While Mahatma Gandi probably didn't exactly say "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", it's a great quote even if wrongly attributed to him. And history teaches us that it's often accurate. Where is Bitcoin in all this? Let's discuss.
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
February 11, 2024: $48,286
Block Height at Time of Recording
830,004
News and Links
Treasury Department Report on Money Laundering
Senator Warren Expands Coalition for Bill
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
February 11, 2024: $48,286
Block Height at Time of Recording
830,004
News and Links
Treasury Department Report on Money Laundering
Senator Warren Expands Coalition for Bill
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
I can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @[email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is February 12th, and this is episode 157 of satoshi's plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is and then they fight you. Alright. That's kinda funny. Ever since I've changed the name from generation Bitcoin over to satoshi's plebs, I really haven't had a trouble I I really haven't had trouble with the name switch. And just a few minutes ago, I ran through my, just a few seconds ago, I ran through my intro and said, and this is episode 150 7 of generation Bitcoin. I'm like and as soon as I said it, I realized I'd made a mistake. So I rerecorded it, of course. I just thought that was funny. The Earl Gray is hot. The tea is perfect.
And it is Super Bowl Sunday here in the United States, which means 100,000,000 people here in the United States will be glued to their TV beginning in about 4 hours. So I thought I'd record this a little early. I'm gonna go ahead and give the price here in just a minute at the current time instead of the close of the week. I have a suspicion. I'll say this one. Well, we'll talk about that in the market update. But, I hope that, this week has, things are going well for you. So let's just jump right on into it. So we've got our market update. And like I said, I'm just gonna go ahead and give the price right now at the current block height, which is 83004.
I missed the 830,000 blocked by 4. That's kind of a bummer. So 83004. Our Bitcoin price at time of recording is a nice 48,286. Where does that have us? Well, obviously, up. I don't think that's a shock. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But before we do that, let's roll through the rest of the stats. If we go to mempool.space, mempool.space and take a look at the transactions. We're actually down. Low priority right now is 18 sats per v byte medium 20 and high of 23. I saw that last night at 12 SATs, and I bet during the Super Bowl tonight, we might even see sub 10 sat per vbyte. Just a thought if you're out there consolidating your Bitcoin.
Although I suppose at this point, I won't get this posted before the Super Bowl. But regardless, it's been down a little bit. I do not know why. I guess they're not printing garbage on the on the blockchain right now. Our mempool usage is actually down below 1 gigabyte for the first time in a long time, 926 megabytes. Again, last night, that was down in the 8 100, like, 8:30 or something. So that's pretty cool. Kind of clearing up a little bit, I guess you could say. And our difficulty adjustment currently is sitting at what is our our difficulty adjustment sitting at?
McIntosh, read the chart, man. Read the chart. I think we're looking at about 8.25 percent in about 3 days. On February 15th at roughly 8:18 AM. I do not know what time zone. I don't know if that's set for my time or not. But we're looking at 3 days out, we're are looking at, unfortunately, another difficulty adjustment up. The blocks are coming in a little hot as they say, and we gotta adjust that difficulty. We're 9.2 minutes per block time right now on average. Although just a few blocks ago, we went 25 minutes without a block and then 16 minutes the block before that. So I don't know. We'll see. Hopefully, that drops. I I think we'll have some more hash. Come on.
Come online, and that'll drop a little bit. Write down our hash rate. I just saw that figure. Where was it? 578,000 x hash, which is insane. I wish you people would stop putting minors online. Come on. Come on. Sorry. In general terms, you know, I talk about my mining occasionally. I would say, January was definitely a very good month for miners. I do believe that here in February, we're February 11th, so we're almost in the middle of the month, and it's been a little less. We've done okay. If this price keeps pumping, we'll be doing alright. But I don't know if that'll happen. So let's talk about that though, let's talk about the price because everybody loves to talk about the price. So where were we at a week ago?
Great question. McIntosh, where were we at? Let's see, 42,811 according to this on February 5th at the time of recording. So that's up, like, $5,000 plus, something like that. That's pretty sweet. 270 so a huge pop this week. There's no reason to believe that we wouldn't have some kind of consolidation slash pullback. That will remain to be seen. What we do know is that these ETFs are pumping. I've got some news about that in the news. They crossed $10,000,000,000. So that is literally $10,000,000,000 out of gracious 800 and something $1,000,000,000 market cap currently for Bitcoin. So it's probably approaching 900,000,000,000. I don't have the figure right in front of me, but we're getting there. And so it's a significant percentage of that. And I guarantee you Monday morning when the bell rings, the et(f) because they cannot trade on the weekend. They do not trade. Now Bitcoin, of course, doesn't stop, and this is kind of the funny thing. This is actually one of the things I've been waiting for.
What happens when Bitcoin goes into the weekend pumping up, which is exactly what it did. It's go it looks like it's gonna pump through the weekend and basically establish a new higher high, at least for, well, for a long time. And where does that mean I mean, we go back literally all the way back to April of 2022. That's where we're at. K. We touched this level very briefly just a couple weeks ago back in January. So we're literally if we break through this level, we haven't been here for two years, almost. What's gonna happen? So let's say we do establish and it's somewhere maybe approaching 49,000 Monday morning. I I'm not saying that's what's gonna happen. I do not know. It may pull back.
If it establishes above 48 solidly for the week, I think we're in a really good spot to start that grind up to 50. If if if it is a grind, it may not be. But, you know, that push up to 50. And if that happens early in the week, these ETFs may go nuts. And we're going to start to see price action because of these ETFs. So grayscale has sold all they're gonna sell. They they're not the the amount that they're selling at this point is negligible versus what these other Bitcoin ETFs are bringing in. And this price action is will happen. It will push it up.
I think maybe I didn't say this. I'm saying it now if I didn't before. I think earlier in the year I said this, though. I would not be surprised if Bitcoin broke the all time high, 69,000 by halving, which is April 19th, April 20th. So we've got that coming if we're reaching that level and we've reached that level by the havening. I'm not saying this is moving the cycle up, but we are in a really good place for the rest of the cycle. K. That is accelerating the cycle. I will say that. If you go back and look at the data for the last 3 cycles, you didn't breach the previous all time high before the happening. That happened post happening, and then it went on from there. So I don't know exactly where that puts us. I think it's a very interesting position, to be honest, But I don't know exactly where that's going to put us. We will have to see.
But I do believe we may see that. So this is as close as I'm going to come to making a prediction that we're gonna we're gonna reach that all time high, 69,000 whatever it is, by the happening, which is, like, 50, 60 plus days out, 63 days or something. I don't know exactly. April 19th or April 20th is what we're looking at. As I said earlier this year, we are in the bull market. We're in the start of it. You need to be prepared, dear listeners, for what's about to come. So for the next almost 2 years, like a year and 3 quarters. It's going to be run up, pull back, run up, pull back, run up, pull back. We're gonna go up been up and up. Most likely.
Now could we spend the rest of the summer in the doldrums? Yes. We've done that before. But I think on what based on what I'm looking at, that's what we're about to start seeing. My point is not that I'm trying to get you to get into some frenzy about, you know, Bitcoin 100,000 or Bitcoin 69,000er. You literally have somebody on Twitter at this point saying, you know, bitcoin $1,000,000. I'm like, dude, we haven't even broke a 100,000. I get the excitement. I and and the point is valid. Will Bitcoin ever be a $100,000,000 are not a 100, $1,000,000.
Yes. It will either be $1,000,000 or it will be 0, and I think the chances of it being 0 are minuscule at this point. So therefore, given enough time, yes, it will be a $1,000,000 Bitcoin. I just don't know when. Will it be this cycle? I don't see that happening, but Bitcoin does crazy things sometimes. Do I see it the next cycle or the cycle at go out to 2030. We'll talk, seriously. Maybe a little further. But ultimately, it's all about how much market share Bitcoin has in terms of all of these financial assets. So as we see things like these Bitcoin ETFs, as we see things like Wall Street moving into the Bitcoin space, so to speak, as we see things like the adoption of Bitcoin across the board by nation states, by individuals who are carrying on transacting business in Bitcoin, then yes. Bitcoin will reach $1,000,000.
Be prepared for that. It may be a ways off. It's certainly not this week. If you've never been through a bull run, the next year and three quarters, you're gonna hear a constant drumbeat. Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin go up, number go up, blah blah blah. Bitcoin to 69,000, which I just said. Bitcoin to a 100000, Bitcoin to a quarter million, Bitcoin to half a 1000000, Bitcoin to a 1000000. You're gonna hear all these things. You need a game plan right now. What are you going to do? Do not wait until we hit 69,000 because your mind will be in this crazy place most likely, unless you're different than everybody else. By the way, we built a perfect flag out of this on the weekly chart. This is amazing. We may not come back below.
