Today we discuss the myriad of ways that you can spend your Bitcoin, Bitcoin adoption rates, overtime in Sweden and an exciting announcement about the next step for Satoshi's Plebs.
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 16th, 2025: 83,750 USD | 73,650 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
892,712
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-205
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 205 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
I am Kenshin, and today's episode is Use Your Bitcoin.
[00:00:23] Matt Johner:
My old man's old man sat down and got to talking. He said this whole life won't roll away, won't it? Lots of curve balls could go out swinging. Use your head, but don't overthink it. So listen when I sing.
[00:00:48] McIntosh:
Yeah.
[00:00:50] Matt Johner:
I found
[00:00:52] McIntosh:
Alright. Thanks, Kenshin. You guys you're gonna have to bear with me today. I as you can probably tell already, I have a cold, and, I also still have a problem with my setup, which is my problem at this point. I kind of understand what's well, I do understand what's going on, but the reality is I didn't have time to fix it before we started recording. So that's life. We're gonna make do. I'm gonna keep my hands off the keyboard today, and we're gonna move on. Our Bitcoin price at time of recording, April 16th 2025, $83,750 USDs.
[00:01:28] Kenshin:
Or €73,650.
[00:01:32] McIntosh:
And the price last, April 16 was $63,702. So we're definitely up compared to that if you wanna look at it that way. Alright. So we've got the various market caps. Could you do that, sir?
[00:01:50] Kenshin:
Right. So we're looking at the market cap of Bitcoin at $1,700,000,000,000 and the gold's market cap at $23,200,000,000,000, which bring Bitcoin to 7.1%, of gold's market cap. And I saw on the previous notes from last week, gold was at, 20,800,000,000,000, and today's 23.2.
[00:02:18] McIntosh:
So Yes. We jumped quite a bit in the, in the last, in the last few days. Yeah.
[00:02:26] Kenshin:
So, yeah, we're down to low 7%
[00:02:30] McIntosh:
for Bitcoin versus gold market. Considering starting a gold podcast. Is that correct, Kinshen? Yeah. That's accurate. We'll ride the wave. No. I'm just kidding. Sorry. I did not. The block height as we record is 892,712. Right now, we've got a difficulty adjustment that would be 1.72 if it happened right now. And, of course, that is the minor difficulty adjustment is what happens to keep things. It's the adjustment that's made to keep things at roughly ten minutes per block, and that is going to be adjusted on April. So it's only a couple of days from now. And, if you remember, our last adjustment was 6.81%.
So this one's quite a bit less. So the growth is slowing. I have some theories about that. I think it involves tariffs, frankly. Do you would you want me to expand on that? I don't know if we've got time, can't you? Well, I would also say that previous 6.8%
[00:03:36] Kenshin:
is a huge increase of difficulty. So No doubt. That is not sustainable to keep that. But, But, yeah, please
[00:03:44] McIntosh:
expand and why I think that tariffs are hurting, the deployment of miners. These miners don't keep, you know, thousands of units sitting around because they're super expensive, and and all your capital is tied up. Basically, their goal as soon as they get a unit is to plug it in, and then they get the money for the next unit, and they plug that in and so on and so forth. So you can see where this is going. We're in a trade war with China. Let's just admit it. I think the last figure I saw, Kenshin, this is crazy. I think our tariffs against China are 245%, which is just insanity.
But that's where we're at. And because of that, people don't there's a lot of units that are not coming into The United States. You know, that's not saying they won't be deployed, but I do think it does affect the growth, if that makes sense. It's also news that even some Boeing airplanes were not being delivered now from China for that reason. Why are they building Boeing airplanes in China? That sounds like a really bad idea to me. I'm just I look. I'm sorry. I whatever. Let's just move on before I turn into old man Macintosh. Excuse.
Yeah. So let's jump into the mempool, sir, and see if it's important.
[00:05:10] Kenshin:
So we have low, medium, high priority transactions at two sats per vbyte Mhmm. Which that would be, at current dollar prices at $0.24 Right. Cost for doing a single transaction in Bitcoin. So that's very low. The mempool is also quite empty at 25 megabytes right now, and 7,500 transactions pending.
[00:05:40] McIntosh:
I wanna inject something here real quick. So I had to pay some hosting bills, which is, you know, that's a normal thing with me. Last night night before last, I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's all a haze of this cold I've got going on. When I went to go do it, it was actually 33 and 3. And I set my transaction to 1.25. I didn't set it to one sat per vByte, but I did set it to 1.25, and it was picked up almost immediately. So even though these things are you're you're seeing it bounce between 123, Unless there's just a real need for you to get a transaction out the next block, my recommendation will be to set it right above one or even one and just wait. It'll get through.
Right. So what's new with you, McIntosh? You sound a bit sick, but otherwise Yeah. No. We went to a conference last week. I don't know if I mentioned sorry. I don't know if I mentioned that we were gonna be doing that. I cannot recall, but my wife and I went to a conference up in Saint Louis. We visited the the city of Saint Louis up in Missouri. And somewhere along the way, I probably shook hands with somebody and gained their cold or whatever this is. I I did not work yesterday, and I was telling Kenshin before the podcast started recording.
I don't look. This frustrates my wife to know when. She's much healthier than I am. She eats the right things. She exercises more than I do, and I'm not as good about that as as she is, frankly. And yet, I never get sick. But when I well, never. I get sick, like, literally maybe twice a year, probably less than that on average. But when I do, man, it's a doozy. I spent all day yesterday sleeping, which is very unusual for me. I mean, y'all know I don't get a whole lot of sleep, and alls I did yesterday, I think I was awake for, like, six hours. It was crazy. And right after we get done recording, I'm going back to bed because I'm whipped, and I've only been up since 10:00, so four hours.
Alright. But, yeah, we did that. I did wanna make a note, actually, and this is the only place I know to put this in. I've been listening to Bitcoin podcast for a long time. I I have all these different podcasts that I listen to, and yet I've noticed in the last three or four months, I'm having trouble having enough content. In other words, like, new episodes. Right? And so I started poking around. Kenshin, like, half the podcast that I listen to have stopped in the last year and a half or so. The Bitcoin podcast, you mean? Literally half the podcast. I mean, I'm not gonna name them, but, yes, Bitcoin podcast. It's crazy.
It's like, you guys, this is the bull market. But this is like when you're supposed to be pumping out the information. I don't know. Whatever. But it just made me think. You know, we've been in this for I'm going on three years in August, if I'm not mistaken. I have no plans of stopping as long as y'all will put up with me. We are continuing to build different things. And I'm not casting casting shade or whatever the kids would say on these people. But the reality is, I guess we are different, Kinshin, so I don't know.
I don't know how else to say it. So I guess I feel proud about that, to be honest. I mean, maybe it's my pride coming forth, but, yeah, I mean, we're still here. We're still pumping out an episode every week. I would love to do more, but we're gonna have to have more support before we start doing that. We have talked about that. Mhmm. But yeah. Yeah. Very interesting.
[00:09:41] Kenshin:
And we're switching things up soon. Right? In five episodes?
[00:09:45] McIntosh:
We are. Oh, this would be a great place to spring that. Good good lead, sir. Well played. Yes. We are. Why don't you go ahead and explain that?
[00:09:55] Kenshin:
Well, we are thinking to do a live episode. We will use the episodes 210 to to do that. We will use Zap.stream to be live. So that's a Nostr platform. So you can be signed in with your Nostr account or make a new Nostr account Right. For that matter. And and just visit that page. We can have a link on our, Nostra and Twitter profiles Mhmm. For that. And you can join us live, while we make the episodes and interact with us live, leave a question, zap us live.
[00:10:39] McIntosh:
So that's the plan. Yep. And I'm looking forward to that. I think it will bring an element to this recording that that that will be helpful. But it is going to require some of the listeners to step up and take the initiative if you've never been on Nostr, to kind of figure that out. I don't think it's very hard. Maybe we need to kind of put up some instructions, Kenshin, about Zap. Stream specifically.
[00:11:07] Kenshin:
Yeah. But,
[00:11:09] McIntosh:
you know, jump in there. You don't look. Just because you're in there doesn't mean you're gonna have to boost us or zap us or whatever. But your feedback and just you being there saying things will help us. Mhmm. And now we gotta think of a clever name. This is what they always do, Kenshin. Adam and and, Dave, the podcasting 2.0 people, they call their live room the the conference room, the boardroom. So Right. That's and and on the No Agenda show that Adam does with John Dvorak, they call it the troll room. So maybe if we could be somewhere in between the trolls and the suits, I think we'd be good. Right. I don't know. To come up with a nice name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:56] Kenshin:
And and I think it might be as easy as as our audience just clicking on a link. I think it they might not have to do much more than that, actually.
[00:12:07] McIntosh:
I think if you don't wanna, like, import your in pub, I guess you'd have to put it your insec, you know, into the setup. I think it's pretty pretty straightforward. And maybe that's all you wanna do to start with. It'd be great if we knew, well, I don't wanna start it'd be great if we knew who the people were that were in there. Right? So, alright, enough about that, but I think we're both really excited about that. Mhmm.
[00:12:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. And about me, my week has been, unfortunately, a lot of Fiat again. It seems I'm getting busier and busier with my Fiat job. I think I'm working at least nine hours a day for the past few weeks. At least I'm getting paid a bit overtime, but,
[00:12:58] McIntosh:
it's overtime?
[00:13:00] Kenshin:
Yeah. But it's not something I would like to do. So my plan from the start of the the year, as you remember, has been to switch over to more Bitcoin, and, unfortunately, it goes the other direction right now. It's going wrong direction.
[00:13:15] McIntosh:
Not to take this off into a different direction, but you're you're a salaried person. Right?
[00:13:21] Kenshin:
Like Yeah. What does that mean? But you get overtime.
[00:13:24] McIntosh:
What what does that mean? Well, like, you made an agreement with the company when you signed up Yeah. That they would pay you x euros per year. Per month. Whatever x it is. Months. Yeah. Year. Yeah. Right. Per month, per year. And then but now you're saying that when you work extra, you get paid overtime. So The United States, I'm not familiar with a single company that does that. So if your salary, which I am, for example, I get my pay per month, and that's it. It doesn't matter how much I work.
[00:14:03] Kenshin:
Interesting.
[00:14:04] McIntosh:
Yeah. I did not realize so that it sounds so that's normal in Europe. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, demand So I should just move to Europe, get paid overtime, and I could, like, buy the world. It'd be great. Nice. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:14:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I just know that the managers where I work, they don't have that, but they paid a lot more as a salary.
[00:14:27] McIntosh:
Interesting. So but their their they're salaried to eat. They're salaried as well.
[00:14:33] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. But they're expected to work so they're expected to work a lot and travel a lot, the managers, so that's why they get don't get paid overtime. Because when I travel and work overtime, I get paid extra.
[00:14:48] McIntosh:
You get paid, like, from the time you leave the house or the airport? Wow. Interesting. I've never heard of anything like that here. That is definitely different.
[00:15:01] Kenshin:
I didn't realize that. Another exciting news on Bitcoin that I just discovered last week, It's a podcast or an audible called Mysteries of the Bitcoin Citadel. They say that it might be the first,
[00:15:23] McIntosh:
feature
[00:15:24] Kenshin:
talking about. Right? Yeah. You didn't okay. It's a fictional story. Uh-huh. It's a notable, so you just listen to that fictional story. It's Bitcoin related. So I repeat, it's called Mysteries of the Bitcoin Citadel. You find it in the Yeah. Podcasting apps. Right. It's incredible. I really, really like it. The production value is really high. It has so much Bitcoin, yeah,
[00:15:51] McIntosh:
stuff sprinkling. How is that? Right.
[00:15:54] Kenshin:
It's basically, two sisters and their uncle has died or disappeared. Mhmm. And they try to sell his estate, and they discover that he was a Bitcoiner and quite a high level Bitcoiner at that. So he has made his sit at the like that. Yeah. So it's it's quite cool. Very cool. And he left like a mystery for them. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So it's only four episodes out right now. Mhmm. I listened to the first three. Now I'm looking forward to listen to the fourth one that came out two days ago.
[00:16:33] McIntosh:
But, yeah, I recommend it. It's very good. I do have one more thing we need to mention before we actually dive into our content. It is official. I should have put this up in my news. I'm sorry. We do have a lightning note up and running. We have multiple channels open at this point. And right before we started from Podcast Guru, I would I ran a 2,000, 20 one hundred sat boost, that showed up immediately in our system the way it should have, and it's all working. We got Helipad up and running. Thanks to some help with, some help from Eric PP, who is the creator of that program.
It's it's all doing the way that it it should. And someone in the podcasting two point o community was generous enough to open a very large channel with us so that we could actually get this really going. And I appreciate that. I do not know their name, but, just thank you. I doubt they listen to the podcast, but I appreciate it.
[00:17:40] Kenshin:
Alright. So for our subject of the day, it's use your Bitcoin. And we chose this subject because it's circulating around, for a few years, but, also now, very recently, the narrative that we don't use Bitcoin as money as it was intended to be used. We use it more as a speculative asset.
