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
Next week begins a new presidency in the United States. Promises of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (for better or for worse) have been made. The accumulation of Bitcoin as a national asset has begun for multiple countries.
Where does this go? Trump has suggested that a SBR could be used to pay off the national debt. Is that even possible? Let's dive into the numbers and discuss where Bitcoin might go in the coming years.
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
January 15th, 2025: 99,599 USD | 96,500 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
879,390
News and Notes
Iran Blocking Crypto Gateways
Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City
Music Credits
Protofunk by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4247-protofunk
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Ethernight Club by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/7612-ethernight-club
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Website
https://satoshis-plebs.com
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
McIntosh can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. His mastodon handle is @[email protected] and his Nostr. Kenshin can be reached on Twitter at @kenshin_ninja or on Nostr. Kenshin’s email is [email protected]. You can also follow the Satoshi’s Plebs podcast account on Nostr. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is January 17th, and this is episode 193 of Sapocia's Pleb. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:08] Kenshin:
And I'm Kenshin. And today's episode is projections.
[00:00:41] McIntosh:
We must be getting serious, Ken. You just took your jacket off and I just realized I didn't have my tea. I've got cold tea today, not hot tea. That's I may have to get up in the middle of the show. I'll go get some, but we'll see. We're gonna roll right through this. We are as of right now as we record a price of 99,300 in US dollars. And how much do we have in Euros?
[00:01:15] Kenshin:
Well, in Euros, we're around 96,500
[00:01:19] McIntosh:
right now. Trying to close-up the slack, trying to make things equal. We'll have to see about that. Alright. We've got a block height right now as we start the recording of 879390. A very small difficulty adjustment estimated. We just had 1, 0 point 1% up. I think it was our 7th up adjustment in a row, if I'm remembering correctly. But, right now, we're looking at 0.8 percent up, on January 26th. But, of course, we're really early in that cycle, so who knows where we'll end up? Do you wanna get the fees?
[00:02:04] Kenshin:
Right now, the fees are 5, 6, and 7. So low priority, 5, medium, 6, high priority, 7. And that's around, half to $1 per transaction. Yes. We also have, in the mempool, let me see, 250 megabytes in the mempool. Very, very low, actually. And a 131,000 unconfirmed transactions. So that's quite good.
[00:02:34] McIntosh:
So even though we're a little higher right now at 5, 6, and 7 sets per v byte depending on your priority, I think overall in the last month or 2, really now, things have kind of been low. We're cleaning out the mempool. It wasn't too long ago that that mempool was 5, 600 megabytes. We're now down below 300, and we have been getting 1 SAP per v byte transactions through quite regularly. I mean, you're not gonna get them through immediately, but, I think that things are starting to clear up. So, you know, if you're trying to move things around, which consolidate maybe, put stuff in cold storage, that kind of thing, that's great.
It does mean that in general, the network's slowing down a little bit. I don't know why that would be. But, I have a feeling later this year, it's going to pick back up, to be honest.
[00:03:34] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:03:35] McIntosh:
I think it's the, the waiting game now for the It is a waiting game, and we were only a few days off from our inauguration, here in the United States. Trump will be taking office on 20th, which is Monday, just a couple of days after this recording, takes place or, well, after it's released. And we're gonna be talking about that in a roundabout way. This is not a political podcast, but frankly, this has become a very important topic here. I believe in regards to Bitcoin and its future. Will Bitcoin if Trump were not in office, would Bitcoin survive 100%. And it would still go on to do, you know, the things that it's going to do. I just think that this does change things a little bit, and and we're gonna talk about that. And we're also gonna talk about kind of one of the off the cuff remarks that I actually heard him say, in July at the Bitcoin conference, during his kind of, promotion to her or whatever you wanna call it when he was reaching out to the crypto people, which is let's be clear, it's not just Bitcoin when it comes to Trump. And I wanna be very clear about that. We love to wanna say he's like the Bitcoin president or whatever.
And it's not true. I do believe he, believes in Bitcoin. I think he also thinks that there's other things going on, and he's certainly shown his support for regulation across the board. So we'll get into all that in just a minute. But first, Kenshin, what's up with you up there in Sweden?
[00:05:17] Kenshin:
Well, I'm quite quite happy this week. The snow is melting surprisingly. So we have a plastic grease finally. And, so most of the snow has gone and it's more comfortable to walk outside right now. So quite satisfied. And a lot of my colleagues are not, they are the opposite. The Swedes love the snow, so they are disappointed. But, but that's fine. I get my way for once. You get your way. Right?
[00:05:50] McIntosh:
Very cool. I bet you'll have some more snow soon. I Yeah. You know, I, maybe this is a good time to talk about this. I listened to a great podcast, yesterday. It was, was it, I think it was the Bitcoin frontier. One of the podcasts that I listened to and they had a guy on there that is like the CEO or CTO or something of a company that operates primarily in the Nordic countries. So when we say the Nordic countries, what that means is Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and Iceland. I maybe And Denmark. Right? Maybe. And Denmark? Denmark, I actually did not know that. So Denmark, as well. And it turns out, which I did not realize this, you guys got some really cheap power up there up in the north.
Now, maybe not where you live, but in the northern part of those countries, especially in Finland, I believe, like 2¢ per kilowatt power, which is I would die for that. Like, just all of my savings would be, like, everything would be into miners, and they would be out there earning me some bitcoin because there is profit margin at that price. Let me tell you. So down where you're at, maybe not so much. There is an excess of power essentially in the northern parts because and there were some reasons that they went into about that. It was very interesting. They were also talking about in Finland with the district heating that they have going on that is being powered.
Some of it by I think it's Marathon, but one of the major miners, they're essentially feeding their hot water that they generate by their miners into that system. So, some very interesting stuff there. If you if you have an interest in that, it was, I think the latest Bitcoin frontier park podcast. Just wanted to throw that out while I was thinking about that.
[00:07:58] Kenshin:
And then for my So you're telling me I need to move north.
[00:08:02] McIntosh:
That's what I'm telling you. If you wanna mind Bitcoin, maybe you should think about moving to Northern Finland. I mean, I'm just saying
[00:08:10] Kenshin:
I'm already really cold. Years
[00:08:12] McIntosh:
of a lot of snow and it just might be worth it. I'm just saying. So yep. So this week for myself, we did not have any snow, but I did get a new iPhone. And this is something that I've wrestled with for a long time, actually. Whether I was gonna get a, like, a Pixel and then convert it into Graphene or go with a new iPhone. The phones that my wife and I had were 4 years old. So they're like super old at this point. And the batteries were junk and just, it was not good. Like, they were just not like, my phone stopped. Call like, people would call and I could not hear them talking. It's great. A great way to cut down on your sales calls.
A month or 2 ago, I actually as I've told y'all in the past, I do projects, construction stuff, and work on sheds and this kind of thing. I need something for my ears because I do, I'm not, I'm not a good person. And when I work on a chop saw, like cutting up, wood to the right length, this kind of thing. I don't put on headphones and it's bad for my ears. So to compromise, I tried something out. So Apple does have a pair of, active noise cancellation is what it's called. I think it's the iPad Pro. I don't know. I don't keep up with all this stuff. It doesn't matter. It's a little set of, of things that go in your ear.
And, it does, it actually cuts down on the noise about 25 decibels, which makes virtually anything that you'd be working on in construction, safe. And they're just in your ears. And of course, you can use them to listen to podcasts and that kind of thing. So I tested it with my old phone and then that's that's really what convinced me to go ahead and get a new iPhone. So I have one of these bright, shiny new iPhones. It's bigger because my eyes are not so good and I'm getting older. Let's be honest. My old one was like the tiny little SE and, yeah. So we went bigger and, we went with a new iPhone and now it's got all these stupid Apple intelligence crap on it. It's gonna be great. I'm telling you.
Plus it's Apple, which I have all kinds of problems with. I know I'm a hypocrite on this, and that's fine. I'm willing to be that.
[00:10:55] Kenshin:
How much surveillance is there in the Apple Landsra?
[00:10:58] McIntosh:
Yeah. I don't know. I I don't even wanna think about it. So that's done, dusted. I've got most of my apps moved over and all that. I've took this opportunity to clean up my iPhone, as well. I had a bunch of junk on it, and so I didn't just move everything over. My wife, on the other hand, she moved everything over. I'm like, okay. You deal with it. It's yourself. I'm just here to help. Alright. Yeah.
[00:11:31] Kenshin:
So are you satisfied then?
[00:11:34] McIntosh:
It is definitely faster. I will say I'm satisfied in that sense. I'm not a fan, this Apple intelligence mess. This kind of AI, so to speak, I'm I'm just really not a fan of. There's very little of it I actually find useful. It's mostly just bells and whistles. Right. Yeah. And a way to shell sell shiny new product. You know? Alright. So let's get into our topic this week, Kim Shin. Now you may be wondering what we meant when we titled this episode projections. This entire thing actually comes from something I saw on Twitter. So if you'll bear with me for just a minute, I'll explain and then we'll go into this and I'll try and keep this reasonably concise.
One of the things that Trump also said in that, meeting, he said, in addition to this strategic Bitcoin reserve, which of course is a big campaign platform thing for him, and is looking very likely to happen. He said that we're going to stack a 1000000 sats, excuse me, a 1000000 Bitcoin over the next 20 years. And I hope I get all this right and it's fluctuated somewhat.
[00:13:00] Kenshin:
No. She said a million in the next 5 years. Okay. I apologize.
[00:13:05] McIntosh:
And actually, maybe I need to update my numbers. It doesn't matter for the raw calculations I did the next 5 years, but we would not sell for 20 years. Right? Okay. So we're gonna stack a 1,000,000 sats in the next 5 years. We're going to not sell for at least 20 years. And, you know, we're gonna make America great because this is Trump and, rah rah rah. He also said we could use that to help pay off the debt. And in fact, I have heard people say, and I'm not gonna say that he said this because I'm not a 100% sure that he did. But I have heard people say something along the lines of we will pay off the debt with this. Like it could cover the debt of the United States. Like this is going to get us out of the debt that we have.