What is that? 44,000? Oh, man. That's beautiful. You could do that. $44,027. I bet if I zoomed in, it would really be 44,000, and we have blown right out of that. I would guess, and I just saw this. I would honestly guess, this is on the weekly time frame that we're not going back below 44,000. This cycle, if ever. Where are we gonna go, Macintosh? I don't know. What history has taught me is based on past patterns, you know, we've got a good chance from here of going past the all time high of doubling, tripling, maybe quadrupling that all time high, maybe more.
I think the quadruple would be kind of the normal. So we went no. That's not well, even just based on the last cycle. So the low last cycle was 20,000, and then it went to 69. So we think we speculate, at least some of us do, that it that was based on, FTX dumping. I mean, that certainly was countering it, and it should have gone higher. So maybe it if it had gone to at least 80, then that would have been 4 times the 20,000. So that's where I'm pulling that from. So let's say 3 times. So 3 times 70 is $210,000. Wherever it ends up, at what point in my estimation last quarter of 2025.
Then where is it gonna go from there? Well, historically, it's pulled back. So it's gonna go back 50, the 70, maybe even 80 percent from there. But it also historically doesn't go back below the all time the previous all time high. Now this last cycle, again, we saw we've seen it go below the 20,000. It went below that twice, basically, I think. So it it's possible that it goes below that, but it would be pretty strong. So we're looking at $70,000 for the kind of the low. Maybe a little below that, but maybe not much or certainly for a very brief period of time. What's your plan? Are you gonna sell everything at the top? I don't recommend that, but are you gonna sell everything at the top and try and buy back in? Are you just gonna hold? That's your safest, most conservative bet. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna sell it and pay off some debt? We talked to seed signer here a few months ago now, I think.
And remember, he sold I think it was the top of the 2017 market. He sold at the top of the market and paid off his house. He considers that to be the right move for him. I'm not the person to sit here and say, well, seed signer, you were at $20,000 there. You should have held that because the next time it was 70,000, and maybe the next time it's a quarter of a 1000000 or whatever it is. No. That's his business. That's his financial business. Right? So anyways, you need that plan. You may need to write it down. Because I'm telling you, if you've never been through a bull market, you do not know what's about to happen.
It's gonna rip your face off. You're gonna look at your Bitcoin and go, no. And number's gonna be cranking up, and you're just gonna get more and more and more excited. So be prepared. Sorry. This market update has taken a little longer, but the show's maybe gonna be a little shorter, and I thought that was important. Let's, move on, though. As always, of course, we talk about dollar cost coverage, I don't want you just throwing vast amounts of money. Everything you got, you know, you should be DC'ing. You should have been DC'ing for a long period time at this point for however long it is that you've been listening to this show, if nothing else.
Alright. Let's do it. What is this all about? I gotta find the right hedgedoc. Alright. Episode 157. That would be today. Alright. And then they fight you. What is he talking about? There is a statement that was wrongly attributed to Gandhi, but he said some form of it. Anyways, first, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And this statement has been thrown around the Bitcoin circles probably since day 1. Now, of course, Bitcoin isn't the only thing that's worth any great movement, you can kind of look at it like this.
And I think it's a useful lens to consider things. And I specifically want to talk about kind of where we're at in this. 1st, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. What does win mean for Bitcoin? I think that could mean different things for bit for different people. For me, it means Bitcoin is a global currency, reserve that's used between nation states for trading that will help bring Austrian economics back into vogue, so to speak, into common use by nation states to help eliminate war to be used as a censorship resistant private, which is not something that we really have right now, form of transactions between people allowing for store value without inflation eating away at that.
Now that was poorly worded because I just thought it up on the fly, so to speak. Didn't have it written down, but I think that conveys what I think that means. It may mean something different for you, and I'm okay with that. I hope you are too. But regardless, that's the end. That's the then you win for me. Now I will probably never see the then you win in terms of a global currency reserve. I'm not of the age where that may I may reach that. Maybe I do. Maybe it happens faster than I think. I think it may take a good portion of the remaining 100 and, what, 20, 15 years of Bitcoin that they even mine it before we reach that. That's my point. Maybe it's, 21100.
Maybe it's, 2,080. I don't know. But I do know that El Salvador, for example, has adopted it as a currency, so that's a good thing and so on and so forth. Let's talk about this. 1st, they ignore you. Certainly, everybody was ignoring Bitcoin when it first came out. When when Hal Finney, received the first transaction from Satoshi when the early coding was going on. Everybody virtually no one knew what they were doing, and and the people who in passing knew what they were doing almost to a person ignored them. I would argue that on May 22nd 2010 is one of the first times that people stopped ignoring Bitcoin.
What was that date? That's Bitcoin pizza day. Laszlo, Hanyecz paid a 10,000 Bitcoin to have 2 Papa John's Pizzas says delivered to him about $25 worth of pizza. It is the first known usage of Bitcoin as a actual medium of exchange. Don't even calculate what that 10,000 Bitcoin would be worth today. But the point is, at that point, I think that actually made some kind of news. It certainly has been remembered down the road. I earlier this well, last year, May 22nd, we posted Bitcoin pizza day. It's a kind of a big deal. So you can consider that time from the early origins of Bitcoin from 2,009, certainly.
That's when they were ignoring them. And then you what you will see as we talk through this is that these phases overlap. So most people kept ignoring it. But I think that that kind of marked, okay, this is actually a real thing. People are trading Bitcoin for something that's physical in the real world. Now that was the one example I pulled up. I don't wanna make this too long, so I didn't do a whole lot of examples. There's numerous examples during these early days of people using Bitcoin. First time it was in mainstream media. The first time that they did a news interview about it, all of these things.
As they moved out of that ignoring stage, what did they move into? Then they laugh at you. And I've got a couple of quotes here. Very famous one. Peter Schiff, gold extended its streak to a record 41 consecutive trading days where the spot price held above $2,000 that exceeds the prior total number of days gold ever traded above 2,000. Yet investor sentiment remains extremely weak with mining stocks falling nearing 4% on the week. Yes, Peter. That is true. This was completely unprepared, but this is one of the reasons why see, Peter, he's a gold bug and he's stuck on gold and, you know, he thinks gold's gonna save us.
People have moved on. People don't want gold in that sense as a store of value. People realize it's extremely difficult to safeguard and use as a method of payment. It doesn't even keep up with inflation. By no means does it keep up with inflation. Okay. So right. So back to what he actually said. He's famous having said for having said this multiple times. Bitcoin is going to 0. Charlie Munger, 98 years old. He passed away, I think, in the last year. But when he was 98, just recently, he said Bitcoin is stupid because it's very likely going to 0. Now Charlie Munger may be one of the great investors of the world. He and Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, one of the largest, stock platforms in the world. I'm not thinking of the word, but you know what I mean.
And that's all well and good, but I think he and Warren both did they have not been capable of understanding the switch that is going on that has been going on for a long time. So Charlie was born if he's 98, he would have been born somewhere around 1925. He was certainly born before the great depression. I'm sure that modeled his, helped in model his worldview, if you wanna call it that. He has lived through the or did live through the entire fiat dis debasement, and yet he can't see that that's what's going on. Now I'm not 98 years old.
I was born before I will say this. I was born before Richard Nixon, took the US off the gold standard, which essentially was the final nail in the coffin of sal money. At that point, you could officially say it was dead, and it was just a matter of time. I have watched this unknowingly for much of my life, not understanding it for half of my life. Even though I knew that inflation I remember back in the eighties being very concerned if you wanna call it that. Well, yeah, I would call it that about inflation, but not really understanding.
I knew that the US was printing money. We, I do remember we've discussed that, and you go back and look at the amount of debt that the US had back in the late eighties. And it was laughable, I mean, compared to now. It's only been in the last few years that I've really zeroed in the last, well, the last 10 years, certainly, that I've really zeroed in on this as to why this is happening and gotten really involved in it, so to speak. Charlie and Warren, they've never made that leap, and I can't there will be people. There will be many people who will never be able to make that leap. Some of these people are very well-to-do, like Munger, like Peter, Schiff. I mean, these guys are multimillionaires, certainly, and they're just never gonna understand.
