62: Bitcoin Is the Geiger Counter

Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, episode 52. My name is Chris.

Chris, L-A-S dot com, Jupiter Broadcasting dot com. This is the last thing I'm recording before I hit the summer road trip with the family. So, of course, I've got a bit of a chest cold developing, and it's not clear at all where things will be when I get back. Much of the world has really been on the edge of their seats following the news as things break since last week's episode because the conflict with Iran took such a serious turn when the U.S. had a strike that made a lot of news.

And while I was trying to sort through all this news and proclamations of this or that, I realized something really deeply powerful during all of this. And I wonder if some of you have been doing the same. And without even thinking twice, I found myself checking the Bitcoin price, not so much to see what the price was, although that's interesting, but more to see how Bitcoin was pricing the news. Like it was this source of how bad is this World War III news based on the Bitcoin price.

You could use it as this sort of global Geiger counter of what's really going on. If the needle jumps, something big just went down. if the price barely moves, it's probably just noise. And if you think about the scale of sentiment that is a news digestion, everything that goes into that, that essentially that price action represents. For certain things, it means you don't need a pundit panel or breaking news. You can just watch the price on a sharp dip.

It's bad news, man. Sudden pump. Something good probably just hit. Bitcoin is the only market that's pricing in the truth 24-7, 365. and what just continues to strike me 14 years or 14 years or something into just following Bitcoin. I mean, nearly every week I still think, how incredible is it that Bitcoin is built to be trustable in a society where we've lost all trust? We've lost trust in the news. You lose trust in

what the politicians announce on social media. All of you can't even trust what you're seeing in the video. And here comes Bitcoin from issuance to allocation and market availability.

So let's start here. This is my shortest story. We're just going to get this out of the way really quick this week. Things are moving fast in D.C., and we're getting a lot more movement around this crypto framework bill stuff. I'm just going to play one clip on this because it's something you need to know, but we don't have to spend an enormous amount of time on it. This joins us with more on that. Emily, good morning.

Good morning, Becky. Yeah, well, CNBC got an exclusive first look at what could be the biggest crypto bill of the year coming out of D.C. Banking chairman Tim Scott, along with Senator Cynthia Lummis, introduced a framework today for a piece of legislation that would really provide the rules of the road for crypto and other digital assets. Now, this framework includes things like a definition of digital assets, when they would be regulated as a security versus as a commodity.

The framework for the bill commits to reducing regulation. And it also says that there is a need for a small common sense package of measures directed at things like preventing money laundering and sanctions evasion. So this is called a framework. In other words, it's a bunch of rules that kind of agree on for now that they're going to incorporate into an actual bill later on. But the idea is the banks and other companies are getting in now. They're announcing their stablecoin plays.

They're announcing their Bitcoin plays. And so they want to be able to add some veneer of legitimacy to it all. Now, the bill is yet to come. But Lummis, who called for the bill to pass before the end of the year, has said in a statement to CNBC that while the European Union and Singapore have established clear regulations, U.S. continues to sit on the sidelines while the digital asset industry seeks greener pastures. That changes today, she says.

The new outline builds on momentum last week when the Senate passed a stablecoin bill with strong bipartisan support. Trump is now pushing for the House to move on that bill, saying on Truth Social that the House must get it to my desk ASAP, no delays, no add-ons. But the House has their own version of not just the stablecoin bill, but also today's introduced bill on market structure. And Chairman French Hill says he wants them to move together before the end of August.

So a lot of crypto news coming up on Capitol Hill. Becky? Emily, thank you. I mean, this has been the problem. Yeah, so you have these, you know, the House and Senate versions of this. And President Trump says also he wants it lightning fast. The House Financial Services Chairman French Hill said in an event that he wants the stablecoin and market structure bills to go together, which is the opposite of what Trump's asking for.

And then when he was asked, he avoided questions about whether the House would take up the Senate's differing stablecoin bill. So they've got competing bills. The Senate is trying to move quick, so they've got theirs now. They've got their Genius Act and this market framework. And now they're looking at the House saying, come on, what's going on? What's taking you so long? It's not really going to impact Bitcoiners, from what I can tell.

There's not a lot in there that really impacts Bitcoiners, other than perhaps financial services around Bitcoin becoming more generally available, which you can decide if it's a good thing or not. I tend to think it is a good thing because it means probably more adoption. So from what I could tell, there's not much meat on this, but there's nothing that I see that is negative for Bitcoin that at least I've been able to pull out of it.

Well, the federal chair, Jay Powell, your buddy, spent Tuesday and Wednesday on Capitol Hill speaking at various committees. Today, he's out there right now, I think, as I record. This one is led by Elizabeth Warren. And this is all in the shadow of building pressure to cut rates, and not just from Trump this time.

The Federal Reserve Governor Michelle Bowman said on Monday that the U.S. Central Bank should consider bringing down interest rates if inflation remains contained or if data shows a weakening labor market. So Governor Michelle Bowman's right there from his crew.

