Bitcoin's sweet 16 has never looked better. This week, I'll unpack the hard data behind the new wave of adoption that's transforming magic internet money into mainstream reality.
LINKS:
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- Buy Sats on River - The Best Way to Stack in the US
- The Bitcoin Company - Spending your Bitcoin Via Lightning
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- SALT Lending - Get access to your BTC Value w/out Selling
LINKS:
- BTC ETFs Record Massive $870 Million Inflows
- BTC price risks new 'FOMO' top as Bitcoin ETF inflows near $1B daily
- Spot Bitcoin ETFs on track to overtak Satoshi Nakamoto's BTC holdings by year-end
- IBIT took in more $$$ *today* than all but 7 of the 590+ ETFs launched in 2024 have taken in *all year*
- The market is getting even more concentrated
- Microsoft to vote for or against "Assessment of Investing in Bitcoin" during shareholder meeting in December
- CNBC reports on the soaring national deficit’s role in the election, noting that “neither politicians nor the public seem to care.”
- The US Treasury expects to drain $186 billion this quarter from its general account plus borrow $546 billion, and then borrow $823 billion in the first quarter of 2025. That’s $1.6 trillion of overdraft spending in the next 6 months.
- The Case for Bitcoin as a Reserve Asset
- This is a very bullish setup for bitcoin into the election, says VanEck's Matthew Sigel - YouTube
- New FinCEN Alert Shows Cash, Smuggling Preferred Method For Hezbollah Financing
- Stephen Mollah Q&A - YouTube
- Macroeconomist claims to be Satoshi, creator of ChatGPT, and Twitter logo designer
- US Treasury says stablecoin growth is increasing demand for T-bills
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Unknown:
I think the most beautiful thing about it is there's no one person setting the direction. And there's no one person on the other side that can stop it. So we have something that is pretty organic in nature and very principled in its original design. And I think the Bitcoin white paper is one of the most seminal works of computer science in the last 20, 30 years. Music. It's poetry. Welcome to Lucky Episode 33. My name is Chris, and let me just say right off the top of the show, happy 16th anniversary for the Bitcoin white paper. Happy anniversary to all you Bitcoiners out there new and old.
And of course, thank you to Satoshi, whoever and wherever you are. It's going to be kind of a celebratory episode, I think. Things are lining up for old Bitcoin on its 16th anniversary. And there really is only one big story this week. And I'm not the one making a big stink out of it. People like the coin. It's clear on its 16th birthday, if you zoom out, it doesn't matter what the hourly price chart says. People like the coin. Bitcoin is trading at its highest point since March. It's up more than 5% in the last 24 hours, with Bitcoin's trading volume topping $31 billion and more than $224 million in short positions liquidated over that same window.
Now, meanwhile, stocks tied to digital asset prices like Riot Platforms, Coinbase and MicroStrategy are all rallying this morning along with the wider crypto market as Bitcoin breaks past that key 70K resistance level. Now, spot Bitcoin ETFs have also seen a surge of inflows, adding over $3.1 billion in just the last two weeks, bringing the total market cap of those funds to nearly $73 billion since they launched in January. Just let that just sink in for a second. $73 billion in total market cap, and they launched this year in January. That's where these ETFs, we're going to get more into ETFs in a moment, but you can see why the people are getting bullish out there.
... purge of inflows, adding over $3.1 billion in just the last two weeks, bringing the total market cap of those funds to nearly $73 billion since they launched in January. I've been speaking with analysts, and they say that with one week to go until the general election here in the U.S., investors are increasingly bullish that no matter who wins, it will be a net benefit for the industry. And already, guys, we are seeing options traders increase bets that regardless of who takes the White House, Bitcoin is poised to hit that 80K mark this year. 80K, she says. All right. Well, so BlackRock's ETF, IBIT, has really been the winner.
Yesterday, as I record, it took in just $875 million in a single day. I'm going to say it again, $875 million in a single day. The Bitcoin ETFs took in, in just the past two days, more than the gold ETF took in during its entire first year. In just the last two days, the ETFs together. More than all gold did in its first year. So now we've exceeded the $1 million Bitcoin number. ETFs now hold over a million Bitcoin. Also in the last couple of days, just kind of keeping things really just kind of frothy, Saylor announced a $42 billion Bitcoin buy plan over the next three years.
That's a staggering number. And Microsoft shareholders have already begun voting on whether or not Microsoft should invest some of its holdings into Bitcoin. The board recommends against it, but in that proposal to vote, the truth is laid unbelievably bare. I really encourage you to track this down and read it. I'll try to link to it if I can. Because the case they make clearly demonstrates that Bitcoin is their best hedge against the debasement of their holdings. So we have the ECB, we have the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and now we have these shareholder activists that are all clearly saying in extremely public venues that Bitcoin is the best hedge against government debasement and government debasement is going to continue.
So the language there is a win alone. So you can see why all of this with the ETFs becoming more successful, Wall Street is really bringing the money in. And the reason why this matters to standard plebs, just regular old plebs like myself... The truth of the matter is Bitcoin's price is getting too rich for most of us. Most of the OGs can't afford to buy Bitcoin at this price. You know, we can DCA, and even if Bitcoin was $200,000 a coin, I'd still DCA because I view that as a form of savings and diversification of future spending and a hedge against inflation.
So it doesn't really matter what the price is at, I'm going to DCA, but I'm getting less and less coin for it. So we're entering into the price as we get to $70,000, where we really don't have the bags to move it as the plebs. It's Wall Street's game now to move these numbers. And that only happens when it becomes legitimate in their eyes. And the success of these ETFs is doing just that. So you've probably heard of VanEck before because it's one of the well-known, respected Wall Street firms out there that manages investments for rich people. I think right now they hold somewhere around $102 billion in funds under management.
And one of their analysts, we'll get into it, Matthew Siegel, came on CNBC. And I'm going to play this clip. It's a little wonky for you if you're not into finance stuff. But bear with it because it really shows you where their head's at. And if you think about how Bitcoin gets to a million dollars, it's by adoption through all these various financial toolings like retirement funds and ETFs. investments. And the VanEck researcher, they'll tell you his name. His name's Matthew, I think. Matthew Siegel. They'll do a brief introduction and he'll get into why he sees what is, regardless of sort of short-term election stuff, a pretty bullish setup in the next, you know, even just a few months.
The price of Bitcoin climbing over $68,000 this morning, up 100% in the last year. Let's take a look at some of the trends in the crypto of retail markets. Joining us is Matthew Siegel, head of digital assets research at VanEck. There are a variety of things that we've tried to correlate with Bitcoin movements. Become less and less successful at anything we can just count on. So this is the struggles real here. These, you know, these talking heads and I respect Joe, but these talking heads, they they try to constantly compare Bitcoin to something else.
You know, what else does it what else does it track to that when they when they talk about if it correlates, they're saying, well, if the S&P goes up, does that mean Bitcoin goes up? And when the S&P goes down, does Bitcoin always go down? They're constantly looking to correlate it to some other asset so then they can kind of put it in a box. And what Joe's saying here at the intro is we keep trying to put Bitcoin in a box. And as soon as we get it all boxed up, it changes form and it no longer fits our definitions. And it throws us for a loop. But it does seem that when Trump started moving up in some of the, we just hit Calci on, in some of the betting sites, it does seem like this most latest run from 57 to almost 70, seems to be correlated with the betting odds improving.
I mean, is that fair to say in your view, Matthew? Yeah, I agree with that. Trump is clearly the more pro-crypto and Bitcoin candidate, and VP Harris has not said a single word on it, so one doubts whether she truly understands it. But to your question about the correlations, the most significant long-term correlations for Bitcoin are a negative correlation with the U.S. Dollar and a positive correlation with money supply growth, or M2. So clearly on the latter front, money growth has re-accelerated. Okay, Matt's got my attention because those are the two things that I think if you were going to correlate Bitcoin to, it's when the money supply is going up and when the U.S. dollar, the Dixie, is going down.
The strength of the dollar goes down, money supply go up, Bitcoin rally. And it makes sense. People are looking for a place to save their money, right? They don't want to basement. So, OK, so far, I'm on board with Matt's analysis here on if you were going to correlate to something, although it's not 100 percent, it's like 80 percent. This is something you could correlate it to. But as we go on, he gets a little spicy. With the Fed pivot, that may be playing part of a role. Also, some seller's exhaustion. The German government and the U.S. government sold, spitefully, $2 billion worth of Bitcoin in the last couple of months.
That has eased. And I think the election is helping. You know, he seems a little nervous, but he still managed to get the German government sold spitefully in there, which doesn't which doesn't get our host don't miss that. They catch it and they try to get him to clarify what he means by spitefully selling their Bitcoin. I don't think he quite does a great job of it. Why did they do that? German government seized a couple billion dollars of Bitcoin in a crime and sold it in August because they don't like it. Because they don't like, you just said spitefully, I wondered why you had that, an adjective or an adverb, I don't know, maybe an adverb.
Couldn't a correlation with the money supply explain why it seems to be just totally correlated with risk assets? If there's a lot of liquidity, risk assets seem to go up. Therefore, Bitcoin seems to go up and down. It doesn't seem to be a safe haven with risk assets. It seems to move totally correlated with, you know, the NASDAQ or the Magnificent Seven or whatever. All right. So this is a standard question. I'm glad Joe's asking it in a way because it's, isn't it really just kind of a risk asset that is correlated to tech stocks? And when the tech market rallies, Bitcoin rallies, isn't that really what's going on here? It's not a safe haven because the price can go down from day to day.
The correlations change over time. Over a 10-year time horizon, the NASDAQ correlation with Bitcoin is a 0.19, quite low. Over the last three months, it's a 0.5, and that's a two-and-a-half-year high. And that may be keeping some allocators on the sideline because they want to see it fall. Our bet is that this is a very bullish setup for Bitcoin into the election. We saw the exact same pattern in 2020 where Bitcoin lagged with low volatility. And then once a winner was announced, we had a high vol rally as new buyers come into this market. And that's the great thing about Bitcoin is that every day there's new buyers being born. It's kind of like the video game industry.
The olds who hate it die off. The new folks are buying it. And what we think is that I thought that was an interesting analogy. It's like the video game industry, which, you know, being around watching home consoles come in with the Atari and then kind of watching some families adopt it. And the younger generations clearly adopted it sooner. But the younger generations that adopted it, like me as a young lad. Man, I remember when we got the first NES. That was so high tech. And then I didn't want the Super Nintendo because I didn't think there were enough games for it when that thing came out.
Because I was so in on the NES, right? Because it was such a step up from like the Atari and we didn't have a lot of money. So like I told my folks and they'd already bought it for me for Christmas. Don't get me the Super Nintendo. I'm fine with the NES. And then I unwrapped my big Christmas present and it was the Super Nintendo, which ended up being my favorite console. And I still game and I still play those games, but I play newer games too. Not much. I mostly can't do it for more than 10 minutes before I feel like guilty. But my observation is a lot of us that grew up video gaming still do it today.
