The Bitcoin halving is here, but are Runes crashing the party? I'll explore how the halving could impact Bitcoin mining, the macro signs that indicate short-term price swings are probable, and why everyone is concerned Runes might cause a spike in transaction fees.
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LINKS:
[[podhome]]
LINKS:
- Runes – Casey Rodarmor’s Blog
- Bitcoin Suddenly Braced For A $35 Trillion Halving Price Earthquake
- A bitcoin halving is imminent. Here’s what that means. - CBS News
- What bitcoin halving could mean for investors and miners
- Blockstream Green: Simple and secure Bitcoin wallet
- AQUA Wallet
- River Referal Link
- Learn RoboSats
- What is KYC
- Craig Wright Discontinues Tulip Trading Case in Major Win for Bitcoin Developers
- 🚨 attention lnd node operators that have upgraded or are considering upgrading to bitcoind 27 🚨
- US Senator Cynthia Lummis says high ranking government officials feel threatened by Bitcoin - YouTube
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Unknown:
Okay, so a lot of people have been talking about the halving, and I want to raise that because the most important thing that people need to understand about the halving is that it marks another milestone in Bitcoin's programmatic monetary policy that is set in stone and completely transparent. Look at the U.S. Our broad money supply increases at about 7% annualized since the 1960s, diluting everyone's savings, everyone's chasing yields, and no one knows what the monetary policy is going to be in four years, much less 10 or 20. With Bitcoin, we know exactly what the supply will be. Everyone can verify it.
And Bitcoin is disinflationary. So as of this halving, it's going to become harder than gold. And with every halving, the American dream is getting cheaper in terms of Bitcoin. My dream home once cost like 600 Bitcoin and then it was 100 and then 50. And now it's approaching single digits because Bitcoin will continue to reprice everything in the existing system. And it's giving a lot of young people hope that they will be able to provide for themselves and for their future descendants. With fiat, they can't do that anymore. Music.
Welcome to episode seven of this week in Bitcoin and happy 2024 happening. This is Bitcoin's fourth happening, just as this episode releases block height 840,000 was just reached. And it's a big one. The minor reward gets cut down to 3.125 Bitcoin, which is down from 6.25. And I feel like Bitcoin is more positioned this epoch than maybe ever before. Like I just see an incredible four years ahead of Bitcoin. Definitely some challenges and some trials, which we will now no doubt document as time goes on, unfortunately. But also, you have a scarcity factor kicking in. That's just, it's getting really, really tight now, whereas the previous halvenings.
We just didn't really see the market demand that was eating up the Bitcoin at this rate because also these ETFs have come out. But also, I can say without a doubt, the end of this epoch is being watched more than ever in Bitcoin's history. In the past, it was only celebrated by a few of the cryptocurrency's biggest cheerleaders. This year, though, the halving is a hot topic. Sometime in the next 12, 18 months, you know, Bitcoin can be over $150,000. Around the halving, where the amount of Bitcoin coming to market is cut in half. After that time period, you see another year of a bull market.
And the reason for all the attention? There are way more people who care about and invest in Bitcoin than there were in 2020 during the last halving. That's thanks to a wave of adoption during the last cycle and new investment options for crypto-curious investors like Spot ETFs. This was the defining moment, I think, of Bitcoin, at least, right, in this era of its history. This was its kind of IPO-like moment. Pandora's box is now open for institutional adoption of the asset class. But also because of the impact it'll have on the mining industry itself, which is almost where it's going to be felt immediately.
Bitcoin miners are preparing for the network's biggest event in four years. We have a halving coming up here, and Riot has a number of ambitious growth plans that we're scaling up our business with. So as the price of Bitcoin appreciates, we should appreciate from that in an outsized way. The rally in Bitcoin really is what's keeping miners in business today when you think about post-halving. The average cost to mine in Bitcoin is somewhere around between $20,000, $25,000 a Bitcoin. Currently, post the halving, that'll go to somewhere between $37,000, $45,000 a Bitcoin, maybe $50,000 a Bitcoin in some cases for some miners.
And with the Bitcoin price being at $67,000, $68,000, $70,000, it means that miners are still mining profitably. Though what it really means is the miners with large scale will be able to mine profitably. The smaller miners will be put under more pressure. This is big. The small miners don't have the capacity to buy up the equipment, the data centers, and failing miners. That's how these larger operations are going to survive, is they will absorb some of the smaller mining operations that couldn't cut it post-having. Large scale will be able to mine profitably. The smaller miners will be put under more pressure.
I think that we will see failures in this space. You know, we already saw in the last market, there were a couple bankruptcies, both in the public and the private space. I think we're going to see that again. So I think that there's going to be great opportunity on an M&A basis. We're thinking about the facilities or the data centers that miners are operating in. If there's a data center full of old equipment that is no longer efficient, we'd love to buy the facility and move in. Oh, they're snapping them up. Marathon mining, all of the big ones are snapping up data centers and contracts.
Just massive, massive head start on this stuff this year because they knew it was coming. It's an uncertain world, but the one thing that's certain is the Bitcoin time chain. So they knew what was coming. You know, it's hard to say what happens from here, where we go from here, other than over time, history shows us usually Bitcoin's price rallies. And that's what makes it sustainable for these miners is they have to make their operations more efficient. Some of them will fail. But generally, you know, 12 to 18 months after the halvening, the price is generally rallied. and that differential makes it possible for these miners that remain to be profitable.
Now, will we see a price rally? It's all a matter of probables, right? We don't really know. It's all probability-based. If the Fed were to cut rates in a month or two, I think it's almost a surefire bet that when you factor in ETF demand, post-halving scarcity, and a rate cut, so money gets looser, liquidity gets free, I think it's, of course, you're going to see a rally. But at this point, with inflation still running hot, I think it's just something that has to be kept on our radar, although it seems like the most unlikely scenario in an election year, but it still remains probable the Fed could always raise rates or not cut rates this year at all, which seems perhaps the most probable to me.
The most probable move, in my opinion, would be to just keep rates where they're at, which keeps inflation running kind of hot. But it's the least political move the Fed could make during an election year. And if they were to cut rates, inflation would start to run hot again. If they were to raise rates, it would be political suicide for the current White House. But it also would be extremely hard on small banks and commercial real estate. And it would also be hard on the average person because credit card rates would go up as well. So there's really no good solution for them.
But if they were to raise rates, it would probably stunt Bitcoin's rally. But I think all of it's just short term. When you zoom out, we're looking at that this is a four-year cycle. And what everybody's talking about today is what this last four years really brought for them. And I think that's kind of a really neat thing about Bitcoin, is that we all get to kind of celebrate this moment together around the world. And I'd like you to boost into the show and tell me what you were doing last happening. Four years ago, were you paying attention? Were you in Bitcoin yet? I flipped through my photos, to kind of look back and see what I was doing and I'll be honest with you, the first photo I came across actually was a sign for COVID that a business put up, a local business here by the studio put up saying, we're closed, but we think we'll be open in two weeks and that business is no longer there.
So I, oh, wow, yeah, okay. okay, that's been a crazy four years. Something else I saw pretty close to that was a photo of our first garden, which we now almost run like a mini farm in the summer. At the last halving, we were starting our first garden. I'd love to know what you were doing or anything major that happened to you during this last epoch and where maybe you see things in 2028. So boost in with that. The halving is a moment for us to reflect, and it's something we all share together because the time chain tells us. Yes, time chain, yes. Something else we're talking a lot about, just moving right along, if I could do a brief transition.
There is concern that high transaction fees will become normal post-Havening because of runes. Now, runes are the creation of Casey Road Armor, who announced the idea on September 25th of 2023 on his blog. And I think it's notable how he started his post. He said, quote, I'm not sure if creating a new fungible token protocol for Bitcoin is a good idea. Fungible tokens are 99.9% scams and memes. However, they don't appear to be going away anytime soon, similar to the way in which casinos don't appear to be going away anytime soon. Creating a good fungible token protocol for Bitcoin might bring significant transaction fee revenue, developer mindshare, and users to Bitcoin.
Additionally, if this protocol had a small on-chain footprint and encouraged responsible UTXO management, it might serve as a harm reduction compared to existing protocols. In other words, people are going to shitcoin, so they might as well shitcoin on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin runes launched with Blockhite 840,000, along with the Havening. Runes utilize unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs, as the foundation to issue fungible tokens and minimize, they say, junk UTXOs that BRC20 tokens and other attempts. Okay, KC is also known for ordinals. So give you a bit of a background there.
The runes protocol uses operaturn to designate the token supply, the ID, and output to a specific UTXO. So a single operaturn output encodes all the rune messages, I call these runestones, in a transaction, including the etching, transferring, and what they call minting. Etching sets the governance rules and they're unchangeable once they're set but you can have some that can be pre-mined i believe you can have some that can be changed and transferred to others some that can't this is all in the etching process now there's a fee increase concern here because, i think people started talking about this when testnet started seeing transaction fees for a brief period of time that were higher than the main net so the testnet that's not really supposed supposed to have many people on it, started seeing higher transaction fees than mainnet.
