As the political postering for Bitcoin votes reaches a fever pitch in the United States it's important to look a little deeper. Just because a politician is pandering and even making campaign promises (that may or may not be true) doesn't mean fundamental issues don't still exits. The United States and virtually every other country in the world can't just be "fixed" by Bitcoin. Let's discuss!
Bitcoin Weekly Close
July 21st, 2024: $68,167
Block Height at Time of Recording
853,300
News and Notes
Trump Considers Dimon For Treasury
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-says-weighing-dimon-treasury-would-allow-powell-finish-term-bloomberg-2024-07-16
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
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Pleb Nation. Today is July 21st, and this is episode 176 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is Two Roads. Alright. Let's get going. Let's get into our stats section. The weekly close happened just a few hours ago, closed at 68,167. It's July 21, 2024, and what that means is that we are back, baby. No. I'm just kidding. We are up. I know y'all all heard that in, like, the dude from Minions voice, Steve, whatever his name is. Right? I hope you did because that's how it was supposed to be. But we are up. We're definitely up for the week, and we're up by a lot.
I wanna say about $3,000. Let's see. There's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Boop. I lost it. Saturday. There's Sunday. Yeah. We started the week at 60,600 ish, at least on that Monday. So, yeah, we're up a solid more than 10%. That's kinda crazy. Alright. Very good. And there was probably some reasons for that. I don't wanna go too much into this, but people have argued it's different things. It it doesn't even matter. You know? It doesn't. Bitcoin as I always say, Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does. And we can put try and put boxes around it, as I've discussed a number of times. We can try and say, well, this is why it didn't.
There's factors, you know, certainly, overall. I just I think the market we try and make the market too neat. How about let me say it that way. It's not affected 100% by single things. It's always a combination. So I don't know. I think we try to make things too simple. And, when it comes to the market, and specifically Bitcoin, I in general, I think that's true as well. But, yeah, that's where we're at. It was a great week. We are building momentum, so to speak, coming up to the Bitcoin conference here in less than a week. As I record next Sunday, assuming I've got sufficient energy to do so, I will be home from the Bitcoin conference and should be reporting on that.
And I'm guessing we may have a new all time high by then. I I I don't like making those predictions, but it's certainly possible given the momentum of this week. So we will see how that works out. That would be very interesting. I think it's been a few years since they've had an all time high at the Bitcoin conference. If ever. I know they were screaming for a 100 k just like a year or two no. two years ago, and, of course, that didn't happen. Can you imagine if we'd gotten a a 100 k two years ago? Crazy. Crazy talk.
Crazy talk, Macintosh. Alright. Let's move on, though. That's really all we got to that. We've not broken out of our box. We've got to break up above 71,000 to have any chance. Of that, it's certainly possible. Let's move on, though. I think I can close that one up. That's just gonna confuse me. As we record, we are at block height. This was a nice round number. 853,300. Yay. Yay. Block heights. 853300. And, the blocks are coming in a little fast. Actually a fair amount fast. 9.9.2 minutes per block. And what that means is it's supposed to average around 10. So they're coming in too fast. Which means that the next difficulty adjustment, which is scheduled for 9 days, the last day of July, right now, it tends to be up and up quite significantly 9.27%.
So if you extrapolate from that, what that means is that miners are coming online. People are turning on their machines. As the price shoots up, it's becoming profitable for them again. I don't quite understand that game, but a lot of people do it. So whatever. I just leave that to to them. I don't actually even really have that option, of course, with my miners, but I wouldn't take it if I did. If I thought that the price was going to be going up very, very soon, why would I not just keep going? Maybe that's me being optimistic in a good way to get myself in trouble. Not great news there, for the minors. But what it does mean, like I said, people are just coming back online.
Hash price is going up. Hash price. We'll have to talk about that one day. I don't if I've ever talked about it. I haven't talked about it in a while. It's simply what is the miner actually earning per terahash or petahash. So, we'll not do that today, but maybe we'll do it another time. And then finally, through our glance to the mempool here, we've got 808 megabytes in the memory pool, which is actually up dramatically. It was, like, down in the lower 700 just yesterday, and our fees have actually spiked as well. 808.
And we are looking at for a high priority, 11 sats per vbyte. Now, you know, that's not crazy considering where we've been recently or even well, a few months ago. But we were down into the fours, fives, a lot. five sats per vbyte, low, medium, high priority. I saw fours for significant periods of time. I never saw anything beef below 4, but I suppose it was possible. But we're really not talking about a whole lot here. It's a whole less than 11 sets per v byte is, a dollar 5. So for a transaction. You know, you don't wanna pay for your coffee like that. But if you're spending some serious money, then a dollar is a dollar.
And in the end, in order to be able to settle globally in less than 45 minutes, typically. What are we talking about tonight? I came up with a crazy title tonight, and I actually did that. It's not a tease. I know some of you don't like talking about politics. I'm gonna open like this. Okay? And bear with me. For one thing, politics shape how the vast majority of us interact with the world. Because I live in the United States, because I live under the laws and regulations that are developed in the United States, That means I can do certain things with Bitcoin without breaking the law.
Okay? That means, for example, that I have a capital gains tax if I sell my Bitcoin. But McIntosh, you can do this at. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the way that the laws and the regulations are set up. And I'm not telling you to, you know, try and circumvent that. So I am gonna talk about politics, because politics right now here in the United States are shaping Bitcoin policy and the future of Bitcoin in the United States. And I believe this will set a precedence for the vast majority. Maybe not vast majority. Majority. That might not be the right word, but for a large part of the world. So I'm not gonna be talking about Democrats. I'm not gonna be talking about Republicans.
This isn't, a Trump stump speech or something like that. So trust me just a little bit. I know some of you have been with me for a long time. And, this is a little bit different. I'm gonna very briefly kinda give my background just so you understand where I'm coming from, and then we're gonna launch into this. So I grew up in the eighties. I remember, for example, when Ronald Reagan was shot, 1981. I grew up in what amounts to a very conservative area of the country, in a very, frankly, very conservative household, especially in the way that we dealt with finances. We didn't overspend. We didn't run up a bunch of credit.
We took care of our bills. We saved, etcetera, etcetera. And I distinctly remember early on realizing I was not terribly old, but to be honest so according to this, we crossed a $1,000,000,000,000 in debt, October 23, 1981. So the very same year during Reagan's first term, very same year that he was shot. And I remember how shocking that was. A $1,000,000,000,000 and people don't even understand what a $1,000,000,000,000 really means. $1,000,000,000 times 1,000 is what it is. It's a 1 followed by 12 zeros. Write that out if you've never done that before. It's a lot of zeros. Or it's a $1,000,000 multiplied by a 1000000 times.
Okay? It's a huge amount of money, and we crossed that Rubicon in 1981. And I remember thinking, man, that's crazy. And through my entire life, the Democrats and the Republicans have fought back and forth about this program, that program, how we're gonna balance the budget, how we're gonna cut the how we're gonna cut the deficit, how we're going to cut the debt. And yet in the I don't even wanna think about this. 20 in 40 years wow. Macintosh does math online live. In the 40 years since then, we've not gone backwards. We've gone forward, so to speak. And very recently, we crossed $34,800,000,000,000, I think. And I actually have a Twitter this week that we'll get to I'll just go ahead and bring it up.
