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 has hit 100k. Multiple times. Where do we go from here? And is it "too late" to be investing in Bitcoin??? I'm sure you have heard the arguments. What is the truth? Let's discuss.
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
December 25th, 2024: 98,792 USD | 94,860 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
876,370
News and notes
Argentina Seeking Free Trade Agreement with United States
Russia Using Bitcoin in Foreign Trade
Russia Enacting Mining Ban in 10 Regions
Software Updates
Keycast
BTCPay Server v2.0.5
NARR
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 27th, and this is episode 1 90 of satoshis plebs. I'm McIntosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And today's episode is, am I too late?
[00:00:43] McIntosh:
Alright. Merry Christmas, Kenshin.
[00:00:47] Kenshin:
Merry Christmas, Macintosh.
[00:00:49] McIntosh:
We are recording this on December 25th in the afternoon. I know y'all partied like rock stars over there in Sweden yesterday, watching Donald Duck of all people. I did look that up. That is crazy. Yeah. Traditions are funny. I mean, seriously, like, you can look this up. It it happens in Sweden. It is a national thing. I didn't disbelieve you, but I had to I had to verify.
[00:01:20] Kenshin:
Don't trust. Verify.
[00:01:22] McIntosh:
That's just that's just wow. That's that's something. So and we've we've had a great Christmas here. We went to a service last night. The kids actually slept in, believe it or not. Mom and dad got up earlier than the kids, so we were up about 7 and got started getting ready for dinner, and, and the kids woke up. And, of course, we did all that kind of stuff. And then, just a few minutes ago, 2 o'clock, about an hour and 15 minutes ago, we sat down with, our family and a number of friends and, and had dinner. So they're still in there. They're actually playing some games and things, and I, we're gonna record, and then I wanna go back and join them.
Alright. So so how was your Christmas?
[00:02:11] Kenshin:
Nice. Yeah. It was as expected, 3 PM yesterday. Sat in front of the TV, together with the rest of Sweden to watch Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the rest of them. Oh my goodness. It lasted longer than I remembered, actually. It's a full hour.
[00:02:27] McIntosh:
Right. Right. And it's the same thing. Old movie. I it's like from the 19 fifties or something. Yeah. I mean, there has to be a story about why that started.
[00:02:38] Kenshin:
I I don't have anything else to show back then. Wanna know. What I heard yesterday is that they didn't have much to show back then in that at that time. So that was what they had available and dubbed in Swedish, so they they kept showing it. And then it became a tradition, of course. So,
[00:02:59] McIntosh:
I asked the kids as we were doing our presents this morning. I said, what was kind of the most meaningful or memorable present that you that you had. And it was kind of funny, what people remembered, you know, the different little things. And I said, when it was my turn, and I don't remember how old I was, although I was roughly probably 10 to 12 years old. I got a Terry Bradshaw Jersey. Okay. So he was the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers back in the eighties and the early eighties, I guess. And, you know, I was a big Pittsburgh Steeler fan. And 1 year, I got his jersey. They actually were playing Kansas City this Saturday, and, unfortunately, they are pretty much getting it handed to them. It's it's kind of a sad game.
But that's probably my most memorable present. But then today, I I will say this. So I've it was a book year for me, which I've I have a number of books on my list of things. I know everybody can't see this, but here's one of them. It's a book by our archenemy, Keynes, actually. The guy who created Keynesian Economics, and it's actually his famous book called The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, or as I like to call it oh, actually, the subtitle is The Economic Consequences of the Peace. I like to call this book how to ruin the world in 3 easy steps, but, okay, we'll go with your title. I think there's like some saying, who is the guy? Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese general about knowing your enemy or something? And I feel like I need to do that. So I'm going to read this book. I'm sure it's not gonna be very pleasant.
And it's not a light book. It's how many pages? Good gracious. It's a lot. 530 odd pages. So I will plug through that at some point in the next few months. And that's not why it's such a memorable year. I just happen to have it right here. As I've mentioned from time to time, I am a Tolkien fanatic. I love JR Tolkien. I think he's hands down the best fantasy Arthur, in the world. And, I've read a lot of his material. I got so they back in the eighties, his son, Christopher Tolkien put together a series of books called the history of middle earth, which essentially were just notes and things about, as token was writing all these stories, he would write all these little side things, write notes about that that would flesh out his world.
Things like literally like a dictionary of elven, the elven language that he used as an example. I mean, just all of this stuff. Well, I got the first six volumes for Christmas, as a, as a present. 2 different presents. And, so I'm halfway there. I got got 12. I had 6 more to go. And then my brother-in-law actually gave me a copy of the down I think it's called The Downfall of Numenor. It's a fairly recent book, which again was basically put together as notes from from some of his stuff. But Numenor was Tolkien's version of Atlantis essentially. So it sank beneath the ocean because the Numenoreans were, because they they they were doing evil things in a nutshell.
And, anyways, most people would find this stuff extremely boring, including probably y'all listening right now. But these are great books, and I've been looking forward to them for a long time. And I have a feeling these are nice hardcover editions, and I think they're gonna they're gonna be with me for a long time. So sorry. That was kinda long, but, it was a good Christmas. All of my family was here. I have children now who are no longer at home. And, so one of them just walked in the door, actually. And, you know, it's good to have have everybody together.
[00:07:36] Kenshin:
So Nice. That sounds very nice. It was too long. It's always nice with family and Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. And for us, it was very similar. We were the whole family or at least the family that we are here in Sweden. Right. Altogether gathered and, it was mostly centered around my son because he was the youngest. The only, non adult, let's say, in the room. So he got all the attention and the presence. Right.
[00:08:05] McIntosh:
And now he'll need therapy, but it's okay. That's awesome. That's 10 years time. Right. But wait, people just don't bring me presents all the time? I don't understand. Alright. Awesome. Alright. So before we get into today's topic, which I actually think is a very important one, we do need to cover our normal kind of time stamp stuff. So we'll start off with our block height, which is 876370. Oh, we got really close. You must have updated it. Yeah. And our price is I've got 98,792 as we record.
[00:08:50] Kenshin:
And I What's our euro? 94,860.
[00:08:56] McIntosh:
Okay. So we're pretty close to what we were at, I think last week when we recorded, but, we did go down. We've pulled back up. We've had a little Santa rally, as we tend to do every year. I don't know why that is, but but it was a bad week in the stock market. It was just kind of a bad week in general. And, you know, things took a tumble, but they've picked back up. So it does not seem to wanna go down and stay down. It twice, I think now it's been down to 90,000 or at least near it Since we've hit a 100,000, in both times, it's come right back up. So I don't really know what that means. I'm not gonna speculate.
We've been up above a 100. We've been above a 100 a good bit. I don't really feel like there's a kind of a a level there, a blockage there, but we'll see.
[00:09:54] Kenshin:
No. It feels like, around the end of the year, it it has a lot to do with the taxes also. That's true. Yep. Manage their taxes. So it feels like January 1st, then everybody starts spending again the usual amount. So let's see. It filled that last few years, a similar thing happened. Very
[00:10:15] McIntosh:
true. So next week, we're gonna kinda be doing our year end review, and we'll cover kind of the price, but I'll just give you a little sneak peek. We have doubled the price in the last year, so that's good. You know, we started the year basically, like, the lower forties. I think I have a number written down, but, somewhere around there. And, of course, now we've, obviously, we've hit over a 100,000. We'll see where we're at next week as we close out the year. Let's go through the our difficulty adjustment, which actually looks pretty even.
[00:10:53] Kenshin:
It's an increase compared to last week. Last week, we were predicting a decrease in difficulty. Now we're up to 0.84% in 4 days approximately. Yeah. It jumped again no. It jumped again from December 29th to December 30th. So that's, like, the cusp of midnight there. Yeah. So it could not make up its mind.
[00:11:18] McIntosh:
Our transaction pool, we're looking at about 548, 46 actually megabytes of unprocessed transactions, and there's about 224,000 of them. So and and our fees, we'll throw that in as well to round things out is, 4, 4, and 5 for low, medium, and high priority for your satoshis. So what that means is to send a average transaction, it's gonna cost you about 55¢ to roughly 70¢. So things are kind of chugging along. We do not seem to be getting back down to those kinda one satoshi, per vbite, fees. If we hit twos, it's very, very seldom and doesn't stay down there long. I you know, long term, we certainly expect that. Twos, earlier today. Yeah. They come and go, not but I don't know if we chartered it out that the one Satoshis have been around really at least most of the year.
So I actually, maybe I should look that up because I'd be curious. You know, a year ago, you could you could send out one's Toshi's left and right, and it was, you know, it was dirt cheap. Not so much anymore. And, of course, the mempool hasn't cleared in a long time as well. So alright.
[00:12:52] Kenshin:
Right. So, what's the topic of the day, Macintosh?
[00:12:57] McIntosh:
What is the topic? Wait. It was your topic. Oh, you you didn't prepare for it? No. I'm just kidding. So I jotted this down. I've learned that if I don't write things down, I I don't remember them. So I actually sent, Kenshin a message saying topic idea, am I too late? And, so that's what we're gonna talk about today. And I think it's very timely. I think it's very relevant as we are at the levels that we're at. Right? So we've we're at a 100. We've been to a 108. I think close to a 110 even very briefly. A lot of times, I think people are looking at that and going, well well, man, it's gone from 0 to a 110,000 dollars. Surely, this is too late.
I don't want to invest in something that's kind of left me behind. So I wanted to take a few minutes, and I do wanna keep this to a few minutes and discuss that. So let me just throw that out there, Kenshin, and and you can talk about that, and then we'll we'll go from there.
[00:14:06] Kenshin:
Yep.
[00:14:10] McIntosh:
When when we are saying this, am I too late? I mean, that's kind of the viewpoint I think that I'll especially people who are not involved. Right? They've never bought Bitcoin. They don't really know a whole lot other about it other than they keep seeing it on the news. Bitcoin hit 40,050, 60, 70, 80, 90, and now a 100 plus $1,000. And they're like, well, what's going on here? Clearly, this is something important. Trump's talking about it. You know, they probably even heard it from that angle. But they're thinking there's 21,000,000 Bitcoin. Maybe they've even heard that.
