More pro-Bitcoin voices are featured, but are some wolves in sheep's clothing? I'll examine the Pomp Problem and the Bitcoin beachhead spreading from state to state. Why the market bracing for higher inflation for longer, is not great news for Bitcoin in the short term.
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
Links:
Music:
Sponsor: http://podhome.fm
Promo Code: TWIB
Links:
- It’s a Higher-for-Longer World for Rates, and That’s OK - WSJ
- Weekly market commentary | BlackRock Investment Institute
- Fed chair: Focusing solely on inflation is “no longer appropriate” - Marketplace
- Fed officials consider leaving rates higher for longer | The Hill
- Fed Chair Powell Wants Inflation to Cool More - The New York Times
- The State of Louisiana Passes a Bill To Protect Your ‘Fundamental Bitcoin Rights’
- Satoshi Action Fund
- Bitcoin’s risk/reward ratio will blow your mind - YouTube
- BlockFi’s Rise and Fall: A Timeline
- Mr. 100" bought 100% of new supply of Bitcoin over the last 2 days
- Mutiny Wallet v0.6.1: New Home Screen, Nostr Profile Setup, Federation Discovery & Recommendations
- Vulnerabilities exploited in the wild fixed based on GrapheneOS reports - GrapheneOS Discussion Forum
- Coinbase Selects Lightspark for Lightning
- 🔄 Lightspark’s SDKs, APIs, and developer tools streamline Lightning Network integration, while Lightspark Predict optimizes liquidity requirements and routing in real time.
- 🔐 Coinbase will use Lightspark’s remote-key signing implementation, allowing Coinbase to benefit from a scalable and reliable node infrastructure without managing Lightning keys.
- This seems to be after a team internally looked at standing up Lightning.
- This was the guy formerly in charge of implementing Lightning at Coinbase 💀
- Tether Awards $100K Grant to BTCPay Server Foundation
Music:
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There are currency devaluations taking place that people are not talking about. The Nigerian Naira is down 50-60% in the last nine months. Egypt just devalued by 40%. Argentina continuing to devalue. I think this is a flight to safety, believe it or not, taking place. A hedge against devaluation, a hedge against a loss of purchasing power and wealth. That's very important. And we saw this even here last year in the United States. Regional banks imploded. Bitcoin went up 40 percent. Bitcoin does not have counterparty risk. And we're putting out a piece in the next few weeks, which is this is both, get this, a risk-on asset.
And so you talk about the Nasdaq. The risk-on. But it is risk-off. off. I remember we got in at $250 when Greece was threatening to leave the euro. Right. But is that folks that are speculating about currency or is that folks in Nigeria and in Greece and other places saying, I got to get my money out of this currency and move it themselves? Do you see what I'm saying? Oh, yes. I think this is an insurance policy against rogue regimes or against just horrible fiscal and monetary policies. Music. Welcome into episode five of This Week in Bitcoin. I've been dodging April Fool's news like Junior dodging a shoe during a presser.
I think you'd be pretty impressed with my agility. I think the Bitcoin community has been pretty heads down this week. Maybe the price action has been a little boring. I don't know, but there just hasn't been a lot going on while the price sort of consolidates before the big event. At least in our local neck of the woods, there are some great project updates, though, that I want you to know about. Some big things are happening behind the scenes. And then on the wider market, we seem to be in a period of market narrative fluctuation, if you will.
I mean, this happens at least once a quarter, sometimes even faster. And these days, I mean, this is wild to say, but these days, these different narratives do seem to have a short-term impact on Bitcoin's price action. And more than ever, the traditional market is obsessed with one man's every single word. But let me get right to Steve Leisman now because we do have those breaking headlines from Fed Chair Powell. He is speaking at Stanford University. And what is he saying, Steve? He says if the economy evolves as expected, it will be appropriate to lower rates at some point this year.
But the Fed chair speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business says it will not be appropriate to lower the policy rate without greater confidence. Inflation is coming down. He cites the Fed policy statement in making that comment. He said the Fed has time to let incoming data guide its decisions. And the policy rate, though, is likely at its peak. That's the good news. News inflation, he says, has come down significantly, but it is still running above the Fed's 2% target. The job of sustainably returning it to target, quote, is not yet done. Will he? Won't he? So there's a couple of things that are interesting, right?
Jay Powell, he goes and sits down and every word he says is then immediately broadcast on national television. And they try to parse and read the tea leaves there. But I guess there's two takeaways. ways. Number one, this is probably the highest we're going to see rates go. Number two, rate cuts are still on the table, but now it's being pushed out and perhaps we'll see less rate cuts because, gosh darn it, that inflation, it turns out to be sticky and trickier than we expected. I have some good news I want you to know about. The Satoshi Action Fund has stacked another win. Now, if you're not familiar with them, they describe themselves as a Bitcoin advocacy advocacy organization.
I think they've got I think they really got started enrolling in 2022. I might have that wrong, but that's what my pre-show research showed. And they say they're quote changing the narrative on Bitcoin. And actually, I think they're not messing around. But before I get to their big win this week, here's Dennis Porter presenting at the Texas Miner Summit a couple of years ago when things were just kicking off. This is why Satoshi Action Fund was created to go on the offensive for Bitcoin miners. By first, through phase one, educating policy makers. We want to get in front of state lawmakers and help them to understand the value of attracting this nascent tech infrastructure to their state.
And then number two, we'll be lobbying for effective policy. So all the great things that you see here in the great state of Texas and all the work that Lee Bratcher is doing with the TBC to make it even better, we want to expand that. We want to expand Texas policy across the entire country so that other states can partake in programs like the Demand Response Incentive Program so that we can create tax breaks for minors. Because this industry brings jobs. It brings investment. It brings innovation to states all across the country. and has the potential to do that. And we want policymakers to understand that story. We also want them to understand the positive story around energy and the fact that Bitcoin mining helps on both sides. It's pro-energy.
And if you like renewables, it helps to soak up all that excess load, right? Yep. And it makes it then profitable for everybody involved. And they have and had a three-phase plan. Phase one, we'll be educating policymakers through our personal connections, as Mandy stated. You know, she's worked in and out of policy in DC and on the state level for over a decade. The rest of our team have a combined amount of time of over 30 years of working in the political arena. So we'll also be doing conferences, attending conferences like this to talk to minors, to let them know about the organization is important so you can get involved.
But we'll also be going to state policymaker conferences. There's one just next month called ALEC, and there's one later in September called the State Policy Network. And we can go there and directly educate lawmakers on the impact that this positive, this nascent tech infrastructure can have in their state. We'll also be doing live Zoom courses, you know, just mass educate, mass educate, mass educate. The premise of this is like, if you get 100 state policymakers who are listening to you, maybe 50 of them will actually agree with you. Maybe 25 of them will actually make an effort. Maybe five of those will be serious.
And maybe two of them will actually go forward and do something. So if two states in this country become a lot more like Texas and a lot less like New York, I think that's a positive thing that can happen here in the USA. Of course, New York has famously been pretty anti-Bitcoin from a policy standpoint. So how'd they do? That was from a couple of years ago. Well, they've been stacking some wins at the state level. They have an agenda that is to use the United States' states' rights system to essentially create beachheads so that if the federal government were to ever take any kind of dramatic action against a Bitcoin mining, they've created these beachheads in various states.
