Twitter triggers McIntosh .. again. Join us this week for the discussion of the three basic components of the Bitcoin network and how they work together and how their differing incentives help keep the network running properly.
News and Links
My First Bitcoin / Mi Primer Bitcoin
Dandelion++
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
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Unknown:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is May 27th, and this is episode 169 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is the the three legs of Bitcoin. Alright. Another week. Bitcoin doing Bitcoin things, news doing political things, but we got stuff to talk about. Let's talk about it. The market. Well I I'm recording this on Sunday night. And, so the weekly close will start right there. The weekly close for Bitcoin, which was a couple hours ago now, three hours ago, 68,476. Been down the last, little bit. I wanna say the last couple of days, but, yeah, that's pretty accurate. We got all the way down to 658 or so.
What day was that? Thursday. And, so we have pulled back, but, you know, surprise surprise, 69, $70,000 definitely seems to be a a level of resistance. And until we smash through that and establish above it and stay above it, then, you know, this show is just gonna end up petering out, going back down. I would actually say I would say probably in the next couple of days, if we don't break through $70,000, say, in the next few days and, you know, the next logical thing would be to start going back towards, you know, that 59, $58,000, level, just like we've been doing for a bit.
So we will see what that what happens there. Not real exciting, though. On the daily chart, we're we're in pushing into positive territory. But, you know, until we get past that $70,000, $71,000 mark and stay above it for more than one day, you know, maybe a couple of days or whatever, then we really don't have anything to talk about. Our block height at time of recording is 845,335. That's 845,335. And that is actually pretty important because the blocks are coming in hot. So according to mempool.space, the average block time since the last difficulty adjustment has been 8.8 minutes, so between blocks. So what that means is we are going to have a strong upward difficulty adjustment in about 8 more days on June 4th.
We're looking at about 13 and a half percent right now. Of course, that will fluctuate. Fluctuate. We probably will come down from that. I hope, certainly, as a minor that we come down. What that means is that a lot of hash rate has come online in the last few weeks for whatever reason, and now it's time to adjust so that, you know, things, start trending back towards that 10 minute per block block time. On the other hand, our transaction fees are nice. Right now, they're sitting at 8, 8 sats per v byte. Quite nice.
If you've got some transactions to do, we've got 913 megabytes. Actually, 910 now, megabytes, memory usage in the mempool space. Still outsized, but maybe that's just the size that it needs to be now. But we are down again to 9 8, 9 SATs per vbyte. So that's pretty nice. That means basically for less than a dollar, you can send an average Bitcoin transaction. Pretty cool. Alright. And that's about it. Pretty boring week in terms of the market. Not looking forward to that difficulty adjustment, but I'm a minor. So what can I say? Alright. So let's jump right on into our topic. It's going to be a fun one, I think, this week, at least for me.
I will see if it is for you. Three legs of Bitcoin. What is Macintosh talking about? Well, funny story. And this is all triggered, to be honest, by a tweet, which I didn't bookmark, so I don't have. But I can basically kinda summarize it. You dirty fiat miners. That's basically the tweet. Now that's not how they worded it. But it was somebody who was mad about the miners, acted like they didn't matter to the Bitcoin ecosystem. So as a miner, I I was a little offended. I'll be honest. I did not reply to the tweet. I was nice. But, but it got me thinking.
And if you recall, for those of us who have been here for the entirety of this show, which is very few people, but but been doing this for a while. This is episode 169. But back in, November of 2021, I recorded an episode, episode number 16. The block train the blockchain trilemma or the 3 leg stool of cryptocurrency. Now I was talking about cryptocurrency in general and the idea that any blockchain has to, compromise between speed, security, and decentralization. And they had to make trade offs between those 2. When you have a system that operates extremely fast, so they're scalable, they're speedy, then they're compromising on either security or decentralization or often both to achieve that.
When the big block, wars, so to speak, in 2017 came up, with Bitcoin when they wanted to increase the block size. They were trying to do that to increase the scalability, to increase the speed, the throughput, But they were going to be compromising these other two things to do that. Enough people realized that that that was stopped, fortunately. So that's one way of looking at these three legs of any blockchain really, but a Bitcoin in particular. Now I'm actually gonna have a different take on that. I'm not disputing those three things. I think they're very important. I think that that is a truism. I think that that is a, maybe that's I don't know. That's probably the best word I can come up with.
You know, this is the reality that we operate in in Bitcoin. Three things that we can code around, speed, scale, scalability, decentralization, and security. However, I would offer there's three other very important things. And when I see crap like this on Twitter, it kinda makes me annoyed, if you can't tell. There's three things that make the Bitcoin blockchain run. And by the way, just as a note, users is not one of them. Users are important, and we're gonna talk about that, but users are not one of them. And I did that on purpose. I think these other three things are we have to have users. So you could argue they're the 4th part of this, but I just love the way this kind of mirrors this other thing.
So if you will excuse me, I think there are three things that help the Bitcoin blockchain run. Miners, node runners, developers. So let's break that down real quick. What are minors? Miners are people like myself who put specialized computers at this point online to mine Bitcoin, not to solve complex mass problems as is oftentimes described. And honestly, I've said that in the past, but to make wild guesses at numbers and occasionally be correct, just do it really, really, really fast. That's what miners do. And when they find the right number, they get the right block or they get the block and they get the reward from that, the block reward itself plus the transactions.
That is literally how transactions happen on the Bitcoin network. Understand if there were no miners, Bitcoin transactions would not happen. They would not happen in ten minutes. They would not happen in 8.8 minutes as they are right now. They would not happen in 30 minutes. They would not happen forever. So they are important. And I'm going to talk more about that tweet after we get through this because there's is nuance to it as there always is with these things on Twitter and, online in general, especially on social media. There are node runners. What are node runners?
There's estimates all over the place about how many people run Bitcoin nodes. The problem is if they're running on a Tor network, you can't really see them. You can't just scan for them. I run currently, I think, 2 nodes. OK? And nodes are used, as basically a record of all the transactions. They run the Bitcoin core software. Now I'll just pull this out of the dust bin of history. It used to be that the the minor software was actually built in to the nodes itself into Bitcoin core, and people would run essentially, the node runners and miners were the same. You would mine Bitcoin, on a laptop or on your server or whatever, and it would also run the node. That's not true anymore. A miner is so specialized.
It only tries to guess that number, and that's it. And that's all it does. It does not run Bitcoin Core. It doesn't run anything like that. So we need node runners. We need records of transaction. We need to decentralize the network. I know there are tens of thousands of nodes. I believe the real number is actually closer to a 100000 all over the world. Some in tours, some in the public Internet, so to speak, all running copies of the Bitcoin blockchain, Running Bitcoin Core. Now I say Bitcoin Core. Most often it's Bitcoin Core. There's, 2 other versions that I know of offhand, and I can never remember one of them. One of them is actually called Knotts. It's Luke Junior's, Luke Dash Junior. I apologize if I'm saying that wrong. But anyways, he has a version of fork essentially of Bitcoin core that was developed a long time ago. He has back ported a number of patches or whatever that he feels is important.
