Episode 162

Bitcoin Daily Close – March 17th 2024

BTC – $67,592

Bitcoin Block at Time of Recording

835,294

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 18th, and this is episode 162 of satoshi’s plebs. I’m your host, McIntosh, and today’s episode is shiny object syndrome. Alright. Let’s do it. Don’t have much time. Seriously, we’ll begin with the market update, and then we’ll jump right into shiny object syndrome, and we’ll talk about our supporters, of course, news and notes, and we’ll wrap it up and call it a day. I am a little late this week. Yesterday, I am recording this on Monday. Yesterday, I was driving for 12 hours. That was fun. I will say this. I drove through Nashville, the place of the 2024 Bitcoin conference in July. And, apparently, Auburn played Florida for the SEC basketball basketball championship, and I guess Auburn won. And all their fans wearing all their orange were down on the interstate, and we did slow up a bit. But, overall, it was actually a good day, good drive.

Listened to some good podcast, had a long conversation with my wife, with actually no one else around, which is for us is kind of unusual about future things, about things, about none of your business. But, yeah, we had a good time, and, we’re back now. But I was we didn’t get home until 10:30 last night. I was not up for doing any kind of recording after sitting in a car for 12 solid hours yesterday. But here we are. Let’s talk about the market. Today, March 18, 2024, the market did close at $67,592. That’s 67, 592.

And we are at block height. Let me jot this down. Block height 835294. So we have passed 835,000. We do roughly a 1000 blocks a week, maybe a little bit more, And, so there you go. That’s where we’re at. We’re closing in on 840,000 halvening event, which will be around April 19, April 20, which is almost exactly 1 month away. Our difficulty adjustment did go up last time. I think I’ve already talked about that, but it’s looking like 9 days from now. We’re gonna get about a 2% downward adjustment. So that would be nice. I’m all for downward adjustments as a Bitcoin miner.

Our transaction fees right now are okay. Looking at about 18 sets per vbyte for a low priority. Our unprocessed transactions is down to 904 megabytes, so we are slowly drifting down. I do not know if we will clear the mempool, so to speak. I don’t think so, but it would be nice if it were down a little bit and some fees drifted down as well, but we will see. Alright. So that’s it. Oh, and in general, let me do this real quick. I we’re kind of in a tough spot. So we we we did go up. We hit 74,000. That was roughly a week ago. No. That was Thursday.

A week ago, we were actually basically at the same spot we are right now. So we did go all the way up to 74,000, touch it, basically, and then we’ve been marching downwards. Right now, for the last 3 days, we we have kind of been sitting at this level right below 69,000. If we do not break above that, and I mean shortly in the next couple of days, I do believe we will continue to fall down, and we’ll figure out where we’re gonna stop. I do know that there is a lot of buy pressure being put in place from these ETFs. These ETFs are also not buying Bitcoin 247. They only buy it during trading hours, which is one of the funny little things about them.

So I don’t know. Eventually, ultimately, we know that this goes up. It has to. The pressure that’s being put on it is just crazy. And I don’t think we’ve seen the quickest sense yet, so to speak. I think we will actually see stuff that’s crazier. I predicted a $10,000 candle. We’ve already gotten a 5 or $6,000 candle in a day. I think we will see 10 and maybe significantly more. I that sounds ludicrous when we’re sitting here at 67,000, but give us 6 months, and we’ll see. So there you go. That’s my predictions, but, of course, this is not trading advice.

And it’s always what DCA. Buy your Bitcoin. Use the Strike app. Use some tool like that. Buy it on a daily or a weekly basis. I would not recommend at this point that you’d be buying Bitcoin monthly. I think that would potentially be a huge mistake in terms of missing an opportunity as the price moves higher. We’ve already seen, I think, a $10,000 week move if I’m not mistaken. So there you go. Buying at the wrong time, you end up $10,000 less. So alright. That will cover our market. We will move on to this week’s main topic, shiny object syndrome. So like I said, my wife and I took this trip. We went to a conference. It was not Bitcoin related. I’m not here to talk about that conference. But as I’m sitting there, it was funny because one of the speakers was talking about people who cannot decide what they want to do in terms of their in terms of this activity. And she called it shiny object syndrome or something like that. And she was talking about people who go here and do this. People who go there and do that, people go over there and do that, and so on and so forth. And it really got me thinking, Crypto market in general, in my opinion, is shiny object syndrome. And if I look back on my past, it’s kind of one of the reasons why I had issues, so to speak, with the crypto, the altcoin, the casino coin market.

