Before we reach the day when we can reduce the debt ceiling,
we may, in spite of our best efforts, see a national debt in excess of a trillion dollars.
Now, this is a figure that's literally beyond our comprehension.
We know now that inflation results from all that deficit spending.
Government has only two ways of getting money other than raising taxes.
It can go into the money market and borrow, competing with its own citizens
and driving up interest rates, which it has done.
Or it can print money and it's done that.
Both methods are inflationary.
We're victims of language. The very word inflation leads us to think of it as just high prices.
Then, of course, we resent the person who puts on the price tags,
forgetting that he or she is also a victim of inflation.
Inflation is not just high prices. It's a reduction in the value of our money.
When the money supply is increased, but the goods and services available for
buying are not, we have too much money chasing too few goods.
Wars are usually accompanied by inflation. Everyone is working or fighting,
but production is of weapons and munitions, not things we can buy and use.
It's time to recognize that we've come to a turning point.
We are threatened with an economic calamity of tremendous proportions,
and the old business-as-usual treatment can't save us.
Together, we must chart a different course.
Music.
Welcome to episode 12 of This Week in Bitcoin. My name is Chris,
and yeah, that was the Gipper, 16 days in office talking about inflation.
I've been digging into the archives this week, trying to wrap my head around the macro picture.
Inflation numbers are just mind-boggling, especially if you zoom out by a couple
of years and stop going by the month-to-month print. Say, go back to January of 2021.
Used cars are up 20.9%, chicken 23.9%, Natural gas, 26.9% increase since 2021.
Airfare, 32.7%. Gasoline is up 47.8%. And eggs, 49.3%. And that's just scratching the surface.
You know, I didn't go grab the latest numbers on insurance, but I know those are way up.
What it really means is that I'd say best case scenario, over the last five
years, the purchasing power of U.S. dollars declined by 23%.
So it effectively means uninvested money from 2019 is now worth almost one-fourth less today.
And it's just really, really hard to get a clear signal on where things are
going right now. There's so many theories as to what's going to happen next in the economy.
And you see the market this week really trying to process this out.
Bank stocks are down. People are trying to get out of the banking industry right now.
The Bitcoin price is kind of going sideways despite extremely bullish news.
So you can't really get a clear signal from the current analysis.
So in moments like this, I think it's appropriate at least to look back at history.
And see what insights we can gain from periods of time that are similar.
And I've been looking at the late 70s to early to mid 80s.
And I find comparing our two moments in time very insightful.
Much of what we're dealing with right now, we were dealing with back then.
Here's an example, a news report, a local news report from 1982.
It's no secret that the real estate industry has been one of the big losers
in these recessionary times. Sales of new and old homes are off 50% from the peak in 1978.
The cause for all this? Well, it's well known, high interest rates.
And the blame, realtors say, should be laid on the lap of Congress.
Already 18 days overdue on a budget resolution for next year,
the representatives are locked in a bitter battle over how much more the government
will spend over what it takes in.
The budget deficit must be cut under $100 billion and must be brought into balance
within three to four years.
Max Hill is regional vice president of the National Association of Realtors.
He says to reduce federal spending, Congress needs to cut benefit programs like
Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, a risky venture he admits in an election year.
The entitlement programs have been built up over a period of 30 to 40 years.
They now amount to over 50% of the budget, and that's a hard one for Congress
to face up to because we're paying the price for 50 years of tax, spend, and elect.
To Hill and other suffering realtors, there are few things more important than
bringing the budget under control.
It's absolutely critical to the economic viability of this country.
It is a serious situation.
Joel Rubin, the Daily News.
You know, I'd have to say one of the big differences right now from back then,
of course, the housing market is in a better position.
And the reasons for that are fascinating social economic reasons.
At least I think I'd be curious to know why you think the housing market isn't doing worse.
But the shift that we were internalizing this week back here in 2024 of the end of May is the U.S.
Economy maybe isn't doing as well as we thought.
You see, they've revised the GDP number downward a little bit.
And this is kind of becoming a trend, both with the employment numbers and the GDP numbers.
They announce a number, and about 20, 30 days later, they revise that number downward.
Additional initial jobless claims also rose slightly last week,
up 3,000. Not a ton, but up a little bit, above what was predicted.
And April pending home sales have hit the lowest level since the start of the pandemic.
And what we now know is a lot of the GDP growth comes from government debt spending.
And we're getting about only 50 cents on the dollar in return.
So what we're spending on debt, we're getting about 50 cents back in GDP growth.
And then another little interesting phenomenon has started. It started about
two weeks ago, I believe, maybe three at this point.
The M2 money supply has started to go positive. The first time since November of 2022.
That means there's more liquidity entering the system.
Now, you just heard the Gipper tell you that that means inflation will go up.
But hold on. The economy is slowing down.
Employment is going, unemployment, I should say, is going up.
