Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
January 8th, 2025: 94,599 USD | 91,500 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
878,384
News and Notes
Canaan Introduces Avalon Mini 3 & Nano 3S Bitcoin Home Miners and Heaters
Bitcoin ATM Operator Byte Federal Reports Data Breach Affecting 58,000 Users
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!
[00:00:01]
McIntosh:
The countdown is over. What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is January 10th, and this is episode 1 92 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:11] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And today's episode is Bitcoin is not crypto.
[00:00:16] McIntosh:
What? I'm shocked. I'm glad we're talking about that, and we are gonna be talking about that. It's a common question that comes up. People talk about crypto and whatever, but we'll dive into that in just a minute. Before we do that, let's talk about everybody's favorite topic, the price. And drum roll, please, we are down to $94,599
[00:01:13] Kenshin:
US as we record
[00:01:16] McIntosh:
€91,500. So I've now put on my sad face. And, actually, I saw it earlier this morning hit 93. Now that's the lowest I've seen it on this pullback. I don't know. It would I is you could make the argument, Kenshin, that this is on bad economic data here in the United States over the last few days, and, wow, everybody's crying. I'm sure there's a lot of truth to that. I just think it's really funny that the tool to fix our monetary system gets beaten down when we get bad economic data. I just find that amusing. But it is what it is. I
[00:01:59] Kenshin:
I I am patient because it's, the year 2025. And as we know, it's,
[00:02:06] McIntosh:
the right thing to know. Thing says 2024. Oh, that's funny. Right.
[00:02:12] Kenshin:
No. But it's we if we follow the cycle and Bitcoin has only the forward look the previous cycle so far, then Mhmm. We're we're for a big year. So Oh.
[00:02:22] McIntosh:
I'm patient for later in the year. And you are a good man, sir. My tea is extremely hot today, so we will let it cool off for just a little bit before I start drinking too much of it. We are also at block height 878,384 as we record. And very quickly, our difficulty adjustment is roughly nothing. It's 0.12% down on January 12th. And what that means, Kenshin, is those stupid Russian miners did not go offline, and I am very mad about that. I'm going to go on strike and turn my miners off. Wait. Maybe I shouldn't do that. Yeah. We haven't seen a block recently in almost We have not. Actually, we were talking about that right before we hit record. It has now been 81 hours.
The last block was 877,919. Is that that's the last block that they mined? Yeah. It must be. Yep.
[00:03:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. And the fees in the mempool are 5, 6, 7 sats per vbyte. So for a normal transaction, you need, to pay 6 sats per v byte, which is around a bit less than $1. And we have 371 megabytes of unprocessed transactions. And the transactions in the mempool are 187,000
[00:03:56] McIntosh:
transactions. You know, I've never taken the time to try and dig into the mempool and, like, look at old transactions and whatever. I mean, you could go to mempool.space, and it's got a graphical interface. And, yes, you can click around in that. But, I mean, like, I don't know. Really examine it. Right? I would be curious. My point is this. I'd be curious, like, how like, what's the oldest transaction in there? Right? What's the average age? Like, are there a lot of old, like, 1 sat per v byte transactions in there? What's what's going on? I've not ever seen an analysis like that, and I I just think it'd be interesting.
So,
[00:04:45] Kenshin:
yeah. Anyway You can find all this information in the mempool.space if you dig into it. Yeah. It has it.
[00:04:51] McIntosh:
Oh, it does? Like, I'm just not looking in the right places. Yes. So okay. Well, maybe I should poke around. Yes. If you go to the charts and graphs area there, you can find. I will take a look at that. I want okay. Mempool by b well, anyways, I don't wanna get sidetracked on that. I will take a look at that. The funny thing is is I've used that for a long time.
[00:05:17] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. We all use it on the front page mostly. Right? Right.
[00:05:23] McIntosh:
So what's up with Kenshin? What's up are you guys did you are you out of your snowpocalypse?
[00:05:30] Kenshin:
The No. No? We got a new how do we say? A new wave of snow. Wave. The same as before. So around 10 to 15 centimeters. Okay. And and we didn't have time to clean it this time. So, yeah, it's, there it sits. It's a lot of snow right now. I have seen this
[00:05:53] McIntosh:
done. You might want to consider this. You could run a Bitcoin, miner and then you could, like, I guess they run I'm not sure if they run a fluid or they run air. It's probably fluid underneath your sidewalks and your driveway, and you can use that to keep the snow melting. Wow. You you actually could do that. I'm not sure how much it would cost and how long, and you might better just keep shoveling, but it is possible.
[00:06:25] Kenshin:
It's incredible how many use cases you think of when you understand mining. Mhmm. And then everything you see around you, you think, oh, could I use that to mine some Bitcoin? Could I use that source of mine?
[00:06:38] McIntosh:
Reasonably common at this point that, you know, there's been a number of people who do it anyways, who mine who heat their swimming pool, which might be a little more relevant to me than than keeping snow off my driveway. Yeah. You got swimming pools, greenhouses. There's a spa in Brooklyn, for example. This is pretty famous that they heat their water with Bitcoin miners. There's actually a place in Finland. Maybe you can make a trek there one day. And, the entire town no. You don't go oh, I don't know if it's too far. Like, it's too far. No. I like it. It's too far.
[00:07:20] Kenshin:
Sounds close. But
[00:07:22] McIntosh:
but 11,000 homes are heated, with it's it's one of the big miners or they have a a, like, a data center there, and they basically that in a new Yeah. It's crazy. And that kind of thing will become more and more common. I know a guy, sort of, who dries beef jerky with his miners. I mean, it's the use cases are endless, and it's just kind of your imagination. You know? Right. And I think for home miners, those type things might be one way that you could justify it. Right? Because for certainly for the majority of us, electricity costs at home are pretty expensive, right, compared to Yeah. That what a miner means.
[00:08:17] Kenshin:
That was the case for me when I bought my little nano miners. I'm not earning any Bitcoin, as profit if I would pay the costs Right. That they produce, but I use them for heat
[00:08:33] McIntosh:
instead of using another minor for heat Right. Or another heater for heat. Now you turned off your heat. So I have a signal to, like, wind down because, your heat pump was, like, making a noise in the room that you're in. So when he pulls the blanket on, and I can see it in the video, that's my cue to stop. So we'll see how that works.
[00:08:57] Kenshin:
Alright. Very cool. And it's in it's in the news. I will bring it back, the subject. I have a item on the news later. Okay.
[00:09:07] McIntosh:
And just in general, though, I think probably our weeks have been pretty similar. Just back at the, old Fiat mine, making Fiat so we can pay the bills and such and buy more Bitcoin, hopefully. I know for me, it's been a, frankly, a pretty rough week. I'm hoping in the next couple weeks, it kinda levels out, but we've been having some troubles at work. And, not all is is good in that that area. So
[00:09:43] Kenshin:
Yeah. I wish you the best. Well,
[00:09:46] McIntosh:
just keep going on. Alright. So this week's topic, Bitcoin is not crypto. Right? So we are gonna break this down. This is something I've talked about in the past on the show. It has been a while, and it is something that comes up every bull run and will, for the foreseeable future. I I view a future where there's no such thing as other crypto. I may be naive. That's true. But I think let me give you a statistic, which I need to look up. Actually, you know what? I'm gonna stay on track. I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna go look that up. Alright. So what what we've done is we've come up with 5 different ways that Bitcoin is different, and I would argue superior to crypto. So you've got all of these other things, and you're there's always something new.
Elon's out there talking about Doge. Ethereum is like a bad rash. It just hangs around. Solana, all the meme coins on Solana, all of this kind of stuff, and you're going to hear about it. So it's important to understand what is different about Bitcoin. Aside from the fact that Bitcoin has been here the longest and has the proven track record, what is different about Bitcoin? What makes it unique? What makes it special? And so to me, the number one thing is actually, that there's no CEO, so to speak, of of Bitcoin. If you look at any other token, whether we're talking about ADA, Ethereum, Solana, or or whoever, there there's there literally is a CEO of Ripple, for example, at least whatever their backing company is, The XRP token.
And that means that, you know, he's involved well, I'll say this. At this point, he's like involved with the government, trying to get some things done. That is literally a point of attack if you wanna look at it that way for that network, for the ripple network. He could be compromised. Will that happen? Am I saying that that is happening? I I don't know. And I'm not saying that it is happening, but it is a possibility. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was started by someone that we he goes by the pseudo anonymous name of Satoshi Nakamoto. He did a very good job of covering his tracks. No one, to my knowledge, has truly been able to figure out who he was.
And after a pretty short period of time, he disappeared. There he posted an email or, what is it? Like a like a bulletin board forum type thing saying, I'm done. I don't know if it was on an email list or a forum. It doesn't matter. The project is in good hands. I should have looked this up beforehand, but and and disappeared. And he go ahead.
[00:12:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. He said something like, I'm taking over new projects, something like that. Which I I've always wondered what that new project was, actually. Yeah.
[00:13:08] McIntosh:
And, no, ladies and gentlemen, it was not Ethereum. He is not Vitalik. Please don't insult me. Alright? So that, I think, is point number 1. Because when you have a CEO, when you have a person in charge, that introduces a whole host of problems. Okay? And and we see that in these other projects from well, just a number of different things. I don't wanna go into all that detail. But yeah.
[00:13:39] Kenshin:
Right. Number 2, we have that Bitcoin is not centralized. Mhmm. It's completely decentralized. It's run by nodes all over the world, and anybody can, set up a node and run the Bitcoin, Blockchain. And right now we know there are around 20,000 nodes that are open for us to see. There are also nodes that are, covered under the Tor network, so we don't really know how many there are. We know that there are at least 20,000. We even know that there is a copy of the blockchain on the International Space Station Yeah. I believe. I don't know if it's still active, that project, but it was at some point.
And, that means that no one can influence the network. In a sense, no one can go and turn off a server. The they cannot just turn off a computer or, confiscate a hard drive or something like that. It's it's literally spread out all over the world. And no matter if if a whole country like US or China bans it, it doesn't matter. It's it's always gonna be online
[00:14:57] McIntosh:
because there's always some people, some countries that will allow it and Have you ever seen there's like a global map of the nodes. Yeah. Like, you know, and then the the globe is spinning around. It's amazing how spread out it is. I mean, it is just literally on it's on every continent. It's on every, it's getting to be the point where it's in every country. It's not. But, yeah, really, really cool stuff. And there's another aspect to this as well with mining.