And Louisiana has passed a groundbreaking bill through their house, 103 to 0, to protect the fundamental Bitcoin rights for mining, for access to Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin, storing Bitcoin. Now, it needs approval by the Senate, and that has to be signed by the governor. Those are the next crucial steps. And the Satoshi Action Fund does take donations to help with this work, satoshiaction.io. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can also follow Dennis Porter on Twitter if you do Weapon X. He'll often tweet about this. They're doing good work over there. I mean, I've followed for a while now, and I can say that this is one of many wins.
So it's really good to see. And I think Dennis has been a force for positive change in the United States. Not everyone has been, though. I call it the pomp problem. And I'm asking you, what do we do as a community about the influenzas? So here's my question. Do you think it matters who represents Bitcoin in the wider media? Then, of course, think about this, too, from who the wider media is appealing to as well. Traditional media is trying and struggling to explain Bitcoin to their viewers. And so they need people who are good communicators because their audience really doesn't get it. And so this is where I think Anthony Pompliano, or known as Pomp, really comes in as sort of the quintessential example of what does the community do about these types of individuals and what specifically should the show do?
All right. Locomotive continues, folks. Bitcoin ETFs trading $111 billion last month, triple what they did in January and February. With us now, Pomp investment investor, Anthony Pompliano. As you can tell by the swooshes, we are on mainstream media again. And this is Fox Business, their midday show when people are watching and they have it on in the background or they have lunch going on. The financial wonks love these channels and they bring on Pomp to explain questions that are typical of their viewers, that they maybe have heard from their viewers or they understand their audience.
You know, Pomp, this is the kind of thing you talked about, right? Right. I mean, the demand has been absolutely through the roof. Here's the interesting thing, though, because it went, I guess, what was the high recently? Seventy five, seventy two, something like that. Seventy two thousand. Seventy two thousand. It's pulled back to sixty five thousand. A narrative there out there now saying, see, gold is up and Bitcoin is down. It's not a store of value. What do you say to folks who are saying maybe it's got some investment opportunities, trading opportunities, but it still hasn't proven itself as a store of value?
Now, Bitcoiners hear this and they roll their eyes, but I have probably heard this and seen this come up a dozen times, if not more. This week alone. It is actually a question that is being asked. And we need somebody who can attack it in a way that is understandable by Bitcoiners and understandable by noobs. It's where Pomp comes in. Well, when you want to store value, usually what you're talking about is not storing value from yesterday to today. What you're trying to store value is from today for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, right? And so when I think of Bitcoin, I think about, can I actually preserve my economic value for my kids or my grandchildren?
And right now, Bitcoin, I think, is probably the best place that you're going to be able to do that. Now, if we go and we look at what people have been historically using as a store of value, there's gold and there's dollars. Gold is up. It's near an all-time high. But we're talking about now it hits an all-time high because it goes up $10, $20, $30. These moves aren't meaningful to people who buy gold right here and see a $30, $40, $50 increase in the price. Now, the dollar is down in purchasing power terms, 25% since 2020. So you've lost 25% of your purchasing power in four years.
Bitcoin during that same time period is up 800%. And so what I think people are starting to realize is, wait a minute, if I store some or a large portion of my wealth in Bitcoin, everything around me gets cheaper over time rather than more expensive. And that's what you want out of a store of value. Clear, concise, well-spoken. But with the good also comes the bad with the influenzas. So why is BlockFi, why does BlockFi need this much money? First of all, what are they going to do? Over 500 employees now around the world. If you don't remember or you weren't around or couldn't care, BlockFi crashed a few days after FTX's collapse.
On November 28th, 2022, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They had more than 100,000 creditors, according to their filings, and BlockFi had around 227 million in uninsured funds in the bank. In October of 2023, BlockFi emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced they're going to try to figure things out, going to try to repay some people. But it sounds like some of that, or maybe the majority of that, depends on how much they can recoup from the FTX payout, which has yet to happen. So depending on that, they may repay some of their customers.
225,000 users, over $15 billion in assets on the platform, $50 million a month, a month, $50 million a month in revenue. Let's roll. Zach, Flory, the rest of the BlockFi team are absolutely killing it. They built an amazing business, obviously. And anytime you can get a who's who at the table of all these investors, something's going right. Right. So I am bullish, bullish, bullish. But maybe he's learned its lesson. I mean, a lot of people accidentally mess around with the altcoins before they figure out the Bitcoin is the only true crypto. OK, it still may be volatile.
Right. In the last 11 years, number one asset eight times, the worst three times. Yes. So buckle up, boys and girls. But you want to be there. So if you go back over 10 years now, Bitcoin's compound annual growth rate for a decade is 60 percent or higher. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, OK, obviously it is going up in price. But the question is, if you're building a portfolio, the average investor is not going to go put 100 percent of their portfolio in one asset like Bitcoin. Instead, what they want to do, as we've seen through various portfolio constructions, et cetera, is you want to take a couple non-correlated assets, put them together and then have a portfolio that should do well over time.
Bitcoin tends to be very low correlation or no correlation to traditional assets. It goes up a lot. It is volatile along the way. And so the key thing with Bitcoin is if you think that you're going to speculate or you're going to gamble or you're going to trade this thing, you probably aren't going to do so hot. But if you can simply learn to just buy an asset, hold it for the long term, Bitcoin has been very good to those investors. And I think that it will continue to do that moving forward. All right. Boost in and tell me your thoughts. Is there an appropriate statute of limitations for somebody like this?
And in your mind, does good behavior after the fact earn them early forgiveness? I genuinely would like to know, because I'm going to factor it into how much we do or don't hear from these types of individuals in the show. And while we're talking about mysterious individuals... There is Mr. 100 out there. Now, when this show launched, we speculated, could it be Jeff Bezos? I mean, it's possible. It's possible it could have been Jeff Bezos, but it seemed, you know, more and more unlikely as time went on. Well, this Mr. 100 has bought an unbelievable amount of Bitcoin in just the last few days.
In fact, 2,566 in the last five days, and they seem to be buying every single dip. We now have somebody who's in the top 100 in just a matter of weeks out there buying and stacking Bitcoin like crazy. We don't know who it is, but people are starting to speculate it is a rumor. We don't really know, but it's a rumor that it's a nation state. All right, coming up, your boost, some big project updates and the clip of the week. But first, thank you to Podhome.fm, sponsor of this here episode. That's my podcasting, 2-0-0 hosting platform with unlimited shows and episodes powered by unlimited Podhome AI.
Tools that make it easy to take advantage of things like chapters. You can have clips. They'll automatically transcribe the episode and make that available as a file that shows up in the podcast player automatically. And they have fantastic support for live streams. Check it out, Podhome.fm. Use the promo code TWIB and you'll get three months for free. Podhome.fm, my podcasting, my podcasting 2.0, my podcasting 2.0, pop, pop, pop, pop platform. That's right. Thank you to Podhome for sponsoring this episode of This Week in Bitcoin. I really do appreciate you. This is the way.
