This week we begin a discussion of privacy principles and how they are implemented in Bitcoin. As government overreach becomes more common and the ability to gather vast amounts of data about everyone becomes easier and more cost effective the right to financial privacy becomes ever more important. Join us as we tackle this thorny issue!
Bitcoin Weekly Closing Price
$43,948.71
Block height at time of recording
824,805
News and Links
VanEck to Support Bitcoin Core Developers
Paperwork Complete for Bitcoin Spot ETFs
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
I can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @[email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:03]
McIntosh:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 7th, and this is episode 150 of Satoshis Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is why privacy matters. Alright. Let's get on into it. I've been having some technical problems. Not sure what's going on. I had to turn off all of my effects In order not to sound like crap, it just was not working. I don't know. I'm in the process of transitioning to the new lap It's not a laptop. The new computer. I've not completed that yet. I have Reaper set up, but I thought I was having problems with that setup of Reaper, but it may actually just Reaper. I'm not sure what's going on, but we are not gonna let that slow us down, are we? So tonight, you get to hear my raw, unfiltered voice. I know you're excited about that, but, And, we will drink the Earl Gray, with our honey to help out our throat, and we will charge on. Let's do our market update. I am going to do everything in my power tonight to keep this down to about 30 minutes to 45 at the most. I'm gonna Go through this, and then we're gonna jump right into tonight's topic, why privacy matters.
I'm gonna talk about some things. Let's do it. Bitcoin price closed January 7th, just a few minutes ago. 6th well, no. It's Been almost 2 hour, no, 2 hours and 40 minutes ago. I got sidetracked. 43,948 Dollars and 71¢, which I do believe means we've had another weekly high. Let me double check that. No. We did not. So we had, I think, 8 weeks in a row, and then, Green, essentially, and then a down and then an up and then a down and then an up and then a down, but it wasn't by much. So, overall, we're still in really good shape. We're on top of that ascending try channel that we've been sitting on since, We got we actually entered the channel on December no. Good gracious, alive.
Back in October, On the 23rd, we were in the channel. This is what I was thinking of. Until oh, let me go down to daily. I'm on the weekly chart. Excuse me for just a second. I like to be as accurate as possible. We exited that channel on December 2nd, and we have been essentially daily closing above it certainly since then. We'll be talking about in the news this week with Bitcoin ETFs, the so called spot ETFs, they are coming. We do look it does look like it will be this week that they will be approved, Probably Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I thought they were gonna slip up and do it Friday, but they did not.
They held off. But all the paperwork, at least, is what I understand is in place. The stamps are ready to be put down, And the companies such as BlackRock are ready to be notified that they can start selling Spot ETFs in very short order. So that's a sneak peek at the news, but let me stick to my hedge doc notes so I don't get off track. Our block height that time we're recording, 824,805 difficulty adjustment It was down or right now, if we had it right now, it'd be down 12.3%. So that's pretty impressive, drop. We've been going up quite a bit, so it'd be a welcome drop that will happen on January 21st, which, of course, Means we just had 1 a couple of days ago, and that difficulty adjustment was up.
And let me see. Come on, time change calendar. 1.65% just a couple days ago. So not a huge spike upward, but yeah. Right now, it's looking like we might have a downward adjustment. I'm hoping for at least half For that, would be nice. The fees in MN pool, 48 sats per vbite right now, which is better than it's been for a while. I've seen it as low as, like, 33. I think that was last night. We still have 1.77 gigabytes of unprocessed transactions, which is just Nuts. Okay. That's it. Market. Not gonna talk about it anymore, until we get to the news.
I will talk about it a little bit more. I'll be honest. Alright. What are we talking about tonight? Why privacy matters? You guys know this has been stewing around with me for a while. This is nothing new, but we're gonna actually spend, I think 2 or 3 weeks talking about this. I am not gonna try and cram all this into 1 week. We're gonna kinda do some background today. And in the next episode, which should be Thursday, we'll start diving into some Bitcoin specific privacy techniques, and then we'll see if we need to do a 3rd episode. So why privacy matters? Why is privacy important? I'm going to talk to you from a US centric view as I always do because I Have lived virtually my entire life in the United States. I have not lived here my entire life, but most of it. The 4th amendment.
This is an amendment to our constitution, which is supposed to be a guarantee of the rights of the United States citizen. The 4th Amendment specifically deals with privacy. There's other amendments that do to an Dent, but this is when they talk about the privacy amendment, this is it. The 4th amendment is very short. It's literally one sentence. It's a long one, but it's one sentence, and I'm gonna read it. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, Papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated And no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched And the persons or things to be seized.
Okay? What does that mean? It means without a warrant, without a court order, You cannot go and search someone's house, their papers, their effects, their private property just because. We see this extend out in theory to when you're driving down the road, they can't just pull you over and search your vehicle because they think that you're a drug dealer because of the way that you look. I'm gonna leave it at that. I know that's not a complete picture of what's going on, but bear with me. So, McIntosh, that is the US View. What is the worldwide view? Well, that's going to depend on what country you live in. But I do understand I do understand that There is a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was published, I believe in the late 19 forties by the United Nations.
In article 12, a right to privacy is expressly stated. What does that mean? Well, that means in theory, the UN buys into this idea that people should have privacy. We see in various countries around the world various levels of this in more Dictatorial comp countries, countries that are authoritarian, we see abuse of this. We see people with a lack of privacy. Why is this so important? It's important, for a lot of reasons, but you here's a common when you start talking about privacy, people will be like, Well, I'm not doing anything wrong, and I will be the 1st person to tell you to my knowledge, which I I have to preface that because with, say, our tax code or our regulations, our laws and regulations In the United States that we currently have, I could be violating a law and not even know it. But to my knowledge, I don't run around violating laws. I have nothing to hide, so to speak. I could be one of these people saying that, but I understand the importance of privacy.
And we should not just give that up because, quote, you know, we're not doing anything wrong. Because there are places, and I have been to one of them at least, where That right is not guaranteed. And, subsequently, you have a government who's out of control, who does everything in his power to monitor the populace and tie everything to that. And I don't wanna dive into that too deeply, But let's just say that that is the case. And they will take things that you're not harming other people, And you're not hurting the government. You're not doing anything except minding your own business, but you're violating A rule of theirs, and therefore, they're going to come down on you very hard.
