Music.
Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 60.
My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Well, can you feel it? It should feel pretty good, a little different.
Because Bitcoin has been staying above the $100,000 USD mark for 30 consecutive
days for the first time ever.
It's actually led some to argue that we're going to see a new style of dip in the future.
Something new for Bitcoin, which I'll get to that in a little bit.
And while I'm at it, I'm also sort of surprised this week that Bitcoin knots
hasn't reached at least 11% node market share after this week's news,
which we'll get to in a moment.
But to set the stage, we got to start with some quick macro news of the week
in both the states and abroad.
And the inflation report for May is out in the U.S.
It shows inflation ticking up by 0.1%, which is lower than expected.
And that has some market bearers like Bob Lane admitting they've been getting
it wrong for the past four months.
I want to start on the inflation data. We saw the market have a significant
move to the upside. We're coming
in just a bit off of that. How would you describe the market reaction?
Quite a bit of a surprise, Maddie. I was looking for a little bit of an increase
in inflation over the prior month, over April, and we came in with a 0.1 print on the core number,
which is a number that the Fed really paid much more attention to than just
the headline number, even though the headline number did come in actually a
little bit less than expected as well, 2.4% annualized.
I think it's important to recognize
that inflation over the last three months has been heading lower.
Just one print is not all that important. But as the Fed has talked about in
the past, Chair Powell has mentioned in several of his press conferences.
What's important is to pay attention to the trend.
And the trend, what he looks at is something like about three to five months worth of data in a row.
So now we have three prints in a row. We have March, April, and May that have
shown very much lower inflation.
Prices are starting to stabilize, which is what the Fed is looking for.
I think now that rate cuts are back in the conversation at next week's meeting.
And I know some people have already come out and started talking about that
as well, too. But I think it's a serious conversation that the Fed has to have.
I think the last projections that they had back
in march maddie was for two rate cuts in
2025 i still don't think that's going to change next
week when they set the new projections coming out in june but
i i do think that there's going to be a a legion of people on the fed in the
voting block of the fed that's going to start saying hey listen you know what
the the proof is in the data here we've been paying attention to the data we
need to start talking about rate cuts well if the data shows that rates are
going down And if Bob is saying here,
then would the Fed be late?
So the consumer price index increased by 0.1%.
So that puts the official overall inflation rate at 2.4%. But the one that the
Fed looks at is the core CPI, which came in at 0.1% and 2.8% if you look at it holistically.
But the core CPI excludes food and energy. But that's the one the Fed goes by.
It's really weakness in energy prices that helped with the inflation costs.
I think the White House likely had a heads up on this news.
They know a day or so. And so, accordingly, they have been increasing their
public pressuring and pushing of the federal chair, J-Pow, to lower rates.
And, I mean, it's both Trump and J.D. Vance that are out there.
Every opportunity they get asked about it, they push and push.
And this is Trump during a press junket on Air Force One.
And if we had a good Fed chairman, you would lower rates.
And you know what? If inflation happened in a year from now or two years, let them raise rates.
But we're going out for long-term debt or
short-term debt we have a lot of debt coming due because biden had
all short-term debt mostly and we would
get a lower rate and a lower interest rate if this guy
would lower rates we get a lower interest rate it's unbelievable and he's worried
about inflation if he worries about inflation any longer all he has to do is
get the lower rate let us go out borrow at a much lower rate much lower you
could go down a point or two but go out borrow And if in two years inflation
comes back, he raises rates.
But he keeps them the same. It's just, it's insane.
What's your next Fed share? Are you already thinking about who your next Fed
share would be? I know it's 2026 when he's termed.
So you're already thinking about it. It's coming out very soon.
But I don't think I have a pretty good idea.
All right, let's stop there. So before we get to the Fed chair stuff, so Trump is there.
He's openly pushing and he's saying, yeah, we're thinking about our next Fed chair.
And he might be right on rates if the inflation date is correct.
I think if it wasn't for the tariff trauma, the Fed might have already cut rates.
Where Trump's wrong is it's not one man's decision. It's not just J-PAL.
It's a committee that votes on it, although I'm sure he has a lot of weight.
But so far, it seems like what happened was the Fed was sort of geared to cut
rates and then the tariff stuff started and they didn't know where that would lead things.
And so the tariff stuff kind of put things on hold.
However, it may be that we look back at the tariff stuff and think it was mostly an overreaction.
Goldman Sachs, chief U.S. economist David Miracle joining us here.
Good to see you, David. Welcome.
Thanks. That's four months of missing the estimate.
Is Sarah right about us misreading the impact of tariffs?
I think it's possible that the tariff effect is a little bit smaller.
In particular, this month, we were only looking for a five-basis point effect
because we had seen the auction price data on cars looked fairly soft,
even though photos are something that's been hit with a large tariff.
I think the other thing, though, that we're learning is that there are meaningful
offsets to any potential tariff effect that we got this month and might get in coming months.
In particular, I think you saw that in the shelter category,
where for quite a while we've had this catch-up inflation, keeping inflation
a little bit elevated month to month.
As CPI prices catch up to kind of market prices, that should gradually go away.
Now, these data can be a little bit erratic from month to month,
but gradually we've seen that theme play out. So do they just miss that earlier?
Or were they overreacting? So now they're not. But, you know,
who knows what happens later in the year?
I mean, the reality is these things do take a while. We could see it in the
second half or something, perhaps.
But so far, it doesn't seem like it's been nearly as bad as was expected.
So maybe the Fed was wrong to pause because the inflation data is looking better.
And one of their counterparts, the ECB, just did their eighth rate cut of the year.
They're now down over there at the ECB to 2% interest rate.
The governing council today decided to lower the three key ECB interest rates by 25 basis points.
