This week we wrapped up the discussion on the fast and furious legislation and enforcement coming out of the various parts of the United States. These are having profound effects on the development of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
News
Wasabi Wallet 2.0.8 Release
Harbor E-cash Wallet Release
Biden Vetos Bitcoin Custody Bill
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
I can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at McIntoshFinTech. My mastodon handle is @[email protected]. Looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is June 2nd, and this is episode 170 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is A Sunday Chat. Alright. We will go ahead and get into it. Of course, I'm McIntosh. I'm the host of Satoshi's Plebs podcast. Around here, we begin things with a brief market update. We talk about where Bitcoin is, where we think it might be going. And, and then we talk about our topic, and then we talk about our supporters, and then we talk about the news, and then we get on out of here. It's a Sunday afternoon here on the East coast of the United States. Early summer, things are heating up in the Bitcoin world. The Bitcoin price itself continues to go sideways as we will talk about here in just a minute.
So there we are. Alright. We are at block height. Let us see. 84625 3 at the time of recording. 846253. We of course have a subsidy right now. 3. 25, Bitcoin per block that's mined plus the transaction fees as we have since the happening that happened back in April. So it's been more than a month. It's been like 6 weeks or so. I'm sorry. 3.125. I think I said 3.25. It's been more than a month since the happening. The price has essentially gone sideways. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, I think, just to be honest, I believe that the miners in general, the public miners specifically in general, are more prepared for the happening than they have been in the past. We don't see any capitulation.
There was a little bit of minor news this week. Riot, actually, the company, that Rob Warren works for that we interviewed just a couple weeks ago, offered to buy Bitfarms. Disclosure, I do own Bitfarms stock. That's the only Bitcoin stock that I own. Not financial advice, etcetera, etcetera. Of course. They offered, like, $2.25, I think, a share to buy all the outstanding shares of the company. Now in my view now I've been I've held Bitcoin a bit farm stock for over a year, and this is not a stock buying. I'm not god. I'm not recommending that you buy a bit from. I'm just telling you where I'm coming from. I've owned this stock for over a year. They have, I started buying essentially, maybe even before the bear market really set in, and I bought some during the bear market.
It seems to me that they've got good plans. They are building out in the right places in Argentina. I think they're also looking at Paraguay some. To my knowledge, they're not doing anything in Africa, but they have, some, well, they their primary or their original certainly facility was in is in Quebec. They're a Canadian company. They don't have a whole lot of debt on their balance sheets, which I think is important. They paid that off when they had that opportunity. And they seem to be poised for success during this next bull run.
Unfortunately, there's some dispute going on with their their ex, I should say, CEO, who was actually asked, to leave the company recently. He is suing the company for $27,000,000 or $24,000,000, which by the way sounds crazy. It happens a lot in these kind of cases and probably shouldn't be too much read into that. If Bitfarms has to pay that, of course, that would be a a blow to them. So right now, they're running with the interim CEO, and Riot is looking to expand. And they see all these plans that they have set up, which, of course, are a public company, so the information is out there, as they disclose in their earnings calls and such. And, so they're trying to swoop in, in my opinion, and buy them on the cheap.
Bitfarms said, no. We're not accepting that offer. They did not say that we are not accepting any offer at whatever price. I think they're worth a lot more than that, to be honest. And let's say Riot were to buy them. Let's say Riot were to buy them at $5 a share. I would just hold on to my Riot shares, although I'm not as bullish on Riot as I am on Bitfarm until the top of the the bull run, which as I've said many, many times on here before, as far as I can tell, for reasons that I have laid out explicitly on this podcast, I'm not going to cover right now, but it should be certainly the last half of 2025. So still over a year away.
I'm guessing. I'm estimating. I shouldn't say guessing. I'm estimating it will be somewhere around the, 3rd 4th quarter, excuse me, or very, very late in the Q3. Q4, most likely, 2025 will be our next top. I'm not speculating on the price. I do believe it will be above a 100. I think I've publicly said that on here. I think it will be well above that actually. But regardless, I would be holding on to whatever stock that is until that point and then sell it. And that's my plan. Anyways, little bit of mining news this week there. Whether you're interested in that or not, I do believe that these miners, these public miners are very important to Bitcoin to the ecosystem.
I think we should keep our eye on them regardless if if you own any of their stock or not. And as I've said many times before, I would love to see more competition in the space. I would love to see more plebs out there. I think I laid it out maybe even on the last episode. Really concretely, I think, saying, you know, plebs should be buying miners. If you've got skin in the game, if you own Bitcoin, if you think Bitcoin's going, you know, a long way north from where it's at right now. If you're in this for the long term, then, and you have the ability to, which it's not as hard as people make it out to me, but it's not trivial.
You know, run a miner. Run it at home. Run it at a hosting company like Kaboom Racks. You can run one miner with them. That's not a problem. Yes. They are not cheap. They will be more expensive at the top of the bull run. I would not recommend that you wait until then. However, you are investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem and, doing your part to keep these public mining companies from becoming too large, frankly, from taking too much of the hash rate. So there you go. So where are we going? That's a great question. We haven't gone anywhere for the last week, essentially.
Last Sunday, we were sitting at 69. We've slowly settled down. We have built out really over gosh. How long has this been going on now? I think you could argue back to certainly very early March. We moved up into this time range. We're still in this box. I mean, I'm just that's where we're at. I know it's boring. I know this is not exciting. Until we break out, we're just gonna keep kinda slowly going up and down. Now we've built out in the last week what amounts to a bull flag. I think you could view it that way. So maybe we pop up from here and try and break that 70,000.
