104: The K Trap

Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 104. My name is Chris, ChrisLAS.com, JupiterBroadcasting.com. The macro world is really talking about inflation today. And the other thing you're seeing going around a lot is the K-shaped economy. They keep kicking that one around. But I think the underlying theme is any time something happens, an energy shortage, a dispute in the Middle East, it just applies so much pressure to the existing system that the disparity we see between the haves and have nots just widens at a more exasperating pace where people can actually feel it these days. So let's start with the big news of the week. Today's headline inflation rate is the highest we've seen since 2023, up half a percentage point from last month. What stands out to you in this report? Inflation is a major problem, again, for the U.S. economy. And it's not just gas. We obviously are all feeling it as we go to the pump to fill up our cars. But it's also electricity prices. You mentioned food prices. Everything from coffee to beef to a lot of vegetables are really up in price. Some medical care costs. And don't forget those airfares have gone way up. So this is a broad problem, and it's hard for many to hide from. And the other thing that really stood out in this report is for the first time in three years, inflation is wiping out all wage gains. So you mentioned 3.8% inflation in the past year versus 3.6% wage gains. That's the big one right there. And I think that's why it's being felt so acutely. So that's the consumer inflation, wholesale inflation also up. Rick Santelli standing by the CME. The numbers, Rick. Hey, Rick. Numbers are coming in on the warm side. Our April producer price index for the month of April. headline number almost triple expectations up a whopping 1.4 percent wow you have to go back to march of 22 to find a bigger number and that number was 1.7 now if we strip out the all important food and energy yeah we're also at a triple header here you're expecting up three tens we end up with up one percent man when you strip out the stuff people use every single day it's still bad and that's the producer inflation so we are you know i mean we are seeing an accelerated rate of inflation and a lot of the blame is being put on the conflict with iran consumers saw a sharp jump in prices last month airfares drove a decent portion of that of course jet fuel costs are soaring just as the summer travel starts to pick up and it's not just the optional purchases that are getting more expensive essentials are rising too The war with Iran is impacting prices here at home, but this afternoon, President Trump said he isn't backing down. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That's probably the most honest thing he's ever said. I don't think about the consumer situation. I think about the fact that we cannot have Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. You see, here's the problem. It's not that we're in a war with Iran. The problem is that we are so backed into a corner financially that anything that happens, any bit of disruption, causes extreme pain. And, of course, a policymaker wants to be able to execute policy. And if they think there's a security threat, they want to be able to solve the security threat. And so they can't be constrained. But yet the realities of the market mean they are. Consumer inflation has reached a three-year high, jumping 3.8% annually. The main driver? Energy, with the war driving up oil prices. Americans are feeling that trickle down at the pump, where gas prices jumped more than 28% from last year. The national average for a gallon of regular is now $4.50. Ha! I wish! Come to the Pacific Northwest. Now, this is a bad situation, and it seems to be getting worse as long as the conflict goes on. Now, there's a lot of ways you could go with this, because it's hard to say at this particular point how bad it's going to get. But Luke Groman, he thinks it's going to get pretty bad. And when I mean pretty bad, it sounds like worst case scenario over there. Luke's really kind of going down the Doomerism rabbit hole. In 2015, there were, I don't know, 8.7 billion people on the planet. And, you know, 4 billion of them wouldn't be here without, give or take, without nitrogen-based fertilizers. And so, you know, half the people in the world take away nitrogen fertilizers altogether. Half the people on the planet Earth are going to starve to death within a year or two. Man, gold butt. So if we cut supplies by 30% out of the Gulf, what's the math? You know, 30%, okay, so 15% of the world's population, it's not right. 50% of them wouldn't be here times 30% of the, you know, so 30% times 50% is 15%. Yeah, I mean, it is potentially catastrophic. It is horrifying, the implications. So let's say, okay, so 15% of where we are now, 8.5 billion people, right? So it's a billion people. Let's say I'm wrong by 90%. That's 100 million people. Starting in the end, that's just, you know, keep in mind, these are also some of the 100 million people that Besant, et cetera, are counting on, you know, buying stable coins with their phones. I'm not sure why he's laughing. In fact, I think it's a bit of a tell, but we'll get to that. et cetera, are counting on buying stable coins with their phones to back the U.S. Treasury market. So people that don't have food don't buy stable coins. People that don't have food don't buy stable coins as they play them off. I think he's laughing because Luke has been – his thinking has been infected by his emotions, and he's laughing because he has such disdain for the Trump administration. and he's laughing at their silly plans to get people to buy stable coins because they're so ridiculous that he finds it funny. But I think that is why I always wrap up the show with I try to focus on the signal, not emotions, because if you start trading based on this emotional thinking, you will inevitably end up poor. You'll sell your Bitcoin like Luke did. The reason why I'm not, I mean, who knows, right? But we don't know. So I'm not freaking out yet until we know. But the reason why I say there's room for to reserve judgment is because when the Ukraine war broke out, I looked it up this morning just to make sure I was right about this. When the Ukraine war broke up, broke out, analysts estimated a 50 percent reduction in the ingredients that make up fertilizer. And there was a hit, you know, DPF, right? Diesel. What is it? What is the diesel fluid? Of course, I'm tired this morning. Guys, the sleep has been so bad recently but the diesel the diesel fluid stuff god oh no man uh that did go up you know there was there was a with there was a bit of a supply crunch but at the time they were saying 50 with a 50 reduction and now they're saying with the situation with iran and the strait a 40 reduction so this is technically less of an impact by 10 than they were saying the ukraine war would cause. But yet here we are. It had a problem. It caused prices to go up for a bit. But it didn't really have this dramatic millions of people dying like Luke said. So if you're trading based on that, I think you're going to overshoot. I hope he's wrong. I hope he's wrong. But let's talk about this actual problem that is real. And that is what they're calling this K-shape. And the reason why they call it a K-shape is picture lines on a graph. The rich, they're just going up and that the not rich the rest of us yeah you guessed it it's just going down like a k and anytime something comes up like this it just immediately makes this problem accelerate so the k is here to stay and some folks who want to argue against it will find these micro data points but the k is here to stay the k-shaped economy is here to stay this is rebecca rebecca Humpkins, she is at the London Business School, and she's a, quote, lecturer and a Bloomberg correspondent. More data reinforcing it. Now, it's not accelerating as much as it was at this time last year, but the data is still showing that our equity markets are being propped up by a very small number of consumers. Consumer spending is led by a very small, 50%, still that 10%, that figure last year still holds. And if you dig into retail sales data, we had a slight bump in March with almost completely correlated to the tax refunds. And I caution CEOs, it's like an insulin shock. Like you got a little bit of it from those tax refunds, but that's going away. If the K is here to stay, does it get more pronounced? And the reason I ask is because if wealth concentrates with a smaller group, but they get more and more of it, and then a larger group gets less and less, then that's a recipe for political unrest. It's a recipe for political unrest. I have the very annoying it depends answer on to whether or not it accelerates, and it comes down to those three Ds. If duration is long, if devastation is there and disruption happens, then the K will definitely exasperate. The three Ds she's talking about are with the war with Iran and the strait. And this whole thing is predicated, this entire analysis is predicated on, well, the K only gets better or worse depending on how the war with Iran goes. I mean she just said that. She also – she iterates that more clearly earlier in the clip, but you didn't need to listen for 10 minutes to understand that. I listened for you. And in there she says, you know, this only gets better or worse depending on how the war with Iran goes. But that's horse manure. That's horse manure, because if it isn't the war with Iran, it would be another COVID. And if it wasn't another COVID, it would be