The price of Bitcoin is crashing. The Japanese Stock Market has had worse two days since the 1980's. An even more widespread war seems to be coming to the Middle East. And the US stock market is diving as well over last week's every underwhelming jobs data. Time to buy the dip!
Bitcoin Weekly Close
August 4th, 2024: $58,143
Block Height at Time of Recording
855,434
News and Notes
Russia Approves Bitcoin Mining and Cross-border Crypto Payments
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/russian-bitcoin-mining-payments-law/
White House Advisors to Meet with Crypto Executives
https://cointelegraph.com/news/crypto-executives-white-house-ro-khanna-policy-meeting
The Tramps - Disco Infereno Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5lSeYd_riw&pp=ygUVdHJhbW1wcyBkaXNjbyBpbmZlcm5v
Software Releases
Alby Hub v1.4.0 enhances mobile-friendliness and integrates fixes and improvements for existing featur
Phoenix Android v2.3.6 addresses parsing issues with BIP-353 addresses and BIP-21 URIs.
Phoenixd v0.3.2 introduces several new features and fixes.
GrapheneOS v2024072800 has been released, featuring various fixes and improvements.
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 August 4th, and this is episode 178 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is the burning down. I'm getting my levels set, making sure everything's adjusted. We're closing out a crazy week. Right now, I wanna go ahead and actually we'll go through the stats. Our weekly close this week was $58,143. $58,143 which was just under $10,000 less than last week, which is, of course, not good. However, since closing, which I I'm recording this at 10 PM CST, UTC flips at 7 PM. So just over 3 hours ago, 10:13 as I start this recording at block height. Let me see. 855,434.
The Bitcoin price sits right above 54 ,000 which means in the last 3 hours we've lost another $4,000 What's going on? The end is here. I can hear it all. Just like all the other times this stuff has happened. At some point in your Bitcoin journey, you become immune to this. I view this as a great opportunity to DCA as a great opportunity to smash buy some Bitcoin. And in fact, I've done that tonight, multiple times, actually, and I still have one more to go. I'm waiting to see if it's going to creep back down it. Yeah. My chart actually shows it's interesting because my chart actually shows, apparently on some exchange, this was Binance. Actually, it got down to 50 3,000.
Oh, wait. They've adjusted this. Hold on. I do think they've adjusted this because I thought it got down to, like, 51,000. But it did get down to 53,000, essentially, according to this chart. I swear this chart has been adjusted. I was just looking at it a few minutes ago. Regardless whether it was 51 or 53, I'm waiting to kinda see if it it keeps moving down. A lot of what's driving this is really bad economic news. This week, we've got the stock market here in the United States dumping. Bitcoin is, by the way, still considered a risk on asset, meaning when when things are being sold when things are, when there's risk, that's not when you people traditionally, the average person, I should say the average investor, maybe, maybe the average in, institutional investor really is investing in Bitcoin.
On the other hand, when things are good, rates are down, all this cut, that's when they're buying in. So they saw the bad news about the stock market. The premarket hours, the stock market doesn't open for, like, another almost 12 hours, like, 10, 12 hours. But it's down in the aftermarket stuff, which I don't that baffles me how we can have an aftermarket if the stock market isn't open, but whatever. It's down like 2 or 300 points. So everybody spooked. And then the Bank of Japan is about to roll over on itself. They adjusted their rates a quarter of a percent up, which doesn't sound like very much, but for them because of the high amount of leverage debt that they have.
It's essentially catastrophic, and the currency is going all over the place and the bank of Japan is trying to control it and it's just not doing well. See, this is modern economic. What do they call it? Modern Monetary Theory, ladies and gentlemen, that you could control these markets, that you can manipulate them, that you can by tweaking an interest rate here and doing this there that, you know, we've got we've got control of this until we don't. And then chaos ensues. And that's what we're seeing to an extent at least right now. No. I'm not saying that Japan is done for. In fact, I don't think that they are. I don't think this is the end, so to speak, for Japan. And I don't wanna sound like I'm saying that, but it's it's really bad news.
And so that's affecting our stock market that's affecting Bitcoin. You've got you've just got all these factors going in. So we're gonna see how low we go. And, I think we'll have a pretty sharp recovery from there, to be honest, but that remains to be seen. But I view these opportunities as a a great place to be DCA ing some cheap sats. And I also view it as a great place to if you have some dollars, so a little stash of dirty Fiat that you want to invest, it's probably a good time to do that. Because at some point we're going to do one of these dips. We're going to go down and then that'll be the last time we ever get to that level. So you can tell you can say that McIntosh bought at this level. Did you?
I'll buy at this level. I'll buy below $50,000 if if it got really bad and, you know, I'll double down and put everything I can in. I mean, that's just the game. At least it's my game. I don't know. Maybe I've been doing this a little too long, but I missed $7,000 Bitcoin when I think it was 7. It may have been lower than that when when COVID happened. I wasn't buying Bitcoin then. That was just a period of time when I just wasn't buying and I regret that. I'm not gonna regret missing this. If we get down to $50,000 and I buy anywhere near that, and then we shoot up and, you know, 60, $70,000 is the lowest level we ever get to, well, then that's the that's a good level. Right? I bought there.
So, you know, that's kind of my market advice for tonight, or probably early into this week. I don't know what's gonna go on. We may We may see a sharp recovery and, you know, we may be above $60,000 by 9 o'clock. I'll be putting this out, of course, as soon as I can edit it, but a lot of people don't listen to it for a few days. And it may be 60, 64, 60 who knows? I don't know. I'm not gonna predict that. I'm not at the panic level yet, although to be honest, I'm getting there. If we don't make a strong recovery here, I think we could even dip down some more. I'll tell you this. There's a lot of miners freaking out right now because this is dipping down to the levels where they can't it's not sustainable.
I was having a discussion online with someone about this. As a pleb miner, as someone who does not depend on my miners to put food on the table, so to speak, I have a Fiat job for that. I can operate at 0 cost essentially, just paying my electricity, essentially forever. They cannot because they have people to pay and executives to compensate and all this kind of crazy stuff. Okay? So burn, baby. Was it Burn Baby Burn? It's an old disco song. Sorry. It's a famous one. If you're old enough, you might even recognize it. Was it disco inferno? I think it's the name of the song.
You can go look it up. I'll include a link in the show notes. Oh, there's gotta be something on YouTube I should never sing. I think it's disco inferno. Sorry. I don't wanna get off, but it's just funny. It's the tramps disco inferno. Nice. It was on the Saturday night fever soundtrack, which by the way, I've never seen that movie despite popular opinion. Yeah. It's a funny song. Might be appropriate to this moment. But, yeah, burn it burn it burn it down. Let's get a quick few of these miners cleared out. That'd be kinda nice. I'm tired of them. They've running up the hash rate.
Just kidding. No. Not really. Don't be afraid to buy. Bitcoin's been around for 15 years. Bitcoin's going to be around for the next 50 years. It'll be around for the next 100 years. Hopefully, it'll be around for far longer than that. Alright. So there you go. That's our market summary. A little bit different tonight. Right? Weekly close, block height. Our difficulty adjustment earlier tonight was showing up at 4.97% down on August 14th, so we're roughly 10 days out of that. The last one was just a couple days ago did end up being 10 and a half percent up. This is what I'm talking about. So many miners putting so much hash rate online, the difficulty adjustment is just shooting up. Well, you know what? Shut them down, baby. Because at 58,000, maybe 54,000, excuse me, they are maybe not profitable.
