Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on Macro, Bitcoin, and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, February 25th, and today we're talking about an update in Bitcoin mining.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying The Breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation,

come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. Hello friends, what's going on? As you know,

I am traveling this week, and so we're doing a little bit different of a slate of episodes.

And today I'm using it as a chance to catch up on a topic which we cover as frequently as

makes sense here, but sometimes gets short shrift because of, I don't know, some crazy exchange

hack or the president of the United States saying that he's

going to ride a Bitcoin train to the moon or whatever it is. So today what we were doing is doing a

catch-up on mining. So these are a number of different mining stories over the past month or so,

which I think will give you a bit of a sense of where the industry stands more broadly.

The plan is currently to be back to our normal episodes tomorrow. But in the meantime,

let's catch up on mining. One interesting thing that's been happening, import issues have started to ramp

up, with Bitcoin miners reporting mining rig seizures at the border. During the fall, customs officials

began holding shipments of mining rigs. By November, Blockspace reported that some miners had already

had their orders held up

for two months. It seemed the issue was only impacting Bitmain mining rigs with machines from rival

manufacturers still being delivered. At the time, we had very little information on what was

behind the scrutiny. Delays coincided with trade restrictions being placed on Bitmain subsidiary Shopgo,

who had recently been accused of circumventing export controls

...