When you are your own sovereign individual, that brings more responsibilities. Are you doing the right things to support your cold storage?
Bitcoin Weekly Close
June 30th, 2024: $62,673
Block Height at Time of Recording
850,186
News and Notes
Julian Assange
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/julian-assange-to-end-12-year-us-prosecution-with-a-guilty-plea-in-exchange-for-freedom/
Bolivia
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bolivia-legalizes-bitcoin-crypto-transactions
Kenya
https://www.vox.com/world-politics/357857/kenya-protest-tax-ruto-loans-china-imf
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/6/27/not-afraid-to-die-kenya-tax-protests-inspire-broader-demand-for-change
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 30th, and this is episode 173 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh. And today's episode is what about your backups. All right. Hope everybody's had a good week. We're going to jump right on into this, get things going. As always, we'll take our very brief market update. We did close just a few hours ago, June 30, 2024, $62, 673. We are up for the last 3 days according to TradingView Market Daily View, which is a good thing. It does look like, once again, we've not really broke through that $60,000 bottom part of the box, and we will now probably march our way back upwards and retest 70, just like we've been doing over and over, it seems.
There we go. We are at block height, 850,186 as we record. And right now, we're looking at a difficulty adjustment, which will happen on July 5th, which would be this Friday. That is actually down even more than last week. Last week, we were sitting at 6 6.10 when I recorded, percent down, and now we're at 6.57. So, again, it's still looking like we're going to have a nice adjustment downward. What's going on? Our blocks are being made too fast. Why would that be happening? Well, because according to a number of charts and sources and whatever, and just pure logic, and we'll get to that in just a minute.
Miners are capitulating right now according to one chart that, I have reposted on Twitter. We are at the same level we were at back in basically the low point of, the last bull or the last bear market. Alright? So, 6.6% or so, something like that have already capitulated. Meaning shut down their servers because they can't afford to run them. When they do that, the hash rate goes down. When the hash rate goes down, then of course, blocks are being mined less frequently, hence the difficulty adjustment down, which will help somebody like me who's still online, still operating, still maybe not profitable, maybe not making a whole lot of money, but I'm hanging in there. Most of my, in fact, the vast majority of my servers at this point are recent enough that they are actually still operating at a profit.
The few that I have that, they're kind of a wash at this level at this, hash price, and it is what it is. I'm not taking well, I contractually actually cannot shut them down. So, I I was expecting this. It's accounted for. I just sent another chunk of money on to Kaboom Racks for more hosting. You know, I'm operating as usual. Public companies, Riot, Bitfarms, I don't know. Sorry. Those are the only two that come to mind because I've been talking about them recently. You know? Maybe they're shutting down some older servers. Maybe, I I don't know. I I do know it's hot. It's getting very hot here in the United States.
And in Texas with ERCOT, with their energy grid situation, a lot of miners make deals where they shut down, miners in return for money, in return for fiat, in order to balance the grid. And that's been working very well for Texas the last few years, and that's a way for those miners to, make some extra cash essentially. So I think that's part of this as well. That will continue as this heat continues. So I am optimistic we get a nice downward adjustment here in just a few days and then maybe even another 1 after that, but we will see. Our mempool has been quite nice right now. We're looking at 9 sats per v byte across the board. Just a little anecdotal story. I sent, I actually sent a well, we'll talk about that in just a minute because it's actually kinda core to our discussion. I I sent off a payment a couple of nights ago, and, and it was 8 sats per vbyte, I think, is what I paid. So it's actually even been lower than this. So, our our mempool is at 974 megabytes. So still not going down. Actually, just up slightly from last week.
Alright. There we go. That's it. That's all we're gonna do with our market. That's kinda where we're at for the week. I will say this, $63, 349 is where we're at since I, am recording here at almost 11 o'clock PM CST, on the East Coast of the United States. So we're actually up getting closing in on $1, 000 higher than Bitcoin, than the weekly close for Bitcoin. I'd this week might it may not just be the 4th July here in the United States. The 4th July is our independence day here in the United States when frankly we kick well, sorry. I will not make this political. Anyways, we celebrate our independence here in the United States and, shoot off fireworks. But I think, frankly, this week, maybe, Bitcoin may have some fireworks of its own. We'll see.
At some point, we are going to break out of what this box, these doldrums, and we've been going for a while. Something like 50 days already. Kind of this sideways motion, post happening. We'll see. Alright. What are we talking about tonight? What are we talking about? What about your backups? Well, I'm gonna tell you all a story. So settle in while uncle Macintosh tells a little story. Maybe grandpa Macintosh. I don't know. The the Earl Grey, I I went back sorry. Let me pull that tea bag out. I don't want it to get too hot, or too not hot. What's the word?
Strong. I went back this week. I finished up the bottle of honey that I've been using, and I actually went back. I'd gone back to my friends at Little Green Bees, and I got them some stuff that they needed. And, actually, we did a little barter, and I got some more honey. So this is actually little green bee honey, from my friends there. Love it. Good stuff. This was straight wildflower honey. Nice and light. Anyways alright. There we go. Oh, yes. I didn't. Sorry. It's been a busy week. Let's tell you this story. I bought my ticket to the Bitcoin conference, and, they're still available. But Friday, Saturday night? Saturday night, I think it was. It was Saturday night. It was last night.
Was the last night before a new change in price went into effect. So I was going to purchase my tickets or my ticket. Is just me, last night. And I was gonna do it with Bitcoin from my mining operation. It is a business expense in my case, so it's perfectly legitimate. And, that's the way I was gonna do it. You may argue otherwise, but they dangled a nice 21% discount for the ticket price if you paid with Bitcoin. So between that and using, like, a coupon code for 10%, I got 31% discount. Pretty sweet. Now this money was set aside for that. This is not money I would be replacing. But just to go through the argument really quickly of these people who say, well, I should never sell my Bitcoin.
If I sell this in from my cold storage, so to speak, from my savings, and it was not an intentional purchase from my savings because, oh, I don't know. I've been holding my Bitcoin for a long time, and it was time to sell some because it had appreciated 10, 30, a 100 x. Right? Well, then I can always if that's not the case, I can always go to Stripe and buy more bit Bitcoin at the same time. It's okay, guys. You can manage that. There's only 2 things going on there. It's not really multitasking. So just a little tip. Anyways, sorry. That just kinda bugs me when people say don't ever sell your Bitcoin. I I'm sorry. I deal with the monetary network, not just a number go up savings network, which I think is what they think when they say that. I'm not really sure.
Regardless, point is, I was gonna purchase it with Bitcoin. Now for my mining business, and I store my Bitcoin on a seed signer. I've had seed signer on the show. We've talked to him. Great guy. He's the the founder of the seed signer project. Great guy. So on. We had a long conversation. You can go back and listen to that. I love the seed signer product, and I, a long time ago, decided to use that for my cold storage, and I have been. In this specific case, it's for my mining business. The money comes off the miners. Just to give you an idea of the flow real quick, it comes off the miners goes the mining pool, brains in this case, has, basically a wallet, a hot wallet that it collects up in. And then when it gets a predetermined amount, it sends it off to cold storage on my seed center. So I pulled out the seed center. I plug it in and I'm looking around and I realize, well, Macintosh can't find the QR code. So with Seed Center, you get a little plastic, not plastic, cardboard stock, blank QR, and you fill that in based on your phrases, your seed phrases.