My folks don't really video game. I mean, maybe they'll play a casual game on their phone from time to time and they'll dabble. But, you know, I still have Steam. I have probably hundreds of games in my Steam library. I just installed a new, it's an older game, but I just installed one last night, right? I'm still actively in that area. And I wonder if the analogy is apt. I would love to have your opinion. What do you think is, is video game adoption similar to maybe how Bitcoin adoption will work? Is that a fair analogy? I'll back it up, boost it, and tell me what you think. In 2020, where Bitcoin lagged with low volatility.
And then once a winner was announced, we had a high vol rally as new buyers come into this market. And that's the great thing about Bitcoin is that every day there's new buyers being born. It's kind of like the video game industry. The olds who hate it die off. The new folks are buying it. And what we think is that once the election result is finalized, Moody's is going to downgrade U.S. Sovereign debt. And that could be a catalyst for Bitcoin. Now, that's a bit of a bombshell right there that they just gloss right over. He thinks Moody's is going to downgrade the U.S. after the election, which I don't think would be great for short term.
Going to downgrade U.S. sovereign debt, and that could be a catalyst for Bitcoin. Doesn't gold correlate with with the dollar and with M2 as well? And gold and Bitcoin It seemed like the correlation broke down a couple of times recently. Bitcoin is a chameleon. Its correlations change over time. It's hard to predict what it's going to be correlated with over the short term, over the long term. But do you really say it's because of the 21 million and fixed amount is out there, therefore the debasement of the currency favors that? I mean, that's. Yeah, it's a non-U.S. asset.
It's an emerging markets asset. And while we were all hyperventilating about the election over the last week, BRICS had a conference in Russia. There's six new members of BRICS this year. So BRICS GDP is now greater than the combined GDP of G7. Of the six new members, three of them, Argentina, the UAE and Ethiopia, are now mining Bitcoin with government resources. So there is tremendous urgency outside of the U.S. To find a way to circumvent the irresponsible fiscal policy that we've been running here in the U.S. In fact, Russia announced an initiative there.
Sovereign Wealth Fund is going to invest in a regional initiative to build Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure throughout BRICS with an idea of settling global trade in Bitcoin. So, look, someday, I don't know if it's five years, 10 years, Putin's going to die. We're going to look to reintegrate some of these countries into the world financial system, and they're going to be trading with Bitcoin. What are we going to be doing? Okay. Yeah. Got him there, didn't he? He got him. They're literally speechless. Stunned? No, I'm just processing. You're processing?
Processing. When will that be complete? The processing? Yes, so that you can make a comment. When is Bitcoin going to be complete? I have no idea. What does that mean? You know, you can sit there and you could say something like, at the scale of what she just did, and Sorkin, who is the one that had that, when is Bitcoin complete comment, he never gets it. In a way, though, it's like he's the perfect, I don't know, is it Muse? Is that the right term? I don't feel like it. But he's like, it gives us something to work against, right? Because he's the perpetual doubter. And so it always gives us something to work against. And I think in a way, we're constantly checking ourself.
We're always kind of revisiting these things. We're refining how we view these things. But VanEck, I and many others, love the coin. And this week, the state of Florida is considering investing state pension funds into Bitcoin. The chief financial officer of Florida, Jimmy Padironis, I think is how you say it, he proposed considering Bitcoin as a diversification asset for public pension funds. And he's requesting a feasibility and risk report by March 2025. This is interesting. Just a quote. Recently, Governor DeSantis also leaned forward to protect the personal finances of Floridians from government overreach and woke corporate monitoring.
And by signing legislation to fight back against the central bank digital currency, CBDC. So you're actually looking at this. The CBDC is a centralized currency, which is sort of the antithesis to what crypto or Bitcoin aims to be. So there's sort of a tinge of some political rhetoric in that comment there. So before we get to the Bitcoin part, God, it's so torturous. Can you believe this guy gets paid unbelievable sums of money? I mean, and Joe's the one I like. He's the one I like. We have this system here in the United States that is really fascinating where the states can kind of compete against each other on some of these things.
And Florida is positioning itself as the anti-CBDC state from, like, the go. Before we even are seriously in the CBDC conversation, when we're still in the, quote, research phase, Florida is taking a very anti-CBDC play. And that anti-CBDC stance seems to be expanding into a pro-consumer crypto advocacy stance and then maybe a little bit more of an open mind towards Bitcoin as a diversification asset. And I don't think I don't think they're talking, you know, going all in. I think they're talking like percentages in the single digits. I think that the government's going to continue to print too much money.
You think Bitcoin is a way for Floridians to maintain purchasing power. Thank you for making those points, because that's exactly where our head is on this. We look at the failed policies of Washington. You know, I hope President Trump is going to be able to turn around, but I don't think it's going to happen overnight. He's walking into a real mess. That's a great hedge, you know, because Trump promises he's going to fix everything. And so you're a pro-Trump state, you're a pro-Trump political person. So how do you say, well, we're still concerned about massive government debasement in CBDCs over the next few years, even if Trump wins? because it sounds like an anti-Trump statement in a way.
But he's figured out a way to make it sound like, well, you know, even if Trump gets in and fixes everything, it's going to take a few years. You know, I hope, President Trump is going to be able to turn around, but I don't think it's going to happen overnight. He's walking into a real mess. But we need to be able to have a hedge against this massive overreach by the federal government with a centralized currency. Look, I don't want the federal government knowing when my son went to the grocery store to go buy a bag of Doritos at 2.15 in the afternoon. So we need to have some protections in place. And I think where we make it a welcome and interesting expansion of dialogues in Florida and maybe even a greater expansion.
We have about $800 million in crypto-related investments in our state portfolio, but I would not be shocked to be able to see that growing under a Trump administration in the near future. So if states start buying, that's going to be massive. And they're not the only state. I think there's two or three others that we've covered before on the show that are looking into this. So you can understand why there's a bit of a froth growing and brewing, I guess, in these larger money bag buyers. And I think some would say 80,000 is, well, Trump change. Bitwise, which, and Bitwise knows their stuff. Bitwise, the CIO, sat down with Yahoo Finance this week.
He's feeling more bullish than 80,000. I think the most important thing for Bitcoin is that the election happens. Regardless of a Trump win or a Harris win, the regulatory setting for Bitcoin is improving. And I think that's what you're seeing reflected in the price. Of course, in the short term, crypto favors a Trump victory over a Harris victory. But really, Bitcoin doesn't need Washington to succeed. Regardless of what happens, institutions are moving into the space. Adoption is rising. ETF flows are happening. I think we go higher either way. It just might be a little bit faster under a Trump win. Yeah.
And when we talk about that, maybe a clarity from a regulation perspective, right? How much of that is necessary in order to continue that momentum, even potentially past 100,000? Yeah, it's a great question. Look, I think we're going above 100,000 on Bitcoin. I think the regulatory clarity you're talking about actually matters more for the so-called altcoins, for Ethereum on down. Those are more exposed to regulatory risks. So I would expect an altcoin rally, even more so than a Bitcoin rally in the event of a Trump win. But regardless, I think both are moving higher. Why does it matter as much for Bitcoin?
So Bitcoin has more regulatory clarity than Ethereum and other assets. The SEC, the CFTC have already declared it a commodity. It's in the clear. There's already an ETF. BlackRock already has a huge business in that. That's not as true for Solana and Aptos and other altcoins. But I suspect if we get a new SEC, that will become clear, that will drive institutional adoption, and we'll see that rising tide lift all of those boats. What then do you think is the number one catalyst for Bitcoin as you look ahead to some of your 2025 projections?
Look, I think this is the best single time to invest in Bitcoin from a risk-adjusted perspective. All of the major existential risks of Bitcoin have been washed away. We have an ETF. We have institutions. They are coming into the space. The biggest catalyst is that move of institutional adoption. We're seeing that accelerate. We saw $800 million in ETF flows yesterday alone. This is a tidal wave of institutional assets moving into the space. There's a fixed supply. And from my perspective, that means higher prices. You were saying it doesn't matter ultimately in the long run who is elected come next week.
I'm curious, because there's been so much talk about why Trump is better for Bitcoin or for the crypto community than Harris. It seems like at least in the short term, maybe that is the case. But why are you confident? I guess, why are you as concerned about the pullback that we could see if Harris is elected? Look, I think we could see a short term pullback. But in that case, I think it would be a major buying opportunity. That's right. Specifically for Bitcoin. For those altcoins, I think there's more regulatory uncertainty. But Harris has already indicated that we're likely to turn the page.
And I think Washington is ready to turn the page on crypto. You see bipartisan support for crypto bills. You see talk about moving on from the SEC. Make no mistake, short term, the rally is higher on crypto if Trump wins. And I think it's more certain we'll get that regulatory clarity for the altcoins. Either case, I think the direction of travel is upwards. I think we'll be at new all-time highs this year on Bitcoin. And I think 2025 will look even better than 2024. What more specifically does that look like? Look, we're going to seven figure, I mean, six figure Bitcoin. We're going to $100,000 plus next year.
We're working on our price target for $100,000 plus next year, he says. We're going to seven figure, I mean, six figure Bitcoin. We're going to $100,000 plus next year. We're working on our price target for what we expect in 2025. We may release that next week. But if you step back and look at it, crypto has moved from the niche to the mainstream. You have Emory University allocating. You have 60% of the largest hedge funds allocating. We've jumped the chasm. We're going mainstream. And that means higher prices. I think that's exactly my analysis as well.
And probably yours if you're listening to this podcast. So I think we have to remember, in the wise words of Matt O'Dell, stay humble and stack sats. Things are really lining up for Bitcoin, and that feels great. And it's obvious that big money sees it clearly now. We all can see the wave that is building. When you combine the scarcity and the demand with the debasement, it's going to be one of the greatest stories of our lifetime. But yet, and we all know this inherently, anybody that's in the community, and you can see it with the Google search traffic.
Your average no-coin-er Joe. Totally, totally missing it. They haven't clued in yet. Not only can they not see a wave building, they don't even think there's a beach. So I think as Bitcoiners, this is an opportunity for us to learn and be humble here. Because A, we can learn how this works. We are watching history. We're watching how Wall Street typically is so successful at front-running the masses. Before they even know it's a thing, Wall Street has gobbled up the majority of the supply that's cheap. They build products on top of it. They get rich. And then they start packaging it in the plebs retirement and whatnot.
They don't even realize it's happening. And we should have the humility to recognize this has probably happened to us. This probably happens all the time in all kinds of sectors. Now, this is a special case here. But I think we should get humility in the fact that this has probably happened to us in our lifetime. And it will probably happen to us again. There's going to be something big, a big wave building in an area, in a sector we don't follow. And we're going to miss it. So we need to take that into consideration, I think. And we should try to get some humility when the price does skyrocket. I mean, it's still fun.
But it's also, I feel bad for those that were too distracted by all of the negative press that Bitcoin's gotten for the last decade, and just the busyness of life. You know, people are just so busy with everyday life now. They don't have an opportunity to stop and research something for 20, 30 hours or listen to a podcast every week. You can try. Yeah. I understand. It probably happens to all of us. And we just happen to be watching this wave build and be clued in. And on that theme, boost in and share your pain. I would love to hear a couple of failed orange pilling stories, because I sure have my share of them.
