. This is very
exciting opportunity to talk to some individuals and to an audience that is vastly different than
I'm familiar with here in Canada. As for myself, I work in the Canadian nuclear industry. I operate
and maintain a laboratory that supports safety and reactor research for the can-do nuclear-powered
reactor fleet. Basically we monitor the corrosion in the pressure tubes and then we report that to
the utilities and that determines the health and longevity of the pressure tubes that are used
in the can-do nuclear-powered reactors. And then the other thing I do in my spare time is I've
taken an interest in Bitcoin and specifically the Bitcoin mining technology that uses an algorithm
that requires a lot of electricity to perform that computing. It requires a lot of electricity to
perform that computing operation. So nuclear power can leverage this technology as a large flexible
load to provide an anchor tenant to nuclear power deployments ensuring that there's always going
to be demand for the power wherever we build a nuclear reactor of what other size from several
gigawatts. The traditional reactors that we're familiar with being built around the world and
the smaller, small modular reactors that we intended to deploy to smaller markets that are
going to open up a wider range of applications for nuclear power. And I believe that having a large
flexible load and used as an anchor will be a value of full assets to expanding the range that we
can deploy these nuclear-powered reactors without as much investment risk and economic risk when
it's when you're trying to deploy a large power asset without certain consumer base it either
doesn't get invested in or it puts a lot of costs on the ratepayers and the consumers in that local
area that are paying for that power asset. So thank you. There's a lot of interest in this very
narrow niche and it's very exciting to see all the developments happening. It's interesting.
As you were talking about the Bitcoin mining and how nuclear power interfaces do it, you talked
about the economics and how people are able to afford energy and this is a very interesting aspect
in Africa, you know, of the several millions of people who are without electricity, the people who
are without it in Africa constituted a larger percentage of this number and most parts of Africa
are still energy poor. We are not talking about energy transition yet. We want to still talk about
energy sufficiency first because now people are talking about, especially in the advanced world,
how they can advance to clean or green energy. But the good thing about nuclear energy is that it
gives you the best of both worlds, giving you both energy sufficiency and also making you transit
in a very clean form if you want to target that way. So this brings me to kind of ask you about
how your journey has been like you just given us a rundown about how this aspect of Bitcoin mining
interfaces with nuclear, what caused your interest in this aspect of
endeavor like Bitcoin mining, nuclear engineering, what's the parallel or what's like the meeting point, if that's the right word to say. Because I know from the Bitcoin mining aspect that it requires a lot of energy. The
ASIC chips that is used to mine Bitcoin and a lot of energy is involved. I remember my professor telling me about the experience of some Nigerians mining Bitcoin, how they have to go get a lot of, they spend a lot on diesel generators because we are energy deficient, the lack of electricity here in Nigeria. So they get to spend a lot of money on off grid power sources like the generating sets.
So considering the large energy resource that is needed to mine Bitcoin, how does nuclear and Bitcoin mining come to kind of have a carry along because people talk about off grid energy and the quickly think of wind renewables and the rest of them. How does nuclear come to play or come to parallel or have a meeting point with Bitcoin mining?
Yeah, that is a big question is like where do these crossover ends? What I would say is that the Bitcoin miners consume a lot of energy and then nuclear power is one of its biggest liabilities is that it can generate too much power and so much so that that often will result in negative prices for having to curtail their load, which has negative effects on like on core and the turbine.
They would prefer to operate everything at 100% and not have to follow the loads if they don't have to because they can make better economics if they're able to sell more electrons to our customers.
So the way that I see this crossing is that you're not always going to have demand for that electricity where it is locally produced because electricity is a very tricky asset to manage because it must be consumed somewhere as it's being generated.
It has to be kept at that supply and demand balance perfectly. So grid operators, their job is to ensure that they have enough generation sources online of sufficient demands of sufficient volume, sufficient like ramping up rates so that they can reliably and quickly and predictably manage how much electricity is going to be using in a given place with what they have available within their operation.
So I'm more familiar with jurisdictions like Ontario in Buffy and Canada and a few of the American locations like Texas is a really interesting use case to see how Bitcoin mining is being used across that grid and how their spot price can vary depending on the time of the day, depending on the temperature, depending on the rate of solar that they're getting,
depending on the wind that they're coming, whether or not the prices of natural gas are available at the time with their peak or plants all over the place, prepared to spin up at a moment's notice.
So that's a service that grids will often pay utilities extra for to just be available to turn on and they'll be paid the premium for doing so when the grid is at really high demand.
So I've heard from like secondhand places in Africa that for the most part electricity demand is fairly sufficient and abundant in where many of the cities are, but as soon as you start to get rural and have grids and lots of dependency on diesel generation,
some places might get lucky and have substantial hydropower resources. But from what I'm familiar with this is it's very tricky to build the infrastructure that's required to transmit electricity out to a very disparate rural population.
