We are down to the last two months before the halving. For weeks the upward march in price has been intense. Little consolidation and only one brief pullback. Are we continuing upward or is it time to pull back?
The rest of the year is probably going to bring some of the most intense price action ever for Bitcoin. How you prepare for this bull run will help determine your long term success. Let's discuss.
Bitcoin Weekly Close Price
February 18th, 2024: $52,132
Block Height at Time of Recording
831,068
News and Links
Argentina Sees First Balanced Budget in Over a Decade
Spot ETFs Continue to See Inflows
Banks Pushing for Regulation to Be Able to Hold Bitcoin
Justin Sun Pushing for Layer Two Bitcoin Defi Solution
Japan Slips Into Recession
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 19th, and this is episode 158 of satoshi's plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is on the pullback. Alright, let's go ahead and do our market update. Block height at time of recording is 831-068. So we have officially crossed 831,000. Marching, marching, marching onward to the happening, which will occur 834 thou no. 840,000. Need to be precise about that. 840,000. So we did have a difficulty adjustment, upwards. And I'll be honest, in my mining profits, in my daily profits, it shows on my pool menu. I use brains. I've mentioned that a number of times, still do.
But regardless, in my menu there, it shows, like, the daily mining reward. And I have watched it steadily drop. Now it's slow, but it is slowly dropping. And that is because the difficulty is going up, and that is because more miners are becoming are coming online. So as as more miners come online, the difficulty adjust upwards. And as those miners come online, of course, there's more people competing for those blocks. It's that simple. So yeah. So even though our last adjustment was 8.24% up, right now, we are looking at a downward adjustment.
I saw earlier. It was, like, 5% or so. Now, of course, we've got a long way till the next adjustment. I think it's 11 days, and it could certainly change. But, man, we for weeks, several weeks now, we've been going upwards, and it's just been oh, there it is. 5.98% down on March 1st. Of course, that's subject to change, but we'll see. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Now to counterbalance that, we have had the price of Bitcoin going up. So that's good. Where are we at, Macintosh? This week, the price closed 52,132. A nice level. I was actually looking at the previous week's close.
Let me go back and pull that up really quick. According to my notes here At the time of recording, so on 11th, it was 48,286. So we've gone up, like, four, yeah, $4,000 in seven days. Right. That's crazy. Just a little, almost 10%. No big deal. It's so volatile. Yes. It is. And when it goes up, it'll melt your face. Our fees, seem to have gone down. Right now, we're at 13 sats per vbyte. Our unprocessed transactions certainly have we're down below a gigabyte now, 896 megabytes. And we seem to be trending down. Although, of course, that could change at any point depending on the activity that's going on.
So maybe that's a blessing. If you've got UTXOs that you need to consolidate, it would be a good time to start thinking about that certainly before the halvening. What What do you mean by that Macintosh? I'm glad you asked. When you receive a transaction, when you receive a Bitcoin transaction on the main net, it has a UTXO that's assigned to it. And the problem is those UTXOs are basically used as part of the transactional cost. So if you receive a bunch of different Bitcoin so let's say you had 20 Bitcoin that were were point 0 1% on each one.
So that's point 2. That's 20 percent of a full Bitcoin. In total, you would have 20 different UTXOs. As the fees go up, it might get more and more difficult to well, it will certainly get more and more expensive to deal with those. It would be far better if you had a point to you, Bitcoin in one transaction than 20 in point 1 transactions, Bitcoin per transaction. I hope that makes sense. But when people talk about UTXO consolidation, that's what they're talking about. They will essentially send to a new address all of these separate small segments. And when the fees are low, like, basically, they are now, and you end up with 1 UTXO, which is what you want. You really want as as few as possible. So there we go.
Now let's talk about the market itself. I have been watching the charts a lot this week. I've been looking at them a lot. We did I believe last week, I said we go up hit 52. We've done that. I think I said we might go up to 54. I'm not so sure that's gonna happen at this point. Because if you're looking at kind of the way that things are laid out, we are in pretty strong need of a pullback. So what I mean by that is we've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks going up, and we've not spent a lot of time consolidating at any one level. We did spend some time.
Well, we've been going up 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks now, essentially. Absolutely. We bottomed out 4 weeks ago. 1, 2. Yeah. January 22nd. That week, the lowest it went was 38,356. And here we are at 52,000. Alright. It's a huge move upward in a month. It would not surprise me if we pulled back. It would not. Not at all. I could definitely see going back even as far back as 42,000, excuse me, 44,000, which was a level of resistance for a long time, basically, between January December 4th, and we broke really free of that February 5th. That's for I'm no. I'm sorry. That's well, no. That is true. February 5th. That's exactly right.
It's the last time we passed 44,000. I could definitely see going back to that level and kind of retesting that. You say, well, that's a $8,000 move. Yes. But you could do that in a couple of days and then turn around and retrace it and be right back where we are right now in a week or 2, but in a significantly stronger position because we've kind of done that retest and said, okay. What was resistance, we've now turned into support is what that's called. And now we're ready to move on. This is not an area I would be betting on. K? This is definitely I do not know if it's gonna go up. I do not know if it's gonna go down.
I think I mean, statistically, looking at the data, most likely will go down. It's more likely, but it's not like 90% likely that we're gonna go down. I would certainly not be betting on that. Of course, we don't talk about trading here at satoshisplebs. That's a good way to lose your sats. What we do talk about is dollar cost averaging. If we do happen to go down to 44,000, that would probably be a little, very good place to kick in some extra dough, dollars if you've got it. You know, convert those into sats, But you should be doing a regular dollar cost average, whether that's daily or weekly, through something like strike.
Okay? So that's what we talk about because that's the easiest. You you set it up at an automated manner, and then you don't have to worry about it. It just happens. You don't have to worry about the price. I mean, we we love talking about the price here, and I've speculated that we'll see, we'll break all time high before the happening. I think that's still possible. If we don't spend too much time pulling back, I still think we could pull back to that $44,000 or so level and then still rock it up before, what, April 19th, April 20th to beat that $69,000 level. And what's pushing a lot of this is these ETFs. These these ETFs are are vacuuming up large amounts of Bitcoin. They're they're buying far more Bitcoin during the week than is being mined, which is just crazy.
I think what we're seeing what I've noticed over the last few weekends is that there's more volatility on the weekend than there is during the week. The the week is just kind of this steady rise. And then on the weekend, when these ETFs are not bringing in any money or whatever, dollars, then then, you know, it's a little more volatile. But we've got this definite upward trend. All the ETFs except, grayscale. They're bringing in positive inflows. They're bringing inflows to of dollars to the the ZTF fund. And they're spending at this point more than is actually being mined, which of course means long term that the price has to go up. It doesn't have a choice essentially. There's other people who are selling right now for whatever reason that I don't understand because they're not going to win against an ETF like Black Rock. You're not gonna outsell Black Rock and then somehow push the price down so that you can buy back in at a lower level.
