Music.
Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 31. My name is Chris.
Is your October finally here? What a bonkers week.
Bitcoin's up 9, 10 percent-ish since the last episode, as I record at least.
The stock market's been all over the place. They're trying to price in maybe
no rate cuts, maybe less rate cuts.
Gold's been pumping for weeks. It slowed down in the last couple of days,
but still hanging out above 2,700 an ounce, which to them is big money.
Even the dollar strengthened by 3% since the end of September.
All of this is telling us something. We're going to get into that in this episode.
And one thing is clear right off the top.
Safe haven money is buying gold and other hard assets like crazy,
as fast as the decrepit financial system will let them.
And when we have seen these types of cycles, Bitcoin's young,
but when we have seen these types of cycles in the past,
historically, gold and the gold market has sniffed out major problems and structural
issues before other assets and before Bitcoin. And it makes sense.
Gold has a larger user base. Gold's hedge against sovereign issues has been
well understood for hundreds of years.
So there's just a lot of momentum to view gold as a safe haven.
But if previous cycles play out, and I think maybe we're starting to see it
this week, Bitcoin becomes one of those as well.
So what's driving all of this craziness, this mismatch of signals,
but the clear picture that we're starting to see?
If you asked a mainstream Keynesian economist, their take would be the Fed did a great job.
What we see and what our experts tell us, no landing might be the best choice
if you're thinking it gets down about 1.5% to 2% growth, which is where it was
sort of for a lot of years prior to the pandemic.
If we can glide into that level and keep the inflation, which is down. That's right.
Not even a soft landing. No landing.
That's Bank of America's chairman and CEO, by the way. And you can hear it in
his answer. They're looking at the official Fed data.
They're looking at the numbers that all of the mainstream economists look at. And they see no problem.
As far as they're concerned, the Fed has pulled off the impossible, a no landing.
Ironically, he's right. What he describes is a soft landing.
That's what he's describing. But he says a no landing.
And he's ironically right. What he's really describing is inflation stays kind of hot.
Rates start to come down. and have little impact on the wider state of the economy.
Rates came down and the housing rates went up. The market rates went up.
That's where we're at right now. See, the recession has already been here.
Like, hey, keep talking about, are we going to have a recession?
Are we going to have a recession? Will there be a soft landing, a hard landing?
We've already had a recession. Inflation and high rates kicked everybody's butt in the West.
And oil prices, I think, are a good proxy for economic demand.
And even with major, major Middle East uncertainty, like including the possibility
that oil reserves could get striked,
The price of crude oil is down 16% this year because demand has been collapsing from the West and China.
That shows you real economic activity. Here's another proxy that I think shows you economic activity.
The share of unprofitable Russell 200 companies is now at 43%.
That's the most since the 2020
pandemic. It even exceeds 41% at the end of the 2008 financial crisis.
The reality is small companies are struggling to service their debt due to historically
high interest rates. And here's one more proxy I'm going to give you that shows
economic activity is bad and everyone out there is struggling.
Auto loan 90-day delinquency rates are now 2.88%. Almost 3% of all the auto
loans out there are overdue by 90 days, more than 90 days.
That's the highest since Q2 of 2010.
That percentage has almost doubled in just two and a half years.
Serious delinquencies in auto loans have been rising at the fastest pace since
the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, another stat that is the worst since 2008.
We've all been witnessing what I've been calling a rolling recession.
It impacted certain areas at certain times, with different kind of narratives
given to describe why it's happening.
And it's been predominantly felt, I believe, my assertion, by those that make
less than $150,000 a year, especially in cities.
And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, that would be 80% of U.S. households.
We never avoided a recession. We've been seeing this snowball since the GFC in 2008.
You'll see it if you just travel around the U.S. for like a couple of days in
a car. You'll see it. You'll see things that have never been rebuilt since 2008.
You'll see people that have been out of work, entire towns just gone,
ghost towns, just abandoned after 2008.
Never rebuilt, never came back.
Now, we haven't had a traditional recession. Most people would say it's two
consecutive quarters of decline in the GDP.
But that can be offset by just excessive spending by a ginormous federal government
that has a huge war machine and a bunch of other social programs.
When you have a federal government that represents somewhere between 20% and
40% of the actual economy when you include contractors and all the companies
that make their money off the federal government, yeah, then if you push that
hard, you're going to see the GDP go up. even when other people are suffering.
So if people are really actually hurting.
Inflation still running kind of hot. What's the real story? Why are we pumping?
Why are we pumping right now? Well, I think it's because we are in the middle
of the eye of the inflation storm right now.
Perhaps the best it gets, depending on how the economy develops.
Or, you know what, others call it an inflation valley, like Barry Bannister. Always in great shape.
Well, a really detailed analysis of inflation, which in this brand new era of
populism is not going to stay quiescent forever.
In other words, the 2% inflation target of the Fed on a long-term basis is over. It's dead. It's gone.
We're in a valley between two moves in inflation.
The next one won't be as high as what we saw in 2022, but we're just in a valley,
and it's a misleading optimism in the market to believe that inflation has been
whipped. This is my base case as well.
We are watching the repercussions of two years of restrictive monetary policy
and, of course, just an extremely tough business environment in general,
talking about small businesses.
It's been pretty good for the really big businesses, the huge businesses.