And even though I wasn't very good at math in college, I do like math in terms of Bitcoin because it's simple. It's, it's, you know, I can manage these numbers. So I said, that doesn't sound right. One thing that Trump never talks about and one thing that no politician, I'm not going to say that because I'm sure there's 1 or 2 out there. The vast majority of the politicians these days do not talk about is cutting spending, not spending more than you make. That is the reason I'm gonna talk about the United States because that's where I live. And these are the numbers that I have in front of me. $36,000,000,000,000 in debt.
And, you know, rah rah, we lead the world in the amount of debt. It's like 36.2 or 0.3 trillion, which is funny because we say 0.2 or 0.3. That's literally 2 or $300,000,000,000 So when the numbers get this big, it becomes really easy to not even understand the scope of what we're talking about. But that is the debt of the United States. So I wanted to do some extrapolation based on what if the United States bought a 1,000,000 Bitcoin? What if we held them for 20 years? And then where would we be in terms of debt? Now, I did not deal with inflation at all.
Now that doesn't mean we're not gonna have inflation. What I did do is go to what do they call it? The congressional budget office or something like that. This is literally people who work for congress, and they deal with the federal budget. These are their own figures. So they have projected out basically 20 years what the debt of the government will be. And the best oh, I need to open up the spreadsheet. Okay. All right. So the figure that they gave, where was it? It's on my sheet here. Current US. Okay. Current US debt is $36,000,000,000,000 as near as I can tell it from what they figure. And again, I want to emphasize, this is the own government projections. This is not some right wing radio guy out there saying, well, the debt's gonna be whatever.
Okay? So my guess is this is going to be low. But in 2050, the debt is projected to be right at $100,000,000,000,000 So roughly three times what it is right now. Okay? Now I would say that if anything, again, those numbers are skewed low, not too high. But let's go with those figures for this. Alright. 21,000,000 bitcoin in total. We wanna stack a million, which by the way, that breaks down to 4.76 percent of the total supply. I want to point out one of the things I learned while I was looking this up. Currently, the US has like 3.8 or something percent of the world's gold supply.
I did not realize we own so much gold. We are at this point the number one holder of gold in the world. Just an interesting little figure that this is roughly the same amount. Okay. A little bit more. We're looking at 5 years to buy. What that means is that we have to buy, let's see. And I did calculate a starting amount of 200,000 Bitcoin. I don't know if that will be true. There was actually an an an there was actually an announcement today that the money that was, the Bitcoin that was taken by the department of justice in the bit fine next hack was actually going to be returned to them like in kind. So in Bitcoin, And that's actually a large part of this 200,000.
I'm going to set that aside. Let's just go with, we have 200,000 to start, meaning we need to buy a 100,000 more. That actually means every month for the next 5 years, and I did change the data. It's 1330 is it 1300 or 13,000? 23 it's 13,000 a month. Now understand there's only 450 that are mined per day right now. So I don't so it's roughly actually, if you think about that, that'd be 4,500 per 10 days. So that's roughly the same amount by one country, if that's true. And if we really are gonna do a 1,000,000 in 5 years and we start with less than 200,000, then it pushes that buy figure up.
Our current Bitcoin price, a 100,000. I am projecting a price in 20 years, 10,000,000 Bitcoin. 10,000,000 per Bitcoin. I actually think that's conservative. You may disagree. I don't know. It's a figure that I came up with for 10 minute 10 years from now with much higher global adoption than what we have right now. That means in 20 years, we will have $10,000,000,000,000 in Bitcoin. Again, our current debt, 36,000,000,000,000, our projected debt in 25 years, 100,000,000,000,000. Tell me, Kenshin, do those numbers add up to you? Can we pay off our debt like that, And which would completely exhaust our Bitcoin supply, by the way, maybe not a good idea. Let's get a little crazy, though. What happens if bitcoins not at $10,000,000 What if it goes, let's see. I did some market cap, figures. So we're at $2,100,000,000,000 right now at $100,000 per Bitcoin.
Okay? It's simply 21,000,000 times a 100,000. That's all it is. 2,100,000,000,000. At 1,000,000,000 bitcoin, we would be at 21,000,000,000,000. At 10,000,000 bitcoin, that's 210,000,000,000,000 total market cap, not at 1,000,000 bitcoin. That's all 21,000,000. And then at 50,000,000 bitcoin, I can't even say it. $50,000,000 per Bitcoin. Okay. It's 1,000,000,000. Which is just an insane number. It is literally, I think it's quadrillion, but it's the next number after trillion. 1.050, and then a whole bunch more zeros. Okay.
So it's it's 4 times bigger, than well, it's 5 times bigger actually than the 10,000,000 market cap. So at that point, you have now surpassed the total economic, what they call like, there's a number for, like, all the economic value in the entire world right now. It's like $900,000,000,000,000.
[00:22:04] Kenshin:
Okay? I was about to say that that's Right.
[00:22:08] McIntosh:
So again, this doesn't account for inflation. It doesn't account for anything. But I did a a crazy price of $50,000,000,000,000 or $50,000,000,000 in 20 years. Okay? The total value of that 1,000,000 Bitcoin would then be $50,000,000,000,000 So technically, it still wouldn't pay off the debts. Okay? Now inflation doesn't play into that. The if we have hyperinflation, then it becomes a better scenario essentially for Bitcoin paying off the debt. But that's not even something I really even want to think about, to be honest, because there's going to be so many things going on at that point that, it's just not a scenario I like to think about a whole lot.
[00:23:06] Kenshin:
I think the numbers are correct, what you're saying. And but I think the the theory of selling the Bitcoin to pay the debt, I think that was Trump saying it, but I don't think it was Trump saying it as part of the real plan. I think I think I remember when he said it was a throwaway line. It it was like, oh, and And I agree with that. Oh, and by the way, we can pay the debt with it someday, maybe. Right. But I think all the smart people behind the scenes, they don't expect the Bitcoin to pay the debt in the same way that the gold they don't use the gold to pay the debt.
[00:23:48] McIntosh:
Right. Because we do have a huge amount of gold, obviously, 5% of the world's total volume, essentially, same situation. And and we don't use that. And it's for a good reason. There's there's a reason we have it and we should not just be selling it off. But the thing that really bugs me in all this is, is going back to this for, and I promise this will be the final time, at least in this episode, Trump, any of the people around him, virtually every politician up there, they do not talk about. Yes. We're taught. I, let me rephrase that. We're talking about this Doge committee, this department of governmental efficiency or whatever.
They are even coming out now and saying, yeah, this really isn't gonna make a serious dent in our spending. Do they need to do it? I 100% think it's a good step, but this does not solve our problems. Our problem is we spend too much. We spend too much on defense. We spend too much on all of these social programs, frankly, health care and things like that. And we can have a different discussion about all of that. But just like a family, a nation needs to have a budget and stick by it and not spend more than they make. And we cannot and have not for decades done that. And that's why we have a $36,000,000,000,000, budget deficit. And it's only going to go up if that doesn't change it. And nobody talks about it because it's unpopular, which is probably not going to raise our ratings by the way, Kenshin. Sorry.
[00:25:36] Kenshin:
But as I talk about it. But it's, I think it's true. I think what really is going to happen happen if they do the reserve is that they will put a very valuable asset in their asset column. The same way that they have collected and they keep collecting gold from throughout the world. It's not to pay the debt, it's to take actually more debt. Because the more assets you have, valuable assets, the more you can keep printing money and get into more debts because it's balancing the scales. So so I think that's the real purpose because right now they don't they have run out of things to buy to balance the scales.
The deficit is too high, and this is the only thing that can balance the scales a bit at least. And it's the same way I think a sailor is doing with micro strategy. No one no one says anything to sailor that he gets into deeper and deep deeper debts right now. The biggest purchases he's doing is with Yeah. Loans. It's not with his profits. I don't
[00:26:50] McIntosh:
you're right. He he's 100% buying Bitcoin with loans, and I I personally am not comfortable with that. He is, he is essentially leveraging, the the the death of the dollar versus Bitcoin, right? The dollar going down in value versus Bitcoin going up. He's comfortable with that. And those type of bets can make the biggest returns. And to be honest, I have a suspicion that he will come out of this looking well. He'll be the richest person in the world. His company will be the largest market cap in the world. And I don't know.
But that doesn't mean that I'm comfortable with it. I'm I'm still a Dave Ramsey guy at heart where I just don't think that debt is is a good thing. I think eventually, whether it's now, 10 years from now, or a 100 years from now, debt comes home to roost and, and you need to be very careful. I'm not saying that you should never have debt, but adding more debt to the United and we do need a Bitcoin reserve. We need a Bitcoin reserve if only because there are other countries who are already doing that. And there are other countries who will start doing that as a nation state. We do need to do that. So I'm to be honest, I'm conflicted about this in some ways.
But with the spending that we've got, the amount that we spend on on a 1,000,000 Bitcoin, it's virtually a drop in the bucket compared to, you know, the the other things that nobody talks about because, man, it makes people uncomfortable and, you know, mad and whatever. Yeah.
[00:28:53] Kenshin:
Anyway. It's us to add to your, numbers that you mentioned earlier. If Just if the US buys 200,000 Bitcoin a year, that was a plan in for 5 years. Right. That is actually 550 Bitcoin per day. That's a 100 Bitcoin more. Right.
[00:29:14] McIntosh:
It's a 100 more than yeah. That sounds right. And so we are when was the mining? Was that this year? These years are are you no. Well, it's certainly last year. It was last year. That's why okay. So it was in April. Yeah. Which means 4 years from then. So before the 5 years is up, it will cut in half and will only be basically getting 225
[00:29:42] Kenshin:
a day. Exactly.
[00:29:44] McIntosh:
So if the United States does this, this will drive the price of Bitcoin up. There's just, it's unavoidable. You can own MicroStrategy is going to continue to buy, we will eventually get these larger companies like Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon and Google buying. We are seeing midsize companies who there are I have a Twitter thing. I think there's 9 public companies last year bought Bitcoin. Or maybe that's so far this year. We'll I'll look at my Twitter account here shortly. That is a drop into the bucket of what will be happening over the next few years. Because these are the pioneers even though we talk about them nonstop.
