Our privacy discussion continues with talk of two fundamental methods of achieving privacy on the Bitcoin chain. This will help to give you the needed information to make choices about how you will achieve online privacy.
Bitcoin Price
$46,611
Block height at time of recording
825,353
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
I can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @[email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 11th, and this is episode 151 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is privacy foundations. Alright. Alright. Alright. As I said, today is January 11th. Today is the official day that The Bitcoin ETFs, the spot ETFs, all eleven of them began trading, and we'll talk about that for a few minutes. That is not really the main topic of today, although I think you'll find that that's what many people will be talking about. As I tweeted earlier this week, just a couple days ago, I said congratulations to all the plebs who have been stacking sats it's day in and day out, and I mean that.
Of course, that's something we advocate here on Satoshi's Plebs. But BTC, Bitcoin, doesn't need ETFs, but they are coming. And for 15 years, you have front run Wall Street. Well played. Then I said, welcome to the big show, w s. You are about to find out it's not about you. So ETFs did get approved. Apparently, the committee voted. I didn't know it was up for a vote, but regardless, committee voted 2 people on the committee, I will point out they were both Democrats. I don't wanna make too much out of that, but they were, voted no. I apologize if you can hear the, leaf blower going in the background, some stuff we gotta get done, and it's just one of those things. But, anyways, it was approved.
Trading started for all 11 of them this morning, and we're already seeing some interesting things. First of all, the price really hasn't gone crazy. I think I speculate that that is because one of them that was converted from a, like, a futures ETF to a spot ETF, people are selling out of that, and it's putting sell pressure on the market. But right now, we're at, officially, as I record this, We're at 46,011 and rising, but then again, it's it at one point this morning, it hit 49,000 and dropped back. So a lot of volatility, a lot of, frothiness in the market today. And that's fine. It will work itself out.
Those people that were in that crazy futures ETF can sell out all their shares to cash out. That's fine. Or they can trade into a spot ETF, which is a better tool for them. The price will settle. More money will come in. I understand already today over 3 and a half $1,000,000,000 of inflow, or I'm not sure if that's inflow and outflow, but regardless of activity have occurred on these ETFs. And I'm sure that will be a record for a 1st day for any, category of ETFs. But we'll see how that turns out at the end of the day. We've had a couple of interesting things happen. I do apologize. We'll just make this part of the market arp update, we'll move on. But, Vanguard and one of the others, more one of the other, funds said that they would not allow their customers to trade or to buy into these ETFs.
I thought that was very interesting. You've got, of course, the play on words of Vanguard, meaning in the van in the front. Vanguard's not doing a very good job of representing their name. But regardless, these large funds are making choices, which if they don't quickly change, may seriously hurt them in the long run, we will see how that plays out. But let's just talk about our normal market stuff. That's kind of it. I'm overdone with, you know, I'd like I said, Bitcoin doesn't need ETFs. Boomers, retirement age people, they're going to be using these. I don't see a whole lot of use from them 20, 30 years from now, to be honest.
As the younger people mature and, you know, they're looking for this type of service, they may just self custody their Bitcoin. In the meantime, these funds will make some money off of that custody. Where we at? I already said the price. At time of recording, 46,011. Our block height is 825-353. So TikTok, we keep hitting that next block. And the mempool is showing a little less pressure, 37 sats per vbyte, but we still have 1.73 gigabytes of unprocessed transactions, which is just insane, as I say every week, difficulty adjustment right now is sitting at 3.01% down if we had an adjustment today.
1 is not scheduled to occur until January 20th. So we've already gone down a lot since what I said last Sunday, which was, I believe, like, 12%. Unfortunately, it looks like we're heading towards another positive adjustment that would not surprise me. That's all well and good. The market is in order. Twitter, crypto Twitter is in chaos. It's great. Regardless, that's not really what we're here to talk about. We're going to talk about privacy again. We're in the second episode of what most likely will be three episodes about privacy. I'm certainly going to be three, at least.
Last week, we talked about, or last Sunday, we talked about why privacy was necessary. Today, we're gonna talk about the foundations of privacy on Bitcoin because I think that's important. Before we dive into some of the technologies, both current and future, about how we can have privacy. If that's not important to you, then maybe don't listen to these episodes, and that's fine. I think it should be. But, to each their own. I am having a little bit of trouble with my Telegram download from Satoshi Stream. That's unfortunate. My entire Telegram app just seems to sit.
One of the things I wanted to talk about here first is, and I think most people understand this, But let's talk about the Bitcoin main chain. It's critical to understand the Bitcoin network, the transactions that flow through that network are in plain text. And when we say plain text, what we mean is it's not encrypted. It is readable by anyone. All you have to do is set up a Bitcoin node, and you see all the transactions since flow through that node. The reason why Bitcoin does this is for auditability. It's an open ledger.
It's a way for you to see, theoretically, anyone, but certainly practically so that some people with experience can open, can verify that there's supposed to be 19.3 I don't know. Well, it's 93% of 21,000,000 Bitcoin that they have been mined, that they're available, that they're not being double spent, all of this kind of stuff. That is why it was developed the way that it was. We want the ability to for anyone to be able to verify that. The reality is that that creates great complications. And we are seeing that, for example, with the chain analysis companies who are taking the data of the of these transactions and using, in theory, this analysis to determine, like, who owns a Bitcoin wallet?
Which is kind of disconcerting if you think about it. It's like, I have my wallet, which I anybody can clearly see there's x amount of dollars in that wallet, and it is sitting out in the open. Now that wallet does not directly have an attribution to me. So this is what we call pseudo anonymous. This is why, this is part of the ideas for behind privacy for Bitcoin. So there's no direct connection. In other words, my name or my Social Security number or some identifying form is not, like, engraved into that wallet. Not it's not encoded into that wallet. So that's good, but everyone can see. Oh, my wallet has one Bitcoin or point one Bitcoin or 1,000 Bitcoin.
That's not necessarily ideal, but it's something that we need to understand. Another thing is that when I go I've said in the well, I've said in the past that going to an exchange like Coinbase or Kraken, one that you have to do KYC in order to operate with, it's the easiest way to buy your Bitcoin. But what you've just done is you've associated your name, your KYC, you know your customer, your personal details, your name, your address, your driver's license number, whatever, with a Bitcoin address. Now can a chain analysis company, would they automatically know that? No. They would not.
