The White House's bold economic gamble is starting to falter, leaving Bitcoiners with one undeniable insight—no matter how the financial dice roll.
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LINKS:
- Trump Plays Recession Roulette With the American Economy - WSJ
- GameStop to put corporate cash in bitcoin, mimicking MicroStrategy
- Millions of student loan borrowers past-due after bills restarted
- Bitcoin Reserve order removes Bitcoin's last "existential threat"
- World Liberty Financial crypto venture to launch stablecoin
- Elon Thinks X Could be 50% of the global economy
- Crusoe Energy exits Bitcoin mining business, sells operations to NYDIG to focus on AI
- Chainalysis Sued For Deception In Celsius Scam
- Consumer confidence comes in lower than estimates - YouTube
- Bill Status SB1373
- Bill Status SB1025
- Bill Information for HB 1203
- Quantitative Tightening is Coming To an End
- Fed says it will slow balance sheet runoff process
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Unknown:
Our next guest just penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing Trump's. Playing recession roulette with the American economy and writing, quote, I thought the probability of a downturn was nearly zero. Now one is likely and we may see stagflation. Music. Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 51. My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. You know, the U.S. government is thinking about boosting the debt ceiling by another $4 trillion. That would bring the grand total to $40 trillion. Yeah, $40 trillion. So I guess they have officially adopted the financial strategy of a young, dumb me with my first credit card, just doubling my debt in eight years.
I hope with that because it really puts things into perspective. Traditional economists are panicked. They think we're going to have a recession. It's a guaranteed. It's the best case scenario that we have a small recession. But the business people advising the White House seem to be extremely bullish. And they're attempting to work the problem from multiple angles. We are under your direction. We're reprivatizing the economy. We're bringing down government spending. This is Treasury Secretary, as I like to say, bassinet, Steve Besson. We're bringing down excess employment in the government sector.
On the other side, we're going to re-leverage the banking system. We're going to have all the new manufacturing jobs. So everyone who's laid off from the government will have an opportunity to go into the private sector. And that is going to lead to disinflation. We're going to, inflation is under control. We're going to get the affordability crisis. So lower energy, deregulation, more private sector jobs that will naturally get interest rates down, interest rates down. Mortgage rates are down almost every week since January 20th. The energy costs are down about 15 percent. Crude oil is down about 15 percent.
And as we keep that going, interest rates are going to keep declining. It'll be good for mortgages. It'll be good for credit card debt. It'll be great for auto loans. But a big part of that strategy, and I got to give him credit, he's getting pretty tight on that presentation. A big part of that strategy is the doge cuts. And those do seem to be slowing down. And the doge cuts seem to be slowing down while maybe we are seeing some of the conviction in this wild turnaround play from the White House crack a little bit. Perhaps our first signs of blinking.
So president trump may be softening his stance on tariffs story in this morning's wall street journal front page drove up stocks 500 bucks they ease back 100 later but then mr trump again suggested a softening at his cabinet meeting and that drove stocks back up to a 600 point gain for the day so the question is is he negotiating with the stock market as well as with other countries or are more moderate voices holding sway inside the White House? Now, look. Yeah, it seems the whole we're not watching the market thing has kind of gone away. So this week, I want to get into the risks of the White House not successfully pulling this pivot off so we as Bitcoiners can plan accordingly.
And I'm going to get into those specifics in a little bit. But I think we have to look at the broader picture. We have seen some initial warning signs. and the first ones are from the Internal Revenue Service here in the States. I'm no fan. They've made my quality of life harder and worse quantifiably, but they tend to be really low-key about some of these types of warnings that they release. And we all know that the U.S. government has a spending problem, and any sizable reduction in revenue could be catastrophic. Interest payments on debt and entitlement obligations already exceed 100% of total tax receipts, despite revenue from taxes being at historical highs recently.
So any dip in there would be bad. And the IRS could see a sharp drop in revenue collected this tax filing season. That's according to a Washington Post report that says senior tax officials are bracing for a shortfall that would be tied to changing taxpayer behavior and attempted IRS cuts by President Trump. The Post cites several sources in an article that says that the Treasury Department is expecting a more than 10 percent drop in tax receipts by April 15th compared to last year. That would amount to about 500 billion dollars in lost revenue. The article says that the IRS has noticed more online chatter from people who say they won't pay their taxes or will claim deductions for which they are ineligible.
You know, people ranting on social media, that doesn't really actually translate to people not paying their taxes, I suspect. I'll admit, seeing a lot of the Doge news come out, it's like, God, I really don't want to pay my taxes this year. It's going to hurt more than ever. But on scale, at scale, people are still going to pay their taxes. They don't want to get in trouble. The real threat, the real threat is the revenue is down because the market is down. That's the real threat. You see, the bulk of the tax income is capital gains. So if you're taking this whole world realignment thing into effect, while it's happening, we're already seeing a significant drop in the US market.
So we have a falling equity market. I mean, it's getting better. It's been getting better for the last week, really. But there's still going to be a direct correlation to a reduction in tax revenue. That's just how it works. So lower stocks mean lower capital gains. We're also going to see lower corporate taxes because corporate profits are down. So these are going to intensify the problem. More spending than revenue, right? That's where we're at. We have a problem now where the U.S. government spends more than it makes already, and we're going to have less money coming in for at least a little period of time.
And if we're already seeing the White House blink, you know, if we're seeing their conviction to ignore the markets weaken before we've really even begun to see a turn, you know, I mean, sure, yes, the tariff policy has brought some investments home. That's true. We've seen announcements from Apple and SoftBank and others. But the story that's not getting a lot of coverage is we're also seeing significant capital flights out of the U.S. into like European markets and others. So you could argue, I don't know, I don't think we have the numbers, but you could argue that all the announcements about money coming in because of tariffs is a bit of a net wash because of all the money leaving.
So it's hard to say. And what we do know is we've gotten recent data on American consumer sentiment, which I imagine probably reflects consumer sentiment in the West in general. Breaking today, consumer confidence is at its lowest point in four years, according to a survey that dates back to 1967. Expectations for the future are at their lowest point since the end of the Great Recession. President Trump's economic policy has been a dramatic change from the Biden administration. Inflation has remained high, and the Federal Reserve has not lowered interest rates since December. They've remained relatively high over the last two and a half years.
And with all that in mind, we welcome financial... We'll stop there. So I think what we could be seeing is perhaps cracks in the execution. I don't know if there was a right way to do this. I have seen them argue that you have to move fast because if you don't move fast, the entrenched interest will slow you down and stop you eventually. So you've got to move quicker than they can. So maybe with our broken U.S. government, it wasn't possible to do this properly. But. You would, if you could, and if you could take the time, the White House would want to do structural preparation, you know, set up tax incentives ahead of time to make sure certain workforces get retained or hired in the country.
Get that in ahead of time, you know, get some training in place, get people prepared, because without that, historically, you see capital flight occur, which is what we're seeing right now. That weakens the dollar and that essentially puts volatility into the Treasury market. So we end up in a very particular situation where essentially fiscal dominance takes over. Music. Long term if the white house is successful or if they fail in this pivot it is going to be good for bitcoin i'll get into that you know if they succeed it increases revenue decreases spending the u.s economy booms liquidity starts to flow the u.s government along with many others have the resources to buy a Bitcoin and they start executing on their plans with one new, very important factor, which I'll get into in just a moment.
But if this fails, if they don't execute it, say beyond 30% or something, I don't know how you'd measure this. I think that's also good for Bitcoin. We have overwhelming debt obligations in the United States. So the Federal Reserve will be forced to go back into quantitative easing. They're already slowing. They're tightening. I'll get into that later. When bond yield spike and fiscal policy dominates monetary policy, that just means that, The dollar weakens, we inflate, and Bitcoin rips. But we have one new important factor, and that is sort of this final boss problem that Bitcoin has faced.
Bitcoiners for a long term, for a long time, have dreaded this then-they-fight-you moment. And we seem to have short-circuited that. And I've been trying to put into words why this feels like a significant moment when you look at the Reserve and the commitment never to sell Bitcoin by the federal government. It feels like Bitcoiners in their gut understand this is really important, but the rest of the world, right over their head. They seem to have missed it. Well, Bitwise's chief investment officer, Matt Hogan, was on Natalie Brunel's Coin Stories podcast, and he managed to put into words this thing that's been on my mind and I think some of your minds, too.
And that is this fact that the landscape for Bitcoin, it really has changed forever. We can feel it. it's a big shift, but the rest of the world has missed it. And I think Matt helps us understand why. The most important thing, in my view, is not actually the government aggressively buying, although that would be great. It's that we've gotten past the point where the government is going to try to shut down Bitcoin. And to me, that's an existential change. That means there is a pre-that-happening market and a post-happening market. And we're now on the other side of that. So if we buy great, if not also great, Bitcoin is going to be just fine.
It really was the big threat. How do you stop Bitcoin? Maybe the federal government puts everything it has into fighting it and at least bans it in the United States, which would significantly harm Western adoption because, you know, our friends in the West would follow suit. In fact, just us legitimizing Bitcoin through reserve has changed attitudes around the world for some places. But it's bigger than just they're not going to sell their coins. In fact, it's a whole land shift in all of Washington, D.C., which only people that have been following the crypto space for the last few years can even begin to kind of appreciate just how significant it is.
It's something that surprised me. It has surprised me. Look, I think the market is underpricing the change in Washington. That's actually surprised me. I know that Bitcoin ripped from 70 to 100K, but I think the change is much greater than that. I look at what's happening, not just in Bitcoin, but in DeFi, even in alt layer ones. I think the market is just underestimating the change. The reason for that is I think unless you worked in crypto over the last four years, you can't imagine how challenging it was, right? You can't understand how difficult being debanked regularly was in this ecosystem.
You can't understand how difficult multiple subpoenas and lawsuits were. You sound crazy when you say that banks won't take your $10 million deposit. People are like, no way. Did that happen to Bitwise? It did happen to Bitwise. It happened to everyone in crypto, of course. We all faced banking challenges. When Bitwise was first formed, it was difficult to get people to accept our checks from VCs to start the business, which is an incredible fact. But unless you realize just how repressive it was, you can't imagine what it will be like now that that's lifted.
You look at what's happened at the SEC recently, you know, pulling back on the Coinbase lawsuit, pulling back on the Uniswap lawsuit. I think just the rebound for that is two to three X more than we've seen in the market so far. So I guess I've been surprised that people haven't sort of felt and intuited that difference. But now I recognize it's because they didn't know how bad we had it. And so therefore, you know, how open the market is now. Yeah. So it's a good buying opportunity. I think it's a great long-term buying opportunity. I saw a tweet yesterday from Avichel from Electric Capital that said, opportunity is fundamentals minus perception.
And the opportunity has never been greater in crypto, if you use that math. Music. Okay, so how do we as Bitcoiners plan for these potential outcomes? A failure on policy or a success in policy or somewhere in between? Let's talk about that. I think one thing we can do is we can quantify what we do know right now because there is as they love to say the meme is there's a lot of uncertainty out there what we do know is that long term we have big buyers and holders in the bitcoin market now right we we know this we know from plebs that are going to hodl forever and always be buying and selling and stacking and cold storing Bitcoin.
Like we have that base layer. 60% of the Bitcoin network is those plebs. And then we have the next largest group is governments. And after governments, it's companies. And companies seem to be aping in one after another. Let's talk some earnings here. GameStop results just hitting the wire. But I should mention first, and it's probably why the stock is up, the company is announcing an update to its investment policy to add Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. This was broadly speculated upon. We have seen the stock pop as of late in expectation. of this. There's no other details in the statement, by the way. It just says update to its investment policy to add Bitcoin as a Treasury Reserve asset.
There are no details on how it's going to add it. There's no details on how they're going to raise funds to do that, although who knows, maybe they'll follow on the heels of strategy and issue shares in order to do that. And by the way, all of this coming as the company's numbers missed estimates, sales in the fourth quarter down 28% to $1.28 billion. Rough is what that is. It's sort of playing out as expected, isn't it? The companies on the edge that have something to lose, that are struggling, they're going to be the first to make these choices. I also wonder if some of the companies that are betting it all on the AI bet right now, that LLMs are going to produce AGI and replace people, and so they're spending billions, assuming they're going to make it all up in efficiencies in the workforce and in the productivity gains.
But I'm becoming a skeptic that LLMs will ever achieve AGI. I think LLMs can be extremely useful tools. Obviously, they have a lot of potential in software development and image generation, media generation, and tech summaries. And there's lots of fields where they're very useful and they make people more productive. I don't think they're going to be Skynet. But that's the way companies are betting. And once that bet starts to fizzle out, Bitcoin is something real that they can bet on. Bitcoin is something that they can, they go from the value of their company being the speculation on what it might do to the value being the money they actually hold on their balance sheet.
