Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 81.
My name is Chris, chrislas.com or jupiterbroadcasting.com.
The sentiment seems to be pretty bad, especially the last couple of weeks.
I've been getting some notes.
I've been reading some things online, complaints that Bitcoin's boring.
It's not producing the returns it should. It's only chopped sideways all year.
I think a lot of it comes from the people that just invested in Bitcoin in 2025.
They expected massive returns. And here they are.
And the price is just about where it was, you know, 11 months ago.
And so there's some truth to that.
But I think something that maybe the new class doesn't appreciate is it's remarkable how Bitcoin has defended this 100,000 line.
I mean, with the whales selling off, some of these Bitcoin dats have been selling off, a couple of them.
There's been a lot of sell pressure just in the last few weeks, some of the largest sell pressure we've ever seen.
And it's still defended that 100,000 line.
And when we do that, we bring up what's called the moving averages, which I usually like to look at the 200-day moving average, which is right around 104,000 right now.
That's chef's kiss.
That's beautiful.
Because when you look at that moving average, you're smoothing out the volatility and the noise.
And you're kind of looking at the longer price trend.
And the longer price trend says that Bitcoin is more and more valued at over $100,000.
And you notice it yourself probably when it for a moment dips below 100 to like 98 or 99.
Oh, it seems so cheap.
It seems spooky.
How could it be so low?
Which is hilarious if you think about it.
So it has a psychological effect. It has a change in the way the market values it when it manages to move up that average.
And the other thing that happens if you look outside the market and you just look inside the crypto space,
what you'll discover is that for the last eight weeks in a row, all the altcoins have bled to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin dominance has risen for eight weeks in a row.
So let an old timer tell you a story for a moment.
Stay a while and listen.
What's really just struck me this year, even during the dips, the Bitcoin initiatives, the companies, the projects, the bank adoption, the loan types, the Congress critters, etc., etc., it all kept going.
They all kept building.
That's not how it used to be.
In the past, people would go silent during dips.
They'd hold their breath, thinking, oh, this might be it.
Others would wait for sentiment to improve and then thus the skepticism to die down before they would dare to make news related to Bitcoin.
But not anymore. Gone are those days.
It's a true change.
Even when the price is sliding, you still have people announcing their initiatives.
We're going to have some more later on in the show.
That's a massive shift.
And I think before too long, those types of days will be long forgotten.
So I just wanted to capture it for a moment.
While people are talking about chop solidations and all of that, what has shifted underneath the surface is it's now a foregone conclusion that Bitcoin is staying around and it's likely going up in value and that there's something here, right?
Like that psychological shift alone is a massive catalyst.
And so a lot of things seem to be lining up.
And one of the major blockers may be clearing.
Well, it seems day 43 of this embarrassing and stupid shutdown is upon us and continues to freeze up Scott's checking account, impacting liquidity in the market.
But it may be coming to an end right now as I record.
Hopefully by the time you're hearing this, it's either over or it's relatively close to finished.
The mad dash is on to get to the Capitol to end the government shutdown.
I am leaving Jonesboro, Arkansas on my way to Washington.
As airports across America face delays and cancellations.
Some members like Wisconsin's Derek Van Orden are taking matters into their own hands.
Flights are too unreliable.
So I'm going to ride my motorcycle.
It's going to take about 16 hours or so.
It's going to be a little chilly.
You know, it kind of feels like they're using this as an opportunity to showboat. And why are flights so unreliable right now?
The vote, while expected to pass, will still be tight. House Democrats, still unhappy with the deal hatched by moderates in the Senate, are telling their members to vote no.
So it's not 100% law because I record this, but people seem to think it's likely to happen.
And I hope so. I hope so, because there are people that are really hurting from this.
Somehow we have accumulated a massive, massive $9 billion a month run rate for the SNAP benefits.
And those people, some of them are very much struggling right now.
And that's the thing I want to talk about for the next few moments is if we do start to see a pump as money supply works its way out into the broader system, makes it from gold and AI stocks out into the broader ecosystem.
There's something I want Bitcoiners to keep in mind.
You have to stay humble during this time because there are going to be second order pump effects.
little term I came up with. When assets go up quickly or pump, as we like to call it for fun,
it is going to compound the gap between asset owners and non-asset owners. I think you're
already seeing this in a big way, and it's going to get so much worse. So this is an analysis from
a gal from Bank of America, and she says, look, folks are spending more money, but they're getting
less because that additional spending is going to inflation. And she also says that their data
clearly indicates higher income folks are doing just fine. The gap is what's really concerning.
So you are continuing to see consumer spending power, but I pull out two things
on this. First, while retail spending did go up, the number of transactions didn't. So one of the
things driving that strengthening the consumer spending number is inflations, it's maybe tariffs.
It's not that consumption is necessarily increasing.
And then the other thing that I pull out is it's the higher income households that are really driving the spending.
That gap between spending growth between higher and lower income households is certainly continuing.
At the lower end, what are you seeing?
So the lower end spending is still growing.
So if you look at lower income spending, last month it was up seven-tenths.
Higher income spending, though, was up almost four times that at 2.7.
What's interesting is, though, what the gaps are in terms of what the difference between the spending growth between the higher and the lower income consumer and where we're seeing the biggest gaps are in bigger ticket items, in airlines, in lodging, in furniture.
To a lesser extent, we're also seeing it in clothing.
But in each of those categories, it's not that the higher income is really spending a lot more.
It's that lower income is pulling back.
Yeah, of course they are.
Of course there. So if we see a rally in assets, it's going to be the most hated rally by the non-asset owners I think we've ever witnessed in our lifetimes. And the unfortunate, uncomfortable truth is some of the Trump administration policies are helping. They might reduce some of the deficit spending a bit. They may be able to lower energy prices in certain sectors like oil due to policies.
