This week we analyze the River Lightning network usage report. There is a lot going on in lightning development and the calls for its demise are very much premature. We have plateaued for now but the next bull run will set things up for the traffic on the lightning network to overtake the Bitcoin mainchain.
News, notes and even a rant. It's all there in less than hour!!
BTC Daily Close: $28,759
Block height at time of recording 812,953
News and Notes
Lightning Labs Taproot Assets on BTC Mainnet
Peter McCormack Film - Follow the Money (Argentina)
Country Garden Property Developer Payment Failure
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
https://satoshis-plebs.com
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
McIntosh can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. His mastodon handle is @[email protected] and his Nostr. Kenshin can be reached on Twitter at @kenshin_ninja or on Nostr. Kenshin’s email is [email protected]. You can also follow the Satoshi’s Plebs podcast account on Nostr. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Sat Stackers. Today is October 19th, and this is episode 138 of generation Bitcoin. I'm your host, Macintosh. And today's episode is about the lightning network usage. Alright. Let's get right into it. Yeah. We'll be talking about the Lightning Network today. Of course, shortly after I did episode 134, on lightning, River Financial posted a a a review, which they've done at least they did it a year ago as well, on lightning network usage. They're one of the largest nodes in the lightning network, and they're one of the people who have the best ability to kind of see what's going on. Now understand before we even dive into this report and some additional information about podcasting 2.0 stats in kind of the network that we use to support shows like mine.
A lot of the Lightning Network is private, private nodes running behind Tor, so on and so forth. And it's very difficult to really understand it all what's going on. So you'll see in this report that they talk about kind of lower bounds, And so what they're saying is it can't be any less than this, but it's certainly more. You can read that into it because there is an unknown number of nodes and and such out there that that are not being accounted for in this report. So. Anyways, we'll get all get to all that in a minute. We've had some good feedback. Bitcoin is pumping.
We'll talk about that for a minute. Our block height at time of recording, let's just go ahead and throw this out there, is 8129 fiver 3812 953. We probably need to talk about that for just a little bit. Why don't we just jump on into our market update? Man, McIntosh, if you only had a script right in front of your eyes that you could actually used to keep on track. I have I have to work really hard to to keep on track even when I do have a script, and I don't have a script. I don't have a word for word script, but I have notes in front of me. By the way, I use Trillium for that on my umbral node. I found it fairly useful. I'm slowly transferring over my notes from Evernote to Trillium.
So, anyways, market. Right now, as I record, we're at 8 28,759. That will be the official price for today. As I record here on Thursday afternoon, unfortunately, I was tied up last night with some work stuff, so I'm having to record later than normal. Sometimes duty calls, I was actually not I was not on call this week, but, I got pulled into an HBI after having to work late already on some other issues. And so, you know, it wrecked my whole night, to be honest. But because of that, I was able to get off a little bit early. So here I am recording, and I'll punch this out as quickly as I can.
I do apologize for the delay during the week. Sometimes these things are just unavoidable. Anyways, 28,759, and we're actually continuing to pump up from there. If I open up trading view. I think overall, well, what we've seen is that things were not so well. We were kind of heading down. And then, basically, I think CoinTelegraph. It was either CoinTelegraph or CoinDesk, and I do not remember which. It should be in my news, but 1 or the other of them posted inherently that, BlackRock had been approved for a spot ETF approval, and it provided in an instant, you know, less than an hour $1,000 pump. And, of course, they retracted that. It's not true. Nothing in terms of bought ETFs has been approved, but the levels have stayed up.
So, you know, we're we're moving back towards the top side of this box, if you wanna call it that. As we've discussed, we've got this box going on between 25,031,000 that's going back for months now. I do believe that when a spot ETF gets approved, we will break out of this box personally late if we're not alright. And that's my personal opinion. It's not financial advice, and I'm certainly not giving you trading advice, by the way. But I think there's a chance after that happens that it stays above 31,000. I'm not a believer that, you know, spot ETFs are gonna save Bitcoin. I don't even care whether they get approved or not. But the reality is is that they bring in Wall Street money.
They bring in people who don't want to invest in Bitcoin in any other way, but they want to invest in Bitcoin. I get all that. It will continue Bitcoin's dominance march to dominance, I I should say, as a global reserve currency at some point. So it's necessary, but I don't really care about them. I would not recommend that you buy in a spot ETF. I would recommend that you own your own Bitcoin and you put it in your own hardware wallet. Seed signer seems to be the best thing going on right now. I am going to be building one of those in the next few months. I'll be reporting on that as I do it.
And one other brief note, by the way, let's see. That clearly happened on October 16th, 16th, Monday, and it pumped all the way up to $30,000, kissed it 29, probably 29 99, and fell right back down, but it fell at a higher level. So, I mean, you very clearly can see that we've consolidated. We're building actually a flag formation, a nice flag formation. The Bollinger Bands are pinching down. We may be pressing back up towards that 30,000, 31,000 mark before the weekend. We'll see. That's certainly not financial advice, and I'm just rambling as I look at a trading view chart.
What do we say here here at Generation Bitcoin Stack Sats. Buy every day. Use the strike app
[00:07:08] McIntosh:
if you must. However you do that,
[00:07:12] McIntosh:
just do it. Just do it daily. Don't worry about the price. Don't worry about, at worst case, weekly. I would not recommend monthly. You may get left behind at some point, and that would be a terrible thing. So just keep stacking those sats. Strike is an easy way to do that. There are other options certainly at this point. Oh, by the way, to close-up the market stuff, I did wanna mention, on 16th, so just a few days ago, we had an adjustment, estimate 6.47% up in the difficulty. So things are getting harder. And, unfortunately, right now, the next one will be on the 29th, so ten days from now, and it's looking like it's going to be another 5% or so up. Now I'm hoping that comes down because, frankly, I could use some more sats in my mining setup.
It does look like we will have another upward adjustment. So what does this mean? Well, what it means is that more hash rate is coming online. As more and more hash rate comes online, there's more people competing. The blocks are getting mined faster. And, of course, as I've explained before, the difficulty adjustment essentially is designed to keep that block mining happening around every 10 minutes. Well, right now, it's not. It's happening faster than that. Our fees are still fairly high. They look like they've actually been kind of going up. Oh, well, look at their a minute ago, they were 15. Now they're 6 and 4, so priority is 6 sets per v byte.
We're still over on the mempool, 451 megabytes. So, I don't know. No idea. But, yeah, it certainly looks like more hash is being added to the network. I think what is happening as Bitcoin goes up in price, miners that have been inactive because they can't afford to run the miners we're starting to bring those online. So there you go. I think that covers that. So we will move on to our topic. So this report, it's a it's a 20 no. 45 page report.
[00:09:32] McIntosh:
I've read through it. I'm going to summarize it in part. There's a lot of interesting things in here.
[00:09:41] McIntosh:
Basically, in summary, despite a drop in Bitcoin. And despite
[00:09:49] McIntosh:
a decrease in search interest, there have been more payments
[00:09:56] McIntosh:
in the last 2 years, 2 years, 2 months since August 2021. So in the last 2 years or so, there's been an increase in lightning payments. That's the way to say it. Even though 44% price drop, 45% decrease in search interest, which by the way directly relates to the price, 1212%. Now that's not a number. And in fact, what we see is that at least for the last year or so, the amount of Bitcoin tied up in lightning, certainly on the visible network, if you wanna call it that. I'm gonna kind of differentiate between visible and invisible, Tor based.
That really hasn't changed a huge amount, not like this, but the number of payments is. And I that makes me very bullish. Show people are using the lightning network. That's the equivalent right now of 2.5 transactions per second. Bitcoin on chain is 4.4. So there you go. So we're basically halfway, no more than halfway to the amount of transactions that are occurring on the Bitcoin main chain. Now what would our fees be like if all this traffic we're on the main chain. I don't wanna think about it. Now the primary use case, and I'm gonna pick a bone here with this report. The primary use case driving transaction growth that we identified are, and we being River, gaming, social media tipping, and streaming.