And there will always be people. There will be people when Bitcoin hits a $1,000,000 dollars. There will probably be somebody saying, but it's gonna go to 0. They just can't make that leap. And so they they turn it into a joke. Why would you say because it's very likely going to 0? The he there's no that's why Bitcoin is stupid because it's but there's no explanation as to why. We have the largest network in the world at this point, running Bitcoin miners, Bitcoin nodes, managing the transactions going on this network. But, yeah, we're just gonna turn all that off. So there you go. And I could pull up story after story. Jamie Dimon famously CEO, JPMorgan, who now is one of the, managers essentially of the back ends of these, Bitcoin ETFs, ironically. He's famously said things about Bitcoin saying Bitcoin was stupid or Bitcoin was going to 0 or Bitcoin is worthless or whatever it is that he says. So you could go down a whole list of people like this. Oh, it got to 10 and it now it jumped to 25, but it's gonna go to 0.
But it got to a 100, but it's tulip mania. Right? This is exactly what went on in in the Netherlands with the tulips. Yeah. Yeah, no. It's it's money laundering. Well, we'll get to that in a minute. Sorry. Don't wanna jump ahead. It's just speculation. Is just like all of those other cryptocurrencies. It's just like Dogecoin, that worthless Dogecoin. No. No. It's not. It's different in a number of ways. So that was the laughing step, and that's still going on. So the next step after that again, remember there's overlap. Everybody knows about Bitcoin at this point. You can't ignore it. It's all over the mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, whoever.
So we're past the ignore you stage. We're on to the laughing thing stage. And now we're on to the fight you stage. And I've I've pulled up more about this than anything else because I want to be very clear about this. This is where we're at. You will hear these type news articles. Bitcoin is bad for the environment. But we use Bitcoin to mitigate methane emissions. But we use Bitcoin to keep from having to flare natural natural gas. But we use Bitcoin to, for example, keep the Texas grid stable energy grid stable during the winter when it's too cold and during the summer when it's too hot. But Bitcoin's bad for the environment. But Bitcoin is the most green industry that there is. But Bitcoin's bad for the environment just over and over and over and over.
When are you gonna realize that it's not? That it's the most useful tool to man. And I stand by that. It's not possible without things like transistors, semiconductors and so on. But I would argue that it's probably the most useful tool. People just don't understand people don't understand the things that it will bring about. They can't see it because we are so early in this process. I have a news item for today. I won't cover this in the news. I'll go and cover it now. Criminals using Bitcoin for money laundering. This is, like, 5 years old. I don't know. It could it's been going on for so long. Well, sick Silk Road. Right when Silk Road got blown up, it was because of people using it for illicit drug use.
But supposedly, they're laundering money. Now never mind that the most common thing to be used for money laundering is the US dollar. They're over here using the public Bitcoin network, which is not private, which is very difficult to maintain privacy and so on and so forth. That's what they're using. But this is what they keep saying. So let me bring this up real quick. A detailed report of money money laundering in the United States. This is by the US Treasury. Highlights that cash remains king looking for criminals looking to launder illicit funds.
So maybe this will actually put to rest some of these things. But cash, not cryptocurrencies remain the go to money laundering method for criminals and organizations. According to a detailed risk assessment report for the United States Treasury Department. So the next time that senator Elizabeth Warren says, but Bitcoin is used for money laundering and for pedophiles to be paid by or whatever garbage that she's comes up with, I would say, with all respect that is due, senator Warren, Janet Yellen over here at the treasury department says that cash is the problem. What are you doing about that? So each of these arguments, whether it's, the environment. Okay center to warm because this was one of her things as well. You're gonna hear her name a lot this episode. I apologize.
Bitcoin's bad for the environment because it uses too much energy. Senator Warren, when when a grid do well, first of all, senator Warren, do you actually understand how electricity works? Let's start there. You do realize that to meet peak demand of any network that you have to have that amount of power essentially all the time. So what do you do with the extra power when people aren't using that peak amount of power? Well, I I I don't know. When you have a cold snap, senator Warren, up there in Massachusetts, how do you think that they meet that peak demand?
Well, I don't know. Let me tell you what they do. They turn on natural gas peaker plants that provide extra power. So what they're doing is they're using polluting natural gas to provide that extra power so that you can stay warm in your home, senator Warren. Now what if instead of doing that, we built clean, renewable, nuclear energy or hydro or wind or whatever. And we soaked up that excess energy that's being used by mining Bitcoin with it to provide sound money and to use that extra energy because they can do that. They can be shut down at any time. We see this in Texas, they do this perfectly down there. 25%, roughly, we think, of the network was shut down during the last really big cold snap down in Texas because they needed that power show that they didn't lose power. And I heard no reports of major power outages at all. I'm sure there were some, but because of lines breaking and this kind of thing. But because of Bitcoin mining, senator, so are we good with that? Okay. Well, what about methane? Is methane bad for the environment? Well, yes. It is. It's actually 25 times worse than any other, what is it, c02, which whatever.
I'm not even I'm not trying to make this a debate about the environment, but this is the stuff that they they bring up over and over. Okay. So methane's bad for the environment, really bad for the environment. All the landfills give off methane. Yes. They do. All of the large scale farming operations like a pig farm, for example, they give off methane. Well, yes. They do. Well, what if we have a way to take that methane to actually convert it on-site into usable power and then use that to mine Bitcoin. So we're literally turning something that pollutes the environment into the world's soundest money, senator Warren. Are you okay with that?
Well, I I guess so. Okay. Then what about all these flare gas things out in West Texas, senator Warren. We need oil. Well, yes. We do. But when we pump oil out in the middle of nowhere and natural gas very likely will be with the oil. What do we do with the natural gas? It doesn't make sense to build a pipeline. There's no economic sense to that whatsoever. So we burn it off. Is that good for the environment, senator Warren? Well, no. Of course not. Okay. Well, what if on site, instead of burning that natural gas off, I flared it instead of flaring it. Excuse me. I, I burn that in a super clean generator and use that to power a Bitcoin operation, mining operation. And so now we're turning what is a emissions causing, you know, global warming adding a thing into the world's soundest form of money. Are you okay with that, senator Warren?
And she probably wouldn't be. She probably wouldn't be okay with any of those because she has this knee jerk reaction Bitcoin bad. But we will continue to build these oh, and by the way, senator Warren, over 50%, over 50%, like, 55%, 56% of the energy used by this industry, which provides jobs and so on and so forth, is renewable energy. Senator Warren, do you know of any other industry that is even close to that? Well, no. I I don't. So what's the argument? We have to build the defenses against this, solid defenses, not just knee jerk reactions, until it's done.
Eventually, these people will wear out or give up. I do believe that legal representation, people like Dennis, and I'm drawing a complete blank on the name of his organization here in the North America region at least where they are going state by state and making making sure that laws are in place to provide for Bitcoin miners to be able to mine. This stuff does matter. So to get back on track here, they will fight you. I have some links to this latest bill by senator Warren, cracking down on cryptos used in money laundering, drug trafficking, etcetera.
Banning literally private wallets. So senator Warren is telling me that if this bill passes, that the FinCEN regulation that, organization that I've talked about previously will have the right to come to me and say, you private citizen, you cannot hold your own Bitcoin. You can hold bars of gold in a safe, but we can't let you own Bitcoin in a private wallet. I'm sorry. That's not okay. They're doing the same thing in Europe, by the way. We have to fight these things. We have to push back. They are now fighting. See, they weren't fighting 5 years ago.
Now they're fighting. And to wrap this up, because I've already got I said this was gonna be short. How do we win? I made a brief list, and I'm sure this doesn't include everything. In fact, I know it doesn't. In fact, I'm gonna add one right now. But, regardless, I got a, like, 6 point list here. How do we win? Prospering of early nations to adopt Bitcoin. El Salvador and Bhutan are prime examples of business. They will do well over the next cycles. El Salvador is in a terrific position. Bhutan, we don't know so much about, but they are investing a $100,000,000 end of Bitcoin mining. If Bitcoin price goes up, Bhutan will prosper. Bhutan has the perfect setup there in the Himalayas for Bitcoin mining. Lots of water, and it's cold.
Building decentralized systems do not depend on Kraken. Do not depend on Coinbase. I had terrible experiences that I was actually gonna talk about today, and I'm not gonna have time on both of those systems recently. We need decentralized system. Do not depend on on these companies. We need person to person tools and apps, not just decentralized systems. A person to person tool would be something like, maybe peaches bitcoin. Although, I think you could argue that was decentralized as well, but regardless, ways for people to, interact, to change dollars or euros or whatever for Bitcoin, to exchange, to transact, to do business, to whatever.