Maybe they're selling because they've got liquidity to sell into and they're a big institution or a very large investor. I don't know. But once that's done, we will see the price go up. I believe that will happen before the happening, and I believe that will be part of what factors in to the price going up. One of the things that we haven't talked about, certainly in a long time on here, is retail interest. In past cycles well, certainly in the past cycle where we were heading to 69,000. At this point in the cycle, there was a huge amount of retail involvement, and there was a huge amount of retail FOMO, fear of missing out. And that was pressing the price higher and higher. But it was doing so in a manner that wasn't sustainable. At this point, we really don't have that much retail investment.
Retail interest is a better way of putting it. What does that mean? Well, that means that we're not there yet. We're nowhere close to the all time high. So it's another way of arriving at saying, even though we've jumped, like, a 168% in the last It's either this year or or the in the last year. Bitcoin's not done. It's not. Bitcoin has a long way to go. So when it passes 69,000, in my opinion, that's probably when the retail interest really starts to pick up. Oh, Bitcoin past the all time high. Let's see where it's gonna go. And everybody will start throwing their money in.
The smart people, which are my listeners, right, are doing what? Their DCA. Don't worry about buying the top, buying the bottom, buy this, buy just buy. Just buy knowing that in 4 plus years that it will be higher, probably much higher than it is right now. I went over just a episode or 2 ago, maybe 3 episodes ago. You can go back at any point in time, a 4 year time frame, if you buy that, it's higher after 4 years. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, and I certainly don't think it's gonna change at this point because we have a lot higher to go from here. So that's our market update. Again, continue to DCA. Whether you do that through mining, whether you do that through strike, whether you do that through, I don't know, buying at your local Bitcoin meetup.
I have no idea how you do that, but continue to do that. Do not trade. Do not try and trade this market. Right now, we could go up. Right now, we could go down. I've been pretty accurate for the last few months. But, again, I've told y'all once this bull market starts, which it really already probably has a few months ago, it gets very easy in some ways to predict price. You can kinda just say price is gonna go up, and most of the time you'll be right. So don't just because I get on here and say we may go up 54 or because I say we may go down to 44, do not be using that for trading advice. And I mean that. This isn't just something I'm saying because I I gotta get off the hook with whatever financial organization it is that might listen to this. This is not financial advice.
Of course, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm trying to keep you from losing your sats. Do not waste them. You will regret it down the road. Alright. Enough about that. I will stop there. For the main part here of the show, I really just wanted to take a few minutes and kind of encourage you. We are at the point where things are gonna get crazy. I do believe, certainly, over the next few weeks, coming up to this halvening event in April, there's gonna be a lot of excitement. Things are gonna be building. Keep in mind, post halving the reward for bitcoin mining goes from 6.25 bitcoin in a block that will drop to 3.125 post halving plus the transactions, of course, the transaction fees, I should say.
So we will see long term. We will see this move upwards. So I hope you have a plan. I hope you've understood at this point. You should be DCA ing on a daily basis. If you believe in Bitcoin long term, if you believe in Bitcoin as a savings vehicle, don't do crazy things. Just sit back. Let the long term time preference work for you. Understand. I'm sitting here buying sets that 4 years from now will be worth more than they are right now. I whether that's now, next month, even right after the halvening, even when I'm buying them at the top of the market 4 years later, they will be worth more than they were at that point.
That is what history has shown to us. And so that is the simplest way for you to invest in your long term future. This is not a get rich scheme. Do not expect this stuff to 100 x next week. I do not know what Bitcoin will do. I do not know what it will end up at for this cycle. I have given some indications. We do know right? The last high was 69,000. We certainly believe that it will be higher than that. There's a lot of people who think that it will solidly break 100,000. I think I've said on the microphone, I have a hard time keeping up with all this, but I'm pretty sure this is correct.
We'll probably see a 100 k by the end of the year. I'm not gonna predict that until we see what happens after the happening. Okay? But it's certainly within the realm of possibility. We do know, for example, the last high was 69,000. The the previous high was 20,000. So it was roughly 3 point something, 3 and a half or whatever times higher. So if we just go three times higher than 60,000, we're at a 180,000 for the next cycle high. We do know that the cycle is four years, which should mean that it should be ending in 2025. Do not listen to these people who are saying that it will be over by the middle of this summer, by the fall.
I just don't think that's true. And until proven otherwise, I will go with the same pattern that we've gone with previously. We also know that once it reaches the high, then it most likely will pull back a significant percentage. What you do with that is your business. It's not my business to tell you how to handle that. The most conservative thing to do is to continue to huddle your Bitcoin, hold your Bitcoin, and continue to buy Bitcoin as it goes down. Again, long range time preference. You know that within 4 years or so, based on historical data, that it will be worth more than it is right now, and so on and so forth. And there's different ways of playing this. So what you do is your business. What I do is my business, but the 4 year pattern is the 4 year pattern. I don't have any chance of changing that.
Eventually, it will go away. What I do see us having happened is that over time, as Bitcoin usage becomes more and more widespread, as more and more institutions and people and nation states for global trade and all of this kind of stuff, as more and more of that occurs, we will see these cycles smooth out. What I mean is instead of a 70, 80% drawdown, maybe it's only 50%, Maybe it's only 40%. Maybe it's only 20%. Are you gonna gamble that you can time that top and then time that bottom? And then maybe at some point there is no down.
And then it will only be a matter of Bitcoin trying to figure out or the world really trying to figure out Bitcoin's value in terms of how much stuff is Bitcoin going to eat, so to speak. Now is that gonna happen this cycle? Probably not. I do think that the ETFs alone will help smooth out that downward shock, But we will see how that works out. I am not betting on when the top is and when the bottom is. I do think the top will probably occur in the Q4 of 2025, basing that on a 4 year cycle. We can adjust that. We know when the halving is gonna be. We'll see when the top is going to be. And we may need to make some adjustments. But my basic strategy is not going to change. I'm going to continue to buy. That's what I'm going to do.
What are you going to do? That's the question. So settle all these things very firmly in your mind now because it's going to pick up before they have any. I saw something interesting. We've got the Bitcoin conference coming up in July in Nashville. That conference. The Bitcoin Magazine conference. How about that? And I thought there was an interesting post by someone whom I'm sure would consider themselves to be a Bitcoin Maxi. And they're basically their premise was you should not be spending money on going to conferences. That if you do, you know, that you do not understand the value of those satoshis that you could buy with that money. Now he was making an argument or she was making an argument that maybe going to that conference is gonna cost you $5,000.
Dollars. If I go to the Bitcoin conference, and I am planning on doing that, it's not gonna cost me $5,000. If it did, it would give me great pause as whether I should go to that conference or not because that is a lot of money. It should cost me less than $1,000. But even then, long term, yes, that's a lot of money that could be turned into sats, that, you know, gonna go up in value. So but on the other hand, education is important. I get that. I'm at my position in life, my place in life, if you wanna call it that, because of my education and my knowledge, shall we say, because my education ended after college, after my bachelor's degree. But I have gained knowledge over over the last decades and will continue to do so until I my mind is no longer capable of gaining knowledge.
