McIntosh and Kenshin dive deep into legitimate methods for acquiring Bitcoin without Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements. They explore the privacy benefits, trade-offs, and practical approaches for stacking sats while maintaining financial privacy.
News and Notes
https://atlas21.com/spanish-company-vanadi-coffee-bets-on-bitcoin-1-1-billion-investment/
Stick around to the very end for the v4v track, “Wait Destiny” by Sara Jade
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
June 4th, 2025: 105,500 USD | 92,250 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording: 899,805
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-212
Music Credits
Sara Jade
Wait Destiny
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 June, and this is episode 212 of Satoshi's Plebs. Today, we're talking about one of the most requested topics from the Plebs, how to buy Bitcoin KYC free. That's right. We're breaking down every legitimate way to stack sats without handing over your passport, your Social Security number, or your mother's maiden name to some exchange.
[00:00:25] Kenshin:
Right. And before anyone gets nervous, we're talking 100% legal methods here. So privacy isn't a dirty word. It's a fundamental right. And whether you're worried about data breaches, government overage, or you just don't want Coinbase knowing how much Bitcoin you own,
[00:00:43] McIntosh:
then there are some solid options out there. We're gonna cover it all today. The top four k YC free exchanges from peach Bitcoin in Europe to Robosats using the Lightning Network, plus how you can earn Bitcoin for goods and services, mining without their surveillance, and some creative methods that may surprise
[00:01:04] Kenshin:
you. Plus, we'll get into the trade offs. KYC free usually means paying a premium and dealing with smaller liquidity pools. And for some that is worth the trade off for more privacy. But for others, like me, it might actually bring a bigger risk.
[00:01:22] McIntosh:
Whether your privacy focused pleb or trying to help friends avoid the KYC honeypot, this episode will give you the complete playbook. But before we dive in to the good stuff, let's check the price of Bitcoin.
[00:01:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. Alright. Before you do that, let's welcome our
[00:01:40] McIntosh:
guests. Yes. We have five people right now, which is almost a record. You guys jumped right on. I appreciate that. I'm sorry we stumbled right out of the gate. I promise that's not normal for us. We're not perfect, but that was that was my fault, actually. It was not Kinshin. So, alright. Well, as we record, the price of Bitcoin, is a hundred and 5,500 in US dollars. And what do you guys have?
[00:02:12] Kenshin:
We have around €92,250
[00:02:15] McIntosh:
here. Okay. And our price last June, so one year ago, was 70,500. And so we're up 49.7% year to date. I think it's interesting, Kinshen, not to get off topic here, but it seems to me that the European market, it's close, but it it does not really track The US market. I just assumed that in general, they were all basically the same. And, like, this week, you seem to be down, whereas we're basically almost the same.
[00:02:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with, devaluation of the US dollar.
[00:02:54] McIntosh:
I don't Mhmm. I think that's You don't want stock above it? No. I think you're putting too much weight on that. I think that the devaluation of the US dollars needed, actually. But yeah. No. I'd I I think week to week changes, I don't think it's that much. I mean, I I don't know. I think it's just market fluctuations. Just kind of odd. But yeah. What's our market cap?
[00:03:19] Kenshin:
2.1 Trillion. So we dropped a bit. And, Gold's market cap is at 23.5 trillion, which increased, by half a trillion from last week, which brings us to Bitcoin versus Gold market cap at 8.9 versus 9.3, we were last, week.
[00:03:42] McIntosh:
So well, I guess Bitcoin went down. I don't know that gold really went up that much. At least I'm not aware of it, but you know, it was up to 22.9
[00:03:52] Kenshin:
last week. So it went up, actually. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, then, you know, definitely. I think we should change to gold bugs soon. No.
[00:04:01] McIntosh:
Not gonna happen. Jack Mallers was actually talking about how he thinks, and this is him. I'm not I'm just repeating what I heard. He thinks that this cycle in the next few years, he thinks gold will hit 20,000, which US, which is just that's a seven x from where we're at now almost. I mean, that's just crazy. I don't know. I mean, I think Bitcoin if if that were to happen, I think Bitcoin would be a lot higher and more than seven x from where we're at now, but I don't know. We'll have to see. The US is warming up the money printers, so there we go.
Our block height. We should get through this as we record. 899805, as of right now So you can check the blockchain and see where we're at. Our difficulty adjustment for the miners out there is about, minus 3.18% currently. So it looks like maybe in another ten days or so, we might have a small downward adjustment. We will see. We're still pretty early in that. We did just have a 4.38, increase, which, yes, I feel that on the side of of, you know, oceans not mining as many blocks. Right? My mining pool.
[00:05:24] Kenshin:
Difficulties way up. Is it on a at an all time high, I guess?
[00:05:28] McIntosh:
What's that? Oh, difficulty? Yeah. I'm actually not sure, to be honest. I don't wanna say it is. But if it's not, it's close. I'll say that. Right now, the mempool is a little high. We I think you plugged in some numbers earlier, and then I went and updated it to four, five, and five. Right now, it's at three three and three. So three sets per vByte. It looks like it's dropping off. We've only got, like, 33 megs of unprocessed transactions. So the mempool is darn near empty, as it has been for weeks on end now. I don't Mhmm. You know, we've never really talked about this. I don't really have an explanation for that. I suspect there's a fair amount of activity that's taking place on the Lightning Network.
Beyond that, I I don't know. People just aren't doing things.
[00:06:22] Kenshin:
It's not on the news so much. It's not. The formal hasn't kicked in yet, I would say, in this cycle. From a retail perspective, that is 100%
[00:06:31] McIntosh:
true. I think it's a combination. I I do think Lightning is is taking more of a load off than I think people realize. Mhmm. Even the exchanges now, like, I think Coinbase happens to have a Lightning set up now so that you can deal with Lightning instead of the main net, Kraken. You know, these are major players that are moving stuff onto the Lightning Network versus the main network. I don't know. What's going on with you?
[00:07:02] Kenshin:
Yeah. Before that, let's say hi again to our viewers. If you if you can tell us you can message us where you're from. That would be interesting to see. Yeah. That'd be cool. I don't have that open. I only have it's it's distracting enough just to see it. We've right now, we've got six viewers.
[00:07:19] McIntosh:
I've gotta be honest. I'm not quite used to that yet. But, yeah, that'd be awesome.
[00:07:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. But, yeah, what's with me? Same. You know, what I've been doing recently with this, project with my wife. We're
[00:07:39] McIntosh:
very committed.
[00:07:41] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that is going really good. And my wife cannot stop working on it and with Claude plugging in on the website. And now we put today some photos on it, so it starts to look really professional. Cool. Good. I am working more on the back end trying to figure out the database and flows of users and yeah. So it's going really good, but I'm getting a bit tired. It's Fiat mining in the morning Yeah. No. I get that. In the office and then in the nights working with this, but it's gonna pay off this, this summer. We're gonna launch it as soon as possible. Awesome.
[00:08:26] McIntosh:
Very cool.
[00:08:27] Kenshin:
And big news. Yes? Big, big news. I'm sitting there. I have yeah. I have not mind to block yet.
[00:08:37] McIntosh:
You heard it here first. Yep. I do not actually know if any of my miners have ever mined a block. That's just not a level of detail that I have in my current setup. Theoretically, one of them could have.
[00:08:52] Kenshin:
You don't want to know. Yeah. No. I don't because
[00:08:56] McIntosh:
yeah. Even if you got a lot of well, I don't know. If I get to a really large amount, like a many, many petahashes of of of mining power, I'm not gonna tell you. So I don't know. I might stay plugged into a pool, though. It's nice to have the evenness. I don't know. In theory, on a on a good pool, you really shouldn't lose that much. I don't know. Alright. In terms of what I've been up to, it's been another fun week. I guess maybe a little personal information here. My wife and I, we're entrepreneurs. I don't know how else to put it. And we have a number of little things going on, businesses, real legitimate businesses that we you know, they're they're set up as corporations and whatever. And I'm not living off of any of them or anything like that. But what that does mean is that taxes every year are a big pain.
And, now that I've added the mining to the mix, doing Bitcoin mining and dealing with taxes is really not fun, and I've I've been dealing with that this week, as well as I did manage late last night finally to get back to our platform. And I got some things kinda moved along. And then, frankly, I had done a bunch of manual steps, and I said, this is not good because if I ever had to reproduce this, which is highly likely, that's gonna be a challenge. So I basically had Claude who I was working with the AI. I had it summarize everything, and I blew away the server, and I'm now rebuilding it. So in the end, this will all be worth it. I keep telling you that, Kinsha.
Yeah. Alright. So before we jump into our topic, I do want to give a shout out to our supporters. We've had some boost come in this week, and I wanna give them credit certainly. Send it Mike, who is a regular here at Satoshi Splebs, boosted this week about episode two eleven, so last week's episode. Send us a 1069 sats. And Send it Mike. I appreciate that. So this was about unit bias. And he said, I don't really remember having unit bias, but I'm a very analytical person. So I pretty quickly started looking at market cap and whether there was still upside. And that's a great way to view it, by the way, just in general. I used to wish we had a unit in between Bitcoin and SAT, Satoshis.
But now 1,000 per dollar is an easy round number, so it's moot. I've other unit explanations, but nothing ever seems to catch on. So very cool. Looking at the market cap, and we've discussed that on here a number of times. Super important, and it's a very good way to look at it.
[00:12:06] Kenshin:
Yeah. You wanna grab the next one? Yeah. That's why also we like to compare it to the gold market cap. Mhmm. It's a nice comparison. You
[00:12:15] McIntosh:
know, let me say this real quick. Sorry. I'm glad you brought that up. But understand, of course, the gold market cap, which Bitcoin is only at 8.9% or whatever, is only a very small part of the overall market. That's like one little piece of the puzzle. So Mhmm. Yeah. Alright.
[00:12:33] Kenshin:
So then we have ABC Stackin, our friend from Australia, who boosted a thousand subs on episodes to 210. And he said, great info again. And for other OZs, Strike won't won't work in, Australia. Right. Neither will fold up. However, Wallet of Satoshi is sound and Amber app and Amber Wallet are also both good for testing here. Foundation Passport, highly recommended, great use and service. So he's talking about the hardware wallets. Right. And he says, and works well with Sparo. For beginners, we started with tan Tangem. Tangem. Tangem. Yeah. I'm not familiar with that. And then upgraded. So he says, hope that help
[00:13:22] McIntosh:
helps. Thanks again, guys. It's a little hardware wallet. I never heard of that one. Appreciate that. I'm sad to hear that strike isn't in Australia, and frankly, I'm a little surprised, but I'm hoping maybe they'll be down there soon. If you're doing KYC, and there's always that trade off, but if you are, it's a great way to set up regular buys and that kind of thing. So alright. Well, let's jump on into what we're actually here to talk about. I called it free range Bitcoin. And for those of you who didn't get that reference, I chickens, free ranging across the I don't know. KYC.
I don't know. Whatever. Macintosh was in a daze. But, yeah, we're gonna talk about some KYC free Bitcoin and how we can get that. So, Kenshin, why don't you start off and in general, just kind of explain what KYC free actually is.
[00:14:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. Well, first of all, KYC, right, is know your customer and is what, banks do, very proudly, I must say. They they like to say that they do KYC and how good that is for us and privacy and all this. And there are plenty of exchanges that require know your customer processes, require you to upload your passport photo, and an address, let some some sort of, invoice that has your address or something to prove that you live where you say you live. Right. So, essentially, after you register to such a service to exchange Bitcoin, then they know everything about you. They know your name. They know your, address. They even have a copy of your passport or ID.
