Bitcoin faces two major headwinds: memecoin mania draining liquidity and gold’s price run pulling in capital. But tides may be turning. I break down why these trends matter and what’s shifting.
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- Argentina's Milei Faces Fraud Charges, Impeachment Calls After Failed Memecoin Launch
- Solana (SOL) Plummets 45% in 30 Days
- Transfers of physical gold from the Bank of England to New York is now exceeding the panic during the COVID-19 crisis.
- The Hidden Crisis Behind Gold’s Surge | Paper Gold Collapse? - YouTube
- Is Global Gold Shortage Brewing? Real Reason Behind Gold Flooding Out of London to U.S. | Josh Phair - YouTube
- Gold bars flown on commercial flights in rush to get to U.S. | Financial Post
- Gold Market Ructions Drive Singapore Exports to the US - Bloomberg
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- ODELL on Nostr RE: Bitwise Donations
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Unknown:
Yeah, but, Raul, if I created my own Mikey coin and then I pumped it on Twitter. And I dumped it on the retail population after I gave a bunch to a celebrity who then told the world it was great, it's illegal and it's unethical. Music. Welcome to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 47. My name is Chris, chrisles.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Does the air smell just a bit better this week? Maybe things seem a little cleaner. I don't know. Maybe the stink has started to clear. This week, Bitcoiners are eating their vegetables and it's going to be worth it. We are making investments this week we don't even realize.
I'm going to get into the two big things that have to change before Bitcoin price and user adoption really starts to rip again. You know, I think at this point, a lot of people thought Bitcoin would be around $120,000, $130,000, $150,000. And I say that because I was looking at the IBIT futures and the options and people were betting for quite a while, at least in December, on 120K Bitcoin at this point in time, if you were looking at the ETF options. The market thought we'd be much further along. I think a lot of us did. But instead, we've gotten sideways price action for a while.
And it's even happening when we're seeing bullish after bullish news. I mean, things that are like realignment of the federal government and their priority around crypto, institutional adoption, sovereign state adoption, all these things that are just massive tether coming to lightning and Fidelity this week saying the lightning delivers on the promise of truly being able to use digital currencies for day to day transactions. But Bitcoin's recent correlation with the S&P 500 has dropped to zero. What's significant about that is it means Bitcoin is not moving with macro market anymore. And yeah, I've been talking about why we should kind of expect this to break from macro for a while. But I'm starting to see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
And like I said, I think we have these two things we have to get knocked down before the situation really begins to shift for Bitcoin. And one of those two things seems to have at least begun to tumble this week. Okay, let's talk about the top stories. Argentinian President Javier Malay is reportedly under investigation for a crypto token that plunged shortly after he promoted it in a now-deleted X-post. That's according to Reuters, which reports that a judge will examine whether the president engaged in fraud when he praised Libra token. Now, the project claimed to stimulate economic development for Argentinian businesses, but data from DexScreener shows the token lost more than $4 billion in value from its February 17th peak.
A legal complaint was also brought forward by a local nonprofit group calling it the biggest rug pull in history. Now, in response to the controversy, President Malay's government, X-Account, shared that the office of the president would launch an urgent investigation into the launch of the Libra cryptocurrency, including businesses and people involved in its operation. In an interview with YouTuber CopyZilla, Kelsier Ventures CEO Hayden Davis claimed he launched the Libra token in what he said was a plan gone miserably wrong. He also claimed to be behind the launch of Melania Trump's meme coin.
We'll get more into Hayden here in a moment. I think it's interesting that Solana, which these meme coins run on top of, has plummeted 45% in the last 30 days. They're basically having their own mini FTX collapse over there. And it's really accelerated after this Miele Libra coin scam came to light. And, you know, these scam meme coins, they have been sold to buyers over and over again as a fair launch. I think this is something you have to appreciate about the type of buyer who's buying these meme coins. They think it's a more transparent thing, not like those crazy VC IPOs.
Oh, no, this is a new world. It's transparent. It's on chain. It's a social revolution in finance. Don't you see? But time after time, there's always been a pre-mine. There's always insiders playing with the market to get rich. and now the wider non-Bitcoin crypto community, is starting to figure this out the hard way. And you heard that clip there mentioned CoffeeZilla's interview. I'll link to the full thing. It's long. So I pulled out just a couple of moments that you need to know about. And this first one underscores the fundamental flaw in the entire meme coin market and why it's always 100% of the time a scam against retail.
A lot of this has turned into some of the wallets which are being linked back to you are linked to wallets which sniped the coins that you launched, right? So in the case of Libra. I want to pause here because this term sniping has been really kind of degraded into this general shitcoin or meme term. And so when they use the term sniping here, now I'm not a meme coin expert, but to the best of my understanding, what you're really talking about is automated buying and selling, essentially dumping on the market at targeted times and also strategic buying to drive the price up at particular moments, to manipulate the market into going harder and going further.
And this sniping practice is also, it happened on the Trump coin, happened on the Melania coins. It happens on all of them. And as we get into the clip, it's just expected that retail is going to get screwed with. There's the wallet which Dave got refunded by, which is, according to him, your personal funds. Dave being Dave Portnoy, which we'll cover in a moment. Was linked to an avalanche wallet, which was funded like a sniper of Libra. But if you launch the coin, isn't it unfair for you to snipe the coin? So I would say no. And I would say that for a couple different reasons.
Number one, a lot of the times... Now, before I let him continue, keep in mind that this quote unquote sniping they're doing is being done with their pre-mined coin. So they launch the Libra coin and then they have some estimates as much as 90% of a pre-mine. That's how unbalanced this is. And they have a bunch of different wallets, treasury wallets, sniping wallets that have, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of coins in them, I don't know, that never get exposed to the market. Then retail comes in, they pay for every one of their Libra coins. They buy every one of them all the way up to $5. The thing ran to $5 for a moment.
They pay for every single one of those. But then the creator of the coin comes in with his own pre-mine and quote unquote snipes the market and essentially manipulates the market with the pre-mine funds. Either taking liquidity in or out. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's extremely unethical. I would say no. And I, and I would say that for a couple of different reasons. Number one, a lot of the times when, and again, this is like, I mean, again, it's a much larger conversation, which is what I told you in text, but most of the time when worse a, I have lots of, I have, I have different money in different places, obviously, but from the standpoint of sniping.
Most of the time when we're sniping, we're attempting to avoid other snipers getting in. We're sniping so that way nobody else can snipe. We're sniping to protect the user. Right? So whether that's, and I, by the way, I don't conduct snipes. I'm not a dev. I just want to throw that out there for like, I don't even know how to. Generally, because of the speed and dynamics of these meme coin markets, the purchasing and selling like this, this manipulation has to be done with a bot. That's why he says, I'm not a dev. I can't do those things because you have to be able to write a bot and set up to do these things.
There's probably, I would imagine, dozens or more out there that are pre-written, but you probably still have to alter them somewhat to get API credentials, et cetera. So the only people that are really taking advantage of this high-level manipulation are the very people that are writing the coin code, like the people that are actually developers. And then you have this tier of middle management who do the sales and the community outreach to influencers, and that's who this guy is. I don't like if you told if you if you put me in front of a computer and had me try and figure out a snipe I don't I don't even know what I've never done a bot I don't know any of that shit but you you're not denying that Wallace link to you snipe Libra but you're just saying you didn't do it to link to the project I wouldn't say link to me I would say no link to the the wallet which refunded Dave which Dave said was your personal funds that just so that just happened to be at the time of stress where we moved money from but that was just a mistake i mean if anything because like what like in in that particular case all i would do is like that money when it went back into the chart it would just flow through another wallet back into the chart like that money that back into the chart is his cute way of saying you know injecting money injecting coins into the market money that we consider sniping quote-unquote is the project's money right that's how we that's how we do it for I mean and anytime we've done it that's how we do it and the most of the time the snipe is to deter and if there's enough volume on the project we use it so that it has the ability to continue on.
And I think that's very hard for people to understand. I will agree with that. I think that is going to be hard to understand. Because you have like, look, right? You have, and I'll give you a great example. If you look at Trump and you look at the snipes, right? Trump had so much volume, the snipes didn't matter. They made zero difference. No, that will, wait, hang on. That's not true. There was a guy who sniped early for $1 million. dollars the big crash in melania that everyone attributes to melania was actually that sniper selling like tens of millions of dollars of like like the one that did like 84 mil right yeah yeah yeah i well yeah i mean i we we could argue all day my point is sniping when you're the team i'm not saying it always should happen but i'm saying a lot of times it's to protect and and if there's enough volume, take some off so that people can have a chance to pump the chart back up.
I mean, just take all this in for a moment. He's saying it's standard practice. We're just pumping the charts. It's not a big deal. And if we don't do it, somebody else will. That's my favorite part. The system is so corrupt that if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it anyways. But you know, this is a new kind of revolution, a social revolution in finance. I just love that. Now, of course, he's got a real problem. I mean, he effed around and found out with the president of Argentina, who's now under investigation. And he's also leaked screenshots saying that if he sends the Argentina president Malay's sister money, he'll sign and do anything for the Hayden guy that we just heard from.
He claims the president of Argentina will do anything for him if he sends money to the president's sister. So those screenshots, this guy's in a lot of trouble. He's going to have people coming after him. He's going to have the Trump administration watching this closely. This is not going to be good. And this radical transparency that he's opted for is completely crushing, as it should, the meme coin market. And so there's this question of the money. There's been some money he's earned and he's sitting on top of it. Of course, they might not get all their money back. Because I have people who are like, hey, send me a million and a half dollars. I go kill your family.
So I still have those people to deal with. Regardless if I refund the money, are you? Of course not. But now I have to protect my whole fucking family. No, well, the first thing you should do is get the money out of your hands. You need to go to a reputable firm. You need to set up a legal structure to get this money out of your hands. So you, Hayden, do not have access. Like part of the reason you're scared is because you do have access to $100 million. Sure, but that's also, yeah, correct. But if I'm being extremely transparent, honest, that's also my leverage with certain groups and parties.
The fact that I have control is also what's making me a target and also protecting me because this is an international incident. This isn't like some random fucking scam. This isn't a scam. This is a plan gone very wrong at a presidential level. Actually, I agree with you. It is a plan. So if I custody it with somebody else, even if it's a trusted third party, I lose my leverage. So until – and I told you off the record what I think is going to happen or maybe it was on. I don't even remember at this point, until I have answers from Javier Malay, until I have answers from his group, until I get an actual real game plan.
This is why I gave it a 48-hour window. It was like, until somebody presents a great plan besides some bullshit thing where it's going to take six months, if that's the right plan, I'll do it. No problem. Don't care. 100%. We'll give custody over. I don't give a fuck. I don't want anything to do with this at all. Zero. He later goes on to say, but I think probably the best plan is that I just inject the money back into the Libre market and let people buy in again. And then the next day after he said that, President Malay, after deleting his tweet, went back and retweeted another one of his previous tweets about how to buy Libra coin.
And the idiot DGN meme coin market aped back in. And guys like Dave Portnoy are so Neanderthal stupid, they have no idea what they're doing. They're just trying to make a buck as fast as possible. They're not looking into anything. They don't consider any fundamentals. Yeah. Sometimes they end up buying the wrong coin when they're trying to ape. Quick update from the trenches. Malay, let's fucking leave this fucking league. Malay tweets how to buy Libra like he's back in on this fucking Libra. So I'm like, I'm back in on Libra. Only problem dumping money in. Only problem I'm buying the wrong Libra.
I'm now 200 deep into the wrong fucking Libra. I guess I'm the owner of long Libra these trenches. I'm crawling. I'm crawling. I'm crawling. I'm crawling. I own a million of fake Libra. Fake Libra to the moon. And then he tweets asking if anybody wants to buy it off of him. He didn't even realize he was buying the wrong meme coin until he posted a screenshot of his purchase and somebody else on X pointed out that he bought the wrong coin. This is so stupid. and the oxygen is quickly evaporating from this market, and just like a perfect moment in time, it couldn't have landed better.
Adam Curry, the podfather, went on the Joe Rogan podcast, right as kind of all this stuff was going down. The timing, chef's kiss. And you know, I've complained before that guys like Pomp have had a hard time explaining the difference between meme coins and Bitcoin. And well, the podfather, he just went right to the heart of the matter. Speaking of scamming, what do you think about shit coins? Like what's your take on like Hakua coin, and Melania coin, and Trump coin. Those are more meme coins. Shit coins, right? Isn't that what a meme coin is? So the only coin I believe in is Bitcoin. And we've talked about this before.
