What happens when the unstoppable force of infinite fiat demand meets the immovable object of absolute scarcity, absolute finite Bitcoin supply of 21 million?
Obviously, the fiat price is going to go up.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker, and this is the Bitcoin podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 870-878, and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Today's episode is an impromptu Bitcoin news roundup, live streamed on Noster only, as is now tradition.
I'm going to run through some of the biggest Bitcoin stories that are happening right now.
Zoom out and give you some context, probably talk about Noster, and some other random stuff as well.
So, before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast, wherever you're watching or listening,
but right now you're probably watching and listening on Noster only, because that's the only place this live stream is available.
So, if you want to watch this show live, you can only do that on Noster, not on Blue Sky, not on X, not on YouTube.
And let's be honest, Blue Sky doesn't even have the capability for that, I'm sure.
I'm pretty sure that just all they're good at is censoring you if you dare to say there are two genders.
I digress.
I'm going to have show notes for this.
You can also grab the link to subscribe to the the sub stack, which I hate to say, because I never wanted to have a sub stack,
but posting the show notes there, so if you want them in your inbox, you can get them.
If you want to support this show, you can also obviously zap it on Noster or on Fountain.
But if you want to support it in a different way and get a great piece of open source hardware,
you can go to bitbox.swiss.walker and use the promo code Walker for 5% off the fully open source,
Bitcoin only, Bitbox O2 hardware wallet, and then get your Bitcoin off the exchange and into your own self-custody.
Let's see, what else?
If you have feedback or if you're interested in sponsoring the Bitcoin podcast, you can send an email to hello at bitcoinpodcast.net.
And again, if you want to watch this show live, the only place that it is live is on Noster.
And we have audience participation. There are zaps flowing. Let the sats flow as Rockstar would say.
So get on Noster if you're not already. Forget about Blue Sky. It's sad over there.
And check out Noster for the Bitcoin podcast live streamed.
Okay, without further ado, let's get into this Bitcoin news roundup.
What do we have first? And I'm also going to check this chat periodically here.
Okay, thank you, Sarah, for pointing out that there are in fact hermaphrodites. That is a very excellent point.
And yes, my point being actually, this brings me to my first topic, which is that if you say there are two genders, it will get you banned on Blue Sky.
So I'm going to go ahead and show you guys this because it's kind of ridiculous and just seems unnecessary.
Okay, so McShane just posted that user banned after one post on Blue Sky. Noster, there is no alternative.
So somebody said, hello, new platform litmus test. This is on blue sky dot social on that server.
The COVID vaccine didn't work. The 2020 election was stolen. There are two genders. Trans women are men. Trans men are women.
Then the account was suspended. So I think this is also just a great advertisement for Noster.
Regardless of whether or not you agree or disagree with somebody, regardless of whether or not you think statements like that are offensive and should not be said, or if you think I'm doing infinity scroll right now too, aren't I?
Or regardless of whether you think that is completely correct and that person is spot on, I think that we should all be able to agree that people saying things you don't agree with is kind of the entire point of free speech.
People being able to say those things, but not just people being able to say them, other people being able to find what they say, because that's like the other part of censorship, right?
It's not just, oh, yeah, you can you can say stuff and that's it. No, no, no, you need people need to be able to hear to read what you are saying.
Otherwise, it is censorship. And I get trying to the good intention behind trying to create a safe space.
But ultimately, the intention to create those safe spaces is what has led to such a massive amount of echo chamber bubble discussion in this country.
And I think around the world, it's like we need to be able to have really uncomfortable conversations where people can disagree fundamentally on the topic at hand, but still be able to have a civil discourse about this.
And maybe I don't know, call it crazy, learn something from each other in the process, because that is how we get better.
And that is how we learn and we grow if we are not challenged.
If our opinions are not challenged, we do not grow.
Failure to have your opinions challenged results in intellectual death.
Like that is just why would you want that?
Like I welcome seeing people disagree with me, because it means there's probably something I still have to learn.
And I may be right about whatever it might be. I'm probably right quite a lot.
I'm just kidding, guys, I'm wrong all the time.
But the point is that how do I know I'm wrong if I'm never challenged?
How do any of us know we're wrong if we're never challenged by anyone that may be able to offer at least a different opinion on that?
And so again, regardless of what you believe, regardless of what you think, a post like that, talking about COVID vaccine, the election and genders is completely off base or right on the money.
I think we can all agree that that person should be able to say that and say it freely.
Now, the fact that that person was censored seemingly pretty quickly indicates to me that blue sky is not at all decentralized.
And I think we kind of all knew this, right? There's a reason that Jack has distanced himself a bit from blue sky.
I think the intention was good.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.
I'm not saying Jack is going to hell.
I think Jack's doing a fantastic job supporting no-ster development and being active on here.
And if you want to know what somebody really cares about, look at where they spend their time and their attention.
And I think that that's clear that Jack's time and attention is spent on no-ster.
So a reason to be very bullish on no-ster.
And again, you are free to say that you think I'm completely wrong on this.
You disagree. You think my hair is stupid and it would look better with a highlight like BTC Sessions and Nico have.
You can say all that and I really welcome it.
You can say things far more offensive to me too.
If you want, you can say I'm right here in the live stream.
I would love to see it. Please just tell me to fuck right off.
You know, awesome. Fuck right off right back at you.
You know what? That is what this is all about.
We need to have Pablo F7Z.
When he came on the show a while ago and I need to have him back on, but he used a term that I loved.