However, the IRS, for example, and they have done this, have requested for data from companies like Coinbase. And so Coinbase, because they're a publicly traded company, and they're not gonna fight the IRS. They gave up this information. And now the IRS has that information about who owes what. Plus, if they're smart, They can then engage a chain analysis company and say, hey. This guy right here, we think he owes taxes, And, you know, we wanna nail him for everything that we can. I want you to take this address, and I want you to figure out what all he has.
Oh, this address has been, had, quote, associations with these other 4 addresses. And it looks like based on the patterns that we see that that person owns all those addresses. And in together, instead of the 10 Bitcoin that he bought on Coinbase 15 years ago or 10 years ago, say, then it's actually a 150 Bitcoin scattered between those 4 wallets. And therefore, sir, you owe the IRS us x amount of money or whatever. Do you see the implications of that? So always understand when you're using a KYC service that's attached to an address, that is, potentially a very bad thing. That is important.
What else? Here's a foundational idea for privacy. I can't to speak to other systems. And I have looked at them some, but I am certainly no authority on them. I will say Bitcoin that I've been using since 2013, being private is nontrivial. People sometimes make it out to be this magical thing that just kind of happens, and that's not true. It's a it's a chain of events. And if you don't do them properly, if you don't secure your Bitcoin properly, if you didn't get it from a KYC source and or run it through a coin mixer, then you're potentially compromised.
And just on and on and on, your hardware could be compromised if you're using a Bitcoin hardware wallet. So we recently saw an issue with Ledger where they've got this crazy Java code going on inside of it. I think it's Java. JavaScript no. JavaScript. Excuse me. That potentially could be utilized to invade people's privacy certainly or even cause them to lose their coins. To the people who say that privacy on Bitcoin is easy and it takes 5 minutes, I say baloney. I don't think I think you're you're actually harming the conversation when you say things like that Because it's not easy, and it's absolutely not easy for the average person. The average person can barely go to Coinbase and buy a a Bitcoin.
And then you want them to run through this and do that and do this and put it in an air gapped cold storage. And then and only then is there some reasonable chance that your Bitcoin it's relatively private. But they got lost at trying to figure out how to hook up their bank account to Coinbase. Do you see the dichotomy? We do need, first of all, privacy improvements in Bitcoin. I look at other tokens, Monero, for example, Zcash. I don't know that Zcash has got much distraction these days, but it was a privacy focused coin. There are other things that are out there. There are other blockchains, frankly, that probably do a better job of this than Bitcoin does.
The default state for any transaction should be that it be as anonymous as possible. Don't assume to know what we'll be coming down the road. That's a bad mistake. The only thing you can assume, remember my axiom from last week, is that the government will continue to increase its ability and its desire, I should say, to surveil, to invade your privacy, to want to monitor things like, well, how many Bitcoin do you have? These are issues we're going to have to deal with here in the United States. I would also presume that they're going to need to be dealt with in the vast majority of countries around the world.
So these are important topics, and it's important to regardless of how that turns out. Again, for all the reasons that I laid out in the last episode, I want privacy on the Bitcoin main chain by default. My receiver, who I'm sending my Bitcoin to doesn't even have to know my identity. They just here, here's an address. Oh, I'm sending you Bitcoin. The nodes along the route, if that's lightning, for example, they don't need to know the details of that transaction. It should all be encrypted. It should all be verifiable. If we can't verify it, then we don't have the ability to know how many Bitcoin are on the network.
It has to be verifiable, though, without revealing your privacy data. So there's a lot of nuance to this and a lot of things that have to be thought through. And maybe that's why Bitcoin, so far, hasn't received a great deal of love, as I like to say, when it comes to privacy, I don't know. But we need that privacy on the main chain. We need that built into our wallets. We essentially need that built into our lives. Because if we don't, we're going to have situations where governments just have complete overreach and visibility into everything that goes on in your life, why do you think governments are pushing for central bank digital currencies? It's not because they want to digitalize the dollar, euro, you know, yen, whatever.
It's because they wanna track what people are doing, what people are spending their money on, frankly, where they're spending their time and things like that. That that the government has no right or legitimate reason to know unless there's an actual issue. Again, if you remember with the discussion about the 4th Amendment, The 4th Amendment is a right to privacy unless you have a warrant, a legitimate warrant, from a court. So if there is illegal activity going on and the government himself. The police can prove within a reasonable doubt That that illegal activity is going on, and they need, say, a trace on I don't know.
It used to be like you'd tap the phone. Right? Well, we're gonna put a phone tap in because for this, this, this, and this reason, we think that this person is doing something illegal that involves drugs. Okay? And I'm not going into that conversation, but that certainly, it's still the case with most drugs that, you know, they're illegal. Well, he's dealing drugs, and we want to tap his phone in order to be able to verify that. And we have these reasons to believe so. You can't just say, well, I think that this part there's a drug dealer in this neighborhood, so we're gonna tap into all the phones of everyone in that ZIP code, and we're gonna monitor it all. No. That's overreach.
Can't do that. But, Well, the Central Bank Digital Currency that has this auditability built into it with this lack of privacy, then that information is all there for the government. They don't even have to ask for it. Oh, Macintosh went to the gas station and bought a Coke and candy bar. Well, that's bad, Macintosh. We're gonna tax you for that because you're contributing to obesity. Owen, you're going here to the gym. Okay. That's good. You're buying some gas. Oh my god, you're spinning up the Earth's oil, and you're causing carbon pollution. And, So we're gonna charge you 10% for that.
And you went here, there, and why did you go to that neighborhood there and spend 15 minutes there? What's going on here and and and just on and on and on and on. And it's all tracked. It's all logged. It's all it'll be there forever. So I haven't talked about CBDCs very much, but they're the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish here in Bitcoin, one of the goals of Bitcoin. Private, secure, censorship resistance, which the privacy by default brings that, currency. So something to think about there. Okay, Macintosh.
If the main net is wide open and then everybody can see all the track transactions, then how can we have privacy? Well, you can have privacy in plain sight, so to speak. If I mine my Bitcoin at home, for example, or if I buy it from someone who is trustworthy, like, at a Bitcoin meetup, and maybe they mined it or they bought it from a mixer so so that was already it was not from a verifiable service and this kind of thing, then that's another way. Or maybe through one of these peer to peer, apps where I can buy Bitcoin with cash or a cashier's check or wire somebody money. Of course, then where's the money coming from? It's coming from your bank account. So now your bank knows about it. And if you spend more than $10,000, they're gonna file a suspicious activity report on you and probably question you. Macintosh, what are you buying with this $10,000 wire? Oh my gosh, I'm so worried about you trafficking drugs or being funding Hamas or child pornography or whatever stupidity is that they throw around.