So, of course, we're seeing inflation kind of kick down, but we haven't beat it.
It's not at their quote unquote 2% target. In fact, it just ticked up slightly.
Food also, by the way, just ticked up more than average than everything else.
Things are still ticking up slightly, even though we're rate cutting and monetary
policy is loose. M2 supply is going back up.
So we haven't beat inflation. It's just lulled because we starved the economy for two years.
But the food is being served. The punch bowl is being refilled.
I don't think it means we get inflation right away. And I don't think it means
we get massive, crazy inflation.
But I think it means what you're seeing right now is sort of the best it gets for quite a while.
We're going to see quite a bit of fiscal, no matter who wins the next in this election.
Quite a bit of fiscal because that's what the public thinks. They want fiscal.
Unless the bond market rejects it, of course. So, Barry, what do you do?
What are you telling your clients to do if you think the market looks too expensive
and you're worried about spending, which could hurt bonds as well?
Well, think about the bonds. Yeah, there was a slight move after the strong
payroll number, but total government
debt held by the public is only 30 percent of non-financial debt.
That's actually fairly low. And we have no term premium in the market,
meaning the cost or price of duration risk. That means that the yield is actually
very low on 10-year treasuries.
So we could issue more debt. And I think the politicians know that.
So as far as we look out into the future, we think valuation is just very stretched.
We are following a composite of past bubbles. So we could go higher.
But unfortunately, when the inflation perks up and the Fed mid-decade is forced
to reckon with that, then we're going to go straight back down.
And it kind of begs the question, what's the point?
So I like his analysis, but I disagree with a couple of things. I think he's right.
Both candidates are going to spend more, and the politicians believe they have more room to spend.
That's why the debt and really no fiscal policy at all has been part of this election.
It's more about what they can give away and how they can reduce taxes than it
is about how they're going to solve the deficit.
The deficit doesn't really even get talked about other than,
oh, yeah, we're going to solve it by being amazing or by having an opportunity
economy. Those are the two answers we get right now.
So I think his analysis is right there. But where I kind of disagree,
and I think it's kind of cynical, is he kind of talks like he's the only one
that's figured this out.
But I'd argue big money is also smelling this out and Bitcoiners.
So assets, hard assets, are going to pump. Gold's going to pump.
Bitcoin's going to pump. Real estate will probably pump.
I think, you know, it's not necessarily right now, not this week necessarily.
It could start now, but we're still pretty close to a pretty major election.
In fact, we're just 14 trading days away from a major election.
I think what we're seeing this week is the frontrunners ape in.
So the question is, are we about to see a big price jump? I don't know.
Probably only Satoshi, a.k.a. Peter Todd, knows for sure. Ha ha ha.
It's a tricky October. You know, and Bitcoin has now been tied to the election to some degree.
I'm watching for Bitcoin to break above and stay above 68K as I record.
It's there right now. But I'd like to see it hang out there for a little bit
and then really see it go, because that's a major resistance level.
It'd be interesting to see if it could keep above it, because as it does,
it starts for better or worse.
It creates a marketing effect. And this time it's not the general public that's going to ape in.
But I think it's going to be major corporations.
Music.
I don't talk about microstrategy a lot because it's Bitcoin adjacent,
but I think we have a big load of tailwinds, if you get what I mean.
Good things once things settle down.
And an example of those things, just like if I were to pick one that I think
is really great for Bitcoin long term, is the ongoing adoption of Saylor's Bitcoin
strategy for microstrategy into other companies.
And there's several examples of this. I think even on a small scale,
podcasters that do value for value could become this.
But MetaPlanet, at a whole other totally different scale, they're a group out of Japan.
You've probably heard of them before. They recently hired Dylan Leclerc to implement
sailor strategy for MetaPlanet.
And this Tuesday, they added another 6.8 million Bitcoin to their treasury,
bringing their total Bitcoin holdings now to 855.4 Bitcoin.
MetaPlanet has doubled their Bitcoin holdings in October alone.
They've been using this lower price to stack, stack, stack.
This is a massive strategy that other companies are going to adopt.
Dylan LeClaire joined, I think it's Charles Payne, that's who it is,
to talk about the strategy a little bit.
And listen, there's a lot of wonk speak in here, but listen to what he's saying
and tell me if you don't think other companies won't just adopt the same strategy.
I mean, just the playbook is out there. It's like an open playbook for anyone.
This micro strategy and the Bitcoin strategy they adopted in August of 2020
has outperformed 500 out of 500 S&P 500 stocks since that time,
right? It's outperformed everything on the planet, including NVIDIA.
That doesn't go unnoticed. It's not on the S&P 500.
But it's outperformed every company on the S&P 500.
There's no way rich CEOs that are sitting on large balances with a company that's
performing mediocrely, mediocrely, don't take notice of this.
500 out of 500 S&P 500 stocks since that time, right?
It's outperformed everything on the planet, including NVIDIA,
right? So this is the biggest story in corporate finance, how a $1 billion NASDAQ
business intelligence company just changed their unit of account and has become
a $36 billion market cap in four years.
And so this idea that dilution is the scariest thing in the world,
Sailor and MicroStrategy's playbook flipping it on its head,
where shareholders cheer every time new stock is issued, new convertible debt
is issued to buy additional Bitcoin.