Right. In fact, I looked it up, hoping you would bring it up. Two years ago when I was here the last time, Bitcoin was around $40,000. Today it's close to $100,000. Damn. Look at the Podfather doing a little bit of prep before the show, right? And I want to play this because it's also a ginormous audience, an influential podcast in front of a ginormous audience. And it sounds to me like Rogan has Bitcoin buying. Last time, Bitcoin was around $40,000. Today, it's close to $100,000. This will continue to go up until we're long gone. It's very interesting. So, I don't believe in shit coins at all because if you have, Bitcoin has no CEO. There's no one in charge of it.
It's literally tens of thousands of people around the world who run these nodes that make it open and make it run and keep it at this 21 million coin limit. I'm totally down with Bitcoin. I'm with you. Good. But I think the shit coin thing is fascinating that anybody can create a coin. Yeah. You know, like Jamie has a pull it up Jamie coin. I don't know if you know that. I did not make it. Don't put that on me. Do not. It's out there now. Now that you just said it, now that we just said it, because we brought it up yesterday with the Boneyard guy, with John Reeves. And we said, you should have your own coin. Get the Boneyard coin.
And now apparently somebody made one. So this is, you bring this up in context of scams because they are scams. It's trouble. So if I wanted to make a quick amount of money, I'd have a shit coin and have my bots ready. And I'd say, hey, Joe, have you heard about my curry coin? And you'd be like, no, wait a minute. And it would come out and it would skyrocket. My bots would sell it. I would make a lot of money and it would be dumped right away. It's a scam over and over and over again. But what if you don't sell it? Yeah, then you'll have empty bits worth nothing.
So it's only available for pump and dumps? That's the only thing it's good for. It's not good for anything else. What about if you wanted to use it to finance charity? Is it possible to do that? Bad idea. Bad idea. Is it a bad idea? Yeah. Bad idea, Joe. Well done. So, you know, the reality is these meme coins have been just pop-a-locking since the election, since Trump coin. I watched this happen with Trump coin. I was looking at the charts for some reason at this exact moment. I don't know. I'm not a chart guy. But for some reason I was, I was trying to, oh, because it was, oh, I know why.
Because it was running. Bitcoin was running into a three-day weekend before the inauguration. You know, the spirit animals were out because Trump was coming in and Bitcoin was pumping. And it was going into a three-day weekend pumping. So that's always exciting. Shortly after the banks close, at least on the East Coast, Trump coin is launched. Within moments of Trump coin coming onto the market, Bitcoin's price run came to an abrupt halt. And since Trump's coin, it's really just been one stupid pump and dump meme coin after another. The floodgates were opened, and the meme coin cycle hit hyperspeed, and dumb money started learning the hard and fast way what a scam all of this is at 2x, 3x speed.
This could be the best thing actually happening right now. Like I said, we could be eating our veggies right now. I know everyone wanted 120,000 Bitcoin by end of January or something, but think about the timing of this. Right as Trump's team is putting together their crypto policies, they get to watch Malay's coin blow up in his face. They get to watch his opponents use this to attack and undermine him. And if these screenshots that he's been paying Malay's sister off and getting Malay to sign things are true, and that's how they got him on board with all of this, that's going to be extremely politically damaging to him.
And he's been a rather polarizing figure who's gotten a lot done. And if the team behind the Libra coin was also the team behind the Melania coin, what are the chances they have ties to the Trump coin? Probably pretty damn high. So if Trump's crypto team is smart, and I think they might be, they better be taking notes right now and watching how all of this is going down and use this to inform their policy. Because the reality is Bitcoin fixes all of this. And so I think this meme market has been a stronger black hole, sucking up money like crazy liquidity that is in the crypto market as people gambled in the casino for a bit.
Some people have even been selling their Bitcoin to buy meme coins, tragically. But I think we're coming to the end. I mean, they're always going to be around. There's always going to be some celebrity trying this. But I think retail is starting to figure it out. So I really think this is pillar number one that has to fall. And then there's pillar number two. Music. Enter Bitcoin's more worthy challenger, gold. And in the short term, this stuff matters. And it's a great opportunity for all of us to understand how it impacts Bitcoin. Gold is up 46% in less than a year.
And that's big numbers for gold. To put that in perspective, it's double the gains of the S&P 500 in the same time period. And typically when gold moves like this, it's about something bigger than just inflation. The gold crew, like I've said before, they're the original bloodhounds that's sniffing out market problems. That's, you know, their whole bag. And we seem to be seeing some incredible things happening in gold that, well, I think are clear indications. Somebody is making some kind of moves, maybe panicking about something. Volatile market conditions are spooking banks.
A lot of things I've been talking about the last few weeks, I think are impacting the gold market. But there's also a very, very interesting narrative developing for the gold bugs. And it starts with the fact, and I verified this data. I looked it up. I have links in the show notes. Someone in the United States is buying unprecedented amounts of gold, so much gold that they're exceeding their capacity to ship it to us from the countries we're buying it from, like Switzerland and London and other places. And some of it's even being put into the cargo holds of commercial flights because they simply don't have the time, the means or the money to ship the amount of gold they need.
And so there may have been if you've been on a commercial flight coming from London recently, they're very well may have been gold in the cargo hold of that flight because they are so desperately trying to bring in the demand. Something historical is happening. There's something going on with gold and nobody really knows what it is. somebody here in the United States is buying a crap load of gold. We think, I hope, it's the Treasury or the central bank, the Fed. But somebody is taking huge physical deliveries, and it's causing shortages in London, where they buy and sell gold.
There are shortages now of gold because somebody is buying it and shipping it here. Somebody with very deep pockets. And this is all happening in the context of a conversation brewing around actually auditing the U.S.'s gold reserves. All right. So this morning to talk about going for the gold, Elon Musk and Doge set in their sights on the country's largest gold reserve, Fort Knox in Kentucky. As its own senator reveals that $425 billion of a gold supply doesn't even get a yearly review. Kentucky Senator Ramp. Yes, I think it's quite well known, at least by Bitcoiners, how much of an effort there has been over the decades to try to properly audit the Fort Knox Gold Reserve.
So we have a possible audit brewing and then what appears to be some sort of broader gold strategy at play. And I'll let Beck continue. He has an interesting theory. Shipping it here. Somebody with very deep pockets. Okay. So why? Now, this is all theory. That's fact. Here's the theory of what's going on. They're preparing for a full-on gold audit. We talked about this yesterday. The government right now claims on its balance sheet as an asset all of this gold, and it's valued at $45 an ounce. I will say Senator Lummis has confirmed this. When she has been going around talking about her Bitcoin reserve bill and selling some of our gold to buy the Bitcoin, she has brought up the fact that the gold that we hold on to, the U.S.
Government holds on to, is still priced at $45 an ounce. In case you haven't heard, it's $2,900 an ounce. So they're talking now about boosting the price of gold, at least market to market, but maybe even making it $5,000 an ounce. If that happens, the balance sheet starts to fall into line, and our debt to GDP is not as bad as it really is right now. Just start claiming the truth about gold, and our balance sheet starts to come into line. Now, we remember that the Trump administration set up this strategic reserve or asset, whatever they're calling it, and they talked about monetizing the assets of the country.
I believe this is what the Treasury Secretary and Trump, and I can't remember if there was another Bassett, were talking about. Start taking our minerals, start taking our oil and claiming those as assets and putting those on the balance sheet, which we can do. And it's not a bad idea unless we lose in the end because then we lose all of our assets, our natural assets. You put those on the balance sheet. This helps strengthen the United States because we're coming to a place where we're not going to be able to finance the debt. Who wants to write the United States a new long-term loan at less than really market value.
And market value, I mean, if you walked into a bank and you had the credit report that the United States of America has, what do you think the bank is going to charge you in interest? And this is an interesting theory just in the context of the debt getting, you know, what is it? 10 trillion of it gets refinanced this year and it goes from the lower interest rates to the current interest rate, much higher. You're a risk. You just are addicted to spending. You're doing ridiculous things. I'm sorry. Now they might write you a check if you have all of this stuff on your balance sheet. Okay. And that's why they're doing it.
They're ourselves healthier than we are because we're at the end of the dollar. We're at the end of this financial system. So I think the gold market is betting on a few things here. The U.S. might reprice its gold stock. If the U.S. Does that, that's going to have implications on the price of gold worldwide. It's probably going to definitely probably pump the price of gold, right? Also, I think gold bugs are betting that Trump's tariff policy is going to be inflationary and drive some conflict. And so they're betting on inflation going up. Assets getting pumped like Bitcoin and gold, non-asset holders, i.e.
The majority of Americans and other people in the West will get hurt. And so they're hedging accordingly. Will it happen? I don't know. I don't know if what Beck says will happen. But I'll be watching, and we do know a few things. I think this really demonstrates what a type zero civilization asset gold is. I mean, all this crap about shortages and moving it around and paper gold and rehypothecated gold. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And so many people put their trust into this massive system. And a lot of it is just run by greedy humans on top of gold. It's just ridiculous. It really shows you what a type zero civilization asset this is.
Then the other thing we know is Bitcoin does not tend to run until the money flowing into gold settles down or just a bunch of money liquidity rushes into the system. It's no coincidence that gold prices have been on a five week consecutive gain, which is their longest streak since 2020. 20, okay? It's no coincidence, at that same time, Bitcoin just had five red weeks in a row, the first time since the bear market. So once the gold pump slows, Bitcoin tends to rip, and so does user adoption. And here's the other thing you have to keep in mind. Adjusted for CPI inflation, gold is only now, after this massive five-week pump, Gold is only now getting to an all-time high after 45 years, if you adjust for inflation.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, even with the recent sideways price activity, still up 84% in just the last year. And Bitcoin hodlers are staying strong. 62% of Bitcoin has not moved within the past year. And we know that because we can audit Bitcoin at any freaking time because it's a superior technology and a superior asset. Okay, I have a question for you. Please boost it and answer. Do you trust your Bitcoin stash to a mobile device? I mean, sure, your spending sats. Yeah, I bet. No problem. Am I spending sats? Yeah, fine. I have some on a couple of mobile devices.
But what about your long-term HODL stash? Would you trust an iPhone or a Graphene OS device with your life-changing wealth stash? I just don't know if I do. I'm feeling the old man here because there are some very good mobile wallets with very legitimate hardware wallet support. And you can do some really nice air gap setups with mobile devices. And I think you could probably even argue that an iPhone, and especially an up-to-date Graphene OS device, are probably more secure than most desktops out there. And yet the old man in me just can't bring himself to do it.
But when I look at my kids, I don't see them using a PC ever. And they're currently using their mobile devices. So I'm curious if you trust a mobile device for your Bitcoin stash, yes or no, and why? BoostInn. Music. Yeah, we got more show coming up. Got your boost, some really great news in the update section. A rare final clip of the week from an OG and the state of the network. So I just want to say, you can support the show just by doing what you do. If you want to buy sats on river, they're one of the best ways to stack sats in the U.S. in DCA. Also, they have a great savings account.
You put your cash into their savings. You make 3.8% interest in sats every month. While your cash is sitting there, you're earning Bitcoin, kind of like DCA. And then you set up a limit order, you know, like a target order. And when Bitcoin dips, auto buy. It's a nice way to go, too. The Bitcoin Well, you want to take custody? Automatic self-custody platform, the Bitcoin Well. All these links are in the show notes. You buy sats, sell sats directly from your own wallet. Never get a third party involved with your keys. Ready to sell something? Maybe you want to buy an Amazon card.
Maybe you want to buy a gift for somebody. The Bitcoin company has hundreds of gift cards. go from lightning to gift card in seconds. If you want to stack stats by paying your bills or when you make purchases, use the Fold Card. And if you want to get access to your liquidity without selling Bitcoin, use Salt Lending. These are all companies I use and love. We'll have links in the show notes. And you can absolutely support the show by just doing... Music. All right, and we have some boosts to get into, and our baller booster this week is Satsquanch with 65,333 sats. Hey, Rich Luster!
Ah, coming in from Breeze. He says, credit this boost to Jeff and Patrick from the secret Thousand Oaks Bitcoin meetup. We all listen and love the show. Second Monday meetup. Yes! I love to hear that still going. Thousand oaks bitcoin meetup shout out to you hey here you go this is for you, thank you for the boost appreciate it okay now let's see if i can get this next one because it's also a very generous boost got to see if i can figure this one out debit coin coers.eu, Debitcoin, K-O-E-R-S dot E-U, boosted in 50,000 sats. Never tell me the odds. I don't think I got that one right.
