Bitcoin faces its biggest decentralization test yet, just as global shifts send shockwaves through markets. In the middle of it all, Bitcoin holds the line.
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But here's the future, folks. Seriously, right now, the World Trade Organization. Lowers their economic growth forecast for this year, for next year. Some of these numbers are huge, huge moves. Rebecca Patterson, you're expert at this. I mean, this is the future that we're seeing right now this morning. Yeah, you know, I've been trying to find when is the last time we saw a dollar bond and stock sell off in tandem that lasted for more than a few days. 1977, 78. So we haven't seen what we're living through right now in a very, very long time. We'll be back.
Music. Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 54. My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Well, that's the word of the week seems to be uncertainty, $70 followed by its good buddy, the always scary volatility. We're going to get into that, how it impacts Bitcoin potentially positively. But first, I think we should start with something a little more core to Bitcoin, something that impacts every Bitcoin user. And anybody that's been around Bitcoin for a while, this probably has been on their mind once or twice, and perhaps even this week. It's mining centralization.
And it was brought to the forefront of conversation by an in-depth analysis of Bitcoin mining centralization done by b10c.me. I'll have a link to their really good post in the show notes. The high-level takeaway is in the current Bitcoin mining landscape, proxy pools like Antpool and their friends, which are about six mining pools, produce more than 95% of the block templates. And this is looking at data for early 2025. Six mining pools mine more than 95% of all the Bitcoin blocks. So you've got Foundry and Amp Pool. They're the biggest. And then they've got their friends, some of which are interestingly organized.
And consistently, they're controlling about 60% to 70% of the hash rate. And one of the things that B10C did is they introduced a mining centralization index, which quantifies centralization by summing up the hash rate of the top mining pools. It's a pretty good looking chart, but it's a pretty serious rate. like Foundry alone. Leads with 30% of the hash rate, just foundry. And mining pools can disguise their affiliation. Antpool and its proxies, they might hash through smaller pools, giving sort of a misleading interpretation of decentralization. But when you take Antpool and all of these sort of proxies that are hashing for Antpool, well, then it goes up from, oh, look at this nice decentralized chart to, well, actually 40% of the pie through 2023 and 2024 was Antpool.
And in their analysis here, they discover that 2017 was really the sweet spot for decentralized mining, and it's only really been getting more centralized. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but the ocean pool has continually articulated their concerns. And I would say Luke Dasher has been at the forefront of that. And this clip gets into what he's worried about. I would say for Bitcoin to be a success, there has to be a decentralized system that provides the guarantees that are expected of Bitcoin. It's like people assume there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins but if the bitcoin network becomes centralized that guarantee is out the door and there's nobody to enforce it.
We don't have a centralized entity enforcing Google, so it's really either the Bitcoin users enforce it or there is no enforcement and the miners can just do whatever they want. The white paper goes in to talk about the potential for a 51% attack if it were to be centralized. What people often don't realize is you don't need 51% of the network cash rate to do a 51% attack. You can do it with 30%, even 20%. There's just a possibility that you will fail when you try to do it, but it's possible to succeed as well. Gotcha. 51% just happens to be the point where you're guaranteed to succeed at any time you want to do a tap.
Now, this is a concern people have. And what he's saying is you don't actually need 51% of the hash rate. And I completely agree. We need to diversify mining. There needs to be... It's nice to see like Tether. Tether announced that they're going to put their mining hash rate into Ocean. I mean, these things are nice to see. But over the years, I've kind of learned not to worry a great deal about this. I mean, I do keep an eye on it, but I have a couple of contrarian views. One, I don't think the current crop top of mining companies, I don't think half of them are going to be around in 10 years.
I mean, big money is about to get into this. Things are going to consolidate and change. New entrances are going to come in with BlackRock money behind them. So these things tend to ebb and flow. Although, you know, the longer these top dogs remain, the more entrenched they get, the more expertise they accumulate. So they're not to be totally shrugged off. But the other reason, the other kind of contrarian view I don't quite worry too much is even if they did have, say, more than 50% of the network cash rate, I still don't understand what the economic incentives would be for them to attack the network.
You know, if a mining operation did something like a 51% style attack. The price of Bitcoin would crash immediately. And so what would really be the advantage? You'd end up with a worthless currency. It's something that Safe pointed out, the author of The Bitcoin Standard, when he was interviewed by Lex Friedman. And also, you know, he points out the block size war taught us some lessons here too. Learn about the 2017 block size war to understand why miners don't control Bitcoin. I discussed this briefly in my Bitcoin Standard, but there's a recent book that discusses this in detail called The Block Size War by Jonathan Beer.
It's a great description of, in 2017, essentially the miners thought that they could control Bitcoin. There was one mining company that produced the majority of the machines that were on the network. And their allies had a control of the machines that were out there. And they controlled the majority of the hashrate. And they thought that they could change Bitcoin's supply, not supply, sorry, they could change Bitcoin's block size, which is a tiny little detail technical parameter it's not even all that big of a deal for the economics of it but they thought that they could pass this change they could force this change on the network and the members of the network rejected it and they weren't able to do it so the nodes are what is sovereign the nodes are what determine the rules of the game the miners.
Are a service provider. The miners invest capital upfront. You know, they buy the machines, they buy the electricity, they buy the storage, they buy the locations, they pay the rent. And they invest all of that money based on the idea that if they behave according to what the nodes want, the nodes will reward them with Bitcoin. So the miners are in no position to dictate terms for anyone. You know, they've put up their capital upfront and they will only recoup it if they do what the nodes want. So therefore, what really matters is the decentralization of the nodes. So you want to have as many nodes as possible.
You want to have a system where there's a large number of nodes. I don't always agree with all of that take. I don't know, maybe his grasp on some of the more esoteric technical aspects of Bitcoin, like his comment there about the block size. But I do agree with the latter half and high-level take that he had there, that these miners have invested capital up front to buy equipment. They need to recoup those costs. they have staff to pay. So it just doesn't seem likely that they would want to destroy the value of Bitcoin. But I'd like to know what you think. Are you concerned about mining centralization?
Is it something the show should focus more on? Is it something you legitimately are concerned about when you look at what risks actually to face Bitcoin? I'm curious if this is actually something the audience is dialed in on. Boost in. Let me know. Music. The last three weeks have been nothing but historical for this show. It started with the tariffs. The tariffs were announced while I was recording the show. The following episode, the next week, the tariffs were paused during the show. And this week, Jay Powell is holding a press conference during the show. And there's just a lot of moving pieces.
Now, as Bitcoiners, this is kind of every other day, right? This is a typical Wednesday for us. But for traditional market, quote unquote, investors, they are losing it. I mean, it has really been something to watch. how well Bitcoin has held up while the market pukes and trades like an altcoin, and then seeing these supposed investors who just can't seem to stomach any volatility at all. What do you make of just some of the action that we're seeing in the markets and how it's impacting the bond market itself, the bond market, something the president seems to be reacting to, and these bond traders, they don't seem to like all this tariff uncertainty.
So last week, they paused the tariffs for 90 days, dropped everything down to 10% except for China, and then the White House came out, It's, oh, no, no, it's totally fine. And then when Trump was asked, he said, oh, yeah, well, it's because the bond market looked queasy. The bond market was getting queasy. So they're watching the bond market. Yeah, so the tariff uncertainty is driving a lot of volatility in the long end of the Treasury curve. So people are paying attention to the 10-year and to the 20-year, and there's been incredible volatility in that space in just the last month.
I mean, even the 20-year has had a total return change of over 7.5% in one month alone. So that worries investors and it concerns people. There's a lot of volatility in the market reflected of this uncertainty where you don't see as much volatility and you do see stability and I think continues to be a safe haven for investors is in the shorter end of the curve where rates have been more stable. OK, let's get into what this crap means. Oh, they're so uncertain. What's going on? Well, there is legitimate. I mean, I am being I am being very, I guess, harsh towards these investors because there are some legitimate curveballs being thrown at them that some of them just don't see coming.
Well, this is the third round of restrictions from the U.S. government on NVIDIA in terms of selling these AI chips into China. The first came in 2022 and then in 2023. There was talk in the late days of the Biden administration that perhaps they would stop NVIDIA from selling this very chip, the H20, into China because many Chinese companies are using this to be able to build their models. Notably, DeepSeek used the H20 to be able to come out with a model that kind of stunned the world a while back. The Trump administration is going ahead. They're saying that they cannot sell this chip for the indefinite future. That's having a direct effect on NVIDIA.
They're taking a write down of $5.5 billion in this quarter. An analyst estimate that it could cost them $12 to $14 billion overall. So it's a setback for NVIDIA. And perhaps just as important, it's going to motivate Chinese companies to move even more quickly in developing alternatives for these AI chips. You know, we didn't see the tariffs against AI chips work last time, right? When we restricted them to the H20s, they created DeepSeek using, you know, every trick in the book they could to get it as efficient as possible. So when we manipulate the market like this, it doesn't actually seem to work out in our favor long-term, yet we keep trying over and over again.
So I understand how it is sort of a changing situation, but that's the landscape here. And I'm going to play Mr. Lunatat to himself, the Mike Novogratz Galaxy CEO. I want to play through this clip. I normally wouldn't play this, but I think we could break this down in real time and kind of understand the stupid mindset that these supposed investors have and why we're not seeing Bitcoin respond as a safe haven like we are gold recently. And perhaps why we will see Bitcoin respond as gold eventually. Take a look at Bitcoin trading right now. $84,000 up from about 76. It had sort of gone below for a while.
Joining us right now in an exclusive interview is Galaxy founder and CEO Mike Novogratz. We've all been trying to figure out exactly what's really going on here, Mike. You know, Bitcoin has moved. We also have folks seemingly maybe getting out of cash and bonds and going into gold. Tell us what you think is really happening. Listen, you know, this tariff thing came out of nowhere for a lot of people, and it has provided a really big shock to the global economy. I just, okay, we're going to start here. This has been a sentiment that we hear, oh, this tariff thing, it came out of nowhere.
Some of it, you know, like, oh, now they're going to do pharmaceuticals, you know, oh, the H20 chips. But he's literally been talking about it since before he was the Republican nominee. I went back and looked, and he was interviewed by Bloomberg right around the debates. He might have just gotten the nomination when he started publicly talking about tariffs. And when you hear this kind of talk, what it makes me think is that these investors are not actually dialed into what's going on. You know, they're looking at maybe their Bloomberg terminal at best, but they're not dialed into the real world situation.
And Bitcoiners over time, I think because they're looking for signal, have dialed into some of these indicators and they have started to pay attention to some of these things. So for this show, for example, we've been talking about the shock this is going to create in the market since November. And a few weeks ago, I exclaimed how I was shocked that these idiot investors that are supposedly these geniuses haven't caught on to what's going on and then all of a sudden panicked when the actual Liberation Day or whatever it was called landed. Who could have seen this coming? Well, just about every Bitcoiner didn't anybody listening to this show.
So I don't buy the premise that this was some big shock. I just don't buy that premise. This tariff thing came out of nowhere for a lot of people and it has provided a really big shot to the global economy right and that's i suppose it has that is true it should not have the scale of them perhaps but the fact that we're doing these tariffs has been i mean you could argue he even ran on it i am not i'm not arguing for against them in fact the more i think about it just seems like more economic manipulation and every time the federal government gets their hand in the market it seems to skew things for the worse and i'd like to i'd like to hear somebody out there convince me how tariffs aren't market manipulation but you know like it wasn't a shock we all knew it was coming of happening at the same time where we're we're really re reimagining what our security apparatus is going to be right so you had 80 years really post-war war ii of a similar security apparatus for the world and an economic structure and does that security apparatus, is that like a euphemism for saying that the United States way overspends on its military budget and was essentially the world police?
You know, we're about to pass our first trillion dollar defense budget. Trillion dollars just for defense. I mean, where do we stop? At what point is it too much money? At what point do we stop putting all of this on the credit card just because we want to be the world police. I don't like going this direction, but the reality is there is sort of an economic unsustainability to it. I don't know how you fix it, But there is talking about it like it has been this golden era is false. We are thirty seven trillion dollars in debt now. Security apparatus for the world and an economic structure.
And then in 89, you really accelerated that with globalism, right, with the global revolution. And Trump saying, wait a minute, I want to change that. And so that uncertainty is showing up in all markets. Right. And, you know, the broad U.S. stock market is roughly down 10 percent on the year. that doesn't seem near enough dislocation when you put it in context that we're looking at this titanic shift in what we're doing. And so I think people are in a risk-off mindset. Bitcoin broadly does well with these kind of macro conditions unless there's this kind of risk-off. What I mean by that is there's always two vectors in Bitcoin.
