Episode 154

Bitcoin Weekly Close

BTC – $41,553

Bitcoin Block at Time of Recording

826,772

Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com/ and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info/

I can be reached by email at mcintosh@satoshis-plebs.com and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @mcintosh@podcastindex.social. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Website

https://satoshis-plebs.com

Music Credits

Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club

License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

 Transcription

[00:00:01] McIntosh:

Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 22nd, and this is episode 154, Satoshi’s Plebs. I’m your host, McIntosh, and today’s episode is Bitcoin for the risk adverse. Alright. We’ll get in our market update, quick market update, and we’ll jump right on into things. Right now, we had a weekly close just a few hours ago as I record this and that was $41,553, which really means we haven’t changed a whole lot. So breaking down kind of what’s going on, we have been consolidating, or even going down a little bit at this level, although it does not so far, seem to want to fall below this $41,000 level at least on the daily chart.

It has gone below it on the lower chart or for higher chart chart time frames, I should say. So a 4 hour or a 1 hour chart, it will you will see that it’s actually you know, it’s going below those. And you can see that on the daily as well, but they’re not, solid parts of the candle. That’s the technical term for McIntosh doesn’t know what to call it. The body probably. But, anyways, it indicates kind of the main area of the day that it’s spent. We we have kind of built this level of resistance there at 41,000. Does not seem to wanna go below it, but we will see.

It’s on the weekly chart. If you even zoom out further, you’re seeing these these same things really going back for a number of weeks now. 1, 2, 3, 4. 8 weeks ago, back on the 4th December, we broke upwards that week, and then we’ve basically today, right above 41,000. We’ve been as high as 49,000, of course. So, you know, a lot of people are very bearish at this point, if you wanna call that, especially the people who were kind of what I would call perma bears before for that, but it’s not been established yet that we’re gonna go down. It may sit right here. It may go down a little more.

If it breaks below 40,000, I would start getting really nervous myself. But at this point, we see no indication of that happening. So we’ll see. And as always here at Satoshi’s Plebs, we DCA. That’s the strategy that we talk about. You should be buying coin on a daily or certainly a weekly basis regardless of the price. You know, you may choose to buy more when prices are lower. It would have optimal to be buying back in January at 15,000. Some people call that a smash buy. I’ll go in there and buy as much as I can when I feel like I’m at the bottom, which in fact I did back when we touched 15 or 16,000 last, which was a year ago, I guess, crazy enough.

But regardless, you should be doing that DCA. My miners are out there working for me on a daily basis, day in and day out. You may choose to do that through strike, or a similar app, a cash app, I guess, you could probably do that, you know, that kind of thing. But what you need to do is make sure that whatever it is that you buy, how, whatever amount and however for that you do that, that you, you know, keep that offline in a safe, secure manner as we always talk about, at least as you build up a reasonable amount. You know, don’t move $10 off chain, or, you know, into cold storage, so to speak. If the fees are super high, which frankly they are right now. We’ll talk about that in just a second, but enough about that. So we are at block 42 or excuse me. I wasn’t even close.

We are at block 826, 772. And we did have a downward adjustment on 20th, so yesterday, as I record this, of 3.9%. So we had a nice downward adjustment. It is way too early to be talking about where we’re at right now in terms of a difficulty adjustment for the next, couple of weeks for that next adjustment. But I would say, of course, mempool.space. We’ve got 35 sat per vbyte. So for these days, we’re pretty low. $2.2 for a transaction on the main chain. So very cool. Yeah, and we’ll call that for a market update. That’s about all there is to it. Until we see what Bitcoin’s going to do, there’s not really a whole lot to talk about.

Please don’t be doing leverage trades. Please don’t be risking your precious sets. Now today is not going to be so technical as last week when we were or last episode when we were talking about the desktop tool chain that I use. Today is going to be, maybe a little more philosophical. It was triggered off of a post that I saw on Twitter. We’re gonna talk about that. I reposted it, and I would recommend that if you don’t follow me, I’m on mac I’m at Macintosh Fintech on Twitter. I just kinda post random stuff on there or most well, I post my stuff. I post repost other people’s stuff, whatever. But let’s see. Oh, I did wanna mention this about the market. What are the interesting things going on actually?