some kind of energy crisis. And if it wasn't some kind of energy crisis, it'd be something else. There's always something happening. We don't just sit around and chill. That's not the era we live in. We live in the age of disruption. We live in the age of an empire thrashing around and about. They're not just going to sit on their hands and do nothing. so this premise that everything would be great if it wasn't just for this war is silly would it be better yeah obviously duh of course of course it'd be better first of all your gas prices would be lower i know that but it'd be something else if it wasn't this and you know that you know that's true so this and all of these analysts they live within this system in this bubble this is how they're all talking that's why i'm playing this clip this is from bloomberg business week because this is how they all look at it. Well, it's really the problem is the war. Once the war's over, I mean, everything's going to snap right. Political unrest. It's a recipe for political unrest. As if like Madami got elected because of the war in Iran, right? As if Trump got elected because of the war in Iran. No, these are populist candidates because the people have been pissed for a while. Right. We have lived during 10 years now or more of a Trump political era because there is a strong contingent of populist voters who are angry about the system. And there's now a growing contingent of populist voters on the other side that are angry about the system for their own reasons. And it really all comes down to the fact that the fiat currency has been getting debased for 40 years, that they have lived in a system that has been stealing their time and their energy for so long that it has become absolutely hyper-financialized to rob them and tax them around every single corner that, of course, they're angry. They don't even realize that's the problem. And they're just pissed and they're done and they can't afford to eat. They can't afford to live. And they want the problem solved. And they're voting for the candidates now that they think will solve those problems. And none of that has anything to do with the straight or Iran or any of it. It only makes it worse now. I have the very annoying it depends answer on to whether or not it accelerates. And it comes down to those three D's. If duration is long, if devastation is there and disruption happens. No, it doesn't. it only gets accelerated. So the conclusion is the K-shaped economy is only going to become a capital K. It's only becoming bigger. It's only going to get worse. And if you think wrapping up the war with Iran and getting the straight flowing again is going to fix everything lickety split, I got bad news for you. You better stack more Bitcoin. Then the K will definitely exasperate because that's what's going to happen. You know, energy is a small percentage daily spend for an consumer but energy as an input is a large percent of that monthly wallet and wages are relatively stagnant in the u.s especially at the lower part of that k so we are getting very distracted by headlines not only are wages stagnant at the lower end of the k as she says but we also just heard in the previous clip that inflation is outstripping wage gains so even people that have gotten wage gains they're being outstripped by inflation because while the headline number is 3.8 percent. When you dig into it, certain areas are more like 20, 20 plus percent inflation. And a lot of those areas are the things you spend on on the regular. If devastation is there and disruption happens, then the K will definitely exasperate because that's what's going to happen. You know, energy is a small percentage daily spend for an American consumer, but energy as an input is a large percent of that monthly wallet. And wages are relatively stagnant in the U.S., especially at the lower part of that K. So we are getting very distracted by headlines that say, hey, the U.S. GDP is growing, equity markets at an all-time high. Those headlines are all true, but it disguises a very nuanced storyline that matters to the majority of companies in the U.S. who have to serve both parts of the king. All right, let's shift to policy mode. Don't worry, it's just the policy stuff that's going to impact you not just doing random policy number one is your buddy the man that's up for the worst job in the world has cleared one of the two echelons he must clear to become the new fed chair hey frank well the senate has now confirmed kevin works to be a member of the board of federal reserves so that's how this works so first he has to become a member of the board if he ain't one already, which he won't. And then once he's a member of the board, there's a second round of voting to make him a governor. This is, of course, the first step in getting him to the chair position. They're actually voting right now, taking a second vote to begin to advance his nominee to be Fed chair. That final vote is expected to happen either late in the afternoon tomorrow on Wednesday or potentially on Thursday morning. We are seeing all Republicans continue to back Warsh for support. But so far, the only Democrat to actually vote for Walsh this last time was Senator John Fetterman. And of course, there have been some concerns raised about his record, Fed independence. But that does not seem to be stopping him at all. And it does look like he is well on his way to be confirmed as Fed chair before the May 15th deadline. You know, this does have a lot of Bitcoiners excited because it's a Fed chair who has an investment in crypto companies and a lightning company in particular and holds Bitcoin. That is pretty remarkable. And of course, Kevin Warsh, several years ago, went on the record saying that Bitcoin is the new gold for anybody under 40. So we should see something pretty soon, perhaps maybe as I'm recording this. So by the time you're hearing this, you may have cleared that second echelon and officially get the vote for governor. Now, the Senate Banking Committee is also scheduled to get the Clarity Act actually out of committee. The committee also set to vote on the Clarity Act tomorrow after releasing the latest draft of the bill advancing the crypto market structure measure following all those months of negotiations. This 300 plus page bill aims to integrate the crypto industry into the financial system. And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong will be joining me shortly to break down what he called compromises made and the bill's potential impact, Mr. Chairman. And as you know, the major banks still are worried that they're going to be on the losing end of the stable coin reward situation. Man, not only are they worried, they have put on a respectable, full-on fight. They have enlisted Elizabeth Warren. They have brought in major bankers and labor unions to try to stop clarity at the last minute. This right now with more on that. Emily, what's the story? Hey, Becky. Well, look, you know, the crypto industry, they're only days away from seeing their top legislative priority get its first vote coming in a Senate panel. But that bill is facing some heavy opposition. We got a first look at the concerns that are raised by the heads of major labor unions. This is the AFL, SEIU, AFT, NEA, others. they've warned senators that backing this Rules of the Road bill for digital assets could legitimize crypto and, as a result, add volatility to workers' retirements savings and pensions account. In a letter, these labor groups told senators that the legislation would invite cryptocurrency industry to take outsized risks, knowing that if those risky bets do not pay off, it is working people and retirees, not crypto billionaires, who will pay the price. It is always rich to hear the unions make this case when they have been busted time and over. For also risky plays that came up and blew up in their faces and sometimes needed bailing out. I mean, everybody chases money. And the people that are running this crypto stuff now, they're just bankers. It's not like they're cypherpunks in their hoodies in some sort of decentralized DAO running these cryptocurrencies that these think they're going to get legitimized by this process. Don't kid yourself. Now, the labor group's opposition could make it more difficult for some Democrats to support the bill. Right now, it's not actually clear if any Democrats on the banking committee are going to be voting for the bill when Thursday comes around. Several lawmakers told me they need to see more work on language around ethics. Well, yeah, so here's what's happened now is they have submitted 100, I guess you'd call them amendments that need to be reviewed before this thing can get out of committee. 