And it can operate on the Bitcoin work, network, but it is different. Famously, the oceans, or ocean, excuse me, mining pool uses knots on its back end. And that's created a fair amount of controversy and whatever stuff I've chosen not to get involved in on this show, and that's probably good for my audience. And there's another one that I honestly cannot I wanna say it's probably, Block. No. Not Block. Where is that Block? Adam Back's company. I think they run a a version of a Bitcoin node. I don't know if it was originally based on core, if it's reverse engineered or whatever. The core code, of course, is open source. So they could have just forked it off and made their own improvements, but it seems like it's more than that.
Regardless, it's, market penetration, so to speak, really not that great. Kinda like knots. Basically, everybody uses Bitcoin Core. That's for better or for worse. I would love to see more diversity, to be honest. And and that's always good for the ecosystem in my opinion. But I'll say that and then I'll tell you I run Bitcoin Core. So anyways, node runners, obviously, very important. Developers. Who are the developers? Well, there are some people who work on Bitcoin Core, and the Bitcoin network in general full time. Other companies pay for their work, or they run off donations or however they do that, and that's what they do. They work on Bitcoin Core. Of course, anyone can contribute again, Bitcoin Core open source. You can create merge requests or what we call in Bitcoin land BIPs, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, I think is what it stands for.
And, you know, you may be able to get your work put in there. It's it's a very complicated process. It's not for the faint of heart. But that's not a bad thing because we don't wanna just be making random changes to the Bitcoin core code. But these developers are very important. Without developers, without the support of, in my opinion, open source companies or not even open source companies, companies that run Bitcoin businesses. What do I mean? I'll just say a few. Swan Bitcoin, maybe you know who they are. Block, Jack, Jack Dorsey, I wanna say.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it's a Jack. I think it's Jack Dorsey. Apologize. Love to get him on the show, but regardless, the block company or spiral. Good God. Adam Back's company may be block. I may be no. His company is Blockstream. Right. It's Jack Dorsey at Block. Why do they all have to have block in the name? I don't know. Maybe it's something about being a blockchain. Regardless, sorry about that. But companies like those companies need, in my opinion, to be throwing some money to support these developers. And I because they live on the success, the ultimate success of Bitcoin Core. And unlike, say, Michael Saylor, I don't believe that the core code should be ossified.
Now I will tell you this. I'm not a proponent of making rapid changes to Bitcoin core, but I realize that things we don't see everything at this point. Most of us certainly at least want Bitcoin to essentially live forever, 100 of years, and that's going to require changes. That's going to require improvements, maintenance, security updates, etcetera. So this nonsense about ossification, in my opinion, even though I'm not a true software engineer, even though that's what I tell people because it's the simplest way to explain my job, in my opinion, that's what needs to happen.
We need to continue to develop the core code and ossification, frankly, is a joke. Now I am also not of the camp, and again, just to emphasize this, of the people who wanna kinda run fast and break things. There's this whole group of developers that have come up over the last 10, 15 years. They have developed this idea because places like Google, places like Netflix, they operate under this mantra. We're just gonna operate quickly. We're gonna create a bunch of new stuff, and some of it's gonna break, and we're gonna fix that, and we're gonna move on. Do not do that with my financial software, ladies and gentlemen, even if it takes longer to develop, even if it takes much longer. When you are a Trillion plus dollar asset, you do not make quick rapid changes to the code.
And this is where I fear or where I see divergences between, Casey Rotterman, the guy who created ordinals, for example. I believe that guy knows a huge amount about Bitcoin. I also believe he operates under this man mantra, if you wanna call it that. And, I think that's a really bad idea and that will set us up for major failures in the future. And it may be 20 years or more, but it's still failure if we do not carry this on into the future and let our children and our grandchildren enjoy the fruits of a sound money. Okay.
Enough about that. Those are the 3 things that are important. Conspicuously absent from that list is users. And, yes, without users, there is no network ultimately because it does take these users. But I give the the I guess you could say users are given, and I don't wanna be dismissive. And I don't wanna say we shouldn't work with users. We always need to be doing things like improving, UX's, for example, user interfaces, on fundamental software like the lightning wallets, Bitcoin wallets in general, of course, even lightning nodes themselves, or core if there's there is a graphical user interface for that. I don't use it, but there is one.
These things need to be easier to use by their end user next year than they were right now when than they are right now. We need to think like a user when we're and not just a very technologically savvy user. Okay? Not a super user because the people who we are onboarding are not always those people. So I am somewhat taking users for granted and I will give you that. However, these three things are critical. If you do not have these three things, if you do not have them essentially competing against each other for their incentives, we do not have a Bitcoin network. Here's what I mean by that. Developers developers, again, oftentimes, they want to put things on the network that maybe the end user won't want or doesn't need, or maybe it's something that could potentially cause a problem in the future.
Who can stop them from doing that? Because they'll just push the code in. The node runners have to update the Bitcoin core code and activate it essentially in order for it to be actually running on the network. And there have been cases where that code didn't get deployed and eventually just got removed or whatever because the node runners were not willing to do that. So the node runners can't be ignored. The developers can't be ignored because if you don't have development, again, we have ossification and eventually we will have chaos. We will have severe technological problems with our systems as they break down.
So we can't ignore the developers either. What about the miners? What about these miners? What about these evil miners who are only doing it for the money? And, yes, they are doing it for the money. Because if they don't make money, it doesn't make any sense to invest, mind you, 1,000 of dollars per machine to mine Bitcoin. And ladies and gentlemen, as someone who mines with those machines, I will promise you they make a surprisingly small amount of Bitcoin when they mine. Let me repeat that. They make a small amount of Bitcoin per machine when they mine. People think you plug in a miner and money is just cascading all over the place. That is not true. It is absolutely not true. I have talked about that before on this podcast.
Mining at any level requires scale if you're going to actually make money. It's that plain simple. Now we just, in our last last episode, talked to Rob Warren who works at Riot, who is very high in that company. I don't remember exactly what his title is, but he has oversight on a lot of stuff. They have 1,000 and 1,000. If I remember correctly, I saw a press release, which I mentioned, they just deployed 60,000 miners just in the last year. They have thousands of miners, and that's how they make their money. And they have people who manage those miners, but one person is managing 100 and 100 and probably really thousands of miners.
That's the only way to scale because people, frankly, are expensive. I don't know if you know what it cost to hire a minor, a person who runs those machines, who changes the cords and pulls the machines when they break and all of that kind of stuff. But it is not cheap. Labor is not cheap. Okay? So those miners, that's why they're so cutthroat about energy cost. That's why they're so cutthroat about making minor tweaks to their stuff, their setups, their the way that they operate, the way that they run their machines in order to make more profit because even 1 or 2% can make a huge difference for them.
There's not a high margin in this business, in the mining business. Now I've said all that and then I will say, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again. First of all, as a libertarian slash capitalist, whatever you wanna call that, I have no problem with Riot operating in the mining space. I have no problem with Bitfarms or any of these other companies operating in this mining space. But ladies and gentlemen, we don't want any minor or any group of minors being more than 50% of the network. Because if that happens, then they can attack the network, and they'll do it for economic incentive. They are incentivized to do that.