It started as a defensive, protective strategy to hedge against the COVID stimulus
and has since turned into an offensive strategy.
The idea that he has somehow shaped the market's perception that when he issues
more stock, dilutes the stock, issues more debt, that's a great thing.
People ape in when he does it. Where Bitcoin and the volatility that so many
people for so many years said was something to avoid at all costs.
MicroStrategy and Saylor are leveraging that volatility to their advantage.
The traders love the Vols, right?
They have the lowest cost of capital out of anybody on the planet,
borrowing billions of dollars for 82 basis points, right? So this is really not understood.
It's still early days, remarkably so. And I think Sailor and MicroStrategy continue
chugging on from here. And it seems to be working well for MetaPlanet as well.
I put some links in the show notes if you'd like to know more,
just kind of dig into this and just kind of about their amazing performance.
There's so much in there that I don't really need to get into because like I
said, it's kind of Bitcoin adjacent, but I'd love to hear your thoughts if you
have a Bitcoin strategy.
I kind of think we all do, at least the listeners of the show,
we have a Bitcoin strategy for the family.
And if you own a small business, why not implement a bit of a Bitcoin strategy there too?
It's like you don't have to put all your financial assets into Bitcoin,
but figure out what your percentage is that you're comfortable with and you
have a little on the balance sheet for the business.
It just seems like a strategy that could save so many of these companies that are struggling.
I talk about small businesses pretty frequently because I'm a small business owner.
And if we have almost half of the companies listed on the Russell 2000, did I say 200 earlier?
The Russell 2000 are struggling worse than they were during 2008 GFC right now.
They need these solutions. Families need a solution too. Families need something
to hedge against inflation as well.
It is, I think, I think it's got to be one of the clever strategies out there.
And so far, it's just served MicroStrategy super well and MetaPlanet super well
and the miners that are implementing this as well.
Music.
All right. Well, coming up, we still have quite a bit. Your boost,
Liz's crypto antics finally get attacked on the stage.
Trump's coin launched, but it was botched. Some big project updates and a great
final clip of the week. Very relevant final clip of the week.
If you'd like to support the show outside of boosting, I've got two affiliate links.
They're not sponsors, no official relationship, but they're two companies I
like. For Stacking Sats in the States, I think River is the way to go.
I have an affiliate link in there. It helps me out, helps you out.
They're a Bitcoin-only company with a fantastic infrastructure,
proof of reserves, and Lightning withdrawals that improve your privacy and reduce
your UTXO issues, which we'll get into in just a moment.
Also, shout out to thebitcoincompany.com, promo code JUPITER.
If you want to spend your sats over Lightning, you got some sats burning a hole
in your pocket, you want to get a gift certificate, maybe leverage some of your
earnings for the holidays, thebitcoincompany.com, promo code JUPITER.
I earned some sats and you earned some sats, And I put that towards the general
fund of the show right there.
There's two links in the show notes to help out. But of course, you can also boost in.
Music.
And we do have some boosts to get into this week.
And Wine Eagle is our baller boost with 100,000 sets.
Oh, boosting in to call out the podfather for running the podcast index on a
shit coin. Hive, we need a real solution.
Oh, Wine Eagle, that seems like maybe now that's like a fake name.
So that way you don't put your real name out there. You know,
I've thought about this.
I wonder if there isn't a role for certain types of messaging buses out there like Hive.
I mean, I think of it as a JSON messaging bus personally.
But I'm not very familiar with Hive, so if you know other details,
please feel free to share them with me.
I haven't really bothered to look into it. But when I look at the functionality,
it seems like a good way to avoid a centralized database that would be run by,
you know, maybe, say, just the index.
Not only would that one server get overwhelmed, but it'd be a central point
of failure and a central point of control.
And if you're looking for a system that's uncensorable, that can be decentralized
if, say, one day Dave and Adam move to an island and get fabulously wealthy
and no longer want to do the index –,
I think having something decentralized that helps with the note. Oh, so I should back up.
So for those of you that don't know what we're talking about,
on the back end, there's a system called PodPing. This is part of the podcasting 2.0 spec.
And PodPing flips the way podcast clients get new updates.
And traditionally, before podcasting 2.0, each podcasting client would subscribe
to all your RSS feeds, and then it would go check the feeds every hour,
every two hours, every 24 hours, wherever the settings are.
And so if you had 100,000 listeners, they all had 100,000 clients that were
pinging your HTTP server to get an XML file to check to see if there had been a new episode.
Still very common practice, but there's a better way.
And that's PodPing. And what PodPing does is you notify PodPing.
You give it, you know, here's our episode, here's the URL.
You notify the PodPing network that an episode has been released or you've made an update to an episode.
And the clients can subscribe to notifications from PodPing and the Podcast
Index also is a client and the Podcast Index can update and offers an API for clients to use as well.
So it's more of a, hey, you've got an update, come now fetch it.
Instead of the client checking, checking, checking, the client is now informed,
yeah, you've got an update.
Or the client can use an energy efficient API to check and just pull in the
changes. And Hive is a JSON blockchain messaging system that enables that kind
of decentralized pod ping.
I would be curious to know what could be used in its place.
