This week McIntosh breaks down the "epoch" and how that contributes to the cycles of Bitcoin. Also we take a look at how tariffs will affect Bitcoin mining with a dash of geopolitical talk.
Stick around to the very end for a new v4v track, “Too Young For Growing Up” by Matt Johner!
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
April 2nd, 2025: 82,641 USD | 75,706 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
890,632
News and Notes
Trump Tariffs
More on Tariffs
Software Updates
Braiins Open Sources Control Board
Zeus v0.10.1
Bisq v2.1.7
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-202
Music Credits
Matt Johner
Too Young For Growing Up
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 April, and this is episode 203 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm McIntosh, and today's episode is A Quarter of the Way cone.
[00:00:19] Unknown:
My old man's old man sat down and got to talking. He said this whole life won't roll the way you want it. Lots of curve balls, but go out swinging. Use your head, but don't overthink it. So listen when I say
[00:00:47] McIntosh:
For regular listeners of our show, you will realize that Kenshin did not chime in and say that he was Kenshin or give the name of the episode. We had a scheduling conflict essentially this weekend due in part, in large part to me, and we just could not record together this week, unfortunately. Unfortunately. Both of us actually have really busy schedules, and there's essentially kind of, one window of time that we can record in. And it just did not work out this week. I will be talking in a few minutes about what I'm I'm doing right now that's keeping keeping that from happening. So I do apologize.
I hope you've enjoyed that music, by the way. That was Matt Johner Joiner? I'm sorry, Matt. I apologize. But either way, he is from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And apparently, according to Facebook, he is down in Sydney right now. I wonder what he's doing now down there. Anyways, regardless, I thought that was a great song. He's a little more along the country kind of vibe, almost a folk folk music. Definitely country. But, anyways, I really enjoyed that song and thought we would bring that to you. It's called Too Young for Growing Up. The rest of it, the full song will be at the end of the episode as always, so you can enjoy that. The tea is hot tonight, and I got it cranked right up. As we record April 2025, our Bitcoin price is $82,641.
Kind of had a interesting day. It skated up to, like, 87,000 and then dumped at the end of the day. We're looking at €75,706. Our block height as we record is 890,632. We're looking at a difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days. It's at least going to be three to four points positive. Positive. So right now, we're at 3.99%. Difficulty adjustment, meaning it will be that much more difficult after April to mine those blocks. Last month or last, two weeks ago, our adjustment was 1.43%. So we've had a couple of upward adjustments.
Now we've started looking at a couple of other items here as well. Last April, we had a price of $65,443. Our market cap information is unchanged. I've got a figure of 1,700,000,000,000.0 USD. Gold market cap, 21,100,000,000,000.0. And what that means is that it's right at 8.1% Bitcoin versus Gold market cap. Our mempool fees, on the other hand, are actually very low, crazy low, one sat per v byte for all types of transactions. There's only six megabytes of unprocessed transactions, about 3,600 transactions in the mempool. Alright?
So things are, not heavily used right now for whatever reason, and I'm not gonna speculate. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. If it's not full up, I think eventually it will be. I would not worry about that one bit. What's going on with Macintosh? I, you know, I haven't talked about this in a while, but this shed project that I've been working on is actually still ongoing. It will be done very soon. And I do think I'm actually gonna go ahead and release a picture when we get done. I'm going to wait until we get completely done. I'll have to scrub the location data from it, and whatnot, the metadata from the pictures so that, you know, you can't figure out things from it.
But, I feel like I've invested so much time and effort into this. I gotta kinda show you guys what I'm doing. But, we were working on that today, and I had some people helping. I've got a couple of guys that are helping finish up here in the next few days, and that's actually why I couldn't make our regular recording time today. So we will have that done very soon, though. And then my miners did get to the new facility. They should be hooked up in the next few days and mining away. So we've kinda got all of that taken care of. So what are we talking about, Macintosh? A quarter of the way done. What does that even mean? It's crazy, crazy title.
Well, one of the things that's going on right now, we have these epochs. We have these periods of time, roughly four years, where we go, the block rewards are a fixed amount. You have in a mining block, you have a a a block reward, and then you have a transaction fee. Both of those together make up the complete kind of block that gets mined and paid to the miner who finds it or to the mining pool. If you remember, it was last April that we had the Bitcoin halving where we went from 6.25 down to 3.125. So it cut in half, and our next reward having will be in roughly three years, and we'll go from 3.125 down to whatever 1.5 plus half of point one two five is. I'm not gonna do that math right now. I'll probably get it wrong.
Not a whole lot. And we are roughly a quarter of the way there. I think we're actually about 24%, twenty four and a half, something like that of the way to that block, which will trigger the next block reward to the halving to kick off, whatever you wanna call it. Why is this why is this important? For one thing, it's important to keep in mind that we've got a long time to go until the next half. The four year cycle as we call it, the market cycle of Bitcoin, at least historically, means that roughly half the way through the, epoch, we will be kind of at our high.
I am estimating that to be at the end of this year, which would not be halfway. But I am thinking fourth quarter, we would be about eighteen, twenty months in at that point. And we will see a gradual decline until we hit the halvening. And then at some point post halvening, things will pick back up. This is the cycle that we've seen since 02/2009. The first transaction was done in 2009. So, that is something that's very important to keep in mind with all of this. You're going to hear a lot of hype over the next few weeks, the next few months. You're going to hear a lot of if things continue as they are, you're going to hear a lot of people who are saying, you know, we've already reached the top. We're not going any higher this cycle.
It's all over. We, in my opinion, still have quite a ways to go. We are getting a lot of kind of interference right now from the market. And I know I've told y'all the market doesn't really determine the price. In the long term, it certainly doesn't. In the short term, it certainly can. And there has been, frankly, an unprecedented and there has been an unprecedented amount of market noise going on. Just today, right before recording, a few hours ago, Trump comes out and he announces all of these tariffs. They call us them reciprocal tariffs. This is the type of thing that causes market uncertainty.