If you are not going to have the sufficient demand that is what the investors say like that the loan guarantees required in order to build these projects in the first place.
So I see Bitcoin as a very good crossroads between that like especially for nuclear power like I nuclear power is at the top of my list but I'm seeing evidence and examples of places in Africa that are using the strategy already for micro scale hydro projects and some solar wind operations where that's available.
But there's a company that's called Ridless compute and what they're doing is they're identifying like small like less than a megawatt sometimes not even 100 megawatt communities where there's only like 30 residences using this power, but they aren't going to use enough to justify the full capacity building full capacity of what these this hydro dam could generate.
So what they're doing is they're offering to use Bitcoin miners to consume that excess capacity, whether it's only like 30 kilowatts to like 100 kilowatts that's four or five computers.
And then they're able to spread out the just the upfront fixed capital of building that power infrastructure across a large wider base of customers. And then one of the more interesting capabilities that this Bitcoin miners have is that it can be programmed to underclock themselves so start consuming less electricity when there is a higher demand priority coming from other users on the grid which when you start
doing stuff like that it can be dramatically changing for people in these communities because now now you can reliably have a light bulb. Now you're not stuck to cooking with wood or other very high pollutant fuel sources.
And you can do each other and can start studying you'll have more reliable refrigeration and all of these things start to compound on each other. You can irrigate better so that the local cattle herdsman is able to get a better block of cows or herd of cows and then that grows and he starts growing a better business.
And that's for local community minutes has these second and third for the ripple effects. Once you are able to get that just reliable, affordable power to communities that have never experienced before.
And there's opportunities for small scale projects like that all across the world. It just requires the right market incentive to unlock it. So I'm very excited about where these two technologies can go when we start getting into much larger scale points but it's beautiful to see that it can be done at any scale.
And can't wait.
It's not sessions don't really have really tell your kids. They just want to tell them that needs to go to.
Well.
Yeah, it does. Hello, Gai Hemina. Hello. Yeah, that's better.
Okay, so. Okay, yeah, sorry about that. So I was trying to illustrate the fact that when
people like talk about electricity, especially in Africa, and also if my extension can also
be the rest part of the world, people on a generous, just want to plug their devices
to the electricity sources or just turn on the light and then have the light on without bothering
much to know where the electricity comes from. And this kind of brings me to the aspect of the
nuclear technology that does this load following from your explanation. You are like talking about
the gridless electricity that's kind of feast on the extra kind of electricity that comes from
wherever sources that the Bitcoin mining is connected to. So like in this place, we don't have
enough energy, let alone sparing it. But because of this, the unique nature of electricity generation,
where you have to have some kind of transmission from the generating points to where it is being
used. So you have some losses. So to curtail that loss, I think we are trying to talk about the
Bitcoin mining kind of using those electricity that would have been lost to transmission to mine
some Bitcoin. So why do we have to use this energy, this excess energy generated to mine
Bitcoin and not other fiat currencies or maybe other kind of cryptos? Why Bitcoin? Why are you
particularly buy Bitcoin and what's the unique feature of this kind of resource that you are
talking about? Perhaps you might want to give us a breakdown of Bitcoin and why is it important in
our days today? Yeah, that would definitely be a good idea. Bitcoin is one of those things that
just about everybody's heard about it, but very few people actually understand what it is, what
it's capable of doing and what benefit it might provide to humanity. And right now, what many
people have seemed to decide that it is and it's very useful for is as a money that's truly
decentralized and global and would enable me to send exchange value to you right here, just as
easily as sending a text message without any counterparty between the two of us. That means
we don't have to go through my banking system, your banking system and all the other steps in
the way that that would take and result in any number of fees that are associated with that
transaction being taken off by some middleman or rent sneaker. So that's definitely one use case
for it. And then it's just a native token that can be used on the internet. It was born on the
internet. It's a great store of value because it holds properties, money that it's, it's divisible,
it's portable, it's scarce, it's recognizable, it's just growing use cases, it's got a very,
very good as a medium of exchange, it's growing in a lot more uses that people are starting
to recognize across the world. And where I am, we've had a fairly stable financial system for
as long as I remember, I grew up, everything seems normal. But now things are starting to be
stressed at the end just because there's a lot of debt piled on a lot of debt. But it's hard for
me to even like comprehend the struggles that have gone on in the other nations that are further
and further away from like the core of like global financial system, which is the United States.
