What does X have to do with Bitcoin? Glad you asked!! In this episode we discuss how building robust, open source protocols can help with government overreach. Centralized systems like X and Telegram are also points of failure subject to pressure from governmental institutions. But what can we do? Let's discuss.
Bitcoin Weekly Close
September 8th, 2024: $54,139.69
Block Height at Time of Recording
860,547
Bitcoin Weekly Close
September 8th, 2024: $54,139.69
Block Height at Time of Recording
860,547
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
[00:00:01]
McIntosh:
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is September 8th, and this is episode 181 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is censorship and privacy. Got a lot to cover, 2 weeks worth of sideways and down and back up and whatever, and the news and the stuff. And we've got some news this week that I really kinda wanna hopefully have you think about, but, we'll we'll get into that shortly. The weekly close just a couple hours ago, was at $54,139.69, actually. So we were up for the day, but we were certainly down. 2 weeks ago, I think the close was 64,000.
So we've actually dropped $10,000 in a couple of weeks, and and that's fine. Bitcoin's doing what Bitcoin does. It's certainly, it's been exploring this area quite thoroughly, and it doesn't really seem to wanna go below 50, but, it doesn't seem to now wanna go above 60. So, I don't know. We'll just have to see. All's I can say is as we always say here at satoshi's plebs, of course, you should be DCA ing. Don't worry about this price one day, and that day may not be very long from now. We may consider this to be cheap sats, buying those cheap sats.
So we're at block height 860,547. We're about to have another difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days on September 10th, and that adjustment will be, if it were to happen right now, 4.86% up, which on top of the almost 3% up we had last time means we will have gone up gracious, like, almost 8%. Hash rate, miners are coming online. Difficulty is going up because of that price, unfortunately, is not. This is a brew, that means that ultimately, we will have a reaction. We will have a a chemical reaction as we brew these ingredients together, and there will be an explosion.
We're going to have Bitcoin miners who are going to go bankrupt if this continues. In fact, there was a small one, Rhodium, I think, is the name of the company, who has declared bankruptcy since we last discussed, and they're pretty small potatoes. I don't recall ever actually having heard of them before they went bankrupt. There's certainly no riot, no bit bitfarms, something like that. But regardless, that's strictly due to, you know, their capital. They're they ran out of money. They ran out of money because it was costing more than $50,000 essentially to mine a Bitcoin.
Now does it cost everybody more than $50,000 to mine a Bitcoin? No. No. Probably not. You know, there's only a few components that goes into this. Things like the price of electricity. You've got the price of Bitcoin itself. Is it low or high? You've got the price of your overhead, your expenditure, sure. There's a financial term for it, but I don't know what it is off hand. Basically, your employees in this type thing. Right? For someone like rhodium, apparently, it was too expensive to mine Bitcoin, so they have declared bankruptcy. And they'll probably get bought up by someone who has some capital and if nothing else for their for their hosting, for their for their miners that are online.
Because other people who are in better shape will weather the storm and move on. But I would not be surprised. My point in all this is is not to, you know, I I it's not to make fun of rhodium or anything like that. It's just I would not be surprised if we saw some bigger bankruptcies or companies being bought by other companies if this price doesn't move up soon. Now why is the price not going up? I can't answer that question. I'm, I'm not gonna speculate. I'm not gonna throw out a conspiracy theory or something like that and say, well, the, you know, the market, the the bankers, whoever, is you know, they're they're artificially keeping the price low. I don't necessarily really think that that's true.
In fact, we well, we see the ETFs who are, selling, at least they have, I think, over the last month, something like 600,000,000 in Bitcoin. Not, you know, but that's that's actually the client's money. That's that's not the broker's money, essentially, whoever that may be. Could corporations be buying this this money? I I this money. This Bitcoin? I I don't know. If they're a public company, they will have to disclose that eventually, within a few months, but I don't know. But this pleb this pleb, his miners are online. His miners are hashing.
His miners are doing their thing. And guess what? Macintosh Mining doesn't have any employees. Right? I don't pay myself. Weather this storm even though my electricity cost is probably a little higher than most of these public in fact, I'm sure it is, the majority of these public companies. Because they're buying massive amounts of electricity, and they're getting a discount for that. But people are expensive, and this person works for free. So there you go. Alright. Enough about that. I don't wanna turn this into the mining show. I know y'all don't really like that, so we'll move right on. Anyways, fees and mempool.
Right now, we're looking at 4 sets per v byte. The the v byte the transaction cost has actually been very good over the last few weeks. I've had to make some payments and whatever, and it's nice when you're sending it out 3 sat per v byte. 30¢ fee to move your, transaction across the main net. We're looking at 717 megabytes of unprocessed transactions right now, which is lower than it was a couple weeks ago by about a 100, I believe. But we're, of course, nowhere near empty. Alright. So that's kind of the roundup of the the view of things. Again, I would encourage you, just keep DCA ing.
Don't don't worry. Don't. Don't. If you figured out that Bitcoin is going to be around, then all you need to do is DCA. Whether that's $10 a day, $5 a day, $100 a day, whatever your level may be, whatever your investment amount may be, whatever your belief may be, you just keep doing that. And you don't worry about whether Bitcoin reaches $50,000 or $40,000 of some are now saying, and I don't believe that. But, you know, it doesn't matter. Right now, here in the last few days, we went down to 52,000 according to this chart. Back in August, early August, we went all the way down to 49220.
So that was actually the last time we got down to basically $50,000. Now if you look over the trend for the last couple weeks, really ever since the end of July, we've gone down. But we just keep basically going down and not it won't continue. It doesn't look like it will. So eventually, we'll reverse, and we'll start going back up, and we'll break that 60 or $64,000 ceiling, whatever that may be. We'll get up above then 70 $1,000. Once we break above the all time high again, man, it's gonna be a rocket. At least, I think it is. I think it's gonna go from 70 to a100 in a blink of an eye. Alright. Let's move on. What are we talking about? Fundamental rights, censorship, privacy. Why is Macintosh talking about what he brings up so often?
In my opinion, it was built as a way to, rest control of monetary policy from governments. In my opinion, it was built to have a way to not have monetary inflation, Printing of money. In my opinion, it was built as a way to build something that was censorship resistant. I know originally there was there was some talk of privacy in Bitcoin. There wasn't necessarily a whole lot. And you can point out various quotes by various people and say, well, look, they were talking about privacy. That's certainly true. We are seeing some privacy things being built in. Silent payments, for example, were just implemented.
Very nice. In my opinion, not enough about privacy. It's a pseudo anonymous privacy. And I don't know that Satoshi or Hal or some of these or Adam, some of these very early people in Bitcoin, at least didn't realize or didn't think through or whatever. The blockchain itself provides a clear record of what's going on. And through chain analysis, whether it's flawed or not, and it probably is. And it's probably being weaponized as a way to get people in trouble and and this kind of thing. But through chain analysis, you can determine a lot. So if we want privacy in our Bitcoin, if we want anonymity in our Bitcoin, then we have to do better on that front. But I don't think that was necessarily a huge early thrust.
Censorship certainly was. A lack of a a fixed limit certainly was. A store of value outside the current system certainly was. A way to exchange money digitally, anonymously, relatively speaking, certainly was. Why do I bring this up? Not that you need a history lesson, because I don't necessarily think that you do. But I bring this up because we are seeing examples in real life of censorship happening, not in Bitcoin necessarily, but in other areas. Since we last talked, the CEO of Telegram and what whatever I'm not here to discuss tell Telegram's merits, but Telegram is a widely used communication messaging app.
I use it to talk to various people in the Bitcoin space. I use it to communicate with Kaboomracks, for example, my my hosting platform. I use it. Seed signer has a Telegram group that we talk in, I don't know. Anyways, 100 probably of millions of people, and I do not know a number. And, of course, Telegram is a company. It's a closed source centralized company. So they may say it's 200,000,000 people. It may not be. I don't know. But regardless, a lot of people do use it. The CEO was arrested in France. He landed his plane apparently in Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport, and the police were nice enough to meet him there and arrest him on the tarmac. Now isn't that sweet?
Welcome to France, sir. Here are your handcuffs, and we will now take you via the gendarmes, which I I hopefully said that right, to the local police station. And they accused him. There's, like, 20 counts in his, 20 charges in his case. Aiding and abetting child pornography and money laundering and fraud. I mean, I heard part of the list today. It was astounding. Why? Because he's the CEO of of this, company that makes a messaging protocol, and he won't just dump the data, at least publicly, to the government on his users who he doesn't know who they are. So they've attempted to, you know, twist his arm and get him to do that.
Oh, one of the things, of course, about Bitcoin was it was to be decentralized. I think that has succeeded very admirably. There are tens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes running on the network that support that network. And that's one of the problems with Telegram. It is not decentralized. So they can apply pressure to the CEO. Right? So turn your attention down to Brazil. Hey, Kyron, mayor Morales down in Brazil. He's been visiting there for a while. He, actually came up here to the United States and apparently up to Canada, which I didn't know he was doing that, but it sounds like he had a good time up there with, Petar.
And one of the supreme court judges, which I don't know anything about Brazilian politics, so maybe their supreme court is only one person. I don't know. But, anyways, apparently, he's in a tiff with, Elon Musk over at x. So he said, you can't have x here in Brazil. And the government is gonna take over essentially the assets of x in Brazil, and it was the same kind of mess. And then he actually went further and said, no. We're taking over the Starlink stuff as well, and we're not allowing Starlink here in Brazil. And how's that going for you guys down there in Brazil? I I don't know.