I'm good with that. Alright. Let's move on before I start ranting. To be honest, ladies and gentlemen, I don't have anything specific to talk about tonight. I do in general. I don't wanna harp on this, but I've been spending a lot of time thinking over the last few weeks. I've gone up to, Bitcoin conference, listened to Trump's talk, listen to RFK's talk, listen to the silence coming out of the Democratic Party. We have some well, actually, no. Let me take that back. I want to be as correct as possible. Not out of the Democratic Party, out of the presumed vice pres or current vice president, presumed presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. And I wanna say her name right. Apparently, I've been saying it wrong, and I do apologize. I was not doing that on purpose.
Anyways, there's been nothing but silence. Now I've got news about that this week, but you compare that with an independent who used to be a democrat and Robert f Kennedy junior. You've got, of course, Donald Trump who actually used to be a democrat and is now a republican and is the republican candidate for president. It's a strange world. Okay? And as I said last year, yes, this year to an extent, at least, I think in a lot of ways has been the year of regulation. Next year, I believe, and I'm it's August. I shouldn't be making these statements, and I will reserve the right to change this before the end of the year. But next year is shaping up to be basically nation state, adoption.
Nation state, Bitcoin Reserve. Nation state, probably legal tender. We've got another news item about that tonight as well, and I don't wanna jump the gun, but another nation state item. And I think we will see a lot of headway pick up on that. But I'm getting to be frankly very concerned about our election here in the United States, and I try not to talk about politics. And I as I've told you before, I'm an independent. I'm neither Republican nor democrat. The one thing you can pin me down on is I am a very conservative financial person and I the 35 now $1,000,000,000,000 deficit that we have as a nation disgust me, frankly. It makes me sick to my stomach.
What I see playing out is if Kamala Harris does not change her tune, and she may, and we'll talk about that. We'll see. But if she were to get in office and she were to continue to collaborate with I'm just going to go ahead and say this because I think it's getting very obvious with with Elizabeth Warren and the anti crypto people that she has involved with that for whatever reason, which I always find bizarre. I don't know if I've told you this or not. Of course, Elizabeth Warren has always painted herself as this progressive democrat. Okay?
Somebody who's for the little people. She used to fight the big banks and this kind of thing. And yet, here she is being so anti crypto. It's just ridiculous. And yet it's being proven over and over again, specifically with Bitcoin, with mining, for example, how influential, how how helpful that can be in terms of the environment and in terms of bringing power to impoverished people who do not have access to the same power that Elizabeth Warren does when she walks in her flat in Massachusetts and flips on a light switch. It's it's disgusting.
But she apparently has Kamala Harris's ear. So if that doesn't change and she gets elected, Kamala Harris. Kamala. I'm sorry. I don't know why I have a I promise you I'm not doing that on purpose. Kamala. It doesn't it could it would be very bad for the United States. So as an American, now the rest of the world might go, well, so what? But as an American, I would not be very happy with that. Whether we do it first or whether another country does it first. Countries, well, you could argue, actually, it's not even an argument. El Salvador, at least publicly, was the 1st country to start stacking sats, to start sack stacking Bitcoin. They're buying 1 Bitcoin per day as far as I understand, and they are mining Bitcoin as well. I do not know what their public Bitcoin reserves are at this point, but they do have them.
But I will say this, if the United States is not the 1st large Western, so to speak, nation, it it will be a very to start stacking Bitcoin, it will be very disappointing to me as an American. So I wanna do everything I can to keep that from happening, which means unfortunately that I had to get drug into this political cesspool and deal with things that make me feel like I'm back in the days when I raised pigs and had to clean out their, pigs are not the cleanest creatures, shall we say. And, taking care of them was sometimes a little messy.
They're all gray. Quite nice tonight. It's about the best thing I got going on. It does look like maybe glancing at the, charts. If I go to the right time frame, I think I can see this better. Yeah. We're starting to get a looks like we're starting to form a bottom there, like, 355 or so. That may be our bottom. The bottom may be in. We may be moving up from there. We'll see. I do have one more smash buying me tonight. I hope you're doing the same. Unfortunately, I can't do this in real time, and it's not financial advice anyways. But this is what I'm doing, and it's worked out well for me in the past. By the way, I did not mention while we're talking about the market.
Transaction fees are actually very nice. Right now, they're at 3 sets per v byte right now for low, medium, and high priority. Sweet. 23¢. You can send money anywhere in the world. Pretty doggone sweet. And our memory usage of the mempool is also down 643 megabytes. That's down like a 100 megs over last week. We may clear this mempool out yet. I don't think so, but it's possible. We'll see. I think when we get down to that 3, 2, and 1 sat per v, but there's gonna be a lot of transactions to shoot through. I've got some stuff to move around myself. It's probably time to go ahead and do that the next few days while things are still low.
Alright. So, yeah, I just I don't know. It it's concerning to me because I almost hate to say this, and I I maybe I shouldn't frame it this way, but I almost feel like I'm a one issue candidate. Right? Do you support Bitcoin? Do you support my right to hold that Bitcoin? Do you support my right to use that Bitcoin legally? Do you support, this country actually stacking Bitcoin? Because that's good for the country. Do you so I would love to see Bitcoin not as illegal tender necessarily, but let's stop the capital gains nonsense. Okay? Especially on smaller purchases. I saw a bill, which as far as I can tell, has never gotten anywhere.
I'm a little confused about it, and it's not the one that Cynthia Loomis, senator excuse me. Senator Cynthia Loomis, put in last week about the strategic reserve for the United States. But there was another bill that doesn't look like it made it anywhere, but one of the aspects of it would if it's a small purchase, basically, like, I don't know what it was. $200 or less, whatever it was, that you don't have to worry about the cap gains. You don't have to keep track of that. I would love to see that because it would make bookkeeping so much simpler for somebody who just wants to use to spend Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
I think that's very important. I don't think that's going to happen right out of the box. I mean, I I look. If we could just tell people to shove off and I have the right as a under the 4th Amendment of the constitution is right to privacy and a right to have control over my papers. Well, code is paper, baby. Code is speech. Code is paper. Put it down there. It's just code. It's my code, and you can't have it, and I shouldn't have to put it somewhere else. Just just that alone would be a big step. I don't think that to me, central bank digital currencies are a really big deal. I think they're the basically, the ultimate way to spy on citizens, en masse, all at once.
You give me a central bank digital currency that you're forcing a nation to use just like what is going on in China, for example, And you can tell everything that they do because it's just a big giant database. You could query that puppy. You could tell what somebody's spending their money on or not spending their money on. That's completely completely the opposite of what the 4th amendment says. So that's important to me. And these things are getting to be very, very important to me, and it almost doesn't matter what party they belong to or the other things that they support or the way that they even act frankly. Look. Let's be honest. Donald Trump, I'm fixing to offend half of y'all. Sorry.
Some of you, I'm the maybe less than half. I don't know. But some of you will be happy. Some of you won't. Donald Trump, you know, not the best individual role model in the world. But if he's telling me, and I have reason to believe that he will follow through, it's not just some rapid campaign promise. But if he's telling me that I'll set up a central reserve or at least I'll try because that's the thing. You can't just wave a magic wand here in the United States and make that happen. You have to work with congress. Right? Your house of representatives, the senate, you had to get a bill passed, but I'm gonna shoot for that strategic reserve. I'm gonna shoot to I don't know. Whatever else was that he promised in that speech.
