[00:00:00] McIntosh:

Welcome back to Satoshi’s Plebs for episode two thirty five. I’m Mcintosh.

[00:00:05] Kenshin:

I’m Kenshin. And in today’s episode, we react to Japan imploding and Texas being the first US state to buy Bitcoin.

[00:00:14] McIntosh:

Good afternoon, Kenshin. How are you, sir? Good afternoon. It’s like like midnight there, isn’t it, or something? Like, I mean No. It’s not after 9 PM. And ladies and gentlemen, I don’t wanna let the cat out of the back here, but he just got done eating dinner, which is something I don’t understand. How do you eat so late, Kinshin? I

[00:00:37] Kenshin:

Well, it was eight, 07:30 at that time when we were talking. I can’t. No.

Well, what do you mean? It’s too early for me? It’s too late.

[00:00:46] McIntosh:

You Europeans and your fancy cultural do do y’all, like, listen to Bach while you eat? Is that what’s going on?

[00:00:55] Kenshin:

Actually, you know, in Sweden, they eat quite early. They eat, like, five Yeah. To six people. That’s not early. That’s a normal time. Well, I I am from Greece. So in Greece is that’s that’s, lunchtime. Lunchtime.

[00:01:12] McIntosh:

Oh my goodness. We gotta talk about this in more depth because, yeah. How do y’all not never mind. Alright. What’s new with you, Kinshan?

[00:01:24] Kenshin:

Well, I don’t know. I haven’t,

[00:01:29] McIntosh:

Just another week.

[00:01:32] Kenshin:

I am actually quite excited of my new laptop. Okay. As I mentioned last time. We talked about that last time. Yeah. That secondhand laptop I got is is more powerful than the desktop I had before. I set it up. I’m quite happy, figuring out, you know, these so called dot files? Yes. You know? So you have your configs for, now this Hyperland that I am. So Right. It’s the first time I do the to upload my so called dot files to GitLab. Okay. So I start I start having my own setup that I can move when needed, and I keep track with Git. Right.

[00:02:18] McIntosh:

Quite happy to use Git in that way for the first time. That sounds like a really good idea and probably something I should be doing.

Just make sure you don’t put passwords in there.

[00:02:28] Kenshin:

No. Exactly. No. Correct. And I I set it up a lot with Claude, so he created a lot of scripts for me. So So I can run run the scripts.

[00:02:41] McIntosh:

Yeah. We’ll get to that. Sure. Yes. News item for the week. Anyways Yeah.

[00:02:46] Kenshin:

Exactly. Apparently, it’s very powerful. Right? Yes. So powerful. It can do it a little bit that I’m watching. Yeah. But yeah. No. I’m I’m happy with that. And so I learned a few new things and with scripting. By doing that. And I can set up my whole system now with, one script and then install my favorite apps with another script.

This is quite exciting stuff. Yeah.

[00:03:15] McIntosh:

Very cool.

[00:03:17] Kenshin:

What about you?

[00:03:22] McIntosh:

One big thing I did this week is well, let’s see. We we celebrate Thanksgiving last Thursday, and that was after the yeah. Right? I’m I’m yeah. No. That was That was after the episode. After the episode. It all runs together. So how We had a good We had a good How much Bitcoin How much what? Did you

[00:03:45] Kenshin:

how much Bitcoin did you talk about? On the table.

[00:03:51] McIntosh:

The people involved, we didn’t, to be honest.

[00:03:56] Kenshin:

Okay.

[00:03:57] McIntosh:

We had a few friends over. I think trying to think who all was here.

Pretty sure that one of the one group of them doesn’t even know that I do Bitcoin. But everyone else knew or they’re already involved or whatever. The majority of them are actually already involved. So it wasn’t really something we just sit around and talk about. I don’t know. Maybe it could have been exciting because, well, here we are in the dumps. So, you know, everybody could dump on Bitcoin. I don’t know. But Yeah. Because last year was the other way around. Right? Right. Going Right. No. We were definitely heading up last year at this point for sure. Yeah.

I don’t know. I don’t find those kind of things the I don’t find that those are the places to talk about Bitcoin. Maybe I should. I don’t know. But I I never have. I can’t think of a single time at Thanksgiving or Christmas that I other than in passing mentioned it. But, you know, we had a good Thanksgiving.

[00:05:13] Kenshin:

Opportunity. You lost your opportunity to orange peel the table.

[00:05:22] McIntosh:

Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. I’m sorry. Now I feel bad. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the other things I did this week, though, I worked on Nextcloud. I set it up on my little server, and, I got it pretty tight at this point. I was able to load some photos off of my laptop onto it, which is, you know, we’re we’re gonna kinda centralize all our stuff on it because I’m just tired of dealing with all these different setups.

And, you know, Apple cloud, whatever, you know, thing, all this kind of stuff. So, in addition to actually using it for our business, which we will be, we’re we’re gonna do it for our family as well. And, I started I started on that. So the the file part is a big thing for us because I personally I’ve got tear well, I got a bunch of data, and it’s scattered across stuff, and it needs to be consolidated. And then I need to make sure I have a, you know, nice, clean, consistent backup of everything.

[00:06:36] Kenshin:

So Yeah. Do you do you back up the next cloud?

[00:06:40] McIntosh:

I’m going to back up the next cloud data to, like, an s three equivalent bucket. Not I I won’t use AWS, but, you know Right.

I don’t know. There’s different ones. It doesn’t matter. But AWS is terribly expensive. And I don’t have an enterprise budget, so I don’t use AWS normally. But, yeah, It’s been a pretty good week, though, I would say.

[00:07:15] Kenshin:

Right. I have actually, I remember something. Okay. If you if you’re done or Yeah. Yeah. No. I remember I had a friend visit me. Haven’t seen no. Long time. My childhood friend that we grew up together. Okay. Neighbor. So I haven’t seen him for over three years, actually. And, yeah, I couldn’t resist. So we talked about Bitcoin at some point. So he he only knew about Bitcoin, you know, the the normal stuff and the bad stuff,

[00:07:49] McIntosh:

mainly that people know. So you’ve never talked with them before about Bitcoin?

