[00:00:00] McIntosh:

Welcome back to Satoshi’s Plebs for episode two twenty five. I’m McIntosh. And I’m Kenshin. Today, we’re talking about Bitcoin Myths. Kenshin, wake up. Come on now. And now I’m on the file. Okay. Yeah. Alright. Kenshin’s a little out of sorts because he’s not at home. That’s okay. But we’re gonna go ahead and jump right on to into this. We are not because he’s not at home doing live streams. Our block height as we begin is nine one four one six two. So we’re chugging along right towards 1,000,000 blocks. Hey, Kenshin. What’s up with you?

[00:00:41] Kenshin:

Yeah. Well, as you said, I am not home. I am over on your side of the pond. The pond. And, it’s a small hop over from Europe to US. Yeah. It’s, it’s nice to be here again. I was here last November. Mhmm. I’m here again now. You have a lot a lot of options with restaurants, which I appreciate. But, every evening we go out with a department and, trying Mexican, trying what did we try? Vietnamese. We tried Japanese. What else we tried? Two Mexican. Two different Mexican restaurants. Yeah. And, they seem very authentic in in in their menus and, the grid ingredients and everything. So

[00:01:37] McIntosh:

Now if I could interrupt, I I I know generally where you’re at.

Yeah. And to be honest, I haven’t spent a great deal of time there, but I will swear on a stack of Bibles. Six deep. The best Mexican food in The United States is in Texas. It just is. It’s called Tex Mex. And because they get it’s right there on the border. They they, I don’t know. It’s just Right. It’s just better. I mean, you can kinda make that argument maybe about Southern California as well and all along the border there, but Texas has a long border with Mexico and a lot of migration and whatever. And and, they just have really good mix. I’m glad you’re enjoying it. I am a food snob. I love food, and anybody who sees me knows that realizes is that.

I do love food. It’s funny because we are planning on going on a vacation, which I’ve mentioned, and I’ll talk about it when we get back. But, I’ve I’m like, okay. We can eat this here, and we can go eat. Oh, it’s gonna be great. But anyways, sorry. Didn’t mean to well, I didn’t mean to interrupt. I’m sorry.

[00:02:53] Kenshin:

Yeah. No. But it’s fine. But I’m looking forward actually to a steakhouse. They have a really nice steakhouse here. And last last year I was here, I actually bought they had a set of knives Mhmm. That you could buy from the restaurant, and I bought them. And, there was Took them home. Really?

Yeah. It’s really interesting. And they let you.

[00:03:17] McIntosh:

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, crazy. Alright. Yeah. Very cool. I’m glad you’re enjoying your trip. I know you’re lots of stuff going on there. Mhmm. But at least you’re enjoying the food part. Right?

[00:03:30] Kenshin:

So Yeah. Trying to.

[00:03:32] McIntosh:

Really, the only thing I got to share this week is, I will say this. I’ve been so without I don’t wanna tell you the actual website. I’m sorry. But we we as a family kinda we have a website. It’s a little ecommerce business, really, and it’s quite old. The site has been around for over twenty years. We have all of our kids have gone through phases of helping with the website, and we were really teaching them entrepreneurial stuff. Right? They earn some money. They’re learning some skills, all this kind of stuff.

And this site has been WordPress from for a while. Ever since well, for, gosh, fifteen years maybe.

[00:04:21] Kenshin:

Alright.

[00:04:22] McIntosh:

Because I am so impressed with Hugo, with our Satoshis web website. I have actually figured out how to convert that site over to Hugo even though it’s an ecommerce site. So Are you? Yeah. You well, it’s not that simple. Hugo doesn’t, like, have a shopping cart. So it’s a combination of Hugo and basically what amounts to, serverless technology. So, like, Amazon has those, little serverless compute device things, whatever. It’s it’s that, essentially, and it handles when they click on the shopping stuff, it it handles that part of it.

So I’m gonna try that. I spent a good bit of time last night with Claude, you know, kinda sketching that out. And I I really think we’re gonna try it because the site’s getting kinda slow, and I hate WordPress, and it’s hard to update and keep up to date. And it’ll let me do things like build a little admin dashboard. So our youngest son is now the one who’s doing the website. And so he’ll be able to go in there and, oh, here’s our sales for the week, and, oh, here’s the orders we need to ship, and so on and so forth. It’ll all be there in one nice little dashboard. Be easy for me to maintain and keep up.

[00:05:45] Kenshin:

That’s cool. So

[00:05:47] McIntosh:

And is perfect for that type of thing. As far as I can tell, it’s basically gonna be free. I mean, we’re gonna host it on GitHub just like we did the Satoshis website for the Hugo part, which that works like a I cannot believe they do that for free. It’s just that boggles my mind.

And the other part, the server lit part, what is the right word for that? There’s there’s a word for it. It doesn’t matter.

[00:06:13] Kenshin:

Serverless.