He called no-ster basically an opportunity for confrontational truth.
And I thought that idea of confrontational truth was really powerful because if the truth or what you believe is the truth,
is not confronted. If it is not attacked and it cannot withstand potential attacks,
then it's probably a pretty weak version of whatever the truth is, right?
So I think we need that confrontational truth.
That's what no-ster enables.
It enables us to have these discussions where nobody is getting censored on any side of this.
You can mute somebody. You don't have to see it, but you can't stop anyone else from seeing what they say.
And that's the important part again.
Nobody is saying that you need to subscribe to what this other person is saying,
that you need to read everything that they say.
No, feel free to mute it. That's your choice, right?
The point is that you should not be able to restrict other people from seeing what they say.
And if your ideas are so weak that they cannot stand up to confrontation, they're probably not very good ideas.
And that's one of the reasons I think Bitcoin is so powerful.
It's one of the reasons the fud never lasts with Bitcoin and they have to recycle the same old talking points
is because their ideas are weak.
And something I always like to say about Bitcoin is like all the Bitcoin critics can do is lie.
All they can do is lie. All we must do is tell the truth.
We are in the power position because we have the truth on our side.
That is the place you want to be.
If you're arguing on the basis of a lie, I mean, first of all, that's just kind of a shitty thing to do.
Like if you know you're lying especially, if you don't know you're lying and you're just ignorant, okay,
that can be forgiven as long as you educate yourself.
But if you know you're lying and you continue to lie to persist in this falsehood,
I just think that's kind of like morally reprehensible.
But hey, also you do you speak however you want, continue to tell lies.
We will continue to use the truth to defend Bitcoin, to defend Noster as well.
And we will use that confrontational truth to help set the minds and the spirits of the people free so we can flourish
in the bright orange blazing future of a Bitcoinized world.
I don't know about that last part, but well, you know, again, we're workshopping this guys.
Truth is sexy. I agree. Sarah's soup box.
Okay, let's talk a little bit of news now that we've got that out of the way.
And you guys, if you are enjoying this stream, feel free to share it or don't Bitcoin doesn't care.
But I do appreciate it. And we'll see how many people we can get into get in here for this random rip.
Okay, so news time.
Micro strategy just this morning.
Sailor announced that they had bought over 50,000 more Bitcoin.
This is pretty wild.
If you consider just for perspective with this single Bitcoin by today,
micro strategy basically bought more than Germany had in total earlier this year in this one by.
So that's just kind of wild. And Sailor tweeted out micro strategy has acquired 51,780 BTC for approximately $4.6 billion at $88,627 per Bitcoin
and has achieved BTC yield of 20.4% QTD and 41.8% year to D.
Jesus year to date. Excuse me. YTD as of 11 17 2024.
We hodled 331,200 BTC acquired for $16.5 billion at approximately $49,874 per Bitcoin.
So I mean just wow, that's a lot of corn.
It's also amazing. You know, if you guys remember people would be giving Sailor a lot of grief because he was constantly buying the top.
But it's like today's top is tomorrow's bottom. You know what I mean? If you just have a little if you zoom out just a little bit did not mean for that to sound as potentially inappropriate as it does, but we're going to move past that.
Anyway, I think that this is just underscoring the fact that Sailor is doing all this out in the open.
He's announcing a public he's announced every single Bitcoin buy it's like been basically every month. This is not some secretive playbook.
He's open sourced his playbook. Anybody can follow this.
But at the end of the day, only founder led companies are really going to be able to move quickly on these kind of things.
And we've seen the same sort of thing with similar scientific also a founder led company with founder having you know, being a key stakeholder still having a lot of control and influence.
I think that really matters.
Other Bitcoin buys today we saw that Mara marathon holdings is going to raise 700 million to buy more Bitcoin.
They're also going to use some of that. I think they said approximately 200 million to pay off some of their notes that are doing 2026.
But they said we announced a proposed private offering of $700 million of convertible senior notes proceeds will be used primarily to acquire Bitcoin.
Repurchase existing convertible notes due in 2026 and for general corporate purposes.
So yeah, I don't know a general corporate purposes. I guess just keeping the lights on and running some admin.
But I think what's interesting here just in the larger context and Sam Callahan summed this up really well.
And if you haven't watched the episode of the Bitcoin podcast with Sam Callahan, I highly recommend you check it out.
Super awesome guy, very, very intelligent.
We discussed the reports that he worked on with Lynn Alden, who also fun fact, Lynn, Steve Lee and I just recorded an episode that dropped today.
So if you have not checked that out, please go do so.
It's about Bitcoin analyzing the Bitcoin consensus and risks in protocol upgrades.
They wrote a really awesome report that is fully open source available on GitHub.
You can contribute to it if you want, which I think is just like should be the standard for these kind of things going forward.
But we dig really deep into that.
And Steve Lee is the he's the head at spiral.
So if you know spiral, they're doing really awesome stuff over there. It was a great conversation.
I digress a little bit, but I have to, of course, shield the fastest growing.
What many people are saying is the fastest growing Bitcoin podcast in the world, which is the Bitcoin podcast, aka TIT coin.
Okay, so Sam Callahan summed this up basically saying micro strategy buys another fifty one thousand seven hundred and eighty BTC for four point six billion dollars.
Mara announces seven hundred million dollar convert convert to acquire more BTC.
Similar scientific raises twenty one million at the market and acquires two hundred and fifteen BTC. You know, orders of magnitude less, but it's still it's still very respectable.
Right. And then meta planet issues one point seven five billion Japanese yen debt offering to buy more BTC.
