This week I discuss why I believe that the African continent could lead the way in Bitcoin adoption and potentially lead to a new Renaissance. Let's discuss!
Bitcoin Weekly Close Price
February 25th, 2024: $51,730
Block Height at Time of Recording
832,075
News and Links
Nigeria Tries to Block Access to Crypto Exchanges
Banking and Securities Commission of Honduras Bans Banks From Dealing in Crypto
EIA Suspends Survey of Bitcoin Mining Power Usage
Malmi and Satoshi Emails
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 26th, and this is episode 159 of Satoshis Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is on the African explosion. Alright. We got the Earl Gray going. Nice and hot, of course, as I like it, along with some honey. We're going to start, of course, with our market update. We're gonna talk about Africa and what I see as its future in general, of course, generalizing, and then we'll talk about our supporters in the news. And some of the news actually is coming from Africa this week. But we begin, as always, with our market update. What happened this week? Macintosh. I'm so excited. I'm sitting on the edge of my my seat.
Not really. Whole lot of nothing. If you recall last week, I was thinking that we may go down and the market pressure to go up, I'm afraid, is just too much. It's interesting. One of the things that I've learned looking looking at the charts in different time frames can be very instructive. And what I mean is you've got you've got charts. I think they even have sub one minute charts. But on trading view, like, 1 minute and 3 minute and 5 minute, 12, 15, 24, 30, and then an hour, 4 hour, and up to days, weeks, I think a month is the highest. What do I mean by that? So each candle on the chart, so you've got these indicators on the chart called candles, is represented by one of those periods of time. On a one minute chart, each candle is 1 minute. On a one day chart, each candle is one day.
So they give different views of the market of the asset, in this case, of Bitcoin. I tend to kind of move through different time frames because they do give you different perspectives. Now one of the indicators that I love is called the Bollinger Bands. They've been around for a long time. They were invented by someone whose last name was Bollinger. That's where they get their name from. And with Bollinger Bands, you can see the activity as it expands and contracts. What do I mean by that? There will be times when the market will just kind of go along sideways without a whole lot of excitement. We saw a lot of that this week.
But there are times when you have an explosion of activity, when you see price shoot up or shoot down. For example, on the 4 hour chart, we saw the last explosion essentially happen back on February 7th, which would be when we left, 42 thou 43,000. And we climbed over the course from February 7th up through February 14th for a week, up to 52,000. Almost well, 52,400. So within a few hours of that, really 53,000. So one week, we had this expansion of the Bollinger Bands, which you can very clearly see on this 4 hour chart. And you you saw the price move $10,000 over the course of a week.
Well, what have we done since then? We've gone sideways. So that was on February 14th, essentially Valentine's Day. We are now on February 25th as I record on Sunday night, and we have gone basically between 50,000 and some change and that 53,000 mark, which we've hit twice. But what we've seen is these Bollinger Bands have contracted. And again, what does this indicate? We've got this sideways action. But when they open back up and it's it's time, it will either explode upwards or it will explode downwards. So we could still get that 47 $1,000 that I've mentioned multiple times.
But to be honest, I think given what I'm looking at and not just the Bollinger Bands, I believe we're gonna go up. It tried to even go down several times. So back on February 17th, so that was a Saturday. That was a week ago. Yesterday, we dipped down to 50,608. And then just a day or so ago when was this? Friday night Friday afternoon, East Coast time on United States. We got down to, 50,500. So kind of almost that exact same place, basically, lined up very well. But there was a lot of support right above that. So we had multiple touch points above that, and then it pushed down below that. And then in both cases, immediately rebounded within a few hours.
So we had that on Friday night excuse me, Friday afternoon. And from there, it went right back up to where we're at right now. We had a market close, which I suppose I should say, $51,730. That was for the week here just a couple of hours ago. So we haven't broken out of this little box, but we will. These Bollinger Bands will ex expand as they they're showing the market energy essentially. I don't know how else to describe it. That's probably not a really good way of putting it, but it does indicate the market activity. And we will either go up strongly or we will go down. I'm guessing we're gonna go up, hit $54,000, and then we will find out if we're gonna reverse at that point.
I pointed out $54,000, that fifty 4 to $55,000 range several times. I think we're going to reach it. We could potentially push right through it because we're certainly gathering the energy. And then if we flip that into support, then we would be on our way to 69,000 and new all time highs, which I still think are possible before the happening, which is coming up on April 20th. We just passed block 83 830,000. I always wanna say 83 1,000. Boy, I wish it was 83,000. Those were the days. Anyways, 80 830,000, yesterday, I think. As I record, it is 832075.
So we did pass that 830,000, which means at that point, we had 8,000 left to get to 840,000. And that's when the happening occurs. Our difficulty right now is sitting at looking like we're gonna have a slight downward adjustment, which is kinda what I was expecting. I've got the note right here. 1.86% down, and that happens in, like, 4 days. Our mempool fees, as I record, are spectacular. They're the lowest we've seen in a long time. 9 sats for per v byte, which means transactions are cheap. That's what that means essentially. It's used to calculate your transactions. Right now, it's jumped up a little bit since I wrote down that number an hour or so ago. Twelve sets per vbyte right now, which is an 86 cent transaction. So you can't complain about that. And our mempool usage is down to right at 800.
So looking pretty good in terms of that. One of the news items that I should probably talk about, but I might not, is that one of the mem one of the mining pools marathon, I'll just go ahead and mention it in passing, They are promoting this new program that people can basically side load transactions, if you wanna call it that. And this is useful for people who wanna pay extra, and they will pay extra, to have those transactions kind of sent to the front of the line for things like these silly BRC 20 tokens. And to be honest, that's all I'm gonna say about that. I'm not gonna get into the politics of it all.
That mempool is welcome to do that. I'm also welcome to move to another mempool if I happen to belong to that one, which I do not. Of course, I use brains. I don't believe in censoring of transactions, but I also think that these transactions that they're doing are stupid. That's my philosophy in a nutshell. Alright. Good stuff. And, of course, so what's Macintosh saying? Is he saying, you know, we're we're gonna hit all time highs by having wow. I clipped that out, but I just kinda went all over the place right there. It's possible.
I don't know that. I'm speculating that that's the case. It certainly looks like that may be the case. And if another week or 2, we'll have a pretty good handle, I think, on whether that's a really strong case, but don't bet on that. Of course, I don't encourage trading here, and anything that I'm doing right here is not trading advice. I just like to take a look at things and kind of see where I think that they're going. We talk all the time here about DCA on satoshi's plebs. You should be dollar cost averaging. That's what that means. Your Bitcoin purchases, whether that's a dollar dollar a day, $5 a day, $300 a month, which I would break down into however me, at least weekly buys. I would not do it once a month. Look, we just saw what did I say? It was $10,000 move in the space of 2 weeks.
As we move through this bull market, you're going to see that repeatedly. So the way to benefit the most from that is what? Buy every day. If you know you're gonna spend $300 a month buying Bitcoin, what is that? Do the math. 30 $10 a day. Go get strike. Yes. It's a custodial app. Yes. You have to put your information in. I don't know of a better way to do it. Well, mine, your Bitcoin, that's one way of doing it, but that requires a lot more capital. And it's riskier, to be honest. But if you can use the strike app, use the daily buy, load your money up every month, buy on the day.
I'm buying Bitcoin $10 worth. Whether the price is 51,700 and whatever I said it was or what it is right now, which is 6 $51,463 or whether it's 47,000. Now if it goes down to that $47,000, I might double buy. I might slide a little extra capital in if I've got it and double down. Don't be trading. Don't be day trading. When I'm talking about trading, I'm just talking about like day trading, like trying to buy Bitcoin on leverage or even just buy Bitcoin without leverage and then sell it at a higher level, for profit.