In fact, I did wanna springboard into that for just a minute. I think tariffs have got a lot of people kind of freaked out. Tariffs are simply one nation saying to another nation, if you send your product to our nation, we're going to charge you a 25% or 50% or 10% or whatever fee in order to bring that product into our country. That's a tariff. Now we can argue a long time probably about the effects of that tariff. Does it increase prices on product that is brought into this country from a country that's got a tariff leveled against it. Absolutely. If, for example, a Chinese car had a tariff of 50% on it, that would mean that the Chinese car, to the average consumer, when they get imported into the country is going to cost probably 50% more. It's it's it's basically unavoidable.
Now tariffs have a long history. They were actually used a lot by The United States in the eighteen hundreds, I want to say, in the late eighteen hundreds. And in fact, some people would argue that that was a time of great prosperity for America. Now I am not, please note, saying that because now we're doing tariffs that suddenly we're going to have this economic boom. One of the things that came out today, which I had heard this information previously, but I think it got a lot of attention today, is that a lot of other countries already have tariffs on The United States. I'm going to talk to CHAT GPT for just a minute.
As an example, I had heard this and appear appears to be accurate. I talked to I asked ChatGPT. India, if you import a car from The United States, a luxury car into India, so say a Cadillac, I'm sure that would be classified as a luxury car. There is a 10% tariff. I have no idea why they do that. It doesn't I I'm not going to I'm not gonna put thought into why they do that. But Trump came out today and set up a bunch of tariffs on a bunch of countries calling these reciprocal tariffs. The idea is, oh, India, overall, you charge a 70% tariff on American products. And I'm just giving this as an example. I do not know the exact figure.
And so in return, we're going to charge a tariff on you. Now interestingly, there were a lot of countries that had smaller tariffs, like say 10% on American product. Those countries, it was basically matched. So if you had a 10% tariff, our tariff to you would be 10%. They kind of even out. On the other hand, if you had one that was really high like this where maybe it was a hundred plus percent, we might only do 50%. So it actually he called it, we're being nice. Now I I don't know, about that, but that's the decision that they've made. Now, why is he attempting to do this? Now, again, whether you agree with tariffs or not, he has talked about this enough. He is trying to onshore to bring back some manufacturing to The United States. In my lifetime, ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the effects of the globalization, what we would call globalization, of The United States economy.
We have shifted so much of our manufacturing to other countries that be for different reasons, but just setting that aside for right now, typically for cost, that a lot, and I mean a substantial amount of the manufacturing jobs that we used to have here in The United States have been moved overseas. The United States used to be a manufacturing powerhouse. That's no longer true. And consequently, I believe The United States virtually does not have a middle class. You have a poor class, essentially. You have people who are struggling, who can't afford to buy a home, and maybe they're making $75,000 a year, which sounds like a lot of money, but they still can't afford to buy a house. I don't actually consider that middle class. A middle class person is someone who can afford a home, who can typically provide a better life for their kids, putting them in college, launching them out, you know, to to do better.
A lot of families in The United States do not have that opportunity. There are very few manufacturers of cars and like motorcycles, for example, here in The United States. I happen to know that Harley is still up in Milwaukee, Harley Davidson, at least as of a few years ago. I don't know. It's probably been ten years or so. Well, maybe not quite that long. About seven years ago, I had a client in Milwaukee, and I used to travel up there fairly regularly. The Harley Davidson plant was right there off the interstate. They went in there. They assembled Harleys on the assembly line or whatever it was that they did. And in return, they got paid for that, and they were able to have that lifestyle.
Trump is trying to bring some of that manufacturing back to The United States. He's trying to make it, essentially, The United States more competitive in terms of manufacturing at least for products that we would use here. Oh, you wanna buy the American car. Well, you're not gonna get tariffed like the one that you would if you were buying from China or from Germany or from the EU in general or the EU has, like, a 20% tax, a VAT tax. Well, now they've got a tariff. I think people think that Trump is bullying when he does this. At least the way he's trying to come across this time.
And from the data that I look at, he's just trying to make it equal. So, I think that's a huge change, frankly. To steer this back towards the Bitcoin conversation, this tariff talk over the last few man, it's been going on for a bit now. I would say more than a few weeks, probably four to well, since inauguration, essentially. So January 20, that has really spooked the market, and the market has been going up and down and up and down. And, oh, we hear some good news. It runs up. We hear some bad news. It crashes down. I would assume that the market in general decided that this whole plan that he unveiled today, maybe not the best. I don't know what the stock market futures are. The meeting was scheduled for 04:00, which is eastern time, which was not too long before the markets closed. I think they close at 04:30.
I may be mistaken on that. But regardless, initially, Bitcoin had gone up quite a bit, but then now it's it's crashed. But you as the the humble Bitcoiner, as as the pleb, as we would say, as much as you can, ignore that. I don't care where you live. If it's in The United States, that's terrific. If it's in The EU, that's terrific. If it's in South America or Africa, it does not matter. Eventually, this stuff will go away. I don't mean that tariffs are gonna go away or any of that. Bitcoin is going to move on. These things will not affect it.
And as we always say, you should view this as an opportunity simply to stack some cheap sats. Do your DCA. By the way, I just and I'm not trying to pick on India, but I think this is actually this is the kind of normal thing that we're talking about. I'm gonna read this straight from ChatGPT so you know that I'm not just making this up. Yes. India imports high tariffs on imported cars, including those from The United States. Here's a breakdown. Completely built units, fully assembled cars. If the cost insurance and freight value is over $40,000 or the energy engine capacity is over 3,000 cc's petrol or 2,500 cc's diesel, which I don't think that's very big.
A % import duty. I would not actually consider that luxury car. $40,000 car these days is not necessarily a luxury car. For other, CBUs, so ones that are smaller than that and cheaper than that, completely built units, a 60% import duty. What they call a completely knocked down kit, CKD. In other words, it's assembled in India from imported parts. Duties range from 15 to 30% depending on the level of localization and assembly. And I will read the rest of this. US carmakers like Tesla and Ford have pushed for lower import duties. Of course, Tesla, Elon Musk, he wants his cars in India. It's a huge market. It's a billion people roughly.
