Episode 164

Bitcoin Weekly Close – March 31th 2024

BTC – $71,312

Bitcoin Block at Time of Recording

837,166

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

Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is April 1st, and this is episode 164 of Satoshi’s Plebs. I’m your host, McIntosh, and today’s episode is about April Fools in Argentina. Alright, everybody. This is your host, McIntosh, and the tea is hot. And we got things going on in Argentina. We’re gonna talk about that but I promise you this is not going to be a quote episode about Argentina. Close quote. There’s somewhere I’m going with this and you will see, and I think this is very important in today’s world. But as always, we will begin with our market update. We will then jump into that topic. We’ll talk about our supporters, and we’ll wrap things up with news and notes.

Alright. So let’s get right to it. We are trying to pump. Bitcoin is pushing up. We closed the week just a few minutes ago, about 30 minutes ago, as I record at $71,312. We, by the way, are at block height 83716 6. We have much as I said last week, you know, Bitcoin has established this level. It doesn’t really wanna go below 70 anymore, it seems. And when it does get pushed down there, it kinda pops right back up. Well, here we are. We’re pushing right back up. We will see where this goes. We will see if we break upwards. The longer this goes, the, the higher the chance of that really happening, to be honest. I could see when the ETFs open up tomorrow morning a big buy because, Bitcoin jumped several $1,000 during the weekend, and we might be off to the races for the week. And that is no April fools.

Alright. Yeah. So there we go. Our difficulty adjustment right now is estimated to be 1.3, I think, 3%, 1.33 percent. That is still, of course, a bit off, but we did just have an adjustment a couple of days ago. It hasn’t been that long. And, we did go down a little bit. It was not very much. Let’s see where is that right there. Yeah. 0.98%. On March 28th, the halving, of course, continues to approach. We are 98.65% of the way there. 2,834 more blocks until or 6.5? I can never remember. Y’all you guys know. Something I struggle with. But, anyways, I think it’s 6 point, 6.5 and the at the current rate. I could look it up. I could even include it in my notes. I probably have it somewhere.

But then we go down to 3.25. And so, essentially, the amount of Bitcoin that’s being mined will get cut in half, and eventually, that will lead to the price go up. Although, of course, we’ve had a huge run for a number of months now of Bitcoin price go up. It’s been great. Alright. There’s our market update. Oh, our fees in MNPL. I did wanna mention this. Fees right now are 14 sets per vbyte. Mempool actually went up a little bit after a couple weeks of going down. We’re at 904 megabytes. Now up, like, 70 or so megabytes. So that basically means there’s more transactions that have not been processed, which should theoretically lead to some higher prices.

I would highly recommend if you have UTXOs to consolidate anything, you know, Bitcoin to move around, whatever, that you do that before the happening, which, as I mentioned, is coming up very soon, April 20th, so roughly three weeks from now. Actually, 3 weeks from today, I guess, if I’m not mistaken, as I record this on March 31st. Let me look. April 20th is a Saturday. Tomorrow is 1st. So you do the math. I don’t know. It’s a Saturday. Let’s jump on into this week’s week’s topic. So I will be honest. I was, doing my normal routine, checking Twitter later in the day, just a few hours ago or just an hour or so ago.

And I came across this tweet, which we’re gonna talk about because I think it’s very important. So there will be a link in the news and link news and notes, of course. Forbes published an article, apparently. Well, they did. I saw the article. Let me bring it up because I wanna make sure I get this correct. Now I’ve mentioned this kind of thing before, but, of course, Argentina down in South America, speaks Spanish. There’s always a chance things get lost in translation. K? And I don’t wanna read too much into this, but it this does seem to be the case. So we know, of course, Javier Milei came into power, Argentina in in December of last year. So just a few months ago, he runs at ran as a libertarian. He proposes to be a libertarian.

He has done a lot certainly to help the budget of Argentina. He’s cut a number of, government jobs, entire what do they call those ministries? This kind of thing to help balance their budget. K? And even recently, I think he well, I’d mentioned a couple weeks ago, I think he was going to he was asking to eliminate 70,000 more government jobs trying to balance their budget. Now in my opinion, as an Austrian conservative, fiscally conservative, certainly, person, I have no problem with this. It’s not you know, governments, in my opinion, cannot continue to operate the way that they are building up debt, eventually, that will come home to roost as we would say.