And it seems that the further away you are from the US dollar, the worse off the effects of its
constant dilution of value will affect you and your local currencies. This, yeah, reading up on how
a lot of the development lending and strategic, no, I shouldn't read that word, but it's where the
structural readjustment, that's what I was looking for. It's imposed on a lot of these countries.
Yeah, especially by the IMF. Yeah, exchange for these loans, they will have these criteria that
now this country needs to rearrange its economy in order to support export markets so that they
can earn US dollars to pay off those loans because they can't get those loans in their own local
currencies. And if they try to, they all end up like Zimbabwe in hyper-inflating their currency
into oblivion, and then nobody knows where they think it's worth anymore. And it just ends up
reverberating to like strange, barter economies, or people just find whatever works for them in
black markets because your results in pulling around wheelbarrows for a full of currencies with
10 zeros on them. Yeah, and money in the hands of humans is, it doesn't seem to go well unless
there is some tangible tether, some energy flow in the world. And Bitcoin can tap into any energy
flow that we can get our hands on, whether it's nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal. If we
can generate electrons with it, we can mine Bitcoin with it. And that is the key distinguishing
feature between Bitcoin being used as a money and the completely self-referential,
disconnected for reality via currencies that we've been using for at least the last 50 years
since the last vestiges of what was the gold standard was completely eliminated.
Then you see examples of nations that propose returning to gold standards. Very shortly afterwards,
they are destabilized and not in a good place anymore. So it is tough to hear the stories of
people who have went through these events, but they are learning experiences for us all to
understand the forces that we are up against. Well, you know, coming from, yeah, I mean,
like, I get your point about the description of how like universally applicable Bitcoins and how
they will change the whole space of independence and how nations can prosper with Bitcoins. But
given the traditional societies where we find ourselves and the regulations that exist already,
it's kind of difficult to find a country that will just relinquish its central banking system to
Bitcoin, you know, Nigeria, for example, I think some few years ago, we're allowing like those
exchanges using some special kind of wallet. I mean, after some time, they found that it was
being used as a backdoor for some corrupt practices. So they had to ban the operations and even the
legal ones had to also for victim as well. So some ways of getting money from different parts of the
world became a bit more challenging, you know. So this brings me to the question of an event
that happened in the just recently concluded summit they had in France where the president of Kenya,
President Ruto, was talking to President Emmanuel Macron at the summit about independence of Africa,
you know, why Africa needs to like be given a place at the table, you know, to have a share
and to have its independence at the same time, you know. This brings me to the point of how this
will bring this paradigm shift that Africa needs to gain its independence and also contribute as
at a level playing ground with the Committee of Nations at the same level and commesurate at the
same time because when it comes to the table of sharing, each person we have to kind of make
contribution according to its size and make profits that is commesurate with its size as against
what is already existing. As you said, those predatory loans that IMF gives that leads to
structural changes in the country. Nigeria is currently experiencing a very big change
given the current subsidiary removal on the petroleum product that has brought
a kind of big hardship on the general public. But we need a paradigm shift that will make us
begin to think in a new way. So I wonder how will this Bitcoin mining and also the energy that
kind of powers it bring about this kind of paradigm shifts in the way that we do things
in terms of financial management, maybe loan and all this. How can it bring about justice? How can
it bring about a kind of fair play on the scheme of things when it comes to financial and global
participation in the larger scheme of things? I mean, how can it bring Africa up on this kind
of platform to play on a level playing field with other Committee of Nations?
Because just like you had mentioned earlier, it levels the playing field. Everybody has to play
by the same game, same rules. And there's no wise group of 12 men that just go into a room and tell
us what the value of money is and how the rest of the world just has to live with that. It's a
constant rule change whenever they break their own rules and then they change the rules to favor
themselves but never to favor in any way that the scales get tips towards the little person or the
producer. But with the Bitcoin, it flips everything on its head and it changes the value of being
extractive versus the value of being productive. Like for the longest time, Africa has the potential
to produce everything that you need for yourselves and be a huge exporter to the rest of the world.
But the way that seems structured now is that many of these nations that have been preyed upon by
these predatory loans, it's all about extracting as much value as possible. And Bitcoin gives that
power back to people that produce things and it diminishes the ability to extract that value in a
way that you are required to do the work and create something of value that people want to
exchange their Bitcoin with before. Like if other nations want to trade with you at that level,
they will have to offer a better good or better service than what is available on the rest of
the market. It's going to completely change the structure of everything just rampant consumerism
and everything is made in a way that is planned to plan the obsolescence. So you're always having to
these breaking objects and then we don't even think about it here at First World. We just
break things and we just get new things. There's no more ethos of trying to buy and build high
quality products. It's been completely wiped out of our culture and it is really
enthusiastic. I see the enthusiasm in all of these other young nations that they
gone through a different path than they still respect a lot of those values.