Employment is going down. Unemployment
is going up. The M2 money supply is going up at the same time.
And what makes it all worse is it seems inflation is still kind of running hotter than we'd like.
Well, at least how the Fed measures it. I'm becoming more and more suspicious,
however, that the Fed is looking at old data.
And I am no fan of Jamie Dimon, the CEO of J.P. Morgan.
But I do agree with a recent point he made in an interview about inflation models.
So, like I said, I think the fiscal stimulus still is high and it's a global phenomenon.
Since COVID, a lot of money was spent. There was a lot of QE and those things
are still kind of surging through the system.
Models, in my view, don't pick up fat tails. I would put the amount of spending as a fat tail.
So, you know, you can build a model that tells you what, you know,
with some actors it might happen if rates go up or down 100 basis points,
but not they go up or down 500 basis points.
And you heard Reagan say when the government prints, it causes inflation to
go up because you're literally increasing the money supply. And now we're printing again.
We just started printing again. And we had, during the pandemic,
printed like never before.
And that money, which is Jamie Dimon's point, it's still in the system.
There's still more money than they know what to do with surging through the
system. They need something to do with all that money, and that is inflationary.
And then on top of all of that, there's just major macro trends that are also
long-term going to be inflationary.
Particularly on defense, defend expenditure, the remilitarization.
We're seeing that in your country. We're seeing that across the world.
You know, it's not just that's remilitarization, the restructure of trade.
There's some of that. We don't know exactly how much yet that's going to be
inflationary. The green economy is going to be inflationary.
Fiscal spending is inflationary.
Commodity prices, if you look at commodities in oil, copper,
there's a chance of being short supply down the couple of years from now.
So there are a lot of things out there which can drive inflation. But again, not today.
You know, I'm talking about 12 months, 24 months from now. Yeah,
on-shoring. That's a major inflationary action.
You see, back in the 70s.
During the late 70s, we had the gas crisis where there was a gas shortage.
We had inflation ripping.
We had a lot of the similar ingredients there.
So what they inevitably had was stagflation back in the day. They got stagflation.
And now stagflation becomes the concern.
It becomes that we're back in a stagflationary period. And it kind of was mentioned and brought up.
I think I may have mentioned it on the show, like the start of the year.
But then didn't say much.
Then, the beginning of May, things started changing.
On May 1st, the rumblings of stagflation began.
That was the day we saw declines in the ISM manufacturing and new orders component
coinciding with a jump in prices paid.
Stagflation is the very undesirable situation where employment and demand are
declining at the same time inflation.
Now, Volcker back in the 80s could raise rates. In fact, he raised it to a peak
of 20% in 1981, in June of 1981. Can you imagine?
That really was painful. It'd be impossible today, though, because the interest
on the debt would be just astronomical.
So we pretend like some of these fundamentals don't matter.
Like maybe this time it's going to be different because employment's still pretty
good. Or this time it's going to be different because, I don't know, AI.
We pretend like maybe it'll be different this time. But I find it so funny because
we never do that when we look retrospectively, when we look at the past cycles.
So as I've been going back in time and looking at what happened in the late
70s, early to mid 80s, when economists talk about it now, it's just very matter of fact.
The politics is taken out of it. The hedging, oh, it might be OK,
is completely taken out of it. And it's just plain and simple.
Here's an example from the Philadelphia Fed talking about this 70s and 80s era of time.
In the 1970s, monetary policy was too loose. The money supply was growing faster
than the economy, and that led to inflation.
People started to expect inflation, and they built this expectation into their
economic decisions. That led to even more inflation.
High inflation, plus other shocks to the economy, like a quadrupling of oil
prices, led to a bad recession with periods of high unemployment.
In other words, stagflation.
Just matter of fact, right? They would, if you asked any of the federal banks
today, they wouldn't analyze the current situation like that.
But when you look back 40 years, well, it's just obviously the government printed.
We all began to hedge because we knew about inflation. That led to even more inflation.
It's obvious, right? I just think that's so funny. And you see,
back then, there were broader deflationary macro trends that were going to play out over the 80s, right?
We had just a massive deflationary boom from technology, email,
and just typing and then printing. We had globalization of manufacturing, massive savings there.
Our sweet new deal with OPEC was really starting to settle in.
These things were all deflationary and there's more at the macro level.
Today, we have the opposite. We have inflationary trends at the macro level.
The tech boom productivity is mostly realized.
I mean, that's why you see the intense hopes pinned on AI.
It's because they need, they just need that productivity.
They need that deflationary productivity so bad. And they hope AI can do it
by laying you off, most likely.
But it's a long shot. It's a long shot. It's a long shot.
We're also trying to onshore as much manufacturing as we can. Very inflationary.
To say nothing about Germany's economy slowing, link in the show notes,
along with most of the EU, which will have impacts on everyone.