And there are a $100,000 Why would I be looking to invest in that? I can't afford a $100,000 Right? And, surely, it's not going to continue to go up like it has over the last 15 years if they even know how long it's been 15, 16 years depending on how you kinda figure it. Right? And I would argue that that's not true. Right? I would argue that there's a couple of things going on here. First of all, as we've said a number of times, a Bitcoin is highly divisible. Right? Each Bitcoin consists, of a 100,000,000 satoshis. So until we get to a $100,000,000 per Bitcoin, a satoshi is going to be worth less than a dollar. In fact, certainly right now and anytime into the near future, they're gonna be worth less than 1¢.
You laugh at me, Kenshin. I know you do, but I can never remember how many sats it is to a dollar. Do you know what it is? A 100,000 is it's a is it a 1,000? Yeah. Okay. I always wanna say a 100. I don't know why. Not yet. I need to put it, like, on my monitor. That's in the in the 1,000,000 price point. Anyways, can't teach an old dog new tricks. Right now it's roughly a 1,000 sats per dollar. Right? So you could literally just spend a few cents and get some satoshis. I mean, I would suggest that you actually save more than that, but you could theoretically.
Right? So as the price of Bitcoin continues to appreciate as it continues to go higher, those satoshis will become more valuable. There will be fewer of them per dollar. However, we got a long way to go until they're even close to a cent parity. I think that's a $1,000,000 Bitcoin. Yeah. It'd be a $1,000,000. Right? Yes. So when Bitcoin reaches a $1,000,000, a Satoshi would be equal to 1¢. Right? So our American, smallest unit of currency. So that's one part of this. So what are some other reasons why they may not be, willing to do this?
[00:17:11] Kenshin:
Right. Well, Bitcoin has gone from $1 to $10. Right? Okay. And then it went from $10 to $100. Mhmm. Then it went from a 100 to a 1000, from a1000 to 10000, from 10,000 to a 100,000.
[00:17:28] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:17:29] Kenshin:
At each of those big emotional, psychological price points Right. Everybody thought they were too late. Right. Bitcoin existed before that point. Mhmm. Let's say one step back down. And they always think, oh, it's too late. It's a $1,000. It it was a $100 a few months ago. It's too late. Oh, now it's $10,000. It was a $1,000 a few months ago. So this keeps happening. But as long as the fiat system keeps devaluing our currencies, Bitcoin is gonna appreciate in price.
[00:18:04] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:18:05] Kenshin:
And as well as and that's with inflation. And even if we think without inflation, still Bitcoin is gonna appreciate due to the fact that it's the limited supply, more people are coming on board. Now we have the ETFs. The Wall Street is advising everybody to invest a certain percentage in Bitcoin. We have companies putting Bitcoin in their balance sheet. We have countries talking about national reserves. Right. So all of this is adding up to to pressure in the limited supply of Bitcoin and, and the mainstream media and the mainstream people, they they haven't seemed to to get on board yet with Bitcoin. So it's still very, very early in that sense. Yeah.
[00:18:52] McIntosh:
So I like to view Bitcoin through a mathematical lens. It's, it's programmed. It has rules that it follows based on that programming, the 21,000,000 cap essentially being one of those. And because of that kind of lens that I look at it at, I love to do these extrapolations. Right? So Bitcoin has a market cap right now of basically $2,000,000,000,000. Alright? And we've mentioned this before that ranks it. It's above silver now, if I'm remembering correctly. Behind gold, gold is 18,000,000,000,000. There's a few things in between. But, in terms of assets, it's it's actually quite high on the chart.
But we can do this. We can also look at this in a in a a slightly different way. If Bitcoin becomes a global, form of currency, if it becomes essentially the global reserve currency replacing the US dollar, one fun thing to do, at least in my opinion, is to kind of view this from that lens. Right now, the figures are basically, if you kind of rolled up all the financial things that go on in the world, the number that a lot of people agree on is roughly $900,000,000,000,000 which is a tremendous amount of money. And Bitcoin cannot handle all of these things. Okay? It cannot. It will not replace them.
But this doesn't even account for things that Bitcoin will allow. I will give you an example. One that I just thought of offhand. So please if well, I just thought of this offhand. So let's see where this goes. One thing that's not in that $900,000,000,000,000 figure because people cannot do it simply is somebody in well, let me put it this way. The billions of people in the world, and I say billions with a b, not millions, who are unbanked, who cannot, for whatever reason, get to a bank. And yet I know right now in the world, most of those people who are unbanked have the ability to have some form of Internet access.
Those people, if they understood what was going on, they could save in Bitcoin. They could bank for themselves wherever they are. Does that make sense, Kenshin? Let me make sure. Absolutely. Okay. So that is effectively a new mechanism, a new input to that figure, that $900,000,000,000,000 figure. And I'm not an economist, and I'm not going to speculate how big that number would be. I'm just saying that that is one example of additional input to that $900,000,000,000,000 figure that Bitcoin enables. There will be other things. There will I'll just throw this out here as well. I'm I'm gonna stop thinking after this to keep this a shorter show. Okay? I promise.
But AI is all the rage these days. Right? One of the things that AI will allow in the long run is for programs to basically interact with each other. And one thing that they will in in a much more complex and rich manner, I should say, than they do currently. And one of the levers that will make that even more, useful is the ability to pass around small amounts of money. Oh, program a over here. I want you to do something for me and return some results. Oh, well, I need some money to do that because that requires computational resources. Well, how can we do that?
You wanna guess Kenshin?
[00:22:56] Kenshin:
Is it bitcoin?
[00:22:57] McIntosh:
It is a bit it is bitcoin. Specifically, probably through lightning or maybe e cash some mechanism like that. Right? So now I can send sub set amounts from 1 computer to another. All programmed. None of that, for example, is included in that $900,000,000,000,000 figure because it's not there. What if that turns out to be a 10,000,000, or excuse excuse me, $10,000,000,000,000 market? That just raised that up by $10,000,000,000,000. Do you see what I'm saying? So my point is, even going with just the $900,000,000,000,000, let's look at that. Let's just assume that Bitcoin let's get crazy. We never talk like this here, Kenshin. I'm very careful not to. What if Bitcoin hit $10,000,000?
Okay. 21,000,000 coin, $10,000,000. Do you know how many trillions that is? Do you remember? We calculated this. It's 210. Yeah. Exactly. 210,000,000,000,000 US dollars. I'm going to be US centric here. I'm sorry. Okay. That is less than 1 fourth of that $900,000,000,000,000 total, which doesn't even account for all the new stuff. Now, are we going to be at $10,000,000,000,000 next week, next month, next year, probably even the next decade? No. But my point is we can grow into that. Okay? So when you look at me and say, well, a $100,000 Bitcoin is just too expensive for me. I'm going to look at you and say, but you can buy $5 of it first of all.
And the market cap is 1,000,000,000,000 and look, if we're at 2,000,000,000,000, that is literally 1,100,000,000,000,000. So that means from here, we could 100 x and still only be a quarter of the overall global market. I don't think that's hype. It's hype when I say that and then say we're gonna be there next year or by 2030. I don't know when that's going to happen. I'm not even sure that it will happen because Bitcoin will have to continue to, to be a thing. But I believe that that's what's going to happen. I see no evidence otherwise. So therefore, I am operating under that assumption. Does that make sense? Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:25:35] Kenshin:
And I have two points. First of all, on on this last one, we we have all the mainstream media and the central banks tried to fight it for the last few years. A lot of fraud spreading around. Right? And it's the same things going on, and we don't have to go through them today. But, Bitcoin keeps proving them wrong. Yeah. It reached levels that they never expected, and they kept telling everybody it will never reach 10,000. It will never reach a 100,000. It is going to 0. So that's one thing. So we we have, as you said, no reason to believe otherwise. And then the other point is that what let's see what was what happened, I'm sorry, with Internet. Right?
Mhmm. Internet exploded in just a few years. Of course, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin will do the same, but it feels, as you said before, that we are in that pre Internet explosion phase. We're in the early nineties still in that sense. Right. So there are so many, use cases for Bitcoin that we don't even know. And you mentioned a few of them that could be, and they are possible right now. But there are a few that we don't even know, and they
[00:26:49] McIntosh:
could come up, in the next few years. Right. And open up those doors even So let me point this out about the Internet. A lot of people don't understand this. So the Internet, there's this meme going around that, you know, bit Bitcoin is kind of it where the Internet was in 1994, which is basically the era when commercialized Internet took off. Most people don't realize that the Internet actually goes back to the seventies. That's when essentially DARPA, the defense research, whatever it means, invented it. Invented TCPIP specifically and started kind of the path of the internet.
So, basically, for 25 years, the Internet was, not commercially viable. And then you had things like Netscape was created right by, I wanna say Mark Andres. I hope I got that right. So a web browser, which was a look. I remember before there were web browsers. I mean, I do. I was on the Internet prior to that. In the mid nineties, I started a dial up Internet provider in the area that I live in. And, so I was involved in that commercialization. Unfortunately, I did not, you know, bring home great riches from that, but I was involved in the commercialization of the Internet.
So I actually did see that kind of firsthand. But the Internet has a long history. We don't know how long Bitcoin is going to take to kind of reach that point, but it certainly seems to be getting there much faster. But we are already 15 years into it. So let's say it took us 25 years to get to that inflection point, so to speak. What does that mean? That means you got 10 years to stack before we even get there. Right? So I wouldn't, you know, put any, I wouldn't use that for a timeline, but just throwing that out there. Right?
[00:28:54] Kenshin:
The the best way to to cap this office, what did, was it Satoshi or who said it? It's it's good to get some just in case it catches on. Yeah. Who did say that? I think it was Satoshi or, was it Harl Finney maybe?
[00:29:15] McIntosh:
Oh, I'm on the list. One of those 2. Because I I have definitely heard that. I don't know. I do see different. Alright. We're we're not we're not gonna, yeah, get bogged. Yeah. But it's true. I mean, you don't know where it's gonna go, but I do know where Fiat's going. And this is something maybe we need to examine in more detail. But as I've mentioned here, Fiat is down not just against Bitcoin in terms of its own value for the over a 100 years now significantly. And there's no signs of that slowing up. And by the way, most of that is because of this man. And this is one of the reasons why I I don't wanna say I hate people, but I have such an intense dislike for this person.
