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
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
December 11th, 2024: 100,914 USD | 96,250 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
874,292
News and notes
🇦🇷 MILEI: ARGENTINA ENDS DEFICIT FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 123 YEARS
Czech Republic Eliminates Bitcoin Capital Gains Tax for Long-term Holdings
Map with Bitcoin taxes per country
Some sources:
- https://koinly.io/sv/blog/crypto-tax-free-countries/
- https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/best-worst-countries-crypto-taxes-crypto-tax-tips/
Russian Lawmaker Proposes Creating Strategic Bitcoin Reserve
More sources:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2024/12/10/leak-reveals-russias-bid-for-bitcoin-reserve-amid-huge-2025-price-predictions/Olas v0.1.5 - Swipe to Zap
Bitkit v1.0.7 - Quick pay
ZEUS Wallet v0.9.3: Improved Channels UI & More
- El Salvador to scale back bitcoin dreams to seal $1.3bn IMF deal
Software Updates
Olas v0.1.5 - Swipe to Zap
Bitkit v1.0.7 - Quick pay
ZEUS Wallet v0.9.3: Improved Channels UI & More
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 December 13th, and this is episode 188 of satoshis plebs. I'm McIntosh. And I am Kinshan. And today's episode is the Crackle in the Wire. Alright. Yeah. I don't know if that's gonna bring in people or not, Kenshin, but it's what I got. So Sounds good enough. I wanna go ahead and apologize upfront for last week's episode because there was a crackle in my recording. I could hear it when I was editing it, but unfortunately, at that point, it's basically too late and or I'm not a good enough audio engineer to get rid of it. I actually tried to make some changes, but I just I did make it better, but I could not solve the problem in total. Now we did just figure out what it was.
We've been using a tool called Jitsi and, for video, and then I record on Clean Feed because Clean Feed, is set up for audio engineering. It's set up for, like, TV station recording and this kind of thing. That's all it does. And it provides really clean audio. But unfortunately, these two things apparently seem to be fighting each other. So we had to turn off our video. So I will say good afternoon to you, sir, over the audio and no video. How are you today?
[00:01:55] Kinshan:
Fine. I'm very good. Thank you. Good afternoon over the Atlantic.
[00:01:59] McIntosh:
Yeah. It is afternoon here as we start recording. We record on Wednesday afternoons. It's kind of it's become our regular time. It gives us a little bit of time to get this put together and then out the door on Fridays, for distribution. But, yeah. Alright. Well, let's jump right on into it. Kenshin, do you wanna go ahead and do the price?
[00:02:23] Kinshan:
Yeah. I see the price right now. We're over a 100,000 USD, almost a 101,000 USD and €96,000.
[00:02:33] McIntosh:
So we were almost a 100 a 101 when I wrote that down just a couple of minutes ago. We're now at a 101 and 423. I'm not gonna update that price, but, yeah, it is still pressing forward. We were talking prior to hitting record. Our all time high, is like a 103 and some change. I think we're gonna have another go at, trying to get up there. This pump, if you wanna call it that, started pretty early this morning, US time. I actually, kinda had an odd schedule today. I fell asleep pretty early last night, and then I woke up about 3:15, 3:30 in the morning and laid there for a while, then I just got up and started doing my stuff because I have stuff to do.
And there was no sense in wasting my day. So I've actually been going now for almost 12 hours. Goodness. I've gotten a lot of work done, But I've watched the price go up all day long, so we will see where it goes. 4 more hours until the UTC, end of day. I'm going to guess, To be honest, it's gonna try and pump right into that 103. I may be wrong. It may not make it today. But I could see it doing that, and then we'll find out what happens from there. Does it get rejected, or does it, you know, break on through, and then we see what happens? I don't know.
What's our European price? What's our what euro? I love saying that. Euro. What's our euro price? 96
[00:04:14] Kinshan:
600 right now Okay. From an all time high of 98800. So we're 2,000 below all time high in euros.
[00:04:23] McIntosh:
So I'm looking forward to reach a €100,000. Yes. I I wish y'all would hurry up and get to a 100,000. I mean, really, slackers. What are y'all doing over there? Block height as we record, 874292. We did, we are looking at a difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days. It'll be before our next recording on December 16th, and we're looking at about 3.27% up. What that means is that we're looking at block times that are not 10 minutes. It's less than that. So your transactions are flying, and your transactions are flying because there's too many of us miners out there mining the Bitcoin.
We did get a previous update, 1.59% on the last, which would have been like, what, just a bit over a week ago?
[00:05:17] Kinshan:
Yes.
[00:05:18] McIntosh:
And, so I I don't know. We'll see. It feels like at least to me, and maybe it's just because it's luck, but ocean the last few days has been pumping out, blocks. I think we've had 4 now in just, like, the last 4 days. One day. Oh, 4 in 2 days. 1, 2, 3, 4. Oh, 5. Yeah. And yeah. Exactly. And 4 of them in 2 days. So, no more hash rate, to be honest, than normal right around 4, which is their normal or at least their new normal. I I don't know why that would be and the but it is what it is. I look. You take blocks when you can get them when you're in the mining business. I'll tell you that. Because we've been going through a little bit of a drought. Those are we've only had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in December so far. So here we are on December 11th as we record not even one block a day.
So alright. And then what what about our fees there, sir? I need to send you some money. How much is it gonna cost me?
[00:06:29] Kinshan:
Right now, it's 999. So all priorities are 9¢ per fee byte. Okay.
[00:06:37] McIntosh:
Which makes it around a dollar and 20 something. Well, I'm sorry. It's We're trying to wait. We got got sats are precious, man. You can get rid of those. Yeah. Yeah. And what's our unprocessed transactions?
[00:06:53] Kinshan:
273,000 transactions right now.
[00:06:57] McIntosh:
Alright. And what is new with you, sir?
[00:07:02] Kinshan:
Well, it's cold. It's cold. Yes.
[00:07:05] McIntosh:
When we had Jitsi up earlier now you gotta picture this. Right? So he's sitting at at his microphone. And I said, Kenshin, it must be cold there because he had a blanket. I guess it's a blanket. Right? You It wrapped around your your your neck. Yeah. Like, how much snow do you have outside?
[00:07:26] Kinshan:
Very little. Maybe that's why.
[00:07:29] McIntosh:
More snow to insulate. More snow to insulate. And then you were saying you were having some problems, I think you said, with your neck. Right?
[00:07:37] Kinshan:
Right. Yeah. I had a very stiff neck. I could barely stand up or move millimeters, my neck, over the weekend. Now it's getting better, but I tried to protect what that means.
[00:07:51] McIntosh:
I got bad news for you. It means you're getting old.
[00:07:55] Kinshan:
Oh, yeah. Might be. It's the first time it works so bad. That later, but,
[00:08:01] McIntosh:
yeah, I'm already to the point where, I wake up with random inks and paints, and then it's like, this is not fun.
[00:08:11] Kinshan:
Right. Oh, man. Alright. How was your week?
[00:08:17] McIntosh:
I don't know how much detail I wanna go into this because for one thing y'all probably don't even really wanna hear, but I, kinda got some stuff dropped on me this week at work. A big project. Kind of the way the place that I work at, to be honest, we tend to operate in these, cycles of panic and fear. Like, we have to get this done. So I'm taking off the week between Christmas and New Year's because I like to take that time off. It's time to spend with my family, and it's also happens to be one of the slowest well, the probably slowest time of the year at my job. And that's coming up. I mean, we're really only, like, 2 weeks off of that. Right? Well, guess what Macintosh found out this week? In 3 weeks, I have to have this entire major project done that I literally just got started on, and I depend on other people to do other things to do my work as part of that.
So it's shaping up to be a spectacular end of the year festival.
[00:09:25] Kinshan:
Right. What about Chat gpt? Can they help a bit? Well,
[00:09:30] McIntosh:
I I don't know that I've ever talked about that on here. So I do use ChatGPT. I actually purchase it, because I find it very useful. I do a lot of programming in Python. I am not a software engineer. It is not in my title. I think I've told y'all before. My official title is I'm I'm a data reliability engineer. So but what I've started telling people is I'm a software engineer because what I do is write a bunch of code that automates the build of servers. So we spin up new environments, and we've gotta manage those database servers. That's where the data part of it comes in. I have a background as a DBA. But, you know, I basically sit and write code all day. And especially with Python, which we use for a lot of our scripting and whatever, I've found chat gbt to be very useful. I know enough to know, like, when it's wrong, and sometimes it is. Although it has gotten better, I've been using it for, I don't know, probably at least a year at this point, as a almost daily part of my work.
I'm not a expert Python programmer by any means, but I know enough to know when it's telling me something wrong. But it does do a lot of things very well. I wrote something just in the last 24, 48 hours that if I would've not been using chat GPT, to be honest, it probably it would've taken me days of work, like a week maybe. It's very good at kinda prototyping stuff out and, you know, filling in little details. And, like, you can give it code and say, how would you improve this? And it'll it'll tell you. And a lot of times, it's they're very good ideas and things like that. So, it's gotten pretty integrated. I don't feel like it's ever going to replace somebody like me. I I hope not just frankly for my own self interest, but I I feel like it's, it is an enabler.
And what that may mean in the long run is that companies don't hire as many people to, you know, to do support or whatever because tools like chat gpt can make them 5 times more effective. Right? So if I'm 5 times more effective, well, then in theory, at least, I can replace 5 of me. Right? So I I do see that as being problematic. You know, we were told all through my childhood, all through my young adulthood, you know, get your computer degree. Go get you a job in the computer field. And there's a lot of people who are doing that. And if we trim off, I don't know, even half the people that are there, that's a lot of people with a lot of high paying jobs who are now out there competing for other jobs with other people, You know? Now will this type thing bring new innovation? Yeah. Will it replace what's there? I I don't know. I can't answer that question.
Anyways, enough philosophy. I'm not very good at that. Go listen to the mere mortals podcast. They talk about philosophical stuff all all the time. Alright.
[00:12:57] Kinshan:
Right. So what are we talking about today? Well,
[00:13:01] McIntosh:
we're gonna start that's a good question.
[00:13:07] Kinshan:
First of all, let me ask you. Mhmm. What did you think of, Microsoft
[00:13:11] McIntosh:
ignoring Yeah. Bitcoin this week? We we gotta talk about that. So in case you missed it, Microsoft, the board meeting or shareholders meeting, whatever it was, was Tuesday, yesterday, as we record just a couple of days ago as this will be released. And, apparently, they voted to not invest in Bitcoin in any capacity. I looked it up. They sit on somewhere between, like, $70,000,000,000 in cash. It's a large amount of cash. Now they're a very large company, but this cash just sits there. If they're not investing it in something, which they're not going to invest all of that money in, say, new AI infrastructure or something like that, it's just sitting there depreciating. It's losing losing value. And you can look at the official government statistics or you can kind of estimate more what you really think that it is.
But even in the best case scenario, it's above 3% a year right now that it's losing value. So that adds up very, very quickly in terms of its purchasing power. I think that this is a huge mistake. I mean, I was very much on the fence about whether they would do it or not. Not. I thought they might do a small allocation, which I get the corporate conservatism, but there's they're not the first company to do this. It's not like others haven't already gone down this path. So to me, it would make a lot of sense to allocate even just a $1,000,000,000 out of that. You know? So that'd be 1 70th, say, of their cash reserves. It's not like they're gonna run out of money. Bitcoin could go down to, you know, 20,000, which it won't, but it could, and they would be okay.
They're not out there playing leveraged games with it or anything like that. It's just sitting there. But over the long term, they should see significant gains from that. And they can evaluate that for their corporate treasury and their strategies moving forward. But they have chosen at this point not to do that, and they're losing an advantage in my opinion.
