Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 106.
My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com.
In 10 years, they'll say holding Bitcoin was so easy.
You got rich the easy way.
They won't know what it felt like to be 232 days from an all-time high, while all the tech bro assets just rip.
Takes a special breed to stay convicted, to hold and even stack sats during these times. Seriously.
But how long could this last? If you've been feeling the pressure, this episode might help you a little bit.
Why is the stock market ripping when Bitcoin is dipping?
I thought it followed liquidity, Chris. I thought it followed M2.
Well, that's what I'm going to try to answer today, is what's going on with Bitcoin and a rough idea of how long we should expect it to be like this.
and you know i am terminally online for purposes of show research always kind of
checking the temperature across the various bitcoin communities online from stacker news
bitcoin talk reddit x nostr mastodon you name it and of course every community has their signals
and X is a total disaster zone right now.
I mean, the sentiment on X in the Bitcoin community
is the lowest I've ever seen it ever, I think.
I mean, lower than I've seen it post FTX, definitely.
Noster, for the most part,
seems to be the most positive.
People are still over there focused on building,
like most Bitcoiners have been around for a while too.
But I understand where it's coming from
because nothing frustrates Bitcoin holders
more than watching every other market pump
while Bitcoin just keeps bleeding patience and hope.
You keep wanting, especially if you've just bought in in the last year or two,
you keep wanting for that rip to happen.
And instead, you're watching AI stocks take off
while your Bitcoin just sort of treads water and overall trends downward.
And it doesn't help that guys like Mark Cuban are out there going around saying,
Bitcoin has lost the plot.
This might get some people upset.
I think Bitcoin has lost the plot.
And when I started buying Bitcoin and I've sold all of it,
except not all of it, most of it. It was because when all the shit hit the fan with the Iran war
and, you know, Bitcoin was always the best alternative to fiat currency losing its value.
And I always thought it was a better version of gold than gold. Well, gold just blew up and went,
you know, to $5,000, Bitcoin dropped. And every time the dollar dropped, Bitcoin should have gone
up, you know, because if it's priced in dollars, it was cheaper. So anybody from around the world
could go pay and off. And it just didn't do that. Not such a hedge. No, it's not the hedge that I
expected it to be. And that was really disappointing. And so I'd say I'm more disappointed in Bitcoin,
not as disappointed in Ethereum and the rest, you know, the token stuff, the meme coins.
Garbage. I don't know by what metrics Mark is comparing Ethereum and Bitcoin. Ethereum will
get to that in a moment. But like this analysis, it really does teach us something here. It teaches
us that even billionaires don't really understand how money works. That's what we're learning.
Mark is as much of a product of his time as he is a man of his own making.
Does Mark think Bitcoin lives in a vacuum? Does he think a developing currency just goes up in a
straight line or that it should perform differently and outperform an asset that's been around for
thousands of years that people have been building trust in? So let's shift gears and let's hear from
somebody who understands the macro picture. You know, I've always talked about Bitcoin on this show
as a liquidity black hole. Bitcoin just sucks in the spare liquidity in the market. And the problem
that we are having right now that started at the beginning of the year and is accelerating really
is that there is a large celestial object with a very large gravity well in our system. And it's
passing through right now and it's going to be passing through for a little while. It used to be
that Bitcoin was the fastest horse in the race,
as I believe Paul Tudor Drones
is the one that coined that particular term.
This is Lynn Alden, of course,
and Lynn Alden's going to explain
kind of what I'm talking about.
For Bitcoin, when he got in,
and it's been the case where like NVIDIA
has been the fastest horse,
and then RAM stocks and AI companies and all this.
And so it's kind of like this either co-fastest horse
or a new fastest horse.
And so to some extent, it sucked capital
out of Bitcoin or, you know, kind of the combination of Bitcoin and the broader crypto space
said, OK, well, if we if we want high returns, AI is now an option. Obviously, you can't self-custody
in the same way. It doesn't have the same properties, but from a pure kind of portfolio
allocation standard, it has been a pretty big competitor. I would say it's not only a competitor,
it's a safe bet in a way that no other asset is. Right now, it's a safe bet because the savvy
investors think that there is no way that the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, the Trump White
House, and the players that be at the banks are going to let the market collapse right now,
especially as we're building up to these three different IPOs we're going to talk about.
I think they're betting that there is an insurance policy at play. There's always going to be a
bailout that with the debts at the level they are, the rates at the level they are, that the
government simply cannot afford a massive stock market crash, and therefore, the PAMP will continue.
I think it did contribute a non-zero amount to maybe the latest disappointing cycle.
And then when we get into payments, I do think that AIs will use Bitcoin as payments.
And there are already a number of wallet providers that are gearing some of their services more
toward agentic payments. I think in the near term, stablecoins will probably take more market share
than many, say, kind of Bitcoin proponents would like.
Because if you're an AI and you're kind of doing a function,
you're kind of saying, okay, this is like my working capital.
I'm not trying to store value for five to 10 years
and put up with the volatility
and be totally kind of censorship resistant.
Instead, if I'm doing something that is probably allowed
and I'm more like, okay, I have like a month of working capital.
I don't want that to draw down 30%.
I'm not trying to make investment calls.
They might just stick with stable coins.
And it also depends on what their human operators kind of expect them to do.
So I think that, you know, digital payments in general, agents will get more and more heavily involved in them.
And then it depends on what the agent needs.
Is it trying to hold capital for the longer term?
Is it trying to make a payment that is a higher risk of being blocked in some way?
Or is it more kind of prioritizing for working capital?
So I think there's kind of multiple types of monies for multiple types of purposes.