Now I don't know what they mean by streaming. Maybe they mean Podcast 2.0, streaming of sats while people listen. I assume they could mean things like streaming while watching a TV show. I don't know because I've never actually heard of I've only heard of streaming outside or in the context of podcast 2 point o. Now the interesting thing is is in this report, as far as I can tell, not once do they mention podcast podcast 2 point o, who, by the way, started, what, 3 years ago. Mhmm. And we do know from the stats that, the guys over at podcast 2 point o keep that the number of sats is fairly significant going across this podcast 2 point o network. Now I don't know. Again, I think from what I understand, these are kind of lower bounds.
But over the last 90 days, $30,000 over a 100,000,000 sats, 1 Bitcoin has been transacted across value for value podcast 2.0 lightning payments.
[00:12:49] McIntosh:
Almost
[00:12:53] McIntosh:
1,000,000 transactions doing that. And the number of unique senders, if I'm reading this correctly,
[00:13:04] McIntosh:
must be well, they don't have a number for unique senders, so I'm I oh, there it is. So it's like 295.
[00:13:13] McIntosh:
It looks like 3 so the lower boundary, like, 260. There's the lowest. So let me see if I can figure this out, 169. The highest is 380, and that's, I think, on a daily basis. So between 160 and almost 400 unique senders per day. So high volume, high transactions, honestly, low number of unique senders. Now, do they have groupings there? I don't know. Is, like, all the, Albi wallets, do they show up as one sender? I do not know. I would love to see that unique senders go up personally, but the point is there is a decent quantity of traffic that if you go back far enough, we know is growing.
It's not in this chart, but if you go back in time, and they've talked about that on the podcast 2.0 show. How over the last few years, of course, this has gone up, and it will only continue to do so as more value for value podcast 2.0, shows come out or shows come on board. People promoting, hey. You can support this podcast as I will at the end of this show by doing what? By streaming sats, by sending boost, by becoming a part of this ecosystem still man, providing value for value instead of sitting like a dumb sheep and listening to a bunch of ads. And I'm sorry if you find that offensive. I I really am, but I I mean it. I mean, I hate listening to ads. Let's be honest.
[00:14:56] McIntosh:
I fast forward through them whenever possible, and I find it
[00:15:01] McIntosh:
look. I'm I'll tell you about a podcast I was listening to this week, and it was
[00:15:06] McIntosh:
it was almost
[00:15:07] McIntosh:
unlistenable, and I'm not gonna mention the name of the podcast. But it's a mining industry podcast that sponsored by a miner, one of the public miners or public hosting companies, and they had on the guy who's behind drive chain and one of his pals. And they were trying to explain to us plebs, how drive chains are awesome. It's the same song and dance they've been listen they've been saying for months. And I've listened to it, and I've read it, and I've dissected it. And as a miner and as a pleb, I completely reject it. I say, I do not need this. They say, well, this is going to increase miner profitability on the one hand, and on the other hand, they say things like literally in this podcast, they said one of the guys who was a miner, it wasn't Paul. Like, Jamie was his name.
He said, well, you know, you gotta be running 50 megawatts to be profitable. I mean, that's almost word for word what he said. And, Jamie, respectfully, with any respect that's due, I would say, that's garbage. Now, if I have one miner, I have a higher chance of failure because maybe I have a hardware failure of that miner that I can't cover out of the operating cost. But let me tell you, if you're mining with one unit and you're upside down in that miner, in other words, you're mining less Bitcoin than it costs you to run that miner, then you're unprofitable. And I can be unprofitable at 50 megawatts. And at the same time, I can be profitable at one unit or ten units or a 100 units or a 1000 units. By the way, a megawatt at today's units. That's roughly 300 units.
So if I'm doing that math right, what he said was, you can't be profitable at roughly 300 times 50. How's that make you feel, plebs? Oh, and by the way, he also talked about having, not him, Paul. I I well, actually, I don't remember which. They were talking about yeah. We need to have, like, a behind closed doors meetings and not have literally said not have the plebs. Now I don't know who he meant by that, but I get very offended with crap like that gets said. Okay? It's not okay. This is an open network, and miners have to participate that in and and and and I don't mean miners. I mean public miners because that's who these people are starting they're trying to represent. And I think it's interesting that the CTO CEO.
I'm not sure. Somebody very high up in Riot, if I'm not mistaken, who is the largest miner public miner in the world
[00:18:10] McIntosh:
has come out and said this is not a good idea. So who's left, Paul? Because now you've ticked off to Plebs because, you know, we don't know what we're talking about.
[00:18:24] McIntosh:
The public miners apparently aren't getting on board, so there's nobody left. So go pound sand. Go over to Litecoin and set up your drivetrain and show us how it works because we're too stupid to understand it after you've called 14,000 people ugly names on Twitter.
[00:18:46] McIntosh:
Ridiculous. Give people the time of day. Sorry.
[00:18:56] McIntosh:
I didn't even mean to talk about that this week. I tell you, sometimes I think the best things I say are scripted. That may just be my opinion. I may have blown out half the audience right there, and that's okay because I'm allowed to have my opinion, and I have this microphone. You can fast forward. That's okay. I wouldn't even want Paul to come on the show. I can't have an honest debate with him at this point. For one thing, he's very good at talking. Maybe not very good at writing on Twitter, but he's very good at talking. He'll talk circles around you, but that doesn't mean that he's right. And I'm not gonna debate somebody like that
[00:19:34] McIntosh:
because I'll look like an idiot,
[00:19:38] McIntosh:
but I have taken the time to do the work. And I do have invested interest in what's going on.
[00:19:45] McIntosh:
And I'm not some stupid idiot. I'm actually reasonably smart. So whatever. Moving right on. Sorry.
[00:19:57] McIntosh:
I do apologize again, going back to lightning, which is what we're here to talk about. I do not know how I got off on that. So the point to this thing, the point to this report because I don't wanna make this week's episode too long. The point to this report, from what they can see, even though in some ways the network is not growing, even though Bitcoin price is down, even though Bitcoin searches are down, which are a direct indicator of interest. Lightning itself seems to be growing. Certainly, the number of transactions across lightning are growing. In the podcast 2 point o industry, we see this.
There was 7 6,600,000 transactions involving more than 2 nodes in public that showed up in August of 2022. If you have direct transactions, if my node opens up a transaction to your node, that often doesn't show up. If you have 2 private nodes over private channels, that certainly won't show up. So we know that, basically, 6a half 1000000 were logged in August 20 23. We don't know. I would actually estimate at least 25% more than that. And I'm not gonna do that math, but it's, what, 8,000,000 or so are actually occurring. So despite claims by Paul that the lightning network is dead, actually, that's, I believe, one of the things he said. Hard to keep up with all the stuff that comes from him.
It is alive and growing. By the way, back in August of 2021, there was 503,000 transactions during that month. That's actually oh, it's exactly 2 years. They're going from August to August. So that's where they get the 1212% growth. That doesn't mean that, there's 1212% more Bitcoin locked up into those notes. And by the way, there's things that I'm not really happy about lightning. I think it still got a ways to go.
[00:22:08] McIntosh:
We do see a clear divergence. There's a chart here between the on daily lightning transactions on and daily on chain transactions. So if you compare the transactions they're occurring on the main net. It is, roughly, I said that 4.4 per transactions per second. Lightning is now 2.5, but the lightning is growing at a faster rate.
[00:22:36] McIntosh:
I would argue that within the next two years that it will exceed that. So probably during the height of the next bull run, let's say August, not August, Q4 2025, when Bitcoin's going to be at an all time high, as I've said, and I'll still stand by that until proven otherwise. That's what the data has shown historically. It doesn't mean it can be different. It can be, but until proven otherwise, that's what I'm going by. I I will say that lightning will probably exceed the main chain transactions. We'll have more transactions per second occurring over lightning, and that is the way that it should be. Now we know that, for exam, Coinbase, for example, hasn't even gone lightning yet. They've announced that they're going to.