[00:18:08] McIntosh:
Right. Sorry. I wanna make one conjecture before we before we dive into this. If you've been around for more than one cycle, this happens every time the mempool clears out. Like, it's like clockwork. Am am I right, Kenshin? Alright. So the the it's funny because mempool full, everybody's screaming, we gotta build big blocks or whatever. Funny. Bitcoin can't scale. When it's empty, nobody's using Bitcoin for anything, including paying things. Now as someone who just paid their hosting bill with Bitcoin over the Bitcoin main network, I'm a little offended at that, but okay. Let's that's that's where I think this comes from, the fact that the mempool usage kind of fluctuates.
Yeah.
[00:19:02] Kenshin:
And for me, what put an exclamation on that topic was, a Twitter post or an ex post called what you like, from bitcoinnews.com. So their account is at bitcoinnewscom. And they ask a question, when was the last time you paid in Bitcoin? They got 01/1972 votes. You see the results. Right? I'm bringing it up. Never.
[00:19:33] McIntosh:
Can k. If you've never done it, you you're not a Bitcoiner. I'm sorry. You're just not. Yeah. This is So I don't know I don't know who voted, but I I don't see the results. Right? Reasonable frankly, I don't think that's a reasonable poll. I don't think it's a reasonable audience. So this post is not going to Bitcoiners. This post is going to everyone. And so the people who don't Bitcoin, yes, they're jumping in and saying, no. I've never paid with Bitcoin.
[00:20:09] Kenshin:
Should we say their results?
[00:20:11] McIntosh:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely.
[00:20:15] Kenshin:
So the first the first, result is this week. Mhmm. So when was the last time you paid in Bitcoin? This week, eleven point seven percent. This month, five point nine percent. The this year, 11.2%. And it's never never is 71.2%. That's Out of a 200
[00:20:42] McIntosh:
people. Right. I would say that's not a very good poll. It wasn't worded correctly. Yeah. I I don't know. That but yeah. But that forms the This type thing forms the narrative out there. That's why we hear things like people don't use Bitcoin to pay. But let's go back to what Satoshi actually talked about in the white paper. I think that's a really good place to start.
[00:21:12] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. So this from the white paper, and I quote, Bitcoin is a purely peer to peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Mhmm. And the white paper identified key problems with traditional payment system, such as high transaction costs, mediation expenses, inefficiencies of trust based models, requiring middlemen. Right? Mhmm. An ability to make truly nonreversible transactions. And it also mentioned the double spending problem that was an issue with other digital currencies at the time.
So Bitcoin was trying to solve all those things and it successfully did those things while it tries to function as money, as traditional money functions, which usually there are three functions of money. Right? It's a medium of exchange to make transactions. It's a unit of account, so you measure how much value different products and services are have. And it's a store of value, so you preserve your wealth Right. With money. So we see that already that Bitcoin can fulfill all those, things. Maybe unit of account, not so much. It's few things that we have
[00:22:53] McIntosh:
I have already been Bitcoin. That has not happened, and it won't for a long time. The US dollar is the unit of account even though it is obviously going down in value very rapidly.
[00:23:05] Kenshin:
Well, I would argue my Zaps on Noster have a unit of account. There are 21 sets consistently.
[00:23:12] McIntosh:
You can't change that. So that
[00:23:15] Kenshin:
I can't change it. Yeah.
[00:23:17] McIntosh:
Anyways. Yep. Yep.
[00:23:20] Kenshin:
So so that was, so the purpose, and I repeat again, from Satoshi and Bitcoin was to be a peer to peer Mhmm. Method of exchange Right. Of electronic cash. Right? And, yeah, arguably, we don't use it so often as just peer to peer. It's a lot, of course, speculative, or I would say it's more of a store of value right now to try to preserve our our wealth to the future. At least the most, hardcore Bitcoiners say. Right. Yeah. We say to HODL it. Right? Mhmm. Look more long term, preserve the wealth, use it as savings, not not, yeah. We say, of course, not to use it as an investment in that sense, but more as a savings mechanism.
And that's a little bit contrast with using it as as everyday money in that sense, and to pay for things. But we discussed it before, right, that we have lightning now. We have other ways to to pay more easily. There are more services and products out there. So that's the topic for today, to remind maybe a bit people that's Bitcoin can be used to to purchase stuff or or use it as a everyday tool to pay and and fulfill the initial purpose.
[00:24:58] McIntosh:
Yeah. Well, I don't wanna jump ahead. Mhmm. And maybe I'm this is. If it is, then let me know. But I think as a store of value, it has done very well. Yeah. That's so cool. I believe that the reason why it hasn't become a medium of exchange, more so than it is, is that it's essentially a gray area. Right? It's not black and white. In The United States, for years, people didn't know what the status of Bitcoin was. Now we know, it's but but its status as, its status as a commodity means that by default, you get a capital gains tax on it. And maybe those two things aren't related, but maybe I need to backtrack that. Actually, I don't think that's true. But it does have a capital gains tax on it Yeah.
Which does make it extremely difficult to use as a medium of exchange.
[00:26:12] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:26:14] McIntosh:
Until that part is solved, I don't see, frankly, widespread usage as a medium of exchange. I would like to see that. I am doing my part to see that. But at the same time, I try and be logical about these things. The average person isn't going to spend their Bitcoin, even if they replace it, because it makes their taxes more difficult. Right? Mhmm. The average person does what is it called? A w two, and it's very well, relatively simple. And, you know, they go through it. If you start having to claim capital gains, and I have, so I have experience with this, it's not easy.
One year when I was trading to prove that essentially I only made a few dollars, I had to send in 72 pages worth of stuff.
[00:27:14] Kenshin:
Oh.
[00:27:16] McIntosh:
Okay. Can you imagine doing that just to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange? Now you can say, well, it shouldn't be that way, and I'm gonna go do this over on the side and whatever. But that's the reality for most people. They're not gonna do that, and they don't live in jurisdictions like El Salvador, for example, that says that Bitcoin, even though it may not be legal tender, I'm not even sure what the status of that is, but there's no cap gains on it. I don't know. Trump's enough of a wild card that maybe he pulls that out of his hat and says no cap gains on Bitcoin, but I'm also not holding my breath.
Now It was mentioned. Yeah. It's been mentioned. I might look. They mentioned eliminating the IRS. So if they eliminate the IRS, they would have to it it you would have to go to a consumption based tax system. Right? And if you do that, then, yeah, I don't think there'd be cap gains because who's gonna account for that? But I also don't think that's happening. Now I did see that 20,000 people from the IRS had, taken the offer to exit early, so that's always a good thing. But I don't see the IRS shutting down. Now one question I have for you, Kinshen, is do you think that I'm sure that Satoshi is still around.
Do you think that he is unhappy about that, or do you think that this is how he saw it working? I think people don't take into account governments, and I don't Yeah. It's so obvious to me. I don't know. Maybe I get hung up on this, but do you think that he's mad about that? Or or he would Yeah. Like, he or she would like to see something different, or or maybe they're overworking on Bitcoin 2.0 and we're just not aware of
[00:29:19] Kenshin:
it. Right. Now, well, it's it's hard to to assume. Right? But I would my my feeling, personal feeling, is that he would be unhappy with the current state because Bitcoin was made to give an alternative path to traditional finance system. And now Bitcoin is integrating more and more into the traditional finance system and Wall Street and and now the governments. So, of course, Bitcoin was designed to be free for everybody to use as they saw fit in that sense. But still, we use it I mean, Bitcoin is affected by the same issues, like the fiat system is affected. Right. Right? All those news and it goes up and down with the, with the stock market in the same direction, in the same way, and same intensity.
So that you would I assume he would be unhappy with, but I guess those are the early steps. We are so early steps. Right.
[00:30:21] McIntosh:
And that would be my argument. Right? Yeah. Until you get widespread adoption, there's no other way for this to work out. Yeah. Governments are going to become involved, and I think he realized that. And when they get involved, they're the big gorilla in the room. Now the nice thing about Bitcoin is it does enable you to protest essentially. Oh, I'm growing up here, and I don't like here because of x, y, and z. I can take 12 words in my head and walk across the border and start a new life.
[00:30:57] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I mean, the the basis, function, you can still use it, Bitcoin, as it was meant to be on individual basis. So if you ignore the the fiat system and the stock market, what they do with it Yeah. Exactly. You can still use it in that way, have it in cold storage with your, so what, 12 words, exchange it peer to peer with other people to buy goods and services directly with Bitcoin. So no capital gains involved either. So, yes, you can use it in those ways. Which I see it's been manipulated a bit now, which is not very pleasant in that way, but it's inevitable, I guess.
[00:31:40] McIntosh:
You've got some interesting statistics here.
[00:31:44] Kenshin:
Right. Yeah. Sorry. Yes. Those are some statistics. We're trying to see the global adoption metrics, as of March 2025. Of course, those are, taken from the Internet, from various sources. So we see that approximately 4% of the world's population holds some sort of Bitcoin. In The United States, around 14% of adults own Bitcoin, which to me sounds quite big, actually. That's a percentage. According to security.org, approximately 28% of American adults hold,
[00:32:33] McIntosh:
crypto in general. Now that's an interesting so it doubles from the ones who own Bitcoin to the ones who own Yeah. Crypto, meaning there's 14% of America who owns crypto but not Bitcoin. Right. Those people are are in for some serious crime. I will also want to point out, ladies and gentlemen, not to be a Homer, but if 14% of America owns Bitcoin and 4% of the world population owns Bitcoin, maybe y'all need to get off your duff and start buying Bitcoin. I mean, I'm just gonna throw that out there. You do not, by the way, have to buy Bitcoin in $85,000 chunks or whatever it is right now, right? You can buy $5 worth. You can buy $10 worth. You can buy $1 worth.
And if you can only afford to buy a dollar's worth, I would argue that you are better off in Bitcoin than probably whatever your local currency is because there's a reason you can only buy 1 dollar's worth. It's your currency. It's your economic system that you're in. So do what you can to get out of that system, and it begins with Bitcoin and holding it for the long term.
[00:33:59] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Right. And another point, I would say is that a lot of those people are probably holding, Bitcoin in exchanges. Right? Yeah. Coinbase.
[00:34:14] McIntosh:
So Coinbase gets hacked. You know, these numbers all get changed.
[00:34:18] Kenshin:
Yeah. So that's also something to consider. Not your keys, not your coin.
[00:34:25] McIntosh:
Now this last stat you have here is very interesting. 14% of non owners plan to buy crypto in 2025. Now again, it says crypto, not Bitcoin. So it's probably half and half, But Yeah. That's the percentage in 2025 this year who plan to buy. So that number is actually going to go up, obviously.
[00:34:49] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Well and some will get wrecked from Yes. They will. Other 14 and then
[00:34:57] McIntosh:
The ones who buy Bitcoin and don't sell it won't, but that's a different story. Well, no. It's not a different story. It's the same story. Actually, the ones who buy Bitcoin and don't sell it will not get wrecked.
[00:35:09] Kenshin:
I would say the crypto holders are pre Bitcoiners.
[00:35:14] McIntosh:
A lot of them are pre But they will
[00:35:16] Kenshin:
yeah. But they will need to spend some time Yes. Yeah, in between.
[00:35:23] McIntosh:
I started with Bitcoin, but then I went off and do other things. So I I know, because, man, those arguments were so persuasive back in the day. Well, Bitcoin is just a medium a store of value. Over here, we're gonna build virtual machines and put contracts on them and do all kinds of nifty stuff, and what you end up with is a pile of messy code and hacks that happen left and right. That's what you end up with. Right. Or people gaming the system, pre mining, etcetera, etcetera. Actually, not or. It's that's included. They never talk about that. Even Ethereum, 70 percent of the Ethereum was pre mined.
That's crazy. That I that's I if I would have heard that, I never would have bought Ethereum from day one. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But they covered that up somehow. I don't know when I first heard that, but I guarantee you, it wasn't when I was buying Ethereum back when it was only a few dollars.
[00:36:31] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. Okay. Then we want to talk then about some ways that, Yeah. To how to use Bitcoin. Right. Right? Some practical ways.
[00:36:46] McIntosh:
How can you help these numbers? Yes. Let's do that.
[00:36:49] Kenshin:
So, of course, the the easiest way is to just do some, I would say peer to peer. Right? Like, send some Bitcoin to a friend or I I have done that many times, so someone pays for me, and then I send Bitcoin.
[00:37:06] McIntosh:
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
[00:37:09] Kenshin:
The other way around is also very good. I bought, I remember two PCs. I gave one to a friend for a node. Mhmm. He paid me in Bitcoin. Right. So that's good because, like, that is, like, for me also indirectly buying Bitcoin in a way. So I like that. I spend my fiat money. I bought something physical. I sold it off. I got Bitcoin back. So in in some way, that's also good. In other ways, it's also good to spend that or or send that to a friend. It's also very convenient on a Saturday night, for example, with lightning. It's super fast and easy to just send send some Bitcoin around without having to wait for, yeah, the banks to be open or something like that.
Then I would say you can also do direct payments with Bitcoin wallets.
[00:38:06] McIntosh:
K.