We will see. 71,000. We'll see. I think that's a a fair bet. I would not be betting on it. I would not this is not trading advice, of course. But ladies and gentlemen, when we do break out of that this range and we establish that, and I don't mean just peeking above it like we did back when in the middle of March, that, you know, we're gonna be off to the races. We'll we'll probably be closing in on a 100,000 before you know it. And I think that would be our next major hurdle. I don't really see a whole lot between here and there, but we'll see.
Of course, as always, not trading advice. That's just idle speculation of Macintosh and his trading view account. Alright. The Earl Gray is hot. Oh, let's wrap this up. We did already say the block height. Our price at time of recording, 67,943 as of a few minutes ago. Actually, 911. So we'll go ahead and put that in as of right now. I'm one hour from the time change, essentially, for the weekly closing. I'm recording a little early today. I could see it breaking 68 trying to establish above that. We'll see. Alright. Difficulty adjustment. Our last adjustment was on May 23rd. Let's see here.
We've got one in 3 days. The last adjustment was, let me see here. Half a percent up. And it looks like we're gonna have another small one. It looks like things settled down a bit. I think a lot of hash rate actually dropped off over the last week. So I think a week ago, I was saying it was gonna be pretty high. Right now, we're looking at us at 0.74% up. So pretty spiffy. That would be nice. We don't I as a minor, I do not need a huge adjustment. And that's on June June June June. June 5th. So just a couple of days for now. Alright.
And our mempool fees are up just a little bit for those of you transacting on the main net. We're looking at, 16/18 sats per v byte. We have about 1.07 gigabytes of unprocessed transactions, so that is up a little bit as well indicating, of course, more activity on the network. Alright. I wanted to kind of book in my talk from last week, the week before. We've been talking a lot about privacy. We've been talking a lot about legislation, and I just wanted to take a few minutes. It's not gonna be very long. We've had some news. I'll go ahead. I'm actually gonna run through the news early this week if that's okay with everybody. We're gonna go ahead and and do the news. And then we're gonna come back and do our talk because there's news here that we need to discuss.
It's relevant to the conversation in the talk. So let's do that, if you don't mind. There was a new Wasabi Wallet release. So Wasabi pulled out of the US market. They were our coin join coordinator and wallet and z k snacks, I think is the name of the company behind the coin joint coordination. And I may have that not quite correct, but I believe that's true. They said, you know, we're not basically, we're not gonna be involved in the US market. There's too much danger even though they're not a US based company. So what have they done? They shut down their coordinator, but now they have released code. At least that's my understanding. But now they've released coordinators are being set up for coin joins. The the new was coordinators are being set up for coin joins, the the new Wasabi Wallet can plug into.
And, this would be much more difficult to shut down. So that's not a bad thing at all. Alright. So that was, very recent this week. They've launched a custom coordinator selection where you can choose your coordinators. And Seth for privacy, our friend Seth for privacy actually questioned something that somebody else was saying, which I thought this was very relevant. He said, what's to prevent chain surveillance companies from running coordinators and acting as all liquidity or at least a high percentage? So if I were a chain surveillance company, I would be setting up one of these coordinators, adding it, putting in some liquidity to get it running, and then using that to coordinate what's going on to keep track of, I should say.
Yeah. So I don't know. It's a step. I think we're not there yet. Alright. Yeah. And this is just what I was afraid of. So Andreas Antonopoulos had a podcast that he was on. Somebody cut a clip from it. It's like a 7 minute clip. This is actually shorter, but, anyways, the clip that I saw was about 7 minutes. And, basically, he was saying, Andreas was saying that we can safely increase the block size. I disagree. I do. I do deeply. And when somebody like this who I respect Andreas. He's been around for a long time. He's obviously thoughtful. He's obviously smart.
But when somebody says something like this, it gets taken as gospel. It gets taken as there's just no way that this is wrong. And I think that's a mistake. Specifically, he says things like the computers have gotten cheaper, bandwidth has gotten cheaper. Therefore, essentially, I don't wanna put words in his mouth, but essentially, we can increase the blocks. Yeah. The block size, right, to whatever the arbitrary value is, and that'll make everything better. It's gonna increase throughput and so on and so forth. I'm glad that Andreas lives in a world where computers are cheap, bandwidth is cheap.
But the reality is is that's not true everywhere. And in fact, it's not true in one of the fastest growing places of Bitcoin usage in the world, and that's Africa. There are people in Africa who are literally, running Bitcoin wallets on flip phone type devices that don't even have data. They only have cellular service. 3 g data, 4 g data, very, very common there To be able to run a node and sync up, all of this stuff in those type of environments. Not not practical. And so, you know, we can't just say, well, everything's gotten cheaper when everyone doesn't have access to that technology.
So, anyways, I did wanna mention that. I'm not trying to pick a fight with him. He'd be the last person probably I would want to. But, you know, I I do believe that we should, we should talk about these things. Right? I think that's important. Alright. Moving on. Mutiny also has put out a e cash desktop wallet. Now I thought this was really cool. This is a, and this is for better Bitcoin privacy, which I haven't dug in all this. Mutiny makes a lightning, wallet that runs in web browser and that's pretty cool. But this would be a desktop wallet and specifically it's for e cash. I don't know exactly what that means. I don't know if it would work with Fediment, Kalei's implementation, cashew nuts, I wanna say.