[00:06:14] McIntosh:

Yeah. That’s right. Be so it’s not like a big volume site. There’s so little traffic, we’ll never get out of the free category. Right? So we don’t have to pay for that either. So I’m excited about that. I don’t know. It’s the simple things. I really shouldn’t be doing it. I do not have time to do it, but I really wanna do it. So I’m gonna do it. So there. Stick it to the man. Wait. I am the man. Today. That sucks.

Sorry. Yeah. Plead that. It’s been a long day.

[00:06:49] Kenshin:

Are you still in your own time? I see. I am. That’s exactly

[00:06:53] McIntosh:

what I’m doing. Oh, man. Alright. So let’s move on to our support. Send It Mike, boost is a thousand and 69 sats, yesterday. No. Today. No. Yesterday. Sorry. I can this was on, episode two twenty four, Labor Day Blues, last episode. He said, good to have Kenshin back. Hope you had a good trip and vacation. Send it Mike to be clear that was not a vacation for him. I’ll let him speak about the good trip part, but I do know it was not a vacation. Curious about the app you built. Let me know if you like the song, and there’s a link to a song. It looks like he wrote a new song. Send it, Mike. I’ll put that in the rotation after a couple weeks from now. I need to make a note of this, Kenshin, but, I just have a new song lined up for this week, that we’ll talk about later. But I’ll I’ll stick you in there. And if you’ve got a place for me to if if you gotta set up value for value, you have to do it that way or it won’t work. We could maybe have listeners boost you. That would be pretty cool.

Alright. Bitcoin myths. Yay. We picked a fun topic for tonight because I frankly needed to pick me up. So we’re gonna roll through these. Gonna do it pretty quickly. We’re gonna go kinda every other we’ll switch back and forth talking about them, but we have a list. I don’t even know how many are on this list. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Some of these we’ve talked about, in passing. Some of them we talked about a little bit. I don’t think we’ve maybe covered these in-depth except maybe one of them. But I kinda wanted to put them all out there. Let’s, because you’re gonna hear these things. You will hear you can hear these things on mainstream media.

And if you’re investing in Bitcoin, if you’re looking at investing in Bitcoin, then you need to understand these and understand why their myths are not true. Kenshin, do you wanna start?

[00:09:03] Kenshin:

Yeah. So the first myth is Bitcoin has no entrained intrinsic value. And and this comes a lot, and it it’s a concept of, saying that since Bitcoin is not backed by something physical, like, for example, gold and Mhmm. Other currencies were backed by gold, for example, in the past, then that means that it doesn’t really have any value. And that’s how they usually argue against Bitcoin.

But, of course, now, for example, the US dollar is impacted by gold either. So

[00:09:46] McIntosh:

in Right. We’re not sure about the value of the US dollar, but okay. You’re you’re correct. What does its value come from, though?

[00:09:56] Kenshin:

Guns, government, police. No. Well, not even talking about

[00:10:03] McIntosh:

Wow. I was talking about Bitcoin. I’m sorry.

[00:10:08] Kenshin:

So yeah. I mean, first of all, of course, comes from its, scarcity, the 21,000,000. Right? Mhmm. It’s decentralized, censorship resistance. Right. And, yeah, a combination of all those things and everything that we have to do over the past, few episodes.

And, of course, like anything, I think we did we mention that example before with art? Right? What is art worth really? It’s just paper and paint. Right. Why would it cost worth more than a dollar since it’s the the parts of the physic yeah. Right. The physical parts of it is Yeah. Is nothing really. But but all it is is worth millions in some cases. Right? So in that sense, yeah, Bitcoin has value because people assign value to it because it’s course, fulfills a purpose. And, yeah, as we said, this decentralized can be exchanged freely, and all those attributes. And those attributes are very unique to Bitcoin in in this scene of cryptocurrencies, since no one really owns it and can yeah. No one affects the issuance.

So yeah. Very cool. Alright. Do you have the second one? On it? Or

[00:11:47] McIntosh:

No. I think that’s actually a really good summary. I think the fact that it’s not physical trips people up, and that’s okay. We live in a digital world. I mean, that’s where things are going. So, there’s not going to be physical things backing those digital objects. And the way that Satoshi solved all this in a very elegant way, in my opinion, that that’s what gives it the value. Yeah. Alright. Bitcoin is only used by criminals or Bitcoin is used by criminals, which I think is more what they’ve switched to. But either way, you know, early on, yes, Bitcoin was used for dark web, you know, go here, buy this, elicit, whatever.

There’s no arguing that. However, certainly, these days, the legitimate and and I would argue well, let me just continue on. Sorry. Legitimate use is certainly far outpaced anything that’s, illegal. They’ve done different analysis of the blockchain, and they’re figuring out that, this illegal activity is less than 1% of all the different Bitcoin transactions. So 99%, in other words, are legitimate. They’re transactions between people for for nonillegal things. Honestly, Bitcoin’s a really bad medium to be Yeah. Doing illegal things because it is transparent.

In fact, I think that that’s, I would argue that’s actually one of the flaws of Bitcoin, that they are working on, but it’s a work in progress. We can do coin join, this type thing to obfuscate to cover things up. But in my opinion, the way that I read the constitution and the bill of rights and especially the bill of rights, we have a right to privacy in our perp in our papers and our our our effects. And one of those is our money. I’ve railed on here a number of times when we go to the bank, and, I’m a perfectly law abiding citizen, but I wanna send $10,000 to someone.