And you may lose Financial privileges, you may lose, family access. You may be put in prison. And this is not a joke. So these things are important. Your employer shouldn't be able to see where you spend your paycheck. It's not their business. The convenience store that I go to To make a small purchase from, maybe a Coke or candy bar, I know I shouldn't be eating those things, but let's be They shouldn't see how much money I have, how much money I control, and where else I go to make purchases. These are just 2 simple examples. My neighbors don't need to know my financial matters.
My friends don't and I love my friends, but they don't need to know my financial business unless I reveal that to them, If I choose to do that by the way, we should probably actually define Privacy. Privacy is the degree that you have control over access to your information. No. I don't want my employer to know my financial business outside of they pay me a certain amount of money to work for them a certain amount of time, and and that's it. That is that is the extent of the contract that we have made. I don't want the convenience store to know everything that I've ever done. That's privacy.
I can reveal that. It doesn't mean it's a black hole and you can't ever See that. I can choose to allow that to happen, but I have the right to the privacy, to the ability to block that. We get this confused, especially in kind of crypto or Bitcoin circles as we talk about here, with anonymity. Anonymity is just the lack of a link between a transaction and your personal identity. So I'm anonymous if you don't know who I really am. And as y'all know, I Use a pseudonym, Macintosh. That's not my real name. In no part is that my real name. You cannot Google Macintosh and find a picture of me. You find a picture of my ancestor, which I've talked about before. He was a Creek Indian chief, pretty famous around 18/12.
Okay? He was one of my ancestors, but I just chose that name because I knew who he was, I knew what he had done, so on and so forth. And it's a way to for me to have anonymous actions. It's not privacy. It's private if the 2 parties who are involved, typically, are the only people who know about details. That's privacy. I'm giving you 1 Bitcoin. You know that I'm giving you that. I I know that I'm giving it to you and so on and so forth. That's it. But nobody else knows, Even the government, even the state, even your friends, your family, your Church, your employer, all of those things. Right?
Alright. So Keep that in mind as we're talking about all this, and we are specifically talking about privacy. Anonymity is Often linked with that, but they are 2 slightly different things. I came up with what I call a privacy axiom. What is an axiom? An axiom was something I learned in mister Hollingsworth's geometry class. Way back in 9th grade, I was not a very good geometry student, but they had these Axioms and geometry. I don't know. All 3 angles, I think this is an axiom. I hope I'm not wrong. I didn't look it up. All 3 angles of a triangle have to add up to a 180 degrees. I think you could call that an axiom.
It is a provable truth. It is, in some cases, is what they call a self evident truth. That's another way of putting it. It's self evident. If I add up a 100 triangles that the inside angles are going to come out, to a 180 degrees. I think that's right. 60, 60, 60, 90. Yeah. 90, 45, 45. Yeah. 180. Right. You'd be proud of me, mister Hollingsworth, if you're still alive. Anyways, I have an axiom that I came up with, and I did make this up. I've never heard this before, at least in this form. Regardless of what amendments, laws, or articles, articles like this one about from the UN, are in place about privacy, Government surveillance will continue to increase over time.
Think about that. Think about the amount of monitor okay. Just right here in the United States, just recently, It was beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is not a conspiracy theory uncovered that various Three letter organizations, I believe it was the FBI and maybe the CIA, but I don't wanna bet on that. We're involved with Facebook. Facebook? No. Twitter. Sorry. Or maybe it now I'm not even sure. I really should look this up. Regardless, they were monitoring customer traffic right in the building. No privacy. Now Twitter, you can say, well, that's a public service or whatever, but this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. They would have had access to details that They should not have, and they were kicked out. They were removed. Now did, you know, Washington DC burned down? No.
I'll give you another example. I was just reading about this last night. I think I included this in the show notes. So and I'd heard about this before, but there's a case going on. This is crazy. I believe this is kind of a worldwide idea, but Here at least here in the United States, we have these things called safety deposit or safe deposit boxes. When Maybe I've got some valuable papers, some coinage, maybe some jewelry, this kind of thing. I don't wanna keep it at my house. I go to a bank or a business whose that's all they do, and it goes into a safe deposit box. Now that is my property. It is going into this company whose their job is to manage That privacy for me. There's a company in California. It's true story. I think it's in Los Angeles, but I do know it's in California.
They went, excuse me. The FBI went in with some warrant To get at the business's papers. The business was under investigation. This is Very important to understand. You've got the business. You got the safety deposit boxes of the customers. They went in and grabbed all of the safety deposit boxes or safe deposit boxes, took them, Open them all up, cataloged everything in there, and then literally the things of value in there, they took out And they started basically trying to pull into custody in order to keep people from getting their stuff back. Now This is a complete invasion of privacy.
I do not see how you reconcile that with the 4th Amendment, for example, And that is being worked out in our court system right now. That's why I even knew about this. But my point is, this is a fairly recent I I don't think you would have heard about this even 20 years ago. Now maybe it did happen. Maybe I'm being naive. But it certainly become easier for governments to monitor data, for governments to monitor Internet traffic, bank transactions, and all this kind of stuff. And the Bank Secrecy Act don't even get me started. Y'all have heard me talk about this before.
What is it? Less than $10,000, and The bank is basically going to be forced to ask you some questions about what you're doing with your money. With your money. Well, I'm sending it to my grandpa because he needs it to stay in the old folks' home. It's none of your business. That Started in, I believe the 19 seventies in some form. I used to I did know at one point the actual time that started. But regardless, this is just another example of government overreach. Where is all this going, Macintosh? To me, Bitcoin has 2 primary functions.
Too. Anything else? It's a store of value, which we'll be discussing shortly in the news. And it's an so it's an investment, and it's a currency. When I use it as either one of those things, let's flip the tables here for just a second. Let's not talk about Bitcoin. Gold no longer really uses currency, still used by a lot of people As a story value. If I own a block of gold, is it the government's business that I own that block of gold? No. Not really. If I choose to take that block of gold and put it into some financial instrument, that's probably going to mean that there's Some level of privacy that I lose, but I have the ability to keep that gold all by itself in my house in, Say, a safe under lock and key. I don't have to tell anybody about it, and it's my store of value.
So that's one of Bitcoin's primary functions. And I want the ability to have that with as much privacy as possible. How do you do that? Well, it's no KYC. You don't buy it or exchange. You don't I don't know. Offhand, I I I I could that would basically be it. And you will store it in your own self custody on a hardware wallet like a seed sign or this kind of thing. So certainly, theoretically and practically, you can do that. It's difficult to buy without kyc. That's the snag. My suggestion would be to talk to people at your Bitcoin meetup.
