This week we celebrate Thanksgiving in America - a time to be thankful. At Satoshi's Plebs podcast we are thankful for Bitcoin and what it has done in our lives. We take a few minutes to talk about that as well as the news, notes and software updates.
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
November 27th, 2024: 96,569 USD | 91,366 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
872,238
Software Updates
Robosats
Umbrel v 1.3.0
Flotilla - Nostr Group Chat
Olas
Amethyst
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
https://satoshis-plebs.com
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
McIntosh can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. His mastodon handle is @[email protected] and his Nostr. Kenshin can be reached on Twitter at @kenshin_ninja or on Nostr. Kenshin’s email is [email protected]. You can also follow the Satoshi’s Plebs podcast account on Nostr. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is November 29th, and this is episode 186 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And this episode is thankful about bitcoin
[00:00:16] McIntosh:
about . Alright. We're gonna start off with our normal statistics. Bitcoin price at time of recording, November 27th is 96 1,569 US dollars.
[00:00:58] Kenshin:
And €91,370.
[00:01:02] McIntosh:
Okay. And we've got a block height right there. Oh, we just got a new block, Kenshin. Let me update that. 872-238. That one went to carbon negative. Don't think I've ever heard of that pool. Interesting. Right now, last week, I was kind of freaked out about the difficulty adjustment estimate. It was way up there. It has come down, although we are still running a little hot. 2.83% up should be the next adjustment, and we've only got 4 days, so that probably won't move very much. Right now, we're looking at about 9.7 minutes per block time. So, of course, that's why we would be moving up. Our previous adjustment was 0.63%.
So we had a very, very minimal move, the last update.
[00:02:02] Kenshin:
Yes. And we see in the mempool.space that the fees right now,
[00:02:06] McIntosh:
just went up, actually. Oh, that's crazy. Because right. We had just logged them. Yeah.
[00:02:13] Kenshin:
They were at 6. Now we're at low priority 8, medium 10, and high priority at 13 sets per v byte. That's funny. And that would give, minimum or a medium, cost of $1.35 for a transaction.
[00:02:32] McIntosh:
And this week, here in the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, as we record this. It will already be done by the time that the podcast comes out. So we did actually think we would kind of do a little bit different today for our news this week with Kenshin and Macintosh. We're just gonna take a minute and say what we're thankful for this year in Bitcoin. Kenshin, why don't you go ahead and start?
[00:02:59] Kenshin:
Right. So I think this year, I really like how Bitcoin is is doing its thing as expected more or less. So it follows the news. It reacts first whenever big news comes up even on a Saturday or in on a Sunday. Mhmm. It's reacting the expected way. It ignores other news in some ways, so it keeps working as it should. It hasn't missed a beat. It hasn't missed a block. So I'm really thankful also for for the start of the bull market, of course. Right. Yeah. It's it's going as it should.
[00:03:41] McIntosh:
Bull markets are the best. So that's always good. Would it be too cheap of me to say that I am thankful for our listeners? Is that would that be okay? I I hope it is. I'm thankful for but actually both for our listeners And for Kenshin, our new cohost, he's been doing a great job. He is learning how to keep me on track, which can be difficult. But we're getting there, and, I am really looking forward to 2025, as we continue to grow this podcast, as we continue to move forward, and, of course, as we continue on in this bull market. Because as I've said many times on here, I don't expect the top to be, at least until the end of 2025. So we've got a long way to go in this particular bull market.
So let's go ahead and jump on into our main topic, Kenshin, and we are gonna be talking about thankful about Bitcoin. Why don't you go ahead and start?
[00:04:49] Kenshin:
Exactly. As as I said, I mean, Bitcoin is is, proving itself once again that it's, it's it's a system that cannot be affected by anyone, and it's a free market. And it's proving the doubters wrong, I would say. We we see a huge shift this year, especially in in the political scene. Mhmm. We see the US embracing or is about to embrace Bitcoin, and that, sends a huge signal globally. And as we will talk in the news, there are a few countries that are reacting and are going to the same direction. Right. We already talked about Poland, last week also.
So I I, yeah, I really like, what Bitcoin is is doing this year, and the adoption is increasing a lot. And I personally get, questions from family members. In the past, I used to be the one initiating the Bitcoin discussions, and now family members come to me and ask me about Bitcoin Mhmm. And to teach them more about it. So I can see already a shift, there. So hopefully, it gets to more mainstream adoption next year. So, yeah.
[00:06:19] McIntosh:
I I definitely see the mainstream adoption happening. We've talked for years about businesses coming on board and governments coming on board, and we are very much in the early stages of that. I don't you know, that's not all gonna just, like, play out in 2025 necessarily, but I do think we will see a lot of growth, in 2025 and and not just in the United States, although that is certainly part of what we're looking at with, the Trump administration coming on board and with the regulatory clarity is what I would call it that they're going to bring. And and go you know, kind of going back to our title, that is actually one of the things that I'm most thankful for. Because for years now, I've lived in a country that it was not clear what you could do with Bitcoin. It was not clear where it was going, and it puts you in this gray zone where you kind of uncomfortably feel like you're almost doing something illegal.
If that makes sense, even though that you know that it's right, even though that you know that we're doing it for the right reasons and to help people who, who, you know, who are unbanked, who can't, who are operating under regimes that are extremely oppressive and and all of these other great reasons that we that we do Bitcoin for. But my own government is sitting here shutting down people, unbanking people. It's one of the things that you'll hear a lot these days who are involved in the in the crypto business, who are involved in in Bitcoin, because they're trying to make them stop and they can't just put them in jail because that would look so bad, you know, for them. So what do they do? They go to, oh, I've got my account at, I don't know what's one of these big banks. JPMorgan.
Right? So they go tap on JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, mister Jamie Dimon. I always love making fun of him. But anyways, I won't do that today. But they say, hey, Jamie, this company, you got to shut their bank account down because we don't like what they're doing, which is extremely un American, by the way. So anyways, I am grateful that that it looks like all of that is kind of in our rear view mirror, so to speak.
[00:08:56] Kenshin:
Right. I'm also thankful that, Bitcoin is bringing us together. I mean, Bitcoiners is is an escape also, I would say. It's like a hobby right now to me personally. So, yeah, I have met a few very nice, people this year. I have created some new friendships that I didn't expect, here as well locally through Bitcoin. Now, of course, with you, Macintosh, as well. And it feels when I talk about Bitcoin during my free time after a very hard Fiat, day, it feels, it feels nice. You know, it's like I talk to people who understand me and my thoughts when I go through the day. And, yeah. You know what I mean? I, you can relate and it's easy. You know, I go to our local Bitcoin meetup,
[00:09:57] McIntosh:
that we meet, you know, once a month at a local restaurant here. And I don't agree with everyone there. I don't even agree with a lot of what some of the people say, to be honest, but we do have a somewhat common purpose. And there's a kinship that you feel when you go. And I don't really know why that is. I don't, I don't know the, philosophical or psychological or whatever reasons behind that. But yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about though.
[00:10:31] Kenshin:
Yeah. I will tell you one thing that I see my colleagues at, at my Fiat world, and I see them, accepting the status quo, let's say. Accepting the the economic situation and the financial system as it is. Mhmm. And I walk around with that frustration that, it's that's not right, and there's a better way. And I see how the system works now better. Bitcoin taught me how the fiat system works in re in reality because at university, I learned the fiat way, and Bitcoin taught me the actual way Mhmm. How the inflation works and affects us and how to look ahead in the future.
So in the that sense, I'm really thankful for for opening my eyes in in that way. And when I talk to Bitcoiner Bitcoiners like you and and people I have met here locally, and we we are on the same page in those terms, And we see the future more or less in a similar similar lens, if that makes sense. Mhmm. It does. Absolutely.
[00:11:47] McIntosh:
Yeah. I I think that the people that we work with at our day to day jobs, because they're not involved with Bitcoin frankly, because I I I almost wanna say that they're blinded by this this fiat world that's there. They don't see a way out. And because of that, it almost brings on this depression. Right? And when you fall down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, so to speak, when you start reading some solid books and understanding that what you're being told by these governmental economist who all are Keynesian believers. Right?
That, when when when you're told their worldview over and over and you have nothing to to go against that with, it is very depressing, you know. And as we fall down this Bitcoin rabbit hole and we start to unpack all this and we figure out, oh, that's why we have inflation. Right? Oh, that's why our job growth is not very good. Oh, that's why and so on and so forth. It's enlightening. And then I hear stories. I you know what? I couldn't get her to come on the podcast. I'm still trying. But I I, on Twitter the other night, I came across this story So somebody who's on Bitcoin, Twitter, or whatever.
And she was talking about how, 5 years ago, I think, she got involved in Bitcoin. Single mother, all kinds of, you know, things going on. And she started basically doing everything she could to save Bitcoin. Now you gotta understand, like, 5 years ago, what is that? It's almost 2. It was like 2019. So COVID was in 2020. Right? Am I doing this math right? I think it was 2020. Yeah. Correct. Yes. We, we, we hit this big spike of implicit inflation for 4 years after that, that we're still seeing the effects of. In the meantime, she's saving a Bitcoin, saving a Bitcoin, saving a Bitcoin as much as she can, and probably not as much as because of her situation.