[00:07:53] Kenshin:

No. Never. So it was the first time, and it was interesting to and he’s, very well educated. He’s into academia, working in universities and stuff Mhmm. And into tech. So it was interesting to see his reaction when I said about the limit cap of 21,000,000 Right. And, how the mining kind of works to keep it under control, the difficulty adjustment. That was a surprise to him to to to figure out, to understand all this. You know? And I could see things clicking. Mhmm. Every piece of information clicking.

[00:08:38] McIntosh:

So that was an interesting Sounds like you need to follow-up with him.

[00:08:43] Kenshin:

Yeah. And I said in the end, I said, look. Just if you need to read something, just go by the Bitcoin sandbox book. That was the perfect I was I would have recommended the exact

[00:08:54] McIntosh:

same thing, especially for somebody coming from an academic background. That’s a very readable book, but I think Yeah. If they I think they’d appreciate that. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah.

Now I’m feeling really bad. Dang. Yeah.

[00:09:10] Kenshin:

You should

[00:09:11] McIntosh:

orange peel the world. I didn’t even go to my meetup this month. Now it was right around Thanksgiving. So you know? But they had it. No one went. Oh, they did? Yeah. They did. I thought they weren’t, but I contacted the kind of the leader and made sure. And he’s like, oh, no. We’re couple of the guys are gonna meet. I’m like, well, I’ll see what I can do, but I did not make it. Alright. Hey. This week, I had something a little bit different, and it ties into the news that we’re gonna talk about, I think, very nicely.

But we titled this episode, you know, play Fiat games and win Fiat prices, which on the one hand kind of, I hope, hooks people. But at the same time, I mean it. And what I mean is the world the financial world is full of fiat. It’s full of money that has no backing by anything other other than a governmental promise, and, and that has consequences. People treat it, in crazy ways. And because of inflation, which is caused primarily by Fiat, in my opinion in fact, I think you could say basically entirely by Fiat. Be but because of inflation, they have to do dangerous things in order to stay ahead of the curve or to, you know, create more wealth.

Does does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So I wanted to take a few minutes because, unfortunately, and this is nothing new, but I see this mentality in Bitcoin as well. Now I’m going to preface this by saying my view of Bitcoin is not only is it digital money, it’s a digital storage of of of a digital store of value. Not only is it neutral, it’s not controlled by any government. But I think it’s the perfect item for an Austrian based economic system. And the problem is is that we’ve spent a hundred years having having this Keynesian form of economics pounded into our head, and we’ve bought it. And we’ve bought it in ways that we don’t even understand quite frequently. Like, it’s just it’s like a fish.

If a fish is you pull a fish out of a fish swimming around in water doesn’t even basically realize they’re in water because it surrounds them. It’s it’s there just like we’re in air all the time. We don’t ever think about air. It’s just there. Right? But when when you walk down the street, I mean, maybe this is a silly analogy, but you’re pushing through that air. But you don’t think about it. And we’re surrounded by Keynesianism. It has been part of The US governmental policy since the early nineteen hundreds, around 1930 or so, really, when it started the Great Depression.

And I think it’s had disastrous results. And I agree. I wanna spend some time talking about some things that others get on here and maybe yell about frequently, but I wanna spend some time explaining why I think that these are bad ideas. And I also wanna look at some news items in the world that maybe you didn’t think about were being Keynesian kind of fiat things. And when we play these Keynesian fiat games, there’s always consequences, whether it’s right then or whether it’s five years or ten years or a hundred years later, there’s still consequences to these things. And we’re starting to see some of these happen, in real time. I think that may potentially, cause very large results.

So I don’t know. Anyways, before we get into all that, we’re at block height nine two six three zero eight. I guess that was my summary before we dive in. I should have done the block height first. I’m such a bad host. God. Such a bad host. It’s okay. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. Anyways, so that’s where we’re going. So how do we wanna break this down? Alright. Kitchen, let’s do this. Let’s do something a little different this week. I wanna go ahead and talk about the news because some of these news items directly relate to kind of the conversation here. So we’re gonna jump ahead. I hope that’s okay with everybody, and and we’re gonna talk about the news.

I do wanna mention one that this is not the stuff we normally talk about, and I’m going to do it very briefly. But, you know, we’re a Bitcoin only podcast. We only talk about Bitcoin. It’s the only thing that we recommend that you buy. We’ve discussed this a number of times in the past, but I’m gonna give you an example of why you should not be involved in anything else. This week, Cardano had a problem. So Cardano is the blockchain that the ADA token runs on. I don’t know why they call it different things. It’s always struck me as a little odd, but okay. It was created by one of the guys who started Ethereum, Charles Hoskinson.

And, you know, he’s probably a pretty smart guy, but, he just doesn’t get it when it comes to a lot of things, including, some of this fundamental stuff about scarcity and, you know, whatever. Anyways, Cardano, had a split on November 21. And I’m just going there’s gonna be a link to this in the show now. I just wanna kinda read this summary, and then we’ll talk about it for just a second. But they split in two on November 21 after a malformed delegation transaction, whatever that is, exploited a deserialization bug that dated back to 2022.

Now I don’t know if they didn’t know about it. I don’t care, whatever, but that’s what it used. Emergency patches were deployed within three hours with the network converging through natural consensus by the next day. Apparently, a developer then came out, claimed responsibility, and apologized to the Cardano community on x saying they, the developer, they were dumb enough to rely on AI’s instructions when attempting to test the damaging transaction. So, apparently, they were vibe coding, kinda like what Kenshin was doing, just on something that, could have a lot, bigger implications.

And, they ran something that apparently actually took down the blockchain. That’s the way I read that. Yes.

[00:16:49] Kenshin:

Is that a fair It’s hilarious. It yeah. It’s it’s actually hilarious. It is. If you can vibe vibe code and a whole blockchain goes down. And That was not a good blockchain to start with. It brings up so many questions like, why the heck was was this dude running code

[00:17:06] McIntosh:

that could even interact with the live network? I mean, that doesn’t make any sense from a a developer slash programming perspective. None. You don’t do that. You don’t develop code in prod. We don’t test in prod.