In fact, there was another Fed governor, I believe, too. Two Fed governors have publicly dissented with J-Pow now on the rates. On Tuesday, June 24th, Vice President Vance posted, quote, I'd love to hear an argument for why Powell cut rates 50 points right before an election, but can't do it now when inflation is actually lower. And on top of that, others have been going to the air, trying to get on like the biz. You know how we have like the CNBC and the Fox Business Networks?

Like this is James Fishback in Fox Business, you know, kind of hitting the talking points, applying the pressure. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is misinformed, uninformed or chloroformed because the inflation picture, as President Trump has rightly called it, is being taken care of. Inflation came in lower than expected last month. We learned that this morning. CPI is at its lowest level in four years. Gas prices down to four-year lows.

Oil prices down 15% since President Trump took office. And what is the Fed? They're doing absolutely nothing. What Economics 101 teaches you is that when inflation comes down, you lower interest rates as a result. Americans deserve a little bit of relief when it comes to their credit card bills and their mortgages. And Jerome Powell can do that if he would stop trying to sabotage the president and his agenda.

All right. So what's really happening here is these two groups are talking past each other. The president and his speakers are talking about inflation right now. They're talking about oil prices right now. And J-Pow is talking about, well, we're concerned about inflation and energy prices in two to three months, in two to three, you know, down the road. And one of my favorite things about these hearings is these guys have to answer the same question over and over and over again.

And by favorite, I mean, I hate it. But it does mean inevitably they kind of refine the answer. And so if you grab the right one, you kind of get a good, concise answer. And I got that from Jay Powell. And I think this is his clearest answer yet on why they are not presently cutting rates. So what is it that's keeping in your mind the Fed from what many of us believe is the right thing to do, which is to lower some interest rates?

and by the way, match with the Bank of Canada, Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swiss Central Bank, a number of emerging central banks. By the way, that's your own assessment on page 33 as where you're laying that out. Why aren't we doing what the rest of the world is doing? Is it because we're at full employment? Is it because of those tariffs concerns that you said weren't part of the analysis? Was it energy, groceries, durable goods? Why?

So you're right that if you just look in the rearview mirror and look at the existing data that we've seen, you can make a good argument that that would call for us to be at a neutral level, which would be a couple of cuts or maybe more kind of thing. The reason we're not is the forecast by all professional forecasters that I know of on the outside and the Fed do expect a meaningful increase in inflation over the course of this year.

When I said we weren't going to talk about tariffs and inflation, that was to say until we see what the policies are. And so now we know a lot more in six months since I said that. So anyway, I'd be happy to continue this. His concern is, of course, you know, the tariffs will produce some sort of inflation down the road. And one of my other favorite things in these hearings is, actually I do kind of like this one. I've been kind of basking it, actually, now that I think about it.

If I'm really honest with myself, I've been loving it as I think about it more and more. When I started this show, these hearings were brutal, you guys, brutal. They were consistently filled with coordinated attacks against Bitcoin and the crypto industry. They brought in actors that didn't know anything, that just spread total, absolute misinformation. I mean, some of the early clips might be kind of entertaining now.

Elizabeth Warren coordinated with guests like Jamie Dimon and seemingly Jerome Powell we've now learned. So that way their testimony and questions were right on point to attack crypto and Bitcoin. But now, now it's all changed. It's a totally different vibe now. You see, it's all good. We've always been friends with crypto. We love you, fam. No, crypto. Yes, stable coins. It's all good. It's all good. Crypto space. Our view is that banks get to decide who their customers are.

That's not our decision. And so banks are free to provide banking services to crypto, the crypto industry, to crypto companies. And banks are also free to conduct crypto activities as long as they do so in a way that is protective of safety and soundness. Huh. Geez, that's a little different than a year ago. Happy to see it, though. Arthur Hayes was on a podcast recently, which I will link to in the show notes.

It's a good interview. He's the BitMEX founder, and we used to love reading some of his analysis on the Bitcoin Dad pod because it generally was a bit on the nose, but accurate. And his track record also tended to be pretty good. So in this interview, which spans a lot of topics, I pulled a couple of clips and they kind of get them to pin down a couple of things. And one of the things that's going on right now is everybody's expecting inevitably a large money print.

Everybody, you know, the shorthand term is money print. But what that means is the regulations around the banks and their balance sheets and the treasuries that they can own, as we've talked about, is changing. They're going to be buying a lot more federal debt. it's very likely the Federal Reserve will also begin buying federal debt, especially

as the foreign market continues to drain out of the U.S. That does seem to be one of the consequences of the tariffs is that foreign investors are putting their money in other markets. And foreign investors have kind of been the secret sauce to the U.S. exceptionalism in the stock market. One of the reasons the U.S. stock market does so fantastically well compared to Canada or the UK or Australia is because everybody has surplus dollars and they're putting it into

our stock market. This is why you maybe didn't even know that Canada had a Bitcoin ETF a year before the United States. It just didn't matter. It didn't matter. And now that we've launched them here in the United States, they're the most successful ETFs in history. It matters. It matters because the size, the liquidity, the money in the market is that much different. And a big reason to that is the rest of the world trades in dollars with us.

