News, Notes and a personal message.
Bitcoin Weekly Close
September 22nd, 2024: $63,614
Block Height at Time of Recording
862,459
News and Notes
Bhutan Setting the Pace for National Adoption
Bitmain and Hut8 to Launch New ASIC Miner
Core Lightning v24.08.1
Software Updates
Ashigaru Mobile Wallet v1.0.0
Sparrow 2.0 Wallet Release
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is September 22nd, and this is episode 182 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Mcintosh, and today's episode is goodbye for now. Let's go ahead and run through our stats for the week. We had a weekly close this week just a couple of hours ago, 2 and a half hours ago. September 22, 2024, 63,614. We are at block height as we record 862-459. That's 862-459. The next difficulty adjustment, which is happening on September 25th, is looking like it will be an estimated 5.64% down, which is great news. Our last adjustment was 3.58% up. So assuming that it stays at around the same amount, we're looking at about 5% here in just a couple of days, Downward adjustment that will help out the miners.
Right now, our transaction pool is actually emptying out. Hooray. 563 megabytes of unprocessed transactions, which is the lowest I've seen it in a long, long time. It got down to 600 a few weeks ago, if I'm recalling correctly, somewhere around 600, but it went back up. So I don't know. We'll see. We're at 3 sats per vbyte, which basically means we're talking about pocket change when you send a transaction on the main net at current prices. We're looking at about 27¢, so not a whole lot to deal with the world's greatest financial network. Awesome.
So those are the stats. We are at, you know, closing in on 64,000. Actually, we're right at 637 right now as I record. We we've been floating around for a while, lower, higher. I don't know. We'll have to see where we go. We're actually sitting right now at what's called the 200 week moving average, and, we're slightly below that, I believe. But if we break through that, that would be a great that would be great news. And I my guess is that we will, and then we'll press upwards, and then our next basic resistance level should be essentially all time highs. If we break that, who knows?
Right now, if we were to close out September, we're actually having the best September on record for Bitcoin, which is really crazy because normally September is not a very good month. But if you remember, we started much lower. I don't have trading view up right now, but we were significantly lower than this, which is basically the highest we've been all month. And, $10,000 lower or so, maybe even a little bit more at the start of the month. So there you go. We will see what happens. But, historically, on the other hand, even though September is historically a poor month, October is normally much, much better for Bitcoin and for traditional, stocks, equities.
And given the fact that they just cut the rates here in the United States by half a percent, that I think is going to give a big boost of confidence to stock traders over the coming weeks, And, well, we'll see. We may be looking at all time highs pretty soon. And then beyond that, we may be heading up towards that $100,000 level. That may be hopium, maybe not. But you know what we always tell you here at satoshis plexus, of course, that you should be DCA ing. However, that you're doing that using the strike app and over a 100 countries at this point or something similar, whether that's daily or weekly buying that Bitcoin.
I actually have a Twitter thing, a post that I did on my Twitter thread, a guy who analyzes this data continually, essentially. And he said, like, 2 days ago that essentially everyone who's been DCA ing, even since the latest all time high at 70 what was it? 73,000, They're all green. That's what DCA does for you. If you'd bought $6,000 worth of Bitcoin at 73,000, for example, you'd be down right now, and you'd probably be like, oh, man. Bitcoin. But if you're DCA ing into it, on the other hand, you're still green, or at least you're green at this point. You wouldn't mean you were green the entire time, obviously, but it does work out over the long run. So that's why we suggest that rather than lump sum buying or trying to DCA, not DCA, trying to daily, like, be a day trader. This kind of thing risky risky risky. So, anyways, that's it.
We're gonna go ahead and jump on into our topic this week, and then we'll be wrapping up after that with, supporters, news, and notes, and software updates. So let's just go ahead and get right into this. I probably suspect that the headline maybe caught your eye. I didn't know what else to say, so that's what I put. And the reality is is that I think I'm gonna take a short break, and it may only be a couple of weeks. It may be longer. I do not know. I've mentioned a few times in my on here kind of my life behind the microphone, so to speak. I have a job that I've been in a company for about 7 years, and I've done fairly well there. I've had several different promotions, to be honest.
But over the last few years, our company has kind of, gone through some rough times. And we've actually, in the last year and a half or so now, gone through 3 different rounds of layoffs. I still have my job, but the reality is it's gotten even more difficult than normal. Just to give you a little brief example, I've actually spent, I've I work in I'm an engineer. I'm a software engineer, essentially. I write automation code, but I'm a back end engineer, and I operate on a team that we do on call. What's called on call, meaning when we have issues that we get texted and, emailed and this kind of thing, and we have to respond and fix these issues. I've been on a call twice, for 2 weeks now out of the last 3 weeks, and, it's actually been the worst on calls that I've had in 7 years at the business. I don't blame the business. There's a number of things going on there that are causing that.