I also know that recently, International Monetary Fund, which I’ve talked about extensively on this program, not a good organization, should be avoided in my opinion at all cost. And apparently, they’re getting a loan from them. Now I maybe they have no alternative, but that was a kind of a red flag for me. Well, here’s red flag number two. Now one of the things that I know that Milei ran on, he talked about allowing currencies to compete. As a libertarian, a country, people should have the ability to choose what they use to buy their goods and services, to trade, to carry on commerce, whatever.

That’s the libertarian attitude. And in fact, he has espoused that. He has talked about that. That all sounds good. He, to my knowledge, has never talked directly about Bitcoin. I do know prior to coming into politics or shortly after or whatever, a few years ago, he was involved in some casino coins, as I would call them, promoting something, I don’t know, some garbage, whatever. Okay? But Forbes Magazine article, here’s what it says. I’m basically gonna read much of it because it’s really not that long. Argentina unveils mandatory registration for Bitcoin and crypto platforms. Now understand when you start saying mandatory registration, so government mandated registration of your business, that basically directly contradicts libertarian policies.

Now it’s not clear that this is directly from Milei, and I would love to have some clarity on that. But I’ll read the article, and I’m sure that Twitter’s going to be in a tizzy about this. So you kinda heard it here first, so to speak. But I I don’t we’re gonna talk about Argentina. But, again, this is just bear with me because this is going to become very real to you regardless of where you’re at here in a few minutes. Let’s read this. With the anarcho capitalist and libertarian leader Javier Milei taking power in Argentina in December of 2023, many felt that his plans to rebuild the national economy and dollarize it, which is what he’s promoting using the US dollar, would help Bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption in the country. But after a few months of his government, which it what? Four months?

More regulation is coming. Again, the exact opposite of a libertarian view. In late March, the Comision Nacional de Valores, I hope I said that close to right, In Argentina. And I don’t know who that is. It’s a commission. It’s a national commission of I don’t know what Valores is. That’s all I know. Announced a new mandatory registry of virtual asset service providers for those operating with crypto assets in the country. Companies and individuals doing that activity now, so they’re currently operating, will be asked to comply with the registration approved on March 14th, so 2 weeks ago, by the Argentine Senate as part of the amendments to the current regulatory framework to address the financial action task force recommendations. I do not know exactly what that means, but I do understand March 14th, this was approved by the Argentine senate.

This and I don’t know where it came from. Again, I don’t know if this is coming from Malay. I don’t know, you know, I don’t exactly understand the power structure there in Argentina. If he has the ability to, you know, put forth some bill and and has the kind of the team put together to make that work? I I don’t know. This new requirement will affect businesses dedicated to providing several services such as buying, selling, sending, receiving, lending, or trading cryptos, which in my opinion basically covers everything. Every provider should complete the registration, and the regulation is not just for locally based companies, but also for those operating in the market but based elsewhere. So in other words, Strike, not based in Argentina, if they were to operate in argin Argentina, they would have to register.

CNVs president, Roberto  Silva, was crystal clear. Those who are not registered will not be able to operate in the country. After the announcement, the securities watchdog participated in a meeting with the country’s main legal firms and the Fintech Chamber on the implementation of the registry with some representatives of local companies participating. Alright. Then we’ll finish this up. There’s a couple more paragraphs. We’re almost there. It’s a terrible idea to have a registry that enables the buying and selling of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money, not a security. It’s as wrong as if currency exchange houses for dollars or euros or shops where gold is bought and sold had to register with the CNV of this the thing I read earlier. It’s complete nonsense. And this is the Argentine Argentinian NGO nongovernmental organization, directive member, and money on chain protocol cofounder Manuel Ferra told me, the journalist who wrote this article in an interview. So that was something separate. So this person is saying, of course, this is a bad idea because it’s money, not a security.

It’s in in at least in the United States system, let me put it that way. We would love for it to be a money, and it is being used as a money. It’s also a commodity here in the United States. It’s not a security. That is correct. That may be a little too detailed or whatever, but this benefits no one except maybe some state bureaucrats and army of lawyers and useless people from the compliance industry, Ferrari argued. For him, this measure doesn’t fit into the pro Bitcoin stance in which many people placed Malay, but he or his party didn’t present the initiative to congress. So according to this, apparently, I didn’t catch that very last sentence of the entire article. Apparently, he did not promote this or his party. So maybe it did come from again, I don’t know what the structure there is. I’m sure there’s competing parties.

