McIntosh:00:00:01 Welcome back to Satoshi’s Plebs for episode two forty two. I’m Macintosh.

Kenshin:00:00:06 I’m Kenshin. And in today’s episode, we are talking about how Bitcoin helps the unbanked.

McIntosh:00:00:18 And ladies and gentlemen

Kenshin:00:00:25 oh my goodness.

McIntosh:00:00:27 Awesome.

00:00:29 That is some fine technical production there.

Kenshin:00:00:32 What was there a delay there or what? This is how you know we’re amateurs.

McIntosh:00:00:37 Oh

00:00:39 my goodness.

00:00:41 Alright, Kenshin.

00:00:43 With that introduction,

00:00:45 what’s going on with you, sir, this fine week?

Kenshin:00:00:49 We’ll get that out of the way.

00:00:52 It’s cold in Sweden, but I I bet it’s cold there also. Right?

McIntosh:00:00:58 It is. Not as cold as you are.

00:01:02 We got down to and I I only know this in Fahrenheit.

00:01:06 I’m sorry. But Okay. Twenty

00:01:10 twenty eight,

00:01:11 twenty seven

00:01:13 last night, and then actually late this week, I think Sunday, it’s supposed to get down to, like, twenty two.

00:01:20 So Oh, okay. Like

00:01:22 well, it’s like 10 degrees less than

00:01:25 freezing, zero.

00:01:27 So I don’t I don’t know. It’d be negative

00:01:31 two or three or something. I don’t know. Negative

Kenshin:00:01:34 five

00:01:35 Swedish.

00:01:36 Okay.

McIntosh:00:01:36 So not as cold because you already told me how cold it was there, and I need to turn the fan off. It was, like, minus 12 when I was on the way home out in the countryside.

Kenshin:00:01:47 And here outside of, I think, our house is, like, minus 10.

00:01:53 So, yeah, quite cold. And,

00:01:57 yeah, it’s at least the days are getting longer, so we’re getting this out of the way,

00:02:02 which

00:02:04 is a big deal here. So it only gets dark at 04:30PM

00:02:09 now, so that’s not so bad compared to 03:00 before.

McIntosh:00:02:13 So I’m gonna go ahead. We’ve got everything booked and whatever.

00:02:18 I’m gonna tell you this. I I don’t think I’ve told you this.

00:02:22 Our family,

00:02:24 a good portion of our family is actually going on a trip

00:02:28 Okay. In June

00:02:31 to go to Fairbanks,

00:02:32 Alaska.

00:02:33 Do you know where that is? You know where Alaska is. Right? Yeah. I heard of it. Yeah. So Fairbanks is right in the middle of the state.

Kenshin:00:02:41 Oh, wow. And When when is that?

McIntosh:00:02:46 June?

00:02:49 Think we leave, like, the twenty third.

00:02:52 The interesting thing what brings this up though,

00:02:55 it’s summer solstice, like, June 21 or something.

00:02:58 And they have a celebration,

00:03:01 which we won’t be there for, but, you know,

00:03:04 basically,

00:03:05 it’s it’s light all day. It’s the opposite of what it is during the winter. Right? It’s light all day long.

00:03:13 So I’m looking forward to that. But yeah. Sorry. I didn’t mean to get sidetracked. It’s just when you were talking about the sun. It’s just

00:03:21 Yeah. Whatever.

Kenshin:00:03:22 Anyway. Yeah. But it in general here, it’s always the topic. You start all the meetings around here in Sweden. It’s always talking about the weather.

00:03:31 It’s cold. It’s snowy. It’s dark. Or

00:03:35 It’s like that. Do

McIntosh:00:03:38 y’all deal with more depression

Kenshin:00:03:40 during the winter when it’s dark all the time like that? Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And Sweden is one of the highest places with

00:03:49 depression and suicide,

McIntosh:00:03:50 surprisingly. Really?

Kenshin:00:03:52 Yeah.

00:03:54 Nordic countries I think. Yeah.

McIntosh:00:03:57 But I thought Denmark was the happiest place on earth. Right? Is it Denmark?

00:04:02 Yeah.

00:04:02 Maybe that’s The Netherlands.

00:04:05 Don’t know. Could be all the stuff. Yeah. They

Kenshin:00:04:08 Yeah.

00:04:09 They they say the quality of life

00:04:12 is also one of the best and whatever but Right.

McIntosh:00:04:17 But you struggle

00:04:18 think it has to do with the the darkness during winter? I

Kenshin:00:04:22 think two two things.

00:04:24 Darkness for sure

00:04:26 Mhmm.

00:04:27 And lack of sun because even in the summer you have a lot of clouds and rainy days.

00:04:33 Mhmm. I remember when I was in another city, South Of Sweden,

00:04:38 and Mhmm.

00:04:40 One day was sunny.

00:04:42 And I looked down and I saw my shadow, and I thought, wow. Okay.

00:04:46 There’s my shadow again.

00:04:48 Yeah. It does realize on that moment, hadn’t seen my shadow for, like, two weeks or something.

00:04:54 So,

00:04:55 yeah, sun is a big thing. And I realized it also when I came to Sweden first six months. I realized, wow, I miss the sun. I never thought about the sun in that way, that I miss the sun because, of course, I come from Greece and we have sun Right. Most of the year You’re in the Mediterranean.

00:05:10 Yeah.

00:05:12 So that’s a big big thing.

00:05:16 Another thing is that

00:05:18 it’s

00:05:19 very

00:05:20 easy

00:05:21 life, would say. Mhmm.

00:05:24 In terms of you don’t worry too much

00:05:28 And I I find it that when you don’t worry,

00:05:31 it’s how do we say?

00:05:35 You don’t activate the brain and the body in the same way as when you have things to fight for in life, you know? You get too complacent and then you get lazy and then you get depressed. You

00:05:47 don’t have a motivation

00:05:49 in life Right. If I say in a better way.

McIntosh:00:05:53 I saying that clearly Sweden is too easy.

Kenshin:00:05:57 Actually, yeah. It is too easy.

00:05:59 And and I saw that even more stark difference when I went to Brazil

00:06:03 for one summer vacation.

00:06:06 And it I real it really felt like Brazilians were the the poorest

00:06:12 people I ever met, the poorest people Right. But at the same time, the happiest people I’ve ever met.

00:06:18 And that’s conflict,

00:06:20 know.

00:06:21 Yeah. It’s weird. Was difficult to understand.

McIntosh:00:06:24 What’s the word? It’s a weird paradigm. And paradigm’s

00:06:27 not the right word but Yeah. Yeah, it is weird. I have been out in the countryside in China

00:06:33 where

00:06:35 I remember

00:06:36 and this has been a number of years ago, in fact it’s been two over two decades ago.

00:06:42 But

00:06:43 we went to visit some people

00:06:46 and they had built a block house, concrete block, okay,

00:06:51 with concrete floor,

00:06:52 which was a big upgrade for them.

00:06:54 But there was one one

00:06:57 light bulb in the entire house.

00:07:00 Okay. And it wasn’t a big house, but literally that was There was just one

00:07:05 that was the sum total of the electric

00:07:08 electricity,

00:07:10 you know, in the in the place.

00:07:13 But my point is extremely poor people,

00:07:17 but yes,

00:07:18 very,

00:07:20 very happy. I I and it’s weird because these

00:07:23 people are

00:07:25 basically fighting to survive,

00:07:27 but at the same time, they’re they’re just happy. I don’t I don’t I can’t I don’t have an answer for that. I just I agree completely with what you’re saying though.

Kenshin:00:07:36 Yeah. And I remember one other big aspect that

00:07:40 kind of combines to all of this is the very Sweden is one of the most individualistic

00:07:45 societies.

00:07:47 So everybody

00:07:49 has an apartment,

00:07:50 you could say, you know, and and they live alone and they go to work and then home and then back to work. You know, they don’t live together, big families with a grandfather and the grandmother and,

00:08:01 you know. When

00:08:03 you are 18, you go out of the house.

00:08:06 Even if you’re in the same city, you go to the student apartment.

McIntosh:00:08:10 Right.

Kenshin:00:08:11 How is it called? So So you’re instantly away from the family and you There’s a lack of community.

McIntosh:00:08:19 Right? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Unfortunately.

00:08:22 Interesting.

00:08:24 Alright. What else?

Kenshin:00:08:26 Yeah.

00:08:28 Well, talking about family, yeah, my mother is visiting for a she will stay maybe a month.

00:08:34 Awesome. Yeah.

00:08:36 Will stay until

00:08:39 actually,

00:08:40 no.

00:08:41 She flew first to

00:08:44 where did she go?

00:08:46 She went to France.

