Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 78.
My name is Chris, ChrisLAS.com, JupyterBroadcasting.com.
Well, Q4 is off to a bit of a rocky start.
And I kind of have the sense that some Bitcoiners out there have been feeling a bit of FOMO, fear of missing out.
Gold has been on a real rip for the whole summer.
And I think some of us Bitcoiners have started to smell a local top.
And we've wondered, OK, if this thing's going to be ripping so hard, eventually it's probably going to take a breather, right?
And you kind of get an idea that that's coming when the no-coiners started lining up around the block to buy the rock.
I'm telling you as consumer, why gold is suddenly shining brighter than ever before.
Isn't it? I just stole this from the podcast table.
I saw you swipe it.
There's only seven cameras on me.
Prices are soaring.
They just reached a new record high, more than $4,200 an ounce.
That's double from just a year and a half ago.
So here to break it all down, whether you've got gold to sell or jewelry to buy or gold to steal, NBC's Vicky Wynn.
All right, so what's behind this price hike?
Listen, gold is up 14% in just the last month, Savannah.
we have been enchanted by gold for thousands of years.
It was one of the original forms of money, right?
And typically gold retains its value.
So when times are turbulent, global economy is going crazy,
people turn to gold to invest.
That's what's pushing the demand up.
By the way, I should mention a thank you to Lionheart,
who's provided all this beautiful gold jewelry,
because that's what people are asking about.
What does it mean for jewelry?
All right.
So you could tell things got a little hot.
And then, of course, the last couple of days, gold has dropped 8%.
And that is a big drop for gold. In fact, on Monday, I think it was Monday, it might have been Tuesday, it all blurs together. It had its largest one day drop since April of 2013. Gold has only seen a move of that magnitude 34 times since 1971.
You know, so an 8% drop for Bitcoin is a Tuesday.
But gold's only seen it 34 times since 1971.
OK, or put another way, gold dropped more than the entire market cap of Bitcoin.
Silver fell as much as 9% in a single day and posted its largest decline since the 2020 crash.
And you still can't buy a cup of coffee with either one of them.
You know what?
I can't buy coffee.
I can't buy a pizza with either one of those things.
And clearly they're not a store of value with the price swings like that.
And they're obviously dead.
OK, I'm joking, of course.
But the gold bugs weren't.
When they get a nice little pump, they just really shorten that window to like a daily chart.
You know, long term thinkers all day long when it comes to gold.
But when it comes to Bitcoin, they always look at the hourly chart.
Let's not just focus on the day to day.
Let's welcome in Ed Yardeny.
He is president and founder of Yardeny Research.
Okay, so we're not just focusing on the day-to-day. We're bringing in Ed. He's a macro guy. He's a gold bug.
Ed, you can comment on what you heard from the president, or we can just move on to the markets.
I know from a market perspective, you think both gold and the S&P 500 can each hit 10,000 by the end of the decade.
I'm not a math whiz, but that's only about four years and, what, two and a half months from now.
Oh, man. So over a medium-term timescale, Ed's pretty bullish, it sounds like.
Why so bullish?
Well, look, on the stock side, the economy has proven to be remarkably resilient.
We've seen three years now where we've had the most widely anticipated recession of all
times that just didn't happen.
Notwithstanding all the shocks that the economy dealt with and continued to grow, I think
the economy is going to remain resilient.
I think we may continue to have these rolling recessions that affect different sectors at
different times, but the overall economy, I think, may very well continue to grow through the end of
the decade. I want to say I agree with old Ed here. This is kind of my base case, too. I think
we've already been seeing these rolling recessions. We saw it hit Budweiser. We saw it hit Disney.
We've seen it hit the movie theaters. There's areas where people are cutting back, but because
we are in a full swing debasement cycle, there's other areas that are just going to pump, totally
divorced from how the average consumer is doing. So far, I'm totally with Ed on his macro analysis.
Okay. Which I, by the way, call a roaring 2020s because so far so good. It has been roaring.
I look for earnings to get down up to over $450 a share by the end of the decade and apply a 22
multiple and you get to something close to 10,000. Gold and stocks have a very interesting
relationship. On a short-term basis, they're inversely related, but on a longer-term basis,
their trends have been nearly identical. And I think gold is increasingly viewed as the safe,
diversifying asset that you want to have in a portfolio. Okay, agree with him or disagree with
him. Once again, Ed is demonstrating a bit of long-term thinking, right? Because gold is going
to be in vogue right now because of the quote-unquote debasement trade. If you're thinking
about the debasement trade, you're probably thinking beyond just five years. You're kind of
naturally thinking long term. Definitely a risk off asset, whereas Bitcoin is proving it to be
more of a risk on asset. Oh, now, wait a minute. Where did this come from? Yeah. Bitcoin's made a
lot of people a lot of money, but it is down about 21,000 right now. Oh, comments right at the bottom,
at the bottom. And this is honestly, this is pretty kid glove stuff. If you look on like X
and other places, the gold bugs just come out and hammer Bitcoin about its store of value
whenever there's a bit of price retracement. But yet that narrative just doesn't come up
when gold has one of its most significant drops and silver as well ever. So it just seems like,
you know, it's the Lindy effect. It's going to take time for people to wrap their head around it.
So whatever it is, it's just it's so funny how the gold bugs don't seem to get it, because when they talk about Bitcoin, they have to go to the hourly chart.
But if you look at a five year price chart, which I think all gold bugs should be looking at.