And this is Saylor's strategy with MicroStrategy, although he obviously is at an extreme. Other companies are following, like MetaPlanet, and that has caught, I should say, Saylor's attention. And Michael Saylor addressed the board of MetaPlanet this week to talk about the strategy. And I think there's some good insights in here. Konnichiwa, MetaPlanet shareholders. I'm so delighted to have the opportunity to speak with you today. MetaPlanet and Strategy are on the same mission together to convert the world to a Bitcoin standard. And we both view ourselves as being cheerful revolutionaries in the capital markets.
Most conventional capital markets' equities are valued based upon the promise of future money. But our company in MetaPlanet, we're offering to be valued based upon the money we actually have. And most fixed income instruments in the capital markets are valued based upon the promise of future cash flows to pay off the debt. Whereas we're pioneering a new world where we actually issue fixed income instruments backed by the actual money that we have. And the reason we can do it is because both companies have capitalized on non-toxic money. We've capitalized on Bitcoin capital asset, which is appreciating faster than the cost of capital.
Every other company in the world is generally capitalized on sovereign debt or currencies that underperform the cost of capital. So I've had many, many great discussions with Simon. And he and I are on this journey together. It's a mission. It's a mission to deliver Bitcoin-backed securities to the world. And we see hundreds of trillions of dollars of equity and hundreds of trillions of dollars of fixed income instruments that are valued based upon what we see as antiquated 20th century methods. We're really excited about taking the capital markets in the 21st century. I think strategy is leading the charge in the United States, and MetaPlanet is leading the charge in Japan.
Thank you for supporting MetaPlanet. Thank you for supporting Bitcoin. Thank you for supporting strategy. And we look forward to continuing this journey together, onward and upward. So the sharks are here. I mean, that's the reality. And they're not selling. And us fish, I guess, if you could go with this analogy, we need to get to one Bitcoin as fast as possible. This market dip is a moment, but it won't be your only moment. I think one of the things that people can do is they can psych themselves out and think this is their last opportunity in Bitcoin.
No. I mean, it's hard to say what price it'll be at again in the future, but there will be future dips as well. But if you have no extra funds to earn sats, I know that's a really hard thing to hear. But there's things you can do. Get on Noster. Post content that's worth zapping. Get on Stacker News. Do the same thing. Use Fountain for your podcast app. You know, they stream you sats. people can zap you sats on there. Start using the fold card and passively stack sats. You can also do things like build a node. Learn Bitcoin better than the average fish. Invest in your knowledge.
Get some experience with lightning and cold storage. You don't need to obsess and focus on becoming a shark. Just don't be a guppy is my advice. That's what you plan for. As you plan for these sharks to hodl and buy more long-term, take advantage of dips, and I think all us plebs should be pivoting to passively stacking Bitcoin as hard as possible. Because I have this gut feeling that this is going to feel like, I can't actually remember if it was called, if I'm getting it wrong, but I want to call it the Bitcoin well. Which is probably, I don't know if I'm getting it confused with the actual Bitcoin well, but there used to be a page. I had been there.
I want to say it was the well, but it might've been something else. It was a faucet, like the Bitcoin faucet. Maybe that's what it was called. And you could go to this page and they would just give you Bitcoin. for going to the page. Just get Bitcoin. Not sats. Bitcoin. You can just get Bitcoin. And that sounds ridiculous now. For going to a website, like filling out a capture or whatever it was. That's crazy, right? I think that's how we're going to look at a lot of these passively stacked Bitcoins. These Bitcoin rewards and things like that. In 30 years, we'll be like, that's crazy. You got 200,000 sats for paying that bill? That's wild. For paying those bills, That's crazy.
You wouldn't get that on one bill. I think that's, I think that's my advice is actively stack if you can, but if you can't, you know, you've got to figure out your passive game and even if you're actively stacking, I think you should figure out your passive game. Because those free sets aren't going to be around forever and it's hard money. Once you have those sets, they're yours. They're never going to get them back. So use this opportunity to stack them sets passively as hard as you can. Music. Here we go. The lever you have pulled breaks. It's not in service. Please make a note of it. I think one of the things that's going to be really rough to watch over the next year or two is all of these different stable coins and all of these different companies, they're going to have their own coin.
And, you know, they're all going to be on some sort of crypto blockchain VC backed thing. Today, as I record, six trillion dollar asset manager Fidelity has announced plans to launch their own stable coin. Earlier this week, Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial raised $550 million and launched the USD1 stablecoin. We're going to see this a lot, I think. This is going to be big, especially once the Genius Act passes or whatever version of it gets through, which I suspect is one of their higher priorities right now. This is going to put a lot of pressure on the network effect of Bitcoin, is my concern, the transactional aspect of Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin doesn't need day-to-day transactions, people buying coffee to be successful.
But if you can, you're probably going to use a free transaction or something like that that doesn't adjust in value. I think it will potentially have some impact on the network effect for Bitcoin and its adoption. But ultimately, I'm more concerned about Elon's plans, actually. I'm not an Elon stan. I'm not an Elon hater. I just don't really get that worked up over individual personalities. I tend to think it's more complex than that. But I do think Elon has been suspiciously quiet about Bitcoin. He's been in the room during some of Trump's biggest announcements pertaining to Bitcoin.
Besties with David Sachs, the AI and crypto czar. And Elon comments on everything except Bitcoin. And maybe I know why. And I think this could also have an impact on Bitcoin's network effect and adoption. Elon believes that X could become 50% of the global economy. And I think he means the transactions of the global economy. Essentially, if done right, the X would be. Would serve people's financial needs to such a degree that over time it would become, I don't know, maybe half of the global financial system. Wow. Or some big number. I'm not sure what the number is, but pretty big.
So it would be by far the biggest sort of financial institution. But like I said, not really in the way that people are used to thinking about banks. Just just the most efficient database for the thing that is money what i said like least amount of fraud everything's real time and if it involves money in any way it can be dealt with seamlessly on one one location so it's the best database for money you know his sequel database what could be better than that so you know me i got a question for y'all boost in and tell me are elon's plans for X, a risk to Bitcoin's adoption by regular users, compare it to Noster for a moment.
Noster not only onboards people to Bitcoin, but to a lightning first experience. Where now, like, if Elon's plans were successful, every X user would basically have Venmo cash app built into their X app with the network effect of X. So is this a risk for Bitcoin? And do you agree? Is this maybe why Elon never talks about Bitcoin? It could go nowhere. But, you know, you combine it with some sort of like stablecoin play. You get money operator licenses money transmitter licenses you set up a SQL database to keep transactions make it easier for people to move money between each other boom boom sounds like at least a decent strategy to pitch to.
Music. Now, before we continue on, I want to say you can support the show by doing what you do. You can buy sats on River when you're stacking or smash buying and use our link to support the show. If you want to buy sats and send them directly to self-custody or maybe you're up in the Canadias, Bitcoin Well is the way to go. Bitcoin Well will go directly to your self-custody when you're buying or selling. It's really slick. If you're ready to spend some of your Bitcoin via Lightning, that's the Bitcoin company. Hundreds of gift cards from Lightning right into a gift card in just seconds. You can even sign in with Lightning.
You don't even need an account. You want to passively stack them sats, fold card. Transactions on a debit card when you're paying your bills, gift cards, fold card will help you stack them sats. If you got some Bitcoin, you need access to liquidity, some fiat without selling it. That's where salt lending comes in. All of these are linked in the show notes. I use them and recommend them. I've been with them for a bit. And I appreciate everybody who supports the show by doing what you do. Now, we've got boosts, updates, and a final clip of the week. Music.
So let's get into it. We'll be right back. Oh, we have some boosts. Look at that. And Adversary 17 is our baller booster this week with 70,000 sats. Adversary says great episode. And in regards to sponsorship, if they make sense and help the show, I'd listen to them. I feel you have a good sense of what your audience values and the sponsors you've chosen for other shows have all been good choices for me. But also here's some sats. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Thanks for being our baller booster this week. yeah i'm i will be getting into that in this episode i think at least a bit more it's still something i'm chewing on appreciate your input and i appreciate that baller boost a trains here with 66,666 sats hmm why you got to put numbers and letters together why can't you just go yourself oh come on well i'll be dipped uh he sends me a link to a video on x about a gal who's worried about a recession you know she might she mainly cites some data that's a little bit off so i don't know how valid her concern is there, but I did take a look at it.
He says, too bad I can't cash out of my 401k for Bitcoin. As for the ads, you know what's best for your audience. I support it either way. Stay stacking. Andrew. Andrew, there may be some solutions to that. I don't know about the 401k and Bitcoin, at least maybe, you know, going into an IRA. But I wouldn't be too concerned by that social media post video. I don't think she has a full grasp on why 21 and me, or 21 and forever, whatever it's called, is actually collapsing. So a bit of her analysis is off. But I appreciate you boosting in and, you know, running it past me, too. Don't mind that at all.
Now, I'm going to say Obel918. I think that's probably wrong, right? That's probably wrong. Because I'm the wind. Yeah, that's true. Came in with a big old bushel of McDucks, 44,445 sats. Things are looking up for old McDuck. Chris, your analysis is spot on. It usually has an angle I haven't heard from anyone else. And nobody else is doing this as well as you are. Keep up the good work. Me and the kids love TWIP. Oh, thank you. I remember your email, too. I've been running a node for some time, but since I never spend sats, I haven't set up Lightning.
I sent you some Quantalooze on PayPal, but I never really felt like I got to participate in the system to do a proper boost. So I went through another KYC process, and I got strike working. Here's my first boost, with many more to come. You know what you're doing a good job well done by the way about sponsorships i wouldn't mind hearing them because i know what it means for you as the creator i listen to the boost every week and i know it's not enough money for the value you're providing that said is it increasing over time if the show grows do you see this working with boosts only because that would be great it's a good question so i i think the you know the boosts kind of ebb and flow, But, you know, over time, the value of the boost goes up. So that's something, right?
And I think that's, I hope, kind of unique to the boost system is if you boost today a row of ducks, that row of ducks hopefully does more later. Your contribution does more for the network later. Because my plan is to essentially, I mean, not as pompous to call it like a Bitcoin reserve strategy, but my plan is to utilize the sats to make it possible to run the network with as little commercial attachments as possible one day. And, you know, I'm not saying never because there's certain things like events or whatnot that it's great to work with sponsors and some sponsors have been really great.
I don't know, as it grows, we'll have to see if we can onboard more people to the boost ecosystem. There is work being done to make that smoother, but with Albi refocusing on self-hosted and removing the hosted option, you know, we've seen a cutback, I think, in the boost. Also with some volatility. So there's a transition period. There are multiple projects in works to kind of fill those gaps, but they're just not ready yet. But, you know, Bitcoin teaches us to be patient, right? And I really appreciate you taking the time to get the boosting set up so you can send in a boost to after you sent in the PayPal and the email.
It's nice to hear from you. I hope to hear from you again. Paranoid Coders here with the Rodex. I've got a Fold question for you. I got the impression that you mainly use Fold to pay bills, and it got me interested. So I set it up and started using my Fold Plus trial. Took me a while to realize, though, that you only get rewards for bill pay up until the dollar amount you spend on your fold card or Bitcoin purchases. You also put a certain amount of your fold card so you can get bill pay rewards. Or am I missing something? Thanks for the show. It's the only show I slow down below 2x, so I can really enjoy it.
That is... You make me want to be a better man. That is so great. So the way I look at Fold is it's really only going to be great for you if you're doing like one of a few things. And that is if you're putting some debit card expenses on there or you're buying gift cards for like gas purchases, like pre-buying a month's worth of gas because they have several gas cards in there. Then you get like 5%, 6% back on those SATs. If you also are buying Bitcoin with it, I think it's a pretty good option, especially with the Fold Plus membership. Because then it's zero fees and they do have, I think it's BitGo for their insurance, up to $300 million in your Bitcoin holdings. I think I could have those numbers wrong so you'd want to double check.
Not that I really advocate keeping any Bitcoin on an exchange, but while you're stacking and consolidating UTXOs, it is nice to have insurance. And with Fold Plus, there's no fees. So what I do is I kind of wait till all the bills are paid. I look at what's left in the Fold account and I tend to do a smash buy with that. What I would like to do is eventually really dial it in so that way I could just do like a 25% conversion to sats during the ACH deposit every time I do an ACH deposit. So it's just automatically 25% goes into sats. But I'd really want to make sure I got all the bill stuff really super dialed in and it's not fluctuating.
I don't want to get surprised there. So right now I do smash buys and a few small purchases on the debit card as well as gift cards. combine all that together with the bill pay, you know, over time you stack stats. It takes a while, I think, to really get the benefit out of it. For your Fold Plus membership, you'd probably want to use the debit card for a lot of your day-to-day purchases. And I think why not? You're going to get sats back anyways. Your only thing, you're only really, unless you have a credit card that's giving you great points for the stuff you buy day to day and you really like that system, I think it's worth considering the fold card. All right. I've said enough.
