The economic dominoes Bitcoiners predicted are falling. Why every route favors Bitcoin, the historic shifts shaking the dollar, and whispers of Bitcoin's "capture."
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LINKS:
- Historic dollar fall needed to eliminate US trade deficit
- WTF Happened In 1971?
- Nothing Stops This Train w/ Lyn Alden | Bitcoin 2025 - YouTube
- Dr. Jack Kruse's MINDBLOWING Answer to "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" - YouTube
- Sparrow Wallet v2.2.1
- BlackRock bought 50,000 BTC in May.
- Bitcoin & Tether: Drinking The Dollar Milkshake w/ Saifedean Ammous - YouTube
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Music. Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 59. My name is Chris. ChrisLAS.com. JupiterBroadcasting.com. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it seems like the thing that Bitcoiners have been saying would happen for years, I would say obsessing over for years, probably feeling a little crazy the rest of the world wasn't seeing it for years, is finally being seen. And the dialogue, the discussion, whatever you will, is changing in big ways. And personally, I think it really accelerated when Elon returned back to private life and the conversation around the success and failure of Doge picked up.
And I was saying I was pretty skeptical of the overall Doge results. I think the results are still yet to be fully seen, but it doesn't seem to be nearly what people were hoping it would be. And that sort of doomerism is creeping in to the overall discussion around the entire Western fiscal situation. I mean, financial wonks and mainstream media that never talked about this stuff are now just knowingly and openly acknowledging just fundamental issues that were just third rail. Don't talk about these types of things that only Bitcoiners and, well, of course, some gold bugs would bring up. Had emerged from World War Two.
This is Jay Powell in a speech this week. It's a global economic superpower. The Bretton Woods Agreement placed the U.S. and the Fed in a central position in the global economy. Our mission then, as it is now, was to serve the American people. But it was clear at that moment that the Fed needed to have better knowledge of global developments to achieve our dual mandate goals. A 1948 memo proposing to create the division stated, quoting, Problems of international economics and finance have become increasingly large, complex and significant in recent years, and our foreign economic relations will undoubtedly continue to give rise to issues of the first magnitude. Now, why is J.
Powell quoting this economic forecast from, I think he said, the 1940s? Problems of international economics and finance have become increasingly large, complex and significant in recent years, and our foreign economic relations will undoubtedly continue to give rise to issues of the first magnitude. That rare economic forecast that has turned out to be spot on. J-Pow is saying this is the very problem we're facing right now. This is the chair of the Federal Reserve. And he's saying this that was predicted at the end of the 1940s is playing out right now. We knew this was going to be an issue post Bretton Woods. The first magnitude.
That rare economic forecast that has turned out to be spot on. 75 years later, it remains critical that the Fed understand the policies and practices of other governments and central banks and their implications for the U.S. Economy and for financial markets, i.e. China. Exchange rate policy, of course, is now firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury. However, the end of the Bretton Woods era in the 1970s fundamentally changed the conduct of monetary policy as policymakers had to understand the effects of potentially more volatile movements of the U.S.
Dollar on American families and businesses. In other words, it hasn't been good for the U.S. consumer. Listen to what he's saying here. He's saying post-1971... The fluctuations and dynamics in the dollar market have been bad for the middle class, which has been challenging for the Fed with their dual mandate. Firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury. However, the end of the Bretton Woods era in the 1970s fundamentally changed the conduct of monetary policy, as policymakers had to understand the effects of potentially more volatile movements of the U.S.
Dollar on American families and businesses. Understanding global trade and capital movements has only grown in importance since 1950, as we saw during the pandemic. This is really wild because to summarize what the Fed chair is saying is he's saying WTF happened in 1971.com. And amazingly, from the top down, from the White House, from the Fed chair, from high profile analysts, we're seeing a shift in acknowledging the reality of the cost of being the reserve currency for the United States. This week, Jamie McIver or Giever, I'm not sure. I've only read the name, but they're a financial analyst who's been pretty well respected since the late 90s.
They've been in and out of different areas of high mucky muck economics. And they wrote an article titled Historic Dollar Fall Needed to Eliminate U.S. Trade Deficit This Week. And this article I'll link to in the show notes, it explores the idea of the reality around the necessity of significantly weakening the U.S. Dollar and how it may be the only viable route to reducing or eliminating as much as possible the trade deficit, which has clearly become a key goal of Trump's economic policy. And in the article, he quotes economists that estimate that to really achieve this reduction in the trade deficit, you'd need somewhere between a 20 to 30 percent depreciation of the dollar.
20 to 30% depreciation. And they also note that that's rarely been achieved without triggering a recession. So you'd really have to have a scream in GDP. And in 1985 to 87, there was a major dollar fall and it helped the deficit then. So we do have a historical example from 85 to 87 where we saw this happen. But in order to make it not hurt like hell, you're going to have to have blowout GDP numbers. And GDP numbers are looking better than estimated. I was impressed when I took a little peek, but we're still not at blowout. So why do I bring all this up? The reason is, is I have a basic thesis that outside of corporate treasury purchasing seeing all around the world, like Meta, Strategy, and others, and Sovereign Reserves that you'll see nations set up, the primary driver of Bitcoin adoption and price action is going to be U.S.
Policy, or I should say the second order effects of U.S. Policy. Like right now, just to zoom out a little bit, you're seeing fireworks around this big, beautiful bill. House Republicans have a legislative package they put together, they sent it to the Senate, and now the Senate is divided. You're seeing Ron Johnson and Rand Paul and others come out, and Elon Musk strongly say they don't like it. You're seeing others, like the Speaker, saying, you don't understand, you don't understand, this is actually necessary, and you can't go by the numbers you're using. I mention all of this because I don't think Bitcoiners should sleep on this situation.
It's not by accident that the second order effects of this bill are going to weaken the U.S. dollar. So the bill's got around a $3.8 trillion tax cut or extension, which will worsen federal deficit, which will weaken the dollar. And large deficits often lead to inflation or higher interest rates, which then also erode currency value. And it's clear that the White House has said they really want to lock in a few things with this bill. They have a few big goals and it's going to add to the deficit. They appear to be willing to accept the risk of dollar devaluation wholeheartedly. And as I covered last week, it seems like the White House has mostly given up on spending cuts.
And I mean, there'll be some here and there, no doubt about it, especially when you consider reduction in federal staffing. But at the same time, that same White House is flirting and trying to get through a trillion dollar defense budget. So let's be real here. Their hope is to stoke spending with military building, to stoke businesses by getting liquidity down and consumer spending by reducing taxes. And the reality is the second order effects of all of this will create more market demand for Bitcoin. And that's why even if you're outside the United States, don't sleep on what happens with this quote unquote big, beautiful bill, because the outcome is going to be increased Bitcoin adoption.
Lynn Alden did a great job of putting this into context during her Bitcoin 2025 conference talk. Glad I wasn't giving a talk. That was a mess. I don't like the name. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't like calling it the Bitcoin 2025. It's a Bitcoin conference, but whatever. It's a Bitcoin magazine conference. But Lynn Alden had a talk, you know, and it was nothing stops this train. The lever you have pulled breaks is not in service. Please make a note of it. Shut up. I'll put the entire talk in the show notes because she does have some nice charts that she will briefly refer to.
In this clip, she does a fine job of describing the charts and they're really secondary to her overall message. But this is only a bit of her talk. I recommend you listen to the entire thing, which is linked in the show notes. But this beautifully puts everything I've just been saying into better context, I think. One of my last slides is to emphasize the Ponzi nature of the system. So even aside from current issues related to demographics and debt levels, basically the way the system's constructed, and by the system I mean central banking with fractional reserve banking built on top of it, the whole fiat system we've been kind of operating under for over a century, relies on constant growth.
It's like a shark that can't stop swimming, otherwise it drowns, ironically. It's a system that has to keep increasing. And so on this chart, the top line is total debt in the system, in the U.S. System. So that's public debt and private debt combined, and it's actually over $100 trillion for the first time. And the bottom line is the monetary base. And what we see is that for the entire period of this chart, so this goes, I believe, from 1966 until 2025, the entire period of this chart, total debt never went down except for one very brief exception, and that was 2008. And it went down by about 1% total debt in the system.
So that's a key thing to understand, is that there was a brief period of time where debt went down, but otherwise, debt's always been going up. And what they did was they rapidly increased the monetary base from $1 trillion to, right now, about $6 trillion. It was so impossible for them to let even a tiny amount of deleveraging occur that they kept the party going. And specifically back in that time, so if we do the math a little bit, in 2008, the total debt in the system was in the ballpark of $50 trillion. So it's about half as big as it is now. And they were on a monetary base of about $1 trillion.
So the system is levered 50 to 1. That's the type of leverage you see in crypto degen derivatives contracts. It was 50 to 1 leverage across the economy. And specifically, they hit zero interest rates. So they couldn't keep propping up the private sector debt bubble. And instead, they rotated to the federal level. And so that kind of shows how sensitive the system is. As you've kind of gone forward, we're now more in the public sector debt growth. I actually looked at the data that goes back even longer than this chart, going back about 110 years, and there were only four other years where the total debt level ever went down nominally, and that was during the Great Depression.
So 1930 through 1934 was the only other period besides 2008 on the chart where it went down. So five years out of over 110 years of data is their tolerance level for ever letting that Ponzi unravel. And that's just kind of the system, that's the math that we find ourselves operating in, and that's the big contrast that we have to Bitcoin. So for my last slide, we don't have to focus on the details here, but just by looking at the shape of these charts, these are century-long charts. And so my main point with these charts is we've actually seen this story before. We've gone through something like what we're going through now in the U.S.
One time in the past, and that was around the 1940s. So the reason that debt growth is so smooth historically is because when they do finally run into something that actually challenges it, they rotate the whole system around, and we're going through it for the second time. So basically, you have a private debt bubble buildup, and then you hit zero interest rates, so you can't keep adding more and more on to the accelerating private debt growth. And then what happens is you find yourself levered 50 to 1, and you start to unravel. And how do you unravel a system that's levered 50 to 1?
The short answer is you don't. You just print more base units is how they always handle it. So what that happens, they switch over to federal debt growth, and they switch over to running massive federal deficits, so that even as private sector debt levels eventually kind of mellow out for a period of time, it keeps growing on the public side. And that tends to be more inflationary, and that tends to be more persistent. Because as we get to the point that I mentioned before, when the Fed raises interest rates to try to slow any of this down, they blow out the federal deficit at a faster rate than they slow down bank growth.
So basically, we're completely off the tracks now. And notice nothing I said is anything about Weimar, nothing's about hyperinflation. It's all about basically long-term, unceasing 7% deficit growth. We're not talking about 70% deficits of GDP, we're talking about 7%, but it's every single year like clockwork. It's the relentlessness of it that matters. And so as we go forward, this is the system that Bitcoin's going to exist in. And if you kind of summarize this whole talk, all these charts, all these points, there's two main reasons why nothing stops this train. One is math. The way that they've constructed the Ponzi system that I've talked about before, the way that it has to always continue growing to ever not start deleveraging in the crazy way that it would.
