This week's episode wraps up our privacy discussion. We discuss the common components of privacy and wrap things up by walking through a solid privacy-based toolchain for secure storage of your Bitcoin.
News and Links
JoinMarket
DMX Decentralized Mixer
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
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 15th, and this is episode 152 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is privacy tools. Alright. We're gonna do our market update first, of course, and then we're gonna jump into this very important discussion about privacy tools It's to wrap things up with our, last few weeks of, discussion on privacy. We'll, of course, thank our Supporters go through the news and call it a day. And, again, I am looking to wrap this up in 30 to 45 minutes. I do find it Very difficult to do it under under about 45, but we'll certainly be targeting that. Our weekly close Yesterday, January 14th, at 6 o'clock UTC, excuse me, at 6 o'clock CST, was $41,796.27.
The block height at time of recording is 825,924. That's 825,924. We are looking right now at a difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days, 5 days to be exact, of 2.34% down. So it does look like we may get that downward adjustment at this point, 2, which would be, of course, nice for the miners out there. And right now, we are looking at about 50 sets per of Fees, which means you're looking at roughly $3, between 301 and 3.25, in US dollars in fiat, for transactions. A little down a little down. Not as much as I would like, of course, but we may never get much below this, to be honest. We'll just have to see.
And, of course, 1.74 gigabytes of transactions. Wow. Staying right up there. And when I say that, I mean, What that means is, essentially, transactions that are built up in the mempool that have not been sent out. Alright. So let's actually take a look at the market itself at Bitcoin. What is going on with Bitcoin? We had our grand, our fabulous ETF opening on Thursday, January 11th, we shot right up to 49,000, and then we crashed. What happened, Macintosh? I don't know. I don't I really don't. It doesn't matter. I view it as buying opportunity as always.
It it doesn't completely surprise me, you know, is this saying in trading or whatever, buy the rumor, sell the news. That's what it is. By the rumor selling news. I think somewhat, that's what happened here. So we had a huge amount of inflows into the ETFs themselves. But, obviously, we also had selling in general, and we also had selling coming from the grayscale ETF, which was getting converted from a futures ETF to a spot ETF, which then allowed those people finally to start leaving grayscale. So that's been a whole mess that I've never really talked about, but, basically, people were kinda getting, shafted over there with grayscale in terms of how things were handled. And now they've been released, and a lot of them left. Today, right now, as I record where we just broke through 43,000, I'm actually recording this on Monday afternoon.
So we have been moving up, since that kind of low for the week yesterday. So we will see. I'm certainly not guaranteeing that we're just going to shoot straight up. It's interesting because going back through my notes, I did say I I thought an ETF would at least it should get to 50,000 now. We obviously, we didn't quite. And I think my calculation, Essentially, that was wrong was I did not think that grayscale was going to affect things that much. Clearly, it did. But regardless, we got close. I think this chart shows well, it basically shows dead even 49 a thousand.
I'm looking at, yeah, like, 48,977. I it depends on kind of how granular you get. Forty eight. Yeah. 48,977, so right at 49,000. I'm certainly not worried about it in the long run. I've talked about this endlessly. I'm not going to belabor it. In terms of where are we going to go from here, that's a great question. And we've been kind of going sideways for quite a while now since early January, early December, actually. December 5th, We got all the way up to 40 January. Right? January 2nd, we got higher. We kinda broke out of that, and then we marched all the way up, like I said, to 49. But in general, again, we've been kind of building this parallel channel, if you wanna call it that, this box.
I don't really consider this a pennant. It doesn't really look looked like 1 or a banner for that matter. I think maybe if you distorted your, You might draw a banner out of this, actually. I I could see that. But I think what we're gonna do is consolidate here for some period of time, and then when we break north again, I think we'll push through 50 and and we'll go on from there. I don't really expect I mentioned, you know, potentially, we could go all the way down to 30. Obviously, I don't think that's gonna happen at this point. I think it would take a lot of sell pressure even to get down to 40 at this point, much less breakthrough. Forty is gonna be very strong resistance if we get down that low, which we have not. We've gotten down. The lowest was three days ago at 41,500.
four days ago. What day was that? Friday. Right. So we got all the way down there and then, you know, went up. We've been slowly building up from there. So, anyways, it does not matter. It's all irrelevant. What do we say here at Satoshi's Plebs? Well, you should be DCA ing. Right? Whether you're doing that using strike, mining, however you're doing that, stack those sats regardless of the price. Don't try and trade this stuff. We have a little fun, of course, sitting here speculating. And during a bull run, which I believe we're in the start of, you can be fairly accurate, Fairly easy. I mean, let's be, let's be honest. I mean, since January, I've probably been easily 80% accurate, maybe even a bit more.
If I were trading this, theoretically, I should be able to make money off of that. The reality is I'm not trading it. I've not traded for multiple years now. I have no intention of doing any trading, and that's just that's just the way it is. Because I know I've made mistakes in bull markets trading. I've certainly made many mistakes in a bear market trading. I've lost a significant amount of money, and it's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. We are talking about the world's most valuable asset. Now it may not be priced that way right now, But it is. If you understand that, you don't wanna lose those sats. This is why even get frustrated about little things like, How can I put this? SATs are SATs. I don't wanna lose any SAT because right now, yes, that SAT might be worth A minuscule amount, say, 1 100th of a of a cent. I don't know offhand, honestly.
But one day, what if it's worth 1 cent? What if it's worth 10¢. I don't know what let's see. 1¢ would be $1,000,000 per Bitcoin, which that sounds outrageous. So, 10¢ would be $10,000,000. What if a Bitcoin's worth $10,000,000 and every sat is worth 10¢? Well, all those sats, I mean, you're just kinda spraying. It'd be like walking down the street, dropping dimes all over the place. Who would do that? I'd be down there picking up those dimes. Maybe I'm just cheap. I don't know. But it is important. So, anyways, It's very easy to mess up trade. I am certainly not encouraging you to be trading. I only do this, and maybe I should stop doing it. I've thought about it, but I I I only do this as a way to kinda get an idea of where the market's going. I really don't listen to other traders anymore. I used to.
I don't have time. I listen to Bitcoin, non trading material, essentially. People like, say, Jimmy Song has a podcast that I listen to. Bitcoin This is this. I do listen to Peter McCormick's what be Bitcoin did podcast. I don't agree with everything that he says or he believes certainly, or the views of a lot of his guests, but he has some very interesting people on there. Alex Gladstein Gladstone. Sorry, Alex, if I I think I just messed up your last name. With the Human Rights Foundation, I love hearing him, and he's occasionally on Peter's show. People like that, I don't waste my time listening to some guy Draw numbers on a chart.
Maybe maybe we just need to stop doing this too. But those people are it's a different different breed. Anyways, enough about that. I have rambled on. Let's keep this train moving. Alright. Privacy tools. So I have, in one way or the other, mentioned at least the majority of these. But as you think about privacy, you're probably on a scale. Right? Everyone's on this Scale from 1 to 10, you're not a 10 being perfectly private, which nobody's there, essentially, because there's not complete privacy. I I don't believe it. You may feel like you have it right now. Down the road, that may prove to be incorrect, but you're highly private. Let's say that. And on a scale of 1, all your coins are on coinbase, and you bought them all with KYC.