So that's not really a clean way to do it. If you can come up with the cash, physical cash, that's always the best way to do it because that's not traceable. Why do you think drug dealers use cash? Well, because it's not traceable. Please use their Visa card and everybody around the world can trace the transaction or at least Visa can and will. I mean, it's it's not a Joe, privacy true privacy is actually extremely difficult in today's age. So how do we do this? There's there's 2 ways. The ideal way would be to build in steps, build in services essentially in the protocol. I'll give you an example. This one's actually really simple.
There's a new change in version 26 of the Bitcoin core software, which is what you run on your node that , up until now, the traffic between nodes was actually unencrypted. Well, this turns on encryption, essentially. There's a flag that you can set that if it's set to a node that you're connecting to, from what this from what I understand, the traffic in between would then be encrypted. So that's a good privacy step. Now that maybe that's not direct privacy for you, but it's a good c Step. That's something that we could do in the software, and that's actually available right now. Another change, which which I believe they have a Bitcoin improvement, paper proposal, whatever it is, a BIP for confidential transactions.
Now that sounds nice and juicy, and it's very much what it sounds like. It's the ability to spend or receive Bitcoin confidentially. So we're gonna talk about that in some more detail, but that's one way. So if one way of doing this is to change protocol, is to modify the protocol to encrypt the traffic between the nodes to allow confidential transactions or this kind of thing. What is the other way? Well, The other way is kind of bolt on services. So these are the kind of things that we already have. And I guess this is what people mean when they say, well, Bitcoin privacy is easy.
Because, surely, it's not easy to run your own Bitcoin miner at home and get all the Bitcoin that you're ever gonna want or need from that miner in order to have it be untraceable. Because even if you use a hosting service like I do because of my power cost or even most of the mining pools or a lot of the mining pools, they have your KYC information, which then means it could end up being traced back to you. Well, that's not good. So I guess you could solo mine or hopefully, go with the mining pool that truly allows you to be anonymous. But, yes, that you could do that. You can.
But I don't necessarily think that's easy. How else can you do it? Well, I can go buy my sats on Coinbase or Kraken or whatever, and then I can run them through what we call a mixer, a a coin join, a Whirlpool. It depends on who you're talking to. But basically, it and we'll be breaking this down next week as well. But this is a way to mix your coins up with other people so that even though you're I've got my coin from Kraken. Let's say I have a Bitcoin. I run it through the mixing service. And then after some period of time, it comes out essentially, But it's not the same coin. It's 1 Bitcoin minus the fees, and there are fees.
They're not terrible, but there are fees because you have to run that Whirlpool service. This is one of the reasons why I don't like this method. It's additional fees. Fees that you're spending money that eventually one day will be worth a lot. It's already worth a lot, but it'll be worth a lot more. What if Bitcoin 100 x's from here? I don't know. It's possible. The 1% that you've spent in a fee, that could add up to a lot of money down the road. So those kind of things always concern me. I would much rather have this built into the protocol. Unfortunately, that requires consensus.
Unfortunately, that requires a lot of argument on Twitter and back and forth, and it is needed because not everybody can afford even to use that Whirlpool service, but everyone deserves privacy. So let's build it into the main chain, into the, base protocol and make it as cheap as possible. Let's make it part of the transaction cost. So maybe it's 0.05% instead of 1% or half a percent. Maybe it's even less than that. So if we can accomplish that, then you don't even have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about sending my money from Kraken to a mixer and then to a wallet that I don't ever mix with KYC deed coin because if you do, then you've just compromised yourself.
See, there's all these little nuances like that that people who say, oh, that's easy. It takes 5 minutes. They don't care to elaborate on or they live in some fantasy world or I don't know. I don't wanna I I doubt they're malicious, but they're not in the world that I'm in. I'll put it that way because I operated their different set of circumstances. And even though I'm a very technical person And and even though I've been involved in Bitcoin, for a long time, these things concern me. And then you have to worry about self custody, which you should be self custody. And how does that manage to affect your anonymity and your privacy.
So all of this adds into there. We'll be talking about some of those specific services like, Whirlpool, for example, which is, probably the one at this point that I would recommend, samurai, Whirlpool, which is like a coin joint type service. But we will discuss what's available. We will discuss how you should manage that when you're moving your money to cold storage. So, looking forward to that. And even after all this, we we really haven't even talked about things like, well, when you do your transactions, Are you taking care of your IP address? Right? Because Bitcoin typically operates over the standard TCP IP network over the clear net. Everybody knows your IP or they can figure that out.
You can do it over Tor. It makes it more difficult. That does obfuscate where you're coming from, or you could use a VPN service where you essentially log in to a server somewhere else, and then you, from that server, do your for transactions or whatever, and that's the IP that shows up in the logs. But then you have to worry about who runs that service unless you do. Most people don't do that. This kind of thing. So there's, again, there's more nuances, all these details to all of this stuff. And depending on the level of interest of the people who are, attempting to figure out what toward doing, you know, you may have to be concerned with those kind of things. So, anyways, at this point, I think we should probably just go ahead and move on.
Let's talk about our supporters, and then we'll talk about a little bit of news. I'm not sure there's really any, but we did have some support, so always appreciate that. Let's just bring up the spreadsheet right there. And we got some boost we got too from the nonymous, which I don't think I've seen before. Kind of a play on anonymous. Glad to hear from you there, nonymous. Boosted twice on the why privacy matters episode. That's episode 115. And, boosted, let's see, 500 sats, I think, and then 2,000 sats. So that's awesome. Appreciate that. A total of 2500 sats and sent a message on the 2nd boost. Said, what's a good lightning wallet for iOS that can notify the user of incoming sats, kind of like a boostogram for nonpodcasters.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean. If you're using a wallet, this is really something I probably should take the time. It's been a few months, and we'll kinda break down what's out there in terms of lightning wallets. The reason why it it actually ties into this privacy stuff. So one of the things I've not talked about is in a well, when I transact on a lightning network, which is not part of the Bitcoin main net. You you kind of jump on and off of it. That does a lot by default of creating privacy. Now you have custodial issues. If you're, for example, using Wallet or Satoshi, That is a custodial service.