But my point is, you know, I haven't been recording regularly for the last few weeks. I've been recording essentially every other week, I think, and I just don't have the energy to put into this right now that it really needs. So that's part of it. I've also got this personal project that's going on that I have mentioned. And to be honest, I think I'm gonna post on Twitter a picture of I wanna kinda rip out the metadata to make sure that it's not something that I could be, what's the word, doxed by? It's not at my house, but regardless, it's it does it's not important. I I just don't want that known. But I'm very proud of this. It's literally a shed, but it's 640 square feet. I don't know what that is in meters, but it's 16 feet wide by 40 feet long.
And we built the shed frame. We've it's what I would call a post and beam style or timber frame style, and then we've gone in. Now we're doing the finish work. We're finishing up the outside. We're doing board and batten on the outside. All this kind of stuff going on, and it's what little time I have left, because I've essentially promised this that's being used for that. So I've got a lot on my plate right now, just to be honest. And then the third thing really is let's be honest right now. It's kinda boring. We've got some news this week. Like, essentially, last week, there was no news. I mean, there was just nothing to talk about without manufacturing something. And if y'all know me, I try very hard not to do that kind of thing.
So I'm thinking probably this would be a good time to take a break. My plan is it's already September 22nd. I probably should have started this basically the 1st September. I did not. I I just kinda went back and forth on it. I've been thinking about this for a while, but I kinda went back and forth on it. And to be honest, I I just need to for for me, for, I guess, my mental well-being or whatever it is, it would be a good thing. And, you know, it's as good a time as any to do this because this bull run is really gonna be kicking off, in my opinion, here shortly, and it may only be a few weeks from now.
And I may honestly just miss some of it, and that's okay, in terms of the podcast. But I do plan on coming back. I and while I'm taking some time off, in addition to finishing that project and hopefully settling some things down at work. I don't know that that's really gonna change a whole lot, but at least I'm hoping we can kind of solve some problems that we've got and, make things a little less hectic. But beyond that, I also wanna take some time to make some modifications to Reaper, which is the program that I've used for a long time now to record with. I would like to get my recordings better. I need to get some well, I don't wanna go in all the details, but I need to dig into all that and take care of that. And that's also something that's gonna take up some time.
So that's where I'm at. I'm still looking for a cohost. In fact, if anyone knows of 1, it would be awesome if I could kinda come back with a cohost. Wow. Here we are, and here's the bull run and all that, but we'll just have to see. So maybe this is gonna be a really short episode because that's kinda it, at least in terms of that. I don't really have a whole lot to say beyond that. I would say that it's not my listeners. The the people, the Pleb Nation that has been making this journey with me, I appreciate. And I, regardless of what happens here, I always will because there have been people that have been for probably over a 100 episodes of this journey, maybe even significantly over than that. I'd have to kinda check with them to find out, but it's been a while, I think, for some of them, and I appreciate that. And people who've been supporting the show, you know, streaming and boosting as well.
I don't have a total for that, actually. I probably I can come up with it fairly quickly here while I'm while I'm talking. But just as a you know, over the last, what, year or so, year, 2 years, I guess, using, Satoshi Stream. Oh, there it is. Total earnings in last 5 999 days, which would cover my entire time certainly with Satoshis Stream. 595,376 sats. So roughly 600,000 sats, which is not an insignificant amount of money. That money is still all sitting there. And to be honest, one of the things I'm doing is debating on kind of what to do with it. I would like to upgrade my microphone. That's one thing. I need to pay for Reaper. I'm still still, quote, evaluating it, and that's $60. I mean, it's not a whole lot, but money's money. And to be honest, I just don't have a whole lot of personal money to put into this. I'd I have done so over time, in particular with the computer that I bought, that I use for projects and stuff that directly and indirectly contribute to this podcast. I really wanna get a decent mic. I've got a, audio Technica.
I don't know. It's a not a super expensive one. It's a USB slash XLR, and, it's kind of like one of these beginning podcaster mics, which we've used forever. I I use a Focusrite interface, which I really like. So it basically the XLR cable plugs into that, and then that turns it into a digital signal, which I feed into my laptop and, of course, then into Reaper. I'm happy at this point with that. I would like to get a mixer long term simply to be able to I wanna do some live things, especially if we have, like, a cohost and, you know, there's some directions there I wanna go that might, I think, make that more easy. But, I do wanna improve the microphone, and then I just need to spend some time tuning Reaper and my sound in particular.
I run it through what is this called? Native Instruments, some plugins, and which actually do very much help my sound. If you've been in the podcasting business, you know there's always stuff to buy. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality is if you wanna improve things, you're just gonna have to spend money. Alright. Enough about that. But again, this isn't about you all. It isn't about your support. This is about lord, how long have I been doing this? 3 years? This is about 3 years of work, if I'm not mistaken. More than 3 years. And, just kinda needing to take a break. It may not be a very long one.