But the tariffs are causing the price of some goods to go up.
And that has an immediate impact on consumers who are stretched thin right now.
So the left hand is trying to do one thing to lower prices while the right hand is doing something that raises prices.
This dichotomy was brought up on one of Scott's Sunday tours.
I think that the tariffs help consumers because we are able to, if you go back and look, we have brought down the budget deficit.
And MIT came out with a study that said that 42% of the great inflation was caused by the big deficit spending.
So as you bring down deficit spending, inflation will come down.
And the tariffs right now, we take in substantial tariff income over time that will rebalance as the factories move to the U.S.
and that will become the corporate income or wage income.
And by bringing down the budget deficit, we are bringing down inflation.
Now, that may be partially true.
You know, reducing deficit spending will help with inflation, but it's going to be down the road.
It may not impact everybody.
It may not be distributed evenly through the economy because it depends on the idea that ultimately wages go up.
So this is why you're seeing the idea of rebate checks or I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Tariff dividend checks.
We heard about the Doge dividends. What about tariff dividends?
The Treasury collected almost 200 billion dollars in tariff revenue in the fiscal year 2025 that ended in September.
Now President Trump wants to cut Americans a check.
So the entire tariff revenue is less than $200 billion, just to be clear about that.
Right?
When they're burning through trillions of dollars in a year, okay.
Writing on True Social over the weekend that low- and middle-income Americans will receive $2,000 payments from the tariff income.
And the rest will be used to help pay down the national debt.
this is pending a decision from the Supreme Court, which just days ago cast doubt on the tariff
legality. Oh, I'm sure that has nothing to do with it, right? And when they say, yeah, you're
going to get a check, you're going to get a dividend, you're going to get a rebate, you're
going to get a stimmy. Or the use of power to impose these tariffs. But Treasury Secretary
Scott Bessent says a dividend can come in a lot of different ways. Yeah. So they're already
starting to kind of wiggle on what this stimulus check might look because no doubt Scott knows
how inflationary this could potentially be. Surely some of that money will flow into Bitcoin. So
yeah, it's going to mean Bitcoin price go up. It also means a lot of shoes are going to be bought.
It means a lot of cars are going to get a down payment, a lot of silly stuff like that.
Some debt will get paid off. But this is very much still in discussion.
Well, there are a lot of options here. The president's talking about a $2,000 rebate, and that would be for families making less than, say, $100,000.
Have you decided on that yet?
We haven't. We haven't. It's in discussion.
But the other thing to think about, Brian, is that what we did with the tax bill is actually financing the presence, no tax and tips over time.
So security and the big refunds you're going to see.
Oh, yeah.
So think of how great your taxes are going to be.
Maybe you don't get a stimmy, but you got your taxes, rebate.
Yeah.
So, I mean, that's good, right?
Are a result of that.
So that's another payment to the American people.
And then the other thing you're going to see in the middle of the year are these Trump accounts.
Every child born retroactively to January 1 for the next three years is going to get a $1,000 account that's going to be invested in the U.S. stock market.
So that's another $1,000 for working families.
So yesterday I just feel like, again, one hand is trying to fight inflation while the other hand is doing things that cause inflation go up.
You know, like what is that going to do?
What is that going to do?
It's going to it's going to increase demand.
It's going to put strain on supply chain.
It'll be the exact same thing we saw during covid.
Only this time there won't be a supply chain shutdown to make it as worse.
So you have this, which to me feels like both a political play to try to put public pressure on the Supreme Court, but also it's a recognition that the tariffs are causing prices to go up. And so why not cut everybody a little check?
And this this is where we get into one of the biggest cell phones that I think the Trump administration ever made.
I may have ranted about this on the show before.
Perhaps not.
I've definitely ranted about it at home.
But Scott has had to go on this tour to do damage control over this, to try to walk back expectations, because the reality is it's not just the Stimmy check.
The expectation by now is that the prices on goods would come down.
The groceries would be cheaper.
Homes would be cheaper.
Everyday goods would be cheaper.
Affordability was the word.
They should have never made that promise.
Huge mistake.
They can't lower the prices on goods.
I mean, some things they can, like perhaps oil,
or they can put reserves into the market to cause an excess demand or excess supply.
So there's some things they can do, but they're not wizards.
You would only really get prices to go down with a recession.
You'd have to have a deep recession.
And the people don't want that.
They're not going to, the Fed's not going to allow that.
The Treasury is not going to allow that.
So they have this massive problem with affordability.
And that something they trying to solve with these stimmy checks as well When you talk about the whole thing from the off elections was affordability that was the words people like Zoram Amdani used
but their ways of solving that are very different from the way you would do it.
So when you look at affordability now and you go grocery shopping, for example,
what products are you working on bringing down?
We know that certain products are down, certain up.
Like, for example, coffee.
The president says, I'm going to lower the rates, tariff rates on Brazil and Vietnam and other places.
to try to bring the price of coffee down.
What else do you do?
See, this is the smooth brain economic thinking.
People actually think the Trump administration
is going to bring down the individual costs
of individual grocery items.
Hey, Scott, when is your rice-a-roni plan going into effect?
When's the white bread discount happening?
When am I a whole,
what is the whole grain bread gonna be a little cheaper?
How long until the cans of tuna, right?
As if the Trump administration can pull levers
on the prices of every single product in the supermarket.
But the smooth brains, that's what they've been told to expect.
And so that's what they want.
Well, it's tough to do a lot of specific things, but I can tell you, Brian, you're going to see substantial announcements over the next couple of days in terms of things we don't grow here in the United States.
Coffee being one of them, bananas, other fruits, things like that.
So that will bring the prices down very quickly.
And Brian, we inherited this affordability mess.
It was the worst inflation.
