Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 93.
My name is Chris, ChrisLAS.com, JupiterBroadcasting.com.
Well, here we go.
Bitcoin's trading like a tech stock again.
And the deflation narrative is back.
We went from inflation and tariffs are going to wreck us to now deflation is back.
And suddenly everyone from Wall Street wonks to permabowls, they're blaming or, depending on their view, crediting artificial intelligence.
So if we are entering a grand deflationary phase, I think the real question is not what it does to prices.
What does it do to Bitcoin?
This really kicked into high gear with the release of OpenClaw a few weeks ago.
OpenClaw has shook the market.
They believe that AI and vibe coding is basically coming for every SaaS business out there.
And the narrative that AI is a deflationary monster has caught fire.
And I really mean from the old school, you know, just really kind of geek, push the glasses up kind of analyst, you know, the kind I like, to the permabulls that always think everything's great and they're going to make a ton of money.
And when you see it kind of go across all forces like that, it becomes a narrative that really gets entrenched.
Here's an example of the wonks.
AI was fuel for this bull market.
So why is it suddenly driving the sell off?
AI euphoria has turned into AI anxiety
and billions have been wiped off global equity markets
in a matter of weeks
from Silicon Valley to Europe's software champions
investors are suddenly questioning
whether artificial intelligence is a goldmine or a wrecking ball
Harry Eastwood is investment director at Artemis Investment Management
So Harry, if fears of AI-driven displacement are only just beginning
how are you positioning right now?
Leaning in or pulling back?
Look, I think
All right. Really, you don't you don't really care to hear what they have to say. Like I said, it's it's pretty wonky. Let's go over to the permable side and kind of get a sense of what's going on over there. So for that, we go to your buddy, Kathy Wood. And, you know, if Kathy Wood's talking about a narrative, it's gone mainstream.
Truflation is down to 0.8 percent. And so it, too, was stuck in that two to three percent range.
It is resolving to the downside. And I think it's going to go negative. When I see Pepsi
cutting the price of potato chips and Doritos by 15 percent, you know, I take note. And when I hear
Coke saying, yeah, it seems like there's a bit of a backlash against price increases,
I take note today, the existing home price inflation rate dropped to 0.9% on a year-over-year basis.
And we think that's going to go negative.
New home prices are already falling on a year-over-year basis.
Gasoline prices falling.
And then the good deflation is associated with technologically enabled innovation.
And the AI boom is massively deflationary.
The AI training costs are dropping 75% per year.
AI inference costs, so what it costs when you query chat GPT or Grok, what it costs to answer that, that's dropping 85 to, if you believe, DeepSeek, 98% per year.
And I think the productivity gains that we are seeing accrue to enterprises, that is going to turn around in a number of ways.
One of them could be price declines.
So many people think, oh, these corporations are going to simply increase their margins.
Well, you know, China is exporting deflation.
I know with tariffs, we're countering it.
But isn't it interesting that our inflation rate did not go accelerate with tariffs?
It remained stuck.
I think we're going to see a lot of price declines in the future.
I mean, it could be.
I also tend to follow Truflation, and they do show that inflation is better than the official numbers, which is odd.
But I'm not so sure we can attribute the price reductions and inflation going down to the AI boom or AI productivity like she seems to be doing.
Now, I will grant she is forecasting future productivity, but the implication is that we're already seeing the AI boom.
And that's why the stock market's reacting.
That's why investors are reacting.
I'm not sure I buy that.
I think it's just a lot simpler than that.
Oil is cheap again, my friends.
Simple as that.
Oil is cheap again.
Crude oil is down to around $65 a barrel.
That's about a 13% drop from a year ago.
Natural gas, also cheaper.
Futures falling roughly 11 to 28 percent, depending on when you look over the last 12 months.
Energy is cheaper.
And I think that probably explains more why the price of Doritos and Coca-Cola might go down a little bit than it does, than AI does at least.
Now, I don't know if lower energy prices really set off all the money printing that's coming, but that's a different discussion.
But let's just go with a moment and assume that the wonks and the bowls are correct and that AI is indeed going to be a very large deflationary force.
It does seem at least possible if agents get a lot of functionality and have a lot of their own autonomy, they could do a lot of work that would otherwise take a human.
So perhaps we will see a productivity boom there.
And if that does happen, you would perhaps see a prolonged productivity boom as people
begun to learn and integrate these different agent skills and whatever.
You know, we're just going with the narrative for a moment.
So if it's a long, prolonged transition, sort of, you know, echoes of a fourth turning kind
of thing.
How does that prolonged deflationary cycle impact Bitcoin, which everybody always says
is an inflation hedge?
Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation and deflation.
because the chaotic part of this is,
and it's ripping through the markets now,
a lot of traditional industries and companies,
you know, being brought, the whole SaaS space,
the disaster as they're calling it.
We think there is merit to that particular one,
but I think you're going to see disruption all over the place
because the five innovation platforms that I mentioned are going to disrupt the existing world order.
And what does that mean?
If these technologies are so deflationary,
it's going to be tough for the traditional world that's gotten used to sort of the 2% to 3% inflation to adjust.
They'll have to embrace some of these technologies faster than expected.
So the idea of counterparty risk, I think, is beginning to surface.
We've seen it with first brands.
We've seen private equity, private credit especially, is where there have been a lot
of excesses.
SaaS, they are too exposed to that.
Are we going to see counterparty risk manifest more broadly?
If so, Bitcoin doesn't have that problem.
And so it is a good hedge against deflation as well as inflation.
Well, I agree with her.
I think what she's actually suggesting there, I mean, I agree with her that, you know, about
the sovereign risk aspect.
But I think what she's suggesting there is that the AI disruption is going to be so massive,
it's going to be such a tidal wave of change that the standard investments will start to
have counterparty risk that people didn't consider.
And when the market recognizes that on a dime, they're going to start buying up Bitcoin because it doesn't have counterparty risk. It's one of its best properties, you might say. Maybe Kathy's right. I tend to think these investor influencer types get a little excited. They get a little too ahead of themselves a little too soon.
and we start spiraling into all kinds of fourth turning talk and everyone starts losing their jobs
and robots are building everything and AI is going to do all the management and all of that, right?
I just, I think if we use history as our teacher, the reality always is somewhere in the middle.
And Lynn Alden had a great chat with the Bankless guys actually really recently.
And Lynn, I think, has a real practical view on all of this.
And she sets up where she thinks this is going and what she considers what really is a fourth turning and her observations in there.
But the parts that I find the most interesting are that historically, the kind of the sovereign long-term debt cycles match up with the fourth turnings, which I don't think is an accident because kind of part of going through fourth turning is having a sovereign like debt issue.
And these things kind of, they have cause and effect.
It's not like these things randomly pop up every few decades.
It's that these things kind of build and they can only kind of go on so long.
So the economic cycle, the debt cycle, is that you have kind of structurally falling interest rates.
You have rising debt as a percentage of GDP.
And for a while, that's both private and public debt.
So every time there's a crisis, they cut interest rates.
They try to restart the debt engine, the fractured reserve bank lending engine, the sovereign debt engine.