I do miss this when I don't record. So I haven't recorded in 2 weeks, and I can tell you that that I miss it. But I have to, at this point, record on Sunday afternoons, Sunday nights, because it's basically the only time slot that there's any sanity in my schedule. And, the rest of the week's just shot. But, anyways, enough about that. Alright. I do not have any supporters this week. So after I said all those great things, now I get to give you the puppy dog look. I I don't. I didn't have any supporters, and that's fine. We got our news and notes. There's a few things I do wanna talk about this week. For 1, this is the most exciting one for me. I'm gonna start off with this. We're gonna headline with this. Bhutan. I have talked about Bhutan numerous times about their mining program that came to light as part of, the FTX, investigation.
I guess they had some assets in FTX. I I hope they got everything back. But it turns out they were actually mining, so this has been known for a while. So this is according to some on chain analytics platform, ARCEM Intelligence. Wow. That's kind of bizarre. But they have detected and identified the 1st Bitcoin address of Bhutan's investment arm, Druck Holding and Investments. According to ARCEM, DHI holds 13,029 Bitcoin, 656 ether, and some BNB and Polygon, accounting to amounting to approximately $780,000,000 in total crypto assets.
Now I know because of FTX that they had things other than Bitcoin. I think that, essentially, they've moved forward with the Bitcoin mining in a big way because they have cold climate, which is good if done properly. And, you know, hydropower, I'm sure. So they got cheap power if they want it, and, it's an ideal environment for for mining, really, in a lot of respects. So I believe that they have continued that on. As far as I know, and they were around before El Salvador, they are the 1st sovereign nation, to mine Bitcoin. Now that may not be true. There may have been others before, but I do know I'm almost a 100% sure that they beat El Salvador. Everybody talks about El Salvador. Nobody talks about Bhutan. Well, Bhutan, certainly, if this is true, owns more Bitcoin than El Salvador.
And it's actually, I think, a smaller country. So that is just incredibly awesome in my opinion. I really thought that was very, very cool. Now this says that if this is true, this means that Bhutan's crypto reserves account for over 26.9 percent of its $2,900,000,000 2023 national Gross Domestic Product. Now let that sink in. Over 25% of its national GDP is in that one thing. I think they're pretty well set in terms of a future that if if the future turns to Bitcoin, as we hope it does, if a future global reserve currency is Bitcoin in any aspect at 10%, this little country is is incredibly well placed.
And the only thing that would keep it from exploding in popularity and economic growth is simply its location because people would not a lot of people would not wanna move to Bhutan. They're a pretty closed up nation regardless, but you you know what I mean? I mean, that's that's just, man, that's just mind boggling. 25%. That'd be like I think I think the United States GDP let me look it up. Oh, okay. It's more it's 5 times more than I thought. 2022, it was $25,000,000,000,000. That means that to essentially be parallel to what Bhutan is doing. We here in the United States would have to have 5 trillion, that's 5 times larger than the the cap of Bitcoin essentially.
$5,000,000,000,000 in Bitcoin assets. Now just just pause. Just pause. Let that sink in. That is how much they hold in equivalent. Is it less Bitcoin? Sure. 13,000, but they're a much smaller country. And you can develop this whole thesis about how this is kind of asymmetric economic warfare. I mean, to put it bluntly, this country with the Himalayas, with the high altitudes, with the cold weather, with hydro power, with cheap power is what that means. They are ideally situated to mine Bitcoin. And it looks like that's what they're going to continue to do and continue to expand. Okay?
And as the price of Bitcoin goes up, I'm going to guess that those other assets are gonna melt away. They're already not that significant in what they're holding. They say $780,000,000. Well, let's see. What's 13,029 Bitcoin at current price? 60 let's just round that to 64,000 because we know it's gonna hit 64,000 overnight. Right? Just kidding. I don't know where these people get their numbers from. How old is this article? I get $833,000,000. Why? It doesn't make any sense. This is September 16th. This hasn't been that long ago. Their numbers are not right.
Just for the Bitcoin alone, it's $833,000,000. But the rest of it, 656 ether, that's pocket change. 656. So a few $1,000,000 times, what's the price of ether right now, 26.29. Let's just plug that in. That is actually the current price, 26.29. Yeah. 1.7. Less than 2,000,000,000 dollars. So just ignore the and Polygon is even less. Just ignore the ether. Just ignore the Polygon because they are mining Bitcoin. They are adding to their stack. They're DCA ing. The just like Macintosh says you should do. Oh, man. So there you go. Be like Bhutan, DCA.
You don't have to do all the mining if you don't live in the Himalayas. Go on strike. Buy buy it right there. So Bhutan is very nicely set up, and I don't know how much debt they have. I'm actually gonna go go ahead and look that up. Bhutan National Debt. It's $800,000,000, so $800,000,000. Is that right? Yeah. 800,000,000. Okay. Macintosh did do the math right. So there you go. 800,000,000, which is actually roughly what they hold. So they that to me is a very reasonable level of debt. I don't know what their debt is, and I'm not saying they should have that much. But compare that to United States, $35,000,000,000,000 in debt and growing.
