Job done! Didn't you notice? Inflation has been licked; the Yen carry trade is nearly wound down, and the fed is about to cut. What could go wrong?!
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Links:
- Wholesale inflation shows few warning signs. Fed interest-rate cut still on track.
- US PPI July 2024: Producer Prices Increased by Less Than Forecast - Bloomberg
- Credit Card and Auto Loan Delinquencies Surge in the Second Quarter – MishTalk
- Thursday morning JP Morgan said 75% of the carry trade was unwound.
- NEW EVIDENCE THAT Kamala Harris WILL CONTINUE CRYPTO CRACKDOWN
- Democrats launch 'Crypto for Harris' campaign to counter Trump’s industry appeal
- President Trump's 20 core promises to America - No Bitcoin on there
- Tim Pool on X: "The CIA invented bitcoin
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I think it was Heather Long at the Washington Post this morning who said it's. Looking more and more like the U.S. Inflation battle is done. Are you willing to go that far? Absolutely. I've been predicting since the summer of 2022 that we get to two to three percent by the end of last year and early this year. And we're basically there and we think that we'll get to two percent by the end of the year. If you take out shelter from the CPI, you're basically there. You know, when the kids in the backseat ask, are we there yet? We're there if you take out shelter. or we're at the... Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Music. Welcome in to episode 23 of This Week in Bitcoin. Congratulations, everybody. Grab a hat, get Get some champagne. Mission accomplished. Inflation's been defeated. You didn't notice? Yeah, according to the world's top financial analyst, Daddy J-Pow, he's arrived. The economy is landing soft. He's pulling into the garage right now. It's good news, everyone, and you should feel really good. I mean, sure, inflation's up, but it's going up a lot slower. lower. So that's a win. The economists got this one right. Bang on. Two tenths increase in the core. Two tenths increase in the headline, just as forecast.
Now, base effects are somewhat hard to measure. So we do see, even though we're in line with the headline number, we see it drop on a year over year basis to two point nine percent from three percent. That is better than. Better than expected is really why I think they're so excited. I mean, there is some signal in here. Inflation coming lower than expected always is really well received by the market. But here's the reality. Inflation at 3%, that's the first time it's gotten that low since March of 2021, if you go by their official number.
And core inflation has dropped to 3.2%, which is the lowest since April of 2021. Okay. You know, I mean, I think 3% is still egregious. I think these numbers are counterfeit. But it doesn't really exactly matter that I think that because the Fed follows these, the market follows, so I guess what matters is what they think, I suppose. I think the consumer is running out of juice. And besides looking at this stuff, one of the things that I watch is companies like Home Depot, because these companies represent new projects. But also, I think these companies can represent trying to repair what you already have, trying to keep what you've got already going.
And so where Home Depot goes, so goes the consumer. And they forecasted they expect things to go down. But its forecast is really the big news here. The company cut its comparable sales outlook for the year, saying it now expects a decline of 3 to 4 percent. It previously expected a decline of about 1 percent. While its forecast for total sales went up, that's only because Home Depot added sales from the recent acquisition of SRS Distribution. Otherwise, it would amount to a cut of both comparable sales and its total sales forecast. CFO Richard McPhail told me Home Depot is contending with a new challenge along with high interest rates.
It's heard that from home professionals like contractors. Pros tell us that for the first time, their customers aren't just deferring because of higher financing costs, he said. They're deferring because of a greater sense of uncertainty in the economy. So that's something that's new this quarter that they've been hearing more widely from both those pros and DIY customers. DIY customers. In other words, people trying to repair stuff. And I just think there's no juice left, right? So over 10% of credit card outstanding debt. He's over 90 days delinquent now. With prices rising, major chains are looking at how to keep customers.
That includes Starbucks, who replaced their CEO after just a year, bringing in the head of Chipotle. Tom Costello explains why he has a tall task ahead. This morning's news broke just as Americans were sipping their first cup. Breaking news to bring you, and this is big, Starbucks' CEO. The CEO of Starbucks, Loxman Nerisman, out. as the world's most iconic copy brand struggles with customers who've said no to higher prices Starbucks new CEO is Brian nickel who turned at Chipotle around after a devastating e coli outbreak in 2015 improving quality and using technology to speed up orders doubling Chipotle's revenue and we We thought he would be the right leader for this moment.
Thank you. Have a good one. The new CEO's challenge, luring back Starbucks customers who've been driven away by inflation, long waits, and cheaper coffee at competitors. I don't like the prices. I think they have gone up a lot. It's a good bit cheaper at the local coffee shop. The move comes as higher prices have turned many Americans away. KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's, all reporting falling sales, are now offering value meals, while under nickel, Chipotle grew its revenue in the last quarter. What are the problems Starbucks has had with consumers? What do consumers want? Consumers are looking for value, and they want to feel like when they spend money at a premium brand like Starbucks, it's worth both their money and their time.
$6 for a tall, small drink. Fed up with inflation, more Americans are simply saying no. Tom Costello, NBC News, Washington. So let's talk about how Bitcoin does fix this because I've talked a lot about, recently about how Bitcoin fixes this at the individual level. And I don't want to talk about that today. I think we have to zoom out because for the individual to be solved for, that means that every average Joe on the street has to understand Bitcoin and be hedging against their government, debasing them. So it just seems like we should zoom out a little bit.
So before I do that, I just want to quickly put into practical terms how Bitcoin has protected individuals. Then we'll get into how it can protect the state. In 2016, the average U.S. house cost $288,400 or about 664 Bitcoin. In 2020, the average house price was $328,900 or about 45 Bitcoin. And now in 2024, the average house is $434,700. I wish they were that cheap in Washington, which works out to be about six Bitcoin. So do you understand now how Bitcoin protects your purchasing power over time? The cost of a house has gone up a lot. 2020, just four years ago, they were $100,000 less, but they've gone down in terms of Bitcoin.
They've gone up in terms of dollar and gone down in terms of Bitcoin. That's really powerful. That's truly protecting your purchase power. But what about the state? How can Bitcoin help protect the state, which in theory would help everyone because it's not good to debase the currency. It's not good to have a sovereign debt crisis. Nobody really wins from that. River put out a great article and a great video that talks a little bit about this. And I want to play a little moment, not all of it, but just a moment of it for you. Let's take the example of the United States to explain. The U.S.
National debt is over $35 trillion today. Last year, over a trillion dollars in taxpayer money went towards paying off just the interest on this debt. Anything that can help the U.S. pay off its debt strengthens the financial position of the country. One way to strengthen your position is by holding assets that increase in value over time. If this happens faster than new money is being printed, then it could help a country pay off a larger amount of debt in the future. The orange line represents how Bitcoin has grown by an average of over 60% per year for the past 10 years.
Bitcoin's value grows so fast because it has a limited supply of 21 million, making it more scarce than gold, currencies, and other stores of value. This supply can't be changed. You would have to convince the vast majority of the network participants that the Bitcoin they hold will become worth less, and they won't agree to that. Many people have tried to create copies of Bitcoin, but these never got close to having the same network effects. One country that already has a strategic Bitcoin reserve is El Salvador. It holds around 5,800 Bitcoin, worth around $340 million, and has made a profit of 38% or around $50 million so far.
The United States already owns 213,246 Bitcoin today, more than any other country, by confiscating it from the Silk Road marketplace and funds stolen from the exchange Bitfinex. If the U.S. Could obtain 5% of all the Bitcoin supply, for example, this could help to pay off a significant portion of the national debt. If more countries create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the price is impacted more. So being among the first countries to adopt it can be a great strategic move to increase your wealth relative to other countries. It forces all countries to consider this decision or risk being left behind. mind.
Bitcoin and all of its individual holders also benefit from this adoption as owning and using it will keep getting easier over time. That's really the game theory right there, bringing wealth to everyone. Now, seven months ago, I'll note that the conversation that seemed crazy to us then was, what would the banks do with Bitcoin? Are the banks really going to adopt Bitcoin in some way? Are they going to fight it? Boy, have we really seen the answer to that this year, haven't we? With the launch of the ETFs. I mean, just yesterday, Goldman Sachs, famous Bitcoin haters, famous Bitcoin haters for years now, revealed they have $418 million in Bitcoin ETFs.
So the conversation, the conversation is turning to how will governments use Bitcoins to solve their giant, crazy fiscal problems? You really just, you got to sit back and And sit back, I mean, and just appreciate the shift in that narrative, even if it's still going to take years. We're here. Music. All right, I got a couple of Kathy Wood clips. She is the CIO at ARK Investment, which she's got some hits. She's got some wins. But I think she's a very sharp gal. And she put out a video this week, and I want to play two clips from it for you. One is her thoughts on why we shouldn't get our hopes on a rate cut to solve us and save us, I should say, from a recession.
Because actually, there is usually a lull or a dip when the market is expecting rate cuts. And Kathy explains. Now, why is the consumer going to weaken or continue weakening? We believe it's because corporations are losing pricing power. And in order to salvage margins, they're going to be doing two things. In other words, corporations have raised prices as far as they can get them. I mean, we just talked about McDonald's and Home Depot. They can't raise prices anymore. They still have their costs have still gone up a bit because inflation is still going up. They're raising wages that trickles in.
California just passed a big, you know, a big law that impacts the wages at all McDonald's in California. They're absorbing those costs. So their costs are actually still increasing. But they've lost the power to charge the consumer more because the consumer's tapped out. Corporations are losing pricing power. And in order to salvage margins, they're going to be doing two things. They will be laying people off and they will be accelerating moves to increase productivity. I would say that we are going into a high alert for layoffs. We are entering a high alert phase. Yes.
This is something I'm going to watch on the show, and this is for the listeners that work day jobs, 9 to 5. Be aware. High alert mode has been issued from this week in Bitcoin. And it's high alert because Cathie Wood is correct. They are going to want to maintain profit margins. Costs of doing business have gone up. They need to maintain margins. So they're going to have to do layoffs. Additionally, that means hiring is going to be soft. So layoffs are going to happen. and hiring is going to be soft. So this is the official warning right here from This Week in Bitcoin. Plan accordingly. Start building up some dry powder. I don't know what you do, but just start planning just in case.
And they will be accelerating moves to increase productivity. So the unemployment rate will go up. That certainly is getting the Fed to change its spots as we're listening to Chairman Powell. And I think now that household net worth being hurt by the stock market going down is another reason that the Fed is going to relent. Now, one last thought here. Interest rates coming down should be very positive for the equity markets, but they will not arrest a recession very quickly. In fact, if consumers and businesses know that interest rates and maybe prices are coming down, what will they do? They will wait.
Now, the market in its wisdom, we believe, already understands. Yeah, so they're already kind of pricing this in. We're kind of watching that develop right now. It could be. I mean, who knows the way this goes? It could be we avoid the recession, but it could be that we end up in a recessionary-like period, a rolling recession, if you will. That spreads, but our assets pump. Which would be really, really strange, you know, because you could be getting richer at the same time you're getting poor, which is essentially what's been happening. So it seems like we'll just see an acceleration of that, I guess. Not so strange.
Actually, now that I think about it, no, that's about what you'd expect. All right. Then shifting gears, Kathy also talked about the state of the yen carry trade, which we talked about quite a bit in the last episode. It usually means the market is meeting a cathartic moment or is in a cathartic moment. And it usually means something is changing. And as you know, we have believed for quite some time that the U.S. Economy and maybe the global economy has been going through a rolling recession ever since the Fed started raising interest rates. Well, the other thing that was happening during that time, apparently, was an increase in the carry trade involving borrowing yen, so really shorting yen, and buying dollars and investing them into higher yielding assets than in Japan, so playing the spread.
The other reason this became a very... Widespread trade is the yen has been depreciating. So shorting yen meant that the investor or the speculator was benefiting from the yen going down. Well, that changed abruptly this week as the Bank of Japan increased rates more than expected and seemed more determined to continue increasing rates than many people expected. So apparently, lots of margin calls and a sell-off in a lot of assets. And now the VIX has calmed down. Now, we're not sure if the carry trade has unwind completely. J.P. Morgan is saying we're halfway there. So perhaps we'll We'll see some more volatility.