40 of them alone from Elizabeth Warren. including random ass things about Jeffrey Epstein's banking balances and all kinds of stuff, including stuff that seems to try to take away protections for developers and how users use that software, which is a major one, which I'm very disappointed to see. It's a really kind of a last minute alley-oop to try to stop this thing. But it doesn't seem to be working. The people involved seem to be very confident it's going to continue to pass. David Sachs was just on X earlier this morning, taking a victory lap before it's even been voted on, And Brian Armstrong is down in D.C. right now taking selfies, congratulating himself and the team for the hard work. And he stopped by Fox News to follow up with Maria. Well, there's been a compromise. And so, you know, it's a true compromise because both sides left a little bit unhappy. And so on this stablecoin rewards issue in particular, we met the asks of the bank lobby and the Senate. And they said they don't want to have any rewards paid on idle balances. And so we came up with this compromise or concession that rewards could be paid as long as there was some sort of material activity on the account, like a payment or a trade that had taken place. And I've got to give a lot of credit to Senators also Brooks and Tillis and their staff who worked tirelessly on this to bring both sides together and reach this compromise. I think it's in the best place that we've seen so far. And the other issues that I brought up in January have also been resolved. And so at this point, we're ready to support a markup later this week. So you're expecting the markup Thursday? That's correct. I don really know the details fully but I wouldn be too surprised if my prediction kind of plays out And that is if you join some sort of Coinbase Plus membership program and they charging your Coinbase account per month then they have all the justification they need to let you earn a yield It's probably something like that. Right. Or if you do a certain amount of trades, you get to earn a yield. You know, I wouldn't be surprised. I'd like to know your thoughts on this. So please do boost in and let me know what you think. I just can't help but feel like maybe Facebook, I mean, I'm sorry, Coinbase, but this gives you my line of thinking. A little Freudian slip there. I'm not sure if Coinbase is a Facebook or if they're a MySpace. And I'd like your opinion. Because I, you know, I've been around forever. Before Coinbase was a company, I remember when Coinbase launched. And I was actually pretty happy to see it because as somebody who got burned significantly by Mt. Gox, this was a significant improvement and a real good sign. However, I find their service to be loaded with crap, especially now that they're getting into prediction markets. I installed and opened up the Coinbase app for the first time in a very long time this week. Whoa, what a bunch of junk. And then, because I was looking into some old account stuff, I needed to engage with technical support. Well, I called two different numbers, and I went through three different AI voice kind of support things, all of which just told me to call this other number. Eventually, I got to a human who was very sick. So she had to take long pauses because she needed to cough. And I know that because she was also coughing while it wasn't muted, but she was just working through it and hoarse. She had a very thick Indian accent, very hard to understand. And it sounded like she was on a speakerphone. And then after 25 minutes of communicating with her very slowly, I was told that I just need to go somewhere else in the app, go through a different tree, and then ask a different department to call me. Then that department called me. I was on the phone again for another 15 minutes. And then all they could do was elevate it to a specialist internal team that should probably email me at some point. Well, this was, I don't know, Monday. And I haven't heard from them. As a company, the product facing the users kind of sucks. The backend stuff seems like junk because it crashes all the time. And then when you interact with it in like a long-term customer way, it's also a bad experience. So it'd be really ironic if Coinbase went through all of this work to try to legitimize this industry so that way they could milk the crypto industry. And then they end up just going away because other institutions like SoFi and probably BlackRock and E-Trade and others are going to offer a lot of the high-end better stuff. and then for Bitcoin specific customers, you've got things like Strike and River and Bitcoin Well and others that are a much better product and better fees. So I find Coinbase to be a, I mean, they could lock it in, right? They could kind of become like the Microsoft in a way and kind of find their space and really lock it in. And they are really, they are very popular. And they, you know, they hold a ton of Bitcoin on the behalf of these ETFs. So it wouldn't be anything that happens overnight. but I just I don't find them to be competitive it's more like momentum it seems to me so I'd like to know your thoughts on that boost into the show and tell me what you think about Coinbase now let's stick with clarity for just one more clip because this I think is probably going to tell you more than anybody else has said about clarity and why it matters for Bitcoiners this is Adam from the Swan YouTube channel from Swan Bitcoin and he has a video that I'll have linked in the show notes. It's much longer. But this section, I think, applies particularly to our audience where Adam kind of breaks down why clarity will matter for Bitcoiners, likely in the long run, probably. So buried in this draft, there is also a provision that may end up being the single most consequential sentence in the entire bill. This is where things start to get fun. A network token is not an ancillary asset or a security if on january 1st 2026 it was the principal asset of an exchange traded product listed on a national securities exchange let that cook for a second in your noodle what a little loophole so your salooners your your your ethereums anything anything that got an etf before january 1st 2026 is considered a commodity now it makes you wonder because remember the solana etf came together so quick and then boom it was just like the bitcoin etf took like years and then there was months of speculation and then and then the the ethereum etf took months after the bitcoin etf and there was weeks of speculation and then the solana one was like okay they're gonna do a salon etf Oh, the salon ETF launched. Okay, another one launched. It was weird. It was weird. Anyways, so I just think that's interesting and not the focus of this clip, but something I wanted you to be aware of. On January 1st, 2026, it was the principal asset of an exchange traded product listed on a national securities exchange. This is very interesting. So you might be asking Adam, what does that mean translated into English? Let me tell you. If you got your spot ETF approved before the cutoff date here of January 1st of this year, that means you graduated, you got out of the regulatory bucket entirely. It means that you are now a commodity-like base asset under the cleanest legal regime America has ever offered, a digital asset. Bitcoin is in that bucket because, hey, obviously there are coin ETFs out there. The Ethereum ETF made it under the wire, which Ethereum maximalists will celebrate, and I will not begrudge them because everyone deserves a good day. But the strategic effect for Bitcoin is enormous because every other coin, the L1s, the L2s, every meme coin with a unicorn logo, you know, the ones with a crypto Twitter account by someone named Kobe, well, they're now staring at a multi-decade obstacle course of classification reviews, disclosure regimes intermediary licensing and don't forget about the endless control tests just to reach the regulatory altitude that bitcoin now already cruises at so why would this i want to stop here just for a second because i think what adam is touching on is an interesting quagmire that new crypto projects are going to face if they want regulatory clarity as it's going to be defined by the clarity act they're going to have to go through a hell of a process now And you have to imagine that is going to basically whittle it down to the ones that are have regulatory protection and institutional backing and then the DeFi coins. Of course, we're taking for this part, we're taking Bitcoin out of this conversation, just talking about all these things they're going to use for tokenization and all that kind of stuff. It's going to be a real segregation in their market. Reach the regulatory altitude that Bitcoin now already cruises. So why would this be bullish for Bitcoin, at least in terms of number go up? Because the allocators out there, capital allocators, they hate ambiguity. Pension funds hate ambiguity. So do insurance company CIOs. They hate ambiguity so much, they would rather leave returns on the table for the rest of their careers rather than touch an asset that their compliance team cannot describe in a single sentence. But now Bitcoin can be described in a single sentence because, you know, we can now say that it is the principal asset of a regulated ETF that the federal government has explicitly carved out of the speculative bucket. That sentence could unlock more institutional capital than any marketing campaign could ever generate. The downstream effect is that Bitcoin becomes the default base asset for everything that touches a fiduciary. RIAs get a green light to buy Bitcoin. Pension boards get an answer for the agenda item that has been getting deferred since 2021. The corporate treasury teams out there, they get a hedging instrument if they want one that survived the regulatory gauntlet. The banks could get an asset that they can custody without filing six different memos, especially as we could potentially get an updated Basel framework by the end of this year. And every other crypto project is just starting a years-long game of legal twister, hoping that when the music stops, their foot is on a square-colored commodity and not on a square-colored unregistered securities offering. Bitcoin is officially already off the mat, drinking water and watching the game. Well, Strategy made news last week when, during a earnings call, Michael Saylor announced that they would consider selling Bitcoin in