I do not intend to stop because I might retire at some point or whatever. For one thing, I think that that actually alone hurts your mind and causes problems. But regardless, it's just the way that I'm wired. So the knowledge that's gained at a Bitcoin conference, the people that you meet, the connections that you make, maybe they are more valuable. I can't answer that question for everyone. I did think it was an interesting question. But think about this. We're gonna have the in April. We're gonna have the conference in July. The price will probably be ripping upward by then. If we did not reach the all time high of 69,000 by the halving, I do believe for sure that by the end of the summer there, as we're approaching that conference or at that conference or shortly after that, we will have reached that high. That conference is gonna be chaos.
People are gonna be going crazy. Twitter is going to be going crazy. Your sources of information, whether they're YouTube or whatever, they're going to be going crazy, and you need to expect and prepare for that. That's all I'm saying. Do not lose your head in all of this. You will make dumb mistakes if you do. Just chill out. If this is your 1st bull cycle, welcome to the show. This is 3rd, 4th? I think it's my 3rd. I'd have to figure it out. Let's see. 2024, 2021, 2017. Technically, I bought Bitcoin in 2013, but at the time, I was so disconnected from the Bitcoin ecosystem.
I didn't even know that that was a bull market. So there you go. Yeah. So technically for the the reality is this is 2017, 2041. Yeah. This is my 3rd. So every time I get a little less, it's it's a little less excitement. I mean, it's fun. I think if you watch that price rip, you know, 5 $1,000 in a day. We'll probably have a $10,000 day this cycle. I'm just gonna prepare you for that. What happens if we start at 90 and end at a 100? Tell me you will not be excited. Just tell me you will not be excited, and I will tell you you are a cold hearted person. Right?
That maybe that's harsh, but the average person will be will be very excited. Right? So just prepare because that stuff is coming. So this isn't some technical explanation. This is kinda more of a heart to heart for me this week. I just wanted to lay that out there. I've kinda tiptoed around this a few times. I just wanted to put this out there and say, this this it's coming. Be prepared. Have your plan. Work your plan. Stay as calm as possible. Understand the economics of what's going on. If you do not understand when I say the halvening, what that means, you probably need to dig in, go through my episode list. I think I've done an episode or 2 specifically about the halvening, but it has to do with the mining of Bitcoin and the issuance, the those blocks being mined.
The amount that will be mined will cut in half in April of this year at block. What did I say? 840,000. And as a direct relation to that, over the coming month, we will see the price go up. Okay. That's it. That's what I got. I hope that helped somebody out there, maybe more than 1. I will not be harping about this every week, so don't be worried about that. Just a just a gentle reminder. And from time to time, I may bring this up and say, hey, hey, pleb. Don't forget. Right? Long term. Think long term. This is this is just a cycle. It's a predictable cycle.
But just as sure as we're gonna shoot up, we will go down. And the matter is how much and the and what you do about that. So before we go on, I wanna take a few minutes to thank our supporters as always. We had some support this week. We had some boost, and we had some streams come in. I always appreciate that. 2 supporters, user 38237600 sent in on episode 157, the last episode, and then they fight you 5 1,000 sats. I appreciate that a lot. And sent in a message, which I am not seeing, and I'm sure I'm sure. That's bizarre. Okay.
And send in a message with it as well. While I bring that up, the second boost, also on episode 157, and then they fight you, came in from anonymous, our friend anonymous, or one of our friends anonymous. There may be more than one because they're anonymous. And they sent in 500 sats. So I appreciate that as well. We also got some streaming sats. Our total sats were 6889 for the week, a little better than last week. And, as I've explained before, what I'm targeting, of course, is 25,000 sats per episode or a 100,000 per month.
Alright. The message that our friend sent was I increased or I increased my streaming sats for your content, brother. Buy the dip, run a node, and satoshi's plebs will inherit the earth. Hear hear. I love that. Satoshi's plebs will inherit the earth. I just hope there's an earth left to inherit, my friend. I'm betting that there is. Sometimes it's a little discouraging, to be honest. But But I appreciate the message. I love it. Buy the dip. DCA, stay humble, all that, and I do appreciate the stats. So alright. Let's jump on into our news. Had some good news this week.
Argentina sees 1st balanced budget in over a decade. Javier Mele, the new president of Argentina, ran as a libertarian and is lobbying immensely for budget, cutbacks and all this kind of thing. So anyways, in January, the Argentine government in January saw its 1st monthly budget surplus in nearly 12 years. As new president Javier Mele continues to push for strong spending cuts, the economy ministry announced. So this is officially coming from the administration of Javier Malay. January was the 1st full month in office for Malay, and it ended with a positive balance for public sector finances of 589,000,000 at the official exchange rate, the government said late Friday. So almost over half a $1,000,000,000.
The figure includes payment of interest on the public debt. It is the 1st monthly financial surplus since August of 2012 and the 1st sub surplus for a January since 2011, the economy minister said according to the official Tel Am news agency. First of all, that's me clapping. Good job. You are now step 1. Step 1. Right? You've cut your budget back to where it actually fits your expenditures. And in fact, you are saving money, which is good. That's what you should be doing. So I know they have a long way to go, but that is a good first step. So good to see that. Wish we had it here in the United States. The Bitcoin ETFs posted 2,200,000,000 net inflows in a week. So this is what I'm talking about earlier.
BlackRock did receive most of the inflows, 1,600,000,000 of that. You had some that were negative. There were 2 that were negative if I'm remembering correctly. Grayscale, certainly. I think there was another one and maybe that was only one day. But overall, up $2,200,000,000, which is, by the way, 0.22% in 1 week of the total market value of Bitcoin. So basically, Bitcoin's at a $1,000,000,000,000. It's actually a little more than that. If it were $1,000,000,000,000, that'd be point 22 percent. So roughly a quarter of a percent of that $1,000,000,000,000. So not a huge amount compared to the total, but a amount that will eventually move the needle. And I do believe we're seeing that already it moving the middle needle. I believe it's part of the upswings that we are seeing. There's an interesting phenomenon that I don't understand truly, that the more activity, the more network that is built, it's this network effect around Bitcoin.
The value of Bitcoin will inflate more than really kind of what this would indicate, so I'm not gonna sit here and act like I do. But so I'm not gonna sit here and act like I do. But, increased use is going to cause the price to go up. That makes a lot of sense. Now this might be the most interesting bit of news for the week. The banking associations argued that US banks were noticeably absent as asset custodians, for Bitcoin ETFs despite their playing a role for other ETFs essentially. Major banks, financial institutions are pushing the SEC to readjust its definition of crypto assets, which could allow them to play a larger role in crypto, acting as custodians, for example, for the recently approved spot bitcoin.
Here's what's going on. They see this action developing that's blowing away any other ETFs that are out there. The growth of these ETFs, people don't understand how well these are doing. And the banks are sitting there going, hey. We're getting hit left and right over all kinds of bad economic news. We want a piece of this action. I don't know how this will work out. I thought it was interesting, but they're wanting to modify what's called the staff accounting bulletin 121, s a b 121 issued in March 2022, which provides guidance around accounting for crypto asset custody obligations.
They stated it's been 2 years since the issuance of the guidance and there have been several relevant developments during that period including the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. The current guidance requires banks to hold crypto assets on their balance sheet, which makes it costly and hinders their ability to provide crypto custody service at scale. So the way I read this, and I may be in correct, but, s e c, we want to custody Bitcoin, and we don't wanna actually hold all the Bitcoin. We wanna be a fractional reserve.
