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
Mining Basics
Mining is fundamental to the Bitcoin Network. Without it, there wouldn't be Bitcoin. Understanding how mining works is a little complicated so in this episode we take the time to break things down and explain how mining actually works. In addition we cover some of the concerns about bitcoin mining. Let's dive right in!!
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
February 19th, 2025: 96,100 USD | 92,100 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
884,487
News and Notes
Argentina’s Milei Faces Fraud Charges, Impeachment Calls After Failed Memecoin Launch
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/mining/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqizJTbxAEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud6GuH7gSDw
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-198
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 February, and this is episode one ninety eight of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm McIntosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And today's episode is mining basics.
[00:00:37] McIntosh:
Alright, Kenshin. I hope you enjoyed that new music. I finally got something going. Yeah. Very upbeat. So this was, thanks. This was some value for value music by a band called, my favorite band. And this actual song was called Racer Why, and I've came across this song a long time ago and really enjoyed it. I it's it's just kind of I don't know. I really enjoyed it. So I've cut the first few seconds, which we dropped in here, and then the whole song is gonna be at the end if you wish to listen to it, or you can just drop off. That's your choice. No problem. Right now, I do not have it set up so that any kind of cut is going towards them. When we get to our final setup where we're running our own lightning node, where we can manage this kind of stuff better, I that will be part of it. They you know, whoever it is that we play it, I do intend to rotate it relatively frequently.
I'm not gonna probably be able to do it every week because it does require some work and some listening and, you know, this kind of thing. But at least I'm hoping every couple of weeks just to give people a flavor of the different value for value music that's available out there. So that was a long introduction, but that's what was going on. So let's talk about the Bitcoin price as we record. I think you updated. Yes. You did. Because once again, you're less than us. Y'all got I'm serious, man. Y'all gotta work on that. I I guess that running joke is probably kinda dead. But
[00:02:18] Kenshin:
Oh, it's more valuable than you're right. It's more valuable.
[00:02:22] McIntosh:
Valuable. Unlike the Canadians. Right? I don't wanna poke at them, but, man, it's getting kinda crazy up there with their money. 96,100 US dollars. And how many euros we got?
[00:02:34] Kenshin:
92,100.
[00:02:36] McIntosh:
Actually, let me look it up just so I can have a good laugh. I'm only doing this because Canada is playing The United States Thursday night in hockey, and we're gonna wipe the floor with them, but I'm not being a a homeboy. Whatever. Right? It's $1.50 or something? Where it should be around $1.50, and I'm I'm I'm looking it up. This should have it right here. Australian dollar, man. No. The Australian dollar is actually doing a little better. Oh oh, look. No. They dropped down, but they are at $1.36 6. So there you go.
[00:03:16] Kenshin:
You want to know how much is the Swedish kroner?
[00:03:19] McIntosh:
It's a lot. You I saw you post that the other day. Go ahead.
[00:03:23] Kenshin:
It's 1,000,000 Swedish kroner.
[00:03:27] McIntosh:
I I really wanted to make a joke, but I these things don't do well on, like, Nostra and Twitter, and I just finally left it alone. I'm just like, I gotta leave it there. Alright. As we record, we are at block height eight eight four four eight seven. Man, that was a pause. And a difficulty adjustment of minus 1.42%. So we did, I guess, more hashes come online during the week. The difficulty adjustment has gone up. We are still negative, obviously, and we're only a couple of days away from our next, difficulty adjustment. So Feb twenty three will be when the next one happens. So, I mean, honestly, we may end up right about zero again.
So not a whole lot of change there. Why don't you go ahead and catch the, fees there?
[00:04:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. The mempool starts to fill up again. I mean, the good old days now until yesterday with the one Sat Privee bite is gone. So So we're up up to four, five, and six. Yeah. Let's see. That's how it stores. No. You're right. You're right. So the mempool is actually a 75 megabytes right now, up from zero, basically, transactions in the queue.
[00:04:48] McIntosh:
Right. So we did get a little backed up today. I don't know what's going on. Lord knows. Who knows? I don't know. It'll you know, I think we're gonna see this for a while. Frankly, I think we'll see it'll fluctuate. Although this is a little high, but I think it'll fluctuate a good bit, kinda in this lower area until the bull run takes back off, which I'm not going to predict when that happens because I very likely would be wrong because Bitcoin likes to make fools of us all. So we will see. But if you have things to do, like move Bitcoin around, get it to long term storage, say, it'd be a really good time to do that or set up a lightning node, which is something that I'm working on and really need to finish before these, fees do get back up too high.
So what's up with you, Kenshin?
[00:05:43] Kenshin:
Well, it relates to today's topic. I started finally to solo mine, which means I took my miners away from Ocean's Pool, and I mined my own blocks, with my own, Bitcoin node. So everything homemade, let's say. And if if and when I find the block, then I get a full, 3.125 Bitcoin reward
[00:06:15] McIntosh:
for it. So And and there will be a party at your house that day. Yes. You're set up to mine on your own. That's cool. Mhmm. And how many years do we have until it's, no. I'm just kidding.
[00:06:32] Kenshin:
Yes. I did the math or I I found the calculator online, based on my both my minors now that I switched over to it. Two thousand five hundred years approximately.
[00:06:44] McIntosh:
So With the current thousand more miners, and you can do one a year. So that just that'll that'll pass budget with your wife. Right? Yes. Hey, honey. I need to get a thousand more miners and plug them all in and run up our phone bill phone bill, our electricity bill. Right? For for a year. Yeah.
[00:07:05] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:07:06] McIntosh:
Okay. Well, you know
[00:07:08] Kenshin:
But but this is and I got that question what what I use to mine, and this is with my small coal miners that are, like, little heaters. So they are only hundred watts, energy consumption. So it's not much. And they they give out a bit of heat, and they look like small heaters. So you wouldn't know if if you don't know that they are minors. So it's nothing powerful in that sense.
[00:07:35] McIntosh:
We really haven't talked about this a whole lot. We've mentioned this kind of stuff in passing. I believe, ultimately, and it may take a significant amount of time. A lot of appliances, a lot of things in our life are going to run like Bitcoin miners. I mean, heat is a very obvious use case. Right? Right. I can use a miner to heat my swimming pool. For example, if I live in a place where it's cool during or cold during the winter, I can use it to keep my driveway clean, my sidewalk clean if I get a lot of snow or ice, this kind of thing. The I don't know, greenhouses. Those are just like three easy things that I came up with. And and this type of innovation is happening all around the world. And it's slowly, very, very slowly being commercialized.
I I know you know this, but, Kenshin, you're very much on the edge of this kind of stuff. Like, this is not normal at this point. But if I'm using a heater in my house, why would I use a heater in my house that did not earn Satoshis versus one that did even if it was a very small amount. So as people understand Bitcoin and as this stuff gets commercialized, ultimately, we will see this in a lot of places. I just kinda wanted to mention that. So Yeah.
[00:09:04] Kenshin:
And and something you might appreciate is I the the Bitcoin address that I have connected to those miners, I put it in a Python script that says good morning every morning on on Oster. So it says in the end of the notes, it says PS, I didn't mine a block today or or then I have another message if I have. So when I
[00:09:29] McIntosh:
see that you did mine one, I need to call you up and make sure that you're you know, you didn't have a heart attack or something. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Well, I'm not gonna talk about work this week, so everybody say yay. I did have work this week, but we're not talking about it. I did over the weekend, my wife and I were able to get away. We went on a little vacation, to a place near us and, you know, stayed for actually, what, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the three days. So I got a chance to decompress. Now even though I really wasn't aware of it, last week was apologize.
It completely slipped my mind. But my wife got me a book, and I have to talk about it. And I'm sorry. Y'all know I'm a Tolkien nerd. I am. Mhmm. And my wife knows me very, very well. She got me a copy of a book called The History of The Hobbit. So The Hobbit was the first book that Tolkien published. It's his most famous book, really. It's a children's book. It's a story that he actually wrote for his children and that, you know, he would read to them at night. So this book and I have read this to actually one of my children. It takes about two weeks of reading if, you know, you read for half an hour or so every night.
It's not a super long book. This book, the history of the Hobbit, on the other hand, I have to I have to look this up real quick. Hold on. It is 900
[00:11:21] Kenshin:
Oof.
[00:11:22] McIntosh:
950 pages. And it's a larger like, this is a full size hardcover book. Okay? You have to picture this. This thing has got to be three inches thick. It is actually longer and well, it's bigger than the Lord of the Rings, like all three of the Lord of the Rings put together. So fellowship and two towers and the return of the king. It's massive, and it's like he documents how Tolkien wrote the Hobbit. Like, Tolkien, just the way that he worked, it was always information, believe it or not, has actually been kept. He never threw anything away, not because I think he thought he was something special. That was just his nature.
And a lot of this stuff has ended up, for example, at a place at a university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I cannot remember the name of. But, like, in there, they have, like, a a, archives for it. And the author of this, John Ratliff, was able to go in and access all of this stuff, and he I am one of the few people in the world who would appreciate this book, but this this book is gonna be awesome. Anyways, I also, did get my some minors online, so I had three that were offline. Two of them are now back online. And I believe what they did was they shipped them from Washington down to Texas and, put them back online there. So they had a problem at their facility, where they were, and I don't know what happened. They don't tell me a whole lot, to be honest, which is very disappointing. But regardless, two of them are back online. One of them at this point is still not, so they're supposed to look at it. So I'm almost back up to full hash rate, and all my hash is pointed at ocean. Thank you. I'm not trying to solo mine.
I cannot wait two thousand years to get a block. But you must have a lot more hash rate, man. I do have more hash rate than you do. Yes. I only have six. One one of my servers, I will say this, and I've talked I have talked a bit about about this. I don't give numbers, but I will say that my oldest miners are, like, 90 hash per miner. Okay. 90 or nine? Nine nine zero. Not
[00:14:10] Kenshin:
nine. Yeah. Yeah. 90. Almost a hundred. But that's a lot. Yes.
[00:14:15] McIntosh:
So we're we're not you can't make money. If you get lucky, you're gonna make a lot of money, and that's awesome. But that's not if you're actually trying to do this as a business, that stuff isn't viable. I mean, it doesn't I you can't have enough of those to make it make any sense.
[00:14:36] Kenshin:
Right? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:39] McIntosh:
That stuff's great for exactly what you're using it for. You're heating your house. You're doing something you need to do anyways, but you're not gonna become financially free on your miner.
[00:14:51] Kenshin:
No. Mine mine are costing me money. They they just repay back half of what they spent in that sense. So they they are not making any profit when I was mining in the pool. Now they are completely waste energy, but the upside is huge if they find a block. Yeah.
[00:15:12] McIntosh:
Yeah. Alright. Well, enough about us, I think. There was one other thing I actually wanted to mention. Oh, well, enough about us. Let's talk about our Zapathon because I I'm you know what? We did a lot of things wrong. I'm gonna be honest. We did. But I'm so excited about our results. So first of all, I wanna apologize. Actually, this gives me a chance to to to do that. Because of the work that I'm not gonna talk about, unfortunately, I did not get to edit Thursday night and it put out. So the episode did come out on Saturday morning instead of Friday morning. So we got off to a late start, and Saturday is not the day that people are on.
And so I know that hindered what happened, but we did give away some Satoshis. I don't know if you have a total. It was a little confusing because of Yeah. I also didn't get the money moved over to start with. So you moved over some money as well.
[00:16:19] Kenshin:
I think around 10,000 subs at least Okay. That we give.
[00:16:24] McIntosh:
That's that's awesome. I would have loved to have given out all of it, and I know that sounds crazy. Yeah. But, that was the goal. We were trying to give away a total of 42,000 sats. Okay? We zapped the first twenty one people got 420, and we did do that. And then we continued on after that zapping 210 sats, until people just stopped because that post kind of fell out of the feed, so to speak.
[00:16:54] Kenshin:
Yeah. We tried to revive it on Saturday night, but it Yeah. It didn't work out. It didn't really work.
[00:17:02] McIntosh:
But what we do know going and looking at our numbers with Pod Home, more people listened, and we got some great feedback. In fact, I wanna read one of them right now. Yeah. If you don't mind, rather than doing this through the boost section, this is not really a boost, but I just I love this. This was awesome. And where is it? Right there. Here it is. So buttercup Roberts, which first of all, I love the name. So this is a reference to princess buttercup on princess bride, the movie. And, so anyways, buttercup Roberts said this, finally had a chance to have a listen to the show and the different fears related to Bitcoin. So this was the last episode, the one that we were promoting, of course, at the invitation of having Plebs share some fears. A few that weren't mentioned and that have gotten into my radar recently are, and I thought these were really good.
Number one, ossification. We did not talk about that at all. So ossification is the idea that we're gonna freeze the base layer. It's not gonna change. Listened to a few Jameson Lop interviews has made me wary of what it means to only focus development on other layers and not on the base chain and what it would mean if little by little, we have fewer and fewer maintainers, to make sure that the chain which holds more than trillions in value starts to lose devs and people who can maintain the decentralized ethos and priorities in the code. I I share that fear, to be honest. I mean, that's something that I am aware of, and I am concerned about.
I will say I have that too. Yeah. For example, we did see something very good. One of the ETFs, and I don't remember which one, but they had promised 10% of their gross profits off of their Bitcoin ETF would go towards developers. And they made good on that for 2024. The gross was I think it was a hundred and 50,000, and they split it up equally among three different nonprofits to, you know, to divvy that out essentially for Bitcoin development. They don't have time to, obviously, to look up all these people and whatever, but these are, you know, nonprofits that should be able to take care of that.