the future. So let's take a look at this because we've had some follow up time. They've gone around. They've done a press tour. When I say they, I mean Michael and the CEO of Strategy Fundly. They've gone around. They've answered questions about this. And I've gotten some of the choice audio to try to put it all into perspective to figure out what's going on. How did we get here? What is really the deal? They manage holdings to maximize the value of its Bitcoin per share. The stock is up. It's up 4% today and on pace for its fifth positive week in a row, although it's about 60% below its 52-week high from July of last year. Let's bring in an exclusive interview of Fong Li. He is the CEO of Strategy. Fong, it's great to have you back. You're welcome. Thanks for having me again. Describe, in your words, this change in strategy from never selling Bitcoin to managing the Bitcoin. What is it? Price per share? Bitcoin per share. Yeah. OK, thank you. What's what is the philosophy behind this change? The biggest change that's happened to the company. And I would argue to Bitcoin and perhaps the financial markets in the last year has been the advent of digital credit, which is stretch. We've raised eight and a half billion dollars in 10 months. And with that, we look at optionality and look at our strategy and we say, now let's look at the Bitcoin and see if it can provide us value from time to time to sell it. and ultimately i believe in math over ideology and at the point where selling bitcoin versus selling equity to pay a dividend is better for our bitcoin per share and for our common shareholders we'll do it so strategy i'm sorry stretch is a perpetual preferred stock within all right i'll stop here i don't need to hear stretch explained five times i just don't really care a sailor though was the never sell your bitcoin guy like that was his brand so how do we get here but if i was being more precise, I'd say never be a net seller of Bitcoin. It just wouldn't have been so viral or so catchy to say never be a net seller of Bitcoin. Wait, wait, now you're saying, I felt this way. Is he saying, it sounds like he's implying, I felt this way all the time. I just didn't want to nuance it. I wanted something viral. I think that in these periods, even if we were to sell one Bitcoin, we'd be buying 10 to 20 more Bitcoin. So you're really talking about a situation where we buy 10 Bitcoin, sell one Bitcoin, buy nine net Bitcoin and continue to accrete Bitcoin. It should be a non-issue after people understand it. But right now, it's a colorful area of commentary. Is it possible for you to comment, how do you sell one Bitcoin and buy 10? Yeah. So the number one Bitcoin accretion engine is Stretch. We sold $3.2 billion of STRC in april so we bought 3.2 billion dollars of bitcoin the dividend is about 80 to 90 million so in the month when we're raising 3 billion where we need to come up with uh 80 or 90 million dollars to pay the dividend so you would be in essence you would be buying 30 bitcoin selling one bitcoin right are it didn't really i mean god this guy for for somebody who owns so much bitcoin he really is such a fiat head too at the same time but i what i do think is good here is he said in another interview that you know kind of inoculates the market you know if we never can sell our bitcoin then it essentially has no price but also it sort of tames some of the ponzi scheme claims but one has to wonder like why borrow the money to buy the bitcoin just to sell the bitcoin to pay the interest dividend like it seems it seems a little loopy it seems a little loopy and then of course the other concern would be well if they start selling isn't that going to crash the price because it's the only thing holding the price up in terms of leading up to the earnings call and then knowing that i think anyone that's been observing the stock that selling bitcoin is something that probably could have happened would have happened eventually but announcing it were you surprised how well one bitcoin's held up and two the the common stocks held up i didn't expect Bitcoin to, you know, the price of Bitcoin to change at all on that announcement. You know, the truth is, if we were to fund all of our dividends exclusively by selling Bitcoin over the next year, we would buy 21 Bitcoin for every one Bitcoin we sold. And so it's no different than buying 20 Bitcoin. Well, it's a little different. And selling no Bitcoin. Well, no, I'd say it's a little bit different. And 21 Bitcoin and selling one Bitcoin. So it's kind of a big nothing burger from an economic point of view. And then from a market point of view, the Bitcoin market has somewhere between $20 and $50 billion of liquidity a day. And if we were to fund all of our dividends with Bitcoin, you would be talking about $3 million. It would be divide three into 50,000, right? If you can do the math in your head of what is three 50,000th of the market, it's not measurable. It's immeasurable. So it's really inconsequential. The whole reason we're confident about Bitcoin is because it's a global market. We have announced we're going to buy 42 billion of Bitcoin. The market goes nowhere. we have literally bought 200 million an hour the market does not the price does not move up we have stopped buying we have bought 200 million an hour for four hours and turn it off and the price trades up you know and and so the truth is the market has its own dynamic and we are a part of it but we're definitely not driving the price it's really more driven by macroeconomics i think so i think that's fair yeah i actually do think that is fair and you know if they sell some bitcoin so be it i guess it is still it is a change and to try to play it off as it's not as one thing but i have a suspicion we're going to talk more about that in the boost and i still want to hear what you think about this change from sailor but lynn alden was making the rounds and she thinks the bottom for bitcoin is in or at least as lynn puts it it's her base case that we're probably near the bottom for bitcoin right now now this money's already out so you get seller exhaustion sorry uh the clip starts with fast money already being out take a listen to the clip tell me what you think here she's kind of talking about some dynamics that might suggest that for the most part we've probably seen the low of bitcoin now whether it's already all like entirely out yet still is an open question like it's like my base case at the bottom is in but it might not be but at least a lot of the fast capital is already out. We've seen coins rotate to more strongly held hands. I think that's a really important factor in building the next base. And then two, changes in liquidity. So if you don't have energy shocks that are causing liquidity shortages and potentially forcing entities to degrose positions from a trading perspective, then that starts alleviating Bitcoin. If you see governments do energy stimmy checks, for example, and just kind of like money supply starts accelerating in various capacities, that can find its way into scarcer assets. That's what the gold enthusiasts are looking for. That's what the Bitcoin enthusiasts are for. That's why some people are willing to hold really top tier stocks, even at kind of inflated valuations, because they say, well, I'm not going to bet against the money printer. So I want to own the scarce things, even if occasionally they're richly priced. And the good news about Bitcoin is that it's not really richly priced at the moment. The lever you have pulled breaks. He's not in service. Please make a note of it. So what do you think? Are we at the bottom? This is a rare circumstance where my gut deviates with Lynn here. I think we could slide through the summer, possibly, into the fall. And I think it really will come down to the Fed stuff and the Iran stuff. If the new Fed chair lowers rates, I think it's off to the races. But with inflation pressures and the wanting to prove the Fed's still independent, we could see them punt. Also, we could still have J-PAL on the board. He could be voting against it. He could be dissenting. There could be all these things. Those dynamics are going to play into Bitcoin and also how long the situation continues to put pressure on the economy with Iran. But if those clear up, well, I guess I could see it turning around. It would be unusual to have a hot summer, but I'd take it. I'd take a hot Bitcoin summer. So boost in and let me know if you think we're going to have a hot Bitcoin summer or is it going to be a Bitcoin fall? You can support the show by doing what you do. if you want to buy sats on river one of the best ways to stack sats in the u.s use my link in the show notes if you're in canada or if you're in the usa then the bitcoin well is an amazing automatic self-custody bitcoin platform they don't host a wallet it's all yours if you want to spend your sats the bitcoin company lets you go from sats to gift card over lightning in like i would say realistically like 20 seconds it's it's amazing and you can just sign in with your lightning credentials you don't have to create a special account that's super powerful it's it works on mobile, works on the desktop. I love the Bitcoin company. Now, FoldCard, with their new credit card and all of that, you want to earn sats as you pay your bills, you buy your day-to-day stuff, whatnot, Fold, go check out Fold in the show notes. If you want to get access to your Bitcoin liquidity without actually selling your Bitcoin, check out Salt Lending. Great rates, great minimums, and they have a liquidation protection system