But the but the rest of the settlers are coming. What do you think of the
[00:30:39] Kenshin:
aspects that they could sell gold to buy Bitcoin? To buy Bitcoin? Some reserves that they say they could. That's a good question.
[00:30:51] McIntosh:
Interestingly, I actually think there are other countries who would buy the gold if we sold it. Sure. And I think those countries would be making a mistake.
[00:31:01] Kenshin:
Yes. They they the price of gold will drop naturally with so much gold being sold. The other countries were would rely on that gold for their reserves, so their value would drop.
[00:31:17] McIntosh:
I do think it would be a mistake for other countries to, like, buy our gold and not buy Bitcoin. If we start buying Bitcoin, if we sell off part of our gold to do that, I don't know that that's maybe the best idea in the world, but in the long run, I think it probably is. At some point, gold is just a shiny metal. Yeah. It's not a currency. It's not a, I mean, you could call it an asset. Yes. But when it's not being used, I just think there's more value in Bitcoin there, you know, gold when it was being used as currency was terrific, but that we're past that. We when we went off the onto a Fiat standard, we we left gold essentially.
And it's interesting that we've had this transition period, so to speak, from gold to Bitcoin, with with Fiat, which is, I guess you could say, it's not gone so well with all the debt that we've got. But yeah. Yeah. Wow. Did that make sense? I think it did. I mean,
[00:32:32] Kenshin:
even for us now, if you want to go and buy some gold and hold gold, how do you buy it? Where do you buy it? Where do you store it? How do you sell it to make profit back?
[00:32:44] McIntosh:
Shh. I got a deal, man. You need to know It's so complicated.
[00:32:49] Kenshin:
It's it's even more complicated. I've never bought gold.
[00:32:53] McIntosh:
And speaking of anonymous deals, that's actually something we need to talk about very soon, with the peer whole peer to peer thing, with Bitcoin. Right. I think, send it Mike requested that. So we don't wanna get scammed, of course, and we don't wanna lose our bitcoin or our cash. So, yeah, we should talk about that soon. But in regards to the strategic bitcoin reserve, I think we're about done. I do believe next Monday, there will probably be, I'll say this next week. I'm not going to say Monday. I think there'll be an announcement. I'm hoping before we go and rerecord and we'll, we're not going to like, keep talking about it, but it will be news. And if so, we will report it.
I think early he's going to, he's, there's all kinds of stuff coming out right now. He's having a crypto ball for his inauguration for one of the balls, which is just weird. He's setting up a crypto council or whatever. He has said that the sec will essentially stop pursuing, like, all the crypto stuff that they're doing. They're just gonna kinda put a freeze on everything until they get proper regulation in place, which I actually think that that's fair, because right now, it's a mess. He is moving very quickly on these crypto things. And I do believe that he will either there there is one option where he can kind of direct some money towards it and go ahead and and kind of do a smash buy.
I think that would be interesting if he did. But then, you know, on the other hand, rumor has it, he also sold off his Bitcoin that he owns. So I don't know. It's with Trump, you you never know what you're getting. I'll say that. But
[00:35:01] Kenshin:
I think he was very genuine during the conference when he he said Bitcoin is worth more than silver. And he looked around. Is that true? Yeah. You know, you could see it. It was genuine. Yeah. He understands Yeah. Value. He doesn't understand Bitcoin.
[00:35:18] McIntosh:
He does. He I don't know where he's from. It's somewhere in the northeast of the United States. And to be to be brutally honest, he just comes across wrong to me. Like just his mannerisms and the way he talks. I don't know. Yeah. I I he does believe a lot of what he's saying, but it's just so hard sometimes to actually I don't know.
[00:35:49] Kenshin:
It just is. Yeah. But he he's for sure not pro I would say Bitcoin. He's pro valuable asset in that sense. So whatever is shiny and more valuable, it seems he goes for it. So in that sense, we need to be a bit careful in that sense. But
[00:36:10] McIntosh:
They tried to do some meme coin or something. I don't I don't even know. Or I think it was a flop, to be honest. I just wish he just buckled down and let's get this done and move on. But I think we're gonna get some useful stuff out of this. Alright. Enough about US politics. Seriously.
[00:36:32] Kenshin:
One last thing. This is related to sending Mike's big unpopular opinion that he shared with us. So
[00:36:41] McIntosh:
Do you wanna go ahead and read that? I no. I yeah. We should. This is very important. Should we read the whole thing? I think it because it's everything we've been talking here. I think so. I he and I actually think a lot along the same lines, about this. But, yeah, let's let's read it. It is pretty long. Do you wanna read half of it and I'll read the other half?
[00:37:05] Kenshin:
So he says unpopular opinion about the Bitcoin strategic reserve, is a bad idea. And all this is him speaking. So if we buy Bitcoin with debt and don't address the underlying issue of uncontrolled deficit, we will get humbled. If you have a body deep in credit card debt, would you tell him, change nothing, take out more debt, and buy Bitcoin? Then magic Internet money will solve your problems. No. You would tell reduce expenses, figure out a plan to pay down the debt, then start stacking. It's no different with the government. It won't be long, and all the buyer of treasuries will start asking, why are we buying this?
Shortly after, the treasury market need massive buying from Fed to meet interest rates targets.
[00:38:04] McIntosh:
Okay. Yeah. And so just to be clear, treasuries are just, notes of credit, essentially, by the government. So they're they're a form of credit and they're it is adding to our debt of the United States. And I agree with what he's saying, other than the fact that I do believe we have to have a Bitcoin reserve of some kind as a nation. We have to have a crypto policy. And we, and because of that, because Bitcoin is the apex predator or whatever you want to call it, we need a Bitcoin reserve just like we need a gold reserve. Alright. Let me finish this up. It it, where were we? Until one day. Until one day it doesn't work and then the government sells what it can at a price they may not like just to operate, not to pay off the debt. Bitcoin doesn't care how big and important the US government is. It will humble them just like everyone else. You are 100% correct about that, sir.
The government gets desperate. They blamed supply chain disruptions for the last inflation. Right? They can just as easily blame crypto speculators for the next round. Then 6102, which is a reference to a executive order of some kind back in the early thirties, if I'm remembering correctly about gold, when they confiscated gold from everyone. Then 6102 on Bitcoin, 50% unrealized capital gains tax required to be paid in Bitcoin. I'll just leave. Okay? But what about your parents, your sister, your cousin? But I I don't speak to my cousins, but that no. I'm just kidding.
Might not be too easily might not be too easy when you're on a TSA no exit list until you pay your tax because you bought the Bitcoin KYC. A BTC strategic reserve won't solve the deficit problem as I proved earlier. And more the community, the Bitcoin community says it will make us more of a target when things go badly later on. There's a lot of very good points here. I will say that I do believe that we need a Bitcoin reserve. I am guessing at this point that the benefit of it will outweigh the more money that we're going to spend that frankly we're just gonna print to do so. And I did not read this before this recording session. I read it one time when, we were putting it in the notes. I'm not going to say I haven't read it before this, but as you could tell, my thoughts about this actually line up very closely with his. It's certainly in terms of we're not addressing the real issues. And yes, there is a possibility of things like, unrealized cap gain tax and you know, these kinds of things. We're not at that point yet.
And we do recommend that you do what you can to protect yourself. Okay? So I I guess I'm just not well, I don't wanna say it that way cause it doesn't sound good. Everybody has to decide for themselves, frankly. This could happen. The, the scenario that he outlined with a 6102 type, ruling, could absolutely happen. They could raise capital gains in general. He but Trump may come in next week and say no cap gains on Bitcoin because it's a currency, which would be spectacular. I don't think that's going to happen, but it is. The thing is we actually don't know with him. I know he's not going to slap down 61 or 2. It would not be his administration. It might not even be the next couple administrations, but it's not that it is a possibility and it is something you should consider.
Okay? And I will 100% agree with something else he says. I'll just leave. But what about your parents, your sisters? He's true. He he's correct about that. Right? If you're more than 20 years old, you have obligations. You may have children. You may have parents who are aging. You may have relatives that you're concerned about. And it does make it difficult. So, anyways, I appreciate that, Mike. That's that very thoughtful piece and, well said.
[00:42:54] Kenshin:
And I'm a bit conflicted because I agree with everything, but it's
[00:42:59] McIntosh:
But there's no answer. The only answer is you can do the best that you can do. And we over the coming, you know, months, we're gonna be talking about ways of protecting yourself, ways of buying crypto anonymously. I also think that we should spend some time talking about, like, coin mixers. In fact, there was some news about that this week. If I I'm not sure it's on the list, but a couple of more of the operators of one of those got arrested. Yes. 2 of them, I think. Yeah. So, you know, you just gotta stay alert, but don't let fear paralyze you. I'll say that.
[00:43:44] Kenshin:
Okay? Good. Great. Thank you, Mike. Should we do some news? Appreciate that. We don't have much.
[00:43:53] McIntosh:
Well, did we skip? Yeah, we did. So we do have some support to talk about before we jump to the news. So Mike also sent us a great boost this week. I wanna make sure to read that and then we're all caught up. Let me read this real quick. I appreciate this, Mike. You've been a great sport of the show. Another great episode. Thanks for the shout out, and thanks for sharing about your experiences in China. I'm sorry for the loss of your friends. I appreciate that, Mike. I was understating my disdain for totalitarian governments regarding China. The answer though is not to attack, China. This will only get a bunch of servants members killed on both sides and lead both governments towards more authoritarianism.
On a different note, you talked about changing up the outro music, not sure if you're taking input, but this song turned out well on Suno, and there's a link there. I'll have the link in the show notes. I would encourage you to go listen to it. Actually, it's a great little tune. I don't know if I wanna do that one for our outro every week, but I will tell you this might next week, I will put it on there, and we will promote it. It's a great song and well worth a listen. And he sent in a 10 69 sets. We also had some streaming, a total of 1128 sets as reported by Satoshi Stream, which is low because that's after their cut, essentially.
So I appreciate that. We appreciate the support, the streaming, and the boosting. And now let's jump into the news caption.
