Episode 085

News and Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_Money_and_Credit

Eurozone inflation drops to 10 percent

Kraken Layoffs of 1,100

Alex Gladstein IMF Essay

Twittersphere

Vladimir Putin asks for a Digital Payment System

Il Capo Thread on Mental Game and Time Factor

Binance auditor, Armanino LLP

DCG, Genesis and Greyscale

Lyn Alden

December 04, 2022 Weekly Close (USD)

BTC – 17,130.49

ETH – 1,280.26

ADA – 0.322750

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

I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.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

Rock Guitar Intro 07 by TaigaSoundProd

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/8342-rock-guitar-intro-07

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

Funky Life by WinnieTheMoog

Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/6040-funky-life

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

Transcription

Hey SatStackers, it’s December the 5th and this is episode 85 of Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency. I’m your host McIntosh, today’s episode is about sound money vs stable money. Of course no one on this podcast is a financial advisor and all information presented here is for informational purposes only. Now that we have the legal stuff out of the way, let’s jump on in.

Alright, we’ll start off with the market update. We had a little bounce this week, finally. Not sure how high this bounce is going to go. Have a little Santa rally maybe, but we’re certainly not out of the woods yet. We are at $17,130.49 for Bitcoin at the closing, $1280.26 for Ethereum, and 32.3 roughly cents for ADA. Bitcoin was up $700, somewhere right around there. Didn’t break $1000 upwards, but some decent upward movement. So that’s all we’re going to do for the market update this week, not really going to talk about anything else. This has not proven itself yet. We can still see a downturn. Of course, my long-standing advice always is in play, DCA.

Before we jump into the weekly topic, I do have a couple of items of errata. I made a couple mistakes last week. So if you’ll recall what I was talking about, the computation and long-term inflation, 2% over 80 years was the example I gave. I said that was 160% and I was absolutely incorrect. This is why I had trouble with math in college. I actually, honestly, if I’d have thought about it, I should have known that wasn’t correct. All I did was multiply 80 times too, of course, but it compounds. So it’s actually much higher than that. It’s like money in a savings account. This is not a good form of it. I found an inflation calculator. I plugged in, just as an example, $100 at start of 2022, this year, ending in 2102, so 80 years in the future, with a future rate of 2%. This is the so-called 2% inflation rate that our Federal Reserve targets.

By the way, I saw a figure from back in 2012 that they calculated that since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created to control this money supply, if you want to call it that, the actual inflation rate was 3. something, 3.23%. So roughly, well, for over the last 100 years, they haven’t been able to do that 2%. I’m not sure why people think that that will ever happen. But I digress. What that means at 2% over 80 years is that $100 in purchasing power, so I go out and buy $100 of food, say, in today’s dollars, I would need $468.61 in 2102. So you see that, obviously, that’s a big difference. The percent, actually, if I’m reading this correctly, there it is, a cumulative price increase of 368.61%. There you go. So that was the first errata.

The second one, I gave an example when talking about deflation. I built a computer when I was, I think I was a junior in high school. My very first, and it was an Intel 3D6DX40, if anybody actually remembers those. And I gave that as an example of deflation, it cost me roughly $800. You go out and buy a decent computer these days, you’re going to spend that amount of money. So technically, that’s not deflation, but I would argue certainly that that computer is much more powerful than that computer that I had back in the dawn of computer time, right? And so you can certainly do a lot more with it, that kind of thing. Probably not the best example of deflation, but we’re going to be talking about deflation more very soon, and I think in two weeks. So we’ll just discuss that more then. That’s all I’m going to say about that. That probably wasn’t the best example.

So let’s get going with this week’s topic, which is of course, sound money versus stable money. And that sounds funny. It sounds like I’m saying the same thing, but it’s a lot more nuanced than that. So sound money is what the Austrian economists argue that we should have, basically money that’s backed by something solid. Probably it was gold in, I don’t want to say ancient times, but certainly up until 1913. On the other hand, stable money is what Keynesian economists promote. They say that the government effectively should manage the money supply to keep it stable. So that was their big argument, of course. So these are some of the contrasting viewpoints, of course, of Keynesian versus Austrian economists. But what I want to do is really jump into this and actually talk about both of those and kind of how they arrived at that. Certainly in the case of the Austrians, I can’t so much do the same with the Keynesians. They just kind of came up with it, at least in my opinion, but that’s okay. We’ll talk about that in a minute.

