The last two weeks has been full of privacy-related news. Unfortunately most of it has not been good news. This episode we cover what has been happening in terms of legislation and the DOJ actions as well the brand new privacy improvements in Bitcoin called Silent Payments.
News and Links
Silent Payments
US Senate and House Vote to Allow Financial Institutions to Hold Bitcoin
Argentina to Mine Bitcoin with Stranded Gas
Bitcoin Mining and Methane Emissions
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 May 20th, and this is episode 168 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is privacy is a must. Alright. The Earl Gray is almost perfect. It is just the right temperature and just the right amount of honey. And we've got two weeks of security information to cover. So let's jump right on into it. As always, we will cover the market, for the last two for the last two weeks. We will, then dive into our discussion of privacy and the various things that have been going on for the last couple of weeks that relate to that, which there's been quite a lot. Of course, we'll talk about our supporters and, the news.
Lot to cover. Not a lot of time to do it, so let's get going. Alright. Our weekly close for Bitcoin, 66,237 happened to 10 minutes ago as I record it block height 844,213. We closed up a couple of 1,000 since I recorded last 2 weeks ago. We are strongly up for the week after we recorded couple weeks ago at the price the price. Well, the price did go down. Bitcoin price went down, wandered around for a bit, went lower than I would have expected, really. I think let's see. Right there, 56,500 and 15, and that was on Wednesday, May 1st. Oh, that was right before we recorded. Sorry. Last time. I think we recorded on 5th.
Yeah. So we we had already pulled up at that point, but my I would like to mention that because I I have kinda set this box up as we've talked about 60 to $70,000. We did go down below that, but we've pulled up. We've clearly pulled up and, stayed there. So even though we briefly went out really for 2 solid days, not too much to worry about. And in fact, a few days ago, we jumped from about, let's see, about 62,000 up to 66,000 to 67,000, which is where we have been staying over the weekend. We did not close over 67,000, obviously. I just said we closed at 66,200 and something. So we did not establish that as a weekly level, certainly.
I believe once we close above that level on a daily level, I think we'll be off to the races. Looking at the chart, looking at the, Bollinger Bands, we on a daily level, which is a very important level, of course, are starting to open up as the price moves higher, which should mean we should be at least testing that $70,000 level again, and we'll see what happens when we get there. Or or is this going to make another run at the all time high, 73,000 ish dollars. It was slightly more than that that we hit about 2 months ago. Let's see when was that back on. Well, maybe it hasn't been that long. No. No. No. Actually, that was 2 months ago. March 14th or so, which was almost exactly 2 months ago.
So, yeah, we we will possibly take another try at that and see where we go from there. I do believe, in general, during this summer, historically speaking post halving, we should have multiple months of kind of chop. So far that certainly what we've seen kinda going sideways, they would call it a crab market. I don't really expect to make a solid breakout from this, although it would certainly be welcome, especially from a mining perspective. The miners these days aren't doing so hot. And in fact, let's tie into that real quick. Our hash rate overall right now is roughly 600,000 exahash, which is certainly down from the halving.
I do believe that some hash rate has come offline. It's unprofitable. The basically, the the money that the miners are making by mining Bitcoin is not it's not really lining up with in a lot of cases with the electricity that they're spending the cost, you know, they're spending to produce that. So what do they do? They turn them off. In my case, my miners happen to be profitable, although some of them only marginal. And I'm looking more towards the long view anyways for this. As long as I can pay the electricity, I will continue to mine.
So if we could maintain this level, I'm okay. If we drop down 50, $40,000 and, you know, I'm gonna have some hard decisions, but I'm hoping that we don't do that. We'll see. Alright. Oh, I did wanna mention, of course, as always, right now, the mempool doing very well. We're down to 853 megabytes in total of transactions, and our low priority is actually down to 9. It's even gone briefly below that. I could well, we're down into the single digit sets per v byte, the cost for the transaction. So we're looking about 83¢ right now to send a even a priority tracks transaction. Pretty nice considering where we've been. And I did wanna start mentioning this to prepare you all for the next happening, which is going to happen in at block 1,050,000 .
That is going to be about 1407 days for now. 15 hours, 12 minutes, one second according to this particular block clock, so to speak, which is at coin wars, coinwarz.com, and then slash bitcoin dash happening. So we are 2.01% of the way to that next halving. That's crazy. It's already been 2%. There you go. And so we will track how that will happen. Of course, that should be roughly 4 years from now. Fees, difficult difficulty adjustment will be up about half a percent. Not very much at all on May 23rd, just a few days from now. So it looks like we're kind of stable in our difficulty. We've reached this equilibrium with the miners in terms of hash rate versus cost versus all that. And that's it's kind of typical post happening, so not surprising at all.
Alright. So let's get on into the topic. So I I'll be honest. I'm just gonna be honest with everybody. I hope that's okay. My original plan was to have Seth, for privacy on to discuss some of these topics that did not work out. Unfortunately, I think he's got a great voice in this and a thoughtful manner. Would love to have had him on, but it did not work out. So I'm going to go ahead and discuss this as best I can. I think the things that we're going to be talking about, even if you live outside the United States, which a lot of this is kind of US centric, but I do believe it's very important. Because in a lot of ways, to be honest, when it comes to Bitcoin, the United States can set a standard, I would argue certainly for Europe.
Other countries, other jurisdictions have certainly gone different directions, but Western Europe in particular seems to follow very closely and sometimes leading, frankly, in the way that Bitcoin is handled, in terms of regulation and this kind of thing. So we've had a number of things come up this week, well, during the last 2 weeks, and we're gonna discuss that. So buckle up. Not real good news for the most part. We did have some good news, that, actually, Seth kinda broke, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to have him on here, but we'll be discussing that as well.
Really quickly, let's see. Okay. So one of the things and I think I had already mentioned this. This was on May 5th. Samurai the samurai wallet users excuse me. I I've already briefly mentioned this. I'm going to discuss it a little bit here, and then we're going to move on to the rest of the privacy news. But things kinda kicked off. Of course, it's been a while. Maybe a year ago. I'd had to look it up to be for certain, but a number of months ago at least, the developer, Tornado Cash, was arrested. This was done at the behest of the Department of Justice, which is, in theory, one of our arms of government here in the United States. They've turned into kind of this, in my opinion, club of the executive branch. And what I mean by club is I don't mean a party. I mean, like a bludgeoning instrument that the executive branch, the president uses against opponents against things that he or she, does not believe in, this kind of thing.
