Markets are stumbling, Bitcoin is under pressure, and the AI bubble might be popping. But beneath the chaos, something more substantial is forming.
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- S&P 500 ekes out gain on Wednesday, ending four-day run of losses
- M2 Money Supply Rises
- Microsoft CEO Admits That AI Is Generating Basically No Value
- Analyst says Microsoft is cutting AI data center spending, which may have led to market sell-off
- How to Prevent the Next $1.5B Bybit Hack: A Strategic Approach to Solving Blind Signing | Blockaid Blog
- Did liquidity in crypto just dry up?
- Apollo Investments worried about downside risks to economy, notes that every 1 federal employee may actually be 3 jobs because of 2 contractors.
- Apollo Global Management - Wikipedia
- Egg prices could increase by 41.1% in 2025 amid bird flu, egg shortages
- U.S. Marshals Service, Managing Billions of Seized Assets, Can't Say How Much Crypto It Holds
- Polymarket | Will Trump create Bitcoin reserve in first 1…
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- The ‘Bitcoin’ Senator To Chair First Digital Asset Hearing Wednesday
- My bill to allow South Dakota to invest in Bitcoin died 9-3 in committee this morning. We will be back next year."
- Local news station KXAN covers the Texas Bitcoin Reserve bill
- Yes, Montana's Bitcoin reserve bill was rejected by House lawmakers BUT, 41 yay to 59 nay is more than most would have expected in past years & implies approval will happen in one of the 26 states SBR proposals are live
- POWELL: “Bitcoin is like gold, only it's virtual, it’s digital.”
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Unknown:
What I think is interesting about this is that nobody has said, this is a crazy idea to go make sure the gold is actually there. And, you know, just think about that. I mean, I think the gold is probably there. I think the gold is almost certainly there. But nobody thinks it's a crazy idea to go check because we don't know. That's how bad the corruption has gotten in Washington. . . Music. . Welcome into This Week in Bitcoin, episode 48. My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Welcome to The Shakedown. Remember these days in the future when they tell us that Bitcoiners just got lucky. It was so easy.
Hodling isn't always all that easy, and this week we're learning why. These are the moments these hard assets transfer from weak hands to serious hodlers. And this market will always either try to scare you out or wear you out. And I think we start this week with the macro picture that's screwing up our Bitcoin game. Volatility is being created by the trump administration we kind of knew this was going to happen kind of been expecting this these are aggressive new economic policies that are being tried well maybe not new but they're being tried which is new and bitcoin plunged to a three-month low following president trump's announcement of 25 percent tariffs on canada and mexico effective march 4th and then earlier today as i record during his first cabinet meeting there was a q a And he also said we should expect tariffs on the EU very soon.
So when we bring all of it together, it now means we're set to see 25 percent tariffs on Canada, 25 percent tariffs on Mexico, 25 percent tariffs on the EU, 10 percent tariffs on China. And there's been a potential threatened 100 percent tariffs on the BRICS nations. So, you know, that is rocking things. One thing that's definitely shifted is the market's expectation for future inflation was at 2.7%. Now they're thinking 4.3% and easily could see it double from there. That's what they're predicting now. And the country is stuck between a rock and a hard place, right?
We've lived beyond our means for a long time. My entire lifetime, this country has borrowed so we'd have a better standard of living, so we could spend money on things that we didn't necessarily have the revenue for. And in doing this and going for the cheapest items, we collapsed our domestic production, we borrowed heavily, and now here we are. We're in this hard place with no great options. And so when the market saw the new Republican spending plan coming out and it authorized four trillion dollars of increase in the debt limit, it sent a real message that there is two very big concerning things on the horizon.
And the biggest of them is stagflation. This is Representative Thomas Massey. He's a Republican and he's blasting the other Republicans for not actually putting forward a serious, real budget. Can you just talk to us? Are you still a no? Is there anything? They convinced me in there. I'm a no. Is there anything? Look, let me let me their own numbers. If the Republican plan passes under the rosiest assumptions, which aren't even true, we're going to add three hundred and twenty eight billion dollars to the deficit this year. We're going to add $295 billion to the deficit the year after that and $242 billion to the deficit after that under the rosiest assumptions.
Why would I vote for that? So were you solidly a no? Yeah, they convinced me. I was a lean no until this meeting. Not a no. This no confirmed you right now. Why? They're talking points. Look, these are not something I made up. This is the leadership's talking points. It adds $328 billion to the deficit. It adds $295 billion to the deficit the year after that. The only way they get to this magic thing... And these numbers, by the way, are best case numbers. When does the federal government spending always go, ever? Has it ever gone best case? Where it's not going to kill our country is five years from now, they imagine that 2.5% growth accumulates.
And that even right here, they say they're going to cap discretionary spending. You think we're going to cap discretionary spending and then spend at the rate of inflation after that? That has never happened. So their assumptions are wrong. But even if you take their assumptions at face value, they told us in there they're going to increase the deficit in 2025 by $328 billion. And I've been here long enough. I've been here 12 years. So, I've seen a 10-year plan or two come all the way to 10 years. Under Boehner, we had these 10-year plans. Under Ryan, we had these 10-year plans. Anything past the third year never happens.
There you go. Anything past the third year, it never happens. And he's right. So government spending is going to be going up. It looks like for the short term, revenue will be coming down. And doge cuts are looming over the market. Now, don't take me the wrong way here on doge cuts, but we have to talk about the reality is there is a cost to it. And the statistics show, and I don't know if these are true, but this is a study that's out there. It's by Apollo Investments. You can look it up. They note for every one federal employee, there are actually maybe three jobs. Because according to the statistics, there are two contractors for every one federal employee.
And so you end up potentially with a much larger number when you lay off federal employees, and that drives up the unemployment number. You know, if we lay off, say, 300,000 federal employees, probably not even going to make a blip on the unemployment charts unless things are already sliding pretty bad. But you double that, that starts to make a difference. If the unemployment number gets affected, that's going to have consequences for rates, equities, the credit market, which has so far been fairly good. And today, Trump ordered the federal agencies to prepare for major staff cuts with a deadline of March 13th.
They see this as existential, and they might be right. I'd be curious to know if you agree. Here is Elon from earlier today describing the scale of the crisis. We spend a lot on the defense department, but we're spending like over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go become de facto bankrupt. It's not an optional thing. It is an essential thing. That's the reason I'm here. I'm taking a lot of plaques and getting a lot of death threats, by the way. I like to stack them up, you know. But if we don't do this, America will go bankrupt. That's why it has to be done.
Confidence at this point, knock on wood, you know, knock on my wooden head. There's a lot of wood up there, that we can actually find a trillion dollars in savings. That would be roughly 15% of the $7 trillion budget. He said this before, but he's saying it again. He believes they can find a trillion dollars in spending. And obviously, it can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I'd like to thank everyone for your support. Thank you very much. This can only be done with your support. They say it's possible to cut a trillion. It's existential to the...
To prevent the company from... to prevent the country... to prevent the country from going bankrupt. And I think he could be right. I think the situation is much worse than is commonly believed. And because we have waited this long to address it, it's going to be extremely painful to fix it. You could make the argument the only way to fix it, though, is to rip the Band-Aid off and go hard and fast. just break things, Just let things just be broken for a few, for, I don't know, a year. I don't know what it would take. And then let a new regime take over. One that is theoretically a lighter federal government, more people in the workforce, because hopefully most of those federal employees would get jobs, lower regulations.
Increase in external revenue. These types of things would all kind of come together and be a new regime. Maybe. You know, we just don't know at this point. But we've never really tried this in modern history. So it's safe to assume some of this is going to work and probably some of this won't work so well. And the reality is, is that just uncertainty is going to be the word everybody's kicking around for a while. I think uncertainty. And it might be bigger than the word of the day. It might be the word of the week, maybe the word of the month. So what I've seen in the last week is uncertainty is really amping up.
It's concerning clients. I think it's suppressing risk appetite. And we see it at the individual stock level. We see it at the market level. But when things like Mexico and Canada tariffs, maybe they're on, maybe they're off, it makes people like me who analyze stocks, it makes our jobs very difficult. I'll give you a quick example. I would like to research Ford for the portfolio, but I can't research Ford unless I know what steel tariffs are actually going to be and what Mexico tariffs might actually be. It makes the job nearly impossible. So that uncertainty leaks in kind of from the bottom and works its way up into valuations, into risk appetite, into people's sentiment and comfort with paying what was a 22 times multiple for the market.
But auto tariffs are just a tricky thing in general, just to take a slight deviation here. If you think about it, say auto tariffs go in on European cars. You want to buy yourself a European vehicle. You know, I drive a Volkswagen. You start tariffing those. So you bring the price up by 25%. Maybe 20%, maybe they eat 5%. So it brings up the price by 20%. You go to finance that. Well, you now have to finance an additional 20% on top of the value of the car. It's already tricky right now to get financing for a $40,000, $50,000 car for some. But now it's going to have a 20% increase in price.
Well, are you even willing to buy that car if you suspect that maybe the tariffs are a negotiation strategy and that maybe in six months to a year those tariffs go away? You'd be inclined just to wait. But my God, what happens if you did buy that car? And then the tariffs roll off and you go to try to sell that car. Well, guess what? It just dropped in value. The tariffs were artificially bringing the price up. You could now just imagine that scenario across other goods. So there's going to be tricky dynamics here with this. Some of these might not last. Music.
Another big shift happened in the last week or so that I don't think people really want to even talk about right now because it's just too scary for them. But I think us Bitcoiners knew this was going to happen. Not saying the show's over yet, but the hype around AI is definitely beginning to slow. And it's coming from within the ship, which I did not expect. Sachi Nadella and Microsoft have kind of begun downplaying AI a bit and the investments in it. Sachi has been getting more excited about quantum computing. I'll link to an article in the show notes where he kind of downplays so far the results of AI and comments on how they haven't really improved the workforce productivity like we thought they would.
That's fine. Those are words. The actions I find to be interesting as well, and it is simply quite clear, Microsoft is culling some of their data center plans. So what's going on with Microsoft's data center spending? Yeah, well, just to step back a bit, Microsoft has been one of the big technology companies that is investing the most in AI and AI data centers in particular. They've talked about spending $80 billion this year on data center capacity. So this note from TD Cowan really raised a lot of questions. They said that there's evidence. They did some channel checks.
They said that there's evidence that Microsoft has been canceling leases at data centers, totaling a couple hundred megawatts of data. They also said that they're stopping something called SOQs, the Statement of Qualifications, which is sort of the step before leases. In other words, they're pulling back pretty dramatically from some of their data center commitments in the U.S., and they're reallocating some of the spending that they were planning on doing internationally into the U.S. So it's a bit of onshoring and it's a bit of reducing investment. I just wonder if the AI hype cycle isn't just slowing down a bit, which means money isn't rushing into the S&P as much.
You're going to see the Magnificent Seven not really get the infusion of cash that they have been. I don't know. We'll see. I could be way off on this, but it's weird to see Microsoft, Satya Nadella, CEO, come out and kind of downplay AI. And then it's interesting to see them kind of roll back some of their data center investments. And today, the whole market just was on the edge waiting for NVIDIA's results, which were fine. You know, they're fine. But I think it shows us a, it really shows us that that AI hype bubble has been pulling a lot of liquidity in the market.
And if it does start to slow, that money's going to be looking for somewhere else to go. It's not like all the money printing that happened didn't create deep pockets. The money's still there. It's just they're not so sure this is the best bet yet. Maybe they'll look at Bitcoin. Somebody's got to. I think retail is just a little dipped out right now. You know, the stats seem to show it. I don't think retail is buying right now, even though the price is great. The situation has just sort of been, I think, we expected, most Bitcoiners expected Bitcoin to be ripping by this time.
You know, it was going to be the year of a million Bitcoin. I think some Bitcoiners thought it was going to be 200k Bitcoin. You'll notice I never said any of that on the show, but I think there was an expectation out there. So people went all in earlier, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but that's the sense that I have. There's just, you know, this there's this sort of euphoria that happened, which is generally a sign that something wrong is going to happen. When everyone expects the Bitcoin price or the market to go in one direction, that's generally when you should be a little a little skeptical.
I want to play this clip from former Blackstone president, Tony James. He's an interesting character. He also has a tie into Costco. So he's got his pulse on kind of a more affluent consumer base. I thought his comments were worth listening to a bit. From the state of the stock market to major companies rolling back DEI policies, there's so much going on. And our next guest says concerns loom for business leaders because many fear losing access influence and potentially attracting retribution. I want to talk about all of these things to discuss everything that's going on in our economy, what it means to be a CEO today, former Blackstone president and COO Tony James.
Also, we should mention the chairman of retailer Costco, and we can get a pulse on what's going on with the state of the consumer as well. Good morning to you. Morning, Andrew. OK, so I'm just curious, your sort of sense of confidence in today's economy relative to what we're seeing in the stock market. What is what's your sort of gut on what's happening here? I think the economy is weakening. It didn't have a lot of momentum, but it was okay, but it's definitely starting to turn down, I think. The consumer, there's several warning signs. Confidence was down, obviously. The base of consumers that are driving spending is narrowed to affluent.
