Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, Episode 89.
My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com.
I'm not sure why.
I thought maybe I'd hit 100 episodes before I saw this much crying in the streets.
I'm not trying to be insensitive, but man, the number one thing I've been hearing and seeing this week, you could probably sum it up as, quote, I'm tired, boss.
And OK, I felt that at times, too, especially over the years.
But it feels like at this particular moment, with everything that's happening this week, which we're about to get into, and gold and silver going crazy, I've sort of heard one sentiment from Bitcoiners over and over again.
I thought this was the moment Bitcoin was built for.
Did Bitcoin miss its bid?
And so that's what we're going to get into is where's the pamp?
And not because we care about price, but because a lot of people are losing faith.
People thought this was the structural moment that Bitcoin was designed for, that it's been
building for.
And now we have all of this adoption.
Why isn't it shining?
Well, let's start with what a week it's been.
The globalist knives are out.
And I don't say that lightly.
And I use that term too often.
The Davos Ski Party has turned ugly.
And what used to be the quiet world order that only conspiracy theorists talked about is now openly crumbling in front of everyone on live streams with clips all over social media.
It's just wild what we're seeing.
And it really is because this world economic forum in Davos is going on and everybody's pissed off.
And let's start with Ray Dalio, the famous Ray Dalio.
And he says we are witnessing happen in real time on our social media streams a new monetary order and the old monetary order breaking down.
The monetary order is breaking down.
OK, what I mean by the monetary order is that fiat currencies and debt as a storehold of wealth is not being held by central banks in the same way.
And that there was a change.
The biggest market to move last year was the gold market, far better than the tech markets and so on.
and the U.S. markets underperformed foreign markets because of the fact you could see it in the numbers of the central banks and so on.
Yeah, if I was a central bank and I could print money, I'd probably buy gold like crazy right now.
So let's just look at the fact that on the other side of trade deficits and trade wars, there are capital and capital wars.
So capital wars are a second order effect of things like tariffs and trade wars.
And so as we're looking at that and you reported what the stock market and so on, but you didn't report that the gold market is also up three.
We did say that earlier this morning. It's up to record levels again.
If you look at what is happening and why it's happening and who's buying it.
So let's let's just take a moment on that capital war issue.
OK. OK. We know that both the holders of U.S. dollar denominated debt, which is money, and the those who need it, the United States, are worried about each other.
Right. So if you have other countries who are holding it and they're worried about each other and we're producing a lot of it, that's a big issue.
So you have to explain what is going on with fiat currencies, generally speaking.
And now if you take the conflicts, you can't ignore the possibility that capital wars,
in other words, maybe there's not the same inclination to buy U.S. debt and so on.
Well, that's definitely something we've been talking about.
But don't worry, the banks will be unleashed on that soon enough.
I think that was a good setup, though, because the banks have been buying gold like crazy.
They're hedging, right?
And what are they hedging?
I think they were hedging what went down this very week.
1971 was the year of the so-called Nixon shock.
This is Ursula.
The EU, supposedly old friends of the U.S., are spilling the tea.
Ursula is currently the president of the European Commission.
You might recognize her name because she's one of those uber elite politicians who's moved from bureaucratic job to other bureaucratic job over the years and been glanced by corruption, but never quite taken down.
And, well, she's on stage and she's saying that we are going through another Nixon shock moment.
And honestly, it's a way to frame, I think, a future position by the European Union.
1971 was the year of the so-called Nixon shock.
And the decision to delink the U.S. dollar from gold.
In an instant, the foundations of the Bretton Woods system
and the entire global economic order set up after the war effectively collapsed.
But it also had two major effects.
It inadvertently created the conditions for what would become a truly global order.
What?
And it provided a sharp lesson for Europe and on the need to strengthen its economic and political power.
It was a warning to reduce our dependencies, in this case, on a foreign currency.
The world may be very different today, without any question.
But I believe the lesson is very much the same, that geopolitical shocks can and must serve as an opportunity for Europe.
Never waste a crisis, as a good politician says.
So we are living through, she's saying right now, this is another Nixon shock moment, the disruption by the Trump administration, the use of tariffs to get what they want for negotiations.
All of this is another shock to the system.
And so this is an opportunity, depending on how you look at it.
Political shocks can and must serve as an opportunity for Europe.
And in my view, the seismic change we are going through today is an opportunity, in fact, a necessity to build a new form of Europe.
That's really something.
I mean, I'll cut her off there because you know where she's going.
And that's just downright friendly compared to what my neighbors to the north had to say.
And I want to play this speech for you.
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless.
This is Mark Carney. I apologize about the audio.
The original audio is quite bad.
So this is a backup track that they had.
Of course, Carney is currently the prime minister of Canada.
Before this role, he served as the United Nations Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance.
Prior to that, he was the governor of the Bank of England.
And from 2003 to 2013, he was the boss man at various positions in the Canadian bank system.
And then before that, he spent 13 years at Goldman Sachs.
I mention all of that because he now runs Canada, and he's kind of the perfect banker mouthpiece to deliver this message.
And in it, he asked a simple question.
How did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window.
Workers of the world unite.
He doesn't believe it.
No one does.
But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble.
So he's building a metaphor comparing the compliance of people under a communist regime to the compliance of nations under the regime of the United States.
Quite an ironic comparison.
To signal compliance, to get along.
And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.
Because every nation participates, the system persists.
not through violence alone but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals
they privately know to be false. Havel called this living within a lie. The system's power
comes not from its truth but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true and
its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the green
grocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies
and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under
what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised
its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could
pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international
rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.
So is he saying that they knowingly enabled a bully, and by his definition, because
it got them what they wanted?
That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.
And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
What?
This fiction was useful.
And American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system.
How are the Canadian people not pissed when they hear this?
I mean, isn't this essentially telling them, yeah, we knew everything we've been telling you for the last 40 years as the quality of life in Canada has gotten significantly worse through globalization.
We knew it was all a lie.
But, you know, we got some better deals out of it and we got some trade partnerships and we got to use soft speech to get the way we wanted around the world.
Is that what you mean?
I've got to play this back a little bit.
As a Canadian, I would think this would be extremely upsetting because it's essentially telling you not only have we been lying to you, but we knew we were lying to you the entire time, but we just did it.
Identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful.
And American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So we placed the sign in the window.
Who is we? The bankers? The politicians? The people?
We participated in the rituals.
And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct.
We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons.
Tariffs is leveraged. Financial infrastructure is coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You know, the irony here is they've also, Carney has announced that they're making deals with Canada or Canada is making deals with China.
Of course, they're going to bring in some of the EVs capped, but they're bringing some EVs in and they're getting in trade.