I'm sure not as much as she would like to, if that makes sense. Yeah. But she had the realization just recently that because of all of that, she had been able basically to save twice. I want to get this right. I wish I should, I should have looked this up, but I wasn't planning on talking about it. I want to say it was like twice her what she could earn. Like, it was it sounded like it was a very significant amount of money, and she would not have been able to do that any other way. There was no way she was gonna invest in real estate. She didn't have the funds for that. If she had put her money in the bank, the purchasing power of that would have just gone down, but she invested in Bitcoin. She didn't invest in, you know, Ethereum and all this other Solana and all this other junk.
She invested in Bitcoin and she is seeing the returns from that. And she is such a positive person even though she's in some, frankly, some pretty difficult situations. You know? That's great to hear. Mhmm. I tried to get her on the show, but to be honest, she's, well, she, this is what she said. I'm not putting words in her mouth. She said she was shy. She was afraid, you know, which I get it. If you've never done this before, it's a little scary. I'm still hoping I can talk her into getting on the, on the show though.
[00:15:46] Kenshin:
Absolutely. Short interview. Yeah. 5, 10 minutes. Exactly. So
[00:15:53] McIntosh:
alright. So yeah. This I mean, we could sit here and go on like this all day. I have a question for you. Okay. Tomorrow
[00:16:05] Kenshin:
at the table, are you gonna mention Bitcoin?
[00:16:12] McIntosh:
Kinsheng, you didn't tell me you were gonna you were gonna ask this. No. Alright. That's a good question. To be honest, most of the people there, well, they all are aware of of that were involved in Bitcoin. Some of them are involved with me. Will it come up? Maybe. And I'd be happy to talk about it, but it's not just something I'm just gonna bring up just because because there's really no point. There's no I'm not gonna rub it in anybody's face who didn't buy any Bitcoin, and there's some of that. But, you know, I don't know. You never know what what comes up.
[00:16:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. Okay. You let me know next week.
[00:16:59] McIntosh:
We'll just see. We'll see. Yeah. One of the things we do want to do, listeners, you know, as we sit here and we're talking about the things that we're thankful for this year in Bitcoin, I would love to hear from you all. We would love to hear from you all. So if you could take a few minutes, think about that, and then we'd love to have you boost in and let us know. What is something that you're thankful for? Oh, I forgot. Oh, gosh. Here's something I'm thankful for. Can you guess what I'm gonna say? That Gary Gensler is residing on January 20th. I'm so excited.
I'm not gonna clap this week, but I am still excited. I am thankful because the lack of clarity that we had in the United States, in large part, in my opinion, came from him. And I do not understand the reasoning why, but I do believe that that is a true statement. So Mhmm. I guess he's moved on to other things. You don't just normally announce that you're quitting, although he may have been asked to quit. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was. I doubt he will have any trouble getting a job, so I'm not really worried about that. I'm just thankful that he's no longer setting policy for the United States.
Yeah. It's good news for everyone. Good news for all of us. Definitely good news. Alright, guys. We are actually gonna go ahead and move on because there's a lot of news this week we wanna cover, and I wanna be respectful of your time. Plus, to be honest, it's Wednesday afternoon, as I said, as we're recording it. I've got a lot of stuff to do, for Thanksgiving. So we did have a boost this week come in from one of our old listeners, Berno, out there listening, and he boosted in and said, thank you for everything you do to keep us informed. And I'll be honest. I read this next part, and I blushed.
I really appreciate this, but he said my favorite podcast. So thank you, Berno. You're you're one of the listeners that I am thankful for very much, and he boosted a 1,000 sats, and I appreciate that a lot. So, we'll move on to, the news. This first one, I actually heard on a podcast a couple of days ago. I looked it up, and it absolutely seems to be true. And I wanna kinda maybe take a different angle on this. I'm just gonna we're gonna read it, and then we'll talk about it for just a minute. But Russia apparently is banning winter mining in Siberia. The carcasses, which are some mountains in west western Russia. Sorry. I had to figure that out. And I guess in occupied Ukraine, although I don't know why they would be mining Bitcoin in occupied Ukraine, but that's literally what the article, was saying in the different, provinces or whatever that are under Russian control.
And, so I found this kind of a source document, the Moscow times, which I guess is not actually being written inside Russia. From what I see, it's like a dissident website, but it's it's this is legitimate. I believe that this is actually real news. And I think the reasoning is this let's take Siberia, for example, which would be a great place to buy mine, Bitcoin in the winter with air cooled miners, because you don't have to worry about them overheating. The concern is actually the energy consumption because their heating, I guess, these days is primarily driven around electricity. Like, I would have thought they would have used a lot of wood heat, but I guess not.
And they need that energy for for heating during the winter. So, basically, they said from December 1st to March 15th, from what I understand, that, you know, they would not be able to mine crypto or Bitcoin specifically in those in those regions.
[00:21:16] Kenshin:
Specifically in Siberia, The other two regions are completely bandits. So the other 2, for some reason, they started December until, let's say, March 2031.
[00:21:29] McIntosh:
Oh, I did not actually catch that. Thank you. Yeah. I I don't know the reasoning, but one of the interesting things is as far as it can be told, which is maybe not a 100% accurate, but it's probably pretty close. A couple of gigawatts of power are used mining Bitcoin in Russia. And what that means is that when they drop offline, if they're all in these regions, which I would suspect that a lot of them are, it's going to significantly lower the hash rate. It may literally be the only reason we do not reach, what is it called? We're at exahashes right now. What is the Zeta Hash.
So we're at like 800 plus exahashes when we get to a 1,000, that's 1 Zeta hash. Okay. And like, I did not see possibly how we could have reached 1 Zeta hash by the end of this year, earlier, like early this year or, or like late last year. But we're at least approaching that area. And it may be these servers going offline unless they move them to another area, kind of like what China used to do when they would move from the North to the south with the seasons. That may actually keep us from reaching that that, what is it? What did I just say? One zeta hash. I'll learn it when we start saying the word a lot. Right? But one zeta hash.
If anything, it should provide a nice little point of relief for us miners out there. You know? They're not, apparently, anywhere in the ballpark of what the United States does, but, they are a major player in the mining space. So if they're gonna be banning that, then it's certainly going to have an effect. Anyways, thought that was interesting at least from a mining aspect. I'll go ahead and do the the the next one. Alright. So Brazil is proposing a law to establish the national reserve. This is exactly the kind of thing what I've been talking about. If the United States is going to talk about this, if the United States is most likely going to implement a national reserve, other countries are going to start stepping up and doing it. I did not have in my cards that Brazil would be one of these countries to do it. Because if you don't follow Brazilian politics right now, let's be in in my American opinion, conservative ish, you know, certainly financially American opinion.
Brazil is very left leaning. Okay? Did not see them doing this, but apparently there's at least a proposal that they do that. This is not the law being put in place. It's a it's essentially a bill that's been put forth to the congress or whatever. And so we'll wait and see. But it's interesting that that these countries or that Brazil in this case is even talking about.
[00:24:44] Kenshin:
Alright? And then This goes goes together, I'm sorry, with the news from Poland. Right? Right. Right. And some other places that they yeah. They want to follow suit, and follow the Trump, let's say, playbook now. Well, and Trump's reserve.
[00:25:03] McIntosh:
People may not like you saying that, but that's that's what it is. They're following the Trump playbook. And if this actually does happen in January, if he if he does an executive order, which it looks like actually that might even work to start with, and then they start a bill through congress that looks like it has a lot of support. I fully expect to see a lot of countries start doing this in the Q1 of 2025. Right? It won't just be Brazil. There will be a number of countries who they start working stuff through their systems in order to do that. I was listening to a podcast right before we were recorded, and they're actually talking about this specific topic. It's Jack Mahler's, podcast, the guy who started strike. He's a phenomenal person, and he has somebody on and they are specifically talking about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. It's a fascinating episode, but I I do expect to see a lot of kind of copycat, you know, going on if we do that.
But what he was saying is here in America, of course, we're a democracy. We've gotta argue about this stuff. We got to have committees and we got to, it's going to take us some time to work through this. On the other hand, and this was literally his example. Putin could say, we're gonna have a we're gonna have a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and, we're gonna do that tomorrow. So, you know, in a in a country that's, I guess, more authoritarian, those things can move a lot faster unlike here in the United States where it may take us a bit. The final one that I was gonna talk about here, the tornado cache case, which we have not talked about a whole lot on this podcast, it deals with essentially a privacy tool, a mixing service that runs for Ethereum.
The developer of that tool was taken to court. And I believe he was put in prison over this. And they have now come out with a ruling saying that the court has actually overstepped their authority. I don't wanna go into this in too much depth, because it's just not really kind of our wheelhouse here. But I also believe you might call me a conspiracy theory person, but this is we are starting even though Trump is not in office. This stuff is starting to get rolled back because they know what is coming, and this kind of makes them look good, if that makes sense. I may be incorrect about that. But either way, the appeals court is is saying that the treasury of OFAC, which is oh, I should know what that is. I I've even heard it before.