Well, gold's up one hundred and seventy four percent in the last five years.
Pretty good.
Bitcoin's up one thousand one hundred and thirty six percent in the same time frame.
And gold's pump really only kicked off this summer.
I mean, it started heating up after the U.S. election, but it got its rocket boosters in the summer.
Go look at a price chart.
June, July-ish, especially in August, it just starts really going up.
But that's if you price it in dollars.
It gets a bit more interesting if you price Bitcoin and gold in something that's scarce, like energy.
So if you price Bitcoin and gold in, say, crude oil, over the last five years, in terms of what you could exchange gold or Bitcoin for energy, forget fiat for a moment, but you want something hard, something scarce.
In terms of oil, Bitcoin is up 731% in the last five years.
Gold is down 30% in terms of oil in the last five years.
Now, if you zoom out, gold's doing much better.
But if we just go by a five-year window, Bitcoin's doing a lot better. Put another way,
let's look at this longer term. In January of 2017, where gold is a bit more competitive when
you zoom out here, in January of 2017, an ounce of gold and one Bitcoin had roughly the same value.
They were both worth around 20 barrels of oil. In 2017, gold and Bitcoin, both of them were worth
about 20 barrels of oil. Today, the performance of the two assets has drastically diverged.
One ounce of gold is now worth around 66 barrels of oil. So you went from 20 barrels to 66 barrels
of oil since 2017. Today, one Bitcoin is worth 1,742 barrels of oil. So from 20 barrels of oil
in 2017 to 1,742 barrels of oil today, making a single Bitcoin currently worth the equivalent
around 26 ounces of gold in terms of crude oil, all priced in barrels.
You have to kind of look outside the system to really understand the Bitcoin gold story.
And these gold guys, they're all about the long term.
They're all about thinking like that until it comes to like, you know, a little bit of
pump and then Bitcoin gets a little retracement.
and then the stupid comes out.
Okay, so if all this is true,
why does it feel like the USD price
has been farting around so much?
After all, everyone says after gold has its run,
Bitcoin's supposed to take a nice run.
And that is kind of generally true,
although the part people don't often say,
although I say it,
There tends to be a lag like 100 days after a gold run is sort of the average.
But like after COVID, I think it was three, four months.
It can take a while sometimes.
But I also think it's because we have a couple of oh shit things that we still need to clear out of the system.
I'll just keep it to just two this week, only two.
And I'll start with the shorter term issue that we have to clear out.
When you look at the different pumps and the different dumps recently and the people short selling, Binance keeps coming up.
They're at the center of all of these stories over and over again.
Now, I'm not a trader.
I don't buy and sell the crap coins.
I just DCA and HODL.
So this and if that's you, you know, this kind of stuff probably doesn't really even really matter to you other than it explains why the price hasn't been ripping in October and with all of the tailwinds.
So this is a theory of mine that follows, but I think we're seeing the slow, soft decline of Binance, the once big king of the crypto exchanges.
And what looks like a lot of long-term hodlers that are selling on Binance might actually be more of a rotation.
Now, the rotation I'm talking about looks like selling on-chain.
And this is me putting together several things.
Bloomberg had a piece called Bitcoin Wealth Flows to Wall Streets as Whales Adopt ETFs.
And in this piece, which I'll link in the show notes, they say, quote, a regulatory change this summer opened up the door for large investors to hand their Bitcoin to an ETF in exchange for shares of the fund.
It's called an in-kind transaction and is used across most ETFs, but was only approved for Bitcoin products in July.
And the thing is, is this process is generally tax neutral.
There's not a lot of options when it comes to moving your Bitcoin around that are tax neutral like this.
No cash changes hands. No sale is recorded. Bitcoin flows out to a regulated ETF institutional custody, but looks like a sale on chain. BlackRock, BlackRock, oh boy, oh boy, I think that's a Freudian slip. BlackRock has announced that they have facilitated more than $3 billion worth of these conversions. That's according to their head of digital assets, Robbie Michnik.
So why? Why are these whales that have been long-term hodlers, why have they converted $3 billion of Bitcoin into Ibit?
Well, by exchanging their Bitcoin for ETF shares, this is again from the Bloomberg piece, investors can keep the same stake in the cryptocurrency while moving it into a form the financial system recognizes.
It goes on to say,
In a brokerage account, that holding can be pledged as collateral, borrowed against or included in estate plans, things that are cumbersome, risky or impossible when assets sit in a private digital wallet.
The ETF wrapper offers legitimacy, ease and turning what was once an off-grid wealth into something banks and advisors can work with.
Again, that's from the Bloomberg article, not from me.
But I do kind of co-sign it to a degree.
Having watched my folks and friends that have brokerage accounts and understanding that you can't move money between like a stock and Bitcoin and these things are isolated and you miss out.
People want it all in one account.
But the other thing they get access to, this article just kind of touches on, is much superior lending products.
Much superior lending products where you can do mixes too.
It doesn't just have to be a Bitcoin-backed loan.
But additionally, the ones you can get from a Bitcoin-backed loan are much more competitive rates than what Strike is going to offer right now, right?
Where Strike might get you a 10% or 12% interest rate, some of these are going to get you something closer to 5%.
I mean, that's a massive difference.
And so there's just a lot of incentive there, plus it's all kind of integrated into the system.
