You may have heard the White House using a new word you'll likely hear on the.
Campaign trail, Bidenomics.
In a recent speech, the president claimed to be setting new records with the U.S. employment rate.
With the American Rescue Plan, we provide a relief and support directly to working-class families.
Our economy came roaring back. Unemployment dipped below 4% by the end of my first year in office.
Now it's been below 4% for the longest stretch in 50 years of American history.
Music.
Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 24. My name is Chris.
You know, I've been having this feeling recently, and I wonder if you felt the
same thing. Have you had the feeling that no matter what your lying eyes tell you, you're wrong?
You're wrong. The experts tell you you're wrong. Politicians tell you you're
wrong. The president tells you you're wrong. Pundits tell you you're wrong.
Turns out you were right. You're not crazy. And I'll bring the receipts.
You've been getting gaslit about the economy for more than a year.
And it's impacting the price of Bitcoin.
It's impacting the price of a banana. It's impacting your job.
So we're going to get to that. We are going to get to that. But first,
I wanted to cover some Bitcoin headlines.
I noticed this week that Bitcoin's mine supply has just passed the 94% milestone.
In other words, there's slightly more than 1.25 million Bitcoin left to be mined
ever for all of humanity. Okay?
We are in a massively scarce market already, and the market just hasn't figured it out.
So whatever price you're stacking Bitcoin at, it's a great price.
1.25 million Bitcoin left. When you start thinking about the numbers, like the ETFs buy.
That's not very much, and it's not going to take long until the market figures
out what a scarce asset this is.
And speaking of investment, we actually have some interesting news out of El Salvador.
The government of El Salvador announced this week plans to enhance the skills
of 80,000 employees through a detailed Bitcoin certification program.
It says it's focused on strategic management and public policy.
The National Bitcoin Office is said to provide the training and certification.
I believe that's Max and Stacey. office.
Now on the other side, the UK National Crime Agency has their latest risk assessment
out and it turns out crypto bad won't someone think of the children.
The UK National Crime Agency's latest risk assessment finds that the crypto
assets are quote, increasingly used to launder non-digital proceeds of crime.
How crypto is used to launder non-digital proceeds, I'm not sure because the
report doesn't tell you.
In fact, the assessment provides no concrete data to back up up its claims and
also throws in there that end-to-end encryption is posing increased risk to children.
So clearly we got a crackdown on encryption and cryptocurrencies.
Also, German authorities around the same time have
announced that they've seized 13 Bitcoin ATMs
and nearly $28 million in cash in
a crackdown where they're trying to take out KYC AML
law violators and I saw a report from
one of these ATM operators who bailed from their operation when
they saw that this crackdown was coming and they basically say
yeah it's the government closing the door behind them they
we our system has problems not negotiated payroll and negotiated payroll across
the border down in Germany for the last quarter people are making less money
they're gonna of course start easing rates faster over there and they're cracking
down on the exits sort of like we've always seen because it always comes back to macro doesn't it.
Music.
Minutes ago, Edward Lawrence live in the Grand Tetons, Jackson,
Wyoming, now has the revision number on the job claim of the past 12 months. And what is it, Edward?
You know, we all felt this one,
didn't we? Because Bitcoin, it's a proxy signal for general liquidity.
And we just got the revised jobs report number, and it's a whopper.
Now, most of the market's been holding their breath as rate cuts approach anyways,
as job numbers last month started to look a little shaky.
The stock market's beginning to rotate into smaller companies after historic
levels of consolidation into the Meg-7.
And we seem to see rolling, isolated recessionary pressures spreading into the wider economy.
And we're watching boomers put what little liquidity they do have into gold
as fast as the decrepit industry can manage.
But we really have two big signals screaming at us this last week.
The price of gold, which has been on a rip, while the price of oil has been on a dump.
And now we have the absolute collapse of employment numbers.
This is a huge revision, down 818,000 fewer jobs.
This is basically the government's overstated the amount of people in the workforce.
And even when you look under this, manufacturing was down 115,000 people.
So this is a revision down, a significant revision down, the largest in 15 years that we've seen.
And it basically says that the government has now overstated the amount of people
who are working in this workforce.
It shows weakness in the job markets over the past year that we didn't realize
was there, but now we know is there.
So again, 818,000 overall jobs down, manufacturing down 115,000 in this.
And if you just look, construction down 45,000. So these numbers are huge numbers
in revisions down, Bill.
They're devastating numbers. And I want to put some of this into perspective.
This is the second worst jobs revision in U.S. history. It's the largest downward revision in 15 years.
We'll talk about why he's a Jackson Hole here in a moment. But let's just break
it down by, you heard some of these numbers here.
Manufacturing has been revised down by 115,000 jobs. Trade, transportation and
utilities down by 104,000 jobs.
Professional business services revised downward by almost 360,000 jobs.
Leisure and hospitality revised downward by 150,000 jobs.
But hey, it's not all bad. Good news.
Government jobs were revised 1,000 upward. So we had some growth.
Huh? Now take this in for a moment.
Just take this in. Almost 120,000 jobs revised downward for over the last year.
In fact, I would be willing to bet some sats they worked real hard to get that number under a million.
Every mainstream economist, every pundit, every politician has been telling
you we are in a record job growth market.
But we knew that was wrong. In fact, you might recall, I predicted on this little
humble show a few weeks ago this might happen in episode 16.
I just wasn't expecting it this soon. I think the first red flags emerged in
the summer of 2022 when Zero Hedge identified this initially.
They found like there was a striking discrepancy between the number of U.S.
Payrolls and the number of actual employed workers, two separate metrics that get tracked.