Anyways, maybe both of them. I don't know. But regardless, they are definitely doing this from a privacy aspect, and I think that's cool. Let's see. I will point this. I just repost. This is not news, ladies and gentlemen. I just thought it was extremely funny. If I want Bitcoin to stay as cheap as possible over the next 4 years, I should vote for Biden. Right? Biden is, of course, the sitting president of the United States. He's not been very pro crypto or Bitcoin, at all. In fact, he just vetoed a bill or law or whatever that allowed the highest regulated financial institutions to hold Bitcoin.
Okay. On the other hand, the Oklahoma senate has passed a bill that would give a tax exemption for Bitcoin and crypto miners. So that's interesting. Oklahoma, like Texas, has a lot of, a fair amount. Probably not as much as Texas, but still a fair amount of oil, mining. And so natural gas, issues like that with the flaring of natural gas, I think it would be a good environment for Bitcoin miners. And now the state, at least at the state level, this, of course, would not operate at the federal level. They're giving tax exemption status for those, miners. So that's really cool.
Yeah. Bitmain's still up to bad things. Bit Bitmain, with the Antminer has a long history of, mis mischievous behavior, shall we say. And, they had some bugs, not bugs. They had some code that they had, years ago that were benefiting them when you would run their miner, and it looks like they're kind of back to it. Again, I posted some very early stuff about that. There's nothing definitive at this point, but I did want to point that out. Cake Wallet now is doing silent payments, that we've talked about in the past or recently. And our legislation, we have legislation that's been drafted to classify not reusing Bitcoin addresses as mixing, which is also ridiculous because it's just reusing it's not reusing an address. You can generate a new Bitcoin address very inexpensively.
It's no big deal and it does help create privacy and so now they're gonna try and legislate that. Alright. And I think that got back to where we were, where we were last week. So we'll stop there and then, we will go into this week's discussion. So here's where I wanna go with this. I do not know what the future of Bitcoin is. I do not know what the future of Bitcoin is in regards to legislation here in the United States. And whatever you may think about the United States, currently, it is kind of the epicenter, if you wanna call it that, of Bitcoin, at least in terms of a lot of development. I'm very well aware that there's a lot of development going on in Africa.
I'm very well aware that there's a lot of development going on in other places in the world, and I am grateful for that. But when the United States, Department of Justice, for example, can shut down samurai. And because of that, you've got other companies like Wasabi who are getting out of the Privacy coin join business at least directly. Whether you like it or not, that's power. I do not believe that Bitcoin will be outlawed here in the United States, and it's a very simple, in my mind, logical, thought. The reason why is simply because of the ETFs. You may not like the ETFs, but they locked in Wall Street.
There's 1,000,000,000 of dollars of assets tied up in those Bitcoin ETFs. And because of that, they're not going to outlaw, they're not going to make illegal Bitcoin here in the United States. Now they may tax it. They may tax it excessively. They may make it very difficult to use as a, means of exchange. They may, you know, put all kinds of roadblocks in the way, but I don't think they will outlaw it. For me, I believe in the end Bitcoin wins. I believe that regardless of what the United States does in terms of privacy. And in fact, I I I almost I almost welcome it. I almost say bring it on because of things like, oh, okay. You're going to shut down samurai.
You're going to shut down that mixing service. Okay. Wasabi is gonna go over here, who it's far more difficult to get to them because they're not here in the United States, and they're going to decentralize their coin joint service. Now is it a perfect situation? Maybe not. Time will tell. Could a chain analysis company do exactly what I described that set for privacy was talking about? Very likely. And I believe it will certainly happen if it's not already done so. Bitcoin has had attacks against its entire 15 years, however long it's been. I guess it's going on 15 years. I don't know. Not doing math well in my head right now. Now. 2009, January.
People have been saying that Bitcoin was dead. I don't know how many times. It's in the 100, and yet somehow it's still here. And yet somehow it's still at $67,000 and, in fact, almost 68,000 because it's an idea whose time has come. Because there is no one to control it. No one. I don't really care what the United States does in regards to Bitcoin legislation. If they make it onerous enough, I will move somewhere else because I have that ability. I do not want to, but I can. I I will continue to stack sats. I will continue to educate. I will continue to get the word out about Bitcoin because I believe in it.
And I believe that the constitution that I live under gives me a right to privacy. It's right there. And one of those fundamental amendments to the constitution, it is right there. And to deprive me of that is not a good thing. That is a breakdown of our constitutional system. I believe, eventually, this will be overturned just like PGP, when the Department of Justice was brought against, Phil Zimmerman. Code is speech. Speech is allowed to be free, at least here in the United States. And even though we've got that sideways right now, ultimately, I believe that we will, that will not be the case.
But I also believe that in the meantime, that this will actually you know, you guys know for a long time, I've been promoting privacy. This will only make that happen sooner. And for that, I am grateful because this will push people to do things that maybe they didn't otherwise. I am trying to figure out my place and all that. How can I help? As I've said a number of times. Not a coder. I'm developing some coding skills, even at this point in my career as my, my job turns more and more into coding. I do code but not the kind of stuff that would probably be useful.
So anyways, we will see how all that pans out. I'm also an entrepreneur. I was, my wife and I were talking By the time from the time that I was a kid until now, I've literally had, like, a dozen businesses of my own. I had 2 businesses while I was in high school. Actually, I had a business before that. I just thought about so that even when I was in middle school, I had a business and then I had But I am, even though I've been working for a while, I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. But I am even though I've been working for a company for a long time now, I am a very entrepreneurial person. And the Bitcoin environment lends itself to the entrepreneurial spirit, if you wanna put it that way. So I'm trying to figure out a way that I can jump in there as well.