That's my, all right. I put it out there. I think they're doing great. They also just had some great news this week. So it's good all around. Moving on. Thank you for the boost, though. Scuffed comes in with 10,000 sats. He says, there's no such thing if I own Bitcoin. There's no such thing as a recession if I own Bitcoin. Right? Right, guys? Right? Fun will now commence. I am going to go with that. He says, I'm good with podcast ads as long as there's a members-only feed with no ads. Sometimes I don't have anything to say in a boost, but I still like to support the show on a weekly basis.
An ad-free or extra content feed would be a way to do that. And, of course, you'll be able to subscribe using lightning. Okay. So that's something, you know, right now I give my all into the main show. And so I would have to come up with something more I could do to give value for a membership. And also I agree you'd want to be able to pay by lightning that could be something that happens in the future. I'd have to think about that you know I'd have to give that some thought thank you appreciate that scuffed, Johns Burt came in with 5,000 sats you're so boosted no message just the value and ITFM99 came in with 2,000 sats B-O-O-S-T long time listener first time booster hey alright thank you, Just set up my Bitcoin full note and I'll be hub. Ha ha!
Make it so. Well done. Good to hear from you. Thank you for letting me know. It's great. Gene Bean's back with 3,559 sats. The traders love the vol. Your choices on sponsor for the rest of JB's shows have felt relevant and solid, so I support you using the same discernment here. I'd much rather hear an ad here than see the show be financially burdened on you. Thanks, Gene. He also boosted our artist, which got to number one. Boop, boop, boop. So the one pause and concern I have when it comes to Bitcoin space sponsors, the space is new, changing, and what is a good sponsor today might not be a great sponsor three years from now or two years from now.
I think in the last bull run and crash, we saw a lot of sponsors that seemed fine for a while in a lot of Bitcoin podcasts. And then when the crash came, we turned out that they weren't wearing pants when the tide went out, et cetera, et cetera. And it was embarrassing You know, I think Peter McCormick Took a lot of that. And others. And I, that's my big concern is that I can, you know, verify a company's good. I can use their product today, but how does it reflect on me when things all of a sudden change? And that's why I've really limited it right now to like Bitcoin well, river, fold, salt, because these companies have survived and they have, they've demonstrated long-term viability and that they actually do what they say they're going to do.
But it's such a small handful. It's such, it's a risk still and that's my main concern i really would like it to work value for value, simply because the topic matter is is really important and i just it's a tricky thing and i don't want to taint it by having a sponsor that goes sour one day and that does happen i've been doing this for like 18 19 years been dealing with podcast sponsors and the other shows it happens you know i mean like even a great sponsor sometimes gets bought out that's seen that happen their CEO goes and shoots an elephant I've seen that happen I mean it's it's you know. It's something so it's it's really been on my mind I appreciate your input thank you for the boost too wise hodls here with 7,474 sets I feel like that's a message almost there's something in there he says regarding sponsorships I wouldn't mind especially if it helps the show I suggest soliciting the companies you already mentioned yeah and then branching out from there those companies are really mostly interested in affiliate deals, I think.
The bull market has made the podcast space pretty noisy, so I've cut down on my podcast subscriptions to just three for the time being. This Week in Bitcoin, Bitcoin and Peterson's Bitcoin Fundamentals. Less is more for now. I don't usually boost, so here's a hello from all the streamers. We appreciate your work, albeit silently. Oh, and the boost amount is the default port on the Neo4j browser. Ah, I knew there was something there. I could just feel it when I read that. Thank you. Thank you for the boost. It's good to hear from you. Thank you for streaming too.
I agree. I really want to focus on Signal. I don't even, yeah. There's so many Bitcoin podcasts out there that I think it's like hypercritical for the success of the show to be focused on Signal. And this boost process is part of that because this is how you guys help me check. You know, I check what I'm talking about. We really seem to like narrow it down into these discussions. Like the show comes to new understandings, like really all of that. And you just don't, that's not something you get with the sponsor. Although this viability, you know, at the end of the day, I guess, is really what I'm concerned about. So I don't know. You can tell I'm all over the place.
Appreciate the boost. And now we go to Baste Potato, who's here with 10,000 sats. Heck yeah, let's go. Relatively new to the show, nothing but quality content, so thank you. Up until now, I've been a sats streamer, but I wanted to boost in order to give you my two cents on the sponsor's question. Please, no. I already have enough podcasters telling me to use Bitbox, River, and Casa. No judgment. I get it. But value for value can work. Step it up, folks! Music. Well, it's good to hear from you, Baste. I'm surprised some sponsors just haven't sent their message in via boost, you know, make it a nice boost and put a quick message in there. I don't know.
I guess I don't have to read if it's awful. Thank you. Yeah, I really would love to see it work, too. You know, wouldn't it be awesome if, because, you know, Jupyter Broadcasting has been so focused on Linux and open source that this shows you could look at it from a business product standpoint as a bit of... You know, a redheaded stepchild doesn't really fit. It's a bit of a risk. Would it be incredible, though, if if it could be the example of a sustainable value for value show that helps create essentially a longevity reserve for the podcast? What are you going to do then, Linux users? OK, all right. I'm sorry.
I shouldn't have said that. Thank you for the boost. It's nice to hear from you, Potato. BuildTheNode.com comes in with three thousand three hundred thirty three sats. Tough little ship. Little. End of the show song. Hit me right in the fields. Great show. New listener here. I heard from Adam Curry, and he mentioned your show, and I thought, oh, no, not another Bitcoin podcast. I know. I was almost just going to name it that. But I am pleasantly surprised. Twib is now my must-listen rotation. Thanks for being awesome. Oh, well, thank you for boosting it. Good to hear from you. That's awfully nice to hear.
Hey, Todd's back. Todd from Northern Virginia is here with 11,101 sats. Oh, my God. This drawer is filled with Froot Loops. Excellent show, he says. Thanks for all you do. I appreciate the insight into the financial roadmap of the new administration, which I don't hear anywhere else. Cheers. Well, cheers to you, Todd. Good to hear from you. Thanks for boosting in. Joey DED is here with 2000 sats. Coming in hot with the boom. I'm a no on the ads, but I understand if you have to. If you have to, then please, please get them over with up front. Ah, break-in ads are horrible. And TWIB is one of my top three clear winners I listen to regularly. Super signal, thank you.
Well, that feels more like a 10,000-sat request there, Joey. I'll just say, but I appreciate what you're saying. I hadn't actually even thought of where I would put them beyond just earlier in the booth segment when I was starting to think about it more. Upfront would be unusual for me, but not impossible. I don't know. I don't like the feeling of it, though. Thank you. Appreciate the boost. Good to hear from you. User 74991472. Oh, yeah. It's coming in with a boost. Let's hear it, good buddy. No message, though. Just 10,000 sats. Well, I appreciate that value. It's over 9,000! Clarkian sent 5,000 sats to our artist, and Hodler came in with 4,000... Oh, it's another 4,747.
Would you look at that? That's right, everybody. It's that time of year again. Happy birthday! Okay, I don't know it's a random one. Okay, all right. Hey, Chris, I've got a lightning question for you. I recently set up an L&D node on a Linux, Debian, Lenovo laptop, and I quickly learned that for good routing, performance channels typically need to be in the 1 to 2 million sats range. My question is, when Bitcoin pumps again and the fiat value of sats increases, do you think the recommended minimum channel size will shrink? Would it make sense to open smaller channels now and just hope that the price catches up?
That's a really good question. And I would love to say yes, that you should just open small channels and wait. However, experience has taught me this has just not been the case. You know, I've been running a Lightning node since 30,000. Well, it was 40, then it dipped down to 15, and then crawled back up to 30. So, you know, I've been running a Lightning node every day, and now I run a couple of them for two years. So I'm not like a super expert here, but I will tell you, in that two-year experience, I've not seen what you're suggesting pan out. In fact, if anything, the channel sizes just seem to be getting bigger and bigger.
You could think of it as the network is kind of getting more efficient. We're consolidating into larger, more efficient channels instead of lots and lots and lots of little channels, which means payments don't have to get broken up as much and things like that. I look at it as putting my Bitcoin to work. So the sats that folks boost into the show, one of the things I do with them is I reinvest them into liquidity channels for the nodes. Since I have a couple of nodes and we open up channels to some listeners and other podcasters and the podcast index and podcast apps.
And you earn, albeit very little because we're trying to make boosts very feasible, you earn tiny bits of routing fees. So your sats, while they're locked up in a channel and you can't initially access them, I wasn't planning on selling them anyways, I can earn some routing fees and I'm putting them to work to add more liquidity. Is it the safest way to hodl sats? No. Well, you're putting them to work. So I don't look at it as a complete loss of the sats. I hope that makes sense. And hodl, they're a great question. Thank you for sending it in. Feel free to send more in. And congrats on the node.
Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. Veggies will be finished in six months. Ah, good. I was hoping we'd get some predictions. The veggies will be finished in six months, and then it's boomtown. I like the strategy, and I'm a fan of smaller government as an overall policy, so I think I'm okay with short-term pain for long-term gain. I essentially agree there, Ace, but do you think we're seeing them blink? Do you agree with my assessment that maybe we're seeing cracks in the level of conviction? And does that concern you? Love to know what you think there. Thanks for the boost.
Hey, Arias, Hybrid Sarcasms here with 12,000 sats. This is a tasty burger. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days. Didn't stream my sats for TWIB 50 because my Albi Hub was locked. So here's a boost to make up for it. Make sure you have a restart parameter to find in your Docker Compose file. That's a good tip. Yeah, I have had that happen to me as well. Oh, oh, I think I noticed it when I was on Nostra and I couldn't zap. I'm like, what? Oh, my. Oh, it's been down for hours. Thank you, hybrid. Nice to hear from you, too. Nico, the Greek is here with 3,333 sats. That's pretty funny.
Next caller. All systems are functional. No message, just the value. Also, you know, we have the 2,000 sat cutoff for time, but I wanted to pull up one from Coach Rick. Coach Rick blew my mind just under the 2,000 sat cutoff with 1,999 sats. Happy 50th episode and belated congratulations on the show's one year anniversary. What? Oh, that's why the birth. There you go. That's right, everybody. It's that time of year again. Happy birthday. I guess it is the show's birthday. I was so heads down, you know, just following the news, cranking out the shows. Didn't even realize I've been doing the show for a year. what a wild year it has been when i started the show i wanted to keep the momentum going from the bitcoin dad because he was wrapping up and i was like well we got to keep going i think i got something i can offer here but it wasn't necessarily the ideal time to launch a show i had a lot going on a lot of events like i do this time of year too every time this year i have a lot of events going on so it was it's crazy time to launch a show but you know what like i kind of feel like you know, the show's getting into a groove now.
Honestly, it takes a while. It does take a while to kind of really to find the groove, to kind of get the community feedback cycle going, to start shaping the show like we're at now. And we're there. We're there and it feels pretty darn great. So thank you everybody who supports the show with a boost. It means a lot. One year in really, really means more than ever. And thank you everybody who streams sats as you listen. 49 of you did that on the last episode. Collectively, you stacked 86,830 sats, you sat streamers. Thank you very much. When you combine that with our boosters, and we had a bunch of them this week, we stacked a grand total for episode 51, 367,461 sats.
Music. Not too shabby at all. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate it. Those links I have at the top of the show notes are probably the best ways to get sats if you want to start participating because those folks are on the lightning network so you can send them right over to a podcasting 2.0 app like fountain or if you want to go to an albi hub and really go all in absolutely can do that with those links too then you can send a message in and you could support episode 52 of this week in bitcoin really means a lot thank you everybody who sent in a message or streams those sats or shares the show with somebody, all of that is vital to keeping the show going.
And I appreciate it. Let's get to those updates. Music. Well, we knew this was going to happen. You may recall, I was worried that we'd see some Bitcoin mining companies capitulate to the sweet, sweet investment money of AI. And AI has a big problem. It uses a lot of energy. And Bitcoin companies, mining companies, have figured out how to do that in a sustainable, cheap way, which immediately kind of put pressure on them to use some of that infrastructure, AI data centers. And one of them, I think it's pronounced Crusoe, Crusoe Energy, which was sort of a darling of the Bitcoin mining space, is selling its operation to NYDIG to focus all on AI.
And I want to put why this is kind of a big deal into perspective for you. Because just two years ago, their CEO was out there selling the benefits, real true benefits, of Bitcoin mining capturing things like methane gas. So this is gas that would otherwise not be used, right? Being used to power Bitcoin mining. How does it work? That's correct. So what happens in the oil field is there's something called flaring. It's one of the largest emission sources from oil production. What happens is an oil company will drill an oil well, and one of the byproducts of that is natural gas. And if they don't have access to a pipeline, the best, most economic thing for them to do is just light it on fire.
