Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 99.
My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com.
This is one of those weeks, had I recorded earlier in the week,
it probably would have been a very different episode.
It's almost like I planned it this way, which I did not.
But for all of this to be happening right around episode 100, it's kind of remarkable.
It's just going to make it super easy to refer back to this moment in history.
Go back to episode 100 and listen to this moment.
So that's pretty, I don't know, good for the show, not great for the world.
So let's set the stage because today's topic is really about energy.
And when we talk about energy, we're also talking about the flow of the dollar and how that impacts Bitcoin.
Energy is the story that really impacts us this week.
And trust me, it does get to Bitcoin all the way to one economist calling for Bitcoin to completely crash because of its dependence on energy.
But I need to set some context by talking about Iraq for a moment.
We always say these conflicts, they're about oil.
And that's true.
Because when it's about oil, it's really about the dollar system.
One of the richest oil fields in the world is in southern Iraq.
It's called majnun, which means crazy in Arabic.
But what's equally crazy is that the revenue from this oil field and others like it
is controlled by the United States.
America doesn't own them.
It doesn't pump the crude.
but more than two decades after its invasion, it retains influence over Iraq's most important
source of income. This has real-world consequences for Iraqi politics and the economy, and on how
Baghdad balances domestic interests with U.S. expectations. After the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
the U.S. imposed a new financial structure on energy revenue, mandating that proceeds from
oil and gas sales be paid into the Development Fund for Iraq, or DFI. The fund was based at the
New York Federal Reserve Bank, so Iraqi oil revenue remained outside Iraq. The DFI eventually
became an account of the Central Bank of Iraq. Legally, this money belongs to Iraq,
but operationally, it continues to pass through American financial and regulatory systems.
Ah, yes, ensuring the flow of the dollar system. The flow of the dollar and the flow of oil are
definitely linked. The problem is the U.S. wants to have it both ways right now. It wants everyone
to trade using the dollar. In fact, why not buy up more dollars right now? We got a great deal.
At the same time, the dollar continues to be the U.S.'s strongest, most abused weapon.
I'd like to ask you, what more can we be doing as we see us place pressure on the Ayatollah,
who is no friend of the United States of America?
This is Katie Britt. She's a Republican senator from Alabama, and she is currently questioning
Treasury Secretary Scott Besant from a couple of weeks ago.
And as we see what he is doing to the citizens of his own country and the streets, what more can we be doing to make sure that we are placing the pressure that we need to?
Well, what we can do at Treasury and what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country.
So right there, that's kind of the, I think, most important key phrase.
What they have do is created a dollar shortage in the country.
They're engineering a dollar shortage.
Well, what we can do at Treasury and what we have done is created a dollar shortage in the country.
At a speech at the Economic Club of New York in March, I outlined the strategy.
It came to a swift and I would say grand culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under.
There was a run in the bank. The central bank had to print money.
The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded.
Notice how this sounds like it's been in the works for months.
I mean, the bank failure that happened in December was in the works via the dollar shortage program for a while,
which kind of puts a new timeline on this entire conflict, or at least explains why we ended up here.
The run of the bank, the central bank had to print money.
The Iranian currency went into free fall.
Inflation exploded.
And hence, we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.
We will continue monitoring all the partners, all the Iranian partners.
It sounds like Scott Besant and the United States are very aware that their policy is putting the Iranian people out on the streets. That's pretty intense. I mean, just think about that from the perspective of someone outside the United States, maybe from somebody from the perspective of a country that has not the best relationship with the United States. It's a pretty dramatic thing for the Treasury Secretary to admit.
The strategy, it came to a swift and I would say grand culmination in December when one of the largest banks in Iran went under.
There was a run in the bank. The central bank had to print money.
The Iranian currency went into free fall. Inflation exploded.
And hence, we have seen the Iranian people out on the street.
We will continue monitoring all the partners, all the Iranian partners.
The good news, Senator, is that we have seen, and we can see it with our fencing, we have seen the Iranian leadership wiring money out of the country like crazy.
So the rats are leaving the ship, and that is a good sign that they know the end may be near.
I want to switch quickly.
All right, let's stop there.
Because I just think that's such an interesting admission.
it is an admission that the dollar system is weaponized and has been being deployed against
the Iranians for some time. And that is the Treasury Secretary just saying it out loud right
there. So, you know, I mean, if you were a leader of another country and you're hearing that,
the responsible thing to do would be to reduce the U.S.'s ability and power to do that to your
nation. Motivated by sanctions, geopolitical shifts and a desire to reduce American economic
influence countries like China India Russia and some GCC members are now
exploring alternatives to the petrodollar system although the green
back still remains dominant in the global energy settlements international
monetary fund data shows that the usage of dollar in oil trade is now about 57
percent down from about 71 percent in 2000 there is a clear rise at alternative
currencies for oil settlements China has pushed for Yuan based settlements for
oil and gas particularly with the Gulf Corporation Council nations and has
successfully used the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange for
transactions Beijing also buys 90% of Iran's oil outside the dollar using the
Yuan oil trading system Bix countries are increasingly bypassing the dollar
for energy trade which has led to a slow erosion of the dollar's role in global
transactions countries under US sanctions such as Russia and Iran are
leading efforts to trade in other currencies to secure energy sales at
discounts and reduce financial dependency
Russia now trades with China mostly in Yuan and ruble with the country's dollar
reserves almost gone Iran has turned to crypto and Bitcoin mining to avoid swift
sanctions. Yeah, isn't that interesting? So the firepower of the dollar is, if this continues,
just continues to decline itself. And it may be why we are seeing more military flexing from the
White House, because they have to lean harder on military might as they cannot influence directly
using the dollar might. And the longer this conflict drags out, the longer the situation
on the straight continues, the more this situation becomes obvious to people all around the world.
