Egypt's currency was unpegged this week as part of a plan to secure eight billion dollars of loans from the IMF/World Bank. Within 48 hours the currency lost about 1/3rd of it's value against the USD. As normal this was all tied into stipulations that the IMF require for this so called "bailout". Let's discuss!
Bitcoin Weekly Close Price
March 10rd, 2024: $69,025
Block Height at Time of Recording
834,131
News and Links
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/features/2023-09-12/africa-s-lost-decade-economic-pain-underlies-sub-saharan-coups
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/03/07/why-africa-is-cryptos-next-frontier
https://thefederalist.com/2024/03/06/the-uns-green-energy-plan-will-widen-the-energy-gap-keeping-the-worlds-poor-in-squalor/
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is March 11th, and this is episode 161 of satoshis plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is the IMF can go pound sand. Alright. Alright. Got some great feedback this week, everybody. We're gonna be talking about that as we go through one of the things that I will be doing as part of this market update that we do every week. I'm probably gonna tighten that up. Going to, skip the TA. We will talk about some of the basic aspects of the market, as we get involved in that, But, we really won't be doing any kind of analysis other than maybe I briefly mentioned high, low, whatever.
Alright. Good stuff. So we've got the tea. It's nice and hot. Tastes just about right. So we'll jump right on in. Alright. Our market closed this week with $69,025.92, which is up almost $6,000 in a week. We did actually go above 70 a couple of times during the week, 69 more than once. I think we hit 70 or very close to it. I think officially they hit 70 on one exchange or another. It has, actually bled back a little bit. We're at $68,280 right now as I record at about 9 o'clock CST. We did have our time change, which means now the for us, the daily, weekly reset, if you wanna call it that. That happens at 7 o'clock CST now instead of 6, which threw me off a little bit at 6 o'clock. And when things didn't reset, I'm like, oh, wait.
But yeah. Alright. So, we did have a weekly close, like I said, 69,025. Our block height at time of recording, 834-131. That's 8 134,131. Now what does that mean? That means we are 40 days from the next halving. Our next halving will occur at 8 140,000, which is estimated right now to be at April 20th at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, my time, which would probably make it late evening, very late evening European time, and so on. Our mempool, actually, taking a look at that. I thought that was a little per v byte are still pretty high. 16 for low, 19 for mid. But I think what we're gonna see, all the blocks I see well, no.
I see a bunch of twelves coming up. So I do believe here shortly later tonight, really in the next hour while I'm recording, I think we'll hit 12 for maybe even go a little, lower than that. 5.9, excuse me, 5.29%. A difficulty adjustment in 3 days, Unfortunately, up because we're getting blocks right now at 9.5 blocks per minute, which means we have more miners online than we did a few days ago, which is exactly what's going on. You can look at the hash price. It's gone up. The hash rate, excuse me, in the last 24 hours, and it's gone up significantly. Some very good stuff there. Overall, I would say the market is really good. We pushed up, like I said, at or near 70,000 depending on USD.
So essentially, we're all time highs, and I believe that is essentially everywhere at this point. Not, of course, just United States. In fact, we were one of the last, if not the last, to reach that. It'd be an interesting discussion as to why that is the case, but I will not get off into that. So there we go. We've now reached all time highs. We're showing strong support when we do get these pullbacks, which we had one that, I think the first time we hit 69,000 or so. It basically dropped to, like, to 65 just within 12 hours or so, if I'm remembering correctly.
And then it turned right around and cranked right back up. It was just at at 70 earlier today, actually. So we will break through that 70,000 barrier, which would not be an unexpected barrier. And I do not believe at this point, unless things change, certainly. But, I do not believe we will be going down from here for a good while. So I'm not gonna say up only as some people do, but, I do believe we will push through 70,000. I do believe we will keep going on. I would not recommend that you sell your stash at this point. And in fact, that brings up a very good point. Of course, here at Satoshi's Plebs, what do we say? We say don't worry about the price.
The only unfortunate thing about this is that now we can buy less. We can only buy less Satoshis with our dollars or whatever it is that you use, your pound, your whatever. So that is what it is. But what do we talk about here? We talk about DCA because that is the easiest and one of the most effective ways to maximize your profits, to continue to stack your sets. And I certainly would not be recommending that you sell right now. There's a very famous YouTube influencer who is, been shorting since, like, 35,000 and is still shorting, and it's just nuts. It's crazy. I can't believe people like that.
First of all, it's just illogical at this point that somebody would be shorting this. But regardless, you're playing with other people's money whether you realize that or not. It's a bad, bad thing. It's one thing when you're making 1,000 or tens of 1,000 of dollars a month off of your big YouTube channel, because you've got so many followers that, you know, you're you are making serious money. You know, it's that to you, it doesn't matter so much to the pleb out there. Just stay humble. As as Odell says, Matt Odell, stay humble, stack sats. Right? Just keep stacking those sats. You don't worry about shorting, longing, all this kind of stuff. Alright. Enough about that. We're gonna, again, I'm gonna be tightening that up as we go forward. There's a couple more things I wanna talk about as we go through. Alright. So what are we talking about this week? What we are talking about I wanna be a little more macro this week. I've got some interesting news that I thought was very relevant. First of all, just as a little aside, I do wanna go ahead and bring this up. I have not cared for Jamie Dimon, who's the CEO of JPMorgan, one of the largest banks in the world for a while. I I don't care for his attitude about Bitcoin.
There's just a number of things going on. Well, he has now come out and said, essentially, that because Bitcoin is going up and I I've got an article here. Let me it's on my laptop. Give me just a second. So here in the United States, just a little background of as much of the world, we are looking at fairly high interest rates. I think on a home mortgage, they're running like 7% or so now, and that means that you're paying a serious amount of cash that's going towards your debt, versus 0% or 1 or 2 percent or whatever. Right? As it was back during COVID and during that time frame. So premature rate cutting the let me read this quote. And this is from Jamie Dimon, again, CEO, JPMorgan.
Premature rate cutting risk further inflating asset prices are causing another leg up in inflation. And there was more to it than that, but that's kind of the core of it. So what he's saying is if the Fed prematurely cuts interest rates so if if they start pairing back on the interest rates that the central banks get charged or the central banks are charging, excuse me, That will actually risk further inflating asset prices or causing another leg up in inflation. Now it's undeniable that when rates are lower, when quantitative easing is actually in effect that assets will real estate, gold, not really gold, but real estate, certainly, stocks in general, Bitcoin will go up.
But what he's doing is he's trying to tie that to actually causing inflation as well. Jamie Dimon, I I don't know. I don't know if he's scared. I don't I don't know. I really don't. But that they think that Bitcoin has any correlation to inflation is just laughable. And, you know, frankly, this comes from a Keynesian mindset without going too far down into it that you could even come up with that kind of nonsense. Okay? If you think about it for more than 2 seconds, it's the the debt that the country has. It's the reality that they are printing money, and I look. I I know they're not printing money literally, but they're adding zeros essentially to the ledger in a computer.