[00:15:35] Kinshan:
Right. Maybe they think they don't need it. As you said, they have so much money. Their market cap is is quite high at 3,000,000,000,000. So maybe they think, oh, I need to make a risk. Wow. Yeah.
[00:15:52] McIntosh:
I predicted last week that if they don't buy Bitcoin, then this time next year, Bitcoin is gonna be worth more than Microsoft. Right. You said 1 year, and I think I said 2 years. Right? Yes. So we'll see. You may be right, actually. In fact, I I actually have a suspicion you will be right. But I was being a little more conservative. I I think you may actually turn out to be right in this case, Kenshin. And I do think We only need to go making a huge mistake.
[00:16:21] Kinshan:
Yeah. We only need to go 50% from here. Right?
[00:16:25] McIntosh:
That's You're right. I did not think that through, because, essentially so I guess that means if we hit 150 Yeah. Which I am pretty confident before the end of this bull cycle, which should be the end of next year, as far as I can tell. I'll put it that way. You know, we should be there. We'll see. I don't know. I do think they're making a mistake. And I to be honest, I stand by. I I don't know if this actually made it in the final audio. I may have cut it out, but I think they disrespected Sailor. I do. To give him 3 minutes to present to their board. Come on. If I were Michael Sailor, I just said, it's clear that Michael Sailor wants Bitcoin adoption because outside of that, I would have just told him to pound sand. I've been like, you guys, whatever.
They MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor's company just got included. And what is it called? Is it the Nasdaq 100? I think
[00:17:32] Kinshan:
I'm not sure.
[00:17:35] McIntosh:
It was yesterday or today.
[00:17:38] Kinshan:
But it's been the most growing company in the world for the past 4 years.
[00:17:44] McIntosh:
Oh, apparently, it actually hasn't happened yet, but they expect it to. I thought it had already happened. All this stuff is saying it could happen as of even a few hours ago. So, they're a company yeah. Exactly. They're doing very, very well. And, you know, we're just because we're Microsoft and we've got it made and we're a $3,000,000,000,000
[00:18:06] Kinshan:
company, we'll just ignore him. That's fine. Mhmm. That's fine. I think I think Microsoft is at the stage of they ignore you. Mhmm. I think when they see Bitcoin pass them in market cap, I think they will they will get regretful, but I think they will get a bit, how do we say? They will be a bit angry maybe, and they will want to see Bitcoin fail.
[00:18:32] McIntosh:
So they're gonna pull the Peter Schiff strategy. Oh, we didn't buy any. So
[00:18:38] Kinshan:
Yeah. It's gonna fail. So I think then they will be in the the fight you stage in a year from now, And then it will take maybe another year to join.
[00:18:48] McIntosh:
So I'm gonna disagree. I think they may have too many shareholders before then who sell their stock and make noise about it that they do it sooner, but we'll see. I just I things are changing so fast, and that's actually kind of one of the things I wanted to talk about today. I could not imagine a year ago that we would be sitting here at the end of 2020 4 talking about Microsoft getting Bitcoin as even a possibility. I could not imagine that we would have Trump being elected as president, potentially in large part, I think, because of his Bitcoin stance. I could not imagine all the things that he's promised.
We'll see what happens as part of that. I could not imagine well, Russia mining Bitcoin. I, actually, I think a year ago, I was already saying that was potentially happening. That's been going on a bit. But now they're actually kinda making it official. I think we have a news item about that. Lots of regulation and whatever. I did I was not aware of so there was a conference this week in Abu Dhabi. I hope I said that right. A Bitcoin conference there. I was not aware of any major announcements coming out of that about, I don't know, Saudi Arabia buying Bitcoin or something like that. But I do think that stuff is is going to happen. I think it's going to happen sooner than we think.
And I think 2025 may be pretty crazy, to be honest. We'll see.
[00:20:38] Kinshan:
Yeah. Every week, we talk about a new country Right. Wanting to adopt Bitcoin or change the regulations in some way, and we have another country this week to talk about. So, yeah, things are happening.
[00:20:50] McIntosh:
Very cool. I yeah. It's just things are accelerating, and I think that acceleration is going to continue to happen. Alright. So we do have a question for the audience. Yep. Is Microsoft are they making a mistake? Would love to hear from you on that. You can boost in and let us know what you think about that. I would guess that most of y'all would think that that was not a that they were, but we'll see. There are people in the Bitcoin community who feel like countries, nations, large corporations, like MicroStrategy should not be buying Bitcoin.
This is something that I'd I don't wanna spend the whole episode talking about, but I philosophically do not understand how they arrive at that position. They're like, it's for people. Well, yes. And people have the right to go out and get it, but it's for everyone. Right? And I've I've consistently made this argument for a long, long time. It's it's for Russia just as much as it is for the United States, And that ruffles a lot of people's feathers, but it's the truth. Yep. And, you know, it's it's a deeper dive to kinda go into that, but it is true. It's for the people that I wanna help the most, the unbanked. Right? The people who are out there for whatever reason, and they can't even own a bank account because Bitcoin offers them hope. Bitcoin offers them a way out of poverty potentially just as much as it is for BlackRock, and I don't like BlackRock. I I don't. I I haven't really made that clear recently, but I'm not a fan.
They make an ETF or whatever. That's fine, but I have a lot of other reasons I don't like BlackRock. But I can't keep them from buying Bitcoin on behalf of their customers. That's their business. So, anyways, I wanna get on to all that. We'll see. Boost in. Let us know.
[00:23:09] Kinshan:
Yeah. I'm happy, personally. We have a bit longer to stack some chipsets. Well, yes.
[00:23:15] McIntosh:
And and that is the benefit. You know? Yeah. We who knows? I don't know if we'll go back below a 100. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't. Right now, we're not, but that's okay. As we say here at satoshi's plebs, it's it's a real simple philosophy, just DCA. Right? Don't worry about the price because over a period of time, a 4 years, I would say minimum, you're going to see that price. It's going to be better than it is at any point when you were buying it. Does that make sense? Like, if I start buying let's say let's just say, I wait until December 15th of next year, which is probably very near the all time high, and I start buying $30 a day of Bitcoin.
I can go to strike and set up a DCA. It will happen automatically, and I just do that. Well, right after I start doing that, the price drops. And what happens? Oh, man. I can't believe I'm doing that. No. You know, but I keep buying and I keep buying, and I keep buying. And after roughly 2 years, we reach a bottom, and then we start back up. And at some point, in between that 2 years 4 years, I'm going to pass the old all time high. And at that point, everything that I bought up until that point is definitely in profit. Because, I mean, it's real straightforward.
You just had to zoom out a little bit.
[00:24:56] Kinshan:
Yeah. And there are plenty of tools that prove that in the past.
[00:25:00] McIntosh:
What was the one we were talking about last week? Does it do that directly? Kimbo. Kimbo. Yeah. We really need to set that up. But Kimbo's a lot of money. Yeah. Another project. Alright. Let's talk about our supporters. Okay? Yep. We had some nice boost come in this week, and I do wanna give credit to those people who were doing that for this actually does not have an episode. Hey, send it, Mike. I appreciate this. He sent in another, 1069. He said, catching up on episodes. I really like the new format and cohost. I I feel like we read this, but then I don't think we did.
So if we did or didn't anyways, there it is. I do appreciate sending it to Mike. I'm curious as to what he's using. I don't know that I can tell from this. Let me double check. No. I can't. I cannot tell. Interesting. I'd love to know where you're boosting from. If you don't mind, you can boost in next time and let us know. And our old friend, hypersensitive Osiris, boosted in I think this is the first time they've boosted since you've joined Kenshin. I don't know. I'm sure you probably heard of them in the past. They've been with us for a long time.
Boosted in about episode 187 last week, bricks and Bitcoin, and said still listening was without a smartphone for a month. That was probably a nice change of pace, actually. Sometimes I wished I would do that. And my life has changed majorly in the last months. Greetings from Portugal. Well, I don't know what's going on, hypersensitive, but I'm glad to hear from you. I'm glad you're doing okay. And, I appreciate that, and we appreciate the support. Alright? And then our final one, episode 187 as well. I I don't know if I said it, but hypersensitive of a sars boosted 500, so did, HBH Gardens, which I believe is a new booster.
I do not recall that handle before. And no message there, but, we do certainly appreciate that support. So that was our total let's see. I don't know. I learned to do to I can actually do this. 2069 was the total. So, I appreciate that. We do. Sorry. I have to learn how to say that. It's been a been a change. So, alright. Let's talk about the news and notes. Can I talk about Argentina? Yep. Y'all are gonna think this is my favorite subject. It's turning out to be. I've been talking about what Malay has wanted to do, what he ran on, Argentina's economy prior to him becoming president and all of this for a long time. You can look back through our episode list over at satoshisdashplebs.com/episodes.
And there are a number of episodes that I talked about Argentina. He has been he was elected back in December of last year, so it's been right at a year. I guess he did like a state of the nation thing type, what we would call state of the nation. Last night, major broadcast interrupted their news not news feed, their regular programming or whatever for for this speech. And some very interesting things came out of that. I'm going to talk about them real quick, and we'll I would preface this by saying this is coming off Twitter. I don't speak Spanish. I did not watch the newscast directly.
So but this sounds honestly right knowing Argentina's past history, first of all. So the first thing is they are no longer in a deficit spending situation. So what that means is they're no longer spending more than they make. So if they bring in, let's just say, a $100,000,000 in tax revenue, they're not spending a $110,000,000 down. The United States, I I don't know how Sweden does at this, but we're champions of overspending. So we have 36 $1,000,000,000,000 in debt at this point and still climbing. I think we're approaching now $2,000,000,000,000 a year in, deficit spending. Do you know offhand what Sweden does?
[00:29:54] Kinshan:
No. No. But I'm curious now. I I thought it's not
[00:30:00] McIntosh:
on on debt or on of course, Sweden is on debt, but they're not on in deficit. But I'm not sure. I need to check. You if at some point, I'm curious. I've never looked them up, but I'm I am curious. Look up their total debt and then if they are in a deficit spending. But, apparently, last night, he said in his speech, that for the first time in a 123 years, they are operating with a surplus, which that is a monumental achievement. Just as an example, they printed 13% of the GDP, which is your gross domestic product. Prod product? It's like your total economic output of the country last year, okay, the previous administration.
And I would point out that they still didn't get elected. That, of course, led to inflation as we would expect it. We were at over 200% year over year at one point last year when I was reporting on that. And inflation has dropped dramatically, and they will continue, I think, to see good things. I am very, very excited to see what is going to happen with Argentina over the next 10 years. I'm excited to see what happens in El Salvador. But to be honest, I mean, if I were being just completely honest, Argentina, I think I'm more excited about it because it is a larger country, in terms of land area and in terms of population.
It has a very storied history. It literally used to be called the Paris of South America. Okay? Because there was a time period before, I would say the left the leftist I know Malay would certainly would call him that. The leftist took over. Right? The is what they were called, which is the name, I can't say the person's name, but it was one of their presidential people who was in power for quite a bit of time. And, you know, I think they're on a good path, and I think they're going to do great things over the next 10, 20 years. So I am very excited about that. The second thing, and I only have a Twitter post to go off here. The other one, I think we have a little more evidence of that.
I'm quite sure he said that. He said what I'm about to tell you. I don't know if this will happen. Understand this is in a state of the union address, but here's what he's laying out for his next set of goals. He's going to reduce the amount of national taxes. So this is the country level taxes by 90%. So let's say going back to that $100,000,000 of tax, which is it's I'm sure it's significantly higher than that, but just to make this easy, they would only take in $10,000,000, and they're going to return to the provinces or their states the tax autonomy.