So something has to be done. President Trump saying that the ceasefire with Iran will lay the groundwork for a permanent peace deal.
Let's get over to Megan Casella in Washington. She's got the latest on what we've been hearing.
Megan, good morning. Morning, Becky. That's the biggest question right now.
What talks will look like from here and whether there is room for agreement on a permanent deal?
And I would say there's some real skepticism around that right now.
Earlier this morning, Vice President J.D. Vance, who's over in Hungary, emphasized that the ceasefire and broader negotiations are contingent on the Iranians coming honestly to the negotiating table.
He called the two week delay a fragile truce.
If the Iranians are willing in good faith to work with us, I think we can make an agreement.
If they're going to lie, if they're going to cheat, if they're going to try to prevent even the fragile truce that we've we've set up from taking place, then they're not going to be happy.
Because what the president has also shown is that we still have clear military, diplomatic, and maybe most importantly, we have extraordinary economic leverage.
Oh, isn't that interesting.
So it's going to be a tenuous piece at best.
And it sounds like the Iranians still continue to charge for passage.
Financial Times had a report saying they'll even accept Bitcoin for passage.
I have not been able to confirm that reporting.
But they do seem to be taking stablecoin and Chinese yuan.
So either way, best case scenario, this isn't looking very good and we should expect some volatility as this thing sounds pretty tenuous.
Now, Luke Grohman, he's kind of a bear these days, and he joined Lynn Alden on the BT Sessions podcast this week.
And Luke is feeling especially bearish for the future of the dollar.
And he says, we're kind of at a best case where if the U.S. can just walk away and pretend victory, but Iran continues to administrate the strait the way they are, it's essentially the de facto end for the $71 system.
The Iranians, they're telling you they'll let oil move for Yuan.
And people say, well, there's no, you know, Yuan is a closed capital account, blah, blah, blah.
They're missing what the Iranians are doing.
That's gold for oil.
How do you get Yuan?
It's simple.
You buy, you sell dollars, you buy gold, you take the gold to China, you sell the gold to China for Yuan, you take the Yuan to Iran, you buy the oil, you put it on a boat, you sail it out of there, and away you go.
And so that option is absolutely the end of the post $71 system.
That is a, you know, whether we're allowing it to happen or as some assert or whether we can't do anything about it, you know, like sink the Chinese boats moving the stuff doesn't matter.
You've got a yuan oil system parallel running alongside the dollar oil system.
And that is de facto the end of the dollars post 71 status.
So yeah, my best case, the happy outcome at this point is we walk away.
We let them keep control of the Strait of Hormuz.
They continue to transact in yuan through gold.
Gold goes to the moon.
The dollar falls sharply.
That facilitates a reindustrialization of the US, high inflation, probably yield curve
control, capital controls in the United States.
That's the good outcome at this point.
They all get uglier from here, from that point.
And I think that maybe the only flaw I'd have there with Luke's analysis is that he's looking at the entire dollar system through the lens of the oil trade.
Lynn comes in with a bit more context.
And, you know, she points out the dollar system's more than just oil trade.
I do think that I would separate the risk of a military kind of strategic defeat from the dollar system itself, at least in any sort of like near term timelines, even though one, of course, can lead to the other over time.
And I do think that regardless of this particular scenario playing out, I think we were already headed sort of a multipolar world in terms of what sovereign store their reserves in.
And then to some extent, even what they denominate payment in so that they can't be sanctioned or censored unilaterally.
So I think we're already seeing just a natural shift there.
And then I'd argue it's even in the U.S.'s interest to let that happen.
That would have been an example of letting things happen kind of gracefully and kind of focusing on inward stuff rather than trying to maintain that unnecessarily.
But this, I think, is an accelerant.
There are moments in time where, you know, like the UK losing its reserve status was a process that, you know, there's World War I, then there's World War II, then there's the Suez moment.
And then, you know, there's the rise first of kind of the early stages of that, the German economic power, then the rise of the American economic power.
So there was this like gradual handover.
And I think this is one particular moment.
I think the Iraq war is already an early moment.
That was kind of our, let's call it World War I for like, you know, losing status.
It's like the early, that's the first shot.
And then, you know, you have a global financial crisis, then you have COVID, then you have
like lockdowns and things like that.
And then you have, and the stimulus, and then you have, you know, this rising conflict between
the US and China.
And then you have this particular moment.
And I think these are all kind of like flags along the way toward a more
multipolar world.
And all of that can be true without the idiocracy component.
But then you mentioned idiocracy.
I mean,
I do think that it's an oddly present movie because it's,
I mean,
that was like a pro wrestler president.
We have reality star president.
We were in a situation where we're like facing election between a senile guy
and a reality star.
And,
and like when the senile guy had to drop out,
we had a person who couldn't win her own primary if she had to.
So we skipped that.
It just the way the timing worked out And so we find ourselves in like the silliest timeline And then we had you know like Doge Epstein Iran Boondoggle
It's just we're in kind of, yeah, we are.
Yeah, that idiocracy component is kind of happening alongside of what otherwise could have been these similar things, just slightly smarter.
All right.
So what's your take?