Now, the thing that doesn't come up when people talk about agentic use cases for Bitcoin, just as a quick aside here, and maybe because the volumes aren't going to be, you know, in the in the trillions or whatever, but it's going to be wealth management.
I know it sounds crazy right now, but in the future, people are going to task their agents to build multi-sig setups for their family, to move and swap funds around, to add collateral to loans, to execute auto buys and sells.
All of that is going to be agentic, and they're going to use Bitcoin for that.
And I will follow up on that in the update segment.
But getting back to this large gravity well, I think as the financial situation becomes more uncertain and the political situation, remember, we're going into a midterms, becomes more uncertain.
These investors see this AI bet as the only sure bet.
And anything that's going to work is going to be where the money is going to go right now.
So right now, investors around the world and all the fools on Robinhood and whatnot are gearing up for the three largest IPOs in market history.
These three IPOs are going to be ginormous liquidity vacuums.
For the most part, we'll probably end up being exits for the early investors, but that's a whole other conversation.
It is going to be the distraction of the year.
SpaceX officially kicking off the race to the public markets with its S1 filing last night.
As we're getting new details about Anthropic and OpenAI, Kate Rooney has more in today's Tech Check.
Hi, Kate.
Hey there, Kelly.
So OpenAI is preparing to file for an IPO confidentially as soon as Friday and looking to go public as soon as September.
This is according to a source familiar with that deal process.
It would follow this record-breaking SpaceX listing you've been talking about with its own AI business, XAI.
I'm also told by sources that rival Anthropic has been getting IPO ready behind the scenes, but TBD there on timing.
It's a little bit more fluid.
OpenAI, though.
All right.
So we have SpaceX with a target market cap of $1.5 trillion.
OpenAI with a valuation of $852 billion.
And Anthropic with a valuation of $900 billion.
So the target dates are June for SpaceX.
and then as soon as September for OpenAI
and a target IPO date of just Q4 for Anthropic.
But by my math, that means the rest of the year,
it's going to be all about these massive, ginormous, crazy IPOs.
You combine that with a midterm election year,
which is historically not great for Bitcoin,
and uncertainty around how far and how long the market can pump
before it's going to correct.
And if the S&P does have a correction, that's going to be really rough for Bitcoin at this point. My prognosis is Bitcoin's going to be on sale for a while. There's a few ways this could go. You know, a lowering of the rates, the federal government formally announcing a Bitcoin reserve or passing some kind of Bitcoin reserve. These types of things would definitely be good news that would maybe turn things around a little bit for Bitcoin.
absent these types of major narrative changing events,
I think it's going to be a slide for a while for Bitcoin,
perhaps the remainder of the year.
It's hard to say.
Generally, the one thing I do know
is when you become certain like this,
that's when you get surprised.
So I could be completely wrong.
I do know that while things are a little bit rough in Bitcoin,
the thesis plays out,
and the trajectory of debasement is only accelerating.
So long-term, the Bitcoin thesis remains strong,
And it could be that after these IPOs pass, we kind of get this AI bubble out of our system.
I'm not saying we're going to have a massive dot-com crash, but we may start to see the market now focusing in on a couple of big winners.
And then you kind of get your dot-com consolidation effect.
I don't know if you're going to see a crash with that so much as perhaps the nature of the liquidity drive changes.
And that money needs a new place to go to protect itself.
And that very well could be when Bitcoin's moment shines again.
Because ultimately, debasement will be the biggest trade of our lifetimes.
But there's going to be ebbs and flows because we live in a casino now.
We live in an economy that is always based on momentum.
Anything that has momentum gets trades.
And people will ride that as long as they can make money because that's what it is.
It's about making money fast.
It's not about protecting their future energy, time, and wealth, and building something for
their families.
It's about getting rich right now and good on them.
If they know how to do it, it seems like a pretty easy way to make money for some of
them.
Easy for me to say, I suppose.
But it's not what I'm about.
I think I'd have a heart attack playing that game.
And when I stack SATs, I'm stacking for a minimum of four years.
So when I buy a SAT or acquire a SAT, work for a SAT, whatever it is, when that SAT comes
in, I'm holding that thing for four years.
And I think most people should tell themselves 10 years with maybe, you know, a little bit
of off-gassing here and there or taking liquidity out via collateral.
So that's, to me, it's not the end of the world if we go through the rest of this year
and it's really bumpy for Bitcoin.
It's going to be tough in terms of, you know, managing collateral loans for people.
Outside of that, I don't think it's going to be that bad for Bitcoiners.
for the other crypto.
It's not just bad vibes.
It's a total narrative collapse.
Some of Ethereum's biggest proponents
announced they've sold their entire stack.
The guys behind the Bankless podcast,
the Ethereum Foundation announced
they're having troubles,
they're leading up.
Vitalik has been making proclamations
about the future of Ethereum
that are freaking out long timers.
The ETFs have launched,
the stables are the talk of the town,
And yet the ETH price action has been bad for five years, essentially since the big switch to proof of stake.
And as the Bankless boys put it, Ethereum just hasn't been putting points up on the scoreboard, whatever that means.
So let's listen to a moment of Bankless.
This is something I don't normally do.
But I think this overall collapse we're seeing outside of Bitcoin is having a knock-on effect, actually a very large knock-on effect, I'll explain, to Bitcoin.
And so I think it important to understand why the rest of the crypto market seems to be having some kind of come to Jesus reckoning where they realizing all these dreams and promises that they were sold and selling themselves
turned out to be lies.
They're now realizing the things
that Bitcoiners have been saying all along
are right.
