In this episode, McIntosh and Kenshin dive into the recent ups and downs of Bitcoin’s price and explore why volatility has been so pronounced lately. Throughout, they stress the importance of long-term conviction, highlighting dollar-cost averaging (DCA) as a strategy to keep stacking sats without the emotional roller coaster.
Stick around to the very end for a new v4v track, “Daydreamer” by Ainsley Costello!
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
March 12th, 2025: 82,800 USD | 76,000 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
887,507
News and Notes
Trump Crypto Summit
EU to Launch CBDC in October
Software Updates
Phoenix Wallet v2.5.0
Core Lightning v25.02
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-201
Music Credits
Ainsley Costello
Daydreamer
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 March, and this is episode 201 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm McIntosh.
[00:00:09] McIntosh:
I am Kenshin, and today's episode is Bitcoin's volatile ride.
[00:00:39] McIntosh:
Kenshin, my tea is so hot. It's scalding. It's perfect. I got my honey, from, Little Green Bees. Shout out there to them, and, it's perfect. I love hot. I coffee, tea, just if it burns the roof of your mouth, it's probably perfect for me.
[00:01:01] McIntosh:
That's too hot for me.
[00:01:04] McIntosh:
So let's talk about Bitcoin maybe. I I hey. Let's change things up. Let's talk about Solana. You wanna talk about Solana?
[00:01:14] McIntosh:
No. No. I want to talk about Nostr. Nostr. Well, let me last week?
[00:01:19] McIntosh:
What happened to Nostr last week? Okay. Well, we'll get there. Bitcoin price at time of recording, though. March as and when which is, today, funny enough. 80 you did we change this? I actually I sorry. I like to round up the numbers. So No. I would okay. Wait. 80 when did you put that down? Oh, an hour ago. Yeah. No. It has changed a lot. Bitcoin price at time of recording is 82,800, illustrating our point perfectly. And what is the euro, sir?
[00:01:59] McIntosh:
€76,000.
[00:02:02] McIntosh:
70 6 thousand euros. Okay. Let me let me go ahead and update this real quick so I can get it later. Alright. And we've got a new metric this week. Thanks to Kenshin. He wanted to throw in, which I love this metric. Bitcoin market cap as of today is $1,600,000,000,000 USD. And then gold, its favorite competitor is 20,300,000,000,000.0 USD. So gold as a store of value, for all of its worth aside from that is basically $20,000,000,000,000. And what that means is that Bitcoin versus gold, the market cap is about 8%. So just to equal gold, we have a a long way to go about a 10 x for no. Yeah. About a 10 x from here a little bit more. That's what And that would just equal gold alone. So when people say fun things like Bitcoin can't keep going higher, it's already too expensive, I'm not gonna invest in it because surely it's not gonna keep going up, etcetera, etcetera.
Here is one simple statistic that you can show to people. Well, let's just round it up. Bitcoin's at 2,000,000,000,000. Gold is at 20,000,000,000,000. We're at one tenth the market cap of gold. And that is just for that one use case.
[00:03:32] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:03:33] McIntosh:
Sound good?
[00:03:34] McIntosh:
Yeah. I have been looking at this metric for for a while, when it was below 5%. So it's nice to see it growing, get close to 10.
[00:03:45] McIntosh:
It is a slow growth, but, yes, it is definitely going upwards and that's what's important. Alright. And what's our block height, sir?
[00:03:56] McIntosh:
So block height is 887,507.
[00:04:02] McIntosh:
Okay.
[00:04:03] McIntosh:
We have a difficulty adjustment projected for March 23 at plus 3%, and the previous, difficulty adjustment was plus again at 1.43%. So hash rate seems to be going up at those times.
[00:04:23] McIntosh:
I would point out the adjustment just happened, and yes, it did go up. It was three days ago. It it went up about one and a half percent. So definitely an upward adjustment. I wouldn't put too much, credence into the 3% at this point because it's so early. So we'll see. We've got, like, ten days, eleven days until the next adjustment. I think next week, we'll have a a lot better view of that. And then for our fees, for transaction fees, this type of thing, we've got, very low two two and two for low, medium, and high transaction values, that sets per v byte, which means that a transaction would cost, it's like 25¢, I think. I'm doing that on the fly.
Yes. Exactly. Somewhere right around there. And then 50 megabytes of unprocessed transactions. So, very low, transactions right now, as we have been seeing mostly for, what, the last month and a half or so now. Right?
[00:05:29] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:05:30] McIntosh:
Okay. So what is up with you, sir, this week? What's new going on in Sweden?
[00:05:37] McIntosh:
Well, it starts getting colder again. We had the plus 11 degrees Celsius in the weekend, so we thought it was spring. That's good. Yeah. And now we have minus one all of a sudden. So Okay. We're freezing a bit. But, otherwise, had the family visit, the past few days, so so that was good. Now it's quiet again in the house, so that's also good. So they're gone.
[00:06:08] McIntosh:
Yes. And everybody went,
[00:06:11] McIntosh:
ah. Yes. And, yeah, I've been playing with some some stuff, like, I got the Treasure Model one, one of the old ones, to use it. But not to use it as a Bitcoin wallet, but to use it as a PGP sign in device to sign things like commits on GitHub and stuff like that.
[00:06:35] McIntosh:
I have never heard of this use case. No. Does this mean we can get a sponsorship by Trezor now and then sell it as a signing device? As a PGPs signing device? I would not trust this with my Bitcoin, by the way, just to be clear. No. There is no Bitcoin involved in this use case. But You are talking about so PGP is pretty good privacy, which was invented by Phil Zimmerman. And if you go back in the shows, I got a chance to meet him at the conference last July. That was actually the highlight of my conference. It was. Sorry.
But, yeah, I get he invented PGP, pretty good privacy, and it's never been broken, which is awesome because it's pretty good. The irony of that is just too funny. But you can now sign, like, your GitHub, repo commits. Right?
[00:07:33] McIntosh:
Yeah. Exactly. And, a friend of mine was doing it, and I thought, well, might as well get one. So I don't I don't have any Bitcoin in it, or I will not probably use it for Bitcoin. It's just Please don't. No. Just to sign because it's a sign in device. Right? And the PGP is using, yeah, secret keys and stuff. So why not? It works. That is very interest
[00:08:12] Unknown:
And someone actually was asking what they should do with their old
[00:08:13] McIntosh:
And someone actually was asking what they should do with their old, sign in wallets, devices, I mean. Someone was asking that on Nostr, and I suggested that and they like the the idea.
[00:08:28] McIntosh:
So I've got some ledgers that, I could do that with. Would that work?
[00:08:33] McIntosh:
You you can. I tried with a NanoS. It didn't work, but maybe it's my fault. But the instructions are also for a NanoS.
[00:08:41] McIntosh:
Well, I don't even know what model these are. I don't all my Bitcoins off of them, I don't care. Yeah. I probably just burn them and protest anyways because I'm cynical vindictive like that. I'm vindictive like that. Alright. They sold me crap. What is new with me? Well, work is is really officially settled down. I'll be honest. And it's back to normal, whatever that means. So I have been able to get on some other projects. I am trying to build out the infrastructure for the Satoshi's Club podcast. Kenshin and I have been talking about kind of how we want to do this as we move forward. For sure, we've been talking about lightning.
I'm going to be moving off of the Satoshi Stream service that I use when you all boost and zap and this well, when you boost, the podcast that goes through Satoshi Stream, they take a cut and then it goes into our wallet, which I have no problem with. But if we set up a core lightning, node, then we can essentially cut them out and run our own node. So we'll be a node runner, and we'll have all of that there. So it will help us. It will give Kenshin more insight into what's going on as well because he'll have keys to that kingdom. By the way, I need to actually I was thinking about that. I need to get you a key to that server so that you can actually get on if you want.
But, yeah, we'll be setting up lightning. We'll talking about other things as well. We really kinda wanna build a fully open source chain for everything, including even our audio processing we were talking about that. I've got some interesting tool ideas for how we can take our audio and then kind of preprocess it before it ever hits me, the editor, or whoever's doing the editing, listening to it, which I think will eliminate a lot of manual work. So I'm I'm actually really excited about that. But, I've got a Bitcoin node that I haven't checked. I could actually check right now, but it should be fully synced at this point.
Once that gets done, I'll be able to set up the lightning node. I know my I know what my plan is. I just haven't done it yet. Oh, look at that. 02/1942, which is the date right now. So good. I'll have to figure that out. But yeah. Awesome. That thing, it's a pretty low end model and it had been seeking for days. So I'm really glad that's done. And it's a pruned node. Right? It is pruned. I pruned it down to 30 gigs, because the full Bitcoin, archive, if you wanna call it that, is like, oh, gracious. 300 plus is it that big? I Yeah. Sorry. It's large.
Actually, I think you're right. It's close to a terabyte. That would make a lot more sense than 300. And since this is a VPS where I pay for the gigabytes of storage, I wanted to keep that low so that and with Corelightning, you can actually do that. So one of their innovations, so to speak, most of the lightning nodes do not work with pruned nodes. Before we get into today's topic, Kenshin, I hope you're sitting down as you listen to this. We do have a little announcement to make. Kenshin and I both are actually going on different trips, but different places, but we are both going on trips next week. And we have made the decision that, frankly, it's best that we just don't record next week. So there will not be an episode next week.
[00:12:41] McIntosh:
Wah. Wah. Wah.
[00:12:44] McIntosh:
I'm well, part of me is going to be very disappointed. I will appreciate the break, to be honest. But, at the same time, it's been a long time since I've missed a week. It has. I do not actually know offhand when it was. We even, of course, recorded over the holidays. As I was telling Kenshin, that kinda got me in a little bit of hot water with, some family people, but, we moved past that. They only bring it up every now and then now. But, yeah, we just made the decision, since we're both gonna be on the road just to just to not record. I hope that's okay with you all. If not, send in a really big boost amount and tell us about it. I would suggest, what, a million sats, Kenshin? Probably. We'll definitely read your note on the air if you send us a million sats.
Alright.
[00:13:40] McIntosh:
Right. And about, Noister Zapathon last week Oh, yes. Had some amazing results. Thank you everybody for contributing to the Zapathon and commenting and reposting. A lot of reposts we said. A hundred, I think. A hundred. Yeah. We said it was not a prerequisite, but people still did it. So we appreciate that. And, we got some good feedback as well, not only random comments that we did get some random comments too, but, we appreciate all the feedback on the episode itself, the questions, and the feedback on our answers to those questions. And, what else did we get, Mikeintosh? We got something.
[00:14:28] McIntosh:
Well, we've made a we've made a decision coming out of that about these questions. I was so blown away with the with the questions, frankly, that I suggested that we start doing this quarterly, and we've agreed to that. So this will be our the end of this quarter, so we'll be a little off this time. But from now on, I think it was the June, the September, and then the end of the year, we'll do an episode basically just like that, asking for questions on Nostra from the listeners. I did wanna mention one other thing real quick about this. I don't go into numbers on on on here, and I do that on purpose because this isn't about the numbers and about how many people we reach. We we do wanna reach more people, frankly, but we had the highest downloads of this episode that we've had since we've been on Pod Home. Now I can't go all the way back to the start with the numbers. I do not remember, and I don't have the data.
But this episode was very well received. We really appreciate it, and we hope that we've got some new listeners off of it. We will see going down the road how that works out. But, I think it's somewhat refined our vision for how we're going forward. Does is that fair, Kenshin? Yeah. It's very fair. Yeah.