[00:45:35] Kenshin:
Right. We have, getting a little bit political and country based, but, we have Iran's Central Bank, blocks payment gateways to cryptocurrency exchanges. Their currency, the Iranian, real Real. Has dropped, has divided by 37% during last year. So for $1 Against the US dollar. So for 1 US dollar, you could buy 500,000 rials in the beginning of the year. And right now, with 1 US dollar, you can buy 800,000. So that's a huge Wow. Devaluation.
[00:46:19] McIntosh:
And that doesn't even take into account the fact that the dollar itself is Yeah. You know, inflating. It's devaluing, whatever. So, and so now they're blocking off access to cryptocurrency.
[00:46:34] Kenshin:
Yeah. So as I understand, you can still log in, but you cannot pay. The payment options are not working. And a few weeks ago, they had blocked the crypto exchanges, their bank accounts. So they they have been fighting from all sides, so people cannot get out of the system, cannot use the exit exit nodes, let's say.
[00:47:01] McIntosh:
Alright. Well, Iran's had a tough time, and their economy is not doing well. And unfortunately, their people are suffering for it. Alright. We've got one more news item I wanna talk about. Bhutan, one of my favorite little countries. I just get tickled. I don't know. I do. I was telling Kenshin, I really wanna go there one day, before we start recording. And maybe we will, and maybe I will get to go to this place. So, they are building a new city. I think this has been in the works for a while. I guess it's it's like a planned city, if I'm understanding if I'm remembering correctly and understanding correctly. It's called and I'm gonna man, this is not even gonna be funny.
Gelefu mindfulness city. They have plans to recognize Bitcoin, ether, the Binance token or whatever as part of their strategic reserve. So they are actually as a city building a strategic reserve. The country itself is out there mining Bitcoin in the Himalayas. I love it. They're using hydro power, and the country is building a strategic reserve. And then now this purpose built city is doing the same thing. Alright? And this was announced in late December, of last year. So it sets up a framework so that, among other things, they can offer companies can offer financial services, this type of thing.
And they are trying to promote growth in in a in a regulated manner. So it will be interesting to see how that turns out. In real estate, we have a saying location, location, location. And, I'm not sure that this is a good location for most people. But maybe with, with digital assets like this, it doesn't actually matter. So it will definitely be something I will be watching. I even though Bhutan is involved in Ethereum and other assets, I love I was telling Kenshin again before before we started recording. I think they have a king or a prince.
I really feel like that person, they are doing things to better their country. Bhutan is a poor country and yet by sats per citizen, if you want to divide it up that way, they actually have more at this point than any other nation in the world. So in the long game, they're going to end up doing very well. Does that make sense? You see what I'm saying, Kenshin? So even like El Salvador, with the amount of Bitcoin that it owns, which is like 6,000, it's not the same because they're such a small country. Right? What they're doing there in the Himalayas with the mining is is going to make a huge impact in the long term when Bitcoin gets to some of these crazy levels, that I think we'll be seeing over the next decade or 2.
So
[00:50:38] Kenshin:
And they say here that is is, on the border with India and Mhmm. And they claim to be well positioned to serve over 2,000,000,000 people in the region. So it might be a good location. We we'll we'll see. It is on the border with India,
[00:50:57] McIntosh:
and it's a good location kind of for that side of India. If you wanna say that India does have 2,000,000,000 people. I'm not I'm not sure where they're getting that number, but that's fine. I think in the end it doesn't really matter. You can look at Singapore, like it's just out in the middle of the Pacific and yet it's become a world financial leader. So maybe location doesn't actually matter Really. Yeah. It will be interesting to track, you know, El Salvador is doing what they can to bring in. Oh, that was actually a big news item. Let me mention this real quick, even though we don't have a link to it.
Tethr is moving to El Salvador. I don't know if you saw that. Tethr, the company, which is a very small company in terms of people, but really, really profitable. They are moving to El Salvador. So they've worked out some deal, and that's the kind of thing that that really helps El Salvador, you know? So really cool stuff. Alright. Do we have some software updates? We got a couple. We have a Bitcoin core 28.1.
[00:52:14] Kenshin:
So that's a semi major release, let's say.
[00:52:20] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:52:22] Kenshin:
And it's it's very technical. It's nothing fancy to really dig into, but it's a good time to update, this to this release, I would say. Yeah. I
[00:52:34] McIntosh:
Especially if you're running 28.0, I you would you would want to immediately
[00:52:40] Kenshin:
move on to this. It has some security updates as well as some small features. But I usually stay one version behind, so I think I'm 27.1.
[00:52:51] McIntosh:
I think I'm even further back than that. I don't know. I it's probably time I update my
[00:52:59] Kenshin:
my, nodes. Yes. You should do that.
[00:53:02] McIntosh:
Yeah. It's not something I worry about a whole lot. One I run behind a firewall, you know, on my local network anyways, and then the other, which is up on, it's on a, VPS. I don't even use it to, like, index anything. So there's no I guess if somebody compromised it because I didn't keep it up to date, it would not be the end. Bad Macintosh.
[00:53:30] Kenshin:
Yeah. FEDIMENT. Do you know? Alright. About FEDIMENT.
[00:53:35] McIntosh:
No. This is old. We can skip that. I we talked or did we just not cover it? I think it's been on there and we didn't cover it. That's okay. FEDIMIT, I'll say this. FEDIMIT, which is the federated, Chummy and e cash, system. They have a major new version out for them. It's, it's, it's not at 1.0 yet, although there are production releases out there, there's people actually using it, 0.5.0. If you are involved in that echo ecosystem, you definitely would wanna take a look at it. Yep.
[00:54:13] Kenshin:
And next, we have the Zapstore, version 0.2. And this is, one of my new favorite apps that I discovered also recently. Okay. It's an, Nostra based app store. So you you find apps on there and popular apps, like, for example, Albigo is the wallet for Albi, and, it's mostly Nostr, let's say, based in Bitcoin based, lightning based apps. But it's all those apps that are open source, that are based usually on GitHub repositories, and they are on that app store, and the devs are signing with their Noister keys. So you see that the actual person that you follow on Noister, which is a dev of, let's say Mhmm. Yeah, Amethyst, and he has signed the release. So, you know, it's genuine, not compromised.
[00:55:21] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:55:22] Kenshin:
Right. And this version is bringing, the ability to zap the devs so you can send them, sats
[00:55:31] McIntosh:
direct. So Zapstore is essentially the website, the software. Right? So is there an example where I could go and look at what you're talking about? You can install it. Okay. Yeah. You can install So it runs on your local on your phone. On your
[00:55:50] Kenshin:
okay. Sorry. I didn't I didn't catch what was So it's it's an app store for the phone, essentially.
[00:55:56] McIntosh:
It's right. I gotcha. The okay. That makes sense. I was thinking a website, and it's it's an app on the phone that acts like the Apple app App Store or the Google Play Store, I think it's That's a good point. Probably, it's not gonna
[00:56:13] Kenshin:
be functional on iPhone. I'm not sure. If you can install those type of apps Yeah. It probably wouldn't be, but
[00:56:22] McIntosh:
we'll take a look at it. Very cool. And then the last one,
[00:56:26] Kenshin:
Nostur.
[00:56:28] McIntosh:
I'm how do you say it? Nostur? Nostur? I don't know. So it's another Nostur client. Yeah. Is that right? And this is only for iOS,
[00:56:42] Kenshin:
macOS and iPadOS. So it's, alternative to demos, I would say, but it keeps popping up. Right. And, in my news feeds, they are updating the upload. So I do use demos.
[00:56:57] McIntosh:
I might wanna take a look at this.
[00:56:59] Kenshin:
Yeah. You should. I think it has more features. Yeah. It has this you can sync, the notes between devices to to see what you have read. So it syncs the progress more or less of of what you have read. And then it also supports now the the new image viewing, the Olas. Olas. Yeah. I see that. Which is essentially like a protocol built on top of Nostr to mimic Instagram type Right. Image viewing style. Yeah. Very cool. If you have an iPhone, you should try it, which now you have a new one. So I think I will.
[00:57:45] McIntosh:
I think I will. There's a few of us out there, unfortunately. Alright. That's gonna wrap it up for today. I think we've about got everything done. I hope that you, I hope that you like this. If you like what we're doing here, the best way that you can actually help support us is just to tell other people. Say grab whatever the latest version of Stoches Club is and, you know, tell your friends to take a listen. Tell your family, tell that uncle that doesn't understand Bitcoin. Whatever. There's other ways that you can support, of course. I don't think fountain has this set back up, but we used to be able to clip an episode. And, I don't think that's actually working. I need to make sure before I promote that again.
But, we have a lot of features in our podcast. I love telling people about this. We are a podcasting 2.0 podcast. Like, we have chapters, we have transcripts. For example, if you have trouble understanding my version of English, you know, you can follow along in the transcript and a lot of times that'll help people. So, we make that available automatically as part of our episodes. We are also a value for value podcast. And what that means is, we don't have ads, we don't have sponsors. We don't do anything like that. And I very explicitly picked that out a long time ago because I want to be able to talk to you without any, hint of shenanigans as I would call about whatever the latest hardware product is or whatever. I mean, I talk about seed cider on here all the time because, frankly, I believe in what they're doing. They are a hardware signing device, that you can use to manage your Bitcoin, your cold storage of your Bitcoin.
It is not, you can buy 1, but it is an open source product and essentially you are buying directly from the main developer. If you wanna do it that way, or you can actually build ones yourself. They're never gonna give me money to promote them. I'm never gonna have Swan on here talking about whatever the Swan product is. Which in fact, ironically Tether and Swan Tether sued Swan this week in the Great Britain court because there's something going on with their mining operation or whatever. And it doesn't matter. And I didn't talk about it on this show because it's not really relevant.
But if Swan were paying me money, let's say they were giving me $1,000 an episode, do that'd be great. If somebody just wants to send us $1,000 an episode, by the way, feel free to do so. But I would not be talking about that if they did. That's my point. So we're very, very careful about that. But you, the listener, can support this show. You can grab a podcasting 2.0 app, which they are available at podcastapps.com. There's a whole list of them, like fountain, like I've been talking about or a cast o matic or podcast guru, which I've been camping out on a lot these days.