[00:15:28] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Exactly. We have the most, processing power. It's backed by real energy Mhmm. And real processing power. So right now, it's at an all time high. The whole network is run by an 800 exahas of compute power. Right. Which is a lot. And this another topic that people say, oh, it's too much energy spent, but it's mostly energy that was going to waste or would go to waste. Right. So it's harnessing excess energy in the world, and it keeps the network running. And that also means that if, how is it called, a bad actor wants to take over the network, they need this amount of energy or more, which is impossible for any entity to do. And and that was a concern
[00:16:28] McIntosh:
early on, to be honest. Right? That that, you know, the US or China or whoever, could take, could basically, take over the network just by putting more more compute power online that was currently mining. I think we're well past that at this point. I mean, we've seen, for example, with China banned mining, and roughly half the miners were in China. And we saw over the course of a month, those miners migrate out of China. The the compute power, the the exahash dropped basically 50%. The miners that were online were having a field day, making money, but no one was able to take advantage of that because even back then, which I think that was 2021, the amount of power that was online was enough that that 50% reduction, which I don't think we'll ever see I don't even ever think I don't think we'll ever even see that amount drop again, but we're certainly far above that level at this point. So I I don't know where we were at back then, to be honest, but it'd be an interesting Much lower than what? But much lower than it is right now. Yes. Yeah. And I was trying to while you were talking about this, I was trying to think, or determine how many servers that would be. I can't find a figure for it.
I guess I could run a raw calculation based on, let's say, an average of a 100 terahash per node and then figure it out that way. But regardless, it would be many, many, many thousands of servers. I do not know how many. But a large operation can have thousands of servers. So, you know, we're probably talking about over a 100,000, probably even closer to a1000000, maybe even than that. I don't know. I'd have to do the calculation. But it's a lot.
[00:18:25] Kenshin:
Yeah. So it's it's a lot of energy and power. And and for me, that's also important because it's it's because everybody says it's digital. It's nothing. It's created out of thin air, but it's really not. It's literally connected to physical, real energy.
[00:18:44] McIntosh:
Right. And I You can't take that away.
[00:18:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I equate it to, in a sense, like a battery. Mhmm. Because you might you use energy, you mine, and then you have Bitcoin. And then that Bitcoin in the future, you can sell it back for energy. So you you move, let's say, the energy to the future in time, like a battery. Right. Of course, you can buy others things with Bitcoin, obviously. And, or you can invest in infrastructure and improve your energy facilities as we see that you're doing with Bitcoin now. So for me, it's it's, it's a clear point once you understand it and you explain to someone and they understand it, it's it's easy to ignore the the FUD out of the mainstream media as well.
[00:19:36] McIntosh:
And I honestly, a lot of the FUD, around mining has died down in the last 6, 12 months, in the last, you know, half a year or year or so. Because it's become so obvious how Bitcoin mining works.
[00:19:53] Kenshin:
Yeah. Except in Norway.
[00:19:56] McIntosh:
We except in Norway. I which I man, I just don't understand that.
[00:20:01] Kenshin:
But I mean, they literally have 95% renewable Mhmm. Energy powering Bitcoin mining in Norway, and they're the ones screaming the most. Right.
[00:20:10] McIntosh:
But overall, over half the Bitcoin miners run off renewable. And it just to be clear, that is not because it's a bunch of green people running Bitcoin miners. That's not what that means. It means that that is the cheapest power that they have available because Bitcoin miners don't care about having to be online 247. They can handle a variable load in your electricity. And AI for example, can't. It just can't. Most compute services can't handle that. Most power, loads can't handle that. Only Bitcoin mining handles that so elegantly. And my, my miners, for example, I hate to say this, but some of them go down on basically daily basis because they're curtailing the power.
Because some of it's on hydro. I know. I'm not actually sure where all my servers are. So they have different reasons for doing that, but it's part of the agreement that we made with them. But that doesn't I mean, it hurts my bottom line in the sense that, you know, I don't get paid when those nodes are not online and hashing. But it but it works. The price of power is cheap enough that that makes sense. So Mhmm. How do you argue with an industry who's 52% renewable? And frankly, is the amount of renewable energy resources goes up, that will go up.
What other I mean, gosh. We sorry. I don't wanna turn maybe we should just stop forecast? No. I yeah. I don't wanna turn this into a long rant about that. But there's no other industry. Just one real quick thing that can do, for example, taking the energy that was being burned off in flare gas, from natural gas when they mine for oil, which we have to do. Taking that, converting it to electricity, and then driving minors off of that. There's no other industry that can do that. It just doesn't make sense anywhere else. So I don't consider that renewable energy, but it's over there Number 3 Number 3, proof of work. So I wanted to talk about this for just a minute. This springboard's off of that, mining.
So in crypto, there's basically two ways of looking at this stuff. We pioneered, not we, but Bitcoin pioneered proof of work with the whole mining setup in order to, distribute things fairly. In order to I'm I'm not even sure how to explain that part of it, Kenshin. But
[00:23:22] Kenshin:
It's the ledger. Keep the keep the blocks coming and keep the blocks connected to each other with cryptography and to be, let's say, have the work done. So so no one can go back. If a bad actor again wants to change the ledger, has to go back and spend at least equal or more energy to change the previous block and only the previous block before the next block valid block comes. So it's it's a bit complicated to describe, I know, but it's
[00:23:57] McIntosh:
So it's both time and compute based. Right? You have a minimal amount of time to do it or it's kind of locked in. And you have to have an a significant amount of power, which at this point is essentially too much to do it. So, it keeps that ledger safe. The alternative to that would be called proof of stake. And for example, Ethereum actually made a mistake and switched from proof of work to proof of stake. What that means is you quote stake your Ethereum, you put it in a vault, so to speak, and it's held and you're supposed to generate, like, Ethereum from that. Okay? You get rewarded for that.
There's a couple of problems with that. For one thing, as the price of the asset gets higher, the cost of a proof of state becomes very, very expensive. I don't remember exactly because it's been way too long. Well, no. It hasn't been too long, but it's been a long time since I've looked at the Ethereum stuff. When they made that switch, is it 32? I think it might it's 20 I wanna say it's 32 coins that you have to stake. Right now with Ethereum being, like, $3,000 or whatever, that's like a $100,000 that you just have to lock up in order to create any kind of, return.
Now I'll tell you, my miners are not cheap, but they're not a $100,000. There are a couple of $1,000. And so I can buy a couple $1,000 miner, plug it in and start earning Bitcoin, so to speak. Creating hash, putting it again in the pool and getting my share of that reward. It's that simple. And I don't ever see a future where a Bitcoin miner is going to cost a $100,000 It just that doesn't make sense. It's a commodity. There are companies out there who are competing building miners. Yes. They're getting more powerful. Yes. They're getting, more energy efficient and these type things. But because of that competition, I can look forward 10 years.
And most likely, those miners shall still only cost 15 100, $2,000, maybe a little bit more, to to buy. And it does depend on what part of the cycle we're at. But I'm gonna leave that aside. Like, right now, I could get a miner for $1500. That's a, a modern miner. So I to me, it's a clear winner. And yet because of the FUD by Greenpeace, specifically by people like that a lot of these cryptocurrencies are using proof of stake. Ethereum famously moved from proof of work to proof of stake. There are a few, I know offhand Monero is a proof of work. Right? You have to you have to compute to earn Monero.
I don't know if others like coin maybe or or have they given a Yeah. I think it is like coin. Yeah. Okay. Dogecoin, but
[00:27:23] Kenshin:
it's they're irrelevant.
[00:27:24] McIntosh:
Well, no. I I I do wanna be fair, though. You're right. I'm just trying to be fair here, Kenji. But the vast majority of them are proof of stake. Right? Yes.
[00:27:36] Kenshin:
Okay. So And why I say they're irrelevant is because the proof of work might be a good aspect of them, but the other points that we're discussing Sure. They don't fulfill those other requirements to be fair and decentralized, etcetera, that we're talking. So in that sense, they're irrelevant, but the proof of work side of them is is okay.
[00:27:58] McIntosh:
So why don't you go ahead and do number 4 there?
[00:28:03] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we have, the fair distribution.
[00:28:06] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:28:07] Kenshin:
So Bitcoin, was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. He mined the first block, the Genesis block, and that was, the anniversary of that was January 3rd. Wasn't it a week ago? Yeah. It went too long ago. Mhmm. Yeah. We were just celebrating that on the on. And so what he did, he mined the 1st block. And because he mined the 1st block, he got a reward of 50 Bitcoin. And that first block was special in a sense that it looked itself up and no one could use those 50 Bitcoin from the reward of mining it. And after Satorce did that, then he announced to the world that now this is the Bitcoin network and this is how it works and this is how you mine it. And he opened it up so anybody could mine it along alongside him in in, equal, let's say, in equal measures. Mhmm. So in that sense, after that point, Bitcoin was spread out around the world to people who mined it as rewards.
And it was spread out in a fair way and in an open way. And and this is quite unique in that sense. Because right now we're sitting at 19,500 or 800,000 coins mined and those 19,800,000 coins minus those 51st coins. All the rest are have been distributed, fairly. And this is a big, minus to the vast majority of the cryptocurrencies where they do the so called pre mine, where a group of people, they pre mine sometimes a lot more than 50%. I saw now whichever came in the news from Trump or whatever, and they had pre mined 90 something percent of that coin. And and though those coins means that the CEO or the founding group have in their wallets, the majority of the coins that they didn't have to pay for them. Right.
And then the when they publish them, publicly and people can buy them, they have to pay for those coins and they push the price up. And then whoever is the founder sells those coins for a huge, huge
[00:30:48] McIntosh:
number. We call that a pump and dump.
[00:30:50] Kenshin:
Pump and dump. Yes. So you see the price is near 0. It climbs up to a strange high level, and then it drops after a few days to back to 0. Right.
[00:31:01] McIntosh:
I did wanna mention, as a maybe another example of this Ethereum. One of the early Ethereum people came out and said that 70% of the Ethereum supply was pre mined, and I'd heard that number for years. Yeah. I think that's a very accurate number. They continue to this day to sell off. They just did a tremendous amount of Ethereum sale. In the last few months, The Ethereum Foundation, the people who were supposed to be guiding Ethereum, it's a joke. I mean, it it really is. I mean, it just creates a much more equitable system when it's fair like this. And to to realize that Satoshi was so smart that he the very first block, which no one else was competing for, that he took the time to make sure that those coins could never be spent.
It's just mind boggling to me. It's like the big leagues versus the little leagues, you know, like, literally, like the little leagues and you got guys down here who can't catch the ball and you got, you know, Satoshi's out here pitching a a no hitter. You know? It's crazy.