But he says it's kind of frustrating to hear that a thousand plus people are listening to your show, but only 44 are streaming sats. So maybe sats is too difficult or maybe 99.5 of your listeners assume that a good thing just came for free. Is this a tragedy of the podcast commons? Keep up the good work. Well, there is a bit of we're early. That's definitely a factor. You know, you got to use a separate app and service, which you have to KYC to generally to get your sats, and then you got to move them to a different app to stream your sats. These things are going to get much easier over this next year, but there is, you know, a curve there that it's not just as simple.
So that friction is there and the friction has to come down. But traditionally in radio and podcasts, you really, I know this sounds crazy, but as a podcaster, you're lucky if you really hear from 5% of your audience. That's huge, right? On average, I bet you most podcasts hear from like 1% of their audience. The vast majority of people are silently listening. And, you know, that's all right. Takes a few people that really care about the sustainability of the show to step forward and support it. But I think that is traditionally always been true of the arts. I don't think it really matters what the medium or art is. But when you were talking about the things that we talk about on this show, I think it's super important that it's obvious and transparent to the audience that the financial incentives of this podcaster and this podcast align with the audience.
And that's what the boosts do, right? And even if this week we don't stack, you know, 500,000 sats, you know, this week I don't go home and tell the wife, oh, I had a great week, really felt like, you know, all my hours put in really got paid for. That's fine because maybe in a year or two, you know, the amount that this show makes will be very substantive and it will be used strategically by my business to keep the podcast going, to make the show sustainable and And to keep the crap out, like dynamic ads, which is, you would not believe the pressure. Man, you guys, I bet you I could make a grand or two a month.
So it's not life-changing money. But I bet you I could, you know, I could DCA that. I bet you I could make a grand or two a month if I stuck two dynamic ads at the start of this show. Maybe less. Maybe, you know, maybe $900. Maybe $800, somewhere in there. Kind of depends on the ad deal and the size of the audience at the time. But I don't want to do that. I hate dynamic ads. Hate them. And so, yeah, you're right. Today, it's not going to make a huge difference today, but tomorrow it could. And my hope is that as these platforms get less friction to participate in the boosting and the streaming, you'll have more people participate.
There's also, last point on this, but there's also tertiary benefits of people boosting and streaming the SATs. This last week, this last week's episode, number one on the fountain chart. Let me say that again. You folks out there streaming sats and boosting this show, showing the value that this show represents to you, put the show at the top of the fountain charts. And so that means new people that are looking for a show. The first thing that was suggested to them was this week in Bitcoin. Think about that. Think about what that means for the show what it means for new people coming to Bitcoin getting good information, high signal information, so there's tertiary benefits here too, not just the day-to-day earnings, and extremely grateful, great question and thank you for the generous boost really appreciate it, users13 comes in with 5,000 sats, that's a Jar Jar boost use a boost, oi chef, keep up the great work and content, I look forward to each episode keep on cooking, thank you user 13 if you'd like to tweak your name and your profile and boost and let me know who you are i'd love to hear from you and i really appreciate the boost there he is gene beans here with a row of two ducks stacked together making them i don't know is that like a mcduck aflac duck i haven't decided this old duck still got it aflac you talked about inflation over the last four years aka one administration but how about it looking longer term say the six ten years, you know what i'm really thinking about i mean i mean what i'm more curious about is the next three years on inflation.
I am pretty pessimistic about inflation. I think it's going to run hot, and I think tariffs are going to make it run hotter. And then the other thing that I haven't really articulated on the show, but is percolating in the back of my mind, is the federal government is the largest employer in the country. And if we start doing massive layoffs, that seems like it's going to have an impact. They buy a lot. And if you shut that down, that's going to have economic impacts. And then you add tariffs to the mix, you're really going to have to raise people's daily income because you can't bring the price of things down.
I mean, eggs can eventually come back down once we have more birds. Oil can come down if there's more inventory. But a lot of goods will not come down in price. So you have to raise people's day-to-day earnings at the same time tariffs are taking place and the federal government's going through massive layoffs. Don't know. It's not the first time we've done it, right? The Clinton administration, Didn't they lay off like 300,000 federal employees, like a buyout or something like that? So country has survived it before, but I think it's a headwind we have to watch for. And I would not be surprised if it's one of the things Bitcoin is pricing in right now. I should have said this earlier in the show.
Any suggestions for a, right, he continues. Any suggestions for a miner to run at home that won't decimate my fiat wallet when purchasing or my monthly power bill? I know odds are super low for anything that is a category that is going to basically give me a block, he says. I want to experiment with mining pools as well. So I have an S9. I don't think it's worth it necessarily. Oh, boy. Does anybody have any advice here for Gene on a somewhat reasonable piece of mining equipment that you could play in a mining pool, earn some sats, and, you know, maybe one day have a chance at winning the lottery of a block?
I would love to know. I would like to, like, oh, my gosh, this winter, it'd be great to run one out in the garage. The garage is freezing cold. I go out there to work on the car. It's too cold. Oh, screw this. I try to turn on the electric heater out there. Takes all day to warm the thing up. I'm probably, and I'm just wasting power doing that. So if anybody has a recommendation for Gene being here on, you know, a home miner that won't decimate his fiat wallet to buy or for the power bill, but maybe you can still get a few sats if he's in a pool or something. It's a great question, Gene. I don't know if there's that sweet spot, but if there is, please, somebody out there pass it along. Thanks, Gene.
Mr. West Payne's here with 3,333 sats. Just pump the brakes right there. Reinfection. It could definitely be an attempt to slow things down or something else anti-crypto. But given the history of banks being dumb, isn't it reasonable to want to make sure banks are taking appropriate measures to deal with new kinds of assets, particular potentially violating volatile ones? So he's talking about the clip I played last week about the senator asking the bankers, are there any way we can slow this down? You know, it's not a bad point, Wes. I mean, I think you kind of expect the traditional banks to go a little bit slower.
I, my read in the subtext there was like, there's still, my takeaway, my high level read was there's still kind of an anti-crypto contingency, a concern, but they're just a smaller contingent now. But, you know, these banks, they have not shown to be the most responsible. So, yeah, a little skepticism maybe is good. He says, J-PAL sort of says, it's one thing to let customers hold Bitcoin. It's another if your bank is trying to ride the next meme coin pump. I can't say this is definitely questions the intent, but it's at least one possible reading. Some more sats for the dope quote and the dope track. Oh, thank you.
Oh, I think we got the artist number one again this week. If you don't want to be a jack off, then you've got to do your research in the math. As Tom Lee says, Bitcoin doesn't look like a traditional bubble. Isn't that true? That was a great clip from Tom Lee. Thank you, Mr. Payne. And thank you for the POV. Appreciate that. Opin 1984 is here with 4,000 sats. On the established financial people not understanding the shifting market, rule of acquisition number 217, you can't free a fish from water. You're right. They're in the water. They're in the water. They're swimming in the water, Abhi. You're so right. That's a great point. Thank you.
Hey, Tomata's back with 10,001 sats. Well, I'll be dipped. I played with Bitcoin a bit in the early days when you could mine on a potato. Yeah, me too, buddy. Let me tell you what. I used to have, I used to be able to mine Bitcoin when I first started mining Bitcoin, you could mine it on a laptop, an Intel laptop on the CPU. You could mine it on the fricking CPU laptop. And I had like three of them going. Then I also later got desktops with GPUs going. When GPUs first really got into it, you could still easily CPU mine for a while. You can find episodes of TechSnap. If you go search for like, on YouTube, go search for Bitcoin TechSnap.
There's an episode in there where we are explaining Bitcoin very early on, you know, like 11, 12 years ago. And I just casually dropped that I mined 50 Bitcoin that week. I also lost a lot of Bitcoin due to that show. He says, I spent some on travel, some on my sats, and I eventually lost my stash to a failed disk and a poor backup strategy. Tomato that happens to a lot of people it's a rite of passage actually now you're a true bitcoiner really that makes you know i think that automatically puts you in the og camp, says i never gave another look though until jupiter broadcast started doing boosts thanks for causing me to look again and i try not to think about how much that crash drive would be worth today and he also sent a thousand sats to the artist for our song last week thank you opi i mean tomato thank you tomato you helped bring that song to the number one on the charts oh boy I feel for you, man. I really do.
But I think, you know, you, now you also really, truly deeply understand and appreciate the importance of it too. So, you know, sometimes you got to touch the stove. It sucks. It really sucks. It's an expensive lesson, but you've learned it, man. Thank you for the boost. Adversary 17 is here with 7,000 sats. When I heard about the fold card from you, I immediately went to set it up and paying my bills and my mortgage with it. So far. So good. All right. Nice job. Adversaries. I love to hear it. Stack and sats while paying bills, right? Why not? Why not?
Just makes sense if you're going to spend the money. Anyways. Bitjineer comes in with a row of ducks. Thank you for the response. If you're referring, but you are referring to MSTU, not MSTY. Ah, you're probably right. Thank you. MSTY is a dividend ETF that exercises a call strategy on the underlying MSTR to generate dividends. Dividends it's actually less volatile than mstr both on the upside and the downside so you do get muted returns especially on the big moves up but with the dividend it's not too far behind actual mstr and he says i'm going to give salt a go and see how it goes keep up the great content but thank you for the clarification i i don't yeah i just assumed msty and there's there's a couple of those mstu and there's mstx so i think i just assumed msty was one of those thank you for the clarification.
Interesting. They're building all of these products on top of MSTR, isn't it? That is something else. People want the exposure. Traditional markets, it seems to be a very popular product. Will you let me know how that goes too? I'd love to know feedback on salt, absolutely. But I want to hear how the MSTY thing works out. Keep us posted. Marcel comes in with 3,333 cents. Thanks for the show. You talked about Bitcoin well. I've never used it, but I do like bull Bitcoin in Canada. I've used it for years after having it recommended in one of the JB Matrix channels. It's non-custodial, and you can withdraw on-chain, Lightning, or Liquid.
That's great, Marcel. Yeah, I've never had a chance to use bull Bitcoin, but I have heard good things from our community out there. And if you're out there, I always like to hear these kinds of things. So thank you for that bit of feedback. And it's great to hear that you support Liquid. Appreciate that. Ace Ackerman brought a row of ducks, too. I've used the Fold card in the past to earn sats on purchases and liked it. But you do have to be mindful of any tax implications. The most obvious solution to this problem is to just get rid of the IRS. I would love you, Ace, to expand on the tax implications of SAT rewards.
So I have a couple of questions. I have read that rewards are taxed differently. So if you sell rewards, they're taxed differently than capital gains. But I'm curious what the tax implication is if you never sell your rewards at all. You know, you just stack and stack and stack and then use something like salt. I wonder if you could give me that feedback because I'm stacking sats right now with Fold so I'd love to know because I think I understand but now you make me think I don't, Scuffed is here with 12,345 sats that's a Spaceballs boost so the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 smoke if you got them I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is about Fold why shouldn't I just continue to use my 2% to 5% cashback fiat cards and just stack more sats with the fiat from that enlighten me, Well, there is something with the sats back cards. So the people that have been doing this for a couple of years, like for me, I've had a, yes, a Gemini card because they offered this for a while and I get sats back.
I've stacked like nine grand in sats by buying things on that card, then paying it off. Just casually not even thinking about it because the price has a cute, you know, the price appreciation over time over the last three or four years. And I've had this card three years. I don't know what it's been. So there is that factor, you know, just, you know, sure you get, you know, maybe you get 5,000 sats back today. It could be worth more. I don't know. But I'll tell you this, Scuffed. My system still pretty much remains my Chase Sapphire card for things like travel, car rentals. Because that card is so oriented towards serving those customers and there's so many programs that come along with that. Like they offer a $300 travel reimbursement.
They cover TSA pre-check. It comes with entrance to some lounges at the airport. So if you fly and travel, there's cards that are optimized. There's cards for different types of markets like this. And I still think those might be better cards. And the reality is you could just keep on using that credit card. And then make a payment using Fold. That's what I do. I pay on the credit card. I pay that bill off with the Fold card. So I'm still sacking that to Fold when I use my credit card. So I get my credit card points with my Chase Sapphire, and then I get my sats when I pay it off with Fold.
And Fold recognizes this. They say the vast majority of their customers already have credit cards that do this. So I think they understand they have to make a competing, compelling offer there. But we'll see. It might work out that the system I'm using now and the system you might want to use just work fine. Great question, Scott. Thank you. Vault Bites here with 2,121 sats. So the reporter says, Chairman Powell, can we even stop this Bitcoin thing or do we even want to? And then Powell's honestly like, nah, we can't. And we're not going to bother trying anymore. Big money's already all in.