So the article wraps up with it been quite the institutional migration moving settlement from offshore venues like Binance to onshore regulated custodians Across 2025 whales and funds have been trading exchange convenience for Wall Street custody Binance liquidity share is
collapsing while BlackRock, Fidelity, and Bitwise soak up that flow, creating the illusion of selling
pressure. So this actually, if I could just break this down, could be bullish because the spot
balances are falling. It looks like there's a lot of selling, but supply isn't actually increasing.
supply is tightening, even though it looks like they're selling.
And these ETF Bitcoin, they're functionally, they're off market.
It does remove some of the volatility fuel,
and especially getting off of Binance, which has a lot of issues.
So we have this, I believe, slow decline of Binance,
which was once the king of the offshore cryptocurrency market,
and it is slowly draining into these United States institutions.
And as the Market Structure Act gets closer to come online,
If in that market structure act, they by law decree that there must be certified central price controls, that's really going to suck for Binance.
Because one of the ways Binance can manipulate the market is by manipulating the Oracle data.
I don't want to get into that because if you don't trade, who cares, right?
I don't care.
But this could be setting up for a sort of shakeout.
It could take a little bit.
And the decline of Binance's actual influence over the market.
And if that were to happen, that I think would actually be an extremely good thing.
Now, there's a second, I'd say, bigger issue that we should talk about.
And we've touched on it recently, so we'll just mention it short, but it's very important.
So I do feel compelled to mention it here, and it is going to have dramatic impact on Bitcoin.
The battle over rare earth minerals could be devastating to the West if this doesn't go right.
And here's a quick recap of where we're at.
The United States used to be an industry leader of rare earth production up until the 1980s.
But for the last several decades, the U.S. and the rest of the world have largely depended on China for the majority of their rare earths.
Now escalating trade tensions between the two countries have forced the U.S. to seek to develop a domestic supply chain after China enacted stringent export controls of rare earths back in April.
The United States is so dependent on a number of these critical materials, we are absolutely held hostage by companies that are geopolitical foes.
This is the feedstock to physical AI. We've had on your air, we've had Jensen Wong, Elon Musk, and many others talking about robotics, drones being the largest industry in the history of the world. Well, rare earth magnets are essential. And so if we don't bring this supply chain on now, then we're really leaving trillions of dollars at risk.
This is all hands on deck warfare right now between the US and China. It's a competition that is an existential competition in my view. And so nothing is off the table.
Global demand for rare earth permanent magnets is expected to more than double by 2035.
But can the U.S. wean itself off of Chinese rare earths?
CNBC spoke to experts and stakeholders about what it will take to mine and process rare earths domestically.
So this issue is why you're seeing folks that might not normally hobnob, knob the hobs.
And as you saw this last week, President Trump and Australia's prime minister were doing just that.
Today, President Trump signed an agreement with the Prime Minister of Australia focused
on rare earth minerals.
The deal aims to secure U.S. access to Australia's earth resources and growing tensions with China.
The deal could involve up to $8.5 billion in projects, focusing on minerals like lithium
and silicone, which are essential for modern technology.
President Trump says the deal would take the U.S. relationship with Australia to the next
level, while also giving the U.S. a chance to negotiate a trade deal with China.
I think that China will come to the table and make a very fair deal, because if they don't, they're going to be paying us 157 percent in tariffs.
The agreement also ties in investments in submarines and unmanned underwater vehicles through a partnership with the U.K. designed to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific.
Trump called it a win for both nations.
Who wrong?
Yeah, so this is, I mean, it's good to see, right?
And there are businesses in both countries that are trying to step up saying we're going to try to have production ready.
And some of their most positive estimates say that we should see some results, especially when it comes to some of the critical magnets that we need in early 2028.
But that's their best case.
OK, I have to I have to sneak in a quick third reason.
I mean, it's it's those things, too.
And they really matter.
And Bitcoin has to work through that.
But I have to toss this one in too because in the United States, there seems to be stress building among some of the regional banks.
And we keep hearing it's an isolated incident.
It's an isolated incident.
Nothing to worry about.
The thing that I have learned is that the banking industry, they can have these problems that can take years to unwind.
They can move really slow until they don't.
And it's also fueling a lot of concern, which is I think what we're seeing in the broader sector, that there are more cracks emerging in credit markets.
You used the phrase cracks. We were doing some market entomology yesterday, picking up on what Jamie Dimon said about the potential of there being more than one cockroach in the environment. And I wonder sort of how we should look at these two events and complement both the comments that he made about the bankruptcies that we've seen and this latest news about these two regional banks.
Well, they still remain quite isolated incidents as far as we can tell.
Oh, maybe not so isolated.
So then we fast forward a couple of days and Tricolor, which was a bank that sold cars and provided auto loans mostly to low income Hispanic communities in the southwestern United States area, also filed for bankruptcy protection in September.
And then today, as I record, subprime lender, which I think subprime is banker for risky lender, subprime lender, Primeland Capital filed for bankruptcy today.
Now, guess what?
Primeland Capital also specialized in car lending to low-income communities.
And Nobody Special Finance on YouTube, one of the few people that covered this this morning, had the report.