Right? Because I feel like he's single handedly. It's a canes. JD canes or j j m, John Maynard canes. Anyways, I really feel like his ideas and his theories have have wrought the fiat destruction that we've seen, not just in the United States, but literally around the world. I don't know where we would be if we had stayed on sound money, but I know it would not be where we're at. It would be in a lot better place anyways. Okay. We we need to move on or this is gonna turn into a regular full length show, Kinkinshan.
[00:30:52] Kenshin:
But we can ask maybe the audience a question. Mhmm. Have you heard that expression in real life? Because I have Yeah. From from relatives. Oh, it's too late now. It's too late to Right. To find what you're saying about Bitcoin, but it's too late now. And what do you say about that? Are you saying something different? Are you not saying anything? No. Me personally, the points that we discussed. But, yes, the audience would be nice to to hear if they hear the same things and what they reply.
[00:31:21] McIntosh:
Right. Alright. Very good. Alright. Okay. We're gonna go ahead and move on. I got a couple of little notes about the supporters. We had a total of a 190 sats this week of support. Support. So I'm going to drag out the sad puppy. I'm sorry. I appreciate the support that we got. There were no boosts this week, so there's no messages to read. I did wanna mention Send It Mike who's been boosting a fair amount, and I really appreciate that Send It Mike. Last week, sent in a boost, with a link to, like, tiny URL link to, basically, a nostril page.
And I swear, I last week, I brought this page up, and we said we were gonna talk about it this week, which we were. I cannot get that page to come up, and I I've actually gone to your page on nostril. I follow you in case you didn't know. Send it Mike. But I something's wrong. I don't know. I'm sorry. I tried the same. I I see I had the same experience. I saw the page just last week,
[00:32:29] Kenshin:
and I saw it in one really in one Nostra really. I saw his
[00:32:34] McIntosh:
note, but not in the main primal in the rest. I I think that might be what had happened. It it probably was a relay issue, but if you can get that to us, I sure would not mind revisiting that. Absolutely.
[00:32:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. I would like to talk about it too. It was something to do with the US. With Russia with the strategic Bitcoin reserves. Yeah. With America. Yeah. Exactly. And then
[00:32:58] McIntosh:
yeah. Okay. So, this week was a fairly light week in terms of news. It usually is, and I this time of year. I'm sure next week will be the same, but, y'all are gonna you you must think I'd like, I'm on Javier Malay's payroll. I'm really not. There were a couple of Argentina things, and I'm gonna go ahead and mention them. I promise I won't spend a whole lot of time on them, but there were 2 things. First of all, apparently, I know Javier, went to, I think, Mar whatever Trump's place is in Florida, Mar Largo, whatever.
I think I just butchered that, but whatever. And, you know, they talked, but he said this week, Malay did during an interview that he was going to make a free trade proposal with Trump and the United States. So what he's looking to do is essentially make a a free trade deal so there's no tariffs between the United States and Argentina. Now that may make a lot of people upset. Why them and, you know, we're gonna have tariffs on Mexico or Canada or whatever. I'm just gonna say this about that. I think it basically is I don't know how to say this without ruffling people's feathers, but it's it's it's tit for tat would be one way of putting it. It's just look.
China does things, for example, that are harmful to the United States. I'll pick on China because nobody will defend China. How about that? Right? And if we put tariffs on them, then we're essentially trying to balance that out. Now you can argue that that's not the right thing to do or whatever. But that's the tool that's either going to be used or used as a negotiating tactic. And I think, Trump frankly does that a lot as well. He will say he's going to do something in order to bring somebody to the bargaining table. You can agree or disagree with that as well, but I think that is kind of the one of the things that he does. So keep that in mind as well. We may end up making some agreement with Canada, for example. I mean, Canada right now is in a tizzy over, the proposed tariffs, because and to be honest, in this case directly, because they are not controlling their border into the United States and they're just allowing anybody to come through. And that's not okay with us. At least it's not okay with Trump. I'll put it that way. Alright. The second thing that Argentina I probably got too political there. So send your boost. Just make them big fat donations, please. Thanks.
Appreciate that. The second thing is, it has to be at least a 1000 sets to be, argumentative. No. I'm just kidding. They did announce now this was interesting because, I watched the announcement of this, and it was in Spanish. But somebody had run it through AI and, had it translate, like, in the video to English. So it was Spanish speakers, but they were speaking English. And this is some of the stuff that I find fascinating. Assuming that this was correct and from the other items that I've seen around this, I see no reason that it's not correct or, you know, it may not have been a perfect translation, but it certainly wasn't malicious. They have announced a a nuclear plan for Argentina. They are going to be building nuclear power. Apparently, according to the video, they already have 3.
I did not realize they've had nuclear power for so long since 19 seventies. They've done a lot of research and whatever, and they feel like that nuclear power is the way to move forward in terms of clean energy, which I happen to agree with. I think that nuclear power provides a great base load for an economy to build on. But they're looking at building small modular, reactors, that they will have all around the country and that will provide them with nuclear power so that they can do things specifically. They talked about this like AI, which of course requires large amounts of power.
[00:37:17] Kenshin:
Did did they announce how much,
[00:37:20] McIntosh:
nuclear power they would Not that I saw. Just basically this aggressive plan to build these power, plants. So I'm sure that they're going to have to look at the regulation side of things. I don't know what their regulations look like, but they were working with the International Atomic Energy Committee or whatever. So they're not just going off and doing this on their own. Okay? Right.
[00:37:46] Kenshin:
It sounds like Argentina might be the right place to be in a couple of years or 10 years time.
[00:37:52] McIntosh:
You mean like I keep saying? Yep. Sounds right. Maybe one day I'll just never mind. I'm not gonna say that. Next thing.
[00:38:02] Kenshin:
Right. I just have a I just have a light hearted news item, if you want. You know Craig Wright? Yes. Have you heard of him? Yes. No. So I'm just gonna mention Satoshi. Mhmm. Yeah. He's, the one keeps screaming that he's Satoshi and keeps suing, programmers Right. Developers of the Bitcoin core, projects. So he is proven. He's the only person on earth that is proven that he's not Satoshi. 100%.
[00:38:33] McIntosh:
Yes. Certain he is not Satoshi. Anyone else could be Satoshi. Yes. That is fine. Now he was he ended up in court again and lost again. And I don't even bother covering him anymore because he's he's it's such a clown show. Yeah. But, yeah.
[00:38:50] Kenshin:
But this time, he got a suspended suspended sentence. So I I thought that was, like, enough is enough by everybody.
[00:38:59] McIntosh:
Yeah. So this time, if she's interested to see what he does going from here. Honestly, with his ego, I bet he continues to try. And I I think he will eventually end up actually in jail. I mean, honestly, that's just speculating. But if he heard this, he'd probably be like, I'm gonna sue you because you said that. Whatever. We call that free speech, Bubba. Come on over here, and I'll talk to you about it.
[00:39:24] Kenshin:
But if he bothers another developer, it sounds like, in the next 2 years, then he he goes in prison for a year. Right. Right. And I I wouldn't be shocked if he did, though. I mean, he thinks he's
[00:39:35] McIntosh:
I don't know. He's a classic narcissist, but yeah. Alright. We do have a couple of items of Russia news. I'm gonna do the first one because I kinda wanna give a warning about this. This is Twitter news. I think this is accurate, but I'm going to caveat this by saying that it's Twitter news. I don't know of another source. But apparently, very recently, the Russian finance minister said, quote, and of course, this is in English, not Russian. But as part of the experimental regime, it is possible to use Bitcoins, which we had mined here in Russia.
Okay. So they were talking about trading cross border, you know, paying for goods and services with bitcoin. And he dropped this little bomb in here saying we've mined it here in Russia. And I've been telling y'all for months that I thought Russia was already mining Bitcoin. This seems to prove that. Now we will see.
[00:40:37] Kenshin:
Slip of the tongue or
[00:40:40] McIntosh:
well, it was bound to come out and maybe it's a way to poke at the United States, but this wouldn't surprise me and say, hey, we're already doing this. Right? And who knows how much they've stored away? Time will tell. We will eventually, the world will eventually figure it out. This is not a US Russia thing. This is just what it is.
[00:41:01] Kenshin:
Alright. Why don't you go ahead and do that next one? Yeah. The next one is that Russia enacts a 6 year blanket ban on Bitcoin mining in 10 Russian regions.
[00:41:12] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:41:13] Kenshin:
So there's I will not try to mention those regions. I cannot pronounce it, but it's 10 regions that Russia completely bans them from mining for six years, from January 1, 2025. So now in in 1 week until, yeah, to the year 2031.
[00:41:34] McIntosh:
Right. Which to me is very weird. I don't understand this. This almost seems like the China mining ban. That wasn't a ban that Lord knows what's going on. In a communist country, I have a little bit of experience with this, so I'm just gonna say this. If you know the right people, you can do whatever you want. Okay. Will there be mining in Russia inside those regions? Probably, especially if you have those connections. But in general, it looks like for now, for whatever reason, and Kenshin and I were kinda speculating prior to this broadcast what those reasons might be. But regardless, at least for now, they've kind of shut down mining, which that causes all kinds of issues. Right?
But we'll see how long this lasts. I I would say it's not gonna last for 6 years or however what is that? 5 years, 6 years? But, who knows? Who knows? It may not last 6 months, to be honest, if things really kick off here in January as we're gonna be talking about next week. Yep. But we'll see.
[00:42:52] Kenshin:
But it has already affected a big mining pool in Russia that shut down 10 days ago And they said, to be a legitimate mining pool in and that's, quote, to be a legitimate mining pool in Russia, you must register yourself in a special government list of mining operators. Also, you must send all data about your clients to the tax office.
[00:43:11] McIntosh:
That's worse than what we do here in the states. Wow.
[00:43:15] Kenshin:
Our cypherpunk views can match all these, they said. So Yeah. So they shall We'll see. I mean,
[00:43:23] McIntosh:
I don't know anybody directly who mines in Russia or used to, but there certainly were a lot of miners who were mining in Russia because it was possible to get, like, super cheap power, like, 2, 2 and a half cent power, which makes a huge difference in your profitability. But there's a huge amount of risk that goes along with that. And, so, I don't know. We'll see. If they actually do this and it's like legitimate and lasts for 6 years, this is going to set them behind greatly in terms of, overall, you know, Bitcoin adoption for them as as this nation state adoption is taking place.