You've got to love seeing the numbers in yen because they're very large.
But let's let's just see because I don't know off the top of my head what the conversion rate is these days.
Let's see what that is in USD. So that is so it's still like over over a billion dollars like one point one two nine billion.
So it's still quite a respectable amount and kind of wild to see what Dylan Leclerc has been helping them do over there.
But Sam's eventual point here is that the corporate Bitcoin race is heating up and I think that that's very much clear.
Right. Again, it's smaller companies doing this now. I mean now micro strategy is really not a small company, though, by any means.
They are their cash position. I think I have a chart about this.
But micro strategies cash position and I'm calling Bitcoin cash because it is peer to peer digital cash and store a value and unit of account.
I digress. But the point being that I think they're like the 14th largest cash liquid cash position right now in the market.
And that's kind of the incredible thing about Bitcoin is that these companies have the ability to hold this incredibly liquid money like dollars.
That's very that's nice to have cash on hand.
But the problem with dollars as we all know is that that is a melting fiat ice cube. You do not want to hold those for very long.
But Bitcoin it's like there is a 24 7365 market for this.
That is great. It's highly, highly liquid and global.
But you can also actually maintain and grow your purchasing power with it, which is kind of incredible.
And I don't know how long it takes before the Google's the Microsoft's the Facebook's of the world.
I think Facebook is probably actually the the most likely of those really big companies to be able to move quickly on a Bitcoin Treasury strategy, simply because back to my earlier point.
This is still a founder led company. Mark Zuckerberg is still at the helm. He still has a massive, you know, interest in Facebook.
That is a similar situation to micro strategy, right, or similar scientific, albeit on a larger scale because Facebook is massive.
But that's actually something that might be able to move pretty quickly and implement this.
And I think with Mark Zuckerberg's recent kind of based transition, it seems.
I don't know if he's just trying to make us forget about all the creepy censorship and spying that Facebook does by like growing his hair out a little bit and wearing gold chains in the outsides of his shirts and trying to be really hip and like kind of basically having like a heavy Gen Z vibe.
Now, like, I don't mean that in a bad way, just like vibe you get, but like a more base Gen Z.
So maybe he's trying to make us forget about all the censorship and spying and everything else and algorithmic manipulation that's done on Facebook. But either way, it seems to hint that Mark Zuckerberg may actually be in the mood to try and do the ultimate based move from a corporate perspective, which is to add Bitcoin to your corporate
treasury. We shall see. Slight sidebar here. But I wanted to, I wanted to mention that if you didn't see this, this video with with Scottie Pippin claiming he met Satoshi in 1993.
So there's a canter Fitzgerald event. Howard let Nick who runs canter Fitzgerald is one of the people that's potentially tapped to be Treasury Secretary. Canter Fitzgerald. I have some, well, let's say there's some interesting history there.
There's a bit of a revolving door with canter Fitzgerald and Washington, which people don't seem to want to talk about right now because they don't want to speak ill of a potential Trump appointee.
But I would encourage you to look at the people who have been paid very large speaking fees by canter Fitzgerald after they have left political office.
I do have an episode on that from way back in the day called Washington's revolving door, which you may find interesting.
I digress. I'm going to continue digressing probably a lot throughout this episode. But at this canter Fitzgerald event, Scottie Pippin's up there on the stage with Michael Saylor and basically says, you know, I met Satoshi.
I met Satoshi in Seattle in 1993. And now he comes to me in dreams. It's just like kind of ridiculous. And I saw this and I was like, oh my God, you've got to be kidding me.
And then Preston in perfect Preston fashion Preston Pish responds, shut the fuck up with this BS Scotty sincerely all your fans from the 90s.
I think that is the appropriate response. But what I do want to say is that at least there is some some good that came out of this. And thank you to Susie BDDS for this, because there is now a really incredible GIF template.
If you see this right here.
Look at those sailor eyes. Those are the eyes of when you told your buddy you should buy Bitcoin.
And instead of buying Bitcoin, they come back to you and say, yeah, so I actually got this, you know, doge coin or the sheebie knew any dog coin like this is how you you look at those friends.
But thanks Susie for making that incredible GIF. I absolutely love it. Okay.
So back to some of this other stuff. So like zooming out. This is not just corporate treasuries that are doing this. I think everybody at this point knows that Cynthia Lummis proposed a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve bill.
And that at Nashville, and has been working on that bill since Trump has talked about it. He's technically said he wants to make America the crypto capital of the world and have every Bitcoin from here to 2140 made in America.
So we don't need to get into him saying crypto capital of the world will just roll our eyes a little bit. But okay, at least he's not saying he's going to establish an anti crypto army like Senator Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren.
So that's probably a little bit of an upgrade there.
But Pennsylvania proposed a Bitcoin Reserve Act. So to that's going to invest up to 10% of the state funds in Bitcoin aiming to diversify assets combat inflation.
This was written up on Fox News to and in BTC Times, BSTIMES linked Fox News, not the other way around. But I think this is just interesting to see how much Bitcoin has entered the national conversation.
So like, you know, this is this is Fox business. This is what your boomer uncle Jim reads, you know, like this is not some Bitcoin publication.
This is Fox business. I'm not saying that that's better. It's just a reality that this lends more credence to these statements because your boomer uncle Jim doesn't read BTC Times or Bitcoin magazine or whatever else.
So it's it's interesting to see this. And of course, they're spinning it as the prospect of Trump's return to the White House has sparked Pennsylvania lawmakers to introduce legislation that would enable the state's treasury to hold the world's largest digital asset.