Now we have some boosts coming into the show right now. And Eric, a.k.a. our podcast, is coming in as our baller booster this week with 120,000 sats. Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate that. Coming in from Podverse, he writes, Hey, Chris, thank you so much for creating this week in Bitcoin. The show strikes the balance between news and practical resource and updates. I was hoping to get your advice from the... Oh, I was able to get advice, he says, from the Bitcoin Dad podcast to get Excalibur up and running from my wallet under my control.
I prefer the release dates of the show on Thursday or Friday so I can listen during my weekend time. I'm also now using Podhome to host my podcast, thanks to your recommendation. Very nice. Thank you very much. Listener Jeff comes in with $27,222. That's a McDuck plus a $5,000. This old duck still got it. Says, let's get this show to the top of the charts. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate that. He says, also, I like the song. Thank you very much. Boost for the artist. Ah, that $5,000 went to the artist. That's really great. Thank you. support that support that value for value music I say, Oppie1984 came in with 4,000 sats and just says, support boost. B-O-O-S-T.
NoSecondBest is back with 15,222 sats. There is no second best. HighSignal confirmed. The last clip was so good, I'm buying that guy's book. Yeah, I found the whole interview on YouTube. You can search it and see it. Nullifier came in with 5,000 sats. These have been great, Chris. Keep it up. Thank you, Nullifier. I appreciate it. And Adam Curry, the Podfather, comes in with 10,000 sats. Podcasts are cool. Hello, Podfather. Coming in a day early. The perfect listen after no agenda. Yeah, nice. That's a good little combo. Wind down with a little This Week in Bitcoin. Thank you, Podfather. Appreciate the value.
Bob B. comes in with 5,000 sats. I hoard that with your kind. Loving the pod. As for the release day, the numbers might be commute related. Any day is fine with me since I rarely do those anymore. Lucky you, sir. Lucky you. That's got to be nice. I work for myself but yet still manage to give myself a little bit of a commute. It's not bad, though. It's 20 minutes unless there's bad traffic. But in my neck of the woods, we have this thing called Tulip Festival where all the normies drive up from Seattle into my neck of the woods to look at flowers and take selfies. And so then I have a much, like I have a triple the commute during spring.
It's horrible, I know. Poor me. Eric Nord comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! Support boost. It's good to have, quote, plan B back. Ah, tell me you're a long timer without telling me you're a long timer, Eric. Thank you for the boost. Todd from Northern Virginia comes in with 7,777 sats. Smoke if you got him. He says my vote for the episode release date is Tuesdays. I'd estimate that 50% of podcasts I subscribe to release on Fridays. It's a very crowded day. Yeah, and so is Sunday. And as an OG who's been publishing, you know, I mean, I mean, OK, I know the Podfather probably beats me.
I know other people have been publishing on Sunday for a long time, but I've been publishing on Sunday for like 16, 17 years. So almost. Right. I mean, a while. So yeah, now I look at my I look at my podcast catcher in the morning on a Monday and there's like five or six or seven shows. And Linux Unplugged, which came out Sunday night, is like off the screen now. Now, maybe I just have too many podcasts. Maybe that's actually the problem. Thank you, Todd. Appreciate the boost. PC null reference comes in with 2,000 cents. Right? Did I get that right? I think I did. Boost. A little pew-pew for you. I was wondering if you will also randomly or by extras do side shows and dig deeper into Bitcoin Lightning and the latest developments as a more technical level for beginners.
Ah, so like technical deep dives. Hmm. Hmm. I don't have plans at the moment, but I would be willing to consider it, especially when it relates to things around podcasting 2.0 to help people figure that out. Figure it out. That's a good question. I'll think more about it also in the resources section of this show. I'll also consider putting more learning resources in there, videos and things like that. So that's perhaps a place to start. Adversary 17 comes in with 2,048 sats. Great episode, he says. And I think that is our deliminator right there. That's above the 2,000-sat cutoff for the on-the-air reading, just for time.
But thank you, everybody, who does boost in. I see Chad boosted in and Gene Bean boosted in and Hypersensitive and Ace boosted in. We had 16 total boosters, stacked 212,915 sats. We started messing around with boost. You're doing a good job. on. Music. Thank you, everybody who supports the show. It is a value for value podcast. And I try to be transparent about the numbers so you know where they're at. It is a high effort podcast. So I appreciate your boosts. And of course, your messages. Music. If you'd like to boost go get a new podcast app podcast apps.com. Podverse fountain FM and castomatic are some of my absolute favorites.
Favorites, you top them off with something like Strike or use RoboSats, anything on the Lightning Network, then you can boost in and send your message and support the show. Music. Really appreciate everybody who took a little bit of time to do that this week. Let's get into the project updates this week because there's some big ones. Mutiny Wallet version 0.6.1 has a brand new home screen, a Nostra profile set up, Federation discovery for Fetterman, and a new profile page that makes it really simple if you're just using it to like square up between friends or maybe family wallets. Really, really nice release from Mutiny Wallet this week.
I'll have a link to that in the show notes. If you're a Graphing OS, or perhaps maybe Graphing OS as you call it, user, there has been a vulnerability that is getting actively exploited in the wild this week, and they have issued an update that fixes that. I just updated my Graphing OS machine this morning, a little Pixel 7 Pro, not so little. And I just wanted to put that out there because I often recommend Graphing OS as if you're going to use a mobile device to do some Bitcoin stuff. I think Graphing OS is a great choice. It's probably my favorite mobile operating system, but it is based on Android.
And so when there are issues out there, they're on top of it, and that update is out right now. And I encourage everybody to go get it. And then I don't know if this is quite a project update, but it's noteworthy, that's for sure. Coinbase has thrown in the towel about building an internal Lightning system and has selected LightSpark for their Lightning services. LightSpark offers an SDK and APIs, and I'm sure lots of compliance, and Coinbase is going to use LightSpark's remote key signing implementation, allowing Coinbase to benefit from scalable and reliable node infrastructure without having to manage Lightning themselves. themselves.
So they had a team internally at Coinbase looking at standing up their own Lightning infra, but they just couldn't get it done. And I think the bloke that was formerly in charge of implementing Lightning might be out. And he had said some really stupid stuff about Bitcoin during the time on Twitter. So maybe better that he's out. And then our last project update that I am super elated to see is BTC Pay Server has gotten a big, hearty donation from. From the Tether folks, yeah, a $100,000 grant to the BTC Pay Server folks. Their developers write, quote, I'm thankful to Tether for recognizing BTC Pay Server's significance as a Bitcoin FOSS project and for its generous grant.
This contribution greatly empowers us to concentrate on our mission, enabling anyone to accept Bitcoin, unhindered by geographic, political, or financial barriers. years. That's according to the Rockstar dev, a core contributor and a founding member of BTC pay server. I think that's good to see. I suppose I'm, I remain somebody who's cautious about Tether. That's my only hesitation here, but it's absolutely great to see the BTC pay server get this a hundred thousand dollar grants. One of the best projects out there in the Bitcoin self-hosting category. This next pick, I can only do it for so long. It's like, I got to do it now or wait four more years.
