Dave Ramsey is one of the top personal financial experts in the United States. Millions of people listen to him give financial advice. I have personally benefited from implementing his advice in the past. But is he behind the times?
Bitcoin Weekly Close
August 25th, 2024: $64,190
Block Height at Time of Recording
858,449
News and Notes
Has crypto-skeptic Dave Ramsey changed his tune when it comes to Bitcoin?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-skeptic-dave-ramsey-changed-110400398.html
Baltic Honeybadger Conference - Day One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48aU2UUV68
Baltic Honeybadger Conference - Day Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgQHBN2PtMo
Nostriga 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6mfqcP9Ic
Software Releases
Fountain 1.1.0 Release
Seedsigner v0.8.0
Blue Wallet 7.0.0
Bisq v2.1.0
Bitcoin Weekly Close
August 25th, 2024: $64,190
Block Height at Time of Recording
858,449
News and Notes
Has crypto-skeptic Dave Ramsey changed his tune when it comes to Bitcoin?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-skeptic-dave-ramsey-changed-110400398.html
Baltic Honeybadger Conference - Day One
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48aU2UUV68
Baltic Honeybadger Conference - Day Two
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgQHBN2PtMo
Nostriga 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p6mfqcP9Ic
Software Releases
Fountain 1.1.0 Release
Seedsigner v0.8.0
Blue Wallet 7.0.0
Bisq v2.1.0
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
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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 25th, and this is episode 180 of satoshis plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is Dave Ramsey wrong. Alright. We're gonna get right on into the stats of the week, and then we'll go right into our story, our discussion. This is probably the closest thing I've ever had to a clickbait title, and I don't really mean it to be. I'm being very sincere, and I will explain when we get into that section. The the weekly close just happened an hour and a half ago, August 25, 2024. We are at $64,190 to close out the week.
We're at block height 858,449. We have an estimated 3.54 percent difficulty adjustment going up on August 28th, just a couple of days from now. The previous, adjustment was down 4.19 percent a few weeks ago. So things are, getting a little bit more difficult, but they've honestly backed off a little bit from say, a week ago. I wanna say, when that number was a little higher. The mempool and, transaction fees, we got 812 megabytes of unprocessed transactions in the mempool. We are definitely up on that. It was like 600 and something last week. There's been a couple of pretty big spikes of transactions. I think our transaction fee went up to over a 100 sats per vbyte briefly.
Couple of days ago, I didn't happen to be transacting anything at that point, which was a really good thing. Right now, we're sitting at 3 sats per vbyte. Alright. I've been sitting here enjoying my Earl Grey with the last of my honey from my friend. Disappointed in that. We've got some more honey, but, I do enjoy theirs. It's a a lighter blend than I'm used to, which is more sweet, which frankly I like. Enough about that though. Who's Dave Ramsey? If you're outside the United States, you might not know who they are. If you are inside the United States, you probably do. Dave Ramsey has been around for a long time. He is probably, certainly in the top few, if not the number one personal finance, guru, if you wanna call it that, here in the United States.
So he teaches you how to manage your money, how to get out of debt. That's a big, big thing for him. This kind of thing. Now, I have experience with Dave Ramsey from a long way back, roughly 20 more than 20 years ago. I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a backstory. So settle in while Uncle Macintosh, sips his tea and tells you a little bit of my background. I've thought about this a good bit this week about kinda how I wanted to present this. I don't really wanna be doxing myself, but, as normal, of course. But I think I can be vague enough about this that it's not anything that you could probably tie to me. When I got out of college in the mid nineties, I ended up getting a job, a government job. Let's put it that way, a military government job.
And I was managing some Oracle. I was doing desktop support for the first part of it. And then I actually had a promotion. I became an Oracle DBA. So in theory, I was managing an Oracle database. Really, what I was doing was taking backups of that database, plus running a bunch of reports on these gigantic Hewlett Packard LaserJet printers. And back then, that was a very new technology. These things were pretty massive. And, I had a lot of reports. I had a stack of reports literally like 4 feet high that I had to print out every month and then package up and mail off.
That was my job, and I was extremely bored. So I started an Internet service provider, a dial up Internet service provider like AOL, not like AOL. AOL AOL was different. We were a pure Internet provider. You logged into our system, and that put you on the Internet. And you went to that brand new thing called the World Wide Web, and you saw amazing things there, and, you know, we had lots of fun. Use, groups. Use use group Usenet groups. That's what they were. I don't know. Pow Wow was the messaging protocol that was prevalent.
I mean, just all kinds of crazy stuff. This is actually how I got into Linux. I, not I had a Windows Server, Windows n Windows NT 4 point o. And I needed a second server, and I could not afford the license on the Windows Server and tried out this shiny new thing called Linux, which by the way, today, the day that I'm recording, is Linux's birthday, and I don't know how that old that makes it. August 25, 1991, a young Finn named Linus Torvales, and I probably just butchered his name, typed out a small now legendary announcement via email to a Minix news group.
Doing a small or doing a free operating system just like a hobby won't be big and professional like new and so on and so forth. This was on August 25th. So that was 33 years ago? 33 years ago. Wow. So I was using it about 5, 6 years after this, maybe 7 years. So definitely less than 7, probably 6. Using actually Red Hat, one of the early versions of Red Hat came on a set of CDs, set up Apache. It was awesome. There's a whole story there that I won't get into about why One of the failures I had with Windows, which made me swear off Windows. This company was growing, but I was doing it part time.
I was actually still working with the military organization. And, it ended up I had to kinda make a choice, and I chose to continue to do the ISP. So now it was our bread and butter, and I'd not been married very long. My wife and I were pretty early in our marriage, and essentially, I took a pay cut and worked a lot more hours, and it it was tough. The problem I was having was not retaining customers. The problem that I was having was bringing in new customers. So I wanted to add on 56 k modems. We were running all Hayes, old Hayes, h a y e s, 33.6 modems.
And back then, it was a really big deal to offer 56 k. And that required some specialized equipment. It required a rack of modems that were really just integrated like DSPs in a kind of a server rack type deal. And then you plug that into a special bundle from the phone company, and voila, you were online. And you authenticated people via your server. So I actually kind of did my one foray into big business, so to speak. I brought on some shareholders. We raised $50,000, which was a huge amount of money. And then proceeded to spend the next year and a half or so trying to make this business work.
Well, ultimately it never proved successful. Let me just I don't want to turn this into this story. This is my point in all this. We ended up basically selling the business off to another company at a fraction, I feel like, of what it was actually worth, but they were the only ones who were interested in buying. And so we were in debt personally at this point or at some point thereafter within a few years anyways. We were in debt about $50,000. This was a huge amount of money. That was, I think at the time, if I'm remembering correctly, and forgive me, it has been a number of years, but I wanna say it was about 3 times, almost 3 times what I was making annually.
And it looked like we really had a lot of people actually telling us, you should declare bankruptcy and all this kind of stuff. And we chose not to. And we said, we're gonna pay this off. And Dave Ramsey was frankly one of the people who helped us do this. Now he had a radio show. He had a couple of books out at that point. And, you know, we devoured his books, and we listened to his radio show. And I'm gonna give you the 5 minute summary of Dave Ramsey. He tells you you can pay off debt, and there's a lot of people in the United States who are in debt. And he says, he's got this kind of 7 he calls them baby steps. Save $1,000 for your starter emergency fund. What that means is when your air conditioner breaks down or your car breaks down and you don't have that budgeted.
Now he teaches you how to have a budget, by the way, which is not really mentioned in all this, but budgeting, taking control of your money is very, very important in all of this. Pay off all debt except the house using the debt snowball, which I'm not gonna go into right now, but it's his method for doing that. Save 3 to 6 months of expenses and a fully funded emergency fund. So in other words, I could lose my job. We could live for 3 to 6 months without any problem on our savings. And then step 4 is invest 15% of your household income in retirement. Step 5, save for your children's college fund. Step 6, pay off your home early. Step 7, build wealth and give.