And also, while we listen to this clip,
and David Hoffman talks about
why he dumped his ETH,
being one of the biggest proponents of ETH
for the last five years,
also listen and reflect on how grateful you are that satoshi walked away from bitcoin this is the
first time we've had a bankless podcast and you are no longer holding ether so that's right from
bankless to ethless david ethless um what why what changed your mind what happened here
it's what laura shin said dude it's like there's not too many parts of ethereum that's focused on
putting points on the scoreboard. I actually think that Vitalik is doing this thing where
he's trying to maximize crops to create Ethereum as a bulwark against some of the worst possible
futures of the world. And I think that's great. I think there's actually a part of him who's just
adverse to growth. And the time for Vitalik to have handed over the keys to somebody who could
take the momentum that Ethereum had in 2022 and 2023 and run with it and grow it was like back in
2023. But he sees himself as like a protector of Ethereum's soul. And if you understand the
trials that Vitalik had to go through navigating all the co-founder mess, you can totally
understand and empathize with why he's doing that. But it seems that there are interests that
prohibit are prohibitive for ethereum growth to happen and therefore eth growth to happen
and a lot of the things that we see on ethereum like the layer twos all of the banks tokenizing
money markets on ethereum all this ethereum adoption is great the ethereum network is great
like lean ethereum is also great and in fact it doesn't need a valuable ether to do any of those
things like which has been some of the counter arguments for ethereum for forever it's like
eth is just gas and it didn't have to be that way but we needed to have leadership to think like that
and push forward like that when ether wasn't gas when ether was more money back in a previous era
but now like i i kind of feel there's just been so much momentum lost and i don't know how ethereum
gets it back, especially when we have like a leader who's trying to protect Ethereum's
crops for a thousand years and is like somewhat disinterested in growth.
Oh, man, there is a mutiny aboard the ship Ethereum right now.
And does this have an impact on Bitcoin?
Yeah.
The problem is, is that we are still associated with the wider crypto market, especially when
it comes to some of the investors on Wall Street.
Bitcoin's digital gold, Ethereum's digital silver, yada, yada, yada.
oh, look at the basket of cryptocurrencies.
It isn't playing out, the basket of cryptocurrencies.
So sticking with Lynn Alden for a moment,
she chatted with Archie from the Bitcoin Archive
and he asked her, hey, you know, outside of Bitcoin,
is crypto just dying?
And I think Lynn nails the exact problem
and what is causing this internal reckoning
across all the different, I mean,
boy, you want to see a real S show right now.
Cordano is a mess right now.
There is some leadership decisions
that haven't been working out.
There's people claiming that the project's about to shut down,
which is not true, but that is the level of concern.
And that's just one of many.
Crypto sector over?
I think so, in the sense that I define over as stagnating now,
not meaning it obviously goes away tomorrow,
but that it's no longer a growth industry.
It never really was.
It's just that now it's kind of being marked to market.
And so if you kind of look at,
I think you can kind of measure this
in terms of narrative exhaustion.
So the really early wave of altcoins
was like alternatives to Bitcoin.
They're saying, hey, you know,
the steel main case to them is,
hey, did we get the block size right?
Did we get the speed right?
Did we get the privacy settings right?
Let's try it.
Let's throw some alternatives at the wall
and see what the market picks, right?
That's kind of the early phase.
Then there was the ICO one,
basically saying, oh, we can just go around the SEC
and issue our own securities
and then get potentially sued.
So that was like the second wave.
then there was the d5 wave which is still a really big narrative but it's actually remarkable how
compressed the initial one was so it kind of really emerged at scale in mid 2020
d5 summer uh and then by late 2021 it hit its peak total locked value and still hasn't quite
reclaimed that figure um five years later right so it's really only had a year and a half bull
market and then it's just been you know four and a half five years of stagnation and as nfts as you
mentioned were another narrative that kind of came soon after that was kind of a flash in the pan
they still trade obviously but they're nowhere near the liquidity and size that they were
then there's been a little bit of a resurgence in privacy coins for a while
um which i think that's kind of over now uh we'll see if that you know that could have another
round of likes to it uh meme coins had a couple attempts uh and and kind of this last cycle there
really was no narrative the narrative was kind of meme coins um and i think that's that's almost
like the final cycle uh where it's like you don't even pretend that there's something innovative
here it's just like let's it's basically player versus player uh competition uh and i think just
now people rightly kind of associate crypto with scams or scam adjacent um kind of like ponzi
jason scam adjacent um and i think that just the overall kind of value that space is minimal i
I think Bitcoin is valuable.
I think stable coins are doing something for a lot of people that they want dollars.
They want digital payment rails and dollars.
I think there's some legs for tokenization, meaning that, you know, if you can tokenize
gold, which people have been doing since at least 2018, you can, it's kind of like a global
ETF in a way, you know, it's an ETF that you can have almost regardless of what country
you're in.
Tokenizing major stocks, you know, for people that want it, it's harder for them to get
access to their own country and they want either an S&P 500 token or an NVIDIA token or, you know,
but I think beyond either tokenizing a handful of those kind of real things and Bitcoin,
I'm not really bullish. It's not really else I see that I'm bullish on or have I been bullish on.
I think it's going to continue to stagnate. And I think Lynn's view is shared by a lot of people
and a lot of people that invest in this stuff. Listen to Lynn. So it is it is a disaster.
It is a disaster over in the rest of the crypto space.
However, things are all not great in the house of Bitcoin.
Now, this is where I fall down as a host of the show.
You guys know that I've really struggled with BIP-110.
For me, it's just so against everything that original Bitcoiners stood for.