For whatever reason, it doesn’t matter. It’s my business, and they wanna be all up in my business saying, what’s this all about? Why are you doing this? That to me is that to me is overstepping. They would call that anti money laundering and, AML, anti money laundering, and these type things. And I just call it overreach. So my word is simple because I’m just a redneck from the Southeast Part of The United States. So you call it AML, I call it overreach. Whatever. Right? Regardless, Bitcoin is a bad choice for these illegal activities. So there you go.

[00:14:58] Kenshin:

And and in that logic, if we see statistically

[00:15:02] McIntosh:

which currencies used for illegal activities the most is the US dollar by far. Yeah. I started to get off on that earlier. You’re exactly right. They use the US dollars simply because it’s untraceable effectively. Right? That, theoretically, there are serial numbers on it, and you can, but the reality is it’s very easy to get around that. So alright. There we go.

[00:15:25] Kenshin:

Right. What’s third? Third one, Bitcoin wastes energy and destroys the environment. Mhmm. And the planet is the most probably got the most traction, I would say. Yeah. It’s easy to to to Yeah. It’s easy to to put it in a headline, and people who don’t know anything about Bitcoin can easily Mhmm.

Understand and agree with this concept, which essentially says that, I mean, some titles had even Bitcoin mining burns as much as a small country. Right. Yeah. And, of course, yes, Bitcoin mining takes a lot of energy as a whole if you take all the mining, around the world. But no one sits and and looks at the numbers more specifically to see that you cannot use the the same energy that we use in homes, to warm up the Right. Our homes, for example, because Mhmm. Bitcoin mining is not profitable with this sort of energy. And so bit for Bitcoin mining to be profitable, you need renewable energies or or waste energies that Wait. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise, we’ll go to waste and like, all those hydro dams that they just burn or produce energy and goes to waste.

So this energy, as majority is the one that goes in Bitcoin mining, at least nowadays, that is so competitive. And, yeah, you need to make profit from mining. So it’s not the same as saying there are other forms of businesses use energy and like, AI, I would say, is is Mhmm. It’s more wasteful because they don’t it’s much more profitable, so they don’t care where the energy is coming from.

[00:17:28] McIntosh:

Right.

[00:17:29] Kenshin:

A lot of servers I mean, even the banking system is using servers. Right? So and they don’t have this incentive to use renewable either. Right. Amazon, AWS servers, all all those things.

[00:17:45] McIntosh:

So there’s a lot going on there. You know, the the renewable energy, like hydropower, is certainly one aspect of it. I think it’s fascinating because in a Bitcoin mining business, the cost of the electricity is the number one driver of profitability. They seek out the cheapest form of electricity possible, and that gets to be some very interesting cases. I’ve mentioned in passing on this show before, for example, they’re turning, methane, which is generated out of your public dump, whatever y’all call it in Europe. I don’t know. We call it dump, but, you know, we all know where you take care of waste.

Landfill. Yeah. We don’t have the fancy words for it. It. Okay.

[00:18:42] Kenshin:

At least not not in Northern Europe.

[00:18:45] McIntosh:

What what do you do with your waste? Burn it. Okay. Energy. Well right. You burn it in a, like, a sealed container type and extract the energy out. Yeah. That’s that’s good. Glad to hear it. That’s that’s it’s expensive, at least initially, but it’s it that’s good. Well, we we bury ours. It’s what we do. And regardless, that generates methane, and methane is a, gas that’s very bad for the environment and so on and so forth. What they do is they basically capture that methane and they burn it and run a generator, and then the generator runs Bitcoin miners because the miners can be put out there by the generator right there in the middle of all this stuff essentially, whereas nothing else can be. Like, you can’t put your bank out in the middle of landfill and then have it run off the methane. That makes no sense.

But Bitcoin is flexible, and it can. You can do that. You can put it on the same site. So you get very interesting things like that out in the oil fields where they used to burn. Well, they still do in a lot of cases, but they burn natural gas, which is normally found with oil. But in places where the natural gas cannot they can’t do anything with it. It’s too expensive to build a pipeline to capture that gas. It’s a waste, and they they burn it. They flare it is what they call. Well, you can capture that, run it through a generator just like the methane, and run Bitcoin miners right out there in the middle of East Texas or West Texas. They’re probably on both sides, but certainly in West Texas. Right?

And now we’re capturing that, and we’re doing something useful. And those Bitcoin miners are given an incentive to to do that by being offered, you know, $2.03 cent per kilowatt power, which is really good. So this, in my opinion, is probably the myth that will stay around the longest, but, eventually, it will get to the point where it just doesn’t make any sense. My understanding and I don’t have a a document to point you to, but I have seen this multiple times. There’s a report, and maybe it’s the Cambridge, people that they do their periodic report on Bitcoin.