They track every they can. I don't know if they do or not, but they can track everything that you do. So that complicates this, but kind of by default, you can send anonymously to something, you can receive anonymously theoretically, although that's actually harder than it maybe should be, and that's one of the things they're working on. But it is better privacy kind of by default than the main chain. So it's probably a good time for me to actually make an episode, go back and look at that, and kind of talk about that maybe from a privacy angle. I've used the Phoenix wallet, which is custodial. I think you can hook it up to your own node. I do not run my own Let's see. Yeah. I when I lost my umbrella, I lost my lightning node.
I will be setting another one up. I have not gotten to it yet on my list of things to do. So, anyways, I don't have one right now, so I am running custodially. I'm not aware, honestly, of any by default. Paul, I have not received any payments on Phoenix. I have some money that I sent to it. I don't know well, let's see. No. Actually, that's not true. So I did a test with the Mere Mortals podcast, of a service that he was doing, and it actually sent me 2,000 sets. Let me make sure I've got this right correct. It sent me 2,000 sets and said mere mortals message. I do not remember if my phone, which is an Ios phone, told me or not when it sent me that, I bet if it didn't, it's probably a setting.
If that's not what you're asking, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. I would say that basically any wallet's it's gonna allow you to do that. But let me if you could defer for maybe 2 weeks. I know next week, I got more direct privacy things I wanna talk about. But let's talk about some lightning in 2 more sessions whenever that falls, I guess, next Thursday. So I appreciate that, though. And I also got another boost, and it does not say from who. It just says test. It was also on episode 150, why privacy matters. I will say this, I've been doing some changes in the background, of course, as I've described, including moving to my own host. I'm not 100% convinced that It's working correctly, and I'm trying to get some help on it.
But if you're seeing some funny behavior, like when you download a new episode, maybe it loops during the middle of the episode or very near the start, something like that, please let me know. I have been having some issues. When I do experience 1, what I have seen is that if I typically delete it and, like, redo it, it will come in correctly again. But I'm really trying to track it down and kind of fix the issue because we're getting a decent amount of downloads, and I, of course, I want every listener to have a good experience, so please let me know what you're seeing. But whoever that was, I did get a test boost. So thank you.
Always appreciate it. And that was for 200 sats. So there we go. That was it for the support this week. We're gonna keep pressing on, news. I mean, really, everybody was just concentrating on the ETF stuff. I've already talked about that. Look. I'm glad they're here. Whatever. Like I said, people can this will bring in Wall Street. So that's a good thing in the long run. What I think is funny, these companies like, Vanguard, like I was talking about, they are fighting something that they are not gonna win. It's like an immovable object. Right?
People are literally leaving Vanguard over this, and I don't blame them. Because if I were one of these people who had money tied up in a four zero one k or whatever, and I wanted to invest, and my company that I'm dealing with did not allow we do that, well, it's like a 15 minute process these days to move. It's not nearly as difficult as it used to be 20, 30 years ago. So good on them. Like I have to say, you know, of course, self custody is always the best, But these things are inevitable. We can't have nation state and world adoption without these things happening, and anybody who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.
So bring it on Wall Street. We have front run you for 15 years. So Now it's your turn. You go ahead and pour some money in. There's roughly, what, 2,000,000 Bitcoin left to buy. Yes. People will sell at some point, of course, certainly as the price goes up. But the 19,000,000 have already been bought before you got here. So the joke is actually on them, and that's fine. Alright. Time to wrap this up. So, of course, Satoshi's Plebs supports podcasting 2 point o. 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. Sometimes I wished I did, but I don't. I don't have anything like that because it's so important that I bring you a clear unfiltered message. I do not ever want some product to compromise what I'm saying in any way, I tried my to not even self censor myself, much less talking about, say Ledger, who I have a Ledger wallet. I've used it. I would no longer recommend it simply because they have a track record at this point of right now, they've got a bunch of it's been exposed. They have a bunch of JavaScript in their code that's just doing all kinds of tracking stuff. It's just stupidity.
And they're doing that because they're making a few dollars on the back end. But you know what? Ledger's out there sponsoring podcasts. And those people who they sponsor get on there because they're making $10 a week or whatever it is based on the number of their downloads from Ledger to promote their product, those people never talk about that. They don't. Why would they? They're getting $10 a week. So I will choose to never never, regardless of how many people I have downloading, taking on that kind of sponsorship. So Does that mean that Macintosh doesn't need some support? No. Of course not.
This stuff costs money. When I go out and buy a new computer like I just to be able to better run this show, to be able to do better edits and do more things and whatever, that it costs $900. So, yeah, I'm, of course, looking for support. With a value for value podcast like mine, there's 3 different ways that you can support this Show. It's through time, it's through talent, and it's through treasure. Time and talent are simply, people getting involved helping with things like transcripts. Scripts. That's something that would take, you know, 15, 20 minutes a week for me, that if somebody else were doing that, it would make my life just that much simpler.
And it would probably get turned around a lot faster. Right? So that would be helpful. There's always stuff like that. Treasure, of course, is Satoshis. It's people just like, nonymous and this other person who who boosted me earlier this week. In one case, of course, nonymous is asking a question, which is terrific. I always would ask for feedback. Nonymous, if that's not clear for you, if there's something I didn't understand, then feel free to boost in it can be a very small amount and just ask another question, and that's fine. But that type of support will ultimately be what helps build this show now. I need to build up more users because not everybody, of course, she's going to support me.
That's very clear, and that's okay. But I will be investing my money, through this year to actually do that. So I'm hoping that we can continue to build this show. It's been a 150 episodes now to over two years. I feel like I have certainly improved, but I've got a long way to go, and I got a lot of stuff that I wanna do. So, anyways, enough about that. How do you support? Go to podcasting 2.0, our podcast apps .com. Excuse me. And there's a whole list there of different products like Fountain, Podverse, these different podcast apps that support podcasting 2.0. And then you simply set up a lightning wallet, you can load up some money, and you can use that to support the show.
Alright. That's it. Thank oh, and Oh, excuse me. The best way to support this show, and it's completely free. If you like this content, turn around to somebody who you care about and say, hey. Go listen to this podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we are at the start, still as amazing as this is, of the next bull run. We've got months. We've got more than a year ahead of us. Almost two years, at least, in my estimation of the next bull run, there will be people coming in to this space. If you want to help them out, let them know about this podcast. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at @MacintoshFintech. I'm on mastodon at [email protected].