And the other tricky side of this, which also suggests stagflation,
is if we got lucky and we saw the economy grow,
there would be more oil demand and the price of oil would go up,
which would drive the cost of energy and thus goods up.
And then to top it all off, we're constantly flirting with more conflict,
like with China, which was one of our largest deflationary forces in the last 40 years.
So what could push us over the top to stagflation, you ask? Well,
conflict with China, or any kind of sharp increase in government spending would
do it. Oil prices surging a bit would do it.
Money supply expanding while the real economy shrinks, that would do it.
So it seems more and more probable. It's not guaranteed, but it's more and more
probable, especially if something like the Fed lowers interest rates because of the election.
One of the things you go back and you see is that there are times when the Fed
has acted politically and it has been bad for long-term policy,
and there has been times when the Fed went against the current administration
and it was really the best decision for long-term policy.
So we're going to see, does the Fed act political and lower rates for the election?
Because they really shouldn't lower rates yet. Let's be real.
So here's my question to you. Say we hit stagflation in the West.
How does that impact the price of Bitcoin for the next couple of years?
Boost it and tell me, do you think Bitcoin still goes up in a stagflation environment?
I'd like to know what you think. I think the banks want in on crypto because
part of this is all in their factory. The BlackRock Bitcoin ETF just became
the fastest ETF to reach $20 billion.
Commenting on BlackRock's success, Goldman Sachs representative said the Bitcoin
ETF approval was a, quote, big psychological turning point.
And it has been a, quote, astonishing success.
And I think the banks want more. I think the banks need more.
I think they need in on this sweet, sweet money. And so we got an ETH ETF approval.
You want to get to the SEC has made a decision on spot either ETFs.
Contessa Brewers got the details.
And it's been approved, Melissa. Melissa, that's the big news coming in,
that these ETFs based on the price of Ether have been approved for the Nasdaq,
the CBOE and the New York Stock Exchange,
potentially paving the way for these ETFs to be listed later this year.
Remember earlier this week, the the agencies themselves had largely predicted,
as had many of the experts on our air, that this would be denied based on some
of the commentary we had heard around the Bitcoin ETFs being approved.
But in fact, you've got VanEck, ARK Investments, BlackRock hoping to launch
these ETFs tied to the second largest cryptocurrency.
You're seeing Ether up about a percent and a half.
Bitcoin, by comparison, took a little bit of a dip there.
You know, there's not as much excitement
about Ether because there's not a supply cap and it is a security.
So, I mean, it's kind of it's maybe, you know, they're going to be able to claim
that it's sufficiently decentralized, which has been my theory all along.
I've never really been full sailor on this.
I don't really get as worked up about it because there are some side benefits
from ETH getting this approval, which I'll touch on here for a moment.
So you know what I'm talking about.
Just like three weeks before this big 180 on the approval of the ETF,
just like a couple of weeks, three weeks or so, Saylor had an event where he
went like so hard on the fact that the ETH ETF would never get approved.
Like he was so clearly convinced he went hard.
When Ethereum is not going to be approved sometime this summer,
it'll be very clear to everyone that Ethereum is deemed a crypto asset security, not a commodity.
After that, you're going to see that Ethereum, BNB, Solana, Ripple,
Cardano, everything down the stack is just a crypto asset security unregistered.
None of them will ever be wrapped by a spot ETF.
None of them will be accepted by Wall Street. None of them will be accepted
by mainstream institutional investors as crypto assets.
This is the one universal consensus accepted institutional grade crypto asset in the world.
The one, the only, the others will never get approved, he said.
But I guess to be fair at the time, that's what everybody kind of thought.
And I wouldn't be surprised if Saylor had a little insight there.
You know, he noticed, he said, by this summer, perhaps he knew about the legal
cases that were in works.
Remember, a Wells notice had been served a consensus, I believe,
which is one of the groups behind Ethereum.
So Saylor has now updated his thinking. So I thought, let's play that for you.
And then I'll share with you why I think this isn't necessarily bad for Bitcoin.
I don't think it's also great either. You know, so here's what I think.
I think two weeks before, the world looked like Bitcoin was going to be the
only asset securitized and offered as a spot ETF.
This is his interview with Peter from What Bitcoin Did. by the Wall Street establishment,
and it was going to spread as the one legitimate crypto asset.
I think right now, the best expectation is the crypto asset class will be legitimized,
supported by both parties. There's an industry.
Crypto is an asset class. There's an entire higher range of use cases,
24-7 digital trading, digital art, NFTs, tokens,
decentralized this, functionality, DeFi.
There's a lot of things that will be considered in a more open light.
And Bitcoin will be the leader of the crypto asset class.
And if you look at it and say, well, is this good for Bitcoin or not?
Yeah, I think it's good for Bitcoin. I think, in fact, it may be better for
Bitcoin because I think that we are politically much more powerful.
You know, supported by the entire crypto industry.