What's another way? Promoting and creating, I added, circular economies. Places like Bitcoin Beach, places like Bitcoin jungle over in Costa Rica. There's places in Africa that are springing up. These are the type of economies that we need. These will provide resilience in the coming years. These will promote Bitcoin. If you go to El Zonte Bitcoin Beach, and you will find it very easy to deal in Bitcoin. I think you will find it less easy to work in dollars over the coming years, promoting Bitcoin in local economies even if you don't have a circular economy set up. I go into stores all the time and I'm like, man, you guys, I love the stores where they go in and you say they're either charging you extra for credit cards or they won't even take them because credit cards charge almost 4% on average for a just a little local shop to be able to take credit cards. Hey. With lightning, that's almost nothing. That's what I'm talking about.
Spreading the orange pill with a reasonable message. Look, we all come in contact with different people. I don't want you running around going, bitcoins go into a $1,000,000. Bitcoin's gonna take over the world. Sometimes I have to rein myself in. And to be honest, I don't talk about Bitcoin a whole lot with the people I interact with on a daily basis. Now, virtually every one of them know I'm involved with Bitcoin. And when the time is right, I talk to them about it, and I do do that from time to time. And as they want to come on board, then we will do that. I will not shove Bitcoin down their throat because it will do no good.
So those are some of the ways we can win. I would also add, for example, to support organizations like Dennis' that represent the industry, the Bitcoin ecosystem really is a better word with things like these mining bills in the localist in the states here. I'm sure there's other organizations that do similar things. So there you go. I would argue we are very much at the how they fight you or now they fight you. We're almost past the laughing at you because you just can't. When Bitcoin's a $100,000,000 and, you know, it's multi $1,000,000,000,000 market cap band. It's being used all over Wall Street, and it's being used in numerous local places.
And there's 3, 4, 5, 10 to 12 20 nations using it. They will not be able to laugh. The fighting will continue for a while. It is not done. I'm afraid this year is gonna be worse than last year in terms of the United States. And there may be places and times that if it's possible, the only way that you can prosper in Bitcoin is to leave. But Bitcoin gives you the ability to do that. We're not there yet here in the United States, at least in my opinion. And I certainly hope that we do not get there, but it is a possibility. Alright. Let's talk about some spurs. We had some good support this week.
I do not have the Excel spreadsheet in front of me, so I summed it up. It was about 25 100 sats for the week. In total, we had 2 boosts, and some good streaming. So both of these were episode 156 is Bitcoin for the poor. Hypersensitive, Osiris sent us a 1,000 hats, no message. And then anonymous, not anonymous. So I actually have 2 going on. We have somebody who's consistently posting anonymous with the 500 sat boost. No message. And, didn't hear from our friend anonymous this week, but that's fine. I appreciate the value that you're sending back to me about this. So I really appreciate both of those. So thank you very much, and I appreciate the value that you're sending my way.
So let's talk about the news. I've already talked about the treasury department report. I will mention the Bitcoin ETFs did hit 1,000,000,000 $10,000,000,000 just 1 month less than, like well, 1 month after approval. I believe that's a record. I don't think that's ever been done with any new like, when gold ETFs got started, that kind of thing. MicroStrategy, I wanted to mention, and I don't talk about MicroStrategy a whole lot, but they're the largest industrial, company holding, Bitcoin. They bought another 850 Bitcoin in January, which gives them a right at a 190,000 Bitcoin, which is crazy.
$8,100,000,000 in valuation at current price. So they have a very interesting strategy that I think, will be emulated down the road by a lot of other companies after this cycle. See, they were all laughing at Michael Saylor last time. They won't be laughing this time because that 8 point what did I say, $8,100,000,000. What if it's worth close to a $100,000,000,000 at the end of this cycle? You think they'll be laughing then? BlackRock actually did a $1,000,000,000 in volume in one day. These 4, I had 4 different news items here. These are all wins.
These are all Bitcoin winning. That's awesome. Okay. Let's look at the Twitter feed real quick. Make sure I didn't. Rob Warren wrote a nice book on the Bitcoin miners almanac. I've asked him to come on the show. I do not know if he will. I hope he does, I'd like to talk about this. I will pick this up at some point. Rob's a a fairly long time minor, I believe. Certainly has a lot of experience, very knowledgeable. I'm looking forward to that book. Janet Yellen, treasury department, which I mentioned earlier, on February 8th, we don't have to get prices down because wages are going up. Let me rephrase that.
Keynesians don't like deflation. They think that's really bad. We need prices to stay higher in order to inflate the GDP, which is like their one metric, and pay off old debt with cheaper dollars. You you have to read between the lines with these people. Got some good innovation coming out of El Salvador. Nice little video how people can pay for local goods with SATS and have it automatically divided up among the people who produce it. So maybe you've got some I don't know. Hand wear, what am I saying? Like, weaving. And that's divided up among 3 different people, they could all get paid at the same time.
That's pretty cool. I love this quote. I retweeted this earlier this week. Anonymous transactions are the digital equivalent of freedom of speech. Timothy C. May, the cryptoanarchist manifesto, 1992. I added that to my Twitter header. I really I really want to see private anonymous transactions on Bitcoin by default. Some of you may know who Buckminster Fuller is. He was, I don't really know how to describe him. But, anyways, back in 1967, there's this video of him. By the year 2000, there will be a realistic scientific accounting system.
Wealth is energy. He's absolutely 100% spot on right. Wealth is energy. I've said that for a long time. So even though, of course, he knew nothing about Bitcoin, he was spot on about this. And finally, Fidelity now has a 1 to 3% Bitcoin allocation in their all in one asset allocation funds in Canada using spot Bitcoin ETFs. That is a conservative ETF. 1%. That's Fidelity. Ladies and gentlemen, listeners of this show, this is what I'm talking about. The world is changing. Bitcoin is winning. And they say cryptocurrencies. It's not cryptocurrencies.
It's Bitcoin, and that is what is in this fund. Alright. I'm done. I'm done. So, of course, satoshi's plebs podcast supports podcasting 2 point o. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I'm providing value that people like hypersensitive as ours are providing value back in the terms of sats. That's really straightforward. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast, I do this very specifically because I don't want any sponsor tainting the view that I have of either Bitcoin in general or of their particular product. I cannot have even, say, a hardware manufacturer.
Look. I love the seed center wallet. I do. I used it multiple times this week. I will never have them regardless of their ability to do so be a sponsor of this show. Because if there's ever a problem with this, I wanna be able to come on here and say, here's the problem. Either they have to fix this or you have to find some other way to store your Bitcoin. Right now, I can look at you. I can talk to you without any hesitation and say, seed signer, in my opinion, is the best thing out there. If you would like, you can certainly go out and use that. If they're giving me a lot of money, that's gonna keep me from it's gonna make me hesitate. It's gonna make me say, well, they got maybe I mentioned it, but then, you know, whatever. They'll fix it. It'll change my perception.
What I do is I continue to grow. I've got plans. I got things that I wanna do. I'm coming to you and say, are you getting value from this podcast? If you are, would you please support it? You could go out and get a podcasting 2.0 app just like fountain, just like cast o matic, just like podcast guru, just like yeah. Podcast guru. I'm using podcast guru a lot these days, to be honest. I really like it. You hook your lightning wallet up to it, and then you can support the show in 2 different ways right there. You can stream sets to the show just like some of these people did during the last week while they were listening, or you can boost it. You can be like hypersensitivosaurus . You could boost in a 1,000 sats. You could send a message at the same time and say, hey, McIntosh.
Great show. Love that. This, that, the other, got a question, whatever. And we occasionally get questions. That way, it's a great way to do it. There are other ways you can provide value, I have no problem. If you enjoy the show, go out and post a review about it. I used to tell you don't do it on Apple, now I'd say go do it on Apple. Apple is changing. They are incorporating podcast 2.0 specs, which is awesome. They've already done it with transcripts. I do believe eventually, I think chapters logically would be next. Eventually, they will even provide the ability to stream sats, I hope.
But go provide a review there. Tell people about it. Alright. And you could also do it by helping out. There's look. I did not get into this this week. Maybe I can next week. I've already gone an hour or so. I have to wrap this up. But I'm building tools. There's things that I could use help with. Absolutely. I want to talk about my tool chain again. I've got a nice little thing going on, I've got Bitcoin core going. I've got electors, which is an electrum. I'll explain that more. I've got that running. Of course, I've got Sparrow, but what I wanna do the last bit of this, I've got electors talking to Bitcoin Core, essentially indexes it. What I wanna do is hook Sparrow up to electors.