But I do believe that the Fed now is on high alert. See, she's kind of couching there, if you notice. She's saying JP Morgan says that the yen carry trade is unwound. Well, the reason why she's not saying that she believes that is because it's probably bullcrap. As long as the yen remains cheaper, the spread exists. As long as the spread exists, the degens on Wall Street are going to take advantage of it. In fact, if you look at the charts, it kind of looks like people are rebounding back into the yen right now, like they're winding back up, they're winding up, whatever you call that.
So there has been some unwinding, but I don't think this goes away until the dollar is cheaper than the yen, right? Because that's why they're doing it. They're doing it so that way they can get themselves a nice, cheap loan. And then they can go lever up and get a bunch of whatever, assets or stocks. And as long as that spreads there, they're going to do it. Hopefully they're on it, right? Cross your fingers. Hopefully they don't blow the whole thing up. Moving right along. I do want to talk about Bitcoin and politics just for a moment. We're about 90 days out from the election and there's still a lot going on in this area.
Circle had a representative. I don't I don't know if I let me see if I did. I note it down. See if I noted it down. Oh, it's the Circle CEO. You know, the guys behind USDC. They sat down on CNBC and they wanted to ask about crypto in politics because as I record, the Harris campaign is putting together a crypto for Harris Zoom meeting. And this is the second one that they've done. They've also had a little get together at the White House, which is what the Circle CEO was there to talk about, all in an effort to court the crypto community for Kamala Harris. Digital currencies should be a nonpartisan issue by now, you would think, but they are not.
Joining us, Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire is here. And you can save me from myself, or at least my voice right now. What do you think is going on here? And this sort of very interesting political bifurcation that's taking place in the crypto community. Says the guy that constantly politically bifurcates Bitcoin. It's fascinating to watch. As you know, I've been going to Capitol Hill for 11 years almost. most. First Senate hearing on crypto in 2013 and has spent an enormous amount of time across Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, you know, every which way.
What's interesting is that if you look at what happened over the past year, you actually saw a lot of bipartisan work getting done. You saw major bills in stablecoin, major bills in market structure advancing and so it looked like this was a purple issue and I actually believe I think crypto is purple and and you know I think now we're in politics though we're trying to get people elected and so people are figuring out okay this is an industry here to stay there's a lot of investment from that industry in in in the campaigns themselves and so people are staking out these new positions but it actually reflects in many ways if you'd look two years ago, it would be very hard to believe that crypto is going to be a presidential political issue.
It would be very hard to believe that there'd be major, major legislation. The industry would be where it is. You know, two years ago, it was a very different world. My observation, it is also notable the two different routes that the campaign seemed to be taking. Trump's route, they went to Nashville, seems to be a little more community focused. But Vice President Harris's route seems to be more outreach to the industry, like the Circle CEO, Coinbase, Mark Cuban, for some reason. They're looking more like they want to build ties with the industry, probably because that's where the money's at, I guess.
But digging into Kamala Harris's advisor choices, it suggests that her plan right now, at least, is to keep Biden's advisors on crypto. Two of whom are key anti-officials in the Biden administration who were the key architects of Biden admin's anti-crypto crusade known as Chokepoint 2.0. She's bringing two of them along. It's possible they're temporary. It's possible they could pivot their policy because none of them seem to actually tightly hold any of their beliefs around crypto. They seem to be strategic beliefs around crypto. But we'll see. I'll keep an eye on how that crypto for Harris Zoom call goes tonight and report if anything interesting comes out. Now, on the Trump side, while he's been really good at outreach so far, he's not delivering on follow through.
President Trump released a 20 core promises to America. It's a list of 20 promises. It's basically his platform in a top 20 style. There's nothing about Bitcoin or crypto on the list. Number 13, keep the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. You know, maybe the story behind how you do that is via Bitcoin bailout somehow. But there's nothing on his list about Bitcoin. And, you know, it's notable after the big splash he made. There's really been no follow up. So I thought I'd point that out. But so neither one of them, I'm trying to say. Also, his sons are launching a new shit coin. So there's that as well.
Nobody's going to have a perfect track record on this, right? It takes people years, even people that become maxis, it takes them years to sort it all out. What we really want to see is just that they'll govern from a pro standpoint, a pro view, because this is a pro human technology. And so that's what we're really watching to see from either camp. I feel like that signal is coming stronger, obviously from RFK and obviously from Trump. But the Harris campaign seems to be kind of fumbling around trying to figure out how to send that signal. They just they haven't figured it out yet.
Now, I don't know if you spend any time on social media. I hope you don't. I do. So you don't have to. And one of the things that I've noticed is the question of who is Satoshi Nakamoto is rolling around a lot. Really, since the Bitcoin Nashville conference. I mean, it's a classic question. And this time conspiracy bacon really seems to be getting fried around who satoshi might be and i blame tucker carlson it started with tucker he was at an event it might have been the trump event something around the bitcoin conference he wasn't at the bitcoin conference and he claimed that the cia created bitcoin now i'm going to apologize first of all i don't usually play tucker carlson clips because it's not a political show and this isn't a political topic but i want to get into this.
And second reason is, I don't know if this was like on YouTube tinies or some sort of tick tank or something like that, but it's got obnoxious music in the background. I apologize about that, but I want you to hear in his own words what he said about Bitcoin. Crypto people aren't just in it to make a buck. They're in it to change the world forever. These are not shallow people. These are people who can answer every single question except who was Satoshi, which they don't answer. Someone should answer that. Nope. I think we know. Anyway, in fact, I have a friend who's probably sitting here who told me he did know, but I don't believe him. And I don't care if it was the CIA, it doesn't matter.
The idea is still a great idea. Obviously it was the CIA. It's like Signal. They got there first. It's a honey trap. Yeah, it's a honey trap. It was created by the CIA, he said, which then caused other investigative journalists like Tim Poole to go research. And he asked ChatGPT. And because ChatGPT gave him some sort of cryptic answer about who Satoshi Nakamoto is, he assumed, well, it's clear the CIA invented Bitcoin. So then you had Tim Poole and Tucker Carlson going around claiming that the CIA created Bitcoin since the Bitcoin conference. Now, it's funny because if you go listen to Tucker in another interview in a totally separate venue later on, he clarifies that he doesn't actually know that the CIA created it. He was just guessing.
Start the crypto movement. I know you were at the Bitcoin conference recently and you told them CIA started Bitcoin. They got really angry on Twitter. I don't know that. But until you can tell me who Satoshi was, I have some questions. Yeah, sure. Some natural questions. And of course, also at that event where Tucker said that Bitcoin was created by the CIA, he revealed that he just clearly doesn't understand it at all. And it's so cringe embarrassing. Just be totally blunt with you. And I'm sure someone's filming this, but I don't really care until I can, I don't know, stage a getaway with Bitcoin.
I'm serious. Until I can move from country to country with Bitcoin and not be tracked as I do it, as is my inalienable human right. I have the right of free movement as a human being. I had the right of free will as a human being. That was not granted to me by the government. I was born with that. It was bestowed by God. Until I can exercise that with this currency, it's less meaningful to me. The second I can, it will be something I'd lay my life down for because it's the key to my freedom. Well, there you go. He says he'd lay his life down. Just wait till somebody tells him about seed praises.
I mean, that's embarrassingly cringe. It's massively embarrassing. What's he going to do? Take all of his mainstream media wealth and put it into gold and backpacks for his entire family and take that across the border? What does he think one of the advantages of a digital asset is? It's remarkable. It's just remarkable, the disconnect here. But also, I think we should just talk about the underlying claim that the CIA created Bitcoin. Let's talk about this for a minute. There's no proof provided. I think it's kind of ironic because some of them now claiming that Bitcoin is created by the CIA were actually folks that originally said, oh, just ignore Bitcoin. The government's going to ban it.
So now they've gone from the government banned it to the government created it. And they never say, is this an all of CIA effort? Or is this like some sort of elite hacker team working inside the CIA in secret and nobody else knows about it? It's just this vague accusation. Sometimes they'll throw in like, well, you know, Tor or, you know, Signal. I think they do Signal, too. And I always think to myself, wouldn't the NSA make more sense? They're the crypto people over there. Why wouldn't you assume the NSA created it? But much like SE Linux, which was actually created by the NSA, it doesn't matter.
Bitcoin is open source, and it has been since the start 15 years ago. In fact, most of Bitcoin Core has been completely refactored since Satoshi wrote it. Gloria Zhao, who is a Core contributor, said just as much on her chat with Natalie Brunel on her podcast. 15 or so years ago when Satoshi first published the proof of concept code to today, it's evolved so much to be almost unrecognizable. Yes, yes. Just from a security perspective, I'll just put this out there first. Bitcoin Core is a very, very security-oriented piece of software compared to almost anything else. If it doesn't work properly, you might lose all your money.
I don't want to like you know scare anybody but that you know it is a very security piece of software and it's going to be on this like anonymous peer-to-peer network and so the threat model is very severe compared to a lot of other applications that you might run on your computer and so that bar of security which has gotten higher and higher as the prices increase as there's been more users, that's also something where you need you actually need to change the code in order to do it's not It's not just, you know. It's actually maybe this is a little too serious but the the analogy that i use is like you know, democracy as as we know it it's not just like you wrote the constitution once and then like you're done democracy's fixed like we know how right you know it's like we see democracy, undermined all over the world if you're following the stolen election in venezuela right there's there's a lot of i guess you can call these implementation details that can undermine the design goal that you had, even if you outlined it in a very like kind of in very key ways where you're like, it's a decentralized network.
But there's like all kinds of things that, you know, it's not just like it's going to be decentralized and then it just is. It's a constant effort and it's been almost completely rewritten. So again, it doesn't really matter. I know the Monero crowd likes to take potshots at Bitcoin for not being like more obscure or private by default, But Bitcoin's transparency in both its code, really in its code, its currency, its scarcity, the way the network functions, that's how people are going to drive trust down the road from Bitcoin. Now, the question of who is Satoshi Nakamoto, I actually don't know if it's one we should answer, but Dave Troy is trying to find out who Satoshi is.
He's an investigative journalist out of Baltimore. Dave Troy is trying to find out who Satoshi's real identity is by sending freedom of information requests to the FBI. He's asking for any records they have to identify Satoshi Nakamoto. And Troy has received a response from the FBI this week. But it wasn't quite what he was hoping for. In not so many words, the FBI told him, quote, they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any records on this person. Maybe he didn't get what he really wanted, but he thinks he got a win out of this. So Troy notes on X, he says, quote, Quote, for you FOIA nerds, this request was made via their all other subjects pathway, not the, quote, deceased individuals form.
I submitted as a broad general subject request with full context. So it is the Bureau and not me that is asserting that this is an individual. Interesting. There you have it. Troy says that the answer he got back is that it is an it's an individual and not a group or something like that. I don't know. It could just be word games. He's going to continue to try to get information via the Freedom of Information Request form that he can fill out. And he has a couple of different pathways he can take to try to get information. So I guess I had a question for you.
Do you think the U.S. government created Bitcoin? And do you want to know the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? Do you want to know? Boost in and tell me. Tell me what you think. Hmm. I'm going to think about it. I'll read your answers and I'll give you my thoughts. I think I might surprise you. Music. Your boosts a big batch of project updates, some new questions, and a final clip of the week if we have time. Jeez. First, though, I want to mention River. If you want a DCA, I recommend you do it with a Bitcoin-only company. River's built out their custody infrastructure, and the only thing they do is Bitcoin.
But also, I think this is just as important, you want a company that supports Lightning, so you can protect your privacy and easily move your stack stats out cheap. If you're like me, it also makes it really convenient to dip them in liquid, consolidate, and then move them to cold storage. River supports Lightning. They have a lot of different options, and I think they're one of the best to do a DCA or a smash grab. Use my link in the show notes to use my affiliate link. It helps you out, and it helps me out, supports the show too. You can also check out the Bitcoin Company at thebitcoincompany.com and use the promo code Jupiter.
You get some sats, I get some sats, everybody gets sats. They're on the Lightning Network as well, so you can convert sats into a gift card super quick when you need it. That's thebitcoincompany.com. Music. I'll see you next time. All right. We got a lot of great boosts this week. But screw me, guys. Guys, screw me in my dumb ear because I was having node issues like all week. So only 8% of the total boost amount you sent in actually made it to the show. That would be because I have a self-hosted node for JB that 8% of the split goes to. So the good news is it means I got your message. The bad news is, yeah, I missed out on most of the boosts. But channel issues were my fault.