Might as well just roll with it. You already bought your ticket, right? Well, then enjoy the ride. It did kind of feel like a huge tone shift, right? Especially, I think, in the next year, probably next six months, we're going to learn a lot more about Chokepoint 2.0 and actually get some concrete evidence, it sounds like, because there's an investigation being launched. So my thought is, is like this tone shift is sort of like preemptively getting ahead of that, you know? And so they're just, they're all making, oh, no, no, we're good. We're good. We just want to mitigate risk, which is their job.
So it's a great pivot. I mean, I guess, right? We're going to see one. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate it, Paul. Clark is here with a Jar Jar boost. You suppose 5,000 sats. I've been passively stacking with full plus for a couple of years now, and I've earned about 13 million sats. Wow, buddy. This is what I'm talking about. Good job. I spend about over 10,000 a month on to get ACH rewards about 1% back. Yeah. So that is one of the things about the fold card is you have to get certain spend levels to get the full rewards on lock. Now, What my family has decided to do is my wife and I just run all of our monthly expenses through the fold card, everything.
And so that's one way you can kind of get that number up because it does ACH. And we actually really prefer this now because before I had these payments coming out of my main checking account, it was a mess. It's stupid. It's way nicer to have it separated anyways. That 13 million sats, Clark, that's no joke. He goes on to say, recently I got a Venmo credit card to get greater percent rewards on bills and groceries, which goes to 1% to 3%. And then I auto buy Bitcoin at the statement period end. I'm planning to go all in with the full credit card once it's released though.
Oh, if you do, let me know. Really like to know how that works. Could you imagine getting, you know, two to 3% sats back on groceries? I mean, you see how that starts to kind of add up over time and you don't even have to make the separate, you know, mental calculation to go like buy sats because you're kind of just DCAing with your day-to-day purchases. I mean, the amounts might not be significant, but there's something. Thanks for the boost. Let me know how it goes. I'd really be curious on that feedback once you get the card. If they ever ship the card. I'm sure. I know. I know. I know.
I know. It's Among Us comes in with a row of ducks. Tom Lee is great. One of the few people both my father and I listened to. He hasn't talked to my dad. He hasn't talked my dad into owning Bitcoin yet, but he just might one day. Oh, dads. I kind of gave up on my dad. I mean, I don't know. I'm thinking for his birthday, I might give him a SATs card. So I guess I haven't given up completely. But, you know, last time I brought it up was a couple of years ago and they kind of laughed at me. But, you know, now it's worth a bit more than the last time I brought it up. You know what? Dads just take a little bit more time sometimes.
Thanks, Zitz. Nice to hear from you. Nakamoto 6102 is here with 4,000 sats. Just pump the brakes right there. Says thanks for the value. Well, thank you for the boost. Appreciate it. User82 is here with 4,000 sats. Let's hear it good, buddy. No message, just sending a test boost. Well, thank you. you're always welcome to send your test boost my direction oh here we go here's hybrid sarcasm coming in with two thousand sets hybrid says i bought the dip today i use bitcoin well to send bitcoin directly to the receive address created on a watch only account in my green wallet app dude hybrid doing it right buddy i love the green wallet and i love the watch only function and that you can still receive to that wallet using the watch only function so you don't got to go fire up your main rig you know it makes it so easy to have a watch only thing main wallet on the desktop watch only on the phone so great nice to hear from you hybrid, Craig, my ego came in with a row of ducks. Is that right? Am I getting that right?
Craig, Craig, oh, my ego, ego, ego, ego, came, ego. It's probably ego, isn't it? Yeah, it's ego. Craig, oh, my ego came in with a row of ducks. I got it. I think that's it. That's got to be it. I love this. He's talking to Gene Bean. He says, hey, Gene Bean, I was wondering when I'd hear the BitBox mentioned. I chose this device for a few key reasons. The big ones were sleek look for spousal approval factor, no Bluetooth, and some way to know I can trust the software. It's open source and it lets you verify the reproducibility of the firmware and the associated mobile app, which is optional.
It supports multi-sig and you can interface with the Sparrow wallet if you don't want to use the app. My only hesitation was that it's USB, but through reading the security and threat model, it gave me the assurances that I needed. It's a great write-up on proxy and Bitcoin through a VPS, by the way. St. Jean's write-up is great. I agree. This is one of the last pieces in the puzzle for me to go now live with a hardware wallet. All right, Craig, that's great to hear. Thanks for the BitBox follow-up, too. Appreciate that. Thank you, everybody, who boosts in.
Of course, I do have the 2,000-sat cutoff for airtime, but appreciate all of you and read all of them that do come into the show. Now, let's look at those streamers. 47 of you this week streamed 95,387 sats. Thank you, sad streamers. Really appreciate that. When you combine that with our boosters, we had a grand total of 288,505 sats sent to the show this week. Thank you, everyone who supports the show with a boost. If you'd like to do it, you need to get your sats using something like River or Bitcoin, Well or Strike. And then you need to get them into a podcasting tutorial like Breeze.
Or if you want to try a new podcast app, which I highly recommend, something like Fountain, Castamatic, Podverse, podcastapps.com. Then, by the way, if you get a podcasting 2.0 app, you get more features with this show, more features with the chapters, transcripts. You also get a release notification within 90 seconds. And, you know, which I might do one day, live streams will show up in your podcast queue list. If I take the show live ever, which I might, It'll be right there in your podcast 2.0 app, and you can just tap and tune right into the live stream. Great features. Oh, and of course, you can boost.
So check them out, podcastapps.com. I really think that's the way to go because then you're also supporting the decentralized podcast future. Check it out, and thank you, everybody, who does indeed support the show. Music. Very excited about the updates this week. Albi Hub going from strength to frickin' strength. 1.14.2 came out. Got some nice new widgets on the home screen, some updates to the App Store, including, I guess, an integration with Bitcoin Pay Server and LNBits, which is big. Also, the cash you back in now allows users to recover stuck funds, It provides new users with recovery phases for funds and other wallets that you need to recover.
And the PhoenixD backend has been updated to support subwallets, which is great because Phoenix is a fantastic backend for AlbiHub. And I believe there's like this new way to support, if you have the self-hosted version, to support Albi with like a message board that uses stats. I haven't gotten to see it yet because I'm on the AlbiHub cloud version. It hasn't been upgraded yet. But AlbiHub is really amazing what they've accomplished in the last year. And it's totally open source and it's self-hostable and it is really good now. So where I fall down on this is if you only interact with Sats to, say, boost one of the Jupyter broadcasting shows or something like that, AlbiHub is probably not for you.
If you see yourself participating in the Bitcoin network for other things or just want to learn more, AlbiHub is definitely for you. Today was pretty wild as i record the fold card the the folks behind fold went live on nasdaq as fld and then within three minutes trading was halted it shot up 17 and they halted trading so i don't know who's buying it this fast i mean fold i like him as a company but if you're really seriously investing money you should probably wait for an earnings report you know because right now you got a lot of market makers and insiders are going to be dumping their bags, yeah i don't know maybe you're like me and you're like geez it's kind of fun i'd like to own a couple of stocks a couple of shares or something whatever you know it's your prerogative i might do the same at some point but i just thought it was fascinating to see the demand shot up 17, had to halt trading to each their own i'm i'm going to definitely watch this it's it is a neat idea i suppose if you want to invest in bitcoin adjacent technologies folded to be a great one But is it going to perform better than just holding Bitcoin?
Not much does. Not much does. This has been really good news as well. The Bitcoin mining industry has created over 31,000 measurable jobs in the United States, and probably more than that when you consider supply chain and whatnot. This is a new report that I'll have linked in the show notes. It highlights the U.S. Bitcoin mining industry and related activities contribute over $4.1 billion annually to the gross product when multiplier effects are included. Industry also includes 31,000 jobs that also factors into this effect. Here's where it breaks down. The state of Texas leads in Bitcoin mining, contributing to $1.7 billion in gross product and over 12,200 jobs.
Georgia follows with $316.8 million contributed and 2,300 jobs. And New York, who doesn't deserve it because of their Bitcoin policy, $225.9 million and 1,600 suit jobs. I kid, but do I? Not so sure. But it's nice to start to see some numbers around the mining impact on the economy and the job market. Those are great jobs. Those are jobs in a lot of the towns in Texas where plants shut down and people are out of work and the town was collapsing. And they came and got good, clean, healthy jobs working at a Bitcoin mine. Bitwise's promise made has now been kept. Bitwise, the folks behind the Bitwise ETF, promised to donate a portion of their proceeds, their ETF proceeds, to Bitcoin developers.
This week, they donated $150,000 to support Bitcoin open source developers, and they committed 10% of gross profits each year. And Matt Odell on Noster confirmed that the $150,000 split from Bitwise went evenly between OpenSats, the Human Rights Foundation, and Brink. OpenSats will not be taking a cut of any of what was donated. The 100% of the funds that were donated will go towards open source contributions. Bitwise is the only one we've actually seen come through on this. The ARC team is talking about this, but Bitwise is the only one, I think, as far as I know, that's actually delivered. Super cool to see. $150,000.
It's not going to be life-changing when you split it amongst those three different places, but it's going to keep them sustained. It's going to keep them, you know, liquid to be able to continue to finance development. So, I mean, there's just no downside to it at all. Really good. Really just a bunch of good updates this week. Every one of the updates was great news this week. Music. Final clip of the week. I can't believe we're here already. I want to feature the amazing Adam Beck. Adam invented Hashcash in 1997, which is the proof of work system.
The basic proof of work system in Hashcash is used in the Bitcoin mining process today. Adam is also the CEO and co-founder of Blockstream. He is the OG of the OGist. He was one of the very first two people to receive an email from satoshi nakamoto and what i love about adam is first he's an extremely humble presenter you know he doesn't he doesn't flaunt you know he's not a max kaiser bitcoin og bitcoiner he's a he's very humble in his presentation but if you listen to him he has a clear instinct for the bitcoin market at this point i followed him for years and i this is just my observation he seems to get it at an instinctual level.
And in his view, the bull run is still on. We're just in the early phase of the current bull market. Well, it's hard to predict the timing, but I think we're certainly in the early stages of the bull market at this point. You know, typically the bull market cycle lasts for a certain period after the halving. And so we're still in the early innings. I think there's very stiff inflows from ETFs buying about two times the Bitcoin mines per day. MicroStrategy and the other Bitcoin treasury companies buying another two times, and the retail buyers and dollar-cost average investors. So really, that's a lot of inflow.
I think temporarily there's some consolidation because some earlier investors, sort of mid-term investors, profit-taking. But, you know, that overlay would set us up for a price where you start to see Bitcoin competing with gold, perhaps pulling money out of gold ETFs into Bitcoin ETFs. And then, of course, if the treasuries come in, like the sovereign treasuries, the Bitcoin reserves, that would be something where you'd see sovereign competition. As soon as one of the bigger countries jumps in, I think the others will feel forced to follow suit. So that would, you know, all bets would be off if that happens.
Now, of course, institutional adoption, I think the family offices are faster, more agile, but the institutions are in play. You can see that the ETF 13F filings, which shows you the institutions that have bought Bitcoin via the ETFs, is about 30% institutional. I think there's a lot more capital in the institutional space of pension funds and mutual funds. so there's a lot of room for capital to come in, you know, in this cycle and into the next cycle. Music. Let's check on the state of the network. This episode is wrapping up at block height 884,488. The price of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars is 96,370.
Stats per dollar is around 1,038. We're 11.7 down percent. We're 11.7 percent down from the previous all-time high. It's been 30 days now. January 19th, 2025, 109,160. But I love this number. It's creeping up. It's creeping up. Reachable Bitcoin nodes, 21,934. If just as many people that boost the show set up nodes in this next week, we could get that to 22,000. It's looking really good. Things are humming along. Things are humming along. Fiat price still hovering near 100,000. Can't complain about that. Bitcoin has held up remarkably well, while the meme coin market and the Solana market has completely collapsed.
Bitcoin has just taken it on the chin. The state of the network is very strong. Now, links are at thisweekinbitcoin.show. I'd love it if you boosted in with what you'd like to see or what you thought should have been in this week's episode. I always appreciate that feedback as well. And maybe consider sharing the podcast with somebody. I'd love this to be the number one Bitcoin news podcast out there, especially for the podcasting 2.0 community because it has all the podcasting 2.0 features. And one of those is the magic wallet switching technology. So I'm going to kick off a song here. And if you boost during the song, 95% of your sats go directly to the artist that created this song.