Interest payments on the US national debt will break one $14,000,000,000,000 this year, 76% of all income tax collected. So for every dollar in tax that they bring in of income tax, I don't know if that what that means, if that's maybe that doesn't include some things, but at least the common income tax, 76% of that goes towards debt. And people talk about this event horizon that we've reached that, you know, we're not gonna be able to get out of. And I I believe that, actually. I don't think we can get out of this without default or hyperinflation. Okay?
But, again, going back to the politics of this, I've watched the Republicans and the Democrats for 40 years fuss and fight. And, yes, they have differences, and I'm that's not what I'm here to talk about. There are different things that they believe in, that they support, and their causes, so to speak. But they have fundamentally, over the last 40 years, run this nation into so much debt that there is no way that it can be paid back. And now so now and just in case you didn't know, maybe the 3 people listening to this, you haven't heard. Earlier today, Biden dropped out of the race.
So the Democrats are in complete disarray right now. Now let me tell you something. I'm gonna tell you this. I well, first of all, I should mention, it's been a number of years now. I'm no longer registered in either party. It doesn't even matter what party I belong to, but I was so disgusted with all the baloney that I literally changed to an independent. And I would encourage you if certainly, if you live in United States, I'm not gonna speak to other countries, but maybe that's something you might wanna think about. That's just my 2 sides.
But as someone whose mother in less than less than a year ago died of Alzheimer's, which is a form of dementia, who's watched for more than 10 years her decline. How can I put this? With all respect that is due to Biden, it was it's been obvious for years that this was going on. And that suddenly because of the debate that happened a couple weeks ago, and the whole world woke up, the the media woke up specifically. The, top people in Democratic party woke up and said, oh, Joe's got dementia. Joe's got issues. Joe can't remember. Joe consistently calls places and things by the wrong name.
You know, just since that debate, he called Zelensky from the Ukraine, Putin. Well, that didn't go over well. Right? There's been a number of things like this. It's been very obvious to me that that this has been going on. And you can go back and look at even from when did he run? I wanna say it was 2016. I may be mistaken. I watched his campaign speeches, which is not that long ago, and it's a completely different person in terms of his personality and the way that he talked and interacted. Because he was. His brain was in a much better state back then.
And his family has things that they have to deal with, and I I'm I'm sorry that he has that. But the my point is the farce that has gone on for so long is it's a joke. So we here in the United States have to kind of figure out how we're gonna deal with this. So now a lot of the bitcoiners are all latched on to Trump because Trump, orange man says, see now I'm gonna PO all the Republicans. See, I just made all Democrats mad now. Democrats that hopefully didn't drop off. Republicans are fixing it. Here are some things. So orange man is now running.
Now he was a form he was our former president. So he he he was president. He ran, lost. Now he's running again. Setting aside maybe some, personal issues, some cult cultural is not the word. Character. Character would be a good word. Character issues, all of that. Trump's now gone out and said, well, I you know, this Bitcoin thing looks pretty good. I might rumor has it. Now rumor I don't know if this has directly come from Trump, but rumor has it that he might make it part of the National Reserve. He's talking about maybe no cap gains on Bitcoin and blah blah blah. All this different stuff. So all the Bitcoin people are like, oh, so excited. And Bitcoin, of course, being sovereign money, being, you know, uninflatable and all these other things is important.
So, yes, I mean, it is important what a candidate thinks about these things. But my point, I want to emphasize my whole thing I wanna talk about. Why did I call it 2 roads? Why did I call this episode 2 roads? Because people think people think that the Republicans and the Democrats are different. Oh, well, you got this party on the far right or right? You got this party on the left far left. Whatever. They're two sides of the same coin. They're politically driven. They're driven by money. They're frequently frequently on both sides driven by power.
They're in bed and beholden to people who give them large amounts of money, political action committees and this kind of thing. They're set up to want to stay in office as long as possible because it's a cushy job, because you make great money and you build influence and you can I mean, the amount of money that some of these people in congress have is staggering, and it's not because of what they get paid and so on and so forth? So somebody like Biden who's literally been in office for 50 years, that's just to be expected. So, anyways, a lot of people have this view that the right and the left, the Republicans and the Democrats, the elephants and the donkeys, they're so different.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm telling you, you might as well view them as both parties walking down the same road fighting over different sides of the road. They're not on 2 different paths. The United States will will either default or hyperinflate the money if they don't. I I don't even know that it's possible to not do that, but certainly without major changes. We can't talk about budget cuts. We have to talk about how do we get the budget so that we're spending less than we are bringing in? We have to talk about the issue of inflation. See, here's the thing.
Here's one of the big differences, and I I would lump Trump into this group. I have no doubt that this is the case. I think that virtually every politician in Washington subscribes to essentially a Keynesian view of economics. And one of the big things that Bitcoin has taught me, solidified really in my life, is that Keynesian economics doesn't work in the long run. And the Austrian economics, solid sound money beginning with that, is the only way to build sustainable growth and a sustainable future. When you print money, it has consequences. When you spend more than you make, it has consequences. Now as, quote, the leader of the world, as the, money of the global trade, that gives the United States some advantages that, frankly we've been riding on since 19 seventies.
But that party will even is about to come to an end. And I don't know when, and I'm not predicting, and but it will eventually happen. So when you go to the polls here in the United States, you vote for who you think is gonna do the best job. Okay? At least I hope you do. I hope you don't vote because a d or an r because that's who your family votes for. But keep in mind, until proven otherwise, and we're a long way from that, when Donald Trump or Robert Kennedy or any of these people get up and start chattering about Bitcoin. They view it as a way to gain votes, first of all.
I think that's obvious, but just to state it, I know that's why Trump's doing it. I mean, let's be honest. Just a few years ago, Trump was saying, you know, Bitcoin bad. I like the dollar. Well, the dollar's frankly almost dead. I'm not even sure it has a heartbeat anymore. So when he says that, I don't believe that he means it now. Maybe I'm pleasantly surprised one day, and he means it. Until proven otherwise, I'm going to continue to believe that. I also believe that he maybe thinks it's a way to bail out the dollar. I don't think that's going to work if we don't do the other things necessary to operate in the long term.
Why am I talking about the United States? I can talk most easily about the United States, but the reality there's a 170 something countries in the world. And they do vary, but the vast majority of them have a lot of debt. Japan, by GDP, has more debt than we do. We have the most debt by dollars. Japan actually leads by percentage, and Japan is frankly shriveling up very quickly. China, Russia. Russia actually doesn't have a whole lot of debt compared relatively speaking, but they do have debt. Until these countries stop thinking in Keynesian terms, until the analysts are kicked out that think that way, until the advisors are kicked out that think that way. And they're replaced by Austrian economists, by people who are grounded in the reality of what's actually going on in the world. We will continue to see nations fall, and nations fall, and nations fall into, into this hyperinflation oblivion.
So you've got Republicans and Democrats over here fighting over the different sides of the same road. And I'm over here going, but guys, we have a different road that we can take. We don't have to fight over that Keynesian road. We can come over here, this Austrian road based on sound economic principles, based on solid money, based on not letting banks manipulate money, based on being prudent and not spending more than you make because eventually that ends. We we can do that, and I do believe we will see countries do that. I time will tell. I mean, we've already got El Salvador, for example, on a Bitcoin standard. Now I don't know what that means in terms of their budget and all of that.