So I wanted to talk about that for just a minute because I’m hoping that there’s people out there listening to this who maybe they wake up and realize, oh, I’ve got shiny object syndrome. I have to buy this, this, this, and this because they’re all so nice. And they make promises that things will do this or that or the other, and invariably, they don’t. Even ETH, in my opinion, will fall. I don’t even talk about ETH on this show. And in fact, there was a major upgrade that just happened in in the last week, and they pulled it off. It worked. Things didn’t crash. But I believe for multiple reasons that in the long term, Ethereum will go away.

So don’t have that shiny object syndrome and say, I’ve got to invest in ETH because ETH might do this. ETH might get an ETF. ETH might run the world’s markets. Whether you believe it or not, it’s my opinion. Let me put it that way. Bitcoin is what will win in the long term. Bitcoin will be the world’s global reserve currency. Bitcoin will be used by nation states. Bitcoin will be used to trade between nation states. Bitcoin will be used for day to day transaction. I have no doubt about that. If you do, my suggestion would be continue to study Bitcoin. And I have no problem with you comparing it to ETH. I have no problem comparing it to Solana. Let’s talk about Solana. Solana is doing, quote, great in terms of prices. It’s up to $200 or so, as I speak. Yep. 195.

You know what? Solana did a week and a half, 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks ago. Solana stopped. How many times has Solana done that since Solana started? I don’t know. 15, 16 times, I think, the last count I saw. Do you wanna base your net worth on that? I mean, these are, like, major outages, like, everything stops. Do you know when the last time the Bitcoin main net stopped? Pleb, it was 10 years ago. That is the stability that I can count on. So don’t get shiny object syndrome and say, well, Solana is going for the moon. Well, maybe Solana does go for the moon, but maybe it’s like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, whose wax melted and fell back to earth.

I don’t want you to do that. I sorry if I mixed up the moon and the sun there, but I think you got the idea. Right? So Bitcoin isn’t exciting enough for you. Well, I’m sorry. My suggestion would be that you would want the product, the asset, the commodity that was boring, but also had the largest market cap possible. See, I don’t want Bitcoin to just be the global reserve currency. I want Bitcoin to be what boomers put their ETF funds into. By the way, more of that in Bitcoin now than gold ETFs. Not that Bitcoin is, now higher than the gold market cap. That’s not true, but it is true.

There are more people who have put or more value in Bitcoin ETFs than in gold ETFs, so let that sink in for just a sink for just a second. I wanna see Bitcoin used by people like Egypt that we’re gonna talk about tonight a little bit, who their currency is crumbling very, very rapidly, and they need a store of value. And that store value could be the US dollar, but the US dollar is also a fiat coin. And over the long term, it too must fail as all fiat currencies do. US dollar, we just have the privilege of owning the current global reserve currency, but that’s being chipped away as we speak.

I want Bitcoin to be used by put things like the BRICS trading group, whatever you want to call it. Why not? Why are they even looking at doing their own cryptocurrency or whatever? Just use the thing that works. Use the thing that moves tremendous value around the world in minutes at very, very low cost. People complain about the cost. Trust me. Try shipping a $1,000,000 of gold from say the United States from New York City to Paris. Go ahead. Let me know how that works out for you. It’s not easy. I can do it on Bitcoin in seconds for nothing, essentially.

A few bucks. Hey. Fees are really high. Okay. It’s $50. Does that matter when you’re talking about $1,000,000? I want people out in the African countryside to have access to Bitcoin in some manner whether that’s lightning network, whether that’s whether that’s a Fedimint or something like that, because that’s better than the currency like the narrow nairo, of Nigeria, the Nigerian currency that’s down, like, 70% or whatever. I can’t even keep up this year. K? I want at the same time for those people if they live in an area that they do not either have reliable power or power at all to have access to power.