For me personally, I, after, you know, seen it in use for a couple of years,
have really not seen any negative aspects of it. But again, luck is it.
Don't know much about Hive. Thanks for the boost, Eagle. Good conversation.
Speaking of the Podfather, he comes in with 100,000 sats. Stop!
And another 1,000 sats thrown in there. He says, love the show.
And thank you, Podfather. He says, here's another thought I had.
I hear you talk about UTXOs a lot and how to, quote, manage them.
I'd love to understand this topic better.
Perhaps you can go into this deeper on a future episode. I will do just that.
And I'll give you my super quick breakdown.
I wrote down some notes because I saw your boost come in on Helipad.
And I thought, all right, I want to talk about this.
And I think I could expand it and then expand into why I use Liquid and all
of that. But here's a super brief, like, top-level overview of a UTXO.
And imagine, okay, all right, so here's an analogy. Imagine you have a digital
wallet and you've got some Bitcoin in it, hopefully.
It's not just one giant balance in there. Bitcoin breaks it down into smaller
pieces called UTXOs, which stands for unspent transaction outputs.
And you can think of a UTXO like an individual coin or a bill in a physical wallet.
Each UTXO has a value, a unique history, all of the details,
like how it came into your possession. And so if you receive like half a Bitcoin
from a friend, you now have a half Bitcoin UTXO in your wallet.
And if later you spent, say, 0.2 of that Bitcoin to buy something,
well, now that original 0.5 Bitcoin is spent, a new 0.2 Bitcoin UTXO is created
for the merchant, and a new 0.3, the remainder balance, the unspent,
is created and sent back to you as changed.
So now your wallet holds two UTXOs, one for the 0.3 Bitcoin and another for the 0.2 Bitcoin.
So your remaining balance and your change.
So, okay. All right. I hope that makes sense. So there's really just a couple
of things to take away from it. You can think of a UTXO as like a building block
for a Bitcoin transaction.
Every transaction involves spending a UTXO or more, whatever the amount of UTXOs
it takes up to meet the amount you're trying to spend. So you're going to send a million sats.
That might actually be, you know, a dozen UTXOs depending on the size, sizes of them.
And the UTXOs help prevent double spending since each UTXO can only be spent
once. So the network can verify that very easily.
And the way to think of your Bitcoin balance is it's really a sum of all your UTXOs.
It's not a single number stored in an account, but rather a total value of all the UTXOs you own.
So like if you have $100 in your wallet, but it's all fives, right?
So you technically have a total of $100, but they're all in $5 bills.
Each one of those $5 bills would be a UTXO.
I hope that makes sense. Please let me know. Give me feedback on that.
And then I will do a dedicated segment that also talks about,
you know, avoiding transaction fees and how I use liquid. But I just wanted to get that out there.
And then based on the feedback I get, please boost in and I'll restructure it
so it makes more sense. And I'll make a whole segment out of it. Thank you, Podfather.
Great question. And I appreciate the boost. Motor Night comes in with 54,642 sats.
I hoard that which your kind covet. I'm a simple man.
I hear some coin joint advocacy. I boost. The amount is how much I made today
on joint market. Jam on. Wow.
That's great. I love that. Regarding the discussion and Fountain getting out
of memory killed, it doesn't sound right.
It happened on my old Pixel 5 as well as my new Pixel 9 Pro with different RAM
amounts. Yeah, no kidding.
And it only happens when charging. So heat might be it. but my phone doesn't
seem to get that hot when charging.
Curious if anyone has had other ideas. Both phones are running Graphene. Hmm.
Boy, I use Fountain quite a bit on my Graphene OS Pixel 7.
And I don't have that problem. I have a problem where my car,
or not CarPlay, Android Auto just disconnects, you know, 20, 30 minutes into a drive.
And then maybe like another hour later. And it doesn't seem to be like in a set time.
That of course disrupts the podcast that I'm listening to. But I don't know
if it's a Graphene OS issue, a cable issue.
I think that's where I'm going to start. It's one of those things.
Appreciate that boost, Moon Knight. And nice job on Jam Market.
I think that's a good hot tip out there. Don't sleep on Jam Market, everybody.
Vault Byte comes in with 21,000 sats. Coming in hot with the booze.
Yeah, you are. Spot on coverage on the Satoshi documentary.
Let's uphold the dignity and privacy of all the developers and their loved ones.
True insights emerge from genuine dialogue on podcasts to conferences,
not through invasive speculation.
Yeah, I agree. Great point, Vault. And I've seen the author,
the director, the creator of that documentary in some follow-up interviews.
And they're doubling down on their position and kind of calling everybody else
as people that don't want to see the truth.
It's so funny how he doesn't see the irony of all of this, being the guy that
went after QAnon folks for making associative conspiracies on their own. It really is something.
The human mind, friends, is incredible, and watching it through the lens of
Bitcoin is a very unique opportunity. Don't take it for granted.
You know? We're really, we're watching. I mean, Bitcoin is the ultimate truth teller.
And we're watching people deal with that. Gene Bean comes in with 3,559 cents.
Everything's under control. So I'm surprisingly interested in your salty opening.
But I get why you're salty. And I'm sure this Visa thing adds to the saltiness. Yeah.
You know, the Visa token market. Things like Hive. I just...