Maybe I'll share a couple, too. And if you have a recent success, you know, you talk to somebody about Bitcoin and it actually went well, yeah, I'd love to hear that, too. Does that happen? I don't know if that actually happens. But I would love to know. So boost in and tell me if you've had a successful orange pilling or an unsuccessful orange pilling. Share your pain or your success with the class, please. Music. All right, coming up, your boost. My thoughts on a wild new fake Toshi that popped on the scene today. A few updates and a final clip of the week.
Plus, stay to the network. But first, if you'd like to support the show by acquiring sats or sending, spending, whatever, I got ways you can help out. Me and you. It's nice. There's two of them. River. I'll have links in the show notes. River, it's a great place to get your sats. They're on the Lightning Network. They run their own network. They're a Bitcoin-only company. Beautiful UI. And the reason why I mention Lightning Network is because it gives you a little privacy after you've DCA'd for a bit. And you have some optionality there. It's nice. It gives you some flexibility. Of course, you can do on-chain as well.
I have an affiliate link in the show notes. You use that. You get some sats. I get some sats. Same with the Bitcoin company. You want to spend some sats, put in a gift card or something like that. It's a quick way to go from lightning sats, boom, right into a gift card and. Make your purchase, like on Amazon or whatever it might be. Hundreds of gift cards. Thebitcoincompany.com, promo code Jupiter. You get some sats, the show gets some sats. Put it all in the fun for the show, and I really appreciate it. It's a nice way to support the show while you're getting some sats or spending some sats. Links at the top of the show notes.
Music. Do have some boost to get to this week and it looks like the podfather mr adam curry is our baller booster this week with 100 000 sets he says. Music. It's a sad puppy boost i was i was really bummed you know because the show doesn't have a official sponsor and so when the boosts are down it's like oh man i i may have misallocated my time this week and i wasn't sure if i was going to be able to do a show this week at all because there's just crazy stuff going on. Lots of stuff going on just behind the scenes. And so, but you know, I saw a big baller boost like that.
I was like, oh boy, better get my big boy pants on. Time to pick it up and do a show. Wine Eagles also are baller booster with a hundred thousand sats. Music. He says, I think he's trying to make good, you know, because he tried to call the podfather out over using Hive as the back end for podping. He says, it's not that podcasting to-do-do sucks. That's not my opinion at all. The podfather is the goat in the morning. I call out Hive out of love. Okay, well, here's what you do, Wine Eagle. You build an entire new system. I was trying to think after the show, like, what would you replace podping with?
I mean, like, the back end. What would you, you know, Hive? And I feel like the first answer somebody would have would say Noster, but I don't think that would go over well. So I would love to know your thoughts on what we could use in its place. And please don't say Lightning or Noster, although I mean, I personally would be more amenable to Noster. I don't think most in the community would. But thank you very much, Wine Eagle, for the boost. Thank you, Podfather, also for the baller boost. And user 20497192 is almost our baller booster with a very generous 99,609 sets.
I hoard that which your kind covet. I love in the stats at the end of the show. It's a great idea. Bitcoin is my exit strategy for retirement if I ever do retire. I put the balance of my legacy IRA savings into MSTR last year. So I'm like 100% Bitcoin now. My wife still thinks I'm crazy, but I stopped asking when I'm going to sell. But she has stopped asking. Man, you know, I have I really have had like a no stocks, no ETFs, just only Bitcoin policy for a very long time. But I do wonder if I, you know, is MSTR a shit coin or is it a good way to earn some money and then turn around and stack some Bitcoin?
I'd love some people's opinions out there. Another great boost comes in from ByteBandit, which is also a very generous 97,757 sats. I hoard that which your kind cover. Coming in hot with the boost. Thank you, Byte. He writes, Hi, Chris, I just started the episode, but I forgot to boost last week, so I wanted to send some fire your way. I wanted to fire some value back your way. And then he says, and this is really sweet, he says, Screw it. Blowing the whole boost budget on Twib this week. Another newbie corner idea. What's the difference between different address and wallet types.
You know, I scanned the boost trying to look for newbie questions and I somehow missed this. So I didn't make a segment on this, but I will bank this. Yeah, because it does become important if you ever need to restore your wallet. And so that's where those kinds of little things, like if you have a seed word, you need to know some of the details about the wallet. So, okay, I will try to do like a boot camp on that in a future episode. Writing that down. Wallet boot camp. Okay, I got it written down. Thank you. Appreciate it. You're the best, Byte Bandit. Boost because it's Wednesday also.
Oh, and there's an extra little 5,000 you snuck in there, you crazy maniac. Thank you. Appreciate that. Bitcoin Lizard comes in with a handsome 50,000 boost, 50,000 boost, 50,000 sats. Make it so. Yeah. And you know what? You're doing a good job. Right. It's a great episode. I really enjoyed how you used older audio clips to show how Saylor and the ECB are now contradicting themselves. I love the Lagarde clip where she says the quiet part out loud, quote, if there is an escape, that escape will be used. Yep. That was my favorite part of that clip, too.
Every now and then, they just say it. Usually it's in a written form. But, you know, when you're in a Zoom call, I guess, and you're laying down all the typical tropes, that one slips out every now and then. That was a good one. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard. Grekar boosts in with 40,000 sats. The traders love the vol. And he says boost. So you know what I say? I say boost. Thank you for the value. Is it Dr. Eckhart? That's what it is. It's doctor. Thank you, doctor. Appreciate the value there. Bitcoin E97 comes in with, I love that, with 25,000 cents. Fun will now commence. How come my earlier boost bounced back, but the comments stayed up?
You know, so the way it works, Bitcoin E97, is there's splits in there, and each split goes to, like, one goes to me, one goes to the node, one goes to Fountain. Sometimes I slip in, like, a couple of other, like, Bitcoin news outlets or something like that in there. And so it's possible for one of those splits to fail, but one of my nodes got it. And the really awesome... Boost, I don't want to call it a scraper system, but it's like a boost monitoring system that Wes has developed that it monitors multiple nodes now. So if your boost makes it to one of our nodes in theory, we'll get it.
Even if, say, like my, even if my split didn't go through for some reason. So you may have seen like a partial failure there. In that case, don't worry, your sats aren't lost. They stay in your wallet. Only the successful splits actually will take the sats. So you're okay. I don't mean to scare you on that. Bob B comes in. Hey, Bob, with 20,000 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. Oh, it's Bobby Gant. Hey, Chris. Finally biting the bullet and streaming stats as I listen. I tried Fountain, but it wouldn't work with the private RSS feeds for your shows, so now I'm trying Podverse.
Yes. Private feeds and podcasting 2.0 are a tricky thing. None of it was really kind of designed with the idea of people who put stuff behind a paywall, because it's not really the way it works with value for value. But we have a legacy system. There's a fiat wall there. You know, all of that. So Fountain looks up the information for boosts and the splits via the podcast index API. But because the member feeds are private and individual RSS feeds, they're not published on the index. So Fountain is unable to look up the splits. Podverse takes it directly from the RSS feed. We publish it in the RSS feed, but Fountain does not look there.
Some podcast players do. It's kind of up to the client how they do that. He says, the only reason I am into Bitcoin now is because you talked about lightning boost way back in an old Office Hours episode. The notion of paying as you listen with streaming sats, to me, is as close to perfect as you can get for patronage of something you value. I wish more people could see that light. I'll boost when I have something to say, but I'll be streaming sats from now on to keep the flow regular. Thanks for doing what you do. Bob, thank you. Thank you for the boost.
And thank you very much for streaming the sats. I try to call out the sat streamers and really appreciate you out there. It's good to hear from you, too. Zach Hillies comes in with 20,000 sats. You suppose? That's not a Jar Jar boost. Who's the soundboard guy around here? Sometimes my genius is, it's almost frightening. Doesn't Clarkson have anything better to do? He writes, Zach Hillies writes, I might be in the minority, but I don't mind the politics in the show. I sometimes think of This Week in Bitcoin as unfiltered 2.0, where current events are now viewed through a Bitcoin lens.
The Bitcoin world has helped me understand economics more than I could ever have hoped. So he says, show me the money. That'd be a great clip. Show me the money. How do I not have that on the soundboard? Oh, my God. Zach, what you say here, I think, is a astute analysis. Unfilter is an old news politics podcast that I did. There was a missing piece. So when you start to understand a lot of the financial system and the situation the government is in, you start to understand the gaslighting. You start to understand why they skew the numbers the way they do. And it explains so much of what Unfilter used to talk about.
But now it explains it through a lens that isn't political or anything like that. But just these are the facts. These are the numbers. This is what the finances are. And so much is downstream of that in our society. And once you understand that, it really is one, I think, the key things to watch in a society, especially one as big as the states that impacts everybody else in the West. Appreciate that, Boosak. Oppie, 1984, is in with 4,000 sats. Tough little ship. Little. And he says, boost! Boost! Ace Ackerman's in with our first row of ducks this week, 2,222 sats. I like the multi-sig vault systems. They could be used in setups for an individual, family, or organization.
I agree, Ace. I think I've been rolling over, you know, my future, like, kid setups, and I could see multisig there working pretty well, you know, maybe until they're 18. I don't know. I think also apps like Nunchuck have a lot of potential for making it palatable for everyday users. And things like the BitKey kind of give you multisig in a consumer package, although it does involve a cloud server, but they seem to have a pretty good setup there. So if anybody has recommendations on solid multi-sig that they sleep well at night with sure would love to hear it because I'm kind of evaluating what the family solution is as the kids get older, and right now I'm not sure if I'm feeling it I'm not sure if I'm feeling my solution I have a kind of half multi-sig solution in place I'll say.
Dexord comes in with 11,101 sats I am your father I don't know if the number of listeners has changed from what you can see, but I know personally I have been finding myself one episode behind and then I don't boost because it feels like I'm late to the party. But that's on me and I love the longer episodes and I definitely want to keep you motivated and I want you to keep going because the information you present in this podcast has been helpful and important. Cheers. Well, cheers to you! Thank you. I appreciate that feedback and value, particularly about the episode length. I am always soliciting the, God, I am having a hard time talking today.
It's been a wild week behind the scenes. I am always soliciting the audience's feedback on the length of the episode because they could be two hours or I could really crunch it down and it could be 30 minutes. And I'm kind of striking a balance in between there right now, but I always appreciate the feedback on that. And it's good to hear from you, Dex. Never feel bad about being behind. I consider once I put a question out there, I consider it fair game for weeks because we can keep the conversation going. It evolves and other people jump in. So I appreciate it if you're listening and you're a couple weeks behind.
And I asked a question out there, don't feel bad at all about being three episodes behind and finally boosting it. I love it when the conversation rolls on like that. Epic Journey comes in with 5,000 sats. Now that is a Jar Jar boost. You so boost. He just says, thanks for the show. Thanks, Epic. I appreciate it. Loomer also came in with a 5,000-sat Jar Jar boost. You so boost. And he just says, boost. And he's here with 2,000 sats. And he says, hi, two years ago since my orange pill. Ah, love the content. Have you listened to any of the presentations from DEFCON 32?