That'll be a big thing. They talked about how gaming has grown a lot. They've talked about all of these use cases have been growing, and and they will continue to grow, in my opinion, for quite a while. By the way, the volume the actual volume in in Bitcoin. In other words, the total, like, amount worth has grown as well. I'm trying to figure this out. The volume in US dollars, volume okay. So it grew from 303 Bitcoin back in August of 2021 to right now in August of 2023, almost 30,02950. So that's an 874% growth. So not as big as 1200%, right, but still quite significant, quite, quite significant. And, again, this doesn't include all the private payments.
The payment size has grown. 25% is 1 to 10 sets, so that's kind of the gaming and streaming stuff, podcasting 2 point o. Another 25% between 10 and 1,000 sats. Maybe a tip? Probably a tip. A 1,000 sets is only, what? Well, it's less than a dollar. It's like, 30¢, so not many purchases would be at that range. From 10,000 and upward, a lot of commerce remittance and node rebalancing, actually. So lightning is definitely solving a need. I think we can certainly draw that. Right? So they got some data here. The US is actually leading lightning usage, followed by my Myanmar.
Interesting. Burma, Southeast Asia, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Nigeria, Canada, Iran. So so far, I see 1 African country, Nigeria. I would have actually thought that in places interesting. I woulda thought that in places like Nigeria, Kenya, you know, these African countries, South America, these places that the lightning usage would have been a lot higher. That is very interesting. Alright. The number of nodes has grown from roughly 7,000 up to, right now, about 17,000. However, I'm sure they well, they do point this out. It very much reached a plateau. In fact, it peaked in 2022, and it's now dropped.
This is a little concerning to me. Okay? I would love to see more lightning notes, not less. I would love to see more plebs running lightning notes, not less. And the number of channels has followed that same course. It peaked back in 2022.
[00:26:41] McIntosh:
It's gone down
[00:26:43] McIntosh:
about 11%, it said. The capacity has followed route as well, actually, the total Bitcoin capacity. So it does look like for now, we've basically reached a plateau, and I think that very much would pattern along with the bear market. We will see as the market starts taking off, this will go up more. Alright. I think that's pretty much it. It's a lot of good stuff. Even though they don't give a lot of emphasis to the podcasting 2.0, stuff, I see this as a very valuable part of the ecosystem, especially as music starts to come along, as we can stream music to, value for value music creators as we can boost in this kind of thing. So I think you'll see a lot of growth there over the next few years as well.
I'll add my own notes here. I I do believe that lightning in general
[00:27:50] McIntosh:
for a custodial a noncustodial setup needs to improve.
[00:27:56] McIntosh:
Being able to run your own node or being able to somehow, manage your own hot wallet, that kind of thing. That's noncustodial. It's very important. The experience is not there yet. It is still difficult to run a note. It has improved, keeping channels. A lot of I talked about splicing recently, keeping channels open, balancing those channels, that type of thing. There needs to be more improvement, and there will be. We're so young. I think it's only been 5 years, that lightning has been around, and we're so young. We're so new to this. I don't wanna be too hard. A lot of people are there. Like, oh, we're not there yet. Blah blah blah. Lightning is dead. I'm like, yeah. You don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, not true.
We we've plateaued as I just talked about, but we are in the middle of a bear market. And the plateau is a very high
[00:28:56] McIntosh:
amount over the two years ago. So there you go. Alright.
[00:29:04] McIntosh:
Let's talk about our supporters. Let's move on so that we can wrap this hop a up before it gets too late. I've been going on for 30 minutes. Thanks to my
[00:29:14] McIntosh:
rant about Paul. Sorry. I just I had to get that off my chest.
[00:29:20] McIntosh:
He'll never listen to this podcast. I don't care. I'm not gonna debate him. Its just stuff like that just, it just rubs me the wrong way.
[00:29:30] McIntosh:
Really? Yep, we did get some support this week. As always, I appreciate that.
[00:29:39] McIntosh:
Just to kinda run through the stats. I'm looking for 25,000 sats per episode as a target. And the way that that works out is it comes out to about $50 a month, which is roughly what it costs to host and, you know, manage the infrastructure, so to speak, for what I'm trying to do. And put aside a little bit for, frankly, things like I need to upgrade my computer. And you'll find out as we as we talk about this, of course, that's not really the case at this point. So we're not there yet, but that's where we're heading, and, and we'll get there. And I do appreciate the people who support the show directly through streams, through boost as we'll talk about here in just a second.
There are certainly other ways that you can support the show, and we'll talk about those at the end, but I've always got things that can help out. While I bring this up really, really quickly, I actually I have 2 podcasts that I deal with, one that I used to edit. The podcast is in hiatus. I don't think it'll ever come back out of hiatus, but we still host it. At Captivate along with the Generation Bitcoin podcast. I'm moving to a Castapod setup, and I actually moved that show because it made the most sense move it first earlier this week, and it went really smoothly. So I may actually before the next episode comes out, Monday, maybe, like, Sunday night. I may I may actually make that move, and will be on cast a pot, and that will open up essentially all the tags from my understanding.
Alright. So we go back to 16th. We had some streaming. This was the conversation with Diego. Appreciate that, some good streaming. I do appreciate that a lot. And then with our Eric Hersman of gridless episode, Kyrin boosted a row of ducks. He said fantastic episode with Eric. More like this, please, thank you, sir. I do appreciate that, and that is one of my goals. I am trying to figure out just to be completely candid kinda how I do this. I love doing these interviews. I think the one with Diego went very well as well. It was a great conversation about somebody who's really on the front lines of what I would call hyperinflation.
I guess, technically, it's not, but they're at a 138% or something inflation year over year. That's just nuts, and they are doing things to cope with that. I thought that was a a very good interview. I would love to get more of those, and I work on that as I can. I'm trying to do them every week. I'm not, as you can tell, but, maybe we can get there. So, I've got the technical stuff. I've got the macro stuff, and I've got the mining stuff. So I've got all these different and that does even talk about the things that I really wanna talk about, helping people who are unbanked. I mean, that's a whole different category, and I don't really talk about it a whole lot anymore.
[00:33:02] McIntosh:
What about the people in Argentina who are out in the in the sticks. And there's actually a, there's a topic well, it goes along with, we'll talk about it in the news. I apologize,
[00:33:16] McIntosh:
it's lightning related, and it relates to this very idea that I just put out, this banking the unbanked. So, Kyron did boost there. I think that might have been our only boost. We got some good streaming. So his was a row of ducks and then 5,126. So that is, of course, after the Satoshi tax, the Satoshi stream tax. So we're probably looking at, I don't know, 52.50 or so total. And that's for this episode between the last one that I put out on Sunday and now. So I do appreciate that. I always appreciate the support we get at whatever amount. Let's jump on into the news.
There's there was a bit of news, and this one thing in particular I wanted to talk about I post my news on Twitter. You can follow me at Macintosh Fintech on Twitter, and you'll kinda get it in real time. So I think this came up after the last episode, ironically. The current government in Argentina has abolished the income tax a week before the presidential elections. Their elections are, like, late this week or very early next week. I'm hoping Monday. We have some news about that, and I'll be honest. I mean, this is just dirty.
[00:34:48] McIntosh:
These full these sorry. These people think that
[00:34:54] McIntosh:
well, they're just trying to buy votes. I mean, it's very obvious. They could just turn right around and reinstate that right after the election. Now from the very latest data that I've seen today, it looks like this is not having any effect on people,
[00:35:08] McIntosh:
and I hope it doesn't.
[00:35:10] McIntosh:
And I don't know if he's the answer, Javier Millet. But I do know that the people who are in power there, it's a joke. The it's a wreck. The country's a wreck. Let's be honest. And they need something new. So maybe he's it. I don't know, and I've made that very clear. And I'm not I don't live in Argentina, so I have no dog in this hunt as they would say. So, anyways, on October 16th, I think that was Monday, that's when we got this report about Bitcoin, about BlackRock, about their spot ETF, and, like, you got this giant candle, and it's just straight up to 30,000, turn around, go right back down. But as I've said, the so it went back down to 27,000, less than 28,000, and now we're at 28,000, almost 800.
New Bitcoin hash rate. Again, that's why we're seeing the increase in difficulty, 440,000 or not a 1,000. It's it's 440
[00:36:18] McIntosh:
Exashash, I guess.