And I think that's what happened in the case of Tornado Cash. I also think, frankly, that's what's going on with Samura. Tornado Cash, of course, is a Ethereum wallet. Excuse me, Ethereum mixing service. The developer, of that service was arrested, if I'm remembering correctly, in the Netherlands, and they are on trial for providing code that's used to provide privacy for Ethereum. Very, very similarly with samurai. The 2 developers, the 2 main leaders of samurai, were arrested. 1 in Pennsylvania, if I'm not mistaken, and one in Portugal. That was done again at the behest of the Department of Justice, and they've thrown all kinds of charges against them, which this is quite normal. They're saying they're laundering helping, people who the United States doesn't like. Oh, I don't know. Russian oligarchs would be an example, to launder money to and being very open about it.
And so they are pursuing justice or what they call justice against these 2 gentlemen even though all these have literally done. This is what it boils down to. They have written code, and we've had at least the PGP lawsuit, which very clearly went all the way to Supreme Court and declared that code is free speech. And under the constitution, anyone is allowed to have free speech. But code is free speech. And also the samurai wallet, even though it's a centralized service, and I want to point that out. It's very important in this discussion. If I'm mixing my Bitcoin with the samurai service, my Bitcoin does not actually go through a samurai wallet, a central wallet, a central location.
Essentially, the samurai service acts as a messaging system to pass messages back and forth to coordinate between all of the recipients of that service. So maybe there's a 100 of us who are mixing our coins and essentially, Samurai is sitting there in the middle kind of passing things around saying here, this goes to you, this goes to you, so on and so forth. Never directly having the Bitcoin in their possession. And so one of the accusations is that they are a money transmitting service, which makes no sense. This is like a banking service. This a bank handles your money. They move it around, all of this kind of stuff. Samurai was not doing that.
Again, to emphasize, samurai was never holding the Bitcoin. So how, if they're not holding it, can they be a money transmitting service? You also had the Wasabi Wallet pulled from the United States. You also had the Phoenix Wallet pulled for the United States. So Phoenix and and just to finish things out, you also had the Tornado Cash case being escalated by the Department of Justice. Now Phoenix, to just to put it simply, they're a central, they're a lightning wallet service provider. You can have a Phoenix wallet. In fact, I have one. And you have your lightning, your satoshis on there, and you transact using the phoenix service, they provide a channel to you. But, again, they're not custodying the satoshis, the Bitcoin.
But because of what was going on with samurai, they decided to pull out of the United States. Wasabi, which does provide both a wallet and a mixing service, very much like samurai, because of what was going on with samurai, has decided to pull out from the United States. And then actually, after the fact, decided to shut down their mixing service period from what I understand. Very, very chilling effect. Okay. So this case with samurai is very important for you to understand. And again, I as I mentioned earlier, I would argue that as it goes in the United States, so goes a good portion of the world, at least in terms of maybe early Bitcoin adoption. I'm not arguing that the United States and Western Europe kinda make up the world. I I do not have that centric type viewpoint, but what I am saying is a lot of the Bitcoin activity is taking place in these areas. A lot of the development And this type of activity that's causing this chilling effect can be, very harmful in the long term.
Okay? So you also had those scenes going. So you Wasabi, you had Phoenix, you had the tornado cash case being escalated. Oh, and the FBI just conveniently came out and warned against it's like this bulletin saying, you know, scary, scary. Stay away from non kyc, crypto tools. So in other words, what the FBI is saying is, Macintosh, you sir, you have a seed signer. You have a self custody wallet. You did not provide KYC for that. You should be worried because, gosh, you might get something that was, I don't know, contaminated. I don't know. It's bizarre.
It really is. This stuff is is not going to be solved in a week. It's not unfortunately gonna be solved in a month or 6 months and probably a year or more. These court cases are going to drag on. They may go through multiple levels in our judicial system. If it goes up to the Supreme Court, it could literally take years to be decided. So in the meantime, the developers of these tools have to decide what are we going to do. If you're a US citizen, you have to look at it from that perspective. If you're, say, somebody from Nigeria where there happens to be a lot of Bitcoin development going on, you maybe have a slightly different perspective and maybe some slightly different parameters to think of. Now I don't know exactly what's going on in Nigeria, but I would argue that at least their justice department or whatever the equivalent of that is is not trying to actively shut you down if you're providing code that's running as a service to provide privacy.
Will they do that in the future? I don't know. It's certainly possible, but they're not doing it right now. So that's all the bad news and it is bad news. And I want to camp out for just a minute there on these ideas that I just kind of threw out at the end. As someone who frankly is not certainly a full time developer, as someone who doesn't wake up in the morning and write c plus plus code or rust code or something like this. But as someone who is an entrepreneur and has a long history of that, to be honest, and who is actively involved in the Bitcoin community, who is looking for ways to provide value.
These things are very concerning to me. So I look at our constitution, which says I have a right to privacy. And then I look at my money, and in that constitution, it says I have a right to privacy in my money. And then I look at Bitcoin and I say, what can I do to improve the privacy of that? Because as we all know, as I've repeated many, many times on here, Bitcoin, of course, is an open blockchain. Everyone can see what's going on, and any privacy that you may have is this kind of pseudo level of privacy. What can we do to help that?
And then I see balanced against that, a DOJ, a Department of Justice of the Biden administration, and I don't wanna get political, but it is his administration and he is the one who is pushing this. And I don't know if it would be better if, say, Trump got elected or maybe Robert Kennedy got elected who probably are maybe the 2 primary candidates right now running against this person. Okay? But what Biden is saying through the Department of Justice is, no. You can't do that because we're worried that you're gonna launder money. We're gonna worry that I don't know.
That money was illicitly gained through, god, I don't know what they could tie it into child porn or or whatever the crap is that they come up with. Even though you can do study after study and show that the vast majority of what goes on in a system like this has nothing to do with anything like that. And the only way that I can gain true privacy is through using some of these tools. Then what does that mean? What does that mean for me? I have to be very careful about what I do. So maybe I don't go get involved in that type of tool, at least writing code for it because I don't want my name, whether it's a pseudonymous name or not, associated with that.
Because I promise you, if the DOJ were interested enough in what I was doing, they could figure out who I was. I have no doubts about that. So that's probably going to at least temper what I'm doing. But on the other hand, again, this was something that Seth for privacy, kinda broke this week. He was talking about something called silent payments. The reason why he knows so much about it is because it's on Monero. It's already on Monero Monero from what I understand, a system that he's very familiar with. And we had a BIP 352.