So that's the system that they've built. And two, the second reason is human nature. None of us want to pay higher taxes. people that are on the receiving side of deficits never want to cut them virtually no politician is ever incentivized enough to actually cut deficits during their term. And basically, this represents a flexible ledger. This is the ledger that we all kind of work with in the US and globally. And because it's a flexible ledger, they can always create more units. And therefore, that's the error correction that they keep falling back on over and over again. And that's what contrasts with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is, you know, the complete opposite of the system in many ways. It's the mirror of the system.
Instead of ever-increasing units, and indeed ever-increasing units that can't even slow down, Bitcoin is absolute scarcity. And instead of opaqueness, it's transparent. And instead of the error correction being able to just print more units, the error correction that happens in Bitcoin is deleveraging can happen, but you can never go after the unit itself. So basically, nothing stops this train. For the next 10 years, we're going to be running very large fiscal deficits in the US, almost regardless of what else happens. There are certain things that can accelerate it a lot. There are certain things that could maybe decelerate it a little bit, nothing meaningfully.
And so the one way to protect yourself from that situation is to own the highest quality scarce assets. And of course, the one we all like here is Bitcoin. Thank you. It's math, baby. And so that's why I have been finding this trend of Bitcoin influenzas going onto social media and decrying that they have discovered a major critical flaw in Bitcoin. So I want to spend just a couple of minutes on this because it's bubbling up more and more. I think there is a natural, strong reaction to the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Vegas because there was so much corporate speak, so much talk about stablecoins.
And if you've been online at all, you've you may have seen this clip going around a stablecoin, stablecoin, stablecoin getting passed around. I mean, it was obnoxious at the conference, and I think it has caused a lot of griping that Bitcoin has been captured. And these influences just discovered that it's been captured. Maybe it's the banks, maybe it's corporations like strategy or the big boogeyman now, because, you know, the talk of reserves is heating up is governments. And I think one of the influenzas that got shared the most was CoffeeZilla. Today, I want to talk about Bitcoin, how the government has fully embraced it.
And what's ironic is that the Bitcoin people who they started as anti-government. Anti-central control, have now started to fully embrace it. And you've got a bunch of billionaires. Let's stop here. So, you know, anytime you cast with a wide brush like this, this isn't a particular product, right? This is a store of value. And that means it appeals to all types, anti-government, pro-government, anti-state, pro-state, anti-establishment, pro-establishment, etc. People that want to preserve value. So do some people on the fringes because they have a higher need than others discover it first? Absolutely.
And do they help drive adoption initially? Of course they do. That's how it works for everything. People on the fringes discover the need of the new thing because they're being served less by the existing system than the average person. But, you know, we do this now in retrospect. But it's lazy with hindsight to just be like, oh, but it was it was the radicals that were all in for Bitcoin. And now look, now look, you've got BlackRock in with Bitcoin. Who they started as anti-government, anti-central control, have now started to fully embrace it. And you've got a bunch of billionaires and oligarchs that sort of control Bitcoin's community in a weird way.
Now, he never really substantiates this claim. But what do you think is going to happen? If people got in and they huddled their Bitcoin, you know, and they got in when it was pennies or dollars and they have thousands of it and they huddled it, they're going to become billionaires. And then they're likely going to turn around and spend some of that winnings on investing in Bitcoin development or paying for certain types of pet projects. We see this happen in Linux, too. I mean, Canonical is essentially, you know, the pet project of Mark Shuttleworth that turned into a legitimate, full-fledged, enterprise-grade company.
But it started with wanting to make something that was just a little bit better than Debian for everybody with some sane human defaults. But does that mean Linux has now been owned by the corporations and the billionaires? Mark Shuttleworth is one of them. You see, it just doesn't work like this with free software. Everybody's allowed to scratch their own itch. It's a lot like free speech. And I know that drives some people crazy. Got a bunch of billionaires and oligarchs that sort of control Bitcoin's community in a weird way. And also, this is where influenzas get lost in the social media bubble.
And I find it extremely frustrating, right? Because we know that 60% of the Bitcoin supply is owned by the plebs, owned by the people. Most wallets in existence have less, the vast majority of wallets in existence have less than one Bitcoin in them, right? This whole narrative here is a misunderstanding. And what really gets me kind of worked up is. He's pretending like he's just discovered all of this, and it's devastating news that there's been some sort of hard turn or hard shift. Got a bunch of billionaires and oligarchs. And he's looking inside the social media bubble, and he's determining all of this because YouTube and Twitter and the other ones, like, they define their reality.
And yeah, sure, does Jack Dorsey have some sway on Noster or on X? Yeah. But does that really affect the real world much? No. No. And so you cannot measure from within social media. It is not a valid system to which measure you can measure against. That sort of control Bitcoin's community in a weird way. And I want to flag it. I want to flag the rise of Bitcoin strategic reserves, which are not strategies. And the weird direction this is going, it's just ironic because of what Bitcoin sort of started out as, as a way to get around the government, get around censorship, you know, things like that.
Which, I wonder, would CoffeeZilla be happy if Bitcoin was these things? If Bitcoin was this tool that completely got around the government, which, I mean, it still is. You can completely transfer value between two individuals peer-to-peer, and the government doesn't have any involvement at all. But outside of that, I mean, I don't have the sense that CoffeeZilla would like something that is outside the system. I think he wouldn't like that either, right? He would not be happy if Bitcoin was the opposite of what he's talking about right now either. As a way to get around the government, get around censorship, you know, things like that.
But now that you have governments starting to accumulate this stuff, you've got the increase of rich and powerful people starting to accumulate this stuff. The question is, what is it doing anymore? Is it even trying to achieve the same goals or is it just about the price going up? So, of course, the fallacy here is that Bitcoin is no longer achieving its original goals, and now it's all about just number go up. And I hate this because it essentially is saying Bitcoiners should not celebrate when the price goes up. Now, you can feel like crap when the price dips.
Coffee's ill is fine with that. But don't get excited if the number goes up. Right? That's bad, apparently. And then this other idea that governments holding Bitcoin somehow gives governments control of Bitcoin. I'm surprised with his years of following crypto, he doesn't understand this better. First of all, let's start with the fundamentals. Governments should be run by the people for the people. So when a government holds Bitcoin by extension, they're holding it for the people. Now, you could argue if that works or not. I'd love to hear that argument. But you're opening up a can of worms.
Should we have an oil reserve? Should we have a cheese reserve? Should we have a gold reserve? Et cetera, right? You're opening up a can of worms there. Because I don't value gold. I don't really care if we have a cheese reserve. I could make an argument that's a ridiculous thing. It's not really a reserve, right? So you either have reserves of scarce things or you don't. But then this other idea that somehow by holding Bitcoin, which would probably really mean in some Coinbase wallet somewhere or some other holder, it doesn't matter. Bitcoin's network is ran across tens of thousands, 20,000 plus nodes.
No single corporation or government controls those nodes. Maybe they run a few, but they don't dictate the consensus rules. The network dictates the consensus rules. And Bitcoin's monetary policy, the 21 million supply cap, that predictable issuance, can't be altered without the overwhelming global consensus. So corporations aren't going to change this. The Trump administration is not going to change this. And regardless of how much Bitcoin they hold, anyone and nothing changes this. Can still hold Bitcoin directly without any intermediary. And Bitcoin remains open source and fully transparent, regardless of how many coins Michael Saylor holds.
And the reality is, if any entity goes crazy and tries to soak up all the Bitcoin and control things economically and hold up and hold it all in a big old reserve, what would happen? The increased scarcity would drive price. Price drives adoption. You then have redistribution as people take profits. And the Bitcoin gets redistributed again, not to mention dips continue to happen and the Bitcoin gets redistributed again. Its design inherently resists capture. Adoption by all kinds, corporates, states, individuals, was always the plan. And if you think about it, what else did you expect? Did you expect to create some sort of giant side economy, essentially a side chain to the US economy, some ginormous multi-multi-trillion dollar side dark economy that wouldn't be constantly attacked by world governments that somehow people would participate in without using liquidity from the existing system.
How do you do that? I don't even know how that would have worked. The route was always going to be we take over the system from the inside out. To suck liquidity out of the system. For value to flow where it is treated best, like water flows. And the market craves, demands, wants Bitcoin. These sovereigns, these corporate treasuries, individuals, they want Bitcoin because it resists capture. So if they buy up the Bitcoin and somehow were able to convince a bunch of node operators and miners to change consensus rules, which would never happen, they would be devaluing and taking away the thing that makes the very asset they're holding precious.
They would be devaluing their investment. The incentives align here. This resistance to censorship this decentralized nature this sovereignty from world governments where individuals corporations governments and everything in between churches can hold bitcoin is what makes it valuable and if you take that away if you wreck it you take away its value so you would be destroying your own investment how do you get the liquidity without the banks and the big money? Were we supposed to create a whole new monetary system and build that mother effer out for a hundred years until it was hundreds of trillions of dollars in value?
And then one day we were just going to hot swap to the new system. That's how this was going to work? It's ridiculous. It always was going to require adoption by the broader system. It was always going to eat the system from the inside out. It's either that or it dies and it's not dying. So these influenzas that are griping about government control and corporate control seem to not actually understand the way Bitcoin works. All right, but what do you think? Check me here. Am I missing something? Is Bitcoin being captured and I'm not seeing it? Make your case with a boost or let me know if and why you agree with my take.
Also, appreciate any shout outs for episode 60. Episode 60 next week. I don't know. 50 didn't feel like it, but 60, it's feeling like a milestone. So shout outs appreciated for that too. Music. . Well, coming up on the show, it's your booze, a bunch of great updates, and then a series for the final clip of the week, which I guess should be called the final clips of the week. But before I go on, I want to mention you can support the show by doing what you do. You can buy sats on River, on River, on Reva, which is one of the best ways to stack sats here in the U.S., but they also have that 3.8% paid in sats savings account.
So you put your fiat in an FDIC insured savings account and you earn 3.8% sats. And then those sats increase in value, too. That's great in the States. And they also have a great DCA system. If you're in Canada or you're all about self-custody here in the U.S., the Bitcoin well is the way to go. You want to spend your sats via Lightning, the Bitcoin company. All they do is Bitcoin, and they make it quick to go from Lightning to a gift card. You want to stack your sats by doing your daily purchases and your bills and all of that. That's the bold card. I got a link to that.
And last but not least, you want to keep that stack but access the liquidity. Salt lending is one of my favorite ways to do that. Links to all of these in the show notes. You do that, it supports the show. Well, we have some boost to get to. Of course, this is a Value for Value podcast and supporting the show with a boost. not only demonstrates to the naysayers out there that there's lots of ways to use Bitcoin and that Lightning is a valid way to do it, but of course it supports the show without any middleman, any corporation. And a little bit goes to the podcast index and the app developer who creates the app too.