And then, you know, running that back in, buying lower, whatever. Whatever the trading scheme is, it's just really easy to lose your money doing that and actually not make any gains. So I don't really encourage that at all. Onto the next item. Alright. Our weekly topic. What do you mean Macintosh, the African explosion? I hope that title caught your eye. That's kind of what I was trying. I wanna take a few minutes and and talk about what's going on in Africa. You know, I talk here on St. Lucia's Pub's podcast a lot about maybe what we would call developing countries. They're not it's hard to even use these terms without maybe implying things that aren't necessarily true. But they're not as developed as, say, the United States or Western Europe.
But I believe, especially in the case of a lot of the countries in Africa, that they have an opportunity to leapfrog both United States and these other kind of, quote, first world countries because they're essentially going to be forced into using Bitcoin. And I wanna kind of unpack that. So I've had people on here well, specifically, I've had Eric, from gridless on here from Africa. If I remember correctly, he lives in Kenya and has for most of his life. And he is involved in mining Bitcoin in off grid situations and at the same time, providing power for local African villages. So one of the statistics that really gets under my skin is that there are 600,000,000 people in Africa who don't have access to electricity.
The United States has roughly 330 odd million, I think, people. Almost double that in Africa do not have power. They don't have reliable electrical power. And Eric is doing 2 things. Eric and people like him because it's not just gridless. It's not just Eric and his company. It is a number of companies who are involved in these same things. They are bringing power to remote places in Africa. A number of different currencies. There are, a number of different currencies. There are a band of countries that were former French colonies who use what do they call that currency?
It's based on the it's now based on the euro. I don't remember the exact name for it, but it's essentially pegged to the euro. But even that coin is manipulated certainly in places like Nigeria with the I think they call it the nera. And just like the United States dollar, these these currencies are not based on any they're not backed by gold. They're not backed by anything. And consequently, as what like, what we see in Nigeria, we see hyperinflation. Now there are a lot of factors that go into this, and there are lot of other things that going on in Africa. And I I don't wanna I guess I have to gloss over them at this point just in order to make the point of where I'm going in all this. And I don't wanna be dismissive, but they have political issues. They have issues with world trade.
They have issues with the IMF. Alex Gladstein, for example, wrote a great book on that called, oh, what's it called? Repression? Repression is in the title. I have it over on my shelf, and I can't quite see it from here. There it is. Hidden repression about the IMF. Great book. You should read it even if you don't like to read. The IMF is excuse me, but they're screwing countries all over the world, and it's not right. Where was I at? Talking about, Well, so we see it kind of in real time the breakdown of these economies in Africa. Now what does Africa have going for it? Basically, across the continent, Africa has tremendous natural resources.
Africa has geothermal energy in a lot of places, which I thought was fascinating. That was a a recent interview I heard. Was it with Eric? It was it was maybe it was with Alex. I can't remember, to be honest. And they were talking about geothermal energy there in Africa, which is apparently quite commonplace, especially in the Great Rift Valley, which takes up a large portion of kind of the central part of Africa. So a nice thing about geothermal is unlike hydropower in a lot of places, especially maybe in Africa, it's steady year round. Hydro power can vary at least the load that it generates based on, of course, the amount of rainwater and this kind of thing. And, Africa, as far as I know, all across the continent has basically a dry season and a wet season. So during dry season, they won't have as much water flow. Therefore, they won't have as much electricity.
And so that's not ideal. It but anyways, that was an interesting little side note. It also has abundant other natural resources, things like the rare earth metals that are used for car batteries, for, car for electric batteries for electric vehicles, I should say. The gold, certainly, uranium, bauxite for aluminum. I don't know. All of these kind of things. These countries in Africa have tremendous natural resources, but historically, they have not been able to utilize them properly. For example, the CFA, countries. These countries, these former French colonial countries, a lot of them, if not all of them, still have policies in place where France gets, like, first pick on their resources, and it's at bargain basement prices, of course. So, you know, France happens to be the number one nuclear power, energy power in Europe.
And guess where it gets its uranium from? From these countries in Africa, and they get really good prices on that. So they get, you know, these bargain basement price prices. And in return and also written into this, the nations don't have the ability to even, refine their products. So bauxite, for example, I mentioned that, which is one of the basic components of aluminum. I believe it's the primary component of aluminum, but don't quote me on that. For example, the country will not have the ability to build a bauxite or aluminum factory and produce aluminum, which would be financially much better for that country than shipping out the bauxite, which is what they're forced to do.
So there's a lot of issues going on here. But it's kind of like cell phones. Now follow me with this. This. I'm fixing to switch gears for just a second. I just said that 600,000,000 people in the on the African continent do not have basically reliable energy. However, almost everybody has some kind of cell phone. They don't have landlines like you and I used to have here where in basically most parts of the world. You know, when I was growing up, we had a phone in the kitchen, and you went and picked up the phone and with the cord, and you talked on the phone. And so, basically, Africa never saw that. They went from no phone to a cell phone. And I believe that this is another opportunity for Africa to kind of leapfrog things.
We see basically all the developed world wrestling over how are we gonna deal with Bitcoin. You've got regulation in America. There was another regulatory thing, which we'll be talking about in the news today. Here in the United States, you've got China outright banning Bitcoin, but then they go back and forth and back. You've got all this going on in all these other places. And you see some of this in Africa, but I believe Africa will be forced into using Bitcoin. And I do not believe that's a bad thing. The Nigerian naira is bound to collapse. It will happen. It's just a matter of how long.
And I hope whoever is in charge of that place has enough backbone to pivot and turn to Bitcoin. Because in my opinion, Bitcoin is more stable than their currency. I don't care. It goes up. It goes down. It goes whatever. At least with Bitcoin and digital currency, if you wanna call it that, people have access to US dollars if they wanna put their money in that. I'm not telling someone from Nigeria who I haven't lived their life and experienced hyperinflation. No, sir. Mister Nigerian or miss Nigerian. You cannot have US dollars in digital form, whether that's USDC or USDT or whatever.
Because that's not true Bitcoin. Well, technically, you're correct. But as a Nigerian, maybe they can't handle seeing their money in their bank, so to speak, fluctuate over a 2 year period down 50%. Now the who doesn't love to see it go up 50% or a 100% or 200% in a couple of years during a bull run. But they can't handle the downside of that. So they have to park at least some of their money in something that's a little more stable. Yes. The US dollar is fiat based. Yes. We are experiencing inflation. Yes. Eventually, we will experience either hyperinflation or default, but it's better for them today than the narrow that they have access to anywhere else.
So I cannot sit there here and tell them that they cannot do that or that they should not do that. That is their financial decision. Just like I have my own financial decisions to make based on my own circumstances. So when I see people like that on Twitter who say things like, you shouldn't be putting your money in stable coins, that's not, you know, we it should be all Bitcoin. I say things like, well, I try and stay out of the argument, but here's what I think. That's good for you, buddy. That's good for you. And maybe that works for you. But you're not somebody who's in that situation, so please stop judging them. Anyways, it will give them an opportunity to leap frog, possibly even these developing or these first world countries.
What do I mean by that? Well, you have a large contingent of people in Africa, in Nigeria specifically, but all over Africa who are already working in Bitcoin, who are inventing fascinating things. Fediment, technology is coming out of Africa. With the Fediment dotorg and Fediment, dotxyz, I think. They're a commercial kind of venture there. You've got oh, there's a gentleman, and I think he's from Nigeria. But regardless, he has developed a way to buy and sell Bitcoin, to send Bitcoin, I or at least to send it. Actually, I think he built in the buy and sell capability as well through any feature phone, which is basically any phone in Africa. And what that means is they don't have to have a smartphone.