And, of course, that's not good for privacy, for Bitcoiners because when not if, when that information leaks, then yeah. Bad actors can have Right. A lot of information on you, and starts, yeah, trying to take your Bitcoin. And we see that
[00:15:36] McIntosh:
from time to time. In fact, of course, it just happened with Coinbase. Their data was, of about what they say is 90,000 roughly users was was stolen. And Right. Those people are essentially being actively, I don't even what's the word? People are trying to get those people's Bitcoin. Right? So, not a good situation and just the latest example of why KYC causes a problem. They'll tell you, oh, it's for, to stop money laundering. It's to It's close. Protect the children or whatever that they come up with. But the reality is it's very invasive. And when that data is compromised and as you correctly said, when, not if, when that data is compromised, it then becomes a a a pool of information that these scammers use to try and get your Bitcoin from you.
So not good at all.
[00:16:43] Kenshin:
No. And when we say how do you get KYC free Bitcoin, we mean services or ways that you can acquire Bitcoin without having to share that sort of information with any institution or government. Right. And that's what we will get into.
[00:17:02] McIntosh:
So I what I wanna do to break this down, we do wanna talk there's basically, in my opinion, about four different exchanges or services that you can use to get KYC free Bitcoin. So what we're talking about here is exchanging something of value, whether that's dollars or something else, and we'll explain that as we go along for Bitcoin. Typically, in some cases, maybe all of these cases, yeah, they're all actually peer to peer. So you're directly dealing with someone else, and there's a structure in place to make that safe, to safeguard your money or your Bitcoin, whichever side of that your own.
But as we've mentioned, of course, no KYC. And these are privacy focused services. So they'll do things like store your stuff on your on your setup, not some central service, that kind of thing. That makes sense, Kenshin? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll begin with peach Bitcoin, which is well, no. Why don't you do it? It's over in Europe. Yeah. I'll do peach. You have experience with pitch?
[00:18:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. I have installed pitch Bitcoin. It's a peer to peer, mobile phone app for exchanging fiat for Bitcoin. Yes. In a peer to peer fashion, of course. So it supports, the major European currencies, including the Swedish kronor. So it's been yeah. I've been curious. I have not used it, and I will tell you in the end why. Okay. I have not used
[00:18:49] McIntosh:
it. That's the hook. Right? That's what I mean. Yeah. Stay around. I'm just kidding.
[00:18:56] Kenshin:
Alright. So, of course, it's very well designed. It's it was quite new when I first used it. So they they were rapidly developing that app as as I was using it. But still it worked. It looks good. It was supporting, as I said, the European, currencies, which was very easy to onboard and and find someone to exchange fiat for Bitcoin. So that was great. And they accept many, European specific, payment methods like SEPA, s e p a Okay. Which is basically bank to bank transfer, but they are instant, which is quite good actually. Is it yeah. It's almost as instant as lightning in some cases.
Okay. So I have managed to send bank to bank on a Saturday night, actually, which is a bit surprising. But, you know, it's quite good in that sense.
[00:19:50] McIntosh:
Actually, moving money from bank to bank is surprising these days, but okay.
[00:19:55] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. It also supports Revolut, which I also have experience with. It's, quite decent also. Although they like altcoins, which is a bit annoying. So they have a whole education system on how good crypto is and how good it is that they can hold your keys for your safety and stuff like that. Okay. So I when I saw that I stopped using their Bitcoin services. So, yeah, so that's Peach. And it's based in Switzerland, I think. So that's also good for privacy here
[00:20:37] McIntosh:
in Europe. Well, maybe better than other places. I'm not sure it's as good as it used to be. But, yeah.
[00:20:44] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's yeah. I mean, to be honest Better than better than the rest of Europe. Right. Not ideal still.
[00:20:51] McIntosh:
So the next one on the list is Robosats, which is a lightning network based system. It does include The United States. It's global, p two p, overtour, which that does provide a great deal of of security Yeah. Privacy. There is a trade limit of about $1,400 per transaction. So that's not a whole lot these days in terms of a Bitcoin. Right? You're only talking about, roughly 1,400,000.0 Satoshis. And but they do have an escrow system set up that has a reputation factor. So when you get started, you're not gonna have as good a reputation as if you've been consistently trading on there.
Mhmm. I love the aspect of Lightning, because that gives you a layer of privacy that you just don't get on the main net. So that's good. And then yep.
[00:21:50] Kenshin:
I I like, robots as how you you make those profiles. Mhmm. It's based on a key. It's like an Oster key. Like an Oster key somewhere? Yeah. So you generate a key, and then you save that key, and that's that's all you need to recreate your profile. Right. So it's it's quite cool technology, actually. But again, I have not used it for a reason. Okay.
[00:22:14] McIntosh:
We're gonna get to that in a minute. Hang on to that. You wanna go and talk about BISK?
[00:22:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. BISK is, quite quite mature by now. Right? It was one of the first ones, I think. So again, it's a peer to peer network. It's, fully decentralized. You can install Bisc on a computer even. Mhmm. They say they're proudly anti KYC, and they are all are also built on top of, Tor network. So that's very good. And they don't do, of course, any custody of the funds, and they have various payment methods including face to face transactions that you can arrange there on on their network. So I think this is quite good, and they they keep to their ethos from the start.
[00:23:11] McIntosh:
Very cool. Alright. And we'll wrap things up in terms of the different possibilities. And I would suggest I I'm sure there's others. I would suggest you stick with one of these if this is what you're looking at simply because these are they've been around for a while, they're well known, you're less likely to have a problem. Is that fair? Yeah. So the last one is HODL HODL, which is also global. It's a noncustodial peer to peer. They do have an escrow system similar to, Robosat. They're gonna have a lot of different payment options as well, including in person, which I would not necessarily recommend, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more.
Bank transfers and cash options options. I would say this, and this is not the only one that to allow bank transfers. Bank transfers and KYC free, to me, don't mix because you just put a KYC enabled account that you're sending money out of. And in the end, you may find that bites you. But your mileage may vary, not financial advice, etcetera, etcetera. Right? Right. So those are kind of the four big ones. I would definitely be taking a look at those. If you're in The United States, you're a little more limited. I believe in Europe, you actually have access to all four of those, which I find odd that it's actually that way and not the other way. I mean, I'm not trying to be a a USA Centrist or whatever, but I guess it's because y'all have more issues with financial KYC stuff than we do maybe. I I don't know.
I I just would note that. So
[00:25:01] Kenshin:
I don't know. I don't know. I I know that Germany, Italy, Spain, they are very active with Bitcoin, transactions and and exchanges. So maybe yeah. They've just pushed it out of the gates through, yeah, through that. But do you want to jump in on the negatives now? Or Yeah. I think we've seen people long enough and I am waiting to hear this too. So, yeah, let's see. So you have a specific reason that you would not want to use this? No. But and you just mentioned it. I mean, most of those you need to do, bank transfer to Right. Those to that person. You are the person and they are the person in that p two p exchange. Mhmm. And you send money through a bank.
And the easiest one I I found was the Revolut. And even if it was a separate transaction, again, it's a bank to bank. And in Sweden, they even have this, Swish, it's called. So you're using an app on the phone and you you it's it looks exactly like lightning, but Right. With Swede Swedish Kroner and Swedish Bank in behind. But again, if all of those methods are KYC, but most importantly for me is the moment I send a transaction by bank, any of those forms to someone else, they will see my name. And the moment you put my name on Google, the first results is the first ten results is 10 different pages with my address. You're famous, Kinshin.
No. It's it's the Swedish system. Yeah. I know. Anyone you Google in Sweden, you instantly find the phone number, address, everything. And then who is my wife and even what my car is, the license plate of my car, the I mean, there's so many details you can find, and it's not even hidden. It's it's it's they're proudly showing it off. So I I I'm feeling more insecure if it's if it's someone, yeah, a bad actor out there that they see my name and, maybe that's why they're on those platforms just to to find
[00:27:32] McIntosh:
trouble of using one of these services, paying an extra price for it, make sure that you're not tied to this some way like this Revolut or sep SEPA SEPA, or your ACH bank transfer or whatever because that's all KYC. And as soon as you do that, you're compromising the whole point to this. Now Yeah. What does that leave? Frankly, not a whole lot. You can do something, with peach, for example. You can use Amazon gift cards, but that's a pain in the neck. Now Mhmm. Not theoretically. It's it's not theoretical. You do break that KYC. When you do that, you you you're not gonna be compromised that way, I don't think. But it is very difficult to do that.
It's just a pain. So there are other ways to kinda handle this, and we're gonna talk about that as we go along. But it's certainly something that you need to be thinking about.
[00:28:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. And before those other KYC freewareings, I think it ties in good here. I can mention the kyc lite ways. Okay. Which I have used a lot.
[00:28:45] McIntosh:
Can you give us an example?
[00:28:48] Kenshin:
Yes. So you there are actually plenty of websites in Europe based in Switzerland now again. Mhmm. Where you go online, you make an account, you don't put your name, you don't do the usual KYC, but you put your bank account. So you you say that if you send money to them through that bank account, put that exchange into that Bitcoin address. And you sign the address with your wallet. So you verify this is indeed your address and that's your, yeah. You can, yeah. It can be your address, your bank account, but, of course, you could tell someone else Mhmm. To give you bank account to use that instead. But still, you essentially, what you do, you do a bank transfer a SEPA in that way again. So it's instant almost to that company, and instantly they exchange that amount for Bitcoin and send it to your Bitcoin address.
And in my case, in a cold wallet.
[00:29:58] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:29:59] Kenshin:
And that was a KYC lite because I didn't explicitly give them any information about me except the bank account and the Bitcoin address. But from as we said, from the bank account number and the SEPA system and the IBAN system in Europe, you see all the information anyway, which if no one is ask asking for it, maybe they will not go in the trouble to look it up. But in my case, it happened that my bank in Sweden wanted to know where some of that money went to that company in Switzerland. So I went to that company in Switzerland, and I said, I need verification that you received those amounts from me.
And they already had my name. And they said, okay. Here's the paper. And, yeah, of course, we already know who you are. So,
[00:30:58] McIntosh:
it's a KYC light. We have all your details, mister Kinshen. There's no reason for you to tell us anything. Looks like It it went like that exactly. No. It's it's not. It's the financial system. I don't And it's it's amazing to me how comfortable people are with it. I literally get in arguments with close friends about this stuff, and I just I finally just stopped because the bias that they had was so clear. There was no point in arguing with them. I'm like, okay. Whatever. Move on. Yeah. You know? For the sake of our friendship,
[00:31:38] Kenshin:
just move on. Yeah. But to be honest, for me, this KYC lite Mhmm. Felt better than the risk of physical risk with the KYC free ways. Right. And felt better than the full KYC of the big exchanges.
[00:31:57] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:31:58] Kenshin:
So for me, that was a good middle ground for where I live. Of course, I would if I had privacy privacy with undress address privacy and and personal privacy, I would probably have used the KYC free by now, for sure. I mean, I have tried everything. Right. And and especially some of the the ways that we would describe next.
[00:32:26] McIntosh:
Well, let yeah. Let's let's jump on into that because that's where we need to go. So those are not your only alternatives. You can, specifically, one good way is just earning Bitcoin for goods and services, and this is something that I have encouraged people to do. Doing that using Lightning. For example, I produce, I don't know, honey. McIntosh likes the honey and the tea. I would be willing to pay for that with Satoshis on the Lightning Network to a farmer, if I could find one that would do that. K? Or for produce or for anything like that or for some craft item or anything you can think of.
Mhmm. If you can have people pay in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, you could consider that KYC free bit Bitcoin because there's just no way it will be traced back. Right? It just won't happen.
[00:33:34] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great way. And, I would add here, you can even do that with, family and friends. So if a family or friend member has Bitcoin Mhmm. And they want something from you, then you pay that with fiat. And I have done that. So I have bought Right. Like, a computer with fiat money, and then I sold it to a friend for Bitcoin. Right. So it was Right. Person to person exchange in hand, let's say. And, you know, some fresh KYC free for me at least, Bitcoin.