It's BitcoinHavening.live, H-L-V-I-N-G.live, BitcoinHavening.live. It is a very simple countdown. It's not anything too dramatic. It's like an old classic flip clock, but it's kind of fun. And right now it says the reward date is, or the reward drop date, as they put it, or AKA the Havening, is April 20th, 2024 at 12.02 UTC. That's fascinating Because when I was doing my pre-show research, it was about 10 minutes or so earlier than that. So since I, which has only been a couple hours ago, since I was starting prepping the show, it's moved forward a little bit.
That's why you need a countdown clock. Because it's just going to be based on TikTok next block. As of right now, it's like 5.02 a.m. in the Pacific Northwest. You know what? I'll get up. I'm going to get up for the halvening. Should we live stream it? Yeah. Is that stupid? I don't know. That might be stupid. Let me know. Send a boost. I feel like I want to celebrate it somehow. Never before has the community been so aware of the happening. It's kind of exciting. I've always just been a loner here. All right. A final clip of the week. You know, there's during this time, there's there's just the funniest things that I'll catch.
Which, and like I said earlier in the show, it's really the mainstream media trying to get their heads around Bitcoin and how to explain it to their audience and answer a lot of the common criticisms. You'd think that these people would understand a little bit better, but perhaps they're just trying to speak for the people. I don't know. So they bring on Strikes Jack Mollers once again to CNBC's Power Lunch. I've played a clip from this once before. And Jack's really figured out the role that they want him to play. And they absolutely, when they book him, they want him to play a very specific role. And he nailed it this week.
For me to know that the crisis is over so I can see we're not there yet. Kelly, I got luscious locks, but I'll toss the hood on for you. How are we? So they start with some jokes about how he should be wearing a hoodie. So then he puts his hood on. Ha ha ha. So it starts, you know, real light and funny. We're all just friends. That has blown up our financial system. Hell of a Monday, huh? So do you think, okay, let me ask you to you this way. or put it to you this way. A banking crisis is deflationary. And so when I see Balaji and others saying Bitcoin's going to go to a million dollars, it may go up, but that may be because of the Fed's response here.
The 2010s were not hyperinflationary. There's no obvious reason why now would be hyperinflationary either. So Kelly, it's actually not that complicated, and I'm excited to try and convey that to America. There's a market term that's used here in Chicago a lot. It's demand finds supply. What do I mean by that? If Ken Griffin is going to want to buy the most expensive condo in America, someone will build it for him. Someone will put a 201st floor in Miami's tallest building. If silver is going to 1,000x, I will walk into my kitchen right now, I will melt all my silverware, and I will sell it at market.
If gold is going to rally, Elon Musk will find more on Mars. Bitcoin is, this is a super important point, Bitcoin is the only monetary instrument in the history of our species that is fixed. It does not matter how much more demand comes into the asset class, Kelly. No one will ever be able to make more of it. There are two things I can guarantee you in my life. One, that I'll die. And the other, that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. And those are the two things that I can only value as my life and my Bitcoin. You know, when I start to think about how to explain Bitcoin to normies, I start to think more and more.
Perhaps you start with the 21 million cap and how rock solid that is and how it's not like a line of code in the Bitcoin source code that says total equals 21. It is the issuance schedule. It's the very nature of the protocol that guarantees us the fixed issuance. It's brilliant and it is truly a unique asset in that way. And people who understand investing will understand why that's unique and good. Now, the reality is, especially I've discovered in the tech community, they're financially illiterate at scale. scale. When the Bitcoin ETF landed, the reason why the tech community didn't say anything, why the Verge didn't have an article about the first open source project ever being commoditized up as an ETF or packaged up, I guess you should say, as an ETF.
The reason why they didn't have a story about that is because they don't know what an ETF is. So they can't get excited about it. But people who maybe are a little bit older, you know, like our parents and their parents' generation, or if they're still around. But you know what? People that have invested, so it could be younger people too, I suppose, they understand. They understand why it's a big deal. And that's why Jack's trying to communicate that to them. So it is the only fixed supply asset, Kelly. It's not that complicated. It's going to go up because everything else can be issued more.
Does that make sense? Why is it? You've got to explain to me one thing. Why is the supply fixed? And is that because someone says it's fixed who could change their mind? No, it's a great point and question, Tyler. It's because it's written in the software and the software is distributed. There is no one person to ask. There is no one person to trust. The whole decentralization, is it decentralized so that you could put pictures and NFTs on the blockchain? Is it decentralized so that you could fix gaming? No, it's decentralized so that the defendants of the monetary policy are distributed is so that it's a network of computers that actually defend the policy and instrumentation of the monetary asset that is not the case for ethereum that is not the case for any other altcoin that is not the case for the u.s dollar that is not the case for miami real estate that is not the case for precious metals it is the all it is the only monetary instrument that has its monetary policy distributed and defended forgive me for being Very dense.
But if you say that it's because this is the way the software is written and it is immutable, it is unchanged. Why couldn't the software be rewritten or why couldn't the authors of the software or the guardians of the software write a new software that creates Bitcoin 2.0 with another supply, a fixed supply of Bitcoin? Yeah. So, Tyler, I run Bitcoin software and someone tried to do this. I want you to Google Bitcoin cash after this interview is over. Someone said, I want to change the rules of Bitcoin. I may want to create more of a supply. I may want to make it faster. I may want to make it do a backflip.
I may make it want to store pictures of monkeys drooling on themselves on the blockchain. And they created it and they created new rules and they called it Bitcoin cash. It's a different asset it's a different instrument and when someone tries to pay me in it my software rules that i run in my home in a room over there says nope that's invalid that thing is a piece of poop and i don't accept it because it is invalidating the rules of the system that were set out by satoshi nakamoto over a decade ago so you can create whatever you want you want to create fed now coin flip a dookie coin i don't care there's 21 million of the things that i run and that i protect and that i save in and those rules were started a long time ago and that's That's what the network runs.
So if you change the rules, you're creating a different monetary asset and a different instrument. It doesn't matter. Now, it's not a bad answer, but it's not a great answer, and it could be a lot tighter. I think you don't even mention Bitcoin Cash. Why give that piece of crap a plug on national television? I think what you say is, Peter, it's been forked a thousand times, and none of them have the network effect. And as you see in tech, the network effect matters quite a bit. Additionally, there are three major different interest groups that all have to have their incentives aligned for any change code to be accepted at scale.
You have miners, you have the developers, and you have the node operators, and most of them have different incentives, and they all would have to align for that to go out and all of them to agree. But then also you have the end user, so really you have the fourth cohort, which is perhaps the largest cohort, which is the hodlers. They also would have to accept the new software patches, and who in their right mind is going to be incentivized to accept a patch like that that would destroy the value of their Bitcoin? None of the miners would consent to that, none of the node operators, none of the hodlers, and the developers wouldn't be able to do that because you'd have to fundamentally change the issuance schedule.
