This week, we'll discuss the high-signal mind virus spreading around the community, why the Saylor strategy has Jim Cramer salty, the final word on ETF centralization, and if we should stop calling it the Blockchain and start calling it the Timechain.
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWiB
Links:
- Bitcoin Atlantis – A Bitcoin conference in the Atlantic
- Bitcoin Is Time | dergigi.com
- Jack Talk Mallers on X
- Lawrence Lepard
- Bitcoin Flips Silver
- Pierre Rochard on X: "BREAKING: the Biden Administration is cancelling the fake #Bitcoin mining “emergency”
- Michael Saylor: Bitcoin’s ‘Gold Rush’ Has Started: 2024-2034, Why Smart Money is Buying #Bitcoin - YouTube
- Dennis Porter on X: "ARIZONA SENATE PASSES RESOLUTION TO CONSIDER ADDING THE #BTC ETF TO AZ STATE PENSIONS
- Lyn Says the ETFs are like an API for Fiat
- Time Chain calendar . Com
- BTC Minstrel - | What Shall We Do With Michael Saylor
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By the way, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, I wouldn't question that guy. Thank you. He's gotten it right. Yes. I mean, say what you want. MSTR, MicroStrategy stock up, obviously, sharply because it is essentially a proxy for Bitcoin. Hello. And he's, what, selling another $600 million worth of... He's getting converted to buy more. Always good to tell ahead of time that you're buying the biggest order so you get a nice price. Hey, guy's been right. Yep. It's better to be lucky than good, my friend. Music. Hello and welcome into episode two of This Week in Bitcoin. Oh, it's just a baby and I'm so glad you're here. My name is Chris.
Yeah, I'll get into why Jim Cramer is salty there. He's just been a hot mess recently, but we don't have to talk about that right now. I want to start with some seriously high signal I've been picking up from the Bitcoin community just this week. And what blows me away is that it's not a new idea. It's been around, well, forever, since the beginning of Bitcoin. But I guess it's kind of been clarified, and it really seemed to get new life at Bitcoin Atlantis. Now, that's a conference that was on Madeira Island. You might have heard about it because all the Bitcoin influencers were there.
I don't mean to be disrespectful because I'm actually going to play some of their audio. But it was very much, you know, that kind of event. And at a big sports arena, which is interesting, it did look really good. And I was watching it from afar, you know, on the Pleb live stream. And I noticed a theme that came up multiple times on stage from different presenters. And I don't know if there was coordination or not. But they were all chewing on a big idea, a transition in how we think about the Bitcoin blockchain, from a blockchain to a time chain. Now, like I said, not a new idea, but it really got new life at Bitcoin Atlantis.
And I think in part because Gigi wrote this fantastic post a while ago called Bitcoin is Time. And it's a chapter from their upcoming book, 21 Ways. It is really good. It's a barn burner. It is a must-read recommendation, like on the level of the Bitcoin standard, broken money, these types of reads. So I will put a link in the show notes because this chapter has been published for free. And it tries to wrap our heads around the concept that Satoshi had to create the ability for Bitcoin to track its own time in a decentralized, trustable way. It's a big idea, and it's one that Strikes Jack Mollers talked about during one of his presentations.
And this is a big idea that I'd like to share with you because I see a lot of conversations about it right now, and I think everybody should be informed because this may be a very productive line of thinking, but to start, Jack wants you to wrap your head around just one core concept about time. The only thing I need you guys to know about time in this whole presentation is that it has a direction, hence the term arrow of time, right? Time has a direction. There's an arrow of time. All this means is that the past is different than the future. And this seems like an obvious statement to us humans.
You know, we can see this in the physical world. Entropy is all around us. And I think. As our memories fade, we associate that with the past. So we almost have this inherent natural way of intuitively understanding what's come and thinking ahead. But this doesn't exist just organically in the digital world. This intuition doesn't exist. It's actually a fairly large problem to try to solve. The problem is in the digital world, we don't have time. All we have is information. information. The physical world is built of atoms in the universe and physical things.
The digital world is just built of bytes of data. So in the digital world, the number 10, I do know the number before it and I do know the number after it, right? I do know the past and the future. If numbers were time, I wouldn't be able to know the next, the future is 11 and the past is 9, right? Or if I we're watching a movie. I could rewind time to the beginning scene of the movie, or I can fast forward time to the very end and watch how the movie ends, right? So the problem is in the digital world, we don't have this arrow of time. Now, Bitcoin doesn't need to have a perfect, perfect concept of time, I suppose, but it does need to have this trustable arrow, if you will.
So it always knows that things are going in the right direction, and it has to be trustable. And we all all have to trust it if it's going to be sound money. Proof of work is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort of their part. For those of you that don't know what that means, this is my version of it in Jack language. Proof of work is proof that you did a certain amount of work to guess a random number. The person verifying that can make the work as hard as they want, and they can verify it instantly.
Now that's a big idea. It's hard to actually make it proved, but you can verify it very easily. And proof of work also ties Bitcoin to the real world. And it allows Bitcoin to establish an undisputable history of events. The future work is unknown, and the past work is easy to verify. The key to Bitcoin and Satoshi unlocking this whole thing and why we're all here is that he found a trustless piece of info, a trustless piece of data that can be produced by the physical world with atoms and with energy linking this universe to his digital scarce money. In a real way, proof of work is giving Bitcoin its verifiable arrow of time. More Satoshi quotes.
So he writes, in this paper, we propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. So proof of work gives Bitcoin its arrow of time. And each block is essentially etching time with that proof of work. If you actually look at Bitcoin blocks, not to get too technical with you guys, but all they are, are transactions and the proof of work as a timestamp. Bitcoin's just a timestamp server. So Satoshi is etching time with proof of work. The clock is key to the entire functionality, but the difficulty adjustment is one of the core innovations because it's what allows the clock to stay decentralized. decentralized.
So if Bitcoin was the same amount of difficulty, someone could get a lot of energy, plow it into Bitcoin, speed up Bitcoin's clock, and leave us out of consensus. And Satoshi talks about this. To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest of running nodes over time, so nodes here means miners, the proof of work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases. So why are bitcoins blocks 10 minutes? Satoshi Nakamoto created time and then slowed it down.
10 minutes is an arbitrary number, but 10 minutes is long enough to make sure that we're accounting for the speed of light and that Bitcoin isn't moving too fast for all of us to agree on the ordering of transactions. But it's also short enough where it's a decent user experience. People aren't going to get like super pissed off, right? That's how he got to that solution. So I don't know who said this quote. Someone super smart. So shout out to you, whoever did this. but difficulty adjusted proof of work is what makes Bitcoin a decentralized clock.
As computers get faster and the total computing power applied to creating Bitcoins increases, the difficulty increases proportionally to the new production constant. Thus, it is known in advance how many new Bitcoins will be created every year in the future. So once you understand that Satoshi created time, You now understand why Bitcoin, Bitcoins are stuck in time, right? This is how we know when Bitcoins are going to be issued. This is why it's the hardest money ever. Gold is stuck in the ground. Bitcoin is stuck in time. Do you guys understand how mind-boggling that is? I love this idea. And it's true. You could always go find more gold.
We could ramp up production today. Or maybe an asteroid, you know, something like that. Maybe there's gold on the moon. But you know what I'm getting at here. But you can't do that with Bitcoin. The only thing you can do is mine through time. It's humbling. It's such a fascinating concept. I'm really glad Jack focused on it. And others did too. The conference, even their, they called their schedule the time chain. So the schedule for the conference is called the time chain. You know, not a bad event, I have to say, just watching from afar. Bitcoin Atlantis. I would recommend searching around on YouTube and catching some of the talks.
There was one other moment on stage that really struck me. And it was from Lawrence Leppard. It echoed my experience from the battle days of IT. I was around during the transition from DOS to Windows and networking TCP IP from NetBui and mainframes because I got started early in finance. and that experience. Was really defining in how I viewed the IT world. And Larry was around, and he was a mover and shaker back in those days, and he makes an analogy to Microsoft DOS that I had to share with you. You know, in the early 80s, I started my business career. IBM PC was introduced in 1980, and Microsoft came public in 1986, came public at 14 times trailing and growing 40% a year.