So BIP is, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, I think, proposal, called silent payments, and it was merged into the master branch, meaning eventually it will get released. And you can begin testing it now. At least that's how I understand the way that it works. What's a silent payment? I'm glad you asked. So let's talk about those silent payments for just a minute. Because in my opinion, silent payments are part of the solution to this problem. Seth has made a website called silentpayments.xyz. I would recommend that you take a a look at. But in general, it makes it easier to receive, static a static address that on the blockchain, doesn't look like a static address. So in other words, I could put an address. If I'm understanding this correctly, I could take a silent payment address, whatever they call that. I could post it on the Stoshi Pledbs website. You could donate to that. Everyone could donate to the same address and yet on chain, it would not look like all that went to the same address. In other words, it's obfuscating what's going on. It's making it chain analysis in that case would start to break down, which in my opinion is a really, really good thing. I think chain analysis.
I think it's flawed for one thing, but anything that we can do to make it work less would be very beneficial. I know there's people who do get all kinds of data and all kinds of analysis and whatever and cool things out of it, but the privacy implications of chain analysis to me are not worth it. Now I also don't expect that people will stop doing that. But according to to his website here, no matter how many people you share your silent payment address with, only the sender and receiver can connect it with on chain activity. So in other words, I can you can send me something and you and I can both see that on chain, but then somebody else can send me something that other person cannot see what the first person did.
Where would this be helpful? Oh, I don't know. Maybe the Canadian truckers protest. It is a step. It's a small step, but I am glad. I'm so glad to see this merged into the master branch, and eventually, it will, get used. And you know what? It seems to me like the wallets are jumping all over it. Seed signer already has, some support for it, which is awesome. Now it's experimental. I wouldn't recommend that you just run out and start using it, but they are moving to it. I think it should be the standard. I think privacy by default, and I think I've made this very clear. I think privacy by default should be the standard for everyone, and I don't care.
Well, I do care the cost. But if it's a few more sats or even if it's a 100 more sats or, you know, then so be it. We have to have privacy. It's there's too much at stake. To finish this up, to wrap this up, because it's probably already been going on for quite a while. Why, yes, it has. To wrap this up, I wanted to think for just a minute, what could samurai have done better? Well, they were apparently making steps for one thing, to being better. They were trying to decentralize the CoinJoint service so that it wasn't just them. See, when this happened, the entire service was shut down immediately because it was centralized because they were running it. They were benefiting from it. They were making fees from it.
And I'm okay with that. That's fine. But the centralization in the end is what got them. The centralization was the key issue. Wasabi, same might. What we have at this point, as far as I can tell, for whatever you wanna call it, mixing or or whatever, what I would call it is anonymizing my Bitcoin is join market. Join market is decentralized. The DOJ, maybe they can shut down their website, but join market can't it won't itself go away because there's not a company behind it. And it does the same kind of thing. Now you may argue it doesn't do it as good, doesn't have the same level of support, all of these kind of things. Decentralization is hard, but it does protect against these kind of attacks. And these kind of attacks will come.
They will. And maybe it's not always the United States. Maybe it's another country. So, anyways, just some thoughts about that whole situation. And I'm not gonna give you easy answers because, frankly, there are no easy answers, at least in my opinion. And anyone who says that there are, I think, doesn't understand what's going on or has another reason to say that. That's just my thoughts. And for those of you outside the United States, please please don't just dismiss this. Especially, in my opinion, if you're in Western Europe because I do believe that the EU is very much emulating what's going on in the United States in terms of crypto.
They're trying to outlaw any kind of, and maybe this has already been tabled, but they certainly were trying to outlaw any kind of non k y c Bitcoin service. It's crazy. So let's, from here, I wanna talk about our supporters real quick. We've had a good couple of weeks. I do do appreciate that. Continue to keep track of stuff like silent payments. And, of course, here on podcast, we are going to continue to monitor this stuff. I personally feel like there's not much, There may be a few things of equal importance, but I don't think there's anything of any more importance than building privacy and anonymity into Bitcoin. I don't.
So I will beat this drum until the point where everybody is going, god, Macintosh, I wish you would stop. You're so annoying, Macintosh. Well, yes. Yes. I am because these things are important. Privacy built in at default level is very, very important. Alright. So we will begin. It's some great streaming. I appreciate that. We had a boost, 2381. So 2405 was the boost on, episode 166. Welcome to the 5th epoch, from captain Egghead. And the message was was 2404. Indeed, this one is 2405. It's talking about the boost amount. I was a little confused, 2 weeks ago, with the amount of the boost. So appreciate that, of course.
And we also got a boost from hypersensitive, a sars, our friend over in Portugal. And, a thousand sats said, love the energy of this interview. Rob sounds like a great guy. Love the book suggestions too. This was our Rob Warren interview from episode 167. Thank you, hypersensitive as ours. I throw I do the book suggestions, the book recommendations on purpose. As a reader, I love to read. I don't honestly always get to these books, but, it's great food for thought. And sometimes I do that capital and energy one that he mentioned, I have been meaning to read for a while. I will definitely be following up on that.
And then we finally had a boost, again, on episode 167, Rob Warren, a 1,000 sats from our friend Gulag Bound. Great interview, unique perspective indeed. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. The total of boost in streaming was, 6,472. So I do appreciate that very, very much. That is value that is will eventually ultimately go directly back into this show. I I keep all of that. I've I have kept that. I've not spent any of it at this point. Anything I've been doing has been coming out of my pocket. But, ultimately, it will be used, to buy equipment or whatever, for the show.
So I do appreciate that. Alright. Let's keep things going. I wanna try and keep this as tight as possible. News and notes, not a whole lot because I've already gone through all of the security news. There was a few things. Join market. I I really I will be spending time talking about that. Strike is actually playing around with bolt 12 invoices. This is on the lightning network. I have not really discussed bolt 12, but, it's a great static lightning address that you can, use. I don't know if it has the same security implications as the silent payment does, but, would be a very useful tool.
Some of the providers frankly have been dragging first first bit, but it is talking about integrating landfill gas and energy for Bitcoin mining. It's coauthored by a former Greenpeace activist and an environmental economist who happens to be a PhD, so that's doctor to you, confirms that, Bitcoin mining is a powerful tool to clean up the environment and mitigate methane emissions. I have been talking about methane, landfill gas recovery essentially for Bitcoin mining, at least for a year. I think it's an awesome tool. I think it should be used in, frankly, in every major metropolitan area if nothing else. You know? This is the kind of thing that I think the the EPA should be pushing. Right? So we're polluting the atmosphere with methane from our trash.