I also have family to take care of, which makes it more difficult. Do not let these things unsettle you. I know that I get pretty wound up about them and they are important, but this will all sort out. And, ultimately, even if in your jurisdiction, it does not give you, the freedoms that you want, the ability to do transactions as you wish, Bitcoin will one day be at the point if you are on a regular basis investing in it, it will be at the point where you can choose to move somewhere else. And I know that's a difficult thing, family, ties, friends, all of that kind of stuff to the community that you're, if you've been in a community for a long time, but it's certainly an option.
So there you go. That's my Sunday chat. Hope that was, hope that was helpful. Alright. Let me pull up Telegram while I'm bringing up the the the, supporters information. I do wanna mention, I did get the chat server online. I've been able to interact with it. I'm not quite ready to release it, but it's out there. I kinda wanna do it in coordination with going live, but I'll probably just go ahead and put it out there so that people can interact, even if it's not kind of in real time. You'll all you'll need is an IRC client, which is IRC has been around forever. There's clients available for every platform.
And, we'll use that kind of as a way to kinda kick off the Satoshis Clubs community, if you wanna put it that way. We've got a website as well. I plan on starting to post more there. I used to write a lot. I would like to get back into doing that some more. I'm trying to kind of push back onto some things, kinda slow down a little bit. And that's kinda one of the things I would like to do more of is is do some riding, but we'll see. Alright. So this week, we did get a, a Row of sticks boost 1111 from, Gulag bound, Sent using fountain, and he sent along a message, Bitcoin is FreedomTech. Support your decentralized devs, podcasters, and communications.
I agree 100%, and I do appreciate that boost. Alright. For the week, we did have a total of, 2207. By the way, Gulag Bounds sent that message about the 3 legs of Bitcoin episode 169. That was last week's episode. Total for the week was, 22100 and 7. Appreciate that support. Of course, we are, that's low. That's to be honest, that's low for what we're trying to accomplish. Looking at about 25,000 sats per week just to be able to kind of, take care of everything, the hosting and, upkeep. And, I would love to maybe one day be able to get somebody to edit the podcast instead of me because that takes quite a bit of time. Those kind of things. But, we're not there yet. That's okay. We're gonna keep working on our value proposition.
This is a value for value podcast, of course. And when we get it right, then that's when we'll get to that goal. So if you clip an episode, go to an app like fountain. You clip a couple of minutes, 1, 2, 3 minutes from that episode, and post it. Post a message about it. If it's a current episode, I will boost you 500 sats back. If it's an older episode, then 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way for you to make some value. And, we get promoted because of that. So I appreciate that as well. We are a value for value podcast.
I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast. I do that very specifically because I believe that even if there's a company that I believe in, say, Seed signer. Right? And they come to me and say, hey, Macintosh. We wanna sponsor your show. I'm already using Seed Signer. I believe in it. But they're gonna give me $5 a week, and you just shill our project. And that's it. We're not gonna tell you how to do it. We're not gonna tell you when to do it. It's just here you go. I'm not gonna do that.
And the reason why is because it changes my perception. I may think that seed signer is a great product. I may have been using it for years. I've been using their product now for probably almost a year, and I've never had an issue with it. And the community is great and all that. But I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's gonna happen with them. I don't know what's gonna happen with their product. And if something does and because I'm getting paid, I may hesitate to tell you guys about it. So I choose not to do anything like that. I know there's a lot of products out there that I would never promote. In fact, I will tell you an example. I have a ledger wallet. I've had one for multiple years. I would never at this point, tell anyone to buy a ledger wallet. Why? Because they've had multiple data breaches because they've done bad stuff with their data because it's just garbage.
Okay? Sorry, Ledger, but you're not Bitcoin only. That increases your attack surface alone right there. If I'm gonna put my life savings in something, then it's not going to be a Ledger wallet. Anyways, I certainly would not go out to them and say, hey. Pay me money to talk about your product. Alright. So what do I do then? Well, I come to you and I say, hey, if you find value in this product, in this podcast, then please support it. How can you do that? Go to Fountain. Go to, cast, cast o matic, podcast guru, any one of these podcast in 2.0 apps. You can hook up a, lightning wallet. By the way, there was a great conversation this week on the podcasting 2.0 podcast that Adam and Dave host about lightning wallets, and this might be a way that I can, give back to the community. We're having a problem because companies like Albi are backing out of the market because of what's going on with the US government, and I get that.
But maybe there's an opportunity there for myself to do a noncustodial wallet solution. We will see. Anyways, hook up your lightning wallet and then you can listen to a podcast like mine. And if you like it, then you can stream sats to it like, was done here. Or you can boost like Gulag Bound did and give me a message and say, hey. Great podcast. Or you can say, hey. Your podcast sucks. I don't care. I don't. I solicit your feedback. I asked for it. I asked for you to tell me. What do you like? What do you don't? Because that feedback is important.
It doesn't have to be a huge amount either. Send me a 100 sats. Send me a 1,000. You know, I love it when I get large boosts and I've gotten a few and they're great, but, I would love for everybody to support in a small way. That would be even more excellent. I don't think it's realistic, but it would be nice. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at McIntoshFintech. I'm on Mastodon at McIntosh at podcast index dot social. I'm also on email, [email protected], and we've got our website as well.
And I am on Noster. The pub key is way too long to list on here. It's on top of my Twitter feed if you go to my profile. I am gonna start posting more regularly on Noster, just because because I think it's the right thing to do. And you know what? I'm finally actually starting to see different content on Noster than on Twitter. For example, the Wasabi notes, the notes about the new Wasabi release. I saw that on nostril nostril. I did not see that on Twitter. And I even went up and looked up Max Hillebrand's Twitter feed. Did not see it. I don't know if that was intentional.