And at the time, if you were in the computer business, you were at IBM or Prime or DEC or Wang, and the mini computer was really the thing and a lot of people regarded these PCs as toys. And I think it's an interesting analogy that back at that point in time. Software was regarded as risky because it was ones and zeros and people didn't see that there could be any value in it. They were saying, how can there be value in the software? It's just written, it's code, it has no value. The values in the disk drives, the values at IBM, the values in these hardware computers, people who are making real stuff.
Sounds kind of familiar, right? And I recall, a little further back, wind it back, I'm at business school and I'm with my business school roommate, he's with his roommate from Harvard College, a guy named Steve Ballmer, we're walking along the Charles River, and Ballmer says, we've got this thing called DOS and the entire world is gonna need this thing. The entire world, everybody is gonna have it, it's gonna be a part of everybody's life, this is gonna be a multi-billion dollar corporation. I looked at him, I thought he was nuts. But then it kind of hit me, he wasn't nuts, it was the base layer of the technology that allowed the PC to grow. And 40 years later, it is ubiquitous and Ballmer's obviously a billionaire and Microsoft's a multi-billion dollar company.
I mean, I bought it at the time in in 86 when it came public, sold it three years later to buy a condo. It was a mistake. The split adjusted price is six cents and the stock trades at, you know, $290 today. So it was, you know, 47,000 times your money or 4,700 times your money. The point I'm trying to make is that Bitcoin is the same thing and people don't understand it. that they don't understand that it is the base layer of money and it is gonna absorb the entire monetary system given a long enough timeframe, at least in my opinion. Music.
I won't really talk about price much on this show unless something notable really happens. And as you likely already know, we hit an all time new high this week. Big day for Bitcoin, with the cryptocurrency hitting a new record high. Now, as of noon Eastern, Bitcoin is technically in the red over the past 24 hours, but that's after the cryptocurrency touched $69,210, a new all time high. Bitcoin's previous record of $68,982 was reached back on November 10th, 2021. The cryptocurrency notched that new record around 10 a.m. It then dropped about 5% and trended lower into the afternoon.
Yeah, yeah. Welcome to Bitcoin. You know, some OGs took their profits. I mean, I'm not a big seller of Bitcoin, but good on them. Some of them have been around since like 2010 or something. something. Also, I thought maybe even more notable, silver took 15, or I should say Bitcoin took 15 years to get where silver took 9,000 years. Bitcoin flipped silver this week, and it's now the ninth most valuable asset on the planet, and it's coming for Alphabet, Google's holding company. It's in sort of the Magnificent Seven, I guess, firing distance, you know, like it's a starship approaching from afar, and it's getting within range.
Of course, that could always change, But it's remarkable to flip silver hit an all-time new high before the happening. I think that's very note notable Bitcoin is just a baby silver has been around and trusted for like I said 9,000 years. I, To see Bitcoin flip that is incredible. It does mean that the hype is getting a little ridiculous. If you're on Bitcoin social, I'm going to help you. I'm going to give you a brain rinse because you've probably seen people screaming about the OTC desk, the over-the-counter desk, where the mucky mucks buy their Bitcoin off the exchanges is running out of coins.
They're running out of coins. And a Glassnode chart has been going around all the various socials that shows, oh, look at this. They're at their lowest level since Q4 of 2018. There's about to be an explosion or there's about to be like no coins available is actually the narrative going around. And Steve Lubica from Swan Bitcoin, I thought, had a good debunking of this narrative. Everybody just needs to calm down. So this OTC story that the OTC desks are running out of coins, this isn't true. OK, they're not running out of coins. They can always get more coins. But here's what is true. And it's more interesting.
So the way to think of this is that these are made up numbers. But let's assume for every $1 that is purchased, we get $3 of market cap growth. And it is true that only a small percentage of the total Bitcoin supplied actually trades. So if this pace of buying continues, let's say the ETFs on average continue to buy $500 million a day, what you will see is growth in that impact. So instead of $1 of purchasing going up $3 in market cap, you're going to see $1 in purchasing go up $10 in market cap. So as the circulating supply becomes scarcer, it's not that they run out of coins to sell. It's that they get sold at increasingly higher prices with greater price impact.
So that's the way to think of this. Number go up. Everybody has their price. That price just goes up. Now we have some really good news. The Texas Blockchain Council had a lawsuit against the Biden administration that has been successful and will stop the collection of Bitcoin miner data. And the government has agreed to destroy the data that has been collected. So it's a very large victory. It's not over yet, but now the administration will be forced to go through the appropriate legal process with public notice and time for comment. Congratulations to them. I know the fight is not over yet, but now it has to go through the correct process at least, and they'll have to justify what their emergency is.
For those of you who are out of the loop, miners have been receiving letters from the administration, an agency under the administration, urging them, compelling them, forcing them to dox their business, their deals with the power companies, how much hardware they have, and the types of different hardware it is. And some of that information, like their individual payment structures, is very competitive data. data. And it also included their GPS locations and no provisions in the documentation for any demand response program participation or participation renewables. They just wanted the bad stuff. They wanted to create a registry of the bad stuff. Now, I'm sure that would have gone fine.
Would have been just fine, right? That's my sarcastic tone. So I'm really, really pleased to see this and the fact that it has to go through the appropriate means. And congratulations Congratulations again to the Texas Blockchain Council. I think we owe you guys a beer. Let's transition now to Salty Jim Kramer, who was reacting to the MicroStrategy podcast. Stock, which is on a absolute tear right now. To put it in perspective, MicroStrategy's stock is almost back to its late 90s dot-com bubble all highs, which was absolutely bonkers back in the day. I want to play that CNBC clip again, and then we'll react on the other side.
By the way, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, I wouldn't question that guy. He's gotten it right. Right. Yes. I mean, say what you want. MSTR, MicroStrategy stock up, obviously sharply because it is essentially a proxy for Bitcoin. Hello. And he's what, selling another 600 million worth of... He's getting converted to buy more. Always good to tell ahead of time that you're buying the biggest order so you get a nice price. Hey, guy's been right. Yep. It's better to be lucky than good, my friend. Now, that criticism that you... I actually think maybe at first you might think it's reasonable, where Kramer says, why would you tell the market?
He says, he's essentially saying this. Why would you tell the market you're about to buy something that is scarce and limited? That just tells them that a big buyer's coming in, so it's going to keep prices up. Why would you do such a thing? MicroStrategy stock up, obviously, sharply because it is essentially a proxy for Bitcoin. Hello. That's why right there. You see, because MicroStrategy does well when Bitcoin goes up. And then they earn more money and they can create more stock. It's not luck. It's not luck. It's not luck. MicroStrategy made $700 million last week. That's not luck.
On Monday morning of this week, they packed on like $500 million in the first half of the day on Monday of this week. So my question to you out there is how long until other billionaires are going to copy this strategy? Boost it and tell me how long until you think we're going to see another billionaire take this playbook. MicroStrategy is now ranked the 350 largest company on the S&P 500. If you look at their price, go look at MSTR price on a chart, it was flatlined since the dot-com bubble. It's the craziest thing. It looks like nothing happened. Then in 2021, Saylor started buying Bitcoin.
That's when the stock comes alive again. It goes from flatlined to activity again. And if you follow the rumors on Twitter, the staff at MicroStrategy are thrilled that the stock is on fire right now. They seem super motivated and more committed. And in August of 2020, MicroStrategy had $1.5 billion market cap and a share price of $123. So this is pre-Bitcoin strategy. In 2020 of August, 1.5 billion market cap, share price of $123. Today, it's somewhere around almost $22 billion market cap. So it's gone up $21 billion. And the stock is up 10x. How can CEOs ignore this? It just seems like an obvious strategy.
Now, maybe it's the downside. Because when Bitcoin tanks, MicroStrategy tanks. tanks. But when Bitcoin goes, well, MicroStrategy does even better. MicroStrategy outperforms Bitcoin. And what ends up happening is people are buying the MicroStrategy stock as if it was an ETF with no management fees. I'm not saying you should be doing that. I'm saying that's what they're doing. As the stock goes up, MicroStrategy then issues more shares, i.e. They print their own own money, and then they go buy Bitcoin, which causes the stock to go up, which then they use to print money and buy more Bitcoin. They've essentially created a fiat money flywheel, and now MicroStrategy holds about 193,000 Bitcoin acquired for an average price of $31,544. dollars.