They don't even have to be on like an LTE network. They can be on any cellular network. And it's mind blowing how it even works. And I I listened to this podcast where they gave a breakdown of it, and I'm a fairly technical person. I had trouble following it, but it sounded like it made sense. And go for it. I don't have a feature phone. Sometimes I wished I did, but, you know, that's what they've got. And as you see Bitcoin, look, the current Bitcoin mining situation is not going to go on forever. Just it will either be broken up through regulation or through overhead.
If I can go down to Africa and mine Bitcoin from a geothermal situation, provide power to an African village and for the first time, and get my power that I need for my miners either in some profit sharing way or through just very cheap. Oh, I'm paying, you know, 2, 3, 4¢ a kilowatt hour. That beats what I'm paying at, Kaboom Racks. I mean, I like Kaboom Racks, but they got me on a mine set up out in Phoenix or Eastern Washington, which that I know is using hydropower, but regardless. 7.9¢. It's right there. I mean, this is not public. This is not a secret. It's right there on their public page.
So I pay 7.9¢ per kilowatt hour. If I could go to Africa and do that for 3¢ kilowatt hour, do you think I would profit? Absolutely. Can Marathon move their operation down to Africa and mine off of a geothermal vent? No. Because they need megawatts of power to build out to for it for the capital expenditure to the capex to make sense. Bitcoin will move into all of these small areas eventually. It's just a matter of time. We'll see that. I believe in the long run, all throughout the Himalayas, for example, Bhutan is leading the way with that. I think they're doing a fabulous job. I would love to see that in Nepal. Right now in Nepal, cryptocurrency is banned. You know why? Because some of these idiot casino coiners were up there, rugging people and causing problems.
That's why I looked into it because I was wanting to go to Nepal. I know some people who have some contacts there and so on and so forth. It was a place that I was looking at. And right now, even though it's a very poor country, I do not have the ability to go in there and set up a mine. I believe one day that will change. I hope it's soon enough that I'm able to do it if I have the ability and the capital. Because I can get power there for cheap and it very much it probably will be like Africa where there are situations where there are villages.
I mean, from what I understand, this is true that they don't have power, but, of course, they've got lots of hydro water in there that we could harness and use to make power. And I can provide them power at a good price, and I can run my Bitcoin operation and make money and everybody's happy. Organically, if nothing else, they will be learning about Bitcoin because I'll be happy to tell them, yeah, we're mining Bitcoin over here. What's Bitcoin? Well, it's sound money, you know, this kind of thing. And one thing will lead to another, and eventually, you'll see those people using that. So I have a lot of hope for what's coming out of Africa in, really, the next 10 to 20 years.
The people, the young people are passionate. They are technology driven even though they're in oftentimes very difficult circumstances. And they have some major problems to solve. And I do believe that Bitcoin can go a long way towards helping them, especially with their power situation. 600 I mean, I it's just staggering to me. 600,000,000 people. This is why, like, when you see pictures of Africa or the world, you know, like at night. You'll see, like, the United States is all lit up except maybe parts of the middle part of it. And then you look at Africa, and it's like, there's nothing. There's no lights because they don't have electricity. I would think it'd be rather obvious that electricity would be a great help to villages for things like lighting so that they can get proper schooling so they can study properly later at night and, you know, these kind of things. I mean, it it the the benefits to that are just endless.
So anyways, I won't go off on that tangent, but but I do expect a huge amount of stuff to come out of Africa over the next few years. I don't wanna continue just to say the same things over and over. But I do believe that the proper components are there, the proper pieces, the proper environment, and it may be tough in a lot of ways for for a lot of these African countries over the next 10 to 20 years. Nigeria, they have to figure something out in regards to, for example, their leadership. And I don't I'm not gonna get in the middle of all that. I don't live in Nigeria. But part of the problem in my opinion is the leadership. And that's there's just so many things going on. It's so difficult as an outsider, frankly, to even comprehend a lot of it. But, wow, the opportunities are there. If the political slash regulatory environment is good enough, you will have companies who can come in and spend capital, build infrastructure, provide power for villages, and this kind of thing at good reasonable prices, and at the same time benefit themselves from doing it.
If you continue to see the youth innovate Bitcoin in ways like Fedimint, in ways like this feature phone cellular network passing of of Bitcoin, which is just mind boggling. Like, it's Bitcoin without Internet. I mean, which is think about that. How much of an anachronism is that? Bitcoin without Internet. But it's possible. These people can make it work. And I think if they get frustrated enough with their current situations, with proper education, which is also happening in various ways, then I think that can make a real difference. So alright. That's gonna be it for that.
We'll move on to some other things, including our supporters, of course. Alright. So we we had some boost this week. I've got 3 total here. All were for the pullback episode, which was episode 158, which I guess I was a little wrong. Not to go back to that, but I'm a little wrong. Maybe shouldn't have called it the pullback. We did pullback. It just didn't go back that far. But, anyways, don't have a perfect track record. That's why you shouldn't be trading. Mere Mortals sent in a boost, row of sticks. 1111. I appreciate that, Karen. And he said regarding or r e regarding, I believe is what he means, the conference, the Bitcoin conference.
I find the ultimate huddle position in AIN reminds me of people who want to extend their life to a 180 and do so by living a joyless, ultra strict, healthy lifestyle. Doi. I think I said that right, Karen. Uh-huh. Yeah. I think we're really very much on the same track there. Now I am in part stacking Bitcoin, stacking sats for my children, for my grandchildren, and there's an element of that to it. But if everybody just stack sats and holds, the network will not grow. Part of it is it look. It is a peer to peer electronic cash system. It's right there in the Bitcoin paper. Anyways, I appreciate that, Karen. Thank you very much. And, yes, we're very much on the same page.
Berno sent us 500 sats. Let's continue our stacking job and no care of what is happening outside her. Thank you, mate. I appreciate that, Berno. I do appreciate that a lot. And then I'm gonna go with Alexis a l three x I s, a a 1000 sats. Great episode again. Thank you. I appreciate that. I like how you push to DCA no matter the Bitcoin direction and price. Regarding oh, he or she is gonna switch to another topic. I absolutely I appreciate that. That makes me feel like I'm doing something right. But I've I've been burned multiple times trading, and I just, man, just DCA. It's so simple. We overthink this stuff.
They continue, regarding UTXO consolidation, I have been doing it every few months, especially during these times of relative low fees. But although I understand the idea of protecting our UTXOs for the future time of high fees, I am concerned about the privacy aspect when Bitcoin is worth a lot more and say you have a relatively Bitcoin of 0.01 Bitcoin. So, what is that? A 1,000,000 sats? And go to pay with it something worth much less, say, 50,000 sats. You're not really asking a question. It's a concern. I get that. I wanted to say great question. It's not really a question, and I can't answer it as a question even in just a short period of time.
I agree. Those are somewhat 2 separate topics. It's funny. I was responding on Twitter to or actually on Noster to someone yesterday and today who was talking about privacy on Bitcoin being a regulatory attack angle from from the government. So in other words, if we start implementing privacy on Bitcoin, that that is going to be a reason for the government to attack Bitcoin in whatever manner. And basically, my position on that is bring it on because the government is going to attack any form of privacy. We've seen this time after time going back to PGP, if I'm not mistaken, was one of the first attacks on privacy, which went, if I'm not mistaken, all the way up to our Supreme Court.
So bring it on because I believe that privacy is a fundamental right of humanity. I believe in our constitution, at least, it is explicitly laid out. I believe in financial privacy as part of that. So if that's what they're going to attack, then let's do it. Let's just get it on and get it out in the courts and let's just find out, are you gonna make this illegal or not? Because I'm not doing this for number go up. I know people sometimes think I'm doing this for number go up. That's an aspect of it that I do enjoy. No doubt. But this is not about number go up. This is about providing censorship resistant privacy, financial transactions, and ability to keep your assets with you regardless of the situation around you. That's what's most important.