And, you know, I would assume that any of his Teslas are going to be $40,000 or more. I may be mistaken about that, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. So you're looking at basically a % tariff. India argues that high tariffs support domestic manufacturing, especially under its Make in India initiative. Yes. It would actually support domestic manufacturing, of course, because people can't afford to buy the Tesla or the Ford. So the politicians are getting what they want. In theory, at least they're getting more domestic manufacturing. My question is, are the people of India getting one of what they want? Do they want Teslas? Do they want Ford Chevys who whatever.
I'm sure some of them do. The way Trump is approaching this is simply to say, well, okay. You've got a %. And probably for India, the rate is around 50%. India, twenty six % tariff. Alright? The highest one is actually Laos, Laos, Laos, 48%. So, Laos must have really high tariffs. I don't know if the EU technically is on this list. China is at 34%. Taiwan, who's, you know, a close ally of ours, 32%. But they must have tariffs on our stuff. There's the EU twenty percent. So that'll cover that VAT tax. So the lower ones are basically equal. The higher ones are not necessarily equal, but they would be actually less.
So I'm thinking and I don't have the data, but I did earlier. The ones that I saw, like the 47, 40 eight percent Lao Laos, you know, a 46% Vietnam, for example. It was much higher. They were, like, a % tariff, if I remember. It was shocking. That's just the lever that he's gonna pull. So you can get mad about it, and that's okay. You can choose to at least try and understand it. How is that going to affect Bitcoin mining? Here in The United States, I do see a potential hiccup. Of course, a lot of the mining equipment comes from China. Some of that Chinese equipment is actually already assembled elsewhere in order to get around various, well, tariffs and things, issues like this.
So I think you see a fair amount being assembled. I think it's Singapore, Malaysia. And the Malaysian tariffs are 24%. The Singapore tariffs are 10%. So, you know, if they're being assembled in Singapore, it probably won't add a whole lot to the price, but I definitely could see the price of Bitcoin miners in the short term, at least going up. I think what you will see is a lot of these countries saying, okay. If you'll take down your tariffs, we'll take down that our tariffs. And that end result would essentially be free trade, which would be nice. I believe I don't see Canada.
No. Mexico. Nope. I do believe both of those after these were announced, have already said, no. We're good. We'll take down ours. You take down yours. And these are going to become effective on April. Now one of the things I'm not clear on, it looks like there might be a baseline 10% tariff, which is going to go into effect April, which is, Saturday. So right after this will come out. I think that is in addition to any of these other tariffs that we talked about. Now I believe that that is kind of the lever that he's really try so these others are really to make these fair. I mean, it's not fair, frankly, that India charges a % tariff on our cars, and we don't do anything like that back.
I'm good with that. In general, it looks like there's going to be a 10% tariff. And that really is to in the long term to to make it more attractive for companies to build manufacturing here in The United States. And we've already started to see some of that, with companies like TSMC. I think they're the world's largest chip maker, and they have announced shortly after Trump started talking about all this terrorist stuff that they were going to invest a hundred billion dollars here in The United States. So this may impact the miners.
Unfortunately, it certainly may. It may make it difficult to get miners here in The United States. It may make the miners who are being manufactured here, more attractive to the people who are mining in America. We'll just have to see how all that works out. I don't know. Maybe that's enough about that. I would go back to the we're 25% of the way through the epoch. Don't forget that. We've still got a bit to go to reach the all time high. I feel like even if we go down from here, I would not get too excited. And even if we have reached our all time high, does it matter?
Bitcoin is not a short term game. I hope you are stacking sets for the long term. And as we've been showing by going back even just a year, just a year ago, we were at 60 something thousand. So we're significantly above that right now. So anything that you've bought essentially in the last year, you're in the green on. So what's the worry, mate? What's the problem? I hope that helps. Just a little a little chat there. I don't like turning this into a political thing, but I do believe that this this tariff discussion is going to become very important, in as we go forward. At least in terms of the minors, I think that that's going to probably create actually some more long term disbursement of where miners are manufactured.
Most of the miners, easily 90% of the miners, are manufactured directly or indirectly by a Chinese company. It's probably actually far higher than 90%. So that from a centralization point standpoint, in my opinion, needs to change. And then I'm not saying, The United States needs to be 90%. I'm not a fan of that either. I'm a fan of decentralization. So alright. We're gonna go ahead and move on to our supporters. We had a great boost from Send It Mike. Send in ten sixty nine sets. Thank you, Send It Mike. I appreciate that. And this was about our discussion of GameStop stock.
He said, am I buying GME GameStop? No. They have a 67 P to E (price to earning) ratio. And if you take out their cash on hand, they have a 36 P to E ratio. Are they going are they doing good by holding Bitcoin over cash? Absolutely. Is their stock going to outperform Bitcoin? Probably not. As Greg Foss says, who's one of the OG Bitcoiners, don't be too smart by half, meaning keep it simple and buy Bitcoin. A lot of good insight there. Send it, Mike. I appreciate that. I would say in the short term, maybe even in the next few years, GME may do better than Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean in the long term that it will. So you may be better off, as he suggests, just holding or buying and holding, of course, Bitcoin rather than that GME stock. The stock market is, can I just say this? The stock market is crazy.
There was this stock that came out yesterday. It got listed. It was Newsmax, which I feel like I should know, but I don't really. And it opened it opened at $16.72 on Monday, March at 11AM. Just that was this Monday. It reached a peak on Tuesday, April at 04:30PM, so closing $279.99. And today, it has gone from that high of $280 down to, wait for it, $47.90. That makes no sense to me. What did those people know during that first day, essentially, that I did not? I don't know. I guess it was first two trading days. And then why all of a sudden did it sell off down to only kind of quotes here, only roughly three times its opening price?
A much more normal kind of number. That's just crazy. And the funny thing is, it seems to me that we have seen this type of activity a lot more in the recent years. I don't know what it's an indicator of, but I just thought I'd bring that up. Be like Send It, Mike. Keep it simple. Buy your Bitcoin. The news this week was simply the tariff stuff. There wasn't a whole lot beyond that. So, I'm gonna insert a couple of articles about that. We'll talk about some software updates, there was a few things. There was a mining related item. I did wanna bring this up. It's not actually software, but I thought this would be fun to talk about since we had a little bit of a mining emphasis.