And if they take those dollars and they convert them into their local currency and they buy crap in their local country, they're going to devalue their own currency. So they keep the dollars and they reinvest them into things like property and stocks and ETFs and whatnot. You know, you get it. All kinds of things, but stock market. But that, Arthur has shown, has data to show. That is genuinely declining since about January.

and that is going to put pressure on the Fed to be the buyer of last resort. So now what we kind of have an idea of is that the banks, because of the regulations changing, are going to be buying more federal debt. The Federal Reserve may end up having to be the buyer of last resort as well and have to buy federal debt and thus have to print money. I could sit here and go on for a while. There's a lot of things that when you play them out are likely going to force the Fed

to print money. It's going to force the government to increase debt. But there are some major macro things that are obvious. And I think maybe on the back of a lot of our minds, it's something I think about as I watch my family age. And Arthur touches on a real problem we might have soon in that the boomer generation compared to my generation, I'm an older millennial, is a lot more well off. They, like, I could not afford my parents' house. Couldn't buy it from them. You know, couldn't.

They are a lot more well off than the, it's just the data shows. The boomers are a lot more well off than the generations after them. And so they own things that we can't necessarily buy from them, but yet they're going to need to fund their retirement and their golden age. The boomers have stocks to sell. Does anyone want these stocks? Maybe to some extent. Do they want that big suburban house or whatever they have, or apartment in the city? I don't know.

So I think that's, there's going to be a massive issue in terms of if the younger generation wants to buy things that the older generation is selling and they need to sell those things to fund their retirement, how does that square?

Are they going to increase taxes because the asset prices of things that boomers own and went down and they can afford their retirement So they going to tax the young more to pay for their retirement And are the young going to accept that I don know What would you guess I think there going to be a lot of intergenerational conflict. I don't know the outcome of it. But it could be money printing at the end of the day, right? Because it's a very easy way for the government to solve this problem.

Everything leads to money printing. Everything does lead to money printing because inevitably it's the easiest solution and you can do it without people even really noticing the second order effects initially. So a lot of these different macro trends kick in that suggest we're probably going to see the banks and the Fed inevitably get into a lot of money printing. And I think a lot of us expect that.

The timeline though is not as clear, but Arthur Hayes thinks that it may kick in sometime this year and that will take towards the end of the year, Bitcoin to 250,000 US dollars. Just give us a sense of the timeline of Bitcoin to a million by 2028. You said $1,250 by end of the year. Is that still your timeline? Yeah, so I think that we get to $250,000 by the end of the year. It'll be bumpy along the way, obviously. But that's sort of my end of year price target.

And then a million dollar Bitcoin is what I just got off stage talking about how they're going to print, I think, in the realm of $9 trillion-ish between now and that period of time. And that is, you know, Fannie and Freddie, the government support entities that are allowed to create mortgages in the US, they will print $5 trillion.

You will have probably up to $1 trillion purchased by the banking system due to supplemental leverage ratio exemptions and purchasing things that the foreigners are selling. And I think the banks are going to free, because they now don't have to hold all this equity capital against their treasury book. Yeah. They can lend more into the real American economy. And so you're going to see the amount of loans going to manufacturing firms increase, which is, again, that's an increase in credit.

And that will make its way into crypto as well. When the Fed printed a limited QE back in 2020, all asset classes went up. It wasn't just Bitcoin. So this is good news for Bitcoin, what you just said, the thesis you laid out. But it could be good news for everything else, including stocks, gold, potentially even bonds as well. Why would Bitcoin in particular outperform everything else in a high-nequity? So Bitcoin has a fixed supply. It's obviously a much smaller market in terms of market cap.

And so you have if you have a lot of things chasing a very small door, then the price goes up on the margin. And so that's why Bitcoin has been the best performing financial asset in the last 15 years. The lever you have pulled breaks is not in service. Please make a note of it. I think nothing stops this train. It's baked into the pie at this point. Decent chat. It's about 26 minutes long in total, so it's not too hard to digest.

It's on David Lynn's channel, and I'll put a link to that in the show notes. I have a question for you. So as of this episode, the Truflation dashboard shows the year-over-year inflation in the states at 2.18%. 2.18%. But you don't get to $250,000 Bitcoin and beyond without a lot of liquidity coming into the which tends to eventually lead to inflation. Now, maybe it takes longer, but if you start to see it in the Bitcoin price, where we see it in other places too.