Are you more with Luke that this is really going to snowball because they're going to end up having to purchase more and more gold, which accelerates the end of the dollar system?
Or are you more with Lynn that there's so many debts and assets out there denominated in dollars and it's a slower unwind?
Either way, it's a series of stupid events.
Boost it and tell me your take.
And for the people paying attention, you got to figure this just makes Bitcoin look great.
I mean, we already know this.
But to the people that have been on the fence, Bitcoin's held up pretty well during this conflict.
And you're looking at this thinking, no sovereign risk is becoming more and more of a feature.
I want to understand how you think about the price of Bitcoin in relation to what's happening in Iran
and whether we think it's some kind of gold and it's a hedge, it's something else.
Where are we? What is happening here?
Bitcoin's been the shining light over the Iran conflict.
I mean, stocks are down. You see bonds going down. You see gold going down.
Bitcoin has been flat to slightly up.
And I don't know if you can take a victory lap in the sense of over the last year, it's been the opposite.
Bitcoin's been down and those assets have been up.
But I do think that people are saying to themselves, well, I thought that Bitcoin was supposed to just be kind of beta to the rest of these risk assets.
And so if everything else is selling off, why is Bitcoin not selling off?
And so I do think that there's a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel for Bitcoin investors who have been taking a couple of beatings.
Do you think this was just a Bitcoin winter and we're now in some kind of pseudo summer?
I think that volatility has significantly compressed in Bitcoin.
It was, you know, an 80, 90 vol asset.
Now it's like a 40 vol asset.
It drew down 50 percent.
That's kind of what you would expect in that kind of volatility environment.
And I think that there's just a lot of people who hold Bitcoin who say, look, I like it at 60 plus thousand dollars.
And the geopolitical uncertainty and chaos actually makes me want to own more Bitcoin rather than less because this thing is neutral and isn't subject to any one country.
Is it happening from individuals or do you think it's through ETFs or what do you think is happening?
I think it's a little bit of everything, right?
One of the things that people have long talked about with Bitcoin is how do we get mass adoption?
And that was the kind of the phrase everyone used.
And this is what mass adoption looks like, is you have individuals, you have companies, you have ETFs, you have countries.
But does that mean that the price discovery suggests that this is not on its way to the moon?
Well, I think that maybe arguably has been more stable than some of these other things you're describing.
But at the same time, we've had Cathie Wood and so many other people, by the way, including yourself, I think, who've talked about.
I was thinking about higher prices.
Tom Lee talked about, you know, half a million dollars, a million dollars of Bitcoin.
And we obviously have.
Yeah, I think if you look at gold as a good example, people used to talk about $5,000 gold price and it was at $1,800 and everyone kind of thought it sounded crazy, right? It will get there. I think Bitcoin is a very similar thing. What the timeframe is, is very, very hard to nail down. But what I will say is just look at the compound annual growth rate. You know, if the stock market compounds at 8 to 10% a year, Bitcoin should do something that is multiples.
So where the conversation then goes to is, besides adoption timeframe, which can kind of be answered by the next question, when is the next wave of adopters going to figure this out?
Cathie Wood has an explanation.
Yes, I think what we're seeing now is the institutionalization of this new asset class that has a very low correlation with other asset classes.
So believe it or not, in the Bitcoin community, down 50%, if that's as far as it goes, they'll consider that a real victory because you're right.
The 85%, 95% collapses associated with a very new technology.
That's done.
This is a proven technology.
It's a proven monetary system, and it's a new asset class.
I think that's how they should be thinking about it.
Now, Kathy, Anthony, they're always a little bullish.
the reality is the global conflict it will settle down at some point and then when that reality
becomes the new talk of the town the fact that there's a bill due for all of this will become
a big topic and you have to wonder when that lands will things shift for bitcoin will matthew
siegel from van eck who tends not to be quite as bullish as kathy or anthony thinks that that might
be when things click for more people adoption continues to grow and the best leading indicator
is the surveys, whether you ask retail investors or institutional investors, do you plan to allocate
more to this asset class in the future? The answer is yes. And we're seeing that at the sovereign
level where the first central bank has just bought Bitcoin for its foreign exchange reserves.
We're seeing that obviously across Wall Street, you know, whether it's Morgan Stanley filing for
a Bitcoin ETF and the retail investor, especially outside the U.S., you know, continues to allocate.
So at some point, the bill for this war will come due and the fiscal and monetary largesse in G7 will become dominant again from a narrative perspective.
Well, a brief update on some quantum FUD because it's starting to make sense this week.
We talked about the research paper that was co-authored by Justin Drake, who works with the Ethereum Foundation.
Well, he mentioned this week that rather than viewing quantum as a hurdle to overcome,
he sees it as a market opportunity for Ethereum.
It gives them a chance to stand out above the Bitcoins and the rest.
So one interesting shift of mindset for me in the last few months is that I've stopped
thinking about post-quantum as a hurdle that we have to overcome.
And I think of it more as an opportunity.
It's an opportunity for Ethereum to stand out as the very first global financial system that is post-quantum secure.
Not just relative to its competitors, like Bitcoin and whatnot, but also relative to fiat and TradFi.
And I think it would send a very strong message and kind of be a very natural security shunning point for the world to migrate over to Ethereum.
And not only is it an opportunity for Ethereum to distinguish itself relative to its peers,
but it's also an opportunity for Ethereum to become the best version of itself.
And this goes back to the idea of the move to post-quantum essentially being a rewrite
and that being a massive opportunity to start with a clean slate and wipe out technical debt.