Meanwhile, we've got the big one of the day here. Subprime lender PrimaLend enters bankruptcy
after a bond default. We saw this one coming. It is now official. PrimaLend Capital Partners
filed for bankruptcy after months of negotiations with creditors following missed interest payments
on its debt. PrimaLend, which provides financing to auto dealerships that cater to subprime borrowers,
listed estimated assets and liabilities below $500 million each, according to court documents
it filed in the Northern District of Texas. So that's an important one there, guys. Number one,
it's a fraction of the size of tricolor. This is much smaller. But the fact that these guys are
filing for bankruptcy in the Northern District of Texas, is this another story where the surge
of deportations and the sudden change in immigration policy may be contributing to this bankruptcy
here. Again, we saw with Tricolor, 30,000 missing cars that they think just drove across the border
when people self-deported. Plus, when somebody gets deported, are they going to pay their bills
if the car gets left behind in America? They're going to keep making their car payments? Probably
not. This is another subprime lender, so maybe they were also specializing to people without
social security numbers or with no credit history. So there's a little bit of overlap here with the
tricolor story. Now, in a press release, Prima Lend said it was pursuing a sale of the business
in bankruptcy court and would continue to fund and service loans to its own borrowers. That's
kind of misleading. They haven't paid interest in months. Prima Lend finances buy here, pay here,
auto dealerships, which serve low-income borrowers. And there's that low-income slash
subprime slash risky bet. You make a bunch of loans to people who can't pay them back.
In particular, guys, that 2021, 22 and 23 vintage car loans, when everybody was flush with Stimmy Cash and their credit scores went way up because, well, it was illegal to report delinquencies.
All of a sudden, risky borrowers looked really good.
And well, a lot of people are missing their payments now.
I think those of us that have been in Bitcoin for a while, we know that it tends to be an indicator of concern.
It becomes a global sentiment indicator because it's the open market 24-7.
It's liquid, it's available, it's around the world, and it's telling us we need to pay attention to these three issues.
That's what I believe.
okay now a bit of a production question for you in the background i have been experimenting
with producing a video version of the show i'm not sure if there is demand for it though so i
thought, why not ask, would you be interested in a video version of This Week in Bitcoin?
I'd probably release it on YouTube, but what I'm actually more interested in from a FreedomTech
standpoint is the alternative enclosure tag in the podcasting 2.0 spec. So unlike the past,
the bad old days where I'd have multiple RSS feeds, one for the audio, one for video. In fact,
for a while back in the day.
I had one for HD video,
one for standard definition video,
one for the audio.
It was a mess.
And some of that technical debt
still exists for Jupyter Broadcasting.
But with the alternative enclosure tag,
oh, it's beautiful.
One single master RSS feed
can have both the audio and the video.
The audio would be the default,
but if your player supported it,
you could just flip over to the video version.
And it turns out like almost all the clips, I guess this week, all the clips, not always, but all the clips this week are video.
I'm just capturing the audio.
So I guess that would probably be the biggest value add I'd suspect is that you'd be able to watch the clips.
But is that something you'd want?
Honestly, I think sometimes listening is more valuable.
I really like the audio medium.
It does keep the production effort down.
But I have to admit something I've realized myself is I am consuming more and more content via video.
probably because more people are just doing it by default.
But if I'm at my desk or I'm at home and the TV's on,
I find myself drifting to video.
So if I could offer the same to you,
that's something I might be interested in.
However, I don't really know if there's demand for it.
You know, this has been an audio podcast from the beginning.
There might not be any interest in there.
So let me know.
Send a boost with your vote
and tell me if you would be interested
in a video version of this here show.
Or, you know, it could be something in between.
I have other ideas as well as like clips and whatnot.
that perhaps I post on Noster that are sort of supplemental to the show.
I'll have more. I'm cooking on all of that.
But I would like, before I get much further down this road, your take.
So boost in and let me know.
coming up we got your boost an update section you're really going to want to catch in a great
last clip of the week so before i go any further besides boosting and being a jupiter party member
you can support the show just by doing what you already do.
If you want to buy Sats on River, one of the best platforms ever
that just introduced supercharged dip buys,
we got a link in the show notes.
If you're in Canada or you're just all about self-custody,
the Bitcoin Well is an amazing automatic self-custody platform.
Love them. Link in the show notes.
Now, if you want to spend your Sats via Lightning,
you can go to the Bitcoin company.
You can go from Sats to gift card in seconds.
You can even log in with your Lightning ID.
like, well, credentials, I guess, whatever you call it.
Link in the show notes for that.
Now, if you want to stack SaaS just doing the day-to-day,
paying your bills, buying what you got to buy,
that kind of stuff, Foldcard.
It's a winner in our community.
I use it every day.
And last but not least, I recommend Salt Lending.
They're still the one with the edge up, I think,
if you want to get access to your Bitcoin
without selling it by taking out a collateralized loan.
Because they have one product
the other guys aren't going to touch,
and that is if the price really tanks,
they will auto-convert your Bitcoin balance to stablecoins to ride out the volatility
and then allow you to convert it back to Bitcoin once the price starts to increase again.
Now, not a huge stablecoin guy,
but that's a compelling way to prevent from getting completely margin called.
Salt Lending has a lot of really great features,
including ACH support for payments and more.
Links to all of that.
No official affiliation, just products I use.
And we did get some boosts.
Ask not what your podcast can boost for you but what you can boost for your podcast Natgasm Immersion comes in with 33 sats
Let's hear it good, buddy.
I probably didn't get that right, but you are our polybooster this week.
You got it at a great price.
Chris, do you need heat for your place without a bunch of extra work?
Check out exergyheat.com.
That's exergyheat.com.
Heat that pays.
Hmm.
Now, you don't say on the site here, are these Bitcoin miners?
Because I see they're featured in a lot of Bitcoin press.
Electric devices convert energy into heat.
Bitcoin miners.
Oh, here we go.
Bitcoin miners pay you for contributing.