That's the answer. Not a bad answer from Jack, but I think it could have been a little. Music. To the show. Tell me what you think, what you'd like to hear, and of course the questions I asked earlier. I'd love this to be your number one Bitcoin news podcast. If you could spread it around the podcasting 2-0 community and Jupyter Broadcasting, I would be delighted. We're going to feature another value for value song this week as we wrap up. Once the song begins, if you boost in, your sats will go to support the artist at a 90% rate. Pretty good for them, and they love it, you guys.
When I monitor social media for this kind of stuff on Mastodon and Noster, Twitter, I see new artists coming on saying, I'm getting sats. I'm finally getting paid for my music. Who are these people? How do I thank them? And I've seen it several times now. It's very cool to see. So this week, we're playing a track by Real Richard, and it's called Element Zero. Thanks for being here. See you next week. That is basically what Satoshi found when he discovered Bitcoin. You can view it as an element without protons or neutrons. So this is an element without matter. Music.
There are currency devaluations taking place that people are not talking about. The Nigerian Naira is down 50-60% in the last nine months. Egypt just devalued by 40%. Argentina continuing to devalue. I think this is a flight to safety, believe it or not, taking place. A hedge against devaluation, a hedge against a loss of purchasing power and wealth. That's very important. And we saw this even here last year in the United States. Regional banks imploded. Bitcoin went up 40 percent. Bitcoin does not have counterparty risk. And we're putting out a piece in the next few weeks, which is this is both, get this, a risk-on asset.
And so you talk about the Nasdaq. The risk-on. But it is risk-off. off. I remember we got in at $250 when Greece was threatening to leave the euro. Right. But is that folks that are speculating about currency or is that folks in Nigeria and in Greece and other places saying, I got to get my money out of this currency and move it themselves? Do you see what I'm saying? Oh, yes. I think this is an insurance policy against rogue regimes or against just horrible fiscal and monetary policies. Music. Welcome into episode five of This Week in Bitcoin. I've been dodging April Fool's news like Junior dodging a shoe during a presser.
I think you'd be pretty impressed with my agility. I think the Bitcoin community has been pretty heads down this week. Maybe the price action has been a little boring. I don't know, but there just hasn't been a lot going on while the price sort of consolidates before the big event. At least in our local neck of the woods, there are some great project updates, though, that I want you to know about. Some big things are happening behind the scenes. And then on the wider market, we seem to be in a period of market narrative fluctuation, if you will.
I mean, this happens at least once a quarter, sometimes even faster. And these days, I mean, this is wild to say, but these days, these different narratives do seem to have a short-term impact on Bitcoin's price action. And more than ever, the traditional market is obsessed with one man's every single word. But let me get right to Steve Leisman now because we do have those breaking headlines from Fed Chair Powell. He is speaking at Stanford University. And what is he saying, Steve? He says if the economy evolves as expected, it will be appropriate to lower rates at some point this year.
But the Fed chair speaking at the Stanford Graduate School of Business says it will not be appropriate to lower the policy rate without greater confidence. Inflation is coming down. He cites the Fed policy statement in making that comment. He said the Fed has time to let incoming data guide its decisions. And the policy rate, though, is likely at its peak. That's the good news. News inflation, he says, has come down significantly, but it is still running above the Fed's 2% target. The job of sustainably returning it to target, quote, is not yet done. Will he? Won't he? So there's a couple of things that are interesting, right?
Jay Powell, he goes and sits down and every word he says is then immediately broadcast on national television. And they try to parse and read the tea leaves there. But I guess there's two takeaways. ways. Number one, this is probably the highest we're going to see rates go. Number two, rate cuts are still on the table, but now it's being pushed out and perhaps we'll see less rate cuts because, gosh darn it, that inflation, it turns out to be sticky and trickier than we expected. I have some good news I want you to know about. The Satoshi Action Fund has stacked another win. Now, if you're not familiar with them, they describe themselves as a Bitcoin advocacy advocacy organization.
I think they've got I think they really got started enrolling in 2022. I might have that wrong, but that's what my pre-show research showed. And they say they're quote changing the narrative on Bitcoin. And actually, I think they're not messing around. But before I get to their big win this week, here's Dennis Porter presenting at the Texas Miner Summit a couple of years ago when things were just kicking off. This is why Satoshi Action Fund was created to go on the offensive for Bitcoin miners. By first, through phase one, educating policy makers. We want to get in front of state lawmakers and help them to understand the value of attracting this nascent tech infrastructure to their state.
And then number two, we'll be lobbying for effective policy. So all the great things that you see here in the great state of Texas and all the work that Lee Bratcher is doing with the TBC to make it even better, we want to expand that. We want to expand Texas policy across the entire country so that other states can partake in programs like the Demand Response Incentive Program so that we can create tax breaks for minors. Because this industry brings jobs. It brings investment. It brings innovation to states all across the country. and has the potential to do that. And we want policymakers to understand that story. We also want them to understand the positive story around energy and the fact that Bitcoin mining helps on both sides. It's pro-energy.
And if you like renewables, it helps to soak up all that excess load, right? Yep. And it makes it then profitable for everybody involved. And they have and had a three-phase plan. Phase one, we'll be educating policymakers through our personal connections, as Mandy stated. You know, she's worked in and out of policy in DC and on the state level for over a decade. The rest of our team have a combined amount of time of over 30 years of working in the political arena. So we'll also be doing conferences, attending conferences like this to talk to minors, to let them know about the organization is important so you can get involved.
But we'll also be going to state policymaker conferences. There's one just next month called ALEC, and there's one later in September called the State Policy Network. And we can go there and directly educate lawmakers on the impact that this positive, this nascent tech infrastructure can have in their state. We'll also be doing live Zoom courses, you know, just mass educate, mass educate, mass educate. The premise of this is like, if you get 100 state policymakers who are listening to you, maybe 50 of them will actually agree with you. Maybe 25 of them will actually make an effort. Maybe five of those will be serious.
And maybe two of them will actually go forward and do something. So if two states in this country become a lot more like Texas and a lot less like New York, I think that's a positive thing that can happen here in the USA. Of course, New York has famously been pretty anti-Bitcoin from a policy standpoint. So how'd they do? That was from a couple of years ago. Well, they've been stacking some wins at the state level. They have an agenda that is to use the United States' states' rights system to essentially create beachheads so that if the federal government were to ever take any kind of dramatic action against a Bitcoin mining, they've created these beachheads in various states.
And Louisiana has passed a groundbreaking bill through their house, 103 to 0, to protect the fundamental Bitcoin rights for mining, for access to Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin, storing Bitcoin. Now, it needs approval by the Senate, and that has to be signed by the governor. Those are the next crucial steps. And the Satoshi Action Fund does take donations to help with this work, satoshiaction.io. I'll put a link in the show notes. You can also follow Dennis Porter on Twitter if you do Weapon X. He'll often tweet about this. They're doing good work over there. I mean, I've followed for a while now, and I can say that this is one of many wins.