Okay. Back in the eighties, back in the nineties when Dave was getting going, even on into the 2000, easily, this was great advice. And some of it still is. You should not have debt. If you have debt, you need to take care of that. And I will be forever grateful for having I say this, it sounds like he was personally coaching us. Certainly, he was not. But having Dave come into our life, so to speak, and help us solve these problems. Because for us, it was the right thing to not declare bankruptcy and pay that debt off. And it took us like 3 years. I wanna say maybe 4.
Again, this is a long time ago, so if I'm getting this wrong, I apologize. It was a significant period of time, and it was a lot of effort, and it was a lot of denying ourselves vacations, going out to eat, those kind of things. Saving where we could. And we did this. We paid off everything. We didn't own a house, so that part wasn't a problem. But, you know, we paid off our debt. The thing is, I think things have changed. And let me actually, before I wrap this up, Dave, historically, has said, crypto bad, bitcoin scam.
On a national radio show that reaches millions and millions of people. And obviously, I think anybody who listens to this podcast realizes that I disagree with him greatly on this point. I would also argue, Dave doesn't understand Bitcoin at least, and he's making a big mistake. I appreciate his caution in not leading his millions of listeners and readers and such down a path of destruction involving crypto, of losing their money, of essentially gambling. I'm trying to remember. I do not. And I don't listen to his radio show anymore. I never really have, a whole lot. I've read a number of his books, and we actually taught. He has this thing called Financial Peace University, FPU.
My wife and I actually taught that multiple times after we were deeply in this process. I think we started before we became financially free. But, you know, we were definitely not just beginning. I don't recall if we actually have his radio station around here. But for whatever reason, I've just never really listened to him much. I have from time to time. I've listened to it online, this kind of thing. You know, he's very, very much anti debt. I don't recall if he talks about the US debt. I believe he does some, but I do wanna say that I'm not 100% certain about this. And I will tell you 100%, he's not an economist, and I'm sure he would tell you that. But if I'm remembering correctly, and I I've actually tried to look this up. I can't really establish if this is true or not. But if I'm remembering correctly, you know, he was always the US is spending too much money and this kind of thing.
But he doesn't have any alternative, all the other than cut back spending. He I don't recall him talking about how the dollar is not backed by gold. Now, maybe that's incorrect on my part. But he's never been beholden to the idea that Bitcoin could actually offer a solution for this. I do have one article, that I came across when I was doing my research. And this was earlier this year. I'm gonna bring this up real quick. Yeah. It was in April. I wanna kinda skim through this. The title of the article is, has crypto skeptic Dave Ramsey changed his tune when it comes to Bitcoin? Here's what he told a recent caller. So one of the parts of the show is, of course, he takes calls and, and, you know, discusses the caller's issues on the air.
Anyways, near nearly 16 years after it was created, Bitcoin continues to divide investors and financial pundits alike. Now I don't understand how that's possible anymore. Look. You've got ETFs. You've got major banks investing in Bitcoin. You've got all of this stuff going on. How is this possible? But it is. On one side, major corporations and financial institutions have added this volatile asset to their operations. On the other hand, financial gurus and market veterans remain as skeptical as ever. Dave Ramsey has recently established a spot in the latter camp. He has previously described crypto assets as risky and stupid investments, often mocking investors and advising his audience to stay away from this segment of the market. And I would tell you quite firmly, please stay away from the crypto casino as we've discussed a number of times. Don't bet on Ethereum. Don't bet on Solana. Don't bet on whatever the flavor of the week is for all the reasons that we have discussed before.
Which is why, continuing on, which is why viewers of the Ramsey show were surprised to hear Ramsey strike a more measured tone in recent comments about crypto asset, about the crypto asset. I'm not sure what that means, but here's what he said. Bitcoin is a currency. Title of the next section, Jason from Connecticut wanted to know Ramsey's thought on Bitcoin given its recent rebound. Each unit of the world's most famous cryptocurrency is trading at 67,459 dollars, roughly 4 times higher than its value in late 2022. Now, apparently, he emailed, Dave, an asset with a $1,000,000,000,000 market cap. It's actually $1,300,000,000,000, but let's not split hairs, is not a beanie baby, Jason said in his email to Ramsey.
Surprisingly, Ramsey didn't aggressively push back as he has in the past on this question about crypto assets. Continuing on, Bitcoin is a currency, Ramsey admitted, seemingly agreeing with some of the most loyal members of this community. However, Ramsey went deeper into his explanation. Listen to this very carefully. Currencies have no value except for their track record that indicates that 2 will people are willing to fight over them. I don't actually quite understand what he means there, but I thought currency was is it? It's not a store about medium of exchange.
That's what it is. But okay. We'll go with that. He compared crypto to other major asset or excuse me, Bitcoin to other major assets such as the yuan and the Chinese yen. However, he was quick to point out that major global currencies were backed by the economic power of their issuing countries and had a much longer track record. There's no doubt they have longer track records. We are backed by the power of the Bitcoin mining network and all of the nodes that are running out there, the tens of thousands of them. I don't need a central bank.
Something that he rails on actually if I'm remembering. I really wish I'd listened to it more over the years, but I don't have time. Sorry. Of all the currencies, if Dave wants to debate this, I'll be happy to go back and listen to some of them, but he won't. And that's fine. I don't expect him to. That's not what I'm trying to achieve here. Of all the currencies, Bitcoin has the least faith he left. Someday it may level out and become a thing, Jason, but it's not there. So Dave doesn't understand that, yes, it's volatile. An asset who is is volatile, it is trying to establish its value.
Gold on the other hand is not valuable, but or volatile because we've established that its value is somewhere around $25,000 per ounce. That's it. It hasn't, you know, done major gyrations over the last few years. It has gone up because of inflation. But regardless, you can see my point. We are still figuring out the use case, the usefulness of Bitcoin, and we are finding major new ways that it is useful as time goes on. So the volatility argument to me is a joke, but that's okay. He predicts that the asset will continue to be volatile. Yes. And it will be. It will be volatile for the next probably significant period of time until we reach global adoption, global use case, global currency, global everything.
And at that point, at whatever that is, which will, in my opinion, be somewhere in the tens of 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, if not more, then yes, you won't see a huge change. But it won't be anywhere near $65,000 in price. So I think he's dead wrong about that. He predicts that the asset will continue to be volatile, and that he wouldn't invest in it for the same reason he wouldn't invest in the Iraqi dinar. I didn't know that the dinar was the Iraqi currency, but regardless, I wouldn't invest in the Iraqi dinar either because I have no faith in that government, and whatever it is that they're doing over there.
He argues that it's not an investment because it doesn't produce cash flow. Well, okay. It's a store of value, mister Ramsey. You're telling people to invest in housing as an example. The reason why houses appreciate, and this is something I know a little bit about, to be honest, it's because of inflation of the dollar. And when it comes down to it, you really aren't earning that much in cash flow as he likes to put it off of the month to month rent. At least in the majority of markets. Certainly, for long term rentals. Short term rentals like Airbnb, if you can rent the place like that, Maybe a little bit of a different use case. But I do know about both of those markets actually.
Long term rentals, if you're basically breaking even, that's a pretty and there's places at California. That's just not true. So, you know, it takes dozens of houses to produce a real positive cash flow unless you're just counting on the inflation of the dollar, which is the very thing that one of the very things that we, in the Bitcoin community, we think it's wrong. Ramsay and his cohosts argue that Bitcoin is not an investment because it doesn't produce cash flow. I didn't know he had a cohost. Anyways, I wouldn't wish Bitcoin investments on somebody I really dislike, Ramsey said. Wow.
That is cold, man. Ramsey said, proving he hasn't changed his stance on the asset. So he has actually so now he's admitted in his mind, it's a currency. Yes. It is a currency. It's also a store of value. And he doesn't understand what a currency is actually. And he has no idea this whole volatility thing. All he has to do is zoom out. Just zoom out past 4 years, bud. That's it. I I sincerely appreciate everything that Dave Ramsey did for us and indirectly to get us out of debt. We would not be where we're at without him. However, just like Warren Buffett, who this article goes on to talk about, I hate to say it, but Dave's wrong. And he he is not willing to change, and he will not change.