Well, isn't this all just really convenient?
So one of the co-authors of the quantum research paper that everybody is panicking about, that happens to also think that this is a market opportunity for Ethereum.
And on Tuesday of this week, Cointelegraph reported that while the threat has not yet materialized, the Ethereum Foundation is judged to cannot any longer delay a response.
And the co-founder and what I like to call CEO Vitalik Buterin recently outlined on X proposals to significantly improve transaction speed and security over the next several years.
The plan includes gradually reducing block slot times from 12 seconds to as low as two seconds and allowing faster transaction processing, quote unquote.
And developers are also targeting a finality between 6 and 16 seconds.
You know, somewhere in there.
The roadmap, of course, spans multiple upgrades expected to go through the end of the decade and introduces quantum resistant cryptography designed to prepare the network for future computing risks.
I love this so much.
It is classic Ethereum.
Quintessential put a bow on it.
Classic Ethereum.
Stay a while and listen.
If you've followed East development at all over the years, you know they never hit their targets.
I mean, the merge to go to proof of stake was missed, I think, by four years.
They generally fall short of the original goal as well.
So not only they're late, but they fall short of the goal.
But what will be powerful here is the narrative.
And it's a narrative that Wall Street can buy.
And that is ETH can always be saying they're working on quantum resistance.
They'll have an answer tomorrow for that question now.
They have an answer for it.
And that is where they can beat Bitcoin with a coordinated narrative set from the top,
put out there by pumpers like Drake or Tom Lee or whoever it needs to be that can get
on the different avenues to put the message out there that ETH is solving the quantum
problem.
Don't worry about it.
We're on top of it.
Those Bitcoin losers, they can't even get their crap together.
Nobody runs that show.
They can't organize.
They can't do anything.
Look at us, though.
We're on top of it.
Not only do we use less energy, but we're working on the quantum problem right now.
And you know what?
One day we're going to have finality down to like, I don't know, six seconds, maybe 16.
I don't know, because we haven't written the code yet.
But we're going to get a really, really tight because we can do that with blockchains.
There's no tradeoff at all to worry about.
So quantum proof and no worries about tradeoffs or centralization.
Do not concern yourselves.
Buy some ETH.
That's their narrative now.
And they can get on that message for a decade, which is why I think it's really important when legends like Adam Back get on outlets like Bloomberg and they explain the reality of the quantum threat.
And when Adam speaks, you should listen because their company, among others, are actually working on solutions for Bitcoin in a quantum era.
Right. I mean, the current hardware, so the Google paper is talking about algorithmic improvements.
It doesn't bring with it any hardware improvements, right?
And the current hardware that the companies doing the research have is extremely basic.
It generally doesn't have any error correction.
The biggest calculation it's performed is to factorize the number 21 into seven times three,
the sort of thing that primary school children can do or practice.
So the hope they have is that with continued research,
the hardware will get faster and eventually be able to tackle serious problems that today's
computers can't. But today it's much slower than a calculator or something extremely basic.
The prudent thing to do is to prepare Bitcoin and give people the option to migrate their keys to a
quantum-ready format and to have, let's say, a decade in which to do that. So I think for that
reason you know the longer times that bitcoin users have in order to migrate their keys for
custodians and exchanges to move their coins to a quantum ready format the safer it will be and
blockchain researchers commented some quantum ready signature format into liquid which is a bitcoin
layer 2 and liquid has a long track record of bringing first to live use features that later
got added to Bitcoin. So there is some precedent for that. We have been saying Blockstream has a...
To make it clear, I'll link to that in the show notes, Blockstream has been doing research on
liquid that could be applied to Bitcoin in the future, where they believe they have solved some
of this. That's what he's talking about there. 20-person research team that's been working on
this all of this year and into last year and published a number of papers and a number of
other researchers in the Bitcoin space have done likewise. So I think it's just that, you know,
negative news sells. So they get a lot of attention for quantum hardware research or
algorithmic research by talking about it in Bitcoin terms. Whereas, you know, the people
like ourselves have a 20 person team publishing papers, implementing things, putting them live,
that doesn't grab as much attention. No, no, it does not. Although maybe if they claim they could
like crack a military system or something like that, that would get some attention.
All right, another question for you.
I'm a little nervous about next week.
Episode 100.
Support for the show has been okay,
but it hasn't been very good.
I mean, it hasn't been great.
I don't know.
It just hasn't, you know,
I think we're in a bit of a slump
as a Bitcoin community.
And I've also noticed that when I take time off,
like I did to go to Planet Nix and scale,
when I take even just one week off,
the show dips about 10% in downloads
for a month or two,
and that affects everything.
This time around, it dipped 13%, which is one of the larger dips, which is also interesting
because the show had been on a 10%, 13% growth trajectory for quite a while.
But I've noticed this over the years when I take a break.
So I feel like we're kind of coming in episode 100 on shaky ground, which is a little awkward
because we're also entering a new phase of history.
At the same time, there's a lot going on at home too, and it's a new phase for me too.
so I don't know I wonder what we should do to celebrate the 100 landmark because I
I don't know exactly what the future path for the show looks like I want to keep going but I you know
I think I think we will it's just you know what I mean like that's where I'm at right now which is
very surprising to be at 100 I guess part of me in the way back in my mind thinks it'd be a great
spot to cap it 100 run and if support's fatiguing a little bit maybe it's time you know go out I
I don't know.
I had a hundred.
I probably won't do it,
but it's just something,
I don't know.