You know, I don't have the clips. I decided not to play it. But I was watching
Bitcoin Amsterdam 2024.
And it wraps up with them like shilling some sort of altcoin that I've never
even heard of or something like,
I don't know what's going on in this world anymore. All I know is I'm stacking my sats.
Just moving forward. I'm not playing with any of that stuff.
Stacking my sats and staying humble, as they say.
Mix comes in. Thank you, Gene. Mix comes in with 8,000, 3, 2, 1 sats.
That feels like a message because it's 1, 2, 3, 8, but backwards.
I feel like there's a message in there. That's not possible.
Nothing can do that. I don't know, Scotty. I think they can.
Thanks for watching the stupid documentary so I don't have to.
I honestly don't think I would have watched it myself because the whole point is to forget Satoshi.
The only reason someone would want to figure it out was because somebody was
trying to discredit Bitcoin. Thank you so much for doing the great shows.
Well, Mix, I'm glad I could watch it so you don't have to. I also wonder, what is the motivation?
Truly be trying to figure out who Satoshi is. What are you trying to accomplish there?
Bitcoin is such a gift for the people. And Satoshi made that just that incredible
sacrifice and seemingly, seemingly such good OPSEC too.
They must have had so much intention behind that. I think we should respect it as well.
Ace Ackerman comes in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats.
Full transparency. I'm also not Satoshi Nakamoto. I just wanted to put your
mind at ease. You know, I had been wondering.
I had been wondering, Ace. It felt like maybe you work. All right.
Well, now I'll have to suspect somebody else. Producer Jeff comes in with 12,100 sats.
Live long and prosper. Another great show while on the road.
Ready or not, here I come. Oh, he sent that. So producer Jeff just came up and
we just had a fantastic weekend of playing around with Mesh-tastic, which is a ton of fun.
It's like an off-grid decentralized text messaging system that you can build
out of tiny cheap devices or you can buy a pre-built one on Amazon. It's fun.
And we just did an episode of Linux Unplugged about it.
I would recommend you check it out. Anonymous comes in with 2,000 sats.
Heard about this on This Week in Bitcoin. He's sending it to our artist.
I love it when you guys do that.
I want you to know that on multiple occasions now, mostly on Noster,
actually, I think, maybe on Twitter one time, an email, I have been contacted
by the artists that we feature in the show that you guys support,
and they're thanking me.
I just, oh, I should have read it on the show. Dang it. I just got a note.
And the artist told me they started getting the sats from the show,
and now they're into Bitcoin, and they're listening. So shout out to them.
How cool is that? You guys got one of those music. So they signed up.
They're like, I'll try this thing.
And they started getting these sats. They're like, well, I got to do something.
I got to figure out what this is. Now they're listening to the show,
and they're getting into Bitcoin.
That's pretty amazing. That's pretty amazing. Thank you, everybody,
who supported the music at the end of the show. You're making a difference.
I've heard from multiple artists now.
Oh, oh my God. I did not plan this. I did not plan this. I am not kidding you. This is incredible.
Sir TJ the Raffle comes in with 3,333 sats. Make it so. I pulled this.
I did not see this. I did not plan this.
Sir TJ the Raffle writes, found your podcast because I saw the sats coming in
from some of your episodes.
Thanks for supporting Value for Value Music. Your show is helping me learn as
I recently, also with the help of Chad F, shout out to Chad F,
built and dode, for the band, Dorfels.
I feel like a newbie. I feel like the newbie. I like the newbie corners. Thanks again.
Oh my God, that's so awesome. Jeez, that's great.
End the show right there. End the show. That is so great.
Well, thank you, TJ the Raffle. It is really great to hear from you.
And I'm really impressed that you set up a note.
Did you use AlbiHub? I'm betting, maybe? Because I think Podcast Guru,
right? That connects to AlbiHub, and that's your client of choice.
Congratulations. Welcome to the jungle. And I hope we can be helpful.
If you have any questions, please do boost them in.
And I will do more newbie corners. That's really great.
I mean, how great is that? Oppie1984 comes in with 4,000 stats. Never tell me the odds.
Plus one for having the price stats at the end. It gives the data for those
of us who want it. And it's out of the way for those like me who aren't interested.
Thanks for the breakdown of the Satoshi documentary.
I'm in the camp that prefers not to know who Satoshi is. So I wasn't really
interested in watching. But your breakdown made me decide to never give it a chance.
Probably fair take, Opi. Probably a fair take. Yeah, so I am planning to do
stats. We'll see how that goes. I'm going to give like a rough version of it today.
I don't know. We'll see. Stay tuned to the end of the show for that.
Thank you, everybody, who boosts in. We do have the 2,000 SAT cutoff just for
time in the show, but we got a bunch of other boosts from other folks.
In fact, we stacked quite a bit this week. I mean, we didn't stack,
but we had... Well, actually, we did.
Altogether, it's pretty good. I should just say it's pretty good.
We had 15 boosters, not bad, and we had 31 folks streaming SATs as they listen.
So the SAT streamers... You can tell me I'm excited. I am excited.
The sat streamers streamed in 55,000 sats right on the nose when I ran this report.
So that's pretty cool. And then when you combine that with everybody that sent
in a message, we stacked a grand total of 368,377 sats.
