"I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can’t stop."
F. Hayek
Bitcoin is the completion of Hayek vision. It's possible with worldwide adoption of Bitcoin that we can have signifcant separation of State and Money. If the State isn't printing fiat money I see three aspects of monetary policy improving over time. Let's discuss!
Bitcoin Weekly Close Price
January 28, 2024: $42,030
Block Height at Time of Recording
827,896
News and Links
https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/the-separation-of-money-and-state-eecedcfe8d69
https://watcher.guru/news/us-government-to-sell-130m-worth-of-bitcoin-from-silk-road
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cantillon
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 29th, and this is episode 155 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is on separation of state and money. Alright. I've got the tea hot. The honey is just the way I like it when it comes from winter honey is, darker tends to be darker. I like it more than I like the light honey, and, we just finished up some summer honey, essentially, some lighter honey, and now the new jar I've got is winter honey. So, Anyways, enjoying that. Today, of course, we're gonna be talking about the separation of state, and by state, I mean government money.
And I think that's very important. I think it's one of the the best reasons to Bitcoin. It's one of the best reasons to promote Bitcoin and it's one of the best reasons for Bitcoin to be around. Alright. Before we dive into that though, let's take a look at the market. So it was an interesting week to say the least. We did have a weekly close just above 42,000 and that would be the $42,030 and while I'm thinking about it, let's get our block height at time of recording. So as I'm recording this right now, our block height is 827896. And it looking like we're gonna have an epic difficulty adjustment here in just a couple of days, up almost 9%.
Zent. And the reason why is simply because, this cold is kind of over in the United States, the miners that were offline down in Texas. As I've mentioned a week or so ago, they have all come back online at this point. So even though we went down, I think it was twice in a row, we are now set to go right back up. So that will that will be painful, but that's coming up on February 2nd. And then our next block is now estimated to be April 21. It keeps sliding downwards. Yikes. I'm pretty sure the last time I looked, it was April 22, our 94.24% progress and 12,104 block.
Alright. So all that being said, let's talk about the price for just a minute and what's been going on. In terms of week over week, we are definitely moving upwards again. Let's see. I think our last close last week was under it was definitely under 42,000. We have marched upwards twice for 2 weeks in a row. And If you scroll back to the daily view, we've actually gone up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 out of 7 days. So it's been basically a very positive week. And I think what we're seeing is kind of the exhaustion of the sell off of the grayscaleETF.
So the people that as I've explained before that they were kinda trapped in that, a lot of them have sold, obviously. There was definitely been a net outflow from that versus all of the other 10 ETFs that were approved. And it has put some pressure on the market very significantly. They were still negative Friday, but I don't think it was very much. But even all of that, like I said, 5 out of the last 7 days were negative. Sale. Very, very promising there. We will see this week kind of how that goes at some point, and I would think fairly quickly given kind of the last, what, 2 weeks now, week and a half, 2 weeks of of record that grayscale will at least stop selling. I don't know if they're going to be positive unless they're going to adjust their rates.
But they are definitely, kind of reached the end of the line there. So things are our lining up. We are still below a level of resistance, although it's not by much at this point. So we're at, I've got a level of resistance on my chart. I'd have to go back and look at why, but essentially, it's at 42,500. We're approaching that again, and we will see how that works out. I would assume, which I probably shouldn't, but I would assume that we'll get there this week. In fact, we may even get there in the next few days. And then we'll see. Are we gonna break through it? Are we gonna play with it and go back down again? I I don't know. My suspicion would be break breaking through that. Of course, this isn't trading advice as we always talk about here at Satoshi's Plebs.
You know, what I talk about is DCA in your, way towards your financial freedom, if you wanna call it that. Rather than trying to trade or do something crazy like that, you know, figure out how much it is that you're going to invest in Bitcoin and then do that on a daily or at least a weekly basis. You can do that with the strike app, of course, as we talk about all the time, and then you can move that off to your cold storage. That's probably the easiest way to do that. So even though we, of course, talk about these numbers week after week, it's really just more to kinda get a general view of the market. I think, frankly, after we get all this stuff sorted out, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't move on up to, you know, 50,000 or so and then kind of see where things are. Good times. So, so that will do it for our market overview for this week, and we'll jump on in to our topic.
So we are gonna start with a quote by Friedrich Hayek. He said this in 1984. So this was before Bitcoin. This was before the precursors of Bitcoin. There were a number of attempts, back in the nineties to build a digital currency that all ultimately failed, but kind of laid a runway, so to speak, for Bitcoin success. So but this was said all long before that, 1984, near the end of, mister Hayek's life, actually. So he said, I don't believe we shall ever have a good money. And by good money, he means sound money. Again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. That is, we can't take them violently out of the hands of government.
All we can do is by some sly roundabout way, introduce something that they can't stop. Of course, they is the government. And the idea is it's very difficult to remove money from government. The idea is that once we moved off of the gold standard, which ultimately was completely broken in 1971 with Nixon, over 50 years ago at this point that it will be very difficult to go back to something like that because the government has what it wants. The government has the ability to print money at will, for whatever reason that it will. And in my opinion, this has led to what we see today.
I believe that Bitcoin is simply the best bet to fulfill Hayek's vision, his view, his dream, really, of some sly roundabout way to introduce something that the government cannot stop. And I think we have reached that point. Maybe not in an individual country, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but Certainly Globally. What does Bitcoin enable? So what is Bitcoin? Let's start right there as a prerequisite to what does Bitcoin enable. Bitcoin, as I've talked about many times on this show is permissionless, private, programmable, noninflationary form of sound money. Well, theoretically, you can argue, Macintosh, that it's inflationary. Yes. We still mine blocks, you know, every day.
There's 900 Bitcoin that are being mined. So, Technically, we are still in an inflationary period, but programmed into the protocol is a hard cap of 21,000,000 Bitcoin. We will never go beyond that without consensus of the entire network essentially, and that will not happen, in my opinion. So what we do have ultimately is a noninflationary form of sal money, a store value, a way to exchange goods for value across the globe instant virtually instantaneously. So if that's what Bitcoin is, then what does Bitcoin enable. If all of what I just said is true, I'm gonna do a little computer thing here. We're gonna go through an if then statement. Okay?
If Bitcoin is permissionless, if it's private, if it's programmable, if it's a noninflationary form of sal money. If this proves true and if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, replacing the US dollar and its dominance and any other rivals that may come up, like bricks, for example, which we've talked about from time to time on this show. Then, Dear listener, what might happen? That is what we're going to explore in this episode, the separation of state t and money. We are going to explore this idea that if Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, what is that going to enable?
It's going to enable I wrote down, 1, 2, 3 different main points. We're gonna cover those. We're gonna talk about them for a few minutes. The first thing that we're going to discuss, if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, it will remove the Cantillon, Cantillon Cantillon effect over the long run. What is the Contelion effect? So this was an idea that was proposed by a French Irish economist and, I believe, the 1700, the late 1700. I have a link to him to his Wikipedia entry. In the show notes, Richard, if I'm not mistaken, Cantillon. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but based on what I see. That's how it looks to me.
And, essentially, this effect is the idea that those closest to the source of money. Benefit from it the most. And when you're in a sound money system, that's one thing. But when you're in a fiat system like what we are in now, when we are in a system where the government prints money based on its perceived needs. This effect is more pronounced. I don't know if you've ever heard this called said this way, but there's a fairly common saying that says the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And in my opinion, that is in large part caused by this contilent effect. When the government is printing money, those closest to that assess are the ones who are going to benefit the most. Who are those people?