No? And the Democrat, is not, well, then frankly, I'm probably voting for Donald Trump. I'll hold my nose and pull that lever. So I guess I'm a single single issue voter. So I hope I didn't offend too many people by that. But regardless, I think this is very important. And you may say, well, Macintosh, that's not going on in my country. No. We've got other things going on in your country, apparently. Well, we'll talk about that. But I do think that these things will happen in time. Countries are going to have to make choices. Some countries already have. You've got El Salvador legal tender. You've got El Salvador mining Bitcoin. You got El Salvador huddling Bitcoin.
You've got Bhutan mining Bitcoin. You can laugh at these countries, but 30 years from now, people won't be laughing. What do you got going on in the EU? Well, self custody bad. I don't think they pass that law. Yeah. I think that got taken down. It's unclear. It happened around the end of March. I think it got overturned. I don't think it ended up going through. Anyways, you've got places that are very, very hard. I'll give you an example. And it's a place I've talked about a number of times. Right next to Bhutan, Nepal. This is a place that I have a personal interest in. I have friends who have been in there multiple times.
I've not been myself, but it's a place that would be the perfect site for something like what gridless is doing, where you go in and you you help people bring power to their village. You and and at the same time and bring them industry, bring them jobs, bring them light so that they can just study more and do better in school. And at the same time, you're mining Bitcoin. You're you know, because there's because there's that part of the equation. You know what? In Nepal, they've banned crypto and Bitcoin because some yahoos were in there. I think it was 2021, and they were, they were scamming people and it didn't have anything to do with Bitcoin.
But the government just said, nope. Can't do that. So I don't have the opportunity to go in there and help those people. I hope eventually that will change, and I hope it's not too long. But countries will be making these kind of choices. And it's funny, but I do well, I don't maybe funny, maybe not. I do believe that these choices will ultimately, shape the future of those countries. Now there's a lot of people in the Bitcoin space in particular who when you start talking about governments and they're just like, anarchy.
We should all rule ourselves. And I'm a libertarian. I'm, I'm really an anarchist and so on and so forth. I get that. I don't want the government interfering in my life. But the reality is in the 100 and almost 200 countries there are in the world, there are governments. And there's not a single one of those that will just leave you alone. So you have to interact with it just like I do. So if I can do something, if I could do my part to make that better, to make it just a little bit more better, you know, you might be amazed in the long run what Bitcoin what a country moving to a Bitcoin standard would do for that country.
One thing, it'll force them not to be borrowing money like or printing money really like there's no tomorrow. Okay. I wanna go ahead and move on, because we're gonna go through our supporters. We're gonna go through our news. I do want to follow-up because some of this news does kind of relate to what we've been talking about. Okay. So let's do that. Let's just go ahead and move on. We got some support this week, a little bit more than last week. Our total was 26105 stats, that was streaming and boosting. We only got one boost this week. It was a great message, so glad to share this. This comes from our friend Gulag Bound, who's a, clearly a regular listener. Thank you, Gulag Bound. And clearly, as you can tell, a regular supporter of this podcast. So they were listening to episode 177, Bitcoin Game Theory, and, posted a row of sticks, 1111, so 1111 SATs, and said, shaking the creator of PGP's hand is something to be proud of. The NGU or number go up. Crowd at the conference had no idea regarding the groundwork and sacrifice the OGs laid and made. Glad my sets went to making his day.
I appreciate that. Good luck bound. Yeah. It was really cool. I said I was he's talking about meeting Phil Zimmerman. I got a chance to shake his hand. I explained that last week in case you didn't catch what was going on there. Okay. I appreciate that, and I do appreciate the streaming that was going on, for those that were involved. Thank you very much. Okay. Let's jump on into the news. I wanna talk about this one first because it directly relates to what we were just talking about. So I have a view, and I can't substantiate this, but that both China and Russia are already mining Bitcoin as a country, as as a nation.
It's just it's just things that I hear, rumor, hearsay, which probably isn't the best way to be, you know, making these kind of, statements, but I'm pretty sure that that's true. Well, Russia has now come out and Russia has kinda been back and forth on Bitcoin. Apparently, in their state legislature, they have passed 2 Bitcoin related bills. This was late last month, so, about a week ago. They've approved Bitcoin mining, and they've also, a second bill approved basically cross border exchange using Bitcoin. And basically, it outlines how the mining is gonna be handled and of course because it's Russia, they're gonna have the Bank of Russia kind of in charge of it.
They're gonna have to work with the mining infrastructure people. So it's all gonna be very, frankly, communistic and which they are. And, you know, but they are not banning mining. They're not banning Bitcoin. And frankly, with the cheap electricity that they have with the immense amounts of oil and then natural gas, which they can flare, just like they do here in the United States, and they can capture that energy with Bitcoin mining and turn that into power and then turn that into cheaper Bitcoin and so on and so forth. They have a and, frankly, their their temperature. I mean, Siberia is a great place to mine.
Right? It doesn't get too hot. And, the only problem you got is making sure it actually stays warm enough. So in addition, they're talking about these cross border settlements. They're basically starting to set up the ability to transfer, to deal with other countries, with other entities outside of Russia in Bitcoin. Now they talk about crypto as well, and you're gonna hear that in a lot of places. I think eventually it will go back to Bitcoin. So that law, the second one goes into effect on September 1st. So just another less than a month from now, actually. And let's see. Yeah. The mining one was November 1st, so it's a couple months from now.
So this is another little example of a country starting to establish its Bitcoin presence. And I think, ultimately, Russia will be spending a lot of rubles on Bitcoin. Back to our our next bit of news. The Bitcoin Core project, I just wanted to make mention of this. They have announced 2 new security advisories, for vulnerabilities. I'm not gonna go into the vulnerabilities. I have the link to the security advisories page. It's just the top 2 on that page. So these were patched in version 22 point o of Bitcoin Core. All the previous versions, are not patched.
Alright? And, so to fix these, you're going to have to, Yeah. You're gonna have to be on version 22. So what they're trying to do what I and I've probably mentioned this before, but what they're trying to do is get people from running really old versions of Bitcoin core because it makes it difficult to maintain. Keep those up to date, keep security issues out of them. So essentially, they're forcing people. They're revealing, well, we patched this. Now this was a vulnerability that they found that, you know, it's not something that's out there in the wild, but they're saying, look. We're releasing this. You've gotta be on version 22 now to be able to, not be vulnerable to this. And then, later in August, it says, and this came straight out of the email from them, we will follow-up later in August to publicly disclose vulnerabilities fixed in version 23, and then in September to disclose those fixed in version 24, and so on until we run out of unmaintained versions to disclose vulnerabilities for. The announced policy, which they've got a policy about this, how long they're gonna maintain these, will then start to be observed for new versions. So they're on version, what is I think 27.
So, you know, we're talking and, I mean, this is actually going back quite a bit. It doesn't sound like it, but these are actually fairly old. I've always been more, I don't upgrade as soon as a new version comes out unless there's just a real reason to. But I've always been pretty good about staying pretty up to date Because I know that there are vulnerabilities that they don't, have patches out for like this in the older version, and but they're known at least internally to Bitcoin Core. And maybe somebody else knows them too, and then then can exploit them. So I've always been one to stay more on the newer side anyways. But if you're not, then that's something you may need to start thinking about because they are absolutely pushing that.