You may be able to buy from somebody there. You still need to be careful. But we're going to be talking about that more over coming weeks. So I don't want to get too deep into that. Bitcoin is a currency. Again, second use case, There are a lot of places where buying certain things, doing certain things, making certain financial transactions Can get you in trouble. I will leave it up to you to figure out, are these things Important for you. I'm not going to tell you what you should be doing with your money. What I do wanna do is make it as private as possible because we do not know what's coming down the road.
You know, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I said and the United States cut off The Russia from the SWIFT network, and make no mistake, that's where it came from. I said that's a bad move. Is Russia wrong to invade the Ukraine? From my perception, absolutely, and it still is. That has not changed. But When you start messing with people's money, and that's what that was doing, that to me is like a sacred thing. If I'm stopping the average person in Russia who may or may not agree with what the Kremlin, Is it the I think it's the Kremlin. Does. Then I that's a problem.
And when we shut off the SWIFT network to Russia, that caused problems for the average Russian person. What if you go to see, I'll think I pick on different countries. I don't. Let's go to Canada. Canada's fairly safe. The truckers strike that happened during COVID. I do not know if you agree with that or not. There's certainly a lot of division about that. Whatever. But you had people protesting in Ottawa, truckers, because they felt like they couldn't do their job. And what did the government do? If they can figure out who they were, they cut off access to their bank accounts. That's not right. That's not okay.
You there's no there was no trial. There was no justice. There was no legal process. There was nothing. There was a court order that the government managed to get, And they shut down their bank account. They froze them. That's not okay. You may or may not agree with the truckers. It's not okay to block access to their money. Money is something that everyone needs. And before we presume guilt, which was another amendment, I think, it's certainly in the constitution in whole, You you we have a right not to be presumed guilty, essentially. You have to prove somebody does something in order to take their money, to take their property. That did not happen in this case. And it does not happen with these random Seizures, just like the FBI thing that I was talking about.
The people who had cash, gold, jewelry, Other things like that in those safe deposit boxes, they were not given a trial. They never appeared before a judge. They There was no guilt on their part. This was not about them. This was some vacuous power grab by the FBI because they're trying to, as far as I can tell, just grab a bunch of stuff. So I want my money to be as private as possible. Let's talk about Bitcoin to wrap this up. I'm 30 minutes in. I Promise you I'm gonna be done in 45 minutes. In total, I'm I'm gonna stick to this this year. 30, 45 minute episodes. I'm gonna tighten it up. Bitcoin is as private as you want it to be. This is a perception. I wrote this straight off of Twitter.
No. It's not. No. It's not. I've been involved with Bitcoin since 2013. When you say something like that, you presume that a person has the knowledge to buy it without fiat, Without sorry. Without going through an exchange, without maybe they mine it. Maybe they Buy it from somebody, at a Bitcoin, meetup. But you don't know who that person is, so maybe they're tracking you. I mean, it is Possible, and it has happened. Bitcoin by default is not private. And to be private, to have some level of privacy, and we're gonna be talking about The ways that we can do that over the next couple weeks and what I hope our future innovations in that, It takes technical knowledge at this point. It's not just point, click, tap, doop, bop, bop, and it costs Money in every case that I know of.
It's not built, for the most part, into the protocol level of the Bitcoin main chain. So when people say things like that, and I copied that Right off the Twitter, Bitcoin is as private as you wanna be. No fiat, no KYC. That presumes I am a tech smart person with access to things that the average person out there, even in the United States, won't have much less A, quote, developing country who, you know, maybe they make $5 a day And any kind of fees on top of Bitcoin, if they're even able to do Bitcoin, are a no go. So one of the most misunderstood benefits of Bitcoin's blockchain, its main chain, is its pseudo anonymity.
This is because, Like I said, we kind of use these terms anonymous and privacy, interchangeably. That's not really true. And it's really important when you're dealing with a Bitcoin transaction. Your transaction cannot be anonymous if it is linked To your personal identity. If you do anything through Coinbase, through Kraken, through any of these exchanges that you have to key in your personal identification or take a picture or whatever to prove that you are you. You're now linked to that. And it's only private if we can the 2 parties involved are the only people who have access to those details. The amount, where it came from, where it's going, etcetera. And who's involved?
Because of the nature of a blockchain, This so called ledger, this actually counteracts completely this concept of privacy. The ledger is publicly distributed data. The transactions between 2 or more parties with some level of anonymity. That anonymity is what Allows users to maintain some level of privacy while ensuring the ability to audit the 21,000,000 in total Bitcoin. Of course, Not all those have been mined. You could argue they've not all been created, etcetera. So that's a problem. Let's see. We want privacy, at least I do. And I this is something I will argue about.
But Bitcoin as a blockchain, as As a ledger of record directly opposes that. So how do we how do we get around that? Well, that's what we'll be talking about over the next couple of weeks. How can we do that? What are some things that can happen? Alright. News. Not a whole lot, but there were a few things. I I wanna talk about the ETFs. I'm also gonna talk about this news came out. I wanna go ahead and throw this out real quick, and then we'll dive into ETFs. Bitmain is the main number one immensely larger by volume Bitcoin miner out there. They're based in mainland China, if I'm not mistaken, in South China.
And they're huge, like, Probably, I don't know, 90 plus percent of the miners out there are Bitmain. So it turns out and I don't know why this came up, but it did. Bring this up real quick. There was some oh, so Core Scientific Was a is a hosting company, a mining hosting company. They mine. They also they also host other people's miners. They're in bankruptcy or some state of bankruptcy. And because of that, they're dealing with the court. They had actually received court approval to purchase, and I heard a guy on a mining podcast this week talking about this. They're purchasing 27,000 s nineteen j x piece from Bitmain, and, and here's the punchline.
And they're going to host an additional 27,000 s nineteen j x piece for the Chinese mining manufacturer. There's kind of been rumors about this, but this is definitive. This is a legal document. Core Scientific is hosting or will host 27,000 of the Bitmain miners for Bitmain. So Bitmain itself, the company, will be mining Bitcoin if they are not already. What does that mean? The company that most people purchase miners from is directly competing with the miners. The irony of this is just fantastic. Now My miners, they're all bit main. Why are they bit main? Well, they run well. They are cheaper than, say, The next one or any of them, really.