Four score and seven boosts to go. And our first boost comes from a, whoa, look at this one, a baller booster from Patari's back with 100,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! I'll see you next time. Music. But that's not possible. Nothing can do that. Ah, Pitar did 100,000 sats to. Say my favorite Bitcoin podcast. Thank you, sir. It has been a very long time since I've had a baller boost of that caliber, and it means a lot. I really appreciate it. It's great to hear from you. And Pitar, you are our baller of this week. And right there behind you, also a very generous boost, Pab's here with 90,000 sats.
He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, you're a great guy. Thank you for helping us help you help us all. He says, I hear you. You're right. My previous question about Proton Wallet versus Strike was definitely worth more than 2,100 sats. The value I've gotten from Jupyter Broadcasting over the past six years exceeds even this boost. Genuinely grateful. Boost on. Well, thank you, Pab. I was really just razzing you, but I do genuinely appreciate that. Keep me the loop on that journey, too. I've been looking at Strike more and more these days because they've got a lot of great features, so I'm always curious to hear how people are liking it. Appreciate that.
User 49 came in with 42,000 and 43 sats. Ah, I wonder if the 43, it's very, I, 42, 43, I feel like there's a message in there. Well, I'll be dipped. He says, last time I boosted, I forgot to message. So here's another one. It's a patch boost, if you will. I agree with the gentleman who said, quote, if I could keep only one podcast. He says, imagine me as Robinson Crusoe with the sat dish, solar panel, and a Linux box. Here's some sunsats to get a whole new meaning. It gives sunsats a whole new meaning. Thank you. That's a really nice compliment. If you only had one Bitcoin, I can't even with that. You guys, you guys. The traders love the vol.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that, user 49. MugDaddy came in with four, nope, 20,000 sats. Still a great boost. Thank you very much. This old duck still got it. This is a great episode regarding stable coins. Why would I save in a stable coin when I could save in the hardest money in human history? Yeah, I agree. I think I do. I suspect it'll be a bunch of no-coiners who don't even really realize they're getting involved with crypto. Like, the banks are going to offer this as a product, and they're going to get some sort of yield. It's going to be low-key stuff, right?
It's not going to be 60% returns, Mung Daddy. I think you're totally right. I mean, you know, but they're going to do it. You know they're going to offer it, right? It's going to happen. Great to hear from you, Mung Daddy. Thanks for the boost. Hey, the Tone Wrecker's here with 3,333 sats. New episode night. Appreciate this effort gathering the news. I like that. I feel like a moment of zen just washed over us. I appreciate it. Why you gotta put numbers and letters together? Why can't you just go f*** yourself? Thanks for the boost. User 51 came in with 2,100 sats.
Coming in hot with the boost. Truly the best way to catch up on the Bitcoin current events. Informative, entertaining, good vibes. I'm a fan. Well, thank you, 51. Nice to hear from you. I'd love to know your username. If you get a chance to set that in fountain, come back. But I appreciate that boost. Gene Bean's back with 6,805 sats. Yep. Yep. He says, holy S, someone has the nerve to go in front of a Bitcoin conference and disparage not your keys, not your coins. Were they at least boot off stage? If not, was the audience even Bitcoiners? I know, that was really wild. I think that was a smaller event.
They have some smaller private events depending on your ticket price. I don't know if you are aware, Gene, but they have a whale ticket. And right after the conference ends, so if you wanted to buy for Bitcoin 2026, the whale ticket's like $3,000. But it goes up steadily to the night before Bitcoin 2026, the whale ticket will be somewhere like $21,000 for one ticket for one person. And so what they do to try to juice it a little bit for you to get you to spend that money is they give some private talks. Like, Sailor had a private talk with the whales. Blue Origin was in the whale-only section with a capsule, the one that they sent Katy Perry up into space. They brought that to the Bitcoin conference, put it in the whale-only section, and then gave the whales tours.
And while they're getting tours of the capsule, they try to sell the whales, because they assume they got money, on booking a flight. They were actually booking Blue Origin, Katy Perry-style flights in the whale section at the Bitcoin conference. So i don't know man it's a big money grab i i think there's a lot of other conferences that are higher signal i it's i hope one day to add more of them to my rotation to really have a better understanding so with regards to the pi 4 and 2 gigs of ram i'm using an mvme m.2 via usb3 maybe that makes all the difference definitely makes a big improvement this is interesting too i saw on social media again this week people discussing how pi 4s and and and and and whatnot are just too slow to be useful.
But, you know, Gene, you're making me feel like if you put a good fast disc on there, maybe it is possible. He says, so how can I get the reporting about the original cost versus the current value and average purchases price like River provides if I move coins to my hardware wallet? Oh, I'm drawing a blank gene, but there is a self-hosted quote unquote crypto accounting app. You can put in some of the dates and it will do the math for you. It can monitor wallet addresses directly as well. I don't remember the name of it, but I do believe it's in the Umbral App Store. It may be in the Start9 App Store. So you could go look at the Umbral App Store online. You can just go Umbral App Store and Google and whatever being it.
And then it is listed in there, I believe, and you might be able to find it that way. Did you, Bob, Bob, do you like, do you like you did with office hours and set a target boost amount, ah, for a separate podcast in the Dupre Xers to fund a special deep dive on things like Core vs. Knots? You know, Gene, I've actually been thinking about something similar to that, about doing special episodes sort of similar to that. So stay tuned. I am just kind of getting back from a busy travel season and kind of pontificating on where I have a little extra time to dedicate to TWIB now.
And so that's one of the areas I've been thinking about. And I may distribute them differently than the main show. I haven't really gotten there yet. But I appreciate that feedback. I'll take it in as I'm sort of sorting it all out, which, as you may have guessed, is happening right now. Thanks, Gene. Nice to hear from you. Thor is here with 2,000 sats. Oh, my God, this drawer is filled with fruit lobes. Plus one for more technical topics. And I also like the idea of a technical episode being a special, preferably with a prefix the listeners can filter based on their preference.
Anyways, I am loving the portal clips. How about a clip of the radio? You're doing very well. Oh, you've got to send that to me. I'll tell you my trick that I have discovered. If you want to send me a boost, they need to be real tight and funny, something recognizable like a boost soundbite. The real unlock is to take a 5.1 Dolby file, like an MKV that has 5.1 audio, load that into Audacity, and the center track is often just mostly dialogue. It makes for really nice, clean cuts. The heck? Like that one or this one? I don't understand what the heck is going on here. Or this one. I like you.
You're a hot ticket. You can hear a little bit of background noise in that one, but it's all center channel. So if you ever want to send me a boost clip, those are sort of the criteria. Thanks, Thor. Nice to hear from you. Sir Naxalot's here with 3,500 sats. Good news, everyone. Those controlling the world order are really brilliant. In Europe, they're bringing in CBDCs by force in a land where the majority of people are comfortable with the rules brought in by force. Canada is likely to join them economically and also adopt their coin. The USA, the land of the free, has the stable coins brought in, a sneaky way to bring in control and into the land where people value freedom.
Bitcoin only, peer-to-peer. Spread Bitcoin and love. Yeah, I'm not, I think I came across last episode as sort of being pro stable coin because it's not a CBDC. That's like saying I'm, I hate it, but I just hate it a little bit less, you know, because I'm hoping we'll have some market choice. It may maybe tether or circle run away with it and then you know are totally government controlled but if we have a if we have a loose definition or the definition that's loose enough that maybe there could be a community created stable coin maybe i don't know i gotta tell you the more i think about it i'm actually pretty pessimistic sir thanks sir next a lot it's nice to hear from you and thank you for the boost appreciate that too we have hello there with a row of ducks 2222 you, Sats.
This is a glad you had a good trip. Don't ever do it again. We missed you. Thank you very much. I feel missed. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks as well. I'm on board with stablecoin adoption, even though it's the lesser of two evils. I think it's inevitable and hope that over time it increases the adoption and appreciation of Bitcoin. Well, Ace, on that note, stay tuned for the final clips of the week. Stay tuned for that. You might already know what I'm talking about, but you're not going to want to miss that. Thank you for the boost. Mix is here with 3,333 sets. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy.
No, he's a great guy. Well, that's Eric good, buddy. Trading a CBDC for a PPDC means that your transactions can be censored by the company without the protection of the constitution. They could really do whatever they want and whatever the government can just, and whenever the government says, or I'm sorry, says, and the government can say it wasn't us. This just eases everyone into a more centralized system, slowly. It's still a garbage solution and only doubles as a way for the government to print more, which is why all the politicians and financial crowd like it. I estimate that physical cash is gone within 10 years.
Oh, I hope not, Mix. I tell you, as a father, it's nice to still have physical cash and just give the kids a couple of bucks when they go to the store, you know what I mean? Well, now it's more like 10 bucks, but it used to be a couple of bucks. I think all of that's true. I don't know if it would have been any better with the CBDC in particular. I guess there would have been some constitutional protections, but they can get away with a lot just with the existing fraud laws. So, and we're kind of, oh, here's the other thing I'd ask you. Are we not already sort of here with Visa and MasterCard?
It seems like we might be. So I don't know if there's a big net change. I think it probably is a net change for the worst. I just don't know how big it is. Does that make sense? Thank you for the boost. HDW is here with 5000Sats. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Thanks for this accurate and well-researched show. As a Bitcoiner first, I started learning Linux so I could run my own node. And now I'm running Core and LND on an Ubuntu server from home. I listened to Linux Unplugged and heard you mention the show, so I had to give it a try. and will keep listening to tell and tell my friends. Great work.
I would love to hear your wallet suggestions. There's one desktop wallet which stand out for me, but I'd love to hear what you think with all your experience in FOSS. Thanks. Well, man, it's a tricky one. My favorite wallet of choice is Sparrow, and I think it is really good software. I'm going to cover it in the update section in a little bit, so I won't say more, but it is great software, and it has a wide range of hardware compatibility and solutions. I think it can be slightly intimidating to brand new Bitcoiners, but it is one of those that helps you prevent foot gunning yourself and it gives you information that is necessary for managing your utxos and making sure that you don't end up in a situation where it is extremely expensive for you to spend your bitcoin in the future it helps you label stuff really well i really like a lot of things about sparrow i think if you want something a little easier maybe something that also supports liquid blockstream just updated their with their wallet.
It's based on green, and now I think they just call the wallet the Blockstream wallet. Green is really good stuff. The green wallet is really good. It does have some ties to Blockstream, but nothing that would prevent you from using it should they go offline. And it has a much nicer user interface, has some additional support, and a wide range of hardware wallet support. And I also think that Jade's pretty good. I think Bitbox is also fantastic. I have one, and I've been really liking the Bitbox too. And if you have something that you want to do on mobile and desktop, Sparrow it doesn't work so great there.
There's ways you can do it and you can use Sparrow with Bitbox, but Bitbox also has a really great app there. So that's a couple of recommendations. I know I've sort of, it's just, it's a very much it depends thing. It feels like it could be its own deep dive episode to tell you the truth. But let me know if I could clarify that any more for you. Thank you so much for coming on board with the show and being a LUP listener too. Jen from Atik's back with 2,000 Sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Hi, Chris. What is your take on this new interview with Dr. Jack Cruz, mind-blowing answer to who is Satoshi Nakamoto.