Frickin' love this idea, dude.
I look around at the space heaters and the oil heaters that I use at my place, and I think
that stupid thing should be using that heat.
That's just wasted energy.
Wasted energy.
Thanks, Nat.
Appreciate that.
Mug Daddy's here with 22,222 sats.
Ah, fine.
This old duck still got it.
Great show.
Glad you're back.
But don't swallow the Eurocoin propaganda.
Your American mind cannot fathom how cuck the average Euro is.
They don't have a competitor to Visa or MasterCard because there's genuinely no need for it.
But Euros reflexively buy almost any propaganda the ECB shoves at them.
The digital euro is a control mechanism masquerading as a solution in search of a problem.
Full stop.
Fun will now commence.
Oh, man.
All right.
I like that.
That's a hot take.
Did you buy that hot take from a certified vendor?
Did you buy that from a certified vendor?
I think I'm all in.
Oh, I'm in.
I don't know about that, but I do like that take.
Boost in if you agree or disagree.
Thank you, Mug Daddy.
Appreciate it.
Hey, here's Gene Bean.
He's here with 6,233 sats.
I like you. You're a hot ticket.
Could you break down leverage for a noob?
Yeah, it's like a loan.
So you take out a loan for $1,000.
I'm making these numbers up.
You back it with $300.
So you have $300, but you have $1,000 worth of purchasing power.
But then you get wiped out because what you backed it with, the price of that.
So, for example, say you put some Bitcoin on the line to get that loan.
Well, when the value of that Bitcoin were to drop,
Or what happens in the case of altcoins is they put their Solana or their ETH or whatever it might be as collateral.
And then when those things have price movements, they make Bitcoin look like gold.
Like it's steady.
They're like 70%, 80% vol.
So they move like and they just get wiped out.
Their collateral becomes worth nothing so their loan isn't backed anymore.
And so they get wiped out.
That's the quick version, Gene.
A command and control economy.
Is he saying China's economy is a botnet?
Now, I think that's their command and control economy.
I think they're trying that out as a way of saying that it's an economy directed from the very top down, which is a lot like a Trump economy.
Anyways, have you ever gotten the bonus stuff for Twib working with Jupyter Party?
If not, is it still in the works?
It is still in the works.
I have the ability to manually post things to the Jupyter Party members in a downloads area where they could log in and download them.
Because I haven't been able to get it to work better than that, I've kind of paused special features for Twib in general.
I don't know if that's a good idea,
but I just don't want to shortchange the members,
and because I can't solve this right now,
I'm just not making bonus content,
which is not great.
I really hate that these platforms
get me up against a wall like this.
Plus, I also want to try to figure out
the video stuff too now, but we'll see.
And then Gene asks,
so what you think about BolWallet?
Oh, Gene, short version looks pretty great.
Long version will be in the update section.
I have more for you coming soon.
Thanks for the boost.
Mix comes in with 5,000 sats.
The traders love the vol.
No message, just value, though, which is just fine.
Thank you very much.
Ace Ackerman's back with a Rodex.
2,222 sats.
This is a great episode.
Thank you, Ace.
Perseate that.
Retro Gear's here with 3,333 sats.
This is the way.
Hey, Chris, I just switched to Nots29.2 from Core.
I ended up using the Linux server IO Docker image.
It's getting pretty simple to set up a node these days,
slowly catching up on Twib.
Cheers for the high signal content.
Well done.
Yes.
I've been thinking, too, I'd like to have another private node, just a really low-key Docker container one.
It doesn't have to be much.
That might be the way I go, RetroGear.
Of course, today, too, if you're concerned about operator and stuff, you can still change those settings.
You can run Core 30, and you can change those defaults.
You can also continue to run Core 29, or you can run not.
So you've got a few options now, and I'd love to even see more options.
Let's have another node out there, another node or two, really.
You know, you look at the Linux landscape, how many freaking distributions there are.
It's strange that we only have one big node implementation, in my opinion.
It seems more like an anomaly of time, not the way it's always going to be.
And I might check that out, RetroGear.
I like the Linux server IO stuff.
Thanks for that.
Appreciate the boost.
Paranoid Coders here with 2,000 sats.
Boost!
No message, just the value.
Thank you.
Mike Newman's here with 7,777 sats.
Love this podcast, Chris.
Well-rounded.
Heard about it on podcasting.
Hey, shout out to those boys.
Thank you, guys.
Also, heard about your road trip and lunch meetup in Turnstile a few weeks ago.
Turnstile.
But I was out of town.
Oh, right, the place we had lunch at.
Yes, right, right.
Told the guys there that you were coming.
Oh, did you?
They had no clue.
Yeah.
Checked in yesterday and they said, quote,
It was huge and a really great group of people.
Stay humble and keep stacking.
Well, you know what?
I appreciate that you did that, Mike, because I don't reach out anymore.
I sometimes do for some really large groups.
Like if we're going to have 100 people or more.
But for the like 30 to 50 people, I've stopped because when I contact these places, they panic.
Or they make me go through all of this process.
Or they make me pay and commit to like $1,000, $2,000.
and if we just show up, they work it out.
I know that's not the way we should do it,
so I try not to abuse it and we try to be very generous,
so we didn't tell them.
And I really wished we had because it turned out the day we showed up,
they were down to a two-person crew and they had one menu item.
Now, it was a good burger, so it worked out.
So I'm kind of glad you gave them a heads up so they knew we were coming.