Right? We test in lower environments, and then we deploy the fix in prod. That’s what we do. And it’s to keep stupid stuff like this from happening, but, you know, whatever. So, anyways, apparently, Hoskinson has called the developer’s actions absolutely personal and claimed that the FBI is already involved. They’ve had foundation members, I guess. I don’t know what IOG is, but they’ve resigned, because of Hoskinson involving the FBI, citing concerns that future development mistakes could lead to legal consequences. It’s just mass chaos.

I don’t know. There’s so many things. They’re they’re clearly led by one individual who, you know, I’m not gonna talk about their sanity or whatever, but, man, when you have one person in charge of everything, it creates issues. There’s no consensus. There’s just whatever he’s gonna say. And by the way, Ethereum has the same thing. And that’s probably why Hoskinson actually left in the first place, but regardless, you know. Yeah. It’s just crazy stuff. I this is why we say Bitcoin only, you know.

[00:18:37] Kenshin:

Yeah. And and this guy was not a random

[00:18:40] McIntosh:

person. As I understand, he was a developer. Right. Right? Of that He was like an approved developer. Now Hoskinson is saying he was being hostile and, you know, he wants to get the FBI involved in all this kind of stuff. I don’t it’s the whole thing’s insane.

Whatever.

[00:18:55] Kenshin:

Okay. It doesn’t matter. I mean, the funny thing is it this happened. I it crossed my eyes Mhmm. For a split second on it. Right. News title or a podcast title or some And then And you didn’t

[00:19:10] McIntosh:

think It didn’t affect us. No. Normally, I wouldn’t either, but it’s just such a clear example of Yeah. To be careful. Yeah. To be careful of what goes wrong. And and I know people who who think that Hoskinson hung in the moon. You know? I’m like, this is nuts. Okay. Sure. Anyways, so that was one of the things. And, you know, again, it’s not about the news itself. I’m just trying to teach you guys, give you examples.

You don’t need to mess with me. Look. Couple weeks ago, I had somebody come up to me and say, oh, sorry. This this will tie in. Bear with me. I know I don’t have a news thing about this, but they’re like, Zcash. What’s going on with Zcash? I’m like, I don’t know. Don’t care. Well, everybody’s talking about Zcash all of a sudden because the price went up. Well, now the price is going down. And you know why? You know why the price went up? I actually did a little digging. I found out because I came across something. I wanted to understand what what it was about because of my friend. It’s this quantum computing stuff we were talking about a few weeks ago.

So apparently What about it? Are they immune? Apparently, they already have the right algorithms in place so that, you know, it shouldn’t be a problem for them. Never mind all the other problems that they’ve got. Yeah. Exactly. Right. But this one is not gonna be a problem, by golly. And by the way, they have a foundation and a marketing department and a marketing budget. And so they ran with that because it’s become a narrative about Bitcoin having an issue with quantum computing at some vague point down the road. And so they leverage I

[00:21:05] Kenshin:

bet it’s on their top tagline, quantum proof, cryptocurrency.

[00:21:12] McIntosh:

But, you know, again, don’t worry about all the other stuff, the the possibility of inflation bugs and, you know, whatever. We’re just gonna talk about this because it’s the hot news type of topic of the day. Anyways, crazy stuff. Just look. If it’s not Bitcoin, stay away from it. Plain and simple. Yeah. Okay. Moving on because we need to. Alright. A good Bitcoin news article. You wanna take this one about Texas?

[00:21:46] Kenshin:

Yeah. So Texas, close to your part of the pond. Yes. Was Yes. It was the first US state that officially bought Bitcoin and put it in their Bitcoin reserve. Right. So they were approved for a 10,000,000, dollar Fund? Yeah. Yeah. Fund. Yeah.

And with that, they already placed a $5,000,000 purchase of So iBit ETF,

[00:22:19] McIntosh:

Bitcoin. So, Kinshan, what you’re saying is Texas bought the dip.

[00:22:25] Kenshin:

Yeah. It seems like it. So good timing. Good timing. They are waiting the other half to buy the top, I guess. Or So they bought iBit, which is,

[00:22:36] McIntosh:

I think that’s BlackRock. It’s it’s stocks that basically is supposed to represent the price of Bitcoin. And we were discussing this preshow. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. No. My understanding is their legislation, their their whatever this bill, it says that they will build out a self custody solution essentially. So so the state of Texas will self custody their own Bitcoin, and they will be able to convert it, no penalty, this iBit stock, into actual Bitcoin. That’s one of the things that you can do.

And, you know, move that into the self custody setup. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. I’m kind of on the fence about it. On the one hand, yes, we we should self custody. But on the other hand, this is not a single person. This is a a state. And to kind of offload that, to other entities,

[00:23:38] Kenshin:

I’ll Who will keep the keys and how they will keep I don’t know. I mean, again

[00:23:44] McIntosh:

them up. I’m really on the fence about it, but that I mean, I’m glad they’re doing it. I’m glad they’re leading the way. That’s good. They’re not I don’t think they were the first state to have a bill saying, you know, we’re gonna have a a Bitcoin reserve, but they are the first to buy the actual Bitcoin. Yeah. So To execute Good job, guys. Let’s let’s god bless Texas. Great to see.

Yeehaw. I drove across Texas a couple of times, Kenshin. It’s a really big state. It’s a really big state. Yeah.

[00:24:22] Kenshin:

I really want to visit,

[00:24:24] McIntosh:

Texas at some point. Yeah. There’s a half dozen states, maybe maybe a dozen. I could probably just say, hey. You should just go there if you had, like and that would be one of them. There’s a lot of interesting things there.

[00:24:42] Kenshin:

But, yeah, I don’t know what’s, what’s better to for a government agency in a way Yeah. To to have an FTA for it to self custody. And I mean, something can easily go wrong with self custody also.

[00:24:58] McIntosh:

It’s not like governor Abbott is gonna, like, literally have a some device on his desk or something.

They are going to hire that out, and a consulting company is going to do that for that’s the way that governments work. But I look. I whatever.