In particular, the decision to lower the deposit facility rate,
the rate through which we steer the monetary policy stance,
is based on our updated assessment of the inflation outlook,
the dynamics of underlying inflation, and the strength of monetary policy transmission.
So she's looking at some of the same data the Fed is, but is deciding to cut rates.
They also are expecting just an increase in spending because of their military buildup.
So we'll see. But I think what we're going to witness now is a maneuvering from the White House.
They're going to start talking more and more about their next possible Fed chair pick for 2026.
And it's just simply political maneuvering to put pressure on J-Pow and to take
power away from him, to kind of convert him into a lame duck and get people
essentially looking at the new Fed chair before he's even in.
And it also, since this doesn't happen until 2026 and it's starting right now,
it gives trump time to pick someone who will
work with him who will be transactional i
want to go to one point that you made in that blueprint that
you laid out and that this here is paul tudor
jones probably recognize the name he's pretty famous for being
a pretty savvy investor and he's on bloomberg and they're talking about who
the next fed chair pick will likely be comes to appointing the most dovish fed
chair possible jerome powell's turn ends in may 2026 we've heard from the president
recently that he's going to announce some contenders sometime soon.
Bloomberg News has reported in the past 24 hours that Scott Besson has emerged
as a pick. Kevin Warsh is under consideration.
I mean, if you had your pick, who do you think is best suited for the chair?
Those are two great names. Those are two fabulous names.
Again, if I was president, if I just think about President Trump,
he's just a he's a growth guy, right?
He's a he's a loyalty and growth guy.
You're going to be my pick if you're loyal to me. You're going to be my pick if you're a growth guy.
And I'd pick a growth guy and probably Scott would be more in line with that than Kevin would.
I suppose just to quickly translate, a growth guy would be somebody who cuts
rates, right? Right. You cut rates.
You make money easier. You get access to loans easier. People invest.
They build things. They buy things, et cetera.
It creates and stimulates growth when you lower rates. So by a growth guy,
he means somebody who will lower rates essentially.
They will have had a really close working relationship at that point.
I also think, again, the playbook's pretty clear historically and right now.
We are fiscally constrained. We're in a debt trap.
You're going to have to run negative real rates to get out of it.
That's what we did in the 50s. If you'll remember, we had a variety of prices
fixed by the Treasury while we had 5% and 6% inflation for a period of time.
We're going to have negative real rates. And that's why you have to think about
what is facing our policymakers in this debt trap as you construct your portfolio.
So what would an ideal portfolio be in something like that?
Well, what has worked so far? What has worked so far has been some combination
of stocks, which won't do great,
which would do terribly if we ever actually had, if they called us out and the
bond market actually gave us an accident that then spilled over.
But it would be some combination of probably gold, vol-adjusted, Bitcoin, gold, stocks.
That's probably your best portfolio to fight inflation.
Vol-adjusted because the vol of Bitcoin is obviously five times out of gold.
So you're going to do it in different ways.
You said at one point you would allocate one or two percent of your portfolio to Bitcoin. Is it still?
Yeah, I mean, I think you just. He doesn't really answer the question here,
but I'm going to let it play because to me, it essentially sounds like the answer
is probably more than one or two percent.
But he just doesn't want to take the risk on air of saying it.
Particularly now that the roadmap is clear. Then I mean, the.
Again, if I'm a policymaker, I'm going to run really low real rates.
I'm going to have inflation running hot and I'm going to tax the American consumer
to get out of my debt trap.
And that's exactly what Japan, who's the most fiscally constrained in the world, doing.
And it works until until the population throws you out because you let inflation get too hot.
So maybe you're in a world with 3, 3.5% inflation and 2.5% overnight rate,
and you're kind of trying to run hot and grow your way out of it.
So he's saying the next Fed chair is likely going to lower rates,
stimulate growth, which will stimulate inflation.
And as soon as the U.S. economy or any of the Western economies really starts
popping, oil will start going back up, which will also stoke inflation.
So what he's saying here is the playbook is clear. The White House is laying
it out right here, and you better have some Bitcoin.
And while we're looking at inflation rates month to month, ticking up 0.1% or whatever it might be,
as we love to say, if you zoom out and look at the compound inflation rate,
and I go by the Truflation dashboard, which I think has held up extremely well
and is actually more generous than the CPI numbers are right now. But it says the U.S.
Compound inflation rate since January of 2020, when we really started kicking
off some of the more recent money printing, is 28.15%.
The compound inflation rate since January of 2020, the compound inflation rate is 28.15%.
And billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones just said, you should probably own
some Bitcoin because the next guy is going to stoke growth, cause inflation
to go up, and the government's going to embrace it because they need to inflate away their debt.
So the game plan has just been laid out by both the White House and Paul Tudor Jones.
And they say Bitcoin is the answer.
At the same time, the White House is establishing a Bitcoin reserve.
And there's legislation working in different states to purchase Bitcoin.
I mean, it all kind of connects here.
These are not individual events.
There is a greater consensus that has happened around what the future of the U.S.
Dollar is and the movements in place that we see now with like state reserves
and the Federal Reserve and corporate
reserves and private reserves with individuals and family offices.
These are becoming more popular in common terms because it's becoming clearer and clearer.
And as we get closer to the inevitability of the problem, even the signals from
the White House and investors and the Treasury are very clear about what's to come.
And it is all routes lead to Bitcoin.
That's why I think you could make a pretty serious argument that it's a damn
shame the Bitcoin community is really wrapping or wrecking or ripping themselves
apart to some degree or another.
It really comes all around to, you know, how people view Bitcoin should be used
as a pure monetary asset or as a decentralized blockchain that stores all kinds
of things that people assign economic value to.
And this week, there was a change in the Bitcoin Core's transaction relay policy.