And you can hook that up to your wallet essentially to, like a lightning wallet, and you can stream and boost just like send it Mike did and the people who were streaming as well. And you can show your support like that, and that certainly we do appreciate. Alright? That's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. We would love to hear from you. We have all the different ways that can be, that you can reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshis plebs.com. Stay humble friends. Go out, make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon.
Goodbye.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is January 17th, and this is episode 193 of Sapocia's Pleb. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:08] Kenshin:
And I'm Kenshin. And today's episode is projections.
[00:00:41] McIntosh:
We must be getting serious, Ken. You just took your jacket off and I just realized I didn't have my tea. I've got cold tea today, not hot tea. That's I may have to get up in the middle of the show. I'll go get some, but we'll see. We're gonna roll right through this. We are as of right now as we record a price of 99,300 in US dollars. And how much do we have in Euros?
[00:01:15] Kenshin:
Well, in Euros, we're around 96,500
[00:01:19] McIntosh:
right now. Trying to close-up the slack, trying to make things equal. We'll have to see about that. Alright. We've got a block height right now as we start the recording of 879390. A very small difficulty adjustment estimated. We just had 1, 0 point 1% up. I think it was our 7th up adjustment in a row, if I'm remembering correctly. But, right now, we're looking at 0.8 percent up, on January 26th. But, of course, we're really early in that cycle, so who knows where we'll end up? Do you wanna get the fees?
[00:02:04] Kenshin:
Right now, the fees are 5, 6, and 7. So low priority, 5, medium, 6, high priority, 7. And that's around, half to $1 per transaction. Yes. We also have, in the mempool, let me see, 250 megabytes in the mempool. Very, very low, actually. And a 131,000 unconfirmed transactions. So that's quite good.
[00:02:34] McIntosh:
So even though we're a little higher right now at 5, 6, and 7 sets per v byte depending on your priority, I think overall in the last month or 2, really now, things have kind of been low. We're cleaning out the mempool. It wasn't too long ago that that mempool was 5, 600 megabytes. We're now down below 300, and we have been getting 1 SAP per v byte transactions through quite regularly. I mean, you're not gonna get them through immediately, but, I think that things are starting to clear up. So, you know, if you're trying to move things around, which consolidate maybe, put stuff in cold storage, that kind of thing, that's great.
It does mean that in general, the network's slowing down a little bit. I don't know why that would be. But, I have a feeling later this year, it's going to pick back up, to be honest.
[00:03:34] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:03:35] McIntosh:
I think it's the, the waiting game now for the It is a waiting game, and we were only a few days off from our inauguration, here in the United States. Trump will be taking office on 20th, which is Monday, just a couple of days after this recording, takes place or, well, after it's released. And we're gonna be talking about that in a roundabout way. This is not a political podcast, but frankly, this has become a very important topic here. I believe in regards to Bitcoin and its future. Will Bitcoin if Trump were not in office, would Bitcoin survive 100%. And it would still go on to do, you know, the things that it's going to do. I just think that this does change things a little bit, and and we're gonna talk about that. And we're also gonna talk about kind of one of the off the cuff remarks that I actually heard him say, in July at the Bitcoin conference, during his kind of, promotion to her or whatever you wanna call it when he was reaching out to the crypto people, which is let's be clear, it's not just Bitcoin when it comes to Trump. And I wanna be very clear about that. We love to wanna say he's like the Bitcoin president or whatever.
And it's not true. I do believe he, believes in Bitcoin. I think he also thinks that there's other things going on, and he's certainly shown his support for regulation across the board. So we'll get into all that in just a minute. But first, Kenshin, what's up with you up there in Sweden?
[00:05:17] Kenshin:
Well, I'm quite quite happy this week. The snow is melting surprisingly. So we have a plastic grease finally. And, so most of the snow has gone and it's more comfortable to walk outside right now. So quite satisfied. And a lot of my colleagues are not, they are the opposite. The Swedes love the snow, so they are disappointed. But, but that's fine. I get my way for once. You get your way. Right?
[00:05:50] McIntosh:
Very cool. I bet you'll have some more snow soon. I Yeah. You know, I, maybe this is a good time to talk about this. I listened to a great podcast, yesterday. It was, was it, I think it was the Bitcoin frontier. One of the podcasts that I listened to and they had a guy on there that is like the CEO or CTO or something of a company that operates primarily in the Nordic countries. So when we say the Nordic countries, what that means is Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and Iceland. I maybe And Denmark. Right? Maybe. And Denmark? Denmark, I actually did not know that. So Denmark, as well. And it turns out, which I did not realize this, you guys got some really cheap power up there up in the north.
Now, maybe not where you live, but in the northern part of those countries, especially in Finland, I believe, like 2¢ per kilowatt power, which is I would die for that. Like, just all of my savings would be, like, everything would be into miners, and they would be out there earning me some bitcoin because there is profit margin at that price. Let me tell you. So down where you're at, maybe not so much. There is an excess of power essentially in the northern parts because and there were some reasons that they went into about that. It was very interesting. They were also talking about in Finland with the district heating that they have going on that is being powered.
Some of it by I think it's Marathon, but one of the major miners, they're essentially feeding their hot water that they generate by their miners into that system. So, some very interesting stuff there. If you if you have an interest in that, it was, I think the latest Bitcoin frontier park podcast. Just wanted to throw that out while I was thinking about that.
[00:07:58] Kenshin:
And then for my So you're telling me I need to move north.
[00:08:02] McIntosh:
That's what I'm telling you. If you wanna mind Bitcoin, maybe you should think about moving to Northern Finland. I mean, I'm just saying
[00:08:10] Kenshin:
I'm already really cold. Years
[00:08:12] McIntosh:
of a lot of snow and it just might be worth it. I'm just saying. So yep. So this week for myself, we did not have any snow, but I did get a new iPhone. And this is something that I've wrestled with for a long time, actually. Whether I was gonna get a, like, a Pixel and then convert it into Graphene or go with a new iPhone. The phones that my wife and I had were 4 years old. So they're like super old at this point. And the batteries were junk and just, it was not good. Like, they were just not like, my phone stopped. Call like, people would call and I could not hear them talking. It's great. A great way to cut down on your sales calls.
A month or 2 ago, I actually as I've told y'all in the past, I do projects, construction stuff, and work on sheds and this kind of thing. I need something for my ears because I do, I'm not, I'm not a good person. And when I work on a chop saw, like cutting up, wood to the right length, this kind of thing. I don't put on headphones and it's bad for my ears. So to compromise, I tried something out. So Apple does have a pair of, active noise cancellation is what it's called. I think it's the iPad Pro. I don't know. I don't keep up with all this stuff. It doesn't matter. It's a little set of, of things that go in your ear.
And, it does, it actually cuts down on the noise about 25 decibels, which makes virtually anything that you'd be working on in construction, safe. And they're just in your ears. And of course, you can use them to listen to podcasts and that kind of thing. So I tested it with my old phone and then that's that's really what convinced me to go ahead and get a new iPhone. So I have one of these bright, shiny new iPhones. It's bigger because my eyes are not so good and I'm getting older. Let's be honest. My old one was like the tiny little SE and, yeah. So we went bigger and, we went with a new iPhone and now it's got all these stupid Apple intelligence crap on it. It's gonna be great. I'm telling you.
Plus it's Apple, which I have all kinds of problems with. I know I'm a hypocrite on this, and that's fine. I'm willing to be that.
[00:10:55] Kenshin:
How much surveillance is there in the Apple Landsra?
[00:10:58] McIntosh:
Yeah. I don't know. I I don't even wanna think about it. So that's done, dusted. I've got most of my apps moved over and all that. I've took this opportunity to clean up my iPhone, as well. I had a bunch of junk on it, and so I didn't just move everything over. My wife, on the other hand, she moved everything over. I'm like, okay. You deal with it. It's yourself. I'm just here to help. Alright. Yeah.
[00:11:31] Kenshin:
So are you satisfied then?
[00:11:34] McIntosh:
It is definitely faster. I will say I'm satisfied in that sense. I'm not a fan, this Apple intelligence mess. This kind of AI, so to speak, I'm I'm just really not a fan of. There's very little of it I actually find useful. It's mostly just bells and whistles. Right. Yeah. And a way to shell sell shiny new product. You know? Alright. So let's get into our topic this week, Kim Shin. Now you may be wondering what we meant when we titled this episode projections. This entire thing actually comes from something I saw on Twitter. So if you'll bear with me for just a minute, I'll explain and then we'll go into this and I'll try and keep this reasonably concise.
One of the things that Trump also said in that, meeting, he said, in addition to this strategic Bitcoin reserve, which of course is a big campaign platform thing for him, and is looking very likely to happen. He said that we're going to stack a 1000000 sats, excuse me, a 1000000 Bitcoin over the next 20 years. And I hope I get all this right and it's fluctuated somewhat.
[00:13:00] Kenshin:
No. She said a million in the next 5 years. Okay. I apologize.
[00:13:05] McIntosh:
And actually, maybe I need to update my numbers. It doesn't matter for the raw calculations I did the next 5 years, but we would not sell for 20 years. Right? Okay. So we're gonna stack a 1,000,000 sats in the next 5 years. We're going to not sell for at least 20 years. And, you know, we're gonna make America great because this is Trump and, rah rah rah. He also said we could use that to help pay off the debt. And in fact, I have heard people say, and I'm not gonna say that he said this because I'm not a 100% sure that he did. But I have heard people say something along the lines of we will pay off the debt with this. Like it could cover the debt of the United States. Like this is going to get us out of the debt that we have.
And even though I wasn't very good at math in college, I do like math in terms of Bitcoin because it's simple. It's, it's, you know, I can manage these numbers. So I said, that doesn't sound right. One thing that Trump never talks about and one thing that no politician, I'm not going to say that because I'm sure there's 1 or 2 out there. The vast majority of the politicians these days do not talk about is cutting spending, not spending more than you make. That is the reason I'm gonna talk about the United States because that's where I live. And these are the numbers that I have in front of me. $36,000,000,000,000 in debt.