There it is. Office of foreign asset controls exceeded its authority when they when they sanctioned, tornado cash and when they were arresting the, the person behind that. Romanoff is his name if I'm remembering correctly. So, to be honest, as someone who believes that code is speech, and here in the United States, we believe in free speech, I am glad to see this. I think that this is very much true. I think this is they did overstep their authority, and, you know, this person shouldn't be locked up in jail for this. So alright.
[00:28:54] Kenshin:
Does that mean that, they will
[00:28:57] McIntosh:
be released now, or it goes through the appeals system? I'm not sure about that. So I'm I'm not gonna speak on that. But it's an interesting article, I think. Yep. You should link it in We will have that in the show notes. Absolutely. And it really actually revolves around the smart contracts, which are not under the control of anyone. So not to get down into all the nitty gritty. But on Ethereum, once you write a smart contract, which is just code that's running, and you release it, so to speak, you cannot modify it. You can't take it back. You can't change it. And that was actually kind of the argument there. But anyway So next news,
[00:29:41] Kenshin:
the, a bank in US, the 10th biggest bank in USA called I don't know what the abbreviation stands for. TD.
[00:29:53] McIntosh:
I oh, I actually didn't know this. It used to be TD Ameritrade, I think.
[00:30:00] Kenshin:
In any case, this this bank, the 10th biggest in US Toronto Dominion Bank. It's a Canadian bank, actually. Oh, okay. Well, they pleaded guilty for, conspiring to fail, to maintain an anti money laundering program that complies with a system. And, yeah, they they caught and, pleaded guilty to that, and they need to pay 1,800,000,000
[00:30:31] McIntosh:
1,000,000,000. Right. So they pay a big fine. Nobody goes to jail. No. They get a tax write off probably, and and this story will be buried. Now the link that I got literally is off the justice.gov site. So it's the justice department, who I guess they're the ones who are prosecuting them. And the, the level of what's it called favoritism is being shown here. Right? Is just, it's crazy because one of the ways that they go about harassing and charging and putting in jail, people who are running, you know, Bitcoin infrastructure is through these type things, through the bank secrecy act. And they'll say, oh, they're money launched samurai, big case, right? The samurai, wallet.
The 2 people who were involved in samurai, they're being charged with money laundering even though they never directly control the money. They're facing jail terms. They're facing all kinds of things. These guys get a fine, which it's a crazy amount, at least to us, but it's nothing for them. And they'll just go on about their merry way. The only thing that would make this story better is if it was JPMorgan and it was Jamie Dimon who was being hauled up in front of the court. But, you know, I have opinions on that. So anyways, these banks are not clean. I mean, I I think everybody thinks that I think a lot of people think that they're they're just like pristine like the snow and they're not.
I mean, these money laundering cases happen more than you think. So
[00:32:24] Kenshin:
my question is who is going to KYC? The KYC. Right. Right. So they get that way with money laundering when yeah. We do a transaction they don't like and they blame us for for that. Oh, I would,
[00:32:42] McIntosh:
I'm I'm doing and I don't wanna go into the details under this, but I'm doing a financial transaction right now with with the bank that I have been with since I've literally 9 years old. I opened an account with them. They were asking for some some porting documentation, which I gave them. And then one of the questions that the lady asked me is, oh, what is this for? And I really wanted to tell her none of your business because it's not. But because I didn't want this process to slow down, I told her what it was for just so that we could move on. You know? The anyways, well, it gets well, actually, I'm using this for money laundering. Don't tell anybody.
You know? It's like, what do you expect me to say? I I don't it it makes no sense, and it frustrates me every time I deal with it. So Yeah. There we go.
[00:33:40] Kenshin:
Okay. In, other news, we have Morocco that banned the use of crypto Mhmm. Transactions back in 2017 for concerns of illegal activities back then. And they are considering to, yeah, permit creep to transactions and assets again. Right. What concerned me is that they are talking about the possibility of introducing a central bank digital currency, CBDCs. Right. So in essence, they, yeah, might unlock some good aspects of script and then bring their own
[00:34:25] McIntosh:
coin into it in some capacity. It's going to be guaranteed as these countries move into this that some of them try the CBDC thing. Some of them won't. We'll just have to see how it all shakes out. And if I were at Morocco or if I were in Nigeria, for example, who has a e narrow, which is their digital currency, I would do everything I could to avoid using those things. Not because I'm doing illegal things, but because I don't want the government all up in my private business. But I did want to bring this particular thing out, not because Morocco is some major world country, but because we are gonna see this.
It was brought out in the article, you know, there was some shenanigans going on and that's why it got shut down in 2017. That happened a lot. As an another example in Nepal, 2020 timeframe, I think they made crypto illegal because there were people in Nepal is a very poor country. And you need to understand that it's actually one of the poorest countries in the world. But there were people in there scamming the the Nepalese citizens, with crypto stuff had nothing to do with Bitcoin. But they shut down all crypto in the country. And what that means is unfortunately, while Bhutan who's there's next door neighbor is moving ahead with with this Bitcoin mining hydro setup that is generating wealth for them as a nation, Nepal is doing nothing of that. So they're falling behind the longer that it takes for them to wake up and realize, like Morocco is doing, that they need to join this digital world.
You know? And scammers are gonna scam. There's always going to be people out there doing stuff like that. But to to tell your whole country you can't be involved in this because of those bad people, not a not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. I'm waiting for him to, I've talked on here before. I would love to go to Nepal and help some of those remote villages build out infrastructure powered by Bitcoin because they have the hydro to do it. Almost every village has a creek flowing through it that could provide power for that village. You know?
[00:37:00] Kenshin:
That would be very interesting. Yeah. And but the interesting part with this Morocco is also that they open the door now to crypto to so they can also bring in the CBDC. Mhmm. But in the end, they will have the CBDC compete with Bitcoin, for example. And who's gonna win in that case? Well, it so if it's a duplicate
[00:37:21] McIntosh:
of their of of their local fiat currency, and they continue to make bad governmental decisions and rack up debt and have inflation and so on and so forth, it will not do well. It'll just be another smokescreen to maybe keep people in the dark for 10 more years longer. I I don't know. We'll just have to see how that plays out, but not a good thing. Not a good thing. Alright. Do you know enough about this last one to talk about? No. I really wanna know your perspective on this. So so Britain is having a, well, Britain's having a lot of trouble. We've talked about this a lot.
But about a year ago, they had an election. The labor party who is kind of their more left leaning party, is in control. And I frankly thought rather surprisingly, it was kind of a split. They actually have like 4 major parties in Britain, and I think it was kind of a toss-up. And they're the ones who ended up with the most, if that makes sense. Anyways, they've done such a terrible job for the last year. Some joker, which is, I think, mentioned in the article, set up a petition to that they would basically have a, there's a word for it, but basically a a snap election Election. Is what they call it. Yeah. Okay. So that they wanna go ahead and and speed things up and have a new election to see if people have confidence in the leadership that they've got or if they wanna move some other party in. And within 24 hours, this petition had, like, 2,000,000, people
[00:39:11] Kenshin:
sign it. So 2a half 1000000.
[00:39:14] McIntosh:
We will see, if they have another election or not. But what that does indicate, if nothing else, is that there is certainly a great deal of interest in that. So I will continue to monitor Britain, and see how that goes.
[00:39:30] Kenshin:
We'll we'll see. Yeah. They have done some some very scary choices lately.
[00:39:35] McIntosh:
I it's cra I, you know, I know I sound like a lunatic when I get on here and and start talking about Britain, but man, it's crazy. The things that they're doing over there. Like, you just literally go to a website and look at a post and they'll put you they could potentially put you in jail for it. I mean, the law is is is the ability to do that is in place. And and that is just such a scary, scary thing. I mean, it's just it's
[00:40:07] Kenshin:
nuts. Yeah. And it's one of the major countries in this world. And if other countries get example from those, it is it's not the right example to follow. So and one one thing to correct maybe, the article says 5 months ago,
[00:40:24] McIntosh:
they saw it in 2 years. I thought it was like I thought I read something that said it had been whether it's 5 months or almost a it wasn't that long ago. Right? Yes. And, the people are just not happy with what they're doing. So I don't think that's the the the vacuum that I'm in that the because the people that I hear talk about Britain are typically, you know, Bitcoiners who are aware of all this stuff, and they're just kind of venting or whatever. I really do think they've got some very serious issues going on there in terms of energy, in terms of policy.
They have got debt out the wazoo as we would say, and that they need to deal with. Best of luck. Right. I mean, that is where America did come from, so I kinda have to hope that they do okay. Software. What do we got? There was a few things this week. I'm gonna jump in and talk about Robosats first. It's a great little peer to peer, way to buy and sell Bitcoin. They're at 0.7.3 alpha. So, you know, they still call it alpha software. It is very, robust and very solid. It's used by a lot of people. And then I also wanted to talk for just a second about Umbrel, which is if you wanna run like a Bitcoin node in your at your home, on some little piece of hardware that you may have, that kind of thing, this is a great piece of software to do it. It's not completely open source, which is not ideal.
