Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 85.
My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com.
As I start rounding out the final episodes of the year, if you can believe it, once again,
we have a big news day on a recording day.
The Federal Reserve chair came out of his cave and declared the price of fiat has changed once again.
But the price of fiat isn't the real story for Bitcoin.
It's what comes next for Bitcoin after these Fed cuts have been digested and the big news that really came out of the conference starts getting felt in the market.
I think you could make a pretty solid argument that they shouldn't be lowering rates at all.
I think I would hear that argument. I'm going to try to argue the other side today.
I recognize that compound inflation over the last five years is at 28.32 percent,
according to Truflation. So let's call it 30%. On average, everything is 30% more expensive
over the last five years. That's five years of inflation increases. And at the same time,
the S&P 500 is doing great. Markets got plenty of money, apparently, for AI to continue to flow.
Gold's ripping. So cutting rates, that could make inflation worse. That would make the market pump
even harder, which could lead to a bigger bubble. I get your argument. But let's set all that aside
for a moment, because while those things are true, I think it's also true the Fed still had to cut
rates. That 30 percent inflation over the last five years is crushing the people. It's five straight
years of getting everything more expensive, your gas, your homes, everything. And thankfully,
some prices are coming down, but not enough. People are still feeling the pinch. And it's all
been building into one term that's emerged to sort of sum up the entire situation. Everybody's just
calling it affordability. Turning now to the economy, President Trump in recent months has
dismissed concerns about affordability as a Democratic hoax. But this evening in the
battleground state of Pennsylvania, he is focusing on the crisis and touting the administration's
efforts to lower the cost of living. Chief White House correspondent Nancy Cordes is with the
president in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. As he prepared to tout his economy,
President Trump was asked to grade it. A plus. A plus. A plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. But at
Shields Family Market in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the shoppers are tougher graders. They always go
to old Scranton, don't they? They love going to Scranton and asking the boomers. I would think a
B minus.
You're definitely failing.
Oh, I would give it a D.
Boy, the grocery store has got to be, you know, the place to find the most negative sentiment possible.
Anne-Marie Hadley is a retired educator.
The economy is not good.
I don't see promises being kept.
And the promise was to bring prices down.
Oh, absolutely.
Uh-huh. Yep, it was.
One of the biggest cell phones the Trump administration ever made.
They should have never promised to bring prices down.
And if I were Trump, I would be countering that narrative right now, say, all right, you want all the prices, all the prices to come down? Fine. Then you're going to get a recession. You want everything to come down in price? Then you get a recession. That's how it works. If I was the president, that's what I'd be saying right now. I'd be making it really clear. You're economically illiterate. You have no idea how market pricing works. And if you want the pricing to come down, then everyone's going to suffer. Say it like that, right?
Instead, they're like, well, but we're getting energy down and we're getting this thing over here down.
And what about your eggs?
And they're basically they're playing a chicken shit game here that is a loser because they made promises during the campaign that prices would come down.
And people want that.
And they're too stupid to realize how this works.
The economy is not good.
I don't see promises being kept.
And the promise was to bring prices down.
Oh, absolutely.
The president insists he is keeping that promise.
Grocery prices are down.
Energy, energy has come down incredibly.
But government data tells a different story.
This is a cute little game they play here.
So when Trump says energy, he's being sort of broad.
He's speaking of oil, right?
Because that's what he's made an impact on.
Oil prices are down.
Gasoline prices are down.
So when he says energy, he's referring to the input cost to the economy for transporting goods.
That's why he's talking about energy.
But they then, I believe, intentionally misunderstand this to talk about electric prices, right?
Like, of course, because everybody's electricity price is going up because of the data centers.
So it's a fun little word game we get to play.
Grocery prices are down. Energy, energy has come down incredibly.
But government data tells a different story.
The cost of energy is up 2.8 percent over 12 months.
Overall inflation was falling, but drifted back up when Trump imposed tariffs.
tariffs. That was a statement that J-Pow underscored today in his press conference,
which we'll get to in just a moment. Now, I'm actually kind of sympathetic to this argument.
It is way too damn expensive to go grocery shopping. It is way too damn expensive to eat
and do the basics. Gas coming down helps, but at this point, it's just not enough. I don't think
they're being completely fair to the president, though. He's being slightly nuanced in his
affordability hoax comments. I can't say affordability hoax because I agree the prices
were too high. I can't call it a hoax because they'll misconstrue that. But they use the word
affordability. And that's their only word. They say affordability. And everyone says, oh,
that must mean Trump has high prices. No, our prices are coming down tremendously from the
highest prices in the history of our country. Heard at the highest prices ever. And we're
bringing them down. We inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.
Well, it was bad inflation, right? That's also partially what got him elected. So you can complain about it. But if it wasn't for that bad economic situation, you may not have gotten the job. Now, I don't think it's fair to pin the fact that we can't bring all the prices down. They have done a pretty good job getting energy down. I mean, I can't believe the price of gas right now. But despite all of that, it's not enough. It's not enough. And even though inflation continues to be hot, you know, running around 3%, the people are crushed and they need something to change.
And we're starting to feel it in different sectors.
And over the year, over 2025, I've covered the various sectors that seem to be going through a localized recession.
And now we're looking at basically a really rough patch for homes after essentially four years of bad market.
Welcome back.
We're heading into the slow season for the housing market.
But this year could be worse than expected as sellers seem to be giving up.
Diana Olek joins us to explain why.
Diana.
Hey, Micah.
Yeah, when a seller takes their home off the market, it's called a delisting, and they're now happening at an unusually high rate.
Delistings in October, which are reported with a one-month lag, were up 45.5% year-to-date and up nearly 38% from October of last year.
That according to a new report from Realtor.com.
Now, this is the highest delisting year since they began tracking in 2022.
Delistings began to rise in June and have remained elevated for five straight months.
About 6% of active listings have been coming off the market each month, which is typically something you only see in the dead of winter.
All right, so why is it happening?
Uncertainty in the economy, stagnant and high mortgage rates, and of course a still pricey market.
Locally, Miami, Denver, and Houston are seeing the highest ratio of delistings compared with new listings.
Those are also markets that saw some of the biggest price gains in recent years.
Oh, imagine that.
So you got the housing market teetering.
You got employment areas just not looking so good outside of tech and medical.
There's a lot of areas when you zoom in that aren't banking and tech and military that are struggling.
And now the housing market.
I happen to think the Fed watches these types of things.
And it all sets the stage for decisions they have to make.
And there's this pomp and circumstance around the entire thing.
The entire day today.
This is Wednesday, December 10th, 2025.
The entire day today, by the mainstream media, it has essentially been JPOW Day.
Welcome back. Markets have turned higher. Take a look.
We are about an hour away from the opening bell for a Wednesday.
The Dow Industrial is now up 35, and the NASDAQ is up 5.5.
The Federal Reserve's rate decision is happening today at 2 p.m. Eastern.
Of course, this is the final big event of the year for the markets.
The yields, however, are higher right now, even though everybody's expecting a cut in rates.
The yield on the 10-year now sitting at 4.20%.
concerns that interest rate cutting cycles could be coming to an end
and that we will have a hawkish tone from Jay Powell.
Well, a hawkish tone it was.
To some extent, the Fed cut rates by another 25 basis points.
That makes it the third rate cut of 2025,
which brings the Fed funds rate to 3.5, 3.75 percent range
and makes it a grand total of 75 basis point cuts in total
since September. All right, pretty standard stuff. I think I kind of understand why they had to do
this. The market would have really had a fit if they hadn't. But that wasn't the big news.
I think we expected that. Market was expecting it. Polymarket had like 94% odds. The big news
is that just as quantitative tightening came to an end on December 1st, today we learned that the
Federal Reserve plans to buy $40 billion worth of treasury bills over the next 30 days starting on
December 12th. $40 billion in T-bills, short-term T-bills. This will inject cash directly into the
financial system. However, I'm going to let you know right now, this isn't Lambo money. This is
Uber ride money, okay? So this isn't going to send us to the moon. It's going to be a rather
limited impact, I would guess. It's hard to really gauge these things, clearly. This is my speculation
here, but you have to make kind of adjustments in your thinking when we come to these numbers.