So I watched this, and I wasn't really blown away with his take. And I was a little disappointed that it's like a 17, 16-minute story to get to what didn't feel like a great answer. But I honestly was having a hard time following it as well, Jin. So if you had a different take, I would definitely love to hear it. Or if anybody else got to see that mind-blowing answer to who is Satoshi Nakamoto interview, where the guy has to tell you a 17-minute story so that way he can give you a one-name answer. But he wants to build the context And make you understand where he's coming from And all that So I get it But it was a lot.
But I'd love to hear your take. Nakamoto6102 is here with 5,000 sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days. He says, appreciate the podcast. We had a bunch of great boosts below the 2,000-sat cutoff, too. I saw Kaspiland in there, which was nice to see you back. A bunch of others as well with some nice boosts and people supporting our value-for-value artists. In fact, we got our track to number one this week. By you boosting and streaming sats as you listen to the final music of the week, we got that tracked to number one on the podcast index.topcharts. So that's pretty great. Thank you everybody who supports this show directly with a boost.
Each episode is made possible because you return value back to the show. And I focus on making something that the audience wants. It's a product where the audience is the largest customer. It's not a business transaction so much. It's an incentive alignment transaction. And so you can support the show with a boost by getting Fountain FM or any podcasting 2.0 app that supports boosts. Those are listed at podcastapps.com. Thank you to everybody who streams sats. 48 of you stream sats and pretty good showing there. That ticked up a bit. 81,154 sats were stacked with our streamers.
Thank you everybody who streams sats as you listen. The artists appreciate it too. You combine that with our boosters. And of course, that big baller boost, we stacked 375,388 sats this week. Really appreciate that. Of course, the future of me will appreciate it more as I look back and say, oh, that wasn't such a bad hourly wage. It may be today, by today's standard, not a great hourly wage. But in future, Chris, and future Jupiter Broadcasting, as we're building a network that has a Bitcoin balance so that we can weather storms, we can be picky about who we work with. I mean, the optionality and power and flexibility it's going to give us down the road just because we stack sats over the long haul, bit by bit, every episode.
And every episode, we're pushing towards that broader, bigger goal. And I really appreciate it because there are some weeks where a lot of work goes in and the show doesn't quite get the support. And there's other weeks where people really step up. and truly, truly one of the best audiences in Bitcoin podcasting. I'm calling it! I've played this gentleman from VanEck before. He's one of the top mucky mucks, and he's going to bring up an outside-the-U.S. Perspective that I think is probably pretty important to touch on this week, considering we talked a lot about the West. And it's this other perspective of there are nations that are going a different route to stack sats.
They're not necessarily setting up a reserve per se and purchasing Bitcoin. They're going a more direct route. And let's move outside the U.S. The number of countries who are mining Bitcoin at the central government level. This was two countries in 2021. El Salvador became the third. In 2024, we had three new countries join the club. all of them have debt deals with the IMF. Scratch your head here. Like, what do they have in common? They are tired of this never-ending cycle of debt that has been facilitated by the IMF, this extend and pretend where countries lose their sovereignty.
So all three countries last year, Kenya, Ethiopia, Argentina, who are now mining Bitcoin, you know, with government resources, they had IMF deals. Then look at the countries this year, Pakistan, another country with an IMF deal. Unfortunately, the interviewer cut them off before you continue. But it is interesting to see slowly but surely more and more nations are starting to mine Bitcoin with some of their resources and build their own little stash. I think that's going to also be a slow boil that leads to the scarcity story just getting more intense.
Sparrow Wallet version 2.2.1 is out. I mentioned I'd be talking more about this during the boost. Sparrow Wallet 2.2.1 has some nice usability improvements, but some technical refinements that are nice to see as well. I think the standout feature is the recent block views, which is now in the send tab and has been modeled after mempool to help you visualize things better. For Linux users, you need to be aware that the package has been renamed from Sparrow to Sparrow Wallet or Sparrow Server, and you may need to remove the old version depending on your package manager and the maintainer.
It's also resolved an issue for macOS, which was causing a UUID issue with Tor, and key under-the-hood upgrades include an updated version of Tor, an optimized Electrum server, and multiple dependency updates. A very, very solid piece of software continuing to get better. Tracking this just because I think it's interesting, we're about to hit a new milestone for BlackRock's iBit ETF. They purchased, on behalf of their customers, 50,000 Bitcoin in May. That's massive. They're on track for 1 million in holdings for within a year. And if you like to follow this kind of stuff, shout out to the BTC Wealth Newsletter where they do follow this.
I think this is a, when they get to the 50,000 mark a month, like if they have another month, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. They have another month like that. I don't think they will initially. Flows have been actually going out for the first bit of June, but I mean, not too surprising after an inflow of 50,000. And 1 million within a year, that'll be the big milestone to watch is when exactly do they hit 1 million in holdings? It's going to be wild. And it's going to be a whole new rash of influencers freaking out about it. I mentioned there was a lot of talk about stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins at the Bitcoin conference.
But there was one talk that really was the signal from the noise. You may have saw some of this going around. It was by SAFE, the author of the Bitcoin Standard. The full talk will be linked in the show notes. And in this talk, SAFE makes the case that Tether's growing size and value of their Bitcoin treasury could actually eventually break Tether's peg to the dollar to the upstream. And then Tether may be able to maintain that broken peg. I'll play a few clips that explain it. here's the intro as Saif walks up on stage to sort of set the tone.
Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for coming out. And thank you to the organizers for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Today, I'm going to be talking about Bitcoin and the dollar, in particular about Tether. And a lot of people think that Tether is going to be something that is very bullish to the dollar. And, you know, to be fair, they found a whole new generation of bag holders around the world to buy the treasury shitcoin. So you would think that that would generally be bullish, but I'd like to take a closer look at it and see how bullish it actually is.
Okay, pretty solid start. And then Safe goes on to explain how Tether might actually break its dollar peg one day. So currently, Tether has over 100,000 bitcoins, which is worth more than $10 billion. And their US dollar denominator reserves and treasuries are around $120 billion. So currently they've got more than 10 times as much fiat as they do Bitcoin. However, if there's one thing we know about Bitcoin, it's that it has number go up technology. And if there's one thing we know about the dollar, it's that it has number go down technology. Now, one thing keeps going up. The other thing keeps going down.
Inevitably, the thing that goes up is going to overtake the things that go, down. And so whether through default devaluation or both, Tether's Bitcoin reserves will likely eventually overtake its US dollar reserves. The ways in which we get there might be different, but as long as Tether keeps buying more and more Bitcoin, which they seem not to be stopping, and which seems to be a very wise thing for them to do because it's the only way to protect themselves from devaluation of the dollar and default on treasuries, as long as they keep doing that, the value of their Bitcoin reserves is going to continue to go up and likely it's going to overtake their US dollar reserves.
Now, at this point, something that the Tether Fudsters have said would happen might actually finally happen. You know, we've always heard that Tether is going to break the peg and maybe it will happen in this situation because ultimately the real risk for Tether, the riskiest part of their business is the treasury bonds. Treasury bonds, which are usually presented as the safe haven, are actually the main risk for Tether. And so over time, as their bonds devalue, as their dollars devalue, their Bitcoins appreciate. And so therefore, they will be able to break the backing of Tether with the dollar, but they would break the peg upwards.
In other words, it would be possible for them at some point to revalue Tether upwards. And so to make it so that one tether is redeemable for $1.02. And then they could keep doing that further and further. They keep revaluing it upwards as the dollar drops. So tether becomes relatively stable coin while the dollar keeps devaluing. If they offered the world $1 plus 2% per year or 1% per year, that would. That would be more attractive than the dollar for a lot of people. I think it would. I mean, people that don't know about Bitcoin. But Safe points out how this could create sort of a cyclical demand for Tether over the dollar.
And so therefore, we enter into this cycle where Tether can increase its valuation, which is going to increase demand for Tether at the expense of the dollar, which is going to then increase the amount of Tether purchases of Bitcoin, which is going to drive up the Bitcoin price further. And the key thing here is that even though Tether puts only a small percentage of its reserves in Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is so much smaller than the U.S. Debt market, that impact on the Bitcoin market is a lot more significant than the impact that they have with the majority of the reserves going into the debt, the U.S.
Government debt. In other words, it takes a little bit of money to dramatically increase their Bitcoin holding value, but it takes trillions of dollars to dramatically increase the value of their other debt. So SAFE just then bottom lines all of this for us. So the bottom line is that even the most bullish scenario for the U.S. Dollar, even the most imaginable way in which the U.S. Dollar's fate can be improved, is finding an enormous amount of bag holders all over the world to buy U.S. Dollar treasury shitcoins. And yet, even that scenario is a lot more bullish for Bitcoin than it is for the US dollar.
Ultimately, even a lot of buying of treasuries is likely going to be a lot more bullish for Bitcoin. It's going to make a lot more of a difference for Bitcoin because of the fact that Tether is accumulating Bitcoin reserves because it's smart for them to accumulate Bitcoin reserves, because this is the best way for them to protect against the devaluation and the likely default that might happen. So, I don't really see this as being something that's going to boost the dollar. I don't think it can make enough of a difference in the dollar. And on the contrary, I think it's going to be more and more bullish for.
Music. Let's check in on the state of the network before i scoot this episode is wrapping up at block height 899 807 the current u.s dollar to bitcoin price is 105 040 that means the sats per dollar right now are sitting at 952. We're down just 6% from our all-time high, which was set pretty recently on May 22nd at 111,980. There are 21,957 nodes on the network. Oh, that should be 22. That should be 22. What's going on over there? Bitcoin knots is currently sitting at 9.9% of the network, a guesstimated count of 2,171 Bitcoin knots nodes.
Bitcoin Core 28 is the largest at 19%. It'll be interesting to watch that over the next year and see if that changes. Look at everything just chugging right along. Fee rate right now is two sats of eBite. Pretty easy if you want to rebalance the channel or consolidate some UTXOs right now, pop in and out of liquid. It's a great time to do it. The Bitcoin network is growing and is very strong. We'll be right back. Music. Well, if you made it this far, links are at thisweekinbitcoin.show. I went to .com and it didn't work. Oh, yeah, right, idiot. It's not show. My goal, and I hope I got there, is to make a show for you that doesn't get distracted by the emotions or the politics around what is happening, but focuses on the signal, really focuses on the alpha for the Bitcoin users and adopters out there so you can make the best decision for you, your family, and your business.
So let me know how I did with the boost. Episode 60 is next week. I'd love to hear a shout out from you and read your message in the 60th episode of This Week in Bitcoin. And don't forget, we're playing a track here. And when you boost during the music, 95% of your sats go to the artists and their team. And this week, I'm pretty stoked because we got the last song to number one and that's neat to see. But this week, I'm going to play one of the OG value for value tracks. They haven't gotten a shout out in a very long time. They were one of the very first on the scene, one of the very first I ever played on air.
And I think it's about time that got some love on This Week in Bitcoin. So we're going to wrap up this week with an artist known as Empathize and it's their track, Shadow Man. Thank you for joining me, and I will see you right back here next week. Thank you. Music.