[00:25:18] Kenshin:

We’re allowed to not really know all the answers. It’s okay, Kenshin. No. Yeah. It’s fine. It’s okay. And if they do it, maybe it it will give, the right signal out there. So that’s good anyway.

[00:25:31] McIntosh:

Alright. So our next two items are directly related to these Fiat games that we’re talking about. So listen up. We are kind of at a, I believe, maybe a a I don’t want I wanna say tipping point, but I’m not sure that’s the right word. The US government is about to start quantitative easing. They officially put an end to the quantitative tightening phase on December 1 because the Federal Reserve has started what they call, like, liquidity expansion. They’re injecting money into the market in a sense. They injected 13 and a half billion dollars, so that’s not even very much, but it’s just a start, into the banking system through what they call overnight repurchase agreements.

It’s the second largest single day liquidity operation since COVID nineteen started. It also exceeds the peak repo injections that were recorded during the .com bubble, but, man, that was a long time ago, and money is worth so much less these days. I wouldn’t look at that very much. But, yeah, they they are turning, and they’re going to start printing money. This is what Trump has said is going to happen, and they are now doing it. So

[00:27:04] Kenshin:

I’m sorry. You said you threw a nice,

[00:27:07] McIntosh:

defect in there. It was the last time something like that happened was just before COVID? Yeah. Well, what this says is so this 13 and a half billion dollars that was done in one day, this is the second largest single day liquidity operation since COVID.

Shit. So I I mean I don’t know what that really time that

[00:27:29] Kenshin:

yeah. And last time that happened, a year after we had a huge inflation. Do you remember what the price of Bitcoin was in COVID?

[00:27:39] McIntosh:

Not during COVID, but afterwards, it went to 70 k. No. No. No. No. No. No. It was not. Not not at the start. Like, the the day that they announced the restrictions in The United States, it was in March 2020.

[00:27:56] Kenshin:

3 and a half k or Yeah. Something like that.

[00:28:00] McIntosh:

I wanna say I I was gonna say three yeah. Four k, something like that. Let’s see if this is it. I don’t know if this will go back that far.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. We’re getting there. Hold on. February? Wait. I remember it being higher lower than this. This is showing on March 1. March. Oh, there it is. There it is. It went from

[00:28:30] Kenshin:

Yeah. 3. $79.11.

[00:28:33] McIntosh:

The next day, it closed at $49.70, and that was the low. That was 03/12/2020.

[00:28:41] Kenshin:

Okay? March the lowest was 3,850.

[00:28:46] McIntosh:

This was the close of the day. I cannot tell you without bringing up more charts and whatever. This is just a close. Yeah. Okay. So this was literally the day they they kinda started locking things down. Okay. Okay?

Yeah. But what happened after that? Let’s see. April let’s see. May 5, we were at $9,000, so it doubled. Let’s see here. By the end of the year Yep. By the end of the year, we doubled again. So December 29 thirty first, we were at $29,000. K? Yeah.

[00:29:35] Kenshin:

I mean, January opened up. It was over 30. So yeah.

[00:29:41] McIntosh:

You tell me, Ken Shen, are we going up or are we going down? I still don’t know, and I understand where you’re coming from. But to me, we’re sitting right here without the fear at the start of COVID in terms of what’s gonna happen in terms of liquidity of money. There’s gonna be so much money sloshing around for the next year plus.

We’re not gonna know what to do with ourselves.

[00:30:09] Kenshin:

Yeah. No. It would be great if the pattern breaks so we don’t have all those people following the trends and That would be

[00:30:19] McIntosh:

interesting. But, again, until it actually happens trend to Sorry. Go ahead.

[00:30:24] Kenshin:

Yeah. Then you don’t have a a pattern to rely on Right. Then everybody’s synchronizing and essentially creating the pattern all over again. I agree. I’m all for it.

[00:30:35] McIntosh:

But until until it happens, I just you know, it’s gotta happen, and then we’ll go from there. It has to happen. Right now, it hasn’t happened. We’re not above twenty one twenty six. Right? Okay. Let’s talk about the second item.

Maybe the the well, I believe these are equally important. In fact, no. Actually, this is less important. It’s less important to United States. It’s more important to traders. And this is this is pure fiat games, ladies and gentlemen. There is something called the Japanese yen trade or carry trade. And it’s this crazy idea that Japan historically for, like, since 1990 roughly, so forty, thirty five years, has had very low interest rates, artificially low in my opinion, very manipulated. Well, it just is what it is, like, really low interest rate. And so what traders would do is they would literally borrow yen, at these extremely, which is yen is the Japanese, like, dollar, coin, whatever you wanna call it.

And so they borrow yen, and then they would use that to buy assets, essentially, buy stock. Theoretically, you could buy, you know, real estate or art or whatever. And then they would just pay back the interest on the the note, essentially, their their yen, which is very low. I mean, like, sub 1%. So if you had any kind of rise in value above that very low amount, you’re making money. So if you leverage this up, it becomes a very attractive deal. And they’ve done that a lot. Well, Japan has been having problems. And now they’re having to start raising their interest rates.

And it’s really starting to hurt this carry trade as they called it. And they raised the interest rates again. The ten year note hit, like, it wasn’t even very much. It’s still not very much. It’s crazy how low it is. Japanese hold on. Let me get this right.

[00:33:09] Kenshin:

So so they were essentially at zero. Right?

[00:33:12] McIntosh:

Pretty doggone close, if not. Ten year bond yield. That’s what I’m looking for. Okay. I’m showing I really wanna see just yeah. Five days. Here we go. This is what I’m looking for. I am showing yep. Right there. It jumped from 1.8 all the way up to 1.87, which doesn’t sound like very much. But if you see it on the chart, I mean, like, it’s a huge jump.

And believe it or not, that happened on December 1. That triggered an unwinding of all a lot of this a huge unwinding of a lot of this carrier trade stuff. Okay? Because it no longer was profitable. They were over leveraged, and they were having to liquidate essentially. And so I believe well, I went to bed on Sunday night watching Bitcoin go up and woke up Monday morning, and Bitcoin was in the toilet. I don’t know if you noticed that. Well, not the toilet, but it went down significantly, multiple thousands of dollars. It was related to this.