Poll request 32406, which uncaps data carrier size to allow larger op return
data up to 100,000 bytes, was merged.
Which we've talked about this potentially allows non-monetary data like NFTs
or other things onto the blockchain.
The change was made in the hope that it would reduce network bloat from unprunable methods.
Gloria Zhao commented on the merge, quote, to elaborate.
This poll request helps avoid a world in which economically relevant volume
of transaction is sent using direct submission.
We move closer to that world when large economic actors, layer twos,
exchanges, etc., choose to build direct relationships with large miners in order
to get non-standard transactions mined.
If widely used, central submission services undermine the permissionless design
of proof-of-work-based consensus, hurt the censorship resistance and privacy
of transaction broadcast,
and destroy the fast block propagation that our network has enjoyed for many years.
All, while not preventing the non-standard transactions we dislike,
such services exist or in use today, and it is worth trying to reduce the reasons to use them.
Now, of course, the counter objections are about enabling more spam.
Gloria counters those specific objections by saying that the op return is in
fact prunable, it's expensive, and does not threaten validation efficiency or incentive models.
Others argue some of the workarounds are cheaper than Opratern and will still get used.
So for you, what you need to understand, the practical thing for those that
may maybe run a node or considering run a node or want to know how this impacts
node operators, this poll request changes the default value of the dash data carrier size flag.
So when you're starting up Bitcoin Core, the defaults are getting changed as of version 30.
You can still set your own limits. You can override these limits and you can
still use Bitcoin core 30 and
override the default limits, but the default limits are getting changed.
If you do override the defaults from 30 going forward, you're going to start
getting a warning message that they're discouraged and that you shouldn't use them.
There is currently no timeline or plan to remove the flag options though.
So you can now override these new data carrier size, this new data carrier size default.
I think a lot of node operators are left feeling like these changes,
which could make some sweeping impacts to their nodes.
I mean, that is a legitimate thing. You may have to store more data on your node.
I think they feel like these changes are all of a sudden, like they're being rushed.
Like there was this big blow up about it and went quiet. Now,
all of a sudden, all this stuff is arriving.
But the Bitcoin core developers argue that, well, this debate's been raging
for years. It kind of simmered down. It was recently renewed.
Only this time when it was renewed, it was a lot more productive.
PRs were submitted, discussions happened, code was reviewed,
and now things are just getting merged.
That's the timeline of things. Things really kind of kicked off a few months ago.
Now for you, the reality is none of this stuff is going to even ship until October.
And even then you're going to be able to override the defaults.
Throughout all of this, there has also been the issue around communication.
Who represents Bitcoin Core? if Bitcoin Core represents something broader than
just one of the interpretations of the protocol, etc.
And a statement was released by a large group of Bitcoin Core developers.
I don't know who made the post, you know, these things, but they posted a statement
trying to defend their position, trying to say that, you know,
these policies didn't work.
We're trying to come up with something that prevents workarounds.
They argue it's better for Node software to reflect a realistic mining behavior
rather than act as gatekeepers.
And there's a bunch of signatories that affirm their commitment to policies
that align with Bitcoin's long-term success.
They say they're really focused on the technical stuff. They don't want to be
led around by social media. And there's a lot of people on the list,
including Gloria Zhao that I just quoted earlier.
But I have a few observations around all of this stuff. The positioning,
these PRs getting merged, along with how they've been communicated,
they're all sending us an actual signal that I think most Bitcoiners have been missing.
And Gloria Zhao just said it out loud recently on X, quote, Bitcoin Core is
just one protocol implementation that can be copied and modified by anybody.
The only thing that makes it special is the way its contributors make decisions.
This, I think, tells us, this statement tells us a little bit how the Core developers see Bitcoin Core.
They see Core not as a baseline MVP implementation that sets the Core standard
for everyone in the network.
They see it as one of the possible implementations that's taking a more opinionated
position on certain things.
Now, the reality is Bitcoin Core is the default. It's the king of the node network.
There are other implementations, but it's the most popular. Bitcoin Noughts,
the second most popular is around 10.5% of the node network,
which is impressive because it's grown quickly, but it's only 10.5%.
You're going to have more people running Bitcoin Core 30 with these defaults
overrided than you probably will have people running Noughts.
Now, some have argued that core policy changes, including these most recent
ones, essentially constitute de facto governance and are dictating Bitcoin's
rules unilaterally, which is outside of true consensus and acts as a centralizing force.
And Bitcoin core developers argue, look, you could just do your own implementation.
Maybe you should. And probably they should. Someone probably should do their
own implementation. But my question to you, isn't this kind of dispute,
these kind of directions inevitable?
If you've been around for a minute, haven't we seen this play out,
say, for example, with Linux and other open source projects?
They start with this unbelievably attractive dream of changing computing for
the better that enables humanity in a significant way. That's what free software and Linux was all about.
It's hard to picture now, but in the late 90s and the early aughts,
there was a dream of freeing the world from commercial software and Microsoft in particular.
The idea that Microsoft would work with free software and open source was ludicrous.
It was like matter and antimatter coming together.
But as time went on, corporations found value in open source Linux and free software.
And they began using it for their own purposes and contributing it to their
own purchase, you know, scratching their own itch, their own purposes.
And we saw things evolve in a direction that was not what the Dreamers,
not what Richard Stallman saw.
But yet it still contributes a significant improvement to the state of technology for humanity.
It's created a generalized technology platform that brings with it disk and
networking and security and a development lifecycle and APIs and an ecosystem
of just billions of different libraries and apps.
Something you could never do if you just created your own OS to run your own device these days.
And right now, I'm staring at a Linux desktop. And right next to it,
I'm recording on a Linux desktop.
So for some of us, it is the year of Linux on the desktop. But it hasn't really
arrived for the rest of the world.
But that doesn't take away from how important free software and how important Linux is.