And it's something fun this week. It's Disco Ball by Jojo Scott. You caught my attention the morning. Music.
Yeah, but, Raul, if I created my own Mikey coin and then I pumped it on Twitter. And I dumped it on the retail population after I gave a bunch to a celebrity who then told the world it was great, it's illegal and it's unethical. Music. Welcome to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 47. My name is Chris, chrisles.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Does the air smell just a bit better this week? Maybe things seem a little cleaner. I don't know. Maybe the stink has started to clear. This week, Bitcoiners are eating their vegetables and it's going to be worth it. We are making investments this week we don't even realize.
I'm going to get into the two big things that have to change before Bitcoin price and user adoption really starts to rip again. You know, I think at this point, a lot of people thought Bitcoin would be around $120,000, $130,000, $150,000. And I say that because I was looking at the IBIT futures and the options and people were betting for quite a while, at least in December, on 120K Bitcoin at this point in time, if you were looking at the ETF options. The market thought we'd be much further along. I think a lot of us did. But instead, we've gotten sideways price action for a while.
And it's even happening when we're seeing bullish after bullish news. I mean, things that are like realignment of the federal government and their priority around crypto, institutional adoption, sovereign state adoption, all these things that are just massive tether coming to lightning and Fidelity this week saying the lightning delivers on the promise of truly being able to use digital currencies for day to day transactions. But Bitcoin's recent correlation with the S&P 500 has dropped to zero. What's significant about that is it means Bitcoin is not moving with macro market anymore. And yeah, I've been talking about why we should kind of expect this to break from macro for a while. But I'm starting to see a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
And like I said, I think we have these two things we have to get knocked down before the situation really begins to shift for Bitcoin. And one of those two things seems to have at least begun to tumble this week. Okay, let's talk about the top stories. Argentinian President Javier Malay is reportedly under investigation for a crypto token that plunged shortly after he promoted it in a now-deleted X-post. That's according to Reuters, which reports that a judge will examine whether the president engaged in fraud when he praised Libra token. Now, the project claimed to stimulate economic development for Argentinian businesses, but data from DexScreener shows the token lost more than $4 billion in value from its February 17th peak.
A legal complaint was also brought forward by a local nonprofit group calling it the biggest rug pull in history. Now, in response to the controversy, President Malay's government, X-Account, shared that the office of the president would launch an urgent investigation into the launch of the Libra cryptocurrency, including businesses and people involved in its operation. In an interview with YouTuber CopyZilla, Kelsier Ventures CEO Hayden Davis claimed he launched the Libra token in what he said was a plan gone miserably wrong. He also claimed to be behind the launch of Melania Trump's meme coin.
We'll get more into Hayden here in a moment. I think it's interesting that Solana, which these meme coins run on top of, has plummeted 45% in the last 30 days. They're basically having their own mini FTX collapse over there. And it's really accelerated after this Miele Libra coin scam came to light. And, you know, these scam meme coins, they have been sold to buyers over and over again as a fair launch. I think this is something you have to appreciate about the type of buyer who's buying these meme coins. They think it's a more transparent thing, not like those crazy VC IPOs.
Oh, no, this is a new world. It's transparent. It's on chain. It's a social revolution in finance. Don't you see? But time after time, there's always been a pre-mine. There's always insiders playing with the market to get rich. and now the wider non-Bitcoin crypto community, is starting to figure this out the hard way. And you heard that clip there mentioned CoffeeZilla's interview. I'll link to the full thing. It's long. So I pulled out just a couple of moments that you need to know about. And this first one underscores the fundamental flaw in the entire meme coin market and why it's always 100% of the time a scam against retail.
A lot of this has turned into some of the wallets which are being linked back to you are linked to wallets which sniped the coins that you launched, right? So in the case of Libra. I want to pause here because this term sniping has been really kind of degraded into this general shitcoin or meme term. And so when they use the term sniping here, now I'm not a meme coin expert, but to the best of my understanding, what you're really talking about is automated buying and selling, essentially dumping on the market at targeted times and also strategic buying to drive the price up at particular moments, to manipulate the market into going harder and going further.
And this sniping practice is also, it happened on the Trump coin, happened on the Melania coins. It happens on all of them. And as we get into the clip, it's just expected that retail is going to get screwed with. There's the wallet which Dave got refunded by, which is, according to him, your personal funds. Dave being Dave Portnoy, which we'll cover in a moment. Was linked to an avalanche wallet, which was funded like a sniper of Libra. But if you launch the coin, isn't it unfair for you to snipe the coin? So I would say no. And I would say that for a couple different reasons.
Number one, a lot of the times... Now, before I let him continue, keep in mind that this quote unquote sniping they're doing is being done with their pre-mined coin. So they launch the Libra coin and then they have some estimates as much as 90% of a pre-mine. That's how unbalanced this is. And they have a bunch of different wallets, treasury wallets, sniping wallets that have, I don't know, hundreds of thousands of coins in them, I don't know, that never get exposed to the market. Then retail comes in, they pay for every one of their Libra coins. They buy every one of them all the way up to $5. The thing ran to $5 for a moment.
They pay for every single one of those. But then the creator of the coin comes in with his own pre-mine and quote unquote snipes the market and essentially manipulates the market with the pre-mine funds. Either taking liquidity in or out. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's extremely unethical. I would say no. And I, and I would say that for a couple of different reasons. Number one, a lot of the times when, and again, this is like, I mean, again, it's a much larger conversation, which is what I told you in text, but most of the time when worse a, I have lots of, I have, I have different money in different places, obviously, but from the standpoint of sniping.
Most of the time when we're sniping, we're attempting to avoid other snipers getting in. We're sniping so that way nobody else can snipe. We're sniping to protect the user. Right? So whether that's, and I, by the way, I don't conduct snipes. I'm not a dev. I just want to throw that out there for like, I don't even know how to. Generally, because of the speed and dynamics of these meme coin markets, the purchasing and selling like this, this manipulation has to be done with a bot. That's why he says, I'm not a dev. I can't do those things because you have to be able to write a bot and set up to do these things.
There's probably, I would imagine, dozens or more out there that are pre-written, but you probably still have to alter them somewhat to get API credentials, et cetera. So the only people that are really taking advantage of this high-level manipulation are the very people that are writing the coin code, like the people that are actually developers. And then you have this tier of middle management who do the sales and the community outreach to influencers, and that's who this guy is. I don't like if you told if you if you put me in front of a computer and had me try and figure out a snipe I don't I don't even know what I've never done a bot I don't know any of that shit but you you're not denying that Wallace link to you snipe Libra but you're just saying you didn't do it to link to the project I wouldn't say link to me I would say no link to the the wallet which refunded Dave which Dave said was your personal funds that just so that just happened to be at the time of stress where we moved money from but that was just a mistake i mean if anything because like what like in in that particular case all i would do is like that money when it went back into the chart it would just flow through another wallet back into the chart like that money that back into the chart is his cute way of saying you know injecting money injecting coins into the market money that we consider sniping quote-unquote is the project's money right that's how we that's how we do it for I mean and anytime we've done it that's how we do it and the most of the time the snipe is to deter and if there's enough volume on the project we use it so that it has the ability to continue on.
And I think that's very hard for people to understand. I will agree with that. I think that is going to be hard to understand. Because you have like, look, right? You have, and I'll give you a great example. If you look at Trump and you look at the snipes, right? Trump had so much volume, the snipes didn't matter. They made zero difference. No, that will, wait, hang on. That's not true. There was a guy who sniped early for $1 million. dollars the big crash in melania that everyone attributes to melania was actually that sniper selling like tens of millions of dollars of like like the one that did like 84 mil right yeah yeah yeah i well yeah i mean i we we could argue all day my point is sniping when you're the team i'm not saying it always should happen but i'm saying a lot of times it's to protect and and if there's enough volume, take some off so that people can have a chance to pump the chart back up.
I mean, just take all this in for a moment. He's saying it's standard practice. We're just pumping the charts. It's not a big deal. And if we don't do it, somebody else will. That's my favorite part. The system is so corrupt that if we don't do it, somebody else is going to do it anyways. But you know, this is a new kind of revolution, a social revolution in finance. I just love that. Now, of course, he's got a real problem. I mean, he effed around and found out with the president of Argentina, who's now under investigation. And he's also leaked screenshots saying that if he sends the Argentina president Malay's sister money, he'll sign and do anything for the Hayden guy that we just heard from.
He claims the president of Argentina will do anything for him if he sends money to the president's sister. So those screenshots, this guy's in a lot of trouble. He's going to have people coming after him. He's going to have the Trump administration watching this closely. This is not going to be good. And this radical transparency that he's opted for is completely crushing, as it should, the meme coin market. And so there's this question of the money. There's been some money he's earned and he's sitting on top of it. Of course, they might not get all their money back. Because I have people who are like, hey, send me a million and a half dollars. I go kill your family.
So I still have those people to deal with. Regardless if I refund the money, are you? Of course not. But now I have to protect my whole fucking family. No, well, the first thing you should do is get the money out of your hands. You need to go to a reputable firm. You need to set up a legal structure to get this money out of your hands. So you, Hayden, do not have access. Like part of the reason you're scared is because you do have access to $100 million. Sure, but that's also, yeah, correct. But if I'm being extremely transparent, honest, that's also my leverage with certain groups and parties.
The fact that I have control is also what's making me a target and also protecting me because this is an international incident. This isn't like some random fucking scam. This isn't a scam. This is a plan gone very wrong at a presidential level. Actually, I agree with you. It is a plan. So if I custody it with somebody else, even if it's a trusted third party, I lose my leverage. So until – and I told you off the record what I think is going to happen or maybe it was on. I don't even remember at this point, until I have answers from Javier Malay, until I have answers from his group, until I get an actual real game plan.
This is why I gave it a 48-hour window. It was like, until somebody presents a great plan besides some bullshit thing where it's going to take six months, if that's the right plan, I'll do it. No problem. Don't care. 100%. We'll give custody over. I don't give a fuck. I don't want anything to do with this at all. Zero. He later goes on to say, but I think probably the best plan is that I just inject the money back into the Libre market and let people buy in again. And then the next day after he said that, President Malay, after deleting his tweet, went back and retweeted another one of his previous tweets about how to buy Libra coin.
And the idiot DGN meme coin market aped back in. And guys like Dave Portnoy are so Neanderthal stupid, they have no idea what they're doing. They're just trying to make a buck as fast as possible. They're not looking into anything. They don't consider any fundamentals. Yeah. Sometimes they end up buying the wrong coin when they're trying to ape. Quick update from the trenches. Malay, let's fucking leave this fucking league. Malay tweets how to buy Libra like he's back in on this fucking Libra. So I'm like, I'm back in on Libra. Only problem dumping money in. Only problem I'm buying the wrong Libra.
I'm now 200 deep into the wrong fucking Libra. I guess I'm the owner of long Libra these trenches. I'm crawling. I'm crawling. I'm crawling. I'm crawling. I own a million of fake Libra. Fake Libra to the moon. And then he tweets asking if anybody wants to buy it off of him. He didn't even realize he was buying the wrong meme coin until he posted a screenshot of his purchase and somebody else on X pointed out that he bought the wrong coin. This is so stupid. and the oxygen is quickly evaporating from this market, and just like a perfect moment in time, it couldn't have landed better.
Adam Curry, the podfather, went on the Joe Rogan podcast, right as kind of all this stuff was going down. The timing, chef's kiss. And you know, I've complained before that guys like Pomp have had a hard time explaining the difference between meme coins and Bitcoin. And well, the podfather, he just went right to the heart of the matter. Speaking of scamming, what do you think about shit coins? Like what's your take on like Hakua coin, and Melania coin, and Trump coin. Those are more meme coins. Shit coins, right? Isn't that what a meme coin is? So the only coin I believe in is Bitcoin. And we've talked about this before.
Right. In fact, I looked it up, hoping you would bring it up. Two years ago when I was here the last time, Bitcoin was around $40,000. Today it's close to $100,000. Damn. Look at the Podfather doing a little bit of prep before the show, right? And I want to play this because it's also a ginormous audience, an influential podcast in front of a ginormous audience. And it sounds to me like Rogan has Bitcoin buying. Last time, Bitcoin was around $40,000. Today, it's close to $100,000. This will continue to go up until we're long gone. It's very interesting. So, I don't believe in shit coins at all because if you have, Bitcoin has no CEO. There's no one in charge of it.