There's farm goods and whatnot.
But then, you know, he's sitting here with this moral outrage about the United States while going to China, who is worse on all of these categories.
Need I remind him that just a few weeks ago, China was threatening to hold and license and scan every single precious metal and earth that they have control over.
Every earth that they have control over, they want to put a barcode on, even if it's just 1% of your product.
Do I need to remind him that that just happened a few weeks ago?
He's still, while claiming like, oh, all the doublespeak is over, he's now just introducing the next kind of doublespeak.
happens. Tariffs is leverage. Financial infrastructure is coercion. Supply chains
as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through
integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. The multilateral institutions
on which the middle powers have relied, the WTO, the UN, the COP, the architecture, the very
architecture of collective problem solving are under threat you see the guys in the middle are
going to get squeezed the most by a hyper growth economy whether they can pull it off or not if we
if we attain a hyper growth economy you know by tech by tech pamping and and and everything else
and we we we increase dollar dominance through stable coins all of this screws canada and they feeling it already As a result many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy food critical minerals in finance and supply chains
And this impulse is understandable.
A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options.
When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads.
A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.
And there's another truth.
If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values
for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests,
the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.
Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty.
The absolute hypocrisy here, because Carney worked in the very banking system that so deeply benefited from the U.S. financial dominance, from all of the money printing and all of the debt, he so deeply benefited from that in his entire run.
and now to be sitting in this position and pretending like all of that hasn't led us to
where we're at right if the governments weren't in such incredible deep debt we wouldn't be seeing
if we wouldn't if we hadn't actually let's go further if we hadn't seen the systematic western
debasement of fiat currency we wouldn't be seeing the surge of populism that we're seeing today
that is putting pressure on all these establishment figures that is getting people like trump into
office, right? We wouldn't be right where we're at right now if it wasn't for the very decisions
and the very teats that guys like Kanye have sucked on for the last 35 years. It didn't just
show up when Trump got elected last year. That's not how this works. This has been building for 30
plus years. And this was an inevitable moment of history that we now find ourselves at. And when
things become scarce again, then yeah, the superpowers start to make their moves. It was
always going to go this way. It's always going to go this way. And he participated in the very
system at its core. Right. He wasn't an ancillary figure at its very core at the Bank of England,
at different levels in the Canadian banking system. He sucked off the climate scam from
the U.N. that went absolutely nowhere, a total waste of money. It's a it's an absolute scam.
And then he comes on there and pretends like, well, it all just fell apart because Trump wants
Greenland. And the most surprising part of it isn't that he didn't pretend that there was a
rules-based international order until Trump came along and ended it. Like, okay, sure, that's a
great political line to go with. It's that he admitted the claim was always a fraud in the first
place, but then affirmed that, yeah, we all went along with it because it benefited us.
I cannot believe it. So yeah, sovereign risk is clearly here.
So isn't this just Bitcoin's perfect moment?
Isn't Bitcoin supposed to be separation of state and money?
Shouldn't this be where everybody's going to?
Well, obviously, we're way too early still.
And I'll explain why.
But first, I also think we should take a moment.
This is not the beginning, right?
We are in a historical period of time, but we are not at the end of this period of time.
And people that are on social medias or on the different TVs or the blogs or whatever that are complaining about how Bitcoin isn't living up to its moment, this isn't the moment.
This is part of a moment.
We are going through massive shifts, and we are still so damn early.
And I know for some of you, that's got to feel crazy to say 17 years in, $2 trillion asset, all these different banks, et cetera, et cetera, ETFs.
we are still so early when it comes to understanding the value of digital scarcity.
Look at who controls the wealth in the world right now.
Most of those folks are still figuring out how to send text messages.
And gold has been benefiting for over a year now, for multiple years now, from safe haven flows,
from people that are slowly hedging against fiat currencies like central banks.
Gold is what you buy when you don't know what to do.
Gold is what you buy when you need to preserve your massive wealth that you already have.
And so from that lens, Bitcoin is still a risky play.
Now, to more and more of us, a provably scarce digital asset is clearly more valuable than a shiny rock that someone else holds for you in a vault.
But central banks have been buying gold because there's these de-dollarization talks, there's these sovereign fiat risk talks, and there's bond yield volatility, which we'll get more into.
These kinds of things, they just make banks nervous and they're not ready.
They're not ready to buy into Bitcoin yet.
And see in other markets I track.
This is Luke Roman.
Bitcoin is gone into a bear market in gold terms.
I think it's going to continue.
I think part of that, you know, a is, you know, Bitcoin has been trading like, you know, a high beta tech stock.
And as much as I think it will ultimately trade as a neutral reserve asset, it isn't yet.
And so it is doing that.
You know, to these traders, it's something that just came into the system still.
So Luke's right there.
But gold having, you know, a good run doesn't mean that Bitcoin won't do well long term.
Bitcoin is savings for the future.
Gold is thinking on politician timelines right now.
Bitcoin is thinking about 10 years out or more.
Worse before it gets better.
This is Lin Alden.
I think that the world in general has to kind of get past the demographics hump.
We kind of built all our systems, assuming that population always goes up and that the next generation is always bigger than the prior one.
But as we have kind of, you know, kind of the ending of that kind of cycle, we have a very, you know, around the world, we have very top heavy entitlement systems.
That's contributing to a lot of the polarization where people kind of feel the social contract breaking down around them.
I mean, just take this point.
She's she's been very, very broad here at very high level.
But just look at the demographic shifts we have, the boomers being the largest generation, then retiring, moving out of the workforce, but still in the workforce, still in the political space right now, still hold most the power, most the wealth.
You have the housing market that seems to be going through some sort of consolidation right now, but housing has been out of the reach of millennials for so long.
But let's just take that one example.
Say housing were to come down 30%.
If we were to have a major housing correction, what would likely happen? I don't know, but it seems most likely that the housing prices would go down pretty significantly over a period of time.
And then they would start to correct back up. They would probably go under and then back up over time.
And millennials and other people under 40 that haven't been able to buy in yet would be able to buy homes.
And once they bought those homes, it would then trigger a bunch of secondary economic activity, furniture, plumbers, garage door installs, you know, things like that that they have to do to equip their home and then the ongoing maintenance.
And so then that creates a new also a new asset holder.
So I think if we saw something like that, it wouldn't be painless.
It would be a painful thing because the boomers are at an age where they need to essentially cash in on their assets.
So they're not going to love this transition. So there will be pain there. Right. And when things correct, it's never very smooth. People overreact, et cetera, et cetera. People always end up getting burned. And it's it's not it's never a clean process. So what she's saying is we have a lot of demographic things, a lot of structural things that are going to need to get worked through that are going to constantly be price issues. This isn't a thing you can trade on in the next three or four years.
kind of cycle.