And that's the brains open source control board. So Braiins is the company they used to have a well, they have a pool, a mining pool. I used to use it. It's still around called the Braiins pool. They have turned over. It's a FFPS or whatever they call it. It's one of these where you get paid regardless of whether the pool mines a a thing, and they did that by essentially turning the operation over to another company. It's one of these deals where you've got, like, one company really running the mining pool of probably half a dozen other companies. I didn't really like that. That's why I switched over to o Ocean.
But one of the things brains has done, and they developed this control board. And I wanted to mention this because one of the issues that we have, in my opinion, with miners is a lack of open source parts. The firmware on the servers, to my knowledge, is not open source. It's you've got, Vanish is one of the big market, companies. You've got, braiins of firmware. There's a number of these, but they're all proprietary. And I don't know if this is the firmware part. So this comes with the brains OS, which is the firmware. I don't know.
I believe they're just kind of open sourcing the board itself. I don't believe they're open sourcing their firmware. There should be an open source version of the firmware. I wished I had the capability of building that. I do not. That is beyond me. But when we don't know what's going on at that low level on a minor, it can create issues. I would just point that out, but this is kind of cool that brains is even open sourcing this control board. That's another level of, you know, we're making things transparent. So very cool. Glad to see that. Now please open source your brains OS.
Sorry. That was part of the news. Let's see here. Zeus did put out, zero zero dot ten dot one. This was in beta, I think, a week ago. Now I posted it as soon as I saw it come out. I cannot find any other notes on it. But we had talked about last week, I think, the beta version of that, but now it's actually in, it's available and ready for you to use if that's something that you're doing. There was also a BISK version two dot one seven. So Bisq is a p2p, so a peer to peer, Bitcoin exchange. It's a way for you to anonymously buy and sell Bitcoin.
They've done some UI improvements. They've added a safeguard against triangular scams. I'm not sure what that means. The buyer is now required to set the trade ID as reason for payment when making fiat transfer. I do not know the detail to know what that means. You've got, some more UI improvements, And the mediators and moderators, which are important in the system like this, are now identified by a badge that appears next to their nickname. And it looks like a little shield. Alright. Message delivery improvements, trade process improvements, mediation improvements, and of course, bug fixes. It sounds like a pretty big release actually.
So if you're using Bisc, you probably want to pick that up. Version two dot one dot seven. Alright. And that's actually it for the software this week. A little bit of a slow week. I would strongly encourage you though to take this dip to do what we always say, stay humble, StackSats. Keep DCA and use a tool like Strike or something similar, to to be buying those Bitcoin. If if you don't use a tool like Strike, which is KYC, you're going to have a little bit more of a difficult time. But however you're doing it, be DCA ing that Bitcoin.
My suggestion actually just offhand, if you really don't wanna KYC your Bitcoin, buy yourself a miner. Buy yourself enough miners that you can, at least pay for the hosting out of your pocket and take the Bitcoin in return, that Bitcoins, when you get it, will have never been used in a transaction. So it would not be associated with you. We are a value for value podcast. We talk about this a lot. You don't hear ads. You don't hear hear sponsors. You don't hear anything like that. We also support what's called podcasting two point o. What that means is we have a lot of new features built into our podcast. Things like transcripts, things like chapters, and also the ability to boost and to stream sets like our users did this week. I did wanna point out actually, I meant to do this earlier.
I am starting to see an uptick in our Nostr support. We posted, for example, a message saying that last week's episode was out. Someone zapped that message, which is how you do it in Nostr, a thousand sats. So I we appreciate that. I know we don't bring it out on here a lot, but, that support is appreciated as well. How can you help the show? One of the best ways that you can do that is simply just telling someone else about it. It. I had a friend of mine that actually told us told me about this podcast. She told my wife, and my wife actually told me, but I've started listening to it, really enjoy it.
And the name of the podcast doesn't matter. The point is I listened to it because I knew her, and I knew what she was like. And I knew if she thought it was good, then I probably would think it was good too. So if you're enjoying this app, this podcast, if you're enjoying this podcast, you can tell some other people about it, and most likely, they'll take a listen. And we would certainly appreciate that. Our numbers are up. Our people who are, downloading and listening no. Maybe not this week because Macintosh is in here all by himself. But, you know, things are things are looking up.
And Kenshen and I do have a lot of plans for how we're gonna move forward. We're working on stuff in the background, and we keep you guys up to date on that. I mean, I just got done setting up the lightning node. I'm in the process of transferring our current setup to that lightning node. Once that's done, we'll be able to move on with some other things. So if you don't know anything about podcasting two point o, go to podcastapps.com. There's a whole list of podcast apps there. You could try out Fountain. Let's see what I've got set up on my phone right now. I have three different ones. Fountain, I have Cast o matic, and I have Podcast Guru.
I actually do like them all. I like them for different reasons. Fountain, frankly, is probably the easiest one for a brand new user to use in terms of boosting and streaming sets to shows that they that you would want to support. But the others are great apps as well, and they do support the ability to do that. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. We would love to hear from you. We have all the different ways to reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshis-plebs.com/episodes, and then just pick out the latest one. Stay humble friends. Go out. Make it a great week.
We will talk to you all soon.
[00:39:20] Unknown:
My old man's old man sat down and got to talking. He said this whole life won't roll the way you want it. Lots of curve balls, but go out swinging. Use your head, but don't overthink it. So listen when I say,
[00:39:48] Unknown:
Yeah. I found faith and I found love, lost it. I wouldn't change a thing. Got everything I wanted. So do what's right, but have some fun before you know it. Twenty years are gone, or you'll get there sure enough. But you're still too young
[00:40:48] Unknown:
it So listen when I say
[00:40:54] Unknown:
Remember this until you're dying Yeah. I found faith and I found love and lost it. I wouldn't change a thing. I got everything I wanted. So do what's right but have some fun. Before you know it, forty years are gone. Boy, you'll get there sure enough. But you're still too young for You're just too young. Yeah. You're still too young
[00:42:30] Unknown:
for growing
[00:42:42] Unknown:
up.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is April, and this is episode 203 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm McIntosh, and today's episode is A Quarter of the Way cone.