More than half of the Bitcoin mining is done on some form of renewable power. In other words, they’re not just plugging into, say, even a nuclear power plant, which you can traditionally get cheaper power from. It’s like hydro or solar or wind or some type of natural gas flaring or something like that. It’s more than half of the mining. There’s no under there is no other industry that does that. None. So you can’t say that we’re not green. How could you I mean, you just can’t. And the people aren’t even doing it to be green. They’re doing it to be cheap. Yeah.

[00:21:59] Kenshin:

So it’s a win win. Right? Yeah. And those Very cool stuff. Yeah. And those cases were, as you say, with methane and and forms do that with methane also. And Mhmm. Mhmm. They had no incentive to No. To be green, as you say. And now the incentive is is still not to be green. It’s to make money from Right. Bitcoin mining. But as a consequence, they have been green. So it’s Right. It’s a win win. You can you can power these by biomass. I mean, there’s so many different ways of doing this. It’s amazing. I love the work that

[00:22:35] McIntosh:

Eric Hirschman’s doing over in Africa, people like him, where they’re going in and they’re doing two things. They’re using hydropower, and they are empowering villages to be able to grow.

Because otherwise, these hydropower dams get shut down because they’re not profitable because they can’t put people online quickly enough, essentially. Mhmm. Very cool stuff. Alright. Bitcoin is too volatile to be a currency. That’s mine, isn’t it? Volatility. Volatility is a thing with Bitcoin. You can look at any Bitcoin chart. I think we were up $4,000 today. Just I mean, we were. So if you have a Bitcoin, you’re up about $4,000 in your position. So, if you wanna call it that. So congratulations. Yes. That is volatile. A 4% move essentially on anything in the course of one day is that’s pretty volatile, and it can get even more than that.

But I would say over time, that volatility is decreasing. I believe we will see the time where we almost reach the status, where it doesn’t really fluctuate. I may be wrong. It may just basically continue to go up because of the idea of the nature of the 21,000,000 Satoshis. Maybe I’m maybe I’m wrong about that. But either way, I think we’re a long way off from that. But the volatility is up overall. It’s not going down 50% and then up 10 and then down another 40. It’s maybe down 10 and up 20. Right? Right. It it is tracking all you gotta do is zoom out. It’s it’s not hard. Just take a trading view chart, zoom out to a four year time frame, and you’re going up.

[00:24:33] Kenshin:

Yeah. And and, really, what does it matter if it’s volatile in a day? If if you don’t day trade, it it doesn’t matter.

[00:24:42] McIntosh:

Right? Right. It it it matters for short term transactions like your day trade. It could potentially, at this point, frankly, matter for merchants or whatever if they’re not keeping it in the longer term, if which would, to me, would be a lack of understanding. But for a store of value, if you zoom out just a little bit, even in the medium term, you’re gonna be okay.

[00:25:10] Kenshin:

No. I will you said that if you’re a merchant, I mean, if you put stable prices, you keep same price in Bitcoin for 6 months or a year. It still doesn’t matter.

Unless if you need to convert

[00:25:25] McIntosh:

back back to fiat every day to cover expenses, but otherwise Right. That’s what I’m talking about. Yeah. That’s the exact situation where I’m talking about. And I will say this, Bitcoin as a currency is being used in a lot of places outside The United States, not so much here. But it’s being used in a lot of places where they already have issues with hyperinflationary currency. Argentina, for example, where the, you know, the the interest rates the the inflation rates have been crazy for years. What does it matter if Bitcoin’s volatile? It’s still better than the peso.

Right? The Argentine peso.

[00:26:13] Kenshin:

And and and, also, if you would compare any of the Fiat with gold or something

[00:26:20] McIntosh:

else Right.

[00:26:21] Kenshin:

They are really volatile too. We just don’t feel it because we we don’t exchange. But for me, for example, every winter, I feel the volatility of electricity prices. It swings hugely in Sweden because it’s so cold. Yeah. Yeah. We pay three, four times more than the summer.

[00:26:44] McIntosh:

For the electricity itself?

[00:26:46] Kenshin:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my my bill is huge in the winter. Just because it’s

[00:26:53] McIntosh:

it’s cold. There’s more demand. And they scream on your property?

[00:26:58] Kenshin:

No.

Yeah. No. The re I I I have thought about it. But yes. No.

[00:27:07] McIntosh:

No. I’m just kidding. Okay. Yeah. No. I there’s a lot of factors for that. I believe ultimately and this is what one of my big pushes, Bitcoin as a neutral global reserve currency. If we reach that point, we won’t be volatile. It will not be going down. I mean, there just won’t be a down. It may continue to go up, and I think it would, but it won’t go down.

[00:27:40] Kenshin:

Mhmm.

[00:27:42] McIntosh:

Because if The United States sells, Russia’s gonna buy. And, you know, and so on and so forth. As a store of value, the volatility is in your favor, so lean into that.