Which one of those do you think is actually going to do better over the long run? I'm just gonna go ahead and throw it out there that Bhutan might outperform the United States, at least in terms of their population size. By the way, they have limited economic capacity as classified by the World Bank. This typically means they have a gross national income per capita below $14,005. So what I believe that means is that basically a household in the country has less than 14,000 basically, $14,000 a year or less. Most countries worldwide are in this category. That is very interesting. I did not realize that.
Okay. Well, we'll move on. I mean, I know maybe that's not everybody's cup of tea, but but I find that fascinating. I've got a few software updates. Core lightning, which is a, a lightning node, is the one I'm thinking about setting up next time and which won't be long. Block Blockstream is the one behind? Adam Back's con company? Yeah. I'm almost sure that's correct. Anyways, they've got a new version, 24.08.1, and it's basically a bug fix improvement on their 24 dot 08 release. So that's, that's year 24, 2024, August, if I'm not mistaken.
And, so it's basically a minor release of bug fixes and that kind of thing. Got a new Bitcoin wallet, and they came out of the gate version 1 dot 0. Well, they did that because they're leveraging the samurai wallet code. It's called, I'm gonna butcher this, Ashigaru. It's supposed to be Japanese. It's like samurai. I've talked about samurai on this show before. They those guys are actually still going through their legal process, essentially. Someone anonymously afford the code, and this is only for the wallet. It's not for the rest of their coin joint spending structure, that kind of thing. And then the other one I wanted to mention was Sparrow, if you happen to use Sparrow.
I use Sparrow, actually, but they've got a 2 point o wallet release. So I actually checked mine tonight. I'm a 1.91, so I'm starting to think about about maybe moving up to that. I love the Sparrow wallet. It works really well with my seed signer setup. Alright. So so that's actually it. And, again, I just kinda wanna repeat. I'm not gonna go through this value for value stuff. You guys have all heard this. Of course, we are a value for value podcast, and I recommend podcast 2.0 apps. They provide a better experience. Okay?
I am planning on coming back. It may only be a few weeks. I may have I may just do another 2 weeks and then pop up. What would that be? Like, October 7th. I don't know. I certainly would like to be back before the end of October, but I have a suspicion October is going to be pretty crazy. I just don't know if I can get everything done that I need to before then. I've got to get this shed done, and work has to calm down some because, you know, work is the way that I live in the house that I live and take care of my family, and so on and so forth. So I can't neglect it.
Even though many, many times I feel like it's running my life. That is where we're at. I'm not, blessed with 100 and 100 of Bitcoin, and I can just say, well, I don't feel like going to work today. Maybe one day, but not today or this week. So I do appreciate y'all. I appreciate the support that y'all have shown me. And like I said, I will be back. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I am on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I actually had a number of things. I'm not gonna go through them, but, that I posted on Twitter. I'll do one just to tease you. This is the kind of stuff I post on Twitter.
I reposted this, which maybe is why I don't get a whole lot of traction, but whatever. And sometimes I put my own spin on it. I thought they stood alone. Wall Street Silver posted, this. It said the 550 US billionaires together are worth 2 and a half $1,000,000,000,000. If we confiscated 100% of their wealth, we'd raise enough to run the federal government for less than 8 months. Perhaps our problem is how much how billionaires have, but how much politicians spend. And that's one of the things I hate about all this political crap.
They talk and talk and talk and talk, and they talk about how they're gonna take money from this person or that person, from this businesses or that business or whatever. But they never talk about even even balancing the budget anymore. They used to talk about balancing the budget. That hasn't been done for probably more than a decade, much less actually paying off the debt, the $35,000,000,000,000 in debt. But, no, we'll just go take it from those billionaires. Well, it turns out those billionaires actually if you just took all their money, it wouldn't even come close to solving the problem. So, anyways, you can follow me on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech for more sharp financial analysis like that and random things like DCA.
Do it. Whatever. Oh, this actually is a a decent news item. When I get back, I may be talking about this more. Arc, which I've talked about in the past, is a layer 2 technology for Bitcoin that has been developing, is starting to move out of the development phase. They have officially sent their 1st transaction on the main net. So this is something somewhat similar. I guess you'd probably say it's more akin to FEDIMIT, the FEDI protocols than, say, lightning, but it's it's a similar layer 2 a Bitcoin layer 2. I'm sorry. I one more thing. This goes with the Bhutan story.
As measured by BTC, Bitcoin per capital, Bhutan is the leader in Bitcoin adoption. The country of Bhutan, according to this, holds 313,011 Bitcoin, which it acquired through monitor mining. With its population of 800,000, this means sorry. I had to click on something. This means the government holds 1,700,000 sats, about $1,000 per citizen, significantly more than any other country, any other country, including El Salvador, by the way, the country we talk about all the time, which literally owns according to this less than am I reading that right?