[00:00:19] Unknown:
My old man's old man sat down and got to talking. He said this whole life won't roll the way you want it. Lots of curve balls, but go out swinging. Use your head, but don't overthink it. So listen when I say
[00:00:47] McIntosh:
For regular listeners of our show, you will realize that Kenshin did not chime in and say that he was Kenshin or give the name of the episode. We had a scheduling conflict essentially this weekend due in part, in large part to me, and we just could not record together this week, unfortunately. Unfortunately. Both of us actually have really busy schedules, and there's essentially kind of, one window of time that we can record in. And it just did not work out this week. I will be talking in a few minutes about what I'm I'm doing right now that's keeping keeping that from happening. So I do apologize.
I hope you've enjoyed that music, by the way. That was Matt Johner Joiner? I'm sorry, Matt. I apologize. But either way, he is from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And apparently, according to Facebook, he is down in Sydney right now. I wonder what he's doing now down there. Anyways, regardless, I thought that was a great song. He's a little more along the country kind of vibe, almost a folk folk music. Definitely country. But, anyways, I really enjoyed that song and thought we would bring that to you. It's called Too Young for Growing Up. The rest of it, the full song will be at the end of the episode as always, so you can enjoy that. The tea is hot tonight, and I got it cranked right up. As we record April 2025, our Bitcoin price is $82,641.
Kind of had a interesting day. It skated up to, like, 87,000 and then dumped at the end of the day. We're looking at €75,706. Our block height as we record is 890,632. We're looking at a difficulty adjustment in just a couple of days. It's at least going to be three to four points positive. Positive. So right now, we're at 3.99%. Difficulty adjustment, meaning it will be that much more difficult after April to mine those blocks. Last month or last, two weeks ago, our adjustment was 1.43%. So we've had a couple of upward adjustments.
Now we've started looking at a couple of other items here as well. Last April, we had a price of $65,443. Our market cap information is unchanged. I've got a figure of 1,700,000,000,000.0 USD. Gold market cap, 21,100,000,000,000.0. And what that means is that it's right at 8.1% Bitcoin versus Gold market cap. Our mempool fees, on the other hand, are actually very low, crazy low, one sat per v byte for all types of transactions. There's only six megabytes of unprocessed transactions, about 3,600 transactions in the mempool. Alright?
So things are, not heavily used right now for whatever reason, and I'm not gonna speculate. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. If it's not full up, I think eventually it will be. I would not worry about that one bit. What's going on with Macintosh? I, you know, I haven't talked about this in a while, but this shed project that I've been working on is actually still ongoing. It will be done very soon. And I do think I'm actually gonna go ahead and release a picture when we get done. I'm going to wait until we get completely done. I'll have to scrub the location data from it, and whatnot, the metadata from the pictures so that, you know, you can't figure out things from it.
But, I feel like I've invested so much time and effort into this. I gotta kinda show you guys what I'm doing. But, we were working on that today, and I had some people helping. I've got a couple of guys that are helping finish up here in the next few days, and that's actually why I couldn't make our regular recording time today. So we will have that done very soon, though. And then my miners did get to the new facility. They should be hooked up in the next few days and mining away. So we've kinda got all of that taken care of. So what are we talking about, Macintosh? A quarter of the way done. What does that even mean? It's crazy, crazy title.
Well, one of the things that's going on right now, we have these epochs. We have these periods of time, roughly four years, where we go, the block rewards are a fixed amount. You have in a mining block, you have a a a block reward, and then you have a transaction fee. Both of those together make up the complete kind of block that gets mined and paid to the miner who finds it or to the mining pool. If you remember, it was last April that we had the Bitcoin halving where we went from 6.25 down to 3.125. So it cut in half, and our next reward having will be in roughly three years, and we'll go from 3.125 down to whatever 1.5 plus half of point one two five is. I'm not gonna do that math right now. I'll probably get it wrong.
Not a whole lot. And we are roughly a quarter of the way there. I think we're actually about 24%, twenty four and a half, something like that of the way to that block, which will trigger the next block reward to the halving to kick off, whatever you wanna call it. Why is this why is this important? For one thing, it's important to keep in mind that we've got a long time to go until the next half. The four year cycle as we call it, the market cycle of Bitcoin, at least historically, means that roughly half the way through the, epoch, we will be kind of at our high.
I am estimating that to be at the end of this year, which would not be halfway. But I am thinking fourth quarter, we would be about eighteen, twenty months in at that point. And we will see a gradual decline until we hit the halvening. And then at some point post halvening, things will pick back up. This is the cycle that we've seen since 02/2009. The first transaction was done in 2009. So, that is something that's very important to keep in mind with all of this. You're going to hear a lot of hype over the next few weeks, the next few months. You're going to hear a lot of if things continue as they are, you're going to hear a lot of people who are saying, you know, we've already reached the top. We're not going any higher this cycle.
It's all over. We, in my opinion, still have quite a ways to go. We are getting a lot of kind of interference right now from the market. And I know I've told y'all the market doesn't really determine the price. In the long term, it certainly doesn't. In the short term, it certainly can. And there has been, frankly, an unprecedented and there has been an unprecedented amount of market noise going on. Just today, right before recording, a few hours ago, Trump comes out and he announces all of these tariffs. They call us them reciprocal tariffs. This is the type of thing that causes market uncertainty.
In fact, I did wanna springboard into that for just a minute. I think tariffs have got a lot of people kind of freaked out. Tariffs are simply one nation saying to another nation, if you send your product to our nation, we're going to charge you a 25% or 50% or 10% or whatever fee in order to bring that product into our country. That's a tariff. Now we can argue a long time probably about the effects of that tariff. Does it increase prices on product that is brought into this country from a country that's got a tariff leveled against it. Absolutely. If, for example, a Chinese car had a tariff of 50% on it, that would mean that the Chinese car, to the average consumer, when they get imported into the country is going to cost probably 50% more. It's it's it's basically unavoidable.