It'll make it super fast and more private. So it's kind of a win win. Things like that. They're always going on in the background, and you can help with that if you would like. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on mastodon@macintosh@podcastindex dot social. You can reach me by email at [email protected]. And, of course, there's a website, satoshisdashplebs.com. Stay humble friends. Go out and make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is February 12th, and this is episode 157 of satoshi's plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is and then they fight you. Alright. That's kinda funny. Ever since I've changed the name from generation Bitcoin over to satoshi's plebs, I really haven't had a trouble I I really haven't had trouble with the name switch. And just a few minutes ago, I ran through my, just a few seconds ago, I ran through my intro and said, and this is episode 150 7 of generation Bitcoin. I'm like and as soon as I said it, I realized I'd made a mistake. So I rerecorded it, of course. I just thought that was funny. The Earl Gray is hot. The tea is perfect.
And it is Super Bowl Sunday here in the United States, which means 100,000,000 people here in the United States will be glued to their TV beginning in about 4 hours. So I thought I'd record this a little early. I'm gonna go ahead and give the price here in just a minute at the current time instead of the close of the week. I have a suspicion. I'll say this one. Well, we'll talk about that in the market update. But, I hope that, this week has, things are going well for you. So let's just jump right on into it. So we've got our market update. And like I said, I'm just gonna go ahead and give the price right now at the current block height, which is 83004.
I missed the 830,000 blocked by 4. That's kind of a bummer. So 83004. Our Bitcoin price at time of recording is a nice 48,286. Where does that have us? Well, obviously, up. I don't think that's a shock. We'll talk about that in just a minute. But before we do that, let's roll through the rest of the stats. If we go to mempool.space, mempool.space and take a look at the transactions. We're actually down. Low priority right now is 18 sats per v byte medium 20 and high of 23. I saw that last night at 12 SATs, and I bet during the Super Bowl tonight, we might even see sub 10 sat per vbyte. Just a thought if you're out there consolidating your Bitcoin.
Although I suppose at this point, I won't get this posted before the Super Bowl. But regardless, it's been down a little bit. I do not know why. I guess they're not printing garbage on the on the blockchain right now. Our mempool usage is actually down below 1 gigabyte for the first time in a long time, 926 megabytes. Again, last night, that was down in the 8 100, like, 8:30 or something. So that's pretty cool. Kind of clearing up a little bit, I guess you could say. And our difficulty adjustment currently is sitting at what is our our difficulty adjustment sitting at?
McIntosh, read the chart, man. Read the chart. I think we're looking at about 8.25 percent in about 3 days. On February 15th at roughly 8:18 AM. I do not know what time zone. I don't know if that's set for my time or not. But we're looking at 3 days out, we're are looking at, unfortunately, another difficulty adjustment up. The blocks are coming in a little hot as they say, and we gotta adjust that difficulty. We're 9.2 minutes per block time right now on average. Although just a few blocks ago, we went 25 minutes without a block and then 16 minutes the block before that. So I don't know. We'll see. Hopefully, that drops. I I think we'll have some more hash. Come on.
Come online, and that'll drop a little bit. Write down our hash rate. I just saw that figure. Where was it? 578,000 x hash, which is insane. I wish you people would stop putting minors online. Come on. Come on. Sorry. In general terms, you know, I talk about my mining occasionally. I would say, January was definitely a very good month for miners. I do believe that here in February, we're February 11th, so we're almost in the middle of the month, and it's been a little less. We've done okay. If this price keeps pumping, we'll be doing alright. But I don't know if that'll happen. So let's talk about that though, let's talk about the price because everybody loves to talk about the price. So where were we at a week ago?
Great question. McIntosh, where were we at? Let's see, 42,811 according to this on February 5th at the time of recording. So that's up, like, $5,000 plus, something like that. That's pretty sweet. 270 so a huge pop this week. There's no reason to believe that we wouldn't have some kind of consolidation slash pullback. That will remain to be seen. What we do know is that these ETFs are pumping. I've got some news about that in the news. They crossed $10,000,000,000. So that is literally $10,000,000,000 out of gracious 800 and something $1,000,000,000 market cap currently for Bitcoin. So it's probably approaching 900,000,000,000. I don't have the figure right in front of me, but we're getting there. And so it's a significant percentage of that. And I guarantee you Monday morning when the bell rings, the et(f) because they cannot trade on the weekend. They do not trade. Now Bitcoin, of course, doesn't stop, and this is kind of the funny thing. This is actually one of the things I've been waiting for.
What happens when Bitcoin goes into the weekend pumping up, which is exactly what it did. It's go it looks like it's gonna pump through the weekend and basically establish a new higher high, at least for, well, for a long time. And where does that mean I mean, we go back literally all the way back to April of 2022. That's where we're at. K. We touched this level very briefly just a couple weeks ago back in January. So we're literally if we break through this level, we haven't been here for two years, almost. What's gonna happen? So let's say we do establish and it's somewhere maybe approaching 49,000 Monday morning. I I'm not saying that's what's gonna happen. I do not know. It may pull back.
If it establishes above 48 solidly for the week, I think we're in a really good spot to start that grind up to 50. If if if it is a grind, it may not be. But, you know, that push up to 50. And if that happens early in the week, these ETFs may go nuts. And we're going to start to see price action because of these ETFs. So grayscale has sold all they're gonna sell. They they're not the the amount that they're selling at this point is negligible versus what these other Bitcoin ETFs are bringing in. And this price action is will happen. It will push it up.
I think maybe I didn't say this. I'm saying it now if I didn't before. I think earlier in the year I said this, though. I would not be surprised if Bitcoin broke the all time high, 69,000 by halving, which is April 19th, April 20th. So we've got that coming if we're reaching that level and we've reached that level by the havening. I'm not saying this is moving the cycle up, but we are in a really good place for the rest of the cycle. K. That is accelerating the cycle. I will say that. If you go back and look at the data for the last 3 cycles, you didn't breach the previous all time high before the happening. That happened post happening, and then it went on from there. So I don't know exactly where that puts us. I think it's a very interesting position, to be honest, But I don't know exactly where that's going to put us. We will have to see.
But I do believe we may see that. So this is as close as I'm going to come to making a prediction that we're gonna we're gonna reach that all time high, 69,000 whatever it is, by the happening, which is, like, 50, 60 plus days out, 63 days or something. I don't know exactly. April 19th or April 20th is what we're looking at. As I said earlier this year, we are in the bull market. We're in the start of it. You need to be prepared, dear listeners, for what's about to come. So for the next almost 2 years, like a year and 3 quarters. It's going to be run up, pull back, run up, pull back, run up, pull back. We're gonna go up been up and up. Most likely.
Now could we spend the rest of the summer in the doldrums? Yes. We've done that before. But I think on what based on what I'm looking at, that's what we're about to start seeing. My point is not that I'm trying to get you to get into some frenzy about, you know, Bitcoin 100,000 or Bitcoin 69,000er. You literally have somebody on Twitter at this point saying, you know, bitcoin $1,000,000. I'm like, dude, we haven't even broke a 100,000. I get the excitement. I and and the point is valid. Will Bitcoin ever be a $100,000,000 are not a 100, $1,000,000.
Yes. It will either be $1,000,000 or it will be 0, and I think the chances of it being 0 are minuscule at this point. So therefore, given enough time, yes, it will be a $1,000,000 Bitcoin. I just don't know when. Will it be this cycle? I don't see that happening, but Bitcoin does crazy things sometimes. Do I see it the next cycle or the cycle at go out to 2030. We'll talk, seriously. Maybe a little further. But ultimately, it's all about how much market share Bitcoin has in terms of all of these financial assets. So as we see things like these Bitcoin ETFs, as we see things like Wall Street moving into the Bitcoin space, so to speak, as we see things like the adoption of Bitcoin across the board by nation states, by individuals who are carrying on transacting business in Bitcoin, then yes. Bitcoin will reach $1,000,000.
Be prepared for that. It may be a ways off. It's certainly not this week. If you've never been through a bull run, the next year and three quarters, you're gonna hear a constant drumbeat. Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin go up, number go up, blah blah blah. Bitcoin to 69,000, which I just said. Bitcoin to a 100000, Bitcoin to a quarter million, Bitcoin to half a 1000000, Bitcoin to a 1000000. You're gonna hear all these things. You need a game plan right now. What are you going to do? Do not wait until we hit 69,000 because your mind will be in this crazy place most likely, unless you're different than everybody else. By the way, we built a perfect flag out of this on the weekly chart. This is amazing. We may not come back below.
