Welcome to the first episode of Satoshi’s Plebs! This week, we wrap up the year with a look at what happened in 2023 as well as a look forward to what we can expect in 2024 in both Bitcoin and the finance/economy in general.
Block height at time of recording
823,771
Bitcoin Price at time of recording
$42,629
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, Pleb Nation. Today is January 1st, and this is episode 149 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode will be a year in review plus what is coming in 2024. Alright. Happy New Year. I hope everyone has had a great holiday. I did, of course, take some time off. This will be the 1st episode in 1 month. And as I posted somewhere, I think on Twitter, I did miss it, to be honest. I did. I've been doing this for two and a half years at this point, for a good portion of that time twice a week. And you get in this rhythm, and then it's like, oh, wait. The rhythm's gone. But I would say that I spent a bunch of time resting and, You know, reenergizing.
But the reality is is that, I spent a bunch of time building, and we'll be discussing that, in a few minutes, about what I've been doing for the last month. Because even though I wasn't recording, I spent a good bit of time building infrastructure For Satoshi's Plebs and laying things out, trying to figure out what I was gonna change, and not everything's in place. For example, I just played the music, same music as I've been playing for a long time. That's going to change. I have not Found new music yet. I was looking for value for value music that I could, include in the splits, and I haven't been able to do that yet, so I spent about an hour kind of poking around. I haven't really found anything. I don't know if I've ever told you all this.
I may have, but, I am very eclectic, if you wanna call it that, in my musical taste. I can basically listen to anything, outside of rap and opera. I don't like opera. I can even listen to classical music to an extent. Regardless, I haven't found anything yet. I hope before the next episode that that is taken care of. But it is New Year's Eve. It's 1:20 in the afternoon as I record. I will post this tomorrow morning, New Year's Day on our regular schedule, Monday mornings. But I did wanna take a time to, I did wanna kinda take This episode and kind of review, I'm not really gonna go over the news of the last month. There's been a bit. I will touch on it. A lot of, you know, fluff, whatever.
But, I did wanna go over kind of the year because it's it's been a long year for a lot of us, and It's always good to look back and kinda see where we came from. Some of this is, podcast specific for for this podcast. Some of it is, After we get done with that, we'll turn more towards kind of the Bitcoin world. And, so we'll just jump right on into that. So for this year, I pulled up some statistics. I recorded 57 episodes, so that's a little more than 1 per week. I did not record, 2 episodes a week all year long. Of course, I took the month of December off, so, I would like to see that be a little more towards a 100 than 57 next year, but Overall, I think pretty good.
One of the things that they said to build to build a solid listenership for your podcast is, of course, to be regular, and Tried, frankly, very hard to do that. I've not always been successful. Sometimes, especially on the Thursday episodes, work will interfere. But, we do the best we can, and we're gonna continue to try and improve on that. So 57 episodes. Our total boost in stream. So, of course, we're a value for value podcast. I strongly support what's going on with the podcasting 2 point o movement, if you wanna call it that. We kind of congregate over at the Mastodon podcast index dot social instance for our Interactions, the two kind of co leaders of that, Adam Curry, Dave.
I actually don't know Dave's Last name offhand. I should. But, anyways, they host the podcast. They put it out every week, and it's about developments In the podcasting world, we are incorporating a huge number of changes that are, In my opinion, very much improving podcast, making it better things like transcripts, chapters, the ability to stream payments to a podcast, The ability to send boost and messages, this type thing. We're talking about some very interesting things about, Cross app comments right now. Probably, it sounds like they're steering towards using the activity pub Protocol to to basically allow for that between the applications. It sounds like a a really brilliant solution.
That work is ongoing, so you can jump into that at new podcast apps.com if you would like and get a podcast two point o app. Like I mentioned, there's the podcast index dot social mastodon instance. You're welcome to join in there. And a lot of that Content is about podcasting. Not all of it, of course, because people are free to post whatever they want, but there's a lot of information there. So would love to see some of the listeners on there, interact with them. Let me know if you, jump on there. I'm McIntosh at podcastindex.social on there. So this year, we had a total boost in streams, and I did not break it down. Both are equally important. I do not know, Honestly, what the ratio is because I'm just using the data that's given to me by Satoshis stream.
And that was 343,408 sats, and that's after basically, they take 10% of that. So it would actually be more like 370 if I'm not mistaken, 375, something like that. That converts to about $145.15 at the current rate. I have not touched that money. It's still sitting in there. And to be honest, I don't really intend to. I'm a let it build up. I will eventually be putting it on a lightning node. In fact, I hope to do that very soon in the next month or so and use that as liquidity, to start routing to be able to accept my own payments so that I don't have to use to to stream. Not that they're a bad service, but I wanna do it myself. I'm kind of a DIY guy, and, I like doing it myself. Plus, that'll save me about 10%.
So always good for a or maybe it's 1%. Let's see. I don't know. I think it's 1%, actually. So my calculation I just did was all off. So I apologize, but I think you get the idea. So 57 episodes. What else did I do this year specific about this podcast? I'm not gonna talk about the topics we covered. I have a page, by the way. If you go to satoshis-pebs.com, , which is our new website, there's a link to it. It's called, like, episode library. It's right on the top. You can click on that, and then it is actually current right now. Episodes 1 through 148.
Back when we were, generation wealth through cryptocurrency and then, Generation Bitcoin. All of those episodes are listed there with the main topic. Feel free to browse through that. You can actually, Well, just feel free to browse. You can take a look at that. Those episodes are all still available in the same feed, by the way. So what did I do? I moved the podcast from Captivate, which is a podcast host, to Castapod, so I am now Self hosting it. I just did that. I started work on it about a month and a half. I actually made the flip about 2 days ago maybe. I kinda waited till there was the the least amount of traffic in case there was any issues, which there were not. It was a very easy process. Castapod itself, this is my 2nd podcast setting it up on Castapod. I Basically, edited another podcast, that my family was involved in, for a couple of years.
There was some overlap there, but, you know, couple years before this. And so we had already moved that one. I kinda learned the ropes on that. Castapod, is some it's PHP based software, and it's self hosting. So my files sit there, all the content sits there, everything. And once you kind of learn a few things, it's It's the I will say this. Well, it was not perfect. However, there was a very good Discord group, A very active Discord group that was very helpful sorting through some issues. So I would encourage people, If you're hosting a podcast or if you have your podcast in, there's 2 reasons to do this. 1, money. So I Self host on Hetz Hetzner. It's a German company, actually.
They do VPS, virtual private servers. Very nice company. I've had zero issues with them. I actually host my servers in Germany, and the reasons why I do that, that is the only place that they have, ARM chipset servers. So rather than Intel or AMD, they're actually, ARM chips, which I really like. They're a little cheaper. They're, more power efficient, but they only host those in Germany. You can if you're in the United States, you can use servers here in the United States that are Intel or, AMD chip servers. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it, but whatever.
I'm spending $3 a month now on the server that runs those, and I could have multiple podcast. In fact, so Very, very economical. I was paying $15 a month at Captivate. I have no problem with Captivate, by the way, other than the fact that they are Slow to put on podcasting 2 point o tags, but their service was always good, but it's $15 a month. So now I just save myself $12 a month and Castapod adds tags very, very frequently. Alright. So anyways, we moved from Captivate to Castapod. I'm now self hosting that. I set up a new website. I already mentioned it. Satoshisplebs.com. satoshis-plebs.com , of course, it looks very much like my old site. It will probably change over the next few months. I set Up a Bitcoin note, this is something I would encourage anyone to do.
Just just set up a Bitcoin node. Watch the transactions going through it. It's fascinating, and there are things that you can do with that. In this case, this is more for just testing and it's just gonna sit out there. I'll get to that in just a minute, but there you go. We've got a note set up. I set up hedge doc for note taking. I'm actually using that right now. This is something When I lost my Umbrel when was that back in November? I had been using one of the programs that, Umbral supplies and, trillium. That was the name of the program, and it worked fine. But I When I moved to Hetzner for all of my different services, and I counted it up. I have, like, a dozen things up there right now. Kinda crazy.
But, anyways, I decided to test out Hedgehog, and I've been pretty pleased with it. It's an online note taking service. I could actually make these notes public, so I could send anybody to the website and they could see it, or private. So most of my notes I think I have 1 public note. It's some links, and I'll add more links to there, and I'll eventually Make that available either directly on Hedgehog or on the Satoshi Plebs website, that kind of thing. It's, can be done in markdown, which I like. It's a, markup language, like XML.
It's a version of that. So very flexible. Anyways, what else? Set up a, it's an SMP server. So it's called it's basically Simple X. So if you've ever heard a Simple X, it's a it's a secure way of communicating. Now my initial thought with this, and it's open source. They make everything available, which is very important to me for something like this. They make everything available as code up on GitHub or GitLab. I'm not sure which. But I set up a server as a test kit, as a test bed, and then I ended up Setting it up for my own use. So my family will actually use this to communicate ultimately between each other rather than using, say, Facebook Messenger. We You may say Macintosh, you're being paranoid. Maybe I am.
But, I would rather control this myself. Plus, it is end to end encrypted. There's a lot of really nice things about simplex, and I really intended to do this as a chatroom For Satoshi's Plebs, unfortunately, one thing it doesn't do very well, there's two issues. It's a little laggy because of the encryption. And it doesn't really handle, like, community, like, group things. There is You can, but, basically, they say if you get above about 50 people, which maybe I don't ever reach, but In the chat room at one time, it kind of implodes. So I wanted to steer away from that. I ended up going, with an IRC server setup, which I am building now.
It's not quite done yet. Basically, on the suggestion of some people over at podcasting 2.0 that I was talking about earlier. So that's not done yet, but when that is done, it's about 75% done probably. When that's done, then that will actually be available for the plebs, to use as kind of a chat room. And one of the big reasons we'll do that is because during 2024, Not to jump ahead, but I do wanna start doing a live stream. My plan is for Sunday nights, and This will not be happening until I'm ready. So it may be several months or more, so don't get too excited. But on Sunday nights at 6 o'clock, Thursdays will be reserved for interviews that I have with people, that kind of thing. That will not be at a fixed time.