[00:32:26] Kenshin:
And for me, what's also crazy is I don't want to insult anyone, but the people who follow some of those coins and they completely ignore it or sometimes make excuses for that. Mhmm. And I don't think it's excusable to pre mine
[00:32:41] McIntosh:
and do this so called No. It's it's it's fraud in my opinion. And I'll just say it. And as someone who started with Bitcoin, who became involved in crypto and then has ended up smartly finally back in Bitcoin. I will tell you that I did not know about that when I was buying Ethereum at 10¢ and selling it at, you know, 15 or whatever it was. It's probably a little higher than that, but I I got involved in Ethereum specifically pretty early on, but I didn't have any clue that that had gone on. Not any idea. There's no one ever told me. Oh, yeah. By the way, the guys who created this also, you know, set aside more than half of it for their own uses.
How fair is that?
[00:33:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And and, honestly, that's a big part of why we're talking about this topic today. It's to educate in some ways some people who might not know it. And I do that if we move on now to the next point. That's what I I do when I onboard friends and family. I like to talk to them about those points, even if they don't know about other cryptocurrencies, even if if the topic is Bitcoin. Right. But then in the end, I told them, look, be careful now that you're into Bitcoin and you learn more about it. You'll go out there to read the post, cryptocurrencies, how they work and stuff.
But, but be careful. There are other cryptocurrencies out there that will will have a lot of claims of how they are better in some ways. They're always better. Yeah. Always better. Faster or, whatever. Yeah. And then so I I caution them. I told them some of those points. Of course, I don't spend 1 hour on explaining those points. But to to say that there is no CEO, there is no centralized centralized authority behind it. The nodes are decentralized, so no government can can confiscate the blockchain. That needs proof of work, that is based on real energy. Mhmm. And that it has been fairly distributed compared to those other cryptocurrencies that are not. So I give them those tools to know, to be careful and watch themselves from and protect them from trying to think, oh, but I was too late for Bitcoin as everybody thinks. And there maybe I can take that other meme coin and make some I don't know. Then I'm early on this and I can make money there.
[00:35:22] McIntosh:
There was not a single crypto outside of Bitcoin that created a website. Somebody created a website for Bitcoin, and I don't know who it was. And maybe they were anonymous. It doesn't matter. But It's open source? The Bitcoin no. The Bitcoin faucet. Do you do you have you heard about this? I'm I didn't see it. I'm sure you I don't think you did either. But literally, you would go to this website and, like, press a button or something, and you would get 5 Bitcoin.
[00:35:51] Kenshin:
Okay. Yeah. I I know that,
[00:35:54] McIntosh:
test net faucets. I I No. That's yeah. That's different. This literally was a website. I mean, in the early days, people were out there mining and they were using or creating Bitcoin. And they were just kind of literally like trading it around. There was no I think it was over a year before Bitcoin had a price at all. Yeah. So, yeah, it's just like a completely different situation. I did want to make one final note. I added it here as we were working, and I can't find the numbers. But there's 2 things that I wanna emphasize. I think most people have no idea how many crypto have been created. It's 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000. I saw a figure and it was well over a year ago.
There was like 20,000. It's trivial to make a crypto currency by the way. Kenshin or I probably have the audience could actually make a cryptocurrency. And that's the problem. It's so simple at this point that everybody just goes out and they make one and then somehow they're gonna magically become the next Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin is Bitcoin, and we don't need the next Bitcoin. But because it's so easy, the vast, vast majority of those crypto are gone. I would say that, I did see a figure that the top where where did that go? Oh, it was right here.
Doggone. Oh, there it is. The top 20% or the top 20 cryptocurrencies, which would include Bitcoin certainly as the number one, make up almost 90% of the total market. And that's just a staggering number. Just think about that. And then I will tell you, I can sit here and tell you. And this is not well, this is what I believe. Time will tell. I think 10 years from now, 20 okay. Let's just go 20 years. 20 years from now, none of the crypto that we talk about, Solana, Doge, Ethereum, EADA. I don't even think ADA is gonna last 5 years, frankly, but, you know, whatever, they'll all be gone.
Now there may be new ones in their place, but they will be gone. The people who were involved with them most likely will have lost a lot of money and have nothing to show for it. And that is one of the reasons why I am Bitcoin only. I played these games, ladies and gentlemen. They're not fun. Learn from someone who has been there. Do the research. Do the proof of work. As we say, Do the research until you understand Bitcoin, until you believe it, and then you invest in it. And stop worrying about the rest of these things. How's that, Kenshin?
[00:38:58] Kenshin:
I I I agree, but I see a world where the governments cannot resist themselves to make their own CBDCs, and companies do their own coins like Twitter is preparing. And, yeah, Meta has done that also and failed. That will probably be true.
[00:39:20] McIntosh:
Those the vast majority of those will not be real investable. I mean, are you gonna invest in a Twitter token? I hope not. And with the whole government thing, I'm interested to see the first country that pegs their actual currency to Bitcoin. I don't know who that's gonna be. I I don't even have a guess, but I do think it will eventually, even if it's a 100 years from now, I think it will happen. Now Yeah. Do they do that as some digital token so that they can manage that for their own reasons? That's possible. But that's not really a it is a cryptocurrency, but it's not the same thing.
Every one of these cryptocurrencies that are out there right now, they're they're they're an investment. Right? Give me your money, and I'm gonna give you Ethereum or ADA or whatever. And that number is gonna go up, and we're all gonna get rich together. There's very few projects that that's not the the pitch. That's not really what we're talking about in that case. We're talking about a country who wants to track transactions, really, which then we could talk about privacy, but that's a separate issue. Yeah.
I don't know. I it will be interesting, and I probably will not get it 100% right. In fact, I'm sure I won't. But I do know that ADA is not gonna last. Ethereum is not gonna last. It's not. What happens when Vitalik gets bored and walks away? I mean, he practically is now, it seems to me. I don't see what's going on over there. It seems like after they did their big switch to proof of stake, they just kinda bogged down and nothing's been and I think there's people getting pretty worked up about that. I don't think that's just me thinking that. So I've told y'all a number of times. I'm gonna go ahead and say it right here.
If you own some of these coins, my this is this is not investment advice, but my advice would be that you sell it at the top. If you cannot sell it right now for if you just you can't. I get that. Sell it at the end of the year. Either to fiat or to bitcoin and move on with your life and stop worrying about this stuff. Okay? Yeah. Alright. We have a question. Agree.
[00:41:52] Kenshin:
Yeah. I mean, question is on the topic. Mhmm. So if the listeners have another way, if if they get that question from friends and family, how do they react? What do they tell them? Why should they focus only on Bitcoin? So that's the question. If you have another strategy and I've seen some comments online, some people have other opinions as well. So it will be interesting to hear from our listeners.
[00:42:22] McIntosh:
It's always fun getting out there into the social media platforms. Kenshin, I'll just say this. Kenshin posted on on Stacker News, which I, early on, had been involved in to an extent. And I kinda stopped getting on there because, man, some of those people are just toxic. That's just all there is to it. I don't mean because of toxic being Bitcoin, Bitcoin only. I mean, toxic as in, if you don't agree with me, then, you know, blankety blank blank blank. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not allowed to have my own opinion. Sorry I don't fit into your narrow world view.
[00:43:08] Kenshin:
I was taken aback today by the reaction. I'm like, as a Bitcoiner, I'm asking other Bitcoiners about,
[00:43:16] McIntosh:
their opinion and their strategy of of So, apparently, what we've been doing is just completely useless, Genshin. So I'm glad that we had people tell us that.
[00:43:28] Kenshin:
Yeah. Good times. Essentially.
[00:43:31] McIntosh:
No. I mean, that's that is literally what, not well, you know what I mean. Alright. Let's move on to some better stuff. No sad puppies this week, Kenshin. No? No sad I need a happy puppy face. That's what I need. I see that. Yeah. I need a like, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to get so the sad puppy is a black Labrador. Right? I'm gonna get, like, a golden Labrador playing in a field of flowers, and that'll be my happy puppy because isn't that happy? So we did get some boost, and we do appreciate it. We're gonna run through these, our friend, Send It Mike, boosted in. Did he send a message? He did not.
[00:44:17] Kenshin:
No? Let me no. No message. Send us a message on,
[00:44:21] McIntosh:
on the stern. We have a message, and we'll get to that. But on the boost itself, 5,000 sats. Very much appreciate it. Send it, Mike. Thank you very much. You wanna go ahead and do the next one?
[00:44:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we got a message and a boost from about yourself. Yeah. So quotes currently splitting wood while Kenshin talks about splitting wood.
[00:44:47] McIntosh:
I love the analysis. Thank you, Will. HBH Gardens, and as you said, boosted a 1,000 sets. We appreciate that.
[00:44:56] Kenshin:
Now and by the way, Will, if you go to my Nostril profile a few days ago, you will see that I was splitting wood again. I did some proof of work or as I call it proof of wood. It's p o w, you both. Yep.
[00:45:12] McIntosh:
Alright. And send it, Mike. We did get your message sorted out, and thank you so much. I am going to read this verbatim, first of all, and then we're gonna talk about I thought this was a fabulous message, first of all. Thank you. You've obviously thought about this. I agree with a lot of it. Some of it, frankly, I don't. And that's okay. We can agree to disagree. Maybe we'll talk about some of it. But, let me just read this. First of all, I usually respond with questions when I hear people say I'm too late. Because it is usually an extension of if I don't find a significant change my lot in life quickly, I feel like I'll never get off the hamster wheel.
I I I understand that. Now you could steer them towards understanding the money itself is broken when it can be printed, and broken money is the problem. 100%. No one will defend China. First of all, I kinda said that in passing, but I I did say it. I will. I will stand up for that. No one will defend China. I will. This is, of course, send it Mike. I feel that reducing the economic interdependence between the US and China is dangerous, and I don't wanna see a trade war. Most Chinese people have no problem with American people. The Chinese government isn't the best. This is true. But a trade war won't hurt them. In fact, it will give them more power as they can say, look at what evil greedy Americans are doing. Blaming China for our Dutch disease is not understanding the issue.
Well, let me just keep going and then I'll circle because that's the paragraph I wanna talk about. Keep up the good work. I would love to hear some more talk about how to get non KYC Bitcoin aside from mining. Great question. I know there are platforms out there, but I hear they involve gift cards and trusting strangers online, which is a recipe for getting robbed. Okay. We will definitely circle back to that in a future episode. Thank you very much. I do wanna talk about China. This is not something I talk about on here other than kind of referencing from time to time. I have been in China, gosh, probably not a dozen times, but close to it.
Initially, on my own, for some reasons that we're not talking about on here. And more recently over the last, well, the last 7 years for, my business, for my company that I worked for, we had people who worked in Beijing, engineers who worked there, and, I traveled back and forth, there a number of times. I'm quite familiar with China. I'm quite familiar with both China in terms of Beijing, although I've not been to the other major cities, and also rural China in terms of, you know, 6, 700 kilometers out of, Beijing. People who I literally remember in 2,002 going to a village and you would go to the village. It was heartbreaking. There'd be a single light bulb in their little brick building, that they lived in.