And, you know, rah rah, we lead the world in the amount of debt. It's like 36.2 or 0.3 trillion, which is funny because we say 0.2 or 0.3. That's literally 2 or $300,000,000,000 So when the numbers get this big, it becomes really easy to not even understand the scope of what we're talking about. But that is the debt of the United States. So I wanted to do some extrapolation based on what if the United States bought a 1,000,000 Bitcoin? What if we held them for 20 years? And then where would we be in terms of debt? Now, I did not deal with inflation at all.
Now that doesn't mean we're not gonna have inflation. What I did do is go to what do they call it? The congressional budget office or something like that. This is literally people who work for congress, and they deal with the federal budget. These are their own figures. So they have projected out basically 20 years what the debt of the government will be. And the best oh, I need to open up the spreadsheet. Okay. All right. So the figure that they gave, where was it? It's on my sheet here. Current US. Okay. Current US debt is $36,000,000,000,000 as near as I can tell it from what they figure. And again, I want to emphasize, this is the own government projections. This is not some right wing radio guy out there saying, well, the debt's gonna be whatever.
Okay? So my guess is this is going to be low. But in 2050, the debt is projected to be right at $100,000,000,000,000 So roughly three times what it is right now. Okay? Now I would say that if anything, again, those numbers are skewed low, not too high. But let's go with those figures for this. Alright. 21,000,000 bitcoin in total. We wanna stack a million, which by the way, that breaks down to 4.76 percent of the total supply. I want to point out one of the things I learned while I was looking this up. Currently, the US has like 3.8 or something percent of the world's gold supply.
I did not realize we own so much gold. We are at this point the number one holder of gold in the world. Just an interesting little figure that this is roughly the same amount. Okay. A little bit more. We're looking at 5 years to buy. What that means is that we have to buy, let's see. And I did calculate a starting amount of 200,000 Bitcoin. I don't know if that will be true. There was actually an an an there was actually an announcement today that the money that was, the Bitcoin that was taken by the department of justice in the bit fine next hack was actually going to be returned to them like in kind. So in Bitcoin, And that's actually a large part of this 200,000.
I'm going to set that aside. Let's just go with, we have 200,000 to start, meaning we need to buy a 100,000 more. That actually means every month for the next 5 years, and I did change the data. It's 1330 is it 1300 or 13,000? 23 it's 13,000 a month. Now understand there's only 450 that are mined per day right now. So I don't so it's roughly actually, if you think about that, that'd be 4,500 per 10 days. So that's roughly the same amount by one country, if that's true. And if we really are gonna do a 1,000,000 in 5 years and we start with less than 200,000, then it pushes that buy figure up.
Our current Bitcoin price, a 100,000. I am projecting a price in 20 years, 10,000,000 Bitcoin. 10,000,000 per Bitcoin. I actually think that's conservative. You may disagree. I don't know. It's a figure that I came up with for 10 minute 10 years from now with much higher global adoption than what we have right now. That means in 20 years, we will have $10,000,000,000,000 in Bitcoin. Again, our current debt, 36,000,000,000,000, our projected debt in 25 years, 100,000,000,000,000. Tell me, Kenshin, do those numbers add up to you? Can we pay off our debt like that, And which would completely exhaust our Bitcoin supply, by the way, maybe not a good idea. Let's get a little crazy, though. What happens if bitcoins not at $10,000,000 What if it goes, let's see. I did some market cap, figures. So we're at $2,100,000,000,000 right now at $100,000 per Bitcoin.
Okay? It's simply 21,000,000 times a 100,000. That's all it is. 2,100,000,000,000. At 1,000,000,000 bitcoin, we would be at 21,000,000,000,000. At 10,000,000 bitcoin, that's 210,000,000,000,000 total market cap, not at 1,000,000 bitcoin. That's all 21,000,000. And then at 50,000,000 bitcoin, I can't even say it. $50,000,000 per Bitcoin. Okay. It's 1,000,000,000. Which is just an insane number. It is literally, I think it's quadrillion, but it's the next number after trillion. 1.050, and then a whole bunch more zeros. Okay.
So it's it's 4 times bigger, than well, it's 5 times bigger actually than the 10,000,000 market cap. So at that point, you have now surpassed the total economic, what they call like, there's a number for, like, all the economic value in the entire world right now. It's like $900,000,000,000,000.
[00:22:04] Kenshin:
Okay? I was about to say that that's Right.
[00:22:08] McIntosh:
So again, this doesn't account for inflation. It doesn't account for anything. But I did a a crazy price of $50,000,000,000,000 or $50,000,000,000 in 20 years. Okay? The total value of that 1,000,000 Bitcoin would then be $50,000,000,000,000 So technically, it still wouldn't pay off the debts. Okay? Now inflation doesn't play into that. The if we have hyperinflation, then it becomes a better scenario essentially for Bitcoin paying off the debt. But that's not even something I really even want to think about, to be honest, because there's going to be so many things going on at that point that, it's just not a scenario I like to think about a whole lot.
[00:23:06] Kenshin:
I think the numbers are correct, what you're saying. And but I think the the theory of selling the Bitcoin to pay the debt, I think that was Trump saying it, but I don't think it was Trump saying it as part of the real plan. I think I think I remember when he said it was a throwaway line. It it was like, oh, and And I agree with that. Oh, and by the way, we can pay the debt with it someday, maybe. Right. But I think all the smart people behind the scenes, they don't expect the Bitcoin to pay the debt in the same way that the gold they don't use the gold to pay the debt.
[00:23:48] McIntosh:
Right. Because we do have a huge amount of gold, obviously, 5% of the world's total volume, essentially, same situation. And and we don't use that. And it's for a good reason. There's there's a reason we have it and we should not just be selling it off. But the thing that really bugs me in all this is, is going back to this for, and I promise this will be the final time, at least in this episode, Trump, any of the people around him, virtually every politician up there, they do not talk about. Yes. We're taught. I, let me rephrase that. We're talking about this Doge committee, this department of governmental efficiency or whatever.
They are even coming out now and saying, yeah, this really isn't gonna make a serious dent in our spending. Do they need to do it? I 100% think it's a good step, but this does not solve our problems. Our problem is we spend too much. We spend too much on defense. We spend too much on all of these social programs, frankly, health care and things like that. And we can have a different discussion about all of that. But just like a family, a nation needs to have a budget and stick by it and not spend more than they make. And we cannot and have not for decades done that. And that's why we have a $36,000,000,000,000, budget deficit. And it's only going to go up if that doesn't change it. And nobody talks about it because it's unpopular, which is probably not going to raise our ratings by the way, Kenshin. Sorry.
[00:25:36] Kenshin:
But as I talk about it. But it's, I think it's true. I think what really is going to happen happen if they do the reserve is that they will put a very valuable asset in their asset column. The same way that they have collected and they keep collecting gold from throughout the world. It's not to pay the debt, it's to take actually more debt. Because the more assets you have, valuable assets, the more you can keep printing money and get into more debts because it's balancing the scales. So so I think that's the real purpose because right now they don't they have run out of things to buy to balance the scales.
The deficit is too high, and this is the only thing that can balance the scales a bit at least. And it's the same way I think a sailor is doing with micro strategy. No one no one says anything to sailor that he gets into deeper and deep deeper debts right now. The biggest purchases he's doing is with Yeah. Loans. It's not with his profits. I don't
[00:26:50] McIntosh:
you're right. He he's 100% buying Bitcoin with loans, and I I personally am not comfortable with that. He is, he is essentially leveraging, the the the death of the dollar versus Bitcoin, right? The dollar going down in value versus Bitcoin going up. He's comfortable with that. And those type of bets can make the biggest returns. And to be honest, I have a suspicion that he will come out of this looking well. He'll be the richest person in the world. His company will be the largest market cap in the world. And I don't know.
But that doesn't mean that I'm comfortable with it. I'm I'm still a Dave Ramsey guy at heart where I just don't think that debt is is a good thing. I think eventually, whether it's now, 10 years from now, or a 100 years from now, debt comes home to roost and, and you need to be very careful. I'm not saying that you should never have debt, but adding more debt to the United and we do need a Bitcoin reserve. We need a Bitcoin reserve if only because there are other countries who are already doing that. And there are other countries who will start doing that as a nation state. We do need to do that. So I'm to be honest, I'm conflicted about this in some ways.
But with the spending that we've got, the amount that we spend on on a 1,000,000 Bitcoin, it's virtually a drop in the bucket compared to, you know, the the other things that nobody talks about because, man, it makes people uncomfortable and, you know, mad and whatever. Yeah.
[00:28:53] Kenshin:
Anyway. It's us to add to your, numbers that you mentioned earlier. If Just if the US buys 200,000 Bitcoin a year, that was a plan in for 5 years. Right. That is actually 550 Bitcoin per day. That's a 100 Bitcoin more. Right.
[00:29:14] McIntosh:
It's a 100 more than yeah. That sounds right. And so we are when was the mining? Was that this year? These years are are you no. Well, it's certainly last year. It was last year. That's why okay. So it was in April. Yeah. Which means 4 years from then. So before the 5 years is up, it will cut in half and will only be basically getting 225
[00:29:42] Kenshin:
a day. Exactly.
[00:29:44] McIntosh:
So if the United States does this, this will drive the price of Bitcoin up. There's just, it's unavoidable. You can own MicroStrategy is going to continue to buy, we will eventually get these larger companies like Microsoft and Facebook and Amazon and Google buying. We are seeing midsize companies who there are I have a Twitter thing. I think there's 9 public companies last year bought Bitcoin. Or maybe that's so far this year. We'll I'll look at my Twitter account here shortly. That is a drop into the bucket of what will be happening over the next few years. Because these are the pioneers even though we talk about them nonstop.
But the but the rest of the settlers are coming. What do you think of the
[00:30:39] Kenshin:
aspects that they could sell gold to buy Bitcoin? To buy Bitcoin? Some reserves that they say they could. That's a good question.
[00:30:51] McIntosh:
Interestingly, I actually think there are other countries who would buy the gold if we sold it. Sure. And I think those countries would be making a mistake.