Again, as I said last week, I am biased. Of course I’m biased when I come to this. Everybody is. I very much fall into the Austrian camp, if you want to call it that. The funny thing is, and I’m dead serious about this, the funny thing is that before I ever knew about Austrian economists, I was one and just didn’t know it. I knew that the government, the United States government in this case, was manipulating the money supply, printing more money so to speak, adding money to circulation and thus devaluing the dollar. It made perfect sense to me that that’s what I knew was going on and the end result of that would be inflation. So I was an Austrian economist, if you want to call me that, and I hesitate to say that, but I was an Austrian economist before I knew what that actually meant. So that is my bias, and I’m going to be very upfront about that.

But in preparing for this, I dug up Ludwig von Mises was one of the early fathers, if you want to call it that, of Austrian economics, and he wrote a number of books, I believe. This information about sound money came out of a book called The Theory of Money and Credit, chapter 21 actually, although I’m not really going to probably read this word for word, certainly not the entire chapter. I find this book, because it was written, I guess around a hundred years or so ago, it’s a little bit difficult to read. The verbiage is kind of almost hard to understand, at least in some cases. So I certainly don’t want to just be reading this word for word, however, there are parts of this, I think, that are very important and that give us a really solid understanding of where Austrian economists come from. So let’s talk about sound money first. So first of all, he says that sound money was meant to be a metallic standard. In other words, standard coins or the currency of a nation should have a definite quantity of a standard metal as precisely determined by the laws of the country. Only standard coins should have unlimited legal tender quality. All token coins and all kinds of money like paper should be on presentation and without delay redeemed and lawful standard money. So in other words, if I’ve got a $20 gold piece, it should be a defined amount of gold, whatever that is, and that’s what it should be. It shouldn’t deviate, it should just be. And if I’ve got a $20 bill, it should be able to be redeemed into a $20 gold piece at any bank at any time. At least that’s my reading of what he’s saying.

So one of the things that he said in here is that the sound money principle, which he was literally describing a principle of Austrian economics, has two aspects. It’s affirmative, so it’s positive in approving the market’s choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. In other words, we leave it up to the market. And if you remember, we talked about Austrian economics, it’s market, market, market. We don’t want government intervention, we want to let the market decide. So we leave it up to the market to decide.

Now history has proven that gold was the common standard, and that’s what the market decided. We traded in gold, we said this gold of whatever is worth this amount of money when we trade it, if that makes sense. So it’s affirmative in approving the market’s choice of a commonly used medium of exchange. It is negative in obstructing the government’s propensity to meddle with the currency system. So this arose out of the idea that the government was going to be meddling, so to speak, in currency in order to benefit the government. Now this has a really long history. You can go back to Roman times at least without even trying, and it’s recorded that the emperors would change the money in order to benefit themselves in some way, to finance things, to put money in their pocket, whatever.

When I was looking through this as an example, this is something I’d never heard of, but in 1544 in England under Henry VIII, there was a policy that was introduced which amounted to a currency debasement. So they reduced the amount of gold and silver and coins, and in fact, in some cases, they actually replaced that with cheaper base metals like copper. And he then used that to both pay for his lifestyle and also to fund foreign wars with France and Scotland. I’m not going to go into this into a whole lot of detail, but this is just one example. So even when they were using gold and silver for money, so they would have what most people would consider sound money, the government, in this case, Henry VIII, was still meddling with that to benefit himself in this case, and of course, fund these fights against France and Scotland.