Alright. I think you’re next. Right. So

[00:28:01] Kenshin:

governments will ban Bitcoin. And, yeah, they tried many times. So that’s a fear, right, that they keep it’s their father. They keep, keep saying, oh, don’t don’t buy Bitcoin because they will ban it and then you’re stuck or you’ll be illegal and whatever. But, yeah, how many times China tried to ban it or they banned it officially, but nothing really changed? The mining companies, of course, had to leave because there were legal entities, but you could always keep buying Bitcoin as a private person and exchange it. I think US, they tried. Right? Or they’ve never succeeded, but they were fighting it a lot in the last four years.

[00:28:52] McIntosh:

The US tried to ban Bitcoin?

[00:28:55] Kenshin:

Or weren’t they fighting it at least a lot with the banking system and Yeah. So

[00:29:00] McIntosh:

right. That’s what you’re talking about, and that makes sense. Yes. There was there was a lot of debanking is what they would call it Right. Where, say, a Bitcoin company would lose their bank account, and it happened a lot. Was that because of the government? I don’t know that there’s direct evidence of that. I believe that’s really what was going on. But, you had people like Elizabeth Warren or, excuse me. Like Elizabeth Warren and the Biden administration who were not pro crypto.

Yes. Choke point two point o was what it was called. But that was more of a regulatory kind of soft thing. It was never, like, you can’t own Bitcoin and and whatever. So Yeah. You’re correct, but I do wanna kind of moderate that just a little bit. Does that make sense? Yeah. But that that could be just as effective if your business can’t have a bank account because they deal in If your business can’t have a bank account because they deal in Bitcoin, that’s a real problem.

[00:30:08] Kenshin:

Yeah. But they did that because they couldn’t really ban it because there was nothing to ban.

[00:30:16] McIntosh:

Maybe or because they knew that if they did that yeah. I let’s go with that. Yeah. Exactly.

[00:30:25] Kenshin:

Yeah. Because I Alright. Because I don’t think the like, a country can ban it because there is no company to go and close it down. There is no CEO. There is no they can tell you you cannot have that, but how can they enforce it? It’s it’s and that’s the point. The governments cannot really ban it. They cannot turn off a server like they have done with so many other services.

[00:30:54] McIntosh:

What you’re saying is beak Bitcoin is decentralized.

[00:30:59] Kenshin:

Exactly.

[00:31:01] McIntosh:

Right. You’re correct. And that is one of the big benefits of it being decentralized. It’s very difficult. We could do something like what they did in the thirties with gold and confiscate people’s gold, but, and confiscate your Bitcoin, but that would be extremely difficult outside outside of centralized services like Coinbase.

[00:31:26] Kenshin:

Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. If if you have your keys, then you’re fine.

[00:31:32] McIntosh:

Right. Okay. The only thing I would add to that I’m not adding anything to that. That was good. Bitcoin the next one, I’ve lost count. I should have numbered these. Bitcoin transactions are too slow and expensive.

We hear this from, I don’t know, Litecoin people, Monero people, whatever, and you are confusing things. So we have two layers in Bitcoin, and this is really important to understand. There is the base layer, the main net. This is the combination of the Bitcoin nodes, like core and knots, and the miners operating in tandem. And that basically, you have a block every ten minutes roughly. That’s what the difficulty adjustment is for is to keep it at around ten minutes. And if you do the math, thank you, like magic numbers are appearing on the sheet. If you do the math, that works out to something like seven transactions per second, and that sounds ridiculously slow.

But above that, we have layer two solutions like lightning. Lightning would certainly be the most common example. With a lightning transaction, I can send Satoshis. I can send a full Bitcoin, for that matter. It doesn’t matter really, but I can send Satoshis around the network from wallet to wallet. So I could send you some Kenshin, and it would literally take seconds to go around the world. And, it would show up at your wallet, and everything would be just as secure as if we did that on the main net. Because of the security that’s built into the main net, the Lightning Network layer takes, advantage of that.

That makes sense? Yeah.

[00:33:37] Kenshin:

And soon There’s an ex well, go ahead. Sorry. And soon, we have the let’s call them layer three, like cashew and some Right.

[00:33:48] McIntosh:

I think they’ll end up classifying cashew as a layer. Well, well, yeah. No. I I could go with that. Yeah. Sure. Layer three, I doubt we’ll ever get above that, but, you know, we’ll see. Time will tell. We got a long time to do this. Thousands of years. I don’t know. Crazy. Who knows what somebody’s gonna come up with five hundred years from now? I’m certainly not gonna try and predict that future. Because, man, have you read old science fiction? Those people had it all wrong. It’s like really crazy stuff. Just like for the nineteen fifties, I was like, you’re so wrong. I will start reading Asimov. Do you know this also? Yes. I do. Isaac Asimov. Yes.

He everybody’s always like, well, he predicted satellites. That’s true. That was about the only thing he predicted. But okay. We’ll give him that. Oh, man. Alright. I now see, now I made all the Asimov people hate me. I like Asimov. He’s alright. He’s alright. I’m not a big sci fi fan. Do you read a lot of sci fi? Do you read a lot of fiction? No. Do you read?