So one specific example, coffee, because that is, you know, through the exports and the
negotiations and the tariffs and the blah, blah, blahs, they can't affect some of those
prices.
So he cites one thing and then immediately pivots to the blame game.
Prices down very quickly.
And Brian, we inherited this affordability mess.
It was the worst inflation, 40, 50 years, one of the worst in the nation's history.
Okay, true.
And affordability has two components. So there's the price level and then there is income level. And what happened under Biden was the cumulative inflation, stated inflation, CPI, was 20, 23 percent. But what happened to working Americans, their basket of goods and services, food, insurance, auto payments, was up in the 30s.
What? Did the United States government just acknowledge that inflation for some consumer goods was in the 30s? I mean, this is remarkable.
They felt a real gigantic differential there.
And what we are going to do is by bringing back high-paying manufacturing jobs,
President Trump is going to do what he did in the first term,
and that is for hourly workers and working Americans to have real wage increases.
So, Brian, imagine two lines.
There is the inflation line.
We've got that under control. It's leveled out. That is going to start turning down.
Then there's the income line, which under Biden, because so many of the jobs were government jobs, you can't get real wage growth from a government job.
Real wages are going to increase. And I would expect in the first quarter, second quarter of next year, those two lines are going to cross.
And the American people are going to start feeling better. But look, this has been a tough period.
Feeling better because what he's saying is if their plans work out, you'll be making more money relative to what you're paying for stuff.
But I'd like you to boost in and answer this question.
What happens when everybody gets a raise?
Where does that come from?
How do the employers deal with that?
I mean, I think everybody should get a raise.
But how does that get processed into the economy?
Boost in and answer that for me.
Well, a bit of bad news this week.
37-year-old Keone Rodriguez, the CEO of Samurai Wallet, was sentenced Thursday to five years in prison for operating a cryptocurrency mixing service.
Prosecutors say he laundered $237 million in illicit funds.
David Morris was there.
He was reporting for The Rage, and he captured his thoughts right outside the court the moment things wrapped up.
Hi, this is David Morris for The Rage here at the Southern District of New York, where we just saw the completion of a sentencing hearing for Keone Rodriguez, one of the two creators of Samurai Wallet, a privacy-slash-mixing service.
Rodriguez, which some people will be disappointed by, Rodriguez got the full possible sentence for his guilty plea on the charge of operating an unlicensed money transmitter.
1960 C, the same charge that Roman Storm was recently found guilty of and that people, including Peter Van Valkenburg from Coin Center, have said is being interpreted strangely in these cases.
But regardless, we saw a judge, Judge Coate, who seemed very unsympathetic to the arguments for financial privacy that were made by Rodriguez in some of his submissions ahead of the sentencing.
I'll be writing more about that at the rage soon.
So full five-year sentence on that one charge.
It is worth keeping in mind that in exchange for his guilty plea, several other charges
with a potential maximum of 25 years in prison were dropped.
And so it's not necessarily that he got a raw deal for the plea.
He did potentially reduce the sentence by pleading guilty.
He will also pay a $250,000 fine, which according to his own defense lawyers is going to be
a real challenge because he has obligations already greater than money that he had on hand
from his work prior to Samurai Wallet. So it's not the outcome that I think many viewing this
are going to have hoped for, but it is still probably less than at least a worse, worst case
scenario. Lots more detail to come as I write for The Rage over the next couple of hours. So stay
tuned to this space. Thanks. I'm pretty disappointed because, well, it never really sounds like he had
a chance. It was really stacked against him. And what worries me is it sets a precedent for open
source privacy developers. It holds developers criminally liable for use by their users. So if
a user uses it in the wrong way, the developer is responsible for that. I just, I don't like this
because that means even non-custodial tools are in the crosshairs, just like the Tornado Cash case.
it's going to have a chilling effect on innovation in the sector if this is going to be the way these
go. So I think we have to stay vigilant in this space. We have to keep watching news developments.
And when we're given the opportunity, make our feelings known.
Okay, now a bit of good news.
After a bit of teasing this week,
Square went live for 4 million merchants to easily turn on Bitcoin payments.
Everywhere in the U.S., except for New York, thanks to their 2015 BitLicense,
anyone that currently accepts Square for payment at their business
can now easily accept payments in Bitcoin.
Square released this video to explain.
Today, I'm going to walk you through how you can take Bitcoin payments in your in-person location.
You'll be able to use your Square devices, Square Terminal or Register, as well as iOS devices to be able to take Bitcoin payments.
Let's get started by enabling Bitcoin payments for your account.
You can start by navigating to your banking page.
Here you'll see the Bitcoin tab.
And on this page, you can see that you can get started.
So they walk the user through how to easily do it, and it works.
Of course, the first payment on Square in the wild was at a coffee shop.
All right, good morning.
So we're here at Compass Coffee, and we're going to be filming the first Bitcoin transaction using Square.
So, sir, what can I get for you?
I'd love a pumpkin spice latte if you have any.
Yeah, we got a PSL for you.
There's no need to be embarrassed.
All right, awesome.
How many sasses is that going to be?
That's going to be 6,526 sats.
All right, perfect.
Just happen to have some sats on me.
Thank you, Walter.
Thank you.
There we go.
Okay, 6,000 sats.
And boom, it's done.
You notice he keeps using the word sats.
That's the only thing I don't like about this,
and I think why he made a point to say sats over and over again.
On the UI, they don't use the word sats.
They use the word Bitcoin, which that's weird, right?
Because say you're going to buy coffee, it says you owe 6,000 Bitcoin.
And then it has the USD value underneath it, which is the correct amount.
But it's just, it's a weird interface.
And it's something that I know Jack thinks using the word sats is preventing public adoption.
It's just, to me, I don't understand it at all.
People understand coins and dollars.