And even if you move them off, you do nothing to make those coins private. You don't use lightning, any of that. Okay? If that's where you're at, that's okay. I want you to think about these things. I want you to be aware of what's out there. And as you choose to move into this stuff, I want you to have the available information to at least have a basic understanding. Now I'm going to talk about some very specific tools here. I also want to mention I did mention earlier about Tor. Tor is not a privacy solution. Just because you're running your node on Tor or you're interacting with the Internet with Tor, that doesn't make you private. It does not make your Bitcoin transactions private. However, it is a part of the puzzle, for example. If you use is Tor or maybe a VPN, which is frankly easier to use than Tor. I'm glad that Tor added their proof of work so that my understanding is essentially that should have eliminated the spam attacks, the that were happening on the network to try and shut it down.
I haven't really heard a whole lot about that since they did it a few months ago, but, that has been implemented. So maybe it's a better solution. I personally use a VPN, just To be honest, I have used Tor in the past. I may go back and check it out again. But chore with a lightning node, for example, at at least until very recently, has been very problematic. I've done that in the past, and it's a nightmare. I was getting forced, chain channel closures, which certainly these days is expensive. And it was my opinion because of Tor. So, you know, these tools are still somewhat in their infancy, but they are improving.
And you do need to be aware So Tor is certainly a kind of a base layer option. If you're not using Tor, and then you should be using a VPN. If you're interacting with a one of these other services that we're going to be talking about. So, if you're got your coins on Coinbase, And I don't I don't wanna pick on Coinbase, but just they're the easy target. Right? If your tool if your coins are on Coinbase, Don't worry about a VPN. Don't worry about Tor. Just that's the first step. You've gotta get your coins off of Coinbase. You If you choose to buy them there, then you need to run them through a process essentially if you want Don't just take them and move them to a hardware wallet. That's to keep them safe. That keeps them off of the exchange. Yes. That's a good thing. But that does nothing to ensure your privacy.
So be clear about that. How do you get that privacy? Well, The other option aside from Coinbase would be buying it through a peer to peer setup, of course. There is some level of privacy there, although that can certainly be compromised, But it's better than, say, buying it on Coinbase. I would start there ideally. And then what I would do is I would run it through a coin joint service. So I mentioned these. I talked about these, but we're gonna get very specific about this. There's 4 different types of non how can I put this? The minimum for me is it's a service that needs to be transparent as possible. Ideally, the code, should be open source or at least open viewable.
Decentralization would be optimal. K? So there are mixer services. There are websites that you can go to that you can mix your coins. You noticed that I never talk about them. Blender dot I o maybe? I may be mistaken about that. But for example, Like, you literally go there. You log in. You send your coin in or whatever, and it mixes it. But there's no transparency there. We don't know. We have to take their word. And they say things like, well, we don't keep your IP addresses. We don't keep logs. We don't do this. We don't do that. We're taking your word for that, though. And I don't wanna disparage them, but we have no way of proving that because they're not Transparent.
So I'm gonna limit this discussion. If you're worried enough about your privacy to take steps to be private, Then do the extra step, which doesn't really cost a whole lot, and use a service that's open That's ideally decentralized. One of these is that, the code is available that you at least Know somewhat behind the scenes what's going on. And there's 4 that I've got listed here. Wasabi, with what they call CoinJoin. Samurai, samurai wallet with Whirlpool. That's their that's their mixing service. One called join market. And then one that, as far as I can tell, is certainly theoretical at this point, but I'm very interested in, and it is supposed to be decentralized. It's called Demix.
I'm gonna include some, the paper that the research paper that was written about that. I'm gonna include as much as I can about that, but I want to be clear it's not an actual solution at this point. Although, ultimately, maybe, It will be. I will say this about wasabi, and I try to stay out of this stuff. Well, for one thing, wasabi is not available in the United So wasabi, in my opinion, this is my opinion only, they got scared when The announcement was made that there might be some regulations that come down the road about any service like this essentially being outlawed or being having to register as a money service or or whatever, and they just closed up shop, and that's their choice.
So if you live in the United States, you, it is not by their rules, a service that's available to you. They are a centralized service. You have a Wasabi Wallet that is controlled by Wasabi. That means they could rock you. That means, it's well, it's they're the custodians. Okay? Need to be aware of that. I also don't think they're open source. Alright. It says it's open source. It also says it's noncustodial. I don't. So the wallet itself, they do have the source code. So that's a good step. Let's see what else they have up here because there are other components to this. I don't see Only the wallet.
And if I'm incorrect about this, I apologize. From what I see here, Only the wallet is open source. None of the other components are. That's unfortunate. I will take back the argument that it's custodian. The wallet itself certainly isn't, but you are interacting with a company. There is definitely a company, ZKSnacks, behind wasabi. There is a company who's there to make money, and, That's why they chose to withdraw from the US market. They were concerned that there would be lawsuits and this kind of thing. When I'm building privacy tools now, they're Completely they're allowed to have their own opinion. But if I'm building a privacy tool, it's not about me. It's about helping everyone in the world point blank. Now that means I should probably approach this in certain ways. I should not be jurisdictionally bound.
I should probably have developers all over the world. I should be as open source as possible. I should also be as low in the protocol stack as possible now. The wasabi, company the company behind wasabi at z k snacks, The company behind the samurai wallet, any of these companies, they don't have control over what goes into the Bitcoin protocol, unfortunately, generally, well, by design. But there are tools that are needed in the protocol, and I talked about this, I think, the last episode, that needs to be there so that we have privacy by default. We should not even have to have these things. These should be, like, Not needed.
We should have privacy by default. Again, we do not with Bitcoin. When we do, then these things become irrelevant. So that's something that I would like to keep in mind now. That doesn't change today's discussion. But hopefully, at some point, we don't need this discussion. So I'm not gonna really say a whole lot about Wasabi other than what I've already said. Yes. Some of the code is open source. Clearly, all of it is not. There is a company that's behind them. There's a company, for example, that's chosen not to operate in the US market, which then makes it unavailable to a lot of the world's Bitcoin holders.
I I don't really know what else to say. Their fees, I believe, are actually among the highest. I'd have to compare that. Samurai, on the other hand, a little more open source. Got Samurai Wallet Android. The dojo is the backing server for the wallet. Whirlpool now see, now this is what I like to see. This is the coin joint implementation of Whirlpool right there on their website on their GitHub website, the Whirlpool client, the Whirlpool stats. At one point, I thought I understood. So there is a Whirlpool server that samurai runs, and one of the nice things is there's a lot of Bitcoin It's up in that whirlpool. It passed, I wanna say, 10,000 Bitcoin in that whirlpool. So, essentially, they're all being mixed around, if you wanna simplify it.
But I thought you could run your own Whirlpool, and I would love to see that if that's Possible. I actually went and looked for it. Couldn't find anything. But, again, I don't want centralization. I don't want One Whirlpool server or a set of Whirlpool servers that samurai runs. So this is kind of the drawback to this. I'm not aware of any others. Now there may be some, but the code at least is right here as long as the client code, the stats code, The GUI code oh, that man, they got a lot of stuff here. So sentinel code, they it looks to me like they do Everything out in the public, which is exactly what I want. Java, JavaScript, Swift, Python, An open SCAD.
Interesting. That's quite a mix. Something to keep in mind. By the way, if you look into these services and whatever, I'm just gonna go ahead and warn you. These these developers are, prickly, very opinionated, however you wanna push it, however you wanna say it. I'm sure they're nice people. There's a lot of back and forth going on on Bitcoin Twitter about these services. And sometimes, frankly, it can be very difficult for you to figure out who's right, who's wrong, whatever, whose spin is correct or or whatever. Join market.