[00:36:21] McIntosh:
By the way, a few weeks ago, I mentioned, oh, so I saw this crazy number and I reported it. It had to have been a glitch in the software. It very clearly said it was, like, 500 and something or 600 and something. There's no way, that was actually realistic. So I apologize. I try not to do things like that, but I did make a mistake. And I think even when I said it, I said this doesn't make sense, but I was just that's literally what I was seeing as I was recording. So right now, we're at roughly 440 Exashash.
The US secretary treasurer. I could not resist posting this. Janet Yellen. I she's our treasury secretary, so she's in charge of the money. America can absolutely fund afford to fund another war. Now I'm not gonna get into the politics of this, but, of course, we're sending money to the Ukraine. We're sending money to Israel. They're trying to approve another 100,000,000,000. Actually, I guess they approved it. Whatever. I don't it doesn't even matter anymore. They just print the money and send it. And she's saying, yeah, we can we can do another war. Hey. What if we open up a third one? Why don't we go ahead and open up maybe three, four? I'll just stop.
Peter McCormick has posted a film actually about Argentina, 45 minutes long. To be honest, I haven't watched it yet. It looks very interesting. I have not had the time. It's been a crazy week, but it's about the very things we were talking about on the podcast last week. Junk bonds now exceed top rated triple 8, triple a, excuse me, debt for the first time in history. So that goes back to the eighties. Spiral made a great video. The whole thing about the pigeons in this video is kinda stupid, but who is Bitcoin? It gives a great 10 minute overview.
It covers so many things that people think about Bitcoin that are wrong and whatever. It's a great little introduction. You should take a look at that. Their 1st prototype of their mining ASIC circuit board. I don't have a whole lot of hope for this, but to be honest, any competition, anything new in the mining space is good. We need more than, you know, a couple of Japanese companies that make cheaper stuff not Japanese, Chinese, and then basically overpriced American stuff. I mean, that's kinda what it is. Right. You got Bitmain. You've got the Whatsminer people, which I can never remember their actual name.
Those are the Chinese companies and then and and Bitmain's the cheapest, and Bitmain's making the best equipment right now. It's inarguable unless they're just not reliable. We'll see. It's we need more competition. We need more competition, and we need things that end users can run at home, and I think that's very important. I don't need a machine that runs on 2 20 volt and sounds like a jet engine when you plug it in in my home and provides enough heat to heat my house because not that that's a terrible thing, but it's also extremely difficult to get rid of unless you, like, plummet into your heating unit, and that becomes a a really big thing. By the way, Janet Yellen, in an interview.
This is the secretary treasurer. She literally said, I don't know where the 122% number comes from the US federal debt to GDP ratio is about 98% right now. It literally came from the Saint Louis Fed, and it is a 122%, and that's our debt to GDP. I'll just leave that there. I really wish they'd find somebody else. Bank of America reported 131,000,000,000 with a b, dollars of unrealized loss on securities in q three. So this is like t bills, treasury notes.
[00:40:49] McIntosh:
In Q3 they have unrealized. Meaning, if they sold them right now, this is how much they would be down, a $131,000,000,000.
[00:41:02] McIntosh:
Alright. The bank industry in the United States at least is not on stable ground. And let's see. It is really starting to look like these spot ETFs are going to be approved. I think they have run out of steam. January 10th at this point would be the last day of approval, or outright refusal. So I will note that we will continue to monitor. I do believe, in my opinion, like I said earlier, especially if BlackRock gets approved, we're gonna immediately spike above 31,000, and then we'll see if it stays above that, Chinese property giant, Country Garden. So this is the second biggest one in China, I believe.
It's Evergrande and then Country Garden. They've missed a final deadline to pay interest on a dollar bond. So they are going to end up going into bankruptcy, I would assume. There's a Wall Street Journal article about that. I'll have that in the show note.
[00:42:09] McIntosh:
Last thing I wanted to mention. Yesterday, Lightning Labs, announced Taproot asset, which is
[00:42:22] McIntosh:
they call it a protocol for assets on Bitcoin and lightning. So then they released it and said you can put it on the main net on the not the test net.
[00:42:35] McIntosh:
What this allows is essentially stable coins on Bitcoin. And I actually think this could potentially prove to be very important. There's a lot of Bitcoin maximalists who say things like, you should only be working in Bitcoin.
[00:42:52] McIntosh:
I understand where that comes from. However,
[00:42:55] McIntosh:
I would argue, respectfully, these people have not been to places like parts of Africa or parts of South America
[00:43:06] McIntosh:
where people live on less than $2 a day, US, if you convert it to US dollars, and or Lebanon. Any a lot of these places. They cannot handle the volatility of Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin is going to go up. Well, yes. I agree with that. But if it drops 20% and that person can't buy the milk that they need to get through the week because of it, is that a good thing?
[00:43:37] McIntosh:
No lightning taproot assets allows you to issue
[00:43:45] McIntosh:
stable coins essentially on Bitcoin, on lightning specifically. So people can transact in US dollars, and that US dollar will be the same regardless of whether Bitcoin goes up or down. Is the US dollar depreciating? Is it becoming worthless? Absolutely, but at a much slower rate than, say, respectfully, the Argentine peso, which is one one of the reasons why Javier says that they want to switch to the US dollar. And as Diego pointed out, it's not pegging it to the dollar. If I understood him and recall correctly, it's actually using the US dollars. So that's why.
And I'm not in their position, and I'm not going to tell somebody, look. You've got to you save in Bitcoin. You've got to keep everything in Bitcoin. You can't keep a US dollar. You shouldn't do that bad. Bad bit you know? No. If you need to keep it in Bitcoin, if you need to keep some savings in Bitcoin and some in some version of the US dollar, then do that. And let me provide you the tools to do that over the Bitcoin lightning network so that we can do things like send money instantaneously
[00:45:06] McIntosh:
from the state of the United States to your country or vice versa for virtually nothing.
[00:45:14] McIntosh:
So these things, I think, are gonna become very important. People don't realize how much of the market, for example, USDT, the Tether token, takes up. That's based on Ethereum. Why would I be pushing somebody to Ethereum if we can have that on Bitcoin? So I wanna point that out. It's a very important release. It's something that from a bankless perspective, again, going back to what I was talking about earlier, this is something that's very interesting to me. I don't understand, to be honest, exactly how that works. How do I issue a a dollar, but we know that the underlying Bitcoin can fluctuate.
I'm looking into that. I have somewhat of an understanding, but I don't completely understand it. So maybe we talk about that down the road. Alright. I think that covers it. So we've already talked about this a little bit, so I won't harp on this too much, but Generation Bitcoin is a podcasting 2.0 podcast. We're a value for value podcast. There will never be a sponsor. Oh my goodness. I didn't even I got so sidetracked. That whole mining podcast I was listening to. They literally had to say at the front, oh, by the way, the people behind driving drive chain, the very people they were interviewing, paid us money,
[00:46:44] McIntosh:
So that didn't change your viewpoint. I'll never have a sponsor.
[00:46:50] McIntosh:
Paul could come to me and say, I will give you a $100,000, and I'll say
[00:46:54] McIntosh:
no. It will be extremely hard, but I will say no.
[00:47:00] McIntosh:
We have no advertising. You can support the podcast in three different ways, time, talent, and treasure. If you wanna support the podcast, it has a time or talent. There's stuff. There's stuff. Just send me a message. Okay? Treasure, we've already talked about. I appreciate immensely the people, those people who sit in those 5,000 sats this week. By the way, I meant to do this during support. If I continue to do this clips program, people are not taking me up on this. Please let me give you sats. If you make a clip of the 1st episode, hey. Go back and clip what I was talking about on that podcast. Do it, and I will post 500 sats to you, sir or ma'am.
On an older episode,
[00:47:44] McIntosh:
three hundred, and I'll do it right there. It'll go right into your lightning wallet. That's it. Done. I'll talk about that another time.