What is that? 44,000? Oh, man. That's beautiful. You could do that. $44,027. I bet if I zoomed in, it would really be 44,000, and we have blown right out of that. I would guess, and I just saw this. I would honestly guess, this is on the weekly time frame that we're not going back below 44,000. This cycle, if ever. Where are we gonna go, Macintosh? I don't know. What history has taught me is based on past patterns, you know, we've got a good chance from here of going past the all time high of doubling, tripling, maybe quadrupling that all time high, maybe more.
I think the quadruple would be kind of the normal. So we went no. That's not well, even just based on the last cycle. So the low last cycle was 20,000, and then it went to 69. So we think we speculate, at least some of us do, that it that was based on, FTX dumping. I mean, that certainly was countering it, and it should have gone higher. So maybe it if it had gone to at least 80, then that would have been 4 times the 20,000. So that's where I'm pulling that from. So let's say 3 times. So 3 times 70 is $210,000. Wherever it ends up, at what point in my estimation last quarter of 2025.
Then where is it gonna go from there? Well, historically, it's pulled back. So it's gonna go back 50, the 70, maybe even 80 percent from there. But it also historically doesn't go back below the all time the previous all time high. Now this last cycle, again, we saw we've seen it go below the 20,000. It went below that twice, basically, I think. So it it's possible that it goes below that, but it would be pretty strong. So we're looking at $70,000 for the kind of the low. Maybe a little below that, but maybe not much or certainly for a very brief period of time. What's your plan? Are you gonna sell everything at the top? I don't recommend that, but are you gonna sell everything at the top and try and buy back in? Are you just gonna hold? That's your safest, most conservative bet. What are you gonna do? Are you gonna sell it and pay off some debt? We talked to seed signer here a few months ago now, I think.
And remember, he sold I think it was the top of the 2017 market. He sold at the top of the market and paid off his house. He considers that to be the right move for him. I'm not the person to sit here and say, well, seed signer, you were at $20,000 there. You should have held that because the next time it was 70,000, and maybe the next time it's a quarter of a 1000000 or whatever it is. No. That's his business. That's his financial business. Right? So anyways, you need that plan. You may need to write it down. Because I'm telling you, if you've never been through a bull market, you do not know what's about to happen.
It's gonna rip your face off. You're gonna look at your Bitcoin and go, no. And number's gonna be cranking up, and you're just gonna get more and more and more excited. So be prepared. Sorry. This market update has taken a little longer, but the show's maybe gonna be a little shorter, and I thought that was important. Let's, move on, though. As always, of course, we talk about dollar cost coverage, I don't want you just throwing vast amounts of money. Everything you got, you know, you should be DC'ing. You should have been DC'ing for a long period time at this point for however long it is that you've been listening to this show, if nothing else.
Alright. Let's do it. What is this all about? I gotta find the right hedgedoc. Alright. Episode 157. That would be today. Alright. And then they fight you. What is he talking about? There is a statement that was wrongly attributed to Gandhi, but he said some form of it. Anyways, first, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. And this statement has been thrown around the Bitcoin circles probably since day 1. Now, of course, Bitcoin isn't the only thing that's worth any great movement, you can kind of look at it like this.
And I think it's a useful lens to consider things. And I specifically want to talk about kind of where we're at in this. 1st, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. What does win mean for Bitcoin? I think that could mean different things for bit for different people. For me, it means Bitcoin is a global currency, reserve that's used between nation states for trading that will help bring Austrian economics back into vogue, so to speak, into common use by nation states to help eliminate war to be used as a censorship resistant private, which is not something that we really have right now, form of transactions between people allowing for store value without inflation eating away at that.
Now that was poorly worded because I just thought it up on the fly, so to speak. Didn't have it written down, but I think that conveys what I think that means. It may mean something different for you, and I'm okay with that. I hope you are too. But regardless, that's the end. That's the then you win for me. Now I will probably never see the then you win in terms of a global currency reserve. I'm not of the age where that may I may reach that. Maybe I do. Maybe it happens faster than I think. I think it may take a good portion of the remaining 100 and, what, 20, 15 years of Bitcoin that they even mine it before we reach that. That's my point. Maybe it's, 21100.
Maybe it's, 2,080. I don't know. But I do know that El Salvador, for example, has adopted it as a currency, so that's a good thing and so on and so forth. Let's talk about this. 1st, they ignore you. Certainly, everybody was ignoring Bitcoin when it first came out. When when Hal Finney, received the first transaction from Satoshi when the early coding was going on. Everybody virtually no one knew what they were doing, and and the people who in passing knew what they were doing almost to a person ignored them. I would argue that on May 22nd 2010 is one of the first times that people stopped ignoring Bitcoin.
What was that date? That's Bitcoin pizza day. Laszlo, Hanyecz paid a 10,000 Bitcoin to have 2 Papa John's Pizzas says delivered to him about $25 worth of pizza. It is the first known usage of Bitcoin as a actual medium of exchange. Don't even calculate what that 10,000 Bitcoin would be worth today. But the point is, at that point, I think that actually made some kind of news. It certainly has been remembered down the road. I earlier this well, last year, May 22nd, we posted Bitcoin pizza day. It's a kind of a big deal. So you can consider that time from the early origins of Bitcoin from 2,009, certainly.
That's when they were ignoring them. And then you what you will see as we talk through this is that these phases overlap. So most people kept ignoring it. But I think that that kind of marked, okay, this is actually a real thing. People are trading Bitcoin for something that's physical in the real world. Now that was the one example I pulled up. I don't wanna make this too long, so I didn't do a whole lot of examples. There's numerous examples during these early days of people using Bitcoin. First time it was in mainstream media. The first time that they did a news interview about it, all of these things.
As they moved out of that ignoring stage, what did they move into? Then they laugh at you. And I've got a couple of quotes here. Very famous one. Peter Schiff, gold extended its streak to a record 41 consecutive trading days where the spot price held above $2,000 that exceeds the prior total number of days gold ever traded above 2,000. Yet investor sentiment remains extremely weak with mining stocks falling nearing 4% on the week. Yes, Peter. That is true. This was completely unprepared, but this is one of the reasons why see, Peter, he's a gold bug and he's stuck on gold and, you know, he thinks gold's gonna save us.
People have moved on. People don't want gold in that sense as a store of value. People realize it's extremely difficult to safeguard and use as a method of payment. It doesn't even keep up with inflation. By no means does it keep up with inflation. Okay. So right. So back to what he actually said. He's famous having said for having said this multiple times. Bitcoin is going to 0. Charlie Munger, 98 years old. He passed away, I think, in the last year. But when he was 98, just recently, he said Bitcoin is stupid because it's very likely going to 0. Now Charlie Munger may be one of the great investors of the world. He and Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, one of the largest, stock platforms in the world. I'm not thinking of the word, but you know what I mean.
And that's all well and good, but I think he and Warren both did they have not been capable of understanding the switch that is going on that has been going on for a long time. So Charlie was born if he's 98, he would have been born somewhere around 1925. He was certainly born before the great depression. I'm sure that modeled his, helped in model his worldview, if you wanna call it that. He has lived through the or did live through the entire fiat dis debasement, and yet he can't see that that's what's going on. Now I'm not 98 years old.
I was born before I will say this. I was born before Richard Nixon, took the US off the gold standard, which essentially was the final nail in the coffin of sal money. At that point, you could officially say it was dead, and it was just a matter of time. I have watched this unknowingly for much of my life, not understanding it for half of my life. Even though I knew that inflation I remember back in the eighties being very concerned if you wanna call it that. Well, yeah, I would call it that about inflation, but not really understanding.
I knew that the US was printing money. We, I do remember we've discussed that, and you go back and look at the amount of debt that the US had back in the late eighties. And it was laughable, I mean, compared to now. It's only been in the last few years that I've really zeroed in the last, well, the last 10 years, certainly, that I've really zeroed in on this as to why this is happening and gotten really involved in it, so to speak. Charlie and Warren, they've never made that leap, and I can't there will be people. There will be many people who will never be able to make that leap. Some of these people are very well-to-do, like Munger, like Peter, Schiff. I mean, these guys are multimillionaires, certainly, and they're just never gonna understand.