And I kind of mentioned this last episode as well, But it’s becoming more obvious. People people aren’t tracking it. The grayscale ETF, whatever it is called, I don’t know offhand, but people are leaving it because they are charging higher fee rates than the other ETFs. And and so we’re seeing an outflow. Plus, a lot of these people have frankly been tied up in that ETF for a long time. It was, maybe a futures ETF prior to this. I think that’s what it was. They were the ones who actually sued the SEC, who kind of got this whole thing moving. But, essentially, people were kind of locked into that situation. So some of them are cashing out, and then, of course, some of them are moving to other ETFs, putting a lot of pressure on the market. This will sort itself out.

Grayscale itself, even though they don’t own these ETFs, of course, or these Bitcoin, excuse me, they are the single largest Bitcoin holder in the space, of a commercial entity. 600,000, they’re less than 600,000 now, but at at one point, it was above 600 1000 Bitcoin. I’ve got a nice hot cup of Earl Grey tonight, of course. Little cold back here, actually. So we’ve been in a bit of a cold snap. We are in the middle of our winter here in the United States. And, it’s been cold for a good week, and it’s been below freezing, a good bit.

And our bedroom is where I record is not as warm as the rest of the house. It’s a little chilly. Sip the oil gray and stay warm. Let me find this, really quick. Let’s see. It would help if I was in the right place. There it is. January 8th. It’s been more than a week. A guy named Ben Van Hottle. I don’t know if I follow him or not, but this was prior to the Bitcoin, ETF launches. I wanna read what he said. We’re gonna talk about it. Actually, before we talk about it and read what he said. The reason why I’m even bringing this up is a lot of people have a perception that Bitcoin is volatile. Now I will grant you a asset that can drop 70, 80% from its top during a bear market. Yes, I guess you could you could certainly say that’s volatile, but I would argue that you’re looking at it incorrectly.

You’re looking at it through a through the wrong time preference. If you say, well, if I buy at 69,000 and that was back in when was that? 2022 or 2021 or maybe both. I don’t know, offhand. Something like that. And that’s volatile because we haven’t been above that since. I would argue you’re not zooming out. You’re not looking at the long enough time frame. Bitcoin has a history now, 15 years, of essentially moving up in value becoming a better store of value, if you wanna call it that. Certainly nothing wrong with that. And I would argue that we will continue to see that. I do not expect to wake up tomorrow and Bitcoin be at 0 or a 1000.

I doubt it will ever return to 10,000 or anything near that. If it does, it would be a great buying opportunity, and that’s actually one of the reasons this is why it will never get that level because there are people who will buy as it dips more and more because that’s just the mentality. So, anyways, out in the the world, so to speak, it’s quite common for people to have this viewpoint. Well, it’s so volatile. Here at Satoshi’s Plebs, that’s one of the reasons why we promote DCA, dollar cost averaging. If you buy regardless of the price, then over time, it’s proven that that works out.

Even though you could have started at the all time high at 69,000 and DCA’d say $5 a day or $10 or it doesn’t matter the amount. It still works out, of course, regardless. You would be positive in your allocation at this point. So in other words, you’ve bought so let’s say you’ve bought a quarter of for Bitcoin let’s say you bought one Bitcoin. Just make this easy. On average, you will not you will have spent less than $42,000. I don’t know what the exact figure is. It would depend on when you started and all that kind of stuff. But in other words, you would be positive. And not only that, you’re positive sitting here at the start of the next bull market, which is a really good place to be.

So this is why we promote DCA. So it’s for one thing, it’s a way to smooth that volatility out. The longer you get as you DCA away from the time that you started DCA ing, the more profit you should be in. In other words, another 4 years from now when we’re at the start of the next bull market, I have you ever considered that we’re in 2024. Macintosh is already thinking about 2027. I was literally writing it in my planner today, some of my plans for that. What am I going to be doing in 2027 in terms of Bitcoin miners? Just I’ll be honest. I’ll just let you know that. I’ve already got plans for that.