I don't know if I mentioned this last week, at the conference, they did reveal at the Bitcoin conference. The next, Bitcoin conference is going to be, oh, I think I did because I said it was in Las Vegas. It's May 27th through 29th next year, so it's a little earlier. I have said on here, I think I've already said on here, I'm probably not going. And I'm probably not. We'll see. Maybe, you know, for looking a couple $100,000 Bitcoin, maybe I am. But, you know, it it kinda be a stretch for me. I'd have to, I'd have to get in an airplane, which is not something I'm particularly thrilled about these days, and travel.
It'd be frankly a lot more expensive than the one that we just went to, at least for me. And, don't know that I really wanna do that even though I would love to continue to meet new people and meet up with old friends. So I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. And then here's the last bit of news, and this is what I this and the Russian piece, I really wanted to spend a few minutes on. So a couple of days ago, actually, this was yesterday, it came out. It I really think I heard about this day before, but regardless, essentially and I'm gonna read this and then I'm gonna kind of explain my view on it. But crypto leaders and the Harris can place campaign. So Kamala Harris, vice president, current vice president of the United States, presidential candidate.
So the campaign officials for her and these crypto leaders are gonna hold a round table. K? It's hosted by one of the democratic representatives, who I have no idea who they are, Roe Connaugh, and they're gonna talk, which I think is a really good thing because the path that the democrat leadership was on was not a good one. They're really starting to get blowback. There are 50,000,000 people in the United States who own Bitcoin, at least not Bitcoin, crypto, at least some amount of it. And this so this will be an election issue for a significant amount of those.
So they're going to meet privately next week with White House aids and with this representative to address, quote, pressing issues and propose policy changes, close quote. Now I've got some policy changes I could propose. First of all, Elizabeth Warren, stop. Just just stop. No more crypto bills from you. Okay? But, yeah, I'm hoping because there are an increasing number of Democrats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate who are coming out and say, yep. I'm pro crypto. We gotta do this for America. But Kamala is not gonna be there apparently.
I think that's a mistake, but hopefully, these people will at least talk to her, and we'll see. Now, I think I've said this on here before. She did turn down an invite to the conference. We could have had the opportunity to hear all 3 major candidates for president speak at that conference. Now unless she changed her tune, it would not have gone over well for her, but she did have the opportunity, and she chose not to do that. And so we will see hopefully, by next week, we'll have some news out of this, and we can talk about that a little bit. I will I will try. Look. I will try not to let politics and specifically the United States politics dominate the discussions. I I'm aware that a number of y'all are maybe not not comfortable, with how much I talked about about US politics. And frankly, I'm not either.
But I will say this, what goes in the United States eventually will be what goes in a lot of the world. So pay attention. If they start banning self custody wallets, that's not good here in the United States. If if they just start shutting down entire industries, if this choke point 2.0 turns into choke point 3.0, where they're just kicking crypto companies just because out of arbitrary pettiness, alpha banks, and this kind of thing. That's not good for the rest of the world. It's not. And I'm well, it's just not. So pay attention to these own these things in your own country. I saw something about Australia, actually, this week.
So limiting I've meant to hold on just a second. I don't remember. Sorry. There was something. But, you know, you've got stuff going on with the EU. And then on the other hand, you've got places where it's booming. But then you've got places that aren't doing so well. I talk about Africa a lot. Nigeria is having some problems. Kenya is having some problems right now. Their economies are not good. I I don't understand Nigeria is so upside down. It makes no sense to me. They have huge oil reserves in Nigeria, and yet somehow they can't make that work for their benefit. I don't know. Maybe they're just in really bad deals. They probably are, and probably has the IMF all over it, to be honest.
But regardless, they're having problems. Right? There's a lot of unrest. I mean, I didn't even talk, like, something's going on in England. I don't understand it. It seems like it popped up all of a sudden. France has been having issues, strikes, all this kind of stuff. Venezuela Venezuela had an election, and, you know, they're supposedly a democracy. Maduro, I think it's Maduro. He's been in charge for 25 years. How's that work? And he said, oh, well, I got 95% of the votes, but won't show the data. And everyone is basically saying, no. You don't. And people are protesting in the streets and they're getting hold off to jail. So in a lot of ways, there's a lot of and, of course, the Bank of Japan, the whole Japan situation, there's a lot of things brewing.
There's a lot going on. Anyways, I don't wanna be a downer. But yeah. Alright. Let's roll through our software updates. Albie hub version 1.4.0. So this came out like a week after the last update. It enhances the mobile friendliness. So that's, like phone. So that's good. And more fixes and improvements. Phoenix Android, version 2 dot 3 dot 6, with some parsing issues fixes that, with BIP 353 addresses. I don't know what those are, but, yeah, fix those. And then their Phoenix Damon, what I would call it Damon, their their their server version, 0.3.2 with several new features as well. And I did wanna point out Graphene OS. If you happen to run that, it's a it's an it's an Android based operating system that's, like, very security optimized and locked down. They've pointed they've got out a new version.
It was, July 28th is something to something to keep an eye on. Crazy world going on right now. Lots of craziness. The miners are getting very restless, with Bitcoin simply because of the price. I don't know. Alright. Let's wrap this up. So Satoshis Plebs is a value for value podcast. And as you've maybe noticed, we have no advertisements. We have no sponsorships, anything like that. And in large part, I do that because of journalistic integrity. I don't want to be sponsored by, say, a hardware wallet and then not free to talk about the flaws in that hardware wallet or maybe one that's better. I love SeedSigner. I don't get a dime for them. I was lucky enough to shake SeedSigner's hand at the conference, but he didn't slip me a $100 bill when I did that.
Okay? I do that because I talk about it because I think it's the best one, and I've looked at a lot of them. I've owned multiple of them. I've looked at everyone that I've I know of. I'll say that. And seats on there for the $100 or so that you spend on it is the best that's out there. It's air gapped. It's reasonably easy to use. You can very easily use it for multiple, like, accounts. So basically multiple wallets, multiple people, and, this kind of thing. So very, very cool stuff. If you're in the market for a Bitcoin hardware wallet, it's cold storage as we like to call it. And if you don't have one, you probably ought to look at that. Anyways, I don't do that. So how do I stay running? Well, mostly out of my pocket right now.
But the idea is this is a value for value podcast. And if you're hearing stuff of value, you're getting stuff of value week after week. You know, maybe you would wanna consider supporting me. And you can do that directly through using a podcasting 2.0 app, something like Fountain or, my favorite right now, I'll just be honest, is Podcast Guru. But regardless, you hook up a lightning wallet to that, and then you can stream sets. You can stream sets like these other people did to support the show or you can send a boost with a message like Gulag Bound did.
I love getting those messages. I love getting that feedback because then I know if something I'm talking about is the right thing or not. Another way that you could provide value is you can simply clip an episode in an app like fountain and post that. If it's something new, a current episode or maybe the last episode, I'll boost you 500 sats back. If it's an older episode, I'll boost you 300. Just tag me in the comment or in the clip so that I I see it. Okay? It's a way for you to make some treasure, so you're getting value. It's also a way for the message of Satoshi's plebs to be spread.
Okay? Another great way is simply just telling other people about the podcast. I'm not very good at marketing. I'll be honest. It's something I need to be better at. I've watched my friends over at mere mortals grow a lot over the last couple of years as I've been listening to them and watching their video cast from time to time, this kind of thing. And they do a great job of marketing their podcast. I, on the other hand, need to learn from them and do the same. But, just spreading that stuff word-of-mouth is great. Okay? How can you get a hold of me?