And that was because people were experimenting with these runes. And Casey puts it pretty well when he ends the blog post, which I'll have linked in the show notes. Casey finishes with, quote, Should such a thing exist? I don't know. It's about as simple as possible. It does not rely on off-chain data. It does not have a native token. And if it's nicely into Bitcoin's native UTXO model, such a scheme might draw users from other schemes with worse on-chain footprints prints and bring developer and user mindshare to Bitcoin, encouraging them to adopt Bitcoin itself. In other words, if we could become the mother asshole over on Bitcoin, perhaps we would drain them from the altcoins.
As Saif has so well put it, Ethereum has really become known as, you know, a meme network. It's for toys. It's tokens. It's junk. Do you classify Ethereum as a shitcoin? For sure. It's the mother asshole from which the shitcoins spring. And, you know, RunePumpers are falling all over themselves, I'll note, to explain that bringing degen behavior to Bitcoin is great for Bitcoin. And they have all these examples of how it'll bring liquidity. It's like we're eating the bottom and we're taking care of some of the stuff and bringing money over and we're going to drain all of the energy out of altcoins and bring them into Bitcoin.
I personally am not so sure about that. But it does seem likely to me that there is a potential reputational harm that could slow adoption among financially illiterate users or potential users of Bitcoin. And they're already spooked by anything to do with crypto. And one of the few things we can genuinely say is Bitcoin is not like any other crypto. But that won't necessarily be true now. So I think it's with great power comes great responsibility. And while it doesn't alter the fundamental monetary asset properties of Bitcoin and the utility of the Bitcoin network and the asset, it does potentially bring a type of behavior and attention we might not want. Then again.
Maybe it will drain attention away from altcoins. Maybe it will bring more developers over. Maybe there's value in deciding some sats are worth more than others. I don't think so. But they have a whole method to determine, like, certain sats are worth more than others. The first sat after the halvening. The first sat after a difficulty adjustment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they have all these names for them and icons and symbols that make them special. And, you know, all these people are just into this. We've seen this kind of thing on Bitcoin many times. It's humans attributing value to individual sats that the Bitcoin network doesn't account for in the protocol or in the code.
It's just humans sort of overlaying that. I don't know. There may be room for that. Where I try to frame it to give you just something to kind of lens this with, say you get married or maybe your offspring gets married or you buy a house or you start a business or some monumental moment in your life. Would you like to enshrine that in the blockchain in the time chain that lasts for say a thousand years that will outlast you and everyone you know is that appealing to sort of somehow, etch it into the blockchain because i think that's sort of the mentality i may have that wrong boosting if you think i've got that wrong but i think that's the appeals like you're saving this thing forever in the blockchain and unlike nfts where they're really just a url pointing to a jpeg on an HTTP endpoint, we're actually loading this crap into the blockchain, I think.
So, you know, my node and your node is going to store it too. All right, moving right along. I'm going to try to remain open-minded, but that's my initial take on Runes. I'd like to hear yours. Coming up, your boost, some big project updates, clip of the week I really want you to hear, and a value for value track. But first, I want to thank Podhome.fm. That's my podcasting 2.0 hosting platform. I've seen many of you out there try it and love it. You get unlimited shows and episodes. It's got Podhome AI that'll help you automatically generate chapters, go through and even suggest titles and descriptions if you like.
Like, and it has the easiest live streaming support for podcasting 2.0 with the audio hosting built right in. The UI makes it easy for remote elements like value-for-value music. Try it for free for three months. Use my promo code TWIB at pothome.fm. Promo code TWIB at pothome.fm, the best podcasting 2.0 hosting platform. And a big thank you to pothome.fm for sponsoring this here show. If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator. Now we do have some boosts to get into this week. Thank you, everybody. And Satsquatch is our baller booster this week with 50,000 sats. Hey, rich lobster!
And he writes, Chris, I'm curious how many Bitcoin you traded for your studio gear. I'm sure it was worth it at the time more content on mining please appreciate all your coverage and tight show format well thank you for being our baller booster satsquash you're not going to believe me but i i think at the time it might have been almost four bitcoin for everything maybe more uh it was complicated, it's complicated it was not an ideal situation i suppose in retrospect uh i may have you know in total it was probably more than that though over the years there was really this mentality of you've got to sell your Bitcoin.
That was really the big pushback then, is you've got to sell your Bitcoin. You've got to make it the next PayPal. And yeah, well, you're welcome. My contribution to the price. Are you okay? Deestalo, probably don't have that right, comes in with 35,769 sats. Aloha, Chris Lass. I've been a listener since the early Linux Action Show days. Great work. I miss some of the breadth you covered with Dad, but I love the new show too. I think it's just the right I think it's just right content wise and I love the boost section and the jingles by the Way, this is a reverse zip code boost.
Oh, ho ho or let me bust out the map here I'm not as good with this as Wes's Oh out right in the eyeball Oh down an eyeball, okay I'm thinking is this Hawaii is this right? Oh? You'll have to tell me, Deestaloo. I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. I don't. Oh, Aloha, though. Ah, ha, ha. You did say Aloha. I think this is right. Well, that's cool. Okay, so I'm not super good with this, but yeah. Hello, Hawaii. Tell me where. Educate me more because that sounds awesome. And can I come visit? I'm sure everybody says that, right? Cdubs comes in with 33,333 sats. That's a nice one. Lucky 33 says, love the show. Keep it up.
Thank you, Cdubs. Well, I will appreciate that. Apisary 17 comes in with 32,768 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Says, I'm still loving the show. Don't lose heart, Chris. I ran out of sats last week, so I couldn't boost. Here's eight theoretical max size blocks worth. You know, we should have, oh man, I should have come up with some sort of like unique boost amount for the Havening. Everybody loves the unique SAT numbers, right? I should have done that. I do like the numerology. I can't lie. That is a great part of it. Red Sheep comes in with 25,000 SATs. Coming in hot with the boost.
Just enjoyed the breakdown. I love the episode. And don't be downtrodden about your views or boost. Consistency is the key. My pod is one year and growing slow. That's true, Red Sheep. Consistency does help a lot. And I missed a couple of weeks in here because I launched this show because the Bitcoin dad came to an end. The ETFs were coming around the halvening was around I was like I just I felt like I want to keep the momentum going, but of course it's also silly season here I'm about to go into my third convention in less than a month or so and I'm losing track we have people coming to town I just got back from Texas which was great.
You know, I've talked to a lot of listeners down there that are figuring out Bitcoin. That's pretty encouraging. So those are just a lot of moving pieces. But I think you're right. As the year goes on, consistency will be key as we grind it out to the next happening, right? Because we've got four more years now. It's going to be a little while, boys. Strap in. It's going to take us a minute. The Podfather comes in with 25,000 sats. But that's not possible. Nothing can do that. He writes, a restaurant that I liked but didn't frequent often here in town closed last week. I felt horrible I hadn't supported them more regularly.
Same holds true for podcasts that I value. Boosting for your week off as well. Zoofication of podcasts? Okay, boomer, he says. Yeah, you get them. You get them. I agree. Make it so. Some people, you know, they just don't like the sound effects. I think they're anti-radio in general. Anything that reminds them of radio. I know what you mean, though, about supporting a restaurant in your local town, Podfather. There was a brewery that I loved. I did hold one meetup there, but I just never had the time to go. They had good snacks. They even had a spot for the kiddos to hang out and play games and, you know, do things that were not screen related while they also brewed beer.
And it was just ideally the perfect, oh, and it was dog friendly. So I could bring the doggo, but they shut down. You know, they survived through most of the pandemic, but they shut down. And I felt really bad. I had that same sensation like, oh, I should have gone like once a week or something. And I should have made it part of my routine. And now I have to drive by their empty building. So, point well taken. Gotta support it while we can. Thank you, sir. Wise Hoddle comes in with 12,121 sats. Almost, almost a Spaceballs boost. Smoke if you got him. This is a great breakdown of the argument last week. I appreciate hearing Roger's take and then your counterpoints.
I like the format more than the one-sided rants you basically hear everywhere else. Thank you. Yeah, I do try to, if I can, always try to get audio from the source. If you ever do see clips that you think would be great on the show, please do consider boosting them in or linking them to me in the matrix. I really do appreciate that. That is very, very handy because collecting the media, trying to get good stuff that you guys actually want to hear, it's all part of the game. Podhome comes in. Our sponsor and our platform for hosting comes in with 5,100 sets. This is a great episode. I'm working on my way up to storing several Bitcoin long-term for my kids. Any tips for the best ways to do that?