We have the tools to fix that. Oh, and build some money at the same time. And interesting stat that Nico Schmidt posted over 50% of the North American Hash rate is now in Texas. I did not know that, although I knew that a lot of mining was happening in Texas. It's not surprising. I'd I'm not really to be honest, I'm not a fan of that. I'd even aside from the fact that United States is a leader in Bitcoin mining, I believe, which is okay. I don't want them even approaching anywhere near 50% of the total hash rate of the network.
But to have it all in one state isn't necessarily ideal either. So mining in Texas is not a cornucopia. Right? During the summer, starting about now, Texas gets hot. And so these Bitcoin miners in Texas do get curtailed. The curtailment happens, which means they're powered off, during the day a lot of times because of the heat, because of the energy has to get used elsewhere. And that actually benefits me, people like me who mine, who don't mine at places where they curtail the energy because that's just not something that I, am involved in or have any interest in.
And, you know, my minors do better because of that. But, anyways, I for whatever reason, Texas and a lot of it, frankly, has to do with the regulation. Texas has been very open about helping Bitcoin miners, about bringing in Bitcoin miners. Argentina, country that we talk about quite frequently, their state owned, I guess, oil company. It doesn't say, but they're talking about stranded gas. So they're talking about stranded natural gas is going to start mining Bitcoin with that stranded natural gas. Good job. Good job. Really, seriously, that should go straight into Argentina's coffers to build a treasury of Bitcoin.
Malay, I haven't talked about a whole lot in the last few months. I'm still kind of on the fence about a lot of things, but apparently, he is making a difference at least in terms of inflation rates down there and the debasement of the peso. So that's good. White House or excuse me. The US House. So this is our congress. Votes to overturn SCC rule preventing highly regulated financial firms from holding Bitcoin and crypto. And our And our fearless leader, president Joe Biden, has said he will veto that. Good job, Joe. Just just like your DOJ. Whatever. The chasm, the canyon that is coming between the people in power and the reality, the world is becoming bigger and bigger.
That a highly regulated firm cannot hold Bitcoin, to me makes no sense. I don't know. JPMorgan can, and in fact, there's a news article about that, which I will try. Yep. There it is. America's largest largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, discloses spot ETF holdings in SEC filings. Now over the years, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's, CEO has pooh poohed Bitcoin endlessly saying it's trash, saying it's a Ponzi scheme, saying it's this, that, the other, and yet his company has now disclosed that they hold essentially Bitcoin. There you go. This is Davos 2024. So this was this year.
This year, just a few months ago, Jamie Dimon on CNBC's, one of their new shows calling Bitcoin a useless pet rock. The hypocrisy is just mind blowing. Oh, by the way, this talking about tornado cash. The defendants, co accused 1 and co accused 2, I actually didn't realize there was 2 people involved, are the inventors, creators, and implementers of Tornado Cash. So these are the developers who developed Tornado Cash. As such, they are also responsible for the consequences of the operation of this tool. The autonomous, immutable, and unstoppable nature of smart contracts does not work in context as a dissulpatory factor.
After all, this is not a fortuitous circumstance. Wow. This is such lawyer speak. These properties are the result of conscious choice made by the designers. Tornado Cash works as it was conceived. Yes. That's true. In the court's opinion, the defendant can therefore be classified as a perpetrator of the money laundering acts carried out by tornado cash. In other words, speech is not or code is not free speech. Directly contradicting, at least here in the United States, what is set by our supreme court. It's getting ugly. However, in Oklahoma, they have now signed a fundamental Bitcoin rights bill into law, right to self custody, right to spend Bitcoin and other digital assets, right to mine Bitcoin, and right to run, I assume, a node. Yes. A node.
Ban additional taxes when Bitcoin and digital mining assets are used as a form of payment. Thank you. Protect the ability to mine. Sorry. I hope that clapping wasn't too loud. Protect the ability to mine Bitcoin at home. Eliminate the need for Bitcoin mining and digital asset validators to obtain a money transmitter license another way that people like the DOJ are trying to bring down these companies, these stupid money transmitter licenses. Oklahoma. Love it. Don't wanna move there, but love it. For those of you outside the United States, Oklahoma is in the middle of the United States. I've been there. I used to have a client there actually in Oklahoma City. I've spent a little bit of time there. Hot, flat, dusty, cold in the winter, and they have tornadoes. I'm not interested.
Sorry. Love you people in Oklahoma. Glad to see that law passed, but not my cup of tea. El Salvador has now mined, 474 Bitcoin worth $29,000,000 using volcano fueled geothermal power in the last 3 years. Here we go. New another wallet, Celineum. Silent payments. One static address without the privacy concerns. See, one of the things we do using Bitcoin wallets is we make new addresses so that, you know, this crap doesn't show up in chain analysis. And it's annoying and whatever. Yeah. Seed Center already talked about that. They're looking at, or actually actively implementing silent payments. Another study in the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems. Now I don't know what that is. I don't read it, but it sounds to me like a pretty important journal if you're in electrical power.
A new study showing microgrids not using Bitcoin mining waste large amounts of renewable energy. This is exactly what we would expect. But using Bitcoin mining stops almost all renewable energy waste, reduces microgrid cost by 46%, percent, accelerates microgrid development, decarbonizes power production. Privacy, most important thing to me. Microgrids, Bitcoin mining as a way to bring power to people right up there. Maybe not number 2, but really close. Just being honest. Because people require energy to flourish. It's that simple.
Microgrids are a great way in a lot of developing countries to bring that. Jameson Lop, said this. I thought it was great. The state will happily claim that only criminals need privacy, but then it bestows special privacy upon agents of the state for their protection. Makes you think. That's it. That's what I got. That's the news. We're gonna wrap this puppy up. This is a value for value podcast. I'm out here hopefully putting out value, things of value that you find useful. If you do, please provide value back, and there's multiple ways you can do that. One way, just like, hypersensitive asaris, just like these other people who boosted in, you can provide value in the forms of streaming of sats or boosting sats, which also allows you to send a message through a podcasting 2.0 app.
You can go to new podcast apps .com. There's a whole list of them there, apps like fountain. And using a lightning wallet, then you can provide that value. Another way that you can provide value to me and get value back is by making clips of this podcast. Go to Fountain, for example, make a 1, 2, 3 minute clip from some part of this episode. If you do it in the next week or 2, I will boost you 500 sats when you do that. Make sure that you tag me in the, like, the note or whatever that you leave with the clip so that I see it. I'm macintosh on fountain.fm.