[00:34:15] McIntosh:
The the the limiting factor here, you can do things like what you're talking about from time to time. It's difficult to do that on a regular basis. Most people are not farmers or small producers. Most people are not crafty or whatever so that they can build something and sell it online. Let's be honest. So that is the limiting factor to what we're talking about here. You're not going to necessarily be able to generate a monthly stream of Satoshis by that method.
[00:34:54] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:34:55] McIntosh:
Right? I have an answer for that. We'll get to that in just a minute. But, you you you know, this is one possibility, especially if you're somebody who happens to to have something to sell and you're looking to expand your your audience. Right? There's I would I don't wanna call it famous, but there's there's a guy in Bitcoin sir well, there is somebody who's basically famous, Mandrake, who sells the baklava. Mhmm. Like, apparently, at the Bitcoin conference, he sold a bunch of baklava again. And this he's been doing that for years and years. There's a guy named, Barn Miner.
Yeah. He's a, like a pleb miner. He dries beef, maybe more than beef. I don't know. But meat with his miners and sells the jerky. Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's clever. Right? Again, not everybody can do that, but but the what he's getting, KYC free. %.
[00:36:08] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Right? And there are plenty of accounts like that on Nostra now, and, there are plenty of apps on Nostra as well to to log in with your Nostra account and advertise your products and get paid with lightning.
[00:36:24] McIntosh:
Now so that may be a rabbit hole that you wanna go down. No. Not now. Not now. I was talking about our listeners. Hang on. Okay. No. I get it. That's not what you wanna do, but I just mean in general. Alright. But another way man, I'm sorry. If you're a little more technical, we can talk about mining. Mhmm. Now, Kenshin, I know you mine with some home miners. Those are don't really require a whole lot of technical prowess. Let's be honest. You plug it in. You connect it up to your network and connect it to your mining pool, and that's it. Yep.
You can also mine with bigger miners, and I don't think I think you'll be able to answer this. Realistically, how much Satoshis are you actually making off of those miners? And you have two. Right?
[00:37:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Well, one is plugged into Ocean. The other is Okay.
[00:37:37] McIntosh:
Solo mining. So Well, let's just deal with the one then. Are you really making any sats per month? Can you estimate that at all?
[00:37:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. Very little less than $5 a month worth of sats, I would say. Well, it's $5. Let's say it's $5. Mhmm.
[00:37:59] McIntosh:
If you're using ocean for your mining pool, that is KYC free. I promise you it is. It is. And what's that? It is. Yes. Yeah. And but that's not a whole lot. What could you do to improve that? Well, I'm glad you asked. There is a way to improve it. You've got two choices. You can either put a miner in your home or multiple miners, or you can host a miner somewhere. This is, this is not why I mine, but but the side benefit of that is the Satoshis that I mine are KYC free. Okay? Now that sounds crazy. Running a miner is not out of the realm of possibility for a lot of people. If you can work your way around a computer, you can probably run a miner in your house. Now I will or in your garage or whatever. I will say you need to look into this.
It probably won't run off your household voltage. You need to check on that specifically, and you need to kind of know what you're getting into. And I certainly would not recommend you go out and buy the biggest, fanciest miner that you can because the new s 23 that I mentioned last week, $15,000. Don't do that.
[00:39:24] Kenshin:
Okay? The hydro cooled. Right? The hydro cooled one. I man. That's good.
[00:39:29] McIntosh:
Really want some of those. Anyways, don't do that. Buy an s, even a well, I'll give you an example. I literally have three of these right now that are coming off the racks. I've got three older miners. They're my original miners, and they're being packed up and sent home to me. They're not worth running on my setup. I might sell those certainly well under a thousand dollars. Let's say 500 if I'm lucky. I don't know. $500 for one of these miners. You could buy this miner and plug it in. You're going to pay for electricity. This is not free, people.
But if you're willing to pay for the electricity, you are gonna make some Satoshis off of that. Do you happen to know the miner that you have plugged into Ocean? How many terahashes that is?
[00:40:27] Kenshin:
Mine is two to four depending on the setting you use. Let's just say it's four terahash.
[00:40:33] McIntosh:
My oldest miner is 25 times more powerful than that. Okay? Hundred? Yeah. It is a hundred. One is a hundred, and one is either a 10 or a 20. I don't remember. Okay. K. So my point is if you'd want to pay to get KYC free Bitcoin, you can plug that in and run it and collect those Satoshis. So maybe you make $5. Maybe, that cannot be right, Kenshin. You must be making less than $5 significantly. Yeah. I must be making less. Yes. It might be one or two. 20 five times that off of that miner. I would have to look it up, but it is a decent amount. It's worth your time.
Now you may and what I would recommend, frankly, is you run one from home and get used to it. You may wanna host this as well. Your your electricity is cheaper. My electricity at my host facility is half of what I pay here at home. Mhmm. But you do in, introduce some complexity, and you better pick the right hosting service, and I'll be happy to chat with you about that if you so choose. You get the wrong hosting service, Compass Mining, historically. Go look it up. You know, you're you're gonna have trouble. But I have a great facility with the one that I use. Now I don't know if they'll take one miner. I don't know.
But I happen to very much like the one that I'm using right now. So there is an option there. It's going to generate a continuous flow of Satoshis for you. Not continuous, but, you know, over the course of months, you're going to get a a stream of Satoshis, KYC free. Plus, you're gonna know more about the Bitcoin network, which who doesn't wanna know that?
[00:42:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. But, a tip there, there are those so called mine Bitcoin mining calculators. No. But those Bitcoin mining calculators, they give you the, the estimated revenue and profitability of your miner. So you plug in your numbers, the terrahas of your miner, the price Mhmm. Of the electricity Right. Or the cost of for the electricity. And then, yeah. It either knows which model you have if you plug in the model of the miner or you or you give you the power consumption Right. In watts, and then it calculates
[00:43:15] McIntosh:
yeah. If you can be profitable and by how much per day. Not be profitable at home. I'm just gonna tell you that. But it is a way to be KYC free, to not have to deal with any of these services, to deal with selling anything. It's it's just simpler, except now you've got a miner that you gotta care and feed for. Right? Mhmm.
[00:43:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And my my equation was that. So I know my miner is costing me money. Mhmm. But in in my equation, it's it's a heating device that I will be using anyway. So half of the heating comes back to me as Bitcoin.
[00:43:54] McIntosh:
I love the heating concept. That whole thing, it's not something that I can use where I'm at. But in general, it's a terrific you're you're already paying for it. Why not at least make some Satoshis off of it? Right. Very cool.
[00:44:15] Kenshin:
What other ways do we have?
[00:44:18] McIntosh:
The another way would just be freelance work. Right? I go on I don't know of a Bitcoin service like this, but Upwork, and I agreed to do work for somebody to build a website, do a service, whatever, and I get paid in Bitcoin. That's a great way to do it.
[00:44:37] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:44:38] McIntosh:
I would not call this KYC free, but Bitcoin backed credit cards and reward programs like FOLD famously, which is not available in Australia. They are just not just getting going, but they're fairly new, so that's not surprising. But, yeah, those get you rewards, which it would be difficult to prove that that was your Bitcoin. How about that? I'm not maybe KYC lite would be a better explanation. Yeah. And then I love this one actually, Bitcoin bounties and competitions. If you're a coder, if you've got some skills there, that might be something you wanna look into. Mhmm. There are companies who are literally paying bounties on different projects, different parts of a project, and they can be pretty minimal.
And if you're good, you get a competitive rate on that. You're getting a if you just flip that Satoshis into dollars, you're actually getting a a good rate on that, if that makes sense, per hour. Yeah. Alright? Mhmm. Now before we wrap this up, I I do want to make sure that we look at some of the downsides, and I think we've already emphasized some of these. But just to make sure, let's put them all in one place.
[00:45:56] Kenshin:
Yes. So we have, you pay a premium usually, especially those p two p platforms. You might pay from, yeah, two. I don't think I've ever seen 2% premium, but 10% easily
[00:46:09] McIntosh:
is most of it I've seen. I think five to 10% would be more normal, and that's fair.
[00:46:14] Kenshin:
Yeah. And the the light KYC choices I've seen, they were around one and a half. Yeah. So that was much better in that way also. Okay. Then you also have lower liquidity. So those are smaller order books and, yeah. So you might not find and and you you have to find the right exact, how do we say, partner in the p two p equation to to have the exact same amount that you want to exchange. Right? And it might be too little or not too much or something.
[00:46:50] McIntosh:
Okay. Definitely a risk. There is a higher risk of fraud. It is true. I think with those four exchanges that we listed, it's reasonable. You know, the chance of fraud happening is is minimal, but it is still there. Mhmm. I did wanna make sure and you don't have protection if there's a real issue that comes up. And so those are some of the kind of risk. I did actually I I wanted to mention one other way. Past the mining, so we talked about the exchanges. We talked about, like, selling a service, that kind of thing. We talked about mining. Here's something that anyone can do.
There are Bitcoin meetups almost everywhere in the world within reasonable driving distance. Now I feel like you should be going to a Bitcoin meetup if you're serious about Bitcoin anyways. But specifically, I would say the vast majority of those Bitcoin meetups, if there are more than a couple of people, are going to have a miner involved in that meetup. Someone like myself. I go to my local meetup. I'm sitting there. I've got miners running. I would sell Bitcoin to anyone in that meetup that I that had been there more than once, right, that I felt reasonably comfortable with.
And I could do it straight from my account, KYC free Bitcoin. There would be a premium, and I haven't ever done it. So so I don't know what that would be, but it would be somewhere around that five to 10% range. It'd probably be right in the middle of that, to be honest. Mhmm. But there's a level of trust there. I mean, that's just how humans are. And if you're a regular person, you could do that every month. That could be your monthly buy. Just throwing it out there as a possibility. I've never heard anybody else say that, but it it would work.
[00:49:18] Kenshin:
Yeah. And a good tip there that I also want to mention is every time you do a KYC, or any Bitcoin transaction for that matter Mhmm. Use a new address. Generate a new address that you never used before. And when you do that, you can also if you use Piro Mhmm. Maybe some other wallets, you can actually put a label on that address. So you know that Satoshis that arrived on that address are KYC free, and you can keep some track of Right. Of them.
[00:49:52] McIntosh:
You remember the tax thing I was talking about? Yeah. I'm going in Sparrow. I'm going through my stuff. And I had one that was labeled Mcintosh Mining. I could not recall what that was for, and it was sending money out. It didn't make sense. I figured it out. I had to think about it for a while. Be careful about your labels. That's my point. Right? I realized what it was after the fact or later. But, you know, labels labels are good, and, yes, certainly be generating new addresses.
[00:50:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I think Sparrow has a function. I haven't used it yet, but you I think you can save your labels and move them to another Sparrow installation because, of course, you cannot sync, online or in any way. So so it's good to use the labels, save them back that saving save somewhere, and then you can restore. Otherwise yeah. If you make the labels and you lose the computer and then you the labels are gone.
[00:51:05] McIntosh:
I got sidetracked. I just brought up my, profile on Noster. Okay. It's this completely different topic. I need some help. My web of trust score is one.
[00:51:21] Kenshin:
What is
[00:51:22] McIntosh:
that? It's like it's it does influence how you get shown. It's like a there's a formula for it. I don't know, but I bet yours is higher than mine. Where do you see that? It's in my profile, at least on Coracle. I've done I'm sure Damus shows it. Sorry. This is sinelating. Let's let's get back to what we were talking about. I apologize. We'll talk about it later. That's just bizarre that it's so low because I do post quite regularly. Alright. Mhmm. Yeah. There wasn't a whole lot of news this week to be Actually, that's why I was bringing it up because I wanted to see if I had news items. There wasn't a whole lot of news this week.