And you'll get these little periods of deleveraging, but you never deleverage back down to the earlier part of that particular kind of five or 10-year cycle.
And you start building up from there.
And when you string enough of those together, you get to very high debt levels and you get
interest rates all the way to zero.
And then you have basically maximum fractional reserve in the system.
And what happened both in the 30s, this last time that happened, as well as the 2008 crises,
those were kind of the peaks of the private debt cycle bubbles.
And what happens when you get private debt maxed out as a percentage of GDP, you can't
really cut interest rates meaningfully lower.
that's when they generally shift toward printing money
and then gradually shifting the debt
from the private sector more toward the public sector.
So that happened throughout the later 30s
and into the 40s.
Obviously, there are other factors going on,
but they were interlinked.
And then we've seen that over the course of the 2010s
and here into the 2020s,
that more of that shift from where we're not as leveraged
in the private sector as we were
in the eve of the global financial crisis
in kind of the US and many developed countries,
but that's been put toward the sovereign.
And when it's on the sovereign level, it can't really go anywhere other than currency devaluation.
Because most sovereigns, at least the ones that have their own currency, will rarely ever default nominally.
So they'll default through purchasing power, debasement, sometimes trimming prior guarantees about retirement or things like that.
They'll make a series of kind of smaller defaults, more invisible defaults to deal with that.
And that's kind of the stage we're in now.
Yeah, that's where we're at now.
And so even if AI is a deflationary force, there are these larger historical macro forces already in play.
And so it means Bitcoin is going to be in this weird spot.
And so will the U.S. dollar.
And ultimately, I think it's good for Bitcoin, but it's bad for the dollar.
And you have to imagine you have to imagine all this uncertainty only leads to destabilizing the dollar as a reserve currency.
And we end up in what people call a multipolar world, where instead of having one giant superpower with one giant financial market, you've got a couple of islands, maybe more around the world that concentrate power.
I do think the more multipolar side wins, which is more of the China side, like the more that they get some degree of kind of dollar independence and neutral reserve assets like gold get elevated.
But that's not even necessarily bad for the U.S.
It's good.
Go back to my prior point around Triffin's dilemma and things like that.
It depends how the U.S. plays its cards while this is happening.
So I've read a couple of pieces on this.
One was back in 2020.
We talked about the rise of this kind of multipolar world happening.
And then, of course, I featured it in Broken Money in 2023, this kind of shift toward a multipolar world.
And, you know, I can't say exactly what's going to happen, but there's kind of a couple options you can lay out.
So one kind of point there is that there's really no currency in the world, including the dollar.
They say no fiat currency in the world, including the dollar, that's big enough to serve the whole world anymore.
So when this dollar system was established, I mean, the U.S. was over 40% of global GDP.
we were the only thing standing after World War II
and we had all the gold
we had all the manufacturing
we had 40% of global GDP
we could run the ledger
over decades
Trif and Dilemma has poisoned that well to some degree
in addition
China, India, Europe
they've kind of recovered
from the whole period of colonialism that happened
the whole period of total war that happened
we've kind of gotten closer to historical GDP ratios
where these big population centers are rising back to their kind of normal place as pretty big economic powers And there really just no currency block big enough to solve the whole world without Triffin Dilemma being a really big deal So even China is not big enough The U isn really big
enough. And so that means you generally need one of two things. Either you need diversification.
So maybe you have two really big hubs. You have the U.S. and China has two really big hubs. Maybe
Europe is kind of its own third smaller hub. And so no ledger is trying to serve the whole world.
The challenge there is that money has network effects. It tries to trend toward one, liquidity begets more liquidity. And so it puts pressure on that diversified model to some degree. And then the other option, the part that alleviates that is neutral reserve assets.
So you can have a diversifying of the ledgers, but then also these neutral things that bridge them.
Gold being the incumbent neutral reserve assets, the obvious first choice, is the one that central banks already hold.
It's the one that almost everybody in the world can understand to some degree.
It's got this multi-thousand year track record, with the main caveat being that it's really slow and expensive to audit.
So it's great as savings, it's not great as settlement.
When Germany wanted to repatriate part of its gold, it took years.
and they finished ahead of schedule
and it still took years.
It just took fewer years than they thought.
And that's, I mean, you know,
whereas like, you know,
a Bitcoin transaction,
you could get six confirmations
in an hour on average.
And so, you know, that's,
it's just like a different world.
Now, Bitcoin is, I mean,
it's a settlement rails
and it's a store of value.
It's got 17 years of track record now,
but it's, you know, we're talking,
depending on if you're in a bull
or bear market at the moment,
it's a $1 to $2 trillion asset.
So it's still small
on the network effect scope.
even though it's got reasonable liquidity,
it's still pretty small on the liquidity spectrum.
And then there are people that just don't understand it.
There are people that are saying,
well, I mean, is it prone to risk XYZ,
let's say quantum, for example,
in a 5, 10, 15, 20-year time horizon,
which sovereigns are going to think in.
So I think that's a rising contender,
but I think this is a very long game.
And really not until Bitcoin has an extra zero on it
would it like its market cap, would it be like a contender at the scales of dollars and Chinese
currency and gold? All right. So that was your macro protein. Now it's time for some Bitcoin
carbs. I want to talk about BIP 110 for a bit. You guys deserve it. I have been avoiding it on
the show because I find the topic to be gross. And it's hard for me to cover it without that bias,
because as a longtime Bitcoiner, BIP-110 is frustrating to me.
But I'll try to get through this a little bit, and I'll explain my thoughts here.
But it really is probably the most important philosophical Bitcoin fight since the block size war.
Supporters say it's going to protect Bitcoin, and critics say it changes fundamentally what Bitcoin is.
Now, the person behind it, we don't exactly know.
It's a pseudo-anonymous dev.
We have some speculation as to who that might be.
They kind of popped up a little while ago and, you know, are pushing one of the most significant changes to Bitcoin in history.
Now, early momentum for BIP-110 is really in the Bitcoin Knotts community and those that run Bitcoin Knotts.
They call themselves, and this is the part I think that really gets to me, is Bitcoin is money advocates.
Or, you know, they'll label themselves as anti-spam advocates or hard money advocates,
implying that the people that are against BIP-110 are spammers or don't want Bitcoin to be sound money.
And critics like CoreDev Adam Back and others worry about a precedent that it sets, as do I.
And it's a big deal.
So here's where we're at in February of 2026.
There's about 2% to 3% of the reachable nodes on the Bitcoin network that are signaling support for BIP-110.
No major mining pools are on board, but there has been some miners that seem to be trying to figure it out.
Now, what we are worried about at this point is what BIP-110 is worried about at this point is that Bitcoin is drifting away from being just sound money and that it could be a data chain to store data, arbitrary data.
Inscriptions, filling up blocks, tokens for weird markets, arbitrary data, you know, for storing JPEGs, things like that.
They don't want Bitcoin to become permanent data storage for junk over time or maybe even illicit material.
What people that are against BIP-110 argue is that if you pay the fee, it's not necessarily spam, that there's a monetary system built in and non-monetary uses still end up subsidizing security.
Bitcoin's always been this way.
And filtering at the protocol level allows for censorship.
