Episode 175

Okay. So we we bottomed at 53,350 on Friday, July 5th. I think we talked about that last week. And we’ve had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 days since, and most of those days have been green. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 of those days have been green. So we have, you know, broken up above this level. Things looking pretty good. If we can have weekly close above 60,000, which is looking very likely than I think, honestly, we could be kind of moving forward from here. The German government has exhausted its selling of however many Bitcoin that they had. And, honestly, they did not.

Initially, I think they affected the market. We had that drop down, but, they the market kinda chewed them up, spit them out. Now they don’t have any money. Well, long term, they don’t have any money, but they don’t have any Bitcoin. And, and now the price is moving up. I think tomorrow will be maybe possibly a fun day when the, ETFs who have been continuing to buy in general, you know, I suspect tomorrow will be a a big buying day. And, I think I could see a move of multiple 1,000 of dollars tomorrow as well. So we will mark down that price, 60,000.

We dropped. I’ll have to go back and listen to it. I think we were at 61028. So now we’re down to about 60,800. So it is fluctuating, of course, as it always does. Our block height at time of recording is 852-206. It’s 852-206. And we are looking at a difficulty adjustment coming up. Last week, I told you we were looking about a 2.8% up on July 18th. And now we are looking, at 3.19%. So not too much. We’re just a little below that 10 minute average block time in 3 days on July 18th. So less up than last week’s down, if that makes sense. So, you know, every little bit up hurts, at least the miners.

On the other hand, our mempool is looking quite low. The sats the blocks that are building right now are I got a number of them. They’re looking at 4 sats per v byte. Just a few minutes ago, I looked at it, and we were actually sitting at 5 for low, medium, and high priority sats according to mempool.space. Now it’s showing 6. So either way, not a whole lot. Less than last week where we were looking at 7. And and this is kinda killer. Crazy. I don’t know. 706 megabytes in the mempool. So that is literally a drop of over a 100, a 170, basically.

706. Could we reach 0 again? Will the mempool clear? I don’t know. It’s possible. I I thought for a long time it was not going to. We seem to have gotten through a large number of transactions, and now we’re kind of starting to chew down lower. So I don’t know. We’ll see. We will see. What are we talking about this week? This is a topic that I have probably talked about in the past. I’m fairly certain I have, although I have not looked back at the index of episodes. The reality is, whether I have or not, I’ve certainly talked about it in passing in various episodes.

So maybe this is a little bit of a rehash, but, I’ll be honest. As most of you, I’m sure, have probably heard because on every major news network at this point. President, previous president, whatever you wanna say, however you wanna say that, Trump had an assassination attempt on his life, yesterday as I record this on Saturday and up in Pennsylvania. And, so there was a guy essentially with a rifle, from about a 100 and yards off or so from where the president was giving a speech, shot at him, I believe only once. I’m not a 100% clear on that, but nicked his ear of all things. So literally within an inch or so of his head.

And from what it looks like to me, watching the video of what happened, like, literally, the president turned his head right at the microsecond before that bullet passed through his ear. So it could have been, it could have ended very, very badly. This is not a political podcast. I’m not gonna talk about my feelings one way or the other or whatever about Trump. That’s not my point here. The United States, you could argue in a lot of ways, is a leader in a lot of things. It’s, probably, I think, unequivocally at this point, the global superpower, if you wanna call it that. It used to be Russia and the United States.

Russia, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, you know, that no longer really is the case. So that leaves us. We certainly have our share of military. We have military bases all over the world. The US dollar is the global trade currency at this point, so on and so forth. And I’m not passing judgment on any of that. I’m just making statements. So please don’t construe what I’m saying. I’m just setting some, setting some groundwork here. Trump, recently has been making statements saying that if he got elected that, you know, he would support Bitcoin, he would support privacy, he would support people’s right to mine, right to hold Bitcoin in self custody, and so on and so forth. Now I don’t know whether this is a political ploy, if he really believes it, if he truly understands Bitcoin. My guess is, honestly, he doesn’t truly understand it. He may understand it to a point, but the reality is he’s a very busy person, and he’s not gonna have time to, you know, spend the 100 plus hours that you need to really understand Bitcoin.