One is the macro story, which you're seeing play out in gold, right? Which is the uncertainty, get myself out of the dollar, get myself into something safe. But the other is the adoption story. And because we're such a young asset, the adoption story needs more calm. It just does. And so when there's this kind of chaos, the new buyers disappear. And that's what we've broadly seen. We've seen very few new buyers. I do kind of agree with that last bit of the analysis. When things get really. New buyers do seem to dry up. We were seeing that with ETFs. First week of April, heavy sell-offs, and now things are starting to actually stabilize. In fact, people are buying more of the Bitcoin ETF.
But when things were really kind of rocky and everything was just taking off with the tariffs, people stopped buying. And so you see people sell, they get short, they buy back. It's starting to trade better in the last few weeks relative to stocks. But broadly, Bitcoin has been the mag-8 and not gold. I don't think that's a permanent condition. And listen, gold is telling you everything you need to know. Right. I used to say this all the time. Bitcoin and gold are report cards on financial stewardship. Right. If you're the secretary of treasury of the U.S.
Or any country, your report card really is what's gold? What's the yield curve telling you? And gold is something that's not great. Who is the buyer of gold right now? And what money is buying gold? You know, foreign central banks, listen, you're going to see, this is a prediction. I don't know if it's true. I know we're going to have a BRICS currency at one point in the next 24 months. I bet you part of it's backed by gold, the digital version. You're seeing gold, the digital version. I don't think he means Bitcoin. Does he mean like some sort of like ERC-20 token pegged to gold?
What is he talking about? It's currency at one point in the next 24 months. I bet you part of it's backed by gold, the digital version. You're seeing foreign central banks buy gold. Listen, when I first got into the markets in the late 80s, I was always fascinated with the fact that in developed markets like the US or Japan, there was no real correlation between the shape of the yield curve and fiscal policy, right? You could spend a lot, you could run big budget deficits, and the yield curve didn't, care. But if you're an emerging market or developing market, it cared a lot. And so this shift between we felt the Minsky moment, when does people start caring?
The way the U.S. market is behaving in a risk off is exactly opposite of what we've seen for 30 years. Right. It's interest rates higher in the dollar weaker. That means we're starting to behave more like an emerging market than a developed market. This is actually an important point and something that I think we should talk about a little bit more as it relates to Bitcoin in a moment. We are seeing an interesting change where the dollar is getting weaker and the yield is going higher. So debt's getting more expensive. The dollar is buying less. And it's all happening pretty quickly for bonds and dollar in their timeframes.
I'm not saying we've gotten there yet. It's the early stages. And that should get us all nervous. I'm sure that's got Secretary Bessett nervous. I'm sure it's got, you know, people around the White House who understand this nervous. Because, Mike, some people tried to dismiss these moves last week and say, look, we don't want to make too much of a two or three day thing. Look, the bond market's already calmed down. So you do think that what was happening was maybe the beginning of a bigger shift that D.C. needs to pay attention to? I think, yeah. I was just going to say, kind of leading from that.
The parachute out is, well, they might be working on a whole new kind of global financial architecture. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that, too. Yeah, listen, the architecture we had brought peace and prosperity to the world in over 80 years. Unless you're in the Middle East or Africa, right? More so than we ever saw. And so globalization was great for the world. It was great for wealthy people in the West. It was great for Vietnamese workers. It was really not great for the factory worker in the U.S. and in Europe. This is the part that really pissed me off.
Now, you heard Novogratz earlier say he got his start in the late 80s. Then you also heard him say globalization really took off in 89. Now, I'm not being ages. I'm just speaking to my observation. But there's a lot of boomer investors that got really, really lucky. They were riding the post-gold peg removal and globalization boom. And getting goods out of China really was, like, think about this. From the late 80s till the early aughts, cheap China goods was disinflationary. So we could have low rates. We could print money. We had the dot-com boom.
These guys were so lucky. I mean, I say no millennial, what Novogratz just said would never come out of the mouth of any millennial or younger generation. This is only something an old generation X or boomer would say, because they were born during a money printing golden golden era and a globalization golden era that benefited people closer to the money spigot. Now, then he just casually said, oh, but the factory worker, which is a euphemism for the entire middle class, for the people of the country. That's what the euphemism for is for the people. And he's just the factory workers.
But otherwise, it's been great. So, you know, other than the other 290 million people in America alone, other than those 290 million, it's been great. It's been the best in the world. Why would we want to change it? than we ever saw. And so I'm sorry, the best system we ever saw. Why would you change it? It's the best system we ever saw. I guess Mike Novogratz has never gone on a road trip through this country because you get 15, 20 minutes outside a city and you start seeing absolute devastation. The architecture we had brought peace and prosperity to the world in over 80 years, more so than we ever saw.
And so globalization was great for the world. It was great for wealthy people in the West. It was great for Vietnamese workers. It was really not great for the factory worker in the US and in Europe. And we're trying to pivot that. It's a very noble, like, you know, it's funny, my politics kind of align. I would have thought if I was in charge, I'd want to bring down the deficit and I'd want to work on inequality. And this is what the goals here are. I just think you can't do that by wishing we didn't have this kind of trade system, wishing we didn't have 30 years of supply chains built out.
Unfortunately, I do agree with him here. I think the United States of America made its bed. I'll get into why later, specifically. But I think the decision was cast by Nixon. And so we have been on a trajectory for so long that to unravel it means to essentially unravel and restart the entire economy. I hate to agree with Novogratz, but I do tend to agree here. You can't do that by wishing we didn't have this kind of trade system, wishing we didn't have 30 years of supply chains built out. You know, people make decisions if you're a Colombian coffee farmer or an American furniture importer, a retail furniture person based on some medium term horizon.
And we're literally ripping up that horizon overnight. Are we stuck, Mike? I mean, do you think the market is basically saying to the administration, OK, you want to try this goal? The electorate has kind of given you this mandate to some extent. You went to put it into practice and it just screamed no. And is that because the fiscal deficit is too big? Like, if they had been able to really make a meaningful change on that front, would it all have worked? Or do you think this is just the global market saying this can never work? This is a deeper question than it sounds like.
Essentially, she's saying, is it the administration versus the markets? And the markets are just simply saying, we ain't going to go with this. We're not going to go along with this. This ain't working. And the administration, which they had been saying, well, we're not watching the markets. They're not quite saying that as much now. So it's a deeper question than it sounds like on the surface. I think the global markets are saying you're going too fast and this strategy is not going to work. That's what I think the markets are saying. Listen, just the increase in our interest rates since this thing started is a higher annual cost than all the Doge savings.
Right. You just think we have thirty five trillion in debt and, you know, you go 50 basis points or 30 basis points. Even that's that's one hundred hundred fifty billion dollars. You know, it's it's really hard. that is that is a damning point, That is a very damning point. And it puts the doge cuts into perspective, which it sounds like there's been some talk about the total impact of those cuts even being reduced quite a bit. That's not going to be the third leg of a stool that the administration has been articulating. You know, it's been tariffs, tax cuts, and deregulation and spending cuts.
Well, $150 billion or so, it's dropping the bucket, especially when you look at the counter things that are happening. So deregulation, it's hard to really quantify. Now, Besant says, oh, you'll see that by November. Well, how do we even quantify that? So I think Novogratz makes an interesting point. We'll wrap it up here. I think the markets are saying, listen, just the increase in our interest rates since this thing started is a higher annual cost than all the Doge savings, right? You just think we have $35 trillion in debt and, you know, you go 50 basis points or 30 basis points even, that's $100, $150 billion. dollars.
You know, it's it's really hard to take this deficit down and doing it at the time when you're going to put growth at risk and shift the entire tax code. Right. Tariffs pre this tariff move accounted for about two percent of taxes where income taxes and payroll taxes are 85 percent. And so we're going to cut taxes here and raise them here. The numbers don't add up. And that kind of uncertainty I think has just scared markets. Yeah, I do agree. The numbers, that's what I've been saying. It doesn't really work out. There has to be another piece to this. I still feel that these supposed investors are nothing but investors.
Whatever's happening with tariffs and taxes and world trade, does that fundamentally alter what a company is capable of doing or the products they're working on? It might alter their profits. It just feels like these people that are freaking out right now and selling their Bitcoin ETFs and selling all of their stocks, they probably shouldn't own stocks in the first place. There's actually a famous quote by Warren Buffett on this. Some people should not own stocks at all because they just get too upset with price fluctuations. If you're going to do dumb things because your stock goes down, you shouldn't own a stock at all. I think this probably applies to Bitcoin too, right?
Maybe you shouldn't, if you're going to do dumb things when Bitcoin goes down, maybe you shouldn't own Bitcoin at all. What are dumb things? Selling a stock as it goes down? Yeah, selling a stock as it goes down. I mean, if you buy your house at $20,000 and somebody comes along the next day and says, I'll pay you 15, you don't sell it because the quote's 15. Look at the house or whatever it may be. Some people are not actually emotionally or psychologically fit to own stocks, but I think there are more of them would be if you get educated on what you're really buying, which is part of a business.
And the longer you hold stocks, the less risky they become. Whereas the longer the maturity of a bond, the more risky it becomes. The longer you hold Bitcoin, the less risky it becomes, right? If you bought Bitcoin years ago at 10,000 or 40,000, 84 is looking pretty good. I think this is all part of a broader strategy. I'm not saying there's a master plan in place. I'm saying something else has to click in. There has to be another component because if the United States wants to remain the reserve currency of the world, which they have recently articulated, they do, then there's always going to be trade deficits.
And Lynn Alden, I'll put a link to the full podcast in the show notes, did a great job of explaining this recently. And what I'm not the first to argue, but I've written this in various articles and in my book is the association between having the global reserve currency and structural trade deficits, at least as the way it's currently structured. I think, too, while you listen to this, consider those out there that have advocated that Bitcoin should be the reserve currency for the United States. Get rid of the Federal Reserve, go back to hard money, maybe peg the dollar to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the reserve currency. So when you hear Lynn explain how the reserve currency works for the United States, it's and how it's related to our deficit, trade deficit. Imagine the United States ever trying to get rid of this.
And the mechanism for that is that, to my definition, if you're the world reserve currency, most countries around the world are using your currency in some way. They're holding that currency or instruments for that currency as reserve assets. They're often using it as a cross-border funding currency. They're using it as the main trading pair for other currencies. And they're denominating a lot of international contracts in that currency. So there's a lot of need for that currency. There's a kind of insatiable demand for it. And particularly those funding, like the debts, all represent inflexible demand for that currency.
So some of that usage is voluntary, and other uses of that is involuntary. Unless you want to default, you need to be able to access that currency. So what that means is that compared to other currencies in the world, there's an extra layer of demand for the dollar. Normally, you hold the currency of a country because you want to interact with that economy in some way. Whereas the dollar, countries that have maybe even minimal trade with the US are not looking for that purpose, will hold a lot of dollar assets anyway, just because they need it for all these kind of global requirements.
And what that means is that unlike many currencies that will trade on interest rate differentials, trade imbalances, things like that, the dollar will trade on those things, but it has this extra structural bid to it. And what that means is that especially for lower margin things, it's generally less economical to produce them in the US, even compared to other developed countries. So it's not just compared to developing ones, even compared to many of our developed peers, it's just harder to manufacture in the US. And our import power is very significant. And so basically, that's the mechanism that kind of forces open our trade deficit.
And so every year, we're pouring dollars out into the world so that they can use it as the global reserve currency. And basically, The imbalance there is that there are some parties that are very boosted by that arrangement. So Washington, D.C. can sanction anyone in the world practically. If you work in Wall Street, you're loving the situation. Tech and healthcare are kind of high margin things that are not really heavily impacted by that. Whereas if you work in industry or in other kind of like heavier areas, particularly the Rust Belt areas, that's part of why it rusted, you're on the wrong side of that.
And so over time, there's been kind of shifting economic realities as well as shifting politics around that kind of accumulating imbalance. I think a key thing that she says here is that there's just a structural system in place when you're the reserve currency. And there's going to be trade deficits because of that. You're putting dollars out into the world. And as a result, it's almost always going to be more economically viable to manufacture outside the United States. So when we went off the gold standard, when we came up with the deal with OPEC and others to do international trade in dollars, when we started that process, we've begun something that has only been building now for over 40 years.
And structurally it doesn't make as much sense to manufacture everything here in the united states not even getting into the talent pool and all of that and you know the potential robotics just getting into just structurally the way the reserve currency functions and you know there there has been talk of well maybe we're going to have a new breton woods and we're going to have a new reserve currency i don't think that's on the table besant has laughed at that question and also seems to have a plan in place, although he is the world's bond salesman, so I don't know, but he seems to think they have plenty of room still and he's not worried about the bond market or the reserve status of the dollar one bit.
Do you have a sense of who is dumping U.S. assets? Who's been dumping U.S. treasuries? I don't think there's a dumping. And I think we saw in the tick data either today or Friday that actually foreign ownerships picked up. We had three big auctions last week. And on the longer end auction, 10-year, 30-year, we saw increased foreign competition. So I actually think this is one of those occasional VAR shocks that you get in the trading community. I think a lot of people got very leveraged, maybe out over their skis. And then you combine that with some real money selling and you get these moves.