We need to build more privacy aspects into the base Bitcoin protocol. What do I mean? By default, somebody shouldn't even be able to tell where I'm sending my money from. I think that should be built into the protocol at the core level and it should be default. I don't think I think you should have to opt out of that. I think Monero does a much better job of this, frankly, than Bitcoin does. And I think that's something we need to learn from. I'm not advocating for Monero. I'm saying we can learn from what they do. Privacy in general hasn't had a whole lot of noise in Bitcoin of late, if ever. I think it needs to become very important because these governmental attacks will happen. And you know what? Here's a reason why I like the ETFs explosion, Wall Street coming in, pension funds using Bitcoin.
Because if I flip on if we do get past the proper test or whatever and privacy based protocol changes get made, do you think the government's gonna say you can't do Bitcoin if Wall Street's all behind Bitcoin? No. They're not gonna do that. They can't. They'll get themselves sacked out of office because that's one thing. You start messing with people's Wall Street money. Goodness. Anyways, I don't I didn't really answer your question because there's not a great answer. I didn't really answer it's not a question again, but I didn't really answer it.
I do hope there's better things down the road. How about that, Alexis? I do. That's something that I'm a staunch advocate for, and I whenever I see it come up, I'm always that's my little soapbox. And we'll talk some more on here about ways that you could do that. Basically, your UTXO consolidation would need to be, what I would do is I would basically consolidate all my UTXOs into one set. Let's say I've got it in cold storage, and then I would run that through a coin join. And another thing I might consider doing is keeping a smaller amount separate that if I do buy well, that's my savings. I don't pull out of that for small purchases and things like that. I would do that separately through lightning, if that makes sense. If I'm out buying a hamburger with my bitcoin through strike, I don't really care about privacy on that. Maybe I should, but I don't.
Right? So I I don't know. That's one way of looking at it. But, again, we just had to have some better base level protocol stuff done there, and I really do hope to see that. So I do appreciate the boost. Thank you very much. Everybody had kind words this week. I I always appreciate. That makes me feel good. We also had a bit of a good bit of streaming. In fact, I noticed 2 people were actually streaming same time, which I haven't seen that in a while, so that was kinda funny, kinda cool, whatever. So you'd see 1, then you'd see the other. I don't know. Hey. I'm a nut. What can I say? Total 4,774 sats this week.
I appreciate that very, very much. Alright. Let's move on to the news. The big news I really wanted to talk about because it does very much go hand in hand with what we were just talking about, Nigeria. Nigeria, is blocking access to Binance, Coinbase, other places like that, because they are trying to keep people out of crypto because they want it in their stupid naira that is dying as I talked about. And I apologize if I if people are taking offense at this. I don't think I would be saying anything offensive, but the currency is dying, and they don't want people leaving the sinking ship. And I think that's rather sad.
So that was kind of the big news of the week. I will have a link to that in the show notes. You can read about that. Of course, people are just using VPNs and this kind of stuff to get around that. So the very thing, Nigeria, the very thing that could be helping them, they're banning. No. You can't have access to that. By the way, Nigeria has one of the world's largest oil reserves, and yet this is what we're dealing with in Nigeria. You've got a failing currency. Makes you think. I wonder why that is. Because corruption, because probably because of some stuff to do.
And by the way, while I finish right before I finish up with the rest of these, I will be talking some more about CoinJoin down the road, in particular. 8,000 blocks till, halvening. I think I already mentioned that. That happened just a few hours ago. Honduras, the National Banking and Securities Commission bans banks from dealing with Bitcoin due to regulatory concern. So they're not banning Bitcoin apparently. And in fact, if I'm remembering, Honduras has a trade zone where they've got, like, all kinds of freedom around Bitcoin. So it's a little wishy washy. Don't really know what's going on there. The EIA.
So I don't remember what EIA stands for, but they are the ones who were trying to get I think I've talked about this. They were trying to get all the minors to, the major miners like Marathon, for example, Riot. They wanna know how much power they're using because they're going to try and attack them based on their power. Even though never mind. I'm not even gonna go off on that. They have been blocked at least temporarily. They're going to do they well, they were requiring minors to do this survey within just a few days. It was a complete overreach. They've been blocked.
So that was good. As part of this, Craig Wright trial, which I've not covered because it's just not news for me. But it was interesting that, some of the earliest emails between, a guy named Marty, m a r t I I, Maumee, and and Satoshi were released. These are early, like, 2,009. The one right here is second of excuse me. February 5, 2009, if I'm reading this correctly. I hope this is not the European way where they flip it around. Anyways, regardless, it was in 2,009. The a whole, like, 120 pages worth. Very interesting stuff. You can take a look at that, if you would like.
And that's it. Not a huge amount of news this week. We will just keep building up those ETFs. I haven't talked about them a whole lot, but, yeah, they have continued to go up. It's crazy. They're getting, in some cases, to be quite large. And I do believe as much as I don't really care for an ETF or whatever, I do believe that those type instruments, those type financial instruments that Wall Street will utilize. You know, if if the treasury says, no. We're gonna ban Bitcoin. Do you think that BlackRock at this point would say that's a great idea, Treasury? No. They have 1,000,000,000 of dollars in that asset at this point. They would fight that as they should.
Anyways, I think that will actually help protect us down the road here in the United States. I do wanna mention, as I do from time to time, every couple weeks, if you clip an episode, if you go to an app like fountain and you clip, you know, 1, 2, 3 minute clip from any episode, I can support that. I can give you some value back for that. You can post that up. You're providing value for me spreading the message. If it's the current episode or maybe the one right after it, I'll give you 500 sat boost. If it's an older episode, it's 300 sat. It's a great way for you to make some treasure, and it's a way for you to help me out as well. So you're welcome to do that. I haven't seen any of that going on lately. But, and if I miss you, please reach out to me either by email at macintosh@at, satoshisdashplebs.com or certainly on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech.
So, of course, here at Satoshis Plebs, we support podcasting 2.0. We're a value for value podcast. I talk about that all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything. You can like that. You can support the podcast in several ways. You can provide, what amounts to talent clipping these episodes or time, if you wanna put it that way, just like what I'm talking about there, that would be a great way to support the show. You can tell somebody, hey. These Toshi's pledge podcast is great. You should go listen to it. That's another way using your time to provide value to this show. I would love to have some more listeners.
That's one way you can do it. You can do it through treasure as we say. How do you do that? Grab a podcasting 2.0 app if you don't already have one. You can go to podcastapps.com. And they built a new website, which I need to get the link for. Pretty fancy stuff. But for now, you can go here. There's a list of apps there. Try one out. Try fountain. What's the one I'm listening to right now? Podcast guru, another great one. Hook up your wallet to it, and you can stream sats or you can boost just like these people did earlier and others that I they were streaming, and I didn't mention them by name.
So it's a great way to provide support for this show. Of course, we're always looking, right now, 25,000 sats per episode, which would be, like, $50 a month, I think, in total, which would really go a long way towards helping me get new equipment to upgrade some of my stuff, hosting this kind of thing. I've got projects I'm always working on. You can provide help there as well. Right now, I happen to be working on a chat room. I'm setting up an IRC server, I think, is what I've decided. I went and did some other things, and they didn't really pan out the way I wanted. They don't really seem to provide the real functionality that I want. Once I get the chat room set up, I'm actually going that may give you an opportunity to kinda get on and see the craziness in action.