And effectively, they're printing money. So there's more money, so that means that money is worth less. This is common sense to anybody who has any grounding in Austrian economics. So you can either believe that or you cannot. I happen to believe it. I've done enough looking into it. That is what I believe. It's certainly logical to me. So why would Bitcoin going up cause inflation to go up? Because what? Because people are saving money in it, because people are taking a dying fiat dollar, and they're putting that into Bitcoin because they're tired of banks going crazy with their money or closing down. We had another bank issue this week, which I didn't really report about. But on Friday, one of the New York State Banks dropped stock price dropped 40%.
But Bitcoin's risky, so that's okay. You know, I don't know. It's getting it's getting tiresome to me. I hope people are looking at stuff like that and saying, well, that's just nonsense. I don't know. Anyways, I did wanna bring that news up while I was pull it was, New York Community Bancorp down 44%. That was Friday. Alright. Where was this news? There it is. Okay. So one of the items that I've got so this all relates to Egypt. Egypt used to be, and it still may be, one of the largest economies in Africa. It was Egypt, Nigeria.
As I was looking through the data, it looked like kind of Egypt and Nigeria were kind of flipping back and forth. But Egypt's had a lot of problems. The price of Bitcoin in Egypt surged by 1,300,000 Egyptian pounds, so that's their currency, as the country's currency has been deprecated by over 34% in the last 48 hours. So in other words, the currency in 48 hour time period was was worth 1 third less. I think I'm reading that correctly. Why is that? So the price of Bitcoin shot up as it should if it's a measure against that country's currency, which it is.
So on March 6th, so 4 days ago as I record this, the Egyptian Central Bank is letting the pound float this morning, triggering a 20% drop against the dollar. So in other words, they had kind of had it fixed. The, I know a little bit about the Chinese situation. For years, they manipulated the renminbi, and they would hold it at, like the first time I went into China, it was like I wanna say it was I don't know. I'm I'm probably gonna get these numbers wrong. But let's say it was, like, 7 renminbi to the dollar. Well, they would just they would not allow it to float. They would not allow it to, for the market to compete. They just pegged it, and they said that's what it is.
And then eventually, 10, 15 years later, you go back, and now it's like 9 or 10 to the dollar because it was devaluing against the dollar. Alright. So this is something similar. Prior to that, they had been holding it, and now they're letting the pound float this morning. They're letting it go. They're they're and that's triggering a 20% drop against the dollar. The reason why has to do with our friends at the IMF. Now I have talked about the IMF and the World Bank, and you can kind of just consider them to be partners as they are.
Egypt secured an $8,000,000,000 IMF deal after removing currency controls. So part of the agreement let me just read through this. Excuse me. Before I start talking about it, Egypt secured a deal to more than double its IMF bailout to $8,000,000,000 after the country allowed its currency to drop to a record low against the US dollar, unlocking support to avert its works' worst economic crisis in decades. Now by unlocking the currency, they then allowed the price to drop a large amount in just a couple of days, and everybody's money became worth less. But we'll just set that aside.
Let's see. Anyways, the fund said on Wednesday that Cairo had taken decisive steps to move toward a credible, flexible exchange rate regime after Egypt's central bank devalued the pound by 40% and massively raising interest massively raising interest rates to relieve a foreign currency shortage. Floating the currency and allowing market forces to set the value of the pound was a key condition. So here's the key. A key condition for the heavily indebted country to access more IMF funds as a condition of a $3,000,000,000 bailout in 2022.
The pound fell beyond 50. I don't know what this means against the dollar on Wednesday. Oh, they're talking. So it's 50 pounds to the dollar after being officially held at about 31 to the dollar for almost a year while it reached more than twice that figure on the black market. The black market knows. The same thing happened in Argentina, by the way. And I've talked about that fairly extensively. With an inflation rate of close to 30% in January, Egyptian authorities have been wary of allowing the pound to fall further and piling additional hardships on family families, which is exactly what it will do. But the recent move by ADQ and Abu Dhabi investment vehicle to inject $35,000,000,000 into Egypt, the single biggest investment in the country's history, provided the central bank with the buffer it needed to prevent from the currency from growing going into freefall what's controls have been lifted. So look, there's a lot going on here, but here's kinda what it boils down to.
The IMF was demanding that they allow their currency to float against the dollar because that is ideal for US investments. Let's be honest. And so that's what they did. So a country that was one of the most heavily in debt countries in Africa is now going to take on more debt. How does that help Egypt? Now Egypt's not gonna listen to me, but here's what I would tell Egypt. Do what El Salvador did. By the way, Ethiopia, right next to Egypt, investing massive amounts of money in hydropower on the Nile River, building very large dams, inviting in Bitcoin miners to come in and take axe access, to that power.
Egypt has the same river going through its country. I mean, it's kinda famous for it. Right? So don't tell me that Egypt couldn't do something about this. They could move to the world's strongest, safest currency before countries like the United States, Russia, China, and some and Europe do as well. And they could tell the IMF where to go pound sand because there's plenty of sand in Egypt from what I understand. I've never been there, but I'm just gonna go by what I've seen on TV. Right? So that's just my opinion. They will not do that. Of course, they've chosen not to do that, and that's unfortunate because they will just be more in debt. And then what? I don't know.
More suffering, more misery, more let's bring in aid from the outside. A whole new level. See, because the people in power, almost assuredly, will be skimming money off the top of this new money. They will live a lavish lifestyle while those out on the streets, on the other hand, will not. And it's disgusting. Least it is in my opinion. So Lynn Alden actually has family in Egypt. I don't know if you know who Lynn Alden is, but she's a very good speaker and financial writer about not just Bitcoin, but kind of the macro, world.
She's got a book, her new book now, I it may be her first one, but she has written quite a bit other things, called Broken Money. I have not bought it yet. It's on my list to buy. I've got a few more that I need to pick up before that one. But I love listening to her, and I love reading the other stuff of hers. And I know she's got family there, and she's actually talked about this situation a decent amount. So that might be something you might wanna take a look at if you get a chance. But I just wanted to look. We talk I don't I've kind of moved away from talking about macro stuff so much because I think people maybe get tired of it. I don't wanna call it that, but maybe because it's kind of slow motion. Well, this is another step in that. This is another example of the IMF being so heavy handed. I'm so glad that Alex Gladstein wrote, his book, Repression.
So many people so many people think that the IMF and the World Bank are there to help people. And the reality is whether they started that way or not, that is not what's going on now. And they should be resisted at every turn because the countries that they're supplying this bailout to, it doesn't help them. There's a saying, I think I've got this right. Give a man a fish he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish he can eat for a lifetime. When I help people and whatever that function is, I'm always there are times when, yes, we we give a handout so to speak, but I really want to help people solve the problem. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin because Bitcoin solves the problem of fiat.