And so if they bought at 31,000, Bitcoin's essentially doubled since then. So they're looking pretty good right now. This is a pretty solid strategy. And I don't think he got lucky. I think Mikey likey the Bitcoin and he figured it out. And I just have to imagine other CEOs are going to see this soon, but I don't know. Is it too risky? Why aren't we seeing this? I'd love to know your thoughts on that. And speaking of Saylor, he was interviewed while While he was at that conference. Music. Yeah, I guess a lot coming out of Bitcoin Atlantis this week. That's how you know it was a decent event. And this chat, he sat down with Natalie Bertel.
And she asked for his thoughts on the three most important things that are a result of the Bitcoin ETF. And I think this is probably worth playing because this has been Sailor's week, Everybody's kind of seen his strategy play out and of course Wall Street is his domain and his thoughts on the ETF I thought were worth visiting this just came out a couple of days ago the most important thing, Or the most important result of this is the ETFs themselves represent a, um regulatory clarity for bitcoin as the institutional grade crypto asset i think that's a very important thing uh i think secondarily the etfs represent an on-ramp, for institutional money and they open up a gateway between a hundred trillion dollars or more of of institutional money and Bitcoin.
I think the third thing is they have sparked this price action and as Bitcoin moves back toward its all-time high they have generated an extraordinary amount of media coverage and Wall Street awareness and Bitcoin benefits from the awareness awareness of the asset class. Because as of now, 99% of the mainstream investors really have an incomplete understanding of Bitcoin. And the best thing that we could do is just build awareness that it is an asset class. And then people will start to do the work to understand what it is. And so all three of those things have been catalyzed over the past month by these ETF launches. That last bit there, it felt particularly insightful to me.
He says, you know, if we can help people understand that it is an asset class, they'll do the homework. Now, clearly not everybody, but he's talking about investors who recognize these opportunities and do the work because they see the profit opportunity. Opportunity, they see the potential in the currency, or they see the need for something to divorce from the state. And I think that's actually pretty intuitive, that we really don't have to explain them fully what Bitcoin is. We need just a shift in their perception of it. And you got to give it to these ETFs. They definitely seem to be doing that.
But the number one concern that I've heard from the audience and the community around JB, Jupiter Broadcasting, is that these ETFs are going to centralize control of Bitcoin and maybe one day lead to issues. Saylor sees it exactly the opposite. Yeah, I think that ETFs are just another application of Bitcoin. And there are thousands and thousands of applications coming. So in this particular case, 1% of Bitcoin, 1% more assets kind of flowed into the ETFs. It boosted the price of Bitcoin coin in the last two months by $20,000 a coin. And that means that 99% of the $200 billion of market cap got created.
And something like 99.7% of the benefit was for the people that didn't own the ETF. If you think about it. And once you do the math, the ETF people bought in at $40,000 and drove the price to $60,000 and have 1%. And everybody else had the other 99% and their Bitcoin is worth $60,000. So in this particular case, if that's taking over Bitcoin by basically making all the people that that don't use ETFs, $200 billion richer, right? Then you probably want that to happen 100 more times. And it goes on to make the point that if the rest of the network is being strengthened, then it's even harder to take over from a centralized point.
Because if everybody is doing well, then you have the mining industry that's growing. They're putting in more hash rate. It becomes even more difficult to centralize as everyone does really well. Then Lynn Alden was recently interviewed as well. Well, she was also at the event, and she describes the Bitcoin ETFs as like an API. Some of the some of the some of the no coin or trad fi arguments are Bitcoin is no longer like cypherpunk money because there's ETFs on it. Right. But that's that's a silly argument because Bitcoin didn't decide to have ETFs on it. It's not like the Bitcoin Committee Council got together and decided we're going to have ETFs now.
There's no such thing as a Bitcoin Committee or Bitcoin Council. So Bitcoin is just an open source protocol. And now TradFi has decided to... Structures on top of part of it to bring some of it into its own system. All the ETF is, in developer terms, is basically the API for the fiat system. It just allows the fiat system to plug into Bitcoin a little bit better than it used to. That's all that these do. It's an upgrade to the TradFi system, not an upgrade to Bitcoin, even though it moves Bitcoin price more than it moves TradFi price this cycle. And so that doesn't change the fact that there's other uses of Bitcoin that are more cypherpunk, right? Right.
If our parents have Bitcoin in a DCF, right, that's not particularly cypherpunk, but they don't they don't really have a cypherpunk need right now. So they're like fine with that. Whereas I think that, you know, kind of the ongoing battleground will probably be around privacy. So Bitcoin has kind of won the war for like existence. And I actually think it's now it's starting to turn the tide about the whole energy debate. bait. There's a lot of really good pushback on the whole Bitcoin's going to consume all the world energy and blow our oceans narrative.
And there's been a lot of pushback on that, both in terms of narrative and in terms of grid balancing or the understanding that it mostly uses stranded energy and it's incentivized to use the cheapest energy in the world, which is mostly energy not being used. That is slowly getting into the media, into academia. But I think the battle that's that's still far from being one, is privacy. Basically, that there's going to be lawmakers cracking down on private use while the ETFs exist. And that's the cypherpunk frontier. That's the part that is still. Developers are still working on, that users are still exploring, that people are pushing back our walls for.
And I think that's the area where there's going to be some battles. She nails it. She absolutely nails it. What we need to keep our eye on is what happens with what they call self-hosted wallets, the ability for us to custody our own Bitcoin, which is one of the key innovations that makes it better than gold or other hard assets. We need to make sure that that protection remains. It's built in and it shouldn't be changed by some regulators in DC. So that's something I'm going to be watching. She didn't mention it, too. But I also think a bunch of crappy L2 scams coming during the next bull cycle that damage the name of Bitcoin could be an issue with adoption, too. But I'll be watching for that.
I am excited to report that the ETFs seem to be getting interest from places I didn't expect so soon. Last week, we talked about how the wire houses are setting up to bring in ongoing purchasing to the ETFs. This week, BlackRock announced one of their funds would be doing ongoing purchases. And just a couple of days ago, the Arizona Senate passed a resolution to consider adding Bitcoin ETFs to the Arizona state pensions. Once passed, the resolution will ask the Senate pension fund managers and state treasurers to study the Bitcoin ETF and look in to see if it's viable. This may or may not happen. But even if this happened in four or five states, that would be incredible new buying pressure. And with such a scarce asset, it just really doesn't take very much.
They see it as a move to diversify from risk, which I think is a really, really positive sentiment. The fact that they're looking at it as risk diversification and spreading out risk and not just like a sole risk asset. It's something to reduce overall investment risk. Now, that state has over 5.5 trillion assets. I'm sorry, all these states have over 5.5 trillion assets under management across state pension funds. So you look at just a couple of those coming online, that 5.5 trillion sitting there, even just a couple of them coming online, putting a small percentage into the ETF would be a big deal.
Now, coming up next, we have your boost we're going to get to. We have some project updates that I'd like you to know about. I've got a clip from Tom Lee on why Bitcoin is so polarizing. And then one of my absolute favorite time chain resources and a pretty important note about next week's episode. So I want to thank Podhome.fm, my podcasting 2.0 platform of choice with unlimited shows and episodes powered by unlimited Podhome AI. Yeah, Podhome's AI tools are really neat. It'll balance your audio. It'll transcribe your podcast, automatically create chapters, clips, and it'll even suggest episode titles and descriptions.
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NoSecondBest came in with 217,000 sats and says, This was a pure Signal News podcast for Bitcoin, and that Fox clip you played was brutal. Yes, thank you, NoSecondBest. It was brutal. Thank you for the 217,000 sats. You are our baller this week. week. UConn Ilias comes in with 5,000 sats and says, thanks for the great listen. I hope you continue to make the show. Purple Elephant sent 10,000 sats saying, hey, Chris, Satsquash here, and I've been listening on Breeze because that's where I found you. I miss the Bitcoin dad pod, but I'm glad you're carrying on. See you at scale. I hope to see you at scale as well. Mr. Adam Curry, the podfather, comes in with 10,000 sats.
This is my new weekly go-to podcast, Great inaugural episode. Inaugural. Thank you. Oh, Oppie1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Says he enjoyed the show. Nice breakdowns. Nice to have a Bitcoin news podcast now that the dad is on hiatus. Thank you, sir. Faraday Fedora came in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. Says, yes, I was worried I was going to have to start listening to some half-baked Bitcoin podcast after the Bitcoin dad hiatus. Yes, I know. I continue on our torch. Thank you for the support. Todd came in with 11,101 sats. Says he's excited for the new show and congrats. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for checking out episode one.