So I like to see that kind of stuff, but I know that the base layer, you know, base chain developers, it's it's hard work. I mean, it is. So, anyways, base layer being self reliant. For the moment, miners can rely on this block subsidy. But seeing how in these USD spike moments, transaction fees remain low. If development on second and third layer remain the way to make transacting on Bitcoin cheaper, then I wonder how the incentive model will make sense for minors after no more block rewards long time frame, but still a fear for legacy. I agree with that. Well, the thought the line makes sense. I'm gonna say that.
I think well, for one thing, there will always be people who mine because it's what runs the network. Okay? And I actually would not mind, a little less public miners, if that makes sense. I think they've gotten kind of heavy in the last couple of, epochs. Companies like Bitfarm, like Hut eight, I think is the name of it. What's the big one? Riot. Right? Those kind of companies. I'm actually glad that some of them are pivoting towards AI. I mean, honestly. But we'll just have to see what the price of Bitcoin is because even though the transaction volume, you know, is it may not be crazy.
The price twenty years from now should be significantly higher than it is now, and that may make that worthwhile. But it's I can see being a fear.
[00:21:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. And the house rate keeps growing. Yes. We are at an all time high recently. We are. Mhmm.
[00:21:27] McIntosh:
People are saying we've reached, what is it called, one zeta hash, which is a thousand, exa hash. Is it peta hash? No. Peta is five. No. I I think it's, exa. I think we've reached it. Right. It's exa and then, yeah. Exa and then, zeta hash. So Yeah. It's a lot. We are at an all time high regardless of whether we've reached that level or not or sustained it or whatever. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. I don't see it going down, but we will see. I I do think the AI thing is an interesting angle, and I do think some of these Pubcos are gonna start pivoting towards that because they see it as a quick buck, which I that's not the way you should be looking at your business, but that's what they may be doing. So the last thing she says or the last thing that this person says is, self custody blacklisting.
The more paper Bitcoin goes into circulation and the more institutions want to hold Bitcoin for you, I worry for self custodial criminalization make people have to choose to behave outside of law and the fact that may result in less and less ways to transact with your self custodial, stack. That's a legitimate fear, certainly, and we did not bring that up. I appreciate bringing up all three of these. These are great, and things that you can think about anyways to finish this up. Anyways, just some thoughts that sparked off listening to your pod.
Thank you. I appreciate that feedback, buttercup Roberts. That was terrific.
[00:23:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. That was great feedback. And we got, three more really good comments, in that note that we posted.
[00:23:26] McIntosh:
Do we have time to to read those, or are they too long? Because that one was kinda long.
[00:23:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. They are quite long, but but, essentially, they they like the theme. They liked the discussion about the fears. They relate to some, and they brought up a couple as well. But for me, the important part is that we we got some, let's say, very good quality, listeners on board with that. So it was definitely worth
[00:23:59] McIntosh:
some of those searches. Saw an uptake in our numbers. I mean, we were tracking that with Pod Home. And even though we released on Saturday, which is probably the worst day of doing it other than May well, even if you released on Sunday night, it'd be it would have been better. We had the highest numbers we've had in in, frankly, months. So it was very encouraging. We are gonna go ahead. I guess we'll just say this here. We're we are gonna go ahead and plan on doing one for episode 200, which is only two episodes away. Two more weeks, we're gonna do one more. If you are, not on Nostr, I would encourage you to get on Nostr.
Get a wallet set up, get involved with the ecosystem, especially, like, if you're a Twitter user, frankly, because this is a less toxic Twitter. It's not without its issues, but, I enjoy spending time on Nostril. I'm on Twitter because there's a lot of people who haven't made the move to Nostril. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, yeah, I would encourage you to get set up, and then we'll do the same thing. I don't know that we'll do 42,000 Satoshis. We'll have to look at what we've got, but I do think it'll be a pretty significant amount. Mhmm. So
[00:25:24] Kenshin:
And I I find myself actually more on Osr now than than Twitter. Twitter, I just go to
[00:25:30] McIntosh:
send you a message sometimes Yeah. And see if you have We we message back and forth through Twitter a lot. It's funny that that's just kind of the way it works out.
[00:25:39] Kenshin:
Yeah. But, otherwise, I I'm actually almost zero on Twitter for the past couple of weeks, and I spend a lot of sats even on the simple good morning messages around. And, I'd like to do to do that for now. It feels good to get the, let's say, the circular economy of of, the zaps and nos are going. So it's quite good to have a budget, for that around a thousand a day or something.
[00:26:10] McIntosh:
Very cool. Alright. We do need to move on so this doesn't get too long. We are gonna talk about Bitcoin mining today. Yep. So, why don't you start things off?
[00:26:24] Kenshin:
Yeah. So the idea today is to go through a bit of the basics for maybe some people who don't know or don't know enough and want to put the pieces together. I had to go through those basics with some family members to make them understand, how Bitcoin actually works and and the Bitcoin, the supply is created and why, essentially why it's it's good thing the way it's working because it's a lot of, fear and, how it's called is FUD in the media about, the Bitcoin in general, the energy consumption and other things. So someone understanding the basics, can actually understand that, why it's good and why maybe some of the mainstream media or don't know exactly.
How do we say? Yeah. Maybe they don't tell the truth. I didn't want to say that, but I'm shocked.
[00:27:31] McIntosh:
Sorry.
[00:27:34] Kenshin:
But because it's it's easy to say, oh, I heard this is bad. So they don't yeah. Don't get involved with that. So then Well, people repeat things without even understanding
[00:27:44] McIntosh:
Yeah. You know, the background or they just they just paired it. They just they've heard it. Oh, Bitcoin mining's bad, and and we'll we'll talk about that. That's fine. Mhmm. Because I've been dealing with that now for multiple years. This is not something new. Yeah. Okay? So, we we I welcome that. These are fun discussions. But before we do that, why don't we talk about what mining actually is. Right? Right.
[00:28:14] Kenshin:
So, essentially, mining, is the process of, putting together transactions. So if I send you a transaction, with Bitcoin, that Bitcoin gets in a queue. And then the mining, which actually should not be called mining, should be called validating maybe.
[00:28:34] McIntosh:
I yeah. I think even the term is bad, but that's the term we've got. So we might as well stick with
[00:28:41] Kenshin:
it. Yeah. But what essentially means is to to put the transaction, group them together
[00:28:47] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And,
[00:28:49] Kenshin:
approve that, yes, this is the sender and that's the receiver. And those are all the transactions that need to be executed now and, exchanged, let's say, signatures between the those, users or how do we call us? People, anyway. And and that creates a block and that block gets in a chain of other blocks and then each block is connected to the next. And essentially, by refer by being connected, they refer to each other and that makes all the previous blocks, secure. So no one can go and say, no, I want to take the transaction back or redo that transaction or
[00:29:38] McIntosh:
or whatever or reject it or something. This is why people say once you mine a block, a transaction, you can't undo that transaction, essentially. It takes two you technically, you can, but it takes too much mining power to do it. You would literally have to control, I hope I get this right, but more than 51% of the mining power of the network, which is that's impossible.
[00:30:08] Kenshin:
Not even a country can do that at this point. Yeah. And if you could do that, you have only ten minutes to do it. Right. Because then the moment the second block is gone on top of the the others It doubles in
[00:30:21] McIntosh:
difficulty, essentially. So, it it is very, very durable in that sense. So how does a miner get a block? How does a miner mine they call it mine a block. How do they mine a block?
[00:30:37] Kenshin:
Well, essentially, it's by luck. They guess very, very long numbers.
[00:30:43] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And
[00:30:45] Kenshin:
it has to do with a lot of leading zeros. So you need to find a very long number with a lot of zeros in front of it, and the rest needs to match exactly the signatures from the previous blocks plus the signatures of the new block. It's very clever and complicated crypto cryptographically, and I cannot explain it any better.
[00:31:10] McIntosh:
Well, we're gonna we're gonna stick in a document. We could spend the whole show kind of talking about this and and maybe not doing a very good job of it. We're gonna Yeah. We're gonna put a link in the show notes to more of that if you want to know more in-depth. But I would I would highlight what you said. It's luck. It's guessing. It's like a lottery because a lot of times you'll hear it. Unfortunately, I've said this in the past. It's like you're solving a puzzle, a cryptographic puzzle. That's not actually true. And I just that is one thing I just kinda wanted to clear up. You're really just guessing really fast to try and match these these hashes.
And the first miner to match that, they're the one who wins the block. If they're in a pool, a mining pool that shared among all the miners in that pool. If they're solo mining, if they're mining by themselves like what Kenshin is actually doing, then that miner gets that block and all of its rewards. So we'll talk about the rewards in just a minute, but it would be all the transaction fees, the fees that are associated with those transactions, plus what's called the block reward.
[00:32:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. And, yes. And you said about the fees. So every transaction when we send from me to you, there is a transaction fee. And when we say in the beginning of its show, we say the transaction fees and it's two, three, or five, and whatever it is. Those are the, yes, the weight, the cost of each byte and the weight of the transaction. If you have the transactions and the kit, they can be light transactions. So me to you directly one transaction, and then you can have multiple senders and multiple receivers. And each sender and the receiver adds, bytes. It's like a text file. So it's you have more information in it. So it means more bytes and it takes more space in the block.
So it's fair. It's a fair system that you need to pay for that space. And that payment then goes to the winning, miner essentially. Right. Whoever that is. And it's added up to the main
[00:33:38] McIntosh:
reward that we will To the block reward. Right? So currently, I don't well, I don't wanna get ahead on this, but currently that reward is what? 3.125. Right? Yeah. Once they moved down from the last one, I I have trouble remembering it. It'll get worse next time. But, yeah, 3.125. So we secure the network with these miners. That's gonna help prevent fraud for one thing. This is actually what makes Bitcoin you can't double spend it. Okay? You can't say, oh, I wanna spend it over here and then turn around and spend it somewhere else as well. It also it helps with decentralization because anybody could run a miner. I can run a miner. Kenshin can run a miner. Any of the listeners to this show can run a miner. A public company like Bitfarms, they can run miners. They run lots of miners.
You know, it doesn't matter. And because of that, that helps decentralize things. We don't have a central authority that we check into to say, oh, mister central authority, can I mine? No. You just join the network and start mining. And if your machine gets the block, then you get the block. So it's a very fair system in that sense.
[00:35:09] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Okay. Yes. And the more miners maybe we can go another time into difficulty, but the more miners there are, the difficulty changes and adjusts. And the less miners they have, again, the difficulty changes. So the the average, block is supposed to come every ten minutes no matter how much power is put into the system, at any given point.
[00:35:37] McIntosh:
The levels that were on the very early systems were so tiny. It was crazy. Like, I mean, we're talking about, like, I think this is correct. Maybe less than a petahash for a so a thousand terahash for a significant period of time, like months and months and months. Okay? But it's ramped up now to where, like we said, where we basically broken that one exahash level, which is so much higher than it was back then, but that difficulty has adjusted during that entire time. So on average, it's not exactly ten minutes per block, but on average, overall that time, it's actually really close. It's kind of crazy.
[00:36:30] Kenshin:
Yeah. That's why it goes up and down all the time.
[00:36:34] McIntosh:
That is a feature that is not a bug unlike what other blockchains would have you tell you. Right? So anyways, go ahead.
[00:36:47] Kenshin:
Yeah. And then we have the actual rewards that we talked about. Mhmm. They started fifteen years ago at 50 Bitcoin per block as a reward. So the early days when, Satoshi Nakamoto and, Halfine were mining and some others.
[00:37:07] McIntosh:
So Well, it was that way for how actually, how long was the first epoch? Was it it wasn't four years, was it? It it was
[00:37:16] Kenshin:
everything.
[00:37:19] McIntosh:
We'll have to look it up. I don't wanna stop everything, but, yes. The first the first epoch, it was 50 per per block, and then it was 25, and then it was 12, and then it was, six. Wait. Yeah. Of course. I didn't do that right. 25. 12 point 5. That's why. 12.5. Right? So half of '25 and then 6.25. Now we're at 3.125. And that happens this havening is what we call it. This happens approximately every four years, and it's based on the blocks. It's actually a certain number of blocks, which offhand oh, here it is. Every 210,000 blocks, the reward gets halved. That is programmed into the algorithm, and, essentially, a huge number of people would have to agree to change that code.
So there's no central authority that says, hey, this time we're not actually gonna have. We're gonna keep it at, say, 3.125.
[00:38:26] Kenshin:
Right? Well well, yes. And, actually, that's something that was worrying me. And when I looked into the block size wars that happened around 02/2016 Mhmm. That's exactly what they were trying to do. And they actually did it, and they did a new chain, and they did new rules.
[00:38:47] McIntosh:
And what's that chain called?
[00:38:49] Kenshin:
I I don't know. It doesn't matter. Oh, okay. Because they're gone or just Yes. Or it it's irrelevant because Right. The the the miners, some switched, but most didn't. And the nodes, some switched, but most didn't. Right. So so they were surprised that their plan didn't work because they thought, oh, we just take the programmers on our side and we do a new change. But then everybody stayed on the old chain and the old chain just kept going and then they had to come back. So in that sense, because I had that fear that, what happens with the programmers if someone gives them a lot of money and, yeah, makes them change the code. And then what happens is it needs to be a new code and a new fork. So it needs to be a new coin. It's not gonna be BTC. Right. Bitcoin is gonna be something else.
And people just not gonna go for that. So that's why.
[00:39:46] McIntosh:
So one of the things that this halvening does, this programmatic half of the reward, it builds in a fixed supply. Now Satoshi set it at 21,000,000 coins, essentially. It's not exactly, but it's so close. That's just what we say. 21,000,000 Bitcoin. So in 2140, the last Bitcoin will be mined completely. The last site, especially. The last Satoshi. Correct. And there will be no more reward. The miners will rely on transaction fees, which is actually the fear that, Buttercup Roberts brought up in their note, that's the exact fear that we're talking about. What happens in 2140 when we get to no reward?