If it's an older episode, I'll boost you 300 sats. It's a great way for you to make some treasure, and it's a great way for me to get more exposure. Would love that. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I try not to be, but it's difficult. I'm a mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. I can also be reached by email at [email protected]. And, of course, there's our website. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is May 20th, and this is episode 168 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is privacy is a must. Alright. The Earl Gray is almost perfect. It is just the right temperature and just the right amount of honey. And we've got two weeks of security information to cover. So let's jump right on into it. As always, we will cover the market, for the last two for the last two weeks. We will, then dive into our discussion of privacy and the various things that have been going on for the last couple of weeks that relate to that, which there's been quite a lot. Of course, we'll talk about our supporters and, the news.
Lot to cover. Not a lot of time to do it, so let's get going. Alright. Our weekly close for Bitcoin, 66,237 happened to 10 minutes ago as I record it block height 844,213. We closed up a couple of 1,000 since I recorded last 2 weeks ago. We are strongly up for the week after we recorded couple weeks ago at the price the price. Well, the price did go down. Bitcoin price went down, wandered around for a bit, went lower than I would have expected, really. I think let's see. Right there, 56,500 and 15, and that was on Wednesday, May 1st. Oh, that was right before we recorded. Sorry. Last time. I think we recorded on 5th.
Yeah. So we we had already pulled up at that point, but my I would like to mention that because I I have kinda set this box up as we've talked about 60 to $70,000. We did go down below that, but we've pulled up. We've clearly pulled up and, stayed there. So even though we briefly went out really for 2 solid days, not too much to worry about. And in fact, a few days ago, we jumped from about, let's see, about 62,000 up to 66,000 to 67,000, which is where we have been staying over the weekend. We did not close over 67,000, obviously. I just said we closed at 66,200 and something. So we did not establish that as a weekly level, certainly.
I believe once we close above that level on a daily level, I think we'll be off to the races. Looking at the chart, looking at the, Bollinger Bands, we on a daily level, which is a very important level, of course, are starting to open up as the price moves higher, which should mean we should be at least testing that $70,000 level again, and we'll see what happens when we get there. Or or is this going to make another run at the all time high, 73,000 ish dollars. It was slightly more than that that we hit about 2 months ago. Let's see when was that back on. Well, maybe it hasn't been that long. No. No. No. Actually, that was 2 months ago. March 14th or so, which was almost exactly 2 months ago.
So, yeah, we we will possibly take another try at that and see where we go from there. I do believe, in general, during this summer, historically speaking post halving, we should have multiple months of kind of chop. So far that certainly what we've seen kinda going sideways, they would call it a crab market. I don't really expect to make a solid breakout from this, although it would certainly be welcome, especially from a mining perspective. The miners these days aren't doing so hot. And in fact, let's tie into that real quick. Our hash rate overall right now is roughly 600,000 exahash, which is certainly down from the halving.
I do believe that some hash rate has come offline. It's unprofitable. The basically, the the money that the miners are making by mining Bitcoin is not it's not really lining up with in a lot of cases with the electricity that they're spending the cost, you know, they're spending to produce that. So what do they do? They turn them off. In my case, my miners happen to be profitable, although some of them only marginal. And I'm looking more towards the long view anyways for this. As long as I can pay the electricity, I will continue to mine.
So if we could maintain this level, I'm okay. If we drop down 50, $40,000 and, you know, I'm gonna have some hard decisions, but I'm hoping that we don't do that. We'll see. Alright. Oh, I did wanna mention, of course, as always, right now, the mempool doing very well. We're down to 853 megabytes in total of transactions, and our low priority is actually down to 9. It's even gone briefly below that. I could well, we're down into the single digit sets per v byte, the cost for the transaction. So we're looking about 83¢ right now to send a even a priority tracks transaction. Pretty nice considering where we've been. And I did wanna start mentioning this to prepare you all for the next happening, which is going to happen in at block 1,050,000 .
That is going to be about 1407 days for now. 15 hours, 12 minutes, one second according to this particular block clock, so to speak, which is at coin wars, coinwarz.com, and then slash bitcoin dash happening. So we are 2.01% of the way to that next halving. That's crazy. It's already been 2%. There you go. And so we will track how that will happen. Of course, that should be roughly 4 years from now. Fees, difficult difficulty adjustment will be up about half a percent. Not very much at all on May 23rd, just a few days from now. So it looks like we're kind of stable in our difficulty. We've reached this equilibrium with the miners in terms of hash rate versus cost versus all that. And that's it's kind of typical post happening, so not surprising at all.
Alright. So let's get on into the topic. So I I'll be honest. I'm just gonna be honest with everybody. I hope that's okay. My original plan was to have Seth, for privacy on to discuss some of these topics that did not work out. Unfortunately, I think he's got a great voice in this and a thoughtful manner. Would love to have had him on, but it did not work out. So I'm going to go ahead and discuss this as best I can. I think the things that we're going to be talking about, even if you live outside the United States, which a lot of this is kind of US centric, but I do believe it's very important. Because in a lot of ways, to be honest, when it comes to Bitcoin, the United States can set a standard, I would argue certainly for Europe.
Other countries, other jurisdictions have certainly gone different directions, but Western Europe in particular seems to follow very closely and sometimes leading, frankly, in the way that Bitcoin is handled, in terms of regulation and this kind of thing. So we've had a number of things come up this week, well, during the last 2 weeks, and we're gonna discuss that. So buckle up. Not real good news for the most part. We did have some good news, that, actually, Seth kinda broke, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to have him on here, but we'll be discussing that as well.
Really quickly, let's see. Okay. So one of the things and I think I had already mentioned this. This was on May 5th. Samurai the samurai wallet users excuse me. I I've already briefly mentioned this. I'm going to discuss it a little bit here, and then we're going to move on to the rest of the privacy news. But things kinda kicked off. Of course, it's been a while. Maybe a year ago. I'd had to look it up to be for certain, but a number of months ago at least, the developer, Tornado Cash, was arrested. This was done at the behest of the Department of Justice, which is, in theory, one of our arms of government here in the United States. They've turned into kind of this, in my opinion, club of the executive branch. And what I mean by club is I don't mean a party. I mean, like a bludgeoning instrument that the executive branch, the president uses against opponents against things that he or she, does not believe in, this kind of thing.
And I think that's what happened in the case of Tornado Cash. I also think, frankly, that's what's going on with Samura. Tornado Cash, of course, is a Ethereum wallet. Excuse me, Ethereum mixing service. The developer, of that service was arrested, if I'm remembering correctly, in the Netherlands, and they are on trial for providing code that's used to provide privacy for Ethereum. Very, very similarly with samurai. The 2 developers, the 2 main leaders of samurai, were arrested. 1 in Pennsylvania, if I'm not mistaken, and one in Portugal. That was done again at the behest of the Department of Justice, and they've thrown all kinds of charges against them, which this is quite normal. They're saying they're laundering helping, people who the United States doesn't like. Oh, I don't know. Russian oligarchs would be an example, to launder money to and being very open about it.