Lazy Locks also sends sentiments with 5,000 sats for the new episode, as JC Denton did as well. And Southern Fried Sassafras came in with 2,000 sats to say, I've heard the term before, but I'm not clear on the implications of it. Can you explain the happening? Every four years, the Bitcoin issuance gets cut in half. And we are only about, as I record, probably 44-ish days away. So the Bitcoin miners will get half the amount of Bitcoin that they got prior. This happens every four years, and it makes the asset more scarce. So you can imagine that the price of Bitcoin, once the market has absorbed these changes, will generally go up.
Thank you, everybody who boosted above 2,000 sats. I really, really appreciate the support for the new show. It makes me want to keep on going. I got some great suggestions from Mere Mortals Podcast and Chad and Gene Bean came in with a big thank you too. So thank you everybody who boosted into the show. We had 17 boosters, which is absolutely incredible for episode one. And we stacked 247,813 sats. My commitment to you is to be as radically transparent as possible with this so you know where the show stands. And so if things decline and the show starts to fade, you know what's going on.
And if things boom and the show is doing really great, you can see that. And we can reward the show with the value that you see it deserves. Just need a new podcast app. You do that over at podcastapps.com. Then you can top off something like Fountain FM and you can boost right in. Music. Sparrow 1.8.3 is out, and it's been my favorite Bitcoin wallet for years. If you want a great desktop wallet that doesn't let you hurt yourself and gives you full control, check out Sparrow 1.8.3 now with cold card Q1 and Trezor Safe 3 support. I love the cold card. I do have a Trezor, but I cannot necessarily recommend it.
But I did want to mention Mutiny Wallet 0.5.10 is out. Now, Mutiny Wallet's interesting. It's a progressive web app wallet. I've been testing this for about six months. It's open source. It's self-custodial, if you'd like. Or you can use their hosted version. And it's a Lightning wallet that is working to integrate Fedament support. And they've fixed some significant bugs in Fedament implementation that had actually prevented it from joining some federations. And I'm just really happy to see this. It's kind of an alternative to something like Liquid, you could say.
And they've been pushing it forward. So Sparrow is a classic desktop software. And Mutiny is a brand new Fluton progressive web app. Two different problems they're solving. Mutiny is great too for spinning up a wallet for a short period of time. I'll put links to that. And then I have a resource of the week I want to play for you or I want to tell you about and then I have a clip I want to play for you. So let's start with the resource of the week. You're going to have to go to the show notes for this one and it's so worth it. Here's how nerdy I am is I have have tablets around my house that are on the wall that control my home assistant. So my home assistant dashboard is up there.
And when you don't use the tablet for a little while, it brings up a screensaver. And the screensaver that it shows, which fits perfectly on there, is timechaincalendar.com. I want you to go check out timechaincalendar.com. It's going to help you visualize the concept that Bitcoin is indeed time. And you can sweep through there. You can watch new blocks as they land, the price, all of it. It's perfect, too, because it's got a halving countdown. So go check out timechaincounter.com, and I will have a link in the show notes. Now, before I leave you, I've got a value for value song, and I've got this clip from Tom Lee, who's been a Bitcoin bull and investor who's got it on Wall Street way before everybody else, on why Bitcoin is so polarizing.
So let's play that, and then I have two last things for you. I've never met an investment investment instrument that is so polarizing. I got people on Twitter or X that are like, it's the future of finance. It's the future of money. It's going to whatever. And then there's people that call it, it's fake. It's fraud. It's a joke. It's worthless. Why do you think Bitcoin is so polarizing? Brian, I think there's many reasons, but the three that come to mind is, number one, it's a generational issue. I think in crypto, they refer to sort of the legacy financial folks as boomers, because Bitcoin is really being adopted and used by both younger folks, millennials and Gen Z, as well as people outside the U.S.
Bitcoin's really useful to the unbanked outside the U.S. I think the second is that because Bitcoin was sort of – is bootstrapped and has a genesis block, it didn't grow inside the traditional financial system. So I think those who are used to the venture capital world or institutional access to products first before individuals find it, this is an anathema. It came out through the opposite way. That is so insightful. First of all, could the CNBC host not type while his guest is speaking? But what Lee said there, I had not fully appreciated. Not being a Wall Street native critter myself, I hadn't considered how this would normally work.
Something that is a serious commodity or a stock even, Wall Street gets first crack at it. And they hear about it from their Wall Street buddies. And the contillion effect is so strong there that if something doesn't start there and they don't get a crack at it, essentially a pre-mine before the public, they don't trust it. They don't trust it because they didn't manipulate it from the start. What Lee touches on here in such a brief moment, moment, I think is so insightful as to why at the institutional level, Bitcoin has been so polarizing. Used to the venture capital world or institutional access to products first before individuals find it.
This is an anathema. You know, it came out through the opposite way. And the third, of course, is that, you know, Bitcoin represents trust in a trustless world. And, you know, it's tough for people who are used to dealing with private banks. Yeah. Yeah. Like Like nobody – what? Something financial that I can trust that isn't a scam? What, what? And of course, dog coins don't necessarily help with that perception. Shout out to Tom Lee. That was just – nailed it. He nailed a complex question with three concise answers. I like that quite a bit. All right. Now, I have to warn you about next week. I will be on the road.
I'm going to NixCon and the Southern California Linux Expo, and I'm taking a road trip with my buddy Wes and Brent, and we're going to go down there and have an Airbnb and cover the events that are back-to-back. I tell you this because I don't know what that means for my This Week in Bitcoin recording schedule. My intention is unless heaven and earth prevents me, I'll have an episode for you. It just may not be as comprehensive. It might just be a quickie to keep you up to date on the most important things and then back to a full episode production for episode four.
Although, you know, maybe not. We'll see. Maybe the events won't be that interesting and I'll just spend all my time thinking about Bitcoin. Or maybe I'll just spend all my time thinking about Bitcoin regardless. Regardless, links www.thisweekinbitcoin.show. Boost in with what you'd like to see and hear from the show. It is brand new and we're still molding it. And I'd love for this to become the number one news podcast for Bitcoin in the podcasting 2-to-do community. Now, I'm going to leave you this week with a song that felt quite fitting for some of our topics. It is a value-for-value track. That means when you boost during the music, your sats will go to support the track. and we're going to play What Shall We Do With A Michael Saylor by BTC Minstrel.
Thank you so much for joining me on episode two. I'll see you next week and this week in Bitcoin. What shall we do with Michael Saylor? What shall we do with Michael Saylor? What shall we do with Michael Saylor? Erlie and the Bull Runs. See his money is a melting ice cube. See his money is a melting ice cube. See his money is a melting ice cube. Take all his treasury and buy some Bitcoin. Take all his treasury and buy some Bitcoin. Take all his treasury and buy some Bitcoin or lie in the bull. Music. Have a conversation with Robert Breedlove. Have a conversation with Robert Breedlove. Have a conversation with Robert Breedlove. Her lie in the bull run.
Drop his knowledge on all the podcasts. Drop his knowledge on all the podcasts. Drop his knowledge on all the podcasts. Her lie in the bull run. See the power of cyber hornets. See the power of cyber hornets. See the power of cyber hornets. Her lie in the bull run. And he buys the corn put him on the tally and watch him pump it put him on the tally and watch him pump it put him on the tally and watch him pump it early in the bull run get him on twitter to orange pill elon get him on twitter to orange pill elon get him on twitter to orange bill elon Thank you for.
Music. Watching. Music.
By the way, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, I wouldn't question that guy. Thank you. He's gotten it right. Yes. I mean, say what you want. MSTR, MicroStrategy stock up, obviously, sharply because it is essentially a proxy for Bitcoin. Hello. And he's, what, selling another $600 million worth of... He's getting converted to buy more. Always good to tell ahead of time that you're buying the biggest order so you get a nice price. Hey, guy's been right. Yep. It's better to be lucky than good, my friend. Music. Hello and welcome into episode two of This Week in Bitcoin. Oh, it's just a baby and I'm so glad you're here. My name is Chris.