So I say, let's all get on the record. At the start of summer 2025, by Halloween 2025, so 128 days from this episode, will the year on year inflation be higher or lower than 2.18%? boost it in, lock in your prediction. Let's see what happens. God, I, hmm. Is J-PAL right? And the tariffs are going to push that up? Or is the Trump White House right? And, you know, all the big economic machinations will push it down. I don't know which way. I would

like you to boost it and lock it in. And then when I read the boost, I'll make my decision. Yes, host privilege. I'm going to punt for a little bit, but I'm going to think about it on the road trip. So I have a justification. Well, coming up on the show, your boost, a quick hardware wallet

review, some updates you probably want to know about, and a couple of final clips of the week again. I'm doing it again. I'm doing a couple of final clips of the week. So if you'd like to support the show just by doing what you do, like when you stack sats. If you buy sats on River, which is one of the best ways to stack sats in the U.S., great company. We have a link in the show notes. You use that. It supports the show. If you're all about self-custody, you're in Canada

or the States, check out the Bitcoin Well. It's an amazing automatic self-custody platform to and from your wallets. They don't have a wallet for you. It's great. If you've got some sats in Lightning and you want to spend them, go convert them to a gift card in just seconds. That's the Bitcoin company. They only deal in Bitcoin. They do great gift cards super fast over lightning. Now, if you want to stack some sats when you're swiping that debit card, paying those bills, that's where Fold

comes in. This is an MVP in our community. I use it. My wife uses it. The Fold card. It's great. And then last but not least, if you need to get access to your Bitcoin value without selling it, check out a salt loan at Salt Lending. Links to those vendors in the show notes. No, no direct relationship other than I use them. And then the affiliate link supports the show. So you can find those in the show notes. We got some boost to support the show this week.

And Satsquatch came in just a little bit before the show and is our baller booster. Sending in 75,000 sats to say value for value. Thanks for keeping the signal strong, man. Sat Squanch, I very, very much appreciate this boost. First of all, you are the baller by about a mile this week. And you brought up the overall average for the entire episode, sending me off onto my summer road trip. Much better shape. So thank you, Sat Squanch. You really have been great and really appreciate that.

I mean, talking about just the perfect time for you to come in and return some of that value. Thank you very much, sir. Appreciate that. Golf Winch is here with 5,000 sats. Coming in hot with the blues. B-O-O-S-T. I just threw a few jingles at him because he said, no jingles, no karma. Just wanted to tell the podfather, I say hello. I felt like if you don't request, I get to pick. So I threw a few at you. But thanks, Golf Winch, and shout out to the podfather. They do great work.

If you are interested, if you're a podcaster at all, want to know where the future of podcasting is going, check out the podcasting 2.0 podcast. Because a lot of the stuff that you'll see me implement in the show is, you know, like I learned about the Magic Walt switching technology and the ability to have value for value music artists on the show by listening to podcasting 2.0. And Adam, the podfather, does that with Dave. Everything's under control. Thank you, Golf. Nice to hear from you.

Orange Pill Lawyers here with 2,000 Sats. Tough little shit. little. I don't know if Bitcoin's going to dump anytime soon. I just know I want to be ready if it does. They're real and they're spectacular. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Gene Bean's here with a row of ducks. Regarding Bitcoin knots, I've been trying to read the tea leaves based off the

reporting you've been providing here. And well, the news in this episode, plus the great boost about the Problems Corps' recent actions have been enough to push me over to the land of knots. Oh, I'd be really grateful to hear how that goes feedback wise on the transition. Seems like it should be pretty smooth. Gene Bean, I'd love to know that, though, if you get a chance to do it.

And also, you see how the booths out there, they make a difference, not just in the value of the show, but others are reading and taking in that feedback, too. Thank you, Gene. Atone's here, or Atone. I like Atone. And he is atoning with 2,222 sets.

I saw S. Oh, I saw Salt take some flack for saying that, but he's right. If your business model relies on Bitcoin never dumping again. Oh, he said safe. I'm an old man. My eyes are getting bad, guys. He said, I'll start over. I'm sorry about that. It's really any glasses. I saw safe take some flack for saying that, but he's right. If your business model relies on Bitcoin never dumping again, you're going to have a bad time. Yeah, really? Yeah, I I I feel like Saylor knows that.

I mean, we saw MicroStrategy survive through a very protracted bear market. And I would imagine some of these other treasury companies. But you have to wonder. I was looking. I think the current count for Bitcoin treasury companies that are public now is 71. 71. So are all of them going to be able to hodl during a bear? I don't think so. I don't. Thank you for the boost. Appreciate it. Hello there's with a row of ducks. Hey, how about that? And they say boost. Thank you, sir. Boost. Or madam.

Appreciate the support. Nakamoto 5000 is here with 5000. Nakamoto 6000 is here with 5000. The traders love the vol. You played a clip from someone discussing their Bitcoin treasury strategy. Maybe these companies will make a lot of money and those investing in them will make some Bitcoin, too. I'm not the brightest, but it just doesn't make sense to me. Listening to these guys talk about nav and arbitrage opportunities, it's over my head and sounds like a sales gimmick.

I'm going to stick to a strategy that makes sense to me. Stacking sats and staying humble. Thanks for the value. This is the way. This is the way. Nakamoto, this is the way. The beautiful thing about Bitcoin, and something I have appreciated a lot over the history of it, you don't have to follow it. You know, you can just stack it, put it away and you don't have to think about like, you know, say if you wanted to buy Apple stock.