People like the bank people. The banks are going to benefit from this. The Wall Street people why why do you say that, Macintosh? Because one of the big reasons that stocks are going up in value is not necessarily because these companies are becoming more valuable, but because the printing of money, it can be argued very easily that stocks are a measure of essentially inflation. As inflation happens, stocks go up because the companies become more valuable, but it's because the money is worth less, if that makes sense. The people on Wall Street, the people who are large trading type institutions and this kind of thing. They are the closest to this process. They are able to benefit the most.
Political people, certainly people in national level governmental power who benefit from being close to this process would also be some of these type people that we're talking about. Who are the poor in this case? Who are the the poor get poor? What do you what do you mean by that? Well, when a country prints money, it experiences inflation. This is logical, and it's certainly a strongly held viewpoint in Austrian economics. Now the Keynesian economics. People would argue that's not true, but to me, it makes the most sense that this is what happens.
When I print money, things are going to go up. Services are gonna go up. Supplies are gonna go up. Everything will end up inflating over time because of this. Who benefits the least? The people who are kind of on the other end of the extreme. Dream. People who are wage earners, they don't get the same benefit from this inflation of money. They typically will not even get wage increases that would cover the cost of inflation. Unless you've had by the governmental figures, what is it, 5% basically every year for the last 3 years, unless you've had a 15 per well, a 5% increase per year because that's not the same as a 15% increase in your income that you're not even keeping up with inflation, much less gaining ground on it because of your increased experience and knowledge that you would have functioning in the same job. Right?
So the person who's making a wage, who doesn't have a whole lot of extra money, who may rent, certainly, or if they're able to own a home, but they have no stocks, snow bonds, no financial assets of any other kind. They're not going to benefit from this inflation process. I guess if you own a home, typically, the home price would inflate. You know, we've We've started viewing in the United States homes as kind of this financial instrument. Home. You buy a home 20 years later, it's worth a lot more. That didn't used to be the case. And if you stop To think about that for just a second, it's because we didn't have inflation or anywhere near the same level of inflation before we lost sound money.
So if I'm renting, I'm not benefiting from from that inflation of that one asset. I certainly don't have other assets that are inflating. I don't have stock money that's in stock market money that's inflating. So I benefit the least, and in fact, I'm I'm actually getting poorer year by year. Unless I'm getting it again, if I'm getting a salary increase every year of at least the real amount of inflation, I'm not even keeping up. So this contilent effect does affect everyone, and it's in different ways. Those closest to that process are the ones who benefit from it. Those furthest from it are the ones who don't, who this is hurting them.
If we move to a Bitcoin standard there's a lot of ifs in this conversation, and I'm quite certain that things will not go exactly as I spell them out. But if the United if the United States, for example, moves to a Bitcoin standard and we stop printing money, this dramatically reduces that contilent effect. If someone who is making, I don't know, 2,000 no. It'd be more than that. Let's say, 20,000 satoshis an hour. If they're not experiencing inflation, then they don't have to worry. Their buying power should stay the same year over year or at least very close to that. And in fact. People like, Jeff Booth, if I'm not mistaken, argue that because of the benefits of technology acceleration that things will actually come down in price, which is we do see this. It's interesting. I've not talked about this in-depth on here, But just think about TVs for a minute.
Back in the nineties, the late nineties, you would spend $1,000 $2,000 or $3,000. Get this giant TV that was a CRT. It wasn't an LCD type screen. So it was a monstrous piece of equipment, and it wouldn't even display high definition like DVD resolution. Now any TV that you can get minimally is going to display that d DVD resolution. It's probably maybe 4 k. Some of them are even displaying higher resolutions now, And yet the prices I mean, you could get a 55 inch TV now for less than $500, and it's not a bad TV. That's just one example.
So that is deflation, and it's a good type of deflation. Right? People are getting better quality for lower price. That will continue regardless. And In fact, I would argue that under a Bitcoin standard, under a solid money, under a sound money standard, that you would see even more from that because, again, we're controlling inflation. So it it will only benefit the price. And it doesn't mean that the company is going to go out of business because they're building inefficiencies. They're bent they're benefiting from the technology changes that are happening that are allowing those prices to come down.
Alright. So removal of cotillion effect. Next. What is next. The removal of fiat as a source of power for government both in the state and between states. Again, state does not mean like a US state. I mean a nation. So in nation and between nation, if you want. A nation state, really, is what I should be saying. What do you mean by that? Well, I came up with 2 quick examples. If the United States didn't have the US dollar as a source of power. Could we have shut down the SWIFT network of rush that Russia uses. That was done by, essentially, by order of the United States.
Their access. And I don't know if that's been enabled again or not, but that access was disabled because the US said, you know, we're not gonna allow that to happen. And because of the financial power that United States has, that was done. If Russia was operating on a Bitcoin standard and the ruble was either tied directly to Bitcoin or they didn't have a ruble at all, then there would be no network to shut down. You could not shut Russia down out of the Bitcoin network. It would not be possible. Alright. So that's between states. That's between essentially United States and Russia. That was allowed because of fiat money at being a source of power.
Well, what about estate to a person? Well, that's even easier. Go back during COVID to I don't remember exactly when this happened. I wanna say it was 2021, but I may be off. We had truckers up in Canada who were protesting the lockdowns that were happening because they could not do their job. They literally were not allowed to drive around. And the government got offended and ordered the shutdown by executive order through this emergency powers act or whatever. The shutdown of the bank accounts of as many of those people as they could get their hands on. So they completely disrupted the financial lives to those people because they didn't like what they were saying.
You can agree or disagree whether they should have been doing that or not, But I would argue that is way too excessive for what was going on. And it was the use of fiat and the banking systems that allowed that. On a Bitcoin standard, now people may keep Bitcoin in a bank like we do dollars now, but you can custody your own Bitcoin. And if I were involved in that trucker's protest personally, You can be quite certain that I would not have all of my Bitcoin in a bank account. It would be on my seed signer or multiple seed signers or whatever my privacy and security needs dictated.
And there is no way for the government to control that. There is none. The government can outlaw Bitcoin, but it can't keep me from using it because it operates because of the structure of the network that it operates over. So moving to a Bitcoin global standard will remove fiat as a source of power for government. That's the second point. The third and final one is what I would call a return to the fundamentals of Austrian economics. Now 100% disclosure. I believe in Austrian economics. This is opposed to Keynesian economics. If you go back far enough in the podcast history, I did a number of episodes on Austrian versus Keynesian economics and this kind of thing. I spent, like, 4 or 5 episodes, I think. You can go to satoshis dashplebs.com/episodes, and there's a list of all the episodes of the podcast. And if you just search for Austrian, you should be able to find those episodes really quickly.
But if we're on an Austrian economics, standard. The reason why we would be on that is because of Bitcoin as this global serve because of Bitcoin as the legal tender or at least the accepted money of the nation. And that essentially that sound money, Bitcoin, forces you to operate in an in an Austrian economics lens. Because what can I do with Bitcoin? I cannot take my Bitcoin and go do what countries do now where they essentially loan out Bitcoin on not or money on nothing. I can't print Bitcoin. And if I can't print Bitcoin and I'm a country, I have two choices. I can I can live in the my means? And what I mean by that is essentially, they'll live on a budget just like you and I should, and they won't spend beyond that because if they do, they can't print more Bitcoin to fix it. The only thing they'll be able to do is ultimately clear bankruptcy by defaulting. So no nation wants to do that.