This whole deal here, this debasement, whether it’s a fiat money, as we would talk about later with stable money, or whether it’s debasement of actual sound money, quote sound money in terms of it being gold or silver, some precious metal, the end result was the same. The currency is not worth as much, the people who are doing the debasement are going to be enriched by that, and the people on the bottom, so to speak, suffer. I think we see that in our everyday life right now, actually. So anyways, of course, in the early 1900s when this book was written, I think I’m correct in that.

Of course, Bitcoin wasn’t a thing, the internet wasn’t a thing, all of that. They never talk about digital money here, of course. Now we have this concept of a digital money, of a digital store of value, of a digital currency with Bitcoin. We have a fixed supply, 21 million. The government can’t make more, the government can’t debase it, you can’t take a sat and split it down and take part of it out and add cheaper sats to it or whatever craziness they can come up with. So using Bitcoin as a sound money, in fact, would enforce this principle that the government shouldn’t meddle, that it should be based on something that’s solid, this sound money.

Oh, by the way, I thought this was very interesting. This goes along with just what I was reading, I see it here. It is impossible, I want to read this paragraph. I think this is actually, this is deep, this is profound. It is impossible to grasp the meaning of the idea of sound money if one does not realize it was devised as an instrument of protection of civil liberties against despotic inroads on the parts of government. So this is actually, according to Ludwig, this is why sound money was created. I think I can agree with this. The demand for constitutional guarantees and for bills of rights was a reaction against arbitrary rule and the non-observance of old customs by kings. That is certainly true. I think most people would agree with that. The postulate of sound money was first brought up as a response to the princely or a monarchy practice of debasing the coinage, just like what I was talking about with Henry VIII. It was later carefully elaborated and perfected in the age which, through the experience of the American continental currency, the paper money of the French Revolution and the British Restriction period had learned what a government can do to a nation’s currency system. I thought that was interesting.

So basically, according to Ludwig, first of all, ideologically, sound money belongs in the same class with political constitutions and bills of rights. So it’s a fundamental thing, and I agree with this. We have, according to our constitution, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, they don’t talk about money in our constitution too much. I think there’s some verbiage in there about the government managing money, but not in this manner. And actually, we did see during the early American history, there was a lot of issues with money. But a fundamental issue, a fundamental right, in my opinion, should be someone’s ability to know that the government, the currency that’s being used by a country is not just going to evaporate and go away tomorrow, or 20 years from now, or 100 years from now, if possible.

Now, if we’re dealing in gold, I can take a gold coin from the time of Julius Caesar and it’s still worth money. Now, it may have value because of its historical, but it’s gold. It’s maybe an ounce of gold or whatever. I can sell that for my currency, US dollar in this case. I can’t do that with whatever the German mark, I think it was, of the Weimar Republic, post World War I, prior to World War II, during the hyperinflation period, when their money became worthless.

If my, say, I don’t know, great-great-grandfather had passed down a hundred thousand marks from that time period, it would be worthless, other than for the historical value of it. You see the difference. I hope you see the difference. One is sound money, one is not. Now, if I have great-great-grandchildren, am I going to be able to pass the US dollar down to them? I would argue that statistically, most likely, that’s not going to happen. Can I pass Bitcoin down to them? Well, that remains to be seen, but we know that Bitcoin has a plan through 2140, at least, to manage this mining of Bitcoin, and the release of Bitcoin, so to speak, until we reach that 21 million, and it’s not going to hyperinflate away.

From a sound money point of view, that very much seems like sound money, even though it’s digital, it’s not a physical thing. All right. So let’s talk, on the other hand, about the second part of this, stable money.