And when they do that, they end up actually venting quite a bit of the methane in the atmosphere. And methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It traps 82 and a half times more heat in the atmosphere than CO2. And so it creates this massive waste with no beneficial use and everybody kind of loses in this situation. So how do you then use it to power Bitcoin mining? Sure. So Crusoe developed a technology called digital flare mitigation, where we build, operate and manage these mobile modular data centers that we deploy into the oil field and And we co-locate on site with the sites that would be flaring.
And now instead of the gas being flared, it feeds into the digital flare mitigation systems to create low-cost computing infrastructure to power digital currency mining, high-performance computing, GPU cloud computing product, and things like artificial intelligence research. You're running a pilot program using excess natural gas from Exxon in North Dakota. How's that going? We actually can't comment on the relationship with Exxon. It's it's womp womp but that is interesting to know exxon is and i've heard that before they're interested in off gas mining exxon yeah you know weird right so this sell-off includes more than 425 of their modular data centers that capture this flared gas and they're going to shift on you know llms basically is what they're doing and i think this is going to be it's a pressure The Bitcoin mining industry is extremely, extremely brutal.
Super hard industry, right? Where you can just sit back and run GPUs and get money from investors when you do AI. So, you know, which way did you think they were going to go, right? Now, how about this next one? You all remember Celsius, right? The massive Ponzi scheme that manipulated their sell token and lost a bunch of money, dumped our holdings on customers and investors. Well, they are in a spat with Chainalysis. I'm no fan of Chainalysis, but it seems that the debtors that are coming after Celsius are also now eyeing a lawsuit against Chainalysis for participating in a bogus third-party audit for Celsius.
They claim that Chainalysis verified billions in assets that did not exist, that the audit was a total lie. Per the complaint, rather than just alleging that Chainalysis' audit was inadequate, the plaintiffs claim that Chainalysis was effectively in on Celsius' scam. The complaint states, quote, Chainalysis, a supposed authority in blockchain analytics, knew the truth but willingly lent its credibility to insiders lies, misleading both the public and Celsius. Now, the truth is Chainalysis didn't conduct any kind of audit from what I could tell. Essentially, they signed off on an audit that was done by Celsius's CEO.
And they just kind of came up with a $3.3 billion figure. And it does seem potentially hard to say at this point that Chainalysis knew about this. They admitted that the announcement was misleading, saying that it did make it look like they performed the audit. But they were incentivized to let that misleading statement go out there to give their company more credibility. This is going to pull in Chainalysis staff. I mean, this is an ugly one. And it also brings in other Chainalysis attributions into doubt. Lawmakers cite chain analysis data on North Korea recently.
They brag that they're the only firm that's been able to prove that North Korea did those actions and that they, quote, turn blockchain into evidence. However, if they are wrongfully attributing audits and other things, they could be wrongfully attributing nation state actions as well. Who knows? It brings a lot of things into questions. I think chain analysis is a pretty sketchy company. And this is a banger of a story that I'll link in the show notes by therage.co. Really good work being done over there. And it's a story that I'll be following for you. Really wild stuff. Celsius story is just crazy. And I'd love to know if any of you out there got wrapped up in it and how it's going for you.
Okay, next story. How about an update on the state-level Bitcoin reserves? The Arizona House Rules Committee approved two Bitcoin reserve bills, deeming them constitutional and proper in form. Yeah, I think that's an important step, obviously. Oklahoma, though, there is a lot of action over here. Their bill, HB 1203, has been approved by the House, making it one of the few states alongside Texas, Arizona, Utah, whose legislators have passed Bitcoin legislation through at least one of the chambers. That has finally caught the attention of their local Fox affiliate, Fox 25, who did a piece on Oklahoma's Bitcoin reserve bill. Would create a strategic Bitcoin reserve in Oklahoma is making its way through the state legislature.
This would allow the state treasurer to invest Oklahoma's money into Bitcoin. Fox 25's Capitol reporter Paige Taylor spoke with the author of the bill and with state treasurer Todd Russ about the benefits and risks this could create for our state. Paige. Well, Wendy, State Representative Cody Maynard is the author of the bill. He tells me he filed it so that the state could have a positive return. State Treasurer Todd Russ says he's happy to invest in Bitcoin if the state legislature passes the bill, but that his job is to be cautious and careful. It's going to allow our state to invest up to 5% of our general revenue funds and our pensions in Bitcoin or other digital assets.
That's the goal of House Bill 1203, authored by State Representative Cody Maynard. Bitcoin is one of the best-performing assets of the last decade. It's had 49% annual returns. And I think where we're at right now is, you know, the way of the future is going to be digital assets, and our state does not need to be ignoring that. If the bill is signed into law, Oklahoma State Treasurer Todd Russ could invest funds from the State General Fund, Revenue Stabilization Fund, and Constitutional Reserve Fund in Bitcoin and digital assets with a market cap over $500 billion. He says there are different factors about this that could be seen as positives or negatives, and people who support it feel like it's a great hedge against inflation.
You know, it's done phenomenal. It's caught on. It's been a very popular product. Started calling it an investment. This is Oklahoma's state treasurer. I don't know if they mentioned that. Todd Russ. Very popular product. Started calling it an investment. but there's questions about whether it's a currency or an investment. Some states have been unsuccessful in passing similar measures due to lawmakers feeling it is too great of a risk with taxpayer dollars. Russ says his first concern is the safety and soundness of taxpayer dollars. I've never understood this argument.
I never get it. What are you going to do, hold it in cash? That's a guaranteed debasement. That's a guaranteed risk. That's a known guaranteed risk. So if you look at the performance of Bitcoin, historically, it goes up. So like, what is the risk exactly? Is the risk that in 10 months, the price that you bought it at might be, you know, the spot price might be lower than the price you bought it at in 10 months? Is that the risk? Are they holding it for six days? What's the risk? They're holding it for years. ...of a risk with taxpayer dollars.
Russ says his first concern is the safety and soundness of taxpayer dollars. For me, the state of Oklahoma decides to do this and the legislature puts it in statute. I've got to follow the law and I'd be happy to, I don't care at all to, but I'd like to start out small, minimize the risk and see how it does. The bill is currently eligible to be heard on the House floor. Reporting live at the state capitol, Paige Taylor, Fox 25 News. I mean, where we're at right now is a couple of these are actually making pretty good progress. I think probably right-leaning states are going to be more likely to move forward with this.
But, you know, it was overall pretty good coverage. They just, again, it's, you know, vague risk and things like that. But so is, you know, investing in anything, I suppose. I'm loving this using Bitcoin for methane capture, but also the benefits that we as a community need to talk more about is how Bitcoin can monetize a power station and bring electricity to a region that could never have afforded to have electricity. They could never have made a power station viable without Bitcoin. Zambia is a great example of this. A cryptocurrency company is planning to roll out mini power plants to rural villages in Africa.
It's in order to bring electricity to remote parts and to mine for Bitcoin. The company has already proven that a similar model works after installing Bitcoin generating mines to six different renewable energy plants in three different countries. Well, the project shows the potential benefits of this controversial energy hungry system that powers Bitcoin. Joe Tidy has been to the remote mine on the Zambezi River to see one project in action. The roar of the Zambezi River is deafening. But there's another sound on the riverbanks here in northwest Zambia too. The unmistakable whirring of a Bitcoin mine.
24 hours a day, this container full of powerful computers crunches through complex mathematical problems to earn bitcoins as part of the global volunteer mining network. It's very noisy, but it's a beautiful noise. Because the truth is, this noise means we're making money. It's an odd place for a high-tech crypto operation, but it makes sense as the electricity is so cheap here as it comes directly from the site's hydroelectric power plant. Zengamina Hydro has been running for 17 years, but the bitcoin mine has been a major boost since it was installed in 2023, as it makes use of excess electricity.
We really struggled to make ends meet. And every day we were wasting over 50% of the energy that we could generate, which also meant we're not earning from that. What we lacked was an institutional, a major user of power in the area. And the extra revenue, important to say, has also helped us keep the prices down for what we charge the local people, which is also very important. A few miles away from the hydro plant, Damien only got power to his barbershop a couple of years ago, but it's been transformational. But I love to do nothing for me anymore. I'll try to score that.
Bitcoin mining didn't build Zengamida Hydro Plant, but there's no doubt it's been a win, not just for the energy company and the Bitcoin miners, but also for the local town. However, the plant has received a huge amount of investment and will soon be expanding. They hope to sell any excess energy, eventually back to the grid. So Philip and team have got to hit the road and find a new place as perfect as this. As well as searching for sites with excess energy, Gridless is now hoping to start building its own mini-grid energy plants, with its Bitcoin mine as the first major tenant. I'm sure you'll have critics who will worry that the community want the energy, but you'll favor the mining.
It's a really good question, and you're right, we get to ask that a lot. The truth is that Bitcoin mining doesn't pay very high prices for electricity. Our economic interest is to sell to the higher paying customer, and that's always going to be the community. But because of Bitcoin's reputation for energy use and environmental impact, some governments and authorities remain uncomfortable with including it in electrification projects. Setups like Zengamina are a tiny part of the overall mining picture, but also a rare example of a controversial industry creating much more than just digital coins.
Joe Tidy, BBC News in Zambia. You know, I think it's fitting they end on the controversial nature of Bitcoin mining because the BBC has played a role in making that controversial, especially in places outside the States. So it's kind of notable that they're doing a rather positive article, or I guess for them it would be a piece. I don't know. I don't like calling it a piece, a video, a report, a report. That's got to be like the most positive BBC report on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining I've ever seen. Music. It's final clip of the week time. And last week, Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve chairman, came out and told the world what the price of the dollar would be for a little while longer.
Not really much news came out because rates are staying the same. Everything's within expectation. J-Pow said it's real hard to predict where things are going. But there was a question in the Q&A that caught my attention. Well, I guess it was really J-Pow's answer. And I want to play strike CEO Jack Mahler's take on it because he noticed it as well. And I think it's kind of big news that didn't get much coverage. Maybe it's why we're seeing some of the things in the market turn around a bit. The Federal Reserve has come out and said it's ending QT. QT stands for quantitative tightening.
Tightening meaning tightening monetary policy, strengthening the dollar. They came out and said, we are putting a stop to QT starting April 1st. That's a big, big, big deal. That's a sign from the Fed that they are easing monetary policy, easing meaning they're making it easier to get money, easier to trade. Easier to get a loan, easing access to capital. That of course is better for the economy. Why were they in quantitative tightening in QT? Well, because they're trying to fight inflation. The less money, the less dollars there are in the economy, then the less you can bid up prices of eggs, right?
The more dollars there are in the economy, the higher the prices of stuff will go. So they had enacted quantitative tightening to fight inflation and they are starting the resignation of that battle. Really big deal. And on the show, we've covered that the Trump administration has been demanding cheaper dollars. They've been aggressively attacking the Fed and Jerome Powell. They say, stop QT, stop QT, stop QT, lower rates, lower rates, lower rates. And we just saw the beginning of that, which I think the tide is very slowly turning in favor of Bitcoin and global liquidity and debased.
Music. Let's check in on the state of the network before I wrap up. The show is coming to an end at block height 889,548. The price of Bitcoin to the U.S. dollar is 86,510. Sats per dollar coming in at 1,156 sats to one U.S. dollar. We're up 2.8% over the last seven days, still down 20.7% from our all-time high, which was on January 19th, 2025, 109,160. Now, let's look at, oh, look at that. Reachable Bitcoin nodes has crossed the 22,000 mark, 22,019 reachable nodes on the Bitcoin network. Well done. Let's get that up to a few more. One or two of you could just launch a node and we could see that number creep up.
This show can make a direct impact on the strength of the Bitcoin network, which is strong. Music. Links to what i talked about are at this week in bitcoin.show my goal is to create a show that doesn't get distracted by emotions around what's happening but focuses on the signal so let me know how i did with a boost and boost in with what you'd like to see maybe i missed something you'd like to see me covered on the show in the future, maybe you got a newbie question you can boost those in as well and of course i always appreciate it when you share the show with a friend.
I think that's probably the number one way podcasts grow. Now, last week, you guys did it. Once again, you got our artists to number one. In fact, I think the top three songs right now are from this show and the launch on the podcast index top charts. Well done, everybody. You're making these artists day. It's another way these people can participate in the value for value system. It's available to anybody. They just create something that people enjoy so this week i'm going a little different direction a different genre than i've ever played than i ever played in the show but i kind of like the tune different but i like it it's it'll be me by i'm going to say rose ethanol.
Music.