You could help out there, those type projects, if that's something that you're interested in. Anyways, 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, like I said a minute ago. I'm on Mastodon at McIntosh at podcast index dot social. And, of course, email at McIntosh at sastoshis-plebs dotcom. Thanks again. Stay humble. Go out. Make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
Hey Pleb Nation. Today is February 26th, and this is episode 159 of Satoshis Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is on the African explosion. Alright. We got the Earl Gray going. Nice and hot, of course, as I like it, along with some honey. We're going to start, of course, with our market update. We're gonna talk about Africa and what I see as its future in general, of course, generalizing, and then we'll talk about our supporters in the news. And some of the news actually is coming from Africa this week. But we begin, as always, with our market update. What happened this week? Macintosh. I'm so excited. I'm sitting on the edge of my my seat.
Not really. Whole lot of nothing. If you recall last week, I was thinking that we may go down and the market pressure to go up, I'm afraid, is just too much. It's interesting. One of the things that I've learned looking looking at the charts in different time frames can be very instructive. And what I mean is you've got you've got charts. I think they even have sub one minute charts. But on trading view, like, 1 minute and 3 minute and 5 minute, 12, 15, 24, 30, and then an hour, 4 hour, and up to days, weeks, I think a month is the highest. What do I mean by that? So each candle on the chart, so you've got these indicators on the chart called candles, is represented by one of those periods of time. On a one minute chart, each candle is 1 minute. On a one day chart, each candle is one day.
So they give different views of the market of the asset, in this case, of Bitcoin. I tend to kind of move through different time frames because they do give you different perspectives. Now one of the indicators that I love is called the Bollinger Bands. They've been around for a long time. They were invented by someone whose last name was Bollinger. That's where they get their name from. And with Bollinger Bands, you can see the activity as it expands and contracts. What do I mean by that? There will be times when the market will just kind of go along sideways without a whole lot of excitement. We saw a lot of that this week.
But there are times when you have an explosion of activity, when you see price shoot up or shoot down. For example, on the 4 hour chart, we saw the last explosion essentially happen back on February 7th, which would be when we left, 42 thou 43,000. And we climbed over the course from February 7th up through February 14th for a week, up to 52,000. Almost well, 52,400. So within a few hours of that, really 53,000. So one week, we had this expansion of the Bollinger Bands, which you can very clearly see on this 4 hour chart. And you you saw the price move $10,000 over the course of a week.
Well, what have we done since then? We've gone sideways. So that was on February 14th, essentially Valentine's Day. We are now on February 25th as I record on Sunday night, and we have gone basically between 50,000 and some change and that 53,000 mark, which we've hit twice. But what we've seen is these Bollinger Bands have contracted. And again, what does this indicate? We've got this sideways action. But when they open back up and it's it's time, it will either explode upwards or it will explode downwards. So we could still get that 47 $1,000 that I've mentioned multiple times.
But to be honest, I think given what I'm looking at and not just the Bollinger Bands, I believe we're gonna go up. It tried to even go down several times. So back on February 17th, so that was a Saturday. That was a week ago. Yesterday, we dipped down to 50,608. And then just a day or so ago when was this? Friday night Friday afternoon, East Coast time on United States. We got down to, 50,500. So kind of almost that exact same place, basically, lined up very well. But there was a lot of support right above that. So we had multiple touch points above that, and then it pushed down below that. And then in both cases, immediately rebounded within a few hours.
So we had that on Friday night excuse me, Friday afternoon. And from there, it went right back up to where we're at right now. We had a market close, which I suppose I should say, $51,730. That was for the week here just a couple of hours ago. So we haven't broken out of this little box, but we will. These Bollinger Bands will ex expand as they they're showing the market energy essentially. I don't know how else to describe it. That's probably not a really good way of putting it, but it does indicate the market activity. And we will either go up strongly or we will go down. I'm guessing we're gonna go up, hit $54,000, and then we will find out if we're gonna reverse at that point.
I pointed out $54,000, that fifty 4 to $55,000 range several times. I think we're going to reach it. We could potentially push right through it because we're certainly gathering the energy. And then if we flip that into support, then we would be on our way to 69,000 and new all time highs, which I still think are possible before the happening, which is coming up on April 20th. We just passed block 83 830,000. I always wanna say 83 1,000. Boy, I wish it was 83,000. Those were the days. Anyways, 80 830,000, yesterday, I think. As I record, it is 832075.
So we did pass that 830,000, which means at that point, we had 8,000 left to get to 840,000. And that's when the happening occurs. Our difficulty right now is sitting at looking like we're gonna have a slight downward adjustment, which is kinda what I was expecting. I've got the note right here. 1.86% down, and that happens in, like, 4 days. Our mempool fees, as I record, are spectacular. They're the lowest we've seen in a long time. 9 sats for per v byte, which means transactions are cheap. That's what that means essentially. It's used to calculate your transactions. Right now, it's jumped up a little bit since I wrote down that number an hour or so ago. Twelve sets per vbyte right now, which is an 86 cent transaction. So you can't complain about that. And our mempool usage is down to right at 800.
So looking pretty good in terms of that. One of the news items that I should probably talk about, but I might not, is that one of the mem one of the mining pools marathon, I'll just go ahead and mention it in passing, They are promoting this new program that people can basically side load transactions, if you wanna call it that. And this is useful for people who wanna pay extra, and they will pay extra, to have those transactions kind of sent to the front of the line for things like these silly BRC 20 tokens. And to be honest, that's all I'm gonna say about that. I'm not gonna get into the politics of it all.
That mempool is welcome to do that. I'm also welcome to move to another mempool if I happen to belong to that one, which I do not. Of course, I use brains. I don't believe in censoring of transactions, but I also think that these transactions that they're doing are stupid. That's my philosophy in a nutshell. Alright. Good stuff. And, of course, so what's Macintosh saying? Is he saying, you know, we're we're gonna hit all time highs by having wow. I clipped that out, but I just kinda went all over the place right there. It's possible.
I don't know that. I'm speculating that that's the case. It certainly looks like that may be the case. And if another week or 2, we'll have a pretty good handle, I think, on whether that's a really strong case, but don't bet on that. Of course, I don't encourage trading here, and anything that I'm doing right here is not trading advice. I just like to take a look at things and kind of see where I think that they're going. We talk all the time here about DCA on satoshi's plebs. You should be dollar cost averaging. That's what that means. Your Bitcoin purchases, whether that's a dollar dollar a day, $5 a day, $300 a month, which I would break down into however me, at least weekly buys. I would not do it once a month. Look, we just saw what did I say? It was $10,000 move in the space of 2 weeks.
As we move through this bull market, you're going to see that repeatedly. So the way to benefit the most from that is what? Buy every day. If you know you're gonna spend $300 a month buying Bitcoin, what is that? Do the math. 30 $10 a day. Go get strike. Yes. It's a custodial app. Yes. You have to put your information in. I don't know of a better way to do it. Well, mine, your Bitcoin, that's one way of doing it, but that requires a lot more capital. And it's riskier, to be honest. But if you can use the strike app, use the daily buy, load your money up every month, buy on the day.
I'm buying Bitcoin $10 worth. Whether the price is 51,700 and whatever I said it was or what it is right now, which is 6 $51,463 or whether it's 47,000. Now if it goes down to that $47,000, I might double buy. I might slide a little extra capital in if I've got it and double down. Don't be trading. Don't be day trading. When I'm talking about trading, I'm just talking about like day trading, like trying to buy Bitcoin on leverage or even just buy Bitcoin without leverage and then sell it at a higher level, for profit.