00:08:49 Oh. I think she went to France first. Yeah. She went to France to a couple of places, then to Italy. And from Italy she came here. Oh, she’s just traveling around. Go go go mom.

McIntosh:00:09:01 That’s awesome.

Kenshin:00:09:02 And then she wants to buy

00:09:05 yeah. She wants to buy here a campervan. How do you call it? Oh. You know the camper van that you live inside?

McIntosh:00:09:12 That’s funny.

00:09:14 So she’s gonna drive around.

Kenshin:00:09:16 Yeah. And then she wants to drive back to Greece and then to the whole of Europe after that.

McIntosh:00:09:22 I’m jealous.

Kenshin:00:09:23 Yeah.

00:09:24 That would be awesome. Good thing about being a pensioner.

McIntosh:00:09:28 I would love to to drive through the Alps,

00:09:31 especially. Yeah. My wife gets carsick,

00:09:35 but I I I so

00:09:38 there’s a problem there but I love driving through the mountains like that.

Kenshin:00:09:44 Right. Maybe it’s your driving style.

McIntosh:00:09:51 No. It’s not.

00:09:53 I’m super careful.

00:09:55 We were just up in North Carolina,

00:09:57 know.

00:09:58 And it’s certainly not the Alps but you know there’s

00:10:02 a lot of curves and whatever and I am I’m very careful. I I drive really slow actually. I probably

00:10:09 I know I annoy people up there that live there because I don’t

00:10:13 unless I’m by myself, I don’t drive

00:10:16 very fast Mhmm. Because of that.

00:10:20 And in fact, like we’ll be going up a mountain

00:10:23 and

00:10:25 I’ll start getting two, three cars behind me and I’ll look for a place to pull off because I just I don’t wanna block people. I don’t wanna be that kind of person. Right. You know? And so we pull off and let them you know, we just take our time. I don’t know. It’s whatever.

Kenshin:00:10:39 Okay. So I wouldn’t like to drive behind you then?

McIntosh:00:10:44 Probably not. Probably not. So I do need to ask,

00:10:49 how’s this project going?

00:10:53 Really

00:10:56 close. Right?

Kenshin:00:10:57 Never been closer.

00:10:59 Is this like is this like mining a block? Is this what it is? That’s Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It’s it’s it’s a difficulty has a it’s adjusting.

McIntosh:00:11:09 It’s adjusting.

00:11:11 Oh, man.

00:11:13 Well, you’re making Yeah.

Kenshin:00:11:15 And, you know, I I started

00:11:18 since a month ago tracking all the issues on GitHub.

00:11:21 Mhmm. So now is the first time that I don’t have a big issue on GitHub. I look at all the issues and I’m thinking,

00:11:28 okay.

00:11:29 Is not crucial for launch. Right. This is not. This is not.

McIntosh:00:11:33 Do you have an MVP?

00:11:35 Do you know what that means? A minimal viable product? Viable product. Yeah.

Kenshin:00:11:39 You could call it deaf, more than MVP right now. There you go.

00:11:45 I

00:11:46 yeah. I think

00:11:48 I would give it an extra week because actually we want to,

00:11:53 how do you say, put data into the site. It’s a site that has Mhmm. Data points. Right? I want to put data points before going live so people have stuff to look

00:12:06 data to look and not be empty. So I would give it an extra week just for that.

00:12:12 But I think the main stuff are done and then just to write some press release, some social media posts.

McIntosh:00:12:20 Get her done.

00:12:22 That’s Larry, the cable guy.

00:12:24 I know you don’t know who that is but

00:12:27 that’s I think I heard of it. He’s a redneck that’s why I identify

00:12:32 with him.

00:12:33 Do

00:12:34 you know what a redneck is?

Kenshin:00:12:36 I heard of it. Yeah. It’s a southern person.

McIntosh:00:12:40 A southern person.

00:12:41 Actually

00:12:42 comes from

00:12:44 in the old days the people of course were they the majority were farmers they’d be out in the field

00:12:51 and in the Southeast

00:12:53 Of The United States. It’s humid, it’s hot, it’s

00:12:57 the sun is out,

00:12:59 you know, a lot unlike in Sweden

00:13:02 apparently.

00:13:03 And people would get burned like on the back of their neck.

00:13:08 So they called them rednecks. That’s literally where that comes from.

00:13:12 Anyways. Yeah.

00:13:15 Cool.

00:13:17 Alright. You

Kenshin:00:13:18 have some news. I

McIntosh:00:13:20 got a few things going on. What was I gonna tell you? I said I was gonna wait.

00:13:24 Something with the Internet. Mediacom. Yeah. So as everyone on this podcast

00:13:30 knows,

00:13:31 sadly,

00:13:32 I have a lot of Internet trouble. In fact, I’m running on my phone today

00:13:38 because our Internet is out. But the reason why it is actually out,

00:13:42 Mediacom came out yesterday

00:13:45 because our Internet started going out again. They came out. The guy looked over everything, and he says, oh, we need to replace your line from the road to the house because

00:13:58 the squirrels have been eating it.

00:14:03 I am like, are you kidding me? Apparently,

00:14:06 they get up there and they chew on the lines

00:14:09 and

00:14:10 they

00:14:12 it’s just what they do. I mean, they’re squirrels. They’re just stupid little animals and they don’t know any better.

00:14:18 But the line is old enough that they’ve literally chewed through a lot of the casing and it’s exposed it to the elements and whatever.

00:14:28 And so

00:14:29 they’re go ahead.

Kenshin:00:14:30 What what type of cable is that? I mean, is is it It’s a it comes on the air, the cable, and then Well say it’s

00:14:38 a phone cable, old school phone cables or what? It’s a I’m not sure.

McIntosh:00:14:44 It it normally would be a coaxial cable.

00:14:47 So this is a cable company like what we used to get our cable TV with. Now everything’s over the Internet, but, you know,

00:14:57 I’m not even a 100% sure that’s what that is,

00:15:00 but they have a box right across the road from us

00:15:04 that’s like a a patch

00:15:07 center for the area. And so they’re gonna run a new line up across the road because we do live on a fairly busy road

00:15:15 and then down.

00:15:16 And then, actually,

00:15:18 not down.

00:15:19 It’s through the air over to our house, and then

00:15:23 that’ll come in to the box that’s on the side of our house. They’ve already rebuilt the line from the box

00:15:30 going

00:15:32 from that box to our modem.

00:15:34 So, essentially, when they get done, we will have brand new

00:15:40 equipment all the way from our modem all the way out to the switch box.

00:15:46 So I actually think this is gonna make a significant difference. I’m very hopeful. We’ll see. Yeah. My wife said earlier that the internet was back on, we switched it over and it didn’t really work very well so

00:15:59 maybe they’re still tweaking it but

00:16:02 I hope so. I’m so tired of this

00:16:06 And we pay a decent amount of money and it’s supposed to be like half a gigabit, like 500 megabits down and like a 100 megabits up. If

00:16:16 everything is okay, we do get that kind of speed

00:16:19 But Yeah. There’s so many times when it just go kinda goes in and out and it’s really annoying.

00:16:25 So we got that going on. I did wanna say one more thing and I know we’ve kinda talked a lot about our personal stuff but

00:16:33 I have to tell you this. We don’t talk a whole lot when we’re not we just don’t have time, neither one of us. And our hours are almost exactly opposite of each other, which doesn’t really help. You get up, it’s like 02:00 in the morning here.

00:16:49 It’s like when you’re going off to work. So a lot of times there’s actually a little bit of overlap there because I still love like last messages.

00:16:58 Right. I start message. Oh, I’m like, he’s awake. Okay. Start sending me messages.

00:17:05 I even told you last night, was off to bed as I put the outline up for the podcast and I said I’m taking melatonin and going to bed because I needed to get a few hours of sleep.

00:17:17 So,

00:17:18 anyways,

00:17:19 I did a thing this week. I I I

00:17:23 forgive me if I’ve already told you about this, but I started a project for my wife a couple weeks ago.

00:17:28 And I didn’t it doesn’t matter. It’s AI based and

00:17:33 we’re pulling in transcripts and building a knowledge base essentially.

00:17:37 I’m training

00:17:39 an AI system is really what I’m doing. So it’s called RAG and I do not know what that stands for, but you can look it up like AI RAG

00:17:48 and you can find it. It’s basically a way of building a specialized system.

00:17:53 So when I query it, it literally looks at these this data I’m pulling into the database

00:17:59 and then uses that as part of the information

00:18:02 that it goes out to ChatGPT

00:18:04 to return the the real query. ChatGPT

00:18:07 is still doing the majority of the lifting, but I’ve I’ve got this pool of information over here that it

00:18:15 it makes it smarter.

