Episode 174

So, yeah, we’re up almost $1,000. We got a difficulty adjustment coming up July 18th, so we’re, like, 9 days off or something like that. And it’s about looking at about 2.8% up right now. We did just on 5th have an adjustment, and it was 5% down, which was slightly below what we talked about last week. So we did get a nice downward adjustment. Again, I I feel like some of that is the, summertime, energy savings programs like with ERCOT. Some of it is the price, to be honest. What I mean is with these lower prices, miners will turn off old technology.

So, like, let’s just say something crazy like they were running at s 9, which is very, very inefficient and requires, like, 15, excuse me, like, at the current prices, it’s something like 5¢ per kilowatt hour or less electricity cost just to break even. So they just shut them off to save money. And, so that frees up hash rate, you know, hash rate goes down, difficulty gets adjusted downward as well. I think that’s what we’re seeing. We will see. But, yeah. And our mempool looking pretty good. 7 sats per v byte, actually, for transactions, which is really nice. And then 878 megabytes of unprocessed transactions right now, which is actually the lowest that it’s been in quite a while.

So that’s pretty cool. So that’s it. We’re gonna go right on into our topic for tonight, and we will discuss that. The topic that is probably on everyone’s mind. At least if you pay attention to Bitcoin Twitter, the news, whatever. Bitcoin’s going to 0. There is a podcast. I think it’s Marty Bent’s podcast maybe. And he always plays this guy, some stupid TV personality type person, somebody online, whatever. And the guy’s like, and Bitcoin’s going to effing except he doesn’t say effing. 0, you know. And this was a number of years ago, of course, and he was completely wrong, of course. Just like the people now who are saying, well, that’s it. You know, Bitcoin’s losing value. We’re in a bear market.

This is all over. We’re at 55,000 yesterday for the weekly close. You know, little chicken little sky is falling, whatever. So we’re gonna talk about that because, of course, we have clearly broken down out of this box, that I’ve talked about for so many months. And I said, you know, if it if it broke out, it would probably go down a decent amount, and it has. I think the lowest it got was in the upper, like, 548 or something. I guess I could look that up real quick. Not that it really matters, to be honest. It was at least in that ballpark.

And I’m not gonna turn this into some analysis, by the way, of, you know looks like, actually, 539, 5359. So 536, we got that what day was that? Friday. It’s been a couple days. We’ve been up a little bit. We did get down yesterday. Monday. Yeah. Yesterday. No. That was today. We’ve already rotated our time. We’ve had a wide range from like 54.3 up to goodness. Like, 58 to 46. Interesting. And then today, here we are sitting, like I said, 566 or so. So just in a nutshell, what’s going on? Right? So clearly, we broke out of this box that I was talking about that we’ve been talking about, and we’ve now been below it for goodness.

Basically, a week. 1, 2, 3, 4. We’re on the 5th day. 6 certainly 6 days, you could argue that without any problem, that we’ve been below $60,000, so almost a week. And, you know, where where are we going from here? Are we gonna go lower? Are we gonna go higher, or are we gonna go sideways? What’s going on? Of course, this is an investment advice. And as we say here, maybe I should preface this. On, Satoshi’s plebs, of course, we strongly believe in dollar cost average. I don’t really want you looking at the price per se. I’d much rather just you just buy Bitcoin on a daily basis. If you’re investing in Bitcoin and you’re going to invest, say, $500 a month, just as an example, you know, that’s maybe a 125 a week.

So either do that once per week or $125 or break that down whatever 7 into that and then buy that daily with something like strike, which makes that very easy. And then stop worrying about the price. The price Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does, as I always say. It’s just gonna do it. It’s just gonna go down. It’s gonna go up. It’s gonna go sideways. We try and interpret this stuff, and we try and explain it. And I’m gonna give some reasons maybe why it’s been so low for the last few days. I don’t I believe these were factors. I don’t think this was the whole story, And that’s fine. I may be right. I may be wrong, but regardless, the goal in the long run is, of course, we wanna make Bitcoin a global reserve currency. We wanna make Bitcoin used all over the world by people every walks of life to do business with to transact globally between nations, and all these different things. And as an natural outcome of that, we’re going to see the price of Bitcoin go up as it builds that market cap.

So I don’t personally really worry about these two things, but I thought it might be, especially since there’s maybe a lot of FUD out there, fear, uncertainty, and doubt, Might be beneficial to go ahead and talk about this this week. Okay. So we’re down below 60. Now what? Let me discuss really briefly why I think we fell out. There’s 2 news items, this week that are relevant, so I’ll just go ahead and cover them here. Mt. Gox, who was an early Bitcoin exchange, actually, I believe it was the first place I used. It may have been Coinbase. I’m not sure when Coinbase started.