But I do like that they're getting local businesses to accept Bitcoin payments.
And here's what they're doing right now for a year, zero fees for the transactions done in Bitcoin.
Now, think about that.
That's a pretty nice selling point compared to credit cards.
That's really nice.
But it does need to stick.
And Hottobot on Nostra had some observations that might help it stick with both consumers and the merchants that are using it.
He suggests some onboarding resources for local guides, some clear, concise materials to help advocate and approach local businesses.
So people like him or myself could go in and make a pitch for people already using Square.
maybe even a referral and incentive program to establish rewards for individuals to go out and
help drive merchant and customer adoption and then some sort of customer value proposition on the
screen maybe clarify why customers would want to spend bitcoin despite maybe confies they might
have to pay consider maybe even like you know points back kind of a thing for a little bit like
that i think kind of stuff would really make it stick i agreed with hodl body had some really
solid suggestions. And you have to wonder if this will be a long-term thing. You know,
will this see very much adoption? And I want to ask you, because this is the front line.
Are you willing to spend your sats? If you go to a merchant that has a square terminal
and they accept Bitcoin payments, are you going to do it? Picture it. It could happen. There's
millions of them, like 4 million of them. They're all over the US, except for New York.
so when given the opportunity to buy your bubble gum or whatever it is you're doing
your sandwich your coffee lumber i don't know are you going to use sats or will you still pay in
fiat boost in and let me know i'm curious to know because if this audience won't do it
nobody's going to do it right or maybe i'm wrong explain your logic and boost in and tell me
you can support the show by doing what you do if you want to stack sats on river use the links in
our show notes check out the top of the show notes links to affiliate programs that you use
that help the show like the bitcoin well automatic self-custody platform for canadia or for the
united states or the bitcoin company sats to gift cards and seconds over the lightning network
or Fold.
You want to stack sats
when you're paying your bills?
Fold does it.
Yeah, sats back on your bills
and Salt Lending.
You want to get access
to your Bitcoin value
without selling it.
Salt Lending's been around.
They've been through some crunches.
They got a great platform.
That's who I use.
These links in the show notes,
click them,
go doing about
what you're going to do anyways.
Stack those sats
and support the show
while you're doing it.
Let's get into the boost because we do have some boosts this week.
Four score and seven boosts to go.
And Sat Squanch is our baller booster.
Hey, rich lobster!
Ah, yes.
88,000 sats.
Chris, you are scaring the bejeebus out of me with this Bip444 commentary.
Thanks for keeping it real.
What a development. Sorry I've been offline for the past few months, traveling and S.
Part of the contribution is from your boys at the Pizza Chief and Diesel Jeff from the Secret Thousand Oaks BTC meetup.
Still hanging out with the boys second Monday nights. That's awesome.
Make it so.
Love to hear that. Thank you, Satsquatch. Yes, I have more on Bit4444 later in the show.
So stay tuned for that. And I really appreciate the boost.
Our next boost comes from Bitcoin Lizard with 35,000 sats.
Let's hear it good, buddy.
You're spot on about BIP444.
This is actually, this BIP could actually make funds in esoteric taproot configurations unspendable.
Those pushing this BIP have gained some level of community approval by proposing something reasonable,
limiting data carrier size and pushing for some censorable blockchain for bitcoin for the
censoring the bitcoin blockchain it's hard to see this as anything other than nefarious
fortunately it unlikely to ever activate yeah i have more on that i agree it I think this is what gotten everybody Nobody wants spam So the argument of something to help prevent spam
seems like a good one.
It's more about the who would lose their coins
and what old transactions that have already happened
would be locked out.
I'll have more on that.
Thank you.
Good to hear from you, Blizzard.
Thanks for the boost.
Hey, Hybrid Sarcasms here with a big old McDuck.
I fly.
Quacka, wacka, it's a treasure.
22,000 sats and hybrid rides.
I didn't realize Cast-O-Matic stopped streaming.
Here's everything in my wallet.
Oh, also wanted to get your take on multisig wallets.
Is it worth the extra inconvenience?
Yeah, if you got a decent little stack, I think it could be.
Because what you get with it is peace of mind that, you know, you are safer from a wrench attack, from building, burning down, those kinds of things.
When you get a substantial amount, I think it could be worth it.
wallets like Nunchuck make it pretty approachable without unreasonable costs,
and they still offer service if you need it.
So it's something to keep an eye on.
I've been watching Nunchuck for a couple of years now since the Bitcoin Dad pod,
just kind of seeing how they're doing, and so far I've been impressed.
So I'm getting ready to try it out myself.
Thank you, Hybrid. Appreciate that boost.
Always good to hear from you, sir.
Hey, there's Gene Bean. Look at that.
He's here with 6,294 sats.
Why you got to put numbers and letters together?
Why can't you just go f*** yourself?
I don't know what all that means.
I think it might be a lot of ducks, too, so I'm going to give him some ducks.
Last week, I boosted and replied on you seeing the rendered version of my NPUB.
Oh, right, right, right, right.
He said, suggest you making my own.
Oh, so Gene set up a site for himself, like I recommended, genebean.me.
That's so great, Gene.
It looks awesome.
And then he links to his Primal profile on there.
Gene, nice page, dude.
set one up for me. No, I'm kidding.
He says, boosting again, because I
keep thinking about the stuff in this episode. Oh, I love
to hear that, Gene. Make it so. Thank you very
much. Glad I got you cooking.
OneDollGeeks here with 2,000
sats.
Regarding the soft fork, I posted
a question to Matthew Cratter. If we only have
20% of node runners switching to knots,
why do they think they have sufficient consensus
to force the miners to
the soft fork? Yeah, to mine
the soft fork. Yeah.
So there is a threshold at which they could be successful without having to be 50% of the network.