We have, you know,
around the world,
we have very top-heavy
and title-blit systems.
That's contributing
to a lot of the polarization
where people kind of feel
the social contract
breaking down around them,
more intergenerational conflict.
You know,
and then that's where
it gets very political.
I mean, some economies
then say, well,
let's have a lot of immigration
to fix that.
And then you get the pushback
against that in both Europe
and the United States.
So that becomes
more of a political crisis.
And a lot of that
has to be worked through.
And I think it's going to take
a very long time.
And then the pendulum
kind of swings back and forth
really far
and gets kind of more extreme
each time.
And so I don't really see
a clean fix anytime
in the next,
like an investable time rise
in three, five, seven years.
I think the best people can do
is focus on themselves
and their own communities
and just try to be,
just, you know,
try to make their lives
and the lives around themselves
better than when they woke up
that morning.
Now, another thing that we've been tracking since about the middle of last year is this yen carry trade.
And the unwind seems to continue.
This is not my area of expertise, but here's what I do know.
On Monday, the Japanese prime minister called for a snap parliamentary election set to be held on February 8th.
So it's pretty soon.
And that kicked things off in the market that, well, was negative.
And Kyle, I think it's Chasey, he has a decent breakdown on his account, which I will link to in the show notes, that goes into sort of the turmoil that's happening here.
Japan's long-dated government bonds just surged to record yields on fiscal and political fears heading into a snap election.
Reuters called it a uncharted territory.
The 40-year JGB yield pushed above 4%, hitting around 4.2%, which is a major regime shift
for Japan.
Why do we care?
Well, because Japan is one of the deepest pools of global capital.
When Japan's yields surge, global money has a reason to come home.
That can pressure US treasuries, pressure equities, and tighten fiscal conditions everywhere.
Reuters explicitly framed this as Japan's sell-off rippling into global bond markets, with U.S. long yields posting their biggest two-day rise since May.
Yeah, that's one thing, is it's not just isolated to one market. It tends to have knock-on effects.
So the prime minister's goal is to gain more support for her agenda, which includes a proposed two-year break on a 8% tax on food products.
And, of course, the market is concerned about Japan's debt levels already, and investors fear such a tax holiday would make things worse.
Now, of course, Japan isn't a side story here.
That's why I've been talking about it on and off over the last six months.
It really is the funding engine for global risk.
So as a Bitcoiner, you need to wrap your noodle around this.
For years, the trade was simple.
You borrow cheap yen.
You then lever into a U.S. bond if you want to play it safe.
You're still making money there.
Stocks was the go-to play and Bitcoin when risk was on.
They would buy Bitcoin.
They would take borrowed yen and buy Bitcoin.
Seems like a sweet deal, right?
Because the rates are crazy low.
Bitcoin, even on a bad year, is still probably going to pay for that.
So in the short term, this impacts Bitcoin's liquidity trade.
And it also means there's going to be some folks that if they bought Bitcoin with borrowed
yen, they may have to sell it to pay that yen back at a higher rate.
Now, longer term, if this kind of thing turns into a sovereign debt crisis or even just sovereign debt stress, well, Bitcoin's no central bank promise is an awful strong appeal here.
So I think the case only gets stronger for Bitcoin as we see more examples of these.
But these are the, quote, teachable moments for the market to learn why Bitcoin matters.
They have to watch this kind of stuff blow up to get it because in their world, something that is owned by the state has been the safest play.
it's going to take them a while to get it in their head that it's the risky play now.
And it's not the tough words about Greenland.
I mean, that spooks people a little bit, but that can be walked back with talk.
What's spooking people is this potential yen carry trade unwinding faster than they're prepared for.
They can handle it as long as it doesn't go too fast.
But that's the big problem.
I believe the markets are going down because the Japanese bond market
had a six standard deviation move for the past two days.
This is Treasury Secretary Scott Besson.
That would be in their 10-year bonds.
I've been in touch with my economic counterparts in Japan and urged them to take the necessary measures to stabilize their bond market.
That's spilling all over into all bond markets.
I can imagine that phone call, hey, man, you're effing our stuff up.
You need to make a buy.
German yields are up.
French yields are up.
U.S. yields are up.
And, again, it's mostly the Japanese bond market.
Got nothing to do with Greenland.
No, of course not.
Nothing to do with Greenland.
Nothing to do with Greenland at all.
Although I think in the scale of things, yeah, the Greenland thing is a small, minor, temporary issue.
The yen carry trade unwinding, depending on the acceleration of that, is a notable issue or a very serious issue.
Well, something messing with your liquidity this week as well is the shenanigans with this stupid Clarity Act.
As Bitcoiners there minimal impact for us other than market sentiment and market momentum And things were just about to get over the finish line when the bald man himself Brian Armstrong put a stop to things
Coinbase has objected at the final hour and is pushing back on the Clarity Act, saying that no bill would be better than this bill.
And I have figured out their main complaints.
Coinbase's main complaints say, essentially from their point of view, that this bill kneecaps stablecoins.
The draft bans platforms like Coinbase from paying yield on idle stablecoins.
No interest, no rewards, unless users are actively transacting that stablecoin.
So in other words, banks don't want you to park dollars on an exchange like Coinbase and just earn yield.
They don't want that, right?
The banks say, look, we can't compete with that.
At best, we give people like 0.1, maybe 0.5% interest.
And now they're going to go park it on Coinbase and get 4% interest.
We can't compete with that.
That's going to suck liquidity out of the banking system.
And Brian Armstrong says, OK, well, then compete with us.
It's a totally different business model for the banks.
And I'm not here to defend the banks, but I can understand why they don't like the idea of you just saving your money on Coinbase and making 4%.
There's no reason to keep it in the savings account because on the Coinbase stablecoin side, it's also backed by treasuries, where in the bank, it's fractional reserve banking.
So they really only have a fraction of your actual money in the bank at any given time, where in theory, the stablecoin system would be completely backed by treasuries.
Now, if you want to trust Coinbase, man, that's up to you.
That's not the point I'm making here.
But you could see why the banks would be a little nervous in theory if like a legitimate – well, OK.
If another banking institution, which one of them would do, had this deal, like if Bank of America lets you just have stable coins in your Bank of America savings account at 4% yield, well, then everybody's pulling their money out of Wells Fargo.
Insert name of bank here to make my point.
The other thing that Coinbase drew a red flag around is that the bill seems to push more control to the SEC.
And it's been noted that Elizabeth Warren herself, you know, thank goodness she's out there helping us.