And it consolidates power in Bitcoin in a way that I find frightening.
Now, I know they don't claim it does, but that just seems to me to be the practical implications of it, implementation of it.
And I really struggled to watch what Bitcoin did recently.
I thought it was good.
Bitcoin Mechanic came on.
He's one of the few proponents of BIP-110, one of the few very vocal proponents that would probably also become one of the glorious leaders once BIP-10 has fully activated.
And I want you to take a listen to what I think is probably the most revealing set of questions and answers and tip to Danny really for asking the tough questions.
I think we look at this the same thing from a different perspective.
Like, I think you see silence as potential support and I see silence as potential resistance.
And the truth will be in the middle.
Some people will be on either side of this.
But what I want to know is,
so let's just assume,
and you might say I'm wrong here,
but I'm going to assume that you don't reach 55%
and get this as a minor activated soft fork
and that you end up doing a user activated soft fork.
And what happens after that?
If you don't have many people building on top of this chain,
do you get orphaned off the network?
What happens?
I have sort of pulled back on my coverage of BIP-110
because it seemed like there just wasn't really much momentum out there,
that there wasn't people that were actively caring.
There's clearly some that are running knots and choosing to activate BIP-110,
but they seem to be a minority.
And so it seemed to me like maybe I should pull back on the story a little bit.
But listening to this clip, I've realized that people's apathy towards this issue,
people not engaging, is part of the design.
It's part of the plan to consolidate power through what is essentially game mechanics.
The mechanic, what I like about him is he speaks very clearly, very calmly and very softly.
And I think the language he chooses to use, it's sort of like how politicians speak about freedom and liberties and rights when they're really just, you know, interested in whatever their own political agenda is.
but they know to wrap their speech in certain language.
And it works.
If you just go read the comments
on what Bitcoin did for this episode on YouTube,
it's nothing but people
that are just absolutely glazing mechanic.
And in part because he has an excellent delivery style.
But he's going to explain how apathy
and people not really engaging with this issue
is actually part of the plan.
So the chain split scenarios are like technical rabbit holes
and they're fun to go down,
but I think they're really unrealistic.
I think the two most likely scenarios are BIP110 completely dies and there's never a block on that UASF activated chain.
But I think that's the lesser of the two scenarios.
I think what happens is as you come up to that height, the tension rises, the temperature rises, more conversations start happening and the prisoner's dilemma type scenarios start kicking off.
because at the end of the day,
if you're foundry or ant pool,
you need to be ready for it to activate
because if the other pool activates it
and you're not ready to activate it,
you're mining on a chain that can get wiped out.
And this is a very important point
about the asymmetry of soft fork enforcement.
So when you said what I view as ambivalence,
you view as resistance.
The problem is resistance
is not the same thing as ambivalence
because ambivalence to any consensus rule in Bitcoin
means you're going along with it. If you don't like a consensus rule in Bitcoin,
not talking about how enforced they are for the moment, you have no choice but to go along with
it. You might not like the one megabyte block size limit, but that doesn't mean you get to
pretend it doesn't exist. You have to, to get along with everyone else. So this is a very
important point of it. The pools can be standing together. Let me just ask a question on that,
because why do they have to go along with it? Why wouldn't they just keep going on Bitcoin as we
know it today because they need everyone else to agree to do that too and if they don't then they
can end up on a dead chain but the vast majority does agree with that agree with what ignore agree
with bitcoin as it is today like i think the vast majority of people are not in support of bit but
you have to you have to just project forward a bit if your foundry and i don't know how close
these companies are right let's just talk in game theory abstracts if your foundry and antpool's
looking for a way to screw you. If Antpool's ready for BIP-110 and they activate it, say they're 25,
30 percent, all right, Antpool's actually more like 40 percent with all its little sub pools.
If the fork height hits and unbeknownst to you, they now start enforcing this, then your blockchain
where you were ignoring it slows down to 60 percent of what it was, which means the minute
ant pool gets longer than you it wipes out your chain because you will accept all the bit 110
blocks they don't break any of the existing rules that is an enormously risky position to put
yourself in so if that scenario were to happen you want to be the one that brings it about
and if either side has done this calculation they realize they have no choice but to go along with
it that's i don't know if that is well enough explained but you can't it is a classic prisoner's
dilemma situation where you need to be sure that the other person is going to do the thing that
doesn't cause you to risk having your blocks wiped out. And if you can't be sure of that,
then you need to be the one putting them in danger. And then they assume you're putting you,
that you're putting them in danger and they want to put you in danger. And then all that happens is
everyone enforces the rules of Bit.10 because no one wants to risk being on a chain that can get
wiped out. And if there's no indication about anything, like even if the CEOs meet and say,
don't worry, we'll ignore this stupid fork, we don't like it. The minute the back's turned,
they might just think they were lying to each other. And this is a very real fact of the matter
about the dynamics of soft fork activation. And there has been concern raised about this,
because what if someone comes up with a really awful soft fork? Can a minority always get a
soft fork activated in Bitcoin just because of these dynamics And I saying yeah actually they can and that why you have to be prepared to actively resist it which no one is doing So they know They know no one is going to resist it
He just said here even a bad proposal can get through,
and they're betting, they're planning on people just being ambivalent to it.
And that's why you have to be prepared to actively resist it,
which no one is doing.
You need a URSF to commit to a chain that cannot be wiped out by the BIP 110.
and there's no energy around that. So it's either, it kind of wins in all scenarios.
And it sounds crazy to say that given what a fringe movement it seems like at the moment,
but unless people can actually coalesce around resisting it and saying, we can't get wiped out
by Bit.1.10 because we are going to intentionally reject that soft fork with a counter fork.