See. Once countries start living on a budget. That's going to force them to make a lot of choices that some of them will be unpleasant, but will put them on the right tracks moving forward to to be more prosperous. A second thing from this, this return to the fundamentals of Austrian economics. And, again, because we're talking about Bitcoin that can't be messed with, so to speak. Credit is going to become harder to get but less scheme. 2007 banking crisis, which was literally kind of the genesis, the seed of why Bitcoin even started. Happened because too many people had too much access to too much credit that could not handle that credit.
That's why it happened. So making credit harder to get but at the same time less risky is a good thing. It will keep these kinds of things from happening, and that ties into the third point. There's an Austrian theory that we always will have booms and busts of economies. Right? We have this. There's times of prosperity and there's times where things aren't doing so good where companies are trimming back and all of this kind of thing. The Austrian view is that those cycles are made worse by Keynesian economics, by fiat money by printing, by inflation, by all of this kind of stuff. And if you eliminate all of that, then these cycles will still be there, but they will become more moderate because credit's going to be harder to get. So companies aren't gonna go so far out on a limb in terms of credit. They're not gonna leverage themselves too much.
And therefore, when things get harder, they they're less likely to break. And finally, because of Austrian economics, because of sal money, we will not see rampant inflation like what we see in Argentina right now. I think they're at 233% inflation, which is an all time high. I have a news item for this, not an all time high, but it's a it's a recent high certainly for them. And I have a news item about this. We'll talk about it more in the news. That can't happen if you can't print Bitcoin. Will we still have inflation? Yes. I believe we will. But we will not have this unsustainable hyperinflation type scenario, that we see happen and we've seen happen from time to time.
And frankly, I, you know, don't see how essentially any country who's operating on a fiat Sander Can Avoid. The United States now has passed $34,000,000,000,000 in debt. It's, an ungodly amount of debt that we can never pay back, and yet everybody acts like it's okay, and it's not. This topic has been discussed by a number of people. I've got some links into the show notes, about different articles, different sources about this that you may want to pursue. But this is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about Bitcoin because it forces it absolutely forces a government ultimately to bend to this Bitcoin standard, this which will ultimately bring about what amounts to Austrian economics. The United States, and I have this in the news item as well, is about to make a disastrous mistake. They're selling a large number of Bitcoin.
They filed to do that. All they have to do is just hold that Bitcoin. The 100, $130,000,000, whatever it is, that they're about to receive for these Bitcoin does not even come close to solving the problems of our debt and all of the things that we've got going on. And yet We have no governmental policy at this point towards Bitcoin, towards an allocation of Bitcoin. But right now, they could make a huge dent, a a huge start to building a a Worcester. Well, maybe that's the wrong word, but towards, moving to that standard, which is frankly inevitable in my opinion at this point.
I don't think that's gonna go down in history as a very wise decision. But, anyways, I I wanna keep this shorter, but There are other things there if you wanna take a look at. You can follow-up on this. So this whole idea of this separation of state and money to me is extremely powerful, and it's one of the primary reasons we should be promoting Bitcoins. And I promise you I promise you that by and large, nations are not gonna go along willingly with this. Eventually, they will be forced to, but there will probably not be a huge number of countries like El Salvador who say, Bitcoin is legal tender who say, we're using it as, a store of value, which they are. They're mining Bitcoin and and this type of talk. Now are other countries, mining Bitcoin? I do believe Russia probably is. I do believe that there's actually mining going on in China as well.
But these examples oh, and the government of Bhutan, I wanna say, right up by Nepal and India. Certainly is. I think we're maybe a few years from a lot of governments embracing this as a standard. I think it will be very difficult for them because they are the politicians who do this will be deincentivizing. They will be making it harder for them to become super wealthy by being a politician when they do this. So it's not really in their self interest, but it is in the interest of the countries as a whole. Alright. We're gonna stop that there. We're gonna go on and talk about our supporters. And as I bring this up, I'll go ahead and throw this out as some news, and there's a reason why I do this, right now.
I have decided. I've wrestled with this. You know, you guys, I'm I'm fairly transparent, let's be honest, kind of about what's going on. And I've been doing this podcast for, like, two and a half years at this point. I enjoy doing it. I'm a 155 episodes in now, And I feel like that there's probably enough material out there to do this twice a week. But the reality is I don't have a huge amount of time. Work is, not gotten any simpler. Let's put it that play. And with the amount of support that I have been getting financially from this podcast. I can't justify a huge amount of of time to be invested in on a weekly basis. Twice a week, you know, 2, 3, 4 hours at a whack. Well, there's no way it'd be 2 hours.
3, 4, 5 hours or more at a time. For the foreseeable future until things pick up, It just doesn't make sense. I'm also struggling to even be, regular because of work, especially on the Thursday episode, I try and record Wednesday, and that just doesn't ever seem to work out. And then half the time on Thursday, I've got some crisis that I'm dealing with, which is actually what happened this week. I did not record on Thursday. So I've made the decision that for now, I'm going to go ahead and just do 1 episode a week like I've done in the past a couple of times, and that's just going to have to do.
Because of that, I am going to kind of lower my goal for a episode target for Satoshis. I'm, you know, I've been promoting this idea essentially that 200,000 token, tokens. 200,000 satoshis a week, a month would be a, you know, a good level of support. That's 50, probably closer to $70 a month, and that would take care of the hosting, would even enable me to maybe have some back end stuff done in terms of maybe, like, just having somebody edit the podcast instead of me doing it, which that would give me more time, this kind of thing. But if I'm not gonna come on here twice a week, then I don't feel like that's a viable goal. So we'll just cut that in half. We'll start promoting a 100,000 satoshis a month, which that breaks down into 25,000 satoshis a week.
So 25 1,000 satoshis an episode would kinda be this new target. That's what I'm looking for. Now we did get some support this week. I'll discuss that in just a second, but that's going to be our long term, goal in terms of what I'm looking to get. Alright. To kick things off, we've got the anonymous. Listening to episode 153, my desktop, boosted 1,000 sats. No message, but I do appreciate that anonymous very much. You're becoming a regular. There yeah. There's your last couple. So I do appreciate that. I'm glad that you enjoyed that episode. I wasn't sure how that one was gonna be taken. Sometimes you just can't tell. And we also had a 1,000 sats boost from our friend in Portugal, hypersensitive asaurus.
And they were listening to episode 150, why privacy matters, and said And they said happy to have returned to Portugal and your content at the start of the year. Keep up the good work. And with an arm, like, muscle thing. So I appreciate that. Hypersensitive, it's always good to hear from you. They also did a lot of nice streaming as well. Certainly appreciate that. And then, episode 150 4 Bitcoin for the risk averse. We had anonymous again boosting, 500 sat. So appreciate that as well. And then a final 1,000 sat boost from the privacy tools episode from hypersensitive asaurus as well.
And They said tried thrice to create a clip of this episode, but it didn't seem to go through a loss. So that's unfortunate. I appreciate the thought. I've had some decent luck with fountain. I'm not let's see. You are using fountain with the clipping tool. They must have had something going on when you were trying to do that. It's gotten a lot better than what it used to be. The clipping tool used to drive me nuts. But, I do appreciate the thought, hypersensitive saris. I don't know. You if you want, you can try again later or, you know, That's fine.