She has snuck in 38 amendments to this market structure bill to really crap it up.
Amendments that remove developer protections, remove sanctioned compliance obligations, more illicit activity power monitoring by the government, more AML obligations for DeFi and especially for front end to DeFi.
repeal positive OCC guidance for banks and gut the SEC's ability to allow tokenization
and basically remove the CFTC as much as possible from the entire picture, which Coinbase doesn't
like. Now, this seems to be the state of affairs. Negotiations are ongoing. Brian Armstrong was at
Davos. He says, well, I think we're going to have a fix soon. The real question will be,
Does Congress go with the banks or does Congress go with the crypto lobby?
This is going to be a huge deal for the banks.
And if they go with the crypto lobby, the banks are going to have to hustle into this as fast as possible to save their asses.
But either way, David Sachs, the cryptos are here in the States, thinks we're going to find a compromise soon.
Well, yeah, there's an issue right now, the so-called yield issue, whether stable coins are going to be able to pay yield.
There's a difference of opinion between the crypto industry and the banking industry.
Where do you sit?
I'm in favor of reaching a solution and facilitating a compromise so that we can get a bill for market structure on the president's desk.
We've seen this movie before, back in August, when the stablecoin bill passed, the Genius Act.
It died about three times before it finally passed and was signed into law.
So there's a process here that has to be worked through.
What's a potential compromise look like?
Because it looks like the banks don't want it to allow it to happen, and it looks like the crypto guys are adamant that it happened, that they'd be able to compete.
How do you split the baby, I guess?
Well, I think the banks have to recognize that yield is already a feature of the Genius Act that passed and was signed into law in August.
So if the bill ends up dying, then there will be a form of rewards.
And so I understand their point of view.
But again, if there's no deal, then they're going to lose on this issue.
So I think it's in their interest to work something out.
At the same time, I would urge some of the crypto folks to be a little bit to see the bigger picture.
Yes, I understand that yield is philosophically important to them, but so is getting an overall market structure bill.
So I think if everybody takes place around everyone has to be reasonable here, I think.
And if they do, that will get a bill.
But is it a bill comes and then there's a sort of longer fight that continues, do you think, afterwards?
No, I mean, it's already past the House.
No, no, no. I mean, you sort of get this compromise.
The banks don't love it. Crypto doesn't love it.
And then over time, after this bill gets, if this gets signed, then there's sort of a continued fight to get even more.
Well, a good compromise is everyone leaves a little bit unhappy.
Right. Right. But I think what's going to happen is that after market structure passes, the banks are going to get fully into the crypto industry.
So we're not going to have a separate banking industry and crypto industry.
It's going to be one digital assets industry.
And I think their opinions are going to evolve over time.
And I bet you over time, the banks like the idea of paying yield because they're going to be in the stable coin business.
All right, boost into the show.
If Lynn's right and it's a structural issue, how long could you hold out?
Most of the internet's pissed off we're not at 200,000 right now.
Are you tired, bro?
Share with me.
How long can you huddle?
Well, you can support the show just by doing what you do.
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And now it is time for the boost.
It is indeed.
This is a value for value podcast supported by our listeners.
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nice
says thanks chris is the highest signal bitcoin and macro podcast out there
i love the focus and refusal to chase the shit coins
i've been using bitcoin since 2012 nice dude
lost 35 bitcoin on bit funder early on
and a brutal lesson that forced a real discipline afterwards
i hear you man i don't i don't i don't know
I think I lost somewhere between 35 and 60 Bitcoin in a wallet hack when I was testing an online wallet for a podcast called TechSnap.
And then I believe I lost somewhere between 10 and 25 Bitcoin on Mt. Gox when Mt. Gox was hacked myself.
Very painful.
My life would be very different.
And I try not to think of it that way, but it is true.
It is true.
So, yes, you know, the thing is, a lot of us that have been in Bitcoin a long time, the stories are not very, very easy.
They're not they're not fun necessarily.
They're hard lessons.
But the conviction also comes from that.
I've already lost more than I'll ever spend.
Same here, dude.
Same here.
And spent more than I'll ever save going forward.
Totally, dude.
At this stage, I'm experimenting with yield.
Two approaches so far.
Heavy STRC exposure, 15 percent of my Bitcoin net worth for yield now with a dividend cash flow.
and then careful DeFi experimentation on the side.
I would love more details about both of those.
I don't know much about any of the DeFi stuff.
It sounds risky to me, but that's just my initial reaction.
And as far as the strike stuff goes,
that seems, I mean, it seems interesting as a long time,
but don't you feel like over 10, 20 years,
it's always risky not to just keep the Bitcoin
over 15 years, even 10 years?
I don't know.
I'd like to know your thoughts on that.
He says, I converted some of my BTC into TBTC,
BTC, which is a threshold on Ethereum, and deposited into Aave. I took a loan against it,
a 4% APR, and I borrowed Tethered. I converted to USDC and withdrawed via Coinbase and moved to
Vanguard for even more yield. Yes, very risky. Okay. This is great detail. So you're using Aave.
I've heard of that before. So you're paying a 4% APR over there. Then you have to convert it to
USDC. Is there an expense to that? And then to move it to Coinbase, once it's USDC, I know that's
free. And then you put it on Vanguard. So you're depositing from Coinbase into Vanguard to get
even more yield. That's interesting. I'd like to know what your total is there.
I'm fully aware there are multiple points of failure. This is a controlled experiment and
not a recommendation. Well, that makes sense. Fun will now commence.
Timeline blew my mind. Did this Saturday night and by Tuesday morning, I already had additional
strike shares in my brokerage. My plan is to repay soon, partially to prove to my wife that
This can be addressed in an emergency if needed.
Cutting edge fun degen leverage aside, stay humble and stack sats.
Don't repeat the mistakes I made in 2013.
Side note, I've been boosting, but my balance doesn't seem to drop.
Are the messages going through?
Breeze is great.
No KYC, no email.
Sometimes clunky.
Yeah, usually if it doesn't go down, it means like one of the splits failed partially or something like that.
So if some of your amount goes down, but not all of it.
This is a really fascinating conversation, Wine Eagle.
I wish you were going to be at scale or Planet Nick so I could talk to you more.
Not necessarily that I'm going to engage in this, but I do think it's an interesting thing to understand better and an area that I could learn more about just so I can speak to it better.
Really appreciate those details.
Anything else you want to share, Wine Eagle?
Very much would be appreciative.
And thanks for being our baller.
Kiwi Bitcoin Guide came in at 33,333 sats.
I hoard that which your kind covets.
That's not too bad either.
Thank you there.
It's across two booths, of course.
Oh, my God.
This drawer is filled with fruit loops.