How do we stop that from happening? Well, to this person on Twitter, and I do not know who they were, and I'll never see the tweet again because Twitter is Twitter and it's a very fast flowing stream of tweets. I would say rather than you arguing and fussing about Riot or Bitfarms or any of these, Marathon, gosh, I don't know, Core Scientific, any of these companies. Buy yourself a miner. And I will disagree with Rob on this. Rob says, basically, go out, start with a little home brew minor almost, one of these bid access or something like that. No. Or an old s9.
Actually, we talked about that, of course, quite a bit. No. Buy yourself a real miner. Buy an s21. Buy an s19 k pro. You can get an s19 k pro right now for $1700. Put your money where your mouth is. Stop griping about the public miners and put hash on the network because that's how we decentralize mining. I don't think it was Satoshi's vision that a bunch of public mining companies take over. I also think that Satoshi thought that there would be public mining companies eventually. I may be mistaken about that. But back in the old days, remember, we ran nodes, we ran miners on the same computers, and everybody could run one. And yet somehow, even though Bitcoin's at $70,000 and it used to be 0, somehow it's become too expensive for the average pleb to buy a miner.
Buddy, if you have made money in Bitcoin, if you've made $10,000 in Bitcoin, do not come to me and gripe about the miners. Do not come to me about just don't. Go buy a miner, put it online, be part of the solution instead of part of the Twitter algorithm raising you because you're griping. Okay? We have to have all three of these. You cannot bit Bitcoin miners have just as much skin in the game as one of our former presidents used to say As any of these as users, as node runners, as developers, if you wanna include if you wanna go ahead and make this 4 things. And buddy, if you're a user out there and you're griping about any of this, any of this well, I don't like the way the developers are are doing this, that, or the other.
I don't like the fact that my code, the Bitcoin code contains ordinals, that you can do ordinals on Bitcoin. Okay? I get it. Are you running a node? Well, no. I'm not. Are you running a minor? Well, no. I'm not. Are you doing merge requests or pull requests, I should say? Are you writing BIPs to improve this situation? No. No. I'm not. Are you running a Bitcoin meetup group? No. I'm not. Are you publishing blog articles about Bitcoin and about how it can be better? Are you trying to educate people in that way? No. No. I'm not. Are you running a podcast and talking to people about? Well, no. I'm not.
Then shut up. Sorry. I try not to be mean like that, but shut up. I don't wanna hear it. You can run a node. Well, I've only made $500 in Bitcoin. Well, first of all, how much have you invested? Nothing. I mean, I don't know. A little bit, I guess, but not that much. So really, again, going back to what Obama used, you don't have any skin in the game. You can put a node on an old computer on your network at home or if you really need to, you can get a very small computer online and run a node. Run a node and then put Bitcoin Core on it and then or put Bitcoin knots if you don't like ordinals.
Put Bitcoin knots on there because that famously, that's one of the things that they don't like and that they filter for. Put it on there. Run it, but be part of the solution instead of just talking about it. I run 2 nodes. I have minors. I'm not a developer because that's not my expertise. I'm out here trying to educate people. What are you doing? And I'm not saying I'm Superman. I'm not. But I'm just asking the question, what are you doing? Because if you're not doing anything, then don't gripe. Alright. Old man done.
Sorry. And I know that's harsh. I get it. But sometimes we have to speak the truth. Okay? Don't have skin in the game. You don't get to complain. At least your complaint doesn't mean a thing to me. I guess you can complain. It's a free country. Right? We have a right to freedom of speech as I often say. So, yeah, you can complain. I'm just not gonna listen to you. Why would I? Hey. Let's jump to our supporters. I love our supporters. We had some this week. It was a little low this week, I'll be honest, but that's okay. We're going to continue to put out value. We're going to continue to improve things. And in vain of that, actually, I will announce, even though it's not online yet, I have been testing the chat for satoshi's plebs. This is kind of my first step towards going live because I feel like in order to do that, we have to have a chat.
And so I've set up, I'm not gonna tell you where it's set up yet, but I am setting up an IRC chat. And I'm kinda well, I'm not stuck, but I'm to the point where I need to build the SSL search so that we can enable SSL or TLS as more commonly known these days, It's for secure communications, that kind of thing. Okay? So I'm hoping this week I can finish that, tomorrow here in the United States. It's a holiday. It's Memorial Day, when we remember those who've fallen, fighting for our country. But I don't have to go to work tomorrow. So that's maybe something I can get done. We'll see. I'm very close. I may even get it done tonight.
But point is, got things going on. I am trying to improve the value here. I'm always trying to improve the value of the content that we're producing, the news that we talk about, the whatever. The people that we interview, this kind of thing. So let's talk about the people who did provide support this week. Hypersensitivosaurus , our friend from Portugal, boosted 500 sats for the, 168 episode. The last episode, Privacy is a Must. He said, I always appreciate the mention. I enjoy listening to this while cooking up lasagna for lunch in the little house in the Portuguese countryside that I recently moved into. I can almost see it there.
Sunny Portugal. I hope you are enjoying it, my friend. And Gulag Plebs sent us a row of sticks, 1111, also on privacy, episode 168. Another great episode. Unless we created ourself, we must be willing to pay for what we want. Privacy is no different. And I agree, my friend, and that is almost nail on the head, so to speak, what I was trying to get across tonight. People who don't have skin in the game, I'm overusing that expression. I get it. But still, I I just don't care what they say. They have no voice in this matter. They're just noise. So if you're not running a node, if you're not doing things with these three things, specifically, being the most important parts, then so what? I don't you can say whatever you want.
Don't care. So between these and some streaming, we had a total of 2351 sats. I do appreciate that. That was a little low for the week. I'm not gonna put up a sad puppy but, yeah. It was. It was low. We're always targeting, I've kinda forgot what I was targeting. I think it's 25,000 sets per episode, a 100,000 a month in order to kinda cover the cost of everything that we're doing here, the hosting, trying to develop new things, this kind of thing. So, we're not there yet, obviously, but that's alright. We will get there. Let's jump on into our news and notes. If you follow me on Twitter, I post a lot of this beforehand.
I'm on Macintosh Fintech on Twitter. I try and do it on Nostra as well, which I have my Nostra pub key actually attached to my Twitter profile because it's tremendously long. Not for the faint of heart, but, yeah. You can follow me on there, but honestly, I tend to post on Twitter, most commonly. So, anyways, let's talk about what came up over the last week. Bitcoin pizza day was on May 22nd. Bitcoin pizza day was made famous by a names, a man called Laszlo. 14 years ago, he purchased 2 Papa John pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin, about $41 at the time.
I talk about this every year. And, today, those 10,000 Bitcoin are worth $700,000,000 and could buy a 40% stake in Papa John's, which is just mind blowing. But Bitcoin pizza day is about a lot more than 10,000 Bitcoin for some pizza. I talked about this at our Bitcoin meetup this week. You know? I'm like, look. If people like Laszlo did not spend their Bitcoin, we would not have a $1,000,000,000,000 asset. It's that simple. Now you go, well, Laszlo spent 10,000 Bitcoin and wow. But at the time, that Bitcoin was worth $41. That's what it was worth. That's the economics of this transaction.