Thank you, everybody who supports the show through a boost or by using our affiliate
links. I really appreciate it. It's what's keeping the show on the road right now.
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Music.
Like I mentioned, we're about 14 days away, trading days, trading days away from the election.
And Bitcoin has once again come up in politics, but this time it is state politics.
I think this is a fascinating moment in history for Bitcoin and for crypto in general.
It is a really, really mainstream topic all of a sudden.
And I cannot believe the words are even coming out of my mouth.
And it's notable that's happening at the state level.
So I think his name is John. Yeah, John Deaton. He's a Republican candidate.
He's going after Liz Warren's U.S. Senate seat.
And he slammed the incumbent senator in their first debate for her anti-crypto
army. It was one of his key points of attack.
He came in swinging. Fine by party.
You notice it's Democrats are great. Republicans are bad. I got news for you, Senator.
All of you suck in Congress. All of you. It's a broken system.
I'm disrupting that system. He actually shocked her with that comment,
but let's focus on the Bitcoin angle of this debate.
I grabbed a little bit of that so we can get into it because Elizabeth Warren
has been one of the key architects behind Operation Chokepoint 2.0.
Well, Liz Warren has been steadily working to hurt the crypto industry,
and I believe we've talked about it before and linked to sources.
Building the groundwork for a CBDC.
If I were going to just wager, and this is my opinion now, my wager is that
Warren is simply trying to slow down the crypto industry long enough for a CBDC
to get off its feet. Yeah.
And she has been very anti-crypto. She has been working hand in glove with Gary,
the White House, the Treasury Department, and others in the Justice Department,
and in, of course, her staff, to attack crypto companies and Bitcoin mining
companies and Bitcoin companies using legal shenanigans instead of regulations.
Using tricks and ways to put them out of business, much like the Obama administration
did with Operation Chokepoint 1.0 for companies they didn't like.
And so finally, finally, she at least has to pay somewhat of a price for that.
And it happened last night in the debate with Deaton.
To the WBZ Boston Globe U.S. Senate debate, John Keller alongside Victoria McGrane of the Globe.
Mr. Deaton, you'll go first on this one. You two take a very different view
of the cryptocurrency industry.
Senator Warren says she wants to build a, quote, anti-crypto army to rein in
what she calls crypto's threat to financial stability. consumer protection,
climate and national security.
You have criticized her and federal authorities for what you claim is overly
aggressive regulation of crypto. What's the right balance?
One minute. Well, listen, I want everyone to know when I found Bitcoin,
I thought of my mom because my mom was on welfare and food stamps.
And she couldn't keep a bank account because she couldn't keep the minimum balance.
And the bank would hit her with the predatory fees. And we needed that money.
And then she had to go to the check cashing stores that you see in the hood
and they would charge her a fee.
My mom would beg them, please, can you take less so that we have the money for food?
And then when I went to college and I would send her money from college,
I used Western Union and Western Union would take 15%. It made a difference.
So when Bitcoin came, I was like, great, you could cut out the predatory banks
and the middlemen and the money grams of Western Unions and you could help unbanked
people like my mom. It's a bit of a cliche.
It's definitely a hard debate tactic to go hard on the mom here,
but I think you need to keep in mind that it's a re-explanation of crypto from
a different perspective to a potentially skeptical audience.
And so in that regard, it's probably the right message for the setting.
But the better question here is for Senator Warren with illegal immigration
bankrupting this state,
with inflation pricing regular people out of economy, with a debt crisis where
40% of the people don't have 500 bucks in case of an emergency,
with foreign wars taking place,
why did this senator wake up one day and say, with all that,
I'm going to build an anti-crypto army because crypto is so important to her?
That's a question that she needs to answer.
Thank you. Senator, one minute. So, look, I'm fine.
People want to buy and sell crypto. That's great. I just want to make sure that
crypto has to follow the same rules as every bank, every stockbroker,
every credit union, and that is some consumer protection laws and some laws
to make sure that it's not open for terrorists and drug traffickers and human traffickers in Iran.
So that's what I want. But I want to be really clear about what's really at issue here.
And that is... Before she goes on, I think why I dislike this woman so much is because how she lies.
She lies with a voice where she sounds like she's doing it to help you.
Sort of like a teacher tone or a motherly tone that's disappointed maybe a little bit.
She plays, oh, I just want them to follow the same rules. I just want them to
follow. And I don't want terrorists to have access to it.
But we have demonstrated over and over again how far that is from the truth.
How far she has made her entire, well, like the last two years.
Like the tentpole of her entire campaign, her brand, and every focus in every
Senate hearing that she's been in has all been about crypto.
And then when she comes out here, I think it's extremely telling that she's
trying to downplay that.
I think that tells us how much the Overton window has shifted.
The fact that she's trying to downplay her involvement as much as she is.
Well, that's significant because there could be a version of Liz where she's out here tough.
I'm the top cop on the crypto beat and I'm cracking down on scams and I'm helping
American people because I'm preventing them from getting hoot winked. Right.
That could there could have been a version of her where she is much more like hawkish in a sense.
But she's coming in very dovish about her crypto policies.
And for terrorists and drug traffickers and human traffickers in Iran.
So that's what I want. But I want to be really clear about what's really at
issue here. And that is, who are you going to represent in Washington?
