Episode 163

Not a big surprise. This is Bitcoin after all. Right? And what we did do was close the week yesterday. Let’s see. Where were we at? 67,216. So we were up, I believe, week over week. We had been down to about 63. And as I record, we’re actually at 70,000 and we’ve been above that level essentially all day. So that’s good. And this kind of 68 to $70,000 level is starting to feel really comfortable, if you know what I mean. When it comes to Bitcoin, it’s kind of established this, in my opinion, as a new level. The ETFs just kinda chug along. They’re buying, buying, buying even with the negative selling of the grayscale, fund, which continues.

Black BlackRock, Fidelity, these others these other exchanges continue to buy even more, and they also are out buying essentially what the miners are producing. So miners are producing about 900 Bitcoin a day, and the buying is certainly even of just the ETFs is more than that. So even though in my opinion, we’ve had several attempts to push down, we did get down actually to 60,800. 123 4, 5, 6. That was roughly a week ago. Looks like Wednesday, March 20th. So a week and a day ago. And, or not a week and a day, 6 days ago. I’ll get my number straight here in a second. We have gone up since then, and I like I said, I just I feel like kind of this is kind of the new level. I don’t think we’re gonna go down.

Of course, that could always happen, but I just don’t see it at this point this close to the halving. We’ll see the issuance essentially of Bitcoin cut from 900 a day roughly to 450. So we will, as miners, we will start crying crying at that point. I promise the price will not double overnight, but that will add more pressure to the price of Bitcoin going up. So if we’re somewhere in this kind of 70 to $80,000 level come April 20th, I think what’s going to happen is I still think even at that price level, I think we’re gonna have some miners who are going to have trouble. So let you know, the public miners are putting out information they have to about their overhead, about their cost, about their electrical cost, about their administrative cost, and all of this kind of stuff. And they make figures, and they say all these different things about, well, you know, I don’t know.

The cost of production of a Bitcoin, some of them claim $25,000 or so. Meaning that until they get down to that level that they can operate in profit. I don’t believe it, at least in every case, to be honest. And I think what we will see after the happening is there will be a large amount of hash rate that will go dark because it won’t be profitable. Now that may mean that’s not going to necessarily mean that the miners go out out of business. It just means they’re gonna shut down a lot of their hash rate because it’s unprofitable. So we’ll just have to see how that pans out. Right now, we’re at about that 600 x hash level. We’re at 590 right now. It’s been higher. It’s been lower, of course.

It has continued overall to move up. We’ve kind of reached a plateau over the last few months. In general, our block height right now is by the way, as we start recording, 838 462. That’s 838-462. And our difficulty adjustment, which is coming up in just a couple of days, is going to be maybe a small downward adjustment. We’re at 0.68% right now. As we always say here, you know, I know y’all get tired of hearing it, but some of you need to hear it. Maybe some of you are not doing this. You’re worried about the price. You’re thinking maybe it’ll go down. I’ll buy some more. Just DCA. Just DCA. Just daily, daily cost average. I’ve heard it said that way.

Dollar cost average, I think, is more common. And what that means is every day you’re gonna buy Bitcoin. Take the strike app. Yes. I know it’s k y c, but there’s frankly not a better way to do it. Buy your Bitcoin on a daily basis. Don’t worry about the price. The price is gonna go up. The price is gonna go down. We may not go below this once we go past the halving. I certainly think that’s a possibility that we may never see that 68, $69,000 level again, the previous all time high or at least for a long while. Don’t worry about that. Just keep buying.

Just keep buying. Be like the little engine that could just keep going. Right? Whether that’s $5 a day, $10 a day, 20, or a100, whatever that amount is for you. So, anyways, in general, I think we’re just probably gonna keep going in this. I think we’re gonna build a new box, to be honest. I think we’re gonna build a new range, and we’ll get comfortable here, and then we’ll head on up after the happening. And by range, I mean, it literally could go up to $80,000 or more. If it goes beyond $80,000, I’ll start getting really interested. And it’s possible.

And it may go down. We do seem to have very much of a floor in these lower sixties, though. So I would not, at this point, expect it to break down into the fifties. And if it does, I don’t think it’ll be for long at all. Alright. So that’s it for our market update. Let’s move on. Oh, the fees actually are very low. I did I forgot to mention this. They’re at 10 sats per vbyte, for low, medium, and high transactions. So that’s awesome. Oh, it bumped up 11, 12, and 14 now. And our mempool is only at 838 megabytes.