This is clearly the thing. This is something that I've said before on the air,
not on this show, but on the Bitcoin Dad Pod, is the crypto industry as a whole
has raised a lot of money to lobby Congress,
to turn people that were viciously against crypto into pro-crypto advocates.
Bitcoin doesn't have a marketing department. It doesn't have VCs that can hire people.
It can't really just put together an organization that will go lobby Congress.
There's nobody in the Bitcoin boardroom that's supervising the strategy for
interfacing with governments.
You need these altcoins that have that kind of infrastructure that can create lobbying groups.
They were always going to have a louder voice they also absorb a lot of the falling rocks,
so perhaps you know uh perhaps that is good for bitcoin in that it means we
have a voice we have representation i don't love the way the system works but
i don't see how bitcoin could have ever had say like the fit 21 stuff in the house.
How could that, which we're going to get to the legislation stuff in a moment,
but how could that have happened without the crypto lobbying industry?
It just simply wouldn't have.
Unless somehow Bitcoin over time got big enough where the mining industry,
the mining sector could have maybe gotten some lobbying groups together,
but we wouldn't be here right now. I don't think it would be part of this current election cycle.
And we almost saw the current administration successfully choke out the industry.
Industry. So it got really close. I don't think we had the time to spare.
Right. They obviously have a lot of political power, a lot of users,
and they serve as another line of defense for Bitcoin.
So I think instead of someone saying, well, there's one crypto asset,
maybe I'll allocate 1% of my money to it.
I think mainstream investors might say, oh, there's a crypto asset class now,
and maybe we'll allocate 5% or 10% of the crypto asset class,
us but bitcoin will be 60 or 70 of that so i
actually think it could accelerate institutional adoption we're
back to indexing i disagree here um i
don't know i don't know if i necessarily see i think if the
only the bitcoin etf had been approved then 100 of the revenue would have gone
into those etfs now you know i would bet 20 something like that splits off to
these other ones the eth ones and then other after that much like if there were
no other alternative coins perhaps all of that liquidity would go into Bitcoin.
But then again, perhaps people wouldn't be in the market.
It's funny to see it play out now on the Wall Street side, like it's going to
play out on the crypto side.
Just, I guess I'm not, I guess I am kind of, I'm not shocked,
but I guess I am still sort of surprised.
We don't have dates yet of when these are going to go live. They're refiling.
And it does seem like, and I think this really sucks.
It does seem like staking is out.
So if you buy ETH through an ETF, then you're leaving like 5% on the table for staking plus fees.
And you're also buying something that has an unlimited cap.
Not a great product.
Music.
All right, let's talk about the state of crypto legislation.
Welcome back to Swapbox. The first ever digital assets legislation is passed
in the House of Representatives, but the future of the bill remaining unclear
as the Senate has yet to come up with companion legislation.
There's no timing on when the Senate needs to act. Join us right now. Now that right there.
It's a critical point. So we've gotten the House on board, but the Senate doesn't
have a timeline yet. Now, Senator Lummis is over there.
She is. And there are others that are working on this. So there are people in
the Senate that have this on their radar, but they don't necessarily have a deadline of any kind.
And I wouldn't be too shocked if they got enough.
They got what they needed. Right. They made the impact with the voters they wanted to reach.
And the rest can all be done with just small nods and virtue signals for the
rest of the campaigning.
You know, you don't really have to have any more actual legislation pass.
And after the election, you can actually pass the legislation and perhaps retract
some of your promises or something like that.
You know, you can be a little more aggressive with stuff than you may be where
you'd be a little more generous before the election. That makes sense.
That's my current thesis for what's going to happen. Like, we're going to have
a more positive outlook from both Democrats and Republicans,
a more positive approach and more positive language and slight,
you know, nods and outreaches.
But I wouldn't be shocked if we don't see the Senate legislation go through.
And I wouldn't be shocked if we don't see something end up on Biden's desk.
However, if they were clever, they would take the Loomis bill or the other one
that's being worked on. I guess there's two in the Senate, my understanding. standing.
Get those things whipped into shape, sync them up with the House bills,
get that on Biden's desk to sign so he could truly send a signal like President Trump has been.
Biden's campaign did announce that, I think it might have been the White House
actually announced, that a presidential delegation is going to El Salvador to
attend McKellie's inauguration, because he won the election again.
That to me is pretty wild.
Joe Biden himself isn't going, But the White House is sending a delegation to
go to McKellie's inauguration, a delegation.
They went from like co-signing letters concerned about the McKellie administration
and their crime enforcement policies and their economic policies.
Right. This is just like two years ago or a year ago they did this.
To now they're sending a delegation to his party.
Also, multiple reports today, as I record, that the Biden campaign has ramped
up crypto industry, crypto industry, whatever that means. I wish that headline
said Bitcoin mining industry.
