Episode 179

Bitcoin Weekly Close – August 18th 2024

BTC – $58,454

Bitcoin Block at Time of Recording

857,412

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 August 18th, and this is episode 179 of Satoshi’s Plebs. I’m your host, Mcintosh, and today’s episode is defeating a scammer. Let’s jump right on into it. Let’s get into our stats, our weekly update section, and, we’ll get right down to our main topic. Just 2 hours ago, Bitcoin closed the week, $58,454. It’s August 18, 2024. Block height as we record, 857,412. We do not have our next difficulty adjustment until August the 28th. I think we just had one, if I’m not mistaken. It does not say when that happened. But we had an adjustment down 4.19 cent percent, and then our next adjustment is estimated to be 4.357%.

Recently, up. So it was good to see the down, but apparently, that down is not going to the downward adjustment is not gonna stay around. Mempool still looking good. I’ve been monitoring it this week. I’ve been making some transactions. And honestly, looking very good right now. We’re getting 3 sets per vbyte. Low, medium, and high priority. Our mempool usage is actually upward at 819 megabytes. So as that creeps up, we may see our sets for v byte creep up as well as pressure happens on that mempool. My trading advice this week, just DCA.

We’re stuck at this level. Can’t really seem to go down. Don’t really seem to wanna go up. There’s all kinds of explanations for it. I don’t really have an answer, ladies and gentlemen. I I’m not gonna tell you that I do. We’re still staying within that box ish if you expand the box out. Like I said, we definitely don’t seem to wanna go down. We did go down, of course, just if like a week and a half or so ago now, but we pop right back up just a day or so later. Kind of crazy how that works. So there’s a lot of a lot of buy pressure. There’s a lot of, excuse me, there’s a lot of sell pressure. There’s a lot of pressure pushing down, but but the plebs, I think, keep on buying. And so regardless if it’s Mt. Gox, regardless if the United States is selling, that’s been in the news, although it’s not substantiated.

I’m not sure it’s actually accurate. I believe that the governmental service responsible for that Bitcoin is actually contracting with Coinbase, to hold that coin. But everybody every time Bitcoin moves out of that wallet, everybody freaks out. So I don’t know. I would assume that they would tell us if that were the case. I don’t really think they have anything to hide. It wouldn’t surprise me, really, if they did, but that’s where we’re at. Still holding the line. The miners are hurting. I’ll tell you that. Hash price is essentially at an all time low. Hash price is basically how much we make for, generating work.

And it would not surprise me to see some capitulation in the coming weeks. Maybe if prices don’t go up yeah. Just do what we always say, DCA. Don’t worry about the cost. Right? Don’t worry about the price. Just continue your daily, your weekly buying of Bitcoin. As I always recommend, you determine what you’re going to invest. You do that on on a daily or weekly basis using something like the strike app, and, and then you don’t worry about it. And if we have an event like what happened a few days ago, a week plus, I guess now, then no. It’s well, 2 weeks ago, gracious time slide.

Then you you buy extra. You know, you smash buy it as they say. So let’s move on. I just want to go ahead and get right on into this topic. This is gonna be a quick, episode, I think. To be honest, lot going on in my life. I’ve mentioned this shed before. This shed is still, we are making progress. We’re actually putting up shiplap on the inside at this point. But, you know, this thing has been it’s taken a lot longer than I expected. And it’s very tiring work here in the summer here in the southeast, in an unheated insulated environment.

I know the heat index today was over a 100 degrees inside that shed, a 100 degrees Fahrenheit. I have no idea what that is in Celsius. Sorry. For those of you who probably have better sense than we do here in America about things like temperature and distance. Let’s talk about scammers. What brings all this up? I bring this up because if you’re in this business long enough, you will come in contact with scammers. There will be people just like in other aspects of life who are trying to rip you off, who are trying to take what you have rightfully earned because I don’t know. I don’t know. I well I don’t know. I don’t understand what’s going on in these people’s head.

I guess that’s a topic maybe for a philosophy discussion. But the point is that you are going to run into these people. Just like the people who call you on the telephone and try and get you the password to your Windows machine or whatever, you know. Oh, I’m here from Microsoft and you’ve got an issue with your computer. They called me it’s funny because I’ve had that happen before they call me and they’re like, sir, you’ve you’ve you’ve got a problem with your Windows machine. What they don’t understand is aside from the fact that I would have figured it out anyways, to be honest, but we don’t even have a Windows computer in our house.