So that’s the lowest I’ve seen it in a long time. Pretty sweet. I would advise if you need to to consolidate your u UTXOs, if you have a bunch of very small transactions, times like this would be a good time to do that. Because I do think over time, certainly, the transaction fees are going to rise, and it will be more and more difficult to find these times of low transaction fees that you can consolidate those UTXOs. In brief, what I mean is if you have a transaction essentially that’s only worth a few dollars. Let’s say you have a $5 transaction that was sent across the main chain when it only costs like 2 sats per v byte. So it was only a few cents.

Well, what happens if we’re at a minimum of, say, 200 sats per vbyte 2 years from now and your transaction fee is $10? Well, the that’s essentially dust. It’s you can’t It makes no sense to consolidate that. It’s lost effectively even though you have it right there. That’s why you would wanna consolidate that. I’m not gonna take the time on here to go into that unless just a bunch of people really want it. There are other you could just Google it. There’s, essentially, you’re just gonna send all your transactions, to a single address and have, and have that consolidate up. So you do need to take responsibility and take care of that, though.

Verify what you’re doing and get that done. And I would do that before the happening. Personally, I probably wouldn’t leave anything less than a tenth of a bitcoin in a single, to multiple UTXO’s. So if I had a 100,000 sats on the main net, I would probably be, you know, doing something to consolidate that if that makes sense. Hope it does. Alright. What are we gonna talk about this week? I actually I don’t have a whole lot to talk about this week, to be honest. This doesn’t happen to me very often, but I do I think we’ll just go through the news. We’ll go through the supporters as we always do. We have some great support this week. I wanted to clarify a few things. Maybe I wasn’t I think I wasn’t clear about this. It’s coming through in these messages.

And, probably talk for a minute about the upcoming Bitcoin conference, because that’s only March, April, May, June, July, 4 months away now, roughly. And, well, we’ll see. So, actually, let’s talk about well, let’s talk about our s’mores first. We’ll do we’ll do things backwards. Can you bear with me? Can we do that? We’ll go ahead and do this backwards. Alright. So what I’ve got, we got 3 great boosts this week as well as a lot of streaming. In total, it was 5,286 sats. I do appreciate that, of course, as always. So here we go. Episode and these were all episode 162, shiny object syndrome, last week’s episode.

We kick things off with hypersensitive SARS and his 500 sats. I have to admit that I’m still suffer somewhat from shiny object syndrome, but I am working on that addiction and am turning things around. Keep up the great work. Thank you, hypersensitive saris. I do appreciate that, and it’s tough, man. I get it. I I do. It’s really hard. And, frankly, they even have stuff that’s, you know, to in my opinion, we have shiny object syndrome on Bitcoin now, and I hope that it doesn’t end terribly. I have a feeling that it probably will for those that are involved, and I frankly, I’m talking about things like these ordinals, even NFTs on Bitcoin. Although an NFT on Bitcoin where it’s actually in the blockchain is probably better than kind of what they do on Ethereum and all that where it’s not it’s just a pointer. It’s just literally a pointer to somewhere else that can change at any time. It’s crazy.

But regardless, in my opinion, these are shiny object syndrome. These are things that aren’t relevant, at least to me. Now maybe I’m being an old man here, but, but I see the pull. I do. It’s hard. It’s hard. So keep at it. Make sure that you’re set, hypersensitive to vesars. The most important thing is, you know, you’ve gotta take care of yourself in the long run. Gulag Pleb, our friend Gulag Pleb sent 2,000 sats. He said my fountain wallet ran out while listening. Too much value on fountain to keep up. Yes. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, but I appreciate you listening, Gulag.

It’s it’s always good to hear from you. And then, Kyron over at Mare Mortals sent a message, and this is kinda where I think the confusion. He said, do an episode on the BTC conference and your observations slash learnings. I’ve never been to one before. Given on what he had said on a podcast that they recorded and this, I think he’s talking about the, the one that was, on Madeira, Bitcoin Atlantic. Just, it was either early this month or late last month. I think it was early this month. Very early. I did not go. I’ve listened to some of the videos, which is what I’ve referenced about the conference. They’re available on YouTube. I would suggest highly if this is of interest to you that you go take a listen to them. Certainly not the same thing as going there, although I frankly would have loved to.