That's the next one. Okay. So JoinMarket is also open source, it looks Next slide. You've gotta joinmarket.org, which they have the client server, the web client, and then the implementation itself. So I gotta be honest. I don't think that join market gets a whole lot of attention. Their website, it looks like, is not even up. It's join market.org. Okay. Apparently, it's join market .net. Maybe it used to be .org. I I'm reading that from the GitHub is why. So, anyways, They do have a, a website. The GitHub is there. I don't know the details other than that. Again, you just don't hear a whole lot about them.
This says it's completely decentralized. Each node operates independently with its own rules, funds, and privacy. That may be true. I hope they're getting traction if that's true. You can actually earn, which that makes sense because you as you participate, As you provide liquidity, essentially, you get paid for doing that. NVK of CoinKite is behind it, apparently, or at least talking about it. I would be cautious about this. Derjigee apparently is behind this. I did not know that. Derek Gigi has a long history in Bitcoin. He's a interesting character, for sure.
So I don't know. I don't I may be I'm not sure about this. I'd have to look at this, in more detail, to be honest, because I don't quite understand everything that's going on here. It says it's decentralized, which would be a big win. I I really wished that there was more out there about them, and I I may need to look into this later. But this is the type of thing I want decentralized certainly as much as possible. It needs to be open source, which 2 of these at least fall directly under that. Wasabi, I think it could be argued that that's not true completely, certainly. And I I've seen them. I'm fairly certain. They say they're open source, but if all the components are not on GitHub and you cannot Browse that code, then they're not open source. Part of it is.
That's just my opinion. Looking at this stuff doesn't change my opinion oh, and we need to talk about DMIX. DMIX, of course, is is being developed. It's a new service. It's supposed to be decentralized. It sounds a lot like joint market, to be honest. So I will definitely be following it as well. If I had to tell somebody today what you should use, and what I would use would be the samurai wallet or the samurai service. You do not actually have to use the wallet to use the service, by the way. For example, my setup right now that I am actively setting up. I'm using I'm setting up the Bitcoin core. It's now synced. It finished up last night on my desktop, which maybe that sounds strange, but, it's this new server and core, once it's synced, really doesn't take a whole lot of, compute power, that kind of thing, so it just kinda sits there in the background.
That will allow me then to set up an Electrum server. I think I'm gonna use the Electrum Rust Server. Electrum essentially acts like an indexing service of the Bitcoin Core. The Bitcoin Core could be considered a database. It's got all the transactions in it that have ever happened. 586 gigabytes of data at this point. However, it's not indexed. You can't search it very easily, and, essentially, Electrum provides a very quick interface to that. Plus, it actually provides another layer of privacy. So I will then hook up Sparrow Wallet to Electrum, to my Electrum server, which is running on my desktop, which connects to my Bitcoin core node. You see how all that works?
And then, which is my hardware solution for storing my private keys, my wallet, so to speak, would then interact with Sparrow, and it would all happen right here on this desktop and in a very secure manner. Now I still have to worry where did my sats come from. The sats that I mine, which are the sats that are on that wallet right now, are could be considered KYC free. Absolutely. If I bought some sats on Coinbase, obviously not. I would have to run them if I want to maintain my privacy with those coins. I would have to run them through samurai. If If I do that, then I can store them as KYC free. Now one of the nice things about Sparrow is you can label your wallets. You can have multiple wallets inside Sparrow, that you interact with, and you can label them. So I can label this address, essentially.
Brains, my my pool, my mining pool software, SATs, my mining pool SATs. I could label it Coinbase for or just KYC. And then anything that I bought on a primary server like Coinbase or Kraken would go into there because they're essentially compromised their KYC. Or I could take them well, I'm not sure you can even run from, say, Coinbase to a samurai Whirlpool. I you may be able to. I do not know. But if I couldn't, then I would bring them down to my seed signer, and then I would send them from there if I needed to clean them, so to speak, to that whirlpool and then back to another wallet, another address that's labeled KYC free or clean or whatever.
So these labels come in really handy, or I could generate an address for Satoshi's Plebs for the podcast. I could put it on the podcast website in, like, a Bitcoin paid what do they call that server? BTC pay server. Right? And then that would enable The supporters to send me directly on chain, Bitcoin. Now the reality is most people aren't gonna do that. I'm not gonna worry about it, but you could. And, again, I got a label for that. I know where it comes from. And I would have to consider that KYC coin because I know people know it's right there on the website. You can match it up, all this kind of stuff. There's ways of kind of tying that back to me. So you need to think about these things. I wished we didn't have to, but you do need to think about these things.
And it's very it's intense. It's you don't wanna make a mistake. But my encouragement to you, the listener, would be If you have not done any of this, get started. Let's say your coins are sitting on an exchange. Let's go through that again. You've never done anything. Well, first step is simply to get them off the exchange. Get a seed signer wallet. Build 1 if you can. Buy 1 if you can't. Either way, get one. Put your coin on that wallet so you stop worrying about what's gonna happen with Coinbase or Kraken and or whomever. That's the first step.
If you want privacy, start thinking about that. How can I get It's set up with samurai so I can clean this? How do I keep that separate? I'm gonna use a different label for that. Can I buy my coin at a local Bitcoin beat up? I may or I might consider if I did that personally, I'm paranoid, guys. I'm just am. I would consider that kind of gray. I wouldn't consider it clean. I wouldn't consider it KYC coin. I would kinda consider it Gray, if that makes sense. And maybe ultimately, I end up running it through Samurai, through Whirlpool. Would I use Tor? Would I use a VPN?
You start building this and make it natural. This stuff needs to be part of your daily workflow, or you won't do it. If you're only doing it every six months, you won't do it in the long term. So I hope that's helpful. Well, I just kinda wanted to tie it all together with this last episode so that you could see exactly how this would all potentially work for you, plus kinda walk through those mixing services that I consider even worthwhile to look at. I again, I would not encourage you to go to some website. I let me I think it's blender dot a o. Let me as an example.
And I'm not trying to pick on them. I why they do it. I'm just saying that, that doesn't seem to come up. It doesn't matter. I'm not gonna take the time to look it up. But one of these kind of web interface mixer solutions is probably not the right thing to do. Alright. I will continue. I may break down each of these in more detail later. I doubt I will do wasabi because I don't think I can actually support that or provided as a, what's the word I'm looking? I I don't think I could actually recommend that while Certainly, based on what I've heard, frankly, and I've heard from both sides, I've heard the CEO or CTO of the company multiple times on different podcasts defending kind of what they do. I've looked at the code in general.
I've heard the arguments, and that's kinda where I fall. I just don't think it's the best solution out there. I wish them the best of luck. And as a US citizen, frankly, I I'm now I can't even use it. So how can I recommend it? But, anyways, I will certainly continue to monitor samurai, and I do wanna look at a joint market more and demix as it comes online. So I will continue. I may do more in-depth. I I'm going to do a tutorial. I've already decided I'm gonna do a tutorial, basically. I I don't know if I'm gonna do it in video or what, but of this samurai not Samurai.
Bitcoin node, Electrum, Sparrow, Seed Signer setup because that's a very important step for people. You get a lot of privacy just having that And then you only have to worry about where your coins have been, so to speak. Where are are they KYC ed or are they non KYC ed? Alright. Let's jump on to supporters. We had some support this week, and we'll go through this. I do think we're still having some problems. I'm gonna talk about that in the news and notes, actually. That'll be part of the news. So we had three supporters this week. Actually, we had two. We had three boosts this week. 151 of privacy fundamentals were the same, all three.