Now tariffs have a long history. They were actually used a lot by The United States in the eighteen hundreds, I want to say, in the late eighteen hundreds. And in fact, some people would argue that that was a time of great prosperity for America. Now I am not, please note, saying that because now we're doing tariffs that suddenly we're going to have this economic boom. One of the things that came out today, which I had heard this information previously, but I think it got a lot of attention today, is that a lot of other countries already have tariffs on The United States. I'm going to talk to CHAT GPT for just a minute.
As an example, I had heard this and appear appears to be accurate. I talked to I asked ChatGPT. India, if you import a car from The United States, a luxury car into India, so say a Cadillac, I'm sure that would be classified as a luxury car. There is a 10% tariff. I have no idea why they do that. It doesn't I I'm not going to I'm not gonna put thought into why they do that. But Trump came out today and set up a bunch of tariffs on a bunch of countries calling these reciprocal tariffs. The idea is, oh, India, overall, you charge a 70% tariff on American products. And I'm just giving this as an example. I do not know the exact figure.
And so in return, we're going to charge a tariff on you. Now interestingly, there were a lot of countries that had smaller tariffs, like say 10% on American product. Those countries, it was basically matched. So if you had a 10% tariff, our tariff to you would be 10%. They kind of even out. On the other hand, if you had one that was really high like this where maybe it was a hundred plus percent, we might only do 50%. So it actually he called it, we're being nice. Now I I don't know, about that, but that's the decision that they've made. Now, why is he attempting to do this? Now, again, whether you agree with tariffs or not, he has talked about this enough. He is trying to onshore to bring back some manufacturing to The United States. In my lifetime, ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the effects of the globalization, what we would call globalization, of The United States economy.
We have shifted so much of our manufacturing to other countries that be for different reasons, but just setting that aside for right now, typically for cost, that a lot, and I mean a substantial amount of the manufacturing jobs that we used to have here in The United States have been moved overseas. The United States used to be a manufacturing powerhouse. That's no longer true. And consequently, I believe The United States virtually does not have a middle class. You have a poor class, essentially. You have people who are struggling, who can't afford to buy a home, and maybe they're making $75,000 a year, which sounds like a lot of money, but they still can't afford to buy a house. I don't actually consider that middle class. A middle class person is someone who can afford a home, who can typically provide a better life for their kids, putting them in college, launching them out, you know, to to do better.
A lot of families in The United States do not have that opportunity. There are very few manufacturers of cars and like motorcycles, for example, here in The United States. I happen to know that Harley is still up in Milwaukee, Harley Davidson, at least as of a few years ago. I don't know. It's probably been ten years or so. Well, maybe not quite that long. About seven years ago, I had a client in Milwaukee, and I used to travel up there fairly regularly. The Harley Davidson plant was right there off the interstate. They went in there. They assembled Harleys on the assembly line or whatever it was that they did. And in return, they got paid for that, and they were able to have that lifestyle.
Trump is trying to bring some of that manufacturing back to The United States. He's trying to make it, essentially, The United States more competitive in terms of manufacturing at least for products that we would use here. Oh, you wanna buy the American car. Well, you're not gonna get tariffed like the one that you would if you were buying from China or from Germany or from the EU in general or the EU has, like, a 20% tax, a VAT tax. Well, now they've got a tariff. I think people think that Trump is bullying when he does this. At least the way he's trying to come across this time.
And from the data that I look at, he's just trying to make it equal. So, I think that's a huge change, frankly. To steer this back towards the Bitcoin conversation, this tariff talk over the last few man, it's been going on for a bit now. I would say more than a few weeks, probably four to well, since inauguration, essentially. So January 20, that has really spooked the market, and the market has been going up and down and up and down. And, oh, we hear some good news. It runs up. We hear some bad news. It crashes down. I would assume that the market in general decided that this whole plan that he unveiled today, maybe not the best. I don't know what the stock market futures are. The meeting was scheduled for 04:00, which is eastern time, which was not too long before the markets closed. I think they close at 04:30.
I may be mistaken on that. But regardless, initially, Bitcoin had gone up quite a bit, but then now it's it's crashed. But you as the the humble Bitcoiner, as as the pleb, as we would say, as much as you can, ignore that. I don't care where you live. If it's in The United States, that's terrific. If it's in The EU, that's terrific. If it's in South America or Africa, it does not matter. Eventually, this stuff will go away. I don't mean that tariffs are gonna go away or any of that. Bitcoin is going to move on. These things will not affect it.
And as we always say, you should view this as an opportunity simply to stack some cheap sats. Do your DCA. By the way, I just and I'm not trying to pick on India, but I think this is actually this is the kind of normal thing that we're talking about. I'm gonna read this straight from ChatGPT so you know that I'm not just making this up. Yes. India imports high tariffs on imported cars, including those from The United States. Here's a breakdown. Completely built units, fully assembled cars. If the cost insurance and freight value is over $40,000 or the energy engine capacity is over 3,000 cc's petrol or 2,500 cc's diesel, which I don't think that's very big.
A % import duty. I would not actually consider that luxury car. $40,000 car these days is not necessarily a luxury car. For other, CBUs, so ones that are smaller than that and cheaper than that, completely built units, a 60% import duty. What they call a completely knocked down kit, CKD. In other words, it's assembled in India from imported parts. Duties range from 15 to 30% depending on the level of localization and assembly. And I will read the rest of this. US carmakers like Tesla and Ford have pushed for lower import duties. Of course, Tesla, Elon Musk, he wants his cars in India. It's a huge market. It's a billion people roughly.
And, you know, I would assume that any of his Teslas are going to be $40,000 or more. I may be mistaken about that, but I'm pretty sure that's the case. So you're looking at basically a % tariff. India argues that high tariffs support domestic manufacturing, especially under its Make in India initiative. Yes. It would actually support domestic manufacturing, of course, because people can't afford to buy the Tesla or the Ford. So the politicians are getting what they want. In theory, at least they're getting more domestic manufacturing. My question is, are the people of India getting one of what they want? Do they want Teslas? Do they want Ford Chevys who whatever.