When I say $40 billion worth of treasury bills, $40 billion sounds like a lot of money. And it is,
no doubt about it, but it's all relative, right? Because the treasury market itself is somewhere
between $7 and $8 trillion. So this works out to be about a buy of $1.3 billion a day
in a $7 to $8 trillion treasury market.
It makes a difference, but it isn't Lambo money.
So this won't significantly boost lending.
This isn't going to significantly boost liquidity here.
It may, though, provide a subtle tailwind that's kind of hard to perceive.
I think the reality is we could call this baby quantitative easing,
quantitative easing light.
It's definitely money printing, but it's not the full-on quantitative easing,
the big print, as some call it. This is more like the gradual print. However, I was reading
through the language of the Fed decision, and they left a door open here. And when the Fed
leaves a door open, they almost always take it. I would be willing to bet, again, total
crisp speculation here, but I would be willing to bet this low-key T-bill buying goes beyond
just the next 30 days. So in there, in the conference, J-Pouse is going to be for 30 days.
starting on December 12th goes 30 days. I would be willing to bet in March this thing's still going
and maybe a little bit longer because they kind of had some Fed language in there
that sort of implied this might be a thing that continues. So that's interesting. And again,
not a huge deal. And it's something they could turn up. You know, maybe it's 40 billion this
month. Maybe it's 60 billion the month after. Who knows? Maybe not. There were three Fed members
that dissented on the rate cuts, still pretty unusual for that kind of level of dissent.
And J-Pow suggested that the rate cuts may be down or done for now. So don't really expect
anything in January. However, he did add that rate hikes are not the base case. In other words,
rate hikes are not likely. And another little nugget that he snuck in there, a J-Pow nug.
He says that they are currently estimating that the federal government is overstating job gains
by 60,000 in recent months. So he thinks somewhere between 50 to 60,000 jobs per month
are not actually there in the reports. And that just like we were seeing in the Biden administration,
we're going to see a revision about once or twice a year that will be, he believes,
about 60,000 per month to get removed whenever that revision happens. That's huge. And it's
fascinating because he doesn't know. He says what we kind of are guessing, like when we guessed
before we got it right. So we're guessing again and we think we're going to get it right. But then
five minutes before, he'll tell you how data-driven they are and how everything is so data-dependent.
But every time they ask him to kind of get down deep on something, it starts sounding real vague
to me. Like, oh, I don't know. We're just kind of guessing. We don't even know if the data is
valid actually. So then we also have this fudge factor where we just kind of make up our own
fudge factor number. So that way we get good data. Like, that's not how that works, guys.
That not how that not being data dependent It it so funny because they give off this era of this aura of of of professionalism and data nerds with their dot plots and all of these things that they take into consideration
But the little bits and cracks that they do show us often reveal they don't really have good jobs numbers.
They don't really have they don't really have good inflation numbers either.
In fact, sometimes they kind of get it wrong, which I don't know.
I mean, there is an argument.
Maybe Trump, you know, Trump wants to get rid of Jay Powell still.
even now. And we have to acknowledge that all of this is just going to all come to a head in a few
months in May when it's time for Jerome Powell to step down. And the new guy, Trump's just come
out and said it's a litmus test that the new guy has to cut rates. I want to ask about interest
rates because a lot of Americans agree with you that they're too high. You're going to pick a new
Fed chair soon. Is it a litmus test that the new chair lower interest rates immediately? Yes.
Well, this guy should too, but I think he's a combination of not a smart person and doesn't like Trump.
Okay.
So he's stepping down in May.
We're still hitting him.
In fact, we're even threatening to nullify his assignment.
We have a lousy Fed chair.
And by the way, it looks, you're going to have to check this, please.
I just heard it could be that all four commissioners in the Fed signed by Biden, including too late.
You know, you know, too late is too late, pal. Jerome too late. He's too late with his interest rates for a reason.
He's a bad guy. He's not a smart guy, but he's a bad guy. Too late.
Is he going to lower rates a little bit? Finally. Did you see what Jamie Dimon respected guy said?
You got to get the rates down, you schmuck, you know?
You know, I don't know. I mean, I honestly am not sure if Trump realizes this, but it's an entire committee. So your best case scenario is to get a guy in there who can just whip consensus up like, I don't know, like somebody who's extremely inspirational.
Like, it's not really usually the type that goes for the Fed chair.
They don't tend to be the type that whips a crowd up into a fever and gets them all to go in a certain direction.
They're kind of, you know, usually accountant types.
I'm not sure what he's expecting because Jay Powell alone does not set the rates.
Now, maybe the next guy in there can really make some good progress and pressure.
I'm not sure.
And I don't mean to come across as some huge Jerome Powell defender.
I think he probably is a little late on the rate cuts.
In fact, I think he's blown it several times on inflation.
Some of his timing on the rate cuts have looked political, even if they're not.
And his timing is off.
I have this clip from May 4th, 2024.
Just over a year and change ago.
And J-Pow was saying he doesn't see the stag or the flation.
You might remember this clip.
I played it in the show.
And I said this was going to be wrong.
And here we are.
and inflation is still over their target, still over 3%. It's still hot and we're cutting rates.
So it's probably going to go up more. This is Jay Powell on May 4th, 2024, saying we don't have a
stagflation problem. In addition, I would say, you know, most forecasters, including our forecasting,
was that last year's level of growth was very high, 3.4% in, I guess, the fourth quarter,
and probably not going to be sustained and would come down.
But that would be our forecast.
That wouldn't be stagflation.
That would still be to a very healthy level of growth.
And, of course, with inflation, we will return inflation to 2%.
And that won't be.
So I don't see the stag or the flation, actually.
The lever you have pulled breaks.
He's not in service.
Sorry about that.
Please make a note of it.
Seems like you were wrong, J-PAL.
Now, I'm not saying I think Trump's right either at the same time because getting somebody else in there might not make all the difference.
He hasn't nailed it every time.
This has been a very hard time to be the Fed chair, and his legacy is going to be a little rocky.
But the rate hikes, they're over.
I guess we are now into a period of at least lower interest rates for an extended period of time, even if we don't see them come down again until the new Fed chair.
3.75 percent, and there's still room to bring those down.
There's still room.
Another 50 basis points even could be in there.
Who knows?
Well, Michael Saylor's real competition showed up this week.
Strategies' most serious competitor is probably Jack Maulers and 21.
21 officially went public.
Jack got to go down to Wall Street.
He got to press the buttons and he got to chat with the folks on the financial news.
Seems like a pretty big day for Jack Mahlers and 21.
CBC Exclusive is the founder and CEO of 21 Capital, Jack Mahlers.
Jack, welcome. Good to have you.
Thanks for having me, guys. How are you?
I'm good. Largest here, but third largest total in terms of corporate Bitcoin treasuries?
That's right.
And how did this all start?
The company's co-founded by Tether and I.
So I was telling you before we aired, there's not too many people that were around in Bitcoin 13 years ago.
Tether and I were some of those folks and we co-founded the business.
We're not a treasury company.
We've been classified that we're not like strategy in the sense that we do have a lot of Bitcoin, but we're also building a business.
We're building an operating company.
We're bringing a lot of Bitcoin products to market with the intent to have cash flow.
It's funny.
He's clearly he's trying to differentiate.
First, he's going to start with strategy.
We're not doing what strategy is doing.
We're building a business.
Of course, strategy would say they're building a digital credit business.
That's exactly what Michael Saylor just said the other day.
But okay.
And then he's going to go after Coinbase.
I think that's a much better attack vector.
But I think with you've got Jack Mahler's, you've got SoftBank, you've got Tether, and you've got Bitfinex all involved in this company.