I understand he's he's wanting to be cautious when it comes to people's investments. But baby, I have driven past on the way to the Bitcoin conference, most recently, Ramsey headquarters in Brentwood, Tennessee. And let me tell you something, Dave's got a lot of money going on. Okay? And I would argue it is virtually impossible using the methods that he says. He literally would counsel you, pay off your house first, and then start investing in real estate and pay that off as you go along. He is just dead set against debt. Well, there's good reason for that, but that also means that it's very, very difficult to get ahead in that game, so to speak.
Maybe 20 years, maybe 30 years. Look, the reality is that's half somebody's life. Their working life, not their life. Is that I mean, I don't know. With inflation running rampant, what happens if we have hyperinflation? And it doesn't matter. You can't sell your house. I mean, I see that as a possibility. So honestly, given today's current environment, I would actually consider Bitcoin over the long term, and I only mean 4 plus years to be a safer investment than real estate. And that is heretical. I know that Dave would 100% disagree with me on that.
But I also think he's unwilling to admit that the appreciation of real estate is because of the inflation, the money printing of the US dollar. And that goes on in other countries too. I'm talking about, in this case, a US centric thing. But it's the same thing elsewhere, just different levels. So yes. Yes. I ask a question at the start of this podcast. Is Dave Ramsey wrong? Yes, he is wrong. He is right about many things. And I know he has helped probably 100 of 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of people just like my wife and I get out of debt, maybe even serious debt. I've had people I have heard people excuse me.
I have heard people call into his show time and time again, tens of 1,000 and sometimes even more of dollars of debt paid off. And they are able to move on in in their life in in freedom from financial bondage. And that's a great thing, and I commend him on that. But Dave is from the 19 eighties or earlier. He's older than I am, so he's probably from the 9 he's born in the sixties, I would assume, if I'm doing the calculation right. And he is from that 19 eighties, investment model is kind of actually what I'm getting at. Put your money in an index fund. Everything's gonna be okay.
Invest in real estate. Get ahead. I think there's a point in time when that doesn't work. And I believe that Bitcoin in general, certainly can be part of what if you just said Dave, 5%. Oh, you've got $50,000 in assets. Maybe you should put 5% in that Bitcoin thing. Because even though, I don't clearly understand it completely. It does have a 15 year track record. And it has gone one way, and you have got every bank, every large investment group, the presidential candidates for the United States talking about it. Wake up man. Just wake up. Please.
Or you're gonna go in the dustbin of history as the guy like like Warren Buffett, who wouldn't invest in in Bitcoin. Alright. Hope that was helpful. You may not know who Dave is, and I get that, but you will meet people like that. Please apply that as as needed. So he hasn't changed his views. And frankly, sometimes you just run across people who like Warren Buffett. Used to be, maybe he still is, the quote best investor in the world. And he is missing out on what's going on in Bitcoin. He he and Charlie Munger, his, partner, they they're making grave mistakes. And and my concern is ultimately, it will hurt their investors. Now they have a diverse range of investments, and they're doing okay.
But I also think in the long run, things are going to change in the financial world because fiat will eventually die a very painful death. And a lot of these businesses are built on without getting into another complete episode, I would just say that there are many, many businesses in the, on Wall Street that list on Wall Street. Okay? On the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S and P and these type things. They have no concern about making profit. And in the long and that is because of fiat, I would argue. But in the long run, that doesn't work because the money runs out, the rent's due, and you gotta pay the piper.
And I can I don't can't come up with any more analogies? Alright. Let's move on. We got a couple of boosts this week. These were both about episode 179, defeating a scammer, last week's episode. Hypersensitivity of SARS, our friend. Oh, I did wanna mention this, hypersensitive of SARS. I'm watching the the tour. They call it the Volta a Espana, the tour of Spain. And my Spanish is slightly better than many other languages that I butcher. So I think I got that mostly right. But they actually started this week. It was a week ago in Portugal. I spent 3 days there.
I thought that was pretty cool. First time I'd seen a bike race like that in Spain in Portugal and and kinda seen the countryside. They started out on the coast, and they ended up going inland, like, on the 3rd day. Quite dry as much of Spain is. Not really a surprise. But the coast in particular looked quite nice. They started in, Lisbon, I wanna say. I think I got that right. Anyways, I was I was thinking about that when I was watching that, section of the race. So, anyways, hypersensitive as ours boosted a 1000 sats. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And said, thanks for sharing. One reason I don't like Telegram is that it seems to be full of scammers.
It happened to me years ago when dabbling in DeFi via PancakeSwap. Everybody raised their hand. Who remembers PancakeSwap? I don't think I ever did anything with PancakeSwap, but I do remember it. A fake help desk employee got me into pasting my MetaMask wallet keys in such a so called okay looking website. I actually wanted to help out a friend with a stuck failed transaction, and thereby almost lost my and his money. Yikes. Alarm bells rang just in time, and both of us managed to transfer our funds to another wallet. Lesson learned.
Yes. Lesson learned. And I'm glad that you did not lose your money. As I mentioned last week, one of the most important things is you don't ever tell anybody your private keys. Your private keys are your private keys unless whether it's Nasr or Bitcoin or any type of cryptography. That's just those are private, and they're private for a reason. And then Gulag bound, sent a row of sticks, 1111. And I love this message. I love this message, Gulag. This is funny. He said, sold some sets for a down payment on the next house. Feels dirty. Friend, don't feel dirty about that.
If that's what you needed to do, then, and that was your choice, and certainly that was fine. I hope you bought those sats at a lower price, of course. But in the end, you know, we have these financial decisions we have to make, and that's that's fine. So we had a total of 3,004 sats this week, including the boost and the streaming. I do appreciate that very, very much. Very cool. Alright. Let's jump right on into the news. Actually, some of our news was just mentioned in a roundabout way. I don't really have a news item about this, but I will say that, Jerome Powell out at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I really wanna go to that meeting because it's in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
I don't care about the meeting. But, they have this meeting every year out there at a very convenient time in August. You know? And they discussed monetary policy or whatever. I don't know. I think they're just out there playing golf. But, anyways, he said, because of the unemployment numbers, which were adjusted recently by 800,000 people, over the last year who actually were unemployed, that because the unemployment numbers were up to, like, 4.6%, that they would definitely be lowering the rates. So this is the same thing that I've been saying for months on end. I said, this fall, that's what's gonna happen. And he basically confirmed that in September, they would start rate cuts. And, of course, he didn't say how many.
He didn't say how much on September. I'm guessing a quarter of a percent, probably in September, October, and then we'll see. But, anyways, that's not really a news article item or whatever, but I did wanna throw that out. Also, not to get political. Also, Robert f Kennedy withdrew, from the presidential race and actually endorsed Donald Trump. So he was the 2nd candidate who was, very pro Bitcoin, spoke at the conference. And actually, I think that the idea of the kind of strategic Bitcoin reserve came from him. Donald, Donald Trump just copied it essentially, which is fine. So we'll see what happens with that. I have a suspicion he will end up in Trump's administration if Trump gets elected.
So enough about the politics, but, yeah. So the other item I did wanna mention, this actually happened earlier today, if I'm not mistaken. I posted about it as soon as I saw it. Let me maybe it was it was yesterday, 24th. There's a guy named Pavel Durov who, is, I guess he used to be Russian or is a Russian who left Russia. And he's founder of Telegram. So Telegram, in case you don't know is there anybody who doesn't know what Telegram is? Maybe there's a few, but it's a messaging platform widely used. I actually use it to talk to, for example, Kaboomrax when I'm making my orders and getting service and that kind of thing.
