What is the halving and why is everyone on Bitcoin Twitter talking about? Let's discuss this very import feature of the Bitcoin protocol and how it can affect you. April 19th or 20 will be a milestone for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Daily Close
Aprill 14th, 2024: $65,757
Block Height at Time of Recording
839,828
News and Links
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/67-bank-accounts-under-brazilian-government-scanner-frozen-after-ed-acts-on-request/articleshow/77071002.cms?from=mdr
https://cointelegraph.com/news/paraguay-pauses-progress-bitcoin-mining-ban-bill
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-10/fdic-chief-says-us-ready-if-big-wall-street-bank-ever-failed
https://www.coinwarz.com/bitcoin-halving
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!
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Unknown:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is April 14th, and this is episode 165 of Toshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is the havening. Missed a week, and we've got a lot to make up for. So let's jump right on in. Of course, we do have the haviting coming up in just a couple of days. We'll be talking about that, but we'll get to that. Let's talk about our market. Of course, right now, as we record, we are on block number. Come on, time change calendar. Alright. We are on block 83928 3. That's 839,283. We are 717 blocks away from the happening, which will happen in approximately 4 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes.
So there you got it. April 192024 at 10:0:9 PM CST US. At the estimate right now. Of course, we'll talk about that in just a second. Alright. Great. So that's our price for the week. We had our weekly close just a few minutes ago. 65,757. And just to round things out, we do have a upcoming difficulty adjustment, looking like April 24th, which would, of course, be post halving. And right now, we're looking at, 1.76% up. So a modest upward increase. We will see the mempool.space website is showing. Our transactions are getting oh my. Oh my goodness.
What is going on? So, right. Our transaction fees are getting more more, expensive. Right now, we're actually sitting at a 110 for the low priority sats per v byte, meaning it would basically cost you about $10 to send a transaction right now. When I looked at it just a few hours ago, it was 32 sats per v byte. So it's obviously gone up quite a bit since then. We are looking at 944 megabytes of, transaction space, but, again, that jumped as well, which is probably why the transaction fees went up. But we're almost to a gigabyte. We're at 995 megabytes. So that's kind of our raw statistics.
We will, sip some Earl Gray, and we will jump right into our discussion of the happening. So what are we talking about in case you have been living under a rock? The havening is coming. This is something that I, have tweeted about a number of times, retweeted different stuff. Of course, a number of podcasts have talked about this. But just in case, I will give a brief summary in case you haven't heard. We'll discuss what's coming up and so on. Now you will hear things like, well, the havening happens every 4 years. So first of all, let's unpack couple of things. What is the happening?
When a block of Bitcoin is mined by miners like myself, It contains a fixed number of Bitcoin. And that number is basically, it's programmed into the protocol, if you wanna put it that way. And it's managed by the the Bitcoin core software that runs, on the various nodes, the 60 or a 100000, however many there are nodes running the Bitcoin, the core Bitcoin software. And I just I keep saying Bitcoin Core. That is certainly the most common, node software. It's not the only software out there. So I'll just leave it at that for now, but, it's kind of the base level protocol. All that being said, what that means is that when Bitcoin got started in 2,009 in January of 2,009, a block reward so this is the the the block that gets mined, was worth 50 Bitcoin.
Now in addition to that, there's also transaction fees that are bundled up with that. I'm not really gonna discuss that tonight. But what that means is that there's kind of a variable amount of Bitcoin that gets mined when a when a miner solves the block reward. Okay? So they get the 50 in in this original case, plus the transaction fees. But, again, every 4 years roughly, and we'll talk about that in more detail in just a second, it gets halved. So it went from 50 to 25. That first happening happened on November 28, 2012. And the and then about 4 years later, July 9, 2016, it went down to 12.5.
From there. On May 11, 2020, it went down to 6.25, which is what it currently is at. So my miners that are sitting out there mining right now, if they solve a block, it's 6.25 Bitcoin plus the transaction fees that, my mining pool would get. And then I get some portion of that 6.25 Bitcoin. Here in just a few days, less than a week at this point, really, is what it's looking like. Certainly, That reward will go from 6.25 to 3.125. So I'm sure you've got some questions, but let me set one thing straight real quick. It's actually not 4 years. And as I read off those dates, you can see that it varies. So let's talk about that for just a second because it's it's so common to say that. I think we almost kind of accepted. It's like, oh, it's every 4 years. Well, it's actually every 210,000 blocks.
Meaning, these blocks, these blocks that get mined, so to speak, these transactional blocks. That first one, when we went from 50 to 25, was at block 210,000. That happened to occur on November 28, 2012. And then you went to 420 to 630, 630,000,420,000. And, right now, we're at block number what did I say? Okay. It might have changed. It looks like maybe it did. I think it did. Yes. It did. As I was talking, 839,280 4. So we're now 716 blocks away from the halving. I'm getting this off time chain calendar.com, by the way. It's a cool site. You should check it out. This particular graphic that I'm looking at, giving you this information.
The point is, it's not every 4 years. The point is, it's a fixed number of blocks that's programmed into the protocol again. And that means that and the difficulty adjustment algorithm, which I've discussed before and I reference when I say the difficulty is going up or it looks like it's going up, you know, 1.69% or whatever it was. My goodness. It just mined another block. Wow. This is kinda crazy. So it's we're now 715 blocks. The average block time right now is 9 minutes and 46 seconds. The target on that is always 10 minutes. That's what the difficulty adjustment is actually there for.
So anyways, it's not an exact time reference, but it's an exact block reference, if that makes sense. 210,000 blocks in between. We will reach that next halving block when we get to 840,000 blocks, which will occur again either late in April 19th or early on April 20th. So that is coming up very, very soon. Just a few days after this, we'll get released tomorrow morning on April 15th. What does that mean? Why is it there? Well, really briefly, it it is there because we have a fixed supply of Bitcoin, and this was Satoshi's plan. I'm not gonna throw it all out there all at once. We're going to distribute it over time. We're going to kind of front load it to help give it legs, so to speak.
But these havenings are going to continue for the next more than 100 years. The exact end will actually be in 2140, most likely, the way that it's scheduled out. When it reaches block number 6,930,000. So we're looking at, like, 21.40. And and when it reaches that, it will literally go from 1 satoshi to 0 satoshis. Meaning that the transaction rewards at that point would have to be completely covering the cost of however many miners that are online. So you can see how that plays out. So from here, of course, we go 6.25 down to 3.125 here in just a few days. And then I'm not gonna bore you with all these numbers, and I'm not the the digits get really long. But 1.56, 0.78, 0.39, that would be in 2036.