And then you can, like, literally just read it, not read it. Have you hold it up for your computer camera, and it reads it. It reads the QR, reads in essentially your passphrases, your seed phrases, and unlocks the wallet. Really handy little device. Well, as I look around this very cluttered desk, Macintosh is not the most organized person in the world. I'm sorry. As hypersensitive as ours might say, it might be because of my creative mind. I don't know. I'm not gonna blame it on that. But, yeah, I'm I'm really not very organized. If I took a picture of this desk right now, you you would be shocked. I couldn't find the QR.
Time was ticking away. Now I never take the seed signer out of my house. I I do the things that I'm supposed to do that we're gonna talk about briefly here in just a minute, in order to safeguard it. But in short, I couldn't find the QR code, and I was down to the last hour before the ticket prices went up. So what do I do? Well, I pulled out my backup of the seed phrases. So that QR code is generated, as I said, from seed phrases as every good Bitcoin wallet is. You start with seed phrases either 12 or 24. In my case, I had 24, and then I have a password that basically encrypts those as well that changes it again. So all I had to do was boot the seed signer manual not manually, but go through the menu, select all the seed phrases. None none of this is online. And then use that more manually. Do the same thing that my QR code would have done.
So I was able to sign the transaction, make the purchase, buy the ticket before midnight, before whenever it was, and lock in my price. But that got me thinking, maybe we should talk about backups. You look. If you're doing this correctly, ladies and gentlemen, you are your own bank. What do we preach here on Satoshi's pledge? Probably 2 things in general. 1, DCA. Don't try and time the market. Don't try and trade the market. Don't try any of this courses crap, whatever. Just DCA. Dollar cost average, whether that's daily or weekly. I would not recommend it more freak less frequently than weekly.
But whether that's daily or weekly, I don't care how you do it. Ideally, it would be through some decentralized, you know, peer to peer anonymous non KYC app, but the reality is most of us have access to things like strike. Okay? Do that. However you do it, do it. Do it on this daily or weekly basis. Put it in cold storage. Don't keep it on an exchange. Right? We preach all that. But when you're in cold storage, when it's sitting on your seed signer, you are your own bank, and you need to think about that. You want to think about your strategy, which is not necessarily my strategy for protecting them. What does that mean? Well, minimally, you probably need to have 2 ways of accessing that device. In my case, I had a QR code. I had to back up seed phrases.
They were in two separate locations. That's something to think about. When I couldn't find 1, I found the other. Now just as a little addendum, if McIntosh doesn't find that QR code in the next couple weeks now I know it didn't leave this house, but let's just say I can't and, you know, we don't routinely have visitors in into our house. I actually can't remember other than 1 particular person who's very well vetted, shall we say, been in this house that wasn't a resident in a number of weeks. Okay? Like months, probably, really. It's not like we have people in here every week. Anyways, point is, Mcintosh, if worst case lost it because he's a goofball.
But if I can't find it in the next few weeks, then what I will do, I will go ahead and generate a new Bitcoin address, and I will actually use this as a time to do some consolidation and clean up house cleaning. But I will change to new seed phrases, new password because I will consider that compromised. Where do you keep that documentation? Do you just leave it out on your desktop? Do you leave it out in the open? Do you put it in a safe? Is that safe fireproof? Do you put it in a bank? Maybe in a safety deposit box. Do you put it with your lawyer? Do you trust your lawyer? What would the lawyer do if, frankly, the government came and said, you must give us those seed phrases for your client?
Would they claim client confidentiality, or would they just roll over and give that to the government? Now, personally, for me, I probably would not trust a lawyer or an accountant or anyone like that unless it were part. We have what is called multi sig wallets. Right? You have to have, like, 3 separate signatures essentially to to access it. You could lose 1 of those, have the other 2 still work. I guess you need 2 out of the 3. And in that case, well, they go to the lawyer. The lawyer says, well, here it is, but it's not enough to actually get into the bank, the cold storage.
I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. I don't know, and I can't answer that question for you. It what happens when you hit a $100, 000, $50, 000, $250, 000? Do you have multiple banks? Right? We've got the FDIC here in the United States, but that only protects a certain amount. It's lower in Europe. I know it's, like, less than a $100, 000, I think, in Europe. What happens when you're at a couple 100 $1, 000? Do you split that up among multiple banks? Well, multiple cold storages, I should say. Excuse me. That was a slip of the fiat tongue. And well but the cold storage only cost, in the case of SeedSiner, like, a $100 or so. Well, sure.
Why would I not? And then, or at least, actually, you don't even have to do that. Now I'm really thinking about this. I could have multiple addresses, multiple seed phrases, multiple wallets, and I'll go through the same device, really, in the case of seed cider. I'm not gonna speak to others because I don't know all the details. Nothing wrong with that. Point is you need to think and what about fire? There's another thing. What happens if your house catches fire? Is that safe? Maybe that you put it in. Is it rated for 10 hours of intense fire? I don't I don't know. I these are all the things you need to think about.
And I just thought I would use this case where, you know, Macintosh kind of slipped up, and there's a decent amount of money in that. You know, I would cry. Maybe not cry, but I would be upset, shall we say, if that were lost. So it gave me a chance to review my procedures, and there's some things I'm probably gonna make a change about here and there, tweaks here and there. I thought this might be instructive for you as the listener to, get a chance to learn, not from my mistake, but from my from what happened to me. I don't mind y'all learning from my mistakes either. I've told you many, many times.
Mcintosh lost a bunch of money trading. Mcintosh was an idiot. Mcintosh has made a number of mistakes. Mcintosh has lost money on NFTs, on crypto other cryptocurrency, on this, that, and the other. It's amazing, frankly, that I'm still here. I get the survivor pleb award, maybe. I don't know. But in this case, I had done all the necessary groundwork. I had the backup. I restored the backup, essentially, And I was able to move on. I bought the ticket and we're locked in. For Bitcoin conference 2024, Probably my first and last 1. I don't think I'll be buying a ticket anymore. I may choose to go to them. I'm not quite sure how that'll work, but a lot of people do that.
They just don't actually go to the conference. I'm not sure. I'll kind of scope all that out. We'll see. But I'm planning on meeting up with Kyrin there from mere mortals. I know he's going. We've been communicating about that. If others of you are going, I sure would love to catch up with you. If we could get a small group, I don't know. It sounds like kind of the food stuff is all kind of wrapped up into the conference. It's all taken care of, but maybe we could go get some pizza somewhere or something. I have no idea. I'm just throwing that out there. Alright.
Enough about that. There we go. So let's move on. We did have some support this week. I actually did not have any mess I had a boost. I didn't have a message. It came from hypersensitive osaurus, our friend over in Portugal. He sent in a a 1000 sats. I appreciate that. This was in regards to 172 and, episode 172. And where are we going? Last week's conversation about how I was looking to make some changes going forward. I do appreciate that. We also had some streaming a total of 1350 sets. So down a little bit, frankly, but, I think summer doldrums are here. I don't know. Last week wasn't the most scintillating content.