Defaults, delinquencies are rising. Meme stocks are down. There's a lot of things to say the consumer is starting to buck a little bit. At the same time, I think the uncertainty coming out of Washington is causing businesses to slow down. What's my supply chain going to cost? I don't know. Can I export? Are there going to be reciprocal duties? I don't know. Should I build another plant? Let's wait and see. OK, so but just tell me with this, because there feels like there's a disconnect. We've had so many business leaders come on our air, I would say over the last two or three months and say, oh, my goodness, we're going to become unshackled by regulations that are just going to disappear.
We are excited about, you know, taxes, all sorts of things. Right. I mean, you've heard that over and over again. So explain that with the perspective that you're offering right now. Well, there's certainly been an ambulance about my Republican friends who are business leaders. I agree. One of the greatest areas of American history is going to unleash the deals business and so on and so forth. I don't see it happening. I mean, on the ground. I actually think we are slowing. And for all the reasons I mentioned, I think business leaders are very reluctant to stick their head up right now and start start complaining.
Hey, Tony, just what we've heard over the last week from a lot of the retailers that have been reporting their earnings is that they're cautious about this next year that's coming up. But the results they saw in December and even in January have been stronger than they had anticipated. The consumers have been doing better. What do you see, maybe through Costco, maybe through other places, that makes you think that the consumers actually are already starting to turn down? I don't think I see it at Costco, honestly. But I'd say they generally target a more affluent consumer.
The average Costco consumer has about two times the national median average of wages. And those results are holding up. Are they exceeding expectations, like you said, Becky? No. But they're holding up. Home Depot and Lowe's in the last two days have both. Said that they've exceeded their own expectations on some of these things. And January was pretty strong for Walmart. January was, but Walmart also blew a caution whistle on the future. I'd say Costco's hanging in there. But that's not where we see the slowdown. It's in confidence. Ironically, something like as simple as egg prices seem to have a lot of correlation with the economy and consumer attitudes. And obviously, you know where those are going.
Well, we know why they're there. It's a total one-off. But do you think that we were overregulated? I think the egg prices comment is a weird one. I know people are, I mean, I've noticed the price of eggs, too. In fact, at our grocery store, they've limited eggs in some times. But thankfully, we've had a line on local chicken eggs. But I think most people know that that's a transitory issue. I thought that was sort of almost a partisan remark. Which was a bit of a flag, and I think old Joe noticed it too. And obviously you know where those are going.
Well, we know why they're there. It's a total one-off. But do you think that we were over-regulated, the economy and business, during the Biden administration? You think only Republican business people are optimistic about a more friendly regulatory environment for business? You don't think there's anything to that? No, I totally agree with you. I think all business executives felt we were over-regulated. Honestly and I think there's both Republicans and Democrats there's a lot of good things that they like about the directions that President Trump is going okay however there's also a lot of uncertainty tariffs and a lot of variability and it's very hard if you're a business to plan right now we own a fertilizer company that's that sells a lot into Canada we were going to build a new plant now we're holding off we don't if there's duties on Canada and the reciprocal duty's coming back but we don't know what that does to us similarly a lot of our companies the supply chains are completely up in the air what's what's the cost of goods and how it's all tariff related it's where a lot of the tariff related some of that we have we have plenty of health care companies that are looking at much slower regulatory approvals with doge and everything so so if you had if you're a if you're a biotech company and you had one year's worth of runway in your cash.
Now maybe you have to slow things down, stretch it out. So you have two years. They already are assuming that cuts at the FDA are going to make we have to put advisory panels. They have to assume that because running out of money is death. Yep. That's their problem, isn't it? Music. All right, so Bitcoin. If you look at it through the lens that we've just constructed, it's kind of remarkable Bitcoin's holding up as well as it is, isn't it? I mean, my God, think about it. Bitcoin is not only going through a historic economic regime change in the United States and, of course, the reaction that creates around the world, but it's also been feeling intense liquidity pressure from the wider crypto market.
And I have to make this clear. You do not hate shit coins enough. It is bad out there. Cryptocurrency exchange, a Bybit disclosing on Friday that it was hacked in what could be the largest crypto heist ever. Join us right now to discuss the crypto market and what's just happened. Anthony Pompliano is the founder and CEO of Professional Capital Management and author of How to Live an Extraordinary Life This Week. Yeah, it's Pom. Pom's back. So I was going to break down the Bybit hack. But because it is so Ethereum specific, I'm just going to give you the high level. Boost in if you would like a full breakdown.
I'd be happy to do it. I just wasn't sure if a Bitcoin audience would be interested. But ByteBit accidentally signed essentially a transaction that executed a smart contract that then proceeded to steal $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum. And it's believed that the Lazarus Group is behind this hack, I guess you could call it. It wasn't ByteBit that was hacked, but it was a front-end provider of theirs that was hacked. And it was a replacement of a front-end web app that hid the execution of the smart contract. They then proceeded to take the stolen ETH funds and launder them by creating meme coins and then ultimately buying Solana and Bitcoin with the profits from their meme coins.
So that's the high level of Bytebit. And that's why CNBC has invited Pomp onto the show. Anthony is hosting New York Bitcoin Investor Week. Which is happening right now as I record. So they're there at the Investor Week watching this crash, by the way. Well, a crash. A crash, right? It's not really a crash. You know what I mean. Which we'll get to as well. Good morning. So how much should we worry about the safety or security, if you will, of crypto after this situation? Well, look, anytime that you have a hack, people obviously get worried about this. But the way that I describe it, the Treasury and the Fed has never been hacked.
The further you get away from the creation of the money point, then you get less secure. Banks have been hacked, armored cars have been hacked, or people have had money stolen from their wallet. Same thing in crypto. The blockchain itself, the Bitcoin blockchain has never been hacked. But if you go and you take that and you put it in an exchange or you put it in some sort of custody solution, those can get hacked. And so I think it's important to pay attention to. The most impressive part to me, though, was this is a $1.4, $1.5 billion hack. Customers obviously were worried. They ran to the exchange. They withdrew $4 billion, no problem. And so obviously the exchange had the money.
Usually what we've seen is when these things happen, the exchange gets caught not having the money or there's some sort of issue. But I think that really the system kind of worked how it was supposed to. And now they're going to work to try to recover that $1.4 billion that was taken from them. Oh, and they have. They've been using market makers to crash the price of all crypto assets. They hire market makers to buy and sell assets from their platforms for them. And you can see it on chain. It's actually, it should be illegal. It should be because they're basically liquidating their own customers.
So you have all the shit coins digesting the end of the meme coin boom right now. I mean, it'll take a while to fully fizzle out. You're always going to have some things going on, but the hype has come crashing down. When you have the combination of the Melania coin, the Libra, the Lazarus group using the meme coins to launder. Well, Bitcoin just experienced the biggest amount of selling pressure on spot exchanges since the China mining ban in May of 2021. And yet, let me see, checking my notes, Bitcoin's at $84,000 right now. So, you know, we're 22.5% down from the all-time high, as I record.
So prices we haven't seen since November. But the reality is a 20% or even a 30-ish percent drawdown isn't unusual. In fact, it's very common. It almost always happens. So if we're around, you know, a 22-ish percent drawdown, well, Bitcoin's 200-day moving average price is $81,000. So we're still above, by just a little bit, the 200-day moving day average price. So that's the price when it's consistently... So think of it this way. As like a quick cheat, it was like, oh man, is Bitcoin really tanking or is this just a correction? If the price is consistently above the 200-day moving average, then you can consider Bitcoin in an uptrend.
And if the price is consistently below the 200-day moving average price, then you can consider Bitcoin in a downtrend. It's the simplest little hack. It doesn't require a bunch of math or charts or trends. You just go look up the 200-day moving average price, and you look at the current price. If it's above the 200-day moving average, then we're in an upswing. If it's below, then we're in a downswing. It's really that simple. And right now, we are still technically hovering right above the 200-day moving average price, which is probably going to be a pretty good resistance point for, you know, we could go down below it, but then we'll pop back up, that kind of thing.
I can't say for sure, but that's what I would at least be watching for if I wanted something to watch for. You probably saw that uh coinbase covered that the u.s marshall service, who manages billions of seized assets can't say how much crypto it holds it doesn't seem to know they have maybe maybe a shot at coming up with a rough estimate of their bitcoin holdings but that's even a long shot this is what the source told coindesk quote As far as I'm aware, the USMS, which is the US Marshal Service, is currently managing this with individual keystrokes in an Excel spreadsheet.
This is according to Chip Borman, who's a contractor. He said, quote, they're one bad day away from a billion dollar mistake. And of course, this is supposed to be if there was to be a Bitcoin reserve, these coins were supposed to be moved into that reserve. Well, today, Polymarket shows now a 10% betting market chance of a Bitcoin reserve getting created in the first 100 days. Only a 10% chance. I think people are kind of refactoring. Some people feel rugged, sort of what I would expect to see happen. But the idea that the U.S. Marshal Service was keeping track of their Bitcoin keys in a spreadsheet, I hope that's FUD because that's so powerful.
Music. Okay, I have a question for you. Is the digital gold meme selling Bitcoin short? At first, that's kind of fine rolling with the, oh yeah, it's like digital gold analogy. You know, it helps the no-coiners wrap their heads around Bitcoin. There's a lot of things that gold and Bitcoin do share in common. A lot of times they also have similar price action. Gold goes on a run and then Bitcoin goes on a run. So I think it does help no-coiners to a degree. But here's my question. Aren't we kind of dramatically underselling Bitcoin with this analogy? And isn't that defeating the purpose? Because gold isn't a global instant settlement network. Bitcoin is a settlement network.
Bitcoin is infinitely more divisible. Bitcoin is easy to self-custody compared to gold, especially if you want to self-custody millions or billions of dollars compared to gold. Bitcoin is outside the control of world banks and governments. Bitcoin is verifiably scarce. You can verify the entire stock right now yourself from any computer. And of course, Bitcoin is digital, which is the key to its true future potential. And yet, I think it's very common. We're seeing this so it's so common, I would say, that even the federal chair, Jerome Powell, does this, yeah, Bitcoin is basically like gold analogy thing.
Or in the Federal Reserve itself, in terms of the system, what do you think of that idea? I don't think that's how people think about it. I mean, it's so, you know, people use Bitcoin as a speculative asset, right? It's like gold. It's just like gold only. It's virtual. It's digital. People are not using it as a form of payment or as a store of value. It's highly volatile. It's not a competitor for the dollar. It's really a competitor for gold. You know, that's really how I think of it. We've heard him say this before too i've played other clips of him saying that it's really a gold competitor you know it's one of those volatile things so here's my question to you is it time to drop the digital gold comparison or does it still serve a purpose i want to hear your take boost in and.
Music. I want to start with a bit of housekeeping. I will not have an episode next week. I'm going to be traveling. I'll be at Scale and Planet Nix, and we'll be on the ground recording and doing interviews. However, I'll be keeping an eye on things, so if something breaks, I might cut into the feed. But plan on no episode next week. I know. I'm trying to give you a warning now. Now's a great time to buy the dip, though. We have a new URL for River. You can support the show by stacking sats. go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river. I think it's the best place in the U.S. to stack sats. They have that 3.8% savings account, so when you have dips like this, you could go boom and smash buy.
Such a great system. If you're all about self-custody, maybe you're in Canada, the Bitcoin Well, bitcoinwell.com slash jupiter. Amazing automatic self-custody platform. Supports Lightning. It's really awesome. Now, if you want to spend some of your sats, you can instantly convert them into a gift card over the Lightning Network using The Bitcoin Company. Promo code JUPITER, link in the show notes. If you want to stack stats by paying your bills or when you use your debit card or their new credit card on the way, that's the Fold card. And the community has been loving the Fold card.
Support the show by using our link in the show notes. If you want to get access to liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, it's all at lending. You can get access to your Bitcoin without having to sell it. And they have, I can attest, a system to make it easy to track your overall loan to value ratio. so you can make sure you don't lose your Bitcoin. And they'll also let you cover the gap with stablecoins. It's not bad. So there you go. Support the show by doing what you do. Music. I really appreciate the boost this week. I am struggling with some health problems, and it's been a hard week.
And I'll tell you, what was a seriously motivating thing was seeing this week in Bitcoin once again get to number one on the fountain charts, thanks to your boost. You guys are bringing in new listeners with that, and I really appreciate it. And, you know, maybe this isn't one of my bangers, but I'm here because of you. And it meant a lot this week. So sometimes it's not just the monetary thing. It's just the value, the recognition of the value, too. So thank you, everybody. We start this week with OB, who is our baller booster with 50,000 sats. OB came in from Fountain says, it sounds like Rogan is a Bitcoin guy.