The dream is always powerful in the early days. But then we have to learn to
either live with it or get out. And I think that's what's happening with Bitcoin.
This is where I want your insights.
Will there be a place in Bitcoin for the believers, just like there still is
for Linux today, even though corporations like Microsoft and Samsung and others
are using Linux to ship and sell devices and ship services?
I'm still using free software on my desktop. Do you think there will be a place
like that in Bitcoin? What will it be like?
And as a Bitcoiner, how do you stay focused on what matters?
What are the things you laser focus on in Bitcoin?
Boost that in. Let me know what you think. I'll read those on episode 61 and into the future.
Music.
Pulled. Breaks is not in service. Please make a note of it. Well,
just a bit more on stablecoins.
I played clips from Lynn Alden and Safe last week on stablecoins,
and Safe had a really good talk at Bitcoin 2025 conference.
But they had a podcast together where he had some follow-up thoughts that didn't make him into his talk.
So I'm going to play those for you in just a moment. But to set the scene,
after hearing way too much about stablecoins over the last few weeks,
I was more than happy not to talk about them this week.
But we have news, and I think we have news that we'll look back on as significant.
Let's get to the biggest story of the day. Circle's public debut,
the stablecoin issuer listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker
CRCL after a multi-year push to bring the company onto U.S. markets.
Shares opened at $69.50 after pricing at $31 per share the night before.
A 124% gain and far above the initial range of $27 to $28 expected earlier this week.
Shares soared as high as 235% at one point. Yeah, they popped up to $235.
I think they had to halt trading. It was nuts. The enthusiasm around stablecoins is becoming unhinged.
It's becoming ridiculous, and I think it's going to have consequences for Bitcoin.
But first, let's pour a little cold water on this hype.
Safe has done the math, and he's run a couple of scenarios.
And assuming Tether grows like bonkers, you know, there's different projections out there.
But assume they grow something like a $20 trillion market cap,
something really crazy, which is conceivable but unlikely.
And it's not because the technology, because of how many treasuries they can
buy, but SAFE says simply because the earth is already kind of awash in dollars
and there's demand for dollars, but not like there used to be.
If Tether got to $20 trillion, then I think in terms of the impact that it would
have on the debt by 10 years' time, it would make about $3.7 trillion difference.
So the debt would be, instead of being about $69.5 trillion,
it would be $65.7 trillion.
That's basically it. this is in this
scenario where tether debt purchases grow
enormously and they have a significant impact that they bring down yields by
one percent they reduce the cost of servicing the debt for sure but the magnitudes
involved are so enormous and the market for money outside of the U.S.
Has already got so much dollars in it that I don't see, even in the most optimistic
growth scenarios, there's just not that much room for bag holders.
It's not 1945 anymore where nobody had dollars outside of the U.S.
Now everybody's swimming in dollars already. So, yeah, they can always buy more
dollars, sure, but it's not going to make as much of a difference as in 1946
when they were going from very little dollars abroad, right?
So a concern of mine is we're going to see a summer of stablecoin hype.
Any chain out there that has any kind of like a semi-series,
but definitely the ones that have a serious stablecoin play,
I suspect we're going to see a bunch of capital rush into those.
And we'll also probably see a rash of altcoin ETFs start to get approved and
then money rush into them. And my main concern here would be that we'll see
Bitcoin ETF holders sell their Bitcoin ETF to buy some of this crap.
And we'll also see liquidity that should be going to spot Bitcoin flow to these
altcoins and soak up liquidity.
You know, that's just short term stuff. But it's something that's on my mind
is there seems to be this ludicrous appetite for stablecoins.
And as Safe points out, there's demand for dollars. But even if you do really,
really optimistic math on Tether, it's just scratching the surface, just tiny stuff here.
And so the only only possible solution is maybe lots of stable coin issuers
beyond just Tether and Circle.
But Bank of America has a stable coin and PayPal, all these companies,
you know, they all become buyers of debt.
All of a sudden, all these corporations, they're not even banks,
they're just corporations are going to become buyers of debt.
And maybe collectively they get to something that really matters.
But the only way you get there is if you have this really Wild West stablecoin ecosystem.
Man, just the more I think about it, the more I don't like it.
Music.
You can support the show just by doing what you do. If you're going to buy sats
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Use our link in the show notes and support the show as you stack sats.
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Last but not least, if you want to get access to your Bitcoin value without
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Link to that in the show notes. Use those services as you would and support
the show as you stack and whatnots. Appreciate it.
And it is time to get to the boost. And now it is time for le boost. I just said that.
And our first boost this week is from Mr.
Adam Curry, the podfather, coming in with a baller of a baller boost.
Ladies and gentlemen, 600,000 sets.
You're the best around Nothing's gonna ever keep you down You're the best around.
Music.
He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. And he writes, I've been listening.
On my light phone a lot recently. Oh, interesting.
So it was time to catch up on returning some value. Congrats on 60 shows.
Here is 10,000 sets for each one.
Woost! Wow. Thank you. I think that's got to be one of the biggest boosts ever
into the show. Man, oh man. Really appreciate that.
There you go. Show's over right there. That's good, right?
Wow. Stop it. Get some help. Thank you, Podfather. Appreciate it.
Our next boost, it's also a very generous boost, comes from Satsquatch with 52,888 sats.
I don't understand what the heck is going on here.
He says, what a wonderful song. One of the best so far, in my opinion.
I'm not against Bitcoin treasuries. However, they may blow up for some reason.
So I'm just going to stay away and just humbly stack sats.
Putting together my second node on an old Optiplex with Nick's Bitcoin.
I'm sticking with Podverse boosting through AlbiHub on my plug-and-play start
9, which so far has been rock solid.
Please talk about tools to get on a Bitcoin standard and off of fiat.