It's literally tens of thousands of people around the world who run these nodes that make it open and make it run and keep it at this 21 million coin limit. I'm totally down with Bitcoin. I'm with you. Good. But I think the shit coin thing is fascinating that anybody can create a coin. Yeah. You know, like Jamie has a pull it up Jamie coin. I don't know if you know that. I did not make it. Don't put that on me. Do not. It's out there now. Now that you just said it, now that we just said it, because we brought it up yesterday with the Boneyard guy, with John Reeves. And we said, you should have your own coin. Get the Boneyard coin.
And now apparently somebody made one. So this is, you bring this up in context of scams because they are scams. It's trouble. So if I wanted to make a quick amount of money, I'd have a shit coin and have my bots ready. And I'd say, hey, Joe, have you heard about my curry coin? And you'd be like, no, wait a minute. And it would come out and it would skyrocket. My bots would sell it. I would make a lot of money and it would be dumped right away. It's a scam over and over and over again. But what if you don't sell it? Yeah, then you'll have empty bits worth nothing.
So it's only available for pump and dumps? That's the only thing it's good for. It's not good for anything else. What about if you wanted to use it to finance charity? Is it possible to do that? Bad idea. Bad idea. Is it a bad idea? Yeah. Bad idea, Joe. Well done. So, you know, the reality is these meme coins have been just pop-a-locking since the election, since Trump coin. I watched this happen with Trump coin. I was looking at the charts for some reason at this exact moment. I don't know. I'm not a chart guy. But for some reason I was, I was trying to, oh, because it was, oh, I know why.
Because it was running. Bitcoin was running into a three-day weekend before the inauguration. You know, the spirit animals were out because Trump was coming in and Bitcoin was pumping. And it was going into a three-day weekend pumping. So that's always exciting. Shortly after the banks close, at least on the East Coast, Trump coin is launched. Within moments of Trump coin coming onto the market, Bitcoin's price run came to an abrupt halt. And since Trump's coin, it's really just been one stupid pump and dump meme coin after another. The floodgates were opened, and the meme coin cycle hit hyperspeed, and dumb money started learning the hard and fast way what a scam all of this is at 2x, 3x speed.
This could be the best thing actually happening right now. Like I said, we could be eating our veggies right now. I know everyone wanted 120,000 Bitcoin by end of January or something, but think about the timing of this. Right as Trump's team is putting together their crypto policies, they get to watch Malay's coin blow up in his face. They get to watch his opponents use this to attack and undermine him. And if these screenshots that he's been paying Malay's sister off and getting Malay to sign things are true, and that's how they got him on board with all of this, that's going to be extremely politically damaging to him.
And he's been a rather polarizing figure who's gotten a lot done. And if the team behind the Libra coin was also the team behind the Melania coin, what are the chances they have ties to the Trump coin? Probably pretty damn high. So if Trump's crypto team is smart, and I think they might be, they better be taking notes right now and watching how all of this is going down and use this to inform their policy. Because the reality is Bitcoin fixes all of this. And so I think this meme market has been a stronger black hole, sucking up money like crazy liquidity that is in the crypto market as people gambled in the casino for a bit.
Some people have even been selling their Bitcoin to buy meme coins, tragically. But I think we're coming to the end. I mean, they're always going to be around. There's always going to be some celebrity trying this. But I think retail is starting to figure it out. So I really think this is pillar number one that has to fall. And then there's pillar number two. Music. Enter Bitcoin's more worthy challenger, gold. And in the short term, this stuff matters. And it's a great opportunity for all of us to understand how it impacts Bitcoin. Gold is up 46% in less than a year.
And that's big numbers for gold. To put that in perspective, it's double the gains of the S&P 500 in the same time period. And typically when gold moves like this, it's about something bigger than just inflation. The gold crew, like I've said before, they're the original bloodhounds that's sniffing out market problems. That's, you know, their whole bag. And we seem to be seeing some incredible things happening in gold that, well, I think are clear indications. Somebody is making some kind of moves, maybe panicking about something. Volatile market conditions are spooking banks.
A lot of things I've been talking about the last few weeks, I think are impacting the gold market. But there's also a very, very interesting narrative developing for the gold bugs. And it starts with the fact, and I verified this data. I looked it up. I have links in the show notes. Someone in the United States is buying unprecedented amounts of gold, so much gold that they're exceeding their capacity to ship it to us from the countries we're buying it from, like Switzerland and London and other places. And some of it's even being put into the cargo holds of commercial flights because they simply don't have the time, the means or the money to ship the amount of gold they need.
And so there may have been if you've been on a commercial flight coming from London recently, they're very well may have been gold in the cargo hold of that flight because they are so desperately trying to bring in the demand. Something historical is happening. There's something going on with gold and nobody really knows what it is. somebody here in the United States is buying a crap load of gold. We think, I hope, it's the Treasury or the central bank, the Fed. But somebody is taking huge physical deliveries, and it's causing shortages in London, where they buy and sell gold.
There are shortages now of gold because somebody is buying it and shipping it here. Somebody with very deep pockets. And this is all happening in the context of a conversation brewing around actually auditing the U.S.'s gold reserves. All right. So this morning to talk about going for the gold, Elon Musk and Doge set in their sights on the country's largest gold reserve, Fort Knox in Kentucky. As its own senator reveals that $425 billion of a gold supply doesn't even get a yearly review. Kentucky Senator Ramp. Yes, I think it's quite well known, at least by Bitcoiners, how much of an effort there has been over the decades to try to properly audit the Fort Knox Gold Reserve.
So we have a possible audit brewing and then what appears to be some sort of broader gold strategy at play. And I'll let Beck continue. He has an interesting theory. Shipping it here. Somebody with very deep pockets. Okay. So why? Now, this is all theory. That's fact. Here's the theory of what's going on. They're preparing for a full-on gold audit. We talked about this yesterday. The government right now claims on its balance sheet as an asset all of this gold, and it's valued at $45 an ounce. I will say Senator Lummis has confirmed this. When she has been going around talking about her Bitcoin reserve bill and selling some of our gold to buy the Bitcoin, she has brought up the fact that the gold that we hold on to, the U.S.
Government holds on to, is still priced at $45 an ounce. In case you haven't heard, it's $2,900 an ounce. So they're talking now about boosting the price of gold, at least market to market, but maybe even making it $5,000 an ounce. If that happens, the balance sheet starts to fall into line, and our debt to GDP is not as bad as it really is right now. Just start claiming the truth about gold, and our balance sheet starts to come into line. Now, we remember that the Trump administration set up this strategic reserve or asset, whatever they're calling it, and they talked about monetizing the assets of the country.
I believe this is what the Treasury Secretary and Trump, and I can't remember if there was another Bassett, were talking about. Start taking our minerals, start taking our oil and claiming those as assets and putting those on the balance sheet, which we can do. And it's not a bad idea unless we lose in the end because then we lose all of our assets, our natural assets. You put those on the balance sheet. This helps strengthen the United States because we're coming to a place where we're not going to be able to finance the debt. Who wants to write the United States a new long-term loan at less than really market value.
And market value, I mean, if you walked into a bank and you had the credit report that the United States of America has, what do you think the bank is going to charge you in interest? And this is an interesting theory just in the context of the debt getting, you know, what is it? 10 trillion of it gets refinanced this year and it goes from the lower interest rates to the current interest rate, much higher. You're a risk. You just are addicted to spending. You're doing ridiculous things. I'm sorry. Now they might write you a check if you have all of this stuff on your balance sheet. Okay. And that's why they're doing it.
They're ourselves healthier than we are because we're at the end of the dollar. We're at the end of this financial system. So I think the gold market is betting on a few things here. The U.S. might reprice its gold stock. If the U.S. Does that, that's going to have implications on the price of gold worldwide. It's probably going to definitely probably pump the price of gold, right? Also, I think gold bugs are betting that Trump's tariff policy is going to be inflationary and drive some conflict. And so they're betting on inflation going up. Assets getting pumped like Bitcoin and gold, non-asset holders, i.e.
The majority of Americans and other people in the West will get hurt. And so they're hedging accordingly. Will it happen? I don't know. I don't know if what Beck says will happen. But I'll be watching, and we do know a few things. I think this really demonstrates what a type zero civilization asset gold is. I mean, all this crap about shortages and moving it around and paper gold and rehypothecated gold. It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. And so many people put their trust into this massive system. And a lot of it is just run by greedy humans on top of gold. It's just ridiculous. It really shows you what a type zero civilization asset this is.
Then the other thing we know is Bitcoin does not tend to run until the money flowing into gold settles down or just a bunch of money liquidity rushes into the system. It's no coincidence that gold prices have been on a five week consecutive gain, which is their longest streak since 2020. 20, okay? It's no coincidence, at that same time, Bitcoin just had five red weeks in a row, the first time since the bear market. So once the gold pump slows, Bitcoin tends to rip, and so does user adoption. And here's the other thing you have to keep in mind. Adjusted for CPI inflation, gold is only now, after this massive five-week pump, Gold is only now getting to an all-time high after 45 years, if you adjust for inflation.
Bitcoin, on the other hand, even with the recent sideways price activity, still up 84% in just the last year. And Bitcoin hodlers are staying strong. 62% of Bitcoin has not moved within the past year. And we know that because we can audit Bitcoin at any freaking time because it's a superior technology and a superior asset. Okay, I have a question for you. Please boost it and answer. Do you trust your Bitcoin stash to a mobile device? I mean, sure, your spending sats. Yeah, I bet. No problem. Am I spending sats? Yeah, fine. I have some on a couple of mobile devices.
But what about your long-term HODL stash? Would you trust an iPhone or a Graphene OS device with your life-changing wealth stash? I just don't know if I do. I'm feeling the old man here because there are some very good mobile wallets with very legitimate hardware wallet support. And you can do some really nice air gap setups with mobile devices. And I think you could probably even argue that an iPhone, and especially an up-to-date Graphene OS device, are probably more secure than most desktops out there. And yet the old man in me just can't bring himself to do it.
But when I look at my kids, I don't see them using a PC ever. And they're currently using their mobile devices. So I'm curious if you trust a mobile device for your Bitcoin stash, yes or no, and why? BoostInn. Music. Yeah, we got more show coming up. Got your boost, some really great news in the update section. A rare final clip of the week from an OG and the state of the network. So I just want to say, you can support the show just by doing what you do. If you want to buy sats on river, they're one of the best ways to stack sats in the U.S. in DCA. Also, they have a great savings account.
You put your cash into their savings. You make 3.8% interest in sats every month. While your cash is sitting there, you're earning Bitcoin, kind of like DCA. And then you set up a limit order, you know, like a target order. And when Bitcoin dips, auto buy. It's a nice way to go, too. The Bitcoin Well, you want to take custody? Automatic self-custody platform, the Bitcoin Well. All these links are in the show notes. You buy sats, sell sats directly from your own wallet. Never get a third party involved with your keys. Ready to sell something? Maybe you want to buy an Amazon card.
Maybe you want to buy a gift for somebody. The Bitcoin company has hundreds of gift cards. go from lightning to gift card in seconds. If you want to stack stats by paying your bills or when you make purchases, use the Fold Card. And if you want to get access to your liquidity without selling Bitcoin, use Salt Lending. These are all companies I use and love. We'll have links in the show notes. And you can absolutely support the show by just doing... Music. All right, and we have some boosts to get into, and our baller booster this week is Satsquanch with 65,333 sats. Hey, Rich Luster!
Ah, coming in from Breeze. He says, credit this boost to Jeff and Patrick from the secret Thousand Oaks Bitcoin meetup. We all listen and love the show. Second Monday meetup. Yes! I love to hear that still going. Thousand oaks bitcoin meetup shout out to you hey here you go this is for you, thank you for the boost appreciate it okay now let's see if i can get this next one because it's also a very generous boost got to see if i can figure this one out debit coin coers.eu, Debitcoin, K-O-E-R-S dot E-U, boosted in 50,000 sats. Never tell me the odds. I don't think I got that one right.
But he says it's kind of frustrating to hear that a thousand plus people are listening to your show, but only 44 are streaming sats. So maybe sats is too difficult or maybe 99.5 of your listeners assume that a good thing just came for free. Is this a tragedy of the podcast commons? Keep up the good work. Well, there is a bit of we're early. That's definitely a factor. You know, you got to use a separate app and service, which you have to KYC to generally to get your sats, and then you got to move them to a different app to stream your sats. These things are going to get much easier over this next year, but there is, you know, a curve there that it's not just as simple.