And by the way, if we have hydro, if we have a a river, if we even have a large stream flowing through that area, you know what we can do? We can drop a container of Bitcoin miners right there, and we can build a hydro project there that would that would be paid off in just a few years powered by those Bitcoin miners who can provide the the sink for that electricity. The the the use for that electricity until the village has such use for it. And then we just simply pick those miners up and move them elsewhere or we increase the size of the hydro project.

You get the idea and we’ve talked about that a number of times. Tell me, can Ethereum do that? No. I don’t think so. Can Ada do that? Ada is a security. I have no idea why the SEC is not gone after Charles, whatever his name is. I can’t think of his name. Sorry. I apologize, mister Charles. It’s not I’m not being disrespectful. I simply do not remember. He’s in Colorado. He’s the guy who started the thing. He’s the guy who has promised time and time again that ADA was gonna run the world, that ADA was going to be very much valued higher than it is. And yet as I sit right now, ADA is sitting at 64.8 cents and was down to a very low value not too long ago, but I don’t see it being used in Africa. I see Bitcoin being used in Africa. Africa was one of his big markets.

Don’t hear anything about that, but maybe I’m just out of the loop. That is possible. But I wanna go with the with the horse that’s winning, so to speak. And that horse is Bitcoin, and I don’t need these other shiny objects to distract me. And I would encourage you highly not to allow them to distract you. So as I’m sitting in this conference and as here’s this person saying this, and I I have these thoughts, I just wanted to share them with you and make sure because I actually think this is a very profound message. If you figured out the best thing, then go for it.

Don’t. It’s like a horse with blinders. Right? That horse can’t see to the right, to the left. That horse is not distracted. That horse is going straight ahead. So don’t get distracted by these things that are around you. Quick short message, but I hope it’s to the point. And, look, you ultimately choose to do what you wanna do. I’m that’s fine. I’ve got friends who own Doge. I do. 1 of my best friends owns Doge, and that’s fine. But if you’re serious about this, do the research. There’s lots of information out there about Bitcoin. There is information about whatever it is that you might be interested in or ask questions.

Ask questions to the people who are in charge. Man, I cannot believe I cannot think of Charles’ doctor Charles, his last name right there. Anyways, I would not bet on that horse. I think the SEC is gonna have a field day with him when they get to him. Anyways, we’re gonna go ahead and move on to our supporters who I very much appreciate. Of course, we had a great week this week. We had some boost come in. We had a lot of streaming. I’m gonna run through these boost. Gulag Plev, who’s now become a regular listener, I guess. I appreciate that Gulag. Episode 161, last episode, sent in a 1,000 sat boosts, said spot on energy availability increases productivity, which is, yes, exactly my thesis. And mental illness in youth from eating Tide pods and whatever is cool now.

The WEF does not want Africa and developing nations to have more, but for us to have less. Us being the developed countries, Europe, America, right, Japan, places like that. I absolutely 100% agree with that part of the statement. The WEF, the the WEF, the World Economic Forum, the IMF, and the World Bank, they are not for our good and I look, if you don’t believe me about the IMF and the World Bank, I would highly encourage you to read Alex Gladstein’s book. Hidden Repression is the name of the book. I would highly encourage you if you have any doubts about that because he lays it out page after page, footnoted, documented, cross referenced, everything.

You look, it just makes me sick to my stomach now when I hear about, like, Egypt getting a loan from the IMF because I know that is no good for Egypt. It is not. Well, that’s awfully harsh, Macintosh. They need money, Macintosh. Yes. But it is putting them further and further behind. So, anyways, our friend Kyrin over at Miramarals by the way, Kyrin, I owe you some sats. Sorry. I’m I’m behind. I’m just behind. I apologize. I did hear a great episode. I’m in the middle of it. I started it yesterday or the day before on where’s your consistency.

So it’s a great episode. I’m halfway through it. I’ll finish it up, and I do need to send them a boost, a big boost, a big baller boost. No. Maybe not that, but I will send them a bigger than normal boost because I am a little behind. So, anyways, Kyron, all that was for free. Great message. Kyron sent in a row of, sticks, 1111, And he said, yeah. I met the TA I’m not interested in. So he we were talking about the market update type thing. A general market update is fine, smiley face. And, I appreciate that, Karen. I know you’re not a fan of the TA. And I’m as I’ve you probably just saw, I definitely backed off on that. Not it’s not just you. It’s people in general. So that’s all good.