I think we've kinda hit the summer doldrums. I don't think there'll be a whole lot of news for the next few months. We did highest monthly close ever at the May, so that's that's good. That literally we didn't mention this. I think this actually happened last week. GameStop bought 4,710 Bitcoin. So if you're kind of into the whole corporate strategy thing, they are making a move. They literally went from zero to third place and or fourth, something like that, in terms of corporate holders. No. Bitcoin.
[00:52:45] Kenshin:
That might not be right. Or what did you say? 4,000 Bitcoin. Yeah. $500,000,000
[00:52:50] McIntosh:
worth.
[00:52:51] Kenshin:
Oh, well, I have one better here. A Spanish coffee chain. Okay. They bought €1,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin.
[00:53:02] McIntosh:
Well, we all know that the euro is not worth the oh, sorry. No. I'm just kidding. Yeah. I saw that, And I think that's a shame because I had not heard about it. When did this happen? So fill me in. I hope this happened today. Oh, okay. I probably would have heard about it.
[00:53:23] Kenshin:
So That's a lot. It's a well known Spanish coffee shop chain. Well, it's preparing for a major shift in its business model through a Bitcoin investment worth over $1,100,000,000 and 1 billion euro equivalent. So, yeah, they are so it's those stories come up now every week. Another big company I think 2025
[00:53:53] McIntosh:
will be the year of corporate adoption, the start of. And it's not that companies had never done this prior. I'm I'm well aware that MicroStrategy or strategy. I mean, that's just an obvious example. But we are starting to see the widespread adoption. And eventually, I saw that I heard this thing on a podcast. James Lavish, I think, was talking. He feels like when one of the giant companies, well, in the tech space, it'd be like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. Right? One of these type companies starts buying Bitcoin. That will wake up basically the entire corporate world and people will go, oh, we gotta do this.
Right now, they're very much swimming against the stream by doing that. It's it's we don't view it as a risk, but for them put yourself in their position. It's it's risky. Right?
[00:55:04] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:55:07] McIntosh:
IBM, go talk to a CEO of it. He's not gonna buy Bitcoin right now. Why would he do that? He could lose his job. Why would you know, it made a lot of sense to me, but kind of one of the things that will really unblock this, and I do not know if this will happen this year, but we'll see Microsoft, Amazon, one of these really large companies lean into Bitcoin. I think it could be Facebook, but that is just me idly speculating. I don't think it will be Apple first. I think they're too too corporate at this point. But I I believe it could be Facebook.
[00:55:50] Kenshin:
I hope it's none of them. Well It will be good for Bitcoin, but Yeah. It will. Facebook. You
[00:55:58] McIntosh:
know it's gonna happen, though. Yeah. This is like the people saying government shouldn't be buying Bitcoin. Yeah. Okay. I get in a hypothetical philosophical world that that is ideal, but that is not reality. And what did Satoshi say? I think it was Satoshi. Bitcoin was made for enemies. Maybe it was somebody else. I don't wanna it is because it is fair in that sense. So I don't know, but I do think that will open up the floodgates even more. Although I think I mean, I gave a figure a few weeks ago. The number of Bitcoin, you know, companies that had Bitcoin had grown so much just since January 1.
Right? It was a lot. Mhmm. I don't know. But, you know,
[00:56:53] Kenshin:
what for me, more realistic scenario is who talked to Michael Saylor a few months ago in his boat? Was it Jeff Bezos?
[00:57:05] McIntosh:
Amazon.
[00:57:06] Kenshin:
Yeah. I think I've heard that. So for me, Amazon would be the realistic one and the big one that would be actually be useful.
[00:57:14] McIntosh:
I will say this. Of course, Bezos has controlling interest in Amazon. He is a risk taker. He is he will take a gamble. And I could definitely you may be right. Yeah. I would not bet Facebook versus Amazon. But I would bet it won't be Apple. It won't be Microsoft, and it won't be Google. They're too corporate. Yeah. I agree. In a lot of ways, Amazon is corporate, but Jeff is a bit of a wild one. And he may just go, we're buying a billion dollars of Bitcoin. Yeah.
[00:57:52] Kenshin:
It makes sense. Alright.
[00:57:58] McIntosh:
There there really was not a lot of news. I don't really have anything else. So, that's good to see. I'm scrolling back through stuff. I'm not nothing posted. Nothing. In general, The United States is falling apart. We're spending too much money. Elon quit Doge, which by the way, I mean, I know y'all don't like it when I start talking about politics, but I'm not a huge Elon fan. I think he's very smart. I think he's done a lot of really interesting things, but I I also think there's a lot of other stuff going on there. But I will give him credit where credit is due. When Trump put up this tremendously stupid bill, which he calls his big beautiful bill, of more spending, which is what it is.
Elon said I've had enough. This is not working, and he quit. I'll give him credit for that. He has a backbone. So good for him. I think what's going on right now is not a good thing in general for The United States, for The United States economy. And it's it's depressing because we're about to see debt go up. And by the way, it'll be a good thing for Bitcoin, but we're about to see debt go up. Our job growth is nonexistent. More and more companies are firing, laying off, whatever, for productivity, for just money savings, for whatever. I personally think, we're not in a good place.
Now they're gonna start printing money, and we'll get magically get a boost, but that's just gonna add to our debt, which I feel is equally important. So
[00:59:53] Kenshin:
Alright. It's interesting times.
[00:59:55] McIntosh:
I and I would like to see it. Let me say this. I I never believed that Doge was going to, like, magically fix everything, but I 100% love the idea of an organization examining itself and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think that should actually be celebrated, and I think it should continue regardless of what else goes on in the government. USAID, all of the stuff going on there, did not need to be happening. Do they ever get it wrong? Probably. In fact, I'm quite certain that they do. But as a taxpayer, the government should be held accountable, and Doge essentially is one way of doing that.
I'm not sure they have enough teeth, but it is one way of doing that. I'll get off my step stool. My I whatever. You know what I mean? English words, hard. Right.
[01:01:00] Kenshin:
Exactly. Do we have a question then
[01:01:03] McIntosh:
for our audience? We do. I put it down. Question. Wait. Have you ever bought any KYC free Bitcoin? Yeah. In whatever method, by the way. I'm not just saying from these four exchanges.
[01:01:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. So be interesting to know. Yeah.
[01:01:23] McIntosh:
Just like the news, we don't really have any software. There was one, LND lightning node. Big update. I think it's zero point one nine. We will eventually probably the new server will have that on it. So, yeah, very cool. Good improvement, stability, on and on. Still no Bolt 12 l and d. Really? Get your act together. But yeah.
[01:01:50] Kenshin:
That's pretty much it. Now what should we announce for
[01:01:54] McIntosh:
Oh. Coming week? We do have an announcement. Hey. You keep me on target. I'm so this is this is why I pay you the big sats, Kenshin. Yes. Yeah. He's like, when is that gonna start? I'm waiting. You see every set come in that I do, by the way. I am not hiding anything. Yeah. We do have an announcement. We are continuing to experiment with this live stuff. We, I think, had a record number of people today. I hope so. It seemed like we did. I know we had six or seven. So at one point, I would love to see more in there. And as you said earlier, I would love to see people asking questions and interacting. That's kind of the point of that aside from getting to hear the episode earlier. But, yeah, we're going live on podcasting two point o stuff.
So if you have a podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain, let me see. My two are Fountain and Podcast Guru. They both support the live tag. That's what it's called. You will get notified when we go live, and you could actually listen to it right then just like what we do with Zap.Stream. It's just another way for you to get this content. And with our setup, it looks like it's a fairly easy add on for us, so we're gonna do it
[01:03:27] Kenshin:
when they even start next week. And the times we go live is Wednesday night in Europe, around 9PM central Yeah. European time.
[01:03:40] McIntosh:
What time is this? That would be 02:00 here. So we normally sit down about 01:30, and we, you know, we chat for a few minutes and kinda get things set up. So yeah. Hopefully, a little before that time, but
[01:03:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's say 08:30 Central European Time.
[01:04:01] McIntosh:
What we will ultimately do once I get a mixer and a better setup, you know, we'll maybe have some music playing as we get started. You know, he and I, Kenshin and I are gonna have to talk, and we'll have to be careful about what we say at that point. But it'll give people kind of a chance to onboard and get up to speed. So we're gonna expand that out. That may give you more opportunities. If you have a podcasting two point o app, that gives you the opportunity also to be like our supporters that you heard earlier in the show, send it Mike, you know, boosting a thousand 69 sats.
Our friend from Australia, which it's ABC something. I apologize.
[01:04:45] Kenshin:
ABC Stacking.
[01:04:46] McIntosh:
ABCStacking. He sent in a thousand thousand. Yeah. And we do appreciate that. But you can do that from a podcasting two point o app like Fountain, or Podcast Guru as a way of supporting. Send in a message. You can get on the zap. Stream. I think we're just trying to overload everybody and give them different ways. Yes. Honestly, ultimately, we'll probably be going to YouTube, I think, is kind of our final destination. I am not a fan of YouTube, but, you know, that's where the kids are. So we're probably gonna start doing live on there before the end of the summer, I would think. Mhmm. Yeah.
For better or for worse. Yeah. For better or for worse, I will probably just not do I'll do it completely ad free. I don't think it'll be a significant source of any kind of money anyways, and the ads on YouTube just annoy the stew out of me. So just another way to get it. Yep. You know what the best way to support this podcast is, Kenshin?
[01:05:54] Kenshin:
No. Please tell me.
[01:05:58] McIntosh:
Hey, Kenshin. Let me tell you about this podcast I listen to. It's called Satoshi's Plebs. It's got this this nutball from, The United States who praddles on about The US spending too much money. And this really great guy from Europe. I the dude speaks, like, 14,000 languages, and he's really sharp. And, man, they talk about Bitcoin. They talk about some macroeconomics. They talk about really practical things like KYC free Bitcoin like they did today. You should listen.
[01:06:30] Kenshin:
Yeah. You should tell your friends to listen.
[01:06:35] McIntosh:
That's how you do it. Mhmm. That is the best way to support. We do appreciate the Satoshis. And at Satoshis. And at the end of the day, they're you know, we need that support. I want to do so many things with this show, and it's just limited by the Satoshis. Let's be honest. But telling other people about the show, we have seen growth. I'm very happy, but I always want more, let's be honest. And the growth has been steady, but it's not been, like, a vertical, you know, climb. Yeah. That's it. That's how you can support us. We've got our web page, satoshis-plebs.com. And if you go to slash episodes, it's like a list of all the episodes.
We have all the different ways of contacting us on those episode pages. Nostr, Twitter, gosh, email, whatever. Okay? Yep.
[01:07:32] Kenshin:
And follow us on Nostr especially. We
[01:07:35] McIntosh:
we're on there. At least I am. Yeah. I we're getting to be certainly the most active on Nostr. I am switching. In fact, hey. Confession. I deleted my Twitter app off my phone. Yeah. Is that cool or what? Yeah.
[01:07:50] Kenshin:
Well, welcome to the club.
[01:07:52] McIntosh:
I still well, I go to the web page, but it does make it harder. Yeah. And so, yeah, I'm not on there as much. Alright? So thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. We've already talked about that, but send us a message. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We will talk to you all soon.
[01:08:14] Kenshin:
Bye bye. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait, Destiny. And I'll be where your time. Wait, Destiny. Say you're still weak. Say you're still weak. Thumbs up, Benny. I'm hitchhiking all across this galaxy. Hello, friend. Where are you traveling?
What is up, Pleb Nation? Today is June, and this is episode 212 of Satoshi's Plebs. Today, we're talking about one of the most requested topics from the Plebs, how to buy Bitcoin KYC free. That's right. We're breaking down every legitimate way to stack sats without handing over your passport, your Social Security number, or your mother's maiden name to some exchange.