They're all involved with 21.
SoftBank, they're having a weak moment, but they like to spend money.
And Tether prints money, right?
And then Bitfinex with their connections.
and their team of people to network.
This really is a pretty good competitor to strategy.
By the way, I don't buy any of these stocks.
I just stack sats.
But I think it's fascinating to watch these guys try to launch
because what Jack's saying here is that 21 is going to try to offer products
to the market that use Bitcoin somehow.
And so we find ourselves, we think we can build a perfect world
between what is a Coinbase or a Robinhood and a strategy in a Bitcoin company.
We look at a Coinbase, we don't think they're a Bitcoin business.
They're a crypto business. We look at a strategy that's focused on Bitcoin, but doesn't have any products and doesn't have cash flow in the industry.
We want to live in the intersection of that. And we think, you know, Tether and I were very confident in our ability to deliver.
What would that mix look like, the part of the business that does give you cash?
So, listen, Tether is obviously the largest stablecoin issuer in the world, tons of cash flow.
I'm the founder of Strike, one of the biggest Bitcoin financial services firms in the world.
Bitfinex, a sister exchange of Tether. So we see many opportunities in brokerage, exchange, credit and lending.
I mean, to us, the opportunities are endless again. This is something we've been doing for over a decade.
Credit and lending. Isn't that interesting? Credit and lending. Isn't that what Strike's doing, Jack?
Jack? Oh, Jack, isn't that what Strike's doing?
Now, does that mean that 21 is going to become like a financer of Strike?
Perhaps they're going to use their 40,000 Bitcoin as a financial backing to provide liquidity to the Strike customers?
Does it mean that 21 is going to buy strike? What does that mean exactly? I'm not so sure. But it does sound like credit products and lending products will be some of 21's products. Now, Jack was then over on Bloomberg, I believe it was. That was CNBC where he's just doing the whole thing. Boop, boop, boop, boop, moving around, you know, because they all have booths down there on the floor at Wall Street. So Jack just goes from one shop to the next and gets to talk about his listing.
You know, when you get to, when you open, when you do the opening bell down there, you're a big deal for the day.
You get lots of pictures, lots of interviews.
So this is Jack's big day.
He goes on Bloomberg and they ask him, where's the Bitcoin price going?
I see the price of Bitcoin heading.
Higher, higher.
How much higher?
A lot higher.
My general framework from the highest level is human beings collectively.
We own about $900 trillion worth of stuff.
That's equities, the things behind us, real estate, precious metals, fine art, all of the things that we own.
Half of that we're using as a savings account.
We're owning the portfolio of companies or the art or the house to actually try and persist wealth into the future.
I think Bitcoin's going after that market.
It's going after a market of $400 to $500 trillion worth, and right now it's $2.5 trillion.
So I think in purchasing power terms, Bitcoin can go up 100 to 200 times more from here.
All right. So we know Bitcoin obviously is the most...
all right so we got baby quantitative easing rates came down again more digital asset treasury
companies are spinning up price seems to be recovering a little bit what is the second
order effect of all of this for Bitcoin. Well, friends, brace yourself, because I've always said
that Bitcoin is truly driven by the overall liquidity cycle, and it's not driven by a four-year cycle.
And I think we may be about to blow the doors off the four-year cycle theory. You see, if we're
going to go into a period of increasing liquidity, Bitcoin's going to respond to that. Four-year cycle
be damned. And the four-year cycle tells us right now that we should be entering a prolonged bear
market. And this is one of the topics that's being hotly debated in Bitcoin right now. Is the four-year
cycle actually over? Or some are suggesting perhaps the four-year cycle was never real at all.
Now, I don't know if I want to go that far, but I did want to get a couple of different takes on
this as we round out 2025, because I think this is going to be one of the defining questions of
2025 and 2026. We're either going to see this thing blow up or we're going to see it play out.
And this is ARK, I think it's just ARK Invest, ARK Invest's Kathy Wood on the four-year cycle
when she stopped by Fox Biz. I want to get your take on gold and Bitcoin as well, because gold
is doing so well this year, up 60%, nearly 60% for the year. Bitcoin has been a lot more choppy.
It's down just 20% in the last three months. You've mentioned this trade could actually flip-flop
next year, with gold facing downside risk and Bitcoin poised to outperform. Tell us about that.
Yes. So Bitcoin is behaving more like a risk-on asset. It has played the risk-off role at different
times during the European sovereign debt crisis, during our regional bank crisis. But right now,
it's risk-on. It is climbing another wall of worry, and that is the four-year cycle. We think
the four-year cycle is going to be disrupted. And what I mean by that is Bitcoin regularly
drops 75 to 90 percent in its early days. The volatility is going down. It's down about 30
some odd percent. And I think there's a fear of the four-year cycle. We think that the move by
institutions into this new asset class is going to prevent much more of a decline.
We may have seen the low a couple of weeks ago. Now, gold is more of a risk-off asset,
and that its rise, we think, is proof that we are climbing a wall of worry. Investors are using
gold as a hedge against geopolitical risk. And yet, if you look at what happened from the early
80s to the late 90s, gold went down as we were in the really the golden age for innovation,
ending with the internet. We think the same could happen now and that Bitcoin will remain a risk on
and re-engage. And this fear of AI hype will, I think it's good as an investor. I'm happy that
people are worried. But I think we will continue to lean into that because we've really just begun
the AI age. Well, yeah, that's easy to say because the country's hooked on the AI crack.
You can't stop the AI PAMP. That's the reality. You can't. You need that 1% of GDP and maybe next
year it's 1.5% or 2%, probably not 2, GDP. You have to have it. So they can't stop the PAMP.
And the downside is AI will continue to siphon money from Bitcoin.
People that are looking for a sure thing are going to go into AI because it's essentially going to be government backed by Project Genesis because they have to have that pump.
They have to have that pump.
They need GDP to get up.
They have to get GDP up just because of our debt and interest payments and our GDP to debt ratio.
They have to do it.
So the AI pamp continues because they need it.
boys in the tech industry lucky the way they position themselves this is what you need to
understand the microsofts and amazons and meta of the world all of them open ai all of them have
figured out how to make them quintessentially critical to the u.s economy essentially making
them government backed making them a sure bet like the banks have just it's it's it's not it's not
written down It just implicit There no choice So that means as investors they always like Kathy she going to continue to throw money at AI because it a sure thing at least for another
couple of years, at least, at least easily till past the midterms. They may struggle to keep it
going, but that's going to be their, that's going to be their goal. Now let's, let's switch from a
general market analyst like Kathy, who sometimes gets it right, sometimes gets it wrong. Let's
switch to Lynn Alden, who I've played before, but now she's got an updated take and Lynn always gets
it right. And of course, she's focused on Bitcoin. So are you in the camp of four-year cycle still
on cue, no real change in how these cycles have gone in the past? Or do you think that has shifted
some? My base case is the four-year cycle is no longer really relevant. It arguably hasn't been
relevant for the past cycle either. Early on, whenever the supply having happened, that was a
very big change to Bitcoin's kind of new supply coming out. Whereas now the annual supply inflation
rate is well under 1%. It's a lower supply growth than gold. I look at the four-year cycle
as something that mattered a lot in the beginning. In early days, miners dumping supply after
struggling with the halving, that moved the market. It took them a while to capitulate,
But when they finally capitulated, that supply moved the market.
But I agree with Lynn that that weight has faded.
But you've got to appreciate the implications.
See, with the ETFs, the four-year cycle became wobbly.
It became like a planet with an elliptical orbit.
It just was – and it got a little wobbly.
And then with the liquidity cycle that we're about to go through starting today,
Well, really starting December 1st and kicking up on December 12th and going into 2026 and especially in May when we get a new chair who's going to push for lower rates.
So the market will act accordingly because they're going to price in future action.
So perhaps even before rates have been cut, once we have a new Fed chair in, the market will start processing that.