A 100 sats? No. 90 no. A 100,000 sats. 93,333. I'm like, less than a 100 sats per person. But see El Salvador, well, they hold 5,880, so roughly a third of what Bhutan does. But they have a population of 6,300,000. So do the math, people. Do the math because Macintosh doesn't do math very well. Alright. Thanks a lot, guys. I'll talk to you, I hope, in a couple of weeks. See you soon.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is September 22nd, and this is episode 182 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm your host, Mcintosh, and today's episode is goodbye for now. Let's go ahead and run through our stats for the week. We had a weekly close this week just a couple of hours ago, 2 and a half hours ago. September 22, 2024, 63,614. We are at block height as we record 862-459. That's 862-459. The next difficulty adjustment, which is happening on September 25th, is looking like it will be an estimated 5.64% down, which is great news. Our last adjustment was 3.58% up. So assuming that it stays at around the same amount, we're looking at about 5% here in just a couple of days, Downward adjustment that will help out the miners.
Right now, our transaction pool is actually emptying out. Hooray. 563 megabytes of unprocessed transactions, which is the lowest I've seen it in a long, long time. It got down to 600 a few weeks ago, if I'm recalling correctly, somewhere around 600, but it went back up. So I don't know. We'll see. We're at 3 sats per vbyte, which basically means we're talking about pocket change when you send a transaction on the main net at current prices. We're looking at about 27¢, so not a whole lot to deal with the world's greatest financial network. Awesome.
So those are the stats. We are at, you know, closing in on 64,000. Actually, we're right at 637 right now as I record. We we've been floating around for a while, lower, higher. I don't know. We'll have to see where we go. We're actually sitting right now at what's called the 200 week moving average, and, we're slightly below that, I believe. But if we break through that, that would be a great that would be great news. And I my guess is that we will, and then we'll press upwards, and then our next basic resistance level should be essentially all time highs. If we break that, who knows?
Right now, if we were to close out September, we're actually having the best September on record for Bitcoin, which is really crazy because normally September is not a very good month. But if you remember, we started much lower. I don't have trading view up right now, but we were significantly lower than this, which is basically the highest we've been all month. And, $10,000 lower or so, maybe even a little bit more at the start of the month. So there you go. We will see what happens. But, historically, on the other hand, even though September is historically a poor month, October is normally much, much better for Bitcoin and for traditional, stocks, equities.
And given the fact that they just cut the rates here in the United States by half a percent, that I think is going to give a big boost of confidence to stock traders over the coming weeks, And, well, we'll see. We may be looking at all time highs pretty soon. And then beyond that, we may be heading up towards that $100,000 level. That may be hopium, maybe not. But you know what we always tell you here at satoshis plexus, of course, that you should be DCA ing. However, that you're doing that using the strike app and over a 100 countries at this point or something similar, whether that's daily or weekly buying that Bitcoin.
I actually have a Twitter thing, a post that I did on my Twitter thread, a guy who analyzes this data continually, essentially. And he said, like, 2 days ago that essentially everyone who's been DCA ing, even since the latest all time high at 70 what was it? 73,000, They're all green. That's what DCA does for you. If you'd bought $6,000 worth of Bitcoin at 73,000, for example, you'd be down right now, and you'd probably be like, oh, man. Bitcoin. But if you're DCA ing into it, on the other hand, you're still green, or at least you're green at this point. You wouldn't mean you were green the entire time, obviously, but it does work out over the long run. So that's why we suggest that rather than lump sum buying or trying to DCA, not DCA, trying to daily, like, be a day trader. This kind of thing risky risky risky. So, anyways, that's it.
We're gonna go ahead and jump on into our topic this week, and then we'll be wrapping up after that with, supporters, news, and notes, and software updates. So let's just go ahead and get right into this. I probably suspect that the headline maybe caught your eye. I didn't know what else to say, so that's what I put. And the reality is is that I think I'm gonna take a short break, and it may only be a couple of weeks. It may be longer. I do not know. I've mentioned a few times in my on here kind of my life behind the microphone, so to speak. I have a job that I've been in a company for about 7 years, and I've done fairly well there. I've had several different promotions, to be honest.
But over the last few years, our company has kind of, gone through some rough times. And we've actually, in the last year and a half or so now, gone through 3 different rounds of layoffs. I still have my job, but the reality is it's gotten even more difficult than normal. Just to give you a little brief example, I've actually spent, I've I work in I'm an engineer. I'm a software engineer, essentially. I write automation code, but I'm a back end engineer, and I operate on a team that we do on call. What's called on call, meaning when we have issues that we get texted and, emailed and this kind of thing, and we have to respond and fix these issues. I've been on a call twice, for 2 weeks now out of the last 3 weeks, and, it's actually been the worst on calls that I've had in 7 years at the business. I don't blame the business. There's a number of things going on there that are causing that.
But my point is, you know, I haven't been recording regularly for the last few weeks. I've been recording essentially every other week, I think, and I just don't have the energy to put into this right now that it really needs. So that's part of it. I've also got this personal project that's going on that I have mentioned. And to be honest, I think I'm gonna post on Twitter a picture of I wanna kinda rip out the metadata to make sure that it's not something that I could be, what's the word, doxed by? It's not at my house, but regardless, it's it does it's not important. I I just don't want that known. But I'm very proud of this. It's literally a shed, but it's 640 square feet. I don't know what that is in meters, but it's 16 feet wide by 40 feet long.