00:18:17 Okay?

00:18:18 Okay. It uses what’s called a vector database,

00:18:21 which is just a specialized database

00:18:24 specifically

00:18:25 for these systems.

00:18:27 I’m so happy, Kenshin. It took me about a day, a day and a half, and I had

00:18:34 I don’t have that MVP.

00:18:36 Actually, I do. I would say I do have an MVP.

00:18:39 I literally have a little product that I can go in there and query

00:18:43 chat GPT

00:18:44 and it pulls it and it I mean, it’s good information. It’s what I would expect to come out of it.

00:18:51 It’s crazy. All’s I gotta do now, I’m gonna do a couple more things. I’ve got more data. I’ve only transcribed like

00:18:58 five hours of data and I have a decent amount more to pull in. And then I’m gonna build a little web interface so she doesn’t have to query it from the command line. So there’ll be a little web server, she’ll query it and

00:19:11 and it’ll go do its thing and return its results.

00:19:14 And

00:19:16 Cool. I’ll be the hero and it’ll be awesome. No. I’m just kidding.

00:19:20 I it’s been really cool though. I really it’s been neat diving into this. And I honestly, it’s it might even be something I’m well,

00:19:29 it’s really cool.

00:19:30 Yeah. It’s really neat.

Kenshin:00:19:32 Amazing what you can do nowadays, all those dashboards

McIntosh:00:19:35 and It’s incredible. Yeah.

00:19:37 It is in I

00:19:40 am

00:19:41 sorry.

00:19:43 I am so excited about what’s coming. I I may get fired from my job.

00:19:50 I mean, it’s a possibility.

00:19:51 It it’s terrible economy,

00:19:54 whatever.

00:19:55 But as an entrepreneur,

00:19:57 which really deep down I am,

00:19:59 I have never been so excited about the ability to create things. It’s just it’s just,

00:20:06 bah. It’s like Yeah. Oh, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do this and I’m you know, something eventually has to work. Right? Yeah. So Yeah. I had also this epiphany like a few weeks ago. I was thinking we will we will be 10 in ten years time, look back

Kenshin:00:20:21 and think, wow. At that time,

00:20:24 we could you know, it’s like the the the start of the .com era. Right. You could buy any website

00:20:31 and you’re in that phase and you look back now and it’s like, oh, those guys could actually make cat.com

00:20:36 or whatever. Exactly.

00:20:38 We are at this phase now. It’s like, you have an idea Exactly where we’re at. You’re Yeah. You don’t need a 10 people programmer team

00:20:47 and millions of of investment to start a project. You you can’t just,

00:20:52 yeah, start it yourself. It’s incredible.

McIntosh:00:20:55 Okay. Look. We’re twenty eight minutes into this. I

00:21:00 don’t know exactly when we started, but we’re a ways into this. We need to get moving along.

00:21:05 Yeah.

00:21:06 The Kenshin and Macintosh

00:21:08 discussion

00:21:10 hour. I don’t know.

00:21:12 Block height as we go is nine three four one one five.

00:21:15 Okay? So I we’re gonna talk about that a little bit more later.

00:21:20 Things are

00:21:22 are slow Slow and dime. On the Bitcoin network right now. And I love it, but we’ll get to that later. What’s today’s topic, sir?

Kenshin:00:21:30 Well, today’s topic is

00:21:33 how Bitcoin

00:21:34 fits in the unbanked

00:21:36 world. Okay. And a bit yeah. The purpose it can fulfill, and it’s it was designed also to fulfill.

00:21:45 Right.

McIntosh:00:21:46 Yeah. I do believe this was

00:21:49 maybe not initially. Maybe he wasn’t directly thinking about this, but I think early on this became very important.

00:21:57 Mhmm. So

00:21:58 dealing with Bitcoin, dealing with reaching,

00:22:02 for lack of a better word, the unbanked. And what we mean simply by unbanked is people who they don’t have access to

00:22:11 a banking system. Banking system, yeah. Maybe it’s because of where they live, maybe it’s because of who they are and we’ll talk about that a little bit more. But I’m banked, I mean I have two different banks that I work with, I don’t know, I assume you work with at least one,

00:22:28 right Kenja?

00:22:29 And most people in the Western world are but there’s so many people

00:22:34 that aren’t. So when when we talk about banking, we’re talking about

00:22:40 things that in general, although I feel like things are maybe not doing so good these days, but they’re easy, they’re convenient.

00:22:48 Things like Mhmm. Apps on your phone, things like credit cards. Right? Things like

00:22:54 instant transfers.

00:22:56 They may ask you a bunch of questions, but the transfer doesn’t take that long in direct deposit. I mean, my paycheck,

00:23:02 I

00:23:03 I used to get a paper paycheck, I haven’t done that in years,

00:23:07 you know? And you’d get the paper paycheck, you’d take it down to the bank, you’d put it in. Now it just shows up in my account. I mean that’s just another example

00:23:16 of convenience.

00:23:17 But unfortunately,

00:23:22 there are over a billion people, about 1,400,000,000

00:23:26 people worldwide that not only is it inconvenient,

00:23:31 they just don’t have banks. They they they have no access

00:23:36 to that.

00:23:38 Mhmm. And then there’s

00:23:40 probably a couple billion more who

00:23:42 it’s very very difficult for them.

Kenshin:00:23:45 Yeah. It’s like two to 3,000,000,000 more

McIntosh:00:23:47 Yeah. Barely works. They don’t have savings.

00:23:51 They don’t have ways of moving money that

00:23:54 work very well. There’s no protection from inflation,

00:23:57 from corruption.

00:23:59 And these are themes,

00:24:01 if you wanna call it that, I think that very conveniently,

00:24:05 very easily,

00:24:07 they mesh

00:24:08 with Bitcoin.

00:24:10 It’s the things that we talk about.

00:24:13 These people don’t have to wait

00:24:16 for Bank of America to open up a

00:24:19 branch.

00:24:21 They can

00:24:23 run their own node

00:24:24 and manage their own Bitcoin

00:24:27 whether that’s by Lightning or on the main network.

00:24:30 We

00:24:33 talk about a lot of things in Bitcoin. We talk about prices,

00:24:36 know, and I think honestly sometimes we’re probably

00:24:40 a little too much on talking about price.

00:24:44 It’s very difficult not to, but, we talk about price. We talk about where it’s going. We talk about all

00:24:52 the other things

00:24:54 in the world about banking and whatever, but in the end, Bitcoin is really

00:25:00 one of its fundamental features. I’m not gonna say the only thing, but one of its fundamental features

00:25:05 is simply access.

00:25:07 Bitcoin doesn’t care

00:25:10 where you live.

00:25:11 Bitcoin doesn’t care

00:25:13 your privilege level,

00:25:16 so to speak. Bitcoin doesn’t care how much money you have in the bank.

00:25:21 If you have a job or not. Yeah. Bitcoin is for and and it doesn’t care what the government thinks, frankly.

00:25:28 Okay? Right.

00:25:29 But

00:25:31 because of all that,

00:25:33 I would make the argument that Bitcoin is for the unbanked, and I think it’s the best option out there.

00:25:41 Does that make sense?

Kenshin:00:25:43 Yeah.

McIntosh:00:25:45 So we’ve got all these people,

00:25:47 right? They don’t have a bank account, they don’t have credit.

00:25:51 It’s funny, my wife and I were talking about our credit rating the other day. They don’t have a credit rating. They don’t have a line of credit at the bank.

00:26:00 They have nothing like that. They don’t have savings. They don’t

00:26:03 have any kind of identity

00:26:05 in the financial world.

00:26:07 And maybe their country,

00:26:10 maybe it’s the Argentine peso,

00:26:14 not stable. Still

00:26:16 better but maybe not as stable as it hopefully will be down the road.

00:26:21 Right?

00:26:22 And they don’t have any kind of access to a global financial system except through Bitcoin.

00:26:28 Right?

Kenshin:00:26:30 And another

00:26:31 thing, some of them might not even have Internet

00:26:35 because Bitcoin

00:26:37 there are some systems in Africa, right, that you can use Bitcoin with SMS? That is correct. You technically

McIntosh:00:26:42 and I don’t know how usable it is.

00:26:45 I would not wanna depend on it,

00:26:48 shall we say.

00:26:50 But

00:26:51 there’s a system that

00:26:54 that doesn’t yeah. It it’s it literally does not connect to the Internet except at the very end.

00:27:03 So

00:27:04 it is possible even in that case. One nice thing,

00:27:08 places like Africa,

00:27:10 developing

00:27:11 areas, if you wanna call it that,

00:27:14 unlike The United States,

00:27:16 they’re not stringing a bunch of phone lines everywhere and, you know, we gotta run this kind of

00:27:22 they’re using wireless,

00:27:23 whether that’s your data phone, you know, your your phone, or whether that’s,

00:27:28 like,

00:27:30 satellite Internet or or whatever,

00:27:33 and they’re actually able to build out that infrastructure much faster.