Mhmm. Well, it's the transactions. Now we hope that the transactions are to a level that will support the miners. If it's not, miners will start dropping off, and they'll do that long before 2140, by the way. And either we'll have a more organic, like, pleb minor movement, if you wanna call it that, or we won't have a Bitcoin network, if that's true. Now, I don't know. I'm not saying that that's true. That's just kind of the thesis, right? I don't believe that that will happen, actually, but that's okay. I think Bitcoin will be so valuable by then. Any amount of Bitcoin will be worth valuable by then. Any amount of Bitcoin will be worth the power that's used to generate it, to to get to get it to get it as a reward.
[00:41:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. Well, if nothing changes, let's assume now we're at that point. And that at that point, the last four years, the Bitcoin, the block reward will be one sat per block.
[00:41:46] McIntosh:
Right. Right?
[00:41:48] Kenshin:
So that one sat, of course, it's not much. It doesn't sound like much. But if we are at this point where we are with current technology and we have the cheapest transaction we can do with 1 sat per v byte is around a hundred and 50 sats for one transaction. Mhmm. So that one transaction for one person to another person, let's say, that's a 50 times more than the block reward. Right. Than the block reward. That's a good point. So those transactions fees are gonna be huge. Mhmm. And this is not a problem because someone would say, okay. But then we cannot send
[00:42:25] McIntosh:
on on chain. What if that transaction what if that Satoshi is worth a dollar? Mhmm. Just to kind of throw this out there. That means every transaction would be at least a hundred and $50.
[00:42:38] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:42:39] McIntosh:
Right? So at that point, it starts making sense Yeah. When you bundle up a lot of those.
[00:42:47] Kenshin:
Yeah. And it's not gonna be an issue that it's too expensive because it's gonna be too expensive for one transaction, but we already have layer two technologies that we already use. Mhmm. And we don't we already don't want to use on chain in many cases. We just want to use lightning for the zaps or whatever else. I I think what we will see is a divergence. These lower,
[00:43:09] McIntosh:
you know, kind of like your walk around wallet type transaction. They'll happen on these layer twos, whatever they end up being, lightning, whatever, cashew, whatever. Right? On the other hand, there will be enough transactions on the base chain from, say, I don't know, business is sending large payments back and forth or nation states sending money back and forth to other nation states that are thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars or billions of dollars, those will travel across the main chain. So it I think it will balance out. I mean, I'm not prophesying that, but that's just kind of the way I I look at. I do wanna talk about one more thing about this before we move on.
Well, maybe this kinda ties into the next point, but why 21,000,000? Why didn't he just say we'll get down to, I don't know, 1 Bitcoin per block and we'll just keep it at that for all eternity. Right? Why do you think he did that?
[00:44:26] Kenshin:
Actually, I don't know that answer, but I if I would have to guess, I think it's just a number that makes sense, for him at least calculation
[00:44:38] McIntosh:
wise. Well, I think the 21,000,000 itself was completely arbitrary. Who knows why? That's not actually my point. My point is we do have a limit. There will never be more than 21,000,000 Bitcoin. Why didn't he just say, once the block reward gets down to one that we keep it at that. Right. Right. We would not have 21,000,000 coins. We would have, depending on what year it was, 21,000,000 plus however many blocks were mined that year plus the next year and so on. Why do you think he did it with a fixed supply versus some scheme like that?
[00:45:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. It starts to keep the scarcity and create a proper hard money in that sense. Okay. And very good inflation
[00:45:25] McIntosh:
type of Right. Because anything else is inflation. Right? Even if it's one Bitcoin per year over a long enough time frame, that is inflation. You can argue, well, that's really low, but it's still inflation. Yeah. And he wanted to create a hard money. He wanted to create a hard asset. Even gold, we've talked I think I've mentioned this on this podcast. You people consider gold a hard asset, and and I can go along with that. By most definitions, it is. But the reality is we could find a huge amount of gold on the bottom of the ocean, for example. And a hundred years from now, it might be viable to mine that. So what does that do to the gold supply? It dilutes it. We could find gold on the moon or on Mars. Elon is, you know, bent on getting to Mars.
They may find a gold supply there. I'm not saying they're going to. I'm just saying it's possible. Or an asteroid, a meteor, whatever. It's not actually a fixed total supply. It's just we have a pretty good idea with our current technology how much gold we could mine per year, and we know how much gold roughly is in existence. So we act like it's fixed. Does that does that make sense? Yes. This is truly fixed. There will only be 21,000,000
[00:46:54] Kenshin:
Bitcoin. Yeah. And you know exactly at this second how much there is in circulation exactly down down to one set. Mhmm. I went down the rabbit hole of figuring out, this week how much gold there is because I I was trying to put it in a Python script, the market cup of gold. Okay. I couldn't find it. It's incredible how difficult it is to find the proper gold supply and make the numbers agree from different websites.
[00:47:23] McIntosh:
I I have to say, Kenshin, you keep saying I'm writing this Python program. I'm beginning to wonder if you're actually doing work anymore. Do you guys do your job or do you just sit at home and write Python?
[00:47:35] Kenshin:
I I slept at 2AM last night.
[00:47:38] McIntosh:
Now you're starting out like me. Alright.
[00:47:43] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:47:45] McIntosh:
The the problem is you have a you you yeah. Anyways, no. I did. Sorry. Okay. So that's why he put in this limit. That's why he put in the halving because he did not want this infinite printing of Bitcoin. The supply issuance is gonna create scarcity scarcity. Right? And that's gonna influence price over time. When when miners can only mine in in fact, what let me back up. It's shocking to me that even post halving, like, immediately, we don't see a price increase because when you go from, I don't know, 6, whatever it is, down to 3.1 6.25 down to 3.125.
I hate keeping up with all these numbers. I'm terrible at it. You know, that the supply that's being created per day is only half, and that's every day. But the amount of Bitcoin that's can being bought is not getting cut in half. So, you know, historically, immediate price increase after a halving. It it always just blows my mind, but, ultimately, we do. I mean, it's happened after every halving. Mhmm. So
[00:49:08] Kenshin:
And at the last halving, I think the price was around $50.60
[00:49:12] McIntosh:
or something. So I think we're around double now a year Yeah. We've already doubled it, but it's it's definitely gonna go. But even that didn't kick off for No. Several months if I'm not mistaken. So we're in February. It was last April. I wanna say it was in the fall when we really jumped. Is that correct?
[00:49:33] Kenshin:
Well, we had an all time high bef before it. Okay. But then we went down again, down to 40,000 in the summer. And then Yeah. I don't remember this stuff. Wow.
[00:49:45] McIntosh:
Good job. Alright. Yeah. Well, we had to flush out all the weak hands. Alright. Well, we need to move on. Let's talk about this. The final Bitcoin is gonna be mined at twenty one forty. We've already talked about this quite a bit actually. Yeah. So miners are gonna rely on transaction fees. Mhmm.
[00:50:12] Kenshin:
Can can I say one time one time again? I I can say one sat per block is gonna be in a hundred and twenty years. Right now is 350,000,000 SATs per block. I just want to to reiterate that part.
[00:50:32] McIntosh:
You know, here's the thing, guys, and I wanna use this as a springboard for this really quickly. Bitcoin's either gonna fail or it's going to be the single most valuable asset in the world, hands down, in 2140. Okay? That's there's no in between because of the way that the system is set up. So if you have people in your life that you want to pass wealth to, there's no better way of doing it because of what you just said, Kenshin. Right now, you mind, you know, millions and millions of Satoshis. And in 2140, which is not that far away. I know it sounds like it's not, but it is it is now just over a hundred years away. Your children may be around when that's mined.
If, you know, obviously, I think most of us would not be, but your children may be. Your grandchildren most likely will be. What's the price of Bitcoin gonna be at that point? And it it just boggles my mind when I start thinking about that. And that's why saving your Bitcoin and securing it is so important because it's not gonna be 10 x. It's not gonna be a hundred x of what it is right now. Okay? So point one Bitcoin right now I'm sorry. Point o one is a thousand dollars. 1 percent of a Bitcoin, roughly a thousand dollars. It's not gonna be a hundred times that.
It's gonna be maybe a thousand times that, maybe more. I don't know. But it's gonna be a lot. Mhmm. So don't be dismissive of whatever the amount is and do whatever you can to increase that amount because this is not gonna get any easier over time. That's just the system.
[00:52:43] Kenshin:
And I I keep saying to myself, he's like, oh, sending around 21 sats for good morning messages. Yeah. It's like I will be talking with my grandkids and he'll be like, what? Throwing 21 You're right.
[00:52:58] McIntosh:
I mean, minimum, I think we're looking well, I mean, just to get all crazy, what if that's a dollar a sat? Right? That's $21 every time you do that. As long as you're replacing it Yeah. I I would actually highly encourage that. Right? I think that that's something that we should be doing, but do not be doing that kind of stuff out of your cold storage, out of your long term storage, out of your savings. Right? You can separate savings and spending money, ladies and gentlemen. Dave Ramsey taught us to put it into little envelopes. You can figure out something digitally to do that. Right? Yeah.
You need to be have a savings, and you need to continue to put into that savings even if it's at what amounts to a tiny amount today. And then don't let your kids go and blow it. What you know, if it's a hundred x, right, and you had a decent amount in there and all of a sudden they're rich Yep. Don't let teach them not to go stupid with that. Teach them the long term benefits. Maybe they do use some of it. I mean, people we need to have a life. Okay? But the majority of it, in my opinion, should be kept for their kids, if not for and it should be put to use at some point.
We will be able to invest Bitcoin in ways that are safe, in ways that generate income, whether it's Bitcoin or not in the long term. Mhmm. But you can't do that if you don't have the Bitcoin in the first
[00:54:43] Kenshin:
place. Yeah. Absolutely. I will say tell you a quick example. I save for my son in fiat and in Bitcoin approximately the same amount every month. His Bitcoin stack is at least four times bigger right now. It's crazy. And that's just a couple of years. It's it's not even
[00:55:02] McIntosh:
that long that I do that. I'm gonna tell you a little story, and I I shouldn't do this. I'm gonna no. We don't have time, and I shouldn't do it anyways. I shouldn't do it anyways. It is amazing how it grows. Okay. Yeah. Let's move on because time is running away. We have criticisms. We need to address those, to wrap this up. So Yeah. I'm gonna say this. Maybe this will because I I've been doing mining for multiple years now, and this stuff was all around when when I was first getting started. A lot of it centers around energy use. Look. These things are powerful. They require a lot of power. It's it's insane.
It's like running so I don't know of miners that have less of industrial miners. I'll put it that way. They have less than 1.5 kilowatts of continuous power usage. Okay. That's 1,500 watts. Some of them are much, much higher than that. It's a lot of energy, and it's always online. And people say that's wasteful. And I will tell you it's the exact opposite. I will point you to places like Africa where people like Eric Hirschman are literally lighting up Africa because of Bitcoin mining. Thank you very much. Okay.
I will point you to places like West Texas. Okay. Right here in The United States where they drill a well. There's natural gas trapped in the well, in the in the oil underground. It's not whatever. Okay. I'm not a oil person. So but but it's there. They're far away from civilization. They can't just build a pipeline for the natural gas, so they flare it off. Okay? And then it that's bad because that's creating pollutants. That's creating, they would argue, global warming. I could go out there to that mining field, capture that natural gas, run a generator, power Bitcoin, and make cheap money, and at the same time, solve a problem.
So where are the most common Bitcoin miners at? Places where they make sense. It has look. The energy has to make sense. It has to be less than even right now, like, 8¢ per kilobyte, kilowatt in order to make any kind of sense. And even at that price, it's it's iffy. Okay? It's breaking. Yeah. You can't just plug into a coal power plant because that's what's there and use up all their power if they're charging 15 or 30¢ per kilowatt. It doesn't make sense. We go to places where the power is cheap, and it's cheap because there's a lot of it. And there's a lot of it because, I don't know. Maybe it's a hydro dam. It's got a lot of water. That power, if it's not used, it's just I think they call it run to ground. It's wasted.
It doesn't go back into the system. It doesn't get stored in a freaking battery. That's just not the way it works. It didn't I I really wished they taught some basic energy in, like, high school, but then they probably wouldn't pay attention anyways. People do not understand how the energy networks work. And because of that, they think that anything that plugs into it is is a problem. These are actually being used to balance the system. They're being used to minimize, these harmful things that go on, like, with the natural gas flare or methane. Oh, they're methane's horrible. It's, like, 25 times worse than, like, natural gas, and it leaks out of landfills.
Are we all gonna stop putting stuff in landfills? No. We're not. But you literally can capture that methane. Again, run it through a generator and power Bitcoin miners and make money. It it's just endless. It goes on and on and on. There's been no legitimate study in in recent times that show that Bitcoin mining is bad. And in fact, Bitcoin mining uses more renewable energy than any other industry. It's over 50% at this point. Right. Sorry. That one gets me every time. And I'm just Me too.
[00:59:39] Kenshin:
And my my what I told you in the beginning with my miners, mine don't make money in a normal home electricity plan. Mhmm. I I just recover half of what I I spent. So it it really only incentivizes good energy, cheap energy, renewable energy. It it doesn't take away from the normal homes type of energy because because it's unprofitable for that. So so it puts people and companies to think cleverly where to find good renewable energy or cheap energy or no, yeah, no cost energy. Right. But it's not used,
[01:00:20] McIntosh:
or waste That's why I'm moving up to the North Part Of Norway, by the way.
[01:00:24] Kenshin:
Anyways. You're welcome.
[01:00:27] McIntosh:
Heating my home with my miner while I run the rest of them in the data center.