But if you can move past that, it actually works very well. This new release, which is 1.3.0 of the Umbrel OS, so it's like a complete operating system. It's based on Debian from what I could tell. It works works very well. So there's a lot of tooling in there. You could set up a lightning node. You could set up a Bitcoin node. You could actually now set up a large language model. So, like, something like kinda like chat GPT, right on your own network using your own data, that kind of thing. So some very interesting stuff going on there. I was looking to set it up on a VPS.
I don't really have a home network for that. Unfortunately, I could not get it to bootstrap off of the, the VPS server itself. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. I've got a Linux node on my home network that I could put it on, but I'd be kind of wiping out other things. I don't know. Anyways, maybe one day I'll, I'll do that again. I've used it in the past though. It's good software.
[00:43:19] Kenshin:
Just a note on those local, GPT solutions. I tried one called free GPT Okay. On, not on Numeral, but on start 9. Mhmm. So it's a similar solution. Right? It's very slow.
[00:43:34] McIntosh:
Well, to do that, you have to have some serious hardware. Right? Because those you either get slow or you have, one of these accelerated GPUs, which is how they do it kind of in the cloud, to get reasonable speed. I don't have one of those. So if I did it, it would be very slow. There is a there is a trade off there for sure, but a lot of people are very leery, maybe rightly so, about kind of all the data that goes in and out of something like chat GPT. So
[00:44:10] Kenshin:
Do you know do you want to go tip for GPT? It's Frankie GPT. You pay with Bitcoin
[00:44:20] McIntosh:
lightning. I think I've actually heard of this. I've never used it. Yeah.
[00:44:24] Kenshin:
You get credits and they use chat GPTs models. So it's the same quality of replies as chat g p t, but it's completely anonymous for you. Oh, that's cool. And you pay with, yeah, and you pay with lightning. I will drop that in the show notes.
[00:44:42] McIntosh:
Doing it right now.
[00:44:44] Kenshin:
It's really, really good. And the developer is on Noister and he's very responds to messages. If you have any feedback on If you have any problems.
[00:44:54] McIntosh:
Yeah. Is his name Frankie?
[00:44:57] Kenshin:
No. I I don't have his name right now, but no. It's a bad joke, man. Yes.
[00:45:02] McIntosh:
Alright. Very cool.
[00:45:05] Kenshin:
Well, and since we mentioned Nostar, we have 3 big Nostar software updates, I would say. We have, Flotilla Okay. If you call it like that. Right. So this it's a Discord like Nostril client.
[00:45:21] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:45:22] Kenshin:
So that's quite interesting. I haven't used it, but I would like to use it and see if it really works. It would be good to use in a, let's say, a small to medium sized company, maybe even not only for gaming. Maybe you you can have that as a group to collaborate. I wanted something like that to use with a group of friends, for projects.
[00:45:46] McIntosh:
I am having a hard time finding some type of collaborative, you know, tool. Like you and I, we use simplex, which is in terms of security, it's a great solution. In terms of convenience and ease of use, it's not so great. Like you cannot actually have it on multiple devices. Like I have it on my phone, but I can't have it on my laptop. And, and that's actually very inconvenient sometimes. And I get the reasons why that's such a problem. But the reality is it is inconvenient, and it's those kind of things that will hold this kind of stuff back. So I'll, take a look at this. I'll I'm always looking for something. One day, I'm gonna figure out something good and really kinda stick to it. But yeah. Very cool.
[00:46:40] Kenshin:
Right. Then we have Olas, a software. It's, like, looks like Instagram, but it's not based again.
[00:46:48] McIntosh:
So it's very much photography oriented. I would right. That's cool. Exactly. I've never been a big Instagram person. I would like to see something like this. This and this makes a lot of sense. And I just wanna call it Olaf. I don't know why. Maybe too much frozen. I don't know.
[00:47:08] Kenshin:
A mess. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And then we have amethyst again, a Nostril client. It's a Swiss army knife of Nostril, clients in on Android. Right. It's on Android. And it's
[00:47:23] McIntosh:
yeah. And it runs Is it so it's version 0 dot 93 dot 0. Does that mean they've had 93 releases?
[00:47:32] Kenshin:
More. I mean, they release weekly, maybe multiple times a week. That's crazy. I've seen versions.
[00:47:40] McIntosh:
I don't have an Android phone, so I can't run this. But, yeah, that's pretty funny.
[00:47:46] Kenshin:
I would say it's my go to on Android. I tried primal. I like primal primal too, but I always go back to Amethyst because it feels like it has all the features. That's funny because I went to primal
[00:48:00] McIntosh:
this week. I tried their web interface with their version 2.0. And Kenshin, I don't know. Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am. Maybe. It's certainly possible. But
[00:48:16] Kenshin:
How smart did you think you are?
[00:48:18] McIntosh:
I mean, there's Einstein and then there's me. No. I'm just kidding. Right. No. Seriously, though, I've I'll never mind. The joke's already bad at this point. We need to move on. But seriously, I could not figure it out. I could not figure out how to do certain things, and I I don't know. Maybe I just need to go back and try again. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, But if I am, it is not intuitive what I'm doing wrong.
[00:48:51] Kenshin:
Yeah. There is a drop down that you need to find that gives you the right feed structure. If it's 24 hour, how do they call yeah. The most popular in 24 hours
[00:49:03] McIntosh:
or live feed or something. I probably did to see that. Host more on no Nostra this week than I usually do, but I'm still I'm nowhere near. I haven't created that tool yet for one thing. I need to I told you I need to write that little tool to push stuff to both at the same time. But even it becomes a problem, like, I'll have something come up on Twitter that I wanna put on Noster because it's not on Noster, and it never it just it's you it just never comes out right. You know, stuff like that. I don't know. We'll we'll get there. Anyways okay. Awesome.
Alright. We're gonna go ahead and get this wrapped up. We're gonna make this episode a little shorter than normal. So I'm gonna go into this stuff. Alright. So, Satoshi's Plebs, of course, is a podcasting 2.0 podcast. We are and we're value for value. So that means 2 different things. Podcasting 2.0 means that we have the latest, stuff, so to speak, for podcasting. We have transcripts. We have chapters. Did you see my sad puppy last week? I thought I did a pretty good job there. Did you, what else do they have? Live.
Literally, there are podcasts that they go live, and it will pop up in your app, in your podcasting 2.0 app that they're live. And then you just click and you can jump right in there and listen to it even as they're recording. So if you wanna know about those, you can go to podcast apps dot com. There's a whole list of different podcast apps that you can use there. I think you asked me last week kind of what the 2 were that I use the most. I use Fountain and Podcast Guru. I kind of have my apps split up between the 2 of those. If you're brand new, I'd basically probably at this point put you on fountain, but I I would also at the same time recommend, go to podcast apps .com.
Try out a number of them and see which ones you like. Now the value for value part of this, you did not hear any what they call pre roll. You will not hear any what you what they call post roll. We do not have ads in the middle of this. We don't have sponsors. We don't we just don't. We don't have any of that. Some of it is for artistic reasons. Some of it is for, journalistic reasons. I don't wanna be promoting, say, Ledger. They're just one of the easy ones to pick on. I have one of my old Ledger sitting right over here, which I bought a long, long time ago.
And if Ledger were giving me a bunch of money every week to promote their product, And I'm saying, well, the latest ledger just came out and you should go buy whatever that ledger is and blah blah blah. And here's a discount code so that you can save some money so that they know that somebody actually went from my podcast and bought that. This is really what that's for. But why would I talk about Ledger in any kind of way that's not positive? Why would I say something like, well, Ledger supports 100 of different coins and they're basically every one of them is an attack vector. Is that really what you wanna put your generational wealth on, you know, and things like that? Or all of their emails got leaked. And so now people get emails from people who say they're from ledger and they're trying to get your Bitcoin and so on and so forth.
So there are actually real reasons why we don't take sponsorships and things like that. But what that does mean, we need to come to you and say, hey. We're a value for value podcast. If you get value out of this podcast, please do me one favor. If nothing else, go tell somebody else about the podcast. We want other people to hear this message. That costs you nothing, and it helps us immensely. And it's why we say things like I'm thankful for my listeners. Right? Another thing that you can do, you can actually directly support this show. Be like Berno earlier who boosted and sent us a message, which we read to you, and give us feedback. Like, we ask a question. What are you thankful for in Bitcoin? Take the time to grab fountain and boost that in and say, well, I'm thankful for Bitcoin because blah blah blah. I look forward to hearing those from you. It's also a way to directly support this. And as the price of Bitcoin goes up, maybe you don't spend so much, and that's fine. I perfectly understand that.
[00:53:51] Kenshin:
And another, input we would like to have is what other subjects you would like us to talk about. If you like our discussions, that could also be a random comment about a new subject.
[00:54:05] McIntosh:
Right. Yep. That 100%. So anyways, to just wrap this up, we appreciate it. We appreciate what everyone has done for us over the years. We've had a lot of support, as a podcast since day 1, and I do appreciate that. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and and we sure would love to hear from you. You can go to satoshisdashplebs.com/ episodes and see a list of all the episodes that we make or that we have. You can click on the current episode, and there is our contact information on there, whether that's Twitter or email or Noster or whatever. It's all there, so you can reach out and get a hold of us that way.