Excuse me. Yeah. Autonomy? Yeah. I did say that right. That that this thing says they never should've lost. I don't know if he really said that, but I know he believes that. Getting out of the CPO, I'm not exactly sure what that means. No. I don't know what you're Sorry. I do not know. I'm gonna have to skip that one because I don't understand it, but the rest of them make perfect sense. Gonna be talking about the free competition currencies. I know this is something that he's wanted to do, and they're gonna basically enable Argentines to use any currency they want. And that's going to include crypto, including Bitcoin, of course. Okay?
They can deal in dollars. They can deal in pesos. They can deal with whatever they want. Malay is very much a libertarian, and this is a very libertarian philosophy, so it makes perfect sense. Investments. They're cutting out a lot of the regulation, and they're making it easier for international trade and for investments. And because of that, they he literally said in this, they have request for approval of investments for more than basically well, almost $12,000,000,000. Okay? So they're already having outside con companies come in and say, we want to invest in Argentina. Now that's as a company, of course, they're gonna profit from that. But they're going to help build the infrastructure to do things like mine, to do things like, harvest oil and gas, for example. Things that require large investments of money. They've already got $12,000,000,000 of companies coming to them saying, we wanna invest this money in Argentina. Argentina.
And I think that will go much, much higher over the next few years. International trade, they're going to eliminate tariffs for trade and that kind of thing. They're going to be looking, he explicitly said promote free trade with the United States. We'll see how that works with Trump and our tariffs, but, maybe. More deregulation with his chainsaw. He is famous for his little chainsaw, which I just that just tickles me every time I see it.
[00:35:45] Kinshan:
Yeah. The central bank wasn't here Yeah. Cutting down.
[00:35:51] McIntosh:
This one, I I guess they're having issues with organized crime. They're going to create an anti mafia, law that's similar to our RICO law. He said, which eliminated organized crime in the United States 50 years ago. It really didn't, but it helped. So we'll go with that. I'm gonna skip over a few of these. But oh, nuclear. That was a big thing. They're planning on building a lot of nuclear power, specifically for artificial intelligence. So they're you know, whatever you think about art artificial intelligence is certainly going to be around for a while. And it consumes vast amounts of power, and it needs stable power. So it's a perfect fit for this type of thing.
Alright. So big announcements coming out of Argentina. We will see how much he gets done. He has a way to work with these other parties that it's just crazy. I've not seen it. Understand, he's gotten all this done, and his party doesn't even have control. It'd be like the Republicans here in the United States. When Trump gets elected, the Republicans were not in power, So the Democrats were or if we had multiple parties, there were other, you know, groups. And he still managed to get all the stuff that he laid out on his campaign trail done.
That's, like, unheard of. It's crazy. So he's a he is a different person. Alright. Very cool. But that's where we're at in Argentina. I'm planning on going down there next week. No. I'm just kidding. I would love to go down there. I'd love to set up mining down there, to be honest, maybe among other businesses. But, yeah. Catch me up on, something a little closer to you there, the Czech Republic.
[00:37:46] Kinshan:
Yeah. We have the Czech Republic, announcing that, they they eliminate Bitcoin capital gains tax for long long term holding. Mhmm. So if you hold Bitcoin for 3 years or more, then you don't have to pay taxes when you settle
[00:38:07] McIntosh:
with So they're really encouraging long term holding, and they're not taking into account. I mean, I guess this would be a negative. What if I wanna go spend my Bitcoin on coffee? I mean, it's like the standard use case. Right? I wanna go down to my coffee shop and use lightning to give them some some Bitcoin. And the only way I know how to handle that is to have a well, if it's spending less than $600 or some amount like that, then there's no cap gains on that.
[00:38:40] Kinshan:
Right.
[00:38:41] McIntosh:
But it's a good start, certainly. And, you know, they join a long list of other countries, which you've got a list here. I wanna go through this. This is really cool, that Yeah. That have incentives, and then we'll we'll talk about that for a minute.
[00:38:57] Kinshan:
Yeah. It took me down the rabbit hole of, how many of the European countries now offer 0%, capital gains tax. It's a few. All of them have a caveat here or there. Mhmm. So for example, as, I see it, the biggest country in Europe is Germany Mhmm. That offers 0% capital gains tax if you hold for 1 year or more. But,
[00:39:28] McIntosh:
otherwise Why do you think that they sold their Bitcoin? They needed the cash? You know what I'm talking about?
[00:39:35] Kinshan:
Yeah. The government.
[00:39:36] McIntosh:
Mhmm. I I didn't actually realize they had this incentive until you, showed me this. I guess they're semi I know that there's people in parliament who are whatever their parliament is called. I'm sorry. But, you know, they are pushing Bitcoin, but I was not even aware that they did this. So Right. They already have one law in effect. They have other people who are really pushing for Bitcoin for a national reserve and all that, but they went and sold, like, one of the largest amounts of Bitcoin I've ever heard of. And just a few months ago and have literally lost 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars by doing that.
[00:40:23] Kinshan:
Yeah. Yes. I mean, they sold, when it was around $50,000. Mhmm. So it's basically doubled now. Right. And I think, in Europe, there's a lot of pressure from the European Central Bank, and Germany is very close to that, of course. So there is one side that is very, very negative and against Bitcoin. And then they have some legislation that I don't know when it it, it passed in Germany Mhmm. To have this, capital gains for 1 year. So I think it's conflicting them as well.
[00:41:04] McIntosh:
I think there's a lot of countries that are kind of in that state. They don't know what to do, and they're gonna have to get off of that fence, as we would say, at some point.
[00:41:16] Kinshan:
Exactly. And the second country I have in my list here is Switzerland, and they have 0% for private people. Mhmm. Period. No other implications. So no period of holding. I think you can pay, as you say, with lightning or whatever. Mhmm.
[00:41:36] McIntosh:
There's no restrictions. Lugano, I think, is famous for this, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Like, a Bitcoin economy going on there.
[00:41:44] Kinshan:
Right. So it that has pushed a lot of innovation. A lot of, companies have set up, their headquarters now in in Switzerland. One of my favorite companies before exchanging euros to Bitcoin was this, BITTR, BITTR. Mhmm. Company. They were based in Netherlands, and they had to flee Netherlands and set up in Switzerland, due to legislations. So, I see that more and more that companies go to Switzerland there. They're very
[00:42:21] McIntosh:
Bitcoin friendly. That's And they have a long history of financial monetary sane policy, I guess you could say. I don't know. Right? Yeah. With the Swiss banks and all that.
[00:42:35] Kinshan:
Yeah. And the Swiss franc was always strong.
[00:42:40] McIntosh:
Because it was acting with gold.
[00:42:42] Kinshan:
But Yeah. It was it I think it was the last Mhmm. The last fiat currency to get off the gold standard. I'm almost sure that you're correct. Yes. I think it was 93 or something. But it was the last one and, of course, since then it's it it goes the direction of, all the other Fiat currencies. Right. Then we have Belarus. Belarus is, another country that is 0% for all private people. I think even companies. Mhmm. They don't have to pay, and there is no restriction again on on years. So that's also very interesting, and it's, not far from these Nordic countries where I am.
[00:43:31] McIntosh:
There's another country that I'm thinking of, which I'm not putting my finger on. Maybe Latvia. I thought it was one of these Soviet states, previous Soviet states. They were very, very friendly. No. It started with an l. I'm almost sure. Let me I wanna check on this real quick. No national framework. This must not be what I'm thinking of. Alright. Never mind. I don't wanna get off on that. Let's sorry. Let's keep going.
[00:44:06] Kinshan:
Yeah. Then, so Belarus, that was 3. Then Belgium. Mhmm. In one map, it says 0%, but when I looked deeper into Belgium, they say you need to pay taxes when you convert to Fiat. That's an interesting twist.
[00:44:23] McIntosh:
That's the only place I know of that does it like that. So if you don't convert to fiat, it's not a problem.
[00:44:30] Kinshan:
Yeah. Maybe you convert to another, a stable coin. I'm not sure. What is the loop for that? Well, why do you just pay for it in Bitcoin? Right. That too.
[00:44:42] McIntosh:
Directly. I mean, I think of the Bitcoin as as both a store of value and a currency. People can't wrap their head around that, but gold is an example. Certainly was a store of value for 1000 of years and has been a currency up until whenever it was, 1913 or I don't know exactly. Sorry. But just like you, you know, as a literal like a gold dollar, $20 gold piece. Right? That was gold, and it was certainly currency. So I don't I don't know why people struggle with that other than we just don't have that anymore. You you don't save your dollars because that's stupid because you're losing 3 plus percent every year.
Sorry. I apologize for the question. But that's an interesting twist, though, if it's when you convert to fiat. Well, that would certainly encourage you not to do that.
[00:45:44] Kinshan:
So Belgium is a good place for that. Luxembourg, you need to hold for at least 6 months, then there is no taxes. Portugal, you need to hold for a year. Then we have Slovenia, you need to hold for 2 years. Then I see Croatia, also you need to hold for 2 years. And there then interestingly, we have Malta, a very tiny island in the Mediterranean. It's 0% for private people.
[00:46:19] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:46:21] Kinshan:
Any period. So, it's also one of the most friendly places. So this and Belarus and Switzerland, I would say are the most friendly ones. Malta, Switzerland, Belarus. Yes. And now, finally, we have a Czech Republic that you need to hold for 3 years. So it's not as good as some of the other countries, but it's a good start. And, yeah. And as I was saying, Czech is the home of, brains, mindful. Mhmm. And it's also the home of treasure.
[00:46:58] McIntosh:
Yeah. I've given that they're not, until now, super Bitcoin friendly, I've never quite understood that other than that's just where they're from. But, you know, at least with brains, I know they are. I don't know about Trezor. But, I don't know. I think we're gonna So the We're gonna see the rise of these Bitcoin I don't wanna call them supernations, but, like, finance centers, maybe. Like like Hong Kong used to be. Maybe not so much anymore, but it was considered to be this big Asian finance center. Right? Singapore, very finance friendly.
I well, New York, even though it's terrible tax policies, New York City has been considered to be a center of finance. Right? I think we're gonna see these in terms of Bitcoin over the coming 20 years or so. You're gonna see countries. You're gonna see cities or city states or whatever you wanna call them that do the same thing because they are because of these Bitcoin friendly policies, they attract the top talent, the top countries. So not countries, companies. Right?
[00:48:21] Kinshan:
Mhmm.
[00:48:23] McIntosh:
So very, very interesting. And we're watching it happen in real time. I mean, we come on here every week and, you know, this country is doing this or the you know? I do I did wanna mention with number 6 with Portugal. They have walked back some of their stuff. They used to be a little more friendly. Not I think they've got some fluctuations going on over there in their politics. I'm sure they're having budget problems in this kind of thing, and I don't know. But, similar to, like, Norway where they're trying to tax what is unrealized capital gains taxes, this crazy Yeah. Policy.
Anyways, I did wanna mention that. One thing about Bitcoin, of course, it makes it very easy. Not that all of us can just up and move, but it certainly helps if you don't have to worry about your your wealth and your sovereignty. Right? Oh, I need to move to some other place because of this policy or that policy. No. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything to do with Bitcoin. It may be persecution or or whatever. The Human Rights Foundation does a great job of kind of cataloging all that and talking about it. So very good.
You wanna talk about this next piece?
[00:49:52] Kinshan:
I can connect the one other piece further down. Okay. El Salvador piece where they're Yeah. Going a little bit backwards, it feels.
[00:50:04] McIntosh:
Maybe. Unfortunately.
[00:50:05] Kinshan:
Maybe. Yeah. We'll see. Maybe,
[00:50:08] McIntosh:
Beukele is playing, like, 3 d chess or something. I don't know. Yeah. Go ahead and yeah. I'm glad you had this on here.
[00:50:16] Kinshan:
Yeah. So now it seems that they are in talks, to get a a loan from the IMF Mhmm. Again.