X is just a messaging platform. X is just Elon's well, originally Jack's vision of a town center where people can talk. But apparently, free speech is a problem. Do you know the UK? I saw some, you know, look. I don't know how to say this. I know I have listeners in the UK. And look. I I self we I talk about America all the time. Fact, I'm gonna talk about it tonight. I'm gonna talk about Trump. You people probably think I'm I'm light on Trump. Trump said something stupid earlier this week, and we're gonna talk about that in just a minute. But some sir whoever, and I don't remember who it was. I I don't.
But it was some famous person who was knighted, said something about the queen, and they're demanding that he gives knighthood back. I mean, get a life, people. And apparently, if you retweet or like or post something on Twitter, excuse me, x, that is deemed racist or offensive, they'll just throw you in jail. I don't understand it. And maybe it's because maybe it's because I grew up in a country that the only difference I can tell in America and and everywhere else, We are not perfect. We are not. And I rail about that constantly. But we do have a constitution and a bill of rights.
And what that says is on a fundamental level, we have a right to free speech, for example. And the court screws it up all the time. But I can point to that and say, I have the right to say, you are a bad person. I have a right to say the queen is stupid. I don't know the queen. Sorry. I'm not saying that. Or the king. I don't know. I'm not in and I'm not saying that, but I have a right to say that. I understand that a lot of countries don't really have those fundamental rights and or they change their constitution all the time.
So maybe that is a difference. And I I I'm not turning this into some philosophical discussion, and god knows I'm not telling everyone that they should come to the United States. I don't know that we're really any better than anywhere else. But I do think that these things that are happening around the world are very interesting. I don't wanna turn this into some patriotic rah rah moment because that's not at all what I'm trying to do. But these things that are happening around the world, I do think they'd be harder to happen here. How about that? Not that I think our stuff happens in the shadows. How about how how does that sound?
I do think there's pressure on companies and this kind of thing, and I we we see that, and there's cases you can point to and say, well, that's what happened. And we find out after the fact that the government was in fact pressuring companies to do certain things. It it's come out recently about Facebook censoring, during COVID. And some of these are Google, I think, but certainly Facebook. Zuckerberg admitted to it. Zuckerberg, the CEO of the company in in public admitted to this. So, yes, it does happen here. So we're certainly not. But it it just I don't know.
We're not gonna get dragged off the street for saying Biden sucks. Okay? Biden shouldn't be on, quote, vacation for weeks on end, which apparently he's been in Delaware for, I don't know, multiple weeks at this point, which maybe that's better for him to do. But at least I can say that, and most likely, with some degree of certainty that that's not gonna get me in trouble. And if it does, there'll be people who probably will stand up for me. Anyways, what were we talking about? Brazil. Brazil x. Again, centralized. Again, same type. It's a slightly different story, but it's the same type thing. You can't do this. You can't do that. Okay. We're just we're gonna find people. It was $75100 if they access x through a VPN.
Where am I going with all this? We live in a world that has changed a lot. And certainly, in the last 50 years. Let's just go back to 1970. So 54 years. It's changed. And if we want from Bitcoin what Bitcoin can provide a global reserve currency, a medium of exchange between people, censorship resistance, and privacy. Then we need to continue the work of building that out. We need to continue the work of using that. We need to continue to ensure that even in places where the government says you can't use Bitcoin. If someone wants to do that and if they freely choose to do that, I want them to have the ability to do that. Because I don't think a government should have the ability to tell me what I can or can't do with my money.
And I don't think the government should have the ability to track everything I do with my money. And by the way, that's why governments push back so hard on cash these days. They hate cash because they can't track it, at least efficiently. Of course, bills have serial numbers on them. So, theoretically, they can. But it certainly makes it much more difficult. So I guess this week's kind of a a downer. I'm actually curious, Karen, if you're listening to this episode, if you heard anything about the whole Twitter kerfuffle, what are people kinda what's going on down there?
I know that the president is, what I would consider certainly to be very left leaning, socialist, essentially. I mean, that's fine. That's who was elected, but I'm just curious as to how all this is playing out in terms of the local population. If you have access, if you're talking to people who are who care about Twitter, you may not all your friends and whatever may they may have no interest in Twitter. I don't I don't know. As we move into the future, as we spend our most precious asset, which is time, on building or doing or being involved in things, I would encourage you to keep this in mind.
Governments aren't gonna suddenly say, oh, we were wrong. We're going to change. So as Matt O'Dell talks about a lot, the Freedom Tech tools, these tools that bring us privacy, these tools that bring us censorship resistance, these tools that bring us decentralization even, noster, I'm not a 100% fan, but boy, it's looking real good right now compared to Twitter. And I do like kind of the flourishing ecosystem, so to speak, of all the different things going on in Nostr. And I love Noster's ability to integrate with Bitcoin. I expect over the next 10 years, we're going to see more of this. I think we're gonna see more countries, places, the EU.
I'm just gonna go ahead and get everybody lumped in here. Sorry. You know, has certainly tried. Just recently, they tried to pass a bill. You can't self host a wallet, a Bitcoin wallet. No. It's gotta be on a central exchange. Well, I I have a few choice words for whoever is in charge of the EU. Words I can't I'm not going to say on here. Okay? I got 12 words in my head or 24. That means that you can't take that from me, actually. If you don't understand what I mean, bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet, which isn't a wallet, but let's not get off on that. It's fundamentally 12 or 24 words.
You can remember those or you can write them on a piece of paper and store them safely or if you're paranoid, which you should be, you can stamp them on steel or some other way of keeping them safe. You can distribute them geographically. You can do all these great things. You don't need a ledger. You don't need a seat signer. And you can tell the EU if that law ever gets passed, and maybe one day it will. Those words that I'm thinking in my head. Okay? That is censorship resistance. That is decentralization. That is I don't need those things, and I don't need a government telling me what to do.
This is going on in so many different ways. I heard a great discussion on the podcasting 2.0 podcast this week with Adam and Dave, about how what they are doing. The podcasting 2.0 project, which in essence is an index of all the podcast and the ability of host no. Of apps, excuse me, of applications like fountain to interact with that back end so that they can provide a more decentralized actually a more it's not decentralized. It's still a single list, but it's not under Apple's control. It's not under Spotify's control. And one of the hosts, I think it was blue Blueberry. I'm probably not saying that right, but had talked to Adam and was telling him about how he was having all of these delistings, and he didn't tell him by whom I if I'm remembering correctly.
But they speculated it was Spotify. There was requesting, oh, you gotta deplatform these people. Oh, go try and put something controversial on YouTube. You won't last a a month if you have an audience. Let's just say that I believed everything that Biden and Harris have done for the last 4 years. Let's just say I hate Trump. Let's just say I think he is Satan's spawn. Now there's a clip. Go ahead and clip that one, ladies and gentlemen. Okay? Well and I have a podcast about the great Harris, 2024 campaign and how it's going to be so awesome for America, and it's groovy.
It's groovy, baby. There's this ad for this. Sorry. I'm not even gonna go down that rabbit trail. Right? It's all good. It's all good until the other person gets elected or the other party gets elected. Because see politics politics are cyclical. Back when I was a kid, Ronald Reagan, he was a reaction to Jimmy Carter, Democrat. Jimmy, great heart. Seriously, he's out there still to this day as far as I know. In his nineties building habitat for humanity. But economically, a train wreck. Reagan was a a response to that, and then you moved on to the next person. And so it just swings from Democrat to Republican, from left to right, to left to right. And as we've gone through the decades, it's gotten more and more polarized.
Right? We're now at the point where it's there's no center. It's left left or right right. And there's very little center. So maybe I'm promoting Biden and and Harrison. I can't believe I can't believe the conservatives would do this to them. But then somehow, the conservatives get elected. And what might they do? Hey, Apple. Can you take that man, that guy's really popular, and he hates us. Take him down. Spotify? Hey. Hey, Spotify. That that guy, he he talks he talks bad about me. He's so mean. Take him take him out. No. Now can Adam and Dave get pressured? Yes.
But, actually, their data is freely available. It's just a MySQL server, and you can make a copy of it essentially. And some people have done that. So there is a level of decentralization, and if they were to ever come under any pressure, I'm sure that that would get a lot more decentralized. So if I have to, I can host my own podcast myself if I need to. That is actually doable. So these are the choices we're going to have to make because whether it's left or right, labor or what's the other party in the UK? Sorry, guys. I apologize. It completely slips my mind, but you get the idea.
Okay? It doesn't matter because even if you're on one side if you're on the side that's in power, quote, now, the other side will be in power at some point, and they may not like what you're doing. So we need to build these things right into the protocols, right into the base level of all of this stuff. Messaging, certainly our money. Our encryption needs to be open source. It needs to be transparent to wrap this up and move on. We need more security. We need more privacy. We need more censorship resistance. And if you live in a country and you that you feel perfectly comfortable in, and you don't feel like you're threatened at all, and you're not a political person, and you would never say anything that was offensive and I try not to, by the way.
I'm really not a mean person. You might be amazed how quickly you can wake up and find that the world has changed. And even if it never happens to you, I would encourage you I would encourage you to do this for the other people who do need it. People in Brazil need a way to communicate right now, at least a lot of them do. I would encourage them to get on Noster. I don't know what to tell the people in the UK. That's a frightening situation in my opinion. And if you've got a different opinion, I'd love to hear it. I I don't want this to be a one-sided discussion. I for those of you actually in the UK, I'm curious if I'm hearing this wrong.