And that's when we reach block number 1,471,000, just as an example. And it keeps going on and on and on. In 21100, for example or yeah. Actually, we would theoretically have 1 in 21100. It'll be 0.000 oh, my goodness. How many zeros are there? There's 5 zeros and then 596. I think that's 596 satoshis, if I'm not mistaken. That is not a very big reward. So if you think about that, what this does, it places the cap on 21,000,000. There were it's not exactly 21,000,000, but it's so close, by the way, that that's what people all always say. If you add up all these block rewards from all of these, it's not 21,000,000.
It's I think it's slightly under. I don't know offhand thinking though that it is. Point being that sets in place that cap, we will never have more than 21,000,000 Bitcoin if to get more than that. Basically, the majority, the super majority, really, of the nodes would have to agree to that. And that's not gonna happen. So there we go. That's what the halvening is all about. How does this affect you? Well, what we've certainly seen historically is as the halvenings have occurred, the price of Bitcoin has gone up. And it makes sense if there's less and less or if there's less and less issuance of a money, it's going to become more and more valuable. It just kinda makes common sense.
Let me throw in a little bit of advice. And you know that I don't commonly come in here and say you should buy some Bitcoin. Whenever we talk about the market, you know, this week, the market was down. Actually, the last couple of days, I guess, the last 24 hours or so as I record this, we had a pretty solid dip down to I wanna say, let me just look. I'm showing $61,676 in the last 24 hours on this chart. Now why was that? Because Iran and Israel are in a elevated state of tension. They're throwing drones and cruise missiles and whatever back and forth at each other.
I guess I Israel has not retaliated at this point, but for whatever reason, this has driven the price of Bitcoin down to 61,000. The price is not going to stay down there because the rate of issuance of Bitcoin is going to cut in half in just a few days. And when that happens, the miners it's going to be more difficult for them to make money. There will be fewer Bitcoin that are available to sell, obviously. And ultimately, we could certainly see this historically. The price is going to go up. You can look at a Bitcoin Bitcoin chart. You can draw. Here's the happening. Here's the happening. Here's the happening, the 3 that have occurred, and you can see the price has gone up every time within a fairly short period of time. And you know that I don't come on here all the time and say, you know, you should just throw all your money into coin. What do we talk about?
We talk about DCA on this show. Right? Dollar cost average. Don't just kind of lump sum throw everything in or any strategy like that because those type things tend to not do as well, certainly for the average person, which let's be honest, I'm certainly an average person as just buying whatever the amount is of Bitcoin that you're going to invest in on a daily basis. Over the long run, that has the best performance. But I will say this. I do know post happening, maybe not immediately, but within a short period of time, within a few months, we're gonna have this happening almost at the end of April. So May, June, July. So kind of things may go sideways during the summer, maybe even go down a little bit.
But by this fall, we will see Bitcoin taking off. So this is one of those points I would consider if I, for whatever reason, had more money to put into Bitcoin. It might be a judicious place to put in. And I will tell you this, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to buy some more miners personally here in the next few weeks. I'm going to wait post happening because a lot of miners may be under some financial stress because now they're mining half the amount of Bitcoin and the price is not going to immediately explode. So maybe I can get some cheaper minor prices.
The point is, I'm going to invest more because I know in the long run that this is going to be an asset that's worth more, maybe significantly more than it is right now. So this is kind of one of those times I would say, if you had some extra that you were going to, you know, you were thinking about investing, well, I might not dollar cost average that. I might throw it in a little more now rather than later, if that makes sense. Because you're essentially buying more for your money. I hope that makes sense. I guarantee you when we get to 21.40 and and a satoshi is the only thing that gets mined in a block, That satoshi is gonna be worth a lot lot more than it is now. And I know you're sitting there saying, but but Macintosh, that's more than a 100 years away.
I get that. We're probably not even talking about your children when we're discussing 21 40. Maybe maybe your grandchildren. I don't know. Do the math. I guess probably your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren. But still, the point is that as we move through these these cycles that this is one of the major drivers. In my opinion, there's kind of 2 things. There's the 21,000,000 Bitcoin, which is driven by this happening cycle. And there's more and more adoption of Bitcoin. Those are the two things that will drive up the price of Bitcoin. But you could easily make the argument that until the last few years, we've really not had major adoption of Bitcoin. I mean, you do not have to go back that far before.
You didn't see major companies like MicroStrategy buying Bitcoin. I don't know how long offhand MicroStrategy has been buying Bitcoin. But think for example, I just saw something the other day talking about and I kinda forgot this when Tesla bought like a 1,000,000,000 and a half dollars of Bitcoin. Now they turned around and sold a lot of that, but they bought a 1,000,000,000 and a half dollars, which isn't a huge amount. Maybe it was back then for them, still probably is. But I in the overall scheme of things compared to this more than a $1,000,000,000,000 asset at this point.
And yet that was such a big deal that there was, like, a major headline story about that. And now I think we're seeing pension funds. We're seeing insurance funds. We're seeing corporate businesses putting it in their treasury. We're seeing small companies putting it in their treasury. Maybe even family run businesses certainly putting it in their treasury and and for long term holdings. So we're seeing more and more of this adoption, but my point is that's all fairly recent. And yet, look at we are right now compared to, I don't know, 10 years ago.
202014. Right? Think about the price of Bitcoin. I could look it up. I have no let's see. Actually, I do know. It'd be, like, 2, $300 maybe. So I I don't know. You tell me. Anyways, my point is, if you're gonna be investing, I'm certainly not saying put all your money on Bitcoin. But if you are already considering buying Bitcoin, this is there's only 2 times, right, that I would consider investing more than just kind of a DCA. Right before the halvening or maybe shortly after the halvening, we may see a price drop after the halvening. It's possible. I think historically, it's happened a couple of times, so don't be surprised.
But the other time is and I did this personally, when Russia invaded Ukraine and Bitcoin dropped to 20 15,000, I thought that was the bottom. I was correct. And I, at that point, pushed in as much as I could, essentially, in the Bitcoin. Now it wasn't a huge amount, to be honest. But, of course, that was, more than 4 x ago. Right? I think that was a pretty good choice that I didn't necessarily just kind of DCA that in because the price sprung back pretty quickly from that point. So there's only a few times that I would be kind of even suggesting that someone might want to do more than just a DCA, but this is one of them. This is this is a very opportune time, shall we say. Because historically, what we see as this happening happens, as things shake out after the happening, you know, number is going to go up later this year. Now I will say this from a minor perspective.
We might see some some hurt. I'm not I kind of I I thought I've kinda backed off on this. I I used to think and by used to, I mean, just in the last couple months, that maybe some of these public miners would I was hope hoping I shouldn't say it this way, but I was kind of thinking at least that maybe 1 or more of these public miners might capitulate. They might have to sell a bunch of miners or kinda shut down or maybe even go bankrupt. Because when the happening happens and the price doesn't double, it becomes twice as expensive essentially for a miner to mine a Bitcoin.