And so they are pursuing justice or what they call justice against these 2 gentlemen even though all these have literally done. This is what it boils down to. They have written code, and we've had at least the PGP lawsuit, which very clearly went all the way to Supreme Court and declared that code is free speech. And under the constitution, anyone is allowed to have free speech. But code is free speech. And also the samurai wallet, even though it's a centralized service, and I want to point that out. It's very important in this discussion. If I'm mixing my Bitcoin with the samurai service, my Bitcoin does not actually go through a samurai wallet, a central wallet, a central location.
Essentially, the samurai service acts as a messaging system to pass messages back and forth to coordinate between all of the recipients of that service. So maybe there's a 100 of us who are mixing our coins and essentially, Samurai is sitting there in the middle kind of passing things around saying here, this goes to you, this goes to you, so on and so forth. Never directly having the Bitcoin in their possession. And so one of the accusations is that they are a money transmitting service, which makes no sense. This is like a banking service. This a bank handles your money. They move it around, all of this kind of stuff. Samurai was not doing that.
Again, to emphasize, samurai was never holding the Bitcoin. So how, if they're not holding it, can they be a money transmitting service? You also had the Wasabi Wallet pulled from the United States. You also had the Phoenix Wallet pulled for the United States. So Phoenix and and just to finish things out, you also had the Tornado Cash case being escalated by the Department of Justice. Now Phoenix, to just to put it simply, they're a central, they're a lightning wallet service provider. You can have a Phoenix wallet. In fact, I have one. And you have your lightning, your satoshis on there, and you transact using the phoenix service, they provide a channel to you. But, again, they're not custodying the satoshis, the Bitcoin.
But because of what was going on with samurai, they decided to pull out of the United States. Wasabi, which does provide both a wallet and a mixing service, very much like samurai, because of what was going on with samurai, has decided to pull out from the United States. And then actually, after the fact, decided to shut down their mixing service period from what I understand. Very, very chilling effect. Okay. So this case with samurai is very important for you to understand. And again, I as I mentioned earlier, I would argue that as it goes in the United States, so goes a good portion of the world, at least in terms of maybe early Bitcoin adoption. I'm not arguing that the United States and Western Europe kinda make up the world. I I do not have that centric type viewpoint, but what I am saying is a lot of the Bitcoin activity is taking place in these areas. A lot of the development And this type of activity that's causing this chilling effect can be, very harmful in the long term.
Okay? So you also had those scenes going. So you Wasabi, you had Phoenix, you had the tornado cash case being escalated. Oh, and the FBI just conveniently came out and warned against it's like this bulletin saying, you know, scary, scary. Stay away from non kyc, crypto tools. So in other words, what the FBI is saying is, Macintosh, you sir, you have a seed signer. You have a self custody wallet. You did not provide KYC for that. You should be worried because, gosh, you might get something that was, I don't know, contaminated. I don't know. It's bizarre.
It really is. This stuff is is not going to be solved in a week. It's not unfortunately gonna be solved in a month or 6 months and probably a year or more. These court cases are going to drag on. They may go through multiple levels in our judicial system. If it goes up to the Supreme Court, it could literally take years to be decided. So in the meantime, the developers of these tools have to decide what are we going to do. If you're a US citizen, you have to look at it from that perspective. If you're, say, somebody from Nigeria where there happens to be a lot of Bitcoin development going on, you maybe have a slightly different perspective and maybe some slightly different parameters to think of. Now I don't know exactly what's going on in Nigeria, but I would argue that at least their justice department or whatever the equivalent of that is is not trying to actively shut you down if you're providing code that's running as a service to provide privacy.
Will they do that in the future? I don't know. It's certainly possible, but they're not doing it right now. So that's all the bad news and it is bad news. And I want to camp out for just a minute there on these ideas that I just kind of threw out at the end. As someone who frankly is not certainly a full time developer, as someone who doesn't wake up in the morning and write c plus plus code or rust code or something like this. But as someone who is an entrepreneur and has a long history of that, to be honest, and who is actively involved in the Bitcoin community, who is looking for ways to provide value.
These things are very concerning to me. So I look at our constitution, which says I have a right to privacy. And then I look at my money, and in that constitution, it says I have a right to privacy in my money. And then I look at Bitcoin and I say, what can I do to improve the privacy of that? Because as we all know, as I've repeated many, many times on here, Bitcoin, of course, is an open blockchain. Everyone can see what's going on, and any privacy that you may have is this kind of pseudo level of privacy. What can we do to help that?
And then I see balanced against that, a DOJ, a Department of Justice of the Biden administration, and I don't wanna get political, but it is his administration and he is the one who is pushing this. And I don't know if it would be better if, say, Trump got elected or maybe Robert Kennedy got elected who probably are maybe the 2 primary candidates right now running against this person. Okay? But what Biden is saying through the Department of Justice is, no. You can't do that because we're worried that you're gonna launder money. We're gonna worry that I don't know.
That money was illicitly gained through, god, I don't know what they could tie it into child porn or or whatever the crap is that they come up with. Even though you can do study after study and show that the vast majority of what goes on in a system like this has nothing to do with anything like that. And the only way that I can gain true privacy is through using some of these tools. Then what does that mean? What does that mean for me? I have to be very careful about what I do. So maybe I don't go get involved in that type of tool, at least writing code for it because I don't want my name, whether it's a pseudonymous name or not, associated with that.
Because I promise you, if the DOJ were interested enough in what I was doing, they could figure out who I was. I have no doubts about that. So that's probably going to at least temper what I'm doing. But on the other hand, again, this was something that Seth for privacy, kinda broke this week. He was talking about something called silent payments. The reason why he knows so much about it is because it's on Monero. It's already on Monero Monero from what I understand, a system that he's very familiar with. And we had a BIP 352.
So BIP is, Bitcoin Improvement Proposal, I think, proposal, called silent payments, and it was merged into the master branch, meaning eventually it will get released. And you can begin testing it now. At least that's how I understand the way that it works. What's a silent payment? I'm glad you asked. So let's talk about those silent payments for just a minute. Because in my opinion, silent payments are part of the solution to this problem. Seth has made a website called silentpayments.xyz. I would recommend that you take a a look at. But in general, it makes it easier to receive, static a static address that on the blockchain, doesn't look like a static address. So in other words, I could put an address. If I'm understanding this correctly, I could take a silent payment address, whatever they call that. I could post it on the Stoshi Pledbs website. You could donate to that. Everyone could donate to the same address and yet on chain, it would not look like all that went to the same address. In other words, it's obfuscating what's going on. It's making it chain analysis in that case would start to break down, which in my opinion is a really, really good thing. I think chain analysis.