And fiat is not just US dollar. The fiat is all around the world, and different countries have differing problems. And I, of course, talk about the United States, not only because I live here, but because it also is the largest economy in the world, although that's being threatened. And as such, the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and it needs to be fixed. So that's why I'm so compassionate about that. Moves by the IMF just continue. That's all I can say about that. So this deal is done. They're gonna get their $8,000,000,000 and they're gonna be $8,000,000,000 more in debt plus all the interest that they're gonna pay on that, and it's not a minor amount of interest.
Alright. If I were in Egypt, I would be putting all my money in bitcoin. That's what I would do. Alright. I think that's enough about that. We're gonna go ahead and move on. I hope you found that helpful or at least a nice little update on what's going on there in Egypt. You may not have heard about that. Where do we go from here? I think we gotta talk about our supporters. Right. Yes. Orders. Had a great week. Got some nice messages. I did like I said, I got some feedback. So Mere Mortals podcast, Kyren over at Mere Mortals, which he's kicked off the new value for value podcast, season. If you're interested in that, it's a great podcast.
To be honest, I haven't caught up with it yet, Kyron, but I will be listening to it. But he said the dreaded twice recording, that's a toughie to get the energy to redo if you did almost a full episode, and he is absolutely right. Of course, that was about episode 160. You should you be all in. And he sent 1100 sats or actually one one one one. So a row of sticks. Thank you very much, Karen. Appreciate that. And then later on, he sent another one. Gave me some feedback, which I think you'd already mentioned this to me. I already knew that this was the case for you, but I do appreciate it. I skip all your market talk personally, just not interested. So, yeah, we'll be making an adjustment there. I'm gonna I'm gonna skip the TA. I do think the other stuff is worthwhile, and it doesn't take a whole long time. But, of course, just like Karen did, you can skip that. I set up chapters for that, that I think come out most of the time. So that would help you if you're using a podcast 2 point o app. So one of our newer listeners, he's been around for a bit, but I I thought this was funny.
I hope it was meant to be. Gulag pleb. He sent 6831, which I don't know what that actually meant. There it is. 69100. 60 yeah. Yeah. 69 no. 6 no. Yeah. 69100. Awesome. Glad I looked that up. We reached 69,000, and he sent 69100 stats. Appreciate that. That's awesome. But here's his message. I read this, and Gulag, to be honest, I act I literally laughed, out loud. I LOL ed. Anyways, I thought it was pretty funny. Missed out on plus minutes of your relaxing voice due to a mishap. Bullish, to answer your question. Everyone covers the market info. Keep it minimal. In my humble opinion, I'm a show. Value for value sets for your mic, for my new microphone, which will be coming later this year, I hope.
I appreciate that gulag pleb very much. I I thought it was funny. If that's what you meant, then I'm all there for you. If not, I'm I'm just gonna consider it to be funny. I don't like my voice. I think I've mentioned this before. So I don't know about being relaxing, but that's kinda why I thought it was funny. And I get a little wound up sometimes. Let's be honest. It's only because I care. And then hypersensitive of ours, our old friend, the hypersensitive of ours from from Portugal said, sent Well, first of all, let's do that. Sent 500 sats and said, I always play the entire podcast to stream you more sats. And they absolutely did that. I appreciate that hypersensitive SARS, but tend to turn off the volume when the outro tune is playing. I like the market updates more than the mining updates as I can relate more to it, not mining myself.
I get that. I've thought about splitting the mining stuff off. You've probably noticed I don't do the mining stuff as much anymore. I'm thinking about doing, like, a once a month podcast for money because it is of interest to me. It is of interest to some people. I'm not sure it's worth trying to do an update or something every week. So that's something I've wrestled with. I don't really wanna start a new podcast, so maybe a bonus episode mining update. I don't know. Maybe I should just leave that alone. But, I appreciate that.
And I I really appreciate you running sat streaming sat for the entire episode. I do. I will say this about the outro tune. I know it's long. I really like the music, but, and I've had it for a while. It's probably been over a year I've been using that particular tune. One of the changes I am gonna make though, I will say this, and this isn't what you were saying, but I'm gonna tangent off this if you don't mind. I'm planning on changing to using value for value music. So a lot of the new stuff which I haven't really talked about. This is kinda thing Kyron has talked about, like, on his value for value podcast. I bet he talks about it a lot this season.
They have talked about it on their other show as well. And then, of course, the podcast 2.0 podcast, also talks about a lot. Anyways, value for value music, places like wave lake, for example, wavlake. And these are artists. These are musicians who they don't have recording contracts. They don't anything like that. They put their music out there, and they ask essentially for donations, which I don't really like that word, but they ask you to value their content and stream stats or boost to them just like what we do here in podcasting 2.0. It's some really interesting technology.
I I've just kind of been how can I explain this? I like a lot of different music, and I've I've been kind of fiddling around trying to find some stuff that I really like. I may try, like I'm thinking about, like, changing maybe the exit music, which would be an entire song. Do not feel like you have to stream for that, by the way. I'm just as a way to allow people to hear it. I may change that every couple weeks. I don't think I wanna keep one just going because there's a lot of good stuff out there. So that change will be coming soon, I think. I really need to put together a list so I'm not, like, worried about it. And it'll be different. And you may not like every piece, and that's fine. Some of it may be a little too hard for your taste. Some of it may be a little too soft for your taste. I heard a piano.
I wanna say a piano piece, the other day that was really good. I really liked it. Maybe not something I would listen to every day, but it's worth throwing out there. And I'm hoping I think I can do this with podhome.fl, my my host. I can do a split so that when their song is playing, if you're streaming or boosting, that gets split. And, like, I would get half of it and they would get half of it or they would get 3 quarters of it, whatever we figure out. It's completely up to me in that sense, but I want them to get value for that if you're certainly, if you're enjoying that. I'll do something similar with the intro. I don't really wanna change my intro too much.
I may just have if I can find a good piece that I really like, I may just clip part of it and do that for the intro music and replace what I've got there. So, anyways, I know that was kind of a long winded explanation, but that is one of the other things that I'm gonna be trying out here soon. And then finally, we've got, user 8469 3916, on fountain, of course. And, because that's that's like one of the the default usernames. That's why I know that. But, anyways, good episode. I too am jealous of those in Madera. Nice to meet you at the meetup last week. Didn't take too long to tag all time high after this episode.
Yes. And it was nice to meet you too. To be honest, I talked to a couple of people. I don't know your name, of course, by your username here. So I I think I know who you are. Pretty sure I do, but I appreciate that. I always enjoy meeting people at those meetups. And, actually, I think you were sitting on my left, if I'm not mistaken. But, anyways, it was nice to meet you as well. Actually, you could have been sitting on my left or my right. Both of those were new people, and I think I told both of them about my podcast. So either way, kind of the way it worked out.