[00:47:52] McIntosh:
If you like the content, I would love it if you tell your friends about Generation Bitcoin podcast. It is the best way to grow this podcast. Thanks for being here. I do hope this has been helpful. I know sometimes I get a little nuts, but it's because it's so important. I'm on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at McIntosh podcast index dot social. That's it. I'm not even going through the rest. Stay humble friends. I'll talk to y'all next Monday.
Hey, Sat Stackers. Today is October 19th, and this is episode 138 of generation Bitcoin. I'm your host, Macintosh. And today's episode is about the lightning network usage. Alright. Let's get right into it. Yeah. We'll be talking about the Lightning Network today. Of course, shortly after I did episode 134, on lightning, River Financial posted a a a review, which they've done at least they did it a year ago as well, on lightning network usage. They're one of the largest nodes in the lightning network, and they're one of the people who have the best ability to kind of see what's going on. Now understand before we even dive into this report and some additional information about podcasting 2.0 stats in kind of the network that we use to support shows like mine.
A lot of the Lightning Network is private, private nodes running behind Tor, so on and so forth. And it's very difficult to really understand it all what's going on. So you'll see in this report that they talk about kind of lower bounds, And so what they're saying is it can't be any less than this, but it's certainly more. You can read that into it because there is an unknown number of nodes and and such out there that that are not being accounted for in this report. So. Anyways, we'll get all get to all that in a minute. We've had some good feedback. Bitcoin is pumping.
We'll talk about that for a minute. Our block height at time of recording, let's just go ahead and throw this out there, is 8129 fiver 3812 953. We probably need to talk about that for just a little bit. Why don't we just jump on into our market update? Man, McIntosh, if you only had a script right in front of your eyes that you could actually used to keep on track. I have I have to work really hard to to keep on track even when I do have a script, and I don't have a script. I don't have a word for word script, but I have notes in front of me. By the way, I use Trillium for that on my umbral node. I found it fairly useful. I'm slowly transferring over my notes from Evernote to Trillium.
So, anyways, market. Right now, as I record, we're at 8 28,759. That will be the official price for today. As I record here on Thursday afternoon, unfortunately, I was tied up last night with some work stuff, so I'm having to record later than normal. Sometimes duty calls, I was actually not I was not on call this week, but, I got pulled into an HBI after having to work late already on some other issues. And so, you know, it wrecked my whole night, to be honest. But because of that, I was able to get off a little bit early. So here I am recording, and I'll punch this out as quickly as I can.
I do apologize for the delay during the week. Sometimes these things are just unavoidable. Anyways, 28,759, and we're actually continuing to pump up from there. If I open up trading view. I think overall, well, what we've seen is that things were not so well. We were kind of heading down. And then, basically, I think CoinTelegraph. It was either CoinTelegraph or CoinDesk, and I do not remember which. It should be in my news, but 1 or the other of them posted inherently that, BlackRock had been approved for a spot ETF approval, and it provided in an instant, you know, less than an hour $1,000 pump. And, of course, they retracted that. It's not true. Nothing in terms of bought ETFs has been approved, but the levels have stayed up.
So, you know, we're we're moving back towards the top side of this box, if you wanna call it that. As we've discussed, we've got this box going on between 25,031,000 that's going back for months now. I do believe that when a spot ETF gets approved, we will break out of this box personally late if we're not alright. And that's my personal opinion. It's not financial advice, and I'm certainly not giving you trading advice, by the way. But I think there's a chance after that happens that it stays above 31,000. I'm not a believer that, you know, spot ETFs are gonna save Bitcoin. I don't even care whether they get approved or not. But the reality is is that they bring in Wall Street money.
They bring in people who don't want to invest in Bitcoin in any other way, but they want to invest in Bitcoin. I get all that. It will continue Bitcoin's dominance march to dominance, I I should say, as a global reserve currency at some point. So it's necessary, but I don't really care about them. I would not recommend that you buy in a spot ETF. I would recommend that you own your own Bitcoin and you put it in your own hardware wallet. Seed signer seems to be the best thing going on right now. I am going to be building one of those in the next few months. I'll be reporting on that as I do it.
And one other brief note, by the way, let's see. That clearly happened on October 16th, 16th, Monday, and it pumped all the way up to $30,000, kissed it 29, probably 29 99, and fell right back down, but it fell at a higher level. So, I mean, you very clearly can see that we've consolidated. We're building actually a flag formation, a nice flag formation. The Bollinger Bands are pinching down. We may be pressing back up towards that 30,000, 31,000 mark before the weekend. We'll see. That's certainly not financial advice, and I'm just rambling as I look at a trading view chart.
What do we say here here at Generation Bitcoin Stack Sats. Buy every day. Use the strike app
[00:07:08] McIntosh:
if you must. However you do that,
[00:07:12] McIntosh:
just do it. Just do it daily. Don't worry about the price. Don't worry about, at worst case, weekly. I would not recommend monthly. You may get left behind at some point, and that would be a terrible thing. So just keep stacking those sats. Strike is an easy way to do that. There are other options certainly at this point. Oh, by the way, to close-up the market stuff, I did wanna mention, on 16th, so just a few days ago, we had an adjustment, estimate 6.47% up in the difficulty. So things are getting harder. And, unfortunately, right now, the next one will be on the 29th, so ten days from now, and it's looking like it's going to be another 5% or so up. Now I'm hoping that comes down because, frankly, I could use some more sats in my mining setup.
It does look like we will have another upward adjustment. So what does this mean? Well, what it means is that more hash rate is coming online. As more and more hash rate comes online, there's more people competing. The blocks are getting mined faster. And, of course, as I've explained before, the difficulty adjustment essentially is designed to keep that block mining happening around every 10 minutes. Well, right now, it's not. It's happening faster than that. Our fees are still fairly high. They look like they've actually been kind of going up. Oh, well, look at their a minute ago, they were 15. Now they're 6 and 4, so priority is 6 sets per v byte.
We're still over on the mempool, 451 megabytes. So, I don't know. No idea. But, yeah, it certainly looks like more hash is being added to the network. I think what is happening as Bitcoin goes up in price, miners that have been inactive because they can't afford to run the miners we're starting to bring those online. So there you go. I think that covers that. So we will move on to our topic. So this report, it's a it's a 20 no. 45 page report.
[00:09:32] McIntosh:
I've read through it. I'm going to summarize it in part. There's a lot of interesting things in here.
[00:09:41] McIntosh:
Basically, in summary, despite a drop in Bitcoin. And despite
[00:09:49] McIntosh:
a decrease in search interest, there have been more payments
[00:09:56] McIntosh:
in the last 2 years, 2 years, 2 months since August 2021. So in the last 2 years or so, there's been an increase in lightning payments. That's the way to say it. Even though 44% price drop, 45% decrease in search interest, which by the way directly relates to the price, 1212%. Now that's not a number. And in fact, what we see is that at least for the last year or so, the amount of Bitcoin tied up in lightning, certainly on the visible network, if you wanna call it that. I'm gonna kind of differentiate between visible and invisible, Tor based.
That really hasn't changed a huge amount, not like this, but the number of payments is. And I that makes me very bullish. Show people are using the lightning network. That's the equivalent right now of 2.5 transactions per second. Bitcoin on chain is 4.4. So there you go. So we're basically halfway, no more than halfway to the amount of transactions that are occurring on the Bitcoin main chain. Now what would our fees be like if all this traffic we're on the main chain. I don't wanna think about it. Now the primary use case, and I'm gonna pick a bone here with this report. The primary use case driving transaction growth that we identified are, and we being River, gaming, social media tipping, and streaming.
Now I don't know what they mean by streaming. Maybe they mean Podcast 2.0, streaming of sats while people listen. I assume they could mean things like streaming while watching a TV show. I don't know because I've never actually heard of I've only heard of streaming outside or in the context of podcast 2 point o. Now the interesting thing is is in this report, as far as I can tell, not once do they mention podcast podcast 2 point o, who, by the way, started, what, 3 years ago. Mhmm. And we do know from the stats that, the guys over at podcast 2 point o keep that the number of sats is fairly significant going across this podcast 2 point o network. Now I don't know. Again, I think from what I understand, these are kind of lower bounds.