They kicked my butt this week. but after what has really been weeks of inbound issues, I believe the issue is not only solved for me, but hopefully for all future AlbiHub users as well. And so what I'm gonna do to thank you is I'm gonna credit you for the full amount that you attempted to boost. So think of like the boost just being massively on sale this week because my node was down, so that portion of the split failed, so those stats didn't leave your wallet. But in the spirit of value for value, I'm going to read out what you intended to boost, Just because I think that's the right way to approach this. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'm just glad I got the messages, I guess.
So let's get into it. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. And we start with Dr. Eckhart, who comes in with 200,000 sats. Hey, rich lifestyle! Keep up the great work and hang in there, Chris. The universe is value for value. Well, thank you. You are our Baller Booster. Appreciate that, Doctor. Lime Hummingbird comes in with 80,000 sats. I hoard that which all kind covet. Well, I'm fairly new to the podcast, and I'm enjoying the content. Looking forward to new episodes. Well, thank you, Lime. Appreciate that.
Rotted Mood comes in with 75,000 sats. I hoard that which all kind covet. Oh, yeah, I remember. We were chatting about this. This is my first boost after my Albie Hub. Whoa, congratulations. Congratulations. I know you are having some issues. We talked about this. He says, by the way, don't try it on a Pi Zero. Yeah, I don't even know if I'd recommend it on a Pi 4, to be honest with you. Maybe a Pi 5, maybe an Odroid, but I think 1-liter PCs and up are probably better for a lightning node. I'd actually be open to hear people's feedback on that, what you think a great low-cost lightning Bitcoin node machine is.
But in my opinion, the Raspberry Pi no longer cuts it. Satsquanch comes in with 66,000 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Yeah. He says, I'm sitting next to a pizza chef at our Thousand Oaks Bitcoin meetup, and one of the group handed cash for me to boost to you. So here we go, Chris. Godspeed. Woo! Make it so. Okay. Thanks, Satsquanch. That's really great. Great. See, you got a cash trade there. I like it. User 204 sends in 50,000 sats. Boost! Satsquanch here just wanted you to know that, Chris, how much we value your hard work. Oh, a double boost from Satsquanch under a different name.
Just let you know how much we value your hard work, keeping us informed, keeping track of our Bitcoin HODL adventures. HODL heartily and stay the course. Thank you. You know what? I hoard that which your kind covet. You get another dragon there for that. Thank you, Satsquanch. I like that. Hoddle heartily and stay the course. Could be a good saying. Listener Jeff comes in with 42,222 sats. The answer to the ultimate question. Says that was another banger talking about the four horsemen of the market apocalypse. Keep up the great work. I really don't like the U.S. government buying up so much Bitcoin.
I understand how it can help them, but it's like feeding a rabid dog the steak off your plate. You're just making it stronger, and you're going to get hungry yourself. Okay, I like it. He says it comes down to the golden rule. He who holds the gold makes the rules. Sure, there's no rules driving Bitcoin, but there's underlying rules in economics. If they hold the majority, they control the price. I prefer this currency to stay in our hands. Yeah, although I suppose the flip side of that would be true, too. Like, if they were to, like, irresponsibly sell it and dump it on the market, the value, like we saw happen to the German government, would crash, and they wouldn't get much out of it.
I think we're probably going to happen, right? At some point, we're going to see some event like that. Some major hodler, like an ETF or a microstrategy or an individual, an early individual that just has a massive stack. We're going to see a massive sell-off eventually. I mean, we see it right now. Today, as I sat down to record tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 Bitcoin from the US government moved to Coinbase Prime. People start to go, it's going to sell. It'll happen. It will happen. I think people will buy it up. You're going to have to ride the vol. The traders love the Vol. Yeah, exactly.
Jcube comes in with 23,000 sats. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. Says, appreciate what you do, and I just want to say, keep it up. We love the show. Thank you, Jcube. Love you. Adversary 17 also came in. 23,000 sats. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. There you go. Double Hank. Thanks for the FUD link. I'm going to give that a watch. It's an 11 out of 10 episode, Chris. Love it. Wow. Thank you, man. That's really nice. I appreciate that a lot. I wasn't sure, you know, if the people liked the mission-focused episode or not. The Podfather, Adam Curry, comes in with 22,222 sats, also known as a McDuck.
Things are looking up for old McDuck. Just thanks for the, quote, emergency podcast. Yeah, you're right, of Trump at the Bitcoin conference. I pulled several clips from it and credited you no agenda. Still weren't a full roll of ducks. Thank you, Podfather. You know, somebody's got to do it. You got the live-to-tape equipment. Why do all the TikTokers and YouTubers get to have all the fun? Right? I want to sit down and have the fun, too. And really, I just, you know, I want to help put things in perspective while the topic is hot and people are interested, too.
Look at this, Crashmaster also coming in with 22,222 ducks. This old duck still got it. Here's an additional boost to my regular 100-sat streaming. Thanks, Chris. Well, thank you, Crashmaster. Mix comes in with 21,000 sats. There's coffee in that nebula. I like the concise updates on the important topics. I listened to that episode right away. Had to top off my wall to boost, though. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that. LazyLox comes in with 20,000 sats. This is the way. Boosting and another boost. Thank you, LazyLux. Appreciate that. Halleck also came in with 20,000 sats. Everything's under control.
Double my normal boost for the bonus episode. I appreciate the conference coverage. The politicians are not going to save us. But I'm blown by the movement of the overtone window. Yeah, me too. And I may have read that one before. Some of these may be dupes from my node. But thank you either way. Either way, I want to give you a shout out. And you're right. That is it. That is really it. This is the way. It's the movement of the overtone window that's really changed. Faraday Fedora sent in, RoaDucks. At the comment from the other listener who's saying that ETH has more use than Bitcoin, are these innovative services in the room with us right now?
Also, the irony that that is coming in a boost on the lighting network. Well, you got to give them credit for using all technologies, right? At least they're informed on how boosts and sats work. I wonder, what is the major utility for Ethereum and Solana? If you get rid of all of like the meme coins. I think it's stablecoins, right? That's the use case, is stablecoins. I think the PayPal stablecoin. I could be wrong. I don't really follow this super closely. But I think the PayPal stablecoin is on Solana. And I think, you know, like USDC is on Ethereum.
Coinbase is in so hardcore with Ethereum. They created Base, and it uses Ethereum as the base gas. It's so weird. It's a fair day. I don't understand how it works. But thank you for the boost. I appreciate it. Jordan Bravo sent in 11,110 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. At the conference in Nashville, I visited the Start9 booth and saw their upcoming product, a plug-and-play router preloaded with their own fork of OpenWRT. They showed off the custom GUI they're building for it. I think the idea is that folks who don't want to deal with network configurations such as port forwarding can have a simple out-of-the-box solution. No release date was given yet.
Thoughts? Hmm, that would make it simpler to manage firewall problems. I guess that's generally the problem with a lot of these start nine umbral type things is they have to use Tor to get around people's NAT and that kind of sucks. I don't know. I don't know if I want them changing the firewall rules. I'd rather they set up VPN mesh network like Tailscale or Nebula or something like that. Interesting product though, Jordan Bravo. I'll keep an eye out for it. He continues, DCing into Bitcoin allows me to ignore the panic in the market because I know I'm saving in the scarcest asset in existence.
I appreciate the peace of mind that comes with not thinking about the, in the first place. Yeah. And not having to keep track of the fiat price. My goal is to increase the number of sats I hold and I'm gradually and continually achieving that goal. Thanks for the great show. That's a great way to think about it, Jordan. I agree. And thank you very much. Appreciate the boost. The tone record comes in with a space balls boost. One, two, three, four, five sats. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Drop in a shout-out to all the talented musicians showcasing Value for Value model in Nashville last weekend.
Wavelake, which just hit 1,000 artists on the platform, and Toonster with video streams on Noster allowing zaps and boosts. It was epic. Massive, massive plus one to that shout-out. Really awesome to see what's happening with Value for Value music. Let's hope that the next Bitcoin conference is integrated deeply into the conference. And I think ultimately the Bitcoin conference folks are missing out massively on podcasting 2.0 and Boost. What we have done here with Boost and peer-to-peer sat transfer with Zaps and Boost is important. But I think even more important, which they should really tune into, is the medium of denomination is sats.
I don't say you boost it in with $2.35. cents. I don't ever actually even convert these to USD. I don't know what the USD value even is. I don't care. Like Jordan, I'm just stacking sats. Like we all are. I don't care right now what the USD price is. But it is a massive shift to start denominating things in sats, let alone the fact that we're sending and streaming sats and paying for music artists to create great songs that lets them play on podcasts that was never accessible for like huge shifts that they're just completely missing over there. Hopefully, maybe the next Bitcoin conference. I really think it's something they should be paying more attention to. And one of the ways they could do that is integrate those great musicians.
I'm glad they were kind of around the area, though. That might be the very first start to wider recognition. Thank you, ToneWrecker. Appreciate that boost. OrangePillLawyer25. Nice. Are you actually a Bitcoin lawyer? Comes in with a row of ducks. Am I sacrificing privacy by putting my XBub into BlueWallet to track my cold card balance? No, I don't think so. I don't think BlueWallet does any kind of uploading to a cloud server. And you're just reading the keys. You're not writing to the blockchain. You're not sending transactions. So I don't think you're making any kind of privacy mistake there.
Now, I'm not a BlueWallet expert. So you just want to double check they're not doing like a cloud backup up that might be readable by their servers, I would doubt it. I have seen BlueWalt. I have used it. It's just been a long time. So from my recollection, your tote's fine. The Golden Dragon comes in with 18,100 sats. I'm not really a fan of the U.S. having a reserve. Yeah, I think we did talk about that. But he says the folks that came out of the woodwork to bash Bitcoin in the hard times just don't get it. It's incredibly obvious that they just want to keep us entrenched in fiat for their own good.
He says, I find immense value from these breaking type shows. Thank you, Dragon. I agree. It's got to be at this point, like Aaron Sorkin. What are you doing, buddy, over there? Like, what are you doing? Figure it out. Really incredible. Bitcoin Lizard comes in with 10,000 sats. Yeah, all right. Fun will now commence. Albie Hub Test Boost, always happy to open a channel to your new node to give you some extra inbound liquidity. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard. I have been rearranging channels as you might have seen from your self-hosted node. I mean, that might be a good option.
I think I'm okay right now wallet of Satoshi has been really beneficial to open a channel to but you have to minimum right now 5 million sats so that's one of the great things about the boosts as they come in is I can turn it around and use it for channel liquidity so I really appreciate that can put those sats to work right away, Ace Ackerman comes in with 4,444 sats. Ah, fuck! You know, Chris, sometimes it takes a while before people recognize real quality. Just keep providing great content. And here's a row of ducks, which is much better than cuck bucks. Because Sorkin is a psyop.
You know what? I agree with you on that one. What is his deal? Podbun comes in with 5,000 sats. Mr. Bustin with happiness seeing you again. Great coverage as always. Just getting back into listening to podcasts. Hope everyone is well. Podbun, I'm glad you're getting back into podcasts. I recommend it. It is a high-fiber media diet. Much better than the mainstream media fast food crap. Mug Daddy comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! See how there's no chance the U.S. government is going to return stolen Bitcoin? I'd rather they toss them in a strategic reserve than just randomly sell them that's a good point because that's probably what they're going to do also recognizing the absurdity and expecting consistency a strategic reserve would treat it as a currency rather than a security which is cool for tax purposes love the show that's a great boost mug daddy great to hear from you thank you piter come no piger piger p-y-j-t-r p-y-j-t-r piger i don't know how you say that man but i appreciate the boost thank you for the valuable content greetings Greetings from the EU.