[00:15:49] McIntosh:
Yeah. And the quality of, followers and reactions we got is the most, how do we say, positive,
[00:15:56] McIntosh:
out of the that we don't love you previous listeners, by some way. Nice. No. It was it was very well received, and I think these are somewhat it's kind of our target market if that's what we're I guess, there's one way of saying it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Our previous followers are on Nostr. Yeah. Our A lot of them are. Now some of them are not, and actually, I wanna address that without getting too far into this. We do have a Nostr cheat sheet at satoshis-plebs.com/nostr that walks you through how you can set up a master setup, essentially. So you a CoinOS setup, and then I think it's primal that we walk through how to use. Yes.
But it's a great way to get started. We are intentionally going to bring some more episodes. In fact, Kenshin, I already have our idea for our next episode, but we'll save that. That are specifically about areas of nostril because it's different that may cause confusion. And so we wanna talk about those and help people explore them. Mhmm. Okay?
[00:17:12] McIntosh:
Sounds good.
[00:17:15] McIntosh:
Alright. Well, let's go into today's topic. We are going to talk about Bitcoin's volatility because if you have not been paying attention, ladies and gentlemen, it has been volatile. It has been going if you bring up trading view, there's been kind of boxes. There's been a really big box between, like, the mid seventies. I think this is $76.08, which is probably about right, and a hundred 9. And but then there's been a tighter box even between the that lower level about 77,000 and roughly 90,000. And it just it just goes up and down. And every time it does it, like, if you're on Bitcoin Twitter, oh my gosh. It is like whiplash. Like, people are just like, we're all gonna die. Oh, hey. We're going to 200,000.
Oh, we're all it's like, good lord, people. Come on. Sometimes I feel like most of the people who are on Bitcoin Twitter, which is not true, actually, but I feel like they've only been in Bitcoin for, like, half a cycle, And they've just they're not used to this. It looks like it's These are normal gyrations. These are normal until you break 30% from the all time high. It's not anything. You can go back every cycle and see 20 to 30% quite regularly, sometimes even more. And then ultimately it goes up. So we wanted to talk about what is all this volatility about? What is causing it?
And specifically, what you should do about it?
[00:19:06] McIntosh:
Alright. So we will go through some points, some of the recent events mainly to give an example of how Bitcoin is affected from the news. Mhmm. We have a few points now. It's six, seven, eight. We we see how many we discuss, but it's a few of them. Some are positive, some are negative. And we can start with the most obvious one, I think. And you can walk us through the whole debate.
[00:19:34] McIntosh:
No? Okay. We'll get to that. The SDR. The strategic Bitcoin reserve, of course, was announced last week. And if you rewind, I think it was two episodes ago. I said that when this got approved, I said two things, and I did that very specifically. If the order was approved, setting up a strategic reserve, and if it outlined regular buys of Bitcoin, like, I don't know, a thousand Bitcoin a month. I have I'm I'm just randomly pulling numbers out. Because what Trump had been saying since the Bitcoin conference last July is we're gonna establish the Bitcoin reserve and we're going to, buy a million Bitcoin.
I think that was the verbiage essentially that he used.
[00:20:29] McIntosh:
He he I don't think he ever mentioned it. It was Loomis. But
[00:20:34] McIntosh:
she has certainly promoted it. I'd okay. You call me on it. Maybe you're right. I would like to look it up later. Let's not worry about it right now. But that has been the idea, the prevalent idea. And I said both of those need to happen in order for us to move on and maybe very rapidly. Obviously, that is not what happened. We announced the price. It's it's 80 well, now 83,000. Okay? We're well below all time highs. We're we're in this box that we were just talking about. What's going on? Did not orange man save us? Well, and I sorry. I shouldn't have said that. That's being disrespectful, but still, he gets called that a lot.
No. Trump did not save us. He did set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve, however, and I thought it was very interesting that for all of the angst and shouting prior to the announcement about the alt coins, he set up specifically a Bitcoin reserve and a separate alt coin reserve and then proceeded in the language of the executive order to only talk about buying Bitcoin. Now he said specifically it had to be done in a budget neutral manner and that can be done in a number of ways. I don't really think we have the time to go into that today. But what it does mean is there will not be a line item in the federal budget saying buy 200 Bitcoin a week or $2.50, whatever.
Right? So because of that, we tanked. It was the craziest thing. I'm like, literally the global GDP leader just announced a strategic Bitcoin reserve and you people are selling your Bitcoin. Do you not have a brain cell? I I don't know. But that is what happened. And it's because their expectations, in my opinion, were set so high about what could have happened that when it didn't reach that, everybody basically bailed. And then once you start selling, it kinda snowballs and it got ugly until we reach some good support down there at 80,000 roughly, a little lower, whatever.
[00:23:14] McIntosh:
It seems like this, this buying into the reserve was already priced in. It feels like the expectation was to buy Bitcoin Yes. In in a manner of, as you said, a few per month or whatever, and 1,000,000 in the span of four years. So that was expectation. And anything less feels like the market was disappointed.
[00:23:40] McIntosh:
And our government is so confused right now that we don't even know how many Bitcoin we actually have. It's true story. The US Marshals Service does not have an accurate count of the number of Bitcoin that they hold. I'm going to say this and I try and be neutral when talking about governments. Because of Trump's budget cuts, not budget cuts. He he you've probably heard of this, most of you at least, but he set up this Doge, this department of governmental efficiency or something. And, basically, their goal is to go in and figure out, is there waste? Is there fraud? Is there abuse? This kind of thing.
And they're finding a lot of stuff, frankly. But there's a lot of chaos in the last, well, six weeks or so now, however long it's been in our government because of that. So I understand as of today, for example, half of the, what is it? The education department, the Department of Education, DOE, I guess, has been cut because the the they feel like they're not needed. And you may agree with that. You may disagree with that, but that is what's going on. And so there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been sorted out. Part of it is this US Marshalls. They have no idea how much Bitcoin we have. Like, they're keeping track of it in a spreadsheet. It's it's insanity.
So that will get sorted out. We will have a thing. Senator Loomis has actually reintroduced her bill to do these regular buys of Bitcoin. We'll see what traction that gets. It already has more support than it did last time. But I do believe there are budget neutral, as he put it, ways of gaining Bitcoin. I'll give you one quick example and then we've got to move on. I do not want to spend the entire episode talking about the SBR. Over in Europe, prepare to laugh. Okay. We have so we have these strategic reserves. We have gold, obviously, in Fort Knox. One of the reserves that we have is cheese Up in Wisconsin, down in these limestone caves, we literally have a storage of cheese.
I have no idea why. I don't even like cheese. Okay? Now I don't wanna be biased, but I don't think that cheese should be our national reserve asset. Okay?
[00:26:29] McIntosh:
Is it, cheese that you can eat? Or Yes. No. It's it's
[00:26:34] McIntosh:
perfectly usable cheese, and it is sitting there waiting for I don't know what. Why don't we sell that and buy Bitcoin with it? Just a thought. I don't know. We need to move on. I never heard of that before. You haven't ridden. That's funny. That's because you're not on Twitter very much, Kenshin, and that's a good thing. But it is literally I mean, that is not some conspiracy theory. It's a true thing. And it's not France or Switzerland doing it. No. It's not France. Yes. It's I mean, it's crazy. This is what the French would do. Right? They love cheese fromage, I think in French. Am I right? Yes. You're right. Woo hoo. I got my French right. Alright.
Anyways yeah. So let's move on, please, because I've had enough on that one.
[00:27:30] McIntosh:
Right. Well, we have another point where, a few a couple of weeks ago, we had a big hack. The Bybit, exchange was hacked by the North Korean Lazarus Group, but not, related to Bitcoin, of course. It was a Ethereum hack, and it was the biggest crypto hack in history, which when I heard about it, I was like, interesting. We're in the middle of it. So that was fun.
[00:28:00] McIntosh:
Yes. It it was entirely socially engineered too from what I understand. Right. It was crazy.
[00:28:08] McIntosh:
Yeah. And some people say that could somehow happen to Bitcoin in similar circumstances. Yes. Maybe. But, but it was with Ethereum, and it took down, the whole crypto industry Right. In that sense because, of course, it's crypto related. And, that that was a short, let's say, event that affected Bitcoin as well negatively.
[00:28:36] McIntosh:
So my question is, are they now gonna mark those Ethereum on the, OFAC compliant list or whatever so that you can't use them? I mean, they they they got rid of them. Right? They sold them. I don't know.
[00:28:52] McIntosh:
They were trying to and they were trying to to how is it called? To move the funds into Bitcoin. Right? At some point. That's what they've done
[00:29:02] McIntosh:
from what I understand. They've they've they've sold it for for Bitcoin without getting too deep into it. Yeah. That's what they went for from soft money to hard money in the end. Right. Well, they're they're smart. I mean and the the social engineering, the thing that they pulled off is just it it really was I don't wanna call it clever, but it was mind boggling. I mean, it was nontrivial for sure. Yeah. Bybit is to blame, frankly, and I don't think, if they have insurance or whatever that they should get all their money back because, they are at fault.
Not that the Koreans the North Koreans were not responsible, but, I mean, they made some huge blunders. So Yeah. Alright. Mt. Gox is next. Now Mt. Gox, is an old old were you around with Mt. Gox, by the way?
[00:29:56] McIntosh:
Yeah. I knew the name, but I never made an account there.
[00:30:00] McIntosh:
You know so I had an account, but I never had I was not involved in the hack. So there was a hack of Mt. Gox, a huge amount of Bitcoin. It's gone on for years and years, and they're now settling it, giving people back their Bitcoin, essentially. And that was in 2013. So it's been twelve years. So earlier this week, they moved 1,100 11,000, excuse me, almost 12,000 Bitcoin. And that sparked market uncertainty and volatility, which it did. I mean, the the market dropped, and it wasn't because those moved. It's because it spooked people. So we dropped again.
[00:30:46] McIntosh:
And supply and demand also. I mean, the the market all of a sudden had more supply, naturally, of course, the price has to
[00:30:54] McIntosh:
Yeah. I would argue that 12,000 Bitcoin probably wouldn't affect the price that much. Maybe if they, like, just dumped it on the market all at once. But if they're distributing it out to people, not everyone is gonna sell at the same time. And that actually hasn't even happened yet from what I under they were moving it from basically cold storage to a wallet to prepare for distribution out to the affected people. Like if you and I had lost Bitcoin in that hack, we might be receiving some of that. By the way, Mount Gox, let me get you an address. I definitely lost a hundred Bitcoin in that hack. So I'm just kidding.
That would not have been dumped on the market. I some amount, but not like what we saw. I mean, it's it's just a roller coaster. It's just, you know but people get spooked and they sell because they don't understand what they're holding, I believe. But that's either here nor there.
[00:31:59] McIntosh:
I agree. And some of it, they say they sold another 12,000 on March 6 Mhmm. Of of which was paid to creditor for debts to BitGo. So they had some some moved, earlier last week and another 12,000 now, and they're think they're afraid that it's gonna be even more coming up. But still, why yeah. I don't understand either. Why should the price drop?
[00:32:29] McIntosh:
But, yeah, it is really A few hundred, maybe a thousand, but, yeah, we see these significant drops and then it just kind of accelerates. And I wanna mention a factor that's not actually on our list that I just thought of. We find in these markets that the traders will leverage themselves. Okay? So maybe they believe that the price of Bitcoin, it's either going up or going down. Right? So they're betting one way or the other. And then they leverage. They say, I'm gonna put on 10 x leverage. So for every Bitcoin I put in, it acts like 10 Bitcoin. And so they can theoretically make more money. The reality is, and they can make more money. But if the market turns the wrong way, they get liquidated.