Well, it’s certainly possible it was Coinbase 2012. So I know I have an email from 2013 when I in February, January, February of when I set up my Mt. Gox account. Now, apparently, at least according to Mt. Gox, and I don’t remember differently, I don’t have any money that was lost in Mount Gox in the, hack, and then the subsequent closing of Mount Gox essentially. But a lot of people did. There was 100 of 1000 of Bitcoin that were lost. And after a long long court battle, essentially, that money is being paid back to the people who lost it. My real great tonight.

It’s a little sweet. I put a little too much honey in it, and it’s astounding how sweet it is actually. It almost makes it difficult to drink and I like sweet things. But it’s good for my throat. Alright. Anyways, that money, has been moved. There the paybacks are starting up. Yeah. I don’t know if we got an actual date on that. I I feel like, yeah, they did start on July 5th. Oh, by the way, that kinda lines up when the price of Bitcoin went down. Okay. And we also had the German government, kind of like the US government, you know, where we’ve seized Bitcoin, for example, with Silk Road. I don’t know where the German government got theirs, but they are starting to sell a number of bitcoin. Again, a fairly large amount, over the weekend from what I understood.

I think both of these did combine to, at least help bring the price down. I mean, 53,000 if we look at this. And this is actually pretty important. So we reached 7 let’s just say 74,000 times 0.3. That’s a $22,200 retracement. I’ll explain in just a second. 74 thousand minus 20,200. I think I did that right. Gets us to 51,800. Okay. What did McIntosh just do? In a bull run, in any bull run that we’ve seen, in Bitcoin, I should say, all through its history. As the price of Bitcoin goes up, we have pullbacks. It’s undoubted. It does. First of all, obviously, it just doesn’t go up in a straight line.

But people don’t understand how much it retraces. At some point during every bull run, we’ve had retracements of 30% or so. Guess what? A 30% retracement from a $74,000 high, which we were at back in March, I think, is $51,800, which means, ladies and gentlemen, that we were very close to that back on Friday. Close enough that we were probably at 25, 26%, I would say. Maybe even a little bit more. Close enough that if we do not go back and revisit that and go on later, people will look at that and go, oh, we had a 30% retracement.

So it would not be completely unexpected in in the history of things, If we are in the middle of a bull run, and I I fully believe that at this point, but if we are, that we would have a 20% retracement. I’ve got an all time high here, 73,712, it looks like. And that was back. It’s a little hard to see on this chart, But right there, right there. Yeah. Back in March, mid March 13, 14. So there you go. We may have reached the bottom. In fact, I would guess. No. I wouldn’t bet on this. I would not trade on this, but I would guess that we’ve reached the bottom. Maybe we go back down and we hit 53 again.

Maybe we even go a little bit lower. I do not think we will break 50,000 dollars. If we break $50,000, my thesis will start to change. I will in fact, I’ve got a level that’s funny because I’ve got a level of 516, which is almost exactly that. That’s interesting because I just noticed that. So I had a a resistance, level, which theoretically should have now become support at 51,000 600, which is all and it was not based off that 30% retracement, but it would almost exactly match it. I would not be shocked if we went down and touched that, but I would also be extremely shocked if we kept going down into the forties. If we start going down into the forties, you will hear Macintosh say, maybe we are going maybe that was it. I don’t it would break everything that we’ve seen for 15 years.

But I also have to operate under the assumption that it is a possibility. Now, does it sound like I’m talking about it both sides of my mouth? Maybe. But I will tell you this, if if Bitcoin goes to $40,000, if Bitcoin goes to $45,000, Macintosh will be buying Bitcoin regardless. To me, it’s meaningless to an extent whether we’re in a bull run or in a bear market. Now as a miner, it would hurt me greatly if we were going down into the forties. Even as somebody who doesn’t pay himself at this point from his mining operations, it would hurt. I mean, it just it would. There’s no doubt about that. But I would continue to buy Bitcoin, myself even if my business could not do so, generate that Bitcoin.

Because whether it’s 2 years, 1 year, 2 years, 4 years, 10 years, I think $40,000 Bitcoin will be a bargain. So when you hear this stuff going on, oh, Bitcoin’s dead. Oh, Bitcoin’s struggling. Oh, we’re going into a bear market. If we are, you view that as a buying opportunity. You know who some of the smartest people were? And, unfortunately, I did not do this, even though I certainly was involved in Bitcoin and should have known better. But I was a little distracted, to be honest. The day I think it was the day, in America.