Music. Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 59. My name is Chris. ChrisLAS.com. JupiterBroadcasting.com. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it seems like the thing that Bitcoiners have been saying would happen for years, I would say obsessing over for years, probably feeling a little crazy the rest of the world wasn't seeing it for years, is finally being seen. And the dialogue, the discussion, whatever you will, is changing in big ways. And personally, I think it really accelerated when Elon returned back to private life and the conversation around the success and failure of Doge picked up.
And I was saying I was pretty skeptical of the overall Doge results. I think the results are still yet to be fully seen, but it doesn't seem to be nearly what people were hoping it would be. And that sort of doomerism is creeping in to the overall discussion around the entire Western fiscal situation. I mean, financial wonks and mainstream media that never talked about this stuff are now just knowingly and openly acknowledging just fundamental issues that were just third rail. Don't talk about these types of things that only Bitcoiners and, well, of course, some gold bugs would bring up. Had emerged from World War Two.
This is Jay Powell in a speech this week. It's a global economic superpower. The Bretton Woods Agreement placed the U.S. and the Fed in a central position in the global economy. Our mission then, as it is now, was to serve the American people. But it was clear at that moment that the Fed needed to have better knowledge of global developments to achieve our dual mandate goals. A 1948 memo proposing to create the division stated, quoting, Problems of international economics and finance have become increasingly large, complex and significant in recent years, and our foreign economic relations will undoubtedly continue to give rise to issues of the first magnitude. Now, why is J.
Powell quoting this economic forecast from, I think he said, the 1940s? Problems of international economics and finance have become increasingly large, complex and significant in recent years, and our foreign economic relations will undoubtedly continue to give rise to issues of the first magnitude. That rare economic forecast that has turned out to be spot on. J-Pow is saying this is the very problem we're facing right now. This is the chair of the Federal Reserve. And he's saying this that was predicted at the end of the 1940s is playing out right now. We knew this was going to be an issue post Bretton Woods. The first magnitude.
That rare economic forecast that has turned out to be spot on. 75 years later, it remains critical that the Fed understand the policies and practices of other governments and central banks and their implications for the U.S. Economy and for financial markets, i.e. China. Exchange rate policy, of course, is now firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury. However, the end of the Bretton Woods era in the 1970s fundamentally changed the conduct of monetary policy as policymakers had to understand the effects of potentially more volatile movements of the U.S.
Dollar on American families and businesses. In other words, it hasn't been good for the U.S. consumer. Listen to what he's saying here. He's saying post-1971... The fluctuations and dynamics in the dollar market have been bad for the middle class, which has been challenging for the Fed with their dual mandate. Firmly in the hands of the U.S. Treasury. However, the end of the Bretton Woods era in the 1970s fundamentally changed the conduct of monetary policy, as policymakers had to understand the effects of potentially more volatile movements of the U.S.
Dollar on American families and businesses. Understanding global trade and capital movements has only grown in importance since 1950, as we saw during the pandemic. This is really wild because to summarize what the Fed chair is saying is he's saying WTF happened in 1971.com. And amazingly, from the top down, from the White House, from the Fed chair, from high profile analysts, we're seeing a shift in acknowledging the reality of the cost of being the reserve currency for the United States. This week, Jamie McIver or Giever, I'm not sure. I've only read the name, but they're a financial analyst who's been pretty well respected since the late 90s.
They've been in and out of different areas of high mucky muck economics. And they wrote an article titled Historic Dollar Fall Needed to Eliminate U.S. Trade Deficit This Week. And this article I'll link to in the show notes, it explores the idea of the reality around the necessity of significantly weakening the U.S. Dollar and how it may be the only viable route to reducing or eliminating as much as possible the trade deficit, which has clearly become a key goal of Trump's economic policy. And in the article, he quotes economists that estimate that to really achieve this reduction in the trade deficit, you'd need somewhere between a 20 to 30 percent depreciation of the dollar.
20 to 30% depreciation. And they also note that that's rarely been achieved without triggering a recession. So you'd really have to have a scream in GDP. And in 1985 to 87, there was a major dollar fall and it helped the deficit then. So we do have a historical example from 85 to 87 where we saw this happen. But in order to make it not hurt like hell, you're going to have to have blowout GDP numbers. And GDP numbers are looking better than estimated. I was impressed when I took a little peek, but we're still not at blowout. So why do I bring all this up? The reason is, is I have a basic thesis that outside of corporate treasury purchasing seeing all around the world, like Meta, Strategy, and others, and Sovereign Reserves that you'll see nations set up, the primary driver of Bitcoin adoption and price action is going to be U.S.
Policy, or I should say the second order effects of U.S. Policy. Like right now, just to zoom out a little bit, you're seeing fireworks around this big, beautiful bill. House Republicans have a legislative package they put together, they sent it to the Senate, and now the Senate is divided. You're seeing Ron Johnson and Rand Paul and others come out, and Elon Musk strongly say they don't like it. You're seeing others, like the Speaker, saying, you don't understand, you don't understand, this is actually necessary, and you can't go by the numbers you're using. I mention all of this because I don't think Bitcoiners should sleep on this situation.
It's not by accident that the second order effects of this bill are going to weaken the U.S. dollar. So the bill's got around a $3.8 trillion tax cut or extension, which will worsen federal deficit, which will weaken the dollar. And large deficits often lead to inflation or higher interest rates, which then also erode currency value. And it's clear that the White House has said they really want to lock in a few things with this bill. They have a few big goals and it's going to add to the deficit. They appear to be willing to accept the risk of dollar devaluation wholeheartedly. And as I covered last week, it seems like the White House has mostly given up on spending cuts.
And I mean, there'll be some here and there, no doubt about it, especially when you consider reduction in federal staffing. But at the same time, that same White House is flirting and trying to get through a trillion dollar defense budget. So let's be real here. Their hope is to stoke spending with military building, to stoke businesses by getting liquidity down and consumer spending by reducing taxes. And the reality is the second order effects of all of this will create more market demand for Bitcoin. And that's why even if you're outside the United States, don't sleep on what happens with this quote unquote big, beautiful bill, because the outcome is going to be increased Bitcoin adoption.
Lynn Alden did a great job of putting this into context during her Bitcoin 2025 conference talk. Glad I wasn't giving a talk. That was a mess. I don't like the name. I'm going to be honest with you. I don't like calling it the Bitcoin 2025. It's a Bitcoin conference, but whatever. It's a Bitcoin magazine conference. But Lynn Alden had a talk, you know, and it was nothing stops this train. The lever you have pulled breaks is not in service. Please make a note of it. Shut up. I'll put the entire talk in the show notes because she does have some nice charts that she will briefly refer to.
In this clip, she does a fine job of describing the charts and they're really secondary to her overall message. But this is only a bit of her talk. I recommend you listen to the entire thing, which is linked in the show notes. But this beautifully puts everything I've just been saying into better context, I think. One of my last slides is to emphasize the Ponzi nature of the system. So even aside from current issues related to demographics and debt levels, basically the way the system's constructed, and by the system I mean central banking with fractional reserve banking built on top of it, the whole fiat system we've been kind of operating under for over a century, relies on constant growth.
It's like a shark that can't stop swimming, otherwise it drowns, ironically. It's a system that has to keep increasing. And so on this chart, the top line is total debt in the system, in the U.S. System. So that's public debt and private debt combined, and it's actually over $100 trillion for the first time. And the bottom line is the monetary base. And what we see is that for the entire period of this chart, so this goes, I believe, from 1966 until 2025, the entire period of this chart, total debt never went down except for one very brief exception, and that was 2008. And it went down by about 1% total debt in the system.
So that's a key thing to understand, is that there was a brief period of time where debt went down, but otherwise, debt's always been going up. And what they did was they rapidly increased the monetary base from $1 trillion to, right now, about $6 trillion. It was so impossible for them to let even a tiny amount of deleveraging occur that they kept the party going. And specifically back in that time, so if we do the math a little bit, in 2008, the total debt in the system was in the ballpark of $50 trillion. So it's about half as big as it is now. And they were on a monetary base of about $1 trillion.
So the system is levered 50 to 1. That's the type of leverage you see in crypto degen derivatives contracts. It was 50 to 1 leverage across the economy. And specifically, they hit zero interest rates. So they couldn't keep propping up the private sector debt bubble. And instead, they rotated to the federal level. And so that kind of shows how sensitive the system is. As you've kind of gone forward, we're now more in the public sector debt growth. I actually looked at the data that goes back even longer than this chart, going back about 110 years, and there were only four other years where the total debt level ever went down nominally, and that was during the Great Depression.
So 1930 through 1934 was the only other period besides 2008 on the chart where it went down. So five years out of over 110 years of data is their tolerance level for ever letting that Ponzi unravel. And that's just kind of the system, that's the math that we find ourselves operating in, and that's the big contrast that we have to Bitcoin. So for my last slide, we don't have to focus on the details here, but just by looking at the shape of these charts, these are century-long charts. And so my main point with these charts is we've actually seen this story before. We've gone through something like what we're going through now in the U.S.
One time in the past, and that was around the 1940s. So the reason that debt growth is so smooth historically is because when they do finally run into something that actually challenges it, they rotate the whole system around, and we're going through it for the second time. So basically, you have a private debt bubble buildup, and then you hit zero interest rates, so you can't keep adding more and more on to the accelerating private debt growth. And then what happens is you find yourself levered 50 to 1, and you start to unravel. And how do you unravel a system that's levered 50 to 1?
The short answer is you don't. You just print more base units is how they always handle it. So what that happens, they switch over to federal debt growth, and they switch over to running massive federal deficits, so that even as private sector debt levels eventually kind of mellow out for a period of time, it keeps growing on the public side. And that tends to be more inflationary, and that tends to be more persistent. Because as we get to the point that I mentioned before, when the Fed raises interest rates to try to slow any of this down, they blow out the federal deficit at a faster rate than they slow down bank growth.
So basically, we're completely off the tracks now. And notice nothing I said is anything about Weimar, nothing's about hyperinflation. It's all about basically long-term, unceasing 7% deficit growth. We're not talking about 70% deficits of GDP, we're talking about 7%, but it's every single year like clockwork. It's the relentlessness of it that matters. And so as we go forward, this is the system that Bitcoin's going to exist in. And if you kind of summarize this whole talk, all these charts, all these points, there's two main reasons why nothing stops this train. One is math. The way that they've constructed the Ponzi system that I've talked about before, the way that it has to always continue growing to ever not start deleveraging in the crazy way that it would.
So that's the system that they've built. And two, the second reason is human nature. None of us want to pay higher taxes. people that are on the receiving side of deficits never want to cut them virtually no politician is ever incentivized enough to actually cut deficits during their term. And basically, this represents a flexible ledger. This is the ledger that we all kind of work with in the US and globally. And because it's a flexible ledger, they can always create more units. And therefore, that's the error correction that they keep falling back on over and over again. And that's what contrasts with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is, you know, the complete opposite of the system in many ways. It's the mirror of the system.