Well, how will it how will it impact you when Tim Cook steps down in the next couple of years? He said about a year ago in the next few years, he's going to retire. He's getting up there in age. How's that going to impact Apple stock negatively? Positively could go either way. It's something you have to think about. Right. Like one of the things that's wild to watch is when when we go to war with Iran, we see the nuclear stocks start ripping because, you know, we need an alternative to oil.

All of a sudden, all of a sudden we're going to invest in this again. And it's this on and off sort of moody way that the market reacts to these news events. I would rather just tune out when it comes to generational wealth that I'm trying to stack. And these Bitcoin strategy companies, to me, just seem like they're making something that should be so simple, very complicated. I think you nailed it, Nakamoto. Thank you for that boost. Completely agree. Ah, Hodler's here. Hello, Hodler.

You're doing very well. 2,062 sats. This is enjoy your trip and stay safe. Thank you. I will. Thank you for helping us help you help us all. Eric FJ is here with 7,777 sats.

regarding microstrategy and the others i think the risk is real the u.s power structure runs on exploiting inflation through the dollar well i agree with that they're not going to sit back and let people incinerate dollar denominated capital inside their own regulated markets without eventually cracking down you think it's a coincidence they showed up to bitcoin 2025 in force pushing stable coins?

In hindsight, parking your wealth in a public treasury stock casinos instead of self-custaining Bitcoin will look like a massive foot gun for so-called Bitcoiners. I think you could be right. One or two of them, you know, maybe for some years outperforms Bitcoin. Over 10, 20 years, I don't know about that. Maybe. Maybe one or two or three of them. I just don't know if it's worth it. And how rich do you need to be is also the other question I have. I suppose everybody wants to be more rich.

I do wonder if there'll be some sort of crackdown. It may also just be as likely that instead of a crackdown, the system just figures out a way to make money on it and benefit from it. You know, that's because we thought they would be cracking down like crazy on Bitcoin. Instead, what we're seeing is, well, we'll do reserves. Well, we're going to have treasury companies. We're going to

create derivative products on Wall Street. Like you see them coming up with other creative ways to take advantage of the money machine instead of attacking it. Maybe they'll do the same with these treasury companies. Very thought-provoking boost. Thanks, Eric. Kospielin's back with 10,000 sats. Hi, Chris. I use an encrypted USB stick for my cold storage in the way of a cold card known by the Sparrow app. I also hold a HODL.zip file on my stick, also encrypted, with all my hot wallet seeds in it.

My HODL Excel sheet is a Monero passphrase and umbrella. I don't know if I want to read all this on the air, dude. I don't know if I want to tell everybody all this. He says, I also use the XPUB feature of SparrowWild. Here's a question. Should this be a reasonable backup for a hot wallet inside of my super cold one? Backing up a wallet within a wallet. Sort of like a master password manager. I suppose if you had a lot of trust. I don't really like mixing it like that. I have to be honest.

Sort of creates a single point of failure. A Linux question. I switched from copy on write on ButterFS for this USB stick to a no copy on write in FFS tab. What do you think of this? Makes it a lot more usable. Yes. So you can disable copy on write on ButterFS. And if you're on Linux, this is something you should consider if you don't implicitly need it for some of these devices. Because it reduces disk usage. So you're on to something there. I like that one. So one out of two ain't bad, Koss.

And thank you very much for the boost. I really appreciate it. Adversary 17 is back. 8,192 sats. And adversary says, I'm going to run both core and not. So I have ample space and compute for another copy of the chain. So why not? That's kind of the big brain move. Hmm. Hmm. And yeah, see what the difference is for a bit. You think maybe eventually you'd settle on one? Thank you, adversaries. Nice to hear from you. Ace Ackerman's here with a row of ducks.

I think there will be an Amazon coin and that if you maintain a minimum balance on your account, it will provide you Amazon Prime benefits and or interest rates that essentially will act as a bank, almost like an investment script. Yeah, or like their credit card. I'm constantly getting pushed to Amazon business credit card.

Well what if instead you just kept an Amazon stable coin balance and they offered you like percentages off or like you said Prime perks That how they going to do it Prime perks Ace man You kind of a psychopath dude That really good I mean, that's like you got in the head of these guys and really thought, how can we make a buck off of these customers? I mean, that's yeah. Right, man. You're going to have like a balance on there.

And like when you do a digital purchase, it'll it'll deduct from your balance. And like, you know, when you do shipping, sometimes they'll say like, hey, if you take the cheap, more eco-friendly, we'll give you a dollar in digital credits, right? They're going to do that kind of stuff. Oh, that is interesting. Thanks, Ace. Thought-provoking. Thank you, everybody who boosted in and everybody who boosted in below the 2,000 sat cutoff, too. I'll keep those in the doc. I read them on my own.

Thank you, everybody who also streamed sats. 43 of you this week. Not bad. Good lift. Streamed 57,973 sats. Thank you, everybody who just sat sat. And I know it means you don't get your message right on the show. So I do want to convey, I really do appreciate it. It's also for me, it's fun because, you know, the middle of the night or in the morning or the afternoon, I'll open up my helipad dashboard and I'll just see sats coming in, you know, two sats, four sats, 24 sats.