Stable money was actually originally defined as money that is managed so its value does not change. That’s no longer actually used. It’s been redefined as money that is managed so its value changes at some fixed predictable rate, the interest rate. The principles of stable money require an authority to control this supply of money, so fluctuations in that value of money don’t create financial disruptions like recessions, panics, and deflation. Now, we’re simply talking about governmental bodies, the Federal Reserve, in our case, from, in theory, independent central bank or whatever. Given that that’s what the definition of stable money is, I think it would be very apparent that that is what the Keynesian economists try and do. So I think it’s interesting, first of all, that they redefined the actual definition when they figured out we can’t actually control inflation, and so now we’re going to have a target of 2%, which I just told you a few minutes ago that after roughly a hundred years of this, they had not been able to achieve that. Now think about that. They’ve had a hundred years since 1913 when this kind of kicked off with the creation of the Federal Reserve, and yet inflation over that period of time is three point something odd percent, which again, that doesn’t even sound too bad, except think about that over a lifetime. And again, the generational value is just siphoned off. There’s no way, it’s more like, well, when grandpa was born X number of 50 years ago or 70 years ago, milk was this, and now it’s this, and that’s okay. It’s not crazy, but it’s not just that, it’s all of the assets that the average person might be able to put together, it gets eroded over time by this. So I think it’s a lot more, I really want to say evil than it sounds when it’s done on purpose, which it is. They are literally trying to keep it at this theoretical target, but they don’t say 0%, they say 2% now, because that’s closer to reality than the actual, 2% is closer to three point whatever than 0%, you see.

Stable money people, Keynesian economist, let’s just call them that, are always going to favor what’s called fiat money, and you’ll hear me say fiat money, fiat money, fiat money, I say it all the time, fiat money is money that has no intrinsic value. It’s the US dollar bill, it’s a euro, it’s a Japanese yen, there’s nothing backing that. It’s backed by the trust and faith in the US government in our case. That’s what it’s backed by.

One of the issues, the differences here is that stable money advocates, so Keynesian economists, they’re going to distrust the market. What I mean by the market is pure capitalism, uncorrupted, not controlled by gigantic companies who can manipulate things or whatever. That statement alone is worth at least an episode or two of discussion, but we’re going to move on from that for right now. They distrust markets in two different ways. Keynesian economists believe that market controlled money will cause recessions, panics, deflation. They would argue that even the Great Depression was caused essentially by sound money. They believe that market controlled money, that capitalism, will periodically cause recession, panics, and deflation, and that therefore markets must be replaced by governmental actions, the government being the only entity strong enough to act in the place of the market.

As I said last week, probably repeatedly, the Keynesians are advocates of government intervention. They also believe that their private citizens who make up the markets, they’ll hoard money, gold coins if it has actual intrinsic value, causing insufficient money to be available to fuel economic expansion, causing recessions, panics, and deflation. That’s hogwash to me. I’m sure there were people who hoarded money back when it was actual money, but in general, I don’t think that’s what really happened. How successful has this stable money policy been? We’ve seen this. It’s been put into place, it’s in the majority, if not all of the Western Europe of the United States, Canada, certainly Mexico, and Japan. Some of these for a long time.

Well, one of the places that this whole idea about stable money and Keynesian economy has really, it’s probably the strongest place is actually Japan. Japan has been battling recession and deflation since 1990, and they’ve not recovered. In fact, with this latest round of global unrest and COVID and disruption in supply chains, their economy is suffering even more, and their GDP to debt ratio, for example, is continuing to skyrocket up. There’s certainly the United States and the Eurozone, neither one is doing well. The Eurozone itself is actually doing worse. In large part, I believe because the United States dollar is still considered the global monetary reserve, and that gives us, the United States, a benefit in terms of monetary policies. Our inflation is roughly seven, seven and a half percent. The Eurozone, I think, is right at 10% now.

To answer the question directly, does stable money actually work? We know that stable money economies, Keynesian run economies, like the United States, like the Eurozone, like Japan, they still experience recessions. They still experience panic and deflation, despite these so-called stable money regimes. And then one of the things, deflation to a Keynesian economist is terrible. They hate that. So they promote this message that we have to prevent deflation. We’re going to have to increase our debt to expand our money supply so that we can spend money. Remember, Keynesian economy, it’s all back to that aggregate spending, that total spending. All right. But deflation really shouldn’t even be possible because one of their ideas was that deflation was created by the market, by capitalism, and there you go. It’s not true.

