Today we talk about the US Treasury and their desire (and proposal) to regulate cryptocurrencies. Also, this episode marks the last episode of Generation Bitcoin and I reveal the new name of the podcast as we move forward into 2024. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!
BTC price at weekly close: $37,739
Block height at time of recording: 819,165
News and Links
https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2023/11/treasury-presses-congress-for-new-power-in-crypto-crackdown-00128907
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/11/29/us-treasury-campaigning-for-amplified-powers-to-chase-crypto-overseas/
https://d-central.tech/braiins-pools-transition-to-fpps-a-new-chapter-in-bitcoin-mining/
https://www.theblock.co/post/265120/jack-dorsey-seed-round-decentralized-bitcoin-mining-pool-ocean
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
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
I can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @[email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Sats Stackers. This is the last episode of Generation Bitcoin, episode one forty eight. This is your host, Macintosh. So let's get to it. Alright. So this is gonna be a little bit different, for a couple of reasons. First of all, this is the last episode Generation Bitcoin. In just a few minutes, I'll tell what the name of the new podcast will be when it comes out in January. We've discussed this a lot, so I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on it, but I will be announcing that very shortly. I had something happen yesterday, and it's thrown me for a loop, which is probably why my intro was off.
I use Umbrel. I've used the Umbrel for a while, for a fair amount for, I don't know, probably at least a year. And last night, I had a partition die, specifically. I actually think I had a a hard drive itself die, and it looks like it's unrecoverable. And your lovable host here did not do his due diligence even though he knew better and he didn't have backups. So, the worst thing I lost was probably a 100,000, sats, on a lightning node that he had set up, but I also just realized Trillium notes were on there as well in the long run. That may actually prove more painful. So I literally have no notes for this.
So if I don't get things correct, I wanna blame it on that, and we'll move on. So this is going to be a fairly short episode. This will be the last episode until the start of next year when I will be kicking off Satoshi's Plebs podcast. I have registered, Satoshis dash plebs, plebs plural, and Satoshi, like, it's Satoshi's possessive, so it's satoshi s Dash Clubs. So that's what we're going to do, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a name. I have dozens, well, at least a dozen different domain names that I could have registered. But I'm I'm very pleased with this, and there's a reason why.
Of course, Satoshi Satoshi Nakamoto who was the pseudononymous, creator of Bitcoin, the founder, the the person who led the project until he disappeared a few years in, said that he was leaving and that was it. Kind of this apocryphal story almost at this point. So I'm very disappointed about my I'm very disappointed about my Trillium. I'm actually more disappointed about that than than the 100,000 sats. Although, in the long run, I may regret the sats. They should be returned to the main chain. That's the way that lightning works when things get forced closed. Satoshi's Plebs. Yes. Satoshis-plebs.com.
It is not up as I make this podcast, and this will be put out later today, but it will be up before January 1st. I will get something going, on there. I will move this podcast over to, CastOS, my CastOS setup, from Captivate. And so there we go. Yeah. So looking forward to that, looking forward to the new podcast. I have always been, as you know, about plebs, about the common person, if you wanna call it that. To me, brick Bitcoin is free to money that that absolutely can help clubs. People like in Argentina, where they have 144% inflation, currently, and, you know, that punishes the people who live out in the countryside, so to speak, who aren't technocrats, who don't, you know, they don't, have a whole lot of Internet knowledge in this kind of thing. They can't buy you you they can't trade for US dollars to keep some value when their currency continues to devaluate.
Bitcoin is freedom money in the sense to them that even though Bitcoin is volatile, I promise you it's less volatile than the Argentine Peso right now or the Turkish lyra or the, Lebanon, currency. I don't know what it is. Or probably a few other places around the world right now. And there's so many other ways that Bitcoin helps the common person, the pleb. Does it help, you know, is it going to help BlackRock, when their ETF gets approved, absolutely, those people are not plebs, but it will help the plebs. It'll help the people who don't have banking services. Otherwise, the unbanked. There's so many people in the world who do not have banks, and Bitcoin is literally a way to solve that problem. Alright.
Block height, that time of recording. Let me do this real quick. Gonna go to mempool.space. Actually, I want to go to time chain calendar. We'll go there real quick, and we'll take a look at the markets. We're at 819-165. That's 819,165. We are now officially 90% of the way to the next halvening, which will occur in late April. Our previous adjustment happened just a few days ago. I think I may have actually said this last time, but it was 5.07%. Right now, we are actually looking at a downward adjustment, 3.69%. That would happen on December 2nd, and, that is because all of a sudden, for whatever reason, block times are now 10 minutes and 23 seconds on average.
So the difficulty is set to adjust downward to account for that. And right now, actually, you know, fees are okay. Priority is 36. Anytime is 22 sets per v byte, so that's actually much better than it has been. We are still at 1.3 gigabytes of mempool. So a lot of transactions out there. Alright. The last block that was mined was 6.619 seven in total subsidy plus fees, and that went, unfortunately, to Ant Poole instead of my beloved brains. Brains, made a big announcement actually yesterday. There was a few mining announcements this week, but they are moving to a different form of reward structure. I think they call it FPP or F p p p, something like that. Here it is. Actually, there's their announcement coming in December.