I don't. That will remain to be seen. Now I will say that I believe that Argentina, on the other hand, is kinda doing the opposite. They're not embracing Bitcoin as a legal tender standard, although they're fine with Bitcoin. But they are, as far as I can tell, making the actual difficult decisions to shut down ministries, to cut staffs, to do the things to get their economy back on track now. Will they do that to the point where they can pay off their debt and move on and actually operate with sound money? I I don't know. But it's kinda funny because in a way, they're kinda taking the opposite tact.
So we're gonna have over the next 20 plus, maybe, I don't know, 30, 40 years. All these experiments going on all over the world, and you're gonna be able to watch them. And the reality is they will affect you if you're living in that country, certainly. Does that make sense? So watch what the United States does because we whether you like it or not, because we are leading this experiment, so to speak. And I think it's gonna be messy. I think it could potentially be, pretty ugly. And I'm not sure it's going to end well. Regardless of his Trump or some other Bitcoin loving person or at least promoting person is put into office. And I don't know who's gonna be in office, and I'm not gonna speculate about that.
Right now, it's looking pretty good for Trump, but this thing is not over. So I'm not gonna say that it's going to be him. And even if he is, I still like I said, I don't know what that really means. It sounds like it'll be positive for Bitcoin, but that remains to be seen. So I want you to think about that. I was thinking when we start talking about 2 roads, if you'll allow me for just a minute, I was actually thinking about Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken, and I am not a poet. I'm not gonna read this to you. I don't even understand half of it, to be honest. English was never my strong suit, and everybody out there went, amen, brother. Oh, sorry.
I mean English as a class, not as a language. I do okay, I think. I some of this stuff, I don't really understand. But the fundamental part of this is Robert Frost, the poet, you know, he took the road that was left less traveled out in the woods, and that has made all the difference. That's the last line of the poem. And you can you can kind of equate that to what's going on here. This is going to be difficult for countries to make this change if any country ever does. I don't know that that will happen actually. But it will not be an easy one, but it will make all the difference. Can you imagine a country on a sound Bitcoin standard operating on its within its budget, not overtaxing people?
The innovation, the the growth that can occur with that. So, anyways, in case you were interested where my little analogy from about the 2 roads came from. Alright. I don't wanna beat that to death, but, that's what I've been thinking about. Let's talk about our supporters. We had a couple of supporters this week boost in. We've certainly had some streaming going on. I appreciate all that. Of course, I'll run through these boosts here. Our friend from Portugal, hypersensitivosaurus , boosted on the last episode, My Bitcoin Journey, a 1000 sats. He said still listening attentively, just busy enjoying life. I am so glad to hear that. Hypersensitosaurus.
SARS. And then Kyrin over at Mere Mortals, who I'm hoping to catch up with on Thursday, boosted a row sticks 1111 and said, would love to hear more stats slash info about the hydro Bitcoin combination. So this is in reference to my discussion about why I Bitcoin. One of the things that I'm looking to do down the road is become involved in this these projects. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on in Africa right now, but wherever it is. But as an example, in Africa, like with, somebody who I would highly recommend that you follow on Twitter, if you're on Twitter. I don't know if he's on Noster, to be honest.
But regardless, they go into places where they don't have power. They're just getting power by, like, generators and that kind of thing. But they have some form of hydro, like a large stream or, even a river. And they build a hydro project, a small scale hydro project. And then that's used to supply power with, to the village. Now, where does Bitcoin come into this? Well, Bitcoin is an immediate consumer of that power until it's needed, and it can consume all of it. Let's say you had a project, which was generating 1 megawatt, which I which I think would cover like 1500 American homes, so it'd be a lot over there based on their level of energy usage, at least currently.
That will drive, like, roughly 300-350 or so Bitcoin miners. So when you build a project like that, it's typically very, very slow to have the energy usage kind of ramp up. But, you know, I could drive a, a shipping container into there, drop it, plug it in in just a few days, and have it online and consuming all that power, paying the bills for the hydro project to ensure that they don't go bankrupt, which would be a great thing. Right? And then as the village ramps up its usage, you can pull those miners off and move them elsewhere. So it's a win win situation because the the power is cheap. You, of course, negotiate a good rate to in order to to do that because you're consuming everything.
And as the network gets laid out and as people bring up their usage of power, then you simply drop back. So, the only stat I know right now I I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for there, Kyron. One of the curious things that I one of the things, of course, that's been up most in my mind is kinda how does this cost. The miners themselves, you can look up the prices. They're not super cheap. Probably right now, about $2,000 a miner. So if you did have, let's say, a 1 megawatt facility, which is probably very much on the high side, but let's just go with that just for because that's numbers I know off the top of my head. You're looking at, let's say, 300 miners times 2,000, so $600,000. It's a lot of miners to put up, of course, but that would be one part of the equation. The other part of the equation would be the project itself, and that will very much depend upon the location, upon the regulations, upon the government kind of dealings, local labor costs, and, again, location. Why did I say location twice? Because if I have water, a large stream of water, just picture this, say it's 6 feet wide.
No. Just say it's 10 feet wide, and it's 3 feet deep, and it's running down a a fairly steep hill. That's a significant amount of water flow that can generate a lot of power. If I can capture that essentially, put it into a pipe, run it a 100 meters down the hill, 300 feet or in elevation, that would actually generate more than 1 megawatt of power. Now run a river would be different. That's a different setup, but I'm not as familiar with it. I talked to Eric about the cost of this, and then I actually talked to chat GPT a little bit about this as well, and it kind of coincided. So I think this is fairly accurate information.
For a megawatt facility, you're looking at somewhere between $1,300,000. So a megawatt is a huge amount of power, of course. That breaks down, I think, to a $100,000 per 100,000 kilo or no. It's a 1000 kilowatts. One tenth of that. A 100 kilowatts. Yeah. Of power. So depending on your situation, you know, you're you probably wouldn't be going that large. But if you have full usage of that, system, I mean, you can basically amortize it. You can, maybe that's not the right word to use. Sorry. You could pay it all back if you had a loan for it in, like, certainly less than 10 years. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 6 years, which is an incredible payback compared to one of these normal projects.
These projects like this have been going on for a long time where they'll go and set up hydropower for a remote village like that. But the reality is the payback is so long. A lot of these companies will go bankrupt. It may take them 20 years to get up and online and get everybody actually using the power. And that's the beauty of this. We plug in the Bitcoin into that system. Boom. All the power is being consumed. They are getting paid. It enables that payback to be much faster. So if you wanted to look at that side of it, you are looking at roughly $1,000,000. What I'm trying to figure out, honestly, going forward is kind of how I divide this up.
I'm looking to do this as both a way to help people kind of as a I don't wanna call it a charity, but as a, and I hate the word NGO, nongovernmental organization. But, you know, I'm doing this to help people who need power because I believe that energy is civilization, plain and simple. Okay? You may choose to live in a hut on the side of a river and not have electricity and have a compost toilet, or a hole in the ground or whatever, and that's your choice. But if you have the ability to have power, if you have the ability to have lights so that you can stay up later and study and get a better job or run a factory. Right? I mean, or or whatever, because essentially of cheap power, that's that's civilization.
It's just it just is. There's great books about that. I've talked about them before. I think it's called Energy as Civilization. But, anyways, that's part of what drives me, and I'm trying to figure out how to make that happen. And I think what I'm arriving at is I need to separate these two things. I don't really need to run a hydro project and then try and plug in my Bitcoin miners over here. I want to partner with people who want to run those hydro projects to help those people. Just like I've talked about people who've been doing this for a long time and maybe back in the nineties or eighties, they were not doing it because they were looking to make money off of those people.