So not good timing. And then go ahead and do this Bank of Italy. Well, you may not know a whole lot about this. There's very little about this. So let me just mention this. I do wanna talk about Kanga. That's on there for a reason. The Bank of Italy has now labeled Bitcoin, PDP services like HODL HODL or something like that as quote, crime as a service in its latest report. Italy just keeps kinda going back and forth. I don't know. Maybe their government's really divided up. I have no idea. Maybe it's just the bank people being, you know, kind of central bank people. This is a normal kind of attitude for them. Of course, Bitcoin's being used by criminals because we would never allow fiat to be used by criminals. Right?
Point to who was it? Bank of America. I don't wanna get this wrong, but one of the very large banks here in America was recently busted for money laundering, which is the main thing they always accuse Bitcoin of and got a $1,000,000,000 fine, which for them was nothing. But, you know, it was not an insignificant amount. I don't know.
[00:45:25] Kenshin:
Yeah. They they don't keep spoking up what's going on. Every week, we have a new Italian news item. And and they say about p 2p service specifically, it's it's a bit, it's a bit weird. I mean, you can
[00:45:39] McIntosh:
yeah. You can sell and exchange whatever you want with each other, but not Bitcoin, apparently, in Italy. And was it last week or the week before when I was talking about these p two p services with the regulations that's coming? I would be very concerned if I lived in the EU about how I'm managing my Bitcoin. And I Kenshin, I I would rely on you since you're right there to speak on this more, but, you know, it's not a good situation in my opinion. It's very it could change at any moment. Yeah. It does change any moment. I'm not happy with what goes on here in the United States, but I feel like the regulation in the EU is even worse, to be honest.
[00:46:22] Kenshin:
Yeah. Because we have the the European Central Bank, ECB. Mhmm. So they, they are very, very aggressive against Bitcoin. And we have the MICA now, which comes in effect in January 1st and it affects a lot of things. So, but I think the outlook is positive, honestly. If if the US as the superpower that it is, it it's
[00:46:46] McIntosh:
it's more positive to Bitcoin than Europe who follow a year later. So That's pretty typical. For a year, I think. And then One more year, guys. One more year. But I I would just encourage you to be careful Yeah. Especially about KYC ing your stuff, you know, because you just you don't know where that's gonna end up. I do wanna wrap up the news real quick, and this is kind of a news ish. There's certainly no definite source. This is actually something I would really like to look into. But what I'm starting to understand about this Cango deal is Bitmain, the company that builds all the ASICs, is actually if they've not bought Kango, they've certainly invested like they're one of the major investors, and I'm trying to figure that out.
But to me, it seems like they're setting up because apparently, Kango really isn't that big. And they're setting them up to essentially turn them into a way that Bitmain can mine through Kango. And, you know, I don't know, kind of front run the rest of us miners. And if that's the case, like I said, I Bitmain's done a lot of shady stuff over the years. This to me would be the last straw. Their miners I mean, if you go and compare prices, their miners are invariably cheaper per terahash essentially. And it stinks because it would directly cut into my profitability, but I will not. There's there's lines that I just you can't you just can't let them do that.
And the only way that I can do anything about it is to stop buying Bitmain miners and buy Whatsminer or one of the newer companies like that. Right? And fork out more per terahash for my miners. But at least I know that these companies are not actively working against me as a miner. So I do intend to do some more on that. And if I can come up with more information, I'll probably be talking about it on here. But, it looks like there's actually more to that story than what we even reported last week. Alright. Let's skip through these software updates real quick. There was only a few. They were all well, the Bitcoin pay server update was relatively minor. It's basically a 2.05, so it's a update on their new 2.0 version.
And it other than bug fixes, it was essentially a solid way for people to upgrade from Bitcoin server 1 point whatever to 2 point o. So if you happen to be involved in that, it's something you should pay attention to. Okay? And then I wanna look at these other 2 in a little more detail.
[00:49:34] Kenshin:
Right. There are 2 nostril software updates.
[00:49:38] McIntosh:
There are 2 nostril programs. They're both brand new apparently. I'm gonna talk about KeeCash. If you've got time, I don't know if you've looked up that other one. I can talk about both of them. But this key cast in particular, is a team signing platform. So one of the issues that we've got with Noster is you have to manage your keys. It's kinda like Bitcoin in that respect. You have your private key. You have your pub key. And actually, one of the things that I recently did was set up an extension for my web browser so that, like, with CoreCall, I didn't have to, put my private keys into CoreCall. Essentially, this extension acts as a, intermediary.
Okay? This is the same kind of idea, but it's expanded for teams, so that you can have multiple members and all this kind of stuff. I'm sure it's not just a web browser extension. It's probably a lot more significant than that. But this is the first edition of that. These are the kind of things in order to make Nostra a first class player that will be needed. So it's good to see this. So we'll follow this evolution, and see what they go. This isn't really something that, you know, Kenshin or I would would be using, but maybe if we were working on a team that was developing some Noster product or whatever, this would be something that we would use for that. Mhmm.
[00:51:05] Kenshin:
Okay. And the next one is, NARR, n a r r. It's a lightweight RSS and Nostra, content reader. Mhmm. And that's, a new a new app that was just released a few days ago.
[00:51:21] McIntosh:
By Fiat Jaff, by the way. So he's like the original Noster guy. Maybe he wasn't the original, but he's one of the very early guy. Yes. He's Domus. Uh-huh. He's got all kinds of he just like it's like he wakes up and just, oh, I'm gonna write a new app. Just Yes.
[00:51:39] Kenshin:
Yeah. He's very involved. And, that's another course of use. RSS reader, which I find fascinating
[00:51:45] McIntosh:
because one of the things that I used to do 20 years ago was I had all my RSS feeds back when blogs were a big deal. Right? Your kids are like, what's a blog? Well, we used to actually write stuff on the Internet, and, you would use an RSS reader to, to read those if to aggregate them so you didn't have to go to the individual websites. And this is the same idea.
[00:52:08] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I really miss the Google Reader, actually, because you could save your settings and your list and then load them up on the computer and on the phone. So now this is actually a good replacement. You can load up RSS, websites, for example, and other RSS feeds. And you can even load up Not sure. Long form.
[00:52:29] McIntosh:
Yeah. Which is different than just the regular little notes. Right? So long form is a lot more like blogs, and that's one differentiation I wanted to make. Yeah. And you can load normal profiles as well as I see here. So
[00:52:43] Kenshin:
if you have a favorite list of of some people that you know, you will get some good information like Lee Knowlton or someone else in Right. In Oser.
[00:52:52] McIntosh:
It's a really good place to So he announced this on December 21st. So buddy, Fiat, Jeff, I don't know you, but really take some time off. It's Christmas, man.
[00:53:05] Kenshin:
His deadline was before Christmas, so he he achieved that part.
[00:53:09] McIntosh:
Alright. Alright. Well, we're gonna wrap this up. I'm sure it's already been probably longer than I really want because I have to edit this and get this out before oh, gosh. It's been almost an hour. Kenshin, we talk too much. I will be out of town next week. I will get back in time to record before our next release date, but just barely. So Kenshin and I want to figure out how we're gonna do that. It may be more of a live kind of on the fly recording next week, but I do want to, I think next week's gonna be very important. We're gonna kinda cover where we think things are going, certainly where they've been for the last year, see where we're at, and see what you should do.
So, let's roll through things here. Of course, we're a podcasting 2.0 podcast. What that means is that what we love to see our listeners do is use podcasting 2.0 apps, which are available at podcastapps.com. There's a whole list of them, but it enables things like transcripts, for example. So maybe English isn't your first language and you can read along with the show, or maybe you don't speak southern like Macintosh does, and you have trouble understanding me, and I understand that. But, you know, it's right there. We've got chapters. We've got, well, boost and streaming certainly as ways of supporting the show. So those are only a few of the many, many things that that are available with podcasting 2.0 as the people over in that arena are just working furiously to kinda move things forward in terms of podcasting. So in terms of actually supporting this show, there's a couple of ways you can do it. The best way, frankly, is to turn around to somebody after you listen to this podcast and say, hey.
This is a great podcast. You should listen to it. We are trying to grow our user base, our listener base, I should say. And it's something frankly that we struggle with. I don't know if maybe we're just not good sales business people or whatever. I don't know. But I do know that if you like this show, you can tell 5 people and get some of them involved, and it will make a huge difference to us. Because we're not out here, you know, trying to shill some product or whatever to support our podcast. Because for me personally, and I don't wanna speak for Kenshin, but for a lot of the products that are available out there in the Bitcoin ecosphere, if I were to promote them, it would compromise kind of my journalistic mission.
Just as a real simple case, Swan Bitcoin has been in the news a lot lately. They're one of the big podcast promoters. And if they were paying us, do you think I'd ever talk about Swan Bitcoin in any kind of bad light? Absolutely not. But you know what? I'll tell you right now. Don't put your money on Swan Bitcoin, because I don't understand what's going on over there, and it does not look good. And I would be very careful about interacting with them. So that's kind of the way I look at it, but we do depend on our supporters, our listeners to support this show. People like Send It Mike that we talked about earlier. Right?
Like the people who streamed earlier this week. I appreciate that again. So you can always boost us. You can always stream sats our way, and it's always always appreciated. Okay?
[00:56:48] Kenshin:
And we know it's busy times, during the whole decision to listen. But if you do listen, leave us a comment. It would be good to know who listens and what you think about the topic we discuss.
[00:57:00] McIntosh:
Yep. We love to hear from us from from the listeners.
[00:57:04] Kenshin:
Yeah. And if you talk to family or friends and you hear the same thing as we do, that, oh, it's too late now. Bitcoin is too high now. Then you can give them a podcast, and we have a few reasons why it's too late. At a $100,
[00:57:17] McIntosh:
people were saying the same thing. It's too late.
[00:57:21] Kenshin:
Absolutely.
[00:57:23] McIntosh:
Don't don't don't live that regret because you'll be here and Bitcoin's gonna be at 200,000, 300,000, whatever it gets to, And you're still gonna be here and you're gonna be going, well, now it's too late. But it still won't be too late. Right? It's not worth it. We're so early in this adoption. It's unbelievable. And as soon as you figure out that out and start DCA ing, the better off you will be. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. We would love to hear from you. We have all kinds of ways to reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshisdashplebs.com/episodes.
There's a whole list of all the episodes. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon.
