Episode 160

Bitcoin Weekly Close

BTC – $63,137

Bitcoin Block at Time of Recording

833,046

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 March 4th, and this is episode 160 of Satoshi’s Plebs. I’m your host, McIntosh, and today’s episode is should you be all in? Right. What did McIntosh learn today? Well, when you can’t hear yourself in your headphones, even though it’s showing squiggly lines on the Reaper screen, that doesn’t mean that it’s actually recording properly. I just recorded 30 some odd minutes of content. I thought it was pretty good and went back, and it was horribly I don’t know what was wrong. I ended up rebooting my Mac and tested it just a minute ago, and everything seems to be fine. But hey. Welcome to satoshi’s plebs, of course. Today’s episode, like I said, should you be all in, we are gonna jump into the market update first.

Alright. So we did have a ripper of a week. I mean, let’s be honest. So last week, we closed at, like, 51.7 or so. Right now, I’ve got a closing for the week of 63,137, which means we gained over $10,000 in a week. That is crazy. I said that most likely we were gonna be heading up. I would not have guessed this far or this strong really. I think I said we might go up to 64 or at least in the next few weeks, we would go up, but we have gone up. We held that for a little bit, fell back to, like, 61, and then went right back up. So we’ve not really had a break. It is consolidated very nicely at this level and now it’s starting to push up higher.

So looking at the charts, and the Bollinger Bands in particular, like I’ve been talking about in the past, I fully expect us to actually have another breakout from here, probably early this week being pushed on by these ETFs. And we will maybe even potentially see 69,000 or basically our all time high this week. I think that’s a possibility. You’re only talking about 1% move from here, if I’m doing that math correctly or at least very close to that. What? $6,000 essentially, and that is very doable. We could do that in a day. We could do that in a day. I said, we were probably gonna see a $10,000 candle, meaning of what daily move, this cycle. And I’m really starting to believe that because as crazy as this sounds, we are just getting started. We have not even reached the happening yet. Oh, and by the way, February was the biggest dollar move ever in terms of a monthly from open to close, and I don’t know what the figure was exactly.

We may continue to see records like that broke as we move through this cycle. Our block height at time of recording is 833,000 and 46, which does mean that we are now less than 7,000 blocks from the next halving. Our difficulty adjustment, Upcoming is 1.33% at this point down, although we’re very early. We did get a downward difficulty adjustment a couple of days ago on 29th, a welcome one. Our transaction pool itself, is filled to overflowing once more. It’s 1.06 gigabytes, and we are sitting at 46 sats per v byte. So getting a little pricey again.

Just a few days ago, I was transacting, you know, with 14, 15 sats per vbyte, so a third of this. It was kinda nice, but, well, that’s kind of the way things go these days. It fluctuates definitely. Let’s talk about our topic this week. Should you be all in? So what is Macintosh talking about? It’s real simple. There’s a meme going around, Bitcoin, Twitter, Bitcoin, Noster, whatever. People who are all in. Jack Maller famously has come out a few days ago. He not well, in the last month, maybe. He’s the CEO, the founder, CEO, whatever of Strike, the Strike app, which I talk about on here from time to time. And he is saying that he’s on Bitcoin standard. In other words, he pays for everything in Bitcoin.

And I wanted to discuss that a little bit. It’s a great ideal. It is something that we will all be on one day, I believe. I believe very strongly, and I’ve said this multiple, multiple times on this podcast. I believe that Bitcoin will be the global reserve currency. In other words, what nations trade with each other. You know, now it’s oil or dollars or gold or whatever they can come up with. I do believe, it’s typically dollars, by the way, but regardless, I do believe that these national level settlements will one day and maybe not even very long, the majority of them, the vast majority of them will be in satoshis, be in Bitcoin.