And then, you know, running that back in, buying lower, whatever. Whatever the trading scheme is, it's just really easy to lose your money doing that and actually not make any gains. So I don't really encourage that at all. Onto the next item. Alright. Our weekly topic. What do you mean Macintosh, the African explosion? I hope that title caught your eye. That's kind of what I was trying. I wanna take a few minutes and and talk about what's going on in Africa. You know, I talk here on St. Lucia's Pub's podcast a lot about maybe what we would call developing countries. They're not it's hard to even use these terms without maybe implying things that aren't necessarily true. But they're not as developed as, say, the United States or Western Europe.
But I believe, especially in the case of a lot of the countries in Africa, that they have an opportunity to leapfrog both United States and these other kind of, quote, first world countries because they're essentially going to be forced into using Bitcoin. And I wanna kind of unpack that. So I've had people on here well, specifically, I've had Eric, from gridless on here from Africa. If I remember correctly, he lives in Kenya and has for most of his life. And he is involved in mining Bitcoin in off grid situations and at the same time, providing power for local African villages. So one of the statistics that really gets under my skin is that there are 600,000,000 people in Africa who don't have access to electricity.
The United States has roughly 330 odd million, I think, people. Almost double that in Africa do not have power. They don't have reliable electrical power. And Eric is doing 2 things. Eric and people like him because it's not just gridless. It's not just Eric and his company. It is a number of companies who are involved in these same things. They are bringing power to remote places in Africa. A number of different currencies. There are, a number of different currencies. There are a band of countries that were former French colonies who use what do they call that currency?
It's based on the it's now based on the euro. I don't remember the exact name for it, but it's essentially pegged to the euro. But even that coin is manipulated certainly in places like Nigeria with the I think they call it the nera. And just like the United States dollar, these these currencies are not based on any they're not backed by gold. They're not backed by anything. And consequently, as what like, what we see in Nigeria, we see hyperinflation. Now there are a lot of factors that go into this, and there are lot of other things that going on in Africa. And I I don't wanna I guess I have to gloss over them at this point just in order to make the point of where I'm going in all this. And I don't wanna be dismissive, but they have political issues. They have issues with world trade.
They have issues with the IMF. Alex Gladstein, for example, wrote a great book on that called, oh, what's it called? Repression? Repression is in the title. I have it over on my shelf, and I can't quite see it from here. There it is. Hidden repression about the IMF. Great book. You should read it even if you don't like to read. The IMF is excuse me, but they're screwing countries all over the world, and it's not right. Where was I at? Talking about, Well, so we see it kind of in real time the breakdown of these economies in Africa. Now what does Africa have going for it? Basically, across the continent, Africa has tremendous natural resources.
Africa has geothermal energy in a lot of places, which I thought was fascinating. That was a a recent interview I heard. Was it with Eric? It was it was maybe it was with Alex. I can't remember, to be honest. And they were talking about geothermal energy there in Africa, which is apparently quite commonplace, especially in the Great Rift Valley, which takes up a large portion of kind of the central part of Africa. So a nice thing about geothermal is unlike hydropower in a lot of places, especially maybe in Africa, it's steady year round. Hydro power can vary at least the load that it generates based on, of course, the amount of rainwater and this kind of thing. And, Africa, as far as I know, all across the continent has basically a dry season and a wet season. So during dry season, they won't have as much water flow. Therefore, they won't have as much electricity.
And so that's not ideal. It but anyways, that was an interesting little side note. It also has abundant other natural resources, things like the rare earth metals that are used for car batteries, for, car for electric batteries for electric vehicles, I should say. The gold, certainly, uranium, bauxite for aluminum. I don't know. All of these kind of things. These countries in Africa have tremendous natural resources, but historically, they have not been able to utilize them properly. For example, the CFA, countries. These countries, these former French colonial countries, a lot of them, if not all of them, still have policies in place where France gets, like, first pick on their resources, and it's at bargain basement prices, of course. So, you know, France happens to be the number one nuclear power, energy power in Europe.
And guess where it gets its uranium from? From these countries in Africa, and they get really good prices on that. So they get, you know, these bargain basement price prices. And in return and also written into this, the nations don't have the ability to even, refine their products. So bauxite, for example, I mentioned that, which is one of the basic components of aluminum. I believe it's the primary component of aluminum, but don't quote me on that. For example, the country will not have the ability to build a bauxite or aluminum factory and produce aluminum, which would be financially much better for that country than shipping out the bauxite, which is what they're forced to do.
So there's a lot of issues going on here. But it's kind of like cell phones. Now follow me with this. This. I'm fixing to switch gears for just a second. I just said that 600,000,000 people in the on the African continent do not have basically reliable energy. However, almost everybody has some kind of cell phone. They don't have landlines like you and I used to have here where in basically most parts of the world. You know, when I was growing up, we had a phone in the kitchen, and you went and picked up the phone and with the cord, and you talked on the phone. And so, basically, Africa never saw that. They went from no phone to a cell phone. And I believe that this is another opportunity for Africa to kind of leapfrog things.
We see basically all the developed world wrestling over how are we gonna deal with Bitcoin. You've got regulation in America. There was another regulatory thing, which we'll be talking about in the news today. Here in the United States, you've got China outright banning Bitcoin, but then they go back and forth and back. You've got all this going on in all these other places. And you see some of this in Africa, but I believe Africa will be forced into using Bitcoin. And I do not believe that's a bad thing. The Nigerian naira is bound to collapse. It will happen. It's just a matter of how long.
And I hope whoever is in charge of that place has enough backbone to pivot and turn to Bitcoin. Because in my opinion, Bitcoin is more stable than their currency. I don't care. It goes up. It goes down. It goes whatever. At least with Bitcoin and digital currency, if you wanna call it that, people have access to US dollars if they wanna put their money in that. I'm not telling someone from Nigeria who I haven't lived their life and experienced hyperinflation. No, sir. Mister Nigerian or miss Nigerian. You cannot have US dollars in digital form, whether that's USDC or USDT or whatever.
Because that's not true Bitcoin. Well, technically, you're correct. But as a Nigerian, maybe they can't handle seeing their money in their bank, so to speak, fluctuate over a 2 year period down 50%. Now the who doesn't love to see it go up 50% or a 100% or 200% in a couple of years during a bull run. But they can't handle the downside of that. So they have to park at least some of their money in something that's a little more stable. Yes. The US dollar is fiat based. Yes. We are experiencing inflation. Yes. Eventually, we will experience either hyperinflation or default, but it's better for them today than the narrow that they have access to anywhere else.
So I cannot sit there here and tell them that they cannot do that or that they should not do that. That is their financial decision. Just like I have my own financial decisions to make based on my own circumstances. So when I see people like that on Twitter who say things like, you shouldn't be putting your money in stable coins, that's not, you know, we it should be all Bitcoin. I say things like, well, I try and stay out of the argument, but here's what I think. That's good for you, buddy. That's good for you. And maybe that works for you. But you're not somebody who's in that situation, so please stop judging them. Anyways, it will give them an opportunity to leap frog, possibly even these developing or these first world countries.
What do I mean by that? Well, you have a large contingent of people in Africa, in Nigeria specifically, but all over Africa who are already working in Bitcoin, who are inventing fascinating things. Fediment, technology is coming out of Africa. With the Fediment dotorg and Fediment, dotxyz, I think. They're a commercial kind of venture there. You've got oh, there's a gentleman, and I think he's from Nigeria. But regardless, he has developed a way to buy and sell Bitcoin, to send Bitcoin, I or at least to send it. Actually, I think he built in the buy and sell capability as well through any feature phone, which is basically any phone in Africa. And what that means is they don't have to have a smartphone.