But awesome. Glad you liked it. Feel free to come along for the ride. And, yeah, it was pretty obvious last week that we were we were gonna hit that all time high, at least it was to me. And sent in a 1,000 hats too, by the way. And I really appreciate that. So, you're welcome to hang around and join this virtual, Bitcoin meetup. So, I do actually wanna get a chat room going and and work on this community because it's kind of a one-sided community. Not totally, of course, people like this are sending me messages, but, I would love to, have people involved a little more and comment, throw out questions. I don't know. Whatever. Whatever. We'll see how that goes.
That may be a bit off, but, yeah, would love to do that, especially as I start recording live. I think that would be helpful ultimately as I try to do this live. And so we'll have a live streaming episode, and then we'll have a regular episode come out later that day. Our total streaming and boost was 11,919. I really appreciate that. That's the most actually we've had in quite a while. So that was really good to see. I appreciate the value that y'all are sending back. I I hope you're getting value out of this. Of course, that's always my goal. Alright. Let's do the news. I've covered what I consider to be the major news item of the week with Egypt.
I've also covered the Jamie Dimon situation, so I won't be mentioning that. I will say there's a few things that aren't really news, but I posted these on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter, by the way, at Macintosh Fintech. But I I made some reposted some stuff that I thought was particularly interesting. I do wanna comment about this for just a second. Eric Hirschman over at, Gridless in Africa who they're putting in or teaming up with other companies who are putting in, energy infrastructure, hydropower typically. Although, I think they're looking at maybe doing some geothermal as well. I don't wanna speak for them. There's people in Africa who are doing geothermal.
I think they are. But, anyways, he's grew up in Africa, has a very good grasp of what's going on. And he posted this. In 3 or 4 days, the Kenyan family, so Kenya Africa, consumes 1 kilowatt hour of electricity, About as much as the typical American family uses in an hour. Now that sounds like that's a slam on America and it's not. And it's not a slam on the people in Kenya either. This is an He's got an article here. It's from the Federalist. But this is an interesting piece journaling a Kenyan and a Texan's energy use.
So they basically compare that. And the and it's the article's frankly not the best. But what they're trying to get at is that the UN is asking for countries, developed countries like the United States, and the United States in particular, to cut back on their energy use because of climate change. And this piece breaks down on the productivity. Look, I've said this on here before and I stand by it. Energy usage represents a level of civilization. Now, mind you, I'm not making fun of anybody, But the reality is, somebody who lives in a highly energized world, computers, internet, air conditioning, heating, cooling, which be air conditioning, but regardless, transportation, all of that kind of stuff, they are the most productive.
Now you can argue with that, but that's what the numbers are. Somebody who lives in Kenya, who lives in a rural farm area, who essentially works by hand, raising their crops and then taking them to the market. I'm not disparaging them and I I think you realize that, but just I have to put it out there. They are not as productive. Now they work harder than I do, if you wanna compare them to me, but they're not as productive. Energy usage, building tools, machines that do things for us. A tractor a a tractor which is burning gasoline or diesel fuel would revolutionize one of these Kenyan farmers' lives. Why? Because they would be much more productive. So the point is we should not be telling countries to cut back on energy use. You can have an argument about climate change. That's not what this podcast is about.
Whether it's nuclear or some form of hydro, wind, solar, or whether it's oil and natural gas. Okay? I think we should be encouraging more energy usage, not less. And that's exactly that's exactly what Eric and his company are doing in Africa, and that's why I love what they're doing. They're going into communities. They're building hydropower. They're turning on Bitcoin miners so that immediately immediately that power is being consumed. And then as the village needs power, they will are able to use part of that. Because you can just turn off Bitcoin miner, move it somewhere else, and plug it back in.
And so what you see over time is the energy power of the village goes up. They're using more energy. And because of that, their lives are getting better. It could be as simple as having a light bulb. You guys, most of us just can't even relate to this. So instead of burning paraffin lamps, which are bad for your lungs, which are really poor as somebody who has poor eyesight, I can just something I I can relate to. It's not enough light, but the kids don't get to study as much and they have more health issues because that's what they're using. Well, now we have a light bulb. We can afford that light bulb. Now I can study more. I can get out of school, maybe move on to college, and so on and so forth. That's just one little example.
Oh, I can run a small refrigerator and keep my food cold that needs to be kept cold so that I don't get sick consuming rotten meat and so on and so forth. So I love what these Bitcoin miners are out there doing in these spots and I get so pumped about that. So, anyways, great art well, not the best written article, but something to keep in mind. Alright. We're good. Oh, bricks did announce the creation of an independent payment system based on cryptocurrency and blockchain. I hope not. Not because I I don't care if they form an alliance. I really don't. In fact, if I were them, I'd do the same thing. I think that's a mistake.
If it's not on bitcoin, they're going to get left behind. I the writing's on the wall. And Nigeria has blamed Binance. I may have mentioned this last week. I don't think I did. For 70%, nera, which is their currency, devaluation, moves to issue arrest warrant against CEO. So that's, c z, is the CEO of Binance. It's it's like Jamie Dimon. I mean, maybe Jamie Dimon heard this and thought, wow. That'd be great. I don't know. Crazy people. Is a sickness is all I know. Alright. I'll stop there. That probably got me in trouble. Okay.
That's it for the news. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a value for value podcast. I appreciate the value that people like Kyron, like hypersensitive as ours provide when they're supporting this show, because they feel like I'm providing value back to them. And that is exactly what I'm looking for. One way that you can get value directly. If you clip an episode, go on the fountain, clip 1, 2, 3 minutes from this episode. If it's the current episode, I'll boost you 500 sats for that if you post it on the fountain stream. If it's an older episode, it's 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way for the satoshi pleb podcast to get more noticed.
You're welcome to do that. I would love to do that more than what I've seen so far. We do support podcasting 2 point o. We're a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. Occasionally, I talk about why, but I can't do it every week. You can support the podcast. Grab a podcasting 2.0 app like fountain, like cast o matic, like like podcast guru. Grab a Bitcoin lightning wallet. Hook it up to that, fountain. You don't even have to do that. Stream some sats. Boost some sats.
Send a message. Let me know what you're thinking. Whatever. Ask your question. I another way to support this project, if you don't feel like you could do that, there's always things that can be done. I'm always looking to improve this podcast. Transcripts are kinda handled. Podhome.fm does a really good job with the transcripts. I don't really need help there anymore. I guess somebody could probably do a better job with the chapters if they want. I would love to have different graphics. That's one thing, on the different chapters.
But that would be one thing. There's always technical things that could get done if you have a technical mindset. Linux, VMs I'm running on Hetzner is my VM setup. Ubuntu. There's help that could be done there building out new things like that chat room that I was talking about. So, if nothing else, like I said, you can support me with Treasure. You can stream stats. A great way to support the podcast actually is just to tell people about it. Tell your friends. Tell people at your local Bitcoin meetup or post a review about the podcast. That would be terrific. If you're wondering about this whole podcasting 2 point o thing, go to https:// podcastapps.com to start with. There's a whole list of podcast apps there that support all these new features that the traditional podcast apps do not.