We had KNS v22 sending a 100 sats on 12th, listing that. No message, but I really do appreciate that. KNSV 22. And then we had our friend, anonymous. Anonymous. I must have not copied that correctly. It's anonymous. Send in 500 sats on the 14th and then again immediately after another 2,000 sats, so so that was cool. Follow-up, he asked a question. He or she asked a question last week. Wallet of Satoshi seems to be the only lightning wallet I can find that does background notifications on mobile when it receives sats. Basically, I was interested in sending the equivalent of a boost to wife, kids, etcetera. I think Telegram has a lightning tip bot that would do this. I think you are correct.
I've seen similar things in Telegram with lightning tip bot. So I think that might It worked for you. I would throw out Wallet of Satoshi actually is custodial. You probably know that already. But, yeah, just as a note. Oh, I didn't talk at all. Sorry. I did mention this As in previous episodes, I do wanna say this. Lightning can be considered a layer of privacy because When you route through a lightning network, it becomes very difficult for that transaction to be traced. So it's not a privacy solution per se, but maybe it's something that you wanna think about. If I've got some KYC free coin, I load up on a lightning wallet. I would not necessarily recommend a custodial one, but a lightning wallet anyways.
And then use that to interact with whomever. That would be a ideal KYC free solution. So something to think about. Anyways, I do appreciate that I support everybody. So that's what? 25, 26100. We also had some streaming. We had some good streaming, Actually, probably more than that, to be honest. News and notes. I wanna run through this real quick. We're running out at a time. Surprise, surprise. Not a whole lot of news, but I did have a few few things. Lynn Alden had a great tweet. I love Lynn Alden. I wish I could get her on show. One day, I'm gonna ask her, or maybe I can catch up with her at the Bitcoin conference. I'm sure she'll be there. Maybe I could somehow grab 5 minutes of our time to try and do an interview.
I would argue that Fiat attempted I changed the definition of money during the last 50 years. Rather than money being a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. That is the traditional Austrian view of money, by the way. It has lost most of its store of value role, even the best one, let alone the worst one. So as an example, what she's talking about here, the US dollar has lost, like, At 93, 96% of its value since 1913, so in the last 100 years. So arguably, it's not a good store of value. It's not. Gold, on the other hand, has gone from basically $20 an ounce back then to $22100 an ounce.
So it is a good store of value. It's just not a good medium of change or unit of account at this point. Anyways, it has lost most of its store value role. Let's see. I already read that. And proponents of this assert that ongoing debasement is necessary and good. See, this is the Keynesian philosophy. We have to debase the money. This is necessary. This is good. You will like it, you peasants. Oh, sorry. I added that last part. Anyways, this forces people to monetize other things for the store of value Rome, real estate, Often, as an example, often resulting in malinvestment, and this dynamic greatly favors those who have access to those other types of assets to monetize. In other words, the poor person can't buy stocks and bonds and real estate, So they're left out. To this extent that it's successful, Bitcoin just reenables earlier definitions of money in a digital age.
I absolutely believe that statement. I wanna reread it. To the extent that it's successful, Bitcoin just reenables earlier definitions of money in a digital age. In other words, it can be a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. I added that. It's the novel idea that money can be held without being debased and can be brought with you wherever you want. Great tweet. You should follow her. By the way, the Federal Reserve, the people who manage our money, posted their largest ever ever annual operating loss. Deficit of $114,300,000,000 for the last year. Go team.
And that's it. So, I do wanna have a little news about what is going on with this podcast. I do apologize. Basically, I've been trying to self host with Castapod. I had initially thought I was having great success, and then I started adding episodes that people were actively pulling. And it turns out there's an issue. A lot of times, like, half the time, people are getting episodes that they loop. Like, you play, like, five or ten minutes. It doesn't seem to be a a definite period of time, but then it just kinda restarts. And it's crazy. And I couldn't get help for it, frankly, on the forum for castapod.
And after, like, a week and a half or two weeks, I've finally had to give up. So Friday, they had a guest of, he's the guy who started PodHome .fm, which is a podcast hosting company, fairly new, doing a lot of great podcasting two point o stuff. And So I signed up for their service. I had to do something, and I did not wanna go back to Captivate because Captivate has been very slow at supporting podcasting testing two point o. So I signed up. I've moved over. We're still having a few issues, frankly, with the, with the index because, basically, both my feeds are still showing up there for some reason.
But, hopefully, once we get that resolved and all this stuff is coming right from PodHome.fm. You'll see the proper episodes. They play properly and all that kind of stuff. But one of the cool things is So Barry is his name, the CEO. He has built a bunch of AI tools into PodHome.fm. For example, I can, At the click of a button, generate a transcript. Now I have to go in and edit that transcript. It's not perfect, but it I can do it right there. I can have it generate chapters. I can even have it generate show titles and show notes, although I still do my own. I think it does a terrible job of that, frankly. Regardless, it saves me a huge amount of time, so and it's improving my workflow.
So that's really cool. So I'm really looking forward to that. I've already gone back and updated, like, the last ten episodes with transcripts and that kind of thing, chapters. So you will start seeing that in your Podcast 2.0 apps, and it will be awesome. Just a little bit of awesomeness. And I do again apologize. I can't there's just my hands are tied. I had to change again. It's unfortunate, but this is, I guess, new stuff or whatever. That's the way it is. So, we are moving forward with that, and I'm really looking forward to the new setup.
And, no, of course, I'm not getting paid by Podhome.fm. I am getting the 1st three months free. But if you go back and listen to podcasting two point know, the interview that came out on Friday, the interview with Barry, they literally gave you a code on there to do do that. So that's not because I'm special. So that's it. Let's run through the end stuff. That's our news and notes. So, of course, Satoshi's Plebs supports Podcasting 2.0. That's how we get this awesome stuff like chapters and transcripts. It's a value for value podcast. As I talk about time and time again, I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have any of that. You, dear listener, can support the podcast. I do this very specifically. I do it because I believe that even if it's a company that I really believe in let's say Swan Bitcoin came to me and say, hey, McIntosh. You wanna we wanna sponsor your show. We're gonna give you $10 a week, for you just to chill away at our product.
I've used the product. I've experienced with it, whatever. I think everything's terrific. But if Swan Bitcoin blows up and they have your money, I feel responsible for that. I cannot put myself into that position. And if something bad does come out and they're telling me they're giving me 5, $10 a week, do you really think I'm gonna talk bad about them? No. Probably not. So what I do is I come to you, the listener. I say, hey. Are you receiving value from this podcast? If you are, would you please support it. There's thre different ways you can support it. Talent, time, treasure. I think I got the transcript thing done. Although, boy, maybe some editing of those transcripts. I don't know. But there's other stuff that people can help out with. So that's the time and talent part of it. There are ways for you to be involved without directly just sending me treasure.
But you can obviously send me treasure. You can get grab a Podcasting 2.0 app there at new podcast apps.com. Just go to podcast index .org, actually. And that'll get you there. There's a list of those, and you can try them out. Try out fountain. Try out, Castomatic. Try out, what's the other one? Pod, Urg, Pod Podverse. There's so many that start with pod. I always get confused. Podverse. I've tried all 3 of those. I use Fountain a lot. I use all 3 of them a fair amount. Oh, and Podcast Guru, actually. So, anyways, You can load up a lightning wallet, and you can stream stats to the show. You can boost the show just like our supporters did today, and I do really appreciate that. It's a great way to show that this show is bringing you value.
Another great way to do that is simply to turn to somebody and say, hey. I've been listening to this nut job, Macintosh. He's kinda crazy, but He provides some really valuable input put from time to time. You should go take a listen. It's Satoshi's Plebs podcast. Alright? Anyways, that's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I certainly would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social, and you can reach me by email at [email protected]. There's a website, of course, as well. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I'll talk to you all soon.