There is a presenter named Joseph Cross who speaks about the FBI's encrypted phone company named Anom. They sell these phones to drug dealers. What I thought was interesting was that he mentions that a lot of large transactions were being made in Bitcoin. Is there any way to confirm that? Do we really know the amount of transactions being made for illegal activity, especially when the FBI is probably the only ones with this data? And don't disclose it because of current laws? Thanks, Andy. Great question, Andy. Two episodes ago, I did get into some stats. Most at volume, most of the kind of illicit activity, if you think about it, this makes total sense.
Most of the illicit activity that's done with cryptocurrency is done with stable coins. Because A, people don't want the value of whatever they've stolen to drop. And B, the blockchain for Bitcoin is fully open and transparent. But it's all relative, right? If they're doing $30 million of transactions, that could seem like a lot to Joseph Cross, right? But it doesn't seem like a lot to Michael Saylor. So it's all kind of relative there. Your question about the video, I did catch it. I tried to find the link. I could not find the link quickly before I sat down to record. But I want to just strongly recommend that if you are into phone privacy and security, this is worth a watch.
And I'd be curious for any of you GrapheneOS users out there, if you think they're basing this little honeypot phone system on GrapheneOS. Because I saw a couple of the config options that Joseph Cross demonstrates on the screen, and it looked like GrapheneOS to me. And I think the FBI is forking Graphene OS and then they're pretending to sell it as like this super privacy focused phone that has private encrypted chat and it scrambles your pin code on the screen and does all these things. And the reality was is that the FBI was totally honeypotting and rooting these devices and then also the quote unquote secure chat.
It was an XMPP server they set up, and then they have a bot listening in a different country. I think it was Lithuania, where they don't have to worry about the laws as much. They have a bot join every single private chat. Every chat session has a hidden FBI bot in it, listening and recording everything you say outside the United States in this database. And they were going around and selling it to drug dealers and other criminals, making them believe that they were getting this super secure anonymous phone. When in reality, it was a whole FBI job from the beginning. Fascinating talk.
Joseph Cross, DEFCON 32. I think if you YouTube that, you'll probably find it. I'll just co-sign Andy's recommendation. If you're into phone security, it's a wild one. And you realize just how in the game the FBI is with all of this. It's no joke. Speaking of no joke, Bitcoin Realist comes in with 2,000 sats. You know, that holiday special idea sounds good. And by the way, I liked your Linux episode that had producer Jeff on there featuring your AI voice. Yeah, I got cloned by Google. I got cloned by Google and A, they won't let me have it. I can't get access to it. And B, where's my check? Where's my check?
That's what I want to know. There he is. Gene Bean's back with 2048 Sats. There's coffee in that nebula. Still loving the show, but I'm just not boosting as much due to other expenses. Keep up the good work. Gene Bean, I am not kidding you. We have had conversations behind the scenes wondering if you're okay. We've been thinking about putting a—I'm not joking. We've been thinking about saying something on air to put a wellness check out on you, to have you, like, boost in with, like, holding the newspaper with the current day on there, something to make sure you're okay.
Because, you know, when somebody's really active in the community and they drop off, we notice. And it's really nice to hear from you. I'm glad you're okay. I'll let Wes and Brent know. They were also concerned. It's good to hear from you. Thank you for the boost. Hodler comes in with 4,747 sats, and I'm feeling like a sailor. The traders love the vol. Small boost from Iceland. Thank you for the great episode. I heard from a friend in Denmark that the government is planning on implementing a 42% tax on unrealized capital gains for Bitcoin in 2026. This would make it really hard to hodl. Thoughts?
First of all, it's not hodl, it's hard, right? Well, I suppose if it's unrealized, hmm, oh boy. I would wonder if this would be a situation where things like ETF products or stock that is a company hodling Bitcoin, would be a way to get Bitcoin price exposure without this particular problem. Because when it's unrealized, I was going to say you could hold and just wait to sell when the laws change. But if they're doing an unrealized, I just can't imagine that'll last. That just crushes an economy. It's death for an economy when you do that. It's death for a small business. So I wouldn't imagine it lasts long. But if anybody knows or hodler, if you do any research, I guess my question back to you would be, do things like ETFs or companies that have stock exposure with price action related to Bitcoin, is that something you could hold that wouldn't be considered an asset so it doesn't have an unrealized gain?
I don't know. That's a tricky situation. Those unrealized gains, you know, I have to wonder for some of us if the Bitcoin doesn't come before state. You know, if I was banking on a Bitcoin retirement, well, I am, and I got to that point and I was successful in my stacking and I actually had enough to live and continue to do the show probably, I would be crushed by an unrealized gain tax and I would probably want to leave the country somehow. Of course, there's an exit tax and you got to do all that or else they'll get you too. So you got, you know, you got to vote.
Vote harder, everybody. Just vote harder. That'll solve it. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. There is a few more boosts in there, but they were below the 2000 cutoff. But I see them. I read them and I'll save them in my show notes. Some of them are just people passing along, you know, best wishes and a high five. Or thanking me for something or other. And I just really appreciate everybody who boosts in or streams. We had 47 of your stream sats as you listened. That number is getting higher there. That's really awesome. And the streamers stacked 94,223 sats. So when you combine that with all of the boosts, we actually had a really fantastic week.
And we stacked a grand total of 687,787 sats. Thank you, everyone. That really got me going. I had really a crazy week. I was feeling kind of down because the value was pretty low last week. And when I saw that stuff rolling in, that's why this episode's here. I was going to take the week off. I figured people are sick of the election stuff. They don't want to hear it. And I paid for it now in Boost. And it feels like the signal has been strong this week. And I appreciate that. I'd love to have you boost in. if there's something I touched on this week that you'd like to get your take on. We still have more show to go.
So before we move on and get to the rest of the show, just really briefly, I'd like to say, if you want to boost it and you haven't done it yet, it's a great time to do it. This is a mechanism for you to just start to learn and understand Bitcoin a little bit. Take this as an opportunity to just get a little bit of exposure to the network and start to just get exposure to the terminology, how it works. It can be extremely beneficial to you down the road. Maybe it's something you decide it's not for you, or maybe it's something you decide, you know what, I'm going to start allocating a percentage to this every single month.
I can't say which one it's going to be, but I think it's worth at least participating in the value for value boost system because you can get a message into the show, you support the show, and you get exposure to things like lightning, the terminology and all of that. So I know most of you are already converted, but if somebody out there hasn't tried it yet, this is the opportunity. This is the time to try it. And, you know, maybe you end up getting into it right before the price just goes crazy. But thank you, everybody who boosts or supports the show with one of our affiliate links. It means the world. Thank you.
Music. A new fake Toshi this week. I don't think I need to spend a lot of time on this, but a guy named, like, Stefan Mohala. He's been facing fraud charges, I think related to his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto, and so today, he attempted to assert his identity as the creator of Bitcoin during a long, awkward, torturous press conference in London. On October 31st, the anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper, he declared himself to be satoshi and then while he was at it he also claimed to have invented the euro bond the twitter logo and the quote chat gpt protocol so we got ourselves a wild one here folks, and i'm not going to play a lot from this because it was torturous this press conference but i'm going to play a minute of or so of it because someone asked him well so then where does craig right the previous fake toshi fit into all of this what was what what was he and why didn't you say anything all of this time if craig wright wasn't actually satoshi why didn't you say something well you see because it was all part of his plan you see he was all in it together, was one of my plan and it's working according to the plan so the factors is here, I'm going through a serious organized persecutions from a group and they don't want me actually to publish my identity.
Even that so-called Craig Wright, he sent me an email, 2017. It's a very serious email. I should not publish myself. I should remain silent. Well, I met him once in London in a conference and we had little discussions. Well, who is Craig Wright? Craig Wright is just was a person I encountered in 2007 because I was looking for in those days to change my surname. So I choose the Wright brothers and when I click on the internet about the Wright brothers, it's Craig Wright profile came up there. So I saw that gentleman was a quite intelligent person.
So I enlisted him to be one of my one of my one of the person in the group who will do some work within the Bitcoin community. Oh, well, I don't know about you, but I'm convinced. I mean, his command of the English language demonstrates Satoshi's writings just clearly. So, yeah, Craig Wright was a pawn, somebody that he had to work to kind of help take the heat off. Now, I'll link to some of the coverage, but many attendees began to leave. And the guy maintained he was Satoshi the entire time, but it just was shakier and shakier. In fact, one observer noticed he seemed to get more nervous as time went on, saying, quote, journalists, including myself, interrupted Mola's long backstory as we asked him to show the promised evidence.
Quote, we've been here nearly an hour and people are restless and increasingly rude. Mr. Mola's cheeks began twitching rapidly as he stares down at the skeptical crowd as people filtered out. So, I mean, I don't know what the legal strategy is that when you're under fraud investigation, the like pivot to I'm Satoshi to somehow get yourself out of those fraud allegations is a wild one. So, and the HUSPA to do it on the anniversary day, which he did intentionally. I say we speak no further of this individual unless they start suing free software developers and causing a ruckus. We have no need to speak further of him.
Well, it's been a long time since I've played a Pomp clip, so give me credit. And our final clip this week, it's a good one, so I'm going to play it. And what I love about it is he gets the typical no-coiner, no-thought pushback on Bitcoin, and it's not a store of value. And Pomp does a great job responding to it. And I think it's it's a maybe it's a line of response with some modifications we could use with friends and family when they ask. The volatility on this thing is way too high for anybody to call that a savings account. I mean, you may like it, but I think that's a bridge too far right now, isn't it?
Over the last 30 years, the U.S. dollar has lost 50 percent of its purchasing power. So in my lifetime, one dollar now buys you 50 percent or 50 cents of service and goods. And so when you think about that, the most volatile asset that most people hold is the dollar. And they're on the wrong side of volatility. Bitcoin, on the other hand, over a long period of time appreciates. And so the best statistic to look at this is in 2016, the average median home was about $380,000. I'm sorry, $280,000. Today, it's over $400,000. Right. So 50% increase in the average home in America.
During that same eight-year period, it used to cost $664 Bitcoin to buy that home. Today, it costs $6 Bitcoin. It has been a 99% reduction in the cost of a home in America if you held Bitcoin. And so another way to think about that is if you had about $5,000 of Bitcoin in 2016, today it could buy you a house. Music. As we wrap up, it's time to look at the state of the network. The Bitcoin price is $70,480 in U.S. That makes it 1,419 sats per dollar. Bitcoin is up 3.8% since the last episode, but it's still down 4.4% from its all-time high 231 days ago.
Right now, there are 18,467 reachable nodes on the Bitcoin network. And this episode wrapped up at block height 868,287. I hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening. Links to what we talked about today are at This Week in Bitcoin.show. Of course, you can also find it in a podcast player of your choice. Newpodcastapps.com was a great way to get started with a podcasting 2.0 app. Boosting with what you'd like to see from the show and what you'd like to hear. If you thought something was missed, let me know what you think that was. Or if you have a newbie question, I'm stacking those again.