[00:31:01] Kenshin:
Yes. They they the price of gold will drop naturally with so much gold being sold. The other countries were would rely on that gold for their reserves, so their value would drop.
[00:31:17] McIntosh:
I do think it would be a mistake for other countries to, like, buy our gold and not buy Bitcoin. If we start buying Bitcoin, if we sell off part of our gold to do that, I don't know that that's maybe the best idea in the world, but in the long run, I think it probably is. At some point, gold is just a shiny metal. Yeah. It's not a currency. It's not a, I mean, you could call it an asset. Yes. But when it's not being used, I just think there's more value in Bitcoin there, you know, gold when it was being used as currency was terrific, but that we're past that. We when we went off the onto a Fiat standard, we we left gold essentially.
And it's interesting that we've had this transition period, so to speak, from gold to Bitcoin, with with Fiat, which is, I guess you could say, it's not gone so well with all the debt that we've got. But yeah. Yeah. Wow. Did that make sense? I think it did. I mean,
[00:32:32] Kenshin:
even for us now, if you want to go and buy some gold and hold gold, how do you buy it? Where do you buy it? Where do you store it? How do you sell it to make profit back?
[00:32:44] McIntosh:
Shh. I got a deal, man. You need to know It's so complicated.
[00:32:49] Kenshin:
It's it's even more complicated. I've never bought gold.
[00:32:53] McIntosh:
And speaking of anonymous deals, that's actually something we need to talk about very soon, with the peer whole peer to peer thing, with Bitcoin. Right. I think, send it Mike requested that. So we don't wanna get scammed, of course, and we don't wanna lose our bitcoin or our cash. So, yeah, we should talk about that soon. But in regards to the strategic bitcoin reserve, I think we're about done. I do believe next Monday, there will probably be, I'll say this next week. I'm not going to say Monday. I think there'll be an announcement. I'm hoping before we go and rerecord and we'll, we're not going to like, keep talking about it, but it will be news. And if so, we will report it.
I think early he's going to, he's, there's all kinds of stuff coming out right now. He's having a crypto ball for his inauguration for one of the balls, which is just weird. He's setting up a crypto council or whatever. He has said that the sec will essentially stop pursuing, like, all the crypto stuff that they're doing. They're just gonna kinda put a freeze on everything until they get proper regulation in place, which I actually think that that's fair, because right now, it's a mess. He is moving very quickly on these crypto things. And I do believe that he will either there there is one option where he can kind of direct some money towards it and go ahead and and kind of do a smash buy.
I think that would be interesting if he did. But then, you know, on the other hand, rumor has it, he also sold off his Bitcoin that he owns. So I don't know. It's with Trump, you you never know what you're getting. I'll say that. But
[00:35:01] Kenshin:
I think he was very genuine during the conference when he he said Bitcoin is worth more than silver. And he looked around. Is that true? Yeah. You know, you could see it. It was genuine. Yeah. He understands Yeah. Value. He doesn't understand Bitcoin.
[00:35:18] McIntosh:
He does. He I don't know where he's from. It's somewhere in the northeast of the United States. And to be to be brutally honest, he just comes across wrong to me. Like just his mannerisms and the way he talks. I don't know. Yeah. I I he does believe a lot of what he's saying, but it's just so hard sometimes to actually I don't know.
[00:35:49] Kenshin:
It just is. Yeah. But he he's for sure not pro I would say Bitcoin. He's pro valuable asset in that sense. So whatever is shiny and more valuable, it seems he goes for it. So in that sense, we need to be a bit careful in that sense. But
[00:36:10] McIntosh:
They tried to do some meme coin or something. I don't I don't even know. Or I think it was a flop, to be honest. I just wish he just buckled down and let's get this done and move on. But I think we're gonna get some useful stuff out of this. Alright. Enough about US politics. Seriously.
[00:36:32] Kenshin:
One last thing. This is related to sending Mike's big unpopular opinion that he shared with us. So
[00:36:41] McIntosh:
Do you wanna go ahead and read that? I no. I yeah. We should. This is very important. Should we read the whole thing? I think it because it's everything we've been talking here. I think so. I he and I actually think a lot along the same lines, about this. But, yeah, let's let's read it. It is pretty long. Do you wanna read half of it and I'll read the other half?
[00:37:05] Kenshin:
So he says unpopular opinion about the Bitcoin strategic reserve, is a bad idea. And all this is him speaking. So if we buy Bitcoin with debt and don't address the underlying issue of uncontrolled deficit, we will get humbled. If you have a body deep in credit card debt, would you tell him, change nothing, take out more debt, and buy Bitcoin? Then magic Internet money will solve your problems. No. You would tell reduce expenses, figure out a plan to pay down the debt, then start stacking. It's no different with the government. It won't be long, and all the buyer of treasuries will start asking, why are we buying this?
Shortly after, the treasury market need massive buying from Fed to meet interest rates targets.
[00:38:04] McIntosh:
Okay. Yeah. And so just to be clear, treasuries are just, notes of credit, essentially, by the government. So they're they're a form of credit and they're it is adding to our debt of the United States. And I agree with what he's saying, other than the fact that I do believe we have to have a Bitcoin reserve of some kind as a nation. We have to have a crypto policy. And we, and because of that, because Bitcoin is the apex predator or whatever you want to call it, we need a Bitcoin reserve just like we need a gold reserve. Alright. Let me finish this up. It it, where were we? Until one day. Until one day it doesn't work and then the government sells what it can at a price they may not like just to operate, not to pay off the debt. Bitcoin doesn't care how big and important the US government is. It will humble them just like everyone else. You are 100% correct about that, sir.
The government gets desperate. They blamed supply chain disruptions for the last inflation. Right? They can just as easily blame crypto speculators for the next round. Then 6102, which is a reference to a executive order of some kind back in the early thirties, if I'm remembering correctly about gold, when they confiscated gold from everyone. Then 6102 on Bitcoin, 50% unrealized capital gains tax required to be paid in Bitcoin. I'll just leave. Okay? But what about your parents, your sister, your cousin? But I I don't speak to my cousins, but that no. I'm just kidding.
Might not be too easily might not be too easy when you're on a TSA no exit list until you pay your tax because you bought the Bitcoin KYC. A BTC strategic reserve won't solve the deficit problem as I proved earlier. And more the community, the Bitcoin community says it will make us more of a target when things go badly later on. There's a lot of very good points here. I will say that I do believe that we need a Bitcoin reserve. I am guessing at this point that the benefit of it will outweigh the more money that we're going to spend that frankly we're just gonna print to do so. And I did not read this before this recording session. I read it one time when, we were putting it in the notes. I'm not going to say I haven't read it before this, but as you could tell, my thoughts about this actually line up very closely with his. It's certainly in terms of we're not addressing the real issues. And yes, there is a possibility of things like, unrealized cap gain tax and you know, these kinds of things. We're not at that point yet.
And we do recommend that you do what you can to protect yourself. Okay? So I I guess I'm just not well, I don't wanna say it that way cause it doesn't sound good. Everybody has to decide for themselves, frankly. This could happen. The, the scenario that he outlined with a 6102 type, ruling, could absolutely happen. They could raise capital gains in general. He but Trump may come in next week and say no cap gains on Bitcoin because it's a currency, which would be spectacular. I don't think that's going to happen, but it is. The thing is we actually don't know with him. I know he's not going to slap down 61 or 2. It would not be his administration. It might not even be the next couple administrations, but it's not that it is a possibility and it is something you should consider.
Okay? And I will 100% agree with something else he says. I'll just leave. But what about your parents, your sisters? He's true. He he's correct about that. Right? If you're more than 20 years old, you have obligations. You may have children. You may have parents who are aging. You may have relatives that you're concerned about. And it does make it difficult. So, anyways, I appreciate that, Mike. That's that very thoughtful piece and, well said.
[00:42:54] Kenshin:
And I'm a bit conflicted because I agree with everything, but it's
[00:42:59] McIntosh:
But there's no answer. The only answer is you can do the best that you can do. And we over the coming, you know, months, we're gonna be talking about ways of protecting yourself, ways of buying crypto anonymously. I also think that we should spend some time talking about, like, coin mixers. In fact, there was some news about that this week. If I I'm not sure it's on the list, but a couple of more of the operators of one of those got arrested. Yes. 2 of them, I think. Yeah. So, you know, you just gotta stay alert, but don't let fear paralyze you. I'll say that.
[00:43:44] Kenshin:
Okay? Good. Great. Thank you, Mike. Should we do some news? Appreciate that. We don't have much.
[00:43:53] McIntosh:
Well, did we skip? Yeah, we did. So we do have some support to talk about before we jump to the news. So Mike also sent us a great boost this week. I wanna make sure to read that and then we're all caught up. Let me read this real quick. I appreciate this, Mike. You've been a great sport of the show. Another great episode. Thanks for the shout out, and thanks for sharing about your experiences in China. I'm sorry for the loss of your friends. I appreciate that, Mike. I was understating my disdain for totalitarian governments regarding China. The answer though is not to attack, China. This will only get a bunch of servants members killed on both sides and lead both governments towards more authoritarianism.
On a different note, you talked about changing up the outro music, not sure if you're taking input, but this song turned out well on Suno, and there's a link there. I'll have the link in the show notes. I would encourage you to go listen to it. Actually, it's a great little tune. I don't know if I wanna do that one for our outro every week, but I will tell you this might next week, I will put it on there, and we will promote it. It's a great song and well worth a listen. And he sent in a 10 69 sets. We also had some streaming, a total of 1128 sets as reported by Satoshi Stream, which is low because that's after their cut, essentially.
So I appreciate that. We appreciate the support, the streaming, and the boosting. And now let's jump into the news caption.
[00:45:35] Kenshin:
Right. We have, getting a little bit political and country based, but, we have Iran's Central Bank, blocks payment gateways to cryptocurrency exchanges. Their currency, the Iranian, real Real. Has dropped, has divided by 37% during last year. So for $1 Against the US dollar. So for 1 US dollar, you could buy 500,000 rials in the beginning of the year. And right now, with 1 US dollar, you can buy 800,000. So that's a huge Wow. Devaluation.