But he was arrested, and he's facing 20 years in jail for refusing to censor his platform. So France has come to him and said, you have to monitor the channels and whatnot on your platform and for terrorism, for money laundering, probably for pedophilia, and, you know, the buzzwords that they throw out. And he landed in apparently, they told him that this was gonna happen, and then he landed his jet in Paris, and they arrested him on the tarmac. So So I'm not sure why he would have done that, but maybe I'm not understanding what actually happened. He may not have known, but apparently, they were also threatening Rumble, which is another social media platform.
And so things are getting a little crazy over there in the old EU. We have well, and England, I should include them, who are, you know, apparently, if we insult the king, they're gonna come put us in jail. Oh, I wanna say some things, but I won't. Anyways, my point in all this is, in my opinion, this is one of the major reasons why we should have decentralization. So Noster, for all its flaws, and maybe it's not truly decentralized, but it doesn't have a CEO like Telegram. Just like Bitcoin, it doesn't have a CEO. Who are they gonna arrest? And it is decentralized certainly to an extent.
So say if China bans Noster, it doesn't really slow it down. It may make it more difficult for the people in China to use it, but it certainly wouldn't keep it from being used elsewhere. So we will see. I I think they'll probably be trying to go after Twitter next. So Elon, doesn't play around with this kind of stuff, so I don't know how that'll go down. We'll see. I did wanna mention I'm gonna actually do an entire episode on this probably fairly soon. I switched over to Ocean recently. Still in the early days of that, it's only been a week. I switched off of Brains, which I've been on since I started mining a year and a half ago.
And because brains has made some changes and I like I said, I wanna make I'll probably just put together a podcast episode that those who really aren't into mining or kind of understanding the what's going on under the covers of Bitcoin, you know, they'll, they can skip, but I'll talk about that. I did wanna mention that. Oh, by the way, I did wanna as a wrap up to that, 818,000 over the last year essentially. That is not a statistical abnormality. It was a huge amount. It's like 25% that they changed the numbers. I have a theory about that, but you could call it a conspiracy theory.
So maybe I won't share it, but I will point out. I mean, it wasn't a couple of percent. They usually do make modifications after the fact like this, but it's been 15 years, 15 years since they've had one that high. So it was a really big thing and kinda sent shock waves through the financial world to an extent. Something to pay attention to. Alright. Let's go through. Let's see. I don't really have any other news. Well, maybe. Hold on. This is software stuff software stuff. Baltic Honey Badger is actually going on this week or is just wrapping up their day 2.
Maybe it's already wrapped up. I think it is. I think it was only 2 days. That was no. That's today. I guess it was over the weekend. So I did just wrap up. There should be YouTube videos of it. I've not gotten a chance to, watch any of it at this point. It is one of the oldest, Bitcoin conferences. Very cool. Takes place in Latvia in Eastern Europe. And, I just love the whole honey badgers thing. Honey badgers are awesome. Anyways, I think everything else is software, so we'll just go ahead and jump on over into that. There were a few things this week I wanted to highlight. BlueWallet has a new version, 7.00.
So that's a kind of a major update there. Bisc has a version 2.1 o with support for lightning networks as additional Bitcoin settlement method. Well, that's interesting. It looks like they just bolted on lightning. Look at that. Seed signer, the the hardware wallet, if you wanna call it that, it's just the easiest thing to call it, tool, that I use, came out with a new version, 0.8.0. And Keith, the developer there, has actually been doing some really cool things with the bigger screens, 3.2 inch screen that I'm very excited about. I don't have the best vision. And the one thing I don't like about the seed signer is that screen is so small.
I do struggle with it a little bit, to be honest, and I would love to have a much bigger screen like that. It'll require a new case or, you know, it'll require all that, but they're putting the code in place to allow that. So at least it will be an option, and I do believe that my next seed signer will actually be with a bigger screen. That'd probably give me a reason to invest in 1. Fountain, one of our favorite podcasting 2.0 apps. It's probably my second favorite one, is doing something I'm interested in, especially considering what's been going on, like, with Telegram now and these other social platforms.
They put out a new version, 1.1, and they are integrating it with Nostr, which does kinda sound strange. But essentially, from what I understand, if you put in your nostril keys and you have a nostril profile, which is what your nostril keys are for, of course, when you comment, when you post, when you boost somebody or this kind of thing, it will show up on your nostril profile. Now you may not want that, but of course, you have complete control over that. But it also it's an interesting integration. And it you know, personally for me, it might be something I might want to do. One of the things I hate about multiple social platforms is having to go from platform to platform. Put out the new podcast. This is what you know, and copy and paste and trying to keep up with all this stuff. And it would be cool to to have that as well.
Nostrika Nostrika, which is the Noster unconference or whatever, is actually going on or did go on in Riga, as well in Latvia, right before the other conference. This is August 22nd through 23rd. I do not know if there's video of that, although there might be. It's Nostriga. I'll try and find that and put it in the show notes for both of those, if I can find that. And looks like that's about it. Let's see if there's anything else I need to discuss. No. I think that's about it. So we're gonna go ahead and wrap this up. So, of course, Stoches PLEBS podcast supports podcasting 2.0. We are what's called a value for value podcast as I talk about on here time and time again. I don't have ads and I don't have sponsorships.
I don't do anything like that, And I do depend on people, like hypersensitive as ours and gulag bound to support me, to boost into I I honestly, from the boost, I love the feedback. It's basically real time and the streaming of sats, which of course I appreciate as well. But all of that is going to get used to help improve the show. Okay? And I have no intention at this point, certainly, of going out and getting any kind of advertising or sponsorship. And if I ever did choose to go that route, I would have to be very, very careful about who I use. Because I I hate to pick on Ledger, and I do this time and time again, but let's just say Ledger. Let's say Ledger came to me and said, well, for every 1,000 downloads, we'll give you a $100.
It's a pretty sweet deal. Okay. Sure, Ledger. And in return, I'm never gonna talk about how your system was recently compromised and all of your users' data was stolen. And now you get fake emails from scammers trying to get your ledger information. Sure, ledger. I'll do that. No. I won't. So there's really very few products in the Bitcoin space that I could actually promote. And I do promote the stuff that I use. I've talked about Kaboom racks, and I've talked about Kaboom racks when we've had issues. I've talked about seed signer and the great work that those guys are doing over there. And again, that's another project that even if they were to approach me and say, hey, Macintosh, we'll pay you to to, you know, for a sponsorship or whatever.
As much as I like them and as much as I believe in them, I would have to turn them down. Because if I did and there was ever a problem, I would hesitate. I may not do that, or it may get me in legal trouble depending on the verbiage of the contract that was written and this kind of thing. And I just, I'm just gonna stay away from all of that. So I do come to you and I say, if you're getting value out of this show, then please consider bringing value back to it. And there are other ways that you could do that besides boosting and streaming. You can certainly go on to Fountain and and just click like on the show, or tell somebody about the show, or whatever.
Those things bring value. And I would encourage you if you're not already using a a podcasting 2 point o app to maybe take a look at that. It's interesting because I looked at my stats recently. Something like 70% of my listeners are using fountain, which is actually pretty crazy. And only a pretty small percentage are using, like, Apple Podcasts. It was Fountain. It was, there's a few of the podcasting 2.0 apps that take up the the great majority. That's just my audience, but for those of you who are not using podcasting 2.0 apps, I would still encourage you to check that out. There's a lot of cool stuff going on right now.
And it goes far beyond just the ability to support the people who are making the content for podcast. You can have chapters for your episodes, which I do every week. You can have a transcript of the episode, which I do every week. And you can see those right in your player. With the chapters, maybe you don't wanna hear this ending rant, so you can just skip it. Or the I don't know, the mining info or whatever. You can skip that, or you can skip ahead so you can hear that part first. Right? There's gotta be one of you out there. I know y'all all love to hear about the mining stuff. Look. You may not you may not think anything of mining, but without mining, there wouldn't be Bitcoin, and that's the truth.