I get that. But, yeah. Alright. So I appreciate that hypersensitive osaurus and the streamers. I do. I appreciate that very much. Before I move on to the news and notes, I've kind of been debating having this little conversation. I'm doing quite good, I think, on time. Let me double check. No way. Oh, okay. It said I was in an hour. I'm like, I have not been talking in an hour, but I didn't start the recording until 35 minutes in. Okay. We are doing good on time. I'm gonna throw this out real quick. Over in the podcast 2.0 kind of ecosphere, Adam and Dave do a podcast, podcasting 2 0. They drive kind of this whole process. They, Dave manages the back end for the, indexing, the database essentially for the podcast, universe, for the podcast 2.0 universe, and they've driven a lot of this development. I appreciate very, very much what they're doing over there, and I've talked about them many, many times.
I think they're both going to the conference, and I'm really, really hoping to get a chance to meet them. Looking forward to that, actually. But here's the thing. The podcasting 2.0 community, in my opinion, is running up against limitations of lightning. I've talked about lightning a number of times. It's maybe not proven to be quite as simple as people would like it to be in terms of usability. And quite frankly, because of that, it's kind of turned into this k y c dominated, vendor dominated, like, landscape. Meaning, vendors providing lightning nodes that you basically rent for $20 a month or whatever.
And wallet providers like GetAlBI, for example, who pretty heavily involved in the podcasting 2 0 ecosphere in various ways, providing lightning wallets and lightning channels. And the channels really are kind of the crux of the issue in terms of usability. So there's been this discussion going on going forward. 1 of the things that I have not voiced and I need to really bring up and kind of put my 2¢ in, 2 sats in, is people in this business need to get paid. And I and I wanna be careful about what I'm saying. I agree with that 100%.
But we start tacking on service after service after service after service. It's just like with, Satoshi Stream. I appreciate what they do, but at the end of the day, they're taking 1% of what I'm running through there in order to provide the service. Now 1%, not a huge amount, and it's in today's dollars, it's essentially nothing. And maybe this is because I had the long view. But I'm looking at because you start, oh, well, I wanna do this and that's a cost. And I wanna do that and that's a cost. And I think this stuff adds up. Now, Macintosh may be crazy.
Okay? And I I will admit to that. But, man, 1 day, I think these sets, they're gonna be worth something. Okay? Right now, 1500 sets roughly per dollar, but at a $1, 000, 000 Bitcoin, it's a penny per sat. These 1, 000 and 1, 000 and 1, 000 of sats that are going off in fees, they actually start to add up. And if it's and and now I I know I'm I'm way out here, but what if Bitcoin in in 30 years when many of you, many of us, I hope I'm still alive, maybe we see 10, 000, 000 per Bitcoin. Maybe maybe, just maybe, maybe Bitcoin is the global currency of the world.
It's used for trade. It's used nationally as currency. It's used just by people who want to send money to each other across borders, as crazy as that sounds, and so on and so forth. And because there's only 21, 000, 000 Bitcoin, and maybe almost 20 have been no. 20, 000, 000 probably, maybe a little more than 20, have been mined at that point. So most of them are gone. We've got heavy use. We've got people. We've got companies stacking sats. We've got Bitcoin on every reasonable business ledger. We've got country stacking sets. And so, I mean, I could see it getting to $10, 000, 000. Now I'm not gonna project when, but I'm just saying maybe, you know what?
Each 1 of these satoshis that we're throwing around for nothing, they're then worth 10¢ in today's money. 10¢. So these 100 and 100 and 1000 of sats that we push around, that we pay in fees, that's a lot of money. That's my point. So I because I'm cheap. Sorry. But I am. Because I'm cheap. I worry about now maybe I shouldn't be, but I do. So I've always been a little sideways on this whole ecosystem that I've seen grown up based on lightning and based on all these additional services. And they're talking about the issues that they're having, and I boosted into that episode when I heard it. And I said, well, if you're talking about rearchitecting the back end, which is essentially what they're talking about, Why don't you consider Fedimintz?
They read it on the next week. And then funny enough, the next week, they get on some guys from I think I got this timeline right. They've got RSS was just on rss.com. They're a podcast hoster. And they really apparently, Adam woke up 1 day and said, let's do FEDIMETs and explained it to Dave. And now I I don't know if this all came from my tweet. I have no way of proving that. Not my tweet, my boost. I don't care. I really don't. But I'm glad that they're having the conversation because we're already using all these KYC services. We might as well and effectively with effediment, you're making a trade off. You actually, KYC isn't the issue any longer. It's the guardians, the people who manage the funds, and there's various ways of doing that.
But they could rug pull you theoretically. Not theoretically, they could. It's also very new technology, but there's no lightning channels. Now you use lightning in between the Fedimint and to communicate with the greater Bitcoin Ecoverse, but but there's no lightning channel. So it becomes a lot simpler. It's kinda like a bank. You can really think of it as a bank. You bring your money in. You deposit it. You can move money around to the people inside that bank who are using that service essentially for free. Again, the whole thing about the SATs, and I'm telling you that bugs me. I'm sorry.
And then you can deposit it. You can withdraw it at any time. Now, again, the trade off, you you you've got these trusted entities who manage this, but I think that can be done. And the trade off is, that's the trade off. So I'm gonna do what I can to promote that, frankly, because I think it needs to be an alternative. I think that if they don't rush into this, this might actually end up being a lot better than their current setup. It might help with onboarding users. You can take strike, take It might help with onboarding users. You can take strike take that strike app, which is available freaking everywhere.
Where did they just pop up this week? I don't remember. Some new spot. I have no idea. It's, like, all over the place. Okay? And send money straight to it. And then it just shows up, and you can, I'm not gonna turn this into a big conversation about Fetti Mince, but I'm excited about that. Sorry. You get that part for free. Move on to the news and notes. We'll see how that turns out. Julian Assange. I wanna talk about this. This is not directly Bitcoin related, but I do think it's very important. He I guess he was in prison for 12 years. He basically had a guilty plea in exchange for his freedom. He's now in Australia, and, and he's free. So this is the guy behind the WikiLeaks, website, the WikiLeaks, release of confidential government information, which basically ticked the United States off, the United States government, and it ended up landing him in jail.
Now I bring this up not to cause division. I I think a lot of people maybe don't understand, kind of the whole circumstances as a US citizen you know, I'm kinda glad to know what actually the government was hiding. I basically believe that the government should not be operating with a bunch of confidentiality. I mean, there may have to be times when it's, like, right then, but there's no reason to have 20 plus year confidentiality agreements or whatever, about what the government's doing. Because, you know, basically, all the money that I'm spending, that's that's what they're that's what they do, and I have a right to know that.
Maybe I'm crazy. Say a lot of crazy things tonight. 10¢ sats. Boy, that's that's insane. Anyways, it was good to see him out, I mean, at least in my opinion. But from a privacy and he's a big privacy advocate. He's a big Bitcoin advocate. Certainly, from those aspects, it's good to see him out. Bolivia. Bolivia is legalizing Bitcoin transactions. Bolivia is a small country down in South America. 1 of the last holdouts kind of on this side, they may be the last 1. I'm not a 100% certain about that, but it's possible. But now they're allowing Bitcoin transactions.
They literally said it was to help improve their economy and help their people, something along those lines. So I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. I do want to talk for a few minutes. I talk about Africa quite a bit. I don't know if you've heard about this. If you've been on Twitter, at least if you've well, I don't know. Maybe even then you haven't been hearing about this. It just kinda depends on who you follow. There have been because you don't at least here in the United States, you don't hear about this on the news. There there have been, currently from my understanding, there is not, but there have been massive protests in Kenya, protesting taxes, protesting the president, and protesting the loans with the IMF and with China. And I think that's actually key.