[00:50:24] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:50:25] Kinshan:
A 1,300,000,000 loan. And the deal is apparently that they need to drop the legal requirement for companies to accept Bitcoin. As it says it, the companies can still voluntarily accept, but it's gonna take away the legal tender requirement.
[00:50:48] McIntosh:
So it would be a step back in So this has everybody all up in arms. I think given the fact that they're so Bitcoin friendly, frankly, and that it has been in effect as legal tender for, what, 2 years? I don't really see this making that much difference, to be honest. I don't know why they feel like they need to get the loan. That's their business, and they're going to choose to do that. If I were running a country, which thankfully I am not and thankful to the citizens of that country that I am not, I would not deal with the IMF, but Bukele is a smart guy. He knows what he's doing, and I'm not gonna go over here and say that's a bad thing.
They need money for whatever reason, I believe, to build out more infrastructure or whatever, and that's how they're gonna do it. If they have a plan to pay it back, then I doubt that they have the ability to do this, but maybe they could take about a quarter of that 1,300,000,000 and invest it in Bitcoin, and then in another year pay off the loan. They usually, the IMF will write in provisions about what they have to do, and this would be a good example, forcing businesses or forcing the country to allow businesses to not use Bitcoin, essentially. Right?
That's the kind of thing that the IMF always puts into these deals, and and they're doing it for for whatever reason. When you're dealing with the IMF and with the World Bank, there's always a a great book that I recommend. It's called Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein at the, Human Rights Foundation. It's a great book. It's not very it's not very long. It's probably less than a 100 pages. I think I read it in about a day and a half, when we were on a cruise, and I had some free time. But, it's lots of data, and it's very well written to cover all this stuff. So, potential bad news. I I don't know. We'll just have to see. I know in terms of their Bitcoin, they're doing very well. And I know people don't like to kinda get involved in this, but I know that in terms of safety in the country, they're doing much better.
And people in the country feel much safer, and they are getting a lot of investment from outside the the country.
[00:53:20] Kinshan:
So I just hope they can say no if they have that choice to say no to or are they being forced to get that loan
[00:53:29] McIntosh:
and I yes. I'd so we only know part of it. Yeah. I'm a little surprised that some Bitcoiner, which they work with some major Bitcoiners, hasn't kinda worked out some kind of plan plan to to help them out, but, man, that's what they've done. Alright. We do we're we're actually we're at an hour, so we need to kinda think about our time. I do wanna cover this Russian news piece, so let's let me do this real quick. We'll talk about any others that you want to. Otherwise, we need to move on. I'm gonna test out my Russian here. Anton I don't know how he says his last name.
T k a c h e v. Something Chev. I don't know. I'm sorry. It's Katchev. I do not speak Russian. Of the New People Party, which was formed in 2020 and has 16 out of the 450 seats in the state Duma, has asked the Russian finance minister to assess the feasibility of creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. I will we can make another bet, not that we've made any, but we could make a bet if the US creates a Bitcoin reserve. I guarantee you within a year, Russia will have done the same publicly. It's just the way that this stuff works. We will see. But they're already getting ahead of this, and it would be very interesting if they actually had one before we did.
That would definitely kick off some FOMO here in the United
[00:55:10] Kinshan:
States. So I I was about to say, if we're making bets, I could bet that Russia does it first. Just It is a possibility.
[00:55:19] McIntosh:
Being an autocratic country does have its benefits when it comes to moving forward with things. If Putin says we're having a national a national reserve, there'll be 1 in 30 days, or you might end up in the gulag. Sorry. I didn't actually say that. I'm being American at this point. Sorry. I'll move on. What else do we wanna talk about? You wanna talk about the Bitmain stuff, or do you wanna kick that to next week? We'll take it next week. Okay. I think that's a good idea. I do wanna talk about that, but I wanna give it the attention it probably deserves. Okay?
[00:56:03] Kinshan:
No. And the last one.
[00:56:05] McIntosh:
Okay.
[00:56:06] Kinshan:
Some good news from Coinbase. Last time, we had bad news about Coinbase, blocking users that were using VPNs and unlock blockers. But this time, they they released some, redacted FDIC letters that were sent to the banks back in 2022 Right. To urge the banks to to cut business with crypto
[00:56:32] McIntosh:
firms. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, Kinshan, what's gonna happen. Alright? So after Trump comes in office, there's gonna be a big flurry of legal activity of Department of Justice, of all this kind of stuff investigating this. And everyone's going to scream on let me back that up. A lot of people on the left are going to scream that this is him trying to get back, And it may be viewed as that. Get back at Biden. Get back at Harris at whoever. But the reality is this was an issue. It did happen. It's not, quote, American, and it should not have been allowed to happen.
So whatever you may think about Trump, if he does this, and I'm a 100% certain he will, he's going to pursue whoever it was that set all this mess up. It's gonna go to the FDIC. It's probably gonna go other places as this spreads. Multiple banks were shut down. So many people were debanked because they were tied up with crypto. It's unbelievable. Just because somebody didn't like crypto. I mean, it's it's nuts. This is not the way we do business in America. At least, it's not how we should be doing business business in America. So I'm glad to see this. I'm not a big Coinbase fan, but, you know, being Coinbase, of course, they would have their they would be involved in this. So I'm glad to see this stuff coming to light.
[00:58:07] Kinshan:
Yeah. They'll try to get ahead of it, I guess. Because, yeah, they were involved a lot.
[00:58:13] McIntosh:
Alright. Let's talk about some software. Few things this week. You've got some stuff there, and I think I have a couple more.
[00:58:23] Kinshan:
Right. I know about the Zeus wallets. Okay. There is an update, where they have improved, especially the lightning channels, UI. So now it's easier to see, which channels are open, which are closed, which are pending. You can see the the channel reserves. Mhmm. So it's a bit technical stuff for lightning, but for people who use Zeus, and and it's a great choice for people who want to use Lightning. Those are very good for advanced users especially.
[00:59:04] McIntosh:
Okay. Let me talk for just a second about BTC pay server. They did have a minor release come out, version 2.04. Nothing major, but if you're running it, you should probably go ahead and get updated to that. Alright. And then Olas is our friend, the, that's like the clone what is it called? Instagram. Right? On Nostra. So if you're involved in Nostra and you like taking pretty pictures, you might wanna take a look at this. And this one, a swipe to zap was kind of the big thing on it. So you it's just a simple motion to zap somebody, which means send them some sats, making it super simple, which is a great update. It'll help the content creators on that platform.
I actually got I've gotten a few zaps over over the time, but I've gotten better at posting on Nostr, and I've actually, like, twice in the last couple weeks gotten zapped on there just for posting some random comment not comment or, you know, news or whatever. It doesn't even matter what it was. Just people just boosting me back essentially just for doing that. Kinda cool.
[01:00:21] Kinshan:
Yeah. It's great. Okay. I used to to participate in those Zapathons or Zapathons. They really look forward to Zap each other. Crazy.
[01:00:31] McIntosh:
I don't know if you got your Simplex updated, but they do have a new version out, 6.2. I did update mine already. We use Simplex to talk back and forth. If you're looking for a messaging app, it's a great app, for that. It's probably the best tool for that for encrypted communications right now. I'm not gonna say it's gonna be that way forever, but it certainly, does a good job. And I think I wanna say there was one more. Well, there's the BitKit right there, but I think there's one more. BitKit 1.07, which is a self custodial Bitcoin and lightning wallet for both Android and iOS. Oh, and, yeah, the reason why I kinda added this in, it's got this quick pay, and so it simplifies the lightning process, which if you've used lightning, it's reasonably simple to do, but you typically have a few steps.
This one kind of simplifies things, make it makes it a little quicker, easier to use. Might be something you wanna look at. I don't know a whole lot about this, but with any lightning wallet, I would always encourage you kinda think of it like a regular wallet. You don't wanna stick a whole bunch of money in there. Let's be honest. You don't wanna carry around $10,000 of Bitcoin in your lightning wallet. That's just dumb.
[01:01:57] Kinshan:
So
[01:01:58] McIntosh:
So that's for spending money. That's for spending money. You should not be spending $10,000. If you're spending $10,000, you probably need to buy some more Bitcoin. The African Bitcoin conference has been going on this week. I did wanna mention this, the, content. The videos are online. I actually watched the last couple of days this morning while I was kinda working my way through my my coding stuff I was doing. Some really good content. I got to see Eric Hersman's presentation there, which I have pinned on not pinned, but I have posted on my Twitter feed. What he had posted about that.
They are doing great things there at gridless. Really glad to see that. I would hope I hope to get him back on the show at some point. He's a really busy man, but, a great guy. Alright. And that might be it. Let's go with that's it. There's a couple other things I could talk about. There was a bricks item, but we we really don't have time. Iran is supposedly embracing Bitcoin and creating regulatory clarity or whatever. It is Iran. I'm just gonna say that. I don't you know, as I told somebody on Twitter, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. I don't care what they say. I would wanna keep my stuff safe.
Alright. You wanna do the wrap up?
[01:03:30] Kinshan:
Yep. As we said earlier, we have the question of the day. So boost us on, fountain, and let us know what you think if Microsoft made the mistake not to buy Bitcoin. We suggest, if you want to to boost us and leave comments to use Fountain, there are a few other apps. There is Podcast Guru. There is Podverse, and there are other apps, on the podcast. What is the website again? It's the podcast apps.com. Yeah. It's the website to find all these, podcasting 2.0 apps. Right. But the fountain is the the easiest, I would say, and it has an integrated lightning wallet. So you just go and make an account, with an email, and you just automatically get a lightning wallet. You can load it up.
Yes. So if you manage to make a fountain account, feel free to to send us a comment. Mhmm. Tell us your thoughts about the podcast or about the question of the day. We would love to hear it. You can also post on Nostr, and, you can also be part of the community there and get some lightning,
[01:04:54] McIntosh:
action there as well as we said. I think for a goal, I I love I'm a big believer in goals. Okay? Mhmm. And one of my goals, I think, for 2025 is going to be to use Nostra a lot more. I'm not convinced it's going to become what we want or need, but I am gonna give it a much more solid effort. I've already started that, but it's I I'm going to be very conscious about it next year.
[01:05:23] Kinshan:
Yeah. And the applications are many and various types of applications that also for the same protocol. So you don't have to just install one app, like, let's say, Instagram, and that's it. You can install an app that looks like Instagram, and you can use your the same profile and the same Mhmm. Notes
[01:05:43] McIntosh:
and comments. So I'm willing to give it a chance, and I'm gonna lean into it in 2025. So I I will post on it at least as much as I post on Twitter. And that will probably be difficult, but I think it will be worth it.
[01:05:58] Kinshan:
Yep. So, where can they find you? Macintosh.
[01:06:03] McIntosh:
Well, I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm just kidding. Well, I am. But, you can reach me by email at Macintosh at satoshisdashplebs.com as well as there on Twitter. I am on Nostr. Actually, my pub key for Nostr is pinned to my Twitter account up at the top, and it's really long, so there's no point in
[01:06:30] Kinshan:
Yeah. That's exactly the same for me. So I'm at at Kenshin_ninja
[01:06:36] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And the first pin post has my nostril key. I I have a question I'd like you to answer, if you don't mind, for our listeners. Where what's the ninja thing? Did we talk about this? I think we did. No? I'm not sure we did on air though. No. What's up with the ninja?
[01:06:55] Kinshan:
I don't know. It's like a Bitcoin ninja. It's it sounded cool. And I found the domain. Ninja, aren't you?
[01:07:02] McIntosh:
Yeah. You say you're from Greece, but you're actually from Japan and you're
[01:07:08] Kinshan:
I I admire the ninjas. Yes. Actually. Okay. And the domain, it was a nice domain that I And the domain name was available. So Yes. Tool fit.