They don't even have to be on like an LTE network. They can be on any cellular network. And it's mind blowing how it even works. And I I listened to this podcast where they gave a breakdown of it, and I'm a fairly technical person. I had trouble following it, but it sounded like it made sense. And go for it. I don't have a feature phone. Sometimes I wished I did, but, you know, that's what they've got. And as you see Bitcoin, look, the current Bitcoin mining situation is not going to go on forever. Just it will either be broken up through regulation or through overhead.
If I can go down to Africa and mine Bitcoin from a geothermal situation, provide power to an African village and for the first time, and get my power that I need for my miners either in some profit sharing way or through just very cheap. Oh, I'm paying, you know, 2, 3, 4¢ a kilowatt hour. That beats what I'm paying at, Kaboom Racks. I mean, I like Kaboom Racks, but they got me on a mine set up out in Phoenix or Eastern Washington, which that I know is using hydropower, but regardless. 7.9¢. It's right there. I mean, this is not public. This is not a secret. It's right there on their public page.
So I pay 7.9¢ per kilowatt hour. If I could go to Africa and do that for 3¢ kilowatt hour, do you think I would profit? Absolutely. Can Marathon move their operation down to Africa and mine off of a geothermal vent? No. Because they need megawatts of power to build out to for it for the capital expenditure to the capex to make sense. Bitcoin will move into all of these small areas eventually. It's just a matter of time. We'll see that. I believe in the long run, all throughout the Himalayas, for example, Bhutan is leading the way with that. I think they're doing a fabulous job. I would love to see that in Nepal. Right now in Nepal, cryptocurrency is banned. You know why? Because some of these idiot casino coiners were up there, rugging people and causing problems.
That's why I looked into it because I was wanting to go to Nepal. I know some people who have some contacts there and so on and so forth. It was a place that I was looking at. And right now, even though it's a very poor country, I do not have the ability to go in there and set up a mine. I believe one day that will change. I hope it's soon enough that I'm able to do it if I have the ability and the capital. Because I can get power there for cheap and it very much it probably will be like Africa where there are situations where there are villages.
I mean, from what I understand, this is true that they don't have power, but, of course, they've got lots of hydro water in there that we could harness and use to make power. And I can provide them power at a good price, and I can run my Bitcoin operation and make money and everybody's happy. Organically, if nothing else, they will be learning about Bitcoin because I'll be happy to tell them, yeah, we're mining Bitcoin over here. What's Bitcoin? Well, it's sound money, you know, this kind of thing. And one thing will lead to another, and eventually, you'll see those people using that. So I have a lot of hope for what's coming out of Africa in, really, the next 10 to 20 years.
The people, the young people are passionate. They are technology driven even though they're in oftentimes very difficult circumstances. And they have some major problems to solve. And I do believe that Bitcoin can go a long way towards helping them, especially with their power situation. 600 I mean, I it's just staggering to me. 600,000,000 people. This is why, like, when you see pictures of Africa or the world, you know, like at night. You'll see, like, the United States is all lit up except maybe parts of the middle part of it. And then you look at Africa, and it's like, there's nothing. There's no lights because they don't have electricity. I would think it'd be rather obvious that electricity would be a great help to villages for things like lighting so that they can get proper schooling so they can study properly later at night and, you know, these kind of things. I mean, it it the the benefits to that are just endless.
So anyways, I won't go off on that tangent, but but I do expect a huge amount of stuff to come out of Africa over the next few years. I don't wanna continue just to say the same things over and over. But I do believe that the proper components are there, the proper pieces, the proper environment, and it may be tough in a lot of ways for for a lot of these African countries over the next 10 to 20 years. Nigeria, they have to figure something out in regards to, for example, their leadership. And I don't I'm not gonna get in the middle of all that. I don't live in Nigeria. But part of the problem in my opinion is the leadership. And that's there's just so many things going on. It's so difficult as an outsider, frankly, to even comprehend a lot of it. But, wow, the opportunities are there. If the political slash regulatory environment is good enough, you will have companies who can come in and spend capital, build infrastructure, provide power for villages, and this kind of thing at good reasonable prices, and at the same time benefit themselves from doing it.
If you continue to see the youth innovate Bitcoin in ways like Fedimint, in ways like this feature phone cellular network passing of of Bitcoin, which is just mind boggling. Like, it's Bitcoin without Internet. I mean, which is think about that. How much of an anachronism is that? Bitcoin without Internet. But it's possible. These people can make it work. And I think if they get frustrated enough with their current situations, with proper education, which is also happening in various ways, then I think that can make a real difference. So alright. That's gonna be it for that.
We'll move on to some other things, including our supporters, of course. Alright. So we we had some boost this week. I've got 3 total here. All were for the pullback episode, which was episode 158, which I guess I was a little wrong. Not to go back to that, but I'm a little wrong. Maybe shouldn't have called it the pullback. We did pullback. It just didn't go back that far. But, anyways, don't have a perfect track record. That's why you shouldn't be trading. Mere Mortals sent in a boost, row of sticks. 1111. I appreciate that, Karen. And he said regarding or r e regarding, I believe is what he means, the conference, the Bitcoin conference.
I find the ultimate huddle position in AIN reminds me of people who want to extend their life to a 180 and do so by living a joyless, ultra strict, healthy lifestyle. Doi. I think I said that right, Karen. Uh-huh. Yeah. I think we're really very much on the same track there. Now I am in part stacking Bitcoin, stacking sats for my children, for my grandchildren, and there's an element of that to it. But if everybody just stack sats and holds, the network will not grow. Part of it is it look. It is a peer to peer electronic cash system. It's right there in the Bitcoin paper. Anyways, I appreciate that, Karen. Thank you very much. And, yes, we're very much on the same page.
Berno sent us 500 sats. Let's continue our stacking job and no care of what is happening outside her. Thank you, mate. I appreciate that, Berno. I do appreciate that a lot. And then I'm gonna go with Alexis a l three x I s, a a 1000 sats. Great episode again. Thank you. I appreciate that. I like how you push to DCA no matter the Bitcoin direction and price. Regarding oh, he or she is gonna switch to another topic. I absolutely I appreciate that. That makes me feel like I'm doing something right. But I've I've been burned multiple times trading, and I just, man, just DCA. It's so simple. We overthink this stuff.
They continue, regarding UTXO consolidation, I have been doing it every few months, especially during these times of relative low fees. But although I understand the idea of protecting our UTXOs for the future time of high fees, I am concerned about the privacy aspect when Bitcoin is worth a lot more and say you have a relatively Bitcoin of 0.01 Bitcoin. So, what is that? A 1,000,000 sats? And go to pay with it something worth much less, say, 50,000 sats. You're not really asking a question. It's a concern. I get that. I wanted to say great question. It's not really a question, and I can't answer it as a question even in just a short period of time.
I agree. Those are somewhat 2 separate topics. It's funny. I was responding on Twitter to or actually on Noster to someone yesterday and today who was talking about privacy on Bitcoin being a regulatory attack angle from from the government. So in other words, if we start implementing privacy on Bitcoin, that that is going to be a reason for the government to attack Bitcoin in whatever manner. And basically, my position on that is bring it on because the government is going to attack any form of privacy. We've seen this time after time going back to PGP, if I'm not mistaken, was one of the first attacks on privacy, which went, if I'm not mistaken, all the way up to our Supreme Court.
So bring it on because I believe that privacy is a fundamental right of humanity. I believe in our constitution, at least, it is explicitly laid out. I believe in financial privacy as part of that. So if that's what they're going to attack, then let's do it. Let's just get it on and get it out in the courts and let's just find out, are you gonna make this illegal or not? Because I'm not doing this for number go up. I know people sometimes think I'm doing this for number go up. That's an aspect of it that I do enjoy. No doubt. But this is not about number go up. This is about providing censorship resistant privacy, financial transactions, and ability to keep your assets with you regardless of the situation around you. That's what's most important.