I know there is. And, apparently, this came from one of those other parties. I will be very interested to see what Malay has to say about all this, and I will be watching that very closely. So I think this is, very interesting news, for those who live in Argentina, for those who want to deal with the people in Argentina in terms of crypto businesses. I think this is very important. You should be watching this. But here’s where I’m going with all this. It’s not that this is Argentina. When it comes to politics and when it comes to Bitcoin, we tend to be very, somebody will say something that seems to be even Bitcoin.

Well, they like Bitcoin or they’re promoting Bitcoin or whatever. And they’re a politician, and we’re like, oh, yes. That’s our guy. Look. Bitcoin is a bottoms up thing. What do I mean by that? If a government is going to solve the world’s problems, essentially, by implementing Bitcoin, this will never work. This will work because the plebs, Satoshi’s Plebs, where I get my podcast name, are out there doing the work, starting El Zonte’s Bitcoin Beach, for example, which ended up changing their entire country. Starting things like the Bitcoin, jungle, which is in Costa Rica, if I’m remembering the place in Africa as well.

All of these different grassroots efforts. This is what’s really important. Yes. These things are important. And, yes, if you’re in Argentina, you need to be aware of this. And I do have Argentine listeners, by the way, which is really cool. You need to write to your person, email them, call them, whatever. And I don’t know if they’re, well, senate or congress or I I don’t know. Obviously, it said they had a senate. So but I also want to see what Malei’s reaction to this is because this should be 180% opposite of what his stance would be. His stance should be, no. We do not need that regulation. You let the market sorted out. That’s the libertarian stance.

Given the fact that this came from an opposing party, he probably will oppose it. My point is the point that I really wanted to drive home in all this is the the government is not going to solve the these problems, ladies and gentlemen, not when it comes to Bitcoin. You going out there and doing the work, promoting the Bitcoin, using it as it is intended, as a source of currency, as a means of transferring value from one person to another, that is what’s going to bring Bitcoin to the next 10% of the world and the next 10% and so on and so forth. So, anyways, I I hope that makes sense.

I think it does. I do think it does. I hope that Argentina makes the right choices here. I’ve been following them, of course, with great interest since before this election last December. And, I was personally as I’ve said on here, I was pleased essentially to see that Malay got voted in, but I don’t believe in in let me put it this way. It’s Easter here in the United States. Still as I’m as I’m recording this. So I’ll make this analogy, and I apologize if this offends anyone. There is no politician who is our savior. Okay?

Not Milei, not Robert F Kennedy, who’s kind of the pro Bitcoin party candidate here in the United States. None of them. They’re not. We are the ones who will do the work to make this happen. These countries will make these decisions, and it will slow their development or it will speed it up. I have a strong feeling that our El Salvador, for example, may turn out to be one of the future world leaders eventually because they got involved in Bitcoin on a sovereign state level very early. And I don’t mean 10 years from now. I don’t mean 5 years from now, and I don’t mean 20 years from now, a 100 years from now, if they make the right choices between now and then.

Bhutan, another example. Very tiny country, insignificant in the views of the world right now. But what are they doing up there in the Himalayas? They are mining. They are building a building a virtual pile of Bitcoin, so to speak. And as as Bitcoin becomes more and more used by more and more people and more and more countries around the world, as it eats the financial world, so to speak, and becomes more and more valuable, these countries are going to be in much better places, and I love to see them flip the script on organizations like the IMF and the World Bank, which is exactly what El Salvador is doing. El Salvador’s credit rating has gone up because of the positive things that are happening because of Bitcoin.

It is indisputable, and they will not be taking any more loans from the IMF. I don’t I think they still owe the IMF money, but that will get paid off. And they will not be going down that road again, and that’s a great thing for them. So, anyways, hope all that made sense. Let’s go ahead and move right on. I will have a link to that article in the show notes, by the way, again. Alright. Let’s talk about our supporters. So it looks to me like satoshi stream had a problem this week. I thought I saw them post something. I have no record here unless I opened the wrong file, which is possible. Hold on.

Note today. Of any streaming or boost. However, I know Kyrin posted something because I saw it on the fountain app itself. Hold on just a second. I’ll go grab that one. So see, Satoshi Stream. Now I’m irritated because now you’re costing me money. Alright. I will say what what he posted on here. Episode news and that’s a 120. 3 sets, 3 scores. Okay. 123 set. That’s odd because that’s not okay. Here’s what, actually yeah. What’s I I will definitely get with Satoshi Stream. Try and figure out if this stuff showed up. We did get two boosts. Streaming apparently was not, working.