They were look doing it to help them because I don't know that there was ever any expectations of great returns. But the reality was it's such a slow ramp up period that they're they run out of money kind of waiting for those returns to even start coming in, if that makes sense. So I want to partner up with people to go to places. I believe in South America, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, and have them handle that because that's not something I do know some about it, but especially the the actual network layout and all that stuff of the electrical generation part. I don't know anything about that. I wouldn't know I wouldn't know what to do.
I could eke out a a system to generate hydropower, but then I wouldn't know what to do with it beyond that, if that makes sense. So if I partner with somebody like that, then I can bring in my servers. And, yes, I'm going to get a good rate. I have to because I'm putting a lot of money at risk essentially. And in a situation that's just not normal and stable. So, yes, I'm I should be getting cheaper power. Anyways, all that being said, in the end, is these villagers are the local people who are going to benefit. And I'll move my minors on elsewhere and do other things with them. I'm not sure what else you'd wanna know.
At this point, I'm not sure what else I'd be able to tell you. Of course, the cost of this can vary from project to project. The minor cost really isn't gonna change that much. Yes. My shipping will change, but the cost of the minors themselves really isn't going to change. So I'm not really that's kind of a fixed cost. I think the price of the power will be fairly fixed in terms of what I'm looking for and what I expect to get. What will change is the cost of that hydro setup. Again, it can run, you know, for a megawatt, which is a, again, a very large facility. That would be a 1,000,000 to $3,000,000 in the right situation. The bet the more ideal situation, we got a big drop, large stream.
I can tap, you know, a 100 meters of downfall through my pipe. I can set up a megawatt. Boom. Done. I don't think that would cost $1,000,000 in a lot of countries. There's going to be a a relatively small amount of earthworks done. Labor, it will be cheaper certainly than like in the United States. And, I don't think the regulation in, say, Rwanda is going to be as much as here in the United States. I may be mistaken about that part, but to be honest, if there's a lot of regulation and governmental trouble, that's probably an area that I would not be involved in at least to start with.
So, anyways, hope that helps. We had a total of 27 120 sats this week. I do appreciate that. Of course, combination of those 2 boost and some streaming as well. So let's move on to news and notes. What do we got this week? You know, a little bit of minor news. We're getting a lot of new hardware coming down the road. There's a company called BitDeer, which is putting out new miners. I'm sitting here looking at a picture of one of them. That they're saying right now, we'll get 18 joules per terahash. They're progressing by, q2 of 2025.
So basically, 1 year from now, 5 jewels per terahash, which is just jaw dropping. Super efficient. Super, super efficient. And I hope the prices on these aren't too insane. We will see. This literally says there's no insight on pricing, so I don't know. But they're not the only company who's out there working on stuff. Glad to see that, Block. Yeah. Block is working on something. Intel was, I think they kinda bailed on that whole deal. But I think as Bitcoin grows, I think we will see more and more interest in this, which is frankly a very good thing because right now, we basically have 2 main players that build miners, and it's not a good situation.
Okay? Let's see. Of course, this week, we had this massive outage of Windows systems because of CrowdStrike, I think, was the program. It did not affect me one bit. It did not impact my work. It did not impact me, individually, certainly. Anyways, one good thing to be pointed out. This was all because of auto updates that happened. We do not do that in Bitcoin. You do not have an auto update for the Bitcoin core code because of this very reason. Could you imagine the chaos if the Bitcoin network went down like that? It would be almost as bad as what it actually happened.
Of course, more news. Earlier this week, it was reported that JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, somebody who I love to poke fun at, he might be the next treasury secretary. I think that's kind of faded. This is if Trump gets elected. So this would be the person who would replace Janet Yellen. I'm not a JPMorgan fan, although apparently, now he suddenly changed his tune on Bitcoin. Also talking to Larry Fink at BlackRock, I wanna say. Anyways, I don't wanna really get on to all that political stuff, but these things are important. They will affect us here in the United States. These are the people who will set policy.
So I I just don't believe that these people are really gonna change until I actually see it myself. I quoted I didn't quote this. I said this, and this is kind of a summary in a single tweet, really, of what I just said. So maybe you should just follow me on Twitter. It's Macintosh Fintech, by the way. I'm just kidding. But I said this. I don't think a single major political candidate has a real grasp of how to actually fix our economy. They wouldn't know Austrian economics if they sat in Vienna with Carl Minger. Carl Minger was one of the early early proponents. He really solidified Austrian economy, economics.
And I believe that. I'd even though they're starting to talk about Bitcoin and whatever in ways that make a lot of sense, down deep, it's all just Keynesian economics. It's just Keynesian economics to the bottom. And until that changes, you know, we can slap a Band Aid on it, but it's not really fixing the problem. So maybe that's what I should have said just a few minutes ago and not gone through the twenty minute, diatribe. I don't know. Alright. Let's roll into software updates. Zeus Wallet, new release, 0.85 and version 0.9.0-beta.
And the beta one was the one that has the Bolt 12. So if you're interested in that, you're using Zeus, that's how you can get that. BTC pay server 1.13.4 bug fixes and more enhancements. That's a great software to run on like, if you're a merchant accepting Bitcoin. Bitcoin Keeper version 1.2 .10 was released. It's a desktop app. It's a actually, this release was a, a desktop app that you compare with your mobile version of Bitcoin Keeper, which is a the whole thing is designed for multi signature Bitcoin wallets so that you can have, like, 2 out of or, well, 3 people involved, and you would have to have 2 of them to actually do a transaction, that kind of thing. It's a interesting thing that I haven't really delved into on this show enough.
Maybe we ought to talk about that. Phoenix Android, version 2.3.4 says Phoenix Wallet. Just more fixes and improvements. Keep this moving. Alright. So, so that's gonna kinda wrap it up for this week. We here at Starshie's Pubs, we are a Podcasting 2.0 podcast. What that means is we support things like boost, like what you saw earlier or heard earlier, streaming stats. You can have chapters in your, episodes, which we do here at Stoshis Plebs. A lot of great features. And I'm also a supporter of what's called value for value. What that means is rather than me going out here and hawking something to you I don't know. I'll let your wallet. Gee. Who would ever do that?
I simply come to you and say, look. In order to be able to bring all the news to you, to not have to self censor, to not have to worry about when Ledger gets hacked and all their customer data gets leaked. Oh, I don't know. That didn't ever happen. Yes. It did. Worrying about the amount of money that they're paying me if I'm gonna talk about that. I just simply come to you and say, hey. If this is providing you value, if my dialogue on monologue, I should say, on the two party system here, not only in America, but essentially you can transplant this to any part of the world. Go look at France right now, same situation. Go look at basically any democracy.
And maybe there's more than two parties, but they're all arguing about the same crap, and they're not worried about the things that are really important as they drive off the, you know, the road into the ditch because of because of debt, because of the basics of of economics. So, anyways, if you enjoyed that, you can boost. You can stream sats using a Podcasting 2.0 app. I will be at the conference this week. I'm planning on arriving on Thursday late afternoon, And, I think at least some of the podcasting 2.0 people are gonna meet up, after one of the concerts that's going on there. It's streaming.
It's part of this whole Podcasting 2.0 thing. We now support music. It's really cool, actually. So bands can put their music on here, and you can stream and boost a band just like you stream and boost a podcaster. So they're putting together a concert there with a number of people, and I think we're gonna kinda meet up there, maybe go out for dinner or something afterwards. So we'll see how that all works out. I'll be out there Friday Saturday and then drive back Saturday night. So I may be tired Sunday. We will see. 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 can always be reached by email at mcintosh@satoshis -plebs.com.
Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
Pleb Nation. Today is July 21st, and this is episode 176 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, McIntosh, and today's episode is Two Roads. Alright. Let's get going. Let's get into our stats section. The weekly close happened just a few hours ago, closed at 68,167. It's July 21, 2024, and what that means is that we are back, baby. No. I'm just kidding. We are up. I know y'all all heard that in, like, the dude from Minions voice, Steve, whatever his name is. Right? I hope you did because that's how it was supposed to be. But we are up. We're definitely up for the week, and we're up by a lot.
I wanna say about $3,000. Let's see. There's Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Boop. I lost it. Saturday. There's Sunday. Yeah. We started the week at 60,600 ish, at least on that Monday. So, yeah, we're up a solid more than 10%. That's kinda crazy. Alright. Very good. And there was probably some reasons for that. I don't wanna go too much into this, but people have argued it's different things. It it doesn't even matter. You know? It doesn't. Bitcoin as I always say, Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does. And we can put try and put boxes around it, as I've discussed a number of times. We can try and say, well, this is why it didn't.
There's factors, you know, certainly, overall. I just I think the market we try and make the market too neat. How about let me say it that way. It's not affected 100% by single things. It's always a combination. So I don't know. I think we try to make things too simple. And, when it comes to the market, and specifically Bitcoin, I in general, I think that's true as well. But, yeah, that's where we're at. It was a great week. We are building momentum, so to speak, coming up to the Bitcoin conference here in less than a week. As I record next Sunday, assuming I've got sufficient energy to do so, I will be home from the Bitcoin conference and should be reporting on that.
And I'm guessing we may have a new all time high by then. I I I don't like making those predictions, but it's certainly possible given the momentum of this week. So we will see how that works out. That would be very interesting. I think it's been a few years since they've had an all time high at the Bitcoin conference. If ever. I know they were screaming for a 100 k just like a year or two no. two years ago, and, of course, that didn't happen. Can you imagine if we'd gotten a a 100 k two years ago? Crazy. Crazy talk.
Crazy talk, Macintosh. Alright. Let's move on, though. That's really all we got to that. We've not broken out of our box. We've got to break up above 71,000 to have any chance. Of that, it's certainly possible. Let's move on, though. I think I can close that one up. That's just gonna confuse me. As we record, we are at block height. This was a nice round number. 853,300. Yay. Yay. Block heights. 853300. And, the blocks are coming in a little fast. Actually a fair amount fast. 9.9.2 minutes per block. And what that means is it's supposed to average around 10. So they're coming in too fast. Which means that the next difficulty adjustment, which is scheduled for 9 days, the last day of July, right now, it tends to be up and up quite significantly 9.27%.
So if you extrapolate from that, what that means is that miners are coming online. People are turning on their machines. As the price shoots up, it's becoming profitable for them again. I don't quite understand that game, but a lot of people do it. So whatever. I just leave that to to them. I don't actually even really have that option, of course, with my miners, but I wouldn't take it if I did. If I thought that the price was going to be going up very, very soon, why would I not just keep going? Maybe that's me being optimistic in a good way to get myself in trouble. Not great news there, for the minors. But what it does mean, like I said, people are just coming back online.
Hash price is going up. Hash price. We'll have to talk about that one day. I don't if I've ever talked about it. I haven't talked about it in a while. It's simply what is the miner actually earning per terahash or petahash. So, we'll not do that today, but maybe we'll do it another time. And then finally, through our glance to the mempool here, we've got 808 megabytes in the memory pool, which is actually up dramatically. It was, like, down in the lower 700 just yesterday, and our fees have actually spiked as well. 808.
And we are looking at for a high priority, 11 sats per vbyte. Now, you know, that's not crazy considering where we've been recently or even well, a few months ago. But we were down into the fours, fives, a lot. five sats per vbyte, low, medium, high priority. I saw fours for significant periods of time. I never saw anything beef below 4, but I suppose it was possible. But we're really not talking about a whole lot here. It's a whole less than 11 sets per v byte is, a dollar 5. So for a transaction. You know, you don't wanna pay for your coffee like that. But if you're spending some serious money, then a dollar is a dollar.
And in the end, in order to be able to settle globally in less than 45 minutes, typically. What are we talking about tonight? I came up with a crazy title tonight, and I actually did that. It's not a tease. I know some of you don't like talking about politics. I'm gonna open like this. Okay? And bear with me. For one thing, politics shape how the vast majority of us interact with the world. Because I live in the United States, because I live under the laws and regulations that are developed in the United States, That means I can do certain things with Bitcoin without breaking the law.
Okay? That means, for example, that I have a capital gains tax if I sell my Bitcoin. But McIntosh, you can do this at. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the way that the laws and the regulations are set up. And I'm not telling you to, you know, try and circumvent that. So I am gonna talk about politics, because politics right now here in the United States are shaping Bitcoin policy and the future of Bitcoin in the United States. And I believe this will set a precedence for the vast majority. Maybe not vast majority. Majority. That might not be the right word, but for a large part of the world. So I'm not gonna be talking about Democrats. I'm not gonna be talking about Republicans.
This isn't, a Trump stump speech or something like that. So trust me just a little bit. I know some of you have been with me for a long time. And, this is a little bit different. I'm gonna very briefly kinda give my background just so you understand where I'm coming from, and then we're gonna launch into this. So I grew up in the eighties. I remember, for example, when Ronald Reagan was shot, 1981. I grew up in what amounts to a very conservative area of the country, in a very, frankly, very conservative household, especially in the way that we dealt with finances. We didn't overspend. We didn't run up a bunch of credit.
We took care of our bills. We saved, etcetera, etcetera. And I distinctly remember early on realizing I was not terribly old, but to be honest so according to this, we crossed a $1,000,000,000,000 in debt, October 23, 1981. So the very same year during Reagan's first term, very same year that he was shot. And I remember how shocking that was. A $1,000,000,000,000 and people don't even understand what a $1,000,000,000,000 really means. $1,000,000,000 times 1,000 is what it is. It's a 1 followed by 12 zeros. Write that out if you've never done that before. It's a lot of zeros. Or it's a $1,000,000 multiplied by a 1000000 times.
Okay? It's a huge amount of money, and we crossed that Rubicon in 1981. And I remember thinking, man, that's crazy. And through my entire life, the Democrats and the Republicans have fought back and forth about this program, that program, how we're gonna balance the budget, how we're gonna cut the how we're gonna cut the deficit, how we're going to cut the debt. And yet in the I don't even wanna think about this. 20 in 40 years wow. Macintosh does math online live. In the 40 years since then, we've not gone backwards. We've gone forward, so to speak. And very recently, we crossed $34,800,000,000,000, I think. And I actually have a Twitter this week that we'll get to I'll just go ahead and bring it up.
Interest payments on the US national debt will break one $14,000,000,000,000 this year, 76% of all income tax collected. So for every dollar in tax that they bring in of income tax, I don't know if that what that means, if that's maybe that doesn't include some things, but at least the common income tax, 76% of that goes towards debt. And people talk about this event horizon that we've reached that, you know, we're not gonna be able to get out of. And I I believe that, actually. I don't think we can get out of this without default or hyperinflation. Okay?