So the president was trying to pass this new bill, this new law, whatever, that was going to put across a raft of tax increases on some very basic items. And, basically, the younger generation, and, like, if I get this wrong, I apologize. Obviously, I'm not on the ground there in Kenya. I'm just this is just from what I've dug up and what I've read. The younger generation there in gen in Kenya has had enough, and they started protesting. Apparently, well, the 1 report I saw said 20 plus people have died. The police were definitely, in my opinion, way I mean, they were just shooting people with with bullets, like, actual not rubber bullets, bullets.
Actual, you know, full metal jacket or whatever craziness. There was even 1 child that I saw that that a small child. Now why that child was out there, I don't know, but apparently, they were killed. And and that's that's heartbreaking for those people, certainly. Tear gassed, I'm sure beaten with, you know, clubs, essentially, this kind of thing. But they stood up to him enough to the point where the president has now withdrawn this bill. And but my understanding, and I've got a few articles here about it I'll be putting in the show notes. These, the protesters essentially are not happy. That's not enough that they're saying that the president needs to get out of office. Now I don't know anything about I will say this. I do not know anything about Kenyan, politics.
I mean, apparently, they have a president. Well, that's about the depth of my knowledge. I don't know how they were elected. I don't know if that election was fair. I I don't know. And as someone here in the United States, I really can't have a fair view of that. So I don't I I don't know about all of that, but it's not done. And this did involve the IMF, by the way, because the IMF was trying to make a large, bailout, what they always call bailout of Kenya, and then part of that was going to be more taxes. This is the standard IMF playbook straight out of Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein. You should take a listen, look.
Well, I guess it's on audio probably but, and wouldn't be a bad read, audio listen, but the book, whatever. Standard stuff. Anyways, I thought that was a very important thing this week that we we should take note of. Now I'm gonna go a little bit more in-depth on that and say, unfortunately, I'm afraid we're gonna see more and more of this, and and I'm glad that they got the bill pulled back. Of course, it's it's very disheartening that all these people died. But at least they accomplished what they were trying to gain.
I hope that if this guy really needs to go, and I think his name is Ruto, you know, then then he's booted. Unfortunately, that's neither trivial nor easy. I did reach out to Eric Hersman this week on Twitter. I have not gotten a response. He's the only person I know that lives there. He lives in Kenya as far as I know, or he's from there, and he probably would have a much better handle on this. I was kinda hoping to talk to him a little bit, but that did not pan out. Alright. So that was this week's news. Our news section, I do wanna go through this before we wrap up software updates. I've got a few things here that you may be of interest. I will kind of clip through these, Bisc, which is a p to p network, a peer to peer, therefore, anonymous essentially network.
New version 1.9.16. Improved network resilience and stability. So grab that if you're using bisque. I personally could use more stability in my life. The tails operating system. So tails, I've not talked about on here, and it's probably something I should. And to be honest, I think it's something I want to experiment with. It's essentially a way to it's a bootable operating system. So you boot it off of like a USB drive, and then it's, like, very, very secure. So at this point, that's all I'm willing to tell you, but it's something you wanna think about in terms of dealing with, like, your hardware wallets and and this kind of thing.
Your remember your cold storage that we were just talking about. So they've got a new 1, an improved a random seed on the USB stick, so that boot device, to strengthen cryptography. So, apparently, they've made some adjustments for that in order to strengthen their cryptography. And then we've got Envoy, which I believe is a wall oh, Envoy goes with 1 of the 1 of the hardware devices. Yeah. Foundation devices. It's basically their software wallet. Envoy. That's the 1 that Seth is a part of. Yes. It is. Seth for privacy, who we've had on here.
Anyways, Envoy 1.7.0, you can buy Bitcoin and redeem coin pay vouchers, BTC pay vouchers, I should say. So BTC pay is the, like, a point of sale device type thing or a Bitcoin. It's like a software Java Java, if I'm not mistaken, software for, to run like a a store. Umbrel OS, 1 of these, devices that you can bootstrap off of a wide range of devices. I have run Umbrel before, and I must have had it plugged in. I didn't realize so version 1 dot 2, they're adding Wi Fi support. So I don't know why it took them so long, but if I'm reading that correctly, and there seem to be, now you can connect to your Wi Fi.
There's some security implications to that, but for most people, I think that would be okay. Even, you know, they're on their own private network. Hopefully, you're treating your WiFi correctly. So if you're using Umbrel, might wanna look at that. And then last, and not least, maybe most important, the Bitcoin Core code got updated. Version 27.1, bug fixes and performance improvements. So if you're running version 20 7, which I think I am, I might wanna get that updated myself. Alright. So that's it for the software this week, hopefully. And, look, as I move forward into doing these software updates, I promise you, you know, like, Treasure got updated. I'm not gonna talk about the Treasure update, t r e z o r, for those of you who can't understand what I'm saying.
Simply because I don't promote treasure. It's a, yes, it's a Bitcoin wallet, but it also covers, you know, hundreds of other cryptocurrencies, and it's a huge attack vector. I'm not gonna talk about that. If you got that, you're gonna have to keep up with that. Sorry. So it says a general policy. Alright. I hope you like what you heard. We are a value for value podcast supporting podcasting 2 0. I don't do sponsors. I don't do ads. I don't do anything like that, because I believe that that can very easily taint my journalistic integrity, so to speak. As an example, if Trezor was paying me $1, 000 a week to promote their crap, Do you think I'd be talking about Trezor like that? No. I'd be taking their $1, 000 a week. So I just remove that. That's not a temptation for me. If I ever do take any sponsors or ads or whatever, it won't be anything like that. I can't even imagine, to be honest, who I would take on as a sponsor.
I don't know. Maybe Kaboomrax. But then I guess if Kaboomrax ever did something any crazy, I'd probably have to talk about that. I don't know. I'm not at the point where that's even an issue, but I will never take on something so obviously. I don't know. I would never take on something like Trezor. I guess, is what I'm saying. Anyways, so I do come to you and say, hey. If you're getting value from this podcast, then I'd love it if you throw me some value back. Now you can do that in a number of ways. Just telling people about the podcast would be great. I love to see the numbers go up in this regard. They've not been going up a whole lot lately and, would love to get the word out there.
You can boost the show like Hypersist Devasars did. Send me 500 sets, send me a 1, 000, whatever, whatever works for you. And, send me a message along with it. You can stream, like the people who were streaming this week. As you're listening, send me 10, 20 sats a minute, whatever works for you there. I can also provide some value back to you directly. If you clip an episode, go to an app like fountain. You can clip 1, 2, 3 minutes out of an episode. If it's the current episode, clip it and then post it on fountain, I should say. If it's from the current episode, I'll boost you 500 sats back. If it's an older episode, I'll boost you 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure, and it's a way to get the word out there about satoshi's plebs.
I always appreciate whatever it is that, the plebs out there do in terms of support. People like hypersensitive to the saris. Right? So there's a number of ways you can get a hold of me. You can you can boost, just like I said. That's a great way. You can send me a message on Twitter. I'm on Macintosh Fintech on Twitter. That's 1 way. I'm also on Nostra. I have my Nostra Pub key, pinned to the top of my Twitter account because that's way too long to, like, be reading out. Or you can send me an email, macintosh at satoshis dashplebs.com. And, so there's a number of different ways there you can get a hold of me, and I always love to talk to listeners. So that's it.