And they're the most convenient to get. And So 9 tenths probably of the minors out there, like I said, are bit man. There's certainly a significant percentage, well over 50%. But this same company is basically competing against the people that they sell product to. It's crazy. I hope This either changes, I don't think it will, or people start migrating to other companies. I really would like to see more diversity in the Bitcoin mining space in terms of the hardware. I think we will slowly see that over the next few years, probably 5 plus years, 5 to 10 years.
Anyways, that was some very interesting news for the miners out there. Let's talk about ETFs. There was so much news about the ETFs this week. Twitter was was all up and whatever because because They thought that basically the approval was gonna come in the last couple of days, and it didn't happen. So I think we're looking at Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, kind of the original time frame if y'all remember, 8 January 8 through 10 Based on when the filing started, to see this, and I do think they'll be approved. And I think when that happens, we will see a lot of money flow into Bitcoin. I think a decent portion of it will happen immediately.
It would not surprise me. So this is kind of the 2nd part of my market update. I think if that happens this week, we can have 1 or 2 things. If If the SEC, for whatever reason, comes out and says this is not happening anytime soon, that's gonna drop the market. It may drop 5, 10 $1,000 wouldn't surprise me. People are so wound up about these ETFs. It'll bounce back, but I'm just saying it could happen. If it gets approved and there's in my mind, there's 95% chance of that happening, Then do we break 50,000? I'm fairly certain we will over the next, say, month. So say Let's say by the end of February.
Could we break 60,000 by the end of February? I believe we could. And I think what I predicted I'll have to go back and look at my notes. But I wrote it up in the notes for last episode. By the happening, so in April, I think we'll be above all time highs. I think Some of it will be the ETFs. Some of it will just be the general environment and what we see going on in Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff. I fully expect that. So you heard it first here, probably not, but, yeah, I think that's what's gonna happen. Now I've said this or I've tweeted this or whatever.
Does Bitcoin need these ETFs? Absolutely not. We know do not. We do not 100% need these ETFs. What this will do, however, is start to open up the gates to the Wall Great money. It will start pouring in. These are big companies that we're talking about. BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity. Van Eck. Van Eck, actually, in in another little bit of news. I thought this was really cool. And, well, we'll get to the cool part, and then we'll talk about what people are saying. They're saying that they're gonna donate a Pretty decent amount. 5 I think it was 5% of the fees that they collect to Bitcoin core development.
So, basically, it will help out the Bitcoin court work that goes on that's so necessary. Now everybody's like, oh, well, they'll be in the pocket of Van Eck and blah blah blah. I suppose that's theoretically possible, but honestly, I don't think that's what's gonna happen. I really don't think that they're gonna sway any core developer to do something to benefit an ETF or anything like that. I don't even see how Possible. But I wouldn't completely write it off, but it kinda seems like a conspiracy theory to me. So, anyways, that was pretty cool.
But everybody has updated They did their final documents. I think the vast majority of them have been updated. There's, like, a dozen companies involved at this point, And it's just about time. So Monday morning, they may approve all this, and you may see the price. I mean, I may barely get this out in time. Now right now, The Bitcoin price, it looks like it dropped. It did. Crazy. While I was recording, Down to 43,300. Actually, down to 43154, which literally was the top of the ascending triangle. Ascending channel. That ascending channel is just nuts how well that thing is holding up. It's crazy. But we get bad news, it'll break right through that channel.
I I would not be surprised at all to I see 35,000, 33,000, 30,000. I think once you hit 30, we're gonna see a lot of buying going on. But, yeah, I mean, it could be bad news and it could really drop, or it could be the exact opposite. Statistically, I think at this point, most likely, we're seeing that upward push, and we're certainly set up for it. We have the perfect, beautiful, Ascending channel that I've been talking about, we're up above it. We've built a bull flag, actually. We're kinda ready to rock and roll. When it breaks, basically, that 4044a half, $45,000 level for the day or longer.
Really, probably even a little longer than that. We're gonna be off to the races, and it won't stop until we at least hit 50,000. I definitely could see it going higher, at least temporarily. So there we go. 42 minutes in, we're gonna thank some supporters, and we are gonna shut it down. Awesome. You know, it's funny this week. I had one boost. I actually had more streaming than normal, so I I do appreciate that. We had user 487940 799 sent a 100 sats on January 1st, listened to the year end review, and, boosted a 100 sats. Like I said, And by the way, user 48794799.
I really appreciate that, of course. But I do wanna mention, we did have some streaming going on as well, and, of course, I appreciate that as well. So A little down, I have not been as regular as I would like to be. Going forth from the in the New Year, I've got to finish this transition over to the new computer, Figure out things with Reaper. I don't completely have it set up. I'm not sure completely, but hopefully, in the next few days, I can get that resolved. And we're gonna talk about privacy for a couple weeks, and then we're gonna roll into some other things. So we will see how that all goes.
What else do we have to wrap it up? We're a podcasting 2 point o podcast. Of course, we're a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You, as the listener, Can support the podcast because of the value that you receive from this podcast. That's what I'm looking for. I do depend on my audience to grow this podcast. I depend on people supporting the show. If you like what you hear, please go out and tell somebody. Go put a review. Go put it on Apple Podcasts. I used to say, don't put it on Apple Podcasts. I'm not an Apple Podcasts fan. The podcast 2.0 stuff, which is available at podcastapps.com, is much, much better than the Apple Podcast apps.
But, hey, if you're using Apple Podcasts and you wanna put a review up there, go for it. I would really appreciate that from the bottom of my heart. I don't know where else you can go and put reviews anywhere that you could. I would appreciate that. How do you get a hold of me? Well, one really easy way is just send me a boost. This user 48 whatever sorry. User 48 blah blah blah. I don't remember the number, but they could've sent me a boost. They could've said, hey, McIntosh. Great show. They could've said, hey, McIntosh. You suck. I don't care.
I am always looking for feedback. Hey. Your sound stinks. Well, tonight, maybe It's a little off because I've got all the effects turned off. I really don't know what's going on there, and I apologize for that. But yeah. Whatever. Just give me feedback, good or bad. I can take both. I'm a big boy. Let me know. That's it. You can reach out to me. I'm on Twitter at McIntoshFintech . Sorry. Yeah. McintoshFintech. I'm on mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. You can reach me by email at macintosh@satoshisplebs .com.