When when you see online of this account or whatever got liquidated, this is what they're talking about. They lose that initial Bitcoin, either all of it or part of it. And once you get that cascade going, it can accelerate the drop. Does that make sense? So you may have a lot of traders who when they reach a certain level, the price that they get liquidated, and then it just drops another couple thousand just because of all that liquidation, because their money gets it gets removed. So I I would add that to this list, along with these. So now I just inserted an extra point. So and typically, it can go both ways. You can if the shorts get liquidated, if the people who think Bitcoin's going down, it will go up really quickly. If the longs get liquidated, the opposite, if they think that Bitcoin's going up and it starts going down and they get liquidated, it'll accelerate that downward movement. So it magnifies the movement one way or the other, which in part brings about this volatility that we're talking about.
[00:34:44] McIntosh:
There is an interesting, bot on Nostr. It's called the the wrecked bot. Yes. And it tells you all the liquidations. Some of them are long, others are short, but you see they're all synchronized. It is r
[00:35:01] McIntosh:
e k t. Correct? R e k t? Yes. Yeah. You can if you're on Nostra, I think if you search for that wrecked r e k t bot, you'll find it. It's an interesting little bot. You might wanna follow it if you're into this kind of thing. I do not trade, by the way. I as I've said over and over at this point, I don't it's not what I do. And I don't recommend that you do it, certainly. But it is fun to watch this train wreck. It's like we humans, we'd love to see we I don't know. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Exactly. It's entertainment. So It's entertainment. So what's the next one, Kenshin?
[00:35:38] McIntosh:
The next one, I mean, is general, macroeconomic factors. Inflation reports come up and potential interest rate changes are affecting the sentiment of the market. I personally look at inflation reports and interest rates in Sweden, and that that's also affects me how I look around at the, let's say, the economy and what I should do next. So that for sure affects people. And right now, it's the inflation is a bit higher, it seems, than Yes. Expected. So instead of going lower, as it it was doing last year, it starts to get back up again. And that spooks a bit some people as well with, what how to invest. And and I think people are waiting on the side if they have some money. Maybe they're waiting to see what happens because
[00:36:39] McIntosh:
Who who has money? Exactly. I'm sorry. What? I'm just kidding. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So I interrupted your train of thought. I apologize. No. But Let's cut that out.
[00:36:51] McIntosh:
No. It's okay. No. But I think the the people are just wait and see type of mentality in that sense.
[00:37:00] McIntosh:
Right. Yeah. I used to talk about macroeconomics a lot. It is something I I don't wanna sound this kinda sounds weird, but I enjoy it. But, yeah. I I don't do it as much anymore. I I don't think the majority of the listeners actually care, but it does definitely affect the market. If if interest rates are up, that is a negative. If interest rates get cut, that's a positive. So just these basic macroeconomic factors will definitely influence the overall market, and I would like to take this time to even though Bitcoin doesn't follow the stock market, like, in terms of percent, it does in general follow the stock market.
At some point, I believe it will break away. But for now, if the stock market's going down in general, Bitcoin's going down. Right now, The US stock market is a mess. And we see that reflected in Bitcoin. And actually, I would argue that Bitcoin has held up very well compared to a lot of the stock market in general. We can bounce out of a 30% drawdown in a week. Let's see the stock market do that. So
[00:38:24] McIntosh:
Some some big stocks were down more than 10% like Tesla and VTech. Tesla is down.
[00:38:30] McIntosh:
There are no. Who is it? I think it is Tesla. They're down 50% from their all time high. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. And there's other factors directly in Tesla, and I we're not that's political. We're not talking about that right now. But yeah. I mean, this there's a lot of stuff going on in the stock market. So I actually would say that Bitcoin's holding up really well. Mhmm. Okay. Institutional adoption. Sweet. I just saw today that Rumble, which is like a video content platform, whatever. They have started investing in Bitcoin. They bought a hundred and 88 Bitcoin, however many millions of dollars that is.
That is just yet another example of institutional adoption. We see companies who are turning into Bitcoin holding companies. Strategy used to be MicroStrategy is like the prime example of that. Right? They are prepared. Oh, my gosh. Did you see this? It it's probably actually ongoing right now. They probably already started another, like, $2,000,000,000 buy of Bitcoin. Because they issued stock or what? I don't under this is the part I don't know. So I'm gonna wave. I'm literally gonna wave my hands here. Yes. They issued stock and they got $2,000,000,000 and now they're buying Bitcoin. There's other companies who are following along with that.
There are companies who are just buying Bitcoin with their cash reserves, and that will accelerate. And I think at some point, we're going to reach a tipping point where if the company is not buying Bitcoin, they are making a huge mistake and the market will reflect that. If they're a public company, they will they will that will price into their stock price.
[00:40:27] McIntosh:
Right. And then we have general market sentiment shifts. So there is a term called the fear and greed index. Right. So that that goes from zero to a hundred, I believe. I think so. And right now, that has turned from, greed
[00:40:50] McIntosh:
into fear in the past few weeks? It's like 18, I think, the last time I saw it, which is really low. And I don't it is a metric, and I don't know how they come up with it. But at the same time, because it's so well known, it brings people go, oh, we're this is the market, so things are bad. So I'm gonna sell my Bitcoin, which is the exact opposite of what they really should be doing. But I do see that happening.
[00:41:22] McIntosh:
Yeah. So people are synchronizing, essentially. They all synchronize with it. And right now, everybody's synchronizing on the negative side because everybody thinks that the the rest of the world is afraid and they should sell. So they just go with the flow and they do sell eventually. It's a self fulfilling prophecy in a sense. Mhmm. Yes.
[00:41:48] McIntosh:
And that kind of wraps up our list. I do wanna add I'm not adding a new item, but I wanna add some context. A couple of weeks ago, it's been a bit, but I said that, you know, these market news we see Bitcoin sell. I was talking about it's not really like, there's not a direct relationship, and I kind of maybe I'd I'm not sure I said that correctly. I'm gonna try again. So even though Bitcoin is affected, for example, by rates, if if the interest rate goes up and the stock market goes down because of that, in general, we will see Bitcoin go down. It's very difficult though. Well, I would argue in the long term, this has no effect.
I think there are two things that will affect Bitcoin in the long term. One of them, unsurprisingly, is 21,000,000 Bitcoin. There will never be more than that. Right now, we've mined 19,500,000.0 or so of those. I don't know exactly. But That's more. A large part of the market of of the Bitcoin that has ever will ever be mined has been mined. As we continue down that road, actually, the new Bitcoin that gets mined will have less and less effect on that current on that cap of 21,000,000. Now that being said, the second part of this is usage. It's market penetration, so to speak.
As the price of Bitcoin creeps up, we gave that new metric for gold earlier. I would argue that when we're 10 x from now and gold is we're at the same level or better than gold is, that means that a lot more people are using Bitcoin. That means that a lot more companies are have adopted Bitcoin. That means more nation states have adopted Bitcoin. That is what drives the price of Bitcoin up. These other things are very, very temporary. Ultimately, Bitcoin is the answer to this stuff. And in the end, it will win out. It is sound money. These US dollars that we talk about or Swedish kroners.
[00:44:05] McIntosh:
Yes. Correct.
[00:44:07] McIntosh:
Yay. I'm learning Swedish, Or whatever the EU oh, well, that's in our the, the euro. Right? Whatever we're talking about, it's based it's fiat based. There's nothing backing it except promises and violence. And ultimately that fails. History proves that. So I don't really care what the price of Bitcoin is today other than the it does change the amount of Bitcoin that I can buy in my weekly DCA. Anything else is almost irrelevant. I mean, we do follow it and it's of interest and all that. But look, Kenshin, let me give you an example. In ten years, are we gonna look back and say, man, Trump did not start buying Bitcoin when he made that executive order to do the strategic Bitcoin reserve, and that's why Bitcoin is only, ten years from now, $5,000,000.
No. We're not. What about Bybit? Who who cares?
[00:45:22] McIntosh:
No. I mean, we didn't need any government until now.
[00:45:26] McIntosh:
Right. So even though the price went down temporarily, this stuff is not really going to affect it in the long term. And it's just like I was talking about with the liquidations. When people get spooked, oh my gosh, Trump didn't start buying all the Bitcoin in the world immediately. Sell than other people that were a bunch of sheep, you know, following along behind each other. Oh, they're selling, so I'm selling. And we'll buy back down at the bottom. And then that doesn't work out. And then you end up with less Bitcoin and the Bitcoin price ends up higher. And if you do that enough, hopefully you will learn and stop doing it.
And what do we say here on Ken, Kenshin? It's just do your DCA every week. Just buy your Bitcoin. Do it with strike if you have it available and you're comfortable with that. However you do that, just do it. And don't worry about these things even though, let's be honest, we all keep track of it. And by the way,
[00:46:32] McIntosh:
people also, sync on the way up too. Right? So the so called FOMO, that's even stronger on the way up. Oh, no. We're we missed the opportunity. Right. Then you look back and you see think, oh, I could have bought that 80 k.
[00:46:48] McIntosh:
Right. You know what my miners do? They mine regardless of the price of Bitcoin.
[00:46:56] McIntosh:
You know what my mine do? They make heat. Yes. They just make heat. Big announcement, everybody.
[00:47:04] McIntosh:
Kenshin did not mine a block this week because he is still here. Yep. Exactly. Oh, man.
[00:47:13] McIntosh:
Yes.
[00:47:16] McIntosh:
Oh, we did mine a block seven hours ago, by the way, on ocean. Sorry. Congratulations.
[00:47:22] McIntosh:
I'm thinking, actually, maybe I should turn one of my miners back to ocean because I'm not helping the network or anyone else for that matter except hitting my roof.
[00:47:34] McIntosh:
Hey. I don't wanna, like, build your hopes up, but I saw that another BitX found a solo Bitcoin. No. You're kidding. I'm not kidding. A Bethex. A Bitex.
[00:47:47] McIntosh:
I have 10 times the speed of a Bethex.
[00:47:50] McIntosh:
Well, then you're 10 times as likely. I I don't know, man. I don't know what to tell you to do. I look. They got cheap power up in Finland. They keep showing me this ad, 6¢ a kilowatt, like, all in. Like, I'm and they're using it for residential heating. It's incredible. It's we've talked about that before, but, man, that just blows me. It knocks my socks off. I don't know. Whatever. That's awesome.
[00:48:21] McIntosh:
Okay. I have a question Okay. For the audience. Yes. We need to move on. That's our question. So we talked about volatility, about feelings. Right? How do you feel, the audience, with Bitcoin's volatility? Are you feeling anxious, excited, or are you just dizzying and you don't care? How do you navigate this, this news cycles? I would like to know. That's a great question. Do you want to answer it, Macintosh, for yourself? Yeah.
[00:49:02] McIntosh:
Excited, anxious, or maintaining a zen like calm. There's nothing zen about me. I'm just afraid there's not. That's just not the way I maybe there should be. I am not excited and I'm not anxious, but I am stacking sets. And I have learned through painful experience that if I let myself get excited or anxious, I lose Bitcoin.
[00:49:30] McIntosh:
Alright.
[00:49:31] McIntosh:
And so I just that's really in large part why I so strongly encourage DCA. Have it and I should specify automatic. My miners are automatic. As long as they're online, when there's a block found, I get reward for it. If I'm use which I do, I do a weekly DCA with strike. On strike, it is set up to automatically pull the money out of the account on Saturday and then on or whatever. It doesn't matter. I think it's early Sunday morning, but my strike, buy is made. It's completely automatic. I don't think about it, and then I don't stress about it. And I'm not you're not trying to hide something, but don't put yourself into the chain.
Oh, I've got to remember to DCA. And then on the week that it drops like a rock, and you're feeling that little bit of anxiety down in your stomach, maybe you don't make that buy. And that's when you should be.