Okay, so are you talking like ways of spending money or are you talking about
self-sovereign banking, like Node, Lightning?
What are you talking about when you say that? Or are you talking about strategies
to take your whole paycheck in Bitcoin and then only sell what you have to to pay for bills?
Or are you talking about putting all of your expenses on a credit card and then
doing one Bitcoin transaction a month to pay off that credit card?
Let me know what you're thinking, Satsquanch.
Thank you to the Podfather and Satsquanch for being our baller boosters.
Just, woof, loving that. Wow. I mean, I think I'm taking the wife out for a
hamburger tonight. That's what I'm doing. I'll tell you what.
It's going to be fancy with a hamburger, and we're going to put some mac and
cheese on it. Put some macaroni and cheese on there.
Yeah, that's how you know we're getting fancy when the mac and cheese comes out.
Thank you very much. Live long and prosper. All right.
Drekkar comes in with 30,000 sats. That's right, everybody. It's that time of
year again. Happy birthday.
He says, as a professional shadow man myself, I had to boost the artist.
So he sent 10,000 sats to our artist. That's fantastic.
And 20,000 sats to the show just to say thank you. Well, thank you very much.
Appreciate that, Drekkar. And thank you for supporting our artist, too. You make their day.
Atones here with 2,222 sats. That's a row of ducks.
And he says, nothing stops this boost. Yes. The traders love the ball. Yes. Thank you, sir.
Jordan Bravo is here with 5,000 sats. Oh, my God. This drawer is filled with Froot Loops.
He says, I would argue that this is the highest signal technical Bitcoin. Oh, the highest.
I would argue that the highest signal technical Bitcoin conference is TabConf in Atlanta.
You should try to attend October if you can. I would love to go to TabConf.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho. Well, that's Eric Goodbody. No, I would.
October, though, I'm already scheduled to go to Texas Linux Festival.
Jordan Bravo, are you going? If anybody is going and would like to do like a
little spot on the show with me, do a little interview about it or send me a
report, would definitely be down for that. Let me know. That's pretty funny.
Next caller. Thank you for the boost. Ace Ackerman's back with a row of ducks.
Value for Value episode 60, Salvatore Super Boost.
Thank you, Ace. Nice to hear from you. Cosnow is here with 2,500 sats.
Love the show. Well, thank you, sir. Appreciate the value.
Oppie1984 is here with 4,000 sats.
He says, thank you and congratulations on episode 60. Thank you,
Oppie. Appreciate the episode 60 call out. Thanks for the boost.
HGW39 is here with 5,000 sats. This is a tasty burger.
He says, I agree with your take. To me, Sparrow is the best desktop wallet out there.
The developer behind it is a machine, and I encourage anyone to read or listen
to his takes on the Bitcoin ecosystem and privacy.
What's your pick for a mobile-only wallet, especially if you're running a Lightning node?
I'd love, I would love, and boost to see some specific and structural content
from you on important Bitcoin tools and the things we need to be sovereign.
Thanks again for the great show. So, okay, well, to answer your first question,
I mean, I hope you've checked out Zeus.
If you're looking for either a lightning node in your phone or you're looking
for something that works fantastic with your own lightning node,
Zeus is great. Zeus is great.
If you're looking for something really easy, Blockstream just upgraded their
wallet, and they have some lightning and liquid support in there.
But Zeus is best for the self-sovereign setup.
There are others. Bitbox makes a great phone wallet as well.
But I really like Zeus a lot. I like the developer behind Zeus.
I think the combo out there, if you're going for a free software wallet stack,
Sparrow on the desktop, Zeus on the phone, you are, you're just set.
You're set for years with that setup.
Solid developers, solid apps, long trajectories for good features and being maintained.
So Sparrow on the desktop, Zeus on the phone, although I'm totally open to others.
I always love to see other apps and stuff.
Those are just so great. Thank you for the boost. Great question.
And I'll think more about tools, instructional content, actually,
for tools Bitcoiners need to be sovereign.
Sort of the same question I got earlier. I don't 100%...
Well, I guess if you think about it from like purchasing and selling Bitcoin,
I guess like, OK, I would like a little more instruction, but I think I'm starting
to put something together. Thank you for the boost.
Northern HODL's here with 2,121 sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days.
Thanks for the continued great work. Moscow time under 10 for 30 plus days.
Under 10. You mean like I'm getting it? Do you mean I'm getting it out on a
certain time? I'm going to be late this week. Let me tell you, new OS in the studio.
Lots of clipping had to do. Woo. Did you buy that from a certified vendor?
It was rough. It was pretty funny.
Next caller. Thanks, Northern Hoddle. Appreciate it.
Wine Eagle's here with 4,444 sats.
Which is really too Rosa Ducks. He says, it's a great show. I don't have to
listen to the stupid finance shows thanks to you. Thanks for suffering.
I'm doing it on our behalf. Dude, thank you, Wine Eagle, for recognizing.
I know the podfather knows this, but some of these news networks are so monotonous. They're so dumb.
It really does drain the soul sometimes watching them.
But then, you know, you get this rush when you get a nugget,
when you find that needle in that haystack and you're like, this is going to
be a great clip for the show. And then you feel great.
It's a real up and downer, let me tell you. So thanks, Wine Eagle. I appreciate that.
I am clipping so you don't have to. That is for sure. At least I try.
I try to get all the good stuff. Thanks for the boost.
Hello there is back with a row of ducks. And we've done it. So we'll do it. There we go.
Yeah, you got another one in there? Oh, there it is. No message,
though. Just sending us a row of ducks. Thank you, sir. Anonymous is here with 2,000 sats.
No message, though. Okay, okay. And Orange Pill Lawyer 25 is here, also with 2,500 sats.
They're real and they're spectacular.