[01:00:32] Kenshin:
Right? Right.
[01:00:34] McIntosh:
Alright. Let's move on because you could spend all the entire day on that. And the people who think it's a problem are still gonna think it's a problem, and that's fine because I got 14 things I can show them to prove that it's not. This is actually, I think, a fairly legitimate concern. Large mining pools dominating hash power. Does this threaten decentralization? I do I I yes. Ant pool right there. I'm looking at you because it's not just Ant pool, which is the mining pool of Bitmain. Bitmain, the main, ASIC manufacturer, which is actually a problem in and of itself. Right? They're they're manufacturing miners, and then they run a mining pool, a very large one, against the very people who they're selling stuff to. Not only that, they then white label that service to other mining pools.
They are already there's two of them that are between the two. They're over 50% of the network. And so that, in my opinion, is a problem. And and I would love to see more mining pools. I would love to see more solo miners like yourself. I do not. I went with Ocean strictly because of that. I used to use, brains Right. And had a good experience with them right up until the point that I figured out that they were white labeled with the, Antminer people. So I said, nope. Boating with my feet. And Ocean had been up for a couple of months at that point, if I'm remembering correctly, and didn't seem to be having any trouble.
And knowing Luke Dasher junior, they will never merge with anyone else. So I went over to Ocean and I've had a good experience. I mean, honestly, we need more of that, whether it's ocean or other mining pools, because having one mining pool is not a good thing. There's a censorship issues. There's just I don't know. There's there's a number of issues, and it hides a lot of things. So, yeah, geopolitical issues. Certainly some governments have banned or restricted mining operations. Yes. China. Yes. Well, who was it? Bolivia that we were talking about the other day?
A number of countries.
[01:03:04] Kenshin:
Russia too. Yeah. Yeah. Russia recently.
[01:03:07] McIntosh:
And that's fine. Fortunately, I can pack my miners up and move them if I have to. And if I'm in doing this for a business and it's not just a hobby, To me, you know, I'm not worried about it as long as they're they're not coming in there with a gun and like they did in Venezuela and take your miners. Now I understand those were illegal operations, but that's what they did. I think over the long term, banning Bitcoin mining would be a stupid thing for a government to do, but we certainly still see that. And we see government still banning Bitcoin itself. I think that'll go away.
Alright. Let's we we need to wrap this up. Yeah.
[01:03:53] Kenshin:
But Yeah. One one last, fun fact that when Bitcoin mining started, a lot of people started with just random laptops mining with the CPU. And now we have evolved to the proper dedicated chips called ASIC chips that mine Bitcoin. Right.
[01:04:13] McIntosh:
If if you kids can settle back for just a minute, grandpa Macintosh will tell one quick story. Yeah. I almost got involved in mining years ago. I do not remember exactly the year. It was probably 2014, '20 '15. It I could look it up. It's when the GPU is first basically, you had to have a GPU. Okay? So laptops no longer were useful. You had to have a GPU. And I was doing consulting work at the time. I had a little office in the town we lived in, and I ordered a GPU. And I ordered I had a server or I ordered the parts or whatever. And I sat it on my desk and I looked at it for weeks and I didn't put it together, not because I'm not able to. I built my own computer when I was a junior in college out of no. High school out of parts.
I was afraid of the power consumption because I didn't want my landlord who was actually a friend of mine. I didn't want him mad at me. I and I knew I had to run it. I knew I had to run it all the time. I was so stupid. And I eventually sold the parts and went on my way, and I never actually set it up. And I, you know, whatever. You would had sold it and sold some of the Bitcoin anyway at some point. You're probably right. I you you you know what? Thanks for making me feel better. Better. You're probably right. But I I can't you know, we go I go through this from time to time. I cannot change the past.
But regardless, I did actually when we were doing GPS, almost get involved. And at that point, we had I mean, originally, it was. It was laptops and desktops and servers and whatever, and then we moved to GPU based systems, which that drove the GPU prices up. And then Butterfly Labs, I think, was the first ASIC miner, which they were almost a scam. They were not, but they were very, very close. I think what it was is they were overwhelmed. They couldn't keep up with orders and all this kind of stuff. But then, you know, kind of the age of ASICS came about. And so I only got involved what? I'd had to look it up, but it's it has been, I think, No. I think it's actually been right at two years right now.
I think it was in late February, very early March of '2 years ago. I bought my first miner, so I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not we're not getting off in that. Alright. Moving
[01:06:56] Kenshin:
on. Yep. Moving on. So I'm gonna cut out. Should we talk about our supporters then from the next episode? Sure.
[01:07:05] McIntosh:
We did get a lot of, we got some support from from Nostra directly, actually, and I don't have any figures on that. I have to bring up sorry. I do not have this.
[01:07:19] Kenshin:
We have a few on,
[01:07:21] McIntosh:
fountain. Just go ahead. I think that's all of them. Go ahead and read those off so I don't have to downgrow. Tell me. Orange beep
[01:07:29] Kenshin:
Okay. Gave boosted us a thousand sets and said, dedicated to the one quarter of Kenshin Italian heritage.
[01:07:39] McIntosh:
I saw that. I'm so glad you read that. Yeah. That's funny. And then he says,
[01:07:47] Kenshin:
so he's saying in Italian. I am Italian too. Right. And it was your grandmother. Right? My grandmother. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you, grandma.
[01:07:56] McIntosh:
We appreciate
[01:07:58] Kenshin:
that. I appreciate it.
[01:08:00] McIntosh:
That was awesome.
[01:08:03] Kenshin:
Appreciate that. Yeah. And he was from, the Nostr, Zapathon. So Okay. So I saw him there also in the comments. And then Geektos Chi, also from Noster, but came on Fountain and gave us back the $4.20.
[01:08:20] McIntosh:
Oh. Suds. Thanks. That's awesome.
[01:08:23] Kenshin:
Circular economy there. Great discussion, James. Looking forward to the next one. Happy to have found your pod. Keep chilling, no stir, and providing value. Thank you very much. We are we are Okay, James. We're shilling stuff. We shouldn't do that.
[01:08:43] McIntosh:
Alright. That's awesome. Is that it?
[01:08:46] Kenshin:
We got the usual agent Natasha
[01:08:50] McIntosh:
Okay. Streaming She's streaming away.
[01:08:52] Kenshin:
858 subs. Thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you. And 11 subs from common sense. But I think without the comment, I'm not sure how it ended up on fountain.
[01:09:08] McIntosh:
Alright. I I think we're gonna skip the software updates. I think the news is important enough even though we're over an hour, we need to talk about it. So there's a couple of things. I like it. You put them both in here. Really quickly, Germany, what the heck? Come on, guys. Y'all are acting like England or England's acting like you. I don't know what's going on over there, but they're literally putting people in jail for cartoons. I don't know. Yeah. Just don't talk about the government. Just shut up. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but, man, you gotta be careful. And if it were me, I'd be thinking about an exit strategy. I'm just saying.
That's not advice, but that's just me. Right. Wow. It's
[01:09:58] Kenshin:
too close here. England did that, Germany
[01:10:03] McIntosh:
for people, like, 50 people in in one morning. They It's they're just breaking into their house and own them off to jail. It's it's For memes. For for me. On social media, media. Man, if they only knew what I had in my head, they'd put me in a solitary, man. Right. Alright. Yeah. Oh, boy. Alright. I don't wanna talk about this, but I'm gonna have to,
[01:10:28] Kenshin:
My man What happened? What happened to Argentina?
[01:10:32] McIntosh:
Well, I will say this. I wanna say this before we dive into that. First of all, I think Argentina in general is still fine. You know, he's gonna be in a lot of hot water for this. I don't think he's gonna get impeached. Maybe he should be, but I don't think he's going to be. And I don't think, in general, he's gonna change anything. I'm not like he suddenly flipped all his ideas.
[01:10:58] Kenshin:
But what happened to you? Well,
[01:11:00] McIntosh:
he is a full blown libertarian. Okay? And that I think that's important to understand. So whether he did it, whether his team did it, whether they worked with another group of people to do it, basically, he promoted a meme coin very similar to what Trump did, who I'm also not happy with about for the exact guarantee you, he made a bunch of money off of it. And, I've listened to an interview of the guy who was supposedly, like, coordinated. I don't know exactly what his role was, but Coffeezilla, who, like, does a lot of uncovering of scams, somehow got this guy to get on, you know, and and talk about this.
It's not good. This whole meme coin thing, it it's it's it is so sorted. We don't talk about it because it's outside the scope of Bitcoin. But for the love of all that is holy people, do not mess with this stuff. Just don't. It's fraudulent. It is designed to remove money from you and put it in someone else's pocket. Now Malay has now come out and said, there was nothing wrong with what we did. People knew what they were getting into. And maybe that's true, but I still don't think, frankly, this kind of thing should be allowed. This is actually the one thing that I was on board with Gary Gensler about.
When these things are clear ripoffs, there's just no reason that they're okay. Now I know you have a slightly different view, and I am anxiously awaiting it. Yeah.
[01:13:08] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I knew that that was your view, and that's the Mhmm. Main view I saw. My view is that I think he had no clue, Millet, and the the rest of them because, I will tell you, when you see on that website about that coin, in the end, there is a Gmail account. It's like for more information, send an email and it's [email protected]. And it's it says something like designed, whatever with this com. I send you I have sent you the image. So it's like private initiative project developed by KIP Network Inc. Yeah. So it's it's a private company in some random KIP
[01:13:51] McIntosh:
was the guy that there was one person essentially behind that. I don't know his name off the top of my head, but that does that was his company. Right. I know he did not know everything that was going on. I I can go along with that, but he literally came out and said there was nothing wrong with this. And I, the translation was not incorrect.
[01:14:16] Kenshin:
Right. But, I really think they got scammed. Everybody got scammed, including the You should come out and say
[01:14:24] McIntosh:
this was this was bad. And but, see, he's not a Bitcoin only guy, of course, just like Trump is not, by the way. He's not. And the beatings will continue until they are because this will not work on a national scale with anything besides Bitcoin we Argentina and to help businesses and all the those businesses are gonna get squat out of this. And the attitude I I kinda wanna point post that Coffeezilla, interview in the notes, and maybe I will. The attitude of the guy that he was talking to who was definitely deeply involved, it it shows you what these meme coin people are like. And you need if if you do not understand, you need to listen to them. You need to understand they want to line their pockets. They do not care about you one bit. You're just a liquidity exit.
That's it. So I don't know. I look. This doesn't change in general kind of the way I feel about Argentina, but I'm very disappointed in Malay. But I and just like I was disappointed in Trump, Although I didn't really talk about it on here, I am disappointed in Trump. I think I said that to an extent, but it's the exact same thing with these stupid meme meme codes. We have way too many important things going on in this world to be trying to do this mess. Mess. This is stupid, and it should stop. I'm afraid, though, saying that that it will continue. There will be more of them until enough people have lost enough money that maybe at some point we can move past these things.
[01:16:37] Kenshin:
Right.
[01:16:38] McIntosh:
Yeah. And there is more more to to learn in this story, I guess, that we don't know the who. It's difficult when you don't speak the same language, and I don't speak Spanish. I'm trying, but trust me, I'm not listening to him talk in Spanish and doing some on the fly translation. There's there's even if you get a good translation, just differences in thinking it makes it does actually you miss the nuances and and whatever. So I don't wanna jump to conclusions, but it looks really bad. And him going out out and saying that everything was okay
[01:17:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I thought I did I did it. Did not help his case.
[01:17:20] McIntosh:
So Yeah. That's that's not Enough about that. You may differ you know, I let me know what you think. That'll be was that okay for a question of the episode? Yeah. Sure. Let let us know what you think about this stuff. I mean, I don't know. Maybe maybe you think it's okay. I know there are libertarians who think that, you know, as long as you don't physically hurt somebody, essentially, that it's okay. I this is hurting people, in my opinion. Yeah. And I don't I'm not okay with it. If that makes me not a libertarian, then I guess I'm not a libertarian. I don't try and classify myself, but, you know, whatever. All right. We're not we're skipping the software updates. Sorry. There is stuff. Oh, what was the one? We should mention that LND.
It was LND. Yeah. If you are running LND for a lightning node or if it's integrated into something that you're using, you need to update immediately. Your your wallet, your Bitcoin that's online. Alright. Hey. Let's wrap this up. This is a value for value show. We go out and do things like what we did with Noster, trying to provide, you know, value to the community. We put this content out here like what we've done here for the last hour and fifteen minutes or so, trying to provide value to the community. Hopefully, you've learned something. I would love for you just to actually go and tell somebody about it. That is the number one way to support this show. We really appreciate it when you do that. We are seeing our numbers go up, and I am and and I know Kenshin as well. We're grateful for that. Yes. We really are.
But another way that you can support us, of course, grab a podcasting two point o app, and you can boost us. Send in messages like these people did earlier, with a message, with some support. We always appreciate that. And now that we have a Nostra page for the podcast, don't boost Kenshin or I directly about, you know, supporting the podcast. You can boost the podcast itself, and that goes into kind of the the lightning wallet for the for the podcast that we will use to do things like these, Zapathons. So, again, got his Zapathon coming up in two more episodes.
Two more weeks. Get on Nostra if you're not. Use this as an opportunity to do that. Get yourself set up with a lightning wallet. Comment on our page when that one comes out, and you will get some fresh hot Bitcoin. Okay? So, that's it. We're we're gonna skip the rest of it, but, thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. You can always reach us. There's ways listed at the bottom of each of our episodes pages that's on satoshis-plebs.com/episodes. We have an entire library listed there. You can just click on the most recent, and our information is there. So stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon. Enjoy this my favorite band.