And what that means, FPPs, actually. I'll probably break this down a little bit more maybe in, well, we'll see. Maybe not. But rather than getting a reward whenever a block is mined, that's the oldest way of doing this. And, brains is one of the few mining pools left that still does that. They're going to move to this system where essentially they calculate, oh, this is what your reward in average would be in every day, every block, I guess. I'm not exactly sure, but you get that fixed amount. It will make it. I it must be every block. Otherwise, when you lose a miner, you can't it that that's what makes sense. It would be every block. Yeah.
You get a fixed amount per your hash rate. So If I have a set number of miners that are all online and all hashing, I would know how much am I going to get today, tomorrow. It makes it more predictable. So a lot of people like it. I don't know. Yeah. I tell you, it is a little annoying when you go for a day or 2. As, again, we had 2 days ago, we went without a block, you know, without getting a a a block. I know overall this is not really gonna change things, but, but it will make it easier for to do calculations if I'm looking to, project cost, this kind of thing. So I will look forward to it from that. There was a couple of other announcements. There was a new mining pool that was, being started up called Ocean. Got a lot of hype. You got Jack, Dorsey from, ex Twitter guy, behind it through some money. Apparently, they got, like, $6,000,000 to start up this mining pool, which just boggles my mind.
Supposedly, they're so they're gonna be using Stratum v 2, which braiins does as well. Braiins supports Stratum. Now, apparently, they're enabling features, that nobody else does. So Stratum is fairly new. Stratum v2, I should say. And, you know, it's it's getting rolled out. So they're really trying to kind of do everything all at once. They've gotten some backlash. I'm gonna reserve any kind of judgment because they just made an announcement a couple of days ago. Luke Dash junior is one of the people behind it who is a very old Bitcoin person. I he got in in the early days. I don't know exactly when. I don't mean age. He's younger than I am, I'm sure quite sure, but he's been around for a long time. So, anyways, he is involved, you know, some fairly prominent people.
And, again, they've already had, some kind of pushback. I'm not even gonna get into today because at this point, it's kind of, gossip and whatever. Water cooler talk. I I don't typically engage in that. I I do wanna give, especially somebody new like this, kind of the benefit of the doubt. We'll see. But that was a new deal coming out, so, a little more money news there. Let's take a look at the market, though. We're holding steady. Our price right now, 37,739. We have not actually fluctuated very much on Tuesday. And then again on Wednesday, we went up and we touched, you know, 38,000, went a little bit above it both days.
Today, we have, actually, I guess we did. That must have been late last night. We went right above 38,000, but we've we've definitely being helmed in by this next line of resistance. And it looks to me like it's going to do exactly what I was projecting where it's gonna kinda crawl sideways, and then it will be forced either to go go up and break out of this upward channel or it will go down and and fall out of it, so to speak. And then If that's the case, it could go down a bit. I should not do this. I was thinking about this earlier today, but I'm going to. Since I'm going to be off for the entire month of December, I'm going to go ahead and project out, and I shouldn't do this. Of course, this is not absolutely trading advice. What we always talk about here, Generation Bitcoin is, you know, DCA. Dollar cost average, you should be buying using something like strike or, you know, ideally, in some non KYC manner. I I get how difficult that is. We're gonna be talking about that kind of stuff more, with Satoshi's plebs. Of course, I've already discussed that a bit.
Privacy is becoming a huge thing, and we need to be very aware of what's going on. So, anyways, however you do that, you should be doing that. Don't be trading. Don't it's gambling. I mean, it's, Well, maybe it's more than gambling, but, yeah, it's for most people, it's gambling. And and really, that's the way a lot of them they, oh, this token's gonna go to the moon. They throw money at it, and then maybe it does very briefly, but then they don't take their money out and it bust and they lose all their money. That happens a lot. Or people are telling, hey. Bitcoin's going to $100,000.
I've people have already been saying by the end of the year, is going to $100,000. Now that was a month ago since we're only at $37,747. Maybe they've withdrawn that. I don't know. Or 200 k by conference day or or whatever, and then you, you know, you kinda ape in. You throw your money in and you lose it. So, anyways, I do this because I find these patterns interesting. I do think in general terms, they certainly give a pretty good idea. I would say just looking at this upward channel, which we've now been in for a month.
Yes, over a month. Actually, we early October 24th, not early October, but October 24th is when we entered this upward channel, and it has played out perfectly. I do believe we are going to be at 40 k before the end of the year. Now, again, not trading advice. Don't do not cut this out if we do not reach 40 k and say, well, he said so. I'm just I'm just sitting here at the water cooler, man. That's all I'm doing. Okay? But given the upward channel, given the predictability that most likely it's going to go up, given that we're already above of and established a fairly strong support level at 375.
If we can make it above this 38 2 or so level, which we're now testing, you know, I think we will we will head on up to 40 at that point. I think we'll touch 40 before the end of the year, if not go higher. I got my next line of resistance at 40000201. It may not make it above that, but we'll see. If we have a strong breakout of this, ascending channel, we could. And then, you know, we'd Be off to the races for a couple of 1,000 anyways up to about 42,000. So I'm pretty positive about the rest of this year. In I'll be honest. I'm pretty positive all the way up till, and then on into the later part of the year. I'm sure there will be dips.