Alright. So, we'll do live on Sunday night and then Monday morning at 7 o'clock. As always, they will come out. But I wanted to have a chat room for that. That's where we were going with all that. That's where the IRC comes in. So I'm almost done with that. Set up activity pub for Satoshi's Plebs site. So there was a new plugin that came out, I think, in September for WordPress, which is what I use for Satoshi's Plebs just because I've done WordPress forever, and it's easy. But it will allow me to federate my post, which I'm pretty pumped about. So, essentially, it will look like I have a mastodon instance. And when I post on the website, which I will We'll be planning to do more during 2024.
That will go right into the feed. And then if you're into Mastodon, you can subscribe to that And see those as they get published. What else did we do? Tested out the seed signer hardware wallet. I am convinced at this point that seed signer is the best hardware wallet that's out there. Of course, I've had seed signer on the program. When he was on the program, I had not picked up 1 yet. I had already, of course, been interested in it at that point. I have thoroughly tested it out. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint, and I do intend to put this on their Discord, and it's not really something that's fixable. One thing I don't really talk about, I have a a fair amount of issues with my eyes.
I've worn glasses forever, and I actually found out not too long ago I have cataracts. Very early stage, but I have eye issues is really what it amounts to. And the screen on the seed signer is very, very tiny, and that's partially what helps keep the cost down. But it's also very hard for me to kinda work around. The screen is not terrible. I wouldn't rather have Easily, I don't know, double, triple, quadruple the size of what it is. But the QR code thing that you fill out paper, Stock paper. Extremely difficult for me. I was able to do it the second time I did it. The first time, it did not work at all.
It's just the dots are so small. It's just I don't know. Not really a complaint. It's just the reality. Maybe not ideal for for people who have vision issues, but Basically, any of I mean, the ledger one's even smaller, to be honest. I've told you all in the past. I have ledger, which I do, which I will be moving off of on the seed center, but, you know, that screen's even smaller. So there you go. That's literally my only complaint. So good good job testing that out. I enjoyed it, learned a bit, all that kind of stuff. And then the last thing, a couple of weeks ago, like, the middle of the month, I did order a new computer.
[00:18:53] McIntosh:
I've been looking into this for a long time. I've I've had the one picked out since middle of the year.
[00:19:01] McIntosh:
And, essentially, I managed to pull together the money to to get it ordered. It's a Beelink GTR 7 Pro. So what that means is I'll be moving from a Mac mini, that's about 10 years old to a computer that'll hold up to 64 gigs. It'll come with 32, and I think it's four cores. It's an AMD chip. I think it's like sixteen or maybe it's sixteen cores. I'm not quite sure, but it's a lot bigger than this one. And I think a terabyte or maybe two terabytes of hard drive. It's supposed to be here the fourth, which is, like, next Thursday. The reality is it hasn't shipped according to their Thing, I don't think it's gonna make it by then, but I'm hoping for it very soon. I will be setting NextOS Up on it is my plan. I've played around with that a little bit. It's a Linux distribution that it's pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to using it. So if I can't get that to work, which I'm not 100% sure that I'll be able to do everything I need to do on it, then I'll use Ubuntu, which is another Linux distribution that I've probably been using for 10 years or more.
So what are we gonna do in 2024? Let me run through this list really quick. Some of these are goals. I'll probably move the goals. I think some of these are set into stone at this point. I do wanna install an Electrum server. This is not something I've talked about. Maybe I'll I should take an episode to talk about this. I'll probably do it after I do which will be basically as soon as I get my computer. Electrum is basically a modified form of a Bitcoin node, and it interacts with that Bitcoin node, you have to have both. So I'm gonna set up a full Bitcoin node on my new computer. I'm gonna set up Electrum. I'll also set up reaper, which is what I use for the audio stuff, and then use that to handle, essentially, my seed signer wallet.
So I'll talk about all that after I get it set up, but that's certainly one goal. I'm going to go to the Bitcoin conference in Nashville that is in July 25 to 27. Nashville is in the southeastern part of the United States. It's a very nice city, actually. I've spent a little bit of time there. I'm looking forward to that. What I'm really looking forward to is meeting some of my my friends, some of the people that I've interviewed, some of the people like Mere Mortals and hopefully some of the listeners as well. Kyrin, better go now. I know you're not sure if you're going, but you need to go, buddy.
Anyways, really looking forward to that. I will set up a live stream this year. I don't know exact or next year. This year, by the time you get this, I don't know exactly when, like I said, but hopefully, maybe Q1. I'm also gonna be providing a video version of podcast. And this is something I've gone back and forth on, but I'm pretty solid at this point. Now that probably will be second half. It would definitely be After setting up the livestream, I wanna get that going first. Why do you say that, why a video podcast? Because I like them, frankly. A lot of people don't, but I do think there's benefit to that for things like this Electrum server that I was just talking about. It would be Very helpful to show that to the listeners, to the viewers, kind of how that works rather than just talking about it.
[00:22:39] McIntosh:
kind of how that works rather than just talking about it.
[00:22:43] McIntosh:
That would be an excellent example right there. I'm gonna host the video up on YouTube, and you may say, gosh, Macintosh, I can't believe you just said that. But for one thing, there won't be any ads. I'm not looking to monetize it on there because I do believe in value for value rather than Shoving ads in your face like what they do on YouTube, but it's free. And With the podcasting 2 point o spec, you can literally just point to that video, and it will show up as a as a source. Now I will also be keeping a set of my video. I don't trust They could take me down for any reason, and I will not self censor just to keep on video on YouTube.
So at some point, when I say something that they don't believe in and they take me down, well, then I'll just point to a new source, which would be my own host. And The thing is that's going to cost money, so I don't wanna jump right into that at this point because we're not making a whole lot. So We're not making enough to cover that is a reality, and it would immediately start coming out of my pocket. I have two goals, in terms of metrics for the podcast, I want to quadruple my listenership. I will tell y'all right now, I'm at around 1800 downloads a month.
I will be able to keep better track of that with castapod than I did with Captivate, but that's roughly what I was doing for the last four or five months. It's slowly growing. Although, of course, in December, I took a nose dive. I only had 500 downloads in December, but, but that's okay. There was no content. So I wanna quadruple that. So we're looking at, you know, roughly 8,000 downloads a month or so. I would love to do more. I think that's very realistic, especially as we come into this bull market, which is cranking up. I haven't even talked about Bitcoin In terms of that, maybe I should do that before we roll into everything else. I will. Actually, I've got it right there on my notes. I firmly believe that 2024, Bitcoin will be moving up, not down. So, anyways, that's going to most likely be steering people our way. I've also decided to go ahead and do another promotional with Fountain just to expose more people to the podcast. So I've already talked to Oscar about that, and I'm planning on do that very early, probably January of of 2024.
And that should help. We saw that last time we, of course, had a huge spike when we did it, but then more people a number of people stayed around after
[00:25:29] McIntosh:
after
[00:25:30] McIntosh:
the promotion that I did a long time ago now at this point. And then the other thing is, and I've mentioned this as a goal in the past, but for 2024, I really do want to have a goal of about 200,000 sats per month of support. That's about $50. It's probably a little more now, but it's about $50 a month. That's 50,000 sats a week. That's 25,000
[00:25:55] McIntosh:
sats an episode if I'm doing two episodes a week. And that is support that's coming from the listeners with value for value as we talk about. So
[00:26:05] McIntosh:
what that means is that essentially stuff that I'm doing out of pocket, I don't so much have to worry about that anymore if I choose to pull that money out. Now I told you I'm putting it into liquidity for a lightning note. But if I'm making, you know, 200,000 sats a month, I will probably start pulling out some of that. And there's other things now that I've got my computer on the way. Of course, I want a new microphone. Oh, you know? Actually, my my next 2 big things would be, I need to get a mixer board. I think I need to do that to do live. I may be mistaken. It certainly would make it easier.
I wanna get a Rodecaster Pro 2, and then I do wanna upgrade my mic. My mic is old. Not that it's well, old isn't really a big deal, but it's pretty low quality. I think I could do a lot better, and it would sound better. So there we go. That's my goals for 2024. Let's talk about Bitcoin for just a second. It had an interesting year. January 1, 2023, it closed at $16,125.10. Do you even remember that? I do. I was stacking sats. I also encouraged you to do the same thing. I hope you did because those sats have now almost tripled in value. December 31, today 2023, Time of recording, which is now 149 in the afternoon, CST, US.
We are at 42,639. I will jot that down right now. So like I said, we have almost tripled in value during the year. Basically, we've seen a steady increase across the year. It's been kind of crazy where we go up and then we level off for a little bit, and then we go up. I I didn't bring up trading view, which I have right here, but, I mean, really, that's kind of what it's been. We we did go sideways. Okay. So here we go. Let's just go ahead, See how Macintosh did. Yep. There's 2023 right there. So we went from basically the bottom in 22 in January 1 right there, all the way up to April 11, we hit 31,000.
We did go sideways, basically, between April and when we have that breakout, October 23. So that was kind of our grind, and you guys remember that. It hasn't been that long, but we just kinda we ground down, then back up. We were in that parallel channel for months, and then we jumped out of it when we broke free. We've gone from there up to 44700 or So and we've kinda been waiting. And what are we waiting for? In my opinion, we're waiting for these ETFs to be approved. This is the one bit of news I did wanna talk about. There's been a fair amount of Activity on that front during January or during December. It does look like those will be approved maybe as early as The next, like, let's see, Tuesday, Wednesday, so 2nd 3rd, the FCC may come out and say, you know, To all these companies or at least the majority of them, you're ready to go. You can go next week. So, like, Literally, January 7 or so, we may see those go live.