[00:58:11] Kenshin:
Keep stuckin'. Bye bye.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is December 27th, and this is episode 1 90 of satoshis plebs. I'm McIntosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And today's episode is, am I too late?
[00:00:43] McIntosh:
Alright. Merry Christmas, Kenshin.
[00:00:47] Kenshin:
Merry Christmas, Macintosh.
[00:00:49] McIntosh:
We are recording this on December 25th in the afternoon. I know y'all partied like rock stars over there in Sweden yesterday, watching Donald Duck of all people. I did look that up. That is crazy. Yeah. Traditions are funny. I mean, seriously, like, you can look this up. It it happens in Sweden. It is a national thing. I didn't disbelieve you, but I had to I had to verify.
[00:01:20] Kenshin:
Don't trust. Verify.
[00:01:22] McIntosh:
That's just that's just wow. That's that's something. So and we've we've had a great Christmas here. We went to a service last night. The kids actually slept in, believe it or not. Mom and dad got up earlier than the kids, so we were up about 7 and got started getting ready for dinner, and, and the kids woke up. And, of course, we did all that kind of stuff. And then, just a few minutes ago, 2 o'clock, about an hour and 15 minutes ago, we sat down with, our family and a number of friends and, and had dinner. So they're still in there. They're actually playing some games and things, and I, we're gonna record, and then I wanna go back and join them.
Alright. So so how was your Christmas?
[00:02:11] Kenshin:
Nice. Yeah. It was as expected, 3 PM yesterday. Sat in front of the TV, together with the rest of Sweden to watch Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and the rest of them. Oh my goodness. It lasted longer than I remembered, actually. It's a full hour.
[00:02:27] McIntosh:
Right. Right. And it's the same thing. Old movie. I it's like from the 19 fifties or something. Yeah. I mean, there has to be a story about why that started.
[00:02:38] Kenshin:
I I don't have anything else to show back then. Wanna know. What I heard yesterday is that they didn't have much to show back then in that at that time. So that was what they had available and dubbed in Swedish, so they they kept showing it. And then it became a tradition, of course. So,
[00:02:59] McIntosh:
I asked the kids as we were doing our presents this morning. I said, what was kind of the most meaningful or memorable present that you that you had. And it was kind of funny, what people remembered, you know, the different little things. And I said, when it was my turn, and I don't remember how old I was, although I was roughly probably 10 to 12 years old. I got a Terry Bradshaw Jersey. Okay. So he was the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers back in the eighties and the early eighties, I guess. And, you know, I was a big Pittsburgh Steeler fan. And 1 year, I got his jersey. They actually were playing Kansas City this Saturday, and, unfortunately, they are pretty much getting it handed to them. It's it's kind of a sad game.
But that's probably my most memorable present. But then today, I I will say this. So I've it was a book year for me, which I've I have a number of books on my list of things. I know everybody can't see this, but here's one of them. It's a book by our archenemy, Keynes, actually. The guy who created Keynesian Economics, and it's actually his famous book called The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, or as I like to call it oh, actually, the subtitle is The Economic Consequences of the Peace. I like to call this book how to ruin the world in 3 easy steps, but, okay, we'll go with your title. I think there's like some saying, who is the guy? Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese general about knowing your enemy or something? And I feel like I need to do that. So I'm going to read this book. I'm sure it's not gonna be very pleasant.
And it's not a light book. It's how many pages? Good gracious. It's a lot. 530 odd pages. So I will plug through that at some point in the next few months. And that's not why it's such a memorable year. I just happen to have it right here. As I've mentioned from time to time, I am a Tolkien fanatic. I love JR Tolkien. I think he's hands down the best fantasy Arthur, in the world. And, I've read a lot of his material. I got so they back in the eighties, his son, Christopher Tolkien put together a series of books called the history of middle earth, which essentially were just notes and things about, as token was writing all these stories, he would write all these little side things, write notes about that that would flesh out his world.
Things like literally like a dictionary of elven, the elven language that he used as an example. I mean, just all of this stuff. Well, I got the first six volumes for Christmas, as a, as a present. 2 different presents. And, so I'm halfway there. I got got 12. I had 6 more to go. And then my brother-in-law actually gave me a copy of the down I think it's called The Downfall of Numenor. It's a fairly recent book, which again was basically put together as notes from from some of his stuff. But Numenor was Tolkien's version of Atlantis essentially. So it sank beneath the ocean because the Numenoreans were, because they they they were doing evil things in a nutshell.
And, anyways, most people would find this stuff extremely boring, including probably y'all listening right now. But these are great books, and I've been looking forward to them for a long time. And I have a feeling these are nice hardcover editions, and I think they're gonna they're gonna be with me for a long time. So sorry. That was kinda long, but, it was a good Christmas. All of my family was here. I have children now who are no longer at home. And, so one of them just walked in the door, actually. And, you know, it's good to have have everybody together.
[00:07:36] Kenshin:
So Nice. That sounds very nice. It was too long. It's always nice with family and Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. And for us, it was very similar. We were the whole family or at least the family that we are here in Sweden. Right. Altogether gathered and, it was mostly centered around my son because he was the youngest. The only, non adult, let's say, in the room. So he got all the attention and the presence. Right.
[00:08:05] McIntosh:
And now he'll need therapy, but it's okay. That's awesome. That's 10 years time. Right. But wait, people just don't bring me presents all the time? I don't understand. Alright. Awesome. Alright. So before we get into today's topic, which I actually think is a very important one, we do need to cover our normal kind of time stamp stuff. So we'll start off with our block height, which is 876370. Oh, we got really close. You must have updated it. Yeah. And our price is I've got 98,792 as we record.
[00:08:50] Kenshin:
And I What's our euro? 94,860.
[00:08:56] McIntosh:
Okay. So we're pretty close to what we were at, I think last week when we recorded, but, we did go down. We've pulled back up. We've had a little Santa rally, as we tend to do every year. I don't know why that is, but but it was a bad week in the stock market. It was just kind of a bad week in general. And, you know, things took a tumble, but they've picked back up. So it does not seem to wanna go down and stay down. It twice, I think now it's been down to 90,000 or at least near it Since we've hit a 100,000, in both times, it's come right back up. So I don't really know what that means. I'm not gonna speculate.
We've been up above a 100. We've been above a 100 a good bit. I don't really feel like there's a kind of a a level there, a blockage there, but we'll see.
[00:09:54] Kenshin:
No. It feels like, around the end of the year, it it has a lot to do with the taxes also. That's true. Yep. Manage their taxes. So it feels like January 1st, then everybody starts spending again the usual amount. So let's see. It filled that last few years, a similar thing happened. Very
[00:10:15] McIntosh:
true. So next week, we're gonna kinda be doing our year end review, and we'll cover kind of the price, but I'll just give you a little sneak peek. We have doubled the price in the last year, so that's good. You know, we started the year basically, like, the lower forties. I think I have a number written down, but, somewhere around there. And, of course, now we've, obviously, we've hit over a 100,000. We'll see where we're at next week as we close out the year. Let's go through the our difficulty adjustment, which actually looks pretty even.
[00:10:53] Kenshin:
It's an increase compared to last week. Last week, we were predicting a decrease in difficulty. Now we're up to 0.84% in 4 days approximately. Yeah. It jumped again no. It jumped again from December 29th to December 30th. So that's, like, the cusp of midnight there. Yeah. So it could not make up its mind.
[00:11:18] McIntosh:
Our transaction pool, we're looking at about 548, 46 actually megabytes of unprocessed transactions, and there's about 224,000 of them. So and and our fees, we'll throw that in as well to round things out is, 4, 4, and 5 for low, medium, and high priority for your satoshis. So what that means is to send a average transaction, it's gonna cost you about 55¢ to roughly 70¢. So things are kind of chugging along. We do not seem to be getting back down to those kinda one satoshi, per vbite, fees. If we hit twos, it's very, very seldom and doesn't stay down there long. I you know, long term, we certainly expect that. Twos, earlier today. Yeah. They come and go, not but I don't know if we chartered it out that the one Satoshis have been around really at least most of the year.
So I actually, maybe I should look that up because I'd be curious. You know, a year ago, you could you could send out one's Toshi's left and right, and it was, you know, it was dirt cheap. Not so much anymore. And, of course, the mempool hasn't cleared in a long time as well. So alright.
[00:12:52] Kenshin:
Right. So, what's the topic of the day, Macintosh?
[00:12:57] McIntosh:
What is the topic? Wait. It was your topic. Oh, you you didn't prepare for it? No. I'm just kidding. So I jotted this down. I've learned that if I don't write things down, I I don't remember them. So I actually sent, Kenshin a message saying topic idea, am I too late? And, so that's what we're gonna talk about today. And I think it's very timely. I think it's very relevant as we are at the levels that we're at. Right? So we've we're at a 100. We've been to a 108. I think close to a 110 even very briefly. A lot of times, I think people are looking at that and going, well well, man, it's gone from 0 to a 110,000 dollars. Surely, this is too late.
I don't want to invest in something that's kind of left me behind. So I wanted to take a few minutes, and I do wanna keep this to a few minutes and discuss that. So let me just throw that out there, Kenshin, and and you can talk about that, and then we'll we'll go from there.
[00:14:06] Kenshin:
Yep.
[00:14:10] McIntosh:
When when we are saying this, am I too late? I mean, that's kind of the viewpoint I think that I'll especially people who are not involved. Right? They've never bought Bitcoin. They don't really know a whole lot other about it other than they keep seeing it on the news. Bitcoin hit 40,050, 60, 70, 80, 90, and now a 100 plus $1,000. And they're like, well, what's going on here? Clearly, this is something important. Trump's talking about it. You know, they probably even heard it from that angle. But they're thinking there's 21,000,000 Bitcoin. Maybe they've even heard that.
And there are a $100,000 Why would I be looking to invest in that? I can't afford a $100,000 Right? And, surely, it's not going to continue to go up like it has over the last 15 years if they even know how long it's been 15, 16 years depending on how you kinda figure it. Right? And I would argue that that's not true. Right? I would argue that there's a couple of things going on here. First of all, as we've said a number of times, a Bitcoin is highly divisible. Right? Each Bitcoin consists, of a 100,000,000 satoshis. So until we get to a $100,000,000 per Bitcoin, a satoshi is going to be worth less than a dollar. In fact, certainly right now and anytime into the near future, they're gonna be worth less than 1¢.