I know that I watch Sky News, and I don't see very much about this at all. But elsewhere, I see stuff that's just staggering. It's crazy. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I am. Let's talk about our supporters because that'll make me happy now that I'm thoroughly depressed. This was not a fun episode to make. I don't. It it's not. It's just not a fun topic, but I think it's necessary. But let's talk about some fun things. I was talking about Kyron just a few minutes ago. We got some support from him, and here's what he said. He first of all, he sent us 1111, a roast sticks, boost.
This was actually on the Dave Ramsey episode, the last episode. Although I saw he, like, watched, like, or listened to, like, 4 in a row. So that was kinda funny. Appreciate that, Kyron. And he said this. He said, just got back to Brazil after finishing my North American tour, so now I have time for podcast again. Was a pleasure to meet you in person. McIntosh was an absolute blast. Yeah. Same here, Kyren, certainly. Of course, I've met him up at the Bitcoin conference a few weeks ago now. And, for the first time in person, that was great. Hopefully, we can do that again at some point somewhere, maybe not at the Bitcoin Bitcoin conference. We he was not at the conference. He was at the, the music event, the podcasting 2 point o music event that was going on across literally across the street from the conference, which was awesome as well.
Although, I'm old and my ears don't handle live music so well anymore. I always used to think it was strange when older people would be like, it's so loud. I remember I went to, it was a heavy metal concert, and it was it was a small venue. It was so loud. It was I have no idea what decibels it was in there, but it was it was really, really my ears were literally ringing when I left, like, for, like, a 30 minutes or something. But the loud never used to bother me, and it's like, man. Now it's like I'm in a situation where there's some kind of live music going on or whatever, and it's like, turn it down. Shut up, grandpa. Anyways, they did it was it's really cool seeing that tech come together, though, with the live music and with the streaming and boosting that was going on.
Really cool stuff. I would encourage you to check it out. If you if you have no idea what I'm talking about, grab the fountain app. I know offhand right now, they have a music selection, and, there's, like, live, not live. There's many, many artists you can, like, find on there, and it's all absolutely free. And you can support by streaming or boosting, I think. Maybe you can stream on fountain. I know you can boost. I I think you can do both. Or Wave Lake is another place. Those kind of things. So, anyways, I appreciate that, Kyron. Again, glad you had a great time on your North American he was all over the place. It was crazy. Let's see.
You were in Nashville. You were in well, you went to Birmingham, actually, after the conference, and then you went to Los Angeles, and then I guess you went up to Toronto, maybe? I I think I heard you say Toronto, but certainly Canada, which I didn't hadn't any idea you were doing. And then you went back to Brazil, I guess. So that was cool. What a life. Yeah. Kyron, actually, seriously, though, I'd love to get your viewpoint on what's going on down there in Brazil, and maybe I'm just missing something. And, frankly, maybe I'm just too conservative. I'm politically, frankly, I'm I've told y'all in the past, financially, I'm very conservative.
Okay? I harp constantly on our budgets and debt and things like that. Things that I believe are super important, but that's not really actually a a party thing. That's it doesn't matter. The Republicans spend just as much as the Democrats do or at least close to it. They're both overspending, and nobody will even do a balanced budget because it because it hurts people's feelings, and it cuts people out and whatever. I'm not gonna talk about anything beyond that, but anyways, and then our second boost came from our friend, hypersensitive SARS boosted in a 1,000 sats.
Again, last week's episode. This was funny. So I'm not gonna say the name because I'll butcher it again. I'll say it this way. The Tour of Spain, the bike race that I've been watching that actually concluded today, he said, you butchered the pronounce pronunciation a little bit, but I am a language snob. That's okay. I actually passed the land of my sister about a week ago. It only lasted about a minute or 2, and the cyclist word passed right in front of my nose. Kind of fun though. PS, it's a bit greener in Central Portugal than near the coast. Thanks a lot. I appreciate that. That's really cool that they went right by her house.
Yeah. It finished in Madrid today. I know who won, although I haven't actually watched the last couple minutes of the of the time trial. It ended on a time trial, which was kinda weird to me. I I don't really like that format. I love it when they race around Madrid or Rome for the Giro d'Italia or the, or Paris, the Champs Elysees for the Tour of France. And that they didn't do that this year for the Tour of France either was terribly disappointing. And it was because of the Olympics, which I get. But, anyways, we're not gonna talk about cycling all day. I do wanna say this.
Look. I'm from the southeast of the United States. I can barely speak English, which is not I barely I speak American. I speak southern, and, I have to work just to get to a level where people outside of, you know, my area can understand me clearly all the time. I'm not very language oriented in in terms of being able to learn. I took 2 years of French in high school. I took 1 year of Spanish in high school, and then sadly, I had to take another semester of Spanish in college. It was a requirement. I never would have done it otherwise. Not that I don't like Spanish, but, man, it was brutal. It was a 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock class in the morning, which I am not a morning person, 5 days a week, and I suffered. I think I made a c minus in it. If I recall, that teacher actually came from Peru, if I'm remembering correctly.
I don't know. I speak Spanish better than French and don't really do either one very good at all is all I know. And what I here's my point. I would love this is the one thing I want out of I want 2 things, actually, out of AI. 2 things. 2 things. And one of them I'm already getting. I I've told you on the past, I do a lot of coding. I'm essentially a software engineer at my job. I write automation code, but it's pretty complex stuff. And I use chat GPT actually quite a bit to kind of flesh out my code. I'd know what I'm trying to get to, and a lot of times I'll have a framework, but then I'll use it to bounce. It's almost like a second person. So that's pretty cool and quite handy. I actually solved a problem last night.
Yes. It was. Last night, using chat g p d. The other thing I want is something that knows languages and can translate on the fly. And it I I guess, kinda what I'm envisioning is maybe things you have in your ear, like earbuds or whatever. And you hear, in my case, English, and the other person hears whatever their language is, whether it's Spanish or say Portuguese or, or French or Italian or Chinese or or whatever, I think it would actually bring the world a lot closer together. And language barriers are tough. And to be able to communicate with people, the common person in other countries, is a fabulous ability. It's one that I don't really have. I spent I I have been in China I don't know how many times. I've lost track. It's been a number. I haven't been in, like, 4 years, but I did spend a lot of time there. And at one point, I actually spent 6 months there, and I tried for 6 months to learn Chinese Mandarin.
I couldn't speak past hello and goodbye and, you know, a few minor phrases. Mandarin is tough. God, I'm not even talking about writing it. I'm just talking about speaking it. And for somebody who struggles with language like I do, it's even worse. It's funny. Well, I I just I would love that ability. I'm sorry. I it's a little tangent, but I would love that ability to kinda have those earbuds in and be able to it would be great if it was the other, like, if I'm listening to you, hypersensitive SARS, and you're talking in your native tongue, whatever that may be, and I hear it in English, but I hear your voice.
It's not some translator voice. It literally on the fly analyzes your voice and that tone and intonation and all that kind of stuff, and translates it from, say, Portuguese to English or, I think you said you were from the Netherlands. So I wanna go out on a limb, and if I'm wrong, you're gonna boost in and be like, you're wrong. And that's fine. But Dutch or German maybe or maybe both. Probably all 3. You probably speak all 3, don't you? I have a feeling you speak, like, 14 different languages. Anyways, I would hear it in your voice and your intonation because that that really does help. And actually, I feel like this is one thing that AI can actually give us. I think that the large language model of AI that we currently have is going to prove to not be good at a lot of things. But I do think that this is one.
That if they do the research, and I've actually looked, there are beginnings of this in terms of translation tools. They're not I don't think they're there yet. But I have hope that one day they will be, and then I will speak fluent perfect Spanish in a Castilian accent. I think that's what my teacher called it. So in Spanish, as with really any language, I mean, there's variations. Right? So I'm I'm in the southeast of the United States, which means I'm near the Mexican border, which means that a lot of the people I hear speak Spanish are from Mexico. Mexican Spanish is not the same as Spanish that they speak in Spain. Now they can understand each other, but there are variances. There's different pronunciations, and in some cases, there are different words and this kind of thing.
But, anyways, I'm sorry. I appreciate it. Hypersensitivity. SARS. I didn't mean to get off on all that. But one day, friend, when that comes around, you and I are gonna meet up, and we're gonna have a chat. And it won't be in English. It'll be in whatever language it is that you talk in most, and I'll talk in English, and we'll have translations going on. That would be awesome. Alright. We had did have a total of 33195 sats, almost 34100 sats that were streamed or boosted this week. I appreciate that. And we're gonna we're gonna go ahead and get our news, which there wasn't, really hasn't been a huge amount.
Everybody's been screaming about the price, but let me check. Of course, I've already talked about Telegram that bit, and I'm not even gonna include I'm not gonna include that in the news because it's not really Bitcoin news. I do think it's important stuff, but I don't think I'm gonna put that in actually in our news. Oh, and here's another one. I didn't even mention this one. August 27th. Yeah. This was well, this was probably right after we recorded. Let me just run through some of this real quick. By the way, I'm I'm gonna tweet this. I'm gonna I did tweet this. I'm gonna repeat this. I want you to hear this.