Unless you can get energy around that, your best strategy is ignoring it and hoping it goes away.
And the problem with ignoring it and hoping it goes away is that other people might not.
And if they don't, then you get these last minute, like I said, super charged, you know,
emotionally, emotional conversations in late July, where everyone's throwing things at each other.
Some people choose to start activating.
And then at that point, everyone else just goes, all right, well, do I hate this thing enough to
actually URSF it?
Or shall I just go along with it?
And then the price stops falling.
I think that's realistically the scenario we get into.
There's the plan.
So they expect towards the end there's going to be a fierce debate
and then everybody will just capitulate and implement it.
And this to me seems to be a cynical exploit of a user-activated soft fork.
And I'd like to know how you feel about it.
Boost into the show and give me your thoughts.
I find it to be, I think what really gets me is how cynical it is,
while also wrapping itself in language about saving Bitcoin against a threat that doesn't
even seem to have materialized even after Bitcoin Core 30 has shipped and has shipped
since October.
But yet we're going to make this radical change.
I don't get it.
I can't wrap my head around it.
And I can only imagine if this has wider exposure, the overall narrative damage it could do to
Bitcoin.
Right now, it doesn't seem to.
In fact, these internal fights don't even seem to register or bother with these Bitcoin treasury companies who are continuing right along.
And the king of them is Saylor.
And he went on CNBC to flex that he just plans to buy all the supply.
Sorry, he's buying everything that's going to get mined.
He might be taking pauses and buying bonds or selling here and there.
But the plan is to just snap up all the supply.
There's not much Bitcoin left because at this point, all of the organic supply of Bitcoin being produced by the miners is being taken up by the Bitcoin.
You bought more than was mined this year for strategy.
Yeah, we have. Yeah. The formation of digital credit means that the credit market itself is absorbing all of the organic supply of Bitcoin from now to forever.
Our company will probably buy all of the Bitcoin gets produced by the miners between here and the year 2140.
Then there's no more Bitcoin.
2140. Yeah.
There you go. So he still plans to buy.
Okay. All right. All right. Well, as long as he can keep raising the money, I suppose.
So I have a question not related to that, but I'd like your input on.
Would you be interested in hearing my review of the new Fold credit card? I'm just about
one month into using the new Fold credit card. The idea is it gives you sats back on your purchases,
and then you can stack it with some other perks on the Fold platform and ultimately get up to 4%
sats back. So I started using it because I have been a Fold customer for a while. And I don't know
if that's something, it's a credit card. It's not exactly Bitcoin related, but it is a credit card
from a Bitcoin company that gives you sats. So I figured I'd toss it out there. And if you're
looking for an excuse to boost the show, that would be a good one. I'd like to know your thoughts.
Well, there's still a lot more show coming up.
Boosts, updates, and of course, the song of the week.
I'll just take a moment to mention you can support the show just by doing what you do.
If you want to stack your sats on River, the best way to stack sats in the U.S., I say,
We got a link in the notes for that.
Now, if you want to go the full self-custody route, automatic full self-custody, they don't even host a wallet.
Check out the Bitcoin well.
They're in the U.S. and Canada.
If you want to sell your sats, go right to a Bitcoin card from, say, Lightning.
Go buy yourself something.
The Bitcoin company.
They go from sats to gift card over the Lightning network in just seconds.
If you want to get access to your liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, that's where Salt can come in.
They'll give you a loan backed by your Bitcoin with some margin call protections in there that are nice to have and other features.
And Salt has lower rates and lower minimums than a lot of other places.
So I like that a lot about them.
Check out those links in the show notes.
It's a great way to support the show just by doing what you do.
And we do have some boost to get to.
We have some support that came into the episode.
And I'm...
Okay, okay.
Nat Gas Emerson came in with 21,012 sats.
I hoard that which your kind covered.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you very much.
Fun will now commence.
Had I known you dressed so nice for these, I would have been boosting more and more often.
Keep it up.
Oh, you watched the video version while I dressed down this week.
Sorry about that.
I feel bad.
I should have dressed up.
I do sometimes.
I'm glad you watched the video version.
I'd be curious to get more feedback on that.
Thank you for the boost.
You are our baller.
You got it on sale this week.
Thank you very much.
OB boosted in with 21,000 sats.
These aren't the droids you were looking for.
perhaps a new gaslighting sound clip.
Hmm.
Yeah, it would be a good one,
but you know, it would be next level
as you clipped it for me.
Come on, man.
What, am I going to go load up Star Wars?
But I like it, OB.
Thank you very much.
Derivation Dingus comes in with 8,500 sats.
Great episode.
I'm busy AF this week,
but I wanted to send some value.
So here's the rest of the sats in my fountain wallet.
Oh, thank you, Derivation.
Appreciate that value a lot.
and I know what you mean.
It's busy days, right?
But then one day we'll look back
and we'll be bored
and we'll think where did it all go.
NPUB1ZapSats comes in with 2,267 sats.
I like that handle.
Go for it.
Hi, Chris.
Thanks for the mention last week.
I hadn't updated my handle in Fountain.
Ah, love the show.
Keep up the good work.
Thanks for following up on that.
Thanks for the boost.
Appreciate the value.
Orange Mart's here with 5,555 sats.
Orange Mart.
No message, just value.
Thank you very much.
Paranoid Coder is here with 4,000 satoshis.
I wanted to give more context around boosting from Pocket Cast.
Well, it wasn't entirely accurate.
Oh, here we go, guys.
As the app just opens a link to the Fountain web app
from the boost button in the podcast main page.