It’s either running Linux or or Macintosh or, you know, Apple OSX. So the last time somebody did that with me, I kinda played along with them for a while just because just to annoy them, I guess. I don’t know. But they’re scammers in the Bitcoin space. And I wanna walk through a scenario. And this scenario happened to me and it happened recently. So that your see a fairly simple example of how this can work to give you ideas about what you might be looking for as you’re interacting with people. So I, of course, use seed signer. I’ve talked about this numerous times. Seed signer is a, a key management tool, that you could use to sign your transactions to send Bitcoin to people, etcetera, etcetera.

It’s open source. I find it to be very high quality. I find it to be very the price is very good, And I really like it. I’ve had one for over a year now. I think I’ve talked about it on this show a number of times. Well, recently I had a question. There’s a seed signer Telegram group. And I had a question. It was a fairly simple question. And to be honest, I probably could have dug up the information somewhere else, but I knew that that group would be able to answer it very quickly. My question was in the Sparrow program, which I use in coordination with seed center, so kind of seed centers the hardware part of it and then I run Sparrow on my laptop to do, to actually send out the transactions.

Okay. I wanted to know if it would be possible in Sparrow to have multiple wallets because the reasoning does even matter not just to move on, but I wanted to have separate wallets, separate storages for this for Bitcoin for different groups of Bitcoin. So I asked about it in the seed signer Telegram group. The question was very quickly resolved. And so that was the end of it. Now this was late at night. This was, I believe, on a Sunday night, and it was actually may have been Monday morning by the time I even asked the question. It was 11, 12, you know, midnight, 1 o’clock in the morning. I I don’t remember exactly.

But early the next morning, I go to sit down to work at my Fiat mine to work at my day job. And I get a telegram message from Keith McKay, who he is the lead developer of seed signer. So there’s 2 people involved with seed signer, primarily to drive the project. Seed signer, the guy who started it, he’s the guy I’ve interviewed on the podcast and Keith, who is a really cool guy, and he’s their lead developer. And he was asking me all kinds of different questions. It seemed pretty normal. But it was in regards to what I had asked the night before about this second wallet.

After a couple of minutes of this, I kind of started thinking it was a little bit odd, but it was also pretty early for me. This was like, must have been about 9:30 or so in the morning. I’d been up late the night before. I had not even got my first cup of coffee. And ladies and gentlemen, aside from my Earl Grey tea, thank you very much, delicious with my honey. I’m a coffee person. In the morning, I typically have 2, 3 cups of coffee, because I don’t get enough sleep, to be honest. And, it helps me, you know, get through the day. But I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee. I was probably a little groggy.

He was asking all kinds of reasonable questions for the most part and some that showed that he seemed to have concern with my problems. Like, he wasn’t just, like, attacking me or whatever. He he it sounded legitimate. It sounded like he wanted to help me. And in reality, in retrospect, what he was trying to he or she, it could have been a she. I have no idea. What they were trying to do was establish a bond of sorts to be able to move on to the next level. He actually offered to help me move Bitcoin from a ledger device, from a ledger hardware wallet to my to my seed signer, to to Sparrow to this Sparrow wallet.

And right after he did that, he sent me a link and said, hey, open this up in your web browser. Now I wasn’t actually on my laptop, which had Sparrow, which would even have seed signer or anything. I was actually talking to him. Let’s see. Let me remember this correctly. I think I was interacting with him on my phone, and then I had my work laptop open. And when he sent me the website, I transferred it over somehow. I don’t remember exactly. But I opened it on my work laptop, which doesn’t have any connection to Sparrow or my seed signer.

And the website kind of it looked official. And the thing is, again, in retrospect, I’m sure that if I told him that my Bitcoin was on Kraken or Coinbase, he could have sent me to a different website that would have looked official. And at this point, I was pretty certain that this guy was a scammer. And so I asked in the official seed signer Telegram group if Keith was DM ing me because this person who was saying that they were Keith was DM ing me. And I was asking in the Telegram group because Keith, if he’d have been online, which he was not, it turns out, would have responded and said, no. That’s not me. And I was looking at his profile. I don’t I think he had something crazy going on with his profile.