Our next guest just penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing Trump's. Playing recession roulette with the American economy and writing, quote, I thought the probability of a downturn was nearly zero. Now one is likely and we may see stagflation. Music. Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 51. My name is Chris, chrislas.com, jupiterbroadcasting.com. You know, the U.S. government is thinking about boosting the debt ceiling by another $4 trillion. That would bring the grand total to $40 trillion. Yeah, $40 trillion. So I guess they have officially adopted the financial strategy of a young, dumb me with my first credit card, just doubling my debt in eight years.
I hope with that because it really puts things into perspective. Traditional economists are panicked. They think we're going to have a recession. It's a guaranteed. It's the best case scenario that we have a small recession. But the business people advising the White House seem to be extremely bullish. And they're attempting to work the problem from multiple angles. We are under your direction. We're reprivatizing the economy. We're bringing down government spending. This is Treasury Secretary, as I like to say, bassinet, Steve Besson. We're bringing down excess employment in the government sector.
On the other side, we're going to re-leverage the banking system. We're going to have all the new manufacturing jobs. So everyone who's laid off from the government will have an opportunity to go into the private sector. And that is going to lead to disinflation. We're going to, inflation is under control. We're going to get the affordability crisis. So lower energy, deregulation, more private sector jobs that will naturally get interest rates down, interest rates down. Mortgage rates are down almost every week since January 20th. The energy costs are down about 15 percent. Crude oil is down about 15 percent.
And as we keep that going, interest rates are going to keep declining. It'll be good for mortgages. It'll be good for credit card debt. It'll be great for auto loans. But a big part of that strategy, and I got to give him credit, he's getting pretty tight on that presentation. A big part of that strategy is the doge cuts. And those do seem to be slowing down. And the doge cuts seem to be slowing down while maybe we are seeing some of the conviction in this wild turnaround play from the White House crack a little bit. Perhaps our first signs of blinking.
So president trump may be softening his stance on tariffs story in this morning's wall street journal front page drove up stocks 500 bucks they ease back 100 later but then mr trump again suggested a softening at his cabinet meeting and that drove stocks back up to a 600 point gain for the day so the question is is he negotiating with the stock market as well as with other countries or are more moderate voices holding sway inside the White House? Now, look. Yeah, it seems the whole we're not watching the market thing has kind of gone away. So this week, I want to get into the risks of the White House not successfully pulling this pivot off so we as Bitcoiners can plan accordingly.
And I'm going to get into those specifics in a little bit. But I think we have to look at the broader picture. We have seen some initial warning signs. and the first ones are from the Internal Revenue Service here in the States. I'm no fan. They've made my quality of life harder and worse quantifiably, but they tend to be really low-key about some of these types of warnings that they release. And we all know that the U.S. government has a spending problem, and any sizable reduction in revenue could be catastrophic. Interest payments on debt and entitlement obligations already exceed 100% of total tax receipts, despite revenue from taxes being at historical highs recently.
So any dip in there would be bad. And the IRS could see a sharp drop in revenue collected this tax filing season. That's according to a Washington Post report that says senior tax officials are bracing for a shortfall that would be tied to changing taxpayer behavior and attempted IRS cuts by President Trump. The Post cites several sources in an article that says that the Treasury Department is expecting a more than 10 percent drop in tax receipts by April 15th compared to last year. That would amount to about 500 billion dollars in lost revenue. The article says that the IRS has noticed more online chatter from people who say they won't pay their taxes or will claim deductions for which they are ineligible.
You know, people ranting on social media, that doesn't really actually translate to people not paying their taxes, I suspect. I'll admit, seeing a lot of the Doge news come out, it's like, God, I really don't want to pay my taxes this year. It's going to hurt more than ever. But on scale, at scale, people are still going to pay their taxes. They don't want to get in trouble. The real threat, the real threat is the revenue is down because the market is down. That's the real threat. You see, the bulk of the tax income is capital gains. So if you're taking this whole world realignment thing into effect, while it's happening, we're already seeing a significant drop in the US market.
So we have a falling equity market. I mean, it's getting better. It's been getting better for the last week, really. But there's still going to be a direct correlation to a reduction in tax revenue. That's just how it works. So lower stocks mean lower capital gains. We're also going to see lower corporate taxes because corporate profits are down. So these are going to intensify the problem. More spending than revenue, right? That's where we're at. We have a problem now where the U.S. government spends more than it makes already, and we're going to have less money coming in for at least a little period of time.
And if we're already seeing the White House blink, you know, if we're seeing their conviction to ignore the markets weaken before we've really even begun to see a turn, you know, I mean, sure, yes, the tariff policy has brought some investments home. That's true. We've seen announcements from Apple and SoftBank and others. But the story that's not getting a lot of coverage is we're also seeing significant capital flights out of the U.S. into like European markets and others. So you could argue, I don't know, I don't think we have the numbers, but you could argue that all the announcements about money coming in because of tariffs is a bit of a net wash because of all the money leaving.
So it's hard to say. And what we do know is we've gotten recent data on American consumer sentiment, which I imagine probably reflects consumer sentiment in the West in general. Breaking today, consumer confidence is at its lowest point in four years, according to a survey that dates back to 1967. Expectations for the future are at their lowest point since the end of the Great Recession. President Trump's economic policy has been a dramatic change from the Biden administration. Inflation has remained high, and the Federal Reserve has not lowered interest rates since December. They've remained relatively high over the last two and a half years.
And with all that in mind, we welcome financial... We'll stop there. So I think what we could be seeing is perhaps cracks in the execution. I don't know if there was a right way to do this. I have seen them argue that you have to move fast because if you don't move fast, the entrenched interest will slow you down and stop you eventually. So you've got to move quicker than they can. So maybe with our broken U.S. government, it wasn't possible to do this properly. But. You would, if you could, and if you could take the time, the White House would want to do structural preparation, you know, set up tax incentives ahead of time to make sure certain workforces get retained or hired in the country.
Get that in ahead of time, you know, get some training in place, get people prepared, because without that, historically, you see capital flight occur, which is what we're seeing right now. That weakens the dollar and that essentially puts volatility into the Treasury market. So we end up in a very particular situation where essentially fiscal dominance takes over. Music. Long term if the white house is successful or if they fail in this pivot it is going to be good for bitcoin i'll get into that you know if they succeed it increases revenue decreases spending the u.s economy booms liquidity starts to flow the u.s government along with many others have the resources to buy a Bitcoin and they start executing on their plans with one new, very important factor, which I'll get into in just a moment.
But if this fails, if they don't execute it, say beyond 30% or something, I don't know how you'd measure this. I think that's also good for Bitcoin. We have overwhelming debt obligations in the United States. So the Federal Reserve will be forced to go back into quantitative easing. They're already slowing. They're tightening. I'll get into that later. When bond yield spike and fiscal policy dominates monetary policy, that just means that, The dollar weakens, we inflate, and Bitcoin rips. But we have one new important factor, and that is sort of this final boss problem that Bitcoin has faced.
Bitcoiners for a long term, for a long time, have dreaded this then-they-fight-you moment. And we seem to have short-circuited that. And I've been trying to put into words why this feels like a significant moment when you look at the Reserve and the commitment never to sell Bitcoin by the federal government. It feels like Bitcoiners in their gut understand this is really important, but the rest of the world, right over their head. They seem to have missed it. Well, Bitwise's chief investment officer, Matt Hogan, was on Natalie Brunel's Coin Stories podcast, and he managed to put into words this thing that's been on my mind and I think some of your minds, too.
And that is this fact that the landscape for Bitcoin, it really has changed forever. We can feel it. it's a big shift, but the rest of the world has missed it. And I think Matt helps us understand why. The most important thing, in my view, is not actually the government aggressively buying, although that would be great. It's that we've gotten past the point where the government is going to try to shut down Bitcoin. And to me, that's an existential change. That means there is a pre-that-happening market and a post-happening market. And we're now on the other side of that. So if we buy great, if not also great, Bitcoin is going to be just fine.
It really was the big threat. How do you stop Bitcoin? Maybe the federal government puts everything it has into fighting it and at least bans it in the United States, which would significantly harm Western adoption because, you know, our friends in the West would follow suit. In fact, just us legitimizing Bitcoin through reserve has changed attitudes around the world for some places. But it's bigger than just they're not going to sell their coins. In fact, it's a whole land shift in all of Washington, D.C., which only people that have been following the crypto space for the last few years can even begin to kind of appreciate just how significant it is.
It's something that surprised me. It has surprised me. Look, I think the market is underpricing the change in Washington. That's actually surprised me. I know that Bitcoin ripped from 70 to 100K, but I think the change is much greater than that. I look at what's happening, not just in Bitcoin, but in DeFi, even in alt layer ones. I think the market is just underestimating the change. The reason for that is I think unless you worked in crypto over the last four years, you can't imagine how challenging it was, right? You can't understand how difficult being debanked regularly was in this ecosystem.
You can't understand how difficult multiple subpoenas and lawsuits were. You sound crazy when you say that banks won't take your $10 million deposit. People are like, no way. Did that happen to Bitwise? It did happen to Bitwise. It happened to everyone in crypto, of course. We all faced banking challenges. When Bitwise was first formed, it was difficult to get people to accept our checks from VCs to start the business, which is an incredible fact. But unless you realize just how repressive it was, you can't imagine what it will be like now that that's lifted.
You look at what's happened at the SEC recently, you know, pulling back on the Coinbase lawsuit, pulling back on the Uniswap lawsuit. I think just the rebound for that is two to three X more than we've seen in the market so far. So I guess I've been surprised that people haven't sort of felt and intuited that difference. But now I recognize it's because they didn't know how bad we had it. And so therefore, you know, how open the market is now. Yeah. So it's a good buying opportunity. I think it's a great long-term buying opportunity. I saw a tweet yesterday from Avichel from Electric Capital that said, opportunity is fundamentals minus perception.
And the opportunity has never been greater in crypto, if you use that math. Music. Okay, so how do we as Bitcoiners plan for these potential outcomes? A failure on policy or a success in policy or somewhere in between? Let's talk about that. I think one thing we can do is we can quantify what we do know right now because there is as they love to say the meme is there's a lot of uncertainty out there what we do know is that long term we have big buyers and holders in the bitcoin market now right we we know this we know from plebs that are going to hodl forever and always be buying and selling and stacking and cold storing Bitcoin.
Like we have that base layer. 60% of the Bitcoin network is those plebs. And then we have the next largest group is governments. And after governments, it's companies. And companies seem to be aping in one after another. Let's talk some earnings here. GameStop results just hitting the wire. But I should mention first, and it's probably why the stock is up, the company is announcing an update to its investment policy to add Bitcoin as a treasury reserve asset. This was broadly speculated upon. We have seen the stock pop as of late in expectation. of this. There's no other details in the statement, by the way. It just says update to its investment policy to add Bitcoin as a Treasury Reserve asset.
There are no details on how it's going to add it. There's no details on how they're going to raise funds to do that, although who knows, maybe they'll follow on the heels of strategy and issue shares in order to do that. And by the way, all of this coming as the company's numbers missed estimates, sales in the fourth quarter down 28% to $1.28 billion. Rough is what that is. It's sort of playing out as expected, isn't it? The companies on the edge that have something to lose, that are struggling, they're going to be the first to make these choices. I also wonder if some of the companies that are betting it all on the AI bet right now, that LLMs are going to produce AGI and replace people, and so they're spending billions, assuming they're going to make it all up in efficiencies in the workforce and in the productivity gains.
But I'm becoming a skeptic that LLMs will ever achieve AGI. I think LLMs can be extremely useful tools. Obviously, they have a lot of potential in software development and image generation, media generation, and tech summaries. And there's lots of fields where they're very useful and they make people more productive. I don't think they're going to be Skynet. But that's the way companies are betting. And once that bet starts to fizzle out, Bitcoin is something real that they can bet on. Bitcoin is something that they can, they go from the value of their company being the speculation on what it might do to the value being the money they actually hold on their balance sheet.
And this is Saylor's strategy with MicroStrategy, although he obviously is at an extreme. Other companies are following, like MetaPlanet, and that has caught, I should say, Saylor's attention. And Michael Saylor addressed the board of MetaPlanet this week to talk about the strategy. And I think there's some good insights in here. Konnichiwa, MetaPlanet shareholders. I'm so delighted to have the opportunity to speak with you today. MetaPlanet and Strategy are on the same mission together to convert the world to a Bitcoin standard. And we both view ourselves as being cheerful revolutionaries in the capital markets.
Most conventional capital markets' equities are valued based upon the promise of future money. But our company in MetaPlanet, we're offering to be valued based upon the money we actually have. And most fixed income instruments in the capital markets are valued based upon the promise of future cash flows to pay off the debt. Whereas we're pioneering a new world where we actually issue fixed income instruments backed by the actual money that we have. And the reason we can do it is because both companies have capitalized on non-toxic money. We've capitalized on Bitcoin capital asset, which is appreciating faster than the cost of capital.