I the thought is what counts. I do appreciate that. I do appreciate that. One of the things that we do, if you create a clip of the current episode, so in this case, this was a little bit older, although it was still quite new. You know, I'd boost, not boost. I'd reply or comment or whatever on your on your clip and support that like 500 sats and then I think if it's an older episode, it's 250. I'll go ahead and do that. I think I can do that to your, this comment will probably show up on the on the stream there. And I'll, I'll go ahead and boost that back essentially, for you, hypersensitive as ours. Because like I said, it really is the thought that counts.
Maybe we can get that sorted out. Whatever. But that's yeah. Pretty cool. So this week, we did have a total. Let me grab that real quick. We'll see where we're at. I don't think it's gonna be 25,000, but we did a lot better than we've been doing. So this week, we did get a total of 7514. So, you know, that's a that's a good amount for us. That's a good start towards our 25,000, for the week. So I do appreciate that, of course. Alright. So let's go ahead and jump on into the news. There was a a little bit of news that was worth talking about. The government, the US government is selling a $130,000,000 worth of Bitcoin that was captured from the Silk Road, shutdown, essentially.
And, I have a article about that. I don't really have anything else to say about that. I think it's a dumb mistake by the US government. That money should be going into the general fund and should be held there until some meaningful time in the future, and that's not next year. We will end up having to buy those back at some point, and it will be at a much higher price. Let's see. I had a few things on Twitter as well. You can follow me on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. The Aqua Wallet, which is a wallet for the liquid, Bitcoin network, which we've talked in passing about. But I don't really feel like it's got enough traction at this point to give it a whole lot of commentary, and I don't like it as a model because I feel like it's too centralized. It's essentially I think it's Block.
The company, Adam Back's company, is essentially controlling that, and I'm not really a fan of that. I hope it is not the way that we kind of end up moving, you know, in terms of a layer 2 protocol like lightning, but time will tell. Let's see. I did throw out something about some cheap, components for the seed signer, if you're interested in that. It looks like samurai wallet and probably along with some other companies, but specifically them are putting together a legal response to these fence in proposed rule changes. We spent an entire episode talking about those, and this is the kind of action that we need as a group of people in order to combat this test. I'm really happy to see that.
We are roughly 80 days until the having. Crazy. The annualized debt of the US government has now exceeded 1,000,000,000,000 dollars and is projected to breach 3,000,000,000,000 by q 4 2030. I think it will be faster than that, but that is the amount of debt that we are adding, by the way, the interest on right? So we've got $34,000,000,000,000 worth debt. Next year, even if we don't add to it by overspending, which we will, it would be 35,000,000,000,000. Good job, guys. Good job. Way to sell that one. I talk quite a bit on here, maybe more than I should, but about commercial real estate. I feel like commercial real estate here in the United States kind of the and, actually, China. I'll go ahead and say that as well. Or kind of the next shoe to drop in terms of the global breakdown.
I've given all kinds of figures and things. Well, right now, according to this newsletter, which is a well known news letter. 14% of all commercial real estate loans and 44% of office building loans are now in negative 40. This is talking about the United States. In other words, the debt is now greater than the property value. So they owe 75,000,000. The pretty is only worth 50,000,000. So in a lot of cases, it then becomes easier for the companies behind that to walk away. Currently US banks hold over $2,900,000,000,000 of CRE, commercial real estate debt.
The majority of which is held by these so called regional banks. Office building prices are down 40% from their highs. CRE commercial real estate as a whole is down over 20%. And this is all happening as rates have risen over the last few years, this course, and many of these loans are now becoming due to be refinanced. You will start to see companies walk away from these deals, leaving it to the bank. The bank has now got its asset is worth less than what is owed on it. So the bank will end up doing fire sales on this stuff in order to move it. Some of these banks will then go into they won't be able to handle that and they will end up going out of business and so on and so forth. So you see how bad that can be. You. I posted, reposted what Eric Hersman, said this week on January 27th.
Eric is the head of a gridless, in Africa. We've had him on the show, a great guy. And, somebody in Africa and I had heard about this, they are allowing Bitcoin transfers essentially over kind of dumb phone, cellular phones which is just amazing. So any feature phone can then transfer and hold it's Bitcoin, and it's all open source. I did see an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about Argentina. Things are really heating up down there. Their inflation is continuing to rise, which is not surprising. If you're not at the top, then the inflation rate is going to keep going higher even though Javier Millet is down there cutting programs and doing everything he can to cut back.
So apparently now, even though his ratings are still fairly high, people are starting to protest. People are not happy. People things are not at least socially going well. Now I think they have to move through this. There will be protests. We will see to what level, but they have got to continue down this path. They don't have a choice. Oh, I saw this great thing. The last thing I this isn't really news, news, but this is the last thing I posted. If you run through the numbers, have you ever thought about how many sats there would be per person if Bitcoin were used around the world. This person did this, Robin Sayer.
And I haven't looked through all the math of this or whatever, but he comes up with a figure of 200 50,000 satoshis per person on average, which is just insane. So that's like a $100. If you buy a $100 worth of coin. And the world moves to a Bitcoin standard, then you would have the amount that the average person would have if you just divided up among everybody in the world. We're so early in this and it's so cheap even though it seems expensive. Alright. Again, don't forget about the clip thing. Make a 1, 2, 3 minute clip. A 500 sat boost back to you. If it's, I'll say the last couple of episodes.
If it goes back a little further than that or an older episode, then it will be 300 sats. I said 250 earlier. It's a way for you to make some treasure and it's a way for you to generate value for the show at the same time. So you're getting value, I'm getting value, and I do appreciate that. We do support podcasting 2 point o. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time on here. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. You can support this podcast. And there's 3 different ways that you can do that. It's through time, through talent, through treasure. There are things I could use help with. You can reach out to me directly, [email protected], would be one way, or on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech.
Let me know. What can you help with? I any kind of help would be appreciated. So that's kind of the time and talent type thing, for treasure. You've got podcast 2.0 apps that stream, Satoshis, as you listen. You can tell it to do that or just like the users did today, hypersensitive as ours like I was talking about. Or you could boost, send a message just like hypersensitive SARS did. You can just boost and not send a message and that's fine like anonymous did. No problem with that. There's some very interesting I'm gonna mention this really quick, but I do wanna wrap this up. There's some very interesting news in kind of the podcast Syn 2 point o. Ecosphere, this week it comes out that Apple Apple, the Apple is now going to start supporting the podcast 2 point o initiative. They are beginning with the transcript tag.
So in Apple Podcast coming very soon, they will automatically do it. All podcasts We'll have a transcript and it will be available in the app. That is because of podcast 2.0 and the work that Dave Jones, Adam Curry have done so tirelessly for what now? The last 3 years? So you have them to thank for that, and you can do that to them directly. These are exciting times. I think you're gonna see more out of that. You're going to see these apps, these features, these podcast 2.0 features like chapters, transcripts, streaming satoshis.
All of this kind of stuff will slowly eat, move through all of these apps and everybody will be doing it. But you can do that. You can go to podcastapps.com. You can try out something like Fountain, Cast O Matic, one of these other podcast apps. You can put a lightning wallet connected up to it, and you can support the show by streaming, by boosting, and that kind of thing. And that's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. Like I said, I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm a mastodon@[email protected].