I don’t think he’s, you know, cruising around in the presidential limo. Well, I guess he’s not at this point. But in his car, listening to, you know, what Bitcoin did or Satoshi’s Plebs or or whatever. Not that I would equate myself with Peter’s podcast, but, yeah, you get the idea. Right? So maybe he does have some understanding. Maybe he’s had some advisers explain a lot of things to him. But I think, in general, I think we’re basically just looking at a political vote getting tool, as most politicians would do. However, he may have started that way and and really maybe he is getting some understanding. I believe he has talked about backing the US dollar with Bitcoin. Now I’m that may not be true.

That would be a very interesting play if he did as a step towards making Bitcoin the reserve currency of the world. So I sell this, because I do see this right now as a very critical time for the United States. We have been divided as a country for a long time, if you wanna call it left and right, with just few it was the last couple of years few years ago, we had riots with Black Lives Matter. We’ve had certainly a bad economy for the last few years. I don’t care what Biden says. I can point to multiple massive company layoffs, you know, tens of 1,000, in some cases, of, tech jobs, this kind of thing.

And, you know, job numbers that continually get revised. And even, like, with the latest job numbers, yes, there was job growth, but, 70% of it was government jobs. And in my mind, that’s not real growth. That’s just putting more people on the dole. Anyways, I’m not gonna say that we’re gonna explode in the civil war. I I don’t think that would actually happen, to be honest. But I do think we’re in a very difficult time. And I can see Bitcoin playing a critical role, potentially, in all of this. Now that remains to be seen. But, in all the talk that I have said about why I Bitcoin, and I wanna go through the other reasons as well.

But I’ve never really said, well, I Bitcoin because I want the United States to be better. I think I can add that at this point. So whether I believe and actually, I wanna even rephrase that now that I said it. I Bitcoin because I believe that it offers opportunity for nation states to be better, not just the United States. So, of course, I’m a US citizen, born and raised in the United States, so on and so forth. Yes. I’m nationalistic in the sense that I want the United States to succeed. However, any country can do that. Bhutan, up in the Himalayas, El Salvador, Argentina, although they’re not making a whole lot of moves that direction. He’s at least interested in Bitcoin, and he’s doing a lot of the right things to hopefully get them on the right track.

We are starting to see cases where countries are doing better, and it’s because of Bitcoin. I hope that trend continues. I hope over the next 10 years or so that we see more and more countries who are using Bitcoin as a source of currency of trade, of international trade, you know, inter nation trade, whatever, and so on. Because I also believe, in addition to that, that Bitcoin can be good for the disenfranchised, for the unbanked, which is a very large number of people worldwide, for people who live in countries like, say, oh, I don’t know, Turkey. Turkey is experiencing a great deal of interest, rate, inflation, hyperinflation, whatever you wanna call it.

And Bitcoin as a store of value can help them. So I would certainly support that. I’m hopeful, maybe optimistically so, that as countries move to a Bitcoin standard, that it removes some of the incentives for them to even go to war. Now I think I’m probably being very optimistic about that, but I hope it’s true. I believe that there have certainly been cases where, countries, have fought over scarce resources and their well, I’ll give you a prime example. Not of scarce resources, but what I was just fixing to say, of of a crumbling economy essentially. I historians directly trace World War II, the rise of the German, empire, whatever you wanna call it, to what happened to Germany post World War 1, with massive inflation. The Weimar Republic, I think I’m saying that correctly, is in Germany or Austria.

It’s actually the subject of the book Where Money Goes to Die, which is actually a really good book if you have time to read that or the desire. But the drastic economic situation that Germany was in, Germany and Austria were in, gave rise to World War 2. So, you know, you can put that squarely on that. And you can argue about who caused that or whatever, but the reality is is that hyperinflation caused, that is why Germany went to war. That is why Germany started conquering its neighbors and so on and so forth. So I hope that, you know, a sound form of money, potentially worldwide, would eliminate some of that. So that is some of the reason why I bitcoin. I certainly, again, to go back and emphasize, the unbanked and, the people in those type countries, I I am just simply wired.