Thanks a lot. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and we will talk to you soon.
[00:55:05] Kenshin:
Have a nice weekend. Bye bye.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is November 29th, and this is episode 186 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And this episode is thankful about bitcoin
[00:00:16] McIntosh:
about . Alright. We're gonna start off with our normal statistics. Bitcoin price at time of recording, November 27th is 96 1,569 US dollars.
[00:00:58] Kenshin:
And €91,370.
[00:01:02] McIntosh:
Okay. And we've got a block height right there. Oh, we just got a new block, Kenshin. Let me update that. 872-238. That one went to carbon negative. Don't think I've ever heard of that pool. Interesting. Right now, last week, I was kind of freaked out about the difficulty adjustment estimate. It was way up there. It has come down, although we are still running a little hot. 2.83% up should be the next adjustment, and we've only got 4 days, so that probably won't move very much. Right now, we're looking at about 9.7 minutes per block time. So, of course, that's why we would be moving up. Our previous adjustment was 0.63%.
So we had a very, very minimal move, the last update.
[00:02:02] Kenshin:
Yes. And we see in the mempool.space that the fees right now,
[00:02:06] McIntosh:
just went up, actually. Oh, that's crazy. Because right. We had just logged them. Yeah.
[00:02:13] Kenshin:
They were at 6. Now we're at low priority 8, medium 10, and high priority at 13 sets per v byte. That's funny. And that would give, minimum or a medium, cost of $1.35 for a transaction.
[00:02:32] McIntosh:
And this week, here in the United States, we celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow, as we record this. It will already be done by the time that the podcast comes out. So we did actually think we would kind of do a little bit different today for our news this week with Kenshin and Macintosh. We're just gonna take a minute and say what we're thankful for this year in Bitcoin. Kenshin, why don't you go ahead and start?
[00:02:59] Kenshin:
Right. So I think this year, I really like how Bitcoin is is doing its thing as expected more or less. So it follows the news. It reacts first whenever big news comes up even on a Saturday or in on a Sunday. Mhmm. It's reacting the expected way. It ignores other news in some ways, so it keeps working as it should. It hasn't missed a beat. It hasn't missed a block. So I'm really thankful also for for the start of the bull market, of course. Right. Yeah. It's it's going as it should.
[00:03:41] McIntosh:
Bull markets are the best. So that's always good. Would it be too cheap of me to say that I am thankful for our listeners? Is that would that be okay? I I hope it is. I'm thankful for but actually both for our listeners And for Kenshin, our new cohost, he's been doing a great job. He is learning how to keep me on track, which can be difficult. But we're getting there, and, I am really looking forward to 2025, as we continue to grow this podcast, as we continue to move forward, and, of course, as we continue on in this bull market. Because as I've said many times on here, I don't expect the top to be, at least until the end of 2025. So we've got a long way to go in this particular bull market.
So let's go ahead and jump on into our main topic, Kenshin, and we are gonna be talking about thankful about Bitcoin. Why don't you go ahead and start?
[00:04:49] Kenshin:
Exactly. As as I said, I mean, Bitcoin is is, proving itself once again that it's, it's it's a system that cannot be affected by anyone, and it's a free market. And it's proving the doubters wrong, I would say. We we see a huge shift this year, especially in in the political scene. Mhmm. We see the US embracing or is about to embrace Bitcoin, and that, sends a huge signal globally. And as we will talk in the news, there are a few countries that are reacting and are going to the same direction. Right. We already talked about Poland, last week also.
So I I, yeah, I really like, what Bitcoin is is doing this year, and the adoption is increasing a lot. And I personally get, questions from family members. In the past, I used to be the one initiating the Bitcoin discussions, and now family members come to me and ask me about Bitcoin Mhmm. And to teach them more about it. So I can see already a shift, there. So hopefully, it gets to more mainstream adoption next year. So, yeah.
[00:06:19] McIntosh:
I I definitely see the mainstream adoption happening. We've talked for years about businesses coming on board and governments coming on board, and we are very much in the early stages of that. I don't you know, that's not all gonna just, like, play out in 2025 necessarily, but I do think we will see a lot of growth, in 2025 and and not just in the United States, although that is certainly part of what we're looking at with, the Trump administration coming on board and with the regulatory clarity is what I would call it that they're going to bring. And and go you know, kind of going back to our title, that is actually one of the things that I'm most thankful for. Because for years now, I've lived in a country that it was not clear what you could do with Bitcoin. It was not clear where it was going, and it puts you in this gray zone where you kind of uncomfortably feel like you're almost doing something illegal.
If that makes sense, even though that you know that it's right, even though that you know that we're doing it for the right reasons and to help people who, who, you know, who are unbanked, who can't, who are operating under regimes that are extremely oppressive and and all of these other great reasons that we that we do Bitcoin for. But my own government is sitting here shutting down people, unbanking people. It's one of the things that you'll hear a lot these days who are involved in the in the crypto business, who are involved in in Bitcoin, because they're trying to make them stop and they can't just put them in jail because that would look so bad, you know, for them. So what do they do? They go to, oh, I've got my account at, I don't know what's one of these big banks. JPMorgan.
Right? So they go tap on JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, mister Jamie Dimon. I always love making fun of him. But anyways, I won't do that today. But they say, hey, Jamie, this company, you got to shut their bank account down because we don't like what they're doing, which is extremely un American, by the way. So anyways, I am grateful that that it looks like all of that is kind of in our rear view mirror, so to speak.
[00:08:56] Kenshin:
Right. I'm also thankful that, Bitcoin is bringing us together. I mean, Bitcoiners is is an escape also, I would say. It's like a hobby right now to me personally. So, yeah, I have met a few very nice, people this year. I have created some new friendships that I didn't expect, here as well locally through Bitcoin. Now, of course, with you, Macintosh, as well. And it feels when I talk about Bitcoin during my free time after a very hard Fiat, day, it feels, it feels nice. You know, it's like I talk to people who understand me and my thoughts when I go through the day. And, yeah. You know what I mean? I, you can relate and it's easy. You know, I go to our local Bitcoin meetup,
[00:09:57] McIntosh:
that we meet, you know, once a month at a local restaurant here. And I don't agree with everyone there. I don't even agree with a lot of what some of the people say, to be honest, but we do have a somewhat common purpose. And there's a kinship that you feel when you go. And I don't really know why that is. I don't, I don't know the, philosophical or psychological or whatever reasons behind that. But yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about though.
[00:10:31] Kenshin:
Yeah. I will tell you one thing that I see my colleagues at, at my Fiat world, and I see them, accepting the status quo, let's say. Accepting the the economic situation and the financial system as it is. Mhmm. And I walk around with that frustration that, it's that's not right, and there's a better way. And I see how the system works now better. Bitcoin taught me how the fiat system works in re in reality because at university, I learned the fiat way, and Bitcoin taught me the actual way Mhmm. How the inflation works and affects us and how to look ahead in the future.
So in the that sense, I'm really thankful for for opening my eyes in in that way. And when I talk to Bitcoiner Bitcoiners like you and and people I have met here locally, and we we are on the same page in those terms, And we see the future more or less in a similar similar lens, if that makes sense. Mhmm. It does. Absolutely.
[00:11:47] McIntosh:
Yeah. I I think that the people that we work with at our day to day jobs, because they're not involved with Bitcoin frankly, because I I I almost wanna say that they're blinded by this this fiat world that's there. They don't see a way out. And because of that, it almost brings on this depression. Right? And when you fall down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, so to speak, when you start reading some solid books and understanding that what you're being told by these governmental economist who all are Keynesian believers. Right?
That, when when when you're told their worldview over and over and you have nothing to to go against that with, it is very depressing, you know. And as we fall down this Bitcoin rabbit hole and we start to unpack all this and we figure out, oh, that's why we have inflation. Right? Oh, that's why our job growth is not very good. Oh, that's why and so on and so forth. It's enlightening. And then I hear stories. I you know what? I couldn't get her to come on the podcast. I'm still trying. But I I, on Twitter the other night, I came across this story So somebody who's on Bitcoin, Twitter, or whatever.
And she was talking about how, 5 years ago, I think, she got involved in Bitcoin. Single mother, all kinds of, you know, things going on. And she started basically doing everything she could to save Bitcoin. Now you gotta understand, like, 5 years ago, what is that? It's almost 2. It was like 2019. So COVID was in 2020. Right? Am I doing this math right? I think it was 2020. Yeah. Correct. Yes. We, we, we hit this big spike of implicit inflation for 4 years after that, that we're still seeing the effects of. In the meantime, she's saving a Bitcoin, saving a Bitcoin, saving a Bitcoin as much as she can, and probably not as much as because of her situation.
I'm sure not as much as she would like to, if that makes sense. Yeah. But she had the realization just recently that because of all of that, she had been able basically to save twice. I want to get this right. I wish I should, I should have looked this up, but I wasn't planning on talking about it. I want to say it was like twice her what she could earn. Like, it was it sounded like it was a very significant amount of money, and she would not have been able to do that any other way. There was no way she was gonna invest in real estate. She didn't have the funds for that. If she had put her money in the bank, the purchasing power of that would have just gone down, but she invested in Bitcoin. She didn't invest in, you know, Ethereum and all this other Solana and all this other junk.