[00:38:08] Kenshin:
There are, like, the Cash App, like, you can buy, Bitcoin and then buy other things
[00:38:17] McIntosh:
without Bitcoin. Can I say this? I'm not a fan of Cash App. Okay. They have a restriction. I just just in full disclosure, like, you can buy however much Bitcoin, but you can't you can only transfer, like, dollars 2,000 a day out of it. So if I buy if I have one Bitcoin on Cash App, how long is that gonna take me to transfer it out of Cash App? Is it your Bitcoin, or is it Cash App's Bitcoin? And I like this jack. This is, Strike.
[00:38:50] Kenshin:
No.
[00:38:51] McIntosh:
Uh-huh. No. That's a jack, yeah. Yeah. Nostra jack. Jack from Sorry. Yeah. From Twitter. Twitter. TwitterJack. Right? This is I I like the guy, but man, this is dressed up. Well, it's mine. It's not hard.
[00:39:07] Kenshin:
Those are fiat limits.
[00:39:09] McIntosh:
You know what? I'm sure that you're right, but I I do wanna point it out. I I because that's I'm not okay with that, personally. And I have Cash App, by the way. I don't use it to buy Bitcoin, but I I do have
[00:39:26] Kenshin:
it. But there are plenty of apps, I would say. We don't have to list them all, actually. And we should as you say, we should be careful to list specific apps because you never know what happens in the future. Right. If you don't want people to go to an app and then something happens. Would strike be an example of what you're talking about here?
[00:39:45] McIntosh:
Yeah. I mean, Strike I use Strike. I will promote Strike until they do something stupid, and then I will say, don't use strike. I'm not gonna use it, then this is why. I Yeah. This is why look. Not to get off track, but this is why we don't take sponsorships. Cash App is not paying us. Strike is not paying us. None of these companies are. Yeah. So we can talk about this stuff, and people know where we're coming from. There's nothing being hidden here. So Mhmm. Yeah. Strike, in in my opinion, is the better app, frankly.
[00:40:15] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's my favorite app, actually. And it's the only app I use right now to to buy Bitcoin and and do some transfers. So you can buy directly things. Oh, there are also a lot of merchants now that accept Bitcoin, from small merchants that you find on Oster to big merchants. So some of those stores you might know, like, Home Depot Home Depot. Apparently apparently, they added Bitcoin payment option. Whole Foods, Starbucks, do you accept Bitcoin through speed Speden?
[00:40:54] McIntosh:
I don't know what that app is. That's intriguing. I do go to Starbucks, unfortunately. I'll have to look that up. So the new company signed up? That was a long time when Newegg started taking big. Right? And then Overstock as well. Overstock.com. Now Tesla did, and then they stopped. And he said, well, when it gets to 50% renewable energy, Elon Musk, but we'll start taking you in. It is well above that at this point. The last I saw, which was months ago, it was at 56%. Talking about the mining energy. Yeah. So I'm waiting for Tesla to put that back on their website. Not that I'm buying a Tesla, mind you, but, they've got some pretty nice driving software these days. But yeah. Anyway.
Mhmm. Okay?
[00:41:49] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we have some, Bitcoin debit cards. I never used one of them. I wanted to use in the past, but there are, like, a coin based card.
[00:42:01] McIntosh:
Is crypto.com even still around?
[00:42:04] Kenshin:
Crypto.com. Yeah. Okay.
[00:42:06] McIntosh:
It is. I would add Fold to this list, by the way. Fold. Yeah. I think it's Fold.com.
[00:42:13] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:42:14] McIntosh:
They're doing things along this line.
[00:42:18] Kenshin:
Yeah. So you can have an account with Bitcoin and have a a usual debit card in your hands and go to a store, pay with that debit card, and it automatically does the exchange in in the background, from Bitcoin to Fiat, and essentially the merchant gets Fiat. So you pay wherever you pay normally with a debit card. So that's quite cool. Okay. And I never use it because in Europe, it's not so easy to find those. It's different rules. And in the end, I never got into it to really find the European card if it exists. What else do we have?
[00:43:04] McIntosh:
Using Bitcoin for international transfers is could be a huge use case because people don't realize how much, like, Western Union gets used for for transferring money around. And they charge, like, $23 to wire somebody money, and it's just nuts. Whereas I can go on strike, send somebody Bitcoin, and, and it's basically free. I'm think that you're getting the ability to send US dollars around as well these days. Now don't quote me on that, but because of the stuff that they're doing with what With Tether. With Tether, I think that that ability is being added.
[00:43:49] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. That's right. And it's a lot of, Jack Mallers was talking about it. A lot of Asian countries and African countries, they use they use that function to send around around money instead of, as you said, Western Union. Right. So it's much cheaper. It's faster, and you present the the wealth much better also. The amount of
[00:44:14] McIntosh:
money that Western Union makes off of remittances, which are what these are called, is staggering. I mean, it's just it's billions of dollars, billions and billions and billions of dollars. Mhmm. Plus, well, we've talked I have talked about this in the past prior to you being on, so I don't wanna go into this too much. But, yeah, lot of lot of stuff there.
[00:44:40] Kenshin:
Yeah. Of course, we talked in the past about Lightning, right? So there is a lot of Lightning use cases, more and more services come up and accept Lightning payments. I use now a VPN service. I pay with Lightning super fast. A few other use cases, what do we have? Oh no, I'm sorry, yes. There is like ln. Pizza, you can order a Domino's pizza with lightning, which is crazy. Sorry.
[00:45:20] McIntosh:
I'm just thinking of the the it wasn't Domino's. It was Papa John's, the 20 it was some ungodly amount of Bitcoin that the dude paid the Papa John's pizzas. Yeah. The the the first one, you mean? Right. We've talked about that. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, he spent, like, 10,000 pizzas. I know. It was a lot. It was a huge it was a lot. And, eventually, he will look back and say the same thing. But what we always talk about, if you're spending this money, it it's not your savings. It's your spendings. You need to make sure that your savings is going up, right? And then it doesn't matter what it is ten years from now or twenty years from now, because you replaced it.
Does that make sense? So you don't worry about, oh, I spent 500 sats on a Domino's pizza, and now I can get one for five. I mean, hypothetically, that's possible. I don't think I don't think that's true anytime soon, but crazy things. I mean, I'm just saying.
[00:46:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, it's always like that. And we will look back now that we're we're zapping on Nostr twenty one sats for good morning notes. I mean, that that would look crazy in twenty years time. So Right. What what can you do? As long as you you earn or you stack more sales than you spend, I think that's that's fine. Right? That's the whole purpose of it, to use it now.
[00:46:54] McIntosh:
I think this next section is one that's very underutilized at this point. Does that make sense? Yeah. This microtransaction use case. And I would love to see maybe a lot of Internet content incorporated where you pay some sats to access the site, as long as it's not too much. Because I hate as long as they didn't have ads. I hate ads on the Internet. And I know you can do all kinds of things to block, and I don't play those games. I don't. I just I don't. I would rather pay 10 sats to access the site with no ads. I mean, that I would do it. I'd do it in a heartbeat. That those type things, and you've got a number here you can talk about certainly, but, you know, these are, I think, very underutilized, frankly.
[00:47:52] Kenshin:
Yeah. I mean, the the easiest example is right now, like, we we are on a podcast 2.0 app. Right? Right. They can zap us, some stats for for, for the episode and, before leaving comments. Zap us.
[00:48:09] McIntosh:
Can you explain that, please? Yes. Go into your Gountain app, ladies and gentlemen, or your Podcast Guru and do what McIntosh did right before we started and boost the show.
[00:48:22] Kenshin:
And leave a comment. Leave a comment.
[00:48:25] McIntosh:
Come straight to our lightning node, and we'll see it in helipad.
[00:48:29] Kenshin:
Yep. So that's great. Apps like that. Also similar to a Reddit app. It's called Stacker News. Mhmm. So you can write articles and have discussions and zap each other. Zap the articles or even the comments under the I like Stacker News a lot. I wish I used it more. I don't, but yeah. Yeah. I'm going to I go on and off on Stacker News. I forget about it for a while and then go back on. There are other services. One is called Sphinx Chat. It's a pay per minute service. I haven't used it. So but there is a lot of ways like that with lightning, especially now that you can just stream sets, in real time, also like Fountain again to listen to an episode and just keep streaming some sets. Mhmm.
What's next? Then we have, some bigger ways to use, Bitcoin. Mhmm. They're they're starting to be more and more banking, services. So you could actually, get a loan based on your Bitcoin. So you you put your Bitcoin in, yeah, I don't know how it's called. Yeah. In in in one of those, services.
[00:49:56] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:49:57] Kenshin:
And you you get fiat back as a loan and Bitcoin stays how is it called in English? It stays as a collateral.
[00:50:07] McIntosh:
Oh, collateral. Yeah. Sorry.
[00:50:09] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. So you could, I heard some some ways that, people have taken a loan with Bitcoin when they thought Bitcoin was low, and and they really thought Bitcoin would go higher. So they would get a loan, and it would work out quite good for them. Of course, it's a bit risky. It is.
[00:50:31] McIntosh:
Yeah. It's it's it Bitcoin is volatile. We all know that. Even in a bull market, it can drop quite a bit. And then the bear market can be here before you know it or realize it, and then it can be even worse. So you need to be careful about those things. But if you're over, I would say over collateralized, like if I had, well, frankly, if I had a hundred Bitcoin and I was looking to do some stuff, I don't wanna sell my Bitcoin. I could use it as collateral to take out a loan, but that loan is not gonna be a a quarter of of that value. Does that make sense?
[00:51:15] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that's what they do. And Stripe started their Bitcoin backed loan. Right? And they tried. They don't do a quarter, but closer to half, but still. Mhmm. I would be cautious
[00:51:28] McIntosh:
about half because we, you know and and Jack, and bless his heart, I love Jack's podcast, Right, Jack Maller's? But he'll get on there and say, well, you just top it off. And I'm like, I don't wanna top it off. I don't wanna have to worry about it. And he's talking about that very case. Oh, you borrowed against half of it, half the value of it right now, and it dropped 50%. So you've gotta put money on there, or you lose your Bitcoin. That's what that means. That's not a good situation in my opinion. Mhmm. Each year So
[00:52:07] Kenshin:
so I I would say we're a bit early with those. There we just mentioned that it's possible Yes. To get a loan based on Bitcoin, Do a lot of research before, a lot of calculations to to be if you really need to do that. I wouldn't do it yet, actually. But I I follow the the progress because I think it's gonna be very useful in the future.
[00:52:32] McIntosh:
If you have a decent amount of Bitcoin, I would hold on to it for the next four years and then start thinking about that, frankly. Because if it's 10x where it is now, your decent amount of Bitcoin has now become a lot of money, and you might start thinking about these things. Right now, you're probably doing what we would say, putting the cart in front of the horse. Okay? Does that it's an expression. Sorry. I don't normally use expressions like that, but it means that your jump you I'm gonna say another expression. You're jumping the gun.
Yeah. I mean, it's too soon. Okay? It's too soon. just wait. Your time is coming. But there's good reasons to borrow against that if you have the right capital. It's because you don't pay to cap gains on that when you do that. You're taking a loan against it, your own collateral. You don't pay cap gains like you would normally if you sold Bitcoin. And then, of course, what happens if Bitcoin goes higher or whatever? So there are financial benefits to that. Let me put it that way before I get myself in too much trouble, but you have to be very careful.
[00:53:50] Kenshin:
Yeah. Alright. Good. Yeah. One last thing I would mention is, gift cards. Okay. So there are services like, I'm sorry. Did I get, did you bring the virus to me now?
[00:54:11] McIntosh:
That would be a trick if I did.
[00:54:13] Kenshin:
Yes, sir. So there is I don't know if you know the service Bitrefill. I think there are others like that. Mhmm. So you could, quite easily exchange some Bitcoin for gift cards. And usually, they have very good categorization that you you find gift cards for your country. So I have looked, and for Sweden, they have so many gift cards for so many stores. So I could, put fuel in my car with a gift card. I could buy groceries, A lot of mobile services. So I could live just with gift cards in Sweden for Is it like a preloaded
[00:54:54] McIntosh:
Visa card or is it it's for that specific store. Right? It's for a specific store. Yes.
[00:55:00] Kenshin:
So it's literally a gift card for a store. Right. And you load it with Bitcoin and you get fiat on on that card. So Yep. Go and use it and no one knows you loaded it up with Bitcoin Right. When you use it in the store. So it's great.
[00:55:15] McIntosh:
Very cool.
[00:55:17] Kenshin:
And of course, the last last thing I would mention is you can always sell some of your Bitcoin, pay the capital gains. Ketchan?
[00:55:26] McIntosh:
I can't believe you said that. No.
[00:55:29] Kenshin:
But people who say what's what can I do with it? You can always do that also.
[00:55:34] McIntosh:
You know, I would I would give this as a reference. Seed Sider, the guy the guy behind the Seed Sider project. Right. When he came on the podcast, he told us a story that he he sold basically his stack to pay the mortgage off on his house. And this was a number of years ago. So I don't know how much it was, but it was a fair amount of Bitcoin. Not I don't know what his mortgage was, but it was it was a fair number of big he says he does not regret that. Different people have different circumstances. He doesn't regret it because of the peace of mind it gave him knowing his house was paid off. Okay. Now, am I going to do that?
No. I'm not. Let's be honest. But it is an option.
[00:56:27] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yep. So I think that concludes our discussion. There are ways to use Bitcoin. And Okay. You can always, yeah, search online based on what you think. And I whatever you think, is your use case, there is already a solution for it Yes. With Bitcoin.