And, of course, we've got the StoshisPlex website. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Home.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is January 29th, and this is episode 155 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is on separation of state and money. Alright. I've got the tea hot. The honey is just the way I like it when it comes from winter honey is, darker tends to be darker. I like it more than I like the light honey, and, we just finished up some summer honey, essentially, some lighter honey, and now the new jar I've got is winter honey. So, Anyways, enjoying that. Today, of course, we're gonna be talking about the separation of state, and by state, I mean government money.
And I think that's very important. I think it's one of the the best reasons to Bitcoin. It's one of the best reasons to promote Bitcoin and it's one of the best reasons for Bitcoin to be around. Alright. Before we dive into that though, let's take a look at the market. So it was an interesting week to say the least. We did have a weekly close just above 42,000 and that would be the $42,030 and while I'm thinking about it, let's get our block height at time of recording. So as I'm recording this right now, our block height is 827896. And it looking like we're gonna have an epic difficulty adjustment here in just a couple of days, up almost 9%.
Zent. And the reason why is simply because, this cold is kind of over in the United States, the miners that were offline down in Texas. As I've mentioned a week or so ago, they have all come back online at this point. So even though we went down, I think it was twice in a row, we are now set to go right back up. So that will that will be painful, but that's coming up on February 2nd. And then our next block is now estimated to be April 21. It keeps sliding downwards. Yikes. I'm pretty sure the last time I looked, it was April 22, our 94.24% progress and 12,104 block.
Alright. So all that being said, let's talk about the price for just a minute and what's been going on. In terms of week over week, we are definitely moving upwards again. Let's see. I think our last close last week was under it was definitely under 42,000. We have marched upwards twice for 2 weeks in a row. And If you scroll back to the daily view, we've actually gone up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 out of 7 days. So it's been basically a very positive week. And I think what we're seeing is kind of the exhaustion of the sell off of the grayscaleETF.
So the people that as I've explained before that they were kinda trapped in that, a lot of them have sold, obviously. There was definitely been a net outflow from that versus all of the other 10 ETFs that were approved. And it has put some pressure on the market very significantly. They were still negative Friday, but I don't think it was very much. But even all of that, like I said, 5 out of the last 7 days were negative. Sale. Very, very promising there. We will see this week kind of how that goes at some point, and I would think fairly quickly given kind of the last, what, 2 weeks now, week and a half, 2 weeks of of record that grayscale will at least stop selling. I don't know if they're going to be positive unless they're going to adjust their rates.
But they are definitely, kind of reached the end of the line there. So things are our lining up. We are still below a level of resistance, although it's not by much at this point. So we're at, I've got a level of resistance on my chart. I'd have to go back and look at why, but essentially, it's at 42,500. We're approaching that again, and we will see how that works out. I would assume, which I probably shouldn't, but I would assume that we'll get there this week. In fact, we may even get there in the next few days. And then we'll see. Are we gonna break through it? Are we gonna play with it and go back down again? I I don't know. My suspicion would be break breaking through that. Of course, this isn't trading advice as we always talk about here at Satoshi's Plebs.
You know, what I talk about is DCA in your, way towards your financial freedom, if you wanna call it that. Rather than trying to trade or do something crazy like that, you know, figure out how much it is that you're going to invest in Bitcoin and then do that on a daily or at least a weekly basis. You can do that with the strike app, of course, as we talk about all the time, and then you can move that off to your cold storage. That's probably the easiest way to do that. So even though we, of course, talk about these numbers week after week, it's really just more to kinda get a general view of the market. I think, frankly, after we get all this stuff sorted out, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't move on up to, you know, 50,000 or so and then kind of see where things are. Good times. So, so that will do it for our market overview for this week, and we'll jump on in to our topic.
So we are gonna start with a quote by Friedrich Hayek. He said this in 1984. So this was before Bitcoin. This was before the precursors of Bitcoin. There were a number of attempts, back in the nineties to build a digital currency that all ultimately failed, but kind of laid a runway, so to speak, for Bitcoin success. So but this was said all long before that, 1984, near the end of, mister Hayek's life, actually. So he said, I don't believe we shall ever have a good money. And by good money, he means sound money. Again before we take the thing out of the hands of government. That is, we can't take them violently out of the hands of government.
All we can do is by some sly roundabout way, introduce something that they can't stop. Of course, they is the government. And the idea is it's very difficult to remove money from government. The idea is that once we moved off of the gold standard, which ultimately was completely broken in 1971 with Nixon, over 50 years ago at this point that it will be very difficult to go back to something like that because the government has what it wants. The government has the ability to print money at will, for whatever reason that it will. And in my opinion, this has led to what we see today.
I believe that Bitcoin is simply the best bet to fulfill Hayek's vision, his view, his dream, really, of some sly roundabout way to introduce something that the government cannot stop. And I think we have reached that point. Maybe not in an individual country, and we'll talk about that a little bit, but Certainly Globally. What does Bitcoin enable? So what is Bitcoin? Let's start right there as a prerequisite to what does Bitcoin enable. Bitcoin, as I've talked about many times on this show is permissionless, private, programmable, noninflationary form of sound money. Well, theoretically, you can argue, Macintosh, that it's inflationary. Yes. We still mine blocks, you know, every day.
There's 900 Bitcoin that are being mined. So, Technically, we are still in an inflationary period, but programmed into the protocol is a hard cap of 21,000,000 Bitcoin. We will never go beyond that without consensus of the entire network essentially, and that will not happen, in my opinion. So what we do have ultimately is a noninflationary form of sal money, a store value, a way to exchange goods for value across the globe instant virtually instantaneously. So if that's what Bitcoin is, then what does Bitcoin enable. If all of what I just said is true, I'm gonna do a little computer thing here. We're gonna go through an if then statement. Okay?
If Bitcoin is permissionless, if it's private, if it's programmable, if it's a noninflationary form of sal money. If this proves true and if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, replacing the US dollar and its dominance and any other rivals that may come up, like bricks, for example, which we've talked about from time to time on this show. Then, Dear listener, what might happen? That is what we're going to explore in this episode, the separation of state t and money. We are going to explore this idea that if Bitcoin becomes the global reserve currency, what is that going to enable?
It's going to enable I wrote down, 1, 2, 3 different main points. We're gonna cover those. We're gonna talk about them for a few minutes. The first thing that we're going to discuss, if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency, it will remove the Cantillon, Cantillon Cantillon effect over the long run. What is the Contelion effect? So this was an idea that was proposed by a French Irish economist and, I believe, the 1700, the late 1700. I have a link to him to his Wikipedia entry. In the show notes, Richard, if I'm not mistaken, Cantillon. I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but based on what I see. That's how it looks to me.
And, essentially, this effect is the idea that those closest to the source of money. Benefit from it the most. And when you're in a sound money system, that's one thing. But when you're in a fiat system like what we are in now, when we are in a system where the government prints money based on its perceived needs. This effect is more pronounced. I don't know if you've ever heard this called said this way, but there's a fairly common saying that says the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And in my opinion, that is in large part caused by this contilent effect. When the government is printing money, those closest to that assess are the ones who are going to benefit the most. Who are those people?