There's one candidate standing here who gets 90% of the funding to keep their
campaign going from one industry, the crypto industry.
One candidate who has said quite openly that his personal worth is 80% tied up in crypto.
Look, people of Massachusetts know me. You know I fight for everybody,
fight for working people. There she is again, gaslighting the line. She works for the banks.
And that's what makes it so insidious. She works for the banks.
Jamie Dimon is her buddy. They pre-coordinate on Senate hearings. They script it all out.
She doesn't work for the people. That's why I can't stand it.
Now, her point, and she just makes it over and over and over again,
is that 90% of his campaign funding has come from crypto. He holds crypto.
Well, what do you expect?
When you have launched Operation Chokepoint 2.0 and are destroying an industry,
you incentivize that industry to organize against you.
This is the reaction. When you do something in politics, there's always a counter reaction.
You created the very monster that's now going after you.
They're funding him because he's a crypto lawyer. He's done work for the Ripple folks.
He holds crypto and he's willing to fight you. That's why they're funding him.
It's life or death for them. And it's ironic because the big crypto backers
of Deaton are also backers of Kamala Harris.
So while she is casting all of these doubts on him for being backed by these insidious,
mysterious crypto backers, those same exact individuals are donating to the
vice president's campaign.
If John Deaton has a chance to go to Washington, his crypto buddies are going
to want a return on their investment.
He's going to be there to fight for crypto. The return on their investment is
you losing. Not likely, by the way, I'm going to point out.
Not very likely, but that would be the return on their investment.
But even even if he doesn't win, he has forced you to come back to the middle on this topic.
So they're likely better off even if he doesn't win. They've already got what
they wanted from their investment.
Senator Warren never lets the truth get in the way. If you actually look what
I did, I've upset more crypto billionaires because I did her job.
She sits on the banking committee. I exposed all this regulatory capture by
former SEC chair, by the way, appointed by Donald Trump, and Bill Hinman appointed
by Donald Trump's administration.
There was an IG report.
I'm responsible for a lot of that, of these conflicts. So I've upset more of
the crypto billionaires than anyone.
I don't know. We don't need to get into it. I don't think we need to hear the whole debate.
I just think it's fast. They go on and they go on. And the key piece of their
disagreement is he comes down to a, I just think, a great line.
He says, I wish Senator Warren attacked inflation the way she attacks crypto.
I think that was a great line. I think he nailed it there. And I don't know
if he's going to win, but I think he has at least it's it's just it was maybe
one of the last pieces we needed. Right. Because Gary Gensler is probably on his way out.
Both campaigns have said pro Bitcoin or pro crypto things to some degree.
Now we really need Liz out. And if we can't get her out, what we need her to
do is walk back, maybe turn, maybe throw, throw up the white flag and give up on the crypto war.
I don't know if it's possible, but I feel like it's more possible now than ever.
So the Trump coin launched and it didn't go great. A rough start for former
President Donald Trump's new crypto project.
Mackenzie Cigalos joins us now with more. Good morning. Hey, good morning, Joe.
World Liberty Financial, which aspires to be a sort of crypto bank,
launched its token sale on Tuesday.
But the project's website suffered regular and lengthy outages for much of the
day, contributing to a limited number of sales.
The team had said that well over 100,000 people were on the white list to invest.
But blockchain data shows less than nine percent of the total number of people
who registered actually hold the WLFI token in a roadmap given to prospective investors.
The project's co-founders said that they were looking to raise 300 million dollars
at a one point five billion dollar valuation in this initial sale.
So far, it's sold around seven hundred and seventy million tokens at one point five cents per coin.
That is less than four percent of the 20 billion tokens made available for public sale.
Now, that's not the worst part.
Check this out. And amounts to $11.4 million, so there are still a ways to go
to make it to that $300 million fundraising goal.
I did reach out to the World Liberty team for comment on the launch and haven't heard back yet.
Now, the actual crypto bank that is connected to this token is not live yet.
It only just begun the process of getting approved about a week ago.
And until that platform gets voted on and cleared for launch,
all that money being raised right now will just sit in the project's treasury.
So the early buyers are getting like issued paper tokens, I guess. I don't know.
And it's just sitting in their bank account right now.
In a Spaces event on X, the project's co-founder said 100,000 customers had been whitelisted.
As we just heard there, only a small percentage have actually been issued any kind of token.
So, man, to have the website crash and stuff like that go down,
I guess it's not totally unexpected. But you would hope that the crew would
have done a little bit better of a job.
I think it is indicative of where this thing is going to go.
And where it goes is probably not up for too long.
Could be wrong. All right, let's do some updates, starting with Craig Wright.
The fake Toshi has filed a lawsuit against Bitcoin Core and Square.
The UK High Court case tracker indicates that Craig Wright is representing himself
in this, which sounds hilarious.
He filed a lawsuit on October 10th. According to the documents,
he accuses Bitcoin Core and Square of falsely presenting Bitcoin as the genuine
version of the cryptocurrency, including the use of the BTC ticker.
He's suing for nearly a trillion dollars because he believes that the,
I believe, from what I can understand, it's hard to even understand it.
He thinks that by them stealing the brand of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin ticker,
they have stolen the market cap of Bitcoin.