Oh, well, this video is freaking out digital asset on its balance sheet as part of a broader movement to recognize Bitcoin as a store of value. Bitcoin doesn't need you to recognize it as a store of value.
It just is a store of value. Bitcoin doesn't care. But anyway, the legislation comes as pro crypto, I'd say pro Bitcoin, Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming says she's hoping to push through her own Bitcoin Reserve bill on the national level during the first 100 days of
Trump's presidency. So again, I think that's interesting. It's just wild to see how much the Overton window has shifted around this stuff regardless of what you think about the actual policy proposition itself, whether you think the government like you don't want to see this
happen, whether you think it has, you know, risks to it, whatever it might be. I'm just trying to look at this from the perspective of the fact that this is even being debated as part of the kind of general political discussion is pretty wild. And I think it just, you know, I haven't been around Bitcoin for that long, I got in in
2020. So I'm not like an OG that's been here for a really long time. But even in just these these four short years, it's wild to see how much it has changed in terms of how this is being discussed. Bitcoin is pumping. And now more than ever, it is extremely important that you get your
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bitbox.swiss slash Walker and use the promo code Walker. Not only do you get 5% off, but you also help support this podcast. So thank you. And it's, you know, pretty, pretty insane to even just like to give credit where credit is due the people who have been in
this year about this whether that be, you know, David Bailey or other people on Trump's team that are, you know, not directly Bitcoin related but clearly open to it. I don't know, maybe it's Baron Trump, you know, whispering in his ear. Clearly he's come around to Bitcoin from the
way it was, which was I don't like Bitcoin because it competes with the US dollar. Going from that. Trump saying that and I think 2018 2019 to now saying, Oh, I want to make America the crypto capital of the world. I want all the all the
the Bitcoins that you're playing with to be made in the US of a that's a pretty monumental shift. So again, I think all these things need to be taken with a grain of salt campaign promises are one thing. But you know, don't trust verify let's see some action around
this. That's what I'm hoping. But I think it's not really going to. It's not going to matter how quickly America moves on this. In a general sense, they're going to move on it eventually they must because every other country in the world, just the fact
that it's being discussed, every other country in the world is put on notice saying, if the US, which is the wealthiest country in the world, which is the world's reserve currency starts buying Bitcoin. That is basically saying, Okay, we need to get on this train right now because
we're going to be moving the station and we don't want the US to absolutely firmly cement itself, you know, for the next 100, 200 years by staving off the death of its own fiat currency by, you know, I don't want to say backing it but by holding Bitcoin as a strategic reserve.
optimistic hope would be that having Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, it doesn't save fiat.
This is something I got into with Jeff Booth and Rockstar a little bit on our recent talk.
I don't think it saves fiat.
I think every fiat currency eventually goes to zero versus Bitcoin regardless.
That said, it may encourage a little bit more responsibility when it comes to running the
money printers on overtime.
So we'll see.
But I think it's very clear this is part of the national and international discourse
at this point.
Poland's presidential candidate, Slaumier Mensen, I'm probably butchering that, promises strategic
Bitcoin reserve ahead of the 2025 election.
So like that, and there's probably more of these, we already know, obviously El Salvador
has been stacking one Bitcoin a day for a long time now under Naib Bukele.
We know that the Kingdom of Bhutan has been mining Bitcoin with a bunch of excess hydropower.
That's been happening for a while.
We know that the oil, you know, oil producing nations in the Middle East, many of them have
been in talks and working with, I think actually Mara Marathon has a project with Saudi Arabia,
if I'm not mistaken.
Don't quote me on that.
The point being that at some level, this is happening, these discussions are happening
all over the world.
And I think that it's pretty wild and things can move really, really quickly from here
in terms of that Bitcoin price that I won't talk about.
Because again, zooming out a little bit, I do not like to talk about price because I
think it's not as interesting as the NGU is less interesting to me than the FGU, the
Freedom Go Up.
That being said, as many have pointed out, as Lightning Goats pointed out in this chat
earlier, this is part of the same cycle, right?
The number go up should lead to the Freedom Go Up because as the value, the fiat value
of this network increases and the actual value of the network increases because there are
more participants in the network, the hash rate is going up, that makes Bitcoin more
secure, right?
Now, whether or not those actions also make it more decentralized is open to debate.
One thing I talked about with Steve and Lynn is mining centralization.
And they both view that as basically the biggest risk to Bitcoin at this time because you look
at those mining pools and they are, the pools are heavily centralized.
One can also make the argument that even though those pools are heavily centralized, people
still have the cost of switching is very low, right?
So you can get out of that pool if it becomes a bad actor.
So that is good.
But it is an important thing to keep in mind because Jeff always adds the caveat.
I don't know if you noticed this.
Whenever Jeff makes a prediction about Bitcoin, what's going to happen in the future?
He always says, if Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure.
And I think he does that for a reason.
He repeats it every time for a reason because he really wants people to get it to their
heads that that is what matters, that it remains decentralized and secure because without that,
that value of the fiat value of Bitcoin goes down and the actual value of Bitcoin goes
down because nobody wants to store their value in a non decentralized and a centralized
insecure network.
But there was a really, just in terms of the general NGU, because I think the other important
part about number go up is that that's what gets more retail people like myself interested
in Bitcoin.
Like it or not, they don't come for the freedom go up.
Some people do, I think most of the early people did not, not all obviously, like a
lot of people are just in this to make money.
