Daniel Roberts
Analyst · Canaccord. Please proceed.
Thanks, Joe. Look, absolutely. Historically, you tend to get anywhere between one and three to four months of a window where bitcoin starts poking its head up and hardware prices don't necessarily respond in kind and there is often opportunities around that. We've been able to capitalize in the past on that when we we’re unlisted to the benefit of our shareholders. But equally, sometimes you can try and get too cute with this. And the reason I say that is, you've got a really natural investment profile for deploying more capacity in this sector, where historically, if you go back over the last four, five, six years, and look at average hardware prices, they're typically priced to deliver the buyer of that hardware on average of 124% return. And that sounds like a precise number, it is. It's an average of all the data points that we've collated. When you amortize the cost of the data center infrastructure, the electrical, the land, et cetera, you end up with somewhere between 50% and 80% year on year. So you can get a little bit too cute trying to tie an asset pricing and to a large degree, it is right way risk. If bitcoin goes up, you pay a bit more for your hardware. It's still priced such that you're still deriving what we view as an acceptable return and allocation of capital. It's not to say that you don't try and optimize around the sides to do that. But this is why the sector is really exciting for us, because you've got that natural hedge on the way down where we've seen with the last 10 exahash contract. At the time that was signed, it was a $40 price cap. I believe the market price at the time was maybe $60 give or take. Great deal. But what really worked in our favor was the fact that we had a clause that said we get the lower off market price at the time of delivery and that $40 cap. So even though bitcoin is obviously having a drawdown, we've had that natural hedge and being able to deploy capital. Hopefully, that what turns out to be the bottom of the market to acquire those assets. But again, on the way up, we're happy to pay. We're happy for all the people to make money. We'll maintain our discipline around capital allocation, but we feel pretty good about the prospect for investing additional capital in this sector.