And once you start allowing for curation of block space, Bitcoin inherently becomes political.
So what we're talking about with BIP-110 is a temporary consensus change limiting embedded data in transactions.
It would cap output data at 34 bytes.
Op return would get capped at 83 bytes.
And this would go for a year and it could be extendable.
And that would definitely have a negative impact on ordinals and BRC-20 tokens and anybody that's kind of trying to put large data loads in there.
And I don't think it would have any significant impact today on the network if it were to be implemented.
And this is in part why I think people are comfortable with it is because if you were to implement that, it just kind of keeps Bitcoin as used as money for right now.
And that's not so bad, right?
But what happens after that year?
What happens if there does need to be a fork?
That's where things get really, really bad, really, really quickly, in my opinion, and why I have concern.
So I grabbed some clips from the Plan B forum that just happened. These clips are about nine days old. They were posted online about nine days ago. This is the BIP-110 debate that was there. And we'll start with Bitcoin Mechanic, an individual that I've generally liked quite a bit, but I just don't agree on this particular issue. And he'll talk about why he's pro BIP-110.
And I want you to pay attention to the language that's used here, because it's the type of language that if you don't understand the meaning and ramifications behind it, it sounds pretty effing reasonable.
And I think it's why so many people that are just watching YouTubers talk about this are getting convinced it's a good idea.
Understood. Yeah, I think it's pretty simple if I can put it in as simple terms as possible.
I don't think anyone thinks that one megabyte op returns, which is what's always been possible with consensus, do anything for Bitcoin.
I don't think anyone that's ever used it as money has used that.
And effectively, it was just a mistake that was never really a thing that manifested
because of a ubiquitous relay policy that capped it at 83 bytes, moved around a bit.
You can sort of gloss over the implications of that and talk in theoretical terms as John does,
but it's obviously misleading because the practical manifestation of having that filter in core for years
meant that almost all operatons fit within this tiny limit.
And that's perfectly observable in blockchain's history.
So they were OK with it if it fit within that tiny limit.
You know, that wasn't ideal, obviously, he's saying.
But we could live with that.
So core pumping up the limit opens us up to a thing that no one really wants in Bitcoin
that's just there anyway, that was effectively, you know, the implications of it were kept
away by this filter.
So core increases the limit.
We've covered that on the show.
Now, what's interesting is the mechanic here is shifting into the theoretical after just criticizing somebody for talking in the theoretical.
But we continue. So now the op return limit size has been increased. This is a problem.
And the whole ideology, the discussion around filters meant it had to go for posturing purposes.
But no one is actually stoked, including even Tone in his presentation yesterday, about big op returns now being an easier thing to stick in the chain.
so BIP110 comes along and says all right well operaturns just aren't a good thing especially
when they're that big because you know contiguity and I guess we'll get into that later I know
Giacomo doesn't particularly care about that but the point is massive operaturns are not doing
anything for Bitcoin as money so limiting them a consensus basically puts us back where we were
before even though it's a different mechanism because prior to this it was a filter that kept
them small now it will be consensus but either way there's no hodler in the world that's losing
some aspect of Bitcoin by virtue of not having one megabyte op returns be possible anymore.
See, look, it's not a big deal. And it's only for a year, right? What could be so bad? We're just
tweaking how we enforce it. It used to be enforced a different way. Now we're going to enforce it a
new way. What's so bad? Well, here's Tony. He takes the other side of it and he cuts really
to the heart of the matter. Main point of contention is that this soft fork BIP-110
is incredibly dangerous.
And one of the main reasons why most technical people,
including the core developers of 2017 days,
which we will all agree was higher quality batch of developers,
were very concerned of using BIP-148
to get SegWit through a soft fork
because the ultimate consequences in the future
will be that a small minority, a vocal minority,
would be able to now push some kind of controversial change
as was just stated.
Let's just do it now and then figure it out later.
This reminds me of two weeks to flatten the curve.
Who remembers that, right?
What he's referring to, and I didn't have this part in the clip,
is mechanics suggest we should just do this.
And we got a year and we'll figure it out.
It'll be fine.
What could be so bad?
Just two weeks to flatten the curve and we will figure it out later.
And what happened for the next two to three years?
So I think that this push for the user-activated soft fork is incredibly dangerous.
It needs to be shut down as soon as possible.
The sooner they turn it into a hard fork and get off the network and they can claim for the rest of eternity,
like Bcash and BSV, that they are the real Bitcoin because they know what is best.
That is my main position that the user activated soft fork is the problem.
And we can talk about what led to the soft fork.
I didn't have a problem with the Nuts implementation, but look what it's turned into.
And yes, I am critical of core development.
That needs to be better.
But this is not a solution.
This is insanity.
And I think one of the things that leaves me unsettled about all of this is there's sort of this smug attitude that they don't need the majority.
They only need a tiny minority of the network to pull this off, and they know it.
And so they're not really too worried about reaching mass consensus.
And Luke Dasher reveals how the BIP-110 folks are thinking about this.
That in this case, having a minority of users being able to change the protocol,
even if the majority defined in different ways don't agree, is itself a dangerous precedent.
Is that a good point?
That is Giacomo, and he's asking the question to Luke.
and I'll just back it up just a bit so you can hear the end of the question.
That in this case, having a minority of users being able to change the protocol,
even if the majority defined in different ways don't agree,
is itself a dangerous precedent.
Is that a good point?
No.
The minority can change the protocol
as long as the majority is not actively in opposition to that change.
If the majority opposes that change,
the minority cannot change the protocol.
In other words, if they can do this,
and most people that are running nodes and most people that are using the Bitcoin network are essentially apathetic to this,
they don't care, then the Nots folks can get away with this.
They can actually pull it off.
I'll let him continue and I won't interrupt, but that's what he's saying.
The minority can change the protocol as long as the majority is not actively in opposition to that change.
If the majority opposes that change, the minority cannot change the protocol.
It's only when the majority is indifferent or doesn't really care that the minority can't successfully change the protocol.
And that's your current model of the community is that even if the minority is going to push for that,
the majority, except for the literal attackers, will not really care and will just basically go with it, along with it, inertially.
Right. If a sizable minority is pushing for a soft fork, the only way to reject that soft fork for the majority is to do a counter fork like Bcash did, where they reject the soft fork changes explicitly in the protocol.
Before moving to mechanics, do you think it's possible that the hash rate connected with this proposal is so low that even without an explicit rejection, you still remain waiting for blocks for a very long time?
Do you think this is an implausible scenario?
So he's essentially saying, well, what if you don't get enough hash rate to participate?
Aren't you just going to be on your own little island?
Luke's thought of that.
There is probably a minimum hash rate, maybe 10% of the network hash rate that would have to support the soft fork.
Without that, then the people that want this would have to do a hard fork.
Good thing Luke and Mechanic both run and operate ocean mining.
But that's not a realistic scenario.
and in this case particularly because Bitcoin is pretty much guaranteed to
fail if we don't do this soft fork it's even if there was a persistent chain
split of some sort induced by the opposition it's only a matter of time
until the opposition spam friendly chain dies and the spam hostile chain survives The opposition spam friendly change In other words the Bitcoin chain you currently using right now
Jesus.