00:27:37 It took us decades in The United States

00:27:40 to build a

00:27:42 semi reasonable

00:27:44 Internet infrastructure.

00:27:47 But now you could put up a tower and cover a gigantic area,

00:27:51 and give access to whoever lives in that area.

00:27:55 Does that make sense?

00:27:57 So Yep. We will see that Internet

00:28:00 adoption

00:28:01 accelerate

00:28:02 in places like Africa,

00:28:04 where frankly they need it the most.

00:28:07 One of the things I wanna touch on real quick is why

00:28:11 these people get excluded. Why are the unbanked left out? It’s

00:28:16 can be a number of reasons.

00:28:19 They may not they may not have

00:28:24 well, I’ll I’ll add one to this list. I have a list here, and there’s one that’s not even on here.

00:28:29 They may not live anywhere where there’s a bank.

00:28:32 I mean, somebody in

00:28:34 Africa

00:28:36 I’m trying to give a good example.

00:28:39 I’m not thinking off the top of my head.

00:28:42 But let’s say they live whatever nation they live in, they may live 500 or a thousand miles from their capital city,

00:28:50 and that capital city is the only place where there are banks. They don’t have regional banks out in a village of a thousand people in rural

00:28:59 Africa.

00:28:59 I’m sorry. They don’t.

00:29:02 So they may not just even be able to get to the bank.

00:29:07 So that’s one problem.

00:29:09 They may have a documentation

00:29:11 problem. They may not be able to prove that they are who they say they are. And when you walk into a bank to open up an account,

00:29:19 they’re gonna want two forms of ID and a note from your village elder, you know.

00:29:25 That

00:29:26 also

00:29:27 excludes a lot of people.

00:29:30 These days, we’ve got KYC and AML

00:29:33 measures,

00:29:34 and it’s not just in The United States. We’re the ones who

00:29:38 sadly pioneered

00:29:40 this.

00:29:41 But

00:29:42 because

00:29:44 you could make the argument that The US is the world leader in finance,

00:29:50 basically,

00:29:51 country in the world who’s

00:29:53 deeply involved in in finance and whatever, they have taken over these standards for their own.

00:30:00 Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Well,

Kenshin:00:30:03 I am I have been a personally declined banking services

McIntosh:00:30:09 Okay.

Kenshin:00:30:09 Here in Europe from

00:30:12 a neo bank. You you know what a neo bank is?

00:30:15 The term? Like like an online bank only? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Those modern online banks. Right.

00:30:22 So one fancy one that says, yeah. You know? We’re the best and more modern and this and that. And Mhmm.

00:30:30 And I thought

00:30:31 because they they ask all those KYC AML questions.

00:30:35 Mhmm. And

00:30:37 some of the questions were, are you gonna send money outside of your country, basically,

00:30:43 to other countries in Europe?

00:30:45 And I’m like, what should I say? And I said, yes. I answered yes because I thought, okay. Maybe I will. Maybe I will use one of those

00:30:54 services in Switzerland where you do some

00:30:57 exchange from Bitcoin from euros to Bitcoin. Right? Right.

00:31:01 So I thought, okay. I don’t want to open an account and then send some money and they block it. You know? So I’m like, okay. I will be super honest

00:31:08 and see what happens. So I said, yes. I will. And, of course, the next question is, what why? What’s the reason?

00:31:17 And I wrote, oh, I’m gonna do some exchanges with Bitcoin.

00:31:22 And

00:31:24 I wrote Bitcoin.

00:31:26 So

00:31:27 I submitted all this,

00:31:29 and I was declined.

00:31:31 Right. And and I asked why,

00:31:35 and they didn’t say why. They said I I don’t remember what they said. Oh, and then I applied again

00:31:41 a few weeks

00:31:43 or months later,

00:31:45 and I didn’t mention Bitcoin.

00:31:47 And I I was declined again, and then a per person from the KYC

00:31:52 officer or whatever said Mhmm. Why

00:31:56 before you said you would do some exchanges with Bitcoin and now you didn’t mention that. I said, well, because now I have a much better service to do that I don’t need you guys for Right. That purpose.

00:32:07 Right. I will not send you money in for that purpose anymore. So anyway, and I was still declined because they

00:32:15 apparently, I was in a blacklist now.

McIntosh:00:32:17 So

00:32:18 so

00:32:20 there’s a couple more here I wanted to cover. So one of the issues is simply profit. Right? They don’t wanna spend

00:32:27 a significant

00:32:29 amount of time helping someone who they’re gonna make very little profit off of versus,

00:32:35 you know, somebody who’s bringing in a large pool of capital or whatever that they can they can manage and and profit from.

00:32:43 So a lot of times they’ll just filter you out based on that. Another is simply political targeting. That’s not some well, I say that’s not something that happens here in The United States.

00:32:55 I believe it happened in the Biden

00:32:58 administration,

00:32:59 the previous administration

00:33:01 with the

00:33:03 Jack Mollers talks about it. It happened to him. He went to they

00:33:09 were

00:33:11 removed from a bank they’d been in for

00:33:13 a long time.

00:33:15 There’s no real reason for that

00:33:18 other than they weren’t happy about

00:33:22 I guess maybe that was more about the Bitcoin than maybe a political affiliation.

00:33:28 But there was no reason. I mean, that

00:33:31 I don’t know. It’s crazy stuff like that. And it’s worse in other countries.

00:33:36 I cannot imagine what’s the country? I talked about them a couple weeks ago. Uganda?

00:33:42 I needed to follow-up on that. Remind me in the news.

00:33:45 But

00:33:46 talk about political targeting. I’m sure it would be very rampant in a country like that.

00:33:52 Okay. Sanctions and capital controls

00:33:55 also this again is

00:33:58 more or less in places,

00:34:01 maybe developing countries.

00:34:03 But that affects a large number of people.

00:34:07 Whether they like it or not, the way that these banks are set up, they’re simply designed to control everything. They’re not designed

00:34:15 to be

00:34:16 universally

00:34:17 accessible

00:34:18 to everyone. Does that make sense?

Kenshin:00:34:21 Yeah.

00:34:22 And we are their customers and it doesn’t even feel that we are the customer

McIntosh:00:34:27 in that way.

00:34:29 Well,

00:34:29 the good news is, of course, we can flip this around. You can look at at Bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn’t care who you are. It is permissionless.

00:34:39 If you’ve got

00:34:42 a item

00:34:43 or money to exchange

00:34:45 someone for Bitcoin,

00:34:47 Bitcoin,

00:34:48 there’s no bank involved

00:34:50 to

00:34:51 to stop that from happening.

00:34:54 Okay?

00:34:55 It’s certainly borderless.

00:34:57 I thought one of the very interesting things about El Salvador,

00:35:01 to be honest,

00:35:03 when El Salvador first legalized Bitcoin, this came up a lot.

00:35:09 Traditionally,

00:35:10 and I’m sure it to an at least to a large extent, it’s still continuing.

00:35:15 El Salvador receives a lot of what they call remitted

00:35:19 remitances,

00:35:20 man. Words,

00:35:22 remittances,

00:35:24 which simply means

00:35:26 someone from El Salvador

00:35:29 left the family,

00:35:30 went to The United States, in this case,

00:35:33 worked,

00:35:34 made money,

00:35:35 and they’re sending some of it back home

00:35:39 to support their family.

00:35:42 That’s traditionally

00:35:44 done through a wire transfer.

00:35:46 I’m gonna go to a Western Union station

00:35:49 and I’m gonna wire say 200.

00:35:52 The problem is the base fee to wire someone is like $25

00:35:58 or something.

00:35:59 So in that case,

00:36:01 it’s more than 10%

00:36:04 just to have that privilege

00:36:07 of wiring that money.

00:36:09 And on the other end,

00:36:11 someone has to go to the Western Union Station to pick up the money,

00:36:16 which has implications

00:36:17 beyond just the fact that they have to travel to the station and pick up the money,

00:36:24 people

00:36:24 know that they went to the station and picked up the money.

00:36:30 So they could be targeted for robbery.

00:36:34 Right. Right?

00:36:35 So they’re literally putting themselves at risk by doing that.

00:36:41 Bitcoin,

00:36:43 if I send if I’m from El Salvador and I’m up here, I could send somebody bitcoin,

00:36:49 it would cost a few Satoshis and

00:36:52 they would not have to go anywhere.