That's what I'd love to see. Anyways, the report, this one's from the block,
but there's been several, say that the administration's campaign,
the people that are in charge of their re-election stuff, are engaging in outreach
to various crypto industry players in, quote, a surprising tone shift.
It's kind of more of the same. The difference here being that they're actually actively reaching out.
All it says here is the election campaign has begun reaching out to cryptocurrency
industry players seeking, quote, guidance on the crypto community and crypto policy moving forward.
Sources with direct knowledge on the matter told the block. The outreach marks
a significant, quote, shift from the Biden's previous arm's length dealings
with the industry, according to several sources. You kind of get the idea.
I think they could do these kinds of things and the Senate wouldn't have to do anything.
And this voting block would be happy now. You know, you said Bitcoin,
you mentioned Ross, you're going to see, you know, the Biden White House delegation
is going to see McKellie.
I think a lot of the people you're trying to reach have been reached now.
You could just sit back and do absolutely crap, nothing. And why not?
I think the real tell is if the Senate gets their crap together,
gets that bill on Biden's desk and he signs it. That's the real tell about the shift.
Shift. And until we see that, gotta remain kind of skeptical.
Last week, I asked you, why do you think the average age of cars is higher than it's ever been?
And you're seeing that vehicles are now at an all-time high in terms of the
average age, 12.6 years according to S&P Global Mobility.
And again, they've never been higher than this.
All right, well, when we get back, I'm going to read your boost on why you think
the average age of cars is higher than it's ever been, plus some project updates,
some resources, and a lot more.
So first, I want to thank the show's sponsor, Podhome.com.
Podcasting 2.0 hosting platform of choice. There's so many great features on
Podcasting 2.0 that can make your podcast more competitive and stand above the
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Unlimited shows and episodes powered by unlimited Podhome AI.
Go check out Podhome.fm, promo code TWIB. And a big thank you to Podhome for
sponsoring this week in Bitcoin.
It is how I host the show, and I absolutely co-sign it.
It's a great platform, and burying the team over there work extremely,
really, extremely hard.
Podhome.fm, go make your podcast more competitive.
All right. We got some boosts this week, and our first one comes from Adversaries.
You know, it's my, at least that's how I pronounce it.
Adversary 17 with 50 000
sats ah the baller
spot is on discount and that's a great get 50 000 sats
for the baller spot adversary 17 rights keep keep these coming chris i'm just
curious though has this show taken the place of unfilter i'm not opposed either
way i know both this and the other are a lot of work to create you know that's
a great question uh because i kind of started them both at the same time that
obviously I've kept the pedal down on this week in Bitcoin.
The unfilter show is probably going to be an outlet that I will use from time
to time when something's going on in the world that I don't think a lot of people
have wrapped their head around quite right.
But if there's a lot of people out there covering this stuff and they're doing
a great job, I don't really feel like I necessarily need to chime in. But also...
As I've gotten a deeper understanding of macroeconomics and how this all works,
I've begun to understand that it all really comes back to the money.
Not to be cliche, but so much of what I cover in Unfilter actually comes back
down to macroeconomics.
It's this wild, wild thing where all these things that you think are conspiracies
and all these evil things really comes down to the money.
When you understand the money, you understand the incentives. rentives.
And so this is where my intention's at right now. But I imagine with the election
and all of that, there's going to have to be an event or two where I get fired
up and I want to talk about it. So that'll be over at unfiltered.show.
Gene Bean comes in with 5,000 sats. There's coffee in that nebula.
Using cast-o-matic, Gene writes, great explanation of how all the news comes
together to drive price.
I think I'll stick to listening here to understand things. Regarding cars,
here we go. It's our first one.
I actually think the clip you played nailed the reasoning for keeping them for
longer. And part of that was the interest rates. I kind of think that's it.
I also suspect they're just not as great of products.
You know, the capacitive touch or the integration with, you know.
Some of these infotainment systems, which have the highest rates of complaints amongst customers.
But we'll keep talking about it as the booths roll in.
Gene Everett comes in with Rho Dux. It says boost. Thank you. Appreciate that.
Ace Ackerman comes in with Rho Dux.
Value for Value episode 11.
Thank you, Ace. Wartime comes in with 3,333 sats. Boost!
No message, just the support. Thank you, Wartime.
GolfWinch comes in with 6,777 sats.
Coming in hot with the boost. You are the top Bitcoin podcast in tie with David
Bennett's. Well, thank you.
Bitcoin and, huh? And we'll check it out.
Zach Gilles comes in with a row of ducks.
2,222 sats. The car situation is a combination of not being able to afford or finance a new one.
And all of the emissions and spyware BS features being included in them.
I had to break the bell out for that. My dream car has turned into buying an
older pickup truck and fixing it up myself.
But even used car prices are ridiculous now.
Yeah, Zach, that's kind of my dream car too. Or I know there's that new Toyota
Hilux, but it's not a Hilux.