Chapters, transcripts, although Apple is finally getting on the bandwagon and they are going to support transcripts. Streaming of sats, boosting, a number of innovative things, but you can try those 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 Mcintosh Fintech. Like I said earlier, I'm on Mastodon at Mcintosh @podcastindex.social, email at [email protected], and then, of course, there's the website. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I'll talk to you all soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is March 11th, and this is episode 161 of satoshis plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is the IMF can go pound sand. Alright. Alright. Got some great feedback this week, everybody. We're gonna be talking about that as we go through one of the things that I will be doing as part of this market update that we do every week. I'm probably gonna tighten that up. Going to, skip the TA. We will talk about some of the basic aspects of the market, as we get involved in that, But, we really won't be doing any kind of analysis other than maybe I briefly mentioned high, low, whatever.
Alright. Good stuff. So we've got the tea. It's nice and hot. Tastes just about right. So we'll jump right on in. Alright. Our market closed this week with $69,025.92, which is up almost $6,000 in a week. We did actually go above 70 a couple of times during the week, 69 more than once. I think we hit 70 or very close to it. I think officially they hit 70 on one exchange or another. It has, actually bled back a little bit. We're at $68,280 right now as I record at about 9 o'clock CST. We did have our time change, which means now the for us, the daily, weekly reset, if you wanna call it that. That happens at 7 o'clock CST now instead of 6, which threw me off a little bit at 6 o'clock. And when things didn't reset, I'm like, oh, wait.
But yeah. Alright. So, we did have a weekly close, like I said, 69,025. Our block height at time of recording, 834-131. That's 8 134,131. Now what does that mean? That means we are 40 days from the next halving. Our next halving will occur at 8 140,000, which is estimated right now to be at April 20th at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, my time, which would probably make it late evening, very late evening European time, and so on. Our mempool, actually, taking a look at that. I thought that was a little per v byte are still pretty high. 16 for low, 19 for mid. But I think what we're gonna see, all the blocks I see well, no.
I see a bunch of twelves coming up. So I do believe here shortly later tonight, really in the next hour while I'm recording, I think we'll hit 12 for maybe even go a little, lower than that. 5.9, excuse me, 5.29%. A difficulty adjustment in 3 days, Unfortunately, up because we're getting blocks right now at 9.5 blocks per minute, which means we have more miners online than we did a few days ago, which is exactly what's going on. You can look at the hash price. It's gone up. The hash rate, excuse me, in the last 24 hours, and it's gone up significantly. Some very good stuff there. Overall, I would say the market is really good. We pushed up, like I said, at or near 70,000 depending on USD.
So essentially, we're all time highs, and I believe that is essentially everywhere at this point. Not, of course, just United States. In fact, we were one of the last, if not the last, to reach that. It'd be an interesting discussion as to why that is the case, but I will not get off into that. So there we go. We've now reached all time highs. We're showing strong support when we do get these pullbacks, which we had one that, I think the first time we hit 69,000 or so. It basically dropped to, like, to 65 just within 12 hours or so, if I'm remembering correctly.
And then it turned right around and cranked right back up. It was just at at 70 earlier today, actually. So we will break through that 70,000 barrier, which would not be an unexpected barrier. And I do not believe at this point, unless things change, certainly. But, I do not believe we will be going down from here for a good while. So I'm not gonna say up only as some people do, but, I do believe we will push through 70,000. I do believe we will keep going on. I would not recommend that you sell your stash at this point. And in fact, that brings up a very good point. Of course, here at Satoshi's Plebs, what do we say? We say don't worry about the price.
The only unfortunate thing about this is that now we can buy less. We can only buy less Satoshis with our dollars or whatever it is that you use, your pound, your whatever. So that is what it is. But what do we talk about here? We talk about DCA because that is the easiest and one of the most effective ways to maximize your profits, to continue to stack your sets. And I certainly would not be recommending that you sell right now. There's a very famous YouTube influencer who is, been shorting since, like, 35,000 and is still shorting, and it's just nuts. It's crazy. I can't believe people like that.
First of all, it's just illogical at this point that somebody would be shorting this. But regardless, you're playing with other people's money whether you realize that or not. It's a bad, bad thing. It's one thing when you're making 1,000 or tens of 1,000 of dollars a month off of your big YouTube channel, because you've got so many followers that, you know, you're you are making serious money. You know, it's that to you, it doesn't matter so much to the pleb out there. Just stay humble. As as Odell says, Matt Odell, stay humble, stack sats. Right? Just keep stacking those sats. You don't worry about shorting, longing, all this kind of stuff. Alright. Enough about that. We're gonna, again, I'm gonna be tightening that up as we go forward. There's a couple more things I wanna talk about as we go through. Alright. So what are we talking about this week? What we are talking about I wanna be a little more macro this week. I've got some interesting news that I thought was very relevant. First of all, just as a little aside, I do wanna go ahead and bring this up. I have not cared for Jamie Dimon, who's the CEO of JPMorgan, one of the largest banks in the world for a while. I I don't care for his attitude about Bitcoin.
There's just a number of things going on. Well, he has now come out and said, essentially, that because Bitcoin is going up and I I've got an article here. Let me it's on my laptop. Give me just a second. So here in the United States, just a little background of as much of the world, we are looking at fairly high interest rates. I think on a home mortgage, they're running like 7% or so now, and that means that you're paying a serious amount of cash that's going towards your debt, versus 0% or 1 or 2 percent or whatever. Right? As it was back during COVID and during that time frame. So premature rate cutting the let me read this quote. And this is from Jamie Dimon, again, CEO, JPMorgan.
Premature rate cutting risk further inflating asset prices are causing another leg up in inflation. And there was more to it than that, but that's kind of the core of it. So what he's saying is if the Fed prematurely cuts interest rates so if if they start pairing back on the interest rates that the central banks get charged or the central banks are charging, excuse me, That will actually risk further inflating asset prices or causing another leg up in inflation. Now it's undeniable that when rates are lower, when quantitative easing is actually in effect that assets will real estate, gold, not really gold, but real estate, certainly, stocks in general, Bitcoin will go up.
But what he's doing is he's trying to tie that to actually causing inflation as well. Jamie Dimon, I I don't know. I don't know if he's scared. I don't I don't know. I really don't. But that they think that Bitcoin has any correlation to inflation is just laughable. And, you know, frankly, this comes from a Keynesian mindset without going too far down into it that you could even come up with that kind of nonsense. Okay? If you think about it for more than 2 seconds, it's the the debt that the country has. It's the reality that they are printing money, and I look. I I know they're not printing money literally, but they're adding zeros essentially to the ledger in a computer.
And effectively, they're printing money. So there's more money, so that means that money is worth less. This is common sense to anybody who has any grounding in Austrian economics. So you can either believe that or you cannot. I happen to believe it. I've done enough looking into it. That is what I believe. It's certainly logical to me. So why would Bitcoin going up cause inflation to go up? Because what? Because people are saving money in it, because people are taking a dying fiat dollar, and they're putting that into Bitcoin because they're tired of banks going crazy with their money or closing down. We had another bank issue this week, which I didn't really report about. But on Friday, one of the New York State Banks dropped stock price dropped 40%.