So that friction is there and the friction has to come down. But traditionally in radio and podcasts, you really, I know this sounds crazy, but as a podcaster, you're lucky if you really hear from 5% of your audience. That's huge, right? On average, I bet you most podcasts hear from like 1% of their audience. The vast majority of people are silently listening. And, you know, that's all right. Takes a few people that really care about the sustainability of the show to step forward and support it. But I think that is traditionally always been true of the arts. I don't think it really matters what the medium or art is. But when you were talking about the things that we talk about on this show, I think it's super important that it's obvious and transparent to the audience that the financial incentives of this podcaster and this podcast align with the audience.
And that's what the boosts do, right? And even if this week we don't stack, you know, 500,000 sats, you know, this week I don't go home and tell the wife, oh, I had a great week, really felt like, you know, all my hours put in really got paid for. That's fine because maybe in a year or two, you know, the amount that this show makes will be very substantive and it will be used strategically by my business to keep the podcast going, to make the show sustainable and And to keep the crap out, like dynamic ads, which is, you would not believe the pressure. Man, you guys, I bet you I could make a grand or two a month.
So it's not life-changing money. But I bet you I could, you know, I could DCA that. I bet you I could make a grand or two a month if I stuck two dynamic ads at the start of this show. Maybe less. Maybe, you know, maybe $900. Maybe $800, somewhere in there. Kind of depends on the ad deal and the size of the audience at the time. But I don't want to do that. I hate dynamic ads. Hate them. And so, yeah, you're right. Today, it's not going to make a huge difference today, but tomorrow it could. And my hope is that as these platforms get less friction to participate in the boosting and the streaming, you'll have more people participate.
There's also, last point on this, but there's also tertiary benefits of people boosting and streaming the SATs. This last week, this last week's episode, number one on the fountain chart. Let me say that again. You folks out there streaming sats and boosting this show, showing the value that this show represents to you, put the show at the top of the fountain charts. And so that means new people that are looking for a show. The first thing that was suggested to them was this week in Bitcoin. Think about that. Think about what that means for the show what it means for new people coming to Bitcoin getting good information, high signal information, so there's tertiary benefits here too, not just the day-to-day earnings, and extremely grateful, great question and thank you for the generous boost really appreciate it, users13 comes in with 5,000 sats, that's a Jar Jar boost use a boost, oi chef, keep up the great work and content, I look forward to each episode keep on cooking, thank you user 13 if you'd like to tweak your name and your profile and boost and let me know who you are i'd love to hear from you and i really appreciate the boost there he is gene beans here with a row of two ducks stacked together making them i don't know is that like a mcduck aflac duck i haven't decided this old duck still got it aflac you talked about inflation over the last four years aka one administration but how about it looking longer term say the six ten years, you know what i'm really thinking about i mean i mean what i'm more curious about is the next three years on inflation.
I am pretty pessimistic about inflation. I think it's going to run hot, and I think tariffs are going to make it run hotter. And then the other thing that I haven't really articulated on the show, but is percolating in the back of my mind, is the federal government is the largest employer in the country. And if we start doing massive layoffs, that seems like it's going to have an impact. They buy a lot. And if you shut that down, that's going to have economic impacts. And then you add tariffs to the mix, you're really going to have to raise people's daily income because you can't bring the price of things down.
I mean, eggs can eventually come back down once we have more birds. Oil can come down if there's more inventory. But a lot of goods will not come down in price. So you have to raise people's day-to-day earnings at the same time tariffs are taking place and the federal government's going through massive layoffs. Don't know. It's not the first time we've done it, right? The Clinton administration, Didn't they lay off like 300,000 federal employees, like a buyout or something like that? So country has survived it before, but I think it's a headwind we have to watch for. And I would not be surprised if it's one of the things Bitcoin is pricing in right now. I should have said this earlier in the show.
Any suggestions for a, right, he continues. Any suggestions for a miner to run at home that won't decimate my fiat wallet when purchasing or my monthly power bill? I know odds are super low for anything that is a category that is going to basically give me a block, he says. I want to experiment with mining pools as well. So I have an S9. I don't think it's worth it necessarily. Oh, boy. Does anybody have any advice here for Gene on a somewhat reasonable piece of mining equipment that you could play in a mining pool, earn some sats, and, you know, maybe one day have a chance at winning the lottery of a block?
I would love to know. I would like to, like, oh, my gosh, this winter, it'd be great to run one out in the garage. The garage is freezing cold. I go out there to work on the car. It's too cold. Oh, screw this. I try to turn on the electric heater out there. Takes all day to warm the thing up. I'm probably, and I'm just wasting power doing that. So if anybody has a recommendation for Gene being here on, you know, a home miner that won't decimate his fiat wallet to buy or for the power bill, but maybe you can still get a few sats if he's in a pool or something. It's a great question, Gene. I don't know if there's that sweet spot, but if there is, please, somebody out there pass it along. Thanks, Gene.
Mr. West Payne's here with 3,333 sats. Just pump the brakes right there. Reinfection. It could definitely be an attempt to slow things down or something else anti-crypto. But given the history of banks being dumb, isn't it reasonable to want to make sure banks are taking appropriate measures to deal with new kinds of assets, particular potentially violating volatile ones? So he's talking about the clip I played last week about the senator asking the bankers, are there any way we can slow this down? You know, it's not a bad point, Wes. I mean, I think you kind of expect the traditional banks to go a little bit slower.
I, my read in the subtext there was like, there's still, my takeaway, my high level read was there's still kind of an anti-crypto contingency, a concern, but they're just a smaller contingent now. But, you know, these banks, they have not shown to be the most responsible. So, yeah, a little skepticism maybe is good. He says, J-PAL sort of says, it's one thing to let customers hold Bitcoin. It's another if your bank is trying to ride the next meme coin pump. I can't say this is definitely questions the intent, but it's at least one possible reading. Some more sats for the dope quote and the dope track. Oh, thank you.
Oh, I think we got the artist number one again this week. If you don't want to be a jack off, then you've got to do your research in the math. As Tom Lee says, Bitcoin doesn't look like a traditional bubble. Isn't that true? That was a great clip from Tom Lee. Thank you, Mr. Payne. And thank you for the POV. Appreciate that. Opin 1984 is here with 4,000 sats. On the established financial people not understanding the shifting market, rule of acquisition number 217, you can't free a fish from water. You're right. They're in the water. They're in the water. They're swimming in the water, Abhi. You're so right. That's a great point. Thank you.
Hey, Tomata's back with 10,001 sats. Well, I'll be dipped. I played with Bitcoin a bit in the early days when you could mine on a potato. Yeah, me too, buddy. Let me tell you what. I used to have, I used to be able to mine Bitcoin when I first started mining Bitcoin, you could mine it on a laptop, an Intel laptop on the CPU. You could mine it on the fricking CPU laptop. And I had like three of them going. Then I also later got desktops with GPUs going. When GPUs first really got into it, you could still easily CPU mine for a while. You can find episodes of TechSnap. If you go search for like, on YouTube, go search for Bitcoin TechSnap.
There's an episode in there where we are explaining Bitcoin very early on, you know, like 11, 12 years ago. And I just casually dropped that I mined 50 Bitcoin that week. I also lost a lot of Bitcoin due to that show. He says, I spent some on travel, some on my sats, and I eventually lost my stash to a failed disk and a poor backup strategy. Tomato that happens to a lot of people it's a rite of passage actually now you're a true bitcoiner really that makes you know i think that automatically puts you in the og camp, says i never gave another look though until jupiter broadcast started doing boosts thanks for causing me to look again and i try not to think about how much that crash drive would be worth today and he also sent a thousand sats to the artist for our song last week thank you opi i mean tomato thank you tomato you helped bring that song to the number one on the charts oh boy I feel for you, man. I really do.
But I think, you know, you, now you also really, truly deeply understand and appreciate the importance of it too. So, you know, sometimes you got to touch the stove. It sucks. It really sucks. It's an expensive lesson, but you've learned it, man. Thank you for the boost. Adversary 17 is here with 7,000 sats. When I heard about the fold card from you, I immediately went to set it up and paying my bills and my mortgage with it. So far. So good. All right. Nice job. Adversaries. I love to hear it. Stack and sats while paying bills, right? Why not? Why not?
Just makes sense if you're going to spend the money. Anyways. Bitjineer comes in with a row of ducks. Thank you for the response. If you're referring, but you are referring to MSTU, not MSTY. Ah, you're probably right. Thank you. MSTY is a dividend ETF that exercises a call strategy on the underlying MSTR to generate dividends. Dividends it's actually less volatile than mstr both on the upside and the downside so you do get muted returns especially on the big moves up but with the dividend it's not too far behind actual mstr and he says i'm going to give salt a go and see how it goes keep up the great content but thank you for the clarification i i don't yeah i just assumed msty and there's there's a couple of those mstu and there's mstx so i think i just assumed msty was one of those thank you for the clarification.
Interesting. They're building all of these products on top of MSTR, isn't it? That is something else. People want the exposure. Traditional markets, it seems to be a very popular product. Will you let me know how that goes too? I'd love to know feedback on salt, absolutely. But I want to hear how the MSTY thing works out. Keep us posted. Marcel comes in with 3,333 cents. Thanks for the show. You talked about Bitcoin well. I've never used it, but I do like bull Bitcoin in Canada. I've used it for years after having it recommended in one of the JB Matrix channels. It's non-custodial, and you can withdraw on-chain, Lightning, or Liquid.
That's great, Marcel. Yeah, I've never had a chance to use bull Bitcoin, but I have heard good things from our community out there. And if you're out there, I always like to hear these kinds of things. So thank you for that bit of feedback. And it's great to hear that you support Liquid. Appreciate that. Ace Ackerman brought a row of ducks, too. I've used the Fold card in the past to earn sats on purchases and liked it. But you do have to be mindful of any tax implications. The most obvious solution to this problem is to just get rid of the IRS. I would love you, Ace, to expand on the tax implications of SAT rewards.
So I have a couple of questions. I have read that rewards are taxed differently. So if you sell rewards, they're taxed differently than capital gains. But I'm curious what the tax implication is if you never sell your rewards at all. You know, you just stack and stack and stack and then use something like salt. I wonder if you could give me that feedback because I'm stacking sats right now with Fold so I'd love to know because I think I understand but now you make me think I don't, Scuffed is here with 12,345 sats that's a Spaceballs boost so the combination is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 smoke if you got them I'm not sure I understand what the fuss is about Fold why shouldn't I just continue to use my 2% to 5% cashback fiat cards and just stack more sats with the fiat from that enlighten me, Well, there is something with the sats back cards. So the people that have been doing this for a couple of years, like for me, I've had a, yes, a Gemini card because they offered this for a while and I get sats back.
I've stacked like nine grand in sats by buying things on that card, then paying it off. Just casually not even thinking about it because the price has a cute, you know, the price appreciation over time over the last three or four years. And I've had this card three years. I don't know what it's been. So there is that factor, you know, just, you know, sure you get, you know, maybe you get 5,000 sats back today. It could be worth more. I don't know. But I'll tell you this, Scuffed. My system still pretty much remains my Chase Sapphire card for things like travel, car rentals. Because that card is so oriented towards serving those customers and there's so many programs that come along with that. Like they offer a $300 travel reimbursement.
They cover TSA pre-check. It comes with entrance to some lounges at the airport. So if you fly and travel, there's cards that are optimized. There's cards for different types of markets like this. And I still think those might be better cards. And the reality is you could just keep on using that credit card. And then make a payment using Fold. That's what I do. I pay on the credit card. I pay that bill off with the Fold card. So I'm still sacking that to Fold when I use my credit card. So I get my credit card points with my Chase Sapphire, and then I get my sats when I pay it off with Fold.
And Fold recognizes this. They say the vast majority of their customers already have credit cards that do this. So I think they understand they have to make a competing, compelling offer there. But we'll see. It might work out that the system I'm using now and the system you might want to use just work fine. Great question, Scott. Thank you. Vault Bites here with 2,121 sats. So the reporter says, Chairman Powell, can we even stop this Bitcoin thing or do we even want to? And then Powell's honestly like, nah, we can't. And we're not going to bother trying anymore. Big money's already all in.
Might as well just roll with it. You already bought your ticket, right? Well, then enjoy the ride. It did kind of feel like a huge tone shift, right? Especially, I think, in the next year, probably next six months, we're going to learn a lot more about Chokepoint 2.0 and actually get some concrete evidence, it sounds like, because there's an investigation being launched. So my thought is, is like this tone shift is sort of like preemptively getting ahead of that, you know? And so they're just, they're all making, oh, no, no, we're good. We're good. We just want to mitigate risk, which is their job.