By the way, if you're having problems, Twitter, just DM me, is probably the best way to get a hold of me. I can be reached by email at [email protected] . And, of course, there's a website at satoshis-plebs.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out, make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 11th, and this is episode 151 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is privacy foundations. Alright. Alright. Alright. As I said, today is January 11th. Today is the official day that The Bitcoin ETFs, the spot ETFs, all eleven of them began trading, and we'll talk about that for a few minutes. That is not really the main topic of today, although I think you'll find that that's what many people will be talking about. As I tweeted earlier this week, just a couple days ago, I said congratulations to all the plebs who have been stacking sats it's day in and day out, and I mean that.
Of course, that's something we advocate here on Satoshi's Plebs. But BTC, Bitcoin, doesn't need ETFs, but they are coming. And for 15 years, you have front run Wall Street. Well played. Then I said, welcome to the big show, w s. You are about to find out it's not about you. So ETFs did get approved. Apparently, the committee voted. I didn't know it was up for a vote, but regardless, committee voted 2 people on the committee, I will point out they were both Democrats. I don't wanna make too much out of that, but they were, voted no. I apologize if you can hear the, leaf blower going in the background, some stuff we gotta get done, and it's just one of those things. But, anyways, it was approved.
Trading started for all 11 of them this morning, and we're already seeing some interesting things. First of all, the price really hasn't gone crazy. I think I speculate that that is because one of them that was converted from a, like, a futures ETF to a spot ETF, people are selling out of that, and it's putting sell pressure on the market. But right now, we're at, officially, as I record this, We're at 46,011 and rising, but then again, it's it at one point this morning, it hit 49,000 and dropped back. So a lot of volatility, a lot of, frothiness in the market today. And that's fine. It will work itself out.
Those people that were in that crazy futures ETF can sell out all their shares to cash out. That's fine. Or they can trade into a spot ETF, which is a better tool for them. The price will settle. More money will come in. I understand already today over 3 and a half $1,000,000,000 of inflow, or I'm not sure if that's inflow and outflow, but regardless of activity have occurred on these ETFs. And I'm sure that will be a record for a 1st day for any, category of ETFs. But we'll see how that turns out at the end of the day. We've had a couple of interesting things happen. I do apologize. We'll just make this part of the market arp update, we'll move on. But, Vanguard and one of the others, more one of the other, funds said that they would not allow their customers to trade or to buy into these ETFs.
I thought that was very interesting. You've got, of course, the play on words of Vanguard, meaning in the van in the front. Vanguard's not doing a very good job of representing their name. But regardless, these large funds are making choices, which if they don't quickly change, may seriously hurt them in the long run, we will see how that plays out. But let's just talk about our normal market stuff. That's kind of it. I'm overdone with, you know, I'd like I said, Bitcoin doesn't need ETFs. Boomers, retirement age people, they're going to be using these. I don't see a whole lot of use from them 20, 30 years from now, to be honest.
As the younger people mature and, you know, they're looking for this type of service, they may just self custody their Bitcoin. In the meantime, these funds will make some money off of that custody. Where we at? I already said the price. At time of recording, 46,011. Our block height is 825-353. So TikTok, we keep hitting that next block. And the mempool is showing a little less pressure, 37 sats per vbyte, but we still have 1.73 gigabytes of unprocessed transactions, which is just insane, as I say every week, difficulty adjustment right now is sitting at 3.01% down if we had an adjustment today.
1 is not scheduled to occur until January 20th. So we've already gone down a lot since what I said last Sunday, which was, I believe, like, 12%. Unfortunately, it looks like we're heading towards another positive adjustment that would not surprise me. That's all well and good. The market is in order. Twitter, crypto Twitter is in chaos. It's great. Regardless, that's not really what we're here to talk about. We're going to talk about privacy again. We're in the second episode of what most likely will be three episodes about privacy. I'm certainly going to be three, at least.
Last week, we talked about, or last Sunday, we talked about why privacy was necessary. Today, we're gonna talk about the foundations of privacy on Bitcoin because I think that's important. Before we dive into some of the technologies, both current and future, about how we can have privacy. If that's not important to you, then maybe don't listen to these episodes, and that's fine. I think it should be. But, to each their own. I am having a little bit of trouble with my Telegram download from Satoshi Stream. That's unfortunate. My entire Telegram app just seems to sit.
One of the things I wanted to talk about here first is, and I think most people understand this, But let's talk about the Bitcoin main chain. It's critical to understand the Bitcoin network, the transactions that flow through that network are in plain text. And when we say plain text, what we mean is it's not encrypted. It is readable by anyone. All you have to do is set up a Bitcoin node, and you see all the transactions since flow through that node. The reason why Bitcoin does this is for auditability. It's an open ledger.
It's a way for you to see, theoretically, anyone, but certainly practically so that some people with experience can open, can verify that there's supposed to be 19.3 I don't know. Well, it's 93% of 21,000,000 Bitcoin that they have been mined, that they're available, that they're not being double spent, all of this kind of stuff. That is why it was developed the way that it was. We want the ability to for anyone to be able to verify that. The reality is that that creates great complications. And we are seeing that, for example, with the chain analysis companies who are taking the data of the of these transactions and using, in theory, this analysis to determine, like, who owns a Bitcoin wallet?
Which is kind of disconcerting if you think about it. It's like, I have my wallet, which I anybody can clearly see there's x amount of dollars in that wallet, and it is sitting out in the open. Now that wallet does not directly have an attribution to me. So this is what we call pseudo anonymous. This is why, this is part of the ideas for behind privacy for Bitcoin. So there's no direct connection. In other words, my name or my Social Security number or some identifying form is not, like, engraved into that wallet. Not it's not encoded into that wallet. So that's good, but everyone can see. Oh, my wallet has one Bitcoin or point one Bitcoin or 1,000 Bitcoin.
That's not necessarily ideal, but it's something that we need to understand. Another thing is that when I go I've said in the well, I've said in the past that going to an exchange like Coinbase or Kraken, one that you have to do KYC in order to operate with, it's the easiest way to buy your Bitcoin. But what you've just done is you've associated your name, your KYC, you know your customer, your personal details, your name, your address, your driver's license number, whatever, with a Bitcoin address. Now can a chain analysis company, would they automatically know that? No. They would not.
However, the IRS, for example, and they have done this, have requested for data from companies like Coinbase. And so Coinbase, because they're a publicly traded company, and they're not gonna fight the IRS. They gave up this information. And now the IRS has that information about who owes what. Plus, if they're smart, They can then engage a chain analysis company and say, hey. This guy right here, we think he owes taxes, And, you know, we wanna nail him for everything that we can. I want you to take this address, and I want you to figure out what all he has.