I find it very convenient and will continue to use it
so long as the company behind Pocket Cast
gets some extra analytics around it.
I haven't seen any other official announcements
of this feature, so I'm waiting to raise awareness.
I'm wanting to raise awareness.
I hadn't heard about that either.
I used to be a big Pocket Cast user,
but they've just sort of fallen behind,
so it's nice to see that window opening.
And they've adopted some other podcasting
to do features as well.
Thank you, Paranoid.
Appreciate you.
Oh my God, this drawer is filled with fruit lobes.
BudgetEye Stormtrooper is here with 2,042 sats.
Just pump the brakes right there.
I propose the Bitcoin slog summer or the cold summer or the Bitcoin thorough summer.
I think slog summer is close.
I don't know if that's quite it, but I think that's it.
Enough.
It's going to be a slog and it's going to be hot.
I think the weather is going to be hot.
So it's, it's yeah.
Slog summer might be the way to go.
I think we can maybe do better, but Stormtrooper, you're close.
Thank you for the value.
Your inner third child comes in with 4,445 sets.
The traders love the ball.
episode 21 was the first episode featuring the music we have all come to count on
would love an outro with these beats sometime a mashup of all the music and maybe some chris
quips okay you get right on it buddy man it's pretty funny next caller holy hand grenade clip
is okay but the clip where they miss counts to three would be preferable one two five three my
lord oh right three right okay well see there's a lot of clip requests i don't mind doing some of
these i can try to find that one because i did have that one loaded up uh i love the emoji shout
out. Thank you. Social media is fine. But how many fans do you need to give out $10 a month to make
this worth your time? Well, I don't know, man, I would have to do the math on that. It's the thing
I like about the value for value models. It also gives me good signal. You know, it helps direct
the show. I can understand what's what topics resonate to. So I do like the per episode signal.
So it's a complicated issue because the monthlies are really good. Something you can count on,
you know, like, are we going to make it if people don't support that kind of stuff? It's good
questions. Nice to hear from you, inner child. I am programmed in multiple techniques. All right.
Coming up next is user 740. Coming in hot with the boom. 2,550 sats. No message, just value,
though. Thank you very much. And we got Gene Bean here. Gene Bean with 8,003 sats. You make me
want to be a better man. Send some value to our artists. And he says, does the Clarity Act have
any impact on liquid, on liquid, on LBTC? No, I don't think it does. Not from what I could tell,
at least gene he says i'm in the just say no to knots camp at this point they have been and i have
been back on core for a while the story on claude cracking that wallet by finding stuff on the hard
drive is why literally every guide i've seen says put your seed phrase on anything anything but
digital yeah well yeah i think it's it's going to be it's going to be wallets that are password
protected which is going to be some of the early stuff it's yeah most people have a seed phrase and
they put it somewhere else i hope this is the way people i hope thank you gene good to hear from you
Thanks for the boost.
Bob is here with 12,533 sets.
I don't understand what the heck is going on here.
What about a dirty orange summer?
Oh, okay.
Sort of like the song Dirty Black Summer for a bad Bitcoin summer.
Well, now that's stuck in my head.
You know what?
I do like dirty orange summer.
Sounds good.
I do want something that rolls.
What do you think's better?
Slog summer or the Bitcoin slog summer or dirty orange summer?
You guys let me know.
Nakamoto 6102 is here with 3,500 sats.
Live long and prosper.
And Nakamoto says thanks for the value.
Well, thank you for the value.
Rock and roll.
I appreciate that very much.
Our next boost comes from user54 with 2,121 sats.
There's coffee in that nebula.
And they just say boost.
Boost.
You bet.
Thank you.
Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks.
Boost to the best Bitcoin podcast in the universe.
Oh, thank you, sir.
Thank you.
Ace, it's always nice to hear from you.
Appreciate the value.
User 809.
You guys got to go set your names in your profiles.
That's not possible.
Nothing can do that.
Oh, yeah, you can do it.
You just got to go into Fountain.
But I do appreciate the boost.
User 809 comes in with 5,000 sats.
I like you.
You're a hot ticket.
Keep up the great work.
Thank you for the value.
I appreciate you coming in over the one hour mark, too.
Listening right along.
Appreciate you.
Kiwi Bitcoin guides here with 4,567 sats.
Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days.
When the opera turn drama started, I was interested to learn more about Knots, and I did.
But over time, I came to the conclusion I would not run it for the following reasons.
Key person and crazy person risk with Luke, limited number of developers, and support of BIP-110.
Then I also learned that each version of Knots includes a built-in deprecation setting by default.
So, no Knots for me.
Yeah, that's sort of right along my line, Kiwi.
I think you've nailed it.
superior ability breeds superior ambition thank you everybody who boosted uh and everybody who
boosted below the 2000 sat cutoff i i just uh cut off there for time on air but i appreciate it and
thank you everyone who stream sats as you listened 32 of you did that and collectively you all stacked
44 599 sats our biggest boost of the episode he's a good guy he's a real good guy no he's a great guy
That goes to all of you. Thank you.
What the hell was that? Spaceball 1. They've gone to Plaid.
When you bring it all together with our boosters, our grand total for this week's episode was 197,432 sats.
Not our strongest week, but I'm not sure if last episode was our strongest episode, so I'm going to call that one fair.
I'd love to see the support step up for this episode.
After all, the sats are on sale and it goes to a good cause this here podcast.
Thank you, everybody, who supports the show with a boost
or with a membership on Jupiter Party or Fountain.
You make the show possible.
Shout out to AlbiHub, too,
which has just been going from strength to strength.