Let's do it. .
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 15th, and this is episode 152 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is privacy tools. Alright. We're gonna do our market update first, of course, and then we're gonna jump into this very important discussion about privacy tools It's to wrap things up with our, last few weeks of, discussion on privacy. We'll, of course, thank our Supporters go through the news and call it a day. And, again, I am looking to wrap this up in 30 to 45 minutes. I do find it Very difficult to do it under under about 45, but we'll certainly be targeting that. Our weekly close Yesterday, January 14th, at 6 o'clock UTC, excuse me, at 6 o'clock CST, was $41,796.27.
The block height at time of recording is 825,924. That's 825,924. We are looking right now at a difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days, 5 days to be exact, of 2.34% down. So it does look like we may get that downward adjustment at this point, 2, which would be, of course, nice for the miners out there. And right now, we are looking at about 50 sets per of Fees, which means you're looking at roughly $3, between 301 and 3.25, in US dollars in fiat, for transactions. A little down a little down. Not as much as I would like, of course, but we may never get much below this, to be honest. We'll just have to see.
And, of course, 1.74 gigabytes of transactions. Wow. Staying right up there. And when I say that, I mean, What that means is, essentially, transactions that are built up in the mempool that have not been sent out. Alright. So let's actually take a look at the market itself at Bitcoin. What is going on with Bitcoin? We had our grand, our fabulous ETF opening on Thursday, January 11th, we shot right up to 49,000, and then we crashed. What happened, Macintosh? I don't know. I don't I really don't. It doesn't matter. I view it as buying opportunity as always.
It it doesn't completely surprise me, you know, is this saying in trading or whatever, buy the rumor, sell the news. That's what it is. By the rumor selling news. I think somewhat, that's what happened here. So we had a huge amount of inflows into the ETFs themselves. But, obviously, we also had selling in general, and we also had selling coming from the grayscale ETF, which was getting converted from a futures ETF to a spot ETF, which then allowed those people finally to start leaving grayscale. So that's been a whole mess that I've never really talked about, but, basically, people were kinda getting, shafted over there with grayscale in terms of how things were handled. And now they've been released, and a lot of them left. Today, right now, as I record where we just broke through 43,000, I'm actually recording this on Monday afternoon.
So we have been moving up, since that kind of low for the week yesterday. So we will see. I'm certainly not guaranteeing that we're just going to shoot straight up. It's interesting because going back through my notes, I did say I I thought an ETF would at least it should get to 50,000 now. We obviously, we didn't quite. And I think my calculation, Essentially, that was wrong was I did not think that grayscale was going to affect things that much. Clearly, it did. But regardless, we got close. I think this chart shows well, it basically shows dead even 49 a thousand.
I'm looking at, yeah, like, 48,977. I it depends on kind of how granular you get. Forty eight. Yeah. 48,977, so right at 49,000. I'm certainly not worried about it in the long run. I've talked about this endlessly. I'm not going to belabor it. In terms of where are we going to go from here, that's a great question. And we've been kind of going sideways for quite a while now since early January, early December, actually. December 5th, We got all the way up to 40 January. Right? January 2nd, we got higher. We kinda broke out of that, and then we marched all the way up, like I said, to 49. But in general, again, we've been kind of building this parallel channel, if you wanna call it that, this box.
I don't really consider this a pennant. It doesn't really look looked like 1 or a banner for that matter. I think maybe if you distorted your, You might draw a banner out of this, actually. I I could see that. But I think what we're gonna do is consolidate here for some period of time, and then when we break north again, I think we'll push through 50 and and we'll go on from there. I don't really expect I mentioned, you know, potentially, we could go all the way down to 30. Obviously, I don't think that's gonna happen at this point. I think it would take a lot of sell pressure even to get down to 40 at this point, much less breakthrough. Forty is gonna be very strong resistance if we get down that low, which we have not. We've gotten down. The lowest was three days ago at 41,500.
four days ago. What day was that? Friday. Right. So we got all the way down there and then, you know, went up. We've been slowly building up from there. So, anyways, it does not matter. It's all irrelevant. What do we say here at Satoshi's Plebs? Well, you should be DCA ing. Right? Whether you're doing that using strike, mining, however you're doing that, stack those sats regardless of the price. Don't try and trade this stuff. We have a little fun, of course, sitting here speculating. And during a bull run, which I believe we're in the start of, you can be fairly accurate, Fairly easy. I mean, let's be, let's be honest. I mean, since January, I've probably been easily 80% accurate, maybe even a bit more.
If I were trading this, theoretically, I should be able to make money off of that. The reality is I'm not trading it. I've not traded for multiple years now. I have no intention of doing any trading, and that's just that's just the way it is. Because I know I've made mistakes in bull markets trading. I've certainly made many mistakes in a bear market trading. I've lost a significant amount of money, and it's just not worth it. It's just not worth it. We are talking about the world's most valuable asset. Now it may not be priced that way right now, But it is. If you understand that, you don't wanna lose those sats. This is why even get frustrated about little things like, How can I put this? SATs are SATs. I don't wanna lose any SAT because right now, yes, that SAT might be worth A minuscule amount, say, 1 100th of a of a cent. I don't know offhand, honestly.
But one day, what if it's worth 1 cent? What if it's worth 10¢. I don't know what let's see. 1¢ would be $1,000,000 per Bitcoin, which that sounds outrageous. So, 10¢ would be $10,000,000. What if a Bitcoin's worth $10,000,000 and every sat is worth 10¢? Well, all those sats, I mean, you're just kinda spraying. It'd be like walking down the street, dropping dimes all over the place. Who would do that? I'd be down there picking up those dimes. Maybe I'm just cheap. I don't know. But it is important. So, anyways, It's very easy to mess up trade. I am certainly not encouraging you to be trading. I only do this, and maybe I should stop doing it. I've thought about it, but I I I only do this as a way to kinda get an idea of where the market's going. I really don't listen to other traders anymore. I used to.
I don't have time. I listen to Bitcoin, non trading material, essentially. People like, say, Jimmy Song has a podcast that I listen to. Bitcoin This is this. I do listen to Peter McCormick's what be Bitcoin did podcast. I don't agree with everything that he says or he believes certainly, or the views of a lot of his guests, but he has some very interesting people on there. Alex Gladstein Gladstone. Sorry, Alex, if I I think I just messed up your last name. With the Human Rights Foundation, I love hearing him, and he's occasionally on Peter's show. People like that, I don't waste my time listening to some guy Draw numbers on a chart.
Maybe maybe we just need to stop doing this too. But those people are it's a different different breed. Anyways, enough about that. I have rambled on. Let's keep this train moving. Alright. Privacy tools. So I have, in one way or the other, mentioned at least the majority of these. But as you think about privacy, you're probably on a scale. Right? Everyone's on this Scale from 1 to 10, you're not a 10 being perfectly private, which nobody's there, essentially, because there's not complete privacy. I I don't believe it. You may feel like you have it right now. Down the road, that may prove to be incorrect, but you're highly private. Let's say that. And on a scale of 1, all your coins are on coinbase, and you bought them all with KYC.
And even if you move them off, you do nothing to make those coins private. You don't use lightning, any of that. Okay? If that's where you're at, that's okay. I want you to think about these things. I want you to be aware of what's out there. And as you choose to move into this stuff, I want you to have the available information to at least have a basic understanding. Now I'm going to talk about some very specific tools here. I also want to mention I did mention earlier about Tor. Tor is not a privacy solution. Just because you're running your node on Tor or you're interacting with the Internet with Tor, that doesn't make you private. It does not make your Bitcoin transactions private. However, it is a part of the puzzle, for example. If you use is Tor or maybe a VPN, which is frankly easier to use than Tor. I'm glad that Tor added their proof of work so that my understanding is essentially that should have eliminated the spam attacks, the that were happening on the network to try and shut it down.