Oh, this address has been, had, quote, associations with these other 4 addresses. And it looks like based on the patterns that we see that that person owns all those addresses. And in together, instead of the 10 Bitcoin that he bought on Coinbase 15 years ago or 10 years ago, say, then it's actually a 150 Bitcoin scattered between those 4 wallets. And therefore, sir, you owe the IRS us x amount of money or whatever. Do you see the implications of that? So always understand when you're using a KYC service that's attached to an address, that is, potentially a very bad thing. That is important.
What else? Here's a foundational idea for privacy. I can't to speak to other systems. And I have looked at them some, but I am certainly no authority on them. I will say Bitcoin that I've been using since 2013, being private is nontrivial. People sometimes make it out to be this magical thing that just kind of happens, and that's not true. It's a it's a chain of events. And if you don't do them properly, if you don't secure your Bitcoin properly, if you didn't get it from a KYC source and or run it through a coin mixer, then you're potentially compromised.
And just on and on and on, your hardware could be compromised if you're using a Bitcoin hardware wallet. So we recently saw an issue with Ledger where they've got this crazy Java code going on inside of it. I think it's Java. JavaScript no. JavaScript. Excuse me. That potentially could be utilized to invade people's privacy certainly or even cause them to lose their coins. To the people who say that privacy on Bitcoin is easy and it takes 5 minutes, I say baloney. I don't think I think you're you're actually harming the conversation when you say things like that Because it's not easy, and it's absolutely not easy for the average person. The average person can barely go to Coinbase and buy a a Bitcoin.
And then you want them to run through this and do that and do this and put it in an air gapped cold storage. And then and only then is there some reasonable chance that your Bitcoin it's relatively private. But they got lost at trying to figure out how to hook up their bank account to Coinbase. Do you see the dichotomy? We do need, first of all, privacy improvements in Bitcoin. I look at other tokens, Monero, for example, Zcash. I don't know that Zcash has got much distraction these days, but it was a privacy focused coin. There are other things that are out there. There are other blockchains, frankly, that probably do a better job of this than Bitcoin does.
The default state for any transaction should be that it be as anonymous as possible. Don't assume to know what we'll be coming down the road. That's a bad mistake. The only thing you can assume, remember my axiom from last week, is that the government will continue to increase its ability and its desire, I should say, to surveil, to invade your privacy, to want to monitor things like, well, how many Bitcoin do you have? These are issues we're going to have to deal with here in the United States. I would also presume that they're going to need to be dealt with in the vast majority of countries around the world.
So these are important topics, and it's important to regardless of how that turns out. Again, for all the reasons that I laid out in the last episode, I want privacy on the Bitcoin main chain by default. My receiver, who I'm sending my Bitcoin to doesn't even have to know my identity. They just here, here's an address. Oh, I'm sending you Bitcoin. The nodes along the route, if that's lightning, for example, they don't need to know the details of that transaction. It should all be encrypted. It should all be verifiable. If we can't verify it, then we don't have the ability to know how many Bitcoin are on the network.
It has to be verifiable, though, without revealing your privacy data. So there's a lot of nuance to this and a lot of things that have to be thought through. And maybe that's why Bitcoin, so far, hasn't received a great deal of love, as I like to say, when it comes to privacy, I don't know. But we need that privacy on the main chain. We need that built into our wallets. We essentially need that built into our lives. Because if we don't, we're going to have situations where governments just have complete overreach and visibility into everything that goes on in your life, why do you think governments are pushing for central bank digital currencies? It's not because they want to digitalize the dollar, euro, you know, yen, whatever.
It's because they wanna track what people are doing, what people are spending their money on, frankly, where they're spending their time and things like that. That that the government has no right or legitimate reason to know unless there's an actual issue. Again, if you remember with the discussion about the 4th Amendment, The 4th Amendment is a right to privacy unless you have a warrant, a legitimate warrant, from a court. So if there is illegal activity going on and the government himself. The police can prove within a reasonable doubt That that illegal activity is going on, and they need, say, a trace on I don't know.
It used to be like you'd tap the phone. Right? Well, we're gonna put a phone tap in because for this, this, this, and this reason, we think that this person is doing something illegal that involves drugs. Okay? And I'm not going into that conversation, but that certainly, it's still the case with most drugs that, you know, they're illegal. Well, he's dealing drugs, and we want to tap his phone in order to be able to verify that. And we have these reasons to believe so. You can't just say, well, I think that this part there's a drug dealer in this neighborhood, so we're gonna tap into all the phones of everyone in that ZIP code, and we're gonna monitor it all. No. That's overreach.
Can't do that. But, Well, the Central Bank Digital Currency that has this auditability built into it with this lack of privacy, then that information is all there for the government. They don't even have to ask for it. Oh, Macintosh went to the gas station and bought a Coke and candy bar. Well, that's bad, Macintosh. We're gonna tax you for that because you're contributing to obesity. Owen, you're going here to the gym. Okay. That's good. You're buying some gas. Oh my god, you're spinning up the Earth's oil, and you're causing carbon pollution. And, So we're gonna charge you 10% for that.
And you went here, there, and why did you go to that neighborhood there and spend 15 minutes there? What's going on here and and and just on and on and on and on. And it's all tracked. It's all logged. It's all it'll be there forever. So I haven't talked about CBDCs very much, but they're the exact opposite of what we're trying to accomplish here in Bitcoin, one of the goals of Bitcoin. Private, secure, censorship resistance, which the privacy by default brings that, currency. So something to think about there. Okay, Macintosh.
If the main net is wide open and then everybody can see all the track transactions, then how can we have privacy? Well, you can have privacy in plain sight, so to speak. If I mine my Bitcoin at home, for example, or if I buy it from someone who is trustworthy, like, at a Bitcoin meetup, and maybe they mined it or they bought it from a mixer so so that was already it was not from a verifiable service and this kind of thing, then that's another way. Or maybe through one of these peer to peer, apps where I can buy Bitcoin with cash or a cashier's check or wire somebody money. Of course, then where's the money coming from? It's coming from your bank account. So now your bank knows about it. And if you spend more than $10,000, they're gonna file a suspicious activity report on you and probably question you. Macintosh, what are you buying with this $10,000 wire? Oh my gosh, I'm so worried about you trafficking drugs or being funding Hamas or child pornography or whatever stupidity is that they throw around.