People like the bank people. The banks are going to benefit from this. The Wall Street people why why do you say that, Macintosh? Because one of the big reasons that stocks are going up in value is not necessarily because these companies are becoming more valuable, but because the printing of money, it can be argued very easily that stocks are a measure of essentially inflation. As inflation happens, stocks go up because the companies become more valuable, but it's because the money is worth less, if that makes sense. The people on Wall Street, the people who are large trading type institutions and this kind of thing. They are the closest to this process. They are able to benefit the most.
Political people, certainly people in national level governmental power who benefit from being close to this process would also be some of these type people that we're talking about. Who are the poor in this case? Who are the the poor get poor? What do you what do you mean by that? Well, when a country prints money, it experiences inflation. This is logical, and it's certainly a strongly held viewpoint in Austrian economics. Now the Keynesian economics. People would argue that's not true, but to me, it makes the most sense that this is what happens.
When I print money, things are going to go up. Services are gonna go up. Supplies are gonna go up. Everything will end up inflating over time because of this. Who benefits the least? The people who are kind of on the other end of the extreme. Dream. People who are wage earners, they don't get the same benefit from this inflation of money. They typically will not even get wage increases that would cover the cost of inflation. Unless you've had by the governmental figures, what is it, 5% basically every year for the last 3 years, unless you've had a 15 per well, a 5% increase per year because that's not the same as a 15% increase in your income that you're not even keeping up with inflation, much less gaining ground on it because of your increased experience and knowledge that you would have functioning in the same job. Right?
So the person who's making a wage, who doesn't have a whole lot of extra money, who may rent, certainly, or if they're able to own a home, but they have no stocks, snow bonds, no financial assets of any other kind. They're not going to benefit from this inflation process. I guess if you own a home, typically, the home price would inflate. You know, we've We've started viewing in the United States homes as kind of this financial instrument. Home. You buy a home 20 years later, it's worth a lot more. That didn't used to be the case. And if you stop To think about that for just a second, it's because we didn't have inflation or anywhere near the same level of inflation before we lost sound money.
So if I'm renting, I'm not benefiting from from that inflation of that one asset. I certainly don't have other assets that are inflating. I don't have stock money that's in stock market money that's inflating. So I benefit the least, and in fact, I'm I'm actually getting poorer year by year. Unless I'm getting it again, if I'm getting a salary increase every year of at least the real amount of inflation, I'm not even keeping up. So this contilent effect does affect everyone, and it's in different ways. Those closest to that process are the ones who benefit from it. Those furthest from it are the ones who don't, who this is hurting them.
If we move to a Bitcoin standard there's a lot of ifs in this conversation, and I'm quite certain that things will not go exactly as I spell them out. But if the United if the United States, for example, moves to a Bitcoin standard and we stop printing money, this dramatically reduces that contilent effect. If someone who is making, I don't know, 2,000 no. It'd be more than that. Let's say, 20,000 satoshis an hour. If they're not experiencing inflation, then they don't have to worry. Their buying power should stay the same year over year or at least very close to that. And in fact. People like, Jeff Booth, if I'm not mistaken, argue that because of the benefits of technology acceleration that things will actually come down in price, which is we do see this. It's interesting. I've not talked about this in-depth on here, But just think about TVs for a minute.
Back in the nineties, the late nineties, you would spend $1,000 $2,000 or $3,000. Get this giant TV that was a CRT. It wasn't an LCD type screen. So it was a monstrous piece of equipment, and it wouldn't even display high definition like DVD resolution. Now any TV that you can get minimally is going to display that d DVD resolution. It's probably maybe 4 k. Some of them are even displaying higher resolutions now, And yet the prices I mean, you could get a 55 inch TV now for less than $500, and it's not a bad TV. That's just one example.
So that is deflation, and it's a good type of deflation. Right? People are getting better quality for lower price. That will continue regardless. And In fact, I would argue that under a Bitcoin standard, under a solid money, under a sound money standard, that you would see even more from that because, again, we're controlling inflation. So it it will only benefit the price. And it doesn't mean that the company is going to go out of business because they're building inefficiencies. They're bent they're benefiting from the technology changes that are happening that are allowing those prices to come down.
Alright. So removal of cotillion effect. Next. What is next. The removal of fiat as a source of power for government both in the state and between states. Again, state does not mean like a US state. I mean a nation. So in nation and between nation, if you want. A nation state, really, is what I should be saying. What do you mean by that? Well, I came up with 2 quick examples. If the United States didn't have the US dollar as a source of power. Could we have shut down the SWIFT network of rush that Russia uses. That was done by, essentially, by order of the United States.
Their access. And I don't know if that's been enabled again or not, but that access was disabled because the US said, you know, we're not gonna allow that to happen. And because of the financial power that United States has, that was done. If Russia was operating on a Bitcoin standard and the ruble was either tied directly to Bitcoin or they didn't have a ruble at all, then there would be no network to shut down. You could not shut Russia down out of the Bitcoin network. It would not be possible. Alright. So that's between states. That's between essentially United States and Russia. That was allowed because of fiat money at being a source of power.
Well, what about estate to a person? Well, that's even easier. Go back during COVID to I don't remember exactly when this happened. I wanna say it was 2021, but I may be off. We had truckers up in Canada who were protesting the lockdowns that were happening because they could not do their job. They literally were not allowed to drive around. And the government got offended and ordered the shutdown by executive order through this emergency powers act or whatever. The shutdown of the bank accounts of as many of those people as they could get their hands on. So they completely disrupted the financial lives to those people because they didn't like what they were saying.
You can agree or disagree whether they should have been doing that or not, But I would argue that is way too excessive for what was going on. And it was the use of fiat and the banking systems that allowed that. On a Bitcoin standard, now people may keep Bitcoin in a bank like we do dollars now, but you can custody your own Bitcoin. And if I were involved in that trucker's protest personally, You can be quite certain that I would not have all of my Bitcoin in a bank account. It would be on my seed signer or multiple seed signers or whatever my privacy and security needs dictated.
And there is no way for the government to control that. There is none. The government can outlaw Bitcoin, but it can't keep me from using it because it operates because of the structure of the network that it operates over. So moving to a Bitcoin global standard will remove fiat as a source of power for government. That's the second point. The third and final one is what I would call a return to the fundamentals of Austrian economics. Now 100% disclosure. I believe in Austrian economics. This is opposed to Keynesian economics. If you go back far enough in the podcast history, I did a number of episodes on Austrian versus Keynesian economics and this kind of thing. I spent, like, 4 or 5 episodes, I think. You can go to satoshis dashplebs.com/episodes, and there's a list of all the episodes of the podcast. And if you just search for Austrian, you should be able to find those episodes really quickly.
But if we're on an Austrian economics, standard. The reason why we would be on that is because of Bitcoin as this global serve because of Bitcoin as the legal tender or at least the accepted money of the nation. And that essentially that sound money, Bitcoin, forces you to operate in an in an Austrian economics lens. Because what can I do with Bitcoin? I cannot take my Bitcoin and go do what countries do now where they essentially loan out Bitcoin on not or money on nothing. I can't print Bitcoin. And if I can't print Bitcoin and I'm a country, I have two choices. I can I can live in the my means? And what I mean by that is essentially, they'll live on a budget just like you and I should, and they won't spend beyond that because if they do, they can't print more Bitcoin to fix it. The only thing they'll be able to do is ultimately clear bankruptcy by defaulting. So no nation wants to do that.