And there will always be people. There will be people when Bitcoin hits a $1,000,000 dollars. There will probably be somebody saying, but it's gonna go to 0. They just can't make that leap. And so they they turn it into a joke. Why would you say because it's very likely going to 0? The he there's no that's why Bitcoin is stupid because it's but there's no explanation as to why. We have the largest network in the world at this point, running Bitcoin miners, Bitcoin nodes, managing the transactions going on this network. But, yeah, we're just gonna turn all that off. So there you go. And I could pull up story after story. Jamie Dimon famously CEO, JPMorgan, who now is one of the, managers essentially of the back ends of these, Bitcoin ETFs, ironically. He's famously said things about Bitcoin saying Bitcoin was stupid or Bitcoin was going to 0 or Bitcoin is worthless or whatever it is that he says. So you could go down a whole list of people like this. Oh, it got to 10 and it now it jumped to 25, but it's gonna go to 0.
But it got to a 100, but it's tulip mania. Right? This is exactly what went on in in the Netherlands with the tulips. Yeah. Yeah, no. It's it's money laundering. Well, we'll get to that in a minute. Sorry. Don't wanna jump ahead. It's just speculation. Is just like all of those other cryptocurrencies. It's just like Dogecoin, that worthless Dogecoin. No. No. It's not. It's different in a number of ways. So that was the laughing step, and that's still going on. So the next step after that again, remember there's overlap. Everybody knows about Bitcoin at this point. You can't ignore it. It's all over the mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, whoever.
So we're past the ignore you stage. We're on to the laughing thing stage. And now we're on to the fight you stage. And I've I've pulled up more about this than anything else because I want to be very clear about this. This is where we're at. You will hear these type news articles. Bitcoin is bad for the environment. But we use Bitcoin to mitigate methane emissions. But we use Bitcoin to keep from having to flare natural natural gas. But we use Bitcoin to, for example, keep the Texas grid stable energy grid stable during the winter when it's too cold and during the summer when it's too hot. But Bitcoin's bad for the environment. But Bitcoin is the most green industry that there is. But Bitcoin's bad for the environment just over and over and over and over.
When are you gonna realize that it's not? That it's the most useful tool to man. And I stand by that. It's not possible without things like transistors, semiconductors and so on. But I would argue that it's probably the most useful tool. People just don't understand people don't understand the things that it will bring about. They can't see it because we are so early in this process. I have a news item for today. I won't cover this in the news. I'll go and cover it now. Criminals using Bitcoin for money laundering. This is, like, 5 years old. I don't know. It could it's been going on for so long. Well, sick Silk Road. Right when Silk Road got blown up, it was because of people using it for illicit drug use.
But supposedly, they're laundering money. Now never mind that the most common thing to be used for money laundering is the US dollar. They're over here using the public Bitcoin network, which is not private, which is very difficult to maintain privacy and so on and so forth. That's what they're using. But this is what they keep saying. So let me bring this up real quick. A detailed report of money money laundering in the United States. This is by the US Treasury. Highlights that cash remains king looking for criminals looking to launder illicit funds.
So maybe this will actually put to rest some of these things. But cash, not cryptocurrencies remain the go to money laundering method for criminals and organizations. According to a detailed risk assessment report for the United States Treasury Department. So the next time that senator Elizabeth Warren says, but Bitcoin is used for money laundering and for pedophiles to be paid by or whatever garbage that she's comes up with, I would say, with all respect that is due, senator Warren, Janet Yellen over here at the treasury department says that cash is the problem. What are you doing about that? So each of these arguments, whether it's, the environment. Okay center to warm because this was one of her things as well. You're gonna hear her name a lot this episode. I apologize.
Bitcoin's bad for the environment because it uses too much energy. Senator Warren, when when a grid do well, first of all, senator Warren, do you actually understand how electricity works? Let's start there. You do realize that to meet peak demand of any network that you have to have that amount of power essentially all the time. So what do you do with the extra power when people aren't using that peak amount of power? Well, I I I don't know. When you have a cold snap, senator Warren, up there in Massachusetts, how do you think that they meet that peak demand?
Well, I don't know. Let me tell you what they do. They turn on natural gas peaker plants that provide extra power. So what they're doing is they're using polluting natural gas to provide that extra power so that you can stay warm in your home, senator Warren. Now what if instead of doing that, we built clean, renewable, nuclear energy or hydro or wind or whatever. And we soaked up that excess energy that's being used by mining Bitcoin with it to provide sound money and to use that extra energy because they can do that. They can be shut down at any time. We see this in Texas, they do this perfectly down there. 25%, roughly, we think, of the network was shut down during the last really big cold snap down in Texas because they needed that power show that they didn't lose power. And I heard no reports of major power outages at all. I'm sure there were some, but because of lines breaking and this kind of thing. But because of Bitcoin mining, senator, so are we good with that? Okay. Well, what about methane? Is methane bad for the environment? Well, yes. It is. It's actually 25 times worse than any other, what is it, c02, which whatever.
I'm not even I'm not trying to make this a debate about the environment, but this is the stuff that they they bring up over and over. Okay. So methane's bad for the environment, really bad for the environment. All the landfills give off methane. Yes. They do. All of the large scale farming operations like a pig farm, for example, they give off methane. Well, yes. They do. Well, what if we have a way to take that methane to actually convert it on-site into usable power and then use that to mine Bitcoin. So we're literally turning something that pollutes the environment into the world's soundest money, senator Warren. Are you okay with that?
Well, I I guess so. Okay. Then what about all these flare gas things out in West Texas, senator Warren. We need oil. Well, yes. We do. But when we pump oil out in the middle of nowhere and natural gas very likely will be with the oil. What do we do with the natural gas? It doesn't make sense to build a pipeline. There's no economic sense to that whatsoever. So we burn it off. Is that good for the environment, senator Warren? Well, no. Of course not. Okay. Well, what if on site, instead of burning that natural gas off, I flared it instead of flaring it. Excuse me. I, I burn that in a super clean generator and use that to power a Bitcoin operation, mining operation. And so now we're turning what is a emissions causing, you know, global warming adding a thing into the world's soundest form of money. Are you okay with that, senator Warren?
And she probably wouldn't be. She probably wouldn't be okay with any of those because she has this knee jerk reaction Bitcoin bad. But we will continue to build these oh, and by the way, senator Warren, over 50%, over 50%, like, 55%, 56% of the energy used by this industry, which provides jobs and so on and so forth, is renewable energy. Senator Warren, do you know of any other industry that is even close to that? Well, no. I I don't. So what's the argument? We have to build the defenses against this, solid defenses, not just knee jerk reactions, until it's done.
Eventually, these people will wear out or give up. I do believe that legal representation, people like Dennis, and I'm drawing a complete blank on the name of his organization here in the North America region at least where they are going state by state and making making sure that laws are in place to provide for Bitcoin miners to be able to mine. This stuff does matter. So to get back on track here, they will fight you. I have some links to this latest bill by senator Warren, cracking down on cryptos used in money laundering, drug trafficking, etcetera.
Banning literally private wallets. So senator Warren is telling me that if this bill passes, that the FinCEN regulation that, organization that I've talked about previously will have the right to come to me and say, you private citizen, you cannot hold your own Bitcoin. You can hold bars of gold in a safe, but we can't let you own Bitcoin in a private wallet. I'm sorry. That's not okay. They're doing the same thing in Europe, by the way. We have to fight these things. We have to push back. They are now fighting. See, they weren't fighting 5 years ago.
Now they're fighting. And to wrap this up, because I've already got I said this was gonna be short. How do we win? I made a brief list, and I'm sure this doesn't include everything. In fact, I know it doesn't. In fact, I'm gonna add one right now. But, regardless, I got a, like, 6 point list here. How do we win? Prospering of early nations to adopt Bitcoin. El Salvador and Bhutan are prime examples of business. They will do well over the next cycles. El Salvador is in a terrific position. Bhutan, we don't know so much about, but they are investing a $100,000,000 end of Bitcoin mining. If Bitcoin price goes up, Bhutan will prosper. Bhutan has the perfect setup there in the Himalayas for Bitcoin mining. Lots of water, and it's cold.
Building decentralized systems do not depend on Kraken. Do not depend on Coinbase. I had terrible experiences that I was actually gonna talk about today, and I'm not gonna have time on both of those systems recently. We need decentralized system. Do not depend on on these companies. We need person to person tools and apps, not just decentralized systems. A person to person tool would be something like, maybe peaches bitcoin. Although, I think you could argue that was decentralized as well, but regardless, ways for people to, interact, to change dollars or euros or whatever for Bitcoin, to exchange, to transact, to do business, to whatever.