Stay humble friends. Go out and make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is June 30th, and this is episode 173 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh. And today's episode is what about your backups. All right. Hope everybody's had a good week. We're going to jump right on into this, get things going. As always, we'll take our very brief market update. We did close just a few hours ago, June 30, 2024, $62, 673. We are up for the last 3 days according to TradingView Market Daily View, which is a good thing. It does look like, once again, we've not really broke through that $60,000 bottom part of the box, and we will now probably march our way back upwards and retest 70, just like we've been doing over and over, it seems.
There we go. We are at block height, 850,186 as we record. And right now, we're looking at a difficulty adjustment, which will happen on July 5th, which would be this Friday. That is actually down even more than last week. Last week, we were sitting at 6 6.10 when I recorded, percent down, and now we're at 6.57. So, again, it's still looking like we're going to have a nice adjustment downward. What's going on? Our blocks are being made too fast. Why would that be happening? Well, because according to a number of charts and sources and whatever, and just pure logic, and we'll get to that in just a minute.
Miners are capitulating right now according to one chart that, I have reposted on Twitter. We are at the same level we were at back in basically the low point of, the last bull or the last bear market. Alright? So, 6.6% or so, something like that have already capitulated. Meaning shut down their servers because they can't afford to run them. When they do that, the hash rate goes down. When the hash rate goes down, then of course, blocks are being mined less frequently, hence the difficulty adjustment down, which will help somebody like me who's still online, still operating, still maybe not profitable, maybe not making a whole lot of money, but I'm hanging in there. Most of my, in fact, the vast majority of my servers at this point are recent enough that they are actually still operating at a profit.
The few that I have that, they're kind of a wash at this level at this, hash price, and it is what it is. I'm not taking well, I contractually actually cannot shut them down. So, I I was expecting this. It's accounted for. I just sent another chunk of money on to Kaboom Racks for more hosting. You know, I'm operating as usual. Public companies, Riot, Bitfarms, I don't know. Sorry. Those are the only two that come to mind because I've been talking about them recently. You know? Maybe they're shutting down some older servers. Maybe, I I don't know. I I do know it's hot. It's getting very hot here in the United States.
And in Texas with ERCOT, with their energy grid situation, a lot of miners make deals where they shut down, miners in return for money, in return for fiat, in order to balance the grid. And that's been working very well for Texas the last few years, and that's a way for those miners to, make some extra cash essentially. So I think that's part of this as well. That will continue as this heat continues. So I am optimistic we get a nice downward adjustment here in just a few days and then maybe even another 1 after that, but we will see. Our mempool has been quite nice right now. We're looking at 9 sats per v byte across the board. Just a little anecdotal story. I sent, I actually sent a well, we'll talk about that in just a minute because it's actually kinda core to our discussion. I I sent off a payment a couple of nights ago, and, and it was 8 sats per vbyte, I think, is what I paid. So it's actually even been lower than this. So, our our mempool is at 974 megabytes. So still not going down. Actually, just up slightly from last week.
Alright. There we go. That's it. That's all we're gonna do with our market. That's kinda where we're at for the week. I will say this, $63, 349 is where we're at since I, am recording here at almost 11 o'clock PM CST, on the East Coast of the United States. So we're actually up getting closing in on $1, 000 higher than Bitcoin, than the weekly close for Bitcoin. I'd this week might it may not just be the 4th July here in the United States. The 4th July is our independence day here in the United States when frankly we kick well, sorry. I will not make this political. Anyways, we celebrate our independence here in the United States and, shoot off fireworks. But I think, frankly, this week, maybe, Bitcoin may have some fireworks of its own. We'll see.
At some point, we are going to break out of what this box, these doldrums, and we've been going for a while. Something like 50 days already. Kind of this sideways motion, post happening. We'll see. Alright. What are we talking about tonight? What are we talking about? What about your backups? Well, I'm gonna tell you all a story. So settle in while uncle Macintosh tells a little story. Maybe grandpa Macintosh. I don't know. The the Earl Grey, I I went back sorry. Let me pull that tea bag out. I don't want it to get too hot, or too not hot. What's the word?
Strong. I went back this week. I finished up the bottle of honey that I've been using, and I actually went back. I'd gone back to my friends at Little Green Bees, and I got them some stuff that they needed. And, actually, we did a little barter, and I got some more honey. So this is actually little green bee honey, from my friends there. Love it. Good stuff. This was straight wildflower honey. Nice and light. Anyways alright. There we go. Oh, yes. I didn't. Sorry. It's been a busy week. Let's tell you this story. I bought my ticket to the Bitcoin conference, and, they're still available. But Friday, Saturday night? Saturday night, I think it was. It was Saturday night. It was last night.
Was the last night before a new change in price went into effect. So I was going to purchase my tickets or my ticket. Is just me, last night. And I was gonna do it with Bitcoin from my mining operation. It is a business expense in my case, so it's perfectly legitimate. And, that's the way I was gonna do it. You may argue otherwise, but they dangled a nice 21% discount for the ticket price if you paid with Bitcoin. So between that and using, like, a coupon code for 10%, I got 31% discount. Pretty sweet. Now this money was set aside for that. This is not money I would be replacing. But just to go through the argument really quickly of these people who say, well, I should never sell my Bitcoin.
If I sell this in from my cold storage, so to speak, from my savings, and it was not an intentional purchase from my savings because, oh, I don't know. I've been holding my Bitcoin for a long time, and it was time to sell some because it had appreciated 10, 30, a 100 x. Right? Well, then I can always if that's not the case, I can always go to Stripe and buy more bit Bitcoin at the same time. It's okay, guys. You can manage that. There's only 2 things going on there. It's not really multitasking. So just a little tip. Anyways, sorry. That just kinda bugs me when people say don't ever sell your Bitcoin. I I'm sorry. I deal with the monetary network, not just a number go up savings network, which I think is what they think when they say that. I'm not really sure.
Regardless, point is, I was gonna purchase it with Bitcoin. Now for my mining business, and I store my Bitcoin on a seed signer. I've had seed signer on the show. We've talked to him. Great guy. He's the the founder of the seed signer project. Great guy. So on. We had a long conversation. You can go back and listen to that. I love the seed signer product, and I, a long time ago, decided to use that for my cold storage, and I have been. In this specific case, it's for my mining business. The money comes off the miners. Just to give you an idea of the flow real quick, it comes off the miners goes the mining pool, brains in this case, has, basically a wallet, a hot wallet that it collects up in. And then when it gets a predetermined amount, it sends it off to cold storage on my seed center. So I pulled out the seed center. I plug it in and I'm looking around and I realize, well, Macintosh can't find the QR code. So with Seed Center, you get a little plastic, not plastic, cardboard stock, blank QR, and you fill that in based on your phrases, your seed phrases.
And then you can, like, literally just read it, not read it. Have you hold it up for your computer camera, and it reads it. It reads the QR, reads in essentially your passphrases, your seed phrases, and unlocks the wallet. Really handy little device. Well, as I look around this very cluttered desk, Macintosh is not the most organized person in the world. I'm sorry. As hypersensitive as ours might say, it might be because of my creative mind. I don't know. I'm not gonna blame it on that. But, yeah, I'm I'm really not very organized. If I took a picture of this desk right now, you you would be shocked. I couldn't find the QR.