[00:56:51] McIntosh:
Yes. And I think we're gonna be talking about this more and more over the coming years. Mhmm. K? So we had some support this week. I wanted to jump on into this. Send it, Mike. Send us a boost on Fountain, And we've got the message here. Send it. To be honest, the boost did not get to us because we were I didn't have that second channel set up. So that's not a big deal. I just wanted to let you know. But we got your message. Gotta get you back on track. You're explaining the reason for our government debt is due to a trade deficit, which that is essentially what I was saying last week. They aren't hand in hand.
Take for instance, Japan. They ran a trade surplus from 1980 until 02/2008, but accumulated a debt to GDP of a 80%. If the government spends more than they bring in, it's a deficit, and they accumulate ever more debt. Our trade balance isn't directly related to it all. I agree. I simplified. It is not directly related, but I would argue, at least in my opinion, that it is part of it. I think a large part of it. I think it also has side things that happen because of it. Essentially, you're telling people in The United States position, frankly, we're gonna print money and give it to you for your real items.
Ultimately, that doesn't work. People wake up and say, Nope, we're not doing that. You cannot give us something that you just printed for our CPU or whatever it is that they're building. So we may just look at this differently, send it Mike, and that's okay. I probably overemphasized the trade deficit in all of this, but frankly, it's a very serious issue for The United States. Alright? And then we well, no. I want you to do the next one.
[00:58:58] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we have the friend of the show, Bullish Clips. Mhmm. He he boosts us with 420 sats. Thank you very much. And he says, thank you for the mention, Kenshin. And that was when I mentioned him, on the episode, right, about his, Cashew wallet. Right. So he continues, you can check out the Bullish Cashew PWA wallet here, and it's a link, bullishnuts.cash. And I have to say it's a really good, good wallet. I I tried it. That was what I mentioned also last last week. Yeah? Let me mention one thing real quick.
[00:59:38] McIntosh:
A PWA is a progressive web app, and that means it's like, I could run it on my desktop, on a Mac. You could run it on Linux. You could run it on Windows. Right? I think you can even run it on a phone. I'm not a % certain about it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You install it actually on the phone through the browser. Oh, okay. Very well, maybe not on iOS. I don't know that they allow that. I think you can now. That's interesting. I'd like to try that. I'll probably give that a try just because. Yeah. Okay. Cool.
[01:00:10] Kenshin:
One thing to consider, right, it's that this those top type of PWA app, apps, they they use a local storage of the phone, of the browser. Yes. So if you reset the browser, that storage goes away Mhmm. And you will lose that,
[01:00:29] McIntosh:
those funds that are on the But that would not be good. No.
[01:00:34] Kenshin:
Alright. So that's that's something to consider. And then she continues, and Macintosh was right. I did mention the shop in a previous boost. Since then, I've I've built my own custom site and migrated there. Check that out at the bullish.shop. Yep. Really good name, actually. Yep.
[01:00:53] McIntosh:
Well done. Very cool. Thank you, Bullish Clips. Appreciate that. Yep. Thank you. Alright. We got a few news items. Let's roll through these, and then we'll wrap it up.
[01:01:04] Kenshin:
Right. We have the biggest news this week is that Bitcoin Core is up to version 29.
[01:01:12] McIntosh:
Point zero. Yep.
[01:01:14] Kenshin:
Yeah. 29. And that brings ephemeral dust, enhanced off or fan handling, CMake, and more.
[01:01:24] McIntosh:
Do you know what ephemeral dust is?
[01:01:29] Kenshin:
I'm not sure, but if I would guess, is that the the dust the small amounts of of Bitcoin? Yeah. I would think Yeah. It's a tie yeah. It says here, an ephemeral dust output is a tiny transaction output below the DASD limit producing v three zero fee transaction and consuming a following v three transaction. Yeah. So essentially is is, UTXOs that are too small to spend again. So this now version brings a solution to to that. That's quite surprising.
[01:02:04] McIntosh:
I had a interesting this is why okay. Sorry. I had an interesting thing happen when I paid my hosting fees. This is one of the reasons you should be doing transactions on a regular basis. I constructed my transaction in Sparrow, like I always do. Sparrow wallet's great. When I built the transaction, it showed 11 inputs, and this was for maybe a 3 maybe $400 order. Okay? It was around $400 It pulled from 11 transactions. Now I don't and they all came from my mining pool, Ocean. I'm just gonna go ahead and give you some figures. I maybe I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to. It came from Ocean. Ocean has a limit. You have to get to point one Bitcoin. No. Is that right? No. Point o one. One percent of a Bitcoin before you send it out over the main net. It's different if you use Lightning, which I think they have set up, but I I just do it over the main net. Okay? Oh, it's a hundred thousand sat. So it pulled it's a hundred no. Hundred thousand sat. Oh, it's a million sat. It's a million. No.
So it pulled eleven, one million sat UTXOs to make this one that was far less than that. And it freaked me out. I'm like, what is going on? It was essentially doing some consolidating because, I think, because fees were low. Because remember, I had set it to 1.02 or whatever, whatever it was that I set it to. And even though I paid a little bit more for that transaction, first of all, before I sent it out, I verified the output going to, KaboomRacks, in this case, was the proper amount. It was, like, 300,000, Satoshis or whatever.
Okay? So I knew that I wasn't losing anything. I sent the transaction out, then I went back and looked at my UTXOs. And sure enough, it it consolidated everything into one UTXO. So it was managing that on the back end, which on the one hand, I like, but you gotta expect that kind of thing if it's programmed in, and you need to be looking for it. Does that make sense?
[01:04:31] Kenshin:
Yeah. Of course. If you do it with Sparrow, you can choose specific UTXO source to to send for the transactionals.
[01:04:38] McIntosh:
Yeah. You can. Mine this is my mining stuff, and it's I'm not worried about that kind of thing. This is all there's just no way. It's it's all it's all tracked. It's all there. Right? So, yeah, you're correct. It's very flexible. But in this case, I just basically said, I need 300,000 sets, and it went and put 11 different previous transactions or whatever into that as input because it wanted to consolidate them all as one output. Yeah. It was a nice little output, by the way.
[01:05:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. Okay. Match. Yeah. And you're right. 1,000,000 such is the minimum threshold. Yeah. On those here. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Okay. So Bitcoin core version 29.
[01:05:32] McIntosh:
Right.
[01:05:34] Kenshin:
I will not update to it currently. No. I will wait a couple of weeks. I just checked. I'm actually running 27
[01:05:41] McIntosh:
o one or something something like that. Yeah. But I'm not looking to move anytime soon. There's just Mhmm. I don't like rushing into that kind of thing.
[01:05:49] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly.
[01:05:50] McIntosh:
Alright. Next one. Next
[01:05:52] Kenshin:
big news is LNBits finally, came to the stable version one point zero zero. So LNBits is a great, a great, service platform for creating, lightning, yeah, connecting to your lightning node, creating lightning wallets with it Mhmm. Creating your own Lightning wallets and your families and, connecting your domains and doing a lot of advanced stuff with Lightning.
[01:06:23] McIntosh:
This little dev kit, if you wanna call it that, gets used in a lot of other products. So it's it's really good to see that they consider it to be stable now and prod ready. I think it was already used, frankly. So Yeah. It was. But now they consider it,
[01:06:38] Kenshin:
hardened and production ready. Right. And they're say that this is after five years and over 6,000 commits.
[01:06:47] McIntosh:
Alright. And then the last one, I'm gonna go ahead and do this one. BTC pay server. So if you happen to be running that in your shop or something like that, there is a new version, v 2.1, new multisig setup with, fee acceleration and other items as well. So we got a great question this week, Kenshin. Why don't you go ahead and ask that?
[01:07:10] Kenshin:
Yeah. So in the theme of today's, episode, so the question is, what everyday purchase would you be most comfortable making with Bitcoin today? And what changes would you like to see before you consider using more of your Bitcoin for daily transactions?
[01:07:28] McIntosh:
Next week, you and I are gonna answer this question on the air, by the way. I'm Yes. Put you on the spot. We're gonna do that. Let's not forget that. There is one news item I wanted to discuss that we didn't cover. Do you happen to have it in front of you, the Swedish news?
[01:07:45] Kenshin:
Oh, right. So Swedish, some members of, political parties. Actually, there were two different members of two different parties that they had the same request to create a Bitcoin reserve in Sweden. And they send a letter to the parliament to discuss it and get a decision.
[01:08:09] McIntosh:
And the decision will come, I think, April 24 or something like that. So at this point, it seems that The United States has a strategic Bitcoin reserve. We are not putting money into it at this point. That is still being discussed. If that happens, I think that will only accelerate the adoption of nations getting Bitcoin reserves. I do not think this will be the last country to get Bitcoin, a Bitcoin reserve set up. If they do so, now this may go nowhere, but I will give you an example. Bhutan. I saw a news article. I'll try and find it to put in the show notes. They've been mining Bitcoin for years. They've done it on the down low, and until it came out in the court case, Sam Bankman Fried, I think, wackadoodle over there at whatever he, ran, which I don't even remember because it was obvious it was a scam.
Anyways, they they've got a lot of Bitcoin. 1 of the things that they've already done is doubled their civil service salaries of their government officials. Woah. Yep. You're going to see this stuff. They actually own more SATs per citizen than any other country. Little old Bhutan. That's crazy. Did you know that?
[01:09:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's, it's, funny. We're saying with, I had a discussion with some Swedish Bitcoiners, and they're saying, yeah, Sweden will be last. It Or we were to pay them. Think you'll be last.
[01:10:02] McIntosh:
Yeah. Let's see where drag your feet, but there will be someone who will be behind you. France. I don't know. I should keep my mouth shut, but I'm gonna offend everyone. Well, at least they they started to catch states listen to this podcast. I don't understand. And Bhutan. Bhutan loves me.
[01:10:24] Kenshin:
You've been ambassador in Bhutan.
[01:10:28] McIntosh:
Oh, man. That's ridiculous.
[01:10:33] Matt Johner:
Oh.
[01:10:35] McIntosh:
Oh, sorry. Yeah. We'll just have to see how all this plays out, but I have a feeling you won't be last. But, yeah, I think you're I don't think this is it either. I'll be honest. I don't.
[01:10:48] Kenshin:
No. It's, I think they just follow the trends right now. But, it's gonna take a lot more to to really do a real Bitcoin reserve in Sweden
[01:10:59] McIntosh:
than any of those Nordic countries. Your seed signer in your sparrow wallet set up, people. Come on. Let's go. Here.
[01:11:07] Kenshin:
I can't I can't help them set it up. Just call me. 1 Bitcoin.
[01:11:12] McIntosh:
Yeah. Alright. Let's wrap this up. I'm not gonna make a big deal out of this. You've already heard why we are the way we are. We don't do sponsors and that kind of thing. We do depend on the listeners to boost the show, to stream stats, and now we have a system. Not only do we not have a middleman, but we can see in real time what's actually going on. And both of us have access to that even though Kenshin hasn't had time to do that, but that's okay. So that's it. We do ask that you support the show. Tell people about the show. We've had our numbers going up, and we would love for that trend to continue. Honestly, just tell somebody, hey. This is a show. They've been around for three years. The dude just said he's not going anywhere, so they're not gonna pack it up next week.
Might even get us through the next cycle. We'll see. I don't know. When Bitcoin gets to 10,000,000, I'm not making any promises. Alright? But we're a long way from 10,000,000. So, you know, that's it. That's what we got.
[01:12:21] Kenshin:
Yeah. Just to remember, spend some such
[01:12:24] McIntosh:
Yeah. And I think here This question, I think, is very appropriate this week. So, again, what everyday purchases would you be most comfortable making with Bitcoin today, and what changes would need to happen for you to consider using Bitcoin for the majority of your daily transactions. I really wanna hear your input on that. And I think it's going to vary depending on location. And I can almost predict what they're gonna say, but I won't because maybe I'll be wrong. Alright?
[01:12:55] Kenshin:
Yep. So Thank you for this week. Yep. Thank you, Macintosh. You're welcome. And, see you in no start.
[01:13:03] McIntosh:
Alright. We'll talk to you all soon. One last thing. Sorry. This week, starting this week, when the music plays, which it will play as soon as I shut up, and you boost or you stream, that money will go to the artist, not to us. We are supporting these value for value musicians like Matt. So now it's on you. Alright? Thanks, everyone.
[01:13:31] Kenshin:
Yeah. Enjoy. Bye bye.
[01:13:43] Matt Johner:
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,
[01:14:11] Matt Johner:
yeah. I found faith and I found love, 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. Twenty years are gone. Boy, you'll get there sure enough. But you're still too young for growing up. 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, or you'll get there sure enough. Get here sure enough. You're just too young. Yeah. You're still too young
[01:16:53] Matt Johner:
for
[01:16:58] Matt Johner:
growing up.
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is April, and this is episode 205 of Satoshi's Plebs. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:09] Kenshin:
I am Kenshin, and today's episode is Use Your Bitcoin.
[00:00:23] Matt Johner:
My old man's old man sat down and got to talking. He said this whole life won't roll away, won't it? Lots of curve balls could go out swinging. Use your head, but don't overthink it. So listen when I sing.