I'm sure some of them do. The way Trump is approaching this is simply to say, well, okay. You've got a %. And probably for India, the rate is around 50%. India, twenty six % tariff. Alright? The highest one is actually Laos, Laos, Laos, 48%. So, Laos must have really high tariffs. I don't know if the EU technically is on this list. China is at 34%. Taiwan, who's, you know, a close ally of ours, 32%. But they must have tariffs on our stuff. There's the EU twenty percent. So that'll cover that VAT tax. So the lower ones are basically equal. The higher ones are not necessarily equal, but they would be actually less.
So I'm thinking and I don't have the data, but I did earlier. The ones that I saw, like the 47, 40 eight percent Lao Laos, you know, a 46% Vietnam, for example. It was much higher. They were, like, a % tariff, if I remember. It was shocking. That's just the lever that he's gonna pull. So you can get mad about it, and that's okay. You can choose to at least try and understand it. How is that going to affect Bitcoin mining? Here in The United States, I do see a potential hiccup. Of course, a lot of the mining equipment comes from China. Some of that Chinese equipment is actually already assembled elsewhere in order to get around various, well, tariffs and things, issues like this.
So I think you see a fair amount being assembled. I think it's Singapore, Malaysia. And the Malaysian tariffs are 24%. The Singapore tariffs are 10%. So, you know, if they're being assembled in Singapore, it probably won't add a whole lot to the price, but I definitely could see the price of Bitcoin miners in the short term, at least going up. I think what you will see is a lot of these countries saying, okay. If you'll take down your tariffs, we'll take down that our tariffs. And that end result would essentially be free trade, which would be nice. I believe I don't see Canada.
No. Mexico. Nope. I do believe both of those after these were announced, have already said, no. We're good. We'll take down ours. You take down yours. And these are going to become effective on April. Now one of the things I'm not clear on, it looks like there might be a baseline 10% tariff, which is going to go into effect April, which is, Saturday. So right after this will come out. I think that is in addition to any of these other tariffs that we talked about. Now I believe that that is kind of the lever that he's really try so these others are really to make these fair. I mean, it's not fair, frankly, that India charges a % tariff on our cars, and we don't do anything like that back.
I'm good with that. In general, it looks like there's going to be a 10% tariff. And that really is to in the long term to to make it more attractive for companies to build manufacturing here in The United States. And we've already started to see some of that, with companies like TSMC. I think they're the world's largest chip maker, and they have announced shortly after Trump started talking about all this terrorist stuff that they were going to invest a hundred billion dollars here in The United States. So this may impact the miners.
Unfortunately, it certainly may. It may make it difficult to get miners here in The United States. It may make the miners who are being manufactured here, more attractive to the people who are mining in America. We'll just have to see how all that works out. I don't know. Maybe that's enough about that. I would go back to the we're 25% of the way through the epoch. Don't forget that. We've still got a bit to go to reach the all time high. I feel like even if we go down from here, I would not get too excited. And even if we have reached our all time high, does it matter?
Bitcoin is not a short term game. I hope you are stacking sets for the long term. And as we've been showing by going back even just a year, just a year ago, we were at 60 something thousand. So we're significantly above that right now. So anything that you've bought essentially in the last year, you're in the green on. So what's the worry, mate? What's the problem? I hope that helps. Just a little a little chat there. I don't like turning this into a political thing, but I do believe that this this tariff discussion is going to become very important, in as we go forward. At least in terms of the minors, I think that that's going to probably create actually some more long term disbursement of where miners are manufactured.
Most of the miners, easily 90% of the miners, are manufactured directly or indirectly by a Chinese company. It's probably actually far higher than 90%. So that from a centralization point standpoint, in my opinion, needs to change. And then I'm not saying, The United States needs to be 90%. I'm not a fan of that either. I'm a fan of decentralization. So alright. We're gonna go ahead and move on to our supporters. We had a great boost from Send It Mike. Send in ten sixty nine sets. Thank you, Send It Mike. I appreciate that. And this was about our discussion of GameStop stock.
He said, am I buying GME GameStop? No. They have a 67 P to E (price to earning) ratio. And if you take out their cash on hand, they have a 36 P to E ratio. Are they going are they doing good by holding Bitcoin over cash? Absolutely. Is their stock going to outperform Bitcoin? Probably not. As Greg Foss says, who's one of the OG Bitcoiners, don't be too smart by half, meaning keep it simple and buy Bitcoin. A lot of good insight there. Send it, Mike. I appreciate that. I would say in the short term, maybe even in the next few years, GME may do better than Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean in the long term that it will. So you may be better off, as he suggests, just holding or buying and holding, of course, Bitcoin rather than that GME stock. The stock market is, can I just say this? The stock market is crazy.
There was this stock that came out yesterday. It got listed. It was Newsmax, which I feel like I should know, but I don't really. And it opened it opened at $16.72 on Monday, March at 11AM. Just that was this Monday. It reached a peak on Tuesday, April at 04:30PM, so closing $279.99. And today, it has gone from that high of $280 down to, wait for it, $47.90. That makes no sense to me. What did those people know during that first day, essentially, that I did not? I don't know. I guess it was first two trading days. And then why all of a sudden did it sell off down to only kind of quotes here, only roughly three times its opening price?
A much more normal kind of number. That's just crazy. And the funny thing is, it seems to me that we have seen this type of activity a lot more in the recent years. I don't know what it's an indicator of, but I just thought I'd bring that up. Be like Send It, Mike. Keep it simple. Buy your Bitcoin. The news this week was simply the tariff stuff. There wasn't a whole lot beyond that. So, I'm gonna insert a couple of articles about that. We'll talk about some software updates, there was a few things. There was a mining related item. I did wanna bring this up. It's not actually software, but I thought this would be fun to talk about since we had a little bit of a mining emphasis.
And that's the brains open source control board. So Braiins is the company they used to have a well, they have a pool, a mining pool. I used to use it. It's still around called the Braiins pool. They have turned over. It's a FFPS or whatever they call it. It's one of these where you get paid regardless of whether the pool mines a a thing, and they did that by essentially turning the operation over to another company. It's one of these deals where you've got, like, one company really running the mining pool of probably half a dozen other companies. I didn't really like that. That's why I switched over to o Ocean.