But Bitcoin's risky, so that's okay. You know, I don't know. It's getting it's getting tiresome to me. I hope people are looking at stuff like that and saying, well, that's just nonsense. I don't know. Anyways, I did wanna bring that news up while I was pull it was, New York Community Bancorp down 44%. That was Friday. Alright. Where was this news? There it is. Okay. So one of the items that I've got so this all relates to Egypt. Egypt used to be, and it still may be, one of the largest economies in Africa. It was Egypt, Nigeria.
As I was looking through the data, it looked like kind of Egypt and Nigeria were kind of flipping back and forth. But Egypt's had a lot of problems. The price of Bitcoin in Egypt surged by 1,300,000 Egyptian pounds, so that's their currency, as the country's currency has been deprecated by over 34% in the last 48 hours. So in other words, the currency in 48 hour time period was was worth 1 third less. I think I'm reading that correctly. Why is that? So the price of Bitcoin shot up as it should if it's a measure against that country's currency, which it is.
So on March 6th, so 4 days ago as I record this, the Egyptian Central Bank is letting the pound float this morning, triggering a 20% drop against the dollar. So in other words, they had kind of had it fixed. The, I know a little bit about the Chinese situation. For years, they manipulated the renminbi, and they would hold it at, like the first time I went into China, it was like I wanna say it was I don't know. I'm I'm probably gonna get these numbers wrong. But let's say it was, like, 7 renminbi to the dollar. Well, they would just they would not allow it to float. They would not allow it to, for the market to compete. They just pegged it, and they said that's what it is.
And then eventually, 10, 15 years later, you go back, and now it's like 9 or 10 to the dollar because it was devaluing against the dollar. Alright. So this is something similar. Prior to that, they had been holding it, and now they're letting the pound float this morning. They're letting it go. They're they're and that's triggering a 20% drop against the dollar. The reason why has to do with our friends at the IMF. Now I have talked about the IMF and the World Bank, and you can kind of just consider them to be partners as they are.
Egypt secured an $8,000,000,000 IMF deal after removing currency controls. So part of the agreement let me just read through this. Excuse me. Before I start talking about it, Egypt secured a deal to more than double its IMF bailout to $8,000,000,000 after the country allowed its currency to drop to a record low against the US dollar, unlocking support to avert its works' worst economic crisis in decades. Now by unlocking the currency, they then allowed the price to drop a large amount in just a couple of days, and everybody's money became worth less. But we'll just set that aside.
Let's see. Anyways, the fund said on Wednesday that Cairo had taken decisive steps to move toward a credible, flexible exchange rate regime after Egypt's central bank devalued the pound by 40% and massively raising interest massively raising interest rates to relieve a foreign currency shortage. Floating the currency and allowing market forces to set the value of the pound was a key condition. So here's the key. A key condition for the heavily indebted country to access more IMF funds as a condition of a $3,000,000,000 bailout in 2022.
The pound fell beyond 50. I don't know what this means against the dollar on Wednesday. Oh, they're talking. So it's 50 pounds to the dollar after being officially held at about 31 to the dollar for almost a year while it reached more than twice that figure on the black market. The black market knows. The same thing happened in Argentina, by the way. And I've talked about that fairly extensively. With an inflation rate of close to 30% in January, Egyptian authorities have been wary of allowing the pound to fall further and piling additional hardships on family families, which is exactly what it will do. But the recent move by ADQ and Abu Dhabi investment vehicle to inject $35,000,000,000 into Egypt, the single biggest investment in the country's history, provided the central bank with the buffer it needed to prevent from the currency from growing going into freefall what's controls have been lifted. So look, there's a lot going on here, but here's kinda what it boils down to.
The IMF was demanding that they allow their currency to float against the dollar because that is ideal for US investments. Let's be honest. And so that's what they did. So a country that was one of the most heavily in debt countries in Africa is now going to take on more debt. How does that help Egypt? Now Egypt's not gonna listen to me, but here's what I would tell Egypt. Do what El Salvador did. By the way, Ethiopia, right next to Egypt, investing massive amounts of money in hydropower on the Nile River, building very large dams, inviting in Bitcoin miners to come in and take axe access, to that power.
Egypt has the same river going through its country. I mean, it's kinda famous for it. Right? So don't tell me that Egypt couldn't do something about this. They could move to the world's strongest, safest currency before countries like the United States, Russia, China, and some and Europe do as well. And they could tell the IMF where to go pound sand because there's plenty of sand in Egypt from what I understand. I've never been there, but I'm just gonna go by what I've seen on TV. Right? So that's just my opinion. They will not do that. Of course, they've chosen not to do that, and that's unfortunate because they will just be more in debt. And then what? I don't know.
More suffering, more misery, more let's bring in aid from the outside. A whole new level. See, because the people in power, almost assuredly, will be skimming money off the top of this new money. They will live a lavish lifestyle while those out on the streets, on the other hand, will not. And it's disgusting. Least it is in my opinion. So Lynn Alden actually has family in Egypt. I don't know if you know who Lynn Alden is, but she's a very good speaker and financial writer about not just Bitcoin, but kind of the macro, world.
She's got a book, her new book now, I it may be her first one, but she has written quite a bit other things, called Broken Money. I have not bought it yet. It's on my list to buy. I've got a few more that I need to pick up before that one. But I love listening to her, and I love reading the other stuff of hers. And I know she's got family there, and she's actually talked about this situation a decent amount. So that might be something you might wanna take a look at if you get a chance. But I just wanted to look. We talk I don't I've kind of moved away from talking about macro stuff so much because I think people maybe get tired of it. I don't wanna call it that, but maybe because it's kind of slow motion. Well, this is another step in that. This is another example of the IMF being so heavy handed. I'm so glad that Alex Gladstein wrote, his book, Repression.
So many people so many people think that the IMF and the World Bank are there to help people. And the reality is whether they started that way or not, that is not what's going on now. And they should be resisted at every turn because the countries that they're supplying this bailout to, it doesn't help them. There's a saying, I think I've got this right. Give a man a fish he can eat for a day. Teach a man to fish he can eat for a lifetime. When I help people and whatever that function is, I'm always there are times when, yes, we we give a handout so to speak, but I really want to help people solve the problem. And this is one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about Bitcoin because Bitcoin solves the problem of fiat.
And fiat is not just US dollar. The fiat is all around the world, and different countries have differing problems. And I, of course, talk about the United States, not only because I live here, but because it also is the largest economy in the world, although that's being threatened. And as such, the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and it needs to be fixed. So that's why I'm so compassionate about that. Moves by the IMF just continue. That's all I can say about that. So this deal is done. They're gonna get their $8,000,000,000 and they're gonna be $8,000,000,000 more in debt plus all the interest that they're gonna pay on that, and it's not a minor amount of interest.