But, again, going back to the politics of this, I've watched the Republicans and the Democrats for 40 years fuss and fight. And, yes, they have differences, and I'm that's not what I'm here to talk about. There are different things that they believe in, that they support, and their causes, so to speak. But they have fundamentally, over the last 40 years, run this nation into so much debt that there is no way that it can be paid back. And now so now and just in case you didn't know, maybe the 3 people listening to this, you haven't heard. Earlier today, Biden dropped out of the race.
So the Democrats are in complete disarray right now. Now let me tell you something. I'm gonna tell you this. I well, first of all, I should mention, it's been a number of years now. I'm no longer registered in either party. It doesn't even matter what party I belong to, but I was so disgusted with all the baloney that I literally changed to an independent. And I would encourage you if certainly, if you live in United States, I'm not gonna speak to other countries, but maybe that's something you might wanna think about. That's just my 2 sides.
But as someone whose mother in less than less than a year ago died of Alzheimer's, which is a form of dementia, who's watched for more than 10 years her decline. How can I put this? With all respect that is due to Biden, it was it's been obvious for years that this was going on. And that suddenly because of the debate that happened a couple weeks ago, and the whole world woke up, the the media woke up specifically. The, top people in Democratic party woke up and said, oh, Joe's got dementia. Joe's got issues. Joe can't remember. Joe consistently calls places and things by the wrong name.
You know, just since that debate, he called Zelensky from the Ukraine, Putin. Well, that didn't go over well. Right? There's been a number of things like this. It's been very obvious to me that that this has been going on. And you can go back and look at even from when did he run? I wanna say it was 2016. I may be mistaken. I watched his campaign speeches, which is not that long ago, and it's a completely different person in terms of his personality and the way that he talked and interacted. Because he was. His brain was in a much better state back then.
And his family has things that they have to deal with, and I I'm I'm sorry that he has that. But the my point is the farce that has gone on for so long is it's a joke. So we here in the United States have to kind of figure out how we're gonna deal with this. So now a lot of the bitcoiners are all latched on to Trump because Trump, orange man says, see now I'm gonna PO all the Republicans. See, I just made all Democrats mad now. Democrats that hopefully didn't drop off. Republicans are fixing it. Here are some things. So orange man is now running.
Now he was a form he was our former president. So he he he was president. He ran, lost. Now he's running again. Setting aside maybe some, personal issues, some cult cultural is not the word. Character. Character would be a good word. Character issues, all of that. Trump's now gone out and said, well, I you know, this Bitcoin thing looks pretty good. I might rumor has it. Now rumor I don't know if this has directly come from Trump, but rumor has it that he might make it part of the National Reserve. He's talking about maybe no cap gains on Bitcoin and blah blah blah. All this different stuff. So all the Bitcoin people are like, oh, so excited. And Bitcoin, of course, being sovereign money, being, you know, uninflatable and all these other things is important.
So, yes, I mean, it is important what a candidate thinks about these things. But my point, I want to emphasize my whole thing I wanna talk about. Why did I call it 2 roads? Why did I call this episode 2 roads? Because people think people think that the Republicans and the Democrats are different. Oh, well, you got this party on the far right or right? You got this party on the left far left. Whatever. They're two sides of the same coin. They're politically driven. They're driven by money. They're frequently frequently on both sides driven by power.
They're in bed and beholden to people who give them large amounts of money, political action committees and this kind of thing. They're set up to want to stay in office as long as possible because it's a cushy job, because you make great money and you build influence and you can I mean, the amount of money that some of these people in congress have is staggering, and it's not because of what they get paid and so on and so forth? So somebody like Biden who's literally been in office for 50 years, that's just to be expected. So, anyways, a lot of people have this view that the right and the left, the Republicans and the Democrats, the elephants and the donkeys, they're so different.
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm telling you, you might as well view them as both parties walking down the same road fighting over different sides of the road. They're not on 2 different paths. The United States will will either default or hyperinflate the money if they don't. I I don't even know that it's possible to not do that, but certainly without major changes. We can't talk about budget cuts. We have to talk about how do we get the budget so that we're spending less than we are bringing in? We have to talk about the issue of inflation. See, here's the thing.
Here's one of the big differences, and I I would lump Trump into this group. I have no doubt that this is the case. I think that virtually every politician in Washington subscribes to essentially a Keynesian view of economics. And one of the big things that Bitcoin has taught me, solidified really in my life, is that Keynesian economics doesn't work in the long run. And the Austrian economics, solid sound money beginning with that, is the only way to build sustainable growth and a sustainable future. When you print money, it has consequences. When you spend more than you make, it has consequences. Now as, quote, the leader of the world, as the, money of the global trade, that gives the United States some advantages that, frankly we've been riding on since 19 seventies.
But that party will even is about to come to an end. And I don't know when, and I'm not predicting, and but it will eventually happen. So when you go to the polls here in the United States, you vote for who you think is gonna do the best job. Okay? At least I hope you do. I hope you don't vote because a d or an r because that's who your family votes for. But keep in mind, until proven otherwise, and we're a long way from that, when Donald Trump or Robert Kennedy or any of these people get up and start chattering about Bitcoin. They view it as a way to gain votes, first of all.
I think that's obvious, but just to state it, I know that's why Trump's doing it. I mean, let's be honest. Just a few years ago, Trump was saying, you know, Bitcoin bad. I like the dollar. Well, the dollar's frankly almost dead. I'm not even sure it has a heartbeat anymore. So when he says that, I don't believe that he means it now. Maybe I'm pleasantly surprised one day, and he means it. Until proven otherwise, I'm going to continue to believe that. I also believe that he maybe thinks it's a way to bail out the dollar. I don't think that's going to work if we don't do the other things necessary to operate in the long term.
Why am I talking about the United States? I can talk most easily about the United States, but the reality there's a 170 something countries in the world. And they do vary, but the vast majority of them have a lot of debt. Japan, by GDP, has more debt than we do. We have the most debt by dollars. Japan actually leads by percentage, and Japan is frankly shriveling up very quickly. China, Russia. Russia actually doesn't have a whole lot of debt compared relatively speaking, but they do have debt. Until these countries stop thinking in Keynesian terms, until the analysts are kicked out that think that way, until the advisors are kicked out that think that way. And they're replaced by Austrian economists, by people who are grounded in the reality of what's actually going on in the world. We will continue to see nations fall, and nations fall, and nations fall into, into this hyperinflation oblivion.
So you've got Republicans and Democrats over here fighting over the different sides of the same road. And I'm over here going, but guys, we have a different road that we can take. We don't have to fight over that Keynesian road. We can come over here, this Austrian road based on sound economic principles, based on solid money, based on not letting banks manipulate money, based on being prudent and not spending more than you make because eventually that ends. We we can do that, and I do believe we will see countries do that. I time will tell. I mean, we've already got El Salvador, for example, on a Bitcoin standard. Now I don't know what that means in terms of their budget and all of that.
I don't. That will remain to be seen. Now I will say that I believe that Argentina, on the other hand, is kinda doing the opposite. They're not embracing Bitcoin as a legal tender standard, although they're fine with Bitcoin. But they are, as far as I can tell, making the actual difficult decisions to shut down ministries, to cut staffs, to do the things to get their economy back on track now. Will they do that to the point where they can pay off their debt and move on and actually operate with sound money? I I don't know. But it's kinda funny because in a way, they're kinda taking the opposite tact.