Let’s talk about this actually real quick. Mere Mortals, Kyrin boosted, row of sticks. 1111. So I appreciate that, Kyren. A 100% still planning to be there, but unlikely to actually go to the conference. He is talking about the Bitcoin conference in July in Nashville. Would prefer to spend that money just hanging around the bar and chatting with people. We’ll see you there, mate. Yep. I appreciate that, Karen. I certainly am looking forward to seeing you there. I will bring along a gift or 2, that I owe you, because you’re, as I said last week, our first octopus, and the level that you reached before that was the one you were you were supposed to get something that I never got to you because I haven’t created it yet, and I apologize.

But it is I have not forgotten, and it is coming. So I have made that my target. Anyways, hypersensitivosaurus boosted 1222 sats. Streaming issues today, so I will send you a higher boost than I usually do. I actually enjoyed the decreased length of this episode. Keep it up or down. PSA, a shame you can’t see who is streaming SATs. I can. I’ll explain that in just a second. Or can you? If so, I might have made it up to, shrimp level already. Actually, hypersensitive saris, that is included in our totals. I didn’t read out your exact levels because I don’t know. That’s kind of I’ve kinda gone back and forth on that. It’s public information, but it’s not, if that makes sense. And then I just feel a little weird about it. You are right there. You’re, I think I don’t know if I mentioned this. You’re 13,000 well, 12,000 sats and now 11,000, actually.

Short. So you’re getting there. Just hang in there. Hang in there. We’ll get there. And that would be awesome. Cool. Yeah. So I can see actually the sats. I don’t talk about them on the air because, the streaming sats just because it takes too long. So I see I have a list. I essentially get this. So y’all I’m gonna get down in the weeds for just a minute because this kinda got me ticked off, and I’m fixing to make a change, I think. Looks like streaming’s, Satoshi streams has not been working for a few days. I got these messages on fountain. I did not get them on Satoshi Streams.

I don’t think I even got payment. So like I said, now they’re messing with my money. And I’m not worried about that from y’all. That’s fine. You’re getting the credit that you deserve. But I’m kinda done with having a middleman. I’ve tried doing this before, and I’m about to do it again. I wanna do my own lightning node that these will go to, that I can I can control? And for one thing, it’ll save me a little money. I already have the infrastructure I could run it on. If I had to pay for the server by itself, it wouldn’t make any sense because that’s $20 a month. But I’ve already got a server, that I can use this for.

I will set this up, and then I’ll pull the stats off there in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I’ve got to send them a note. You know, stuff happens. I get it. This was four days ago, so Tuesday or so, which I think that correlates with the time that this was going on. I’m sure that’s what happened. That is not your problem, and I don’t want y’all worrying about it. But, yeah, it’s gonna make a change for me, and that’s cool. I was needing to do it anyways. So you like the decreased length of the episode. I will try and keep these shorter. I’ve always strived to keep these shorter. I think when I get longer episodes, I should frankly just start cutting them in half and making them two episodes. I think this one will end up being about right. Let’s see. We’re at yeah. We’re at 30 minutes, and, I can tighten this up a little bit as I do the editing.

And alls I have left to do is the news notes. So, anyways, I actually cannot get a total this week because I don’t know what it is because that’s broken. But there you go. So, Kyrin, looking forward to seeing you there at the conference. Hypersentiviosaurus . I always appreciate your support and the kind comments and the feedback, and that’s awesome. I will be, thinking about that going forward. And it was already kind of a direction I was looking at. So very cool. Great minds think alike as they say. So let’s do our news. Not a whole lot of news this week, but we’ll run through it. I actually thought what the news that we just talked about was the most important thing, frankly.

Although, I think maybe a lot people a lot of people will be arguing about it or whatever, but I think they’re missing my point anyways. I mean, I I’m making I’m not making that up, but my that’s not what the article is about. I think a lot of people will not think about it from that perspective. So there we go. I did wanna mention this, s 21 pro has now come out. So this is a new Bitmain miner. I it’s pretty mind blowing machine. 234 terahash. So this thing is, like, almost exactly double my miners. It does depend on the price. Of course, they won’t be out for a few months. It’ll certainly be post halving.