[01:20:49] Kenshin:
Alright. Have a great weekend.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is February, and this is episode one ninety eight of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm McIntosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
And I am Kenshin. And today's episode is mining basics.
[00:00:37] McIntosh:
Alright, Kenshin. I hope you enjoyed that new music. I finally got something going. Yeah. Very upbeat. So this was, thanks. This was some value for value music by a band called, my favorite band. And this actual song was called Racer Why, and I've came across this song a long time ago and really enjoyed it. I it's it's just kind of I don't know. I really enjoyed it. So I've cut the first few seconds, which we dropped in here, and then the whole song is gonna be at the end if you wish to listen to it, or you can just drop off. That's your choice. No problem. Right now, I do not have it set up so that any kind of cut is going towards them. When we get to our final setup where we're running our own lightning node, where we can manage this kind of stuff better, I that will be part of it. They you know, whoever it is that we play it, I do intend to rotate it relatively frequently.
I'm not gonna probably be able to do it every week because it does require some work and some listening and, you know, this kind of thing. But at least I'm hoping every couple of weeks just to give people a flavor of the different value for value music that's available out there. So that was a long introduction, but that's what was going on. So let's talk about the Bitcoin price as we record. I think you updated. Yes. You did. Because once again, you're less than us. Y'all got I'm serious, man. Y'all gotta work on that. I I guess that running joke is probably kinda dead. But
[00:02:18] Kenshin:
Oh, it's more valuable than you're right. It's more valuable.
[00:02:22] McIntosh:
Valuable. Unlike the Canadians. Right? I don't wanna poke at them, but, man, it's getting kinda crazy up there with their money. 96,100 US dollars. And how many euros we got?
[00:02:34] Kenshin:
92,100.
[00:02:36] McIntosh:
Actually, let me look it up just so I can have a good laugh. I'm only doing this because Canada is playing The United States Thursday night in hockey, and we're gonna wipe the floor with them, but I'm not being a a homeboy. Whatever. Right? It's $1.50 or something? Where it should be around $1.50, and I'm I'm I'm looking it up. This should have it right here. Australian dollar, man. No. The Australian dollar is actually doing a little better. Oh oh, look. No. They dropped down, but they are at $1.36 6. So there you go.
[00:03:16] Kenshin:
You want to know how much is the Swedish kroner?
[00:03:19] McIntosh:
It's a lot. You I saw you post that the other day. Go ahead.
[00:03:23] Kenshin:
It's 1,000,000 Swedish kroner.
[00:03:27] McIntosh:
I I really wanted to make a joke, but I these things don't do well on, like, Nostra and Twitter, and I just finally left it alone. I'm just like, I gotta leave it there. Alright. As we record, we are at block height eight eight four four eight seven. Man, that was a pause. And a difficulty adjustment of minus 1.42%. So we did, I guess, more hashes come online during the week. The difficulty adjustment has gone up. We are still negative, obviously, and we're only a couple of days away from our next, difficulty adjustment. So Feb twenty three will be when the next one happens. So, I mean, honestly, we may end up right about zero again.
So not a whole lot of change there. Why don't you go ahead and catch the, fees there?
[00:04:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. The mempool starts to fill up again. I mean, the good old days now until yesterday with the one Sat Privee bite is gone. So So we're up up to four, five, and six. Yeah. Let's see. That's how it stores. No. You're right. You're right. So the mempool is actually a 75 megabytes right now, up from zero, basically, transactions in the queue.
[00:04:48] McIntosh:
Right. So we did get a little backed up today. I don't know what's going on. Lord knows. Who knows? I don't know. It'll you know, I think we're gonna see this for a while. Frankly, I think we'll see it'll fluctuate. Although this is a little high, but I think it'll fluctuate a good bit, kinda in this lower area until the bull run takes back off, which I'm not going to predict when that happens because I very likely would be wrong because Bitcoin likes to make fools of us all. So we will see. But if you have things to do, like move Bitcoin around, get it to long term storage, say, it'd be a really good time to do that or set up a lightning node, which is something that I'm working on and really need to finish before these, fees do get back up too high.
So what's up with you, Kenshin?
[00:05:43] Kenshin:
Well, it relates to today's topic. I started finally to solo mine, which means I took my miners away from Ocean's Pool, and I mined my own blocks, with my own, Bitcoin node. So everything homemade, let's say. And if if and when I find the block, then I get a full, 3.125 Bitcoin reward
[00:06:15] McIntosh:
for it. So And and there will be a party at your house that day. Yes. You're set up to mine on your own. That's cool. Mhmm. And how many years do we have until it's, no. I'm just kidding.
[00:06:32] Kenshin:
Yes. I did the math or I I found the calculator online, based on my both my minors now that I switched over to it. Two thousand five hundred years approximately.
[00:06:44] McIntosh:
So With the current thousand more miners, and you can do one a year. So that just that'll that'll pass budget with your wife. Right? Yes. Hey, honey. I need to get a thousand more miners and plug them all in and run up our phone bill phone bill, our electricity bill. Right? For for a year. Yeah.
[00:07:05] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:07:06] McIntosh:
Okay. Well, you know
[00:07:08] Kenshin:
But but this is and I got that question what what I use to mine, and this is with my small coal miners that are, like, little heaters. So they are only hundred watts, energy consumption. So it's not much. And they they give out a bit of heat, and they look like small heaters. So you wouldn't know if if you don't know that they are minors. So it's nothing powerful in that sense.
[00:07:35] McIntosh:
We really haven't talked about this a whole lot. We've mentioned this kind of stuff in passing. I believe, ultimately, and it may take a significant amount of time. A lot of appliances, a lot of things in our life are going to run like Bitcoin miners. I mean, heat is a very obvious use case. Right? Right. I can use a miner to heat my swimming pool. For example, if I live in a place where it's cool during or cold during the winter, I can use it to keep my driveway clean, my sidewalk clean if I get a lot of snow or ice, this kind of thing. The I don't know, greenhouses. Those are just like three easy things that I came up with. And and this type of innovation is happening all around the world. And it's slowly, very, very slowly being commercialized.
I I know you know this, but, Kenshin, you're very much on the edge of this kind of stuff. Like, this is not normal at this point. But if I'm using a heater in my house, why would I use a heater in my house that did not earn Satoshis versus one that did even if it was a very small amount. So as people understand Bitcoin and as this stuff gets commercialized, ultimately, we will see this in a lot of places. I just kinda wanted to mention that. So Yeah.
[00:09:04] Kenshin:
And and something you might appreciate is I the the Bitcoin address that I have connected to those miners, I put it in a Python script that says good morning every morning on on Oster. So it says in the end of the notes, it says PS, I didn't mine a block today or or then I have another message if I have. So when I
[00:09:29] McIntosh:
see that you did mine one, I need to call you up and make sure that you're you know, you didn't have a heart attack or something. Right? Yeah. Exactly. Okay. Well, I'm not gonna talk about work this week, so everybody say yay. I did have work this week, but we're not talking about it. I did over the weekend, my wife and I were able to get away. We went on a little vacation, to a place near us and, you know, stayed for actually, what, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the three days. So I got a chance to decompress. Now even though I really wasn't aware of it, last week was apologize.
It completely slipped my mind. But my wife got me a book, and I have to talk about it. And I'm sorry. Y'all know I'm a Tolkien nerd. I am. Mhmm. And my wife knows me very, very well. She got me a copy of a book called The History of The Hobbit. So The Hobbit was the first book that Tolkien published. It's his most famous book, really. It's a children's book. It's a story that he actually wrote for his children and that, you know, he would read to them at night. So this book and I have read this to actually one of my children. It takes about two weeks of reading if, you know, you read for half an hour or so every night.
It's not a super long book. This book, the history of the Hobbit, on the other hand, I have to I have to look this up real quick. Hold on. It is 900
[00:11:21] Kenshin:
Oof.
[00:11:22] McIntosh:
950 pages. And it's a larger like, this is a full size hardcover book. Okay? You have to picture this. This thing has got to be three inches thick. It is actually longer and well, it's bigger than the Lord of the Rings, like all three of the Lord of the Rings put together. So fellowship and two towers and the return of the king. It's massive, and it's like he documents how Tolkien wrote the Hobbit. Like, Tolkien, just the way that he worked, it was always information, believe it or not, has actually been kept. He never threw anything away, not because I think he thought he was something special. That was just his nature.
And a lot of this stuff has ended up, for example, at a place at a university in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which I cannot remember the name of. But, like, in there, they have, like, a a, archives for it. And the author of this, John Ratliff, was able to go in and access all of this stuff, and he I am one of the few people in the world who would appreciate this book, but this this book is gonna be awesome. Anyways, I also, did get my some minors online, so I had three that were offline. Two of them are now back online. And I believe what they did was they shipped them from Washington down to Texas and, put them back online there. So they had a problem at their facility, where they were, and I don't know what happened. They don't tell me a whole lot, to be honest, which is very disappointing. But regardless, two of them are back online. One of them at this point is still not, so they're supposed to look at it. So I'm almost back up to full hash rate, and all my hash is pointed at ocean. Thank you. I'm not trying to solo mine.
I cannot wait two thousand years to get a block. But you must have a lot more hash rate, man. I do have more hash rate than you do. Yes. I only have six. One one of my servers, I will say this, and I've talked I have talked a bit about about this. I don't give numbers, but I will say that my oldest miners are, like, 90 hash per miner. Okay. 90 or nine? Nine nine zero. Not
[00:14:10] Kenshin:
nine. Yeah. Yeah. 90. Almost a hundred. But that's a lot. Yes.
[00:14:15] McIntosh:
So we're we're not you can't make money. If you get lucky, you're gonna make a lot of money, and that's awesome. But that's not if you're actually trying to do this as a business, that stuff isn't viable. I mean, it doesn't I you can't have enough of those to make it make any sense.
[00:14:36] Kenshin:
Right? Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:39] McIntosh:
That stuff's great for exactly what you're using it for. You're heating your house. You're doing something you need to do anyways, but you're not gonna become financially free on your miner.
[00:14:51] Kenshin:
No. Mine mine are costing me money. They they just repay back half of what they spent in that sense. So they they are not making any profit when I was mining in the pool. Now they are completely waste energy, but the upside is huge if they find a block. Yeah.
[00:15:12] McIntosh:
Yeah. Alright. Well, enough about us, I think. There was one other thing I actually wanted to mention. Oh, well, enough about us. Let's talk about our Zapathon because I I'm you know what? We did a lot of things wrong. I'm gonna be honest. We did. But I'm so excited about our results. So first of all, I wanna apologize. Actually, this gives me a chance to to to do that. Because of the work that I'm not gonna talk about, unfortunately, I did not get to edit Thursday night and it put out. So the episode did come out on Saturday morning instead of Friday morning. So we got off to a late start, and Saturday is not the day that people are on.
And so I know that hindered what happened, but we did give away some Satoshis. I don't know if you have a total. It was a little confusing because of Yeah. I also didn't get the money moved over to start with. So you moved over some money as well.
[00:16:19] Kenshin:
I think around 10,000 subs at least Okay. That we give.
[00:16:24] McIntosh:
That's that's awesome. I would have loved to have given out all of it, and I know that sounds crazy. Yeah. But, that was the goal. We were trying to give away a total of 42,000 sats. Okay? We zapped the first twenty one people got 420, and we did do that. And then we continued on after that zapping 210 sats, until people just stopped because that post kind of fell out of the feed, so to speak.
[00:16:54] Kenshin:
Yeah. We tried to revive it on Saturday night, but it Yeah. It didn't work out. It didn't really work.
[00:17:02] McIntosh:
But what we do know going and looking at our numbers with Pod Home, more people listened, and we got some great feedback. In fact, I wanna read one of them right now. Yeah. If you don't mind, rather than doing this through the boost section, this is not really a boost, but I just I love this. This was awesome. And where is it? Right there. Here it is. So buttercup Roberts, which first of all, I love the name. So this is a reference to princess buttercup on princess bride, the movie. And, so anyways, buttercup Roberts said this, finally had a chance to have a listen to the show and the different fears related to Bitcoin. So this was the last episode, the one that we were promoting, of course, at the invitation of having Plebs share some fears. A few that weren't mentioned and that have gotten into my radar recently are, and I thought these were really good.
Number one, ossification. We did not talk about that at all. So ossification is the idea that we're gonna freeze the base layer. It's not gonna change. Listened to a few Jameson Lop interviews has made me wary of what it means to only focus development on other layers and not on the base chain and what it would mean if little by little, we have fewer and fewer maintainers, to make sure that the chain which holds more than trillions in value starts to lose devs and people who can maintain the decentralized ethos and priorities in the code. I I share that fear, to be honest. I mean, that's something that I am aware of, and I am concerned about.
I will say I have that too. Yeah. For example, we did see something very good. One of the ETFs, and I don't remember which one, but they had promised 10% of their gross profits off of their Bitcoin ETF would go towards developers. And they made good on that for 2024. The gross was I think it was a hundred and 50,000, and they split it up equally among three different nonprofits to, you know, to divvy that out essentially for Bitcoin development. They don't have time to, obviously, to look up all these people and whatever, but these are, you know, nonprofits that should be able to take care of that.
So I like to see that kind of stuff, but I know that the base layer, you know, base chain developers, it's it's hard work. I mean, it is. So, anyways, base layer being self reliant. For the moment, miners can rely on this block subsidy. But seeing how in these USD spike moments, transaction fees remain low. If development on second and third layer remain the way to make transacting on Bitcoin cheaper, then I wonder how the incentive model will make sense for minors after no more block rewards long time frame, but still a fear for legacy. I agree with that. Well, the thought the line makes sense. I'm gonna say that.