You laugh at me, Kenshin. I know you do, but I can never remember how many sats it is to a dollar. Do you know what it is? A 100,000 is it's a is it a 1,000? Yeah. Okay. I always wanna say a 100. I don't know why. Not yet. I need to put it, like, on my monitor. That's in the in the 1,000,000 price point. Anyways, can't teach an old dog new tricks. Right now it's roughly a 1,000 sats per dollar. Right? So you could literally just spend a few cents and get some satoshis. I mean, I would suggest that you actually save more than that, but you could theoretically.
Right? So as the price of Bitcoin continues to appreciate as it continues to go higher, those satoshis will become more valuable. There will be fewer of them per dollar. However, we got a long way to go until they're even close to a cent parity. I think that's a $1,000,000 Bitcoin. Yeah. It'd be a $1,000,000. Right? Yes. So when Bitcoin reaches a $1,000,000, a Satoshi would be equal to 1¢. Right? So our American, smallest unit of currency. So that's one part of this. So what are some other reasons why they may not be, willing to do this?
[00:17:11] Kenshin:
Right. Well, Bitcoin has gone from $1 to $10. Right? Okay. And then it went from $10 to $100. Mhmm. Then it went from a 100 to a 1000, from a1000 to 10000, from 10,000 to a 100,000.
[00:17:28] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:17:29] Kenshin:
At each of those big emotional, psychological price points Right. Everybody thought they were too late. Right. Bitcoin existed before that point. Mhmm. Let's say one step back down. And they always think, oh, it's too late. It's a $1,000. It it was a $100 a few months ago. It's too late. Oh, now it's $10,000. It was a $1,000 a few months ago. So this keeps happening. But as long as the fiat system keeps devaluing our currencies, Bitcoin is gonna appreciate in price.
[00:18:04] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:18:05] Kenshin:
And as well as and that's with inflation. And even if we think without inflation, still Bitcoin is gonna appreciate due to the fact that it's the limited supply, more people are coming on board. Now we have the ETFs. The Wall Street is advising everybody to invest a certain percentage in Bitcoin. We have companies putting Bitcoin in their balance sheet. We have countries talking about national reserves. Right. So all of this is adding up to to pressure in the limited supply of Bitcoin and, and the mainstream media and the mainstream people, they they haven't seemed to to get on board yet with Bitcoin. So it's still very, very early in that sense. Yeah.
[00:18:52] McIntosh:
So I like to view Bitcoin through a mathematical lens. It's, it's programmed. It has rules that it follows based on that programming, the 21,000,000 cap essentially being one of those. And because of that kind of lens that I look at it at, I love to do these extrapolations. Right? So Bitcoin has a market cap right now of basically $2,000,000,000,000. Alright? And we've mentioned this before that ranks it. It's above silver now, if I'm remembering correctly. Behind gold, gold is 18,000,000,000,000. There's a few things in between. But, in terms of assets, it's it's actually quite high on the chart.
But we can do this. We can also look at this in a in a a slightly different way. If Bitcoin becomes a global, form of currency, if it becomes essentially the global reserve currency replacing the US dollar, one fun thing to do, at least in my opinion, is to kind of view this from that lens. Right now, the figures are basically, if you kind of rolled up all the financial things that go on in the world, the number that a lot of people agree on is roughly $900,000,000,000,000 which is a tremendous amount of money. And Bitcoin cannot handle all of these things. Okay? It cannot. It will not replace them.
But this doesn't even account for things that Bitcoin will allow. I will give you an example. One that I just thought of offhand. So please if well, I just thought of this offhand. So let's see where this goes. One thing that's not in that $900,000,000,000,000 figure because people cannot do it simply is somebody in well, let me put it this way. The billions of people in the world, and I say billions with a b, not millions, who are unbanked, who cannot, for whatever reason, get to a bank. And yet I know right now in the world, most of those people who are unbanked have the ability to have some form of Internet access.
Those people, if they understood what was going on, they could save in Bitcoin. They could bank for themselves wherever they are. Does that make sense, Kenshin? Let me make sure. Absolutely. Okay. So that is effectively a new mechanism, a new input to that figure, that $900,000,000,000,000 figure. And I'm not an economist, and I'm not going to speculate how big that number would be. I'm just saying that that is one example of additional input to that $900,000,000,000,000 figure that Bitcoin enables. There will be other things. There will I'll just throw this out here as well. I'm I'm gonna stop thinking after this to keep this a shorter show. Okay? I promise.
But AI is all the rage these days. Right? One of the things that AI will allow in the long run is for programs to basically interact with each other. And one thing that they will in in a much more complex and rich manner, I should say, than they do currently. And one of the levers that will make that even more, useful is the ability to pass around small amounts of money. Oh, program a over here. I want you to do something for me and return some results. Oh, well, I need some money to do that because that requires computational resources. Well, how can we do that?
You wanna guess Kenshin?
[00:22:56] Kenshin:
Is it bitcoin?
[00:22:57] McIntosh:
It is a bit it is bitcoin. Specifically, probably through lightning or maybe e cash some mechanism like that. Right? So now I can send sub set amounts from 1 computer to another. All programmed. None of that, for example, is included in that $900,000,000,000,000 figure because it's not there. What if that turns out to be a 10,000,000, or excuse excuse me, $10,000,000,000,000 market? That just raised that up by $10,000,000,000,000. Do you see what I'm saying? So my point is, even going with just the $900,000,000,000,000, let's look at that. Let's just assume that Bitcoin let's get crazy. We never talk like this here, Kenshin. I'm very careful not to. What if Bitcoin hit $10,000,000?
Okay. 21,000,000 coin, $10,000,000. Do you know how many trillions that is? Do you remember? We calculated this. It's 210. Yeah. Exactly. 210,000,000,000,000 US dollars. I'm going to be US centric here. I'm sorry. Okay. That is less than 1 fourth of that $900,000,000,000,000 total, which doesn't even account for all the new stuff. Now, are we going to be at $10,000,000,000,000 next week, next month, next year, probably even the next decade? No. But my point is we can grow into that. Okay? So when you look at me and say, well, a $100,000 Bitcoin is just too expensive for me. I'm going to look at you and say, but you can buy $5 of it first of all.
And the market cap is 1,000,000,000,000 and look, if we're at 2,000,000,000,000, that is literally 1,100,000,000,000,000. So that means from here, we could 100 x and still only be a quarter of the overall global market. I don't think that's hype. It's hype when I say that and then say we're gonna be there next year or by 2030. I don't know when that's going to happen. I'm not even sure that it will happen because Bitcoin will have to continue to, to be a thing. But I believe that that's what's going to happen. I see no evidence otherwise. So therefore, I am operating under that assumption. Does that make sense? Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:25:35] Kenshin:
And I have two points. First of all, on on this last one, we we have all the mainstream media and the central banks tried to fight it for the last few years. A lot of fraud spreading around. Right? And it's the same things going on, and we don't have to go through them today. But, Bitcoin keeps proving them wrong. Yeah. It reached levels that they never expected, and they kept telling everybody it will never reach 10,000. It will never reach a 100,000. It is going to 0. So that's one thing. So we we have, as you said, no reason to believe otherwise. And then the other point is that what let's see what was what happened, I'm sorry, with Internet. Right?
Mhmm. Internet exploded in just a few years. Of course, that doesn't mean that Bitcoin will do the same, but it feels, as you said before, that we are in that pre Internet explosion phase. We're in the early nineties still in that sense. Right. So there are so many, use cases for Bitcoin that we don't even know. And you mentioned a few of them that could be, and they are possible right now. But there are a few that we don't even know, and they
[00:26:49] McIntosh:
could come up, in the next few years. Right. And open up those doors even So let me point this out about the Internet. A lot of people don't understand this. So the Internet, there's this meme going around that, you know, bit Bitcoin is kind of it where the Internet was in 1994, which is basically the era when commercialized Internet took off. Most people don't realize that the Internet actually goes back to the seventies. That's when essentially DARPA, the defense research, whatever it means, invented it. Invented TCPIP specifically and started kind of the path of the internet.
So, basically, for 25 years, the Internet was, not commercially viable. And then you had things like Netscape was created right by, I wanna say Mark Andres. I hope I got that right. So a web browser, which was a look. I remember before there were web browsers. I mean, I do. I was on the Internet prior to that. In the mid nineties, I started a dial up Internet provider in the area that I live in. And, so I was involved in that commercialization. Unfortunately, I did not, you know, bring home great riches from that, but I was involved in the commercialization of the Internet.
So I actually did see that kind of firsthand. But the Internet has a long history. We don't know how long Bitcoin is going to take to kind of reach that point, but it certainly seems to be getting there much faster. But we are already 15 years into it. So let's say it took us 25 years to get to that inflection point, so to speak. What does that mean? That means you got 10 years to stack before we even get there. Right? So I wouldn't, you know, put any, I wouldn't use that for a timeline, but just throwing that out there. Right?
[00:28:54] Kenshin:
The the best way to to cap this office, what did, was it Satoshi or who said it? It's it's good to get some just in case it catches on. Yeah. Who did say that? I think it was Satoshi or, was it Harl Finney maybe?
[00:29:15] McIntosh:
Oh, I'm on the list. One of those 2. Because I I have definitely heard that. I don't know. I do see different. Alright. We're we're not we're not gonna, yeah, get bogged. Yeah. But it's true. I mean, you don't know where it's gonna go, but I do know where Fiat's going. And this is something maybe we need to examine in more detail. But as I've mentioned here, Fiat is down not just against Bitcoin in terms of its own value for the over a 100 years now significantly. And there's no signs of that slowing up. And by the way, most of that is because of this man. And this is one of the reasons why I I don't wanna say I hate people, but I have such an intense dislike for this person.
Right? Because I feel like he's single handedly. It's a canes. JD canes or j j m, John Maynard canes. Anyways, I really feel like his ideas and his theories have have wrought the fiat destruction that we've seen, not just in the United States, but literally around the world. I don't know where we would be if we had stayed on sound money, but I know it would not be where we're at. It would be in a lot better place anyways. Okay. We we need to move on or this is gonna turn into a regular full length show, Kinkinshan.