So I've seen a lot of China. I have watched Chinese politics. I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak, I'm sorry, the one that they speak in the southern part of China. I'm a complete blank. But I don't speak or read Chinese. But I do have a number of people that I keep in touch with and this kind of thing. First of all, the Chinese government not only is not the best, they're among the worst. And there's a number of reasons for that. I can talk to you about that privately if you would like. That's fine. I'm not gonna sit here on this podcast and and do that. But you can look at the history of China and the millions and millions of people who starved to death, for example, in the seventies because of the governmental policies.
You can look at the eighties, frankly, and this may get me in trouble. You know, I I guess this could get our podcast banned in China. I don't know how well, I do know they monitor for stuff like this, and that's fine. I don't give a crap. I personally know people in 1989 that were Chinese, university students in Beijing, who were at Tiananmen Square, okay, In April, May, June, I think June 4th was when they sent the regiment of, troops, tanks in, not from Beijing, and that was on purpose. It was from 100 of miles away. That way, the people who came in, the army who came in, the army unit, didn't know the people in Beijing.
Makes it a little easier when you don't know somebody. And they ran them down, and they slaughtered them. And the numbers that you see don't do justice that are released by the government. I again, I know people who were there. And, in fact, the friend of mine who was there after I met him in in early 2000, I think in 2005, 2006, he killed himself. He could not handle it. Okay? So, yeah, I'll say that. I don't want a trade war. I don't. I do believe that the US economy needs to shore up its manufacturing. I'm sorry, Ken Chen. I didn't really intend to get into this, but, I don't want a trade war. I don't. And you're right. Most Chinese people have no problem with American people. And frankly, if you know the Chinese people, I don't have a problem with the Chinese people at all.
I have a problem with the Chinese government. I also believe at this point in my life, I can't do anything about that. Neither can the US. That is up to the Chinese to deal with as they see fit. I I am not for interventionist. Okay? Yeah. Sorry. I that unleashed a lot for me. I apologize. I just I probably should apologize before I started that. But yeah. I I don't know. China is in a very, precarious position though. Economically, they are not doing well at all. Not at all. They have built a facade in a way that our government hasn't even managed to do to cover things up, and it's starting to fall apart. And I feel sorry for them.
I do. Because the people there, those same people we were talking about who have no problem with the US, with Americans, they're the ones who are gonna get hurt. It's not gonna be, the people in power. It's not. It never is. But it's certainly in this case, it will not. And I can't think of the guy's name, the guy that came in power power 20 years ago. I I can't, but it doesn't matter. I remember when he came in power, by the way, thinking maybe he was going to change things. And it's very clear at this point that he's not. So, anyways, sorry.
You're right. We cannot blame China for our lack of manufacturing. I will 100% agree with that. That was our decision because we wanted cheap crap here in the United States, and I rail against that. I do not like it. It's causes landfills to get filled up, and it causes lots of issues. So I do think we ought to bring back manufacturing to America. Do we do how can we do that in the right way? I can't I can't answer that. But yeah. Alright. Sorry. Wow. Whew. That was not fun. Sorry.
[00:53:28] Kenshin:
It's okay.
[00:53:30] McIntosh:
I may decide to cut all that out. I don't think so. But yeah. No. It's so it's fine. It's okay.
[00:53:37] Kenshin:
Alright.
[00:53:38] McIntosh:
Send it back. I it's not you, buddy. I promise. I just you touched a nerve. I am so glad you're listening. Really. Seriously. And you still may not agree with that, and that's fine. I'm I'm good with that. I really am. I have no problem with people having different opinions. Trust me. I'd I'm not a fan of our a lot of things about our government. I'm not a lot of fans of a lot of governments. So, I mean, it's not a big deal. Yeah. Alright. News. Notes. Move on. News.
[00:54:13] Kenshin:
Well, news. We talked a lot about mining in this episode. Right? Mhmm. And I saw today, actually, Canaan, the the Chinese company, as we talk about China as well, introduced the Avalon, Mini and Nano 3s. So I have the Avalon Nano 3, and it's a very small heating unit with around a 100 to a 140 watts of power, and it's producing 3 to 4 terahertz of of, Bitcoin mining power. And now they introduced the Nano 3 s. It's the same exact, device with, 6 terahashes for the same amount of power. So that's quite a big, upgrade on the device. And they introduced also the Avalon mini. That's a bigger bigger, unit. How do you call it? Heating heating units Mhmm.
That, spends around 800 watts, and produces a lot more heat, of course, for bigger rooms and combined with around 35, 37, terrahasis of power per second. So that's that's quite quite efficient. I did the calculations really fast. It's very, very efficient. But I assume it's gonna be quite expensive. So I would consider it really because I need more heat in my home. And those small, Nana's are not so powerful. So I would like a bigger heater, but, I need to see the price first. Yeah. But I thought it was it's interesting to we get now more consumer level products that you can actually put in your home, and it looks like normal small heater. Right. And I think we'll see more of this than that.
[00:56:13] McIntosh:
And right now, they're not generating any income. At some point, I think those sats will become more meaningful even with little bit that they're producing. 10 years might be a different story. Right?
[00:56:31] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:56:33] McIntosh:
Okay. Yeah. And there was a Bitcoin ATM, operator that reported a data breach of 58,000 users. So I don't know what they take when you do one of these. I've never actually done one, although I've walked up to one and looked at it. I know that they've got the camera going on there. I don't know what other kind of personal information you're having to put in, and I have a suspicion it may vary. This company was called Byte Federal, and name just the whole 9 yards. All of it. It doesn't matter. It's all your personal wow.
[00:57:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's name, birth date, address, phone number, email address, government issued ID, Social transaction activity, and photographs of users. That's what the company said. Good.
[00:57:30] McIntosh:
So this actually goes back to what Synth and Mike said kind of about the whole p to p thing, you know, with the security aspect. It's the same thing here because someone could then take that. And now they've got your address if they think you got a bunch of Bitcoin. They can do the old, you know, quote, $5 wrench attack Mhmm. And show up at your house. Hey. Give us a $100,000 in Bitcoin or, you know, we're gonna hit you over the head. Right. Be careful. Yeah. Be careful. And that stuff will become more prevalent. Don't be scared. Be careful and be vigilant because this stuff will become more of an issue as Bitcoin price go up and Bitcoin becomes more mainstream.
Yep. Mhmm. I'd let me look at my Twitter. Excuse me. X real quick in case I I posted Maybe a few things we wanna I keep meaning to do this, and I think, actually, today, in terms of time, we're doing okay. I had this beautiful Twitter. I I really you know what? I'm gonna read this. I'm sorry. I'm fixing to screw up this whole podcast today. But you know what? This goes back to what those and I'm gonna read this, and I'm just gonna stop. This is gonna be it. This goes back to what those people on on Macintosh is a little wild today.
Stacker News. They were talking about, well, we only care about number go up and whatever. That was one of the criticisms. I wanna read this because this right here is about and I just posted reposted this earlier today. This person has already followed me back. I'm glad. Maybe one day we can get her on the show. I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. She posted this earlier today. Forever Laura. Laura Stack Sats on Twitter. Okay? This, I started receiving Bitcoin as a payment method at 23 years old when my parents were losing everything we had against banks. Even though I was earning Bitcoin back when it was at $6,000, I was living paycheck to paycheck when I had to pack up my things from my bedroom and the family house that was taken from us all while finishing university on my own and paying for it myself while I had 2 jobs, 1 paid in Bitcoin.
Over the years, I finally started saving, €10, I think. Pretty sure that's what that is. €10 a month in Bitcoin, then a100. Sometimes I had to dip into those savings, and that's okay. When idiots tell me I should have just huddled everything, I remind them that I simply use this technology the way it was meant to be used as a monetary system to receive payment for work I did for companies outside of Italy. She lives in Italy. A beautiful but dead country full of lost opportunities and corrupted people to try to reclaim my financial independence. I was a young girl with an artistic design background, 0 technology, bankrupt parents, and no idea how money worked.
Through Bitcoin, I rewrote my future, and nothing else could have given me such an opportunity. My only mission is now to help people understand that there is a way out of everything even when they have to do it on their own because there's a better system. Only fiat minded people judge you based on how much Bitcoin you have. Screw them. Sorry. Nice. I I That's beautiful. You know what? That's what Bitcoin is about. Bitcoin is a store of value, but it's also a way to exchange money. These and it's fair. It's fair. Unlike so much of our world.
Alright. I we're skipping the software updates. Sorry. I'm just not into it. I don't know. Sorry.
[01:01:22] Kenshin:
I I I love it because it's it also gives the opportunity to people like that to eventually pursue their own dreams Right. And do what they're best at. And I think that's more productive for society. It is. It is a hard way. The society
[01:01:38] McIntosh:
in general will be better off because I think I guess her name's Laura because Laura did that because she was willing to do the work and set that aside and scrape and scrimp and sometimes have to pull from that savings. You know? Could you do the wrap up, Kenshin? Would that be okay?
[01:01:59] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. So that's it for this episode. As we have discussed before, this is a value for value podcast, which means that we try to offer you some value, and in return, we would love if you could leave us a comment and boost on the comment section to give us some value back. It might be value, in some feedback, what we can do better, what you would like to hear from us, and it could be value in, terms of sets. For example, you can use a podcasting 2.0 application, like fountain, like podcast guru. What's a popular one on iPhone right now? Macintosh.
[01:02:45] McIntosh:
Nostner? Sorry. I apologize. I'm I'm out of it. What's
[01:02:51] Kenshin:
I I'm so sorry. Podcasting 2.0 on iPhone. Good lord. Fountain,
[01:02:57] McIntosh:
podcast guru, Castomatic. All 3. Custom guru. Yeah. Those those are cool. Yeah. I I mean, let's be honest. Fountain is the most popular. I mean, it just is.
[01:03:11] Kenshin:
Yeah. It is, but I'm going back and forth. I will stop using Fountain now for a few months. I will go back to Podcast Guru personally because I prefer the app, how it functions, and how it functions as a podcasting app. I will miss some of the Zapin features, but, I'm a bit frustrated with the technical issues of the actual player Yeah. In that sense. Sense. But, anyway, that's out of the point. Mhmm. So you can go ahead and and find your own post podcast, app in in the website, podcastapps.com, And you can support us that way. You can, follow us on Nostr. We are both on Nostr and x.
We have our information on the description of the podcast. So you can follow us from that and you can visit the website, satorches plebs.com for all the information and the library of, of all the episodes of this podcast. So that's all for today. Thank you, my friend.
[01:04:27] McIntosh:
Sorry, guys. I've I've never been like this on this podcast before. I do apologize. Bitcoin is a beautiful thing, and I just I don't want it screwed up. I don't. You guys have a great week, and we'll talk to you soon.