Yeah, I'll get into why Jim Cramer is salty there. He's just been a hot mess recently, but we don't have to talk about that right now. I want to start with some seriously high signal I've been picking up from the Bitcoin community just this week. And what blows me away is that it's not a new idea. It's been around, well, forever, since the beginning of Bitcoin. But I guess it's kind of been clarified, and it really seemed to get new life at Bitcoin Atlantis. Now, that's a conference that was on Madeira Island. You might have heard about it because all the Bitcoin influencers were there.
I don't mean to be disrespectful because I'm actually going to play some of their audio. But it was very much, you know, that kind of event. And at a big sports arena, which is interesting, it did look really good. And I was watching it from afar, you know, on the Pleb live stream. And I noticed a theme that came up multiple times on stage from different presenters. And I don't know if there was coordination or not. But they were all chewing on a big idea, a transition in how we think about the Bitcoin blockchain, from a blockchain to a time chain. Now, like I said, not a new idea, but it really got new life at Bitcoin Atlantis.
And I think in part because Gigi wrote this fantastic post a while ago called Bitcoin is Time. And it's a chapter from their upcoming book, 21 Ways. It is really good. It's a barn burner. It is a must-read recommendation, like on the level of the Bitcoin standard, broken money, these types of reads. So I will put a link in the show notes because this chapter has been published for free. And it tries to wrap our heads around the concept that Satoshi had to create the ability for Bitcoin to track its own time in a decentralized, trustable way. It's a big idea, and it's one that Strikes Jack Mollers talked about during one of his presentations.
And this is a big idea that I'd like to share with you because I see a lot of conversations about it right now, and I think everybody should be informed because this may be a very productive line of thinking, but to start, Jack wants you to wrap your head around just one core concept about time. The only thing I need you guys to know about time in this whole presentation is that it has a direction, hence the term arrow of time, right? Time has a direction. There's an arrow of time. All this means is that the past is different than the future. And this seems like an obvious statement to us humans.
You know, we can see this in the physical world. Entropy is all around us. And I think. As our memories fade, we associate that with the past. So we almost have this inherent natural way of intuitively understanding what's come and thinking ahead. But this doesn't exist just organically in the digital world. This intuition doesn't exist. It's actually a fairly large problem to try to solve. The problem is in the digital world, we don't have time. All we have is information. information. The physical world is built of atoms in the universe and physical things.
The digital world is just built of bytes of data. So in the digital world, the number 10, I do know the number before it and I do know the number after it, right? I do know the past and the future. If numbers were time, I wouldn't be able to know the next, the future is 11 and the past is 9, right? Or if I we're watching a movie. I could rewind time to the beginning scene of the movie, or I can fast forward time to the very end and watch how the movie ends, right? So the problem is in the digital world, we don't have this arrow of time. Now, Bitcoin doesn't need to have a perfect, perfect concept of time, I suppose, but it does need to have this trustable arrow, if you will.
So it always knows that things are going in the right direction, and it has to be trustable. And we all all have to trust it if it's going to be sound money. Proof of work is a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a certain amount of a specific computational effort has been expended. Verifiers can subsequently confirm this expenditure with minimal effort of their part. For those of you that don't know what that means, this is my version of it in Jack language. Proof of work is proof that you did a certain amount of work to guess a random number. The person verifying that can make the work as hard as they want, and they can verify it instantly.
Now that's a big idea. It's hard to actually make it proved, but you can verify it very easily. And proof of work also ties Bitcoin to the real world. And it allows Bitcoin to establish an undisputable history of events. The future work is unknown, and the past work is easy to verify. The key to Bitcoin and Satoshi unlocking this whole thing and why we're all here is that he found a trustless piece of info, a trustless piece of data that can be produced by the physical world with atoms and with energy linking this universe to his digital scarce money. In a real way, proof of work is giving Bitcoin its verifiable arrow of time. More Satoshi quotes.
So he writes, in this paper, we propose a solution to the double spending problem using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate computational proof of the chronological order of transactions. So proof of work gives Bitcoin its arrow of time. And each block is essentially etching time with that proof of work. If you actually look at Bitcoin blocks, not to get too technical with you guys, but all they are, are transactions and the proof of work as a timestamp. Bitcoin's just a timestamp server. So Satoshi is etching time with proof of work. The clock is key to the entire functionality, but the difficulty adjustment is one of the core innovations because it's what allows the clock to stay decentralized. decentralized.
So if Bitcoin was the same amount of difficulty, someone could get a lot of energy, plow it into Bitcoin, speed up Bitcoin's clock, and leave us out of consensus. And Satoshi talks about this. To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest of running nodes over time, so nodes here means miners, the proof of work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases. So why are bitcoins blocks 10 minutes? Satoshi Nakamoto created time and then slowed it down.
10 minutes is an arbitrary number, but 10 minutes is long enough to make sure that we're accounting for the speed of light and that Bitcoin isn't moving too fast for all of us to agree on the ordering of transactions. But it's also short enough where it's a decent user experience. People aren't going to get like super pissed off, right? That's how he got to that solution. So I don't know who said this quote. Someone super smart. So shout out to you, whoever did this. but difficulty adjusted proof of work is what makes Bitcoin a decentralized clock.
As computers get faster and the total computing power applied to creating Bitcoins increases, the difficulty increases proportionally to the new production constant. Thus, it is known in advance how many new Bitcoins will be created every year in the future. So once you understand that Satoshi created time, You now understand why Bitcoin, Bitcoins are stuck in time, right? This is how we know when Bitcoins are going to be issued. This is why it's the hardest money ever. Gold is stuck in the ground. Bitcoin is stuck in time. Do you guys understand how mind-boggling that is? I love this idea. And it's true. You could always go find more gold.
We could ramp up production today. Or maybe an asteroid, you know, something like that. Maybe there's gold on the moon. But you know what I'm getting at here. But you can't do that with Bitcoin. The only thing you can do is mine through time. It's humbling. It's such a fascinating concept. I'm really glad Jack focused on it. And others did too. The conference, even their, they called their schedule the time chain. So the schedule for the conference is called the time chain. You know, not a bad event, I have to say, just watching from afar. Bitcoin Atlantis. I would recommend searching around on YouTube and catching some of the talks.
There was one other moment on stage that really struck me. And it was from Lawrence Leppard. It echoed my experience from the battle days of IT. I was around during the transition from DOS to Windows and networking TCP IP from NetBui and mainframes because I got started early in finance. and that experience. Was really defining in how I viewed the IT world. And Larry was around, and he was a mover and shaker back in those days, and he makes an analogy to Microsoft DOS that I had to share with you. You know, in the early 80s, I started my business career. IBM PC was introduced in 1980, and Microsoft came public in 1986, came public at 14 times trailing and growing 40% a year.
And at the time, if you were in the computer business, you were at IBM or Prime or DEC or Wang, and the mini computer was really the thing and a lot of people regarded these PCs as toys. And I think it's an interesting analogy that back at that point in time. Software was regarded as risky because it was ones and zeros and people didn't see that there could be any value in it. They were saying, how can there be value in the software? It's just written, it's code, it has no value. The values in the disk drives, the values at IBM, the values in these hardware computers, people who are making real stuff.
Sounds kind of familiar, right? And I recall, a little further back, wind it back, I'm at business school and I'm with my business school roommate, he's with his roommate from Harvard College, a guy named Steve Ballmer, we're walking along the Charles River, and Ballmer says, we've got this thing called DOS and the entire world is gonna need this thing. The entire world, everybody is gonna have it, it's gonna be a part of everybody's life, this is gonna be a multi-billion dollar corporation. I looked at him, I thought he was nuts. But then it kind of hit me, he wasn't nuts, it was the base layer of the technology that allowed the PC to grow. And 40 years later, it is ubiquitous and Ballmer's obviously a billionaire and Microsoft's a multi-billion dollar company.
I mean, I bought it at the time in in 86 when it came public, sold it three years later to buy a condo. It was a mistake. The split adjusted price is six cents and the stock trades at, you know, $290 today. So it was, you know, 47,000 times your money or 4,700 times your money. The point I'm trying to make is that Bitcoin is the same thing and people don't understand it. that they don't understand that it is the base layer of money and it is gonna absorb the entire monetary system given a long enough timeframe, at least in my opinion. Music.