[00:50:43] McIntosh:
Mhmm. I completely agree. I actually do the same. I do DCA with strike, but I do daily. It's very small amounts daily. Right. I top it up manually because I don't know if it can take it from my account automatically. But in any case, I do it once a month, so it doesn't really matter. Right. And it it does this year's month, daily for that matter. And it's for free and which is another big top tip.
[00:51:12] McIntosh:
Yes. That's a few percent that you end up saving every week. And I every once in a while, I go in there and I look at the stacks and the buys and the price, the value. Right now, just to be blunt, I'm down because the price is down. But that's okay because the price won't go up. As sure as the sun comes up, and it may not be tomorrow morning, but it will. That's what I'm betting on. That's not financial advice. I mean, you guys know I have to say that, but I'm not somebody who's out here just saying things. This is what I'm doing, and I tell y'all exactly what I'm doing.
[00:51:55] McIntosh:
Mhmm. So And, I I agree with the feeling aspect. I am also I'm a bit excited in a sense. It it's fun to see. It's a bit entertainment for me because I'm not involved, in the trading aspect of it, so I don't care who gets liquidated. But, I agree with the sentiment. I I tried trading, ten years ago with forex and other stuff, and I couldn't handle the mental, anxiousness of of it. So so I don't like trading, and I like DCA. And that's it. I have stuck what I could stack so far, and the rest is entertainment.
[00:52:39] McIntosh:
Okay. Very cool. So that's our weekly DCA promotion. That's what you should be doing. Let's talk about our supporters. We've got a couple. We we you wanna do you wanna do send it, Mike? Do you have that the note Yeah.
[00:52:55] Unknown:
I I just have the, sent it Mike. He boosted us, like usually,
[00:53:01] McIntosh:
in 1,069
[00:53:02] McIntosh:
sets. Okay. He did have a message and I should be able to find it here.
[00:53:08] McIntosh:
Okay. Haddon Fountain?
[00:53:10] McIntosh:
Yeah. No. I'll have to bring it back up. Hang on. I did have it. Something happened. It's alright. Telegram. I have a message. It was a good message. That's why I remember it.
[00:53:22] McIntosh:
Oh, oh, I'm sorry. I have it. I have it in front of me. So send in Mike. We got the message and a boost from him. +1 sets. And the message on fountain, I see here, another good one, he says. Mhmm. Thank you. Looking forward to the possibility of Zap.stream, getting going. Keep recommending episode number one ninety five. It really is a great guide to get started on Nostr. Looking forward to the next 200 episodes. Well, thank you very much, Mike.
[00:53:54] McIntosh:
Yep. I appreciate that. And we also had user five nine one eight nine zero six eight. His username's, I guess, Go, g o e. Yes. And boosted a hundred sats and said, noise.
[00:54:10] McIntosh:
Noise.
[00:54:12] McIntosh:
And so we had a total of 1,987 sats this week, including the streaming that was happening. We appreciate that, of course. So pretty cool. Alright. Streaming this week. Yeah? Yeah. We did. And so we also had a couple of news items. Actually, in general, it was pretty slow both in, software and news. Okay. So our first bit of news item, we've we've really already covered. It was the crypto summit, the executive order that came out of that. We've got clear delineation between Bitcoin and everything else, which there should be. There actually is the opportunity to ultimately sell everything else, which I think they should, frankly, immediately and buy Bitcoin.
That would be another budget neutral way of adding to the Bitcoin stack. So I'm not gonna elaborate on that any further. I do want you to take the next one since it involves good old Europe, and then we'll talk about that for a minute.
[00:55:13] McIntosh:
Yeah. So the ECB, the European Central Bank targets in October, targets, I'm sorry, October this year to finish the digital euro preparation phase. So they've been out there and, campaigning for, bringing stakeholders, to to their side to finalize the digital euro. There are some lawmakers, it says, that have expressed doubts. So they are not really everybody. It's they're not on board, and that's a good thing. Mhmm. So they're hesitant to trust ACB with with running a digital euro following an outage, it says here, that occurred with the Target two payment system last month where it could not settle transactions for a day.
So they are having growing pains with their prototyping and things like that. So but I would say the the most fun part of this whole thing was the photos that came out of that announcement. It was Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank. She was dressed with a orange suit, how do you say?
[00:56:29] McIntosh:
I saw no. Yeah. It's perfect. No. It was. It was it looked just like a Bitcoin color. It was amazing. I'm like, is she doing it on purpose? Or I doubt it.
[00:56:40] McIntosh:
I doubt it. I doubt it too, but it it it looks so funny. I mean, talking about, digital, euro and CBDC with an orange suit. It was very funny.
[00:56:56] McIntosh:
I I express a great deal of concern about The United States budget policy and the fact that there's very little thought given to even being deficit neutral much less paying down our debt. And I think that has long term implications for our country. But one thing I will say with Trump, I am very happy. He signed an executive order, I think, saying that we would not have a central bank digital currency. And I am so glad because the government has no business. It's not that it's a digital currency, by the way, just to be clear. It's any centralized digital currency like what the EU is talking about here can be used to track everything that you do, everything that you buy, every just every little detail of your life, and the government has no business being in that.
So I am super happy at least with that because I think if Biden had remained in office or Kamala Harris had come into office essentially, really. I I don't think that'd be true. I think we'd be looking at a CBDC here in The United States. And, unfortunately, there are places around the world where these are proceedings such as the EU. So with whatever ability that you have, I would press back against these if these were in your country because there's nothing good that's gonna come out of this. Not it will give them to the ability to instantly print new money, by the way.
Oh, we need a a stimulus because the economy is tanking. Oh, here's some more money. Thousand dollars into your account or a thousand euros or whatever into your account instantly. Well, where'd that money come from? I don't know. Crazy stuff. So that needs to be watched. If you're in Europe, you need to and part of the EU, I guess I should say, then that's definitely something you need to be pushing back on in whatever the appropriate manner is.
[00:59:09] McIntosh:
Right. And, yeah, I mean, they are not really, thankfully saying that something will happen this year. It's just the preparation phase.
[00:59:19] McIntosh:
And I am pretty sure it's not gonna happen anytime soon. Well, this might be a case of, thank god, for bureaucracy. I don't I don't know. We'll see. But alright. And that was actually it for any real news this week, but let's move on to our software updates. There were a couple of things. Go ahead and take Phoenix since that's a non US item.
[00:59:43] McIntosh:
Yeah. So Phoenix has released the version 2.5, with major improvements in QR code scanning on Android and a 78% reduction in their APK size, so their file size and the space it takes on the phone, and the display of pending on chain fonts on the home screen in the iOS app. So a lot of improvements there. This version also removes embedded Tor library from the app, meaning that users now have to install a third party Tor proxy VPN app such as Orbot. And, actually, I was doing that myself too. Before, it was more reliable than using the built in,
[01:00:29] McIntosh:
Tor library. And that's exactly what they're talking about here. It just makes it more stable. They were not able to keep up with it or for whatever reason, it doesn't even matter. So Yeah. If you wanna use Tor, you do it separately.
[01:00:42] McIntosh:
So that's a very good upgrade to Phoenix Wallet. And I really like the the wallet, but I left it since when they left US because I was thinking maybe they will close down, but they didn't close it down. Right. So I would say that was a bit of fear.
[01:00:57] McIntosh:
I am wondering if they're gonna come back. Actually, I suspect that they will fairly soon. I would definitely say within the next year. I would hope sooner than that. They're just missing out otherwise, because it's very clear that this administration is very pro crypto, so roll with it. Our final updates, in terms of software was Corelightning. A brand new version came out in the last day or so. I don't know if this is what's going to be installed when I set up, the Core Lightning, by the way. I'm very curious. But if not now, certainly soon, I I believe, with the package repo that I'm using.
And it's version 25 o two. And so they I don't wanna go through all this. There's quite a bit, but there was some channel, backup improvements certainly, which is very important. You open up channels between nodes. That's how the money, the Satoshis get passed back and forth, essentially. And being able to back those up in a secure manner is is super important. So glad to see they're they're working on that. And they've got this new XPay plug in, which I am not familiar with, but it just came out in the last version of of core lightning. So this is basically a bug fix on that.
Mhmm. And, yeah. So there was a sprinkling of other things in there as well, but those are kind of some of the highlights, the biggest, most important thing. If you're using it, it's probably well worth upgrading to. Right. And you're adding something on the fly.
[01:02:39] McIntosh:
Yes. I would add, an important, release from AlbiHub. Okay. They updated recently to version 1.14 something, and that, introduced a bug, and a lot of channels closed down. My my I had up updated also, and I had to restart my whole node because my wallet kept locking up. And then they released another version, 1.15, that says now that they fixed the bug. But I see in that release on Oster a lot of reports of, channels with Megalith. What what was the name? Megalith. Anyway, it's a channel, service and a lot of closed channels there too. So I would say don't update to 1.14 or 1.15 for now.
[01:03:35] McIntosh:
Well, that's unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah. I when I ran a lightning node previously, it was on an Umbrel type setup. I think it was actually Umbrel, but regardless, it was one of these that I ran on my little local network. And I never had stability from this wind up shutting it down. I I had channels closed. It wasn't Alby. I'm not saying it's Alby's fault. I'm just saying at least with my setup with the network, I've given up on trying to set up things here locally that are Internet accessible because my Internet provider does a really well, they block a lot of stuff, and it just creates a lot of issues. So, just a reminder, no podcast next week. Please don't forget, and please don't forget about us.
Please promote it. I wanna give a big shout out to miss Hellbreaker. She gave one of our questions last week, but she then took the time to clip it and put it up on fountain. And, miss Hellbreaker, I am going to boost you 500 sats. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do that. It probably will come through Noster, not through fountain. I'm having a lot of problem with my fountain set up right now. But that type of activity really helps us. Telling your friends, hey. I like this podcast. They're fresh, insightful, whatever whatever your don't use my words. Use your words, obviously.
But, you know, let other people know that's a huge thing. I would love to see these numbers continue to grow because frankly, ultimately, this is gonna get Kenshin and I to a place where we can put more money into this podcast. That's how you can help us make that happen. Let other people know about it. Okay?
[01:05:33] McIntosh:
Mhmm. Yes. And as always, as you say, this is a value for value podcast, and we appreciate all the support. Now not only on Fountain, but also on NoSir. We have, we post weekly now the episodes, and we see a lot of support, and we appreciate it. Yes. And as well, like Mike said, if you can share some episodes like the one ninety five that is about Nostr, how to get there, that seems to be a good way as well to to get the word-of-mouth, promotion going. Join us on Oster. Join us on Fountain or other value for value podcasts, two point o apps. There are a list of apps on podcastapps.com where you can find Android or iOS apps or even on the web.
There is the podcasting index, actually. You can play our podcast live on the on the web. Not live, but on the web. And you can also find our back catalog on satoshis.plebs.com/episodes. That's all for this week.
[01:06:48] McIntosh:
Hey, Kinshin. This week, I just wanted to mention we did change our music. We're doing an Ainsley Costello song. I hope I said that right, Ainsley. It's much more of a pop song, and got the full song at the end of the show. I got a chance to see her actually at the conference last July at the value for value music event that was going on live. I'm not a big music person anymore, but, live music, certainly. But to be honest, she's got a good stage presence. She's I don't know. She's just one of these and she's got a good voice, so I hope you enjoy this. It's called daydreaming.
[01:07:28] McIntosh:
Mhmm. Very appropriate. Sounds good. Goodbye for me. Have a nice week and see you in two weeks. Alright. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.