[01:04:42] Kenshin:
Have a nice week. Bye bye.
The countdown is over. What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is January 10th, and this is episode 1 92 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:11] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And today's episode is Bitcoin is not crypto.
[00:00:16] McIntosh:
What? I'm shocked. I'm glad we're talking about that, and we are gonna be talking about that. It's a common question that comes up. People talk about crypto and whatever, but we'll dive into that in just a minute. Before we do that, let's talk about everybody's favorite topic, the price. And drum roll, please, we are down to $94,599
[00:01:13] Kenshin:
US as we record
[00:01:16] McIntosh:
€91,500. So I've now put on my sad face. And, actually, I saw it earlier this morning hit 93. Now that's the lowest I've seen it on this pullback. I don't know. It would I is you could make the argument, Kenshin, that this is on bad economic data here in the United States over the last few days, and, wow, everybody's crying. I'm sure there's a lot of truth to that. I just think it's really funny that the tool to fix our monetary system gets beaten down when we get bad economic data. I just find that amusing. But it is what it is. I
[00:01:59] Kenshin:
I I am patient because it's, the year 2025. And as we know, it's,
[00:02:06] McIntosh:
the right thing to know. Thing says 2024. Oh, that's funny. Right.
[00:02:12] Kenshin:
No. But it's we if we follow the cycle and Bitcoin has only the forward look the previous cycle so far, then Mhmm. We're we're for a big year. So Oh.
[00:02:22] McIntosh:
I'm patient for later in the year. And you are a good man, sir. My tea is extremely hot today, so we will let it cool off for just a little bit before I start drinking too much of it. We are also at block height 878,384 as we record. And very quickly, our difficulty adjustment is roughly nothing. It's 0.12% down on January 12th. And what that means, Kenshin, is those stupid Russian miners did not go offline, and I am very mad about that. I'm going to go on strike and turn my miners off. Wait. Maybe I shouldn't do that. Yeah. We haven't seen a block recently in almost We have not. Actually, we were talking about that right before we hit record. It has now been 81 hours.
The last block was 877,919. Is that that's the last block that they mined? Yeah. It must be. Yep.
[00:03:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. And the fees in the mempool are 5, 6, 7 sats per vbyte. So for a normal transaction, you need, to pay 6 sats per v byte, which is around a bit less than $1. And we have 371 megabytes of unprocessed transactions. And the transactions in the mempool are 187,000
[00:03:56] McIntosh:
transactions. You know, I've never taken the time to try and dig into the mempool and, like, look at old transactions and whatever. I mean, you could go to mempool.space, and it's got a graphical interface. And, yes, you can click around in that. But, I mean, like, I don't know. Really examine it. Right? I would be curious. My point is this. I'd be curious, like, how like, what's the oldest transaction in there? Right? What's the average age? Like, are there a lot of old, like, 1 sat per v byte transactions in there? What's what's going on? I've not ever seen an analysis like that, and I I just think it'd be interesting.
So,
[00:04:45] Kenshin:
yeah. Anyway You can find all this information in the mempool.space if you dig into it. Yeah. It has it.
[00:04:51] McIntosh:
Oh, it does? Like, I'm just not looking in the right places. Yes. So okay. Well, maybe I should poke around. Yes. If you go to the charts and graphs area there, you can find. I will take a look at that. I want okay. Mempool by b well, anyways, I don't wanna get sidetracked on that. I will take a look at that. The funny thing is is I've used that for a long time.
[00:05:17] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. We all use it on the front page mostly. Right? Right.
[00:05:23] McIntosh:
So what's up with Kenshin? What's up are you guys did you are you out of your snowpocalypse?
[00:05:30] Kenshin:
The No. No? We got a new how do we say? A new wave of snow. Wave. The same as before. So around 10 to 15 centimeters. Okay. And and we didn't have time to clean it this time. So, yeah, it's, there it sits. It's a lot of snow right now. I have seen this
[00:05:53] McIntosh:
done. You might want to consider this. You could run a Bitcoin, miner and then you could, like, I guess they run I'm not sure if they run a fluid or they run air. It's probably fluid underneath your sidewalks and your driveway, and you can use that to keep the snow melting. Wow. You you actually could do that. I'm not sure how much it would cost and how long, and you might better just keep shoveling, but it is possible.
[00:06:25] Kenshin:
It's incredible how many use cases you think of when you understand mining. Mhmm. And then everything you see around you, you think, oh, could I use that to mine some Bitcoin? Could I use that source of mine?
[00:06:38] McIntosh:
Reasonably common at this point that, you know, there's been a number of people who do it anyways, who mine who heat their swimming pool, which might be a little more relevant to me than than keeping snow off my driveway. Yeah. You got swimming pools, greenhouses. There's a spa in Brooklyn, for example. This is pretty famous that they heat their water with Bitcoin miners. There's actually a place in Finland. Maybe you can make a trek there one day. And, the entire town no. You don't go oh, I don't know if it's too far. Like, it's too far. No. I like it. It's too far.
[00:07:20] Kenshin:
Sounds close. But
[00:07:22] McIntosh:
but 11,000 homes are heated, with it's it's one of the big miners or they have a a, like, a data center there, and they basically that in a new Yeah. It's crazy. And that kind of thing will become more and more common. I know a guy, sort of, who dries beef jerky with his miners. I mean, it's the use cases are endless, and it's just kind of your imagination. You know? Right. And I think for home miners, those type things might be one way that you could justify it. Right? Because for certainly for the majority of us, electricity costs at home are pretty expensive, right, compared to Yeah. That what a miner means.
[00:08:17] Kenshin:
That was the case for me when I bought my little nano miners. I'm not earning any Bitcoin, as profit if I would pay the costs Right. That they produce, but I use them for heat
[00:08:33] McIntosh:
instead of using another minor for heat Right. Or another heater for heat. Now you turned off your heat. So I have a signal to, like, wind down because, your heat pump was, like, making a noise in the room that you're in. So when he pulls the blanket on, and I can see it in the video, that's my cue to stop. So we'll see how that works.
[00:08:57] Kenshin:
Alright. Very cool. And it's in it's in the news. I will bring it back, the subject. I have a item on the news later. Okay.
[00:09:07] McIntosh:
And just in general, though, I think probably our weeks have been pretty similar. Just back at the, old Fiat mine, making Fiat so we can pay the bills and such and buy more Bitcoin, hopefully. I know for me, it's been a, frankly, a pretty rough week. I'm hoping in the next couple weeks, it kinda levels out, but we've been having some troubles at work. And, not all is is good in that that area. So
[00:09:43] Kenshin:
Yeah. I wish you the best. Well,
[00:09:46] McIntosh:
just keep going on. Alright. So this week's topic, Bitcoin is not crypto. Right? So we are gonna break this down. This is something I've talked about in the past on the show. It has been a while, and it is something that comes up every bull run and will, for the foreseeable future. I I view a future where there's no such thing as other crypto. I may be naive. That's true. But I think let me give you a statistic, which I need to look up. Actually, you know what? I'm gonna stay on track. I'm gonna do this, and then I'm gonna go look that up. Alright. So what what we've done is we've come up with 5 different ways that Bitcoin is different, and I would argue superior to crypto. So you've got all of these other things, and you're there's always something new.
Elon's out there talking about Doge. Ethereum is like a bad rash. It just hangs around. Solana, all the meme coins on Solana, all of this kind of stuff, and you're going to hear about it. So it's important to understand what is different about Bitcoin. Aside from the fact that Bitcoin has been here the longest and has the proven track record, what is different about Bitcoin? What makes it unique? What makes it special? And so to me, the number one thing is actually, that there's no CEO, so to speak, of of Bitcoin. If you look at any other token, whether we're talking about ADA, Ethereum, Solana, or or whoever, there there's there literally is a CEO of Ripple, for example, at least whatever their backing company is, The XRP token.
And that means that, you know, he's involved well, I'll say this. At this point, he's like involved with the government, trying to get some things done. That is literally a point of attack if you wanna look at it that way for that network, for the ripple network. He could be compromised. Will that happen? Am I saying that that is happening? I I don't know. And I'm not saying that it is happening, but it is a possibility. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was started by someone that we he goes by the pseudo anonymous name of Satoshi Nakamoto. He did a very good job of covering his tracks. No one, to my knowledge, has truly been able to figure out who he was.
And after a pretty short period of time, he disappeared. There he posted an email or, what is it? Like a like a bulletin board forum type thing saying, I'm done. I don't know if it was on an email list or a forum. It doesn't matter. The project is in good hands. I should have looked this up beforehand, but and and disappeared. And he go ahead.
[00:12:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. He said something like, I'm taking over new projects, something like that. Which I I've always wondered what that new project was, actually. Yeah.
[00:13:08] McIntosh:
And, no, ladies and gentlemen, it was not Ethereum. He is not Vitalik. Please don't insult me. Alright? So that, I think, is point number 1. Because when you have a CEO, when you have a person in charge, that introduces a whole host of problems. Okay? And and we see that in these other projects from well, just a number of different things. I don't wanna go into all that detail. But yeah.
[00:13:39] Kenshin:
Right. Number 2, we have that Bitcoin is not centralized. Mhmm. It's completely decentralized. It's run by nodes all over the world, and anybody can, set up a node and run the Bitcoin, Blockchain. And right now we know there are around 20,000 nodes that are open for us to see. There are also nodes that are, covered under the Tor network, so we don't really know how many there are. We know that there are at least 20,000. We even know that there is a copy of the blockchain on the International Space Station Yeah. I believe. I don't know if it's still active, that project, but it was at some point.
And, that means that no one can influence the network. In a sense, no one can go and turn off a server. The they cannot just turn off a computer or, confiscate a hard drive or something like that. It's it's literally spread out all over the world. And no matter if if a whole country like US or China bans it, it doesn't matter. It's it's always gonna be online
[00:14:57] McIntosh:
because there's always some people, some countries that will allow it and Have you ever seen there's like a global map of the nodes. Yeah. Like, you know, and then the the globe is spinning around. It's amazing how spread out it is. I mean, it is just literally on it's on every continent. It's on every, it's getting to be the point where it's in every country. It's not. But, yeah, really, really cool stuff. And there's another aspect to this as well with mining.