And if their price of production is higher than that price of Bitcoin, then they're operating at a loss, obviously. And they've had a number a couple of good months now, really kind of well, all year, all of this year. So what are we now? 4 months in. And I think a lot of them have done a lot of pretty smart moves, kind of eliminated some debt, built up some cash. They've been buying miners. Certainly, this hash rate that's coming online is is, you know, coming from brand new miners in a lot of cases. I think they're prepared this time unlike, say, 4 years ago.
So, anyways, that's gonna kinda wrap that up. I just wanted to give a brief overview. I wanted you to get in this mindset, though, of what is coming. It is coming. We are 714 blocks now from the next happening. 714. Yeah. We're 99.66% away from that next happening. So there you go. Hope you're going to a happening party. I don't think we're having one in my area. Anyways, let's talk about our supporters. Now it has been a couple of weeks. Oh, I wanted to mention this real quick, kind of why I missed last week. I thought I would share a little something with you. I don't normally talk a lot about kinda what's going on with me, but I'm gonna give you a real quick story if that's okay. So kinda lean back.
Over 10 years ago, my wife and I went to a 3 day log home class log home building class, I should say, out in Monroe, Washington. No hands on experience. Came back to our place. We had bought some land. And over the next 3 plus years, we built a log home. Didn't live there for a whole long time, but that kinda put a bug in my wife and I. And ever since then, we've kind of we've done a number of different things, but I have ended up I've built a shed out there. I built a shed somewhere else on another property that I owned at the time. I built a shed for a friend fairly recently.
And right now, I'm building a shed, a fairly large shed for another friend. This one is 16 by 40. And I build in what would be called a post and beam style. And what that is, a lot of people call it timber frame. It's it's not handcrafted, like, no connectors, no joint, no screws, I should say, anything like that. I do not take the time or have the skill to to do all that. But it's obviously it's a wood structure. Large posts, large beams. I think in this case, our posts are 6 by 6. Our beams are 6 by 8. Our trusses are 3 by 6. And, so it's just and all all around is just a big structure. Well, we started working on it about a month ago, and it has progressed fairly well. So today, actually, we got the trusses finished. So we're now ready to put on the roof and close in the walls and hang the doors and windows and and put the board and button on the outside, and that will be it.
I'm rather proud of it. I mean, to be not to be vain, but we've put a lot of work in it. I think it's actually turned out very well, and I enjoy doing this a lot, actually. This scratches an itch, so to speak, that I didn't even know I had. So I've been involved in the computer business for a long, long time. I'd never done anything like this. And then we built this first log home or the only log home that we built, but, you know, 10 years ago. And all of a sudden, kind of with our own hands, we've got this structure rising up out of the ground. And I don't I don't know how to describe it other than that, but we're seeing something physical.
Whereas these days, alls I ever do is deal with virtual private servers, essentially, you know, Amazon, EC 2 instances and this kind of thing. So it's a completely different experience, and I love it. We've not really made a profession at this point. We're thinking about doing some different things along those ways. But right now, you know, we're just kinda doing it for fun. Well, this fun, and it has been fun, has taken a lot of my time. It's why I didn't record last week. I'll be honest. We worked all weekend, and I just physically was not up for recording. And I do apologize, but I try not to let those things, kind of interfere.
But anyways and I'm not gonna post a picture of it on Twitter because, to be honest, my Twitter feed's really not for that, and I'd have to go ahead and strip out the metadata about kinda where where we took the picture and all this. And I'm just not up for it. But I will say this, go into the conference. If you wanna see picture of it, just let me know. I've certainly got a number of them on my phone and, you can take a look at it, if you catch up with me. But, we'll be finishing that. I'm hoping in the next few weeks, we'll be starting on what's called the purlins tomorrow. Those are the things that run horizontal along the trusses to provide stiffness between the trusses.
And then over the parlance would basically go the roofing material, done and, and get, get it under roof so we don't really have to worry about the rain so much. I said 16 by 40, and that's in feet. I didn't even think about that. Let's see. How many meters would that be? It'd be about 5 by over 10. Well, about 5 by 15, I guess. Let's see. Is that right? Yeah. Almost 5 by 15. It's not quite 5. It's not quite or maybe it is. Anyways, it's somewhere around there. And it stands, about the wall heights are 8 feet, and then it's probably another gracious. I don't know. It's probably oh, I actually, I do know. It's, 4 more feet, to the tip. So, like, 12 feet to the top of the roof.
And we're actually gonna frame this out, put some insulation in it. It really kinda make it fancy. They're gonna put an air conditioner in there, air condition heat unit, I should say. And, part of it will be a workshop, part of it will be storage, and part of it will be, oh, let's see. Well, it doesn't matter. Like garden stuff. So anyways, kinda cool. Having fun with that. And again, I do apologize. It kinda interfered. But I do have a life outside of this. I don't talk about it, but I do. Anyways, that was it. So let's jump right in to some of my awesome supporters. Had a lot of streaming, a lot of, some boost this week as well. I had a total of 79159 sats. So that's above our normal. I appreciate that at an extremely, extreme extreme amount.
There we go. And, you know, we're kinda heading towards our target, 25,000 sats per episode. And, basically, that would cover kinda my expenses and maybe even let me upgrade a thing or 2 along the way. Would love to not pull that out of my pocket. But yeah. So we're kind of on this value for value journey together. April fools in Argentina was our last episode, and that was episode 164. All 3 boosts came from that episode. We had hypersensitive as far as first off said great episode and good to hear about you knowing about those who stream to you.
When I was talking about the lightning node set up and the issues I was having with Satoshi's plebs is what he's talking about there. Even better if the sats would actually reach you, and I do agree with that onward and upward. I have not done that, setup yet. I'm gonna talk about that. There's another comment about that here in just a second. I will. I'm going to. I'm just again, I'm I'm really tied up with this shed. The next one was from our friend Gulag Plem, sent 3,000 sets and said, here's the value that kicked back from last week. Wasn't sure what the issue was and didn't wanna boost. Keep it up. Thank you, Gulag. I appreciate that, and I really do. Thank you very much. And I guess they've got it all sorted out. Things seem to be working for now, but yeah. And then, Kyron at Mare Mortals, sent this boost in, row of sticks, 1111.
He said, I manage custodial risk by splitting the sats between satoshi stream, fountain, and albi. All 3 of those, well, Fountain and Albi are lightning wallets. Satoshi Stream technically isn't, but it's similar. Well, I guess it is. I've never really thought about that. Wow. Macintosh just learned something. Unlikely that all 3 would be down at any given time, and I can switch rapidly to another if there is an extended outage. This type of decentralization seems neglected as it's always custodial equals bad. Frowny kitten face, I think. I've seen that before. I think it's supposed to be a kitten. Anyways, running my own node makes no sense for me, technically, practically, and time wise.