[00:00:48] McIntosh:
Yeah.
[00:00:50] Matt Johner:
I found
[00:00:52] McIntosh:
Alright. Thanks, Kenshin. You guys you're gonna have to bear with me today. I as you can probably tell already, I have a cold, and, I also still have a problem with my setup, which is my problem at this point. I kind of understand what's well, I do understand what's going on, but the reality is I didn't have time to fix it before we started recording. So that's life. We're gonna make do. I'm gonna keep my hands off the keyboard today, and we're gonna move on. Our Bitcoin price at time of recording, April 16th 2025, $83,750 USDs.
[00:01:28] Kenshin:
Or €73,650.
[00:01:32] McIntosh:
And the price last, April 16 was $63,702. So we're definitely up compared to that if you wanna look at it that way. Alright. So we've got the various market caps. Could you do that, sir?
[00:01:50] Kenshin:
Right. So we're looking at the market cap of Bitcoin at $1,700,000,000,000 and the gold's market cap at $23,200,000,000,000, which bring Bitcoin to 7.1%, of gold's market cap. And I saw on the previous notes from last week, gold was at, 20,800,000,000,000, and today's 23.2.
[00:02:18] McIntosh:
So Yes. We jumped quite a bit in the, in the last, in the last few days. Yeah.
[00:02:26] Kenshin:
So, yeah, we're down to low 7%
[00:02:30] McIntosh:
for Bitcoin versus gold market. Considering starting a gold podcast. Is that correct, Kinshen? Yeah. That's accurate. We'll ride the wave. No. I'm just kidding. Sorry. I did not. The block height as we record is 892,712. Right now, we've got a difficulty adjustment that would be 1.72 if it happened right now. And, of course, that is the minor difficulty adjustment is what happens to keep things. It's the adjustment that's made to keep things at roughly ten minutes per block, and that is going to be adjusted on April. So it's only a couple of days from now. And, if you remember, our last adjustment was 6.81%.
So this one's quite a bit less. So the growth is slowing. I have some theories about that. I think it involves tariffs, frankly. Do you would you want me to expand on that? I don't know if we've got time, can't you? Well, I would also say that previous 6.8%
[00:03:36] Kenshin:
is a huge increase of difficulty. So No doubt. That is not sustainable to keep that. But, But, yeah, please
[00:03:44] McIntosh:
expand and why I think that tariffs are hurting, the deployment of miners. These miners don't keep, you know, thousands of units sitting around because they're super expensive, and and all your capital is tied up. Basically, their goal as soon as they get a unit is to plug it in, and then they get the money for the next unit, and they plug that in and so on and so forth. So you can see where this is going. We're in a trade war with China. Let's just admit it. I think the last figure I saw, Kenshin, this is crazy. I think our tariffs against China are 245%, which is just insanity.
But that's where we're at. And because of that, people don't there's a lot of units that are not coming into The United States. You know, that's not saying they won't be deployed, but I do think it does affect the growth, if that makes sense. It's also news that even some Boeing airplanes were not being delivered now from China for that reason. Why are they building Boeing airplanes in China? That sounds like a really bad idea to me. I'm just I look. I'm sorry. I whatever. Let's just move on before I turn into old man Macintosh. Excuse.
Yeah. So let's jump into the mempool, sir, and see if it's important.
[00:05:10] Kenshin:
So we have low, medium, high priority transactions at two sats per vbyte Mhmm. Which that would be, at current dollar prices at $0.24 Right. Cost for doing a single transaction in Bitcoin. So that's very low. The mempool is also quite empty at 25 megabytes right now, and 7,500 transactions pending.
[00:05:40] McIntosh:
I wanna inject something here real quick. So I had to pay some hosting bills, which is, you know, that's a normal thing with me. Last night night before last, I don't know. It doesn't matter. It's all a haze of this cold I've got going on. When I went to go do it, it was actually 33 and 3. And I set my transaction to 1.25. I didn't set it to one sat per vByte, but I did set it to 1.25, and it was picked up almost immediately. So even though these things are you're you're seeing it bounce between 123, Unless there's just a real need for you to get a transaction out the next block, my recommendation will be to set it right above one or even one and just wait. It'll get through.
Right. So what's new with you, McIntosh? You sound a bit sick, but otherwise Yeah. No. We went to a conference last week. I don't know if I mentioned sorry. I don't know if I mentioned that we were gonna be doing that. I cannot recall, but my wife and I went to a conference up in Saint Louis. We visited the the city of Saint Louis up in Missouri. And somewhere along the way, I probably shook hands with somebody and gained their cold or whatever this is. I I did not work yesterday, and I was telling Kenshin before the podcast started recording.
I don't look. This frustrates my wife to know when. She's much healthier than I am. She eats the right things. She exercises more than I do, and I'm not as good about that as as she is, frankly. And yet, I never get sick. But when I well, never. I get sick, like, literally maybe twice a year, probably less than that on average. But when I do, man, it's a doozy. I spent all day yesterday sleeping, which is very unusual for me. I mean, y'all know I don't get a whole lot of sleep, and alls I did yesterday, I think I was awake for, like, six hours. It was crazy. And right after we get done recording, I'm going back to bed because I'm whipped, and I've only been up since 10:00, so four hours.
Alright. But, yeah, we did that. I did wanna make a note, actually, and this is the only place I know to put this in. I've been listening to Bitcoin podcast for a long time. I I have all these different podcasts that I listen to, and yet I've noticed in the last three or four months, I'm having trouble having enough content. In other words, like, new episodes. Right? And so I started poking around. Kenshin, like, half the podcast that I listen to have stopped in the last year and a half or so. The Bitcoin podcast, you mean? Literally half the podcast. I mean, I'm not gonna name them, but, yes, Bitcoin podcast. It's crazy.
It's like, you guys, this is the bull market. But this is like when you're supposed to be pumping out the information. I don't know. Whatever. But it just made me think. You know, we've been in this for I'm going on three years in August, if I'm not mistaken. I have no plans of stopping as long as y'all will put up with me. We are continuing to build different things. And I'm not casting casting shade or whatever the kids would say on these people. But the reality is, I guess we are different, Kinshin, so I don't know.
I don't know how else to say it. So I guess I feel proud about that, to be honest. I mean, maybe it's my pride coming forth, but, yeah, I mean, we're still here. We're still pumping out an episode every week. I would love to do more, but we're gonna have to have more support before we start doing that. We have talked about that. Mhmm. But yeah. Yeah. Very interesting.
[00:09:41] Kenshin:
And we're switching things up soon. Right? In five episodes?
[00:09:45] McIntosh:
We are. Oh, this would be a great place to spring that. Good good lead, sir. Well played. Yes. We are. Why don't you go ahead and explain that?
[00:09:55] Kenshin:
Well, we are thinking to do a live episode. We will use the episodes 210 to to do that. We will use Zap.stream to be live. So that's a Nostr platform. So you can be signed in with your Nostr account or make a new Nostr account Right. For that matter. And and just visit that page. We can have a link on our, Nostra and Twitter profiles Mhmm. For that. And you can join us live, while we make the episodes and interact with us live, leave a question, zap us live.
[00:10:39] McIntosh:
So that's the plan. Yep. And I'm looking forward to that. I think it will bring an element to this recording that that that will be helpful. But it is going to require some of the listeners to step up and take the initiative if you've never been on Nostr, to kind of figure that out. I don't think it's very hard. Maybe we need to kind of put up some instructions, Kenshin, about Zap. Stream specifically.
[00:11:07] Kenshin:
Yeah. But,
[00:11:09] McIntosh:
you know, jump in there. You don't look. Just because you're in there doesn't mean you're gonna have to boost us or zap us or whatever. But your feedback and just you being there saying things will help us. Mhmm. And now we gotta think of a clever name. This is what they always do, Kenshin. Adam and and, Dave, the podcasting 2.0 people, they call their live room the the conference room, the boardroom. So Right. That's and and on the No Agenda show that Adam does with John Dvorak, they call it the troll room. So maybe if we could be somewhere in between the trolls and the suits, I think we'd be good. Right. I don't know. To come up with a nice name. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:11:56] Kenshin:
And and I think it might be as easy as as our audience just clicking on a link. I think it they might not have to do much more than that, actually.
[00:12:07] McIntosh:
I think if you don't wanna, like, import your in pub, I guess you'd have to put it your insec, you know, into the setup. I think it's pretty pretty straightforward. And maybe that's all you wanna do to start with. It'd be great if we knew, well, I don't wanna start it'd be great if we knew who the people were that were in there. Right? So, alright, enough about that, but I think we're both really excited about that. Mhmm.
[00:12:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. And about me, my week has been, unfortunately, a lot of Fiat again. It seems I'm getting busier and busier with my Fiat job. I think I'm working at least nine hours a day for the past few weeks. At least I'm getting paid a bit overtime, but,
[00:12:58] McIntosh:
it's overtime?
[00:13:00] Kenshin:
Yeah. But it's not something I would like to do. So my plan from the start of the the year, as you remember, has been to switch over to more Bitcoin, and, unfortunately, it goes the other direction right now. It's going wrong direction.
[00:13:15] McIntosh:
Not to take this off into a different direction, but you're you're a salaried person. Right?
[00:13:21] Kenshin:
Like Yeah. What does that mean? But you get overtime.
[00:13:24] McIntosh:
What what does that mean? Well, like, you made an agreement with the company when you signed up Yeah. That they would pay you x euros per year. Per month. Whatever x it is. Months. Yeah. Year. Yeah. Right. Per month, per year. And then but now you're saying that when you work extra, you get paid overtime. So The United States, I'm not familiar with a single company that does that. So if your salary, which I am, for example, I get my pay per month, and that's it. It doesn't matter how much I work.
[00:14:03] Kenshin:
Interesting.
[00:14:04] McIntosh:
Yeah. I did not realize so that it sounds so that's normal in Europe. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, demand So I should just move to Europe, get paid overtime, and I could, like, buy the world. It'd be great. Nice. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:14:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I just know that the managers where I work, they don't have that, but they paid a lot more as a salary.
[00:14:27] McIntosh:
Interesting. So but their their they're salaried to eat. They're salaried as well.
[00:14:33] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. But they're expected to work so they're expected to work a lot and travel a lot, the managers, so that's why they get don't get paid overtime. Because when I travel and work overtime, I get paid extra.
[00:14:48] McIntosh:
You get paid, like, from the time you leave the house or the airport? Wow. Interesting. I've never heard of anything like that here. That is definitely different.
[00:15:01] Kenshin:
I didn't realize that. Another exciting news on Bitcoin that I just discovered last week, It's a podcast or an audible called Mysteries of the Bitcoin Citadel. They say that it might be the first,
[00:15:23] McIntosh:
feature
[00:15:24] Kenshin:
talking about. Right? Yeah. You didn't okay. It's a fictional story. Uh-huh. It's a notable, so you just listen to that fictional story. It's Bitcoin related. So I repeat, it's called Mysteries of the Bitcoin Citadel. You find it in the Yeah. Podcasting apps. Right. It's incredible. I really, really like it. The production value is really high. It has so much Bitcoin, yeah,
[00:15:51] McIntosh:
stuff sprinkling. How is that? Right.
[00:15:54] Kenshin:
It's basically, two sisters and their uncle has died or disappeared. Mhmm. And they try to sell his estate, and they discover that he was a Bitcoiner and quite a high level Bitcoiner at that. So he has made his sit at the like that. Yeah. So it's it's quite cool. Very cool. And he left like a mystery for them. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So it's only four episodes out right now. Mhmm. I listened to the first three. Now I'm looking forward to listen to the fourth one that came out two days ago.
[00:16:33] McIntosh:
But, yeah, I recommend it. It's very good. I do have one more thing we need to mention before we actually dive into our content. It is official. I should have put this up in my news. I'm sorry. We do have a lightning note up and running. We have multiple channels open at this point. And right before we started from Podcast Guru, I would I ran a 2,000, 20 one hundred sat boost, that showed up immediately in our system the way it should have, and it's all working. We got Helipad up and running. Thanks to some help with, some help from Eric PP, who is the creator of that program.
It's it's all doing the way that it it should. And someone in the podcasting two point o community was generous enough to open a very large channel with us so that we could actually get this really going. And I appreciate that. I do not know their name, but, just thank you. I doubt they listen to the podcast, but I appreciate it.
[00:17:40] Kenshin:
Alright. So for our subject of the day, it's use your Bitcoin. And we chose this subject because it's circulating around, for a few years, but, also now, very recently, the narrative that we don't use Bitcoin as money as it was intended to be used. We use it more as a speculative asset.
[00:18:08] McIntosh:
Right. Sorry. I wanna make one conjecture before we before we dive into this. If you've been around for more than one cycle, this happens every time the mempool clears out. Like, it's like clockwork. Am am I right, Kenshin? Alright. So the the it's funny because mempool full, everybody's screaming, we gotta build big blocks or whatever. Funny. Bitcoin can't scale. When it's empty, nobody's using Bitcoin for anything, including paying things. Now as someone who just paid their hosting bill with Bitcoin over the Bitcoin main network, I'm a little offended at that, but okay. Let's that's that's where I think this comes from, the fact that the mempool usage kind of fluctuates.