So I don't know. You may not wanna go into the depths of the mind, so to speak, but it is important to to kinda understand where all this stuff intersects. Anyways, that's gonna be it. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. There's a number of ways you can get a hold of me. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on mastodon@[email protected]. You can also reach me by email at [email protected]. My pubkey, I have posted on Twitter pinned to the top of my profile. Okay? So if you're on noster and you wanna hook up, you could go look up that on there and find that there because it's probably the best place to put it because it's a it's a pub key. It's not human readable, and that's it. So stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
Hey, Pleb Nation. Today is August 25th, and this is episode 180 of satoshis plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is Dave Ramsey wrong. Alright. We're gonna get right on into the stats of the week, and then we'll go right into our story, our discussion. This is probably the closest thing I've ever had to a clickbait title, and I don't really mean it to be. I'm being very sincere, and I will explain when we get into that section. The the weekly close just happened an hour and a half ago, August 25, 2024. We are at $64,190 to close out the week.
We're at block height 858,449. We have an estimated 3.54 percent difficulty adjustment going up on August 28th, just a couple of days from now. The previous, adjustment was down 4.19 percent a few weeks ago. So things are, getting a little bit more difficult, but they've honestly backed off a little bit from say, a week ago. I wanna say, when that number was a little higher. The mempool and, transaction fees, we got 812 megabytes of unprocessed transactions in the mempool. We are definitely up on that. It was like 600 and something last week. There's been a couple of pretty big spikes of transactions. I think our transaction fee went up to over a 100 sats per vbyte briefly.
Couple of days ago, I didn't happen to be transacting anything at that point, which was a really good thing. Right now, we're sitting at 3 sats per vbyte. Alright. I've been sitting here enjoying my Earl Grey with the last of my honey from my friend. Disappointed in that. We've got some more honey, but, I do enjoy theirs. It's a a lighter blend than I'm used to, which is more sweet, which frankly I like. Enough about that though. Who's Dave Ramsey? If you're outside the United States, you might not know who they are. If you are inside the United States, you probably do. Dave Ramsey has been around for a long time. He is probably, certainly in the top few, if not the number one personal finance, guru, if you wanna call it that, here in the United States.
So he teaches you how to manage your money, how to get out of debt. That's a big, big thing for him. This kind of thing. Now, I have experience with Dave Ramsey from a long way back, roughly 20 more than 20 years ago. I'm gonna tell you a little bit of a backstory. So settle in while Uncle Macintosh, sips his tea and tells you a little bit of my background. I've thought about this a good bit this week about kinda how I wanted to present this. I don't really wanna be doxing myself, but, as normal, of course. But I think I can be vague enough about this that it's not anything that you could probably tie to me. When I got out of college in the mid nineties, I ended up getting a job, a government job. Let's put it that way, a military government job.
And I was managing some Oracle. I was doing desktop support for the first part of it. And then I actually had a promotion. I became an Oracle DBA. So in theory, I was managing an Oracle database. Really, what I was doing was taking backups of that database, plus running a bunch of reports on these gigantic Hewlett Packard LaserJet printers. And back then, that was a very new technology. These things were pretty massive. And, I had a lot of reports. I had a stack of reports literally like 4 feet high that I had to print out every month and then package up and mail off.
That was my job, and I was extremely bored. So I started an Internet service provider, a dial up Internet service provider like AOL, not like AOL. AOL AOL was different. We were a pure Internet provider. You logged into our system, and that put you on the Internet. And you went to that brand new thing called the World Wide Web, and you saw amazing things there, and, you know, we had lots of fun. Use, groups. Use use group Usenet groups. That's what they were. I don't know. Pow Wow was the messaging protocol that was prevalent.
I mean, just all kinds of crazy stuff. This is actually how I got into Linux. I, not I had a Windows Server, Windows n Windows NT 4 point o. And I needed a second server, and I could not afford the license on the Windows Server and tried out this shiny new thing called Linux, which by the way, today, the day that I'm recording, is Linux's birthday, and I don't know how that old that makes it. August 25, 1991, a young Finn named Linus Torvales, and I probably just butchered his name, typed out a small now legendary announcement via email to a Minix news group.
Doing a small or doing a free operating system just like a hobby won't be big and professional like new and so on and so forth. This was on August 25th. So that was 33 years ago? 33 years ago. Wow. So I was using it about 5, 6 years after this, maybe 7 years. So definitely less than 7, probably 6. Using actually Red Hat, one of the early versions of Red Hat came on a set of CDs, set up Apache. It was awesome. There's a whole story there that I won't get into about why One of the failures I had with Windows, which made me swear off Windows. This company was growing, but I was doing it part time.
I was actually still working with the military organization. And, it ended up I had to kinda make a choice, and I chose to continue to do the ISP. So now it was our bread and butter, and I'd not been married very long. My wife and I were pretty early in our marriage, and essentially, I took a pay cut and worked a lot more hours, and it it was tough. The problem I was having was not retaining customers. The problem that I was having was bringing in new customers. So I wanted to add on 56 k modems. We were running all Hayes, old Hayes, h a y e s, 33.6 modems.
And back then, it was a really big deal to offer 56 k. And that required some specialized equipment. It required a rack of modems that were really just integrated like DSPs in a kind of a server rack type deal. And then you plug that into a special bundle from the phone company, and voila, you were online. And you authenticated people via your server. So I actually kind of did my one foray into big business, so to speak. I brought on some shareholders. We raised $50,000, which was a huge amount of money. And then proceeded to spend the next year and a half or so trying to make this business work.
Well, ultimately it never proved successful. Let me just I don't want to turn this into this story. This is my point in all this. We ended up basically selling the business off to another company at a fraction, I feel like, of what it was actually worth, but they were the only ones who were interested in buying. And so we were in debt personally at this point or at some point thereafter within a few years anyways. We were in debt about $50,000. This was a huge amount of money. That was, I think at the time, if I'm remembering correctly, and forgive me, it has been a number of years, but I wanna say it was about 3 times, almost 3 times what I was making annually.
And it looked like we really had a lot of people actually telling us, you should declare bankruptcy and all this kind of stuff. And we chose not to. And we said, we're gonna pay this off. And Dave Ramsey was frankly one of the people who helped us do this. Now he had a radio show. He had a couple of books out at that point. And, you know, we devoured his books, and we listened to his radio show. And I'm gonna give you the 5 minute summary of Dave Ramsey. He tells you you can pay off debt, and there's a lot of people in the United States who are in debt. And he says, he's got this kind of 7 he calls them baby steps. Save $1,000 for your starter emergency fund. What that means is when your air conditioner breaks down or your car breaks down and you don't have that budgeted.
Now he teaches you how to have a budget, by the way, which is not really mentioned in all this, but budgeting, taking control of your money is very, very important in all of this. Pay off all debt except the house using the debt snowball, which I'm not gonna go into right now, but it's his method for doing that. Save 3 to 6 months of expenses and a fully funded emergency fund. So in other words, I could lose my job. We could live for 3 to 6 months without any problem on our savings. And then step 4 is invest 15% of your household income in retirement. Step 5, save for your children's college fund. Step 6, pay off your home early. Step 7, build wealth and give.
Okay. Back in the eighties, back in the nineties when Dave was getting going, even on into the 2000, easily, this was great advice. And some of it still is. You should not have debt. If you have debt, you need to take care of that. And I will be forever grateful for having I say this, it sounds like he was personally coaching us. Certainly, he was not. But having Dave come into our life, so to speak, and help us solve these problems. Because for us, it was the right thing to not declare bankruptcy and pay that debt off. And it took us like 3 years. I wanna say maybe 4.
Again, this is a long time ago, so if I'm getting this wrong, I apologize. It was a significant period of time, and it was a lot of effort, and it was a lot of denying ourselves vacations, going out to eat, those kind of things. Saving where we could. And we did this. We paid off everything. We didn't own a house, so that part wasn't a problem. But, you know, we paid off our debt. The thing is, I think things have changed. And let me actually, before I wrap this up, Dave, historically, has said, crypto bad, bitcoin scam.