I won't really talk about price much on this show unless something notable really happens. And as you likely already know, we hit an all time new high this week. Big day for Bitcoin, with the cryptocurrency hitting a new record high. Now, as of noon Eastern, Bitcoin is technically in the red over the past 24 hours, but that's after the cryptocurrency touched $69,210, a new all time high. Bitcoin's previous record of $68,982 was reached back on November 10th, 2021. The cryptocurrency notched that new record around 10 a.m. It then dropped about 5% and trended lower into the afternoon.
Yeah, yeah. Welcome to Bitcoin. You know, some OGs took their profits. I mean, I'm not a big seller of Bitcoin, but good on them. Some of them have been around since like 2010 or something. something. Also, I thought maybe even more notable, silver took 15, or I should say Bitcoin took 15 years to get where silver took 9,000 years. Bitcoin flipped silver this week, and it's now the ninth most valuable asset on the planet, and it's coming for Alphabet, Google's holding company. It's in sort of the Magnificent Seven, I guess, firing distance, you know, like it's a starship approaching from afar, and it's getting within range.
Of course, that could always change, But it's remarkable to flip silver hit an all-time new high before the happening. I think that's very note notable Bitcoin is just a baby silver has been around and trusted for like I said 9,000 years. I, To see Bitcoin flip that is incredible. It does mean that the hype is getting a little ridiculous. If you're on Bitcoin social, I'm going to help you. I'm going to give you a brain rinse because you've probably seen people screaming about the OTC desk, the over-the-counter desk, where the mucky mucks buy their Bitcoin off the exchanges is running out of coins.
They're running out of coins. And a Glassnode chart has been going around all the various socials that shows, oh, look at this. They're at their lowest level since Q4 of 2018. There's about to be an explosion or there's about to be like no coins available is actually the narrative going around. And Steve Lubica from Swan Bitcoin, I thought, had a good debunking of this narrative. Everybody just needs to calm down. So this OTC story that the OTC desks are running out of coins, this isn't true. OK, they're not running out of coins. They can always get more coins. But here's what is true. And it's more interesting.
So the way to think of this is that these are made up numbers. But let's assume for every $1 that is purchased, we get $3 of market cap growth. And it is true that only a small percentage of the total Bitcoin supplied actually trades. So if this pace of buying continues, let's say the ETFs on average continue to buy $500 million a day, what you will see is growth in that impact. So instead of $1 of purchasing going up $3 in market cap, you're going to see $1 in purchasing go up $10 in market cap. So as the circulating supply becomes scarcer, it's not that they run out of coins to sell. It's that they get sold at increasingly higher prices with greater price impact.
So that's the way to think of this. Number go up. Everybody has their price. That price just goes up. Now we have some really good news. The Texas Blockchain Council had a lawsuit against the Biden administration that has been successful and will stop the collection of Bitcoin miner data. And the government has agreed to destroy the data that has been collected. So it's a very large victory. It's not over yet, but now the administration will be forced to go through the appropriate legal process with public notice and time for comment. Congratulations to them. I know the fight is not over yet, but now it has to go through the correct process at least, and they'll have to justify what their emergency is.
For those of you who are out of the loop, miners have been receiving letters from the administration, an agency under the administration, urging them, compelling them, forcing them to dox their business, their deals with the power companies, how much hardware they have, and the types of different hardware it is. And some of that information, like their individual payment structures, is very competitive data. data. And it also included their GPS locations and no provisions in the documentation for any demand response program participation or participation renewables. They just wanted the bad stuff. They wanted to create a registry of the bad stuff. Now, I'm sure that would have gone fine.
Would have been just fine, right? That's my sarcastic tone. So I'm really, really pleased to see this and the fact that it has to go through the appropriate means. And congratulations Congratulations again to the Texas Blockchain Council. I think we owe you guys a beer. Let's transition now to Salty Jim Kramer, who was reacting to the MicroStrategy podcast. Stock, which is on a absolute tear right now. To put it in perspective, MicroStrategy's stock is almost back to its late 90s dot-com bubble all highs, which was absolutely bonkers back in the day. I want to play that CNBC clip again, and then we'll react on the other side.
By the way, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy, I wouldn't question that guy. He's gotten it right. Right. Yes. I mean, say what you want. MSTR, MicroStrategy stock up, obviously sharply because it is essentially a proxy for Bitcoin. Hello. And he's what, selling another 600 million worth of... He's getting converted to buy more. Always good to tell ahead of time that you're buying the biggest order so you get a nice price. Hey, guy's been right. Yep. It's better to be lucky than good, my friend. Now, that criticism that you... I actually think maybe at first you might think it's reasonable, where Kramer says, why would you tell the market?
He says, he's essentially saying this. Why would you tell the market you're about to buy something that is scarce and limited? That just tells them that a big buyer's coming in, so it's going to keep prices up. Why would you do such a thing? MicroStrategy stock up, obviously, sharply because it is essentially a proxy for Bitcoin. Hello. That's why right there. You see, because MicroStrategy does well when Bitcoin goes up. And then they earn more money and they can create more stock. It's not luck. It's not luck. It's not luck. MicroStrategy made $700 million last week. That's not luck.
On Monday morning of this week, they packed on like $500 million in the first half of the day on Monday of this week. So my question to you out there is how long until other billionaires are going to copy this strategy? Boost it and tell me how long until you think we're going to see another billionaire take this playbook. MicroStrategy is now ranked the 350 largest company on the S&P 500. If you look at their price, go look at MSTR price on a chart, it was flatlined since the dot-com bubble. It's the craziest thing. It looks like nothing happened. Then in 2021, Saylor started buying Bitcoin.
That's when the stock comes alive again. It goes from flatlined to activity again. And if you follow the rumors on Twitter, the staff at MicroStrategy are thrilled that the stock is on fire right now. They seem super motivated and more committed. And in August of 2020, MicroStrategy had $1.5 billion market cap and a share price of $123. So this is pre-Bitcoin strategy. In 2020 of August, 1.5 billion market cap, share price of $123. Today, it's somewhere around almost $22 billion market cap. So it's gone up $21 billion. And the stock is up 10x. How can CEOs ignore this? It just seems like an obvious strategy.
Now, maybe it's the downside. Because when Bitcoin tanks, MicroStrategy tanks. tanks. But when Bitcoin goes, well, MicroStrategy does even better. MicroStrategy outperforms Bitcoin. And what ends up happening is people are buying the MicroStrategy stock as if it was an ETF with no management fees. I'm not saying you should be doing that. I'm saying that's what they're doing. As the stock goes up, MicroStrategy then issues more shares, i.e. They print their own own money, and then they go buy Bitcoin, which causes the stock to go up, which then they use to print money and buy more Bitcoin. They've essentially created a fiat money flywheel, and now MicroStrategy holds about 193,000 Bitcoin acquired for an average price of $31,544. dollars.
And so if they bought at 31,000, Bitcoin's essentially doubled since then. So they're looking pretty good right now. This is a pretty solid strategy. And I don't think he got lucky. I think Mikey likey the Bitcoin and he figured it out. And I just have to imagine other CEOs are going to see this soon, but I don't know. Is it too risky? Why aren't we seeing this? I'd love to know your thoughts on that. And speaking of Saylor, he was interviewed while While he was at that conference. Music. Yeah, I guess a lot coming out of Bitcoin Atlantis this week. That's how you know it was a decent event. And this chat, he sat down with Natalie Bertel.
And she asked for his thoughts on the three most important things that are a result of the Bitcoin ETF. And I think this is probably worth playing because this has been Sailor's week, Everybody's kind of seen his strategy play out and of course Wall Street is his domain and his thoughts on the ETF I thought were worth visiting this just came out a couple of days ago the most important thing, Or the most important result of this is the ETFs themselves represent a, um regulatory clarity for bitcoin as the institutional grade crypto asset i think that's a very important thing uh i think secondarily the etfs represent an on-ramp, for institutional money and they open up a gateway between a hundred trillion dollars or more of of institutional money and Bitcoin.
I think the third thing is they have sparked this price action and as Bitcoin moves back toward its all-time high they have generated an extraordinary amount of media coverage and Wall Street awareness and Bitcoin benefits from the awareness awareness of the asset class. Because as of now, 99% of the mainstream investors really have an incomplete understanding of Bitcoin. And the best thing that we could do is just build awareness that it is an asset class. And then people will start to do the work to understand what it is. And so all three of those things have been catalyzed over the past month by these ETF launches. That last bit there, it felt particularly insightful to me.