Okay? That didn't keep Laszlo from saving Bitcoin. And to these people on Twitter who say, well, I only buy my Bitcoin. I never spend it. I say, you need to learn from Laszlo. Yes. You can save and you can spend at the same time. In the Fiat world, that's what we've always been taught to do. You save your money, but you're supposed to spend it, of course, because you gotta pay for rent and things like that. If we do not spend our Bitcoin, and I know in some jurisdictions, including the United States, that's very hard, but it can be done. If we don't spend our Bitcoin, it will never reach its fullest potential. It's that simple.
So think about that and think about poor Laszlo as he as you buy your next Papa John's. By the way, Laszlo, I always like to mention this. He was the guy who created the code that lets you mine Bitcoin on GPU. So they went from CPU mining originally to GPUs, like an NVIDIA GPU card or whatever. He was a really is, I should say, is a really smart dude. I'm sure he saved some Bitcoin, ladies and gentlemen, and he's doing okay. May 22nd, the US house passed a crypto rules bill designating the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as the leading regulator of crypto instead of the SEC.
So this has been brewing here in the United States for a while. The SCC, this commodity futures trading commission thing, they've kind of been battling over who's gonna be the regulator. Well, apparently, it's actually going to be the CFTC. And in fact, in later news this week, essentially, they're saying that given some vague requirements that they're gonna basically declare everything in crypto a commodity which is crazy to me because clearly things like Ethereum, things like, ADA, whatever they call that, it's, the ADA token. Any, Solana, these are all these are the definition of a security, and I've talked about that endlessly.
I'm not gonna repeat it, but these are securities, and they should be under the jurisdiction of the SEC. Bitcoin on the other hand, where for 2 years roughly, it was used with no value that there's no company behind it. There's no CEO. There's no board of directors. There's no foundation. There's nothing like that. It has been definitively and repeatedly declared a commodity. It is different, ladies and gentlemen, and this is only gonna muddy the waters in the long term. But I will say it probably in terms of regulation makes things a little easier here in the United States. Seth, for privacy, on May 22nd, also posted something about dandelion plus plus, which I'm not that familiar with.
But it is a way that if it's implemented, that it will help keep Bitcoin transactions to be censorship resistant. So you won't be able to tie transactions to their source node in a nutshell. So I'm going to, include some information about that in the show notes if you wish to dig further. As this develops, I will probably talk about it more. I am excited to see these security features at least being discussed. That's a really good thing. I think we need them. ETFs brought bought excuse me. ETFs, the, these big funds have bought approximately 24,800 Bitcoin equivalent to a 55 day supply to almost 2 months in the last 8 days. This was on May 23rd.
This is one of the reasons why number will go up eventually. Right now, we're seeing a sideways action. This ultimately means it has to go up. It's that simple. This has come up before. I've noted it before. Somebody posted a chart on Twitter. I will say I do not know if this is completely accurate. It looks like it probably is. But they're comparing Bitcoin to the Internet, and they're saying at this point, the adoption rate for Bitcoin is the same that the inter that the Internet had in 1999. So you are that early, ladies and gentlemen. And that is why I believe, and this is not investment advice, this is not financial advice, this is what Macintosh believes that in 20 to 30 years that Bitcoin will have 100 x from right now. I will let you do the math because when I say numbers that big, to be honest, it kinda scares me but the math works out.
And we have 15 years at this point of history to stand on. And I see no reason even if the United States came out and said Bitcoin is illegal. Bitcoin will live and within 30 years, it will have recovered and will have moved on like nothing has happened and the only people who will suffer were those in the United States. I posted reposted this little meme thing. It was really funny. Picture of some, like, US dollars. Has anyone heard of the altcoin called USD? I hear it has no cap, meaning no limit on how many you can have. And isn't backed by anything? Is it a scam? I don't know if they had done this before, but me, premier, Bitcoin, which is a program that was developed, I I'm not sure where. Maybe it was El Salvador. I think it was at least in Central South America.
They are releasing as open source their educational material. 10 week worth program, should be looked at. I think there's a lot of valuable stuff there. And to stir things up on May 25th, so what is that yesterday as I was rec as I record here on, Sunday night, Trump and the libertarian so Donald Trump, he's been president of the United States. He's run running again for president. He's also got a whole lot of baggage. I'll say that and duck because there's gonna be people who don't even like me saying that. But he does have a lot of baggage that comes along with him. But regardless, at the Libertarian National Conference, he said, I will ensure, and this is a direct quote, that the future of crypto, and I would emphasize that this is not Bitcoin only, and Bitcoin will be made in the United States or the USA actually is what he said. I will support the right to self custody to the nation's 50 million crypto holders. So I believe if that happens, that's good. So we're getting this at the state level. We have not been getting this at the national level. And in fact, we've got people like senator Warren who are running the exact opposite of this.
And he is just hear me out on this. And if you don't agree, that's okay. But he is doing this as a campaign ploy. He's also saying he will release, Ross Ulrich, who was the founder of Silk Road, for time served, which he's been in prison for 11 years. And I don't know what to think about that whole situation, but okay. So he is pandering for votes is what he's doing. He could have released Ross Holrich back when he was president before. Why is that all of a sudden an issue? I don't know. So anyways, that was the last bit of news.
So that's it for the news and we're gonna wrap things up here. I will throw this out. You know, I as I said earlier, I'm always striving to provide value And one of the ways that I try and give back value in this value for value podcast is if you clip part of this episode and you put it on fountain or if you put it on one of these other sources, these podcasting 2.0 apps, if you can do that. 1, 2, 3 minutes from an episode, I'll boost you 500 stats. I know I can do that on fountain. That's if it's the latest, the last couple of episodes. So this episode, the one about privacy, say. If it's an older episode, then you get 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way to make, some sats directly from me, and it's a way to promote the show. So, of course, I want you clipping the best content, which my ego would say would be the entire show. But let's be honest, we all know that that's not true.
So, of course, Satoshis PLEV podcast supports podcasting 2 point o. We're a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. I depend on the listeners. People like Gulag Pleb and hypersensitive asaurus to support the show. And you can do the exact same thing. Go out and grab a copy of fountain, for example, on your iPhone. It's got a bitcoin wallet integrated into it. With fountain, you can actually even occasionally earn some sats just by using it. But regardless, since some sats to it, use it to support shows my like mine. Value for value shows, and there's a lot of them out there.
If you're getting value from that show, show value back by supporting it, by streaming sets, by boosting it. You can ask questions. You can say whatever. You can tell me how many decentralized servers there are in Solana. Okay? Because I'm not gonna take the time to look it up because I don't care. But if you're a Solana guy, take some of that money you've made from Solana and support me and let me know. How about that? Right? Twitter's probably the easiest way to get a hold of me, McIntosh Fintech on Twitter. You can also email me, McIntosh at satoshisdashplebs.com.