And he says later, like somebody asked, what about the risk of this?
You're talking about user activated forks and we could have all kinds of problems.
And and their answer is, well, the crisis is so existential.
The threat is so existential.
The crisis is so immediate that Bitcoin is dead if we don't make these changes.
So we should make these changes.
Well, OK, if that's true, let's look at the logic.
Stay a while and listen.
Because we have some data now.
Op return increased the size limit with Core 30.
Core 30 has been up for a little bit.
And so here's what we know now.
Multi-op return span, which is the one they're really worried about, nearly non-existent.
large operaturn payloads in the Bitcoin blockchain since this went live,
statistical rounding error.
In fact, the usage that does exist is still the old smaller way,
the one that mechanics start saying he was, you know, not happy with,
but could live with.
That's actually the most widely used way to jam data into a Bitcoin transaction right now.
And we all know that the fees have been low for a long time.
Now, the real action is inscriptions. They use witness data, not op return. So you can have both things be true at the same time. Op return abuse is a statistical rounding error. It's negligible. It's hard to even measure. And there can be at times blocks based pressure from inscriptions. Two different things, both real. Okay. It's not that bad.
Only 61 multiple op return outputs were used since September of 2025.
61.
Do you hear me?
For large payloads and other concern, 0.001%, sorry, 0.0016% of transactions.
The total since September of 2025 for all data on the blockchain is 474 megabytes.
OK, so this entire scary scenario that they are freaking everyone out about, that Matthew Cratter is scaring everybody on his YouTube channel, the mechanic and Luke are going around saying Bitcoin is dead if they don't make these changes.
Well, there you have it. 474 megabytes of data. That's it. 61 large operatons where they use multiple. There you have it. That's it. That's the spam scenario that we're willing to risk a soft fork over.
you can see why i consider it just stupid and if the people the people spoke to core 30 was adopted
very quickly they didn't seem particularly concerned about this so i'm not really sure
outside of crater stands mechanic and luke and a few others who's actually truly concerned about
this and when you put it all together it looks like people appealing to emotion to get political
control over Bitcoin.
And also at the same time, they have Ocean as a pool play to help centralize mining.
Even though they say it's not about centralization, you can't help but start to wonder when you
put the entire picture together and you add knots into it, it actually starts to look
like a hostile takeover of Bitcoin, which is what they're accusing the core devs of.
But we have to remember, this is the current chain.
Like what they're talking about is they're talking about messing with your sats.
They're talking about messing with your blockchain.
to fix a problem that doesn't even really exist.
So I think the entire thing is absolutely ridiculous.
I have more links, including from them,
so, you know, both sides, in the show notes
if you'd like to read more on your own.
But I have a question.
Where do you stand on this BIP 110 stuff?
Do you disagree with me?
I'd like to hear your opinion.
I really would.
And if you do agree, has it changed your not's view?
You not look at Bitcoin not the same way anymore.
I'd like to know if those things,
either one of those things are true for you.
Boost in, support the show,
And let me know, because I'd love to read those in episode 94.
Well, a lot more show coming up.
So support the show just by doing what you do.
Stack them sats.
And if you're going to do it on River, use the link in the show notes.
In fact, I have links for all these in the show notes.
River is one of the best ways in the States to stack sats.
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to support the show by doing what you do.
All right, it is time for some boosts.
Four score and seven boosts to go.
And Murray Fio comes in with 33,333 sats.
Moises, maybe your best episode yet.
I bet you that's not how you say your name, though.
If this is your first best bear market, the key thing to distract yourself is listening to Bitcoin podcasts.
It will reinforce why you're in this and will help pass the time until it turns up.
Also, make sure to put on another drop in the bucket every time it dumps.
Yeah, buy another stash right there.
You know, that's very true, is reminding yourself.
It's like, yeah, you could say it's like immersing yourself in Cope.
I actually think it's about reminding yourself of the fundamentals, right?
Because so many times, well, always, the issue isn't within Bitcoin.
It's externalized.
So helping remember the fundamentals, why you're there, the thesis, it actually is useful in these times.
That's a great boost.
Thanks for being our baller.
Appreciate you.
PJ's here with a row of McDucks.
Hey!
This old duck still got it.
Yeah, here it goes.
He's not looking up for old McDuck.
This low price is what we wanted during the last peak.
Funny how everyone's memory is so short.
Not that this community, though.
We know better.
this is our opportunity to stack and build for our future.
Most of us don't have a fiat retirement plan
and are too old or make too little to build one,
but young enough to build a slow stack.
So just stack sats.
Amen to that, PJ.
You know, it's funny.
I guess like I had these grand,
I guess because we had expectations, right?
We had all these expectations, but you're right.
These, it's like if this took, you know,
another three years, if this isn't gonna, what happens.
But let's just say cumulatively over the next five years,
we have three years of bad price action.
Well, in 10 years, you're going to look back and be grateful.
But right now, it doesn't feel as good.
That's a really insightful one.
Thank you, PJ!
User 56, and if you want to boost in again with your full name, let me know.
User 56 is here with 21,112 cents.
Chris, I've looked forward to your show every week for the past year.
I respect the hard work you put into it.
Well, thank you, sir.
Keeping the signal high and emotion low.
I hope your content continues to turn new people to Bitcoin fountain and the value for value structure.
With that said, please accept my humble investment of 21,000 sats.
Also, I know you talk about the fold card and Bitcoin rewards.
What are your thoughts on the Gemini card?
Boost! Boost!
I have the Gemini card.
I have the older one, not their newer one, but it's essentially the same.
I thought they were supposed to upgrade me in October, by the way, Winklevoss boys.
but I got it a long time ago when it came out
and they would let you do any crypto.
And I think for 10 minutes,
I accidentally did have it on ETH.
I think maybe that was the default.
I don't remember.
That lasted for 10 minutes.
I'll tell you what I've used it for.
Large repairs.
You know, like I'm going to maybe pay off
over like two, three months
or sometimes longer, unfortunately.
It's like, might as well stack some sats.
If I've got to fix the slide for $5,000 on my RV,
I might as well get some sats for that.
And several hundred dollars at least,
maybe over a grand of rewards.
Probably at this point.
So I've liked it.
You know, if you don't pay it off, though, the interest rates can kill you these days.
So you just got to watch for that.
But you probably already know that, eh?
Thank you for the boost.
Boba's here with 21,000 sats.
What do you think Jack means by the term home?
What exactly is home in this case?
Yeah, Bitcoin's coming home.
I believe I saw the floor in real time at 60K during this last leg down.
The bounce back looked almost like it was programmed.
Everyone set their auto buyback at 60K.
Miners may need to brace themselves as the chart readers are touting a capital rotation event.
And they think it's still going to go lower through Q3 and Q4.
Interesting how people in the space were calling the four-year cycle dead and never existed and expected things to go up against the four-year cycle prediction.
Well, I'm sitting here seeing things go down and down.
Is it possible that 2025 was the up year, but the whales taking profits just masked the top?
And how about 2026 and why we're down relative to 2025?
Okay.
I want to answer this now, but I want to see, do I, I don't know if I saved this clip.