He says, boost!
Boost! Thank you, Orange Pill Lawyer. Nice to hear from you.
All right. We had a banger of a show. We had a banger of a show. Thank you, everyone.
I think this probably was one of the best performing episodes ever,
and I really appreciate it.
I have been putting in a lot of extra work recently, and I've felt the value
come back in the show. It's kind of an incredible system.
And we had a lot of support this week. We had 22 folks streaming sats as they listened.
It's pretty awesome. Oh, 52. I'm sorry. I said 22. 52. Read the wrong number.
52 folks streaming sats as they listened.
That's great. You know, that number's ticking up. And you sat streamers stacked
216,575 sats for episode 60, the big 6-0 of this week in Bitcoin.
When you combine that with our boosters and of course the Podfather's big old 600,000 sat boost,
that big old baller boost, this episode stacked a record-breaking 936,827 sats.
All right.
Music.
Woo! How about that? Let's go! Thank you, everyone who supports this show.
This is just really a banger of an episode. Of course, they won't always be
this way, but I'm extremely grateful for the support.
If you want to get in, get your message on the show, support This Week in Bitcoin,
give a little value back. You can do it really easily with a podcasting 2.0
app. That's how you send a boost.
Fountain makes it easy because they host everything, fountain.fm,
and they also integrate really easily with Noster, so you can start that adventure as well.
But there is a plethora of podcasting apps, including the ability to just boost
from the podcast index if you have Albi.
So check out podcastapps.com for all of those. The idea is you're using the
Lightning Network to send a little value and a message to the creator,
to the podcast app creator, and also the podcast index.
So you're supporting this show and a bit of the podcasting 2.0 ecosystem with
no middleman, nobody taking a cut. thank you everybody who supported this episode and,
I hope you'll considering I hope you'll consider supporting episode 61 it's
such a such a great episode I'm a little concerned about next week but I'm going
to take it in stride however it goes and thank you everyone.
Music.
Well, I have some updates for you, and I thought this was a bit interesting.
The block is summarizing a warning from an investment bank.
This says that strategy and similar firms are undermining Bitcoin's credibility
as a central bank reserve asset by aggressively amassing Bitcoin through leverage.
And they're concerned that strategy is now around almost 3% of the total supply,
and that highlights the risk of centralized holdings, distorted liquidity,
and reduced volatility.
Which are all factors that are critical to institutional trust.
Essentially, they're saying strategy is becoming too much of a risk for central
banks to want to use Bitcoin.
We'll see about that. But I thought, you know, we've talked a lot about what
about centralizing control, et cetera, et cetera. Those are not risks that I
was really concerned about.
But other folks thinking it's too risky to have a strategy or Capital 21 or
whatever it is, or a meta planet that is collecting all this Bitcoin, we'll see.
Just sort of a side note, if by chance, and this is a long shot,
but if by chance Bitcoin were to close out Q2 above 119,000,
strategy would probably post the largest quarterly earnings in human history.
Because, you know, there's some new accounting rules come into effect.
And if the price went up, I mean, they would just report quite the banger of a quarter.
I don't know about risk. You know, I think as these become more and more successful,
the price becomes higher and it becomes further and further out of their grasp.
So I'm not sure it's a concern, but it's a new angle on the issue.
BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF has flown past the $700 billion mark for assets under management.
This is massive. It's achieved this milestone in just 341 days,
which makes it five times quicker than the gold-backed ETF that launched years ago.
Bloomberg analyst Eric highlighted the rapid ascent, noting that IBIT launched
when Bitcoin was around $30,000 and lingering concerns around FTX and bank when
fraud were still going around.
It now trades closer to $110,000, returning seven times greater than the S&P 500 during that time.
And they believe it's really just getting started.
In fact, they were at a conference and were talking about how it's going to fly past gold.
Look at this. Gold ETFs, obviously, you know they were a big hit.
This is the assets historically of gold and Bitcoin ETFs. You can see how quickly
the Bitcoin ETFs matched gold.
Now, gold had a hell of a Q1, so its assets went up pretty good.
This chart's a little old. That Bitcoin line is almost up to gold as we speak
today. We think Bitcoin ETFs will probably get triple the gold ETFs in the next three to five years.
Nobody's out talking about gold. I go to these things all the time.
I go to TradFi events, crypto events. The energy behind Bitcoin and the wholesalers, huge.
Everyone's very excited talking about it. There's nobody talking about gold
except for like Peter Schiff.
Nobody's talking about gold except for Peter Schiff.
Everybody's talking about Bitcoin, he says. So 70 billion assets under management
for their customers in just 341 days.
They're now over 76 billion in digital assets.
They rode Bitcoin from 30,000 to 110,000 so far. Pretty awesome.
Pretty awesome to see. And it's, you know, this new kid on the block comes along.
These ETFs, they're no slouch on Wall Street. They're a serious product, very popular product.
And the Bitcoin ETF comes along and it's the biggest success in ETF history.
I just love to see it. But let's stop talking about Wall Street and talk about
something a little more real.
Bitcoin was introduced by a firm in a what is being called not by me,
but by the AP as Africa's largest urban slum.
And it's made a big difference in the people's lives there. And it's a short clip.
Not all of it's in English. So I'll do some live translation for you,
but it's pretty powerful.
So this is in Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya. I started using Bitcoin last year.
I sell vegetables, and I accept Bitcoin.
So far, around 9 to 5 people use Bitcoin on a good day.
I like it because it's cheap, it's fast, and it doesn't have any transaction costs.
When people pay using Bitcoin, it becomes my savings.
And from cash transactions, I restock vegetables.
I would like Bitcoin value to be rising so that I can at least make a profit.
I have been using Bitcoin for close to a year and a half.
Secondly, first I started using Bitcoin. It has been a good experience.