On a national radio show that reaches millions and millions of people. And obviously, I think anybody who listens to this podcast realizes that I disagree with him greatly on this point. I would also argue, Dave doesn't understand Bitcoin at least, and he's making a big mistake. I appreciate his caution in not leading his millions of listeners and readers and such down a path of destruction involving crypto, of losing their money, of essentially gambling. I'm trying to remember. I do not. And I don't listen to his radio show anymore. I never really have, a whole lot. I've read a number of his books, and we actually taught. He has this thing called Financial Peace University, FPU.
My wife and I actually taught that multiple times after we were deeply in this process. I think we started before we became financially free. But, you know, we were definitely not just beginning. I don't recall if we actually have his radio station around here. But for whatever reason, I've just never really listened to him much. I have from time to time. I've listened to it online, this kind of thing. You know, he's very, very much anti debt. I don't recall if he talks about the US debt. I believe he does some, but I do wanna say that I'm not 100% certain about this. And I will tell you 100%, he's not an economist, and I'm sure he would tell you that. But if I'm remembering correctly, and I I've actually tried to look this up. I can't really establish if this is true or not. But if I'm remembering correctly, you know, he was always the US is spending too much money and this kind of thing.
But he doesn't have any alternative, all the other than cut back spending. He I don't recall him talking about how the dollar is not backed by gold. Now, maybe that's incorrect on my part. But he's never been beholden to the idea that Bitcoin could actually offer a solution for this. I do have one article, that I came across when I was doing my research. And this was earlier this year. I'm gonna bring this up real quick. Yeah. It was in April. I wanna kinda skim through this. The title of the article is, has crypto skeptic Dave Ramsey changed his tune when it comes to Bitcoin? Here's what he told a recent caller. So one of the parts of the show is, of course, he takes calls and, and, you know, discusses the caller's issues on the air.
Anyways, near nearly 16 years after it was created, Bitcoin continues to divide investors and financial pundits alike. Now I don't understand how that's possible anymore. Look. You've got ETFs. You've got major banks investing in Bitcoin. You've got all of this stuff going on. How is this possible? But it is. On one side, major corporations and financial institutions have added this volatile asset to their operations. On the other hand, financial gurus and market veterans remain as skeptical as ever. Dave Ramsey has recently established a spot in the latter camp. He has previously described crypto assets as risky and stupid investments, often mocking investors and advising his audience to stay away from this segment of the market. And I would tell you quite firmly, please stay away from the crypto casino as we've discussed a number of times. Don't bet on Ethereum. Don't bet on Solana. Don't bet on whatever the flavor of the week is for all the reasons that we have discussed before.
Which is why, continuing on, which is why viewers of the Ramsey show were surprised to hear Ramsey strike a more measured tone in recent comments about crypto asset, about the crypto asset. I'm not sure what that means, but here's what he said. Bitcoin is a currency. Title of the next section, Jason from Connecticut wanted to know Ramsey's thought on Bitcoin given its recent rebound. Each unit of the world's most famous cryptocurrency is trading at 67,459 dollars, roughly 4 times higher than its value in late 2022. Now, apparently, he emailed, Dave, an asset with a $1,000,000,000,000 market cap. It's actually $1,300,000,000,000, but let's not split hairs, is not a beanie baby, Jason said in his email to Ramsey.
Surprisingly, Ramsey didn't aggressively push back as he has in the past on this question about crypto assets. Continuing on, Bitcoin is a currency, Ramsey admitted, seemingly agreeing with some of the most loyal members of this community. However, Ramsey went deeper into his explanation. Listen to this very carefully. Currencies have no value except for their track record that indicates that 2 will people are willing to fight over them. I don't actually quite understand what he means there, but I thought currency was is it? It's not a store about medium of exchange.
That's what it is. But okay. We'll go with that. He compared crypto to other major asset or excuse me, Bitcoin to other major assets such as the yuan and the Chinese yen. However, he was quick to point out that major global currencies were backed by the economic power of their issuing countries and had a much longer track record. There's no doubt they have longer track records. We are backed by the power of the Bitcoin mining network and all of the nodes that are running out there, the tens of thousands of them. I don't need a central bank.
Something that he rails on actually if I'm remembering. I really wish I'd listened to it more over the years, but I don't have time. Sorry. Of all the currencies, if Dave wants to debate this, I'll be happy to go back and listen to some of them, but he won't. And that's fine. I don't expect him to. That's not what I'm trying to achieve here. Of all the currencies, Bitcoin has the least faith he left. Someday it may level out and become a thing, Jason, but it's not there. So Dave doesn't understand that, yes, it's volatile. An asset who is is volatile, it is trying to establish its value.
Gold on the other hand is not valuable, but or volatile because we've established that its value is somewhere around $25,000 per ounce. That's it. It hasn't, you know, done major gyrations over the last few years. It has gone up because of inflation. But regardless, you can see my point. We are still figuring out the use case, the usefulness of Bitcoin, and we are finding major new ways that it is useful as time goes on. So the volatility argument to me is a joke, but that's okay. He predicts that the asset will continue to be volatile. Yes. And it will be. It will be volatile for the next probably significant period of time until we reach global adoption, global use case, global currency, global everything.
And at that point, at whatever that is, which will, in my opinion, be somewhere in the tens of 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, if not more, then yes, you won't see a huge change. But it won't be anywhere near $65,000 in price. So I think he's dead wrong about that. He predicts that the asset will continue to be volatile, and that he wouldn't invest in it for the same reason he wouldn't invest in the Iraqi dinar. I didn't know that the dinar was the Iraqi currency, but regardless, I wouldn't invest in the Iraqi dinar either because I have no faith in that government, and whatever it is that they're doing over there.
He argues that it's not an investment because it doesn't produce cash flow. Well, okay. It's a store of value, mister Ramsey. You're telling people to invest in housing as an example. The reason why houses appreciate, and this is something I know a little bit about, to be honest, it's because of inflation of the dollar. And when it comes down to it, you really aren't earning that much in cash flow as he likes to put it off of the month to month rent. At least in the majority of markets. Certainly, for long term rentals. Short term rentals like Airbnb, if you can rent the place like that, Maybe a little bit of a different use case. But I do know about both of those markets actually.
Long term rentals, if you're basically breaking even, that's a pretty and there's places at California. That's just not true. So, you know, it takes dozens of houses to produce a real positive cash flow unless you're just counting on the inflation of the dollar, which is the very thing that one of the very things that we, in the Bitcoin community, we think it's wrong. Ramsay and his cohosts argue that Bitcoin is not an investment because it doesn't produce cash flow. I didn't know he had a cohost. Anyways, I wouldn't wish Bitcoin investments on somebody I really dislike, Ramsey said. Wow.
That is cold, man. Ramsey said, proving he hasn't changed his stance on the asset. So he has actually so now he's admitted in his mind, it's a currency. Yes. It is a currency. It's also a store of value. And he doesn't understand what a currency is actually. And he has no idea this whole volatility thing. All he has to do is zoom out. Just zoom out past 4 years, bud. That's it. I I sincerely appreciate everything that Dave Ramsey did for us and indirectly to get us out of debt. We would not be where we're at without him. However, just like Warren Buffett, who this article goes on to talk about, I hate to say it, but Dave's wrong. And he he is not willing to change, and he will not change.
I understand he's he's wanting to be cautious when it comes to people's investments. But baby, I have driven past on the way to the Bitcoin conference, most recently, Ramsey headquarters in Brentwood, Tennessee. And let me tell you something, Dave's got a lot of money going on. Okay? And I would argue it is virtually impossible using the methods that he says. He literally would counsel you, pay off your house first, and then start investing in real estate and pay that off as you go along. He is just dead set against debt. Well, there's good reason for that, but that also means that it's very, very difficult to get ahead in that game, so to speak.