I still would love to have a couple more options if you know of another decent lightning wallet I can put in the splits. The only one I can think of offhand, Kyron, is maybe Phoenix. Might wanna look at that. Outside of that, there's not a whole lot, which is actually kind of one of my issues. There's not a whole lot of options. I would have hoped at this point there would have been more, but it's almost like especially, Albie is kind of moved in and taken over. But I don't have any problem with what you're saying. It's not the way that I wanna do it, and I'll explain why. But I know that this would make sense for a lot of people.
Exactly what you're describing. At least that way, you've kind of got your fingers in different pies. And if one has a problem, then, you know, it's not taking everything down. I am a very technical person. I can run my own node. I would actually like to. I love the control. It's practically does it make sense? Not at the amount of no sats that I'm bringing in at this point. However, because of other things, I have some websites. I'm actually got the virtual private server space that I could do it on, and it basically wouldn't cost me any money. So time wise, yes. I probably don't need to be doing it, but I'm a control freak, and I would love to monitor. I mean, it's like with Satoshi streams not to knock them, but whenever they have problems, and they do every couple months, to be honest, you know, hear anything about it. It just kinda stops working, and then it starts working whenever they fix it.
And if you manage to catch it, then, you know, there's a channel that you can hit them up for tech support. And the guy or man or woman, I don't I don't know. But, anyways, they'll see that and respond to it. But I have no way of monitoring that. I have no way of testing that my lightning node is up or or this kind of thing. So I actually have the proficiency and skill set to not only run my own node, but kind of monitor that thing and make sure that it's up and things are working properly. And so I think I would have a better experience. Plus, that would also and maybe this would work. Other ways, it probably would, but I really wanna hook up.
Dave and Adam are always talking about this on their show. The program that monitors the, the lightning node that all the boost and things. I'm drawing a complete blank. Anyways, it's an open source product, and it would basically give me a list of the streaming that's coming in and the boost, like, all in one little nice little console. Anyways, enough about that. I appreciate your input, Karen, and I I honestly would recommend exactly what you're doing to a lot of people. And I'm not saying I'm better than that. I'm just saying I'm different than that. But I do appreciate that and appreciate the boost, and and all that. So very cool. Alright. Let's get on to news. Let's get on out of here. This is getting long.
Well, there were a few topics I wanted to mention this week. So, of course, we've talked about the happening. We're we're getting there. BlackRock's Larry Fink had this to say, and I I believe this. I'm not a big fan of him, but I think he's certainly accurate on this. If inflation was measured like it was in the 19 eighties with a heavier emphasis on food inflation, housing, and interest rates, inflation would be 12%. Right? So your housing and energy needs, gasoline, electricity, that kind of thing. Those are kinda core needs and yet in the CPI that's commonly used for inflation rates, those are not emphasized.
I 100% agree with what he says there. Okay. I did retweet about kind of the cost of, minors. I won't go into that. But as this happening approaches because, again, the amount of product essentially that minors are gonna be able to create post habiting will go in half. I mean, so the older miners, the less efficient miners, they become less likely to be able to make any sense. So a nice little chart about that. Now here's something you probably aren't gonna hear, very many places. But I did confirm, and I have a link to an article on this in show notes. The Brazilian journalists are having their money frozen in their bank accounts.
I I don't understand. I mean, I'm an American. Documents, if I'm not mistaken. They are, in our documents, if I'm not mistaken. They are, kinda given a protected status. This heavy handed, you know, political this kind of pushback, I just don't understand. But it did happen. It is happening. So, basically, these people are being judgmental. They're being they're writing about the current government, and the government doesn't like that. But, you know, Bitcoin doesn't have a real world use case. Right? Stuff like this this and dissidents and just people in countries that are heavily persecuted are the reasons. One of the many of the main reasons that I so strongly push for privacy in Bitcoin for base protocol level privacy, not privacy that you have to use coin join or this kind of thing to have. Not privacy that you have to do this special setup to kind of have effect. I think that privacy should be the default Because this is the world that we live in whether we like it or not, and I don't think it's going to get better at least for a while.
This is Brazil. Brazil is never I'd never thought of Brazil as a place that this would happen. Of course, I never thought of Canada as a place that this would happen until they froze the truckers funds up there. So, anyways so Paraguay, right down there by Brazil, has kind of had this flip flop thing going on about Bitcoin mining specifically and about crypto in general and all this. So very, very recently, there came out saying, oh, they're gonna, put a kind of a moratorium on Bitcoin mining, and they were gonna have this discussion about it and potentially kind of shut it all down. Paraguay, why this is important? Paraguay has one of the world's largest dams, hydroelectric dams, and they have very cheap power.
They have a surplus of it. Their country doesn't even come close to using it all. They send most of it actually off to Brazil, Argentina, Brazil Brazil and Argentina, ironically. Brazil, we were just talking about, and all of this. So miners have moved in, so to speak, and they've been setting up operations. Well, there's been some people who didn't like that. So they're, you know, there was this talk about kinda shutting all that down. Well, apparently, there was a big backlash when that came out, and now they've kind of done this complete 180. They've got a public hearing set for 423, so just a few days from now, to discuss crypto mining. Decision on the anti mining law has been deferred by 30 days and now they're proposing selling surplus energy to miners instead of exporting it to Brazil and Argentina.
So there you go. We'll see what happens. The whole Bitcoin electricity mining thing is this kind of this whole subculture. I don't know. There you go. And, of course, our difficulty adjustment is we're at an all time high. It has never been more difficult to mine Bitcoin. And yet, it still looks like our next one is gonna go even higher. Bloomberg, a respected financial paper institution, says that the FDIC chief, so that's the federal depository, here in the United States, they they're an insurance, bank insurance type thing. Say the US is ready to handle the collapse of any major Wall Street bank.
I don't know why they would say that unless they were worried that one was fixing to do that. So we will see. We will see. Alright. That's it. So we're gonna wrap this up. Of course, Satoshi's PLEBS is a value for value podcast. I provide value, at least I attempt to. And if you find that valuable, you can provide value back through apps like Fountain, where you can stream sats. You can boost just like these people did earlier and show your support. There's other things. This is what I would call treasure. You're giving me Satoshis. You're saying, Macintosh, you are providing value to me. I wanna provide value back to you. But there are other ways to do that.
For example, with fountain specifically, you can clip 1, 2, or 3 minutes from any episode. If you post that, I will actually provide value back to you. If it's a new episode, I'll provide a 500 set boost. If it's an older episode, it's 300. Why would I do that? Because people surfacing clips like that provide exposure to the show, and it brings new people in. And, of course, you can tell other people about it as well. You can say, hey. Go listen to Soshi's Plebs. It's a great podcast. He's always talking about different things, you know, from a, frankly, a different perspective. I'm a old time person around here.