I didn't.
Okay.
Well, I had a clip and I decided not to play because I already played too much Lynn.
But Lynn was in another interview this week where she kind of brought up a good point,
something that I probably should have brought up on the show sooner because it's crossed my mind.
the treasury companies really took some of the spotlight in the energy for retail.
So I think when you combine treasury companies and whale selling, you create a sort of a self-fulfilling four-year cycle in a way.
And I do think that maybe some of Bitcoin's gains that we expected in 2025 went to digital asset companies that are essentially underwater now.
It's like the new version of altcoins.
I had, now I wish I would have brought that clip.
But I do have one that will kind of answer a couple other more pieces towards the end of the show.
So do stay tuned for that, Boba, and thank you for the boost.
Kongaroo Paradox is back with 21,000 sats.
Great episode and a great boost episode.
What's all this noise around BIP-110?
Well, I hope I gave you some idea.
I hope I did at least.
I know I could do it better, but I find it's a very frustrating thing for me to research because, I don't know, be where I stand on it, I suppose.
It's the one issue on the show I have a hard time not getting very worked up about.
Everything else is pretty straightforward, but when you start talking about user soft forks for something that's just a non-issue by people that don't know what the hell they're talking about, I just, I don't know, man.
I don't know.
I have a hard time, Obi.
Thank you for the boost.
Derivision Dingus is here with 21,000 stats.
I don't love it, but I'm still sticking with it.
I might be biased, considering I've Nixified nearly every device in the house.
But I'll add a big old plus one to NixBitcoin.
It's been rock solid for me.
I deployed it on a NixOS container a couple of years ago,
and I just did another major version update on it just a couple of nights ago.
The update went super smooth, no issues.
After a quick reboot, everything was back up, including the lightning channel with your node.
NixBitcoin is awesome.
I think so, too.
And the only reason I don't just say that's the only way to go is because there is a technical overhead to Nix.
But I think if you are in a business, if you're going to run a merchant shop, perhaps if you're a podcaster with high volume or humble high volume, nothing serious.
I think you really should consider it because it's much more robust than any of the other systems.
And I'll just leave it at that.
I talk about Nix enough other places.
Thanks, Derivation.
I do appreciate the plus one.
It gave me a little bit of an excuse to talk about it again.
I'm going to be honest with you.
Hey, there's Gene Bean, 4,534 sats.
This is the way.
From what I've learned thus far, it feels to me like there are other things at play that generally line up on the four-year intervals rather than Bitcoin itself having a four-year cycle.
Primarily, I think what you've laid out previously about liquidity market being the driver is really the key.
Yeah, and I think too, like you have election cycles in there,
which often bring with it Fed cutting cycles and all those kinds of things.
I'm of the camp that you're going to have a declining influence of the four-year cycle,
that the four-year cycle mattered a lot more earlier on,
especially when it was just Bitcoiners.
But as you have all these other entities that are soaking up inventory
and the miners are making already less than the daily supply being bought often,
I do think there could be some diminishing returns
around the four-year cycle,
but you know, if everybody wants to F around and find out-
I am programmed in multiple techniques.
Yeah, then we're gonna find out.
The traders love the vol.
Gene says, I wonder if you and Wes could update us
on the Boost tooling to resolve NOSTER addresses.
I tend to boost the show from Fountain simply
because it also posted NOSTER Yeah which also helps the show on the Fountain trending pages I wonder if the tooling could also use Fountain includes boost to make that easier That would be a truncated boost from here
Yeah, okay.
So yes and no, Gene, because there's a lot in transition right now with the boosts and
LNURL and metadata in particular.
And I think a real telling thing will be which direction Podverse goes, which they're
investigating it right now.
I would have been happy if a year ago we all just would have gone all in on Noster.
for the backend and then we'd have it decentralized.
Instead, we're going to go some sort of HTTP metadata server
where you have to have a metadata server
running on somebody's box,
which is going to lead to centralization.
And the best answer that the Podfather and Podsage
have right now is to have everybody centralize on Strike
and use some hacked together third-party tool
to go read the metadata off Strike.
Like that's the opposite direction we need to go.
Right, yeah, let's go.
I like Strike and I like Jack,
But that's ridiculous.
We can't all centralize around Strike.
It's not even available everywhere.
I can't even use Strike for some of those purposes in Washington State.
We need something that is workable.
And Mitch is looking into it.
He's trying to figure it out right now because he's at that stage for the new Podverse development.
And I had a phone call with him recently about it.
And we haven't solved the LNURL metadata issue.
And hopefully we will.
Hopefully we will.
Hodler comes in.
Thank you, Gene, by the way.
Hodler comes in with 4,747 sats.
Greetings from Iceland.
I completely agree.
This is a great time to work hard and stack more sats.
I think we just have to stay at these lower levels for a big chunk of the year.
Just have that feeling.
Oh, do you now?
All right, Hodler.
I know I'm starting to feel that way more and more, too.
Moon Knight's here with 2,000 sats.
Let's hear it, good buddy.
Plus one to PPQ.ai.
That is basically payperquery.ai.
PPQ.ai, and you can pay with lightning.
I use it a couple times a week.
I love having access to the latest model without needing to spin up a single account.
These creepy AI tech bros don't need to be keeping a profile of me.
That's true.
That is true.
That is a nice advantage of it.
I think you're on to something there.
Thank you, Moon Knight.
Make it so.
Ace Ackerman's back with a row of ducks.
That's 2,222 sats.
Well, 58K does seem like the bottom to me.
I'm starting to agree with the idea that not only is the four-year cycle dead,
but it never really existed in the first place.
Oh, now, Ace, I feel like that is a hot take,
since we are currently, what some would argue,
in a price decline that the four-year cycle would have forecasted.
So I think it's bold for you to come in and say,
58K is the bottom when we're not even at 58K yet,
and that the four-year cycle is dead at the same time.
and I like it because I'm feeling that vibe,
but I want to know your logic.
So Ace, if you want to follow up, I would love to hear it.
Tomatoes here with a row of ducks.
I don't see any reason why Bitcoin couldn't stay under the cost of mining
for quite a while.
The miners with reserves would just keep going,
and the small ones, well, they wouldn't make it.
But my prediction is that it doesn't stay below 60 for too long,
exactly because this idea is widespread,
and people will start buying again if it does.
you know tomato that is some next level market reasoning right there you know once it becomes a
narrative you can trade it either way and also i think you are absolutely right one of the things
that makes mining so brutal is you do have to sometimes you have to just grin and bear it during
a bear market and the ones that can do that better and extend credit etc etc maybe you know make a
little more money off of ai they're the ones that are going to survive so how long do you think it
goes tomorrow. You say you don't think it'll stay below 60 for long. What does that mean?
Thank you for the boost. Kiwi Bitcoin. He's back. 6,789 sats.
One plus, plus one, one plus, that's the phone. Plus one for the ppq.ai site. This has been my
go-to AI for about a year now. Oh, it's built by a Bitcoiner. You get a discount when you pay in
sats and you can pay over lightning there's zero kyc and the built-in privacy of lightning i use it
with a vpn like molvad which i also pay for with sats and offers pretty good privacy for general
use you can connect via a browser or with api keys i use it for general topics or learning
not for anything private or sensitive you can connect to all the latest models and it's really
great okay what are you using it for exactly you say learning and topics i'm now discovering that
You guys are using these high-end models for a while, and I'm wondering what you're doing.