Some of you are crazy as you listen. And I don't always necessarily know who it is, especially if I'm just looking at like my node. That's often where I'll see it too, is I'm just looking at my lightning node. I'll just see these coming in. It's really nice because it means like you're really out there. You're listening right now. And I'm looking at the screen as they're coming in. Never had that kind of a connection.

I know it sounds weird, but as somebody who's been doing this for like 17, 18 years ish, you know, wasn't until we got to here where I felt like a real true connection there. It's something there's something about you create something, you put it out there, and then you see people sending you something of value in real time as they listen to it, either as a boost or as a stream. It's incredible rewarding. It's incredibly rewarding.

So thank you, everybody who participates and supports the show, either because you want to keep it going or because you got some particular value. I really do appreciate it. So when we combine our streamers with our boosters, we stacked a grand total of 184,493 sets. Not our strongest week, but not every week can be. And I appreciate everybody who takes a moment to step up and support the show with a boost. Fountain FM makes it real easy these days.

And we are now live on the Fountain FM hosting platform. So you're going to see more features and options right there, including a way to subscribe to the show monthly and send support with SATs or fiat and special content as well. More on that very soon. So thank you, everybody who supports the show. And keep your ears peeled, as my grandpa would say. There's more coming in that department very soon. The BitBox folks have big news this week.

They've announced the BitBox 02 Nova. Now, I've been testing what I'm going to call the BitBox 01, which was just the BitBox. It's a Swiss-made hardware wallet. And you can use it with your wallet app of choice, like in my case, Sparrow. Or you can use it with their app. And it works with Android and Windows and Linux. It's a hardware device. It's small, compact. It has an OLED screen on it. It's about the size of a USB thumb drive.

It has capacitive touch sensors, so you can navigate and select and confirm actions and make sure, you know, everything looks legit right there on the screen, which honestly I found tricky at first use, which is also the most critical time because you're, you know, you're setting up your keys and stuff, right? So you kind of sink or swim immediately with the bit box.

but once you get it to work if you get past that it's a real treat because that OLED screen has a lot of uses but additionally their app which I like quite a bit the Bitbox app implemented the Breeze SDK and the Breeze SDK at least in the beta I was testing meant that I could have on-chain sats protected by a hardware wallet connected over USB-C to my Pixel 7. And I could have a spending wallet on Lightning, all on my PiZelle 7 from one app.

That's nice. And I don't think the BitBox folks get as much attention in the States because they're Swiss and they're very active in the EU Bitcoin space, but not so much in the US Bitcoin space. And a lot of the US Bitcoin space is more commercial. Well, this week, the BitBox team announced the BitBox O2, which has a tempered glass display. And now, along with Linux, Mac, Windows, and Android, BitBox O2 has support for iOS.

This is a really big deal and not as easy to do securely as you might think. So the team created this really well-done video for their 10th anniversary and the BitBox O2 launch video. I'm going to play a clip from it, but I think you should probably watch the whole one if you're not familiar with them, because they go in a bit about the company and how they designed the product.

But in this clip, they talk a little bit about how the iOS pairing process works and how they're using, I think, something called Whisper to do the initial handshake between the iPhone and the BitBox. And then after that, it's essentially in stealth mode. We're very excited, very proud to come out with a new product right now called the BitBox02 Nova.

So what we do with the Nova is to finally implement all the features that we wanted to do over the years, but we were not able to do just in software. So at some point, we knew we need a new version, and today is the day where we can release it. The most requested feature we get from users is iPhone support. And we're very pleased to announce that the Bitbox O2 Nova now gives iPhone and iPad support to all of our users.

All right, so this is the bit where they talk about how that actually works, which I think is interesting as heck. With Inova we're addressing our customers' main request, iOS support. Whisper enables us to allow iOS users to use the BitBox with their iPhone without compromising on our core values. We call our wireless integration Whisper Wireless because typically when you develop a Bluetooth device you want it to have the longest possible reach.

But of course in our case, our customers kind of demand the shortest possible reach. The Bluetooth range is extremely limited because we care about your privacy. Somebody who is more than a meter away from you will probably not see your BitBox. Once it's connected, you can't detect the Nova from the outside because it has turned off broadcasting. And this means that if your friend scans for Bluetooth devices on their iPhone, they won't see your BitBox.

We avoid trusting the Bluetooth chip by putting the Bluetooth stack on a separate chip. By putting it on a separate chip, we don't allow all that code access to the regular main MCU code. We encrypt the data already before we give it to the Bluetooth chip. So there is no way, even if the Bluetooth chip becomes compromised, that it could learn any of your data. Now my BitBox 01 doesn't do this, so I haven't seen this.

But my takeaway is with the Bitbox 02 Nova, they have built an intentionally limited Bluetooth radio that gets very limited range. That's only really used during the initial pairing and setup with the iPhone, perhaps due to iOS security limitations. But then the other thing I caught in there that I thought was interesting is they've implemented the Bluetooth stack, or as I like to say, Bluetooth, on its own chip. Do we know of anybody else that does that?