that I think is pretty good. So you can support the show just by doing what you do by using the links in the show notes. But it is time for some boosts. And thank you, everybody who supports the show by sending in a boost using a podcasting 2.0 app. And now it is time for the boost. And our baller booster this week is VCP with 100,000 sats. You the best around VCP writes Chris twib is my only podcast every week come to a podcast episode on my show farmers ranchers geneticists seed salesmen they will love your insights and their pump is primed for bitcoin okay wow vcp that's that is such a generous offer all right i here i would like to thursdays and Fridays are probably going to be my best days by my holdup right now, but this should be fixed soon because I've torn down my home recording setup. So that way, all the stuff I had to move. So that way I could have baby chickens in the RV got put where my home recording setup is, right? So I'd like move in an RV. You just move crap around constantly. And I have eight baby chickens living in my 38 foot class A RV. And so their coop is almost done. Should be done this weekend or early next week, and then I'm going to get them out and I'll get my stuff set up. And then Thursday or Friday when I'm at home, yeah, I'd be down. Let's talk more. Thank you for that very generous boost, too. I really – you made the episode this week. I think you saved the episode this week. And I wanted to stop for a second. It just takes one person. I think about the tens of thousands of people that will get to listen to this, or even if it's just 100 people, right? But it just takes one person to make it an episode that crosses the threshold so that way it's valuable for my time as well. So thank you very much. Appreciate that, VCP, for being that one person. Now, still in the baller category this week, it's our buddy, producer Jeff, who's coming in with 22,222 sats. Things are looking up for all the duck. 11,111. Remember those for our artist he sent a boost to the track this week. He says, I hope you clip that just closed the effing door. I love that clip. As for selling Bitcoin, if it's a store of value, that value must be transferred to be worth something else. selling it for usd for its utility makes the most sense for an american and its computer we we can hold and save forever but what's the point if we never use that stored value yeah well i think there is a bit of proving it to the market i don't necessarily totally agree with the sentiment because i don't want to sell i probably will i've actually come to the realization i may have to sell some this year just to cover expenses which i really never want to do just simply because the line of credit products are not there yet but i think in another year the line of credit products are so good they're so good right now you know miners and and and people at large stacks are taking advantage of them but if you know if i wasn't in washington i don't know if it's available in california either pj but you know you open up the strike app you transfer your bitcoin over lightning and then you tap a button in there and you get a line of credit and they only charge you for what you use and there's other companies out there that are are working around this, but strike is the one that offers like the most institutional rails where you actually get cash. You can put in a checking account. A lot of the other systems are like stable coins or, or whatnot. The line of credit thing is extremely, extremely useful, but you're right. There has to be somebody that's willing. Well, and that's what you see on the exchanges, right? I mean, that's what sets the price. People are buying and selling it, but it'd be ideal that if it wasn't just on an exchange exchange traded asset. And so, you know, over the years I've managed to use that as a justification to sell more Bitcoin than I will ever huddle for the rest of my life. So I probably will end up selling a bit this year, too. Thank you, PJ. Nice to hear from you. Bobby Pins here with 21,000 sats. I saw some people mention that Bitcoin, that Bitcoin we can have with Bitcoin, we can have a Star Trek future instead of a Star Wars future. As the biggest Star Trek fan I know of, what are some episodes, series or movies I should watch to understand what Star Trek post scarcity utopia? And do you think this is a good analogy for Bitcoin? Great question. So there's a couple of ways to look at this. You could say that Star Trek is a socialist future, but I like to look at Star Trek as an optimistic future. And so within Starfleet and the Federation of Planets, they don't necessarily use currency to exchange goods. However, outside of that, there is absolutely currency. I mean, look at the Ferengi. The Ferengi use something called latinum. And a lot of other species, including humans, also use latinum when they need to trade. So there's latinum. Now, the Star Trek writers in the 80s and the 90s, you know, they didn't conceive of a digital currency that could be galactically peer to peer. You know what I mean? They didn't think of Bitcoin. So they wanted a gold equivalent. They came up with Latinum. There is a book on the economics of Star Trek, but the reality is they never really fully pin it down. In Star Trek 4, Kirk says they don't have money in the future. and in First Contact, Picard says something similar and there's references throughout the episodes. But then, of course, there's also episodes where they're clearly spending money and doing trade. And they also, in the original series, sometimes refer to the credit system. So Star Trek is actually not particularly consistent, but the general economic theory I would attribute to Star Trek would be energy abundance with some kind of scarce thing that people can trade for the species that need that. And people don't work for money because you can just replicate anything. They work for fulfillment. That's how I would describe sort of the Star Trek economy to the best I could, you know, having watched every single show that's ever been aired multiple times except for the new Trek. I've watched it, but I haven't watched it multiple times. Hope that was satisfactory enough, Bobby Pinn. Thanks for the question. Sorry to everybody else. Chip Seeker is here with 3,000 sats. I like you. You're a hot ticket. Thank you. He sent those 3,000 sats to our song artist. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that. paranoid coders here with 4 000 sats i don't understand what the heck is going on here still boosting from pocket cast also wanted to mention what how is that possible it says fountain what are you talking about also wanted to mention that i've been digging into the spark sdk by building my own wallet for fun and i realized the lightning invoices created by the spark sdk can optionally embed a spark invoice into a qr code as well this allows wallets like the wallet to Satoshi to use only the Spark network bypassing the lightning swap without the user ever knowing, which I thought was pretty useful and a way to seamlessly promote adoption of this technology. Yeah, that is kind of neat. And good for you getting into the Breeze. Oh, the Spark SDK. The Spark SDK is interesting. So is the Breeze SDK, if you want just pure lightning. Thank you for that boost. Appreciate it. And great update. OB's here with 16,000 cents. he was loving the close the effing door clip as well i know it is so good it's so practical too like just close the door why are we letting them in here just close the door thanks opie gene beans here with a row of ducks keep up the good work well thank you gene nice to hear from you thanks for the check-in i always appreciate that thanks for the value hello there's here with row of ducks as well no message just value you're in their child what you're you're oh your inner third child comes in with 12,533 sats fun will now come okay this is the way it's been a while since one's got me like that a journey to get enough sats on here hey well done river for the win as well as the bitcoin atms that charge nine dollars for the conversion uh one two three three I hope you can get the Monty Python holy, oh, holy grenade clip for this number. Sorry, man. I just, I saw this just now. That's what happens when I'm running late. I'm running two hours behind this week. So I did not read these ahead of time. Two hours, you guys, two hours. Sorry about that. He says, could we maybe use a microgram price as the current system? Would be even crazier for the Bitcoin number. The way people can see the inflated US, that way people can see the inflated United States dollar has become and the real power of the sat. You know what I do is I do sats per dollar. That's my number. And right now we're at 1,256 sats to $1. And now that, you know, comes up and down for a little while. We were below 1,000. But to watch that over a five-year period is remarkable. And that really showed my wife. My wife had the insight like a year or two ago to put that widget on her phone. She doesn't watch the Bitcoin price exactly. she watches the sats per dollar and she noticed just how over time it was less sats less sats for a dollar it's it's i think a powerful one thank you for the boost appreciate you third child ace akerman's here with the road x sailor's change of heart makes sense but it's annoying maybe the excessive strike has changed his perspective or strategy and the fed now get it in there. Yeah, I think so. He's also really in on the DeFi stuff that's being built around his products. So he has a much, much, much softer tone now about crypto. There is no longer no second best coming out of that guy's mouth, but people didn't really notice that either. It is what it is. You know, he's in a finance. He's a financialization guy. That's what he likes. I'm a Bitcoin guy. There's a difference there. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate you. chuck run amok is here with a space balls boost one two three four five sats so the combination is one two three four five yes that's amazing i've got the same combination on my luggage uh he says news versus tech as long as i as long as a long time jb fan my interest in bitcoin is likely your fault plan b last jb has always been about the tech all this news politics is relevant and you have a great take on it but i enjoy the bitcoin tech rabbit hole a lot one vote for a little more tech talk. I know tutorial probably isn't top twib. What makes an address of quantum proof? Latest mining tech, funny gentry trading bots. Be fair, news is important, but take 20% more tech. See, the issue there is I don't make the news, right? And I don't make the audio clips. So I do bias towards stories that have audio I can play because this is an audio medium. And in fact, the longest segment without a clip is the boost. If you think about it, This is the longest the show goes without audio playing. So that is a particular production challenge. That doesn't mean I can't do it. But again, the further I stray from the format, the less I'm actually delivering on the expectations of what people want. And I may not be the best person to give you agentic trading bot advice. Right. I've tried it very little. My focus is is more on just buying and stacking Bitcoin, not trading it. As far as what makes it quantum proof. Right. Well, actually, we're going to we're we're going to get into that today, but I cut it. I may play it. I may play it for you. I just thought it was a very, very long clip. But it is interesting, so maybe I'll change my mind. It kind of depends on also what's breaking, right? Because if there's something developing, and this is where you have to be willing to stick with me for a while. And I think this is maybe something that I kind of get screwed on a lot, is people have so little faith in podcasts and podcasters, and people have limited time and attention, and they don't maybe know why something should be interesting when they first start hearing about it. So they are biased against it. But, you know, if people stick with me for a while, Chuck, if they listen to a couple of months of episodes, you start to see a tapestry that gets connected. And I think this is even more evident if you go back and say you listen to the last 10 episodes to today. There is a tapestry that develops that we're continuing to talk about and revisit, building kind of a what happened during this time catalog, a time capsule of the events that will inevitably lead to wherever Bitcoin gets. But we're still telling that story. But there are, just like any long arc, there are periods of time where we talk about inflation a lot or the Clarity Act. But in a few months, we won't be talking about the Clarity Act. Well, a little side, the Clarity Act stuff's going to be going on forever. It's going to go on for months. And then Even once it passes, it's going to be in rulemaking for years, especially if the Democrats win the midterms. They're just going to slow it down in rulemaking like they do other things that pass. Like that's normal. That's part of the process. So we'll eventually stop talking about as it just goes into the background and we'll focus on more things. But as you listen back, it builds a connective tissue of history for Bitcoin. And so I can take deviations into, you know, how to set up a node or, you know, agentic trading. but when you're listening in the back catalog, those are going to be strange odd B-plots, like when Strange New Worlds does an episode where they sing or they're puppets. Okay, it's a one-off, but when you're listening back, it didn't serve the story. It didn't serve the plot. It didn't move things forward. So that's just something else to consider. But thank you for the value, and I always like Spaceballs Boost. Appreciate that. User 3000 is here with the Roadux. Thanks for the signal. One of my favorite things about JB Shows that I can listen to them with my kids in the car. Would it be possible to avoid explicit songs or bleep clips with expletives? Thanks for all you do in Bitcoin. I've been listening for five plus years. Sorry about the song. Yeah, I will say it's a rare thing for swearing, but I'll try to disclose it. I don't know if I'll beep it because I don't want to beep somebody else's art, right? I mean, it's a real privilege that they even let me play it to begin with. I mean, that's never been a thing in podcasting before until we had Value for Value Music. It's huge. So I'm not going to bleep it, but I will try to warn you if I know about it. I may not have caught it. I do listen to the songs, but I don't. I'm bad with lyrics. So I do apologize if that happens. I try to keep it to a minimum as a dad myself. Thanks for the boost. EKN 394 is here with 8,000 sats. Oh, my God. This drawer is filled with fruit loops. That Star Trek quote is from the original series episode Spacey. Spock is. That's from. Oh, of course. superior ability breeds superior ambition of course he's talking about con and the genetic engineering which was illegal which is what led to the wars and then they had to escape and then they got found by the enterprise it all makes sense now thanks you can appreciate thank you for setting me straight kiwi bitcoins back with 4567 sats where do you find the number of nodes on the network there was a great site called bitcoin nodes which used to have lots of network info like this can you explain the difference between a listening node and a non-listening node if the node total if the node total includes non-listening nodes it's much higher so i wanted to find out the difference okay so there's several questions in here okay so where do i get the node information you can get it from your mempool instance you can get it from clark moody's dashboard there's multiple different dashboards to get them from. There will sometimes be slight differences in the numbers, so I usually default to clerks. Now, okay, so the other thing is, God, there has been an obnoxious amount of a monetary node versus a non-monetary node, and a participating node versus a non-participating node, and a listening node versus a non-listening node. We're really getting into the ant effing here with this. I'm too old for this stuff. Really, just, you know, the difference is really, Is your node reachable? Can it respond to other nodes versus is your node just responding to you? Right. Think of it that way. The difference like it's monetary node versus this is no. This is not a thing. These are made up distinctions. This monetary node versus a non-monetary node. Your big nodes versus your small nodes. Every node matters. So don't listen to people that say your node doesn't matter. It's just not how it works. But I do appreciate that question. And thank you for the boost. Nice to hear from you, KiwiBitcoin guy. VK Varello, right? That's not how you say it at all. comes in with 2,026 sats. You're so boost. And he's sending that value to our artists. This is a fun song. Thank you very much. Nakamoto 6102 is here with 4,000 sats. This is the way. Thank you for the value. Well, thank you for the boost. Appreciate it. And Sebastian CM is here with 6,000 sats. Fun will now commence. Long-time listener. First-time booster. Oh, well, I probably got your name wrong, Sebastian, so I'm sorry. Hopefully this gets through. The MicroStrategy Sailor derivation, deviation from the Never Sell strategy. Oh, it's deviation from his never sell strategy. Whether to service the debt or facilitate future strategic purchases doesn't strike me as a rash decision in the slightest, especially given the overheated state of markets. Besson's laughable, transitory, temporary aberrations characterization of the Iran war and the impact completely ignores the lagging supply chain shocks and just points to inevitable and then he gets cut off. But I want to talk more about this. So I like where you're going. I do think we need to discuss what are things looking like six months after this thing wraps up and what kind of impact do we see? And I think the jury is still out because it's not over yet. But that could be an interesting area to explore. And I think Bitcoin will be an early signal on that. It goes back to my potential concern about kind of a weaker summer. Because I think maybe Bitcoin will be digesting some of that news. I'd like to know what you think about that. Thank you for taking the time to boost, get it all set up. It means a lot. Thank you very much for doing that. Boost! Good to hear from you. I hope to hear from you again. And thank you for listening, too. Hodler's here with 2,100 four sats. Hearing Sailor talking about selling is a bit like hearing Peter Schiff wanting to buy Bitcoin. I guess there's anything possible in this hilarious timeline that we live in. Great show as always. yeah it does feel although didn't didn't uh old shiffy start accepting bitcoin during one of the last pumps to build his uh bitcoin reserve and kind of stop talking about it it's such a dork oh all right thank you everybody for boosting and everybody who boosted in below the 2000 sat cutoff too appreciate that and of course thank you to you sat streamers we had 33 of you stream sats as you listened, and I'm impressed by this. You stacked 21,000 sats, 21,836. 