Part two, I'd love to hear more about your node config on Bitcoin Core and what version you're using.
I've been holding off on upgrading, and I'm still running 28, but 31 is coming out soon, so I think I need to upgrade to keep with the maintenance window.
What configuration changes have you made to the defaults?
Ah, well, so I'm on 28 and 29.
I know that's a cop-out, but I, like you, have been expecting and planning to just skip 30 and go to 31.
And when I do that, I will try to document what I change.
I'll probably do it at the Nix config level, but I think you could probably use that even without Nix because they're just config settings.
And I will try to share that.
I will share it publicly when I do that.
And I think it'll be around the 31 release.
I'll probably give it a beat.
I generally wait, you know, a week or so just to see if anything absolutely blows up.
And then I start updating my nodes.
So I will keep you posted on that, Kiwi.
And this, by the way, is I don't know if it's my recommendation, but it's my approach.
when there's ever a controversial release
or a big point release with some new features,
I wait.
And with Bitcoin, you can do that.
So why not take advantage of it?
Unless there's something you really need.
That's a great boost.
Thank you, sir.
Nakamoto 6102 is here with 3,500 sats.
Appreciate the value.
Well, I appreciate you, Nakamoto.
Thank you for the boost.
Bobbypin is here with 10,000 sats.
You make me want to be a better man.
I'd be willing to go to a Bitcoin meetup
If it's relatively close, I'm going to a mining disrupt in Dallas, Fort Worth, later this year.
I would love to do that.
I miss Fort Worth.
I was down there quite a bit a few years ago and haven't been back since.
But when I was working at Linux Academy, I was there quite a bit.
Oh, I'm in.
Yeah, it was great.
I'd love to know how it goes.
That'd be really neat.
Thanks, BobbyPin.
If you remember, send us a report.
Thank you, everybody who boosted the show.
Even of those that came in below the 2000s at cutoff, I still got your boost.
I still got them in the show notes, and I still really appreciate it.
Also, I want to thank everybody who streamed sats.
Wow.
The sats streamers were really our baller booster this week.
90,421 sats from our sats streamers.
Thank you, everybody who just streams those sats as you listen.
When we combine it with our boosters, it's a pretty good episode.
We stacked a grand total of 345,654 sats.
There's no advertiser on this show.
In fact, I was just approached by one this last week who had a pitch.
And I said no, because we've been getting great boosts these last few weeks.
It's a value for value show.
There's a membership through Fountain and Jupiter.party.
You can put your support on autopilot as well.
Really appreciate it.
Fountain makes it easy.
AlbiHub makes it totally self-sovereign.
And that's all over at Fountain.fm or go search for AlbiHub.
And then get yourself a podcasting 2.0 app.
You get more features, the boost capabilities, all of that.
Those are at newpodcastapps.com.
All right, let's talk a little price action.
Why?
Why should we talk a little price action?
Because the speculation as to why the price is down is quite funny.
So we start with Fox Business, who's trying to wrap their head around it all.
Crypto this morning, which is once again lower, as you can see, Bitcoin down again now below 68,000.
That is down better than 25% over the last month, roughly 50% from the all-time highs, which was about 127,000.
Bitcoin has had a rough going.
Ethereum as well, down nearly 40%, way down by ETF outflows, softer institutional demand.
analysts say bitcoin could fall to 50 000 warning a sharp v-shaped rebound is looking more unlikely
while others are arguing that digital assets close to hitting a price bottom what's going on here
what's going on so they want to figure it out so they bring on the world's premier i guess um expert
mr wonderful clearly right because he was buddies with sam bankman fraud so clearly kevin o'leary
is the one to go. Clearly, it's O'Leary. He comes on and actually, at first, he's doing all right.
But then just as he's wrapping it up, he tosses a turd in the punch bowl.
How do you think about Bitcoin fundamentally, technically, especially after a little bit of
this washout we've seen? Well, Bitcoin has had a major correction yet again, down 50 percent. This
is not the first time this has occurred. Something else has occurred, though, underneath it that is
quite a problem for the crypto market to resolve. Last October, October 20th was the day when this
stuff really melted. But no, no, it was not October 20th. Not just Bitcoin, everything. Some of them
down 80, 90 percent. The reason that occurred, in my opinion, is everybody in the institutional
sovereign wealth at that time saw that the Clarity Act, the Stability Act that made the first act,
which was the Genius Act, the second part was going to come and make Bitcoin legal for them to
own an index. It didn't happen. This is so dumb. This is so dumb. This is worse than I remember,
actually, when I first heard when I when I grabbed this clip. So first of all,
it was October 10th and it was because Binance's stable coin de-pegged and a bunch of market makers
got washed out and completely drained liquidity from the crypto market and destroyed the plebs.
And some of the crap coins are down like 80 percent as a result. It really had nothing to
do with clarity clarity has been an ongoing price suppressant but made bitcoin legal for them to own
what the hell is he talking about like what what what does he think blackrock and and sailor and
everybody's been doing what are they talking about like he's just saying stuff the second part was
going to come and make bitcoin legal for them to own in an index it didn't happen so they were doing
a lot of analysis this is quite shocking it turns out oh it's shocking so they were getting all
And you see these dumb, stupid institutions spent five years researching Bitcoin and buying just its perfectly timed moments when the market was crashing, only to just on October 20th, reevaluate the entire premise and realize they'd made a mistake.
So they were doing a lot of analysis.
This is quite shocking.
It turns out if you actually do the analysis, and they did, these institutions did, they basically went in, eyes open, saying, let's run the numbers.
What do I need to own in crypto to capture 90% of the alpha?
The volatility.
Turns out all you need is Bitcoin and Ethereum, and the rest of the Pupu coins are worthless.
They had to do analysis on that?
They had to, like, reevaluate?
Really?
Just look at a price chart.
Go on Twitter.
Like, this is so stupid.
Okay.
But so the Pupu coins have been no good.
They've realized it's only Bitcoin and Ethereum.
But you see, the turd is still coming.
the punch bowl is not safe.
The alpha, the volatility.
Turns out all you need is Bitcoin and Ethereum
and the rest of the poo-poo coins are worthless.
So they dropped 80, 90%.
They never came back.
Bitcoin got slaughtered because of a lot of deleveraging.
Remember, we had all these treasury products that came out.
They had leverage on them.
I'm still long this, but there's a new concern
that is kind of floating around for 10% of the people out there.
Okay, a new concern and it's floating around for 10% of the people.
And Mr. Wonderful, he's pretty tapped in.
Remember, he was friends with Sam, so he knows what's going on in the crypto world.
He's tapped in.
There's a brand new concern.
You just heard about it.
It landed in October, and this is really the issue.
And until this is solved, Bitcoin is screwed.
Out they had leverage on them.
I'm still long this, but there's a new concern that is kind of floating around for 10% of the people out there.
Quantum.
The idea that a quantum computer can break the chain.