Maybe 20 years, maybe 30 years. Look, the reality is that's half somebody's life. Their working life, not their life. Is that I mean, I don't know. With inflation running rampant, what happens if we have hyperinflation? And it doesn't matter. You can't sell your house. I mean, I see that as a possibility. So honestly, given today's current environment, I would actually consider Bitcoin over the long term, and I only mean 4 plus years to be a safer investment than real estate. And that is heretical. I know that Dave would 100% disagree with me on that.
But I also think he's unwilling to admit that the appreciation of real estate is because of the inflation, the money printing of the US dollar. And that goes on in other countries too. I'm talking about, in this case, a US centric thing. But it's the same thing elsewhere, just different levels. So yes. Yes. I ask a question at the start of this podcast. Is Dave Ramsey wrong? Yes, he is wrong. He is right about many things. And I know he has helped probably 100 of 1,000, if not 1,000,000 of people just like my wife and I get out of debt, maybe even serious debt. I've had people I have heard people excuse me.
I have heard people call into his show time and time again, tens of 1,000 and sometimes even more of dollars of debt paid off. And they are able to move on in in their life in in freedom from financial bondage. And that's a great thing, and I commend him on that. But Dave is from the 19 eighties or earlier. He's older than I am, so he's probably from the 9 he's born in the sixties, I would assume, if I'm doing the calculation right. And he is from that 19 eighties, investment model is kind of actually what I'm getting at. Put your money in an index fund. Everything's gonna be okay.
Invest in real estate. Get ahead. I think there's a point in time when that doesn't work. And I believe that Bitcoin in general, certainly can be part of what if you just said Dave, 5%. Oh, you've got $50,000 in assets. Maybe you should put 5% in that Bitcoin thing. Because even though, I don't clearly understand it completely. It does have a 15 year track record. And it has gone one way, and you have got every bank, every large investment group, the presidential candidates for the United States talking about it. Wake up man. Just wake up. Please.
Or you're gonna go in the dustbin of history as the guy like like Warren Buffett, who wouldn't invest in in Bitcoin. Alright. Hope that was helpful. You may not know who Dave is, and I get that, but you will meet people like that. Please apply that as as needed. So he hasn't changed his views. And frankly, sometimes you just run across people who like Warren Buffett. Used to be, maybe he still is, the quote best investor in the world. And he is missing out on what's going on in Bitcoin. He he and Charlie Munger, his, partner, they they're making grave mistakes. And and my concern is ultimately, it will hurt their investors. Now they have a diverse range of investments, and they're doing okay.
But I also think in the long run, things are going to change in the financial world because fiat will eventually die a very painful death. And a lot of these businesses are built on without getting into another complete episode, I would just say that there are many, many businesses in the, on Wall Street that list on Wall Street. Okay? On the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S and P and these type things. They have no concern about making profit. And in the long and that is because of fiat, I would argue. But in the long run, that doesn't work because the money runs out, the rent's due, and you gotta pay the piper.
And I can I don't can't come up with any more analogies? Alright. Let's move on. We got a couple of boosts this week. These were both about episode 179, defeating a scammer, last week's episode. Hypersensitivity of SARS, our friend. Oh, I did wanna mention this, hypersensitive of SARS. I'm watching the the tour. They call it the Volta a Espana, the tour of Spain. And my Spanish is slightly better than many other languages that I butcher. So I think I got that mostly right. But they actually started this week. It was a week ago in Portugal. I spent 3 days there.
I thought that was pretty cool. First time I'd seen a bike race like that in Spain in Portugal and and kinda seen the countryside. They started out on the coast, and they ended up going inland, like, on the 3rd day. Quite dry as much of Spain is. Not really a surprise. But the coast in particular looked quite nice. They started in, Lisbon, I wanna say. I think I got that right. Anyways, I was I was thinking about that when I was watching that, section of the race. So, anyways, hypersensitive as ours boosted a 1000 sats. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And said, thanks for sharing. One reason I don't like Telegram is that it seems to be full of scammers.
It happened to me years ago when dabbling in DeFi via PancakeSwap. Everybody raised their hand. Who remembers PancakeSwap? I don't think I ever did anything with PancakeSwap, but I do remember it. A fake help desk employee got me into pasting my MetaMask wallet keys in such a so called okay looking website. I actually wanted to help out a friend with a stuck failed transaction, and thereby almost lost my and his money. Yikes. Alarm bells rang just in time, and both of us managed to transfer our funds to another wallet. Lesson learned.
Yes. Lesson learned. And I'm glad that you did not lose your money. As I mentioned last week, one of the most important things is you don't ever tell anybody your private keys. Your private keys are your private keys unless whether it's Nasr or Bitcoin or any type of cryptography. That's just those are private, and they're private for a reason. And then Gulag bound, sent a row of sticks, 1111. And I love this message. I love this message, Gulag. This is funny. He said, sold some sets for a down payment on the next house. Feels dirty. Friend, don't feel dirty about that.
If that's what you needed to do, then, and that was your choice, and certainly that was fine. I hope you bought those sats at a lower price, of course. But in the end, you know, we have these financial decisions we have to make, and that's that's fine. So we had a total of 3,004 sats this week, including the boost and the streaming. I do appreciate that very, very much. Very cool. Alright. Let's jump right on into the news. Actually, some of our news was just mentioned in a roundabout way. I don't really have a news item about this, but I will say that, Jerome Powell out at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I really wanna go to that meeting because it's in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
I don't care about the meeting. But, they have this meeting every year out there at a very convenient time in August. You know? And they discussed monetary policy or whatever. I don't know. I think they're just out there playing golf. But, anyways, he said, because of the unemployment numbers, which were adjusted recently by 800,000 people, over the last year who actually were unemployed, that because the unemployment numbers were up to, like, 4.6%, that they would definitely be lowering the rates. So this is the same thing that I've been saying for months on end. I said, this fall, that's what's gonna happen. And he basically confirmed that in September, they would start rate cuts. And, of course, he didn't say how many.
He didn't say how much on September. I'm guessing a quarter of a percent, probably in September, October, and then we'll see. But, anyways, that's not really a news article item or whatever, but I did wanna throw that out. Also, not to get political. Also, Robert f Kennedy withdrew, from the presidential race and actually endorsed Donald Trump. So he was the 2nd candidate who was, very pro Bitcoin, spoke at the conference. And actually, I think that the idea of the kind of strategic Bitcoin reserve came from him. Donald, Donald Trump just copied it essentially, which is fine. So we'll see what happens with that. I have a suspicion he will end up in Trump's administration if Trump gets elected.
So enough about the politics, but, yeah. So the other item I did wanna mention, this actually happened earlier today, if I'm not mistaken. I posted about it as soon as I saw it. Let me maybe it was it was yesterday, 24th. There's a guy named Pavel Durov who, is, I guess he used to be Russian or is a Russian who left Russia. And he's founder of Telegram. So Telegram, in case you don't know is there anybody who doesn't know what Telegram is? Maybe there's a few, but it's a messaging platform widely used. I actually use it to talk to, for example, Kaboomrax when I'm making my orders and getting service and that kind of thing.
But he was arrested, and he's facing 20 years in jail for refusing to censor his platform. So France has come to him and said, you have to monitor the channels and whatnot on your platform and for terrorism, for money laundering, probably for pedophilia, and, you know, the buzzwords that they throw out. And he landed in apparently, they told him that this was gonna happen, and then he landed his jet in Paris, and they arrested him on the tarmac. So So I'm not sure why he would have done that, but maybe I'm not understanding what actually happened. He may not have known, but apparently, they were also threatening Rumble, which is another social media platform.
And so things are getting a little crazy over there in the old EU. We have well, and England, I should include them, who are, you know, apparently, if we insult the king, they're gonna come put us in jail. Oh, I wanna say some things, but I won't. Anyways, my point in all this is, in my opinion, this is one of the major reasons why we should have decentralization. So Noster, for all its flaws, and maybe it's not truly decentralized, but it doesn't have a CEO like Telegram. Just like Bitcoin, it doesn't have a CEO. Who are they gonna arrest? And it is decentralized certainly to an extent.