We've got our website. I'm also on podcast index.social as McIntosh. That's part of the podcasting 2 point o ecosystem where they're building these great features like transcripts and that kind of thing into these apps. Alright. That's it. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is May 27th, and this is episode 169 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is the the three legs of Bitcoin. Alright. Another week. Bitcoin doing Bitcoin things, news doing political things, but we got stuff to talk about. Let's talk about it. The market. Well I I'm recording this on Sunday night. And, so the weekly close will start right there. The weekly close for Bitcoin, which was a couple hours ago now, three hours ago, 68,476. Been down the last, little bit. I wanna say the last couple of days, but, yeah, that's pretty accurate. We got all the way down to 658 or so.
What day was that? Thursday. And, so we have pulled back, but, you know, surprise surprise, 69, $70,000 definitely seems to be a a level of resistance. And until we smash through that and establish above it and stay above it, then, you know, this show is just gonna end up petering out, going back down. I would actually say I would say probably in the next couple of days, if we don't break through $70,000, say, in the next few days and, you know, the next logical thing would be to start going back towards, you know, that 59, $58,000, level, just like we've been doing for a bit.
So we will see what that what happens there. Not real exciting, though. On the daily chart, we're we're in pushing into positive territory. But, you know, until we get past that $70,000, $71,000 mark and stay above it for more than one day, you know, maybe a couple of days or whatever, then we really don't have anything to talk about. Our block height at time of recording is 845,335. That's 845,335. And that is actually pretty important because the blocks are coming in hot. So according to mempool.space, the average block time since the last difficulty adjustment has been 8.8 minutes, so between blocks. So what that means is we are going to have a strong upward difficulty adjustment in about 8 more days on June 4th.
We're looking at about 13 and a half percent right now. Of course, that will fluctuate. Fluctuate. We probably will come down from that. I hope, certainly, as a minor that we come down. What that means is that a lot of hash rate has come online in the last few weeks for whatever reason, and now it's time to adjust so that, you know, things, start trending back towards that 10 minute per block block time. On the other hand, our transaction fees are nice. Right now, they're sitting at 8, 8 sats per v byte. Quite nice.
If you've got some transactions to do, we've got 913 megabytes. Actually, 910 now, megabytes, memory usage in the mempool space. Still outsized, but maybe that's just the size that it needs to be now. But we are down again to 9 8, 9 SATs per vbyte. So that's pretty nice. That means basically for less than a dollar, you can send an average Bitcoin transaction. Pretty cool. Alright. And that's about it. Pretty boring week in terms of the market. Not looking forward to that difficulty adjustment, but I'm a minor. So what can I say? Alright. So let's jump right on into our topic. It's going to be a fun one, I think, this week, at least for me.
I will see if it is for you. Three legs of Bitcoin. What is Macintosh talking about? Well, funny story. And this is all triggered, to be honest, by a tweet, which I didn't bookmark, so I don't have. But I can basically kinda summarize it. You dirty fiat miners. That's basically the tweet. Now that's not how they worded it. But it was somebody who was mad about the miners, acted like they didn't matter to the Bitcoin ecosystem. So as a miner, I I was a little offended. I'll be honest. I did not reply to the tweet. I was nice. But, but it got me thinking.
And if you recall, for those of us who have been here for the entirety of this show, which is very few people, but but been doing this for a while. This is episode 169. But back in, November of 2021, I recorded an episode, episode number 16. The block train the blockchain trilemma or the 3 leg stool of cryptocurrency. Now I was talking about cryptocurrency in general and the idea that any blockchain has to, compromise between speed, security, and decentralization. And they had to make trade offs between those 2. When you have a system that operates extremely fast, so they're scalable, they're speedy, then they're compromising on either security or decentralization or often both to achieve that.
When the big block, wars, so to speak, in 2017 came up, with Bitcoin when they wanted to increase the block size. They were trying to do that to increase the scalability, to increase the speed, the throughput, But they were going to be compromising these other two things to do that. Enough people realized that that that was stopped, fortunately. So that's one way of looking at these three legs of any blockchain really, but a Bitcoin in particular. Now I'm actually gonna have a different take on that. I'm not disputing those three things. I think they're very important. I think that that is a truism. I think that that is a, maybe that's I don't know. That's probably the best word I can come up with.
You know, this is the reality that we operate in in Bitcoin. Three things that we can code around, speed, scale, scalability, decentralization, and security. However, I would offer there's three other very important things. And when I see crap like this on Twitter, it kinda makes me annoyed, if you can't tell. There's three things that make the Bitcoin blockchain run. And by the way, just as a note, users is not one of them. Users are important, and we're gonna talk about that, but users are not one of them. And I did that on purpose. I think these other three things are we have to have users. So you could argue they're the 4th part of this, but I just love the way this kind of mirrors this other thing.
So if you will excuse me, I think there are three things that help the Bitcoin blockchain run. Miners, node runners, developers. So let's break that down real quick. What are minors? Miners are people like myself who put specialized computers at this point online to mine Bitcoin, not to solve complex mass problems as is oftentimes described. And honestly, I've said that in the past, but to make wild guesses at numbers and occasionally be correct, just do it really, really, really fast. That's what miners do. And when they find the right number, they get the right block or they get the block and they get the reward from that, the block reward itself plus the transactions.
That is literally how transactions happen on the Bitcoin network. Understand if there were no miners, Bitcoin transactions would not happen. They would not happen in ten minutes. They would not happen in 8.8 minutes as they are right now. They would not happen in 30 minutes. They would not happen forever. So they are important. And I'm going to talk more about that tweet after we get through this because there's is nuance to it as there always is with these things on Twitter and, online in general, especially on social media. There are node runners. What are node runners?
There's estimates all over the place about how many people run Bitcoin nodes. The problem is if they're running on a Tor network, you can't really see them. You can't just scan for them. I run currently, I think, 2 nodes. OK? And nodes are used, as basically a record of all the transactions. They run the Bitcoin core software. Now I'll just pull this out of the dust bin of history. It used to be that the the minor software was actually built in to the nodes itself into Bitcoin core, and people would run essentially, the node runners and miners were the same. You would mine Bitcoin, on a laptop or on your server or whatever, and it would also run the node. That's not true anymore. A miner is so specialized.
It only tries to guess that number, and that's it. And that's all it does. It does not run Bitcoin Core. It doesn't run anything like that. So we need node runners. We need records of transaction. We need to decentralize the network. I know there are tens of thousands of nodes. I believe the real number is actually closer to a 100000 all over the world. Some in tours, some in the public Internet, so to speak, all running copies of the Bitcoin blockchain, Running Bitcoin Core. Now I say Bitcoin Core. Most often it's Bitcoin Core. There's, 2 other versions that I know of offhand, and I can never remember one of them. One of them is actually called Knotts. It's Luke Junior's, Luke Dash Junior. I apologize if I'm saying that wrong. But anyways, he has a version of fork essentially of Bitcoin core that was developed a long time ago. He has back ported a number of patches or whatever that he feels is important.