So it's really good to see. And I think Dennis has been a force for positive change in the United States. Not everyone has been, though. I call it the pomp problem. And I'm asking you, what do we do as a community about the influenzas? So here's my question. Do you think it matters who represents Bitcoin in the wider media? Then, of course, think about this, too, from who the wider media is appealing to as well. Traditional media is trying and struggling to explain Bitcoin to their viewers. And so they need people who are good communicators because their audience really doesn't get it. And so this is where I think Anthony Pompliano, or known as Pomp, really comes in as sort of the quintessential example of what does the community do about these types of individuals and what specifically should the show do?
All right. Locomotive continues, folks. Bitcoin ETFs trading $111 billion last month, triple what they did in January and February. With us now, Pomp investment investor, Anthony Pompliano. As you can tell by the swooshes, we are on mainstream media again. And this is Fox Business, their midday show when people are watching and they have it on in the background or they have lunch going on. The financial wonks love these channels and they bring on Pomp to explain questions that are typical of their viewers, that they maybe have heard from their viewers or they understand their audience.
You know, Pomp, this is the kind of thing you talked about, right? Right. I mean, the demand has been absolutely through the roof. Here's the interesting thing, though, because it went, I guess, what was the high recently? Seventy five, seventy two, something like that. Seventy two thousand. Seventy two thousand. It's pulled back to sixty five thousand. A narrative there out there now saying, see, gold is up and Bitcoin is down. It's not a store of value. What do you say to folks who are saying maybe it's got some investment opportunities, trading opportunities, but it still hasn't proven itself as a store of value?
Now, Bitcoiners hear this and they roll their eyes, but I have probably heard this and seen this come up a dozen times, if not more. This week alone. It is actually a question that is being asked. And we need somebody who can attack it in a way that is understandable by Bitcoiners and understandable by noobs. It's where Pomp comes in. Well, when you want to store value, usually what you're talking about is not storing value from yesterday to today. What you're trying to store value is from today for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, right? And so when I think of Bitcoin, I think about, can I actually preserve my economic value for my kids or my grandchildren?
And right now, Bitcoin, I think, is probably the best place that you're going to be able to do that. Now, if we go and we look at what people have been historically using as a store of value, there's gold and there's dollars. Gold is up. It's near an all-time high. But we're talking about now it hits an all-time high because it goes up $10, $20, $30. These moves aren't meaningful to people who buy gold right here and see a $30, $40, $50 increase in the price. Now, the dollar is down in purchasing power terms, 25% since 2020. So you've lost 25% of your purchasing power in four years.
Bitcoin during that same time period is up 800%. And so what I think people are starting to realize is, wait a minute, if I store some or a large portion of my wealth in Bitcoin, everything around me gets cheaper over time rather than more expensive. And that's what you want out of a store of value. Clear, concise, well-spoken. But with the good also comes the bad with the influenzas. So why is BlockFi, why does BlockFi need this much money? First of all, what are they going to do? Over 500 employees now around the world. If you don't remember or you weren't around or couldn't care, BlockFi crashed a few days after FTX's collapse.
On November 28th, 2022, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They had more than 100,000 creditors, according to their filings, and BlockFi had around 227 million in uninsured funds in the bank. In October of 2023, BlockFi emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy and announced they're going to try to figure things out, going to try to repay some people. But it sounds like some of that, or maybe the majority of that, depends on how much they can recoup from the FTX payout, which has yet to happen. So depending on that, they may repay some of their customers.
225,000 users, over $15 billion in assets on the platform, $50 million a month, a month, $50 million a month in revenue. Let's roll. Zach, Flory, the rest of the BlockFi team are absolutely killing it. They built an amazing business, obviously. And anytime you can get a who's who at the table of all these investors, something's going right. Right. So I am bullish, bullish, bullish. But maybe he's learned its lesson. I mean, a lot of people accidentally mess around with the altcoins before they figure out the Bitcoin is the only true crypto. OK, it still may be volatile.
Right. In the last 11 years, number one asset eight times, the worst three times. Yes. So buckle up, boys and girls. But you want to be there. So if you go back over 10 years now, Bitcoin's compound annual growth rate for a decade is 60 percent or higher. And so when you look at that, you say to yourself, OK, obviously it is going up in price. But the question is, if you're building a portfolio, the average investor is not going to go put 100 percent of their portfolio in one asset like Bitcoin. Instead, what they want to do, as we've seen through various portfolio constructions, et cetera, is you want to take a couple non-correlated assets, put them together and then have a portfolio that should do well over time.
Bitcoin tends to be very low correlation or no correlation to traditional assets. It goes up a lot. It is volatile along the way. And so the key thing with Bitcoin is if you think that you're going to speculate or you're going to gamble or you're going to trade this thing, you probably aren't going to do so hot. But if you can simply learn to just buy an asset, hold it for the long term, Bitcoin has been very good to those investors. And I think that it will continue to do that moving forward. All right. Boost in and tell me your thoughts. Is there an appropriate statute of limitations for somebody like this?
And in your mind, does good behavior after the fact earn them early forgiveness? I genuinely would like to know, because I'm going to factor it into how much we do or don't hear from these types of individuals in the show. And while we're talking about mysterious individuals... There is Mr. 100 out there. Now, when this show launched, we speculated, could it be Jeff Bezos? I mean, it's possible. It's possible it could have been Jeff Bezos, but it seemed, you know, more and more unlikely as time went on. Well, this Mr. 100 has bought an unbelievable amount of Bitcoin in just the last few days.
In fact, 2,566 in the last five days, and they seem to be buying every single dip. We now have somebody who's in the top 100 in just a matter of weeks out there buying and stacking Bitcoin like crazy. We don't know who it is, but people are starting to speculate it is a rumor. We don't really know, but it's a rumor that it's a nation state. All right, coming up, your boost, some big project updates and the clip of the week. But first, thank you to Podhome.fm, sponsor of this here episode. That's my podcasting, 2-0-0 hosting platform with unlimited shows and episodes powered by unlimited Podhome AI.
Tools that make it easy to take advantage of things like chapters. You can have clips. They'll automatically transcribe the episode and make that available as a file that shows up in the podcast player automatically. And they have fantastic support for live streams. Check it out, Podhome.fm. Use the promo code TWIB and you'll get three months for free. Podhome.fm, my podcasting, my podcasting 2.0, my podcasting 2.0, pop, pop, pop, pop platform. That's right. Thank you to Podhome for sponsoring this episode of This Week in Bitcoin. I really do appreciate you. This is the way.
Now we have some boosts coming into the show right now. And Eric, a.k.a. our podcast, is coming in as our baller booster this week with 120,000 sats. Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate that. Coming in from Podverse, he writes, Hey, Chris, thank you so much for creating this week in Bitcoin. The show strikes the balance between news and practical resource and updates. I was hoping to get your advice from the... Oh, I was able to get advice, he says, from the Bitcoin Dad podcast to get Excalibur up and running from my wallet under my control.
I prefer the release dates of the show on Thursday or Friday so I can listen during my weekend time. I'm also now using Podhome to host my podcast, thanks to your recommendation. Very nice. Thank you very much. Listener Jeff comes in with $27,222. That's a McDuck plus a $5,000. This old duck still got it. Says, let's get this show to the top of the charts. Thank you, Jeff. Appreciate that. He says, also, I like the song. Thank you very much. Boost for the artist. Ah, that $5,000 went to the artist. That's really great. Thank you. support that support that value for value music I say, Oppie1984 came in with 4,000 sats and just says, support boost. B-O-O-S-T.