He was quoting me when I played a clip last week. He says, Rogan is well aware of Bitcoin and the monetary problem when, oh, yeah, right. Andrew Antonopoulos came on in 2016. Although he really hasn't spoken about it since, probably for a reason. I think he knows, and he's worried about his influence, good or bad. His endorsement could incentivize speculation or accelerate adoption. Slower Bitcoin adoption is better for the world, but not likely IMO. Gradually, then suddenly, isn't just a meme, it's historically relevant. Careful, one million Bitcoin is painful for so many, probably even Bitcoiners. You know, I agree.
We're moving real fast these days, Obi. We're moving real fast. And people still don't know the difference between meme coins and Bitcoin, between crypto and Bitcoin. People don't understand what makes something a good asset. They don't understand what makes something good money yet. They don't all need to, but I sure would love to see at least a few more. You know, we're moving really fast. People don't even understand what they're getting into yet. They, I guess this always does happen. Maybe a little price cooling will slow some of that for a bit and give us plebs a chance to stack at a little bit more reasonable prices.
It's funny how 80,000 feels reasonable now. You know, if you go back to October, I'd be like, oh my God, 80,000, what? But now it's like, oh, what a great deal. Appreciate the baller boost. Thank you, OB. Hope to hear from you again. A-Train's here with 20,000 sats. Fun will now commence. Thanks for the value. So I've heard some forward-thinking stories about future uses of Bitcoin, like using mining to stabilize power grids. Can you do a future show, okay, with ideas on future uses of Bitcoin, be it banking or infrastructure use? Thanks again, Andrew. That is, so I don't know if you might be new, Andrew. One of my favorite topics is, and that's kind of maybe why I hold back on it because I've talked about it too much for a while.
I think it's remarkable how Bitcoin is a lens in which I begin to understand other industries too. I had no idea about how demand response worked in the power grid, and I had no idea that we had these 50,000, 30,000 are the cheap ones, these just ginormous loud machines that we have deployed in places that do nothing but waste power. It's just great. Or think about all of those different methane off-gassing pipes out there that we could cap. We could cap, and we could mine that energy. I think it's going to be a revolution. Yeah, I'll try to find a good story to talk about in the future. Thanks for the boost, Andrew. Appreciate it.
Joe Stones is here with a row of ducks. That's 2,222 cents. We're treading a fine line between accelerating the downfall of ship coins and turning the normings off from crypto. Yeah, including Bitcoin. Do you think the average Joe can understand the fundamental differences? The opinions outside the echo chamber seem woefully uninformed. I've been really feeling that. I've been feeling that, Joe. I've been really feeling that recently. The thing is, what I believe happens is meme coins or things like Doge, right? The last cycle, it was the Doge coin, right? We kind of forgotten that Doge actually used to mean a coin.
Those things would get a lot of attention. And then people would confuse what's the difference between Doge and Bitcoin. I don't understand. What's the difference? And then many cycles before that, Joe, it was things like Bitcoin and Litecoin. So this has been a constant problem. And one of the key things that I think people fail to appreciate and understand is, A, the network effect. This is true for all technologies. The network effect always has a massive influence. Two, there will never be another Bitcoin because everything else that's going to get created after Bitcoin is going to have a founder or a team.
Some of these have marketing departments and they're not fairly distributed. And these just, those two things, network effect and fair distribution are some of the key differentiators between meme coins and Bitcoin. But people don't understand, they've lived a fiat lifestyle for so long, their whole lives. They grew up and they don't know anything else. You know, they're a fish in the ocean. And we're up here saying there's a whole other world. You just need an air tank. Thank you. Appreciate the boost, Joe. And it's a good question and one I'd love to hear more thoughts on.
Oppie 1984 is here with 4,000 sats. This is the way. Hey there, Oppie. Good to hear from you. Why you got to put numbers and letters together? Why can't you just go f*** yourself? My cold storage is a paper wallet stored in an Altoid-style tin that is locked in a fireproof wall safe. I print my paper wallets on a laptop. I print my paper wallets on a laptop that I ran DBAN on. Oh, I see. And then I installed Mint 19-1 to cover over that. The laptop is permanently air gapped and the only connection it has is USB connection to an old dumb laser printer around Bitcoin paper wallet locally to generate new wallets as needed.
It may not be military grade encryption, but it works for me in my humble little stack. I'll be it sounds like you got a good system there. I also think, you know, you could always incorporate like some seed plates, something like that, something metal in that safe. I don't I don't after hearing from some listeners in the California wildfires, I don't trust those fireproof safes anymore. I heard from listeners that lost stuff inside the safe. It just cooked. I have not heard from anybody that did metal plates, though. So I'm assuming those people did okay. But it's something to consider.
You could always work that in there if you want to. Appreciate the boost, and thanks for telling me about the setup. That made me think. I'd love to kind of go through an exercise like that with my kids one day. I might do that. Vault Byte comes in with 2,121 cents. The traders love the vault. Not today. I only trust my phone and my computer for handling pocket money. I asked last week if folks like me have a hard time trusting mobile devices with a lot of Bitcoin. Hardware wallets are fine for letting them participate in the signing, no matter where the transaction gets created or broadcast.
On a side note, I highly recommend using NitroPhone, NitroPads, and NitroKeys. These guys are awesome. And your security is worth it. NitroPads, huh? Taking a look. Oh, yeah, okay. Shop.NitroKey.com. Very nice. Thanks for the tip on that. I had not seen that before. Yeah, you make a good point. As long as the signing device is secure, right? That's a good point, too. Thanks, Vault. One dull geeks here with 4,444 sats. That's two rows of birds. That's a big old stack of birds. You could be a McDuck or you could be an Affleck duck. Affleck! This old duck still got it. When I use a hardware wallet, I have my private keys on that wallet. I don't have them on the mobile wallet.
So I don't understand what you mean by trusting a mobile wallet when it's paired to a hardware wallet. As far as supporting the show, I didn't even know you existed until you showed up in Fountain, and I immediately trusted the fact that it was users sending their support as an indication that this was a quality podcast and way more than just fiat marketing. Thanks for not blasting my ear holes with the fiat mindset. Oh, with the fiat ads. You know, one dull geek nailed it. Nailed it. Coming in hot with the boost. I think that's your boost.
When I saw this coming earlier this week, I realized, yeah, you know, like the Jade is great with the green wallet. And there's a lot of options there. You're right on that count. You're technically you're right. And that's the best kind of right. You're making me reconsider my mobile device hesitation. I have to say, thank you for the boost. And glad you found us. It's always nice to hear from you. Amorphageage? Amorphageage? Come on. Amorphasausage is what I'm going with. came in with 3,500 sats. A little thought experiment for you. There's a bang. We're all KO. We're all knocked out. We wake up. Everybody has a wristband with sats on it.
Everyone's money has been converted to sats. There is no more cash, credit cards, etc. No more fiat. Only Bitcoin stocks, bonds, housing, other assets. Everybody can pay with Bitcoin Lightning and knows how it works. Is the world a better place or worse? I'm curious. I'll provide my answer next week. The only way the world could be better is if there was software solutions to help these people manage this safely and then also transact safely and securely, right? Because it's like giving everyone the internet, which we did with smartphones. You know what I mean, though? It's putting TCP IP on everyone's wrist, essentially, is what you're asking me.
Okay well now the application stack that runs on top of that you know it can't be centralized like we saw the chivo wallet in in el salvador was centralized you know there's so there's ways you can kind of mess up the implementation this goes back to maybe a little bit slower adoptions better because we get time to work out these ui issues and the software stack issue i have to say i don't know if it happened tomorrow if the world would be better, Ultimately, I think it would, but I think it would take years. It would take, that's a hard reason.
That's like literally taking all the fish out of water at once and then telling them to calm down and just breathe normally. You know what I mean? I'd love to hear your answer, though. Thanks for the boost. And, you know, maybe give me a little help on that there. Username, too. Appreciate it. Tiara comes in with 6,222 sats. I'm probably not getting that one right either. There's some new boosters. This is great to see. and I'm making a horrible impression, which is bad to see. I'm not on my game this episode, but I really appreciate the boost. And Tara writes, Tierra writes, I do use my phone for my main custody setup, but as part of my multi-sig, it's three of four multi-sig where I have a tap signer, a jade, not the plus version, Trezor Model T and my phone.
Wow. Nice setup. Okay. Look, you know, I think there's some logic in kind of trying different wallets like that too, because then you are diffusing the risk in a sense, right? You're not necessarily vulnerable if one particular one gets compromised at some point in the future. I mean, it's a little bit more to manage. The multi-sig can be managed all on the phone using nunchuck wallet. Oh yeah, nunchuck wallet is great for that. The setup always requires at least one hardware wallet to be available to spend the funds, making it so that the phone plays a lesser role in the overall security of the multi-sig.
And it's really there for most of the times as a watch only. And always to build transactions for future spending. I, so far, have been loving this wallet setup, and I'm planning on upgrading some of my other hardware wallets, like switching to the Trezor or the Cold Card Q or Mark IV. I can give a big endorsement to the Mark IV. I have one Trezor, and I have many Mark IVs. I really like the Cold Card. I don't love the Q. I just think it's maybe more than I need, although I could be convinced I do think some of the functionality would be nice. But I also the only problem with the cold card queue is, For me, it looks like a Bitcoin wallet or something. I mean, it looks like something you want to steal.
Cold card queue. Go Google it right now. It looks like something you'd want to steal. So you break into somebody. I'm taking that. You know, but the Mark IV, I mean, it looks like, you know, a classroom calculator, basically. You don't know what you're looking at. Who cares? I'm leaving that piece of crap. That thing's like a $15 calculator. I'm leaving it. You know? I mean, I know it's stupid security through obscurity, but it's something I think about. Thank you for the boost. It's really nice to hear from you. Sir Naxalot's here with 4,321 sats. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy.
On using a PC to Bitcoin, I don't own one. I use multiple phones and I feel secure, but not having a PC sure makes running a node hard. I'm breaking down in the near future and I'm going to buy a laptop and then I will run my own node. I love the Bitcoin well and I love this week in Bitcoin. Well, thank you. Nice to hear from you, sir. I'm really stoked to hear you're going to do a node. Let me know how that goes and what route you take. And I always hear good things about AlbiHub, but there's a lot of options there. Interesting to also hear from somebody that doesn't have a PC.
Is anybody else listening out there that doesn't have a personal computer, a PC? I don't hear that very often. Fascinating. And I'm really glad that you're listening. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks. Not financial advice, but my understanding is that Bitcoin rewards programs are considered a rebate and not taxable. But if you were to sell those earned sats, that would be a taxable event. Simple solution, never sell your sack. You're right, Ace. That's what we looked up to after the show. That's what I was able to figure out. And I guess your cost basis would have to be when you earn the rewards so you would be dependent on the platform to essentially generate you a report, which I'm sure things like River and Fold do that. So it's not really an issue.
Yeah. So Bitcoin rewards, I'm all about it because I don't ever plan to sell those sets. And they're just like, I call it passive stacking. It's my way to passive stack. And so when I have moments like right now when the price is dipping and I'm like, oh God, I wish we could just go in big right now. I have a little bit of peace in knowing that, Well, when I pay my bills, I'm stacking some sats. When we buy some groceries or whatever we're doing, I'm stacking some sats. And I'm getting a little bit more sats right now while I do those things. And so it doesn't completely get rid of the FOMO. But it does help knowing that, well, I'm always stacking. I'm always stacking.
Thanks, Ace. Appreciate it. Moon Knight's here with AroaDux. Hey! I'm with you on trusting my desktop and a hardware wallet more than my Graphene OS phone with an AirGap signer. I love the multi-sig combo of nunchuck plus tap signer for my walking around wallet, but for some reason I feel safer with my single SIG on my home Ubuntu desktop that's offline 99% of the time. I've been trying to get over this because multi-sig is far and away the safer way to go, and nunchuck does make it so easy. Look at that, another good plug for nunchuck. I think, Moon and I, you and I have been in the exact headspace, right?
Maybe, I don't know, are you like me? Maybe you've been using desktop computers for a while, you know, maybe built a few of them yourselves. You know, you just, I don't think I know of a more secure system than the desktop systems I've built, you know, with the run Linux. I just, I don't quite know what's in the phone, but I know what's in that system from, you know, bolts and fans all the way up to the software stack. And so I think that's part of, and oh, oh, oh, oh, and you know what else it is? If the power supply dies in that PC, I swap out the power supply. If something dies in the charging components for the cell phone, I got to toss the whole phone.
Right. If if there is a memory issue or a single disk issue or even a file system corruption issue, I know how to go into a live boot environment and try to repair the file system and maybe mount the file system and rescue files. Maybe I could do that with a phone. Maybe I can't. Right. So it's like just the doomsday scenarios. I know how to handle those on the PC as well. And I think that plays a factor. And I'd be curious, Moon Knight, if that's true for you as well. Monty's here with a row of ducks. I got my AlbiHub set up.