Had I known they were going to be limited like that,
I would have given them a heads up too.
I rolled the dice on that, but you had my back.
Appreciate that and appreciate the boost.
Kiwi Bitcoin Guide's here with 4,567 sats.
Fun will now commence.
Note up, Bitcoiners.
We all got to do it.
Here's a guide from our community website in New Zealand.
I just published it to help all Bitcoiners run their own node.
It's right up your alley, Chris, and it's running straight on Ubuntu.
You can find it at kiwibitcoinguide.org, and I will put a link to it.
It's Set Up the Bitcoin Node Guide.
Thanks, Kiwi Bitcoin Guide.
That's a really great idea.
We need more people doing that.
Get your voice.
Thank you, Kiwi.
Bobby Pins here with 5,000 sats.
Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too.
Well, speaking of nodding up, great timing.
I was looking at the mempool of my node during block 91, 919,953, which was also during the AWS outage.
I was confused why the block would be taking over six times as long as it should be.
The best thesis I can come up with is maybe the big pool uses AWS orchestration software.
Maybe the big pools.
Is there a better explanation you could think of, or am I just inexperienced and don't realize these anomalies just happen sometimes?
Also odd that almost after an hour, it gets mined by an unknown solo miner.
Bobby Penn.
So the key party says, I was confused why a block would be taking almost six minutes as long as it should be.
Oh, I'm sorry, six times.
I was going to say six minutes.
I could say six times.
The best thesis I can come up with is the big pools use AWS for orchestration software.
Huh.
I would buy that. I would buy that. I wonder if anybody else has information on this.
Bobby Penn. I like that. I like that theory. Oh, I'm in. Yeah. I like it a lot. I don't know.
There could be other explanations for sure, Bobby Penn, but that does seem pretty good.
Thank you, everybody who boosted in. We do have the 2000s cutoff, but I keep all the boosts even
below 2000s. I save them in the dock and I count them towards our total and I appreciate all of
them. Now let's take a look at how we did. We had 42 of you stream SATs. SAT streamers really did a
heavy lift this episode. You stacked 53,593 SATs. Now, when you combine that with our boosters,
this episode stacked a humble 147,960 SATs.
lower expectations
now that's not horrible but it's not great so if i lowball estimate 12 hours of work for this
episode which is a lowball that's an hourly rate of i don't know i'm doing the math but i think
it's about 13 an hour it's not horrible it's not nothing but if you feel that my analysis the news
collation the clip collation the collection of all of it in the presentation if you feel it's worth
more than $13 an hour, please do consider sending a boost to this episode. In fact, that math only
gets worse if I'm honest about the amount of time I spend on the episode. But that said,
that said, it's not nothing. It's just not where I was hoping it would be at.
But I do really appreciate those of you who did support this, either with a Jupiter Party
membership or a boost. Thank you very much. I mean, you were the MVPs of this week's episode,
So thank you.
And all of this said, to put it in context, I have to be aware that this last week's episode still did make it to number two on the fountain charts.
So it might have just been a lower, weaker overall week in the value verse, perhaps.
I don't know.
So that means those of you who did boost, you matter a lot.
Thank you, everybody who did send some value into this episode.
Appreciate you.
and if you would like to boost the show,
Fountain FM makes it really easy to do so
because they do all the lightning hosting for you
or you can take the challenge on with Albie Hub
and build your own environment
and then connect you to a lot of different backend apps
like Castomatic.
I think that's a really good one.
Podverse is fantastic
or you can actually just get the Albie extension
and then you can boost from the podcastindex.org website.
I had some updates I wanted to get into, and you heard Gene ask about it.
Boll Wallet is finally available on iOS and Android worldwide,
and it is an open-source wallet that I think is probably worth at least a little bit of your attention.
It's reproducible. Well, it will be very soon, so that's very good.
It's open-source. It's SigWit native.
It uses a lot of proven libraries under the hood that have already been in use by Dolphin or Aqua
and other wallets out there.
You can connect it to your own node.
It has coin selection and labeling.
That's huge.
It has a mempool-based fee algorithm,
so you're paying just what you need to pay.
It's Bitcoin only.
It also supports importing watch-only wallets,
so if you have cold storage but you want to keep an eye on it.
It has encrypted secrets to protect against malicious apps on your phone,
secure keyboard to prevent clipboard hijacking.
I'm reading from their points here.
no push notifications and no data collection, no IP tracking whatsoever.
It's interesting they call it no push notifications.
And they also support testnet if you want to mess around.
And here's something I think you're going to like.
When receiving payments, a bull user can choose to receive via Lightning, Bitcoin, or Liquid.
It actually, I installed it. I like it.
I think I might like it a little bit more than the Aqua Wallet, to be honest with you.
And I also like the bull Bitcoin folks.
If you haven't heard of them before, I will link to a presentation they gave recently about their origin story.
And one of the things, and I like this, that they get into, and they have it time-coded, is how open source plays a role pretty deeply with everything they do.
And that always registers highly on my list of priorities.
So I'll have a link in the show notes for that.
Go check that out.
Now, some reports of an AlbiScam email are surfacing, so I just wanted to make you aware of it.
Be extra bear aware.
Daniel, or the Daniel, on Noster has reported some Alba users are getting fake phishing emails,
claiming they need to log back into their Alba account.
The email and the link it gives you are bogus.
This is what Daniel posted on Noster.
He says, quote,
What I believe is happening is someone is using the public lightning addresses from Noster profiles
to dox everyone's registered email address on Alba.