It was in March. Was it 2,000 or 2,001? I think it was in 2,000 when the pandemic here in the United States kind of started. When the first cases had been announced on the West Coast of the United States. I hope it’s 2,000, I think. 2020, I should say, not 2,000. Goodness. Bitcoin hit, like, some ridiculous low number that it’s been nowhere near ever since. The day that Russia invaded Ukraine, the market dropped. It was a great buying opportunity because we haven’t seen that level since. If we have, for some reason, happened to go down, regardless my point is regardless of whether in 6 months, 12 months, 2 years, 4 years, or 10 years, you will look upon those purchases as, man, I bought that stuff dirt cheap.

K? So that is something I would like you, as a listener to this show, to keep in mind. Alright. What else are we gonna talk about here? I I don’t wanna beat this to death. Maybe this is gonna be a short episode, and I’ve had some longer ones recently. So maybe that’s not a bad thing. I think we’re just gonna kinda wrap it up there. This week, we will see. I think this week will be pivotal. I hope that what we do here is establish a bottom, or if we’re gonna go down to 5,100,516, whatever, that we just go ahead and do that. Rip the band aid off. Let’s go down there, touch that, and then let’s move on.

I’m tired personally of this sideways action, and now of this downward action. Of course, everyone likes a bull market. This may or may not be one. But, yeah. This this we question ourselves too much. And but Bitcoin does this. I mean, there’s multiple time frames you can pick out from the timeline where it just kinda does this sideways, and I’d had to go back and look at the charts. It seems like it does it in the summer. Now maybe I’m just maybe that’s just my impression, and that’s completely incorrect. I would have to go back and look at that. But fall is coming.

I know it’s weird to say here, July 8th in the northern hemisphere when it’s the middle of the summer. And by summer, I have to reference our summer, not the southern hemisphere summer. Sorry, guys, down there. I do realize y’all are opposite. But, yeah, that’s that’s just the way that it is, so we’ll see. We’ll, of course, continue to monitor, but I would, as always, encourage you to continue to buy your Bitcoin daily or weekly at most, and do that regardless of the price. Alright. Alright. Let’s go ahead and move on to our news section. There is a little bit of news and I’ve already covered, of course, Mt. Gox. They did start their repay payments.

I think I have a I’m not sure I have an article, but I did note that Germany was selling that. I do wanna mention this is our part of our coverage of Africa. There are 4 nations in Sub Saharan Africa, the Sahel or whatever that is called. Burkina Faso, Mali excuse me. 3 nations. Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger signed a confederation treaty. So I’m gonna read a little bit of this. This is Barron’s view, Barron, the magazine view on this. I’m not willing to commit to everything that they’re saying here, but we’ll read it and discuss it. You’ve got the military leaders ruling Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger have entered a new confederation signing a treaty during their first summit in Niamey after having severed ties with an existing West African block. The heads of the 3 countries who took power through coups in recent years decided to take a step further towards greater integration between the member states and adopted a treaty establishing a confederation, they said in a statement at the end of Saturday summit. So we’re looking at basically 72,000,000 people between the three countries.

So it’s not an insignificant amount. They are quitting the economic community of West African States. An organization, and I think this is important, that they accuse of being manipulated by France, their former colonial ruler. So France was in charge of these countries. They’ve also broken all their military and defense links with France, and they are seeking greater cooperation with Russia. You do have a situation where all three leaders came into power through the military taking over. I think they would argue in all three cases, that they were doing this out of best interest for these countries because of the ties of France through the previous leaders, rulers, however you wanna phrase it.

Now I will tell you as a person who has grown up in a democracy, as very flawed as it is, as you all know that I talk about quite a bit. The idea of a military leader running the country that I live in would disturb me greatly. Time will tell what happens. Frankly, history tells us that most often that if not basically all the time, these leaders essentially become dictators. And that is something that I am not comfortable with at all. I also now I’ll and this is part of my discomfort, and I think y’all can probably tell that as I talk about Africa. Understanding where they came from, at least to an extent, with the rulership, the former just heavy handed rulership of these countries through France. And then really after France left up through the 19 fifties, if I’m not mistaken, where they were really controlling it from the sidelines, hand picked leaders, all of this kind of stuff.