That's a very bad idea, by the way. Very, very bad idea. So I don't know if this will get approved or not. I have no problem with ETFs in their current form, really, and I believe that even though it's not something I would ever use, I do see a lot of basically boomers, if you wanna call them that. Maybe that they don't like that term, but it's one of the ones that gets used quite a bit. Anyways, a lot of older people who this is the way that they invest in Bitcoin. If this starts happening with fractional reserve Bitcoin, do not get anywhere near this. That will not end well in the long term.
So that's all I'm gonna say about that. I do think it's interesting, though, that these banks are are starting to become interested in this stuff after for so long saying it was so bad. Justin Sun. So he's the guy who founded Tron. He's got a long history in crypto. He wants to get involved in a Bitcoin layer 2 solution for Bitcoin Defi. And it's kinda like the banks that we were just talking about. I do not trust this person. I would not get anywhere near something that he has done. Now you may call me that baseless, whatever.
I've been around this long enough to know that this is not a good idea. So you can take my advice or you cannot. I wouldn't have anything to do with this personally, and I can never promote this. So he wants to quote foster decentralization and seamless integration of diverse token formats within the Tron network and broader Bitcoin ecosystem. This strategic move would enhance interoperability and allow Bitcoin to tap into Tron's 55,000,000,000 stable coin pool. So there's a large amount of Trond backed US dollar stable coins. We can build those same assets on lightning on some other system like that. We do not need to use their system to do that. I really, really, really don't think this is a good idea. And I'm sorry if that sounds negative, but, again, I've been involved in this long enough.
These things, I could just it's not gonna end well. It's all I'm gonna say about it. Alright. Japan loses its spot as the world's 3rd largest economy and slips into recession. Japan does have the highest amount of debt to GDP of anywhere in the world at depending on how you calculate it, something like 200 plus percent, like 225%. But it's now the world's 4th largest after it contracted in the last quarter of 2023 and fell behind Germany. It shrank at an annual rate of 0.4% from October to December. It also contracted 2.9% between July September.
2 straight quarters of contraction are considered indicator and economy is in a technical recession. Yeah. So a lot of times, in my opinion, these countries are in recession. I guess it can be argued I don't really have the right view of a recession, but, like, right now, the United States is not in recession. I look around, and I've said, we've been in recession for years. That's just my opinion. Probably an argument I would lose, but that's okay. It is actually in recession now. We will see where that goes. It was the 2nd largest until 2010 when it was over taken by China and then now Germany.
Alright. Well, there we go. We will continue to see the recession information over the rest of this year, probably on into next year. I've got another tweet about that. We'll get to that in just a minute. I posted this incredible tweet by somebody who said a 4 year grind. Happy to be here. And then posted this Excel spreadsheet showing that they have 1.002, and some more decimals. Bitcoin. Average price, $29,831. Market value, $52,894. So they did this when it was basically at the very top recently. Bitcoin, In 2021, 0.171 bitcoin, $7537.
Average price, 43 $1,980.25. 2022. Point, 459 Bitcoin, they spent $9708.49. Average price, 21,100 and $67.10. So, of course, that was kinda at the bottom of the bear market. 2023, 0.27. And they spent $7940.58, 29,000, 409 dot 56, average price. And then finally in 2024, 0.120. So 12% of a Bitcoin. They spent 50 to 42. So $5242. Average price, $43,691.17. Of course, they knew the halvening was coming, and it would be that much more difficult after the happening. Well played. Good job. You are the kind of pleb I would love to have listening to this. I don't know who this is. It doesn't say u power donkey?
I have no idea. U slash power donkey. I'm not I don't know if that's actually their screen name. I can't tell. I think that might just be some picture. I don't know. Anyways, some data about trucking employment. Trucking employment collapse has been a precursor to recessions since 1991, and they are showing absolutely the signal of trucking employment falling. And so that would indicate going back as far as 2,000 and 1 and going back to 1991, really, actually, that that's an indicator of an upcoming recession. Great video you should watch about paying some somebody paying their bills in El Salvador with Bitcoin, which may not sound like that big a deal to you.
But this person lives out in the countryside. They do not have a bank account. They would spend an hour on the bus and 2 more hours waiting in line, and now they just do it line. Great stuff. BlackRock. Again, sorry. I don't wanna harp on BlackRock, but Bloomberg's, Eric Balacunas reports that BlackRock's spot ETF has taken in $5,200,000,000 year to date. 50% of BlackRock's total net flows for their 417 ETFs. They have over 400 ETFs. This one ETF is half of their net flow for the year. The daily demand from Bitcoin ETFs is 2.6 x. So 2.6 times the number of new Bitcoin that are mined each day. Post halving, this will double to 5.9 x. And then here's the economies that are currently in recession.
And we'll end with this, Peru, Japan, which I mentioned just a minute ago, Ireland, Estonia, Finland, Moldova, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the good old United Kingdom. Well, there you go. I would argue that most certainly China should be on this list. They just don't release their data. At least that's not, what's the word, manipulated? So, alright. Let's wrap this up. Hey. I've got a program, if you wanna call it that. I got a way that you can make money. Sats. Sats that will be more and more valuable over time. You should take these and you should hold on to them and not let them go. If you clip an episode, if you go to an app like fountain and you clip 1, 2, or 3 minutes from 1 episode, If it's the current episode or at least a very recent episode, it's 500 sets that I will boost back to you or reply back to your comment. And if it's like on fountain, then it will go into your fountain wallet. If it's an older episode, then it's 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way for you to make some sats from me. So you're welcome to do that.
At here at satoshis plebs, we support podcasting 2.0. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time on here. I don't have ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't do anything like that. There's reasons I do that. It's basically a way that I can ensure that I have journalistic integrity when I talk about any of these topics. Because nobody's paying me anything except my listeners who are listening and getting value from what I am saying. So if you get value, consider supporting me via streaming sats or boosting sats like these people did earlier, anonymous, and the user sorry, user. I do not remember your number.
But, you're welcome to do that. There's other ways that you can support the podcast as well. I am continuing to build out things. I got some things done this week, which was pretty exciting. Things that I'm continuing to build to support this show. There's ways for people to help there. There's simple things like just a couple days ago, I sat down and updated the episode list on the satoshis plex website and caught it up to date. There was, like, 10 episodes that needed to be added. Just stuff like that. And that's just WordPress. It's just editing basically a text file. It's not hard at all.
Anybody could do that, and that would be a great way to provide some value. That would be one less thing that I would have to do, and then I would have time to do something else. So, let's see. So there are, you know, time, talent, treasure. Those are basically 3 ways that you can support me. And if you want to support me through treasure, you need to use a podcasting 2.0 app. I mentioned Fountain already. There's a whole list. You can go to podcastapps.com and take a look. I would recommend highly that you try out several of them. You could even go use Apple. I mean, we can't stream from Apple at this point, but Apple is actually starting to embrace podcasting 2 point o. They've added the transcripts, which is a great move for them.