[00:46:19] McIntosh:
And that doesn't even take into account the fact that the dollar itself is Yeah. You know, inflating. It's devaluing, whatever. So, and so now they're blocking off access to cryptocurrency.
[00:46:34] Kenshin:
Yeah. So as I understand, you can still log in, but you cannot pay. The payment options are not working. And a few weeks ago, they had blocked the crypto exchanges, their bank accounts. So they they have been fighting from all sides, so people cannot get out of the system, cannot use the exit exit nodes, let's say.
[00:47:01] McIntosh:
Alright. Well, Iran's had a tough time, and their economy is not doing well. And unfortunately, their people are suffering for it. Alright. We've got one more news item I wanna talk about. Bhutan, one of my favorite little countries. I just get tickled. I don't know. I do. I was telling Kenshin, I really wanna go there one day, before we start recording. And maybe we will, and maybe I will get to go to this place. So, they are building a new city. I think this has been in the works for a while. I guess it's it's like a planned city, if I'm understanding if I'm remembering correctly and understanding correctly. It's called and I'm gonna man, this is not even gonna be funny.
Gelefu mindfulness city. They have plans to recognize Bitcoin, ether, the Binance token or whatever as part of their strategic reserve. So they are actually as a city building a strategic reserve. The country itself is out there mining Bitcoin in the Himalayas. I love it. They're using hydro power, and the country is building a strategic reserve. And then now this purpose built city is doing the same thing. Alright? And this was announced in late December, of last year. So it sets up a framework so that, among other things, they can offer companies can offer financial services, this type of thing.
And they are trying to promote growth in in a in a regulated manner. So it will be interesting to see how that turns out. In real estate, we have a saying location, location, location. And, I'm not sure that this is a good location for most people. But maybe with, with digital assets like this, it doesn't actually matter. So it will definitely be something I will be watching. I even though Bhutan is involved in Ethereum and other assets, I love I was telling Kenshin again before before we started recording. I think they have a king or a prince.
I really feel like that person, they are doing things to better their country. Bhutan is a poor country and yet by sats per citizen, if you want to divide it up that way, they actually have more at this point than any other nation in the world. So in the long game, they're going to end up doing very well. Does that make sense? You see what I'm saying, Kenshin? So even like El Salvador, with the amount of Bitcoin that it owns, which is like 6,000, it's not the same because they're such a small country. Right? What they're doing there in the Himalayas with the mining is is going to make a huge impact in the long term when Bitcoin gets to some of these crazy levels, that I think we'll be seeing over the next decade or 2.
So
[00:50:38] Kenshin:
And they say here that is is, on the border with India and Mhmm. And they claim to be well positioned to serve over 2,000,000,000 people in the region. So it might be a good location. We we'll we'll see. It is on the border with India,
[00:50:57] McIntosh:
and it's a good location kind of for that side of India. If you wanna say that India does have 2,000,000,000 people. I'm not I'm not sure where they're getting that number, but that's fine. I think in the end it doesn't really matter. You can look at Singapore, like it's just out in the middle of the Pacific and yet it's become a world financial leader. So maybe location doesn't actually matter Really. Yeah. It will be interesting to track, you know, El Salvador is doing what they can to bring in. Oh, that was actually a big news item. Let me mention this real quick, even though we don't have a link to it.
Tethr is moving to El Salvador. I don't know if you saw that. Tethr, the company, which is a very small company in terms of people, but really, really profitable. They are moving to El Salvador. So they've worked out some deal, and that's the kind of thing that that really helps El Salvador, you know? So really cool stuff. Alright. Do we have some software updates? We got a couple. We have a Bitcoin core 28.1.
[00:52:14] Kenshin:
So that's a semi major release, let's say.
[00:52:20] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:52:22] Kenshin:
And it's it's very technical. It's nothing fancy to really dig into, but it's a good time to update, this to this release, I would say. Yeah. I
[00:52:34] McIntosh:
Especially if you're running 28.0, I you would you would want to immediately
[00:52:40] Kenshin:
move on to this. It has some security updates as well as some small features. But I usually stay one version behind, so I think I'm 27.1.
[00:52:51] McIntosh:
I think I'm even further back than that. I don't know. I it's probably time I update my
[00:52:59] Kenshin:
my, nodes. Yes. You should do that.
[00:53:02] McIntosh:
Yeah. It's not something I worry about a whole lot. One I run behind a firewall, you know, on my local network anyways, and then the other, which is up on, it's on a, VPS. I don't even use it to, like, index anything. So there's no I guess if somebody compromised it because I didn't keep it up to date, it would not be the end. Bad Macintosh.
[00:53:30] Kenshin:
Yeah. FEDIMENT. Do you know? Alright. About FEDIMENT.
[00:53:35] McIntosh:
No. This is old. We can skip that. I we talked or did we just not cover it? I think it's been on there and we didn't cover it. That's okay. FEDIMIT, I'll say this. FEDIMIT, which is the federated, Chummy and e cash, system. They have a major new version out for them. It's, it's, it's not at 1.0 yet, although there are production releases out there, there's people actually using it, 0.5.0. If you are involved in that echo ecosystem, you definitely would wanna take a look at it. Yep.
[00:54:13] Kenshin:
And next, we have the Zapstore, version 0.2. And this is, one of my new favorite apps that I discovered also recently. Okay. It's an, Nostra based app store. So you you find apps on there and popular apps, like, for example, Albigo is the wallet for Albi, and, it's mostly Nostr, let's say, based in Bitcoin based, lightning based apps. But it's all those apps that are open source, that are based usually on GitHub repositories, and they are on that app store, and the devs are signing with their Noister keys. So you see that the actual person that you follow on Noister, which is a dev of, let's say Mhmm. Yeah, Amethyst, and he has signed the release. So, you know, it's genuine, not compromised.
[00:55:21] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:55:22] Kenshin:
Right. And this version is bringing, the ability to zap the devs so you can send them, sats
[00:55:31] McIntosh:
direct. So Zapstore is essentially the website, the software. Right? So is there an example where I could go and look at what you're talking about? You can install it. Okay. Yeah. You can install So it runs on your local on your phone. On your
[00:55:50] Kenshin:
okay. Sorry. I didn't I didn't catch what was So it's it's an app store for the phone, essentially.
[00:55:56] McIntosh:
It's right. I gotcha. The okay. That makes sense. I was thinking a website, and it's it's an app on the phone that acts like the Apple app App Store or the Google Play Store, I think it's That's a good point. Probably, it's not gonna
[00:56:13] Kenshin:
be functional on iPhone. I'm not sure. If you can install those type of apps Yeah. It probably wouldn't be, but
[00:56:22] McIntosh:
we'll take a look at it. Very cool. And then the last one,
[00:56:26] Kenshin:
Nostur.
[00:56:28] McIntosh:
I'm how do you say it? Nostur? Nostur? I don't know. So it's another Nostur client. Yeah. Is that right? And this is only for iOS,
[00:56:42] Kenshin:
macOS and iPadOS. So it's, alternative to demos, I would say, but it keeps popping up. Right. And, in my news feeds, they are updating the upload. So I do use demos.
[00:56:57] McIntosh:
I might wanna take a look at this.
[00:56:59] Kenshin:
Yeah. You should. I think it has more features. Yeah. It has this you can sync, the notes between devices to to see what you have read. So it syncs the progress more or less of of what you have read. And then it also supports now the the new image viewing, the Olas. Olas. Yeah. I see that. Which is essentially like a protocol built on top of Nostr to mimic Instagram type Right. Image viewing style. Yeah. Very cool. If you have an iPhone, you should try it, which now you have a new one. So I think I will.
[00:57:45] McIntosh:
I think I will. There's a few of us out there, unfortunately. Alright. That's gonna wrap it up for today. I think we've about got everything done. I hope that you, I hope that you like this. If you like what we're doing here, the best way that you can actually help support us is just to tell other people. Say grab whatever the latest version of Stoches Club is and, you know, tell your friends to take a listen. Tell your family, tell that uncle that doesn't understand Bitcoin. Whatever. There's other ways that you can support, of course. I don't think fountain has this set back up, but we used to be able to clip an episode. And, I don't think that's actually working. I need to make sure before I promote that again.
But, we have a lot of features in our podcast. I love telling people about this. We are a podcasting 2.0 podcast. Like, we have chapters, we have transcripts. For example, if you have trouble understanding my version of English, you know, you can follow along in the transcript and a lot of times that'll help people. So, we make that available automatically as part of our episodes. We are also a value for value podcast. And what that means is, we don't have ads, we don't have sponsors. We don't do anything like that. And I very explicitly picked that out a long time ago because I want to be able to talk to you without any, hint of shenanigans as I would call about whatever the latest hardware product is or whatever. I mean, I talk about seed cider on here all the time because, frankly, I believe in what they're doing. They are a hardware signing device, that you can use to manage your Bitcoin, your cold storage of your Bitcoin.
It is not, you can buy 1, but it is an open source product and essentially you are buying directly from the main developer. If you wanna do it that way, or you can actually build ones yourself. They're never gonna give me money to promote them. I'm never gonna have Swan on here talking about whatever the Swan product is. Which in fact, ironically Tether and Swan Tether sued Swan this week in the Great Britain court because there's something going on with their mining operation or whatever. And it doesn't matter. And I didn't talk about it on this show because it's not really relevant.
But if Swan were paying me money, let's say they were giving me $1,000 an episode, do that'd be great. If somebody just wants to send us $1,000 an episode, by the way, feel free to do so. But I would not be talking about that if they did. That's my point. So we're very, very careful about that. But you, the listener, can support this show. You can grab a podcasting 2.0 app, which they are available at podcastapps.com. There's a whole list of them, like fountain, like I've been talking about or a cast o matic or podcast guru, which I've been camping out on a lot these days.
And you can hook that up to your wallet essentially to, like a lightning wallet, and you can stream and boost just like send it Mike did and the people who were streaming as well. And you can show your support like that, and that certainly we do appreciate. Alright? That's it. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. We would love to hear from you. We have all the different ways that can be, that you can reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshis plebs.com. Stay humble friends. Go out, make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon.
Goodbye.