Hey, Chris.
It was interesting to hear you say that you look at each of your shows as a business.
Tell us more about the vision for Twib.
Do you see it following the same path as LUP with value for value memberships and bonus content but no paid ads?
Are there any other unique things you're considering for Twib?
Nah.
Oh, man.
You know, I'm so heads down on every single week just following the news that I don't think about it as much as I probably should.
Where I say that is because each show has its own unique audience.
There's crossover, of course, obviously, but there's also its own unique audience with its own unique demographic and niche that it addresses and its own topics with its own possible swag line.
You know, I would love to do a couple of stupid swag items, not crappy ones, but fun ones.
And I would like to go to events and I would like to meet up with people like I do for LUP.
Would I be willing to take paid sponsorships because that is part of the LUP model?
You'd really have to be the right.
I'd have to have, you know, I just, I don't know, man.
Things change so fast in the Bitcoin space.
So it's a risky one.
It'd be hard to do right.
What other areas and things am I thinking?
Well, I'd like to get more into guides and how-tos,
but that's just been, again, doing the show itself takes so much time.
Yeah, we'll see.
But he goes on,
do you see any opportunities in the Bitcoin education space through TWIP?
Membership and courses, educational content.
Are there any ways to open source any of this
via the value for value community contributions or something like that?
I see why you've done with Linux Unplugged
and wonder if it's possible to do with Twib.
Anyway, something to ponder.
Your show drops on Thursday in my part of the world,
and I always look forward to Twib Thursdays now.
Oh, that's nice.
Yeah, I try to get it out as early as I can my time Wednesday.
So I start working on the show usually by 6 a.m.,
and if I can get my butt out of bed early enough,
I start working on the show about 5.30 a.m. Wednesday morning.
But I am working on the show pretty heavily by Monday,
and Tuesday I'm already starting to sort and process and eliminate some clips and add new
clips. And then I do another round of that Wednesday. And then I kind of just trickle follow
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I still, every day I'm reading the news, following feeds. I have
about, probably have about 70 RSS feeds dedicated for Twib. I have about 300-ish overall, but about
70 dedicated to Twib. And these are following content creators and news sources that I've found
to be reliable. And so I follow that every single day using fresh RSS, which is kind of my go-to
tool that I have self-hosted. And that comes into a pipeline that I have ready for me when I sit down
Wednesday morning. So, and I try to automate that as much as possible so that I can dedicate myself
to other functions like, you know, reviewing the clips, clipping the clips, thinking about a lot of
this requires taking in multiple different perspectives and then really kind of coming
up with my own thoughts about it. And then trying to find somebody who can intellectually challenge
that like a, you know, an audio clip or something like that.
And then, so that is a big time consumer.
So then getting into tutorials and how to and guides is a whole nother type of content creation And so that why I say they really are a business unto themselves right Especially if you get ads involved and whatnot
So what I struggle with is getting out underneath just the production of the show.
And I wonder if there isn't some experimentation in here, you know, on slow weeks.
Maybe I don't do a regular show, although there's never really a slow week.
So there hasn't been a slow week.
I don't know. I'd like input if anybody can make any sense of that rambling and give me feedback.
I could use some guidance. But I do appreciate the questions and I appreciate the boost Kiwi.
Good to hear from you. Marius is here with 21,420 sats.
and you know i think too we still have still collecting opinions out there on
what we should do for a bitcoin boost a 21 000 sats boost there has been one submission for an
idea so we'll go with that this week but i don't i don't think it's the final idea i think we i
think we could do something a little better and i believe you'll understand when i played all right
Okay, all of that to say, Marius writes, clear words on the nature of Fed from Edwards Griffins, the creature from Jekyll Island.
Oh, yeah.
To hear, people have iterated over and over how the Fed is a private bank with public funding, a pursuit of cover government agency, and an outdated mandate.
Nice, Marius.
And thank you for the boost.
Moon Knight comes in with 21,121 sats.
1.21 gigawatts!
Moon Knight writes, how about 1.21 gigawatts as a sound clip for the Bitcoin boost?
Well, there you go.
What'd you think?
The thing is, that clip is not as tight as you remember.
So you remember him just saying that in isolation, but he actually says it over the video version
of himself.
It just doesn't work.
1.21 gigawatts!
Could just be a little tighter.
A little tighter.
But I like the idea, Moon Knight.
Hybrid Sarcasms here with 10,000 sats.
It's over 9,000!
A really enjoyable episode and a happy new year to you.
Well, thank you.
He's a good guy.
He's a real good guy.
No, he's a great guy.
Appreciate it, hybrid.
Speaking of good guys, Gene Beans here.
He comes in with 4,100 sats.
Well, I'll be dipped.
Regarding the dual mandate of the Fed, I think Matthew nailed it.
No one can serve two masters.
Either you will hate the one and love the other,
or you'll be devoted to one and despise the other.
I says please talk more about the hosted minor stuff
Okay Gene, I will as I learn more
And here's a boost for you, boosting the song
Oh yeah, thanks, thanks for boosting our artist
I appreciate that Gene
Always good to hear from you too
Fair Vaultie is here with 2026 Sats
Yes, hi
Did I get that right?
Fair Vaultie, Fair Vaultie
The traders love the vol
Happy New Year Twib and Merry Noster
And he links me to a Noster and Pub
Oh, is that you?
I will try to remember to follow that.
Good times.
Glad to see you're on Nostert.
Thanks for the boost.
Appreciate that.
A blazer, 4151.
Oh, it's been a long time getting from.
Oh, sorry.
He says.
The traders love the vol.
No, he doesn't say that.
Another great episode.
Thank you so much for the spin.
I'd been in Bitcoin space through my husband,
but I got active, or she says.
Sorry about that.
actively involved, or they, in 2023 with music and the Value for Value model.
Bitcoin and Value for Value are changing the game for artists,
and it's been exciting to be a part of it and watch it grow.
Oh, it's Sarah Jade.
Did I skip one?
I did.
Bias Blazar, thank you.
He just had a smiley face.
Thank you, Blazar.
Appreciate the value.
Sarah Jade, good to hear from you again with 3,333 sats.
Got all mixed up there.
But yeah, if you haven't boosted last week's artist,
go back and listen and boost Sarah Jade.
That was her song.
Sarah, I love that you're listening,
and thanks for staying in touch
and great work on the song.
It was a banger.
Tomatoes here with 4,444 sats.
Yeah, now I got it.
Welcome back.
Whilst I prefer the show's not focused
on U.S. internal politics,
I know there will be some of that.
It's only natural for your U.S.-based show.
Oh, Tomato.
That's such a...