Yeah.
[00:19:02] Kenshin:
And for me, what put an exclamation on that topic was, a Twitter post or an ex post called what you like, from bitcoinnews.com. So their account is at bitcoinnewscom. And they ask a question, when was the last time you paid in Bitcoin? They got 01/1972 votes. You see the results. Right? I'm bringing it up. Never.
[00:19:33] McIntosh:
Can k. If you've never done it, you you're not a Bitcoiner. I'm sorry. You're just not. Yeah. This is So I don't know I don't know who voted, but I I don't see the results. Right? Reasonable frankly, I don't think that's a reasonable poll. I don't think it's a reasonable audience. So this post is not going to Bitcoiners. This post is going to everyone. And so the people who don't Bitcoin, yes, they're jumping in and saying, no. I've never paid with Bitcoin.
[00:20:09] Kenshin:
Should we say their results?
[00:20:11] McIntosh:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Definitely.
[00:20:15] Kenshin:
So the first the first, result is this week. Mhmm. So when was the last time you paid in Bitcoin? This week, eleven point seven percent. This month, five point nine percent. The this year, 11.2%. And it's never never is 71.2%. That's Out of a 200
[00:20:42] McIntosh:
people. Right. I would say that's not a very good poll. It wasn't worded correctly. Yeah. I I don't know. That but yeah. But that forms the This type thing forms the narrative out there. That's why we hear things like people don't use Bitcoin to pay. But let's go back to what Satoshi actually talked about in the white paper. I think that's a really good place to start.
[00:21:12] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. So this from the white paper, and I quote, Bitcoin is a purely peer to peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Mhmm. And the white paper identified key problems with traditional payment system, such as high transaction costs, mediation expenses, inefficiencies of trust based models, requiring middlemen. Right? Mhmm. An ability to make truly nonreversible transactions. And it also mentioned the double spending problem that was an issue with other digital currencies at the time.
So Bitcoin was trying to solve all those things and it successfully did those things while it tries to function as money, as traditional money functions, which usually there are three functions of money. Right? It's a medium of exchange to make transactions. It's a unit of account, so you measure how much value different products and services are have. And it's a store of value, so you preserve your wealth Right. With money. So we see that already that Bitcoin can fulfill all those, things. Maybe unit of account, not so much. It's few things that we have
[00:22:53] McIntosh:
I have already been Bitcoin. That has not happened, and it won't for a long time. The US dollar is the unit of account even though it is obviously going down in value very rapidly.
[00:23:05] Kenshin:
Well, I would argue my Zaps on Noster have a unit of account. There are 21 sets consistently.
[00:23:12] McIntosh:
You can't change that. So that
[00:23:15] Kenshin:
I can't change it. Yeah.
[00:23:17] McIntosh:
Anyways. Yep. Yep.
[00:23:20] Kenshin:
So so that was, so the purpose, and I repeat again, from Satoshi and Bitcoin was to be a peer to peer Mhmm. Method of exchange Right. Of electronic cash. Right? And, yeah, arguably, we don't use it so often as just peer to peer. It's a lot, of course, speculative, or I would say it's more of a store of value right now to try to preserve our our wealth to the future. At least the most, hardcore Bitcoiners say. Right. Yeah. We say to HODL it. Right? Mhmm. Look more long term, preserve the wealth, use it as savings, not not, yeah. We say, of course, not to use it as an investment in that sense, but more as a savings mechanism.
And that's a little bit contrast with using it as as everyday money in that sense, and to pay for things. But we discussed it before, right, that we have lightning now. We have other ways to to pay more easily. There are more services and products out there. So that's the topic for today, to remind maybe a bit people that's Bitcoin can be used to to purchase stuff or or use it as a everyday tool to pay and and fulfill the initial purpose.
[00:24:58] McIntosh:
Yeah. Well, I don't wanna jump ahead. Mhmm. And maybe I'm this is. If it is, then let me know. But I think as a store of value, it has done very well. Yeah. That's so cool. I believe that the reason why it hasn't become a medium of exchange, more so than it is, is that it's essentially a gray area. Right? It's not black and white. In The United States, for years, people didn't know what the status of Bitcoin was. Now we know, it's but but its status as, its status as a commodity means that by default, you get a capital gains tax on it. And maybe those two things aren't related, but maybe I need to backtrack that. Actually, I don't think that's true. But it does have a capital gains tax on it Yeah.
Which does make it extremely difficult to use as a medium of exchange.
[00:26:12] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:26:14] McIntosh:
Until that part is solved, I don't see, frankly, widespread usage as a medium of exchange. I would like to see that. I am doing my part to see that. But at the same time, I try and be logical about these things. The average person isn't going to spend their Bitcoin, even if they replace it, because it makes their taxes more difficult. Right? Mhmm. The average person does what is it called? A w two, and it's very well, relatively simple. And, you know, they go through it. If you start having to claim capital gains, and I have, so I have experience with this, it's not easy.
One year when I was trading to prove that essentially I only made a few dollars, I had to send in 72 pages worth of stuff.
[00:27:14] Kenshin:
Oh.
[00:27:16] McIntosh:
Okay. Can you imagine doing that just to use Bitcoin as a medium of exchange? Now you can say, well, it shouldn't be that way, and I'm gonna go do this over on the side and whatever. But that's the reality for most people. They're not gonna do that, and they don't live in jurisdictions like El Salvador, for example, that says that Bitcoin, even though it may not be legal tender, I'm not even sure what the status of that is, but there's no cap gains on it. I don't know. Trump's enough of a wild card that maybe he pulls that out of his hat and says no cap gains on Bitcoin, but I'm also not holding my breath.
Now It was mentioned. Yeah. It's been mentioned. I might look. They mentioned eliminating the IRS. So if they eliminate the IRS, they would have to it it you would have to go to a consumption based tax system. Right? And if you do that, then, yeah, I don't think there'd be cap gains because who's gonna account for that? But I also don't think that's happening. Now I did see that 20,000 people from the IRS had, taken the offer to exit early, so that's always a good thing. But I don't see the IRS shutting down. Now one question I have for you, Kinshen, is do you think that I'm sure that Satoshi is still around.
Do you think that he is unhappy about that, or do you think that this is how he saw it working? I think people don't take into account governments, and I don't Yeah. It's so obvious to me. I don't know. Maybe I get hung up on this, but do you think that he's mad about that? Or or he would Yeah. Like, he or she would like to see something different, or or maybe they're overworking on Bitcoin 2.0 and we're just not aware of
[00:29:19] Kenshin:
it. Right. Now, well, it's it's hard to to assume. Right? But I would my my feeling, personal feeling, is that he would be unhappy with the current state because Bitcoin was made to give an alternative path to traditional finance system. And now Bitcoin is integrating more and more into the traditional finance system and Wall Street and and now the governments. So, of course, Bitcoin was designed to be free for everybody to use as they saw fit in that sense. But still, we use it I mean, Bitcoin is affected by the same issues, like the fiat system is affected. Right. Right? All those news and it goes up and down with the, with the stock market in the same direction, in the same way, and same intensity.
So that you would I assume he would be unhappy with, but I guess those are the early steps. We are so early steps. Right.
[00:30:21] McIntosh:
And that would be my argument. Right? Yeah. Until you get widespread adoption, there's no other way for this to work out. Yeah. Governments are going to become involved, and I think he realized that. And when they get involved, they're the big gorilla in the room. Now the nice thing about Bitcoin is it does enable you to protest essentially. Oh, I'm growing up here, and I don't like here because of x, y, and z. I can take 12 words in my head and walk across the border and start a new life.
[00:30:57] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. You're right. I mean, the the basis, function, you can still use it, Bitcoin, as it was meant to be on individual basis. So if you ignore the the fiat system and the stock market, what they do with it Yeah. Exactly. You can still use it in that way, have it in cold storage with your, so what, 12 words, exchange it peer to peer with other people to buy goods and services directly with Bitcoin. So no capital gains involved either. So, yes, you can use it in those ways. Which I see it's been manipulated a bit now, which is not very pleasant in that way, but it's inevitable, I guess.
[00:31:40] McIntosh:
You've got some interesting statistics here.
[00:31:44] Kenshin:
Right. Yeah. Sorry. Yes. Those are some statistics. We're trying to see the global adoption metrics, as of March 2025. Of course, those are, taken from the Internet, from various sources. So we see that approximately 4% of the world's population holds some sort of Bitcoin. In The United States, around 14% of adults own Bitcoin, which to me sounds quite big, actually. That's a percentage. According to security.org, approximately 28% of American adults hold,
[00:32:33] McIntosh:
crypto in general. Now that's an interesting so it doubles from the ones who own Bitcoin to the ones who own Yeah. Crypto, meaning there's 14% of America who owns crypto but not Bitcoin. Right. Those people are are in for some serious crime. I will also want to point out, ladies and gentlemen, not to be a Homer, but if 14% of America owns Bitcoin and 4% of the world population owns Bitcoin, maybe y'all need to get off your duff and start buying Bitcoin. I mean, I'm just gonna throw that out there. You do not, by the way, have to buy Bitcoin in $85,000 chunks or whatever it is right now, right? You can buy $5 worth. You can buy $10 worth. You can buy $1 worth.
And if you can only afford to buy a dollar's worth, I would argue that you are better off in Bitcoin than probably whatever your local currency is because there's a reason you can only buy 1 dollar's worth. It's your currency. It's your economic system that you're in. So do what you can to get out of that system, and it begins with Bitcoin and holding it for the long term.
[00:33:59] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Right. And another point, I would say is that a lot of those people are probably holding, Bitcoin in exchanges. Right? Yeah. Coinbase.
[00:34:14] McIntosh:
So Coinbase gets hacked. You know, these numbers all get changed.
[00:34:18] Kenshin:
Yeah. So that's also something to consider. Not your keys, not your coin.
[00:34:25] McIntosh:
Now this last stat you have here is very interesting. 14% of non owners plan to buy crypto in 2025. Now again, it says crypto, not Bitcoin. So it's probably half and half, But Yeah. That's the percentage in 2025 this year who plan to buy. So that number is actually going to go up, obviously.
[00:34:49] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Well and some will get wrecked from Yes. They will. Other 14 and then
[00:34:57] McIntosh:
The ones who buy Bitcoin and don't sell it won't, but that's a different story. Well, no. It's not a different story. It's the same story. Actually, the ones who buy Bitcoin and don't sell it will not get wrecked.
[00:35:09] Kenshin:
I would say the crypto holders are pre Bitcoiners.
[00:35:14] McIntosh:
A lot of them are pre But they will
[00:35:16] Kenshin:
yeah. But they will need to spend some time Yes. Yeah, in between.
[00:35:23] McIntosh:
I started with Bitcoin, but then I went off and do other things. So I I know, because, man, those arguments were so persuasive back in the day. Well, Bitcoin is just a medium a store of value. Over here, we're gonna build virtual machines and put contracts on them and do all kinds of nifty stuff, and what you end up with is a pile of messy code and hacks that happen left and right. That's what you end up with. Right. Or people gaming the system, pre mining, etcetera, etcetera. Actually, not or. It's that's included. They never talk about that. Even Ethereum, 70 percent of the Ethereum was pre mined.
That's crazy. That I that's I if I would have heard that, I never would have bought Ethereum from day one. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. But they covered that up somehow. I don't know when I first heard that, but I guarantee you, it wasn't when I was buying Ethereum back when it was only a few dollars.
[00:36:31] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yeah. Okay. Then we want to talk then about some ways that, Yeah. To how to use Bitcoin. Right. Right? Some practical ways.
[00:36:46] McIntosh:
How can you help these numbers? Yes. Let's do that.
[00:36:49] Kenshin:
So, of course, the the easiest way is to just do some, I would say peer to peer. Right? Like, send some Bitcoin to a friend or I I have done that many times, so someone pays for me, and then I send Bitcoin.
[00:37:06] McIntosh:
Oh, interesting. Yeah.
[00:37:09] Kenshin:
The other way around is also very good. I bought, I remember two PCs. I gave one to a friend for a node. Mhmm. He paid me in Bitcoin. Right. So that's good because, like, that is, like, for me also indirectly buying Bitcoin in a way. So I like that. I spend my fiat money. I bought something physical. I sold it off. I got Bitcoin back. So in in some way, that's also good. In other ways, it's also good to spend that or or send that to a friend. It's also very convenient on a Saturday night, for example, with lightning. It's super fast and easy to just send send some Bitcoin around without having to wait for, yeah, the banks to be open or something like that.
Then I would say you can also do direct payments with Bitcoin wallets.
[00:38:06] McIntosh:
K.
[00:38:08] Kenshin:
There are, like, the Cash App, like, you can buy, Bitcoin and then buy other things
[00:38:17] McIntosh:
without Bitcoin. Can I say this? I'm not a fan of Cash App. Okay. They have a restriction. I just just in full disclosure, like, you can buy however much Bitcoin, but you can't you can only transfer, like, dollars 2,000 a day out of it. So if I buy if I have one Bitcoin on Cash App, how long is that gonna take me to transfer it out of Cash App? Is it your Bitcoin, or is it Cash App's Bitcoin? And I like this jack. This is, Strike.
[00:38:50] Kenshin:
No.