NoSecondBest is back with 15,222 sats. There is no second best. HighSignal confirmed. The last clip was so good, I'm buying that guy's book. Yeah, I found the whole interview on YouTube. You can search it and see it. Nullifier came in with 5,000 sats. These have been great, Chris. Keep it up. Thank you, Nullifier. I appreciate it. And Adam Curry, the Podfather, comes in with 10,000 sats. Podcasts are cool. Hello, Podfather. Coming in a day early. The perfect listen after no agenda. Yeah, nice. That's a good little combo. Wind down with a little This Week in Bitcoin. Thank you, Podfather. Appreciate the value.
Bob B. comes in with 5,000 sats. I hoard that with your kind. Loving the pod. As for the release day, the numbers might be commute related. Any day is fine with me since I rarely do those anymore. Lucky you, sir. Lucky you. That's got to be nice. I work for myself but yet still manage to give myself a little bit of a commute. It's not bad, though. It's 20 minutes unless there's bad traffic. But in my neck of the woods, we have this thing called Tulip Festival where all the normies drive up from Seattle into my neck of the woods to look at flowers and take selfies. And so then I have a much, like I have a triple the commute during spring.
It's horrible, I know. Poor me. Eric Nord comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! Support boost. It's good to have, quote, plan B back. Ah, tell me you're a long timer without telling me you're a long timer, Eric. Thank you for the boost. Todd from Northern Virginia comes in with 7,777 sats. Smoke if you got him. He says my vote for the episode release date is Tuesdays. I'd estimate that 50% of podcasts I subscribe to release on Fridays. It's a very crowded day. Yeah, and so is Sunday. And as an OG who's been publishing, you know, I mean, I mean, OK, I know the Podfather probably beats me.
I know other people have been publishing on Sunday for a long time, but I've been publishing on Sunday for like 16, 17 years. So almost. Right. I mean, a while. So yeah, now I look at my I look at my podcast catcher in the morning on a Monday and there's like five or six or seven shows. And Linux Unplugged, which came out Sunday night, is like off the screen now. Now, maybe I just have too many podcasts. Maybe that's actually the problem. Thank you, Todd. Appreciate the boost. PC null reference comes in with 2,000 cents. Right? Did I get that right? I think I did. Boost. A little pew-pew for you. I was wondering if you will also randomly or by extras do side shows and dig deeper into Bitcoin Lightning and the latest developments as a more technical level for beginners.
Ah, so like technical deep dives. Hmm. Hmm. I don't have plans at the moment, but I would be willing to consider it, especially when it relates to things around podcasting 2.0 to help people figure that out. Figure it out. That's a good question. I'll think more about it also in the resources section of this show. I'll also consider putting more learning resources in there, videos and things like that. So that's perhaps a place to start. Adversary 17 comes in with 2,048 sats. Great episode, he says. And I think that is our deliminator right there. That's above the 2,000-sat cutoff for the on-the-air reading, just for time.
But thank you, everybody, who does boost in. I see Chad boosted in and Gene Bean boosted in and Hypersensitive and Ace boosted in. We had 16 total boosters, stacked 212,915 sats. We started messing around with boost. You're doing a good job. on. Music. Thank you, everybody who supports the show. It is a value for value podcast. And I try to be transparent about the numbers so you know where they're at. It is a high effort podcast. So I appreciate your boosts. And of course, your messages. Music. If you'd like to boost go get a new podcast app podcast apps.com. Podverse fountain FM and castomatic are some of my absolute favorites.
Favorites, you top them off with something like Strike or use RoboSats, anything on the Lightning Network, then you can boost in and send your message and support the show. Music. Really appreciate everybody who took a little bit of time to do that this week. Let's get into the project updates this week because there's some big ones. Mutiny Wallet version 0.6.1 has a brand new home screen, a Nostra profile set up, Federation discovery for Fetterman, and a new profile page that makes it really simple if you're just using it to like square up between friends or maybe family wallets. Really, really nice release from Mutiny Wallet this week.
I'll have a link to that in the show notes. If you're a Graphing OS, or perhaps maybe Graphing OS as you call it, user, there has been a vulnerability that is getting actively exploited in the wild this week, and they have issued an update that fixes that. I just updated my Graphing OS machine this morning, a little Pixel 7 Pro, not so little. And I just wanted to put that out there because I often recommend Graphing OS as if you're going to use a mobile device to do some Bitcoin stuff. I think Graphing OS is a great choice. It's probably my favorite mobile operating system, but it is based on Android.
And so when there are issues out there, they're on top of it, and that update is out right now. And I encourage everybody to go get it. And then I don't know if this is quite a project update, but it's noteworthy, that's for sure. Coinbase has thrown in the towel about building an internal Lightning system and has selected LightSpark for their Lightning services. LightSpark offers an SDK and APIs, and I'm sure lots of compliance, and Coinbase is going to use LightSpark's remote key signing implementation, allowing Coinbase to benefit from scalable and reliable node infrastructure without having to manage Lightning themselves. themselves.
So they had a team internally at Coinbase looking at standing up their own Lightning infra, but they just couldn't get it done. And I think the bloke that was formerly in charge of implementing Lightning might be out. And he had said some really stupid stuff about Bitcoin during the time on Twitter. So maybe better that he's out. And then our last project update that I am super elated to see is BTC Pay Server has gotten a big, hearty donation from. From the Tether folks, yeah, a $100,000 grant to the BTC Pay Server folks. Their developers write, quote, I'm thankful to Tether for recognizing BTC Pay Server's significance as a Bitcoin FOSS project and for its generous grant.
This contribution greatly empowers us to concentrate on our mission, enabling anyone to accept Bitcoin, unhindered by geographic, political, or financial barriers. years. That's according to the Rockstar dev, a core contributor and a founding member of BTC pay server. I think that's good to see. I suppose I'm, I remain somebody who's cautious about Tether. That's my only hesitation here, but it's absolutely great to see the BTC pay server get this a hundred thousand dollar grants. One of the best projects out there in the Bitcoin self-hosting category. This next pick, I can only do it for so long. It's like, I got to do it now or wait four more years.
It's BitcoinHavening.live, H-L-V-I-N-G.live, BitcoinHavening.live. It is a very simple countdown. It's not anything too dramatic. It's like an old classic flip clock, but it's kind of fun. And right now it says the reward date is, or the reward drop date, as they put it, or AKA the Havening, is April 20th, 2024 at 12.02 UTC. That's fascinating Because when I was doing my pre-show research, it was about 10 minutes or so earlier than that. So since I, which has only been a couple hours ago, since I was starting prepping the show, it's moved forward a little bit.