I'm going to guess you're not in the U.S.
You guys do this all the time.
All the effing time.
You see, you sit here and you lecture me about being too focused on the U.S.
And then shit goes down like this week with the Greenland and the changing economic order and the EU must protect themselves.
And now it's all up in your backyard.
And now all of a sudden it matters quite a bit, doesn't it?
It's almost like there was a point to covering it even if you're outside the U.S.
If we're talking about the U.S. Fed, though, he continues, what do you think about the New York Fed holding 7000 tonnins of gold on behalf of foreign governments?
I think it's hilarious that people haven't demanded that back.
After invading Venezuela, the U.S. might be able to steal its Bitcoin reserves or maybe not.
The gold in New York is much easier to steal.
If I wanted a sovereign reserve, I know where I'd look.
I think they already do.
I'm not saying it's right, but I think they already do, don't you?
I bet that's on a balance sheet somewhere.
I would bet it is.
I would think so, tomato.
I don't know.
Just food for thought, he writes.
I do wonder what the eventual effects might be for Bitcoin.
Hopefully positive.
Yeah, I think it'd be even wilder if we got to a point where some of these trade deals
ended up getting settled in gold and then the gold needed to start being accounted for.
And then that, I think, would be the spark.
That's a good point, Tamato.
Thank you very much for the boost.
Appreciate it.
Even if I had to give you a hard time, I really do appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
OB's here with 19,001 sat.
Our buddy Luke Roman did an interesting interview with Joe Burnett.
He equated Bitcoin's scarcity with the scarcity of his lake house property.
He paid off his mortgage with his Bitcoin sale proceeds.
Overall, though, he sounded defensive.
He certainly went over and above to explain away his Bitcoin sale.
Oh, really?
I missed that interview.
Thank you for the heads up, Obi.
I have seen Luke subsequently also seeming very defensive.
The thing about it is, like, I think it's weird for a macro person to day trade Bitcoin.
It's a scarce asset.
There's other things you can buy and sell.
I don't know, man.
I don't know.
I know.
I do appreciate getting, like, front property, but then it'd be hilarious if real estate prices crash because Luke is the one saying that there's going to be a market crash, right?
It seems like maybe he bought at the top.
I don't know.
You mentioned something about Luke and Lopp and Knott's.
What did I miss?
No, you didn't miss anything on the podcast, OB.
It was Lopp made a post about, you know, sort of Luke's wacky history.
I didn't cover on the show because it's sort of a personal attack and doesn't really bear on if the code quality of Knott's is good or not.
But, you know, also all that was getting so personal.
It's probably, you know, if you want to go search it, you could probably find it on Lopp's social media.
You know, it's the whole thing about core and knots and getting into the personal stuff.
I just never liked that.
I'd rather focus on the technical aspects of the implementations and which ones seem to have the better preference for us node runners.
Although there may be something to understanding people's past.
I don't know.
You know what I mean, Obi?
You know what I mean?
It's one of those things.
But thank you for the boost.
And thank you for asking.
I probably could have been more clear about that.
ChloroFloor is here with a row of ducks.
That's 2,222 sats.
When you say node up, does running the AlbiHub count?
I think, is that a full node?
Yeah, AlbiHub counts.
AlbiHub and a Lightning node count, they're going to depend on a Bitcoin node one way or another.
And participating in the network with Lightning is a fantastic learning experience.
And if you are doing that, you are helping grow the network.
If you're participating in Lightning and learning it and understanding what channels are and what a pain in the neck they can be,
but why they can be a pain in the neck and how to make them not a pain, like you learn all that stuff.
you're helping Bitcoin grow and you're doing your part.
You've noted up.
Absolutely.
Good question.
Thank you, Clara.
Wise Hoddles here with 2,100 sats.
No message, just value.
Well, thank you very much.
Ace Ackerman's back with a row of ducks.
I do like the cold card Mark IV better than the original Jade wallets,
and the Jade is not compatible with Unchained Capital multi-sig vaults,
which I also like.
Oh, you know, I'd like to hear more about Unchained Capital.
Seems appealing for some, especially with the multi-sig setup.
Thanks, Ace.
That's good insight there.
Appreciate that.
I had not even thought about the Unchained Capital route.
I haven't heard a lot from them recently.
You know, see, there's a company I could perhaps see sponsoring, right?
That seems like somebody who's been around for a while I could trust.
So somebody over at Unchained, get a hold of me.
Amorph Sausage, or no, I always say sausage.
Amorph Phage.
but I like to say Amorphous Sausage is here with 6,600 sets.
Yeah, isn't that nice?
Yeah.
He says, talking about hardware wallets,
I'm surprised nobody mentioned the seed signer yet.
There it is.
I know it's a bit different from the others
as it's not storing your keys,
but it's air-gapped, open source,
and you build the device yourself from a Raspberry Pi.
I like it. Curious what you think.
I'm also interested in getting to mining with a J.B. pool.
Yes, yes, yes.
Another plus one to a JB mining pool.
Let's do this.
I don't know how to get started.
Anybody that does, let me know.
Okay, to your other question.
I think a lot of people like the cold card
because of the secure element and all of that.
But I think the seed signer
could all absolutely be part of it.
You know, I think I would like to have
a multi-vendor setup either way, myself personally.
Thanks, Amorph, and hope you enjoy the sausage.
Thank you, everybody who boosted,
including those of you who boost below 2,000 sats.
2,000 sats is our cutoff for airtime.
And of course, a shout out to all of you
who stream sats as you listened.
A nice, wow, good, look at this,
43 of you stacked a good one.
It's 74,906 sats.
That's technically our baller booster.
Thanks, sat streamers.
I really appreciate that.
You collectively had a big lift this week.
When you combine that with our boosters,
this episode stacked a grand total of 261,221 sats.
Not too bad.
In fact, not too bad at all.
My goal would be to get to 300,000 sats
if we can make it possible for episode 90,
which is just next week, if you can believe it.
90 feels like a milestone.
And I think 300,000 sats is right where future me
feels like it was worth the time invested in the show.
So if you'd like to help get me to my goal for 300,000 sats,
boost in with something like fountain.fm or go set up AlbiHub.
And there's lots of apps, including just the podcast index that make it all quite possible.
And thank you, everybody who supported episode 89.
Well, let's keep a watch on the Federal Reserve pressure.
We're just going to spend one moment on this.
Not too much of an update here.
But U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant was out and about.
And we'll start with the most Bitcoin-relevant update we have from him.
And that was he was just asked a matter of hours ago for an update on the U.S. Bitcoin reserve.
Can you give us an update this year in 2026 what America's strategy is for a Bitcoin strategic reserve?