So you don't think it's sovereigns? Potentially it's hedge funds unwinding? I have no evidence that it's sovereigns. Look, Anne-Marie, not you, but the nature of journalism is to create a headline that 10 days ago, when 10-year yields hit 390, said, well. Secretary Besson got what he wanted. He got 10-year yields down, but it's the wrong reason. Now, I forget what they hit on Friday, maybe 440-something. We saw a 50 basis move last week in 10-year yield. at the same time that the dollar was weakening nearly 3%. How do you simultaneously look at that situation? It feels like investors are dumping U.S. assets.
Well, look, I've learned that not to look at what happens over a week. I, for better or worse, have lived through a lot of these things. And in trading, in one's personal trading history, it's the scar tissue that sticks with you the most. I can tell you exactly where I was standing in 1998 when the long-term capital, the debacle happened. That had nothing to do with anything other than a bunch of geniuses up in Greenwich who had too much leverage. So you're not concerned at this moment about the U.S. dollar or the U.S. Treasury losing safe haven asset?
No. We're still a global reserve currency. We are still a global reserve currency. We have a strong dollar policy. The dollar can go up and down. If you go and look back at President Trump's first term, I don't remember the exact number, but the dollar in 2017 went down, I can't remember, 7, 8, 9 percent. And then once the tax bill was done, took off, took off for the remainder of his term. We have a strong dollar policy and we take a long term look at the dollar value. And then he talks about how it will look in the second half of President Trump's previous term, the dollar just took off.
So the decline we're seeing now, they may view as temporary if they have some sort of strategy. He does get into some of the ways they could boost the dollar strength, basically games. Bitcoin doesn't tend to shine when the dollar rips. So if they do have some sort of plan for the dollar to rip later on, it'll be interesting to see how that impacts Bitcoin. There was one other comment he made there before we get off of Besant for the day that I thought was noteworthy. They talk about J-Pow and if the Fed wants to step in and help. And Besant reveals that they have breakfast together every week.
Have you spoken to the Fed at all about contingency plans, though, if financial stability risks flare up? Chair Powell and I have breakfast every week, and we discuss a wide range of things. And, you know, our staffs are always in contact. We have a markets room. They have a markets room. But, you know, and specifically, did we discuss some kind of a break the glass? I think we're a long way from that. So when was the last time you guys spoke? You had breakfast last week? We had breakfast last week, and it was an away game. I was over at the Fed. And no concern so far from the Fed chair on what he saw in the treasury market.
I think we would have heard from the Fed chair. I think we heard from Governor Collins of Boston on Friday. We heard from Governor Weller today on his thoughts on what tariffs mean. So it seems like business as usual. Totally independent, though. Totally independent. Has breakfast every week. I wonder which A-PAL serves for breakfast when you come to visit. Something a grandma would serve? I don't know. What do you think? Who's going to tell me you think J-Powell would serve for breakfast? So speaking of Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, he spoke today, and he seems also to be fairly confident in the state of the economy.
Now, I think this is important because Bitcoin is sort of waiting this out right now to try to figure out where this is going. So at the Fed, we are always focused on the dual mandate goals that Congress has given us, maximum employment, and stable prices. Despite heightened uncertainty and downside risks, the U.S. economy is still in a solid position. The labor market is at or near maximum employment. Inflation has come down a great deal, but is still running a bit above our 2% objective. When JPOW speaks, Bitcoin reacts in real time. So you can suss out if the market likes what he's saying or not just by watching the price of Bitcoin.
But he didn't have much new to add there. But he did have something new to add with his thoughts on crypto. During a Q&A later, he was asked about his thoughts on stablecoins and crypto. This is probably noteworthy because it's the Federal Chairman of the Federal Reserve talking about crypto and in a fairly positive way. Pretty big tone shift from a couple of years ago. You know, so we went through a wave of failures and fraud and things like that were the headlines for a couple of years. I think what you see now is, and during that period, by the way, we were trying to work, we worked with Congress to try to get a framework, a legal framework for stable coins, which would have been a nice place to start.
We were not successful. I think that the climate is changing and you're moving into sort of more mainstreaming of that whole sector. So Congress is, again, looking at both the Senate and the House are looking at a framework, a legal framework for stable coins. You know, depending on what's in it, that's a good idea. We need that. There isn't one now. And stable coins are a product that a digital product that could actually have fairly wide appeal and should contain consumer protections of the typical sorts and transparency. And that's what the Senate and the House are working on.
So that's a positive thing. I also think some of the you know, we took a pretty conservative and other other bank regulators took an even more conservative perspective on on on the guidance and rules we imposed on banks. I think there'll be some loosening of that, and I think we'll try to do it in a way that preserves safety and soundness, but that, you know, permits and fosters appropriate innovation, but that does so in a way that, again, doesn't put consumers at risk in ways they don't understand or make banks less safe and sound. Well, I guess it's safe to assume the Federal Reserve won't be lobbying against stablecoin legislation, and it sounds like...
They're also on board with lessening regulations for banks getting involved with crypto. Should be interesting, for better or for worse, I suppose. I just, I don't think it's like, nothing there he said was absolutely blow away, other than it was so positive, and he's the chair of the Federal Reserve. And gold's been really having a runaway, which you'll hear or read anywhere, that that's a sign that something is really wrong structurally and the market is preparing for the worst case scenario. Correct. Where are we going here? And how are you thinking about Bitcoin relative to gold in this particular moment?
Yeah, I think that's what everyone's really talking about right now. Bitcoin is down about 10% to start the year. Gold's up 20%. But if you look out over one year, they're both up about 35%. So it's pretty interesting that there's been this divergence. But if you go back and you take a look, you can actually see that gold usually leads these rallies. and nobody really knows why that happens. My kind of guess would be that a lot of the central banks and institutional investors, they're either not approved to buy Bitcoin or they're not used to running to Bitcoin in these moments of kind of geopolitical uncertainty.
What we do see though is when gold runs about a hundred days later or so, Bitcoin not only catches up, it usually runs much harder. And so you get that kind of higher volatility. That's the key point is there's usually about a hundred day lag and then Bitcoin starts to run. It's like, oh, I don't know. Nobody knows why people run the gold. Really? It's called a safe haven right so when you have times of uncertainty you don't go for the thing that's new and maybe risky in your central banker opinion you go for the thing you've known for thousands of years is considered a store of value i mean it's a totally logical play we're not there yet with bitcoin and bitcoin doesn't have the market size even we don't have the liquidity depth like we couldn't fill that role right now you couldn't do it now at a smaller scale for like us you know the plebs we're already there right but at like the nation state level no it's not deep enough it's not deep enough of course not now will it get there yes yes of course it will, it's everything but but better that gold is for this type of thing but we're not there yet and it may be let's be honest maybe a generational thing for some people you know some of these central bankers have been doing this for 20 30 40 years some of them are getting up there, you think they're going to roll the dice at this point in their career.
Music. Thank you, everybody, that supports the show by doing what you do. You can buy Sats on River with our link in the show notes. Hooks you up. It's a great way to stack Sats here in the U.S., and they have that awesome 3.8% in-sats savings for your fiat. Great for smash buys. Now, if you're all about the self-custody, the Bitcoin Well is an automatic self-custody platform for the U.S. and Canada. Link to that in the show notes. If you've got some Sats on Lightning you're ready to spend, maybe you want to pick up some gift cards the bitcoin company a bitcoin only unlike the others bitcoin only hundreds of gift cards and you get sats back when you use my link in the show notes if you're ready to pay bills and stack sats maybe when you do a little bit of purchases here and there buy some gas with a debit card the fold card is awesome community favorite out there i've been using it now for almost a year link to that in the show notes support the show and last but not least if you need to get access to your bitcoin value but you don't want to sell it salt lending is what I use.
They have a great system over there. Check those links out and support the show in the show notes. Music. And we did get some boost into the show this week, and we're going to start with a truly baller boost from Adversary17. Music. All right. You're doing a good job. And Adversary17 writes, Great episode, Mr. Fisher. So much great information and very high density. Thank you again for all you two. Well, thank you, adversaries. I really appreciate that. It's been a wild three weeks of shows just adapting and tucking and rolling. So that means a lot. Appreciate that baller boost. It's been a minute, too, since we had a big baller boost.
You did some heavy lifting. Appreciate it very much. Thank you for the boost. A-Train is here with 33,333 sats. You made me want to be a better man. He says, great show. Thanks for the thought-provoking content. One thing that kept going through my mind, especially after the Redaglio clip, is that we are living through an unprecedented time, a once-in-a-lifetime. His book, Principles for Dealing with a Change of World Order, spells this cycle out well, which begs the question, Do any of these talking heads really know how to predict this stuff? I don't think any of their charts will work through this.
Part of the beauty of getting orange-pilled is that you're forced to have a basic understanding of the current fiat system. Yep, and how broken it is. I know. Bitcoin, the lens of Bitcoin truly helps you understand how broken the fiat system is. I've heard it said before, and it's true, it's hard to measure the system from within the system. Then Bitcoin gives you a way to step outside that and measure it, and it's... He says, I think those of us who have taken the time to understand Bitcoin aren't stressed. Just bummed that we will be priced out of being a whole coiner. Thanks again. Yeah, we, you know, to that point, I feel like we are in this weird price point where, you know, 80,000 and above, it's kind of too expensive for plebs.
I mean, you can stack against that and you should be. You should always be stacking against it regardless because it's a savings technology, in my opinion. But, you know, you're not going to go buy one, right? You're not going to go. If it was at 20,000, that almost seems reasonable now. So like i think the plebs aren't stacking as hard as they used to be when it was lower priced and it's not yet quite expensive to make wall street just freak out and buy like crazy, we're in this in-between phase thank you train nice to hear from you user 20 20049 says i hope you can see my handle now no not yet not yet the traders love the vol i'm not sure what's going on there i'm not i i would love to know if you go into your fountain profile and you see it they sent 21,000 sats.
So they said, I'm hoping you see my handle now. If not, let it be known. I'm satsquanch. Well, there you go, satsquanch. Thank you for boosting in. He says, the show rocks. I hope you can attend and speak at BitBlockBoom next year, April 15th in Fort Worth, Texas. I just got back from this party and it was a blast. I ate a bit too much barbecue, but I'll recover to eat another day. That's what you should do when you're in Austin. I hope you went to Terry Black's. So I would love to go. Oh no, Fort Worth, Fort Worth. Yeah, I actually I would love to go to Fort Worth. Been to Fort Worth a few times. I liked it quite a bit.
Not quite Austin, but a very easy flight from Seattle. I, for a little while there, I was doing that flight a couple of times a year when I was working at Linux Academy. They were based out of Fort Worth. So I've been there and I like it. Would go again. Barbecue is not quite as good as Austin, but that's all right as far as I know. I would, I hope at some point the show gets noticed by events and would like to invite us out. And I have heard that BitBlockBoom is a good one. I'd love to know your thoughts on it and what made it so good, too.
Because I hear that it's really great, but I don't, I don't know why, you know? I don't hear, I don't, I don't know. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate it. Hybrid sarcasm is here with 10,000 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. To me, success, and this would be like success for the Trump administration's effort here, would look like the U.S. Having another semiconductor option besides Taiwan. Whether manufactured in the U.S. or another country, the economy is currently too fragile with Taiwan being the only real option. Interesting. So diversifying our supplier base would be an indication of success.
I think that's a decent metric and one that would be measurable. Good suggestion, hybrid. Appreciate that. I think there's others, too. I'd love to hear other ideas. But that is a decent one. Wise Hoddle comes in with 4,242 sats. That's not possible. Nothing could do that. Well, Wise Hoddle did it. Shut up, Scotty. He says, high signal week in and out. Keep up the good work. The emotion level is just right for me. Okay, good. I do like to know. If I were to gauge the success of all these crazy moves in the economy by the Trump administration, I would look at the number of reputable, genuinely independent news and entertainment media in business by the end of the term.
How many more independent banks? How many more independent small businesses? How much higher are the birth rates? How many more people are debt free? All of these are, I think, signs of a healthy society. And if that's not the goal, then I don't know what is. That's seriously wise hodl stuff right there he lived up to your username i agree so we should see an increase in independent businesses an increase in independent banks and higher birth rates and less debt those would be things i think we could measure maybe we you know you'd want to measure them four or five years out so it'd be a little bit delay but, I was hoping for metrics that we could probably observe sooner, but I do think those would be really good long-term metrics.
Great ideas. Thank you, Wise. Appreciate it. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks. He says, here's a whipsaw row of ducks boost. Whipsaw! Whipsaw! Woo! Gene Bean's back with a row of ducks. Gene Bean says, keep up the good work. Nice to hear from you, Gene Bean. Thanks for boosting in. Now we've got a boost from OBL918 with 14,567 sats. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with fruit loops. Who is so clueless about Bitcoin that they sell right along with their stocks just to hold the dollar, which is guaranteed to go down in value? I get why the market spooks and sells, but Bitcoin is not some U.S. corporation.