I don't know if 20% is at one dull geek.
This is an aspect to this data carrier size reduction thing that I don't understand fully in that it would require node operators and miners to comply.
And I don't know what incentive they have to do that.
I mean, obviously, they don't want spam.
So maybe if there was some sort of horrendous spam problem, maybe the incentive would be obvious.
But it's something I've been wondering, too.
Thanks, Wendell.
Appreciate that.
Northern Hoddle's here with 2,121 sats.
Hey, I like that.
I like you.
You're a hot ticket.
Gracias.
Agree on bit444.
Sounds nutty.
Yep.
I tell you what.
This is why I've been drinking bedtime wine.
This is why I have bedtime wine.
No, not really.
But, you know, you can understand.
Thank you for the boost.
Appreciate it, Northern Hoddle.
Eighth Ackerman's here with a row of ducks.
2,222 sats.
He says, Cratter has been kind of has been a Bitcoin purist, but I have had a tough time following him recently, too.
Seems like an overreaction on his part or some kind of sour grapes.
The last thing we want is a group or individuals determining what Bitcoin should or should not be used for.
Yeah, especially since Bitcoin is going to out survive all of us.
It's sort of quaint to think that we should be making some of these decisions for future generations.
I think audience capture is a thing, but also people truly are concerned about bogus, spam,
porn, whatever it might be, getting in the blockchain and affecting the value of their
money.
So I can see that making them a little nutty on this.
And then I think a lot of these folks, people that I respect, like Mechanic and until now
recently, Cratter, they went so all in on fighting 30 that the fact that 30 went with
the opportune changes, there's nowhere else for them to go except for this direction.
You know what I mean?
They're so dug in.
There's nowhere else to go.
And they passionately believe their cause.
I believe.
I think they're genuine in it.
I just, well, I'm going to get more to it.
I'll save my thoughts for more in the update section.
Stay tuned.
Thank you for the boost.
Brewagator's here with 5,000 sats.
This is the way.
As someone whose wife is a government employee, we have had to scale back on our DCA.
Yeah, I understand.
Once the back pay hits, though, we're going to smash buy.
Coming in hot with the boost.
hopefully before the price jumps back up.
Yeah, right, man.
You might be lucky, dude.
I don't know how long that takes them to get the back pay.
God, this is where I wish that we had great access to lines of credit right now
because, you know, you could take out a lot of credit, smash buy,
and then pay it off when you get paid because you're right.
Now it's going to be a great – we're below the 200-day moving average price.
So just historically, that makes it a discount.
It's technically on sale right now.
Bitcoin does have a sale price,
and that sale price is when it's below its 200-day moving average,
which it is right now as I record.
So it's on sale, and I hope you can do it, Brew.
Good luck. Let me know how it goes,
and thanks for boosting even in the lean times.
Really appreciate it.
As a podcaster, it's lean times all the time.
So thank you, sir, and I'm glad you're able to survive.
I'm sure that was not fun.
BobbyPin comes in with 5,000 sats.
The traders love the vol.
Linux and Bitcoin do go well together.
I've been listening to you since 2014
and bought Bitcoin for the first time two years ago
just to boost the show.
It's because I wanted to support
Jupiter Broadcasting.
I've only gotten orange-pilled this year
after doing the research.
I wish I was there for the Plan B days.
Oh, yeah.
People that are new to the show,
I used to have a Bitcoin podcast a decade ago
called Plan B,
which has been used by multiple people
for other things now,
but we were a little early.
He says,
I remember a while ago,
you and Alan sold Bitcoin to buy a server.
I wonder how much that server costs now
in the fiat fun bucks
given today's Bitcoin price.
Yeah, man, I bought a lot of studio gear.
Back in the day, a long time ago.
I'm just going to leave it at that.
I'll just say Newegg used to take Bitcoin directly.
Okay?
That was not good for me.
It was not good for me.
I'm glad Newegg no longer takes Bitcoin directly because...
Anyways, thank you for listening for so long, Bobby.
And thanks for checking in.
Clark Gaines here with 5,000 sats.
That's not possible.
Nothing can do that.
As much as I like the idea of Lava's products,
that's one of the lines of credit we've been talking about recently,
I've seen some investigative posts from Corey Clipson and Samson Mao showing lava zone terms and the risk being put on the bower.
Yeah, I'm going to talk about that.
I have an update on that.
He says, I suggest checking out Guy Swan's recent roundtable on the core knots and bit44 stuff.
And they get into the social layer.
He finishes with, it's a technical, he says, I think the technical arguments are just a distraction from the social arguments.
I don't know.
The technical implications are pretty big.
They're pretty, pretty big.
Thank you for the boost.
and I'll talk more about those in a moment.
Chance of Dizzy Spells is here with 2,500 sats.
Danger zone.
I think it is the danger zone.
Danger zone.
Thanks for the high signal.
There's a small amount of value in return.
I'm a few shows out, but please stay audio focused.
Visuals like the notes on your nostril count add on would be a bonus,
but I'm finding I have to stop and dry and clean my hands multiple times per show
where we've leaned more heavily into video.
It's just frustrating when I hit rhythm in some tedious chore and then succinctly transported to a realm of self-sovereign contemplation and education to have to stop what I'm doing and drop back into reality and work out what on earth they're talking about.
It makes the task seem much longer and I enjoy the show a bit less.
Anyways, that's my view.
Thanks for the work you put in.
Oh, well, don't worry about it, Chance of Dizzy Spells.
Your boy here got that video distraction thing out of his system many, many years ago and learned the hard way.
So around 2017-ish, all of my shows hard pivoted to audio only, multi-track audio only. And we went from producing live video and just recording that and then exporting out the audio, like you'll see a lot of podcasts do that now stream, like on YouTube.