Some dude I guess he's like a big investor. I have no idea. Mike Alford. Mike Alford on Twitter. Like, literally, that's his handle. So apparently, he's been around a long time. If you have 1 Bitcoin or intend to have 1 Bitcoin by the end of 2025, like and retweet this, so I can congratulate you on your vision and foresight. Now, aside from the fact that he's just doing that to kinda build audience awareness or get new people or or whatever. When you see something like this, here's what I said. That's really bad OPSEC, and by OPSEC, I mean operational security. I know you don't care now, but one day, that might be really important information that you wish you hadn't broadcast to the world.
I hope you have a plan to get to 1 + Bitcoin, but, yeah, don't be saying you have 1 or that that's even your plan. Do you hear me? What if Bitcoin's a $1,000,000? What if Bitcoin is $5,000,000? Hal Finney, may he rest in peace, said Bitcoin could get to 10,000,000. And he did the math. He's a really smart guy or was. And, basically, if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency and widespread usage and so on, it it is possible. Do you want back in 2024 to have everybody know on a public forum that you have 1 + Bitcoin? Mark Zuckerberg says White House pressured Meta to censor COVID 19 content. By the way, this is not a conspiracy. It was on CNBC, a very left leaning news, news source. So if you think that this was something that was just made up, well, no. It's not.
Talking about censorship, privacy, and all that kind of stuff, self sovereignty, I never really even threw that in there. Binance, the exchange, has seized all Palestinian assets at Israel's request. I have very purposely stayed out of the argument about Israel, Palestine, all of that. I it's not my duck. I just stayed out of it. But that is not okay. So Israel came to Binance and said, freeze those assets. And those people at Binance did it, that is not okay. Just like it's not okay to freeze Russian assets, just like it's, not okay to cut Russia off the SWIFT network, just like it would not be okay to freeze Ukrainian assets or Israeli assets or Brazilian assets or oh, god. What did the United States just do?
They've they they seized Maduro's down in Venezuela. The president, they seized his private plane. That is not okay. Twelve words people, 24 words, Bitcoin. You that is unseasonable. Interesting little article about textbooks in Africa. And if you don't understand why that would be important, I posted it on Twitter on the 28th August. Okay. Oh, the VPN access to x, $8874 per day. That's nice. 94% of the total Bitcoin supply has now been issued. That means, ladies and gentlemen, there's only 6% remaining. Get yours while it's on sale. There's only, oh, this was interesting. I haven't run the numbers on this. I have no idea if this is true, so take this with a grain of salt.
There are only 365,000 wholecoiners in the world. That's 0.0045 percent of the world population. A whole coiner is someone who owns 1 Bitcoin. In comparison, the chance of lightning, getting struck by lightning is higher at 0.0065%. There you go. That's gonna be worth a lot one day. I'm not even gonna talk about that. That'll be in the well, I'm gonna go ahead and throw this out because I don't remember this being in my software list. Core lightning 2, 24.08 bringing bolt 12, which is awesome. Self payments and blinded paths, so good security improvements there. Plus, bolt 12, which means I could stick a, QR code up on my website, and you could send me lightning.
That's cool. Strike now has bolt 12, which that is incredible. You may not like strike. You may think that strike, you know, is not self sovereign and so on and so forth. You would certainly be correct. You're not self sovereign, but they are all over the world, At least in many, many parts of it. And they are now offering Bolt 12 to their millions and millions and millions of users, and that's great. I posted a video that I reposted of a honey badger. I will You need to follow me on Twitter to see it. It's hilarious. It's a minute and 14 seconds. It's a honey badger taking on 3 leopards. I love the honey badger. If you know anything about honey badgers, they are tough. S o.
Yeah. You get the idea. Okay. I think honey badgers well, I seriously thought about a Bitcoin podcast along the lines of, like, honey badger Bitcoin or something like that. Like, it would be the mascot. I would if it wasn't so overused in the Bitcoin space, but I think it's a great analogy. I really do. Honey badgers are awesome. Credit card defaults from small lenders hit record high. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Companies have grown their Bitcoin holdings by almost 600%, 587% over the last 4 years by according to River Financial.
So in other words, the institutions are buying. Even if your neighbor isn't buying yet, the institutions are. And our candidate, Democrat candidate for president, miss Harris, said, I will direct the Department of Justice to censor misinformation and hate online. Sounds a lot like what's going on in some of these other countries, and I would be 100% opposed to that. The DOJ is not to be used in that manner. In fact, I think the DOJ has been misused for a long time. Here's my Donald Trump. There was no I'm not gonna have any links in the show notes, I guess, because there's not really any anything to put in there.
Earlier today, I retweeted this, and I'm just assuming this is correct. I don't know why it would not be. I know he's going to do tariffs. He said he or at least attempt to. He has said that. I've heard him say it multiple times. And by the way, I'm not opposed to tariffs. So for example, China is dumping steel on the market at very, very, very low value cost. A tariff on that, I think, would not be out of line. I because they're doing it at below at below cost in order to basically wreck our market. That's my opinion. I'm not opposed to that necessarily, but here's what he said. Donald Trump pledges 100% tariff for countries that shun the US dollar.
So in other words, if you don't use our dollar for trade, we're going to put a tariff on you. I'm not okay with that. I've gone on for an hour. It's time to wrap this up. Software updates. I do have a few. I've got a new program, reader. It's kind of interesting. You you basically stick, RSS feeds, websites. You can so I'm I'm pulling the sites in that I regularly review, and then you can, like, bookmark stuff. So what I should be able to do is go in here. And I do have a couple, although I thought I did more than that. The strike one, which we've already talked about. There are only three examples, by the way, of illicit tornado cash use cited by the US Treasury and their sanctions case against the tornado cash developers.
That's appalling. It's a longer conversation, I think, maybe, and I'm not sure I'm willing to have it on this show, but about how platforms are held responsible for what their users do. And I've thought a lot about this. I I used to own a dial up Internet provider, and I was providing people access to the Internet. They would dial into my modems and access the Internet. And I'm sure some of those people were doing things that I would not approve of or maybe even were illegal. But it's not my job to police them. That's actually the police's job.
You follow me? And it's not the government's job to lean on companies and lean on developers, like in this case, in order to keep them, quote, in line because they don't like see, they don't like what they're doing because they're offering a privacy service. Very, very disappointing. That not surprising. I've mentioned the Core Lightning. A bold Bitcoin now in France, that's, they were primarily a Canadian company. They've opened up in Costa Rica. Oh, let's see. There is a new version of the lightning development kit, lndk0.2.0, for blinded paths. That's awesome.
Wait. What's the difference between these? Lightning LDK is a lightning dev kit. What is l n? It leverages the LDK. I don't okay. They they're getting upgraded in conjunction. It's the same. It's 2 different parts of the same product, essentially. So the lightning, development kit did get updated, for blinded past. That's great. That tool is used by a lot of development companies. If you're using Mutiny Wallet, I don't know if I've mentioned this or not. They are shutting down. You need to get your funds off of their servers. Yeah.
You've got till the end of the year. Okay. I think we're gonna stop there, and, we'll we'll wrap things up. This is a value for value podcast. In case you don't know, I don't do ads. I don't do promotions. I don't do anything like that, sponsorships. And there's very good reasons for that. And I always give the example of ledger. I literally am sitting here looking at 3 Ledger wallets. I bought these years ago. Ledger could come to me and say, Macintosh, I want you to promote our product because they're always putting out new product, and we'll pay you a $1,000 an episode. And all you gotta do is say, hey. This is leisure. This is whatever they're doing is thingamabob and whatever. And we'll give you a $1,000.
And you know what? I can't tell you at that point the problems with Ledger. Ledger, large surface area of attack. You've got 1,000, 100, if not 1,000 of different coins that you can hold on a ledger wallet. Every one of them is an attack vector. Your hardware wallet, if you have one, should only have one coin on it, not one single coin, but one type of coin. It should be Bitcoin, by the way, in case I'm not clear about that. Anything else is a is an attack vector. I can't talk about that because they'll pull $1,000 a week. That would be terrible.
So what I do is I come to you and I say, hey. This is a value for value podcast. If you like what you hear, if I am providing value to you, then I respectfully ask that you provide value back to me. It doesn't have to be sats. It doesn't have to be streaming. It doesn't have to be boosting. But if you wanna do that, that's terrific. There's a whole list of podcast 2.0 apps out there, by the way. You can go to podcastapps.com and see them. They provide a lot of new functionality that your old app doesn't necessarily provide chapters, transcripts, the ability to stream and boost, the ability to listen to a live show.
That's happening in a lot of these apps now, and that is really cool. I tune in when I can to the podcast in 2 episode on Friday afternoons live. And I literally am sitting there listening to it while they're doing it. But, yeah, you can also provide value and, there's stuff I can have people do if they were looking for a way to help out. I mean, that would be awesome. You can always get a hold of me. There's a number of ways to do that. Email at macintosh@satoshisdash plebs.com. I'm on Twitter as I've mentioned, Macintosh Fintech. I'm on mac mastodon. I'm on mastodon@[email protected].