Now, the reason why that was noteworthy is because those two numbers had tracked together forever.
But they started to widen, and that's when Zero Hedge noticed.
They looked at it and they charted the U.S. payrolls. They looked at it and
they charted the actual employed numbers.
And they saw that the two, after being tick for tick for years,
started to have a widening gap in March of 2022.
It grew to 1.5 million and then it just kept growing. The gap just kept growing
as time went on. So that was red flag number one.
But also in March of this year, we saw the Philadelphia Fed suggest that payroll
data could be overstated by 800,000.
And then, like I mentioned, on June 27th of this year, I covered the California
jobs that had been revised and took out all job gains in 2023.
So I put it all together. It seemed like it's very possible to me,
I said, it's very possible that we could have a massive revision at some point.
I just didn't expect it this soon. I thought, you know, it's the kind of thing
you keep quiet until after an election.
You don't talk about it now. Now, but looking into it, the BLS does have scheduled
revisement periods, and it
also happens to be landing right as Fed Chair Powell is at Jackson Hole,
where in the past he has indicated that rate cuts would happen or that rate hikes would happen.
And the BLS, with their $750 million annual budget, revised these numbers and
put it out just in time for him to be at Jackson Hole.
Now, I suspect you won't see the media cover this until it's like a post facto
explanation for why the rate cuts are arriving.
They're not going to really run with it tonight because it's devastating news
for the current administration.
But what this tells us is that the job market has been soft for more than a
year and we didn't have the right tools to measure it. We just had our guts.
But all of the best tooling was wrong.
But in my point of view, it's actually good news now that we know this.
I mean, it sucks for the work situation, but this is the market healing.
Getting the right data is a step in the direction to correctly price risk.
And I suspect this is why the big banks are buying the dip in a big way.
We have some reports filed that suggest they're going all in.
In the second quarter of 2024, we had a major buy from the banks,
even though Bitcoin itself wasn't really doing all that hot.
And interest continues to grow, even though Bitcoin's price hasn't been pumping this quarter.
Bitcoin on pace for a negative quarter, but interest continues to grow across
Wall Street when it comes to Bitcoin ETFs. Let's get to Mackenzie Segalos with that story.
Hi, Mack. Hey, Contessa. So that 13F deadline on Wednesday gave us a read on
which banks and hedge funds took a position in the new spot Bitcoin ETFs in the second quarter.
Goldman Sachs in particular went big in Q2, lifting its holdings to over $418
million, up from zero exposure in Q1.
Now, most of that is coming from the 7 million shares that it holds in BlackRock's
ETF. Morgan Stanley actually trimmed its Bitcoin ETF holdings to around one
hundred and eighty nine million dollars and swapped out its grayscale shares
for BlackRock's offering.
HSBC has nearly three point six million dollars worth of spot Bitcoin holdings.
And Bank of America has five point three million dollars in these products.
UBS and JP Morgan both took on minimal stakes. Now, it's worth noting that most
of these banks are likely just snapping up crypto for their clients,
not their own balance sheets. And then you've got hedge funds like Millennium
Management, which are some of the biggest buyers.
It's the single largest holder of shares in BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF.
Recent filings also show that Point72 Asset Management, Elliott,
Apollo, Citadel, Jane Street, and the Michigan Retirement System have all got
spot Bitcoin products in their portfolio.
You know, it feels like it's almost a crime they're getting Bitcoin at this price.
This is how it works, folks. folks, this is how the financial institutions front-run the regular folk.
The people really in the know, they front-run the financial institutions,
but ultimately, on average, the financial institutions win because so many average
Joes out there are still not at all tuned in to what's going on here.
Meanwhile, these banks are spending massive money.
Yesterday, the ETF saw an aggregate inflow of $88 million, and they've had another,
I don't have the number today, but I know that it's already,
I think it's more than $88 million today as I record. on a Wednesday.
Now, what do you think? These banks are all stupid? Are they all getting sucked
into a scam when they're dumping money like this into a Bitcoin ETF? What do you think?
It was reported that recently 60% of the largest head funds in the United States
have exposure to the Bitcoin ETFs. 60% of the largest hedge funds.
Music.
You, I will be off next week. I'm getting on an airplane, and I'm flying to
Toronto, and I'll be racking and stacking new servers for Jupiter Broadcasting.
And maybe it's the travel. Maybe it's the airplane. Because personally,
I think dying on an airplane would be a pretty badass way to go.
You know, because otherwise I'm probably just going to die from being a fatty
or in a car accident or something like that. But if I could die in an airplane,
well, that's pretty notable.
You know, people are like, hey, what happened to that podcaster,
Chris? Oh, he died in an airplane. No!
Yeah, he died in an airplane crash in 2024. No!
You know, that's a cool story. So if I die on my way to Toronto or back,
I just want you to know I'm totally okay if it was in an airplane crash.
But it does have me thinking, you know, what happens if, say,
I don't make it back, if something were to happen on the trip?
Your buddy Mikey Saylor recently spoke to this when he sat down with a little
chat for Odell. I didn't answer your last question, which is, you know, key man risk.
You know, what if I go away? You know, and I thought about it and I,
you know, and and what I would just say is, first of all, I don't have any heirs,
but a nonprofit foundation, which will morph into being a public charity.
So when I'm gone, my stock, my shares, my assets flow into a public charity
whose mission is to support Bitcoin and the adoption of Bitcoin forever.
And so you don't have to worry about micro strategy changing direction.
You don't have to worry about, you know, the truth is I'm probably better for
a Bitcoin gone than here. Thank you.