That's great. That's awesome. I tried several times to get Nick's Bitcoin up and running, but I just couldn't get it to build. Albi, though, I had up in about 10 minutes. Any suggestions on getting going with my own Lightning Wallet? I opened a channel as part of my setup. Anything else I should know? Well, you definitely want to play around, Monty, with AlbiGo. That is a really simple but functional Lightning Wallet that just plugs right into your AlbiHub. You could also look into Zeus wallet. Also connects to your AlbiHub. Very good wallet. And could solve some of your problems for you, like channel management too, potentially.
You'd have to dig into that though. Man, I'm so stoked for you. Congratulations. We got another node on the network. I hope when I go check the state of the network, we see the numbers ticking up over there. Now the channels is a thing. You got to pick and choose. AQIN or whatever it is. ACQIN, if that's in the list still, I would definitely recommend that one. Opening channels to somebody like kraken also gets you well placed in the network, It does take some sats to do that, but once those sats are in the channels, then you're able to transmit back and forth. And when you close the channels, you do get the sats back.
Thanks for boosting in, Monty. Good to hear from you. Block 7 is here with 5,000 sats. Never tell me the odds. And he just says, boost! Thank you. Appreciate it. Neural P is here with 5,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. No message, just the value. Scuffed is here with 7,222 sats. Pew, pew, pew. He says, thanks for your insights on Fold. I think I'll at least get a debit card and pay some bills through it. What do I have to lose? Yeah, that's what I figured. And I actually ended up liking the way I had. I reorganized it. So now, you know, not everything's coming out of one checking account.
So we just do two transfers a month to Fold to cover the bills at the beginning of the month and the second half of the month. And it keeps the volume down in the main checking account. It's been way better. Just that separation of bills and main checking and then getting the sats on there is pretty great and you know that debit card check out some of those merchant boosts you can get like 5% back sats on some of that stuff he continues the state of the network has gained one more node hey yes. Alright I set mine up using start 9 a VM that I have running inside Proxmox I already had a Proxmox cluster going and I also installed electors which is Electrum running on Rust.
Nice. So I can interface with the Sparrow wallet securely. Oh, yes. This is so fun. And it really has broadened my understanding of this whole Bitcoin thing. I'd encourage everyone to try it. I'm going to give that a ding too. That is a great story. And it really does help you understand Bitcoin. Sparrow is one of the best tools in this space. And it helps you understand where you're spending your Bitcoin and not, you know, I can use it to make sure that I don't mix KYC to non-KYC Bitcoin very easily. Love that whole setup, dude. Well done, Scuffed. That's really great. That is really great. VCP's here with 5,000 sats. You're so boosted. Love the perspective on eating our vegetables.
I have a node, and I think it's the path for all true Bitcoiners. Once I saw how long it took to download the blockchain, it was like seeing the edge of the universe. At that point on the Bitcoin journey at what point on the Bitcoin journey should a newbie start up a node hmm I think you gotta have some sats you know you want a little skin in the game, And I think, you know, you're going to want a wallet probably when you get to, I, you know, if you can, if you're down for a little server shenanigans, different for everybody, when you're ready to set up a desktop wallet and a hardware wallet, great time to get a note up first and then just have everything use your note as the source of truth from the beginning.
That could be the threshold, but, you know, everybody's to each their own. I mean, I'd say if you just want to have fun, even if you just like distributed computing and you're not going to set up a hardware wallet or like a soft wallet, it's just fun to participate in a distributed computing platform too. So to be honest with you, I'd do it either way. But that's just me. Thanks for the boost. Anonymous comes in with 2,000 sats. You're doing a good job. No message, just the sats. Appreciate that. Nico, the Greek, not the geek, the Greek comes in with 4,000 sats. I've got to be careful. Danger zone. Almost just almost blew that.
No message, though, just the boost. Danger zone. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you, everybody who boosts in. There's a lot below the 2,000 sat cutoff line this week. This is, wow. Gene Bean, I see you down in there. Nice to hear from you as well. Oh, wow. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate that. First time buying the dip by Coach Rick. Nice, Coach Rick. Good for you. I can buy that dip, buddy. All right. So thank you, everybody, who boosted in. I will not have an episode next week. So this was a nice segment. I felt like there's a lot of good stuff in there. I'm going to be thinking about that during the down week.
I really appreciate it if you wanted to boost in. Before we run, I want to tell you how we did. With the sat streamers out there streaming sats, as they listened, 57 of you did that. Thank you very much. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. All of you helped me stack 108,825 sats for the show. Oh, boy. They want them. It's our guarantee. Thank you. Now, when you combine that with the boosters, we stacked a grand total of 245,479 sats for the show. Music. This is a value for value show. That means the show is out there for free. The work I do is free. You can distribute it as you like.
But if you get some value from the show, I always appreciate if you send it back. time, talent, or treasure, and of course a boost is a way to do it in a Bitcoin-native way. Every time somebody says Bitcoin isn't used for a transaction, you can shove it in their face with a boost. The easiest way is with Strike or some other way to buy sats like River or Bitcoin Well that's on the Lightning Network, and then you send them to Fountain or your Albie Hub, whatever app you choose at podcastapps.com. There's a whole world out there, and then you get new features too. Like with this show, you get transcripts, you get chapters, you get the Magic Walt switching technology so you can support the artists and you see their album art and all that. It's pretty great.
Thank you, everybody who supports the show. I appreciate you. And also, if you recognize that tune, I want to be your friend. Music. I got some updates for you. We've been talking about hardware wallets, and I am now keeping an eye on the BitKey as I gave one to a family member over the holidays. And a feature that had been rumored is now live, and it's inheritance. And I know this is something that some of you consider. They now have a beneficiary mode. You have your spending mobile key, which gets encrypted with a wrapping key. That wrapped key is then encrypted with your beneficiary's public key.
Then both encrypted keys are stored on Block's servers. So now nobody involved, Block can't access the key, like nobody can see each other's keys, but they have this system all guided by the app to essentially wrap keys and store it on the server. And then in the event of your death, your beneficiary can go into the BitKey app and say, hey, he's dead or they're dead and I need access to their funds. BitKey will then initiate a six-month delay and notify period. Essentially, for six months, you'll get periodic alerts about the claim, and either you or the beneficiary can cancel the process at any time.
After six months, then BitKey releases the encrypted keys to your beneficiary. Their BitKey app then decrypts the wrapped key with their private key. It decrypts your mobile key with the wrapped key, however that works. And now they can co-sign transactions with BitKey servers to move funds over into their own BitKey wallet. So your beneficiary never sees your Bitcoin balance, and it never has access to your funds before any transfers, and they don't get to see your keys. They just have this whole system that they can take care of. Now, the only real downside I see to this is that block servers are involved, which is fine. I mean, they're probably going to be around. They're a great, solid company.
But, you know, if this is a 30-year thing here, I mean, I don't know. Like I said to say, you know, they did BitKeys for my family or whatever. Well, I'd hope I'd make it like another 20 years. So is block servers going to be online in 20 years to do this? That would be my concern here. Now, if I was, you know, later in life, something like that, maybe it would make sense. I don't know. But that's my one kind of note is to make all this magic happen, their servers are required. It is going to be probably, I haven't seen this yet, but it'd be a safe bet. This is going to be the smoothest, cleanest, noobiest, friendly beneficiary process out there for a Bitcoin stash.
Oklahoma's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act, which is HB 1203, has passed the House committee and is advancing for a House floor vote. The bill allows the state to invest 10% of public funds into Bitcoin or any digital assets with a market cap over $500 billion. There has been a couple of states, Montana and I believe North Dakota, their Bitcoin reserve bills have failed. But things are also moving forward, including in the state of Tejas and in the state of Utah. Things are moving pretty good. And a local news station, KXAN in Texas, they covered the Bitcoin reserve bill that's in the works.
The state of texas could begin investing in bitcoin lawmakers got their first look at a bill to create a cryptocurrency reserve supporters believe crypto could help the state's bottom line as kevin basker reports the idea is also raising concern seeking for an alternative to the dollar Cryptocurrency is what people believe is, in this case, Bitcoin, finite and decentralized and something that they don't have to worry about governments printing more and more money. It's not something we believe. It's a fact. I'm a little concerned that the chair of this says things like people believe it's scarce. No, people believe gold is scarce.
We know Bitcoin is scarce. Texas Senator Charles Schwartner is behind the bill to establish the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The Business and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the proposal on Tuesday. He says the creation will protect the economy from inflation. People are really worried about federal overspending. That's been going on decades, and the inflation that that engenders. It can be very, very volatile. Kendall Garrison, the CEO of Amplify Credit Union, explains the possible pitfalls of a crypto reserve. Uh-oh. So, Ken... Ken guy here, he's going to warn us about how volatile crypto is.
Kendall Garrison, the CEO of Amplify Credit Union, explains the possible pitfalls of a crypto reserve. Switching from very safe investments that the state of Texas has today, like government bonds. Index funds, hedge fund investments, moving to cryptocurrency is really increasing the risk in that portfolio. But Schwartner doesn't think it's as risky as what it seems to be. Bitcoin in particular is the largest cryptocurrency, the one that trades the largest volume. And I think it has the least amount of overall volatility. What I would suggest is they have a very strong, very well thought out investment policy that has a stop loss built into it.
So if it decreases more than X percent, then you exit those investments. And on the other side of the coin, if it increases more than X percent, you harvest some of the profits. Kevin Bosker, State of Texas. Boy, that's some bad advice. You know, again, I just, I think we're too early, especially for these Bitcoin reserve bills. There's so much confusion about Bitcoin and crypto. The word volatility is thrown around as if it's utterance, just the utterance of the word volatility is justification in enough of itself to just stay away from something. Oh, it's volatile.
And then he starts talking about buying bonds and other things that are going to have no purchasing power after it's been eroded away by inflation. Not to mention that investors demand higher yields to compensate for inflation risks with bonds. So that puts upward pressure on bond yields and downward pressure on the prices. So for example, if a bond pays 4% yield and inflation is 3%, like they say, then your real rate of return is 1% on that bond. And well, most things in life, inflation has been well above 4%. And during periods of high inflation, bonds often experience negative real returns commonly, which is the very issue that people are concerned about.
And this dip flip that they bring on Ken completely misses it because he's just looking at everything through a traditional fiat lens. And there's another mistake they're experiencing. Music. This will be our final clip of the week here. You noticed, I'm sure, that he says you ought to put some, he had something like, you know, you got to have really good investing policy. I always love when people say that. Yeah. Okay, great. Great tip. What you're going to want to do is if that Bitcoin pumps, you're going to want to sell it, you know, and make some of that money back.
Maybe that makes sense in some circumstances, you know, like with oil. I don't know, because they can always make more oil for a while, right? Or silver. Maybe that makes more sense with silver. But it's very fiat thinking. And I got a clip here from Larry Leppard. He's going to recount a famous story I've told once before on the show that puts this into perspective. It's the wrong way to think when investing in Bitcoin. It's a mistake that a lot of investors make, I think. And that is to say you've got a gain and you're feeling good about it. And you think, oh, this can't last. And maybe it's overpriced now and therefore I'll sell it.
I bought Microsoft in 86 when it went public, 14 times trailing, growing 40% a year. and I made, I don't know, three times my money on it. And I sold it for a logical reason, actually, because it was the only money I had to make a down payment on a condominium and I wanted to own a condominium. But had I held on to it, it turned out it went up another 4,000x and I missed all that. Buying Bitcoin right here is buying Microsoft in its first five or 10 years of existence. It's like Manhattan real estate, as he said. You don't want to sell a cornerstone asset that can't be replicated.
Music. Let's check in on the state of the network. We end the episode at block height 885,472. The Bitcoin price in USD is 84,470 sats per dollar, 1,184. We are down 22.6% from our all-time high, which was 109,160 on January 19, 2025. However, reachable Bitcoin nodes is looking real good. $21,903. I'm going to write that down. See, I'm going to compare it in two weeks when I'm back. $21,903. Do you think we can put a few more on there? Bitcoin's doing great. 22% drawdown. You don't even feel it once you've been in here for a little while. Ain't no thing at all. And if you look at the pressures Bitcoin is under right now, It's remarkable it's holding up.
I think it deserves even a little bit more of a sale. Let's get those stats even cheaper. We'll see how it's doing when I get back in a couple of weeks. Now, if you'd like links to what I talked about, those will be over at the website, thisweekinbitcoin.show. If you're at Planet Nix or Scale, come say hi and tell me you love the show, of course. And I would love to have you boost in with what you would have liked to have heard from the show, but maybe I missed this week. I'm always trying to make sure I'm catching what you want to hear, or if you have a different take on something, of course.