Time was ticking away. Now I never take the seed signer out of my house. I I do the things that I'm supposed to do that we're gonna talk about briefly here in just a minute, in order to safeguard it. But in short, I couldn't find the QR code, and I was down to the last hour before the ticket prices went up. So what do I do? Well, I pulled out my backup of the seed phrases. So that QR code is generated, as I said, from seed phrases as every good Bitcoin wallet is. You start with seed phrases either 12 or 24. In my case, I had 24, and then I have a password that basically encrypts those as well that changes it again. So all I had to do was boot the seed signer manual not manually, but go through the menu, select all the seed phrases. None none of this is online. And then use that more manually. Do the same thing that my QR code would have done.
So I was able to sign the transaction, make the purchase, buy the ticket before midnight, before whenever it was, and lock in my price. But that got me thinking, maybe we should talk about backups. You look. If you're doing this correctly, ladies and gentlemen, you are your own bank. What do we preach here on Satoshi's pledge? Probably 2 things in general. 1, DCA. Don't try and time the market. Don't try and trade the market. Don't try any of this courses crap, whatever. Just DCA. Dollar cost average, whether that's daily or weekly. I would not recommend it more freak less frequently than weekly.
But whether that's daily or weekly, I don't care how you do it. Ideally, it would be through some decentralized, you know, peer to peer anonymous non KYC app, but the reality is most of us have access to things like strike. Okay? Do that. However you do it, do it. Do it on this daily or weekly basis. Put it in cold storage. Don't keep it on an exchange. Right? We preach all that. But when you're in cold storage, when it's sitting on your seed signer, you are your own bank, and you need to think about that. You want to think about your strategy, which is not necessarily my strategy for protecting them. What does that mean? Well, minimally, you probably need to have 2 ways of accessing that device. In my case, I had a QR code. I had to back up seed phrases.
They were in two separate locations. That's something to think about. When I couldn't find 1, I found the other. Now just as a little addendum, if McIntosh doesn't find that QR code in the next couple weeks now I know it didn't leave this house, but let's just say I can't and, you know, we don't routinely have visitors in into our house. I actually can't remember other than 1 particular person who's very well vetted, shall we say, been in this house that wasn't a resident in a number of weeks. Okay? Like months, probably, really. It's not like we have people in here every week. Anyways, point is, Mcintosh, if worst case lost it because he's a goofball.
But if I can't find it in the next few weeks, then what I will do, I will go ahead and generate a new Bitcoin address, and I will actually use this as a time to do some consolidation and clean up house cleaning. But I will change to new seed phrases, new password because I will consider that compromised. Where do you keep that documentation? Do you just leave it out on your desktop? Do you leave it out in the open? Do you put it in a safe? Is that safe fireproof? Do you put it in a bank? Maybe in a safety deposit box. Do you put it with your lawyer? Do you trust your lawyer? What would the lawyer do if, frankly, the government came and said, you must give us those seed phrases for your client?
Would they claim client confidentiality, or would they just roll over and give that to the government? Now, personally, for me, I probably would not trust a lawyer or an accountant or anyone like that unless it were part. We have what is called multi sig wallets. Right? You have to have, like, 3 separate signatures essentially to to access it. You could lose 1 of those, have the other 2 still work. I guess you need 2 out of the 3. And in that case, well, they go to the lawyer. The lawyer says, well, here it is, but it's not enough to actually get into the bank, the cold storage.
I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. I don't know, and I can't answer that question for you. It what happens when you hit a $100, 000, $50, 000, $250, 000? Do you have multiple banks? Right? We've got the FDIC here in the United States, but that only protects a certain amount. It's lower in Europe. I know it's, like, less than a $100, 000, I think, in Europe. What happens when you're at a couple 100 $1, 000? Do you split that up among multiple banks? Well, multiple cold storages, I should say. Excuse me. That was a slip of the fiat tongue. And well but the cold storage only cost, in the case of SeedSiner, like, a $100 or so. Well, sure.
Why would I not? And then, or at least, actually, you don't even have to do that. Now I'm really thinking about this. I could have multiple addresses, multiple seed phrases, multiple wallets, and I'll go through the same device, really, in the case of seed cider. I'm not gonna speak to others because I don't know all the details. Nothing wrong with that. Point is you need to think and what about fire? There's another thing. What happens if your house catches fire? Is that safe? Maybe that you put it in. Is it rated for 10 hours of intense fire? I don't I don't know. I these are all the things you need to think about.
And I just thought I would use this case where, you know, Macintosh kind of slipped up, and there's a decent amount of money in that. You know, I would cry. Maybe not cry, but I would be upset, shall we say, if that were lost. So it gave me a chance to review my procedures, and there's some things I'm probably gonna make a change about here and there, tweaks here and there. I thought this might be instructive for you as the listener to, get a chance to learn, not from my mistake, but from my from what happened to me. I don't mind y'all learning from my mistakes either. I've told you many, many times.
Mcintosh lost a bunch of money trading. Mcintosh was an idiot. Mcintosh has made a number of mistakes. Mcintosh has lost money on NFTs, on crypto other cryptocurrency, on this, that, and the other. It's amazing, frankly, that I'm still here. I get the survivor pleb award, maybe. I don't know. But in this case, I had done all the necessary groundwork. I had the backup. I restored the backup, essentially, And I was able to move on. I bought the ticket and we're locked in. For Bitcoin conference 2024, Probably my first and last 1. I don't think I'll be buying a ticket anymore. I may choose to go to them. I'm not quite sure how that'll work, but a lot of people do that.
They just don't actually go to the conference. I'm not sure. I'll kind of scope all that out. We'll see. But I'm planning on meeting up with Kyrin there from mere mortals. I know he's going. We've been communicating about that. If others of you are going, I sure would love to catch up with you. If we could get a small group, I don't know. It sounds like kind of the food stuff is all kind of wrapped up into the conference. It's all taken care of, but maybe we could go get some pizza somewhere or something. I have no idea. I'm just throwing that out there. Alright.
Enough about that. There we go. So let's move on. We did have some support this week. I actually did not have any mess I had a boost. I didn't have a message. It came from hypersensitive osaurus, our friend over in Portugal. He sent in a a 1000 sats. I appreciate that. This was in regards to 172 and, episode 172. And where are we going? Last week's conversation about how I was looking to make some changes going forward. I do appreciate that. We also had some streaming a total of 1350 sets. So down a little bit, frankly, but, I think summer doldrums are here. I don't know. Last week wasn't the most scintillating content.
I get that. But, yeah. Alright. So I appreciate that hypersensitive osaurus and the streamers. I do. I appreciate that very much. Before I move on to the news and notes, I've kind of been debating having this little conversation. I'm doing quite good, I think, on time. Let me double check. No way. Oh, okay. It said I was in an hour. I'm like, I have not been talking in an hour, but I didn't start the recording until 35 minutes in. Okay. We are doing good on time. I'm gonna throw this out real quick. Over in the podcast 2.0 kind of ecosphere, Adam and Dave do a podcast, podcasting 2 0. They drive kind of this whole process. They, Dave manages the back end for the, indexing, the database essentially for the podcast, universe, for the podcast 2.0 universe, and they've driven a lot of this development. I appreciate very, very much what they're doing over there, and I've talked about them many, many times.