And, of course, there's the website satoshis-plebs.com as well. That's about it. I'll talk to you guys next Thursday.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 7th, and this is episode 150 of Satoshis Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is why privacy matters. Alright. Let's get on into it. I've been having some technical problems. Not sure what's going on. I had to turn off all of my effects In order not to sound like crap, it just was not working. I don't know. I'm in the process of transitioning to the new lap It's not a laptop. The new computer. I've not completed that yet. I have Reaper set up, but I thought I was having problems with that setup of Reaper, but it may actually just Reaper. I'm not sure what's going on, but we are not gonna let that slow us down, are we? So tonight, you get to hear my raw, unfiltered voice. I know you're excited about that, but, And, we will drink the Earl Gray, with our honey to help out our throat, and we will charge on. Let's do our market update. I am going to do everything in my power tonight to keep this down to about 30 minutes to 45 at the most. I'm gonna Go through this, and then we're gonna jump right into tonight's topic, why privacy matters.
I'm gonna talk about some things. Let's do it. Bitcoin price closed January 7th, just a few minutes ago. 6th well, no. It's Been almost 2 hour, no, 2 hours and 40 minutes ago. I got sidetracked. 43,948 Dollars and 71¢, which I do believe means we've had another weekly high. Let me double check that. No. We did not. So we had, I think, 8 weeks in a row, and then, Green, essentially, and then a down and then an up and then a down and then an up and then a down, but it wasn't by much. So, overall, we're still in really good shape. We're on top of that ascending try channel that we've been sitting on since, We got we actually entered the channel on December no. Good gracious, alive.
Back in October, On the 23rd, we were in the channel. This is what I was thinking of. Until oh, let me go down to daily. I'm on the weekly chart. Excuse me for just a second. I like to be as accurate as possible. We exited that channel on December 2nd, and we have been essentially daily closing above it certainly since then. We'll be talking about in the news this week with Bitcoin ETFs, the so called spot ETFs, they are coming. We do look it does look like it will be this week that they will be approved, Probably Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. I thought they were gonna slip up and do it Friday, but they did not.
They held off. But all the paperwork, at least, is what I understand is in place. The stamps are ready to be put down, And the companies such as BlackRock are ready to be notified that they can start selling Spot ETFs in very short order. So that's a sneak peek at the news, but let me stick to my hedge doc notes so I don't get off track. Our block height that time we're recording, 824,805 difficulty adjustment It was down or right now, if we had it right now, it'd be down 12.3%. So that's pretty impressive, drop. We've been going up quite a bit, so it'd be a welcome drop that will happen on January 21st, which, of course, Means we just had 1 a couple of days ago, and that difficulty adjustment was up.
And let me see. Come on, time change calendar. 1.65% just a couple days ago. So not a huge spike upward, but yeah. Right now, it's looking like we might have a downward adjustment. I'm hoping for at least half For that, would be nice. The fees in MN pool, 48 sats per vbite right now, which is better than it's been for a while. I've seen it as low as, like, 33. I think that was last night. We still have 1.77 gigabytes of unprocessed transactions, which is just Nuts. Okay. That's it. Market. Not gonna talk about it anymore, until we get to the news.
I will talk about it a little bit more. I'll be honest. Alright. What are we talking about tonight? Why privacy matters? You guys know this has been stewing around with me for a while. This is nothing new, but we're gonna actually spend, I think 2 or 3 weeks talking about this. I am not gonna try and cram all this into 1 week. We're gonna kinda do some background today. And in the next episode, which should be Thursday, we'll start diving into some Bitcoin specific privacy techniques, and then we'll see if we need to do a 3rd episode. So why privacy matters? Why is privacy important? I'm going to talk to you from a US centric view as I always do because I Have lived virtually my entire life in the United States. I have not lived here my entire life, but most of it. The 4th amendment.
This is an amendment to our constitution, which is supposed to be a guarantee of the rights of the United States citizen. The 4th Amendment specifically deals with privacy. There's other amendments that do to an Dent, but this is when they talk about the privacy amendment, this is it. The 4th amendment is very short. It's literally one sentence. It's a long one, but it's one sentence, and I'm gonna read it. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, Papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated And no warrant shall issue, but upon probable cause supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched And the persons or things to be seized.
Okay? What does that mean? It means without a warrant, without a court order, You cannot go and search someone's house, their papers, their effects, their private property just because. We see this extend out in theory to when you're driving down the road, they can't just pull you over and search your vehicle because they think that you're a drug dealer because of the way that you look. I'm gonna leave it at that. I know that's not a complete picture of what's going on, but bear with me. So, McIntosh, that is the US View. What is the worldwide view? Well, that's going to depend on what country you live in. But I do understand I do understand that There is a document called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This was published, I believe in the late 19 forties by the United Nations.
In article 12, a right to privacy is expressly stated. What does that mean? Well, that means in theory, the UN buys into this idea that people should have privacy. We see in various countries around the world various levels of this in more Dictatorial comp countries, countries that are authoritarian, we see abuse of this. We see people with a lack of privacy. Why is this so important? It's important, for a lot of reasons, but you here's a common when you start talking about privacy, people will be like, Well, I'm not doing anything wrong, and I will be the 1st person to tell you to my knowledge, which I I have to preface that because with, say, our tax code or our regulations, our laws and regulations In the United States that we currently have, I could be violating a law and not even know it. But to my knowledge, I don't run around violating laws. I have nothing to hide, so to speak. I could be one of these people saying that, but I understand the importance of privacy.
And we should not just give that up because, quote, you know, we're not doing anything wrong. Because there are places, and I have been to one of them at least, where That right is not guaranteed. And, subsequently, you have a government who's out of control, who does everything in his power to monitor the populace and tie everything to that. And I don't wanna dive into that too deeply, But let's just say that that is the case. And they will take things that you're not harming other people, And you're not hurting the government. You're not doing anything except minding your own business, but you're violating A rule of theirs, and therefore, they're going to come down on you very hard.
And you may lose Financial privileges, you may lose, family access. You may be put in prison. And this is not a joke. So these things are important. Your employer shouldn't be able to see where you spend your paycheck. It's not their business. The convenience store that I go to To make a small purchase from, maybe a Coke or candy bar, I know I shouldn't be eating those things, but let's be They shouldn't see how much money I have, how much money I control, and where else I go to make purchases. These are just 2 simple examples. My neighbors don't need to know my financial matters.