I certainly think it's going to happen in January. I'm willing to say that at this point. All signs point to that. When that happens, I do believe we'll see Bitcoin probably spike up to about $50,000. Now it may be more. I'm fairly confident we'll at least kind of touch that even if we fall back down. I actually don't have anything charted above where we're at at 448 or whatever, that last line of resistance that we hit. So I'm not willing to do anything other than say, well, $50,000 is a nice round number, which it is.
We may spike right on past that, and we'll see where we go. I do believe, I'm jumping ahead in my notes. I'm not even looking at them. Alright. We'll get to that in a minute. Hash rate. Well, no. I I'll just go ahead and make that. Yeah. No. I've got I'll talk about I've let me stop. Let me stop. Anyways, that ETF news is very important, not because we need e ETFs, and I think I've made that very clear. But what it does is, You know, we gain acceptance. This is Wall Street coming into Bitcoin land, and we will see a surge in investment. I don't have the figures in front of me, but the amount of money that it could be quite large.
So we will see how that works out. I'm very, very interested about that because In a sense, not that Bitcoin needs legitimizing, but it legitimizes Bitcoin. At least it does to Wall Street. Now Wall Street can kiss my rear end, but but that doesn't mean Bitcoin is for everybody. I'd say this over and over. And so it's it's for Wall Street too. Now
[00:31:47] McIntosh:
they can put in all their money, BlackRock and, you know,
[00:31:54] McIntosh:
Morgan Stanley, I don't know, all these different companies. They can put all their money in a custodial solution, which seems to be Coinbase for the most part, and that's fine. That's not the way that I do it, and that's not what I preach, so to speak, but that is there's nothing wrong with that for those people. So, anyways, what was I where was I at? Hash rate, January 1, 2023. We were at approximately 255,000 Exashash. So today, We're at roughly 563 Exashash. So we have more than doubled, essentially, the mining power in the last year, which is stunning.
I don't know where we go from here. Now If I'm going to make estimations, I would say,
[00:32:45] McIntosh:
we don't make,
[00:32:47] McIntosh:
whatever a 1000 Exashash is, a zetahash, think it is, next year. I believe we'll end up somewhere around 750. I think we have to slow down, but I could be wrong. I do believe after the havening, which we'll talk about in just a minute, you will see a drop in hash as servers go offline because it's no longer profitable at least for a short while, but then we'll see it ramp back up. I I am prepared to be wrong on on my estimations. We may be approaching a zeta hash or even above it by the end of next year, which would be insane. Alright.
Let's talk about what went on last year, kind of the big stories. And where were we at on this? What does it mean for 2024? Bank failures. We had 3 big bank failures. There was more, But we had 3 big bank failures here in the United States. 1st Republic. No. Let's go in order. Sorry. Silicon Valley, March 10th, failed. So Silicon Valley Bank was a bank that was used by a lot of the companies in Silicon Valley. They, like, literally companies held $1,000,000,000 for payroll, things like this. Companies like Netflix. Now I don't know if Netflix was. Very likely they were, but Maybe they weren't, but that kind of company would have their accounts. And they because of what The fed had done with interest rates driving up.
Well, because inflation went up so quickly, they drove up interest rates grew from 0 to 5% in the order of a few months. That put a lot of banks in turmoil. Silicon Valley, like I said, They were they basically went bankrupt, March 10th. March 12th, Signature Bank. That was on a Friday. Signature Bank was on a Sunday, which was very weird. The thing about signature was it was actually responsible for banking some of the exchanges, if I'm not mistaken. I think signature was forced to close, in my opinion. Now that's conspiratorial. I'll just tell you that, but I don't think they were insolvent.
I think the SEC closed them or not the SEC, Whoever's in charge of the banks to send a message. Now we've seen crypto regulation all year long, and we're about to talk about that. But, Yeah. I think this was a warning. I don't know. That's just me being conspiratorial probably. And then on May 1st, First National or First Republic Bank. So these three things kinda sent shock waves through the industry, through Finance through, you know, all of that kind of stuff. These are large banks. These were not small little mom and pop banks. There were not super banks like, you know, JPMorgan, Chase, I don't know. City, one of these very large banks, but they were certainly mid level.
And they all three within six weeks, or so, kind of, you know, they they were basically bought out for pennies on the dollar, really, by other companies, including JPMorgan. Actually, they bought First Republic. What else did we have going on? Well, 2023, it looks like, will probably bring the end to the FTX mess. So back early in the year, somewhere around that same time frame, March, April, May, I don't know. A jury convicted, Sam Bankman freed of a number of charges, wire fraud. Well, this is wire fraud and 6 other charges. So he has been cooling his heels in jail for house arrest.
Not too long after that, CZ, who was the founder of Binance agreed to plead guilty to money laundering of all things as part of a settlement between the US authorities and Binance. And just recently, he was actually denied the ability to leave the United States. So, essentially, he's trapped here. So that remains to be seen. One of the interesting things about FTX to circle back to that is just recently, it was disclosed. FTX gave, like, $100,000,000 to different politicians in the United States, primarily, but not exclusively Democrats.
That's a fact. Just throwing that out there. And he will not Sam Bankman Fried will not be charged with that. So, basically, they've come out and said, the the trial that's done, you know, he's found guilty of all that. The penalty phase has not been done yet, but he's in, you know, house arrest or jail. I don't know which. But he will spend basically the rest of his life in jail for that most likely, at least a long time. But they're not going to charge him with all of the other things. There are a number of other charges that were to be done separately, including This campaign fraud, which is what it was.
So that's interesting. One of the things that went on this year, the SEC has been cracking down on casino coins as securities. So what this means is they're going into places and like Kraken. They're saying, Kraken, You have been dealing in unregistered securities, which is what they call them because they are securities, and they're not registered as such. And I think in Kraken's case, they paid a $30,000,000 fine. Now I don't know what came out of that other than a fine, but that's just one example. Coinbase, same thing.
They've gone after Ripple. The Ripple case kind of settled. Basically, they were saying the people who bought the coins on the Changes were not guilty of anything, which is I mean, really, what are you gonna do? I think they're still trying to get to the people in charge of Ripple. So Ripple's a company. Actually, it's Ripple Labs. But, you know, Whatever. I don't know. Ripples' security, and they called it as such, at least in certain cases, which I don't know how that works, but whatever. So, anyways, the last figure I've seen, I think this is a legitimate number. I've looked at it a couple times.
There have been 68 different tokens that have been declared to be securities. So 68. Bitcoin, of course, is not among them because Coin is not a security, for a number of reasons, but and I don't think Ethereum is listed at this point. Now I think the SEC is Setting Ethereum aside. In my opinion, Ethereum very much is a security, probably more so than The vast majority of those stupid tokens, but they're they're setting them aside for, you know, whatever. To make a example of maybe in the next few years. We'll see. But it well, I'm not gonna go down the Ethereum rabbit hole. It doesn't Matter we don't talk about Ethereum here. But funny things are going on over there. They are becoming they are realizing I will say this. They are realizing they have to now that they moved to proof of stake. They're going to end up being even more centralized in terms of their Collinators. I'm like, man, you geniuses didn't see that coming.
Whatever. China news. You guys know I like to talk about China. There was 2 big things out of China this year, and I think both of them are very important. Evergrande went bankrupt. They had been defaulting on their debt. Let's see. I think that was in 2022. In 2023, they did go bankrupt in August. So they are officially bankrupt. Not sure really what's gonna happen at this point. There's some kind of ruling that's happening soon on that. Country Gardens, The other big real estate company essentially in China, they have not defaulted, but their sales are down a stupid amount of money.
That's like 81% year over year, in September. So a few months ago, They did report $7,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, dollars loss in the first half of twenty twenty three. So I think they will be defaulting and going bankrupt as well. They're just a little behind Evergrande. I think that saga will continue, and what people don't understand is that a lot of the financial wealth that was built up in China was done. A significant percentage. I'm not gonna give it a number, but it's not like 5%. It's, you know, much larger than that. Was done through fine, real estate, through companies like these 2 companies. That's why you saw Literal cities being built that were empty, and that's been reported. I'm not gonna go into that, but It this will hurt China in the long run very significantly.
What do we have coming in 2024? I've written down a few things. I think these are are very important. I think these will help fuel Bitcoin. We already know about the 4 year cycle. We already know, you know, we're kind of in that paradigm, but these are the things that the reasons why I think we're gonna come out of 2024. You know, we're at 42,000, roughly 43,000 right now. We could be double that towards the end of the year. It may be higher. So we got to have an incoming in late April. So at block height, 840,000.
Oh, I did not do what our current block height is. Man, Macintosh. 823,771. Let me jot that down. Okay. So that's our current block height. I'm not gonna go through the difficulty or whatever. Fees are still crazy high. Right now, it's looking like about 200 stats per vbite. Very little relief in that. It's all I'm gonna say about that for right now. Still on target. Who was that that said that in Star Wars? Was that Luke? I can't remember.
[00:43:49] McIntosh:
Alright. Sorry. Squirrels run amok. Halvening.
[00:43:55] McIntosh:
The block reward will go from 0.25 Bitcoin down to 3.175 Bitcoin plus the transaction fees. So we will see an immediate cut in the reward. So that's coming. We've got US elections in November November 5th, our general election next year. Why is that important? Well, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, I would argue that regardless of whomever is in Our, whether that be Republican or Democrat, during an election year, they will do everything in their power to make the market look Good. Because a bad economy is the easiest way to get someone out of office. What does that mean? Hey.
If I'm Joe Biden, which I am not, but if I'm Joe Biden, I tap, Powell on the shoulder and say, hey, buddy. you need to start bringing down interest rates because when you start bringing down interest rates, that's gonna mean that people are gonna start investing, and the economy is going to do better. People will feel better and so on and so forth.