Anyways, I will be promoting that more in the future. Stay humble friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is June 2nd, and this is episode 170 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is A Sunday Chat. Alright. We will go ahead and get into it. Of course, I'm McIntosh. I'm the host of Satoshi's Plebs podcast. Around here, we begin things with a brief market update. We talk about where Bitcoin is, where we think it might be going. And, and then we talk about our topic, and then we talk about our supporters, and then we talk about the news, and then we get on out of here. It's a Sunday afternoon here on the East coast of the United States. Early summer, things are heating up in the Bitcoin world. The Bitcoin price itself continues to go sideways as we will talk about here in just a minute.
So there we are. Alright. We are at block height. Let us see. 84625 3 at the time of recording. 846253. We of course have a subsidy right now. 3. 25, Bitcoin per block that's mined plus the transaction fees as we have since the happening that happened back in April. So it's been more than a month. It's been like 6 weeks or so. I'm sorry. 3.125. I think I said 3.25. It's been more than a month since the happening. The price has essentially gone sideways. What does that mean? Well, for one thing, I think, just to be honest, I believe that the miners in general, the public miners specifically in general, are more prepared for the happening than they have been in the past. We don't see any capitulation.
There was a little bit of minor news this week. Riot, actually, the company, that Rob Warren works for that we interviewed just a couple weeks ago, offered to buy Bitfarms. Disclosure, I do own Bitfarms stock. That's the only Bitcoin stock that I own. Not financial advice, etcetera, etcetera. Of course. They offered, like, $2.25, I think, a share to buy all the outstanding shares of the company. Now in my view now I've been I've held Bitcoin a bit farm stock for over a year, and this is not a stock buying. I'm not god. I'm not recommending that you buy a bit from. I'm just telling you where I'm coming from. I've owned this stock for over a year. They have, I started buying essentially, maybe even before the bear market really set in, and I bought some during the bear market.
It seems to me that they've got good plans. They are building out in the right places in Argentina. I think they're also looking at Paraguay some. To my knowledge, they're not doing anything in Africa, but they have, some, well, they their primary or their original certainly facility was in is in Quebec. They're a Canadian company. They don't have a whole lot of debt on their balance sheets, which I think is important. They paid that off when they had that opportunity. And they seem to be poised for success during this next bull run.
Unfortunately, there's some dispute going on with their their ex, I should say, CEO, who was actually asked, to leave the company recently. He is suing the company for $27,000,000 or $24,000,000, which by the way sounds crazy. It happens a lot in these kind of cases and probably shouldn't be too much read into that. If Bitfarms has to pay that, of course, that would be a a blow to them. So right now, they're running with the interim CEO, and Riot is looking to expand. And they see all these plans that they have set up, which, of course, are a public company, so the information is out there, as they disclose in their earnings calls and such. And, so they're trying to swoop in, in my opinion, and buy them on the cheap.
Bitfarms said, no. We're not accepting that offer. They did not say that we are not accepting any offer at whatever price. I think they're worth a lot more than that, to be honest. And let's say Riot were to buy them. Let's say Riot were to buy them at $5 a share. I would just hold on to my Riot shares, although I'm not as bullish on Riot as I am on Bitfarm until the top of the the bull run, which as I've said many, many times on here before, as far as I can tell, for reasons that I have laid out explicitly on this podcast, I'm not going to cover right now, but it should be certainly the last half of 2025. So still over a year away.
I'm guessing. I'm estimating. I shouldn't say guessing. I'm estimating it will be somewhere around the, 3rd 4th quarter, excuse me, or very, very late in the Q3. Q4, most likely, 2025 will be our next top. I'm not speculating on the price. I do believe it will be above a 100. I think I've publicly said that on here. I think it will be well above that actually. But regardless, I would be holding on to whatever stock that is until that point and then sell it. And that's my plan. Anyways, little bit of mining news this week there. Whether you're interested in that or not, I do believe that these miners, these public miners are very important to Bitcoin to the ecosystem.
I think we should keep our eye on them regardless if if you own any of their stock or not. And as I've said many times before, I would love to see more competition in the space. I would love to see more plebs out there. I think I laid it out maybe even on the last episode. Really concretely, I think, saying, you know, plebs should be buying miners. If you've got skin in the game, if you own Bitcoin, if you think Bitcoin's going, you know, a long way north from where it's at right now. If you're in this for the long term, then, and you have the ability to, which it's not as hard as people make it out to me, but it's not trivial.
You know, run a miner. Run it at home. Run it at a hosting company like Kaboom Racks. You can run one miner with them. That's not a problem. Yes. They are not cheap. They will be more expensive at the top of the bull run. I would not recommend that you wait until then. However, you are investing in the Bitcoin ecosystem and, doing your part to keep these public mining companies from becoming too large, frankly, from taking too much of the hash rate. So there you go. So where are we going? That's a great question. We haven't gone anywhere for the last week, essentially.
Last Sunday, we were sitting at 69. We've slowly settled down. We have built out really over gosh. How long has this been going on now? I think you could argue back to certainly very early March. We moved up into this time range. We're still in this box. I mean, I'm just that's where we're at. I know it's boring. I know this is not exciting. Until we break out, we're just gonna keep kinda slowly going up and down. Now we've built out in the last week what amounts to a bull flag. I think you could view it that way. So maybe we pop up from here and try and break that 70,000.