I also believe that that step is kind of necessary in order for worldwide adoption of Bitcoin to take place. I believe that there will be countries like El Salvador right now where you can transact in Bitcoin on a daily basis. You can pay for everything, this type of technology, without that global adoption and without those nation states using Bitcoin as a form of legal tender, it does frankly make it very difficult to operate on this Bitcoin standard, to not use fiat, to not use dollars or euros or whatever it is that you operate in.

However, I do believe that that is coming. In the meantime, what do we do? That is going to depend on the individual. I am not going to tell you you should be doing everything in bitcoin. That may not be possible for you. It will certainly be easier if you’re younger, if you’re single, if you don’t have a family to deal with or worry about or sorry. Whatever the politically correct way is to put that. You know, those type things. It will certainly be easier if you live in El Salvador, for example. In the United States, transacting in Bitcoin legally is like a IRS taxable transaction, and then you gotta deal with cap gains and it’s a big mess.

So that will end up changing, I believe, ultimately. But in the meantime, you either break the law or you don’t operate that way, as far as I can tell. Now I do things like I pay for, for example, my Bitcoin miners in Bitcoin. So, they have a monthly fee essentially for the electrical cost of the miners, that I had to pay. And so the miners mine Bitcoin, and I turn around with that Bitcoin, and some of that goes to pay for the hosting of the miners. And that transaction takes place completely in Bitcoin. So you can certainly say, I’m all in on that.

It also happens to be the most convenient way to do it and the cheapest and the fastest. So that’s what I do in that case. Can I go down to my grocery store or my local vegetable stand like I did today and bought some vegetables for a soup that I made tonight? No. Can’t do that. They don’t take it. I could go talk to them. Maybe at some point, we get that set up, but then at this point, there’s no clear path for me paying that legally. Doesn’t mean I couldn’t do it, but legally in Bitcoin. I do hope that changes. I believe that it will change, and it may not even be that long. And your nation may be different. If you are fortunate enough to live in El Salvador, for example, that’s certainly not an issue.

Good place to live if you happen to be very, very pro Bitcoin, I guess, you could say. In my circumstance where I have a family and a career and a house and so on and so forth, that’s a lot more difficult for me. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in Bitcoin. It doesn’t mean that I don’t save in Bitcoin. I talked to you guys here on the Satoshis Club podcast all the time about DCA. Now I’m DCA with my miners. You can DCA with your strike app or however it is that you happen to do that. Maybe you’re buying from someone at your local Bitcoin meetup or this kind of thing. That would probably be preferable to strike, to be honest, although it’s not quite as convenient.

But regardless of how you’re doing that, that is a Bitcoin as a store of value. That is not Bitcoin as a currency. That’s not Bitcoin as a means of exchange. I’m exchanging Bitcoin for bananas or whatever. Right? That is a lot more difficult in the United States certainly at this point. Go to Bitcoin jungle down in Costa Rica where they have a, you know what’s what’s the word that they use for that? But it’s the the people in that place operate essentially on a Bitcoin standard. You can go operate you can buy, sell with Bitcoin with a lightning wallet.

Same place, Bitcoin Beach down in El Salvador. In fact, theoretically, in El Salvador, you can operate everywhere on Bitcoin, although that’s so far not proven to be the case. I think, ultimately, it will. It’s going to take people time to adapt to that. But where do I see this all going? Well, the regulations will get sorted out. I believe given the market, you know, I’m a doom and glimmer if you wanna call it that. I just call what I see. We’ve got 34 and a half trillion dollatrs of debt here in the United States. The dollar is dead. It’s just not gone yet. And we will see more and more money flow into Bitcoin.

We will see more and more uses. It will become easier to do that. We will see nations ultimately kind of a seed to that. And it may be after they’re trading in Bitcoin with each other. So we may be at a global reserve currency status, and then suddenly, France says, well, Bitcoin’s legal tender. Maybe the euro is as well, but you can operate in Bitcoin and there’s no capital gains, problems with that. I don’t know how you separate that out because ultimately, Bitcoin is a currency. So I I’m not sure they don’t want to lose that tax and I’ve referenced this before.