I haven't really heard a whole lot about that since they did it a few months ago, but, that has been implemented. So maybe it's a better solution. I personally use a VPN, just To be honest, I have used Tor in the past. I may go back and check it out again. But chore with a lightning node, for example, at at least until very recently, has been very problematic. I've done that in the past, and it's a nightmare. I was getting forced, chain channel closures, which certainly these days is expensive. And it was my opinion because of Tor. So, you know, these tools are still somewhat in their infancy, but they are improving.
And you do need to be aware So Tor is certainly a kind of a base layer option. If you're not using Tor, and then you should be using a VPN. If you're interacting with a one of these other services that we're going to be talking about. So, if you're got your coins on Coinbase, And I don't I don't wanna pick on Coinbase, but just they're the easy target. Right? If your tool if your coins are on Coinbase, Don't worry about a VPN. Don't worry about Tor. Just that's the first step. You've gotta get your coins off of Coinbase. You If you choose to buy them there, then you need to run them through a process essentially if you want Don't just take them and move them to a hardware wallet. That's to keep them safe. That keeps them off of the exchange. Yes. That's a good thing. But that does nothing to ensure your privacy.
So be clear about that. How do you get that privacy? Well, The other option aside from Coinbase would be buying it through a peer to peer setup, of course. There is some level of privacy there, although that can certainly be compromised, But it's better than, say, buying it on Coinbase. I would start there ideally. And then what I would do is I would run it through a coin joint service. So I mentioned these. I talked about these, but we're gonna get very specific about this. There's 4 different types of non how can I put this? The minimum for me is it's a service that needs to be transparent as possible. Ideally, the code, should be open source or at least open viewable.
Decentralization would be optimal. K? So there are mixer services. There are websites that you can go to that you can mix your coins. You noticed that I never talk about them. Blender dot I o maybe? I may be mistaken about that. But for example, Like, you literally go there. You log in. You send your coin in or whatever, and it mixes it. But there's no transparency there. We don't know. We have to take their word. And they say things like, well, we don't keep your IP addresses. We don't keep logs. We don't do this. We don't do that. We're taking your word for that, though. And I don't wanna disparage them, but we have no way of proving that because they're not Transparent.
So I'm gonna limit this discussion. If you're worried enough about your privacy to take steps to be private, Then do the extra step, which doesn't really cost a whole lot, and use a service that's open That's ideally decentralized. One of these is that, the code is available that you at least Know somewhat behind the scenes what's going on. And there's 4 that I've got listed here. Wasabi, with what they call CoinJoin. Samurai, samurai wallet with Whirlpool. That's their that's their mixing service. One called join market. And then one that, as far as I can tell, is certainly theoretical at this point, but I'm very interested in, and it is supposed to be decentralized. It's called Demix.
I'm gonna include some, the paper that the research paper that was written about that. I'm gonna include as much as I can about that, but I want to be clear it's not an actual solution at this point. Although, ultimately, maybe, It will be. I will say this about wasabi, and I try to stay out of this stuff. Well, for one thing, wasabi is not available in the United So wasabi, in my opinion, this is my opinion only, they got scared when The announcement was made that there might be some regulations that come down the road about any service like this essentially being outlawed or being having to register as a money service or or whatever, and they just closed up shop, and that's their choice.
So if you live in the United States, you, it is not by their rules, a service that's available to you. They are a centralized service. You have a Wasabi Wallet that is controlled by Wasabi. That means they could rock you. That means, it's well, it's they're the custodians. Okay? Need to be aware of that. I also don't think they're open source. Alright. It says it's open source. It also says it's noncustodial. I don't. So the wallet itself, they do have the source code. So that's a good step. Let's see what else they have up here because there are other components to this. I don't see Only the wallet.
And if I'm incorrect about this, I apologize. From what I see here, Only the wallet is open source. None of the other components are. That's unfortunate. I will take back the argument that it's custodian. The wallet itself certainly isn't, but you are interacting with a company. There is definitely a company, ZKSnacks, behind wasabi. There is a company who's there to make money, and, That's why they chose to withdraw from the US market. They were concerned that there would be lawsuits and this kind of thing. When I'm building privacy tools now, they're Completely they're allowed to have their own opinion. But if I'm building a privacy tool, it's not about me. It's about helping everyone in the world point blank. Now that means I should probably approach this in certain ways. I should not be jurisdictionally bound.
I should probably have developers all over the world. I should be as open source as possible. I should also be as low in the protocol stack as possible now. The wasabi, company the company behind wasabi at z k snacks, The company behind the samurai wallet, any of these companies, they don't have control over what goes into the Bitcoin protocol, unfortunately, generally, well, by design. But there are tools that are needed in the protocol, and I talked about this, I think, the last episode, that needs to be there so that we have privacy by default. We should not even have to have these things. These should be, like, Not needed.
We should have privacy by default. Again, we do not with Bitcoin. When we do, then these things become irrelevant. So that's something that I would like to keep in mind now. That doesn't change today's discussion. But hopefully, at some point, we don't need this discussion. So I'm not gonna really say a whole lot about Wasabi other than what I've already said. Yes. Some of the code is open source. Clearly, all of it is not. There is a company that's behind them. There's a company, for example, that's chosen not to operate in the US market, which then makes it unavailable to a lot of the world's Bitcoin holders.
I I don't really know what else to say. Their fees, I believe, are actually among the highest. I'd have to compare that. Samurai, on the other hand, a little more open source. Got Samurai Wallet Android. The dojo is the backing server for the wallet. Whirlpool now see, now this is what I like to see. This is the coin joint implementation of Whirlpool right there on their website on their GitHub website, the Whirlpool client, the Whirlpool stats. At one point, I thought I understood. So there is a Whirlpool server that samurai runs, and one of the nice things is there's a lot of Bitcoin It's up in that whirlpool. It passed, I wanna say, 10,000 Bitcoin in that whirlpool. So, essentially, they're all being mixed around, if you wanna simplify it.
But I thought you could run your own Whirlpool, and I would love to see that if that's Possible. I actually went and looked for it. Couldn't find anything. But, again, I don't want centralization. I don't want One Whirlpool server or a set of Whirlpool servers that samurai runs. So this is kind of the drawback to this. I'm not aware of any others. Now there may be some, but the code at least is right here as long as the client code, the stats code, The GUI code oh, that man, they got a lot of stuff here. So sentinel code, they it looks to me like they do Everything out in the public, which is exactly what I want. Java, JavaScript, Swift, Python, An open SCAD.
Interesting. That's quite a mix. Something to keep in mind. By the way, if you look into these services and whatever, I'm just gonna go ahead and warn you. These these developers are, prickly, very opinionated, however you wanna push it, however you wanna say it. I'm sure they're nice people. There's a lot of back and forth going on on Bitcoin Twitter about these services. And sometimes, frankly, it can be very difficult for you to figure out who's right, who's wrong, whatever, whose spin is correct or or whatever. Join market.
That's the next one. Okay. So JoinMarket is also open source, it looks Next slide. You've gotta joinmarket.org, which they have the client server, the web client, and then the implementation itself. So I gotta be honest. I don't think that join market gets a whole lot of attention. Their website, it looks like, is not even up. It's join market.org. Okay. Apparently, it's join market .net. Maybe it used to be .org. I I'm reading that from the GitHub is why. So, anyways, They do have a, a website. The GitHub is there. I don't know the details other than that. Again, you just don't hear a whole lot about them.