You know, dead than alive. As long as you're, if you're dead,
you can't, you know, you can't, what was the word, murder, was it, slay your heroes.
Slay your heroes. You know, so, you know, like, once I'm gone,
I'm not going to be talking, so I can't give a bad tweet, I suppose.
And micro-strategy, or just go on with the micro-strategy.
And the micro-strategy is simple. It's raise capital from the institutions that
have capital, buy Bitcoin, hold the Bitcoin forever, don't lose the Bitcoin, don't sell the Bitcoin.
That's a great note to end on, Michael. Bitcoin is forever to the moon.
Thank you for everybody in the room. So it has me wondering,
what are you going to do if something ever happens to you with your coins?
I'm looking for simple but effective tips.
Boost them in, and I'll read them when I come back after racking and stacking servers.
Coming up in the show, it is your boost. Major project updates. Big one.
Also, a great clip of the week. Some newbie questions and more. So stand by.
Music.
If you'd like to support the show, you can use two of our affiliates,
River and the Bitcoin company. River is a great way to stack sats,
then transmit them over Lightning when you're done.
It's a Bitcoin-only company. And the Bitcoin company is a great way to spend
your sats when you've got them on Lightning.
Maybe you've been doing some boosting, now you want to pick up a gift card.
The Bitcoin company helps you convert sats into gift cards instantly over Lightning.
Both companies, River and the Bitcoin company, run by Bitcoiners,
for Bitcoiners, Bitcoin-only companies.
The affiliate links in the show notes, if you use those, support the show.
It's a great way to get yourself a little something while you're supporting the show.
Music.
Because we got some great ones this week. And Byte Bandit is our baller booster
with 81,000 sats. Hey, rich lobster!
First, he sent me a message to ask if I had checked out Fetty.
And he says, oh, I then listened to the show.
I hadn't finished the episode yet. And I realized that you did give Fetty a mention.
Regarding what makes good money, I'd like to plus one your recommendation for
Lynn Alden's Broken Money book.
She begins the book by answering questions like, what is money?
Money with history and logic anyone could follow.
She explains early money, fiat, inflation, and Bitcoin very simply,
with each concept building on the last.
I highly recommend it if you're looking for a more detailed explanation than
Chris gave in the last episode.
Yes, also, I'll plus two Lynn Alden's broken money. I was just looking at it
this morning on my bookshelf thinking, I need to mention this on the show again.
He also said he's convinced three people, including his wife,
to play around with Bitcoin for the first time because Because of Fetty,
the sign-up process is super simple, and he avoided exchanges altogether by
just sending them 8,000 or 10,000 sats.
In his opinion, Fetty is positioning itself to be the perfect open community-first onboarding tool.
And he also sent 1,000 sats to our artist for the Value for Value track.
Thank you very, very, very much, ByteBandit, for that baller boost and those
messages. I really appreciate that. You are our baller this week.
Thank you kindly. Finally, Halleck doesn't want to be left out of the fun, though.
He's coming in with 30,000 saps. Yeah, live long and prosper.
Using Bitcoin to pay off debt sounds nice, but wouldn't we just run up the debt
again? He's talking, of course, about the country.
Oh, Halleck, you're right. Yeah.
And, you know, there's always, I think, going to be a fiat or a CBDC fiat kind
of thing because it's too easy for the governments when they can print their
own money. It's too hard when they can't so.
Yeah. I don't know. Although you would think the government's going to want
to get in on some of those sweet, sweet gains besides just cap gains and unrealized taxes. So we'll see.
Because what they're doing right now doesn't seem to be enough to me.
Jcube comes in with 20,000 sats. Coming in hot with the booze.
Sorry to hear about your note issue. So here are some additional sats. Thank you. Yeah.
Yeah. I only received 8% of the sats for the last episode. Fixed now, though.
Running real good. He says, I'm good with the U.S. owning 5% of Bitcoin,
though I'd rather... I'm good with the U.S., although I'd rather it wasn't me.
I'd rather the U.S. move to confiscate a Bitcoin onto the balance sheet, then sell it.
I'd rather there be an early nation-state adopter rather than late to the party.
Yeah i also am not super comfortable with the keeping the seized bitcoin thing
and it's not like traditional assets like you seize cash or gold bars from a criminal you can't,
necessarily maybe gold bars have serial numbers but you can't necessarily always
trace back where that money originated from like the person that was maybe a
victim of a crime but with bitcoin you sure can so like why not give it back
to the original people that didn't commit a crime instead of the government getting to keep it.
And if the government gets to keep it, then that just incentivizes the government
keeping other people's Bitcoin.
So the more I think about using seized Bitcoin to build up some sort of strategic
reserve or whatever they want to call it, the less comfortable I am with it.
I have to be honest with you.
I think ultimately, if you were to zoom out, my position could be described as I'd rather the U.S.
Put some Bitcoin on its balance sheet rather than not.
I too would rather they be an early adopter rather than a late adopter.
I think I care about that more than what they do with the seized Bitcoin,
but pretty close second to that is I really don't want them to use the seized Bitcoin.
Does that make sense? I know it feels like I guess a little bit all over the
place, but I guess it's, you know, I just have two opinions about it, I suppose.
I'm going to, you know, but as you guys talk about it with me,
the more I actually kind of feel like I'm whittling it down to how I feel.
So thank you for that. I appreciate the boost, Jcube.
LazyLox comes in, 20,000 saps. The traders love the vol.
Boosting in, he says they do love that vol mikey is
right about that thank you lazy locks appreciate
that doesn't have to be a profound message the
support itself is truly what matters faraday fedora comes in with a row of ducks
2,222 sats boosting to make sure that the value you earned wasn't lost in the
node shuffle i'm currently trying to migrate my umbral node to 1.0 so far i
have about a million on-chain Sats missing in action and three million channels that won't close.