I think they're both going to the conference, and I'm really, really hoping to get a chance to meet them. Looking forward to that, actually. But here's the thing. The podcasting 2.0 community, in my opinion, is running up against limitations of lightning. I've talked about lightning a number of times. It's maybe not proven to be quite as simple as people would like it to be in terms of usability. And quite frankly, because of that, it's kind of turned into this k y c dominated, vendor dominated, like, landscape. Meaning, vendors providing lightning nodes that you basically rent for $20 a month or whatever.
And wallet providers like GetAlBI, for example, who pretty heavily involved in the podcasting 2 0 ecosphere in various ways, providing lightning wallets and lightning channels. And the channels really are kind of the crux of the issue in terms of usability. So there's been this discussion going on going forward. 1 of the things that I have not voiced and I need to really bring up and kind of put my 2¢ in, 2 sats in, is people in this business need to get paid. And I and I wanna be careful about what I'm saying. I agree with that 100%.
But we start tacking on service after service after service after service. It's just like with, Satoshi Stream. I appreciate what they do, but at the end of the day, they're taking 1% of what I'm running through there in order to provide the service. Now 1%, not a huge amount, and it's in today's dollars, it's essentially nothing. And maybe this is because I had the long view. But I'm looking at because you start, oh, well, I wanna do this and that's a cost. And I wanna do that and that's a cost. And I think this stuff adds up. Now, Macintosh may be crazy.
Okay? And I I will admit to that. But, man, 1 day, I think these sets, they're gonna be worth something. Okay? Right now, 1500 sets roughly per dollar, but at a $1, 000, 000 Bitcoin, it's a penny per sat. These 1, 000 and 1, 000 and 1, 000 of sats that are going off in fees, they actually start to add up. And if it's and and now I I know I'm I'm way out here, but what if Bitcoin in in 30 years when many of you, many of us, I hope I'm still alive, maybe we see 10, 000, 000 per Bitcoin. Maybe maybe, just maybe, maybe Bitcoin is the global currency of the world.
It's used for trade. It's used nationally as currency. It's used just by people who want to send money to each other across borders, as crazy as that sounds, and so on and so forth. And because there's only 21, 000, 000 Bitcoin, and maybe almost 20 have been no. 20, 000, 000 probably, maybe a little more than 20, have been mined at that point. So most of them are gone. We've got heavy use. We've got people. We've got companies stacking sats. We've got Bitcoin on every reasonable business ledger. We've got country stacking sets. And so, I mean, I could see it getting to $10, 000, 000. Now I'm not gonna project when, but I'm just saying maybe, you know what?
Each 1 of these satoshis that we're throwing around for nothing, they're then worth 10¢ in today's money. 10¢. So these 100 and 100 and 1000 of sats that we push around, that we pay in fees, that's a lot of money. That's my point. So I because I'm cheap. Sorry. But I am. Because I'm cheap. I worry about now maybe I shouldn't be, but I do. So I've always been a little sideways on this whole ecosystem that I've seen grown up based on lightning and based on all these additional services. And they're talking about the issues that they're having, and I boosted into that episode when I heard it. And I said, well, if you're talking about rearchitecting the back end, which is essentially what they're talking about, Why don't you consider Fedimintz?
They read it on the next week. And then funny enough, the next week, they get on some guys from I think I got this timeline right. They've got RSS was just on rss.com. They're a podcast hoster. And they really apparently, Adam woke up 1 day and said, let's do FEDIMETs and explained it to Dave. And now I I don't know if this all came from my tweet. I have no way of proving that. Not my tweet, my boost. I don't care. I really don't. But I'm glad that they're having the conversation because we're already using all these KYC services. We might as well and effectively with effediment, you're making a trade off. You actually, KYC isn't the issue any longer. It's the guardians, the people who manage the funds, and there's various ways of doing that.
But they could rug pull you theoretically. Not theoretically, they could. It's also very new technology, but there's no lightning channels. Now you use lightning in between the Fedimint and to communicate with the greater Bitcoin Ecoverse, but but there's no lightning channel. So it becomes a lot simpler. It's kinda like a bank. You can really think of it as a bank. You bring your money in. You deposit it. You can move money around to the people inside that bank who are using that service essentially for free. Again, the whole thing about the SATs, and I'm telling you that bugs me. I'm sorry.
And then you can deposit it. You can withdraw it at any time. Now, again, the trade off, you you you've got these trusted entities who manage this, but I think that can be done. And the trade off is, that's the trade off. So I'm gonna do what I can to promote that, frankly, because I think it needs to be an alternative. I think that if they don't rush into this, this might actually end up being a lot better than their current setup. It might help with onboarding users. You can take strike, take It might help with onboarding users. You can take strike take that strike app, which is available freaking everywhere.
Where did they just pop up this week? I don't remember. Some new spot. I have no idea. It's, like, all over the place. Okay? And send money straight to it. And then it just shows up, and you can, I'm not gonna turn this into a big conversation about Fetti Mince, but I'm excited about that. Sorry. You get that part for free. Move on to the news and notes. We'll see how that turns out. Julian Assange. I wanna talk about this. This is not directly Bitcoin related, but I do think it's very important. He I guess he was in prison for 12 years. He basically had a guilty plea in exchange for his freedom. He's now in Australia, and, and he's free. So this is the guy behind the WikiLeaks, website, the WikiLeaks, release of confidential government information, which basically ticked the United States off, the United States government, and it ended up landing him in jail.
Now I bring this up not to cause division. I I think a lot of people maybe don't understand, kind of the whole circumstances as a US citizen you know, I'm kinda glad to know what actually the government was hiding. I basically believe that the government should not be operating with a bunch of confidentiality. I mean, there may have to be times when it's, like, right then, but there's no reason to have 20 plus year confidentiality agreements or whatever, about what the government's doing. Because, you know, basically, all the money that I'm spending, that's that's what they're that's what they do, and I have a right to know that.
Maybe I'm crazy. Say a lot of crazy things tonight. 10¢ sats. Boy, that's that's insane. Anyways, it was good to see him out, I mean, at least in my opinion. But from a privacy and he's a big privacy advocate. He's a big Bitcoin advocate. Certainly, from those aspects, it's good to see him out. Bolivia. Bolivia is legalizing Bitcoin transactions. Bolivia is a small country down in South America. 1 of the last holdouts kind of on this side, they may be the last 1. I'm not a 100% certain about that, but it's possible. But now they're allowing Bitcoin transactions.
They literally said it was to help improve their economy and help their people, something along those lines. So I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah. I do want to talk for a few minutes. I talk about Africa quite a bit. I don't know if you've heard about this. If you've been on Twitter, at least if you've well, I don't know. Maybe even then you haven't been hearing about this. It just kinda depends on who you follow. There have been because you don't at least here in the United States, you don't hear about this on the news. There there have been, currently from my understanding, there is not, but there have been massive protests in Kenya, protesting taxes, protesting the president, and protesting the loans with the IMF and with China. And I think that's actually key.