Absolutely, we may pull back to 35,000. I'll just be honest. We could I could see it. I could see us falling out of this ascending channel, going down, hitting 35,000 or something like that, and then shooting right back up. There is so much positivity in this market now in terms money's not moving. And by money, I mean, Bitcoin. People are not moving their Bitcoin up to exchanges to sell. Over 70% have held for, what was it? I said it a couple weeks ago. Like, 2 years or so. Alright. So there's my prediction. There's my end of year prediction. We'll see. 40 k by the end of the year. Will I get back on before the end of the year? No. Not even if there's a Bitcoin ETF, and there could be 1 approved by them. I'm not going to do it. I will restrain myself. I've already prepped everybody on all of this stuff. You know?
If BlackRock gets approved. Yes. The price is gonna shoot up. In fact, it would smash 40 k. There's no doubt about that. It would I don't know where it would stop. It might go up to 60. I could definitely see that. It might go higher even within a just a couple of months. I don't know. We will see. We could have some very bad news. So we'll jump into today's topic at this point. There were some more attempts, the beginnings of attempts at regulation, here in the United States. And I wanted to point this out way back January, December last year now, I was talking about how 2023 is going to be the year of regulation, and, it has proven to be certainly.
I have a feeling that that regulation will continue. I believe we have multiple years of this left before the governmental bodies of the world, really, not just United States or whomever, forms frameworks that Bitcoin can operate in. And until that's done, until we get reasonableness in the way that Bitcoin is treated, we need to continue to be very aware of these, and we need to continue to push back when necessary. And I believe that this is another case where a pushback needs to happen. So without further ado, the treasury, on 11/28, so just 2 days ago, has gone to congress, writing congress, and, saying, We want new power over crypto.
In general, they're not talking about Bitcoin specifically, but this will, I assure you, fall under, Bitcoin will fall under this act. So their argument is they're trying to crack down on illicit activity in crypto. Now this is an age old argument. It gets refuted over and over again. Criminals use, by and large cash. So I guess if we really wanna get rid of criminals, money laundering of all the things that go along with that, then, you know, we should get rid of cash. So here's what they're saying. Treasury is asking congress to grant new power to go after crypto and fintech platforms, used by militant organizations like Hamas according to documents attained by Politico.
Of political as a website here in the United States. Obviously, very politically oriented as terrorists, transnational criminals, and rogue states turns to sorry. That was sound effects by Macintosh. Turns to digital assets to finance their activities. We need to build an enforcement regime that is capable of preventing This activity, deputy treasurer secretary Wally Adeamo wrote in a letter to senate banking chair, Sherrod Brown, Democrat, Ohio, House Financial Services chair, Patrick McHenry, Republican from North Carolina, and ranking members, senator Tom Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina, and representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California.
So there's, a lot more than just this letter. There was a lot here. And they make it very broad. They do that on purpose. It's a power grab. Why the treasury would have, of the United States, the people who manage the money, would have any input into Fintech platforms and crypto at this point. I don't understand. I don't. Now maybe I'm being naive, but they're looking, to categorize, financial institutions that are involved in crypto under the Bank secrecy act? Oh, okay. You can't send $10,000 from me to you, from swan Bitcoin to unchained because that's gonna fall under the BSA.
That's just one example. The authority to sanction notes and chains. I don't know what they mean by notes. Now how they're gonna sanction Bitcoin, I don't know how that's gonna work out because, Bitcoin isn't a security. Bitcoin doesn't have a foundation. Bitcoin doesn't have a CEO, CTO, CFO, or any of those other c letters. Bitcoin doesn't employ anyone, so go ahead and sanction Bitcoin and watch us care. Tools to sever crypto operations from the US. I actually think that's what we see in a case like Binance going on right down where, you know, clearly, they think that there was a lot of malfeasance going on, with Binance. So they basically kicked them out of the country, gave them a huge fine on the way out the door. And I guess, from what I'm understanding, literally putting the CEO of Binance in jail for, like, 6 months. Federal penitentiary, I'm sure. So he'll probably have a nice cushy little place there to do some quiet contemplation along with his, what, $150,000,000 fine, which is chump change for him, frankly, not to be dis well, I guess that is being dismissive, but still, I don't know. I mean, I I don't know.
I think they were trying to make an example of them, and This would give the treasury department the tools to sever those, operations. So, In this case, of course, it went through our justice department, as it probably should have. I do not know if all the information will come out about what they found. I do know that there were some leaks of, you know, like, Slack channel messaging or whatever it was that they used, and it was not good stuff. They were definitely trying to circumvent the United States laws when they would have someone who was trying to work with them from the United States, so I don't know.
Oh, and most importantly, maybe direct authority overall USD Stablecoins. So I cannot go out as Joe Bitcoin, for example, and make a Stablecoin based on lightning, with the what is it called? Taproot assets, I think. We can now mint essentially stable assets on that. That's something that I I have an interest in personally. I'll probably talk about that in the future, but but no. That would directly fall under the treasury. Why? Because the treasury is in charge of the United States dollar. That one, at least from their perspective, certainly makes sense. I wanted to make everyone aware of this. This is not something that we need to dismiss.
I hope it dies in congress and never gains any kind of traction, but it's definitely something that you need to be aware of. I will be including a link in the show notes to the Politico, article. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall, but I will include a link to the article. I will also try and find some other information about it to include as well. So that's it. One final thing to go off into this year. I hope that, maybe all the politicians could go home for the holidays, like starting tomorrow would be great and stay out of our business. But that's just me. McIntosh here, his opinion. Alright.