So, you know, reach out to me if you got something you wanna do or some feature or something you wanna talk about or whatever. Alright? And if you clip an episode, if you just go in and clip a couple of minutes out of an episode and you post it up on, fountain, which by the way, they're doing some cool things with Nostra integration. Should talk about that sometime. But if you do that, I'll boost you 500 sats. Just tag me in the boost, in the post, and I'll I'll boost you. Okay? That's it. Thanks for being here. I hope it's been helpful. I've already gone through all the different ways you can reach me. Stay humble. Go out. Make it a great week. I'll talk to you all soon.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is September 8th, and this is episode 181 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Macintosh, and today's episode is censorship and privacy. Got a lot to cover, 2 weeks worth of sideways and down and back up and whatever, and the news and the stuff. And we've got some news this week that I really kinda wanna hopefully have you think about, but, we'll we'll get into that shortly. The weekly close just a couple hours ago, was at $54,139.69, actually. So we were up for the day, but we were certainly down. 2 weeks ago, I think the close was 64,000.
So we've actually dropped $10,000 in a couple of weeks, and and that's fine. Bitcoin's doing what Bitcoin does. It's certainly, it's been exploring this area quite thoroughly, and it doesn't really seem to wanna go below 50, but, it doesn't seem to now wanna go above 60. So, I don't know. We'll just have to see. All's I can say is as we always say here at satoshi's plebs, of course, you should be DCA ing. Don't worry about this price one day, and that day may not be very long from now. We may consider this to be cheap sats, buying those cheap sats.
So we're at block height 860,547. We're about to have another difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days on September 10th, and that adjustment will be, if it were to happen right now, 4.86% up, which on top of the almost 3% up we had last time means we will have gone up gracious, like, almost 8%. Hash rate, miners are coming online. Difficulty is going up because of that price, unfortunately, is not. This is a brew, that means that ultimately, we will have a reaction. We will have a a chemical reaction as we brew these ingredients together, and there will be an explosion.
We're going to have Bitcoin miners who are going to go bankrupt if this continues. In fact, there was a small one, Rhodium, I think, is the name of the company, who has declared bankruptcy since we last discussed, and they're pretty small potatoes. I don't recall ever actually having heard of them before they went bankrupt. There's certainly no riot, no bit bitfarms, something like that. But regardless, that's strictly due to, you know, their capital. They're they ran out of money. They ran out of money because it was costing more than $50,000 essentially to mine a Bitcoin.
Now does it cost everybody more than $50,000 to mine a Bitcoin? No. No. Probably not. You know, there's only a few components that goes into this. Things like the price of electricity. You've got the price of Bitcoin itself. Is it low or high? You've got the price of your overhead, your expenditure, sure. There's a financial term for it, but I don't know what it is off hand. Basically, your employees in this type thing. Right? For someone like rhodium, apparently, it was too expensive to mine Bitcoin, so they have declared bankruptcy. And they'll probably get bought up by someone who has some capital and if nothing else for their for their hosting, for their for their miners that are online.
Because other people who are in better shape will weather the storm and move on. But I would not be surprised. My point in all this is is not to, you know, I I it's not to make fun of rhodium or anything like that. It's just I would not be surprised if we saw some bigger bankruptcies or companies being bought by other companies if this price doesn't move up soon. Now why is the price not going up? I can't answer that question. I'm, I'm not gonna speculate. I'm not gonna throw out a conspiracy theory or something like that and say, well, the, you know, the market, the the bankers, whoever, is you know, they're they're artificially keeping the price low. I don't necessarily really think that that's true.
In fact, we well, we see the ETFs who are, selling, at least they have, I think, over the last month, something like 600,000,000 in Bitcoin. Not, you know, but that's that's actually the client's money. That's that's not the broker's money, essentially, whoever that may be. Could corporations be buying this this money? I I this money. This Bitcoin? I I don't know. If they're a public company, they will have to disclose that eventually, within a few months, but I don't know. But this pleb this pleb, his miners are online. His miners are hashing.
His miners are doing their thing. And guess what? Macintosh Mining doesn't have any employees. Right? I don't pay myself. Weather this storm even though my electricity cost is probably a little higher than most of these public in fact, I'm sure it is, the majority of these public companies. Because they're buying massive amounts of electricity, and they're getting a discount for that. But people are expensive, and this person works for free. So there you go. Alright. Enough about that. I don't wanna turn this into the mining show. I know y'all don't really like that, so we'll move right on. Anyways, fees and mempool.
Right now, we're looking at 4 sets per v byte. The the v byte the transaction cost has actually been very good over the last few weeks. I've had to make some payments and whatever, and it's nice when you're sending it out 3 sat per v byte. 30¢ fee to move your, transaction across the main net. We're looking at 717 megabytes of unprocessed transactions right now, which is lower than it was a couple weeks ago by about a 100, I believe. But we're, of course, nowhere near empty. Alright. So that's kind of the roundup of the the view of things. Again, I would encourage you, just keep DCA ing.
Don't don't worry. Don't. Don't. If you figured out that Bitcoin is going to be around, then all you need to do is DCA. Whether that's $10 a day, $5 a day, $100 a day, whatever your level may be, whatever your investment amount may be, whatever your belief may be, you just keep doing that. And you don't worry about whether Bitcoin reaches $50,000 or $40,000 of some are now saying, and I don't believe that. But, you know, it doesn't matter. Right now, here in the last few days, we went down to 52,000 according to this chart. Back in August, early August, we went all the way down to 49220.
So that was actually the last time we got down to basically $50,000. Now if you look over the trend for the last couple weeks, really ever since the end of July, we've gone down. But we just keep basically going down and not it won't continue. It doesn't look like it will. So eventually, we'll reverse, and we'll start going back up, and we'll break that 60 or $64,000 ceiling, whatever that may be. We'll get up above then 70 $1,000. Once we break above the all time high again, man, it's gonna be a rocket. At least, I think it is. I think it's gonna go from 70 to a100 in a blink of an eye. Alright. Let's move on. What are we talking about? Fundamental rights, censorship, privacy. Why is Macintosh talking about what he brings up so often?
In my opinion, it was built as a way to, rest control of monetary policy from governments. In my opinion, it was built to have a way to not have monetary inflation, Printing of money. In my opinion, it was built as a way to build something that was censorship resistant. I know originally there was there was some talk of privacy in Bitcoin. There wasn't necessarily a whole lot. And you can point out various quotes by various people and say, well, look, they were talking about privacy. That's certainly true. We are seeing some privacy things being built in. Silent payments, for example, were just implemented.
Very nice. In my opinion, not enough about privacy. It's a pseudo anonymous privacy. And I don't know that Satoshi or Hal or some of these or Adam, some of these very early people in Bitcoin, at least didn't realize or didn't think through or whatever. The blockchain itself provides a clear record of what's going on. And through chain analysis, whether it's flawed or not, and it probably is. And it's probably being weaponized as a way to get people in trouble and and this kind of thing. But through chain analysis, you can determine a lot. So if we want privacy in our Bitcoin, if we want anonymity in our Bitcoin, then we have to do better on that front. But I don't think that was necessarily a huge early thrust.
Censorship certainly was. A lack of a a fixed limit certainly was. A store of value outside the current system certainly was. A way to exchange money digitally, anonymously, relatively speaking, certainly was. Why do I bring this up? Not that you need a history lesson, because I don't necessarily think that you do. But I bring this up because we are seeing examples in real life of censorship happening, not in Bitcoin necessarily, but in other areas. Since we last talked, the CEO of Telegram and what whatever I'm not here to discuss tell Telegram's merits, but Telegram is a widely used communication messaging app.
I use it to talk to various people in the Bitcoin space. I use it to communicate with Kaboomracks, for example, my my hosting platform. I use it. Seed signer has a Telegram group that we talk in, I don't know. Anyways, 100 probably of millions of people, and I do not know a number. And, of course, Telegram is a company. It's a closed source centralized company. So they may say it's 200,000,000 people. It may not be. I don't know. But regardless, a lot of people do use it. The CEO was arrested in France. He landed his plane apparently in Paris, Charles de Gaulle Airport, and the police were nice enough to meet him there and arrest him on the tarmac. Now isn't that sweet?
Welcome to France, sir. Here are your handcuffs, and we will now take you via the gendarmes, which I I hopefully said that right, to the local police station. And they accused him. There's, like, 20 counts in his, 20 charges in his case. Aiding and abetting child pornography and money laundering and fraud. I mean, I heard part of the list today. It was astounding. Why? Because he's the CEO of of this, company that makes a messaging protocol, and he won't just dump the data, at least publicly, to the government on his users who he doesn't know who they are. So they've attempted to, you know, twist his arm and get him to do that.
Oh, one of the things, of course, about Bitcoin was it was to be decentralized. I think that has succeeded very admirably. There are tens of thousands of Bitcoin nodes running on the network that support that network. And that's one of the problems with Telegram. It is not decentralized. So they can apply pressure to the CEO. Right? So turn your attention down to Brazil. Hey, Kyron, mayor Morales down in Brazil. He's been visiting there for a while. He, actually came up here to the United States and apparently up to Canada, which I didn't know he was doing that, but it sounds like he had a good time up there with, Petar.
And one of the supreme court judges, which I don't know anything about Brazilian politics, so maybe their supreme court is only one person. I don't know. But, anyways, apparently, he's in a tiff with, Elon Musk over at x. So he said, you can't have x here in Brazil. And the government is gonna take over essentially the assets of x in Brazil, and it was the same kind of mess. And then he actually went further and said, no. We're taking over the Starlink stuff as well, and we're not allowing Starlink here in Brazil. And how's that going for you guys down there in Brazil? I I don't know.