So that's not really a clean way to do it. If you can come up with the cash, physical cash, that's always the best way to do it because that's not traceable. Why do you think drug dealers use cash? Well, because it's not traceable. Please use their Visa card and everybody around the world can trace the transaction or at least Visa can and will. I mean, it's it's not a Joe, privacy true privacy is actually extremely difficult in today's age. So how do we do this? There's there's 2 ways. The ideal way would be to build in steps, build in services essentially in the protocol. I'll give you an example. This one's actually really simple.
There's a new change in version 26 of the Bitcoin core software, which is what you run on your node that , up until now, the traffic between nodes was actually unencrypted. Well, this turns on encryption, essentially. There's a flag that you can set that if it's set to a node that you're connecting to, from what this from what I understand, the traffic in between would then be encrypted. So that's a good privacy step. Now that maybe that's not direct privacy for you, but it's a good c Step. That's something that we could do in the software, and that's actually available right now. Another change, which which I believe they have a Bitcoin improvement, paper proposal, whatever it is, a BIP for confidential transactions.
Now that sounds nice and juicy, and it's very much what it sounds like. It's the ability to spend or receive Bitcoin confidentially. So we're gonna talk about that in some more detail, but that's one way. So if one way of doing this is to change protocol, is to modify the protocol to encrypt the traffic between the nodes to allow confidential transactions or this kind of thing. What is the other way? Well, The other way is kind of bolt on services. So these are the kind of things that we already have. And I guess this is what people mean when they say, well, Bitcoin privacy is easy.
Because, surely, it's not easy to run your own Bitcoin miner at home and get all the Bitcoin that you're ever gonna want or need from that miner in order to have it be untraceable. Because even if you use a hosting service like I do because of my power cost or even most of the mining pools or a lot of the mining pools, they have your KYC information, which then means it could end up being traced back to you. Well, that's not good. So I guess you could solo mine or hopefully, go with the mining pool that truly allows you to be anonymous. But, yes, that you could do that. You can.
But I don't necessarily think that's easy. How else can you do it? Well, I can go buy my sats on Coinbase or Kraken or whatever, and then I can run them through what we call a mixer, a a coin join, a Whirlpool. It depends on who you're talking to. But basically, it and we'll be breaking this down next week as well. But this is a way to mix your coins up with other people so that even though you're I've got my coin from Kraken. Let's say I have a Bitcoin. I run it through the mixing service. And then after some period of time, it comes out essentially, But it's not the same coin. It's 1 Bitcoin minus the fees, and there are fees.
They're not terrible, but there are fees because you have to run that Whirlpool service. This is one of the reasons why I don't like this method. It's additional fees. Fees that you're spending money that eventually one day will be worth a lot. It's already worth a lot, but it'll be worth a lot more. What if Bitcoin 100 x's from here? I don't know. It's possible. The 1% that you've spent in a fee, that could add up to a lot of money down the road. So those kind of things always concern me. I would much rather have this built into the protocol. Unfortunately, that requires consensus.
Unfortunately, that requires a lot of argument on Twitter and back and forth, and it is needed because not everybody can afford even to use that Whirlpool service, but everyone deserves privacy. So let's build it into the main chain, into the, base protocol and make it as cheap as possible. Let's make it part of the transaction cost. So maybe it's 0.05% instead of 1% or half a percent. Maybe it's even less than that. So if we can accomplish that, then you don't even have to worry about it. I don't have to worry about sending my money from Kraken to a mixer and then to a wallet that I don't ever mix with KYC deed coin because if you do, then you've just compromised yourself.
See, there's all these little nuances like that that people who say, oh, that's easy. It takes 5 minutes. They don't care to elaborate on or they live in some fantasy world or I don't know. I don't wanna I I doubt they're malicious, but they're not in the world that I'm in. I'll put it that way because I operated their different set of circumstances. And even though I'm a very technical person And and even though I've been involved in Bitcoin, for a long time, these things concern me. And then you have to worry about self custody, which you should be self custody. And how does that manage to affect your anonymity and your privacy.
So all of this adds into there. We'll be talking about some of those specific services like, Whirlpool, for example, which is, probably the one at this point that I would recommend, samurai, Whirlpool, which is like a coin joint type service. But we will discuss what's available. We will discuss how you should manage that when you're moving your money to cold storage. So, looking forward to that. And even after all this, we we really haven't even talked about things like, well, when you do your transactions, Are you taking care of your IP address? Right? Because Bitcoin typically operates over the standard TCP IP network over the clear net. Everybody knows your IP or they can figure that out.
You can do it over Tor. It makes it more difficult. That does obfuscate where you're coming from, or you could use a VPN service where you essentially log in to a server somewhere else, and then you, from that server, do your for transactions or whatever, and that's the IP that shows up in the logs. But then you have to worry about who runs that service unless you do. Most people don't do that. This kind of thing. So there's, again, there's more nuances, all these details to all of this stuff. And depending on the level of interest of the people who are, attempting to figure out what toward doing, you know, you may have to be concerned with those kind of things. So, anyways, at this point, I think we should probably just go ahead and move on.
Let's talk about our supporters, and then we'll talk about a little bit of news. I'm not sure there's really any, but we did have some support, so always appreciate that. Let's just bring up the spreadsheet right there. And we got some boost we got too from the nonymous, which I don't think I've seen before. Kind of a play on anonymous. Glad to hear from you there, nonymous. Boosted twice on the why privacy matters episode. That's episode 115. And, boosted, let's see, 500 sats, I think, and then 2,000 sats. So that's awesome. Appreciate that. A total of 2500 sats and sent a message on the 2nd boost. Said, what's a good lightning wallet for iOS that can notify the user of incoming sats, kind of like a boostogram for nonpodcasters.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean. If you're using a wallet, this is really something I probably should take the time. It's been a few months, and we'll kinda break down what's out there in terms of lightning wallets. The reason why it it actually ties into this privacy stuff. So one of the things I've not talked about is in a well, when I transact on a lightning network, which is not part of the Bitcoin main net. You you kind of jump on and off of it. That does a lot by default of creating privacy. Now you have custodial issues. If you're, for example, using Wallet or Satoshi, That is a custodial service.