Oh man, Faraday, that sounds rough.
Hopefully you know within about 14 days you'll get the channel stuff
back if you had to do like a force close or something like
that i've spent so i've spent so much
hard money getting different nodes going in the last month i've
been through like three nodes in the last month i'm in a really good place with
my node now in fact for the first time my node seems to be so well peered on
the network i'm having to pay attention to like what my channel fees are because
kraken is trying to route through me and a bunch of others are trying to bolts
and others are trying to route through my well-connected Lightning node now.
I've never had that problem because my node's either been poorly connected or behind Tor.
So now that it's on ClearNet and well-connected and positioned to the network
with low fees, because of course I'm trying to make it cheap to boost.
I'm getting used as like a router for Kraken and others.
It's pretty interesting to be on the other side of the connectivity issue.
I covered a little bit of the setup. I didn't really say it directly,
but in Linux Unplugged that came out this week, I discussed sort of the setup
around the node. The short version is I went with Nix Bitcoin.
I don't know if I'd recommend this for most folks unless you're already comfortable
with Nix, but it is like mission bulletproof grade, pro-level way to run a node.
Like if you were a services company offering lightning services to customers,
I'd run it on Nix Bitcoin.
It's professional grade, and one of the things you don't have to worry about
is like that upgrade process like you do with Umbral.
But the key thing is because you do a start nine, you could do this with Umbral,
you could do this with just Linux and Bitcoin D and light L and D.
But the key thing that I did is I set up a VPS on Linode, but you can use any
VPS, and I'm using Nginx and Tailscale to forward inbound and outbound traffic to a node on my LAN.
But according to the rest of the world, according to the Bitcoin network and
the Lightning network, my node's public IP is that VPS.
So the world interacts with that VPS, and that VPS is forwarding the traffic
to my actual node, which lives on Tailscale. scale.
And that way I can have lots of disk and lots of power and I can have stuff
that's on hardware I already own, but I can have a public IP that doesn't expose
my ISP, doesn't really give my ISP an idea what I'm doing, and isn't affected
when my dynamic IP changes.
And I'm having a great time with it. The LND node is rocking now. It's been really great.
OPI 1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Just close this fucking door.
It looks like my last boost was lost, but it's no big deal. The TLDR is I have a guide to Meshtastic.
It's at opi1984.com slash Meshtastic.
You know what? I actually knew I missed your boost, OPI, because I shared your
link with the guys internally at the time when you boosted it in originally.
Originally, but then when the report ran, it didn't get it from the,
I guess it was my Albie or whatever, whatever, wherever we pulled the report
from, that node didn't get your boost.
But I did see it in like the helipad dashboard at one point,
when I got the 8% split to the studio, I got that on the, because I'm always
watching that dashboard.
And so we've all been looking at your link and listener Jeff's building out
a Meshtastic system, very excited about Meshtastic.
And I don't know if there's a Bitcoin transaction angle yet,
but I'd love to do a Bitcoin transaction over Meshtastic somehow.
Maybe it's not possible.
He goes on to say, as for the CIA creating Bitcoin, I highly doubt it.
I think it was an individual or maybe a group on who Satoshi is.
I feel like it's best if we don't know.
When a project has a face, people judge it by that person or group.
By not knowing who Satoshi is, Bitcoin can stand on its own merits without the
threat of its creator or saying or doing something to denigrate it.
Boy, do I completely agree.
I Now is Elon. It's all it's Elon's the face of every decision.
Anything wrong that happens, it's Elon. When Steve Jobs was alive,
anything people didn't like about Apple, it was all Steve Jobs.
He personified the entire company.
And that would happen with Satoshi. And if Satoshi said the wrong thing,
it'd be bad. You know, I saw.
Boy, I wonder if I could find it. Probably not. But Vitalik tweeted or posted this morning.
And I don't know. I just got a really weird vibe from it. I don't know if I'll
be able to find it in time, but essentially he posted this morning that,
oh, I've been told I need to be more bullish when I talk about Ethereum.
And then he posted a AI generated picture of a bull. But if you zoom out,
who's telling him he needs to be more bullish?
And why does he need to be more bullish? Because apparently his words on X directly
affect the price of Ethereum.
That's the unsaid thing in that tweet is that if he tweets more bullishly,
the price go up. And when he just tweets about esoteric chain problems, price go down. One man.
That's not good. And he just says it, too. He doesn't even realize it. I mean, no, I'm not.
I don't know. I just don't know how people don't see that. Jordan Bravo comes
in with. Thank you very much for the bootstop. And I'm sorry I missed it last week.
Jordan Bravo comes in with 5,500 and rid of offsets. That's not possible. Nothing can do that.
Oh, but it can. He says, my lightning node runs on a Dell OptiPlex mini PC using Nick's Bitcoin.
Yeah, brother. There we go.
I use Tailscale, oh, here we go, to connect to a VPS so I don't expose my IP address. Yes!
Yes! L&D has been incredibly reliable with a 99.9% payment success rate over
the course of many months.
Lastly, I remote control it with Zeus. Yes!
Which provides a wonderfully slick UI. Chef's kiss.
That's the ultimate setup. The ultimate setup. You don't need a big old fancy
Umbral Web UI or the Start9 UI.
You just need the processes, the services running, the ports open,
listening on the right network interface, and then you connect to it with Zeus.
Zeus is such a great app. I'm going to get into it more because they have a
massive update coming up in the show. But Jordan, bravo.