I'm thinking 10 plus years of storage. Boy, there's a lot of ways to crack that one. I think you do it through graduated types of holdings. So the first bit, you don't really worry too much. You could probably even keep it on a hot wallet. I will say, I think GreenWallet from Blockstream is actually really great for this because you can have multiple sub-wallets in the app. And it supports the ability to restrict spending after two-factor authentication. So what I do is I'll stack sometimes in there for my kids, But I can't spend any of it unless they give me the two-factor code from a code generator on their device. So I can add Bitcoin.
They can check balances, but they don't spend it, and I can't spend it without that two-factor code. So the Blockstream wallet is pretty nice for that because you can also get a hardware wallet with it. There is also that ability to potentially you might consider stacking in Liquid. The Aqua wallet can be really great for that. and then moving to on-chain once the amount is worth moving on-chain. And there's also things like, you know, graduating to a cold card after it's a considerable amount of Bitcoin and then giving that to them at a certain age. Those are things that are all in my mind and methods.
But it's a great topic. How do you stack for family? What are your, what does anybody, if anybody else out there has some tips on how they would stack for family, please do consider sending that in. I think that'd be a great thing to crowdsource for the show. So thank you for the boost, Pothome. Ace Ackerman comes in with 2,468 sats. Value for Value Episode 5 and Value for Value Episode 6. Two boosts for both shows. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Gene Bean comes in with Row of Ducks, 2,222 sats. Boosting just because I want this show to continue. Thank you, Gene Bean. I miss you. It was good seeing you back at scale.
Hope you're doing well, and thank you for the boost. Hybrid Sarcasm comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! He says, keep the soundboard. Well, thank you very much. Dexord comes in with 9,134 sats. I had to come back and re-listen because I remembered loving this episode and hearing you say that it sucked. So it made me do a double take. I get... That's the one I didn't like. I get lost listening. I love hearing all this color and context around Bitcoin and finance. I don't get anywhere else. So please don't stop. Well, good. If you like the bad episodes, Dex, then you should really like the good ones, I hope.
It says all episodes have been great so far. You, sir, are too kind. I am also my worst critic. That is definitely, that's the way you got to be, really, for this kind of stuff. You kind of want to be your worst critic because otherwise somebody else will. And you might as well get to it before they do, I say. Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 stats. B-O-O-S-T. My first boost for episode 5 failed. and I didn't catch it. I was low on sets, but I'll catch up later. The TLDR for my message was, um. Oh, posting the show at the end of the week works best for me, but do whatever works best for the show. Yeah, I am still pulling.
I have experimented. I got to say, the earlier release in the weeks do seem to do slightly better, but it's also going to be topic-wise. I'm just going to keep at it. This one, I'm timing with the halvening, so it's nice to just say, okay, well, once we hit block height 840,000, that's when I'm releasing the episode. You know what? I like that timescale better. Lazy Locks came in with 7,000 sats to say, keep on going. Appreciate that. 5,000 sats from 21 is enough just to say strong emoji. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate that boost. And my frio comes in with 2,845 sats to say cheers and keep the soundboard.
Enjoy your dang show. Make it so. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Sir Alex Gates, the podcasting to-do-do consultant comes in with 4,096 sats. Hey, citizen. How many want to spend have already moved to Monero? Or many who want to spend have already moved to Monero. The adaptive block size is working and I believe the correct solution for the foreseeable future. See coin cards and shop and bit usage statistics, for example. Unfortunately, the low transaction bandwidth on layer one Bitcoin will always stunt future possibilities.
I'm a big proponent of Arctic Minds scaling arguments from Monero's core team. I just can't imagine that Monero will ever be a large store of value. Because of the inability to audit, because I think the world wants a counter option to the banking system, which is opaque and full of rot and corruption. They want something transparent, audible, something where the rules are known by everybody. And Monero is really useful in privacy sense, but it's not useful in an auditability and store of value sense. And I continue to make the argument, which was the counter-argument to Roger and the big blockers, that you do not get to a currency and a medium of exchange before you get to a store of value.
You have to get to a store of value first because this has to be worth something, and it has to be worth a lot likely, and we all kind of have to agree on what it's worth before we can start trading it for in real life goods and time and services. You don't get to the point without some sort of agreement, and we see it. We're seeing that price discovery. We've been witnessing it. But we're not done yet. And I don't think we have to rush that part of it. And I maintain we may not get to see it in our lifetime. Monero is useful, but its price will always fluctuate. It'll always be hard to totally nail down what it's worth.
Because the scarcity cannot be fully accounted for. And I think the idea that we can't use Layer 2s or side chains or Fetamins or whatever. Is very challengeable. I think I could argue that we can and that layer twos and side chains and things like Fetament are actually perhaps going to be exactly the direction things go and should always have been. Much like HTTP is built on top of TCP IP. You don't get HTTP without TCP IP, but we're not all just sitting here, you know, sending things via UDP directly to each other. That's just not, yeah, the applications that are built on top of the internet, maybe speaking UDP or TCP, right?
But I'm not. I'm not opening up my terminal and doing it directly. I'm using an application that's talking to that stack. And there's even a middleman called the operating system in between there. And then you have TCP, the base layer. I know it's a rough analogy, and I wouldn't try to build a big case on that analogy, but I do think it's worth considering. And it's a lens worth looking at this, Alex, is you do not get to a medium of exchange without it being a store of value. And we're very deeply in the store of value learning process. And I could see it lasting our entire lifetimes as we just try to process something that's new and that's different.
But I'd love to know if you think differently and how do we get to a unit of exchange if we don't all universally agree that it's a store of value first. I think that would be an interesting conversation. I'd love to hear if you have thoughts on that. Tomato comes in with 5,555 sats. Stay a while and listen. He says, LUP subscriber here. I finally read up enough on Lightning that I'm convinced of Bitcoin as something that might work out for sending value. I'm very happy to have the Bitcoin podcast from a trusted name in the free software group. I'd like to start moving some of my money into Bitcoin, but for a newcomer, the software is a bit intimidating.
You've been dropping recommendations here and there for years, but I'd love to have the Chris Fisher recommendation for Bitcoin-related software in 2024. I want desktop self-custodial wallet that you trust and any advice for someone getting into it that my newbie is trying to read up. Should I just set up a node myself for the first 1,000 euros? What's a completely open source stack that you trust with convenience as an important consideration distinctly after the first two? Cheers, fans of Linux Action Show. Man, that's a big question. Boy, I could do a whole episode on that. Let me see if I can get through this pretty quick. Two things you need to come to a decision about really kind of off the top.
Are you okay with KYC, which is know your customer, where they're going to identify you and your purchases will be linked to your Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean anybody will do anything with it, but in theory, the IRS or somebody could subpoena where you bought your Bitcoin from or whatever, you know, you know, national security letter, then whatever it might be and say, uh, how many Bitcoin did this Chris guy buy? You know, or in your case, how many Bitcoin did tomato buy? Maybe you go buy tomato. And, uh, then they'd say, well, you know, um, We see this large dollar amount.
It seems like maybe you made a sale and didn't report on your taxes. What's going on here? You know, they can make a connection like that. KYC, though, does have the benefit of being simple. You can tie it to your bank account. It's probably the most straightforward way if you just want to do what's called a DCA, daily cash average, where you just make a small reoccurring purchase, either like once a day or once a week, and you kind of average out the volatility. That generally only happens when you KYC. There are services, if you don't want to have your identity tied to it, like RoboSats that are on tour that are really straightforward to use, but you'll have to jump through at least some more hoops.
Remember, you are buying outside a system. You are working inside a closed system, and you are trying to buy outside that into an open system. To get there, you have to go through the closed system's gates. They determine what information and what you give them in order to go through those gates, much like going through a border in a country. RoboSats kind of bypasses all of that, but you'll have to buy smaller amounts and there'll be a premium for the privacy and you'll have to get a Tor browser and probably want to go read the RoboSats learning website. So you'll have to make a decision how you want to acquire your Bitcoin.
If you want to use the KYC route, I like River a lot. Not a sponsor. I don't get paid to say that. I just think River is a good company and they have lightning withdrawals, which can help your privacy and reduce your fees. My personal recommendation would be to stack more than a million sats, it's your kind of determination what's a high value, but more than a million sats in river, transfer it over Lightning into Liquid using bolts.exchange, consolidate in Liquid for a little bit longer, then move it to something like the Sparrow wallet that's using a cold card or some other hardware wallet that you like.
You'll have to create that wallet first with your cold card before you start moving into it. These are all the self-custodial ways you can do it. There's a lot of in-between. I want to be clear that you shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good, especially when you're just trying to get started. When you're just dealing with a couple hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars worth, you don't need to invent your own Fort Knox before you get started. You don't necessarily need to go that far. If you enjoy it like I do and you want to run a node like you asked, something like Start9 or Umbral is a pretty straightforward approach.
Umbral is going through some major changes right now. you might wait them out and just see where they're at in six months because they're doing major updates. They look like it's good stuff, good changes for the platform. Start9, a bit more solid, a little bit slower changes, a little bit more, I'd say, limited scope in what they're trying to accomplish, but they're nailing doing a Bitcoin node. That's the Start9 OS. If you are really technical, and you know what we're doing here at JB, Nick's Bitcoin cannot be beat. It is a appliance-level Bitcoin node.