I just updated my AlbiHub,
and there's a lot of good stuff in there
if you follow the agentic workflow It really cool And I have more on that later But I want to start the updates with a little bit of fun if you allow it
So I played the opening clip of Mark Cuban talking about how Bitcoin had lost the plot.
Well, let's stick with Mark for a moment. And when he's not running his mouth about Bitcoin
losing the plot, he actually was quite the advocate for Bitcoin just a couple of years
ago when he bought in.
Bitcoin is just driven by supply and demand.
There's only going to be 21 million of them.
The more people that buy and the fewer people that sell, that means the price is going to
go up.
That's just the nature of it.
It's a great store of value.
That's why I have an investment in it, you know, because I do feel that the demand is
going to exceed the number of people selling.
Oh, I guess I guess that changed somehow.
Like any of the fundamentals of that changed.
It's so bizarre how these billionaires have got it right before and then flipped for seemingly odd reasons.
I can't I can't make sense of it.
There is a story over at The Rage I wanted to bring your attention to.
I'm just reading up on it, and I thought it's important enough that I should flag it before I have a complete understanding.
The article is titled Mind in America Act would put would put Bitcoin at risk.
And it argues that the new proposed Mind in America Act of 2026 could threaten Bitcoin's neutrality and decentralization by creating U.S. government certification program for miners.
Yeah, this is a real program and it would include incentives and also the phasing out of foreign produced mining hardware, which would also probably include government grants, loans and capital gains exemptions to help transition over to U.S.-based hardware.
But as the rage argues, that would essentially introduce dependence on government grants and loan programs and then force these companies, these mining companies to bend to the federal government as needed.
And they say the bill leaves room for a higher certification level for operations that exceed the phase out timeline in the bill.
So there's another phase where you could get a higher level.
And the bill gives the energy secretary or the secretary of energy 180 days from enactment to define documentation requirements to prove compliance.
with the bill.
So the rules of compliance,
to say that another way,
will not even be established
until 180 days after the bill has been passed.
In order for a miner to be eligible
to participate in the subsidies program,
the bill orders the establishment
of the certification program
by the Secretary of Commerce
to ensure that mining pools
and mining operations
comply with hardware sourcing standards
as well as ownership requirements.
It would ban the purchase
of any new mining hardware produced by a designated foreign adversary after January 1st,
2027.
Each year until 2030 adds a decreasing maximum percentage of foreign source hardware being
operated by a miner to comply.
Now, this is quite the requirement considering that all of the high end ASIC equipment is
manufactured outside the United States.
not sure how that would work because if you want the u.s mining operations to be competitive they
need to buy the most competitive mining hardware so the rage argues that the bill threatens
bitcoin's neutrality and decentralization and swings control over to the u.s government
and so i recommend you read it i'm going to be following up on it i'm still new to this i just
came across this before the show so i wanted to bring it to your attention speaking of agents
setting up wallets earlier in the show, this is really something. The Nunchuck wallet has been
demonstrating a set of skills and command line tools that they have released so that way your
agents can manage Nunchuck wallets. For example, I have a prompt here that says, create a three of
four wallet. After two years, it becomes a two of four. After five years, it becomes a one of four.
And so they're walking the agent in this example through setting up a multi-sig wallet.
Another prompt, create a three of four wallet.
Six months after funds arrive,
they can be spent with a two of four signature.
After one year, they can be spent with one of four.
So it's sort of an aging process.
To do this, they've released the Nunchuck CLI
and the Nunchuck Agent Skills,
which I'll have linked in the show notes.
And this to me is, of course, very early days.
And so a big warning signs all around it
that you're gonna wanna do this with just test funds.
And you probably wanna plan to let your AI agent
hold a key in a Bitcoin wallet that you can isolate probably on a hardware wallet somewhere
that they don't, you know, you're going to want to take some best practices.
And alternatively, you could set up a watch only mode with these agents.
They support the agent only being able to do read and draft transactions, manage history,
do coin control and so on, but they won't do any transactions or spend.
You can set that mode as well.
I highlight this, not because I encourage you to use it, although go play with it if
you want.
I highlight it because I think this is low key going to be the user level adoption of Bitcoin and agentic use for Bitcoin.
If you have a lightning node now, wouldn't it be nice?
And this is something we talked about in our special to be able to just ask your agent to go rebalance your channels for you and sweep liquidity into your liquid wallet.
These are very useful things and set up properly.
They can be done pretty reliably, but you want to test it.
I just think it's an interesting, I don't know, perhaps window into where actual agentic use cases for Bitcoin will go.
We see people speculating about it all the time.
I think that one may actually have some legs.
OK, next, stick with me here for this.
But the Fox Business Channel went really heavy on Bitcoin this week and crypto to an extent.
And I've narrowed down from about a dozen clips to just a few select clips, starting with coverage on a potential new Bitcoin reserve.
administration is pushing for global crypto dominance in the U.S. Darren Botello is with us.
He's on Capital Electric. In plain English, how are they going to do it, Darren?
Hi, good morning, Stuart. So the president is asking Fed to review allowing crypto and fintech
firms to store their money in the central bank. And this comes after Kraken got access to the
central bank back in March. So they were the first. Now other banks want the same kind of access.
But in Washington, as you know, an executive order is only as good as the president who's in the White House.
The next person that takes over, they could completely change that.
That's why in a Fox Business exclusive, Congressman Nick Begich is introducing a bill, he says,
to lock in Trump's plan and officially establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve.
Begich tells Fox Business that this is basically the new Fort Knox.