I got multiple ways. You can just send me an email, mcintosh at satoshis-plebs.com. I'm on Twitter at McintoshFintech, and I'm on mastodon at mcintosh@podcast index.social. I sure would love to hear from you. I hope this has been helpful. So as I always end, stay humble, go out, make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Go smash, buy some Bitcoin.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is August 4th, and this is episode 178 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is the burning down. I'm getting my levels set, making sure everything's adjusted. We're closing out a crazy week. Right now, I wanna go ahead and actually we'll go through the stats. Our weekly close this week was $58,143. $58,143 which was just under $10,000 less than last week, which is, of course, not good. However, since closing, which I I'm recording this at 10 PM CST, UTC flips at 7 PM. So just over 3 hours ago, 10:13 as I start this recording at block height. Let me see. 855,434.
The Bitcoin price sits right above 54 ,000 which means in the last 3 hours we've lost another $4,000 What's going on? The end is here. I can hear it all. Just like all the other times this stuff has happened. At some point in your Bitcoin journey, you become immune to this. I view this as a great opportunity to DCA as a great opportunity to smash buy some Bitcoin. And in fact, I've done that tonight, multiple times, actually, and I still have one more to go. I'm waiting to see if it's going to creep back down it. Yeah. My chart actually shows it's interesting because my chart actually shows, apparently on some exchange, this was Binance. Actually, it got down to 50 3,000.
Oh, wait. They've adjusted this. Hold on. I do think they've adjusted this because I thought it got down to, like, 51,000. But it did get down to 53,000, essentially, according to this chart. I swear this chart has been adjusted. I was just looking at it a few minutes ago. Regardless whether it was 51 or 53, I'm waiting to kinda see if it it keeps moving down. A lot of what's driving this is really bad economic news. This week, we've got the stock market here in the United States dumping. Bitcoin is, by the way, still considered a risk on asset, meaning when when things are being sold when things are, when there's risk, that's not when you people traditionally, the average person, I should say the average investor, maybe, maybe the average in, institutional investor really is investing in Bitcoin.
On the other hand, when things are good, rates are down, all this cut, that's when they're buying in. So they saw the bad news about the stock market. The premarket hours, the stock market doesn't open for, like, another almost 12 hours, like, 10, 12 hours. But it's down in the aftermarket stuff, which I don't that baffles me how we can have an aftermarket if the stock market isn't open, but whatever. It's down like 2 or 300 points. So everybody spooked. And then the Bank of Japan is about to roll over on itself. They adjusted their rates a quarter of a percent up, which doesn't sound like very much, but for them because of the high amount of leverage debt that they have.
It's essentially catastrophic, and the currency is going all over the place and the bank of Japan is trying to control it and it's just not doing well. See, this is modern economic. What do they call it? Modern Monetary Theory, ladies and gentlemen, that you could control these markets, that you can manipulate them, that you can by tweaking an interest rate here and doing this there that, you know, we've got we've got control of this until we don't. And then chaos ensues. And that's what we're seeing to an extent at least right now. No. I'm not saying that Japan is done for. In fact, I don't think that they are. I don't think this is the end, so to speak, for Japan. And I don't wanna sound like I'm saying that, but it's it's really bad news.
And so that's affecting our stock market that's affecting Bitcoin. You've got you've just got all these factors going in. So we're gonna see how low we go. And, I think we'll have a pretty sharp recovery from there, to be honest, but that remains to be seen. But I view these opportunities as a a great place to be DCA ing some cheap sats. And I also view it as a great place to if you have some dollars, so a little stash of dirty Fiat that you want to invest, it's probably a good time to do that. Because at some point we're going to do one of these dips. We're going to go down and then that'll be the last time we ever get to that level. So you can tell you can say that McIntosh bought at this level. Did you?
I'll buy at this level. I'll buy below $50,000 if if it got really bad and, you know, I'll double down and put everything I can in. I mean, that's just the game. At least it's my game. I don't know. Maybe I've been doing this a little too long, but I missed $7,000 Bitcoin when I think it was 7. It may have been lower than that when when COVID happened. I wasn't buying Bitcoin then. That was just a period of time when I just wasn't buying and I regret that. I'm not gonna regret missing this. If we get down to $50,000 and I buy anywhere near that, and then we shoot up and, you know, 60, $70,000 is the lowest level we ever get to, well, then that's the that's a good level. Right? I bought there.
So, you know, that's kind of my market advice for tonight, or probably early into this week. I don't know what's gonna go on. We may We may see a sharp recovery and, you know, we may be above $60,000 by 9 o'clock. I'll be putting this out, of course, as soon as I can edit it, but a lot of people don't listen to it for a few days. And it may be 60, 64, 60 who knows? I don't know. I'm not gonna predict that. I'm not at the panic level yet, although to be honest, I'm getting there. If we don't make a strong recovery here, I think we could even dip down some more. I'll tell you this. There's a lot of miners freaking out right now because this is dipping down to the levels where they can't it's not sustainable.
I was having a discussion online with someone about this. As a pleb miner, as someone who does not depend on my miners to put food on the table, so to speak, I have a Fiat job for that. I can operate at 0 cost essentially, just paying my electricity, essentially forever. They cannot because they have people to pay and executives to compensate and all this kind of crazy stuff. Okay? So burn, baby. Was it Burn Baby Burn? It's an old disco song. Sorry. It's a famous one. If you're old enough, you might even recognize it. Was it disco inferno? I think it's the name of the song.
You can go look it up. I'll include a link in the show notes. Oh, there's gotta be something on YouTube I should never sing. I think it's disco inferno. Sorry. I don't wanna get off, but it's just funny. It's the tramps disco inferno. Nice. It was on the Saturday night fever soundtrack, which by the way, I've never seen that movie despite popular opinion. Yeah. It's a funny song. Might be appropriate to this moment. But, yeah, burn it burn it burn it down. Let's get a quick few of these miners cleared out. That'd be kinda nice. I'm tired of them. They've running up the hash rate.
Just kidding. No. Not really. Don't be afraid to buy. Bitcoin's been around for 15 years. Bitcoin's going to be around for the next 50 years. It'll be around for the next 100 years. Hopefully, it'll be around for far longer than that. Alright. So there you go. That's our market summary. A little bit different tonight. Right? Weekly close, block height. Our difficulty adjustment earlier tonight was showing up at 4.97% down on August 14th, so we're roughly 10 days out of that. The last one was just a couple days ago did end up being 10 and a half percent up. This is what I'm talking about. So many miners putting so much hash rate online, the difficulty adjustment is just shooting up. Well, you know what? Shut them down, baby. Because at 58,000, maybe 54,000, excuse me, they are maybe not profitable.
I'm good with that. Alright. Let's move on before I start ranting. To be honest, ladies and gentlemen, I don't have anything specific to talk about tonight. I do in general. I don't wanna harp on this, but I've been spending a lot of time thinking over the last few weeks. I've gone up to, Bitcoin conference, listened to Trump's talk, listen to RFK's talk, listen to the silence coming out of the Democratic Party. We have some well, actually, no. Let me take that back. I want to be as correct as possible. Not out of the Democratic Party, out of the presumed vice pres or current vice president, presumed presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. And I wanna say her name right. Apparently, I've been saying it wrong, and I do apologize. I was not doing that on purpose.