It’s all good. I’ll keep my TA to myself, and that’s fine. I just kinda felt like that segment was getting a bit top heavy anyways, but, hypersensitive Osiris sent us 500 sats. No message, but good to hear from you hypersensitive Osiris. Always good to see you around, and user 846-9391 sent, a 1,000 sats. These were all for the IMF compound sand last week’s episode and said, I really like the new music value for value split outro play, talking about kind of my plans for the future. We’ll talk about that in just a second. For building the community, I personally would just use Nostr.

You could do live Nostr nest for streaming and Amethyst has a group chat function. Not sure if Primal and Domus do too. So Amethyst, Primal and Domus are all essentially chat clients. I do like Nostra Nest. I’ve looked at it. I would honestly like to have more control, and I do not think that the group chat functions work between those 3. I don’t think so. I may be wrong about that, but I do like Nostranest. And if I went that direction, I would certainly use that. It’s a pretty cool little system. I would just honestly like to have control. One of the things, I’m dabbling in thinking about implementing kind of half implemented already, actually about 75% is just plain old IRC.

Because I can have chat.satoshisdashplebs.com and have that go straight to the IRC server and you simply log in with your made up username, with your client, whatever you’re using, and interact. And I and it stays around permanently. I don’t have to worry about nostril nest going down. I know a lot of people do multiple things. I really don’t I’m not a fan of that, and I apologize. Well, I’m not a fan of that. The reason why is now I’ve got 3 things or 2 things to manage instead of 1. I’d really like to concentrate on 1, but we’ll see. So I do appreciate it. I I love the feedback. Thank you. I’m glad you’re gonna like the new, music set. I’ve got the front one. I’ve decided, the group I wanna say it’s Tyrannosaurus Rocks, but that may be the name of the album. I apologize to the gentleman in it.

I did not bookmark it yet. Yeah. Anyways, they have an instrumental track, which I kinda like. Actually, I really like, and I’m gonna cut, like, 15 seconds or so, maybe even a little bit longer and do that in the front. What I would like to do if I can get a mixer, I can kinda fade that in like a professional instead of just dropping it into Reaper like I do. And then I I’m still looking for kind of my exit music. I haven’t and and I, at least for the exit music, I want to rotate that. So I really need to find more than 1. So I don’t know if I’m just being too picky. I probably am, but I also need to get with pod home dotfm, which is my host plan, and see if we can implement this split thing so that they get proper credit when I’m doing that.

But it is coming. I’m working on it. I’m glad to hear that you like it. That’s awesome. Total this week, 6,029 sats. I do appreciate that from everyone. We did, of course, have streaming besides these 1, 2, 3, 4 boost, and I appreciate all of it. It means a lot. And it will ultimately enable me to do some things like upgrade my microphone. Planning on doing that, down the road. So very cool. Alright. News and notes. I got a few things I’m gonna mention, and then we’re gonna kinda wrap this up. Not a whole lot going on. I’d posted some stuff on Twitter, and I thought this was worth going over as normal. There’s usually a few things even if there’s I try and kinda get the, maybe not the mainstream things if that makes sense. I did wanna point out, El Salvador.

I thought this was pretty cool. Essentially, they put all their Bitcoin together in cold storage and then publish the address. So that means you can see how much Bitcoin they’ve got, which is 5,600 and 89 point whatever Bitcoin, which is 406,000,000 US dollars worth. And they’ve been stacking for a couple of years. They’re doing very well. Of course, the price of Bitcoin keeps going up. They are buying a Bitcoin every day according to Naeem. They’re mining Bitcoin as well. And they’re also, I think, putting in money that comes in where people pay, like, taxes or whatever in Bitcoin. So that’s all going into one big fund, and I don’t know what they’re gonna do with that ultimately, but, pretty awesome.

So, anyways, I’m gonna say this one thing. I posted this. We are all Satoshi except for CSW. That stands for Craig Wright. I don’t know what his middle initial is for. You can look it up if you’re interested. He was claiming to be Satoshi. Drug it ended up being dragged into court because of him, frankly. And the court has officially ruled that he is not Satoshi, and I’m going to leave it at that because it turns into a soap opera really quickly. I think the court was absolutely 100% correct, and I hope that that clears up a lot of things and, frankly, makes some Bitcoin core developers much more comfortable because he was causing a lot of legal issues.