But the further that we move away from where you start DCA, and the better off your profits this will be the better off your your allocation will be. Let’s get to this tweet. Ben Van Hottel, b van h o o l. Ben Van Hool. Excuse me, sir. Maybe he’s Dutch. It’s the only thing I could figure probably. Anyways, this is what he posted. My apologies, Ben. I apologize just about that. Now that the Bitcoin ETF launch is near, I ran some numbers for all portfolio managers out there. Here’s what I calculated. If you take a 100% S and P 500 portfolio and replace 5, 10, or 15% of that portfolio with Bitcoin and hold it over a 4 year period, then your portfolio return will increase considerably.

So a lot of people say, well, Bitcoin’s too volatile. You should just invest in the S & P, in a standard index fund or whatever. And his argument is, look. I’ve got the data here that proves that over a 4 year time period, again, a longer time period, that this is not true. It does not matter from what date till what date. Since 2014, that’s 10 years ago. Any date that you pick delivers a positive result regardless of Bitcoin’s volatility. During that time period, Bitcoin dropped, like, 70 something percent during the last downturn or maybe 80. 1 of them, it was like 70 and one was like 80. It’s something like that.

Very, very steep drops during a pretty short time frame, and yet it doesn’t matter. So for example, I put that in, not him. Continuing the tweet. So for example, if you replace 10% of the S and P portfolio by Bitcoin, your return would have improved on average 140%. That’s a lot. With 15% Bitcoin added, your return would have improved 210%. And then he said, and I don’t necessarily recommend this, but if you can time your entry and exit moment, taking into account market volatility, right, the bull and the bear market, these cycle highs and cycle lows, then the result would be even would even be much better.

And then he gave a little chart. So S & P allocation 100%, Bitcoin 0%, and he does give the median and then the average. So, two different values. The median would actually be slightly lower, you’ll see, but regardless of how you calculate it, this is what he came up with. 0% for median, of course, 0% for average. 95%, so a 5% Bitcoin allocation. So if you had a $100,000 allocated, $5,000 would be allocated to Bitcoin. The median increase is 58%. The average increase is 70%. 90% s and p 500 allocation. So in other words, a 10% Bitcoin allocation. 117%.

So now we have more than doubled your profit, so to speak, and the average is a 140%. S & P 500 85%, 15% Bitcoin, 176% median and 210% average. You need to let those numbers sink in. My thesis is simple. If you have if you’re more than less okay. If you’re less than, say, 70 years old or maybe 60, and you do not to have a decent percent of Bitcoin in your portfolio allocation, you are making a grave mistake. You are, at least statistically for the last 10 years. Now you may not trust Bitcoin. That’s your choice. My argument about that is, well, you haven’t not enough research. But aside from that, there’s no reason for you not to have Bitcoin in your allocation.

Now I’m not gonna tell you you should be a 100% Bitcoin. That is your choice. We are sovereign individuals as we preach here on Satoshi’s Plebs. And part of that sovereignty is choosing your own comfort level. Very few people are like Jack Mallers, and they’re just all in on Bitcoin. And don’t let anybody kid you otherwise. Jack Mallers. Strike guy recently posted, like, he literally had $0. Not only was he getting paid in Bitcoin, not only was he all of his savings and whatever were him, he literally doesn’t even use dollars in his day to day stuff. And that’s difficult for one thing right now.

And I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m just saying it for the average person, that’s just not where they’re at. Ladies and gentlemen, when BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, goes in on a Bitcoin ETF like this. When they are doing studies that say, yes. You should have Bitcoin allocation, and it should be quite significant. When their salespeople are pitching that their clients should be investing and Bitcoin. You need to take notice. These are the people who are the so called movers and shakers of Wall Street. And let me tell you something just so that I’m real clear. Bitcoin doesn’t need BlackRock. Bitcoin doesn’t need ETFs. But these things will come, and they are a sign that Bitcoin is doing what Bitcoin does, and it is moving through the network, and it is taking over everything as it comes along.

But Wall Street is just scratching the surface. Don’t think that this is all over. It’s not. We had the largest ETF launch ever just a few days ago, and that money is going to continue to pour in through that. And that money will mean that the price of Bitcoin will be forced up. The happening is coming. All of this stuff, we’ve got the political elections here in the United States. I’m not looking forward to this year in terms of that, so on and so forth. The economy, in many people’s eyes is doing very, very badly in large part because of the over deadliness of the majority of countries in the world.