Anyways, there's been nothing but silence. Now I've got news about that this week, but you compare that with an independent who used to be a democrat and Robert f Kennedy junior. You've got, of course, Donald Trump who actually used to be a democrat and is now a republican and is the republican candidate for president. It's a strange world. Okay? And as I said last year, yes, this year to an extent, at least, I think in a lot of ways has been the year of regulation. Next year, I believe, and I'm it's August. I shouldn't be making these statements, and I will reserve the right to change this before the end of the year. But next year is shaping up to be basically nation state, adoption.
Nation state, Bitcoin Reserve. Nation state, probably legal tender. We've got another news item about that tonight as well, and I don't wanna jump the gun, but another nation state item. And I think we will see a lot of headway pick up on that. But I'm getting to be frankly very concerned about our election here in the United States, and I try not to talk about politics. And I as I've told you before, I'm an independent. I'm neither Republican nor democrat. The one thing you can pin me down on is I am a very conservative financial person and I the 35 now $1,000,000,000,000 deficit that we have as a nation disgust me, frankly. It makes me sick to my stomach.
What I see playing out is if Kamala Harris does not change her tune, and she may, and we'll talk about that. We'll see. But if she were to get in office and she were to continue to collaborate with I'm just going to go ahead and say this because I think it's getting very obvious with with Elizabeth Warren and the anti crypto people that she has involved with that for whatever reason, which I always find bizarre. I don't know if I've told you this or not. Of course, Elizabeth Warren has always painted herself as this progressive democrat. Okay?
Somebody who's for the little people. She used to fight the big banks and this kind of thing. And yet, here she is being so anti crypto. It's just ridiculous. And yet it's being proven over and over again, specifically with Bitcoin, with mining, for example, how influential, how how helpful that can be in terms of the environment and in terms of bringing power to impoverished people who do not have access to the same power that Elizabeth Warren does when she walks in her flat in Massachusetts and flips on a light switch. It's it's disgusting.
But she apparently has Kamala Harris's ear. So if that doesn't change and she gets elected, Kamala Harris. Kamala. I'm sorry. I don't know why I have a I promise you I'm not doing that on purpose. Kamala. It doesn't it could it would be very bad for the United States. So as an American, now the rest of the world might go, well, so what? But as an American, I would not be very happy with that. Whether we do it first or whether another country does it first. Countries, well, you could argue, actually, it's not even an argument. El Salvador, at least publicly, was the 1st country to start stacking sats, to start sack stacking Bitcoin. They're buying 1 Bitcoin per day as far as I understand, and they are mining Bitcoin as well. I do not know what their public Bitcoin reserves are at this point, but they do have them.
But I will say this, if the United States is not the 1st large Western, so to speak, nation, it it will be a very to start stacking Bitcoin, it will be very disappointing to me as an American. So I wanna do everything I can to keep that from happening, which means unfortunately that I had to get drug into this political cesspool and deal with things that make me feel like I'm back in the days when I raised pigs and had to clean out their, pigs are not the cleanest creatures, shall we say. And, taking care of them was sometimes a little messy.
They're all gray. Quite nice tonight. It's about the best thing I got going on. It does look like maybe glancing at the, charts. If I go to the right time frame, I think I can see this better. Yeah. We're starting to get a looks like we're starting to form a bottom there, like, 355 or so. That may be our bottom. The bottom may be in. We may be moving up from there. We'll see. I do have one more smash buying me tonight. I hope you're doing the same. Unfortunately, I can't do this in real time, and it's not financial advice anyways. But this is what I'm doing, and it's worked out well for me in the past. By the way, I did not mention while we're talking about the market.
Transaction fees are actually very nice. Right now, they're at 3 sets per v byte right now for low, medium, and high priority. Sweet. 23¢. You can send money anywhere in the world. Pretty doggone sweet. And our memory usage of the mempool is also down 643 megabytes. That's down like a 100 megs over last week. We may clear this mempool out yet. I don't think so, but it's possible. We'll see. I think when we get down to that 3, 2, and 1 sat per v, but there's gonna be a lot of transactions to shoot through. I've got some stuff to move around myself. It's probably time to go ahead and do that the next few days while things are still low.
Alright. So, yeah, I just I don't know. It it's concerning to me because I almost hate to say this, and I I maybe I shouldn't frame it this way, but I almost feel like I'm a one issue candidate. Right? Do you support Bitcoin? Do you support my right to hold that Bitcoin? Do you support my right to use that Bitcoin legally? Do you support, this country actually stacking Bitcoin? Because that's good for the country. Do you so I would love to see Bitcoin not as illegal tender necessarily, but let's stop the capital gains nonsense. Okay? Especially on smaller purchases. I saw a bill, which as far as I can tell, has never gotten anywhere.
I'm a little confused about it, and it's not the one that Cynthia Loomis, senator excuse me. Senator Cynthia Loomis, put in last week about the strategic reserve for the United States. But there was another bill that doesn't look like it made it anywhere, but one of the aspects of it would if it's a small purchase, basically, like, I don't know what it was. $200 or less, whatever it was, that you don't have to worry about the cap gains. You don't have to keep track of that. I would love to see that because it would make bookkeeping so much simpler for somebody who just wants to use to spend Bitcoin as a medium of exchange.
I think that's very important. I don't think that's going to happen right out of the box. I mean, I I look. If we could just tell people to shove off and I have the right as a under the 4th Amendment of the constitution is right to privacy and a right to have control over my papers. Well, code is paper, baby. Code is speech. Code is paper. Put it down there. It's just code. It's my code, and you can't have it, and I shouldn't have to put it somewhere else. Just just that alone would be a big step. I don't think that to me, central bank digital currencies are a really big deal. I think they're the basically, the ultimate way to spy on citizens, en masse, all at once.
You give me a central bank digital currency that you're forcing a nation to use just like what is going on in China, for example, And you can tell everything that they do because it's just a big giant database. You could query that puppy. You could tell what somebody's spending their money on or not spending their money on. That's completely completely the opposite of what the 4th amendment says. So that's important to me. And these things are getting to be very, very important to me, and it almost doesn't matter what party they belong to or the other things that they support or the way that they even act frankly. Look. Let's be honest. Donald Trump, I'm fixing to offend half of y'all. Sorry.
Some of you, I'm the maybe less than half. I don't know. But some of you will be happy. Some of you won't. Donald Trump, you know, not the best individual role model in the world. But if he's telling me, and I have reason to believe that he will follow through, it's not just some rapid campaign promise. But if he's telling me that I'll set up a central reserve or at least I'll try because that's the thing. You can't just wave a magic wand here in the United States and make that happen. You have to work with congress. Right? Your house of representatives, the senate, you had to get a bill passed, but I'm gonna shoot for that strategic reserve. I'm gonna shoot to I don't know. Whatever else was that he promised in that speech.
No? And the Democrat, is not, well, then frankly, I'm probably voting for Donald Trump. I'll hold my nose and pull that lever. So I guess I'm a single single issue voter. So I hope I didn't offend too many people by that. But regardless, I think this is very important. And you may say, well, Macintosh, that's not going on in my country. No. We've got other things going on in your country, apparently. Well, we'll talk about that. But I do think that these things will happen in time. Countries are going to have to make choices. Some countries already have. You've got El Salvador legal tender. You've got El Salvador mining Bitcoin. You got El Salvador huddling Bitcoin.