Every other company in the world is generally capitalized on sovereign debt or currencies that underperform the cost of capital. So I've had many, many great discussions with Simon. And he and I are on this journey together. It's a mission. It's a mission to deliver Bitcoin-backed securities to the world. And we see hundreds of trillions of dollars of equity and hundreds of trillions of dollars of fixed income instruments that are valued based upon what we see as antiquated 20th century methods. We're really excited about taking the capital markets in the 21st century. I think strategy is leading the charge in the United States, and MetaPlanet is leading the charge in Japan.
Thank you for supporting MetaPlanet. Thank you for supporting Bitcoin. Thank you for supporting strategy. And we look forward to continuing this journey together, onward and upward. So the sharks are here. I mean, that's the reality. And they're not selling. And us fish, I guess, if you could go with this analogy, we need to get to one Bitcoin as fast as possible. This market dip is a moment, but it won't be your only moment. I think one of the things that people can do is they can psych themselves out and think this is their last opportunity in Bitcoin.
No. I mean, it's hard to say what price it'll be at again in the future, but there will be future dips as well. But if you have no extra funds to earn sats, I know that's a really hard thing to hear. But there's things you can do. Get on Noster. Post content that's worth zapping. Get on Stacker News. Do the same thing. Use Fountain for your podcast app. You know, they stream you sats. people can zap you sats on there. Start using the fold card and passively stack sats. You can also do things like build a node. Learn Bitcoin better than the average fish. Invest in your knowledge.
Get some experience with lightning and cold storage. You don't need to obsess and focus on becoming a shark. Just don't be a guppy is my advice. That's what you plan for. As you plan for these sharks to hodl and buy more long-term, take advantage of dips, and I think all us plebs should be pivoting to passively stacking Bitcoin as hard as possible. Because I have this gut feeling that this is going to feel like, I can't actually remember if it was called, if I'm getting it wrong, but I want to call it the Bitcoin well. Which is probably, I don't know if I'm getting it confused with the actual Bitcoin well, but there used to be a page. I had been there.
I want to say it was the well, but it might've been something else. It was a faucet, like the Bitcoin faucet. Maybe that's what it was called. And you could go to this page and they would just give you Bitcoin. for going to the page. Just get Bitcoin. Not sats. Bitcoin. You can just get Bitcoin. And that sounds ridiculous now. For going to a website, like filling out a capture or whatever it was. That's crazy, right? I think that's how we're going to look at a lot of these passively stacked Bitcoins. These Bitcoin rewards and things like that. In 30 years, we'll be like, that's crazy. You got 200,000 sats for paying that bill? That's wild. For paying those bills, That's crazy.
You wouldn't get that on one bill. I think that's, I think that's my advice is actively stack if you can, but if you can't, you know, you've got to figure out your passive game and even if you're actively stacking, I think you should figure out your passive game. Because those free sets aren't going to be around forever and it's hard money. Once you have those sets, they're yours. They're never going to get them back. So use this opportunity to stack them sets passively as hard as you can. Music. Here we go. The lever you have pulled breaks. It's not in service. Please make a note of it. I think one of the things that's going to be really rough to watch over the next year or two is all of these different stable coins and all of these different companies, they're going to have their own coin.
And, you know, they're all going to be on some sort of crypto blockchain VC backed thing. Today, as I record, six trillion dollar asset manager Fidelity has announced plans to launch their own stable coin. Earlier this week, Donald Trump's World Liberty Financial raised $550 million and launched the USD1 stablecoin. We're going to see this a lot, I think. This is going to be big, especially once the Genius Act passes or whatever version of it gets through, which I suspect is one of their higher priorities right now. This is going to put a lot of pressure on the network effect of Bitcoin, is my concern, the transactional aspect of Bitcoin. I mean, Bitcoin doesn't need day-to-day transactions, people buying coffee to be successful.
But if you can, you're probably going to use a free transaction or something like that that doesn't adjust in value. I think it will potentially have some impact on the network effect for Bitcoin and its adoption. But ultimately, I'm more concerned about Elon's plans, actually. I'm not an Elon stan. I'm not an Elon hater. I just don't really get that worked up over individual personalities. I tend to think it's more complex than that. But I do think Elon has been suspiciously quiet about Bitcoin. He's been in the room during some of Trump's biggest announcements pertaining to Bitcoin.
Besties with David Sachs, the AI and crypto czar. And Elon comments on everything except Bitcoin. And maybe I know why. And I think this could also have an impact on Bitcoin's network effect and adoption. Elon believes that X could become 50% of the global economy. And I think he means the transactions of the global economy. Essentially, if done right, the X would be. Would serve people's financial needs to such a degree that over time it would become, I don't know, maybe half of the global financial system. Wow. Or some big number. I'm not sure what the number is, but pretty big.
So it would be by far the biggest sort of financial institution. But like I said, not really in the way that people are used to thinking about banks. Just just the most efficient database for the thing that is money what i said like least amount of fraud everything's real time and if it involves money in any way it can be dealt with seamlessly on one one location so it's the best database for money you know his sequel database what could be better than that so you know me i got a question for y'all boost in and tell me are elon's plans for X, a risk to Bitcoin's adoption by regular users, compare it to Noster for a moment.
Noster not only onboards people to Bitcoin, but to a lightning first experience. Where now, like, if Elon's plans were successful, every X user would basically have Venmo cash app built into their X app with the network effect of X. So is this a risk for Bitcoin? And do you agree? Is this maybe why Elon never talks about Bitcoin? It could go nowhere. But, you know, you combine it with some sort of like stablecoin play. You get money operator licenses money transmitter licenses you set up a SQL database to keep transactions make it easier for people to move money between each other boom boom sounds like at least a decent strategy to pitch to.
Music. Now, before we continue on, I want to say you can support the show by doing what you do. You can buy sats on River when you're stacking or smash buying and use our link to support the show. If you want to buy sats and send them directly to self-custody or maybe you're up in the Canadias, Bitcoin Well is the way to go. Bitcoin Well will go directly to your self-custody when you're buying or selling. It's really slick. If you're ready to spend some of your Bitcoin via Lightning, that's the Bitcoin company. Hundreds of gift cards from Lightning right into a gift card in just seconds. You can even sign in with Lightning.
You don't even need an account. You want to passively stack them sats, fold card. Transactions on a debit card when you're paying your bills, gift cards, fold card will help you stack them sats. If you got some Bitcoin, you need access to liquidity, some fiat without selling it. That's where salt lending comes in. All of these are linked in the show notes. I use them and recommend them. I've been with them for a bit. And I appreciate everybody who supports the show by doing what you do. Now, we've got boosts, updates, and a final clip of the week. Music.
So let's get into it. We'll be right back. Oh, we have some boosts. Look at that. And Adversary 17 is our baller booster this week with 70,000 sats. Adversary says great episode. And in regards to sponsorship, if they make sense and help the show, I'd listen to them. I feel you have a good sense of what your audience values and the sponsors you've chosen for other shows have all been good choices for me. But also here's some sats. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. He's a good guy. He's a real good guy. No, he's a great guy. Thanks for being our baller booster this week. yeah i'm i will be getting into that in this episode i think at least a bit more it's still something i'm chewing on appreciate your input and i appreciate that baller boost a trains here with 66,666 sats hmm why you got to put numbers and letters together why can't you just go yourself oh come on well i'll be dipped uh he sends me a link to a video on x about a gal who's worried about a recession you know she might she mainly cites some data that's a little bit off so i don't know how valid her concern is there, but I did take a look at it.
He says, too bad I can't cash out of my 401k for Bitcoin. As for the ads, you know what's best for your audience. I support it either way. Stay stacking. Andrew. Andrew, there may be some solutions to that. I don't know about the 401k and Bitcoin, at least maybe, you know, going into an IRA. But I wouldn't be too concerned by that social media post video. I don't think she has a full grasp on why 21 and me, or 21 and forever, whatever it's called, is actually collapsing. So a bit of her analysis is off. But I appreciate you boosting in and, you know, running it past me, too. Don't mind that at all.
Now, I'm going to say Obel918. I think that's probably wrong, right? That's probably wrong. Because I'm the wind. Yeah, that's true. Came in with a big old bushel of McDucks, 44,445 sats. Things are looking up for old McDuck. Chris, your analysis is spot on. It usually has an angle I haven't heard from anyone else. And nobody else is doing this as well as you are. Keep up the good work. Me and the kids love TWIP. Oh, thank you. I remember your email, too. I've been running a node for some time, but since I never spend sats, I haven't set up Lightning.
I sent you some Quantalooze on PayPal, but I never really felt like I got to participate in the system to do a proper boost. So I went through another KYC process, and I got strike working. Here's my first boost, with many more to come. You know what you're doing a good job well done by the way about sponsorships i wouldn't mind hearing them because i know what it means for you as the creator i listen to the boost every week and i know it's not enough money for the value you're providing that said is it increasing over time if the show grows do you see this working with boosts only because that would be great it's a good question so i i think the you know the boosts kind of ebb and flow, But, you know, over time, the value of the boost goes up. So that's something, right?
And I think that's, I hope, kind of unique to the boost system is if you boost today a row of ducks, that row of ducks hopefully does more later. Your contribution does more for the network later. Because my plan is to essentially, I mean, not as pompous to call it like a Bitcoin reserve strategy, but my plan is to utilize the sats to make it possible to run the network with as little commercial attachments as possible one day. And, you know, I'm not saying never because there's certain things like events or whatnot that it's great to work with sponsors and some sponsors have been really great.
I don't know, as it grows, we'll have to see if we can onboard more people to the boost ecosystem. There is work being done to make that smoother, but with Albi refocusing on self-hosted and removing the hosted option, you know, we've seen a cutback, I think, in the boost. Also with some volatility. So there's a transition period. There are multiple projects in works to kind of fill those gaps, but they're just not ready yet. But, you know, Bitcoin teaches us to be patient, right? And I really appreciate you taking the time to get the boosting set up so you can send in a boost to after you sent in the PayPal and the email.
It's nice to hear from you. I hope to hear from you again. Paranoid Coders here with the Rodex. I've got a Fold question for you. I got the impression that you mainly use Fold to pay bills, and it got me interested. So I set it up and started using my Fold Plus trial. Took me a while to realize, though, that you only get rewards for bill pay up until the dollar amount you spend on your fold card or Bitcoin purchases. You also put a certain amount of your fold card so you can get bill pay rewards. Or am I missing something? Thanks for the show. It's the only show I slow down below 2x, so I can really enjoy it.
That is... You make me want to be a better man. That is so great. So the way I look at Fold is it's really only going to be great for you if you're doing like one of a few things. And that is if you're putting some debit card expenses on there or you're buying gift cards for like gas purchases, like pre-buying a month's worth of gas because they have several gas cards in there. Then you get like 5%, 6% back on those SATs. If you also are buying Bitcoin with it, I think it's a pretty good option, especially with the Fold Plus membership. Because then it's zero fees and they do have, I think it's BitGo for their insurance, up to $300 million in your Bitcoin holdings. I think I could have those numbers wrong so you'd want to double check.
Not that I really advocate keeping any Bitcoin on an exchange, but while you're stacking and consolidating UTXOs, it is nice to have insurance. And with Fold Plus, there's no fees. So what I do is I kind of wait till all the bills are paid. I look at what's left in the Fold account and I tend to do a smash buy with that. What I would like to do is eventually really dial it in so that way I could just do like a 25% conversion to sats during the ACH deposit every time I do an ACH deposit. So it's just automatically 25% goes into sats. But I'd really want to make sure I got all the bill stuff really super dialed in and it's not fluctuating.
I don't want to get surprised there. So right now I do smash buys and a few small purchases on the debit card as well as gift cards. combine all that together with the bill pay, you know, over time you stack stats. It takes a while, I think, to really get the benefit out of it. For your Fold Plus membership, you'd probably want to use the debit card for a lot of your day-to-day purchases. And I think why not? You're going to get sats back anyways. Your only thing, you're only really, unless you have a credit card that's giving you great points for the stuff you buy day to day and you really like that system, I think it's worth considering the fold card. All right. I've said enough.
That's my, all right. I put it out there. I think they're doing great. They also just had some great news this week. So it's good all around. Moving on. Thank you for the boost, though. Scuffed comes in with 10,000 sats. He says, there's no such thing if I own Bitcoin. There's no such thing as a recession if I own Bitcoin. Right? Right, guys? Right? Fun will now commence. I am going to go with that. He says, I'm good with podcast ads as long as there's a members-only feed with no ads. Sometimes I don't have anything to say in a boost, but I still like to support the show on a weekly basis.