That happened overnight. Japan is, you know, twelve hours ahead of us or whatever. So that market opened. This happened, and all of this stuff starts unwinding overnight. And the numbers I saw, and I don’t have them written down, so I don’t wanna say them, but they were they were very large. It’s very clear that this Japan carry trade thing is is going to have to become, go down because this ten year note is already up to 1.9. So here just a couple days later, it is on a pattern, a steady pattern. Like, if you just zoom out three months wow. Three months ago, it was at 1.56.

Right? And, let’s see. Six months. Let’s do year to date. Yep. One point o seven in February. So it’s doubled almost.

[00:35:45] Kenshin:

Wow.

[00:35:46] McIntosh:

I mean, you can see if you’re if you’re leveraged, how that could be a real problem. I mean, it you’re talking about less than a percent, really. It doesn’t sound like that much. But when you’re hyper leveraged on that and then it essentially doubles, yeah, that’s a problem. And that’s what we’re seeing. And it rippled through the entire market. The stock market dump, Bitcoin dump, everybody dumped. Bitcoin has started going back up since then. But Bitcoin is it’s like this canary in the coal mine. We use this analogy a lot. It sniffs things out because it’s twenty four seven and because it’s an easy liquidity dump.

Oh, I need to sell my Bitcoin so I can buy pay for this margin call, which is literally what was going on. Right?

[00:36:38] Kenshin:

Yeah. But this is not this is something that I personally don’t like, actually. What do you mean? But the same peep but the same people who who are employing those tactics and games and trying to benefit from those trades Right. Are the same people who trade Bitcoin at those votes I agree. Where where that’s what happens. Then Bitcoin dumps first because it’s the easiest on a Sunday night to trade, etcetera, etcetera. So I don’t see this as a good Oh, it’s not a good thing. Bitcoin I I don’t think because we say Bitcoin should be a hedge against the fiat system, and it’s actually now it’s it’s it’s, yeah, signaling all those issues, as you say beforehand, but still follows all the the the other feared dumps.

[00:37:33] McIntosh:

Well, it’s signaling that it’s being at this point, I believe it’s signaling that it’s being used as this liquidity dump, like I was explaining. People are not you don’t do this well, I suppose you could buy borrow yen and buy Bitcoin highly leveraged. I don’t know. I don’t know if people are doing that. There probably are people who are doing that. Regardless of whether it’s Bitcoin or, you know, the NVIDIA stock or whatever that these fools are are are leveraging like this, these are pure Fiat games. This makes no sense in a real Austrian economic system, at least in my opinion.

Yeah. This is this is bad stuff, and we’re seeing it happen in the global markets, and it’s going to cause pain, and it’s going to contribute to what I believe is an ongoing recession going on around the world. And what I don’t wanna see is this deeply take root in Bitcoin, and I think that’s what you’re getting at. Yes. We can’t keep people from doing stupid stuff like this with Bitcoin. But what I can do is sit here and say, well, these fiat things that you’re doing to try and make money because the money that you’ve got is depreciating in value at five to 10% a year, right, or more, these are not safe. These are these are not good things to do. You should invest in in Bitcoin, frankly, because that’s literally what Bitcoin is one of the things that it’s designed to do is is to keep, with a constant supply essentially with a with a, well defined growing supply, I guess you could say, but with a fixed cap of 21,000,000.

You know, these are the kind of things that that it’s designed to guard against. The US government cannot inject more Bitcoin into the market in order to fix the liquidity problems. Right? They can’t paper things over with Bitcoin like they can with fiat. And that’s that’s I believe, ultimately, that will force governments to change the way that they work. At least I hope it does. Yeah. I I think it will.

[00:40:15] Kenshin:

I think we’re in a phase, in the past, we were in a phase where big holders could sell Bitcoin and the Bitcoin price would crash. Right. Right? Now this doesn’t happen anymore.

Then we enter the phase where an exchange would cross maybe and yeah. Like it happened, FTX and others and the price would crash. Now we’re in the Wall Street game. So we’re playing those big Fiat

[00:40:45] McIntosh:

moves. And that is exactly what they’re doing. They’re playing these Fiat games, and I just I want to encourage you to stay as far away from that as possible. Now I wanna move this conversation over for at least a few minutes to some of the things that I think are very concerning in the Bitcoin space itself. You’ve got companies, and I’m going to pick on Michael Saylor who has a billion times more money than I do. But the reality is what he’s doing with, strategy with his company, I’m not a fan of. These are fiat things that he’s doing.

He’s Yeah. Essentially printing money to buy Bitcoin, and then forcing that on his shareholders. And that’s the best explanation that I can give you of what’s going on. So, they’re diluting the shares of the stock, in order to purchase more Bitcoin with the idea, well, Bitcoin’s gonna go up, so, therefore, everybody’s gonna end up winning. I just don’t think that’s a good idea. Ironically, he has a $500,000,000, I think, revenue. Like, I don’t know if it’s gross or net, but a very large operating software company. They they write enterprise software. That’s what MicroStrategy used to do, or still does.

They have cash flow coming in, but he has to be he has to be greedy, to put it simply, and try and and do this. I don’t know if he’s gonna get away with it or not. I would say he probably is, but I wouldn’t bet on it. But but if you’re out there buying MicroStrategy stock excuse me, strategy. I’m sorry. I’m still not used to that. Strategy stock instead of Bitcoin. You’re making a mistake in my book.

[00:42:53] Kenshin:

Now it’s it’s like it’s leveraged, and we see it now with our price. Right? Bitcoin drops 30%, but the strategy drops 60. Exactly. So

[00:43:04] McIntosh:

yeah. I mean, it’s good when it goes up, but now it’s it’s not good anymore. But they will tell you they know what they’re doing, and I’m sure he does to the extent that he understands what’s going on.

But when you build these systems, I before we started, I think I said this. You you end up with this this house of cards. Right? It’s not built on something solid. It’s built on Fiat. And then when one little piece gets removed from that, the whole thing falls down.

[00:43:38] Kenshin:

Mhmm. Yeah. I I will be very interested to see what happens to strategic action because it feels like they will either become like a Bitcoin bank of the future or they will crush and burn spectacularly. So either way, it’s gonna be impressive.