And it can operate on the Bitcoin work, network, but it is different. Famously, the oceans, or ocean, excuse me, mining pool uses knots on its back end. And that's created a fair amount of controversy and whatever stuff I've chosen not to get involved in on this show, and that's probably good for my audience. And there's another one that I honestly cannot I wanna say it's probably, Block. No. Not Block. Where is that Block? Adam Back's company. I think they run a a version of a Bitcoin node. I don't know if it was originally based on core, if it's reverse engineered or whatever. The core code, of course, is open source. So they could have just forked it off and made their own improvements, but it seems like it's more than that.
Regardless, it's, market penetration, so to speak, really not that great. Kinda like knots. Basically, everybody uses Bitcoin Core. That's for better or for worse. I would love to see more diversity, to be honest. And and that's always good for the ecosystem in my opinion. But I'll say that and then I'll tell you I run Bitcoin Core. So anyways, node runners, obviously, very important. Developers. Who are the developers? Well, there are some people who work on Bitcoin Core, and the Bitcoin network in general full time. Other companies pay for their work, or they run off donations or however they do that, and that's what they do. They work on Bitcoin Core. Of course, anyone can contribute again, Bitcoin Core open source. You can create merge requests or what we call in Bitcoin land BIPs, Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, I think is what it stands for.
And, you know, you may be able to get your work put in there. It's it's a very complicated process. It's not for the faint of heart. But that's not a bad thing because we don't wanna just be making random changes to the Bitcoin core code. But these developers are very important. Without developers, without the support of, in my opinion, open source companies or not even open source companies, companies that run Bitcoin businesses. What do I mean? I'll just say a few. Swan Bitcoin, maybe you know who they are. Block, Jack, Jack Dorsey, I wanna say.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it's a Jack. I think it's Jack Dorsey. Apologize. Love to get him on the show, but regardless, the block company or spiral. Good God. Adam Back's company may be block. I may be no. His company is Blockstream. Right. It's Jack Dorsey at Block. Why do they all have to have block in the name? I don't know. Maybe it's something about being a blockchain. Regardless, sorry about that. But companies like those companies need, in my opinion, to be throwing some money to support these developers. And I because they live on the success, the ultimate success of Bitcoin Core. And unlike, say, Michael Saylor, I don't believe that the core code should be ossified.
Now I will tell you this. I'm not a proponent of making rapid changes to Bitcoin core, but I realize that things we don't see everything at this point. Most of us certainly at least want Bitcoin to essentially live forever, 100 of years, and that's going to require changes. That's going to require improvements, maintenance, security updates, etcetera. So this nonsense about ossification, in my opinion, even though I'm not a true software engineer, even though that's what I tell people because it's the simplest way to explain my job, in my opinion, that's what needs to happen.
We need to continue to develop the core code and ossification, frankly, is a joke. Now I am also not of the camp, and again, just to emphasize this, of the people who wanna kinda run fast and break things. There's this whole group of developers that have come up over the last 10, 15 years. They have developed this idea because places like Google, places like Netflix, they operate under this mantra. We're just gonna operate quickly. We're gonna create a bunch of new stuff, and some of it's gonna break, and we're gonna fix that, and we're gonna move on. Do not do that with my financial software, ladies and gentlemen, even if it takes longer to develop, even if it takes much longer. When you are a Trillion plus dollar asset, you do not make quick rapid changes to the code.
And this is where I fear or where I see divergences between, Casey Rotterman, the guy who created ordinals, for example. I believe that guy knows a huge amount about Bitcoin. I also believe he operates under this man mantra, if you wanna call it that. And, I think that's a really bad idea and that will set us up for major failures in the future. And it may be 20 years or more, but it's still failure if we do not carry this on into the future and let our children and our grandchildren enjoy the fruits of a sound money. Okay.
Enough about that. Those are the 3 things that are important. Conspicuously absent from that list is users. And, yes, without users, there is no network ultimately because it does take these users. But I give the the I guess you could say users are given, and I don't wanna be dismissive. And I don't wanna say we shouldn't work with users. We always need to be doing things like improving, UX's, for example, user interfaces, on fundamental software like the lightning wallets, Bitcoin wallets in general, of course, even lightning nodes themselves, or core if there's there is a graphical user interface for that. I don't use it, but there is one.
These things need to be easier to use by their end user next year than they were right now when than they are right now. We need to think like a user when we're and not just a very technologically savvy user. Okay? Not a super user because the people who we are onboarding are not always those people. So I am somewhat taking users for granted and I will give you that. However, these three things are critical. If you do not have these three things, if you do not have them essentially competing against each other for their incentives, we do not have a Bitcoin network. Here's what I mean by that. Developers developers, again, oftentimes, they want to put things on the network that maybe the end user won't want or doesn't need, or maybe it's something that could potentially cause a problem in the future.
Who can stop them from doing that? Because they'll just push the code in. The node runners have to update the Bitcoin core code and activate it essentially in order for it to be actually running on the network. And there have been cases where that code didn't get deployed and eventually just got removed or whatever because the node runners were not willing to do that. So the node runners can't be ignored. The developers can't be ignored because if you don't have development, again, we have ossification and eventually we will have chaos. We will have severe technological problems with our systems as they break down.
So we can't ignore the developers either. What about the miners? What about these miners? What about these evil miners who are only doing it for the money? And, yes, they are doing it for the money. Because if they don't make money, it doesn't make any sense to invest, mind you, 1,000 of dollars per machine to mine Bitcoin. And ladies and gentlemen, as someone who mines with those machines, I will promise you they make a surprisingly small amount of Bitcoin when they mine. Let me repeat that. They make a small amount of Bitcoin per machine when they mine. People think you plug in a miner and money is just cascading all over the place. That is not true. It is absolutely not true. I have talked about that before on this podcast.
Mining at any level requires scale if you're going to actually make money. It's that plain simple. Now we just, in our last last episode, talked to Rob Warren who works at Riot, who is very high in that company. I don't remember exactly what his title is, but he has oversight on a lot of stuff. They have 1,000 and 1,000. If I remember correctly, I saw a press release, which I mentioned, they just deployed 60,000 miners just in the last year. They have thousands of miners, and that's how they make their money. And they have people who manage those miners, but one person is managing 100 and 100 and probably really thousands of miners.
That's the only way to scale because people, frankly, are expensive. I don't know if you know what it cost to hire a minor, a person who runs those machines, who changes the cords and pulls the machines when they break and all of that kind of stuff. But it is not cheap. Labor is not cheap. Okay? So those miners, that's why they're so cutthroat about energy cost. That's why they're so cutthroat about making minor tweaks to their stuff, their setups, their the way that they operate, the way that they run their machines in order to make more profit because even 1 or 2% can make a huge difference for them.
There's not a high margin in this business, in the mining business. Now I've said all that and then I will say, and I've said it before, and I'll say it again. First of all, as a libertarian slash capitalist, whatever you wanna call that, I have no problem with Riot operating in the mining space. I have no problem with Bitfarms or any of these other companies operating in this mining space. But ladies and gentlemen, we don't want any minor or any group of minors being more than 50% of the network. Because if that happens, then they can attack the network, and they'll do it for economic incentive. They are incentivized to do that.