And given that the SDNY recently seized Bitcoin from developers working on a project called Tornado Cash, what does the administration think about that, contrary to Trump's executive order saying that Bitcoin should not be, seized Bitcoin should not be sold?
So a lot of things to unpack there.
I'm not going to talk about Bitcoin specifically.
What I will talk about is the administration led by Treasury,
and they are our colleagues on both sides of the aisle in Congress
passed historic legislation, the Genius Act for stable coins.
We are working on clarity legislation.
And our goal, again, it is the president bringing digital assets
and innovation onshore to the U.S.
We want to be the best regulatory regime.
He'll get there, don't worry.
And that Bitcoin does come up.
For digital assets and creativity to spark innovations.
The previous administration almost created an extinction event
for digital asset companies.
We are bringing them back.
I'm not going to comment on that litigation
other than to say if anything was seized,
I believe it would have been seized from the founders.
And the policy of this government is to add seized Bitcoin to our digital asset reserve after the damages are done.
So the Bitcoin reserve.
So that's an important clarification there.
What he's saying is it is our policy to seize the Bitcoin, but we do not put it in the reserve until after the case is essentially closed.
And this might explain some of the confusion because we saw Bitcoin get seized and then
we saw a federal agency transfer that Bitcoin to Coinbase.
And it's very likely that it's being held at Coinbase until all of the damages are finished
for the case.
The damages are done.
So the Bitcoin reserve, our view was first you have to stop selling, which we had
And then we can add the assets and asset forfeitures.
Yeah, so don't let them get your Bitcoin.
And just to make a few things clear, the Bitcoin was forfeited from the Samurai wallet developers who were made to sign an asset liquidation agreement in regard to their Bitcoin.
That's how we know about this.
And then that Bitcoin seems to have been sent to Coinbase.
They're claiming it wasn't sold.
The U.S. government has claimed recently that that Bitcoin was, in fact, not sold.
Tornado Cash is a separate case, but like the Samurai developers, were also brought by the Biden Southern District of New York.
And that case is ongoing.
Both cases involve privacy software, but Tornado Cash is on ETH.
Samurai was Bitcoin.
And the founders of Samurai are currently servicing prison sentences for unlicensed money transmission, even though regulators in charge of Finston said that they would not qualify for a license because they didn't take custody of any funds.
So chew on that one.
That deserves its own special episode.
But I wanted to make it clear what's going on here.
And we do have one more Scott update while we're in the Scott folder.
And then he was, again, saying the quiet part out loud.
The Fed has the luxury of when they need to buy something, when they're going over budget, they just print the money for themselves.
So when they need something, they debase our currency.
Larry, a lot to unpack there.
First of all, I'm not going to comment and can't comment on the ongoing investigation if there is one.
I don't know much about it.
But what I can tell you is that as far back as beginning of last summer, I've been calling
for the Fed to conduct its own internal investigation into a lot of the deficiencies that the institution
has had.
Because, Larry, as you know, I know, and everyone, especially in the financial markets, knows,
the Federal Reserve occupies a special place with the American people.
It has a tremendous amount of sway and influence over their life, but there is no accountability.
So I think the Fed has to be like Caesar's wife, beyond reproach.
And we have seen, we recently saw a governor resign over an ethics violation, and that was put out three, four months after she left.
In my opinion, deficient.
We have seen these cost overruns, and I think it would just be much better if the Fed came forward
and they got these issues out in the open rather than having a tight hold.
I can't.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what the Fed's known for is doing this stuff out in the open.
They should just come out and be transparent.
They live in the shadows.
And the very fact that the Treasury Secretary is out there airing this dirty laundry is historic.
And that's why I keep playing this.
You have to understand this is a complete change in narrative and it is really a power struggle that's happening and a clear sign that we are just in the absolute throes of fiscal dominance.
They got these issues out in the open rather than having a tight hold.
I do think we need some transparency here because, again, I don't know anything about construction.
Seemingly, not many people at the Fed do.
But the way the Fed works, there are no appropriations.
They just print the extra $700 million, whether it turns into an extra billion, an extra billion and a half.
They just print it.
I can't do that. If I wanted a new chair in my office at Treasury, I have to go through the appropriations process.
No wonder they're building such a palace. I mean, really, it's no wonder they're building such an incredible palace.
Well, this is an interesting study that came out. I believe it was over by CoinGecko.
And they say that more than half of all the crypto tokens that have ever been created failed and most have died in 2025.
Over 53% of all crypto tokens launched since 2021 are now inactive, with 2025 alone accounting for 86% of total failures.
Okay.
And you're not going to be too surprised to hear this, but the $19 billion liquidation event in October triggered a sharp downturn, wiping out 7.7 million tokens in just three months.
More than half of all cryptocurrencies ever launched are now defunct, with most of the failures happening in 2025.
That's according to CoinGecko.
What a brutal year for altcoins.
Everything bleeds to Bitcoin and just really puts it in perspective.
I'll have a link to that in the show notes.
All right let zoom out for a moment Tim Draper he built a career by really having conviction early to certain things He one of those rich guys He so rich You know his name and his eyebrows even though you
probably can't quite picture his face. And he's really made his billions by staying focused during
times of chaos. He was on the Divot podcast this last week, and the topic of trading Bitcoin during
these uncertain times came up. And well, I thought the clip was worth sharing with you.
See, I'm looking at it very differently than that. I'm not looking at it as an investor. I'm looking at it as a transformative technology that is, and, you know, I'll give you this example. My dad gave me a million dollar bill when I was about 10 years old. And I go, million dollars? Look, what can I do with it? And he goes, nothing. And I said, what do you mean? It's a million dollars. He said, that's a million Confederate dollars.
The Confederates lost the word of the union.
They inflated their money.
A million dollars wouldn't buy one single union dollar.
A million Confederate dollars wouldn't buy one single Confederate dollar.
So I'm seeing, in effect, in slow motion, the exact same thing.
Sure.
Because, okay, not only is a dollar today worth more than a dollar in a year, we lose it to inflation or usage or whatever, or even stable coins, you know, that actually is inflative.
And so the value of a dollar today versus, I mean, is a dollar and in a year that's going to be 90 cents and 80 cents or whatever, and it'll keep dropping.
But the value of Bitcoin continues to grow because the network continues to grow. The bigger the network, the more powerful and effective the unit of currency Bitcoin is. And so not only is Bitcoin against the dollar a really good bet, but you're seeing the dollar fall as fast as you're seeing Bitcoin grow.
And that combination is going to, you know, it'll hit 250,000, but it's going to hit a million, it's going to hit 10 million on its way to where the dollar is no longer accepted, no longer worth it.