And then last but not least, I want your thoughts on that whole digital gold meme. Is it time to drop it or do we need to embrace it for just a little bit longer? Now I'm going to leave you with a value for value track. Last week, I played Disco Ball by Jojo Scott and you guys once again brought it to number one on the charts this week. I believe that's four episodes in a row and these artists, they notice it. They notice it and they really appreciate it. So this week, I'm going to play acetaminophen by Mookie. See you in two weeks. See you in two weeks. Music.
That day. We were supposed to be together. Remember you had pro-yo. Pro-yo. With Ashley? Oh, oh, no, don't talk about yo. Don't talk about yo.
What I think is interesting about this is that nobody has said, this is a crazy idea to go make sure the gold is actually there. And, you know, just think about that. I mean, I think the gold is probably there. I think the gold is almost certainly there. But nobody thinks it's a crazy idea to go check because we don't know. That's how bad the corruption has gotten in Washington. . . Music. . Welcome into This Week in Bitcoin, episode 48. My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. Welcome to The Shakedown. Remember these days in the future when they tell us that Bitcoiners just got lucky. It was so easy.
Hodling isn't always all that easy, and this week we're learning why. These are the moments these hard assets transfer from weak hands to serious hodlers. And this market will always either try to scare you out or wear you out. And I think we start this week with the macro picture that's screwing up our Bitcoin game. Volatility is being created by the trump administration we kind of knew this was going to happen kind of been expecting this these are aggressive new economic policies that are being tried well maybe not new but they're being tried which is new and bitcoin plunged to a three-month low following president trump's announcement of 25 percent tariffs on canada and mexico effective march 4th and then earlier today as i record during his first cabinet meeting there was a q a And he also said we should expect tariffs on the EU very soon.
So when we bring all of it together, it now means we're set to see 25 percent tariffs on Canada, 25 percent tariffs on Mexico, 25 percent tariffs on the EU, 10 percent tariffs on China. And there's been a potential threatened 100 percent tariffs on the BRICS nations. So, you know, that is rocking things. One thing that's definitely shifted is the market's expectation for future inflation was at 2.7%. Now they're thinking 4.3% and easily could see it double from there. That's what they're predicting now. And the country is stuck between a rock and a hard place, right?
We've lived beyond our means for a long time. My entire lifetime, this country has borrowed so we'd have a better standard of living, so we could spend money on things that we didn't necessarily have the revenue for. And in doing this and going for the cheapest items, we collapsed our domestic production, we borrowed heavily, and now here we are. We're in this hard place with no great options. And so when the market saw the new Republican spending plan coming out and it authorized four trillion dollars of increase in the debt limit, it sent a real message that there is two very big concerning things on the horizon.
And the biggest of them is stagflation. This is Representative Thomas Massey. He's a Republican and he's blasting the other Republicans for not actually putting forward a serious, real budget. Can you just talk to us? Are you still a no? Is there anything? They convinced me in there. I'm a no. Is there anything? Look, let me let me their own numbers. If the Republican plan passes under the rosiest assumptions, which aren't even true, we're going to add three hundred and twenty eight billion dollars to the deficit this year. We're going to add $295 billion to the deficit the year after that and $242 billion to the deficit after that under the rosiest assumptions.
Why would I vote for that? So were you solidly a no? Yeah, they convinced me. I was a lean no until this meeting. Not a no. This no confirmed you right now. Why? They're talking points. Look, these are not something I made up. This is the leadership's talking points. It adds $328 billion to the deficit. It adds $295 billion to the deficit the year after that. The only way they get to this magic thing... And these numbers, by the way, are best case numbers. When does the federal government spending always go, ever? Has it ever gone best case? Where it's not going to kill our country is five years from now, they imagine that 2.5% growth accumulates.
And that even right here, they say they're going to cap discretionary spending. You think we're going to cap discretionary spending and then spend at the rate of inflation after that? That has never happened. So their assumptions are wrong. But even if you take their assumptions at face value, they told us in there they're going to increase the deficit in 2025 by $328 billion. And I've been here long enough. I've been here 12 years. So, I've seen a 10-year plan or two come all the way to 10 years. Under Boehner, we had these 10-year plans. Under Ryan, we had these 10-year plans. Anything past the third year never happens.
There you go. Anything past the third year, it never happens. And he's right. So government spending is going to be going up. It looks like for the short term, revenue will be coming down. And doge cuts are looming over the market. Now, don't take me the wrong way here on doge cuts, but we have to talk about the reality is there is a cost to it. And the statistics show, and I don't know if these are true, but this is a study that's out there. It's by Apollo Investments. You can look it up. They note for every one federal employee, there are actually maybe three jobs. Because according to the statistics, there are two contractors for every one federal employee.
And so you end up potentially with a much larger number when you lay off federal employees, and that drives up the unemployment number. You know, if we lay off, say, 300,000 federal employees, probably not even going to make a blip on the unemployment charts unless things are already sliding pretty bad. But you double that, that starts to make a difference. If the unemployment number gets affected, that's going to have consequences for rates, equities, the credit market, which has so far been fairly good. And today, Trump ordered the federal agencies to prepare for major staff cuts with a deadline of March 13th.
They see this as existential, and they might be right. I'd be curious to know if you agree. Here is Elon from earlier today describing the scale of the crisis. We spend a lot on the defense department, but we're spending like over a trillion dollars on interest. If this continues, the country will go become de facto bankrupt. It's not an optional thing. It is an essential thing. That's the reason I'm here. I'm taking a lot of plaques and getting a lot of death threats, by the way. I like to stack them up, you know. But if we don't do this, America will go bankrupt. That's why it has to be done.
Confidence at this point, knock on wood, you know, knock on my wooden head. There's a lot of wood up there, that we can actually find a trillion dollars in savings. That would be roughly 15% of the $7 trillion budget. He said this before, but he's saying it again. He believes they can find a trillion dollars in spending. And obviously, it can only be done with the support of everyone in this room. And I'd like to thank everyone for your support. Thank you very much. This can only be done with your support. They say it's possible to cut a trillion. It's existential to the...
To prevent the company from... to prevent the country... to prevent the country from going bankrupt. And I think he could be right. I think the situation is much worse than is commonly believed. And because we have waited this long to address it, it's going to be extremely painful to fix it. You could make the argument the only way to fix it, though, is to rip the Band-Aid off and go hard and fast. just break things, Just let things just be broken for a few, for, I don't know, a year. I don't know what it would take. And then let a new regime take over. One that is theoretically a lighter federal government, more people in the workforce, because hopefully most of those federal employees would get jobs, lower regulations.
Increase in external revenue. These types of things would all kind of come together and be a new regime. Maybe. You know, we just don't know at this point. But we've never really tried this in modern history. So it's safe to assume some of this is going to work and probably some of this won't work so well. And the reality is, is that just uncertainty is going to be the word everybody's kicking around for a while. I think uncertainty. And it might be bigger than the word of the day. It might be the word of the week, maybe the word of the month. So what I've seen in the last week is uncertainty is really amping up.
It's concerning clients. I think it's suppressing risk appetite. And we see it at the individual stock level. We see it at the market level. But when things like Mexico and Canada tariffs, maybe they're on, maybe they're off, it makes people like me who analyze stocks, it makes our jobs very difficult. I'll give you a quick example. I would like to research Ford for the portfolio, but I can't research Ford unless I know what steel tariffs are actually going to be and what Mexico tariffs might actually be. It makes the job nearly impossible. So that uncertainty leaks in kind of from the bottom and works its way up into valuations, into risk appetite, into people's sentiment and comfort with paying what was a 22 times multiple for the market.
But auto tariffs are just a tricky thing in general, just to take a slight deviation here. If you think about it, say auto tariffs go in on European cars. You want to buy yourself a European vehicle. You know, I drive a Volkswagen. You start tariffing those. So you bring the price up by 25%. Maybe 20%, maybe they eat 5%. So it brings up the price by 20%. You go to finance that. Well, you now have to finance an additional 20% on top of the value of the car. It's already tricky right now to get financing for a $40,000, $50,000 car for some. But now it's going to have a 20% increase in price.
Well, are you even willing to buy that car if you suspect that maybe the tariffs are a negotiation strategy and that maybe in six months to a year those tariffs go away? You'd be inclined just to wait. But my God, what happens if you did buy that car? And then the tariffs roll off and you go to try to sell that car. Well, guess what? It just dropped in value. The tariffs were artificially bringing the price up. You could now just imagine that scenario across other goods. So there's going to be tricky dynamics here with this. Some of these might not last. Music.
Another big shift happened in the last week or so that I don't think people really want to even talk about right now because it's just too scary for them. But I think us Bitcoiners knew this was going to happen. Not saying the show's over yet, but the hype around AI is definitely beginning to slow. And it's coming from within the ship, which I did not expect. Sachi Nadella and Microsoft have kind of begun downplaying AI a bit and the investments in it. Sachi has been getting more excited about quantum computing. I'll link to an article in the show notes where he kind of downplays so far the results of AI and comments on how they haven't really improved the workforce productivity like we thought they would.
That's fine. Those are words. The actions I find to be interesting as well, and it is simply quite clear, Microsoft is culling some of their data center plans. So what's going on with Microsoft's data center spending? Yeah, well, just to step back a bit, Microsoft has been one of the big technology companies that is investing the most in AI and AI data centers in particular. They've talked about spending $80 billion this year on data center capacity. So this note from TD Cowan really raised a lot of questions. They said that there's evidence. They did some channel checks.
They said that there's evidence that Microsoft has been canceling leases at data centers, totaling a couple hundred megawatts of data. They also said that they're stopping something called SOQs, the Statement of Qualifications, which is sort of the step before leases. In other words, they're pulling back pretty dramatically from some of their data center commitments in the U.S., and they're reallocating some of the spending that they were planning on doing internationally into the U.S. So it's a bit of onshoring and it's a bit of reducing investment. I just wonder if the AI hype cycle isn't just slowing down a bit, which means money isn't rushing into the S&P as much.
You're going to see the Magnificent Seven not really get the infusion of cash that they have been. I don't know. We'll see. I could be way off on this, but it's weird to see Microsoft, Satya Nadella, CEO, come out and kind of downplay AI. And then it's interesting to see them kind of roll back some of their data center investments. And today, the whole market just was on the edge waiting for NVIDIA's results, which were fine. You know, they're fine. But I think it shows us a, it really shows us that that AI hype bubble has been pulling a lot of liquidity in the market.
And if it does start to slow, that money's going to be looking for somewhere else to go. It's not like all the money printing that happened didn't create deep pockets. The money's still there. It's just they're not so sure this is the best bet yet. Maybe they'll look at Bitcoin. Somebody's got to. I think retail is just a little dipped out right now. You know, the stats seem to show it. I don't think retail is buying right now, even though the price is great. The situation has just sort of been, I think, we expected, most Bitcoiners expected Bitcoin to be ripping by this time.
You know, it was going to be the year of a million Bitcoin. I think some Bitcoiners thought it was going to be 200k Bitcoin. You'll notice I never said any of that on the show, but I think there was an expectation out there. So people went all in earlier, in my opinion. I could be wrong, but that's the sense that I have. There's just, you know, this there's this sort of euphoria that happened, which is generally a sign that something wrong is going to happen. When everyone expects the Bitcoin price or the market to go in one direction, that's generally when you should be a little a little skeptical.
I want to play this clip from former Blackstone president, Tony James. He's an interesting character. He also has a tie into Costco. So he's got his pulse on kind of a more affluent consumer base. I thought his comments were worth listening to a bit. From the state of the stock market to major companies rolling back DEI policies, there's so much going on. And our next guest says concerns loom for business leaders because many fear losing access influence and potentially attracting retribution. I want to talk about all of these things to discuss everything that's going on in our economy, what it means to be a CEO today, former Blackstone president and COO Tony James.
Also, we should mention the chairman of retailer Costco, and we can get a pulse on what's going on with the state of the consumer as well. Good morning to you. Morning, Andrew. OK, so I'm just curious, your sort of sense of confidence in today's economy relative to what we're seeing in the stock market. What is what's your sort of gut on what's happening here? I think the economy is weakening. It didn't have a lot of momentum, but it was okay, but it's definitely starting to turn down, I think. The consumer, there's several warning signs. Confidence was down, obviously. The base of consumers that are driving spending is narrowed to affluent.
Defaults, delinquencies are rising. Meme stocks are down. There's a lot of things to say the consumer is starting to buck a little bit. At the same time, I think the uncertainty coming out of Washington is causing businesses to slow down. What's my supply chain going to cost? I don't know. Can I export? Are there going to be reciprocal duties? I don't know. Should I build another plant? Let's wait and see. OK, so but just tell me with this, because there feels like there's a disconnect. We've had so many business leaders come on our air, I would say over the last two or three months and say, oh, my goodness, we're going to become unshackled by regulations that are just going to disappear.