He says, you know, if we can help people understand that it is an asset class, they'll do the homework. Now, clearly not everybody, but he's talking about investors who recognize these opportunities and do the work because they see the profit opportunity. Opportunity, they see the potential in the currency, or they see the need for something to divorce from the state. And I think that's actually pretty intuitive, that we really don't have to explain them fully what Bitcoin is. We need just a shift in their perception of it. And you got to give it to these ETFs. They definitely seem to be doing that.
But the number one concern that I've heard from the audience and the community around JB, Jupiter Broadcasting, is that these ETFs are going to centralize control of Bitcoin and maybe one day lead to issues. Saylor sees it exactly the opposite. Yeah, I think that ETFs are just another application of Bitcoin. And there are thousands and thousands of applications coming. So in this particular case, 1% of Bitcoin, 1% more assets kind of flowed into the ETFs. It boosted the price of Bitcoin coin in the last two months by $20,000 a coin. And that means that 99% of the $200 billion of market cap got created.
And something like 99.7% of the benefit was for the people that didn't own the ETF. If you think about it. And once you do the math, the ETF people bought in at $40,000 and drove the price to $60,000 and have 1%. And everybody else had the other 99% and their Bitcoin is worth $60,000. So in this particular case, if that's taking over Bitcoin by basically making all the people that that don't use ETFs, $200 billion richer, right? Then you probably want that to happen 100 more times. And it goes on to make the point that if the rest of the network is being strengthened, then it's even harder to take over from a centralized point.
Because if everybody is doing well, then you have the mining industry that's growing. They're putting in more hash rate. It becomes even more difficult to centralize as everyone does really well. Then Lynn Alden was recently interviewed as well. Well, she was also at the event, and she describes the Bitcoin ETFs as like an API. Some of the some of the some of the no coin or trad fi arguments are Bitcoin is no longer like cypherpunk money because there's ETFs on it. Right. But that's that's a silly argument because Bitcoin didn't decide to have ETFs on it. It's not like the Bitcoin Committee Council got together and decided we're going to have ETFs now.
There's no such thing as a Bitcoin Committee or Bitcoin Council. So Bitcoin is just an open source protocol. And now TradFi has decided to... Structures on top of part of it to bring some of it into its own system. All the ETF is, in developer terms, is basically the API for the fiat system. It just allows the fiat system to plug into Bitcoin a little bit better than it used to. That's all that these do. It's an upgrade to the TradFi system, not an upgrade to Bitcoin, even though it moves Bitcoin price more than it moves TradFi price this cycle. And so that doesn't change the fact that there's other uses of Bitcoin that are more cypherpunk, right? Right.
If our parents have Bitcoin in a DCF, right, that's not particularly cypherpunk, but they don't they don't really have a cypherpunk need right now. So they're like fine with that. Whereas I think that, you know, kind of the ongoing battleground will probably be around privacy. So Bitcoin has kind of won the war for like existence. And I actually think it's now it's starting to turn the tide about the whole energy debate. bait. There's a lot of really good pushback on the whole Bitcoin's going to consume all the world energy and blow our oceans narrative.
And there's been a lot of pushback on that, both in terms of narrative and in terms of grid balancing or the understanding that it mostly uses stranded energy and it's incentivized to use the cheapest energy in the world, which is mostly energy not being used. That is slowly getting into the media, into academia. But I think the battle that's that's still far from being one, is privacy. Basically, that there's going to be lawmakers cracking down on private use while the ETFs exist. And that's the cypherpunk frontier. That's the part that is still. Developers are still working on, that users are still exploring, that people are pushing back our walls for.
And I think that's the area where there's going to be some battles. She nails it. She absolutely nails it. What we need to keep our eye on is what happens with what they call self-hosted wallets, the ability for us to custody our own Bitcoin, which is one of the key innovations that makes it better than gold or other hard assets. We need to make sure that that protection remains. It's built in and it shouldn't be changed by some regulators in DC. So that's something I'm going to be watching. She didn't mention it, too. But I also think a bunch of crappy L2 scams coming during the next bull cycle that damage the name of Bitcoin could be an issue with adoption, too. But I'll be watching for that.
I am excited to report that the ETFs seem to be getting interest from places I didn't expect so soon. Last week, we talked about how the wire houses are setting up to bring in ongoing purchasing to the ETFs. This week, BlackRock announced one of their funds would be doing ongoing purchases. And just a couple of days ago, the Arizona Senate passed a resolution to consider adding Bitcoin ETFs to the Arizona state pensions. Once passed, the resolution will ask the Senate pension fund managers and state treasurers to study the Bitcoin ETF and look in to see if it's viable. This may or may not happen. But even if this happened in four or five states, that would be incredible new buying pressure. And with such a scarce asset, it just really doesn't take very much.
They see it as a move to diversify from risk, which I think is a really, really positive sentiment. The fact that they're looking at it as risk diversification and spreading out risk and not just like a sole risk asset. It's something to reduce overall investment risk. Now, that state has over 5.5 trillion assets. I'm sorry, all these states have over 5.5 trillion assets under management across state pension funds. So you look at just a couple of those coming online, that 5.5 trillion sitting there, even just a couple of them coming online, putting a small percentage into the ETF would be a big deal.
Now, coming up next, we have your boost we're going to get to. We have some project updates that I'd like you to know about. I've got a clip from Tom Lee on why Bitcoin is so polarizing. And then one of my absolute favorite time chain resources and a pretty important note about next week's episode. So I want to thank Podhome.fm, my podcasting 2.0 platform of choice with unlimited shows and episodes powered by unlimited Podhome AI. Yeah, Podhome's AI tools are really neat. It'll balance your audio. It'll transcribe your podcast, automatically create chapters, clips, and it'll even suggest episode titles and descriptions.
And Podhome, that's podhome.fm, has the easiest podcasting, two-to-two live streaming with audio streaming built into the service, full support for value tags, everything you like. Plus the UI makes it really simple to add remote items like value for value music, set up your splits and make your own clips. And Podhome focuses on solving the things that I have found over the years to be the grind. mind. When you use Podhome, it feels like you got a team of people because it's just taking care of that stuff for you. And podcasters, you can get your first three months for free when you use the promo code TWIB.
Yep. Try it out for three months for free and get all the podcasting two-to-do features you've been wanting. It is my hosting platform of choice and you get unlimited shows and episodes with unlimited Podhome AI. So go to podhome.fm and use the promo code TWIB And thank you to Podhome.fm for sponsoring this week in Bitcoin. Music. Now, we've got a bunch of great boosts into the show. Thank you, everybody who's supporting the production. This is a value-for-value show. If you get some valuable information or insights from the podcast, please consider sending a boost with the new podcast app.
NoSecondBest came in with 217,000 sats and says, This was a pure Signal News podcast for Bitcoin, and that Fox clip you played was brutal. Yes, thank you, NoSecondBest. It was brutal. Thank you for the 217,000 sats. You are our baller this week. week. UConn Ilias comes in with 5,000 sats and says, thanks for the great listen. I hope you continue to make the show. Purple Elephant sent 10,000 sats saying, hey, Chris, Satsquash here, and I've been listening on Breeze because that's where I found you. I miss the Bitcoin dad pod, but I'm glad you're carrying on. See you at scale. I hope to see you at scale as well. Mr. Adam Curry, the podfather, comes in with 10,000 sats.
This is my new weekly go-to podcast, Great inaugural episode. Inaugural. Thank you. Oh, Oppie1984 comes in with 4,000 sats. Says he enjoyed the show. Nice breakdowns. Nice to have a Bitcoin news podcast now that the dad is on hiatus. Thank you, sir. Faraday Fedora came in with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. Says, yes, I was worried I was going to have to start listening to some half-baked Bitcoin podcast after the Bitcoin dad hiatus. Yes, I know. I continue on our torch. Thank you for the support. Todd came in with 11,101 sats. Says he's excited for the new show and congrats. Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for checking out episode one.
Lazy Locks also sends sentiments with 5,000 sats for the new episode, as JC Denton did as well. And Southern Fried Sassafras came in with 2,000 sats to say, I've heard the term before, but I'm not clear on the implications of it. Can you explain the happening? Every four years, the Bitcoin issuance gets cut in half. And we are only about, as I record, probably 44-ish days away. So the Bitcoin miners will get half the amount of Bitcoin that they got prior. This happens every four years, and it makes the asset more scarce. So you can imagine that the price of Bitcoin, once the market has absorbed these changes, will generally go up.