Oh, man, thank you for... You know, I don't hear from a lot of folks from the EU because I feel like Bitcoin has such a bad reputation across the pond in general, in the EU and in the UK. And so it's really nice to hear from listeners over there. Thank you. I appreciate that boost. ReadyTake4 is back. I love it. With 10,000 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. ReadyTake4 did. Plus one for the focused episodes. Always appreciate the high signal. Okay, roger that. I will keep doing them. You know, I won't overdo them. I'll just do them when they seem appropriate. but I will keep at it.
Digital Farmer, I think I got these boosts before, but I loved it because they were new and they just got boosting set up and they're using Breeze. And they sent in a boost that I thought was particularly funny. And you know what? I'm going to read it. Hopefully, he says, there's no issue in taking my sats as they were converted from altcoin staking rewards. Roger that. You know what? Sats are sats, man. You cashed out those staking rewards and you bought a hard asset. set. So I can't complain about that. It's the first time I've ever seen that, and it did make me laugh.
I really appreciate that. Anonymous comes in with 5,100 sats. Everything's under control. Keep up the good work, they say. And Glacier came in with a row of ducks. First time booster and a party member. Oh, thank you. Appreciate that. I'm new to Bitcoin, but I'm learning fast thanks to this show. I was watching the markets carefully on Monday and was excited to see this episode come out and hear your take keep up the great work with increasing centralization of tech your show keeps me optimistic about the future of independent media, hey plus one to that right i i tell you i hope so let's see let's round it out there's so many boosts i really appreciate you guys really what it is is some of them are dupes some of them i missed before and i want to get in here but we're going to round it out bit cryptic says thanks for the thanks from the southern hemisphere he sent 2048 sets.
And that right there is all of the boosts I could track with a message. And that's not all the boosts we got. I actually had 68 boosts that I was able to scrape together across 49 individual boosters. There was also 46 individual SAT streamers who streamed a total of 64,523 SATs, bringing the show's total. Total, total sats collected for this episode, when you include everything, 884,311 sats. Now, the reality is only about 8% of that made it to this show, but that's on me. But I'd love it and invite you to consider boosting again. Truly now, for the love of Satoshi, my node should be working.
I need to know if it's not working, so there's that as well. Lightning's so easy, guys. Everybody knows it. Lightning's so easy. What's your problem? I don't understand. It's fine. Man, talk about a bad week to have node problems, but so grateful for all of the incredible support there, and I would love to hear from you if I did miss your boost, which is possible. Please let me know. Send another note back in, and I'll try to go find it. And also, consider boosting again. Really appreciate it, and I'd love to keep the support rolling for this week in Bitcoin. How about some project updates? lightning.pub has reached a huge milestone this is a noster native lightning node that allows you to share your node with other noster accounts so essentially their noster id becomes their key to use your lightning nodes kind of like a you know like a semi uncle john jim kind of setup and it also has well they promise at least automatic channel management which sounds Sounds really, really nice.
And this week, they announced one-line deployments to get up and running with Lightning Pub. I'll play a little bit. The dev over there, Justin, who's a Lightning developer and a head over at ShockNet, he demoed it. And I got a little bit of that demo for you. Howdy folks, it's Justin from ShockNet. I just wanted to share something with you that we shipped today, and that is a one-line deployment for LightningPub, which is a Nostr-powered LightningNode. It makes it the easiest way to set up a LightningNode, and it integrates Nostr as an account system, so you can connect apps and family and friends to your LightningNode as guest users without any complicated networking.
Working so this means you can use like an old laptop you know from your home or literally a five dollar vps we're using neutrino just like a mobile lightning node so it's super light and going to super cheap vps and there's no easier way to spin up a lightning node and share it with friends and family and all that stuff so i'm going to show you right here let me tell you anything that's going to make lightning easier to get up and going and work for people i'm a big fan of and along that same line zeus has launched two new olympus integrations olympus is our liquidity provider, one with lightning.pub, and another with Mutiny Wallet.
Now, Mutiny Wallet, and I'll put a link to this, has announced that the team behind it is retiring and shutting down, which is a damn shame because it's fantastic technology. But even though the project is shutting down, it's open source and it's self-hosted. So it's going to continue to be used by users. And this integration will work with that self-hosted version. In fact, it'll just become the default if you want to open up a lightning channel in Mutiny. Zeus's LSP just makes that really easy. It already works in the Zeus app super well. So to see them kind of expand beyond the Zeus app is an interesting play for them, and I think a good development.
Moving on, there's more OpenSAT grants this week. Now, OpenSAT has a nonprofit set aside just for Nostra, and OpenSAT sends, well, they're a Bitcoin-focused funding group that primarily sponsors Freedom Tech projects, has announced a sixth wave of Nostra grants, awarding nine projects. Yeah, there's six wave of NostraGrants from their Nostra Fund. The organization has also granted long-term support for a developer who will use it to improve the Snort client and develop native apps for Zap.Stream, including a new backend to create a marketplace of streaming providers. That's interesting to me. I'll have to watch that one. I think it could be very interesting. And then the last project I want to mention this week is Fetty.
The first full release of what they're calling their super app, at least in their live stream, has been announced. The app is now available on Android and iOS. Fetty is currently, quote, source available, meaning the code is available for inspection by the public. But the project isn't set to actually transition to a full AGPL open source license until January of 2026, although it seems they've already locked that in. Fetty is interesting. To me, all this technology is so early that right now I stick with Liquid. But it doesn't mean it won't be something that I'll play around with in the future.
All right. So I wanted to answer some noob questions and I'm already running tight on time. So I'm going to get to just one. In episode 21, Monty33 boosted in a batch of great newbie questions that I think I should answer. So that way, people from the JB audience or the podcasting to the audience that have found this show that don't really know Bitcoin yet can get a few fundamentals under their belt. And I'm going to start with one big question that Monty asked, and we'll get to the other ones in future episodes. And that question simply was, why does Bitcoin have value?
I'd love to hear your answer if you want to pause right now and send it in your answer. But I think to understand this, you need to understand the four things that gives money in general utility and value. For money to be good money, it must be a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account, and I'd say it probably needs to be accepted as a means to settle a debt or an obligation over time. Bitcoin is pharmaceutical-grade money. It is the best version of these things. It is a much, much better medium of exchange. It has its own built-in network. It's peer-to-peer.
It's much faster than the dollar to transmit. It is a great store of value. Anybody that's held Bitcoin for more than a few years has made money. No one's ever lost money over four years of holding Bitcoin. Bitcoin is already being used as a unit account all over the world. Well, this is growing, but an example right here is on this podcast. Your sats that come in for a boost are a unit of account. Bitcoin is the ultimate money. And so its utility is inherent because of that. It's the best version of money. Additionally, it's scarce. There's a fixed supply capped at 21 million.
It's decentralized and it operates independently of banks or government, it, which means it operates without the risk of sovereign debt, sovereign crises, or bank collapse. Its security is top-notch. It's considered the highest secure network out there. It has so much compute power behind it. It has a huge network effect. More and more people trust it. More and more value comes from it every day. It's transparent. All transactions are recorded on public ledger. The network is transparent. The coin is transparent. The code is transparent. It's divisible. It can be divided into very small units, enabling microtransactions like you see here in these podcasts.
And it's portable. It can be moved and transferred globally without physical limitations. It is the best form and utility of money man has ever created. And money naturally flows to where it's treated the best. And Bitcoin's created by proof of work. Proof of work uses a real world commodity, energy. So Bitcoin is created from something valuable. So that sets the floor price for Bitcoin long term because these mining operations have to make money. They have the cost of mine. They got staff. They got a whole business operation. There's a floor there. And that can also set the price long term. Well, sometimes, of course, the volatility will buck away from that price. Sometimes it'll dip below it.
But ultimately, it has to at least be at that cost to mine Bitcoin. The last time I looked, I think the floor cost is somewhere in the mid-50s to mine Bitcoin, a single Bitcoin right now, $50,000. It's really expensive. It's an incredible cost. That cost is also that security because it means in order to try to overwhelm the Bitcoin network, the cost to do so would be so incredibly expensive, you might as well just buy Bitcoin. So Bitcoin has value because it is the best form of money we've ever created. It's pharmaceutical grade money. Bitcoin has value because of how it's created.
And it has value because it's scarce. And it's mathematically provably scarce. And every coin can be accounted for. These are some of the things that I think make Bitcoin valuable. But I'd love to hear from the audience if I've missed something. Coming up, I want to answer what KYC is, custodial versus non-custodial wallets, Bitcoin savings flows, how to move Bitcoin around in larger chunks, So what's the right amount? How fees can work in these scenarios? The differences between holding the ETF, putting in an IRA versus just stacking sats directly. We're going to answer more of those.
And if anybody else has any newbie questions, please do boost them in. I'm going to start collecting them and then I'll try to get to them as time allows. When things are really busy, I may skip a week, but then when we have a little time, I'm going to try to get there. And I've just been meaning to for a week. So I wanted to cover that one this week, even though we are a little tight on time. Let's move along. Music. I got a final clip of the week. Speaking of utility, Alex Gladstein had a great talk at the Bitcoin Nashville conference that was really for anybody that ever said Bitcoin is worthless.
It was an entire talk that addresses the utility of Bitcoin, even in scenarios where there's no Internet and et cetera. And I'll play for you the introduction of the talk and I'll link to the full thing. Not that long, actually. The actual talk's pretty short. And then there's a follow-up interview with him where he goes into a few more details. But here is just a taste of Bitcoin's global utility with Alex Gladstein. As was hinted at, we live in a world where governments and some of the most powerful people on our planet continue to tell us that Bitcoin is useless or worse or dangerous. This has been happening for more than a decade. decade, people continue to be gaslit by the media and the government in every country, essentially, you know, save for maybe a few, into thinking that this thing is risky and dangerous and maybe bad for the planet and bad for people and good for criminals.
And it's just such an incredible global brainwashing operation. I mean, it's one of these things that in 10 years, we're going to look back in time and be like, I can't believe that happened. I can't believe all of these important, you know, People that were supposed to be leaders in the world were telling us that this technology was bad when it is far from it. So what I hope to do today and tomorrow is walk you through in detail what Bitcoin does around the world and how transformative it is. And how it's changing lives and how it's changing our relationship with freedom and commerce and electric power.
So we're going to start with our friend Jamie here. So I have a few slides with people who, you know, are trusted by Wall Street, by Washington, you know, by world leaders. They're just completely wrong. I mean, this is somebody who really should know better. You know, this is something he said. I personally think Bitcoin is worthless. Warren Buffett has said that Bitcoin has no unique value at all. It's a delusion, basically. It's rat poison squared. Bill Gates has said that Bitcoin is a pure greater fool theory type of investment. Charlie Munger, rest in peace, said, I hate the Bitcoin success.
I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. The Fed's Neil Kashkari said just a couple months ago that more than a decade later, there's still no legitimate use case for Bitcoin. This is someone who has a very senior role in the world's most important monetary body. And probably one of the most prestigious English language publications going back a century is The Atlantic. And just a couple months ago, they said in an essay that they published, 15 years into its existence, Bitcoin has yet to demonstrate any serious use case. So again, the world is so lost. And the crazy part is there's so many amazing use cases for Bitcoin.
Now, I think that most people at this conference understand that the primary use case for Bitcoin is savings. I don't necessarily have to get too into that. It's been the best performing asset in the world since it was created. It is a profoundly effective wage technology, technology, savings technology. It protects your purchasing power. I think, you know, most of the content at the conference here is talking about, you know, why that's the case. And people talk about the technology of that and the effect of that and why you should join the Bitcoin movement.
So I don't really need to cover savings, but I wanted to cover three other areas where Bitcoin is really transforming the world. One is commerce, one is freedom, and one is power. So today we're going to talk about commerce and freedom. Tomorrow, same time, I'm going to come back and talk to you guys about power. Like I said, you got to catch the whole talk. It's for anybody that ever said Bitcoin doesn't have any utility. He's got the receipts and real world examples all around the world. And that does bring me to the end of this week's episode. Links to everything I talked about are over at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
You'll look for episode 23 and you'll find it there in our show notes. Please do boost in. Tell me what you think about what was covered, what maybe I should have covered. I'm always down to hear that as well. And again, if you have somebody you can mention the show to that might be interested in learning about Bitcoin, send them a link our way. We're always happy to have them on board. I'm going to wrap it up with one of my absolute favorite value for value tracks. It's one of the songs I just keep coming back to and bopping my head to. It's One Night by Daddy Nat.