I have been involved in Bitcoin since 2013. I was not smart about it for a long time, but I've seen a lot. So it does give me a little bit of a different perspective. There's other things. I'll cut that out. I'll abbreviate that this week because this episode is getting long. How could you get a hold of me? Send me an email, macintosh@satoshisdash blebs.com. You can DM me on, Twitter. My Twitter handle is Macintosh Fintech. Probably the best two ways to get a hold of me. That's it. That's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. Of course, like I said, you can just reach out to me and give me some comment or provide a boost and ask a question.
Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week, and get prepared for this happening.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is April 14th, and this is episode 165 of Toshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is the havening. Missed a week, and we've got a lot to make up for. So let's jump right on in. Of course, we do have the haviting coming up in just a couple of days. We'll be talking about that, but we'll get to that. Let's talk about our market. Of course, right now, as we record, we are on block number. Come on, time change calendar. Alright. We are on block 83928 3. That's 839,283. We are 717 blocks away from the happening, which will happen in approximately 4 days, 23 hours and 30 minutes.
So there you got it. April 192024 at 10:0:9 PM CST US. At the estimate right now. Of course, we'll talk about that in just a second. Alright. Great. So that's our price for the week. We had our weekly close just a few minutes ago. 65,757. And just to round things out, we do have a upcoming difficulty adjustment, looking like April 24th, which would, of course, be post halving. And right now, we're looking at, 1.76% up. So a modest upward increase. We will see the mempool.space website is showing. Our transactions are getting oh my. Oh my goodness.
What is going on? So, right. Our transaction fees are getting more more, expensive. Right now, we're actually sitting at a 110 for the low priority sats per v byte, meaning it would basically cost you about $10 to send a transaction right now. When I looked at it just a few hours ago, it was 32 sats per v byte. So it's obviously gone up quite a bit since then. We are looking at 944 megabytes of, transaction space, but, again, that jumped as well, which is probably why the transaction fees went up. But we're almost to a gigabyte. We're at 995 megabytes. So that's kind of our raw statistics.
We will, sip some Earl Gray, and we will jump right into our discussion of the happening. So what are we talking about in case you have been living under a rock? The havening is coming. This is something that I, have tweeted about a number of times, retweeted different stuff. Of course, a number of podcasts have talked about this. But just in case, I will give a brief summary in case you haven't heard. We'll discuss what's coming up and so on. Now you will hear things like, well, the havening happens every 4 years. So first of all, let's unpack couple of things. What is the happening?
When a block of Bitcoin is mined by miners like myself, It contains a fixed number of Bitcoin. And that number is basically, it's programmed into the protocol, if you wanna put it that way. And it's managed by the the Bitcoin core software that runs, on the various nodes, the 60 or a 100000, however many there are nodes running the Bitcoin, the core Bitcoin software. And I just I keep saying Bitcoin Core. That is certainly the most common, node software. It's not the only software out there. So I'll just leave it at that for now, but, it's kind of the base level protocol. All that being said, what that means is that when Bitcoin got started in 2,009 in January of 2,009, a block reward so this is the the the block that gets mined, was worth 50 Bitcoin.
Now in addition to that, there's also transaction fees that are bundled up with that. I'm not really gonna discuss that tonight. But what that means is that there's kind of a variable amount of Bitcoin that gets mined when a when a miner solves the block reward. Okay? So they get the 50 in in this original case, plus the transaction fees. But, again, every 4 years roughly, and we'll talk about that in more detail in just a second, it gets halved. So it went from 50 to 25. That first happening happened on November 28, 2012. And the and then about 4 years later, July 9, 2016, it went down to 12.5.
From there. On May 11, 2020, it went down to 6.25, which is what it currently is at. So my miners that are sitting out there mining right now, if they solve a block, it's 6.25 Bitcoin plus the transaction fees that, my mining pool would get. And then I get some portion of that 6.25 Bitcoin. Here in just a few days, less than a week at this point, really, is what it's looking like. Certainly, That reward will go from 6.25 to 3.125. So I'm sure you've got some questions, but let me set one thing straight real quick. It's actually not 4 years. And as I read off those dates, you can see that it varies. So let's talk about that for just a second because it's it's so common to say that. I think we almost kind of accepted. It's like, oh, it's every 4 years. Well, it's actually every 210,000 blocks.
Meaning, these blocks, these blocks that get mined, so to speak, these transactional blocks. That first one, when we went from 50 to 25, was at block 210,000. That happened to occur on November 28, 2012. And then you went to 420 to 630, 630,000,420,000. And, right now, we're at block number what did I say? Okay. It might have changed. It looks like maybe it did. I think it did. Yes. It did. As I was talking, 839,280 4. So we're now 716 blocks away from the halving. I'm getting this off time chain calendar.com, by the way. It's a cool site. You should check it out. This particular graphic that I'm looking at, giving you this information.
The point is, it's not every 4 years. The point is, it's a fixed number of blocks that's programmed into the protocol again. And that means that and the difficulty adjustment algorithm, which I've discussed before and I reference when I say the difficulty is going up or it looks like it's going up, you know, 1.69% or whatever it was. My goodness. It just mined another block. Wow. This is kinda crazy. So it's we're now 715 blocks. The average block time right now is 9 minutes and 46 seconds. The target on that is always 10 minutes. That's what the difficulty adjustment is actually there for.
So anyways, it's not an exact time reference, but it's an exact block reference, if that makes sense. 210,000 blocks in between. We will reach that next halving block when we get to 840,000 blocks, which will occur again either late in April 19th or early on April 20th. So that is coming up very, very soon. Just a few days after this, we'll get released tomorrow morning on April 15th. What does that mean? Why is it there? Well, really briefly, it it is there because we have a fixed supply of Bitcoin, and this was Satoshi's plan. I'm not gonna throw it all out there all at once. We're going to distribute it over time. We're going to kind of front load it to help give it legs, so to speak.
But these havenings are going to continue for the next more than 100 years. The exact end will actually be in 2140, most likely, the way that it's scheduled out. When it reaches block number 6,930,000. So we're looking at, like, 21.40. And and when it reaches that, it will literally go from 1 satoshi to 0 satoshis. Meaning that the transaction rewards at that point would have to be completely covering the cost of however many miners that are online. So you can see how that plays out. So from here, of course, we go 6.25 down to 3.125 here in just a few days. And then I'm not gonna bore you with all these numbers, and I'm not the the digits get really long. But 1.56, 0.78, 0.39, that would be in 2036.
And that's when we reach block number 1,471,000, just as an example. And it keeps going on and on and on. In 21100, for example or yeah. Actually, we would theoretically have 1 in 21100. It'll be 0.000 oh, my goodness. How many zeros are there? There's 5 zeros and then 596. I think that's 596 satoshis, if I'm not mistaken. That is not a very big reward. So if you think about that, what this does, it places the cap on 21,000,000. There were it's not exactly 21,000,000, but it's so close, by the way, that that's what people all always say. If you add up all these block rewards from all of these, it's not 21,000,000.