So we're gonna have over the next 20 plus, maybe, I don't know, 30, 40 years. All these experiments going on all over the world, and you're gonna be able to watch them. And the reality is they will affect you if you're living in that country, certainly. Does that make sense? So watch what the United States does because we whether you like it or not, because we are leading this experiment, so to speak. And I think it's gonna be messy. I think it could potentially be, pretty ugly. And I'm not sure it's going to end well. Regardless of his Trump or some other Bitcoin loving person or at least promoting person is put into office. And I don't know who's gonna be in office, and I'm not gonna speculate about that.
Right now, it's looking pretty good for Trump, but this thing is not over. So I'm not gonna say that it's going to be him. And even if he is, I still like I said, I don't know what that really means. It sounds like it'll be positive for Bitcoin, but that remains to be seen. So I want you to think about that. I was thinking when we start talking about 2 roads, if you'll allow me for just a minute, I was actually thinking about Robert Frost's poem, The Road Not Taken, and I am not a poet. I'm not gonna read this to you. I don't even understand half of it, to be honest. English was never my strong suit, and everybody out there went, amen, brother. Oh, sorry.
I mean English as a class, not as a language. I do okay, I think. I some of this stuff, I don't really understand. But the fundamental part of this is Robert Frost, the poet, you know, he took the road that was left less traveled out in the woods, and that has made all the difference. That's the last line of the poem. And you can you can kind of equate that to what's going on here. This is going to be difficult for countries to make this change if any country ever does. I don't know that that will happen actually. But it will not be an easy one, but it will make all the difference. Can you imagine a country on a sound Bitcoin standard operating on its within its budget, not overtaxing people?
The innovation, the the growth that can occur with that. So, anyways, in case you were interested where my little analogy from about the 2 roads came from. Alright. I don't wanna beat that to death, but, that's what I've been thinking about. Let's talk about our supporters. We had a couple of supporters this week boost in. We've certainly had some streaming going on. I appreciate all that. Of course, I'll run through these boosts here. Our friend from Portugal, hypersensitivosaurus , boosted on the last episode, My Bitcoin Journey, a 1000 sats. He said still listening attentively, just busy enjoying life. I am so glad to hear that. Hypersensitosaurus.
SARS. And then Kyrin over at Mere Mortals, who I'm hoping to catch up with on Thursday, boosted a row sticks 1111 and said, would love to hear more stats slash info about the hydro Bitcoin combination. So this is in reference to my discussion about why I Bitcoin. One of the things that I'm looking to do down the road is become involved in this these projects. You know, there's a lot of stuff going on in Africa right now, but wherever it is. But as an example, in Africa, like with, somebody who I would highly recommend that you follow on Twitter, if you're on Twitter. I don't know if he's on Noster, to be honest.
But regardless, they go into places where they don't have power. They're just getting power by, like, generators and that kind of thing. But they have some form of hydro, like a large stream or, even a river. And they build a hydro project, a small scale hydro project. And then that's used to supply power with, to the village. Now, where does Bitcoin come into this? Well, Bitcoin is an immediate consumer of that power until it's needed, and it can consume all of it. Let's say you had a project, which was generating 1 megawatt, which I which I think would cover like 1500 American homes, so it'd be a lot over there based on their level of energy usage, at least currently.
That will drive, like, roughly 300-350 or so Bitcoin miners. So when you build a project like that, it's typically very, very slow to have the energy usage kind of ramp up. But, you know, I could drive a, a shipping container into there, drop it, plug it in in just a few days, and have it online and consuming all that power, paying the bills for the hydro project to ensure that they don't go bankrupt, which would be a great thing. Right? And then as the village ramps up its usage, you can pull those miners off and move them elsewhere. So it's a win win situation because the the power is cheap. You, of course, negotiate a good rate to in order to to do that because you're consuming everything.
And as the network gets laid out and as people bring up their usage of power, then you simply drop back. So, the only stat I know right now I I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for there, Kyron. One of the curious things that I one of the things, of course, that's been up most in my mind is kinda how does this cost. The miners themselves, you can look up the prices. They're not super cheap. Probably right now, about $2,000 a miner. So if you did have, let's say, a 1 megawatt facility, which is probably very much on the high side, but let's just go with that just for because that's numbers I know off the top of my head. You're looking at, let's say, 300 miners times 2,000, so $600,000. It's a lot of miners to put up, of course, but that would be one part of the equation. The other part of the equation would be the project itself, and that will very much depend upon the location, upon the regulations, upon the government kind of dealings, local labor costs, and, again, location. Why did I say location twice? Because if I have water, a large stream of water, just picture this, say it's 6 feet wide.
No. Just say it's 10 feet wide, and it's 3 feet deep, and it's running down a a fairly steep hill. That's a significant amount of water flow that can generate a lot of power. If I can capture that essentially, put it into a pipe, run it a 100 meters down the hill, 300 feet or in elevation, that would actually generate more than 1 megawatt of power. Now run a river would be different. That's a different setup, but I'm not as familiar with it. I talked to Eric about the cost of this, and then I actually talked to chat GPT a little bit about this as well, and it kind of coincided. So I think this is fairly accurate information.
For a megawatt facility, you're looking at somewhere between $1,300,000. So a megawatt is a huge amount of power, of course. That breaks down, I think, to a $100,000 per 100,000 kilo or no. It's a 1000 kilowatts. One tenth of that. A 100 kilowatts. Yeah. Of power. So depending on your situation, you know, you're you probably wouldn't be going that large. But if you have full usage of that, system, I mean, you can basically amortize it. You can, maybe that's not the right word to use. Sorry. You could pay it all back if you had a loan for it in, like, certainly less than 10 years. I think somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to 6 years, which is an incredible payback compared to one of these normal projects.
These projects like this have been going on for a long time where they'll go and set up hydropower for a remote village like that. But the reality is the payback is so long. A lot of these companies will go bankrupt. It may take them 20 years to get up and online and get everybody actually using the power. And that's the beauty of this. We plug in the Bitcoin into that system. Boom. All the power is being consumed. They are getting paid. It enables that payback to be much faster. So if you wanted to look at that side of it, you are looking at roughly $1,000,000. What I'm trying to figure out, honestly, going forward is kind of how I divide this up.
I'm looking to do this as both a way to help people kind of as a I don't wanna call it a charity, but as a, and I hate the word NGO, nongovernmental organization. But, you know, I'm doing this to help people who need power because I believe that energy is civilization, plain and simple. Okay? You may choose to live in a hut on the side of a river and not have electricity and have a compost toilet, or a hole in the ground or whatever, and that's your choice. But if you have the ability to have power, if you have the ability to have lights so that you can stay up later and study and get a better job or run a factory. Right? I mean, or or whatever, because essentially of cheap power, that's that's civilization.
It's just it just is. There's great books about that. I've talked about them before. I think it's called Energy as Civilization. But, anyways, that's part of what drives me, and I'm trying to figure out how to make that happen. And I think what I'm arriving at is I need to separate these two things. I don't really need to run a hydro project and then try and plug in my Bitcoin miners over here. I want to partner with people who want to run those hydro projects to help those people. Just like I've talked about people who've been doing this for a long time and maybe back in the nineties or eighties, they were not doing it because they were looking to make money off of those people.
They were look doing it to help them because I don't know that there was ever any expectations of great returns. But the reality was it's such a slow ramp up period that they're they run out of money kind of waiting for those returns to even start coming in, if that makes sense. So I want to partner up with people to go to places. I believe in South America, in Africa, in Southeast Asia, and have them handle that because that's not something I do know some about it, but especially the the actual network layout and all that stuff of the electrical generation part. I don't know anything about that. I wouldn't know I wouldn't know what to do.