[00:30:52] Kenshin:
But we can ask maybe the audience a question. Mhmm. Have you heard that expression in real life? Because I have Yeah. From from relatives. Oh, it's too late now. It's too late to Right. To find what you're saying about Bitcoin, but it's too late now. And what do you say about that? Are you saying something different? Are you not saying anything? No. Me personally, the points that we discussed. But, yes, the audience would be nice to to hear if they hear the same things and what they reply.
[00:31:21] McIntosh:
Right. Alright. Very good. Alright. Okay. We're gonna go ahead and move on. I got a couple of little notes about the supporters. We had a total of a 190 sats this week of support. Support. So I'm going to drag out the sad puppy. I'm sorry. I appreciate the support that we got. There were no boosts this week, so there's no messages to read. I did wanna mention Send It Mike who's been boosting a fair amount, and I really appreciate that Send It Mike. Last week, sent in a boost, with a link to, like, tiny URL link to, basically, a nostril page.
And I swear, I last week, I brought this page up, and we said we were gonna talk about it this week, which we were. I cannot get that page to come up, and I I've actually gone to your page on nostril. I follow you in case you didn't know. Send it Mike. But I something's wrong. I don't know. I'm sorry. I tried the same. I I see I had the same experience. I saw the page just last week,
[00:32:29] Kenshin:
and I saw it in one really in one Nostra really. I saw his
[00:32:34] McIntosh:
note, but not in the main primal in the rest. I I think that might be what had happened. It it probably was a relay issue, but if you can get that to us, I sure would not mind revisiting that. Absolutely.
[00:32:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. I would like to talk about it too. It was something to do with the US. With Russia with the strategic Bitcoin reserves. Yeah. With America. Yeah. Exactly. And then
[00:32:58] McIntosh:
yeah. Okay. So, this week was a fairly light week in terms of news. It usually is, and I this time of year. I'm sure next week will be the same, but, y'all are gonna you you must think I'd like, I'm on Javier Malay's payroll. I'm really not. There were a couple of Argentina things, and I'm gonna go ahead and mention them. I promise I won't spend a whole lot of time on them, but there were 2 things. First of all, apparently, I know Javier, went to, I think, Mar whatever Trump's place is in Florida, Mar Largo, whatever.
I think I just butchered that, but whatever. And, you know, they talked, but he said this week, Malay did during an interview that he was going to make a free trade proposal with Trump and the United States. So what he's looking to do is essentially make a a free trade deal so there's no tariffs between the United States and Argentina. Now that may make a lot of people upset. Why them and, you know, we're gonna have tariffs on Mexico or Canada or whatever. I'm just gonna say this about that. I think it basically is I don't know how to say this without ruffling people's feathers, but it's it's it's tit for tat would be one way of putting it. It's just look.
China does things, for example, that are harmful to the United States. I'll pick on China because nobody will defend China. How about that? Right? And if we put tariffs on them, then we're essentially trying to balance that out. Now you can argue that that's not the right thing to do or whatever. But that's the tool that's either going to be used or used as a negotiating tactic. And I think, Trump frankly does that a lot as well. He will say he's going to do something in order to bring somebody to the bargaining table. You can agree or disagree with that as well, but I think that is kind of the one of the things that he does. So keep that in mind as well. We may end up making some agreement with Canada, for example. I mean, Canada right now is in a tizzy over, the proposed tariffs, because and to be honest, in this case directly, because they are not controlling their border into the United States and they're just allowing anybody to come through. And that's not okay with us. At least it's not okay with Trump. I'll put it that way. Alright. The second thing that Argentina I probably got too political there. So send your boost. Just make them big fat donations, please. Thanks.
Appreciate that. The second thing is, it has to be at least a 1000 sets to be, argumentative. No. I'm just kidding. They did announce now this was interesting because, I watched the announcement of this, and it was in Spanish. But somebody had run it through AI and, had it translate, like, in the video to English. So it was Spanish speakers, but they were speaking English. And this is some of the stuff that I find fascinating. Assuming that this was correct and from the other items that I've seen around this, I see no reason that it's not correct or, you know, it may not have been a perfect translation, but it certainly wasn't malicious. They have announced a a nuclear plan for Argentina. They are going to be building nuclear power. Apparently, according to the video, they already have 3.
I did not realize they've had nuclear power for so long since 19 seventies. They've done a lot of research and whatever, and they feel like that nuclear power is the way to move forward in terms of clean energy, which I happen to agree with. I think that nuclear power provides a great base load for an economy to build on. But they're looking at building small modular, reactors, that they will have all around the country and that will provide them with nuclear power so that they can do things specifically. They talked about this like AI, which of course requires large amounts of power.
[00:37:17] Kenshin:
Did did they announce how much,
[00:37:20] McIntosh:
nuclear power they would Not that I saw. Just basically this aggressive plan to build these power, plants. So I'm sure that they're going to have to look at the regulation side of things. I don't know what their regulations look like, but they were working with the International Atomic Energy Committee or whatever. So they're not just going off and doing this on their own. Okay? Right.
[00:37:46] Kenshin:
It sounds like Argentina might be the right place to be in a couple of years or 10 years time.
[00:37:52] McIntosh:
You mean like I keep saying? Yep. Sounds right. Maybe one day I'll just never mind. I'm not gonna say that. Next thing.
[00:38:02] Kenshin:
Right. I just have a I just have a light hearted news item, if you want. You know Craig Wright? Yes. Have you heard of him? Yes. No. So I'm just gonna mention Satoshi. Mhmm. Yeah. He's, the one keeps screaming that he's Satoshi and keeps suing, programmers Right. Developers of the Bitcoin core, projects. So he is proven. He's the only person on earth that is proven that he's not Satoshi. 100%.
[00:38:33] McIntosh:
Yes. Certain he is not Satoshi. Anyone else could be Satoshi. Yes. That is fine. Now he was he ended up in court again and lost again. And I don't even bother covering him anymore because he's he's it's such a clown show. Yeah. But, yeah.
[00:38:50] Kenshin:
But this time, he got a suspended suspended sentence. So I I thought that was, like, enough is enough by everybody.
[00:38:59] McIntosh:
Yeah. So this time, if she's interested to see what he does going from here. Honestly, with his ego, I bet he continues to try. And I I think he will eventually end up actually in jail. I mean, honestly, that's just speculating. But if he heard this, he'd probably be like, I'm gonna sue you because you said that. Whatever. We call that free speech, Bubba. Come on over here, and I'll talk to you about it.
[00:39:24] Kenshin:
But if he bothers another developer, it sounds like, in the next 2 years, then he he goes in prison for a year. Right. Right. And I I wouldn't be shocked if he did, though. I mean, he thinks he's
[00:39:35] McIntosh:
I don't know. He's a classic narcissist, but yeah. Alright. We do have a couple of items of Russia news. I'm gonna do the first one because I kinda wanna give a warning about this. This is Twitter news. I think this is accurate, but I'm going to caveat this by saying that it's Twitter news. I don't know of another source. But apparently, very recently, the Russian finance minister said, quote, and of course, this is in English, not Russian. But as part of the experimental regime, it is possible to use Bitcoins, which we had mined here in Russia.
Okay. So they were talking about trading cross border, you know, paying for goods and services with bitcoin. And he dropped this little bomb in here saying we've mined it here in Russia. And I've been telling y'all for months that I thought Russia was already mining Bitcoin. This seems to prove that. Now we will see.
[00:40:37] Kenshin:
Slip of the tongue or
[00:40:40] McIntosh:
well, it was bound to come out and maybe it's a way to poke at the United States, but this wouldn't surprise me and say, hey, we're already doing this. Right? And who knows how much they've stored away? Time will tell. We will eventually, the world will eventually figure it out. This is not a US Russia thing. This is just what it is.
[00:41:01] Kenshin:
Alright. Why don't you go ahead and do that next one? Yeah. The next one is that Russia enacts a 6 year blanket ban on Bitcoin mining in 10 Russian regions.
[00:41:12] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:41:13] Kenshin:
So there's I will not try to mention those regions. I cannot pronounce it, but it's 10 regions that Russia completely bans them from mining for six years, from January 1, 2025. So now in in 1 week until, yeah, to the year 2031.
[00:41:34] McIntosh:
Right. Which to me is very weird. I don't understand this. This almost seems like the China mining ban. That wasn't a ban that Lord knows what's going on. In a communist country, I have a little bit of experience with this, so I'm just gonna say this. If you know the right people, you can do whatever you want. Okay. Will there be mining in Russia inside those regions? Probably, especially if you have those connections. But in general, it looks like for now, for whatever reason, and Kenshin and I were kinda speculating prior to this broadcast what those reasons might be. But regardless, at least for now, they've kind of shut down mining, which that causes all kinds of issues. Right?
But we'll see how long this lasts. I I would say it's not gonna last for 6 years or however what is that? 5 years, 6 years? But, who knows? Who knows? It may not last 6 months, to be honest, if things really kick off here in January as we're gonna be talking about next week. Yep. But we'll see.
[00:42:52] Kenshin:
But it has already affected a big mining pool in Russia that shut down 10 days ago And they said, to be a legitimate mining pool in and that's, quote, to be a legitimate mining pool in Russia, you must register yourself in a special government list of mining operators. Also, you must send all data about your clients to the tax office.
[00:43:11] McIntosh:
That's worse than what we do here in the states. Wow.
[00:43:15] Kenshin:
Our cypherpunk views can match all these, they said. So Yeah. So they shall We'll see. I mean,
[00:43:23] McIntosh:
I don't know anybody directly who mines in Russia or used to, but there certainly were a lot of miners who were mining in Russia because it was possible to get, like, super cheap power, like, 2, 2 and a half cent power, which makes a huge difference in your profitability. But there's a huge amount of risk that goes along with that. And, so, I don't know. We'll see. If they actually do this and it's like legitimate and lasts for 6 years, this is going to set them behind greatly in terms of, overall, you know, Bitcoin adoption for them as as this nation state adoption is taking place.
So not good timing. And then go ahead and do this Bank of Italy. Well, you may not know a whole lot about this. There's very little about this. So let me just mention this. I do wanna talk about Kanga. That's on there for a reason. The Bank of Italy has now labeled Bitcoin, PDP services like HODL HODL or something like that as quote, crime as a service in its latest report. Italy just keeps kinda going back and forth. I don't know. Maybe their government's really divided up. I have no idea. Maybe it's just the bank people being, you know, kind of central bank people. This is a normal kind of attitude for them. Of course, Bitcoin's being used by criminals because we would never allow fiat to be used by criminals. Right?