We are excited about, you know, taxes, all sorts of things. Right. I mean, you've heard that over and over again. So explain that with the perspective that you're offering right now. Well, there's certainly been an ambulance about my Republican friends who are business leaders. I agree. One of the greatest areas of American history is going to unleash the deals business and so on and so forth. I don't see it happening. I mean, on the ground. I actually think we are slowing. And for all the reasons I mentioned, I think business leaders are very reluctant to stick their head up right now and start start complaining.
Hey, Tony, just what we've heard over the last week from a lot of the retailers that have been reporting their earnings is that they're cautious about this next year that's coming up. But the results they saw in December and even in January have been stronger than they had anticipated. The consumers have been doing better. What do you see, maybe through Costco, maybe through other places, that makes you think that the consumers actually are already starting to turn down? I don't think I see it at Costco, honestly. But I'd say they generally target a more affluent consumer.
The average Costco consumer has about two times the national median average of wages. And those results are holding up. Are they exceeding expectations, like you said, Becky? No. But they're holding up. Home Depot and Lowe's in the last two days have both. Said that they've exceeded their own expectations on some of these things. And January was pretty strong for Walmart. January was, but Walmart also blew a caution whistle on the future. I'd say Costco's hanging in there. But that's not where we see the slowdown. It's in confidence. Ironically, something like as simple as egg prices seem to have a lot of correlation with the economy and consumer attitudes. And obviously, you know where those are going.
Well, we know why they're there. It's a total one-off. But do you think that we were overregulated? I think the egg prices comment is a weird one. I know people are, I mean, I've noticed the price of eggs, too. In fact, at our grocery store, they've limited eggs in some times. But thankfully, we've had a line on local chicken eggs. But I think most people know that that's a transitory issue. I thought that was sort of almost a partisan remark. Which was a bit of a flag, and I think old Joe noticed it too. And obviously you know where those are going.
Well, we know why they're there. It's a total one-off. But do you think that we were over-regulated, the economy and business, during the Biden administration? You think only Republican business people are optimistic about a more friendly regulatory environment for business? You don't think there's anything to that? No, I totally agree with you. I think all business executives felt we were over-regulated. Honestly and I think there's both Republicans and Democrats there's a lot of good things that they like about the directions that President Trump is going okay however there's also a lot of uncertainty tariffs and a lot of variability and it's very hard if you're a business to plan right now we own a fertilizer company that's that sells a lot into Canada we were going to build a new plant now we're holding off we don't if there's duties on Canada and the reciprocal duty's coming back but we don't know what that does to us similarly a lot of our companies the supply chains are completely up in the air what's what's the cost of goods and how it's all tariff related it's where a lot of the tariff related some of that we have we have plenty of health care companies that are looking at much slower regulatory approvals with doge and everything so so if you had if you're a if you're a biotech company and you had one year's worth of runway in your cash.
Now maybe you have to slow things down, stretch it out. So you have two years. They already are assuming that cuts at the FDA are going to make we have to put advisory panels. They have to assume that because running out of money is death. Yep. That's their problem, isn't it? Music. All right, so Bitcoin. If you look at it through the lens that we've just constructed, it's kind of remarkable Bitcoin's holding up as well as it is, isn't it? I mean, my God, think about it. Bitcoin is not only going through a historic economic regime change in the United States and, of course, the reaction that creates around the world, but it's also been feeling intense liquidity pressure from the wider crypto market.
And I have to make this clear. You do not hate shit coins enough. It is bad out there. Cryptocurrency exchange, a Bybit disclosing on Friday that it was hacked in what could be the largest crypto heist ever. Join us right now to discuss the crypto market and what's just happened. Anthony Pompliano is the founder and CEO of Professional Capital Management and author of How to Live an Extraordinary Life This Week. Yeah, it's Pom. Pom's back. So I was going to break down the Bybit hack. But because it is so Ethereum specific, I'm just going to give you the high level. Boost in if you would like a full breakdown.
I'd be happy to do it. I just wasn't sure if a Bitcoin audience would be interested. But ByteBit accidentally signed essentially a transaction that executed a smart contract that then proceeded to steal $1.4 billion worth of Ethereum. And it's believed that the Lazarus Group is behind this hack, I guess you could call it. It wasn't ByteBit that was hacked, but it was a front-end provider of theirs that was hacked. And it was a replacement of a front-end web app that hid the execution of the smart contract. They then proceeded to take the stolen ETH funds and launder them by creating meme coins and then ultimately buying Solana and Bitcoin with the profits from their meme coins.
So that's the high level of Bytebit. And that's why CNBC has invited Pomp onto the show. Anthony is hosting New York Bitcoin Investor Week. Which is happening right now as I record. So they're there at the Investor Week watching this crash, by the way. Well, a crash. A crash, right? It's not really a crash. You know what I mean. Which we'll get to as well. Good morning. So how much should we worry about the safety or security, if you will, of crypto after this situation? Well, look, anytime that you have a hack, people obviously get worried about this. But the way that I describe it, the Treasury and the Fed has never been hacked.
The further you get away from the creation of the money point, then you get less secure. Banks have been hacked, armored cars have been hacked, or people have had money stolen from their wallet. Same thing in crypto. The blockchain itself, the Bitcoin blockchain has never been hacked. But if you go and you take that and you put it in an exchange or you put it in some sort of custody solution, those can get hacked. And so I think it's important to pay attention to. The most impressive part to me, though, was this is a $1.4, $1.5 billion hack. Customers obviously were worried. They ran to the exchange. They withdrew $4 billion, no problem. And so obviously the exchange had the money.
Usually what we've seen is when these things happen, the exchange gets caught not having the money or there's some sort of issue. But I think that really the system kind of worked how it was supposed to. And now they're going to work to try to recover that $1.4 billion that was taken from them. Oh, and they have. They've been using market makers to crash the price of all crypto assets. They hire market makers to buy and sell assets from their platforms for them. And you can see it on chain. It's actually, it should be illegal. It should be because they're basically liquidating their own customers.
So you have all the shit coins digesting the end of the meme coin boom right now. I mean, it'll take a while to fully fizzle out. You're always going to have some things going on, but the hype has come crashing down. When you have the combination of the Melania coin, the Libra, the Lazarus group using the meme coins to launder. Well, Bitcoin just experienced the biggest amount of selling pressure on spot exchanges since the China mining ban in May of 2021. And yet, let me see, checking my notes, Bitcoin's at $84,000 right now. So, you know, we're 22.5% down from the all-time high, as I record.
So prices we haven't seen since November. But the reality is a 20% or even a 30-ish percent drawdown isn't unusual. In fact, it's very common. It almost always happens. So if we're around, you know, a 22-ish percent drawdown, well, Bitcoin's 200-day moving average price is $81,000. So we're still above, by just a little bit, the 200-day moving day average price. So that's the price when it's consistently... So think of it this way. As like a quick cheat, it was like, oh man, is Bitcoin really tanking or is this just a correction? If the price is consistently above the 200-day moving average, then you can consider Bitcoin in an uptrend.
And if the price is consistently below the 200-day moving average price, then you can consider Bitcoin in a downtrend. It's the simplest little hack. It doesn't require a bunch of math or charts or trends. You just go look up the 200-day moving average price, and you look at the current price. If it's above the 200-day moving average, then we're in an upswing. If it's below, then we're in a downswing. It's really that simple. And right now, we are still technically hovering right above the 200-day moving average price, which is probably going to be a pretty good resistance point for, you know, we could go down below it, but then we'll pop back up, that kind of thing.
I can't say for sure, but that's what I would at least be watching for if I wanted something to watch for. You probably saw that uh coinbase covered that the u.s marshall service, who manages billions of seized assets can't say how much crypto it holds it doesn't seem to know they have maybe maybe a shot at coming up with a rough estimate of their bitcoin holdings but that's even a long shot this is what the source told coindesk quote As far as I'm aware, the USMS, which is the US Marshal Service, is currently managing this with individual keystrokes in an Excel spreadsheet.
This is according to Chip Borman, who's a contractor. He said, quote, they're one bad day away from a billion dollar mistake. And of course, this is supposed to be if there was to be a Bitcoin reserve, these coins were supposed to be moved into that reserve. Well, today, Polymarket shows now a 10% betting market chance of a Bitcoin reserve getting created in the first 100 days. Only a 10% chance. I think people are kind of refactoring. Some people feel rugged, sort of what I would expect to see happen. But the idea that the U.S. Marshal Service was keeping track of their Bitcoin keys in a spreadsheet, I hope that's FUD because that's so powerful.
Music. Okay, I have a question for you. Is the digital gold meme selling Bitcoin short? At first, that's kind of fine rolling with the, oh yeah, it's like digital gold analogy. You know, it helps the no-coiners wrap their heads around Bitcoin. There's a lot of things that gold and Bitcoin do share in common. A lot of times they also have similar price action. Gold goes on a run and then Bitcoin goes on a run. So I think it does help no-coiners to a degree. But here's my question. Aren't we kind of dramatically underselling Bitcoin with this analogy? And isn't that defeating the purpose? Because gold isn't a global instant settlement network. Bitcoin is a settlement network.
Bitcoin is infinitely more divisible. Bitcoin is easy to self-custody compared to gold, especially if you want to self-custody millions or billions of dollars compared to gold. Bitcoin is outside the control of world banks and governments. Bitcoin is verifiably scarce. You can verify the entire stock right now yourself from any computer. And of course, Bitcoin is digital, which is the key to its true future potential. And yet, I think it's very common. We're seeing this so it's so common, I would say, that even the federal chair, Jerome Powell, does this, yeah, Bitcoin is basically like gold analogy thing.
Or in the Federal Reserve itself, in terms of the system, what do you think of that idea? I don't think that's how people think about it. I mean, it's so, you know, people use Bitcoin as a speculative asset, right? It's like gold. It's just like gold only. It's virtual. It's digital. People are not using it as a form of payment or as a store of value. It's highly volatile. It's not a competitor for the dollar. It's really a competitor for gold. You know, that's really how I think of it. We've heard him say this before too i've played other clips of him saying that it's really a gold competitor you know it's one of those volatile things so here's my question to you is it time to drop the digital gold comparison or does it still serve a purpose i want to hear your take boost in and.
Music. I want to start with a bit of housekeeping. I will not have an episode next week. I'm going to be traveling. I'll be at Scale and Planet Nix, and we'll be on the ground recording and doing interviews. However, I'll be keeping an eye on things, so if something breaks, I might cut into the feed. But plan on no episode next week. I know. I'm trying to give you a warning now. Now's a great time to buy the dip, though. We have a new URL for River. You can support the show by stacking sats. go to jupiterbroadcasting.com slash river. I think it's the best place in the U.S. to stack sats. They have that 3.8% savings account, so when you have dips like this, you could go boom and smash buy.
Such a great system. If you're all about self-custody, maybe you're in Canada, the Bitcoin Well, bitcoinwell.com slash jupiter. Amazing automatic self-custody platform. Supports Lightning. It's really awesome. Now, if you want to spend some of your sats, you can instantly convert them into a gift card over the Lightning Network using The Bitcoin Company. Promo code JUPITER, link in the show notes. If you want to stack stats by paying your bills or when you use your debit card or their new credit card on the way, that's the Fold card. And the community has been loving the Fold card.
Support the show by using our link in the show notes. If you want to get access to liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, it's all at lending. You can get access to your Bitcoin without having to sell it. And they have, I can attest, a system to make it easy to track your overall loan to value ratio. so you can make sure you don't lose your Bitcoin. And they'll also let you cover the gap with stablecoins. It's not bad. So there you go. Support the show by doing what you do. Music. I really appreciate the boost this week. I am struggling with some health problems, and it's been a hard week.
And I'll tell you, what was a seriously motivating thing was seeing this week in Bitcoin once again get to number one on the fountain charts, thanks to your boost. You guys are bringing in new listeners with that, and I really appreciate it. And, you know, maybe this isn't one of my bangers, but I'm here because of you. And it meant a lot this week. So sometimes it's not just the monetary thing. It's just the value, the recognition of the value, too. So thank you, everybody. We start this week with OB, who is our baller booster with 50,000 sats. OB came in from Fountain says, it sounds like Rogan is a Bitcoin guy.
He was quoting me when I played a clip last week. He says, Rogan is well aware of Bitcoin and the monetary problem when, oh, yeah, right. Andrew Antonopoulos came on in 2016. Although he really hasn't spoken about it since, probably for a reason. I think he knows, and he's worried about his influence, good or bad. His endorsement could incentivize speculation or accelerate adoption. Slower Bitcoin adoption is better for the world, but not likely IMO. Gradually, then suddenly, isn't just a meme, it's historically relevant. Careful, one million Bitcoin is painful for so many, probably even Bitcoiners. You know, I agree.
We're moving real fast these days, Obi. We're moving real fast. And people still don't know the difference between meme coins and Bitcoin, between crypto and Bitcoin. People don't understand what makes something a good asset. They don't understand what makes something good money yet. They don't all need to, but I sure would love to see at least a few more. You know, we're moving really fast. People don't even understand what they're getting into yet. They, I guess this always does happen. Maybe a little price cooling will slow some of that for a bit and give us plebs a chance to stack at a little bit more reasonable prices.