I do understand the, why this is happening. Maybe I should put it that way. But I just don’t know that this is the right way to do this, but I also don’t know a good way to do it. You know, I do know there are people who would say this is the only way to do it. And I do know that there are people who would say you should never do it this way. And I, as I frequently do in my life, say I do not know. I don’t know, and I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that I do. But I do think that this is important. I do think that this could lead to wider Bitcoin adoption in these countries. They will eventually all figure out that the best way to operate among themselves in any type of trade federation is through Bitcoin, where you don’t have to trust the other country involved.

Bitcoin is made for enemies is a statement that’s often said, and it also works for people who get along. Let’s see. I did wanna mention this. This is not something I normally talk about, but this is also something that’s very important. There is an open SSH vulnerability, in the open SSH SSH server, which is the server that handles SSH connections. So if you are logging into servers using SSH, Linux based servers, most often they’re going to be running this software, and you should probably look into this. K. I will have a link to that in the show notes. I know that most of you that’s not relevant, but there may be somebody out there that that makes a big difference for.

Oh, let’s see. And then last, at least last on my list of links, Bitcoin Core, the, core developers of the code that’s most commonly run to run the Bitcoin daemon. They have introduced a new security disclosure policy for publicizing security critical bugs. Now if you’re not into software, you can kinda skip this section, but this is actually a really big change and I’m glad to see it. They’ve established a standardized process for reporting and disclosing vulnerabilities, and improving the transparency and security within the Bitcoin ecosystem. Essentially, they’re gonna say, they’re going to start reporting, all the bugs that they fixed in versions x, y, and z, whatever those are. And then they’re going to give you time to they’re gonna make sure that your software is updated the way that it should. At least they’re going to do the responsible thing and disclose the issues that are out there. I think a lot of people I happen to run 0 dot 27 dot 1, which I think is the latest version.

But I’ve always felt uncomfortable running older versions of this when they don’t get patched after a certain amount of time. But they never talk about the security issues as well. So this is really kind of, it’s addressing that. So this is a really good it’s, to be honest, it’s a sign of a mature software project. I mean, this is the way that it’s normally done by these large software projects, and it’s the way that it should be done. So it’s good to see that. Oh, last week, we were talking about Kenya. The president, Ruto, has removed the budgets for the office of the first lady, the second lady, which I assume would be the vice president’s wife, and dissolve 47 state agencies.

47. That’s crazy. After 3 weeks of anti government protest, he has also suspended nonessential travel for governmental workers and buying of new cars and cut advisers by half. So at least it’s making him look like he’s trying. That whole situation remains to see what happens. Of course, people are still saying that’s not enough, but at least it’s a maybe a step in the right direction. We’ll see. July 4th, we, and it’s gotten worse, I think. The hash price, Bitcoin hash price, which is basically the amount of money that you make per terahash, or petahash depending on how you measure it, is it an all time low. Meaning, miners aren’t making any money.

I did wanna say, some of this will show up in the software updates. There was a number of announcements this week about bolt 12. Bolt 12 is a lightning, proposal, so called proposal, for it will give you a reusable address, which is really good, and actually also gives you better privacy. So you preserve your privacy, but you can reuse the address, which means you can have, like, a QR code sitting on your website, which people can use to send you lightning payments. So we’re starting to see Zeus this week, even though that they haven’t put out this version as far as I can tell. They’re saying in their next version, 0 dot 9 alpha.

I can’t find an actual download for it, but this is what they’re saying. It will be bolt 12 compatible. Phoenix, will get to that in the actual software updates because they did actually do a release. They’re integrating it as well. A lot of people are now coming out and starting to say, there was a lightning, let’s see. Corelightning, I believe, has supported it for a long time. I think one of the others actually came out this week and said they were implementing it. I thought this was a good tweet. 55% of Argentines approve, president Malay, of his performance despite 6 months of deep budget cuts and growing concerns over rising joblessness.

In the end, economics matter is what I said. Even though people are hurting, they can tell that Argentina is now on a better road, what I would call a better road. At least that’s my impression. We will because things are inflation is definitely down. No doubt. But it’s the economy is not booming, and that’s what actually matters in the short term to people. But we don’t see, massive widespread protesting, for example. Oh, I love these type of, data. If you do the math based on the worldwide population currently, everyone in the world would have 259,259 sats.

And just to show you what that means, If I plug that into a converter, that is $67 in the u in US dollars. Obviously, bitcoin is not distributed that way. The average person in the world, if you just fast forward a 100 years, let’s just do this crazy little mental math thing. If you just fast forwarded a 100 years, the entire world essentially is on a Bitcoin standard. Everybody is using it, lightning, e cash, whatever. But it all ties back to Bitcoin. The average person will not have 259,259 sets. They will have less than that, and it will be worth more than $69. Keep stacking sets.