Secondly, it helps us not carry cash in the pocket, which is unsafe.
Cash in your pocket makes you a target for thieves, and your life will be in danger.
Because with Bitcoin, you can scan and make a payment. This is community empowerment,
and this is by using Bitcoin tools to empower and provide knowledge to these communities.
Right now we work with merchants and the waste management groups.
These are the heartbeats of the Kibra community, and they represent about 80%
of the population that does not have access to the traditional banking system.
Literally, they are their own banks.
No one controls that. And that gives them the foundation, you know, for financial freedom.
I mean, that is pretty great. They go from having no access to the banks to being their own bank.
And they've gone straight to smartphones. No one in that video had a laptop.
Everybody was using smartphones.
It's interesting and similar to the stories I heard in El Salvador when I was visiting El Salvador.
My favorite thing to do is talk to Uber drivers about how they use Bitcoin.
The younger Uber drivers were all about it. The older ones were a little more skeptical.
Some of them were saving in Bitcoin. Some of them were avoiding it altogether,
but very similar trajectories.
You know, you love to see the way different people adopt it organically,
but incentives are incentives.
So Opportunity Cost has been released, and it is a browser extension that instantly
converts fiat currency prices into the Bitcoin Satoshi equivalent as you browse the web.
So you can see essentially the opportunity cost of buying something in Satoshis.
You're on Amazon or whatever it might be.
Now, it's a semi-open source. It's a view-only license. So the source code is viewable.
Permission is granted to view the source code of the software for
transparency and education and auditing but you cannot copy or
reuse any of the source you cannot modify or distribute the
source and you cannot use the source code in any of your projects now on their
website they say does it collect any of my browsing data they say no opportunity
cost runs entirely in your browser and doesn't send your data to any remote
servers your privacy is respected it pings the coin gecko API for the Bitcoin
price, and then it does the calculations locally.
I believe Marty Benton team are behind this, or at least helping work with the
developers to create this.
It's available for Chromium-based browsers right now, not yet available for Firefox.
It's an interesting idea. I actually do think that there is some wisdom in thinking
about buying things in Satoshis.
So that way you're always considering, is this worth buying over sats?
I think it is a decent way to think about stuff, or at least large purchases.
So you can visualize how much Bitcoin you're burning.
You're essentially shorting to buy that. So it's called Opportunity Cost,
and I'll have a link in the show notes.
If you try it out, let me know what you think.
I'd be curious to know your experiences. I'm not going to try it yet because
I'm a Firefox user, and I want to hear some reports on it.
And our last update of the week, it's a Coinbase ad. It's a Coinbase ad, but it's a Bitcoin ad.
In fact, they don't even say the word Coinbase in the ad.
They do put the text at the end of it, but it's a highly stylized cartoon.
It almost looks like AI-generated cartoon of a more realistic version of the Pixar cartoon Up.
And in this video, while they're narrating, the house begins to float up into
the air and kind of float away.
Sort of a la Pixar's Up, but with a more realistic kind of styling.
But it's actually the message of the ad that matters.
Music.
Pretty good way to position that there at the end. If it's falling in Bitcoin,
why is it rising in dollars? Not too bad.
We are at the final clip of the week and I'm doing it again.
I'm playing two clips. It's supposed to be the final clip, but I'm doing the final clips of the week.
Last week, I was a bit hard on Saylor. I got some pushback from some of you.
You argued that, you know, he might have been right about funding Bitcoin Core.
And you're arguing that maybe he's right about proof of reserves and the security risk.
I'm not so sure on that. I appreciate that feedback.
I think we'll wait and see. He was definitely getting his flowers this week.
As more and more companies are copying his strategy, you're seeing a shift in
the authority and tone which his responses seem to carry with the news pundits or the news actors.
And he was on Bloomberg this week and he was kind of swatting down bearish questions
with some ease. I thought I'd play a little bit of it for you.
How do you expect the asset to continue a price increase at these levels that we've seen?
I mean, can it keep that up over the next five years, over the next 10 years?
This is a combination of, am I too late to Bitcoin?
How can Bitcoin possibly go up from here? How could there be any more buyers
at this price? It's so crazily expensive.
People truly don't understand how it's possible it could go up any further. They don't get it.
Even Bloomberg news analysts don't understand how it's possible it could go up any further.
110 is the top. It can't go any further than that because the money just isn't there, right?
And at what point do we see winter coming again? Because that's been a permanent
fixture of this asset class, right? It's gone. Right, volatility, it's scary.
Bad volley, bad ball. We don't want vol. No, the volley's scary.
It's always that question. Well, won't it crash here? It gets to 110.
Sure, it might get to 130.
But, you know, I've seen it crash down. So what if it goes from 110 to 50,000
again? Isn't that going to be horrible?
And from zero or 1,000 to 20 and then back down to three or four and then up
to 50 and then back down to 15 and now up to 110. Like, when does it drop again?
Winter's not coming back. We're past that. We're past that phase.
If Bitcoin's not going to zero, it's going. So when he says winter isn't coming
back and this is getting a lot of play, I think he's talking about in the long
term sense, like in the 200 day moving average sense.
I think that's what he's talking about. He's not talking about in the hourly candle.
He's talking about the 200 day moving average. We're not going to zero for him.
Winter would be like sustained 30,000.
Right. And he doesn't think we're going there. But.
You know, in his sailor-esque way, he just says winter's never coming back. When does it drop again?
Winter's not coming back. We're past that. We're past that phase.
If Bitcoin's not going to zero, it's going to a million dollars.
And you have all the evidence you need to determine that, right?
The president of the United States has determined he supports Bitcoin.
The cabinet supports Bitcoin.
Scott Peasant supports Bitcoin. Paul Atkins has shown himself to be an enthusiastic
believer of Bitcoin and digital assets.