[00:00:25] Kenshin:
Right. And before anyone gets nervous, we're talking 100% legal methods here. So privacy isn't a dirty word. It's a fundamental right. And whether you're worried about data breaches, government overage, or you just don't want Coinbase knowing how much Bitcoin you own,
[00:00:43] McIntosh:
then there are some solid options out there. We're gonna cover it all today. The top four k YC free exchanges from peach Bitcoin in Europe to Robosats using the Lightning Network, plus how you can earn Bitcoin for goods and services, mining without their surveillance, and some creative methods that may surprise
[00:01:04] Kenshin:
you. Plus, we'll get into the trade offs. KYC free usually means paying a premium and dealing with smaller liquidity pools. And for some that is worth the trade off for more privacy. But for others, like me, it might actually bring a bigger risk.
[00:01:22] McIntosh:
Whether your privacy focused pleb or trying to help friends avoid the KYC honeypot, this episode will give you the complete playbook. But before we dive in to the good stuff, let's check the price of Bitcoin.
[00:01:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. Alright. Before you do that, let's welcome our
[00:01:40] McIntosh:
guests. Yes. We have five people right now, which is almost a record. You guys jumped right on. I appreciate that. I'm sorry we stumbled right out of the gate. I promise that's not normal for us. We're not perfect, but that was that was my fault, actually. It was not Kinshin. So, alright. Well, as we record, the price of Bitcoin, is a hundred and 5,500 in US dollars. And what do you guys have?
[00:02:12] Kenshin:
We have around €92,250
[00:02:15] McIntosh:
here. Okay. And our price last June, so one year ago, was 70,500. And so we're up 49.7% year to date. I think it's interesting, Kinshen, not to get off topic here, but it seems to me that the European market, it's close, but it it does not really track The US market. I just assumed that in general, they were all basically the same. And, like, this week, you seem to be down, whereas we're basically almost the same.
[00:02:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with, devaluation of the US dollar.
[00:02:54] McIntosh:
I don't Mhmm. I think that's You don't want stock above it? No. I think you're putting too much weight on that. I think that the devaluation of the US dollars needed, actually. But yeah. No. I'd I I think week to week changes, I don't think it's that much. I mean, I I don't know. I think it's just market fluctuations. Just kind of odd. But yeah. What's our market cap?
[00:03:19] Kenshin:
2.1 Trillion. So we dropped a bit. And, Gold's market cap is at 23.5 trillion, which increased, by half a trillion from last week, which brings us to Bitcoin versus Gold market cap at 8.9 versus 9.3, we were last, week.
[00:03:42] McIntosh:
So well, I guess Bitcoin went down. I don't know that gold really went up that much. At least I'm not aware of it, but you know, it was up to 22.9
[00:03:52] Kenshin:
last week. So it went up, actually. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, then, you know, definitely. I think we should change to gold bugs soon. No.
[00:04:01] McIntosh:
Not gonna happen. Jack Mallers was actually talking about how he thinks, and this is him. I'm not I'm just repeating what I heard. He thinks that this cycle in the next few years, he thinks gold will hit 20,000, which US, which is just that's a seven x from where we're at now almost. I mean, that's just crazy. I don't know. I mean, I think Bitcoin if if that were to happen, I think Bitcoin would be a lot higher and more than seven x from where we're at now, but I don't know. We'll have to see. The US is warming up the money printers, so there we go.
Our block height. We should get through this as we record. 899805, as of right now So you can check the blockchain and see where we're at. Our difficulty adjustment for the miners out there is about, minus 3.18% currently. So it looks like maybe in another ten days or so, we might have a small downward adjustment. We will see. We're still pretty early in that. We did just have a 4.38, increase, which, yes, I feel that on the side of of, you know, oceans not mining as many blocks. Right? My mining pool.
[00:05:24] Kenshin:
Difficulties way up. Is it on a at an all time high, I guess?
[00:05:28] McIntosh:
What's that? Oh, difficulty? Yeah. I'm actually not sure, to be honest. I don't wanna say it is. But if it's not, it's close. I'll say that. Right now, the mempool is a little high. We I think you plugged in some numbers earlier, and then I went and updated it to four, five, and five. Right now, it's at three three and three. So three sets per vByte. It looks like it's dropping off. We've only got, like, 33 megs of unprocessed transactions. So the mempool is darn near empty, as it has been for weeks on end now. I don't Mhmm. You know, we've never really talked about this. I don't really have an explanation for that. I suspect there's a fair amount of activity that's taking place on the Lightning Network.
Beyond that, I I don't know. People just aren't doing things.
[00:06:22] Kenshin:
It's not on the news so much. It's not. The formal hasn't kicked in yet, I would say, in this cycle. From a retail perspective, that is 100%
[00:06:31] McIntosh:
true. I think it's a combination. I I do think Lightning is is taking more of a load off than I think people realize. Mhmm. Even the exchanges now, like, I think Coinbase happens to have a Lightning set up now so that you can deal with Lightning instead of the main net, Kraken. You know, these are major players that are moving stuff onto the Lightning Network versus the main network. I don't know. What's going on with you?
[00:07:02] Kenshin:
Yeah. Before that, let's say hi again to our viewers. If you if you can tell us you can message us where you're from. That would be interesting to see. Yeah. That'd be cool. I don't have that open. I only have it's it's distracting enough just to see it. We've right now, we've got six viewers.
[00:07:19] McIntosh:
I've gotta be honest. I'm not quite used to that yet. But, yeah, that'd be awesome.
[00:07:26] Kenshin:
Yeah. But, yeah, what's with me? Same. You know, what I've been doing recently with this, project with my wife. We're
[00:07:39] McIntosh:
very committed.
[00:07:41] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that is going really good. And my wife cannot stop working on it and with Claude plugging in on the website. And now we put today some photos on it, so it starts to look really professional. Cool. Good. I am working more on the back end trying to figure out the database and flows of users and yeah. So it's going really good, but I'm getting a bit tired. It's Fiat mining in the morning Yeah. No. I get that. In the office and then in the nights working with this, but it's gonna pay off this, this summer. We're gonna launch it as soon as possible. Awesome.
[00:08:26] McIntosh:
Very cool.
[00:08:27] Kenshin:
And big news. Yes? Big, big news. I'm sitting there. I have yeah. I have not mind to block yet.
[00:08:37] McIntosh:
You heard it here first. Yep. I do not actually know if any of my miners have ever mined a block. That's just not a level of detail that I have in my current setup. Theoretically, one of them could have.
[00:08:52] Kenshin:
You don't want to know. Yeah. No. I don't because
[00:08:56] McIntosh:
yeah. Even if you got a lot of well, I don't know. If I get to a really large amount, like a many, many petahashes of of of mining power, I'm not gonna tell you. So I don't know. I might stay plugged into a pool, though. It's nice to have the evenness. I don't know. In theory, on a on a good pool, you really shouldn't lose that much. I don't know. Alright. In terms of what I've been up to, it's been another fun week. I guess maybe a little personal information here. My wife and I, we're entrepreneurs. I don't know how else to put it. And we have a number of little things going on, businesses, real legitimate businesses that we you know, they're they're set up as corporations and whatever. And I'm not living off of any of them or anything like that. But what that does mean is that taxes every year are a big pain.
And, now that I've added the mining to the mix, doing Bitcoin mining and dealing with taxes is really not fun, and I've I've been dealing with that this week, as well as I did manage late last night finally to get back to our platform. And I got some things kinda moved along. And then, frankly, I had done a bunch of manual steps, and I said, this is not good because if I ever had to reproduce this, which is highly likely, that's gonna be a challenge. So I basically had Claude who I was working with the AI. I had it summarize everything, and I blew away the server, and I'm now rebuilding it. So in the end, this will all be worth it. I keep telling you that, Kinsha.
Yeah. Alright. So before we jump into our topic, I do want to give a shout out to our supporters. We've had some boost come in this week, and I wanna give them credit certainly. Send it Mike, who is a regular here at Satoshi Splebs, boosted this week about episode two eleven, so last week's episode. Send us a 1069 sats. And Send it Mike. I appreciate that. So this was about unit bias. And he said, I don't really remember having unit bias, but I'm a very analytical person. So I pretty quickly started looking at market cap and whether there was still upside. And that's a great way to view it, by the way, just in general. I used to wish we had a unit in between Bitcoin and SAT, Satoshis.
But now 1,000 per dollar is an easy round number, so it's moot. I've other unit explanations, but nothing ever seems to catch on. So very cool. Looking at the market cap, and we've discussed that on here a number of times. Super important, and it's a very good way to look at it.
[00:12:06] Kenshin:
Yeah. You wanna grab the next one? Yeah. That's why also we like to compare it to the gold market cap. Mhmm. It's a nice comparison. You
[00:12:15] McIntosh:
know, let me say this real quick. Sorry. I'm glad you brought that up. But understand, of course, the gold market cap, which Bitcoin is only at 8.9% or whatever, is only a very small part of the overall market. That's like one little piece of the puzzle. So Mhmm. Yeah. Alright.
[00:12:33] Kenshin:
So then we have ABC Stackin, our friend from Australia, who boosted a thousand subs on episodes to 210. And he said, great info again. And for other OZs, Strike won't won't work in, Australia. Right. Neither will fold up. However, Wallet of Satoshi is sound and Amber app and Amber Wallet are also both good for testing here. Foundation Passport, highly recommended, great use and service. So he's talking about the hardware wallets. Right. And he says, and works well with Sparo. For beginners, we started with tan Tangem. Tangem. Tangem. Yeah. I'm not familiar with that. And then upgraded. So he says, hope that help
[00:13:22] McIntosh:
helps. Thanks again, guys. It's a little hardware wallet. I never heard of that one. Appreciate that. I'm sad to hear that strike isn't in Australia, and frankly, I'm a little surprised, but I'm hoping maybe they'll be down there soon. If you're doing KYC, and there's always that trade off, but if you are, it's a great way to set up regular buys and that kind of thing. So alright. Well, let's jump on into what we're actually here to talk about. I called it free range Bitcoin. And for those of you who didn't get that reference, I chickens, free ranging across the I don't know. KYC.
I don't know. Whatever. Macintosh was in a daze. But, yeah, we're gonna talk about some KYC free Bitcoin and how we can get that. So, Kenshin, why don't you start off and in general, just kind of explain what KYC free actually is.
[00:14:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. Well, first of all, KYC, right, is know your customer and is what, banks do, very proudly, I must say. They they like to say that they do KYC and how good that is for us and privacy and all this. And there are plenty of exchanges that require know your customer processes, require you to upload your passport photo, and an address, let some some sort of, invoice that has your address or something to prove that you live where you say you live. Right. So, essentially, after you register to such a service to exchange Bitcoin, then they know everything about you. They know your name. They know your, address. They even have a copy of your passport or ID.
And, of course, that's not good for privacy, for Bitcoiners because when not if, when that information leaks, then yeah. Bad actors can have Right. A lot of information on you, and starts, yeah, trying to take your Bitcoin. And we see that
[00:15:36] McIntosh:
from time to time. In fact, of course, it just happened with Coinbase. Their data was, of about what they say is 90,000 roughly users was was stolen. And Right. Those people are essentially being actively, I don't even what's the word? People are trying to get those people's Bitcoin. Right? So, not a good situation and just the latest example of why KYC causes a problem. They'll tell you, oh, it's for, to stop money laundering. It's to It's close. Protect the children or whatever that they come up with. But the reality is it's very invasive. And when that data is compromised and as you correctly said, when, not if, when that data is compromised, it then becomes a a a pool of information that these scammers use to try and get your Bitcoin from you.
So not good at all.