And we built the shed frame. We've it's what I would call a post and beam style or timber frame style, and then we've gone in. Now we're doing the finish work. We're finishing up the outside. We're doing board and batten on the outside. All this kind of stuff going on, and it's what little time I have left, because I've essentially promised this that's being used for that. So I've got a lot on my plate right now, just to be honest. And then the third thing really is let's be honest right now. It's kinda boring. We've got some news this week. Like, essentially, last week, there was no news. I mean, there was just nothing to talk about without manufacturing something. And if y'all know me, I try very hard not to do that kind of thing.
So I'm thinking probably this would be a good time to take a break. My plan is it's already September 22nd. I probably should have started this basically the 1st September. I did not. I I just kinda went back and forth on it. I've been thinking about this for a while, but I kinda went back and forth on it. And to be honest, I I just need to for for me, for, I guess, my mental well-being or whatever it is, it would be a good thing. And, you know, it's as good a time as any to do this because this bull run is really gonna be kicking off, in my opinion, here shortly, and it may only be a few weeks from now.
And I may honestly just miss some of it, and that's okay, in terms of the podcast. But I do plan on coming back. I and while I'm taking some time off, in addition to finishing that project and hopefully settling some things down at work. I don't know that that's really gonna change a whole lot, but at least I'm hoping we can kind of solve some problems that we've got and, make things a little less hectic. But beyond that, I also wanna take some time to make some modifications to Reaper, which is the program that I've used for a long time now to record with. I would like to get my recordings better. I need to get some well, I don't wanna go in all the details, but I need to dig into all that and take care of that. And that's also something that's gonna take up some time.
So that's where I'm at. I'm still looking for a cohost. In fact, if anyone knows of 1, it would be awesome if I could kinda come back with a cohost. Wow. Here we are, and here's the bull run and all that, but we'll just have to see. So maybe this is gonna be a really short episode because that's kinda it, at least in terms of that. I don't really have a whole lot to say beyond that. I would say that it's not my listeners. The the people, the Pleb Nation that has been making this journey with me, I appreciate. And I, regardless of what happens here, I always will because there have been people that have been for probably over a 100 episodes of this journey, maybe even significantly over than that. I'd have to kinda check with them to find out, but it's been a while, I think, for some of them, and I appreciate that. And people who've been supporting the show, you know, streaming and boosting as well.
I don't have a total for that, actually. I probably I can come up with it fairly quickly here while I'm while I'm talking. But just as a you know, over the last, what, year or so, year, 2 years, I guess, using, Satoshi Stream. Oh, there it is. Total earnings in last 5 999 days, which would cover my entire time certainly with Satoshis Stream. 595,376 sats. So roughly 600,000 sats, which is not an insignificant amount of money. That money is still all sitting there. And to be honest, one of the things I'm doing is debating on kind of what to do with it. I would like to upgrade my microphone. That's one thing. I need to pay for Reaper. I'm still still, quote, evaluating it, and that's $60. I mean, it's not a whole lot, but money's money. And to be honest, I just don't have a whole lot of personal money to put into this. I'd I have done so over time, in particular with the computer that I bought, that I use for projects and stuff that directly and indirectly contribute to this podcast. I really wanna get a decent mic. I've got a, audio Technica.
I don't know. It's a not a super expensive one. It's a USB slash XLR, and, it's kind of like one of these beginning podcaster mics, which we've used forever. I I use a Focusrite interface, which I really like. So it basically the XLR cable plugs into that, and then that turns it into a digital signal, which I feed into my laptop and, of course, then into Reaper. I'm happy at this point with that. I would like to get a mixer long term simply to be able to I wanna do some live things, especially if we have, like, a cohost and, you know, there's some directions there I wanna go that might, I think, make that more easy. But, I do wanna improve the microphone, and then I just need to spend some time tuning Reaper and my sound in particular.
I run it through what is this called? Native Instruments, some plugins, and which actually do very much help my sound. If you've been in the podcasting business, you know there's always stuff to buy. It's unfortunate, but it's the reality is if you wanna improve things, you're just gonna have to spend money. Alright. Enough about that. But again, this isn't about you all. It isn't about your support. This is about lord, how long have I been doing this? 3 years? This is about 3 years of work, if I'm not mistaken. More than 3 years. And, just kinda needing to take a break. It may not be a very long one.
I do miss this when I don't record. So I haven't recorded in 2 weeks, and I can tell you that that I miss it. But I have to, at this point, record on Sunday afternoons, Sunday nights, because it's basically the only time slot that there's any sanity in my schedule. And, the rest of the week's just shot. But, anyways, enough about that. Alright. I do not have any supporters this week. So after I said all those great things, now I get to give you the puppy dog look. I I don't. I didn't have any supporters, and that's fine. We got our news and notes. There's a few things I do wanna talk about this week. For 1, this is the most exciting one for me. I'm gonna start off with this. We're gonna headline with this. Bhutan. I have talked about Bhutan numerous times about their mining program that came to light as part of, the FTX, investigation.