From a governmental perspective, you know, the government doesn’t wanna lose that tax on that capital gains from the savings aspect of it. But, ultimately, Bitcoin is a currency. And if it’s a currency, then I don’t see how you have cap gains on that at all. And I think, ultimately, nations will be forced to accede to that especially if, say, Bhutan comes along. Now Bhutan’s a very small country, but let’s say they’re saying over here, you know, Bitcoin can be used freely anywhere. There’s no taxes on it, all this kind of stuff. El Salvador says the same thing or I don’t know what’s the island that they’re at this week. By the way, that’s a great conference of Madeira. It’s in the eastern it’s in the Atlantic off the court coast of Portugal.

Great conference. I did not go, but they do stream it live or they did stream it live on YouTube. You can go back and watch. There’s very long videos, 9 hours for the 1st day, but it’s high quality content, and I would recommend that you take a look at that. Places like Madeira, maybe they operate on a Bitcoin standard sooner than the United States or the EU in general. Who knows how all this is going to play out, but ultimately, countries will be forced to recognize Bitcoin as a currency. And at that point, it becomes very easy to operate on this so called Bitcoin standard. I want you to do what’s comfortable for you. And by the way, the person in Africa who’s operating on $2 a day US dollars, don’t tell them they have to be on a Bitcoin standard.

Why do you say that, McIntosh? Everybody needs to be on a Bitcoin standard. With the volatility of Bitcoin at this point, that does not make sense for somebody in Sub-Saharan Africa to operate on Bitcoin standard. Plain and simple. If you don’t understand that, then maybe you should go to Sub Saharan Africa and spend some time. When the price of the asset maybe we shoot through 69,000 and maybe we go past a 100,000 this year. I think that’s probable at this point. I don’t know how high we’re gonna go and I’m not gonna guess. But whenever we get there, probably at the end of 2025 according to our kind of historical 4 year cycle.

What’s gonna happen? Well, history tells us that we’re going to drop 50, 60, 70, maybe 80%. So tell that person in Sub Saharan Africa who’s living on the equivalent of $2 a day of US dollars. Oh, yeah. By the way, your savings are gonna be cut in half or you’re spending because they don’t even make enough to save any. So I’m not going to impose that on them. I’m gonna say, I wanna introduce Bitcoin to them. I’m gonna explain it to them if they understand it at least to a decent amount and they understand what’s going on. If they choose to save in it, that’s their business. But if they choose to continue to operate day to day in some digital US dollar or equivalent, who am I to tell them that they can’t do that?

So I guess that’s probably an area where I and Maxi’s would disagree, but that’s okay. So let’s wrap all this up. I don’t wanna make this too long because I’ve already recorded this twice. My voice is giving out, and I’m just kinda tired. But, anyways, you figure that out. I do think it’s very interesting. I’ve got a link, and I can’t bring it up right now, although I did earlier. So, hopefully, I’ll be able to explain this as best I can. Fidelity, who’s one of the major ETF, Bitcoin investors, and they have been involved in Bitcoin for a long time, by the way, far longer than these ETFs. But they put out a report recently, which essentially said, hey. You should start thinking about Bitcoin as an investor.

This is from a traditional financial institution. These people are conservative. They’re not going to rush into things. And they’re telling people, you should allocate between, you know, 1 – 5% or something like that into Bitcoin as part of your portfolio. And, oh, by the way, it may have outsized returns. Why did they say that? Because they look at the same data that we do that if you go back 15 years, pick any 4 year period there, Bitcoin outperforms the stock market. Is Bitcoin early? Certainly in terms of financial technology, if you wanna call it that. Absolutely. Are these companies conservative? Yes, they are. Do they realize that Bitcoin is moving in a big way? Yes. They do.

Do they want their investors to benefit from that? Yes. They do. Should you be aware of that? Probably. When they’re telling 40, 50, 60 year old investors, you should be investing 0, 1, excuse me, 1 to 5% of your wealth, which in some cases can be a lot into Bitcoin because of the outsized returns of that, you should pay attention. Are those people all in? Obviously not. Should you be all in? Most likely not. But you should be working towards that and ultimately one day, we all will be and I will enjoy being there because one of the goals of my life is to provide a sound currency money for my children and my grandchildren, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m in this.