An ad-free or extra content feed would be a way to do that. And, of course, you'll be able to subscribe using lightning. Okay. So that's something, you know, right now I give my all into the main show. And so I would have to come up with something more I could do to give value for a membership. And also I agree you'd want to be able to pay by lightning that could be something that happens in the future. I'd have to think about that you know I'd have to give that some thought thank you appreciate that scuffed, Johns Burt came in with 5,000 sats you're so boosted no message just the value and ITFM99 came in with 2,000 sats B-O-O-S-T long time listener first time booster hey alright thank you, Just set up my Bitcoin full note and I'll be hub. Ha ha!
Make it so. Well done. Good to hear from you. Thank you for letting me know. It's great. Gene Bean's back with 3,559 sats. The traders love the vol. Your choices on sponsor for the rest of JB's shows have felt relevant and solid, so I support you using the same discernment here. I'd much rather hear an ad here than see the show be financially burdened on you. Thanks, Gene. He also boosted our artist, which got to number one. Boop, boop, boop. So the one pause and concern I have when it comes to Bitcoin space sponsors, the space is new, changing, and what is a good sponsor today might not be a great sponsor three years from now or two years from now.
I think in the last bull run and crash, we saw a lot of sponsors that seemed fine for a while in a lot of Bitcoin podcasts. And then when the crash came, we turned out that they weren't wearing pants when the tide went out, et cetera, et cetera. And it was embarrassing You know, I think Peter McCormick Took a lot of that. And others. And I, that's my big concern is that I can, you know, verify a company's good. I can use their product today, but how does it reflect on me when things all of a sudden change? And that's why I've really limited it right now to like Bitcoin well, river, fold, salt, because these companies have survived and they have, they've demonstrated long-term viability and that they actually do what they say they're going to do.
But it's such a small handful. It's such, it's a risk still and that's my main concern i really would like it to work value for value, simply because the topic matter is is really important and i just it's a tricky thing and i don't want to taint it by having a sponsor that goes sour one day and that does happen i've been doing this for like 18 19 years been dealing with podcast sponsors and the other shows it happens you know i mean like even a great sponsor sometimes gets bought out that's seen that happen their CEO goes and shoots an elephant I've seen that happen I mean it's it's you know. It's something so it's it's really been on my mind I appreciate your input thank you for the boost too wise hodls here with 7,474 sets I feel like that's a message almost there's something in there he says regarding sponsorships I wouldn't mind especially if it helps the show I suggest soliciting the companies you already mentioned yeah and then branching out from there those companies are really mostly interested in affiliate deals, I think.
The bull market has made the podcast space pretty noisy, so I've cut down on my podcast subscriptions to just three for the time being. This Week in Bitcoin, Bitcoin and Peterson's Bitcoin Fundamentals. Less is more for now. I don't usually boost, so here's a hello from all the streamers. We appreciate your work, albeit silently. Oh, and the boost amount is the default port on the Neo4j browser. Ah, I knew there was something there. I could just feel it when I read that. Thank you. Thank you for the boost. It's good to hear from you. Thank you for streaming too.
I agree. I really want to focus on Signal. I don't even, yeah. There's so many Bitcoin podcasts out there that I think it's like hypercritical for the success of the show to be focused on Signal. And this boost process is part of that because this is how you guys help me check. You know, I check what I'm talking about. We really seem to like narrow it down into these discussions. Like the show comes to new understandings, like really all of that. And you just don't, that's not something you get with the sponsor. Although this viability, you know, at the end of the day, I guess, is really what I'm concerned about. So I don't know. You can tell I'm all over the place.
Appreciate the boost. And now we go to Baste Potato, who's here with 10,000 sats. Heck yeah, let's go. Relatively new to the show, nothing but quality content, so thank you. Up until now, I've been a sats streamer, but I wanted to boost in order to give you my two cents on the sponsor's question. Please, no. I already have enough podcasters telling me to use Bitbox, River, and Casa. No judgment. I get it. But value for value can work. Step it up, folks! Music. Well, it's good to hear from you, Baste. I'm surprised some sponsors just haven't sent their message in via boost, you know, make it a nice boost and put a quick message in there. I don't know.
I guess I don't have to read if it's awful. Thank you. Yeah, I really would love to see it work, too. You know, wouldn't it be awesome if, because, you know, Jupyter Broadcasting has been so focused on Linux and open source that this shows you could look at it from a business product standpoint as a bit of... You know, a redheaded stepchild doesn't really fit. It's a bit of a risk. Would it be incredible, though, if if it could be the example of a sustainable value for value show that helps create essentially a longevity reserve for the podcast? What are you going to do then, Linux users? OK, all right. I'm sorry.
I shouldn't have said that. Thank you for the boost. It's nice to hear from you, Potato. BuildTheNode.com comes in with three thousand three hundred thirty three sats. Tough little ship. Little. End of the show song. Hit me right in the fields. Great show. New listener here. I heard from Adam Curry, and he mentioned your show, and I thought, oh, no, not another Bitcoin podcast. I know. I was almost just going to name it that. But I am pleasantly surprised. Twib is now my must-listen rotation. Thanks for being awesome. Oh, well, thank you for boosting it. Good to hear from you. That's awfully nice to hear.
Hey, Todd's back. Todd from Northern Virginia is here with 11,101 sats. Oh, my God. This drawer is filled with Froot Loops. Excellent show, he says. Thanks for all you do. I appreciate the insight into the financial roadmap of the new administration, which I don't hear anywhere else. Cheers. Well, cheers to you, Todd. Good to hear from you. Thanks for boosting in. Joey DED is here with 2000 sats. Coming in hot with the boom. I'm a no on the ads, but I understand if you have to. If you have to, then please, please get them over with up front. Ah, break-in ads are horrible. And TWIB is one of my top three clear winners I listen to regularly. Super signal, thank you.
Well, that feels more like a 10,000-sat request there, Joey. I'll just say, but I appreciate what you're saying. I hadn't actually even thought of where I would put them beyond just earlier in the booth segment when I was starting to think about it more. Upfront would be unusual for me, but not impossible. I don't know. I don't like the feeling of it, though. Thank you. Appreciate the boost. Good to hear from you. User 74991472. Oh, yeah. It's coming in with a boost. Let's hear it, good buddy. No message, though. Just 10,000 sats. Well, I appreciate that value. It's over 9,000! Clarkian sent 5,000 sats to our artist, and Hodler came in with 4,000... Oh, it's another 4,747.
Would you look at that? That's right, everybody. It's that time of year again. Happy birthday! Okay, I don't know it's a random one. Okay, all right. Hey, Chris, I've got a lightning question for you. I recently set up an L&D node on a Linux, Debian, Lenovo laptop, and I quickly learned that for good routing, performance channels typically need to be in the 1 to 2 million sats range. My question is, when Bitcoin pumps again and the fiat value of sats increases, do you think the recommended minimum channel size will shrink? Would it make sense to open smaller channels now and just hope that the price catches up?
That's a really good question. And I would love to say yes, that you should just open small channels and wait. However, experience has taught me this has just not been the case. You know, I've been running a Lightning node since 30,000. Well, it was 40, then it dipped down to 15, and then crawled back up to 30. So, you know, I've been running a Lightning node every day, and now I run a couple of them for two years. So I'm not like a super expert here, but I will tell you, in that two-year experience, I've not seen what you're suggesting pan out. In fact, if anything, the channel sizes just seem to be getting bigger and bigger.
You could think of it as the network is kind of getting more efficient. We're consolidating into larger, more efficient channels instead of lots and lots and lots of little channels, which means payments don't have to get broken up as much and things like that. I look at it as putting my Bitcoin to work. So the sats that folks boost into the show, one of the things I do with them is I reinvest them into liquidity channels for the nodes. Since I have a couple of nodes and we open up channels to some listeners and other podcasters and the podcast index and podcast apps.
And you earn, albeit very little because we're trying to make boosts very feasible, you earn tiny bits of routing fees. So your sats, while they're locked up in a channel and you can't initially access them, I wasn't planning on selling them anyways, I can earn some routing fees and I'm putting them to work to add more liquidity. Is it the safest way to hodl sats? No. Well, you're putting them to work. So I don't look at it as a complete loss of the sats. I hope that makes sense. And hodl, they're a great question. Thank you for sending it in. Feel free to send more in. And congrats on the node.
Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks, 2,222 sats. Veggies will be finished in six months. Ah, good. I was hoping we'd get some predictions. The veggies will be finished in six months, and then it's boomtown. I like the strategy, and I'm a fan of smaller government as an overall policy, so I think I'm okay with short-term pain for long-term gain. I essentially agree there, Ace, but do you think we're seeing them blink? Do you agree with my assessment that maybe we're seeing cracks in the level of conviction? And does that concern you? Love to know what you think there. Thanks for the boost.
Hey, Arias, Hybrid Sarcasms here with 12,000 sats. This is a tasty burger. Boy, they are doing a lot with mayo these days. Didn't stream my sats for TWIB 50 because my Albi Hub was locked. So here's a boost to make up for it. Make sure you have a restart parameter to find in your Docker Compose file. That's a good tip. Yeah, I have had that happen to me as well. Oh, oh, I think I noticed it when I was on Nostra and I couldn't zap. I'm like, what? Oh, my. Oh, it's been down for hours. Thank you, hybrid. Nice to hear from you, too. Nico, the Greek is here with 3,333 sats. That's pretty funny.
Next caller. All systems are functional. No message, just the value. Also, you know, we have the 2,000 sat cutoff for time, but I wanted to pull up one from Coach Rick. Coach Rick blew my mind just under the 2,000 sat cutoff with 1,999 sats. Happy 50th episode and belated congratulations on the show's one year anniversary. What? Oh, that's why the birth. There you go. That's right, everybody. It's that time of year again. Happy birthday. I guess it is the show's birthday. I was so heads down, you know, just following the news, cranking out the shows. Didn't even realize I've been doing the show for a year. what a wild year it has been when i started the show i wanted to keep the momentum going from the bitcoin dad because he was wrapping up and i was like well we got to keep going i think i got something i can offer here but it wasn't necessarily the ideal time to launch a show i had a lot going on a lot of events like i do this time of year too every time this year i have a lot of events going on so it was it's crazy time to launch a show but you know what like i kind of feel like you know, the show's getting into a groove now.
Honestly, it takes a while. It does take a while to kind of really to find the groove, to kind of get the community feedback cycle going, to start shaping the show like we're at now. And we're there. We're there and it feels pretty darn great. So thank you everybody who supports the show with a boost. It means a lot. One year in really, really means more than ever. And thank you everybody who streams sats as you listen. 49 of you did that on the last episode. Collectively, you stacked 86,830 sats, you sat streamers. Thank you very much. When you combine that with our boosters, and we had a bunch of them this week, we stacked a grand total for episode 51, 367,461 sats.
Music. Not too shabby at all. Thank you, everybody. I really appreciate it. Those links I have at the top of the show notes are probably the best ways to get sats if you want to start participating because those folks are on the lightning network so you can send them right over to a podcasting 2.0 app like fountain or if you want to go to an albi hub and really go all in absolutely can do that with those links too then you can send a message in and you could support episode 52 of this week in bitcoin really means a lot thank you everybody who sent in a message or streams those sats or shares the show with somebody, all of that is vital to keeping the show going.
And I appreciate it. Let's get to those updates. Music. Well, we knew this was going to happen. You may recall, I was worried that we'd see some Bitcoin mining companies capitulate to the sweet, sweet investment money of AI. And AI has a big problem. It uses a lot of energy. And Bitcoin companies, mining companies, have figured out how to do that in a sustainable, cheap way, which immediately kind of put pressure on them to use some of that infrastructure, AI data centers. And one of them, I think it's pronounced Crusoe, Crusoe Energy, which was sort of a darling of the Bitcoin mining space, is selling its operation to NYDIG to focus all on AI.
And I want to put why this is kind of a big deal into perspective for you. Because just two years ago, their CEO was out there selling the benefits, real true benefits, of Bitcoin mining capturing things like methane gas. So this is gas that would otherwise not be used, right? Being used to power Bitcoin mining. How does it work? That's correct. So what happens in the oil field is there's something called flaring. It's one of the largest emission sources from oil production. What happens is an oil company will drill an oil well, and one of the byproducts of that is natural gas. And if they don't have access to a pipeline, the best, most economic thing for them to do is just light it on fire.
And when they do that, they end up actually venting quite a bit of the methane in the atmosphere. And methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It traps 82 and a half times more heat in the atmosphere than CO2. And so it creates this massive waste with no beneficial use and everybody kind of loses in this situation. So how do you then use it to power Bitcoin mining? Sure. So Crusoe developed a technology called digital flare mitigation, where we build, operate and manage these mobile modular data centers that we deploy into the oil field and And we co-locate on site with the sites that would be flaring.