That's why you need a countdown clock. Because it's just going to be based on TikTok next block. As of right now, it's like 5.02 a.m. in the Pacific Northwest. You know what? I'll get up. I'm going to get up for the halvening. Should we live stream it? Yeah. Is that stupid? I don't know. That might be stupid. Let me know. Send a boost. I feel like I want to celebrate it somehow. Never before has the community been so aware of the happening. It's kind of exciting. I've always just been a loner here. All right. A final clip of the week. You know, there's during this time, there's there's just the funniest things that I'll catch.
Which, and like I said earlier in the show, it's really the mainstream media trying to get their heads around Bitcoin and how to explain it to their audience and answer a lot of the common criticisms. You'd think that these people would understand a little bit better, but perhaps they're just trying to speak for the people. I don't know. So they bring on Strikes Jack Mollers once again to CNBC's Power Lunch. I've played a clip from this once before. And Jack's really figured out the role that they want him to play. And they absolutely, when they book him, they want him to play a very specific role. And he nailed it this week.
For me to know that the crisis is over so I can see we're not there yet. Kelly, I got luscious locks, but I'll toss the hood on for you. How are we? So they start with some jokes about how he should be wearing a hoodie. So then he puts his hood on. Ha ha ha. So it starts, you know, real light and funny. We're all just friends. That has blown up our financial system. Hell of a Monday, huh? So do you think, okay, let me ask you to you this way. or put it to you this way. A banking crisis is deflationary. And so when I see Balaji and others saying Bitcoin's going to go to a million dollars, it may go up, but that may be because of the Fed's response here.
The 2010s were not hyperinflationary. There's no obvious reason why now would be hyperinflationary either. So Kelly, it's actually not that complicated, and I'm excited to try and convey that to America. There's a market term that's used here in Chicago a lot. It's demand finds supply. What do I mean by that? If Ken Griffin is going to want to buy the most expensive condo in America, someone will build it for him. Someone will put a 201st floor in Miami's tallest building. If silver is going to 1,000x, I will walk into my kitchen right now, I will melt all my silverware, and I will sell it at market.
If gold is going to rally, Elon Musk will find more on Mars. Bitcoin is, this is a super important point, Bitcoin is the only monetary instrument in the history of our species that is fixed. It does not matter how much more demand comes into the asset class, Kelly. No one will ever be able to make more of it. There are two things I can guarantee you in my life. One, that I'll die. And the other, that there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoin. And those are the two things that I can only value as my life and my Bitcoin. You know, when I start to think about how to explain Bitcoin to normies, I start to think more and more.
Perhaps you start with the 21 million cap and how rock solid that is and how it's not like a line of code in the Bitcoin source code that says total equals 21. It is the issuance schedule. It's the very nature of the protocol that guarantees us the fixed issuance. It's brilliant and it is truly a unique asset in that way. And people who understand investing will understand why that's unique and good. Now, the reality is, especially I've discovered in the tech community, they're financially illiterate at scale. scale. When the Bitcoin ETF landed, the reason why the tech community didn't say anything, why the Verge didn't have an article about the first open source project ever being commoditized up as an ETF or packaged up, I guess you should say, as an ETF.
The reason why they didn't have a story about that is because they don't know what an ETF is. So they can't get excited about it. But people who maybe are a little bit older, you know, like our parents and their parents' generation, or if they're still around. But you know what? People that have invested, so it could be younger people too, I suppose, they understand. They understand why it's a big deal. And that's why Jack's trying to communicate that to them. So it is the only fixed supply asset, Kelly. It's not that complicated. It's going to go up because everything else can be issued more.
Does that make sense? Why is it? You've got to explain to me one thing. Why is the supply fixed? And is that because someone says it's fixed who could change their mind? No, it's a great point and question, Tyler. It's because it's written in the software and the software is distributed. There is no one person to ask. There is no one person to trust. The whole decentralization, is it decentralized so that you could put pictures and NFTs on the blockchain? Is it decentralized so that you could fix gaming? No, it's decentralized so that the defendants of the monetary policy are distributed is so that it's a network of computers that actually defend the policy and instrumentation of the monetary asset that is not the case for ethereum that is not the case for any other altcoin that is not the case for the u.s dollar that is not the case for miami real estate that is not the case for precious metals it is the all it is the only monetary instrument that has its monetary policy distributed and defended forgive me for being Very dense.
But if you say that it's because this is the way the software is written and it is immutable, it is unchanged. Why couldn't the software be rewritten or why couldn't the authors of the software or the guardians of the software write a new software that creates Bitcoin 2.0 with another supply, a fixed supply of Bitcoin? Yeah. So, Tyler, I run Bitcoin software and someone tried to do this. I want you to Google Bitcoin cash after this interview is over. Someone said, I want to change the rules of Bitcoin. I may want to create more of a supply. I may want to make it faster. I may want to make it do a backflip.
I may make it want to store pictures of monkeys drooling on themselves on the blockchain. And they created it and they created new rules and they called it Bitcoin cash. It's a different asset it's a different instrument and when someone tries to pay me in it my software rules that i run in my home in a room over there says nope that's invalid that thing is a piece of poop and i don't accept it because it is invalidating the rules of the system that were set out by satoshi nakamoto over a decade ago so you can create whatever you want you want to create fed now coin flip a dookie coin i don't care there's 21 million of the things that i run and that i protect and that i save in and those rules were started a long time ago and that's That's what the network runs.
So if you change the rules, you're creating a different monetary asset and a different instrument. It doesn't matter. Now, it's not a bad answer, but it's not a great answer, and it could be a lot tighter. I think you don't even mention Bitcoin Cash. Why give that piece of crap a plug on national television? I think what you say is, Peter, it's been forked a thousand times, and none of them have the network effect. And as you see in tech, the network effect matters quite a bit. Additionally, there are three major different interest groups that all have to have their incentives aligned for any change code to be accepted at scale.
You have miners, you have the developers, and you have the node operators, and most of them have different incentives, and they all would have to align for that to go out and all of them to agree. But then also you have the end user, so really you have the fourth cohort, which is perhaps the largest cohort, which is the hodlers. They also would have to accept the new software patches, and who in their right mind is going to be incentivized to accept a patch like that that would destroy the value of their Bitcoin? None of the miners would consent to that, none of the node operators, none of the hodlers, and the developers wouldn't be able to do that because you'd have to fundamentally change the issuance schedule.
That's the answer. Not a bad answer from Jack, but I think it could have been a little. Music. To the show. Tell me what you think, what you'd like to hear, and of course the questions I asked earlier. I'd love this to be your number one Bitcoin news podcast. If you could spread it around the podcasting 2-0 community and Jupyter Broadcasting, I would be delighted. We're going to feature another value for value song this week as we wrap up. Once the song begins, if you boost in, your sats will go to support the artist at a 90% rate. Pretty good for them, and they love it, you guys.
When I monitor social media for this kind of stuff on Mastodon and Noster, Twitter, I see new artists coming on saying, I'm getting sats. I'm finally getting paid for my music. Who are these people? How do I thank them? And I've seen it several times now. It's very cool to see. So this week, we're playing a track by Real Richard, and it's called Element Zero. Thanks for being here. See you next week. That is basically what Satoshi found when he discovered Bitcoin. You can view it as an element without protons or neutrons. So this is an element without matter. Music.