[01:07:46] Unknown:
Say dreamer. Keep that head of yours up there in the clouds. Because once you see what's going on down there, you won't have to calm them down. Hey, dreamer. Don't you go to bed. The dreams are better before you lay down your own head. Daydreamers.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is March, and this is episode 201 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm McIntosh.
[00:00:09] McIntosh:
I am Kenshin, and today's episode is Bitcoin's volatile ride.
[00:00:39] McIntosh:
Kenshin, my tea is so hot. It's scalding. It's perfect. I got my honey, from, Little Green Bees. Shout out there to them, and, it's perfect. I love hot. I coffee, tea, just if it burns the roof of your mouth, it's probably perfect for me.
[00:01:01] McIntosh:
That's too hot for me.
[00:01:04] McIntosh:
So let's talk about Bitcoin maybe. I I hey. Let's change things up. Let's talk about Solana. You wanna talk about Solana?
[00:01:14] McIntosh:
No. No. I want to talk about Nostr. Nostr. Well, let me last week?
[00:01:19] McIntosh:
What happened to Nostr last week? Okay. Well, we'll get there. Bitcoin price at time of recording, though. March as and when which is, today, funny enough. 80 you did we change this? I actually I sorry. I like to round up the numbers. So No. I would okay. Wait. 80 when did you put that down? Oh, an hour ago. Yeah. No. It has changed a lot. Bitcoin price at time of recording is 82,800, illustrating our point perfectly. And what is the euro, sir?
[00:01:59] McIntosh:
€76,000.
[00:02:02] McIntosh:
70 6 thousand euros. Okay. Let me let me go ahead and update this real quick so I can get it later. Alright. And we've got a new metric this week. Thanks to Kenshin. He wanted to throw in, which I love this metric. Bitcoin market cap as of today is $1,600,000,000,000 USD. And then gold, its favorite competitor is 20,300,000,000,000.0 USD. So gold as a store of value, for all of its worth aside from that is basically $20,000,000,000,000. And what that means is that Bitcoin versus gold, the market cap is about 8%. So just to equal gold, we have a a long way to go about a 10 x for no. Yeah. About a 10 x from here a little bit more. That's what And that would just equal gold alone. So when people say fun things like Bitcoin can't keep going higher, it's already too expensive, I'm not gonna invest in it because surely it's not gonna keep going up, etcetera, etcetera.
Here is one simple statistic that you can show to people. Well, let's just round it up. Bitcoin's at 2,000,000,000,000. Gold is at 20,000,000,000,000. We're at one tenth the market cap of gold. And that is just for that one use case.
[00:03:32] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:03:33] McIntosh:
Sound good?
[00:03:34] McIntosh:
Yeah. I have been looking at this metric for for a while, when it was below 5%. So it's nice to see it growing, get close to 10.
[00:03:45] McIntosh:
It is a slow growth, but, yes, it is definitely going upwards and that's what's important. Alright. And what's our block height, sir?
[00:03:56] McIntosh:
So block height is 887,507.
[00:04:02] McIntosh:
Okay.
[00:04:03] McIntosh:
We have a difficulty adjustment projected for March 23 at plus 3%, and the previous, difficulty adjustment was plus again at 1.43%. So hash rate seems to be going up at those times.
[00:04:23] McIntosh:
I would point out the adjustment just happened, and yes, it did go up. It was three days ago. It it went up about one and a half percent. So definitely an upward adjustment. I wouldn't put too much, credence into the 3% at this point because it's so early. So we'll see. We've got, like, ten days, eleven days until the next adjustment. I think next week, we'll have a a lot better view of that. And then for our fees, for transaction fees, this type of thing, we've got, very low two two and two for low, medium, and high transaction values, that sets per v byte, which means that a transaction would cost, it's like 25¢, I think. I'm doing that on the fly.
Yes. Exactly. Somewhere right around there. And then 50 megabytes of unprocessed transactions. So, very low, transactions right now, as we have been seeing mostly for, what, the last month and a half or so now. Right?
[00:05:29] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:05:30] McIntosh:
Okay. So what is up with you, sir, this week? What's new going on in Sweden?
[00:05:37] McIntosh:
Well, it starts getting colder again. We had the plus 11 degrees Celsius in the weekend, so we thought it was spring. That's good. Yeah. And now we have minus one all of a sudden. So Okay. We're freezing a bit. But, otherwise, had the family visit, the past few days, so so that was good. Now it's quiet again in the house, so that's also good. So they're gone.
[00:06:08] McIntosh:
Yes. And everybody went,
[00:06:11] McIntosh:
ah. Yes. And, yeah, I've been playing with some some stuff, like, I got the Treasure Model one, one of the old ones, to use it. But not to use it as a Bitcoin wallet, but to use it as a PGP sign in device to sign things like commits on GitHub and stuff like that.
[00:06:35] McIntosh:
I have never heard of this use case. No. Does this mean we can get a sponsorship by Trezor now and then sell it as a signing device? As a PGPs signing device? I would not trust this with my Bitcoin, by the way, just to be clear. No. There is no Bitcoin involved in this use case. But You are talking about so PGP is pretty good privacy, which was invented by Phil Zimmerman. And if you go back in the shows, I got a chance to meet him at the conference last July. That was actually the highlight of my conference. It was. Sorry.
But, yeah, I get he invented PGP, pretty good privacy, and it's never been broken, which is awesome because it's pretty good. The irony of that is just too funny. But you can now sign, like, your GitHub, repo commits. Right?
[00:07:33] McIntosh:
Yeah. Exactly. And, a friend of mine was doing it, and I thought, well, might as well get one. So I don't I don't have any Bitcoin in it, or I will not probably use it for Bitcoin. It's just Please don't. No. Just to sign because it's a sign in device. Right? And the PGP is using, yeah, secret keys and stuff. So why not? It works. That is very interest
[00:08:12] Unknown:
And someone actually was asking what they should do with their old
[00:08:13] McIntosh:
And someone actually was asking what they should do with their old, sign in wallets, devices, I mean. Someone was asking that on Nostr, and I suggested that and they like the the idea.
[00:08:28] McIntosh:
So I've got some ledgers that, I could do that with. Would that work?
[00:08:33] McIntosh:
You you can. I tried with a NanoS. It didn't work, but maybe it's my fault. But the instructions are also for a NanoS.
[00:08:41] McIntosh:
Well, I don't even know what model these are. I don't all my Bitcoins off of them, I don't care. Yeah. I probably just burn them and protest anyways because I'm cynical vindictive like that. I'm vindictive like that. Alright. They sold me crap. What is new with me? Well, work is is really officially settled down. I'll be honest. And it's back to normal, whatever that means. So I have been able to get on some other projects. I am trying to build out the infrastructure for the Satoshi's Club podcast. Kenshin and I have been talking about kind of how we want to do this as we move forward. For sure, we've been talking about lightning.
I'm going to be moving off of the Satoshi Stream service that I use when you all boost and zap and this well, when you boost, the podcast that goes through Satoshi Stream, they take a cut and then it goes into our wallet, which I have no problem with. But if we set up a core lightning, node, then we can essentially cut them out and run our own node. So we'll be a node runner, and we'll have all of that there. So it will help us. It will give Kenshin more insight into what's going on as well because he'll have keys to that kingdom. By the way, I need to actually I was thinking about that. I need to get you a key to that server so that you can actually get on if you want.
But, yeah, we'll be setting up lightning. We'll talking about other things as well. We really kinda wanna build a fully open source chain for everything, including even our audio processing we were talking about that. I've got some interesting tool ideas for how we can take our audio and then kind of preprocess it before it ever hits me, the editor, or whoever's doing the editing, listening to it, which I think will eliminate a lot of manual work. So I'm I'm actually really excited about that. But, I've got a Bitcoin node that I haven't checked. I could actually check right now, but it should be fully synced at this point.
Once that gets done, I'll be able to set up the lightning node. I know my I know what my plan is. I just haven't done it yet. Oh, look at that. 02/1942, which is the date right now. So good. I'll have to figure that out. But yeah. Awesome. That thing, it's a pretty low end model and it had been seeking for days. So I'm really glad that's done. And it's a pruned node. Right? It is pruned. I pruned it down to 30 gigs, because the full Bitcoin, archive, if you wanna call it that, is like, oh, gracious. 300 plus is it that big? I Yeah. Sorry. It's large.
Actually, I think you're right. It's close to a terabyte. That would make a lot more sense than 300. And since this is a VPS where I pay for the gigabytes of storage, I wanted to keep that low so that and with Corelightning, you can actually do that. So one of their innovations, so to speak, most of the lightning nodes do not work with pruned nodes. Before we get into today's topic, Kenshin, I hope you're sitting down as you listen to this. We do have a little announcement to make. Kenshin and I both are actually going on different trips, but different places, but we are both going on trips next week. And we have made the decision that, frankly, it's best that we just don't record next week. So there will not be an episode next week.
[00:12:41] McIntosh:
Wah. Wah. Wah.
[00:12:44] McIntosh:
I'm well, part of me is going to be very disappointed. I will appreciate the break, to be honest. But, at the same time, it's been a long time since I've missed a week. It has. I do not actually know offhand when it was. We even, of course, recorded over the holidays. As I was telling Kenshin, that kinda got me in a little bit of hot water with, some family people, but, we moved past that. They only bring it up every now and then now. But, yeah, we just made the decision, since we're both gonna be on the road just to just to not record. I hope that's okay with you all. If not, send in a really big boost amount and tell us about it. I would suggest, what, a million sats, Kenshin? Probably. We'll definitely read your note on the air if you send us a million sats.
Alright.
[00:13:40] McIntosh:
Right. And about, Noister Zapathon last week Oh, yes. Had some amazing results. Thank you everybody for contributing to the Zapathon and commenting and reposting. A lot of reposts we said. A hundred, I think. A hundred. Yeah. We said it was not a prerequisite, but people still did it. So we appreciate that. And, we got some good feedback as well, not only random comments that we did get some random comments too, but, we appreciate all the feedback on the episode itself, the questions, and the feedback on our answers to those questions. And, what else did we get, Mikeintosh? We got something.
[00:14:28] McIntosh:
Well, we've made a we've made a decision coming out of that about these questions. I was so blown away with the with the questions, frankly, that I suggested that we start doing this quarterly, and we've agreed to that. So this will be our the end of this quarter, so we'll be a little off this time. But from now on, I think it was the June, the September, and then the end of the year, we'll do an episode basically just like that, asking for questions on Nostra from the listeners. I did wanna mention one other thing real quick about this. I don't go into numbers on on on here, and I do that on purpose because this isn't about the numbers and about how many people we reach. We we do wanna reach more people, frankly, but we had the highest downloads of this episode that we've had since we've been on Pod Home. Now I can't go all the way back to the start with the numbers. I do not remember, and I don't have the data.
But this episode was very well received. We really appreciate it, and we hope that we've got some new listeners off of it. We will see going down the road how that works out. But, I think it's somewhat refined our vision for how we're going forward. Does is that fair, Kenshin? Yeah. It's very fair. Yeah.
[00:15:49] McIntosh:
Yeah. And the quality of, followers and reactions we got is the most, how do we say, positive,
[00:15:56] McIntosh:
out of the that we don't love you previous listeners, by some way. Nice. No. It was it was very well received, and I think these are somewhat it's kind of our target market if that's what we're I guess, there's one way of saying it. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Our previous followers are on Nostr. Yeah. Our A lot of them are. Now some of them are not, and actually, I wanna address that without getting too far into this. We do have a Nostr cheat sheet at satoshis-plebs.com/nostr that walks you through how you can set up a master setup, essentially. So you a CoinOS setup, and then I think it's primal that we walk through how to use. Yes.