[01:07:20] McIntosh:
Yep. If it's Very cool. Alright. Is there anything else or is that it?
[01:07:24] Kinshan:
That's it. Have a nice week.
[01:07:27] McIntosh:
Alright. You have a nice week as well. Looking forward to talking to you next week, and we'll see you all
[01:07:40] Kinshan:
soon.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is December 13th, and this is episode 188 of satoshis plebs. I'm McIntosh. And I am Kinshan. And today's episode is the Crackle in the Wire. Alright. Yeah. I don't know if that's gonna bring in people or not, Kenshin, but it's what I got. So Sounds good enough. I wanna go ahead and apologize upfront for last week's episode because there was a crackle in my recording. I could hear it when I was editing it, but unfortunately, at that point, it's basically too late and or I'm not a good enough audio engineer to get rid of it. I actually tried to make some changes, but I just I did make it better, but I could not solve the problem in total. Now we did just figure out what it was.
We've been using a tool called Jitsi and, for video, and then I record on Clean Feed because Clean Feed, is set up for audio engineering. It's set up for, like, TV station recording and this kind of thing. That's all it does. And it provides really clean audio. But unfortunately, these two things apparently seem to be fighting each other. So we had to turn off our video. So I will say good afternoon to you, sir, over the audio and no video. How are you today?
[00:01:55] Kinshan:
Fine. I'm very good. Thank you. Good afternoon over the Atlantic.
[00:01:59] McIntosh:
Yeah. It is afternoon here as we start recording. We record on Wednesday afternoons. It's kind of it's become our regular time. It gives us a little bit of time to get this put together and then out the door on Fridays, for distribution. But, yeah. Alright. Well, let's jump right on into it. Kenshin, do you wanna go ahead and do the price?
[00:02:23] Kinshan:
Yeah. I see the price right now. We're over a 100,000 USD, almost a 101,000 USD and €96,000.
[00:02:33] McIntosh:
So we were almost a 100 a 101 when I wrote that down just a couple of minutes ago. We're now at a 101 and 423. I'm not gonna update that price, but, yeah, it is still pressing forward. We were talking prior to hitting record. Our all time high, is like a 103 and some change. I think we're gonna have another go at, trying to get up there. This pump, if you wanna call it that, started pretty early this morning, US time. I actually, kinda had an odd schedule today. I fell asleep pretty early last night, and then I woke up about 3:15, 3:30 in the morning and laid there for a while, then I just got up and started doing my stuff because I have stuff to do.
And there was no sense in wasting my day. So I've actually been going now for almost 12 hours. Goodness. I've gotten a lot of work done, But I've watched the price go up all day long, so we will see where it goes. 4 more hours until the UTC, end of day. I'm going to guess, To be honest, it's gonna try and pump right into that 103. I may be wrong. It may not make it today. But I could see it doing that, and then we'll find out what happens from there. Does it get rejected, or does it, you know, break on through, and then we see what happens? I don't know.
What's our European price? What's our what euro? I love saying that. Euro. What's our euro price? 96
[00:04:14] Kinshan:
600 right now Okay. From an all time high of 98800. So we're 2,000 below all time high in euros.
[00:04:23] McIntosh:
So I'm looking forward to reach a €100,000. Yes. I I wish y'all would hurry up and get to a 100,000. I mean, really, slackers. What are y'all doing over there? Block height as we record, 874292. We did, we are looking at a difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days. It'll be before our next recording on December 16th, and we're looking at about 3.27% up. What that means is that we're looking at block times that are not 10 minutes. It's less than that. So your transactions are flying, and your transactions are flying because there's too many of us miners out there mining the Bitcoin.
We did get a previous update, 1.59% on the last, which would have been like, what, just a bit over a week ago?
[00:05:17] Kinshan:
Yes.
[00:05:18] McIntosh:
And, so I I don't know. We'll see. It feels like at least to me, and maybe it's just because it's luck, but ocean the last few days has been pumping out, blocks. I think we've had 4 now in just, like, the last 4 days. One day. Oh, 4 in 2 days. 1, 2, 3, 4. Oh, 5. Yeah. And yeah. Exactly. And 4 of them in 2 days. So, no more hash rate, to be honest, than normal right around 4, which is their normal or at least their new normal. I I don't know why that would be and the but it is what it is. I look. You take blocks when you can get them when you're in the mining business. I'll tell you that. Because we've been going through a little bit of a drought. Those are we've only had 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 in December so far. So here we are on December 11th as we record not even one block a day.
So alright. And then what what about our fees there, sir? I need to send you some money. How much is it gonna cost me?
[00:06:29] Kinshan:
Right now, it's 999. So all priorities are 9¢ per fee byte. Okay.
[00:06:37] McIntosh:
Which makes it around a dollar and 20 something. Well, I'm sorry. It's We're trying to wait. We got got sats are precious, man. You can get rid of those. Yeah. Yeah. And what's our unprocessed transactions?
[00:06:53] Kinshan:
273,000 transactions right now.
[00:06:57] McIntosh:
Alright. And what is new with you, sir?
[00:07:02] Kinshan:
Well, it's cold. It's cold. Yes.
[00:07:05] McIntosh:
When we had Jitsi up earlier now you gotta picture this. Right? So he's sitting at at his microphone. And I said, Kenshin, it must be cold there because he had a blanket. I guess it's a blanket. Right? You It wrapped around your your your neck. Yeah. Like, how much snow do you have outside?
[00:07:26] Kinshan:
Very little. Maybe that's why.
[00:07:29] McIntosh:
More snow to insulate. More snow to insulate. And then you were saying you were having some problems, I think you said, with your neck. Right?
[00:07:37] Kinshan:
Right. Yeah. I had a very stiff neck. I could barely stand up or move millimeters, my neck, over the weekend. Now it's getting better, but I tried to protect what that means.
[00:07:51] McIntosh:
I got bad news for you. It means you're getting old.
[00:07:55] Kinshan:
Oh, yeah. Might be. It's the first time it works so bad. That later, but,
[00:08:01] McIntosh:
yeah, I'm already to the point where, I wake up with random inks and paints, and then it's like, this is not fun.
[00:08:11] Kinshan:
Right. Oh, man. Alright. How was your week?
[00:08:17] McIntosh:
I don't know how much detail I wanna go into this because for one thing y'all probably don't even really wanna hear, but I, kinda got some stuff dropped on me this week at work. A big project. Kind of the way the place that I work at, to be honest, we tend to operate in these, cycles of panic and fear. Like, we have to get this done. So I'm taking off the week between Christmas and New Year's because I like to take that time off. It's time to spend with my family, and it's also happens to be one of the slowest well, the probably slowest time of the year at my job. And that's coming up. I mean, we're really only, like, 2 weeks off of that. Right? Well, guess what Macintosh found out this week? In 3 weeks, I have to have this entire major project done that I literally just got started on, and I depend on other people to do other things to do my work as part of that.
So it's shaping up to be a spectacular end of the year festival.
[00:09:25] Kinshan:
Right. What about Chat gpt? Can they help a bit? Well,
[00:09:30] McIntosh:
I I don't know that I've ever talked about that on here. So I do use ChatGPT. I actually purchase it, because I find it very useful. I do a lot of programming in Python. I am not a software engineer. It is not in my title. I think I've told y'all before. My official title is I'm I'm a data reliability engineer. So but what I've started telling people is I'm a software engineer because what I do is write a bunch of code that automates the build of servers. So we spin up new environments, and we've gotta manage those database servers. That's where the data part of it comes in. I have a background as a DBA. But, you know, I basically sit and write code all day. And especially with Python, which we use for a lot of our scripting and whatever, I've found chat gbt to be very useful. I know enough to know, like, when it's wrong, and sometimes it is. Although it has gotten better, I've been using it for, I don't know, probably at least a year at this point, as a almost daily part of my work.
I'm not a expert Python programmer by any means, but I know enough to know when it's telling me something wrong. But it does do a lot of things very well. I wrote something just in the last 24, 48 hours that if I would've not been using chat GPT, to be honest, it probably it would've taken me days of work, like a week maybe. It's very good at kinda prototyping stuff out and, you know, filling in little details. And, like, you can give it code and say, how would you improve this? And it'll it'll tell you. And a lot of times, it's they're very good ideas and things like that. So, it's gotten pretty integrated. I don't feel like it's ever going to replace somebody like me. I I hope not just frankly for my own self interest, but I I feel like it's, it is an enabler.
And what that may mean in the long run is that companies don't hire as many people to, you know, to do support or whatever because tools like chat gpt can make them 5 times more effective. Right? So if I'm 5 times more effective, well, then in theory, at least, I can replace 5 of me. Right? So I I do see that as being problematic. You know, we were told all through my childhood, all through my young adulthood, you know, get your computer degree. Go get you a job in the computer field. And there's a lot of people who are doing that. And if we trim off, I don't know, even half the people that are there, that's a lot of people with a lot of high paying jobs who are now out there competing for other jobs with other people, You know? Now will this type thing bring new innovation? Yeah. Will it replace what's there? I I don't know. I can't answer that question.
Anyways, enough philosophy. I'm not very good at that. Go listen to the mere mortals podcast. They talk about philosophical stuff all all the time. Alright.
[00:12:57] Kinshan:
Right. So what are we talking about today? Well,
[00:13:01] McIntosh:
we're gonna start that's a good question.
[00:13:07] Kinshan:
First of all, let me ask you. Mhmm. What did you think of, Microsoft
[00:13:11] McIntosh:
ignoring Yeah. Bitcoin this week? We we gotta talk about that. So in case you missed it, Microsoft, the board meeting or shareholders meeting, whatever it was, was Tuesday, yesterday, as we record just a couple of days ago as this will be released. And, apparently, they voted to not invest in Bitcoin in any capacity. I looked it up. They sit on somewhere between, like, $70,000,000,000 in cash. It's a large amount of cash. Now they're a very large company, but this cash just sits there. If they're not investing it in something, which they're not going to invest all of that money in, say, new AI infrastructure or something like that, it's just sitting there depreciating. It's losing losing value. And you can look at the official government statistics or you can kind of estimate more what you really think that it is.
But even in the best case scenario, it's above 3% a year right now that it's losing value. So that adds up very, very quickly in terms of its purchasing power. I think that this is a huge mistake. I mean, I was very much on the fence about whether they would do it or not. Not. I thought they might do a small allocation, which I get the corporate conservatism, but there's they're not the first company to do this. It's not like others haven't already gone down this path. So to me, it would make a lot of sense to allocate even just a $1,000,000,000 out of that. You know? So that'd be 1 70th, say, of their cash reserves. It's not like they're gonna run out of money. Bitcoin could go down to, you know, 20,000, which it won't, but it could, and they would be okay.
They're not out there playing leveraged games with it or anything like that. It's just sitting there. But over the long term, they should see significant gains from that. And they can evaluate that for their corporate treasury and their strategies moving forward. But they have chosen at this point not to do that, and they're losing an advantage in my opinion.
[00:15:35] Kinshan:
Right. Maybe they think they don't need it. As you said, they have so much money. Their market cap is is quite high at 3,000,000,000,000. So maybe they think, oh, I need to make a risk. Wow. Yeah.
[00:15:52] McIntosh:
I predicted last week that if they don't buy Bitcoin, then this time next year, Bitcoin is gonna be worth more than Microsoft. Right. You said 1 year, and I think I said 2 years. Right? Yes. So we'll see. You may be right, actually. In fact, I I actually have a suspicion you will be right. But I was being a little more conservative. I I think you may actually turn out to be right in this case, Kenshin. And I do think We only need to go making a huge mistake.
[00:16:21] Kinshan:
Yeah. We only need to go 50% from here. Right?