And we went from just making a video and exporting out the audio to making an audio show that will render out like a video visualizer if you want to watch that.
So that's, you know, that's the lesson I learned 2017, 2018.
And you don't have to worry about that.
That's something I learned the very hard way.
Speaking of things you spent Bitcoin on.
But thank you for listening.
And I totally get it.
You know, I love locking into one subject while I'm choring.
And I don't want 15 minutes.
I want like an hour and I don't want to be interrupted by them talking about some chart that has some intricate lines on it that you can't even see.
So don't worry about it, man.
I feel you.
And you keep on boosting.
Appreciate it.
It is the way.
This is the way.
All right.
Our next boost comes from Nakamoto 6102.
Fun will now commence.
And fun is definitely commencing when he says, thanks for the value.
Well, thank you for the value.
I appreciate that very much.
Ed Broughton's here with 2,345 sats.
I don't understand what the heck is going on here.
He sent me a article on Noster, it looks like.
I will check out because it didn't render in my notes.
But it looks like it's the golden encirclement and how China and then it cuts off.
But I will follow that up.
I do have some China updates later in the show as well.
So maybe, Ed, we're right on sync.
Thank you for the boost.
Appreciate it.
Bob was here with a row of ducks.
2,222 sats.
I found Twib last week.
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Welcome aboard.
And I've been binging backwards to episode 50.
Love the macro.
Well, thank you, Boba.
Thank you for boosting him very much.
Glad to have you on board.
Kiwi Bitcoin Guide is back with 5,432 sats.
Here's what I think.
Oh, he says, what do you think of BIP44?
If you're interested, go read to the proposal.
BIP44 makes no reference to a decision being made to determine if arbitrary data is objectionable.
Right?
I'll get to that.
This BIP seems unlikely to have legs, though.
But if we're going to debate, it should at least understand it properly.
Here's my two sats worth.
Also, bonus boost for the term nose candy mark in the last episode.
I definitely approve.
No scared.
Thanks, Kiwi.
I always like hearing from you.
And stay tuned on some of my BIP444 follow-up.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.
That's all the sats above 2,000.
We have the 2,000 sat cutoff because, you know, numbers and stuff.
Why you got to put numbers and letters together?
Why can't you just go f*** yourself?
No, it's really for time.
But thank you, everybody, who also streams those sats as another way to support the show.
In fact, 47 of you stream sats and you collectively stacked 47,740 sats for this here podcast.
Thank you very, very much.
When you combine that with our boosters who sent a message, we stacked a total of 237,497 sats.
Thank you, everybody.
I really appreciate that value.
You can boost with Fountain FM.
They make it real easy or any podcasting 2.0 app that supports boosts and you get AlbiHub and you're totally self-sovereign.
Of course, you can subscribe in the Fountain app and support automatically that way with
SATs or Fiat or become a Jupyter.Party member.
All right, I do have a few updates that I want to get into.
Let's start with a Lava update.
I have removed most of my funds from Lava.
Why?
Well, a few red flags that have crossed the line for me personally.
Now that I've gotten a better understanding of what happened to older Lava users before this new line of credit product,
it seems they were moved from what they thought was a self-custody model to a full custody model by Lava.
It turned out Lava had full control of the user's funds the entire time, despite positioning otherwise.
And when they made this transition to a full custody model, they didn't properly communicate it to the users,
and they didn't properly communicate the scope of change, which is a violation of trust.
Second thing is I'm finding issues in the terms of service.
Lava's terms of service seems to read that borrowers certify they're legally allowed to borrow from Lava.
The proof is on the borrower.
That's not really how that works.
From the terms, they say, quote,
You agree and warrant that any use of the interface, the Lava Protocol and Associated Services, is done for business purposes.
The interface is intended solely for business, commercial, and professional purposes and is not intended for personal, household, or consumer use.
So they seem to be trying to shift a lot of the risk to the user, but I don't think that's going to work in court.
And Corey Clipson from Swan's also been pointing out that some of their math doesn't work on their supposed $200 raise.
And it means that they're probably not legally allowed to operate in my home state of Washington.
Much like Strike can give a loan to a business in Washington, but not to a pleb, they cannot.
The third thing that I've noticed is I've seen some reports of stablecoin issues.
So people try to put money in there and then try to take it out via stablecoin.
And they expected to receive USDC on the receiving side, only to receive lava coin that you can't do anything with.
And when they contact support, they're told to wait a few days.
It also seems like perhaps they're co-mixing user funds.
I don't like that they seem to reuse the same Bitcoin deposit address.
And when you do some mempool sleuthing, which was done, I'll link to that in the show notes,
They seem to be keeping some of their funds in a hot wallet and then they send some of the funds over to Kraken and then they kind of move them back and forth as liquidity is needed.
All of that makes me a little uncomfortable.
I'm hopeful Strikes product will be available soon with a credit card in front of it shortly after that.
And I also hopeful that Lava can explain some of this because the line of credit product with a credit card is a game changer for long Bitcoin holders They could put a little bit of a stash in there But for now I hitting pause
I'm going to keep a few hundred dollars, a couple, literally $200 of funds in there just to keep an eye on things and maybe qualify for the card if they do it so I can continue to follow it.
But right now, I am putting it in the not recommended column as far as Bitcoin services go.
I'm hopeful and I will monitor it and report back.
but there's too many red flags for me personally to recommend it to you.
So I'd say avoid it for now.
And if you've tried it, report in and you can be on the front line right with me.
And I'd love to hear your take.
SoFi on the other side of the spectrum, we go from the Wild West to fully regulated banks.
SoFi seems like they're going all in on Bitcoin holding and a few other assets.
New this morning, we got the guy at the desk.
SoFi launching crypto trading on its platform.