And, Karen, if you’re talking about the upcoming one, I certainly will be. And I I do wanna talk about that for a few minutes here after we get done. But I’m planning on going to the one in Nashville, the Bitcoin conference, the whatever Bitcoin USA conference. So, real quick, I wanted to go through this. I have not done this in a long time. Had some extra time tonight probably, so thought it’d be a good time to do this. I pulled out our top 10 supporters, and our friend Kyron right there is at the top. He is an octopus now. He just passed that level very, very recently. So he is, the 3rd pleb support level. I’ll go over that in just a second. So that’s really cool. He’s our only octopus.

Tobias, m h, was in 2nd. Hypersensitivityosaurus, who I just mentioned, is in 3rd place. And then, I do not know how to say this, 4g3n 7_zeror4ng3. There has to be a name in there somehow because it’s intentional that they did it that way. I do not know what it is, so I apologize. And anonymous, and I don’t think this is actually anonymous, like the anonymous people. I think this is a specific person there in 5th because I’ve seen their boost come through, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same person. Not 100%, but I’m pretty sure. Captain Egghead is in 6th place. Our friend Gulag Pled, who we just heard from in 7th, Loki, l o k e, 8th.

The anonymous, who I do know is an an individual is in 9th and Sir Michael, one of the 9th of the no agenda round table in 10th. Pretty awesome. So that’s where we’re at right now. Let me see. Tobias is actually a shrimp now. I think he was a shrimp last time And to be honest, hypersensitive asaris, you’re approaching that. So you’re about 13 actually, almost, just a little over 12,000 sats off. So you, sir, you are you are definitely approaching that. So very cool. Kyron, I do know I owe you something. I, to be honest, I still haven’t completely 100% decided. I’ve got to create a logo. I’m sorry, guys. I’m just terrible at this kind of stuff. I really am. Part of the reason why I’m a lot of times I don’t do so well on the marketing side of things, but I will. I have not forgotten about it.

All of our supporters here at Satoshi’s Pubs are important. So, anyways, that’s where we’re at. I do wanna talk about the conference for just a second. My plan is this is the Bitcoin conference in July in Nashville, America here in Tennessee, and it’s not too bad a drive for me. It’s a number of hours, but it’s doable. I’m not gonna fly. I’m gonna drive up. I think I’ve even mentioned I’m not fully convinced I’m gonna buy a ticket. The reason why it’s ideological, essentially. I mean, to be honest, the Bitcoin Magazine is the company that puts on the Bitcoin conference. And I’ve been a little sideways with them. Not it’s not personal. It’s just I don’t view things the same way that they do about the Bitcoin world. And they support a lot of stuff in the conference that I’m not I’m not real happy about. I don’t know how else to put it. But the reality is they also there also is a lot of good content, and there will be a lot of good people there that I would love to talk to.

So I don’t know. I will have to make that decision soon, but I’m planning on on being there for the 2 days, of the conference. I think it’s 2 days or two and a half days. And, would love to meet up some of you. Karen, I know you were talking at one point about going. If you know for sure if you’re going in your travels, please let me know. But, anybody else that’s gonna be up that way as well would love to hear from you. Would love to get together with everybody, for some kind of dinner or something one night and, just have a bit of fun. You know?

So, let’s go ahead and jump on into the news of the week. Aside from the fact that Bitcoin went up, there was some other news. Bank of Japan, little macro news, just raised their interest rates for the first time in 17 years. Japan and its central bank has an interesting policy that, they are the number one debt or, in terms of percentage anyways, in the world. So they 250 percent plus of their GDP, if I’m not sure, if I’m not mistaken. More debt per GDP or whatever, than anyone. And they have had a long standing history. In fact, as you can tell, they just raised their interest rates for the first time in 17 years, and it wasn’t a whole lot. But with that much debt, it’s a real problem. See, they’ve gotten to the point where raising their interest rates will wreck their economy.