She invested in Bitcoin and she is seeing the returns from that. And she is such a positive person even though she's in some, frankly, some pretty difficult situations. You know? That's great to hear. Mhmm. I tried to get her on the show, but to be honest, she's, well, she, this is what she said. I'm not putting words in her mouth. She said she was shy. She was afraid, you know, which I get it. If you've never done this before, it's a little scary. I'm still hoping I can talk her into getting on the, on the show though.
[00:15:46] Kenshin:
Absolutely. Short interview. Yeah. 5, 10 minutes. Exactly. So
[00:15:53] McIntosh:
alright. So yeah. This I mean, we could sit here and go on like this all day. I have a question for you. Okay. Tomorrow
[00:16:05] Kenshin:
at the table, are you gonna mention Bitcoin?
[00:16:12] McIntosh:
Kinsheng, you didn't tell me you were gonna you were gonna ask this. No. Alright. That's a good question. To be honest, most of the people there, well, they all are aware of of that were involved in Bitcoin. Some of them are involved with me. Will it come up? Maybe. And I'd be happy to talk about it, but it's not just something I'm just gonna bring up just because because there's really no point. There's no I'm not gonna rub it in anybody's face who didn't buy any Bitcoin, and there's some of that. But, you know, I don't know. You never know what what comes up.
[00:16:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. Okay. You let me know next week.
[00:16:59] McIntosh:
We'll just see. We'll see. Yeah. One of the things we do want to do, listeners, you know, as we sit here and we're talking about the things that we're thankful for this year in Bitcoin, I would love to hear from you all. We would love to hear from you all. So if you could take a few minutes, think about that, and then we'd love to have you boost in and let us know. What is something that you're thankful for? Oh, I forgot. Oh, gosh. Here's something I'm thankful for. Can you guess what I'm gonna say? That Gary Gensler is residing on January 20th. I'm so excited.
I'm not gonna clap this week, but I am still excited. I am thankful because the lack of clarity that we had in the United States, in large part, in my opinion, came from him. And I do not understand the reasoning why, but I do believe that that is a true statement. So Mhmm. I guess he's moved on to other things. You don't just normally announce that you're quitting, although he may have been asked to quit. In fact, I'm pretty sure he was. I doubt he will have any trouble getting a job, so I'm not really worried about that. I'm just thankful that he's no longer setting policy for the United States.
Yeah. It's good news for everyone. Good news for all of us. Definitely good news. Alright, guys. We are actually gonna go ahead and move on because there's a lot of news this week we wanna cover, and I wanna be respectful of your time. Plus, to be honest, it's Wednesday afternoon, as I said, as we're recording it. I've got a lot of stuff to do, for Thanksgiving. So we did have a boost this week come in from one of our old listeners, Berno, out there listening, and he boosted in and said, thank you for everything you do to keep us informed. And I'll be honest. I read this next part, and I blushed.
I really appreciate this, but he said my favorite podcast. So thank you, Berno. You're you're one of the listeners that I am thankful for very much, and he boosted a 1,000 sats, and I appreciate that a lot. So, we'll move on to, the news. This first one, I actually heard on a podcast a couple of days ago. I looked it up, and it absolutely seems to be true. And I wanna kinda maybe take a different angle on this. I'm just gonna we're gonna read it, and then we'll talk about it for just a minute. But Russia apparently is banning winter mining in Siberia. The carcasses, which are some mountains in west western Russia. Sorry. I had to figure that out. And I guess in occupied Ukraine, although I don't know why they would be mining Bitcoin in occupied Ukraine, but that's literally what the article, was saying in the different, provinces or whatever that are under Russian control.
And, so I found this kind of a source document, the Moscow times, which I guess is not actually being written inside Russia. From what I see, it's like a dissident website, but it's it's this is legitimate. I believe that this is actually real news. And I think the reasoning is this let's take Siberia, for example, which would be a great place to buy mine, Bitcoin in the winter with air cooled miners, because you don't have to worry about them overheating. The concern is actually the energy consumption because their heating, I guess, these days is primarily driven around electricity. Like, I would have thought they would have used a lot of wood heat, but I guess not.
And they need that energy for for heating during the winter. So, basically, they said from December 1st to March 15th, from what I understand, that, you know, they would not be able to mine crypto or Bitcoin specifically in those in those regions.
[00:21:16] Kenshin:
Specifically in Siberia, The other two regions are completely bandits. So the other 2, for some reason, they started December until, let's say, March 2031.
[00:21:29] McIntosh:
Oh, I did not actually catch that. Thank you. Yeah. I I don't know the reasoning, but one of the interesting things is as far as it can be told, which is maybe not a 100% accurate, but it's probably pretty close. A couple of gigawatts of power are used mining Bitcoin in Russia. And what that means is that when they drop offline, if they're all in these regions, which I would suspect that a lot of them are, it's going to significantly lower the hash rate. It may literally be the only reason we do not reach, what is it called? We're at exahashes right now. What is the Zeta Hash.
So we're at like 800 plus exahashes when we get to a 1,000, that's 1 Zeta hash. Okay. And like, I did not see possibly how we could have reached 1 Zeta hash by the end of this year, earlier, like early this year or, or like late last year. But we're at least approaching that area. And it may be these servers going offline unless they move them to another area, kind of like what China used to do when they would move from the North to the south with the seasons. That may actually keep us from reaching that that, what is it? What did I just say? One zeta hash. I'll learn it when we start saying the word a lot. Right? But one zeta hash.
If anything, it should provide a nice little point of relief for us miners out there. You know? They're not, apparently, anywhere in the ballpark of what the United States does, but, they are a major player in the mining space. So if they're gonna be banning that, then it's certainly going to have an effect. Anyways, thought that was interesting at least from a mining aspect. I'll go ahead and do the the the next one. Alright. So Brazil is proposing a law to establish the national reserve. This is exactly the kind of thing what I've been talking about. If the United States is going to talk about this, if the United States is most likely going to implement a national reserve, other countries are going to start stepping up and doing it. I did not have in my cards that Brazil would be one of these countries to do it. Because if you don't follow Brazilian politics right now, let's be in in my American opinion, conservative ish, you know, certainly financially American opinion.
Brazil is very left leaning. Okay? Did not see them doing this, but apparently there's at least a proposal that they do that. This is not the law being put in place. It's a it's essentially a bill that's been put forth to the congress or whatever. And so we'll wait and see. But it's interesting that that these countries or that Brazil in this case is even talking about.
[00:24:44] Kenshin:
Alright? And then This goes goes together, I'm sorry, with the news from Poland. Right? Right. Right. And some other places that they yeah. They want to follow suit, and follow the Trump, let's say, playbook now. Well, and Trump's reserve.
[00:25:03] McIntosh:
People may not like you saying that, but that's that's what it is. They're following the Trump playbook. And if this actually does happen in January, if he if he does an executive order, which it looks like actually that might even work to start with, and then they start a bill through congress that looks like it has a lot of support. I fully expect to see a lot of countries start doing this in the Q1 of 2025. Right? It won't just be Brazil. There will be a number of countries who they start working stuff through their systems in order to do that. I was listening to a podcast right before we were recorded, and they're actually talking about this specific topic. It's Jack Mahler's, podcast, the guy who started strike. He's a phenomenal person, and he has somebody on and they are specifically talking about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. It's a fascinating episode, but I I do expect to see a lot of kind of copycat, you know, going on if we do that.
But what he was saying is here in America, of course, we're a democracy. We've gotta argue about this stuff. We got to have committees and we got to, it's going to take us some time to work through this. On the other hand, and this was literally his example. Putin could say, we're gonna have a we're gonna have a strategic Bitcoin reserve, and, we're gonna do that tomorrow. So, you know, in a in a country that's, I guess, more authoritarian, those things can move a lot faster unlike here in the United States where it may take us a bit. The final one that I was gonna talk about here, the tornado cache case, which we have not talked about a whole lot on this podcast, it deals with essentially a privacy tool, a mixing service that runs for Ethereum.
The developer of that tool was taken to court. And I believe he was put in prison over this. And they have now come out with a ruling saying that the court has actually overstepped their authority. I don't wanna go into this in too much depth, because it's just not really kind of our wheelhouse here. But I also believe you might call me a conspiracy theory person, but this is we are starting even though Trump is not in office. This stuff is starting to get rolled back because they know what is coming, and this kind of makes them look good, if that makes sense. I may be incorrect about that. But either way, the appeals court is is saying that the treasury of OFAC, which is oh, I should know what that is. I I've even heard it before.
There it is. Office of foreign asset controls exceeded its authority when they when they sanctioned, tornado cash and when they were arresting the, the person behind that. Romanoff is his name if I'm remembering correctly. So, to be honest, as someone who believes that code is speech, and here in the United States, we believe in free speech, I am glad to see this. I think that this is very much true. I think this is they did overstep their authority, and, you know, this person shouldn't be locked up in jail for this. So alright.