Joining us right now, first on CNBC, is SoFi's CEO, Anthony Noto, in town.
Nice to see you, sir, in person.
Good to see you as well.
Okay, so what's going on here?
This is a big deal.
Yeah, this morning.
It's a very big deal for you.
It is a very big deal.
It's a big day and a big milestone.
It reverses the course of time.
It does.
We've wanted to be a one-stop shop for all your financial services needs.
And one of the holes we've had for the last two years was in cryptocurrency,
the ability to buy, sell, and hold crypto.
We were not allowed to do that as a bank.
It was not permissible.
But in March of this year, the OCC came out with an interpretive letter that it's now permissible for banks like SoFi to offer cryptocurrencies.
So this morning we're launching as the only national bank, the first and only national bank, the opportunity to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana.
So I was going to ask, are we just talking about three for now?
We'll expand well beyond three. It'll be a pretty broad assortment.
We try to differentiate on being fast, having broad selection, great prices, ease of use.
So we'll try to give members, SoFi members, as much selection as they would like.
And what's the difference between going through you and going through Coinbase, you're going through Robinhood or somebody else?
Yeah, there's a couple of really big differences.
First, we're a nationally chartered bank, which means we have the infrastructure, the processes, the financial conditions that provides the safeguards that a consumer would expect from a bank, which is going to allow us to scale responsibly.
The second thing is because we are a one-stop shop, you can do all your banking, checking and savings at SoFi,
your borrowing and your investing, and now crypto.
And one of the unique things about that is when you come to SoFi and fund your crypto investments,
you'll fund them in a SoFi checking and savings account.
That checking and savings account deposits earn interest.
Say that again. You're going to fund it with crypto?
You're going to fund it.
By your checking account.
You're going to fund your checking account with cash.
And then when you buy Bitcoin or Solano or Ethereum, the money will come straight out of your checking savings account.
So when you're not putting cash to work, it's not sitting in an account that earns no interest and it's not sitting in an account that's not insured.
Okay, so what I don't like is they don't know how to differentiate the coins necessarily.
They're not just picking a winner.
What I do like is this kind of integration, while maybe not necessarily appealing to you, it's probably appealing to someone you know.
Many people you know.
And so I think this is going to be a very compelling product for a certain consumer base.
And it also, it makes purchasing so much simpler if it's connected directly to your checking account.
One of the things that sucks, at least in the States, I think it's probably better in places like Canada and the EU.
But in the States, it can take three days to transfer funds.
I'll have people that will contact me and be like, Chris, I bought some sats to boost you, but it's been five days and I don't have access to move them.
It's because the backing platform like Strike is waiting for the fiat funds to clear.
So it's just it's a really slow and old process right now.
And so if it's just connected directly to your checking account, it's an instant transfer.
You know, that's going to make some smash buys a lot easier.
So I'm really pleased to see it.
Curious to hear your take.
All right.
Let's talk about the reduced data temporary soft fork or bit 444 as some folks go to it.
So I am still developing my understanding because there has been an update, which I'll link in the show notes, to the draft.
And I want to get into all of this.
So my new understanding is that there isn't any active content scanning.
It uses mechanical limits and rules to make certain data heavy or misuses, spam uses, invalid.
It doesn't classify or detect any types of content.
Its stated aim is to restrict arbitrary large data at the consensus level to make sure that Bitcoin stays money and not data storage.
They're not analyzing the data.
They're rolling back the ability to store this data.
The way it gets actually adopted is the rules get adopted by node operators via updates to your node.
So if you're on NOTs, you would have to update the latest version of NOTs.
If you're on core and you want these rules, you'd have to switch to NOTs.
any significant subset of miners or nodes that refuse the rule change,
or if the rule change requires invalidating past transactions, which as it stands right now would,
then you're probably looking at a hard fork scenario, not just a clean soft fork upgrade
like everybody keeps talking about it. My personal opinion, but that's the way it's going to go
if they don't solve for the fact that it invalidates certain important past
transactions. There's also a number of these that I think are a moral question. Who has the right to
take even one SAT from anyone. Many of the P2K-PK and P2MS outputs are going to be completely
invalidated by this. And it disables a whole bunch of upgrade hooks and upgrade paths that people
have been talking about for the future. Now, there is a new draft, like I talked about, and it does
fix a few things. It takes out some of the legal language that seemed kind of like a scare tactic.
And they're mostly just calling it now the Reduced Data Temporary Softwork, or UASF, I should say,
U-A-S-F, the Reduced Data Fork, or R-D-T-S.
Not so much BIP444.
Now, Luke, he maintains that it's still BIP444,
but other BIP editors have disputed that.
So right now, everybody's just calling it
the Reduced Data Temporary Soft Fork.
And, you know, maybe it becomes BIP4444444.
Or, you know, maybe, who knows?
It does seem like it's adjusting
to be slightly more reasonable.
I like that.
But I still think we have to be real
about what's happening here.
This is the community deciding to freeze a Bitcoiner's coins.
So if you're going to do that, I think it has to be spelled out in real plain English when people are updating their nodes to do this.
This fork will stop X number of UTXOs from moving for one year.
That is no small thing.
That's a massive, massive issue.
And some groups are trying to make this a right wing, left wing thing.
It's not. It's about taking property and about clearly and plainly spelling it out that if we make a fork like this, X amount of UTXOs will be immovable for a year.
All right, let's talk about Bitcoin in China.
I didn't think this would be a topic, but if you caught episode 80, you might remember I played this kind of oddball clip from Trump.
Now, China is getting into it very big right now.
Now, if you want to go after people, you're going to kill that industry and it'll be very bad.
Tremendous number of jobs.
He's talking, of course, about Bitcoin in China.
And then later on in the clip.
An industry where basically you're going to have number one and you're not going to have a number two.