00:36:55 Yeah. It would go right to their wallet. Do you see I’m a I mean that’s so much simpler and cleaner

00:37:01 than having

00:37:03 to do

00:37:04 that banking system, that traditional banking system which

00:37:09 sending a wire is is is a part of the banking system. People maybe don’t think about it like that but that’s exactly

00:37:16 what it is. You can hold it yourself, of course. We talk about self custody all the time.

00:37:23 It’s so important that you self custody

00:37:25 when you get to the point in your journey where that

00:37:29 where you’re able to do that.

00:37:32 And go ahead and tell me what I’m gonna say that you should have.

00:37:38 Can you see it? A

Kenshin:00:37:41 cold wallet. Well,

McIntosh:00:37:43 a cold wallet but specifically,

00:37:45 this is my Seat Signer. Seat Signer?

Kenshin:00:37:48 Yeah.

00:37:49 Seat Signer is good.

McIntosh:00:37:51 Seat Signers are awesome. I’m about ready I to get a new

Kenshin:00:37:55 have a Seat Signer, but only for

00:37:58 experimentation.

00:37:59 I’ve never used it

McIntosh:00:38:01 properly.

00:38:03 It’s my primary driver.

Kenshin:00:38:05 Yeah. It’s good. I love it. I like I like it with the QR codes and everything. I they they’ve got a newer version now

McIntosh:00:38:12 that’s got a bigger screen and I’ve talked about this. This is my one

00:38:16 big beef.

00:38:18 That screen is too small for somebody like me who has vision problems. Right?

00:38:25 I am going to get one of their newer ones that has a bigger screen.

00:38:29 They’ve like doubled the screen size or whatever. I would I mean, I wouldn’t mind it if they had one that was like that big because I don’t carry it around all the time. But but it’s a Raspberry Pi. You can buy the seven inch Raspberry Pi screen and

00:38:44 I guess the interface will Well, yeah, it is a Raspberry Pi.

00:38:47 Yeah. Well, join the seed signer like telegram group and you get hacking on that.

00:38:55 And I bet they’ll take the input and

00:38:59 you could like

00:39:01 add code to the thing.

00:39:03 Sure.

00:39:05 Censorship resistant.

00:39:07 Bitcoin doesn’t care who your president

00:39:11 or

00:39:12 country leader is.

00:39:15 Doesn’t.

00:39:16 And

00:39:17 those people can’t stop you

00:39:19 from getting Bitcoin.

Kenshin:00:39:21 They tried.

McIntosh:00:39:23 They try

00:39:24 and maybe it’s difficult but it’s not impossible. There’s anything

00:39:28 that they do virtually there’s a workaround for.

Kenshin:00:39:32 Yeah.

00:39:33 And even when Europe tried to ban self custody.

McIntosh:00:39:38 But, yeah, it’s not Thanks for bringing that up. Now we got a downer. I’m just kidding. Right?

Kenshin:00:39:45 It’s not gonna happen. And,

McIntosh:00:39:47 of course,

00:39:47 Bitcoin is open source.

00:39:49 You don’t have to depend on a company. We talk about Strike a lot, who makes a Lightning

00:39:57 wallet and Lightning service.

00:40:00 Strike

00:40:01 doesn’t run Bitcoin.

00:40:03 They don’t.

00:40:07 People like Kenshin and I who run nodes

00:40:10 who mine bitcoin,

00:40:13 we run the network.

00:40:15 Doesn’t that make you feel good? It makes me feel good. Didn’t even say that. We run the network. I think I’m gonna put that on a shirt. We run the network.

00:40:23 Oh, that’s good. That’s good. And see, you’re not saying Bitcoin so you’re not trying but but the people in the know, they know, baby. Yeah. I like that. We run the network.

Kenshin:00:40:34 Yeah. It it feels now I need to turn on a a second

00:40:38 a second note.

McIntosh:00:40:40 I like that. I’m still We run the we should like make that the show title. We run We run Okay. Anyways,

00:40:47 I need to at least post it on Noster. We run the network. Alright. When I’m listening to this, I’ll hear it and I’ll go to Noster and post it.

00:40:55 Alright.

00:40:58 Bitcoin doesn’t ask who you are unlike

00:41:01 every one of these other banking systems.

00:41:04 It only asks if you control your keys. Are those your keys?

00:41:08 You have their your keys?

00:41:09 Here’s your Bitcoin.

00:41:11 What a great way of looking at it. Yeah. Even your kids can have the wallets.

00:41:17 They can. And I think they should,

00:41:21 actually.

Kenshin:00:41:22 I started with my son already.

00:41:25 That’s to send him some sets.

McIntosh:00:41:28 Send him some sets.

00:41:29 And

00:41:30 kid you cannot do anything with these until you’re at least 25 by the way. Not 18 because

00:41:37 males

00:41:38 specifically

00:41:39 their frontal cortex does not finish developing

00:41:42 until they’re 25.

00:41:44 Okay? That’s why 18 year old boys

00:41:49 in particular

00:41:50 act so stupid. Sorry.

00:41:53 Love you, son.

00:41:56 I have one that’s 18.

00:42:01 Yeah. They’re just not developed.

00:42:03 It’s just not so I I personally probably wouldn’t be giving them real

00:42:09 real

00:42:11 wealth, if you wanna call it that,

00:42:13 at 18.

Kenshin:00:42:15 No. I’m DCA ing, but in a cold wallet, so he will not know about it.

00:42:22 Yeah.

00:42:23 But yeah. Alright. Some lightning sets. Yeah. No harm.

McIntosh:00:42:28 Real world examples of this, El Salvador, Nigeria, Argentina, Lebanon.

00:42:33 I mean, every one of those. Lebanon

00:42:36 experienced crazy

00:42:38 currency

00:42:39 debasement.

00:42:40 Argentina

00:42:41 certainly did. Nigeria did as well. El Salvador is actually the only one who really didn’t. But El Salvador in particular, I know the whole remittance issue with them. It’s like 7% of their GDP.

00:42:53 And just switching to Bitcoin,

00:42:56 just all those fees are just essentially gone.

Kenshin:00:43:01 Yeah. And you hear those stories from people like Chuck Mullers and stuff. They they say in their statistics, could see how much

00:43:09 Yes. Such and not only such, even stablecoins.

00:43:13 That’s why they enable stablecoins because Right. Countries like Philippines,

00:43:17 that was a big thing,

00:43:19 those type of countries.

McIntosh:00:43:22 So

00:43:23 in places like Sweden

00:43:26 No. That’s the best one. Or

00:43:29 The United States,

00:43:31 even places like China

00:43:34 and, you

00:43:35 know, a lot of countries like that,

00:43:38 Bitcoin is is speculative.

00:43:40 We we

00:43:41 a lot of us, not all of us, but a lot of us invest in it because we expect it to go up.

00:43:47 That’s what almost

00:43:49 always brings people in.

00:43:51 Oh, Bitcoin go up.

00:43:53 Some of us figure out along the way Bitcoin can change the world. I feel like I’m there. I’m I don’t wanna speak for you. I believe you

Kenshin:00:44:01 think that. No. But

00:44:03 Yeah. Yeah.

00:44:04 For me, I think it’s a savings, not investment anymore. So that’s that’s where my mind clicked Right. In a in a different way. But in a place like Nigeria

McIntosh:00:44:14 with the e nero,

00:44:16 I think that’s what it’s called,

00:44:19 Bitcoin is is survival.

00:44:21 Bitcoin is a way to actually break the cycles

00:44:25 of poverty

00:44:26 and inability

00:44:27 to

00:44:28 to better yourself.

00:44:31 Lightning,

00:44:33 one of the great ways of making this work. We don’t talk about lightning in particular a whole lot on this show,

00:44:39 but it is a layer two over Bitcoin.

00:44:42 So essentially, it’s tied into the Bitcoin main network.

00:44:46 You deal with Satoshis just like you do with Bitcoin.

00:44:50 But

00:44:51 unlike the Bitcoin main net where you get a new block every ten minutes,

00:44:56 I can basically send Kenshin some

00:44:59 Satoshis instantaneously

00:45:01 over the Lightning Network. We we’ve talked about the details of that in the past, but yeah. You

Kenshin:00:45:08 know, I haven’t sent

00:45:10 Bitcoin in the main net sent.

00:45:13 I haven’t sent in maybe over a year. Wow.

00:45:17 Hey. All my

McIntosh:00:45:19 purchases now. These days.

Kenshin:00:45:21 No. Exactly. But I still prefer Lightning.

McIntosh:00:45:24 Right.

00:45:25 And as the network builds,

00:45:28 as Bitcoin goes up, as

00:45:31 more traffic is on that main net, the price of sending a transaction

00:45:36 will happen. Mark my word.