X is just a messaging platform. X is just Elon's well, originally Jack's vision of a town center where people can talk. But apparently, free speech is a problem. Do you know the UK? I saw some, you know, look. I don't know how to say this. I know I have listeners in the UK. And look. I I self we I talk about America all the time. Fact, I'm gonna talk about it tonight. I'm gonna talk about Trump. You people probably think I'm I'm light on Trump. Trump said something stupid earlier this week, and we're gonna talk about that in just a minute. But some sir whoever, and I don't remember who it was. I I don't.
But it was some famous person who was knighted, said something about the queen, and they're demanding that he gives knighthood back. I mean, get a life, people. And apparently, if you retweet or like or post something on Twitter, excuse me, x, that is deemed racist or offensive, they'll just throw you in jail. I don't understand it. And maybe it's because maybe it's because I grew up in a country that the only difference I can tell in America and and everywhere else, We are not perfect. We are not. And I rail about that constantly. But we do have a constitution and a bill of rights.
And what that says is on a fundamental level, we have a right to free speech, for example. And the court screws it up all the time. But I can point to that and say, I have the right to say, you are a bad person. I have a right to say the queen is stupid. I don't know the queen. Sorry. I'm not saying that. Or the king. I don't know. I'm not in and I'm not saying that, but I have a right to say that. I understand that a lot of countries don't really have those fundamental rights and or they change their constitution all the time.
So maybe that is a difference. And I I I'm not turning this into some philosophical discussion, and god knows I'm not telling everyone that they should come to the United States. I don't know that we're really any better than anywhere else. But I do think that these things that are happening around the world are very interesting. I don't wanna turn this into some patriotic rah rah moment because that's not at all what I'm trying to do. But these things that are happening around the world, I do think they'd be harder to happen here. How about that? Not that I think our stuff happens in the shadows. How about how how does that sound?
I do think there's pressure on companies and this kind of thing, and I we we see that, and there's cases you can point to and say, well, that's what happened. And we find out after the fact that the government was in fact pressuring companies to do certain things. It it's come out recently about Facebook censoring, during COVID. And some of these are Google, I think, but certainly Facebook. Zuckerberg admitted to it. Zuckerberg, the CEO of the company in in public admitted to this. So, yes, it does happen here. So we're certainly not. But it it just I don't know.
We're not gonna get dragged off the street for saying Biden sucks. Okay? Biden shouldn't be on, quote, vacation for weeks on end, which apparently he's been in Delaware for, I don't know, multiple weeks at this point, which maybe that's better for him to do. But at least I can say that, and most likely, with some degree of certainty that that's not gonna get me in trouble. And if it does, there'll be people who probably will stand up for me. Anyways, what were we talking about? Brazil. Brazil x. Again, centralized. Again, same type. It's a slightly different story, but it's the same type thing. You can't do this. You can't do that. Okay. We're just we're gonna find people. It was $75100 if they access x through a VPN.
Where am I going with all this? We live in a world that has changed a lot. And certainly, in the last 50 years. Let's just go back to 1970. So 54 years. It's changed. And if we want from Bitcoin what Bitcoin can provide a global reserve currency, a medium of exchange between people, censorship resistance, and privacy. Then we need to continue the work of building that out. We need to continue the work of using that. We need to continue to ensure that even in places where the government says you can't use Bitcoin. If someone wants to do that and if they freely choose to do that, I want them to have the ability to do that. Because I don't think a government should have the ability to tell me what I can or can't do with my money.
And I don't think the government should have the ability to track everything I do with my money. And by the way, that's why governments push back so hard on cash these days. They hate cash because they can't track it, at least efficiently. Of course, bills have serial numbers on them. So, theoretically, they can. But it certainly makes it much more difficult. So I guess this week's kind of a a downer. I'm actually curious, Karen, if you're listening to this episode, if you heard anything about the whole Twitter kerfuffle, what are people kinda what's going on down there?
I know that the president is, what I would consider certainly to be very left leaning, socialist, essentially. I mean, that's fine. That's who was elected, but I'm just curious as to how all this is playing out in terms of the local population. If you have access, if you're talking to people who are who care about Twitter, you may not all your friends and whatever may they may have no interest in Twitter. I don't I don't know. As we move into the future, as we spend our most precious asset, which is time, on building or doing or being involved in things, I would encourage you to keep this in mind.
Governments aren't gonna suddenly say, oh, we were wrong. We're going to change. So as Matt O'Dell talks about a lot, the Freedom Tech tools, these tools that bring us privacy, these tools that bring us censorship resistance, these tools that bring us decentralization even, noster, I'm not a 100% fan, but boy, it's looking real good right now compared to Twitter. And I do like kind of the flourishing ecosystem, so to speak, of all the different things going on in Nostr. And I love Noster's ability to integrate with Bitcoin. I expect over the next 10 years, we're going to see more of this. I think we're gonna see more countries, places, the EU.
I'm just gonna go ahead and get everybody lumped in here. Sorry. You know, has certainly tried. Just recently, they tried to pass a bill. You can't self host a wallet, a Bitcoin wallet. No. It's gotta be on a central exchange. Well, I I have a few choice words for whoever is in charge of the EU. Words I can't I'm not going to say on here. Okay? I got 12 words in my head or 24. That means that you can't take that from me, actually. If you don't understand what I mean, bitcoin, a bitcoin wallet, which isn't a wallet, but let's not get off on that. It's fundamentally 12 or 24 words.
You can remember those or you can write them on a piece of paper and store them safely or if you're paranoid, which you should be, you can stamp them on steel or some other way of keeping them safe. You can distribute them geographically. You can do all these great things. You don't need a ledger. You don't need a seat signer. And you can tell the EU if that law ever gets passed, and maybe one day it will. Those words that I'm thinking in my head. Okay? That is censorship resistance. That is decentralization. That is I don't need those things, and I don't need a government telling me what to do.
This is going on in so many different ways. I heard a great discussion on the podcasting 2.0 podcast this week with Adam and Dave, about how what they are doing. The podcasting 2.0 project, which in essence is an index of all the podcast and the ability of host no. Of apps, excuse me, of applications like fountain to interact with that back end so that they can provide a more decentralized actually a more it's not decentralized. It's still a single list, but it's not under Apple's control. It's not under Spotify's control. And one of the hosts, I think it was blue Blueberry. I'm probably not saying that right, but had talked to Adam and was telling him about how he was having all of these delistings, and he didn't tell him by whom I if I'm remembering correctly.
But they speculated it was Spotify. There was requesting, oh, you gotta deplatform these people. Oh, go try and put something controversial on YouTube. You won't last a a month if you have an audience. Let's just say that I believed everything that Biden and Harris have done for the last 4 years. Let's just say I hate Trump. Let's just say I think he is Satan's spawn. Now there's a clip. Go ahead and clip that one, ladies and gentlemen. Okay? Well and I have a podcast about the great Harris, 2024 campaign and how it's going to be so awesome for America, and it's groovy.
It's groovy, baby. There's this ad for this. Sorry. I'm not even gonna go down that rabbit trail. Right? It's all good. It's all good until the other person gets elected or the other party gets elected. Because see politics politics are cyclical. Back when I was a kid, Ronald Reagan, he was a reaction to Jimmy Carter, Democrat. Jimmy, great heart. Seriously, he's out there still to this day as far as I know. In his nineties building habitat for humanity. But economically, a train wreck. Reagan was a a response to that, and then you moved on to the next person. And so it just swings from Democrat to Republican, from left to right, to left to right. And as we've gone through the decades, it's gotten more and more polarized.
Right? We're now at the point where it's there's no center. It's left left or right right. And there's very little center. So maybe I'm promoting Biden and and Harrison. I can't believe I can't believe the conservatives would do this to them. But then somehow, the conservatives get elected. And what might they do? Hey, Apple. Can you take that man, that guy's really popular, and he hates us. Take him down. Spotify? Hey. Hey, Spotify. That that guy, he he talks he talks bad about me. He's so mean. Take him take him out. No. Now can Adam and Dave get pressured? Yes.
But, actually, their data is freely available. It's just a MySQL server, and you can make a copy of it essentially. And some people have done that. So there is a level of decentralization, and if they were to ever come under any pressure, I'm sure that that would get a lot more decentralized. So if I have to, I can host my own podcast myself if I need to. That is actually doable. So these are the choices we're going to have to make because whether it's left or right, labor or what's the other party in the UK? Sorry, guys. I apologize. It completely slips my mind, but you get the idea.
Okay? It doesn't matter because even if you're on one side if you're on the side that's in power, quote, now, the other side will be in power at some point, and they may not like what you're doing. So we need to build these things right into the protocols, right into the base level of all of this stuff. Messaging, certainly our money. Our encryption needs to be open source. It needs to be transparent to wrap this up and move on. We need more security. We need more privacy. We need more censorship resistance. And if you live in a country and you that you feel perfectly comfortable in, and you don't feel like you're threatened at all, and you're not a political person, and you would never say anything that was offensive and I try not to, by the way.
I'm really not a mean person. You might be amazed how quickly you can wake up and find that the world has changed. And even if it never happens to you, I would encourage you I would encourage you to do this for the other people who do need it. People in Brazil need a way to communicate right now, at least a lot of them do. I would encourage them to get on Noster. I don't know what to tell the people in the UK. That's a frightening situation in my opinion. And if you've got a different opinion, I'd love to hear it. I I don't want this to be a one-sided discussion. I for those of you actually in the UK, I'm curious if I'm hearing this wrong.