We will see. 71,000. We'll see. I think that's a a fair bet. I would not be betting on it. I would not this is not trading advice, of course. But ladies and gentlemen, when we do break out of that this range and we establish that, and I don't mean just peeking above it like we did back when in the middle of March, that, you know, we're gonna be off to the races. We'll we'll probably be closing in on a 100,000 before you know it. And I think that would be our next major hurdle. I don't really see a whole lot between here and there, but we'll see.
Of course, as always, not trading advice. That's just idle speculation of Macintosh and his trading view account. Alright. The Earl Gray is hot. Oh, let's wrap this up. We did already say the block height. Our price at time of recording, 67,943 as of a few minutes ago. Actually, 911. So we'll go ahead and put that in as of right now. I'm one hour from the time change, essentially, for the weekly closing. I'm recording a little early today. I could see it breaking 68 trying to establish above that. We'll see. Alright. Difficulty adjustment. Our last adjustment was on May 23rd. Let's see here.
We've got one in 3 days. The last adjustment was, let me see here. Half a percent up. And it looks like we're gonna have another small one. It looks like things settled down a bit. I think a lot of hash rate actually dropped off over the last week. So I think a week ago, I was saying it was gonna be pretty high. Right now, we're looking at us at 0.74% up. So pretty spiffy. That would be nice. We don't I as a minor, I do not need a huge adjustment. And that's on June June June June. June 5th. So just a couple of days for now. Alright.
And our mempool fees are up just a little bit for those of you transacting on the main net. We're looking at, 16/18 sats per v byte. We have about 1.07 gigabytes of unprocessed transactions, so that is up a little bit as well indicating, of course, more activity on the network. Alright. I wanted to kind of book in my talk from last week, the week before. We've been talking a lot about privacy. We've been talking a lot about legislation, and I just wanted to take a few minutes. It's not gonna be very long. We've had some news. I'll go ahead. I'm actually gonna run through the news early this week if that's okay with everybody. We're gonna go ahead and and do the news. And then we're gonna come back and do our talk because there's news here that we need to discuss.
It's relevant to the conversation in the talk. So let's do that, if you don't mind. There was a new Wasabi Wallet release. So Wasabi pulled out of the US market. They were our coin join coordinator and wallet and z k snacks, I think is the name of the company behind the coin joint coordination. And I may have that not quite correct, but I believe that's true. They said, you know, we're not basically, we're not gonna be involved in the US market. There's too much danger even though they're not a US based company. So what have they done? They shut down their coordinator, but now they have released code. At least that's my understanding. But now they've released coordinators are being set up for coin joins. The the new was coordinators are being set up for coin joins, the the new Wasabi Wallet can plug into.
And, this would be much more difficult to shut down. So that's not a bad thing at all. Alright. So that was, very recent this week. They've launched a custom coordinator selection where you can choose your coordinators. And Seth for privacy, our friend Seth for privacy actually questioned something that somebody else was saying, which I thought this was very relevant. He said, what's to prevent chain surveillance companies from running coordinators and acting as all liquidity or at least a high percentage? So if I were a chain surveillance company, I would be setting up one of these coordinators, adding it, putting in some liquidity to get it running, and then using that to coordinate what's going on to keep track of, I should say.
Yeah. So I don't know. It's a step. I think we're not there yet. Alright. Yeah. And this is just what I was afraid of. So Andreas Antonopoulos had a podcast that he was on. Somebody cut a clip from it. It's like a 7 minute clip. This is actually shorter, but, anyways, the clip that I saw was about 7 minutes. And, basically, he was saying, Andreas was saying that we can safely increase the block size. I disagree. I do. I do deeply. And when somebody like this who I respect Andreas. He's been around for a long time. He's obviously thoughtful. He's obviously smart.
But when somebody says something like this, it gets taken as gospel. It gets taken as there's just no way that this is wrong. And I think that's a mistake. Specifically, he says things like the computers have gotten cheaper, bandwidth has gotten cheaper. Therefore, essentially, I don't wanna put words in his mouth, but essentially, we can increase the blocks. Yeah. The block size, right, to whatever the arbitrary value is, and that'll make everything better. It's gonna increase throughput and so on and so forth. I'm glad that Andreas lives in a world where computers are cheap, bandwidth is cheap.
But the reality is is that's not true everywhere. And in fact, it's not true in one of the fastest growing places of Bitcoin usage in the world, and that's Africa. There are people in Africa who are literally, running Bitcoin wallets on flip phone type devices that don't even have data. They only have cellular service. 3 g data, 4 g data, very, very common there To be able to run a node and sync up, all of this stuff in those type of environments. Not not practical. And so, you know, we can't just say, well, everything's gotten cheaper when everyone doesn't have access to that technology.
So, anyways, I did wanna mention that. I'm not trying to pick a fight with him. He'd be the last person probably I would want to. But, you know, I I do believe that we should, we should talk about these things. Right? I think that's important. Alright. Moving on. Mutiny also has put out a e cash desktop wallet. Now I thought this was really cool. This is a, and this is for better Bitcoin privacy, which I haven't dug in all this. Mutiny makes a lightning, wallet that runs in web browser and that's pretty cool. But this would be a desktop wallet and specifically it's for e cash. I don't know exactly what that means. I don't know if it would work with Fediment, Kalei's implementation, cashew nuts, I wanna say.
Anyways, maybe both of them. I don't know. But regardless, they are definitely doing this from a privacy aspect, and I think that's cool. Let's see. I will point this. I just repost. This is not news, ladies and gentlemen. I just thought it was extremely funny. If I want Bitcoin to stay as cheap as possible over the next 4 years, I should vote for Biden. Right? Biden is, of course, the sitting president of the United States. He's not been very pro crypto or Bitcoin, at all. In fact, he just vetoed a bill or law or whatever that allowed the highest regulated financial institutions to hold Bitcoin.