So we have a real liquidity buildup.
So you have the ETFs that came along and kind of knocked the four-year cycle out of its orbit.
Everybody thought, OK, well, the four-year cycle just arrived early.
We just arrived early.
And then that was the explanation.
But when you look at the sheer amount of liquidity that's about to come in over 2026, I think it's going to destroy this four-year cycle.
Something that used to be real is going to be absolutely destroyed.
But this, you have to appreciate how baked in this has been to the Bitcoin thesis for years.
For a decade plus, all these whales that started selling in May and July, I bet a lot of them were betting on the four-year cycle.
And in this weird way, they kind of manifest it.
Narratives become reality.
But even soon, they will be like pissing in the wind, especially as a lot of them are apparently getting tapped out.
The whale selling is down.
Well, the price is down, too.
I suppose that might also change their calculus a little bit is that the price is down.
But I just think this is something we should take a moment with.
And if the four-year cycle truly is dead, it's a different Bitcoin.
It's a completely different Bitcoin.
I'm okay with that because I think it might actually mean a more stable Bitcoin.
You know, we used to see 80% drawdowns.
Now we're seeing 30% drawdowns.
Okay, I have to ask.
Have I convinced you? Will the liquidity star kill the four-year cycle star?
What do you think? Is the four-year cycle over?
Boost in. Tell me your thoughts and what you think the implications of that might be.
Is there a negative ramification of the four-year cycle coming to an end?
Boost in and let me know.
Well, you can support the show by doing what you do.
So don't go anywhere.
We have a lot more coming up.
But first, I want to tell you, if you want to buy sats on River, the best way to stack sats in the U.S., use my link in the show notes.
Doesn't cost you more.
Supports the show.
If you are all about self-custody, check out the Bitcoin Well, an amazing automatic self-custody platform here in the U.S. and Canada.
Now, if you want to spend sats, go from lightning to gift cards, hundreds of different gift cards, Bitcoin only platform.
Go to thebitcoincompany.com, but use the link in our show notes.
If you're ready to stack sats while you pay bills, passively stack.
Foldcard makes it happen.
And last but not least, if you need to get access to a little liquidity yourself without selling your Bitcoin, without a tax event, check out Salt Lending.
They make it great.
All right.
We have a lot coming up still in the show, including a new soft fork proposal.
and all kinds of other shenanigans.
And what I'm going to call is the debunk of the week.
I think I'll call it that.
We have so much more.
So all of that.
So if you want to support the show,
I'll have a link in the show notes.
You can do it passively.
four score and seven boosts ago yeah we do have some good good boosts good old boosts some good
boost. From adversary 17, we start
with, as our baller booster.
Hey, rich lobster!
Yep, but, not but.
Atversary 17 comes in with
99,152
sats. Yes,
buddy, thank you very, very much.
Appreciate that.
Adversaries writes, catching up regarding the poverty
line. I spent over $23,000
on housing myself, and I'm in
the Midwest in a rural area. What gets
me is that these so-called experts never update their formulas, even though everything is
constantly changing around them. Why do you think that is? It's a great, great point. In fact,
you'd think they'd be going on about how much work it is all the time and how they need more
money to stay up to date. Instead, you're right. They just sit with models from the 60s.
Huh. Interesting. Chris, I will buy you a BitX. Tell me which one and where to ship it. I'm
almost done setting up a pool server so we can have a JB pool. Oh my God. I love that idea.
extra bonus stats for the baby Chris clip.
Man, you'd buy me a, that is really generous.
I don't know.
I haven't, I'd love to get a minor going
and I'd love to do a little pool,
but I don't know which one to get.
I got to do some research.
That's such a great idea, JB Pool.
I'm so down for that.
Fun to get Brent doing it in the van too.
You know, warm up the van with a little bit axe.
Thank you, adversaries.
Appreciate that.
Baller boost.
you are our baller this episode and i'd love to take you up on that bit x i just don't know
anything really about it i'm such a noob you know what i mean thank you sir j cube came in with 60
000 sets i hoard that which your kind covered coming in hot with the boobs value for value
for you going to swap back to core i don't feel like we can risk adding censorship even if i hate
the idea of cats or worse on chain definitely would appreciate any guidance on configure to
Keep the bloat out.
Keep up the amazing work.
Love all the macro coverage.
Thank you, JQ.
Yeah, I mean, maybe core for the new years, huh?
Totally upending my plans.
I am beside myself with disappointment, actually, with knots and the soft fork debate.
Literally, literally makes me sick.
I hate it so much.
It's really, really disappointing and sad.
And yeah, so, okay, I'll be working on that.
And so when I do get that sorted out, I will share it with you.
Thank you, JQ.
YouTube, turd in the punch bowl comes in with 40,000 sats.
There's coffee in that nebula.
150,000 sats for a show you put together.
It ain't enough.
Keep up the good work.
You earn that bump like a meffer.
OK, I like the way you spell it.
There is a podcast called The Lemonade Stand.
They're mostly skeptics.
They don't talk Bitcoin very often.
In their latest episode, they talked about the X402 payment protocol.
They were so close to understanding Bitcoin, but just missed.
I'd be interested in your breakdown in response to their commentary.
Oh, do they actually talk about Bitcoin?
All right, I'll make a note.
Lemonade stand.
Yeah, it's funny.
I often hear podcasters in the Linux space talking about how there's no great way to fund open source software
or there's no great way to fund their podcast or content.
I just think, you're so close.
You know, there's this open source money you could use.
Thank you, turd.
I'm not sure if I heard the lemonade stand.
We'll check it out after the show.
Appreciate the boost, too.
Really do.
User 54549358 is here with 23,000 sats.
And they say Oklahoma's in the house.
Great.
Now, if you want to claim your username and your fountain profile and boost back, let me know how you were.
Appreciate that.
And thank you for the boost.
And hello, Oklahoma.
Nice to have you on board.
Marius is here with 21,420 sats.
Okay, I got you.
I got you.
Why you got to put numbers and letters together?
Why can't you just go f*** yourself?
Because it's fun.
It's fun.
Thanks for compressing the latest financial markets for us Bitcoiners.
Compressing.
Thank you, Marius.
Appreciate that.
All right, those are big boosters.
Thank you, everybody.
Gene Bean comes in.
I think he's using Nostra Wallet Connect from Fountain to boost 2,723 sats.
Boost!
Testing up, testing boosting from Fountain with Albi Hub and Nostra Wallet Connect.
Yes, the new Fountain beta is working on adding Nostra Wallet Connect.
He says, Chris, any suggestions for what to self-host to provide my own lightning address?
It's like me at mydomain.com.
I know I can have a custom Ailes with Albi, but I'm more interested in something I run connected to my self-hosted wallet directly.
He says, by the way, this boost did come from Fountain with my AlbiHub wallet and Nostra
wallet connect.
Oh, that's so great, Gene.
Regarding an LN address, the way I have done this on a node without Albi, and I will give
it probably four out of six, was LN bits.
LN bits, it's, and LN bits is actually kind of handy too, because you can set up some sub
wallets and things like, you get a couple other features you get with AlbiHub, but you
also can manage an LN address.
and I think it's probably worth
if you're not going to use AlbiHub
it might be worth taking a look at LNBits
but I am telling you from a somewhat foggy memory
on that one Gene
because I do solve that now
I do solve that now with AlbiHub
however I have a node
that is a totally self-hosted node as you know
and would love a solution for that
so I may be taking a look at LNBits too
if you give me a positive response
let me know how that goes
and thank you for the boost
Okie Dokie's here with 10,000 sats
It's over 9,000!
Hey, Chris, I wanted to thank you for the great signal you provide and for starting my Bitcoin journey over a year ago.
Nice. I always look forward to the next episode.
P.S. sent via AlbiHub on my NixOS home server.
I still can't believe this works.
Oh, that's so cool.
Yes.
Fun will now commence.
Well done, okie dokie.
That is really cool.