And now instead of the gas being flared, it feeds into the digital flare mitigation systems to create low-cost computing infrastructure to power digital currency mining, high-performance computing, GPU cloud computing product, and things like artificial intelligence research. You're running a pilot program using excess natural gas from Exxon in North Dakota. How's that going? We actually can't comment on the relationship with Exxon. It's it's womp womp but that is interesting to know exxon is and i've heard that before they're interested in off gas mining exxon yeah you know weird right so this sell-off includes more than 425 of their modular data centers that capture this flared gas and they're going to shift on you know llms basically is what they're doing and i think this is going to be it's a pressure The Bitcoin mining industry is extremely, extremely brutal.
Super hard industry, right? Where you can just sit back and run GPUs and get money from investors when you do AI. So, you know, which way did you think they were going to go, right? Now, how about this next one? You all remember Celsius, right? The massive Ponzi scheme that manipulated their sell token and lost a bunch of money, dumped our holdings on customers and investors. Well, they are in a spat with Chainalysis. I'm no fan of Chainalysis, but it seems that the debtors that are coming after Celsius are also now eyeing a lawsuit against Chainalysis for participating in a bogus third-party audit for Celsius.
They claim that Chainalysis verified billions in assets that did not exist, that the audit was a total lie. Per the complaint, rather than just alleging that Chainalysis' audit was inadequate, the plaintiffs claim that Chainalysis was effectively in on Celsius' scam. The complaint states, quote, Chainalysis, a supposed authority in blockchain analytics, knew the truth but willingly lent its credibility to insiders lies, misleading both the public and Celsius. Now, the truth is Chainalysis didn't conduct any kind of audit from what I could tell. Essentially, they signed off on an audit that was done by Celsius's CEO.
And they just kind of came up with a $3.3 billion figure. And it does seem potentially hard to say at this point that Chainalysis knew about this. They admitted that the announcement was misleading, saying that it did make it look like they performed the audit. But they were incentivized to let that misleading statement go out there to give their company more credibility. This is going to pull in Chainalysis staff. I mean, this is an ugly one. And it also brings in other Chainalysis attributions into doubt. Lawmakers cite chain analysis data on North Korea recently.
They brag that they're the only firm that's been able to prove that North Korea did those actions and that they, quote, turn blockchain into evidence. However, if they are wrongfully attributing audits and other things, they could be wrongfully attributing nation state actions as well. Who knows? It brings a lot of things into questions. I think chain analysis is a pretty sketchy company. And this is a banger of a story that I'll link in the show notes by therage.co. Really good work being done over there. And it's a story that I'll be following for you. Really wild stuff. Celsius story is just crazy. And I'd love to know if any of you out there got wrapped up in it and how it's going for you.
Okay, next story. How about an update on the state-level Bitcoin reserves? The Arizona House Rules Committee approved two Bitcoin reserve bills, deeming them constitutional and proper in form. Yeah, I think that's an important step, obviously. Oklahoma, though, there is a lot of action over here. Their bill, HB 1203, has been approved by the House, making it one of the few states alongside Texas, Arizona, Utah, whose legislators have passed Bitcoin legislation through at least one of the chambers. That has finally caught the attention of their local Fox affiliate, Fox 25, who did a piece on Oklahoma's Bitcoin reserve bill. Would create a strategic Bitcoin reserve in Oklahoma is making its way through the state legislature.
This would allow the state treasurer to invest Oklahoma's money into Bitcoin. Fox 25's Capitol reporter Paige Taylor spoke with the author of the bill and with state treasurer Todd Russ about the benefits and risks this could create for our state. Paige. Well, Wendy, State Representative Cody Maynard is the author of the bill. He tells me he filed it so that the state could have a positive return. State Treasurer Todd Russ says he's happy to invest in Bitcoin if the state legislature passes the bill, but that his job is to be cautious and careful. It's going to allow our state to invest up to 5% of our general revenue funds and our pensions in Bitcoin or other digital assets.
That's the goal of House Bill 1203, authored by State Representative Cody Maynard. Bitcoin is one of the best-performing assets of the last decade. It's had 49% annual returns. And I think where we're at right now is, you know, the way of the future is going to be digital assets, and our state does not need to be ignoring that. If the bill is signed into law, Oklahoma State Treasurer Todd Russ could invest funds from the State General Fund, Revenue Stabilization Fund, and Constitutional Reserve Fund in Bitcoin and digital assets with a market cap over $500 billion. He says there are different factors about this that could be seen as positives or negatives, and people who support it feel like it's a great hedge against inflation.
You know, it's done phenomenal. It's caught on. It's been a very popular product. Started calling it an investment. This is Oklahoma's state treasurer. I don't know if they mentioned that. Todd Russ. Very popular product. Started calling it an investment. but there's questions about whether it's a currency or an investment. Some states have been unsuccessful in passing similar measures due to lawmakers feeling it is too great of a risk with taxpayer dollars. Russ says his first concern is the safety and soundness of taxpayer dollars. I've never understood this argument.
I never get it. What are you going to do, hold it in cash? That's a guaranteed debasement. That's a guaranteed risk. That's a known guaranteed risk. So if you look at the performance of Bitcoin, historically, it goes up. So like, what is the risk exactly? Is the risk that in 10 months, the price that you bought it at might be, you know, the spot price might be lower than the price you bought it at in 10 months? Is that the risk? Are they holding it for six days? What's the risk? They're holding it for years. ...of a risk with taxpayer dollars.
Russ says his first concern is the safety and soundness of taxpayer dollars. For me, the state of Oklahoma decides to do this and the legislature puts it in statute. I've got to follow the law and I'd be happy to, I don't care at all to, but I'd like to start out small, minimize the risk and see how it does. The bill is currently eligible to be heard on the House floor. Reporting live at the state capitol, Paige Taylor, Fox 25 News. I mean, where we're at right now is a couple of these are actually making pretty good progress. I think probably right-leaning states are going to be more likely to move forward with this.
But, you know, it was overall pretty good coverage. They just, again, it's, you know, vague risk and things like that. But so is, you know, investing in anything, I suppose. I'm loving this using Bitcoin for methane capture, but also the benefits that we as a community need to talk more about is how Bitcoin can monetize a power station and bring electricity to a region that could never have afforded to have electricity. They could never have made a power station viable without Bitcoin. Zambia is a great example of this. A cryptocurrency company is planning to roll out mini power plants to rural villages in Africa.
It's in order to bring electricity to remote parts and to mine for Bitcoin. The company has already proven that a similar model works after installing Bitcoin generating mines to six different renewable energy plants in three different countries. Well, the project shows the potential benefits of this controversial energy hungry system that powers Bitcoin. Joe Tidy has been to the remote mine on the Zambezi River to see one project in action. The roar of the Zambezi River is deafening. But there's another sound on the riverbanks here in northwest Zambia too. The unmistakable whirring of a Bitcoin mine.
24 hours a day, this container full of powerful computers crunches through complex mathematical problems to earn bitcoins as part of the global volunteer mining network. It's very noisy, but it's a beautiful noise. Because the truth is, this noise means we're making money. It's an odd place for a high-tech crypto operation, but it makes sense as the electricity is so cheap here as it comes directly from the site's hydroelectric power plant. Zengamina Hydro has been running for 17 years, but the bitcoin mine has been a major boost since it was installed in 2023, as it makes use of excess electricity.
We really struggled to make ends meet. And every day we were wasting over 50% of the energy that we could generate, which also meant we're not earning from that. What we lacked was an institutional, a major user of power in the area. And the extra revenue, important to say, has also helped us keep the prices down for what we charge the local people, which is also very important. A few miles away from the hydro plant, Damien only got power to his barbershop a couple of years ago, but it's been transformational. But I love to do nothing for me anymore. I'll try to score that.
Bitcoin mining didn't build Zengamida Hydro Plant, but there's no doubt it's been a win, not just for the energy company and the Bitcoin miners, but also for the local town. However, the plant has received a huge amount of investment and will soon be expanding. They hope to sell any excess energy, eventually back to the grid. So Philip and team have got to hit the road and find a new place as perfect as this. As well as searching for sites with excess energy, Gridless is now hoping to start building its own mini-grid energy plants, with its Bitcoin mine as the first major tenant. I'm sure you'll have critics who will worry that the community want the energy, but you'll favor the mining.
It's a really good question, and you're right, we get to ask that a lot. The truth is that Bitcoin mining doesn't pay very high prices for electricity. Our economic interest is to sell to the higher paying customer, and that's always going to be the community. But because of Bitcoin's reputation for energy use and environmental impact, some governments and authorities remain uncomfortable with including it in electrification projects. Setups like Zengamina are a tiny part of the overall mining picture, but also a rare example of a controversial industry creating much more than just digital coins.
Joe Tidy, BBC News in Zambia. You know, I think it's fitting they end on the controversial nature of Bitcoin mining because the BBC has played a role in making that controversial, especially in places outside the States. So it's kind of notable that they're doing a rather positive article, or I guess for them it would be a piece. I don't know. I don't like calling it a piece, a video, a report, a report. That's got to be like the most positive BBC report on Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining I've ever seen. Music. It's final clip of the week time. And last week, Jerome Powell, Federal Reserve chairman, came out and told the world what the price of the dollar would be for a little while longer.
Not really much news came out because rates are staying the same. Everything's within expectation. J-Pow said it's real hard to predict where things are going. But there was a question in the Q&A that caught my attention. Well, I guess it was really J-Pow's answer. And I want to play strike CEO Jack Mahler's take on it because he noticed it as well. And I think it's kind of big news that didn't get much coverage. Maybe it's why we're seeing some of the things in the market turn around a bit. The Federal Reserve has come out and said it's ending QT. QT stands for quantitative tightening.
Tightening meaning tightening monetary policy, strengthening the dollar. They came out and said, we are putting a stop to QT starting April 1st. That's a big, big, big deal. That's a sign from the Fed that they are easing monetary policy, easing meaning they're making it easier to get money, easier to trade. Easier to get a loan, easing access to capital. That of course is better for the economy. Why were they in quantitative tightening in QT? Well, because they're trying to fight inflation. The less money, the less dollars there are in the economy, then the less you can bid up prices of eggs, right?
The more dollars there are in the economy, the higher the prices of stuff will go. So they had enacted quantitative tightening to fight inflation and they are starting the resignation of that battle. Really big deal. And on the show, we've covered that the Trump administration has been demanding cheaper dollars. They've been aggressively attacking the Fed and Jerome Powell. They say, stop QT, stop QT, stop QT, lower rates, lower rates, lower rates. And we just saw the beginning of that, which I think the tide is very slowly turning in favor of Bitcoin and global liquidity and debased.
Music. Let's check in on the state of the network before I wrap up. The show is coming to an end at block height 889,548. The price of Bitcoin to the U.S. dollar is 86,510. Sats per dollar coming in at 1,156 sats to one U.S. dollar. We're up 2.8% over the last seven days, still down 20.7% from our all-time high, which was on January 19th, 2025, 109,160. Now, let's look at, oh, look at that. Reachable Bitcoin nodes has crossed the 22,000 mark, 22,019 reachable nodes on the Bitcoin network. Well done. Let's get that up to a few more. One or two of you could just launch a node and we could see that number creep up.
This show can make a direct impact on the strength of the Bitcoin network, which is strong. Music. Links to what i talked about are at this week in bitcoin.show my goal is to create a show that doesn't get distracted by emotions around what's happening but focuses on the signal so let me know how i did with a boost and boost in with what you'd like to see maybe i missed something you'd like to see me covered on the show in the future, maybe you got a newbie question you can boost those in as well and of course i always appreciate it when you share the show with a friend.
I think that's probably the number one way podcasts grow. Now, last week, you guys did it. Once again, you got our artists to number one. In fact, I think the top three songs right now are from this show and the launch on the podcast index top charts. Well done, everybody. You're making these artists day. It's another way these people can participate in the value for value system. It's available to anybody. They just create something that people enjoy so this week i'm going a little different direction a different genre than i've ever played than i ever played in the show but i kind of like the tune different but i like it it's it'll be me by i'm going to say rose ethanol.
Music.
Welcome to Episode 51!
Economic Roulette with Trump's Policies
The Bullish Outlook Amidst Panic
Risks of a Failed White House Pivot
Bitcoin's Future Amid Economic Strategies
The Shift in Government's Stance on Bitcoin
Planning for Bitcoin's Potential Outcomes
Strategies for Passive Bitcoin Stacking
The Rise of Stablecoins and Their Impact
Bitcoin Mining vs. AI Investment Trends
State-Level Bitcoin Reserves Update
Positive Developments in Bitcoin Mining
Federal Reserve's Shift in Monetary Policy