It will only change When you iterate, those changes will be built and tested before they're deployed, and it has snapshot rollbacks if something goes wrong. I mean, it is the best way to go if your NIC's comfortable. I would probably recommend start 9 just to get started, though. That's as fast as I can try to go through it. That's a big question to ask, and if people are more interested in that, if people are at that spot and they want more information, I would absolutely consider in the future doing like a special episode on it, perhaps when I'm traveling, and we could go through there. Now, Tomato, so that was from Tomato.
Not even kidding. Now, Tomato with an H comes in with a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. They added an H and they said, I just wanted to send a little more value for the show. Well, thank you very much, Tomato. I hope you found my answer useful. I know I blasted through that really quick. If you have clarifying questions, please feel free to boost them in and I will try to dedicate time to answering them. Just figure out if you want KYC or not. That's know your customer. If you want to do it private or not, and you're willing to pay a premium for that, that'd be RoboSats.
If you're comfortable with the identification, like this is more of an investment, not like a rebel money for you, then I'd probably recommend River. There's other really great companies out there, but I think River's been doing it really well for a while. And then you can build it up from there. You don't have to have it all solved at once. And you have time to read. And Sparrow, by the way, the Sparrow wallet has some great documentation. Definitely go check that out. Okay, well, we got 3,222 sats from Faraday Fedora. This old duck still got it.
So sorry, man, I've been stacking, not zapping lately, but the content has been great. Thank you very much. Rounding it out now, Bob B takes us out with 5,000 sats. Boost! Chris, Oak and a self-hosted lightning node was an interesting experiment, but I don't think I want to maintain my own node. It's crashed twice now, and I had to recover it, And I think there's got to be a better way. I really like sending stats automatically, though, because I rarely have anything to say. But I wanted to send the love. Got any recommendations for something like Oak that would work with custodial Lightning wallets? Thanks, Bob.
So Bob's been a longtime booster who set up automated boosts using Oak, where it just sort of uses a schedule like Cron to send a boost a certain amount of time. But as you heard, he had some problems there. There really should be a better automated way, Bob. Bob, some platforms like TrueFans are building that in. And, you know, you could probably really accomplish it with streaming sats if you just upped it. But I do love hearing from you from time to time. It makes me really happy to know you're still out there, Bob. I got to say, I wasn't sure if you were still listening. And I think about you boosters.
You make an impression on us. So I really appreciate that you just took a moment to let me know what you're up to. And if anybody has a recommendation for automated boosting over the lighting network. Let me know. I definitely look into that. We had a bunch of other great boosts under the 2,000 on-air cutoff, but I cut off at 2,000 sats just to make sure we don't go on forever in this segment. But we had 25 boosters, 34 total boosts sent in. That's not bad at all. And we stacked 294,948 sats. Thank you, everybody. That is much better this week. I really appreciate it. But as the hustle continues, I appreciate those boosts.
If you'd like to send a boost in to support this individual production, send a little value. If you got good information, you enjoyed the listen, you want to see the show continue on, Value for Value is a great way to support an episode either with your treasure, your time, or your talent. And a lot of us these days, we're very busy, but we can send a few sats in. Go get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. Bunch of great apps over there. Fountain is cranking out changes like crazy. They just got a brand new release that improves the UI a little bit and performance. Podverse.fm is a GPL cross-platform app that is also available in the web.
And if you like to finish podcasts at your desk on your big speakers like I do, that's a huge feature. And Castomatic is one of the best podcast players on iOS, hands down. So those are some great podcasting 2.0 apps that also support boosts, transcripts, and chapters, which this show does. Those are all podcasting 2.0 features. It's an open standard that makes podcasting better and compete with proprietary platforms because that's what. We're trying to do here is offer something better that is decentralized. It doesn't have to, you don't have to go on YouTube. You don't have to use Discord.
You don't have to use Spotify. We're doing it in the RSS feed. It is the source of truth and you can support that and the creators in the podcasting 2.0 ecosystem by sending in a boost, by listening and by sharing the show. Thank you, everybody that does that. Music. Well, how about some project updates? This first one, not so much a big project update, but good for projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Fake Toshi Craig Wright is discontinuing his case against 12 Bitcoin developers and other individuals that he was suing in the UK high court. The end of this lawsuit signifies the conclusion of Wright's nearly 10-year-long strategy of trying to intimidate and harass good people doing good work in the Bitcoin ecosystem. system.
And this is a major victory for Bitcoin developers who are being chased and haunted by this man. The tulip trading case, as it was known, has been an existential complication for Bitcoin for quite some time. That's how I'm putting it. I don't want to give the man too much credit, but it's been like, you know, you got a sore butt and every time you sit down, you hurt yourself. Wright's decision to drop the lawsuit came shortly after a distinct victory for the Bitcoin developers associated with this UK lawsuit known as the Identity Trial. Also, Hodlnaut, who was being sued, found out that Wright is dropping the case against him as well, which is great.
That was a ridiculous case. And Wright has had his assets frozen, which are worth around $7.6 million somehow. I don't know how, but somehow. Hopefully that's the last I ever have to talk about that man. I've been talking about him for way, way too long, and I try to keep it as minimal as possible. Heads up for those of you that run on the Lightning LND demon and are looking at upgrading to the new Bitcoin Core 27. This is developing. It appears that an update to LND will be released soon that addresses an issue. There is essentially an incompatibility between Bitcoin D version 27 and LND 17.4.
So LND 0.17.5 will be released soon, probably maybe by the time you're hearing this, to address this issue. But But until then, you should hold off on upgrading Bitcoin D27 because transaction broadcasts will fail. And your Lightning Network is not going to like that. Your Bitcoin is not going to like that. Nothing is going to like that. It's a little issue with the RPC code in Bitcoin D's recipient in BTC JSON library. And the issue will actually be resolved by an LND update. So keep an eye out for LND 0.17.5 if you run a Lightning server. Then you can upgrade your Bitcoin daemon. And I wanted to let you know about that because that seems kind of awful.
Music. Moving right along, though, I have one hell of a final clip for you. This is a U.S. senator that feels like it should be headline news. It should be playing on every financial newscast out there. But of course, I've seen no coverage of it. It was just during a Q&A that was live streamed. I mean, I've seen some Bitcoiners talk about it, but nobody in the mainstream, nobody in the financial press has covered that U.S. Senator Cynthia Loomis says that high-ranking government officials feel directly threatened by Bitcoin. Here's the audio. I'll have it linked in the show notes, too.
So the state of play on Capitol Hill is, I think, best explained by what I see as the overarching motivations. innovations. And in this administration, there are a number of high-ranking policy positions that are held by people who are threatened by Bitcoin because they know they can't control it. They know it's decentralized. They know its potential. And these are people that are so wedded to the government being in control of the money, how it's spent, how it's used, that they find it threatening that something exists that they can't control. And so with that policy overarching motivation, we're seeing things like a proposed 30% tax on Bitcoin mining.
We're seeing things like that truly odd regulatory overreach by the EIA, Energy Information Administration over at Energy, to send out questionnaires about mining consumption of energy that was just egregious. And so these are the policy headwinds that the Bitcoin world is facing right now. And it's really, I think, entirely based on this administration's fear of things they can't control. When I think about this, about her statements there, I wonder what the next four years hold for Bitcoin. It's an interesting way to kind of think about time. You know, in 2028 is the next halving.
And then we go down to 1.56 Bitcoin issued. Imagine when we get down to 1.56 Bitcoin. What is one Bitcoin going to be worth at that point? Or what about the 2032 halving? In 2032, the block reward goes to 0.78 Bitcoin. Bitcoin, not even a full Bitcoin in 2028. The price of one Bitcoin is going to go up substantially if the entire reward is less than one Bitcoin. Or even in 2028 when it's 1.5 bitcoins. How will policy change and adapt in that four-year window? What a pressure cooker four years that's going to be for policy, for awareness. I just can't even imagine. I mean, personally, in my life, my oldest will be more than an adult.
He's going to be, you know, all grown up. And I'll have other ones close on the way. The next four years is going to be life-changing for all of us. And it's going to be completely redefining for Bitcoin. And one of the things I'm excited about is podcasting 2.0 is helping normalize sats as a unit of account, which is a critical part of us all accepting it as a medium of exchange. When you boost in, we're going by the sat amounts, you know, a row of ducks, space balls boost. These things are numbers of sats, not their USD value. We don't even internally do the calculation into USD.
Internally, all of our accounting is in Sats. And we're doing that with independent media. I wonder over the next four years how many other places will be doing that. Audiobooks and music, but more. Not just content, perhaps services, companies. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see. But I'm going to leave you with a little value for value music. If you boost in during this track, your Sats go to support the artist. And the artist in this case is June and the Jets. And the track is Leave It Alone. loaned. I hope you had a great happening and I'll see you next week. Music.