Instead of ever-increasing units, and indeed ever-increasing units that can't even slow down, Bitcoin is absolute scarcity. And instead of opaqueness, it's transparent. And instead of the error correction being able to just print more units, the error correction that happens in Bitcoin is deleveraging can happen, but you can never go after the unit itself. So basically, nothing stops this train. For the next 10 years, we're going to be running very large fiscal deficits in the US, almost regardless of what else happens. There are certain things that can accelerate it a lot. There are certain things that could maybe decelerate it a little bit, nothing meaningfully.
And so the one way to protect yourself from that situation is to own the highest quality scarce assets. And of course, the one we all like here is Bitcoin. Thank you. It's math, baby. And so that's why I have been finding this trend of Bitcoin influenzas going onto social media and decrying that they have discovered a major critical flaw in Bitcoin. So I want to spend just a couple of minutes on this because it's bubbling up more and more. I think there is a natural, strong reaction to the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Vegas because there was so much corporate speak, so much talk about stablecoins.
And if you've been online at all, you've you may have seen this clip going around a stablecoin, stablecoin, stablecoin getting passed around. I mean, it was obnoxious at the conference, and I think it has caused a lot of griping that Bitcoin has been captured. And these influences just discovered that it's been captured. Maybe it's the banks, maybe it's corporations like strategy or the big boogeyman now, because, you know, the talk of reserves is heating up is governments. And I think one of the influenzas that got shared the most was CoffeeZilla. Today, I want to talk about Bitcoin, how the government has fully embraced it.
And what's ironic is that the Bitcoin people who they started as anti-government. Anti-central control, have now started to fully embrace it. And you've got a bunch of billionaires. Let's stop here. So, you know, anytime you cast with a wide brush like this, this isn't a particular product, right? This is a store of value. And that means it appeals to all types, anti-government, pro-government, anti-state, pro-state, anti-establishment, pro-establishment, etc. People that want to preserve value. So do some people on the fringes because they have a higher need than others discover it first? Absolutely.
And do they help drive adoption initially? Of course they do. That's how it works for everything. People on the fringes discover the need of the new thing because they're being served less by the existing system than the average person. But, you know, we do this now in retrospect. But it's lazy with hindsight to just be like, oh, but it was it was the radicals that were all in for Bitcoin. And now look, now look, you've got BlackRock in with Bitcoin. Who they started as anti-government, anti-central control, have now started to fully embrace it. And you've got a bunch of billionaires and oligarchs that sort of control Bitcoin's community in a weird way.
Now, he never really substantiates this claim. But what do you think is going to happen? If people got in and they huddled their Bitcoin, you know, and they got in when it was pennies or dollars and they have thousands of it and they huddled it, they're going to become billionaires. And then they're likely going to turn around and spend some of that winnings on investing in Bitcoin development or paying for certain types of pet projects. We see this happen in Linux, too. I mean, Canonical is essentially, you know, the pet project of Mark Shuttleworth that turned into a legitimate, full-fledged, enterprise-grade company.
But it started with wanting to make something that was just a little bit better than Debian for everybody with some sane human defaults. But does that mean Linux has now been owned by the corporations and the billionaires? Mark Shuttleworth is one of them. You see, it just doesn't work like this with free software. Everybody's allowed to scratch their own itch. It's a lot like free speech. And I know that drives some people crazy. Got a bunch of billionaires and oligarchs that sort of control Bitcoin's community in a weird way. And also, this is where influenzas get lost in the social media bubble.
And I find it extremely frustrating, right? Because we know that 60% of the Bitcoin supply is owned by the plebs, owned by the people. Most wallets in existence have less, the vast majority of wallets in existence have less than one Bitcoin in them, right? This whole narrative here is a misunderstanding. And what really gets me kind of worked up is. He's pretending like he's just discovered all of this, and it's devastating news that there's been some sort of hard turn or hard shift. Got a bunch of billionaires and oligarchs. And he's looking inside the social media bubble, and he's determining all of this because YouTube and Twitter and the other ones, like, they define their reality.
And yeah, sure, does Jack Dorsey have some sway on Noster or on X? Yeah. But does that really affect the real world much? No. No. And so you cannot measure from within social media. It is not a valid system to which measure you can measure against. That sort of control Bitcoin's community in a weird way. And I want to flag it. I want to flag the rise of Bitcoin strategic reserves, which are not strategies. And the weird direction this is going, it's just ironic because of what Bitcoin sort of started out as, as a way to get around the government, get around censorship, you know, things like that.
Which, I wonder, would CoffeeZilla be happy if Bitcoin was these things? If Bitcoin was this tool that completely got around the government, which, I mean, it still is. You can completely transfer value between two individuals peer-to-peer, and the government doesn't have any involvement at all. But outside of that, I mean, I don't have the sense that CoffeeZilla would like something that is outside the system. I think he wouldn't like that either, right? He would not be happy if Bitcoin was the opposite of what he's talking about right now either. As a way to get around the government, get around censorship, you know, things like that.
But now that you have governments starting to accumulate this stuff, you've got the increase of rich and powerful people starting to accumulate this stuff. The question is, what is it doing anymore? Is it even trying to achieve the same goals or is it just about the price going up? So, of course, the fallacy here is that Bitcoin is no longer achieving its original goals, and now it's all about just number go up. And I hate this because it essentially is saying Bitcoiners should not celebrate when the price goes up. Now, you can feel like crap when the price dips.
Coffee's ill is fine with that. But don't get excited if the number goes up. Right? That's bad, apparently. And then this other idea that governments holding Bitcoin somehow gives governments control of Bitcoin. I'm surprised with his years of following crypto, he doesn't understand this better. First of all, let's start with the fundamentals. Governments should be run by the people for the people. So when a government holds Bitcoin by extension, they're holding it for the people. Now, you could argue if that works or not. I'd love to hear that argument. But you're opening up a can of worms.
Should we have an oil reserve? Should we have a cheese reserve? Should we have a gold reserve? Et cetera, right? You're opening up a can of worms there. Because I don't value gold. I don't really care if we have a cheese reserve. I could make an argument that's a ridiculous thing. It's not really a reserve, right? So you either have reserves of scarce things or you don't. But then this other idea that somehow by holding Bitcoin, which would probably really mean in some Coinbase wallet somewhere or some other holder, it doesn't matter. Bitcoin's network is ran across tens of thousands, 20,000 plus nodes.
No single corporation or government controls those nodes. Maybe they run a few, but they don't dictate the consensus rules. The network dictates the consensus rules. And Bitcoin's monetary policy, the 21 million supply cap, that predictable issuance, can't be altered without the overwhelming global consensus. So corporations aren't going to change this. The Trump administration is not going to change this. And regardless of how much Bitcoin they hold, anyone and nothing changes this. Can still hold Bitcoin directly without any intermediary. And Bitcoin remains open source and fully transparent, regardless of how many coins Michael Saylor holds.
And the reality is, if any entity goes crazy and tries to soak up all the Bitcoin and control things economically and hold up and hold it all in a big old reserve, what would happen? The increased scarcity would drive price. Price drives adoption. You then have redistribution as people take profits. And the Bitcoin gets redistributed again, not to mention dips continue to happen and the Bitcoin gets redistributed again. Its design inherently resists capture. Adoption by all kinds, corporates, states, individuals, was always the plan. And if you think about it, what else did you expect? Did you expect to create some sort of giant side economy, essentially a side chain to the US economy, some ginormous multi-multi-trillion dollar side dark economy that wouldn't be constantly attacked by world governments that somehow people would participate in without using liquidity from the existing system.
How do you do that? I don't even know how that would have worked. The route was always going to be we take over the system from the inside out. To suck liquidity out of the system. For value to flow where it is treated best, like water flows. And the market craves, demands, wants Bitcoin. These sovereigns, these corporate treasuries, individuals, they want Bitcoin because it resists capture. So if they buy up the Bitcoin and somehow were able to convince a bunch of node operators and miners to change consensus rules, which would never happen, they would be devaluing and taking away the thing that makes the very asset they're holding precious.
They would be devaluing their investment. The incentives align here. This resistance to censorship this decentralized nature this sovereignty from world governments where individuals corporations governments and everything in between churches can hold bitcoin is what makes it valuable and if you take that away if you wreck it you take away its value so you would be destroying your own investment how do you get the liquidity without the banks and the big money? Were we supposed to create a whole new monetary system and build that mother effer out for a hundred years until it was hundreds of trillions of dollars in value?
And then one day we were just going to hot swap to the new system. That's how this was going to work? It's ridiculous. It always was going to require adoption by the broader system. It was always going to eat the system from the inside out. It's either that or it dies and it's not dying. So these influenzas that are griping about government control and corporate control seem to not actually understand the way Bitcoin works. All right, but what do you think? Check me here. Am I missing something? Is Bitcoin being captured and I'm not seeing it? Make your case with a boost or let me know if and why you agree with my take.
Also, appreciate any shout outs for episode 60. Episode 60 next week. I don't know. 50 didn't feel like it, but 60, it's feeling like a milestone. So shout outs appreciated for that too. Music. . Well, coming up on the show, it's your booze, a bunch of great updates, and then a series for the final clip of the week, which I guess should be called the final clips of the week. But before I go on, I want to mention you can support the show by doing what you do. You can buy sats on River, on River, on Reva, which is one of the best ways to stack sats here in the U.S., but they also have that 3.8% paid in sats savings account.
So you put your fiat in an FDIC insured savings account and you earn 3.8% sats. And then those sats increase in value, too. That's great in the States. And they also have a great DCA system. If you're in Canada or you're all about self-custody here in the U.S., the Bitcoin well is the way to go. You want to spend your sats via Lightning, the Bitcoin company. All they do is Bitcoin, and they make it quick to go from Lightning to a gift card. You want to stack your sats by doing your daily purchases and your bills and all of that. That's the bold card. I got a link to that.
And last but not least, you want to keep that stack but access the liquidity. Salt lending is one of my favorite ways to do that. Links to all of these in the show notes. You do that, it supports the show. Well, we have some boost to get to. Of course, this is a Value for Value podcast and supporting the show with a boost. not only demonstrates to the naysayers out there that there's lots of ways to use Bitcoin and that Lightning is a valid way to do it, but of course it supports the show without any middleman, any corporation. And a little bit goes to the podcast index and the app developer who creates the app too.
Four score and seven boosts to go. And our first boost comes from a, whoa, look at this one, a baller booster from Patari's back with 100,000 sats. Hey, Rich Lobster! I'll see you next time. Music. But that's not possible. Nothing can do that. Ah, Pitar did 100,000 sats to. Say my favorite Bitcoin podcast. Thank you, sir. It has been a very long time since I've had a baller boost of that caliber, and it means a lot. I really appreciate it. It's great to hear from you. And Pitar, you are our baller of this week. And right there behind you, also a very generous boost, Pab's here with 90,000 sats.