So say if China bans Noster, it doesn't really slow it down. It may make it more difficult for the people in China to use it, but it certainly wouldn't keep it from being used elsewhere. So we will see. I I think they'll probably be trying to go after Twitter next. So Elon, doesn't play around with this kind of stuff, so I don't know how that'll go down. We'll see. I did wanna mention I'm gonna actually do an entire episode on this probably fairly soon. I switched over to Ocean recently. Still in the early days of that, it's only been a week. I switched off of Brains, which I've been on since I started mining a year and a half ago.
And because brains has made some changes and I like I said, I wanna make I'll probably just put together a podcast episode that those who really aren't into mining or kind of understanding the what's going on under the covers of Bitcoin, you know, they'll, they can skip, but I'll talk about that. I did wanna mention that. Oh, by the way, I did wanna as a wrap up to that, 818,000 over the last year essentially. That is not a statistical abnormality. It was a huge amount. It's like 25% that they changed the numbers. I have a theory about that, but you could call it a conspiracy theory.
So maybe I won't share it, but I will point out. I mean, it wasn't a couple of percent. They usually do make modifications after the fact like this, but it's been 15 years, 15 years since they've had one that high. So it was a really big thing and kinda sent shock waves through the financial world to an extent. Something to pay attention to. Alright. Let's go through. Let's see. I don't really have any other news. Well, maybe. Hold on. This is software stuff software stuff. Baltic Honey Badger is actually going on this week or is just wrapping up their day 2.
Maybe it's already wrapped up. I think it is. I think it was only 2 days. That was no. That's today. I guess it was over the weekend. So I did just wrap up. There should be YouTube videos of it. I've not gotten a chance to, watch any of it at this point. It is one of the oldest, Bitcoin conferences. Very cool. Takes place in Latvia in Eastern Europe. And, I just love the whole honey badgers thing. Honey badgers are awesome. Anyways, I think everything else is software, so we'll just go ahead and jump on over into that. There were a few things this week I wanted to highlight. BlueWallet has a new version, 7.00.
So that's a kind of a major update there. Bisc has a version 2.1 o with support for lightning networks as additional Bitcoin settlement method. Well, that's interesting. It looks like they just bolted on lightning. Look at that. Seed signer, the the hardware wallet, if you wanna call it that, it's just the easiest thing to call it, tool, that I use, came out with a new version, 0.8.0. And Keith, the developer there, has actually been doing some really cool things with the bigger screens, 3.2 inch screen that I'm very excited about. I don't have the best vision. And the one thing I don't like about the seed signer is that screen is so small.
I do struggle with it a little bit, to be honest, and I would love to have a much bigger screen like that. It'll require a new case or, you know, it'll require all that, but they're putting the code in place to allow that. So at least it will be an option, and I do believe that my next seed signer will actually be with a bigger screen. That'd probably give me a reason to invest in 1. Fountain, one of our favorite podcasting 2.0 apps. It's probably my second favorite one, is doing something I'm interested in, especially considering what's been going on, like, with Telegram now and these other social platforms.
They put out a new version, 1.1, and they are integrating it with Nostr, which does kinda sound strange. But essentially, from what I understand, if you put in your nostril keys and you have a nostril profile, which is what your nostril keys are for, of course, when you comment, when you post, when you boost somebody or this kind of thing, it will show up on your nostril profile. Now you may not want that, but of course, you have complete control over that. But it also it's an interesting integration. And it you know, personally for me, it might be something I might want to do. One of the things I hate about multiple social platforms is having to go from platform to platform. Put out the new podcast. This is what you know, and copy and paste and trying to keep up with all this stuff. And it would be cool to to have that as well.
Nostrika Nostrika, which is the Noster unconference or whatever, is actually going on or did go on in Riga, as well in Latvia, right before the other conference. This is August 22nd through 23rd. I do not know if there's video of that, although there might be. It's Nostriga. I'll try and find that and put it in the show notes for both of those, if I can find that. And looks like that's about it. Let's see if there's anything else I need to discuss. No. I think that's about it. So we're gonna go ahead and wrap this up. So, of course, Stoches PLEBS podcast supports podcasting 2.0. We are what's called a value for value podcast as I talk about on here time and time again. I don't have ads and I don't have sponsorships.
I don't do anything like that, And I do depend on people, like hypersensitive as ours and gulag bound to support me, to boost into I I honestly, from the boost, I love the feedback. It's basically real time and the streaming of sats, which of course I appreciate as well. But all of that is going to get used to help improve the show. Okay? And I have no intention at this point, certainly, of going out and getting any kind of advertising or sponsorship. And if I ever did choose to go that route, I would have to be very, very careful about who I use. Because I I hate to pick on Ledger, and I do this time and time again, but let's just say Ledger. Let's say Ledger came to me and said, well, for every 1,000 downloads, we'll give you a $100.
It's a pretty sweet deal. Okay. Sure, Ledger. And in return, I'm never gonna talk about how your system was recently compromised and all of your users' data was stolen. And now you get fake emails from scammers trying to get your ledger information. Sure, ledger. I'll do that. No. I won't. So there's really very few products in the Bitcoin space that I could actually promote. And I do promote the stuff that I use. I've talked about Kaboom racks, and I've talked about Kaboom racks when we've had issues. I've talked about seed signer and the great work that those guys are doing over there. And again, that's another project that even if they were to approach me and say, hey, Macintosh, we'll pay you to to, you know, for a sponsorship or whatever.
As much as I like them and as much as I believe in them, I would have to turn them down. Because if I did and there was ever a problem, I would hesitate. I may not do that, or it may get me in legal trouble depending on the verbiage of the contract that was written and this kind of thing. And I just, I'm just gonna stay away from all of that. So I do come to you and I say, if you're getting value out of this show, then please consider bringing value back to it. And there are other ways that you could do that besides boosting and streaming. You can certainly go on to Fountain and and just click like on the show, or tell somebody about the show, or whatever.
Those things bring value. And I would encourage you if you're not already using a a podcasting 2 point o app to maybe take a look at that. It's interesting because I looked at my stats recently. Something like 70% of my listeners are using fountain, which is actually pretty crazy. And only a pretty small percentage are using, like, Apple Podcasts. It was Fountain. It was, there's a few of the podcasting 2.0 apps that take up the the great majority. That's just my audience, but for those of you who are not using podcasting 2.0 apps, I would still encourage you to check that out. There's a lot of cool stuff going on right now.
And it goes far beyond just the ability to support the people who are making the content for podcast. You can have chapters for your episodes, which I do every week. You can have a transcript of the episode, which I do every week. And you can see those right in your player. With the chapters, maybe you don't wanna hear this ending rant, so you can just skip it. Or the I don't know, the mining info or whatever. You can skip that, or you can skip ahead so you can hear that part first. Right? There's gotta be one of you out there. I know y'all all love to hear about the mining stuff. Look. You may not you may not think anything of mining, but without mining, there wouldn't be Bitcoin, and that's the truth.
So I don't know. You may not wanna go into the depths of the mind, so to speak, but it is important to to kinda understand where all this stuff intersects. Anyways, that's gonna be it. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up. There's a number of ways you can get a hold of me. I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm on mastodon@[email protected]. You can also reach me by email at [email protected]. My pubkey, I have posted on Twitter pinned to the top of my profile. Okay? So if you're on noster and you wanna hook up, you could go look up that on there and find that there because it's probably the best place to put it because it's a it's a pub key. It's not human readable, and that's it. So stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. I will talk to you all soon.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Weekly Bitcoin Stats and Market Update
Who is Dave Ramsey?
Macintosh's Personal Finance Journey
Dave Ramsey's Financial Principles
Dave Ramsey's Stance on Bitcoin
Critique of Dave Ramsey
Listener Boosts and Feedback
News and Notes
Software Updates
Podcasting 2.0 and Value for Value Model
Closing Remarks and Contact Information