[00:45:05] McIntosh:
So that's coming. Now
[00:45:08] McIntosh:
Now we know Powell is already even saying kind of we've reached the top. We're probably gonna hold here for a few more months. I'm expecting by the end of Q1, so January, February, March, Right around that happening that we start seeing the interest rates drop, which will push Jay, boom. People don't realize even though the financial markets are in terrible shape in terms in a lot of metrics, by pure numbers, One of the markets is in an all time high. I don't remember which one, the S and P or whatever, which one of those it was, But they're doing very well. And if they break out, what we're going to see, in my opinion, especially as these interest rates drop. We're gonna see a market boom. I think over the summer, the stock market's gonna go crazy, And we've seen this in the past. We saw it, by the way, after, the great depression started, kind of during that, Well, the thirties. Right? We saw that stuff going on back then.
So the lower interest rates, The stock market will shoot up. Everybody's gonna rah rah rah. Now what's gonna happen, I believe in 2024, we will see. Now this is my speculation, but I believe that we'll see the commercial real estate market crash. Why? Well, I've talked about that. Vacancy rates are very high. This is a combination not a combination. It's primarily driven by COVID. When people left for COVID, when nobody was working at the office, a lot of these people decided they like working remotely. And so companies are coming up with all kinds of, you know, you either work at home or maybe you come in 1 day a week or you do some kind of hybrid thing. Not as much office space usage. Also, we've had a lot of layoffs. We've had hundreds of thousands of people who are getting laid off from these big tech companies and this kind of thing.
We've also had companies going bankrupt quietly. So you've got companies going out of business. You got companies who are downsizing, and you've got companies who are to stay competitive moving to this Kinda hybrid working model where people are working from home more. My own company, not that I own it, but the company I work for, for example, Owned, like, 3 floors of an office building, and I'm not even gonna say where because it's not relevant and it's none of your business. But they've given up one of those. Not that they owned it. They were leasing that. They gave it up, and now that floor just sits it sits empty. There are markets where there are extremely high vacancy rates, and these companies, especially with these high interest rates, are going to start going bankrupt. These are the commercial real estate companies.
Companies like Evergrande and, Country Garden in China. Now those were slightly different, but those are for maybe for different reasons, really. But The those kind of companies, real estate investment companies, companies who own buildings who then lease them out. I do not know what the implications are of that. I don't know if that's going to cause a general crash of the market. I'm not gonna speculate on that. I do not know. I believe it will cause a significant drag, but this market has to reset. The prices have to reset. The expectations have to reset. All of this has to be done before we could even talk about moving forward.
I do think that will happen in 2025. I will say in general also, I don't think 2025 for most people is gonna be any better than 2024. I hope you are doing well. Some of us are, But there's a lot of people, frankly, who are hurting. And, I hope that, you know, you, the listeners, of course, are not in that case. I'm sure some of you are unfortunately and I hope 2025 or 2024 is better for you. I'm not sure that that's gonna be the case. I think I misspoke earlier and said 2025 instead of 2024. But just in general, I think that 2024 is going to be Not a whole lot different than 2023.
We may not reach a level of great depression, and I was pretty doom and gloom about a year or so ago. I'm still very pessimistic, but we may not reach that level at this point. We will see. It is possible that we could pull ourselves out of this and continue to build debt. Oh, by the way, the US is poised. I believe well, we're at, like, $33,900,000,000,000. So we're almost $34,000,000,000,000
[00:50:05] McIntosh:
of debt. I don't think we're gonna quite make it before
[00:50:09] McIntosh:
2024, but I'm sure that will be happening very soon in January. So there you go. That debt has to get taken care of. The global debt has to get taken care of some somewhere. We there's just way, way, way too much.
[00:50:24] McIntosh:
And how that's done through default or or through, you know,
[00:50:30] McIntosh:
I can't think of the word right now, but you're making your money Worthless. It has to be done one way or the other. Remains to be seen how that's done. Anyways, enough about that. Let's talk about some other things. The SEC and various other guns government institutions are going to continue to regulate the crypto market. We have people in our government who are dead set against any kind of crypto other than central bank digital currencies. Elizabeth Warren, who's a senator here in the United States, is a prime example. She has a bill that she is trying to float that I hope get shot down. That will do everything possible to shut down crypto.
I think we will continue to see that in twenty 24, I think you will see it more on the side of crypto rather than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin will see its fair share as well. I hope all this ordinals, inscriptions, stamps, and BRC 20 crap fades off into the background. I don't think we should be censoring Yeah. I don't as a minor, frankly, I'm benefiting from it every day, but I also don't think it's a a good use of the blockchain. I think that we are pricing people out who, are not ready for that. We know ultimately in the long run that blockchain space on the Bitcoin main chain will become very expensive. But right now, I don't want it to be $50 just to do something on the main chain. I think lightning is going to continue to become more mature And more stable, god, I hope they fix all these force channel closures because especially with these high fee environments, that gets to be very expensive to reopen those. I also think it will probably become more centralized, which is something I would love to not see, but I also fully expect.
I don't expect the e cash systems like Fedimint and ARC to take off in 2024. I do expect to see significant process progress on them. I also hope to see serious progress is made towards main chain, I mean, the Bitcoin main chain privacy. Privacy by default should be the model. I would love to see Monero's model essentially on Bitcoin. I don't know why at this point that we haven't given serious attention to that. We can use Whirlpool. We can use things like that, and we'll be talking about those through the year. But I want to see it baked into the main chain. We're over here arguing about covenants and this, that, and the other.
To me, privacy is the number one concern right now on Bitcoin because we don't know what governments around the world are going to do, and I will continue to use Bitcoin regardless of what they say. And I would love to have my right to privacy, which as a US citizen is guaranteed to me in the constitution even though it's routinely trampled on. I also hope that Satoshi plebs listeners stack more sats, To maintain more self custody and gain more knowledge about Bitcoin and financial freedom. That is my predictions for 2024. In terms of price, In case I didn't say it, I think I did at least roughly. I wrote down 50 to 60,000
[00:53:45] McIntosh:
by having, So in just a few months, 80 k plus by end of year. I am
[00:53:53] McIntosh:
purposely underestimating the effects Spot ETF potentially by a lot. I still believe at this point, 2025, Q4, probably November, if you forced my hand on it, will be the top of this cycle. And until proven otherwise, I will maintain that position. So we have an exciting couple of years. We are at the start, if not already past the start. In fact, it could be argued we're past the start of the bull market. So welcome to 2024. Dear listeners, I hope it will be a good one. I need to throw out some shouts, shout outs or whatever you say To some supporters, we did have some support come in after I posted the last episode, and this was for episode 148, mere mortals podcast, which Kyron.
Our friend Kyron over there, sent 2222, a row of ducks. And he said, Satoshi plebs, fitting since you like the socioplebis motto so much. Thank you, Kyron. I put a lot of thought into that name, and I really like it. I hope y'all do as well. Episode 147, Hypersentivosaurus sent us 1,000 sats, our friend in Portugal. And, no message, and then sent another 1,000 sat and said, have a great December. I am going for a family time I tripped to the Netherlands myself, so sounds like they went back home. He's told us before that he is from the Netherlands. So I hope you had a great holiday.
Hypersentivosaurus , I did. I enjoyed myself. I did work too much, But I've told y'all before, I'm a workaholic. I really wanted to get this stuff done, and I'm very pleased with how my I had more stuff. I have a list, but I did get a lot done. So and I also got to spend some time with my family and our friends and doing so tonight in just a few hours actually as well. So very cool. And thank you very much, hypersensitive. I do appreciate your support as always. And anonymous Sent us another 500 sets. I think he's sending 500 every time. Really cool. No message. Thank you. Anonymous as always. I appreciate that.
Not gonna have any news and notes this week. I kinda covered everything. I think ETFs for the last month have kinda been the big news. You've probably already caught up about that elsewhere, and that's fine. Alright. So, of course, Satoshi's Plebs podcast. Boy, I'm gonna have to learn how to say that. That's fun. Y'all know I have trouble sometimes. Satoshis Plebs podcast supports podcasting 2.0. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about time and time again. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast in a couple of ways. You can support it by time, by talent, by treasure.
What do I mean? Well, I've still got projects. I as I've outlined, I will have projects through 2024. There will always be projects. There's always things that people can help out on if they wish. That's the time and talent. If you've got treasure, if you've got some Bitcoin that you wanna support the show with, if this Show brings you value on a week in, week out basis, and I certainly hope it does. Please do 2 things. First of all, Promote the show. Let other people know. Say, hey. There's this guy, Macintosh. Does this show called Satoshi's Plebs? You can find did on any podcast 2 point o app. You can even find it on Apple Podcasts.
But, go take a listen, And you can leave a review, which that would be nice. And then also, you can, if you're using a podcasting 2 point o app, you can stream some sats. You can boost and send a message Just like hypersensitive asaris and mere mortals did and anonymous. You can also if you really love Apple Podcasts, For example, you can go to podcast index.com. You can look up Satoshi's Plebs, and you can boost straight from there with an Alby wallet, which is simply a lightning wallet. So you can do it that way even without a podcasting 2 point o app. Alright. I'm gonna skip through Oh, some of this because, man, I got to get this edited and posted.
Fountain podcast, I believe, is in 1 point o now. If it's not, it will be very soon. It's been a very solid app. I really like what they've done, especially with the clipping. The new clipping feature is a vast improvement. I think I told him it was a 2000% improvement, and I was not exaggerating. The other one used to frustrate me to no end, and this one's beautiful. It just works. It's great. You can check that out, fountain.fm Or there's a number of others. I use, I don't have it right. Customatic. Podcast Guru is another one. There's there's a number of them. You can go to podcastapps.com and take a look.
Anyways, you can now reach me, Mcintosh at podcast index dot social on mastodon, [email protected]. And there's also the website at https://satoshis-plebs.com. So stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I will talk to you soon
[00:59:29] McIntosh:
soon, and have a great
[00:59:33] McIntosh:
New Year's
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 1st, and this is episode 149 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode will be a year in review plus what is coming in 2024. Alright. Happy New Year. I hope everyone has had a great holiday. I did, of course, take some time off. This will be the 1st episode in 1 month. And as I posted somewhere, I think on Twitter, I did miss it, to be honest. I did. I've been doing this for two and a half years at this point, for a good portion of that time twice a week. And you get in this rhythm, and then it's like, oh, wait. The rhythm's gone. But I would say that I spent a bunch of time resting and, You know, reenergizing.