Bloomberg said, she’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen. I regret saying inflation was transitory. Right. Because it’s not. Inflation here in the United States is cranking back up, and, you know, Jerome Powell, is the Fed chairman, is backpedaling on we’re gonna cut rates soon because they’re not. I don’t think they’re gonna cut rate. It’s possible not even this year. We’ll see. Okay. Moving on. Naib Bukele also from El Salvador also announced that they’ve congress reform their income tax law for international investments and money transfers, dropping the rate, which I believe he’s talking about capital gains rates, from 30% to 0%. So good for them.

The Biden administration, on the other hand, here in the United States is proposing a 30% tax on electricity used by Bitcoin miners. Okay. So there’s so many things wrong with this, and I could do an entire episode. I’m not going to. I’m sure others will. Obviously, I’m a miner. This would directly hit me in the pocket. I it would make mining in the United States. Basically, you couldn’t do it at least on a scale. Anyways we’ll see how it turns out in Egypt inflation rose 36% Oh, I’m sorry. It went from 30% to 36% in the January February time frame. Food prices were up 50% compared with a year earlier.

And this happened before the 40 percent weakening of the official exchange rate on 6 March, which I talked about last week or so. So I think it’s gonna get uglier in Egypt, unfortunately, and I think that’s about it. I not a whole lot. Yeah. That’s it. Great. So that’s it. So, of course, Club’s podcast supports podcasting 2.0. It’s value for value podcast. I talk about this all the time. I don’t have ads. I don’t have sponsorships. I don’t have anything like that. I depend on people, like hiring for Miramarals, like, the gulag pleb, like, hypersensitive SARS.

And sorry, user number, whatever, I do not not remember your number. You can change that in Fountain, by the way, if you choose to. Of course, you can use a a non diploma. I mean, Macintosh is not my real name, just so you know. I think I and it helps that from time to time. And on Fountain, I use Macintosh. So there you go. I do depend on people like that to support the show so that we can grow it, so that we can reach more people, so that we can do more things. And, anyways, all you do, you can grab a podcasting 2.0 app. Go to, where’s the link? Podcastapps.com.

There’s a whole list of apps there. Try one out if you’re not using one currently. You can hook up a lightning wallet to it or like fountain has it integrated into it. You can send some lightning, send some lightning. Send some sats to that wallet and then you can support podcast like mine. You can stream sats to them while you’re listening. You could do that 10, 20, a 100 sets a minute, whatever. Adam, these days, the the Podfather, he’s, he I said the other day, now it’s 200 is his standard stream. Adam, you can listen to my show anytime you want, buddy. Just kidding.

I’m not jealous. You’re jealous. No. I’m jealous. Anyways, you can do that. You can also boost just like these people did. You can send in a note if you want to or don’t send a note. That’s fine. Let me know what you think if you’d like. But anyways, you can do that. I would highly recommend it. These apps are getting to be much better than, say, the Apple Podcast apps. We support transcripts. We support chapters. Great way to kind of skip around in a podcast. All of of course, streaming and boosting and a number of other things. How else can you support the show? Let’s say you just don’t have the sats to spend, and that’s fine. I get that. How else can you support the show? Go to Apple Podcasts. Go to one of these podcast places and write a review about the show. Tell other people about the show. Let people know about satoshi’s place.

Alright? That’d be invaluable. You can make a clip of the show in the fountain app, at least I know. Make a 1, 2, 3 minute clip from the show of a important part that you think, and it gets put out there. And if I don’t see it, please let me know. But if I I should see it, I can boost it, and you will get that value back. So I’ll boost a current show, 500. Sats. If it’s an older show, 300 sats. Great way for you to make some treasure for the value that you’re providing. I’m putting value out there. I hope you are providing value back whether that’s clipping or telling other people or so on and so forth. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I’m on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. You can reach me email at Mcintosh at satoshis-plebs.com.

And, of course, there’s the website at satoshis-plebs.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I’ll talk to you soon.