See. Once countries start living on a budget. That's going to force them to make a lot of choices that some of them will be unpleasant, but will put them on the right tracks moving forward to to be more prosperous. A second thing from this, this return to the fundamentals of Austrian economics. And, again, because we're talking about Bitcoin that can't be messed with, so to speak. Credit is going to become harder to get but less scheme. 2007 banking crisis, which was literally kind of the genesis, the seed of why Bitcoin even started. Happened because too many people had too much access to too much credit that could not handle that credit.
That's why it happened. So making credit harder to get but at the same time less risky is a good thing. It will keep these kinds of things from happening, and that ties into the third point. There's an Austrian theory that we always will have booms and busts of economies. Right? We have this. There's times of prosperity and there's times where things aren't doing so good where companies are trimming back and all of this kind of thing. The Austrian view is that those cycles are made worse by Keynesian economics, by fiat money by printing, by inflation, by all of this kind of stuff. And if you eliminate all of that, then these cycles will still be there, but they will become more moderate because credit's going to be harder to get. So companies aren't gonna go so far out on a limb in terms of credit. They're not gonna leverage themselves too much.
And therefore, when things get harder, they they're less likely to break. And finally, because of Austrian economics, because of sal money, we will not see rampant inflation like what we see in Argentina right now. I think they're at 233% inflation, which is an all time high. I have a news item for this, not an all time high, but it's a it's a recent high certainly for them. And I have a news item about this. We'll talk about it more in the news. That can't happen if you can't print Bitcoin. Will we still have inflation? Yes. I believe we will. But we will not have this unsustainable hyperinflation type scenario, that we see happen and we've seen happen from time to time.
And frankly, I, you know, don't see how essentially any country who's operating on a fiat Sander Can Avoid. The United States now has passed $34,000,000,000,000 in debt. It's, an ungodly amount of debt that we can never pay back, and yet everybody acts like it's okay, and it's not. This topic has been discussed by a number of people. I've got some links into the show notes, about different articles, different sources about this that you may want to pursue. But this is one of the reasons why I'm so excited about Bitcoin because it forces it absolutely forces a government ultimately to bend to this Bitcoin standard, this which will ultimately bring about what amounts to Austrian economics. The United States, and I have this in the news item as well, is about to make a disastrous mistake. They're selling a large number of Bitcoin.
They filed to do that. All they have to do is just hold that Bitcoin. The 100, $130,000,000, whatever it is, that they're about to receive for these Bitcoin does not even come close to solving the problems of our debt and all of the things that we've got going on. And yet We have no governmental policy at this point towards Bitcoin, towards an allocation of Bitcoin. But right now, they could make a huge dent, a a huge start to building a a Worcester. Well, maybe that's the wrong word, but towards, moving to that standard, which is frankly inevitable in my opinion at this point.
I don't think that's gonna go down in history as a very wise decision. But, anyways, I I wanna keep this shorter, but There are other things there if you wanna take a look at. You can follow-up on this. So this whole idea of this separation of state and money to me is extremely powerful, and it's one of the primary reasons we should be promoting Bitcoins. And I promise you I promise you that by and large, nations are not gonna go along willingly with this. Eventually, they will be forced to, but there will probably not be a huge number of countries like El Salvador who say, Bitcoin is legal tender who say, we're using it as, a store of value, which they are. They're mining Bitcoin and and this type of talk. Now are other countries, mining Bitcoin? I do believe Russia probably is. I do believe that there's actually mining going on in China as well.
But these examples oh, and the government of Bhutan, I wanna say, right up by Nepal and India. Certainly is. I think we're maybe a few years from a lot of governments embracing this as a standard. I think it will be very difficult for them because they are the politicians who do this will be deincentivizing. They will be making it harder for them to become super wealthy by being a politician when they do this. So it's not really in their self interest, but it is in the interest of the countries as a whole. Alright. We're gonna stop that there. We're gonna go on and talk about our supporters. And as I bring this up, I'll go ahead and throw this out as some news, and there's a reason why I do this, right now.
I have decided. I've wrestled with this. You know, you guys, I'm I'm fairly transparent, let's be honest, kind of about what's going on. And I've been doing this podcast for, like, two and a half years at this point. I enjoy doing it. I'm a 155 episodes in now, And I feel like that there's probably enough material out there to do this twice a week. But the reality is I don't have a huge amount of time. Work is, not gotten any simpler. Let's put it that play. And with the amount of support that I have been getting financially from this podcast. I can't justify a huge amount of of time to be invested in on a weekly basis. Twice a week, you know, 2, 3, 4 hours at a whack. Well, there's no way it'd be 2 hours.
3, 4, 5 hours or more at a time. For the foreseeable future until things pick up, It just doesn't make sense. I'm also struggling to even be, regular because of work, especially on the Thursday episode, I try and record Wednesday, and that just doesn't ever seem to work out. And then half the time on Thursday, I've got some crisis that I'm dealing with, which is actually what happened this week. I did not record on Thursday. So I've made the decision that for now, I'm going to go ahead and just do 1 episode a week like I've done in the past a couple of times, and that's just going to have to do.
Because of that, I am going to kind of lower my goal for a episode target for Satoshis. I'm, you know, I've been promoting this idea essentially that 200,000 token, tokens. 200,000 satoshis a week, a month would be a, you know, a good level of support. That's 50, probably closer to $70 a month, and that would take care of the hosting, would even enable me to maybe have some back end stuff done in terms of maybe, like, just having somebody edit the podcast instead of me doing it, which that would give me more time, this kind of thing. But if I'm not gonna come on here twice a week, then I don't feel like that's a viable goal. So we'll just cut that in half. We'll start promoting a 100,000 satoshis a month, which that breaks down into 25,000 satoshis a week.
So 25 1,000 satoshis an episode would kinda be this new target. That's what I'm looking for. Now we did get some support this week. I'll discuss that in just a second, but that's going to be our long term, goal in terms of what I'm looking to get. Alright. To kick things off, we've got the anonymous. Listening to episode 153, my desktop, boosted 1,000 sats. No message, but I do appreciate that anonymous very much. You're becoming a regular. There yeah. There's your last couple. So I do appreciate that. I'm glad that you enjoyed that episode. I wasn't sure how that one was gonna be taken. Sometimes you just can't tell. And we also had a 1,000 sats boost from our friend in Portugal, hypersensitive asaurus.
And they were listening to episode 150, why privacy matters, and said And they said happy to have returned to Portugal and your content at the start of the year. Keep up the good work. And with an arm, like, muscle thing. So I appreciate that. Hypersensitive, it's always good to hear from you. They also did a lot of nice streaming as well. Certainly appreciate that. And then, episode 150 4 Bitcoin for the risk averse. We had anonymous again boosting, 500 sat. So appreciate that as well. And then a final 1,000 sat boost from the privacy tools episode from hypersensitive asaurus as well.
And They said tried thrice to create a clip of this episode, but it didn't seem to go through a loss. So that's unfortunate. I appreciate the thought. I've had some decent luck with fountain. I'm not let's see. You are using fountain with the clipping tool. They must have had something going on when you were trying to do that. It's gotten a lot better than what it used to be. The clipping tool used to drive me nuts. But, I do appreciate the thought, hypersensitive saris. I don't know. You if you want, you can try again later or, you know, That's fine.