Just goes to show having money is not the same as having whizzed Boosty McBoosterson. OBU are so right. I mean, the dollar is getting weaker right now. So like they're bailing out the dollars and just losing money. Now, the fair interpretation would be to assume they put it into like some sort of money market account or something. And so, you know, they're getting like a four or five on this thing or something. Who knows? But still, it is really something. I mean, I get the Bitcoin goes down. And yes, it can be volatile. The traders love the vol. But, like, the U.S. dollar is guaranteed to go down in Bitcoin over time, over, like, definitely a four-year period goes up.
I think they have not wrapped their head around how much of a special attribute it is for Bitcoin as an asset not to have corporate risk, not to have sovereign risk, not to actually be a stock. I don't think they've wrapped their heads around it like they have with gold. They still look at it as a bit of a tech stock. He says, I love the in-depth coverage of U.S. economics. don't even think about scaling it back. That has been a debate that's brewing on the show. It's something I think about. It's tricky, right? Because not only is the US market driving the Bitcoin price action and also the largest economy looking at seriously adopting Bitcoin and other crypto, but additionally, this tariff stuff is driving the world news, driving the world economy, having worldwide impacts. So...
It's hard to avoid. And what's interesting is when Bitcoin isn't ripping, it's generally because something massive is happening in the macro. And so that tends to get a lot of attention on the show because that macro situation is the next hurdle Bitcoin has to get through. That's where we're at right now. But then Bitcoin gets over that hurdle and then Bitcoin begins to be the center of attention again. And you start seeing mainstream media coverage, you start seeing more written coverage of it it's a fascinating cycle and you know as we see these things happen you see the price often go sideways too clarkian comes in with 5 000 sats you're supposed do you also have to post at least 2x collateral for loans on salt lending do they do margin calls at 70 ltv and liquidation 80 like lent it's essentially the same yeah you want it you want essentially so say you want to take out five thousand dollar loan you'd want to have ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin collateral, or more, ideally.
One thing that SALT does, I've never experienced this, so I can't speak to it, but SALT has a stabilization process, which they talk about this on their website. I don't know. I think I would actually like it. Perhaps this is a use case for a Bitcoin or in stable coins. If the Bitcoin price is dropping massively, like it did right before the COVID lockdowns, and it just dropped, I don't know, what was it, 50, 60% in a day. They have a process where they can swap your Bitcoin into stablecoins and maintain its value before you get liquidated, and then let you buy back into Bitcoin when the price recovers.
They also let you add stablecoins, and now you can connect through ACH. You can add a balance of fiat that it will pull from before it liquidates your Bitcoin. So you could have $10,000 in Bitcoin collateral for your $5,000 loan, and then you could have another $1,000 in fiat if you wanted or whatever that would be pulled from before it liquidated your Bitcoin. So I like that that's how salt works. I've never had to work with any of that aspect of it, but it's an interesting use of stable coins and that kind of stuff. I don't know how they technically do it, So it does give me some pause, but I think if I were actually to experience it, I'd probably appreciate the service. Great question. Thank you for the Boost Clarkian.
Producer Jeff's here with a row of ducks. Aha! I finally got my what's minor up and running. Just in time for it to be too hot to run. Oh, California's already too hot. I got it integrated into Home Assistant, which allows for the next step, power use automation. Thought I'd share. Thanks for the show. Yeah, what producer Jeff has going here is he's got his solar system also hooked up to Home Assistant, much like I do. And so he knows when I've got X amount of solar coming in, I've essentially got more power than I can use. And he can run things like the Bitcoin miners. It's pretty neat.
And it's something I've always wanted to do. My RV has solar, not nearly as much as Jeff, but it has about 1,300 or 1,400 theoretical. But I really get, at best days, 1,000 watts of solar at best. But it does often It didn't mean I have more power than I know to do with, you know, midday by about two o'clock. I'm all charged up. And I've always thought it'd be so neat to then fire up like a Bitcoin miner or kick off an EV charger. So, so cool. You're doing that, PJ. And thanks for the boost. Keep me updated on how it goes. 1776 is here with 2,121 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. Hey, Chris, digging the show.
I got a bug in my ear from your podcast. So I post on Noster. And by the way, you present the latest news on what factors influencing Bitcoin's behavior and adoption. Keep up the great work. Unfortunately, my Nostra link isn't loading at the moment. Sorry about that. I will take a look at that after the show, though. And it's really great to hear from you, 1776. I think that's your first boost. It's great to have you on board. Glad you're listening. I also appreciate when anybody shares about the show. Shout out to Nostra. If you want to hit my Nostra profile, I have a redirect set up at chrislas.com.
And it'll take you to like a primal page. but you can follow me on any Nostra client. And Northern HODL rounds us out with a Spaceballs boost 12,345 sets. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Excellent High Signal episode. Appreciate your efforts into sifting out the best nuggets from all the noise. Catching up from a couple of weeks of boost. Booyah! Booyah indeed! Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. Yeah, it's been a really wild couple of news weeks. And trying to just really focus on the big picture stuff and stuff that I think will impact Bitcoin has really been my motivation going forward.
And I appreciate the boost giving me that feedback. And I really appreciate that it's actually getting noticed too. You know, it's something, sometimes those things go unnoticed. Thank you, everyone. And thank you, everybody who streams sats. We had 45 of you stream sats as you listened to the episode and you stacked collectively 71,667 sats for episode 54 of This Week in Bitcoin. When you combine that with our boosters, we have a grand total this week of 285,864 sets big shout out to Adversary17. Our boost put us over. Thank you, everybody who supports the show with a boost. It is a value for value podcast, and I'm definitely trying to make this value for value model work. This is a great way to support the show with a boost.
You can use Fountain FM or any of the podcast apps that support it. You can find those at podcastapps.com. Fountain makes it really easy. And if you just aren't in a position to boost right now, sharing the show with somebody who's Bitcoin curious, or maybe contributing to the website in some way, we have a Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub or joining our community in Matrix, something to help spread the awareness of the show and help people listening. Anything like that, word of mouth is a great way to help grow a podcast. That kind of stuff matters too.
But these days, a boost is greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank you, everybody. Smoke if you got them. Really? I just, I really have no excuse. I love that clip. All right, that concludes the boost segment. Thank you, everybody. We had 58 unique participants. It's always an interesting number, right? Because we have tens of thousands that can listen. Well, in this case, just around 10,000 or so. And 58 folks make all the difference to keep the show going. I think we could get that number up a tick, too. If you haven't boosted for. Music.
A while and you'd like to, it can make a difference. How about some updates for you? Yeah. Block has launched an open source tool for Bitcoin treasury management. It includes a dashboard for managing corporate Bitcoin holdings and provides a real-time Bitcoin to USD price quote API. So you can have a website and have a public disclosure of your Bitcoin treasury using this tool that's open source released by Block. It'd be something pretty interesting if some companies fold and others maybe started looking at something like that. Also in the updates section, Unchained has launched the Bitcoin Legacy Project.
The initiative seeks to advance the Bitcoin ecosystem through a Bitcoin-native donor-advised fund platform, also known as a DAF. Investments in community hubs, support for education and open source development, and a commitment to long-term sustainability with transparent annual reporting are expected. In the first year, the program will provide support to Bitcoin hubs in Nashville, Austin, and Denver. I'm a pretty big fan of these Bitcoin hubs, so I think that's kind of neat. Support also includes $50,000 to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, $150,000 commitment to the University of Austin, and up to $250,000 in research grants through Bitcoin Scholars Program.
Unchain says that, quote, they will match grants one-to-one made to partner organizations who support Bitcoin core development when made through the Unchain-powered Bitcoin DAF up to one Bitcoin. So they'll match up to one Bitcoin. Metaplanet i've told you they're deploying the micro strategy strategy has now reached the 10th largest public bitcoin holder after acquiring another 319 bitcoin and increasing their total holdings to 4 525 coins and ross albrecht is expected to speak at bitcoin 2025 the conference He writes on X, quote, it's official. I'm excited to announce that I will be making my first public appearance and speech since my release from prison at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
Well, that's pretty neat to see. Be interested to hear what he has to say. I will keep an ear out to see if I can get clips for the show and if there's anything newsworthy that comes out of Bitcoin 2025 conference today. Music. Now, I believe Oklahoma's Bitcoin reserve bill has failed. But I still want to play this clip. This is the senator from Oklahoma. And she notes that she changed her vote on the Bitcoin reserve bill because of the feedback she heard. Up until this afternoon, I have been a no, but I am going to be a yes. And I had a couple of constituents reach out to me.
And because of that, because I'll be honest, I don't like voting yes on things that I don't understand. But my ignorance maybe isn't the reason to vote no. But that doesn't mean that I won't be a no on the floor if it gets to that point. But because constituents reached out and talked to me about it a little bit, I'm going to be yes today. Because constituents reached out and talked to me about it, I'm going to be a yes today. Do you understand that means you can directly make a difference? That's huge. There's still states that have these Bitcoin reserves up. If you're motivated, it might be worth a call. It can make a difference.
Now, before we get to the state of the network, I want to play a clip from Sam Hyde. It's been getting shared around X and Noster this week. And I think it's a good motivator for anybody out there right now who's a little freaked out that Bitcoin isn't $100,000 or more. You don't understand what you own. And if you have any common sense, you should be spending a little bit more time learning about Bitcoin. Maybe go run a node or something like that. You'll realize how much more there is to the rabbit hole. But instead of me saying it, I'm going to let Sam say it. What is there that's more important than your time and your energy, right?
And it's like you could say that like family is more important than money. But what are you doing when you're away from your family? You're trading your time and energy for the stuff that you need to like get by in life. It's a core civilizational technology like fire. And to fuck with the parameters of money, to like mess with the little variables and the ingredients that make it what it is. You're messing with something that's at the base of a really powerful vector. Like little changes down here make the vector swing wildly. Robert Kiyosaki, is that the guy's name?
Who's the guy that wears the glasses that he stole from me? Rich dad, poor dad. And he says, gold is God's money. I don't think that that's hyperbole or a fallacious thing to say or... That you that it's like out of pocket saying I think that using precious metals for money in particular the one precious metal that every civilization settled upon using as money I don't think it's coincidence you said something to me that was very interesting you said Bitcoin isn't something you're gonna want to sell it's something you're gonna want to pass down to your kids yeah which that is basically how I look at gold how I've looked at gold and now I'm a little more Listen, I dove in headfirst, so I'm kind of getting into Bitcoin a lot more.
But that was a very interesting statement. I'm starting to ramble, and I would just urge anybody watching this to do the research on Bitcoin and figure out what it is. Because it's not going anywhere, and it's going to be the unit of account for the future. If it's not going to change your life materially it's going to change the lives of your children materially put aside the negativity and the anxiety that comes with thinking about money and the surface level ponzi scheme get rich quick stuff that that is associated with cryptocurrency and start researching bitcoin and what it is because there's there's.
Music. Let's take a look at the state of the network. As I wrap up, it is block height 892,722. The price of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars is 84,340. Kind of been hanging out around here. Sats per U.S. dollar is 1,186. Although over the last seven days, we're actually up 2.4%. Still down 22.7 from our all-time high on January 19th, 2025, which was 109,160. However, fee rate's pretty low. Two sats per v-bike, great time to open up a lightning channel. And there, I think these are down a bit. 21,368 reachable nodes. I think that's down. Oh, I think the TWIB crew out there needs to go do a lift, get a few more nodes online.
The hash rate is crazy. The power of the network is incredible. I mean, overall, the hash rate for 90 days, 822 exahash. It's remarkable. So it's, yeah, the Bitcoin network is doing very well. It is very strong. We're just sniffing at block height 900,000. I mean, it's going to be a bit, but like, it's now in the far distance. You know when you're on your road trip and the city you're going to finally shows up on the sign? I feel like that's where Blockhite 900,000 is right now. Thank you so much for tuning in. Links to what I talked about this week are at ThisWeekInBitcoin.show, including things I didn't manage to make into the show.
Now, I hope I got you something that was high signal, didn't get too distracted by emotions. Let me know how I did there. That is always the goal, and I appreciate a boost telling me how I did. And I'd also like it if you have anything that you wished you saw or heard on the show that didn't make it in. Boost that in as well, and I'll try to incorporate it into future episodes. Now, when we get out of here, I'm going to leave you with a value for value track. This is a new one. I believe she's from Austin. Music.
But here's the future, folks. Seriously, right now, the World Trade Organization. Lowers their economic growth forecast for this year, for next year. Some of these numbers are huge, huge moves. Rebecca Patterson, you're expert at this. I mean, this is the future that we're seeing right now this morning. Yeah, you know, I've been trying to find when is the last time we saw a dollar bond and stock sell off in tandem that lasted for more than a few days. 1977, 78. So we haven't seen what we're living through right now in a very, very long time. We'll be back.