And so until that time,
gets resolved, there'll be some resistance at the institutional level to go past 3%.
I just wish they'd shut up because they don't even know what they're talking about.
Break the chain. Break the chain. They don't even know what they're talking about, but they just
spread stupid FUD all the time. It's so frustrating. So now compare and contrast. This is Bitwise's
CIO, Matt Hogan, and he's going to talk about quantum and he's going to talk about what some
of you were saying in the booths that we might be in this one for a while. And unfortunately,
it is something I'm starting to come around to as well. And you can't really argue with what Matt
lays out. So we started with our macro protein. We got our Bitcoin carbs with BIP 110. And now,
I hate to tell you this, you're going to get your Bitcoin veggies here with Matt Hogan.
So just chew up and swallow.
When we have talked more recently, I don't know if we've talked since the price plunge.
So I'm just curious, first of all, to get your take on what's been happening and what's happening with flows in your business, in your ETFs.
Have we seen flows?
follow price. Yeah, you know, it's really interesting. There's sort of a tale of two
markets. There's the original crypto investors who have been selling. I think that's one of the
primary drivers of what's driving the market down. The institutional or at least financial
advisor market that Bitwise services has been buying. We had inflows last week. Even if you
look at just the inflows of Bitcoin ETFs, yes, there've been some outflows since October,
but very small. I actually think the ETF holders are the diamond hands and it's been others who
have been leading the downturn. So that's really interesting because I think one of the biggest
questions I have during all of this is who is the natural buyer, so to speak, right? That the
institutions who got into Bitcoin haven't necessarily wanted to step in there. What's
your take on this? Well, yeah, I think that's the point. I think they're the eventual natural
buyer, right? Institutions have most of the money, but most of crypto today is held by retail
investors. So there's this transition from retail primary ownership to institutional primary
ownership. The reason you're not seeing the institution sell is it's been risky professionally
to buy Bitcoin. So you had to have very high conviction to buy those ETFs in the first two
years. It's still outside of the norm. And for that reason, I think the existing holders will
continue to hold in ETF land. I think institutions will help lead us out of this bear market,
but it could take a while, right? It could be months, quarters, longer than that.
Let's take a step back because you wrote an interesting piece recently where you kind of
trying to grapple with the reason behind the pullback that we have seen. And you said it's
not just one thing. It's a lot of things. So just succinctly highlight a couple of those reasons for
us. Yeah. Crypto winners are never monocausal. They're always multiple factors. You had people
selling ahead of the four year cycle. That's sort of a reflexive. They're selling because they think
it will go down. They're never monocausal. Never a word I would have used myself, but it exactly
describes how I think about this. It's never one thing. It's never one thing that brings it all down,
which means it's never one thing that brings it all up.
Factors. You had people selling ahead of the four year cycle. That's sort of a reflexive.
They're selling because they think it will go down. Therefore, it goes down.
Self-fulfilling. That's right. But it's true. You had people worried that Kevin Warsh will
shrink the balance sheet. You had people worried about quantum risk in the market.
You had a macro sell off in software names. You add all those together and it's too much weight.
The market just falls over the course of time.
Those are now well-known in the market.
We're starting to see some positive news come in.
But the same thing is true on the reverse.
Now, before he gets there, what I like about this is this is really everything we've been talking about for the last few weeks.
I should have just taken the last few weeks off and played this clip.
But now what Matt does is he brings it to how we go back up in price.
And this is where I say we're eating our veggies.
Those are now well-known in the market.
We're starting to see some positive news come in.
But the same thing is true on the reverse.
It's not going to be one thing that turns this market around.
It's going to be a slow accumulation of multiple pieces of good news.
When that eventually overwhelms that bad news, we'll return up to all-time highs.
So you don't think there's going to be like a catalyst?
This is not a V-shaped bottom.
No, there were multiple factors that drove us down.
There will be multiple factors that drive us back up.
Progress on quantum.
Maybe Kevin Warsh cutting rates more than people expect.
Maybe these institutional flows coming back.
The rise of agentic finance.
It was multiple things coming down.
It will take multiple things to come back up, but we will see those things over time.
The rise of agentic finance.
Yeah, maybe.
Maybe.
I don't know.
What I see happening seems like, God, I have an agent set up with an Albi Hub sub wallet.
Little budget.
It works great.
It's amazing.
Cali has put out an eCashew scale for open claw agents.
So it absolutely can be done.
But I'll tell you what I'm seeing more of a trend is the poopoo coins, as Mr. Wonderful put it.
A lot of base.
Today I saw some stuff around Tether.
So the, you know, and they're integrating base and these payments in at like service levels.
So people have created LLM proxy routers to route your agent's request to the most price efficient LLM.
And the agent auto pays on the base chain, on Coinbase's thing. So I don't know if Bitcoin will be the go-to payment system for all agents. I think for some, obviously, especially ones that are doing really important transactions. But there isn't a Bitcoin marketing department that's going to go put out SDKs and MCP servers, right? There are individuals like Kali and others that are doing it, but there's no Coinbase marketing department behind it.
So I do wonder about that.
I'd be curious to know what you think about agents and, you know, using Bitcoin.
I would love to hear your feedback if this is something you thought about.
Multiple things coming down.
It'll take multiple things to come back up, but we will see those things over time.
Now one of the other themes I been talking to a lot of people about today is TradFi meets DeFi right That institutions coming into the market I mean Bitwise is kind of an example of that right The ETFs which is a more institutional product applied on top of something that is very nontraditional
With that has come all kinds of new products, right?
You've had options which are newish still to the market.
You've got leverage of all kinds.
Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
What are the risks of layering that on top?
Yeah, look, mostly it's strictly good.
Bitcoin is more valuable the more liquid it is. It's more useful in a macro perspective. It is
more useful in a global perspective. You need all those derivatives to pile up to add liquidity.
It does introduce a new risk, which is now Bitcoin is more integrated into other macro
hedge funds. It's more integrated into the macro economy. There's certain thoughts that part of the
sharp sell-off last week was due to non-crypto hedge funds unwinding crypto as part of a more
complex trade. So we're now in the game. The game is complex. We're not our own corner of the market.
That introduces some negatives, but mostly it's positive. There's no. Yeah, it does. And one of
those negatives, as I've been saying on the show, is we are a bit in a holding pattern until the
damn Clarity Act passes, which I hate, as you know. And here we are. Another week goes by where
we have to do a little bit of a clarity update. It is moving. Brian Armstrong is in D.C. right now,
and he's buddied up with a senator, Senator Bernie Marino from Ohio. And they've sat down,
and they kind of let it slip when we might actually see clarity pass.
Part of this equation.
Wait, can we just explain this? Like, why people should care about this? What the whole
yield rewards on stablecoins thing is about?
Oh, yeah. I included this, too, because I want to hear your thoughts on this.
Well, unless you own a bank, you probably shouldn't care.
But if you're an American consumer, what it means is that the cash that you hold, you're going to have competition to pay you more interest.
So you're going to be able to get more money for the money that you have in your wallet or the money that you have in some sort of account.
So this is very, very good for working Americans because ultimately this is about giving Americans more rewards for being able to have cash on reserve, be able to get paid quicker, be able to transact faster.