And if you think there's something we could do to make 100 a little more fun or interesting,
let me know.
Or if you just think it should be,
you know,
job as usual,
let me know.
And,
uh,
I'll try to,
if I get some ideas in time,
I'll try to work them into the show.
So that's what I want.
I want your ideas on how we could celebrate episode 100 and kind of take a,
you know,
temperature check on,
on the support for the show and see where we going from there Thank you everybody who does So also if you want to boost in and let me know if you with Luke or if you with Lynn you can boost in and give me your take on that too well I know this we got more show coming up your boost my favorite thought of the week some updates
and of course a great clip to wrap us up so let me just touch on this you can support the show also
by doing what you do.
If you buy sats on River,
use my link in the show notes.
One of the best ways to stack sats in the U.S.
You can use the link and support the show.
If you're all about self-custody
and you're in Canada or the States,
check out the Bitcoin well.
It's an automatic self-custody platform.
They don't host the wallet.
You do.
If it's time to spend your Bitcoin via Lightning,
the Bitcoin company has hundreds of gift cards.
You can go from sats to gift cards in seconds,
and they only support Bitcoin.
They're not in all the other stuff
like some of the other gift card places.
The Bitcoin company, link in the notes,
If you want to stack sats passively, the fold card is one of the best ways to do that.
Big hit in our community.
Link in the notes for that.
And then last but not least, salt lending.
Get access to your Bitcoin value without selling it.
With rates that are lower and limits that are lower than some of the other providers out there.
And yeah, you guessed it.
Link in the notes for that too.
You can support the show just by doing what you do.
Four score and seven boosts to go.
And we do have some boosts to get to this week.
Let's start off with our baller booster.
BMW Vroom Vroom comes in with 100,000 cents.
Hey, Rich Lobster!
Fun will now commence.
Things are looking up for all my luck.
Make it so.
Wow.
And he just says value for value.
Thank you.
That definitely picked things up.
Really brought up the average for the show there.
Thank you, BMW.
Really appreciate that a lot.
J-Cube also comes in with a very generous boost.
45,900 sats.
Oh, and I love this.
This is value sent from my new Nix Bitcoin node.
Yes.
That's not possible.
Nothing can do that.
Complete with Albi Hub.
Yes.
Well done, J-Cube.
And thank you for the boost.
That is very impressive.
Love to see it.
MDS is here with 21,000 sats.
Well, I'm not in the US.
I don't give two sats about old D-sacks.
But OpenCode sounds interesting.
I'm grappling with OpenClaw at the moment, and I'm weak on SSH.
I skipped your last episode after hearing you were going to, quote, try something different.
Take that as a compliment.
Maybe I'll check it out.
P.S. The soundbite for 21Sats has grown on me.
Yeah, it's kind of grown on me, too, actually.
Anyone on Fountain of Not Streaming Sats or listening is a bum.
Wow.
A bum, huh?
Yeah, it's grown on me, too.
Isn't that funny?
Yeah, I understand about the DSACs.
See, if I were outside the U.S., I would still think it's notable that the U.S. had a crypto czar role.
If this was, you know, the thing I followed.
But I get you.
Thank you, MDS, for the support.
Hey, there's Gene Bean here with 4,444 sats.
This old duck still got it.
For a newbie episode, instead of worrying about Umbral versus Star 9 versus whatever it might be,
maybe just focus on the components and how they associate and their settings.
For example, what do you set in Bitcoin D or in Lightning D?
do you run additional tools like electress or mempool or thunderhub or albihub or anything else
if so which ones and how do you configure them okay do you do it at home do you don't have vps
would you configure inbound and outbound access to components or the world would you use clearnet
etc i do kind of see what you're going for there gene keep it generic so the problem i still have
is the start nines and the umbrals and all the other ones you know they don't necessarily expose
these settings, then you go spelunking in below.
And I don't know if that's necessarily good advice or not.
But I do think I like where your head's at on that.
And there's something to work with there.
Thank you, Gene.
Gene also says, I'm excited by the prospect of seeing lightning on square terminals now
that they're flipping on by default.
I'm waiting.
If anybody sees one, let me know.
I'll do it.
I've probably got, you know, a little bit of like spending money in my strike account,
you know, 20,000 cents or something.
I'd spend on a candy bar to see a square terminal in action.
I'll admit to that.
it may be a Bitcoin pizza purchase in the future,
but I'll do it.
It wouldn't be the first time.
Thank you, Gene.
Appreciate you.
Sats over bits comes in with 4,000 sats.
I really enjoyed the new operator episode,
but I also would like a first-time node operator one.
I get why that could be difficult to make work, though.
Also, I think you could cover the new Core 31 mempool changes
a little further in depth in one of your segments.
Oh, really?
I mean, there's not a lot more to talk about than I did.
I did hit a high level, but, you know.
Okay.
I was wondering if people would be interested in that kind of stuff.
That's good signal stats over bits.
I could definitely spend more time in the update section on those kinds of things.
I've been thinking about doing that a bit more, so I appreciate that.
I'll take that under advisement.
Rue Gator comes in with 4,000 stats.
David Sachs' tenure will probably end up as the same category as Trump's presidency.
Lots of loud, quote, I can fix it alone energy.
But plenty of chaos.
and in the end, either things got worse
or we just went in a very exhausting circle.
I wonder where we're at right now.
Thank you, Brugator.
Appreciate that.
Hey, Ace Ackerman's back with a row of ducks.
David Sachs has earned a C as CryptoZar.