That's a really nice setup.
NixOS, AlbiHub, self-hosting it.
That's really good. Really good. Okie dokie. Thank you for the boost.
Beholder's here with 4,100 sats.
Best and most valuable Bitcoin podcast.
Wow. Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that.
Thank you for helping us help you help us all.
Yes. Appreciate it very much.
Nakamoto 6102 is here with 3,000 sats.
Oh, my God. This drawer is filled with Froot Loops.
Well, I do gift Bitcoin for the holidays.
The kids have a choice of either dollars or Bitcoin, and they always choose Bitcoin.
Thanks for the value.
Oh, that's a nice idea.
Give them a choice, huh?
I never thought about giving them a choice.
Let's just do it.
Yeah, kids, I'm still debating dad this year.
I've given mom Bitcoin before.
I probably shouldn't be saying this, but it's not much.
So if you're going to go wrench attack my mom, enjoy your $50 of Bitcoin or whatever.
And that's, you know, at different times, been different technologies.
And I've been meaning to ask if she still even knows where it is.
There's Sats card.
CoinKite makes a couple of different, like the one dime.
They make a couple of physical products you can gift to, but then you're also, you know, you're paying a premium because they're kind of expensive.
And then River makes it possible to gift via like a link, which is pretty easy if you're in the States.
Thank you, Nakamoto.
Appreciate the boost.
Paranoid Coders here with 4,000 Sats.
I got answers and I want some questions.
Do you bring up taxes at all when giving family members your Bitcoin as a gift or giving Bitcoin as a gift?
That's probably my biggest hesitation with giving out these days.
I'd almost rather give them some cash and help them learn how to buy Bitcoin from themselves, introduce them to custody and when it makes sense to them.
What would be the difference there tax wise?
I guess cost basis, a gift cost basis versus a purchase cost basis, I suppose.
I'm not inclined to do it that way just because the extra steps.
I just want to give them the Bitcoin.
hold on to this, don't lose it, talk to me again in five years.
Right? That's what I want to do.
The tax accounting for that, you know, it would be a capital gains for them.
And it would probably not be a great one for that.
But it would also be like giving somebody a gold bar or, you know,
some other asset silver something like that So there just when you get something for free you know having to pay 30 capital gains on it I mean yes you still paying it but it you got it for free
So I think as a gift, it's not a huge concern of mine.
Ideally, the conversation we would have
would be hold this for five years.
Maybe I give them a storage mechanism
or maybe, you know, for the amount,
maybe I trust something like river.
I don't know.
I haven't really come to a conclusion on that my own,
but you give it to him, you say,
hold on this for five years and five years we'll talk about how to spend it and maybe you can look
at you know options at that point you know maybe it's no big deal at that in five years maybe you
can throw it on the strike app in five seconds over the lightning network and take out a collateral
loan against it and maybe it'll be worth two grand so you can take out a grand or something
you know i there's this is hard to really know paranoid so i i don't worry about it too much
because they got something for free and even if they have to pay cap gains on if they want to sell
But that's one thing.
But two, if they're selling it outright, they probably didn't talk to me to begin with.
Something probably broke down before we got to that point.
It's a good question.
Thank you.
Turbo came in with 6,767 sats.
Turbo, huh?
I like it.
That's pretty funny.
Next caller.
Relatively new listener and loving the show.
Thank you for helping me find Ronald Jinkies.
The tunes are taking me back to my Amiga 500 retro gaming.
Oh, that's awesome.
As you can probably tell, I do love me the retro gaming.
I don't know what might have given it away.
Probably nothing.
Thank you for the boost.
Gene Bean's here with a row of ducks.
Oh, this went under a different accounting for you, Gene,
because the Noster Wallet Connect comes from your username with an Albie address, I think, or something.
He says, I had to re-
Oh, oof.
I've had to re-record a podcast episode, and I know how taxing that is.
Here's a drop in the bucket to help offset the additional labor for last week's episode.
Oh, thank you, Gene.
Appreciate you thinking about me.
Ed Broughton's here with 12,000 sats right on the nose.
He's a good guy.
He's a real good guy.
No, he's a great guy.
Merry Christmas, Chris, to answer your question.
Yeah, I share some sats for the holidays.
Here's some proof of work.
1,000 sats for each of the 12 days of Christmas, a 12,000-sat boost for TWIB.
Very, very nice.
Thanks, Ed. Appreciate that.
Philip is back with 3,333 sats.
Did you buy that from a certified vendor?
No message, just the value.
Thank you very much.
That's a spicy meatball.
Oh, and here's Boba.
Boba's here with 9,999 sets.
I don't understand what the heck is going on here.
Oh, he's picking up on my glitch thing I talked about.
He says bug versus glitch.
Aren't these just talking points that have often been rehearsed and echoed across the talking heads in support of some overarching narrative?
Even though Tom never said glitch, they still need to get that talking point out.
Remember, the media is supposed to tell you what to think. Yeah. Or maybe the most insidious version of that is the media likes to walk you down a path for you to form a conclusion that you will own. Right. And I think that's actually the most insidious thing, because once you once you make that final connection and you make the decision, you own it. You love it. Everybody loves their own creation.
So if they can get you to walk down a path and take you right to the conclusion without telling you the conclusion and allowing you to form that like any reasonable person would, given the path and information they just received and walked down, it's incredibly insidious if you think about it.
Also, thanks for going above and beyond.
Producing the same show twice in a row is rough.
Yeah, let me tell you, I was exhausted, too.
I took a beat and I said, the longer I wait, the harder this is going to get.
So I'm going to scratch the file recovery process and I'm just going to get started.
Regarding Bitcoin for the holidays, I set my wife up with a River account so she can start stacking sets.
Oh, yeah, that's a great idea.
I wish you could do a family account at River.
If she questions a component or if she has a question, if you question the infrastructure or a component, then you're probably not doing right.
Giving someone something they don't want or aren't ready for might be like giving them a holiday sweater in July.
Yeah, something that gets stored away and forgotten, he says.
A holiday sweater in July.
Yeah, you don't want your Bitcoin gift to be a holiday sweater in July.
You do not.
You want to make sure they're ready to receive it.
I think that's where some of my hesitation comes from, Bob.
I think you nailed it.
Thank you very much for the boost.
It's good to hear from you.
The Musos here with 5,000 sats.
This is the way.
I'm also in Australia, and I also use Hardblock.
Unlike Coinjar, they are Bitcoin only.
Ah, Hardblock is Bitcoin only, huh?
The MasterCard offering sounds appealing, and to be fair, I haven't read about it completely.
But my immediate concern is the tax implications. CoinJar's offering other cryptocurrencies is also unappealing to me. Yeah.
This is the way.
I agree. It's just a more complicated stack. When you just focus on Bitcoin, there's enough problems there, let alone all of the other blockchains and their technology stack and all that.
The tax implications of selling Bitcoin keep coming up. I think because we're getting closer to tax time, it's something people are thinking about.
Now, the reality is most of these platforms are going to give you a report at tax time with a cost basis.
And I will maintain that if you ultimately net more sats than you would have, even if you end up paying some capital gains tax, it's still worth it.
But of course, that's easy for me to say because I'm all in on Bitcoin and I hate capital gains tax too.
But if you could have a MasterCard that was linked to a line of credit where it was using Bitcoin as collateral to issue the credit, you're not selling the Bitcoin.
And that is not a tax event at that point.
So that I'm all about.
It's a little nuance there.
Thanks, Temuso.
Appreciate that.
Ace Ackerman's back with a row of ducks.
2,222 sats.
Investing in the best Bitcoin podcast in the universe.
Coming in hot with the boost.
Yeah, hot take there.
I like it.
Thank you, sir.
Appreciate it, Ace.
Bitcoin Focus is here with 3,000 sats.
Coming in hot with the boost.
Another hot boost.
Make it so.
Thanks, Picard.
How's Bitcoin dad doing?
Would be cool to get him on with an end of year episode review.