Alright. If I were in Egypt, I would be putting all my money in bitcoin. That's what I would do. Alright. I think that's enough about that. We're gonna go ahead and move on. I hope you found that helpful or at least a nice little update on what's going on there in Egypt. You may not have heard about that. Where do we go from here? I think we gotta talk about our supporters. Right. Yes. Orders. Had a great week. Got some nice messages. I did like I said, I got some feedback. So Mere Mortals podcast, Kyren over at Mere Mortals, which he's kicked off the new value for value podcast, season. If you're interested in that, it's a great podcast.
To be honest, I haven't caught up with it yet, Kyron, but I will be listening to it. But he said the dreaded twice recording, that's a toughie to get the energy to redo if you did almost a full episode, and he is absolutely right. Of course, that was about episode 160. You should you be all in. And he sent 1100 sats or actually one one one one. So a row of sticks. Thank you very much, Karen. Appreciate that. And then later on, he sent another one. Gave me some feedback, which I think you'd already mentioned this to me. I already knew that this was the case for you, but I do appreciate it. I skip all your market talk personally, just not interested. So, yeah, we'll be making an adjustment there. I'm gonna I'm gonna skip the TA. I do think the other stuff is worthwhile, and it doesn't take a whole long time. But, of course, just like Karen did, you can skip that. I set up chapters for that, that I think come out most of the time. So that would help you if you're using a podcast 2 point o app. So one of our newer listeners, he's been around for a bit, but I I thought this was funny.
I hope it was meant to be. Gulag pleb. He sent 6831, which I don't know what that actually meant. There it is. 69100. 60 yeah. Yeah. 69 no. 6 no. Yeah. 69100. Awesome. Glad I looked that up. We reached 69,000, and he sent 69100 stats. Appreciate that. That's awesome. But here's his message. I read this, and Gulag, to be honest, I act I literally laughed, out loud. I LOL ed. Anyways, I thought it was pretty funny. Missed out on plus minutes of your relaxing voice due to a mishap. Bullish, to answer your question. Everyone covers the market info. Keep it minimal. In my humble opinion, I'm a show. Value for value sets for your mic, for my new microphone, which will be coming later this year, I hope.
I appreciate that gulag pleb very much. I I thought it was funny. If that's what you meant, then I'm all there for you. If not, I'm I'm just gonna consider it to be funny. I don't like my voice. I think I've mentioned this before. So I don't know about being relaxing, but that's kinda why I thought it was funny. And I get a little wound up sometimes. Let's be honest. It's only because I care. And then hypersensitive of ours, our old friend, the hypersensitive of ours from from Portugal said, sent Well, first of all, let's do that. Sent 500 sats and said, I always play the entire podcast to stream you more sats. And they absolutely did that. I appreciate that hypersensitive SARS, but tend to turn off the volume when the outro tune is playing. I like the market updates more than the mining updates as I can relate more to it, not mining myself.
I get that. I've thought about splitting the mining stuff off. You've probably noticed I don't do the mining stuff as much anymore. I'm thinking about doing, like, a once a month podcast for money because it is of interest to me. It is of interest to some people. I'm not sure it's worth trying to do an update or something every week. So that's something I've wrestled with. I don't really wanna start a new podcast, so maybe a bonus episode mining update. I don't know. Maybe I should just leave that alone. But, I appreciate that.
And I I really appreciate you running sat streaming sat for the entire episode. I do. I will say this about the outro tune. I know it's long. I really like the music, but, and I've had it for a while. It's probably been over a year I've been using that particular tune. One of the changes I am gonna make though, I will say this, and this isn't what you were saying, but I'm gonna tangent off this if you don't mind. I'm planning on changing to using value for value music. So a lot of the new stuff which I haven't really talked about. This is kinda thing Kyron has talked about, like, on his value for value podcast. I bet he talks about it a lot this season.
They have talked about it on their other show as well. And then, of course, the podcast 2.0 podcast, also talks about a lot. Anyways, value for value music, places like wave lake, for example, wavlake. And these are artists. These are musicians who they don't have recording contracts. They don't anything like that. They put their music out there, and they ask essentially for donations, which I don't really like that word, but they ask you to value their content and stream stats or boost to them just like what we do here in podcasting 2.0. It's some really interesting technology.
I I've just kind of been how can I explain this? I like a lot of different music, and I've I've been kind of fiddling around trying to find some stuff that I really like. I may try, like I'm thinking about, like, changing maybe the exit music, which would be an entire song. Do not feel like you have to stream for that, by the way. I'm just as a way to allow people to hear it. I may change that every couple weeks. I don't think I wanna keep one just going because there's a lot of good stuff out there. So that change will be coming soon, I think. I really need to put together a list so I'm not, like, worried about it. And it'll be different. And you may not like every piece, and that's fine. Some of it may be a little too hard for your taste. Some of it may be a little too soft for your taste. I heard a piano.
I wanna say a piano piece, the other day that was really good. I really liked it. Maybe not something I would listen to every day, but it's worth throwing out there. And I'm hoping I think I can do this with podhome.fl, my my host. I can do a split so that when their song is playing, if you're streaming or boosting, that gets split. And, like, I would get half of it and they would get half of it or they would get 3 quarters of it, whatever we figure out. It's completely up to me in that sense, but I want them to get value for that if you're certainly, if you're enjoying that. I'll do something similar with the intro. I don't really wanna change my intro too much.
I may just have if I can find a good piece that I really like, I may just clip part of it and do that for the intro music and replace what I've got there. So, anyways, I know that was kind of a long winded explanation, but that is one of the other things that I'm gonna be trying out here soon. And then finally, we've got, user 8469 3916, on fountain, of course. And, because that's that's like one of the the default usernames. That's why I know that. But, anyways, good episode. I too am jealous of those in Madera. Nice to meet you at the meetup last week. Didn't take too long to tag all time high after this episode.
Yes. And it was nice to meet you too. To be honest, I talked to a couple of people. I don't know your name, of course, by your username here. So I I think I know who you are. Pretty sure I do, but I appreciate that. I always enjoy meeting people at those meetups. And, actually, I think you were sitting on my left, if I'm not mistaken. But, anyways, it was nice to meet you as well. Actually, you could have been sitting on my left or my right. Both of those were new people, and I think I told both of them about my podcast. So either way, kind of the way it worked out.
But awesome. Glad you liked it. Feel free to come along for the ride. And, yeah, it was pretty obvious last week that we were we were gonna hit that all time high, at least it was to me. And sent in a 1,000 hats too, by the way. And I really appreciate that. So, you're welcome to hang around and join this virtual, Bitcoin meetup. So, I do actually wanna get a chat room going and and work on this community because it's kind of a one-sided community. Not totally, of course, people like this are sending me messages, but, I would love to, have people involved a little more and comment, throw out questions. I don't know. Whatever. Whatever. We'll see how that goes.