It's I think it's slightly under. I don't know offhand thinking though that it is. Point being that sets in place that cap, we will never have more than 21,000,000 Bitcoin if to get more than that. Basically, the majority, the super majority, really, of the nodes would have to agree to that. And that's not gonna happen. So there we go. That's what the halvening is all about. How does this affect you? Well, what we've certainly seen historically is as the halvenings have occurred, the price of Bitcoin has gone up. And it makes sense if there's less and less or if there's less and less issuance of a money, it's going to become more and more valuable. It just kinda makes common sense.
Let me throw in a little bit of advice. And you know that I don't commonly come in here and say you should buy some Bitcoin. Whenever we talk about the market, you know, this week, the market was down. Actually, the last couple of days, I guess, the last 24 hours or so as I record this, we had a pretty solid dip down to I wanna say, let me just look. I'm showing $61,676 in the last 24 hours on this chart. Now why was that? Because Iran and Israel are in a elevated state of tension. They're throwing drones and cruise missiles and whatever back and forth at each other.
I guess I Israel has not retaliated at this point, but for whatever reason, this has driven the price of Bitcoin down to 61,000. The price is not going to stay down there because the rate of issuance of Bitcoin is going to cut in half in just a few days. And when that happens, the miners it's going to be more difficult for them to make money. There will be fewer Bitcoin that are available to sell, obviously. And ultimately, we could certainly see this historically. The price is going to go up. You can look at a Bitcoin Bitcoin chart. You can draw. Here's the happening. Here's the happening. Here's the happening, the 3 that have occurred, and you can see the price has gone up every time within a fairly short period of time. And you know that I don't come on here all the time and say, you know, you should just throw all your money into coin. What do we talk about?
We talk about DCA on this show. Right? Dollar cost average. Don't just kind of lump sum throw everything in or any strategy like that because those type things tend to not do as well, certainly for the average person, which let's be honest, I'm certainly an average person as just buying whatever the amount is of Bitcoin that you're going to invest in on a daily basis. Over the long run, that has the best performance. But I will say this. I do know post happening, maybe not immediately, but within a short period of time, within a few months, we're gonna have this happening almost at the end of April. So May, June, July. So kind of things may go sideways during the summer, maybe even go down a little bit.
But by this fall, we will see Bitcoin taking off. So this is one of those points I would consider if I, for whatever reason, had more money to put into Bitcoin. It might be a judicious place to put in. And I will tell you this, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to buy some more miners personally here in the next few weeks. I'm going to wait post happening because a lot of miners may be under some financial stress because now they're mining half the amount of Bitcoin and the price is not going to immediately explode. So maybe I can get some cheaper minor prices.
The point is, I'm going to invest more because I know in the long run that this is going to be an asset that's worth more, maybe significantly more than it is right now. So this is kind of one of those times I would say, if you had some extra that you were going to, you know, you were thinking about investing, well, I might not dollar cost average that. I might throw it in a little more now rather than later, if that makes sense. Because you're essentially buying more for your money. I hope that makes sense. I guarantee you when we get to 21.40 and and a satoshi is the only thing that gets mined in a block, That satoshi is gonna be worth a lot lot more than it is now. And I know you're sitting there saying, but but Macintosh, that's more than a 100 years away.
I get that. We're probably not even talking about your children when we're discussing 21 40. Maybe maybe your grandchildren. I don't know. Do the math. I guess probably your grandchildren, or your great grandchildren. But still, the point is that as we move through these these cycles that this is one of the major drivers. In my opinion, there's kind of 2 things. There's the 21,000,000 Bitcoin, which is driven by this happening cycle. And there's more and more adoption of Bitcoin. Those are the two things that will drive up the price of Bitcoin. But you could easily make the argument that until the last few years, we've really not had major adoption of Bitcoin. I mean, you do not have to go back that far before.
You didn't see major companies like MicroStrategy buying Bitcoin. I don't know how long offhand MicroStrategy has been buying Bitcoin. But think for example, I just saw something the other day talking about and I kinda forgot this when Tesla bought like a 1,000,000,000 and a half dollars of Bitcoin. Now they turned around and sold a lot of that, but they bought a 1,000,000,000 and a half dollars, which isn't a huge amount. Maybe it was back then for them, still probably is. But I in the overall scheme of things compared to this more than a $1,000,000,000,000 asset at this point.
And yet that was such a big deal that there was, like, a major headline story about that. And now I think we're seeing pension funds. We're seeing insurance funds. We're seeing corporate businesses putting it in their treasury. We're seeing small companies putting it in their treasury. Maybe even family run businesses certainly putting it in their treasury and and for long term holdings. So we're seeing more and more of this adoption, but my point is that's all fairly recent. And yet, look at we are right now compared to, I don't know, 10 years ago.
202014. Right? Think about the price of Bitcoin. I could look it up. I have no let's see. Actually, I do know. It'd be, like, 2, $300 maybe. So I I don't know. You tell me. Anyways, my point is, if you're gonna be investing, I'm certainly not saying put all your money on Bitcoin. But if you are already considering buying Bitcoin, this is there's only 2 times, right, that I would consider investing more than just kind of a DCA. Right before the halvening or maybe shortly after the halvening, we may see a price drop after the halvening. It's possible. I think historically, it's happened a couple of times, so don't be surprised.
But the other time is and I did this personally, when Russia invaded Ukraine and Bitcoin dropped to 20 15,000, I thought that was the bottom. I was correct. And I, at that point, pushed in as much as I could, essentially, in the Bitcoin. Now it wasn't a huge amount, to be honest. But, of course, that was, more than 4 x ago. Right? I think that was a pretty good choice that I didn't necessarily just kind of DCA that in because the price sprung back pretty quickly from that point. So there's only a few times that I would be kind of even suggesting that someone might want to do more than just a DCA, but this is one of them. This is this is a very opportune time, shall we say. Because historically, what we see as this happening happens, as things shake out after the happening, you know, number is going to go up later this year. Now I will say this from a minor perspective.
We might see some some hurt. I'm not I kind of I I thought I've kinda backed off on this. I I used to think and by used to, I mean, just in the last couple months, that maybe some of these public miners would I was hope hoping I shouldn't say it this way, but I was kind of thinking at least that maybe 1 or more of these public miners might capitulate. They might have to sell a bunch of miners or kinda shut down or maybe even go bankrupt. Because when the happening happens and the price doesn't double, it becomes twice as expensive essentially for a miner to mine a Bitcoin.
And if their price of production is higher than that price of Bitcoin, then they're operating at a loss, obviously. And they've had a number a couple of good months now, really kind of well, all year, all of this year. So what are we now? 4 months in. And I think a lot of them have done a lot of pretty smart moves, kind of eliminated some debt, built up some cash. They've been buying miners. Certainly, this hash rate that's coming online is is, you know, coming from brand new miners in a lot of cases. I think they're prepared this time unlike, say, 4 years ago.