One of the major things that drives me is I I want to certainly help people who want to help themselves. So people who are in a place where they have no out and their country is inflating their currency and, you know, this is going on in a number of African countries right now, for example. And they have no control over it. I I want to help them be able to have control over that. They can buy bitcoin in whatever amounts and the country that they’re in cannot control that. They can’t deflate or inflate whatever it is, that currency. They have no control over because Bitcoin is controlled by the code that runs on the network.

And a final little facet of that, I am completely fascinated, by the ability of Bitcoin mining to actually improve people’s lives. And I don’t mean by supplying them with a couple of jobs, because one of the things that they kind of gloss over in Bitcoin mining is you can have 100 of thousands of miners and only a handful of people are literally running that. That’s it’s not like, you know, you’ve got all these miners in a big building or whatever, but it’s not like a factory where you’ve got 100 and 100 of workers going in there and doing things and, you know, they’re all employed. Well, that’s not really true with a Bitcoin mine. There are people who are employed in their nice jobs, mind you.

But you’re not going to turn around a country’s economy based on that. However, what it does do, because of the ability to shed load and this kind of thing, it brings the opportunity to bring civilization, literally civilization in the form of power, to areas who have never had it reliably or, economically. What do I mean by this? We see this going on in Africa right now with, Eric, Hersman, I think is his last name, but, Gridless, and a number of other Bitcoin mining companies in Africa where they go to a rural area where there is water power. They develop that water power, hydropower, which costs money, which the people in the village can’t pay, and ordinarily has a an extremely long return on investment, 20, 30 years, which bankrupts the company who does the hydropower project.

But they say, hey. You build the hydropower, and we’ll consume every bit of it from day 1. And that’s what they do. They’re mining for Bitcoin at efficient prices, at low prices. But as the village needs power, that hydro project is able to supply it. And over time, the village use uses more and more power, and then the miners use less and less. And then ultimately, they’re moved off maybe to somewhere else. It’s an incredible model. I think Eric understands that, but I’m amazed at it. And I don’t I see this as a way literally to bring light to the darkness all over Africa, all over places in Latin America, all over places probably in Southeast Asia that aren’t as well developed as, say, China or most of China and Japan and these kind of places.

Because as Bitcoin continues to become the global reserve currency, it’s going to need more and more miners to secure that, network, and more and more people are going to want to mine. Not to secure the network, but to what? To actually mine that Bitcoin and, make a profit. So it’s a it’s a incredibly, symbiotic and smooth system. I don’t know how else to put it. And we’ve never had anything like this literally in the history of mankind, and it’s something that I’m trying to figure out how I can become more involved with. And it’s one of the reasons why Bitcoin and why I mine Bitcoin. So there you go. Maybe this has been a little, what do we call it, self reflective. I don’t know. I hope it was helpful. I would question you and and ask you a simple question, but and a very important one at that. Why do you Bitcoin?

You need to be able to answer that question at least in some form. Oh, and just like everybody else, I left this I left this one off the list. I can’t believe I did not do this on purpose. Of course, one of the reasons why I Bitcoin personally, why I own Bitcoin, why I buy Bitcoin, why I mine Bitcoin, etcetera, is, you know, for me personally, to be able to store my savings, to be able to, take the work that I do and be able to honestly transfer it down to, my children and so on and so forth. Because if I do that in US dollars, it’s not a good situation in the long run.

So that’s why that’s another reason why Bitcoin. Alright. So, hopefully, you can answer that question if somebody ask you. Alright. We’ll go ahead and move on to our supporters. We have some streaming and a boost for 173. The boost was for 1111, so 1111 row 6 From our friend, Kyron, over at Mere Mortals Podcast, he sent a message saying, glad Julian finally came home, talking about Julian, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. He said, I don’t believe Adam is going to Nashville. Phil. He was going to present at the conference, but that fell through. So that’s actually the first I had heard about that, and that is disappointing.