I know that I watch Sky News, and I don't see very much about this at all. But elsewhere, I see stuff that's just staggering. It's crazy. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe I am. Let's talk about our supporters because that'll make me happy now that I'm thoroughly depressed. This was not a fun episode to make. I don't. It it's not. It's just not a fun topic, but I think it's necessary. But let's talk about some fun things. I was talking about Kyron just a few minutes ago. We got some support from him, and here's what he said. He first of all, he sent us 1111, a roast sticks, boost.
This was actually on the Dave Ramsey episode, the last episode. Although I saw he, like, watched, like, or listened to, like, 4 in a row. So that was kinda funny. Appreciate that, Kyron. And he said this. He said, just got back to Brazil after finishing my North American tour, so now I have time for podcast again. Was a pleasure to meet you in person. McIntosh was an absolute blast. Yeah. Same here, Kyren, certainly. Of course, I've met him up at the Bitcoin conference a few weeks ago now. And, for the first time in person, that was great. Hopefully, we can do that again at some point somewhere, maybe not at the Bitcoin Bitcoin conference. We he was not at the conference. He was at the, the music event, the podcasting 2 point o music event that was going on across literally across the street from the conference, which was awesome as well.
Although, I'm old and my ears don't handle live music so well anymore. I always used to think it was strange when older people would be like, it's so loud. I remember I went to, it was a heavy metal concert, and it was it was a small venue. It was so loud. It was I have no idea what decibels it was in there, but it was it was really, really my ears were literally ringing when I left, like, for, like, a 30 minutes or something. But the loud never used to bother me, and it's like, man. Now it's like I'm in a situation where there's some kind of live music going on or whatever, and it's like, turn it down. Shut up, grandpa. Anyways, they did it was it's really cool seeing that tech come together, though, with the live music and with the streaming and boosting that was going on.
Really cool stuff. I would encourage you to check it out. If you if you have no idea what I'm talking about, grab the fountain app. I know offhand right now, they have a music selection, and, there's, like, live, not live. There's many, many artists you can, like, find on there, and it's all absolutely free. And you can support by streaming or boosting, I think. Maybe you can stream on fountain. I know you can boost. I I think you can do both. Or Wave Lake is another place. Those kind of things. So, anyways, I appreciate that, Kyron. Again, glad you had a great time on your North American he was all over the place. It was crazy. Let's see.
You were in Nashville. You were in well, you went to Birmingham, actually, after the conference, and then you went to Los Angeles, and then I guess you went up to Toronto, maybe? I I think I heard you say Toronto, but certainly Canada, which I didn't hadn't any idea you were doing. And then you went back to Brazil, I guess. So that was cool. What a life. Yeah. Kyron, actually, seriously, though, I'd love to get your viewpoint on what's going on down there in Brazil, and maybe I'm just missing something. And, frankly, maybe I'm just too conservative. I'm politically, frankly, I'm I've told y'all in the past, financially, I'm very conservative.
Okay? I harp constantly on our budgets and debt and things like that. Things that I believe are super important, but that's not really actually a a party thing. That's it doesn't matter. The Republicans spend just as much as the Democrats do or at least close to it. They're both overspending, and nobody will even do a balanced budget because it because it hurts people's feelings, and it cuts people out and whatever. I'm not gonna talk about anything beyond that, but anyways, and then our second boost came from our friend, hypersensitive SARS boosted in a 1,000 sats.
Again, last week's episode. This was funny. So I'm not gonna say the name because I'll butcher it again. I'll say it this way. The Tour of Spain, the bike race that I've been watching that actually concluded today, he said, you butchered the pronounce pronunciation a little bit, but I am a language snob. That's okay. I actually passed the land of my sister about a week ago. It only lasted about a minute or 2, and the cyclist word passed right in front of my nose. Kind of fun though. PS, it's a bit greener in Central Portugal than near the coast. Thanks a lot. I appreciate that. That's really cool that they went right by her house.
Yeah. It finished in Madrid today. I know who won, although I haven't actually watched the last couple minutes of the of the time trial. It ended on a time trial, which was kinda weird to me. I I don't really like that format. I love it when they race around Madrid or Rome for the Giro d'Italia or the, or Paris, the Champs Elysees for the Tour of France. And that they didn't do that this year for the Tour of France either was terribly disappointing. And it was because of the Olympics, which I get. But, anyways, we're not gonna talk about cycling all day. I do wanna say this.
Look. I'm from the southeast of the United States. I can barely speak English, which is not I barely I speak American. I speak southern, and, I have to work just to get to a level where people outside of, you know, my area can understand me clearly all the time. I'm not very language oriented in in terms of being able to learn. I took 2 years of French in high school. I took 1 year of Spanish in high school, and then sadly, I had to take another semester of Spanish in college. It was a requirement. I never would have done it otherwise. Not that I don't like Spanish, but, man, it was brutal. It was a 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock class in the morning, which I am not a morning person, 5 days a week, and I suffered. I think I made a c minus in it. If I recall, that teacher actually came from Peru, if I'm remembering correctly.
I don't know. I speak Spanish better than French and don't really do either one very good at all is all I know. And what I here's my point. I would love this is the one thing I want out of I want 2 things, actually, out of AI. 2 things. 2 things. And one of them I'm already getting. I I've told you on the past, I do a lot of coding. I'm essentially a software engineer at my job. I write automation code, but it's pretty complex stuff. And I use chat GPT actually quite a bit to kind of flesh out my code. I'd know what I'm trying to get to, and a lot of times I'll have a framework, but then I'll use it to bounce. It's almost like a second person. So that's pretty cool and quite handy. I actually solved a problem last night.
Yes. It was. Last night, using chat g p d. The other thing I want is something that knows languages and can translate on the fly. And it I I guess, kinda what I'm envisioning is maybe things you have in your ear, like earbuds or whatever. And you hear, in my case, English, and the other person hears whatever their language is, whether it's Spanish or say Portuguese or, or French or Italian or Chinese or or whatever, I think it would actually bring the world a lot closer together. And language barriers are tough. And to be able to communicate with people, the common person in other countries, is a fabulous ability. It's one that I don't really have. I spent I I have been in China I don't know how many times. I've lost track. It's been a number. I haven't been in, like, 4 years, but I did spend a lot of time there. And at one point, I actually spent 6 months there, and I tried for 6 months to learn Chinese Mandarin.
I couldn't speak past hello and goodbye and, you know, a few minor phrases. Mandarin is tough. God, I'm not even talking about writing it. I'm just talking about speaking it. And for somebody who struggles with language like I do, it's even worse. It's funny. Well, I I just I would love that ability. I'm sorry. I it's a little tangent, but I would love that ability to kinda have those earbuds in and be able to it would be great if it was the other, like, if I'm listening to you, hypersensitive SARS, and you're talking in your native tongue, whatever that may be, and I hear it in English, but I hear your voice.
It's not some translator voice. It literally on the fly analyzes your voice and that tone and intonation and all that kind of stuff, and translates it from, say, Portuguese to English or, I think you said you were from the Netherlands. So I wanna go out on a limb, and if I'm wrong, you're gonna boost in and be like, you're wrong. And that's fine. But Dutch or German maybe or maybe both. Probably all 3. You probably speak all 3, don't you? I have a feeling you speak, like, 14 different languages. Anyways, I would hear it in your voice and your intonation because that that really does help. And actually, I feel like this is one thing that AI can actually give us. I think that the large language model of AI that we currently have is going to prove to not be good at a lot of things. But I do think that this is one.
That if they do the research, and I've actually looked, there are beginnings of this in terms of translation tools. They're not I don't think they're there yet. But I have hope that one day they will be, and then I will speak fluent perfect Spanish in a Castilian accent. I think that's what my teacher called it. So in Spanish, as with really any language, I mean, there's variations. Right? So I'm I'm in the southeast of the United States, which means I'm near the Mexican border, which means that a lot of the people I hear speak Spanish are from Mexico. Mexican Spanish is not the same as Spanish that they speak in Spain. Now they can understand each other, but there are variances. There's different pronunciations, and in some cases, there are different words and this kind of thing.
But, anyways, I'm sorry. I appreciate it. Hypersensitivity. SARS. I didn't mean to get off on all that. But one day, friend, when that comes around, you and I are gonna meet up, and we're gonna have a chat. And it won't be in English. It'll be in whatever language it is that you talk in most, and I'll talk in English, and we'll have translations going on. That would be awesome. Alright. We had did have a total of 33195 sats, almost 34100 sats that were streamed or boosted this week. I appreciate that. And we're gonna we're gonna go ahead and get our news, which there wasn't, really hasn't been a huge amount.
Everybody's been screaming about the price, but let me check. Of course, I've already talked about Telegram that bit, and I'm not even gonna include I'm not gonna include that in the news because it's not really Bitcoin news. I do think it's important stuff, but I don't think I'm gonna put that in actually in our news. Oh, and here's another one. I didn't even mention this one. August 27th. Yeah. This was well, this was probably right after we recorded. Let me just run through some of this real quick. By the way, I'm I'm gonna tweet this. I'm gonna I did tweet this. I'm gonna repeat this. I want you to hear this.