1.21 gigawatts! That's pretty neat. When you combine that with all our boosters, and like I said, I think, you know, we really had the episode made this week by VCP, who was our baller booster and really helped us out because that brought our total, when you combine the streamers and the boosters, up to 290,024 sats. Thank you. The show keeps on coming. You can boost with Fountain FM or any of the new podcast apps, the new podcast apps that support boosting. Get Albie Hub, and you can even boost from the Podcast Index website. You can keep your dang podcast app. It's a great way to participate. Use the Lightning Network. Send a message to the show and keep it going. All right, let's talk more, just for a moment, about this annoying K-shaped economy. And I don't mean to obsess on this, but this is the thing. This is the big thing because it all ties back to the debasement trade money printing all of it And the way that Main Street is starting to understand it and conceptualize it is this K economy term So that why we going to spend just a little bit more time on this because I think this is a genuine shift that begins to build the market demand for something like Bitcoin. And CNBC has the data on why we're saying the K-shaped economy is accelerating. Some new data that shows the gap between the earnings of higher and lower income groups is widening. That is more K-shaped in the K-shaped economy. Higher highs, lower lows. This data is amazing. I'll explain why at the end, but let me just tell you what it says. First, two studies we have looking at income disparities, one on wages, the other on gas spending, show this widening gap between Americans with the highest and lowest incomes. The Bank of America Institute finding wealthiest Americans enjoying much bigger wage gains than middle and lower income families on a consistent and widening basis. That is, I wouldn't be here if this wasn't a trend that's been going on now for months. The report comes from actual bank account data. It found wage gains of 6% year-on-year for the highest income groups, 1.5% for the lowest. B of A economist David Michael Tinsley, he doesn't know why this is happening. He could be related to bigger bonuses that are out there. Automation, he said, could be undercutting the bargaining power of workers at the bottom end of the wage spectrum. Now, I didn't really believe this data. So I asked ADP to run their numbers. They also found a more steady but still rising wage gap between the highest and lowest paid workers. Highest paid workers on average are making 6.4 times what the lowest paid workers are bringing in, up from 5.9 to 2023. On the spending side, as you might imagine, the surge in gas prices hitting the poorest Americans the hardest. New data from the New York Fed finding that the wealthiest household, they boosted their spending, but they matched the increase in prices so they kept their gas consumption the same. That's the orange line on the top. But look at what happened to the lower income families. They cut back on their gas consumption to make ends meet and apparently maybe cutting back on McDonald's. They were hit harder in March than they were from the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Okay, overall we know this from data last week. Real incomes adjusted for inflation. They've turned negative the past two months and in four of the last six months inflation has taken a bigger bite from paychecks right now retail companies reporting widely this far takes on the consumers we have disney starbucks hershey's and gm who i found they say the consumer looks great healthy whirlpool saying today in its earnings release the war in iran leading to recession level declines in u.s okay i'm glad you brought up whirlpool all right so whirlpool is seeing recession level declines mcdonald's is seeing declines but hershey's is seeing sales It's kind of all over the place. But I think it's, you know, you're seeing people spend on their credit cards. It's an interesting, I try to wrap my head around it because when I go out, take the kids out, whatever it is, the shopping areas are busy. The restaurants are packed. There's a line around the Dairy Queen. So people are spending money. But where is that coming from? It's a, it's, it's, you see it in the numbers, but yet you see people out there spending at the same time. I find that to be very confusing. Now, this next clip, we're going to school. We are going to school. Safe, you know, the author of The Bitcoin Standard, he had a lecture that was a real banger recently. And this was at the Global Economy and Finance Conference in Seoul. And I'll link to the full talk. But Safe makes this brilliant case that as the world de-dollars, and let's just take it to its inevitable inclusion, that it is no longer the reserve currency. and that another currency like the yuan comes along and becomes a reserve currency. We're just going to have all the same problems. Government policy, yanking everyone around, empire expansion. We're just going to inherit all of the same problems. And gold certainly isn't going to work because we've already tried gold and it failed. And so he lays out a brilliant case in what is honestly the longest clip I've ever played on the show. But it's so good. So smoke them if you got them. pour yourself a drink and listen to Papa Safe, tell us why gold wasn't going to work and where Bitcoin can come in and the brilliant way he makes it all seem so damn inevitable. The national financial institutions who are failing at achieving what the gold standard did. But why did gold fail? Why do we no longer use gold? Well, it wasn't gold that failed. It was us who failed. It was us because we, essentially governments, I shouldn't say we, I wasn't around, But governments wouldn't let people use a form of money that they can't inflate because they wanted to finance war. And the reason that they could stop gold is because they could stop gold. They had the ability to stop people from using gold because gold is physical and it needs to be centralized. In a modern economy where trade keeps moving at a faster pace across the world, at a faster speed, it becomes difficult to move physical gold every time you want to transact with people. So people started using secondary instruments instead of gold, and that led to the centralization of gold in central banks, which then made it easy for governments to just one day say, okay, your paper is no longer redeemable for gold because of war or whatever, and it's only temporary, but it's been going on for 120 years now almost. So a gold standard, because of its centralization, devolves into a government credit standard. Gold is too slow for a modern economy. Goods move faster than gold. Well, Bitcoin is the solution to this. Bitcoin automates and improves on the functions of a central bank and can function as a neutral global money. The two key properties of Bitcoin that make it really important as far as I'm concerned is its scarcity and its digital settlement. Scarcity, Bitcoin's supply is fixed, making its monetary policy essentially perfect and apolitical. It's the best monetary policy in the world. We're just dealing with another few decades or about a century of a little bit more inflation. But Bitcoin's monetary policy is to take inflation to zero. And by inflation, I mean supply growth. And that's the best monetary policy imaginable. You don't need to create more money in order for the economy to grow. The value of money can just go up. And that's what Bitcoin does. And that is an enormously important point, which I think most economists miss, because they haven't really thought through the implications, which is what we're going to do now. Now, the second important property of Bitcoin is that it offers digital final settlement. Bitcoin settlement network is global and its operation is independent of any national authority. You can send money from Korea to Brazil using Bitcoin without having to go through central banks, without your government or the Brazilian government even finding out that this is happening or taking place. So the fact that it is essentially a digital form of final settlement makes it similar to cash, makes it similar to gold, but its scarcity makes it even better than gold. So the fact that it can't be inflated, there's no central bank, it can't finance war in governments with inflation. That's a feature, not a bug. A lot of the economists, when they complain about Bitcoin, they say, oh no, but if we have Bitcoin as money, how are we going to finance the government? Exactly. You can't finance the government with inflation. You need to learn to be a responsible adult and try and spend less than you earn and try and find a way to earn that doesn't involve you devaluing the money of everybody else. Is that going to harm governments? Absolutely. It's going to limit their ability to control their citizens, and that's a good thing. But another thing as an economic asset is that Bitcoin can be used as a saving asset, freeing houses to go back to being a consumer good than a saving account, going back to the original problem that I mentioned. So people can just save in Bitcoin rather than saving in stocks and bonds and things that they don't understand, and saving in houses that makes it more and more expensive. But most significantly to the topic of this presentation is that Bitcoin is apolar money. It's independent of all monetary policy. It doesn't provide any country with benefits at the expense of another. Nobody has a Bitcoin printer that they can use to devalue the wealth of