I do believe that the Bitcoin conference is actually missing out there. Adam Curry is the, cofounder of podcasting and, has been doing a great job leading, along with Dave, this, Podcasting 2.0 movement that is bringing so much attention to the value for value idea as well as new features and this kind of thing. So, very important stuff. And I think, frankly, that the Bitcoin conference could benefit from that, but I don’t know. They probably had one too many politicians, and that’s the truth. So, maybe they moved him off for that reason, but, I appreciate that.

Kyrin, of course, as always, you’ve, been supporting the podcast for a long time. So thank you. And then episode 174, I think we had some streaming. We’ve not had any boost, and that was the episode on crash. So I do appreciate the streaming. A total of 2,673 sats for the week. So, alright, before we get out of here, let’s go through our news and notes and our software updates. We’ll begin with our news, of course. Best way to catch up on this news in real time might be to follow me on Twitter, to be honest, at Fintech. I do post on Nostr as well. I have my Nostr Pub key right there pinned on my Twitter page.

So, yeah, I posted actually, I did it’s not really news, but I posted the World Economic Forum, the famous World Economic Forum, posted in 2017. This is right on their Twitter feed, December 15, 2017. In 2020, Bitcoin will consume more power than the world does today, and that simply is not true. It’s not even close, but whatever. We just spew out garbage and people listen. In mining news, I did kinda want I did wanna mention this a couple days ago. It was announced that Bitfarms, who now has his new CEO, he’s used to be the chief mining officer. Ben, and I’m gonna butcher his last name, but I think it’s like Gagnon.

He is now the CEO. They put him in a CEO to replace the, exited CEO, and, they’ve been, going back and forth with Riot who holds 14.9% of the Bitfarms stock. Riot is trying to take over Bitfarms. It’s essentially what’s going on, and they have now scheduled an October 29th shareholder meeting to vote on Riot Platform’s takeover bid. There’s a report that has recently come out that Bitcoin mining has now reached a new all time high in sustainable energy usage at 56.2%, so well over 50%. One of the things that you probably won’t hear a whole lot about, in macroeconomic news, 40 Chinese banks, went under in a single week in June. So, that is not a good thing.

Chinese, China is having a lot of economic issues. I tweeted another thread. Here it is. On July 11th, I reposted. Some of the economic things, there’s, like, an entire thread on on their all the data. Interesting stuff, at least to me. 300 plus percent debt to GDP, the the yuan versus the USD is losing value, you know, these type things. So you can pursue that if you wish. I’m not going to go through all of that on here, but China is not doing well. And there is something to keep an eye on because if China fails, that will hurt manufacturing worldwide.

We will be having severe issues. Not to mention, of course, what it’s doing to the Chinese people right there in their own country with roughly, what, 1 eighth of the world or somewhere between an 8 and a quarter, something like that. In June, the US spent a record $140,000,000,000 on debt interest, 30% of all tax revenue. It is insane. We are spending 30% of our tax revenue on debt interest, and that interest will continue to go higher. Not good. Kenya continues to have problems. They have $26,000,000,000 in foreign aid, which when we just got done up a 140,000,000,000 in the United States in debt interest in June, it doesn’t really seem like a lot. But, of course, their economy is a lot smaller.

I think Kenya needs to do some radical things in order to fix their problems, but I don’t know what’s gonna happen there. I suspect that somehow the IMF is gonna come in and bail them out again. I did post about domains had been, blacklisted essentially. They’ve deployed a hotfix to be able to handle that, and they’ve also got a long term fix in place for the next major release. So I’m glad to see that essentially no well, apparently, no one lost any money, although I’m sure they were inconvenience. And, of course, this is early technology. We don’t wanna be we don’t wanna be putting large amounts of money into something like that and so on. But, in this case, they’ve certainly taken care of everything. Jerome Powell this week said the level of the US debt is not itself unsustainable, but the path that we’re on is unsustainable.