[00:16:25] McIntosh:
That's You're right. I did not think that through, because, essentially so I guess that means if we hit 150 Yeah. Which I am pretty confident before the end of this bull cycle, which should be the end of next year, as far as I can tell. I'll put it that way. You know, we should be there. We'll see. I don't know. I do think they're making a mistake. And I to be honest, I stand by. I I don't know if this actually made it in the final audio. I may have cut it out, but I think they disrespected Sailor. I do. To give him 3 minutes to present to their board. Come on. If I were Michael Sailor, I just said, it's clear that Michael Sailor wants Bitcoin adoption because outside of that, I would have just told him to pound sand. I've been like, you guys, whatever.
They MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor's company just got included. And what is it called? Is it the Nasdaq 100? I think
[00:17:32] Kinshan:
I'm not sure.
[00:17:35] McIntosh:
It was yesterday or today.
[00:17:38] Kinshan:
But it's been the most growing company in the world for the past 4 years.
[00:17:44] McIntosh:
Oh, apparently, it actually hasn't happened yet, but they expect it to. I thought it had already happened. All this stuff is saying it could happen as of even a few hours ago. So, they're a company yeah. Exactly. They're doing very, very well. And, you know, we're just because we're Microsoft and we've got it made and we're a $3,000,000,000,000
[00:18:06] Kinshan:
company, we'll just ignore him. That's fine. Mhmm. That's fine. I think I think Microsoft is at the stage of they ignore you. Mhmm. I think when they see Bitcoin pass them in market cap, I think they will they will get regretful, but I think they will get a bit, how do we say? They will be a bit angry maybe, and they will want to see Bitcoin fail.
[00:18:32] McIntosh:
So they're gonna pull the Peter Schiff strategy. Oh, we didn't buy any. So
[00:18:38] Kinshan:
Yeah. It's gonna fail. So I think then they will be in the the fight you stage in a year from now, And then it will take maybe another year to join.
[00:18:48] McIntosh:
So I'm gonna disagree. I think they may have too many shareholders before then who sell their stock and make noise about it that they do it sooner, but we'll see. I just I things are changing so fast, and that's actually kind of one of the things I wanted to talk about today. I could not imagine a year ago that we would be sitting here at the end of 2020 4 talking about Microsoft getting Bitcoin as even a possibility. I could not imagine that we would have Trump being elected as president, potentially in large part, I think, because of his Bitcoin stance. I could not imagine all the things that he's promised.
We'll see what happens as part of that. I could not imagine well, Russia mining Bitcoin. I, actually, I think a year ago, I was already saying that was potentially happening. That's been going on a bit. But now they're actually kinda making it official. I think we have a news item about that. Lots of regulation and whatever. I did I was not aware of so there was a conference this week in Abu Dhabi. I hope I said that right. A Bitcoin conference there. I was not aware of any major announcements coming out of that about, I don't know, Saudi Arabia buying Bitcoin or something like that. But I do think that stuff is is going to happen. I think it's going to happen sooner than we think.
And I think 2025 may be pretty crazy, to be honest. We'll see.
[00:20:38] Kinshan:
Yeah. Every week, we talk about a new country Right. Wanting to adopt Bitcoin or change the regulations in some way, and we have another country this week to talk about. So, yeah, things are happening.
[00:20:50] McIntosh:
Very cool. I yeah. It's just things are accelerating, and I think that acceleration is going to continue to happen. Alright. So we do have a question for the audience. Yep. Is Microsoft are they making a mistake? Would love to hear from you on that. You can boost in and let us know what you think about that. I would guess that most of y'all would think that that was not a that they were, but we'll see. There are people in the Bitcoin community who feel like countries, nations, large corporations, like MicroStrategy should not be buying Bitcoin.
This is something that I'd I don't wanna spend the whole episode talking about, but I philosophically do not understand how they arrive at that position. They're like, it's for people. Well, yes. And people have the right to go out and get it, but it's for everyone. Right? And I've I've consistently made this argument for a long, long time. It's it's for Russia just as much as it is for the United States, And that ruffles a lot of people's feathers, but it's the truth. Yep. And, you know, it's it's a deeper dive to kinda go into that, but it is true. It's for the people that I wanna help the most, the unbanked. Right? The people who are out there for whatever reason, and they can't even own a bank account because Bitcoin offers them hope. Bitcoin offers them a way out of poverty potentially just as much as it is for BlackRock, and I don't like BlackRock. I I don't. I I haven't really made that clear recently, but I'm not a fan.
They make an ETF or whatever. That's fine, but I have a lot of other reasons I don't like BlackRock. But I can't keep them from buying Bitcoin on behalf of their customers. That's their business. So, anyways, I wanna get on to all that. We'll see. Boost in. Let us know.
[00:23:09] Kinshan:
Yeah. I'm happy, personally. We have a bit longer to stack some chipsets. Well, yes.
[00:23:15] McIntosh:
And and that is the benefit. You know? Yeah. We who knows? I don't know if we'll go back below a 100. Maybe we will. Maybe we won't. Right now, we're not, but that's okay. As we say here at satoshi's plebs, it's it's a real simple philosophy, just DCA. Right? Don't worry about the price because over a period of time, a 4 years, I would say minimum, you're going to see that price. It's going to be better than it is at any point when you were buying it. Does that make sense? Like, if I start buying let's say let's just say, I wait until December 15th of next year, which is probably very near the all time high, and I start buying $30 a day of Bitcoin.
I can go to strike and set up a DCA. It will happen automatically, and I just do that. Well, right after I start doing that, the price drops. And what happens? Oh, man. I can't believe I'm doing that. No. You know, but I keep buying and I keep buying, and I keep buying. And after roughly 2 years, we reach a bottom, and then we start back up. And at some point, in between that 2 years 4 years, I'm going to pass the old all time high. And at that point, everything that I bought up until that point is definitely in profit. Because, I mean, it's real straightforward.
You just had to zoom out a little bit.
[00:24:56] Kinshan:
Yeah. And there are plenty of tools that prove that in the past.
[00:25:00] McIntosh:
What was the one we were talking about last week? Does it do that directly? Kimbo. Kimbo. Yeah. We really need to set that up. But Kimbo's a lot of money. Yeah. Another project. Alright. Let's talk about our supporters. Okay? Yep. We had some nice boost come in this week, and I do wanna give credit to those people who were doing that for this actually does not have an episode. Hey, send it, Mike. I appreciate this. He sent in another, 1069. He said, catching up on episodes. I really like the new format and cohost. I I feel like we read this, but then I don't think we did.
So if we did or didn't anyways, there it is. I do appreciate sending it to Mike. I'm curious as to what he's using. I don't know that I can tell from this. Let me double check. No. I can't. I cannot tell. Interesting. I'd love to know where you're boosting from. If you don't mind, you can boost in next time and let us know. And our old friend, hypersensitive Osiris, boosted in I think this is the first time they've boosted since you've joined Kenshin. I don't know. I'm sure you probably heard of them in the past. They've been with us for a long time.
Boosted in about episode 187 last week, bricks and Bitcoin, and said still listening was without a smartphone for a month. That was probably a nice change of pace, actually. Sometimes I wished I would do that. And my life has changed majorly in the last months. Greetings from Portugal. Well, I don't know what's going on, hypersensitive, but I'm glad to hear from you. I'm glad you're doing okay. And, I appreciate that, and we appreciate the support. Alright? And then our final one, episode 187 as well. I I don't know if I said it, but hypersensitive of a sars boosted 500, so did, HBH Gardens, which I believe is a new booster.
I do not recall that handle before. And no message there, but, we do certainly appreciate that support. So that was our total let's see. I don't know. I learned to do to I can actually do this. 2069 was the total. So, I appreciate that. We do. Sorry. I have to learn how to say that. It's been a been a change. So, alright. Let's talk about the news and notes. Can I talk about Argentina? Yep. Y'all are gonna think this is my favorite subject. It's turning out to be. I've been talking about what Malay has wanted to do, what he ran on, Argentina's economy prior to him becoming president and all of this for a long time. You can look back through our episode list over at satoshisdashplebs.com/episodes.
And there are a number of episodes that I talked about Argentina. He has been he was elected back in December of last year, so it's been right at a year. I guess he did like a state of the nation thing type, what we would call state of the nation. Last night, major broadcast interrupted their news not news feed, their regular programming or whatever for for this speech. And some very interesting things came out of that. I'm going to talk about them real quick, and we'll I would preface this by saying this is coming off Twitter. I don't speak Spanish. I did not watch the newscast directly.
So but this sounds honestly right knowing Argentina's past history, first of all. So the first thing is they are no longer in a deficit spending situation. So what that means is they're no longer spending more than they make. So if they bring in, let's just say, a $100,000,000 in tax revenue, they're not spending a $110,000,000 down. The United States, I I don't know how Sweden does at this, but we're champions of overspending. So we have 36 $1,000,000,000,000 in debt at this point and still climbing. I think we're approaching now $2,000,000,000,000 a year in, deficit spending. Do you know offhand what Sweden does?
[00:29:54] Kinshan:
No. No. But I'm curious now. I I thought it's not
[00:30:00] McIntosh:
on on debt or on of course, Sweden is on debt, but they're not on in deficit. But I'm not sure. I need to check. You if at some point, I'm curious. I've never looked them up, but I'm I am curious. Look up their total debt and then if they are in a deficit spending. But, apparently, last night, he said in his speech, that for the first time in a 123 years, they are operating with a surplus, which that is a monumental achievement. Just as an example, they printed 13% of the GDP, which is your gross domestic product. Prod product? It's like your total economic output of the country last year, okay, the previous administration.
And I would point out that they still didn't get elected. That, of course, led to inflation as we would expect it. We were at over 200% year over year at one point last year when I was reporting on that. And inflation has dropped dramatically, and they will continue, I think, to see good things. I am very, very excited to see what is going to happen with Argentina over the next 10 years. I'm excited to see what happens in El Salvador. But to be honest, I mean, if I were being just completely honest, Argentina, I think I'm more excited about it because it is a larger country, in terms of land area and in terms of population.
It has a very storied history. It literally used to be called the Paris of South America. Okay? Because there was a time period before, I would say the left the leftist I know Malay would certainly would call him that. The leftist took over. Right? The is what they were called, which is the name, I can't say the person's name, but it was one of their presidential people who was in power for quite a bit of time. And, you know, I think they're on a good path, and I think they're going to do great things over the next 10, 20 years. So I am very excited about that. The second thing, and I only have a Twitter post to go off here. The other one, I think we have a little more evidence of that.
I'm quite sure he said that. He said what I'm about to tell you. I don't know if this will happen. Understand this is in a state of the union address, but here's what he's laying out for his next set of goals. He's going to reduce the amount of national taxes. So this is the country level taxes by 90%. So let's say going back to that $100,000,000 of tax, which is it's I'm sure it's significantly higher than that, but just to make this easy, they would only take in $10,000,000, and they're going to return to the provinces or their states the tax autonomy.
Excuse me. Yeah. Autonomy? Yeah. I did say that right. That that this thing says they never should've lost. I don't know if he really said that, but I know he believes that. Getting out of the CPO, I'm not exactly sure what that means. No. I don't know what you're Sorry. I do not know. I'm gonna have to skip that one because I don't understand it, but the rest of them make perfect sense. Gonna be talking about the free competition currencies. I know this is something that he's wanted to do, and they're gonna basically enable Argentines to use any currency they want. And that's going to include crypto, including Bitcoin, of course. Okay?
They can deal in dollars. They can deal in pesos. They can deal with whatever they want. Malay is very much a libertarian, and this is a very libertarian philosophy, so it makes perfect sense. Investments. They're cutting out a lot of the regulation, and they're making it easier for international trade and for investments. And because of that, they he literally said in this, they have request for approval of investments for more than basically well, almost $12,000,000,000. Okay? So they're already having outside con companies come in and say, we want to invest in Argentina. Now that's as a company, of course, they're gonna profit from that. But they're going to help build the infrastructure to do things like mine, to do things like, harvest oil and gas, for example. Things that require large investments of money. They've already got $12,000,000,000 of companies coming to them saying, we wanna invest this money in Argentina. Argentina.