On June 30th, we closed 6 months, the first half of the year. Right? January, February, March, April, May. Yes. June. We had the highest 6 month close ever in the history of bitcoin ever. The highest. You could if you basically, if you look at a 6 month chart, not daily, not hourly, not weekly, not even monthly, go to a 6 month time frame. You see what I’m talking about? We are at a higher level on a 6 month time frame than we have ever been. That kind of thing is why it’s so hard to be bearish on Bitcoin right now. There are so many things that have lined up.

It’s crazy. ETFs continue to buy. They have not really slowed down. More more money is going into ETFs alone that are being mined right now. And it’s been that way since the happening. Alright. Let’s move on to software updates. Got a few here. Phoenix Wallet, I already mentioned version 2.31 and the Phoenix Damon, it’s Phoenix server, whatever you wanna call it, version 0.2.0. They are now offering bolt 12. So that’s cool. I would encourage you to be careful. I’m very excited about bolt 12. The it’s very early days for it though, whether it’s Phoenix or Zeus or whoever. Let’s make sure that these things actually work before you commit real money to it. Robosats, which is a peer to peer app, version 0 dot 6 dot 3 alpha, gives you the ability to add coordinators manually rather than relying on what’s given to you. So that’s a good, change. Blue Wallet, the 6 dot 6 dot 8, that’s a bitcoin and lightning wallet, if I’m not mistaken. In fact, I’m I’m certain of that.

It’s getting full BIP 47 support. I’m actually not sure offhand what that is. So they’re getting BIP 47 for reusable payment, and you can send to a silent payment address. So we talked about silent payments a few weeks ago, which is that’s a really good feature. Glad they’re adding that. Bitcoin Keeper, which is a Bitcoin, wallet, version 1 dot 2 dot 9. They’re adding cashed transactions and health check for their keys. And then to round things out, the lnd lightning node, It’s a hotfix, probably for some performance type, or just bug fixes, version 0.18.onedashbeta.

So alright. That’s it for our software update. That’s it for our news. Oh, supporters. Sorry. I did not do that on purpose. We did get some support this week. I appreciate that. We’ll read through that real quick. We got a boost from our friend Gulag Bound, and this was about last episode, episode 173. What about your backup? Sent a rolesticks 1111, said backups, ladies and gentlemen. A reminder to test your recovery keys before you load up your wallet, 100%, gulag bound. I appreciate that. We also had some streaming. We had a total of 2172 sats this week, so I do appreciate that.

And, we’ll wrap things up. If you clip an episode of Satoshi’s blebs, if you go to an app like fountain, you clip 1, 2, 3 minutes out of that episode. If it’s current episode and you clip it and post it on fountain as an example, I will, I should be see that, and I will boost you back 500 sets for that. If it’s an older episode, I’ll boost you 300 sets. It’s a way to make some treasure, and, for you, and it’s a way for me to get some value out of that as well by getting the message of Toshi’s Plebs spread a little further. We are a podcast at 2 point o podcast. We’re value for value. I don’t have sponsors. I don’t have advertisers.

I talk about that all the time. I’m not gonna give the kind of spiel this week that I normally do. Go to another episode and listen to that, but we support as many of those podcast 2.0 features as we can. Transcripts, for example, chapters, another example, of course, streaming and boosting. I love the feedback of getting messages from people like Gulag Bowne saying, you know, good job, Macintosh. You know, clearly Gulag Bowne agreed with what I was saying last week. And, by the way, you should too. The only reason that you wouldn’t agree is, maybe you’ve never had that mistake happen, but it happens to the best of us.

And, you will understand the wisdom of having that backup when that happens. Boosting, a message in is a great way to get a hold of me. It doesn’t really have to be a huge amount. Just send a 100 stats and say, hey, Macintosh. Great show or, you know, hey, Macintosh. You suck. If you do that, please tell me why. Don’t just say that. Hopefully, it’s something that I can improve. K? If you don’t know what I mean by podcasting 2.0, it’s essentially the next evolution of podcasting apps and the ecosystem that goes along with that. It’s a way to have chapters. You can go to podcastapps.com and see a whole list of apps and different things that support podcasting 2.0, and I’d encourage you to do that.

Right now, I’m using three different apps, and they’re different, and I like them in different ways to be fine, to be honest with you. So you go and give a try to a number of them and see what you think. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I’m on Twitter at McintoshFintech. I’m a mastodon at Mcintosh@podcastindex.social. And, of course, I can be reached by email at mcintosh@satoshis-plebs.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I’ll talk to you soon.