Music.
I think it was Heather Long at the Washington Post this morning who said it's. Looking more and more like the U.S. Inflation battle is done. Are you willing to go that far? Absolutely. I've been predicting since the summer of 2022 that we get to two to three percent by the end of last year and early this year. And we're basically there and we think that we'll get to two percent by the end of the year. If you take out shelter from the CPI, you're basically there. You know, when the kids in the backseat ask, are we there yet? We're there if you take out shelter. or we're at the... Ha, ha, ha, ha.
Music. Welcome in to episode 23 of This Week in Bitcoin. Congratulations, everybody. Grab a hat, get Get some champagne. Mission accomplished. Inflation's been defeated. You didn't notice? Yeah, according to the world's top financial analyst, Daddy J-Pow, he's arrived. The economy is landing soft. He's pulling into the garage right now. It's good news, everyone, and you should feel really good. I mean, sure, inflation's up, but it's going up a lot slower. lower. So that's a win. The economists got this one right. Bang on. Two tenths increase in the core. Two tenths increase in the headline, just as forecast.
Now, base effects are somewhat hard to measure. So we do see, even though we're in line with the headline number, we see it drop on a year over year basis to two point nine percent from three percent. That is better than. Better than expected is really why I think they're so excited. I mean, there is some signal in here. Inflation coming lower than expected always is really well received by the market. But here's the reality. Inflation at 3%, that's the first time it's gotten that low since March of 2021, if you go by their official number.
And core inflation has dropped to 3.2%, which is the lowest since April of 2021. Okay. You know, I mean, I think 3% is still egregious. I think these numbers are counterfeit. But it doesn't really exactly matter that I think that because the Fed follows these, the market follows, so I guess what matters is what they think, I suppose. I think the consumer is running out of juice. And besides looking at this stuff, one of the things that I watch is companies like Home Depot, because these companies represent new projects. But also, I think these companies can represent trying to repair what you already have, trying to keep what you've got already going.
And so where Home Depot goes, so goes the consumer. And they forecasted they expect things to go down. But its forecast is really the big news here. The company cut its comparable sales outlook for the year, saying it now expects a decline of 3 to 4 percent. It previously expected a decline of about 1 percent. While its forecast for total sales went up, that's only because Home Depot added sales from the recent acquisition of SRS Distribution. Otherwise, it would amount to a cut of both comparable sales and its total sales forecast. CFO Richard McPhail told me Home Depot is contending with a new challenge along with high interest rates.
It's heard that from home professionals like contractors. Pros tell us that for the first time, their customers aren't just deferring because of higher financing costs, he said. They're deferring because of a greater sense of uncertainty in the economy. So that's something that's new this quarter that they've been hearing more widely from both those pros and DIY customers. DIY customers. In other words, people trying to repair stuff. And I just think there's no juice left, right? So over 10% of credit card outstanding debt. He's over 90 days delinquent now. With prices rising, major chains are looking at how to keep customers.
That includes Starbucks, who replaced their CEO after just a year, bringing in the head of Chipotle. Tom Costello explains why he has a tall task ahead. This morning's news broke just as Americans were sipping their first cup. Breaking news to bring you, and this is big, Starbucks' CEO. The CEO of Starbucks, Loxman Nerisman, out. as the world's most iconic copy brand struggles with customers who've said no to higher prices Starbucks new CEO is Brian nickel who turned at Chipotle around after a devastating e coli outbreak in 2015 improving quality and using technology to speed up orders doubling Chipotle's revenue and we We thought he would be the right leader for this moment.
Thank you. Have a good one. The new CEO's challenge, luring back Starbucks customers who've been driven away by inflation, long waits, and cheaper coffee at competitors. I don't like the prices. I think they have gone up a lot. It's a good bit cheaper at the local coffee shop. The move comes as higher prices have turned many Americans away. KFC, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's, all reporting falling sales, are now offering value meals, while under nickel, Chipotle grew its revenue in the last quarter. What are the problems Starbucks has had with consumers? What do consumers want? Consumers are looking for value, and they want to feel like when they spend money at a premium brand like Starbucks, it's worth both their money and their time.
$6 for a tall, small drink. Fed up with inflation, more Americans are simply saying no. Tom Costello, NBC News, Washington. So let's talk about how Bitcoin does fix this because I've talked a lot about, recently about how Bitcoin fixes this at the individual level. And I don't want to talk about that today. I think we have to zoom out because for the individual to be solved for, that means that every average Joe on the street has to understand Bitcoin and be hedging against their government, debasing them. So it just seems like we should zoom out a little bit.
So before I do that, I just want to quickly put into practical terms how Bitcoin has protected individuals. Then we'll get into how it can protect the state. In 2016, the average U.S. house cost $288,400 or about 664 Bitcoin. In 2020, the average house price was $328,900 or about 45 Bitcoin. And now in 2024, the average house is $434,700. I wish they were that cheap in Washington, which works out to be about six Bitcoin. So do you understand now how Bitcoin protects your purchasing power over time? The cost of a house has gone up a lot. 2020, just four years ago, they were $100,000 less, but they've gone down in terms of Bitcoin.
They've gone up in terms of dollar and gone down in terms of Bitcoin. That's really powerful. That's truly protecting your purchase power. But what about the state? How can Bitcoin help protect the state, which in theory would help everyone because it's not good to debase the currency. It's not good to have a sovereign debt crisis. Nobody really wins from that. River put out a great article and a great video that talks a little bit about this. And I want to play a little moment, not all of it, but just a moment of it for you. Let's take the example of the United States to explain. The U.S.
National debt is over $35 trillion today. Last year, over a trillion dollars in taxpayer money went towards paying off just the interest on this debt. Anything that can help the U.S. pay off its debt strengthens the financial position of the country. One way to strengthen your position is by holding assets that increase in value over time. If this happens faster than new money is being printed, then it could help a country pay off a larger amount of debt in the future. The orange line represents how Bitcoin has grown by an average of over 60% per year for the past 10 years.
Bitcoin's value grows so fast because it has a limited supply of 21 million, making it more scarce than gold, currencies, and other stores of value. This supply can't be changed. You would have to convince the vast majority of the network participants that the Bitcoin they hold will become worth less, and they won't agree to that. Many people have tried to create copies of Bitcoin, but these never got close to having the same network effects. One country that already has a strategic Bitcoin reserve is El Salvador. It holds around 5,800 Bitcoin, worth around $340 million, and has made a profit of 38% or around $50 million so far.
The United States already owns 213,246 Bitcoin today, more than any other country, by confiscating it from the Silk Road marketplace and funds stolen from the exchange Bitfinex. If the U.S. Could obtain 5% of all the Bitcoin supply, for example, this could help to pay off a significant portion of the national debt. If more countries create a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the price is impacted more. So being among the first countries to adopt it can be a great strategic move to increase your wealth relative to other countries. It forces all countries to consider this decision or risk being left behind. mind.
Bitcoin and all of its individual holders also benefit from this adoption as owning and using it will keep getting easier over time. That's really the game theory right there, bringing wealth to everyone. Now, seven months ago, I'll note that the conversation that seemed crazy to us then was, what would the banks do with Bitcoin? Are the banks really going to adopt Bitcoin in some way? Are they going to fight it? Boy, have we really seen the answer to that this year, haven't we? With the launch of the ETFs. I mean, just yesterday, Goldman Sachs, famous Bitcoin haters, famous Bitcoin haters for years now, revealed they have $418 million in Bitcoin ETFs.
So the conversation, the conversation is turning to how will governments use Bitcoins to solve their giant, crazy fiscal problems? You really just, you got to sit back and And sit back, I mean, and just appreciate the shift in that narrative, even if it's still going to take years. We're here. Music. All right, I got a couple of Kathy Wood clips. She is the CIO at ARK Investment, which she's got some hits. She's got some wins. But I think she's a very sharp gal. And she put out a video this week, and I want to play two clips from it for you. One is her thoughts on why we shouldn't get our hopes on a rate cut to solve us and save us, I should say, from a recession.
Because actually, there is usually a lull or a dip when the market is expecting rate cuts. And Kathy explains. Now, why is the consumer going to weaken or continue weakening? We believe it's because corporations are losing pricing power. And in order to salvage margins, they're going to be doing two things. In other words, corporations have raised prices as far as they can get them. I mean, we just talked about McDonald's and Home Depot. They can't raise prices anymore. They still have their costs have still gone up a bit because inflation is still going up. They're raising wages that trickles in.
California just passed a big, you know, a big law that impacts the wages at all McDonald's in California. They're absorbing those costs. So their costs are actually still increasing. But they've lost the power to charge the consumer more because the consumer's tapped out. Corporations are losing pricing power. And in order to salvage margins, they're going to be doing two things. They will be laying people off and they will be accelerating moves to increase productivity. I would say that we are going into a high alert for layoffs. We are entering a high alert phase. Yes.
This is something I'm going to watch on the show, and this is for the listeners that work day jobs, 9 to 5. Be aware. High alert mode has been issued from this week in Bitcoin. And it's high alert because Cathie Wood is correct. They are going to want to maintain profit margins. Costs of doing business have gone up. They need to maintain margins. So they're going to have to do layoffs. Additionally, that means hiring is going to be soft. So layoffs are going to happen. and hiring is going to be soft. So this is the official warning right here from This Week in Bitcoin. Plan accordingly. Start building up some dry powder. I don't know what you do, but just start planning just in case.
And they will be accelerating moves to increase productivity. So the unemployment rate will go up. That certainly is getting the Fed to change its spots as we're listening to Chairman Powell. And I think now that household net worth being hurt by the stock market going down is another reason that the Fed is going to relent. Now, one last thought here. Interest rates coming down should be very positive for the equity markets, but they will not arrest a recession very quickly. In fact, if consumers and businesses know that interest rates and maybe prices are coming down, what will they do? They will wait.
Now, the market in its wisdom, we believe, already understands. Yeah, so they're already kind of pricing this in. We're kind of watching that develop right now. It could be. I mean, who knows the way this goes? It could be we avoid the recession, but it could be that we end up in a recessionary-like period, a rolling recession, if you will. That spreads, but our assets pump. Which would be really, really strange, you know, because you could be getting richer at the same time you're getting poor, which is essentially what's been happening. So it seems like we'll just see an acceleration of that, I guess. Not so strange.
Actually, now that I think about it, no, that's about what you'd expect. All right. Then shifting gears, Kathy also talked about the state of the yen carry trade, which we talked about quite a bit in the last episode. It usually means the market is meeting a cathartic moment or is in a cathartic moment. And it usually means something is changing. And as you know, we have believed for quite some time that the U.S. Economy and maybe the global economy has been going through a rolling recession ever since the Fed started raising interest rates. Well, the other thing that was happening during that time, apparently, was an increase in the carry trade involving borrowing yen, so really shorting yen, and buying dollars and investing them into higher yielding assets than in Japan, so playing the spread.
The other reason this became a very... Widespread trade is the yen has been depreciating. So shorting yen meant that the investor or the speculator was benefiting from the yen going down. Well, that changed abruptly this week as the Bank of Japan increased rates more than expected and seemed more determined to continue increasing rates than many people expected. So apparently, lots of margin calls and a sell-off in a lot of assets. And now the VIX has calmed down. Now, we're not sure if the carry trade has unwind completely. J.P. Morgan is saying we're halfway there. So perhaps we'll We'll see some more volatility.
But I do believe that the Fed now is on high alert. See, she's kind of couching there, if you notice. She's saying JP Morgan says that the yen carry trade is unwound. Well, the reason why she's not saying that she believes that is because it's probably bullcrap. As long as the yen remains cheaper, the spread exists. As long as the spread exists, the degens on Wall Street are going to take advantage of it. In fact, if you look at the charts, it kind of looks like people are rebounding back into the yen right now, like they're winding back up, they're winding up, whatever you call that.