You've got Bhutan mining Bitcoin. You can laugh at these countries, but 30 years from now, people won't be laughing. What do you got going on in the EU? Well, self custody bad. I don't think they pass that law. Yeah. I think that got taken down. It's unclear. It happened around the end of March. I think it got overturned. I don't think it ended up going through. Anyways, you've got places that are very, very hard. I'll give you an example. And it's a place I've talked about a number of times. Right next to Bhutan, Nepal. This is a place that I have a personal interest in. I have friends who have been in there multiple times.
I've not been myself, but it's a place that would be the perfect site for something like what gridless is doing, where you go in and you you help people bring power to their village. You and and at the same time and bring them industry, bring them jobs, bring them light so that they can just study more and do better in school. And at the same time, you're mining Bitcoin. You're you know, because there's because there's that part of the equation. You know what? In Nepal, they've banned crypto and Bitcoin because some yahoos were in there. I think it was 2021, and they were, they were scamming people and it didn't have anything to do with Bitcoin.
But the government just said, nope. Can't do that. So I don't have the opportunity to go in there and help those people. I hope eventually that will change, and I hope it's not too long. But countries will be making these kind of choices. And it's funny, but I do well, I don't maybe funny, maybe not. I do believe that these choices will ultimately, shape the future of those countries. Now there's a lot of people in the Bitcoin space in particular who when you start talking about governments and they're just like, anarchy.
We should all rule ourselves. And I'm a libertarian. I'm, I'm really an anarchist and so on and so forth. I get that. I don't want the government interfering in my life. But the reality is in the 100 and almost 200 countries there are in the world, there are governments. And there's not a single one of those that will just leave you alone. So you have to interact with it just like I do. So if I can do something, if I could do my part to make that better, to make it just a little bit more better, you know, you might be amazed in the long run what Bitcoin what a country moving to a Bitcoin standard would do for that country.
One thing, it'll force them not to be borrowing money like or printing money really like there's no tomorrow. Okay. I wanna go ahead and move on, because we're gonna go through our supporters. We're gonna go through our news. I do want to follow-up because some of this news does kind of relate to what we've been talking about. Okay. So let's do that. Let's just go ahead and move on. We got some support this week, a little bit more than last week. Our total was 26105 stats, that was streaming and boosting. We only got one boost this week. It was a great message, so glad to share this. This comes from our friend Gulag Bound, who's a, clearly a regular listener. Thank you, Gulag Bound. And clearly, as you can tell, a regular supporter of this podcast. So they were listening to episode 177, Bitcoin Game Theory, and, posted a row of sticks, 1111, so 1111 SATs, and said, shaking the creator of PGP's hand is something to be proud of. The NGU or number go up. Crowd at the conference had no idea regarding the groundwork and sacrifice the OGs laid and made. Glad my sets went to making his day.
I appreciate that. Good luck bound. Yeah. It was really cool. I said I was he's talking about meeting Phil Zimmerman. I got a chance to shake his hand. I explained that last week in case you didn't catch what was going on there. Okay. I appreciate that, and I do appreciate the streaming that was going on, for those that were involved. Thank you very much. Okay. Let's jump on into the news. I wanna talk about this one first because it directly relates to what we were just talking about. So I have a view, and I can't substantiate this, but that both China and Russia are already mining Bitcoin as a country, as as a nation.
It's just it's just things that I hear, rumor, hearsay, which probably isn't the best way to be, you know, making these kind of, statements, but I'm pretty sure that that's true. Well, Russia has now come out and Russia has kinda been back and forth on Bitcoin. Apparently, in their state legislature, they have passed 2 Bitcoin related bills. This was late last month, so, about a week ago. They've approved Bitcoin mining, and they've also, a second bill approved basically cross border exchange using Bitcoin. And basically, it outlines how the mining is gonna be handled and of course because it's Russia, they're gonna have the Bank of Russia kind of in charge of it.
They're gonna have to work with the mining infrastructure people. So it's all gonna be very, frankly, communistic and which they are. And, you know, but they are not banning mining. They're not banning Bitcoin. And frankly, with the cheap electricity that they have with the immense amounts of oil and then natural gas, which they can flare, just like they do here in the United States, and they can capture that energy with Bitcoin mining and turn that into power and then turn that into cheaper Bitcoin and so on and so forth. They have a and, frankly, their their temperature. I mean, Siberia is a great place to mine.
Right? It doesn't get too hot. And, the only problem you got is making sure it actually stays warm enough. So in addition, they're talking about these cross border settlements. They're basically starting to set up the ability to transfer, to deal with other countries, with other entities outside of Russia in Bitcoin. Now they talk about crypto as well, and you're gonna hear that in a lot of places. I think eventually it will go back to Bitcoin. So that law, the second one goes into effect on September 1st. So just another less than a month from now, actually. And let's see. Yeah. The mining one was November 1st, so it's a couple months from now.
So this is another little example of a country starting to establish its Bitcoin presence. And I think, ultimately, Russia will be spending a lot of rubles on Bitcoin. Back to our our next bit of news. The Bitcoin Core project, I just wanted to make mention of this. They have announced 2 new security advisories, for vulnerabilities. I'm not gonna go into the vulnerabilities. I have the link to the security advisories page. It's just the top 2 on that page. So these were patched in version 22 point o of Bitcoin Core. All the previous versions, are not patched.
Alright? And, so to fix these, you're going to have to, Yeah. You're gonna have to be on version 22. So what they're trying to do what I and I've probably mentioned this before, but what they're trying to do is get people from running really old versions of Bitcoin core because it makes it difficult to maintain. Keep those up to date, keep security issues out of them. So essentially, they're forcing people. They're revealing, well, we patched this. Now this was a vulnerability that they found that, you know, it's not something that's out there in the wild, but they're saying, look. We're releasing this. You've gotta be on version 22 now to be able to, not be vulnerable to this. And then, later in August, it says, and this came straight out of the email from them, we will follow-up later in August to publicly disclose vulnerabilities fixed in version 23, and then in September to disclose those fixed in version 24, and so on until we run out of unmaintained versions to disclose vulnerabilities for. The announced policy, which they've got a policy about this, how long they're gonna maintain these, will then start to be observed for new versions. So they're on version, what is I think 27.
So, you know, we're talking and, I mean, this is actually going back quite a bit. It doesn't sound like it, but these are actually fairly old. I've always been more, I don't upgrade as soon as a new version comes out unless there's just a real reason to. But I've always been pretty good about staying pretty up to date Because I know that there are vulnerabilities that they don't, have patches out for like this in the older version, and but they're known at least internally to Bitcoin Core. And maybe somebody else knows them too, and then then can exploit them. So I've always been one to stay more on the newer side anyways. But if you're not, then that's something you may need to start thinking about because they are absolutely pushing that.
I don't know if I mentioned this last week, at the conference, they did reveal at the Bitcoin conference. The next, Bitcoin conference is going to be, oh, I think I did because I said it was in Las Vegas. It's May 27th through 29th next year, so it's a little earlier. I have said on here, I think I've already said on here, I'm probably not going. And I'm probably not. We'll see. Maybe, you know, for looking a couple $100,000 Bitcoin, maybe I am. But, you know, it it kinda be a stretch for me. I'd have to, I'd have to get in an airplane, which is not something I'm particularly thrilled about these days, and travel.