I guess they had some assets in FTX. I I hope they got everything back. But it turns out they were actually mining, so this has been known for a while. So this is according to some on chain analytics platform, ARCEM Intelligence. Wow. That's kind of bizarre. But they have detected and identified the 1st Bitcoin address of Bhutan's investment arm, Druck Holding and Investments. According to ARCEM, DHI holds 13,029 Bitcoin, 656 ether, and some BNB and Polygon, accounting to amounting to approximately $780,000,000 in total crypto assets.
Now I know because of FTX that they had things other than Bitcoin. I think that, essentially, they've moved forward with the Bitcoin mining in a big way because they have cold climate, which is good if done properly. And, you know, hydropower, I'm sure. So they got cheap power if they want it, and, it's an ideal environment for for mining, really, in a lot of respects. So I believe that they have continued that on. As far as I know, and they were around before El Salvador, they are the 1st sovereign nation, to mine Bitcoin. Now that may not be true. There may have been others before, but I do know I'm almost a 100% sure that they beat El Salvador. Everybody talks about El Salvador. Nobody talks about Bhutan. Well, Bhutan, certainly, if this is true, owns more Bitcoin than El Salvador.
And it's actually, I think, a smaller country. So that is just incredibly awesome in my opinion. I really thought that was very, very cool. Now this says that if this is true, this means that Bhutan's crypto reserves account for over 26.9 percent of its $2,900,000,000 2023 national Gross Domestic Product. Now let that sink in. Over 25% of its national GDP is in that one thing. I think they're pretty well set in terms of a future that if if the future turns to Bitcoin, as we hope it does, if a future global reserve currency is Bitcoin in any aspect at 10%, this little country is is incredibly well placed.
And the only thing that would keep it from exploding in popularity and economic growth is simply its location because people would not a lot of people would not wanna move to Bhutan. They're a pretty closed up nation regardless, but you you know what I mean? I mean, that's that's just, man, that's just mind boggling. 25%. That'd be like I think I think the United States GDP let me look it up. Oh, okay. It's more it's 5 times more than I thought. 2022, it was $25,000,000,000,000. That means that to essentially be parallel to what Bhutan is doing. We here in the United States would have to have 5 trillion, that's 5 times larger than the the cap of Bitcoin essentially.
$5,000,000,000,000 in Bitcoin assets. Now just just pause. Just pause. Let that sink in. That is how much they hold in equivalent. Is it less Bitcoin? Sure. 13,000, but they're a much smaller country. And you can develop this whole thesis about how this is kind of asymmetric economic warfare. I mean, to put it bluntly, this country with the Himalayas, with the high altitudes, with the cold weather, with hydro power, with cheap power is what that means. They are ideally situated to mine Bitcoin. And it looks like that's what they're going to continue to do and continue to expand. Okay?
And as the price of Bitcoin goes up, I'm going to guess that those other assets are gonna melt away. They're already not that significant in what they're holding. They say $780,000,000. Well, let's see. What's 13,029 Bitcoin at current price? 60 let's just round that to 64,000 because we know it's gonna hit 64,000 overnight. Right? Just kidding. I don't know where these people get their numbers from. How old is this article? I get $833,000,000. Why? It doesn't make any sense. This is September 16th. This hasn't been that long ago. Their numbers are not right.
Just for the Bitcoin alone, it's $833,000,000. But the rest of it, 656 ether, that's pocket change. 656. So a few $1,000,000 times, what's the price of ether right now, 26.29. Let's just plug that in. That is actually the current price, 26.29. Yeah. 1.7. Less than 2,000,000,000 dollars. So just ignore the and Polygon is even less. Just ignore the ether. Just ignore the Polygon because they are mining Bitcoin. They are adding to their stack. They're DCA ing. The just like Macintosh says you should do. Oh, man. So there you go. Be like Bhutan, DCA.
You don't have to do all the mining if you don't live in the Himalayas. Go on strike. Buy buy it right there. So Bhutan is very nicely set up, and I don't know how much debt they have. I'm actually gonna go go ahead and look that up. Bhutan National Debt. It's $800,000,000, so $800,000,000. Is that right? Yeah. 800,000,000. Okay. Macintosh did do the math right. So there you go. 800,000,000, which is actually roughly what they hold. So they that to me is a very reasonable level of debt. I don't know what their debt is, and I'm not saying they should have that much. But compare that to United States, $35,000,000,000,000 in debt and growing.
Which one of those do you think is actually going to do better over the long run? I'm just gonna go ahead and throw it out there that Bhutan might outperform the United States, at least in terms of their population size. By the way, they have limited economic capacity as classified by the World Bank. This typically means they have a gross national income per capita below $14,005. So what I believe that means is that basically a household in the country has less than 14,000 basically, $14,000 a year or less. Most countries worldwide are in this category. That is very interesting. I did not realize that.