By simply entering a valid Alba address, the login page leaks the corresponding email address.
This means the purpose of the attack is not so much to breach your Albi account,
it's to collect the emails of Albi users for future phishing attacks.
So just something to be aware of.
And if the Albi folks have any comment on that I keep an eye out for that PayPal had a very embarrassing crypto week You might have heard that they accidentally issued trillion worth of a stablecoin The mistake was made by Paxos
which is PYUSD's issuer during an internal transfer. It showed up publicly on the Ethereum
blockchain and then was reversed about 20 minutes later after on-chain observers flagged it. Now,
fat finger mistakes. They've happened before. Tether once minted $5 billion by accident and
Citigroup mistakenly sent $81 trillion in a single transaction last year.
I don't know why, but it just it feels like, of course, it was on the Ethereum network.
There's not anything to back $300 trillion. Remember how the genius acts as all these
things are supposed to be backed? Well, backed by what proof? Because apparently they can still
just issue $300 trillion. So I guess there is no mechanism to prove they have those backings
before they issue it, which seems awfully busted to me and will never be a problem.
Clearly, that'll never come up again in the future.
That's just not going to be a problem.
It's not going to cause a huge disaster.
Clearly, obviously.
Jeez.
OK, OK.
One more thing.
OK, maybe not with just one.
I've been doing that this week.
It's probably two.
Fed Governor Christopher J.
Waller says the Federal Reserve loves crypto now.
This week at the Payments Innovation Conference, the Federal Reserve governor said that crypto has become integrated into the payments and financial system, which, believe it or not, I mean, if that's true or not, that's not really the point.
The point is, this is a very notable shift in the tone coming from the Federal Reserve staff.
And here was his comments to open his, I don't think they call it keynote, opening remarks, I suppose.
This is an acknowledgement that distributed ledgers and crypto assets are no longer on the fringes,
but are increasingly woven into the fabric of the payment and financial system.
Now, before we hear from these innovators, I would like to touch on roles that the Federal Reserve plays to support the private sector.
These include serving as a convener to solve coordination problems and operating core payment and settlement infrastructure.
We are also looking ahead, conducting hands-on research on tokenization, using smart contracts,
and the intersection of AI and payments for use in our own payment systems.
We do this to understand the innovation happening within the payment system, as well as to evaluate
whether these technologies could provide opportunities to upgrade our own payment infrastructures
and to enable us to have deeper conversations with the industry on these new technologies.
The Federal Reserve governor went on to say that the Federal Reserve needs to do more to support this new payment system.
And they have called on the staff to explore the idea of what is being called a payment account at the Federal Reserve.
So a Federal Reserve payment account would function as a regulated on-ramp for crypto and stablecoin payment networks,
giving them a way to plug into the Fedwire and ACH networks without needing a traditional middleman bank.
that's big. I mean, if that is true, that is a really big, that is actually truly them
embracing this. Well, I don't know if that goes anywhere, but just that kind of language from the
Federal Reserve, that has to count for something. All right. Last week, I got a bit worked up
over Andrew Sorkin, you know, the CNBC host, mostly because he's just horrible at his job
in general. And he's now going around on a book tour, totally unaware of the structural problems
and the overall system
and just trying to gin up as much 1929 fear as possible.
It just drives me nuts.
And I just had to go on a bit of a rant.
And after I published last week's episode,
a clip of Andrew talking about his Bitcoin regrets
popped up online.
And man, it just would have been perfect
to include in last week's episode
because I think it gives you some insights
into why he drives me freaking nuts.
In Bitcoin and or gold, but we don't.
Why is that?
I don't know.
How do you invest?
Anyone ever ask you that?
Most people don't ask me that.
And the truth is I'm not allowed to invest in individual stocks.
It's actually given what I do for a living, that's part of the-
Remember, he's super important guys, right?
I mean, he's just a really important guy and everything he says matters.
So that's why he's not allowed to invest in stocks because Andrew can move markets or something.
Part of the-
Part of the deal?
Part of the nunnery that I have to live in.
You're long the index.
I'm long the index.
I am long-
Bitcoin?
Bitcoin gold?
I'm long the indexes.
And no, by the way, I wish I could.
I thought for many, many years, it's probably shifted now.
So he wishes he could buy Bitcoin is what he means to say.
But it's not because he isn't allowed by contract.
He didn't buy Bitcoin because he was afraid of how it might look.
But for years upon years, I was always, I think Chmaph and I have talked about this.
I was always worried about buying Bitcoin because I didn't know, I didn't want to be on TV or in the papers.
Well, I would do it.
I came on CNBC.
I know. I know. I would tell Sorkin to buy it. And I would sit there. A hundred, a coin, two hundred coins. Sorkin would show me a clip of Charlie Munger telling me that it was a rat poison. And he would say, Tom, what do you think? And I said, I have tremendous respect for Charlie and Warren, but they're wrong.
I remember those moments fondly and sadly because I should have listened.
I should have listened.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
Ha.
So this is why it drives me crazy.
Andrew Sorkin, he's not a weatherman.
Okay, he's not reporting on White House Palace drama.
He covers the markets every single day.
And after years of crapping on Bitcoin, laughing in his co-host Joe's face and other guests that came on to tell him about Bitcoin, he now says he regrets not buying Bitcoin himself.
And he didn't do it because he didn't want to look bad.
And he's totally like a psychopath, indifferent to those that he misled by following his advice.
I looked it up.