I was thinking that too.
Then I thought he may be enjoying not doing a podcast, right?
And he might not be following the news.
One of the things that can be nice is to not follow the news or let somebody else follow the news for you, which is an offer, which is a service I try to provide.
So I don't know how current he is on stuff, but I have been meaning to bring it up to him because I would love to have a chat just to kind of get his macro thoughts on stuff.
Thanks, Bitcoin Focus.
Appreciate you.
Hey, Kiwi Bitcoin guide is back.
Look at that with 4,567 sats.
Thank you for helping us help you help us all.
I gave my niece and nephew some Bitcoin for Christmas in 2022.
Turns out it was a great time to do that as it's gone nothing but up.
I gave them the same amount of fiat again last Christmas and explained how much it was worth less now in sats.
When I see them check and ask how their magic internet money is doing, I love it.
One of them is right into it.
So I send him sats and the quest to spend them at a local merchant.
Oh, and a quest to spend them at a...
Really?
Did he do it?
I've become the Bitcoin uncle.
You're doing very well.
That's great.
I would love to know if they've spent Bitcoin in the wild.
I'm trying to think if my kids have ever done that.
I don't think so.
No.
New life goal.
Unlocked.
Thank you, KiwiBitcoinGuide.
Cardboard warriors here with 8,500 sats.
I like you.
You're a hot ticket.
Originally, I have my node up and running.
Oh, officially, I have my node up and running, and I'm not a very techie person,
so I decided to go with the Raspberry Pi 5 running Umbral.
It took an entire month to sync.
The internet connection was good, and I did use an SSD,
so I'm not really sure what happened there.
But we're synced up now, and I'm proud to add another node to the network.
Love the solid weekly informational stuff on the show,
and thanks for your service in podcasting.
Oh, thanks, Cardboard Warrior.
First of all, great name.
Second of all, no shame in that game.
It does take a long time on the Pi.
I think on the Pi, you're just,
you're comboed by probably IO,
even though it's SSD, right?
You're still going to be,
it's not like it's a super fast bus.
Low memory, lower CPU,
like it's just all kind of combos up,
but there ain't nothing wrong with it
once you get up and running
and it's a great starting point to learn more
and in the future,
if you like pick up a one liter PC off of eBay or Amazon for a hundred,
200 bucks,
when you're really into this,
you're going to have a substantial upgrade and all the skill sets you've
learned will apply.
So go for it,
man.
And thank you for letting me know.
And I appreciate the boost.
Hope to hear from you again,
cardboard retro gears here with 12,100 sats.
Reporting back regarding coin jar.
So far,
so good.
I've updated my Jupiter party subscription to use the attached mastercard
now.
So now I'm paying for my membership with sats.
Ah, that's great.
Few retail purchases this week too, and it's been working great.
Hurts to spend those sats, I'll have to say that.
Also flipping back to core with my config tweaks,
given the nots BIP444 shenanigans.
Buy store goods, stack sats.
Also been keen to know how you'll be handling gifting to non-coiners,
thinking I might do that this Xmas for family and friends.
The nice thing about Bitcoin is it can be a last minute gift.
I am probably taking advantage of that this year.
That might be one of the things I do.
In that circumstance, in the States,
River makes that really easy.
But there are Bitcoin gift cards and other ways to do it.
There's so many different ways.
If I had a budget, and I think every year I dream of this,
is I'd like to go spend $100 on CoinKite
and buy SATs cards and buy OneDimes or OpenDimes
and give those out.
but yet I haven't done it,
but I often will fall back on more electronic ways to do it because it just
makes it so quick.
I know it's not a great answer.
I'm a bad person when it comes to that.
When I first started giving away Bitcoin,
I even,
I even went on Amazon and I got a stupid gold coin,
a Bitcoin gold coin.
You know,
you can picture it in your head and I got in a little jewel case and I put a
little note in there.
Like one time I even put an SD card in there.
Like I did the whole thing and now I'm just,
It's like, yeah, there's some Bitcoin on account for you.
Enjoy your money.
It's horrible retro.
Thank you for the boost.
I appreciate it.
Orange Pill Lawyer 25 is here.
This is why I have bedtime wine.
This is one of those boosts that makes me want to drink bedtime wine.
8,888 sats.
Sorry to hear about the lost episode.
Thanks for everything you do.
Don't make me think about it, man.
Don't make me think about it.
I'm just kidding.
Thank you for the boost.
Cost Now is here with 2,500 sats.
The traders love the vol.
Always look forward to my Thursday commute and the latest episode of TWIB.
Keep up the great work.
Well, thank you.
You're so boost.
I will with these great boosts.
This is a great support week.
OB is here with 16,000 sats.
That's not possible.
Nothing can do that.
No message, just value.
I am programmed in multiple techniques.
No problem with that.
Thank you very much.
Hodler is here with 5,047 real good sats.
They're real and they're spectacular.
Hey, Chris, thanks for the value.
I've been thinking about ways to get my friends and family into Bitcoin, but no matter what I do, it doesn't click for them.
I know you get Bitcoin at the price you deserve, but it still feels like I'm failing the people I care about.
Thoughts.
Yeah, I know that feeling.
I guess everybody gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve.
I guess another way to look at that is everybody gets Bitcoin when it clicks for them.
And usually it clicks for them when it fills a need.
So if you can identify what need they have, what hard money solves for them, and usually it's something to do with inflation.
Sometimes it can be a long-term thing.
You give them some Bitcoin for Christmas this year, and then a couple of years, you ask them how that Bitcoin's doing.
It's not an overnight thing.
It's a slow, honest, open, easy conversation, and it still isn't always successful.
I mean, think about it from my perspective.
Hundreds of thousands of listeners on my other shows,
how many of them ever picked up Bitcoin?
A small percentage.
The ones that are listening to this show now.
It's really something, isn't it?
You can lead a horse to water, man.
You can lead a horse to water.
One of the things Bitcoin teaches us
is humans are a fascinating creature.
I'm really constantly amazed at how much I learn
about human nature, human behavior, ego, bias filtering,
I mean, all of it I learned through Bitcoin.
It's really something.
And so don't hurt your, like, you know, don't kick yourself.
Don't be hard on yourself is what I'm trying to say.
It can just be a really tricky thing.
Good luck.
Let me know how it goes.
Maybe the holidays are the time to do it.
And the musical coder rounds us out with 5,000 sats.
Because I'm the win.
He's adding some value on top of his Jupiter party membership.
Says keep up the great work.
This is the one true signal on the economy and Bitcoin.
Wow.
Thank you very, very much.
Thank you, everybody who boosted in.
All of you who boosted in below 2,000 sats, I have those as well.
The cutoff is 2,000 sats for just time on the show because even that can sometimes get a bit long.
But I am extremely grateful.
We had a couple of lean weeks, and you guys really stepped up, supported the show.
There is no sponsor.
This is a value for value podcast.
I make it for the people.
It's a show for the people by the people.
And you really, really came through.
44 of you stream sats as you listen thank you very much you collectively stacked 63 971 sats
not bad at all and when you combine that with our boosters we stacked 443 030 sats this week
Thank you, everyone.
Fountain FM is going from strength to strength.
Not only do they have the self-hosted option now with Nostra Wallet Connect,
but they also have a completely hosted infrastructure.
There's a bunch of great apps that make it possible to boost over at newpodcastapps.com.
We also have the Fountain FM membership program and the Jupiter.party membership program.
Thank you everyone who supports the show. It means the world to me. This is a work of passion. It's something I care extremely about. And I think one listen at a time, we could change the world. We're really, I mean, look where this is going to be in five, 10 years. Look back. Look back at what we learned together through this podcast. It's going to be something. It's going to be really something to look back at. Thank you everyone for making episode 85 possible.
Well, it's time to talk about the cat.
Before I do, I want to mention that BIP444 has received its official Bitcoin improvement proposal number, and it is now officially BIP110.