You can add a review somewhere even on Apple. I would love it if people would go somewhere and review this show. It only takes a few minutes and just say, hey, this is a great show or whatever. And post that review. Let people know about it. It's a great way to kind of surface things in the in the stream of content that's out there. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. I could be reached by email at [email protected].
And, of course, there's the satoshisplebs website. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is February 19th, and this is episode 158 of satoshi's plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is on the pullback. Alright, let's go ahead and do our market update. Block height at time of recording is 831-068. So we have officially crossed 831,000. Marching, marching, marching onward to the happening, which will occur 834 thou no. 840,000. Need to be precise about that. 840,000. So we did have a difficulty adjustment, upwards. And I'll be honest, in my mining profits, in my daily profits, it shows on my pool menu. I use brains. I've mentioned that a number of times, still do.
But regardless, in my menu there, it shows, like, the daily mining reward. And I have watched it steadily drop. Now it's slow, but it is slowly dropping. And that is because the difficulty is going up, and that is because more miners are becoming are coming online. So as as more miners come online, the difficulty adjust upwards. And as those miners come online, of course, there's more people competing for those blocks. It's that simple. So yeah. So even though our last adjustment was 8.24% up, right now, we are looking at a downward adjustment.
I saw earlier. It was, like, 5% or so. Now, of course, we've got a long way till the next adjustment. I think it's 11 days, and it could certainly change. But, man, we for weeks, several weeks now, we've been going upwards, and it's just been oh, there it is. 5.98% down on March 1st. Of course, that's subject to change, but we'll see. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy. Now to counterbalance that, we have had the price of Bitcoin going up. So that's good. Where are we at, Macintosh? This week, the price closed 52,132. A nice level. I was actually looking at the previous week's close.
Let me go back and pull that up really quick. According to my notes here At the time of recording, so on 11th, it was 48,286. So we've gone up, like, four, yeah, $4,000 in seven days. Right. That's crazy. Just a little, almost 10%. No big deal. It's so volatile. Yes. It is. And when it goes up, it'll melt your face. Our fees, seem to have gone down. Right now, we're at 13 sats per vbyte. Our unprocessed transactions certainly have we're down below a gigabyte now, 896 megabytes. And we seem to be trending down. Although, of course, that could change at any point depending on the activity that's going on.
So maybe that's a blessing. If you've got UTXOs that you need to consolidate, it would be a good time to start thinking about that certainly before the halvening. What What do you mean by that Macintosh? I'm glad you asked. When you receive a transaction, when you receive a Bitcoin transaction on the main net, it has a UTXO that's assigned to it. And the problem is those UTXOs are basically used as part of the transactional cost. So if you receive a bunch of different Bitcoin so let's say you had 20 Bitcoin that were were point 0 1% on each one.
So that's point 2. That's 20 percent of a full Bitcoin. In total, you would have 20 different UTXOs. As the fees go up, it might get more and more difficult to well, it will certainly get more and more expensive to deal with those. It would be far better if you had a point to you, Bitcoin in one transaction than 20 in point 1 transactions, Bitcoin per transaction. I hope that makes sense. But when people talk about UTXO consolidation, that's what they're talking about. They will essentially send to a new address all of these separate small segments. And when the fees are low, like, basically, they are now, and you end up with 1 UTXO, which is what you want. You really want as as few as possible. So there we go.
Now let's talk about the market itself. I have been watching the charts a lot this week. I've been looking at them a lot. We did I believe last week, I said we go up hit 52. We've done that. I think I said we might go up to 54. I'm not so sure that's gonna happen at this point. Because if you're looking at kind of the way that things are laid out, we are in pretty strong need of a pullback. So what I mean by that is we've spent a lot of time in the last few weeks going up, and we've not spent a lot of time consolidating at any one level. We did spend some time.
Well, we've been going up 1, 2, 3, 4 weeks now, essentially. Absolutely. We bottomed out 4 weeks ago. 1, 2. Yeah. January 22nd. That week, the lowest it went was 38,356. And here we are at 52,000. Alright. It's a huge move upward in a month. It would not surprise me if we pulled back. It would not. Not at all. I could definitely see going back even as far back as 42,000, excuse me, 44,000, which was a level of resistance for a long time, basically, between January December 4th, and we broke really free of that February 5th. That's for I'm no. I'm sorry. That's well, no. That is true. February 5th. That's exactly right.
It's the last time we passed 44,000. I could definitely see going back to that level and kind of retesting that. You say, well, that's a $8,000 move. Yes. But you could do that in a couple of days and then turn around and retrace it and be right back where we are right now in a week or 2, but in a significantly stronger position because we've kind of done that retest and said, okay. What was resistance, we've now turned into support is what that's called. And now we're ready to move on. This is not an area I would be betting on. K? This is definitely I do not know if it's gonna go up. I do not know if it's gonna go down.
I think I mean, statistically, looking at the data, most likely will go down. It's more likely, but it's not like 90% likely that we're gonna go down. I would certainly not be betting on that. Of course, we don't talk about trading here at satoshisplebs. That's a good way to lose your sats. What we do talk about is dollar cost averaging. If we do happen to go down to 44,000, that would probably be a little, very good place to kick in some extra dough, dollars if you've got it. You know, convert those into sats, But you should be doing a regular dollar cost average, whether that's daily or weekly, through something like strike.
Okay? So that's what we talk about because that's the easiest. You you set it up at an automated manner, and then you don't have to worry about it. It just happens. You don't have to worry about the price. I mean, we we love talking about the price here, and I've speculated that we'll see, we'll break all time high before the happening. I think that's still possible. If we don't spend too much time pulling back, I still think we could pull back to that $44,000 or so level and then still rock it up before, what, April 19th, April 20th to beat that $69,000 level. And what's pushing a lot of this is these ETFs. These these ETFs are are vacuuming up large amounts of Bitcoin. They're they're buying far more Bitcoin during the week than is being mined, which is just crazy.
I think what we're seeing what I've noticed over the last few weekends is that there's more volatility on the weekend than there is during the week. The the week is just kind of this steady rise. And then on the weekend, when these ETFs are not bringing in any money or whatever, dollars, then then, you know, it's a little more volatile. But we've got this definite upward trend. All the ETFs except, grayscale. They're bringing in positive inflows. They're bringing inflows to of dollars to the the ZTF fund. And they're spending at this point more than is actually being mined, which of course means long term that the price has to go up. It doesn't have a choice essentially. There's other people who are selling right now for whatever reason that I don't understand because they're not going to win against an ETF like Black Rock. You're not gonna outsell Black Rock and then somehow push the price down so that you can buy back in at a lower level.
Maybe they're selling because they've got liquidity to sell into and they're a big institution or a very large investor. I don't know. But once that's done, we will see the price go up. I believe that will happen before the happening, and I believe that will be part of what factors in to the price going up. One of the things that we haven't talked about, certainly in a long time on here, is retail interest. In past cycles well, certainly in the past cycle where we were heading to 69,000. At this point in the cycle, there was a huge amount of retail involvement, and there was a huge amount of retail FOMO, fear of missing out. And that was pressing the price higher and higher. But it was doing so in a manner that wasn't sustainable. At this point, we really don't have that much retail investment.