A lot of sound and fury, but really almost nothing.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, it was good, I suppose.
Net benefit, maybe?
At least for Stamplecoins, right?
Thank you, Ace.
Appreciate it.
Paranoid Coders here with 2,000 sats.
Coming in hot with the boost.
No message, just value. Appreciate that a lot.
JPEG81 came in with 2,200 sats.
Put some macaroni and cheese on there too.
No message, just value as well.
And Kiwi Bitcoin guides here with 4,567 sats.
He's a good guy.
He's a real good guy.
No, he's a great guy.
For anyone interested in starting a node from scratch, there's a guide I wrote last year.
Oh, I remember that.
It's a little technical as you have to do it all yourself,
from sourcing hardware to installing Linux and running it all through the command line.
but it includes Bitcoin Core,
Electrum Server,
and it connects to your wallet.
I've done this now on two servers.
It's a lot of fun.
If you like this kind of thing,
it's also great to be a sovereign actor
on the Bitcoin network.
Kiwibitcoinguide.org
and you can probably find it from there.
It did get caught off in the message
but the advantage to doing that
even if you didn't run it in production
would be just to understand the components.
That would be very useful.
Nice tip, Kiwi.
Thank you for remembering and reminding us.
Nakamoto 6102 is here with 3,500 sats.
Thank you for helping us help you help us all.
And he just says thank you for the value.
Well, thank you very much.
You're doing very well.
Sarah Jade's here.
Hey, Sarah, back with 3,466 sats.
Let's go.
Another great episode.
Shameless promotion.
If anyone is going to be in Vegas for the Bitcoin conference,
I'll be performing with my full band
and a stacked lineup of other value-for-value artists.
Yes!
Make it show.
I love this.
The artists will be at the, and DJs, at the Nos Vegas After Party.
It's on Tuesday night, April 28th, at the We Are All Scream on Fremont Street.
Dropping the link below to grab your tickets.
Hope to see some awesome Bitcoiners and Nosters there.
And I will put a link to that at nosvegas.shakespeare.wtf.
I'll try to remember, put a link to that in the show notes too.
great to hear from you Sarah Jade and good luck with the event feel free to promote in the future
I love actually I think all I think anybody listening that's going to a bitcoin event should
be promoting it here in the booth cheap way to get some airtime and promote a bitcoin event to
the community I'm not going to stop you well I mean probably not yes that's amazing I've got the
same combination on my luggage all right thank you everybody who boosted in including those of
you below the 2000s at cutoff and of course our sat streamers you all 26 of you collectively
stacked 51,932 sats.
That's not too bad, really.
When you combine it all together,
especially with our baller booster,
we stacked a grand total of 278,674 sats.
Not too bad for 99, really.
This is a nice uptick from what we've seen
for the last few weeks.
Thank you, everybody who supported episode 99.
Got in.
Got in before the 100 series you did.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate you.
you're doing a good job if you'd like to boost the show fountain.fm makes it really easy these
days but there's also a plethora of self-hosted options with albi hub you can even connect fountain
albi hub you can also subscribe via membership support the show on autopilot fountain makes that
possible with your sats or your fiat, or you can go to jupiter.party and support the network shows
over there. Thank you everybody who supported the show this week.
all right i waited this long it's time for my favorite fud of the week this one hurt this one
hurt because it came from an economist who's well-liked, noted for calling the 2008 global
financial crisis before it happened. His name is Steve Keen, and he recently appeared on the
Diary of a CEO podcast. And even though, as he says, he knew about Bitcoin early on, he said,
no, no thank you, even when it was cheap, because he's known forever it ultimately is going to zero.
I wanted to come back to something you actually said earlier. You talked about
Bitcoin briefly. I've heard you say that you think Bitcoin's going to zero.
Yeah. Okay, this is worrying. I think I have some Bitcoin.
You're an economist. You're saying that Bitcoin is going to zero. Why?
Ultimately, because of its reliance upon energy. I mean, you know, Max Kaiser and Stacey Herbert,
have you met them at all? No.
They were sort of the original proselytizers for Bitcoin, and they're now living in,
I think, El Salvador, which has adopted Bitcoin as a form of currency.
When they told me about Bitcoin, I could have bought it for a pound of Bitcoin, which I would
have been bloody wealthier than you if I'd done that. The reason I didn't was they explained that
the way that the public ledger is kept safe is that it takes too much energy to break it.
So each transaction requires 10 minutes of computer processing time globally, by the looks of it,
to actually create an extra Bitcoin. And that means it's too expensive for somebody to try to
break the ledger. That means it's got a huge requirement for energy use. And I believe,
knowing what I know from climate scientists, that at some point we're going to realize we're using
far too much energy on the planet. We've got to cut the energy consumption. And the two easiest
things to cut out to reduce energy consumption are cryptocurrencies and international travel.
Yeah, wait till he finds out about AI. This is a really interesting conclusion to come to,
is that, well, we have to cut out energy use
because it always seems so anti-human to me.
You can go look it up.
The more energy a civilization uses,
the more productive and happy the people are
because as the people are expanding
and doing more things,
they're consuming more energy.
I've said it a million times
and I'm not even joking.
You don't get warp drive transporters,
replicators and holodecks
without using more energy.
You don't get super intelligence
without using more energy, right?
You don't get faster trains and whatnot
without using more energy.
Bitcoin security doesn't come from trust in governments or CEOs or some unspoken social contract.
It's demonstrable, irreversible expenditure of a universally scarce real-world asset, energy.