[00:43:54] McIntosh:

If he bail builds a Bitcoin bank, and I could see him doing that, I hope he doesn’t do any of this kind of stuff in the background to try and he needs to build a fraction not a fractional reserve bank. Good lord. I can’t believe I just said that. He needs to build a fully what’s the word, like, where they can’t lend out more than they have and whatever. It’s nonfractional.

Right? It’s the exact opposite of our current banking system. He needs to be okay with that. I I don’t trust. And I don’t think he he will be right. Not anymore. I don’t think he will be. I don’t think he’ll be happy with that. He’s gonna try and squeeze everything for as much as he can. And you know what? If eventually he gets washed out and 6 or 700,000 or a million, let’s say he collects a million Bitcoin and then something happens. That’s okay. The market’s gonna go down, and people like you and I are gonna buy that Bitcoin at a bargain price, and the price is gonna go back up, and it’s going to cleanse itself.

Fiat doesn’t the governments have gotten to the point where Fiat does not it doesn’t cleanse itself. The government steps in. We saw this in 2008. We had banks, major banks, well, major banks that were that failed, that that were insolvent. And the US government stepped in and said, these are too big to fail and give them a bunch of cash. The some of that’s mine, by the way. And they did that, and those companies have continued right on down their path. Are they doing the exact thing that caused them to fail? No. But they’re doing other stupid stuff. Can’t do that in Bitcoin when you can’t print Yeah. The Bitcoin.

You gotta do the printable work. Yeah. But

[00:46:06] Kenshin:

as you said, then they find clever new ways to essentially print with this, strategies,

[00:46:15] McIntosh:

whatever instrument. I think eventually that will run out. And then I don’t know what Michael’s gonna do. If he’s smart, he’ll sit on his pile and watch it grow. I don’t think that’s what he’s gonna do.

[00:46:27] Kenshin:

He’ll keep trying. They they get, yeah, they get obsessed with this with this game. So I don’t know. And and it’s the whole focus is their own benefits. It’s in the beginning, he was good for Bitcoin, I think, the way he was talking and onboarding people. Right.

People were listening. He was saying good things in a proper Bitcoin way, but now it’s all about strategy and the stocks. And it’s it’s a typical corporate, focus on the stock stock prices and their own profits. So I I don’t like it.

[00:47:10] McIntosh:

Well, I don’t know. I guess we’ll see how it all turns out, but the problem is it takes a long time. And I might be too old at that point to say, I told you so.

[00:47:27] Kenshin:

Oh, man. I mean, at at some point, I was even thinking to buy stock from MicroStrategy

[00:47:35] McIntosh:

stocks. But Yeah. I’ve mentioned other than I own some Bitfarm stock, and that will probably be the last Bitcoin related. Well, I don’t own any other stocks, but regardless, it’ll be the last Bitcoin related stock I buy, because there is something about that whole capital raising capital, whatever environment that just it makes people make bad decisions.

I I don’t know. We’re so impatient.

[00:48:13] Kenshin:

I don’t know. What what do you think about Jack? Because he’s going that path down that path. No. I agree. He probably is.

[00:48:20] McIntosh:

I but I can’t. I we need to do we need to do an episode, Kinsha. And we’ve talked about this a little bit. Slay your heroes. It’s like a reference to Yeah. You know, you you just you can’t let people get so built up in your mind that you just believe everything that they say. Jack is, we’re talking about Jack Mallers Mallers. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very smart guy, young, brilliant, very energetic, done a huge amount of Bitcoin stuff.

But you’re right. I mean, he started starting up a treasury. I don’t know what else they’re gonna do except be like Michael. I don’t think I mean, Bitcoin just doesn’t have gains by itself. It’s just not how it works. But he’s he’s I don’t know. We’ll see. Yeah. Who’s But, yeah, you cannot let any of us, including Kenshin and myself, certainly Kenshin. No. I’m perfect, but I’m just kidding. I’m just kidding. I really shouldn’t say stuff like that. I am not perfect. Anyways, yeah, I’m I’m sure there may be a point where we say things that just that we’re off the rails.

And almost every person in the Bitcoin ecosystem who’s been around for ten plus years, I can look at and go, yeah. No. I don’t agree with this, that, or the other. And you sometimes you just have to be willing to to let go of them as a as a hero, and certainly let go of these ideas that are not good. Right? Yeah. Maybe they give you some other insight or whatever, but, I don’t know. There’s something about I don’t know.

[00:50:25] Kenshin:

I I don’t. Look. And and and and I would say some people who have actually benefited from, let’s say, micro strategy stock or whatever, I would say good for them.

Nothing against that. No? Because I actually have a friend who who bought MicroStrategy stock quite early. And because of that, he managed to take a year off. Right? Right. And live his life a bit and enjoy life. And that that was very good and respectable. My wife said I can’t do that. I’m not allowed to do that. Okay. So nothing against that. I I just, I’m afraid were some of the damage that could be done by Oh, yeah. Michael eventually.

[00:51:13] McIntosh:

And there’s others. I mean, I don’t wanna pick on him. I mean, you mentioned Jack. I could certainly see it going that way with him. I don’t know what else they’re doing with this SPAC or whatever they call it that they’re putting together. I will say this, and I’m gonna maybe okay. I’ll give you one final example.

We’ll just call this the Slayer Heroes podcast. It’s okay. Jack Dorsey, Twitter.

[00:51:45] Kenshin:

Right? Yeah. Yeah.

[00:51:47] McIntosh:

I love a lot of the things that he’s doing, especially I’ll give you a prime example. Right now, I am super, super excited about their proto mining rig. He is solving problems in the mining space that for whatever reason, no one else is willing to do. On the other hand, is he perfect? Absolutely not. I don’t think so. But he is a humble person, it seems to me, And I think that’s pretty key, actually.

[00:52:22] Kenshin:

What did he do that was not good? I don’t know.

[00:52:29] McIntosh:

I’ll get back with you on that next week.

[00:52:31] Kenshin:

Okay.