I give you a big bell. That's a plus one bell right there to your setup.
You've essentially nailed my setup.
Only I'm not using a Dell Optiplex, but I do plus one those mini PCs.
Those do work really, really great.
That's such a perfect. How funny is that? I did not realize I was going to get
to that boost. How can you be deaf with ears like that?
Blaster 41 comes in with 10,000 sats. Says, I look forward to the show every week. Well, thank you.
I look forward to this segment every week and chatting with you guys.
Oh, come on. Get rid of the bell. Who's got the bell?
Somebody here's got a bell. Get rid of the bell.
Dexord comes in with 2,345 sats.
I'm glad the boosts are working again. So please don't stop.
Oh, this is my main Bitcoin news and vibe source.
Right on. We'll keep on vibing. Thank you, Dexort. I appreciate that.
Pitar comes in with a row of ducks. Is it you? Is it really you, Pitar?
It's fun to debate, speaking of Satoshi, but ultimately, I think it's better not to know who he was.
Maybe we should all rally behind Tucker and just collectively agree it's the CIA.
Then it still remains mysterious.
Let's go with it. Yes. Let's pivot into it. Oh, yeah, it's totally the CIA.
Yeah, they're best elite ninja hackers designed it. It's really good.
Best hackers ever. Yeah, it's good code. It's really good code.
You're going to be really impressed. It was the CIA.
Hi, I love it. Thank you. It's nice to hear from you. Digital Farmer comes in
with 5,000 sats. It's peanut butter jelly time.
Using Breeze, too, which is nice to see.
He writes, what a bad week to have a node in trouble. You're telling me, buddy.
You're telling me. Is the cold card still your go-to hardware Bitcoin wallet?
I'm also looking forward to the SafePal wallet.
Yes, the cold card is still my go-to hardware wallet.
The primary thing that I look for in a hardware wallet, besides good security
and good support in software, obviously...
I don't want it to have a battery. I don't want it to have anything that's going to expire in 10 years.
Right? Because we're all going to be good little hodlers here.
We're going to keep our cold card or whatever it is you have in somewhere really safe.
And you're not going to touch it for five years. You're not going to touch it for 10 years.
So I don't want the next time I take that thing out of the drawer for it to break.
Reality is I think you should actually check in on your setup a little more
often than that. Make sure the workflow still works and everything's the way you expect.
But that way you don't have a bad surprise one time when you really need it.
But I don't like these devices that are getting more complicated with bigger
screens and more touch and battery.
I want this thing to be an inert piece of electronics.
It's just as inert as possible. And I feel like the cold card,
at least the standard like 4, gets pretty close to that.
I will take a look at the SafePal wallet though. I'm always interested.
I also, I would love to hear somebody articulate a really solid no hardware wallet setup.
And advocate for that. I don't feel like we have anybody out there,
but we've really just locked into this hardware waltz or the only way to secure
your stash when you self-host. Is that true?
I'd love to hear somebody articulate maybe an argument in the other way.
Anonymous comes in with 3,000 sats. No message, though. Everything's under control.
And Ace Ackerman comes in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats.
Ace says, I don't think knowing the identity of Satoshi would be a net positive
for Bitcoin, because Tucker Carlson is a PSYOP.
You know, maybe he is. It would make the most sense. Nice to hear from you, Ace.
Rotted Mood also has a row of ducks to say, testing out my new Albie hub.
Bigger, this was the place to send the test.
Well, you got that right, Rotted Mood. Thank you very much.
Monty comes in with a row of ducks. Thanks for starting in on the noob questions.
Really helpful summary on why Bitcoin has value. Thanks to the transcription,
I was able to grab that section for future reference.
Oh, I'm glad you're enjoying the transcription, too. Yep. Trying to put all
the podcasting tutorial features I can. And Monty, stay tuned.
I'm doing another batch of those this episode. So we'll be right there.
Okay. I'm going to say Karamado Zero comes in with 3,000 sats. Make it so.
And they write, ironically, even though I'm sold on the concept of value for
value, you, and I've been boosting various shows, I don't fully grasp how Sats work.
I understand that it's a fraction of a Bitcoin, and it's on a separate network
that allows faster transactions.
I guess I just find it a bit unnatural for popular applications which support Bitcoin.
Not always supporting sending and receiving Sats out of the box,
not to mention the confusion of Sats and Satoshi's vision, which also look like Sats.
Okay, yeah, man. Yeah, there's a few things in here. So, Karamedo, you're right.
Bitcoins are, there's not really technically a Bitcoin.
That's what we call 100 million sats. 100 million Satoshis is a Bitcoin.
And that's just a unit of account we came up with a long time ago.
I don't even remember. I don't remember if it was a community-created thing
or Satoshi created that actual unit.
But you have, they are units of a total Bitcoin. That's what we denominate here
is we denominate in sats.
Roger that. Now, you said something here. Oh, you said, I understand it's a
fraction of a Bitcoin on a separate network that allows for faster transactions.
So let's give you a little bit better understanding there. The way the Lightning
Network works is you're still, yep, you're still using sats,
but users, they've pre-opened channels to each other so that they can send multiple
transactions to each other without waiting for the slower mainnet confirmations.
You open these channels and you commit some sats to them.
That gets settled on the network. So the network is aware of that arrangement.
And then And then you can move sats across that channel instantly.
That's what Lightning does.
And they're not a separate token. It's not like another blockchain or anything like that.
It's just a layer two that runs on top of the main net, the main Bitcoin blockchain.