And the beautiful thing is that security scales with the energy that Bitcoin spends.
A higher hash rate means more energy, which makes 51% of tax exponentially more expensive.
And the network, which is over a trillion dollars in market cap, is protected precisely because attacking it requires outbidding the entire global mining fleet on energy costs.
It simply becomes more economic just to mine Bitcoin.
And that system is something we can all trust to store our value in, not just because somebody says, this is money, bro.
We say so.
And I think what also he's missing is that miners run when Bitcoin's price covers their electricity and hardware costs.
Do you understand that?
Miners only run when Bitcoin price covers electricity and hardware costs.
Sure, they can run on loans for a bit, but the economics are the economics of it.
And the difficulty adjustment self-corrects every two weeks.
If energy becomes too expensive relative to rewards, the hash rate drops until profitability returns.
So the system literally cannot overconsume energy beyond what the market is willing to subsidize via the price And that comes from the value that the market finds in the Bitcoin It literally cannot over because the market will only pay so much It self He also misses that miners are the most flexible location
demand for electricity on Earth, something that AI and data centers still can't achieve.
It seeks out mining. It has to by the cost of it, the nature of the business.
is the cheapest, most stranded or curtailed power, like flared natural gas, excess hydro
or solar somewhere that can't be transmitted.
It monetizes stranded energy that the grid just economically or just physically cannot
transport.
He also, of course, is completely ignorant, I would imagine, to the fact that estimates
now show 52% of Bitcoin mining now uses sustainable resources.
And that's up a lot over the last few years, so it'd be easy to miss that.
And even if you go by some of the more exaggerated estimates, like Cambridge, Bitcoin's energy use is tiny globally, less than, I don't know, 0.6%. I think it's around 0.5% right now.
gold mining, banking data centers, the military,
they all consume comparable or more amounts of energy
and you really cannot verify the security.
Like, look what's happening right now in the strait.
Look what's happening with Iran.
It's a totally different dynamic
and the energy use is key to that.
And the answer to the future
is that we all stop using energy.
That's just not how it works.
So Bitcoin's something for the future.
And I just, I think it's interesting
that he's known about it since it was a pound a coin.
And he's dismissed it the entire time.
Imagine that.
Wow, that is some conviction, though.
Whew, got to be impressed by that.
Well, Morgan Stanley has announced and launched their Bitcoin ETF, MSBT.
It hit the market today.
And it's really going to consider the new ETF king entering the chat.
And it is from the one, the only big Morgan.
The firm taps its almost $6 trillion in advisor-led client assets.
Morgan Stanley has an army of 16,000 financial advisors.
Up till now, they were mainly offering eligible clients access to IBIT or FBTC.
But Morgan Stanley is looking to offer a cheaper homegrown Bitcoin ETF, which will trade under the ticker MSNT.
Let's talk more about this issue with Bloomberg's Isabel Lee.
When does this new Morgan Stanley Bitcoin ETF begin trading?
Today!
Yeah, and cheaper than IBIT, which is actually pretty aggressive.
Now, Eric Blockhouse of Bloomberg calls it the, quote, big boy launch.
He says it's arguably the biggest Bitcoin launch since the ETFs began at all.
It's the biggest ETF launch since the ETFs began, period.
He says, here is my predictions.
They're going to have $5 billion in assets under management in the first year, and they're going to get $30 million in day one volume.
The global head of ETFs at Morgan Stanley said, quote, we really wanted to show our commitment by having that lower fee.
This is from Allison Wallace, I guess.
The demand, especially from high net worth investors, has been quite high.
We viewed it at a firm level.
This is an asset class that isn't going away.
In other words, they don't want to sell BlackRock or other ETFs anymore.
They went in on the action directly because they have come to the determination
Bitcoin is not going away and there is a market demand for it.
So Eric was expecting about $30 million in day one volume.
Well, as I sat down to record, it's already at $27 million and the market wasn't closed yet.
So it's definitely going to clear Eric's estimate.
It may actually end up closer to $50 million in day one.
That would, if it happens, put it in the top 1% of ETF launches in history.
We'll see.
Now, Mike McGlone of Bloomberg, on the other side of the Bloomberg analyst column,
is saying that Bitcoin is headed to 10K once again.
This is the second time he's made this call.
Maybe he's missed out on the big ETF news.
But he has restated his call.
He says that as long as Bitcoin remains below 75,000,
it's more likely to go to 10,000.
At the heart of his bearish argument is a simple idea.
Bitcoin's rally from 2020 to 2025
was artificially inflated by global liquidity.
He thinks that liquidity is unwinding
and Bitcoin is going to revert to historical numbers like it was back then before liquidity
pumped. Now, this has been a constant debate on the Wolf of Wall Street podcast where
Mike is on there and his co-host, among other things, James Lavish,
finally kind of put Mike McGlone in his place on this $10,000 prediction because
when Mike goes out on Bloomberg, a lot of people do listen to Mike. He's been around for a long
time. And these old timers that have been doing this have got quite a following in the market,
especially by the hard money people.
And so it was interesting to see James Lavish
finally give some pushback to this prediction
that Mike McGlone's been making over and over.
There are people who really truly do believe
and they're in my comments all the time
that Bitcoin's over.
It's the boomer coin of crypto.
It doesn't do anything.
It doesn't have yield.
It's not flashy enough.
It's too expensive.
It's not going to go up 100x
like some of these other things.
and it's just not a lottery ticket.
And I get that, you know,
and that's what a lot of younger investors
are looking for lottery tickets.