[00:28:54] Kenshin:
Does that mean that, they will
[00:28:57] McIntosh:
be released now, or it goes through the appeals system? I'm not sure about that. So I'm I'm not gonna speak on that. But it's an interesting article, I think. Yep. You should link it in We will have that in the show notes. Absolutely. And it really actually revolves around the smart contracts, which are not under the control of anyone. So not to get down into all the nitty gritty. But on Ethereum, once you write a smart contract, which is just code that's running, and you release it, so to speak, you cannot modify it. You can't take it back. You can't change it. And that was actually kind of the argument there. But anyway So next news,
[00:29:41] Kenshin:
the, a bank in US, the 10th biggest bank in USA called I don't know what the abbreviation stands for. TD.
[00:29:53] McIntosh:
I oh, I actually didn't know this. It used to be TD Ameritrade, I think.
[00:30:00] Kenshin:
In any case, this this bank, the 10th biggest in US Toronto Dominion Bank. It's a Canadian bank, actually. Oh, okay. Well, they pleaded guilty for, conspiring to fail, to maintain an anti money laundering program that complies with a system. And, yeah, they they caught and, pleaded guilty to that, and they need to pay 1,800,000,000
[00:30:31] McIntosh:
1,000,000,000. Right. So they pay a big fine. Nobody goes to jail. No. They get a tax write off probably, and and this story will be buried. Now the link that I got literally is off the justice.gov site. So it's the justice department, who I guess they're the ones who are prosecuting them. And the, the level of what's it called favoritism is being shown here. Right? Is just, it's crazy because one of the ways that they go about harassing and charging and putting in jail, people who are running, you know, Bitcoin infrastructure is through these type things, through the bank secrecy act. And they'll say, oh, they're money launched samurai, big case, right? The samurai, wallet.
The 2 people who were involved in samurai, they're being charged with money laundering even though they never directly control the money. They're facing jail terms. They're facing all kinds of things. These guys get a fine, which it's a crazy amount, at least to us, but it's nothing for them. And they'll just go on about their merry way. The only thing that would make this story better is if it was JPMorgan and it was Jamie Dimon who was being hauled up in front of the court. But, you know, I have opinions on that. So anyways, these banks are not clean. I mean, I I think everybody thinks that I think a lot of people think that they're they're just like pristine like the snow and they're not.
I mean, these money laundering cases happen more than you think. So
[00:32:24] Kenshin:
my question is who is going to KYC? The KYC. Right. Right. So they get that way with money laundering when yeah. We do a transaction they don't like and they blame us for for that. Oh, I would,
[00:32:42] McIntosh:
I'm I'm doing and I don't wanna go into the details under this, but I'm doing a financial transaction right now with with the bank that I have been with since I've literally 9 years old. I opened an account with them. They were asking for some some porting documentation, which I gave them. And then one of the questions that the lady asked me is, oh, what is this for? And I really wanted to tell her none of your business because it's not. But because I didn't want this process to slow down, I told her what it was for just so that we could move on. You know? The anyways, well, it gets well, actually, I'm using this for money laundering. Don't tell anybody.
You know? It's like, what do you expect me to say? I I don't it it makes no sense, and it frustrates me every time I deal with it. So Yeah. There we go.
[00:33:40] Kenshin:
Okay. In, other news, we have Morocco that banned the use of crypto Mhmm. Transactions back in 2017 for concerns of illegal activities back then. And they are considering to, yeah, permit creep to transactions and assets again. Right. What concerned me is that they are talking about the possibility of introducing a central bank digital currency, CBDCs. Right. So in essence, they, yeah, might unlock some good aspects of script and then bring their own
[00:34:25] McIntosh:
coin into it in some capacity. It's going to be guaranteed as these countries move into this that some of them try the CBDC thing. Some of them won't. We'll just have to see how it all shakes out. And if I were at Morocco or if I were in Nigeria, for example, who has a e narrow, which is their digital currency, I would do everything I could to avoid using those things. Not because I'm doing illegal things, but because I don't want the government all up in my private business. But I did want to bring this particular thing out, not because Morocco is some major world country, but because we are gonna see this.
It was brought out in the article, you know, there was some shenanigans going on and that's why it got shut down in 2017. That happened a lot. As an another example in Nepal, 2020 timeframe, I think they made crypto illegal because there were people in Nepal is a very poor country. And you need to understand that it's actually one of the poorest countries in the world. But there were people in there scamming the the Nepalese citizens, with crypto stuff had nothing to do with Bitcoin. But they shut down all crypto in the country. And what that means is unfortunately, while Bhutan who's there's next door neighbor is moving ahead with with this Bitcoin mining hydro setup that is generating wealth for them as a nation, Nepal is doing nothing of that. So they're falling behind the longer that it takes for them to wake up and realize, like Morocco is doing, that they need to join this digital world.
You know? And scammers are gonna scam. There's always going to be people out there doing stuff like that. But to to tell your whole country you can't be involved in this because of those bad people, not a not a good idea. Not a good idea at all. I'm waiting for him to, I've talked on here before. I would love to go to Nepal and help some of those remote villages build out infrastructure powered by Bitcoin because they have the hydro to do it. Almost every village has a creek flowing through it that could provide power for that village. You know?
[00:37:00] Kenshin:
That would be very interesting. Yeah. And but the interesting part with this Morocco is also that they open the door now to crypto to so they can also bring in the CBDC. Mhmm. But in the end, they will have the CBDC compete with Bitcoin, for example. And who's gonna win in that case? Well, it so if it's a duplicate
[00:37:21] McIntosh:
of their of of their local fiat currency, and they continue to make bad governmental decisions and rack up debt and have inflation and so on and so forth, it will not do well. It'll just be another smokescreen to maybe keep people in the dark for 10 more years longer. I I don't know. We'll just have to see how that plays out, but not a good thing. Not a good thing. Alright. Do you know enough about this last one to talk about? No. I really wanna know your perspective on this. So so Britain is having a, well, Britain's having a lot of trouble. We've talked about this a lot.
But about a year ago, they had an election. The labor party who is kind of their more left leaning party, is in control. And I frankly thought rather surprisingly, it was kind of a split. They actually have like 4 major parties in Britain, and I think it was kind of a toss-up. And they're the ones who ended up with the most, if that makes sense. Anyways, they've done such a terrible job for the last year. Some joker, which is, I think, mentioned in the article, set up a petition to that they would basically have a, there's a word for it, but basically a a snap election Election. Is what they call it. Yeah. Okay. So that they wanna go ahead and and speed things up and have a new election to see if people have confidence in the leadership that they've got or if they wanna move some other party in. And within 24 hours, this petition had, like, 2,000,000, people
[00:39:11] Kenshin:
sign it. So 2a half 1000000.
[00:39:14] McIntosh:
We will see, if they have another election or not. But what that does indicate, if nothing else, is that there is certainly a great deal of interest in that. So I will continue to monitor Britain, and see how that goes.
[00:39:30] Kenshin:
We'll we'll see. Yeah. They have done some some very scary choices lately.
[00:39:35] McIntosh:
I it's cra I, you know, I know I sound like a lunatic when I get on here and and start talking about Britain, but man, it's crazy. The things that they're doing over there. Like, you just literally go to a website and look at a post and they'll put you they could potentially put you in jail for it. I mean, the law is is is the ability to do that is in place. And and that is just such a scary, scary thing. I mean, it's just it's
[00:40:07] Kenshin:
nuts. Yeah. And it's one of the major countries in this world. And if other countries get example from those, it is it's not the right example to follow. So and one one thing to correct maybe, the article says 5 months ago,
[00:40:24] McIntosh:
they saw it in 2 years. I thought it was like I thought I read something that said it had been whether it's 5 months or almost a it wasn't that long ago. Right? Yes. And, the people are just not happy with what they're doing. So I don't think that's the the the vacuum that I'm in that the because the people that I hear talk about Britain are typically, you know, Bitcoiners who are aware of all this stuff, and they're just kind of venting or whatever. I really do think they've got some very serious issues going on there in terms of energy, in terms of policy.
They have got debt out the wazoo as we would say, and that they need to deal with. Best of luck. Right. I mean, that is where America did come from, so I kinda have to hope that they do okay. Software. What do we got? There was a few things this week. I'm gonna jump in and talk about Robosats first. It's a great little peer to peer, way to buy and sell Bitcoin. They're at 0.7.3 alpha. So, you know, they still call it alpha software. It is very, robust and very solid. It's used by a lot of people. And then I also wanted to talk for just a second about Umbrel, which is if you wanna run like a Bitcoin node in your at your home, on some little piece of hardware that you may have, that kind of thing, this is a great piece of software to do it. It's not completely open source, which is not ideal.
But if you can move past that, it actually works very well. This new release, which is 1.3.0 of the Umbrel OS, so it's like a complete operating system. It's based on Debian from what I could tell. It works works very well. So there's a lot of tooling in there. You could set up a lightning node. You could set up a Bitcoin node. You could actually now set up a large language model. So, like, something like kinda like chat GPT, right on your own network using your own data, that kind of thing. So some very interesting stuff going on there. I was looking to set it up on a VPS.