But it starts at like $10,000 and doesn't even come with a radio.
And it's just a super bare bones truck.
But with a modern Toyota engine, that sounds pretty compelling.
I agree with you though. I used to, when I was younger, I wasted a lot of money
on cars. In my 20s when I worked in IT.
I wasted a lot of money on cars because they were, you know,
getting faster and more technologically advanced and adding Bluetooth and then
adding infotainment systems.
And for a minute, it was going in a good direction.
But now the systems have, you know, they haven't stayed competitive.
And you're right. There's tons of spyware baked in now, too.
I really. And then the other thing is, as inflation has gotten worse,
and now perhaps we see stagflation setting in, it just becomes more compelling
to fix up what you got and keep it running.
And you realize then simplicity is like one of the number one things you want to shop for in a vehicle.
Because the simpler it is, the more you can maintain it yourself.
And I have three different cars, which is a mistake in itself.
And each one is a different tier of complexity. And it's fascinating how much
harder the car that's really complex with all the electronics and sensors and
really tight engine bay is pretty much impossible to work on.
So I think you're on to something there, Zach. I think you're on to something.
Thank you very much for the boost.
Appreciate that. And in fact, appreciate everybody's boost. These are some solid
boosterines, as they say. Right? People say that, right?
Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. I hoard that which your kind covet.
Five years ago, I took out an auto loan through my credit union,
who's also my bank. The interest rate was 4%.
Last year, I was in the office discussing a second loan to cover my dog's surgery.
He's fine now, by the way.
And we looked at adding that to my loan, to my current auto loan,
I should say. Just maybe refinance the whole thing.
It would have gone from 4% to 7.35%, even though my credit score had improved
by 97 points since taking out the original loan.
So I just took out a separate loan. With these rates, I'm not buying anytime soon.
That's just it, too. You know, you can't pay cash because they're so expensive.
And the interest rates make it just ridiculous. Ridiculous. I don't know if
you guys have ever watched Vice Grip Garage on YouTube, but you should go look up Vice Grip Garage.
This guy, he's hilarious. His name's Derek. He goes out into fields or,
you know, barns or garages where a car has been parked for 20,
30, even 50 years. I mean, it's ridiculous, this guy.
Car hasn't moved. It just sat there and rusted. It looks like a pile of garbage.
And this guy manages to fix it up and get it driving.
You know, he'll buy him for like two, 300 bucks.
Now, he's got unbelievable skills, but it just makes you really think,
you know, get a $200, $300 car, drive it until it falls apart.
Better than sitting in a landfill, I suppose. And you can make a planter out
of it. Faraday Fedora comes in with a row of ducks.
Now, it's not KYC-free, but my stacking solution in Canada has been ShakePay.
No lightning yet, but they have prepay Visa that gets you 1% back in sats.
I run all my work expenses to get reimbursed, and it adds up pretty quickly.
Nice move, dude. Getting 1% back SATs on work expenses to get reimbursed for?
Dude, that's the ninja move right there. It's a good company that supports self-custody.
I got a link for any Canadians who want to try it. We both get 20 bucks when you put in $100.
And he has a ShakePay URL. I will add that to the show notes.
Faraday Fedora, thank you for the plug for ShakePay.
Being a non-Canadian, they didn't even know about it. But the name does ring a bell, actually.
Ah, Barks comes in with 9,000 sets.
Make it so. So and Bark says using Podverse, hey, Chris, thanks for this podcast and the boosters.
I managed to get my Bitcoin out of my samurai wallet that I should have had
moved out, but got lazy. Well, good.
Good. I've learned my lesson on that point. So I wanted to pay it forward.
Also, as a UK Bitcoiner, I like all the tips on EU stacking.
One question on hardware wallets.
Would you recommend any other wallets other than the cold card?
That's not possible. Nothing can do that. Well, I don't have a lot of experience outside the cold card.
I do have a Trezor that I played with a long time ago, but I don't necessarily recommend it.
If you or someone you're recommending it for is mobile first,
I hear good things about the BitKey from Block. It is available in 95 countries.
I've also gotten good reports from the audience on Blockstream's Jade,
but I don't have direct experience with Jade Wallet.
I would love people to boost in and tell me what hardware wallets.
Don't dox yourself much, but just yay or nay or good experiences with other
hardware wallets besides the cold card I think would be great because I'm very
much focused on the cold card.
And that's not necessarily great from a something goes wrong,
they go out of business, they get compromised standpoint. I should probably have a backup plan.
So I'd really appreciate any insights you all have. Boost in and tell me what
hardware wallets besides the cold card.
Because I think right now the
cold card is the one to beat. But you tell me. Boost in and let me know.
That's a great question. and
hopefully, Barks, I can pass it along to you soon. The answer, at least.
Lazy Locks comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000!
And just says another awesome episode. Thanks, Chris. Thank you,
Lazy Locks. Just a nice simple boost. Just let me know you're out there.