They track every they can. I don't know if they do or not, but they can track everything that you do. So that complicates this, but kind of by default, you can send anonymously to something, you can receive anonymously theoretically, although that's actually harder than it maybe should be, and that's one of the things they're working on. But it is better privacy kind of by default than the main chain. So it's probably a good time for me to actually make an episode, go back and look at that, and kind of talk about that maybe from a privacy angle. I've used the Phoenix wallet, which is custodial. I think you can hook it up to your own node. I do not run my own Let's see. Yeah. I when I lost my umbrella, I lost my lightning node.
I will be setting another one up. I have not gotten to it yet on my list of things to do. So, anyways, I don't have one right now, so I am running custodially. I'm not aware, honestly, of any by default. Paul, I have not received any payments on Phoenix. I have some money that I sent to it. I don't know well, let's see. No. Actually, that's not true. So I did a test with the Mere Mortals podcast, of a service that he was doing, and it actually sent me 2,000 sets. Let me make sure I've got this right correct. It sent me 2,000 sets and said mere mortals message. I do not remember if my phone, which is an Ios phone, told me or not when it sent me that, I bet if it didn't, it's probably a setting.
If that's not what you're asking, I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. I would say that basically any wallet's it's gonna allow you to do that. But let me if you could defer for maybe 2 weeks. I know next week, I got more direct privacy things I wanna talk about. But let's talk about some lightning in 2 more sessions whenever that falls, I guess, next Thursday. So I appreciate that, though. And I also got another boost, and it does not say from who. It just says test. It was also on episode 150, why privacy matters. I will say this, I've been doing some changes in the background, of course, as I've described, including moving to my own host. I'm not 100% convinced that It's working correctly, and I'm trying to get some help on it.
But if you're seeing some funny behavior, like when you download a new episode, maybe it loops during the middle of the episode or very near the start, something like that, please let me know. I have been having some issues. When I do experience 1, what I have seen is that if I typically delete it and, like, redo it, it will come in correctly again. But I'm really trying to track it down and kind of fix the issue because we're getting a decent amount of downloads, and I, of course, I want every listener to have a good experience, so please let me know what you're seeing. But whoever that was, I did get a test boost. So thank you.
Always appreciate it. And that was for 200 sats. So there we go. That was it for the support this week. We're gonna keep pressing on, news. I mean, really, everybody was just concentrating on the ETF stuff. I've already talked about that. Look. I'm glad they're here. Whatever. Like I said, people can this will bring in Wall Street. So that's a good thing in the long run. What I think is funny, these companies like, Vanguard, like I was talking about, they are fighting something that they are not gonna win. It's like an immovable object. Right?
People are literally leaving Vanguard over this, and I don't blame them. Because if I were one of these people who had money tied up in a four zero one k or whatever, and I wanted to invest, and my company that I'm dealing with did not allow we do that, well, it's like a 15 minute process these days to move. It's not nearly as difficult as it used to be 20, 30 years ago. So good on them. Like I have to say, you know, of course, self custody is always the best, But these things are inevitable. We can't have nation state and world adoption without these things happening, and anybody who thinks otherwise is fooling themselves.
So bring it on Wall Street. We have front run you for 15 years. So Now it's your turn. You go ahead and pour some money in. There's roughly, what, 2,000,000 Bitcoin left to buy. Yes. People will sell at some point, of course, certainly as the price goes up. But the 19,000,000 have already been bought before you got here. So the joke is actually on them, and that's fine. Alright. Time to wrap this up. So, of course, Satoshi's Plebs supports podcasting 2 point o. 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. Sometimes I wished I did, but I don't. I don't have anything like that because it's so important that I bring you a clear unfiltered message. I do not ever want some product to compromise what I'm saying in any way, I tried my to not even self censor myself, much less talking about, say Ledger, who I have a Ledger wallet. I've used it. I would no longer recommend it simply because they have a track record at this point of right now, they've got a bunch of it's been exposed. They have a bunch of JavaScript in their code that's just doing all kinds of tracking stuff. It's just stupidity.
And they're doing that because they're making a few dollars on the back end. But you know what? Ledger's out there sponsoring podcasts. And those people who they sponsor get on there because they're making $10 a week or whatever it is based on the number of their downloads from Ledger to promote their product, those people never talk about that. They don't. Why would they? They're getting $10 a week. So I will choose to never never, regardless of how many people I have downloading, taking on that kind of sponsorship. So Does that mean that Macintosh doesn't need some support? No. Of course not.
This stuff costs money. When I go out and buy a new computer like I just to be able to better run this show, to be able to do better edits and do more things and whatever, that it costs $900. So, yeah, I'm, of course, looking for support. With a value for value podcast like mine, there's 3 different ways that you can support this Show. It's through time, it's through talent, and it's through treasure. Time and talent are simply, people getting involved helping with things like transcripts. Scripts. That's something that would take, you know, 15, 20 minutes a week for me, that if somebody else were doing that, it would make my life just that much simpler.
And it would probably get turned around a lot faster. Right? So that would be helpful. There's always stuff like that. Treasure, of course, is Satoshis. It's people just like, nonymous and this other person who who boosted me earlier this week. In one case, of course, nonymous is asking a question, which is terrific. I always would ask for feedback. Nonymous, if that's not clear for you, if there's something I didn't understand, then feel free to boost in it can be a very small amount and just ask another question, and that's fine. But that type of support will ultimately be what helps build this show now. I need to build up more users because not everybody, of course, she's going to support me.
That's very clear, and that's okay. But I will be investing my money, through this year to actually do that. So I'm hoping that we can continue to build this show. It's been a 150 episodes now to over two years. I feel like I have certainly improved, but I've got a long way to go, and I got a lot of stuff that I wanna do. So, anyways, enough about that. How do you support? Go to podcasting 2.0, our podcast apps .com. Excuse me. And there's a whole list there of different products like Fountain, Podverse, these different podcast apps that support podcasting 2.0. And then you simply set up a lightning wallet, you can load up some money, and you can use that to support the show.
Alright. That's it. Thank oh, and Oh, excuse me. The best way to support this show, and it's completely free. If you like this content, turn around to somebody who you care about and say, hey. Go listen to this podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we are at the start, still as amazing as this is, of the next bull run. We've got months. We've got more than a year ahead of us. Almost two years, at least, in my estimation of the next bull run, there will be people coming in to this space. If you want to help them out, let them know about this podcast. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at @MacintoshFintech. I'm on mastodon at [email protected].
By the way, if you're having problems, Twitter, just DM me, is probably the best way to get a hold of me. I can be reached by email at [email protected] . And, of course, there's a website at satoshis-plebs.com. Stay humble, friends. Go out, make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