Like if you're going to put something like that in a wallet, that's the way to do it. And then once you've got the physical connection, turn it off. Now, I think if you use Android, you use Windows, Linux, or macOS over USB-C, you don't need Bluetooth at all. This is really for those that want to be able to interact with their iPad and their iPhone.

But one of the topics that's come up on the show before is, do you use for your life savings a mobile app on a phone, or do you only trust a desktop? And some of you like me out there have said, I only trust PCs for this. And then some of you said, are you kidding? A PC? It doesn't have isolated apps. It doesn't have image-based OSs. Are you serious? The security vulnerability is way higher on a PC. I only trust a mobile device. And I secure it with a hardware wallet.

So I've got the best of both worlds. What are you cranky old men talking about? So there really is a bit of a division in our audience about how they store their Bitcoin. And the thing is, with the BitBox 01 for me was like that breakthrough device where I was like, oh, I could really see using like a graphene device and a BitBox. And that's the main that's the main stash. Like I don't use a PC, right? Because it's in the wallet. It's in the recovery.

Like it's the phone is just really the interface, but it's still been a huge mental shift for me. And so with Bitbox, so to bringing that to iOS users, it's going to open that that window, that Overton window, if you will. And I will say my interaction with the company, Bitbox, has been really positive. They listened to the show. They reached out to me months ago, asked if I wanted to test the old version. I said, yes, but, you know, my reviews can take a while.

I want to use it through the new and shiny phase and I want to use it during the boring phase where I haven't touched it for a bit. And I kind of forget how it works and want to maybe use it through an update cycle. and they said, okay, fine, here it is, no problem. They answered all my questions and they let me do my thing. So I've walked away with a really good impression of the company and the product. And when I chatted with them, we chatted more about Bitcoin than anything else.

I felt like there were some Bitcoiners in that group. So it's good to see them hit 2.0 and their 10th anniversary. Well, if you're following things closely, you may have seen a lot of speculation going around

what looked like a 20% hash rate drop after the U.S. struck Iran last week. Well, it turns out the timings don't quite work out. In fact, there was a hash rate drop, but the hash rate drop kind of started before the strike. Now, if you're not familiar, hash rate measures, how much computing power essentially is being used to secure the Bitcoin network. High hash rate means more miners are online and active. And if the hash rate drops, it usually means some miners have gone offline.

And Bitcoin mining is kind of a known thing in Iran. They legalized it in 2019. They've issued license to operators. They have some state-operated Bitcoin mining operations. And shortly before the U.S. strike, Iran ordered blackouts to different regions, likely being cautious to avoid damage. And then, of course, in general, between Israel and the U.S., there has been damage to Israel's or there's been damage to Iran's energy systems. And some of these have brought Bitcoin mining offline.

And so there was around a 20 percent hash rate drop. That's now evened out. As of this recording, the hash rate's only down about 1.8 percent. So it's almost completely entirely recovered. But it is down. And if the hash rate were to continue to decline, as you know, the Bitcoin network will automatically lower its difficulty to maintain transactions every 10 minutes. And as I record right now, the next difficulty target retarget date is June 29th. So just a couple of days away.

And we're somewhere in the 8% adjustment. When I first checked, it was 8.9. I'm seeing that back off a little bit now. but it's going to be somewhere likely in the round of a downward adjustment of 8%. Not huge. Not huge. This is a wild one. How about this?

So an individual known as AonBTC, who was for the op return limit removal, didn't think spam filters worked, and makes a great iOS app that I have installed on my iPhone called MemPow, has now created a ban list they're sharing for those who are still on Bitcoin Core that want to block transactions from Bitcoin Nots-based nodes. Are you following this? So, yeah, your head might be spinning a little bit.

The folks that were anti-filter in Bitcoin Core are now creating a filter list to block Bitcoin Nots nodes. And on the GitHub, it says, why ban Nots? And this is their quote-unquote rationale. By default, knots nodes implement a highly restrictive relay policy that attempts to prevent specific valid transactions from propagating through the network.

This means that if your node is connected to a majority of knots nodes, it will hinder your node's ability to estimate fees properly and increase the time it takes your node to receive new blocks. Pretty flimsy. That is pretty flimsy. I've also heard other excuses like, well, Bitcoin knots nodes are just rattled with security problems and I don't want that tucking in my node.

That's also pretty weak, and it would seem to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how the nodes communicate and your trust in the software. And especially core, too, I guess, then. But this is really something I did not expect, and that would be the anti-filter folks creating a filter. Now, it's not all of them, of course. It's just certain individuals, so don't paint too broad of a brush. But if you wanted something truly ironic for the week, I think this is it.

All right, we're getting in the home stretch.

Home stretch, and then it's time to hit the road. This is a series of clips, and I'm going to start with the rich dad, poor dad. Are you familiar with the rich dad, poor dad? You know, he's always kind of flirted with understanding Bitcoin. He's talked about it at times, gotten close, and then kind of like an astronaut that's coming in at too steep of an angle, he bounces right off the atmosphere of Bitcoin. Of course, I'm talking about Robert Kiyosaki, and he has a podcast now.

