I'm very bullish on the long-term viability of Bitcoin and I'm pleasantly surprised.
And I would never have predicted it before we filed it that we were going to see this type of retail.
So you thought you'd do good but not this good. I thought yes.
IBit is your ETF over at iShares.
It's about to overtake Grayscale which was in the business certainly a lot longer.
You look at the gains since january 11th when it first came about have you ever
seen this much inflow this quickly into ibid is the fastest growing etf in the history of etfs.
Music.
Welcome in to Episode 4 of This Week in Bitcoin, your weekly high-signal Bitcoin news podcast.
You know, that was Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock.
He's been going on a bit of a victory tour this week. I'll get into why.
And depending on when you're listening to this, we're about 20,
22-ish days out from the Bitcoin halving.
And I promise I won't play this card very often, but as a long-timer in Bitcoin,
I can say that this halving will be like no other.
And I'm going to make a case for that today. I'll get you up to date on what's
going on in the Bitcoin community, some new projects that could replace Lightning
for everyday users, and more.
But before we get into all that, I want to set up some context for you.
There is a tone shift, a definite tone shift, that's been stepping forward each
week around Bitcoin in the mainstream media.
You gotta understand that the loudest voices
used to call bitcoin rat poison that got
the most attention but now the ceo of
a 10 trillion asset management company is going around boasting about
their bitcoin etf and since the announcement of that etf larry's kind of been
dodgy about what's the market fit why are they doing this and for whatever reason
i suspect he has many he hasn't come out directly and addressed it.
But if you take what he says across multiple interviews, you can actually piece
together why Larry Fink and BlackRock are quite bullish about Bitcoin.
Larry sat down with Bloomberg Television and talked a little bit about the U.S. debt situation.
Let's just use a statistic. And I think when I talk about this statistic,
I get frightened. In the year 2000, the U.S. deficit was $8 trillion.
Today it's $34 trillion, so 23 years later, we increased our deficit by $26 trillion.
So for the first 230-odd, 40 years.
We increased our deficit to $8 trillion, and in the last 23 years,
we increased it by $26 trillion.
I think that speaks volumes of what's happening in our country today. day.
The problem with these type of deficits is and now with and I believe higher
interest rates for longer,
the cost of financing our deficits are going to erode more and more of our of
our disposable income as a country.
And I do believe there we're getting to a point where our public debt is going
to start crowding out private capital and we're going to have structurally higher interest rates.
Now you put that together with what Larry has said in other views,
say like on Fox Business. There's a lot of merit to it.
There's a lot of opportunity. It is a great store and this is where you can
debate. Is it a good store?
Do you know how it's made? A bunch of computers figure out math problems.
But there's only, but the issue is if people believe that it can be an asset
that can be cross-border.
And let's be clear, if you're in a country where you're fearful of your government
and maybe this is one of the reason why China has banned it if,
you're in a government where you're if you're in
a country where you're fearful of your future fearful of
your right government or that is Larry identifying a market fit for Bitcoin
right there I think you have to appreciate that he is telling you that's the
market and he's also telling you this is the most successful ETF in history
or you're frightened that your government is is devaluing its currency by too much deficits.
Like us. I'm not going to go there.
Got the little elf in the room here.
You could say this is a great potential long-term store of value.
You could say that. And it's not like the CEO of BlackRock and other financial
institutions don't have ears and eyeballs.
They hear what was recently said by central bankers around the world.
You know, the fiscal challenges, et cetera, that are there. Yeah,
so very focused on being cost-effective.
We actually fund ourselves and then work out what dividend is needed to pay.
So it's a great business to be in central banking.
We print money and people believe it. Oh, I believe this is New Zealand.
Great business to be in. We print money and people believe it.
It's a great business to be in central banking.
We print money and people believe it.
And touch wood. and so it's a slightly different beast. He said touch wood though, so it's all good.
I mean, if you hear central bankers joking like that and you see the results
of their monetary policy, I'd be looking for something that is divorced from sovereign risk too.
And the other aspect that is looming, and I think just the closeness of the
halving, they can't help themselves.
They're showing their cards. And if you're not familiar with the Bitcoin halving
and why it's kind of a big deal and why people are counting down the days,
Strikes Jack Mollers explains why Bitcoiners as a community care about the halving.