[00:16:43] Kenshin:
No. And when we say how do you get KYC free Bitcoin, we mean services or ways that you can acquire Bitcoin without having to share that sort of information with any institution or government. Right. And that's what we will get into.
[00:17:02] McIntosh:
So I what I wanna do to break this down, we do wanna talk there's basically, in my opinion, about four different exchanges or services that you can use to get KYC free Bitcoin. So what we're talking about here is exchanging something of value, whether that's dollars or something else, and we'll explain that as we go along for Bitcoin. Typically, in some cases, maybe all of these cases, yeah, they're all actually peer to peer. So you're directly dealing with someone else, and there's a structure in place to make that safe, to safeguard your money or your Bitcoin, whichever side of that your own.
But as we've mentioned, of course, no KYC. And these are privacy focused services. So they'll do things like store your stuff on your on your setup, not some central service, that kind of thing. That makes sense, Kenshin? Yeah. Yeah. So I'll begin with peach Bitcoin, which is well, no. Why don't you do it? It's over in Europe. Yeah. I'll do peach. You have experience with pitch?
[00:18:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. I have installed pitch Bitcoin. It's a peer to peer, mobile phone app for exchanging fiat for Bitcoin. Yes. In a peer to peer fashion, of course. So it supports, the major European currencies, including the Swedish kronor. So it's been yeah. I've been curious. I have not used it, and I will tell you in the end why. Okay. I have not used
[00:18:49] McIntosh:
it. That's the hook. Right? That's what I mean. Yeah. Stay around. I'm just kidding.
[00:18:56] Kenshin:
Alright. So, of course, it's very well designed. It's it was quite new when I first used it. So they they were rapidly developing that app as as I was using it. But still it worked. It looks good. It was supporting, as I said, the European, currencies, which was very easy to onboard and and find someone to exchange fiat for Bitcoin. So that was great. And they accept many, European specific, payment methods like SEPA, s e p a Okay. Which is basically bank to bank transfer, but they are instant, which is quite good actually. Is it yeah. It's almost as instant as lightning in some cases.
Okay. So I have managed to send bank to bank on a Saturday night, actually, which is a bit surprising. But, you know, it's quite good in that sense.
[00:19:50] McIntosh:
Actually, moving money from bank to bank is surprising these days, but okay.
[00:19:55] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. It also supports Revolut, which I also have experience with. It's, quite decent also. Although they like altcoins, which is a bit annoying. So they have a whole education system on how good crypto is and how good it is that they can hold your keys for your safety and stuff like that. Okay. So I when I saw that I stopped using their Bitcoin services. So, yeah, so that's Peach. And it's based in Switzerland, I think. So that's also good for privacy here
[00:20:37] McIntosh:
in Europe. Well, maybe better than other places. I'm not sure it's as good as it used to be. But, yeah.
[00:20:44] Kenshin:
Yeah. It's yeah. I mean, to be honest Better than better than the rest of Europe. Right. Not ideal still.
[00:20:51] McIntosh:
So the next one on the list is Robosats, which is a lightning network based system. It does include The United States. It's global, p two p, overtour, which that does provide a great deal of of security Yeah. Privacy. There is a trade limit of about $1,400 per transaction. So that's not a whole lot these days in terms of a Bitcoin. Right? You're only talking about, roughly 1,400,000.0 Satoshis. And but they do have an escrow system set up that has a reputation factor. So when you get started, you're not gonna have as good a reputation as if you've been consistently trading on there.
Mhmm. I love the aspect of Lightning, because that gives you a layer of privacy that you just don't get on the main net. So that's good. And then yep.
[00:21:50] Kenshin:
I I like, robots as how you you make those profiles. Mhmm. It's based on a key. It's like an Oster key. Like an Oster key somewhere? Yeah. So you generate a key, and then you save that key, and that's that's all you need to recreate your profile. Right. So it's it's quite cool technology, actually. But again, I have not used it for a reason. Okay.
[00:22:14] McIntosh:
We're gonna get to that in a minute. Hang on to that. You wanna go and talk about BISK?
[00:22:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. BISK is, quite quite mature by now. Right? It was one of the first ones, I think. So again, it's a peer to peer network. It's, fully decentralized. You can install Bisc on a computer even. Mhmm. They say they're proudly anti KYC, and they are all are also built on top of, Tor network. So that's very good. And they don't do, of course, any custody of the funds, and they have various payment methods including face to face transactions that you can arrange there on on their network. So I think this is quite good, and they they keep to their ethos from the start.
[00:23:11] McIntosh:
Very cool. Alright. And we'll wrap things up in terms of the different possibilities. And I would suggest I I'm sure there's others. I would suggest you stick with one of these if this is what you're looking at simply because these are they've been around for a while, they're well known, you're less likely to have a problem. Is that fair? Yeah. So the last one is HODL HODL, which is also global. It's a noncustodial peer to peer. They do have an escrow system similar to, Robosat. They're gonna have a lot of different payment options as well, including in person, which I would not necessarily recommend, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more.
Bank transfers and cash options options. I would say this, and this is not the only one that to allow bank transfers. Bank transfers and KYC free, to me, don't mix because you just put a KYC enabled account that you're sending money out of. And in the end, you may find that bites you. But your mileage may vary, not financial advice, etcetera, etcetera. Right? Right. So those are kind of the four big ones. I would definitely be taking a look at those. If you're in The United States, you're a little more limited. I believe in Europe, you actually have access to all four of those, which I find odd that it's actually that way and not the other way. I mean, I'm not trying to be a a USA Centrist or whatever, but I guess it's because y'all have more issues with financial KYC stuff than we do maybe. I I don't know.
I I just would note that. So
[00:25:01] Kenshin:
I don't know. I don't know. I I know that Germany, Italy, Spain, they are very active with Bitcoin, transactions and and exchanges. So maybe yeah. They've just pushed it out of the gates through, yeah, through that. But do you want to jump in on the negatives now? Or Yeah. I think we've seen people long enough and I am waiting to hear this too. So, yeah, let's see. So you have a specific reason that you would not want to use this? No. But and you just mentioned it. I mean, most of those you need to do, bank transfer to Right. Those to that person. You are the person and they are the person in that p two p exchange. Mhmm. And you send money through a bank.
And the easiest one I I found was the Revolut. And even if it was a separate transaction, again, it's a bank to bank. And in Sweden, they even have this, Swish, it's called. So you're using an app on the phone and you you it's it looks exactly like lightning, but Right. With Swede Swedish Kroner and Swedish Bank in behind. But again, if all of those methods are KYC, but most importantly for me is the moment I send a transaction by bank, any of those forms to someone else, they will see my name. And the moment you put my name on Google, the first results is the first ten results is 10 different pages with my address. You're famous, Kinshin.
No. It's it's the Swedish system. Yeah. I know. Anyone you Google in Sweden, you instantly find the phone number, address, everything. And then who is my wife and even what my car is, the license plate of my car, the I mean, there's so many details you can find, and it's not even hidden. It's it's it's they're proudly showing it off. So I I I'm feeling more insecure if it's if it's someone, yeah, a bad actor out there that they see my name and, maybe that's why they're on those platforms just to to find
[00:27:32] McIntosh:
trouble of using one of these services, paying an extra price for it, make sure that you're not tied to this some way like this Revolut or sep SEPA SEPA, or your ACH bank transfer or whatever because that's all KYC. And as soon as you do that, you're compromising the whole point to this. Now Yeah. What does that leave? Frankly, not a whole lot. You can do something, with peach, for example. You can use Amazon gift cards, but that's a pain in the neck. Now Mhmm. Not theoretically. It's it's not theoretical. You do break that KYC. When you do that, you you you're not gonna be compromised that way, I don't think. But it is very difficult to do that.
It's just a pain. So there are other ways to kinda handle this, and we're gonna talk about that as we go along. But it's certainly something that you need to be thinking about.
[00:28:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. And before those other KYC freewareings, I think it ties in good here. I can mention the kyc lite ways. Okay. Which I have used a lot.
[00:28:45] McIntosh:
Can you give us an example?
[00:28:48] Kenshin:
Yes. So you there are actually plenty of websites in Europe based in Switzerland now again. Mhmm. Where you go online, you make an account, you don't put your name, you don't do the usual KYC, but you put your bank account. So you you say that if you send money to them through that bank account, put that exchange into that Bitcoin address. And you sign the address with your wallet. So you verify this is indeed your address and that's your, yeah. You can, yeah. It can be your address, your bank account, but, of course, you could tell someone else Mhmm. To give you bank account to use that instead. But still, you essentially, what you do, you do a bank transfer a SEPA in that way again. So it's instant almost to that company, and instantly they exchange that amount for Bitcoin and send it to your Bitcoin address.
And in my case, in a cold wallet.
[00:29:58] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:29:59] Kenshin:
And that was a KYC lite because I didn't explicitly give them any information about me except the bank account and the Bitcoin address. But from as we said, from the bank account number and the SEPA system and the IBAN system in Europe, you see all the information anyway, which if no one is ask asking for it, maybe they will not go in the trouble to look it up. But in my case, it happened that my bank in Sweden wanted to know where some of that money went to that company in Switzerland. So I went to that company in Switzerland, and I said, I need verification that you received those amounts from me.
And they already had my name. And they said, okay. Here's the paper. And, yeah, of course, we already know who you are. So,
[00:30:58] McIntosh:
it's a KYC light. We have all your details, mister Kinshen. There's no reason for you to tell us anything. Looks like It it went like that exactly. No. It's it's not. It's the financial system. I don't And it's it's amazing to me how comfortable people are with it. I literally get in arguments with close friends about this stuff, and I just I finally just stopped because the bias that they had was so clear. There was no point in arguing with them. I'm like, okay. Whatever. Move on. Yeah. You know? For the sake of our friendship,
[00:31:38] Kenshin:
just move on. Yeah. But to be honest, for me, this KYC lite Mhmm. Felt better than the risk of physical risk with the KYC free ways. Right. And felt better than the full KYC of the big exchanges.
[00:31:57] McIntosh:
Right.
[00:31:58] Kenshin:
So for me, that was a good middle ground for where I live. Of course, I would if I had privacy privacy with undress address privacy and and personal privacy, I would probably have used the KYC free by now, for sure. I mean, I have tried everything. Right. And and especially some of the the ways that we would describe next.
[00:32:26] McIntosh:
Well, let yeah. Let's let's jump on into that because that's where we need to go. So those are not your only alternatives. You can, specifically, one good way is just earning Bitcoin for goods and services, and this is something that I have encouraged people to do. Doing that using Lightning. For example, I produce, I don't know, honey. McIntosh likes the honey and the tea. I would be willing to pay for that with Satoshis on the Lightning Network to a farmer, if I could find one that would do that. K? Or for produce or for anything like that or for some craft item or anything you can think of.
Mhmm. If you can have people pay in Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, you could consider that KYC free bit Bitcoin because there's just no way it will be traced back. Right? It just won't happen.
[00:33:34] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great way. And, I would add here, you can even do that with, family and friends. So if a family or friend member has Bitcoin Mhmm. And they want something from you, then you pay that with fiat. And I have done that. So I have bought Right. Like, a computer with fiat money, and then I sold it to a friend for Bitcoin. Right. So it was Right. Person to person exchange in hand, let's say. And, you know, some fresh KYC free for me at least, Bitcoin.
[00:34:15] McIntosh:
The the the limiting factor here, you can do things like what you're talking about from time to time. It's difficult to do that on a regular basis. Most people are not farmers or small producers. Most people are not crafty or whatever so that they can build something and sell it online. Let's be honest. So that is the limiting factor to what we're talking about here. You're not going to necessarily be able to generate a monthly stream of Satoshis by that method.