And so therefore, he's owed basically nearly the market cap of Bitcoin,
which is above a trillion dollars. He's just crazy.
And the fact that he's going to represent himself should be really wild.
That should be something to just keep an eye on.
I don't know how much signal is going to be there, but I'm watching it.
The mayor of a Texas town called Rockdale says the Bitcoin mining has saved the town's economy.
That's a nice little story to hear after we had a recent story about a town
having issues with the noise made from a Bitcoin mine.
Well, the mayor of Rockdale says that it's a totally different story out there.
See, it all happened shortly ago when a plant that had been running since 1952,
which was really the backbone of Rockdale's economy for decades,
provided jobs and, of course, tax revenue. It shut down.
When it closed, hundreds of jobs just vanished.
Families had to leave the town. The town's tax base absolutely crumbled.
Services, parks, schools suffered massively.
The town was really at rock bottom. And their fortunes completely changed around,
according to the mayor, when Bitcoin came into the picture.
Because the same energy infrastructure that was left behind by that old plant,
well, it was the perfect setup for Bitcoin mining.
And the mayor was skeptical at first. Mayor Ward wrote him, said,
well, quote, I wasn't sure about these miners.
Are they here to stay? Is Bitcoin even real, he asked. He had doubts.
But time went on. In a town that had lost its main economic driver,
these Bitcoin miners came in, they set up shop, they started creating jobs.
Hundreds of people got employed.
Residents got an opportunity to actually start earning money without having to leave Rockdale.
Tax revenue started going up. The mining companies also, to sweeten the deal,
poured a billion into the town.
They became the biggest taxpayer in the entire county. So they're now the biggest
payer for the local school district and other public services.
And then the Bitcoin companies also donated to local causes,
scholarships, police and fire departments. They sponsored community events.
They backed the annual Christmas tree lighting.
I mean, they really came in and kind of wined and dined this town and won them over.
So we hear stories of like towns that are being terrorized by fan noise.
And now we hear stories of towns getting completely turned around by good, clean Bitcoin mining.
Jobs that, you know, they go into these people, we shouldn't even call them,
they're Bitcoin producing outfits, data centers.
These employees show up in a clean environment. It's safe. It's not like mining.
It's not like an actual factory. It's so much safer. It's a cleaner job.
It's a good job. It's healthy. It's great for the economy.
It's a really good story. I'll put a couple of links in the show notes if you want to check it out.
And then our last update of the week is Zeus. Zeus version 0.9.1 is out.
Don't sleep on Zeus Wallet, even if you just use it to connect to your existing node or Albi.
It's so fantastic. And 9.1 has a few really nice features in there,
including some improvements for on-chain spending and finding transactions.
Some improvements around managing your UTXOs, sort of relevant for today's episode,
and support for Bolt 11 blinded paths now.
As well as an interesting feature which I haven't got to play with,
but linked. So if you have contacts in Zeus, like you're gonna send money to
somebody, you got a channel to them, it'll show your channel capacity and status
in your contact view. I wanna play with that, I haven't seen that yet.
And then they're always slightly, like just adding one or two features for their
point of sale mode, which is
another really cool feature of Zeus that my wife might start using soon.
And they keep making little tweaks to that to make it even better.
And Zeus is just a fantastic wallet. So shout out to them. It's great to see another update out.
Music.
I'm not a very political person. I actually prefer to look at the economics of things.
And I think a lot of political narratives derive from the actual economic realities on the ground.
And so I think in a way you can kind of rise above party politics and kind of look at the numbers.
And this week I wanted to look at the voter numbers behind crypto holders.
Because we've been hearing throughout this whole U.S. election cycle,
and I would imagine this is probably similar in other countries,
crypto holders are a voter block now. and they are a relevant voter block.
Well, perhaps. Perhaps that is true. I've been looking for data and I've got
some information from two different sources this week that kind of speak to
how relevant the crypto holder is in elections.
Music.
Yeah! Half of all U.S. voters support pro-crypto policies according to software
company ConsenSys and polling from HarrisX.
The poll found that 49% of voters are in favor of crypto, and of those,
13% are actually open to crossing party lines for favorable crypto policies on the other side.
And an overwhelming majority, 92% of crypto owners, do plan to vote in November.
That's an interesting stat. 92% of them plan to vote. So Coinbase also looked
at this, and they didn't really give us a source on all their data, but...
They gave me some information. So Coinbase looked at the 2020 election data
and their user base stats and God knows what else.
And they then just took a look particularly at the swing states.
And it turns out the swing states are loaded with crypto holders.
Michigan and Pennsylvania stand out as the largest bag holders out there.
I'll put a link to Coinbase's numbers.
I don't know if I trust them 100%, but they seem pretty significant.
It feels like we're just short, you know, a couple episodes away really from
finding out. It's just shortly, shortly going to have the answer to this.
I don't know. I don't need to cover it much, but I just think as we get close,
it's interesting to take a look at it right now.
Now, as we wrap up, I'll give a little mention to the Bitcoin stats.
I'll figure out a nice formal segment for this. But the Bitcoin price is $67,904.
Sats to USD, 1,473 sats to 1 USD.
And we are currently, as I wrap the show, at block height 865,945.
The Bitcoin network chugs right along. Links to what we talked about are at
thisweekinbitcoin.show.
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Music.