Kintez at CFTC feels the same, Ray. The banks are going to custody Bitcoin.
Bitcoin has gotten through its riskiest period. The accounting has been corrected.
There's now only 450 Bitcoin a day available for sale by natural sellers.
That's the miners. At this level, that works out to about $50 million of Bitcoin
available for sale every day.
If that $50 million is bought, then the price has got to move up to find any
seller that's price sensitive.
I actually think these numbers are interesting because you hear about IBIT buying
X amount of Bitcoin, or every Monday you hear that MicroStrategy bought X number of Bitcoin.
It's actually worth remembering there's only so much Bitcoin produced per day,
only so much Bitcoin produced per month, and only so much Bitcoin produced in a year.
The miners, at this level, that works out to about $50 million of Bitcoin available
for sale every day. If that $50 million is bought, then the price has got to
move up to find any seller that's price sensitive.
Now, if you do the math, you'll actually see the Bitcoin treasury companies
by themselves are buying the entire natural supply. Yeah.
BlackRock and the ETFs are buying another measure of that.
And we've got nation state actors coming into the space.
So I think when Bitcoin rallies, if it surges to five hundred thousand or a
million dollars, then maybe we could talk about it crashing down by two hundred
thousand dollars a coin.
But at the current price levels, it only takes $50 million to turn the entire
drive shaft of the crypto economy one turn.
And you've got the Trump media organization announcing $2.5 billion.
You've got GameStop announcing $500 million. You've got my company that's raising
billions and billions of dollars.
So the writing is on the wall. Bitcoin's moving higher.
Yeah, the writing's on the wall. Bitcoin is moving higher. Of course,
they would say that. But I think he's kind of right.
Think he is right. It's obvious, really. He got around this week.
He was also on Peterson's podcast, and maybe he did his best job yet explaining
to the situation that led him to find COVID.
And he kind of talks about his mindset and where he was at during COVID and
the lockdowns with Peterson and explains how that led him to Bitcoin.
I had a guy, after 30 years in business and in engineering education,
reasonably educated, but not a classically trained economist,
not an Austrian economist.
I am struggling with the time-honored question, what is money?
I need a liquid, fungible asset
which will store my economic energy for an indefinite period of time.
And so what is money? I'm looking for money.
And I you know eventually I get to gold and
I'm like I'm thinking should I buy 500 million dollars of gold and
you know my attorney he looks at me goes you know Mike I
remember when gold was 800 dollars an ounce back in
the 70s or the 80s and then it went nowhere for 20 years and you should be careful
about that and it might not it's kind of dead money and then I so I'm sitting
at this table and I'm watching the world burn while all the Wall Street guys
get rich and the talking heads on CNBC say what they're saying.
And I'm looking out at Miami Beach and I'm looking at Collins Avenue and every
car is not, there's no cars on the road except for an Amazon truck,
which just makes me angry.
One Amazon truck going by. And I've got 82 birds in my backyard and they're
hunting for worms because all the restaurants in Miami Beach shut down.
So whatever, whoever was feeding them is not feeding them. So I'm watching us
strip the world back to the Stone Age, right? A devolution.
And I'm staring over my pool. I look at Eric and I say, Eric.
Tell me about that Bitcoin thing again.
And Eric was a crypto entrepreneur and he had been investing in digital assets
and crypto. And I had dismissed him two years earlier in 2018.
I was like, oh, that's probably just a scam coin that's going to collapse.
But you know everybody finds this
when you you know if i tell you you got six
months to live you would go looking for a cure and if
i told you every asset that you hold in canada
is going to be seized from you within six months that could happen you would
think about how you're going to get your money out of canada yeah we already
thought about that you know and like and the point is you didn't think about
it for the 20 years of your career when it just wasn't the priority and then
when you're faced with a crisis,
a challenge, you start thinking.
Music.
Let's check in on the state of the network as I wrap up. We're at block height
900,829. The current U.S.
Price is 108,580 for one Bitcoin to U.S. dollar.
That makes the sats per U.S. dollar 921.
Let's check in on a few vital stats. We have 22,108 reachable nodes on the network.
And I have to say, Bitcoin knots climbing faster than I thought.
It was at, well, no, now it's down.
Well, it was up 10.5%, but now it's at 10.49%. Still, though, not too bad.
Of course, the most dominant node software is Core 28.1, followed by 29, then 26.
Looking over at things, things are looking really good on the Bitcoin network.
We're just 3% down from our all-time high, which is basically in the landing
zone about 20 days ago is when we hit that.
It's pretty neat. You'll love to see it.
State of the network is strong. The Lightning Network is rocking, too.
I was trying to find some stats right there real quick on that,
but I don't have it on this dashboard.
But the transactions on the Lightning Network is getting crazy, too.
So you can still open and close channels and move things around.
You still have people that are recognizing the value and building on top of Bitcoin.
And watch lightning grow. Watch some of the layer twos come along like ARK.
It's pretty cool. Lots of innovation in Bitcoin.
That's it for me this week. Links for everything I talked about and more at
thisweekinbitcoin.show.
This was episode 60. I hope I got pretty close to my goal this week of creating
something that doesn't get distracted by emotions or the noise or the drama
and just focuses on the signal for you. So let me know how I did with the boost.
And of course, boost in if I missed anything or more that you'd like to see
from the show. I always take that very seriously. And I'm taking notes on all of that.
I'm going to leave you this week with a value for value song like I do.
So if you boost in during the track, 95% of the sats will go to the artist.
And with all the recent dust ups and drama and infighting around Bitcoin policies,
I thought we should focus on something with a positive message.
And I came across this week's song and I thought, wow, this is just it right
here. I like this message.
It's Decentralized by Zaza Wow Wow. See you next week.
Music.