[00:52:32] McIntosh:

Okay. They I mean, he’s not perfect. He’s not. But he Because this Square stuff he’s doing now are good for Bitcoin. No. I I mean, there’s another good example. He turned 4,000,000, I think is the number, square terminals Yeah. Let them accept Bitcoin. How many Bitcoiners are gonna come out of that? How many small businesses are gonna get on board when they need it the most with Bitcoin because of that. That’s huge. Yeah. Yep. But, you know, I don’t know. He certainly made some wrong decisions while he was at Twitter. I’ll say that. Yeah. No. Okay.

And you could argue, well, that’s because he was the CEO and and whatever, but it he literally started that company. It’s not like he just was some outsider, if I’m remembering correctly. He he could have done the things that needed to be done and and did not. So that’s okay. I mean, it’s what it is. I don’t know. And there’s a lot of people that don’t care for him. They think he’s I don’t know. I’m not sure why. I would like to meet I’d love to interview him for the podcast, actually. I’m not sure what I would say. Can you hire me? That’d be a good start.

[00:54:02] Kenshin:

Okay. Supporters. We have a support.

[00:54:05] McIntosh:

We do? Carry on, sir. Send it. I didn’t Send it, Mike? I did not oh, send it, Mike. You’re the best. I did not look. Yes.

[00:54:15] Kenshin:

In the thankful for Bitcoin episode, last week’s episode, so he sent us 1069¢. He says, good episode. I always like a good dose of gratitude from Kenshin and Macintosh. I’m grateful for family and cheap sets. Thanks. That’s awesome. And then he continues, I recommend Robert Kiyosaki’s cash flow quadrant book as a good follow-up to the original. I’m really looking forward to Bushido of Bitcoin. Glad it’s finally out in audio. Thanks to the guy, Swan.

Oh, I didn’t know it was out in audio. Yep. Yes. The Robert Kiyosaki’s second book. I have it. I haven’t started it.

[00:55:00] McIntosh:

So that’s a good reminder. It’s how he built his entire business, and he is worth more than a dollar. Right. More than a million or $10,000,000. Probably maybe more than a 100. I don’t know.

[00:55:15] Kenshin:

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. But, yeah, it’s a good reminder. Thank you. I need to find that book. Hey. Send it my my bedside.

[00:55:24] McIntosh:

I actually would like to solicit your input on what we’ve said today. I know that in terms of financial stuff, you’re pretty hip, so to speak.

Just wanted to get your thoughts, on how we kinda dealt with this. I hope you get where we’re coming from. Yeah. And by the way The I’m just You don’t have to agree. No. You don’t have to agree. Just to kinda wrap that up, something we didn’t even talk about was was real estate. And real estate is a fiat game. I mean, I’m sorry. It is. And I benefit from it. I sit in a house that appreciates. And if you think about why it’s appreciating, it’s not because the house is getting more valuable. It’s because the money is getting less, less valuable.

Right? Yeah. So when we leverage that and we go out and buy rental homes and whatever that appreciate, they go up in price over time. And then we can do fun things with our taxes to kinda write that off and all this kinda stuff, which don’t even get me started on the tax system. Talk about fiat. Good lord. Anyways, you know, it just it all ties in together. And, look, everybody’s gonna do different things, and I’m not saying I’m just I’m pointing things out, I guess. Like you said, you have no problem with people owning MicroStrategy stock. I just hope you know what you’re getting into.

Right?

[00:57:06] Kenshin:

There is, a nice website called it’s a very long name, something about 1971. What happened?

[00:57:17] McIntosh:

Yeah. No. I know what you’re talking about. Exactly. I’ve heard of this website. In Can you put the that in the show notes? Can you send that to me? So this is when we agree w

[00:57:29] Kenshin:

c Yeah. W t f happened in nineteen seventy one dot com. So there is a bunch of charts in there. A bunch of charts. All of them, all the lines diverging in 1971, basically, which gives a good idea of of how going away from the gold standard, basically, how it affected our economy.

Because and that that’s that fits with our subject today. Right? The Fiat games. That’s where we became, let’s say, obsessed with the Fiat games and trying different things and going away from hard money. And that was actually the also, it’s a bad assumption from mainstream people, like my very good friend that I met last week Mhmm. That he said, but aren’t we in the best economy ever? I said, actually, no. We’re in the worst and getting even worse since 1971. Where people

[00:58:33] McIntosh:

how they say things like that. How old is this person? Never mind.

Okay. It’s alright. Yeah. It doesn’t matter. No. It doesn’t. I well, I I would say that But he’s very well educated.

[00:58:45] Kenshin:

Yeah.

[00:58:47] McIntosh:

I don’t think you can live sixty years on this planet and think that things are better now than they were forty years ago. I I think it’s a matter of perspective for one thing. I do think a lot of it is what we’re taught in school because you don’t get Austrian economics in school, certainly not in university. And I think people just don’t actually well, yeah. I think that’s a lot to do with it.

[00:59:17] Kenshin:

Yeah.

But look at the that website. It has some really nice quotes because when you also talk about Yeah. Yeah. I edit it now. And because when also you talk about real estate prices Mhmm. And the rest of it, then you see some charts relate to that and how many, months

[00:59:37] McIntosh:

salary someone needs to have to own a house versus the then and now. And Stuff like that. Just to give you another example, not to overemphasize this, but I actually do own investment real estate, not just the house that I live in. Okay? So I am participating in that fiat game. I’m not leveraged on it or anything like that, but, you know, I I do. I I I but I do it knowingly, knowing what I’m going into. And I don’t necessarily even think that that’s the best investment of my money. To be honest, I think the best investment of my money would be Bitcoin.

But the reality is that it’s one of my investments because of family situations and so on. Does that make sense? So please don’t feel like Macintosh is sitting here telling you, you know, you should never you should do nothing investment wise or anything like that outside of Bitcoin. You should just stay humble and stack sets. Well, you you should. That should be part of your strategy. But I also realize where most people are.

[01:00:46] Kenshin:

Right? One of the one of the charts, tomato soup unit price per can, can of soup. The price was basically stable since 1895 until 1970 was at $0.1.

And now it’s $1.2, more than ten minutes.