He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, you're a great guy. Thank you for helping us help you help us all. He says, I hear you. You're right. My previous question about Proton Wallet versus Strike was definitely worth more than 2,100 sats. The value I've gotten from Jupyter Broadcasting over the past six years exceeds even this boost. Genuinely grateful. Boost on. Well, thank you, Pab. I was really just razzing you, but I do genuinely appreciate that. Keep me the loop on that journey, too. I've been looking at Strike more and more these days because they've got a lot of great features, so I'm always curious to hear how people are liking it. Appreciate that.
User 49 came in with 42,000 and 43 sats. Ah, I wonder if the 43, it's very, I, 42, 43, I feel like there's a message in there. Well, I'll be dipped. He says, last time I boosted, I forgot to message. So here's another one. It's a patch boost, if you will. I agree with the gentleman who said, quote, if I could keep only one podcast. He says, imagine me as Robinson Crusoe with the sat dish, solar panel, and a Linux box. Here's some sunsats to get a whole new meaning. It gives sunsats a whole new meaning. Thank you. That's a really nice compliment. If you only had one Bitcoin, I can't even with that. You guys, you guys. The traders love the vol.
Thank you very much. I appreciate that, user 49. MugDaddy came in with four, nope, 20,000 sats. Still a great boost. Thank you very much. This old duck still got it. This is a great episode regarding stable coins. Why would I save in a stable coin when I could save in the hardest money in human history? Yeah, I agree. I think I do. I suspect it'll be a bunch of no-coiners who don't even really realize they're getting involved with crypto. Like, the banks are going to offer this as a product, and they're going to get some sort of yield. It's going to be low-key stuff, right?
It's not going to be 60% returns, Mung Daddy. I think you're totally right. I mean, you know, but they're going to do it. You know they're going to offer it, right? It's going to happen. Great to hear from you, Mung Daddy. Thanks for the boost. Hey, the Tone Wrecker's here with 3,333 sats. New episode night. Appreciate this effort gathering the news. I like that. I feel like a moment of zen just washed over us. I appreciate it. Why you gotta put numbers and letters together? Why can't you just go f*** yourself? Thanks for the boost. User 51 came in with 2,100 sats.
Coming in hot with the boost. Truly the best way to catch up on the Bitcoin current events. Informative, entertaining, good vibes. I'm a fan. Well, thank you, 51. Nice to hear from you. I'd love to know your username. If you get a chance to set that in fountain, come back. But I appreciate that boost. Gene Bean's back with 6,805 sats. Yep. Yep. He says, holy S, someone has the nerve to go in front of a Bitcoin conference and disparage not your keys, not your coins. Were they at least boot off stage? If not, was the audience even Bitcoiners? I know, that was really wild. I think that was a smaller event.
They have some smaller private events depending on your ticket price. I don't know if you are aware, Gene, but they have a whale ticket. And right after the conference ends, so if you wanted to buy for Bitcoin 2026, the whale ticket's like $3,000. But it goes up steadily to the night before Bitcoin 2026, the whale ticket will be somewhere like $21,000 for one ticket for one person. And so what they do to try to juice it a little bit for you to get you to spend that money is they give some private talks. Like, Sailor had a private talk with the whales. Blue Origin was in the whale-only section with a capsule, the one that they sent Katy Perry up into space. They brought that to the Bitcoin conference, put it in the whale-only section, and then gave the whales tours.
And while they're getting tours of the capsule, they try to sell the whales, because they assume they got money, on booking a flight. They were actually booking Blue Origin, Katy Perry-style flights in the whale section at the Bitcoin conference. So i don't know man it's a big money grab i i think there's a lot of other conferences that are higher signal i it's i hope one day to add more of them to my rotation to really have a better understanding so with regards to the pi 4 and 2 gigs of ram i'm using an mvme m.2 via usb3 maybe that makes all the difference definitely makes a big improvement this is interesting too i saw on social media again this week people discussing how pi 4s and and and and and whatnot are just too slow to be useful.
But, you know, Gene, you're making me feel like if you put a good fast disc on there, maybe it is possible. He says, so how can I get the reporting about the original cost versus the current value and average purchases price like River provides if I move coins to my hardware wallet? Oh, I'm drawing a blank gene, but there is a self-hosted quote unquote crypto accounting app. You can put in some of the dates and it will do the math for you. It can monitor wallet addresses directly as well. I don't remember the name of it, but I do believe it's in the Umbral App Store. It may be in the Start9 App Store. So you could go look at the Umbral App Store online. You can just go Umbral App Store and Google and whatever being it.
And then it is listed in there, I believe, and you might be able to find it that way. Did you, Bob, Bob, do you like, do you like you did with office hours and set a target boost amount, ah, for a separate podcast in the Dupre Xers to fund a special deep dive on things like Core vs. Knots? You know, Gene, I've actually been thinking about something similar to that, about doing special episodes sort of similar to that. So stay tuned. I am just kind of getting back from a busy travel season and kind of pontificating on where I have a little extra time to dedicate to TWIB now.
And so that's one of the areas I've been thinking about. And I may distribute them differently than the main show. I haven't really gotten there yet. But I appreciate that feedback. I'll take it in as I'm sort of sorting it all out, which, as you may have guessed, is happening right now. Thanks, Gene. Nice to hear from you. Thor is here with 2,000 sats. Oh, my God, this drawer is filled with fruit lobes. Plus one for more technical topics. And I also like the idea of a technical episode being a special, preferably with a prefix the listeners can filter based on their preference.
Anyways, I am loving the portal clips. How about a clip of the radio? You're doing very well. Oh, you've got to send that to me. I'll tell you my trick that I have discovered. If you want to send me a boost, they need to be real tight and funny, something recognizable like a boost soundbite. The real unlock is to take a 5.1 Dolby file, like an MKV that has 5.1 audio, load that into Audacity, and the center track is often just mostly dialogue. It makes for really nice, clean cuts. The heck? Like that one or this one? I don't understand what the heck is going on here. Or this one. I like you.
You're a hot ticket. You can hear a little bit of background noise in that one, but it's all center channel. So if you ever want to send me a boost clip, those are sort of the criteria. Thanks, Thor. Nice to hear from you. Sir Naxalot's here with 3,500 sats. Good news, everyone. Those controlling the world order are really brilliant. In Europe, they're bringing in CBDCs by force in a land where the majority of people are comfortable with the rules brought in by force. Canada is likely to join them economically and also adopt their coin. The USA, the land of the free, has the stable coins brought in, a sneaky way to bring in control and into the land where people value freedom.
Bitcoin only, peer-to-peer. Spread Bitcoin and love. Yeah, I'm not, I think I came across last episode as sort of being pro stable coin because it's not a CBDC. That's like saying I'm, I hate it, but I just hate it a little bit less, you know, because I'm hoping we'll have some market choice. It may maybe tether or circle run away with it and then you know are totally government controlled but if we have a if we have a loose definition or the definition that's loose enough that maybe there could be a community created stable coin maybe i don't know i gotta tell you the more i think about it i'm actually pretty pessimistic sir thanks sir next a lot it's nice to hear from you and thank you for the boost appreciate that too we have hello there with a row of ducks 2222 you, Sats.
This is a glad you had a good trip. Don't ever do it again. We missed you. Thank you very much. I feel missed. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks as well. I'm on board with stablecoin adoption, even though it's the lesser of two evils. I think it's inevitable and hope that over time it increases the adoption and appreciation of Bitcoin. Well, Ace, on that note, stay tuned for the final clips of the week. Stay tuned for that. You might already know what I'm talking about, but you're not going to want to miss that. Thank you for the boost. Mix is here with 3,333 sets. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy.
No, he's a great guy. Well, that's Eric good, buddy. Trading a CBDC for a PPDC means that your transactions can be censored by the company without the protection of the constitution. They could really do whatever they want and whatever the government can just, and whenever the government says, or I'm sorry, says, and the government can say it wasn't us. This just eases everyone into a more centralized system, slowly. It's still a garbage solution and only doubles as a way for the government to print more, which is why all the politicians and financial crowd like it. I estimate that physical cash is gone within 10 years.
Oh, I hope not, Mix. I tell you, as a father, it's nice to still have physical cash and just give the kids a couple of bucks when they go to the store, you know what I mean? Well, now it's more like 10 bucks, but it used to be a couple of bucks. I think all of that's true. I don't know if it would have been any better with the CBDC in particular. I guess there would have been some constitutional protections, but they can get away with a lot just with the existing fraud laws. So, and we're kind of, oh, here's the other thing I'd ask you. Are we not already sort of here with Visa and MasterCard?
It seems like we might be. So I don't know if there's a big net change. I think it probably is a net change for the worst. I just don't know how big it is. Does that make sense? Thank you for the boost. HDW is here with 5000Sats. I am programmed in multiple techniques. Thanks for this accurate and well-researched show. As a Bitcoiner first, I started learning Linux so I could run my own node. And now I'm running Core and LND on an Ubuntu server from home. I listened to Linux Unplugged and heard you mention the show, so I had to give it a try. and will keep listening to tell and tell my friends. Great work.
I would love to hear your wallet suggestions. There's one desktop wallet which stand out for me, but I'd love to hear what you think with all your experience in FOSS. Thanks. Well, man, it's a tricky one. My favorite wallet of choice is Sparrow, and I think it is really good software. I'm going to cover it in the update section in a little bit, so I won't say more, but it is great software, and it has a wide range of hardware compatibility and solutions. I think it can be slightly intimidating to brand new Bitcoiners, but it is one of those that helps you prevent foot gunning yourself and it gives you information that is necessary for managing your utxos and making sure that you don't end up in a situation where it is extremely expensive for you to spend your bitcoin in the future it helps you label stuff really well i really like a lot of things about sparrow i think if you want something a little easier maybe something that also supports liquid blockstream just updated their with their wallet.
It's based on green, and now I think they just call the wallet the Blockstream wallet. Green is really good stuff. The green wallet is really good. It does have some ties to Blockstream, but nothing that would prevent you from using it should they go offline. And it has a much nicer user interface, has some additional support, and a wide range of hardware wallet support. And I also think that Jade's pretty good. I think Bitbox is also fantastic. I have one, and I've been really liking the Bitbox too. And if you have something that you want to do on mobile and desktop, Sparrow it doesn't work so great there.
There's ways you can do it and you can use Sparrow with Bitbox, but Bitbox also has a really great app there. So that's a couple of recommendations. I know I've sort of, it's just, it's a very much it depends thing. It feels like it could be its own deep dive episode to tell you the truth. But let me know if I could clarify that any more for you. Thank you so much for coming on board with the show and being a LUP listener too. Jen from Atik's back with 2,000 Sats. Coming in hot with the boost. Hi, Chris. What is your take on this new interview with Dr. Jack Cruz, mind-blowing answer to who is Satoshi Nakamoto.
So I watched this, and I wasn't really blown away with his take. And I was a little disappointed that it's like a 17, 16-minute story to get to what didn't feel like a great answer. But I honestly was having a hard time following it as well, Jin. So if you had a different take, I would definitely love to hear it. Or if anybody else got to see that mind-blowing answer to who is Satoshi Nakamoto interview, where the guy has to tell you a 17-minute story so that way he can give you a one-name answer. But he wants to build the context And make you understand where he's coming from And all that So I get it But it was a lot.