And right now we're number one by a long shot.
I want to keep it that way.
The same way we're number one with AI, we're number one with crypto.
And I want to keep it that way.
He was talking about China.
And I thought, since when has this been a thing?
I don't really know. Well, this week, China accused the U.S. of stealing 127,000 Bitcoin in a cyber attack. Yeah. OK, so let me give you the original story. We go back here to 2020. It's another stay a while and listen.
Stay a while and listen.
So in December of 2020, about 127,000 Bitcoin were stolen from Lubain Mining Pool, which is a Chinese-run Bitcoin operation.
They had facilities in China and some facilities in Iran.
And the exploit targeted a weak wallet key generator, only 32 bits of entropy in there, making the private keys brute forcible.
Not a particularly clever but, you know, effective hack.
and the stolen coins then stayed mostly dormant for nearly four years.
Not really anything happened to them.
And then in mid 2024, the stolen Bitcoin began to move again into new wallets.
And Bitcoin analytic firms like Arkham Intelligence
later traced those wallets to the U.S. government.
By October of this year, 2025,
the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the seizure in a civil forfeiture case
targeting the Cambodian businessman Shai Zen, the chairman of the Prince Group.
Shai Zen and his network were accused of running a massive pig butchering investment scam, which you may have heard of recently, including other things like wire fraud, money laundering operations and forced labor compounds.
So they took the money from them.
The Chinese government says it's theirs as the dispute is actually escalating to diplomatic levels now.
And both countries are using technical language to make political points.
The U.S. insists the seizure was legitimate, while China frames it as an abuse of legal mechanisms and a form of digital theft.
So these Bitcoin are becoming a bit of a geopolitical issue between China and the U.S.
And here's why.
These funds, if my math is right, would be nearly 40% of what would make up the U.S.
Strategic Reserve.
There's no way the U.S. wants to give that up.
Nearly 40%.
And so you have to wonder at what levels this is coming up if Trump is mentioning it in
interviews.
And then we see China making these claims.
This could get interesting because I don't think they're going to want to give up 40%
of the reserve.
Well, speaking of China, Dan Moorhead, he's an American investor, an entrepreneur, and
a hedge fund manager.
He's the founder and managing partner of Pantera Capital, and he thinks China is going to buy
more Bitcoin, perhaps why they want this Bitcoin back, as a hedge, a hedge to protect themselves
against the weaponization, as China sees it, of the U.S. dollar.
Oh, I think it's pretty obvious that the countries that are adversaries of the U.S.
will ultimately buy Bitcoin and potentially other coins, but I would say at least start with Bitcoin.
And so I think I think there's gonna be an arms race. Right. And there'll be like Dr. Strangelove,
strategic mineshaft gap, right? Like it's going to be a real race. And as you know,
there's only 21 million. And if a bunch of people all want to buy a million each,
it's not enough to go around, right? And there again, that's why I'm so bullish because
there's just not enough Bitcoins to satisfy countries' desires. I think the US has 200,000
Bitcoins just, you know, from confiscations, kind of a random.
And China has roughly the same, I think.
Yeah, and China has roughly the same. I mean, no problem seeing them wanting to buy a million
bitcoins you know yeah i mean it's still tiny compared to their balance sheets budgets all that
stuff and so if you you have two three four like say the gc wants to buy a million china wants to
buy a million maybe russia wants to buy some us like it's gonna squeeze up like a watermelon seat
Let's check in on the state of the network as I'm wrapping up at block height 923,349.
Now, the Bitcoin price, one Bitcoin to US dollar, 101,780, hovering right above 100,000.
That puts our sats per dollar at 983 sats to one U.S. dollar.
We're down in proper correction territory at 19% down from our all-time high, which was $126,000 37 days ago.
October 6th, a long 37 days.
Difficulty adjustments have been all over the place.
Now at an upward adjustment of 10% next target date, November 26th.
Let's check in on the nodes.
Core 30 flirting with 10% this week now at 9.4%.
It's fluctuated quite a bit.
Followed closely by Noughts 2025-1010 at 9.1%.
With Core 28.1 having the majority of the network at 10.8%.
We've got three Noughts nodes on there and Core 30 though now has 2,243 nodes by my count.
That makes the total reachable Bitcoin nodes 23,739.
Well, if you made it this far, you should probably check out the links in the show notes.
There's always more there this week in Bitcoin.show.
A bunch of other great Jupyter broadcasting shows there as well as like Linux Unplugged.
You also got the launch, which I highly recommend.
It's a little fun. Nice distraction. But back to this year's show. Let me know how I did. I try to
make a show that doesn't get distracted. I touch on the issues caused by politics, but not the
emotions around them. And I think that's important because that signal, that information you need as
a Bitcoiner to plan. So let me know how I did with a boost or anything I missed or additional
things you'd like to see covered. Go ahead and boost those into the show. I always appreciate
all that. And I'm going to wrap you up with a value for value track this week, as I do. This
This one is from Suzanne Santo
track new all along.
But it's gonna hurt forever
Being who you are
But you knew all along
That you weren't like the other ones
And you knew all along
That half the time you have to run
And you knew all along
That love would leave you still
And you'd be another level down
From leveling up
She said they're crowning you a queen
Thought you're turning your back
Do you know what I mean
When I say you're living in lack
But you don't need to suffer, honey
You can just relax
Cause you knew all along
You weren't like the other ones
You knew all along
Half the time you left to run
You'd never want it on
That luck would leave you stunned
And you'd be another level down
From leveling up
From leveling up From leveling up From leveling up For level in it For level in it
You knew all along that you were like the other ones you knew.
You would have to ride and do all along.
The love would leave you stunned.
Then you'd be another level down.
Leveling down.
You're going out to level up.
You're gonna have to live with you
We'll see you next time.