But it's a great way to get started. We are intentionally going to bring some more episodes. In fact, Kenshin, I already have our idea for our next episode, but we'll save that. That are specifically about areas of nostril because it's different that may cause confusion. And so we wanna talk about those and help people explore them. Mhmm. Okay?
[00:17:12] McIntosh:
Sounds good.
[00:17:15] McIntosh:
Alright. Well, let's go into today's topic. We are going to talk about Bitcoin's volatility because if you have not been paying attention, ladies and gentlemen, it has been volatile. It has been going if you bring up trading view, there's been kind of boxes. There's been a really big box between, like, the mid seventies. I think this is $76.08, which is probably about right, and a hundred 9. And but then there's been a tighter box even between the that lower level about 77,000 and roughly 90,000. And it just it just goes up and down. And every time it does it, like, if you're on Bitcoin Twitter, oh my gosh. It is like whiplash. Like, people are just like, we're all gonna die. Oh, hey. We're going to 200,000.
Oh, we're all it's like, good lord, people. Come on. Sometimes I feel like most of the people who are on Bitcoin Twitter, which is not true, actually, but I feel like they've only been in Bitcoin for, like, half a cycle, And they've just they're not used to this. It looks like it's These are normal gyrations. These are normal until you break 30% from the all time high. It's not anything. You can go back every cycle and see 20 to 30% quite regularly, sometimes even more. And then ultimately it goes up. So we wanted to talk about what is all this volatility about? What is causing it?
And specifically, what you should do about it?
[00:19:06] McIntosh:
Alright. So we will go through some points, some of the recent events mainly to give an example of how Bitcoin is affected from the news. Mhmm. We have a few points now. It's six, seven, eight. We we see how many we discuss, but it's a few of them. Some are positive, some are negative. And we can start with the most obvious one, I think. And you can walk us through the whole debate.
[00:19:34] McIntosh:
No? Okay. We'll get to that. The SDR. The strategic Bitcoin reserve, of course, was announced last week. And if you rewind, I think it was two episodes ago. I said that when this got approved, I said two things, and I did that very specifically. If the order was approved, setting up a strategic reserve, and if it outlined regular buys of Bitcoin, like, I don't know, a thousand Bitcoin a month. I have I'm I'm just randomly pulling numbers out. Because what Trump had been saying since the Bitcoin conference last July is we're gonna establish the Bitcoin reserve and we're going to, buy a million Bitcoin.
I think that was the verbiage essentially that he used.
[00:20:29] McIntosh:
He he I don't think he ever mentioned it. It was Loomis. But
[00:20:34] McIntosh:
she has certainly promoted it. I'd okay. You call me on it. Maybe you're right. I would like to look it up later. Let's not worry about it right now. But that has been the idea, the prevalent idea. And I said both of those need to happen in order for us to move on and maybe very rapidly. Obviously, that is not what happened. We announced the price. It's it's 80 well, now 83,000. Okay? We're well below all time highs. We're we're in this box that we were just talking about. What's going on? Did not orange man save us? Well, and I sorry. I shouldn't have said that. That's being disrespectful, but still, he gets called that a lot.
No. Trump did not save us. He did set up a strategic Bitcoin reserve, however, and I thought it was very interesting that for all of the angst and shouting prior to the announcement about the alt coins, he set up specifically a Bitcoin reserve and a separate alt coin reserve and then proceeded in the language of the executive order to only talk about buying Bitcoin. Now he said specifically it had to be done in a budget neutral manner and that can be done in a number of ways. I don't really think we have the time to go into that today. But what it does mean is there will not be a line item in the federal budget saying buy 200 Bitcoin a week or $2.50, whatever.
Right? So because of that, we tanked. It was the craziest thing. I'm like, literally the global GDP leader just announced a strategic Bitcoin reserve and you people are selling your Bitcoin. Do you not have a brain cell? I I don't know. But that is what happened. And it's because their expectations, in my opinion, were set so high about what could have happened that when it didn't reach that, everybody basically bailed. And then once you start selling, it kinda snowballs and it got ugly until we reach some good support down there at 80,000 roughly, a little lower, whatever.
[00:23:14] McIntosh:
It seems like this, this buying into the reserve was already priced in. It feels like the expectation was to buy Bitcoin Yes. In in a manner of, as you said, a few per month or whatever, and 1,000,000 in the span of four years. So that was expectation. And anything less feels like the market was disappointed.
[00:23:40] McIntosh:
And our government is so confused right now that we don't even know how many Bitcoin we actually have. It's true story. The US Marshals Service does not have an accurate count of the number of Bitcoin that they hold. I'm going to say this and I try and be neutral when talking about governments. Because of Trump's budget cuts, not budget cuts. He he you've probably heard of this, most of you at least, but he set up this Doge, this department of governmental efficiency or something. And, basically, their goal is to go in and figure out, is there waste? Is there fraud? Is there abuse? This kind of thing.
And they're finding a lot of stuff, frankly. But there's a lot of chaos in the last, well, six weeks or so now, however long it's been in our government because of that. So I understand as of today, for example, half of the, what is it? The education department, the Department of Education, DOE, I guess, has been cut because the the they feel like they're not needed. And you may agree with that. You may disagree with that, but that is what's going on. And so there's a lot of stuff that hasn't been sorted out. Part of it is this US Marshalls. They have no idea how much Bitcoin we have. Like, they're keeping track of it in a spreadsheet. It's it's insanity.
So that will get sorted out. We will have a thing. Senator Loomis has actually reintroduced her bill to do these regular buys of Bitcoin. We'll see what traction that gets. It already has more support than it did last time. But I do believe there are budget neutral, as he put it, ways of gaining Bitcoin. I'll give you one quick example and then we've got to move on. I do not want to spend the entire episode talking about the SBR. Over in Europe, prepare to laugh. Okay. We have so we have these strategic reserves. We have gold, obviously, in Fort Knox. One of the reserves that we have is cheese Up in Wisconsin, down in these limestone caves, we literally have a storage of cheese.
I have no idea why. I don't even like cheese. Okay? Now I don't wanna be biased, but I don't think that cheese should be our national reserve asset. Okay?
[00:26:29] McIntosh:
Is it, cheese that you can eat? Or Yes. No. It's it's
[00:26:34] McIntosh:
perfectly usable cheese, and it is sitting there waiting for I don't know what. Why don't we sell that and buy Bitcoin with it? Just a thought. I don't know. We need to move on. I never heard of that before. You haven't ridden. That's funny. That's because you're not on Twitter very much, Kenshin, and that's a good thing. But it is literally I mean, that is not some conspiracy theory. It's a true thing. And it's not France or Switzerland doing it. No. It's not France. Yes. It's I mean, it's crazy. This is what the French would do. Right? They love cheese fromage, I think in French. Am I right? Yes. You're right. Woo hoo. I got my French right. Alright.
Anyways yeah. So let's move on, please, because I've had enough on that one.
[00:27:30] McIntosh:
Right. Well, we have another point where, a few a couple of weeks ago, we had a big hack. The Bybit, exchange was hacked by the North Korean Lazarus Group, but not, related to Bitcoin, of course. It was a Ethereum hack, and it was the biggest crypto hack in history, which when I heard about it, I was like, interesting. We're in the middle of it. So that was fun.
[00:28:00] McIntosh:
Yes. It it was entirely socially engineered too from what I understand. Right. It was crazy.
[00:28:08] McIntosh:
Yeah. And some people say that could somehow happen to Bitcoin in similar circumstances. Yes. Maybe. But, but it was with Ethereum, and it took down, the whole crypto industry Right. In that sense because, of course, it's crypto related. And, that that was a short, let's say, event that affected Bitcoin as well negatively.
[00:28:36] McIntosh:
So my question is, are they now gonna mark those Ethereum on the, OFAC compliant list or whatever so that you can't use them? I mean, they they they got rid of them. Right? They sold them. I don't know.
[00:28:52] McIntosh:
They were trying to and they were trying to to how is it called? To move the funds into Bitcoin. Right? At some point. That's what they've done
[00:29:02] McIntosh:
from what I understand. They've they've they've sold it for for Bitcoin without getting too deep into it. Yeah. That's what they went for from soft money to hard money in the end. Right. Well, they're they're smart. I mean and the the social engineering, the thing that they pulled off is just it it really was I don't wanna call it clever, but it was mind boggling. I mean, it was nontrivial for sure. Yeah. Bybit is to blame, frankly, and I don't think, if they have insurance or whatever that they should get all their money back because, they are at fault.
Not that the Koreans the North Koreans were not responsible, but, I mean, they made some huge blunders. So Yeah. Alright. Mt. Gox is next. Now Mt. Gox, is an old old were you around with Mt. Gox, by the way?
[00:29:56] McIntosh:
Yeah. I knew the name, but I never made an account there.
[00:30:00] McIntosh:
You know so I had an account, but I never had I was not involved in the hack. So there was a hack of Mt. Gox, a huge amount of Bitcoin. It's gone on for years and years, and they're now settling it, giving people back their Bitcoin, essentially. And that was in 2013. So it's been twelve years. So earlier this week, they moved 1,100 11,000, excuse me, almost 12,000 Bitcoin. And that sparked market uncertainty and volatility, which it did. I mean, the the market dropped, and it wasn't because those moved. It's because it spooked people. So we dropped again.
[00:30:46] McIntosh:
And supply and demand also. I mean, the the market all of a sudden had more supply, naturally, of course, the price has to
[00:30:54] McIntosh:
Yeah. I would argue that 12,000 Bitcoin probably wouldn't affect the price that much. Maybe if they, like, just dumped it on the market all at once. But if they're distributing it out to people, not everyone is gonna sell at the same time. And that actually hasn't even happened yet from what I under they were moving it from basically cold storage to a wallet to prepare for distribution out to the affected people. Like if you and I had lost Bitcoin in that hack, we might be receiving some of that. By the way, Mount Gox, let me get you an address. I definitely lost a hundred Bitcoin in that hack. So I'm just kidding.
That would not have been dumped on the market. I some amount, but not like what we saw. I mean, it's it's just a roller coaster. It's just, you know but people get spooked and they sell because they don't understand what they're holding, I believe. But that's either here nor there.
[00:31:59] McIntosh:
I agree. And some of it, they say they sold another 12,000 on March 6 Mhmm. Of of which was paid to creditor for debts to BitGo. So they had some some moved, earlier last week and another 12,000 now, and they're think they're afraid that it's gonna be even more coming up. But still, why yeah. I don't understand either. Why should the price drop?
[00:32:29] McIntosh:
But, yeah, it is really A few hundred, maybe a thousand, but, yeah, we see these significant drops and then it just kind of accelerates. And I wanna mention a factor that's not actually on our list that I just thought of. We find in these markets that the traders will leverage themselves. Okay? So maybe they believe that the price of Bitcoin, it's either going up or going down. Right? So they're betting one way or the other. And then they leverage. They say, I'm gonna put on 10 x leverage. So for every Bitcoin I put in, it acts like 10 Bitcoin. And so they can theoretically make more money. The reality is, and they can make more money. But if the market turns the wrong way, they get liquidated.
When when you see online of this account or whatever got liquidated, this is what they're talking about. They lose that initial Bitcoin, either all of it or part of it. And once you get that cascade going, it can accelerate the drop. Does that make sense? So you may have a lot of traders who when they reach a certain level, the price that they get liquidated, and then it just drops another couple thousand just because of all that liquidation, because their money gets it gets removed. So I I would add that to this list, along with these. So now I just inserted an extra point. So and typically, it can go both ways. You can if the shorts get liquidated, if the people who think Bitcoin's going down, it will go up really quickly. If the longs get liquidated, the opposite, if they think that Bitcoin's going up and it starts going down and they get liquidated, it'll accelerate that downward movement. So it magnifies the movement one way or the other, which in part brings about this volatility that we're talking about.