And all of this fiat madness just continues to push, push, push Bitcoin. And it’s just going to keep going and keep creeping into all these corners. So, anyways, I know that was maybe a little more philosophical, but think about that, especially if you’re one of these people who just kind of throws a little bit at Bitcoin here and there. Maybe you don’t really know. According to this, and I saw this figure somewhere, BlackRock actually calculated the ideal allocation of Bitcoin around 85%, not S & P at 85%. So in other words, they were saying that the 80 the actual optimal allocation of assets would be 85 percent Bitcoin. I did see a report about that.

I don’t have my fingers on it, so I don’t wanna swear by that. But, anyways, very, very interesting stuff, and things to keep in mind. Alright. Where do we go from here? Supporters, I’ll be honest. We haven’t had any support in the last couple of days, of course, it’s only been a couple of days since we did an episode. Yes. We’ve not had any activity Tea, since I posted the last episode. So I do think we’ve got everything sorted out. Just kinda give you a quick update. We’ve had a number of it’s episodes, downloaded since I posted the last one. Go ahead and log in real quick to Pod Home, and I can tell you.

I think analytics. Privacy tools. My desktop. My desktop has had 63 downloads in the last couple of days. So I think we’re starting to get back out there. The map’s starting to fill in, which is kinda cool. They can include a map showing where our downloads are coming from. There’s Australia down there. Brazil, Argentina 9 downloads in Argentina. Listening to speaking of Argentina, a great episode. And I don’t remember the podcast, but it’s somebody who, has a lot of insight on what’s going on in Argentina and Javier Mele’s presidency.

Apparently, the guy, Javier was actually, like, in his class, in an economics class or something in the last few years or maybe it was a while ago. It’s a little difficult to understand, but regardless, they there’s some connection there. There’s some relationship, and, he seems to be very upbeat about what’s going on down there. We’ll see. Again, I’m reserving judgment, but regardless cool? Sweden, Finland, 1 download each. Norway, 4. Hey. Sweden and Finland, Norway’s beating you. Just saying. 4 to 1. Japan, none in Russia, none in China. India, 5 downloads.

So yeah. Map’s starting to fill back in. That’s kinda cool. Once I get everything sorted out, we’re gonna promote it again, like I said, and we’ll get things rolling. Anyways, that’s kinda where we’re at on that. So we’ll just go ahead and move on. I do appreciate the people who listen. News and notes. There really hasn’t been a whole lot of news either in the last couple of days. Man, I think I told y’all, like, before I took my time off, this is the time of year when it just tends to be slow. I mean, literally outside of the ETF stuff, there’s just not a whole lot going on. So, I probably posted a few things.

Let’s see. There was maybe a couple I wanted to mention. Great quote. The average savings rate, of the 7 largest advanced economies was 12.66% in 1970, but has dropped to 3.39% in 2015. So that was probably 10 years ago, almost. A fall of almost 3 quarters, and that was Sayfidina Moose who’s written a number of, very good books. I’ve got one of them on my I got it for Christmas. It’s sitting waiting to be read. And then another great quote, from Hayek, who is an Austrian economist, a pretty interesting fellow, had a really good grasp, in my opinion on Austrian economics. And he said, I don’t believe we shall ever have good money again, meaning sound money, essentially, what we would I’ll sell money. Before we take it out of the hands of the government, we can’t take it violently.

All we can do is by some by roundabout way, introduce something that they can’t stop. And I would argue that Bitcoin is that, and I am just honestly sad that I did not get to see that. I’m going to be doing an episode very soon on that topic. The separation you know, you hear this, oh, separation of church and state and this kind of thing all the time. I’m going to do an episode on the separation of money and state. And I think that’s critical to what we’re trying to do in the Bitcoin e ecosphere. We all get obsessed about stupid inscriptions and ordinals and JPEGs and this mess, and I don’t know.

I think this is the most important thing because governments are ruining millions, if not billions, of people’s lives. I heard a interesting, podcast earlier today, a guy on it called CK Snarks. He’s working at the, Human Rights Foundation now. But, he posted too many people in Bitcoin are obsessed with investment advice, not enough people in Bitcoin focusing on Bitcoin. I do believe that investing in Bitcoin is important, But I I do agree with what he’s saying. Bitcoin’s here to fix something. I would argue what, Hayek said taking money essentially out of the hands of government in in this sly roundabout way.