In order to maintain the sovereignty of the U.S. dollar and the strength of the U.S. dollar,
You've got to have a strong reserve policy. That's why central banks around the world for so many years, thousands of years, in fact, have held reserves on their balance sheet.
We need to recognize that digital assets are the 21st century equivalent of those historical gold reserves.
So Begich wants the government to stockpile 5% of all Bitcoin, which is equivalent to how much of the world's gold, the U.S. stores and reserves.
and he already found a way to fund it without taxpayers.
The Treasury is currently sucking up crypto assets
tied to Iran through Operation Economic Fury.
Baggage's plan?
Seize the Ayatollah's crypto
and drop it straight into the U.S. balance sheet.
But he warns the GOP cannot afford to drag its feet.
Conservatives have a tight six-month window
to pass this bill and lock the end of law
while Republicans still control both houses of Congress.
So of course, as we know,
the clock is ticking with the midterms
coming up in November.
Long shot. There's also been discussion of revaluing the U.S. gold stock and buying Bitcoin with some of the differential there. But that one about just taking the seized assets from Iran, that tickled me because this is where this next clip goes. We get an idea with this next clip and you with that previous clip, just what a bad idea stable coins are for any country that is at odds with the United States, but especially Iran.
Aaron, how do we stop this?
works. The companies pay the insurance companies in Bitcoin and they get through the straight safely.
That's the trade off. It's a direct move to dodge our banks and scoop up a fresh source of cash.
And this covers a much larger shadow economy. New estimates from a threat detection data firm
show Tehran is sitting on a crypto pile worth a staggering $7.7 billion. That war chest has been
expanding ever since heavy sanctions cracked down. This was during the first Trump administration,
by the way. And here's a look at the price of crude right now. The hot board's up. Prices are
trading near recent highs as regional shipping tensions. They're flaring. But the regime is
counting on crypto to keep its military funded. The Treasury Department is tracking the digital
breadcrumbs. And they're telling Fox, here's a statement over here, through economic fury,
Treasury has taken actions that have led to the freezing of nearly half a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency linked to the Iranian regime, severing financial lifelines that Iran's regime and military depend on.
According to crypto experts, Tehran's tech is actually their weak spot here.
We found over and over again that they're actually a much better asset for U.S. law enforcement and other agencies to track because you leave a lot of breadcrumbs.
Yep.
So I said the administration is taking action, but how do we actually stop this?
Industry insiders say Washington has a massive trump card here by threatening to cut off crypto exchanges from the American banking system.
Regulators could actually then flush out these foreign adversaries.
Stuart?
The stablecoins have made a deal with the devil.
I mean, maybe it's for the best, right?
If you want to use a different stablecoin, go right ahead, I suppose.
I wonder if the Zcash people will jump on this as an opportunity to hype Zcash.
All right, now our last clip, I thought this one had some good takes because they wanted to come on and they wanted to fear monger a little bit about quantum and the threat it proposes to Bitcoin.
And the guests, they weren't really having it.
And the industry are using that to price Bitcoin, but the threat is really not imminent.
The hardware right now does not even exist to be able to crack Bitcoin.
And it's several years away.
So the industry is really working hard to prepare because Bitcoin can upgrade through consensus.
It's software.
And so I think that we're going to solve this problem as an industry, especially with all of these stakeholders, both on the retail level, as well as institutional and sovereigns that have gotten into Bitcoin.
But here's the thing, right?
We talk about Softland, Caitlin.
And software stocks, the biggest companies that have ever existed, Microsoft is getting hammered.
ServiceNow getting hammered.
Salesforce.com getting hammered.
Software has been annihilated.
And not just software, other industries because of potential AI threats.
So when do we start this push for consensus?
Because I think if you're too confident, you're going to be caught flat-footed.
Well, that's certainly true for software, for AI, in part because the services business is going to be disrupted.
But I, too, am not worried about the quantum risk.
We typically can see that coming.
The cryptographers will tell you, for example, that when SHA-1 was broken by Chinese cryptographers in 2005, theoretically, it took 11 years for Google to actually brute force break SHA-1.
let's check in on the state of the network before i wrap up right now it's block height 951 288
the current u.s price to one bitcoin 74 650 that puts our sats per dollar at 1339 sats
We are down a mighty 40.8% from our all-time high 232 days ago, October 6th, 2025, before the big liquidity event on October 10th.
Retarget date set for May 29th with an upward adjustment of 0.9%.
Currently, an impressive 27,063 Bitcoin nodes on the network.
Where'd y'all come from?
We are down 3.6% since the last show.
Sorry about that.
But you know what?
It's just an opportunity to test your conviction and stack a little harder.
State of the Network is just fine.
All right, that leaves us at the end of the show.
You know what that means.
Links at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
My goal is to give you a show
that doesn't get too distracted by the emotions
or what's happening in the macro picture,
but just focuses on the signal.
That way you can plan
Yourself, your friends, your family, whatever it might be, your biz, I don't know.
So let me know how I did with the boost.
Also want to hear your thoughts on a fold card review.
Anything else that came up during the show?
Now, I'm going to try something that I really shouldn't do because I keep picking songs where I can't pronounce the artist's name, but they're good songs.
And this week's Value for Value track is going to be something that I haven't done for a while.
It's an instrumental track, and it's by Gawalt, or that's the track name.
The track name is Gawalt, and the artist name is Absolute Absalom.
See you next week.
95% of your sats will go to the artist during the track.
Thank you.
Thank you
This is a place where override pattern replied.
"... nuncaего CHANGE отбойки sessizó как альтернативой Y
... чер愛 yV exchanged笑-y".
Climate change t先ならениям от dûRIES и punto-ulturer он envie
Thank you.