Music. Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 54. My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Well, that's the word of the week seems to be uncertainty, $70 followed by its good buddy, the always scary volatility. We're going to get into that, how it impacts Bitcoin potentially positively. But first, I think we should start with something a little more core to Bitcoin, something that impacts every Bitcoin user. And anybody that's been around Bitcoin for a while, this probably has been on their mind once or twice, and perhaps even this week. It's mining centralization.
And it was brought to the forefront of conversation by an in-depth analysis of Bitcoin mining centralization done by b10c.me. I'll have a link to their really good post in the show notes. The high-level takeaway is in the current Bitcoin mining landscape, proxy pools like Antpool and their friends, which are about six mining pools, produce more than 95% of the block templates. And this is looking at data for early 2025. Six mining pools mine more than 95% of all the Bitcoin blocks. So you've got Foundry and Amp Pool. They're the biggest. And then they've got their friends, some of which are interestingly organized.
And consistently, they're controlling about 60% to 70% of the hash rate. And one of the things that B10C did is they introduced a mining centralization index, which quantifies centralization by summing up the hash rate of the top mining pools. It's a pretty good looking chart, but it's a pretty serious rate. like Foundry alone. Leads with 30% of the hash rate, just foundry. And mining pools can disguise their affiliation. Antpool and its proxies, they might hash through smaller pools, giving sort of a misleading interpretation of decentralization. But when you take Antpool and all of these sort of proxies that are hashing for Antpool, well, then it goes up from, oh, look at this nice decentralized chart to, well, actually 40% of the pie through 2023 and 2024 was Antpool.
And in their analysis here, they discover that 2017 was really the sweet spot for decentralized mining, and it's only really been getting more centralized. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but the ocean pool has continually articulated their concerns. And I would say Luke Dasher has been at the forefront of that. And this clip gets into what he's worried about. I would say for Bitcoin to be a success, there has to be a decentralized system that provides the guarantees that are expected of Bitcoin. It's like people assume there will only ever be 21 million bitcoins but if the bitcoin network becomes centralized that guarantee is out the door and there's nobody to enforce it.
We don't have a centralized entity enforcing Google, so it's really either the Bitcoin users enforce it or there is no enforcement and the miners can just do whatever they want. The white paper goes in to talk about the potential for a 51% attack if it were to be centralized. What people often don't realize is you don't need 51% of the network cash rate to do a 51% attack. You can do it with 30%, even 20%. There's just a possibility that you will fail when you try to do it, but it's possible to succeed as well. Gotcha. 51% just happens to be the point where you're guaranteed to succeed at any time you want to do a tap.
Now, this is a concern people have. And what he's saying is you don't actually need 51% of the hash rate. And I completely agree. We need to diversify mining. There needs to be... It's nice to see like Tether. Tether announced that they're going to put their mining hash rate into Ocean. I mean, these things are nice to see. But over the years, I've kind of learned not to worry a great deal about this. I mean, I do keep an eye on it, but I have a couple of contrarian views. One, I don't think the current crop top of mining companies, I don't think half of them are going to be around in 10 years.
I mean, big money is about to get into this. Things are going to consolidate and change. New entrances are going to come in with BlackRock money behind them. So these things tend to ebb and flow. Although, you know, the longer these top dogs remain, the more entrenched they get, the more expertise they accumulate. So they're not to be totally shrugged off. But the other reason, the other kind of contrarian view I don't quite worry too much is even if they did have, say, more than 50% of the network cash rate, I still don't understand what the economic incentives would be for them to attack the network.
You know, if a mining operation did something like a 51% style attack. The price of Bitcoin would crash immediately. And so what would really be the advantage? You'd end up with a worthless currency. It's something that Safe pointed out, the author of The Bitcoin Standard, when he was interviewed by Lex Friedman. And also, you know, he points out the block size war taught us some lessons here too. Learn about the 2017 block size war to understand why miners don't control Bitcoin. I discussed this briefly in my Bitcoin Standard, but there's a recent book that discusses this in detail called The Block Size War by Jonathan Beer.
It's a great description of, in 2017, essentially the miners thought that they could control Bitcoin. There was one mining company that produced the majority of the machines that were on the network. And their allies had a control of the machines that were out there. And they controlled the majority of the hashrate. And they thought that they could change Bitcoin's supply, not supply, sorry, they could change Bitcoin's block size, which is a tiny little detail technical parameter it's not even all that big of a deal for the economics of it but they thought that they could pass this change they could force this change on the network and the members of the network rejected it and they weren't able to do it so the nodes are what is sovereign the nodes are what determine the rules of the game the miners.
Are a service provider. The miners invest capital upfront. You know, they buy the machines, they buy the electricity, they buy the storage, they buy the locations, they pay the rent. And they invest all of that money based on the idea that if they behave according to what the nodes want, the nodes will reward them with Bitcoin. So the miners are in no position to dictate terms for anyone. You know, they've put up their capital upfront and they will only recoup it if they do what the nodes want. So therefore, what really matters is the decentralization of the nodes. So you want to have as many nodes as possible.
You want to have a system where there's a large number of nodes. I don't always agree with all of that take. I don't know, maybe his grasp on some of the more esoteric technical aspects of Bitcoin, like his comment there about the block size. But I do agree with the latter half and high-level take that he had there, that these miners have invested capital up front to buy equipment. They need to recoup those costs. they have staff to pay. So it just doesn't seem likely that they would want to destroy the value of Bitcoin. But I'd like to know what you think. Are you concerned about mining centralization?
Is it something the show should focus more on? Is it something you legitimately are concerned about when you look at what risks actually to face Bitcoin? I'm curious if this is actually something the audience is dialed in on. Boost in. Let me know. Music. The last three weeks have been nothing but historical for this show. It started with the tariffs. The tariffs were announced while I was recording the show. The following episode, the next week, the tariffs were paused during the show. And this week, Jay Powell is holding a press conference during the show. And there's just a lot of moving pieces.
Now, as Bitcoiners, this is kind of every other day, right? This is a typical Wednesday for us. But for traditional market, quote unquote, investors, they are losing it. I mean, it has really been something to watch. how well Bitcoin has held up while the market pukes and trades like an altcoin, and then seeing these supposed investors who just can't seem to stomach any volatility at all. What do you make of just some of the action that we're seeing in the markets and how it's impacting the bond market itself, the bond market, something the president seems to be reacting to, and these bond traders, they don't seem to like all this tariff uncertainty.
So last week, they paused the tariffs for 90 days, dropped everything down to 10% except for China, and then the White House came out, It's, oh, no, no, it's totally fine. And then when Trump was asked, he said, oh, yeah, well, it's because the bond market looked queasy. The bond market was getting queasy. So they're watching the bond market. Yeah, so the tariff uncertainty is driving a lot of volatility in the long end of the Treasury curve. So people are paying attention to the 10-year and to the 20-year, and there's been incredible volatility in that space in just the last month.
I mean, even the 20-year has had a total return change of over 7.5% in one month alone. So that worries investors and it concerns people. There's a lot of volatility in the market reflected of this uncertainty where you don't see as much volatility and you do see stability and I think continues to be a safe haven for investors is in the shorter end of the curve where rates have been more stable. OK, let's get into what this crap means. Oh, they're so uncertain. What's going on? Well, there is legitimate. I mean, I am being I am being very, I guess, harsh towards these investors because there are some legitimate curveballs being thrown at them that some of them just don't see coming.
Well, this is the third round of restrictions from the U.S. government on NVIDIA in terms of selling these AI chips into China. The first came in 2022 and then in 2023. There was talk in the late days of the Biden administration that perhaps they would stop NVIDIA from selling this very chip, the H20, into China because many Chinese companies are using this to be able to build their models. Notably, DeepSeek used the H20 to be able to come out with a model that kind of stunned the world a while back. The Trump administration is going ahead. They're saying that they cannot sell this chip for the indefinite future. That's having a direct effect on NVIDIA.
They're taking a write down of $5.5 billion in this quarter. An analyst estimate that it could cost them $12 to $14 billion overall. So it's a setback for NVIDIA. And perhaps just as important, it's going to motivate Chinese companies to move even more quickly in developing alternatives for these AI chips. You know, we didn't see the tariffs against AI chips work last time, right? When we restricted them to the H20s, they created DeepSeek using, you know, every trick in the book they could to get it as efficient as possible. So when we manipulate the market like this, it doesn't actually seem to work out in our favor long-term, yet we keep trying over and over again.
So I understand how it is sort of a changing situation, but that's the landscape here. And I'm going to play Mr. Lunatat to himself, the Mike Novogratz Galaxy CEO. I want to play through this clip. I normally wouldn't play this, but I think we could break this down in real time and kind of understand the stupid mindset that these supposed investors have and why we're not seeing Bitcoin respond as a safe haven like we are gold recently. And perhaps why we will see Bitcoin respond as gold eventually. Take a look at Bitcoin trading right now. $84,000 up from about 76. It had sort of gone below for a while.
Joining us right now in an exclusive interview is Galaxy founder and CEO Mike Novogratz. We've all been trying to figure out exactly what's really going on here, Mike. You know, Bitcoin has moved. We also have folks seemingly maybe getting out of cash and bonds and going into gold. Tell us what you think is really happening. Listen, you know, this tariff thing came out of nowhere for a lot of people, and it has provided a really big shock to the global economy. I just, okay, we're going to start here. This has been a sentiment that we hear, oh, this tariff thing, it came out of nowhere.
Some of it, you know, like, oh, now they're going to do pharmaceuticals, you know, oh, the H20 chips. But he's literally been talking about it since before he was the Republican nominee. I went back and looked, and he was interviewed by Bloomberg right around the debates. He might have just gotten the nomination when he started publicly talking about tariffs. And when you hear this kind of talk, what it makes me think is that these investors are not actually dialed into what's going on. You know, they're looking at maybe their Bloomberg terminal at best, but they're not dialed into the real world situation.
And Bitcoiners over time, I think because they're looking for signal, have dialed into some of these indicators and they have started to pay attention to some of these things. So for this show, for example, we've been talking about the shock this is going to create in the market since November. And a few weeks ago, I exclaimed how I was shocked that these idiot investors that are supposedly these geniuses haven't caught on to what's going on and then all of a sudden panicked when the actual Liberation Day or whatever it was called landed. Who could have seen this coming? Well, just about every Bitcoiner didn't anybody listening to this show.
So I don't buy the premise that this was some big shock. I just don't buy that premise. This tariff thing came out of nowhere for a lot of people and it has provided a really big shot to the global economy right and that's i suppose it has that is true it should not have the scale of them perhaps but the fact that we're doing these tariffs has been i mean you could argue he even ran on it i am not i'm not arguing for against them in fact the more i think about it just seems like more economic manipulation and every time the federal government gets their hand in the market it seems to skew things for the worse and i'd like to i'd like to hear somebody out there convince me how tariffs aren't market manipulation but you know like it wasn't a shock we all knew it was coming of happening at the same time where we're we're really re reimagining what our security apparatus is going to be right so you had 80 years really post-war war ii of a similar security apparatus for the world and an economic structure and does that security apparatus, is that like a euphemism for saying that the United States way overspends on its military budget and was essentially the world police?
You know, we're about to pass our first trillion dollar defense budget. Trillion dollars just for defense. I mean, where do we stop? At what point is it too much money? At what point do we stop putting all of this on the credit card just because we want to be the world police. I don't like going this direction, but the reality is there is sort of an economic unsustainability to it. I don't know how you fix it, But there is talking about it like it has been this golden era is false. We are thirty seven trillion dollars in debt now. Security apparatus for the world and an economic structure.
And then in 89, you really accelerated that with globalism, right, with the global revolution. And Trump saying, wait a minute, I want to change that. And so that uncertainty is showing up in all markets. Right. And, you know, the broad U.S. stock market is roughly down 10 percent on the year. that doesn't seem near enough dislocation when you put it in context that we're looking at this titanic shift in what we're doing. And so I think people are in a risk-off mindset. Bitcoin broadly does well with these kind of macro conditions unless there's this kind of risk-off. What I mean by that is there's always two vectors in Bitcoin.
One is the macro story, which you're seeing play out in gold, right? Which is the uncertainty, get myself out of the dollar, get myself into something safe. But the other is the adoption story. And because we're such a young asset, the adoption story needs more calm. It just does. And so when there's this kind of chaos, the new buyers disappear. And that's what we've broadly seen. We've seen very few new buyers. I do kind of agree with that last bit of the analysis. When things get really. New buyers do seem to dry up. We were seeing that with ETFs. First week of April, heavy sell-offs, and now things are starting to actually stabilize. In fact, people are buying more of the Bitcoin ETF.