It's funny how 80,000 feels reasonable now. You know, if you go back to October, I'd be like, oh my God, 80,000, what? But now it's like, oh, what a great deal. Appreciate the baller boost. Thank you, OB. Hope to hear from you again. A-Train's here with 20,000 sats. Fun will now commence. Thanks for the value. So I've heard some forward-thinking stories about future uses of Bitcoin, like using mining to stabilize power grids. Can you do a future show, okay, with ideas on future uses of Bitcoin, be it banking or infrastructure use? Thanks again, Andrew. That is, so I don't know if you might be new, Andrew. One of my favorite topics is, and that's kind of maybe why I hold back on it because I've talked about it too much for a while.
I think it's remarkable how Bitcoin is a lens in which I begin to understand other industries too. I had no idea about how demand response worked in the power grid, and I had no idea that we had these 50,000, 30,000 are the cheap ones, these just ginormous loud machines that we have deployed in places that do nothing but waste power. It's just great. Or think about all of those different methane off-gassing pipes out there that we could cap. We could cap, and we could mine that energy. I think it's going to be a revolution. Yeah, I'll try to find a good story to talk about in the future. Thanks for the boost, Andrew. Appreciate it.
Joe Stones is here with a row of ducks. That's 2,222 cents. We're treading a fine line between accelerating the downfall of ship coins and turning the normings off from crypto. Yeah, including Bitcoin. Do you think the average Joe can understand the fundamental differences? The opinions outside the echo chamber seem woefully uninformed. I've been really feeling that. I've been feeling that, Joe. I've been really feeling that recently. The thing is, what I believe happens is meme coins or things like Doge, right? The last cycle, it was the Doge coin, right? We kind of forgotten that Doge actually used to mean a coin.
Those things would get a lot of attention. And then people would confuse what's the difference between Doge and Bitcoin. I don't understand. What's the difference? And then many cycles before that, Joe, it was things like Bitcoin and Litecoin. So this has been a constant problem. And one of the key things that I think people fail to appreciate and understand is, A, the network effect. This is true for all technologies. The network effect always has a massive influence. Two, there will never be another Bitcoin because everything else that's going to get created after Bitcoin is going to have a founder or a team.
Some of these have marketing departments and they're not fairly distributed. And these just, those two things, network effect and fair distribution are some of the key differentiators between meme coins and Bitcoin. But people don't understand, they've lived a fiat lifestyle for so long, their whole lives. They grew up and they don't know anything else. You know, they're a fish in the ocean. And we're up here saying there's a whole other world. You just need an air tank. Thank you. Appreciate the boost, Joe. And it's a good question and one I'd love to hear more thoughts on.
Oppie 1984 is here with 4,000 sats. This is the way. Hey there, Oppie. Good to hear from you. Why you got to put numbers and letters together? Why can't you just go f*** yourself? My cold storage is a paper wallet stored in an Altoid-style tin that is locked in a fireproof wall safe. I print my paper wallets on a laptop. I print my paper wallets on a laptop that I ran DBAN on. Oh, I see. And then I installed Mint 19-1 to cover over that. The laptop is permanently air gapped and the only connection it has is USB connection to an old dumb laser printer around Bitcoin paper wallet locally to generate new wallets as needed.
It may not be military grade encryption, but it works for me in my humble little stack. I'll be it sounds like you got a good system there. I also think, you know, you could always incorporate like some seed plates, something like that, something metal in that safe. I don't I don't after hearing from some listeners in the California wildfires, I don't trust those fireproof safes anymore. I heard from listeners that lost stuff inside the safe. It just cooked. I have not heard from anybody that did metal plates, though. So I'm assuming those people did okay. But it's something to consider.
You could always work that in there if you want to. Appreciate the boost, and thanks for telling me about the setup. That made me think. I'd love to kind of go through an exercise like that with my kids one day. I might do that. Vault Byte comes in with 2,121 cents. The traders love the vault. Not today. I only trust my phone and my computer for handling pocket money. I asked last week if folks like me have a hard time trusting mobile devices with a lot of Bitcoin. Hardware wallets are fine for letting them participate in the signing, no matter where the transaction gets created or broadcast.
On a side note, I highly recommend using NitroPhone, NitroPads, and NitroKeys. These guys are awesome. And your security is worth it. NitroPads, huh? Taking a look. Oh, yeah, okay. Shop.NitroKey.com. Very nice. Thanks for the tip on that. I had not seen that before. Yeah, you make a good point. As long as the signing device is secure, right? That's a good point, too. Thanks, Vault. One dull geeks here with 4,444 sats. That's two rows of birds. That's a big old stack of birds. You could be a McDuck or you could be an Affleck duck. Affleck! This old duck still got it. When I use a hardware wallet, I have my private keys on that wallet. I don't have them on the mobile wallet.
So I don't understand what you mean by trusting a mobile wallet when it's paired to a hardware wallet. As far as supporting the show, I didn't even know you existed until you showed up in Fountain, and I immediately trusted the fact that it was users sending their support as an indication that this was a quality podcast and way more than just fiat marketing. Thanks for not blasting my ear holes with the fiat mindset. Oh, with the fiat ads. You know, one dull geek nailed it. Nailed it. Coming in hot with the boost. I think that's your boost.
When I saw this coming earlier this week, I realized, yeah, you know, like the Jade is great with the green wallet. And there's a lot of options there. You're right on that count. You're technically you're right. And that's the best kind of right. You're making me reconsider my mobile device hesitation. I have to say, thank you for the boost. And glad you found us. It's always nice to hear from you. Amorphageage? Amorphageage? Come on. Amorphasausage is what I'm going with. came in with 3,500 sats. A little thought experiment for you. There's a bang. We're all KO. We're all knocked out. We wake up. Everybody has a wristband with sats on it.
Everyone's money has been converted to sats. There is no more cash, credit cards, etc. No more fiat. Only Bitcoin stocks, bonds, housing, other assets. Everybody can pay with Bitcoin Lightning and knows how it works. Is the world a better place or worse? I'm curious. I'll provide my answer next week. The only way the world could be better is if there was software solutions to help these people manage this safely and then also transact safely and securely, right? Because it's like giving everyone the internet, which we did with smartphones. You know what I mean, though? It's putting TCP IP on everyone's wrist, essentially, is what you're asking me.
Okay well now the application stack that runs on top of that you know it can't be centralized like we saw the chivo wallet in in el salvador was centralized you know there's so there's ways you can kind of mess up the implementation this goes back to maybe a little bit slower adoptions better because we get time to work out these ui issues and the software stack issue i have to say i don't know if it happened tomorrow if the world would be better, Ultimately, I think it would, but I think it would take years. It would take, that's a hard reason.
That's like literally taking all the fish out of water at once and then telling them to calm down and just breathe normally. You know what I mean? I'd love to hear your answer, though. Thanks for the boost. And, you know, maybe give me a little help on that there. Username, too. Appreciate it. Tiara comes in with 6,222 sats. I'm probably not getting that one right either. There's some new boosters. This is great to see. and I'm making a horrible impression, which is bad to see. I'm not on my game this episode, but I really appreciate the boost. And Tara writes, Tierra writes, I do use my phone for my main custody setup, but as part of my multi-sig, it's three of four multi-sig where I have a tap signer, a jade, not the plus version, Trezor Model T and my phone.
Wow. Nice setup. Okay. Look, you know, I think there's some logic in kind of trying different wallets like that too, because then you are diffusing the risk in a sense, right? You're not necessarily vulnerable if one particular one gets compromised at some point in the future. I mean, it's a little bit more to manage. The multi-sig can be managed all on the phone using nunchuck wallet. Oh yeah, nunchuck wallet is great for that. The setup always requires at least one hardware wallet to be available to spend the funds, making it so that the phone plays a lesser role in the overall security of the multi-sig.
And it's really there for most of the times as a watch only. And always to build transactions for future spending. I, so far, have been loving this wallet setup, and I'm planning on upgrading some of my other hardware wallets, like switching to the Trezor or the Cold Card Q or Mark IV. I can give a big endorsement to the Mark IV. I have one Trezor, and I have many Mark IVs. I really like the Cold Card. I don't love the Q. I just think it's maybe more than I need, although I could be convinced I do think some of the functionality would be nice. But I also the only problem with the cold card queue is, For me, it looks like a Bitcoin wallet or something. I mean, it looks like something you want to steal.
Cold card queue. Go Google it right now. It looks like something you'd want to steal. So you break into somebody. I'm taking that. You know, but the Mark IV, I mean, it looks like, you know, a classroom calculator, basically. You don't know what you're looking at. Who cares? I'm leaving that piece of crap. That thing's like a $15 calculator. I'm leaving it. You know? I mean, I know it's stupid security through obscurity, but it's something I think about. Thank you for the boost. It's really nice to hear from you. Sir Naxalot's here with 4,321 sats. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy.
On using a PC to Bitcoin, I don't own one. I use multiple phones and I feel secure, but not having a PC sure makes running a node hard. I'm breaking down in the near future and I'm going to buy a laptop and then I will run my own node. I love the Bitcoin well and I love this week in Bitcoin. Well, thank you. Nice to hear from you, sir. I'm really stoked to hear you're going to do a node. Let me know how that goes and what route you take. And I always hear good things about AlbiHub, but there's a lot of options there. Interesting to also hear from somebody that doesn't have a PC.
Is anybody else listening out there that doesn't have a personal computer, a PC? I don't hear that very often. Fascinating. And I'm really glad that you're listening. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks. Not financial advice, but my understanding is that Bitcoin rewards programs are considered a rebate and not taxable. But if you were to sell those earned sats, that would be a taxable event. Simple solution, never sell your sack. You're right, Ace. That's what we looked up to after the show. That's what I was able to figure out. And I guess your cost basis would have to be when you earn the rewards so you would be dependent on the platform to essentially generate you a report, which I'm sure things like River and Fold do that. So it's not really an issue.
Yeah. So Bitcoin rewards, I'm all about it because I don't ever plan to sell those sets. And they're just like, I call it passive stacking. It's my way to passive stack. And so when I have moments like right now when the price is dipping and I'm like, oh God, I wish we could just go in big right now. I have a little bit of peace in knowing that, Well, when I pay my bills, I'm stacking some sats. When we buy some groceries or whatever we're doing, I'm stacking some sats. And I'm getting a little bit more sats right now while I do those things. And so it doesn't completely get rid of the FOMO. But it does help knowing that, well, I'm always stacking. I'm always stacking.
Thanks, Ace. Appreciate it. Moon Knight's here with AroaDux. Hey! I'm with you on trusting my desktop and a hardware wallet more than my Graphene OS phone with an AirGap signer. I love the multi-sig combo of nunchuck plus tap signer for my walking around wallet, but for some reason I feel safer with my single SIG on my home Ubuntu desktop that's offline 99% of the time. I've been trying to get over this because multi-sig is far and away the safer way to go, and nunchuck does make it so easy. Look at that, another good plug for nunchuck. I think, Moon and I, you and I have been in the exact headspace, right?
Maybe, I don't know, are you like me? Maybe you've been using desktop computers for a while, you know, maybe built a few of them yourselves. You know, you just, I don't think I know of a more secure system than the desktop systems I've built, you know, with the run Linux. I just, I don't quite know what's in the phone, but I know what's in that system from, you know, bolts and fans all the way up to the software stack. And so I think that's part of, and oh, oh, oh, oh, and you know what else it is? If the power supply dies in that PC, I swap out the power supply. If something dies in the charging components for the cell phone, I got to toss the whole phone.
Right. If if there is a memory issue or a single disk issue or even a file system corruption issue, I know how to go into a live boot environment and try to repair the file system and maybe mount the file system and rescue files. Maybe I could do that with a phone. Maybe I can't. Right. So it's like just the doomsday scenarios. I know how to handle those on the PC as well. And I think that plays a factor. And I'd be curious, Moon Knight, if that's true for you as well. Monty's here with a row of ducks. I got my AlbiHub set up.
That's great. That's awesome. I tried several times to get Nick's Bitcoin up and running, but I just couldn't get it to build. Albi, though, I had up in about 10 minutes. Any suggestions on getting going with my own Lightning Wallet? I opened a channel as part of my setup. Anything else I should know? Well, you definitely want to play around, Monty, with AlbiGo. That is a really simple but functional Lightning Wallet that just plugs right into your AlbiHub. You could also look into Zeus wallet. Also connects to your AlbiHub. Very good wallet. And could solve some of your problems for you, like channel management too, potentially.