Interesting things, some stuff maybe to ponder. So, of course, Satoshi’s Plebs podcast supports podcasting 2 .0. We’re a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don’t have ads. I don’t have sponsorships. I do look for the listeners to provide support for the podcast. If we are providing value to you, I would ask in return that you provide value back to us, frankly. I do that because I believe that it’s the best way to provide a clear, uncompromised message that people can count on. I may not get every detail right. I may not get every fact right, but I promise you that the promise of some money is not muddying what I say ever.

Okay? In fact, Trezor, I should have mentioned this in the news, came out just a couple hours ago. Trezor, t r e z o r, one of the hardware wallets, for not just Bitcoin, which is really part of the problem, but they had a security alert. So this came out two days ago, apparently, on their blog site. So we’ll credit it to that. January the well, this says two days ago. We’re investigating a security incident that occurred on January 17th where there was unauthorized access to the third party support ticketing portal we use. I’ve heard that before. Not with the ticketing, but other third party. They loved blaming it on other things inside their system.

We want to reassure our users that their digital assets have not been compromised in any way. The security incident we’ve identified has implications for customers who have interacted with Trezor support since December 2021. While this represents a small part of our entire user base, up to 66,000 contacts were present in the system during that time. So, basically, your email and various sundry other things were probably stolen. Now supposedly, they didn’t have access to sensitive information like your Social Security number or this kind of thing. But here’s what’ll happen. You’re gonna start receiving emails from Trezor saying, not from Trezor, from somebody who acts like Trezor. And I apologize. I’m probably not saying that quite right. I have real difficulty with that word.

Saying, oh, we’re Trezor support, and there’s a problem with your product, and here, do this, this, to this, click here, put in your credentials, and boom, you’re done because they will scam you. So who you interact with is very important. Now if Trezor were giving me $10,000 an episode, do you think I’d be telling you these details? No. I would be self censoring. So this is yet another example of why I don’t do these types of ads and sponsorships. I will never have a hardware product like this that I show. I will never have a service like river.fm or I think it’s river.fm.

Anyways, no. That’s the podcast app. Swan Bitcoin, they do, you know, custodial services. Now you may choose to use that service, but I will not promote them. Why? Because if something ever comes out, I want to be able to come to you as a listener and say, there’s this problem with Swan. Maybe you should consider not using them. Does that make sense? I hope it does. But what that does mean is that if I’m providing value to you, that I ask that you provide value back to me in order to continue to build this show, how can we do that? Grab a podcasting 2.0 app. Go to podcastapps.com.

There’s a list there. You can use just one of them, there’s a lot of them. They’re all great. Just get one. Hook up with it. Look. I was using Fountain. I tested something today. I hooked it up to my Strike app, and I was able to move money from my Strike app, actually, Bitcoin from my Strike app to fountain. Just like that, using the lightning network. Super simple, super quick. It was it was frankly flawless. And these are the kind of tools that we now have. But if you’re using a Podcasting 2.0 app, you can stream sats to the list to the host, to me, in this case, whoever it is that you’re listening to, you can send them 10 sats a minute, a 100 sats a minute.

Hey. Go crazy do a 1,000. I don’t know. But regardless of the amount, that’s up to you, you can stream that while you’re listening. You can send in a boost and ask a message or just say, hey. You’re doing a great job or you’re doing a terrible job, and this is what you should change or whatever. So these are light years beyond things like Apple Podcasts. Another way that you can support the show is simply telling other people about it. Take go to any podcast app and go search for Satoshi’s Plebs, and you should be able to find the podcast. Recommend it, basically. You can go leave a review on one of these platforms. That would be terrific as well.

Alright. That’s it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter, as I said earlier, at McintoshFintech. I’m on Mastodon at Mcintosh at Podcast Index dot social. You can reach me by email at mcintosh@satoshis-plebs.com. And, of course, there’s the website at satoshis-plebs.com. I’ll talk to you all soon. Have a great week.