Retail interest is a better way of putting it. What does that mean? Well, that means that we're not there yet. We're nowhere close to the all time high. So it's another way of arriving at saying, even though we've jumped, like, a 168% in the last It's either this year or or the in the last year. Bitcoin's not done. It's not. Bitcoin has a long way to go. So when it passes 69,000, in my opinion, that's probably when the retail interest really starts to pick up. Oh, Bitcoin past the all time high. Let's see where it's gonna go. And everybody will start throwing their money in.
The smart people, which are my listeners, right, are doing what? Their DCA. Don't worry about buying the top, buying the bottom, buy this, buy just buy. Just buy knowing that in 4 plus years that it will be higher, probably much higher than it is right now. I went over just a episode or 2 ago, maybe 3 episodes ago. You can go back at any point in time, a 4 year time frame, if you buy that, it's higher after 4 years. I don't think that's going to change anytime soon, and I certainly don't think it's gonna change at this point because we have a lot higher to go from here. So that's our market update. Again, continue to DCA. Whether you do that through mining, whether you do that through strike, whether you do that through, I don't know, buying at your local Bitcoin meetup.
I have no idea how you do that, but continue to do that. Do not trade. Do not try and trade this market. Right now, we could go up. Right now, we could go down. I've been pretty accurate for the last few months. But, again, I've told y'all once this bull market starts, which it really already probably has a few months ago, it gets very easy in some ways to predict price. You can kinda just say price is gonna go up, and most of the time you'll be right. So don't just because I get on here and say we may go up 54 or because I say we may go down to 44, do not be using that for trading advice. And I mean that. This isn't just something I'm saying because I I gotta get off the hook with whatever financial organization it is that might listen to this. This is not financial advice.
Of course, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm trying to keep you from losing your sats. Do not waste them. You will regret it down the road. Alright. Enough about that. I will stop there. For the main part here of the show, I really just wanted to take a few minutes and kind of encourage you. We are at the point where things are gonna get crazy. I do believe, certainly, over the next few weeks, coming up to this halvening event in April, there's gonna be a lot of excitement. Things are gonna be building. Keep in mind, post halving the reward for bitcoin mining goes from 6.25 bitcoin in a block that will drop to 3.125 post halving plus the transactions, of course, the transaction fees, I should say.
So we will see long term. We will see this move upwards. So I hope you have a plan. I hope you've understood at this point. You should be DCA ing on a daily basis. If you believe in Bitcoin long term, if you believe in Bitcoin as a savings vehicle, don't do crazy things. Just sit back. Let the long term time preference work for you. Understand. I'm sitting here buying sets that 4 years from now will be worth more than they are right now. I whether that's now, next month, even right after the halvening, even when I'm buying them at the top of the market 4 years later, they will be worth more than they were at that point.
That is what history has shown to us. And so that is the simplest way for you to invest in your long term future. This is not a get rich scheme. Do not expect this stuff to 100 x next week. I do not know what Bitcoin will do. I do not know what it will end up at for this cycle. I have given some indications. We do know right? The last high was 69,000. We certainly believe that it will be higher than that. There's a lot of people who think that it will solidly break 100,000. I think I've said on the microphone, I have a hard time keeping up with all this, but I'm pretty sure this is correct.
We'll probably see a 100 k by the end of the year. I'm not gonna predict that until we see what happens after the happening. Okay? But it's certainly within the realm of possibility. We do know, for example, the last high was 69,000. The the previous high was 20,000. So it was roughly 3 point something, 3 and a half or whatever times higher. So if we just go three times higher than 60,000, we're at a 180,000 for the next cycle high. We do know that the cycle is four years, which should mean that it should be ending in 2025. Do not listen to these people who are saying that it will be over by the middle of this summer, by the fall.
I just don't think that's true. And until proven otherwise, I will go with the same pattern that we've gone with previously. We also know that once it reaches the high, then it most likely will pull back a significant percentage. What you do with that is your business. It's not my business to tell you how to handle that. The most conservative thing to do is to continue to huddle your Bitcoin, hold your Bitcoin, and continue to buy Bitcoin as it goes down. Again, long range time preference. You know that within 4 years or so, based on historical data, that it will be worth more than it is right now, and so on and so forth. And there's different ways of playing this. So what you do is your business. What I do is my business, but the 4 year pattern is the 4 year pattern. I don't have any chance of changing that.
Eventually, it will go away. What I do see us having happened is that over time, as Bitcoin usage becomes more and more widespread, as more and more institutions and people and nation states for global trade and all of this kind of stuff, as more and more of that occurs, we will see these cycles smooth out. What I mean is instead of a 70, 80% drawdown, maybe it's only 50%, Maybe it's only 40%. Maybe it's only 20%. Are you gonna gamble that you can time that top and then time that bottom? And then maybe at some point there is no down.
And then it will only be a matter of Bitcoin trying to figure out or the world really trying to figure out Bitcoin's value in terms of how much stuff is Bitcoin going to eat, so to speak. Now is that gonna happen this cycle? Probably not. I do think that the ETFs alone will help smooth out that downward shock, But we will see how that works out. I am not betting on when the top is and when the bottom is. I do think the top will probably occur in the Q4 of 2025, basing that on a 4 year cycle. We can adjust that. We know when the halving is gonna be. We'll see when the top is going to be. And we may need to make some adjustments. But my basic strategy is not going to change. I'm going to continue to buy. That's what I'm going to do.
What are you going to do? That's the question. So settle all these things very firmly in your mind now because it's going to pick up before they have any. I saw something interesting. We've got the Bitcoin conference coming up in July in Nashville. That conference. The Bitcoin Magazine conference. How about that? And I thought there was an interesting post by someone whom I'm sure would consider themselves to be a Bitcoin Maxi. And they're basically their premise was you should not be spending money on going to conferences. That if you do, you know, that you do not understand the value of those satoshis that you could buy with that money. Now he was making an argument or she was making an argument that maybe going to that conference is gonna cost you $5,000.
Dollars. If I go to the Bitcoin conference, and I am planning on doing that, it's not gonna cost me $5,000. If it did, it would give me great pause as whether I should go to that conference or not because that is a lot of money. It should cost me less than $1,000. But even then, long term, yes, that's a lot of money that could be turned into sats, that, you know, gonna go up in value. So but on the other hand, education is important. I get that. I'm at my position in life, my place in life, if you wanna call it that, because of my education and my knowledge, shall we say, because my education ended after college, after my bachelor's degree. But I have gained knowledge over over the last decades and will continue to do so until I my mind is no longer capable of gaining knowledge.
I do not intend to stop because I might retire at some point or whatever. For one thing, I think that that actually alone hurts your mind and causes problems. But regardless, it's just the way that I'm wired. So the knowledge that's gained at a Bitcoin conference, the people that you meet, the connections that you make, maybe they are more valuable. I can't answer that question for everyone. I did think it was an interesting question. But think about this. We're gonna have the in April. We're gonna have the conference in July. The price will probably be ripping upward by then. If we did not reach the all time high of 69,000 by the halving, I do believe for sure that by the end of the summer there, as we're approaching that conference or at that conference or shortly after that, we will have reached that high. That conference is gonna be chaos.