I think it's flawed for one thing, but anything that we can do to make it work less would be very beneficial. I know there's people who do get all kinds of data and all kinds of analysis and whatever and cool things out of it, but the privacy implications of chain analysis to me are not worth it. Now I also don't expect that people will stop doing that. But according to to his website here, no matter how many people you share your silent payment address with, only the sender and receiver can connect it with on chain activity. So in other words, I can you can send me something and you and I can both see that on chain, but then somebody else can send me something that other person cannot see what the first person did.
Where would this be helpful? Oh, I don't know. Maybe the Canadian truckers protest. It is a step. It's a small step, but I am glad. I'm so glad to see this merged into the master branch, and eventually, it will, get used. And you know what? It seems to me like the wallets are jumping all over it. Seed signer already has, some support for it, which is awesome. Now it's experimental. I wouldn't recommend that you just run out and start using it, but they are moving to it. I think it should be the standard. I think privacy by default, and I think I've made this very clear. I think privacy by default should be the standard for everyone, and I don't care.
Well, I do care the cost. But if it's a few more sats or even if it's a 100 more sats or, you know, then so be it. We have to have privacy. It's there's too much at stake. To finish this up, to wrap this up, because it's probably already been going on for quite a while. Why, yes, it has. To wrap this up, I wanted to think for just a minute, what could samurai have done better? Well, they were apparently making steps for one thing, to being better. They were trying to decentralize the CoinJoint service so that it wasn't just them. See, when this happened, the entire service was shut down immediately because it was centralized because they were running it. They were benefiting from it. They were making fees from it.
And I'm okay with that. That's fine. But the centralization in the end is what got them. The centralization was the key issue. Wasabi, same might. What we have at this point, as far as I can tell, for whatever you wanna call it, mixing or or whatever, what I would call it is anonymizing my Bitcoin is join market. Join market is decentralized. The DOJ, maybe they can shut down their website, but join market can't it won't itself go away because there's not a company behind it. And it does the same kind of thing. Now you may argue it doesn't do it as good, doesn't have the same level of support, all of these kind of things. Decentralization is hard, but it does protect against these kind of attacks. And these kind of attacks will come.
They will. And maybe it's not always the United States. Maybe it's another country. So, anyways, just some thoughts about that whole situation. And I'm not gonna give you easy answers because, frankly, there are no easy answers, at least in my opinion. And anyone who says that there are, I think, doesn't understand what's going on or has another reason to say that. That's just my thoughts. And for those of you outside the United States, please please don't just dismiss this. Especially, in my opinion, if you're in Western Europe because I do believe that the EU is very much emulating what's going on in the United States in terms of crypto.
They're trying to outlaw any kind of, and maybe this has already been tabled, but they certainly were trying to outlaw any kind of non k y c Bitcoin service. It's crazy. So let's, from here, I wanna talk about our supporters real quick. We've had a good couple of weeks. I do do appreciate that. Continue to keep track of stuff like silent payments. And, of course, here on podcast, we are going to continue to monitor this stuff. I personally feel like there's not much, There may be a few things of equal importance, but I don't think there's anything of any more importance than building privacy and anonymity into Bitcoin. I don't.
So I will beat this drum until the point where everybody is going, god, Macintosh, I wish you would stop. You're so annoying, Macintosh. Well, yes. Yes. I am because these things are important. Privacy built in at default level is very, very important. Alright. So we will begin. It's some great streaming. I appreciate that. We had a boost, 2381. So 2405 was the boost on, episode 166. Welcome to the 5th epoch, from captain Egghead. And the message was was 2404. Indeed, this one is 2405. It's talking about the boost amount. I was a little confused, 2 weeks ago, with the amount of the boost. So appreciate that, of course.
And we also got a boost from hypersensitive, a sars, our friend over in Portugal. And, a thousand sats said, love the energy of this interview. Rob sounds like a great guy. Love the book suggestions too. This was our Rob Warren interview from episode 167. Thank you, hypersensitive as ours. I throw I do the book suggestions, the book recommendations on purpose. As a reader, I love to read. I don't honestly always get to these books, but, it's great food for thought. And sometimes I do that capital and energy one that he mentioned, I have been meaning to read for a while. I will definitely be following up on that.
And then we finally had a boost, again, on episode 167, Rob Warren, a 1,000 sats from our friend Gulag Bound. Great interview, unique perspective indeed. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. The total of boost in streaming was, 6,472. So I do appreciate that very, very much. That is value that is will eventually ultimately go directly back into this show. I I keep all of that. I've I have kept that. I've not spent any of it at this point. Anything I've been doing has been coming out of my pocket. But, ultimately, it will be used, to buy equipment or whatever, for the show.
So I do appreciate that. Alright. Let's keep things going. I wanna try and keep this as tight as possible. News and notes, not a whole lot because I've already gone through all of the security news. There was a few things. Join market. I I really I will be spending time talking about that. Strike is actually playing around with bolt 12 invoices. This is on the lightning network. I have not really discussed bolt 12, but, it's a great static lightning address that you can, use. I don't know if it has the same security implications as the silent payment does, but, would be a very useful tool.
Some of the providers frankly have been dragging first first bit, but it is talking about integrating landfill gas and energy for Bitcoin mining. It's coauthored by a former Greenpeace activist and an environmental economist who happens to be a PhD, so that's doctor to you, confirms that, Bitcoin mining is a powerful tool to clean up the environment and mitigate methane emissions. I have been talking about methane, landfill gas recovery essentially for Bitcoin mining, at least for a year. I think it's an awesome tool. I think it should be used in, frankly, in every major metropolitan area if nothing else. You know? This is the kind of thing that I think the the EPA should be pushing. Right? So we're polluting the atmosphere with methane from our trash.
We have the tools to fix that. Oh, and build some money at the same time. And interesting stat that Nico Schmidt posted over 50% of the North American Hash rate is now in Texas. I did not know that, although I knew that a lot of mining was happening in Texas. It's not surprising. I'd I'm not really to be honest, I'm not a fan of that. I'd even aside from the fact that United States is a leader in Bitcoin mining, I believe, which is okay. I don't want them even approaching anywhere near 50% of the total hash rate of the network.