So that kind of wraps that up, at least in terms of sound money. Next week we’ll move on. Probably I think maybe next week we’ll be talking about inflation and then we’ll talk about deflation. I don’t know if I’ll fit those in the same week. We’ll just have to see. I kind of wanted to break this down into probably four weeks, so we’ll wing it. That’s what we do around here, right? Not really, but we’ll see how it goes. All right. Got a couple of things left.

So first of all, of course, we want to thank our supporters. We’ve had some supporters this week. Both of these were in relation to the overview of Austrian and Keynesian economics that we did last week. And so we got two boosts. 150 SATS came in from ETIC Investment, ETIC Investment is what it is. I think I copied and pasted that, so I thought originally it was ETC Investment, but I do believe it’s ETIC Investment. Whoever you are, I really appreciate it. They sent a message that says, wow, I like this podcast. It’s perfect for to learn about economy and finance. It’s good night. So I appreciate that message a lot. I’m glad you enjoyed it. I would argue I probably am not the best about economics. It’s not my field, but I’m kind of forcing myself to learn about it even more because I do think it’s really important to what’s going on in the world today. I’ve always kind of had an interest in kind of macroeconomics, or at least I have for a number of years. So it is kind of something I have, I’ve been spending some time on, but I’m getting more intentional and in depth about it. I mean, good Lord, if you go read this book I was just quoting, reading from earlier, you’re pretty serious, I would have to say. And then we also got 100 Sats from Spiral. No message, but I super appreciate that, of course. Thank you very much.

I also wanted to go through our top 10 lists. So first week of the month, go through our top 10 real quick. I’ll just go from the top, number one, 56,864 Sats in total, the Mere Mortal’s podcast. And I’ll run through the list. Of course, I appreciate everybody on this list. I appreciate all the listeners and supporters. Jenny Jams at 7865 was number two, signs of new growth at 3,300, number three. Martin, I think I’ve got your total correct at 3,056 for number four. Patar at 2,200, I actually think that’s 2,222, it’s row ducks. Again, Satoshi Stream lightning node setup that I use, they rightfully take off 1%. I wish they would actually report the total because it blows stuff like this off and it’s kind of annoying. 1881 from defunct mode, number six. Seven is pipipooch, P-I-P-I-P-U-C-H, 706. Number eight, 495 Sats at user 5303696025436824. Number nine, 470 Sats, five times nine is 45. I thought that was one of the most unique usernames I’ve seen. And then number 10, 442 Sats, user 5175386301288162, so shout out to all of those supporters. You can be on that board. You see there what it’s taking these days. The numbers are of course going up over time and there we go.

So where do we go from here? News and notes. Not a whole lot of news this week. I’m going to jump basically straight to the Twitter. I’ve actually, I figured out something, I’m a little slow sometimes maybe, I don’t know. I always tweet basically about any news item I see that I’m probably going to talk about. So what I’ve started doing is just tweeting everything and then we’ll talk about my tweets. So it’s part of, I tweet and I tweet about the news, I retweet other people’s stuff, whatever. You can follow me on Twitter at McIntoshFintech. I’m on Mastodon as well, McIntosh at podcastindex.social. We’ll go through the rest at the end, but let’s go over my tweets. So this week, some of these I’ll be very brief on, some maybe we’ll elaborate more, but this will cover the news of the week. I think I will actually go in reverse. That’ll make it easy, easier.

Our friend Sam Bankman Fried, Sam Bankman Fried, yeah, that’s the guy, oh man. So look, the last tweet I posted earlier tonight, this other guy tweeted and I actually retweeted this. He said, SBF is the CSW, speaking of Craig Wright, I think is his name, of crypto. So Craig Wright was a guy who claimed to be Satoshi, the creator of Bitcoin. He clearly is not. It’s a big sham. He’s actually sued people in court, all kinds of things. He was definitely around early in Twitter, early in Bitcoin’s history, but it’s very clear. He’s not the creator of Bitcoin. Anyways, with that as the backstory, so SBF is the CSW of crypto. He’ll waste lots of time with nonsense and I agree with this. This is ridiculous. Not rubbernecking is hard, but increasingly necessary. Let’s try and leave him in 2022. I am going to stop talking about him fairly soon as he becomes very irrelevant. I’ve never mentioned CSW because he’s irrelevant to Bitcoin, to the entire crypto ecosphere and SBF is going to very rapidly join that group though. Obviously he’s directly impacted a lot of people over the last month or so, whatever it’s been. But anyways, it’s becoming very obvious, SBF, FTX, they spent a lot of money making donations to politicians and he’s getting special treatment. He’s still not in jail. He’s still not been charged with anything, even though it’s very obvious what in fact has gone on.