So there has been some unwinding, but I don't think this goes away until the dollar is cheaper than the yen, right? Because that's why they're doing it. They're doing it so that way they can get themselves a nice, cheap loan. And then they can go lever up and get a bunch of whatever, assets or stocks. And as long as that spreads there, they're going to do it. Hopefully they're on it, right? Cross your fingers. Hopefully they don't blow the whole thing up. Moving right along. I do want to talk about Bitcoin and politics just for a moment. We're about 90 days out from the election and there's still a lot going on in this area.
Circle had a representative. I don't I don't know if I let me see if I did. I note it down. See if I noted it down. Oh, it's the Circle CEO. You know, the guys behind USDC. They sat down on CNBC and they wanted to ask about crypto in politics because as I record, the Harris campaign is putting together a crypto for Harris Zoom meeting. And this is the second one that they've done. They've also had a little get together at the White House, which is what the Circle CEO was there to talk about, all in an effort to court the crypto community for Kamala Harris. Digital currencies should be a nonpartisan issue by now, you would think, but they are not.
Joining us, Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire is here. And you can save me from myself, or at least my voice right now. What do you think is going on here? And this sort of very interesting political bifurcation that's taking place in the crypto community. Says the guy that constantly politically bifurcates Bitcoin. It's fascinating to watch. As you know, I've been going to Capitol Hill for 11 years almost. most. First Senate hearing on crypto in 2013 and has spent an enormous amount of time across Republican administrations, Democratic administrations, you know, every which way.
What's interesting is that if you look at what happened over the past year, you actually saw a lot of bipartisan work getting done. You saw major bills in stablecoin, major bills in market structure advancing and so it looked like this was a purple issue and I actually believe I think crypto is purple and and you know I think now we're in politics though we're trying to get people elected and so people are figuring out okay this is an industry here to stay there's a lot of investment from that industry in in in the campaigns themselves and so people are staking out these new positions but it actually reflects in many ways if you'd look two years ago, it would be very hard to believe that crypto is going to be a presidential political issue.
It would be very hard to believe that there'd be major, major legislation. The industry would be where it is. You know, two years ago, it was a very different world. My observation, it is also notable the two different routes that the campaign seemed to be taking. Trump's route, they went to Nashville, seems to be a little more community focused. But Vice President Harris's route seems to be more outreach to the industry, like the Circle CEO, Coinbase, Mark Cuban, for some reason. They're looking more like they want to build ties with the industry, probably because that's where the money's at, I guess.
But digging into Kamala Harris's advisor choices, it suggests that her plan right now, at least, is to keep Biden's advisors on crypto. Two of whom are key anti-officials in the Biden administration who were the key architects of Biden admin's anti-crypto crusade known as Chokepoint 2.0. She's bringing two of them along. It's possible they're temporary. It's possible they could pivot their policy because none of them seem to actually tightly hold any of their beliefs around crypto. They seem to be strategic beliefs around crypto. But we'll see. I'll keep an eye on how that crypto for Harris Zoom call goes tonight and report if anything interesting comes out. Now, on the Trump side, while he's been really good at outreach so far, he's not delivering on follow through.
President Trump released a 20 core promises to America. It's a list of 20 promises. It's basically his platform in a top 20 style. There's nothing about Bitcoin or crypto on the list. Number 13, keep the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency. You know, maybe the story behind how you do that is via Bitcoin bailout somehow. But there's nothing on his list about Bitcoin. And, you know, it's notable after the big splash he made. There's really been no follow up. So I thought I'd point that out. But so neither one of them, I'm trying to say. Also, his sons are launching a new shit coin. So there's that as well.
Nobody's going to have a perfect track record on this, right? It takes people years, even people that become maxis, it takes them years to sort it all out. What we really want to see is just that they'll govern from a pro standpoint, a pro view, because this is a pro human technology. And so that's what we're really watching to see from either camp. I feel like that signal is coming stronger, obviously from RFK and obviously from Trump. But the Harris campaign seems to be kind of fumbling around trying to figure out how to send that signal. They just they haven't figured it out yet.
Now, I don't know if you spend any time on social media. I hope you don't. I do. So you don't have to. And one of the things that I've noticed is the question of who is Satoshi Nakamoto is rolling around a lot. Really, since the Bitcoin Nashville conference. I mean, it's a classic question. And this time conspiracy bacon really seems to be getting fried around who satoshi might be and i blame tucker carlson it started with tucker he was at an event it might have been the trump event something around the bitcoin conference he wasn't at the bitcoin conference and he claimed that the cia created bitcoin now i'm going to apologize first of all i don't usually play tucker carlson clips because it's not a political show and this isn't a political topic but i want to get into this.
And second reason is, I don't know if this was like on YouTube tinies or some sort of tick tank or something like that, but it's got obnoxious music in the background. I apologize about that, but I want you to hear in his own words what he said about Bitcoin. Crypto people aren't just in it to make a buck. They're in it to change the world forever. These are not shallow people. These are people who can answer every single question except who was Satoshi, which they don't answer. Someone should answer that. Nope. I think we know. Anyway, in fact, I have a friend who's probably sitting here who told me he did know, but I don't believe him. And I don't care if it was the CIA, it doesn't matter.
The idea is still a great idea. Obviously it was the CIA. It's like Signal. They got there first. It's a honey trap. Yeah, it's a honey trap. It was created by the CIA, he said, which then caused other investigative journalists like Tim Poole to go research. And he asked ChatGPT. And because ChatGPT gave him some sort of cryptic answer about who Satoshi Nakamoto is, he assumed, well, it's clear the CIA invented Bitcoin. So then you had Tim Poole and Tucker Carlson going around claiming that the CIA created Bitcoin since the Bitcoin conference. Now, it's funny because if you go listen to Tucker in another interview in a totally separate venue later on, he clarifies that he doesn't actually know that the CIA created it. He was just guessing.
Start the crypto movement. I know you were at the Bitcoin conference recently and you told them CIA started Bitcoin. They got really angry on Twitter. I don't know that. But until you can tell me who Satoshi was, I have some questions. Yeah, sure. Some natural questions. And of course, also at that event where Tucker said that Bitcoin was created by the CIA, he revealed that he just clearly doesn't understand it at all. And it's so cringe embarrassing. Just be totally blunt with you. And I'm sure someone's filming this, but I don't really care until I can, I don't know, stage a getaway with Bitcoin.
I'm serious. Until I can move from country to country with Bitcoin and not be tracked as I do it, as is my inalienable human right. I have the right of free movement as a human being. I had the right of free will as a human being. That was not granted to me by the government. I was born with that. It was bestowed by God. Until I can exercise that with this currency, it's less meaningful to me. The second I can, it will be something I'd lay my life down for because it's the key to my freedom. Well, there you go. He says he'd lay his life down. Just wait till somebody tells him about seed praises.
I mean, that's embarrassingly cringe. It's massively embarrassing. What's he going to do? Take all of his mainstream media wealth and put it into gold and backpacks for his entire family and take that across the border? What does he think one of the advantages of a digital asset is? It's remarkable. It's just remarkable, the disconnect here. But also, I think we should just talk about the underlying claim that the CIA created Bitcoin. Let's talk about this for a minute. There's no proof provided. I think it's kind of ironic because some of them now claiming that Bitcoin is created by the CIA were actually folks that originally said, oh, just ignore Bitcoin. The government's going to ban it.
So now they've gone from the government banned it to the government created it. And they never say, is this an all of CIA effort? Or is this like some sort of elite hacker team working inside the CIA in secret and nobody else knows about it? It's just this vague accusation. Sometimes they'll throw in like, well, you know, Tor or, you know, Signal. I think they do Signal, too. And I always think to myself, wouldn't the NSA make more sense? They're the crypto people over there. Why wouldn't you assume the NSA created it? But much like SE Linux, which was actually created by the NSA, it doesn't matter.
Bitcoin is open source, and it has been since the start 15 years ago. In fact, most of Bitcoin Core has been completely refactored since Satoshi wrote it. Gloria Zhao, who is a Core contributor, said just as much on her chat with Natalie Brunel on her podcast. 15 or so years ago when Satoshi first published the proof of concept code to today, it's evolved so much to be almost unrecognizable. Yes, yes. Just from a security perspective, I'll just put this out there first. Bitcoin Core is a very, very security-oriented piece of software compared to almost anything else. If it doesn't work properly, you might lose all your money.
I don't want to like you know scare anybody but that you know it is a very security piece of software and it's going to be on this like anonymous peer-to-peer network and so the threat model is very severe compared to a lot of other applications that you might run on your computer and so that bar of security which has gotten higher and higher as the prices increase as there's been more users, that's also something where you need you actually need to change the code in order to do it's not It's not just, you know. It's actually maybe this is a little too serious but the the analogy that i use is like you know, democracy as as we know it it's not just like you wrote the constitution once and then like you're done democracy's fixed like we know how right you know it's like we see democracy, undermined all over the world if you're following the stolen election in venezuela right there's there's a lot of i guess you can call these implementation details that can undermine the design goal that you had, even if you outlined it in a very like kind of in very key ways where you're like, it's a decentralized network.
But there's like all kinds of things that, you know, it's not just like it's going to be decentralized and then it just is. It's a constant effort and it's been almost completely rewritten. So again, it doesn't really matter. I know the Monero crowd likes to take potshots at Bitcoin for not being like more obscure or private by default, But Bitcoin's transparency in both its code, really in its code, its currency, its scarcity, the way the network functions, that's how people are going to drive trust down the road from Bitcoin. Now, the question of who is Satoshi Nakamoto, I actually don't know if it's one we should answer, but Dave Troy is trying to find out who Satoshi is.
He's an investigative journalist out of Baltimore. Dave Troy is trying to find out who Satoshi's real identity is by sending freedom of information requests to the FBI. He's asking for any records they have to identify Satoshi Nakamoto. And Troy has received a response from the FBI this week. But it wasn't quite what he was hoping for. In not so many words, the FBI told him, quote, they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any records on this person. Maybe he didn't get what he really wanted, but he thinks he got a win out of this. So Troy notes on X, he says, quote, Quote, for you FOIA nerds, this request was made via their all other subjects pathway, not the, quote, deceased individuals form.
I submitted as a broad general subject request with full context. So it is the Bureau and not me that is asserting that this is an individual. Interesting. There you have it. Troy says that the answer he got back is that it is an it's an individual and not a group or something like that. I don't know. It could just be word games. He's going to continue to try to get information via the Freedom of Information Request form that he can fill out. And he has a couple of different pathways he can take to try to get information. So I guess I had a question for you.
Do you think the U.S. government created Bitcoin? And do you want to know the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? Do you want to know? Boost in and tell me. Tell me what you think. Hmm. I'm going to think about it. I'll read your answers and I'll give you my thoughts. I think I might surprise you. Music. Your boosts a big batch of project updates, some new questions, and a final clip of the week if we have time. Jeez. First, though, I want to mention River. If you want a DCA, I recommend you do it with a Bitcoin-only company. River's built out their custody infrastructure, and the only thing they do is Bitcoin.
But also, I think this is just as important, you want a company that supports Lightning, so you can protect your privacy and easily move your stack stats out cheap. If you're like me, it also makes it really convenient to dip them in liquid, consolidate, and then move them to cold storage. River supports Lightning. They have a lot of different options, and I think they're one of the best to do a DCA or a smash grab. Use my link in the show notes to use my affiliate link. It helps you out, and it helps me out, supports the show too. You can also check out the Bitcoin Company at thebitcoincompany.com and use the promo code Jupiter.
You get some sats, I get some sats, everybody gets sats. They're on the Lightning Network as well, so you can convert sats into a gift card super quick when you need it. That's thebitcoincompany.com. Music. I'll see you next time. All right. We got a lot of great boosts this week. But screw me, guys. Guys, screw me in my dumb ear because I was having node issues like all week. So only 8% of the total boost amount you sent in actually made it to the show. That would be because I have a self-hosted node for JB that 8% of the split goes to. So the good news is it means I got your message. The bad news is, yeah, I missed out on most of the boosts. But channel issues were my fault.
They kicked my butt this week. but after what has really been weeks of inbound issues, I believe the issue is not only solved for me, but hopefully for all future AlbiHub users as well. And so what I'm gonna do to thank you is I'm gonna credit you for the full amount that you attempted to boost. So think of like the boost just being massively on sale this week because my node was down, so that portion of the split failed, so those stats didn't leave your wallet. But in the spirit of value for value, I'm going to read out what you intended to boost, Just because I think that's the right way to approach this. And, you know, at the end of the day, I'm just glad I got the messages, I guess.