And when things start to shift and tip to those that are willing to put in the work
to generate something of quality, I think a lot of that is going to tip towards Africa.
We've lost our way in the West and we don't appreciate. I don't think you lost your way.
How we got to where we are? You still showing the way. We are still learning from you guys.
There's parts of it. But the one example I want to stress is just as a country that just threw it
all to the wind and is experimenting with Bitcoin and that's El Salvador. A lot of other countries
yet you do have your own central banks and they're going to be put a resistance but El Salvador
was only using the US dollar. They had lost their central bank. It was shut down well over a decade
ago. They haven't had their own currency for some time and they came out of years of civil war
and then gangland war and then they finally elected a president that just said enough is enough
and they turned everything around. It seems like overnight. I don't know how much you know about
El Salvador but the headlines were basically it was the murder capital of the world more than
five years ago. And now there are more murders and violent crimes happening in major Canadian
and American cities than are happening all throughout El Salvador because they had the leader
with a vision and he had the intent to pull it off. It's a bold move with the Bitcoin abuse of it
because a lot of what he did was just actually start to enforce the law and clean up a lot of
the gang issues that their country was having. But the Bitcoin thing is attracting a lot of
tourism, it's attracting a lot of development, it's attracting a lot of educators, it's attracting
a lot of Canadians and Americans and Australians that were not happy with the state of our own
countries. It's interesting that it's providing a place it's not it's providing somewhere where
people are fleeing to as opposed to fleeing from. So it's a really interesting paradigm and it looks
like it's working very well and I hope it succeeds and it does appear that there are smaller examples
popping up here and there throughout the world and they're providing an example that many African
nations could try and emulate. Like there's lots of talk, Ghana hosts the African Bitcoin conference.
Yeah, I was going to talk about that. Yeah. So there's a lot of interest in this technology
and a lot of the African nations have already been meeting with Bukalian, his finance minister
and foreign ministers to discuss different strategies that they can implement themselves.
But it goes in against a lot of the IMF policies and the contingencies that are attached to taking
those loans from those entities. So it's a risk but it's also an opportunity cost and
I hope more follow suit because there's a lot of potential for these nations to do well with
this technology before the rest of the wealthy world catches on and we get to the top of the S-curve.
Yeah, I hope so too as well because when it comes to the story of the brown bread and the white bread
there's this struggle kind of that catches up with the public and also the elites. Sometimes
the elite think that the public think that what the elites are taking is better when the white
bread came up. They wanted the white bread but it was a business model to catch the people because
it was more easily mass produced but the brown bread was more nutritious and it was what the public
had. So hopefully that case doesn't come in the Bitcoin issue. So to wrap it up we've kind of had
a conversation about nuclear energy and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is kind of currency that is decentralized
and can be used to make transactions in different parts of the world in a very simultaneous way.
So I kind of wonder as a last word what would you like want to advise maybe a country that is
still struggling to have its energy provision met yet because like Nigeria for example and
most African countries we are still energy poor and we are not here talking about energy transition.
Climate change is real and we need to have more energy. Canada for example has a lot of energy
but it can lend its excesses to Bitcoin mining unlike Nigeria and most African countries that
don't have enough energy. So what can we do to tap from this great gold mine that is in the horizon
in summary? Well in the meantime just look for any opportunities where you can.
There's definitely going to be a community of local bitcoins wherever you are. They're popping up
everywhere but you will have no problem finding them. And they will be able if you have
knowledge of places where there is an opportunity for something like this that can help finance
a small electrical infrastructure project the people are out there that want to help you
do this and develop these technologies. So reaching out to your local Bitcoin community is a great
start. Learning about power systems wherever you can just learn about Bitcoin. I don't even try to
start by telling people to go out and buy Bitcoin especially like under your circumstances people
have enough trouble just saving for what they need today and tomorrow that saving anything
that's a challenge. But even if you start with just tiny amounts that can make all the difference
to your future self and that's where you start to just not have zero you can just a few cents
worth is a great place to start and just learn what it is and how you can use it because I
guarantee everybody in this world is going to find a use case for it sooner or later especially
with the tumultuous times that it appears that we are going through at a global scale right now.
I think if we can get to the 30s I think if we can get to the 30s intact everyone's going to be
alright. Thank you very much Ryan. Thank you so much Ryan it's been a great time with you
in this episode of the afternoon podcast. I hope we have more time to talk about the summit that's
coming up in Ghana where we delve more into how the nuclear community can contribute to the
Bitcoin mining community. So till then I hope you keep your ears glued and stay tuned to the
afternoon podcast. Thank you so much Ryan until we talk next time. I appreciate it. Thanks for
having me. Thank you so much.