The halving is a huge deal.
So just to be clear, everyone is aware of the fixed supply of Bitcoin.
There will only ever be 21 million, but not all 21 million have been issued to the world yet.
And so Bitcoin is on a fixed issuance schedule.
Satoshi programmed when he launched, he or she or they launched Bitcoin on how
those would be issued out.
We're at about 19 million out of 21 so far.
And every 10 minutes, more and more get issued. And the halving is when that
issuance schedule gets cut in half.
So the supply, the forced sellers, those that pay money to produce Bitcoins,
which then have to sell it to pay for their costs, that's going to be halved.
And so the really simple way to think about it, Ed, is if demand remains the
same and the Bitcoin sold gets cut in half, it should have an impact on the price to the upside.
So it's a big event and we're all pretty excited about it. It's something the
Bitcoiners have cared more and more about as time has gone on and the result
of the cycles has become more clear.
What is different about this particular halving cycle is at this time,
Wall Street is excited about it as well.
And they're excited about it in a way that is palpable.
And this is Kathy Wood. She's from ARK Investments. She's a big Bitcoin bull.
And she explains why Wall Street is excited.
So the halving. So we'll go from roughly 1.9 percent growth in Bitcoin supply per year down to 0.9%.
So we will drop below 1% for the first time.
And if you look at the long-term history of gold, very long-term,
what you'll find is the average supply growth has been roughly 1%.
So now Bitcoin supply growth is dropping below the supply growth of gold.
Gold that is that is a milestone I
would say and the other difference here
is when the gold price spikes there's
usually a mining response and and
the supply spikes with it that cannot happen
with Bitcoin so it's quite a different dynamic so
the halving is that milestone and
if you look historically after havings it's
usually been very good for the bitcoin
price now uh it doesn't happen right away
uh i think i don't know why it doesn't
happen right away but it doesn't uh now that the market's becoming more efficient
with etfs it might because think about how many people know even know about
the having this time around when they didn't even know what bitcoin was four
years ago. They didn't know what it truly was.
It's such a small but major point.
So many people are talking about the halving. Regular plebs,
influenzas, and folks like Cathie Wood.
They're all talking about it. Additionally, they're all talking about the supply
side demand that the ETFs are bringing.
And this narrative, they love this narrative. Did you catch it?
It was in there and And Wall Street just loves it. I've been seeing it in the
financial press every single day.
After the halving, Bitcoin has a lower inflation rate than gold.
And, you know, it has a few better features than gold, too. And it's finding a wider audience.
And if I can just throw one in, in terms of how we try and describe what this
monetary revolution is.
And each one of these words is important. The first...
Global, that's critical. Private, no government oversight.
Digital, decentralized, rules-based monetary system in history.
It is what my mentor, and many people know Art Laffer for his Laffer Curve and
fiscal policy and so forth.
He's a monetary scholar as well. And he said, I have been waiting for this for
50 years, ever since they closed the gold window here in the United States in 1971.
He's been waiting it for 50 years. He's not the only one.
So when you combine that with the hodlers that just are not selling and the
ETFs that are, quote, efficiently snapping up Bitcoin, it's going to be a different halving cycle.
Bitcoin alone is going to be the biggest part of the entire crypto asset ecosystem. ecosystem.
Our expectation out in 2030 that... Now I'm going to remind you here,
Kathy Wood, she's a big bull.
We don't really know where this is going. In fact, often it goes somewhere opposite
of what everybody expects, but they have their estimates and I'll let you hear
them. Just keep in mind, Kathy Wood's a big bull.
Expectation out in 2030 that it will be
a 20 trillion dollar
it will be worth 20 trillion dollars now
how much will etfs get of that
20 trillion dollars i don't know but that
already right there is if you think about it i mean it runs circles around spy
number one and i believe all of public equities globally no matter what are
valued right now at roughly $120 trillion.
So when I say 20 trillion by 2030, that's a very big.
Music.
Well, we'll see about that. She may be right. I think it's going up forever, Laura.
Coinbase, well, they're trying to spin it as a big win, but the SEC scored a
major victory in the initiation of a legal case against Coinbase that they tried to get thrown out.