But I think you come for the NGU, you stay for the FGU, right?
Come for the number go up, stay for the freedom go up, come for the speculation, stay for
the sovereignty.
However you want to say it, I think that this is really an important part of the adoption
cycle because people pay attention when they realize that they are perceiving themselves
as missing out on gains.
They have that foam all right, that fear of missing out.
And so I think that that is a really important part of the cycle.
So I will touch on it without actually mentioning the price, but because we all know it's, you
know, it's the price in fiat is very high right now.
But that's because fiat is a terrible measuring stick.
Fiat is a really bad way to measure anything because it's like measuring with an elastic
ruler.
And it's like you're stretching the ruler out and you're trying to measure something.
It's going to be different every time because your units keep changing, right?
When fiat is debased, that measuring stick just gets longer and longer and longer and
longer.
Bitcoin is like an adamantine, you know, measuring stick.
Like you are not changing it whatsoever.
And I think that that's kind of a beautiful thing.
So one of the things that Crocius, Jesse Myers points it out was that I'll just read this
because I think it's kind of important because people like to, I noticed again in my short
time in Bitcoin, one thing I've noticed is that people always like to ascribe meaning
to Bitcoin price going up, like Bitcoin price goes up and then people retrospectively look
back and say, ah, well, that's because of X, Y and Z clearly.
And if you just go on like, you know, news.google.com and I'll do this sometimes just to see, okay,
what are the mainstream sites saying about Bitcoin?
And that's usually what you see there, right?
You see a lot of people, a lot of articles just saying, oh yeah, Bitcoin's price is going
up because, you know, because Trump is elected because this is just one example, but like,
you know, whatever it might be, they're always retroactively ascribing some sort of meaning
to the price movements.
But I think a lot of times these price movements are just, they were going to happen anyway
and they happen to coincide with these things.
Like, yeah, I think a lot of people probably got more bullish when Trump was elected because
you have now a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin president, and it's coming into the White House, right?
That being said, we, and here's where I'll read Crocius's point because I think he says
it very well.
If you're wondering what's happening with Bitcoin, yes, the incoming Bitcoin friendly
administration has provided a recent catalyst, but that's not the main story here.
The main story is that we are six months post-having and that means a supply shock has accumulated
it.
There's not enough supply available at current prices to satisfy demand.
Supply demand price equilibrium must be restored.
The only way to do that is for price to go higher, which will flywheel into mania and
a bubble, but that's how this thing works.
It sounds crazy to say that there will be a reliable, predictable bubble every four years,
but then there's never been an asset in the world where new supply creation is halved
every four years.
A post-having bubble is the result.
It's what happened after the 2020, 2016, and 2012 havings.
And now it's taking shape again.
Welcome to the post-2024 having bull market.
This thing goes much higher.
So again, I think that's really well put, right?
We may want to try and give meaning to something, but the fact that Bitcoin coincides, that
having coincides with election years, I think is no coincidence, probably on Satoshi's
part.
But I don't know, maybe I'm trying to retroactively ascribe meaning to what Satoshi did when in
fact he was just like, I just got to release this now and the havings are going to, oh,
what a coincidence.
I guess they fall on election years.
Who knows?
Regardless, that's how it works, right?
So yeah, there's always going to be the potential to, you know, it would seem that if you have
bull runs in every election year, you know, after every election, it's like, well, okay,
Bitcoin wasn't pumping because Joe Biden was elected, right?
That'd be ridiculous.
Say Bitcoin wasn't pumping because it was Barack Obama's second term and he got reelected.
No, that'd be ridiculous.
Bitcoin wasn't pumping because it was, you know, Trump's first term and he got reelected.
Or he got elected.
No, Bitcoin was pumping because the supply had been cut in half about six months prior.
And what happens when the unstoppable force of infinite fiat demand meets the immovable
object of absolute scarcity, absolute finite Bitcoin supply of 21 million?
Obviously, the fiat price is going to go up.
So don't want to talk about price too much, but I think price context is interesting.
And Pete Rizzo posted something this morning that I thought provided some really great
context, which is for the first time ever, one BTC is now worth more than the average
U.S. retirement savings.
Now that's pretty wild if we think about the price today versus like the price during
the COVID crash where it got down to like, you know, 3,500.
And I didn't mention the price today, right?
But I will mention a prior price.
It's like, that wasn't that long ago.
That was four, what, four years ago.
And if you bought one of that, I mean, if you took, you know, your, your stimmy check
and put it in there, you'd have about what half of the current U.S. retirement savings.
It is wild that one of these units of Bitcoin is currently worth more than the average U.S.
retirement savings, but it's also not surprising, right?
Because we're a nation that's, well, we're not a nation, we're a world that's bad at
saving.
It's not necessarily our fault.
The instruments that we have to save the value of our time and energy are broken, right?
Our money is broken.
And if you have money in a retirement account, oh yeah, I'm getting, you know, 6 to 7% a
year on a good year, I get 8% or 9 even.
Yeah, that's great.
That's barely not even treading water with the compound annual growth rate of money supply.
So if you're getting 6, 7, 8, 9%, you're not getting richer.
The value of your, or the price of your portfolio is going up, but ultimately the value of your
money, the value of your dollars is going down.
Again, the dollar is a terrible measuring stick because it is constantly stretching out and
stretching out and making everything look bigger, right?
That's what happens when you debase the currency constantly and forever with no gold to back
it up.
So thanks a lot, Richard Tricky Dick Nixon, you son of a bitch.
So where do I want to go from here?