But when things were really kind of rocky and everything was just taking off with the tariffs, people stopped buying. And so you see people sell, they get short, they buy back. It's starting to trade better in the last few weeks relative to stocks. But broadly, Bitcoin has been the mag-8 and not gold. I don't think that's a permanent condition. And listen, gold is telling you everything you need to know. Right. I used to say this all the time. Bitcoin and gold are report cards on financial stewardship. Right. If you're the secretary of treasury of the U.S.
Or any country, your report card really is what's gold? What's the yield curve telling you? And gold is something that's not great. Who is the buyer of gold right now? And what money is buying gold? You know, foreign central banks, listen, you're going to see, this is a prediction. I don't know if it's true. I know we're going to have a BRICS currency at one point in the next 24 months. I bet you part of it's backed by gold, the digital version. You're seeing gold, the digital version. I don't think he means Bitcoin. Does he mean like some sort of like ERC-20 token pegged to gold?
What is he talking about? It's currency at one point in the next 24 months. I bet you part of it's backed by gold, the digital version. You're seeing foreign central banks buy gold. Listen, when I first got into the markets in the late 80s, I was always fascinated with the fact that in developed markets like the US or Japan, there was no real correlation between the shape of the yield curve and fiscal policy, right? You could spend a lot, you could run big budget deficits, and the yield curve didn't, care. But if you're an emerging market or developing market, it cared a lot. And so this shift between we felt the Minsky moment, when does people start caring?
The way the U.S. market is behaving in a risk off is exactly opposite of what we've seen for 30 years. Right. It's interest rates higher in the dollar weaker. That means we're starting to behave more like an emerging market than a developed market. This is actually an important point and something that I think we should talk about a little bit more as it relates to Bitcoin in a moment. We are seeing an interesting change where the dollar is getting weaker and the yield is going higher. So debt's getting more expensive. The dollar is buying less. And it's all happening pretty quickly for bonds and dollar in their timeframes.
I'm not saying we've gotten there yet. It's the early stages. And that should get us all nervous. I'm sure that's got Secretary Bessett nervous. I'm sure it's got, you know, people around the White House who understand this nervous. Because, Mike, some people tried to dismiss these moves last week and say, look, we don't want to make too much of a two or three day thing. Look, the bond market's already calmed down. So you do think that what was happening was maybe the beginning of a bigger shift that D.C. needs to pay attention to? I think, yeah. I was just going to say, kind of leading from that.
The parachute out is, well, they might be working on a whole new kind of global financial architecture. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that, too. Yeah, listen, the architecture we had brought peace and prosperity to the world in over 80 years. Unless you're in the Middle East or Africa, right? More so than we ever saw. And so globalization was great for the world. It was great for wealthy people in the West. It was great for Vietnamese workers. It was really not great for the factory worker in the U.S. and in Europe. This is the part that really pissed me off.
Now, you heard Novogratz earlier say he got his start in the late 80s. Then you also heard him say globalization really took off in 89. Now, I'm not being ages. I'm just speaking to my observation. But there's a lot of boomer investors that got really, really lucky. They were riding the post-gold peg removal and globalization boom. And getting goods out of China really was, like, think about this. From the late 80s till the early aughts, cheap China goods was disinflationary. So we could have low rates. We could print money. We had the dot-com boom.
These guys were so lucky. I mean, I say no millennial, what Novogratz just said would never come out of the mouth of any millennial or younger generation. This is only something an old generation X or boomer would say, because they were born during a money printing golden golden era and a globalization golden era that benefited people closer to the money spigot. Now, then he just casually said, oh, but the factory worker, which is a euphemism for the entire middle class, for the people of the country. That's what the euphemism for is for the people. And he's just the factory workers.
But otherwise, it's been great. So, you know, other than the other 290 million people in America alone, other than those 290 million, it's been great. It's been the best in the world. Why would we want to change it? than we ever saw. And so I'm sorry, the best system we ever saw. Why would you change it? It's the best system we ever saw. I guess Mike Novogratz has never gone on a road trip through this country because you get 15, 20 minutes outside a city and you start seeing absolute devastation. The architecture we had brought peace and prosperity to the world in over 80 years, more so than we ever saw.
And so globalization was great for the world. It was great for wealthy people in the West. It was great for Vietnamese workers. It was really not great for the factory worker in the US and in Europe. And we're trying to pivot that. It's a very noble, like, you know, it's funny, my politics kind of align. I would have thought if I was in charge, I'd want to bring down the deficit and I'd want to work on inequality. And this is what the goals here are. I just think you can't do that by wishing we didn't have this kind of trade system, wishing we didn't have 30 years of supply chains built out.
Unfortunately, I do agree with him here. I think the United States of America made its bed. I'll get into why later, specifically. But I think the decision was cast by Nixon. And so we have been on a trajectory for so long that to unravel it means to essentially unravel and restart the entire economy. I hate to agree with Novogratz, but I do tend to agree here. You can't do that by wishing we didn't have this kind of trade system, wishing we didn't have 30 years of supply chains built out. You know, people make decisions if you're a Colombian coffee farmer or an American furniture importer, a retail furniture person based on some medium term horizon.
And we're literally ripping up that horizon overnight. Are we stuck, Mike? I mean, do you think the market is basically saying to the administration, OK, you want to try this goal? The electorate has kind of given you this mandate to some extent. You went to put it into practice and it just screamed no. And is that because the fiscal deficit is too big? Like, if they had been able to really make a meaningful change on that front, would it all have worked? Or do you think this is just the global market saying this can never work? This is a deeper question than it sounds like.
Essentially, she's saying, is it the administration versus the markets? And the markets are just simply saying, we ain't going to go with this. We're not going to go along with this. This ain't working. And the administration, which they had been saying, well, we're not watching the markets. They're not quite saying that as much now. So it's a deeper question than it sounds like on the surface. I think the global markets are saying you're going too fast and this strategy is not going to work. That's what I think the markets are saying. Listen, just the increase in our interest rates since this thing started is a higher annual cost than all the Doge savings.
Right. You just think we have thirty five trillion in debt and, you know, you go 50 basis points or 30 basis points. Even that's that's one hundred hundred fifty billion dollars. You know, it's it's really hard. that is that is a damning point, That is a very damning point. And it puts the doge cuts into perspective, which it sounds like there's been some talk about the total impact of those cuts even being reduced quite a bit. That's not going to be the third leg of a stool that the administration has been articulating. You know, it's been tariffs, tax cuts, and deregulation and spending cuts.
Well, $150 billion or so, it's dropping the bucket, especially when you look at the counter things that are happening. So deregulation, it's hard to really quantify. Now, Besant says, oh, you'll see that by November. Well, how do we even quantify that? So I think Novogratz makes an interesting point. We'll wrap it up here. I think the markets are saying, listen, just the increase in our interest rates since this thing started is a higher annual cost than all the Doge savings, right? You just think we have $35 trillion in debt and, you know, you go 50 basis points or 30 basis points even, that's $100, $150 billion. dollars.
You know, it's it's really hard to take this deficit down and doing it at the time when you're going to put growth at risk and shift the entire tax code. Right. Tariffs pre this tariff move accounted for about two percent of taxes where income taxes and payroll taxes are 85 percent. And so we're going to cut taxes here and raise them here. The numbers don't add up. And that kind of uncertainty I think has just scared markets. Yeah, I do agree. The numbers, that's what I've been saying. It doesn't really work out. There has to be another piece to this. I still feel that these supposed investors are nothing but investors.
Whatever's happening with tariffs and taxes and world trade, does that fundamentally alter what a company is capable of doing or the products they're working on? It might alter their profits. It just feels like these people that are freaking out right now and selling their Bitcoin ETFs and selling all of their stocks, they probably shouldn't own stocks in the first place. There's actually a famous quote by Warren Buffett on this. Some people should not own stocks at all because they just get too upset with price fluctuations. If you're going to do dumb things because your stock goes down, you shouldn't own a stock at all. I think this probably applies to Bitcoin too, right?
Maybe you shouldn't, if you're going to do dumb things when Bitcoin goes down, maybe you shouldn't own Bitcoin at all. What are dumb things? Selling a stock as it goes down? Yeah, selling a stock as it goes down. I mean, if you buy your house at $20,000 and somebody comes along the next day and says, I'll pay you 15, you don't sell it because the quote's 15. Look at the house or whatever it may be. Some people are not actually emotionally or psychologically fit to own stocks, but I think there are more of them would be if you get educated on what you're really buying, which is part of a business.
And the longer you hold stocks, the less risky they become. Whereas the longer the maturity of a bond, the more risky it becomes. The longer you hold Bitcoin, the less risky it becomes, right? If you bought Bitcoin years ago at 10,000 or 40,000, 84 is looking pretty good. I think this is all part of a broader strategy. I'm not saying there's a master plan in place. I'm saying something else has to click in. There has to be another component because if the United States wants to remain the reserve currency of the world, which they have recently articulated, they do, then there's always going to be trade deficits.
And Lynn Alden, I'll put a link to the full podcast in the show notes, did a great job of explaining this recently. And what I'm not the first to argue, but I've written this in various articles and in my book is the association between having the global reserve currency and structural trade deficits, at least as the way it's currently structured. I think, too, while you listen to this, consider those out there that have advocated that Bitcoin should be the reserve currency for the United States. Get rid of the Federal Reserve, go back to hard money, maybe peg the dollar to Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the reserve currency. So when you hear Lynn explain how the reserve currency works for the United States, it's and how it's related to our deficit, trade deficit. Imagine the United States ever trying to get rid of this.
And the mechanism for that is that, to my definition, if you're the world reserve currency, most countries around the world are using your currency in some way. They're holding that currency or instruments for that currency as reserve assets. They're often using it as a cross-border funding currency. They're using it as the main trading pair for other currencies. And they're denominating a lot of international contracts in that currency. So there's a lot of need for that currency. There's a kind of insatiable demand for it. And particularly those funding, like the debts, all represent inflexible demand for that currency.
So some of that usage is voluntary, and other uses of that is involuntary. Unless you want to default, you need to be able to access that currency. So what that means is that compared to other currencies in the world, there's an extra layer of demand for the dollar. Normally, you hold the currency of a country because you want to interact with that economy in some way. Whereas the dollar, countries that have maybe even minimal trade with the US are not looking for that purpose, will hold a lot of dollar assets anyway, just because they need it for all these kind of global requirements.
And what that means is that unlike many currencies that will trade on interest rate differentials, trade imbalances, things like that, the dollar will trade on those things, but it has this extra structural bid to it. And what that means is that especially for lower margin things, it's generally less economical to produce them in the US, even compared to other developed countries. So it's not just compared to developing ones, even compared to many of our developed peers, it's just harder to manufacture in the US. And our import power is very significant. And so basically, that's the mechanism that kind of forces open our trade deficit.
And so every year, we're pouring dollars out into the world so that they can use it as the global reserve currency. And basically, The imbalance there is that there are some parties that are very boosted by that arrangement. So Washington, D.C. can sanction anyone in the world practically. If you work in Wall Street, you're loving the situation. Tech and healthcare are kind of high margin things that are not really heavily impacted by that. Whereas if you work in industry or in other kind of like heavier areas, particularly the Rust Belt areas, that's part of why it rusted, you're on the wrong side of that.
And so over time, there's been kind of shifting economic realities as well as shifting politics around that kind of accumulating imbalance. I think a key thing that she says here is that there's just a structural system in place when you're the reserve currency. And there's going to be trade deficits because of that. You're putting dollars out into the world. And as a result, it's almost always going to be more economically viable to manufacture outside the United States. So when we went off the gold standard, when we came up with the deal with OPEC and others to do international trade in dollars, when we started that process, we've begun something that has only been building now for over 40 years.
And structurally it doesn't make as much sense to manufacture everything here in the united states not even getting into the talent pool and all of that and you know the potential robotics just getting into just structurally the way the reserve currency functions and you know there there has been talk of well maybe we're going to have a new breton woods and we're going to have a new reserve currency i don't think that's on the table besant has laughed at that question and also seems to have a plan in place, although he is the world's bond salesman, so I don't know, but he seems to think they have plenty of room still and he's not worried about the bond market or the reserve status of the dollar one bit.
Do you have a sense of who is dumping U.S. assets? Who's been dumping U.S. treasuries? I don't think there's a dumping. And I think we saw in the tick data either today or Friday that actually foreign ownerships picked up. We had three big auctions last week. And on the longer end auction, 10-year, 30-year, we saw increased foreign competition. So I actually think this is one of those occasional VAR shocks that you get in the trading community. I think a lot of people got very leveraged, maybe out over their skis. And then you combine that with some real money selling and you get these moves.