People are gonna be going crazy. Twitter is going to be going crazy. Your sources of information, whether they're YouTube or whatever, they're going to be going crazy, and you need to expect and prepare for that. That's all I'm saying. Do not lose your head in all of this. You will make dumb mistakes if you do. Just chill out. If this is your 1st bull cycle, welcome to the show. This is 3rd, 4th? I think it's my 3rd. I'd have to figure it out. Let's see. 2024, 2021, 2017. Technically, I bought Bitcoin in 2013, but at the time, I was so disconnected from the Bitcoin ecosystem.
I didn't even know that that was a bull market. So there you go. Yeah. So technically for the the reality is this is 2017, 2041. Yeah. This is my 3rd. So every time I get a little less, it's it's a little less excitement. I mean, it's fun. I think if you watch that price rip, you know, 5 $1,000 in a day. We'll probably have a $10,000 day this cycle. I'm just gonna prepare you for that. What happens if we start at 90 and end at a 100? Tell me you will not be excited. Just tell me you will not be excited, and I will tell you you are a cold hearted person. Right?
That maybe that's harsh, but the average person will be will be very excited. Right? So just prepare because that stuff is coming. So this isn't some technical explanation. This is kinda more of a heart to heart for me this week. I just wanted to lay that out there. I've kinda tiptoed around this a few times. I just wanted to put this out there and say, this this it's coming. Be prepared. Have your plan. Work your plan. Stay as calm as possible. Understand the economics of what's going on. If you do not understand when I say the halvening, what that means, you probably need to dig in, go through my episode list. I think I've done an episode or 2 specifically about the halvening, but it has to do with the mining of Bitcoin and the issuance, the those blocks being mined.
The amount that will be mined will cut in half in April of this year at block. What did I say? 840,000. And as a direct relation to that, over the coming month, we will see the price go up. Okay. That's it. That's what I got. I hope that helped somebody out there, maybe more than 1. I will not be harping about this every week, so don't be worried about that. Just a just a gentle reminder. And from time to time, I may bring this up and say, hey, hey, pleb. Don't forget. Right? Long term. Think long term. This is this is just a cycle. It's a predictable cycle.
But just as sure as we're gonna shoot up, we will go down. And the matter is how much and the and what you do about that. So before we go on, I wanna take a few minutes to thank our supporters as always. We had some support this week. We had some boost, and we had some streams come in. I always appreciate that. 2 supporters, user 38237600 sent in on episode 157, the last episode, and then they fight you 5 1,000 sats. I appreciate that a lot. And sent in a message, which I am not seeing, and I'm sure I'm sure. That's bizarre. Okay.
And send in a message with it as well. While I bring that up, the second boost, also on episode 157, and then they fight you, came in from anonymous, our friend anonymous, or one of our friends anonymous. There may be more than one because they're anonymous. And they sent in 500 sats. So I appreciate that as well. We also got some streaming sats. Our total sats were 6889 for the week, a little better than last week. And, as I've explained before, what I'm targeting, of course, is 25,000 sats per episode or a 100,000 per month.
Alright. The message that our friend sent was I increased or I increased my streaming sats for your content, brother. Buy the dip, run a node, and satoshi's plebs will inherit the earth. Hear hear. I love that. Satoshi's plebs will inherit the earth. I just hope there's an earth left to inherit, my friend. I'm betting that there is. Sometimes it's a little discouraging, to be honest. But But I appreciate the message. I love it. Buy the dip. DCA, stay humble, all that, and I do appreciate the stats. So alright. Let's jump on into our news. Had some good news this week.
Argentina sees 1st balanced budget in over a decade. Javier Mele, the new president of Argentina, ran as a libertarian and is lobbying immensely for budget, cutbacks and all this kind of thing. So anyways, in January, the Argentine government in January saw its 1st monthly budget surplus in nearly 12 years. As new president Javier Mele continues to push for strong spending cuts, the economy ministry announced. So this is officially coming from the administration of Javier Malay. January was the 1st full month in office for Malay, and it ended with a positive balance for public sector finances of 589,000,000 at the official exchange rate, the government said late Friday. So almost over half a $1,000,000,000.
The figure includes payment of interest on the public debt. It is the 1st monthly financial surplus since August of 2012 and the 1st sub surplus for a January since 2011, the economy minister said according to the official Tel Am news agency. First of all, that's me clapping. Good job. You are now step 1. Step 1. Right? You've cut your budget back to where it actually fits your expenditures. And in fact, you are saving money, which is good. That's what you should be doing. So I know they have a long way to go, but that is a good first step. So good to see that. Wish we had it here in the United States. The Bitcoin ETFs posted 2,200,000,000 net inflows in a week. So this is what I'm talking about earlier.
BlackRock did receive most of the inflows, 1,600,000,000 of that. You had some that were negative. There were 2 that were negative if I'm remembering correctly. Grayscale, certainly. I think there was another one and maybe that was only one day. But overall, up $2,200,000,000, which is, by the way, 0.22% in 1 week of the total market value of Bitcoin. So basically, Bitcoin's at a $1,000,000,000,000. It's actually a little more than that. If it were $1,000,000,000,000, that'd be point 22 percent. So roughly a quarter of a percent of that $1,000,000,000,000. So not a huge amount compared to the total, but a amount that will eventually move the needle. And I do believe we're seeing that already it moving the middle needle. I believe it's part of the upswings that we are seeing. There's an interesting phenomenon that I don't understand truly, that the more activity, the more network that is built, it's this network effect around Bitcoin.
The value of Bitcoin will inflate more than really kind of what this would indicate, so I'm not gonna sit here and act like I do. But so I'm not gonna sit here and act like I do. But, increased use is going to cause the price to go up. That makes a lot of sense. Now this might be the most interesting bit of news for the week. The banking associations argued that US banks were noticeably absent as asset custodians, for Bitcoin ETFs despite their playing a role for other ETFs essentially. Major banks, financial institutions are pushing the SEC to readjust its definition of crypto assets, which could allow them to play a larger role in crypto, acting as custodians, for example, for the recently approved spot bitcoin.
Here's what's going on. They see this action developing that's blowing away any other ETFs that are out there. The growth of these ETFs, people don't understand how well these are doing. And the banks are sitting there going, hey. We're getting hit left and right over all kinds of bad economic news. We want a piece of this action. I don't know how this will work out. I thought it was interesting, but they're wanting to modify what's called the staff accounting bulletin 121, s a b 121 issued in March 2022, which provides guidance around accounting for crypto asset custody obligations.
They stated it's been 2 years since the issuance of the guidance and there have been several relevant developments during that period including the approval of spot Bitcoin ETFs. The current guidance requires banks to hold crypto assets on their balance sheet, which makes it costly and hinders their ability to provide crypto custody service at scale. So the way I read this, and I may be in correct, but, s e c, we want to custody Bitcoin, and we don't wanna actually hold all the Bitcoin. We wanna be a fractional reserve.