So BIP110 is out there and they're still debating it.
But this week, we're going to spend a little time talking about the cat.
Claire Ostrom wrote on X, quote,
After weeks of work, I'm finally sharing my BIP draft, The Cat, a non-monetary UTXO cleanup.
It's a soft fork proposal focused on preventing and cleaning up non-monetary UTXO spam.
Please read before commenting.
I'm seeking serious critical review.
So when you go to the GitHub, the readme towards the top states the following.
Again, I'm going to do just a little bit of quoting from the GitHub here.
It says that the project documents a soft fork consensus change and new spending rules intended to remove an existing snapshot-based set of non-monetary UTXOs, which they call MMUs.
I'm sorry, NMUs, non-monetary UTXOs, NMUs.
This will be done by protocols such as the ordinals and stamps protocols, making those UTXOs permanently unspendable and eligible for removal from the UTXO set.
In other words, it introduces a new consensus concept, a binary classification that marks some existing UTXOs as permanently unspendable and considers them to be non-monetary UTXOs.
The BIP is effectively a socially curated UTXO blacklist enforced by consensus based on external indexers to Bitcoin Core.
So you have to appreciate this is a massive philosophical and technological departure from Bitcoin's historical model.
Even if the target is spam, this is really something.
They're trying to solve UTXO bloat from inscription spam.
But to do so, they're introducing three dangerous precedents, in my opinion.
Here they are.
Number one, a consensus-enforced asset classification.
So we're going to start having consensus classify different UTXO transactions.
Perhaps the worst of them.
Number two, using an external indexer as a binding force in Bitcoin.
And then number three, the inconceivable thing that Bitcoiners are even considering.
Number three, retroactive destruction of settled property rights.
In other words, when you use the Bitcoin blockchain at the time you were following the rules,
somebody is going to come along after the fact and determine that that is not a valid
transaction anymore and invalidate it.
they're going to come along after the fact and steal your property rights.
That's retroactive selective UTXO confiscation by rule change.
Do you appreciate that?
Now, how are they doing this?
Well, this is the really dumb part.
They're using a specific version of Ordinal's indexing software called Ord,
Ord 0.240 with their patch,
to interpret inscriptions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
It's not part of the Bitcoin consensus software like Bitcoin Core.
It's an off-chain parser and indexer that interprets Bitcoin data according to the Ordinals protocol.
You have to understand Bitcoin itself has no concept of inscriptions, ordinals, spam.
These are things that are layered on top of Bitcoin by ORD or ORD.
So you have a third-party content classifier that becomes the consensus oracle for the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin would then inherit ORD's ideas of what is and not monetary uses.
And if there's any bug, any change, any bias in ORD, it becomes law on Bitcoin.
They're introducing a probabilistic filter with a false positive exclusion list embedded as a consensus object.
That's weird.
And every implementation you have to understand is going to have to be bug for bug compatible.
Any mismatch creates a silent consensus split.
That's not good because that's probably going to happen.
Consensus already hates things like floating points, time, external data, hash table behavior.
And it's definitely going to hate a fancy probabilistic memory structure.
This is not conservative engineering on Bitcoin.
This is not ossification on Bitcoin.
This is wild ideas bolted on top of Bitcoin.
And here's the crazy thing, too.
There's a value threshold.
It's arbitrary.
It's gameable.
It can be changed.
It does not make for a constant law.
Right now, they suggest a value max for things that could just be wiped off of 1,000 sats.
Attackers can easily bypass that.
You could batch inscriptions.
You could share.
There's a lot of ways.
So it doesn't even really stop future spam.
It targets past economic winners.
You have to understand how wild this is to me as a longtime Bitcoiner.
We talking about setting a precedent where we can rug coins for any reason I can believe this is even happening right now I really can And I because I have to think this is so crazy it not really going to go anywhere These people are going to be barking up this tree for a while
And I just can't believe this is really going to go anywhere.
I have links in the show notes.
I, what really gets me is how many of you out there,
not you, like the listener, but like people in the world,
think this is a good idea.
I have watched people on Noster and X all day long rave about what a great idea the cat is, about how it turns Bitcoin truly to a monetary protocol.
I don't know if these are all status cucks.
I don't know if these people like to hand things over.
Like, I don't know what has gotten into their heads that anybody should be anointed the winner and losers by a group of people in Bitcoin.
is so antithesis to anything Bitcoin's,
I just can't, I can't believe we're here.
But here we are.
I'll have links if you want to read more about the cat.
And of course, BIP-110, formerly 444,
which continues on.
They're still trying to soft fork.
So now we got two different soft fork proposals.
Two different soft fork proposals.
It's just absolutely crazy.
Oh my.
All right.
I don't know if you're going to find this interesting or not.
I have to be honest with you, but it matters.
You know, it's one of these things is like sometimes the news isn't that sexy.
But acting CFTC chairman Caroline Pham is piloting a new program that allows users of the financial system, like, you know, bankers, like real users, like players, to have Bitcoin as collateral in their loans.
She can explain it better than I can because these are things I care a little about, but I understand will have a big impact long term.
Well, good morning, and thank you so much for having me here on the show.
So I think what's really important to understand is that we are doing a limited pilot program that has important guardrails that are in place because we've seen with the events that have happened on offshore exchanges that it's more important than ever that Americans deserve safe U.S. markets under U.S. regulations.
So what we've done to structure this pilot program is that if you are using a CFTC broker, which is what are our futures commission merchants, those are registered by us, those are overseen by us and the National Futures Association, which is like FINRA, you will be able to use Bitcoin, Ether, and USDC to collateralize contracts that are denominated in those Bitcoin, Ether, or USDC.
And it's basically in-kind collateral. So that's very limited in what you can do. You can't use it instead of cash, for example.
Now, I had a hard time really understanding this.
So I went to kind of try to find some reactions online.
And as one person put it, collateralizing derivatives with Bitcoin is crypto finally showing up to the party in a tuxedo instead of sweats.
Another person put, quote, a big step towards full integration of Bitcoin.
When Bitcoin is accepted as clean collateral, balance sheets and leverage infrastructure start treating it like a true monetary asset.
This is how adoption compounds.
So my basic take, the little I do understand here from what the CFTC guy was saying, is going to be great for businesses that hold Bitcoin.
If you're a small, medium, or large business and you have Bitcoin on the balance sheet, for some of them, this could free up billions in capital to let them use Bitcoin holdings for loans.
They don't have to now liquidate their Bitcoin to get access to the value.
It's their equivalent of being able to use salt lending now or strike, but in the business world.
So that alone just seems like it's going to be huge.
I would imagine, too, it's going to be huge, but it'll be one of those things that builds, right?
Some companies will dip their toes in it.
More companies will try.
You'll start to get customer demand.
And then you really see it take off.
So for our final clip, and yes, we're at the final clip of the week,
I wanted to talk about something that I saw getting shared online.
So I'm going to set the stage and we'll play the clip.
And you may have seen this get shared.
It was called I Wasted Eight Years of My Life in Crypto,
a Bitcoin-centric deconstruction.
And I don't really think that was fair.
People said it was really anti-Bitcoin.
It was, oh, Bitcoin's really been put on notice here.
I think Brian Krebs, the security guy, was like,
oh, it just shows crypto's a cult.
It's really just none of that.
So here's the deal.
This week, a former developer in crypto published a long reflection titled, I Wasted Eight Years of My Life in Crypto.
And then he went on describing how libertarian ideals, things that he heard from Ayn Rand and cyberpunk culture, they really pulled him into the crypto industry, he says.
He loved the idea of, quote, walking across the border with a billion dollars in your head, end quote, and believed that he was going to build a new financial system by working in shit coins.
And then years later, after all of that, he concluded that, well, he spent his 20s actually building a casino, the biggest online multiplayer 24-7 casino, and that he lost his purpose.
And along the way, the crypto industry as a whole lost his purpose.
And that was the part that the critics really liked.