Okay, so a lot of people have been talking about the halving, and I want to raise that because the most important thing that people need to understand about the halving is that it marks another milestone in Bitcoin's programmatic monetary policy that is set in stone and completely transparent. Look at the U.S. Our broad money supply increases at about 7% annualized since the 1960s, diluting everyone's savings, everyone's chasing yields, and no one knows what the monetary policy is going to be in four years, much less 10 or 20. With Bitcoin, we know exactly what the supply will be. Everyone can verify it.
And Bitcoin is disinflationary. So as of this halving, it's going to become harder than gold. And with every halving, the American dream is getting cheaper in terms of Bitcoin. My dream home once cost like 600 Bitcoin and then it was 100 and then 50. And now it's approaching single digits because Bitcoin will continue to reprice everything in the existing system. And it's giving a lot of young people hope that they will be able to provide for themselves and for their future descendants. With fiat, they can't do that anymore. Music.
Welcome to episode seven of this week in Bitcoin and happy 2024 happening. This is Bitcoin's fourth happening, just as this episode releases block height 840,000 was just reached. And it's a big one. The minor reward gets cut down to 3.125 Bitcoin, which is down from 6.25. And I feel like Bitcoin is more positioned this epoch than maybe ever before. Like I just see an incredible four years ahead of Bitcoin. Definitely some challenges and some trials, which we will now no doubt document as time goes on, unfortunately. But also, you have a scarcity factor kicking in. That's just, it's getting really, really tight now, whereas the previous halvenings.
We just didn't really see the market demand that was eating up the Bitcoin at this rate because also these ETFs have come out. But also, I can say without a doubt, the end of this epoch is being watched more than ever in Bitcoin's history. In the past, it was only celebrated by a few of the cryptocurrency's biggest cheerleaders. This year, though, the halving is a hot topic. Sometime in the next 12, 18 months, you know, Bitcoin can be over $150,000. Around the halving, where the amount of Bitcoin coming to market is cut in half. After that time period, you see another year of a bull market.
And the reason for all the attention? There are way more people who care about and invest in Bitcoin than there were in 2020 during the last halving. That's thanks to a wave of adoption during the last cycle and new investment options for crypto-curious investors like Spot ETFs. This was the defining moment, I think, of Bitcoin, at least, right, in this era of its history. This was its kind of IPO-like moment. Pandora's box is now open for institutional adoption of the asset class. But also because of the impact it'll have on the mining industry itself, which is almost where it's going to be felt immediately.
Bitcoin miners are preparing for the network's biggest event in four years. We have a halving coming up here, and Riot has a number of ambitious growth plans that we're scaling up our business with. So as the price of Bitcoin appreciates, we should appreciate from that in an outsized way. The rally in Bitcoin really is what's keeping miners in business today when you think about post-halving. The average cost to mine in Bitcoin is somewhere around between $20,000, $25,000 a Bitcoin. Currently, post the halving, that'll go to somewhere between $37,000, $45,000 a Bitcoin, maybe $50,000 a Bitcoin in some cases for some miners.
And with the Bitcoin price being at $67,000, $68,000, $70,000, it means that miners are still mining profitably. Though what it really means is the miners with large scale will be able to mine profitably. The smaller miners will be put under more pressure. This is big. The small miners don't have the capacity to buy up the equipment, the data centers, and failing miners. That's how these larger operations are going to survive, is they will absorb some of the smaller mining operations that couldn't cut it post-having. Large scale will be able to mine profitably. The smaller miners will be put under more pressure.
I think that we will see failures in this space. You know, we already saw in the last market, there were a couple bankruptcies, both in the public and the private space. I think we're going to see that again. So I think that there's going to be great opportunity on an M&A basis. We're thinking about the facilities or the data centers that miners are operating in. If there's a data center full of old equipment that is no longer efficient, we'd love to buy the facility and move in. Oh, they're snapping them up. Marathon mining, all of the big ones are snapping up data centers and contracts.
Just massive, massive head start on this stuff this year because they knew it was coming. It's an uncertain world, but the one thing that's certain is the Bitcoin time chain. So they knew what was coming. You know, it's hard to say what happens from here, where we go from here, other than over time, history shows us usually Bitcoin's price rallies. And that's what makes it sustainable for these miners is they have to make their operations more efficient. Some of them will fail. But generally, you know, 12 to 18 months after the halvening, the price is generally rallied. and that differential makes it possible for these miners that remain to be profitable.
Now, will we see a price rally? It's all a matter of probables, right? We don't really know. It's all probability-based. If the Fed were to cut rates in a month or two, I think it's almost a surefire bet that when you factor in ETF demand, post-halving scarcity, and a rate cut, so money gets looser, liquidity gets free, I think it's, of course, you're going to see a rally. But at this point, with inflation still running hot, I think it's just something that has to be kept on our radar, although it seems like the most unlikely scenario in an election year, but it still remains probable the Fed could always raise rates or not cut rates this year at all, which seems perhaps the most probable to me.
The most probable move, in my opinion, would be to just keep rates where they're at, which keeps inflation running kind of hot. But it's the least political move the Fed could make during an election year. And if they were to cut rates, inflation would start to run hot again. If they were to raise rates, it would be political suicide for the current White House. But it also would be extremely hard on small banks and commercial real estate. And it would also be hard on the average person because credit card rates would go up as well. So there's really no good solution for them.
But if they were to raise rates, it would probably stunt Bitcoin's rally. But I think all of it's just short term. When you zoom out, we're looking at that this is a four-year cycle. And what everybody's talking about today is what this last four years really brought for them. And I think that's kind of a really neat thing about Bitcoin, is that we all get to kind of celebrate this moment together around the world. And I'd like you to boost into the show and tell me what you were doing last happening. Four years ago, were you paying attention? Were you in Bitcoin yet? I flipped through my photos, to kind of look back and see what I was doing and I'll be honest with you, the first photo I came across actually was a sign for COVID that a business put up, a local business here by the studio put up saying, we're closed, but we think we'll be open in two weeks and that business is no longer there.
So I, oh, wow, yeah, okay. okay, that's been a crazy four years. Something else I saw pretty close to that was a photo of our first garden, which we now almost run like a mini farm in the summer. At the last halving, we were starting our first garden. I'd love to know what you were doing or anything major that happened to you during this last epoch and where maybe you see things in 2028. So boost in with that. The halving is a moment for us to reflect, and it's something we all share together because the time chain tells us. Yes, time chain, yes. Something else we're talking a lot about, just moving right along, if I could do a brief transition.
There is concern that high transaction fees will become normal post-Havening because of runes. Now, runes are the creation of Casey Road Armor, who announced the idea on September 25th of 2023 on his blog. And I think it's notable how he started his post. He said, quote, I'm not sure if creating a new fungible token protocol for Bitcoin is a good idea. Fungible tokens are 99.9% scams and memes. However, they don't appear to be going away anytime soon, similar to the way in which casinos don't appear to be going away anytime soon. Creating a good fungible token protocol for Bitcoin might bring significant transaction fee revenue, developer mindshare, and users to Bitcoin.
Additionally, if this protocol had a small on-chain footprint and encouraged responsible UTXO management, it might serve as a harm reduction compared to existing protocols. In other words, people are going to shitcoin, so they might as well shitcoin on Bitcoin. And Bitcoin runes launched with Blockhite 840,000, along with the Havening. Runes utilize unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs, as the foundation to issue fungible tokens and minimize, they say, junk UTXOs that BRC20 tokens and other attempts. Okay, KC is also known for ordinals. So give you a bit of a background there.
The runes protocol uses operaturn to designate the token supply, the ID, and output to a specific UTXO. So a single operaturn output encodes all the rune messages, I call these runestones, in a transaction, including the etching, transferring, and what they call minting. Etching sets the governance rules and they're unchangeable once they're set but you can have some that can be pre-mined i believe you can have some that can be changed and transferred to others some that can't this is all in the etching process now there's a fee increase concern here because, i think people started talking about this when testnet started seeing transaction fees for a brief period of time that were higher than the main net so the testnet that's not really supposed supposed to have many people on it, started seeing higher transaction fees than mainnet.
And that was because people were experimenting with these runes. And Casey puts it pretty well when he ends the blog post, which I'll have linked in the show notes. Casey finishes with, quote, Should such a thing exist? I don't know. It's about as simple as possible. It does not rely on off-chain data. It does not have a native token. And if it's nicely into Bitcoin's native UTXO model, such a scheme might draw users from other schemes with worse on-chain footprints prints and bring developer and user mindshare to Bitcoin, encouraging them to adopt Bitcoin itself. In other words, if we could become the mother asshole over on Bitcoin, perhaps we would drain them from the altcoins.