00:45:39 I wanna think about what I’m about to say. 2026,

00:45:44 by 2035,

00:45:46 nine years from now,

00:45:48 it will cost typically

00:45:51 more than a $100 to send a transaction

00:45:53 on the main net. And at that point, you’ll be thinking about it very carefully.

00:45:58 Right?

00:45:59 Do I need to send this on the main net?

00:46:02 If I’m gonna pay off my house mortgage,

00:46:04 I’m gonna send it on the main net. If I’m gonna buy a a Coke,

00:46:08 I wanna

00:46:10 use lightning or liquid or something similar. There are other systems.

00:46:14 Lightning is just frankly the most prevalent.

Kenshin:00:46:19 Yeah. I I would argue that might not happen.

00:46:22 Not in nine years.

00:46:23 Because we go into

00:46:250.1

00:46:26 Bitcoin

00:46:27 Mhmm. SATs right now.

00:46:30 So we we see below one already, such per v b. Why is it so low?

McIntosh:00:46:37 Low because the lack of traffic on the network. Is that correct?

Kenshin:00:46:42 Not really.

McIntosh:00:46:44 Right, not. I

Kenshin:00:46:47 mean, the main pool is not empty.

McIntosh:00:46:50 But it’s near empty.

00:46:52 No. It’s not.

Kenshin:00:46:54 It’s 30%. It’s a 100 megabytes.

00:46:58 It’s 40,000

00:46:59 unconfirmed

00:47:00 transactions.

00:47:0140,000.

McIntosh:00:47:02 It’s 20 blocks. Never argue with Kenshin, Macintosh. I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re right. It it is 20 blocks.

00:47:10 People feel like it’s empty.

Kenshin:00:47:12 Right.

McIntosh:00:47:14 When we get busy

00:47:15 it’ll go up.

00:47:17 I believe. We’ll see. It will but

00:47:22 I

00:47:23 guess what I’m betting is that countries

00:47:26 will start settling

00:47:29 deals, payments, whatever in Bitcoin.

00:47:32 They will not be doing it over Lightning. They will do it on the main net.

00:47:37 Yeah.

00:47:38 Yeah. For sure. As that traffic picks up,

00:47:42 I mean,

00:47:43 it is constricted.

00:47:44 There’s a certain amount of transactions and I don’t know what it is offhand,

00:47:49 but there’s only a certain amount that you can send

00:47:52 over the Bitcoin main net in the course of a week or a year, however you wanna phrase it.

Kenshin:00:47:58 Yeah. I mean the limitation is the block. Right? And you can send around 4,000

McIntosh:00:48:02 Right. Per block. Right.

00:48:04 And there’s Best case. Block every ten minutes and you can do the math.

00:48:08 There’s numbers there. That’s why people are building things like liquid and

00:48:13 lightning.

00:48:15 But

00:48:16 when enough people are using the main net because

00:48:19 that’s the ultimate settlement.

00:48:22 When we send a

00:48:26 when we send a payment to,

00:48:28 I don’t know, Saudi Arabia for oil,

00:48:31 that’s not gonna be done over

00:48:34 Lightning. It’s gonna be done over

00:48:37 the main net. It doesn’t matter

00:48:39 if it cost a $100

00:48:41 when

00:48:42 you’re sending

00:48:44$5,000,000

00:48:45 worth of value. I mean, it’s nothing.

00:48:48 Right?

00:48:49 But

00:48:50 it’s just about scale. Alright. I don’t wanna get bogged down in that. I already said 2035.

00:48:56 Write it down.

00:48:57 You can say you were right when we get there.

00:49:01 Do you still think we’ll be doing this in 2035?

Kenshin:00:49:05 No.

00:49:06 What?

McIntosh:00:49:10 Oh man.

00:49:12 Now I’m hurt.

Kenshin:00:49:16 I’ll probably not be in Sweden.

McIntosh:00:49:19 Hey. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s this thing called the Internet.

00:49:24 You don’t have to be in one location.

Kenshin:00:49:27 No. I just think my life will be so different. Wait. My

00:49:33 son will be old.

McIntosh:00:49:35 Old. No, he won’t. Older.

00:49:38 Older. He won’t even be out of the house. Anyways.

00:49:42 Alright.

00:49:42 We really need to There move

00:49:46 are limitations.

00:49:48 People need to understand this. They they

00:49:51 lack of education,

00:49:53 lack of training,

00:49:54 lack of teaching, whatever you want to call it,

00:49:57 simply blocks this process.

00:49:59 People are not gonna do it on their own.

00:50:02 We do have infrastructure challenges.

00:50:04 We do have

00:50:07 custody risk in cases where people are not self custodying.

00:50:13 Maybe you’ve got a fetement set up, which we’ve talked about some before,

00:50:19 for

00:50:20 a group of people. There is a risk there of a rug pull, essentially.

00:50:25 It’s difficult but it can be done.

00:50:27 And we do have volatility and this is the thing that scares people. They don’t understand why there’s volatility.

00:50:34 It’s because Bitcoin is of course, it doesn’t seem so volatile lately.

00:50:38 But regardless,

00:50:40 you know, they’re worried about

00:50:43 losing

00:50:44 their value.

Kenshin:00:50:46 Yeah.

00:50:48 Yeah. Isn’t this funny?

00:50:50 People wonder if volatility debug now.

McIntosh:00:50:57 We yeah. We’re never happy.

00:50:59 I wanna wrap this up.

00:51:01 I think one of the most important things that this brings to people

00:51:06 is their dignity

00:51:08 and self worth, and I mean that.

00:51:11 When

00:51:13 somebody

00:51:14 lives in a village in Africa

00:51:17 that’s hundreds of kilometers from the nearest

00:51:20 city

00:51:21 and they don’t have access to a financial infrastructure,

00:51:25 they do not have the ability to think

00:51:30 it makes it much more difficult to think long term

00:51:34 because when

00:51:36 you save what little bit of money you’ve got under your pillow

00:51:40 or

00:51:41 you know in a jar in a hole in the ground or whatever,

00:51:46 that’s not

00:51:48 that’s not a good system.

00:51:50 It’s very fragile.

00:51:52 And giving them the ability to have powerful security,

00:51:57 self custody,

00:51:59 and be

00:52:00 a part of

00:52:02 this global financial

00:52:05 system that we are building that’s got all the benefits that it has, which we’ve talked about.

00:52:13 When they understand that and when they grasp that,

00:52:17 they realize they’re equal to anybody in the world. They may not have the same

00:52:21 ability to make money as say

00:52:26 somebody who’s working at Meta

00:52:28 or whatever

00:52:30 but

00:52:31 they have the ability to participate

00:52:33 on a level playing field in terms of

00:52:38 that money. Does that make sense?

Kenshin:00:52:40 Yeah. It’s good.

McIntosh:00:52:42 And it unleashes something. The things that I see coming out of Africa in terms of development and whatever is just mind boggling.

00:52:52 And it’s because

00:52:53 you are essentially

00:52:55 I believe it’s because you’re essentially

00:52:57 freeing these people

00:53:00 in a way that they’ve never had the ability to before.

00:53:09 How’s that?

Kenshin:00:53:11 Good.

McIntosh:00:53:12 Very good. And it already gave us the show notes. Look at that.

00:53:19 What do we got? Question of the week.

Kenshin:00:53:22 Yeah. Where is that?

McIntosh:00:53:25 We

00:53:26 don’t have a question this week, ladies and gentlemen.

00:53:30 Where can I get that shirt that says we are the network?

Kenshin:00:53:36 That’s the question. Do you would you buy it?

McIntosh:00:53:40 Here is the question of the week, ladies and gentlemen. If I go out on a limb and make a shirt that says we are the network, would you buy that?

00:53:49 I need at least a 100 people to boost in and say yes.

Kenshin:00:53:53 Yeah. And now someone else would do it.

McIntosh:00:53:55 Yeah.

00:53:56 Kinda concerning. I need to grab that domain, wearethenetwork.com.

00:54:02 I bet it’s I bet it’s already done.

00:54:06 I can check. Alright.

00:54:09 Hey, we

00:54:10 got a boost this week.

00:54:12 Good to see. Yeah. Friend sending Mike,

00:54:15 thousand and 69 sats.

00:54:18 And he said,

00:54:20 he

00:54:22 said, I believe Kenshin is approaching the completion of his project

00:54:27 asymptotically.

00:54:29 And that’s what we were talking about with calculus where you approach the end and you never get there. Right?

00:54:35 Looking forward to seeing it when it’s done. Well, it’s done. Send it, Mike. He’s got an MVP. Don’t let him he’s just over there fooling around with chat g b t. Don’t you don’t worry about that.