So you don't think it's sovereigns? Potentially it's hedge funds unwinding? I have no evidence that it's sovereigns. Look, Anne-Marie, not you, but the nature of journalism is to create a headline that 10 days ago, when 10-year yields hit 390, said, well. Secretary Besson got what he wanted. He got 10-year yields down, but it's the wrong reason. Now, I forget what they hit on Friday, maybe 440-something. We saw a 50 basis move last week in 10-year yield. at the same time that the dollar was weakening nearly 3%. How do you simultaneously look at that situation? It feels like investors are dumping U.S. assets.
Well, look, I've learned that not to look at what happens over a week. I, for better or worse, have lived through a lot of these things. And in trading, in one's personal trading history, it's the scar tissue that sticks with you the most. I can tell you exactly where I was standing in 1998 when the long-term capital, the debacle happened. That had nothing to do with anything other than a bunch of geniuses up in Greenwich who had too much leverage. So you're not concerned at this moment about the U.S. dollar or the U.S. Treasury losing safe haven asset?
No. We're still a global reserve currency. We are still a global reserve currency. We have a strong dollar policy. The dollar can go up and down. If you go and look back at President Trump's first term, I don't remember the exact number, but the dollar in 2017 went down, I can't remember, 7, 8, 9 percent. And then once the tax bill was done, took off, took off for the remainder of his term. We have a strong dollar policy and we take a long term look at the dollar value. And then he talks about how it will look in the second half of President Trump's previous term, the dollar just took off.
So the decline we're seeing now, they may view as temporary if they have some sort of strategy. He does get into some of the ways they could boost the dollar strength, basically games. Bitcoin doesn't tend to shine when the dollar rips. So if they do have some sort of plan for the dollar to rip later on, it'll be interesting to see how that impacts Bitcoin. There was one other comment he made there before we get off of Besant for the day that I thought was noteworthy. They talk about J-Pow and if the Fed wants to step in and help. And Besant reveals that they have breakfast together every week.
Have you spoken to the Fed at all about contingency plans, though, if financial stability risks flare up? Chair Powell and I have breakfast every week, and we discuss a wide range of things. And, you know, our staffs are always in contact. We have a markets room. They have a markets room. But, you know, and specifically, did we discuss some kind of a break the glass? I think we're a long way from that. So when was the last time you guys spoke? You had breakfast last week? We had breakfast last week, and it was an away game. I was over at the Fed. And no concern so far from the Fed chair on what he saw in the treasury market.
I think we would have heard from the Fed chair. I think we heard from Governor Collins of Boston on Friday. We heard from Governor Weller today on his thoughts on what tariffs mean. So it seems like business as usual. Totally independent, though. Totally independent. Has breakfast every week. I wonder which A-PAL serves for breakfast when you come to visit. Something a grandma would serve? I don't know. What do you think? Who's going to tell me you think J-Powell would serve for breakfast? So speaking of Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, he spoke today, and he seems also to be fairly confident in the state of the economy.
Now, I think this is important because Bitcoin is sort of waiting this out right now to try to figure out where this is going. So at the Fed, we are always focused on the dual mandate goals that Congress has given us, maximum employment, and stable prices. Despite heightened uncertainty and downside risks, the U.S. economy is still in a solid position. The labor market is at or near maximum employment. Inflation has come down a great deal, but is still running a bit above our 2% objective. When JPOW speaks, Bitcoin reacts in real time. So you can suss out if the market likes what he's saying or not just by watching the price of Bitcoin.
But he didn't have much new to add there. But he did have something new to add with his thoughts on crypto. During a Q&A later, he was asked about his thoughts on stablecoins and crypto. This is probably noteworthy because it's the Federal Chairman of the Federal Reserve talking about crypto and in a fairly positive way. Pretty big tone shift from a couple of years ago. You know, so we went through a wave of failures and fraud and things like that were the headlines for a couple of years. I think what you see now is, and during that period, by the way, we were trying to work, we worked with Congress to try to get a framework, a legal framework for stable coins, which would have been a nice place to start.
We were not successful. I think that the climate is changing and you're moving into sort of more mainstreaming of that whole sector. So Congress is, again, looking at both the Senate and the House are looking at a framework, a legal framework for stable coins. You know, depending on what's in it, that's a good idea. We need that. There isn't one now. And stable coins are a product that a digital product that could actually have fairly wide appeal and should contain consumer protections of the typical sorts and transparency. And that's what the Senate and the House are working on.
So that's a positive thing. I also think some of the you know, we took a pretty conservative and other other bank regulators took an even more conservative perspective on on on the guidance and rules we imposed on banks. I think there'll be some loosening of that, and I think we'll try to do it in a way that preserves safety and soundness, but that, you know, permits and fosters appropriate innovation, but that does so in a way that, again, doesn't put consumers at risk in ways they don't understand or make banks less safe and sound. Well, I guess it's safe to assume the Federal Reserve won't be lobbying against stablecoin legislation, and it sounds like...
They're also on board with lessening regulations for banks getting involved with crypto. Should be interesting, for better or for worse, I suppose. I just, I don't think it's like, nothing there he said was absolutely blow away, other than it was so positive, and he's the chair of the Federal Reserve. And gold's been really having a runaway, which you'll hear or read anywhere, that that's a sign that something is really wrong structurally and the market is preparing for the worst case scenario. Correct. Where are we going here? And how are you thinking about Bitcoin relative to gold in this particular moment?
Yeah, I think that's what everyone's really talking about right now. Bitcoin is down about 10% to start the year. Gold's up 20%. But if you look out over one year, they're both up about 35%. So it's pretty interesting that there's been this divergence. But if you go back and you take a look, you can actually see that gold usually leads these rallies. and nobody really knows why that happens. My kind of guess would be that a lot of the central banks and institutional investors, they're either not approved to buy Bitcoin or they're not used to running to Bitcoin in these moments of kind of geopolitical uncertainty.
What we do see though is when gold runs about a hundred days later or so, Bitcoin not only catches up, it usually runs much harder. And so you get that kind of higher volatility. That's the key point is there's usually about a hundred day lag and then Bitcoin starts to run. It's like, oh, I don't know. Nobody knows why people run the gold. Really? It's called a safe haven right so when you have times of uncertainty you don't go for the thing that's new and maybe risky in your central banker opinion you go for the thing you've known for thousands of years is considered a store of value i mean it's a totally logical play we're not there yet with bitcoin and bitcoin doesn't have the market size even we don't have the liquidity depth like we couldn't fill that role right now you couldn't do it now at a smaller scale for like us you know the plebs we're already there right but at like the nation state level no it's not deep enough it's not deep enough of course not now will it get there yes yes of course it will, it's everything but but better that gold is for this type of thing but we're not there yet and it may be let's be honest maybe a generational thing for some people you know some of these central bankers have been doing this for 20 30 40 years some of them are getting up there, you think they're going to roll the dice at this point in their career.
Music. Thank you, everybody, that supports the show by doing what you do. You can buy Sats on River with our link in the show notes. Hooks you up. It's a great way to stack Sats here in the U.S., and they have that awesome 3.8% in-sats savings for your fiat. Great for smash buys. Now, if you're all about the self-custody, the Bitcoin Well is an automatic self-custody platform for the U.S. and Canada. Link to that in the show notes. If you've got some Sats on Lightning you're ready to spend, maybe you want to pick up some gift cards the bitcoin company a bitcoin only unlike the others bitcoin only hundreds of gift cards and you get sats back when you use my link in the show notes if you're ready to pay bills and stack sats maybe when you do a little bit of purchases here and there buy some gas with a debit card the fold card is awesome community favorite out there i've been using it now for almost a year link to that in the show notes support the show and last but not least if you need to get access to your bitcoin value but you don't want to sell it salt lending is what I use.
They have a great system over there. Check those links out and support the show in the show notes. Music. And we did get some boost into the show this week, and we're going to start with a truly baller boost from Adversary17. Music. All right. You're doing a good job. And Adversary17 writes, Great episode, Mr. Fisher. So much great information and very high density. Thank you again for all you two. Well, thank you, adversaries. I really appreciate that. It's been a wild three weeks of shows just adapting and tucking and rolling. So that means a lot. Appreciate that baller boost. It's been a minute, too, since we had a big baller boost.
You did some heavy lifting. Appreciate it very much. Thank you for the boost. A-Train is here with 33,333 sats. You made me want to be a better man. He says, great show. Thanks for the thought-provoking content. One thing that kept going through my mind, especially after the Redaglio clip, is that we are living through an unprecedented time, a once-in-a-lifetime. His book, Principles for Dealing with a Change of World Order, spells this cycle out well, which begs the question, Do any of these talking heads really know how to predict this stuff? I don't think any of their charts will work through this.
Part of the beauty of getting orange-pilled is that you're forced to have a basic understanding of the current fiat system. Yep, and how broken it is. I know. Bitcoin, the lens of Bitcoin truly helps you understand how broken the fiat system is. I've heard it said before, and it's true, it's hard to measure the system from within the system. Then Bitcoin gives you a way to step outside that and measure it, and it's... He says, I think those of us who have taken the time to understand Bitcoin aren't stressed. Just bummed that we will be priced out of being a whole coiner. Thanks again. Yeah, we, you know, to that point, I feel like we are in this weird price point where, you know, 80,000 and above, it's kind of too expensive for plebs.
I mean, you can stack against that and you should be. You should always be stacking against it regardless because it's a savings technology, in my opinion. But, you know, you're not going to go buy one, right? You're not going to go. If it was at 20,000, that almost seems reasonable now. So like i think the plebs aren't stacking as hard as they used to be when it was lower priced and it's not yet quite expensive to make wall street just freak out and buy like crazy, we're in this in-between phase thank you train nice to hear from you user 20 20049 says i hope you can see my handle now no not yet not yet the traders love the vol i'm not sure what's going on there i'm not i i would love to know if you go into your fountain profile and you see it they sent 21,000 sats.
So they said, I'm hoping you see my handle now. If not, let it be known. I'm satsquanch. Well, there you go, satsquanch. Thank you for boosting in. He says, the show rocks. I hope you can attend and speak at BitBlockBoom next year, April 15th in Fort Worth, Texas. I just got back from this party and it was a blast. I ate a bit too much barbecue, but I'll recover to eat another day. That's what you should do when you're in Austin. I hope you went to Terry Black's. So I would love to go. Oh no, Fort Worth, Fort Worth. Yeah, I actually I would love to go to Fort Worth. Been to Fort Worth a few times. I liked it quite a bit.
Not quite Austin, but a very easy flight from Seattle. I, for a little while there, I was doing that flight a couple of times a year when I was working at Linux Academy. They were based out of Fort Worth. So I've been there and I like it. Would go again. Barbecue is not quite as good as Austin, but that's all right as far as I know. I would, I hope at some point the show gets noticed by events and would like to invite us out. And I have heard that BitBlockBoom is a good one. I'd love to know your thoughts on it and what made it so good, too.
Because I hear that it's really great, but I don't, I don't know why, you know? I don't hear, I don't, I don't know. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate it. Hybrid sarcasm is here with 10,000 sats. Coming in hot with the boost. To me, success, and this would be like success for the Trump administration's effort here, would look like the U.S. Having another semiconductor option besides Taiwan. Whether manufactured in the U.S. or another country, the economy is currently too fragile with Taiwan being the only real option. Interesting. So diversifying our supplier base would be an indication of success.
I think that's a decent metric and one that would be measurable. Good suggestion, hybrid. Appreciate that. I think there's others, too. I'd love to hear other ideas. But that is a decent one. Wise Hoddle comes in with 4,242 sats. That's not possible. Nothing could do that. Well, Wise Hoddle did it. Shut up, Scotty. He says, high signal week in and out. Keep up the good work. The emotion level is just right for me. Okay, good. I do like to know. If I were to gauge the success of all these crazy moves in the economy by the Trump administration, I would look at the number of reputable, genuinely independent news and entertainment media in business by the end of the term.
How many more independent banks? How many more independent small businesses? How much higher are the birth rates? How many more people are debt free? All of these are, I think, signs of a healthy society. And if that's not the goal, then I don't know what is. That's seriously wise hodl stuff right there he lived up to your username i agree so we should see an increase in independent businesses an increase in independent banks and higher birth rates and less debt those would be things i think we could measure maybe we you know you'd want to measure them four or five years out so it'd be a little bit delay but, I was hoping for metrics that we could probably observe sooner, but I do think those would be really good long-term metrics.
Great ideas. Thank you, Wise. Appreciate it. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks. He says, here's a whipsaw row of ducks boost. Whipsaw! Whipsaw! Woo! Gene Bean's back with a row of ducks. Gene Bean says, keep up the good work. Nice to hear from you, Gene Bean. Thanks for boosting in. Now we've got a boost from OBL918 with 14,567 sats. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with fruit loops. Who is so clueless about Bitcoin that they sell right along with their stocks just to hold the dollar, which is guaranteed to go down in value? I get why the market spooks and sells, but Bitcoin is not some U.S. corporation.