As Saif has so well put it, Ethereum has really become known as, you know, a meme network. It's for toys. It's tokens. It's junk. Do you classify Ethereum as a shitcoin? For sure. It's the mother asshole from which the shitcoins spring. And, you know, RunePumpers are falling all over themselves, I'll note, to explain that bringing degen behavior to Bitcoin is great for Bitcoin. And they have all these examples of how it'll bring liquidity. It's like we're eating the bottom and we're taking care of some of the stuff and bringing money over and we're going to drain all of the energy out of altcoins and bring them into Bitcoin.
I personally am not so sure about that. But it does seem likely to me that there is a potential reputational harm that could slow adoption among financially illiterate users or potential users of Bitcoin. And they're already spooked by anything to do with crypto. And one of the few things we can genuinely say is Bitcoin is not like any other crypto. But that won't necessarily be true now. So I think it's with great power comes great responsibility. And while it doesn't alter the fundamental monetary asset properties of Bitcoin and the utility of the Bitcoin network and the asset, it does potentially bring a type of behavior and attention we might not want. Then again.
Maybe it will drain attention away from altcoins. Maybe it will bring more developers over. Maybe there's value in deciding some sats are worth more than others. I don't think so. But they have a whole method to determine, like, certain sats are worth more than others. The first sat after the halvening. The first sat after a difficulty adjustment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they have all these names for them and icons and symbols that make them special. And, you know, all these people are just into this. We've seen this kind of thing on Bitcoin many times. It's humans attributing value to individual sats that the Bitcoin network doesn't account for in the protocol or in the code.
It's just humans sort of overlaying that. I don't know. There may be room for that. Where I try to frame it to give you just something to kind of lens this with, say you get married or maybe your offspring gets married or you buy a house or you start a business or some monumental moment in your life. Would you like to enshrine that in the blockchain in the time chain that lasts for say a thousand years that will outlast you and everyone you know is that appealing to sort of somehow, etch it into the blockchain because i think that's sort of the mentality i may have that wrong boosting if you think i've got that wrong but i think that's the appeals like you're saving this thing forever in the blockchain and unlike nfts where they're really just a url pointing to a jpeg on an HTTP endpoint, we're actually loading this crap into the blockchain, I think.
So, you know, my node and your node is going to store it too. All right, moving right along. I'm going to try to remain open-minded, but that's my initial take on Runes. I'd like to hear yours. Coming up, your boost, some big project updates, clip of the week I really want you to hear, and a value for value track. But first, I want to thank Podhome.fm. That's my podcasting 2.0 hosting platform. I've seen many of you out there try it and love it. You get unlimited shows and episodes. It's got Podhome AI that'll help you automatically generate chapters, go through and even suggest titles and descriptions if you like.
Like, and it has the easiest live streaming support for podcasting 2.0 with the audio hosting built right in. The UI makes it easy for remote elements like value-for-value music. Try it for free for three months. Use my promo code TWIB at pothome.fm. Promo code TWIB at pothome.fm, the best podcasting 2.0 hosting platform. And a big thank you to pothome.fm for sponsoring this here show. If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator. Now we do have some boosts to get into this week. Thank you, everybody. And Satsquatch is our baller booster this week with 50,000 sats. Hey, rich lobster!
And he writes, Chris, I'm curious how many Bitcoin you traded for your studio gear. I'm sure it was worth it at the time more content on mining please appreciate all your coverage and tight show format well thank you for being our baller booster satsquash you're not going to believe me but i i think at the time it might have been almost four bitcoin for everything maybe more uh it was complicated, it's complicated it was not an ideal situation i suppose in retrospect uh i may have you know in total it was probably more than that though over the years there was really this mentality of you've got to sell your Bitcoin.
That was really the big pushback then, is you've got to sell your Bitcoin. You've got to make it the next PayPal. And yeah, well, you're welcome. My contribution to the price. Are you okay? Deestalo, probably don't have that right, comes in with 35,769 sats. Aloha, Chris Lass. I've been a listener since the early Linux Action Show days. Great work. I miss some of the breadth you covered with Dad, but I love the new show too. I think it's just the right I think it's just right content wise and I love the boost section and the jingles by the Way, this is a reverse zip code boost.
Oh, ho ho or let me bust out the map here I'm not as good with this as Wes's Oh out right in the eyeball Oh down an eyeball, okay I'm thinking is this Hawaii is this right? Oh? You'll have to tell me, Deestaloo. I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. I don't. Oh, Aloha, though. Ah, ha, ha. You did say Aloha. I think this is right. Well, that's cool. Okay, so I'm not super good with this, but yeah. Hello, Hawaii. Tell me where. Educate me more because that sounds awesome. And can I come visit? I'm sure everybody says that, right? Cdubs comes in with 33,333 sats. That's a nice one. Lucky 33 says, love the show. Keep it up.
Thank you, Cdubs. Well, I will appreciate that. Apisary 17 comes in with 32,768 sats. Keep the change, you filthy animal. Says, I'm still loving the show. Don't lose heart, Chris. I ran out of sats last week, so I couldn't boost. Here's eight theoretical max size blocks worth. You know, we should have, oh man, I should have come up with some sort of like unique boost amount for the Havening. Everybody loves the unique SAT numbers, right? I should have done that. I do like the numerology. I can't lie. That is a great part of it. Red Sheep comes in with 25,000 SATs. Coming in hot with the boost.
Just enjoyed the breakdown. I love the episode. And don't be downtrodden about your views or boost. Consistency is the key. My pod is one year and growing slow. That's true, Red Sheep. Consistency does help a lot. And I missed a couple of weeks in here because I launched this show because the Bitcoin dad came to an end. The ETFs were coming around the halvening was around I was like I just I felt like I want to keep the momentum going, but of course it's also silly season here I'm about to go into my third convention in less than a month or so and I'm losing track we have people coming to town I just got back from Texas which was great.
You know, I've talked to a lot of listeners down there that are figuring out Bitcoin. That's pretty encouraging. So those are just a lot of moving pieces. But I think you're right. As the year goes on, consistency will be key as we grind it out to the next happening, right? Because we've got four more years now. It's going to be a little while, boys. Strap in. It's going to take us a minute. The Podfather comes in with 25,000 sats. But that's not possible. Nothing can do that. He writes, a restaurant that I liked but didn't frequent often here in town closed last week. I felt horrible I hadn't supported them more regularly.
Same holds true for podcasts that I value. Boosting for your week off as well. Zoofication of podcasts? Okay, boomer, he says. Yeah, you get them. You get them. I agree. Make it so. Some people, you know, they just don't like the sound effects. I think they're anti-radio in general. Anything that reminds them of radio. I know what you mean, though, about supporting a restaurant in your local town, Podfather. There was a brewery that I loved. I did hold one meetup there, but I just never had the time to go. They had good snacks. They even had a spot for the kiddos to hang out and play games and, you know, do things that were not screen related while they also brewed beer.
And it was just ideally the perfect, oh, and it was dog friendly. So I could bring the doggo, but they shut down. You know, they survived through most of the pandemic, but they shut down. And I felt really bad. I had that same sensation like, oh, I should have gone like once a week or something. And I should have made it part of my routine. And now I have to drive by their empty building. So, point well taken. Gotta support it while we can. Thank you, sir. Wise Hoddle comes in with 12,121 sats. Almost, almost a Spaceballs boost. Smoke if you got him. This is a great breakdown of the argument last week. I appreciate hearing Roger's take and then your counterpoints.
I like the format more than the one-sided rants you basically hear everywhere else. Thank you. Yeah, I do try to, if I can, always try to get audio from the source. If you ever do see clips that you think would be great on the show, please do consider boosting them in or linking them to me in the matrix. I really do appreciate that. That is very, very handy because collecting the media, trying to get good stuff that you guys actually want to hear, it's all part of the game. Podhome comes in. Our sponsor and our platform for hosting comes in with 5,100 sets. This is a great episode. I'm working on my way up to storing several Bitcoin long-term for my kids. Any tips for the best ways to do that?
I'm thinking 10 plus years of storage. Boy, there's a lot of ways to crack that one. I think you do it through graduated types of holdings. So the first bit, you don't really worry too much. You could probably even keep it on a hot wallet. I will say, I think GreenWallet from Blockstream is actually really great for this because you can have multiple sub-wallets in the app. And it supports the ability to restrict spending after two-factor authentication. So what I do is I'll stack sometimes in there for my kids, But I can't spend any of it unless they give me the two-factor code from a code generator on their device. So I can add Bitcoin.
They can check balances, but they don't spend it, and I can't spend it without that two-factor code. So the Blockstream wallet is pretty nice for that because you can also get a hardware wallet with it. There is also that ability to potentially you might consider stacking in Liquid. The Aqua wallet can be really great for that. and then moving to on-chain once the amount is worth moving on-chain. And there's also things like, you know, graduating to a cold card after it's a considerable amount of Bitcoin and then giving that to them at a certain age. Those are things that are all in my mind and methods.