Some dude I guess he's like a big investor. I have no idea. Mike Alford. Mike Alford on Twitter. Like, literally, that's his handle. So apparently, he's been around a long time. If you have 1 Bitcoin or intend to have 1 Bitcoin by the end of 2025, like and retweet this, so I can congratulate you on your vision and foresight. Now, aside from the fact that he's just doing that to kinda build audience awareness or get new people or or whatever. When you see something like this, here's what I said. That's really bad OPSEC, and by OPSEC, I mean operational security. I know you don't care now, but one day, that might be really important information that you wish you hadn't broadcast to the world.
I hope you have a plan to get to 1 + Bitcoin, but, yeah, don't be saying you have 1 or that that's even your plan. Do you hear me? What if Bitcoin's a $1,000,000? What if Bitcoin is $5,000,000? Hal Finney, may he rest in peace, said Bitcoin could get to 10,000,000. And he did the math. He's a really smart guy or was. And, basically, if Bitcoin becomes a global reserve currency and widespread usage and so on, it it is possible. Do you want back in 2024 to have everybody know on a public forum that you have 1 + Bitcoin? Mark Zuckerberg says White House pressured Meta to censor COVID 19 content. By the way, this is not a conspiracy. It was on CNBC, a very left leaning news, news source. So if you think that this was something that was just made up, well, no. It's not.
Talking about censorship, privacy, and all that kind of stuff, self sovereignty, I never really even threw that in there. Binance, the exchange, has seized all Palestinian assets at Israel's request. I have very purposely stayed out of the argument about Israel, Palestine, all of that. I it's not my duck. I just stayed out of it. But that is not okay. So Israel came to Binance and said, freeze those assets. And those people at Binance did it, that is not okay. Just like it's not okay to freeze Russian assets, just like it's, not okay to cut Russia off the SWIFT network, just like it would not be okay to freeze Ukrainian assets or Israeli assets or Brazilian assets or oh, god. What did the United States just do?
They've they they seized Maduro's down in Venezuela. The president, they seized his private plane. That is not okay. Twelve words people, 24 words, Bitcoin. You that is unseasonable. Interesting little article about textbooks in Africa. And if you don't understand why that would be important, I posted it on Twitter on the 28th August. Okay. Oh, the VPN access to x, $8874 per day. That's nice. 94% of the total Bitcoin supply has now been issued. That means, ladies and gentlemen, there's only 6% remaining. Get yours while it's on sale. There's only, oh, this was interesting. I haven't run the numbers on this. I have no idea if this is true, so take this with a grain of salt.
There are only 365,000 wholecoiners in the world. That's 0.0045 percent of the world population. A whole coiner is someone who owns 1 Bitcoin. In comparison, the chance of lightning, getting struck by lightning is higher at 0.0065%. There you go. That's gonna be worth a lot one day. I'm not even gonna talk about that. That'll be in the well, I'm gonna go ahead and throw this out because I don't remember this being in my software list. Core lightning 2, 24.08 bringing bolt 12, which is awesome. Self payments and blinded paths, so good security improvements there. Plus, bolt 12, which means I could stick a, QR code up on my website, and you could send me lightning.
That's cool. Strike now has bolt 12, which that is incredible. You may not like strike. You may think that strike, you know, is not self sovereign and so on and so forth. You would certainly be correct. You're not self sovereign, but they are all over the world, At least in many, many parts of it. And they are now offering Bolt 12 to their millions and millions and millions of users, and that's great. I posted a video that I reposted of a honey badger. I will You need to follow me on Twitter to see it. It's hilarious. It's a minute and 14 seconds. It's a honey badger taking on 3 leopards. I love the honey badger. If you know anything about honey badgers, they are tough. S o.
Yeah. You get the idea. Okay. I think honey badgers well, I seriously thought about a Bitcoin podcast along the lines of, like, honey badger Bitcoin or something like that. Like, it would be the mascot. I would if it wasn't so overused in the Bitcoin space, but I think it's a great analogy. I really do. Honey badgers are awesome. Credit card defaults from small lenders hit record high. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Companies have grown their Bitcoin holdings by almost 600%, 587% over the last 4 years by according to River Financial.
So in other words, the institutions are buying. Even if your neighbor isn't buying yet, the institutions are. And our candidate, Democrat candidate for president, miss Harris, said, I will direct the Department of Justice to censor misinformation and hate online. Sounds a lot like what's going on in some of these other countries, and I would be 100% opposed to that. The DOJ is not to be used in that manner. In fact, I think the DOJ has been misused for a long time. Here's my Donald Trump. There was no I'm not gonna have any links in the show notes, I guess, because there's not really any anything to put in there.
Earlier today, I retweeted this, and I'm just assuming this is correct. I don't know why it would not be. I know he's going to do tariffs. He said he or at least attempt to. He has said that. I've heard him say it multiple times. And by the way, I'm not opposed to tariffs. So for example, China is dumping steel on the market at very, very, very low value cost. A tariff on that, I think, would not be out of line. I because they're doing it at below at below cost in order to basically wreck our market. That's my opinion. I'm not opposed to that necessarily, but here's what he said. Donald Trump pledges 100% tariff for countries that shun the US dollar.
So in other words, if you don't use our dollar for trade, we're going to put a tariff on you. I'm not okay with that. I've gone on for an hour. It's time to wrap this up. Software updates. I do have a few. I've got a new program, reader. It's kind of interesting. You you basically stick, RSS feeds, websites. You can so I'm I'm pulling the sites in that I regularly review, and then you can, like, bookmark stuff. So what I should be able to do is go in here. And I do have a couple, although I thought I did more than that. The strike one, which we've already talked about. There are only three examples, by the way, of illicit tornado cash use cited by the US Treasury and their sanctions case against the tornado cash developers.
That's appalling. It's a longer conversation, I think, maybe, and I'm not sure I'm willing to have it on this show, but about how platforms are held responsible for what their users do. And I've thought a lot about this. I I used to own a dial up Internet provider, and I was providing people access to the Internet. They would dial into my modems and access the Internet. And I'm sure some of those people were doing things that I would not approve of or maybe even were illegal. But it's not my job to police them. That's actually the police's job.
You follow me? And it's not the government's job to lean on companies and lean on developers, like in this case, in order to keep them, quote, in line because they don't like see, they don't like what they're doing because they're offering a privacy service. Very, very disappointing. That not surprising. I've mentioned the Core Lightning. A bold Bitcoin now in France, that's, they were primarily a Canadian company. They've opened up in Costa Rica. Oh, let's see. There is a new version of the lightning development kit, lndk0.2.0, for blinded paths. That's awesome.
Wait. What's the difference between these? Lightning LDK is a lightning dev kit. What is l n? It leverages the LDK. I don't okay. They they're getting upgraded in conjunction. It's the same. It's 2 different parts of the same product, essentially. So the lightning, development kit did get updated, for blinded past. That's great. That tool is used by a lot of development companies. If you're using Mutiny Wallet, I don't know if I've mentioned this or not. They are shutting down. You need to get your funds off of their servers. Yeah.
You've got till the end of the year. Okay. I think we're gonna stop there, and, we'll we'll wrap things up. This is a value for value podcast. In case you don't know, I don't do ads. I don't do promotions. I don't do anything like that, sponsorships. And there's very good reasons for that. And I always give the example of ledger. I literally am sitting here looking at 3 Ledger wallets. I bought these years ago. Ledger could come to me and say, Macintosh, I want you to promote our product because they're always putting out new product, and we'll pay you a $1,000 an episode. And all you gotta do is say, hey. This is leisure. This is whatever they're doing is thingamabob and whatever. And we'll give you a $1,000.
And you know what? I can't tell you at that point the problems with Ledger. Ledger, large surface area of attack. You've got 1,000, 100, if not 1,000 of different coins that you can hold on a ledger wallet. Every one of them is an attack vector. Your hardware wallet, if you have one, should only have one coin on it, not one single coin, but one type of coin. It should be Bitcoin, by the way, in case I'm not clear about that. Anything else is a is an attack vector. I can't talk about that because they'll pull $1,000 a week. That would be terrible.
So what I do is I come to you and I say, hey. This is a value for value podcast. If you like what you hear, if I am providing value to you, then I respectfully ask that you provide value back to me. It doesn't have to be sats. It doesn't have to be streaming. It doesn't have to be boosting. But if you wanna do that, that's terrific. There's a whole list of podcast 2.0 apps out there, by the way. You can go to podcastapps.com and see them. They provide a lot of new functionality that your old app doesn't necessarily provide chapters, transcripts, the ability to stream and boost, the ability to listen to a live show.
That's happening in a lot of these apps now, and that is really cool. I tune in when I can to the podcast in 2 episode on Friday afternoons live. And I literally am sitting there listening to it while they're doing it. But, yeah, you can also provide value and, there's stuff I can have people do if they were looking for a way to help out. I mean, that would be awesome. You can always get a hold of me. There's a number of ways to do that. Email at macintosh@satoshisdash plebs.com. I'm on Twitter as I've mentioned, Macintosh Fintech. I'm on mac mastodon. I'm on mastodon@[email protected].
So, you know, reach out to me if you got something you wanna do or some feature or something you wanna talk about or whatever. Alright? And if you clip an episode, if you just go in and clip a couple of minutes out of an episode and you post it up on, fountain, which by the way, they're doing some cool things with Nostra integration. Should talk about that sometime. But if you do that, I'll boost you 500 sats. Just tag me in the boost, in the post, and I'll I'll boost you. Okay? That's it. Thanks for being here. I hope it's been helpful. I've already gone through all the different ways you can reach me. Stay humble. Go out. Make it a great week. I'll talk to you all soon.