So Representative Waters from Congress actually requested, so this is the tweet and why we’re doing this on Twitter is beyond me. I wasn’t aware that Twitter now was the official governmental communications channel, but okay. Let me read this. She said three days ago, SBF FTX. So that is actually his Twitter handle. We appreciate that you’ve been candid in your discussions about what happened at FTX. Here’s what he said, by the way, over the last few weeks. I don’t know what happened. I’ll have to look into it. It wasn’t me. I’m clueless. I can’t even code. That’s basically what he said. So this is the CEO, the guy in charge of both of these companies. I guess he wasn’t technically the CEO of Alameda, but he ran everything. He doesn’t know anything. Okay. So anyway, she said that your willingness to talk to the public will help the company’s customers, investors, and others. To that end, we would welcome your participation in our hearing on the 13th of December. So he replied earlier tonight, 10 hours ago, Representative Waters and the House Committee on Financial Services. Once I have finished learning and reviewing what happened, I would feel like it was my duty to appear before the committee and explain. I’m not sure that will happen by the 13th, but when it does, I will testify.

And I retweeted, and this is exactly how I feel about this, since you were in charge of the entire money launderer client investment scheme, maybe you could review those documents while detained in a high-security prison. Your hubris is stunningly mind boggling, stunningly mind boggling. It would be nice if the Justice Department could become involved. I do not understand, sorry, I just clipped out my audio because I’m a little excited. I do understand. It’s very obvious actually that a lot of client money went to pay off politicians. I see no other explanation. I’m only worried about this because of the people who they’ve lost a lot of money. That’s why I’m worried about it, because this buffoon, I just won’t have any dealings with after this. If he somehow surfaces out of the swamp and manages to do anything somehow after this, I will not be speaking about him. I won’t, other than maybe to say, run, don’t do anything that he’s involved in.

All right, moving on. Here’s came out unemployment forecast 3.7, actual 3.7, non-farm numbers went forecast of 200,000 up. It actually was 263,000, so 263,000 new jobs essentially. There’s these people who think that the Fed is going to start to pivot. In other words, lower interest rates. There’s no incentive to do that. If you remember, I’ve said on a number of occasions, essentially the goal of raising interest rates is to crush the economy back into submission, as weird as that sounds. If jobs are continuing to go up, they’re not going to pivot. They may slow down a little bit. I think in December, we’ll see a half a point increase instead of the last few months. We’ve had 0.75, I should say, percent increase.

Three days ago, the US Department of Justice demands fraud investigation of FTX, claims there’s substantial evidence that SBF and other managers engaged in fraudulent behavior. Just go put the man in handcuffs. This is ridiculous. All right, I’ll stop. Look, I know half y’all listen to me because I get upset about this stuff. It’s not a joke to me. This is seriously the way I feel. It’s very frustrating.

I retweeted one by one of my favorite Bitcoiners, Odell, Matt Odell. He does a podcast. Is it Citadel? I think it’s Citadel Dispatch. He said, if the bottom is in, then I stacked it. If it is yet to be in, then I will stack it. So in other words, he’s stacking stats. He’s doing the DCA thing, and that’s awesome.

Kraken cut their global workforce by 30%. I’m not sure how many people that was. Let’s see. Ooh, 1,100 people. Yikes. They’re bigger than I thought. So 1,100 people get cut. As far as I know, Kraken’s still making money, I don’t know.