My friends don't and I love my friends, but they don't need to know my financial business unless I reveal that to them, If I choose to do that by the way, we should probably actually define Privacy. Privacy is the degree that you have control over access to your information. No. I don't want my employer to know my financial business outside of they pay me a certain amount of money to work for them a certain amount of time, and and that's it. That is that is the extent of the contract that we have made. I don't want the convenience store to know everything that I've ever done. That's privacy.
I can reveal that. It doesn't mean it's a black hole and you can't ever See that. I can choose to allow that to happen, but I have the right to the privacy, to the ability to block that. We get this confused, especially in kind of crypto or Bitcoin circles as we talk about here, with anonymity. Anonymity is just the lack of a link between a transaction and your personal identity. So I'm anonymous if you don't know who I really am. And as y'all know, I Use a pseudonym, Macintosh. That's not my real name. In no part is that my real name. You cannot Google Macintosh and find a picture of me. You find a picture of my ancestor, which I've talked about before. He was a Creek Indian chief, pretty famous around 18/12.
Okay? He was one of my ancestors, but I just chose that name because I knew who he was, I knew what he had done, so on and so forth. And it's a way to for me to have anonymous actions. It's not privacy. It's private if the 2 parties who are involved, typically, are the only people who know about details. That's privacy. I'm giving you 1 Bitcoin. You know that I'm giving you that. I I know that I'm giving it to you and so on and so forth. That's it. But nobody else knows, Even the government, even the state, even your friends, your family, your Church, your employer, all of those things. Right?
Alright. So Keep that in mind as we're talking about all this, and we are specifically talking about privacy. Anonymity is Often linked with that, but they are 2 slightly different things. I came up with what I call a privacy axiom. What is an axiom? An axiom was something I learned in mister Hollingsworth's geometry class. Way back in 9th grade, I was not a very good geometry student, but they had these Axioms and geometry. I don't know. All 3 angles, I think this is an axiom. I hope I'm not wrong. I didn't look it up. All 3 angles of a triangle have to add up to a 180 degrees. I think you could call that an axiom.
It is a provable truth. It is, in some cases, is what they call a self evident truth. That's another way of putting it. It's self evident. If I add up a 100 triangles that the inside angles are going to come out, to a 180 degrees. I think that's right. 60, 60, 60, 90. Yeah. 90, 45, 45. Yeah. 180. Right. You'd be proud of me, mister Hollingsworth, if you're still alive. Anyways, I have an axiom that I came up with, and I did make this up. I've never heard this before, at least in this form. Regardless of what amendments, laws, or articles, articles like this one about from the UN, are in place about privacy, Government surveillance will continue to increase over time.
Think about that. Think about the amount of monitor okay. Just right here in the United States, just recently, It was beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is not a conspiracy theory uncovered that various Three letter organizations, I believe it was the FBI and maybe the CIA, but I don't wanna bet on that. We're involved with Facebook. Facebook? No. Twitter. Sorry. Or maybe it now I'm not even sure. I really should look this up. Regardless, they were monitoring customer traffic right in the building. No privacy. Now Twitter, you can say, well, that's a public service or whatever, but this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. They would have had access to details that They should not have, and they were kicked out. They were removed. Now did, you know, Washington DC burned down? No.
I'll give you another example. I was just reading about this last night. I think I included this in the show notes. So and I'd heard about this before, but there's a case going on. This is crazy. I believe this is kind of a worldwide idea, but Here at least here in the United States, we have these things called safety deposit or safe deposit boxes. When Maybe I've got some valuable papers, some coinage, maybe some jewelry, this kind of thing. I don't wanna keep it at my house. I go to a bank or a business whose that's all they do, and it goes into a safe deposit box. Now that is my property. It is going into this company whose their job is to manage That privacy for me. There's a company in California. It's true story. I think it's in Los Angeles, but I do know it's in California.
They went, excuse me. The FBI went in with some warrant To get at the business's papers. The business was under investigation. This is Very important to understand. You've got the business. You got the safety deposit boxes of the customers. They went in and grabbed all of the safety deposit boxes or safe deposit boxes, took them, Open them all up, cataloged everything in there, and then literally the things of value in there, they took out And they started basically trying to pull into custody in order to keep people from getting their stuff back. Now This is a complete invasion of privacy.
I do not see how you reconcile that with the 4th Amendment, for example, And that is being worked out in our court system right now. That's why I even knew about this. But my point is, this is a fairly recent I I don't think you would have heard about this even 20 years ago. Now maybe it did happen. Maybe I'm being naive. But it certainly become easier for governments to monitor data, for governments to monitor Internet traffic, bank transactions, and all this kind of stuff. And the Bank Secrecy Act don't even get me started. Y'all have heard me talk about this before.
What is it? Less than $10,000, and The bank is basically going to be forced to ask you some questions about what you're doing with your money. With your money. Well, I'm sending it to my grandpa because he needs it to stay in the old folks' home. It's none of your business. That Started in, I believe the 19 seventies in some form. I used to I did know at one point the actual time that started. But regardless, this is just another example of government overreach. Where is all this going, Macintosh? To me, Bitcoin has 2 primary functions.
Too. Anything else? It's a store of value, which we'll be discussing shortly in the news. And it's an so it's an investment, and it's a currency. When I use it as either one of those things, let's flip the tables here for just a second. Let's not talk about Bitcoin. Gold no longer really uses currency, still used by a lot of people As a story value. If I own a block of gold, is it the government's business that I own that block of gold? No. Not really. If I choose to take that block of gold and put it into some financial instrument, that's probably going to mean that there's Some level of privacy that I lose, but I have the ability to keep that gold all by itself in my house in, Say, a safe under lock and key. I don't have to tell anybody about it, and it's my store of value.
So that's one of Bitcoin's primary functions. And I want the ability to have that with as much privacy as possible. How do you do that? Well, it's no KYC. You don't buy it or exchange. You don't I don't know. Offhand, I I I I could that would basically be it. And you will store it in your own self custody on a hardware wallet like a seed sign or this kind of thing. So certainly, theoretically and practically, you can do that. It's difficult to buy without kyc. That's the snag. My suggestion would be to talk to people at your Bitcoin meetup.
You may be able to buy from somebody there. You still need to be careful. But we're going to be talking about that more over coming weeks. So I don't want to get too deep into that. Bitcoin is a currency. Again, second use case, There are a lot of places where buying certain things, doing certain things, making certain financial transactions Can get you in trouble. I will leave it up to you to figure out, are these things Important for you. I'm not going to tell you what you should be doing with your money. What I do wanna do is make it as private as possible because we do not know what's coming down the road.