But the reality is is that, I spent a bunch of time building, and we'll be discussing that, in a few minutes, about what I've been doing for the last month. Because even though I wasn't recording, I spent a good bit of time building infrastructure For Satoshi's Plebs and laying things out, trying to figure out what I was gonna change, and not everything's in place. For example, I just played the music, same music as I've been playing for a long time. That's going to change. I have not Found new music yet. I was looking for value for value music that I could, include in the splits, and I haven't been able to do that yet, so I spent about an hour kind of poking around. I haven't really found anything. I don't know if I've ever told you all this.
I may have, but, I am very eclectic, if you wanna call it that, in my musical taste. I can basically listen to anything, outside of rap and opera. I don't like opera. I can even listen to classical music to an extent. Regardless, I haven't found anything yet. I hope before the next episode that that is taken care of. But it is New Year's Eve. It's 1:20 in the afternoon as I record. I will post this tomorrow morning, New Year's Day on our regular schedule, Monday mornings. But I did wanna take a time to, I did wanna kinda take This episode and kind of review, I'm not really gonna go over the news of the last month. There's been a bit. I will touch on it. A lot of, you know, fluff, whatever.
But, I did wanna go over kind of the year because it's it's been a long year for a lot of us, and It's always good to look back and kinda see where we came from. Some of this is, podcast specific for for this podcast. Some of it is, After we get done with that, we'll turn more towards kind of the Bitcoin world. And, so we'll just jump right on into that. So for this year, I pulled up some statistics. I recorded 57 episodes, so that's a little more than 1 per week. I did not record, 2 episodes a week all year long. Of course, I took the month of December off, so, I would like to see that be a little more towards a 100 than 57 next year, but Overall, I think pretty good.
One of the things that they said to build to build a solid listenership for your podcast is, of course, to be regular, and Tried, frankly, very hard to do that. I've not always been successful. Sometimes, especially on the Thursday episodes, work will interfere. But, we do the best we can, and we're gonna continue to try and improve on that. So 57 episodes. Our total boost in stream. So, of course, we're a value for value podcast. I strongly support what's going on with the podcasting 2 point o movement, if you wanna call it that. We kind of congregate over at the Mastodon podcast index dot social instance for our Interactions, the two kind of co leaders of that, Adam Curry, Dave.
I actually don't know Dave's Last name offhand. I should. But, anyways, they host the podcast. They put it out every week, and it's about developments In the podcasting world, we are incorporating a huge number of changes that are, In my opinion, very much improving podcast, making it better things like transcripts, chapters, the ability to stream payments to a podcast, The ability to send boost and messages, this type thing. We're talking about some very interesting things about, Cross app comments right now. Probably, it sounds like they're steering towards using the activity pub Protocol to to basically allow for that between the applications. It sounds like a a really brilliant solution.
That work is ongoing, so you can jump into that at new podcast apps.com if you would like and get a podcast two point o app. Like I mentioned, there's the podcast index dot social mastodon instance. You're welcome to join in there. And a lot of that Content is about podcasting. Not all of it, of course, because people are free to post whatever they want, but there's a lot of information there. So would love to see some of the listeners on there, interact with them. Let me know if you, jump on there. I'm McIntosh at podcastindex.social on there. So this year, we had a total boost in streams, and I did not break it down. Both are equally important. I do not know, Honestly, what the ratio is because I'm just using the data that's given to me by Satoshis stream.
And that was 343,408 sats, and that's after basically, they take 10% of that. So it would actually be more like 370 if I'm not mistaken, 375, something like that. That converts to about $145.15 at the current rate. I have not touched that money. It's still sitting in there. And to be honest, I don't really intend to. I'm a let it build up. I will eventually be putting it on a lightning node. In fact, I hope to do that very soon in the next month or so and use that as liquidity, to start routing to be able to accept my own payments so that I don't have to use to to stream. Not that they're a bad service, but I wanna do it myself. I'm kind of a DIY guy, and, I like doing it myself. Plus, that'll save me about 10%.
So always good for a or maybe it's 1%. Let's see. I don't know. I think it's 1%, actually. So my calculation I just did was all off. So I apologize, but I think you get the idea. So 57 episodes. What else did I do this year specific about this podcast? I'm not gonna talk about the topics we covered. I have a page, by the way. If you go to satoshis-pebs.com, , which is our new website, there's a link to it. It's called, like, episode library. It's right on the top. You can click on that, and then it is actually current right now. Episodes 1 through 148.
Back when we were, generation wealth through cryptocurrency and then, Generation Bitcoin. All of those episodes are listed there with the main topic. Feel free to browse through that. You can actually, Well, just feel free to browse. You can take a look at that. Those episodes are all still available in the same feed, by the way. So what did I do? I moved the podcast from Captivate, which is a podcast host, to Castapod, so I am now Self hosting it. I just did that. I started work on it about a month and a half. I actually made the flip about 2 days ago maybe. I kinda waited till there was the the least amount of traffic in case there was any issues, which there were not. It was a very easy process. Castapod itself, this is my 2nd podcast setting it up on Castapod. I Basically, edited another podcast, that my family was involved in, for a couple of years.
There was some overlap there, but, you know, couple years before this. And so we had already moved that one. I kinda learned the ropes on that. Castapod, is some it's PHP based software, and it's self hosting. So my files sit there, all the content sits there, everything. And once you kind of learn a few things, it's It's the I will say this. Well, it was not perfect. However, there was a very good Discord group, A very active Discord group that was very helpful sorting through some issues. So I would encourage people, If you're hosting a podcast or if you have your podcast in, there's 2 reasons to do this. 1, money. So I Self host on Hetz Hetzner. It's a German company, actually.
They do VPS, virtual private servers. Very nice company. I've had zero issues with them. I actually host my servers in Germany, and the reasons why I do that, that is the only place that they have, ARM chipset servers. So rather than Intel or AMD, they're actually, ARM chips, which I really like. They're a little cheaper. They're, more power efficient, but they only host those in Germany. You can if you're in the United States, you can use servers here in the United States that are Intel or, AMD chip servers. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't worry about it, but whatever.
I'm spending $3 a month now on the server that runs those, and I could have multiple podcast. In fact, so Very, very economical. I was paying $15 a month at Captivate. I have no problem with Captivate, by the way, other than the fact that they are Slow to put on podcasting 2 point o tags, but their service was always good, but it's $15 a month. So now I just save myself $12 a month and Castapod adds tags very, very frequently. Alright. So anyways, we moved from Captivate to Castapod. I'm now self hosting that. I set up a new website. I already mentioned it. Satoshisplebs.com. satoshis-plebs.com , of course, it looks very much like my old site. It will probably change over the next few months. I set Up a Bitcoin note, this is something I would encourage anyone to do.
Just just set up a Bitcoin node. Watch the transactions going through it. It's fascinating, and there are things that you can do with that. In this case, this is more for just testing and it's just gonna sit out there. I'll get to that in just a minute, but there you go. We've got a note set up. I set up hedge doc for note taking. I'm actually using that right now. This is something When I lost my Umbrel when was that back in November? I had been using one of the programs that, Umbral supplies and, trillium. That was the name of the program, and it worked fine. But I When I moved to Hetzner for all of my different services, and I counted it up. I have, like, a dozen things up there right now. Kinda crazy.
But, anyways, I decided to test out Hedgehog, and I've been pretty pleased with it. It's an online note taking service. I could actually make these notes public, so I could send anybody to the website and they could see it, or private. So most of my notes I think I have 1 public note. It's some links, and I'll add more links to there, and I'll eventually Make that available either directly on Hedgehog or on the Satoshi Plebs website, that kind of thing. It's, can be done in markdown, which I like. It's a, markup language, like XML.
It's a version of that. So very flexible. Anyways, what else? Set up a, it's an SMP server. So it's called it's basically Simple X. So if you've ever heard a Simple X, it's a it's a secure way of communicating. Now my initial thought with this, and it's open source. They make everything available, which is very important to me for something like this. They make everything available as code up on GitHub or GitLab. I'm not sure which. But I set up a server as a test kit, as a test bed, and then I ended up Setting it up for my own use. So my family will actually use this to communicate ultimately between each other rather than using, say, Facebook Messenger. We You may say Macintosh, you're being paranoid. Maybe I am.
But, I would rather control this myself. Plus, it is end to end encrypted. There's a lot of really nice things about simplex, and I really intended to do this as a chatroom For Satoshi's Plebs, unfortunately, one thing it doesn't do very well, there's two issues. It's a little laggy because of the encryption. And it doesn't really handle, like, community, like, group things. There is You can, but, basically, they say if you get above about 50 people, which maybe I don't ever reach, but In the chat room at one time, it kind of implodes. So I wanted to steer away from that. I ended up going, with an IRC server setup, which I am building now.
It's not quite done yet. Basically, on the suggestion of some people over at podcasting 2.0 that I was talking about earlier. So that's not done yet, but when that is done, it's about 75% done probably. When that's done, then that will actually be available for the plebs, to use as kind of a chat room. And one of the big reasons we'll do that is because during 2024, Not to jump ahead, but I do wanna start doing a live stream. My plan is for Sunday nights, and This will not be happening until I'm ready. So it may be several months or more, so don't get too excited. But on Sunday nights at 6 o'clock, Thursdays will be reserved for interviews that I have with people, that kind of thing. That will not be at a fixed time.
Alright. So, we'll do live on Sunday night and then Monday morning at 7 o'clock. As always, they will come out. But I wanted to have a chat room for that. That's where we were going with all that. That's where the IRC comes in. So I'm almost done with that. Set up activity pub for Satoshi's Plebs site. So there was a new plugin that came out, I think, in September for WordPress, which is what I use for Satoshi's Plebs just because I've done WordPress forever, and it's easy. But it will allow me to federate my post, which I'm pretty pumped about. So, essentially, it will look like I have a mastodon instance. And when I post on the website, which I will We'll be planning to do more during 2024.