That's a very bad idea, by the way. Very, very bad idea. So I don't know if this will get approved or not. I have no problem with ETFs in their current form, really, and I believe that even though it's not something I would ever use, I do see a lot of basically boomers, if you wanna call them that. Maybe that they don't like that term, but it's one of the ones that gets used quite a bit. Anyways, a lot of older people who this is the way that they invest in Bitcoin. If this starts happening with fractional reserve Bitcoin, do not get anywhere near this. That will not end well in the long term.
So that's all I'm gonna say about that. I do think it's interesting, though, that these banks are are starting to become interested in this stuff after for so long saying it was so bad. Justin Sun. So he's the guy who founded Tron. He's got a long history in crypto. He wants to get involved in a Bitcoin layer 2 solution for Bitcoin Defi. And it's kinda like the banks that we were just talking about. I do not trust this person. I would not get anywhere near something that he has done. Now you may call me that baseless, whatever.
I've been around this long enough to know that this is not a good idea. So you can take my advice or you cannot. I wouldn't have anything to do with this personally, and I can never promote this. So he wants to quote foster decentralization and seamless integration of diverse token formats within the Tron network and broader Bitcoin ecosystem. This strategic move would enhance interoperability and allow Bitcoin to tap into Tron's 55,000,000,000 stable coin pool. So there's a large amount of Trond backed US dollar stable coins. We can build those same assets on lightning on some other system like that. We do not need to use their system to do that. I really, really, really don't think this is a good idea. And I'm sorry if that sounds negative, but, again, I've been involved in this long enough.
These things, I could just it's not gonna end well. It's all I'm gonna say about it. Alright. Japan loses its spot as the world's 3rd largest economy and slips into recession. Japan does have the highest amount of debt to GDP of anywhere in the world at depending on how you calculate it, something like 200 plus percent, like 225%. But it's now the world's 4th largest after it contracted in the last quarter of 2023 and fell behind Germany. It shrank at an annual rate of 0.4% from October to December. It also contracted 2.9% between July September.
2 straight quarters of contraction are considered indicator and economy is in a technical recession. Yeah. So a lot of times, in my opinion, these countries are in recession. I guess it can be argued I don't really have the right view of a recession, but, like, right now, the United States is not in recession. I look around, and I've said, we've been in recession for years. That's just my opinion. Probably an argument I would lose, but that's okay. It is actually in recession now. We will see where that goes. It was the 2nd largest until 2010 when it was over taken by China and then now Germany.
Alright. Well, there we go. We will continue to see the recession information over the rest of this year, probably on into next year. I've got another tweet about that. We'll get to that in just a minute. I posted this incredible tweet by somebody who said a 4 year grind. Happy to be here. And then posted this Excel spreadsheet showing that they have 1.002, and some more decimals. Bitcoin. Average price, $29,831. Market value, $52,894. So they did this when it was basically at the very top recently. Bitcoin, In 2021, 0.171 bitcoin, $7537.
Average price, 43 $1,980.25. 2022. Point, 459 Bitcoin, they spent $9708.49. Average price, 21,100 and $67.10. So, of course, that was kinda at the bottom of the bear market. 2023, 0.27. And they spent $7940.58, 29,000, 409 dot 56, average price. And then finally in 2024, 0.120. So 12% of a Bitcoin. They spent 50 to 42. So $5242. Average price, $43,691.17. Of course, they knew the halvening was coming, and it would be that much more difficult after the happening. Well played. Good job. You are the kind of pleb I would love to have listening to this. I don't know who this is. It doesn't say u power donkey?
I have no idea. U slash power donkey. I'm not I don't know if that's actually their screen name. I can't tell. I think that might just be some picture. I don't know. Anyways, some data about trucking employment. Trucking employment collapse has been a precursor to recessions since 1991, and they are showing absolutely the signal of trucking employment falling. And so that would indicate going back as far as 2,000 and 1 and going back to 1991, really, actually, that that's an indicator of an upcoming recession. Great video you should watch about paying some somebody paying their bills in El Salvador with Bitcoin, which may not sound like that big a deal to you.
But this person lives out in the countryside. They do not have a bank account. They would spend an hour on the bus and 2 more hours waiting in line, and now they just do it line. Great stuff. BlackRock. Again, sorry. I don't wanna harp on BlackRock, but Bloomberg's, Eric Balacunas reports that BlackRock's spot ETF has taken in $5,200,000,000 year to date. 50% of BlackRock's total net flows for their 417 ETFs. They have over 400 ETFs. This one ETF is half of their net flow for the year. The daily demand from Bitcoin ETFs is 2.6 x. So 2.6 times the number of new Bitcoin that are mined each day. Post halving, this will double to 5.9 x. And then here's the economies that are currently in recession.
And we'll end with this, Peru, Japan, which I mentioned just a minute ago, Ireland, Estonia, Finland, Moldova, Denmark, Luxembourg, and the good old United Kingdom. Well, there you go. I would argue that most certainly China should be on this list. They just don't release their data. At least that's not, what's the word, manipulated? So, alright. Let's wrap this up. Hey. I've got a program, if you wanna call it that. I got a way that you can make money. Sats. Sats that will be more and more valuable over time. You should take these and you should hold on to them and not let them go. If you clip an episode, if you go to an app like fountain and you clip 1, 2, or 3 minutes from 1 episode, If it's the current episode or at least a very recent episode, it's 500 sets that I will boost back to you or reply back to your comment. And if it's like on fountain, then it will go into your fountain wallet. If it's an older episode, then it's 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way for you to make some sats from me. So you're welcome to do that.
At here at satoshis plebs, we support podcasting 2.0. It's a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time on here. I don't have ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't do anything like that. There's reasons I do that. It's basically a way that I can ensure that I have journalistic integrity when I talk about any of these topics. Because nobody's paying me anything except my listeners who are listening and getting value from what I am saying. So if you get value, consider supporting me via streaming sats or boosting sats like these people did earlier, anonymous, and the user sorry, user. I do not remember your number.
But, you're welcome to do that. There's other ways that you can support the podcast as well. I am continuing to build out things. I got some things done this week, which was pretty exciting. Things that I'm continuing to build to support this show. There's ways for people to help there. There's simple things like just a couple days ago, I sat down and updated the episode list on the satoshis plex website and caught it up to date. There was, like, 10 episodes that needed to be added. Just stuff like that. And that's just WordPress. It's just editing basically a text file. It's not hard at all.
Anybody could do that, and that would be a great way to provide some value. That would be one less thing that I would have to do, and then I would have time to do something else. So, let's see. So there are, you know, time, talent, treasure. Those are basically 3 ways that you can support me. And if you want to support me through treasure, you need to use a podcasting 2.0 app. I mentioned Fountain already. There's a whole list. You can go to podcastapps.com and take a look. I would recommend highly that you try out several of them. You could even go use Apple. I mean, we can't stream from Apple at this point, but Apple is actually starting to embrace podcasting 2 point o. They've added the transcripts, which is a great move for them.
You can add a review somewhere even on Apple. I would love it if people would go somewhere and review this show. It only takes a few minutes and just say, hey, this is a great show or whatever. And post that review. Let people know about it. It's a great way to kind of surface things in the in the stream of content that's out there. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. I could be reached by email at [email protected].
And, of course, there's the satoshisplebs website. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