Send me that signal. I really appreciate it.
And Anonymous, I don't think I got your name. I don't know if this thing didn't
scrape bits or if you were just being anonymous on purpose.
2,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T! T.
Hey, Chris. Thanks for the shout out for Rely. It's either Rely or Rely AI, but I think it's Rely.
Has anyone watched the movie Dirty Coin? I was able to see it.
I was able to see Stranded. That is only part of it. You just need to create
an account on IndieHub.studio. You'll need to provide a CB, but you won't be charged.
After watching it, you can close your account. All the best, John.
Dirty Coin. You know, before I go sign up for something and,
you know, go through that hassle, I kind of want to know what Dirty Coin is.
Nice tease, though. At least he thinks anonymous. Don't really know. But we'll see.
So I have a 2,000-sat cutoff, but I wanted to give a shout-out to SirFunk,
who came in and said, keep fighting the good fight, and had a good point about
big blockers. We had 16 boosters.
We got to 100,937 sats. That's not a blowaway for the amount of work this show
gets, and I'll just put it out there to you if you get value out of this show.
And I feel like my commitment to you is try to make a real high-signal show.
So that way you can take it in, and whatever kind of models you have that help
you inform your decisions in life. You know, whatever mental models you go by,
I'm hoping I can be a high signal data point for how you think about Bitcoin
or the macroeconomic situations.
And maybe that influences decisions you make from grocery purchases or employment or how you stack.
And if you find that kind of insight and information valuable,
I'd hope you'd return what you find that value to the show through a boost.
You can do that with something like Fountain FM.
You can boost through their website without switching podcast apps.
You just need something that can scan lightning QR codes and send sats.
Or go try out the podcasting 2.0 experience because this here pod.
Transcripts, chapters, value for value, magic wallet switching technology for music and more.
Like within 90 seconds of the show being posted, your podcast client knows about
it and goes and pulls down the file.
And in the future, if there was ever some kind of event, real breaking news,
I can go live in the RSS feed and you just open up your podcast client.
Boom. Hey, there's This Week in Bitcoin. He's live right now.
Let's see what he's talking about.
You know, breaking news. I don't know what it would be, right?
Maybe when Bitcoin reaches a million. I don't know. You know, it's a live stream.
These are all podcasting 2.0 features that you just get for free.
It's all in open spec. You just need a new podcast app that knows what to do with it.
You can find those at podcastapps.com. And then you can boost in as well.
Thank you, everybody who does.
Really appreciate it. It really means a lot. It's a good signal to,
you know, how engaging the episode was or how valuable it was.
And I internalize that and I try to make sure that I use that to inform future
directions for the show. Also, always really appreciate ideas and feedback for the pod as well.
Music.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you to store all your Bitcoin in liquid.
Go burn all those perfectly good sats for some liquid Bitcoin.
No, I'm not going to do that.
But I do think liquid should be in your stacking rotation as a way to store
up UTXOs before you move them to cold storage.
The idea being that you could make smaller transactions, maybe on strike or
in a DCA or however you do it.
Then you store that on liquid until you get to a large amount.
And then you move that large amount to cold storage.
So that way, in the future, if fees are high, you don't get left with UTXOs that you can't spend.
And one of the tools that has just been super useful in this stacking has been bolts.exchange.
But until this week, they didn't have a way to go directly from Liquid to main chain.
You had to use something like sideswap.io. Some apps have this built in like Aqua.
But Bolts wasn't actually doing the swap from liquid back to on-chain.
They could do lightning to liquid and liquid to lightning and on-chain to lightning
and back and forth. Like they were doing all that, but they weren't doing liquid to main chain.
Now this is super useful on the back end for managing lightning channel liquidity.
This is one of the things Boltz is doing a lot is helping lightning nodes manage
their liquidity and swap in using liquid.
It's actually really neat stuff and it's making the lightning network more reliable.
I have a link in the blog post that goes into more... I have a link to the blog
post in the show notes that goes into more detail.
But now using bolts.exchange, you can both go from lightning into liquid or
main chain into liquid and from liquid now to main chain or lightning.
So my stacking regime remains... If you're going to DCA and you're going to
do it with a KYC organization, a know-your-custom organization,
choose one that supports lightning.
River is a great example i guess coinbase does now there's a lot out there to
support lightning we've mentioned some before in the boost segment you stack
with a provider that supports lightning,
using lightning you go to bolts bolt swaps it to liquid,
you use liquid as kind of a temporary storage place to stack up and then once
you've got i mean i don't know i think my number these days is,
around 5 million sats you know it sometimes it's one it just depends on you
it's each one it depends on where you're at i i've had some listeners tell me
like you know when i get to 15 million sats i'm like wow okay you know for me
it's somewhere between one to five million,
that's kind of when i feel okay i can put that in cold storage my main goal
is i don't want to end up with bitcoin i can't spend in 2030,
And the Liquid Network provides sort of a space where you can swap the coins.