But one of the things brains has done, and they developed this control board. And I wanted to mention this because one of the issues that we have, in my opinion, with miners is a lack of open source parts. The firmware on the servers, to my knowledge, is not open source. It's you've got, Vanish is one of the big market, companies. You've got, braiins of firmware. There's a number of these, but they're all proprietary. And I don't know if this is the firmware part. So this comes with the brains OS, which is the firmware. I don't know.
I believe they're just kind of open sourcing the board itself. I don't believe they're open sourcing their firmware. There should be an open source version of the firmware. I wished I had the capability of building that. I do not. That is beyond me. But when we don't know what's going on at that low level on a minor, it can create issues. I would just point that out, but this is kind of cool that brains is even open sourcing this control board. That's another level of, you know, we're making things transparent. So very cool. Glad to see that. Now please open source your brains OS.
Sorry. That was part of the news. Let's see here. Zeus did put out, zero zero dot ten dot one. This was in beta, I think, a week ago. Now I posted it as soon as I saw it come out. I cannot find any other notes on it. But we had talked about last week, I think, the beta version of that, but now it's actually in, it's available and ready for you to use if that's something that you're doing. There was also a BISK version two dot one seven. So Bisq is a p2p, so a peer to peer, Bitcoin exchange. It's a way for you to anonymously buy and sell Bitcoin.
They've done some UI improvements. They've added a safeguard against triangular scams. I'm not sure what that means. The buyer is now required to set the trade ID as reason for payment when making fiat transfer. I do not know the detail to know what that means. You've got, some more UI improvements, And the mediators and moderators, which are important in the system like this, are now identified by a badge that appears next to their nickname. And it looks like a little shield. Alright. Message delivery improvements, trade process improvements, mediation improvements, and of course, bug fixes. It sounds like a pretty big release actually.
So if you're using Bisc, you probably want to pick that up. Version two dot one dot seven. Alright. And that's actually it for the software this week. A little bit of a slow week. I would strongly encourage you though to take this dip to do what we always say, stay humble, StackSats. Keep DCA and use a tool like Strike or something similar, to to be buying those Bitcoin. If if you don't use a tool like Strike, which is KYC, you're going to have a little bit more of a difficult time. But however you're doing it, be DCA ing that Bitcoin.
My suggestion actually just offhand, if you really don't wanna KYC your Bitcoin, buy yourself a miner. Buy yourself enough miners that you can, at least pay for the hosting out of your pocket and take the Bitcoin in return, that Bitcoins, when you get it, will have never been used in a transaction. So it would not be associated with you. We are a value for value podcast. We talk about this a lot. You don't hear ads. You don't hear hear sponsors. You don't hear anything like that. We also support what's called podcasting two point o. What that means is we have a lot of new features built into our podcast. Things like transcripts, things like chapters, and also the ability to boost and to stream sets like our users did this week. I did wanna point out actually, I meant to do this earlier.
I am starting to see an uptick in our Nostr support. We posted, for example, a message saying that last week's episode was out. Someone zapped that message, which is how you do it in Nostr, a thousand sats. So I we appreciate that. I know we don't bring it out on here a lot, but, that support is appreciated as well. How can you help the show? One of the best ways that you can do that is simply just telling someone else about it. It. I had a friend of mine that actually told us told me about this podcast. She told my wife, and my wife actually told me, but I've started listening to it, really enjoy it.
And the name of the podcast doesn't matter. The point is I listened to it because I knew her, and I knew what she was like. And I knew if she thought it was good, then I probably would think it was good too. So if you're enjoying this app, this podcast, if you're enjoying this podcast, you can tell some other people about it, and most likely, they'll take a listen. And we would certainly appreciate that. Our numbers are up. Our people who are, downloading and listening no. Maybe not this week because Macintosh is in here all by himself. But, you know, things are things are looking up.
And Kenshen and I do have a lot of plans for how we're gonna move forward. We're working on stuff in the background, and we keep you guys up to date on that. I mean, I just got done setting up the lightning node. I'm in the process of transferring our current setup to that lightning node. Once that's done, we'll be able to move on with some other things. So if you don't know anything about podcasting two point o, go to podcastapps.com. There's a whole list of podcast apps there. You could try out Fountain. Let's see what I've got set up on my phone right now. I have three different ones. Fountain, I have Cast o matic, and I have Podcast Guru.
I actually do like them all. I like them for different reasons. Fountain, frankly, is probably the easiest one for a brand new user to use in terms of boosting and streaming sets to shows that they that you would want to support. But the others are great apps as well, and they do support the ability to do that. Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. We would love to hear from you. We have all the different ways to reach us listed at the bottom of each episode page on the website at satoshis-plebs.com/episodes, and then just pick out the latest one. Stay humble friends. Go out. Make it a great week.
We will talk to you all soon.
[00:39:20] Unknown:
My old man's old man sat down and got to talking. He said this whole life won't roll the way you want it. Lots of curve balls, but go out swinging. Use your head, but don't overthink it. So listen when I say,
[00:39:48] Unknown:
Yeah. I found faith and I found love, lost it. I wouldn't change a thing. Got everything I wanted. So do what's right, but have some fun before you know it. Twenty years are gone, or you'll get there sure enough. But you're still too young
[00:40:48] Unknown:
it So listen when I say
[00:40:54] Unknown:
Remember this until you're dying Yeah. I found faith and I found love and lost it. I wouldn't change a thing. I got everything I wanted. So do what's right but have some fun. Before you know it, forty years are gone. Boy, you'll get there sure enough. But you're still too young for You're just too young. Yeah. You're still too young
[00:42:30] Unknown:
for growing
[00:42:42] Unknown:
up.
Introduction
Bitcoin Market Update
Personal Updates
Understanding Bitcoin Halving and Epochs
Market Reactions to Tariffs and Economic Policies
Impact of Tariffs on Bitcoin Mining
Listener Feedback
Open Source in Bitcoin Mining
Software Updates
Podcasting 2.0 and Listener Engagement