Of course, I'd love to have you also recommend this show to somebody who might be a little Bitcoin curious. This could be a great show for them to stay on the Bitcoin path and not get distracted by the altcoins, especially once they begin to rally. I'll leave you this week with a song that I think hits great. It's That Smile You're Wearing by Cavan Yaw. That smile you're wearing goes ear to ear I hadn't seen it in so long That smile you're wearing from ear to ear Makes my heart feel so warm. Music.
I think the most beautiful thing about it is there's no one person setting the direction. And there's no one person on the other side that can stop it. So we have something that is pretty organic in nature and very principled in its original design. And I think the Bitcoin white paper is one of the most seminal works of computer science in the last 20, 30 years. Music. It's poetry. Welcome to Lucky Episode 33. My name is Chris, and let me just say right off the top of the show, happy 16th anniversary for the Bitcoin white paper. Happy anniversary to all you Bitcoiners out there new and old.
And of course, thank you to Satoshi, whoever and wherever you are. It's going to be kind of a celebratory episode, I think. Things are lining up for old Bitcoin on its 16th anniversary. And there really is only one big story this week. And I'm not the one making a big stink out of it. People like the coin. It's clear on its 16th birthday, if you zoom out, it doesn't matter what the hourly price chart says. People like the coin. Bitcoin is trading at its highest point since March. It's up more than 5% in the last 24 hours, with Bitcoin's trading volume topping $31 billion and more than $224 million in short positions liquidated over that same window.
Now, meanwhile, stocks tied to digital asset prices like Riot Platforms, Coinbase and MicroStrategy are all rallying this morning along with the wider crypto market as Bitcoin breaks past that key 70K resistance level. Now, spot Bitcoin ETFs have also seen a surge of inflows, adding over $3.1 billion in just the last two weeks, bringing the total market cap of those funds to nearly $73 billion since they launched in January. Just let that just sink in for a second. $73 billion in total market cap, and they launched this year in January. That's where these ETFs, we're going to get more into ETFs in a moment, but you can see why the people are getting bullish out there.
... purge of inflows, adding over $3.1 billion in just the last two weeks, bringing the total market cap of those funds to nearly $73 billion since they launched in January. I've been speaking with analysts, and they say that with one week to go until the general election here in the U.S., investors are increasingly bullish that no matter who wins, it will be a net benefit for the industry. And already, guys, we are seeing options traders increase bets that regardless of who takes the White House, Bitcoin is poised to hit that 80K mark this year. 80K, she says. All right. Well, so BlackRock's ETF, IBIT, has really been the winner.
Yesterday, as I record, it took in just $875 million in a single day. I'm going to say it again, $875 million in a single day. The Bitcoin ETFs took in, in just the past two days, more than the gold ETF took in during its entire first year. In just the last two days, the ETFs together. More than all gold did in its first year. So now we've exceeded the $1 million Bitcoin number. ETFs now hold over a million Bitcoin. Also in the last couple of days, just kind of keeping things really just kind of frothy, Saylor announced a $42 billion Bitcoin buy plan over the next three years.
That's a staggering number. And Microsoft shareholders have already begun voting on whether or not Microsoft should invest some of its holdings into Bitcoin. The board recommends against it, but in that proposal to vote, the truth is laid unbelievably bare. I really encourage you to track this down and read it. I'll try to link to it if I can. Because the case they make clearly demonstrates that Bitcoin is their best hedge against the debasement of their holdings. So we have the ECB, we have the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and now we have these shareholder activists that are all clearly saying in extremely public venues that Bitcoin is the best hedge against government debasement and government debasement is going to continue.
So the language there is a win alone. So you can see why all of this with the ETFs becoming more successful, Wall Street is really bringing the money in. And the reason why this matters to standard plebs, just regular old plebs like myself... The truth of the matter is Bitcoin's price is getting too rich for most of us. Most of the OGs can't afford to buy Bitcoin at this price. You know, we can DCA, and even if Bitcoin was $200,000 a coin, I'd still DCA because I view that as a form of savings and diversification of future spending and a hedge against inflation.
So it doesn't really matter what the price is at, I'm going to DCA, but I'm getting less and less coin for it. So we're entering into the price as we get to $70,000, where we really don't have the bags to move it as the plebs. It's Wall Street's game now to move these numbers. And that only happens when it becomes legitimate in their eyes. And the success of these ETFs is doing just that. So you've probably heard of VanEck before because it's one of the well-known, respected Wall Street firms out there that manages investments for rich people. I think right now they hold somewhere around $102 billion in funds under management.
And one of their analysts, we'll get into it, Matthew Siegel, came on CNBC. And I'm going to play this clip. It's a little wonky for you if you're not into finance stuff. But bear with it because it really shows you where their head's at. And if you think about how Bitcoin gets to a million dollars, it's by adoption through all these various financial toolings like retirement funds and ETFs. investments. And the VanEck researcher, they'll tell you his name. His name's Matthew, I think. Matthew Siegel. They'll do a brief introduction and he'll get into why he sees what is, regardless of sort of short-term election stuff, a pretty bullish setup in the next, you know, even just a few months.
The price of Bitcoin climbing over $68,000 this morning, up 100% in the last year. Let's take a look at some of the trends in the crypto of retail markets. Joining us is Matthew Siegel, head of digital assets research at VanEck. There are a variety of things that we've tried to correlate with Bitcoin movements. Become less and less successful at anything we can just count on. So this is the struggles real here. These, you know, these talking heads and I respect Joe, but these talking heads, they they try to constantly compare Bitcoin to something else.
You know, what else does it what else does it track to that when they when they talk about if it correlates, they're saying, well, if the S&P goes up, does that mean Bitcoin goes up? And when the S&P goes down, does Bitcoin always go down? They're constantly looking to correlate it to some other asset so then they can kind of put it in a box. And what Joe's saying here at the intro is we keep trying to put Bitcoin in a box. And as soon as we get it all boxed up, it changes form and it no longer fits our definitions. And it throws us for a loop. But it does seem that when Trump started moving up in some of the, we just hit Calci on, in some of the betting sites, it does seem like this most latest run from 57 to almost 70, seems to be correlated with the betting odds improving.
I mean, is that fair to say in your view, Matthew? Yeah, I agree with that. Trump is clearly the more pro-crypto and Bitcoin candidate, and VP Harris has not said a single word on it, so one doubts whether she truly understands it. But to your question about the correlations, the most significant long-term correlations for Bitcoin are a negative correlation with the U.S. Dollar and a positive correlation with money supply growth, or M2. So clearly on the latter front, money growth has re-accelerated. Okay, Matt's got my attention because those are the two things that I think if you were going to correlate Bitcoin to, it's when the money supply is going up and when the U.S. dollar, the Dixie, is going down.
The strength of the dollar goes down, money supply go up, Bitcoin rally. And it makes sense. People are looking for a place to save their money, right? They don't want to basement. So, OK, so far, I'm on board with Matt's analysis here on if you were going to correlate to something, although it's not 100 percent, it's like 80 percent. This is something you could correlate it to. But as we go on, he gets a little spicy. With the Fed pivot, that may be playing part of a role. Also, some seller's exhaustion. The German government and the U.S. government sold, spitefully, $2 billion worth of Bitcoin in the last couple of months.
That has eased. And I think the election is helping. You know, he seems a little nervous, but he still managed to get the German government sold spitefully in there, which doesn't which doesn't get our host don't miss that. They catch it and they try to get him to clarify what he means by spitefully selling their Bitcoin. I don't think he quite does a great job of it. Why did they do that? German government seized a couple billion dollars of Bitcoin in a crime and sold it in August because they don't like it. Because they don't like, you just said spitefully, I wondered why you had that, an adjective or an adverb, I don't know, maybe an adverb.
Couldn't a correlation with the money supply explain why it seems to be just totally correlated with risk assets? If there's a lot of liquidity, risk assets seem to go up. Therefore, Bitcoin seems to go up and down. It doesn't seem to be a safe haven with risk assets. It seems to move totally correlated with, you know, the NASDAQ or the Magnificent Seven or whatever. All right. So this is a standard question. I'm glad Joe's asking it in a way because it's, isn't it really just kind of a risk asset that is correlated to tech stocks? And when the tech market rallies, Bitcoin rallies, isn't that really what's going on here? It's not a safe haven because the price can go down from day to day.
The correlations change over time. Over a 10-year time horizon, the NASDAQ correlation with Bitcoin is a 0.19, quite low. Over the last three months, it's a 0.5, and that's a two-and-a-half-year high. And that may be keeping some allocators on the sideline because they want to see it fall. Our bet is that this is a very bullish setup for Bitcoin into the election. We saw the exact same pattern in 2020 where Bitcoin lagged with low volatility. And then once a winner was announced, we had a high vol rally as new buyers come into this market. And that's the great thing about Bitcoin is that every day there's new buyers being born. It's kind of like the video game industry.
The olds who hate it die off. The new folks are buying it. And what we think is that I thought that was an interesting analogy. It's like the video game industry, which, you know, being around watching home consoles come in with the Atari and then kind of watching some families adopt it. And the younger generations clearly adopted it sooner. But the younger generations that adopted it, like me as a young lad. Man, I remember when we got the first NES. That was so high tech. And then I didn't want the Super Nintendo because I didn't think there were enough games for it when that thing came out.
Because I was so in on the NES, right? Because it was such a step up from like the Atari and we didn't have a lot of money. So like I told my folks and they'd already bought it for me for Christmas. Don't get me the Super Nintendo. I'm fine with the NES. And then I unwrapped my big Christmas present and it was the Super Nintendo, which ended up being my favorite console. And I still game and I still play those games, but I play newer games too. Not much. I mostly can't do it for more than 10 minutes before I feel like guilty. But my observation is a lot of us that grew up video gaming still do it today.
My folks don't really video game. I mean, maybe they'll play a casual game on their phone from time to time and they'll dabble. But, you know, I still have Steam. I have probably hundreds of games in my Steam library. I just installed a new, it's an older game, but I just installed one last night, right? I'm still actively in that area. And I wonder if the analogy is apt. I would love to have your opinion. What do you think is, is video game adoption similar to maybe how Bitcoin adoption will work? Is that a fair analogy? I'll back it up, boost it, and tell me what you think. In 2020, where Bitcoin lagged with low volatility.
And then once a winner was announced, we had a high vol rally as new buyers come into this market. And that's the great thing about Bitcoin is that every day there's new buyers being born. It's kind of like the video game industry. The olds who hate it die off. The new folks are buying it. And what we think is that once the election result is finalized, Moody's is going to downgrade U.S. Sovereign debt. And that could be a catalyst for Bitcoin. Now, that's a bit of a bombshell right there that they just gloss right over. He thinks Moody's is going to downgrade the U.S. after the election, which I don't think would be great for short term.
Going to downgrade U.S. sovereign debt, and that could be a catalyst for Bitcoin. Doesn't gold correlate with with the dollar and with M2 as well? And gold and Bitcoin It seemed like the correlation broke down a couple of times recently. Bitcoin is a chameleon. Its correlations change over time. It's hard to predict what it's going to be correlated with over the short term, over the long term. But do you really say it's because of the 21 million and fixed amount is out there, therefore the debasement of the currency favors that? I mean, that's. Yeah, it's a non-U.S. asset.