The SEC just scored a big win in its lawsuit against Coinbase.
This morning, a judge rejected the crypto exchange's bid to dismiss the agency's
claim that Coinbase engaged in unregistered sales of securities.
That complaint will now head to trial. The regulator first filed suit against
the crypto company back in June,
alleging that the firm was acting as an unregistered broker and exchange.
In the ruling, the judge wrote that the challenged transactions fall comfortably
within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly
80 years, and that the SEC adequately alleges that Coinbase,
through its staking program,
engaged in the unregistered offer and sale of securities.
The judge went on to say that the court agreed to dismiss the SEC's claim in
the lawsuit suit that Coinbase acted as an unregistered broker by making its
wallet application available to customers.
That was actually the victory bit that Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, was trying to spin.
He said, quote, great progress on the SEC case and a huge win for self-custodial
wallets. This ensures the on-chain ecosystem will continue to innovate and create
economic freedom around the world.
Basically, they got off the hook for wallet. The court agreed that is not a
hosted product. product.
However, what the court said around Solana is fascinating. They said.
The statements of deflationary policies of Solana are an example of facts that
support a reasonable expectation of profits from purchases passing the Howey test.
In other words, they said that, look, here's a team talking about actions they're
going to take to make this a deflationary protocol. That's central management.
I'll put a link to that in the show notes. But now off to discovery we go.
I don't know exactly what we'll discover. If there is anything interesting,
I'll keep my eyes out for it and I'll report back.
Hedgehog was announced this week. Now, this is a payment protocol that allows
two people to pay each other, similar to Lightning, but it has a couple of advantages.
One of them, no servers required.
Another, you can do it while one of the other users is offline.
Super Testnet is the developer of this, and he gives us a little introduction.
Hey, guys, this is Super Testnet, and today I just wanted to show you my latest
invention, which is called Hedgehog.
Hedgehog is a protocol for asynchronous layer to Bitcoin payments.
So these are kind of like the Lightning Network. This is a protocol similar
to the Lightning Network, in that it's in a layer 2 for Bitcoin payments.
Only in this one, unlike the Lightning Network, the two parties don't have to
both be online. It's asynchronous.
One party can send the other party money when they're offline.
When the second party is offline.
So, I want to show you how it works, and to do that, I'm going to show you first...
I will link you to the YouTube video where he demonstrates it.
It's working today, because it's using primitives that already exist,
some of which were created for Lightning. He uses something that I invented,
I think, I think I invented this, called a revocable connector.
And I got the idea for revocable connectors from Barak, who invented connectors,
and from Lightning, which invented revocation scripts.
Or, Lightning probably didn't invent revocation scripts, but they're used in
Lightning, and that's where I learned about them.
So basically, a revocation script looks like something like this.
Alice can spend the money after, you know, some amount of blocks.
Or Bob can spend the money if he knows Alice's secret.
If Bob lends a certain secret created by Alice, he can just spend the money.
We'll have the docs and the notes as well. And then there's a second primitive
that's known as a connector.
But then the other thing we use is connector outputs, which were invented by Barack.
And they allow, if you've got some money in a multisave like we do here,
a connector allows you to say, hey, I'm going to send some money from Alice to Bob.
But it only goes through if a certain UTXO exists, because that UTXO is used
as an input to the transaction.
And this makes it so that you can't create UTXO-B unless UTXO-A exists,
because the transaction allowing you to do it consumes UTXO-A as an input.
So the highlights really are that Hedgehog channels are simpler than Lightning channels.
State updates only require the sender to propose an update and the recipient
to accept it, and the recipient can wait to accept a state change until they
propose another one. So again, that's kind of neat.
And you could even see how that could be used in something like Podcasting 2.0
if the Lightning Network were to become untenable at some point in the future.
Not saying it will, but it's a very promising project.
Music.
All right, coming up next, your boost, project updates, and a really good clip of the week.
But first, I want to thank our sponsor, Podhome.fm, my podcasting 2.0 hosting
platform of choice, unlimited shows and episodes powered by unlimited Podhome AI. AI.
They have also the best live streaming experience out there.
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It's like having a whole team in your back pocket. So go get unlimited shows
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Thank you so much to Podhome for sponsoring this week in Bitcoin.