You'd have to dig into that though. Man, I'm so stoked for you. Congratulations. We got another node on the network. I hope when I go check the state of the network, we see the numbers ticking up over there. Now the channels is a thing. You got to pick and choose. AQIN or whatever it is. ACQIN, if that's in the list still, I would definitely recommend that one. Opening channels to somebody like kraken also gets you well placed in the network, It does take some sats to do that, but once those sats are in the channels, then you're able to transmit back and forth. And when you close the channels, you do get the sats back.
Thanks for boosting in, Monty. Good to hear from you. Block 7 is here with 5,000 sats. Never tell me the odds. And he just says, boost! Thank you. Appreciate it. Neural P is here with 5,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. No message, just the value. Scuffed is here with 7,222 sats. Pew, pew, pew. He says, thanks for your insights on Fold. I think I'll at least get a debit card and pay some bills through it. What do I have to lose? Yeah, that's what I figured. And I actually ended up liking the way I had. I reorganized it. So now, you know, not everything's coming out of one checking account.
So we just do two transfers a month to Fold to cover the bills at the beginning of the month and the second half of the month. And it keeps the volume down in the main checking account. It's been way better. Just that separation of bills and main checking and then getting the sats on there is pretty great and you know that debit card check out some of those merchant boosts you can get like 5% back sats on some of that stuff he continues the state of the network has gained one more node hey yes. Alright I set mine up using start 9 a VM that I have running inside Proxmox I already had a Proxmox cluster going and I also installed electors which is Electrum running on Rust.
Nice. So I can interface with the Sparrow wallet securely. Oh, yes. This is so fun. And it really has broadened my understanding of this whole Bitcoin thing. I'd encourage everyone to try it. I'm going to give that a ding too. That is a great story. And it really does help you understand Bitcoin. Sparrow is one of the best tools in this space. And it helps you understand where you're spending your Bitcoin and not, you know, I can use it to make sure that I don't mix KYC to non-KYC Bitcoin very easily. Love that whole setup, dude. Well done, Scuffed. That's really great. That is really great. VCP's here with 5,000 sats. You're so boosted. Love the perspective on eating our vegetables.
I have a node, and I think it's the path for all true Bitcoiners. Once I saw how long it took to download the blockchain, it was like seeing the edge of the universe. At that point on the Bitcoin journey at what point on the Bitcoin journey should a newbie start up a node hmm I think you gotta have some sats you know you want a little skin in the game, And I think, you know, you're going to want a wallet probably when you get to, I, you know, if you can, if you're down for a little server shenanigans, different for everybody, when you're ready to set up a desktop wallet and a hardware wallet, great time to get a note up first and then just have everything use your note as the source of truth from the beginning.
That could be the threshold, but, you know, everybody's to each their own. I mean, I'd say if you just want to have fun, even if you just like distributed computing and you're not going to set up a hardware wallet or like a soft wallet, it's just fun to participate in a distributed computing platform too. So to be honest with you, I'd do it either way. But that's just me. Thanks for the boost. Anonymous comes in with 2,000 sats. You're doing a good job. No message, just the sats. Appreciate that. Nico, the Greek, not the geek, the Greek comes in with 4,000 sats. I've got to be careful. Danger zone. Almost just almost blew that.
No message, though, just the boost. Danger zone. Thank you. Appreciate that. Thank you, everybody who boosts in. There's a lot below the 2,000 sat cutoff line this week. This is, wow. Gene Bean, I see you down in there. Nice to hear from you as well. Oh, wow. Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate that. First time buying the dip by Coach Rick. Nice, Coach Rick. Good for you. I can buy that dip, buddy. All right. So thank you, everybody, who boosted in. I will not have an episode next week. So this was a nice segment. I felt like there's a lot of good stuff in there. I'm going to be thinking about that during the down week.
I really appreciate it if you wanted to boost in. Before we run, I want to tell you how we did. With the sat streamers out there streaming sats, as they listened, 57 of you did that. Thank you very much. Oh, this is Cajun Spice. All of you helped me stack 108,825 sats for the show. Oh, boy. They want them. It's our guarantee. Thank you. Now, when you combine that with the boosters, we stacked a grand total of 245,479 sats for the show. Music. This is a value for value show. That means the show is out there for free. The work I do is free. You can distribute it as you like.
But if you get some value from the show, I always appreciate if you send it back. time, talent, or treasure, and of course a boost is a way to do it in a Bitcoin-native way. Every time somebody says Bitcoin isn't used for a transaction, you can shove it in their face with a boost. The easiest way is with Strike or some other way to buy sats like River or Bitcoin Well that's on the Lightning Network, and then you send them to Fountain or your Albie Hub, whatever app you choose at podcastapps.com. There's a whole world out there, and then you get new features too. Like with this show, you get transcripts, you get chapters, you get the Magic Walt switching technology so you can support the artists and you see their album art and all that. It's pretty great.
Thank you, everybody who supports the show. I appreciate you. And also, if you recognize that tune, I want to be your friend. Music. I got some updates for you. We've been talking about hardware wallets, and I am now keeping an eye on the BitKey as I gave one to a family member over the holidays. And a feature that had been rumored is now live, and it's inheritance. And I know this is something that some of you consider. They now have a beneficiary mode. You have your spending mobile key, which gets encrypted with a wrapping key. That wrapped key is then encrypted with your beneficiary's public key.
Then both encrypted keys are stored on Block's servers. So now nobody involved, Block can't access the key, like nobody can see each other's keys, but they have this system all guided by the app to essentially wrap keys and store it on the server. And then in the event of your death, your beneficiary can go into the BitKey app and say, hey, he's dead or they're dead and I need access to their funds. BitKey will then initiate a six-month delay and notify period. Essentially, for six months, you'll get periodic alerts about the claim, and either you or the beneficiary can cancel the process at any time.
After six months, then BitKey releases the encrypted keys to your beneficiary. Their BitKey app then decrypts the wrapped key with their private key. It decrypts your mobile key with the wrapped key, however that works. And now they can co-sign transactions with BitKey servers to move funds over into their own BitKey wallet. So your beneficiary never sees your Bitcoin balance, and it never has access to your funds before any transfers, and they don't get to see your keys. They just have this whole system that they can take care of. Now, the only real downside I see to this is that block servers are involved, which is fine. I mean, they're probably going to be around. They're a great, solid company.
But, you know, if this is a 30-year thing here, I mean, I don't know. Like I said to say, you know, they did BitKeys for my family or whatever. Well, I'd hope I'd make it like another 20 years. So is block servers going to be online in 20 years to do this? That would be my concern here. Now, if I was, you know, later in life, something like that, maybe it would make sense. I don't know. But that's my one kind of note is to make all this magic happen, their servers are required. It is going to be probably, I haven't seen this yet, but it'd be a safe bet. This is going to be the smoothest, cleanest, noobiest, friendly beneficiary process out there for a Bitcoin stash.
Oklahoma's Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act, which is HB 1203, has passed the House committee and is advancing for a House floor vote. The bill allows the state to invest 10% of public funds into Bitcoin or any digital assets with a market cap over $500 billion. There has been a couple of states, Montana and I believe North Dakota, their Bitcoin reserve bills have failed. But things are also moving forward, including in the state of Tejas and in the state of Utah. Things are moving pretty good. And a local news station, KXAN in Texas, they covered the Bitcoin reserve bill that's in the works.
The state of texas could begin investing in bitcoin lawmakers got their first look at a bill to create a cryptocurrency reserve supporters believe crypto could help the state's bottom line as kevin basker reports the idea is also raising concern seeking for an alternative to the dollar Cryptocurrency is what people believe is, in this case, Bitcoin, finite and decentralized and something that they don't have to worry about governments printing more and more money. It's not something we believe. It's a fact. I'm a little concerned that the chair of this says things like people believe it's scarce. No, people believe gold is scarce.
We know Bitcoin is scarce. Texas Senator Charles Schwartner is behind the bill to establish the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The Business and Commerce Committee held a hearing on the proposal on Tuesday. He says the creation will protect the economy from inflation. People are really worried about federal overspending. That's been going on decades, and the inflation that that engenders. It can be very, very volatile. Kendall Garrison, the CEO of Amplify Credit Union, explains the possible pitfalls of a crypto reserve. Uh-oh. So, Ken... Ken guy here, he's going to warn us about how volatile crypto is.
Kendall Garrison, the CEO of Amplify Credit Union, explains the possible pitfalls of a crypto reserve. Switching from very safe investments that the state of Texas has today, like government bonds. Index funds, hedge fund investments, moving to cryptocurrency is really increasing the risk in that portfolio. But Schwartner doesn't think it's as risky as what it seems to be. Bitcoin in particular is the largest cryptocurrency, the one that trades the largest volume. And I think it has the least amount of overall volatility. What I would suggest is they have a very strong, very well thought out investment policy that has a stop loss built into it.
So if it decreases more than X percent, then you exit those investments. And on the other side of the coin, if it increases more than X percent, you harvest some of the profits. Kevin Bosker, State of Texas. Boy, that's some bad advice. You know, again, I just, I think we're too early, especially for these Bitcoin reserve bills. There's so much confusion about Bitcoin and crypto. The word volatility is thrown around as if it's utterance, just the utterance of the word volatility is justification in enough of itself to just stay away from something. Oh, it's volatile.
And then he starts talking about buying bonds and other things that are going to have no purchasing power after it's been eroded away by inflation. Not to mention that investors demand higher yields to compensate for inflation risks with bonds. So that puts upward pressure on bond yields and downward pressure on the prices. So for example, if a bond pays 4% yield and inflation is 3%, like they say, then your real rate of return is 1% on that bond. And well, most things in life, inflation has been well above 4%. And during periods of high inflation, bonds often experience negative real returns commonly, which is the very issue that people are concerned about.
And this dip flip that they bring on Ken completely misses it because he's just looking at everything through a traditional fiat lens. And there's another mistake they're experiencing. Music. This will be our final clip of the week here. You noticed, I'm sure, that he says you ought to put some, he had something like, you know, you got to have really good investing policy. I always love when people say that. Yeah. Okay, great. Great tip. What you're going to want to do is if that Bitcoin pumps, you're going to want to sell it, you know, and make some of that money back.
Maybe that makes sense in some circumstances, you know, like with oil. I don't know, because they can always make more oil for a while, right? Or silver. Maybe that makes more sense with silver. But it's very fiat thinking. And I got a clip here from Larry Leppard. He's going to recount a famous story I've told once before on the show that puts this into perspective. It's the wrong way to think when investing in Bitcoin. It's a mistake that a lot of investors make, I think. And that is to say you've got a gain and you're feeling good about it. And you think, oh, this can't last. And maybe it's overpriced now and therefore I'll sell it.
I bought Microsoft in 86 when it went public, 14 times trailing, growing 40% a year. and I made, I don't know, three times my money on it. And I sold it for a logical reason, actually, because it was the only money I had to make a down payment on a condominium and I wanted to own a condominium. But had I held on to it, it turned out it went up another 4,000x and I missed all that. Buying Bitcoin right here is buying Microsoft in its first five or 10 years of existence. It's like Manhattan real estate, as he said. You don't want to sell a cornerstone asset that can't be replicated.
Music. Let's check in on the state of the network. We end the episode at block height 885,472. The Bitcoin price in USD is 84,470 sats per dollar, 1,184. We are down 22.6% from our all-time high, which was 109,160 on January 19, 2025. However, reachable Bitcoin nodes is looking real good. $21,903. I'm going to write that down. See, I'm going to compare it in two weeks when I'm back. $21,903. Do you think we can put a few more on there? Bitcoin's doing great. 22% drawdown. You don't even feel it once you've been in here for a little while. Ain't no thing at all. And if you look at the pressures Bitcoin is under right now, It's remarkable it's holding up.
I think it deserves even a little bit more of a sale. Let's get those stats even cheaper. We'll see how it's doing when I get back in a couple of weeks. Now, if you'd like links to what I talked about, those will be over at the website, thisweekinbitcoin.show. If you're at Planet Nix or Scale, come say hi and tell me you love the show, of course. And I would love to have you boost in with what you would have liked to have heard from the show, but maybe I missed this week. I'm always trying to make sure I'm catching what you want to hear, or if you have a different take on something, of course.
And then last but not least, I want your thoughts on that whole digital gold meme. Is it time to drop it or do we need to embrace it for just a little bit longer? Now I'm going to leave you with a value for value track. Last week, I played Disco Ball by Jojo Scott and you guys once again brought it to number one on the charts this week. I believe that's four episodes in a row and these artists, they notice it. They notice it and they really appreciate it. So this week, I'm going to play acetaminophen by Mookie. See you in two weeks. See you in two weeks. Music.
That day. We were supposed to be together. Remember you had pro-yo. Pro-yo. With Ashley? Oh, oh, no, don't talk about yo. Don't talk about yo.
Welcome to Episode 48!
The Impact on Bitcoin
AI Hype Begins to Fade
The State of Bitcoin Amidst Economic Uncertainty
Bitcoin's Digital Gold Analogy
Bitcoin Wallet Innovations and State Updates
Closing Thoughts on Bitcoin's Future