[00:34:54] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:34:55] McIntosh:
Right? I have an answer for that. We'll get to that in just a minute. But, you you you know, this is one possibility, especially if you're somebody who happens to to have something to sell and you're looking to expand your your audience. Right? There's I would I don't wanna call it famous, but there's there's a guy in Bitcoin sir well, there is somebody who's basically famous, Mandrake, who sells the baklava. Mhmm. Like, apparently, at the Bitcoin conference, he sold a bunch of baklava again. And this he's been doing that for years and years. There's a guy named, Barn Miner.
Yeah. He's a, like a pleb miner. He dries beef, maybe more than beef. I don't know. But meat with his miners and sells the jerky. Okay. Yeah. I mean, that's clever. Right? Again, not everybody can do that, but but the what he's getting, KYC free. %.
[00:36:08] Kenshin:
Mhmm. Right? And there are plenty of accounts like that on Nostra now, and, there are plenty of apps on Nostra as well to to log in with your Nostra account and advertise your products and get paid with lightning.
[00:36:24] McIntosh:
Now so that may be a rabbit hole that you wanna go down. No. Not now. Not now. I was talking about our listeners. Hang on. Okay. No. I get it. That's not what you wanna do, but I just mean in general. Alright. But another way man, I'm sorry. If you're a little more technical, we can talk about mining. Mhmm. Now, Kenshin, I know you mine with some home miners. Those are don't really require a whole lot of technical prowess. Let's be honest. You plug it in. You connect it up to your network and connect it to your mining pool, and that's it. Yep.
You can also mine with bigger miners, and I don't think I think you'll be able to answer this. Realistically, how much Satoshis are you actually making off of those miners? And you have two. Right?
[00:37:33] Kenshin:
Yeah. Well, one is plugged into Ocean. The other is Okay.
[00:37:37] McIntosh:
Solo mining. So Well, let's just deal with the one then. Are you really making any sats per month? Can you estimate that at all?
[00:37:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. Very little less than $5 a month worth of sats, I would say. Well, it's $5. Let's say it's $5. Mhmm.
[00:37:59] McIntosh:
If you're using ocean for your mining pool, that is KYC free. I promise you it is. It is. And what's that? It is. Yes. Yeah. And but that's not a whole lot. What could you do to improve that? Well, I'm glad you asked. There is a way to improve it. You've got two choices. You can either put a miner in your home or multiple miners, or you can host a miner somewhere. This is, this is not why I mine, but but the side benefit of that is the Satoshis that I mine are KYC free. Okay? Now that sounds crazy. Running a miner is not out of the realm of possibility for a lot of people. If you can work your way around a computer, you can probably run a miner in your house. Now I will or in your garage or whatever. I will say you need to look into this.
It probably won't run off your household voltage. You need to check on that specifically, and you need to kind of know what you're getting into. And I certainly would not recommend you go out and buy the biggest, fanciest miner that you can because the new s 23 that I mentioned last week, $15,000. Don't do that.
[00:39:24] Kenshin:
Okay? The hydro cooled. Right? The hydro cooled one. I man. That's good.
[00:39:29] McIntosh:
Really want some of those. Anyways, don't do that. Buy an s, even a well, I'll give you an example. I literally have three of these right now that are coming off the racks. I've got three older miners. They're my original miners, and they're being packed up and sent home to me. They're not worth running on my setup. I might sell those certainly well under a thousand dollars. Let's say 500 if I'm lucky. I don't know. $500 for one of these miners. You could buy this miner and plug it in. You're going to pay for electricity. This is not free, people.
But if you're willing to pay for the electricity, you are gonna make some Satoshis off of that. Do you happen to know the miner that you have plugged into Ocean? How many terahashes that is?
[00:40:27] Kenshin:
Mine is two to four depending on the setting you use. Let's just say it's four terahash.
[00:40:33] McIntosh:
My oldest miner is 25 times more powerful than that. Okay? Hundred? Yeah. It is a hundred. One is a hundred, and one is either a 10 or a 20. I don't remember. Okay. K. So my point is if you'd want to pay to get KYC free Bitcoin, you can plug that in and run it and collect those Satoshis. So maybe you make $5. Maybe, that cannot be right, Kenshin. You must be making less than $5 significantly. Yeah. I must be making less. Yes. It might be one or two. 20 five times that off of that miner. I would have to look it up, but it is a decent amount. It's worth your time.
Now you may and what I would recommend, frankly, is you run one from home and get used to it. You may wanna host this as well. Your your electricity is cheaper. My electricity at my host facility is half of what I pay here at home. Mhmm. But you do in, introduce some complexity, and you better pick the right hosting service, and I'll be happy to chat with you about that if you so choose. You get the wrong hosting service, Compass Mining, historically. Go look it up. You know, you're you're gonna have trouble. But I have a great facility with the one that I use. Now I don't know if they'll take one miner. I don't know.
But I happen to very much like the one that I'm using right now. So there is an option there. It's going to generate a continuous flow of Satoshis for you. Not continuous, but, you know, over the course of months, you're going to get a a stream of Satoshis, KYC free. Plus, you're gonna know more about the Bitcoin network, which who doesn't wanna know that?
[00:42:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. But, a tip there, there are those so called mine Bitcoin mining calculators. No. But those Bitcoin mining calculators, they give you the, the estimated revenue and profitability of your miner. So you plug in your numbers, the terrahas of your miner, the price Mhmm. Of the electricity Right. Or the cost of for the electricity. And then, yeah. It either knows which model you have if you plug in the model of the miner or you or you give you the power consumption Right. In watts, and then it calculates
[00:43:15] McIntosh:
yeah. If you can be profitable and by how much per day. Not be profitable at home. I'm just gonna tell you that. But it is a way to be KYC free, to not have to deal with any of these services, to deal with selling anything. It's it's just simpler, except now you've got a miner that you gotta care and feed for. Right? Mhmm.
[00:43:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And my my equation was that. So I know my miner is costing me money. Mhmm. But in in my equation, it's it's a heating device that I will be using anyway. So half of the heating comes back to me as Bitcoin.
[00:43:54] McIntosh:
I love the heating concept. That whole thing, it's not something that I can use where I'm at. But in general, it's a terrific you're you're already paying for it. Why not at least make some Satoshis off of it? Right. Very cool.
[00:44:15] Kenshin:
What other ways do we have?
[00:44:18] McIntosh:
The another way would just be freelance work. Right? I go on I don't know of a Bitcoin service like this, but Upwork, and I agreed to do work for somebody to build a website, do a service, whatever, and I get paid in Bitcoin. That's a great way to do it.
[00:44:37] Kenshin:
Mhmm.
[00:44:38] McIntosh:
I would not call this KYC free, but Bitcoin backed credit cards and reward programs like FOLD famously, which is not available in Australia. They are just not just getting going, but they're fairly new, so that's not surprising. But, yeah, those get you rewards, which it would be difficult to prove that that was your Bitcoin. How about that? I'm not maybe KYC lite would be a better explanation. Yeah. And then I love this one actually, Bitcoin bounties and competitions. If you're a coder, if you've got some skills there, that might be something you wanna look into. Mhmm. There are companies who are literally paying bounties on different projects, different parts of a project, and they can be pretty minimal.
And if you're good, you get a competitive rate on that. You're getting a if you just flip that Satoshis into dollars, you're actually getting a a good rate on that, if that makes sense, per hour. Yeah. Alright? Mhmm. Now before we wrap this up, I I do want to make sure that we look at some of the downsides, and I think we've already emphasized some of these. But just to make sure, let's put them all in one place.
[00:45:56] Kenshin:
Yes. So we have, you pay a premium usually, especially those p two p platforms. You might pay from, yeah, two. I don't think I've ever seen 2% premium, but 10% easily
[00:46:09] McIntosh:
is most of it I've seen. I think five to 10% would be more normal, and that's fair.
[00:46:14] Kenshin:
Yeah. And the the light KYC choices I've seen, they were around one and a half. Yeah. So that was much better in that way also. Okay. Then you also have lower liquidity. So those are smaller order books and, yeah. So you might not find and and you you have to find the right exact, how do we say, partner in the p two p equation to to have the exact same amount that you want to exchange. Right? And it might be too little or not too much or something.
[00:46:50] McIntosh:
Okay. Definitely a risk. There is a higher risk of fraud. It is true. I think with those four exchanges that we listed, it's reasonable. You know, the chance of fraud happening is is minimal, but it is still there. Mhmm. I did wanna make sure and you don't have protection if there's a real issue that comes up. And so those are some of the kind of risk. I did actually I I wanted to mention one other way. Past the mining, so we talked about the exchanges. We talked about, like, selling a service, that kind of thing. We talked about mining. Here's something that anyone can do.
There are Bitcoin meetups almost everywhere in the world within reasonable driving distance. Now I feel like you should be going to a Bitcoin meetup if you're serious about Bitcoin anyways. But specifically, I would say the vast majority of those Bitcoin meetups, if there are more than a couple of people, are going to have a miner involved in that meetup. Someone like myself. I go to my local meetup. I'm sitting there. I've got miners running. I would sell Bitcoin to anyone in that meetup that I that had been there more than once, right, that I felt reasonably comfortable with.
And I could do it straight from my account, KYC free Bitcoin. There would be a premium, and I haven't ever done it. So so I don't know what that would be, but it would be somewhere around that five to 10% range. It'd probably be right in the middle of that, to be honest. Mhmm. But there's a level of trust there. I mean, that's just how humans are. And if you're a regular person, you could do that every month. That could be your monthly buy. Just throwing it out there as a possibility. I've never heard anybody else say that, but it it would work.
[00:49:18] Kenshin:
Yeah. And a good tip there that I also want to mention is every time you do a KYC, or any Bitcoin transaction for that matter Mhmm. Use a new address. Generate a new address that you never used before. And when you do that, you can also if you use Piro Mhmm. Maybe some other wallets, you can actually put a label on that address. So you know that Satoshis that arrived on that address are KYC free, and you can keep some track of Right. Of them.
[00:49:52] McIntosh:
You remember the tax thing I was talking about? Yeah. I'm going in Sparrow. I'm going through my stuff. And I had one that was labeled Mcintosh Mining. I could not recall what that was for, and it was sending money out. It didn't make sense. I figured it out. I had to think about it for a while. Be careful about your labels. That's my point. Right? I realized what it was after the fact or later. But, you know, labels labels are good, and, yes, certainly be generating new addresses.
[00:50:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I think Sparrow has a function. I haven't used it yet, but you I think you can save your labels and move them to another Sparrow installation because, of course, you cannot sync, online or in any way. So so it's good to use the labels, save them back that saving save somewhere, and then you can restore. Otherwise yeah. If you make the labels and you lose the computer and then you the labels are gone.
[00:51:05] McIntosh:
I got sidetracked. I just brought up my, profile on Noster. Okay. It's this completely different topic. I need some help. My web of trust score is one.
[00:51:21] Kenshin:
What is
[00:51:22] McIntosh:
that? It's like it's it does influence how you get shown. It's like a there's a formula for it. I don't know, but I bet yours is higher than mine. Where do you see that? It's in my profile, at least on Coracle. I've done I'm sure Damus shows it. Sorry. This is sinelating. Let's let's get back to what we were talking about. I apologize. We'll talk about it later. That's just bizarre that it's so low because I do post quite regularly. Alright. Mhmm. Yeah. There wasn't a whole lot of news this week to be Actually, that's why I was bringing it up because I wanted to see if I had news items. There wasn't a whole lot of news this week.
I think we've kinda hit the summer doldrums. I don't think there'll be a whole lot of news for the next few months. We did highest monthly close ever at the May, so that's that's good. That literally we didn't mention this. I think this actually happened last week. GameStop bought 4,710 Bitcoin. So if you're kind of into the whole corporate strategy thing, they are making a move. They literally went from zero to third place and or fourth, something like that, in terms of corporate holders. No. Bitcoin.