That's really the question.
We've covered a decent amount there, right?
And my point in doing this was really just to give a little bit of perspective that beyond
price movements upward, which is like, great, right?
We all love to see that.
As we said, that brings new people into Bitcoin because they have a fear of missing out.
That's awesome.
It's Bitcoin is going up forever, Laura.
It is going to keep going up.
We're going to keep repeating this.
Three, four years, that new supply gets cut in half.
The issuance is having, well, not forever, until 2140.
It's never even going to get all the way to 21 million Bitcoin because if you have something
forever, it's like you're asymptotically approaching.
If you guys remember your geometry stuff, it's never going to get all the way there.
This is an absolutely scarce asset.
Of course, of course, it's going to keep going up in fiat price because I think we all agree
that regardless of in the US who won Trump or Kamala, the money printer is not going
to stop.
We also know that from what Powell said in one of his recent hearings, I think a lot
of people are shocked by this, but if you know anything about the Federal Reserve, you're
not shocked at all because it's not federal and it has no reserves.
The President of the United States cannot fire the Federal Reserve chair.
The Federal Reserve is what they call a public-private institution, which the public part is that
it gets all the benefits of being a public institution while being run by a cartel of
unelected bankers.
The main part of it is private.
All those member banks are private, but they are going to keep printing money forever.
They tried to shock the economy into getting rid of that transitory inflation that was
somehow being stickier than they thought, but of course it was.
They printed trillions and trillions of dollars under both Trump and Biden out of thin air.
They printed trillions under Obama as well.
This is not going to stop.
The interest expense and the national debt is more than our military budget now, which
is insane because we've got a massive military budget.
The interest expense is like $1.2 trillion or $1.3 trillion per year.
That is just going to keep going up and up and up.
The only options that they have are to go to war and reset the system.
That's historically been a pretty good way to do that.
Or you debase the currency.
You're making your debt worth less by making your money worth less by decreasing the purchasing
power of that debt.
I would hope they go the money printer route versus the war route.
Both roads involve money printing.
The war one just also involves a shitload of death and destruction and human suffering.
I think that we would all like to avoid that.
Unfortunately, we see that the Biden administration is escalating things in these last month and
a half or whatever before Trump has sworn in.
They're sending more weapons, more long range missiles now to Ukraine.
Again, it's like the only way to stop the forever wars is to fix the money.
I think that's the reason a lot of us are here because it sounds cheesy, the whole fix
the money, fix the world thing, but it's about fixing the incentives.
Right now, the incentives are not aligned with the individual.
The incentives are aligned with the state.
The incentives are aligned with the corporateocracy and the kleptocracy that is also a gerontocracy
because they are old as fuck that we have running this country and running most of the
world.
The entrenched power structures that Fiat has created since the end of Bretton Woods
2, since Nixon took us fully off the gold standard and temporarily suspended the convertibility
of dollars to gold for foreign nations.
It had already been stopped for individual citizens.
They already put the interests of the states, the United States and foreign states above
the interests of individual United States citizens.
We see this again and again.
And what I'd like to remind people in the context of wars is that wars are never waged
between individuals.
Wars are only waged by governments.
Right?
The people of Ukraine aren't fighting the people of Russia.
It's the governments that are fighting.
And the people are the ones who are sent into battle to die.
And I think that that's tragic.
And it's a sad thing to see because, again, governments typically don't ask the people
what they actually want.
If they did, the governments would be much, much, much smaller than they are now all across
the world.
But they have votes and elections and nothing ever really changes that much.
The only way you actually change things is by changing the incentive structure.
The only way you change the incentive structure is by changing the money.
It's by separating money from state.
And now some of you may say, well, Walker, you said earlier that maybe the Bitcoin strategic
reserve might actually be a good thing for the United States.
Isn't that no longer, is that negating the separation of money in state?
Isn't that just creating the same problem?
And so you had a fair question.
However, what I think is an important context in the separation of money in state discussion
is that we're not talking about separating the state from its ability to use money, to
use whatever money wants.
Everyone doesn't care if you're an individual or a nation state.
The important thing is separating the ability to create money from the state.
You have to separate money creation from state.
And that is what Bitcoin has already done.
We've already had the separation of money in state.
It's called Bitcoin.
And anyone can opt in and start using it at any time.
And no government, no corporation, no individual can print more Bitcoin at will.
You must expend real world time and energy in order to create more Bitcoin.
And you are in a free market, vicious open competition to see who can do that best.
That is how money is supposed to work.
And I don't think we understood that until Bitcoin.
Now we do.
But we already have the separation of money creation from state.
Now the question is, okay, where do we go from here?
And I think another important thing is because we often see, you know, like Bitcoin fixes
this, fix the money, fix the world.
And that's true to an extent.
But I had a conversation with Daniel Prince, Princey.
And if he's got another great podcast, you should check it out.
It's called Once Bitten.
We had a conversation that was about Bitcoin tangentially, but it was really more so about
homeschooling and the separation of education and state and the dark, dark roots of the
public education system, which date back to Prussia, grooming young men, because, you
know, they didn't really care about the ladies at that point, but grooming young men to become
good soldiers and good workers and, you know, good servants of the state and to not question
authority.
And then more recently to Nazi Germany, to Nazi Germany where Adolf Hitler made homeschooling
illegal because they wanted to make sure that they could indoctrinate the youth of the nation.
And that policy in Germany still exists today, which I find rather insane.
The point being that separation of money and state is a start, but we have to look at separating
all of these power structures from the state.