[01:01:09] McIntosh:

But now we’re we’re better off now than we were in 1970. Sure. Yeah. I

[01:01:17] Kenshin:

It’s crazy. It is.

[01:01:20] McIntosh:

Again, I think it’s it’s the fish swimming around in the water. We just don’t even see it. It’s just what it is. And and we’re told things like, well, now you got a TV. I mean, I got a I literally have a 34 inch, I think, monitor here that I probably paid $300 for. Like, you couldn’t do that in 1980. But there’s outside of technology, there’s very little that that’s the case. I mean, think about it. Right? All the technology, all the computer stuff, it has it has gone down in terms of, like, I can get more bang for my buck, so to speak.

But it would have done that anyways if we were on a gold standard or on on a the this Fiat standard that we’re on. It just would have been more dramatic if we were on a gold standard. Can you imagine? Right? If we were on a gold standard and and that can of soup that you were just talking about was still only $0.1.10, what the price of a computer would be? Oh my goodness. Yeah. It’d be insane because sometimes I just I don’t know. I get to the point where I just don’t even know what to say. I think we’re at that point.

[01:02:53] Kenshin:

No. But it’s but, and I found the other chart. How long does it take to save for a house? It was around two years, two point four years in 1970, and now it’s seven years.

[01:03:04] McIntosh:

I’m surprised it’s that low, to be honest.

[01:03:07] Kenshin:

Yeah. I mean, that’s maybe American price. In Europe, I mean,

[01:03:12] McIntosh:

our our loans here are €50. That’s not the loan length. That’s not they’re talking about the down payment, I think, is what they’re talking about. The down payment? I’m almost sure that’s what that’s talking about. Years of saving an average income required to buy an average house. Like, if you saved the entire income? Oh, I see.

[01:03:31] Kenshin:

I guess so. No. That doesn’t. Yeah. If you save the average income. Right.

[01:03:36] McIntosh:

Right. But you who can save their entire income for even two years? Right? It was the down payment and the interest.

Yeah. But now the down payment is so large that that the millennials, the the kids who are buying the the properties now trying to get their first home, whoever that is. Sorry, guys. I you can call me boomer. It’s okay. I’m not, but I don’t know who’s buying houses these days. But they’re they’re to the point where they get out of college. They probably have a bunch of debt because of college, which is another issue, and then they can’t buy a house because they can’t I mean, it’s it’s an astronomical amount for them to save. It’s one of the worst economies in recent history.

Wages are you know, it’s just on and on and on. It’s crazy. And that’s why the numbers of the people who are actually buying houses, the average age is going up and up and up. Like, it’s it’s really high. I think I’ve even mentioned it on here because it’s it’s the boomers who are buying the second and third and fourth house. Right? Yeah.

[01:05:03] Kenshin:

No. It’s very addicting to look at those charts. It’s so many.

[01:05:07] McIntosh:

I mean, I I it’s Twenty twenty five, it’s 40 years old, which is an all time high. That’s the average age. The median age is 59 years old for a first time home buyer.

What? It’s right here. The average age of a first time home buyer in 2025 is 40 years old. Meaning, right now, the average age of a first time home buyer is 40.

[01:05:42] Kenshin:

That’s crazy. You need to wait until you’re 40 to buy your first house. No?

[01:05:49] McIntosh:

On average. Anyways

[01:05:52] Kenshin:

And and and then you get a loan for fifty years.

[01:05:55] McIntosh:

Hey. Let’s talk about a few other things and let’s get off of here because it’s been it’s going on. Our price, as we started recording anyways, was $92,800. What do we got in euros, sir?

[01:06:09] Kenshin:

79,500

[01:06:11] McIntosh:

approximately. Last December 3, we were at 96,000. So we’re down 3.33%.

So what that means, Kenshin, is we’ve had a great year for stacking sites.

[01:06:24] Kenshin:

Yeah. Kind of.

[01:06:26] McIntosh:

Bitcoin market cap, that’s the way I’m gonna look at it. I’m a glass half full guy. Remember? Bitcoin market cap, $1,800,000,000,000. Gold market cap Yeah. Is what?

[01:06:38] Kenshin:

29,200,000,000,000.0. And so we So the gap is divergent still. So our, difference is at 6.3%

[01:06:47] McIntosh:

Bitcoin versus gold. Yep. Gold and silver in particular are doing quite well. Silver is about to break $60, which is just insane. Mempool fees, four sets per vByte. So we’re a little busy. 87,500 unprocessed transactions, about a 191 megabytes in the mempool.

[01:07:09] Kenshin:

Yeah. It’s a bit busy. A little bit. I was looking at that earlier, but you can still put with 0.2 sets for That’s pretty crazy. Very, very very low.

[01:07:18] McIntosh:

That completely baffles me. I just don’t understand it. Why they would even think about doing that. Alright. Satoshi Splebs is a value for value podcast supporting podcasting two point o. We strive to bring you honest Bitcoin content every week. We’re asking, are you getting value from this show? Support it through time, talent, or treasure. Help with future projects in like our chat room. I think we’re still working on that. Or you can stream sats and boost with messages. Even a 100 sats saying great show or you suck, we’ll read it either way. Check out the apps at podcastapps.com and support independent Bitcoin media. If you like the content, I would love it if you would write a review on Apple and tell your friends about the podcast.

That is the best way for us to grow. This week’s music is, drum roll, please, racer wide number two by my favorite band. Any boost for streaming a sats during that song will go straight to the artist, so turn it up. Wait. What? But your favorite brand? The name of the band is my favorite band.

[01:08:29] Kenshin:

Right. Very cool.

[01:08:31] McIntosh:

You gotta love it. Yes. It is my favorite. My favorite band is ABBA. Everyone knows that. I’m just kidding. But at least you know who ABBA is. It is.

[01:08:42] Kenshin:

Yeah. I I know because I live in Sweden. I didn’t know before that. Okay. So thanks for being here.

We hope this has been helpful, maybe, hopefully, and we would love to hear from you. Find all our contact info at satoshis.plebs.com. Stay humble. This is our site, and have a great weekend. We’ll talk to y’all soon. Bye bye.