[00:34:54] Kenshin:

Yeah. Could say. Not not too fantastical. I

[00:35:01] McIntosh:

yeah. I read more sci fi when I was younger than than I do now. I’ve actually just picked up a few days ago at some sci fi thing on Kindle. It’s kind of an experiment, and it’s like a series. And I’m probably halfway through the book, and it it’s okay. Like, they’re crash landed on this planet, and they gotta do things to get off. Whatever.

I don’t know. Sometimes I just need to turn my brain down, and it’s only reading tends to be very effective for me for that. So I take my melatonin, and then I read for, like, fifteen minutes in the bed, and I go to sleep instead of sitting there.

[00:35:42] Kenshin:

My recommendation is Project Hail Mary

[00:35:46] McIntosh:

from Is that that’s a book? Okay. Yeah. That was my favorite. Last one I read. I’m trying to think. Oh, well, I’ll hear it when I listen to this again, so I don’t have to type it right now. I’m trying to think. It doesn’t matter. This is not a sci fi podcast. Move on. Could be. Could no. And we’re not doing gold and so on and so forth.

[00:36:11] Kenshin:

Let me see.

[00:36:13] McIntosh:

Let’s see. I did the last one. I think it’s your turn. Number seven. By the way, that last one was number six. Thank you, Kenshin. Appreciate that. Right. So seven, Bitcoin will be replaced by a better cryptocurrency.

[00:36:25] Kenshin:

And, yeah, a lot of people say, oh, I missed the train with Bitcoin, so I go with x y z coin now instead. And, there are thousands or maybe millions by now with all those meme coins also of cryptocurrencies out there. But, yeah, none is is, how do we say? Like, Bitcoin that is not controlled by an entity or a person or a group. Or a person. Yep. So Mhmm.

Out of okay. Maybe there are, but a few small examples. But Bitcoin is the one that has, gained all the traction for the last fifteen years and has the community and has the recognition now and has the volumes and the market cap. So in that sense, it’s never too late. And all the other cryptocurrencies are actually, yeah, businesses, essentially. Right. So you cannot rely That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah. You cannot rely on them. They they want to make money from you. And Bitcoin is completely out there for us to use.

[00:37:48] McIntosh:

I’m not aware of a single cryptocurrency that’s that’s actually relevant that does not have a founder slash CEO who’s not still involved or been replaced by someone.

When Satoshi

[00:38:09] Kenshin:

left Alright. I don’t

[00:38:12] McIntosh:

he set an example that I don’t think will ever be repeated because he can’t benefit from Bitcoin in the way that those people can by staying around and, you know, taking advantage of the system.

[00:38:30] Kenshin:

Yeah. And there was no pre mining.

[00:38:33] McIntosh:

Right? And it is I cannot I don’t know how that’s even humanly possible for him to do that. And frankly, that’s the one reason why I almost think it’s almost I’m not ladies and gentlemen, I’m not saying this is true, but it’s like it was he like some angel or something that some some spiritual being came down and did this and and left?

I mean, think about it. He left Bitcoin. He coulda had the fame, the fortune, all the things, and he didn’t. He left it. I I don’t that’s so countercultural. It it’s amazing. I’m not saying he was. I just man, that’s, like, the one thing that gives it credence. If you read his writing enough, you know, he probably was not, but he was almost like a

[00:39:27] Kenshin:

It reminds me do you know the silly game Flappy Bird? Yes. In our draft I do. So so that I think it was someone from Vietnam or somewhere around that part of the world who made it, and he couldn’t handle the attention and the money that he brought so fast.

So he he abandoned it. He deleted it. Interesting. Instead of so it could be, you know, some Yeah. People are wired. You’re right. I’m just being

[00:40:00] McIntosh:

I don’t know. You’re right. I that that I never heard that. Satoshi

[00:40:06] Kenshin:

or Satoshi made fluffy bird also.

[00:40:09] McIntosh:

Well, one of the theories is it was Jack Dorsey. So, you know, he made Twitter and made a billion dollars or whatever off that, so it doesn’t matter. I don’t think it was him, but yeah. Yeah. Alright. Where are we at? Last one. I think it’s my turn. Yep. Alright. Are we good with that? Are we done? Sorry. No. Yeah. We have Yeah.

Oh, before I move on, I did wanna say this about number seven being replaced by better currency. It’s been my impression lately that this has kind of been the thing. This is what I’ve heard people literally say that there’s going to be something better and that it’s x, y, or z. So maybe this is going to be the new big thing, kinda like the way the whole illegal thing was or really, for a long time, the whole minor thing was you’re you’re using the energy of Norway or whatever country it was. You know? We’ve we’ve taken care of that. We’ve taken care of the whole dark web. You know? Hey. It’s 99% legitimate.

And, oh, by the way, if you actually are doing something illegal, here’s your track record. Right? This probably will be the next thing that needs to be handled. And I don’t know what point that gets proven true. It may not be a long it may be it may be a long time, honestly. I don’t know, but we’ll see. Last one. Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme or bubble. Yeah. We’ve heard this before. The way a Ponzi scheme works, you have to have new investors. If there’s not a flow of new investors who are investing money that goes to the older people, the whole thing collapses when that stops when the money stops flowing.