I don't really have a home network for that. Unfortunately, I could not get it to bootstrap off of the, the VPS server itself. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do. I've got a Linux node on my home network that I could put it on, but I'd be kind of wiping out other things. I don't know. Anyways, maybe one day I'll, I'll do that again. I've used it in the past though. It's good software.
[00:43:19] Kenshin:
Just a note on those local, GPT solutions. I tried one called free GPT Okay. On, not on Numeral, but on start 9. Mhmm. So it's a similar solution. Right? It's very slow.
[00:43:34] McIntosh:
Well, to do that, you have to have some serious hardware. Right? Because those you either get slow or you have, one of these accelerated GPUs, which is how they do it kind of in the cloud, to get reasonable speed. I don't have one of those. So if I did it, it would be very slow. There is a there is a trade off there for sure, but a lot of people are very leery, maybe rightly so, about kind of all the data that goes in and out of something like chat GPT. So
[00:44:10] Kenshin:
Do you know do you want to go tip for GPT? It's Frankie GPT. You pay with Bitcoin
[00:44:20] McIntosh:
lightning. I think I've actually heard of this. I've never used it. Yeah.
[00:44:24] Kenshin:
You get credits and they use chat GPTs models. So it's the same quality of replies as chat g p t, but it's completely anonymous for you. Oh, that's cool. And you pay with, yeah, and you pay with lightning. I will drop that in the show notes.
[00:44:42] McIntosh:
Doing it right now.
[00:44:44] Kenshin:
It's really, really good. And the developer is on Noister and he's very responds to messages. If you have any feedback on If you have any problems.
[00:44:54] McIntosh:
Yeah. Is his name Frankie?
[00:44:57] Kenshin:
No. I I don't have his name right now, but no. It's a bad joke, man. Yes.
[00:45:02] McIntosh:
Alright. Very cool.
[00:45:05] Kenshin:
Well, and since we mentioned Nostar, we have 3 big Nostar software updates, I would say. We have, Flotilla Okay. If you call it like that. Right. So this it's a Discord like Nostril client.
[00:45:21] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:45:22] Kenshin:
So that's quite interesting. I haven't used it, but I would like to use it and see if it really works. It would be good to use in a, let's say, a small to medium sized company, maybe even not only for gaming. Maybe you you can have that as a group to collaborate. I wanted something like that to use with a group of friends, for projects.
[00:45:46] McIntosh:
I am having a hard time finding some type of collaborative, you know, tool. Like you and I, we use simplex, which is in terms of security, it's a great solution. In terms of convenience and ease of use, it's not so great. Like you cannot actually have it on multiple devices. Like I have it on my phone, but I can't have it on my laptop. And, and that's actually very inconvenient sometimes. And I get the reasons why that's such a problem. But the reality is it is inconvenient, and it's those kind of things that will hold this kind of stuff back. So I'll, take a look at this. I'll I'm always looking for something. One day, I'm gonna figure out something good and really kinda stick to it. But yeah. Very cool.
[00:46:40] Kenshin:
Right. Then we have Olas, a software. It's, like, looks like Instagram, but it's not based again.
[00:46:48] McIntosh:
So it's very much photography oriented. I would right. That's cool. Exactly. I've never been a big Instagram person. I would like to see something like this. This and this makes a lot of sense. And I just wanna call it Olaf. I don't know why. Maybe too much frozen. I don't know.
[00:47:08] Kenshin:
A mess. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And then we have amethyst again, a Nostril client. It's a Swiss army knife of Nostril, clients in on Android. Right. It's on Android. And it's
[00:47:23] McIntosh:
yeah. And it runs Is it so it's version 0 dot 93 dot 0. Does that mean they've had 93 releases?
[00:47:32] Kenshin:
More. I mean, they release weekly, maybe multiple times a week. That's crazy. I've seen versions.
[00:47:40] McIntosh:
I don't have an Android phone, so I can't run this. But, yeah, that's pretty funny.
[00:47:46] Kenshin:
I would say it's my go to on Android. I tried primal. I like primal primal too, but I always go back to Amethyst because it feels like it has all the features. That's funny because I went to primal
[00:48:00] McIntosh:
this week. I tried their web interface with their version 2.0. And Kenshin, I don't know. Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am. Maybe. It's certainly possible. But
[00:48:16] Kenshin:
How smart did you think you are?
[00:48:18] McIntosh:
I mean, there's Einstein and then there's me. No. I'm just kidding. Right. No. Seriously, though, I've I'll never mind. The joke's already bad at this point. We need to move on. But seriously, I could not figure it out. I could not figure out how to do certain things, and I I don't know. Maybe I just need to go back and try again. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, But if I am, it is not intuitive what I'm doing wrong.
[00:48:51] Kenshin:
Yeah. There is a drop down that you need to find that gives you the right feed structure. If it's 24 hour, how do they call yeah. The most popular in 24 hours
[00:49:03] McIntosh:
or live feed or something. I probably did to see that. Host more on no Nostra this week than I usually do, but I'm still I'm nowhere near. I haven't created that tool yet for one thing. I need to I told you I need to write that little tool to push stuff to both at the same time. But even it becomes a problem, like, I'll have something come up on Twitter that I wanna put on Noster because it's not on Noster, and it never it just it's you it just never comes out right. You know, stuff like that. I don't know. We'll we'll get there. Anyways okay. Awesome.
Alright. We're gonna go ahead and get this wrapped up. We're gonna make this episode a little shorter than normal. So I'm gonna go into this stuff. Alright. So, Satoshi's Plebs, of course, is a podcasting 2.0 podcast. We are and we're value for value. So that means 2 different things. Podcasting 2.0 means that we have the latest, stuff, so to speak, for podcasting. We have transcripts. We have chapters. Did you see my sad puppy last week? I thought I did a pretty good job there. Did you, what else do they have? Live.
Literally, there are podcasts that they go live, and it will pop up in your app, in your podcasting 2.0 app that they're live. And then you just click and you can jump right in there and listen to it even as they're recording. So if you wanna know about those, you can go to podcast apps dot com. There's a whole list of different podcast apps that you can use there. I think you asked me last week kind of what the 2 were that I use the most. I use Fountain and Podcast Guru. I kind of have my apps split up between the 2 of those. If you're brand new, I'd basically probably at this point put you on fountain, but I I would also at the same time recommend, go to podcast apps .com.
Try out a number of them and see which ones you like. Now the value for value part of this, you did not hear any what they call pre roll. You will not hear any what you what they call post roll. We do not have ads in the middle of this. We don't have sponsors. We don't we just don't. We don't have any of that. Some of it is for artistic reasons. Some of it is for, journalistic reasons. I don't wanna be promoting, say, Ledger. They're just one of the easy ones to pick on. I have one of my old Ledger sitting right over here, which I bought a long, long time ago.
And if Ledger were giving me a bunch of money every week to promote their product, And I'm saying, well, the latest ledger just came out and you should go buy whatever that ledger is and blah blah blah. And here's a discount code so that you can save some money so that they know that somebody actually went from my podcast and bought that. This is really what that's for. But why would I talk about Ledger in any kind of way that's not positive? Why would I say something like, well, Ledger supports 100 of different coins and they're basically every one of them is an attack vector. Is that really what you wanna put your generational wealth on, you know, and things like that? Or all of their emails got leaked. And so now people get emails from people who say they're from ledger and they're trying to get your Bitcoin and so on and so forth.
So there are actually real reasons why we don't take sponsorships and things like that. But what that does mean, we need to come to you and say, hey. We're a value for value podcast. If you get value out of this podcast, please do me one favor. If nothing else, go tell somebody else about the podcast. We want other people to hear this message. That costs you nothing, and it helps us immensely. And it's why we say things like I'm thankful for my listeners. Right? Another thing that you can do, you can actually directly support this show. Be like Berno earlier who boosted and sent us a message, which we read to you, and give us feedback. Like, we ask a question. What are you thankful for in Bitcoin? Take the time to grab fountain and boost that in and say, well, I'm thankful for Bitcoin because blah blah blah. I look forward to hearing those from you. It's also a way to directly support this. And as the price of Bitcoin goes up, maybe you don't spend so much, and that's fine. I perfectly understand that.
[00:53:51] Kenshin:
And another, input we would like to have is what other subjects you would like us to talk about. If you like our discussions, that could also be a random comment about a new subject.
[00:54:05] McIntosh:
Right. Yep. That 100%. So anyways, to just wrap this up, we appreciate it. We appreciate what everyone has done for us over the years. We've had a lot of support, as a podcast since day 1, and I do appreciate that. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and and we sure would love to hear from you. You can go to satoshisdashplebs.com/ episodes and see a list of all the episodes that we make or that we have. You can click on the current episode, and there is our contact information on there, whether that's Twitter or email or Noster or whatever. It's all there, so you can reach out and get a hold of us that way.
Thanks a lot. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, and we will talk to you soon.
[00:55:05] Kenshin:
Have a nice weekend. Bye bye.
Introductions
Thanksgiving and Gratitude in Bitcoin
Bitcoin's Global Impact and Adoption
Regulatory Clarity and Challenges
Bitcoin's Influence on Personal Finance
News Highlights: Russia, Brazil, and More
Software Updates and Innovations
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