Let's, let's move on. It looks like within the hour, according to Oscar at Fountain, the new one point o beta build will be out. So I will certainly be testing things. Alright. Just came out hot off the press, but that's not what I'm looking for. Here we go. I'm gonna go ahead and do this right off of here. I'm not gonna pull up the spreadsheet. There we go. Yep. So when did that come in? November 27. I think this came in post the last episode. Today is Thursday. Yes. It did. I got a great boost. Yes. There's where I exported. I got a great boost on the 27th, so let me bring up the calendar. That was Monday.
10,000 sats sent using Podverse. Awesome. From anonymous. Too many sats in my Albie Wallet after transferring WOS, which is Wallet of Satoshi, balance over. Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you very much. I do appreciate that anonymous very, very much. And I actually meant to mention this last week. I did not. Wallet of Satoshi, which is a custodial Bitcoin wallet, has pulled out of the US market. They've been removed from the Amazon, Apple and Google Play Store, App Stores, and they say it's because of the regulation. They say they're just not even gonna deal with it essentially. Now I don't know if they were pressured to do that. There's no telling. That's their story.
If you have a wallet of Hitoshi here in the United States, you still have it. It's still there. But my suggestion would be you should probably take a hint and move your move your Bitcoin. So, again, I appreciate that. We got a boost from mere mortals. RODUX, 20222. Enjoy your break, Macintosh. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks. I appreciate that, in advance. Of course, I will not be on. But, Yes. Kyron, I do appreciate that. Merry Christmas. Happy New Years to you down there in Australia, as well. And in fact, I will go ahead and say this in case I forget it at the end because I don't have my notes. The same goes for all the listeners, of course.
I hope that you have a happy, rest of the year. And finally, we got a boost actually earlier today, 500 sat boost, anonymous. It doesn't say from whom. It doesn't say any details. Yeah. But that did come in today just a couple hours ago. So I do appreciate that. So very awesome. I appreciate that. Let's go ahead and jump on into the news. A few things. Peter Schiff, who's a well known you know, he's a gold bug, actually, he's very anti Bitcoin, which is very unfortunate. He just does not get it, which is fine, to each their own, but, he's, I would say, an Austrian. Anyways, he says that the US economy is already in recession. Through q three, GDP grew by 5.2%.
So during the Q3, our GDP grew by 5.2%, but then government spending contributed five point 5%. So without government spending, which in my mind is not part of the economy, it's just frankly, waste, essentially. So without that spending, GDP would have contracted by 0.3 percent. Government spending borrowed money doesn't reflect real economic growth. It only leads to higher inflation. So because this is Twitter, there was some context added here, and this actually does make sense. So maybe a little bit of pushback against Peter. They said this is not correct. Government spending increased by 5.5%. It did not contribute. I think he meant 5.2%.
I doubt Peter got that wrong, but either way, it's a a high number. It did not contribute 5.5% to GDP growth. That is correct. The spending grew, which is not good. It should be going down, not up. But that would not have in the exact same ratio increased the overall GDP, by the way that they calculate it. There was a tweet that I posted about the upcoming. I believe even unless price really rockets gets off. The miners are going to be hurt when the happening occurs because the the reward gets cut in half. The price does not double instantaneously from 1 block to the next. It does not. We see that, you know, over the months afterwards.
But I just don't think that some of these miners are prepared for that. I do think we're gonna see some hurt. I think we could see some consolidation, maybe some capitulation. I hope I'm wrong. I just don't think so. Real quick, Germany. Germany's residential grid operators will be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers from 2024 in order to preserve the stability of the grid. Right. Why is their grid unstable? Because they're not building and turning on nuclear power plants and they're not building natural gas facilities that they need and this kind of thing. Because, you know well, I I don't know.
Actually, I don't know. I don't understand it, but that's what it is. I've been reporting on, Germany who, by the way, is now officially in recession for over a year, and I I've it's sad. It's a beautiful country. It's a great country, and it's the economic powerhouse of the EU, and they're shooting themselves in the foot. And that's it for for the news. So I'm going to go through my ending spiel here without my notes, this may be fun, but Generation Bitcoin, soon to be the Potashiplebs podcast, is a value for value show.
You know, I completely depend on supporters like anonymous, like Kyron at Mere Mortals to, you know, to support the show in a in a direct way with treasure with you know, in value for value lingo, so to speak, there's 3 things. There's time, there's talent, there's treasure. Treasure sat streaming from a podcasting two point o app, which you can go to new podcast apps dot come and check that out. Try out the new fountain 1 point o when it comes out. Try, you know, podcast guru or whatever. There's a whole list of them there, and they will allow you to directly interact with these podcast 2 point o podcast like mine.
You'll see chapter art, you'll see, boost, all of this kind of stuff that's getting turned on, transcripts, those kind of things. So, I'm gonna be off for the next month. Essentially, I will be busy building things to make this better when I come back as Toshi's plebs. So I really appreciate everybody's support this year. Please continue to spread the news. I will do what I can in January to promote things, because the name will change. You will not have to update your streams or whatever. That should be automatic. But, looking forward to it. You all have a great rest of your year.