Bitcoin does not have any kind of central operator promising any kind of return. We have already survived multiple boom bust cycles. I mean, every four years. I mean, especially early on, it was 80% plus drops. There was one early on, and I had to pull up the figures, but it was crazy. Like, it got to a I don’t even wanna say because I don’t wanna mess this up, but I wanna say it was something like a thousand dollars, and then it got down to, like, maybe a 130. I I hope I’m at least close to right with those numbers. It was a huge drop. And you can imagine people are like, it’s over, and and no.

No. It wasn’t. So calling it a bubble is is you’re you’re ignoring a lot. You’re ignoring those boom bust cycles for one thing. Because any Ponzi scheme, when it drops like that, that’s when it’s gonna break apart. We’ve already been through that multiple times while continuing to build new things that better like, lightning came out in 2017, I think somewhere around there, not too long after a a one of those bear markets, one of those busts. Right? Calling it a bubble is ignoring what’s going on in terms of institutional adoptions. Right now, ETFs and companies are buying far more Bitcoin than is being mined, which is mind boggling to me that the price has been so stable all summer. And this is why you’re going to win the bet. You’ve already won it, I think. Aren’t we past the date?

And I will now hang my head in shame, but I could not understand I already knew this buying was going on, and they’re still doing it, and yet the price doesn’t go up. So there’s something there I don’t understand, but that’s okay because eventually the price will catch up. And I hope you’re along for the ride. Not you can well, I hope you are too, Kinsha. I’m talking to you listener though. Seriously. Mhmm. I caught you off guard. Sorry. That’s it. Yeah. Do you have a question for the week? We really didn’t talk about this beforehand.

[00:44:28] Kenshin:

Is there a myth that you believe or are concerned with? Right. Great question.

[00:44:36] McIntosh:

Alright. Next week, we’ll talk about that. Hopefully, we’ll get some boost in about that. I don’t really have any news this week. The only software I think I looked

[00:44:50] Kenshin:

I looked also, and there’s nothing really interesting except the usual.

[00:44:55] McIntosh:

There is a software update I wanna talk about. Primal did have their big update. It was the week after what I said, so I was wrong. I apologize. If you’re running primal, you might want to update. Our Bitcoin price as we record, $114,050 in US military backed government debt.

[00:45:21] Kenshin:

Right. How’s that for a name?

It’s very good. I like it. Very descriptive. And it’s €97,400.

[00:45:33] McIntosh:

Alright. Sorry. I needed that. And last September, actually, the tenth, the time it doesn’t matter. The time had already changed. It’s close enough. 57,343. And

[00:45:53] Kenshin:

So we’re up 98.9%.

[00:45:57] McIntosh:

Thank you. Sorry. Our Bitcoin market cap, $2,300,000,000,000 USD. What are we at in gold, sir?

[00:46:05] Kenshin:

25.4. So Bitcoin versus yeah. Bitcoin versus gold market cap is at 8.9. So we’re down from the 9%

[00:46:17] McIntosh:

from last time. And you know why that is? Because not only was Bitcoin up, gold is up. Gold is at a new all time high. I think yesterday or today, I think it was yesterday, it touched, thirty seven fifteen maybe in dollars.

Wow. I hope it’s not a predictor of a global I don’t know. Whatever. But things are things are not looking good. You need to store your your your wealth in in things of value, not in dollars or euros maybe or whatever government backed fiat that there is out there. And I would recommend investing in Bitcoin that is not financial advice, etcetera, etcetera. But that is what we are talking about. Alright. Maybe one day we should do a show about real estate versus Bitcoin because real estate I mean, we’ve talked about a little bit, but I did oh, here’s a little news. Speaking of real estate, I saw this week Grant Cardone, who’s a very well known influencer business type person here in The United States, sold his $43,000,000 mansion for 400 Bitcoin.

[00:47:44] Kenshin:

Woah. Yep.

[00:47:46] McIntosh:

As far as I know well, he’s certainly not been talking about Bitcoin for a long time. I think he started talking about it fairly recently. I don’t wanna say too much because I’m probably gonna get it wrong, and somebody like, Send it Mike who probably knows all about Grant Cardone will be like, he didn’t say that. But he did sell his mansion for 400 Bitcoin. I did see that, so I’ll cut the rest out. Macintosh never said that. That’s why I do the editing, ladies and gentlemen. Alright. You wanna do the the mempool?

[00:48:23] Kenshin:

Yes. So in the mempool right now, we have only one sat per v byte as transaction fees.

We have 191 megabytes and 66,000 transactions unprocessed transactions. So it’s a lot of unprocessed transactions with only one sub per v, but it’s for me, earlier when I was looking at the mempool, it looked a bit weird. Right. It is what it is.

[00:48:52] McIntosh:

Yeah. There’s a lot of sub one SAT transactions, which to me Yeah. I truly hope is an anomaly because people who are willing to send around transactions for less than these are minors that are willing to send around transactions for less than 1 SAP per vByte. Man, dude, go find a cheaper power source or something. You’re that’s just ridiculous. Like, there’s nothing there.