Chain and lightning is kind of like
smtp in that anybody can implement it and anybody
can send on and participate on that network but they
just have to set it up and so some people do that by implementing like
a back-end provider and other folks like
here at jb do it by running our own node and then
when it comes to like satoshi's vision and the other stuff don't even
pay attention it's all crap there's a reason why
they're called shit coins and just look at the prices compared to
bitcoin go price them all in bitcoin they're going to zero it is
it's a it's ostensibly trying to wrap themselves
in in bitcoin's brand it it's
called affinity scamming they're trying to ride on the fame of bitcoin and some
of them were created because you know their founders had different visions for
different ideas of how the bitcoin network should operate or block sizes things
like that other things are created just because people want to get rich and
they try to make a software project and make it all work.
That's a whole other episode, but those are great questions,
and don't feel frustrated.
You were actually really close to the mark there, Karamado.
So I will see if I can't find a link for the Lightning Network that kind of
talks a little bit more about how it works, and I'll toss that in the show notes
so you can read up on that later if you'd like.
It sounds complicated, but you could think of the main Bitcoin network as layer
one. That's where all the security happens.
Layer two is where the faster transactions happen, in.
And you could even have a layer three on top of that. That's a whole other network.
Maybe that's what Fedements will be considered one time.
Okay. That wraps us up on the boost. At least everybody that was above the 2000
sat cutoff, but thank you everybody who did boost in. We had 19 total boosters.
We also had 37 of you just streaming your sats as you listened,
which is I think a new watermark.
So we had a total of 42,000 sats just streamed in while folks were listening.
So when you combine that with the boosts, that means we stacked for this episode,
239,816 sats.
Thank you, everyone, who boosted in. I really appreciate that.
It's a great batch in there.
And overall, it's 51 unique people that participated in the Value for Value system this week.
And if you'd like to participate, the best way is to get a new podcast app at
podcastapps.com. Fountain 1.1 just came out. I'll be telling you more about that shortly.
Podverse is going to be rebuilt from the ground up to be better than ever.
And Castomatic is fantastic on iOS. But there's a bunch of others,
too, like True Fans and more.
Just find them at podcastapps.com. I say you start with Strike if you're new
to this whole thing because it works in over 100 countries. It supports lightning out of the box.
It's run by a Bitcoiner. And it's easy to link to something like Fountain.
But you can also boost from the web if you use Fountain's website.
There's a lot of ways to get your message and your support into the show.
This is a value-for-value production, which means if you got some value,
if you got some knowledge, if you got something that mattered to you and you
want the show to stick around, one of the ways you can make sure that happens is by boosting.
Because right now it's advertiser-free. I don't know if it'll always stay that
way, but I'm not in a huge rush to get an advertiser on board if we do have
great support from our audience, which we have had.
And I'd love to see that keep rolling in. Thank you, everybody.
All right, let's get to the newbies corner. You heard me mention we'd be talking about this.
And this week I'm going to answer what is KYC?
It's something we toss around a lot. and I want to get this out there so we have this to refer to.
KYC or know your customer refers to the process of verifying your identity before
you're allowed to buy, sell or trade Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency on a commercial platform.
Typically you'll have to be of a certain age, probably 18 or older.
You'll have to provide personal information like your full name,
your date of birth, your address.
You'll have to show a picture with either you'll take it with a phone or webcam
of government issued ID could be like driver's license passport sometimes even bills will work and,
Also proof of address. So that's another place where you'll often have to supply
like a bank statement or a utility bill.
And you may even have to scan your face with your selfie camera.
And then some platforms, if you're going to do even larger transactions,
will follow up with even additional information that they need.
Now, if you're listening to this and you're thinking, geez, Chris,
that sounds like a lot, I can tell you that companies don't do this voluntarily.
They do it because they're required to by law.
The idea is that with this information, we'll finally stop money laundering
and terrorism and all that stuff that it never seems to stop.
And it does have a negative impact on Bitcoin purchases. That's why you'll generally
hear the Bitcoin community refer to it negatively.
Delays your access. If you say you want to go buy some Bitcoin when the price
is dropping, too bad. You're going to wait maybe even several days to get your identity verified.
There's usually purchasing limits assigned with KYC. And of course,
there's privacy concerns.
It means the platform has a record of every Bitcoin, every transaction at every
amount, every value and at the time you bought it and where you did or did not send it.
And it's probably safe to assume that most of them are then automatically reporting
that to a tax authority with your name, with your address and all of that.
And the reason I believe this is my speculation that this is so stringent is
because when you're buying Bitcoin, you're buying something outside the system, man.
You're buying outside the system. You understand?
You're exiting. You're going out the door. It's like when you leave the country
and they want to monitor the exits.
They want to monitor who's coming in and who's going out, and they want to make
sure that when you came in and you got some, and when you walk out with a big
profit, that they get their cut of the action.
That's really what this is about. It's about controlling the exits and the entrances.
The way we refer to it in Bitcoin is they control the on and off ramps of the fiat system.
But you are off ramping out of the fiat system. And when you exist outside that
fiat system, they have no oversight.
But when you return, they got you again.
Now, the way around KYC is generally peer-to-peer platforms.
BISC is getting pretty good. BISC 2 version 2.10 came out this week,
and it brings support for the Lightning Network.
QR codes and also, I think, support for webcams, improved Tor startup,
better chats for when you're buying peer-to-peer.
So BISQ, B-I-S-Q, and you want version 2, will facilitate a peer-to-peer transaction.
There's also things like RoboSats.
I'll put a link to a very nice resource called Learn RoboSats.
And it's essentially a brokerage system or whatever. Maybe that's not the right
term. But you go there and there's buys and sells, two sides of the order.