I would argue mister Powell respectfully. Actually, both of those are unsustainable. I think we’re already past the point where we could pay off the debt. I’m not sure how he thinks that that’s possible. Peter Saint Onge, has been posting some stuff about France with their center as left, really, actually. Sorry. Left and very far left, takeover of their parliament, of their whatever they call it. It’s maybe not a parliament, but their political system. I do not think that’s a good thing for France. I think I’ve said that on here before, but, he’s a much smarter person than I am. He literally is a doctor, a PhD, and, does a very good job of explaining these things. And they’re really based in kind of an Austrian viewpoint. So, might be worth listening to to there. Alright. That’s it for the news. Let’s go over our releases for the week.

Didn’t see anything super exciting. The mempool accelerator is now live. I’m not 100% convinced that this is maybe a good idea. I don’t know. But basically, if you go to mempool.space, you can speed up a transaction. I will say this, it’s kind of cool that you can do this. But you can I would assume search for a transaction or you can find it on the little, block chart type thing? And then you can just, let’s see. I think they said hang on, trying to test it right now. If I click on it, there should be maybe it’s still beta. I think there’s some type of beta program. But you can accelerate it, right in the in the screen, which would be really handy. What that means is, let’s say fees are higher and you’re trying to get a low fee, so you post your transaction at, let’s say, 10 sets per vbyte, and overall everything’s running at 15, but you need it right now. Well, you can go in and basically pay a lightning invoice and have it go into the next block, almost guaranteed.

So on the one hand, it’s something new and I’m I I don’t know, but seems pretty The Boltz client, b o l t z client, which connects to lightning nodes, you can have essentially unattended channel balancing using that API, which that’s pretty cool. That’s actually really cool. So that’s interesting. You’ve got Phoenix Wallet, v2.3.3 and server 0.3.0. They now support the BIP 353 DNS address, which is a way to use your email essentially, as a address for lightning payments. I’m not talking about that or that. Fully noted 1.1.1, the barbecue update.

So fully noted, I think I’ve mentioned them before. They are a Bitcoin wallet. They have a new QR update, QR code type update. It’s called bbqrbarbecue. It’s just a new format for QR. I don’t know if it’s better or worse, whatever, but a different way of doing it. So I they certainly think that it’s better. I don’t know if it actually is. Wasabi Wallet, I’m not sure I would be using them at this point. I would just say that, but if you are, they do have a new version out, v2.1.0, adding some safeguards for coinjoin participants. As always, I appreciate the support that, the listeners provide. This is a value for value podcast. So what that means is that, you know, we we don’t have ads. We don’t have sponsors.

I do look to the listeners to provide time, talent, and treasure to support the show. Time can be something as simple as turning to someone and saying, hey. You should listen to Satoshi’s Plebs podcast. This guy’s great. Whatever. That’s as easy as that can be, and treasure simply using the Podcasting 2.0 tools that are out there, and there are a number of them fountain, pod oh, man. I always draw I don’t know why I have so much trouble with the name of this. Podcast Guru, Podverse, Castomatic. There are a number of different, podcasting 2.0 compatible apps that you can get on your phone.

You could go to podcast apps .com. There is a whole list there, but you simply hook it up to your lightning wallet and then you can boost and stream such as Kyrin did and these, other people who were streaming. So, one way you can actually receive some value back from this podcast, by the way, and I I know I kind of harp on this, but I’m also not really adding people take me up on it. But, if you clip an episode, if you go to an app like fountain and you clip a couple of minutes from an episode and then post that, If it’s occurred episode or at least maybe the last month or so not the the last week or so, last couple of weeks, I’ll boost 500 sats back. If it’s an older episode, then it’s gonna be 300 sets back. It’s a way for you to make some treasure. It’s a way for me to gain exposure.

So you’re always welcome to do that. So 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 on mastodon @macintosh@podcastindex.social, and I can be reached by email  at mcintosh@satoshis -plebs.com. So stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I’ll talk to you soon.