Thank you, everybody who boosted above 2,000 sats. I really, really appreciate the support for the new show. It makes me want to keep on going. I got some great suggestions from Mere Mortals Podcast and Chad and Gene Bean came in with a big thank you too. So thank you everybody who boosted into the show. We had 17 boosters, which is absolutely incredible for episode one. And we stacked 247,813 sats. My commitment to you is to be as radically transparent as possible with this so you know where the show stands. And so if things decline and the show starts to fade, you know what's going on.
And if things boom and the show is doing really great, you can see that. And we can reward the show with the value that you see it deserves. Just need a new podcast app. You do that over at podcastapps.com. Then you can top off something like Fountain FM and you can boost right in. Music. Sparrow 1.8.3 is out, and it's been my favorite Bitcoin wallet for years. If you want a great desktop wallet that doesn't let you hurt yourself and gives you full control, check out Sparrow 1.8.3 now with cold card Q1 and Trezor Safe 3 support. I love the cold card. I do have a Trezor, but I cannot necessarily recommend it.
But I did want to mention Mutiny Wallet 0.5.10 is out. Now, Mutiny Wallet's interesting. It's a progressive web app wallet. I've been testing this for about six months. It's open source. It's self-custodial, if you'd like. Or you can use their hosted version. And it's a Lightning wallet that is working to integrate Fedament support. And they've fixed some significant bugs in Fedament implementation that had actually prevented it from joining some federations. And I'm just really happy to see this. It's kind of an alternative to something like Liquid, you could say.
And they've been pushing it forward. So Sparrow is a classic desktop software. And Mutiny is a brand new Fluton progressive web app. Two different problems they're solving. Mutiny is great too for spinning up a wallet for a short period of time. I'll put links to that. And then I have a resource of the week I want to play for you or I want to tell you about and then I have a clip I want to play for you. So let's start with the resource of the week. You're going to have to go to the show notes for this one and it's so worth it. Here's how nerdy I am is I have have tablets around my house that are on the wall that control my home assistant. So my home assistant dashboard is up there.
And when you don't use the tablet for a little while, it brings up a screensaver. And the screensaver that it shows, which fits perfectly on there, is timechaincalendar.com. I want you to go check out timechaincalendar.com. It's going to help you visualize the concept that Bitcoin is indeed time. And you can sweep through there. You can watch new blocks as they land, the price, all of it. It's perfect, too, because it's got a halving countdown. So go check out timechaincounter.com, and I will have a link in the show notes. Now, before I leave you, I've got a value for value song, and I've got this clip from Tom Lee, who's been a Bitcoin bull and investor who's got it on Wall Street way before everybody else, on why Bitcoin is so polarizing.
So let's play that, and then I have two last things for you. I've never met an investment investment instrument that is so polarizing. I got people on Twitter or X that are like, it's the future of finance. It's the future of money. It's going to whatever. And then there's people that call it, it's fake. It's fraud. It's a joke. It's worthless. Why do you think Bitcoin is so polarizing? Brian, I think there's many reasons, but the three that come to mind is, number one, it's a generational issue. I think in crypto, they refer to sort of the legacy financial folks as boomers, because Bitcoin is really being adopted and used by both younger folks, millennials and Gen Z, as well as people outside the U.S.
Bitcoin's really useful to the unbanked outside the U.S. I think the second is that because Bitcoin was sort of – is bootstrapped and has a genesis block, it didn't grow inside the traditional financial system. So I think those who are used to the venture capital world or institutional access to products first before individuals find it, this is an anathema. It came out through the opposite way. That is so insightful. First of all, could the CNBC host not type while his guest is speaking? But what Lee said there, I had not fully appreciated. Not being a Wall Street native critter myself, I hadn't considered how this would normally work.
Something that is a serious commodity or a stock even, Wall Street gets first crack at it. And they hear about it from their Wall Street buddies. And the contillion effect is so strong there that if something doesn't start there and they don't get a crack at it, essentially a pre-mine before the public, they don't trust it. They don't trust it because they didn't manipulate it from the start. What Lee touches on here in such a brief moment, moment, I think is so insightful as to why at the institutional level, Bitcoin has been so polarizing. Used to the venture capital world or institutional access to products first before individuals find it.
This is an anathema. You know, it came out through the opposite way. And the third, of course, is that, you know, Bitcoin represents trust in a trustless world. And, you know, it's tough for people who are used to dealing with private banks. Yeah. Yeah. Like Like nobody – what? Something financial that I can trust that isn't a scam? What, what? And of course, dog coins don't necessarily help with that perception. Shout out to Tom Lee. That was just – nailed it. He nailed a complex question with three concise answers. I like that quite a bit. All right. Now, I have to warn you about next week. I will be on the road.
I'm going to NixCon and the Southern California Linux Expo, and I'm taking a road trip with my buddy Wes and Brent, and we're going to go down there and have an Airbnb and cover the events that are back-to-back. I tell you this because I don't know what that means for my This Week in Bitcoin recording schedule. My intention is unless heaven and earth prevents me, I'll have an episode for you. It just may not be as comprehensive. It might just be a quickie to keep you up to date on the most important things and then back to a full episode production for episode four.
Although, you know, maybe not. We'll see. Maybe the events won't be that interesting and I'll just spend all my time thinking about Bitcoin. Or maybe I'll just spend all my time thinking about Bitcoin regardless. Regardless, links www.thisweekinbitcoin.show. Boost in with what you'd like to see and hear from the show. It is brand new and we're still molding it. And I'd love for this to become the number one news podcast for Bitcoin in the podcasting 2-to-do community. Now, I'm going to leave you this week with a song that felt quite fitting for some of our topics. It is a value-for-value track. That means when you boost during the music, your sats will go to support the track. and we're going to play What Shall We Do With A Michael Saylor by BTC Minstrel.
Thank you so much for joining me on episode two. I'll see you next week and this week in Bitcoin. What shall we do with Michael Saylor? What shall we do with Michael Saylor? What shall we do with Michael Saylor? Erlie and the Bull Runs. See his money is a melting ice cube. See his money is a melting ice cube. See his money is a melting ice cube. Take all his treasury and buy some Bitcoin. Take all his treasury and buy some Bitcoin. Take all his treasury and buy some Bitcoin or lie in the bull. Music. Have a conversation with Robert Breedlove. Have a conversation with Robert Breedlove. Have a conversation with Robert Breedlove. Her lie in the bull run.
Drop his knowledge on all the podcasts. Drop his knowledge on all the podcasts. Drop his knowledge on all the podcasts. Her lie in the bull run. See the power of cyber hornets. See the power of cyber hornets. See the power of cyber hornets. Her lie in the bull run. And he buys the corn put him on the tally and watch him pump it put him on the tally and watch him pump it put him on the tally and watch him pump it early in the bull run get him on twitter to orange pill elon get him on twitter to orange pill elon get him on twitter to orange bill elon Thank you for.
Music. Watching. Music.
Welcome into Episode 2
Bitcoin Atlantis Insights
Transitioning to Time Chain Concept
Understanding the Arrow of Time
Proof of Work and Trustable Time
Importance of Difficulty Adjustment
Bitcoin's Immovable Time
Nostalgia for Tech Transitions
The Significance of Software
Celebrating Bitcoin's All-Time High
Bitcoin Flips Silver
Debunking OTC Desk Rumors
Legal Victory for Bitcoin Miners
Analyzing MicroStrategy's Strategy
The Debate on Market Transparency
MicroStrategy's Financial Success
MicroStrategy's Market Cap Growth
Creating a Fiat Money Flywheel
Evaluating Bitcoin ETF Impact
The Battle for Privacy in Bitcoin
Bitcoin ETFs as Financial Upgrades
Mutiny Wallet and Sparrow Updates
Bitcoin ETFs and the Financial System
Listener Support and Engagement
Resource of the Week: Time Chain Calendar
Sponsorship by Podhome.fm
Sparrow and Mutiny Wallet Updates
Navigating Time Chain Concepts
Tom Lee on Bitcoin's Polarizing Nature
Upcoming Episode Schedule Notice