I could eke out a a system to generate hydropower, but then I wouldn't know what to do with it beyond that, if that makes sense. So if I partner with somebody like that, then I can bring in my servers. And, yes, I'm going to get a good rate. I have to because I'm putting a lot of money at risk essentially. And in a situation that's just not normal and stable. So, yes, I'm I should be getting cheaper power. Anyways, all that being said, in the end, is these villagers are the local people who are going to benefit. And I'll move my minors on elsewhere and do other things with them. I'm not sure what else you'd wanna know.
At this point, I'm not sure what else I'd be able to tell you. Of course, the cost of this can vary from project to project. The minor cost really isn't gonna change that much. Yes. My shipping will change, but the cost of the minors themselves really isn't going to change. So I'm not really that's kind of a fixed cost. I think the price of the power will be fairly fixed in terms of what I'm looking for and what I expect to get. What will change is the cost of that hydro setup. Again, it can run, you know, for a megawatt, which is a, again, a very large facility. That would be a 1,000,000 to $3,000,000 in the right situation. The bet the more ideal situation, we got a big drop, large stream.
I can tap, you know, a 100 meters of downfall through my pipe. I can set up a megawatt. Boom. Done. I don't think that would cost $1,000,000 in a lot of countries. There's going to be a a relatively small amount of earthworks done. Labor, it will be cheaper certainly than like in the United States. And, I don't think the regulation in, say, Rwanda is going to be as much as here in the United States. I may be mistaken about that part, but to be honest, if there's a lot of regulation and governmental trouble, that's probably an area that I would not be involved in at least to start with.
So, anyways, hope that helps. We had a total of 27 120 sats this week. I do appreciate that. Of course, combination of those 2 boost and some streaming as well. So let's move on to news and notes. What do we got this week? You know, a little bit of minor news. We're getting a lot of new hardware coming down the road. There's a company called BitDeer, which is putting out new miners. I'm sitting here looking at a picture of one of them. That they're saying right now, we'll get 18 joules per terahash. They're progressing by, q2 of 2025.
So basically, 1 year from now, 5 jewels per terahash, which is just jaw dropping. Super efficient. Super, super efficient. And I hope the prices on these aren't too insane. We will see. This literally says there's no insight on pricing, so I don't know. But they're not the only company who's out there working on stuff. Glad to see that, Block. Yeah. Block is working on something. Intel was, I think they kinda bailed on that whole deal. But I think as Bitcoin grows, I think we will see more and more interest in this, which is frankly a very good thing because right now, we basically have 2 main players that build miners, and it's not a good situation.
Okay? Let's see. Of course, this week, we had this massive outage of Windows systems because of CrowdStrike, I think, was the program. It did not affect me one bit. It did not impact my work. It did not impact me, individually, certainly. Anyways, one good thing to be pointed out. This was all because of auto updates that happened. We do not do that in Bitcoin. You do not have an auto update for the Bitcoin core code because of this very reason. Could you imagine the chaos if the Bitcoin network went down like that? It would be almost as bad as what it actually happened.
Of course, more news. Earlier this week, it was reported that JPMorgan's CEO, Jamie Dimon, somebody who I love to poke fun at, he might be the next treasury secretary. I think that's kind of faded. This is if Trump gets elected. So this would be the person who would replace Janet Yellen. I'm not a JPMorgan fan, although apparently, now he suddenly changed his tune on Bitcoin. Also talking to Larry Fink at BlackRock, I wanna say. Anyways, I don't wanna really get on to all that political stuff, but these things are important. They will affect us here in the United States. These are the people who will set policy.
So I I just don't believe that these people are really gonna change until I actually see it myself. I quoted I didn't quote this. I said this, and this is kind of a summary in a single tweet, really, of what I just said. So maybe you should just follow me on Twitter. It's Macintosh Fintech, by the way. I'm just kidding. But I said this. I don't think a single major political candidate has a real grasp of how to actually fix our economy. They wouldn't know Austrian economics if they sat in Vienna with Carl Minger. Carl Minger was one of the early early proponents. He really solidified Austrian economy, economics.
And I believe that. I'd even though they're starting to talk about Bitcoin and whatever in ways that make a lot of sense, down deep, it's all just Keynesian economics. It's just Keynesian economics to the bottom. And until that changes, you know, we can slap a Band Aid on it, but it's not really fixing the problem. So maybe that's what I should have said just a few minutes ago and not gone through the twenty minute, diatribe. I don't know. Alright. Let's roll into software updates. Zeus Wallet, new release, 0.85 and version 0.9.0-beta.
And the beta one was the one that has the Bolt 12. So if you're interested in that, you're using Zeus, that's how you can get that. BTC pay server 1.13.4 bug fixes and more enhancements. That's a great software to run on like, if you're a merchant accepting Bitcoin. Bitcoin Keeper version 1.2 .10 was released. It's a desktop app. It's a actually, this release was a, a desktop app that you compare with your mobile version of Bitcoin Keeper, which is a the whole thing is designed for multi signature Bitcoin wallets so that you can have, like, 2 out of or, well, 3 people involved, and you would have to have 2 of them to actually do a transaction, that kind of thing. It's a interesting thing that I haven't really delved into on this show enough.
Maybe we ought to talk about that. Phoenix Android, version 2.3.4 says Phoenix Wallet. Just more fixes and improvements. Keep this moving. Alright. So, so that's gonna kinda wrap it up for this week. We here at Starshie's Pubs, we are a Podcasting 2.0 podcast. What that means is we support things like boost, like what you saw earlier or heard earlier, streaming stats. You can have chapters in your, episodes, which we do here at Stoshis Plebs. A lot of great features. And I'm also a supporter of what's called value for value. What that means is rather than me going out here and hawking something to you I don't know. I'll let your wallet. Gee. Who would ever do that?
I simply come to you and say, look. In order to be able to bring all the news to you, to not have to self censor, to not have to worry about when Ledger gets hacked and all their customer data gets leaked. Oh, I don't know. That didn't ever happen. Yes. It did. Worrying about the amount of money that they're paying me if I'm gonna talk about that. I just simply come to you and say, hey. If this is providing you value, if my dialogue on monologue, I should say, on the two party system here, not only in America, but essentially you can transplant this to any part of the world. Go look at France right now, same situation. Go look at basically any democracy.
And maybe there's more than two parties, but they're all arguing about the same crap, and they're not worried about the things that are really important as they drive off the, you know, the road into the ditch because of because of debt, because of the basics of of economics. So, anyways, if you enjoyed that, you can boost. You can stream sats using a Podcasting 2.0 app. I will be at the conference this week. I'm planning on arriving on Thursday late afternoon, And, I think at least some of the podcasting 2.0 people are gonna meet up, after one of the concerts that's going on there. It's streaming.
It's part of this whole Podcasting 2.0 thing. We now support music. It's really cool, actually. So bands can put their music on here, and you can stream and boost a band just like you stream and boost a podcaster. So they're putting together a concert there with a number of people, and I think we're gonna kinda meet up there, maybe go out for dinner or something afterwards. So we'll see how that all works out. I'll be out there Friday Saturday and then drive back Saturday night. So I may be tired Sunday. We will see. 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 can always be reached by email at mcintosh@satoshis -plebs.com.
Stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you soon.