[00:38:51] McIntosh:
Uh-huh. No. That's a jack, yeah. Yeah. Nostra jack. Jack from Sorry. Yeah. From Twitter. Twitter. TwitterJack. Right? This is I I like the guy, but man, this is dressed up. Well, it's mine. It's not hard.
[00:39:07] Kenshin:
Those are fiat limits.
[00:39:09] McIntosh:
You know what? I'm sure that you're right, but I I do wanna point it out. I I because that's I'm not okay with that, personally. And I have Cash App, by the way. I don't use it to buy Bitcoin, but I I do have
[00:39:26] Kenshin:
it. But there are plenty of apps, I would say. We don't have to list them all, actually. And we should as you say, we should be careful to list specific apps because you never know what happens in the future. Right. If you don't want people to go to an app and then something happens. Would strike be an example of what you're talking about here?
[00:39:45] McIntosh:
Yeah. I mean, Strike I use Strike. I will promote Strike until they do something stupid, and then I will say, don't use strike. I'm not gonna use it, then this is why. I Yeah. This is why look. Not to get off track, but this is why we don't take sponsorships. Cash App is not paying us. Strike is not paying us. None of these companies are. Yeah. So we can talk about this stuff, and people know where we're coming from. There's nothing being hidden here. So Mhmm. Yeah. Strike, in in my opinion, is the better app, frankly.
[00:40:15] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's my favorite app, actually. And it's the only app I use right now to to buy Bitcoin and and do some transfers. So you can buy directly things. Oh, there are also a lot of merchants now that accept Bitcoin, from small merchants that you find on Oster to big merchants. So some of those stores you might know, like, Home Depot Home Depot. Apparently apparently, they added Bitcoin payment option. Whole Foods, Starbucks, do you accept Bitcoin through speed Speden?
[00:40:54] McIntosh:
I don't know what that app is. That's intriguing. I do go to Starbucks, unfortunately. I'll have to look that up. So the new company signed up? That was a long time when Newegg started taking big. Right? And then Overstock as well. Overstock.com. Now Tesla did, and then they stopped. And he said, well, when it gets to 50% renewable energy, Elon Musk, but we'll start taking you in. It is well above that at this point. The last I saw, which was months ago, it was at 56%. Talking about the mining energy. Yeah. So I'm waiting for Tesla to put that back on their website. Not that I'm buying a Tesla, mind you, but, they've got some pretty nice driving software these days. But yeah. Anyway.
Mhmm. Okay?
[00:41:49] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we have some, Bitcoin debit cards. I never used one of them. I wanted to use in the past, but there are, like, a coin based card.
[00:42:01] McIntosh:
Is crypto.com even still around?
[00:42:04] Kenshin:
Crypto.com. Yeah. Okay.
[00:42:06] McIntosh:
It is. I would add Fold to this list, by the way. Fold. Yeah. I think it's Fold.com.
[00:42:13] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:42:14] McIntosh:
They're doing things along this line.
[00:42:18] Kenshin:
Yeah. So you can have an account with Bitcoin and have a a usual debit card in your hands and go to a store, pay with that debit card, and it automatically does the exchange in in the background, from Bitcoin to Fiat, and essentially the merchant gets Fiat. So you pay wherever you pay normally with a debit card. So that's quite cool. Okay. And I never use it because in Europe, it's not so easy to find those. It's different rules. And in the end, I never got into it to really find the European card if it exists. What else do we have?
[00:43:04] McIntosh:
Using Bitcoin for international transfers is could be a huge use case because people don't realize how much, like, Western Union gets used for for transferring money around. And they charge, like, $23 to wire somebody money, and it's just nuts. Whereas I can go on strike, send somebody Bitcoin, and, and it's basically free. I'm think that you're getting the ability to send US dollars around as well these days. Now don't quote me on that, but because of the stuff that they're doing with what With Tether. With Tether, I think that that ability is being added.
[00:43:49] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. That's right. And it's a lot of, Jack Mallers was talking about it. A lot of Asian countries and African countries, they use they use that function to send around around money instead of, as you said, Western Union. Right. So it's much cheaper. It's faster, and you present the the wealth much better also. The amount of
[00:44:14] McIntosh:
money that Western Union makes off of remittances, which are what these are called, is staggering. I mean, it's just it's billions of dollars, billions and billions and billions of dollars. Mhmm. Plus, well, we've talked I have talked about this in the past prior to you being on, so I don't wanna go into this too much. But, yeah, lot of lot of stuff there.
[00:44:40] Kenshin:
Yeah. Of course, we talked in the past about Lightning, right? So there is a lot of Lightning use cases, more and more services come up and accept Lightning payments. I use now a VPN service. I pay with Lightning super fast. A few other use cases, what do we have? Oh no, I'm sorry, yes. There is like ln. Pizza, you can order a Domino's pizza with lightning, which is crazy. Sorry.
[00:45:20] McIntosh:
I'm just thinking of the the it wasn't Domino's. It was Papa John's, the 20 it was some ungodly amount of Bitcoin that the dude paid the Papa John's pizzas. Yeah. The the the first one, you mean? Right. We've talked about that. But yeah. Yeah. I mean, he spent, like, 10,000 pizzas. I know. It was a lot. It was a huge it was a lot. And, eventually, he will look back and say the same thing. But what we always talk about, if you're spending this money, it it's not your savings. It's your spendings. You need to make sure that your savings is going up, right? And then it doesn't matter what it is ten years from now or twenty years from now, because you replaced it.
Does that make sense? So you don't worry about, oh, I spent 500 sats on a Domino's pizza, and now I can get one for five. I mean, hypothetically, that's possible. I don't think I don't think that's true anytime soon, but crazy things. I mean, I'm just saying.
[00:46:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. But, I mean, it's always like that. And we will look back now that we're we're zapping on Nostr twenty one sats for good morning notes. I mean, that that would look crazy in twenty years time. So Right. What what can you do? As long as you you earn or you stack more sales than you spend, I think that's that's fine. Right? That's the whole purpose of it, to use it now.
[00:46:54] McIntosh:
I think this next section is one that's very underutilized at this point. Does that make sense? Yeah. This microtransaction use case. And I would love to see maybe a lot of Internet content incorporated where you pay some sats to access the site, as long as it's not too much. Because I hate as long as they didn't have ads. I hate ads on the Internet. And I know you can do all kinds of things to block, and I don't play those games. I don't. I just I don't. I would rather pay 10 sats to access the site with no ads. I mean, that I would do it. I'd do it in a heartbeat. That those type things, and you've got a number here you can talk about certainly, but, you know, these are, I think, very underutilized, frankly.
[00:47:52] Kenshin:
Yeah. I mean, the the easiest example is right now, like, we we are on a podcast 2.0 app. Right? Right. They can zap us, some stats for for, for the episode and, before leaving comments. Zap us.
[00:48:09] McIntosh:
Can you explain that, please? Yes. Go into your Gountain app, ladies and gentlemen, or your Podcast Guru and do what McIntosh did right before we started and boost the show.
[00:48:22] Kenshin:
And leave a comment. Leave a comment.
[00:48:25] McIntosh:
Come straight to our lightning node, and we'll see it in helipad.
[00:48:29] Kenshin:
Yep. So that's great. Apps like that. Also similar to a Reddit app. It's called Stacker News. Mhmm. So you can write articles and have discussions and zap each other. Zap the articles or even the comments under the I like Stacker News a lot. I wish I used it more. I don't, but yeah. Yeah. I'm going to I go on and off on Stacker News. I forget about it for a while and then go back on. There are other services. One is called Sphinx Chat. It's a pay per minute service. I haven't used it. So but there is a lot of ways like that with lightning, especially now that you can just stream sets, in real time, also like Fountain again to listen to an episode and just keep streaming some sets. Mhmm.
What's next? Then we have, some bigger ways to use, Bitcoin. Mhmm. They're they're starting to be more and more banking, services. So you could actually, get a loan based on your Bitcoin. So you you put your Bitcoin in, yeah, I don't know how it's called. Yeah. In in in one of those, services.
[00:49:56] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:49:57] Kenshin:
And you you get fiat back as a loan and Bitcoin stays how is it called in English? It stays as a collateral.
[00:50:07] McIntosh:
Oh, collateral. Yeah. Sorry.
[00:50:09] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. So you could, I heard some some ways that, people have taken a loan with Bitcoin when they thought Bitcoin was low, and and they really thought Bitcoin would go higher. So they would get a loan, and it would work out quite good for them. Of course, it's a bit risky. It is.
[00:50:31] McIntosh:
Yeah. It's it's it Bitcoin is volatile. We all know that. Even in a bull market, it can drop quite a bit. And then the bear market can be here before you know it or realize it, and then it can be even worse. So you need to be careful about those things. But if you're over, I would say over collateralized, like if I had, well, frankly, if I had a hundred Bitcoin and I was looking to do some stuff, I don't wanna sell my Bitcoin. I could use it as collateral to take out a loan, but that loan is not gonna be a a quarter of of that value. Does that make sense?
[00:51:15] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that's what they do. And Stripe started their Bitcoin backed loan. Right? And they tried. They don't do a quarter, but closer to half, but still. Mhmm. I would be cautious
[00:51:28] McIntosh:
about half because we, you know and and Jack, and bless his heart, I love Jack's podcast, Right, Jack Maller's? But he'll get on there and say, well, you just top it off. And I'm like, I don't wanna top it off. I don't wanna have to worry about it. And he's talking about that very case. Oh, you borrowed against half of it, half the value of it right now, and it dropped 50%. So you've gotta put money on there, or you lose your Bitcoin. That's what that means. That's not a good situation in my opinion. Mhmm. Each year So
[00:52:07] Kenshin:
so I I would say we're a bit early with those. There we just mentioned that it's possible Yes. To get a loan based on Bitcoin, Do a lot of research before, a lot of calculations to to be if you really need to do that. I wouldn't do it yet, actually. But I I follow the the progress because I think it's gonna be very useful in the future.
[00:52:32] McIntosh:
If you have a decent amount of Bitcoin, I would hold on to it for the next four years and then start thinking about that, frankly. Because if it's 10x where it is now, your decent amount of Bitcoin has now become a lot of money, and you might start thinking about these things. Right now, you're probably doing what we would say, putting the cart in front of the horse. Okay? Does that it's an expression. Sorry. I don't normally use expressions like that, but it means that your jump you I'm gonna say another expression. You're jumping the gun.
Yeah. I mean, it's too soon. Okay? It's too soon. just wait. Your time is coming. But there's good reasons to borrow against that if you have the right capital. It's because you don't pay to cap gains on that when you do that. You're taking a loan against it, your own collateral. You don't pay cap gains like you would normally if you sold Bitcoin. And then, of course, what happens if Bitcoin goes higher or whatever? So there are financial benefits to that. Let me put it that way before I get myself in too much trouble, but you have to be very careful.
[00:53:50] Kenshin:
Yeah. Alright. Good. Yeah. One last thing I would mention is, gift cards. Okay. So there are services like, I'm sorry. Did I get, did you bring the virus to me now?
[00:54:11] McIntosh:
That would be a trick if I did.
[00:54:13] Kenshin:
Yes, sir. So there is I don't know if you know the service Bitrefill. I think there are others like that. Mhmm. So you could, quite easily exchange some Bitcoin for gift cards. And usually, they have very good categorization that you you find gift cards for your country. So I have looked, and for Sweden, they have so many gift cards for so many stores. So I could, put fuel in my car with a gift card. I could buy groceries, A lot of mobile services. So I could live just with gift cards in Sweden for Is it like a preloaded
[00:54:54] McIntosh:
Visa card or is it it's for that specific store. Right? It's for a specific store. Yes.
[00:55:00] Kenshin:
So it's literally a gift card for a store. Right. And you load it with Bitcoin and you get fiat on on that card. So Yep. Go and use it and no one knows you loaded it up with Bitcoin Right. When you use it in the store. So it's great.
[00:55:15] McIntosh:
Very cool.
[00:55:17] Kenshin:
And of course, the last last thing I would mention is you can always sell some of your Bitcoin, pay the capital gains. Ketchan?
[00:55:26] McIntosh:
I can't believe you said that. No.
[00:55:29] Kenshin:
But people who say what's what can I do with it? You can always do that also.
[00:55:34] McIntosh:
You know, I would I would give this as a reference. Seed Sider, the guy the guy behind the Seed Sider project. Right. When he came on the podcast, he told us a story that he he sold basically his stack to pay the mortgage off on his house. And this was a number of years ago. So I don't know how much it was, but it was a fair amount of Bitcoin. Not I don't know what his mortgage was, but it was it was a fair number of big he says he does not regret that. Different people have different circumstances. He doesn't regret it because of the peace of mind it gave him knowing his house was paid off. Okay. Now, am I going to do that?
No. I'm not. Let's be honest. But it is an option.
[00:56:27] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Yep. So I think that concludes our discussion. There are ways to use Bitcoin. And Okay. You can always, yeah, search online based on what you think. And I whatever you think, is your use case, there is already a solution for it Yes. With Bitcoin.