I think well, for one thing, there will always be people who mine because it's what runs the network. Okay? And I actually would not mind, a little less public miners, if that makes sense. I think they've gotten kind of heavy in the last couple of, epochs. Companies like Bitfarm, like Hut eight, I think is the name of it. What's the big one? Riot. Right? Those kind of companies. I'm actually glad that some of them are pivoting towards AI. I mean, honestly. But we'll just have to see what the price of Bitcoin is because even though the transaction volume, you know, is it may not be crazy.
The price twenty years from now should be significantly higher than it is now, and that may make that worthwhile. But it's I can see being a fear.
[00:21:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. And the house rate keeps growing. Yes. We are at an all time high recently. We are. Mhmm.
[00:21:27] McIntosh:
People are saying we've reached, what is it called, one zeta hash, which is a thousand, exa hash. Is it peta hash? No. Peta is five. No. I I think it's, exa. I think we've reached it. Right. It's exa and then, yeah. Exa and then, zeta hash. So Yeah. It's a lot. We are at an all time high regardless of whether we've reached that level or not or sustained it or whatever. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. I don't see it going down, but we will see. I I do think the AI thing is an interesting angle, and I do think some of these Pubcos are gonna start pivoting towards that because they see it as a quick buck, which I that's not the way you should be looking at your business, but that's what they may be doing. So the last thing she says or the last thing that this person says is, self custody blacklisting.
The more paper Bitcoin goes into circulation and the more institutions want to hold Bitcoin for you, I worry for self custodial criminalization make people have to choose to behave outside of law and the fact that may result in less and less ways to transact with your self custodial, stack. That's a legitimate fear, certainly, and we did not bring that up. I appreciate bringing up all three of these. These are great, and things that you can think about anyways to finish this up. Anyways, just some thoughts that sparked off listening to your pod.
Thank you. I appreciate that feedback, buttercup Roberts. That was terrific.
[00:23:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. That was great feedback. And we got, three more really good comments, in that note that we posted.
[00:23:26] McIntosh:
Do we have time to to read those, or are they too long? Because that one was kinda long.
[00:23:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. They are quite long, but but, essentially, they they like the theme. They liked the discussion about the fears. They relate to some, and they brought up a couple as well. But for me, the important part is that we we got some, let's say, very good quality, listeners on board with that. So it was definitely worth
[00:23:59] McIntosh:
some of those searches. Saw an uptake in our numbers. I mean, we were tracking that with Pod Home. And even though we released on Saturday, which is probably the worst day of doing it other than May well, even if you released on Sunday night, it'd be it would have been better. We had the highest numbers we've had in in, frankly, months. So it was very encouraging. We are gonna go ahead. I guess we'll just say this here. We're we are gonna go ahead and plan on doing one for episode 200, which is only two episodes away. Two more weeks, we're gonna do one more. If you are, not on Nostr, I would encourage you to get on Nostr.
Get a wallet set up, get involved with the ecosystem, especially, like, if you're a Twitter user, frankly, because this is a less toxic Twitter. It's not without its issues, but, I enjoy spending time on Nostril. I'm on Twitter because there's a lot of people who haven't made the move to Nostril. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, yeah, I would encourage you to get set up, and then we'll do the same thing. I don't know that we'll do 42,000 Satoshis. We'll have to look at what we've got, but I do think it'll be a pretty significant amount. Mhmm. So
[00:25:24] Kenshin:
And I I find myself actually more on Osr now than than Twitter. Twitter, I just go to
[00:25:30] McIntosh:
send you a message sometimes Yeah. And see if you have We we message back and forth through Twitter a lot. It's funny that that's just kind of the way it works out.
[00:25:39] Kenshin:
Yeah. But, otherwise, I I'm actually almost zero on Twitter for the past couple of weeks, and I spend a lot of sats even on the simple good morning messages around. And, I'd like to do to do that for now. It feels good to get the, let's say, the circular economy of of, the zaps and nos are going. So it's quite good to have a budget, for that around a thousand a day or something.
[00:26:10] McIntosh:
Very cool. Alright. We do need to move on so this doesn't get too long. We are gonna talk about Bitcoin mining today. Yep. So, why don't you start things off?
[00:26:24] Kenshin:
Yeah. So the idea today is to go through a bit of the basics for maybe some people who don't know or don't know enough and want to put the pieces together. I had to go through those basics with some family members to make them understand, how Bitcoin actually works and and the Bitcoin, the supply is created and why, essentially why it's it's good thing the way it's working because it's a lot of, fear and, how it's called is FUD in the media about, the Bitcoin in general, the energy consumption and other things. So someone understanding the basics, can actually understand that, why it's good and why maybe some of the mainstream media or don't know exactly.
How do we say? Yeah. Maybe they don't tell the truth. I didn't want to say that, but I'm shocked.
[00:27:31] McIntosh:
Sorry.
[00:27:34] Kenshin:
But because it's it's easy to say, oh, I heard this is bad. So they don't yeah. Don't get involved with that. So then Well, people repeat things without even understanding
[00:27:44] McIntosh:
Yeah. You know, the background or they just they just paired it. They just they've heard it. Oh, Bitcoin mining's bad, and and we'll we'll talk about that. That's fine. Mhmm. Because I've been dealing with that now for multiple years. This is not something new. Yeah. Okay? So, we we I welcome that. These are fun discussions. But before we do that, why don't we talk about what mining actually is. Right? Right.
[00:28:14] Kenshin:
So, essentially, mining, is the process of, putting together transactions. So if I send you a transaction, with Bitcoin, that Bitcoin gets in a queue. And then the mining, which actually should not be called mining, should be called validating maybe.
[00:28:34] McIntosh:
I yeah. I think even the term is bad, but that's the term we've got. So we might as well stick with
[00:28:41] Kenshin:
it. Yeah. But what essentially means is to to put the transaction, group them together
[00:28:47] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And,
[00:28:49] Kenshin:
approve that, yes, this is the sender and that's the receiver. And those are all the transactions that need to be executed now and, exchanged, let's say, signatures between the those, users or how do we call us? People, anyway. And and that creates a block and that block gets in a chain of other blocks and then each block is connected to the next. And essentially, by refer by being connected, they refer to each other and that makes all the previous blocks, secure. So no one can go and say, no, I want to take the transaction back or redo that transaction or
[00:29:38] McIntosh:
or whatever or reject it or something. This is why people say once you mine a block, a transaction, you can't undo that transaction, essentially. It takes two you technically, you can, but it takes too much mining power to do it. You would literally have to control, I hope I get this right, but more than 51% of the mining power of the network, which is that's impossible.
[00:30:08] Kenshin:
Not even a country can do that at this point. Yeah. And if you could do that, you have only ten minutes to do it. Right. Because then the moment the second block is gone on top of the the others It doubles in
[00:30:21] McIntosh:
difficulty, essentially. So, it it is very, very durable in that sense. So how does a miner get a block? How does a miner mine they call it mine a block. How do they mine a block?
[00:30:37] Kenshin:
Well, essentially, it's by luck. They guess very, very long numbers.
[00:30:43] McIntosh:
Mhmm. And
[00:30:45] Kenshin:
it has to do with a lot of leading zeros. So you need to find a very long number with a lot of zeros in front of it, and the rest needs to match exactly the signatures from the previous blocks plus the signatures of the new block. It's very clever and complicated crypto cryptographically, and I cannot explain it any better.
[00:31:10] McIntosh:
Well, we're gonna we're gonna stick in a document. We could spend the whole show kind of talking about this and and maybe not doing a very good job of it. We're gonna Yeah. We're gonna put a link in the show notes to more of that if you want to know more in-depth. But I would I would highlight what you said. It's luck. It's guessing. It's like a lottery because a lot of times you'll hear it. Unfortunately, I've said this in the past. It's like you're solving a puzzle, a cryptographic puzzle. That's not actually true. And I just that is one thing I just kinda wanted to clear up. You're really just guessing really fast to try and match these these hashes.
And the first miner to match that, they're the one who wins the block. If they're in a pool, a mining pool that shared among all the miners in that pool. If they're solo mining, if they're mining by themselves like what Kenshin is actually doing, then that miner gets that block and all of its rewards. So we'll talk about the rewards in just a minute, but it would be all the transaction fees, the fees that are associated with those transactions, plus what's called the block reward.
[00:32:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. And, yes. And you said about the fees. So every transaction when we send from me to you, there is a transaction fee. And when we say in the beginning of its show, we say the transaction fees and it's two, three, or five, and whatever it is. Those are the, yes, the weight, the cost of each byte and the weight of the transaction. If you have the transactions and the kit, they can be light transactions. So me to you directly one transaction, and then you can have multiple senders and multiple receivers. And each sender and the receiver adds, bytes. It's like a text file. So it's you have more information in it. So it means more bytes and it takes more space in the block.
So it's fair. It's a fair system that you need to pay for that space. And that payment then goes to the winning, miner essentially. Right. Whoever that is. And it's added up to the main
[00:33:38] McIntosh:
reward that we will To the block reward. Right? So currently, I don't well, I don't wanna get ahead on this, but currently that reward is what? 3.125. Right? Yeah. Once they moved down from the last one, I I have trouble remembering it. It'll get worse next time. But, yeah, 3.125. So we secure the network with these miners. That's gonna help prevent fraud for one thing. This is actually what makes Bitcoin you can't double spend it. Okay? You can't say, oh, I wanna spend it over here and then turn around and spend it somewhere else as well. It also it helps with decentralization because anybody could run a miner. I can run a miner. Kenshin can run a miner. Any of the listeners to this show can run a miner. A public company like Bitfarms, they can run miners. They run lots of miners.
You know, it doesn't matter. And because of that, that helps decentralize things. We don't have a central authority that we check into to say, oh, mister central authority, can I mine? No. You just join the network and start mining. And if your machine gets the block, then you get the block. So it's a very fair system in that sense.
[00:35:09] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Okay. Yes. And the more miners maybe we can go another time into difficulty, but the more miners there are, the difficulty changes and adjusts. And the less miners they have, again, the difficulty changes. So the the average, block is supposed to come every ten minutes no matter how much power is put into the system, at any given point.
[00:35:37] McIntosh:
The levels that were on the very early systems were so tiny. It was crazy. Like, I mean, we're talking about, like, I think this is correct. Maybe less than a petahash for a so a thousand terahash for a significant period of time, like months and months and months. Okay? But it's ramped up now to where, like we said, where we basically broken that one exahash level, which is so much higher than it was back then, but that difficulty has adjusted during that entire time. So on average, it's not exactly ten minutes per block, but on average, overall that time, it's actually really close. It's kind of crazy.
[00:36:30] Kenshin:
Yeah. That's why it goes up and down all the time.
[00:36:34] McIntosh:
That is a feature that is not a bug unlike what other blockchains would have you tell you. Right? So anyways, go ahead.
[00:36:47] Kenshin:
Yeah. And then we have the actual rewards that we talked about. Mhmm. They started fifteen years ago at 50 Bitcoin per block as a reward. So the early days when, Satoshi Nakamoto and, Halfine were mining and some others.
[00:37:07] McIntosh:
So Well, it was that way for how actually, how long was the first epoch? Was it it wasn't four years, was it? It it was
[00:37:16] Kenshin:
everything.
[00:37:19] McIntosh:
We'll have to look it up. I don't wanna stop everything, but, yes. The first the first epoch, it was 50 per per block, and then it was 25, and then it was 12, and then it was, six. Wait. Yeah. Of course. I didn't do that right. 25. 12 point 5. That's why. 12.5. Right? So half of '25 and then 6.25. Now we're at 3.125. And that happens this havening is what we call it. This happens approximately every four years, and it's based on the blocks. It's actually a certain number of blocks, which offhand oh, here it is. Every 210,000 blocks, the reward gets halved. That is programmed into the algorithm, and, essentially, a huge number of people would have to agree to change that code.
So there's no central authority that says, hey, this time we're not actually gonna have. We're gonna keep it at, say, 3.125.
[00:38:26] Kenshin:
Right? Well well, yes. And, actually, that's something that was worrying me. And when I looked into the block size wars that happened around 02/2016 Mhmm. That's exactly what they were trying to do. And they actually did it, and they did a new chain, and they did new rules.
[00:38:47] McIntosh:
And what's that chain called?
[00:38:49] Kenshin:
I I don't know. It doesn't matter. Oh, okay. Because they're gone or just Yes. Or it it's irrelevant because Right. The the the miners, some switched, but most didn't. And the nodes, some switched, but most didn't. Right. So so they were surprised that their plan didn't work because they thought, oh, we just take the programmers on our side and we do a new change. But then everybody stayed on the old chain and the old chain just kept going and then they had to come back. So in that sense, because I had that fear that, what happens with the programmers if someone gives them a lot of money and, yeah, makes them change the code. And then what happens is it needs to be a new code and a new fork. So it needs to be a new coin. It's not gonna be BTC. Right. Bitcoin is gonna be something else.
And people just not gonna go for that. So that's why.
[00:39:46] McIntosh:
So one of the things that this halvening does, this programmatic half of the reward, it builds in a fixed supply. Now Satoshi set it at 21,000,000 coins, essentially. It's not exactly, but it's so close. That's just what we say. 21,000,000 Bitcoin. So in 2140, the last Bitcoin will be mined completely. The last site, especially. The last Satoshi. Correct. And there will be no more reward. The miners will rely on transaction fees, which is actually the fear that, Buttercup Roberts brought up in their note, that's the exact fear that we're talking about. What happens in 2140 when we get to no reward?
Mhmm. Well, it's the transactions. Now we hope that the transactions are to a level that will support the miners. If it's not, miners will start dropping off, and they'll do that long before 2140, by the way. And either we'll have a more organic, like, pleb minor movement, if you wanna call it that, or we won't have a Bitcoin network, if that's true. Now, I don't know. I'm not saying that that's true. That's just kind of the thesis, right? I don't believe that that will happen, actually, but that's okay. I think Bitcoin will be so valuable by then. Any amount of Bitcoin will be worth valuable by then. Any amount of Bitcoin will be worth the power that's used to generate it, to to get to get it to get it as a reward.