[00:34:44] McIntosh:
There is an interesting, bot on Nostr. It's called the the wrecked bot. Yes. And it tells you all the liquidations. Some of them are long, others are short, but you see they're all synchronized. It is r
[00:35:01] McIntosh:
e k t. Correct? R e k t? Yes. Yeah. You can if you're on Nostra, I think if you search for that wrecked r e k t bot, you'll find it. It's an interesting little bot. You might wanna follow it if you're into this kind of thing. I do not trade, by the way. I as I've said over and over at this point, I don't it's not what I do. And I don't recommend that you do it, certainly. But it is fun to watch this train wreck. It's like we humans, we'd love to see we I don't know. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Exactly. It's entertainment. So It's entertainment. So what's the next one, Kenshin?
[00:35:38] McIntosh:
The next one, I mean, is general, macroeconomic factors. Inflation reports come up and potential interest rate changes are affecting the sentiment of the market. I personally look at inflation reports and interest rates in Sweden, and that that's also affects me how I look around at the, let's say, the economy and what I should do next. So that for sure affects people. And right now, it's the inflation is a bit higher, it seems, than Yes. Expected. So instead of going lower, as it it was doing last year, it starts to get back up again. And that spooks a bit some people as well with, what how to invest. And and I think people are waiting on the side if they have some money. Maybe they're waiting to see what happens because
[00:36:39] McIntosh:
Who who has money? Exactly. I'm sorry. What? I'm just kidding. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So I interrupted your train of thought. I apologize. No. But Let's cut that out.
[00:36:51] McIntosh:
No. It's okay. No. But I think the the people are just wait and see type of mentality in that sense.
[00:37:00] McIntosh:
Right. Yeah. I used to talk about macroeconomics a lot. It is something I I don't wanna sound this kinda sounds weird, but I enjoy it. But, yeah. I I don't do it as much anymore. I I don't think the majority of the listeners actually care, but it does definitely affect the market. If if interest rates are up, that is a negative. If interest rates get cut, that's a positive. So just these basic macroeconomic factors will definitely influence the overall market, and I would like to take this time to even though Bitcoin doesn't follow the stock market, like, in terms of percent, it does in general follow the stock market.
At some point, I believe it will break away. But for now, if the stock market's going down in general, Bitcoin's going down. Right now, The US stock market is a mess. And we see that reflected in Bitcoin. And actually, I would argue that Bitcoin has held up very well compared to a lot of the stock market in general. We can bounce out of a 30% drawdown in a week. Let's see the stock market do that. So
[00:38:24] McIntosh:
Some some big stocks were down more than 10% like Tesla and VTech. Tesla is down.
[00:38:30] McIntosh:
There are no. Who is it? I think it is Tesla. They're down 50% from their all time high. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah. And there's other factors directly in Tesla, and I we're not that's political. We're not talking about that right now. But yeah. I mean, this there's a lot of stuff going on in the stock market. So I actually would say that Bitcoin's holding up really well. Mhmm. Okay. Institutional adoption. Sweet. I just saw today that Rumble, which is like a video content platform, whatever. They have started investing in Bitcoin. They bought a hundred and 88 Bitcoin, however many millions of dollars that is.
That is just yet another example of institutional adoption. We see companies who are turning into Bitcoin holding companies. Strategy used to be MicroStrategy is like the prime example of that. Right? They are prepared. Oh, my gosh. Did you see this? It it's probably actually ongoing right now. They probably already started another, like, $2,000,000,000 buy of Bitcoin. Because they issued stock or what? I don't under this is the part I don't know. So I'm gonna wave. I'm literally gonna wave my hands here. Yes. They issued stock and they got $2,000,000,000 and now they're buying Bitcoin. There's other companies who are following along with that.
There are companies who are just buying Bitcoin with their cash reserves, and that will accelerate. And I think at some point, we're going to reach a tipping point where if the company is not buying Bitcoin, they are making a huge mistake and the market will reflect that. If they're a public company, they will they will that will price into their stock price.
[00:40:27] McIntosh:
Right. And then we have general market sentiment shifts. So there is a term called the fear and greed index. Right. So that that goes from zero to a hundred, I believe. I think so. And right now, that has turned from, greed
[00:40:50] McIntosh:
into fear in the past few weeks? It's like 18, I think, the last time I saw it, which is really low. And I don't it is a metric, and I don't know how they come up with it. But at the same time, because it's so well known, it brings people go, oh, we're this is the market, so things are bad. So I'm gonna sell my Bitcoin, which is the exact opposite of what they really should be doing. But I do see that happening.
[00:41:22] McIntosh:
Yeah. So people are synchronizing, essentially. They all synchronize with it. And right now, everybody's synchronizing on the negative side because everybody thinks that the the rest of the world is afraid and they should sell. So they just go with the flow and they do sell eventually. It's a self fulfilling prophecy in a sense. Mhmm. Yes.
[00:41:48] McIntosh:
And that kind of wraps up our list. I do wanna add I'm not adding a new item, but I wanna add some context. A couple of weeks ago, it's been a bit, but I said that, you know, these market news we see Bitcoin sell. I was talking about it's not really like, there's not a direct relationship, and I kind of maybe I'd I'm not sure I said that correctly. I'm gonna try again. So even though Bitcoin is affected, for example, by rates, if if the interest rate goes up and the stock market goes down because of that, in general, we will see Bitcoin go down. It's very difficult though. Well, I would argue in the long term, this has no effect.
I think there are two things that will affect Bitcoin in the long term. One of them, unsurprisingly, is 21,000,000 Bitcoin. There will never be more than that. Right now, we've mined 19,500,000.0 or so of those. I don't know exactly. But That's more. A large part of the market of of the Bitcoin that has ever will ever be mined has been mined. As we continue down that road, actually, the new Bitcoin that gets mined will have less and less effect on that current on that cap of 21,000,000. Now that being said, the second part of this is usage. It's market penetration, so to speak.
As the price of Bitcoin creeps up, we gave that new metric for gold earlier. I would argue that when we're 10 x from now and gold is we're at the same level or better than gold is, that means that a lot more people are using Bitcoin. That means that a lot more companies are have adopted Bitcoin. That means more nation states have adopted Bitcoin. That is what drives the price of Bitcoin up. These other things are very, very temporary. Ultimately, Bitcoin is the answer to this stuff. And in the end, it will win out. It is sound money. These US dollars that we talk about or Swedish kroners.
[00:44:05] McIntosh:
Yes. Correct.
[00:44:07] McIntosh:
Yay. I'm learning Swedish, Or whatever the EU oh, well, that's in our the, the euro. Right? Whatever we're talking about, it's based it's fiat based. There's nothing backing it except promises and violence. And ultimately that fails. History proves that. So I don't really care what the price of Bitcoin is today other than the it does change the amount of Bitcoin that I can buy in my weekly DCA. Anything else is almost irrelevant. I mean, we do follow it and it's of interest and all that. But look, Kenshin, let me give you an example. In ten years, are we gonna look back and say, man, Trump did not start buying Bitcoin when he made that executive order to do the strategic Bitcoin reserve, and that's why Bitcoin is only, ten years from now, $5,000,000.
No. We're not. What about Bybit? Who who cares?
[00:45:22] McIntosh:
No. I mean, we didn't need any government until now.
[00:45:26] McIntosh:
Right. So even though the price went down temporarily, this stuff is not really going to affect it in the long term. And it's just like I was talking about with the liquidations. When people get spooked, oh my gosh, Trump didn't start buying all the Bitcoin in the world immediately. Sell than other people that were a bunch of sheep, you know, following along behind each other. Oh, they're selling, so I'm selling. And we'll buy back down at the bottom. And then that doesn't work out. And then you end up with less Bitcoin and the Bitcoin price ends up higher. And if you do that enough, hopefully you will learn and stop doing it.
And what do we say here on Ken, Kenshin? It's just do your DCA every week. Just buy your Bitcoin. Do it with strike if you have it available and you're comfortable with that. However you do that, just do it. And don't worry about these things even though, let's be honest, we all keep track of it. And by the way,
[00:46:32] McIntosh:
people also, sync on the way up too. Right? So the so called FOMO, that's even stronger on the way up. Oh, no. We're we missed the opportunity. Right. Then you look back and you see think, oh, I could have bought that 80 k.
[00:46:48] McIntosh:
Right. You know what my miners do? They mine regardless of the price of Bitcoin.
[00:46:56] McIntosh:
You know what my mine do? They make heat. Yes. They just make heat. Big announcement, everybody.
[00:47:04] McIntosh:
Kenshin did not mine a block this week because he is still here. Yep. Exactly. Oh, man.
[00:47:13] McIntosh:
Yes.
[00:47:16] McIntosh:
Oh, we did mine a block seven hours ago, by the way, on ocean. Sorry. Congratulations.
[00:47:22] McIntosh:
I'm thinking, actually, maybe I should turn one of my miners back to ocean because I'm not helping the network or anyone else for that matter except hitting my roof.
[00:47:34] McIntosh:
Hey. I don't wanna, like, build your hopes up, but I saw that another BitX found a solo Bitcoin. No. You're kidding. I'm not kidding. A Bethex. A Bitex.
[00:47:47] McIntosh:
I have 10 times the speed of a Bethex.
[00:47:50] McIntosh:
Well, then you're 10 times as likely. I I don't know, man. I don't know what to tell you to do. I look. They got cheap power up in Finland. They keep showing me this ad, 6¢ a kilowatt, like, all in. Like, I'm and they're using it for residential heating. It's incredible. It's we've talked about that before, but, man, that just blows me. It knocks my socks off. I don't know. Whatever. That's awesome.
[00:48:21] McIntosh:
Okay. I have a question Okay. For the audience. Yes. We need to move on. That's our question. So we talked about volatility, about feelings. Right? How do you feel, the audience, with Bitcoin's volatility? Are you feeling anxious, excited, or are you just dizzying and you don't care? How do you navigate this, this news cycles? I would like to know. That's a great question. Do you want to answer it, Macintosh, for yourself? Yeah.
[00:49:02] McIntosh:
Excited, anxious, or maintaining a zen like calm. There's nothing zen about me. I'm just afraid there's not. That's just not the way I maybe there should be. I am not excited and I'm not anxious, but I am stacking sets. And I have learned through painful experience that if I let myself get excited or anxious, I lose Bitcoin.
[00:49:30] McIntosh:
Alright.
[00:49:31] McIntosh:
And so I just that's really in large part why I so strongly encourage DCA. Have it and I should specify automatic. My miners are automatic. As long as they're online, when there's a block found, I get reward for it. If I'm use which I do, I do a weekly DCA with strike. On strike, it is set up to automatically pull the money out of the account on Saturday and then on or whatever. It doesn't matter. I think it's early Sunday morning, but my strike, buy is made. It's completely automatic. I don't think about it, and then I don't stress about it. And I'm not you're not trying to hide something, but don't put yourself into the chain.
Oh, I've got to remember to DCA. And then on the week that it drops like a rock, and you're feeling that little bit of anxiety down in your stomach, maybe you don't make that buy. And that's when you should be.
[00:50:43] McIntosh:
Mhmm. I completely agree. I actually do the same. I do DCA with strike, but I do daily. It's very small amounts daily. Right. I top it up manually because I don't know if it can take it from my account automatically. But in any case, I do it once a month, so it doesn't really matter. Right. And it it does this year's month, daily for that matter. And it's for free and which is another big top tip.