But it's a great topic. How do you stack for family? What are your, what does anybody, if anybody else out there has some tips on how they would stack for family, please do consider sending that in. I think that'd be a great thing to crowdsource for the show. So thank you for the boost, Pothome. Ace Ackerman comes in with 2,468 sats. Value for Value Episode 5 and Value for Value Episode 6. Two boosts for both shows. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Gene Bean comes in with Row of Ducks, 2,222 sats. Boosting just because I want this show to continue. Thank you, Gene Bean. I miss you. It was good seeing you back at scale.
Hope you're doing well, and thank you for the boost. Hybrid Sarcasm comes in with 10,000 sats. It's over 9,000! He says, keep the soundboard. Well, thank you very much. Dexord comes in with 9,134 sats. I had to come back and re-listen because I remembered loving this episode and hearing you say that it sucked. So it made me do a double take. I get... That's the one I didn't like. I get lost listening. I love hearing all this color and context around Bitcoin and finance. I don't get anywhere else. So please don't stop. Well, good. If you like the bad episodes, Dex, then you should really like the good ones, I hope.
It says all episodes have been great so far. You, sir, are too kind. I am also my worst critic. That is definitely, that's the way you got to be, really, for this kind of stuff. You kind of want to be your worst critic because otherwise somebody else will. And you might as well get to it before they do, I say. Oppie 1984 comes in with 4,000 stats. B-O-O-S-T. My first boost for episode 5 failed. and I didn't catch it. I was low on sets, but I'll catch up later. The TLDR for my message was, um. Oh, posting the show at the end of the week works best for me, but do whatever works best for the show. Yeah, I am still pulling.
I have experimented. I got to say, the earlier release in the weeks do seem to do slightly better, but it's also going to be topic-wise. I'm just going to keep at it. This one, I'm timing with the halvening, so it's nice to just say, okay, well, once we hit block height 840,000, that's when I'm releasing the episode. You know what? I like that timescale better. Lazy Locks came in with 7,000 sats to say, keep on going. Appreciate that. 5,000 sats from 21 is enough just to say strong emoji. Thank you, sir. Really appreciate that boost. And my frio comes in with 2,845 sats to say cheers and keep the soundboard.
Enjoy your dang show. Make it so. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Sir Alex Gates, the podcasting to-do-do consultant comes in with 4,096 sats. Hey, citizen. How many want to spend have already moved to Monero? Or many who want to spend have already moved to Monero. The adaptive block size is working and I believe the correct solution for the foreseeable future. See coin cards and shop and bit usage statistics, for example. Unfortunately, the low transaction bandwidth on layer one Bitcoin will always stunt future possibilities.
I'm a big proponent of Arctic Minds scaling arguments from Monero's core team. I just can't imagine that Monero will ever be a large store of value. Because of the inability to audit, because I think the world wants a counter option to the banking system, which is opaque and full of rot and corruption. They want something transparent, audible, something where the rules are known by everybody. And Monero is really useful in privacy sense, but it's not useful in an auditability and store of value sense. And I continue to make the argument, which was the counter-argument to Roger and the big blockers, that you do not get to a currency and a medium of exchange before you get to a store of value.
You have to get to a store of value first because this has to be worth something, and it has to be worth a lot likely, and we all kind of have to agree on what it's worth before we can start trading it for in real life goods and time and services. You don't get to the point without some sort of agreement, and we see it. We're seeing that price discovery. We've been witnessing it. But we're not done yet. And I don't think we have to rush that part of it. And I maintain we may not get to see it in our lifetime. Monero is useful, but its price will always fluctuate. It'll always be hard to totally nail down what it's worth.
Because the scarcity cannot be fully accounted for. And I think the idea that we can't use Layer 2s or side chains or Fetamins or whatever. Is very challengeable. I think I could argue that we can and that layer twos and side chains and things like Fetament are actually perhaps going to be exactly the direction things go and should always have been. Much like HTTP is built on top of TCP IP. You don't get HTTP without TCP IP, but we're not all just sitting here, you know, sending things via UDP directly to each other. That's just not, yeah, the applications that are built on top of the internet, maybe speaking UDP or TCP, right?
But I'm not. I'm not opening up my terminal and doing it directly. I'm using an application that's talking to that stack. And there's even a middleman called the operating system in between there. And then you have TCP, the base layer. I know it's a rough analogy, and I wouldn't try to build a big case on that analogy, but I do think it's worth considering. And it's a lens worth looking at this, Alex, is you do not get to a medium of exchange without it being a store of value. And we're very deeply in the store of value learning process. And I could see it lasting our entire lifetimes as we just try to process something that's new and that's different.
But I'd love to know if you think differently and how do we get to a unit of exchange if we don't all universally agree that it's a store of value first. I think that would be an interesting conversation. I'd love to hear if you have thoughts on that. Tomato comes in with 5,555 sats. Stay a while and listen. He says, LUP subscriber here. I finally read up enough on Lightning that I'm convinced of Bitcoin as something that might work out for sending value. I'm very happy to have the Bitcoin podcast from a trusted name in the free software group. I'd like to start moving some of my money into Bitcoin, but for a newcomer, the software is a bit intimidating.
You've been dropping recommendations here and there for years, but I'd love to have the Chris Fisher recommendation for Bitcoin-related software in 2024. I want desktop self-custodial wallet that you trust and any advice for someone getting into it that my newbie is trying to read up. Should I just set up a node myself for the first 1,000 euros? What's a completely open source stack that you trust with convenience as an important consideration distinctly after the first two? Cheers, fans of Linux Action Show. Man, that's a big question. Boy, I could do a whole episode on that. Let me see if I can get through this pretty quick. Two things you need to come to a decision about really kind of off the top.
Are you okay with KYC, which is know your customer, where they're going to identify you and your purchases will be linked to your Bitcoin. That doesn't necessarily mean anybody will do anything with it, but in theory, the IRS or somebody could subpoena where you bought your Bitcoin from or whatever, you know, you know, national security letter, then whatever it might be and say, uh, how many Bitcoin did this Chris guy buy? You know, or in your case, how many Bitcoin did tomato buy? Maybe you go buy tomato. And, uh, then they'd say, well, you know, um, We see this large dollar amount.
It seems like maybe you made a sale and didn't report on your taxes. What's going on here? You know, they can make a connection like that. KYC, though, does have the benefit of being simple. You can tie it to your bank account. It's probably the most straightforward way if you just want to do what's called a DCA, daily cash average, where you just make a small reoccurring purchase, either like once a day or once a week, and you kind of average out the volatility. That generally only happens when you KYC. There are services, if you don't want to have your identity tied to it, like RoboSats that are on tour that are really straightforward to use, but you'll have to jump through at least some more hoops.
Remember, you are buying outside a system. You are working inside a closed system, and you are trying to buy outside that into an open system. To get there, you have to go through the closed system's gates. They determine what information and what you give them in order to go through those gates, much like going through a border in a country. RoboSats kind of bypasses all of that, but you'll have to buy smaller amounts and there'll be a premium for the privacy and you'll have to get a Tor browser and probably want to go read the RoboSats learning website. So you'll have to make a decision how you want to acquire your Bitcoin.
If you want to use the KYC route, I like River a lot. Not a sponsor. I don't get paid to say that. I just think River is a good company and they have lightning withdrawals, which can help your privacy and reduce your fees. My personal recommendation would be to stack more than a million sats, it's your kind of determination what's a high value, but more than a million sats in river, transfer it over Lightning into Liquid using bolts.exchange, consolidate in Liquid for a little bit longer, then move it to something like the Sparrow wallet that's using a cold card or some other hardware wallet that you like.
You'll have to create that wallet first with your cold card before you start moving into it. These are all the self-custodial ways you can do it. There's a lot of in-between. I want to be clear that you shouldn't make perfect the enemy of the good, especially when you're just trying to get started. When you're just dealing with a couple hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars worth, you don't need to invent your own Fort Knox before you get started. You don't necessarily need to go that far. If you enjoy it like I do and you want to run a node like you asked, something like Start9 or Umbral is a pretty straightforward approach.
Umbral is going through some major changes right now. you might wait them out and just see where they're at in six months because they're doing major updates. They look like it's good stuff, good changes for the platform. Start9, a bit more solid, a little bit slower changes, a little bit more, I'd say, limited scope in what they're trying to accomplish, but they're nailing doing a Bitcoin node. That's the Start9 OS. If you are really technical, and you know what we're doing here at JB, Nick's Bitcoin cannot be beat. It is a appliance-level Bitcoin node.
It will only change When you iterate, those changes will be built and tested before they're deployed, and it has snapshot rollbacks if something goes wrong. I mean, it is the best way to go if your NIC's comfortable. I would probably recommend start 9 just to get started, though. That's as fast as I can try to go through it. That's a big question to ask, and if people are more interested in that, if people are at that spot and they want more information, I would absolutely consider in the future doing like a special episode on it, perhaps when I'm traveling, and we could go through there. Now, Tomato, so that was from Tomato.