[00:15:28] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Exactly. We have the most, processing power. It's backed by real energy Mhmm. And real processing power. So right now, it's at an all time high. The whole network is run by an 800 exahas of compute power. Right. Which is a lot. And this another topic that people say, oh, it's too much energy spent, but it's mostly energy that was going to waste or would go to waste. Right. So it's harnessing excess energy in the world, and it keeps the network running. And that also means that if, how is it called, a bad actor wants to take over the network, they need this amount of energy or more, which is impossible for any entity to do. And and that was a concern
[00:16:28] McIntosh:
early on, to be honest. Right? That that, you know, the US or China or whoever, could take, could basically, take over the network just by putting more more compute power online that was currently mining. I think we're well past that at this point. I mean, we've seen, for example, with China banned mining, and roughly half the miners were in China. And we saw over the course of a month, those miners migrate out of China. The the compute power, the the exahash dropped basically 50%. The miners that were online were having a field day, making money, but no one was able to take advantage of that because even back then, which I think that was 2021, the amount of power that was online was enough that that 50% reduction, which I don't think we'll ever see I don't even ever think I don't think we'll ever even see that amount drop again, but we're certainly far above that level at this point. So I I don't know where we were at back then, to be honest, but it'd be an interesting Much lower than what? But much lower than it is right now. Yes. Yeah. And I was trying to while you were talking about this, I was trying to think, or determine how many servers that would be. I can't find a figure for it.
I guess I could run a raw calculation based on, let's say, an average of a 100 terahash per node and then figure it out that way. But regardless, it would be many, many, many thousands of servers. I do not know how many. But a large operation can have thousands of servers. So, you know, we're probably talking about over a 100,000, probably even closer to a1000000, maybe even than that. I don't know. I'd have to do the calculation. But it's a lot.
[00:18:25] Kenshin:
Yeah. So it's it's a lot of energy and power. And and for me, that's also important because it's it's because everybody says it's digital. It's nothing. It's created out of thin air, but it's really not. It's literally connected to physical, real energy.
[00:18:44] McIntosh:
Right. And I You can't take that away.
[00:18:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I equate it to, in a sense, like a battery. Mhmm. Because you might you use energy, you mine, and then you have Bitcoin. And then that Bitcoin in the future, you can sell it back for energy. So you you move, let's say, the energy to the future in time, like a battery. Right. Of course, you can buy others things with Bitcoin, obviously. And, or you can invest in infrastructure and improve your energy facilities as we see that you're doing with Bitcoin now. So for me, it's it's, it's a clear point once you understand it and you explain to someone and they understand it, it's it's easy to ignore the the FUD out of the mainstream media as well.
[00:19:36] McIntosh:
And I honestly, a lot of the FUD, around mining has died down in the last 6, 12 months, in the last, you know, half a year or year or so. Because it's become so obvious how Bitcoin mining works.
[00:19:53] Kenshin:
Yeah. Except in Norway.
[00:19:56] McIntosh:
We except in Norway. I which I man, I just don't understand that.
[00:20:01] Kenshin:
But I mean, they literally have 95% renewable Mhmm. Energy powering Bitcoin mining in Norway, and they're the ones screaming the most. Right.
[00:20:10] McIntosh:
But overall, over half the Bitcoin miners run off renewable. And it just to be clear, that is not because it's a bunch of green people running Bitcoin miners. That's not what that means. It means that that is the cheapest power that they have available because Bitcoin miners don't care about having to be online 247. They can handle a variable load in your electricity. And AI for example, can't. It just can't. Most compute services can't handle that. Most power, loads can't handle that. Only Bitcoin mining handles that so elegantly. And my, my miners, for example, I hate to say this, but some of them go down on basically daily basis because they're curtailing the power.
Because some of it's on hydro. I know. I'm not actually sure where all my servers are. So they have different reasons for doing that, but it's part of the agreement that we made with them. But that doesn't I mean, it hurts my bottom line in the sense that, you know, I don't get paid when those nodes are not online and hashing. But it but it works. The price of power is cheap enough that that makes sense. So Mhmm. How do you argue with an industry who's 52% renewable? And frankly, is the amount of renewable energy resources goes up, that will go up.
What other I mean, gosh. We sorry. I don't wanna turn maybe we should just stop forecast? No. I yeah. I don't wanna turn this into a long rant about that. But there's no other industry. Just one real quick thing that can do, for example, taking the energy that was being burned off in flare gas, from natural gas when they mine for oil, which we have to do. Taking that, converting it to electricity, and then driving minors off of that. There's no other industry that can do that. It just doesn't make sense anywhere else. So I don't consider that renewable energy, but it's over there Number 3 Number 3, proof of work. So I wanted to talk about this for just a minute. This springboard's off of that, mining.
So in crypto, there's basically two ways of looking at this stuff. We pioneered, not we, but Bitcoin pioneered proof of work with the whole mining setup in order to, distribute things fairly. In order to I'm I'm not even sure how to explain that part of it, Kenshin. But
[00:23:22] Kenshin:
It's the ledger. Keep the keep the blocks coming and keep the blocks connected to each other with cryptography and to be, let's say, have the work done. So so no one can go back. If a bad actor again wants to change the ledger, has to go back and spend at least equal or more energy to change the previous block and only the previous block before the next block valid block comes. So it's it's a bit complicated to describe, I know, but it's
[00:23:57] McIntosh:
So it's both time and compute based. Right? You have a minimal amount of time to do it or it's kind of locked in. And you have to have an a significant amount of power, which at this point is essentially too much to do it. So, it keeps that ledger safe. The alternative to that would be called proof of stake. And for example, Ethereum actually made a mistake and switched from proof of work to proof of stake. What that means is you quote stake your Ethereum, you put it in a vault, so to speak, and it's held and you're supposed to generate, like, Ethereum from that. Okay? You get rewarded for that.
There's a couple of problems with that. For one thing, as the price of the asset gets higher, the cost of a proof of state becomes very, very expensive. I don't remember exactly because it's been way too long. Well, no. It hasn't been too long, but it's been a long time since I've looked at the Ethereum stuff. When they made that switch, is it 32? I think it might it's 20 I wanna say it's 32 coins that you have to stake. Right now with Ethereum being, like, $3,000 or whatever, that's like a $100,000 that you just have to lock up in order to create any kind of, return.
Now I'll tell you, my miners are not cheap, but they're not a $100,000. There are a couple of $1,000. And so I can buy a couple $1,000 miner, plug it in and start earning Bitcoin, so to speak. Creating hash, putting it again in the pool and getting my share of that reward. It's that simple. And I don't ever see a future where a Bitcoin miner is going to cost a $100,000 It just that doesn't make sense. It's a commodity. There are companies out there who are competing building miners. Yes. They're getting more powerful. Yes. They're getting, more energy efficient and these type things. But because of that competition, I can look forward 10 years.
And most likely, those miners shall still only cost 15 100, $2,000, maybe a little bit more, to to buy. And it does depend on what part of the cycle we're at. But I'm gonna leave that aside. Like, right now, I could get a miner for $1500. That's a, a modern miner. So I to me, it's a clear winner. And yet because of the FUD by Greenpeace, specifically by people like that a lot of these cryptocurrencies are using proof of stake. Ethereum famously moved from proof of work to proof of stake. There are a few, I know offhand Monero is a proof of work. Right? You have to you have to compute to earn Monero.
I don't know if others like coin maybe or or have they given a Yeah. I think it is like coin. Yeah. Okay. Dogecoin, but
[00:27:23] Kenshin:
it's they're irrelevant.
[00:27:24] McIntosh:
Well, no. I I I do wanna be fair, though. You're right. I'm just trying to be fair here, Kenji. But the vast majority of them are proof of stake. Right? Yes.
[00:27:36] Kenshin:
Okay. So And why I say they're irrelevant is because the proof of work might be a good aspect of them, but the other points that we're discussing Sure. They don't fulfill those other requirements to be fair and decentralized, etcetera, that we're talking. So in that sense, they're irrelevant, but the proof of work side of them is is okay.
[00:27:58] McIntosh:
So why don't you go ahead and do number 4 there?
[00:28:03] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we have, the fair distribution.
[00:28:06] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:28:07] Kenshin:
So Bitcoin, was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto. He mined the first block, the Genesis block, and that was, the anniversary of that was January 3rd. Wasn't it a week ago? Yeah. It went too long ago. Mhmm. Yeah. We were just celebrating that on the on. And so what he did, he mined the 1st block. And because he mined the 1st block, he got a reward of 50 Bitcoin. And that first block was special in a sense that it looked itself up and no one could use those 50 Bitcoin from the reward of mining it. And after Satorce did that, then he announced to the world that now this is the Bitcoin network and this is how it works and this is how you mine it. And he opened it up so anybody could mine it along alongside him in in, equal, let's say, in equal measures. Mhmm. So in that sense, after that point, Bitcoin was spread out around the world to people who mined it as rewards.
And it was spread out in a fair way and in an open way. And and this is quite unique in that sense. Because right now we're sitting at 19,500 or 800,000 coins mined and those 19,800,000 coins minus those 51st coins. All the rest are have been distributed, fairly. And this is a big, minus to the vast majority of the cryptocurrencies where they do the so called pre mine, where a group of people, they pre mine sometimes a lot more than 50%. I saw now whichever came in the news from Trump or whatever, and they had pre mined 90 something percent of that coin. And and though those coins means that the CEO or the founding group have in their wallets, the majority of the coins that they didn't have to pay for them. Right.
And then the when they publish them, publicly and people can buy them, they have to pay for those coins and they push the price up. And then whoever is the founder sells those coins for a huge, huge
[00:30:48] McIntosh:
number. We call that a pump and dump.
[00:30:50] Kenshin:
Pump and dump. Yes. So you see the price is near 0. It climbs up to a strange high level, and then it drops after a few days to back to 0. Right.
[00:31:01] McIntosh:
I did wanna mention, as a maybe another example of this Ethereum. One of the early Ethereum people came out and said that 70% of the Ethereum supply was pre mined, and I'd heard that number for years. Yeah. I think that's a very accurate number. They continue to this day to sell off. They just did a tremendous amount of Ethereum sale. In the last few months, The Ethereum Foundation, the people who were supposed to be guiding Ethereum, it's a joke. I mean, it it really is. I mean, it just creates a much more equitable system when it's fair like this. And to to realize that Satoshi was so smart that he the very first block, which no one else was competing for, that he took the time to make sure that those coins could never be spent.
It's just mind boggling to me. It's like the big leagues versus the little leagues, you know, like, literally, like the little leagues and you got guys down here who can't catch the ball and you got, you know, Satoshi's out here pitching a a no hitter. You know? It's crazy.
[00:32:26] Kenshin:
And for me, what's also crazy is I don't want to insult anyone, but the people who follow some of those coins and they completely ignore it or sometimes make excuses for that. Mhmm. And I don't think it's excusable to pre mine
[00:32:41] McIntosh:
and do this so called No. It's it's it's fraud in my opinion. And I'll just say it. And as someone who started with Bitcoin, who became involved in crypto and then has ended up smartly finally back in Bitcoin. I will tell you that I did not know about that when I was buying Ethereum at 10¢ and selling it at, you know, 15 or whatever it was. It's probably a little higher than that, but I I got involved in Ethereum specifically pretty early on, but I didn't have any clue that that had gone on. Not any idea. There's no one ever told me. Oh, yeah. By the way, the guys who created this also, you know, set aside more than half of it for their own uses.