[00:51:12] McIntosh:
Yes. That's a few percent that you end up saving every week. And I every once in a while, I go in there and I look at the stacks and the buys and the price, the value. Right now, just to be blunt, I'm down because the price is down. But that's okay because the price won't go up. As sure as the sun comes up, and it may not be tomorrow morning, but it will. That's what I'm betting on. That's not financial advice. I mean, you guys know I have to say that, but I'm not somebody who's out here just saying things. This is what I'm doing, and I tell y'all exactly what I'm doing.
[00:51:55] McIntosh:
Mhmm. So And, I I agree with the feeling aspect. I am also I'm a bit excited in a sense. It it's fun to see. It's a bit entertainment for me because I'm not involved, in the trading aspect of it, so I don't care who gets liquidated. But, I agree with the sentiment. I I tried trading, ten years ago with forex and other stuff, and I couldn't handle the mental, anxiousness of of it. So so I don't like trading, and I like DCA. And that's it. I have stuck what I could stack so far, and the rest is entertainment.
[00:52:39] McIntosh:
Okay. Very cool. So that's our weekly DCA promotion. That's what you should be doing. Let's talk about our supporters. We've got a couple. We we you wanna do you wanna do send it, Mike? Do you have that the note Yeah.
[00:52:55] Unknown:
I I just have the, sent it Mike. He boosted us, like usually,
[00:53:01] McIntosh:
in 1,069
[00:53:02] McIntosh:
sets. Okay. He did have a message and I should be able to find it here.
[00:53:08] McIntosh:
Okay. Haddon Fountain?
[00:53:10] McIntosh:
Yeah. No. I'll have to bring it back up. Hang on. I did have it. Something happened. It's alright. Telegram. I have a message. It was a good message. That's why I remember it.
[00:53:22] McIntosh:
Oh, oh, I'm sorry. I have it. I have it in front of me. So send in Mike. We got the message and a boost from him. +1 sets. And the message on fountain, I see here, another good one, he says. Mhmm. Thank you. Looking forward to the possibility of Zap.stream, getting going. Keep recommending episode number one ninety five. It really is a great guide to get started on Nostr. Looking forward to the next 200 episodes. Well, thank you very much, Mike.
[00:53:54] McIntosh:
Yep. I appreciate that. And we also had user five nine one eight nine zero six eight. His username's, I guess, Go, g o e. Yes. And boosted a hundred sats and said, noise.
[00:54:10] McIntosh:
Noise.
[00:54:12] McIntosh:
And so we had a total of 1,987 sats this week, including the streaming that was happening. We appreciate that, of course. So pretty cool. Alright. Streaming this week. Yeah? Yeah. We did. And so we also had a couple of news items. Actually, in general, it was pretty slow both in, software and news. Okay. So our first bit of news item, we've we've really already covered. It was the crypto summit, the executive order that came out of that. We've got clear delineation between Bitcoin and everything else, which there should be. There actually is the opportunity to ultimately sell everything else, which I think they should, frankly, immediately and buy Bitcoin.
That would be another budget neutral way of adding to the Bitcoin stack. So I'm not gonna elaborate on that any further. I do want you to take the next one since it involves good old Europe, and then we'll talk about that for a minute.
[00:55:13] McIntosh:
Yeah. So the ECB, the European Central Bank targets in October, targets, I'm sorry, October this year to finish the digital euro preparation phase. So they've been out there and, campaigning for, bringing stakeholders, to to their side to finalize the digital euro. There are some lawmakers, it says, that have expressed doubts. So they are not really everybody. It's they're not on board, and that's a good thing. Mhmm. So they're hesitant to trust ACB with with running a digital euro following an outage, it says here, that occurred with the Target two payment system last month where it could not settle transactions for a day.
So they are having growing pains with their prototyping and things like that. So but I would say the the most fun part of this whole thing was the photos that came out of that announcement. It was Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank. She was dressed with a orange suit, how do you say?
[00:56:29] McIntosh:
I saw no. Yeah. It's perfect. No. It was. It was it looked just like a Bitcoin color. It was amazing. I'm like, is she doing it on purpose? Or I doubt it.
[00:56:40] McIntosh:
I doubt it. I doubt it too, but it it it looks so funny. I mean, talking about, digital, euro and CBDC with an orange suit. It was very funny.
[00:56:56] McIntosh:
I I express a great deal of concern about The United States budget policy and the fact that there's very little thought given to even being deficit neutral much less paying down our debt. And I think that has long term implications for our country. But one thing I will say with Trump, I am very happy. He signed an executive order, I think, saying that we would not have a central bank digital currency. And I am so glad because the government has no business. It's not that it's a digital currency, by the way, just to be clear. It's any centralized digital currency like what the EU is talking about here can be used to track everything that you do, everything that you buy, every just every little detail of your life, and the government has no business being in that.
So I am super happy at least with that because I think if Biden had remained in office or Kamala Harris had come into office essentially, really. I I don't think that'd be true. I think we'd be looking at a CBDC here in The United States. And, unfortunately, there are places around the world where these are proceedings such as the EU. So with whatever ability that you have, I would press back against these if these were in your country because there's nothing good that's gonna come out of this. Not it will give them to the ability to instantly print new money, by the way.
Oh, we need a a stimulus because the economy is tanking. Oh, here's some more money. Thousand dollars into your account or a thousand euros or whatever into your account instantly. Well, where'd that money come from? I don't know. Crazy stuff. So that needs to be watched. If you're in Europe, you need to and part of the EU, I guess I should say, then that's definitely something you need to be pushing back on in whatever the appropriate manner is.
[00:59:09] McIntosh:
Right. And, yeah, I mean, they are not really, thankfully saying that something will happen this year. It's just the preparation phase.
[00:59:19] McIntosh:
And I am pretty sure it's not gonna happen anytime soon. Well, this might be a case of, thank god, for bureaucracy. I don't I don't know. We'll see. But alright. And that was actually it for any real news this week, but let's move on to our software updates. There were a couple of things. Go ahead and take Phoenix since that's a non US item.
[00:59:43] McIntosh:
Yeah. So Phoenix has released the version 2.5, with major improvements in QR code scanning on Android and a 78% reduction in their APK size, so their file size and the space it takes on the phone, and the display of pending on chain fonts on the home screen in the iOS app. So a lot of improvements there. This version also removes embedded Tor library from the app, meaning that users now have to install a third party Tor proxy VPN app such as Orbot. And, actually, I was doing that myself too. Before, it was more reliable than using the built in,
[01:00:29] McIntosh:
Tor library. And that's exactly what they're talking about here. It just makes it more stable. They were not able to keep up with it or for whatever reason, it doesn't even matter. So Yeah. If you wanna use Tor, you do it separately.
[01:00:42] McIntosh:
So that's a very good upgrade to Phoenix Wallet. And I really like the the wallet, but I left it since when they left US because I was thinking maybe they will close down, but they didn't close it down. Right. So I would say that was a bit of fear.
[01:00:57] McIntosh:
I am wondering if they're gonna come back. Actually, I suspect that they will fairly soon. I would definitely say within the next year. I would hope sooner than that. They're just missing out otherwise, because it's very clear that this administration is very pro crypto, so roll with it. Our final updates, in terms of software was Corelightning. A brand new version came out in the last day or so. I don't know if this is what's going to be installed when I set up, the Core Lightning, by the way. I'm very curious. But if not now, certainly soon, I I believe, with the package repo that I'm using.
And it's version 25 o two. And so they I don't wanna go through all this. There's quite a bit, but there was some channel, backup improvements certainly, which is very important. You open up channels between nodes. That's how the money, the Satoshis get passed back and forth, essentially. And being able to back those up in a secure manner is is super important. So glad to see they're they're working on that. And they've got this new XPay plug in, which I am not familiar with, but it just came out in the last version of of core lightning. So this is basically a bug fix on that.
Mhmm. And, yeah. So there was a sprinkling of other things in there as well, but those are kind of some of the highlights, the biggest, most important thing. If you're using it, it's probably well worth upgrading to. Right. And you're adding something on the fly.
[01:02:39] McIntosh:
Yes. I would add, an important, release from AlbiHub. Okay. They updated recently to version 1.14 something, and that, introduced a bug, and a lot of channels closed down. My my I had up updated also, and I had to restart my whole node because my wallet kept locking up. And then they released another version, 1.15, that says now that they fixed the bug. But I see in that release on Oster a lot of reports of, channels with Megalith. What what was the name? Megalith. Anyway, it's a channel, service and a lot of closed channels there too. So I would say don't update to 1.14 or 1.15 for now.
[01:03:35] McIntosh:
Well, that's unfortunate. Yeah. Yeah. I when I ran a lightning node previously, it was on an Umbrel type setup. I think it was actually Umbrel, but regardless, it was one of these that I ran on my little local network. And I never had stability from this wind up shutting it down. I I had channels closed. It wasn't Alby. I'm not saying it's Alby's fault. I'm just saying at least with my setup with the network, I've given up on trying to set up things here locally that are Internet accessible because my Internet provider does a really well, they block a lot of stuff, and it just creates a lot of issues. So, just a reminder, no podcast next week. Please don't forget, and please don't forget about us.
Please promote it. I wanna give a big shout out to miss Hellbreaker. She gave one of our questions last week, but she then took the time to clip it and put it up on fountain. And, miss Hellbreaker, I am going to boost you 500 sats. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do that. It probably will come through Noster, not through fountain. I'm having a lot of problem with my fountain set up right now. But that type of activity really helps us. Telling your friends, hey. I like this podcast. They're fresh, insightful, whatever whatever your don't use my words. Use your words, obviously.
But, you know, let other people know that's a huge thing. I would love to see these numbers continue to grow because frankly, ultimately, this is gonna get Kenshin and I to a place where we can put more money into this podcast. That's how you can help us make that happen. Let other people know about it. Okay?
[01:05:33] McIntosh:
Mhmm. Yes. And as always, as you say, this is a value for value podcast, and we appreciate all the support. Now not only on Fountain, but also on NoSir. We have, we post weekly now the episodes, and we see a lot of support, and we appreciate it. Yes. And as well, like Mike said, if you can share some episodes like the one ninety five that is about Nostr, how to get there, that seems to be a good way as well to to get the word-of-mouth, promotion going. Join us on Oster. Join us on Fountain or other value for value podcasts, two point o apps. There are a list of apps on podcastapps.com where you can find Android or iOS apps or even on the web.
There is the podcasting index, actually. You can play our podcast live on the on the web. Not live, but on the web. And you can also find our back catalog on satoshis.plebs.com/episodes. That's all for this week.
[01:06:48] McIntosh:
Hey, Kinshin. This week, I just wanted to mention we did change our music. We're doing an Ainsley Costello song. I hope I said that right, Ainsley. It's much more of a pop song, and got the full song at the end of the show. I got a chance to see her actually at the conference last July at the value for value music event that was going on live. I'm not a big music person anymore, but, live music, certainly. But to be honest, she's got a good stage presence. She's I don't know. She's just one of these and she's got a good voice, so I hope you enjoy this. It's called daydreaming.
[01:07:28] McIntosh:
Mhmm. Very appropriate. Sounds good. Goodbye for me. Have a nice week and see you in two weeks. Alright. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.
[01:07:46] Unknown:
Say dreamer. Keep that head of yours up there in the clouds. Because once you see what's going on down there, you won't have to calm them down. Hey, dreamer. Don't you go to bed. The dreams are better before you lay down your own head. Daydreamers.
Introduction
Bitcoin Price and Market Metrics
Personal Updates and Tech Experiments
Bitcoin's Volatility and Market Reactions
Macroeconomic Factors and Bitcoin
Institutional Adoption and Market Sentiment
Long-term Bitcoin Outlook
Listener Support
News and Software Updates