And I think that will go much, much higher over the next few years. International trade, they're going to eliminate tariffs for trade and that kind of thing. They're going to be looking, he explicitly said promote free trade with the United States. We'll see how that works with Trump and our tariffs, but, maybe. More deregulation with his chainsaw. He is famous for his little chainsaw, which I just that just tickles me every time I see it.
[00:35:45] Kinshan:
Yeah. The central bank wasn't here Yeah. Cutting down.
[00:35:51] McIntosh:
This one, I I guess they're having issues with organized crime. They're going to create an anti mafia, law that's similar to our RICO law. He said, which eliminated organized crime in the United States 50 years ago. It really didn't, but it helped. So we'll go with that. I'm gonna skip over a few of these. But oh, nuclear. That was a big thing. They're planning on building a lot of nuclear power, specifically for artificial intelligence. So they're you know, whatever you think about art artificial intelligence is certainly going to be around for a while. And it consumes vast amounts of power, and it needs stable power. So it's a perfect fit for this type of thing.
Alright. So big announcements coming out of Argentina. We will see how much he gets done. He has a way to work with these other parties that it's just crazy. I've not seen it. Understand, he's gotten all this done, and his party doesn't even have control. It'd be like the Republicans here in the United States. When Trump gets elected, the Republicans were not in power, So the Democrats were or if we had multiple parties, there were other, you know, groups. And he still managed to get all the stuff that he laid out on his campaign trail done.
That's, like, unheard of. It's crazy. So he's a he is a different person. Alright. Very cool. But that's where we're at in Argentina. I'm planning on going down there next week. No. I'm just kidding. I would love to go down there. I'd love to set up mining down there, to be honest, maybe among other businesses. But, yeah. Catch me up on, something a little closer to you there, the Czech Republic.
[00:37:46] Kinshan:
Yeah. We have the Czech Republic, announcing that, they they eliminate Bitcoin capital gains tax for long long term holding. Mhmm. So if you hold Bitcoin for 3 years or more, then you don't have to pay taxes when you settle
[00:38:07] McIntosh:
with So they're really encouraging long term holding, and they're not taking into account. I mean, I guess this would be a negative. What if I wanna go spend my Bitcoin on coffee? I mean, it's like the standard use case. Right? I wanna go down to my coffee shop and use lightning to give them some some Bitcoin. And the only way I know how to handle that is to have a well, if it's spending less than $600 or some amount like that, then there's no cap gains on that.
[00:38:40] Kinshan:
Right.
[00:38:41] McIntosh:
But it's a good start, certainly. And, you know, they join a long list of other countries, which you've got a list here. I wanna go through this. This is really cool, that Yeah. That have incentives, and then we'll we'll talk about that for a minute.
[00:38:57] Kinshan:
Yeah. It took me down the rabbit hole of, how many of the European countries now offer 0%, capital gains tax. It's a few. All of them have a caveat here or there. Mhmm. So for example, as, I see it, the biggest country in Europe is Germany Mhmm. That offers 0% capital gains tax if you hold for 1 year or more. But,
[00:39:28] McIntosh:
otherwise Why do you think that they sold their Bitcoin? They needed the cash? You know what I'm talking about?
[00:39:35] Kinshan:
Yeah. The government.
[00:39:36] McIntosh:
Mhmm. I I didn't actually realize they had this incentive until you, showed me this. I guess they're semi I know that there's people in parliament who are whatever their parliament is called. I'm sorry. But, you know, they are pushing Bitcoin, but I was not even aware that they did this. So Right. They already have one law in effect. They have other people who are really pushing for Bitcoin for a national reserve and all that, but they went and sold, like, one of the largest amounts of Bitcoin I've ever heard of. And just a few months ago and have literally lost 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 and 1,000,000 of dollars by doing that.
[00:40:23] Kinshan:
Yeah. Yes. I mean, they sold, when it was around $50,000. Mhmm. So it's basically doubled now. Right. And I think, in Europe, there's a lot of pressure from the European Central Bank, and Germany is very close to that, of course. So there is one side that is very, very negative and against Bitcoin. And then they have some legislation that I don't know when it it, it passed in Germany Mhmm. To have this, capital gains for 1 year. So I think it's conflicting them as well.
[00:41:04] McIntosh:
I think there's a lot of countries that are kind of in that state. They don't know what to do, and they're gonna have to get off of that fence, as we would say, at some point.
[00:41:16] Kinshan:
Exactly. And the second country I have in my list here is Switzerland, and they have 0% for private people. Mhmm. Period. No other implications. So no period of holding. I think you can pay, as you say, with lightning or whatever. Mhmm.
[00:41:36] McIntosh:
There's no restrictions. Lugano, I think, is famous for this, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Like, a Bitcoin economy going on there.
[00:41:44] Kinshan:
Right. So it that has pushed a lot of innovation. A lot of, companies have set up, their headquarters now in in Switzerland. One of my favorite companies before exchanging euros to Bitcoin was this, BITTR, BITTR. Mhmm. Company. They were based in Netherlands, and they had to flee Netherlands and set up in Switzerland, due to legislations. So, I see that more and more that companies go to Switzerland there. They're very
[00:42:21] McIntosh:
Bitcoin friendly. That's And they have a long history of financial monetary sane policy, I guess you could say. I don't know. Right? Yeah. With the Swiss banks and all that.
[00:42:35] Kinshan:
Yeah. And the Swiss franc was always strong.
[00:42:40] McIntosh:
Because it was acting with gold.
[00:42:42] Kinshan:
But Yeah. It was it I think it was the last Mhmm. The last fiat currency to get off the gold standard. I'm almost sure that you're correct. Yes. I think it was 93 or something. But it was the last one and, of course, since then it's it it goes the direction of, all the other Fiat currencies. Right. Then we have Belarus. Belarus is, another country that is 0% for all private people. I think even companies. Mhmm. They don't have to pay, and there is no restriction again on on years. So that's also very interesting, and it's, not far from these Nordic countries where I am.
[00:43:31] McIntosh:
There's another country that I'm thinking of, which I'm not putting my finger on. Maybe Latvia. I thought it was one of these Soviet states, previous Soviet states. They were very, very friendly. No. It started with an l. I'm almost sure. Let me I wanna check on this real quick. No national framework. This must not be what I'm thinking of. Alright. Never mind. I don't wanna get off on that. Let's sorry. Let's keep going.
[00:44:06] Kinshan:
Yeah. Then, so Belarus, that was 3. Then Belgium. Mhmm. In one map, it says 0%, but when I looked deeper into Belgium, they say you need to pay taxes when you convert to Fiat. That's an interesting twist.
[00:44:23] McIntosh:
That's the only place I know of that does it like that. So if you don't convert to fiat, it's not a problem.
[00:44:30] Kinshan:
Yeah. Maybe you convert to another, a stable coin. I'm not sure. What is the loop for that? Well, why do you just pay for it in Bitcoin? Right. That too.
[00:44:42] McIntosh:
Directly. I mean, I think of the Bitcoin as as both a store of value and a currency. People can't wrap their head around that, but gold is an example. Certainly was a store of value for 1000 of years and has been a currency up until whenever it was, 1913 or I don't know exactly. Sorry. But just like you, you know, as a literal like a gold dollar, $20 gold piece. Right? That was gold, and it was certainly currency. So I don't I don't know why people struggle with that other than we just don't have that anymore. You you don't save your dollars because that's stupid because you're losing 3 plus percent every year.
Sorry. I apologize for the question. But that's an interesting twist, though, if it's when you convert to fiat. Well, that would certainly encourage you not to do that.
[00:45:44] Kinshan:
So Belgium is a good place for that. Luxembourg, you need to hold for at least 6 months, then there is no taxes. Portugal, you need to hold for a year. Then we have Slovenia, you need to hold for 2 years. Then I see Croatia, also you need to hold for 2 years. And there then interestingly, we have Malta, a very tiny island in the Mediterranean. It's 0% for private people.
[00:46:19] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:46:21] Kinshan:
Any period. So, it's also one of the most friendly places. So this and Belarus and Switzerland, I would say are the most friendly ones. Malta, Switzerland, Belarus. Yes. And now, finally, we have a Czech Republic that you need to hold for 3 years. So it's not as good as some of the other countries, but it's a good start. And, yeah. And as I was saying, Czech is the home of, brains, mindful. Mhmm. And it's also the home of treasure.
[00:46:58] McIntosh:
Yeah. I've given that they're not, until now, super Bitcoin friendly, I've never quite understood that other than that's just where they're from. But, you know, at least with brains, I know they are. I don't know about Trezor. But, I don't know. I think we're gonna So the We're gonna see the rise of these Bitcoin I don't wanna call them supernations, but, like, finance centers, maybe. Like like Hong Kong used to be. Maybe not so much anymore, but it was considered to be this big Asian finance center. Right? Singapore, very finance friendly.
I well, New York, even though it's terrible tax policies, New York City has been considered to be a center of finance. Right? I think we're gonna see these in terms of Bitcoin over the coming 20 years or so. You're gonna see countries. You're gonna see cities or city states or whatever you wanna call them that do the same thing because they are because of these Bitcoin friendly policies, they attract the top talent, the top countries. So not countries, companies. Right?
[00:48:21] Kinshan:
Mhmm.
[00:48:23] McIntosh:
So very, very interesting. And we're watching it happen in real time. I mean, we come on here every week and, you know, this country is doing this or the you know? I do I did wanna mention with number 6 with Portugal. They have walked back some of their stuff. They used to be a little more friendly. Not I think they've got some fluctuations going on over there in their politics. I'm sure they're having budget problems in this kind of thing, and I don't know. But, similar to, like, Norway where they're trying to tax what is unrealized capital gains taxes, this crazy Yeah. Policy.
Anyways, I did wanna mention that. One thing about Bitcoin, of course, it makes it very easy. Not that all of us can just up and move, but it certainly helps if you don't have to worry about your your wealth and your sovereignty. Right? Oh, I need to move to some other place because of this policy or that policy. No. It doesn't necessarily have to be anything to do with Bitcoin. It may be persecution or or whatever. The Human Rights Foundation does a great job of kind of cataloging all that and talking about it. So very good.
You wanna talk about this next piece?
[00:49:52] Kinshan:
I can connect the one other piece further down. Okay. El Salvador piece where they're Yeah. Going a little bit backwards, it feels.
[00:50:04] McIntosh:
Maybe. Unfortunately.
[00:50:05] Kinshan:
Maybe. Yeah. We'll see. Maybe,
[00:50:08] McIntosh:
Beukele is playing, like, 3 d chess or something. I don't know. Yeah. Go ahead and yeah. I'm glad you had this on here.
[00:50:16] Kinshan:
Yeah. So now it seems that they are in talks, to get a a loan from the IMF Mhmm. Again.
[00:50:24] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:50:25] Kinshan:
A 1,300,000,000 loan. And the deal is apparently that they need to drop the legal requirement for companies to accept Bitcoin. As it says it, the companies can still voluntarily accept, but it's gonna take away the legal tender requirement.
[00:50:48] McIntosh:
So it would be a step back in So this has everybody all up in arms. I think given the fact that they're so Bitcoin friendly, frankly, and that it has been in effect as legal tender for, what, 2 years? I don't really see this making that much difference, to be honest. I don't know why they feel like they need to get the loan. That's their business, and they're going to choose to do that. If I were running a country, which thankfully I am not and thankful to the citizens of that country that I am not, I would not deal with the IMF, but Bukele is a smart guy. He knows what he's doing, and I'm not gonna go over here and say that's a bad thing.