But to have it all in one state isn't necessarily ideal either. So mining in Texas is not a cornucopia. Right? During the summer, starting about now, Texas gets hot. And so these Bitcoin miners in Texas do get curtailed. The curtailment happens, which means they're powered off, during the day a lot of times because of the heat, because of the energy has to get used elsewhere. And that actually benefits me, people like me who mine, who don't mine at places where they curtail the energy because that's just not something that I, am involved in or have any interest in.
And, you know, my minors do better because of that. But, anyways, I for whatever reason, Texas and a lot of it, frankly, has to do with the regulation. Texas has been very open about helping Bitcoin miners, about bringing in Bitcoin miners. Argentina, country that we talk about quite frequently, their state owned, I guess, oil company. It doesn't say, but they're talking about stranded gas. So they're talking about stranded natural gas is going to start mining Bitcoin with that stranded natural gas. Good job. Good job. Really, seriously, that should go straight into Argentina's coffers to build a treasury of Bitcoin.
Malay, I haven't talked about a whole lot in the last few months. I'm still kind of on the fence about a lot of things, but apparently, he is making a difference at least in terms of inflation rates down there and the debasement of the peso. So that's good. White House or excuse me. The US House. So this is our congress. Votes to overturn SCC rule preventing highly regulated financial firms from holding Bitcoin and crypto. And our And our fearless leader, president Joe Biden, has said he will veto that. Good job, Joe. Just just like your DOJ. Whatever. The chasm, the canyon that is coming between the people in power and the reality, the world is becoming bigger and bigger.
That a highly regulated firm cannot hold Bitcoin, to me makes no sense. I don't know. JPMorgan can, and in fact, there's a news article about that, which I will try. Yep. There it is. America's largest largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, discloses spot ETF holdings in SEC filings. Now over the years, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's, CEO has pooh poohed Bitcoin endlessly saying it's trash, saying it's a Ponzi scheme, saying it's this, that, the other, and yet his company has now disclosed that they hold essentially Bitcoin. There you go. This is Davos 2024. So this was this year.
This year, just a few months ago, Jamie Dimon on CNBC's, one of their new shows calling Bitcoin a useless pet rock. The hypocrisy is just mind blowing. Oh, by the way, this talking about tornado cash. The defendants, co accused 1 and co accused 2, I actually didn't realize there was 2 people involved, are the inventors, creators, and implementers of Tornado Cash. So these are the developers who developed Tornado Cash. As such, they are also responsible for the consequences of the operation of this tool. The autonomous, immutable, and unstoppable nature of smart contracts does not work in context as a dissulpatory factor.
After all, this is not a fortuitous circumstance. Wow. This is such lawyer speak. These properties are the result of conscious choice made by the designers. Tornado Cash works as it was conceived. Yes. That's true. In the court's opinion, the defendant can therefore be classified as a perpetrator of the money laundering acts carried out by tornado cash. In other words, speech is not or code is not free speech. Directly contradicting, at least here in the United States, what is set by our supreme court. It's getting ugly. However, in Oklahoma, they have now signed a fundamental Bitcoin rights bill into law, right to self custody, right to spend Bitcoin and other digital assets, right to mine Bitcoin, and right to run, I assume, a node. Yes. A node.
Ban additional taxes when Bitcoin and digital mining assets are used as a form of payment. Thank you. Protect the ability to mine. Sorry. I hope that clapping wasn't too loud. Protect the ability to mine Bitcoin at home. Eliminate the need for Bitcoin mining and digital asset validators to obtain a money transmitter license another way that people like the DOJ are trying to bring down these companies, these stupid money transmitter licenses. Oklahoma. Love it. Don't wanna move there, but love it. For those of you outside the United States, Oklahoma is in the middle of the United States. I've been there. I used to have a client there actually in Oklahoma City. I've spent a little bit of time there. Hot, flat, dusty, cold in the winter, and they have tornadoes. I'm not interested.
Sorry. Love you people in Oklahoma. Glad to see that law passed, but not my cup of tea. El Salvador has now mined, 474 Bitcoin worth $29,000,000 using volcano fueled geothermal power in the last 3 years. Here we go. New another wallet, Celineum. Silent payments. One static address without the privacy concerns. See, one of the things we do using Bitcoin wallets is we make new addresses so that, you know, this crap doesn't show up in chain analysis. And it's annoying and whatever. Yeah. Seed Center already talked about that. They're looking at, or actually actively implementing silent payments. Another study in the International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems. Now I don't know what that is. I don't read it, but it sounds to me like a pretty important journal if you're in electrical power.
A new study showing microgrids not using Bitcoin mining waste large amounts of renewable energy. This is exactly what we would expect. But using Bitcoin mining stops almost all renewable energy waste, reduces microgrid cost by 46%, percent, accelerates microgrid development, decarbonizes power production. Privacy, most important thing to me. Microgrids, Bitcoin mining as a way to bring power to people right up there. Maybe not number 2, but really close. Just being honest. Because people require energy to flourish. It's that simple.
Microgrids are a great way in a lot of developing countries to bring that. Jameson Lop, said this. I thought it was great. The state will happily claim that only criminals need privacy, but then it bestows special privacy upon agents of the state for their protection. Makes you think. That's it. That's what I got. That's the news. We're gonna wrap this puppy up. This is a value for value podcast. I'm out here hopefully putting out value, things of value that you find useful. If you do, please provide value back, and there's multiple ways you can do that. One way, just like, hypersensitive asaris, just like these other people who boosted in, you can provide value in the forms of streaming of sats or boosting sats, which also allows you to send a message through a podcasting 2.0 app.
You can go to new podcast apps .com. There's a whole list of them there, apps like fountain. And using a lightning wallet, then you can provide that value. Another way that you can provide value to me and get value back is by making clips of this podcast. Go to Fountain, for example, make a 1, 2, 3 minute clip from some part of this episode. If you do it in the next week or 2, I will boost you 500 sats when you do that. Make sure that you tag me in the, like, the note or whatever that you leave with the clip so that I see it. I'm macintosh on fountain.fm.
If it's an older episode, I'll boost you 300 sats. It's a great way for you to make some treasure, and it's a great way for me to get more exposure. Would love that. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I try not to be, but it's difficult. I'm a mastodon at Macintosh at podcast index dot social. I can also be reached by email at [email protected]. And, of course, there's our website. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
Introduction
Market update
Discussion on the importance of privacy in Bitcoin transactions and recent events impacting privacy tools like Tornado Cash and Samurai Wallet.
Impact of US regulations on Bitcoin privacy tools and comparison with developments in other countries like Argentina and El Salvador.