That will go right into the feed. And then if you're into Mastodon, you can subscribe to that And see those as they get published. What else did we do? Tested out the seed signer hardware wallet. I am convinced at this point that seed signer is the best hardware wallet that's out there. Of course, I've had seed signer on the program. When he was on the program, I had not picked up 1 yet. I had already, of course, been interested in it at that point. I have thoroughly tested it out. I'm very happy with it. My only complaint, and I do intend to put this on their Discord, and it's not really something that's fixable. One thing I don't really talk about, I have a a fair amount of issues with my eyes.
I've worn glasses forever, and I actually found out not too long ago I have cataracts. Very early stage, but I have eye issues is really what it amounts to. And the screen on the seed signer is very, very tiny, and that's partially what helps keep the cost down. But it's also very hard for me to kinda work around. The screen is not terrible. I wouldn't rather have Easily, I don't know, double, triple, quadruple the size of what it is. But the QR code thing that you fill out paper, Stock paper. Extremely difficult for me. I was able to do it the second time I did it. The first time, it did not work at all.
It's just the dots are so small. It's just I don't know. Not really a complaint. It's just the reality. Maybe not ideal for for people who have vision issues, but Basically, any of I mean, the ledger one's even smaller, to be honest. I've told you all in the past. I have ledger, which I do, which I will be moving off of on the seed center, but, you know, that screen's even smaller. So there you go. That's literally my only complaint. So good good job testing that out. I enjoyed it, learned a bit, all that kind of stuff. And then the last thing, a couple of weeks ago, like, the middle of the month, I did order a new computer.
[00:18:53] McIntosh:
I've been looking into this for a long time. I've I've had the one picked out since middle of the year.
[00:19:01] McIntosh:
And, essentially, I managed to pull together the money to to get it ordered. It's a Beelink GTR 7 Pro. So what that means is I'll be moving from a Mac mini, that's about 10 years old to a computer that'll hold up to 64 gigs. It'll come with 32, and I think it's four cores. It's an AMD chip. I think it's like sixteen or maybe it's sixteen cores. I'm not quite sure, but it's a lot bigger than this one. And I think a terabyte or maybe two terabytes of hard drive. It's supposed to be here the fourth, which is, like, next Thursday. The reality is it hasn't shipped according to their Thing, I don't think it's gonna make it by then, but I'm hoping for it very soon. I will be setting NextOS Up on it is my plan. I've played around with that a little bit. It's a Linux distribution that it's pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to using it. So if I can't get that to work, which I'm not 100% sure that I'll be able to do everything I need to do on it, then I'll use Ubuntu, which is another Linux distribution that I've probably been using for 10 years or more.
So what are we gonna do in 2024? Let me run through this list really quick. Some of these are goals. I'll probably move the goals. I think some of these are set into stone at this point. I do wanna install an Electrum server. This is not something I've talked about. Maybe I'll I should take an episode to talk about this. I'll probably do it after I do which will be basically as soon as I get my computer. Electrum is basically a modified form of a Bitcoin node, and it interacts with that Bitcoin node, you have to have both. So I'm gonna set up a full Bitcoin node on my new computer. I'm gonna set up Electrum. I'll also set up reaper, which is what I use for the audio stuff, and then use that to handle, essentially, my seed signer wallet.
So I'll talk about all that after I get it set up, but that's certainly one goal. I'm going to go to the Bitcoin conference in Nashville that is in July 25 to 27. Nashville is in the southeastern part of the United States. It's a very nice city, actually. I've spent a little bit of time there. I'm looking forward to that. What I'm really looking forward to is meeting some of my my friends, some of the people that I've interviewed, some of the people like Mere Mortals and hopefully some of the listeners as well. Kyrin, better go now. I know you're not sure if you're going, but you need to go, buddy.
Anyways, really looking forward to that. I will set up a live stream this year. I don't know exact or next year. This year, by the time you get this, I don't know exactly when, like I said, but hopefully, maybe Q1. I'm also gonna be providing a video version of podcast. And this is something I've gone back and forth on, but I'm pretty solid at this point. Now that probably will be second half. It would definitely be After setting up the livestream, I wanna get that going first. Why do you say that, why a video podcast? Because I like them, frankly. A lot of people don't, but I do think there's benefit to that for things like this Electrum server that I was just talking about. It would be Very helpful to show that to the listeners, to the viewers, kind of how that works rather than just talking about it.
[00:22:39] McIntosh:
kind of how that works rather than just talking about it.
[00:22:43] McIntosh:
That would be an excellent example right there. I'm gonna host the video up on YouTube, and you may say, gosh, Macintosh, I can't believe you just said that. But for one thing, there won't be any ads. I'm not looking to monetize it on there because I do believe in value for value rather than Shoving ads in your face like what they do on YouTube, but it's free. And With the podcasting 2 point o spec, you can literally just point to that video, and it will show up as a as a source. Now I will also be keeping a set of my video. I don't trust They could take me down for any reason, and I will not self censor just to keep on video on YouTube.
So at some point, when I say something that they don't believe in and they take me down, well, then I'll just point to a new source, which would be my own host. And The thing is that's going to cost money, so I don't wanna jump right into that at this point because we're not making a whole lot. So We're not making enough to cover that is a reality, and it would immediately start coming out of my pocket. I have two goals, in terms of metrics for the podcast, I want to quadruple my listenership. I will tell y'all right now, I'm at around 1800 downloads a month.
I will be able to keep better track of that with castapod than I did with Captivate, but that's roughly what I was doing for the last four or five months. It's slowly growing. Although, of course, in December, I took a nose dive. I only had 500 downloads in December, but, but that's okay. There was no content. So I wanna quadruple that. So we're looking at, you know, roughly 8,000 downloads a month or so. I would love to do more. I think that's very realistic, especially as we come into this bull market, which is cranking up. I haven't even talked about Bitcoin In terms of that, maybe I should do that before we roll into everything else. I will. Actually, I've got it right there on my notes. I firmly believe that 2024, Bitcoin will be moving up, not down. So, anyways, that's going to most likely be steering people our way. I've also decided to go ahead and do another promotional with Fountain just to expose more people to the podcast. So I've already talked to Oscar about that, and I'm planning on do that very early, probably January of of 2024.
And that should help. We saw that last time we, of course, had a huge spike when we did it, but then more people a number of people stayed around after
[00:25:29] McIntosh:
after
[00:25:30] McIntosh:
the promotion that I did a long time ago now at this point. And then the other thing is, and I've mentioned this as a goal in the past, but for 2024, I really do want to have a goal of about 200,000 sats per month of support. That's about $50. It's probably a little more now, but it's about $50 a month. That's 50,000 sats a week. That's 25,000
[00:25:55] McIntosh:
sats an episode if I'm doing two episodes a week. And that is support that's coming from the listeners with value for value as we talk about. So
[00:26:05] McIntosh:
what that means is that essentially stuff that I'm doing out of pocket, I don't so much have to worry about that anymore if I choose to pull that money out. Now I told you I'm putting it into liquidity for a lightning note. But if I'm making, you know, 200,000 sats a month, I will probably start pulling out some of that. And there's other things now that I've got my computer on the way. Of course, I want a new microphone. Oh, you know? Actually, my my next 2 big things would be, I need to get a mixer board. I think I need to do that to do live. I may be mistaken. It certainly would make it easier.
I wanna get a Rodecaster Pro 2, and then I do wanna upgrade my mic. My mic is old. Not that it's well, old isn't really a big deal, but it's pretty low quality. I think I could do a lot better, and it would sound better. So there we go. That's my goals for 2024. Let's talk about Bitcoin for just a second. It had an interesting year. January 1, 2023, it closed at $16,125.10. Do you even remember that? I do. I was stacking sats. I also encouraged you to do the same thing. I hope you did because those sats have now almost tripled in value. December 31, today 2023, Time of recording, which is now 149 in the afternoon, CST, US.
We are at 42,639. I will jot that down right now. So like I said, we have almost tripled in value during the year. Basically, we've seen a steady increase across the year. It's been kind of crazy where we go up and then we level off for a little bit, and then we go up. I I didn't bring up trading view, which I have right here, but, I mean, really, that's kind of what it's been. We we did go sideways. Okay. So here we go. Let's just go ahead, See how Macintosh did. Yep. There's 2023 right there. So we went from basically the bottom in 22 in January 1 right there, all the way up to April 11, we hit 31,000.
We did go sideways, basically, between April and when we have that breakout, October 23. So that was kind of our grind, and you guys remember that. It hasn't been that long, but we just kinda we ground down, then back up. We were in that parallel channel for months, and then we jumped out of it when we broke free. We've gone from there up to 44700 or So and we've kinda been waiting. And what are we waiting for? In my opinion, we're waiting for these ETFs to be approved. This is the one bit of news I did wanna talk about. There's been a fair amount of Activity on that front during January or during December. It does look like those will be approved maybe as early as The next, like, let's see, Tuesday, Wednesday, so 2nd 3rd, the FCC may come out and say, you know, To all these companies or at least the majority of them, you're ready to go. You can go next week. So, like, Literally, January 7 or so, we may see those go live.
I certainly think it's going to happen in January. I'm willing to say that at this point. All signs point to that. When that happens, I do believe we'll see Bitcoin probably spike up to about $50,000. Now it may be more. I'm fairly confident we'll at least kind of touch that even if we fall back down. I actually don't have anything charted above where we're at at 448 or whatever, that last line of resistance that we hit. So I'm not willing to do anything other than say, well, $50,000 is a nice round number, which it is.
We may spike right on past that, and we'll see where we go. I do believe, I'm jumping ahead in my notes. I'm not even looking at them. Alright. We'll get to that in a minute. Hash rate. Well, no. I I'll just go ahead and make that. Yeah. No. I've got I'll talk about I've let me stop. Let me stop. Anyways, that ETF news is very important, not because we need e ETFs, and I think I've made that very clear. But what it does is, You know, we gain acceptance. This is Wall Street coming into Bitcoin land, and we will see a surge in investment. I don't have the figures in front of me, but the amount of money that it could be quite large.