This says it's completely decentralized. Each node operates independently with its own rules, funds, and privacy. That may be true. I hope they're getting traction if that's true. You can actually earn, which that makes sense because you as you participate, As you provide liquidity, essentially, you get paid for doing that. NVK of CoinKite is behind it, apparently, or at least talking about it. I would be cautious about this. Derjigee apparently is behind this. I did not know that. Derek Gigi has a long history in Bitcoin. He's a interesting character, for sure.
So I don't know. I don't I may be I'm not sure about this. I'd have to look at this, in more detail, to be honest, because I don't quite understand everything that's going on here. It says it's decentralized, which would be a big win. I I really wished that there was more out there about them, and I I may need to look into this later. But this is the type of thing I want decentralized certainly as much as possible. It needs to be open source, which 2 of these at least fall directly under that. Wasabi, I think it could be argued that that's not true completely, certainly. And I I've seen them. I'm fairly certain. They say they're open source, but if all the components are not on GitHub and you cannot Browse that code, then they're not open source. Part of it is.
That's just my opinion. Looking at this stuff doesn't change my opinion oh, and we need to talk about DMIX. DMIX, of course, is is being developed. It's a new service. It's supposed to be decentralized. It sounds a lot like joint market, to be honest. So I will definitely be following it as well. If I had to tell somebody today what you should use, and what I would use would be the samurai wallet or the samurai service. You do not actually have to use the wallet to use the service, by the way. For example, my setup right now that I am actively setting up. I'm using I'm setting up the Bitcoin core. It's now synced. It finished up last night on my desktop, which maybe that sounds strange, but, it's this new server and core, once it's synced, really doesn't take a whole lot of, compute power, that kind of thing, so it just kinda sits there in the background.
That will allow me then to set up an Electrum server. I think I'm gonna use the Electrum Rust Server. Electrum essentially acts like an indexing service of the Bitcoin Core. The Bitcoin Core could be considered a database. It's got all the transactions in it that have ever happened. 586 gigabytes of data at this point. However, it's not indexed. You can't search it very easily, and, essentially, Electrum provides a very quick interface to that. Plus, it actually provides another layer of privacy. So I will then hook up Sparrow Wallet to Electrum, to my Electrum server, which is running on my desktop, which connects to my Bitcoin core node. You see how all that works?
And then, which is my hardware solution for storing my private keys, my wallet, so to speak, would then interact with Sparrow, and it would all happen right here on this desktop and in a very secure manner. Now I still have to worry where did my sats come from. The sats that I mine, which are the sats that are on that wallet right now, are could be considered KYC free. Absolutely. If I bought some sats on Coinbase, obviously not. I would have to run them if I want to maintain my privacy with those coins. I would have to run them through samurai. If If I do that, then I can store them as KYC free. Now one of the nice things about Sparrow is you can label your wallets. You can have multiple wallets inside Sparrow, that you interact with, and you can label them. So I can label this address, essentially.
Brains, my my pool, my mining pool software, SATs, my mining pool SATs. I could label it Coinbase for or just KYC. And then anything that I bought on a primary server like Coinbase or Kraken would go into there because they're essentially compromised their KYC. Or I could take them well, I'm not sure you can even run from, say, Coinbase to a samurai Whirlpool. I you may be able to. I do not know. But if I couldn't, then I would bring them down to my seed signer, and then I would send them from there if I needed to clean them, so to speak, to that whirlpool and then back to another wallet, another address that's labeled KYC free or clean or whatever.
So these labels come in really handy, or I could generate an address for Satoshi's Plebs for the podcast. I could put it on the podcast website in, like, a Bitcoin paid what do they call that server? BTC pay server. Right? And then that would enable The supporters to send me directly on chain, Bitcoin. Now the reality is most people aren't gonna do that. I'm not gonna worry about it, but you could. And, again, I got a label for that. I know where it comes from. And I would have to consider that KYC coin because I know people know it's right there on the website. You can match it up, all this kind of stuff. There's ways of kind of tying that back to me. So you need to think about these things. I wished we didn't have to, but you do need to think about these things.
And it's very it's intense. It's you don't wanna make a mistake. But my encouragement to you, the listener, would be If you have not done any of this, get started. Let's say your coins are sitting on an exchange. Let's go through that again. You've never done anything. Well, first step is simply to get them off the exchange. Get a seed signer wallet. Build 1 if you can. Buy 1 if you can't. Either way, get one. Put your coin on that wallet so you stop worrying about what's gonna happen with Coinbase or Kraken and or whomever. That's the first step.
If you want privacy, start thinking about that. How can I get It's set up with samurai so I can clean this? How do I keep that separate? I'm gonna use a different label for that. Can I buy my coin at a local Bitcoin beat up? I may or I might consider if I did that personally, I'm paranoid, guys. I'm just am. I would consider that kind of gray. I wouldn't consider it clean. I wouldn't consider it KYC coin. I would kinda consider it Gray, if that makes sense. And maybe ultimately, I end up running it through Samurai, through Whirlpool. Would I use Tor? Would I use a VPN?
You start building this and make it natural. This stuff needs to be part of your daily workflow, or you won't do it. If you're only doing it every six months, you won't do it in the long term. So I hope that's helpful. Well, I just kinda wanted to tie it all together with this last episode so that you could see exactly how this would all potentially work for you, plus kinda walk through those mixing services that I consider even worthwhile to look at. I again, I would not encourage you to go to some website. I let me I think it's blender dot a o. Let me as an example.
And I'm not trying to pick on them. I why they do it. I'm just saying that, that doesn't seem to come up. It doesn't matter. I'm not gonna take the time to look it up. But one of these kind of web interface mixer solutions is probably not the right thing to do. Alright. I will continue. I may break down each of these in more detail later. I doubt I will do wasabi because I don't think I can actually support that or provided as a, what's the word I'm looking? I I don't think I could actually recommend that while Certainly, based on what I've heard, frankly, and I've heard from both sides, I've heard the CEO or CTO of the company multiple times on different podcasts defending kind of what they do. I've looked at the code in general.
I've heard the arguments, and that's kinda where I fall. I just don't think it's the best solution out there. I wish them the best of luck. And as a US citizen, frankly, I I'm now I can't even use it. So how can I recommend it? But, anyways, I will certainly continue to monitor samurai, and I do wanna look at a joint market more and demix as it comes online. So I will continue. I may do more in-depth. I I'm going to do a tutorial. I've already decided I'm gonna do a tutorial, basically. I I don't know if I'm gonna do it in video or what, but of this samurai not Samurai.
Bitcoin node, Electrum, Sparrow, Seed Signer setup because that's a very important step for people. You get a lot of privacy just having that And then you only have to worry about where your coins have been, so to speak. Where are are they KYC ed or are they non KYC ed? Alright. Let's jump on to supporters. We had some support this week, and we'll go through this. I do think we're still having some problems. I'm gonna talk about that in the news and notes, actually. That'll be part of the news. So we had three supporters this week. Actually, we had two. We had three boosts this week. 151 of privacy fundamentals were the same, all three.
We had KNS v22 sending a 100 sats on 12th, listing that. No message, but I really do appreciate that. KNSV 22. And then we had our friend, anonymous. Anonymous. I must have not copied that correctly. It's anonymous. Send in 500 sats on the 14th and then again immediately after another 2,000 sats, so so that was cool. Follow-up, he asked a question. He or she asked a question last week. Wallet of Satoshi seems to be the only lightning wallet I can find that does background notifications on mobile when it receives sats. Basically, I was interested in sending the equivalent of a boost to wife, kids, etcetera. I think Telegram has a lightning tip bot that would do this. I think you are correct.