others. It can be used by everyone, and it can be banned by no one. Nobody can stop you from using Bitcoin. It's completely transparent and apolitical, and it allows everybody in the world the freedom to engage in trade and capitalism regardless of their politics. If your government does something that pisses off the Trump administration, you can still trade with the rest of the world. You don't have to be held hostage by all of these governments controlling your banks and central banks. Essentially, Bitcoin separates money from politics, and I think this is a hugely important development. It's important here to note, we have stablecoins, we have CBDCs, we have other fintechs, and they remain dependent on state currencies and regulated intermediaries. They may be able to modernize consumer payments, but Bitcoin is completely different. Bitcoin is not here to replace Western Union or bank transfers or PayPal or Venmo or credit cards. Bitcoin is replacing the base layer of the monetary system. It's replacing the system of settlement between central banks and large financial institutions, and it's replacing the monetary policy that is conducted by central banks and instead replacing it with an algorithm that is predictable and transparent and everybody in the world can use it. So we are essentially removing a manual, political, partial, corrupt, unjust, unipolar system with an electronically automatic, apolitical, impartial, just, apolar system. Bitcoin essentially would replace the aggression-based fiat world order with a rules-based Bitcoin global order. Now, I'm sure most of you are thinking here, who is this guy and what military he thinks is going to impose on the world the use of Bitcoin? And the answer is, I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm not here to force you to do it. I don't have a military. I'm not going to shoot anybody. And you can shoot me and it won't make a difference. I'm here to explain economic reality. Bitcoin will win not because it's a political choice. Bitcoin will win not because politicians are going to be convinced. There will be no grand treaties. There will be no negotiations. There will be no voting on these things. This will be imposed through the force of economic incentives. Bitcoin will win in the same way that computers replaced typewriters. It's just a better technology. We didn't need to ban typewriters. We didn't need to fight typewriter factories. We just made typewriters obsolete. And Bitcoin has made central banks obsolete because it is infinitely better money. And the reason for that is that it's quite simple. Bitcoin holds value. Other monies lose it. When Professor Reinhardt concluded her remarks, she said, well, you know, we've heard this before. In the past, the dollar has depreciated. Other currencies have appreciated against the dollar. But it didn't really work out in the long run. Yes, it's true. However, before Bitcoin, all of the alternatives were government monies, and they were all essentially backed by the dollar. They're all essentially, as I like to call fiat currencies that are not the dollar, I essentially call them, it's the dollar plus country risk. It's really no value added to the dollar. So the dollar is not going to lose to an inferior version of itself because all of these fiat currencies are constantly being devalued and losing their value. Whereas with Bitcoin, it's a very different story because Bitcoin holds its value, appreciates over time, and there's no mechanism for it to become more inflationary. If the German Deutschmark was going to become a replacement and threat to the dollar, the US government can saddle the Germans with a bunch of incompetent European governments that place fiscal strains on it and then make the mark unusable. Nobody can do that with Bitcoin. Nobody can find a way to make more Bitcoin. We're always going to be stuck with 21 million Bitcoin and that just means that Bitcoin is going to hold its value and increase in value, whereas all the other forms of money are just going to decline. And this is what's been going on for 17 years of Bitcoin's existence. And really, all that Bitcoin needs to do over the next 17 years is have 1% of the growth rate that it has had over the past 17 years, and it will become larger in terms of capitalization than all of the world's fiat currencies combined, roughly. Bitcoin's already at about $1.8 trillion as an asset. Now, if you keep adding another 20%, 30% per year, which Bitcoin's done 70% a year over the last 10 years. Let's just say 10% per year over the next 15, 20 years, Bitcoin becomes larger than the treasury's market. It becomes the most liquid market in the world. It becomes the best asset in the world and everybody will want to hold Bitcoin in that world. And Bitcoin is just going to appreciate more and more and it's going to become the real economy. Whereas fiat governments and fiat currencies are going to increasingly lose and lose and lose value until they become an economically insignificant part of the world economy. In a sense, Bitcoin is a technological solution to a political and economic problem. Human ingenuity has finally found a way to free itself from inflation. Thank you very much. All right, let's check in on the state of the network. I'm wrapping up at Blockite 949,258. The current price for U.S. dollar to Bitcoin is 79,463. That makes sats per dollar, one of my favorite numbers, 1,258 sats to one U.S. dollar. We're down about 1.6% for the last 24 hours. We're still up 9.66% for the last 30 days. And we're down 23% for the year. Now, reachable nodes on the network currently clocking in at 23,866. Now, to answer your question earlier, that number comes from Clark Moody. Sometimes I get them from CoinGecko's API, and my mempool also pulls in some of this data. It's a script that pulls it in for me from multiple sources. It's very handy that way. Let's see. The next block fee right now is one sat per vbyte. 30 minutes, one sat per vbyte. 60 minutes, one sat per vbyte. Guess what? It's one sat for me by. So move your stuff around. Make some transactions. Open some channels. We're down to just 278 blocks until our next retarget, which will be on May 15th. Currently scheduled at 4.18pm my time, with a difficulty change of upwards of 3.07% because more mining capacity has come online despite what you've been hearing, and the state of the network is strong. Well, if you made it this far, why not go check out the links at thisweekinbitcoin.show? Maybe check out some of the past episodes. I always like to hear two follow-ups. If you're a time travel listener and you want to boost from the past and follow up on something we talked about, got right or wrong, let me know. And, of course, you know my goal here is to not get distracted by the emotions around what's happening, But focus on the signal for you, for your friends, your family, your business, whatever it might be. So you can always let me know how I did with that with a boost as well. And I do want your take if we are at the Bitcoin bottom or if it's going to be a Bitcoin. Is it going to be a hot Bitcoin summer or is it going to be a Bitcoin fall during summer? OK, I need a better one for that. But let's just hope it's a hot Bitcoin summer. But boost and get it on the record before it gets here. I love doing that. So before it gets here, let me know before the month of May is up. boost in and let me know if you think bitcoin's going up or down for the summer and we'll see how it turns out all right i'm going to leave it right there but you know what i do you know what happens next you know what is about to happen i'm going to play a value for value track and if you boost in while the music plays 95 of the sats will go to the artist and this week it's shoot me down by nat hills see you next week I've been destined to break free Since 86 From the clutches and desperation Of patriarchy And all this trick Daddy broke her home, Grandpa had to set the tone of what it is Bloody hell Somewhere along the lines, poison crept into my mind And I believe I should be seen in the world And I'm sorry, boys, but I can't tell the silence What I face won't be, it may no longer hide It'll come and stay for ya, but it's super down I'm gonna take my hand You lost my voice but I can't stand the sign of what I face for me If ain't no longer hiding, come and shake my hand I'm gonna shoot you down, but I take my hand Take my hand Guess you thought you'd kick me down Ah, get up Yes I did Throw punches and stop running out of town Guess you're not that tough No, you're not that tough But I hate to break the news But I'm starting to see through All the bullshit that is heavy that feels Lost my voice but I can't understand What I'm saying is what I'm leaving No longer hide, you'll never stay for ya But you're super down, gonna take my You lost my voice but I can't tell the sound of what I face won't be in me No longer hide, you'll come and stay for yours I'll be shooting down, so I'll take my Well, control your ego Slandy, bet you never thought you'd end up shending My words are like a silent venom Kill of heart as I'm alive as I'm alive Take me home, but don't be screwed I've got no brick and wood Stay out loud, I'll keep coming back for more I lost my voice but I can't stop the silence What I face won't be in me No longer hide it, I'm a straight fire But you shoot me down, gonna take my I feel my voice and I won't stop the silence What I face won't be in me No longer hide it, I'm a straight fire Gonna shoot me down, gonna take my I'll take my I'll take my You wanna shoot me down? I'm gonna take my name