It kind of breaks the trail a bit.
I mean, of course, wherever you bought, it still has a record of what you bought.
So you're not sneaking away from taxes or anything like that.
But you are getting a little privacy from people that just want to snoop on
your stack and watch your transactions.
So it's still kind of a nice little benefit. So Bolst.Exchange,
big, big update this week. Really big update. Congratulations to them.
As you can tell, I'm actually quite excited about it.
Now, I have a resource of the week that really tickled me. It's a bit of a read. It is a bit of a read.
But a peer-reviewed study has come out.
And it looks into Bitcoiners and their personalities.
And one of the results is that Bitcoiners tend to be intellectually curious
and a little more emotionally stable than average. They tend to value personal
growth, relationships and community.
And they scored significantly higher in financial literacy. Now,
this is an over the phone survey. They go into some of their details.
It seems kind of fun to read, though. It turns out Bitcoiners,
you know, they get called all kinds
of names, psychopaths and right wing lunatics or whatever it might be.
But a peer-reviewed study that went and did the work actually shows them to be intellectual,
valuing relationships and community, not particularly materialistic,
and to have higher financial literacy than the rest of the general public.
I'm like, it's so counter to the narratives that have been out there all these years.
It's really, I just, I don't know why Tickle Sweet does that.
You'll have to go read it. Link in the show notes.
Okay, our final clip of the week. I don't know if I've played a safe clip on the show.
You know, safe is the offer, offer. Oh boy, it's a good thing it's the end of the show, guys.
I think my mouth is going to retire for the day.
Safe is the author of the Bitcoin Standard, one of the quintessential reads.
And this is kind of an older clip, but I thought this could be a good one that
you could probably play for your no-coiner friends or family that still haven't
wrapped their heads around why Bitcoin and why Bitcoin's monetary policy ultimately
is what makes it the number one crypto and why there really truly isn't a second best.
It's not a technology thing. It's a monetary policy.
And what Saif talks about here is how Bitcoin is more like financial gunpowder
than it is a technology like the iPhone.
It's not optional. I mean, you will either move there or you will watch your
wealth lose its value as the people who put their money there appreciate.
You know what I mean? Just think about it. You know, if you have a million dollars
and you put them in a currency that's constantly depreciating or somebody has
$10,000 and puts them in a currency that's constantly appreciating,
it's only a matter of time until they overtake you.
And, you know, people are not stupid. They will realize this and they will want to move forward.
So when I talk about Bitcoin adoption, people think of it as being like,
say, Apple iPhone adoption.
You know, it's very nice and very cute and then people will buy it.
But I think that's not the model for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is more like gunpowder adoption.
If you think about it, did the French army have a choice whether they should adopt gunpowder or not?
Did they decide, no, you know what, we like to keep it real with sticks and
stones and swords and we're not going to use gunpowder.
Any army that decided to do this, it didn't matter because then another army
with gunpowder would come and take over France.
So eventually, everywhere in the world ended up with gunpowder,
either because people adopted it or because it was used against them.
And I think Bitcoin is like that. Bitcoin is like financial gunpowder.
It's the safest way of sending money halfway around the world, the most secure way.
And it's the hardest money that we've ever invented. So it's not something that
is, you know, whether we should or want to or whether people,
you know, we try to win people over.
And this you know this is why my book is not marketing for
bitcoin because i don't think marketing for bitcoin matters at the
end of the day this is economic reality the harder money will
win you know gold beats silver and
i discussed this in my book not because um you know there was better marketing
for gold or it was better propaganda for gold beat silver because of economic
reality gold grew at a much slower rate than silver the value of silver declined
and i think this is this is really the the case with um with bitcoin i think
at the long run All right.
That wraps us up. So if you made it this far, I want to just say thank you very
much. I'm going to be out in the woods next week.
I still plan to do a show, but it might sound slightly different.
If you know somebody out there that's looking for a high signal Bitcoin news
podcast, we just send them my way.
I'd really appreciate that. And also, if you're on Fountain FM,
I'm at Chris LAS on there. I make clips of the show on occasion.
If you want to help spread those around, that's probably another way people
could discover the show. And you can always help us show up on the charts by
boosting in, helps people discover the show, because then we show up at the
top of the Discover page on Fountain.
And that brings them in. I really
appreciate everybody who helps grow the show. It's still early days.
We're still under 20 episodes even. It's just a baby.
It's just a little baby. And I appreciate everybody for listening.
Now, this is a Podcasting 2.0 show. And in that spirit, we're going to end with
a value for value track. That means if you boost while this track is playing,
90% of your sats go to the artist and whoever they have in their splits.
And this week, it's Tiptoe by Jack Holliday.
Thank you so much for joining me on This Week in Bitcoin.
Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Music.