But over the last 90 days, $30,000 over a 100,000,000 sats, 1 Bitcoin has been transacted across value for value podcast 2.0 lightning payments.
[00:12:49] McIntosh:
Almost
[00:12:53] McIntosh:
1,000,000 transactions doing that. And the number of unique senders, if I'm reading this correctly,
[00:13:04] McIntosh:
must be well, they don't have a number for unique senders, so I'm I oh, there it is. So it's like 295.
[00:13:13] McIntosh:
It looks like 3 so the lower boundary, like, 260. There's the lowest. So let me see if I can figure this out, 169. The highest is 380, and that's, I think, on a daily basis. So between 160 and almost 400 unique senders per day. So high volume, high transactions, honestly, low number of unique senders. Now, do they have groupings there? I don't know. Is, like, all the, Albi wallets, do they show up as one sender? I do not know. I would love to see that unique senders go up personally, but the point is there is a decent quantity of traffic that if you go back far enough, we know is growing.
It's not in this chart, but if you go back in time, and they've talked about that on the podcast 2.0 show. How over the last few years, of course, this has gone up, and it will only continue to do so as more value for value podcast 2.0, shows come out or shows come on board. People promoting, hey. You can support this podcast as I will at the end of this show by doing what? By streaming sats, by sending boost, by becoming a part of this ecosystem still man, providing value for value instead of sitting like a dumb sheep and listening to a bunch of ads. And I'm sorry if you find that offensive. I I really am, but I I mean it. I mean, I hate listening to ads. Let's be honest.
[00:14:56] McIntosh:
I fast forward through them whenever possible, and I find it
[00:15:01] McIntosh:
look. I'm I'll tell you about a podcast I was listening to this week, and it was
[00:15:06] McIntosh:
it was almost
[00:15:07] McIntosh:
unlistenable, and I'm not gonna mention the name of the podcast. But it's a mining industry podcast that sponsored by a miner, one of the public miners or public hosting companies, and they had on the guy who's behind drive chain and one of his pals. And they were trying to explain to us plebs, how drive chains are awesome. It's the same song and dance they've been listen they've been saying for months. And I've listened to it, and I've read it, and I've dissected it. And as a miner and as a pleb, I completely reject it. I say, I do not need this. They say, well, this is going to increase miner profitability on the one hand, and on the other hand, they say things like literally in this podcast, they said one of the guys who was a miner, it wasn't Paul. Like, Jamie was his name.
He said, well, you know, you gotta be running 50 megawatts to be profitable. I mean, that's almost word for word what he said. And, Jamie, respectfully, with any respect that's due, I would say, that's garbage. Now, if I have one miner, I have a higher chance of failure because maybe I have a hardware failure of that miner that I can't cover out of the operating cost. But let me tell you, if you're mining with one unit and you're upside down in that miner, in other words, you're mining less Bitcoin than it costs you to run that miner, then you're unprofitable. And I can be unprofitable at 50 megawatts. And at the same time, I can be profitable at one unit or ten units or a 100 units or a 1000 units. By the way, a megawatt at today's units. That's roughly 300 units.
So if I'm doing that math right, what he said was, you can't be profitable at roughly 300 times 50. How's that make you feel, plebs? Oh, and by the way, he also talked about having, not him, Paul. I I well, actually, I don't remember which. They were talking about yeah. We need to have, like, a behind closed doors meetings and not have literally said not have the plebs. Now I don't know who he meant by that, but I get very offended with crap like that gets said. Okay? It's not okay. This is an open network, and miners have to participate that in and and and and I don't mean miners. I mean public miners because that's who these people are starting they're trying to represent. And I think it's interesting that the CTO CEO.
I'm not sure. Somebody very high up in Riot, if I'm not mistaken, who is the largest miner public miner in the world
[00:18:10] McIntosh:
has come out and said this is not a good idea. So who's left, Paul? Because now you've ticked off to Plebs because, you know, we don't know what we're talking about.
[00:18:24] McIntosh:
The public miners apparently aren't getting on board, so there's nobody left. So go pound sand. Go over to Litecoin and set up your drivetrain and show us how it works because we're too stupid to understand it after you've called 14,000 people ugly names on Twitter.
[00:18:46] McIntosh:
Ridiculous. Give people the time of day. Sorry.
[00:18:56] McIntosh:
I didn't even mean to talk about that this week. I tell you, sometimes I think the best things I say are scripted. That may just be my opinion. I may have blown out half the audience right there, and that's okay because I'm allowed to have my opinion, and I have this microphone. You can fast forward. That's okay. I wouldn't even want Paul to come on the show. I can't have an honest debate with him at this point. For one thing, he's very good at talking. Maybe not very good at writing on Twitter, but he's very good at talking. He'll talk circles around you, but that doesn't mean that he's right. And I'm not gonna debate somebody like that
[00:19:34] McIntosh:
because I'll look like an idiot,
[00:19:38] McIntosh:
but I have taken the time to do the work. And I do have invested interest in what's going on.
[00:19:45] McIntosh:
And I'm not some stupid idiot. I'm actually reasonably smart. So whatever. Moving right on. Sorry.
[00:19:57] McIntosh:
I do apologize again, going back to lightning, which is what we're here to talk about. I do not know how I got off on that. So the point to this thing, the point to this report because I don't wanna make this week's episode too long. The point to this report, from what they can see, even though in some ways the network is not growing, even though Bitcoin price is down, even though Bitcoin searches are down, which are a direct indicator of interest. Lightning itself seems to be growing. Certainly, the number of transactions across lightning are growing. In the podcast 2 point o industry, we see this.
There was 7 6,600,000 transactions involving more than 2 nodes in public that showed up in August of 2022. If you have direct transactions, if my node opens up a transaction to your node, that often doesn't show up. If you have 2 private nodes over private channels, that certainly won't show up. So we know that, basically, 6a half 1000000 were logged in August 20 23. We don't know. I would actually estimate at least 25% more than that. And I'm not gonna do that math, but it's, what, 8,000,000 or so are actually occurring. So despite claims by Paul that the lightning network is dead, actually, that's, I believe, one of the things he said. Hard to keep up with all the stuff that comes from him.
It is alive and growing. By the way, back in August of 2021, there was 503,000 transactions during that month. That's actually oh, it's exactly 2 years. They're going from August to August. So that's where they get the 1212% growth. That doesn't mean that, there's 1212% more Bitcoin locked up into those notes. And by the way, there's things that I'm not really happy about lightning. I think it still got a ways to go.
[00:22:08] McIntosh:
We do see a clear divergence. There's a chart here between the on daily lightning transactions on and daily on chain transactions. So if you compare the transactions they're occurring on the main net. It is, roughly, I said that 4.4 per transactions per second. Lightning is now 2.5, but the lightning is growing at a faster rate.
[00:22:36] McIntosh:
I would argue that within the next two years that it will exceed that. So probably during the height of the next bull run, let's say August, not August, Q4 2025, when Bitcoin's going to be at an all time high, as I've said, and I'll still stand by that until proven otherwise. That's what the data has shown historically. It doesn't mean it can be different. It can be, but until proven otherwise, that's what I'm going by. I I will say that lightning will probably exceed the main chain transactions. We'll have more transactions per second occurring over lightning, and that is the way that it should be. Now we know that, for exam, Coinbase, for example, hasn't even gone lightning yet. They've announced that they're going to.
That'll be a big thing. They talked about how gaming has grown a lot. They've talked about all of these use cases have been growing, and and they will continue to grow, in my opinion, for quite a while. By the way, the volume the actual volume in in Bitcoin. In other words, the total, like, amount worth has grown as well. I'm trying to figure this out. The volume in US dollars, volume okay. So it grew from 303 Bitcoin back in August of 2021 to right now in August of 2023, almost 30,02950. So that's an 874% growth. So not as big as 1200%, right, but still quite significant, quite, quite significant. And, again, this doesn't include all the private payments.