It's an emerging markets asset. And while we were all hyperventilating about the election over the last week, BRICS had a conference in Russia. There's six new members of BRICS this year. So BRICS GDP is now greater than the combined GDP of G7. Of the six new members, three of them, Argentina, the UAE and Ethiopia, are now mining Bitcoin with government resources. So there is tremendous urgency outside of the U.S. To find a way to circumvent the irresponsible fiscal policy that we've been running here in the U.S. In fact, Russia announced an initiative there.
Sovereign Wealth Fund is going to invest in a regional initiative to build Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure throughout BRICS with an idea of settling global trade in Bitcoin. So, look, someday, I don't know if it's five years, 10 years, Putin's going to die. We're going to look to reintegrate some of these countries into the world financial system, and they're going to be trading with Bitcoin. What are we going to be doing? Okay. Yeah. Got him there, didn't he? He got him. They're literally speechless. Stunned? No, I'm just processing. You're processing?
Processing. When will that be complete? The processing? Yes, so that you can make a comment. When is Bitcoin going to be complete? I have no idea. What does that mean? You know, you can sit there and you could say something like, at the scale of what she just did, and Sorkin, who is the one that had that, when is Bitcoin complete comment, he never gets it. In a way, though, it's like he's the perfect, I don't know, is it Muse? Is that the right term? I don't feel like it. But he's like, it gives us something to work against, right? Because he's the perpetual doubter. And so it always gives us something to work against. And I think in a way, we're constantly checking ourself.
We're always kind of revisiting these things. We're refining how we view these things. But VanEck, I and many others, love the coin. And this week, the state of Florida is considering investing state pension funds into Bitcoin. The chief financial officer of Florida, Jimmy Padironis, I think is how you say it, he proposed considering Bitcoin as a diversification asset for public pension funds. And he's requesting a feasibility and risk report by March 2025. This is interesting. Just a quote. Recently, Governor DeSantis also leaned forward to protect the personal finances of Floridians from government overreach and woke corporate monitoring.
And by signing legislation to fight back against the central bank digital currency, CBDC. So you're actually looking at this. The CBDC is a centralized currency, which is sort of the antithesis to what crypto or Bitcoin aims to be. So there's sort of a tinge of some political rhetoric in that comment there. So before we get to the Bitcoin part, God, it's so torturous. Can you believe this guy gets paid unbelievable sums of money? I mean, and Joe's the one I like. He's the one I like. We have this system here in the United States that is really fascinating where the states can kind of compete against each other on some of these things.
And Florida is positioning itself as the anti-CBDC state from, like, the go. Before we even are seriously in the CBDC conversation, when we're still in the, quote, research phase, Florida is taking a very anti-CBDC play. And that anti-CBDC stance seems to be expanding into a pro-consumer crypto advocacy stance and then maybe a little bit more of an open mind towards Bitcoin as a diversification asset. And I don't think I don't think they're talking, you know, going all in. I think they're talking like percentages in the single digits. I think that the government's going to continue to print too much money.
You think Bitcoin is a way for Floridians to maintain purchasing power. Thank you for making those points, because that's exactly where our head is on this. We look at the failed policies of Washington. You know, I hope President Trump is going to be able to turn around, but I don't think it's going to happen overnight. He's walking into a real mess. That's a great hedge, you know, because Trump promises he's going to fix everything. And so you're a pro-Trump state, you're a pro-Trump political person. So how do you say, well, we're still concerned about massive government debasement in CBDCs over the next few years, even if Trump wins? because it sounds like an anti-Trump statement in a way.
But he's figured out a way to make it sound like, well, you know, even if Trump gets in and fixes everything, it's going to take a few years. You know, I hope, President Trump is going to be able to turn around, but I don't think it's going to happen overnight. He's walking into a real mess. But we need to be able to have a hedge against this massive overreach by the federal government with a centralized currency. Look, I don't want the federal government knowing when my son went to the grocery store to go buy a bag of Doritos at 2.15 in the afternoon. So we need to have some protections in place. And I think where we make it a welcome and interesting expansion of dialogues in Florida and maybe even a greater expansion.
We have about $800 million in crypto-related investments in our state portfolio, but I would not be shocked to be able to see that growing under a Trump administration in the near future. So if states start buying, that's going to be massive. And they're not the only state. I think there's two or three others that we've covered before on the show that are looking into this. So you can understand why there's a bit of a froth growing and brewing, I guess, in these larger money bag buyers. And I think some would say 80,000 is, well, Trump change. Bitwise, which, and Bitwise knows their stuff. Bitwise, the CIO, sat down with Yahoo Finance this week.
He's feeling more bullish than 80,000. I think the most important thing for Bitcoin is that the election happens. Regardless of a Trump win or a Harris win, the regulatory setting for Bitcoin is improving. And I think that's what you're seeing reflected in the price. Of course, in the short term, crypto favors a Trump victory over a Harris victory. But really, Bitcoin doesn't need Washington to succeed. Regardless of what happens, institutions are moving into the space. Adoption is rising. ETF flows are happening. I think we go higher either way. It just might be a little bit faster under a Trump win. Yeah.
And when we talk about that, maybe a clarity from a regulation perspective, right? How much of that is necessary in order to continue that momentum, even potentially past 100,000? Yeah, it's a great question. Look, I think we're going above 100,000 on Bitcoin. I think the regulatory clarity you're talking about actually matters more for the so-called altcoins, for Ethereum on down. Those are more exposed to regulatory risks. So I would expect an altcoin rally, even more so than a Bitcoin rally in the event of a Trump win. But regardless, I think both are moving higher. Why does it matter as much for Bitcoin?
So Bitcoin has more regulatory clarity than Ethereum and other assets. The SEC, the CFTC have already declared it a commodity. It's in the clear. There's already an ETF. BlackRock already has a huge business in that. That's not as true for Solana and Aptos and other altcoins. But I suspect if we get a new SEC, that will become clear, that will drive institutional adoption, and we'll see that rising tide lift all of those boats. What then do you think is the number one catalyst for Bitcoin as you look ahead to some of your 2025 projections?
Look, I think this is the best single time to invest in Bitcoin from a risk-adjusted perspective. All of the major existential risks of Bitcoin have been washed away. We have an ETF. We have institutions. They are coming into the space. The biggest catalyst is that move of institutional adoption. We're seeing that accelerate. We saw $800 million in ETF flows yesterday alone. This is a tidal wave of institutional assets moving into the space. There's a fixed supply. And from my perspective, that means higher prices. You were saying it doesn't matter ultimately in the long run who is elected come next week.
I'm curious, because there's been so much talk about why Trump is better for Bitcoin or for the crypto community than Harris. It seems like at least in the short term, maybe that is the case. But why are you confident? I guess, why are you as concerned about the pullback that we could see if Harris is elected? Look, I think we could see a short term pullback. But in that case, I think it would be a major buying opportunity. That's right. Specifically for Bitcoin. For those altcoins, I think there's more regulatory uncertainty. But Harris has already indicated that we're likely to turn the page.
And I think Washington is ready to turn the page on crypto. You see bipartisan support for crypto bills. You see talk about moving on from the SEC. Make no mistake, short term, the rally is higher on crypto if Trump wins. And I think it's more certain we'll get that regulatory clarity for the altcoins. Either case, I think the direction of travel is upwards. I think we'll be at new all-time highs this year on Bitcoin. And I think 2025 will look even better than 2024. What more specifically does that look like? Look, we're going to seven figure, I mean, six figure Bitcoin. We're going to $100,000 plus next year.
We're working on our price target for $100,000 plus next year, he says. We're going to seven figure, I mean, six figure Bitcoin. We're going to $100,000 plus next year. We're working on our price target for what we expect in 2025. We may release that next week. But if you step back and look at it, crypto has moved from the niche to the mainstream. You have Emory University allocating. You have 60% of the largest hedge funds allocating. We've jumped the chasm. We're going mainstream. And that means higher prices. I think that's exactly my analysis as well.
And probably yours if you're listening to this podcast. So I think we have to remember, in the wise words of Matt O'Dell, stay humble and stack sats. Things are really lining up for Bitcoin, and that feels great. And it's obvious that big money sees it clearly now. We all can see the wave that is building. When you combine the scarcity and the demand with the debasement, it's going to be one of the greatest stories of our lifetime. But yet, and we all know this inherently, anybody that's in the community, and you can see it with the Google search traffic.
Your average no-coin-er Joe. Totally, totally missing it. They haven't clued in yet. Not only can they not see a wave building, they don't even think there's a beach. So I think as Bitcoiners, this is an opportunity for us to learn and be humble here. Because A, we can learn how this works. We are watching history. We're watching how Wall Street typically is so successful at front-running the masses. Before they even know it's a thing, Wall Street has gobbled up the majority of the supply that's cheap. They build products on top of it. They get rich. And then they start packaging it in the plebs retirement and whatnot.
They don't even realize it's happening. And we should have the humility to recognize this has probably happened to us. This probably happens all the time in all kinds of sectors. Now, this is a special case here. But I think we should get humility in the fact that this has probably happened to us in our lifetime. And it will probably happen to us again. There's going to be something big, a big wave building in an area, in a sector we don't follow. And we're going to miss it. So we need to take that into consideration, I think. And we should try to get some humility when the price does skyrocket. I mean, it's still fun.
But it's also, I feel bad for those that were too distracted by all of the negative press that Bitcoin's gotten for the last decade, and just the busyness of life. You know, people are just so busy with everyday life now. They don't have an opportunity to stop and research something for 20, 30 hours or listen to a podcast every week. You can try. Yeah. I understand. It probably happens to all of us. And we just happen to be watching this wave build and be clued in. And on that theme, boost in and share your pain. I would love to hear a couple of failed orange pilling stories, because I sure have my share of them.
Maybe I'll share a couple, too. And if you have a recent success, you know, you talk to somebody about Bitcoin and it actually went well, yeah, I'd love to hear that, too. Does that happen? I don't know if that actually happens. But I would love to know. So boost in and tell me if you've had a successful orange pilling or an unsuccessful orange pilling. Share your pain or your success with the class, please. Music. All right, coming up, your boost. My thoughts on a wild new fake Toshi that popped on the scene today. A few updates and a final clip of the week.
Plus, stay to the network. But first, if you'd like to support the show by acquiring sats or sending, spending, whatever, I got ways you can help out. Me and you. It's nice. There's two of them. River. I'll have links in the show notes. River, it's a great place to get your sats. They're on the Lightning Network. They run their own network. They're a Bitcoin-only company. Beautiful UI. And the reason why I mention Lightning Network is because it gives you a little privacy after you've DCA'd for a bit. And you have some optionality there. It's nice. It gives you some flexibility. Of course, you can do on-chain as well.