Now, I also want to give a big shout out to our boosters.
And Adam Curry, the Podfather, is our baller booster this week with 10,000 sats,
and he loves this week in Bitcoin, his weekly go-to podcast.
Thank you, Podfather. Appreciate that. that.
Wartime comes in with 3,333 sats and says, in the morning, I've been digging the show.
Thank you very much for that. Appreciate that boost from Fountain,
too, because, of course, puts us up on the chart so others can discover us.
Jordan Bravo comes in with 10,101 sats. It's over 9,000!
You mentioned BISC-2 and RoboSats becoming decentralized. To round out that
topic, let's celebrate the recent release of Decentralized Whirlpool.
Also, another listener asked for a good beginner resource, I recommend bitcoiner.guide.
Then click on either beginner or intermediate or advanced accordingly.
Jordan, bravo. That, my friend, super high signal boost. Thank you very much.
Really appreciate that. bitcoiner.guide.
That is really good. Also, yeah, big shout-out to Decentralized Whirlpool.
I need to read up on that. Appreciate you bringing that to my attention.
Oppie1984 comes in with 4,000 sats saying, support boost. Coming in hot with
the boost. Thanks, Oppie.
Chad F. came in with 3,333 sats, and he just shouts, boost!
Like a maniac over there. Thank you very much. B-O-O-S-T.
Adversary17, because that's how you say it, comes in with 8,192 sats saying,
love the show. Keep them coming. I mean, just close the fucking door. Thank you very much.
Lazy Locks comes in with 5,000 sats saying it was great hanging out with you
in the JB crew at scale. Thanks for everything you guys do.
Lazy Locks, thank you. If we ever have an opportunity again to meet in person,
you've always got to tell me your booster name.
I'd like to introduce you to the wife. You know, I'd like to,
you know, you're a, you're a, you're a celebrity in these parts.
Oh, and of course, Cultivator came in with a Spaceballs boost, 12,345 sats.
That's probably, that's probably our baller, but there was no message.
So the culmination is one, two, three, four, five.
That's the stupidest culmination I ever heard in my life. Thank you,
Cultivator. Appreciate that boost. And Gene Bean came in with some leet sats.
You're doing a good job. With a song suggestion. And we had a bunch of other sats below the 2,000.
A bunch of other boosts, I should say, below the 2,000 cutoff. We stacked 60,987 sats.
Not our best week. Lower expectations.
But there were 16 boosters across 26 boosts. That's a lot for 60,987 sats.
But I appreciate everybody who supports this show. It is a value-for-value production.
The idea is if you get a little bit of benefit, if it helps you,
if it gets you thinking about something, or you want to keep it going,
you can send a boost in with a message and a little bit of value.
Of course, value can also be in your time or in your talent.
The show is brand new, and if you have any suggestions, I always appreciate those as well.
So thank you, everybody, who boosts in with a new podcast app.
You can get one of those at podcast apps.
Music.
Let's focus on one project update this week, because it's a big one. Albi 3.7.0 is out.
That's got Safari support, which is nice for Mac users and iOS users,
but they've greatly improved the Nostr onboarding process, and this matters.
This matters a lot for just ease of use when you're trying to send messages on Nostr.
They have improved permissions management in general, presets,
and kind-based permissions, so hopefully no more annoying Nostr request pop-ups
if that's how you want it. it.
They've also integrated stable sets, the Blink stable sets, which is fascinating
there, and some onboarding improvements.
I would really encourage you to check out Albi because it is a companion and
useful in the web Nostra world.
And if you have yet to dip your toe into the web Nostra world,
I think you should start with Albi. Go get comfortable over there.
There's more coming from the Nostra world that's going to get your interest,
I suspect. And so you'll wannabe setup.
So Albi version 3.7.0 is out with NIP44 support, new onboarding flows,
new icons, multilingual support as well, which is nice to see.
And like I mentioned, for those of you that really care, it's got Safari support as well.
You know what? I'm not going to discount that. Safari support's nice.
Now you got it on your iPad or your internet phone.
Now our resource of the week and our clip of the week are really going to kind of be the same thing.
The book that you should check out is Softwar. It is from Jason Lowery.
And he also has a TEDx talk called The Future of Warfare.