All right. Do you think you guys haven't answered this? And I asked last week, too. Do you think people will leave their bank account for 3% rewards in stable coins? I mean, that doesn't even beat actual inflation for the goods you actually buy in your day to day life. I guess it's better than nothing. But is this really a thing? Are people going to go to these quasi casinos to put their savings account on there to get 3% back?
there's other products in the market that are better and produce better yields with established
financial institutions i'm genuinely not clear i mean maybe kids maybe kids democratize the
financial systems uh but we're going to get this bill across the finish line but i would say
when hopefully by april hopefully by april i was going to say because if you you don't
buy the midterms and then the house goes democrat then what happens to it uh well the house isn't
going to go Democrat in the Senate. People say, well, the election is not today. We're going to
win because look at the end of the day. All right. He goes into campaign robot mode. But your buddy,
Scotty B, the Treasury Secretary, he said something that caught my attention. He said that passing
the Clarity Act would bring comfort to the market. The overall crypto community. So in a time when we
are having one of these historically volatile sell-offs, I think some clarity on the clarity
bill would give great comfort to the market and we could move forward from there. So it's very
important to get this done. And I think if the Democrats were to take the House, which is
far from my best case, then the prospects of getting a deal done will just fall apart. I mean,
Look what the Democrats did to crypto under the Biden administration.
It was almost an extinction event.
And President Trump has worked to make the U.S. the digital asset capital of the world.
There's a lot of innovation that goes on adjacent to crypto in the blockchain, in DeFi.
So I think it's important to get this clarity bill done as soon as possible and on the president's desk this spring.
It's funny how, oh, this spring.
It's funny how they drop in DeFi there, like they have any idea, right?
And honestly, guys, we want the market to be comfortable, right?
Heaven forbid.
Heaven forbid the market was uncomfortable.
All right.
Final clip of the week time.
And I'm playing a classic because it's so relevant today.
This clip shows us no matter how educated somebody is no matter how deep they are in the financial system it can be extremely difficult for them to understand Bitcoin In fact it can be an impairment to understanding Bitcoin
And it takes these folks a really long time to wrap their heads around it.
And that's why some people that seem like they're the smartest financial people still don't get it.
And I love this clip because this is Professor Tad Smith, and he talks about his journey.
And I think he's qualified to talk about this.
I didn't realize that if the average year the money printer goes, call it 8% to 10%,
even in the Western countries, even in the OECD nations, and the average return on the S&P 500
is, call it 9-ish percent, including dividends, maybe 9.7, maybe a little less, that it means
that all of the work of the S&P 500, all of the value created there is actually the money printer.
That to me was startling. I mean, to think about that, the fundamental notion that in a closed
system or even an open system, when you're printing money at the rate of 8% to 10% a year,
everything is losing value. And the things that appear to be gaining value are not gaining value.
They're just keeping you even.
So you can put all your money in the S&P 500 and you're not gaining any relative wealth
at all.
That's a startling insight.
I mean, when you really think about the entire value of the S&P 500 on average over a long
period of time, not even a long period of time, is equivalent to the money printer.
That's to me a shock.
And it was a shock that said, oh my goodness, how do you think about creating wealth that
is relatively greater in this economy and you have to look hard. The other thing you can imagine is I
could tell you about sharp ratios and diversification. I could tell you all these different things.
And, you know, it's interesting. You can take a concept like diversification of risk and at a top
level, it can be a very powerful and useful tool. But if you are so focused on the mechanistic
aspect of that, you can step back and miss the forest, which is in a highly diversified portfolio,
it's unbelievably hard to pick up relative amounts of wealth. It is. Diversifying your portfolio,
however you do it, is by and large going to reduce your incremental gain in wealth,
irrespective of the Sharpe ratio. It's concentration of capital in specific bets
that outperform the money printer where you actually create wealth. That was a shock to me.
I just didn't get it. I didn't understand it. Even though I taught finance for 20 plus years,
I'm still a professor at NYU Stern at Stern Business School. I've taught strategy and finance
for technology and media entertainment companies. I'm on a two-year hire atus, but I'll be presumably
going back in the spring. For 25 years, I have almost actually more than 1,000 former students.
and I still didn't get it until I'm age 58.
That's the Bitcoin journey.
All right, I am wrapping up at block height 937,286.
Bitcoin's priced to US dollars right now, 66,321 Bitcoin.
All right.
That makes our sats per dollar 1,508.
1,500 sats to $1.
We are down 47.4% from our all-time high,
which was $126,180 135 days ago, October 6th, 2025.
Our difficulty retarget date, February 19th.
An estimated upward adjustment of 14.4%.
Oh, we should have got our mining pool going, boys.
It's getting up there.
That's a big jump.
That might change a little bit.
I don't know.
That's a big one.
Well, I'm looking at the total nodes.
Everything's looking really good.
I'd love to see more nodes, but we've gone up a tick.
25,207 Bitcoin nodes out there.
The transaction fees are crazy right now.
Just a big, huge, expensive one sat for a VBite.
What's that?
All across the board.
For quick, low, fast, high.
Hi.
Cheese is bad.
I mean, gosh, clearly the spam's a real issue.
I think the blockchain is doing just fine.
well if you made it this far links at this week in bitcoin this was episode 93 The whole back catalog is there Maybe you could go find the last time I played that clip of the week
I hope you got what you needed from today's episode.
I try to focus on the signal as much as possible,
even though it gets a little tough when things are a little existential.
That is my job, and I try to get you the information,
and I will have great links for you in the show notes too.
Let me know how you think I did on that with a boost as well.
And I'd love to see you in Pasadena around March 5th to the 9th-ish.
We'll be at Planet Nix and at Scale, the Southern California Linux Expo.
Biggest Linux event in the North America area.
So we'd love to see you there.
Meetup.com slash Jupyter Broadcasting is where I have the details.
Even if you can't be at the event, I'd love to see you at the meetup if you're in the area.
Because I just love talking Bitcoin.
All right, I'm going to leave you with a track.
Of course, if you boost during this track, then 95% of the sats will go to the artist.
And this week, it's Radio Brigade by Mellow Cassette.
I'm not saying that it's fair
Just saying where the smoke
There's probably ashes too
My mind was on the fight
I followed you all night
God let me make this right
God let me make this better
Off its head
The light is thought you'd tread
Yeah, it's my fault I fed
Into a heart worth breaking
Oh yeah
The only trick in the book
Yeah, I am a begging for more
Alright, I'll give the old pain back a try
But no one here listens to this for
Let's call this what it is
An imitation powder keg with fierce despair
You can light it all you want
But the radio brigade reclaims her rightful air
Say what you want this time
Can't reach your goddamn mind
It's not my job to fight
It's not my job to tell you who to trust
So how to wheel back crutch
Just breathe out thought for once
And let the full church circle open in
The oldest trick in the book
Here I am, I'm begging for more
Alright, I'll give the old group a try
But no one here is going to the score
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
The oldest trick in the book.
Here I am.
I'm begging for more.
Lord, I'll give the old pain.
Make me try.
But no one really screams you the score.
S20