How fair is that?
[00:33:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And and, honestly, that's a big part of why we're talking about this topic today. It's to educate in some ways some people who might not know it. And I do that if we move on now to the next point. That's what I I do when I onboard friends and family. I like to talk to them about those points, even if they don't know about other cryptocurrencies, even if if the topic is Bitcoin. Right. But then in the end, I told them, look, be careful now that you're into Bitcoin and you learn more about it. You'll go out there to read the post, cryptocurrencies, how they work and stuff.
But, but be careful. There are other cryptocurrencies out there that will will have a lot of claims of how they are better in some ways. They're always better. Yeah. Always better. Faster or, whatever. Yeah. And then so I I caution them. I told them some of those points. Of course, I don't spend 1 hour on explaining those points. But to to say that there is no CEO, there is no centralized centralized authority behind it. The nodes are decentralized, so no government can can confiscate the blockchain. That needs proof of work, that is based on real energy. Mhmm. And that it has been fairly distributed compared to those other cryptocurrencies that are not. So I give them those tools to know, to be careful and watch themselves from and protect them from trying to think, oh, but I was too late for Bitcoin as everybody thinks. And there maybe I can take that other meme coin and make some I don't know. Then I'm early on this and I can make money there.
[00:35:22] McIntosh:
There was not a single crypto outside of Bitcoin that created a website. Somebody created a website for Bitcoin, and I don't know who it was. And maybe they were anonymous. It doesn't matter. But It's open source? The Bitcoin no. The Bitcoin faucet. Do you do you have you heard about this? I'm I didn't see it. I'm sure you I don't think you did either. But literally, you would go to this website and, like, press a button or something, and you would get 5 Bitcoin.
[00:35:51] Kenshin:
Okay. Yeah. I I know that,
[00:35:54] McIntosh:
test net faucets. I I No. That's yeah. That's different. This literally was a website. I mean, in the early days, people were out there mining and they were using or creating Bitcoin. And they were just kind of literally like trading it around. There was no I think it was over a year before Bitcoin had a price at all. Yeah. So, yeah, it's just like a completely different situation. I did want to make one final note. I added it here as we were working, and I can't find the numbers. But there's 2 things that I wanna emphasize. I think most people have no idea how many crypto have been created. It's 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000. I saw a figure and it was well over a year ago.
There was like 20,000. It's trivial to make a crypto currency by the way. Kenshin or I probably have the audience could actually make a cryptocurrency. And that's the problem. It's so simple at this point that everybody just goes out and they make one and then somehow they're gonna magically become the next Bitcoin. Well, Bitcoin is Bitcoin, and we don't need the next Bitcoin. But because it's so easy, the vast, vast majority of those crypto are gone. I would say that, I did see a figure that the top where where did that go? Oh, it was right here.
Doggone. Oh, there it is. The top 20% or the top 20 cryptocurrencies, which would include Bitcoin certainly as the number one, make up almost 90% of the total market. And that's just a staggering number. Just think about that. And then I will tell you, I can sit here and tell you. And this is not well, this is what I believe. Time will tell. I think 10 years from now, 20 okay. Let's just go 20 years. 20 years from now, none of the crypto that we talk about, Solana, Doge, Ethereum, EADA. I don't even think ADA is gonna last 5 years, frankly, but, you know, whatever, they'll all be gone.
Now there may be new ones in their place, but they will be gone. The people who were involved with them most likely will have lost a lot of money and have nothing to show for it. And that is one of the reasons why I am Bitcoin only. I played these games, ladies and gentlemen. They're not fun. Learn from someone who has been there. Do the research. Do the proof of work. As we say, Do the research until you understand Bitcoin, until you believe it, and then you invest in it. And stop worrying about the rest of these things. How's that, Kenshin?
[00:38:58] Kenshin:
I I I agree, but I see a world where the governments cannot resist themselves to make their own CBDCs, and companies do their own coins like Twitter is preparing. And, yeah, Meta has done that also and failed. That will probably be true.
[00:39:20] McIntosh:
Those the vast majority of those will not be real investable. I mean, are you gonna invest in a Twitter token? I hope not. And with the whole government thing, I'm interested to see the first country that pegs their actual currency to Bitcoin. I don't know who that's gonna be. I I don't even have a guess, but I do think it will eventually, even if it's a 100 years from now, I think it will happen. Now Yeah. Do they do that as some digital token so that they can manage that for their own reasons? That's possible. But that's not really a it is a cryptocurrency, but it's not the same thing.
Every one of these cryptocurrencies that are out there right now, they're they're they're an investment. Right? Give me your money, and I'm gonna give you Ethereum or ADA or whatever. And that number is gonna go up, and we're all gonna get rich together. There's very few projects that that's not the the pitch. That's not really what we're talking about in that case. We're talking about a country who wants to track transactions, really, which then we could talk about privacy, but that's a separate issue. Yeah.
I don't know. I it will be interesting, and I probably will not get it 100% right. In fact, I'm sure I won't. But I do know that ADA is not gonna last. Ethereum is not gonna last. It's not. What happens when Vitalik gets bored and walks away? I mean, he practically is now, it seems to me. I don't see what's going on over there. It seems like after they did their big switch to proof of stake, they just kinda bogged down and nothing's been and I think there's people getting pretty worked up about that. I don't think that's just me thinking that. So I've told y'all a number of times. I'm gonna go ahead and say it right here.
If you own some of these coins, my this is this is not investment advice, but my advice would be that you sell it at the top. If you cannot sell it right now for if you just you can't. I get that. Sell it at the end of the year. Either to fiat or to bitcoin and move on with your life and stop worrying about this stuff. Okay? Yeah. Alright. We have a question. Agree.
[00:41:52] Kenshin:
Yeah. I mean, question is on the topic. Mhmm. So if the listeners have another way, if if they get that question from friends and family, how do they react? What do they tell them? Why should they focus only on Bitcoin? So that's the question. If you have another strategy and I've seen some comments online, some people have other opinions as well. So it will be interesting to hear from our listeners.
[00:42:22] McIntosh:
It's always fun getting out there into the social media platforms. Kenshin, I'll just say this. Kenshin posted on on Stacker News, which I, early on, had been involved in to an extent. And I kinda stopped getting on there because, man, some of those people are just toxic. That's just all there is to it. I don't mean because of toxic being Bitcoin, Bitcoin only. I mean, toxic as in, if you don't agree with me, then, you know, blankety blank blank blank. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not allowed to have my own opinion. Sorry I don't fit into your narrow world view.
[00:43:08] Kenshin:
I was taken aback today by the reaction. I'm like, as a Bitcoiner, I'm asking other Bitcoiners about,
[00:43:16] McIntosh:
their opinion and their strategy of of So, apparently, what we've been doing is just completely useless, Genshin. So I'm glad that we had people tell us that.
[00:43:28] Kenshin:
Yeah. Good times. Essentially.
[00:43:31] McIntosh:
No. I mean, that's that is literally what, not well, you know what I mean. Alright. Let's move on to some better stuff. No sad puppies this week, Kenshin. No? No sad I need a happy puppy face. That's what I need. I see that. Yeah. I need a like, I know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to get so the sad puppy is a black Labrador. Right? I'm gonna get, like, a golden Labrador playing in a field of flowers, and that'll be my happy puppy because isn't that happy? So we did get some boost, and we do appreciate it. We're gonna run through these, our friend, Send It Mike, boosted in. Did he send a message? He did not.
[00:44:17] Kenshin:
No? Let me no. No message. Send us a message on,
[00:44:21] McIntosh:
on the stern. We have a message, and we'll get to that. But on the boost itself, 5,000 sats. Very much appreciate it. Send it, Mike. Thank you very much. You wanna go ahead and do the next one?
[00:44:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we got a message and a boost from about yourself. Yeah. So quotes currently splitting wood while Kenshin talks about splitting wood.
[00:44:47] McIntosh:
I love the analysis. Thank you, Will. HBH Gardens, and as you said, boosted a 1,000 sets. We appreciate that.
[00:44:56] Kenshin:
Now and by the way, Will, if you go to my Nostril profile a few days ago, you will see that I was splitting wood again. I did some proof of work or as I call it proof of wood. It's p o w, you both. Yep.
[00:45:12] McIntosh:
Alright. And send it, Mike. We did get your message sorted out, and thank you so much. I am going to read this verbatim, first of all, and then we're gonna talk about I thought this was a fabulous message, first of all. Thank you. You've obviously thought about this. I agree with a lot of it. Some of it, frankly, I don't. And that's okay. We can agree to disagree. Maybe we'll talk about some of it. But, let me just read this. First of all, I usually respond with questions when I hear people say I'm too late. Because it is usually an extension of if I don't find a significant change my lot in life quickly, I feel like I'll never get off the hamster wheel.
I I I understand that. Now you could steer them towards understanding the money itself is broken when it can be printed, and broken money is the problem. 100%. No one will defend China. First of all, I kinda said that in passing, but I I did say it. I will. I will stand up for that. No one will defend China. I will. This is, of course, send it Mike. I feel that reducing the economic interdependence between the US and China is dangerous, and I don't wanna see a trade war. Most Chinese people have no problem with American people. The Chinese government isn't the best. This is true. But a trade war won't hurt them. In fact, it will give them more power as they can say, look at what evil greedy Americans are doing. Blaming China for our Dutch disease is not understanding the issue.
Well, let me just keep going and then I'll circle because that's the paragraph I wanna talk about. Keep up the good work. I would love to hear some more talk about how to get non KYC Bitcoin aside from mining. Great question. I know there are platforms out there, but I hear they involve gift cards and trusting strangers online, which is a recipe for getting robbed. Okay. We will definitely circle back to that in a future episode. Thank you very much. I do wanna talk about China. This is not something I talk about on here other than kind of referencing from time to time. I have been in China, gosh, probably not a dozen times, but close to it.
Initially, on my own, for some reasons that we're not talking about on here. And more recently over the last, well, the last 7 years for, my business, for my company that I worked for, we had people who worked in Beijing, engineers who worked there, and, I traveled back and forth, there a number of times. I'm quite familiar with China. I'm quite familiar with both China in terms of Beijing, although I've not been to the other major cities, and also rural China in terms of, you know, 6, 700 kilometers out of, Beijing. People who I literally remember in 2,002 going to a village and you would go to the village. It was heartbreaking. There'd be a single light bulb in their little brick building, that they lived in.