So there you go. Alright. So we’re gonna go ahead and move on. We did not have any boost this week. We did have a lot of streaming. I went back and added it up. It’s about 200 and, 2500, excuse me, sats of streaming, and I do appreciate that there was multiple people who were streaming. So thank you very much for that. Of course, here at Satoshi’s Plebs, we I’m striving to get 25,000, sats an episode, a 100,000 a month because that will enable me to kinda buy some things that I want to start maybe going to some of these conferences. I probably wouldn’t have gone to, Madeira. That’s I would love to go, but, man, that’s a flight from here to, basically, Portugal.

Anyways, it does look like they’re having a fabulous time, so that’s cool. But, yeah, it would it would enable me to do more, essentially. I’d like to upgrade my microphone, for example. This microphone is more than a few years old, and it’s a pretty low end mic. And I think it’s time to upgrade it, to be honest, but things like that. So, the money that comes in, the sats that come in, that’s what it’s ultimately going to go for. So, anyways, Satoshi’s Plebs is a value for value podcast where we don’t have ads. We don’t have sponsorships. I don’t do anything like that. I depend on my users to support the podcast.

I do this for a very specific reason. I don’t want sponsorship by Ledger, Trezor, any of these hardware manufacturers of wallets or any of the stuff that could possibly break or could possibly have issues. And then I would be journalistically maybe inclined not to talk about that because they’re paying me money. So I don’t go into that a whole lot anymore, but, yeah, that’s kind of the deal. Right? I always want to keep communication open between me and the users. I tell you directly, I use KaboomRacks. Why? Because I think that they’re the best out there right now. Are they perfect? No. I will tell you.

Just recently, we resolved some issue issues with invoicing, and I told them. I said, I like you guys. You do a great job, good customer support, all of that. Your invoicing stinks. I hope they fix it. Because as I grow in my mining business, eventually, it will be enough of an irritant that I will go somewhere else even though that’s a lot of trouble. Anyways, I don’t wanna take money from Kaboom Racks to say, sponsored by Kaboom Racks. Why? Because I won’t be able to talk about them in the same way. So anyways, I do depend on y’all for that. That’s called treasure. You can do that in a couple of ways by streaming sats like our listeners did this week, or sending in a boost where you say, send me 500 sats. And when you do that, you can send me a message and say, hey, McIntosh.

Great show. Hey, McIntosh. That whole thing about the Bitcoin standard, I appreciate that. Hey, McIntosh. What are you doing, man? Oh, and by the way, real quick about the market stuff. I would love to hear some feedback from y’all about that. I’m debating kinda trimming that back. I certainly don’t wanna make it anymore, but I kinda feel like I love to talk about this stuff, but I also I feel like maybe some people don’t necessarily want to spend the time listening to it. Now with chapters, you can skip it. But if enough people really don’t want it, then I’ll at least slim it back a great deal.

So send me a boost. Let me know what you think about that. Bury that one down in the end. We’ll see who listens to that. I may only get one response to that, but that’s okay. There’s a whole list of podcast 2.0 apps at https://podcastapps .com. If you’ve never heard of them, things like Fountain, things like Podcast Guru, both of those that I use. You hook them up to a lightning wallet and you can stream sats. You can support shows. You can boost all of that kind of stuff. Other ways you can support, please go post a review about the podcast. Say, I love this podcast, whatever.

Tell your friends about it. I want this show to grow. I want our audience to get bigger, and the best way to do it is those kind of things. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at MacintoshFintech. I’m a mastodon@macintosh@podcastindex.social. You can reach me by email at macintosh@satoshis-plebs. com. And, of course, we have a website there as well. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. Let’s go for 69,000 this week. I’ll talk to you soon.