That may be a bit off, but, yeah, would love to do that, especially as I start recording live. I think that would be helpful ultimately as I try to do this live. And so we'll have a live streaming episode, and then we'll have a regular episode come out later that day. Our total streaming and boost was 11,919. I really appreciate that. That's the most actually we've had in quite a while. So that was really good to see. I appreciate the value that y'all are sending back. I I hope you're getting value out of this. Of course, that's always my goal. Alright. Let's do the news. I've covered what I consider to be the major news item of the week with Egypt.
I've also covered the Jamie Dimon situation, so I won't be mentioning that. I will say there's a few things that aren't really news, but I posted these on Twitter. You can follow me on Twitter, by the way, at Macintosh Fintech. But I I made some reposted some stuff that I thought was particularly interesting. I do wanna comment about this for just a second. Eric Hirschman over at, Gridless in Africa who they're putting in or teaming up with other companies who are putting in, energy infrastructure, hydropower typically. Although, I think they're looking at maybe doing some geothermal as well. I don't wanna speak for them. There's people in Africa who are doing geothermal.
I think they are. But, anyways, he's grew up in Africa, has a very good grasp of what's going on. And he posted this. In 3 or 4 days, the Kenyan family, so Kenya Africa, consumes 1 kilowatt hour of electricity, About as much as the typical American family uses in an hour. Now that sounds like that's a slam on America and it's not. And it's not a slam on the people in Kenya either. This is an He's got an article here. It's from the Federalist. But this is an interesting piece journaling a Kenyan and a Texan's energy use.
So they basically compare that. And the and it's the article's frankly not the best. But what they're trying to get at is that the UN is asking for countries, developed countries like the United States, and the United States in particular, to cut back on their energy use because of climate change. And this piece breaks down on the productivity. Look, I've said this on here before and I stand by it. Energy usage represents a level of civilization. Now, mind you, I'm not making fun of anybody, But the reality is, somebody who lives in a highly energized world, computers, internet, air conditioning, heating, cooling, which be air conditioning, but regardless, transportation, all of that kind of stuff, they are the most productive.
Now you can argue with that, but that's what the numbers are. Somebody who lives in Kenya, who lives in a rural farm area, who essentially works by hand, raising their crops and then taking them to the market. I'm not disparaging them and I I think you realize that, but just I have to put it out there. They are not as productive. Now they work harder than I do, if you wanna compare them to me, but they're not as productive. Energy usage, building tools, machines that do things for us. A tractor a a tractor which is burning gasoline or diesel fuel would revolutionize one of these Kenyan farmers' lives. Why? Because they would be much more productive. So the point is we should not be telling countries to cut back on energy use. You can have an argument about climate change. That's not what this podcast is about.
Whether it's nuclear or some form of hydro, wind, solar, or whether it's oil and natural gas. Okay? I think we should be encouraging more energy usage, not less. And that's exactly that's exactly what Eric and his company are doing in Africa, and that's why I love what they're doing. They're going into communities. They're building hydropower. They're turning on Bitcoin miners so that immediately immediately that power is being consumed. And then as the village needs power, they will are able to use part of that. Because you can just turn off Bitcoin miner, move it somewhere else, and plug it back in.
And so what you see over time is the energy power of the village goes up. They're using more energy. And because of that, their lives are getting better. It could be as simple as having a light bulb. You guys, most of us just can't even relate to this. So instead of burning paraffin lamps, which are bad for your lungs, which are really poor as somebody who has poor eyesight, I can just something I I can relate to. It's not enough light, but the kids don't get to study as much and they have more health issues because that's what they're using. Well, now we have a light bulb. We can afford that light bulb. Now I can study more. I can get out of school, maybe move on to college, and so on and so forth. That's just one little example.
Oh, I can run a small refrigerator and keep my food cold that needs to be kept cold so that I don't get sick consuming rotten meat and so on and so forth. So I love what these Bitcoin miners are out there doing in these spots and I get so pumped about that. So, anyways, great art well, not the best written article, but something to keep in mind. Alright. We're good. Oh, bricks did announce the creation of an independent payment system based on cryptocurrency and blockchain. I hope not. Not because I I don't care if they form an alliance. I really don't. In fact, if I were them, I'd do the same thing. I think that's a mistake.
If it's not on bitcoin, they're going to get left behind. I the writing's on the wall. And Nigeria has blamed Binance. I may have mentioned this last week. I don't think I did. For 70%, nera, which is their currency, devaluation, moves to issue arrest warrant against CEO. So that's, c z, is the CEO of Binance. It's it's like Jamie Dimon. I mean, maybe Jamie Dimon heard this and thought, wow. That'd be great. I don't know. Crazy people. Is a sickness is all I know. Alright. I'll stop there. That probably got me in trouble. Okay.
That's it for the news. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a value for value podcast. I appreciate the value that people like Kyron, like hypersensitive as ours provide when they're supporting this show, because they feel like I'm providing value back to them. And that is exactly what I'm looking for. One way that you can get value directly. If you clip an episode, go on the fountain, clip 1, 2, 3 minutes from this episode. If it's the current episode, I'll boost you 500 sats for that if you post it on the fountain stream. If it's an older episode, it's 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way for the satoshi pleb podcast to get more noticed.
You're welcome to do that. I would love to do that more than what I've seen so far. We do support podcasting 2 point o. We're a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. Occasionally, I talk about why, but I can't do it every week. You can support the podcast. Grab a podcasting 2.0 app like fountain, like cast o matic, like like podcast guru. Grab a Bitcoin lightning wallet. Hook it up to that, fountain. You don't even have to do that. Stream some sats. Boost some sats.
Send a message. Let me know what you're thinking. Whatever. Ask your question. I another way to support this project, if you don't feel like you could do that, there's always things that can be done. I'm always looking to improve this podcast. Transcripts are kinda handled. Podhome.fm does a really good job with the transcripts. I don't really need help there anymore. I guess somebody could probably do a better job with the chapters if they want. I would love to have different graphics. That's one thing, on the different chapters.
But that would be one thing. There's always technical things that could get done if you have a technical mindset. Linux, VMs I'm running on Hetzner is my VM setup. Ubuntu. There's help that could be done there building out new things like that chat room that I was talking about. So, if nothing else, like I said, you can support me with Treasure. You can stream stats. A great way to support the podcast actually is just to tell people about it. Tell your friends. Tell people at your local Bitcoin meetup or post a review about the podcast. That would be terrific. If you're wondering about this whole podcasting 2 point o thing, go to https:// podcastapps.com to start with. There's a whole list of podcast apps there that support all these new features that the traditional podcast apps do not.
Chapters, transcripts, although Apple is finally getting on the bandwagon and they are going to support transcripts. Streaming of sats, boosting, a number of innovative things, but you can try those 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 Mcintosh Fintech. Like I said earlier, I'm on Mastodon at Mcintosh @podcastindex.social, email at [email protected], and then, of course, there's the website. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I'll talk to you all soon.