But I'd love to hear your take. Nakamoto6102 is here with 5,000 sats. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days. He says, appreciate the podcast. We had a bunch of great boosts below the 2,000-sat cutoff, too. I saw Kaspiland in there, which was nice to see you back. A bunch of others as well with some nice boosts and people supporting our value-for-value artists. In fact, we got our track to number one this week. By you boosting and streaming sats as you listen to the final music of the week, we got that tracked to number one on the podcast index.topcharts. So that's pretty great. Thank you everybody who supports this show directly with a boost.
Each episode is made possible because you return value back to the show. And I focus on making something that the audience wants. It's a product where the audience is the largest customer. It's not a business transaction so much. It's an incentive alignment transaction. And so you can support the show with a boost by getting Fountain FM or any podcasting 2.0 app that supports boosts. Those are listed at podcastapps.com. Thank you to everybody who streams sats. 48 of you stream sats and pretty good showing there. That ticked up a bit. 81,154 sats were stacked with our streamers.
Thank you everybody who streams sats as you listen. The artists appreciate it too. You combine that with our boosters. And of course, that big baller boost, we stacked 375,388 sats this week. Really appreciate that. Of course, the future of me will appreciate it more as I look back and say, oh, that wasn't such a bad hourly wage. It may be today, by today's standard, not a great hourly wage. But in future, Chris, and future Jupiter Broadcasting, as we're building a network that has a Bitcoin balance so that we can weather storms, we can be picky about who we work with. I mean, the optionality and power and flexibility it's going to give us down the road just because we stack sats over the long haul, bit by bit, every episode.
And every episode, we're pushing towards that broader, bigger goal. And I really appreciate it because there are some weeks where a lot of work goes in and the show doesn't quite get the support. And there's other weeks where people really step up. and truly, truly one of the best audiences in Bitcoin podcasting. I'm calling it! I've played this gentleman from VanEck before. He's one of the top mucky mucks, and he's going to bring up an outside-the-U.S. Perspective that I think is probably pretty important to touch on this week, considering we talked a lot about the West. And it's this other perspective of there are nations that are going a different route to stack sats.
They're not necessarily setting up a reserve per se and purchasing Bitcoin. They're going a more direct route. And let's move outside the U.S. The number of countries who are mining Bitcoin at the central government level. This was two countries in 2021. El Salvador became the third. In 2024, we had three new countries join the club. all of them have debt deals with the IMF. Scratch your head here. Like, what do they have in common? They are tired of this never-ending cycle of debt that has been facilitated by the IMF, this extend and pretend where countries lose their sovereignty.
So all three countries last year, Kenya, Ethiopia, Argentina, who are now mining Bitcoin, you know, with government resources, they had IMF deals. Then look at the countries this year, Pakistan, another country with an IMF deal. Unfortunately, the interviewer cut them off before you continue. But it is interesting to see slowly but surely more and more nations are starting to mine Bitcoin with some of their resources and build their own little stash. I think that's going to also be a slow boil that leads to the scarcity story just getting more intense.
Sparrow Wallet version 2.2.1 is out. I mentioned I'd be talking more about this during the boost. Sparrow Wallet 2.2.1 has some nice usability improvements, but some technical refinements that are nice to see as well. I think the standout feature is the recent block views, which is now in the send tab and has been modeled after mempool to help you visualize things better. For Linux users, you need to be aware that the package has been renamed from Sparrow to Sparrow Wallet or Sparrow Server, and you may need to remove the old version depending on your package manager and the maintainer.
It's also resolved an issue for macOS, which was causing a UUID issue with Tor, and key under-the-hood upgrades include an updated version of Tor, an optimized Electrum server, and multiple dependency updates. A very, very solid piece of software continuing to get better. Tracking this just because I think it's interesting, we're about to hit a new milestone for BlackRock's iBit ETF. They purchased, on behalf of their customers, 50,000 Bitcoin in May. That's massive. They're on track for 1 million in holdings for within a year. And if you like to follow this kind of stuff, shout out to the BTC Wealth Newsletter where they do follow this.
I think this is a, when they get to the 50,000 mark a month, like if they have another month, oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. They have another month like that. I don't think they will initially. Flows have been actually going out for the first bit of June, but I mean, not too surprising after an inflow of 50,000. And 1 million within a year, that'll be the big milestone to watch is when exactly do they hit 1 million in holdings? It's going to be wild. And it's going to be a whole new rash of influencers freaking out about it. I mentioned there was a lot of talk about stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins at the Bitcoin conference.
But there was one talk that really was the signal from the noise. You may have saw some of this going around. It was by SAFE, the author of the Bitcoin Standard. The full talk will be linked in the show notes. And in this talk, SAFE makes the case that Tether's growing size and value of their Bitcoin treasury could actually eventually break Tether's peg to the dollar to the upstream. And then Tether may be able to maintain that broken peg. I'll play a few clips that explain it. here's the intro as Saif walks up on stage to sort of set the tone.
Thank you. Thank you, everybody, for coming out. And thank you to the organizers for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here. Today, I'm going to be talking about Bitcoin and the dollar, in particular about Tether. And a lot of people think that Tether is going to be something that is very bullish to the dollar. And, you know, to be fair, they found a whole new generation of bag holders around the world to buy the treasury shitcoin. So you would think that that would generally be bullish, but I'd like to take a closer look at it and see how bullish it actually is.
Okay, pretty solid start. And then Safe goes on to explain how Tether might actually break its dollar peg one day. So currently, Tether has over 100,000 bitcoins, which is worth more than $10 billion. And their US dollar denominator reserves and treasuries are around $120 billion. So currently they've got more than 10 times as much fiat as they do Bitcoin. However, if there's one thing we know about Bitcoin, it's that it has number go up technology. And if there's one thing we know about the dollar, it's that it has number go down technology. Now, one thing keeps going up. The other thing keeps going down.
Inevitably, the thing that goes up is going to overtake the things that go, down. And so whether through default devaluation or both, Tether's Bitcoin reserves will likely eventually overtake its US dollar reserves. The ways in which we get there might be different, but as long as Tether keeps buying more and more Bitcoin, which they seem not to be stopping, and which seems to be a very wise thing for them to do because it's the only way to protect themselves from devaluation of the dollar and default on treasuries, as long as they keep doing that, the value of their Bitcoin reserves is going to continue to go up and likely it's going to overtake their US dollar reserves.
Now, at this point, something that the Tether Fudsters have said would happen might actually finally happen. You know, we've always heard that Tether is going to break the peg and maybe it will happen in this situation because ultimately the real risk for Tether, the riskiest part of their business is the treasury bonds. Treasury bonds, which are usually presented as the safe haven, are actually the main risk for Tether. And so over time, as their bonds devalue, as their dollars devalue, their Bitcoins appreciate. And so therefore, they will be able to break the backing of Tether with the dollar, but they would break the peg upwards.
In other words, it would be possible for them at some point to revalue Tether upwards. And so to make it so that one tether is redeemable for $1.02. And then they could keep doing that further and further. They keep revaluing it upwards as the dollar drops. So tether becomes relatively stable coin while the dollar keeps devaluing. If they offered the world $1 plus 2% per year or 1% per year, that would. That would be more attractive than the dollar for a lot of people. I think it would. I mean, people that don't know about Bitcoin. But Safe points out how this could create sort of a cyclical demand for Tether over the dollar.
And so therefore, we enter into this cycle where Tether can increase its valuation, which is going to increase demand for Tether at the expense of the dollar, which is going to then increase the amount of Tether purchases of Bitcoin, which is going to drive up the Bitcoin price further. And the key thing here is that even though Tether puts only a small percentage of its reserves in Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is so much smaller than the U.S. Debt market, that impact on the Bitcoin market is a lot more significant than the impact that they have with the majority of the reserves going into the debt, the U.S.
Government debt. In other words, it takes a little bit of money to dramatically increase their Bitcoin holding value, but it takes trillions of dollars to dramatically increase the value of their other debt. So SAFE just then bottom lines all of this for us. So the bottom line is that even the most bullish scenario for the U.S. Dollar, even the most imaginable way in which the U.S. Dollar's fate can be improved, is finding an enormous amount of bag holders all over the world to buy U.S. Dollar treasury shitcoins. And yet, even that scenario is a lot more bullish for Bitcoin than it is for the US dollar.
Ultimately, even a lot of buying of treasuries is likely going to be a lot more bullish for Bitcoin. It's going to make a lot more of a difference for Bitcoin because of the fact that Tether is accumulating Bitcoin reserves because it's smart for them to accumulate Bitcoin reserves, because this is the best way for them to protect against the devaluation and the likely default that might happen. So, I don't really see this as being something that's going to boost the dollar. I don't think it can make enough of a difference in the dollar. And on the contrary, I think it's going to be more and more bullish for.
Music. Let's check in on the state of the network before i scoot this episode is wrapping up at block height 899 807 the current u.s dollar to bitcoin price is 105 040 that means the sats per dollar right now are sitting at 952. We're down just 6% from our all-time high, which was set pretty recently on May 22nd at 111,980. There are 21,957 nodes on the network. Oh, that should be 22. That should be 22. What's going on over there? Bitcoin knots is currently sitting at 9.9% of the network, a guesstimated count of 2,171 Bitcoin knots nodes.
Bitcoin Core 28 is the largest at 19%. It'll be interesting to watch that over the next year and see if that changes. Look at everything just chugging right along. Fee rate right now is two sats of eBite. Pretty easy if you want to rebalance the channel or consolidate some UTXOs right now, pop in and out of liquid. It's a great time to do it. The Bitcoin network is growing and is very strong. We'll be right back. Music. Well, if you made it this far, links are at thisweekinbitcoin.show. I went to .com and it didn't work. Oh, yeah, right, idiot. It's not show. My goal, and I hope I got there, is to make a show for you that doesn't get distracted by the emotions or the politics around what is happening, but focuses on the signal, really focuses on the alpha for the Bitcoin users and adopters out there so you can make the best decision for you, your family, and your business.
So let me know how I did with the boost. Episode 60 is next week. I'd love to hear a shout out from you and read your message in the 60th episode of This Week in Bitcoin. And don't forget, we're playing a track here. And when you boost during the music, 95% of your sats go to the artists and their team. And this week, I'm pretty stoked because we got the last song to number one and that's neat to see. But this week, I'm going to play one of the OG value for value tracks. They haven't gotten a shout out in a very long time. They were one of the very first on the scene, one of the very first I ever played on air.
And I think it's about time that got some love on This Week in Bitcoin. So we're going to wrap up this week with an artist known as Empathize and it's their track, Shadow Man. Thank you for joining me, and I will see you right back here next week. Thank you. Music.
Welcome to TWiB 59
Bitcoin Adoption and U.S. Policy
The Debate on Bitcoin's Future
The Nature of Bitcoin Control
Updates and Community Boosts
Tether and Bitcoin's Future