It'd be frankly a lot more expensive than the one that we just went to, at least for me. And, don't know that I really wanna do that even though I would love to continue to meet new people and meet up with old friends. So I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. And then here's the last bit of news, and this is what I this and the Russian piece, I really wanted to spend a few minutes on. So a couple of days ago, actually, this was yesterday, it came out. It I really think I heard about this day before, but regardless, essentially and I'm gonna read this and then I'm gonna kind of explain my view on it. But crypto leaders and the Harris can place campaign. So Kamala Harris, vice president, current vice president of the United States, presidential candidate.
So the campaign officials for her and these crypto leaders are gonna hold a round table. K? It's hosted by one of the democratic representatives, who I have no idea who they are, Roe Connaugh, and they're gonna talk, which I think is a really good thing because the path that the democrat leadership was on was not a good one. They're really starting to get blowback. There are 50,000,000 people in the United States who own Bitcoin, at least not Bitcoin, crypto, at least some amount of it. And this so this will be an election issue for a significant amount of those.
So they're going to meet privately next week with White House aids and with this representative to address, quote, pressing issues and propose policy changes, close quote. Now I've got some policy changes I could propose. First of all, Elizabeth Warren, stop. Just just stop. No more crypto bills from you. Okay? But, yeah, I'm hoping because there are an increasing number of Democrats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate who are coming out and say, yep. I'm pro crypto. We gotta do this for America. But Kamala is not gonna be there apparently.
I think that's a mistake, but hopefully, these people will at least talk to her, and we'll see. Now, I think I've said this on here before. She did turn down an invite to the conference. We could have had the opportunity to hear all 3 major candidates for president speak at that conference. Now unless she changed her tune, it would not have gone over well for her, but she did have the opportunity, and she chose not to do that. And so we will see hopefully, by next week, we'll have some news out of this, and we can talk about that a little bit. I will I will try. Look. I will try not to let politics and specifically the United States politics dominate the discussions. I I'm aware that a number of y'all are maybe not not comfortable, with how much I talked about about US politics. And frankly, I'm not either.
But I will say this, what goes in the United States eventually will be what goes in a lot of the world. So pay attention. If they start banning self custody wallets, that's not good here in the United States. If if they just start shutting down entire industries, if this choke point 2.0 turns into choke point 3.0, where they're just kicking crypto companies just because out of arbitrary pettiness, alpha banks, and this kind of thing. That's not good for the rest of the world. It's not. And I'm well, it's just not. So pay attention to these own these things in your own country. I saw something about Australia, actually, this week.
So limiting I've meant to hold on just a second. I don't remember. Sorry. There was something. But, you know, you've got stuff going on with the EU. And then on the other hand, you've got places where it's booming. But then you've got places that aren't doing so well. I talk about Africa a lot. Nigeria is having some problems. Kenya is having some problems right now. Their economies are not good. I I don't understand Nigeria is so upside down. It makes no sense to me. They have huge oil reserves in Nigeria, and yet somehow they can't make that work for their benefit. I don't know. Maybe they're just in really bad deals. They probably are, and probably has the IMF all over it, to be honest.
But regardless, they're having problems. Right? There's a lot of unrest. I mean, I didn't even talk, like, something's going on in England. I don't understand it. It seems like it popped up all of a sudden. France has been having issues, strikes, all this kind of stuff. Venezuela Venezuela had an election, and, you know, they're supposedly a democracy. Maduro, I think it's Maduro. He's been in charge for 25 years. How's that work? And he said, oh, well, I got 95% of the votes, but won't show the data. And everyone is basically saying, no. You don't. And people are protesting in the streets and they're getting hold off to jail. So in a lot of ways, there's a lot of and, of course, the Bank of Japan, the whole Japan situation, there's a lot of things brewing.
There's a lot going on. Anyways, I don't wanna be a downer. But yeah. Alright. Let's roll through our software updates. Albie hub version 1.4.0. So this came out like a week after the last update. It enhances the mobile friendliness. So that's, like phone. So that's good. And more fixes and improvements. Phoenix Android, version 2 dot 3 dot 6, with some parsing issues fixes that, with BIP 353 addresses. I don't know what those are, but, yeah, fix those. And then their Phoenix Damon, what I would call it Damon, their their their server version, 0.3.2 with several new features as well. And I did wanna point out Graphene OS. If you happen to run that, it's a it's an it's an Android based operating system that's, like, very security optimized and locked down. They've pointed they've got out a new version.
It was, July 28th is something to something to keep an eye on. Crazy world going on right now. Lots of craziness. The miners are getting very restless, with Bitcoin simply because of the price. I don't know. Alright. Let's wrap this up. So Satoshis Plebs is a value for value podcast. And as you've maybe noticed, we have no advertisements. We have no sponsorships, anything like that. And in large part, I do that because of journalistic integrity. I don't want to be sponsored by, say, a hardware wallet and then not free to talk about the flaws in that hardware wallet or maybe one that's better. I love SeedSigner. I don't get a dime for them. I was lucky enough to shake SeedSigner's hand at the conference, but he didn't slip me a $100 bill when I did that.
Okay? I do that because I talk about it because I think it's the best one, and I've looked at a lot of them. I've owned multiple of them. I've looked at everyone that I've I know of. I'll say that. And seats on there for the $100 or so that you spend on it is the best that's out there. It's air gapped. It's reasonably easy to use. You can very easily use it for multiple, like, accounts. So basically multiple wallets, multiple people, and, this kind of thing. So very, very cool stuff. If you're in the market for a Bitcoin hardware wallet, it's cold storage as we like to call it. And if you don't have one, you probably ought to look at that. Anyways, I don't do that. So how do I stay running? Well, mostly out of my pocket right now.
But the idea is this is a value for value podcast. And if you're hearing stuff of value, you're getting stuff of value week after week. You know, maybe you would wanna consider supporting me. And you can do that directly through using a podcasting 2.0 app, something like Fountain or, my favorite right now, I'll just be honest, is Podcast Guru. But regardless, you hook up a lightning wallet to that, and then you can stream sets. You can stream sets like these other people did to support the show or you can send a boost with a message like Gulag Bound did.
I love getting those messages. I love getting that feedback because then I know if something I'm talking about is the right thing or not. Another way that you could provide value is you can simply clip an episode in an app like fountain and post that. If it's something new, a current episode or maybe the last episode, I'll boost you 500 sats back. If it's an older episode, I'll boost you 300. Just tag me in the comment or in the clip so that I I see it. Okay? It's a way for you to make some treasure, so you're getting value. It's also a way for the message of Satoshi's plebs to be spread.
Okay? Another great way is simply just telling other people about the podcast. I'm not very good at marketing. I'll be honest. It's something I need to be better at. I've watched my friends over at mere mortals grow a lot over the last couple of years as I've been listening to them and watching their video cast from time to time, this kind of thing. And they do a great job of marketing their podcast. I, on the other hand, need to learn from them and do the same. But, just spreading that stuff word-of-mouth is great. Okay? How can you get a hold of me?
I got multiple ways. You can just send me an email, mcintosh at satoshis-plebs.com. I'm on Twitter at McintoshFintech, and I'm on mastodon at mcintosh@podcast index.social. I sure would love to hear from you. I hope this has been helpful. So as I always end, stay humble, go out, make it a great week. I'll talk to you soon. Go smash, buy some Bitcoin.
Introduction and Market Overview
Economic Factors Affecting Bitcoin
Bitcoin Buying Strategies
Mining and Market Dynamics
Political Implications for Bitcoin
Global Bitcoin Adoption
Bitcoin Core Security Updates
Crypto Leaders and Political Engagement
Software Updates and Closing Remarks