The payment size has grown. 25% is 1 to 10 sets, so that's kind of the gaming and streaming stuff, podcasting 2 point o. Another 25% between 10 and 1,000 sats. Maybe a tip? Probably a tip. A 1,000 sets is only, what? Well, it's less than a dollar. It's like, 30¢, so not many purchases would be at that range. From 10,000 and upward, a lot of commerce remittance and node rebalancing, actually. So lightning is definitely solving a need. I think we can certainly draw that. Right? So they got some data here. The US is actually leading lightning usage, followed by my Myanmar.
Interesting. Burma, Southeast Asia, the UK, Italy, Germany, France, Nigeria, Canada, Iran. So so far, I see 1 African country, Nigeria. I would have actually thought that in places interesting. I woulda thought that in places like Nigeria, Kenya, you know, these African countries, South America, these places that the lightning usage would have been a lot higher. That is very interesting. Alright. The number of nodes has grown from roughly 7,000 up to, right now, about 17,000. However, I'm sure they well, they do point this out. It very much reached a plateau. In fact, it peaked in 2022, and it's now dropped.
This is a little concerning to me. Okay? I would love to see more lightning notes, not less. I would love to see more plebs running lightning notes, not less. And the number of channels has followed that same course. It peaked back in 2022.
[00:26:41] McIntosh:
It's gone down
[00:26:43] McIntosh:
about 11%, it said. The capacity has followed route as well, actually, the total Bitcoin capacity. So it does look like for now, we've basically reached a plateau, and I think that very much would pattern along with the bear market. We will see as the market starts taking off, this will go up more. Alright. I think that's pretty much it. It's a lot of good stuff. Even though they don't give a lot of emphasis to the podcasting 2.0, stuff, I see this as a very valuable part of the ecosystem, especially as music starts to come along, as we can stream music to, value for value music creators as we can boost in this kind of thing. So I think you'll see a lot of growth there over the next few years as well.
I'll add my own notes here. I I do believe that lightning in general
[00:27:50] McIntosh:
for a custodial a noncustodial setup needs to improve.
[00:27:56] McIntosh:
Being able to run your own node or being able to somehow, manage your own hot wallet, that kind of thing. That's noncustodial. It's very important. The experience is not there yet. It is still difficult to run a note. It has improved, keeping channels. A lot of I talked about splicing recently, keeping channels open, balancing those channels, that type of thing. There needs to be more improvement, and there will be. We're so young. I think it's only been 5 years, that lightning has been around, and we're so young. We're so new to this. I don't wanna be too hard. A lot of people are there. Like, oh, we're not there yet. Blah blah blah. Lightning is dead. I'm like, yeah. You don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, not true.
We we've plateaued as I just talked about, but we are in the middle of a bear market. And the plateau is a very high
[00:28:56] McIntosh:
amount over the two years ago. So there you go. Alright.
[00:29:04] McIntosh:
Let's talk about our supporters. Let's move on so that we can wrap this hop a up before it gets too late. I've been going on for 30 minutes. Thanks to my
[00:29:14] McIntosh:
rant about Paul. Sorry. I just I had to get that off my chest.
[00:29:20] McIntosh:
He'll never listen to this podcast. I don't care. I'm not gonna debate him. Its just stuff like that just, it just rubs me the wrong way.
[00:29:30] McIntosh:
Really? Yep, we did get some support this week. As always, I appreciate that.
[00:29:39] McIntosh:
Just to kinda run through the stats. I'm looking for 25,000 sats per episode as a target. And the way that that works out is it comes out to about $50 a month, which is roughly what it costs to host and, you know, manage the infrastructure, so to speak, for what I'm trying to do. And put aside a little bit for, frankly, things like I need to upgrade my computer. And you'll find out as we as we talk about this, of course, that's not really the case at this point. So we're not there yet, but that's where we're heading, and, and we'll get there. And I do appreciate the people who support the show directly through streams, through boost as we'll talk about here in just a second.
There are certainly other ways that you can support the show, and we'll talk about those at the end, but I've always got things that can help out. While I bring this up really, really quickly, I actually I have 2 podcasts that I deal with, one that I used to edit. The podcast is in hiatus. I don't think it'll ever come back out of hiatus, but we still host it. At Captivate along with the Generation Bitcoin podcast. I'm moving to a Castapod setup, and I actually moved that show because it made the most sense move it first earlier this week, and it went really smoothly. So I may actually before the next episode comes out, Monday, maybe, like, Sunday night. I may I may actually make that move, and will be on cast a pot, and that will open up essentially all the tags from my understanding.
Alright. So we go back to 16th. We had some streaming. This was the conversation with Diego. Appreciate that, some good streaming. I do appreciate that a lot. And then with our Eric Hersman of gridless episode, Kyrin boosted a row of ducks. He said fantastic episode with Eric. More like this, please, thank you, sir. I do appreciate that, and that is one of my goals. I am trying to figure out just to be completely candid kinda how I do this. I love doing these interviews. I think the one with Diego went very well as well. It was a great conversation about somebody who's really on the front lines of what I would call hyperinflation.
I guess, technically, it's not, but they're at a 138% or something inflation year over year. That's just nuts, and they are doing things to cope with that. I thought that was a a very good interview. I would love to get more of those, and I work on that as I can. I'm trying to do them every week. I'm not, as you can tell, but, maybe we can get there. So, I've got the technical stuff. I've got the macro stuff, and I've got the mining stuff. So I've got all these different and that does even talk about the things that I really wanna talk about, helping people who are unbanked. I mean, that's a whole different category, and I don't really talk about it a whole lot anymore.
[00:33:02] McIntosh:
What about the people in Argentina who are out in the in the sticks. And there's actually a, there's a topic well, it goes along with, we'll talk about it in the news. I apologize,
[00:33:16] McIntosh:
it's lightning related, and it relates to this very idea that I just put out, this banking the unbanked. So, Kyron did boost there. I think that might have been our only boost. We got some good streaming. So his was a row of ducks and then 5,126. So that is, of course, after the Satoshi tax, the Satoshi stream tax. So we're probably looking at, I don't know, 52.50 or so total. And that's for this episode between the last one that I put out on Sunday and now. So I do appreciate that. I always appreciate the support we get at whatever amount. Let's jump on into the news.
There's there was a bit of news, and this one thing in particular I wanted to talk about I post my news on Twitter. You can follow me at Macintosh Fintech on Twitter, and you'll kinda get it in real time. So I think this came up after the last episode, ironically. The current government in Argentina has abolished the income tax a week before the presidential elections. Their elections are, like, late this week or very early next week. I'm hoping Monday. We have some news about that, and I'll be honest. I mean, this is just dirty.
[00:34:48] McIntosh:
These full these sorry. These people think that
[00:34:54] McIntosh:
well, they're just trying to buy votes. I mean, it's very obvious. They could just turn right around and reinstate that right after the election. Now from the very latest data that I've seen today, it looks like this is not having any effect on people,
[00:35:08] McIntosh:
and I hope it doesn't.
[00:35:10] McIntosh:
And I don't know if he's the answer, Javier Millet. But I do know that the people who are in power there, it's a joke. The it's a wreck. The country's a wreck. Let's be honest. And they need something new. So maybe he's it. I don't know, and I've made that very clear. And I'm not I don't live in Argentina, so I have no dog in this hunt as they would say. So, anyways, on October 16th, I think that was Monday, that's when we got this report about Bitcoin, about BlackRock, about their spot ETF, and, like, you got this giant candle, and it's just straight up to 30,000, turn around, go right back down. But as I've said, the so it went back down to 27,000, less than 28,000, and now we're at 28,000, almost 800.
New Bitcoin hash rate. Again, that's why we're seeing the increase in difficulty, 440,000 or not a 1,000. It's it's 440
[00:36:18] McIntosh:
Exashash, I guess.
[00:36:21] McIntosh:
By the way, a few weeks ago, I mentioned, oh, so I saw this crazy number and I reported it. It had to have been a glitch in the software. It very clearly said it was, like, 500 and something or 600 and something. There's no way, that was actually realistic. So I apologize. I try not to do things like that, but I did make a mistake. And I think even when I said it, I said this doesn't make sense, but I was just that's literally what I was seeing as I was recording. So right now, we're at roughly 440 Exashash.