CNBC, in print before this, but on television, first talks about Bitcoin.
on June 20th, 2011, because Bitcoin had a crash and they were having a little laugh at it.
Bitcoin was at $17.56 at the time when CNBC decided to talk about it on television.
Less than lunch at McDonald's.
Can you believe that?
For an entire Bitcoin, not some sats.
The entire Bitcoin was less than lunch at McDonald's when they first talked about it.
So the viewers that followed Andrew's advice missed out on a price appreciation of approximately 618,000%.
The most asymmetric bet of their lifetime.
They missed out on it if they followed Andrew's advice.
So now that he sits there and laughs about it, it drives me crazy.
So let's get some signal back in here.
Jack Mahler's had a great point on his recent podcast,
and it's something I was touching on earlier,
and I think it's the way we should wrap up this episode.
When you're looking at Bitcoin's price action,
it's always, I think, worth keeping in mind
that it might be the canary in the coal mine.
And while this can be stressful,
it can be disappointing that you don't get the pump
that you want, we would rather have it this way
than any other way.
And I think Jack illustrates that point.
So I wanted to put out this tweet really to calm everyone down. I said, remember,
Bitcoin is the most sensitive to liquidity. It moves first. It's a truth machine.
Bitcoin on a Friday night tanking is telling us something. It's telling us there's something
broken in the financial system. Liquidity is off. The fiat system is failing. Okay. And you want
Bitcoin to be the most sensitive to liquidity because we want it to be the best expression
of currency debasement. We want it to be the best performer on the other side of the money printer.
When you're the most sensitive to liquidity, it goes both ways.
Yes, you react on a Friday night when the stock market can't because it's closed and
when gold doesn't because it's a rock.
But that means if they're going to print a ton of money, and this is the end of fiat
as we know it, Bitcoin is going to be the best performer.
Let's check in on the state of the network before I get out of here.
I'm wrapping up at block height 920,285.
My monkey brain loves that.
920,285.
I don't know.
I just like that.
The current price, 107,880 Bitcoin to one US dollar.
107,000.
Just ticked up to 107,900.
Actually, it's ticking up right now as I talk.
I like that.
920, 940.
Look at it go.
Sats per dollar, 926.
926 sats to one US dollar.
We are currently down 14.5-ish, 4-ish percent from our all-time high, which was $126,180 15 days ago on October 6, 2025.
Our difficulty retarget date is coming up on October 29th, an estimated difficulty adjustment upwards of 5.9%.
And our reachable nodes on the network has been hovering right around here, 24,558.
I'd love to see that break into the 600 zone.
Let's see, Bitcoin Core 30 clocking in at 2.5% of the network.
2.5%.
Notts October release, 4.2.
Notts September release, 11.6.
And an earlier Notts release, I think March, 5.9.
So still sitting around 20% too.
The node stuff hasn't moved much.
Interesting.
All right.
There you go.
State of the network, it's strong.
Well, I'm heading out into the woods,
celebrating Halloween a little early with the kids.
But I'd love to hear from you.
Before I get back, send me a boost.
Let me know how I did.
I hope I didn't get distracted by too many things.
We focused on the signal, got you the information you needed,
explained what's going on.
Let me know if I did that successfully with a boost.
And of course, you can always boost in with what else you'd like to hear from the show.
future topic ideas.
We are cooking up an AlbiHub special
that kind of gets into lightning
and things like that.
It's not fully flushed out yet.
So if you have any input
on what that might pertain to,
what it might include,
what else questions we could answer
around AlbiHub and lightning nodes,
send those in as well
and I'll start banking them
for that production.
All right.
That's it for me this week.
Links to what I talked about
are at thisweekinbitcoin.show,
a bunch of other great
Jupyter broadcasting productions
over there as well.
I'm going to leave you
with a value for value track.
If you boost in during the song, 95% of your sats go to the artist.
And this week, it's one of my all-time favorite value-for-value artists, Oli.
And it's his song, Low Key.
Since I can't remember, I've been chasing this dream, dream.
It's been out and up.
A lot of people switch lanes, and it's like G, G.
I've been doing enough.
Had too many long days, which I ain't seen, seen.
When you been in love, bottle in my hand, I just keep it low key.
Key
That's what feeling does
Bottle in my hand
I just keep it low key
Only for the weak
Hold up
Need a second just to breathe
Know how life can be
Learning nothing but it's coming free
Had to fail to see
I was in the city 17
Trying to build a dream
I've seen a lot of shit that no one ever do
Feelings turn to pain
That's the subtle truth
And the colors I assume
They finally coming through
Think I lost what I was running to
Since I can't remember
I've been chasing this dream
Dream
It's been out enough
A lot of people switch lanes
And it's like G, G
I've been through enough
Had too many long days
Wish I ain't seen, seen
When you been in love
Bottle in my hand
I just keep it low-key
G, that's what feeling does
Yeah, trips can only bring you down sometimes
When you're back against a wall
Thinking that you lost it all
I don't even make a sound, I'm fine
I just keep it to myself
Only one that wished me well
I guess I had to lose some to make it out right
People I grew from and maybe lost sight
Still I feel like I'm too gone and sleeping at night
Drink a little, I might
Since I can't remember, I've been chasing this dream
Dream
It's been out of now
A lot of people switch lanes
And it's like G, G
I've been doing enough
Had too many long days
Wish I ain't seen, seen
When you been in love
Bottle in my hand
I just keep it low, keep it
G, that's what feeling does