I the thought is what counts. I do appreciate that. I do appreciate that. One of the things that we do, if you create a clip of the current episode, so in this case, this was a little bit older, although it was still quite new. You know, I'd boost, not boost. I'd reply or comment or whatever on your on your clip and support that like 500 sats and then I think if it's an older episode, it's 250. I'll go ahead and do that. I think I can do that to your, this comment will probably show up on the on the stream there. And I'll, I'll go ahead and boost that back essentially, for you, hypersensitive as ours. Because like I said, it really is the thought that counts.
Maybe we can get that sorted out. Whatever. But that's yeah. Pretty cool. So this week, we did have a total. Let me grab that real quick. We'll see where we're at. I don't think it's gonna be 25,000, but we did a lot better than we've been doing. So this week, we did get a total of 7514. So, you know, that's a that's a good amount for us. That's a good start towards our 25,000, for the week. So I do appreciate that, of course. Alright. So let's go ahead and jump on into the news. There was a a little bit of news that was worth talking about. The government, the US government is selling a $130,000,000 worth of Bitcoin that was captured from the Silk Road, shutdown, essentially.
And, I have a article about that. I don't really have anything else to say about that. I think it's a dumb mistake by the US government. That money should be going into the general fund and should be held there until some meaningful time in the future, and that's not next year. We will end up having to buy those back at some point, and it will be at a much higher price. Let's see. I had a few things on Twitter as well. You can follow me on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. The Aqua Wallet, which is a wallet for the liquid, Bitcoin network, which we've talked in passing about. But I don't really feel like it's got enough traction at this point to give it a whole lot of commentary, and I don't like it as a model because I feel like it's too centralized. It's essentially I think it's Block.
The company, Adam Back's company, is essentially controlling that, and I'm not really a fan of that. I hope it is not the way that we kind of end up moving, you know, in terms of a layer 2 protocol like lightning, but time will tell. Let's see. I did throw out something about some cheap, components for the seed signer, if you're interested in that. It looks like samurai wallet and probably along with some other companies, but specifically them are putting together a legal response to these fence in proposed rule changes. We spent an entire episode talking about those, and this is the kind of action that we need as a group of people in order to combat this test. I'm really happy to see that.
We are roughly 80 days until the having. Crazy. The annualized debt of the US government has now exceeded 1,000,000,000,000 dollars and is projected to breach 3,000,000,000,000 by q 4 2030. I think it will be faster than that, but that is the amount of debt that we are adding, by the way, the interest on right? So we've got $34,000,000,000,000 worth debt. Next year, even if we don't add to it by overspending, which we will, it would be 35,000,000,000,000. Good job, guys. Good job. Way to sell that one. I talk quite a bit on here, maybe more than I should, but about commercial real estate. I feel like commercial real estate here in the United States kind of the and, actually, China. I'll go ahead and say that as well. Or kind of the next shoe to drop in terms of the global breakdown.
I've given all kinds of figures and things. Well, right now, according to this newsletter, which is a well known news letter. 14% of all commercial real estate loans and 44% of office building loans are now in negative 40. This is talking about the United States. In other words, the debt is now greater than the property value. So they owe 75,000,000. The pretty is only worth 50,000,000. So in a lot of cases, it then becomes easier for the companies behind that to walk away. Currently US banks hold over $2,900,000,000,000 of CRE, commercial real estate debt.
The majority of which is held by these so called regional banks. Office building prices are down 40% from their highs. CRE commercial real estate as a whole is down over 20%. And this is all happening as rates have risen over the last few years, this course, and many of these loans are now becoming due to be refinanced. You will start to see companies walk away from these deals, leaving it to the bank. The bank has now got its asset is worth less than what is owed on it. So the bank will end up doing fire sales on this stuff in order to move it. Some of these banks will then go into they won't be able to handle that and they will end up going out of business and so on and so forth. So you see how bad that can be. You. I posted, reposted what Eric Hersman, said this week on January 27th.
Eric is the head of a gridless, in Africa. We've had him on the show, a great guy. And, somebody in Africa and I had heard about this, they are allowing Bitcoin transfers essentially over kind of dumb phone, cellular phones which is just amazing. So any feature phone can then transfer and hold it's Bitcoin, and it's all open source. I did see an interesting article in The Wall Street Journal about Argentina. Things are really heating up down there. Their inflation is continuing to rise, which is not surprising. If you're not at the top, then the inflation rate is going to keep going higher even though Javier Millet is down there cutting programs and doing everything he can to cut back.
So apparently now, even though his ratings are still fairly high, people are starting to protest. People are not happy. People things are not at least socially going well. Now I think they have to move through this. There will be protests. We will see to what level, but they have got to continue down this path. They don't have a choice. Oh, I saw this great thing. The last thing I this isn't really news, news, but this is the last thing I posted. If you run through the numbers, have you ever thought about how many sats there would be per person if Bitcoin were used around the world. This person did this, Robin Sayer.
And I haven't looked through all the math of this or whatever, but he comes up with a figure of 200 50,000 satoshis per person on average, which is just insane. So that's like a $100. If you buy a $100 worth of coin. And the world moves to a Bitcoin standard, then you would have the amount that the average person would have if you just divided up among everybody in the world. We're so early in this and it's so cheap even though it seems expensive. Alright. Again, don't forget about the clip thing. Make a 1, 2, 3 minute clip. A 500 sat boost back to you. If it's, I'll say the last couple of episodes.
If it goes back a little further than that or an older episode, then it will be 300 sats. I said 250 earlier. It's a way for you to make some treasure and it's a way for you to generate value for the show at the same time. So you're getting value, I'm getting value, and I do appreciate that. We do support podcasting 2 point o. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time on here. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. You can support this podcast. And there's 3 different ways that you can do that. It's through time, through talent, through treasure. There are things I could use help with. You can reach out to me directly, [email protected], would be one way, or on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech.
Let me know. What can you help with? I any kind of help would be appreciated. So that's kind of the time and talent type thing, for treasure. You've got podcast 2.0 apps that stream, Satoshis, as you listen. You can tell it to do that or just like the users did today, hypersensitive as ours like I was talking about. Or you could boost, send a message just like hypersensitive SARS did. You can just boost and not send a message and that's fine like anonymous did. No problem with that. There's some very interesting I'm gonna mention this really quick, but I do wanna wrap this up. There's some very interesting news in kind of the podcast Syn 2 point o. Ecosphere, this week it comes out that Apple Apple, the Apple is now going to start supporting the podcast 2 point o initiative. They are beginning with the transcript tag.
So in Apple Podcast coming very soon, they will automatically do it. All podcasts We'll have a transcript and it will be available in the app. That is because of podcast 2.0 and the work that Dave Jones, Adam Curry have done so tirelessly for what now? The last 3 years? So you have them to thank for that, and you can do that to them directly. These are exciting times. I think you're gonna see more out of that. You're going to see these apps, these features, these podcast 2.0 features like chapters, transcripts, streaming satoshis.
All of this kind of stuff will slowly eat, move through all of these apps and everybody will be doing it. But you can do that. You can go to podcastapps.com. You can try out something like Fountain, Cast O Matic, one of these other podcast apps. You can put a lightning wallet connected up to it, and you can support the show by streaming, by boosting, and that kind of thing. And that's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. Like I said, I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm a mastodon@[email protected].
And, of course, we've got the StoshisPlex website. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Home.