I don’t know. But we’re getting half filled blocks, and this is part of why everybody’s like, oh, this isn’t working. The block reward is still there. The transaction fees are smaller. I see this as frankly a lot of activity moving up to the Lightning Network that we were talking about earlier, and that was a natural thing that would happen. Now what’ll happen is we’ll start moving up in price. We’ll start and this activity will pick up. But for now, anyways, it’s very, very minimal. It seems it’s a great time to consolidate those Bitcoin wallets.

[00:50:01] Kenshin:

Yes. And that’s my currently my stress. I I have accumulated, a little bit in my DCA Mhmm. In strike. At least point zero $0.00

[00:50:16] McIntosh:

$0.01 Bitcoin. Right?

[00:50:19] Kenshin:

I think it’s seven of zeros. Put put another zero. Oh, okay.

[00:50:24] McIntosh:

Whatever one side is. How about that? Right. That’s the one.

[00:50:29] Kenshin:

But I need to give an address now to strike to move those out. Right. Need to to do the Yeah. The work to find the unused address.

[00:50:39] McIntosh:

If things go the way historically they have, we bring this up from time to time. This next few months, October, November, December, things should really pick up. We should, you know, really start seeing not just an all time high, but things move on after I lose my bet. Thanks. Appreciate that. Appreciate that, Bitcoin world. Already.

I did lose You already lost it. Right? I did. I’m sorry. I’ll I don’t know. I’ll bow down to you the next the first time I meet you, not the next time. Well, it will be the next time. We we never did agree to what I was losing to. Yeah. That’s unfortunate. I’m so glad we didn’t have Satoshis involved. I would not do that. I would not even bet a 100 Satoshis because there will be a day when I would regret that. Be like, man, I was a idiot. Idiot. I hear these guys doing this on these podcasts all the time. I’m like, you guys are knuckleheads.

[00:51:33] Kenshin:

Yeah. I mean, no. 100,000

[00:51:36] McIntosh:

sats. That’s a $100 these days, which is one thing, but in another ten years, are you kidding me?

[00:51:42] Kenshin:

Right.

[00:51:44] McIntosh:

Okay. Where were we at? What was I talking?

[00:51:47] Kenshin:

I have no idea. No idea.

[00:51:51] McIntosh:

Clearly, Macintosh needs to get some sleep or something. Yeah. Oh,

[00:52:00] Kenshin:

I I I could say to finish off because I I threw out that mempool looks weird, and I thought maybe I should say what looks weird to me. Mhmm. But there are sixty sixty thousand unprocessed transactions and some half full half filled up blocks. So I don’t know how that happens. I don’t know. Or they don’t have they don’t have time to fill up? I I don’t know how to do it. Think that’s true.

[00:52:26] McIntosh:

I think there’s something there’s some I’m not sure.

I I’m really not. I’m I’ll try and investigate. I don’t know that I’ll come up with anything. I don’t think it’s because they’re happening too fast.

[00:52:45] Kenshin:

No. I don’t think so. I mean, I I look at the block now and it it’s 600 kilobytes.

[00:52:53] McIntosh:

It has space in it. I think Or more transactions. Well, I’m not even gonna speculate what I think because I very likely will be wrong. So I’m gonna try and do some research and figure that out because it is odd, frankly. Is there a listener that knows have heard of that before? That is That would be great. Yeah. I’m gonna have to talk to my sources.

My sources. We’ll see. I’ll see what I can come up with. Mac is next week, you’re gonna be like, well, what’d you find out, Macintosh? About what? What are you talking about? Mhmm. I’ll hear this again when I edit it tomorrow. Alright. Let’s wrap this up. It’s we’re we’re hitting an hour, and it’s time to time to wrap it up. Yep. Satoshi’s Plebs is a value for value podcast, supporting podcast thing two point o. No ads, no sponsorships, just honest Bitcoin content. I deliberately avoid sponsors because even if I love a company, taking their money is going to influence my opinion. What if something goes wrong with that company?

I would hesitate to tell you. Instead, I ask, are you getting value from the show, support it through time, talent, treasure, help with chapters, transcripts, or future projects like our chat room? I gotta stop saying that. I need stream sats, boost with messages, even a 100 sats saying great show, or, you know, you suck. I’ll read it either way on the air live. Check out the apps at podcastapps.com and support independent Bitcoin media. If you’d like the content if you like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the podcast. That is the best way for us to grow. This week’s music is Play Guitar by Dorfel Family Bluegrass.

Any booster streaming sats during that song will go straight to the artist. The Dorfel family is they’re a crazy group of musicians. They do all kinds of stuff. I have not played them before to today. This is something they don’t normally do. They did, like, some live radio shows and they recorded it. And I really I’m not a huge bluegrass person, but this song is really good. So I just thought I’d throw it in there, and we’ll probably explore some of their other stuff down the road.

[00:55:12] Kenshin:

Cool. So thanks for being here. We hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. Find all our contact info at satoshis.plebs.com. Stay humble. DCA those sites, and have a great weekend.

[00:55:26] McIntosh:

We will talk to you all soon.