And that's not done from a top-down approach.
That's just not going to happen.
It has to be done from a bottom-up approach.
It has to be done by individuals freely making the choice to opt out of the current system
and start operating in a parallel system.
That's what anybody who homeschools their kids is already doing.
It's like Bitcoin.
They made a choice to separate themselves, for themselves to separate education of their
children from the state.
When you buy Bitcoin, you make a choice to separate your money and the creation of that
money from the state.
All of this comes down to choice, right?
It comes down to individual choice.
And that's where concepts like Bitcoin or similarly, but in a very different sense, homeschooling
are kind of this perfect symbiotic relationship, right?
The more people you have opting out of any of these entrenched power structures and beginning
to build in parallel systems, the stronger those parallel systems become.
And I don't think the government ever truly goes through meaningful change from the inside
out.
I'd love to be wrong.
I'd love for RFK Jr. to get this country back on track in terms of its health, which is,
it is disgusting to me that we are the fattest, sickest country in the world when we spend
the most on healthcare.
And that's because of a disgustingly unholy alliance between healthcare and the insurance
companies and the government, which clearly isn't working out for anyone, right?
We're obese, we're sick, we're full of pills because they don't want to cure anything that
we have.
And it's like, oh no, why don't you just take some ozempic instead of eating right,
you know, putting down the fucking fork every once in a while and maybe going for a long
walk.
Now here's another injection we'll sell you.
It's sad to see.
But I hope, I would love to be wrong and maybe there is meaningful change that can come from
within the state.
I'm just not holding my breath.
And that's why it's up to individuals, individuals like you and me.
And if everybody's on the stream to make changes themselves, to make a choice, to decide that
you are going to do something different, we all made the choice to join Noster as well,
right?
That's a choice.
Nobody forced us to do it.
We freely opted into it.
It's an open protocol.
Anyone can do it.
But they're not going to.
Most people don't get smart by choice.
They get smart by force.
They get smart after they must get smart because they have no other option because they have
a boot on their neck.
And the only way to remove it is to figure out how the fuck they're going to do that
and to figure it out quick.
So everybody that is on Noster right now, everybody that is using Bitcoin right now
as a medium of exchange, as a store of value, as a unit of account, everybody that's homeschooling
their kids right now because they made the choice to opt out.
All of those people are ahead of the game because everyone will eventually be forced.
They will have to get smart by force eventually, not now.
It's just not going to happen.
But sometimes there are forcing functions, right?
Censorship on centralized social media, debasement of the currency when it comes to money and
Bitcoin, insane indoctrination in public schools, lockdowns that make kids wear masks
outside on the playground.
There are these forcing functions that happen that may seem really bad at the time, but
ultimately, they are bad, right?
But ultimately have a positive result and that is getting more people to opt out of
the current entrenched power system and into the parallel system, which is a free opt-in.
Anyone can do it.
You just have to make the choice.
So I've been ranting for a while now.
I guess this is why I don't know if I should do these more or if it's just going to result
in me ranting a lot.
I hope that made some cohesive sense because I think it's important to look at these things.
We're in a really unique time in history.
This is the last financial, the last monetary revolution.
That's what Bitcoin is.
And it's already being adopted.
The separation of money and state, money creation state has already happened because Bitcoin
exists and fiat currencies still exist too.
I think they'll exist for a very long time because governments will continue to use them.
However, I think Bitcoin may provide a little bit of a check and balance on that because
if people always have something that they can freely opt into, that they can use as
an escape hatch, as a life raft, whatever analogy you want to use, that makes governments
that forces them to be more careful.
They can't just debase the currency willy nilly because people now have a way to opt
out.
That's what Satoshi gave us is a free opt out at any time for anyone in the world who
wants to choose.
You have to make the choice, but you have the option to make the choice.
That option didn't exist before.
It wasn't possible.
You were stuck with your constantly debasing fiat currency.
We have a choice now.
Similarly, with social media, before Nostar, we were stuck with social media companies
that could abuse, use and treat us as the product versus the user.
We were stuck with that.
Yeah, you could delete all your social media, but people like social media, right?
Now with Nostar, you have and thank you fiat Jaff and to all the developers who build on
Nostar.
Now with Nostar, you have a way to opt out.
You have a way to opt out of that experience.
You have an escape hatch.
You have a life raft, just like you do with Bitcoin escaping from a constantly debasing
currency.
The ability to have the option to choose is what matters.
It doesn't matter when people make the choice.
If they make the choice to choose earlier, they're going to benefit better from that,
right?
That's logical.
But the point is that they have the choice and I think the best thing, the reason I have
this podcast, the reason I talk about Nostar every chance I get on this podcast in addition
to Bitcoin, the reason I try to use my whatever small platform I have to speak about these
things is because I think that they're important and I want more people to make the choice to
opt in.
But to make the choice, they have to realize the choice exists and a lot of people still
don't.
And so I think that everybody that's out there doing, thank you to the developers who
build the things that allow us to actually make this choice.
But content creators as well, like it's more important now than ever to get this stuff
out there.
We need more Bitcoin podcasts.
We need more Nostar podcasts.
We need to eclipse the financial world podcasts that exist out there that give people shitty
advice about what new stock they should buy or what ETF they should invest in.
The fact that they still exist and there are many of them that still do not talk about
Bitcoin is a testament to how early we are.
So I would say it's important to focus on this community to this vibrant and strange
and decentralized and super quirky community that exists around Bitcoin and Nostar and
to focus on trying to bring more people in.