Just goes to show having money is not the same as having whizzed Boosty McBoosterson. OBU are so right. I mean, the dollar is getting weaker right now. So like they're bailing out the dollars and just losing money. Now, the fair interpretation would be to assume they put it into like some sort of money market account or something. And so, you know, they're getting like a four or five on this thing or something. Who knows? But still, it is really something. I mean, I get the Bitcoin goes down. And yes, it can be volatile. The traders love the vol. But, like, the U.S. dollar is guaranteed to go down in Bitcoin over time, over, like, definitely a four-year period goes up.
I think they have not wrapped their head around how much of a special attribute it is for Bitcoin as an asset not to have corporate risk, not to have sovereign risk, not to actually be a stock. I don't think they've wrapped their heads around it like they have with gold. They still look at it as a bit of a tech stock. He says, I love the in-depth coverage of U.S. economics. don't even think about scaling it back. That has been a debate that's brewing on the show. It's something I think about. It's tricky, right? Because not only is the US market driving the Bitcoin price action and also the largest economy looking at seriously adopting Bitcoin and other crypto, but additionally, this tariff stuff is driving the world news, driving the world economy, having worldwide impacts. So...
It's hard to avoid. And what's interesting is when Bitcoin isn't ripping, it's generally because something massive is happening in the macro. And so that tends to get a lot of attention on the show because that macro situation is the next hurdle Bitcoin has to get through. That's where we're at right now. But then Bitcoin gets over that hurdle and then Bitcoin begins to be the center of attention again. And you start seeing mainstream media coverage, you start seeing more written coverage of it it's a fascinating cycle and you know as we see these things happen you see the price often go sideways too clarkian comes in with 5 000 sats you're supposed do you also have to post at least 2x collateral for loans on salt lending do they do margin calls at 70 ltv and liquidation 80 like lent it's essentially the same yeah you want it you want essentially so say you want to take out five thousand dollar loan you'd want to have ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin collateral, or more, ideally.
One thing that SALT does, I've never experienced this, so I can't speak to it, but SALT has a stabilization process, which they talk about this on their website. I don't know. I think I would actually like it. Perhaps this is a use case for a Bitcoin or in stable coins. If the Bitcoin price is dropping massively, like it did right before the COVID lockdowns, and it just dropped, I don't know, what was it, 50, 60% in a day. They have a process where they can swap your Bitcoin into stablecoins and maintain its value before you get liquidated, and then let you buy back into Bitcoin when the price recovers.
They also let you add stablecoins, and now you can connect through ACH. You can add a balance of fiat that it will pull from before it liquidates your Bitcoin. So you could have $10,000 in Bitcoin collateral for your $5,000 loan, and then you could have another $1,000 in fiat if you wanted or whatever that would be pulled from before it liquidated your Bitcoin. So I like that that's how salt works. I've never had to work with any of that aspect of it, but it's an interesting use of stable coins and that kind of stuff. I don't know how they technically do it, So it does give me some pause, but I think if I were actually to experience it, I'd probably appreciate the service. Great question. Thank you for the Boost Clarkian.
Producer Jeff's here with a row of ducks. Aha! I finally got my what's minor up and running. Just in time for it to be too hot to run. Oh, California's already too hot. I got it integrated into Home Assistant, which allows for the next step, power use automation. Thought I'd share. Thanks for the show. Yeah, what producer Jeff has going here is he's got his solar system also hooked up to Home Assistant, much like I do. And so he knows when I've got X amount of solar coming in, I've essentially got more power than I can use. And he can run things like the Bitcoin miners. It's pretty neat.
And it's something I've always wanted to do. My RV has solar, not nearly as much as Jeff, but it has about 1,300 or 1,400 theoretical. But I really get, at best days, 1,000 watts of solar at best. But it does often It didn't mean I have more power than I know to do with, you know, midday by about two o'clock. I'm all charged up. And I've always thought it'd be so neat to then fire up like a Bitcoin miner or kick off an EV charger. So, so cool. You're doing that, PJ. And thanks for the boost. Keep me updated on how it goes. 1776 is here with 2,121 sets. Coming in hot with the boost. Hey, Chris, digging the show.
I got a bug in my ear from your podcast. So I post on Noster. And by the way, you present the latest news on what factors influencing Bitcoin's behavior and adoption. Keep up the great work. Unfortunately, my Nostra link isn't loading at the moment. Sorry about that. I will take a look at that after the show, though. And it's really great to hear from you, 1776. I think that's your first boost. It's great to have you on board. Glad you're listening. I also appreciate when anybody shares about the show. Shout out to Nostra. If you want to hit my Nostra profile, I have a redirect set up at chrislas.com.
And it'll take you to like a primal page. but you can follow me on any Nostra client. And Northern HODL rounds us out with a Spaceballs boost 12,345 sets. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. Excellent High Signal episode. Appreciate your efforts into sifting out the best nuggets from all the noise. Catching up from a couple of weeks of boost. Booyah! Booyah indeed! Yes. That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage. Yeah, it's been a really wild couple of news weeks. And trying to just really focus on the big picture stuff and stuff that I think will impact Bitcoin has really been my motivation going forward.
And I appreciate the boost giving me that feedback. And I really appreciate that it's actually getting noticed too. You know, it's something, sometimes those things go unnoticed. Thank you, everyone. And thank you, everybody who streams sats. We had 45 of you stream sats as you listened to the episode and you stacked collectively 71,667 sats for episode 54 of This Week in Bitcoin. When you combine that with our boosters, we have a grand total this week of 285,864 sets big shout out to Adversary17. Our boost put us over. Thank you, everybody who supports the show with a boost. It is a value for value podcast, and I'm definitely trying to make this value for value model work. This is a great way to support the show with a boost.
You can use Fountain FM or any of the podcast apps that support it. You can find those at podcastapps.com. Fountain makes it really easy. And if you just aren't in a position to boost right now, sharing the show with somebody who's Bitcoin curious, or maybe contributing to the website in some way, we have a Jupyter Broadcasting GitHub or joining our community in Matrix, something to help spread the awareness of the show and help people listening. Anything like that, word of mouth is a great way to help grow a podcast. That kind of stuff matters too.
But these days, a boost is greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank you, everybody. Smoke if you got them. Really? I just, I really have no excuse. I love that clip. All right, that concludes the boost segment. Thank you, everybody. We had 58 unique participants. It's always an interesting number, right? Because we have tens of thousands that can listen. Well, in this case, just around 10,000 or so. And 58 folks make all the difference to keep the show going. I think we could get that number up a tick, too. If you haven't boosted for. Music.
A while and you'd like to, it can make a difference. How about some updates for you? Yeah. Block has launched an open source tool for Bitcoin treasury management. It includes a dashboard for managing corporate Bitcoin holdings and provides a real-time Bitcoin to USD price quote API. So you can have a website and have a public disclosure of your Bitcoin treasury using this tool that's open source released by Block. It'd be something pretty interesting if some companies fold and others maybe started looking at something like that. Also in the updates section, Unchained has launched the Bitcoin Legacy Project.
The initiative seeks to advance the Bitcoin ecosystem through a Bitcoin-native donor-advised fund platform, also known as a DAF. Investments in community hubs, support for education and open source development, and a commitment to long-term sustainability with transparent annual reporting are expected. In the first year, the program will provide support to Bitcoin hubs in Nashville, Austin, and Denver. I'm a pretty big fan of these Bitcoin hubs, so I think that's kind of neat. Support also includes $50,000 to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, $150,000 commitment to the University of Austin, and up to $250,000 in research grants through Bitcoin Scholars Program.
Unchain says that, quote, they will match grants one-to-one made to partner organizations who support Bitcoin core development when made through the Unchain-powered Bitcoin DAF up to one Bitcoin. So they'll match up to one Bitcoin. Metaplanet i've told you they're deploying the micro strategy strategy has now reached the 10th largest public bitcoin holder after acquiring another 319 bitcoin and increasing their total holdings to 4 525 coins and ross albrecht is expected to speak at bitcoin 2025 the conference He writes on X, quote, it's official. I'm excited to announce that I will be making my first public appearance and speech since my release from prison at the Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.
Well, that's pretty neat to see. Be interested to hear what he has to say. I will keep an ear out to see if I can get clips for the show and if there's anything newsworthy that comes out of Bitcoin 2025 conference today. Music. Now, I believe Oklahoma's Bitcoin reserve bill has failed. But I still want to play this clip. This is the senator from Oklahoma. And she notes that she changed her vote on the Bitcoin reserve bill because of the feedback she heard. Up until this afternoon, I have been a no, but I am going to be a yes. And I had a couple of constituents reach out to me.
And because of that, because I'll be honest, I don't like voting yes on things that I don't understand. But my ignorance maybe isn't the reason to vote no. But that doesn't mean that I won't be a no on the floor if it gets to that point. But because constituents reached out and talked to me about it a little bit, I'm going to be yes today. Because constituents reached out and talked to me about it, I'm going to be a yes today. Do you understand that means you can directly make a difference? That's huge. There's still states that have these Bitcoin reserves up. If you're motivated, it might be worth a call. It can make a difference.
Now, before we get to the state of the network, I want to play a clip from Sam Hyde. It's been getting shared around X and Noster this week. And I think it's a good motivator for anybody out there right now who's a little freaked out that Bitcoin isn't $100,000 or more. You don't understand what you own. And if you have any common sense, you should be spending a little bit more time learning about Bitcoin. Maybe go run a node or something like that. You'll realize how much more there is to the rabbit hole. But instead of me saying it, I'm going to let Sam say it. What is there that's more important than your time and your energy, right?
And it's like you could say that like family is more important than money. But what are you doing when you're away from your family? You're trading your time and energy for the stuff that you need to like get by in life. It's a core civilizational technology like fire. And to fuck with the parameters of money, to like mess with the little variables and the ingredients that make it what it is. You're messing with something that's at the base of a really powerful vector. Like little changes down here make the vector swing wildly. Robert Kiyosaki, is that the guy's name?
Who's the guy that wears the glasses that he stole from me? Rich dad, poor dad. And he says, gold is God's money. I don't think that that's hyperbole or a fallacious thing to say or... That you that it's like out of pocket saying I think that using precious metals for money in particular the one precious metal that every civilization settled upon using as money I don't think it's coincidence you said something to me that was very interesting you said Bitcoin isn't something you're gonna want to sell it's something you're gonna want to pass down to your kids yeah which that is basically how I look at gold how I've looked at gold and now I'm a little more Listen, I dove in headfirst, so I'm kind of getting into Bitcoin a lot more.
But that was a very interesting statement. I'm starting to ramble, and I would just urge anybody watching this to do the research on Bitcoin and figure out what it is. Because it's not going anywhere, and it's going to be the unit of account for the future. If it's not going to change your life materially it's going to change the lives of your children materially put aside the negativity and the anxiety that comes with thinking about money and the surface level ponzi scheme get rich quick stuff that that is associated with cryptocurrency and start researching bitcoin and what it is because there's there's.
Music. Let's take a look at the state of the network. As I wrap up, it is block height 892,722. The price of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars is 84,340. Kind of been hanging out around here. Sats per U.S. dollar is 1,186. Although over the last seven days, we're actually up 2.4%. Still down 22.7 from our all-time high on January 19th, 2025, which was 109,160. However, fee rate's pretty low. Two sats per v-bike, great time to open up a lightning channel. And there, I think these are down a bit. 21,368 reachable nodes. I think that's down. Oh, I think the TWIB crew out there needs to go do a lift, get a few more nodes online.
The hash rate is crazy. The power of the network is incredible. I mean, overall, the hash rate for 90 days, 822 exahash. It's remarkable. So it's, yeah, the Bitcoin network is doing very well. It is very strong. We're just sniffing at block height 900,000. I mean, it's going to be a bit, but like, it's now in the far distance. You know when you're on your road trip and the city you're going to finally shows up on the sign? I feel like that's where Blockhite 900,000 is right now. Thank you so much for tuning in. Links to what I talked about this week are at ThisWeekInBitcoin.show, including things I didn't manage to make into the show.
Now, I hope I got you something that was high signal, didn't get too distracted by emotions. Let me know how I did there. That is always the goal, and I appreciate a boost telling me how I did. And I'd also like it if you have anything that you wished you saw or heard on the show that didn't make it in. Boost that in as well, and I'll try to incorporate it into future episodes. Now, when we get out of here, I'm going to leave you with a value for value track. This is a new one. I believe she's from Austin. Music.
Welcome into TWiB 54!
Historic Times
Bitcoin Mining Centralization Concerns
Market Reactions to Tariffs and Economics
Bitcoin vs. Gold: Safe Haven Dynamics
Global Economic Architecture Shifts
Bitcoin's Role in Global Trade Deficits
Federal Reserve's Stance on Crypto
Bitcoin's Comparison with Gold
Bitcoin Treasury Management Tools
Legislative Updates on Bitcoin Reserves
State of the Bitcoin Network