So, anyways, that's gonna kinda wrap that up. I just wanted to give a brief overview. I wanted you to get in this mindset, though, of what is coming. It is coming. We are 714 blocks now from the next happening. 714. Yeah. We're 99.66% away from that next happening. So there you go. Hope you're going to a happening party. I don't think we're having one in my area. Anyways, let's talk about our supporters. Now it has been a couple of weeks. Oh, I wanted to mention this real quick, kind of why I missed last week. I thought I would share a little something with you. I don't normally talk a lot about kinda what's going on with me, but I'm gonna give you a real quick story if that's okay. So kinda lean back.
Over 10 years ago, my wife and I went to a 3 day log home class log home building class, I should say, out in Monroe, Washington. No hands on experience. Came back to our place. We had bought some land. And over the next 3 plus years, we built a log home. Didn't live there for a whole long time, but that kinda put a bug in my wife and I. And ever since then, we've kind of we've done a number of different things, but I have ended up I've built a shed out there. I built a shed somewhere else on another property that I owned at the time. I built a shed for a friend fairly recently.
And right now, I'm building a shed, a fairly large shed for another friend. This one is 16 by 40. And I build in what would be called a post and beam style. And what that is, a lot of people call it timber frame. It's it's not handcrafted, like, no connectors, no joint, no screws, I should say, anything like that. I do not take the time or have the skill to to do all that. But it's obviously it's a wood structure. Large posts, large beams. I think in this case, our posts are 6 by 6. Our beams are 6 by 8. Our trusses are 3 by 6. And, so it's just and all all around is just a big structure. Well, we started working on it about a month ago, and it has progressed fairly well. So today, actually, we got the trusses finished. So we're now ready to put on the roof and close in the walls and hang the doors and windows and and put the board and button on the outside, and that will be it.
I'm rather proud of it. I mean, to be not to be vain, but we've put a lot of work in it. I think it's actually turned out very well, and I enjoy doing this a lot, actually. This scratches an itch, so to speak, that I didn't even know I had. So I've been involved in the computer business for a long, long time. I'd never done anything like this. And then we built this first log home or the only log home that we built, but, you know, 10 years ago. And all of a sudden, kind of with our own hands, we've got this structure rising up out of the ground. And I don't I don't know how to describe it other than that, but we're seeing something physical.
Whereas these days, alls I ever do is deal with virtual private servers, essentially, you know, Amazon, EC 2 instances and this kind of thing. So it's a completely different experience, and I love it. We've not really made a profession at this point. We're thinking about doing some different things along those ways. But right now, you know, we're just kinda doing it for fun. Well, this fun, and it has been fun, has taken a lot of my time. It's why I didn't record last week. I'll be honest. We worked all weekend, and I just physically was not up for recording. And I do apologize, but I try not to let those things, kind of interfere.
But anyways and I'm not gonna post a picture of it on Twitter because, to be honest, my Twitter feed's really not for that, and I'd have to go ahead and strip out the metadata about kinda where where we took the picture and all this. And I'm just not up for it. But I will say this, go into the conference. If you wanna see picture of it, just let me know. I've certainly got a number of them on my phone and, you can take a look at it, if you catch up with me. But, we'll be finishing that. I'm hoping in the next few weeks, we'll be starting on what's called the purlins tomorrow. Those are the things that run horizontal along the trusses to provide stiffness between the trusses.
And then over the parlance would basically go the roofing material, done and, and get, get it under roof so we don't really have to worry about the rain so much. I said 16 by 40, and that's in feet. I didn't even think about that. Let's see. How many meters would that be? It'd be about 5 by over 10. Well, about 5 by 15, I guess. Let's see. Is that right? Yeah. Almost 5 by 15. It's not quite 5. It's not quite or maybe it is. Anyways, it's somewhere around there. And it stands, about the wall heights are 8 feet, and then it's probably another gracious. I don't know. It's probably oh, I actually, I do know. It's, 4 more feet, to the tip. So, like, 12 feet to the top of the roof.
And we're actually gonna frame this out, put some insulation in it. It really kinda make it fancy. They're gonna put an air conditioner in there, air condition heat unit, I should say. And, part of it will be a workshop, part of it will be storage, and part of it will be, oh, let's see. Well, it doesn't matter. Like garden stuff. So anyways, kinda cool. Having fun with that. And again, I do apologize. It kinda interfered. But I do have a life outside of this. I don't talk about it, but I do. Anyways, that was it. So let's jump right in to some of my awesome supporters. Had a lot of streaming, a lot of, some boost this week as well. I had a total of 79159 sats. So that's above our normal. I appreciate that at an extremely, extreme extreme amount.
There we go. And, you know, we're kinda heading towards our target, 25,000 sats per episode. And, basically, that would cover kinda my expenses and maybe even let me upgrade a thing or 2 along the way. Would love to not pull that out of my pocket. But yeah. So we're kind of on this value for value journey together. April fools in Argentina was our last episode, and that was episode 164. All 3 boosts came from that episode. We had hypersensitive as far as first off said great episode and good to hear about you knowing about those who stream to you.
When I was talking about the lightning node set up and the issues I was having with Satoshi's plebs is what he's talking about there. Even better if the sats would actually reach you, and I do agree with that onward and upward. I have not done that, setup yet. I'm gonna talk about that. There's another comment about that here in just a second. I will. I'm going to. I'm just again, I'm I'm really tied up with this shed. The next one was from our friend Gulag Plem, sent 3,000 sets and said, here's the value that kicked back from last week. Wasn't sure what the issue was and didn't wanna boost. Keep it up. Thank you, Gulag. I appreciate that, and I really do. Thank you very much. And I guess they've got it all sorted out. Things seem to be working for now, but yeah. And then, Kyron at Mare Mortals, sent this boost in, row of sticks, 1111.
He said, I manage custodial risk by splitting the sats between satoshi stream, fountain, and albi. All 3 of those, well, Fountain and Albi are lightning wallets. Satoshi Stream technically isn't, but it's similar. Well, I guess it is. I've never really thought about that. Wow. Macintosh just learned something. Unlikely that all 3 would be down at any given time, and I can switch rapidly to another if there is an extended outage. This type of decentralization seems neglected as it's always custodial equals bad. Frowny kitten face, I think. I've seen that before. I think it's supposed to be a kitten. Anyways, running my own node makes no sense for me, technically, practically, and time wise.
I still would love to have a couple more options if you know of another decent lightning wallet I can put in the splits. The only one I can think of offhand, Kyron, is maybe Phoenix. Might wanna look at that. Outside of that, there's not a whole lot, which is actually kind of one of my issues. There's not a whole lot of options. I would have hoped at this point there would have been more, but it's almost like especially, Albie is kind of moved in and taken over. But I don't have any problem with what you're saying. It's not the way that I wanna do it, and I'll explain why. But I know that this would make sense for a lot of people.