And you say if you're buying or you're selling, you generate a nymph or a nym,
not a nympho, but a nym. You could be a nympho and do it still.
And that's like, you know, like your own identity for that site.
And you can either choose to keep it or generate a new one.
And you engage in a person-to-person direct selling process.
And they have different ways you can fund the transaction or different ways they can pay you.
And, of course, with Bitcoin, you could buy Bitcoin the way I used to back in
the day. and then you just give somebody cash.
I mean, I distinctly remember giving somebody $200 in cash to buy two Bitcoin
from them when that was slightly above market price for two Bitcoin.
I was paying like 25 bucks over probably.
You will pay sometimes for the convenience of the peer-to-peer system.
And if you're listening and saying, Chris, Chris, Chris, tell them about XYZ
platform. Please send it in.
You know, I don't really have a I don't have an extensive list of ways to get
Bitcoin peer to peer these days.
There's also things like Noster, Stacker News or Podcasting 2.0 or Fold,
which will sort of earn you Bitcoin if you're an active participant in those
ecosystems, just sort of low key earn you Bitcoin.
Now, at least in the case of Stacker News and Noster, that's not necessarily KYC. see.
So I hope that answers your question. And since I have a little bit of time
here, I want to answer one other question you had.
We still have a whole other stack, but you also asked about custodial versus
non-custodial wallets.
What is that? What does this term mean?
The primary difference is who controls your private keys.
Is a business or a service or an entity holding those keys on your behalf and
essentially managing your Bitcoin?
Or do you hold those keys? And do you manage that Bitcoin? You may have heard
the saying, not your keys, not your coins.
Whoever manages the wallet that your keys stay in actually technically owns your Bitcoin.
So that's why so many folks advocate
for self-custody, because you remove yourself from third-party risk.
Something could happen at Coinbase, they could get hacked. Something could happen
at Celsius, they could go out of business. Oh, wait, they did.
These things, and then you lose your coins.
A private party, though, often makes it a little easier. You know,
maybe you forget your password. They have a support process to help you reset it.
If your house burns down, you don't lose your Bitcoin if that's where you're
storing it. Or if your safety deposit box gets raided by the feds,
you don't lose your Bitcoin if that's where you store it.
What? There's higher risk of hacks and mismanagement and just losing your Bitcoin.
Non-custodial wallets give you full control over your private keys.
It's complete ownership.
And that's one of the unique properties of Bitcoin as an asset,
is you can digitally move this thing and have complete ownership over it.
You don't need any third party. So you're kind of missing out on one of the
greatest things about Bitcoin if you're using a custodial wallet.
So a non-custodial wallet. It's under your control. But that also means it's
up to you if something goes wrong.
You lose your seed phrase, you lose your hardware wallet, you lose your laptop
that you put your Bitcoin on, whatever it is, that's on you now.
But there's no third party risk. So it's what are you the most comfortable with?
And generally, I default for long term storage to non-custodial wallets, something that you own.
So that way you're not putting your life changing wealth into some company that
could make a mistake and go out of business or get hacked.
And I'm not super impressed with Coinbase's security. I mean,
I don't have any incidents to point to, but I've watched this company since
they were created, and I look at how their system works behind the scenes from
what you can tell, and it's getting kind of antiquated.
So I'm not really comfortable leaving Bitcoin on any exchange at all.
River probably is the one I'm the most comfortable with because they've built
their infrastructure, so a strike.
And they have recently built it and recently made sure it's hardened and it's
following best practices of like the last couple of years.
But other folks like Coinbase, they've been around for a long time.
They don't necessarily do that.
And you just, when you know, if you start to get like, say, a million bucks
in Bitcoin one day, that stuff starts to bother you.
And there's such an intense peace of mind.
There's like a tranquility when you see the markets freaking out one day.
You wake up and Bitcoin's tanking and Coinbase is down or Bitcoin's ripping
and nobody can get to Coinbase to buy.
The platforms are down and people can't sell. People can't buy.
They can't move it. But, well, if you self-custody your Bitcoin,
none of that impacts you at all.
You just sit back, pop the popcorn, and watch the chaos because your Bitcoin's
sitting there on your cold wallet or whatever just fine.
So that's just something to consider when it comes to non-custodial wallets as well.
Nothing says you can't get started. You know, stack those sats on river for
a while and then eventually move them to cold storage.
When it's at a price point that matters a lot to you. You know, it may be at $1,000.
You'll be disappointed if you lose that, but it's not going to change your life.
But when it gets to $100,000, probably would change your life.
And that might be, you know, $50,000, whatever that number is for you, $10,000.
Maybe that's when you start moving it to something you own and you control.
I hope that makes sense. I'd love to hear others' thoughts on that as well.
Now, I do have more coming up, such as why I have a complicated flow for my
Bitcoin savings going from River to Aqua to Sparrow to Cold Storage.
Why am I doing that? Is there a better way?
Also, how to move larger chunks of Bitcoin. What's the best way to do that?
What are the different types of Bitcoin, liquid, lightning, and others?
There's not really different types of Bitcoin, but I'll answer that.
A primer on fees, especially into the future. And are there any benefits to
the ETF, Roth IRAs, and things like that?
Those are some of the more advanced questions that I want to try to get to over the next few weeks.
At least once the show comes back. I'll answer them as time allows,
and I hope that made sense.
Music.
Now, project updates.
Fountain 1.1 is out, and it's a big one.
You can now bring your existing Nostra profile to Fountain or create a new one.
Your boosts and your comments will be surfaced to other Nostra clients.
Posts shared from other Nostra clients relating to audio, audio shares,
will now show up in your Fountain feed inside the app.