What's another way? Promoting and creating, I added, circular economies. Places like Bitcoin Beach, places like Bitcoin jungle over in Costa Rica. There's places in Africa that are springing up. These are the type of economies that we need. These will provide resilience in the coming years. These will promote Bitcoin. If you go to El Zonte Bitcoin Beach, and you will find it very easy to deal in Bitcoin. I think you will find it less easy to work in dollars over the coming years, promoting Bitcoin in local economies even if you don't have a circular economy set up. I go into stores all the time and I'm like, man, you guys, I love the stores where they go in and you say they're either charging you extra for credit cards or they won't even take them because credit cards charge almost 4% on average for a just a little local shop to be able to take credit cards. Hey. With lightning, that's almost nothing. That's what I'm talking about.
Spreading the orange pill with a reasonable message. Look, we all come in contact with different people. I don't want you running around going, bitcoins go into a $1,000,000. Bitcoin's gonna take over the world. Sometimes I have to rein myself in. And to be honest, I don't talk about Bitcoin a whole lot with the people I interact with on a daily basis. Now, virtually every one of them know I'm involved with Bitcoin. And when the time is right, I talk to them about it, and I do do that from time to time. And as they want to come on board, then we will do that. I will not shove Bitcoin down their throat because it will do no good.
So those are some of the ways we can win. I would also add, for example, to support organizations like Dennis' that represent the industry, the Bitcoin ecosystem really is a better word with things like these mining bills in the localist in the states here. I'm sure there's other organizations that do similar things. So there you go. I would argue we are very much at the how they fight you or now they fight you. We're almost past the laughing at you because you just can't. When Bitcoin's a $100,000,000 and, you know, it's multi $1,000,000,000,000 market cap band. It's being used all over Wall Street, and it's being used in numerous local places.
And there's 3, 4, 5, 10 to 12 20 nations using it. They will not be able to laugh. The fighting will continue for a while. It is not done. I'm afraid this year is gonna be worse than last year in terms of the United States. And there may be places and times that if it's possible, the only way that you can prosper in Bitcoin is to leave. But Bitcoin gives you the ability to do that. We're not there yet here in the United States, at least in my opinion. And I certainly hope that we do not get there, but it is a possibility. Alright. Let's talk about some spurs. We had some good support this week.
I do not have the Excel spreadsheet in front of me, so I summed it up. It was about 25 100 sats for the week. In total, we had 2 boosts, and some good streaming. So both of these were episode 156 is Bitcoin for the poor. Hypersensitive, Osiris sent us a 1,000 hats, no message. And then anonymous, not anonymous. So I actually have 2 going on. We have somebody who's consistently posting anonymous with the 500 sat boost. No message. And, didn't hear from our friend anonymous this week, but that's fine. I appreciate the value that you're sending back to me about this. So I really appreciate both of those. So thank you very much, and I appreciate the value that you're sending my way.
So let's talk about the news. I've already talked about the treasury department report. I will mention the Bitcoin ETFs did hit 1,000,000,000 $10,000,000,000 just 1 month less than, like well, 1 month after approval. I believe that's a record. I don't think that's ever been done with any new like, when gold ETFs got started, that kind of thing. MicroStrategy, I wanted to mention, and I don't talk about MicroStrategy a whole lot, but they're the largest industrial, company holding, Bitcoin. They bought another 850 Bitcoin in January, which gives them a right at a 190,000 Bitcoin, which is crazy.
$8,100,000,000 in valuation at current price. So they have a very interesting strategy that I think, will be emulated down the road by a lot of other companies after this cycle. See, they were all laughing at Michael Saylor last time. They won't be laughing this time because that 8 point what did I say, $8,100,000,000. What if it's worth close to a $100,000,000,000 at the end of this cycle? You think they'll be laughing then? BlackRock actually did a $1,000,000,000 in volume in one day. These 4, I had 4 different news items here. These are all wins.
These are all Bitcoin winning. That's awesome. Okay. Let's look at the Twitter feed real quick. Make sure I didn't. Rob Warren wrote a nice book on the Bitcoin miners almanac. I've asked him to come on the show. I do not know if he will. I hope he does, I'd like to talk about this. I will pick this up at some point. Rob's a a fairly long time minor, I believe. Certainly has a lot of experience, very knowledgeable. I'm looking forward to that book. Janet Yellen, treasury department, which I mentioned earlier, on February 8th, we don't have to get prices down because wages are going up. Let me rephrase that.
Keynesians don't like deflation. They think that's really bad. We need prices to stay higher in order to inflate the GDP, which is like their one metric, and pay off old debt with cheaper dollars. You you have to read between the lines with these people. Got some good innovation coming out of El Salvador. Nice little video how people can pay for local goods with SATS and have it automatically divided up among the people who produce it. So maybe you've got some I don't know. Hand wear, what am I saying? Like, weaving. And that's divided up among 3 different people, they could all get paid at the same time.
That's pretty cool. I love this quote. I retweeted this earlier this week. Anonymous transactions are the digital equivalent of freedom of speech. Timothy C. May, the cryptoanarchist manifesto, 1992. I added that to my Twitter header. I really I really want to see private anonymous transactions on Bitcoin by default. Some of you may know who Buckminster Fuller is. He was, I don't really know how to describe him. But, anyways, back in 1967, there's this video of him. By the year 2000, there will be a realistic scientific accounting system.
Wealth is energy. He's absolutely 100% spot on right. Wealth is energy. I've said that for a long time. So even though, of course, he knew nothing about Bitcoin, he was spot on about this. And finally, Fidelity now has a 1 to 3% Bitcoin allocation in their all in one asset allocation funds in Canada using spot Bitcoin ETFs. That is a conservative ETF. 1%. That's Fidelity. Ladies and gentlemen, listeners of this show, this is what I'm talking about. The world is changing. Bitcoin is winning. And they say cryptocurrencies. It's not cryptocurrencies.
It's Bitcoin, and that is what is in this fund. Alright. I'm done. I'm done. So, of course, satoshi's plebs podcast supports podcasting 2 point o. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I'm providing value that people like hypersensitive as ours are providing value back in the terms of sats. That's really straightforward. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast, I do this very specifically because I don't want any sponsor tainting the view that I have of either Bitcoin in general or of their particular product. I cannot have even, say, a hardware manufacturer.
Look. I love the seed center wallet. I do. I used it multiple times this week. I will never have them regardless of their ability to do so be a sponsor of this show. Because if there's ever a problem with this, I wanna be able to come on here and say, here's the problem. Either they have to fix this or you have to find some other way to store your Bitcoin. Right now, I can look at you. I can talk to you without any hesitation and say, seed signer, in my opinion, is the best thing out there. If you would like, you can certainly go out and use that. If they're giving me a lot of money, that's gonna keep me from it's gonna make me hesitate. It's gonna make me say, well, they got maybe I mentioned it, but then, you know, whatever. They'll fix it. It'll change my perception.
What I do is I continue to grow. I've got plans. I got things that I wanna do. I'm coming to you and say, are you getting value from this podcast? If you are, would you please support it? You could go out and get a podcasting 2.0 app just like fountain, just like cast o matic, just like podcast guru, just like yeah. Podcast guru. I'm using podcast guru a lot these days, to be honest. I really like it. You hook your lightning wallet up to it, and then you can support the show in 2 different ways right there. You can stream sets to the show just like some of these people did during the last week while they were listening, or you can boost it. You can be like hypersensitivosaurus . You could boost in a 1,000 sats. You could send a message at the same time and say, hey, McIntosh.
Great show. Love that. This, that, the other, got a question, whatever. And we occasionally get questions. That way, it's a great way to do it. There are other ways you can provide value, I have no problem. If you enjoy the show, go out and post a review about it. I used to tell you don't do it on Apple, now I'd say go do it on Apple. Apple is changing. They are incorporating podcast 2.0 specs, which is awesome. They've already done it with transcripts. I do believe eventually, I think chapters logically would be next. Eventually, they will even provide the ability to stream sats, I hope.
But go provide a review there. Tell people about it. Alright. And you could also do it by helping out. There's look. I did not get into this this week. Maybe I can next week. I've already gone an hour or so. I have to wrap this up. But I'm building tools. There's things that I could use help with. Absolutely. I want to talk about my tool chain again. I've got a nice little thing going on, I've got Bitcoin core going. I've got electors, which is an electrum. I'll explain that more. I've got that running. Of course, I've got Sparrow, but what I wanna do the last bit of this, I've got electors talking to Bitcoin Core, essentially indexes it. What I wanna do is hook Sparrow up to electors.
It'll make it super fast and more private. So it's kind of a win win. Things like that. They're always going on in the background, and you can help with that if you would like. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on mastodon@macintosh@podcastindex dot social. You can reach me by email at [email protected]. And, of course, there's a website, satoshisdashplebs.com. Stay humble friends. Go out and make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon.