His profile did look like Keith’s for the most part, but I never saw his username. I don’t know if I missed it kind of in the heat of the moment, but his his profile name should have it might have made it obvious, and I never really saw that. As I suspected, the scammer was monitoring the messages in the seats on our Telegram group. And then at that point, when he saw that I I was asking Keith if he was DM ing me, he deleted our messages and disappeared. So I got out of very easily. This is not the first time I’ve I’ve had people try and scam me.

But this guy, they’re not really any more in-depth than that, to be honest, most of them. Unless it’s very, very targeted. Now he knew, and I’m assuming it’s a he, but again, you know, he knew from the conversation there had occurred last night or the night before, I should say, that he would that I was trying to move some Bitcoin and, you know, basically, he was trying to act nice and act like he could help me. And if I had plugged in seed signer or some information into that website, I’m sure I would have ended up, you know, losing my Bitcoin. My ledger, if I had to plug my ledger actually into that laptop, it probably would have compromised it and stolen that money. And once you steal Bitcoin, you don’t there’s no you can’t claw it back. That’s just not the way it works.

So that got me thinking, How can I I think this is valuable to to kind of explain some of the ways, some of the things that these scammers do? And and how can I, help you be protected from that? So some of the signs of a scammer. I’ve got a few bullet points here. Pressuring you to do something right now. And this was something that this scammer kind of did. He was trying to get me to go to that website right then and plug in my ledger. There is almost never a reason to do something right now when it comes to Bitcoin. Do not rush into something because someone is offering to help you or whatever.

Another sign sending me to a different website. You can make websites look official. You can copy logos. You can, you know, just in general, make them very legitimate, and they may be completely illegitimate. They may be, this spam site that’s not spam site, the scammer site, this gathering your information, your credentials, your secrets or whatever, to be very careful. When somebody’s trying to send you off to a different website. Grammatical errors, of course, many of these scammers, of course, I speak English, but you know, in English, they’re they’re not really fluent and they’ll send a message and it will have a lot of grammatical errors in it.

In any legitimate Bitcoin business, a founder like SeedSider, a support person, a developer, a team member like Keith, they’re never gonna reach out to you via Telegram or Discord or whatever in a direct fashion. It makes no sense for them to do that because that’s what the scammers do. They’re going to reach out to you just like this person did. And it becomes very difficult when you’re on Telegram or something like that to tell. They again, it’s like the website. They can make themselves look like somebody else. Be aware, of course, of unsolicited contact, unsolicited email, definitely Telegram messages, this kind of thing, or social media.

Always be suspicious of that. Don’t ever share your passwords, your financial details, or other sensitive data with anyone on these Telegram channels. I I would if if I knew I was talking to Keith or seed signer, I still wouldn’t be telling them my password. Why would I do that? And most important of all, just across the board, do not ever give your seed phrases to anyone. If you don’t know what seed phrases are, they’re the 12 or 24 words that are used to basically protect your Bitcoin. Verify who you’re talking to when asking for support just like I did. Now, just them alone direct messaging me was a big clue that there was something wrong.

But I took the step to go back to seed signer forum and say, hey. Is Keith talking to me? So I blew that person’s cover right there. When you have Bitcoin setups, you might want to, look at a couple of different ways if let’s say and and you probably wanna approach this kind of depending on your level of effort slash income slash savings or whatever. If I’ve got a $100 in Bitcoin and I make $50,000 a year, I’m not gonna go through the trouble of splitting that $100 up or creating a multi signature setup so that I use separate devices and, you know, this kind of thing to help protect my funds.

But on the other hand, if say I’ve got $50,000 in a seed in a in a Bitcoin setup, I’ve got, you know, essentially 1 plus Bitcoin or whatever. That’s a lot of money for me at that level. And maybe I do have, maybe I’m using multiple signatures or maybe maybe maybe I just split up the funds. So I’ve got half Bitcoin here, half Bitcoin there in different bank accounts, so to speak. You’re going to have to give thought to risk management essentially. Will I ever have a $1,000,000 in Bitcoin in one single setup? Single signature setup. Let me put it that way. No.

I’m not gonna do that. I’m not Michael Saylor. And I I that level for me, probably for my lifetime will be far more than what I would have in just a simple setup like that. So, you know, plan for that and think about the fact that Bitcoin may 10 x or more, between now and the end of this cycle. We’re at $60,000. Well, what if it ten x is at $600,000? It’s possible. I’m not gonna say it’s gonna happen, but it’s possible. Are you gonna keep it in your exact same setup? I guess I wanna summarize this by saying being self sovereign is hard. It’s harder.