Okay. On the other hand, the Oklahoma senate has passed a bill that would give a tax exemption for Bitcoin and crypto miners. So that's interesting. Oklahoma, like Texas, has a lot of, a fair amount. Probably not as much as Texas, but still a fair amount of oil, mining. And so natural gas, issues like that with the flaring of natural gas, I think it would be a good environment for Bitcoin miners. And now the state, at least at the state level, this, of course, would not operate at the federal level. They're giving tax exemption status for those, miners. So that's really cool.
Yeah. Bitmain's still up to bad things. Bit Bitmain, with the Antminer has a long history of, mis mischievous behavior, shall we say. And, they had some bugs, not bugs. They had some code that they had, years ago that were benefiting them when you would run their miner, and it looks like they're kind of back to it. Again, I posted some very early stuff about that. There's nothing definitive at this point, but I did want to point that out. Cake Wallet now is doing silent payments, that we've talked about in the past or recently. And our legislation, we have legislation that's been drafted to classify not reusing Bitcoin addresses as mixing, which is also ridiculous because it's just reusing it's not reusing an address. You can generate a new Bitcoin address very inexpensively.
It's no big deal and it does help create privacy and so now they're gonna try and legislate that. Alright. And I think that got back to where we were, where we were last week. So we'll stop there and then, we will go into this week's discussion. So here's where I wanna go with this. I do not know what the future of Bitcoin is. I do not know what the future of Bitcoin is in regards to legislation here in the United States. And whatever you may think about the United States, currently, it is kind of the epicenter, if you wanna call it that, of Bitcoin, at least in terms of a lot of development. I'm very well aware that there's a lot of development going on in Africa.
I'm very well aware that there's a lot of development going on in other places in the world, and I am grateful for that. But when the United States, Department of Justice, for example, can shut down samurai. And because of that, you've got other companies like Wasabi who are getting out of the Privacy coin join business at least directly. Whether you like it or not, that's power. I do not believe that Bitcoin will be outlawed here in the United States, and it's a very simple, in my mind, logical, thought. The reason why is simply because of the ETFs. You may not like the ETFs, but they locked in Wall Street.
There's 1,000,000,000 of dollars of assets tied up in those Bitcoin ETFs. And because of that, they're not going to outlaw, they're not going to make illegal Bitcoin here in the United States. Now they may tax it. They may tax it excessively. They may make it very difficult to use as a, means of exchange. They may, you know, put all kinds of roadblocks in the way, but I don't think they will outlaw it. For me, I believe in the end Bitcoin wins. I believe that regardless of what the United States does in terms of privacy. And in fact, I I I almost I almost welcome it. I almost say bring it on because of things like, oh, okay. You're going to shut down samurai.
You're going to shut down that mixing service. Okay. Wasabi is gonna go over here, who it's far more difficult to get to them because they're not here in the United States, and they're going to decentralize their coin joint service. Now is it a perfect situation? Maybe not. Time will tell. Could a chain analysis company do exactly what I described that set for privacy was talking about? Very likely. And I believe it will certainly happen if it's not already done so. Bitcoin has had attacks against its entire 15 years, however long it's been. I guess it's going on 15 years. I don't know. Not doing math well in my head right now. Now. 2009, January.
People have been saying that Bitcoin was dead. I don't know how many times. It's in the 100, and yet somehow it's still here. And yet somehow it's still at $67,000 and, in fact, almost 68,000 because it's an idea whose time has come. Because there is no one to control it. No one. I don't really care what the United States does in regards to Bitcoin legislation. If they make it onerous enough, I will move somewhere else because I have that ability. I do not want to, but I can. I I will continue to stack sats. I will continue to educate. I will continue to get the word out about Bitcoin because I believe in it.
And I believe that the constitution that I live under gives me a right to privacy. It's right there. And one of those fundamental amendments to the constitution, it is right there. And to deprive me of that is not a good thing. That is a breakdown of our constitutional system. I believe, eventually, this will be overturned just like PGP, when the Department of Justice was brought against, Phil Zimmerman. Code is speech. Speech is allowed to be free, at least here in the United States. And even though we've got that sideways right now, ultimately, I believe that we will, that will not be the case.
But I also believe that in the meantime, that this will actually you know, you guys know for a long time, I've been promoting privacy. This will only make that happen sooner. And for that, I am grateful because this will push people to do things that maybe they didn't otherwise. I am trying to figure out my place and all that. How can I help? As I've said a number of times. Not a coder. I'm developing some coding skills, even at this point in my career as my, my job turns more and more into coding. I do code but not the kind of stuff that would probably be useful.
So anyways, we will see how all that pans out. I'm also an entrepreneur. I was, my wife and I were talking By the time from the time that I was a kid until now, I've literally had, like, a dozen businesses of my own. I had 2 businesses while I was in high school. Actually, I had a business before that. I just thought about so that even when I was in middle school, I had a business and then I had But I am, even though I've been working for a while, I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. I've been working for a while. But I am even though I've been working for a company for a long time now, I am a very entrepreneurial person. And the Bitcoin environment lends itself to the entrepreneurial spirit, if you wanna put it that way. So I'm trying to figure out a way that I can jump in there as well.
I also have family to take care of, which makes it more difficult. Do not let these things unsettle you. I know that I get pretty wound up about them and they are important, but this will all sort out. And, ultimately, even if in your jurisdiction, it does not give you, the freedoms that you want, the ability to do transactions as you wish, Bitcoin will one day be at the point if you are on a regular basis investing in it, it will be at the point where you can choose to move somewhere else. And I know that's a difficult thing, family, ties, friends, all of that kind of stuff to the community that you're, if you've been in a community for a long time, but it's certainly an option.