Have a Merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy New Year, all of that kind of stuff. I really, really appreciate it. I will talk to y'all soon. That's it.
Hey, Sats Stackers. This is the last episode of Generation Bitcoin, episode one forty eight. This is your host, Macintosh. So let's get to it. Alright. So this is gonna be a little bit different, for a couple of reasons. First of all, this is the last episode Generation Bitcoin. In just a few minutes, I'll tell what the name of the new podcast will be when it comes out in January. We've discussed this a lot, so I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on it, but I will be announcing that very shortly. I had something happen yesterday, and it's thrown me for a loop, which is probably why my intro was off.
I use Umbrel. I've used the Umbrel for a while, for a fair amount for, I don't know, probably at least a year. And last night, I had a partition die, specifically. I actually think I had a a hard drive itself die, and it looks like it's unrecoverable. And your lovable host here did not do his due diligence even though he knew better and he didn't have backups. So, the worst thing I lost was probably a 100,000, sats, on a lightning node that he had set up, but I also just realized Trillium notes were on there as well in the long run. That may actually prove more painful. So I literally have no notes for this.
So if I don't get things correct, I wanna blame it on that, and we'll move on. So this is going to be a fairly short episode. This will be the last episode until the start of next year when I will be kicking off Satoshi's Plebs podcast. I have registered, Satoshis dash plebs, plebs plural, and Satoshi, like, it's Satoshi's possessive, so it's satoshi s Dash Clubs. So that's what we're going to do, and I spent quite a bit of time trying to come up with a name. I have dozens, well, at least a dozen different domain names that I could have registered. But I'm I'm very pleased with this, and there's a reason why.
Of course, Satoshi Satoshi Nakamoto who was the pseudononymous, creator of Bitcoin, the founder, the the person who led the project until he disappeared a few years in, said that he was leaving and that was it. Kind of this apocryphal story almost at this point. So I'm very disappointed about my I'm very disappointed about my Trillium. I'm actually more disappointed about that than than the 100,000 sats. Although, in the long run, I may regret the sats. They should be returned to the main chain. That's the way that lightning works when things get forced closed. Satoshi's Plebs. Yes. Satoshis-plebs.com.
It is not up as I make this podcast, and this will be put out later today, but it will be up before January 1st. I will get something going, on there. I will move this podcast over to, CastOS, my CastOS setup, from Captivate. And so there we go. Yeah. So looking forward to that, looking forward to the new podcast. I have always been, as you know, about plebs, about the common person, if you wanna call it that. To me, brick Bitcoin is free to money that that absolutely can help clubs. People like in Argentina, where they have 144% inflation, currently, and, you know, that punishes the people who live out in the countryside, so to speak, who aren't technocrats, who don't, you know, they don't, have a whole lot of Internet knowledge in this kind of thing. They can't buy you you they can't trade for US dollars to keep some value when their currency continues to devaluate.
Bitcoin is freedom money in the sense to them that even though Bitcoin is volatile, I promise you it's less volatile than the Argentine Peso right now or the Turkish lyra or the, Lebanon, currency. I don't know what it is. Or probably a few other places around the world right now. And there's so many other ways that Bitcoin helps the common person, the pleb. Does it help, you know, is it going to help BlackRock, when their ETF gets approved, absolutely, those people are not plebs, but it will help the plebs. It'll help the people who don't have banking services. Otherwise, the unbanked. There's so many people in the world who do not have banks, and Bitcoin is literally a way to solve that problem. Alright.
Block height, that time of recording. Let me do this real quick. Gonna go to mempool.space. Actually, I want to go to time chain calendar. We'll go there real quick, and we'll take a look at the markets. We're at 819-165. That's 819,165. We are now officially 90% of the way to the next halvening, which will occur in late April. Our previous adjustment happened just a few days ago. I think I may have actually said this last time, but it was 5.07%. Right now, we are actually looking at a downward adjustment, 3.69%. That would happen on December 2nd, and, that is because all of a sudden, for whatever reason, block times are now 10 minutes and 23 seconds on average.
So the difficulty is set to adjust downward to account for that. And right now, actually, you know, fees are okay. Priority is 36. Anytime is 22 sets per v byte, so that's actually much better than it has been. We are still at 1.3 gigabytes of mempool. So a lot of transactions out there. Alright. The last block that was mined was 6.619 seven in total subsidy plus fees, and that went, unfortunately, to Ant Poole instead of my beloved brains. Brains, made a big announcement actually yesterday. There was a few mining announcements this week, but they are moving to a different form of reward structure. I think they call it FPP or F p p p, something like that. Here it is. Actually, there's their announcement coming in December.
And what that means, FPPs, actually. I'll probably break this down a little bit more maybe in, well, we'll see. Maybe not. But rather than getting a reward whenever a block is mined, that's the oldest way of doing this. And, brains is one of the few mining pools left that still does that. They're going to move to this system where essentially they calculate, oh, this is what your reward in average would be in every day, every block, I guess. I'm not exactly sure, but you get that fixed amount. It will make it. I it must be every block. Otherwise, when you lose a miner, you can't it that that's what makes sense. It would be every block. Yeah.