So let's get into it. Ask not what your podcast can boost for you, but what you can boost for your podcast. And we start with Dr. Eckhart, who comes in with 200,000 sats. Hey, rich lifestyle! Keep up the great work and hang in there, Chris. The universe is value for value. Well, thank you. You are our Baller Booster. Appreciate that, Doctor. Lime Hummingbird comes in with 80,000 sats. I hoard that which all kind covet. Well, I'm fairly new to the podcast, and I'm enjoying the content. Looking forward to new episodes. Well, thank you, Lime. Appreciate that.
Rotted Mood comes in with 75,000 sats. I hoard that which all kind covet. Oh, yeah, I remember. We were chatting about this. This is my first boost after my Albie Hub. Whoa, congratulations. Congratulations. I know you are having some issues. We talked about this. He says, by the way, don't try it on a Pi Zero. Yeah, I don't even know if I'd recommend it on a Pi 4, to be honest with you. Maybe a Pi 5, maybe an Odroid, but I think 1-liter PCs and up are probably better for a lightning node. I'd actually be open to hear people's feedback on that, what you think a great low-cost lightning Bitcoin node machine is.
But in my opinion, the Raspberry Pi no longer cuts it. Satsquanch comes in with 66,000 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Yeah. He says, I'm sitting next to a pizza chef at our Thousand Oaks Bitcoin meetup, and one of the group handed cash for me to boost to you. So here we go, Chris. Godspeed. Woo! Make it so. Okay. Thanks, Satsquanch. That's really great. Great. See, you got a cash trade there. I like it. User 204 sends in 50,000 sats. Boost! Satsquanch here just wanted you to know that, Chris, how much we value your hard work. Oh, a double boost from Satsquanch under a different name.
Just let you know how much we value your hard work, keeping us informed, keeping track of our Bitcoin HODL adventures. HODL heartily and stay the course. Thank you. You know what? I hoard that which your kind covet. You get another dragon there for that. Thank you, Satsquanch. I like that. Hoddle heartily and stay the course. Could be a good saying. Listener Jeff comes in with 42,222 sats. The answer to the ultimate question. Says that was another banger talking about the four horsemen of the market apocalypse. Keep up the great work. I really don't like the U.S. government buying up so much Bitcoin.
I understand how it can help them, but it's like feeding a rabid dog the steak off your plate. You're just making it stronger, and you're going to get hungry yourself. Okay, I like it. He says it comes down to the golden rule. He who holds the gold makes the rules. Sure, there's no rules driving Bitcoin, but there's underlying rules in economics. If they hold the majority, they control the price. I prefer this currency to stay in our hands. Yeah, although I suppose the flip side of that would be true, too. Like, if they were to, like, irresponsibly sell it and dump it on the market, the value, like we saw happen to the German government, would crash, and they wouldn't get much out of it.
I think we're probably going to happen, right? At some point, we're going to see some event like that. Some major hodler, like an ETF or a microstrategy or an individual, an early individual that just has a massive stack. We're going to see a massive sell-off eventually. I mean, we see it right now. Today, as I sat down to record tens of thousands, maybe 100,000 Bitcoin from the US government moved to Coinbase Prime. People start to go, it's going to sell. It'll happen. It will happen. I think people will buy it up. You're going to have to ride the vol. The traders love the Vol. Yeah, exactly.
Jcube comes in with 23,000 sats. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. Says, appreciate what you do, and I just want to say, keep it up. We love the show. Thank you, Jcube. Love you. Adversary 17 also came in. 23,000 sats. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. There you go. Double Hank. Thanks for the FUD link. I'm going to give that a watch. It's an 11 out of 10 episode, Chris. Love it. Wow. Thank you, man. That's really nice. I appreciate that a lot. I wasn't sure, you know, if the people liked the mission-focused episode or not. The Podfather, Adam Curry, comes in with 22,222 sats, also known as a McDuck.
Things are looking up for old McDuck. Just thanks for the, quote, emergency podcast. Yeah, you're right, of Trump at the Bitcoin conference. I pulled several clips from it and credited you no agenda. Still weren't a full roll of ducks. Thank you, Podfather. You know, somebody's got to do it. You got the live-to-tape equipment. Why do all the TikTokers and YouTubers get to have all the fun? Right? I want to sit down and have the fun, too. And really, I just, you know, I want to help put things in perspective while the topic is hot and people are interested, too.
Look at this, Crashmaster also coming in with 22,222 ducks. This old duck still got it. Here's an additional boost to my regular 100-sat streaming. Thanks, Chris. Well, thank you, Crashmaster. Mix comes in with 21,000 sats. There's coffee in that nebula. I like the concise updates on the important topics. I listened to that episode right away. Had to top off my wall to boost, though. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that. LazyLox comes in with 20,000 sats. This is the way. Boosting and another boost. Thank you, LazyLux. Appreciate that. Halleck also came in with 20,000 sats. Everything's under control.
Double my normal boost for the bonus episode. I appreciate the conference coverage. The politicians are not going to save us. But I'm blown by the movement of the overtone window. Yeah, me too. And I may have read that one before. Some of these may be dupes from my node. But thank you either way. Either way, I want to give you a shout out. And you're right. That is it. That is really it. This is the way. It's the movement of the overtone window that's really changed. Faraday Fedora sent in, RoaDucks. At the comment from the other listener who's saying that ETH has more use than Bitcoin, are these innovative services in the room with us right now?
Also, the irony that that is coming in a boost on the lighting network. Well, you got to give them credit for using all technologies, right? At least they're informed on how boosts and sats work. I wonder, what is the major utility for Ethereum and Solana? If you get rid of all of like the meme coins. I think it's stablecoins, right? That's the use case, is stablecoins. I think the PayPal stablecoin. I could be wrong. I don't really follow this super closely. But I think the PayPal stablecoin is on Solana. And I think, you know, like USDC is on Ethereum.
Coinbase is in so hardcore with Ethereum. They created Base, and it uses Ethereum as the base gas. It's so weird. It's a fair day. I don't understand how it works. But thank you for the boost. I appreciate it. Jordan Bravo sent in 11,110 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. At the conference in Nashville, I visited the Start9 booth and saw their upcoming product, a plug-and-play router preloaded with their own fork of OpenWRT. They showed off the custom GUI they're building for it. I think the idea is that folks who don't want to deal with network configurations such as port forwarding can have a simple out-of-the-box solution. No release date was given yet.
Thoughts? Hmm, that would make it simpler to manage firewall problems. I guess that's generally the problem with a lot of these start nine umbral type things is they have to use Tor to get around people's NAT and that kind of sucks. I don't know. I don't know if I want them changing the firewall rules. I'd rather they set up VPN mesh network like Tailscale or Nebula or something like that. Interesting product though, Jordan Bravo. I'll keep an eye out for it. He continues, DCing into Bitcoin allows me to ignore the panic in the market because I know I'm saving in the scarcest asset in existence.
I appreciate the peace of mind that comes with not thinking about the, in the first place. Yeah. And not having to keep track of the fiat price. My goal is to increase the number of sats I hold and I'm gradually and continually achieving that goal. Thanks for the great show. That's a great way to think about it, Jordan. I agree. And thank you very much. Appreciate the boost. The tone record comes in with a space balls boost. One, two, three, four, five sats. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Drop in a shout-out to all the talented musicians showcasing Value for Value model in Nashville last weekend.
Wavelake, which just hit 1,000 artists on the platform, and Toonster with video streams on Noster allowing zaps and boosts. It was epic. Massive, massive plus one to that shout-out. Really awesome to see what's happening with Value for Value music. Let's hope that the next Bitcoin conference is integrated deeply into the conference. And I think ultimately the Bitcoin conference folks are missing out massively on podcasting 2.0 and Boost. What we have done here with Boost and peer-to-peer sat transfer with Zaps and Boost is important. But I think even more important, which they should really tune into, is the medium of denomination is sats.
I don't say you boost it in with $2.35. cents. I don't ever actually even convert these to USD. I don't know what the USD value even is. I don't care. Like Jordan, I'm just stacking sats. Like we all are. I don't care right now what the USD price is. But it is a massive shift to start denominating things in sats, let alone the fact that we're sending and streaming sats and paying for music artists to create great songs that lets them play on podcasts that was never accessible for like huge shifts that they're just completely missing over there. Hopefully, maybe the next Bitcoin conference. I really think it's something they should be paying more attention to. And one of the ways they could do that is integrate those great musicians.
I'm glad they were kind of around the area, though. That might be the very first start to wider recognition. Thank you, ToneWrecker. Appreciate that boost. OrangePillLawyer25. Nice. Are you actually a Bitcoin lawyer? Comes in with a row of ducks. Am I sacrificing privacy by putting my XBub into BlueWallet to track my cold card balance? No, I don't think so. I don't think BlueWallet does any kind of uploading to a cloud server. And you're just reading the keys. You're not writing to the blockchain. You're not sending transactions. So I don't think you're making any kind of privacy mistake there.
Now, I'm not a BlueWallet expert. So you just want to double check they're not doing like a cloud backup up that might be readable by their servers, I would doubt it. I have seen BlueWalt. I have used it. It's just been a long time. So from my recollection, your tote's fine. The Golden Dragon comes in with 18,100 sats. I'm not really a fan of the U.S. having a reserve. Yeah, I think we did talk about that. But he says the folks that came out of the woodwork to bash Bitcoin in the hard times just don't get it. It's incredibly obvious that they just want to keep us entrenched in fiat for their own good.
He says, I find immense value from these breaking type shows. Thank you, Dragon. I agree. It's got to be at this point, like Aaron Sorkin. What are you doing, buddy, over there? Like, what are you doing? Figure it out. Really incredible. Bitcoin Lizard comes in with 10,000 sats. Yeah, all right. Fun will now commence. Albie Hub Test Boost, always happy to open a channel to your new node to give you some extra inbound liquidity. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard. I have been rearranging channels as you might have seen from your self-hosted node. I mean, that might be a good option.
I think I'm okay right now wallet of Satoshi has been really beneficial to open a channel to but you have to minimum right now 5 million sats so that's one of the great things about the boosts as they come in is I can turn it around and use it for channel liquidity so I really appreciate that can put those sats to work right away, Ace Ackerman comes in with 4,444 sats. Ah, fuck! You know, Chris, sometimes it takes a while before people recognize real quality. Just keep providing great content. And here's a row of ducks, which is much better than cuck bucks. Because Sorkin is a psyop.
You know what? I agree with you on that one. What is his deal? Podbun comes in with 5,000 sats. Mr. Bustin with happiness seeing you again. Great coverage as always. Just getting back into listening to podcasts. Hope everyone is well. Podbun, I'm glad you're getting back into podcasts. I recommend it. It is a high-fiber media diet. Much better than the mainstream media fast food crap. Mug Daddy comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! See how there's no chance the U.S. government is going to return stolen Bitcoin? I'd rather they toss them in a strategic reserve than just randomly sell them that's a good point because that's probably what they're going to do also recognizing the absurdity and expecting consistency a strategic reserve would treat it as a currency rather than a security which is cool for tax purposes love the show that's a great boost mug daddy great to hear from you thank you piter come no piger piger p-y-j-t-r p-y-j-t-r piger i don't know how you say that man but i appreciate the boost thank you for the valuable content greetings Greetings from the EU.
Oh, man, thank you for... You know, I don't hear from a lot of folks from the EU because I feel like Bitcoin has such a bad reputation across the pond in general, in the EU and in the UK. And so it's really nice to hear from listeners over there. Thank you. I appreciate that boost. ReadyTake4 is back. I love it. With 10,000 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. ReadyTake4 did. Plus one for the focused episodes. Always appreciate the high signal. Okay, roger that. I will keep doing them. You know, I won't overdo them. I'll just do them when they seem appropriate. but I will keep at it.