Okay. Well, we'll move on. I mean, I know maybe that's not everybody's cup of tea, but but I find that fascinating. I've got a few software updates. Core lightning, which is a, a lightning node, is the one I'm thinking about setting up next time and which won't be long. Block Blockstream is the one behind? Adam Back's con company? Yeah. I'm almost sure that's correct. Anyways, they've got a new version, 24.08.1, and it's basically a bug fix improvement on their 24 dot 08 release. So that's, that's year 24, 2024, August, if I'm not mistaken.
And, so it's basically a minor release of bug fixes and that kind of thing. Got a new Bitcoin wallet, and they came out of the gate version 1 dot 0. Well, they did that because they're leveraging the samurai wallet code. It's called, I'm gonna butcher this, Ashigaru. It's supposed to be Japanese. It's like samurai. I've talked about samurai on this show before. They those guys are actually still going through their legal process, essentially. Someone anonymously afford the code, and this is only for the wallet. It's not for the rest of their coin joint spending structure, that kind of thing. And then the other one I wanted to mention was Sparrow, if you happen to use Sparrow.
I use Sparrow, actually, but they've got a 2 point o wallet release. So I actually checked mine tonight. I'm a 1.91, so I'm starting to think about about maybe moving up to that. I love the Sparrow wallet. It works really well with my seed signer setup. Alright. So so that's actually it. And, again, I just kinda wanna repeat. I'm not gonna go through this value for value stuff. You guys have all heard this. Of course, we are a value for value podcast, and I recommend podcast 2.0 apps. They provide a better experience. Okay?
I am planning on coming back. It may only be a few weeks. I may have I may just do another 2 weeks and then pop up. What would that be? Like, October 7th. I don't know. I certainly would like to be back before the end of October, but I have a suspicion October is going to be pretty crazy. I just don't know if I can get everything done that I need to before then. I've got to get this shed done, and work has to calm down some because, you know, work is the way that I live in the house that I live and take care of my family, and so on and so forth. So I can't neglect it.
Even though many, many times I feel like it's running my life. That is where we're at. I'm not, blessed with 100 and 100 of Bitcoin, and I can just say, well, I don't feel like going to work today. Maybe one day, but not today or this week. So I do appreciate y'all. I appreciate the support that y'all have shown me. And like I said, I will be back. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I am on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I actually had a number of things. I'm not gonna go through them, but, that I posted on Twitter. I'll do one just to tease you. This is the kind of stuff I post on Twitter.
I reposted this, which maybe is why I don't get a whole lot of traction, but whatever. And sometimes I put my own spin on it. I thought they stood alone. Wall Street Silver posted, this. It said the 550 US billionaires together are worth 2 and a half $1,000,000,000,000. If we confiscated 100% of their wealth, we'd raise enough to run the federal government for less than 8 months. Perhaps our problem is how much how billionaires have, but how much politicians spend. And that's one of the things I hate about all this political crap.
They talk and talk and talk and talk, and they talk about how they're gonna take money from this person or that person, from this businesses or that business or whatever. But they never talk about even even balancing the budget anymore. They used to talk about balancing the budget. That hasn't been done for probably more than a decade, much less actually paying off the debt, the $35,000,000,000,000 in debt. But, no, we'll just go take it from those billionaires. Well, it turns out those billionaires actually if you just took all their money, it wouldn't even come close to solving the problem. So, anyways, you can follow me on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech for more sharp financial analysis like that and random things like DCA.
Do it. Whatever. Oh, this actually is a a decent news item. When I get back, I may be talking about this more. Arc, which I've talked about in the past, is a layer 2 technology for Bitcoin that has been developing, is starting to move out of the development phase. They have officially sent their 1st transaction on the main net. So this is something somewhat similar. I guess you'd probably say it's more akin to FEDIMIT, the FEDI protocols than, say, lightning, but it's it's a similar layer 2 a Bitcoin layer 2. I'm sorry. I one more thing. This goes with the Bhutan story.
As measured by BTC, Bitcoin per capital, Bhutan is the leader in Bitcoin adoption. The country of Bhutan, according to this, holds 313,011 Bitcoin, which it acquired through monitor mining. With its population of 800,000, this means sorry. I had to click on something. This means the government holds 1,700,000 sats, about $1,000 per citizen, significantly more than any other country, any other country, including El Salvador, by the way, the country we talk about all the time, which literally owns according to this less than am I reading that right?
A 100 sats? No. 90 no. A 100,000 sats. 93,333. I'm like, less than a 100 sats per person. But see El Salvador, well, they hold 5,880, so roughly a third of what Bhutan does. But they have a population of 6,300,000. So do the math, people. Do the math because Macintosh doesn't do math very well. Alright. Thanks a lot, guys. I'll talk to you, I hope, in a couple of weeks. See you soon.