Alex Gladstein posted, just a couple days ago a great article about Bitcoin brought electricity to countries in the global south. This is something we’ve touched on time and time and time again. I would highly suggest you check that out. I will put a link to that in the show notes. We were talking about the Japanese yen last week. On Wednesday, it hit the lowest level since 1990. So it is falling against I think they’re comparing this to the dollar. And, so they are starting a debate in Japan essentially about intervening to boost their currency.

And, I whether they do or don’t, when they do at some point, it’s going to end up triggering, you know, a big tidal wave against the debt of their country. It’s going to end up causing complete chaos. Again, Japan may be the one leading us down the, you know, the hyperinflation path. We’ll see. Peruvian Bull, who’s somebody that I follow, he’s a financial analysis, says that Standard Chartered says that Japan is very, very close to yin intervention. So and that’s about it. I I don’t have context for this, but I I will mention this really briefly.

Senegal’s next president spoke, just a few days ago for the first time since his, since he won. He ran a successful presidential campaign in 10 days after leaving prison, and he was elected on his 44th birthday. I do not know why he was in prison. I have no context for this. None. None. So I I don’t know. I know there’s a lot of discontent. I know there’s a lot of angst, anger, all of these things in a lot of these African countries. I believe Senegal is in that belt, that Sub Saharan African belt that, was controlled by the, by the French.

And I don’t know if they had put the former leader or in, in place. So Senegal, Dakar is it is on the coast. It’s on the West Coast. That’s actually the end of the Paris Dakar rally. So I’m pretty sure that that was a French country, a French colony. So I think this all relates back to that. But, again, that’s me speculating or whatever. Alright. That’s it. That’s all the news we got This week, I do think we might see some I’m just gonna go ahead and say, I think we could see some explosive price action. Next week, it is possible we’re looking at $80,000 Bitcoin in US dollars.

I think we will move once we break 73. It will go up to 80 very, very shortly. I’ll put it that way. How about that? That gives me a little bit of but, Macintosh, you said it was gonna be that? No. I didn’t. And as always, I forgot to put this disclaimer. DCA, you strike, buy daily, don’t trade, etcetera, etcetera. Go back and listen to any other episode if you’re confused because I say the same thing every time. Alright. Let’s talk about this podcast. We are a podcasting 2 point o podcast. We are a value for value podcast. What does all that mean? 1st of all, I don’t have advertisers. I don’t have sponsors. I depend on my real listeners. People like Kyrin and people like Hypersentivosaurus to support this show.

They are doing it through what I would call treasure. There’s other ways of doing it as well. We are what’s called a value for value podcast. If I am providing value, I would hope that you would be able to provide value back. And that is not necessarily always in terms of treasure, in terms of sats. You can do that if you’re using a Podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain, like castomatic, like one of these other apps. Okay? You connect it up to a lightning wallet. You can stream sats. You can boost like they did and send me some sats. There’s other ways. If you clip an episode, if you go in and clip out 2 1, 2, 3 minutes out of that episode, boost it up on, put it up on Fountain, for example.

If I first of all, thank you because you’re spreading the message of satoshi’s plebs, and that’s what’s most important. But I will also boost you back 500 sets for a new episode, 300 for an older episode. If you do that, you get to make some treasure. Our message gets spread around, and more people hear about it. Just tell somebody about the podcast. That’s a great way to spread the message. In fact, it’s probably the most effective way to do it. K? Why do we do podcasting 2.0? Because of the ability to stream those sets, because of things like transcripts, because of things like chapters. These are all new things that we have been building into these tools over the last few years.

Oh, alright. That’s it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and I want you to think about that. Politicians are still politicians at the end of the day. They are not going to save you. They are not. What will help you financially in the future is saving Bitcoin. Having that DCA going, stacking sats. Do what you can and don’t depend on whomever that is, Robert Kennedy, I don’t know, Trump, whoever the most pro Bitcoin candidate here in the, which was Vivek, I guess. I think I said his name right. But anyways, he’s not in the running at this point, although I think he might be a vice presidential candidate or Milei down in Argentina.

Don’t depend on them. Go out and be the pleb. Do the groundwork. Spread the message. I would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at McIntoshFintech. I’m on mastodon at macintosh@podcastindex.social. I can also be reached by email, macintosh@satoshis-plebs.com. That’s it. I I’m gonna talk to you guys soon. Go out. Make it a great week.