You’re in control. And if you send your Bitcoin off to some scammer, it’s gone. This is one of the reasons why I believe that there’s always gonna be third party custody tools as part of a Bitcoin landscape. People like, River, I don’t know, Bitcoin ETFs, whatever. Because there are people many, many people who frankly don’t wanna deal with this, And I I understand that. Or maybe people like probably some of your parents or grandparents who maybe they’re not capable of managing that Bitcoin themselves. My grandfather, my grandfathers were never on the Internet.

My dad, my father-in-law, both, very they do get on the Internet, but, you know, they’re not experts. So it it, you know, depending on situations, they they might have they might choose to do that. I don’t want to scare you. Okay? And and yet one of the news items we’ll talk about in just a minute may scare you. I I don’t wanna scare you, but I want you to be both realistic and be prepared. This person, I was only targeted because of convenience. I wasn’t targeted because they knew a whole lot about me or they thought I had a whole lot of Bitcoin necessarily. They probably had no idea.

I don’t see how they would possibly know how much Bitcoin I had. I certainly don’t talk about it. Because for number 1, it’s not your business. And number 2, that’s just stupid OPSEC, operational security. Don’t run around and tell people how much Bitcoin you have. There’s just no reason to do that. Just don’t. But it was it was a matter of convenience. But as Bitcoin becomes more and more popular, you will see more and more of this. So be prepared. Learn to laugh at this, and, and move on with the more important things. Alright. That’s it. So we’re gonna move on.

I do wanna talk to, let’s see. Yeah. We got a great message. I love it. We got a great message from Gulag Bound on our last from our last episode, listening to the burning down. Gulag Bound sent a row of sticks, 1111, and said stay humble and stack stats. I appreciate that. I love that saying. And so in total, between the boost and streaming, we had 7 hun or excuse me, 1730 sat sent in. So I do appreciate that. That is honestly down a little bit. I am looking as always at ways to build better value for the listeners. I’ve made adjustments over the last few months.

One thing I’ve realized of late is that I’m actually going to have to force myself. I, of course, I edit my own podcast. I don’t know if I’ve ever said that before, but I do. I I hate listening to myself. I do. I think most people are like that, but I’m going to have to force myself to go back more frequently and listen to my podcast so that I can even though I edit it, there’s still things I don’t catch simply because I don’t, like, listen to it from start to finish. You know, it’s cut and paste and delete and all that kind of stuff going on.

So I’m gonna start doing that. I don’t know. I’m gonna start evaluating some more things, once I get done with this shed. Maybe I’ll have some more time for this as well, which would probably help. I would still like to look for or, another area well, there’s 2 things. Sorry. I’m still looking for a cohost essentially. I have no idea who. No idea. But I would also I’m going to have to do some work to promote this in terms of getting out there and marketing the podcast, that kind of thing. So Gulag Gulag bound, I’d I appreciate that. You have been a supporter for a long time. Thank you very much. So let’s move on to the news and notes.

Oh, boy. Every Social Security number in the United States has been stolen. There was a hack of some website, and, apparently, they essentially had everyone’s Social Security number, address, all that kind of personal information, and it was stolen. Yay. So not only is my Social Security itself actually going to go away before I start taking Social Security when I retire. Now they’ve actually stolen my social security number for certain. So that I have to do things in order to protect my identity. I’m gonna have to invest in one of these identity protection services or whatever. It’s just it’s nuts. This is why one of the reasons why k y c is a very, very bad idea.

Number 2, the Nigerian government has been sued by a Nigerian politician over the right to own, acquire, and trade Bitcoin. So apparently well, there’s a lot of Bitcoin activity going on in Nigeria, but it’s it’s very much gray market. It’s very much, borderline illegal or whatever. And this politician is actually suing the government to explicitly lay out the rights to own, acquire, and trade Bitcoin. That’s pretty cool. Alright. I do wanna talk about bit farm for just a second. They’re a mining company. This was in the news this week, of course, as I always do when I talk about bit farm. They’re a stock that I own. They’re the only stock in the Bitcoin space that I own.

Ben Gagnon, who was recently promoted to CEO of Bitfarms, has been appointed to the board of directors. Founder and former chairman Nicholas Bonta has stepped down from the board and will be replaced by the lead director, Brian Hallett, who is now the independent chair. And Liam Wilson will be the new COO effective August 26. So what’s this all about? This is part of their plan to try and keep Riot from buying them. I don’t know how this is all gonna go down. I’m still hoping that Bitfarms may manages to stay independent. Bitfarms has a huge amount of current and available energy and that they are very rapidly powering up with, miners here in the United States, in Canada, where they’re from. Bitfarms is out of Canada and also down in South America, in Argentina specifically.