I have an affiliate link in the show notes. You use that. You get some sats. I get some sats. Same with the Bitcoin company. You want to spend some sats, put in a gift card or something like that. It's a quick way to go from lightning sats, boom, right into a gift card and. Make your purchase, like on Amazon or whatever it might be. Hundreds of gift cards. Thebitcoincompany.com, promo code Jupiter. You get some sats, the show gets some sats. Put it all in the fun for the show, and I really appreciate it. It's a nice way to support the show while you're getting some sats or spending some sats. Links at the top of the show notes.
Music. Do have some boost to get to this week and it looks like the podfather mr adam curry is our baller booster this week with 100 000 sets he says. Music. It's a sad puppy boost i was i was really bummed you know because the show doesn't have a official sponsor and so when the boosts are down it's like oh man i i may have misallocated my time this week and i wasn't sure if i was going to be able to do a show this week at all because there's just crazy stuff going on. Lots of stuff going on just behind the scenes. And so, but you know, I saw a big baller boost like that.
I was like, oh boy, better get my big boy pants on. Time to pick it up and do a show. Wine Eagles also are baller booster with a hundred thousand sats. Music. He says, I think he's trying to make good, you know, because he tried to call the podfather out over using Hive as the back end for podping. He says, it's not that podcasting to-do-do sucks. That's not my opinion at all. The podfather is the goat in the morning. I call out Hive out of love. Okay, well, here's what you do, Wine Eagle. You build an entire new system. I was trying to think after the show, like, what would you replace podping with?
I mean, like, the back end. What would you, you know, Hive? And I feel like the first answer somebody would have would say Noster, but I don't think that would go over well. So I would love to know your thoughts on what we could use in its place. And please don't say Lightning or Noster, although I mean, I personally would be more amenable to Noster. I don't think most in the community would. But thank you very much, Wine Eagle, for the boost. Thank you, Podfather, also for the baller boost. And user 20497192 is almost our baller booster with a very generous 99,609 sets.
I hoard that which your kind covet. I love in the stats at the end of the show. It's a great idea. Bitcoin is my exit strategy for retirement if I ever do retire. I put the balance of my legacy IRA savings into MSTR last year. So I'm like 100% Bitcoin now. My wife still thinks I'm crazy, but I stopped asking when I'm going to sell. But she has stopped asking. Man, you know, I have I really have had like a no stocks, no ETFs, just only Bitcoin policy for a very long time. But I do wonder if I, you know, is MSTR a shit coin or is it a good way to earn some money and then turn around and stack some Bitcoin?
I'd love some people's opinions out there. Another great boost comes in from ByteBandit, which is also a very generous 97,757 sats. I hoard that which your kind cover. Coming in hot with the boost. Thank you, Byte. He writes, Hi, Chris, I just started the episode, but I forgot to boost last week, so I wanted to send some fire your way. I wanted to fire some value back your way. And then he says, and this is really sweet, he says, Screw it. Blowing the whole boost budget on Twib this week. Another newbie corner idea. What's the difference between different address and wallet types.
You know, I scanned the boost trying to look for newbie questions and I somehow missed this. So I didn't make a segment on this, but I will bank this. Yeah, because it does become important if you ever need to restore your wallet. And so that's where those kinds of little things, like if you have a seed word, you need to know some of the details about the wallet. So, okay, I will try to do like a boot camp on that in a future episode. Writing that down. Wallet boot camp. Okay, I got it written down. Thank you. Appreciate it. You're the best, Byte Bandit. Boost because it's Wednesday also.
Oh, and there's an extra little 5,000 you snuck in there, you crazy maniac. Thank you. Appreciate that. Bitcoin Lizard comes in with a handsome 50,000 boost, 50,000 boost, 50,000 sats. Make it so. Yeah. And you know what? You're doing a good job. Right. It's a great episode. I really enjoyed how you used older audio clips to show how Saylor and the ECB are now contradicting themselves. I love the Lagarde clip where she says the quiet part out loud, quote, if there is an escape, that escape will be used. Yep. That was my favorite part of that clip, too.
Every now and then, they just say it. Usually it's in a written form. But, you know, when you're in a Zoom call, I guess, and you're laying down all the typical tropes, that one slips out every now and then. That was a good one. Thank you, Bitcoin Lizard. Grekar boosts in with 40,000 sats. The traders love the vol. And he says boost. So you know what I say? I say boost. Thank you for the value. Is it Dr. Eckhart? That's what it is. It's doctor. Thank you, doctor. Appreciate the value there. Bitcoin E97 comes in with, I love that, with 25,000 cents. Fun will now commence. How come my earlier boost bounced back, but the comments stayed up?
You know, so the way it works, Bitcoin E97, is there's splits in there, and each split goes to, like, one goes to me, one goes to the node, one goes to Fountain. Sometimes I slip in, like, a couple of other, like, Bitcoin news outlets or something like that in there. And so it's possible for one of those splits to fail, but one of my nodes got it. And the really awesome... Boost, I don't want to call it a scraper system, but it's like a boost monitoring system that Wes has developed that it monitors multiple nodes now. So if your boost makes it to one of our nodes in theory, we'll get it.
Even if, say, like my, even if my split didn't go through for some reason. So you may have seen like a partial failure there. In that case, don't worry, your sats aren't lost. They stay in your wallet. Only the successful splits actually will take the sats. So you're okay. I don't mean to scare you on that. Bob B comes in. Hey, Bob, with 20,000 sats. That's not possible. Nothing can do that. Oh, it's Bobby Gant. Hey, Chris. Finally biting the bullet and streaming stats as I listen. I tried Fountain, but it wouldn't work with the private RSS feeds for your shows, so now I'm trying Podverse.
Yes. Private feeds and podcasting 2.0 are a tricky thing. None of it was really kind of designed with the idea of people who put stuff behind a paywall, because it's not really the way it works with value for value. But we have a legacy system. There's a fiat wall there. You know, all of that. So Fountain looks up the information for boosts and the splits via the podcast index API. But because the member feeds are private and individual RSS feeds, they're not published on the index. So Fountain is unable to look up the splits. Podverse takes it directly from the RSS feed. We publish it in the RSS feed, but Fountain does not look there.
Some podcast players do. It's kind of up to the client how they do that. He says, the only reason I am into Bitcoin now is because you talked about lightning boost way back in an old Office Hours episode. The notion of paying as you listen with streaming sats, to me, is as close to perfect as you can get for patronage of something you value. I wish more people could see that light. I'll boost when I have something to say, but I'll be streaming sats from now on to keep the flow regular. Thanks for doing what you do. Bob, thank you. Thank you for the boost.
And thank you very much for streaming the sats. I try to call out the sat streamers and really appreciate you out there. It's good to hear from you, too. Zach Hillies comes in with 20,000 sats. You suppose? That's not a Jar Jar boost. Who's the soundboard guy around here? Sometimes my genius is, it's almost frightening. Doesn't Clarkson have anything better to do? He writes, Zach Hillies writes, I might be in the minority, but I don't mind the politics in the show. I sometimes think of This Week in Bitcoin as unfiltered 2.0, where current events are now viewed through a Bitcoin lens.
The Bitcoin world has helped me understand economics more than I could ever have hoped. So he says, show me the money. That'd be a great clip. Show me the money. How do I not have that on the soundboard? Oh, my God. Zach, what you say here, I think, is a astute analysis. Unfilter is an old news politics podcast that I did. There was a missing piece. So when you start to understand a lot of the financial system and the situation the government is in, you start to understand the gaslighting. You start to understand why they skew the numbers the way they do. And it explains so much of what Unfilter used to talk about.
But now it explains it through a lens that isn't political or anything like that. But just these are the facts. These are the numbers. This is what the finances are. And so much is downstream of that in our society. And once you understand that, it really is one, I think, the key things to watch in a society, especially one as big as the states that impacts everybody else in the West. Appreciate that, Boosak. Oppie, 1984, is in with 4,000 sats. Tough little ship. Little. And he says, boost! Boost! Ace Ackerman's in with our first row of ducks this week, 2,222 sats. I like the multi-sig vault systems. They could be used in setups for an individual, family, or organization.
I agree, Ace. I think I've been rolling over, you know, my future, like, kid setups, and I could see multisig there working pretty well, you know, maybe until they're 18. I don't know. I think also apps like Nunchuck have a lot of potential for making it palatable for everyday users. And things like the BitKey kind of give you multisig in a consumer package, although it does involve a cloud server, but they seem to have a pretty good setup there. So if anybody has recommendations on solid multi-sig that they sleep well at night with sure would love to hear it because I'm kind of evaluating what the family solution is as the kids get older, and right now I'm not sure if I'm feeling it I'm not sure if I'm feeling my solution I have a kind of half multi-sig solution in place I'll say.
Dexord comes in with 11,101 sats I am your father I don't know if the number of listeners has changed from what you can see, but I know personally I have been finding myself one episode behind and then I don't boost because it feels like I'm late to the party. But that's on me and I love the longer episodes and I definitely want to keep you motivated and I want you to keep going because the information you present in this podcast has been helpful and important. Cheers. Well, cheers to you! Thank you. I appreciate that feedback and value, particularly about the episode length. I am always soliciting the, God, I am having a hard time talking today.
It's been a wild week behind the scenes. I am always soliciting the audience's feedback on the length of the episode because they could be two hours or I could really crunch it down and it could be 30 minutes. And I'm kind of striking a balance in between there right now, but I always appreciate the feedback on that. And it's good to hear from you, Dex. Never feel bad about being behind. I consider once I put a question out there, I consider it fair game for weeks because we can keep the conversation going. It evolves and other people jump in. So I appreciate it if you're listening and you're a couple weeks behind.
And I asked a question out there, don't feel bad at all about being three episodes behind and finally boosting it. I love it when the conversation rolls on like that. Epic Journey comes in with 5,000 sats. Now that is a Jar Jar boost. You so boost. He just says, thanks for the show. Thanks, Epic. I appreciate it. Loomer also came in with a 5,000-sat Jar Jar boost. You so boost. And he just says, boost. And he's here with 2,000 sats. And he says, hi, two years ago since my orange pill. Ah, love the content. Have you listened to any of the presentations from DEFCON 32?
There is a presenter named Joseph Cross who speaks about the FBI's encrypted phone company named Anom. They sell these phones to drug dealers. What I thought was interesting was that he mentions that a lot of large transactions were being made in Bitcoin. Is there any way to confirm that? Do we really know the amount of transactions being made for illegal activity, especially when the FBI is probably the only ones with this data? And don't disclose it because of current laws? Thanks, Andy. Great question, Andy. Two episodes ago, I did get into some stats. Most at volume, most of the kind of illicit activity, if you think about it, this makes total sense.
Most of the illicit activity that's done with cryptocurrency is done with stable coins. Because A, people don't want the value of whatever they've stolen to drop. And B, the blockchain for Bitcoin is fully open and transparent. But it's all relative, right? If they're doing $30 million of transactions, that could seem like a lot to Joseph Cross, right? But it doesn't seem like a lot to Michael Saylor. So it's all kind of relative there. Your question about the video, I did catch it. I tried to find the link. I could not find the link quickly before I sat down to record. But I want to just strongly recommend that if you are into phone privacy and security, this is worth a watch.