How do we stop that from happening? Well, to this person on Twitter, and I do not know who they were, and I'll never see the tweet again because Twitter is Twitter and it's a very fast flowing stream of tweets. I would say rather than you arguing and fussing about Riot or Bitfarms or any of these, Marathon, gosh, I don't know, Core Scientific, any of these companies. Buy yourself a miner. And I will disagree with Rob on this. Rob says, basically, go out, start with a little home brew minor almost, one of these bid access or something like that. No. Or an old s9.
Actually, we talked about that, of course, quite a bit. No. Buy yourself a real miner. Buy an s21. Buy an s19 k pro. You can get an s19 k pro right now for $1700. Put your money where your mouth is. Stop griping about the public miners and put hash on the network because that's how we decentralize mining. I don't think it was Satoshi's vision that a bunch of public mining companies take over. I also think that Satoshi thought that there would be public mining companies eventually. I may be mistaken about that. But back in the old days, remember, we ran nodes, we ran miners on the same computers, and everybody could run one. And yet somehow, even though Bitcoin's at $70,000 and it used to be 0, somehow it's become too expensive for the average pleb to buy a miner.
Buddy, if you have made money in Bitcoin, if you've made $10,000 in Bitcoin, do not come to me and gripe about the miners. Do not come to me about just don't. Go buy a miner, put it online, be part of the solution instead of part of the Twitter algorithm raising you because you're griping. Okay? We have to have all three of these. You cannot bit Bitcoin miners have just as much skin in the game as one of our former presidents used to say As any of these as users, as node runners, as developers, if you wanna include if you wanna go ahead and make this 4 things. And buddy, if you're a user out there and you're griping about any of this, any of this well, I don't like the way the developers are are doing this, that, or the other.
I don't like the fact that my code, the Bitcoin code contains ordinals, that you can do ordinals on Bitcoin. Okay? I get it. Are you running a node? Well, no. I'm not. Are you running a minor? Well, no. I'm not. Are you doing merge requests or pull requests, I should say? Are you writing BIPs to improve this situation? No. No. I'm not. Are you running a Bitcoin meetup group? No. I'm not. Are you publishing blog articles about Bitcoin and about how it can be better? Are you trying to educate people in that way? No. No. I'm not. Are you running a podcast and talking to people about? Well, no. I'm not.
Then shut up. Sorry. I try not to be mean like that, but shut up. I don't wanna hear it. You can run a node. Well, I've only made $500 in Bitcoin. Well, first of all, how much have you invested? Nothing. I mean, I don't know. A little bit, I guess, but not that much. So really, again, going back to what Obama used, you don't have any skin in the game. You can put a node on an old computer on your network at home or if you really need to, you can get a very small computer online and run a node. Run a node and then put Bitcoin Core on it and then or put Bitcoin knots if you don't like ordinals.
Put Bitcoin knots on there because that famously, that's one of the things that they don't like and that they filter for. Put it on there. Run it, but be part of the solution instead of just talking about it. I run 2 nodes. I have minors. I'm not a developer because that's not my expertise. I'm out here trying to educate people. What are you doing? And I'm not saying I'm Superman. I'm not. But I'm just asking the question, what are you doing? Because if you're not doing anything, then don't gripe. Alright. Old man done.
Sorry. And I know that's harsh. I get it. But sometimes we have to speak the truth. Okay? Don't have skin in the game. You don't get to complain. At least your complaint doesn't mean a thing to me. I guess you can complain. It's a free country. Right? We have a right to freedom of speech as I often say. So, yeah, you can complain. I'm just not gonna listen to you. Why would I? Hey. Let's jump to our supporters. I love our supporters. We had some this week. It was a little low this week, I'll be honest, but that's okay. We're going to continue to put out value. We're going to continue to improve things. And in vain of that, actually, I will announce, even though it's not online yet, I have been testing the chat for satoshi's plebs. This is kind of my first step towards going live because I feel like in order to do that, we have to have a chat.
And so I've set up, I'm not gonna tell you where it's set up yet, but I am setting up an IRC chat. And I'm kinda well, I'm not stuck, but I'm to the point where I need to build the SSL search so that we can enable SSL or TLS as more commonly known these days, It's for secure communications, that kind of thing. Okay? So I'm hoping this week I can finish that, tomorrow here in the United States. It's a holiday. It's Memorial Day, when we remember those who've fallen, fighting for our country. But I don't have to go to work tomorrow. So that's maybe something I can get done. We'll see. I'm very close. I may even get it done tonight.
But point is, got things going on. I am trying to improve the value here. I'm always trying to improve the value of the content that we're producing, the news that we talk about, the whatever. The people that we interview, this kind of thing. So let's talk about the people who did provide support this week. Hypersensitivosaurus , our friend from Portugal, boosted 500 sats for the, 168 episode. The last episode, Privacy is a Must. He said, I always appreciate the mention. I enjoy listening to this while cooking up lasagna for lunch in the little house in the Portuguese countryside that I recently moved into. I can almost see it there.
Sunny Portugal. I hope you are enjoying it, my friend. And Gulag Plebs sent us a row of sticks, 1111, also on privacy, episode 168. Another great episode. Unless we created ourself, we must be willing to pay for what we want. Privacy is no different. And I agree, my friend, and that is almost nail on the head, so to speak, what I was trying to get across tonight. People who don't have skin in the game, I'm overusing that expression. I get it. But still, I I just don't care what they say. They have no voice in this matter. They're just noise. So if you're not running a node, if you're not doing things with these three things, specifically, being the most important parts, then so what? I don't you can say whatever you want.
Don't care. So between these and some streaming, we had a total of 2351 sats. I do appreciate that. That was a little low for the week. I'm not gonna put up a sad puppy but, yeah. It was. It was low. We're always targeting, I've kinda forgot what I was targeting. I think it's 25,000 sets per episode, a 100,000 a month in order to kinda cover the cost of everything that we're doing here, the hosting, trying to develop new things, this kind of thing. So, we're not there yet, obviously, but that's alright. We will get there. Let's jump on into our news and notes. If you follow me on Twitter, I post a lot of this beforehand.
I'm on Macintosh Fintech on Twitter. I try and do it on Nostra as well, which I have my Nostra pub key actually attached to my Twitter profile because it's tremendously long. Not for the faint of heart, but, yeah. You can follow me on there, but honestly, I tend to post on Twitter, most commonly. So, anyways, let's talk about what came up over the last week. Bitcoin pizza day was on May 22nd. Bitcoin pizza day was made famous by a names, a man called Laszlo. 14 years ago, he purchased 2 Papa John pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin, about $41 at the time.
I talk about this every year. And, today, those 10,000 Bitcoin are worth $700,000,000 and could buy a 40% stake in Papa John's, which is just mind blowing. But Bitcoin pizza day is about a lot more than 10,000 Bitcoin for some pizza. I talked about this at our Bitcoin meetup this week. You know? I'm like, look. If people like Laszlo did not spend their Bitcoin, we would not have a $1,000,000,000,000 asset. It's that simple. Now you go, well, Laszlo spent 10,000 Bitcoin and wow. But at the time, that Bitcoin was worth $41. That's what it was worth. That's the economics of this transaction.