So it's a great pivot. I mean, I guess, right? We're going to see one. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate it, Paul. Clark is here with a Jar Jar boost. You suppose 5,000 sats. I've been passively stacking with full plus for a couple of years now, and I've earned about 13 million sats. Wow, buddy. This is what I'm talking about. Good job. I spend about over 10,000 a month on to get ACH rewards about 1% back. Yeah. So that is one of the things about the fold card is you have to get certain spend levels to get the full rewards on lock. Now, What my family has decided to do is my wife and I just run all of our monthly expenses through the fold card, everything.
And so that's one way you can kind of get that number up because it does ACH. And we actually really prefer this now because before I had these payments coming out of my main checking account, it was a mess. It's stupid. It's way nicer to have it separated anyways. That 13 million sats, Clark, that's no joke. He goes on to say, recently I got a Venmo credit card to get greater percent rewards on bills and groceries, which goes to 1% to 3%. And then I auto buy Bitcoin at the statement period end. I'm planning to go all in with the full credit card once it's released though.
Oh, if you do, let me know. Really like to know how that works. Could you imagine getting, you know, two to 3% sats back on groceries? I mean, you see how that starts to kind of add up over time and you don't even have to make the separate, you know, mental calculation to go like buy sats because you're kind of just DCAing with your day-to-day purchases. I mean, the amounts might not be significant, but there's something. Thanks for the boost. Let me know how it goes. I'd really be curious on that feedback once you get the card. If they ever ship the card. I'm sure. I know. I know. I know.
I know. It's Among Us comes in with a row of ducks. Tom Lee is great. One of the few people both my father and I listened to. He hasn't talked to my dad. He hasn't talked my dad into owning Bitcoin yet, but he just might one day. Oh, dads. I kind of gave up on my dad. I mean, I don't know. I'm thinking for his birthday, I might give him a SATs card. So I guess I haven't given up completely. But, you know, last time I brought it up was a couple of years ago and they kind of laughed at me. But, you know, now it's worth a bit more than the last time I brought it up. You know what? Dads just take a little bit more time sometimes.
Thanks, Zitz. Nice to hear from you. Nakamoto 6102 is here with 4,000 sats. Just pump the brakes right there. Says thanks for the value. Well, thank you for the boost. Appreciate it. User82 is here with 4,000 sats. Let's hear it good, buddy. No message, just sending a test boost. Well, thank you. you're always welcome to send your test boost my direction oh here we go here's hybrid sarcasm coming in with two thousand sets hybrid says i bought the dip today i use bitcoin well to send bitcoin directly to the receive address created on a watch only account in my green wallet app dude hybrid doing it right buddy i love the green wallet and i love the watch only function and that you can still receive to that wallet using the watch only function so you don't got to go fire up your main rig you know it makes it so easy to have a watch only thing main wallet on the desktop watch only on the phone so great nice to hear from you hybrid, Craig, my ego came in with a row of ducks. Is that right? Am I getting that right?
Craig, Craig, oh, my ego, ego, ego, ego, came, ego. It's probably ego, isn't it? Yeah, it's ego. Craig, oh, my ego came in with a row of ducks. I got it. I think that's it. That's got to be it. I love this. He's talking to Gene Bean. He says, hey, Gene Bean, I was wondering when I'd hear the BitBox mentioned. I chose this device for a few key reasons. The big ones were sleek look for spousal approval factor, no Bluetooth, and some way to know I can trust the software. It's open source and it lets you verify the reproducibility of the firmware and the associated mobile app, which is optional.
It supports multi-sig and you can interface with the Sparrow wallet if you don't want to use the app. My only hesitation was that it's USB, but through reading the security and threat model, it gave me the assurances that I needed. It's a great write-up on proxy and Bitcoin through a VPS, by the way. St. Jean's write-up is great. I agree. This is one of the last pieces in the puzzle for me to go now live with a hardware wallet. All right, Craig, that's great to hear. Thanks for the BitBox follow-up, too. Appreciate that. Thank you, everybody, who boosts in.
Of course, I do have the 2,000-sat cutoff for airtime, but appreciate all of you and read all of them that do come into the show. Now, let's look at those streamers. 47 of you this week streamed 95,387 sats. Thank you, sad streamers. Really appreciate that. When you combine that with our boosters, we had a grand total of 288,505 sats sent to the show this week. Thank you, everyone who supports the show with a boost. If you'd like to do it, you need to get your sats using something like River or Bitcoin, Well or Strike. And then you need to get them into a podcasting tutorial like Breeze.
Or if you want to try a new podcast app, which I highly recommend, something like Fountain, Castamatic, Podverse, podcastapps.com. Then, by the way, if you get a podcasting 2.0 app, you get more features with this show, more features with the chapters, transcripts. You also get a release notification within 90 seconds. And, you know, which I might do one day, live streams will show up in your podcast queue list. If I take the show live ever, which I might, It'll be right there in your podcast 2.0 app, and you can just tap and tune right into the live stream. Great features. Oh, and of course, you can boost.
So check them out, podcastapps.com. I really think that's the way to go because then you're also supporting the decentralized podcast future. Check it out, and thank you, everybody, who does indeed support the show. Music. Very excited about the updates this week. Albi Hub going from strength to frickin' strength. 1.14.2 came out. Got some nice new widgets on the home screen, some updates to the App Store, including, I guess, an integration with Bitcoin Pay Server and LNBits, which is big. Also, the cash you back in now allows users to recover stuck funds, It provides new users with recovery phases for funds and other wallets that you need to recover.
And the PhoenixD backend has been updated to support subwallets, which is great because Phoenix is a fantastic backend for AlbiHub. And I believe there's like this new way to support, if you have the self-hosted version, to support Albi with like a message board that uses stats. I haven't gotten to see it yet because I'm on the AlbiHub cloud version. It hasn't been upgraded yet. But AlbiHub is really amazing what they've accomplished in the last year. And it's totally open source and it's self-hostable and it is really good now. So where I fall down on this is if you only interact with Sats to, say, boost one of the Jupyter broadcasting shows or something like that, AlbiHub is probably not for you.
If you see yourself participating in the Bitcoin network for other things or just want to learn more, AlbiHub is definitely for you. Today was pretty wild as i record the fold card the the folks behind fold went live on nasdaq as fld and then within three minutes trading was halted it shot up 17 and they halted trading so i don't know who's buying it this fast i mean fold i like him as a company but if you're really seriously investing money you should probably wait for an earnings report you know because right now you got a lot of market makers and insiders are going to be dumping their bags, yeah i don't know maybe you're like me and you're like geez it's kind of fun i'd like to own a couple of stocks a couple of shares or something whatever you know it's your prerogative i might do the same at some point but i just thought it was fascinating to see the demand shot up 17, had to halt trading to each their own i'm i'm going to definitely watch this it's it is a neat idea i suppose if you want to invest in bitcoin adjacent technologies folded to be a great one But is it going to perform better than just holding Bitcoin?
Not much does. Not much does. This has been really good news as well. The Bitcoin mining industry has created over 31,000 measurable jobs in the United States, and probably more than that when you consider supply chain and whatnot. This is a new report that I'll have linked in the show notes. It highlights the U.S. Bitcoin mining industry and related activities contribute over $4.1 billion annually to the gross product when multiplier effects are included. Industry also includes 31,000 jobs that also factors into this effect. Here's where it breaks down. The state of Texas leads in Bitcoin mining, contributing to $1.7 billion in gross product and over 12,200 jobs.
Georgia follows with $316.8 million contributed and 2,300 jobs. And New York, who doesn't deserve it because of their Bitcoin policy, $225.9 million and 1,600 suit jobs. I kid, but do I? Not so sure. But it's nice to start to see some numbers around the mining impact on the economy and the job market. Those are great jobs. Those are jobs in a lot of the towns in Texas where plants shut down and people are out of work and the town was collapsing. And they came and got good, clean, healthy jobs working at a Bitcoin mine. Bitwise's promise made has now been kept. Bitwise, the folks behind the Bitwise ETF, promised to donate a portion of their proceeds, their ETF proceeds, to Bitcoin developers.
This week, they donated $150,000 to support Bitcoin open source developers, and they committed 10% of gross profits each year. And Matt Odell on Noster confirmed that the $150,000 split from Bitwise went evenly between OpenSats, the Human Rights Foundation, and Brink. OpenSats will not be taking a cut of any of what was donated. The 100% of the funds that were donated will go towards open source contributions. Bitwise is the only one we've actually seen come through on this. The ARC team is talking about this, but Bitwise is the only one, I think, as far as I know, that's actually delivered. Super cool to see. $150,000.
It's not going to be life-changing when you split it amongst those three different places, but it's going to keep them sustained. It's going to keep them, you know, liquid to be able to continue to finance development. So, I mean, there's just no downside to it at all. Really good. Really just a bunch of good updates this week. Every one of the updates was great news this week. Music. Final clip of the week. I can't believe we're here already. I want to feature the amazing Adam Beck. Adam invented Hashcash in 1997, which is the proof of work system.
The basic proof of work system in Hashcash is used in the Bitcoin mining process today. Adam is also the CEO and co-founder of Blockstream. He is the OG of the OGist. He was one of the very first two people to receive an email from satoshi nakamoto and what i love about adam is first he's an extremely humble presenter you know he doesn't he doesn't flaunt you know he's not a max kaiser bitcoin og bitcoiner he's a he's very humble in his presentation but if you listen to him he has a clear instinct for the bitcoin market at this point i followed him for years and i this is just my observation he seems to get it at an instinctual level.
And in his view, the bull run is still on. We're just in the early phase of the current bull market. Well, it's hard to predict the timing, but I think we're certainly in the early stages of the bull market at this point. You know, typically the bull market cycle lasts for a certain period after the halving. And so we're still in the early innings. I think there's very stiff inflows from ETFs buying about two times the Bitcoin mines per day. MicroStrategy and the other Bitcoin treasury companies buying another two times, and the retail buyers and dollar-cost average investors. So really, that's a lot of inflow.
I think temporarily there's some consolidation because some earlier investors, sort of mid-term investors, profit-taking. But, you know, that overlay would set us up for a price where you start to see Bitcoin competing with gold, perhaps pulling money out of gold ETFs into Bitcoin ETFs. And then, of course, if the treasuries come in, like the sovereign treasuries, the Bitcoin reserves, that would be something where you'd see sovereign competition. As soon as one of the bigger countries jumps in, I think the others will feel forced to follow suit. So that would, you know, all bets would be off if that happens.
Now, of course, institutional adoption, I think the family offices are faster, more agile, but the institutions are in play. You can see that the ETF 13F filings, which shows you the institutions that have bought Bitcoin via the ETFs, is about 30% institutional. I think there's a lot more capital in the institutional space of pension funds and mutual funds. so there's a lot of room for capital to come in, you know, in this cycle and into the next cycle. Music. Let's check on the state of the network. This episode is wrapping up at block height 884,488. The price of Bitcoin in U.S. dollars is 96,370.
Stats per dollar is around 1,038. We're 11.7 down percent. We're 11.7 percent down from the previous all-time high. It's been 30 days now. January 19th, 2025, 109,160. But I love this number. It's creeping up. It's creeping up. Reachable Bitcoin nodes, 21,934. If just as many people that boost the show set up nodes in this next week, we could get that to 22,000. It's looking really good. Things are humming along. Things are humming along. Fiat price still hovering near 100,000. Can't complain about that. Bitcoin has held up remarkably well, while the meme coin market and the Solana market has completely collapsed.
Bitcoin has just taken it on the chin. The state of the network is very strong. Now, links are at thisweekinbitcoin.show. I'd love it if you boosted in with what you'd like to see or what you thought should have been in this week's episode. I always appreciate that feedback as well. And maybe consider sharing the podcast with somebody. I'd love this to be the number one Bitcoin news podcast out there, especially for the podcasting 2.0 community because it has all the podcasting 2.0 features. And one of those is the magic wallet switching technology. So I'm going to kick off a song here. And if you boost during the song, 95% of your sats go directly to the artist that created this song.
And it's something fun this week. It's Disco Ball by Jojo Scott. You caught my attention the morning. Music.
Welcome into TWiB 47
Two Things are In the Way
Market Analysis
The Libra Token Controversy
Sniping and Market Manipulation
The Ethical Dilemma of Memecoins
Investigating the Libra Coin Fallout
The Rise of Gold as a Bitcoin Challenger
Trusting Mobile Devices for Bitcoin Storage
The Importance of Community Support
Updates on Bitcoin Mining and Jobs Impact
Insights from Adam Beck on Bitcoin's Future
State of the Bitcoin Network