And I'd be curious for any of you GrapheneOS users out there, if you think they're basing this little honeypot phone system on GrapheneOS. Because I saw a couple of the config options that Joseph Cross demonstrates on the screen, and it looked like GrapheneOS to me. And I think the FBI is forking Graphene OS and then they're pretending to sell it as like this super privacy focused phone that has private encrypted chat and it scrambles your pin code on the screen and does all these things. And the reality was is that the FBI was totally honeypotting and rooting these devices and then also the quote unquote secure chat.
It was an XMPP server they set up, and then they have a bot listening in a different country. I think it was Lithuania, where they don't have to worry about the laws as much. They have a bot join every single private chat. Every chat session has a hidden FBI bot in it, listening and recording everything you say outside the United States in this database. And they were going around and selling it to drug dealers and other criminals, making them believe that they were getting this super secure anonymous phone. When in reality, it was a whole FBI job from the beginning. Fascinating talk.
Joseph Cross, DEFCON 32. I think if you YouTube that, you'll probably find it. I'll just co-sign Andy's recommendation. If you're into phone security, it's a wild one. And you realize just how in the game the FBI is with all of this. It's no joke. Speaking of no joke, Bitcoin Realist comes in with 2,000 sats. You know, that holiday special idea sounds good. And by the way, I liked your Linux episode that had producer Jeff on there featuring your AI voice. Yeah, I got cloned by Google. I got cloned by Google and A, they won't let me have it. I can't get access to it. And B, where's my check? Where's my check?
That's what I want to know. There he is. Gene Bean's back with 2048 Sats. There's coffee in that nebula. Still loving the show, but I'm just not boosting as much due to other expenses. Keep up the good work. Gene Bean, I am not kidding you. We have had conversations behind the scenes wondering if you're okay. We've been thinking about putting a—I'm not joking. We've been thinking about saying something on air to put a wellness check out on you, to have you, like, boost in with, like, holding the newspaper with the current day on there, something to make sure you're okay.
Because, you know, when somebody's really active in the community and they drop off, we notice. And it's really nice to hear from you. I'm glad you're okay. I'll let Wes and Brent know. They were also concerned. It's good to hear from you. Thank you for the boost. Hodler comes in with 4,747 sats, and I'm feeling like a sailor. The traders love the vol. Small boost from Iceland. Thank you for the great episode. I heard from a friend in Denmark that the government is planning on implementing a 42% tax on unrealized capital gains for Bitcoin in 2026. This would make it really hard to hodl. Thoughts?
First of all, it's not hodl, it's hard, right? Well, I suppose if it's unrealized, hmm, oh boy. I would wonder if this would be a situation where things like ETF products or stock that is a company hodling Bitcoin, would be a way to get Bitcoin price exposure without this particular problem. Because when it's unrealized, I was going to say you could hold and just wait to sell when the laws change. But if they're doing an unrealized, I just can't imagine that'll last. That just crushes an economy. It's death for an economy when you do that. It's death for a small business. So I wouldn't imagine it lasts long. But if anybody knows or hodler, if you do any research, I guess my question back to you would be, do things like ETFs or companies that have stock exposure with price action related to Bitcoin, is that something you could hold that wouldn't be considered an asset so it doesn't have an unrealized gain?
I don't know. That's a tricky situation. Those unrealized gains, you know, I have to wonder for some of us if the Bitcoin doesn't come before state. You know, if I was banking on a Bitcoin retirement, well, I am, and I got to that point and I was successful in my stacking and I actually had enough to live and continue to do the show probably, I would be crushed by an unrealized gain tax and I would probably want to leave the country somehow. Of course, there's an exit tax and you got to do all that or else they'll get you too. So you got, you know, you got to vote.
Vote harder, everybody. Just vote harder. That'll solve it. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. There is a few more boosts in there, but they were below the 2000 cutoff. But I see them. I read them and I'll save them in my show notes. Some of them are just people passing along, you know, best wishes and a high five. Or thanking me for something or other. And I just really appreciate everybody who boosts in or streams. We had 47 of your stream sats as you listened. That number is getting higher there. That's really awesome. And the streamers stacked 94,223 sats. So when you combine that with all of the boosts, we actually had a really fantastic week.
And we stacked a grand total of 687,787 sats. Thank you, everyone. That really got me going. I had really a crazy week. I was feeling kind of down because the value was pretty low last week. And when I saw that stuff rolling in, that's why this episode's here. I was going to take the week off. I figured people are sick of the election stuff. They don't want to hear it. And I paid for it now in Boost. And it feels like the signal has been strong this week. And I appreciate that. I'd love to have you boost in. if there's something I touched on this week that you'd like to get your take on. We still have more show to go.
So before we move on and get to the rest of the show, just really briefly, I'd like to say, if you want to boost it and you haven't done it yet, it's a great time to do it. This is a mechanism for you to just start to learn and understand Bitcoin a little bit. Take this as an opportunity to just get a little bit of exposure to the network and start to just get exposure to the terminology, how it works. It can be extremely beneficial to you down the road. Maybe it's something you decide it's not for you, or maybe it's something you decide, you know what, I'm going to start allocating a percentage to this every single month.
I can't say which one it's going to be, but I think it's worth at least participating in the value for value boost system because you can get a message into the show, you support the show, and you get exposure to things like lightning, the terminology and all of that. So I know most of you are already converted, but if somebody out there hasn't tried it yet, this is the opportunity. This is the time to try it. And, you know, maybe you end up getting into it right before the price just goes crazy. But thank you, everybody who boosts or supports the show with one of our affiliate links. It means the world. Thank you.
Music. A new fake Toshi this week. I don't think I need to spend a lot of time on this, but a guy named, like, Stefan Mohala. He's been facing fraud charges, I think related to his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto, and so today, he attempted to assert his identity as the creator of Bitcoin during a long, awkward, torturous press conference in London. On October 31st, the anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper, he declared himself to be satoshi and then while he was at it he also claimed to have invented the euro bond the twitter logo and the quote chat gpt protocol so we got ourselves a wild one here folks, and i'm not going to play a lot from this because it was torturous this press conference but i'm going to play a minute of or so of it because someone asked him well so then where does craig right the previous fake toshi fit into all of this what was what what was he and why didn't you say anything all of this time if craig wright wasn't actually satoshi why didn't you say something well you see because it was all part of his plan you see he was all in it together, was one of my plan and it's working according to the plan so the factors is here, I'm going through a serious organized persecutions from a group and they don't want me actually to publish my identity.
Even that so-called Craig Wright, he sent me an email, 2017. It's a very serious email. I should not publish myself. I should remain silent. Well, I met him once in London in a conference and we had little discussions. Well, who is Craig Wright? Craig Wright is just was a person I encountered in 2007 because I was looking for in those days to change my surname. So I choose the Wright brothers and when I click on the internet about the Wright brothers, it's Craig Wright profile came up there. So I saw that gentleman was a quite intelligent person.
So I enlisted him to be one of my one of my one of the person in the group who will do some work within the Bitcoin community. Oh, well, I don't know about you, but I'm convinced. I mean, his command of the English language demonstrates Satoshi's writings just clearly. So, yeah, Craig Wright was a pawn, somebody that he had to work to kind of help take the heat off. Now, I'll link to some of the coverage, but many attendees began to leave. And the guy maintained he was Satoshi the entire time, but it just was shakier and shakier. In fact, one observer noticed he seemed to get more nervous as time went on, saying, quote, journalists, including myself, interrupted Mola's long backstory as we asked him to show the promised evidence.
Quote, we've been here nearly an hour and people are restless and increasingly rude. Mr. Mola's cheeks began twitching rapidly as he stares down at the skeptical crowd as people filtered out. So, I mean, I don't know what the legal strategy is that when you're under fraud investigation, the like pivot to I'm Satoshi to somehow get yourself out of those fraud allegations is a wild one. So, and the HUSPA to do it on the anniversary day, which he did intentionally. I say we speak no further of this individual unless they start suing free software developers and causing a ruckus. We have no need to speak further of him.
Well, it's been a long time since I've played a Pomp clip, so give me credit. And our final clip this week, it's a good one, so I'm going to play it. And what I love about it is he gets the typical no-coiner, no-thought pushback on Bitcoin, and it's not a store of value. And Pomp does a great job responding to it. And I think it's it's a maybe it's a line of response with some modifications we could use with friends and family when they ask. The volatility on this thing is way too high for anybody to call that a savings account. I mean, you may like it, but I think that's a bridge too far right now, isn't it?
Over the last 30 years, the U.S. dollar has lost 50 percent of its purchasing power. So in my lifetime, one dollar now buys you 50 percent or 50 cents of service and goods. And so when you think about that, the most volatile asset that most people hold is the dollar. And they're on the wrong side of volatility. Bitcoin, on the other hand, over a long period of time appreciates. And so the best statistic to look at this is in 2016, the average median home was about $380,000. I'm sorry, $280,000. Today, it's over $400,000. Right. So 50% increase in the average home in America.
During that same eight-year period, it used to cost $664 Bitcoin to buy that home. Today, it costs $6 Bitcoin. It has been a 99% reduction in the cost of a home in America if you held Bitcoin. And so another way to think about that is if you had about $5,000 of Bitcoin in 2016, today it could buy you a house. Music. As we wrap up, it's time to look at the state of the network. The Bitcoin price is $70,480 in U.S. That makes it 1,419 sats per dollar. Bitcoin is up 3.8% since the last episode, but it's still down 4.4% from its all-time high 231 days ago.
Right now, there are 18,467 reachable nodes on the Bitcoin network. And this episode wrapped up at block height 868,287. I hope you have a great week. Thank you for listening. Links to what we talked about today are at This Week in Bitcoin.show. Of course, you can also find it in a podcast player of your choice. Newpodcastapps.com was a great way to get started with a podcasting 2.0 app. Boosting with what you'd like to see from the show and what you'd like to hear. If you thought something was missed, let me know what you think that was. Or if you have a newbie question, I'm stacking those again.
Of course, I'd love to have you also recommend this show to somebody who might be a little Bitcoin curious. This could be a great show for them to stay on the Bitcoin path and not get distracted by the altcoins, especially once they begin to rally. I'll leave you this week with a song that I think hits great. It's That Smile You're Wearing by Cavan Yaw. That smile you're wearing goes ear to ear I hadn't seen it in so long That smile you're wearing from ear to ear Makes my heart feel so warm. Music.
Jack Dorsey Thoughts on Bitcoin White Paper
Celebrating Bitcoin's 16th Anniversary
The ETF Surge
Wall Street's Game
Insights from VanEck
Correlating Bitcoin with Market Trends
The Election's Impact on Bitcoin
Generational Adoption of Bitcoin
Global Bitcoin Mining Initiatives
Florida's Pro-Bitcoin Moves
The Rise of Anti-CBDC Sentiment
Regulatory Clarity and Bitcoin's Future
The Shift from Niche to Mainstream
The Importance of Community Learning
Boosts and Listener Feedback
The New Wild Fake Satoshi
Addressing Bitcoin's Volatility
State of the Bitcoin Network