So I've seen a lot of China. I have watched Chinese politics. I do not speak Mandarin. I do not speak, I'm sorry, the one that they speak in the southern part of China. I'm a complete blank. But I don't speak or read Chinese. But I do have a number of people that I keep in touch with and this kind of thing. First of all, the Chinese government not only is not the best, they're among the worst. And there's a number of reasons for that. I can talk to you about that privately if you would like. That's fine. I'm not gonna sit here on this podcast and and do that. But you can look at the history of China and the millions and millions of people who starved to death, for example, in the seventies because of the governmental policies.
You can look at the eighties, frankly, and this may get me in trouble. You know, I I guess this could get our podcast banned in China. I don't know how well, I do know they monitor for stuff like this, and that's fine. I don't give a crap. I personally know people in 1989 that were Chinese, university students in Beijing, who were at Tiananmen Square, okay, In April, May, June, I think June 4th was when they sent the regiment of, troops, tanks in, not from Beijing, and that was on purpose. It was from 100 of miles away. That way, the people who came in, the army who came in, the army unit, didn't know the people in Beijing.
Makes it a little easier when you don't know somebody. And they ran them down, and they slaughtered them. And the numbers that you see don't do justice that are released by the government. I again, I know people who were there. And, in fact, the friend of mine who was there after I met him in in early 2000, I think in 2005, 2006, he killed himself. He could not handle it. Okay? So, yeah, I'll say that. I don't want a trade war. I don't. I do believe that the US economy needs to shore up its manufacturing. I'm sorry, Ken Chen. I didn't really intend to get into this, but, I don't want a trade war. I don't. And you're right. Most Chinese people have no problem with American people. And frankly, if you know the Chinese people, I don't have a problem with the Chinese people at all.
I have a problem with the Chinese government. I also believe at this point in my life, I can't do anything about that. Neither can the US. That is up to the Chinese to deal with as they see fit. I I am not for interventionist. Okay? Yeah. Sorry. I that unleashed a lot for me. I apologize. I just I probably should apologize before I started that. But yeah. I I don't know. China is in a very, precarious position though. Economically, they are not doing well at all. Not at all. They have built a facade in a way that our government hasn't even managed to do to cover things up, and it's starting to fall apart. And I feel sorry for them.
I do. Because the people there, those same people we were talking about who have no problem with the US, with Americans, they're the ones who are gonna get hurt. It's not gonna be, the people in power. It's not. It never is. But it's certainly in this case, it will not. And I can't think of the guy's name, the guy that came in power power 20 years ago. I I can't, but it doesn't matter. I remember when he came in power, by the way, thinking maybe he was going to change things. And it's very clear at this point that he's not. So, anyways, sorry.
You're right. We cannot blame China for our lack of manufacturing. I will 100% agree with that. That was our decision because we wanted cheap crap here in the United States, and I rail against that. I do not like it. It's causes landfills to get filled up, and it causes lots of issues. So I do think we ought to bring back manufacturing to America. Do we do how can we do that in the right way? I can't I can't answer that. But yeah. Alright. Sorry. Wow. Whew. That was not fun. Sorry.
[00:53:28] Kenshin:
It's okay.
[00:53:30] McIntosh:
I may decide to cut all that out. I don't think so. But yeah. No. It's so it's fine. It's okay.
[00:53:37] Kenshin:
Alright.
[00:53:38] McIntosh:
Send it back. I it's not you, buddy. I promise. I just you touched a nerve. I am so glad you're listening. Really. Seriously. And you still may not agree with that, and that's fine. I'm I'm good with that. I really am. I have no problem with people having different opinions. Trust me. I'd I'm not a fan of our a lot of things about our government. I'm not a lot of fans of a lot of governments. So, I mean, it's not a big deal. Yeah. Alright. News. Notes. Move on. News.
[00:54:13] Kenshin:
Well, news. We talked a lot about mining in this episode. Right? Mhmm. And I saw today, actually, Canaan, the the Chinese company, as we talk about China as well, introduced the Avalon, Mini and Nano 3s. So I have the Avalon Nano 3, and it's a very small heating unit with around a 100 to a 140 watts of power, and it's producing 3 to 4 terahertz of of, Bitcoin mining power. And now they introduced the Nano 3 s. It's the same exact, device with, 6 terahashes for the same amount of power. So that's quite a big, upgrade on the device. And they introduced also the Avalon mini. That's a bigger bigger, unit. How do you call it? Heating heating units Mhmm.
That, spends around 800 watts, and produces a lot more heat, of course, for bigger rooms and combined with around 35, 37, terrahasis of power per second. So that's that's quite quite efficient. I did the calculations really fast. It's very, very efficient. But I assume it's gonna be quite expensive. So I would consider it really because I need more heat in my home. And those small, Nana's are not so powerful. So I would like a bigger heater, but, I need to see the price first. Yeah. But I thought it was it's interesting to we get now more consumer level products that you can actually put in your home, and it looks like normal small heater. Right. And I think we'll see more of this than that.
[00:56:13] McIntosh:
And right now, they're not generating any income. At some point, I think those sats will become more meaningful even with little bit that they're producing. 10 years might be a different story. Right?
[00:56:31] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:56:33] McIntosh:
Okay. Yeah. And there was a Bitcoin ATM, operator that reported a data breach of 58,000 users. So I don't know what they take when you do one of these. I've never actually done one, although I've walked up to one and looked at it. I know that they've got the camera going on there. I don't know what other kind of personal information you're having to put in, and I have a suspicion it may vary. This company was called Byte Federal, and name just the whole 9 yards. All of it. It doesn't matter. It's all your personal wow.
[00:57:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's name, birth date, address, phone number, email address, government issued ID, Social transaction activity, and photographs of users. That's what the company said. Good.
[00:57:30] McIntosh:
So this actually goes back to what Synth and Mike said kind of about the whole p to p thing, you know, with the security aspect. It's the same thing here because someone could then take that. And now they've got your address if they think you got a bunch of Bitcoin. They can do the old, you know, quote, $5 wrench attack Mhmm. And show up at your house. Hey. Give us a $100,000 in Bitcoin or, you know, we're gonna hit you over the head. Right. Be careful. Yeah. Be careful. And that stuff will become more prevalent. Don't be scared. Be careful and be vigilant because this stuff will become more of an issue as Bitcoin price go up and Bitcoin becomes more mainstream.
Yep. Mhmm. I'd let me look at my Twitter. Excuse me. X real quick in case I I posted Maybe a few things we wanna I keep meaning to do this, and I think, actually, today, in terms of time, we're doing okay. I had this beautiful Twitter. I I really you know what? I'm gonna read this. I'm sorry. I'm fixing to screw up this whole podcast today. But you know what? This goes back to what those and I'm gonna read this, and I'm just gonna stop. This is gonna be it. This goes back to what those people on on Macintosh is a little wild today.
Stacker News. They were talking about, well, we only care about number go up and whatever. That was one of the criticisms. I wanna read this because this right here is about and I just posted reposted this earlier today. This person has already followed me back. I'm glad. Maybe one day we can get her on the show. I don't know. Maybe that makes sense. She posted this earlier today. Forever Laura. Laura Stack Sats on Twitter. Okay? This, I started receiving Bitcoin as a payment method at 23 years old when my parents were losing everything we had against banks. Even though I was earning Bitcoin back when it was at $6,000, I was living paycheck to paycheck when I had to pack up my things from my bedroom and the family house that was taken from us all while finishing university on my own and paying for it myself while I had 2 jobs, 1 paid in Bitcoin.
Over the years, I finally started saving, €10, I think. Pretty sure that's what that is. €10 a month in Bitcoin, then a100. Sometimes I had to dip into those savings, and that's okay. When idiots tell me I should have just huddled everything, I remind them that I simply use this technology the way it was meant to be used as a monetary system to receive payment for work I did for companies outside of Italy. She lives in Italy. A beautiful but dead country full of lost opportunities and corrupted people to try to reclaim my financial independence. I was a young girl with an artistic design background, 0 technology, bankrupt parents, and no idea how money worked.
Through Bitcoin, I rewrote my future, and nothing else could have given me such an opportunity. My only mission is now to help people understand that there is a way out of everything even when they have to do it on their own because there's a better system. Only fiat minded people judge you based on how much Bitcoin you have. Screw them. Sorry. Nice. I I That's beautiful. You know what? That's what Bitcoin is about. Bitcoin is a store of value, but it's also a way to exchange money. These and it's fair. It's fair. Unlike so much of our world.
Alright. I we're skipping the software updates. Sorry. I'm just not into it. I don't know. Sorry.
[01:01:22] Kenshin:
I I I love it because it's it also gives the opportunity to people like that to eventually pursue their own dreams Right. And do what they're best at. And I think that's more productive for society. It is. It is a hard way. The society
[01:01:38] McIntosh:
in general will be better off because I think I guess her name's Laura because Laura did that because she was willing to do the work and set that aside and scrape and scrimp and sometimes have to pull from that savings. You know? Could you do the wrap up, Kenshin? Would that be okay?
[01:01:59] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. So that's it for this episode. As we have discussed before, this is a value for value podcast, which means that we try to offer you some value, and in return, we would love if you could leave us a comment and boost on the comment section to give us some value back. It might be value, in some feedback, what we can do better, what you would like to hear from us, and it could be value in, terms of sets. For example, you can use a podcasting 2.0 application, like fountain, like podcast guru. What's a popular one on iPhone right now? Macintosh.
[01:02:45] McIntosh:
Nostner? Sorry. I apologize. I'm I'm out of it. What's
[01:02:51] Kenshin:
I I'm so sorry. Podcasting 2.0 on iPhone. Good lord. Fountain,
[01:02:57] McIntosh:
podcast guru, Castomatic. All 3. Custom guru. Yeah. Those those are cool. Yeah. I I mean, let's be honest. Fountain is the most popular. I mean, it just is.
[01:03:11] Kenshin:
Yeah. It is, but I'm going back and forth. I will stop using Fountain now for a few months. I will go back to Podcast Guru personally because I prefer the app, how it functions, and how it functions as a podcasting app. I will miss some of the Zapin features, but, I'm a bit frustrated with the technical issues of the actual player Yeah. In that sense. Sense. But, anyway, that's out of the point. Mhmm. So you can go ahead and and find your own post podcast, app in in the website, podcastapps.com, And you can support us that way. You can, follow us on Nostr. We are both on Nostr and x.
We have our information on the description of the podcast. So you can follow us from that and you can visit the website, satorches plebs.com for all the information and the library of, of all the episodes of this podcast. So that's all for today. Thank you, my friend.
[01:04:27] McIntosh:
Sorry, guys. I've I've never been like this on this podcast before. I do apologize. Bitcoin is a beautiful thing, and I just I don't want it screwed up. I don't. You guys have a great week, and we'll talk to you soon.
[01:04:42] Kenshin:
Have a nice week. Bye bye.