We need to build more privacy aspects into the base Bitcoin protocol. What do I mean? By default, somebody shouldn't even be able to tell where I'm sending my money from. I think that should be built into the protocol at the core level and it should be default. I don't think I think you should have to opt out of that. I think Monero does a much better job of this, frankly, than Bitcoin does. And I think that's something we need to learn from. I'm not advocating for Monero. I'm saying we can learn from what they do. Privacy in general hasn't had a whole lot of noise in Bitcoin of late, if ever. I think it needs to become very important because these governmental attacks will happen. And you know what? Here's a reason why I like the ETFs explosion, Wall Street coming in, pension funds using Bitcoin.
Because if I flip on if we do get past the proper test or whatever and privacy based protocol changes get made, do you think the government's gonna say you can't do Bitcoin if Wall Street's all behind Bitcoin? No. They're not gonna do that. They can't. They'll get themselves sacked out of office because that's one thing. You start messing with people's Wall Street money. Goodness. Anyways, I don't I didn't really answer your question because there's not a great answer. I didn't really answer it's not a question again, but I didn't really answer it.
I do hope there's better things down the road. How about that, Alexis? I do. That's something that I'm a staunch advocate for, and I whenever I see it come up, I'm always that's my little soapbox. And we'll talk some more on here about ways that you could do that. Basically, your UTXO consolidation would need to be, what I would do is I would basically consolidate all my UTXOs into one set. Let's say I've got it in cold storage, and then I would run that through a coin join. And another thing I might consider doing is keeping a smaller amount separate that if I do buy well, that's my savings. I don't pull out of that for small purchases and things like that. I would do that separately through lightning, if that makes sense. If I'm out buying a hamburger with my bitcoin through strike, I don't really care about privacy on that. Maybe I should, but I don't.
Right? So I I don't know. That's one way of looking at it. But, again, we just had to have some better base level protocol stuff done there, and I really do hope to see that. So I do appreciate the boost. Thank you very much. Everybody had kind words this week. I I always appreciate. That makes me feel good. We also had a bit of a good bit of streaming. In fact, I noticed 2 people were actually streaming same time, which I haven't seen that in a while, so that was kinda funny, kinda cool, whatever. So you'd see 1, then you'd see the other. I don't know. Hey. I'm a nut. What can I say? Total 4,774 sats this week.
I appreciate that very, very much. Alright. Let's move on to the news. The big news I really wanted to talk about because it does very much go hand in hand with what we were just talking about, Nigeria. Nigeria, is blocking access to Binance, Coinbase, other places like that, because they are trying to keep people out of crypto because they want it in their stupid naira that is dying as I talked about. And I apologize if I if people are taking offense at this. I don't think I would be saying anything offensive, but the currency is dying, and they don't want people leaving the sinking ship. And I think that's rather sad.
So that was kind of the big news of the week. I will have a link to that in the show notes. You can read about that. Of course, people are just using VPNs and this kind of stuff to get around that. So the very thing, Nigeria, the very thing that could be helping them, they're banning. No. You can't have access to that. By the way, Nigeria has one of the world's largest oil reserves, and yet this is what we're dealing with in Nigeria. You've got a failing currency. Makes you think. I wonder why that is. Because corruption, because probably because of some stuff to do.
And by the way, while I finish right before I finish up with the rest of these, I will be talking some more about CoinJoin down the road, in particular. 8,000 blocks till, halvening. I think I already mentioned that. That happened just a few hours ago. Honduras, the National Banking and Securities Commission bans banks from dealing with Bitcoin due to regulatory concern. So they're not banning Bitcoin apparently. And in fact, if I'm remembering, Honduras has a trade zone where they've got, like, all kinds of freedom around Bitcoin. So it's a little wishy washy. Don't really know what's going on there. The EIA.
So I don't remember what EIA stands for, but they are the ones who were trying to get I think I've talked about this. They were trying to get all the minors to, the major miners like Marathon, for example, Riot. They wanna know how much power they're using because they're going to try and attack them based on their power. Even though never mind. I'm not even gonna go off on that. They have been blocked at least temporarily. They're going to do they well, they were requiring minors to do this survey within just a few days. It was a complete overreach. They've been blocked.
So that was good. As part of this, Craig Wright trial, which I've not covered because it's just not news for me. But it was interesting that, some of the earliest emails between, a guy named Marty, m a r t I I, Maumee, and and Satoshi were released. These are early, like, 2,009. The one right here is second of excuse me. February 5, 2009, if I'm reading this correctly. I hope this is not the European way where they flip it around. Anyways, regardless, it was in 2,009. The a whole, like, 120 pages worth. Very interesting stuff. You can take a look at that, if you would like.
And that's it. Not a huge amount of news this week. We will just keep building up those ETFs. I haven't talked about them a whole lot, but, yeah, they have continued to go up. It's crazy. They're getting, in some cases, to be quite large. And I do believe as much as I don't really care for an ETF or whatever, I do believe that those type instruments, those type financial instruments that Wall Street will utilize. You know, if if the treasury says, no. We're gonna ban Bitcoin. Do you think that BlackRock at this point would say that's a great idea, Treasury? No. They have 1,000,000,000 of dollars in that asset at this point. They would fight that as they should.
Anyways, I think that will actually help protect us down the road here in the United States. I do wanna mention, as I do from time to time, every couple weeks, if you clip an episode, if you go to an app like fountain and you clip, you know, 1, 2, 3 minute clip from any episode, I can support that. I can give you some value back for that. You can post that up. You're providing value for me spreading the message. If it's the current episode or maybe the one right after it, I'll give you 500 sat boost. If it's an older episode, it's 300 sat. It's a great way for you to make some treasure, and it's a way for you to help me out as well. So you're welcome to do that. I haven't seen any of that going on lately. But, and if I miss you, please reach out to me either by email at macintosh@at, satoshisdashplebs.com or certainly on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech.
So, of course, here at Satoshis Plebs, we support podcasting 2.0. We're a value for value podcast. I talk about that all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything. You can like that. You can support the podcast in several ways. You can provide, what amounts to talent clipping these episodes or time, if you wanna put it that way, just like what I'm talking about there, that would be a great way to support the show. You can tell somebody, hey. These Toshi's pledge podcast is great. You should go listen to it. That's another way using your time to provide value to this show. I would love to have some more listeners.
That's one way you can do it. You can do it through treasure as we say. How do you do that? Grab a podcasting 2.0 app if you don't already have one. You can go to podcastapps.com. And they built a new website, which I need to get the link for. Pretty fancy stuff. But for now, you can go here. There's a list of apps there. Try one out. Try fountain. What's the one I'm listening to right now? Podcast guru, another great one. Hook up your wallet to it, and you can stream sats or you can boost just like these people did earlier and others that I they were streaming, and I didn't mention them by name.
So it's a great way to provide support for this show. Of course, we're always looking, right now, 25,000 sats per episode, which would be, like, $50 a month, I think, in total, which would really go a long way towards helping me get new equipment to upgrade some of my stuff, hosting this kind of thing. I've got projects I'm always working on. You can provide help there as well. Right now, I happen to be working on a chat room. I'm setting up an IRC server, I think, is what I've decided. I went and did some other things, and they didn't really pan out the way I wanted. They don't really seem to provide the real functionality that I want. Once I get the chat room set up, I'm actually going that may give you an opportunity to kinda get on and see the craziness in action.
You could help out there, those type projects, if that's something that you're interested in. Anyways, 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, like I said a minute ago. I'm on Mastodon at McIntosh at podcast index dot social. And, of course, email at McIntosh at sastoshis-plebs dotcom. Thanks again. Stay humble. Go out. Make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