I've seen similar things in Telegram with lightning tip bot. So I think that might It worked for you. I would throw out Wallet of Satoshi actually is custodial. You probably know that already. But, yeah, just as a note. Oh, I didn't talk at all. Sorry. I did mention this As in previous episodes, I do wanna say this. Lightning can be considered a layer of privacy because When you route through a lightning network, it becomes very difficult for that transaction to be traced. So it's not a privacy solution per se, but maybe it's something that you wanna think about. If I've got some KYC free coin, I load up on a lightning wallet. I would not necessarily recommend a custodial one, but a lightning wallet anyways.
And then use that to interact with whomever. That would be a ideal KYC free solution. So something to think about. Anyways, I do appreciate that I support everybody. So that's what? 25, 26100. We also had some streaming. We had some good streaming, Actually, probably more than that, to be honest. News and notes. I wanna run through this real quick. We're running out at a time. Surprise, surprise. Not a whole lot of news, but I did have a few few things. Lynn Alden had a great tweet. I love Lynn Alden. I wish I could get her on show. One day, I'm gonna ask her, or maybe I can catch up with her at the Bitcoin conference. I'm sure she'll be there. Maybe I could somehow grab 5 minutes of our time to try and do an interview.
I would argue that Fiat attempted I changed the definition of money during the last 50 years. Rather than money being a medium of exchange, store of value and unit of account. That is the traditional Austrian view of money, by the way. It has lost most of its store of value role, even the best one, let alone the worst one. So as an example, what she's talking about here, the US dollar has lost, like, At 93, 96% of its value since 1913, so in the last 100 years. So arguably, it's not a good store of value. It's not. Gold, on the other hand, has gone from basically $20 an ounce back then to $22100 an ounce.
So it is a good store of value. It's just not a good medium of change or unit of account at this point. Anyways, it has lost most of its store value role. Let's see. I already read that. And proponents of this assert that ongoing debasement is necessary and good. See, this is the Keynesian philosophy. We have to debase the money. This is necessary. This is good. You will like it, you peasants. Oh, sorry. I added that last part. Anyways, this forces people to monetize other things for the store of value Rome, real estate, Often, as an example, often resulting in malinvestment, and this dynamic greatly favors those who have access to those other types of assets to monetize. In other words, the poor person can't buy stocks and bonds and real estate, So they're left out. To this extent that it's successful, Bitcoin just reenables earlier definitions of money in a digital age.
I absolutely believe that statement. I wanna reread it. To the extent that it's successful, Bitcoin just reenables earlier definitions of money in a digital age. In other words, it can be a store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. I added that. It's the novel idea that money can be held without being debased and can be brought with you wherever you want. Great tweet. You should follow her. By the way, the Federal Reserve, the people who manage our money, posted their largest ever ever annual operating loss. Deficit of $114,300,000,000 for the last year. Go team.
And that's it. So, I do wanna have a little news about what is going on with this podcast. I do apologize. Basically, I've been trying to self host with Castapod. I had initially thought I was having great success, and then I started adding episodes that people were actively pulling. And it turns out there's an issue. A lot of times, like, half the time, people are getting episodes that they loop. Like, you play, like, five or ten minutes. It doesn't seem to be a a definite period of time, but then it just kinda restarts. And it's crazy. And I couldn't get help for it, frankly, on the forum for castapod.
And after, like, a week and a half or two weeks, I've finally had to give up. So Friday, they had a guest of, he's the guy who started PodHome .fm, which is a podcast hosting company, fairly new, doing a lot of great podcasting two point o stuff. And So I signed up for their service. I had to do something, and I did not wanna go back to Captivate because Captivate has been very slow at supporting podcasting testing two point o. So I signed up. I've moved over. We're still having a few issues, frankly, with the, with the index because, basically, both my feeds are still showing up there for some reason.
But, hopefully, once we get that resolved and all this stuff is coming right from PodHome.fm. You'll see the proper episodes. They play properly and all that kind of stuff. But one of the cool things is So Barry is his name, the CEO. He has built a bunch of AI tools into PodHome.fm. For example, I can, At the click of a button, generate a transcript. Now I have to go in and edit that transcript. It's not perfect, but it I can do it right there. I can have it generate chapters. I can even have it generate show titles and show notes, although I still do my own. I think it does a terrible job of that, frankly. Regardless, it saves me a huge amount of time, so and it's improving my workflow.
So that's really cool. So I'm really looking forward to that. I've already gone back and updated, like, the last ten episodes with transcripts and that kind of thing, chapters. So you will start seeing that in your Podcast 2.0 apps, and it will be awesome. Just a little bit of awesomeness. And I do again apologize. I can't there's just my hands are tied. I had to change again. It's unfortunate, but this is, I guess, new stuff or whatever. That's the way it is. So, we are moving forward with that, and I'm really looking forward to the new setup.
And, no, of course, I'm not getting paid by Podhome.fm. I am getting the 1st three months free. But if you go back and listen to podcasting two point know, the interview that came out on Friday, the interview with Barry, they literally gave you a code on there to do do that. So that's not because I'm special. So that's it. Let's run through the end stuff. That's our news and notes. So, of course, Satoshi's Plebs supports Podcasting 2.0. That's how we get this awesome stuff like chapters and transcripts. It's a value for value podcast. As I talk about time and time again, I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have any of that. You, dear listener, can support the podcast. I do this very specifically. I do it because I believe that even if it's a company that I really believe in let's say Swan Bitcoin came to me and say, hey, McIntosh. You wanna we wanna sponsor your show. We're gonna give you $10 a week, for you just to chill away at our product.
I've used the product. I've experienced with it, whatever. I think everything's terrific. But if Swan Bitcoin blows up and they have your money, I feel responsible for that. I cannot put myself into that position. And if something bad does come out and they're telling me they're giving me 5, $10 a week, do you really think I'm gonna talk bad about them? No. Probably not. So what I do is I come to you, the listener. I say, hey. Are you receiving value from this podcast? If you are, would you please support it. There's thre different ways you can support it. Talent, time, treasure. I think I got the transcript thing done. Although, boy, maybe some editing of those transcripts. I don't know. But there's other stuff that people can help out with. So that's the time and talent part of it. There are ways for you to be involved without directly just sending me treasure.
But you can obviously send me treasure. You can get grab a Podcasting 2.0 app there at new podcast apps.com. Just go to podcast index .org, actually. And that'll get you there. There's a list of those, and you can try them out. Try out fountain. Try out, Castomatic. Try out, what's the other one? Pod, Urg, Pod Podverse. There's so many that start with pod. I always get confused. Podverse. I've tried all 3 of those. I use Fountain a lot. I use all 3 of them a fair amount. Oh, and Podcast Guru, actually. So, anyways, You can load up a lightning wallet, and you can stream stats to the show. You can boost the show just like our supporters did today, and I do really appreciate that. It's a great way to show that this show is bringing you value.
Another great way to do that is simply to turn to somebody and say, hey. I've been listening to this nut job, Macintosh. He's kinda crazy, but He provides some really valuable input put from time to time. You should go take a listen. It's Satoshi's Plebs podcast. Alright? Anyways, that's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I certainly would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social, and you can reach me by email at [email protected]. There's a website, of course, as well. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I'll talk to you all soon.
Let's do it. .