And Bitcoin is the one source of store of value in currency for the world eventually.
But there will probably be competitive currencies, but Bitcoin's 61% of the market for cryptocurrency.
So I think there's kind of one big winner and then there are lots of little things.
You think there's no turning back for the dollar?
Is there no way for the U.S. to resurrect the dollar?
I think if you put a, if you told Congress, here's your budget and everybody votes for a share of that budget, then people would hold, then the dollar still might be able to survive.
But it is old technology and it's tied to banks and it's tied to governments.
And even if you solve the problem one time, the government spending as a percentage of GDP is on a straight line up.
It just keeps going higher.
Well, our role seems pretty clear to me then.
We just got to grow the network.
Node up, add more wallets, add more users, grow the network.
All right, I'm usually pretty tough on Coinbase and Brian Armstrong in particular,
especially recently. But I got to give him final clip of the week because like a pro,
he calmly and sharply knocked back a rather smug French central banker who was having a laugh
when the topic of Bitcoin came up.
This was at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.
And props to Brian Armstrong.
I mean, you'll hear how smug this guy is and how well Brian handles it.
Governor, you have to address this.
Is the euro in danger from a Bitcoin standard?
No, I'm a bit skeptical, Brian.
Sorry to say it about this idea of the Bitcoin standard.
We left the gold standard, but the gold was only a technical mean.
What is important is what you say.
but that monetary policy and money is part of sovereignty.
And we live in democracies, and I think the public role is key.
And if we lose that, we lose a key function of democracy.
That said I always keep repeating that money as long as it exists for centuries has been a public partnership You need a public anchor whatever its form is Remember silver and gold were sovereign assets so it was on the public side
And then you had banknotes and you will have CBDC.
But anyway, the most important part of payments is in the private sphere,
and this is the development of tokenized private money.
But this tokenized private money must be regulated to inspire trust.
I love the idea here that he's trying to imply that, well, a CBDC is essentially a public money.
And you see the whole framework here is you have public money with a private pin, a private anchor.
And you're going to have CBDCs now that will play that role.
This actually, that right there, that one sentence reveals why they want CBDCs so badly.
Because there was a public component.
And now with CBDCs, they can own the entire chain.
You had banknotes and you will have CBDC.
But anyway, the most important part of payments is in the private sphere.
And this is a development of tokenized private money.
But this tokenized private money must be regulated to inspire trust, confidence.
It's fascinating that you say that, Brian, you mentioned a complementary role that you could play.
So I think that crypto is very good for fiat currencies.
It's very good.
Bitcoin is good as a check and balance on deficit spending because when there is a lack of trust or people, you know,
like in a U.S. context, if people are worried about inflation or maybe in places like Argentina or Turkey or Nigeria,
they are going to flee to the thing that they believe is going to store value more.
So I think in general, it's going to be very complimentary.
And like you said, I think it comes down to trust.
And so if fiat currencies can maintain trust and not have the money printer kind of debasing everybody, then they'll survive.
But if countries that have bad behavior on that dimension, Bitcoin doesn't have a money printer.
The supply is fixed and people will go to it in times of uncertainty, kind of like they did with gold.
The guarantee for trust is independence on central bank side.
And we have a common date and we are accountable to that.
But sorry to say that.
I love that they always have this.
Oh, the central banks are so independent.
You see, the central bank, what he just said, the promise of trust is independence of the central bank.
Of course, when Jay Powell puts out a statement, they all work in unison.
Or when one of them starts to lower rates, they all seem to lower rates, especially during COVID.
There wasn't any independent action during COVID at all.
But then the moment that's passed, they're back to clutching their pearls about how independence of the central bank is at the cornerstone of the financial system.
It's essentially saying an illusion is at the center of the financial system.
And we have a common date and we are accountable to that.
But sorry to say that I trust more independent central banks with a democratic mandate than private issuers of Bitcoin, which have a very useful role.
Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol.
There's actually no issuer of it.
So that's in the sense that central banks have independence.
Bitcoin is even more independent.
There's no country or company or individual who controls it in the world.
And so anyway, I think it's a healthy competition because because if people can decide which one they trust more.
And I think it's actually the greatest accountability mechanism on deficit spending.
All right, I'm wrapping up at block height 933,258, the Bitcoin price to one U.S. dollar.
You can get a Bitcoin for 89,830 greenbacks.
That makes our sats per dollar 1,113 sats to one U.S. dollar.
We're just near that 30% downrange, that 30% significant number in my head for some reason.
Our current all-time high decline, 28.8%.
Of course, that was October 6, 2025, 126,180.
That was 107 days ago.
Now, we still have a downwards adjustment expected, and this could get even sharper with the cold weather forcing some miners to shut down.
Estimated difficulty change is currently a downwards 3.8%.
Nodes have ticked back up a bit, but we need more nodes.
Reachable nodes, 24,624.
Let's get some more nodes going.
And that right there, my friends, is the state of the Bitcoin network.
Well if you going to be at scale or Planet Nix at I don know March 5th to the 6th Pasadena California Come say hi I probably have a meetup somewhere in there like a Friday or a Saturday
I'll be attending both Planet Nix and Scale.
You do need to register.
If you want to go, you can get 40% off registration with my promo code UNPLG.
UNPLG.
And meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting is where I'll put the meetup details when I actually have them.
That's meetup.com slash Jupiter Broadcasting.
Links to what I talked about this week are over at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
Lots of stuff over there, including the back catalog and details and extra info that didn't even make it into this episode.
So my goal right here, right now, is to create a show that doesn't get distracted by the emotions around what's happening,
but stays focused for you on the signal so you can plan for yourself, your family, your business, whatever it might be.
So let me know how I did with a boost or if there's anything you think I should have included or any questions you have,
you can boost those in.
And don't forget the show also has a membership through Fountain FM or Jupiter.Party, where you can support the whole network and all of the shows.
Now, I am going to leave you with a value for value track, as I always do.
This week's song is by Suzanne Santo, and it's her track, New All Along.
We'll be right back.
That half the time you have to run
And you do all alone
That love would leave you stunned
And you'd be another level down
From leveling up
She said they're crowning you a queen
Thought you're turning your back
Do you know what I mean
When I say you're living in lack
But you don't need to suffer, honey
You can just relax
Cause you knew all along
You weren't like the other ones
You knew all along
Half the time you left to run
You knew all along
That love would leave you stunned
Then you'd be another level down
From leveling up
Leveling up, leveling up, leveling up
You knew all along
That you were like the other ones you knew
You would have to ride
You knew all along
The love would leave you still
Maybe another level down
Leveling down
You're gonna have to level up
You're gonna have to live
You knew
Thank you.