00:54:47 And then he said you talk about the cost to send email. That was the origin of Adam Back’s hashcash p o w, a proof of work system

00:54:56 to eliminate email

00:54:58 spam. I’m familiar with that. It it is actually the basis

00:55:03 of

00:55:04 Bitcoin

00:55:05 as well.

00:55:06 That

00:55:08 idea

00:55:09 at least.

00:55:10 Let me go ahead and finish this. I’ll come back to that. I’m bullish on Bitcoin though. I’m a little concerned about my outperform silver prediction.

00:55:19 I personally would prefer the gold and silver price update in ounces. I thought this was maybe a good idea since market cap comparison is hard to make tangible in day to day life. I’d like to do both actually. I don’t wanna make it longer but

00:55:32 maybe we could do what are you sending me? Maybe we could do both.

00:55:40 Yeah. Of course it is.

00:55:44 Okay.

00:55:46 Two two things real quick and I know we’re going long so I don’t wanna make this too long.

00:55:51 Yeah. Hashcash,

00:55:52 I get it. That was about email spam.

00:55:55 Part of what I’m doing is

00:55:57 dealing with spam. There’s other aspects to it, a lot of other aspects. I don’t wanna talk about it too much. I appreciate the input.

00:56:05 I’m gonna have an MVP on that very soon and once I get things up and rolling. It’s going to be open source.

00:56:13 I’m gonna be looking for people to help, frankly,

00:56:17 because I can’t I’m not gonna do it all by myself.

00:56:20 I believe

00:56:21 if I’m correct in my thinking,

00:56:25 even

00:56:27 open source, all of that, there will be the opportunity to make money

00:56:32 by providing a service.

00:56:34 Okay? Because

00:56:36 you should get paid for what you’re doing.

00:56:39 And so anyways, we’ll talk about all that. I’m bullish on oh, the silver. I did wanna talk about this. I have a thesis actually. I’ve kinda put it together.

00:56:50 We all know that gold is basically going up because of inflation. It’s kind of predicting

00:56:56 the printing of money.

00:56:58 I believe this year in The United States in particular,

00:57:02 the money printing is about to be unleashed like a like a tsunami.

00:57:08 I believe personally that silver is basically kind of moving back to its rightful place.

00:57:14 Silver

00:57:15 up until

00:57:17 the

00:57:18 probably the early seventies, mid seventies.

00:57:23 How can I put this? It may have been older than that but

00:57:27 it has a long history of being about 15 to one and you can look this up in terms of price,

00:57:34 silver to gold. So in other words, 15 ounces of silver,

00:57:38 one ounce of gold.

00:57:40 Okay?

00:57:41 The

00:57:42 reality is we’re nowhere near that right now.

00:57:45 And in fact, I did a little calculation

00:57:48 last night.

00:57:49 When Bitcoin when Bitcoin

00:57:52 when gold hits $6,000,

00:57:55 which it’s it’s going to, I mean, it’s just gonna keep going up, it’s going to we’re at 5,300 or something.

00:58:03 When it hits 6,000

00:58:05 a 15 to one ratio

00:58:07 would be $400

00:58:11 an ounce for silver.

00:58:14 Okay? Right.

00:58:17 Oh.

00:58:18 And that’s the historical

00:58:20 value ladies and gentlemen. That is not McIntosh just pulling numbers out of thin air.

00:58:27 That is if you go back in history and look at silver versus gold.

00:58:32 Silver is more common.

00:58:35 People don’t like it as much as gold, whatever. That is the ratio.

00:58:41 Okay?

00:58:42 And there’s two things.

00:58:46 I think well, I think the price was suppressed for a long period of time. I I don’t I can’t tell you how that was done. I mean, the Hunt brothers, we know tried to corner the market in the past. There’s been things like that.

00:59:01 But

00:59:02 in a free market where everything is the way it should be,

00:59:07 we should see this 15 to one ratio.

00:59:10 And not only are we seeing gold shoot up and we’re seeing silver

00:59:14 follow along behind or really outperform it,

00:59:18 What’s something that silver has a use for? It’s not just jewelry,

00:59:23 it is used in industry.

00:59:25 And we are in the middle of the largest industrial build out in history

00:59:30 because of AI. Whether it’s a bubble or not, it doesn’t matter. It’s happening.

00:59:36 Have a friend of mine. I’ve never talked about this on the show. He does listen to this occasionally.

00:59:42 So if he’s listening, hi. He’s in the electrical business. Okay?

00:59:47 On a high level.

00:59:49 And he has talked to me about walking through these giant data centers and these giant industrial

00:59:56 like the t s m.

00:59:58 It’s the Taiwan

01:00:00 chip manufacturer.

01:00:02 I don’t know what their initials are but t s building m

01:00:05 a huge plant

01:00:07 out in Arizona.

01:00:09 It is

01:00:10 mind boggling

01:00:12 the electrical work and whatever that’s being done for that.

01:00:16 All of that stuff

01:00:17 is driving demand

01:00:19 for silver from an industrial aspect.

01:00:23 I don’t know when silver is going to get back to that 15 to one ratio and I am not making price predictions ladies and gentlemen, but I do believe

01:00:32 one day,

01:00:34 hopefully within my lifetime,

01:00:36 that we’re back to that in general kind of 15 to one ratio.

Kenshin:01:00:44 So are we the silver plebs soon? No. We’re not.

McIntosh:01:00:49 I

01:00:50 own zero gold. I own very little silver.

01:00:53 And by the way, I have not bought any silver since it started running up. So I’m not a a

01:01:00 jump on the bandwagon person.

01:01:02 Okay? I hope it does well but it’s just a hard asset to me that I bought before I knew about Bitcoin.

01:01:11 Does that make sense?

01:01:13 I

01:01:14 I would not spend thousands of dollars on silver these days. If I had that kind of money to spend

01:01:19 on on

01:01:21 an asset, it would be Bitcoin

01:01:24100%.

01:01:26 Send it, Mike. I really would like to sit down with you and talk. I know we’ve said that before or at least I have.

01:01:32 Kenshin doesn’t think you’ll go across the Atlantic, so whatever.

01:01:36 But,

01:01:39 yeah, you and I think a lot alike. It’s interesting because we don’t in some ways but a lot of ways we do. We’d love to sit down and have a drink.

01:01:47 Think wasn’t he the one that said something about the Buffalo Ranch that you wanted to come out to the ranch? I think it was.

01:01:52 Yeah. Was that Anyways, somebody

01:01:55 once I get the ranch up and running, know,

01:01:59 I guess you’re welcome to come out.

01:02:04 You’ll have to like prove that you’re you and

01:02:07 then I’ll let you know where it’s at.

01:02:10 Alright. That’s enough. We’re we’re done. Oh, news and notes.

01:02:14 We’re done with that.

01:02:17 News and notes. I I have one item and it’s not the price of silver.

01:02:22 It Yeah. Is

01:02:24 What’s going on in the mining market? Right?

01:02:27 Wow. We know

01:02:29 right now

01:02:30 if the difficulty adjustment were to happen today,

01:02:36 we would be down 18%

01:02:38 in difficulty.

01:02:40 Okay?

01:02:41 Which is

01:02:42 and I don’t know that this is what’s gonna happen. We’re ten days out from the next difficulty adjustment. So we’ve got a ways to go.

01:02:49 But right now, I don’t think we’ve ever had a drop this big. I would have to go back and look at the data but

01:02:57 it that’s what it seems. That’s a

01:03:00 staggering drop in one in one difficulty adjustment.

01:03:04 And it’s because

01:03:06 The US is in the middle of a deep freeze and

01:03:11 Texas in particular which hosts a huge number of minors,

01:03:15 they have this deal a lot of them with ERCOT,

01:03:18 the energy

01:03:20 consortium or whatever.

01:03:22 And when ERCOT needs that energy,

01:03:26 the Bitcoin miners shut down. And that’s what’s going on right now, I believe.

01:03:30 This isn’t China mining ban. This isn’t, you know, it’s it’s pure we see this every year with the weather, at least the last few years, but we’ve never seen it to this extent.

01:03:40 Now my miners happen to all be online unless they’re in for repair. I’ve got a few like that. So I’m happy cause this is benefiting me.

01:03:49 I looked actually at the ocean statistics

01:03:54 a few last night.

01:03:56 We’ve mined like 52 blocks this month.

Kenshin:01:04:00 Wow.

McIntosh:01:04:00 Yeah. It’s crazy. 52?

01:04:03 Yeah. Like two a day.

01:04:06 Actually the pool hash has gone down not up.

01:04:10 So

01:04:11 that’s kinda crazy.

01:04:13 I’m I’m happy with that.