Okay? That didn't keep Laszlo from saving Bitcoin. And to these people on Twitter who say, well, I only buy my Bitcoin. I never spend it. I say, you need to learn from Laszlo. Yes. You can save and you can spend at the same time. In the Fiat world, that's what we've always been taught to do. You save your money, but you're supposed to spend it, of course, because you gotta pay for rent and things like that. If we do not spend our Bitcoin, and I know in some jurisdictions, including the United States, that's very hard, but it can be done. If we don't spend our Bitcoin, it will never reach its fullest potential. It's that simple.
So think about that and think about poor Laszlo as he as you buy your next Papa John's. By the way, Laszlo, I always like to mention this. He was the guy who created the code that lets you mine Bitcoin on GPU. So they went from CPU mining originally to GPUs, like an NVIDIA GPU card or whatever. He was a really is, I should say, is a really smart dude. I'm sure he saved some Bitcoin, ladies and gentlemen, and he's doing okay. May 22nd, the US house passed a crypto rules bill designating the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as the leading regulator of crypto instead of the SEC.
So this has been brewing here in the United States for a while. The SCC, this commodity futures trading commission thing, they've kind of been battling over who's gonna be the regulator. Well, apparently, it's actually going to be the CFTC. And in fact, in later news this week, essentially, they're saying that given some vague requirements that they're gonna basically declare everything in crypto a commodity which is crazy to me because clearly things like Ethereum, things like, ADA, whatever they call that, it's, the ADA token. Any, Solana, these are all these are the definition of a security, and I've talked about that endlessly.
I'm not gonna repeat it, but these are securities, and they should be under the jurisdiction of the SEC. Bitcoin on the other hand, where for 2 years roughly, it was used with no value that there's no company behind it. There's no CEO. There's no board of directors. There's no foundation. There's nothing like that. It has been definitively and repeatedly declared a commodity. It is different, ladies and gentlemen, and this is only gonna muddy the waters in the long term. But I will say it probably in terms of regulation makes things a little easier here in the United States. Seth, for privacy, on May 22nd, also posted something about dandelion plus plus, which I'm not that familiar with.
But it is a way that if it's implemented, that it will help keep Bitcoin transactions to be censorship resistant. So you won't be able to tie transactions to their source node in a nutshell. So I'm going to, include some information about that in the show notes if you wish to dig further. As this develops, I will probably talk about it more. I am excited to see these security features at least being discussed. That's a really good thing. I think we need them. ETFs brought bought excuse me. ETFs, the, these big funds have bought approximately 24,800 Bitcoin equivalent to a 55 day supply to almost 2 months in the last 8 days. This was on May 23rd.
This is one of the reasons why number will go up eventually. Right now, we're seeing a sideways action. This ultimately means it has to go up. It's that simple. This has come up before. I've noted it before. Somebody posted a chart on Twitter. I will say I do not know if this is completely accurate. It looks like it probably is. But they're comparing Bitcoin to the Internet, and they're saying at this point, the adoption rate for Bitcoin is the same that the inter that the Internet had in 1999. So you are that early, ladies and gentlemen. And that is why I believe, and this is not investment advice, this is not financial advice, this is what Macintosh believes that in 20 to 30 years that Bitcoin will have 100 x from right now. I will let you do the math because when I say numbers that big, to be honest, it kinda scares me but the math works out.
And we have 15 years at this point of history to stand on. And I see no reason even if the United States came out and said Bitcoin is illegal. Bitcoin will live and within 30 years, it will have recovered and will have moved on like nothing has happened and the only people who will suffer were those in the United States. I posted reposted this little meme thing. It was really funny. Picture of some, like, US dollars. Has anyone heard of the altcoin called USD? I hear it has no cap, meaning no limit on how many you can have. And isn't backed by anything? Is it a scam? I don't know if they had done this before, but me, premier, Bitcoin, which is a program that was developed, I I'm not sure where. Maybe it was El Salvador. I think it was at least in Central South America.
They are releasing as open source their educational material. 10 week worth program, should be looked at. I think there's a lot of valuable stuff there. And to stir things up on May 25th, so what is that yesterday as I was rec as I record here on, Sunday night, Trump and the libertarian so Donald Trump, he's been president of the United States. He's run running again for president. He's also got a whole lot of baggage. I'll say that and duck because there's gonna be people who don't even like me saying that. But he does have a lot of baggage that comes along with him. But regardless, at the Libertarian National Conference, he said, I will ensure, and this is a direct quote, that the future of crypto, and I would emphasize that this is not Bitcoin only, and Bitcoin will be made in the United States or the USA actually is what he said. I will support the right to self custody to the nation's 50 million crypto holders. So I believe if that happens, that's good. So we're getting this at the state level. We have not been getting this at the national level. And in fact, we've got people like senator Warren who are running the exact opposite of this.
And he is just hear me out on this. And if you don't agree, that's okay. But he is doing this as a campaign ploy. He's also saying he will release, Ross Ulrich, who was the founder of Silk Road, for time served, which he's been in prison for 11 years. And I don't know what to think about that whole situation, but okay. So he is pandering for votes is what he's doing. He could have released Ross Holrich back when he was president before. Why is that all of a sudden an issue? I don't know. So anyways, that was the last bit of news.
So that's it for the news and we're gonna wrap things up here. I will throw this out. You know, I as I said earlier, I'm always striving to provide value And one of the ways that I try and give back value in this value for value podcast is if you clip part of this episode and you put it on fountain or if you put it on one of these other sources, these podcasting 2.0 apps, if you can do that. 1, 2, 3 minutes from an episode, I'll boost you 500 stats. I know I can do that on fountain. That's if it's the latest, the last couple of episodes. So this episode, the one about privacy, say. If it's an older episode, then you get 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way to make, some sats directly from me, and it's a way to promote the show. So, of course, I want you clipping the best content, which my ego would say would be the entire show. But let's be honest, we all know that that's not true.
So, of course, Satoshis PLEV podcast supports podcasting 2 point o. We're a value for value podcast as I talk about all the time. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. I depend on the listeners. People like Gulag Pleb and hypersensitive asaurus to support the show. And you can do the exact same thing. Go out and grab a copy of fountain, for example, on your iPhone. It's got a bitcoin wallet integrated into it. With fountain, you can actually even occasionally earn some sats just by using it. But regardless, since some sats to it, use it to support shows my like mine. Value for value shows, and there's a lot of them out there.
If you're getting value from that show, show value back by supporting it, by streaming sets, by boosting it. You can ask questions. You can say whatever. You can tell me how many decentralized servers there are in Solana. Okay? Because I'm not gonna take the time to look it up because I don't care. But if you're a Solana guy, take some of that money you've made from Solana and support me and let me know. How about that? Right? Twitter's probably the easiest way to get a hold of me, McIntosh Fintech on Twitter. You can also email me, McIntosh at satoshisdashplebs.com.
We've got our website. I'm also on podcast index.social as McIntosh. That's part of the podcasting 2 point o ecosystem where they're building these great features like transcripts and that kind of thing into these apps. Alright. That's it. Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