You get a fixed amount per your hash rate. So If I have a set number of miners that are all online and all hashing, I would know how much am I going to get today, tomorrow. It makes it more predictable. So a lot of people like it. I don't know. Yeah. I tell you, it is a little annoying when you go for a day or 2. As, again, we had 2 days ago, we went without a block, you know, without getting a a a block. I know overall this is not really gonna change things, but, but it will make it easier for to do calculations if I'm looking to, project cost, this kind of thing. So I will look forward to it from that. There was a couple of other announcements. There was a new mining pool that was, being started up called Ocean. Got a lot of hype. You got Jack, Dorsey from, ex Twitter guy, behind it through some money. Apparently, they got, like, $6,000,000 to start up this mining pool, which just boggles my mind.
Supposedly, they're so they're gonna be using Stratum v 2, which braiins does as well. Braiins supports Stratum. Now, apparently, they're enabling features, that nobody else does. So Stratum is fairly new. Stratum v2, I should say. And, you know, it's it's getting rolled out. So they're really trying to kind of do everything all at once. They've gotten some backlash. I'm gonna reserve any kind of judgment because they just made an announcement a couple of days ago. Luke Dash junior is one of the people behind it who is a very old Bitcoin person. I he got in in the early days. I don't know exactly when. I don't mean age. He's younger than I am, I'm sure quite sure, but he's been around for a long time. So, anyways, he is involved, you know, some fairly prominent people.
And, again, they've already had, some kind of pushback. I'm not even gonna get into today because at this point, it's kind of, gossip and whatever. Water cooler talk. I I don't typically engage in that. I I do wanna give, especially somebody new like this, kind of the benefit of the doubt. We'll see. But that was a new deal coming out, so, a little more money news there. Let's take a look at the market, though. We're holding steady. Our price right now, 37,739. We have not actually fluctuated very much on Tuesday. And then again on Wednesday, we went up and we touched, you know, 38,000, went a little bit above it both days.
Today, we have, actually, I guess we did. That must have been late last night. We went right above 38,000, but we've we've definitely being helmed in by this next line of resistance. And it looks to me like it's going to do exactly what I was projecting where it's gonna kinda crawl sideways, and then it will be forced either to go go up and break out of this upward channel or it will go down and and fall out of it, so to speak. And then If that's the case, it could go down a bit. I should not do this. I was thinking about this earlier today, but I'm going to. Since I'm going to be off for the entire month of December, I'm going to go ahead and project out, and I shouldn't do this. Of course, this is not absolutely trading advice. What we always talk about here, Generation Bitcoin is, you know, DCA. Dollar cost average, you should be buying using something like strike or, you know, ideally, in some non KYC manner. I I get how difficult that is. We're gonna be talking about that kind of stuff more, with Satoshi's plebs. Of course, I've already discussed that a bit.
Privacy is becoming a huge thing, and we need to be very aware of what's going on. So, anyways, however you do that, you should be doing that. Don't be trading. Don't it's gambling. I mean, it's, Well, maybe it's more than gambling, but, yeah, it's for most people, it's gambling. And and really, that's the way a lot of them they, oh, this token's gonna go to the moon. They throw money at it, and then maybe it does very briefly, but then they don't take their money out and it bust and they lose all their money. That happens a lot. Or people are telling, hey. Bitcoin's going to $100,000.
I've people have already been saying by the end of the year, is going to $100,000. Now that was a month ago since we're only at $37,747. Maybe they've withdrawn that. I don't know. Or 200 k by conference day or or whatever, and then you, you know, you kinda ape in. You throw your money in and you lose it. So, anyways, I do this because I find these patterns interesting. I do think in general terms, they certainly give a pretty good idea. I would say just looking at this upward channel, which we've now been in for a month.
Yes, over a month. Actually, we early October 24th, not early October, but October 24th is when we entered this upward channel, and it has played out perfectly. I do believe we are going to be at 40 k before the end of the year. Now, again, not trading advice. Don't do not cut this out if we do not reach 40 k and say, well, he said so. I'm just I'm just sitting here at the water cooler, man. That's all I'm doing. Okay? But given the upward channel, given the predictability that most likely it's going to go up, given that we're already above of and established a fairly strong support level at 375.
If we can make it above this 38 2 or so level, which we're now testing, you know, I think we will we will head on up to 40 at that point. I think we'll touch 40 before the end of the year, if not go higher. I got my next line of resistance at 40000201. It may not make it above that, but we'll see. If we have a strong breakout of this, ascending channel, we could. And then, you know, we'd Be off to the races for a couple of 1,000 anyways up to about 42,000. So I'm pretty positive about the rest of this year. In I'll be honest. I'm pretty positive all the way up till, and then on into the later part of the year. I'm sure there will be dips.
Absolutely, we may pull back to 35,000. I'll just be honest. We could I could see it. I could see us falling out of this ascending channel, going down, hitting 35,000 or something like that, and then shooting right back up. There is so much positivity in this market now in terms money's not moving. And by money, I mean, Bitcoin. People are not moving their Bitcoin up to exchanges to sell. Over 70% have held for, what was it? I said it a couple weeks ago. Like, 2 years or so. Alright. So there's my prediction. There's my end of year prediction. We'll see. 40 k by the end of the year. Will I get back on before the end of the year? No. Not even if there's a Bitcoin ETF, and there could be 1 approved by them. I'm not going to do it. I will restrain myself. I've already prepped everybody on all of this stuff. You know?