[00:52:45] Kenshin:
That might not be right. Or what did you say? 4,000 Bitcoin. Yeah. $500,000,000
[00:52:50] McIntosh:
worth.
[00:52:51] Kenshin:
Oh, well, I have one better here. A Spanish coffee chain. Okay. They bought €1,000,000,000 worth of Bitcoin.
[00:53:02] McIntosh:
Well, we all know that the euro is not worth the oh, sorry. No. I'm just kidding. Yeah. I saw that, And I think that's a shame because I had not heard about it. When did this happen? So fill me in. I hope this happened today. Oh, okay. I probably would have heard about it.
[00:53:23] Kenshin:
So That's a lot. It's a well known Spanish coffee shop chain. Well, it's preparing for a major shift in its business model through a Bitcoin investment worth over $1,100,000,000 and 1 billion euro equivalent. So, yeah, they are so it's those stories come up now every week. Another big company I think 2025
[00:53:53] McIntosh:
will be the year of corporate adoption, the start of. And it's not that companies had never done this prior. I'm I'm well aware that MicroStrategy or strategy. I mean, that's just an obvious example. But we are starting to see the widespread adoption. And eventually, I saw that I heard this thing on a podcast. James Lavish, I think, was talking. He feels like when one of the giant companies, well, in the tech space, it'd be like Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. Right? One of these type companies starts buying Bitcoin. That will wake up basically the entire corporate world and people will go, oh, we gotta do this.
Right now, they're very much swimming against the stream by doing that. It's it's we don't view it as a risk, but for them put yourself in their position. It's it's risky. Right?
[00:55:04] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:55:07] McIntosh:
IBM, go talk to a CEO of it. He's not gonna buy Bitcoin right now. Why would he do that? He could lose his job. Why would you know, it made a lot of sense to me, but kind of one of the things that will really unblock this, and I do not know if this will happen this year, but we'll see Microsoft, Amazon, one of these really large companies lean into Bitcoin. I think it could be Facebook, but that is just me idly speculating. I don't think it will be Apple first. I think they're too too corporate at this point. But I I believe it could be Facebook.
[00:55:50] Kenshin:
I hope it's none of them. Well It will be good for Bitcoin, but Yeah. It will. Facebook. You
[00:55:58] McIntosh:
know it's gonna happen, though. Yeah. This is like the people saying government shouldn't be buying Bitcoin. Yeah. Okay. I get in a hypothetical philosophical world that that is ideal, but that is not reality. And what did Satoshi say? I think it was Satoshi. Bitcoin was made for enemies. Maybe it was somebody else. I don't wanna it is because it is fair in that sense. So I don't know, but I do think that will open up the floodgates even more. Although I think I mean, I gave a figure a few weeks ago. The number of Bitcoin, you know, companies that had Bitcoin had grown so much just since January 1.
Right? It was a lot. Mhmm. I don't know. But, you know,
[00:56:53] Kenshin:
what for me, more realistic scenario is who talked to Michael Saylor a few months ago in his boat? Was it Jeff Bezos?
[00:57:05] McIntosh:
Amazon.
[00:57:06] Kenshin:
Yeah. I think I've heard that. So for me, Amazon would be the realistic one and the big one that would be actually be useful.
[00:57:14] McIntosh:
I will say this. Of course, Bezos has controlling interest in Amazon. He is a risk taker. He is he will take a gamble. And I could definitely you may be right. Yeah. I would not bet Facebook versus Amazon. But I would bet it won't be Apple. It won't be Microsoft, and it won't be Google. They're too corporate. Yeah. I agree. In a lot of ways, Amazon is corporate, but Jeff is a bit of a wild one. And he may just go, we're buying a billion dollars of Bitcoin. Yeah.
[00:57:52] Kenshin:
It makes sense. Alright.
[00:57:58] McIntosh:
There there really was not a lot of news. I don't really have anything else. So, that's good to see. I'm scrolling back through stuff. I'm not nothing posted. Nothing. In general, The United States is falling apart. We're spending too much money. Elon quit Doge, which by the way, I mean, I know y'all don't like it when I start talking about politics, but I'm not a huge Elon fan. I think he's very smart. I think he's done a lot of really interesting things, but I I also think there's a lot of other stuff going on there. But I will give him credit where credit is due. When Trump put up this tremendously stupid bill, which he calls his big beautiful bill, of more spending, which is what it is.
Elon said I've had enough. This is not working, and he quit. I'll give him credit for that. He has a backbone. So good for him. I think what's going on right now is not a good thing in general for The United States, for The United States economy. And it's it's depressing because we're about to see debt go up. And by the way, it'll be a good thing for Bitcoin, but we're about to see debt go up. Our job growth is nonexistent. More and more companies are firing, laying off, whatever, for productivity, for just money savings, for whatever. I personally think, we're not in a good place.
Now they're gonna start printing money, and we'll get magically get a boost, but that's just gonna add to our debt, which I feel is equally important. So
[00:59:53] Kenshin:
Alright. It's interesting times.
[00:59:55] McIntosh:
I and I would like to see it. Let me say this. I I never believed that Doge was going to, like, magically fix everything, but I 100% love the idea of an organization examining itself and cutting waste, fraud, and abuse. And I think that should actually be celebrated, and I think it should continue regardless of what else goes on in the government. USAID, all of the stuff going on there, did not need to be happening. Do they ever get it wrong? Probably. In fact, I'm quite certain that they do. But as a taxpayer, the government should be held accountable, and Doge essentially is one way of doing that.
I'm not sure they have enough teeth, but it is one way of doing that. I'll get off my step stool. My I whatever. You know what I mean? English words, hard. Right.
[01:01:00] Kenshin:
Exactly. Do we have a question then
[01:01:03] McIntosh:
for our audience? We do. I put it down. Question. Wait. Have you ever bought any KYC free Bitcoin? Yeah. In whatever method, by the way. I'm not just saying from these four exchanges.
[01:01:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. So be interesting to know. Yeah.
[01:01:23] McIntosh:
Just like the news, we don't really have any software. There was one, LND lightning node. Big update. I think it's zero point one nine. We will eventually probably the new server will have that on it. So, yeah, very cool. Good improvement, stability, on and on. Still no Bolt 12 l and d. Really? Get your act together. But yeah.
[01:01:50] Kenshin:
That's pretty much it. Now what should we announce for
[01:01:54] McIntosh:
Oh. Coming week? We do have an announcement. Hey. You keep me on target. I'm so this is this is why I pay you the big sats, Kenshin. Yes. Yeah. He's like, when is that gonna start? I'm waiting. You see every set come in that I do, by the way. I am not hiding anything. Yeah. We do have an announcement. We are continuing to experiment with this live stuff. We, I think, had a record number of people today. I hope so. It seemed like we did. I know we had six or seven. So at one point, I would love to see more in there. And as you said earlier, I would love to see people asking questions and interacting. That's kind of the point of that aside from getting to hear the episode earlier. But, yeah, we're going live on podcasting two point o stuff.
So if you have a podcasting 2.0 app like Fountain, let me see. My two are Fountain and Podcast Guru. They both support the live tag. That's what it's called. You will get notified when we go live, and you could actually listen to it right then just like what we do with Zap.Stream. It's just another way for you to get this content. And with our setup, it looks like it's a fairly easy add on for us, so we're gonna do it
[01:03:27] Kenshin:
when they even start next week. And the times we go live is Wednesday night in Europe, around 9PM central Yeah. European time.
[01:03:40] McIntosh:
What time is this? That would be 02:00 here. So we normally sit down about 01:30, and we, you know, we chat for a few minutes and kinda get things set up. So yeah. Hopefully, a little before that time, but
[01:03:56] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. Let's say 08:30 Central European Time.
[01:04:01] McIntosh:
What we will ultimately do once I get a mixer and a better setup, you know, we'll maybe have some music playing as we get started. You know, he and I, Kenshin and I are gonna have to talk, and we'll have to be careful about what we say at that point. But it'll give people kind of a chance to onboard and get up to speed. So we're gonna expand that out. That may give you more opportunities. If you have a podcasting two point o app, that gives you the opportunity also to be like our supporters that you heard earlier in the show, send it Mike, you know, boosting a thousand 69 sats.
Our friend from Australia, which it's ABC something. I apologize.
[01:04:45] Kenshin:
ABC Stacking.
[01:04:46] McIntosh:
ABCStacking. He sent in a thousand thousand. Yeah. And we do appreciate that. But you can do that from a podcasting two point o app like Fountain, or Podcast Guru as a way of supporting. Send in a message. You can get on the zap. Stream. I think we're just trying to overload everybody and give them different ways. Yes. Honestly, ultimately, we'll probably be going to YouTube, I think, is kind of our final destination. I am not a fan of YouTube, but, you know, that's where the kids are. So we're probably gonna start doing live on there before the end of the summer, I would think. Mhmm. Yeah.
For better or for worse. Yeah. For better or for worse, I will probably just not do I'll do it completely ad free. I don't think it'll be a significant source of any kind of money anyways, and the ads on YouTube just annoy the stew out of me. So just another way to get it. Yep. You know what the best way to support this podcast is, Kenshin?
[01:05:54] Kenshin:
No. Please tell me.
[01:05:58] McIntosh:
Hey, Kenshin. Let me tell you about this podcast I listen to. It's called Satoshi's Plebs. It's got this this nutball from, The United States who praddles on about The US spending too much money. And this really great guy from Europe. I the dude speaks, like, 14,000 languages, and he's really sharp. And, man, they talk about Bitcoin. They talk about some macroeconomics. They talk about really practical things like KYC free Bitcoin like they did today. You should listen.
[01:06:30] Kenshin:
Yeah. You should tell your friends to listen.
[01:06:35] McIntosh:
That's how you do it. Mhmm. That is the best way to support. We do appreciate the Satoshis. And at Satoshis. And at the end of the day, they're you know, we need that support. I want to do so many things with this show, and it's just limited by the Satoshis. Let's be honest. But telling other people about the show, we have seen growth. I'm very happy, but I always want more, let's be honest. And the growth has been steady, but it's not been, like, a vertical, you know, climb. Yeah. That's it. That's how you can support us. We've got our web page, satoshis-plebs.com. And if you go to slash episodes, it's like a list of all the episodes.
We have all the different ways of contacting us on those episode pages. Nostr, Twitter, gosh, email, whatever. Okay? Yep.
[01:07:32] Kenshin:
And follow us on Nostr especially. We
[01:07:35] McIntosh:
we're on there. At least I am. Yeah. I we're getting to be certainly the most active on Nostr. I am switching. In fact, hey. Confession. I deleted my Twitter app off my phone. Yeah. Is that cool or what? Yeah.
[01:07:50] Kenshin:
Well, welcome to the club.
[01:07:52] McIntosh:
I still well, I go to the web page, but it does make it harder. Yeah. And so, yeah, I'm not on there as much. Alright? So thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. We've already talked about that, but send us a message. Stay humble, friends. Go out. Make it a great week. We will talk to you all soon.
[01:08:14] Kenshin:
Bye bye. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait, Destiny. And I'll be where your time. Wait, Destiny. Say you're still weak. Say you're still weak. Thumbs up, Benny. I'm hitchhiking all across this galaxy. Hello, friend. Where are you traveling?
Introduction
Bitcoin Price and Market Discussion
Mining and Market Cap Updates
Personal Updates and Projects
Listener Boosts and Feedback
Exploring KYC-Free Bitcoin Methods
Peer-to-Peer Exchanges Overview
Challenges with KYC-Free Methods
Alternative KYC-Free Bitcoin Acquisition
Risks and Downsides of KYC-Free Bitcoin
Bitcoin Meetups and Community Trading
Corporate Bitcoin Adoption Trends
Economic Commentary and Political Views
Audience Engagement and Future Plans