Unlike the United States where we just got the middle class by raising interest rates, but that’s a completely different story. Yeah. I’ll just leave that alone, but I have held that most likely either the Japan or I I could see 3 things going on here. I think either Japan or China or maybe the United States, if we keep trucking along the way we’re going, could kind of collapse first. And by collapse, I mean hyperinflate. I’ve been reading a great book, which I’m gonna talk about. I think it’s called The Death of Money. It was a book about the Weimar Weimar Republic post World War 1, kind of one of the first, well, certainly in modern times, cases of, well, of hyperinflation.

And, I mean, just like crazy hyperinflation. So, anyways, there’s a lot of things going on in that book, and it’s it’s a little bit difficult to read. So I can’t just, like, skip right through it. But I’m gonna read it. We’re probably just gonna take an episode and talk about it because I believe, personally, at least, history doesn’t repeat. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this, but it rhymes. I’m not saying that the United States, Japan, or China, or maybe countries in Western Europe or wherever, I’m not saying they’re gonna follow this exact path, but it’s very interesting reading.

The Ethereum Foundation is under investigation by state authority. So don’t really know exactly who. So I’ve kinda predicted this. By the way, the Bitcoin CEO is not available to comment. That was funny. A little joke. Of course, there’s no Bitcoin CEO. There was, yeah, this is based on their GitHub. So, there was a message that came out or like a canary in the coal coal mine type thing where they changed saying that they’d been contacted by a state agency, and and state meaning a country, potentially. And so the foundation has been being taught to. I would guess, most likely, it’s the SEC.

But this process, regardless, will take a long time. If you happen to hold some Ethereum, this is something and I don’t talk about Ethereum or any other of these altcoins on here, but but this is definitely something you should follow. I would not panic and I would not panic sell if I, you know, if you did, I would buy Bitcoin with it, but regardless, something to keep your eye on. I do believe, in fact that as I’ve said many times on here, Ethereum is security. And I think eventually the SEC will rule that. And when that happens, there will be large lawsuits. There will be I think it will gut Ethereum, to be honest.

Alright. Oh, great reason I posted something, reposted something from Alex Gladstein, human rights, foundation. Another good reason to Bitcoin. The Iranian regime has passed a law allowing for the auto deduction. So, in other words, the automatic removal of money from bank accounts of women who don’t adhere to, the mandatory hijab, rules that they have. So, I’m not gonna get into that other than just saying, Bitcoin would fix that actually because you can’t just mandatorily take someone’s Bitcoin. I posted a video of this run of river, turbine. Now I just to give you a little background, hydro, I know far more about hydro than, say, solar.

I know a little bit about solar. But hydro, is something I’ve followed for a long time. I’ve been very interested in building a micro hydro system, a small scale system. So, like, up to, say, 1 megawatt. But I’ve always looked at it in terms of where you take a creek or a small river, a very small river maybe, that’s going down a hillside, and you’ve got definite drop. And you basically harness that drop to create power. This turbine, in fact, is used for a run of river essentially where there’s not very much drop. In fact, only a couple of meters, so maybe 6, feet or so, which is nothing. I mean and you can harness part of that and they’re talking about getting 15 to 70 kilowatts of of energy out of that which that’s a a significant amount.

Let’s see. At 3 kilowatts per miner, that’d be 5 to 22 roughly, if I’m doing that math right, miners. Just for free. Just sitting there cruising along. Anyways, interesting stuff. I reposted something just and I was serious about this. Hal Finning, one of the well, he actually received the first transaction of bitcoin from Satoshi. He died a number of years ago of multiple sclerosis. But January 21, 2009, so this is the very early days of Bitcoin, like, literally very, very early days. Posted on Twitter looking at ways to add more anonymity to bitcoin and I could not somebody else had reposted this and I couldn’t help myself. Is privacy and anonymity.

Is privacy and anonymity. And I really wished that more of it had been done early on when it when, you know, the change could happen much faster. Brains has acquired, a new mining management system called Crater. Of course, I use brains. I don’t really know a whole lot about that. I’ll let you know as I find out more about it. Okay. And earlier today, Argentina, I did wanna actually mention this and even talk about it for just a men minute. Javier Millet has said in a speech that he wants to cut 70,000 more state jobs. He is trying to get the state, the Argentine nation budget level, essentially, so that they’re not running a deficit every year. Something I wished our government could learn how to do, which is great. I I think that’s absolutely 100% strictly necessary. I hope he’s watching what’s going on in El Salvador.