Not even kidding. Now, Tomato with an H comes in with a Spaceballs boost. So the combination is one, two, three, four, five. That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life. They added an H and they said, I just wanted to send a little more value for the show. Well, thank you very much, Tomato. I hope you found my answer useful. I know I blasted through that really quick. If you have clarifying questions, please feel free to boost them in and I will try to dedicate time to answering them. Just figure out if you want KYC or not. That's know your customer. If you want to do it private or not, and you're willing to pay a premium for that, that'd be RoboSats.
If you're comfortable with the identification, like this is more of an investment, not like a rebel money for you, then I'd probably recommend River. There's other really great companies out there, but I think River's been doing it really well for a while. And then you can build it up from there. You don't have to have it all solved at once. And you have time to read. And Sparrow, by the way, the Sparrow wallet has some great documentation. Definitely go check that out. Okay, well, we got 3,222 sats from Faraday Fedora. This old duck still got it.
So sorry, man, I've been stacking, not zapping lately, but the content has been great. Thank you very much. Rounding it out now, Bob B takes us out with 5,000 sats. Boost! Chris, Oak and a self-hosted lightning node was an interesting experiment, but I don't think I want to maintain my own node. It's crashed twice now, and I had to recover it, And I think there's got to be a better way. I really like sending stats automatically, though, because I rarely have anything to say. But I wanted to send the love. Got any recommendations for something like Oak that would work with custodial Lightning wallets? Thanks, Bob.
So Bob's been a longtime booster who set up automated boosts using Oak, where it just sort of uses a schedule like Cron to send a boost a certain amount of time. But as you heard, he had some problems there. There really should be a better automated way, Bob. Bob, some platforms like TrueFans are building that in. And, you know, you could probably really accomplish it with streaming sats if you just upped it. But I do love hearing from you from time to time. It makes me really happy to know you're still out there, Bob. I got to say, I wasn't sure if you were still listening. And I think about you boosters.
You make an impression on us. So I really appreciate that you just took a moment to let me know what you're up to. And if anybody has a recommendation for automated boosting over the lighting network. Let me know. I definitely look into that. We had a bunch of other great boosts under the 2,000 on-air cutoff, but I cut off at 2,000 sats just to make sure we don't go on forever in this segment. But we had 25 boosters, 34 total boosts sent in. That's not bad at all. And we stacked 294,948 sats. Thank you, everybody. That is much better this week. I really appreciate it. But as the hustle continues, I appreciate those boosts.
If you'd like to send a boost in to support this individual production, send a little value. If you got good information, you enjoyed the listen, you want to see the show continue on, Value for Value is a great way to support an episode either with your treasure, your time, or your talent. And a lot of us these days, we're very busy, but we can send a few sats in. Go get a new podcast app at podcastapps.com. Bunch of great apps over there. Fountain is cranking out changes like crazy. They just got a brand new release that improves the UI a little bit and performance. Podverse.fm is a GPL cross-platform app that is also available in the web.
And if you like to finish podcasts at your desk on your big speakers like I do, that's a huge feature. And Castomatic is one of the best podcast players on iOS, hands down. So those are some great podcasting 2.0 apps that also support boosts, transcripts, and chapters, which this show does. Those are all podcasting 2.0 features. It's an open standard that makes podcasting better and compete with proprietary platforms because that's what. We're trying to do here is offer something better that is decentralized. It doesn't have to, you don't have to go on YouTube. You don't have to use Discord.
You don't have to use Spotify. We're doing it in the RSS feed. It is the source of truth and you can support that and the creators in the podcasting 2.0 ecosystem by sending in a boost, by listening and by sharing the show. Thank you, everybody that does that. Music. Well, how about some project updates? This first one, not so much a big project update, but good for projects in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Fake Toshi Craig Wright is discontinuing his case against 12 Bitcoin developers and other individuals that he was suing in the UK high court. The end of this lawsuit signifies the conclusion of Wright's nearly 10-year-long strategy of trying to intimidate and harass good people doing good work in the Bitcoin ecosystem. system.
And this is a major victory for Bitcoin developers who are being chased and haunted by this man. The tulip trading case, as it was known, has been an existential complication for Bitcoin for quite some time. That's how I'm putting it. I don't want to give the man too much credit, but it's been like, you know, you got a sore butt and every time you sit down, you hurt yourself. Wright's decision to drop the lawsuit came shortly after a distinct victory for the Bitcoin developers associated with this UK lawsuit known as the Identity Trial. Also, Hodlnaut, who was being sued, found out that Wright is dropping the case against him as well, which is great.
That was a ridiculous case. And Wright has had his assets frozen, which are worth around $7.6 million somehow. I don't know how, but somehow. Hopefully that's the last I ever have to talk about that man. I've been talking about him for way, way too long, and I try to keep it as minimal as possible. Heads up for those of you that run on the Lightning LND demon and are looking at upgrading to the new Bitcoin Core 27. This is developing. It appears that an update to LND will be released soon that addresses an issue. There is essentially an incompatibility between Bitcoin D version 27 and LND 17.4.
So LND 0.17.5 will be released soon, probably maybe by the time you're hearing this, to address this issue. But But until then, you should hold off on upgrading Bitcoin D27 because transaction broadcasts will fail. And your Lightning Network is not going to like that. Your Bitcoin is not going to like that. Nothing is going to like that. It's a little issue with the RPC code in Bitcoin D's recipient in BTC JSON library. And the issue will actually be resolved by an LND update. So keep an eye out for LND 0.17.5 if you run a Lightning server. Then you can upgrade your Bitcoin daemon. And I wanted to let you know about that because that seems kind of awful.
Music. Moving right along, though, I have one hell of a final clip for you. This is a U.S. senator that feels like it should be headline news. It should be playing on every financial newscast out there. But of course, I've seen no coverage of it. It was just during a Q&A that was live streamed. I mean, I've seen some Bitcoiners talk about it, but nobody in the mainstream, nobody in the financial press has covered that U.S. Senator Cynthia Loomis says that high-ranking government officials feel directly threatened by Bitcoin. Here's the audio. I'll have it linked in the show notes, too.
So the state of play on Capitol Hill is, I think, best explained by what I see as the overarching motivations. innovations. And in this administration, there are a number of high-ranking policy positions that are held by people who are threatened by Bitcoin because they know they can't control it. They know it's decentralized. They know its potential. And these are people that are so wedded to the government being in control of the money, how it's spent, how it's used, that they find it threatening that something exists that they can't control. And so with that policy overarching motivation, we're seeing things like a proposed 30% tax on Bitcoin mining.
We're seeing things like that truly odd regulatory overreach by the EIA, Energy Information Administration over at Energy, to send out questionnaires about mining consumption of energy that was just egregious. And so these are the policy headwinds that the Bitcoin world is facing right now. And it's really, I think, entirely based on this administration's fear of things they can't control. When I think about this, about her statements there, I wonder what the next four years hold for Bitcoin. It's an interesting way to kind of think about time. You know, in 2028 is the next halving.
And then we go down to 1.56 Bitcoin issued. Imagine when we get down to 1.56 Bitcoin. What is one Bitcoin going to be worth at that point? Or what about the 2032 halving? In 2032, the block reward goes to 0.78 Bitcoin. Bitcoin, not even a full Bitcoin in 2028. The price of one Bitcoin is going to go up substantially if the entire reward is less than one Bitcoin. Or even in 2028 when it's 1.5 bitcoins. How will policy change and adapt in that four-year window? What a pressure cooker four years that's going to be for policy, for awareness. I just can't even imagine. I mean, personally, in my life, my oldest will be more than an adult.
He's going to be, you know, all grown up. And I'll have other ones close on the way. The next four years is going to be life-changing for all of us. And it's going to be completely redefining for Bitcoin. And one of the things I'm excited about is podcasting 2.0 is helping normalize sats as a unit of account, which is a critical part of us all accepting it as a medium of exchange. When you boost in, we're going by the sat amounts, you know, a row of ducks, space balls boost. These things are numbers of sats, not their USD value. We don't even internally do the calculation into USD.
Internally, all of our accounting is in Sats. And we're doing that with independent media. I wonder over the next four years how many other places will be doing that. Audiobooks and music, but more. Not just content, perhaps services, companies. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see. But I'm going to leave you with a little value for value music. If you boost in during this track, your Sats go to support the artist. And the artist in this case is June and the Jets. And the track is Leave It Alone. loaned. I hope you had a great happening and I'll see you next week. Music.
Understanding the Bitcoin Halving
Episode Seven: The Fourth Halving
Impact on the Mining Industry
Listener Boosts and Comments
Storing Bitcoin Long-Term
Green Wallet for Family Stacking
Crowdsource Family Stacking Tips
Bitcoin Software Recommendations
Project Updates
Senator on Bitcoin Threat
Normalizing Sats as Unit of Account