Oh yeah, by the way, yet another thing, I apologize. So apparently, SBF has admitted to somebody named Tiffany Fong, who I don’t know who they are, to reopening withdrawals for local Bahamian citizens without authorization, as he didn’t want to be in a country with a lot of angry people in it. There you go. That’s your winner, ladies and gentlemen. By the way, Casa, some of you may like this. I’m not really a fan. Casa used to be a Bitcoin only product. They’re expanding into Ethereum. I’ll just leave it at that. You can look it up if that’s of any interest.

I did actually think this was very important. The European Central Bank came out and said, oh, Bitcoin’s dead, basically. That was the tweet. I’ll read it. It’s not that long. The apparent stabilization of Bitcoin’s value is likely to be an artificially induced last guess before the crypto asset embarks on a road to irrelevance. They looked into it more in depth. I’m excited because now the central banks have taken notice of Bitcoin. We must be almost there.

Very important one here, Alex Gladstein, who writes a lot about human rights and Bitcoin’s role in that, all this kind of very interesting stuff to me, wrote a great article on the IMF. I’ve talked about the IMF before. He did it in depth and spectacularly. I have a link to that in my Twitter. I will probably throw that in the show notes as well.

Germany, unfortunately, their supermarket prices keep going up. German food CPI jumped 21% year over year in November, the highest food price inflation since the start of the statistic, whenever that was. It’s very much higher than other eurozone countries. I don’t understand that part of it. If my German listeners would know why that would be, I’d love to hear from you. German inflation actually did drop first time in 17 months from 10.6 to 10.0. Now I would caution, same thing happened to the United States. A lot of people are getting really excited about this. Maybe that was the top. We’ve certainly seen cases in the past where you had a brief drop and then it continues to keep right on going.

Bitcoinbase, their wallet app, is going to delist BCH, which I believe is Bitcoin Cash, ETC, which is Ethereum classic, XLM and XRP due to low usage. That’s not good for those tokens. I’ll say that. I was going to be talking about XLM and XRP probably right after this series on this economic series if you want to call it that. There’s a relation of them to an ISO standard. JennyJamz mentioned several weeks ago at this point. I’m sorry, Jenny. I haven’t got to it sooner, but I will be getting to it. This does not bode well for that, to be honest. If this is, well, this is not good. All right, I think that’s where we’re going to stop.

They put out a new version of Bitcoin Core 24.0 if you’re running a Bitcoin node.

Yeah, actually, the creditors, and this was a week ago, so I’m definitely going to stop after this. The creditors of our lovely FTX include the SEC for $30 million. Now my question would be, what the heck? Why would the SEC have $30 million in FTX? I don’t know. Things that make you go, hmm.

And there it is. All the news in a nutshell. If you want it more in real time, you can follow me on Twitter. I unfortunately, I just don’t copy all these over to my podcast index social. I don’t have time, to be honest. I just don’t. But you can follow me on Twitter. If you really don’t like Twitter, I understand. You can hear it on here. That’s fine. Okay.

The GWC podcast supports Podcasting 2.0. It’s a value for value podcast with no sponsors and no advertising. By the way, not to get off topic, but I am in the middle of listening to the Miramorals podcast. I think it’s the current one and they are talking about value for value. It’s a fascinating discussion. Someone questioning value for value versus other ways of doing this. If you want to support the podcast and have some time or talent, I could use help with things like chapters, well, not for now, in the future, transcripts and probably a few other things. Treasure is just what it sounds like. If you find the content valuable, you can support the podcast by streaming sats or boosting from a Podcast 2.0 app. That’s also a great way to get me a message. You can get a Podcasting 2.0 app for the optimal listening experience at newpodcastapps.com. If you like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the GWC podcast. Thanks for being here. As always, I hope this has been helpful and I would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at what? McIntosh Fintech. Yay. That’s like the 14th time I’ve said that tonight. And Mastodon at macintosh at podcastindex.social. You can reach me by email at macintosh at genwealthcrypto and of course our genwealthcrypto.com website. Stay humble friends, go out and make it a great week.