But what I am not frankly pleased about in the last couple weeks, I’ve been seeing information saying that Argentina is going to take out another loan with the IMF. Now this is something that they’ve done a number of times. The IMF is an organization that I’ve talked about a lot, and I don’t know all their numbers. I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I just do not think that’s a good idea. So I’m sad to hear that. If they continue to balance their budget, if they continue to be aggressive and cutting back, austerity as they call it, which is funny because we used to just call it common sense, but whatever.

Maybe they can get that settled with the IMF and move on. I have not really heard other than him creating an environment where, you know, mining companies like Bitfarm, who who I feel like I should always say when I say that. I do own some Bitfarm stock. But, anyways, you know, they have a fairly large, mining farm down in Southern Argentina. But he’s not talked about Argentina mining Bitcoin. He’s not talked about Argentina hodling Bitcoin, doing anything like that in regards to Bitcoin. So I hope that changes. We will see. But I do believe getting rid of those jobs.

It’s unfortunate for those people who have those jobs, but if it’s necessary, it’s necessary. So that’s gonna actually be it for tonight. I’ll be back next Saturday or next Sunday. I know the following week after that. This week is is going to ramp up. The following week is just gonna be crazy, but I’ll get in my my my thing on Sunday, I I’m sure. And, we’ll talk about the week, how things have been going, all that kind of stuff. But, hey. I do wanna mention, of course, this is a value for value podcast. This is a podcasting 2.0, what they call a podcasting 2.0 podcast.

The podcast world is changing. Even Apple is finally acceding to that. They’re adding transcripts to the Apple Podcasts which hasn’t changed in years. But over in podcasting 2.0 land, if you wanna call it that, we have apps like fountain where you have transcripts, of course. You have, chapters where you could kinda skip around in the podcast. You have the ability to stream, sats, and boost just like these people did earlier that I was talking about to support your podcast. I do not take advertisers, and I do not take sponsors. And it’s not because I hate money, by the way, to be very clear. It’s because in general, I do not want them polluting the journalistic integrity that I feel like I have.

Now it’s up to you ultimately to determine that yourself. But if I’m getting paid by Ledger, for example, and Ledger had a problem, which Ledger has been having problems for years, Do you think I wanna come to you and say, hey, pleb, Ledger is their database was breached and all those emails are out and whatever. No. Of course not. So that’s why I do value for value. So I come to you and say, if I’ve provided value to you, then please provide value back. Now there are a number of ways to do it. The one of the best ways that you can do it, please tell people about this podcast. Say, hey, Satoshi’s Plebs, this guy, Macintosh, he has a great weekly roundup of Bitcoin. I’ve been doing this. This is my 100 and 63rd episode.

I’ve been doing this for approaching 2 years, I think. It must be. No. It has to be more than that. Is it 3 years? I think it is. Gracious alive. I need to look it up. Anyways, I’m not going anywhere, but I would love for people to hear about it. And the way that you can do that is simply tell other people. Another way that you can provide value is clipping these episodes. If you take a 1, 2, 3 minute clip using fountain and that gets posted up on their page, for example, when I see that, I will boost it, which I should see it because it shows up in my timeline because it’s my podcast. And then I’ll boost that back, like, 500 sets or like it or whatever it is. I think it’s actually a like, but you will get rewarded for that. Okay?

There’s other ways, tech stuff. There’s whatever, but I don’t wanna take too long. So, check out fountain. There’s a whole list. Go to podcastapps.com, and you can check those out. Fountain, cast o matic cast is it cast o matic? I think it is. Castopod? No. Cast o matic. Cast o Matic is the platform. Why do they have to be so close? Podverse, Fountain, those are the 3 that I use. I love them all in different ways. They’re like my children. No. I’m just kidding. Anyways, check those out, and that’s it. I’m not gonna elaborate. You could always boost. You can always send stats, and I do appreciate that.

Of course, it’s a great way to get feedback, by the way. You can tell me what you think. Good episode, McIntosh. You suck, McIntosh. Stop talking about your tea, Mcintosh. By the way, the tea was great tonight even though I didn’t mention that until now. But, regardless, thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at McintoshFintech.  I’m on mastodon@macintosh@podcastindex.social. I can also be reached by email at mcintosh@satoshis-plebs.com. We also have the website. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I’ll talk to you soon.