I think long term, they have a very bright future, but right now, because of hash prices, because just all the stuff, they’re not really doing that great. Riot Platforms has increased their ownership in Bitcoin or, excuse me, in Bitfarms to 18.9%. They bought another 1000000 Bitfarms shares, bringing their total up to about 85,300,000 shares. So I think Ryan is doing this, to be honest, because they need the power. I think that’s what this is all about. We’ll see how it works out. I try not to get into that stuff too much, but it’s just one of the interesting things going on in the space.

Let’s talk about some software updates. A few. Tails 6 dot 6 is out. So Tails is an operating system that’s a it’s a I think it’s called a live operating system. So you boot it from like a USB drive, stick or whatever. Or I think you could even do it from a like a DVD as well. And when you do that, you don’t interact. So you you you boot the computer off the USB stick essentially, and and you’re running an operating system, Ubuntu, a version of Ubuntu if I’m not mistaken, but definitely Linux. And you are not touching the the hardware, the hard drive, or whatever is the flash drive of that computer.

You can actually save onto the USB drive if you need to, but what this does, it enables you to build a very secure environment. So why would you do this? I’m actually writing an article right now, a document, whatever, about how to use tails, seed signer, and Sparrow to manage your Bitcoin because this is probably one of the most elegant and safe ways of doing this. So, anyways, they’ve got a new version now. I’m not gonna go into the release notes on that, but just some updates of packages, essentially. Simpleax, who’s a very, very well done, like, chat service or whatever, releases version 6. They also raised $1,300,000 from Jack Dorsey and Asymmetric VC. I don’t know who Asymmetric VC is, but, that’s cool.

They’re getting support in order to continue to build a very, very high quality open source project. If you have family members or whatever that you need to communicate with and you’re concerned about using, I don’t know, imessages or text messaging or whatever, might be something you wanna look into. And I threw this in here as well. The validating lightning signer version 0.12 is out. This is essentially a beta version from what I can tell, but this is a way so one of the things and I’ve talked about this before, but one of the things with lightning nodes, essentially you have money that is kind of at risk. It’s your your keys are there on the lightning node itself.

It’s very much connected with lightning node and, you know, it’s a security risk. And some of these lightning nodes are getting to to have a lot of Bitcoin on them. Right? They’re large or many many high bandwidth or not bandwidth, high, Satoshi channels, and, you know, that adds up. You oh, you open a 1000000 sat channel between you, your node, and somebody else, and so on and so forth. You end up with a lot of Bitcoin tied up, and it’s again, it’s kind of at risk because it’s right there. So this is a way to remove that risk where the keys are not on the actual node, and you essentially can sign for stuff remotely.

I do expect this to become a very valuable part of the ecosystem, whether it’s this one or something very similar. That’s why I am making note of it even though it’s very early, it seems, in its development cycle. It has a lot of promise. This is not I think they actually said this is beta or whatever, but it’s getting close to being, you know, ready for production. Also, Phoenix had a new release, Phoenix lightning, 2 dot 3 dot 2, which brought some additional features to the Apple users. If you have Phoenix, you might wanna take a look at that. Alright.

That’s it for tonight. I’m I’m gonna skip the kind of the end preamble preamble preamble would be in at the start. The end wrap up, whatever you wanna call it. You guys know who I am. You know what I’m out here doing. I’ve been doing this a long time. I hope this brings you value. If it does, simply I ask that you you can support this show in a number of ways, but, you know, grab a podcasting 2 point o app. I think, frankly, it’s the best experiences out there in the podcasting space, transcripts, chapters, all this kind of stuff. And if you hook up a lightning wallet to one of those, then you can support the show by boosting our streaming just like Gulag bound did, just like so many other supporters have done over the years, and I’m very grateful for the support that’s been shown.

One of the best ways that you can support the show though simply is just telling somebody about it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and I’d love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I’m on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social, and you can always email me at Macintosh at satoshis dash plebs dot com. Of course, there’s a website at stoshisplebs.com. And as our friend Gulag Bounds said, stay humble, stack sat. Go out, make a great week. I’ll talk to you also.