[00:56:51] McIntosh:
Yes. And I think we're gonna be talking about this more and more over the coming years. Mhmm. K? So we had some support this week. I wanted to jump on into this. Send it, Mike. Send us a boost on Fountain, And we've got the message here. Send it. To be honest, the boost did not get to us because we were I didn't have that second channel set up. So that's not a big deal. I just wanted to let you know. But we got your message. Gotta get you back on track. You're explaining the reason for our government debt is due to a trade deficit, which that is essentially what I was saying last week. They aren't hand in hand.
Take for instance, Japan. They ran a trade surplus from 1980 until 02/2008, but accumulated a debt to GDP of a 80%. If the government spends more than they bring in, it's a deficit, and they accumulate ever more debt. Our trade balance isn't directly related to it all. I agree. I simplified. It is not directly related, but I would argue, at least in my opinion, that it is part of it. I think a large part of it. I think it also has side things that happen because of it. Essentially, you're telling people in The United States position, frankly, we're gonna print money and give it to you for your real items.
Ultimately, that doesn't work. People wake up and say, Nope, we're not doing that. You cannot give us something that you just printed for our CPU or whatever it is that they're building. So we may just look at this differently, send it Mike, and that's okay. I probably overemphasized the trade deficit in all of this, but frankly, it's a very serious issue for The United States. Alright? And then we well, no. I want you to do the next one.
[00:58:58] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then we have the friend of the show, Bullish Clips. Mhmm. He he boosts us with 420 sats. Thank you very much. And he says, thank you for the mention, Kenshin. And that was when I mentioned him, on the episode, right, about his, Cashew wallet. Right. So he continues, you can check out the Bullish Cashew PWA wallet here, and it's a link, bullishnuts.cash. And I have to say it's a really good, good wallet. I I tried it. That was what I mentioned also last last week. Yeah? Let me mention one thing real quick.
[00:59:38] McIntosh:
A PWA is a progressive web app, and that means it's like, I could run it on my desktop, on a Mac. You could run it on Linux. You could run it on Windows. Right? I think you can even run it on a phone. I'm not a % certain about it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You install it actually on the phone through the browser. Oh, okay. Very well, maybe not on iOS. I don't know that they allow that. I think you can now. That's interesting. I'd like to try that. I'll probably give that a try just because. Yeah. Okay. Cool.
[01:00:10] Kenshin:
One thing to consider, right, it's that this those top type of PWA app, apps, they they use a local storage of the phone, of the browser. Yes. So if you reset the browser, that storage goes away Mhmm. And you will lose that,
[01:00:29] McIntosh:
those funds that are on the But that would not be good. No.
[01:00:34] Kenshin:
Alright. So that's that's something to consider. And then she continues, and Macintosh was right. I did mention the shop in a previous boost. Since then, I've I've built my own custom site and migrated there. Check that out at the bullish.shop. Yep. Really good name, actually. Yep.
[01:00:53] McIntosh:
Well done. Very cool. Thank you, Bullish Clips. Appreciate that. Yep. Thank you. Alright. We got a few news items. Let's roll through these, and then we'll wrap it up.
[01:01:04] Kenshin:
Right. We have the biggest news this week is that Bitcoin Core is up to version 29.
[01:01:12] McIntosh:
Point zero. Yep.
[01:01:14] Kenshin:
Yeah. 29. And that brings ephemeral dust, enhanced off or fan handling, CMake, and more.
[01:01:24] McIntosh:
Do you know what ephemeral dust is?
[01:01:29] Kenshin:
I'm not sure, but if I would guess, is that the the dust the small amounts of of Bitcoin? Yeah. I would think Yeah. It's a tie yeah. It says here, an ephemeral dust output is a tiny transaction output below the DASD limit producing v three zero fee transaction and consuming a following v three transaction. Yeah. So essentially is is, UTXOs that are too small to spend again. So this now version brings a solution to to that. That's quite surprising.
[01:02:04] McIntosh:
I had a interesting this is why okay. Sorry. I had an interesting thing happen when I paid my hosting fees. This is one of the reasons you should be doing transactions on a regular basis. I constructed my transaction in Sparrow, like I always do. Sparrow wallet's great. When I built the transaction, it showed 11 inputs, and this was for maybe a 3 maybe $400 order. Okay? It was around $400 It pulled from 11 transactions. Now I don't and they all came from my mining pool, Ocean. I'm just gonna go ahead and give you some figures. I maybe I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to. It came from Ocean. Ocean has a limit. You have to get to point one Bitcoin. No. Is that right? No. Point o one. One percent of a Bitcoin before you send it out over the main net. It's different if you use Lightning, which I think they have set up, but I I just do it over the main net. Okay? Oh, it's a hundred thousand sat. So it pulled it's a hundred no. Hundred thousand sat. Oh, it's a million sat. It's a million. No.
So it pulled eleven, one million sat UTXOs to make this one that was far less than that. And it freaked me out. I'm like, what is going on? It was essentially doing some consolidating because, I think, because fees were low. Because remember, I had set it to 1.02 or whatever, whatever it was that I set it to. And even though I paid a little bit more for that transaction, first of all, before I sent it out, I verified the output going to, KaboomRacks, in this case, was the proper amount. It was, like, 300,000, Satoshis or whatever.
Okay? So I knew that I wasn't losing anything. I sent the transaction out, then I went back and looked at my UTXOs. And sure enough, it it consolidated everything into one UTXO. So it was managing that on the back end, which on the one hand, I like, but you gotta expect that kind of thing if it's programmed in, and you need to be looking for it. Does that make sense?
[01:04:31] Kenshin:
Yeah. Of course. If you do it with Sparrow, you can choose specific UTXO source to to send for the transactionals.
[01:04:38] McIntosh:
Yeah. You can. Mine this is my mining stuff, and it's I'm not worried about that kind of thing. This is all there's just no way. It's it's all it's all tracked. It's all there. Right? So, yeah, you're correct. It's very flexible. But in this case, I just basically said, I need 300,000 sets, and it went and put 11 different previous transactions or whatever into that as input because it wanted to consolidate them all as one output. Yeah. It was a nice little output, by the way.
[01:05:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. Okay. Match. Yeah. And you're right. 1,000,000 such is the minimum threshold. Yeah. On those here. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Okay. So Bitcoin core version 29.
[01:05:32] McIntosh:
Right.
[01:05:34] Kenshin:
I will not update to it currently. No. I will wait a couple of weeks. I just checked. I'm actually running 27
[01:05:41] McIntosh:
o one or something something like that. Yeah. But I'm not looking to move anytime soon. There's just Mhmm. I don't like rushing into that kind of thing.
[01:05:49] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly.
[01:05:50] McIntosh:
Alright. Next one. Next
[01:05:52] Kenshin:
big news is LNBits finally, came to the stable version one point zero zero. So LNBits is a great, a great, service platform for creating, lightning, yeah, connecting to your lightning node, creating lightning wallets with it Mhmm. Creating your own Lightning wallets and your families and, connecting your domains and doing a lot of advanced stuff with Lightning.
[01:06:23] McIntosh:
This little dev kit, if you wanna call it that, gets used in a lot of other products. So it's it's really good to see that they consider it to be stable now and prod ready. I think it was already used, frankly. So Yeah. It was. But now they consider it,
[01:06:38] Kenshin:
hardened and production ready. Right. And they're say that this is after five years and over 6,000 commits.
[01:06:47] McIntosh:
Alright. And then the last one, I'm gonna go ahead and do this one. BTC pay server. So if you happen to be running that in your shop or something like that, there is a new version, v 2.1, new multisig setup with, fee acceleration and other items as well. So we got a great question this week, Kenshin. Why don't you go ahead and ask that?
[01:07:10] Kenshin:
Yeah. So in the theme of today's, episode, so the question is, what everyday purchase would you be most comfortable making with Bitcoin today? And what changes would you like to see before you consider using more of your Bitcoin for daily transactions?
[01:07:28] McIntosh:
Next week, you and I are gonna answer this question on the air, by the way. I'm Yes. Put you on the spot. We're gonna do that. Let's not forget that. There is one news item I wanted to discuss that we didn't cover. Do you happen to have it in front of you, the Swedish news?
[01:07:45] Kenshin:
Oh, right. So Swedish, some members of, political parties. Actually, there were two different members of two different parties that they had the same request to create a Bitcoin reserve in Sweden. And they send a letter to the parliament to discuss it and get a decision.
[01:08:09] McIntosh:
And the decision will come, I think, April 24 or something like that. So at this point, it seems that The United States has a strategic Bitcoin reserve. We are not putting money into it at this point. That is still being discussed. If that happens, I think that will only accelerate the adoption of nations getting Bitcoin reserves. I do not think this will be the last country to get Bitcoin, a Bitcoin reserve set up. If they do so, now this may go nowhere, but I will give you an example. Bhutan. I saw a news article. I'll try and find it to put in the show notes. They've been mining Bitcoin for years. They've done it on the down low, and until it came out in the court case, Sam Bankman Fried, I think, wackadoodle over there at whatever he, ran, which I don't even remember because it was obvious it was a scam.
Anyways, they they've got a lot of Bitcoin. 1 of the things that they've already done is doubled their civil service salaries of their government officials. Woah. Yep. You're going to see this stuff. They actually own more SATs per citizen than any other country. Little old Bhutan. That's crazy. Did you know that?
[01:09:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's, it's, funny. We're saying with, I had a discussion with some Swedish Bitcoiners, and they're saying, yeah, Sweden will be last. It Or we were to pay them. Think you'll be last.
[01:10:02] McIntosh:
Yeah. Let's see where drag your feet, but there will be someone who will be behind you. France. I don't know. I should keep my mouth shut, but I'm gonna offend everyone. Well, at least they they started to catch states listen to this podcast. I don't understand. And Bhutan. Bhutan loves me.
[01:10:24] Kenshin:
You've been ambassador in Bhutan.
[01:10:28] McIntosh:
Oh, man. That's ridiculous.
[01:10:33] Matt Johner:
Oh.
[01:10:35] McIntosh:
Oh, sorry. Yeah. We'll just have to see how all this plays out, but I have a feeling you won't be last. But, yeah, I think you're I don't think this is it either. I'll be honest. I don't.
[01:10:48] Kenshin:
No. It's, I think they just follow the trends right now. But, it's gonna take a lot more to to really do a real Bitcoin reserve in Sweden
[01:10:59] McIntosh:
than any of those Nordic countries. Your seed signer in your sparrow wallet set up, people. Come on. Let's go. Here.
[01:11:07] Kenshin:
I can't I can't help them set it up. Just call me. 1 Bitcoin.
[01:11:12] McIntosh:
Yeah. Alright. Let's wrap this up. I'm not gonna make a big deal out of this. You've already heard why we are the way we are. We don't do sponsors and that kind of thing. We do depend on the listeners to boost the show, to stream stats, and now we have a system. Not only do we not have a middleman, but we can see in real time what's actually going on. And both of us have access to that even though Kenshin hasn't had time to do that, but that's okay. So that's it. We do ask that you support the show. Tell people about the show. We've had our numbers going up, and we would love for that trend to continue. Honestly, just tell somebody, hey. This is a show. They've been around for three years. The dude just said he's not going anywhere, so they're not gonna pack it up next week.
Might even get us through the next cycle. We'll see. I don't know. When Bitcoin gets to 10,000,000, I'm not making any promises. Alright? But we're a long way from 10,000,000. So, you know, that's it. That's what we got.
[01:12:21] Kenshin:
Yeah. Just to remember, spend some such
[01:12:24] McIntosh:
Yeah. And I think here This question, I think, is very appropriate this week. So, again, what everyday purchases would you be most comfortable making with Bitcoin today, and what changes would need to happen for you to consider using Bitcoin for the majority of your daily transactions. I really wanna hear your input on that. And I think it's going to vary depending on location. And I can almost predict what they're gonna say, but I won't because maybe I'll be wrong. Alright?
[01:12:55] Kenshin:
Yep. So Thank you for this week. Yep. Thank you, Macintosh. You're welcome. And, see you in no start.
[01:13:03] McIntosh:
Alright. We'll talk to you all soon. One last thing. Sorry. This week, starting this week, when the music plays, which it will play as soon as I shut up, and you boost or you stream, that money will go to the artist, not to us. We are supporting these value for value musicians like Matt. So now it's on you. Alright? Thanks, everyone.
[01:13:31] Kenshin:
Yeah. Enjoy. Bye bye.
[01:13:43] Matt Johner:
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,
[01:14:11] Matt Johner:
yeah. I found faith and I found love, 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. Twenty years are gone. Boy, you'll get there sure enough. But you're still too young for growing up. 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, or you'll get there sure enough. Get here sure enough. You're just too young. Yeah. You're still too young
[01:16:53] Matt Johner:
for
[01:16:58] Matt Johner:
growing up.
Introduction
Market Update
Macintosh's Conference Experience
Upcoming Live Episode Announcement
Kenshin's Fiat Job and Overtime
Mysteries of the Bitcoin Citadel Podcast
Using Bitcoin as Money
Bitcoin as a Store of Value
Global Bitcoin Adoption Statistics
Practical Ways to Use Bitcoin
Microtransactions and Content Monetization
Bitcoin-Backed Loans
Gift Cards and Selling Bitcoin
Listener Support and Feedback
Bitcoin Core and LNBits Updates
BTC Pay Server Update
Question of the Week
Sweden's Potential Bitcoin Reserve