You may have heard this because there's been some controversy around this talk.
He got in trouble from the military. He had to take the book down for a bit.
He had to make some changes.
But what he had to say in that talk was actually pretty powerful.
And I'll link to a bit of it that we have online.
But I'll also just play a few of my favorite moments right now for you.
And Jason says that history is repeating itself in the halls of D.C.
And other leadership spots around the world when Bitcoin gets just dismissed as a simple coin.
I think this technology is going to become critical, that nations are going
to rely on it to secure their cyberspace, just like they rely on airplanes to secure their airspace.
And I think most people in this room don't get it yet because they think it's
just the coin. They think maybe, at best, that it's interesting technology,
but of no military value whatsoever.
Ironically, here's the ironic part about this.
This has happened before. For hundreds of years, the Chinese alchemists who
invented black powder thought it was just medicine.
It took centuries for people to figure out that black powder was useful for
way more than just medicine, that it would change the game of national security.
They say that history doesn't repeat. They say that it echoes.
I think history is echoing right now with this new technology.
That people think is just a coin. He also sends a warning to nation states,
don't blame Bitcoin. And if you do, it could deny us access to the future.
Bitcoin didn't cause a bunch of bankers to do fractional reserve Lindy.
I think we can all agree about that, right?
I should mention there is some mic noise of some type in this clip.
I apologize, but I still think the message is good enough that you want to hear it.
Bitcoin didn't cause a bunch of bankers to do fractional reserve Lindy.
I think we can all agree about that, right? Right.
Bitcoin didn't cause a bunch of bankers to take too much leverage.
Bitcoin didn't cause bankers to debase savers and to destroy the purchasing
power of the currency to bail out the bankers who are fractionally reserve lending
and taking too much leverage.
Bitcoin didn't kick entire sovereign nations off of an international payment system.
OK, so we have to keep that in mind. If you're an architect of a financial system,
then it's your responsibility to not motivate people to leave that financial
system, which means don't debase them.
Don't continue bailing out the people who are making the mistakes.
Don't kick entire sovereign nations off this thing. It's your responsibility
to not do that if you want to maintain the dominant financial information network.
Don't blame Bitcoin for your...
I almost said something bad.
I'll just leave it at that. Okay. And by the way, if this is more than just a coin, right?
If this is bit power, if we have no kidding, again, this is theory,
I could be crazy. I'm relying on other people to evaluate.
That's how computer science works. Computer theory works.
If we have no kidding, figured out a way to project power in from through cyberspace,
a new physical power projection protocol that will transform cybersecurity and national security,
then blaming Bitcoin to protect your failing hegemony, let's call it for what
it is, that's not going to help you. It's still going to break down.
Like your financial system is still going to collapse as long as you keep on
doing the things that I just said. Okay?
What you would actually be doing is you would be forfeiting our access as a
nation to this protocol, to BitPower.
Okay? You would be denying us access to this future.
Music.
All right, if you made it this far, I have a question for you.
What is the best day of the week for This Week in Bitcoin to get released?
My gut tells me Friday is good for the news cycle, but hasn't been great for
the audience looking at the metrics.
So I'm playing around with different release days to try to get an idea of what
works best for everybody.
I hope maybe some of you are just busy on the weekend. You're just taking the
weekend off. You're doing stuff. You're not listening to podcasts.
Maybe that's it. So what is the perfect day to release? Boost it and tell me
that. And if I get enough responses, I'm going to math it all up and pick from what people say.
It's just, you know, one of those things that's kind of early in the discovery
process for a brand new podcast.
It's just a little baby. Also, please consider telling someone else about this show.
It is brand new. So word of mouth, that's the best kind of marketing for a podcast.
And I really appreciate if you can do that.
You can find links to what I talked about today this week in Bitcoin show and
then boost in. Tell me what else you'd like to hear. If you thought anything was missed.
Appreciate that as well. Well, we'd love this to be the number one Bitcoin news
podcast for the Jupyter Broadcasting community and the entire podcasting 2.0 community.
And with that said, we have a value for value song this week. We end with Moneymaker.
This is a song that is created by Two Weeks in Nashville. If you boost in while
the track plays, 90% of your sats will go to the artist.
Thank you for joining me this week. See you next week.
Music.