So we will see how that works out. I'm very, very interested about that because In a sense, not that Bitcoin needs legitimizing, but it legitimizes Bitcoin. At least it does to Wall Street. Now Wall Street can kiss my rear end, but but that doesn't mean Bitcoin is for everybody. I'd say this over and over. And so it's it's for Wall Street too. Now
[00:31:47] McIntosh:
they can put in all their money, BlackRock and, you know,
[00:31:54] McIntosh:
Morgan Stanley, I don't know, all these different companies. They can put all their money in a custodial solution, which seems to be Coinbase for the most part, and that's fine. That's not the way that I do it, and that's not what I preach, so to speak, but that is there's nothing wrong with that for those people. So, anyways, what was I where was I at? Hash rate, January 1, 2023. We were at approximately 255,000 Exashash. So today, We're at roughly 563 Exashash. So we have more than doubled, essentially, the mining power in the last year, which is stunning.
I don't know where we go from here. Now If I'm going to make estimations, I would say,
[00:32:45] McIntosh:
we don't make,
[00:32:47] McIntosh:
whatever a 1000 Exashash is, a zetahash, think it is, next year. I believe we'll end up somewhere around 750. I think we have to slow down, but I could be wrong. I do believe after the havening, which we'll talk about in just a minute, you will see a drop in hash as servers go offline because it's no longer profitable at least for a short while, but then we'll see it ramp back up. I I am prepared to be wrong on on my estimations. We may be approaching a zeta hash or even above it by the end of next year, which would be insane. Alright.
Let's talk about what went on last year, kind of the big stories. And where were we at on this? What does it mean for 2024? Bank failures. We had 3 big bank failures. There was more, But we had 3 big bank failures here in the United States. 1st Republic. No. Let's go in order. Sorry. Silicon Valley, March 10th, failed. So Silicon Valley Bank was a bank that was used by a lot of the companies in Silicon Valley. They, like, literally companies held $1,000,000,000 for payroll, things like this. Companies like Netflix. Now I don't know if Netflix was. Very likely they were, but Maybe they weren't, but that kind of company would have their accounts. And they because of what The fed had done with interest rates driving up.
Well, because inflation went up so quickly, they drove up interest rates grew from 0 to 5% in the order of a few months. That put a lot of banks in turmoil. Silicon Valley, like I said, They were they basically went bankrupt, March 10th. March 12th, Signature Bank. That was on a Friday. Signature Bank was on a Sunday, which was very weird. The thing about signature was it was actually responsible for banking some of the exchanges, if I'm not mistaken. I think signature was forced to close, in my opinion. Now that's conspiratorial. I'll just tell you that, but I don't think they were insolvent.
I think the SEC closed them or not the SEC, Whoever's in charge of the banks to send a message. Now we've seen crypto regulation all year long, and we're about to talk about that. But, Yeah. I think this was a warning. I don't know. That's just me being conspiratorial probably. And then on May 1st, First National or First Republic Bank. So these three things kinda sent shock waves through the industry, through Finance through, you know, all of that kind of stuff. These are large banks. These were not small little mom and pop banks. There were not super banks like, you know, JPMorgan, Chase, I don't know. City, one of these very large banks, but they were certainly mid level.
And they all three within six weeks, or so, kind of, you know, they they were basically bought out for pennies on the dollar, really, by other companies, including JPMorgan. Actually, they bought First Republic. What else did we have going on? Well, 2023, it looks like, will probably bring the end to the FTX mess. So back early in the year, somewhere around that same time frame, March, April, May, I don't know. A jury convicted, Sam Bankman freed of a number of charges, wire fraud. Well, this is wire fraud and 6 other charges. So he has been cooling his heels in jail for house arrest.
Not too long after that, CZ, who was the founder of Binance agreed to plead guilty to money laundering of all things as part of a settlement between the US authorities and Binance. And just recently, he was actually denied the ability to leave the United States. So, essentially, he's trapped here. So that remains to be seen. One of the interesting things about FTX to circle back to that is just recently, it was disclosed. FTX gave, like, $100,000,000 to different politicians in the United States, primarily, but not exclusively Democrats.
That's a fact. Just throwing that out there. And he will not Sam Bankman Fried will not be charged with that. So, basically, they've come out and said, the the trial that's done, you know, he's found guilty of all that. The penalty phase has not been done yet, but he's in, you know, house arrest or jail. I don't know which. But he will spend basically the rest of his life in jail for that most likely, at least a long time. But they're not going to charge him with all of the other things. There are a number of other charges that were to be done separately, including This campaign fraud, which is what it was.
So that's interesting. One of the things that went on this year, the SEC has been cracking down on casino coins as securities. So what this means is they're going into places and like Kraken. They're saying, Kraken, You have been dealing in unregistered securities, which is what they call them because they are securities, and they're not registered as such. And I think in Kraken's case, they paid a $30,000,000 fine. Now I don't know what came out of that other than a fine, but that's just one example. Coinbase, same thing.
They've gone after Ripple. The Ripple case kind of settled. Basically, they were saying the people who bought the coins on the Changes were not guilty of anything, which is I mean, really, what are you gonna do? I think they're still trying to get to the people in charge of Ripple. So Ripple's a company. Actually, it's Ripple Labs. But, you know, Whatever. I don't know. Ripples' security, and they called it as such, at least in certain cases, which I don't know how that works, but whatever. So, anyways, the last figure I've seen, I think this is a legitimate number. I've looked at it a couple times.
There have been 68 different tokens that have been declared to be securities. So 68. Bitcoin, of course, is not among them because Coin is not a security, for a number of reasons, but and I don't think Ethereum is listed at this point. Now I think the SEC is Setting Ethereum aside. In my opinion, Ethereum very much is a security, probably more so than The vast majority of those stupid tokens, but they're they're setting them aside for, you know, whatever. To make a example of maybe in the next few years. We'll see. But it well, I'm not gonna go down the Ethereum rabbit hole. It doesn't Matter we don't talk about Ethereum here. But funny things are going on over there. They are becoming they are realizing I will say this. They are realizing they have to now that they moved to proof of stake. They're going to end up being even more centralized in terms of their Collinators. I'm like, man, you geniuses didn't see that coming.
Whatever. China news. You guys know I like to talk about China. There was 2 big things out of China this year, and I think both of them are very important. Evergrande went bankrupt. They had been defaulting on their debt. Let's see. I think that was in 2022. In 2023, they did go bankrupt in August. So they are officially bankrupt. Not sure really what's gonna happen at this point. There's some kind of ruling that's happening soon on that. Country Gardens, The other big real estate company essentially in China, they have not defaulted, but their sales are down a stupid amount of money.
That's like 81% year over year, in September. So a few months ago, They did report $7,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, dollars loss in the first half of twenty twenty three. So I think they will be defaulting and going bankrupt as well. They're just a little behind Evergrande. I think that saga will continue, and what people don't understand is that a lot of the financial wealth that was built up in China was done. A significant percentage. I'm not gonna give it a number, but it's not like 5%. It's, you know, much larger than that. Was done through fine, real estate, through companies like these 2 companies. That's why you saw Literal cities being built that were empty, and that's been reported. I'm not gonna go into that, but It this will hurt China in the long run very significantly.
What do we have coming in 2024? I've written down a few things. I think these are are very important. I think these will help fuel Bitcoin. We already know about the 4 year cycle. We already know, you know, we're kind of in that paradigm, but these are the things that the reasons why I think we're gonna come out of 2024. You know, we're at 42,000, roughly 43,000 right now. We could be double that towards the end of the year. It may be higher. So we got to have an incoming in late April. So at block height, 840,000.
Oh, I did not do what our current block height is. Man, Macintosh. 823,771. Let me jot that down. Okay. So that's our current block height. I'm not gonna go through the difficulty or whatever. Fees are still crazy high. Right now, it's looking like about 200 stats per vbite. Very little relief in that. It's all I'm gonna say about that for right now. Still on target. Who was that that said that in Star Wars? Was that Luke? I can't remember.
[00:43:49] McIntosh:
Alright. Sorry. Squirrels run amok. Halvening.
[00:43:55] McIntosh:
The block reward will go from 0.25 Bitcoin down to 3.175 Bitcoin plus the transaction fees. So we will see an immediate cut in the reward. So that's coming. We've got US elections in November November 5th, our general election next year. Why is that important? Well, being the conspiracy theorist that I am, I would argue that regardless of whomever is in Our, whether that be Republican or Democrat, during an election year, they will do everything in their power to make the market look Good. Because a bad economy is the easiest way to get someone out of office. What does that mean? Hey.
If I'm Joe Biden, which I am not, but if I'm Joe Biden, I tap, Powell on the shoulder and say, hey, buddy. you need to start bringing down interest rates because when you start bringing down interest rates, that's gonna mean that people are gonna start investing, and the economy is going to do better. People will feel better and so on and so forth.
[00:45:05] McIntosh:
So that's coming. Now
[00:45:08] McIntosh:
Now we know Powell is already even saying kind of we've reached the top. We're probably gonna hold here for a few more months. I'm expecting by the end of Q1, so January, February, March, Right around that happening that we start seeing the interest rates drop, which will push Jay, boom. People don't realize even though the financial markets are in terrible shape in terms in a lot of metrics, by pure numbers, One of the markets is in an all time high. I don't remember which one, the S and P or whatever, which one of those it was, But they're doing very well. And if they break out, what we're going to see, in my opinion, especially as these interest rates drop. We're gonna see a market boom. I think over the summer, the stock market's gonna go crazy, And we've seen this in the past. We saw it, by the way, after, the great depression started, kind of during that, Well, the thirties. Right? We saw that stuff going on back then.