If BlackRock gets approved. Yes. The price is gonna shoot up. In fact, it would smash 40 k. There's no doubt about that. It would I don't know where it would stop. It might go up to 60. I could definitely see that. It might go higher even within a just a couple of months. I don't know. We will see. We could have some very bad news. So we'll jump into today's topic at this point. There were some more attempts, the beginnings of attempts at regulation, here in the United States. And I wanted to point this out way back January, December last year now, I was talking about how 2023 is going to be the year of regulation, and, it has proven to be certainly.
I have a feeling that that regulation will continue. I believe we have multiple years of this left before the governmental bodies of the world, really, not just United States or whomever, forms frameworks that Bitcoin can operate in. And until that's done, until we get reasonableness in the way that Bitcoin is treated, we need to continue to be very aware of these, and we need to continue to push back when necessary. And I believe that this is another case where a pushback needs to happen. So without further ado, the treasury, on 11/28, so just 2 days ago, has gone to congress, writing congress, and, saying, We want new power over crypto.
In general, they're not talking about Bitcoin specifically, but this will, I assure you, fall under, Bitcoin will fall under this act. So their argument is they're trying to crack down on illicit activity in crypto. Now this is an age old argument. It gets refuted over and over again. Criminals use, by and large cash. So I guess if we really wanna get rid of criminals, money laundering of all the things that go along with that, then, you know, we should get rid of cash. So here's what they're saying. Treasury is asking congress to grant new power to go after crypto and fintech platforms, used by militant organizations like Hamas according to documents attained by Politico.
Of political as a website here in the United States. Obviously, very politically oriented as terrorists, transnational criminals, and rogue states turns to sorry. That was sound effects by Macintosh. Turns to digital assets to finance their activities. We need to build an enforcement regime that is capable of preventing This activity, deputy treasurer secretary Wally Adeamo wrote in a letter to senate banking chair, Sherrod Brown, Democrat, Ohio, House Financial Services chair, Patrick McHenry, Republican from North Carolina, and ranking members, senator Tom Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina, and representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California.
So there's, a lot more than just this letter. There was a lot here. And they make it very broad. They do that on purpose. It's a power grab. Why the treasury would have, of the United States, the people who manage the money, would have any input into Fintech platforms and crypto at this point. I don't understand. I don't. Now maybe I'm being naive, but they're looking, to categorize, financial institutions that are involved in crypto under the Bank secrecy act? Oh, okay. You can't send $10,000 from me to you, from swan Bitcoin to unchained because that's gonna fall under the BSA.
That's just one example. The authority to sanction notes and chains. I don't know what they mean by notes. Now how they're gonna sanction Bitcoin, I don't know how that's gonna work out because, Bitcoin isn't a security. Bitcoin doesn't have a foundation. Bitcoin doesn't have a CEO, CTO, CFO, or any of those other c letters. Bitcoin doesn't employ anyone, so go ahead and sanction Bitcoin and watch us care. Tools to sever crypto operations from the US. I actually think that's what we see in a case like Binance going on right down where, you know, clearly, they think that there was a lot of malfeasance going on, with Binance. So they basically kicked them out of the country, gave them a huge fine on the way out the door. And I guess, from what I'm understanding, literally putting the CEO of Binance in jail for, like, 6 months. Federal penitentiary, I'm sure. So he'll probably have a nice cushy little place there to do some quiet contemplation along with his, what, $150,000,000 fine, which is chump change for him, frankly, not to be dis well, I guess that is being dismissive, but still, I don't know. I mean, I I don't know.
I think they were trying to make an example of them, and This would give the treasury department the tools to sever those, operations. So, In this case, of course, it went through our justice department, as it probably should have. I do not know if all the information will come out about what they found. I do know that there were some leaks of, you know, like, Slack channel messaging or whatever it was that they used, and it was not good stuff. They were definitely trying to circumvent the United States laws when they would have someone who was trying to work with them from the United States, so I don't know.
Oh, and most importantly, maybe direct authority overall USD Stablecoins. So I cannot go out as Joe Bitcoin, for example, and make a Stablecoin based on lightning, with the what is it called? Taproot assets, I think. We can now mint essentially stable assets on that. That's something that I I have an interest in personally. I'll probably talk about that in the future, but but no. That would directly fall under the treasury. Why? Because the treasury is in charge of the United States dollar. That one, at least from their perspective, certainly makes sense. I wanted to make everyone aware of this. This is not something that we need to dismiss.
I hope it dies in congress and never gains any kind of traction, but it's definitely something that you need to be aware of. I will be including a link in the show notes to the Politico, article. Yeah. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall, but I will include a link to the article. I will also try and find some other information about it to include as well. So that's it. One final thing to go off into this year. I hope that, maybe all the politicians could go home for the holidays, like starting tomorrow would be great and stay out of our business. But that's just me. McIntosh here, his opinion. Alright.
Let's, let's move on. It looks like within the hour, according to Oscar at Fountain, the new one point o beta build will be out. So I will certainly be testing things. Alright. Just came out hot off the press, but that's not what I'm looking for. Here we go. I'm gonna go ahead and do this right off of here. I'm not gonna pull up the spreadsheet. There we go. Yep. So when did that come in? November 27. I think this came in post the last episode. Today is Thursday. Yes. It did. I got a great boost. Yes. There's where I exported. I got a great boost on the 27th, so let me bring up the calendar. That was Monday.