The US secretary treasurer. I could not resist posting this. Janet Yellen. I she's our treasury secretary, so she's in charge of the money. America can absolutely fund afford to fund another war. Now I'm not gonna get into the politics of this, but, of course, we're sending money to the Ukraine. We're sending money to Israel. They're trying to approve another 100,000,000,000. Actually, I guess they approved it. Whatever. I don't it doesn't even matter anymore. They just print the money and send it. And she's saying, yeah, we can we can do another war. Hey. What if we open up a third one? Why don't we go ahead and open up maybe three, four? I'll just stop.
Peter McCormick has posted a film actually about Argentina, 45 minutes long. To be honest, I haven't watched it yet. It looks very interesting. I have not had the time. It's been a crazy week, but it's about the very things we were talking about on the podcast last week. Junk bonds now exceed top rated triple 8, triple a, excuse me, debt for the first time in history. So that goes back to the eighties. Spiral made a great video. The whole thing about the pigeons in this video is kinda stupid, but who is Bitcoin? It gives a great 10 minute overview.
It covers so many things that people think about Bitcoin that are wrong and whatever. It's a great little introduction. You should take a look at that. Their 1st prototype of their mining ASIC circuit board. I don't have a whole lot of hope for this, but to be honest, any competition, anything new in the mining space is good. We need more than, you know, a couple of Japanese companies that make cheaper stuff not Japanese, Chinese, and then basically overpriced American stuff. I mean, that's kinda what it is. Right. You got Bitmain. You've got the Whatsminer people, which I can never remember their actual name.
Those are the Chinese companies and then and and Bitmain's the cheapest, and Bitmain's making the best equipment right now. It's inarguable unless they're just not reliable. We'll see. It's we need more competition. We need more competition, and we need things that end users can run at home, and I think that's very important. I don't need a machine that runs on 2 20 volt and sounds like a jet engine when you plug it in in my home and provides enough heat to heat my house because not that that's a terrible thing, but it's also extremely difficult to get rid of unless you, like, plummet into your heating unit, and that becomes a a really big thing. By the way, Janet Yellen, in an interview.
This is the secretary treasurer. She literally said, I don't know where the 122% number comes from the US federal debt to GDP ratio is about 98% right now. It literally came from the Saint Louis Fed, and it is a 122%, and that's our debt to GDP. I'll just leave that there. I really wish they'd find somebody else. Bank of America reported 131,000,000,000 with a b, dollars of unrealized loss on securities in q three. So this is like t bills, treasury notes.
[00:40:49] McIntosh:
In Q3 they have unrealized. Meaning, if they sold them right now, this is how much they would be down, a $131,000,000,000.
[00:41:02] McIntosh:
Alright. The bank industry in the United States at least is not on stable ground. And let's see. It is really starting to look like these spot ETFs are going to be approved. I think they have run out of steam. January 10th at this point would be the last day of approval, or outright refusal. So I will note that we will continue to monitor. I do believe, in my opinion, like I said earlier, especially if BlackRock gets approved, we're gonna immediately spike above 31,000, and then we'll see if it stays above that, Chinese property giant, Country Garden. So this is the second biggest one in China, I believe.
It's Evergrande and then Country Garden. They've missed a final deadline to pay interest on a dollar bond. So they are going to end up going into bankruptcy, I would assume. There's a Wall Street Journal article about that. I'll have that in the show note.
[00:42:09] McIntosh:
Last thing I wanted to mention. Yesterday, Lightning Labs, announced Taproot asset, which is
[00:42:22] McIntosh:
they call it a protocol for assets on Bitcoin and lightning. So then they released it and said you can put it on the main net on the not the test net.
[00:42:35] McIntosh:
What this allows is essentially stable coins on Bitcoin. And I actually think this could potentially prove to be very important. There's a lot of Bitcoin maximalists who say things like, you should only be working in Bitcoin.
[00:42:52] McIntosh:
I understand where that comes from. However,
[00:42:55] McIntosh:
I would argue, respectfully, these people have not been to places like parts of Africa or parts of South America
[00:43:06] McIntosh:
where people live on less than $2 a day, US, if you convert it to US dollars, and or Lebanon. Any a lot of these places. They cannot handle the volatility of Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin is going to go up. Well, yes. I agree with that. But if it drops 20% and that person can't buy the milk that they need to get through the week because of it, is that a good thing?
[00:43:37] McIntosh:
No lightning taproot assets allows you to issue
[00:43:45] McIntosh:
stable coins essentially on Bitcoin, on lightning specifically. So people can transact in US dollars, and that US dollar will be the same regardless of whether Bitcoin goes up or down. Is the US dollar depreciating? Is it becoming worthless? Absolutely, but at a much slower rate than, say, respectfully, the Argentine peso, which is one one of the reasons why Javier says that they want to switch to the US dollar. And as Diego pointed out, it's not pegging it to the dollar. If I understood him and recall correctly, it's actually using the US dollars. So that's why.
And I'm not in their position, and I'm not going to tell somebody, look. You've got to you save in Bitcoin. You've got to keep everything in Bitcoin. You can't keep a US dollar. You shouldn't do that bad. Bad bit you know? No. If you need to keep it in Bitcoin, if you need to keep some savings in Bitcoin and some in some version of the US dollar, then do that. And let me provide you the tools to do that over the Bitcoin lightning network so that we can do things like send money instantaneously
[00:45:06] McIntosh:
from the state of the United States to your country or vice versa for virtually nothing.
[00:45:14] McIntosh:
So these things, I think, are gonna become very important. People don't realize how much of the market, for example, USDT, the Tether token, takes up. That's based on Ethereum. Why would I be pushing somebody to Ethereum if we can have that on Bitcoin? So I wanna point that out. It's a very important release. It's something that from a bankless perspective, again, going back to what I was talking about earlier, this is something that's very interesting to me. I don't understand, to be honest, exactly how that works. How do I issue a a dollar, but we know that the underlying Bitcoin can fluctuate.
I'm looking into that. I have somewhat of an understanding, but I don't completely understand it. So maybe we talk about that down the road. Alright. I think that covers it. So we've already talked about this a little bit, so I won't harp on this too much, but Generation Bitcoin is a podcasting 2.0 podcast. We're a value for value podcast. There will never be a sponsor. Oh my goodness. I didn't even I got so sidetracked. That whole mining podcast I was listening to. They literally had to say at the front, oh, by the way, the people behind driving drive chain, the very people they were interviewing, paid us money,
[00:46:44] McIntosh:
So that didn't change your viewpoint. I'll never have a sponsor.
[00:46:50] McIntosh:
Paul could come to me and say, I will give you a $100,000, and I'll say
[00:46:54] McIntosh:
no. It will be extremely hard, but I will say no.
[00:47:00] McIntosh:
We have no advertising. You can support the podcast in three different ways, time, talent, and treasure. If you wanna support the podcast, it has a time or talent. There's stuff. There's stuff. Just send me a message. Okay? Treasure, we've already talked about. I appreciate immensely the people, those people who sit in those 5,000 sats this week. By the way, I meant to do this during support. If I continue to do this clips program, people are not taking me up on this. Please let me give you sats. If you make a clip of the 1st episode, hey. Go back and clip what I was talking about on that podcast. Do it, and I will post 500 sats to you, sir or ma'am.
On an older episode,
[00:47:44] McIntosh:
three hundred, and I'll do it right there. It'll go right into your lightning wallet. That's it. Done. I'll talk about that another time.
[00:47:52] McIntosh:
If you like the content, I would love it if you tell your friends about Generation Bitcoin podcast. It is the best way to grow this podcast. Thanks for being here. I do hope this has been helpful. I know sometimes I get a little nuts, but it's because it's so important. I'm on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at McIntosh podcast index dot social. That's it. I'm not even going through the rest. Stay humble friends. I'll talk to y'all next Monday.
Introduction
Updates on Bitcoin's market performance and block height
Summary and analysis of a report on Lightning Network usage
Discussion on the growth and potential of the Lightning Network
Appreciation for supporters and discussion on the importance of value for value podcasting
Updates on recent news