[00:41:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. Well, if nothing changes, let's assume now we're at that point. And that at that point, the last four years, the Bitcoin, the block reward will be one sat per block.
[00:41:46] McIntosh:
Right. Right?
[00:41:48] Kenshin:
So that one sat, of course, it's not much. It doesn't sound like much. But if we are at this point where we are with current technology and we have the cheapest transaction we can do with 1 sat per v byte is around a hundred and 50 sats for one transaction. Mhmm. So that one transaction for one person to another person, let's say, that's a 50 times more than the block reward. Right. Than the block reward. That's a good point. So those transactions fees are gonna be huge. Mhmm. And this is not a problem because someone would say, okay. But then we cannot send
[00:42:25] McIntosh:
on on chain. What if that transaction what if that Satoshi is worth a dollar? Mhmm. Just to kind of throw this out there. That means every transaction would be at least a hundred and $50.
[00:42:38] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:42:39] McIntosh:
Right? So at that point, it starts making sense Yeah. When you bundle up a lot of those.
[00:42:47] Kenshin:
Yeah. And it's not gonna be an issue that it's too expensive because it's gonna be too expensive for one transaction, but we already have layer two technologies that we already use. Mhmm. And we don't we already don't want to use on chain in many cases. We just want to use lightning for the zaps or whatever else. I I think what we will see is a divergence. These lower,
[00:43:09] McIntosh:
you know, kind of like your walk around wallet type transaction. They'll happen on these layer twos, whatever they end up being, lightning, whatever, cashew, whatever. Right? On the other hand, there will be enough transactions on the base chain from, say, I don't know, business is sending large payments back and forth or nation states sending money back and forth to other nation states that are thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars or billions of dollars, those will travel across the main chain. So it I think it will balance out. I mean, I'm not prophesying that, but that's just kind of the way I I look at. I do wanna talk about one more thing about this before we move on.
Well, maybe this kinda ties into the next point, but why 21,000,000? Why didn't he just say we'll get down to, I don't know, 1 Bitcoin per block and we'll just keep it at that for all eternity. Right? Why do you think he did that?
[00:44:26] Kenshin:
Actually, I don't know that answer, but I if I would have to guess, I think it's just a number that makes sense, for him at least calculation
[00:44:38] McIntosh:
wise. Well, I think the 21,000,000 itself was completely arbitrary. Who knows why? That's not actually my point. My point is we do have a limit. There will never be more than 21,000,000 Bitcoin. Why didn't he just say, once the block reward gets down to one that we keep it at that. Right. Right. We would not have 21,000,000 coins. We would have, depending on what year it was, 21,000,000 plus however many blocks were mined that year plus the next year and so on. Why do you think he did it with a fixed supply versus some scheme like that?
[00:45:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. It starts to keep the scarcity and create a proper hard money in that sense. Okay. And very good inflation
[00:45:25] McIntosh:
type of Right. Because anything else is inflation. Right? Even if it's one Bitcoin per year over a long enough time frame, that is inflation. You can argue, well, that's really low, but it's still inflation. Yeah. And he wanted to create a hard money. He wanted to create a hard asset. Even gold, we've talked I think I've mentioned this on this podcast. You people consider gold a hard asset, and and I can go along with that. By most definitions, it is. But the reality is we could find a huge amount of gold on the bottom of the ocean, for example. And a hundred years from now, it might be viable to mine that. So what does that do to the gold supply? It dilutes it. We could find gold on the moon or on Mars. Elon is, you know, bent on getting to Mars.
They may find a gold supply there. I'm not saying they're going to. I'm just saying it's possible. Or an asteroid, a meteor, whatever. It's not actually a fixed total supply. It's just we have a pretty good idea with our current technology how much gold we could mine per year, and we know how much gold roughly is in existence. So we act like it's fixed. Does that does that make sense? Yes. This is truly fixed. There will only be 21,000,000
[00:46:54] Kenshin:
Bitcoin. Yeah. And you know exactly at this second how much there is in circulation exactly down down to one set. Mhmm. I went down the rabbit hole of figuring out, this week how much gold there is because I I was trying to put it in a Python script, the market cup of gold. Okay. I couldn't find it. It's incredible how difficult it is to find the proper gold supply and make the numbers agree from different websites.
[00:47:23] McIntosh:
I I have to say, Kenshin, you keep saying I'm writing this Python program. I'm beginning to wonder if you're actually doing work anymore. Do you guys do your job or do you just sit at home and write Python?
[00:47:35] Kenshin:
I I slept at 2AM last night.
[00:47:38] McIntosh:
Now you're starting out like me. Alright.
[00:47:43] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:47:45] McIntosh:
The the problem is you have a you you yeah. Anyways, no. I did. Sorry. Okay. So that's why he put in this limit. That's why he put in the halving because he did not want this infinite printing of Bitcoin. The supply issuance is gonna create scarcity scarcity. Right? And that's gonna influence price over time. When when miners can only mine in in fact, what let me back up. It's shocking to me that even post halving, like, immediately, we don't see a price increase because when you go from, I don't know, 6, whatever it is, down to 3.1 6.25 down to 3.125.
I hate keeping up with all these numbers. I'm terrible at it. You know, that the supply that's being created per day is only half, and that's every day. But the amount of Bitcoin that's can being bought is not getting cut in half. So, you know, historically, immediate price increase after a halving. It it always just blows my mind, but, ultimately, we do. I mean, it's happened after every halving. Mhmm. So
[00:49:08] Kenshin:
And at the last halving, I think the price was around $50.60
[00:49:12] McIntosh:
or something. So I think we're around double now a year Yeah. We've already doubled it, but it's it's definitely gonna go. But even that didn't kick off for No. Several months if I'm not mistaken. So we're in February. It was last April. I wanna say it was in the fall when we really jumped. Is that correct?
[00:49:33] Kenshin:
Well, we had an all time high bef before it. Okay. But then we went down again, down to 40,000 in the summer. And then Yeah. I don't remember this stuff. Wow.
[00:49:45] McIntosh:
Good job. Alright. Yeah. Well, we had to flush out all the weak hands. Alright. Well, we need to move on. Let's talk about this. The final Bitcoin is gonna be mined at twenty one forty. We've already talked about this quite a bit actually. Yeah. So miners are gonna rely on transaction fees. Mhmm.
[00:50:12] Kenshin:
Can can I say one time one time again? I I can say one sat per block is gonna be in a hundred and twenty years. Right now is 350,000,000 SATs per block. I just want to to reiterate that part.
[00:50:32] McIntosh:
You know, here's the thing, guys, and I wanna use this as a springboard for this really quickly. Bitcoin's either gonna fail or it's going to be the single most valuable asset in the world, hands down, in 2140. Okay? That's there's no in between because of the way that the system is set up. So if you have people in your life that you want to pass wealth to, there's no better way of doing it because of what you just said, Kenshin. Right now, you mind, you know, millions and millions of Satoshis. And in 2140, which is not that far away. I know it sounds like it's not, but it is it is now just over a hundred years away. Your children may be around when that's mined.
If, you know, obviously, I think most of us would not be, but your children may be. Your grandchildren most likely will be. What's the price of Bitcoin gonna be at that point? And it it just boggles my mind when I start thinking about that. And that's why saving your Bitcoin and securing it is so important because it's not gonna be 10 x. It's not gonna be a hundred x of what it is right now. Okay? So point one Bitcoin right now I'm sorry. Point o one is a thousand dollars. 1 percent of a Bitcoin, roughly a thousand dollars. It's not gonna be a hundred times that.
It's gonna be maybe a thousand times that, maybe more. I don't know. But it's gonna be a lot. Mhmm. So don't be dismissive of whatever the amount is and do whatever you can to increase that amount because this is not gonna get any easier over time. That's just the system.
[00:52:43] Kenshin:
And I I keep saying to myself, he's like, oh, sending around 21 sats for good morning messages. Yeah. It's like I will be talking with my grandkids and he'll be like, what? Throwing 21 You're right.
[00:52:58] McIntosh:
I mean, minimum, I think we're looking well, I mean, just to get all crazy, what if that's a dollar a sat? Right? That's $21 every time you do that. As long as you're replacing it Yeah. I I would actually highly encourage that. Right? I think that that's something that we should be doing, but do not be doing that kind of stuff out of your cold storage, out of your long term storage, out of your savings. Right? You can separate savings and spending money, ladies and gentlemen. Dave Ramsey taught us to put it into little envelopes. You can figure out something digitally to do that. Right? Yeah.
You need to be have a savings, and you need to continue to put into that savings even if it's at what amounts to a tiny amount today. And then don't let your kids go and blow it. What you know, if it's a hundred x, right, and you had a decent amount in there and all of a sudden they're rich Yep. Don't let teach them not to go stupid with that. Teach them the long term benefits. Maybe they do use some of it. I mean, people we need to have a life. Okay? But the majority of it, in my opinion, should be kept for their kids, if not for and it should be put to use at some point.
We will be able to invest Bitcoin in ways that are safe, in ways that generate income, whether it's Bitcoin or not in the long term. Mhmm. But you can't do that if you don't have the Bitcoin in the first
[00:54:43] Kenshin:
place. Yeah. Absolutely. I will say tell you a quick example. I save for my son in fiat and in Bitcoin approximately the same amount every month. His Bitcoin stack is at least four times bigger right now. It's crazy. And that's just a couple of years. It's it's not even
[00:55:02] McIntosh:
that long that I do that. I'm gonna tell you a little story, and I I shouldn't do this. I'm gonna no. We don't have time, and I shouldn't do it anyways. I shouldn't do it anyways. It is amazing how it grows. Okay. Yeah. Let's move on because time is running away. We have criticisms. We need to address those, to wrap this up. So Yeah. I'm gonna say this. Maybe this will because I I've been doing mining for multiple years now, and this stuff was all around when when I was first getting started. A lot of it centers around energy use. Look. These things are powerful. They require a lot of power. It's it's insane.
It's like running so I don't know of miners that have less of industrial miners. I'll put it that way. They have less than 1.5 kilowatts of continuous power usage. Okay. That's 1,500 watts. Some of them are much, much higher than that. It's a lot of energy, and it's always online. And people say that's wasteful. And I will tell you it's the exact opposite. I will point you to places like Africa where people like Eric Hirschman are literally lighting up Africa because of Bitcoin mining. Thank you very much. Okay.
I will point you to places like West Texas. Okay. Right here in The United States where they drill a well. There's natural gas trapped in the well, in the in the oil underground. It's not whatever. Okay. I'm not a oil person. So but but it's there. They're far away from civilization. They can't just build a pipeline for the natural gas, so they flare it off. Okay? And then it that's bad because that's creating pollutants. That's creating, they would argue, global warming. I could go out there to that mining field, capture that natural gas, run a generator, power Bitcoin, and make cheap money, and at the same time, solve a problem.
So where are the most common Bitcoin miners at? Places where they make sense. It has look. The energy has to make sense. It has to be less than even right now, like, 8¢ per kilobyte, kilowatt in order to make any kind of sense. And even at that price, it's it's iffy. Okay? It's breaking. Yeah. You can't just plug into a coal power plant because that's what's there and use up all their power if they're charging 15 or 30¢ per kilowatt. It doesn't make sense. We go to places where the power is cheap, and it's cheap because there's a lot of it. And there's a lot of it because, I don't know. Maybe it's a hydro dam. It's got a lot of water. That power, if it's not used, it's just I think they call it run to ground. It's wasted.
It doesn't go back into the system. It doesn't get stored in a freaking battery. That's just not the way it works. It didn't I I really wished they taught some basic energy in, like, high school, but then they probably wouldn't pay attention anyways. People do not understand how the energy networks work. And because of that, they think that anything that plugs into it is is a problem. These are actually being used to balance the system. They're being used to minimize, these harmful things that go on, like, with the natural gas flare or methane. Oh, they're methane's horrible. It's, like, 25 times worse than, like, natural gas, and it leaks out of landfills.
Are we all gonna stop putting stuff in landfills? No. We're not. But you literally can capture that methane. Again, run it through a generator and power Bitcoin miners and make money. It it's just endless. It goes on and on and on. There's been no legitimate study in in recent times that show that Bitcoin mining is bad. And in fact, Bitcoin mining uses more renewable energy than any other industry. It's over 50% at this point. Right. Sorry. That one gets me every time. And I'm just Me too.
[00:59:39] Kenshin:
And my my what I told you in the beginning with my miners, mine don't make money in a normal home electricity plan. Mhmm. I I just recover half of what I I spent. So it it really only incentivizes good energy, cheap energy, renewable energy. It it doesn't take away from the normal homes type of energy because because it's unprofitable for that. So so it puts people and companies to think cleverly where to find good renewable energy or cheap energy or no, yeah, no cost energy. Right. But it's not used,
[01:00:20] McIntosh:
or waste That's why I'm moving up to the North Part Of Norway, by the way.
[01:00:24] Kenshin:
Anyways. You're welcome.
[01:00:27] McIntosh:
Heating my home with my miner while I run the rest of them in the data center.
[01:00:32] Kenshin:
Right? Right.
[01:00:34] McIntosh:
Alright. Let's move on because you could spend all the entire day on that. And the people who think it's a problem are still gonna think it's a problem, and that's fine because I got 14 things I can show them to prove that it's not. This is actually, I think, a fairly legitimate concern. Large mining pools dominating hash power. Does this threaten decentralization? I do I I yes. Ant pool right there. I'm looking at you because it's not just Ant pool, which is the mining pool of Bitmain. Bitmain, the main, ASIC manufacturer, which is actually a problem in and of itself. Right? They're they're manufacturing miners, and then they run a mining pool, a very large one, against the very people who they're selling stuff to. Not only that, they then white label that service to other mining pools.