10,000 sats sent using Podverse. Awesome. From anonymous. Too many sats in my Albie Wallet after transferring WOS, which is Wallet of Satoshi, balance over. Happy Thanksgiving. Thank you very much. I do appreciate that anonymous very, very much. And I actually meant to mention this last week. I did not. Wallet of Satoshi, which is a custodial Bitcoin wallet, has pulled out of the US market. They've been removed from the Amazon, Apple and Google Play Store, App Stores, and they say it's because of the regulation. They say they're just not even gonna deal with it essentially. Now I don't know if they were pressured to do that. There's no telling. That's their story.
If you have a wallet of Hitoshi here in the United States, you still have it. It's still there. But my suggestion would be you should probably take a hint and move your move your Bitcoin. So, again, I appreciate that. We got a boost from mere mortals. RODUX, 20222. Enjoy your break, Macintosh. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Thanks. I appreciate that, in advance. Of course, I will not be on. But, Yes. Kyron, I do appreciate that. Merry Christmas. Happy New Years to you down there in Australia, as well. And in fact, I will go ahead and say this in case I forget it at the end because I don't have my notes. The same goes for all the listeners, of course.
I hope that you have a happy, rest of the year. And finally, we got a boost actually earlier today, 500 sat boost, anonymous. It doesn't say from whom. It doesn't say any details. Yeah. But that did come in today just a couple hours ago. So I do appreciate that. So very awesome. I appreciate that. Let's go ahead and jump on into the news. A few things. Peter Schiff, who's a well known you know, he's a gold bug, actually, he's very anti Bitcoin, which is very unfortunate. He just does not get it, which is fine, to each their own, but, he's, I would say, an Austrian. Anyways, he says that the US economy is already in recession. Through q three, GDP grew by 5.2%.
So during the Q3, our GDP grew by 5.2%, but then government spending contributed five point 5%. So without government spending, which in my mind is not part of the economy, it's just frankly, waste, essentially. So without that spending, GDP would have contracted by 0.3 percent. Government spending borrowed money doesn't reflect real economic growth. It only leads to higher inflation. So because this is Twitter, there was some context added here, and this actually does make sense. So maybe a little bit of pushback against Peter. They said this is not correct. Government spending increased by 5.5%. It did not contribute. I think he meant 5.2%.
I doubt Peter got that wrong, but either way, it's a a high number. It did not contribute 5.5% to GDP growth. That is correct. The spending grew, which is not good. It should be going down, not up. But that would not have in the exact same ratio increased the overall GDP, by the way that they calculate it. There was a tweet that I posted about the upcoming. I believe even unless price really rockets gets off. The miners are going to be hurt when the happening occurs because the the reward gets cut in half. The price does not double instantaneously from 1 block to the next. It does not. We see that, you know, over the months afterwards.
But I just don't think that some of these miners are prepared for that. I do think we're gonna see some hurt. I think we could see some consolidation, maybe some capitulation. I hope I'm wrong. I just don't think so. Real quick, Germany. Germany's residential grid operators will be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers from 2024 in order to preserve the stability of the grid. Right. Why is their grid unstable? Because they're not building and turning on nuclear power plants and they're not building natural gas facilities that they need and this kind of thing. Because, you know well, I I don't know.
Actually, I don't know. I don't understand it, but that's what it is. I've been reporting on, Germany who, by the way, is now officially in recession for over a year, and I I've it's sad. It's a beautiful country. It's a great country, and it's the economic powerhouse of the EU, and they're shooting themselves in the foot. And that's it for for the news. So I'm going to go through my ending spiel here without my notes, this may be fun, but Generation Bitcoin, soon to be the Potashiplebs podcast, is a value for value show.
You know, I completely depend on supporters like anonymous, like Kyron at Mere Mortals to, you know, to support the show in a in a direct way with treasure with you know, in value for value lingo, so to speak, there's 3 things. There's time, there's talent, there's treasure. Treasure sat streaming from a podcasting two point o app, which you can go to new podcast apps dot come and check that out. Try out the new fountain 1 point o when it comes out. Try, you know, podcast guru or whatever. There's a whole list of them there, and they will allow you to directly interact with these podcast 2 point o podcast like mine.
You'll see chapter art, you'll see, boost, all of this kind of stuff that's getting turned on, transcripts, those kind of things. So, I'm gonna be off for the next month. Essentially, I will be busy building things to make this better when I come back as Toshi's plebs. So I really appreciate everybody's support this year. Please continue to spread the news. I will do what I can in January to promote things, because the name will change. You will not have to update your streams or whatever. That should be automatic. But, looking forward to it. You all have a great rest of your year.
Have a Merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy New Year, all of that kind of stuff. I really, really appreciate it. I will talk to y'all soon. That's it.
Announcing the end of Generation Bitcoin and the new podcast name
Losing data on Umbrel and the impact
Introducing the new podcast name: Satoshi's Plebs
Discussion on changes in mining pool reward structure
Treasury's request for new power over crypto and fintech platforms
Peter Schiff's view on the US economy and government spending
Germany's plan to restrict power flow to heat pumps and EV chargers