We've talked about this before.
And so, and it's not a lottery ticket.
It's an escape valve from the system
that is oppressing you every day with inflation.
It's a way to not get poor slowly.
So, you know, but that's fine.
you have a different opinion. Just want you to be, you know, don't want you to be disingenuous
about it. And that's why Dave is calling you out on it is that that $10,000 level is just, I mean,
come on, we had every single thing happen. And in, like you said, back in 2022, 2023,
and, you know, it, it never got below 16,000 or touched maybe right there. And since that time,
think about just the sheer amount, not just money printing, the sheer amount of expansion
of money supply and debt in the entire system. So unless we have a collapse of all of that
and the liquidity, so you have to add the money and liquidity and the debt together to get the
liquidity, we're not going anywhere near 16,000 in this. And I don't know about gold, but I can't
imagine that going down to a thousand. That might be like saying gold's going to be at what, 500?
It just doesn't make sense. Now, you have a different philosophy and you've made that extremely
clear on here that your philosophy is that Bitcoin is just one of thousands of options in the
cryptocurrency space. And I hear you. I understand why you think that. You know that Bitcoin's
different, but you believe that the perception of it, and please correct me if I'm wrong,
but the perception of it doesn't matter. It's the only thing that matters, is that the people
out there are looking for something to put their money in and the whole crypto space is, you know,
kind of looped together. And part of that is true. And part of that is why that perception has to
gradually change. But you can't get away from the fact that this coin has also become extremely
political. And it's been made to be political. And it's got caught up in so many different nonsense
things. So Dave is right. I agree that we've got to get through this quantum fear. And that's going
to take some time and some clarity. But it's also going to require a genuine explanation
from places like Bloomberg and CNBC and Fox and all the rest of them with genuine, Mike,
that they understand how it's different and why it makes sense to be a store of value.
Because you're going against the major banks who have been fighting it all along,
who now agree. And they're not using it just because it's just something that they can sell
their investors, they're actually building around it. And that's a key development that's happened
over the last two years. And it's taken time and it's going to continue to take time.
On mainstream, it's it, it's over. It's going mainstream. And that means something completely
different. It means that it really is becoming something closer to digital gold. When it gets
there, we don't know, but I have a very high degree of confidence that it will. It's just,
you know, we all have to be truthful. And your truth is a little bit different than mine is.
All right, let's check in on the state of the network. I'm wrapping up at block height 944,232.
Bitcoin's coming in at a cold US dollar, one US dollar. I don't even really know how to say that.
One U.S. dollar? No.
71,130 in U.S. dollars. How about that?
That makes our sats per dollar. This is the number I really like.
1,406 sats to one U.S. dollar.
We're down 43.6%. Up a little bit, actually.
That kind of feels nice, doesn't it?
We're up 4.4% for the last seven days and just 3.7% in the last 24 hours.
And over the last 30 days, Bitcoin's actually up 2.6% in the price.
All right. Not too bad.
Current estimated difficulty change is a downward adjustment of 4.6%.
There's also, again, a decline of nodes on the network.
Got to get out there and node up.
Well, we are doing our part, I suppose.
Our community is doing our part.
I do like to see that.
Let's see.
Other than that, I think, I would say everything's looking pretty standard.
Fee standard, up sometimes, a little bit.
But otherwise, looking pretty standard.
And I'd say, strong as always.
Well, come say hi at LinuxFest Northwest, won't you?
It's going to be April 24th to the 26th at the Bellingham Technical College in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
We'll be doing a Linux Unplugged live on Sunday, which you can come to.
And of course, you have links to go check out at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
this was episode 99
my goal here was a show
that doesn't get distracted
by the emotions around
what's happening
but focuses on the signal
so that way you can plan
for your friends
your family
yourself
your business
whatever it might be
for your future
so let me know how I did
with the boost
and of course I want to know
if you side with Luke
or with Lynn
and of course any ideas
for how to celebrate
for episode 100
I'm going to leave you now
with a value for value track
this song is a lot of fun
it's 95% of your sats
will go to the artist when you boost.
If you see the album art change,
then you know your podcast app supports it.
Of course, things like Fountain FM and Podverse
and Cast-O-Matic and many others do.
So you can boost while the track is playing
and 95% of the sets automatically go to them.
And this week, it's You Say You're a Warrior, Are Ya?
And it's by Longley.
See you next week for episode 100.
All the way for yourself, let's see, I do
Well, if you dance to the end like a hurricane
Staring at your pain, shadow the pain and grief
Act with me
Still swimming in the deep, crawling
Say what you feel is to be an amenity pouring
Sometimes it feels you can't move on
You say you're a warrior, are you?
She'll say you're a warrior, oh yeah
Yeah, on your feet, may I choose from a factory
On Monday morning, a car in a semi-tool
You ain't got time to realign, to redefine
I'll change what you've got in mind
And breathe, are you with me?
Be the one who finally scored
Be the one beat the one beat goal
And breathe how to win it
Look through the constellations
Fire vibrations
And the only way to do it
Be there and to prove it
Be the same around what do I go
Sometimes it fills you there
Move on
Sometimes it fills you there
Move on
You say you're a warrior
Higher, higher, higher, higher, higher, higher.
guitar solo
This is what the seaside sounds like to child 3 o'clock in the morning brothers and sisters
to say you a warrior you you you
you
uh
"'do you say you're a warrior?'
You say you're a warrior, ah-yeah, ah-yeah
Thank you.