01:04:16 But yeah, we’re we’re crazy

01:04:18 crazy low on the price.

01:04:21 What else were we got? Was there any other news? Zeus

01:04:24 for software updates. I know Zeus had a 12 dot two dot two I think came out.

01:04:30 I I reboosted

01:04:31 it earlier

01:04:34 or last night or this morning. I don’t remember which. But they’re just always turning out stuff but it looks like they have a

01:04:42 a an actual full release, not a like an alpha or a beta.

01:04:47 So if you’re using Zeus, you should do that.

01:04:51 Let’s see.

01:04:54 Bit Bit Chat has has had some good news. Okay. You wanna go ahead and I don’t know about that. Please share.

01:05:01 Yes. It I’m sorry, but it’s zero dot twelve dot two. Yeah.

Kenshin:01:05:05 Okay. Zeus.

01:05:07 Bit chat supports now photos audio notes in Bluetooth mesh.

01:05:13 It has better routing algorithm

01:05:15 for stable and longer range meshes,

01:05:18 uses TOR projects and

01:05:21 RT framework

01:05:23 for speed and reliability.

01:05:25 I don’t know what is that. RT framework.

01:05:30 And it’s now audited by third party security group and addressed all findings.

McIntosh:01:05:36 That’s good.

01:05:37 Good to hear that, especially when you’re dealing with people’s lives

01:05:42 as sometimes is the case here.

01:05:45 For those of you who don’t know, a bit chat is a

01:05:49 Bluetooth based tool that builds a mesh network

01:05:53 for communication.

01:05:54 So if you have a large group of people, say

01:05:58 protesters in Iran,

01:06:00 people could have this as a way to

01:06:04 talk

01:06:05 and

01:06:06 the

01:06:08 government

01:06:09 cannot shut it down. You can’t block Bluetooth like that. You can block the cellular data, which is what they do. They shut down the cell towers or whatever in the area. That kind of thing.

01:06:20 Doesn’t work the same way for Bluetooth. So people can communicate

01:06:24 if there’s enough of them using it in in a given area

01:06:29 and it works very very well from what I hear.

01:06:33 Mhmm.

01:06:33 Really cool stuff.

01:06:35 Glad to hear it.

01:06:37 We did not try it

Kenshin:01:06:39 and see if we can send a message

01:06:42 between us.

McIntosh:01:06:44 I don’t think it’s gonna reach.

01:06:46 No.

01:06:51 Complete random

01:06:52 not no. Nope. Not doing it.

01:06:55 Not doing it.

01:06:59 I’m exercising

01:07:01 my

01:07:02 don’t go down that rabbit trail.

01:07:06 I need a price. I did not update price.

01:07:10 I

01:07:12 don’t even know where to look for price these days.

Kenshin:01:07:14 Go charting.

McIntosh:01:07:16 I had the links there. Okay. I’ve got a price right now of 88,981

01:07:23 in US dollars.

01:07:25 What do you have, sir?

Kenshin:01:07:27 I have

01:07:29 the up to date is 74,466

01:07:35 I

McIntosh:01:07:36 heard some kind of sad news.

01:07:38 It looks like we close out this month.

01:07:42 We’ll be down for the fourth month in a row.

01:07:46 Okay. Not good. But we haven’t gone down. I mean, 88,000,

01:07:50 I still it’s 30%.

01:07:52 You people,

01:07:53 if you think this is bad,

01:07:56 nah.

01:07:57 Nah.

01:07:58 It’s just not.

01:08:00 Try 50. Try 70. Try 80%

01:08:04 drawdown.

01:08:05 And maybe that’s what still happens in the end. We don’t know. But

01:08:09 it seems to me like I keep saying we just kinda keep

01:08:13 we’re in this little box. You know? We’re just kinda bouncing back and forth. I don’t know.

01:08:20 Let’s go ahead do the market cap. We got $1,800,000,000,000

01:08:24 US in for Bitcoin,

01:08:2733,100,000,000,000.0

01:08:29 for gold. Do you even remember what it was when we started doing this? I it was in the twenties. Right? The lower twenties

Kenshin:01:08:35 for gold? I think below maybe then. Maybe. Yeah. Actually actually now right now, it’s it’s even more.

01:08:43 Wait.

McIntosh:01:08:46 Wait. Wait. 37,000,000,000,000.

01:08:47 Bitcoin was at like, we touched 10% at one point, the Bitcoin versus gold market gap, and now we’re down to 5.4.

01:08:54 Oh, 37,000,000,000,000

01:08:56 for the gold market gap. Yep.

01:08:58 Crazy stuff. And, of course, silver has shot up. We were look silver’s now the number two asset. Right?

Kenshin:01:09:04 Right behind gold? Yeah. It is. Yeah. It is. Yeah.

McIntosh:01:09:09 Just a few months ago, it was like seven or eight. I mean, it’s just insane what silver’s been doing.

01:09:15 Yeah. Not financial advice people.

01:09:18 It could go down to 50. It could go down to, I don’t know,

01:09:2225.

01:09:24 Just saying.

01:09:26 But it is interesting.

01:09:29 And I will operate on that thesis I outlined until

01:09:32 otherwise proven. Wrong fees and mimple.

Kenshin:01:09:36 Oh, you wanna hit that? Sorry. Oh, no. No. That’s an old one. Okay.

01:09:41 Fees. So we are at

01:09:44 one sat per v bytes. That’s If it’s a high priority. Yeah. Oh. That’s now high. Go for it. Half.

01:09:53 Yeah. And low priority

01:09:55 is 0.1 SAT per v byte. And I saw one transactions I picked up on random that had 0.13

01:10:01 SATs,

01:10:02 and they paid a total of 16 sets

01:10:06 for the transaction, which is $0.01.

McIntosh:01:10:11 We should make a web page on the website,

01:10:15 Kenshin and and Macintosh bets

01:10:18 put

01:10:19$20.35

Kenshin:01:10:22 cost. Oh, no.

McIntosh:01:10:254.82

01:10:27 percent of the way to the next happening.

01:10:29 Habit happening

01:10:31 And that’s gonna be on April 12. It slid back a day because everything’s behind.

01:10:36 In 2028, two years, seventy four days.

01:10:39 And we are, as I said, when I wrote this down, 18 o 7%

01:10:44 downward adjustment in like eleven days.

Kenshin:01:10:48 Yes. Love

McIntosh:01:10:50 it. Love it.

01:10:52 It’s the I think the fourth downward third or fourth downward adjustment in a row as well. Yeah.

01:10:58 I mean Yeah.

Kenshin:01:11:00 But I mean when you zoom out we are at a level higher than That’s why I wanted to go down. That means that servers are going offline.

01:11:10 Yeah. Exactly. I mean August we were at where we are now basically.

McIntosh:01:11:14 It’s Look. So bad. If I woke up tomorrow and Marathon

01:11:20 had pivoted

01:11:22 to AI and shut down every one of their Bitcoin servers,

01:11:26 I would be extremely happy.

01:11:29 Bitbet Farm by the way is doing that. I mean they’re they they closed down their Paraguay businesses as public news

01:11:36 and they’re pivoting

01:11:38 more to AI. They say they’re gonna maintain like a mix but I believe in the long run they’re just gonna become a because they make more profit per space

01:11:49 for AI Sure. Right

Kenshin:01:11:52 Yeah. Sure. But they need different hardware. Not so easy It’s the mindset thing. You’re right. But

McIntosh:01:11:58 they think, oh for the same amount of

01:12:01 energy It’s we can make more

01:12:04 just pure fiat thinking. They’re not thinking in the long run.

01:12:10 That’s

01:12:10 it. Satoshi’s Plebs is a value for value podcast supporting podcasting two point o. We strive to bring you honest Bitcoin content every week. We ask, are you getting value from this show? Support it through time, talent, or treasure. Help with future projects like our chat room,

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01:12:34 Even a 100 sats saying great show or you suck. We’ll read it. Check out the apps at podcastapps.com.

01:12:39 Support independent bitcoin media. If you like the content, I would love it if you would write a review on Apple. Please,

01:12:46 people,

01:12:47 and tell your friends about the podcast. Is that begging?

01:12:52 It’s okay. That’s the best way for us to grow. This week’s music, and I promise this will be the last week. I hope you’ve enjoyed the song though. Empty passenger seat by Joe Martin. Any boost streaming of Sats during that song will go straight to the artist.

Kenshin:01:13:07 Thanks for joining us again this week. You will hear from us again next Thursday morning.

01:13:12 We hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you on Nostril on Fountain.

01:13:17 You can also find all our contact info at satoshi.plebs.com.

01:13:22 Stay humble, DCA those sites, and have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you all soon.

01:13:26 Bye bye.