But ultimately, as I said, people are going to get smart by force, not by choice.
But while they may not join because join Nostar because they love censorship resistant
publishing or adopt Bitcoin because they want the separation of money and state, they may
join Nostar because the user experience is just better.
They may join it because the community around Nostar is just better.
They may join it because the content that's available there is just better.
The things that they can do in this ecosystem are just better.
Similarly, people may adopt Bitcoin and do adopt Bitcoin because number go up and number
keeps going up and number will go up forever.
That's okay.
You can come for the number go up.
You can come for the community on the Nostar side of things.
You can come for the memes.
But stay for the revolution.
A lot of us right now, we came for the revolution.
The killer memes were just a happy byproduct of getting a bunch of psychopaths together
in one decentralized protocol and seeing what happens.
But that's where NGU has its place, right?
To bring that back full circle.
NGU helps FGU, I think ultimately, as long as Bitcoin stays decentralized and secure,
as Jeff Booth would say.
Ultimately, to go back to Bitcoin a little bit, like where we're at in this cycle, I
don't think is very complicated.
This is Bitcoin's game theory playing out exactly as it was always going to.
This is companies trying to buy as much Bitcoin as they can and more companies doing that
all the time.
This is nation states realizing that the first mover is going to have a massive advantage.
But the thing I care about most is individuals realizing again that they have the option
to opt out, to transfer their time and energy and their attention when it comes to Nostar
over to these new parallel systems and thereby make those systems stronger.
And that's what makes me really hopeful because Nostar may be small, the number of Bitcoiners
may be small, but they're both growing every day.
You don't have to be between the tortoise and the hare, I'd rather be the tortoise
that ends up actually winning the race, not the hare that looks great out of the starting
line and then ends up losing.
So take a step back, touch some grass, zoom out, spend time with your family, save in
Bitcoin, post memes on Nostar, zap memes on Nostar, zap this podcast if you find it valuable
or don't, Bitcoin doesn't care, but again, I really appreciate it and live your life.
That's the best thing that we can do, right?
Because ultimately we can't save everyone unless they want to be saved and they will
eventually.
But until then, let's just focus on doing what we can to make these parallel systems
as strong as they can possibly be.
And I think with that, I may wrap up.
You guys have been ignoring the chat a little bit.
And I want to apologize for that.
But I was cooking and I couldn't be stopped.
I see somebody put the price in the chat.
I will not be reading that.
And average Gary, great point on Prussian education, patriotism indoctrination, debt-based forever
wars.
Although I don't think patriotism in and of itself is a bad thing.
It's the indoctrination and I think that's why you probably put the word indoctrination
in there.
It's okay to be proud of your country.
That's a good thing.
I'm very proud to be an American.
I'm proud because I love the American idea.
I hate the US government.
I love Americans and the American idea.
It's like why I always like to clarify that I thank the men and women who have served
this country, who have risked their lives for this country.
I'm very, very grateful to them.
And I mean that sincerely.
Although I'm against war, I am not against the individuals who volunteer to fight it.
Because I have found in my experience talking to many veterans that they do so because they
genuinely believe they're going to help and make a difference and keep their family, their
friends, their nation safe.
And that is admirable.
And many of them that are in Bitcoin right now, which are some of the most based dudes
and women you will ever meet, they realized that the reasons that they joined up were
not aligned with what was actually going on.
And I can't imagine how difficult that would be as well to go through that process of realizing
that you thought you were fighting for one thing, but you're fighting a war of governments
and bankers and military industrial contractors.
So that's a digression, but just want to clarify, I think being a patriot is a good thing if
you're passionate about the ideas that your country is built on and holding those ideas
close to your heart.
And the American idea is a powerful one.
And I will be damned if we let the government fuck that up.
The government doesn't have a monopoly on ideas.
Ideas are bulletproof.
That's why Bitcoin is bulletproof and Nostra is bulletproof.
These are ideas that are out in the wild.
Like the American idea, you can't silence that or put it to Jeannie back in the bottle.
It's out there now.
So that's a reason to be hopeful because ideas cannot be stopped.
And with that, I think I saw somebody say about time to create some content on their
own.
That's awesome.
I appreciate you guys.
Thank you to everyone who has joined in on this live stream.
I got to go do some fiat mining now.
Put the nose back to the old grindstone.
But I appreciate everyone who's tuned in here.
If you enjoyed this stream, if you found this valuable, you can give it a zap.
Again, you don't have to.
Bitcoin doesn't care.
But again, I appreciate it.
Share the stream if you want.
These streams are recorded and available on zap.stream.
So if you don't want to watch any of the episodes on YouTube because you hate YouTube, you can
do it on zap.stream or on highlighter.com slash Walker or search my end pub on flair.pub,
which is honestly a really nice site that apparently not a lot of people are using,
but I would recommend people check out flair.pub.
Thanks to the developers who build these tools and make it possible.
Thanks to Kieran who builds zap.stream because it's awesome.
And I'm liking these impromptu streams.
I'm glad I did this one today.
I hope you guys are glad as well.
And you feel that this was time well spent.
We covered some news.
We covered some context.
We covered some perspective.
We talked about Noster, of course.
We didn't mention the current price of Bitcoin, which is good.
And we will not.
And I appreciate you all being here.
So I'm going to sign off now.
This will be available on the RSS feed and such later after I get back to the old fiat
line.
But thank you guys for joining because, you know, Bitcoin is scarce, but Bitcoin podcasts
are abundant.
So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast.
And until next time, stay free.