So the lower interest rates, The stock market will shoot up. Everybody's gonna rah rah rah. Now what's gonna happen, I believe in 2024, we will see. Now this is my speculation, but I believe that we'll see the commercial real estate market crash. Why? Well, I've talked about that. Vacancy rates are very high. This is a combination not a combination. It's primarily driven by COVID. When people left for COVID, when nobody was working at the office, a lot of these people decided they like working remotely. And so companies are coming up with all kinds of, you know, you either work at home or maybe you come in 1 day a week or you do some kind of hybrid thing. Not as much office space usage. Also, we've had a lot of layoffs. We've had hundreds of thousands of people who are getting laid off from these big tech companies and this kind of thing.
We've also had companies going bankrupt quietly. So you've got companies going out of business. You got companies who are downsizing, and you've got companies who are to stay competitive moving to this Kinda hybrid working model where people are working from home more. My own company, not that I own it, but the company I work for, for example, Owned, like, 3 floors of an office building, and I'm not even gonna say where because it's not relevant and it's none of your business. But they've given up one of those. Not that they owned it. They were leasing that. They gave it up, and now that floor just sits it sits empty. There are markets where there are extremely high vacancy rates, and these companies, especially with these high interest rates, are going to start going bankrupt. These are the commercial real estate companies.
Companies like Evergrande and, Country Garden in China. Now those were slightly different, but those are for maybe for different reasons, really. But The those kind of companies, real estate investment companies, companies who own buildings who then lease them out. I do not know what the implications are of that. I don't know if that's going to cause a general crash of the market. I'm not gonna speculate on that. I do not know. I believe it will cause a significant drag, but this market has to reset. The prices have to reset. The expectations have to reset. All of this has to be done before we could even talk about moving forward.
I do think that will happen in 2025. I will say in general also, I don't think 2025 for most people is gonna be any better than 2024. I hope you are doing well. Some of us are, But there's a lot of people, frankly, who are hurting. And, I hope that, you know, you, the listeners, of course, are not in that case. I'm sure some of you are unfortunately and I hope 2025 or 2024 is better for you. I'm not sure that that's gonna be the case. I think I misspoke earlier and said 2025 instead of 2024. But just in general, I think that 2024 is going to be Not a whole lot different than 2023.
We may not reach a level of great depression, and I was pretty doom and gloom about a year or so ago. I'm still very pessimistic, but we may not reach that level at this point. We will see. It is possible that we could pull ourselves out of this and continue to build debt. Oh, by the way, the US is poised. I believe well, we're at, like, $33,900,000,000,000. So we're almost $34,000,000,000,000
[00:50:05] McIntosh:
of debt. I don't think we're gonna quite make it before
[00:50:09] McIntosh:
2024, but I'm sure that will be happening very soon in January. So there you go. That debt has to get taken care of. The global debt has to get taken care of some somewhere. We there's just way, way, way too much.
[00:50:24] McIntosh:
And how that's done through default or or through, you know,
[00:50:30] McIntosh:
I can't think of the word right now, but you're making your money Worthless. It has to be done one way or the other. Remains to be seen how that's done. Anyways, enough about that. Let's talk about some other things. The SEC and various other guns government institutions are going to continue to regulate the crypto market. We have people in our government who are dead set against any kind of crypto other than central bank digital currencies. Elizabeth Warren, who's a senator here in the United States, is a prime example. She has a bill that she is trying to float that I hope get shot down. That will do everything possible to shut down crypto.
I think we will continue to see that in twenty 24, I think you will see it more on the side of crypto rather than Bitcoin, but Bitcoin will see its fair share as well. I hope all this ordinals, inscriptions, stamps, and BRC 20 crap fades off into the background. I don't think we should be censoring Yeah. I don't as a minor, frankly, I'm benefiting from it every day, but I also don't think it's a a good use of the blockchain. I think that we are pricing people out who, are not ready for that. We know ultimately in the long run that blockchain space on the Bitcoin main chain will become very expensive. But right now, I don't want it to be $50 just to do something on the main chain. I think lightning is going to continue to become more mature And more stable, god, I hope they fix all these force channel closures because especially with these high fee environments, that gets to be very expensive to reopen those. I also think it will probably become more centralized, which is something I would love to not see, but I also fully expect.
I don't expect the e cash systems like Fedimint and ARC to take off in 2024. I do expect to see significant process progress on them. I also hope to see serious progress is made towards main chain, I mean, the Bitcoin main chain privacy. Privacy by default should be the model. I would love to see Monero's model essentially on Bitcoin. I don't know why at this point that we haven't given serious attention to that. We can use Whirlpool. We can use things like that, and we'll be talking about those through the year. But I want to see it baked into the main chain. We're over here arguing about covenants and this, that, and the other.
To me, privacy is the number one concern right now on Bitcoin because we don't know what governments around the world are going to do, and I will continue to use Bitcoin regardless of what they say. And I would love to have my right to privacy, which as a US citizen is guaranteed to me in the constitution even though it's routinely trampled on. I also hope that Satoshi plebs listeners stack more sats, To maintain more self custody and gain more knowledge about Bitcoin and financial freedom. That is my predictions for 2024. In terms of price, In case I didn't say it, I think I did at least roughly. I wrote down 50 to 60,000
[00:53:45] McIntosh:
by having, So in just a few months, 80 k plus by end of year. I am
[00:53:53] McIntosh:
purposely underestimating the effects Spot ETF potentially by a lot. I still believe at this point, 2025, Q4, probably November, if you forced my hand on it, will be the top of this cycle. And until proven otherwise, I will maintain that position. So we have an exciting couple of years. We are at the start, if not already past the start. In fact, it could be argued we're past the start of the bull market. So welcome to 2024. Dear listeners, I hope it will be a good one. I need to throw out some shouts, shout outs or whatever you say To some supporters, we did have some support come in after I posted the last episode, and this was for episode 148, mere mortals podcast, which Kyron.
Our friend Kyron over there, sent 2222, a row of ducks. And he said, Satoshi plebs, fitting since you like the socioplebis motto so much. Thank you, Kyron. I put a lot of thought into that name, and I really like it. I hope y'all do as well. Episode 147, Hypersentivosaurus sent us 1,000 sats, our friend in Portugal. And, no message, and then sent another 1,000 sat and said, have a great December. I am going for a family time I tripped to the Netherlands myself, so sounds like they went back home. He's told us before that he is from the Netherlands. So I hope you had a great holiday.
Hypersentivosaurus , I did. I enjoyed myself. I did work too much, But I've told y'all before, I'm a workaholic. I really wanted to get this stuff done, and I'm very pleased with how my I had more stuff. I have a list, but I did get a lot done. So and I also got to spend some time with my family and our friends and doing so tonight in just a few hours actually as well. So very cool. And thank you very much, hypersensitive. I do appreciate your support as always. And anonymous Sent us another 500 sets. I think he's sending 500 every time. Really cool. No message. Thank you. Anonymous as always. I appreciate that.
Not gonna have any news and notes this week. I kinda covered everything. I think ETFs for the last month have kinda been the big news. You've probably already caught up about that elsewhere, and that's fine. Alright. So, of course, Satoshi's Plebs podcast. Boy, I'm gonna have to learn how to say that. That's fun. Y'all know I have trouble sometimes. Satoshis Plebs podcast supports podcasting 2.0. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about time and time again. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast in a couple of ways. You can support it by time, by talent, by treasure.
What do I mean? Well, I've still got projects. I as I've outlined, I will have projects through 2024. There will always be projects. There's always things that people can help out on if they wish. That's the time and talent. If you've got treasure, if you've got some Bitcoin that you wanna support the show with, if this Show brings you value on a week in, week out basis, and I certainly hope it does. Please do 2 things. First of all, Promote the show. Let other people know. Say, hey. There's this guy, Macintosh. Does this show called Satoshi's Plebs? You can find did on any podcast 2 point o app. You can even find it on Apple Podcasts.
But, go take a listen, And you can leave a review, which that would be nice. And then also, you can, if you're using a podcasting 2 point o app, you can stream some sats. You can boost and send a message Just like hypersensitive asaris and mere mortals did and anonymous. You can also if you really love Apple Podcasts, For example, you can go to podcast index.com. You can look up Satoshi's Plebs, and you can boost straight from there with an Alby wallet, which is simply a lightning wallet. So you can do it that way even without a podcasting 2 point o app. Alright. I'm gonna skip through Oh, some of this because, man, I got to get this edited and posted.
Fountain podcast, I believe, is in 1 point o now. If it's not, it will be very soon. It's been a very solid app. I really like what they've done, especially with the clipping. The new clipping feature is a vast improvement. I think I told him it was a 2000% improvement, and I was not exaggerating. The other one used to frustrate me to no end, and this one's beautiful. It just works. It's great. You can check that out, fountain.fm Or there's a number of others. I use, I don't have it right. Customatic. Podcast Guru is another one. There's there's a number of them. You can go to podcastapps.com and take a look.
Anyways, you can now reach me, Mcintosh at podcast index dot social on mastodon, [email protected]. And there's also the website at https://satoshis-plebs.com. So stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I will talk to you soon
[00:59:29] McIntosh:
soon, and have a great
[00:59:33] McIntosh:
New Year's
Review of the past year and plans for 2024
Building infrastructure for Satoshi's Plebs
Podcasting 2.0 developments
Moving hosting to Castapod
Setting up a Bitcoin node and hedge doc for note taking
Setting up an SMP server and activity pub for Satoshi's Plebs site
Testing out the Seed Signer hardware wallet
Ordering a new computer and setting up NextOS
Goals for 2024: installing an Electrum server, attending the Bitcoin conference, setting up a live stream and video version of the podcast, increasing listenership and support, and upgrading equipment
Bitcoin performance in 2023 and predictions for 2024
Bank failures, FTX and Binance legal issues, SEC cracking down on casino coins, and China's Evergrande and Country Gardens
Upcoming events in 2024: Bitcoin halving, US elections, and commercial real estate market
Discussion about the state of the economy in 2025
Regulation of the crypto market by government institutions
Progress on blockchain privacy and e-cash systems