You know, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I said and the United States cut off The Russia from the SWIFT network, and make no mistake, that's where it came from. I said that's a bad move. Is Russia wrong to invade the Ukraine? From my perception, absolutely, and it still is. That has not changed. But When you start messing with people's money, and that's what that was doing, that to me is like a sacred thing. If I'm stopping the average person in Russia who may or may not agree with what the Kremlin, Is it the I think it's the Kremlin. Does. Then I that's a problem.
And when we shut off the SWIFT network to Russia, that caused problems for the average Russian person. What if you go to see, I'll think I pick on different countries. I don't. Let's go to Canada. Canada's fairly safe. The truckers strike that happened during COVID. I do not know if you agree with that or not. There's certainly a lot of division about that. Whatever. But you had people protesting in Ottawa, truckers, because they felt like they couldn't do their job. And what did the government do? If they can figure out who they were, they cut off access to their bank accounts. That's not right. That's not okay.
You there's no there was no trial. There was no justice. There was no legal process. There was nothing. There was a court order that the government managed to get, And they shut down their bank account. They froze them. That's not okay. You may or may not agree with the truckers. It's not okay to block access to their money. Money is something that everyone needs. And before we presume guilt, which was another amendment, I think, it's certainly in the constitution in whole, You you we have a right not to be presumed guilty, essentially. You have to prove somebody does something in order to take their money, to take their property. That did not happen in this case. And it does not happen with these random Seizures, just like the FBI thing that I was talking about.
The people who had cash, gold, jewelry, Other things like that in those safe deposit boxes, they were not given a trial. They never appeared before a judge. They There was no guilt on their part. This was not about them. This was some vacuous power grab by the FBI because they're trying to, as far as I can tell, just grab a bunch of stuff. So I want my money to be as private as possible. Let's talk about Bitcoin to wrap this up. I'm 30 minutes in. I Promise you I'm gonna be done in 45 minutes. In total, I'm I'm gonna stick to this this year. 30, 45 minute episodes. I'm gonna tighten it up. Bitcoin is as private as you want it to be. This is a perception. I wrote this straight off of Twitter.
No. It's not. No. It's not. I've been involved with Bitcoin since 2013. When you say something like that, you presume that a person has the knowledge to buy it without fiat, Without sorry. Without going through an exchange, without maybe they mine it. Maybe they Buy it from somebody, at a Bitcoin, meetup. But you don't know who that person is, so maybe they're tracking you. I mean, it is Possible, and it has happened. Bitcoin by default is not private. And to be private, to have some level of privacy, and we're gonna be talking about The ways that we can do that over the next couple weeks and what I hope our future innovations in that, It takes technical knowledge at this point. It's not just point, click, tap, doop, bop, bop, and it costs Money in every case that I know of.
It's not built, for the most part, into the protocol level of the Bitcoin main chain. So when people say things like that, and I copied that Right off the Twitter, Bitcoin is as private as you wanna be. No fiat, no KYC. That presumes I am a tech smart person with access to things that the average person out there, even in the United States, won't have much less A, quote, developing country who, you know, maybe they make $5 a day And any kind of fees on top of Bitcoin, if they're even able to do Bitcoin, are a no go. So one of the most misunderstood benefits of Bitcoin's blockchain, its main chain, is its pseudo anonymity.
This is because, Like I said, we kind of use these terms anonymous and privacy, interchangeably. That's not really true. And it's really important when you're dealing with a Bitcoin transaction. Your transaction cannot be anonymous if it is linked To your personal identity. If you do anything through Coinbase, through Kraken, through any of these exchanges that you have to key in your personal identification or take a picture or whatever to prove that you are you. You're now linked to that. And it's only private if we can the 2 parties involved are the only people who have access to those details. The amount, where it came from, where it's going, etcetera. And who's involved?
Because of the nature of a blockchain, This so called ledger, this actually counteracts completely this concept of privacy. The ledger is publicly distributed data. The transactions between 2 or more parties with some level of anonymity. That anonymity is what Allows users to maintain some level of privacy while ensuring the ability to audit the 21,000,000 in total Bitcoin. Of course, Not all those have been mined. You could argue they've not all been created, etcetera. So that's a problem. Let's see. We want privacy, at least I do. And I this is something I will argue about.
But Bitcoin as a blockchain, as As a ledger of record directly opposes that. So how do we how do we get around that? Well, that's what we'll be talking about over the next couple of weeks. How can we do that? What are some things that can happen? Alright. News. Not a whole lot, but there were a few things. I I wanna talk about the ETFs. I'm also gonna talk about this news came out. I wanna go ahead and throw this out real quick, and then we'll dive into ETFs. Bitmain is the main number one immensely larger by volume Bitcoin miner out there. They're based in mainland China, if I'm not mistaken, in South China.
And they're huge, like, Probably, I don't know, 90 plus percent of the miners out there are Bitmain. So it turns out and I don't know why this came up, but it did. Bring this up real quick. There was some oh, so Core Scientific Was a is a hosting company, a mining hosting company. They mine. They also they also host other people's miners. They're in bankruptcy or some state of bankruptcy. And because of that, they're dealing with the court. They had actually received court approval to purchase, and I heard a guy on a mining podcast this week talking about this. They're purchasing 27,000 s nineteen j x piece from Bitmain, and, and here's the punchline.
And they're going to host an additional 27,000 s nineteen j x piece for the Chinese mining manufacturer. There's kind of been rumors about this, but this is definitive. This is a legal document. Core Scientific is hosting or will host 27,000 of the Bitmain miners for Bitmain. So Bitmain itself, the company, will be mining Bitcoin if they are not already. What does that mean? The company that most people purchase miners from is directly competing with the miners. The irony of this is just fantastic. Now My miners, they're all bit main. Why are they bit main? Well, they run well. They are cheaper than, say, The next one or any of them, really.
And they're the most convenient to get. And So 9 tenths probably of the minors out there, like I said, are bit man. There's certainly a significant percentage, well over 50%. But this same company is basically competing against the people that they sell product to. It's crazy. I hope This either changes, I don't think it will, or people start migrating to other companies. I really would like to see more diversity in the Bitcoin mining space in terms of the hardware. I think we will slowly see that over the next few years, probably 5 plus years, 5 to 10 years.