So there you go. That's my Sunday chat. Hope that was, hope that was helpful. Alright. Let me pull up Telegram while I'm bringing up the the the, supporters information. I do wanna mention, I did get the chat server online. I've been able to interact with it. I'm not quite ready to release it, but it's out there. I kinda wanna do it in coordination with going live, but I'll probably just go ahead and put it out there so that people can interact, even if it's not kind of in real time. You'll all you'll need is an IRC client, which is IRC has been around forever. There's clients available for every platform.
And, we'll use that kind of as a way to kinda kick off the Satoshis Clubs community, if you wanna put it that way. We've got a website as well. I plan on starting to post more there. I used to write a lot. I would like to get back into doing that some more. I'm trying to kind of push back onto some things, kinda slow down a little bit. And that's kinda one of the things I would like to do more of is is do some riding, but we'll see. Alright. So this week, we did get a, a Row of sticks boost 1111 from, Gulag bound, Sent using fountain, and he sent along a message, Bitcoin is FreedomTech. Support your decentralized devs, podcasters, and communications.
I agree 100%, and I do appreciate that boost. Alright. For the week, we did have a total of, 2207. By the way, Gulag Bounds sent that message about the 3 legs of Bitcoin episode 169. That was last week's episode. Total for the week was, 22100 and 7. Appreciate that support. Of course, we are, that's low. That's to be honest, that's low for what we're trying to accomplish. Looking at about 25,000 sats per week just to be able to kind of, take care of everything, the hosting and, upkeep. And, I would love to maybe one day be able to get somebody to edit the podcast instead of me because that takes quite a bit of time. Those kind of things. But, we're not there yet. That's okay. We're gonna keep working on our value proposition.
This is a value for value podcast, of course. And when we get it right, then that's when we'll get to that goal. So if you clip an episode, go to an app like fountain. You clip a couple of minutes, 1, 2, 3 minutes from that episode, and post it. Post a message about it. If it's a current episode, I will boost you 500 sats back. If it's an older episode, then 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure. It's a way for you to make some value. And, we get promoted because of that. So I appreciate that as well. We are a value for value podcast.
I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast. I do that very specifically because I believe that even if there's a company that I believe in, say, Seed signer. Right? And they come to me and say, hey, Macintosh. We wanna sponsor your show. I'm already using Seed Signer. I believe in it. But they're gonna give me $5 a week, and you just shill our project. And that's it. We're not gonna tell you how to do it. We're not gonna tell you when to do it. It's just here you go. I'm not gonna do that.
And the reason why is because it changes my perception. I may think that seed signer is a great product. I may have been using it for years. I've been using their product now for probably almost a year, and I've never had an issue with it. And the community is great and all that. But I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's gonna happen with them. I don't know what's gonna happen with their product. And if something does and because I'm getting paid, I may hesitate to tell you guys about it. So I choose not to do anything like that. I know there's a lot of products out there that I would never promote. In fact, I will tell you an example. I have a ledger wallet. I've had one for multiple years. I would never at this point, tell anyone to buy a ledger wallet. Why? Because they've had multiple data breaches because they've done bad stuff with their data because it's just garbage.
Okay? Sorry, Ledger, but you're not Bitcoin only. That increases your attack surface alone right there. If I'm gonna put my life savings in something, then it's not going to be a Ledger wallet. Anyways, I certainly would not go out to them and say, hey. Pay me money to talk about your product. Alright. So what do I do then? Well, I come to you and I say, hey, if you find value in this product, in this podcast, then please support it. How can you do that? Go to Fountain. Go to, cast, cast o matic, podcast guru, any one of these podcast in 2.0 apps. You can hook up a, lightning wallet. By the way, there was a great conversation this week on the podcasting 2.0 podcast that Adam and Dave host about lightning wallets, and this might be a way that I can, give back to the community. We're having a problem because companies like Albi are backing out of the market because of what's going on with the US government, and I get that.
But maybe there's an opportunity there for myself to do a noncustodial wallet solution. We will see. Anyways, hook up your lightning wallet and then you can listen to a podcast like mine. And if you like it, then you can stream sats to it like, was done here. Or you can boost like Gulag Bound did and give me a message and say, hey. Great podcast. Or you can say, hey. Your podcast sucks. I don't care. I don't. I solicit your feedback. I asked for it. I asked for you to tell me. What do you like? What do you don't? Because that feedback is important.
It doesn't have to be a huge amount either. Send me a 100 sats. Send me a 1,000. You know, I love it when I get large boosts and I've gotten a few and they're great, but, I would love for everybody to support in a small way. That would be even more excellent. I don't think it's realistic, but it would be nice. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I would love to hear from you. I'm on Twitter at McIntoshFintech. I'm on Mastodon at McIntosh at podcast index dot social. I'm also on email, [email protected], and we've got our website as well.
And I am on Noster. The pub key is way too long to list on here. It's on top of my Twitter feed if you go to my profile. I am gonna start posting more regularly on Noster, just because because I think it's the right thing to do. And you know what? I'm finally actually starting to see different content on Noster than on Twitter. For example, the Wasabi notes, the notes about the new Wasabi release. I saw that on nostril nostril. I did not see that on Twitter. And I even went up and looked up Max Hillebrand's Twitter feed. Did not see it. I don't know if that was intentional.
Anyways, I will be promoting that more in the future. Stay humble friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