They are already there's two of them that are between the two. They're over 50% of the network. And so that, in my opinion, is a problem. And and I would love to see more mining pools. I would love to see more solo miners like yourself. I do not. I went with Ocean strictly because of that. I used to use, brains Right. And had a good experience with them right up until the point that I figured out that they were white labeled with the, Antminer people. So I said, nope. Boating with my feet. And Ocean had been up for a couple of months at that point, if I'm remembering correctly, and didn't seem to be having any trouble.
And knowing Luke Dasher junior, they will never merge with anyone else. So I went over to Ocean and I've had a good experience. I mean, honestly, we need more of that, whether it's ocean or other mining pools, because having one mining pool is not a good thing. There's a censorship issues. There's just I don't know. There's there's a number of issues, and it hides a lot of things. So, yeah, geopolitical issues. Certainly some governments have banned or restricted mining operations. Yes. China. Yes. Well, who was it? Bolivia that we were talking about the other day?
A number of countries.
[01:03:04] Kenshin:
Russia too. Yeah. Yeah. Russia recently.
[01:03:07] McIntosh:
And that's fine. Fortunately, I can pack my miners up and move them if I have to. And if I'm in doing this for a business and it's not just a hobby, To me, you know, I'm not worried about it as long as they're they're not coming in there with a gun and like they did in Venezuela and take your miners. Now I understand those were illegal operations, but that's what they did. I think over the long term, banning Bitcoin mining would be a stupid thing for a government to do, but we certainly still see that. And we see government still banning Bitcoin itself. I think that'll go away.
Alright. Let's we we need to wrap this up. Yeah.
[01:03:53] Kenshin:
But Yeah. One one last, fun fact that when Bitcoin mining started, a lot of people started with just random laptops mining with the CPU. And now we have evolved to the proper dedicated chips called ASIC chips that mine Bitcoin. Right.
[01:04:13] McIntosh:
If if you kids can settle back for just a minute, grandpa Macintosh will tell one quick story. Yeah. I almost got involved in mining years ago. I do not remember exactly the year. It was probably 2014, '20 '15. It I could look it up. It's when the GPU is first basically, you had to have a GPU. Okay? So laptops no longer were useful. You had to have a GPU. And I was doing consulting work at the time. I had a little office in the town we lived in, and I ordered a GPU. And I ordered I had a server or I ordered the parts or whatever. And I sat it on my desk and I looked at it for weeks and I didn't put it together, not because I'm not able to. I built my own computer when I was a junior in college out of no. High school out of parts.
I was afraid of the power consumption because I didn't want my landlord who was actually a friend of mine. I didn't want him mad at me. I and I knew I had to run it. I knew I had to run it all the time. I was so stupid. And I eventually sold the parts and went on my way, and I never actually set it up. And I, you know, whatever. You would had sold it and sold some of the Bitcoin anyway at some point. You're probably right. I you you you know what? Thanks for making me feel better. Better. You're probably right. But I I can't you know, we go I go through this from time to time. I cannot change the past.
But regardless, I did actually when we were doing GPS, almost get involved. And at that point, we had I mean, originally, it was. It was laptops and desktops and servers and whatever, and then we moved to GPU based systems, which that drove the GPU prices up. And then Butterfly Labs, I think, was the first ASIC miner, which they were almost a scam. They were not, but they were very, very close. I think what it was is they were overwhelmed. They couldn't keep up with orders and all this kind of stuff. But then, you know, kind of the age of ASICS came about. And so I only got involved what? I'd had to look it up, but it's it has been, I think, No. I think it's actually been right at two years right now.
I think it was in late February, very early March of '2 years ago. I bought my first miner, so I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not we're not getting off in that. Alright. Moving
[01:06:56] Kenshin:
on. Yep. Moving on. So I'm gonna cut out. Should we talk about our supporters then from the next episode? Sure.
[01:07:05] McIntosh:
We did get a lot of, we got some support from from Nostra directly, actually, and I don't have any figures on that. I have to bring up sorry. I do not have this.
[01:07:19] Kenshin:
We have a few on,
[01:07:21] McIntosh:
fountain. Just go ahead. I think that's all of them. Go ahead and read those off so I don't have to downgrow. Tell me. Orange beep
[01:07:29] Kenshin:
Okay. Gave boosted us a thousand sets and said, dedicated to the one quarter of Kenshin Italian heritage.
[01:07:39] McIntosh:
I saw that. I'm so glad you read that. Yeah. That's funny. And then he says,
[01:07:47] Kenshin:
so he's saying in Italian. I am Italian too. Right. And it was your grandmother. Right? My grandmother. Yeah. Yeah. So thank you, grandma.
[01:07:56] McIntosh:
We appreciate
[01:07:58] Kenshin:
that. I appreciate it.
[01:08:00] McIntosh:
That was awesome.
[01:08:03] Kenshin:
Appreciate that. Yeah. And he was from, the Nostr, Zapathon. So Okay. So I saw him there also in the comments. And then Geektos Chi, also from Noster, but came on Fountain and gave us back the $4.20.
[01:08:20] McIntosh:
Oh. Suds. Thanks. That's awesome.
[01:08:23] Kenshin:
Circular economy there. Great discussion, James. Looking forward to the next one. Happy to have found your pod. Keep chilling, no stir, and providing value. Thank you very much. We are we are Okay, James. We're shilling stuff. We shouldn't do that.
[01:08:43] McIntosh:
Alright. That's awesome. Is that it?
[01:08:46] Kenshin:
We got the usual agent Natasha
[01:08:50] McIntosh:
Okay. Streaming She's streaming away.
[01:08:52] Kenshin:
858 subs. Thank you very much. Awesome. Thank you. And 11 subs from common sense. But I think without the comment, I'm not sure how it ended up on fountain.
[01:09:08] McIntosh:
Alright. I I think we're gonna skip the software updates. I think the news is important enough even though we're over an hour, we need to talk about it. So there's a couple of things. I like it. You put them both in here. Really quickly, Germany, what the heck? Come on, guys. Y'all are acting like England or England's acting like you. I don't know what's going on over there, but they're literally putting people in jail for cartoons. I don't know. Yeah. Just don't talk about the government. Just shut up. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be rude, but, man, you gotta be careful. And if it were me, I'd be thinking about an exit strategy. I'm just saying.
That's not advice, but that's just me. Right. Wow. It's
[01:09:58] Kenshin:
too close here. England did that, Germany
[01:10:03] McIntosh:
for people, like, 50 people in in one morning. They It's they're just breaking into their house and own them off to jail. It's it's For memes. For for me. On social media, media. Man, if they only knew what I had in my head, they'd put me in a solitary, man. Right. Alright. Yeah. Oh, boy. Alright. I don't wanna talk about this, but I'm gonna have to,
[01:10:28] Kenshin:
My man What happened? What happened to Argentina?
[01:10:32] McIntosh:
Well, I will say this. I wanna say this before we dive into that. First of all, I think Argentina in general is still fine. You know, he's gonna be in a lot of hot water for this. I don't think he's gonna get impeached. Maybe he should be, but I don't think he's going to be. And I don't think, in general, he's gonna change anything. I'm not like he suddenly flipped all his ideas.
[01:10:58] Kenshin:
But what happened to you? Well,
[01:11:00] McIntosh:
he is a full blown libertarian. Okay? And that I think that's important to understand. So whether he did it, whether his team did it, whether they worked with another group of people to do it, basically, he promoted a meme coin very similar to what Trump did, who I'm also not happy with about for the exact guarantee you, he made a bunch of money off of it. And, I've listened to an interview of the guy who was supposedly, like, coordinated. I don't know exactly what his role was, but Coffeezilla, who, like, does a lot of uncovering of scams, somehow got this guy to get on, you know, and and talk about this.
It's not good. This whole meme coin thing, it it's it's it is so sorted. We don't talk about it because it's outside the scope of Bitcoin. But for the love of all that is holy people, do not mess with this stuff. Just don't. It's fraudulent. It is designed to remove money from you and put it in someone else's pocket. Now Malay has now come out and said, there was nothing wrong with what we did. People knew what they were getting into. And maybe that's true, but I still don't think, frankly, this kind of thing should be allowed. This is actually the one thing that I was on board with Gary Gensler about.
When these things are clear ripoffs, there's just no reason that they're okay. Now I know you have a slightly different view, and I am anxiously awaiting it. Yeah.
[01:13:08] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I knew that that was your view, and that's the Mhmm. Main view I saw. My view is that I think he had no clue, Millet, and the the rest of them because, I will tell you, when you see on that website about that coin, in the end, there is a Gmail account. It's like for more information, send an email and it's [email protected]. And it's it says something like designed, whatever with this com. I send you I have sent you the image. So it's like private initiative project developed by KIP Network Inc. Yeah. So it's it's a private company in some random KIP
[01:13:51] McIntosh:
was the guy that there was one person essentially behind that. I don't know his name off the top of my head, but that does that was his company. Right. I know he did not know everything that was going on. I I can go along with that, but he literally came out and said there was nothing wrong with this. And I, the translation was not incorrect.
[01:14:16] Kenshin:
Right. But, I really think they got scammed. Everybody got scammed, including the You should come out and say
[01:14:24] McIntosh:
this was this was bad. And but, see, he's not a Bitcoin only guy, of course, just like Trump is not, by the way. He's not. And the beatings will continue until they are because this will not work on a national scale with anything besides Bitcoin we Argentina and to help businesses and all the those businesses are gonna get squat out of this. And the attitude I I kinda wanna point post that Coffeezilla, interview in the notes, and maybe I will. The attitude of the guy that he was talking to who was definitely deeply involved, it it shows you what these meme coin people are like. And you need if if you do not understand, you need to listen to them. You need to understand they want to line their pockets. They do not care about you one bit. You're just a liquidity exit.
That's it. So I don't know. I look. This doesn't change in general kind of the way I feel about Argentina, but I'm very disappointed in Malay. But I and just like I was disappointed in Trump, Although I didn't really talk about it on here, I am disappointed in Trump. I think I said that to an extent, but it's the exact same thing with these stupid meme meme codes. We have way too many important things going on in this world to be trying to do this mess. Mess. This is stupid, and it should stop. I'm afraid, though, saying that that it will continue. There will be more of them until enough people have lost enough money that maybe at some point we can move past these things.
[01:16:37] Kenshin:
Right.
[01:16:38] McIntosh:
Yeah. And there is more more to to learn in this story, I guess, that we don't know the who. It's difficult when you don't speak the same language, and I don't speak Spanish. I'm trying, but trust me, I'm not listening to him talk in Spanish and doing some on the fly translation. There's there's even if you get a good translation, just differences in thinking it makes it does actually you miss the nuances and and whatever. So I don't wanna jump to conclusions, but it looks really bad. And him going out out and saying that everything was okay
[01:17:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I thought I did I did it. Did not help his case.
[01:17:20] McIntosh:
So Yeah. That's that's not Enough about that. You may differ you know, I let me know what you think. That'll be was that okay for a question of the episode? Yeah. Sure. Let let us know what you think about this stuff. I mean, I don't know. Maybe maybe you think it's okay. I know there are libertarians who think that, you know, as long as you don't physically hurt somebody, essentially, that it's okay. I this is hurting people, in my opinion. Yeah. And I don't I'm not okay with it. If that makes me not a libertarian, then I guess I'm not a libertarian. I don't try and classify myself, but, you know, whatever. All right. We're not we're skipping the software updates. Sorry. There is stuff. Oh, what was the one? We should mention that LND.
It was LND. Yeah. If you are running LND for a lightning node or if it's integrated into something that you're using, you need to update immediately. Your your wallet, your Bitcoin that's online. Alright. Hey. Let's wrap this up. This is a value for value show. We go out and do things like what we did with Noster, trying to provide, you know, value to the community. We put this content out here like what we've done here for the last hour and fifteen minutes or so, trying to provide value to the community. Hopefully, you've learned something. I would love for you just to actually go and tell somebody about it. That is the number one way to support this show. We really appreciate it when you do that. We are seeing our numbers go up, and I am and and I know Kenshin as well. We're grateful for that. Yes. We really are.
But another way that you can support us, of course, grab a podcasting two point o app, and you can boost us. Send in messages like these people did earlier, with a message, with some support. We always appreciate that. And now that we have a Nostra page for the podcast, don't boost Kenshin or I directly about, you know, supporting the podcast. You can boost the podcast itself, and that goes into kind of the the lightning wallet for the for the podcast that we will use to do things like these, Zapathons. So, again, got his Zapathon coming up in two more episodes.
Two more weeks. Get on Nostra if you're not. Use this as an opportunity to do that. Get yourself set up with a lightning wallet. Comment on our page when that one comes out, and you will get some fresh hot Bitcoin. Okay? So, that's it. We're we're gonna skip the rest of it, but, thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. You can always reach us. There's ways listed at the bottom of each of our episodes pages that's on satoshis-plebs.com/episodes. We have an entire library listed there. You can just click on the most recent, and our information is there. So stay humble, friends. Go out and make it a great week. We'll talk to you soon. Enjoy this my favorite band.
[01:20:49] Kenshin:
Alright. Have a great weekend.
Introduction
Bitcoin Price and Market Update
Solo Mining and Personal Updates
Zapathon Results and Listener Feedback
Bitcoin Mining Basics
Bitcoin's Fixed Supply and Future Value
Criticisms and Misconceptions of Bitcoin Mining
Challenges in Mining: Pools and Regulations
Controversies: Meme Coins and Political Figures