Anyways, that was some very interesting news for the miners out there. Let's talk about ETFs. There was so much news about the ETFs this week. Twitter was was all up and whatever because because They thought that basically the approval was gonna come in the last couple of days, and it didn't happen. So I think we're looking at Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, kind of the original time frame if y'all remember, 8 January 8 through 10 Based on when the filing started, to see this, and I do think they'll be approved. And I think when that happens, we will see a lot of money flow into Bitcoin. I think a decent portion of it will happen immediately.
It would not surprise me. So this is kind of the 2nd part of my market update. I think if that happens this week, we can have 1 or 2 things. If If the SEC, for whatever reason, comes out and says this is not happening anytime soon, that's gonna drop the market. It may drop 5, 10 $1,000 wouldn't surprise me. People are so wound up about these ETFs. It'll bounce back, but I'm just saying it could happen. If it gets approved and there's in my mind, there's 95% chance of that happening, Then do we break 50,000? I'm fairly certain we will over the next, say, month. So say Let's say by the end of February.
Could we break 60,000 by the end of February? I believe we could. And I think what I predicted I'll have to go back and look at my notes. But I wrote it up in the notes for last episode. By the happening, so in April, I think we'll be above all time highs. I think Some of it will be the ETFs. Some of it will just be the general environment and what we see going on in Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff. I fully expect that. So you heard it first here, probably not, but, yeah, I think that's what's gonna happen. Now I've said this or I've tweeted this or whatever.
Does Bitcoin need these ETFs? Absolutely not. We know do not. We do not 100% need these ETFs. What this will do, however, is start to open up the gates to the Wall Great money. It will start pouring in. These are big companies that we're talking about. BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity. Van Eck. Van Eck, actually, in in another little bit of news. I thought this was really cool. And, well, we'll get to the cool part, and then we'll talk about what people are saying. They're saying that they're gonna donate a Pretty decent amount. 5 I think it was 5% of the fees that they collect to Bitcoin core development.
So, basically, it will help out the Bitcoin court work that goes on that's so necessary. Now everybody's like, oh, well, they'll be in the pocket of Van Eck and blah blah blah. I suppose that's theoretically possible, but honestly, I don't think that's what's gonna happen. I really don't think that they're gonna sway any core developer to do something to benefit an ETF or anything like that. I don't even see how Possible. But I wouldn't completely write it off, but it kinda seems like a conspiracy theory to me. So, anyways, that was pretty cool.
But everybody has updated They did their final documents. I think the vast majority of them have been updated. There's, like, a dozen companies involved at this point, And it's just about time. So Monday morning, they may approve all this, and you may see the price. I mean, I may barely get this out in time. Now right now, The Bitcoin price, it looks like it dropped. It did. Crazy. While I was recording, Down to 43,300. Actually, down to 43154, which literally was the top of the ascending triangle. Ascending channel. That ascending channel is just nuts how well that thing is holding up. It's crazy. But we get bad news, it'll break right through that channel.
I I would not be surprised at all to I see 35,000, 33,000, 30,000. I think once you hit 30, we're gonna see a lot of buying going on. But, yeah, I mean, it could be bad news and it could really drop, or it could be the exact opposite. Statistically, I think at this point, most likely, we're seeing that upward push, and we're certainly set up for it. We have the perfect, beautiful, Ascending channel that I've been talking about, we're up above it. We've built a bull flag, actually. We're kinda ready to rock and roll. When it breaks, basically, that 4044a half, $45,000 level for the day or longer.
Really, probably even a little longer than that. We're gonna be off to the races, and it won't stop until we at least hit 50,000. I definitely could see it going higher, at least temporarily. So there we go. 42 minutes in, we're gonna thank some supporters, and we are gonna shut it down. Awesome. You know, it's funny this week. I had one boost. I actually had more streaming than normal, so I I do appreciate that. We had user 487940 799 sent a 100 sats on January 1st, listened to the year end review, and, boosted a 100 sats. Like I said, And by the way, user 48794799.
I really appreciate that, of course. But I do wanna mention, we did have some streaming going on as well, and, of course, I appreciate that as well. So A little down, I have not been as regular as I would like to be. Going forth from the in the New Year, I've got to finish this transition over to the new computer, Figure out things with Reaper. I don't completely have it set up. I'm not sure completely, but hopefully, in the next few days, I can get that resolved. And we're gonna talk about privacy for a couple weeks, and then we're gonna roll into some other things. So we will see how that all goes.
What else do we have to wrap it up? We're a podcasting 2 point o podcast. Of course, we're a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You, as the listener, Can support the podcast because of the value that you receive from this podcast. That's what I'm looking for. I do depend on my audience to grow this podcast. I depend on people supporting the show. If you like what you hear, please go out and tell somebody. Go put a review. Go put it on Apple Podcasts. I used to say, don't put it on Apple Podcasts. I'm not an Apple Podcasts fan. The podcast 2.0 stuff, which is available at podcastapps.com, is much, much better than the Apple Podcast apps.
But, hey, if you're using Apple Podcasts and you wanna put a review up there, go for it. I would really appreciate that from the bottom of my heart. I don't know where else you can go and put reviews anywhere that you could. I would appreciate that. How do you get a hold of me? Well, one really easy way is just send me a boost. This user 48 whatever sorry. User 48 blah blah blah. I don't remember the number, but they could've sent me a boost. They could've said, hey, McIntosh. Great show. They could've said, hey, McIntosh. You suck. I don't care.
I am always looking for feedback. Hey. Your sound stinks. Well, tonight, maybe It's a little off because I've got all the effects turned off. I really don't know what's going on there, and I apologize for that. But yeah. Whatever. Just give me feedback, good or bad. I can take both. I'm a big boy. Let me know. That's it. You can reach out to me. I'm on Twitter at McIntoshFintech . Sorry. Yeah. McintoshFintech. I'm on mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. You can reach me by email at macintosh@satoshisplebs .com.
And, of course, there's the website satoshis-plebs.com as well. That's about it. I'll talk to you guys next Thursday.
Introduction to the topic of privacy and its importance
Explanation of the 4th Amendment and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Definition of privacy and its distinction from anonymity
Discussion of Bitcoin's primary functions and the need for privacy
Analysis of the potential impact of ETF approval on the market
Acknowledgment of supporters and call for reviews and feedback