And conversations and interactions will now flow freely across multiple apps that use Nostra.
So Fountain is now a first-class Noster audio client.
Your Fountain profile is the same as your Noster profile, so the two are one and the same now.
And as a result, any content that you interact with is going to reach more people
and see higher engagement on the Noster network.
When you launch the app, you can connect a profile or you can create one.
Audio posts from Noster clients will now appear there in Fountain.
And Fountain is using brand new, just a baby, Nostra Improvement Proposal 73,
NIP 73, to associate posts with podcast episodes using a globally unique podcast GUID ID.
It's really exciting to see this land. I know the team's been working on this for weeks.
We helped them test some of this early on. and what this does is it moves your
identity, your social graph, and all of that outside of one single app and lets
you take it to any app that treats you the best.
And your followers on Noster will move to the next app with you,
your recommendations, your posts, but also the podcasts that you love are going
to get greater exposure now.
It's a fantastic move and it really shows how Fountain is blazing a trail and
setting the way forward for a Noster future, at least for for those that want it.
Now let's talk about Zeus.
One of the best wallets out there. Runs on Android and iOS.
And version 9.0 RC1 is out. I'm covering this early because maybe 9.0 comes
out while I'm on my break next week.
Stacking and racking. But it's so great. It's got a brand new purchase channel, advanced service UI.
It supports hardware wallets and signing device support, which allows users
to craft on-chain transactions
and open and close channels using hardware wallets
like the cold card seed signer and many others that's
awesome you can now import xpubs for watch only
accounts you can do batch channel opens and transactions you can close channels
to an external address you can see the pending htls there's a new swipe to pay
component for invoices that are around 10 000 sats and a new layout that makes
it easier to use one-handed and scan invoices more performant camera support port.
It's just, it's so good.
And you heard us talk about it earlier in the show.
You can use Zeus either as just a lightning wallet and you run everything right there in the app.
It is a node in your freaking pocket. It's unbelievable.
Or you can configure Zeus to manage a remote node. They'll manage the channels,
look at the liquidity to spend from that node.
It is the MVP setup. up. Just a little Linux box running in your corner,
running Bitcoin D and LND and Zeus. It's really all you need.
It's so magical. It's such a great app. I've met Evan, too, the developer of it. He's a great guy.
It's just top to bottom one of my favorite pieces of software in the Bitcoin space.
And version 9.0 is so, 0.9.0 is so, so close.
And then last but not least, as a project update for you. I have an interesting one.
It's a film called The Anatomy of Bitcoin.
It's an open source community funded hyper realism film taking the viewer on
a visual understanding of the mechanisms that make Bitcoin work.
Fascinated by this. I'm not totally sure where this is going.
I think it's really, really, really early days because the trailer right now
is kind of like, you know, it's a little AI-generated vibe going on here.
We've always defined ourselves by the way we use our time.
How we remember the past and project the future.
How we become memories after our time is over.
How our experience Experience is equalized by the common bond of the passage of time.
I'll keep an eye on it, see if it develops into something interesting.
That's probably just getting the
word out there. I doubt the whole film is going to be narrated that way.
That was my initial fear. And then I realized, slow down, slow down.
They're probably just getting it set up and they want people to know about it.
And this is how they chose to do it.
So I'll reserve judgment until then. But it's called the anatomy of Bitcoin.
And they're looking for people to help support create it.
And I'll keep an eye on it and tell you where it goes in the future.
Time for our final clip of the week and i like this one a lot,
Jack Maulers used the metaphor of Taylor Swift tickets to illustrate fiat debasement
to folks that just don't seem to get it.
Let me just give an example. If I owed you, let me try and think,
if I owed you 20 Taylor Swift tickets, so this is, could clip this,
send this to your family, this will be understandable.
If I owed you 20 Taylor Swift tickets, in theory, I have two options.
I can either pay those back in full by giving you the tickets,
or I could say, I can't afford to pay that back and we call that a default.
Two options when you're in debt, pay it back or default.
And I say, I'm so sorry, I can't actually pay that back. Now,
the government has a third option.
They can actually devalue and debase the thing that they owe by printing money, right?
So if I could say, well, Taylor Swift tickets at one point were like $20,000 a pop.
If I can make them $2 a pop, I can pay you back 20 Taylor Swift tickets.
No problem. I'll just devalue what they're worth and so
the US government has a third option which
is printing currency debasing the currency and that's
their only way out so they the
US government cannot default that is not an option right and they also can't
pay it back debt to GDP in the US is almost 130% global debt to GDP is well
over 300% so that is the amount of debt they have versus the amount of growth
they're producing to pay that back.
Paying it back is not an option. Defaulting is not an option.
So anyone listening, what's the only thing they can do to value the thing they
owe? Print money, debase the currency.
What's the scarcest thing in human history?
What's the best performing asset in the last 15 years?
What is the best expression of currency debasement? What's a put option on the
existing financial system? What is long volatility?
How do you monetize this chaos? us. You buy Bitcoin. You buy Bitcoin.
That's been my macro thesis from day one. And that's my Taylor Swift analogy. Bam. Clip it.
There you go. And we did. Thank you, Jack. If you made it this far,
links at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
Please boost in what you'd like to hear from the show. If I missed a story or
if you have any thoughts I want to hear from you and share it with a friend.
I'd love to be the number one Bitcoin podcast for the JB and podcasting 2.0 community.
A reminder, I'm off stacking and racking servers next week but I'll see you
right back here in September and I leave you this week with a value for value
track you can boost in and support the artists directly it's Swamp Thing by Abel James.
Music.