Digital Farmer, I think I got these boosts before, but I loved it because they were new and they just got boosting set up and they're using Breeze. And they sent in a boost that I thought was particularly funny. And you know what? I'm going to read it. Hopefully, he says, there's no issue in taking my sats as they were converted from altcoin staking rewards. Roger that. You know what? Sats are sats, man. You cashed out those staking rewards and you bought a hard asset. set. So I can't complain about that. It's the first time I've ever seen that, and it did make me laugh.
I really appreciate that. Anonymous comes in with 5,100 sats. Everything's under control. Keep up the good work, they say. And Glacier came in with a row of ducks. First time booster and a party member. Oh, thank you. Appreciate that. I'm new to Bitcoin, but I'm learning fast thanks to this show. I was watching the markets carefully on Monday and was excited to see this episode come out and hear your take keep up the great work with increasing centralization of tech your show keeps me optimistic about the future of independent media, hey plus one to that right i i tell you i hope so let's see let's round it out there's so many boosts i really appreciate you guys really what it is is some of them are dupes some of them i missed before and i want to get in here but we're going to round it out bit cryptic says thanks for the thanks from the southern hemisphere he sent 2048 sets.
And that right there is all of the boosts I could track with a message. And that's not all the boosts we got. I actually had 68 boosts that I was able to scrape together across 49 individual boosters. There was also 46 individual SAT streamers who streamed a total of 64,523 SATs, bringing the show's total. Total, total sats collected for this episode, when you include everything, 884,311 sats. Now, the reality is only about 8% of that made it to this show, but that's on me. But I'd love it and invite you to consider boosting again. Truly now, for the love of Satoshi, my node should be working.
I need to know if it's not working, so there's that as well. Lightning's so easy, guys. Everybody knows it. Lightning's so easy. What's your problem? I don't understand. It's fine. Man, talk about a bad week to have node problems, but so grateful for all of the incredible support there, and I would love to hear from you if I did miss your boost, which is possible. Please let me know. Send another note back in, and I'll try to go find it. And also, consider boosting again. Really appreciate it, and I'd love to keep the support rolling for this week in Bitcoin. How about some project updates? lightning.pub has reached a huge milestone this is a noster native lightning node that allows you to share your node with other noster accounts so essentially their noster id becomes their key to use your lightning nodes kind of like a you know like a semi uncle john jim kind of setup and it also has well they promise at least automatic channel management which sounds Sounds really, really nice.
And this week, they announced one-line deployments to get up and running with Lightning Pub. I'll play a little bit. The dev over there, Justin, who's a Lightning developer and a head over at ShockNet, he demoed it. And I got a little bit of that demo for you. Howdy folks, it's Justin from ShockNet. I just wanted to share something with you that we shipped today, and that is a one-line deployment for LightningPub, which is a Nostr-powered LightningNode. It makes it the easiest way to set up a LightningNode, and it integrates Nostr as an account system, so you can connect apps and family and friends to your LightningNode as guest users without any complicated networking.
Working so this means you can use like an old laptop you know from your home or literally a five dollar vps we're using neutrino just like a mobile lightning node so it's super light and going to super cheap vps and there's no easier way to spin up a lightning node and share it with friends and family and all that stuff so i'm going to show you right here let me tell you anything that's going to make lightning easier to get up and going and work for people i'm a big fan of and along that same line zeus has launched two new olympus integrations olympus is our liquidity provider, one with lightning.pub, and another with Mutiny Wallet.
Now, Mutiny Wallet, and I'll put a link to this, has announced that the team behind it is retiring and shutting down, which is a damn shame because it's fantastic technology. But even though the project is shutting down, it's open source and it's self-hosted. So it's going to continue to be used by users. And this integration will work with that self-hosted version. In fact, it'll just become the default if you want to open up a lightning channel in Mutiny. Zeus's LSP just makes that really easy. It already works in the Zeus app super well. So to see them kind of expand beyond the Zeus app is an interesting play for them, and I think a good development.
Moving on, there's more OpenSAT grants this week. Now, OpenSAT has a nonprofit set aside just for Nostra, and OpenSAT sends, well, they're a Bitcoin-focused funding group that primarily sponsors Freedom Tech projects, has announced a sixth wave of Nostra grants, awarding nine projects. Yeah, there's six wave of NostraGrants from their Nostra Fund. The organization has also granted long-term support for a developer who will use it to improve the Snort client and develop native apps for Zap.Stream, including a new backend to create a marketplace of streaming providers. That's interesting to me. I'll have to watch that one. I think it could be very interesting. And then the last project I want to mention this week is Fetty.
The first full release of what they're calling their super app, at least in their live stream, has been announced. The app is now available on Android and iOS. Fetty is currently, quote, source available, meaning the code is available for inspection by the public. But the project isn't set to actually transition to a full AGPL open source license until January of 2026, although it seems they've already locked that in. Fetty is interesting. To me, all this technology is so early that right now I stick with Liquid. But it doesn't mean it won't be something that I'll play around with in the future.
All right. So I wanted to answer some noob questions and I'm already running tight on time. So I'm going to get to just one. In episode 21, Monty33 boosted in a batch of great newbie questions that I think I should answer. So that way, people from the JB audience or the podcasting to the audience that have found this show that don't really know Bitcoin yet can get a few fundamentals under their belt. And I'm going to start with one big question that Monty asked, and we'll get to the other ones in future episodes. And that question simply was, why does Bitcoin have value?
I'd love to hear your answer if you want to pause right now and send it in your answer. But I think to understand this, you need to understand the four things that gives money in general utility and value. For money to be good money, it must be a medium of exchange, a store of value, a unit of account, and I'd say it probably needs to be accepted as a means to settle a debt or an obligation over time. Bitcoin is pharmaceutical-grade money. It is the best version of these things. It is a much, much better medium of exchange. It has its own built-in network. It's peer-to-peer.
It's much faster than the dollar to transmit. It is a great store of value. Anybody that's held Bitcoin for more than a few years has made money. No one's ever lost money over four years of holding Bitcoin. Bitcoin is already being used as a unit account all over the world. Well, this is growing, but an example right here is on this podcast. Your sats that come in for a boost are a unit of account. Bitcoin is the ultimate money. And so its utility is inherent because of that. It's the best version of money. Additionally, it's scarce. There's a fixed supply capped at 21 million.
It's decentralized and it operates independently of banks or government, it, which means it operates without the risk of sovereign debt, sovereign crises, or bank collapse. Its security is top-notch. It's considered the highest secure network out there. It has so much compute power behind it. It has a huge network effect. More and more people trust it. More and more value comes from it every day. It's transparent. All transactions are recorded on public ledger. The network is transparent. The coin is transparent. The code is transparent. It's divisible. It can be divided into very small units, enabling microtransactions like you see here in these podcasts.
And it's portable. It can be moved and transferred globally without physical limitations. It is the best form and utility of money man has ever created. And money naturally flows to where it's treated the best. And Bitcoin's created by proof of work. Proof of work uses a real world commodity, energy. So Bitcoin is created from something valuable. So that sets the floor price for Bitcoin long term because these mining operations have to make money. They have the cost of mine. They got staff. They got a whole business operation. There's a floor there. And that can also set the price long term. Well, sometimes, of course, the volatility will buck away from that price. Sometimes it'll dip below it.
But ultimately, it has to at least be at that cost to mine Bitcoin. The last time I looked, I think the floor cost is somewhere in the mid-50s to mine Bitcoin, a single Bitcoin right now, $50,000. It's really expensive. It's an incredible cost. That cost is also that security because it means in order to try to overwhelm the Bitcoin network, the cost to do so would be so incredibly expensive, you might as well just buy Bitcoin. So Bitcoin has value because it is the best form of money we've ever created. It's pharmaceutical grade money. Bitcoin has value because of how it's created.
And it has value because it's scarce. And it's mathematically provably scarce. And every coin can be accounted for. These are some of the things that I think make Bitcoin valuable. But I'd love to hear from the audience if I've missed something. Coming up, I want to answer what KYC is, custodial versus non-custodial wallets, Bitcoin savings flows, how to move Bitcoin around in larger chunks, So what's the right amount? How fees can work in these scenarios? The differences between holding the ETF, putting in an IRA versus just stacking sats directly. We're going to answer more of those.
And if anybody else has any newbie questions, please do boost them in. I'm going to start collecting them and then I'll try to get to them as time allows. When things are really busy, I may skip a week, but then when we have a little time, I'm going to try to get there. And I've just been meaning to for a week. So I wanted to cover that one this week, even though we are a little tight on time. Let's move along. Music. I got a final clip of the week. Speaking of utility, Alex Gladstein had a great talk at the Bitcoin Nashville conference that was really for anybody that ever said Bitcoin is worthless.
It was an entire talk that addresses the utility of Bitcoin, even in scenarios where there's no Internet and et cetera. And I'll play for you the introduction of the talk and I'll link to the full thing. Not that long, actually. The actual talk's pretty short. And then there's a follow-up interview with him where he goes into a few more details. But here is just a taste of Bitcoin's global utility with Alex Gladstein. As was hinted at, we live in a world where governments and some of the most powerful people on our planet continue to tell us that Bitcoin is useless or worse or dangerous. This has been happening for more than a decade. decade, people continue to be gaslit by the media and the government in every country, essentially, you know, save for maybe a few, into thinking that this thing is risky and dangerous and maybe bad for the planet and bad for people and good for criminals.
And it's just such an incredible global brainwashing operation. I mean, it's one of these things that in 10 years, we're going to look back in time and be like, I can't believe that happened. I can't believe all of these important, you know, People that were supposed to be leaders in the world were telling us that this technology was bad when it is far from it. So what I hope to do today and tomorrow is walk you through in detail what Bitcoin does around the world and how transformative it is. And how it's changing lives and how it's changing our relationship with freedom and commerce and electric power.
So we're going to start with our friend Jamie here. So I have a few slides with people who, you know, are trusted by Wall Street, by Washington, you know, by world leaders. They're just completely wrong. I mean, this is somebody who really should know better. You know, this is something he said. I personally think Bitcoin is worthless. Warren Buffett has said that Bitcoin has no unique value at all. It's a delusion, basically. It's rat poison squared. Bill Gates has said that Bitcoin is a pure greater fool theory type of investment. Charlie Munger, rest in peace, said, I hate the Bitcoin success.
I think the whole damn development is disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. The Fed's Neil Kashkari said just a couple months ago that more than a decade later, there's still no legitimate use case for Bitcoin. This is someone who has a very senior role in the world's most important monetary body. And probably one of the most prestigious English language publications going back a century is The Atlantic. And just a couple months ago, they said in an essay that they published, 15 years into its existence, Bitcoin has yet to demonstrate any serious use case. So again, the world is so lost. And the crazy part is there's so many amazing use cases for Bitcoin.
Now, I think that most people at this conference understand that the primary use case for Bitcoin is savings. I don't necessarily have to get too into that. It's been the best performing asset in the world since it was created. It is a profoundly effective wage technology, technology, savings technology. It protects your purchasing power. I think, you know, most of the content at the conference here is talking about, you know, why that's the case. And people talk about the technology of that and the effect of that and why you should join the Bitcoin movement.
So I don't really need to cover savings, but I wanted to cover three other areas where Bitcoin is really transforming the world. One is commerce, one is freedom, and one is power. So today we're going to talk about commerce and freedom. Tomorrow, same time, I'm going to come back and talk to you guys about power. Like I said, you got to catch the whole talk. It's for anybody that ever said Bitcoin doesn't have any utility. He's got the receipts and real world examples all around the world. And that does bring me to the end of this week's episode. Links to everything I talked about are over at thisweekinbitcoin.show.
You'll look for episode 23 and you'll find it there in our show notes. Please do boost in. Tell me what you think about what was covered, what maybe I should have covered. I'm always down to hear that as well. And again, if you have somebody you can mention the show to that might be interested in learning about Bitcoin, send them a link our way. We're always happy to have them on board. I'm going to wrap it up with one of my absolute favorite value for value tracks. It's one of the songs I just keep coming back to and bopping my head to. It's One Night by Daddy Nat.
Music.
Yardeni Research president Kick off
Inflation Gaslighting
Consumer Sentiment
Bitcoin's Role
Kathy Wood's Predictions
Bitcoin and Politics
Satoshi's Identity
Project Updates and Boosts
Utility of Bitcoin
Closing Thoughts