Exactly what you're describing. At least that way, you've kind of got your fingers in different pies. And if one has a problem, then, you know, it's not taking everything down. I am a very technical person. I can run my own node. I would actually like to. I love the control. It's practically does it make sense? Not at the amount of no sats that I'm bringing in at this point. However, because of other things, I have some websites. I'm actually got the virtual private server space that I could do it on, and it basically wouldn't cost me any money. So time wise, yes. I probably don't need to be doing it, but I'm a control freak, and I would love to monitor. I mean, it's like with Satoshi streams not to knock them, but whenever they have problems, and they do every couple months, to be honest, you know, hear anything about it. It just kinda stops working, and then it starts working whenever they fix it.
And if you manage to catch it, then, you know, there's a channel that you can hit them up for tech support. And the guy or man or woman, I don't I don't know. But, anyways, they'll see that and respond to it. But I have no way of monitoring that. I have no way of testing that my lightning node is up or or this kind of thing. So I actually have the proficiency and skill set to not only run my own node, but kind of monitor that thing and make sure that it's up and things are working properly. And so I think I would have a better experience. Plus, that would also and maybe this would work. Other ways, it probably would, but I really wanna hook up.
Dave and Adam are always talking about this on their show. The program that monitors the, the lightning node that all the boost and things. I'm drawing a complete blank. Anyways, it's an open source product, and it would basically give me a list of the streaming that's coming in and the boost, like, all in one little nice little console. Anyways, enough about that. I appreciate your input, Karen, and I I honestly would recommend exactly what you're doing to a lot of people. And I'm not saying I'm better than that. I'm just saying I'm different than that. But I do appreciate that and appreciate the boost, and and all that. So very cool. Alright. Let's get on to news. Let's get on out of here. This is getting long.
Well, there were a few topics I wanted to mention this week. So, of course, we've talked about the happening. We're we're getting there. BlackRock's Larry Fink had this to say, and I I believe this. I'm not a big fan of him, but I think he's certainly accurate on this. If inflation was measured like it was in the 19 eighties with a heavier emphasis on food inflation, housing, and interest rates, inflation would be 12%. Right? So your housing and energy needs, gasoline, electricity, that kind of thing. Those are kinda core needs and yet in the CPI that's commonly used for inflation rates, those are not emphasized.
I 100% agree with what he says there. Okay. I did retweet about kind of the cost of, minors. I won't go into that. But as this happening approaches because, again, the amount of product essentially that minors are gonna be able to create post habiting will go in half. I mean, so the older miners, the less efficient miners, they become less likely to be able to make any sense. So a nice little chart about that. Now here's something you probably aren't gonna hear, very many places. But I did confirm, and I have a link to an article on this in show notes. The Brazilian journalists are having their money frozen in their bank accounts.
I I don't understand. I mean, I'm an American. Documents, if I'm not mistaken. They are, in our documents, if I'm not mistaken. They are, kinda given a protected status. This heavy handed, you know, political this kind of pushback, I just don't understand. But it did happen. It is happening. So, basically, these people are being judgmental. They're being they're writing about the current government, and the government doesn't like that. But, you know, Bitcoin doesn't have a real world use case. Right? Stuff like this this and dissidents and just people in countries that are heavily persecuted are the reasons. One of the many of the main reasons that I so strongly push for privacy in Bitcoin for base protocol level privacy, not privacy that you have to use coin join or this kind of thing to have. Not privacy that you have to do this special setup to kind of have effect. I think that privacy should be the default Because this is the world that we live in whether we like it or not, and I don't think it's going to get better at least for a while.
This is Brazil. Brazil is never I'd never thought of Brazil as a place that this would happen. Of course, I never thought of Canada as a place that this would happen until they froze the truckers funds up there. So, anyways so Paraguay, right down there by Brazil, has kind of had this flip flop thing going on about Bitcoin mining specifically and about crypto in general and all this. So very, very recently, there came out saying, oh, they're gonna, put a kind of a moratorium on Bitcoin mining, and they were gonna have this discussion about it and potentially kind of shut it all down. Paraguay, why this is important? Paraguay has one of the world's largest dams, hydroelectric dams, and they have very cheap power.
They have a surplus of it. Their country doesn't even come close to using it all. They send most of it actually off to Brazil, Argentina, Brazil Brazil and Argentina, ironically. Brazil, we were just talking about, and all of this. So miners have moved in, so to speak, and they've been setting up operations. Well, there's been some people who didn't like that. So they're, you know, there was this talk about kinda shutting all that down. Well, apparently, there was a big backlash when that came out, and now they've kind of done this complete 180. They've got a public hearing set for 423, so just a few days from now, to discuss crypto mining. Decision on the anti mining law has been deferred by 30 days and now they're proposing selling surplus energy to miners instead of exporting it to Brazil and Argentina.
So there you go. We'll see what happens. The whole Bitcoin electricity mining thing is this kind of this whole subculture. I don't know. There you go. And, of course, our difficulty adjustment is we're at an all time high. It has never been more difficult to mine Bitcoin. And yet, it still looks like our next one is gonna go even higher. Bloomberg, a respected financial paper institution, says that the FDIC chief, so that's the federal depository, here in the United States, they they're an insurance, bank insurance type thing. Say the US is ready to handle the collapse of any major Wall Street bank.
I don't know why they would say that unless they were worried that one was fixing to do that. So we will see. We will see. Alright. That's it. So we're gonna wrap this up. Of course, Satoshi's PLEBS is a value for value podcast. I provide value, at least I attempt to. And if you find that valuable, you can provide value back through apps like Fountain, where you can stream sats. You can boost just like these people did earlier and show your support. There's other things. This is what I would call treasure. You're giving me Satoshis. You're saying, Macintosh, you are providing value to me. I wanna provide value back to you. But there are other ways to do that.
For example, with fountain specifically, you can clip 1, 2, or 3 minutes from any episode. If you post that, I will actually provide value back to you. If it's a new episode, I'll provide a 500 set boost. If it's an older episode, it's 300. Why would I do that? Because people surfacing clips like that provide exposure to the show, and it brings new people in. And, of course, you can tell other people about it as well. You can say, hey. Go listen to Soshi's Plebs. It's a great podcast. He's always talking about different things, you know, from a, frankly, a different perspective. I'm a old time person around here.
I have been involved in Bitcoin since 2013. I was not smart about it for a long time, but I've seen a lot. So it does give me a little bit of a different perspective. There's other things. I'll cut that out. I'll abbreviate that this week because this episode is getting long. How could you get a hold of me? Send me an email, macintosh@satoshisdash blebs.com. You can DM me on, Twitter. My Twitter handle is Macintosh Fintech. Probably the best two ways to get a hold of me. That's it. That's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. Of course, like I said, you can just reach out to me and give me some comment or provide a boost and ask a question.
Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week, and get prepared for this happening.