So the president was trying to pass this new bill, this new law, whatever, that was going to put across a raft of tax increases on some very basic items. And, basically, the younger generation, and, like, if I get this wrong, I apologize. Obviously, I'm not on the ground there in Kenya. I'm just this is just from what I've dug up and what I've read. The younger generation there in gen in Kenya has had enough, and they started protesting. Apparently, well, the 1 report I saw said 20 plus people have died. The police were definitely, in my opinion, way I mean, they were just shooting people with with bullets, like, actual not rubber bullets, bullets.
Actual, you know, full metal jacket or whatever craziness. There was even 1 child that I saw that that a small child. Now why that child was out there, I don't know, but apparently, they were killed. And and that's that's heartbreaking for those people, certainly. Tear gassed, I'm sure beaten with, you know, clubs, essentially, this kind of thing. But they stood up to him enough to the point where the president has now withdrawn this bill. And but my understanding, and I've got a few articles here about it I'll be putting in the show notes. These, the protesters essentially are not happy. That's not enough that they're saying that the president needs to get out of office. Now I don't know anything about I will say this. I do not know anything about Kenyan, politics.
I mean, apparently, they have a president. Well, that's about the depth of my knowledge. I don't know how they were elected. I don't know if that election was fair. I I don't know. And as someone here in the United States, I really can't have a fair view of that. So I don't I I don't know about all of that, but it's not done. And this did involve the IMF, by the way, because the IMF was trying to make a large, bailout, what they always call bailout of Kenya, and then part of that was going to be more taxes. This is the standard IMF playbook straight out of Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein. You should take a listen, look.
Well, I guess it's on audio probably but, and wouldn't be a bad read, audio listen, but the book, whatever. Standard stuff. Anyways, I thought that was a very important thing this week that we we should take note of. Now I'm gonna go a little bit more in-depth on that and say, unfortunately, I'm afraid we're gonna see more and more of this, and and I'm glad that they got the bill pulled back. Of course, it's it's very disheartening that all these people died. But at least they accomplished what they were trying to gain.
I hope that if this guy really needs to go, and I think his name is Ruto, you know, then then he's booted. Unfortunately, that's neither trivial nor easy. I did reach out to Eric Hersman this week on Twitter. I have not gotten a response. He's the only person I know that lives there. He lives in Kenya as far as I know, or he's from there, and he probably would have a much better handle on this. I was kinda hoping to talk to him a little bit, but that did not pan out. Alright. So that was this week's news. Our news section, I do wanna go through this before we wrap up software updates. I've got a few things here that you may be of interest. I will kind of clip through these, Bisc, which is a p to p network, a peer to peer, therefore, anonymous essentially network.
New version 1.9.16. Improved network resilience and stability. So grab that if you're using bisque. I personally could use more stability in my life. The tails operating system. So tails, I've not talked about on here, and it's probably something I should. And to be honest, I think it's something I want to experiment with. It's essentially a way to it's a bootable operating system. So you boot it off of like a USB drive, and then it's, like, very, very secure. So at this point, that's all I'm willing to tell you, but it's something you wanna think about in terms of dealing with, like, your hardware wallets and and this kind of thing.
Your remember your cold storage that we were just talking about. So they've got a new 1, an improved a random seed on the USB stick, so that boot device, to strengthen cryptography. So, apparently, they've made some adjustments for that in order to strengthen their cryptography. And then we've got Envoy, which I believe is a wall oh, Envoy goes with 1 of the 1 of the hardware devices. Yeah. Foundation devices. It's basically their software wallet. Envoy. That's the 1 that Seth is a part of. Yes. It is. Seth for privacy, who we've had on here.
Anyways, Envoy 1.7.0, you can buy Bitcoin and redeem coin pay vouchers, BTC pay vouchers, I should say. So BTC pay is the, like, a point of sale device type thing or a Bitcoin. It's like a software Java Java, if I'm not mistaken, software for, to run like a a store. Umbrel OS, 1 of these, devices that you can bootstrap off of a wide range of devices. I have run Umbrel before, and I must have had it plugged in. I didn't realize so version 1 dot 2, they're adding Wi Fi support. So I don't know why it took them so long, but if I'm reading that correctly, and there seem to be, now you can connect to your Wi Fi.
There's some security implications to that, but for most people, I think that would be okay. Even, you know, they're on their own private network. Hopefully, you're treating your WiFi correctly. So if you're using Umbrel, might wanna look at that. And then last, and not least, maybe most important, the Bitcoin Core code got updated. Version 27.1, bug fixes and performance improvements. So if you're running version 20 7, which I think I am, I might wanna get that updated myself. Alright. So that's it for the software this week, hopefully. And, look, as I move forward into doing these software updates, I promise you, you know, like, Treasure got updated. I'm not gonna talk about the Treasure update, t r e z o r, for those of you who can't understand what I'm saying.
Simply because I don't promote treasure. It's a, yes, it's a Bitcoin wallet, but it also covers, you know, hundreds of other cryptocurrencies, and it's a huge attack vector. I'm not gonna talk about that. If you got that, you're gonna have to keep up with that. Sorry. So it says a general policy. Alright. I hope you like what you heard. We are a value for value podcast supporting podcasting 2 0. I don't do sponsors. I don't do ads. I don't do anything like that, because I believe that that can very easily taint my journalistic integrity, so to speak. As an example, if Trezor was paying me $1, 000 a week to promote their crap, Do you think I'd be talking about Trezor like that? No. I'd be taking their $1, 000 a week. So I just remove that. That's not a temptation for me. If I ever do take any sponsors or ads or whatever, it won't be anything like that. I can't even imagine, to be honest, who I would take on as a sponsor.
I don't know. Maybe Kaboomrax. But then I guess if Kaboomrax ever did something any crazy, I'd probably have to talk about that. I don't know. I'm not at the point where that's even an issue, but I will never take on something so obviously. I don't know. I would never take on something like Trezor. I guess, is what I'm saying. Anyways, so I do come to you and say, hey. If you're getting value from this podcast, then I'd love it if you throw me some value back. Now you can do that in a number of ways. Just telling people about the podcast would be great. I love to see the numbers go up in this regard. They've not been going up a whole lot lately and, would love to get the word out there.
You can boost the show like Hypersist Devasars did. Send me 500 sets, send me a 1, 000, whatever, whatever works for you. And, send me a message along with it. You can stream, like the people who were streaming this week. As you're listening, send me 10, 20 sats a minute, whatever works for you there. I can also provide some value back to you directly. If you clip an episode, go to an app like fountain. You can clip 1, 2, 3 minutes out of an episode. If it's the current episode, clip it and then post it on fountain, I should say. If it's from the current episode, I'll boost you 500 sats back. If it's an older episode, I'll boost you 300 sats. It's a way for you to make some treasure, and it's a way to get the word out there about satoshi's plebs.
I always appreciate whatever it is that, the plebs out there do in terms of support. People like hypersensitive to the saris. Right? So there's a number of ways you can get a hold of me. You can you can boost, just like I said. That's a great way. You can send me a message on Twitter. I'm on Macintosh Fintech on Twitter. That's 1 way. I'm also on Nostra. I have my Nostra Pub key, pinned to the top of my Twitter account because that's way too long to, like, be reading out. Or you can send me an email, macintosh at satoshis dashplebs.com. And, so there's a number of different ways there you can get a hold of me, and I always love to talk to listeners. So that's it.
Stay humble friends. Go out and make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon.