They need money for whatever reason, I believe, to build out more infrastructure or whatever, and that's how they're gonna do it. If they have a plan to pay it back, then I doubt that they have the ability to do this, but maybe they could take about a quarter of that 1,300,000,000 and invest it in Bitcoin, and then in another year pay off the loan. They usually, the IMF will write in provisions about what they have to do, and this would be a good example, forcing businesses or forcing the country to allow businesses to not use Bitcoin, essentially. Right?
That's the kind of thing that the IMF always puts into these deals, and and they're doing it for for whatever reason. When you're dealing with the IMF and with the World Bank, there's always a a great book that I recommend. It's called Hidden Repression by Alex Gladstein at the, Human Rights Foundation. It's a great book. It's not very it's not very long. It's probably less than a 100 pages. I think I read it in about a day and a half, when we were on a cruise, and I had some free time. But, it's lots of data, and it's very well written to cover all this stuff. So, potential bad news. I I don't know. We'll just have to see. I know in terms of their Bitcoin, they're doing very well. And I know people don't like to kinda get involved in this, but I know that in terms of safety in the country, they're doing much better.
And people in the country feel much safer, and they are getting a lot of investment from outside the the country.
[00:53:20] Kinshan:
So I just hope they can say no if they have that choice to say no to or are they being forced to get that loan
[00:53:29] McIntosh:
and I yes. I'd so we only know part of it. Yeah. I'm a little surprised that some Bitcoiner, which they work with some major Bitcoiners, hasn't kinda worked out some kind of plan plan to to help them out, but, man, that's what they've done. Alright. We do we're we're actually we're at an hour, so we need to kinda think about our time. I do wanna cover this Russian news piece, so let's let me do this real quick. We'll talk about any others that you want to. Otherwise, we need to move on. I'm gonna test out my Russian here. Anton I don't know how he says his last name.
T k a c h e v. Something Chev. I don't know. I'm sorry. It's Katchev. I do not speak Russian. Of the New People Party, which was formed in 2020 and has 16 out of the 450 seats in the state Duma, has asked the Russian finance minister to assess the feasibility of creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. I will we can make another bet, not that we've made any, but we could make a bet if the US creates a Bitcoin reserve. I guarantee you within a year, Russia will have done the same publicly. It's just the way that this stuff works. We will see. But they're already getting ahead of this, and it would be very interesting if they actually had one before we did.
That would definitely kick off some FOMO here in the United
[00:55:10] Kinshan:
States. So I I was about to say, if we're making bets, I could bet that Russia does it first. Just It is a possibility.
[00:55:19] McIntosh:
Being an autocratic country does have its benefits when it comes to moving forward with things. If Putin says we're having a national a national reserve, there'll be 1 in 30 days, or you might end up in the gulag. Sorry. I didn't actually say that. I'm being American at this point. Sorry. I'll move on. What else do we wanna talk about? You wanna talk about the Bitmain stuff, or do you wanna kick that to next week? We'll take it next week. Okay. I think that's a good idea. I do wanna talk about that, but I wanna give it the attention it probably deserves. Okay?
[00:56:03] Kinshan:
No. And the last one.
[00:56:05] McIntosh:
Okay.
[00:56:06] Kinshan:
Some good news from Coinbase. Last time, we had bad news about Coinbase, blocking users that were using VPNs and unlock blockers. But this time, they they released some, redacted FDIC letters that were sent to the banks back in 2022 Right. To urge the banks to to cut business with crypto
[00:56:32] McIntosh:
firms. I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, Kinshan, what's gonna happen. Alright? So after Trump comes in office, there's gonna be a big flurry of legal activity of Department of Justice, of all this kind of stuff investigating this. And everyone's going to scream on let me back that up. A lot of people on the left are going to scream that this is him trying to get back, And it may be viewed as that. Get back at Biden. Get back at Harris at whoever. But the reality is this was an issue. It did happen. It's not, quote, American, and it should not have been allowed to happen.
So whatever you may think about Trump, if he does this, and I'm a 100% certain he will, he's going to pursue whoever it was that set all this mess up. It's gonna go to the FDIC. It's probably gonna go other places as this spreads. Multiple banks were shut down. So many people were debanked because they were tied up with crypto. It's unbelievable. Just because somebody didn't like crypto. I mean, it's it's nuts. This is not the way we do business in America. At least, it's not how we should be doing business business in America. So I'm glad to see this. I'm not a big Coinbase fan, but, you know, being Coinbase, of course, they would have their they would be involved in this. So I'm glad to see this stuff coming to light.
[00:58:07] Kinshan:
Yeah. They'll try to get ahead of it, I guess. Because, yeah, they were involved a lot.
[00:58:13] McIntosh:
Alright. Let's talk about some software. Few things this week. You've got some stuff there, and I think I have a couple more.
[00:58:23] Kinshan:
Right. I know about the Zeus wallets. Okay. There is an update, where they have improved, especially the lightning channels, UI. So now it's easier to see, which channels are open, which are closed, which are pending. You can see the the channel reserves. Mhmm. So it's a bit technical stuff for lightning, but for people who use Zeus, and and it's a great choice for people who want to use Lightning. Those are very good for advanced users especially.
[00:59:04] McIntosh:
Okay. Let me talk for just a second about BTC pay server. They did have a minor release come out, version 2.04. Nothing major, but if you're running it, you should probably go ahead and get updated to that. Alright. And then Olas is our friend, the, that's like the clone what is it called? Instagram. Right? On Nostra. So if you're involved in Nostra and you like taking pretty pictures, you might wanna take a look at this. And this one, a swipe to zap was kind of the big thing on it. So you it's just a simple motion to zap somebody, which means send them some sats, making it super simple, which is a great update. It'll help the content creators on that platform.
I actually got I've gotten a few zaps over over the time, but I've gotten better at posting on Nostr, and I've actually, like, twice in the last couple weeks gotten zapped on there just for posting some random comment not comment or, you know, news or whatever. It doesn't even matter what it was. Just people just boosting me back essentially just for doing that. Kinda cool.
[01:00:21] Kinshan:
Yeah. It's great. Okay. I used to to participate in those Zapathons or Zapathons. They really look forward to Zap each other. Crazy.
[01:00:31] McIntosh:
I don't know if you got your Simplex updated, but they do have a new version out, 6.2. I did update mine already. We use Simplex to talk back and forth. If you're looking for a messaging app, it's a great app, for that. It's probably the best tool for that for encrypted communications right now. I'm not gonna say it's gonna be that way forever, but it certainly, does a good job. And I think I wanna say there was one more. Well, there's the BitKit right there, but I think there's one more. BitKit 1.07, which is a self custodial Bitcoin and lightning wallet for both Android and iOS. Oh, and, yeah, the reason why I kinda added this in, it's got this quick pay, and so it simplifies the lightning process, which if you've used lightning, it's reasonably simple to do, but you typically have a few steps.
This one kind of simplifies things, make it makes it a little quicker, easier to use. Might be something you wanna look at. I don't know a whole lot about this, but with any lightning wallet, I would always encourage you kinda think of it like a regular wallet. You don't wanna stick a whole bunch of money in there. Let's be honest. You don't wanna carry around $10,000 of Bitcoin in your lightning wallet. That's just dumb.
[01:01:57] Kinshan:
So
[01:01:58] McIntosh:
So that's for spending money. That's for spending money. You should not be spending $10,000. If you're spending $10,000, you probably need to buy some more Bitcoin. The African Bitcoin conference has been going on this week. I did wanna mention this, the, content. The videos are online. I actually watched the last couple of days this morning while I was kinda working my way through my my coding stuff I was doing. Some really good content. I got to see Eric Hersman's presentation there, which I have pinned on not pinned, but I have posted on my Twitter feed. What he had posted about that.
They are doing great things there at gridless. Really glad to see that. I would hope I hope to get him back on the show at some point. He's a really busy man, but, a great guy. Alright. And that might be it. Let's go with that's it. There's a couple other things I could talk about. There was a bricks item, but we we really don't have time. Iran is supposedly embracing Bitcoin and creating regulatory clarity or whatever. It is Iran. I'm just gonna say that. I don't you know, as I told somebody on Twitter, not your keys, not your Bitcoin. I don't care what they say. I would wanna keep my stuff safe.
Alright. You wanna do the wrap up?
[01:03:30] Kinshan:
Yep. As we said earlier, we have the question of the day. So boost us on, fountain, and let us know what you think if Microsoft made the mistake not to buy Bitcoin. We suggest, if you want to to boost us and leave comments to use Fountain, there are a few other apps. There is Podcast Guru. There is Podverse, and there are other apps, on the podcast. What is the website again? It's the podcast apps.com. Yeah. It's the website to find all these, podcasting 2.0 apps. Right. But the fountain is the the easiest, I would say, and it has an integrated lightning wallet. So you just go and make an account, with an email, and you just automatically get a lightning wallet. You can load it up.
Yes. So if you manage to make a fountain account, feel free to to send us a comment. Mhmm. Tell us your thoughts about the podcast or about the question of the day. We would love to hear it. You can also post on Nostr, and, you can also be part of the community there and get some lightning,
[01:04:54] McIntosh:
action there as well as we said. I think for a goal, I I love I'm a big believer in goals. Okay? Mhmm. And one of my goals, I think, for 2025 is going to be to use Nostra a lot more. I'm not convinced it's going to become what we want or need, but I am gonna give it a much more solid effort. I've already started that, but it's I I'm going to be very conscious about it next year.
[01:05:23] Kinshan:
Yeah. And the applications are many and various types of applications that also for the same protocol. So you don't have to just install one app, like, let's say, Instagram, and that's it. You can install an app that looks like Instagram, and you can use your the same profile and the same Mhmm. Notes
[01:05:43] McIntosh:
and comments. So I'm willing to give it a chance, and I'm gonna lean into it in 2025. So I I will post on it at least as much as I post on Twitter. And that will probably be difficult, but I think it will be worth it.
[01:05:58] Kinshan:
Yep. So, where can they find you? Macintosh.
[01:06:03] McIntosh:
Well, I'm on Twitter at Macintosh Fintech. I'm just kidding. Well, I am. But, you can reach me by email at Macintosh at satoshisdashplebs.com as well as there on Twitter. I am on Nostr. Actually, my pub key for Nostr is pinned to my Twitter account up at the top, and it's really long, so there's no point in
[01:06:30] Kinshan:
Yeah. That's exactly the same for me. So I'm at at Kenshin_ninja
[01:06:36] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And the first pin post has my nostril key. I I have a question I'd like you to answer, if you don't mind, for our listeners. Where what's the ninja thing? Did we talk about this? I think we did. No? I'm not sure we did on air though. No. What's up with the ninja?
[01:06:55] Kinshan:
I don't know. It's like a Bitcoin ninja. It's it sounded cool. And I found the domain. Ninja, aren't you?
[01:07:02] McIntosh:
Yeah. You say you're from Greece, but you're actually from Japan and you're
[01:07:08] Kinshan:
I I admire the ninjas. Yes. Actually. Okay. And the domain, it was a nice domain that I And the domain name was available. So Yes. Tool fit.
[01:07:20] McIntosh:
Yep. If it's Very cool. Alright. Is there anything else or is that it?
[01:07:24] Kinshan:
That's it. Have a nice week.
[01:07:27] McIntosh:
Alright. You have a nice week as well. Looking forward to talking to you next week, and we'll see you all
[01:07:40] Kinshan:
soon.
Introduction
Market Analysis
What is Going on With Kenshin and McIntosh
Microsoft's Decision on Bitcoin Investment
Argentina's Economic Reforms
Czech Republic and European Bitcoin Tax Policies
El Salvador's IMF Loan and Bitcoin Policy
Russia's Bitcoin Reserve
Software Updates