He says all the layer one horse races, meme coins and zero sum financial games just disillusioned him.
He claims the gamblification not only destroys value, but threatens long term social mobility.
He says he ultimately still thinks Bitcoin could reach a million dollars, but insists the broader crypto ecosystem is toxic, nihilistic, and ending with this quote,
Do you want to make money or do you want to be right?
I choose to be right this time.
I always love those self-righteous ones.
I know Bitcoin's going to a million, but I'm going to sell it because I'm a moral person and I choose to be right.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, that's how humans work.
All right.
So let's talk about this.
And a lot of people will say this is a real Bitcoin takedown.
It was a deconstruction of Bitcoin, et cetera, et cetera.
It's so stupid.
First of all, throughout the piece, he conflates crypto and Bitcoin constantly.
I hate that.
When he wants to take shots directly at Bitcoin, he'll put it in there.
But otherwise, everything is crypto, this casino, that.
Well, yeah.
You went and worked in the shitcoin casino industry, buddy.
You saw sound money You said oh neat I go build my own You were arrogant Bitcoin monetary policy is fixed Crypto is arbitrary All those different projects have different monetary policies Bitcoin is a savings technology Crypto is a venture capital speculative
engine. You got sucked into VC games, idiot. Calling Bitcoin a casino is like blaming gold
because penny stocks pump and dump. That's stupid. And then he describes the level one wars is like
this pointless war. And I guess he's supposed to be implying that Bitcoin's lost that war or
something like that. But that's silly. Bitcoin's strict monetary policy sets it aside from all of
these. I just would not even mix these other level ones. They're not final settlement levels.
And his personal disillusionment, he says, I built a casino, not a new financial system.
Yeah. Yeah, you worked on casino projects. Bitcoin isn't a casino just because Solana VCs are around.
the noise does not negate the presence of the signal.
How did you work in this industry for so long and not know that?
And I think despite his seemingly conviction that Bitcoin would reach a million dollars,
he never does pause to differentiate Bitcoin's monetary role from the casino architecture he helped build.
And then he just throws it all under the bus.
He spends eight years running the slot machine, and then he concludes sound money doesn't work.
Think about that for a second.
And then all of the NPCs online, including Brian Krebs, pass this around like it's some sort of hot takedown of Bitcoin and crypto.
Think about how mentally weak they are.
I mean, you don't even have to know Bitcoin to read through this and understand the logical fallacy.
You don't have to understand Bitcoin to understand developer burnout and how people can get disenfranchised with an industry that honestly is a little crap.
His experience is real. His burnout is understandable.
But the target of his blame is completely misaligned.
He misses the target.
He built the casino.
That was his choice.
Bitcoin is not the casino.
It's the exit.
And I think what people have to reframe, and I don't know how, maybe this is why they're
so nihilistic.
He said people are nihilistic.
Maybe they are.
They don't understand Bitcoin.
Imagine looking at the world where you see a Federal Reserve that's debasing your savings.
You see a federal government that's going to back an LLM PAMP for as long as they can.
And you see all these conflicting things that are making your purchasing power weaker.
And you're watching it erode over these last five years at the tune of an average of 30%.
If you didn't know about Bitcoin, how depressed would you be right now?
Like Bitcoin is the saving grace of all of this.
Bitcoin is how we all collectively work together without even realizing we're doing it to build a better world.
If you did, you know, Saylor says this and it sounded it sounded kind of cliche when I first heard it.
But he's right. Bitcoin is hope. It's hard money.
It's the best way we've ever invented to store your time and energy into the future.
And imagine spending eight years building casinos instead.
I'd be pretty disillusioned, too. I want to play a clip here.
This is our final clip of the week. This is Jeff Walton.
He's the chief risk officer at Strive, which is Vivek Ramaswamy's Bitcoin digital asset company.
And he echoes similar sentiments.
He's a younger millennial, or maybe, I don't know how you classify it, but he's not an older millennial.
He's younger than me.
He's a mid-tier millennial.
And I think he really sums up the situation, well, quite accurately.
I grew up like lower middle class.
I'm an only, only child.
Like I don't speak with my parents anymore.
I've got no, like, I've got nothing to fall back on.
So every risk that I've had to take in my life or any, like anything I've needed to build
for myself is like, I like truly in the spirit of like Western America, I've had to like
build it myself.
And so that's required me to like be really analytical about every, everything I've done,
like every risk that I've taken has been just so incredibly calculated that it's like, I have to,
like, I have to succeed. This, this needs to succeed or else I'm just like, I'm screwed.
I can't go live in my parents' basement, right? Like I got to go figure, figure something else
out. And so that necessity is really like what's landed me where I'm at and figuring, like having
to go figure this out and like rationalize it. And then once you just keep digging, like I just
keep digging, keep digging, keep digging and keep rationalizing things. They're like, okay,
this is, this is the only, this is the only solution. Like this is the best use of time,
energy, money, and focus into perpetuity because it's not real estate, it's decaying.
There's so much monetary premium that's stuck in real estate. All these bonds look horrible.
99.9% of the stocks in the stock market don't make any money. So I've got to make a bet on
MAG7. I think valuations are incredibly high in the pure equity market. Okay. So PE, so I could go
of private equity or private credit. And like, this just seems like a bunch of schmoozing and
bullshit and nobody really knows anything and it's illiquid and I'm not going to get capital for 10,
15, 20 years. So, you know, it's like none of that makes any sense. And so really it's like,
it is the, it's what's left. It's like, this is what our generation like can hold and build and
be a part of and like actually make a better world like the world can be improved
let's check in on the state of the network as i wrap up at block height 927 327 the price
one Bitcoin to a US dollar 92 That makes our sats per dollar 1 sats to one US dollar We starting a little bit of recovery Let hope it keeps on going You never know after a Fed cut Our decline right now from our all high is 26 which was 65 days ago
Our all-time high date, October 6th, as you know, 2025.
65 days ago.
We're currently on target for a downward adjustment of 0.6% for the estimated difficulty change for the Bitcoin network.
Not too bad.
That would be on December 10th, which is today.
Probably just a couple of...
Jeez, probably by the time I get this episode out.
There are currently 24,856 nodes on the network.
Ticking up a little bit.
A little bit.
Core 30, 14.3%.
Nots 2525.
Looks like November's edition.
My eyesight's getting bad.
10.4% of the network.
Okay.
Interesting.
Bitcoin priced in gold right now, currently 21.8 ounces.
How's that?
There's a metric.
Let's watch that one.
Bitcoin priced in gold, 21.8 ounces.
Hmm.
I'd like to see that change.
All right.
Looks like everything's moving right along.
I'm just checking over the rest of the stats.
Everything looks really good.
The state of the network is strong.
Well, if you made it this far, go check out the links in the show notes this week in Bitcoin.show.
You'll find the back catalog over there.
Also, all the other great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
My goal is to create something that doesn't get distracted by the motions.
You know, the president says something that gets people triggered.
I try to look past that, find the signal and tell you how it's going to impact your stack.
That's what I try to do.
Let me know how I did with a boost.
Also, you can let me know anything you'd like to see additional in the show.
Maybe something that should have been cut from the show.
That's fine, too.
You can boost that in.
I appreciate that.
The show's out every single Wednesday.
I don't quite have the holiday schedule figured out.
I'm feeling like we're going to keep going, but you never know.
I may take the week of the 24th off, so I suppose a heads up there, because that'll be Christmas Eve.
But that's pretty much all I really have planned for at the moment.
Yeah, I think that's all the little housekeeping I have to tell you.
So thank you so much for tuning in.
Now, I'm going to leave you with a value for value track, as I do.
And you know what the drill is here.
If you boost in while this track plays, 95% of your sats go to our artist.
I thought, since it's the holidays, I'd play a song that I think really got me into value for value music.
It's not the one that got me there, but I think it really opened the door for me.
So this week, I want to play Apex by Empath Eyes.
Thank you.