Point to who was it? Bank of America. I don't wanna get this wrong, but one of the very large banks here in America was recently busted for money laundering, which is the main thing they always accuse Bitcoin of and got a $1,000,000,000 fine, which for them was nothing. But, you know, it was not an insignificant amount. I don't know.
[00:45:25] Kenshin:
Yeah. They they don't keep spoking up what's going on. Every week, we have a new Italian news item. And and they say about p 2p service specifically, it's it's a bit, it's a bit weird. I mean, you can
[00:45:39] McIntosh:
yeah. You can sell and exchange whatever you want with each other, but not Bitcoin, apparently, in Italy. And was it last week or the week before when I was talking about these p two p services with the regulations that's coming? I would be very concerned if I lived in the EU about how I'm managing my Bitcoin. And I Kenshin, I I would rely on you since you're right there to speak on this more, but, you know, it's not a good situation in my opinion. It's very it could change at any moment. Yeah. It does change any moment. I'm not happy with what goes on here in the United States, but I feel like the regulation in the EU is even worse, to be honest.
[00:46:22] Kenshin:
Yeah. Because we have the the European Central Bank, ECB. Mhmm. So they, they are very, very aggressive against Bitcoin. And we have the MICA now, which comes in effect in January 1st and it affects a lot of things. So, but I think the outlook is positive, honestly. If if the US as the superpower that it is, it it's
[00:46:46] McIntosh:
it's more positive to Bitcoin than Europe who follow a year later. So That's pretty typical. For a year, I think. And then One more year, guys. One more year. But I I would just encourage you to be careful Yeah. Especially about KYC ing your stuff, you know, because you just you don't know where that's gonna end up. I do wanna wrap up the news real quick, and this is kind of a news ish. There's certainly no definite source. This is actually something I would really like to look into. But what I'm starting to understand about this Cango deal is Bitmain, the company that builds all the ASICs, is actually if they've not bought Kango, they've certainly invested like they're one of the major investors, and I'm trying to figure that out.
But to me, it seems like they're setting up because apparently, Kango really isn't that big. And they're setting them up to essentially turn them into a way that Bitmain can mine through Kango. And, you know, I don't know, kind of front run the rest of us miners. And if that's the case, like I said, I Bitmain's done a lot of shady stuff over the years. This to me would be the last straw. Their miners I mean, if you go and compare prices, their miners are invariably cheaper per terahash essentially. And it stinks because it would directly cut into my profitability, but I will not. There's there's lines that I just you can't you just can't let them do that.
And the only way that I can do anything about it is to stop buying Bitmain miners and buy Whatsminer or one of the newer companies like that. Right? And fork out more per terahash for my miners. But at least I know that these companies are not actively working against me as a miner. So I do intend to do some more on that. And if I can come up with more information, I'll probably be talking about it on here. But, it looks like there's actually more to that story than what we even reported last week. Alright. Let's skip through these software updates real quick. There was only a few. They were all well, the Bitcoin pay server update was relatively minor. It's basically a 2.05, so it's a update on their new 2.0 version.
And it other than bug fixes, it was essentially a solid way for people to upgrade from Bitcoin server 1 point whatever to 2 point o. So if you happen to be involved in that, it's something you should pay attention to. Okay? And then I wanna look at these other 2 in a little more detail.
[00:49:34] Kenshin:
Right. There are 2 nostril software updates.
[00:49:38] McIntosh:
There are 2 nostril programs. They're both brand new apparently. I'm gonna talk about KeeCash. If you've got time, I don't know if you've looked up that other one. I can talk about both of them. But this key cast in particular, is a team signing platform. So one of the issues that we've got with Noster is you have to manage your keys. It's kinda like Bitcoin in that respect. You have your private key. You have your pub key. And actually, one of the things that I recently did was set up an extension for my web browser so that, like, with CoreCall, I didn't have to, put my private keys into CoreCall. Essentially, this extension acts as a, intermediary.
Okay? This is the same kind of idea, but it's expanded for teams, so that you can have multiple members and all this kind of stuff. I'm sure it's not just a web browser extension. It's probably a lot more significant than that. But this is the first edition of that. These are the kind of things in order to make Nostra a first class player that will be needed. So it's good to see this. So we'll follow this evolution, and see what they go. This isn't really something that, you know, Kenshin or I would would be using, but maybe if we were working on a team that was developing some Noster product or whatever, this would be something that we would use for that. Mhmm.
[00:51:05] Kenshin:
Okay. And the next one is, NARR, n a r r. It's a lightweight RSS and Nostra, content reader. Mhmm. And that's, a new a new app that was just released a few days ago.
[00:51:21] McIntosh:
By Fiat Jaff, by the way. So he's like the original Noster guy. Maybe he wasn't the original, but he's one of the very early guy. Yes. He's Domus. Uh-huh. He's got all kinds of he just like it's like he wakes up and just, oh, I'm gonna write a new app. Just Yes.
[00:51:39] Kenshin:
Yeah. He's very involved. And, that's another course of use. RSS reader, which I find fascinating
[00:51:45] McIntosh:
because one of the things that I used to do 20 years ago was I had all my RSS feeds back when blogs were a big deal. Right? Your kids are like, what's a blog? Well, we used to actually write stuff on the Internet, and, you would use an RSS reader to, to read those if to aggregate them so you didn't have to go to the individual websites. And this is the same idea.
[00:52:08] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I really miss the Google Reader, actually, because you could save your settings and your list and then load them up on the computer and on the phone. So now this is actually a good replacement. You can load up RSS, websites, for example, and other RSS feeds. And you can even load up Not sure. Long form.
[00:52:29] McIntosh:
Yeah. Which is different than just the regular little notes. Right? So long form is a lot more like blogs, and that's one differentiation I wanted to make. Yeah. And you can load normal profiles as well as I see here. So
[00:52:43] Kenshin:
if you have a favorite list of of some people that you know, you will get some good information like Lee Knowlton or someone else in Right. In Oser.
[00:52:52] McIntosh:
It's a really good place to So he announced this on December 21st. So buddy, Fiat, Jeff, I don't know you, but really take some time off. It's Christmas, man.
[00:53:05] Kenshin:
His deadline was before Christmas, so he he achieved that part.
[00:53:09] McIntosh:
Alright. Alright. Well, we're gonna wrap this up. I'm sure it's already been probably longer than I really want because I have to edit this and get this out before oh, gosh. It's been almost an hour. Kenshin, we talk too much. I will be out of town next week. I will get back in time to record before our next release date, but just barely. So Kenshin and I want to figure out how we're gonna do that. It may be more of a live kind of on the fly recording next week, but I do want to, I think next week's gonna be very important. We're gonna kinda cover where we think things are going, certainly where they've been for the last year, see where we're at, and see what you should do.
So, let's roll through things here. Of course, we're a podcasting 2.0 podcast. What that means is that what we love to see our listeners do is use podcasting 2.0 apps, which are available at podcastapps.com. There's a whole list of them, but it enables things like transcripts, for example. So maybe English isn't your first language and you can read along with the show, or maybe you don't speak southern like Macintosh does, and you have trouble understanding me, and I understand that. But, you know, it's right there. We've got chapters. We've got, well, boost and streaming certainly as ways of supporting the show. So those are only a few of the many, many things that that are available with podcasting 2.0 as the people over in that arena are just working furiously to kinda move things forward in terms of podcasting. So in terms of actually supporting this show, there's a couple of ways you can do it. The best way, frankly, is to turn around to somebody after you listen to this podcast and say, hey.
This is a great podcast. You should listen to it. We are trying to grow our user base, our listener base, I should say. And it's something frankly that we struggle with. I don't know if maybe we're just not good sales business people or whatever. I don't know. But I do know that if you like this show, you can tell 5 people and get some of them involved, and it will make a huge difference to us. Because we're not out here, you know, trying to shill some product or whatever to support our podcast. Because for me personally, and I don't wanna speak for Kenshin, but for a lot of the products that are available out there in the Bitcoin ecosphere, if I were to promote them, it would compromise kind of my journalistic mission.
Just as a real simple case, Swan Bitcoin has been in the news a lot lately. They're one of the big podcast promoters. And if they were paying us, do you think I'd ever talk about Swan Bitcoin in any kind of bad light? Absolutely not. But you know what? I'll tell you right now. Don't put your money on Swan Bitcoin, because I don't understand what's going on over there, and it does not look good. And I would be very careful about interacting with them. So that's kind of the way I look at it, but we do depend on our supporters, our listeners to support this show. People like Send It Mike that we talked about earlier. Right?
Like the people who streamed earlier this week. I appreciate that again. So you can always boost us. You can always stream sats our way, and it's always always appreciated. Okay?
[00:56:48] Kenshin:
And we know it's busy times, during the whole decision to listen. But if you do listen, leave us a comment. It would be good to know who listens and what you think about the topic we discuss.
[00:57:00] McIntosh:
Yep. We love to hear from us from from the listeners.
[00:57:04] Kenshin:
Yeah. And if you talk to family or friends and you hear the same thing as we do, that, oh, it's too late now. Bitcoin is too high now. Then you can give them a podcast, and we have a few reasons why it's too late. At a $100,
[00:57:17] McIntosh:
people were saying the same thing. It's too late.
[00:57:21] Kenshin:
Absolutely.
[00:57:23] McIntosh:
Don't don't don't live that regret because you'll be here and Bitcoin's gonna be at 200,000, 300,000, whatever it gets to, And you're still gonna be here and you're gonna be going, well, now it's too late. But it still won't be too late. Right? It's not worth it. We're so early in this adoption. It's unbelievable. And as soon as you figure out that out and start DCA ing, the better off you will be. Alright. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. We would love to hear from you. We have all kinds of ways to reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshisdashplebs.com/episodes.
There's a whole list of all the episodes. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon.
[00:58:11] Kenshin:
Keep stuckin'. Bye bye.
Introduction
Memorable Christmas Gifts
Bitcoin Market Update
Am I Too Late to Invest in Bitcoin?
Bitcoin's Future Potential
Argentina's Economic Moves
Russia's Bitcoin Mining Ban
European Bitcoin Regulations
Nostr Software Updates
