2024 Bitcoin Halving: CEO Adam Sullivan Discusses the Impact

2024 Bitcoin Halving: CEO Adam Sullivan Discusses the Impact

Bitcoin having happens every four years
and 2024 is one of those years while the
next having takes place today and
joining me now to talk about it is the
CEO of core scientific Adam Sullivan
Adam
welcome thanks for having me on how big
is this having event for the
cryptocurrency
industry a it’s a big year you know it’s
it follows the leap year but you know
every four years this is a really sumal
moment for the Bitcoin mining industry
as a whole um it it brings a lot of
machines offline it makes a a
challenging event for a lot of Bitcoin
miners out there and so it takes a lot
of preparation and there’s a lot of
discussion around it right now
especially it’s the next big news event
in Bitcoin this year you know we had the
ETFs the beginning of the year and now
we have the having both of which uh can
cause significant price movements in
Bitcoin interesting so what exactly does
it mean for Bitcoin miners uh like core
scientific and
others yeah so it means right at block8
84 ,000 which is the next having block
so having happen every 210,000 blocks a
block occurs every 10 minutes and the
current block reward is 6.25 Bitcoin
well when we hit block 840,000 we go to
3.125 bitcoin per block and so it
reduces our Revenue significantly the
moment the having occurs interesting and
what are your predictions for how the
having will go
today it’s going to be interesting you
know there’s been a lot of discussion
that this could be a Y2K moment uh for
Bitcoin miners um it’s a it’s a really
dangerous kind of time period uh for a
number of different reasons people are
moving their machines around they’re
moving their half rate around which is
your compute power being applied to the
network uh amongst different pools and
so there’s just a lot of things moving
around today and uh it’s you know it’s
an interesting time period though to go
through because we haven’t really had a
having event where we’ve had
institutionally scale Bitcoin mining
companies what does this mean for the
price of Bitcoin
well if you follow previous having you
know generally after the having there’s
a time period in which you know Bitcoin
remains relatively flat or potentially
down but it it generally tends to go
higher over the long term over the next
12 months and so there’s a lot of I
would say discussion around how much
higher could we go I think you have to
take a look back though and say did the
ETFs already allow for this runup to
happen or are the ETFs going to enable a
larger runup to occur in a post hav
environment interesting now terms of
challenges or changes that this would
create for the industry what would those
be yeah the main changes are mainly
around locations uh so there’s locations
all over the world right now that are
mining Bitcoin in almost every single
country and so certain areas and
locations where power costs may be
higher those are locations where in a
POS having world there’s not going to be
a a profitable Bitcoin mining operation
there and so you’re going to see a lot
of machine movements you’re going to see
a lot of facility fail so in the the
data centers where we operate many of
those facilities will end up getting
sold by other companies to larger
companies and there’s just going to be a
significant amount of consolidation but
over the long term you know in 2028 as
our next having you’re going to see a
lot more decentralization across the
network in terms of smaller sites
finding lowcost power opportunities I
see shares of course scientific up about
2% today
$2 94 a share so something that we can
alert our viewers on here but I’m just
curious in your own words Adam as to how
your specific mining operations might
differ from other comparables in the
market yeah absolutely so we have seven
facilities across five states with one
of the most geographically diverse
companies and we have a very active
strategy on our facilities and
operations management so you know our
facilities are located in multiple
different with multiple different
utility providers that provides us with
flexibility to be able to move machines
around our facility base versus having
to sell them off and move to and buy
different machines and so that’s
something that allows us to be a lot
more flexible post having where we can
participate in continued profitability
across our portfolio without having to
do any major machine sales or machine
purchases how would you respond to
concerns Adam that the declining block
rewards could potentially destabilize
the economic incentives underlying
Bitcoin Security in the long
term yeah there’s a great example of
this back in
2021 uh the Chinese government banned
Bitcoin mining you immediately saw a
drop off of nearly 40% of the hash rate
on the network over the course of about
a month time period there was no delay
in blocks there was no uh the security
was still extraordinarily strong and
today the amount of hashr on the network
it’s impossible to break it’s actually
more profitable to participate in the
Bitcoin Network than it would be to try
to break Bitcoin at this point and so
the stability and long-term security of
Bitcoin cannot be called into question
anymore how would you interpret some of
the recent price movements uh that we’ve
seen with Bitcoin and what it might mean
for the broader
Market the movements in Bitcoin the past
I would say four months have been really
interesting to watch you know it’s it’s
definitely changed our industry a bit in
terms of profitability um but in the
broader industry uh you know we’re
seeing you know the Hong Kong ETF
Bitcoin ETF potentially coming into play
and I think what you’re going to see
over time are institutions continuing to
move into Bitcoin as it performs well
because once one institution outperforms
another because they had Bitcoin in
their portfolio that’s going to cause
more institutions to want to hold
Bitcoin and now they have the capability
to we have the ETF that will allow for
large institutions to be able to
participate in the Bitcoin Network and I
think that’s going to cause that major
shift and that major move to making a
large percentage of uh the portfolio
allocations moved into Bitcoin and now
large you know today I would say that’s
probably three to 5% but who knows where
it could go in the future what are your
thoughts Adam on some emerging new
technologies and protocols on the
network um like ordinals and the brc2
tokens you know I would have to say it
just shows how exciting Bitcoin is again
what we saw was a lot of early
bitcoiners move to actually be
developers on other blockchains now what
we’re seeing today are those people back
to the Bitcoin Network and want to
develop on bitcoin what that means for
everyone in the network is that there’s
going to be long-term Health long-term
stability and long-term growth in this
network that doesn’t just happen from
price it happens from more people
wanting to build on bitcoin and so this
is a huge bullish signal from my
perspective that you know the the health
of the Bitcoin network is very strong
all right Adam Sullivan see of course
scientific uh Adam thank you so much

Bitcoin halving is a pivotal event in the cryptocurrency world. CEO Adam Sullivan from Core Scientific discusses its impact and more.