It's called The Rich Dad Show, and he has Larry Leppard on, the author of The Big Print, good book, and he touches on a trope that drives me crazy. The Rich Dad does.

you've probably heard a variation of this trope before and that is everybody who got rich in Bitcoin is just lucky or you don't have to be smart you just have to hold Bitcoin you know that some variation of that or any dummy can get rich with Bitcoin you heard these before and I find them to be false holding Bitcoin is extremely difficult ask me how I know 14 years into it And I also just think it going to become more common because people who

didn't initially get Bitcoin kind of get it now. It's kind of a way to say, well, the problem was I overthought it. You see, the issue was, is I didn't get Bitcoin sooner because I was too smart. And if I was dumb as some of these hodlers, I would have a lot more Bitcoin now. But I overthought it because of my big galaxy brain. And that's why I don't own Bitcoin. This is why the trope, this is what's at the root of the trope that drives me crazy. And rich dad's going to lay

it down a few times. And then finally, Larry comes in with a good, concise rebuttal. And I thought we should be here for it. Yeah. So, but this is the point, Lawrence, it's never been easier to get rich. I would agree with you. I would agree with you. To start this thing, it took brain power, It took money. It took a lot of freaking hard work. It took yelling and screaming and raising capital and doing dog and pony shows. All you have to do is buy one freaking Bitcoin and you get it made.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's what's going to happen. I mean, Michael Saylor thinks that Bitcoin is going to 13 million a coin, and I agree with him. Now, that's going to take many, many, many years, but you can buy that coin today for $100,000. I mean, as you know, like in the gold mining business, as you point out, with any other company investment, even with Amazon, They had a management team that could have screwed it up.

I mean, you know, the mathematical protocol behind Bitcoin, you know, has now been time tested for 900, almost 900,000 blocks in 16 years. And I don't think it can get screwed up. I think we just sit back and watch it increase in value. So, you know, if you're an artist or, you know, you have a different craft, I mean, you don't have to suddenly have a financial advisor. You can just put your money in Bitcoin, forget about it, know that every year you'll gain in value.

It's really kind of an amazing leveler of the financial system and the notion that average people can front run Wall Street and all these financial geniuses. I mean, I went to Harvard Business School and I've tried to interest them. I said, guys, this is the most revolutionary monetary development in the last 2000 years. And I know some of the students there and they've got a club and it's like three people. I sent it to the dean and he said, well, that's an interesting book.

But I proposed that we have a debate about it up on stage and, you know, they haven't followed up. They're not interested. And I'm like, you're missing it. You're just missing an enormous change. And it came from the grassroots. You know, it came from just average people understanding what this is. And it's going to continue. Yeah. I think I like about Bitcoin is you don't have to be smart. No. You've got to be smart to go to Harvard. And that, you know, Trump. I can debate that.

So I looked at some of my classmates. I may take the other side of that, but you got to be smart on paper to get in. Anyway, that's the whole thing. It's the greatest advantage I've ever seen. I'll start to repeat it again because every Bitcoin says the same words. I should have bought more. I should have bought more. Yeah, I bought a handful of coins in 2014, and I wish I'd bought more. And I got buying, of course, but those were $300 a coin. It kind of looks cheap now.

So, you know, and to be fair, I mean, in 10 or 20 years, you know, there are going to be people, our relatives and others are going to say, hang on a second. You mean to tell me you've got an entire Bitcoin? I mean, think about it this way. Here's an interesting model. We think there are about 45, maybe 50 million people in the world who are millionaires. I think it might be higher than that. But there are only 21 million Bitcoin in the world.

Some of them have been lost and some of them are locked up, you know, at MicroStrategy and so forth. And so every millionaire in the world can't even own one Bitcoin, right? I mean, they can own half a Bitcoin if we distribute them evenly. And by the way, you know, they're not distributed evenly. So, you know, you own one Bitcoin, you're almost guaranteed to be a millionaire as this whole thing unfolds. And I think you're going to be much more than that. You don't have to be smart.

Well, you've got to be willing to think outside of the box. You've got to be smart enough not to sell. I mean, you know, there'll be a lot of mistakes people will make, Robert. I mean, they will, you know, it'll go up, they'll double and they'll think, oh, I got a profit. I got to take it. You know, they'll be, you know, hanging on to it and being patient. It's not simple. Just try it. It's so easy.

You know, it's they don't have to be smart kind of thing drives me crazy, especially as he's always late to the party and he still hasn't wrapped his head around it. It turns out maybe, Robert, you do have to be smart. Someone that seems to be very smart is Philip LaFont. I don't know a lot about him, but he's one of those guys that when he comes into the room, all of the media in the financial media get very excited.

because he seems to be one of these individuals that gets to help define the various lists on Wall Street. You know, the ones like the NASDAQ 100 and all of that. He gets to be in on that, his company. And so his team, when they say a company is worth following, a Wall Street investor should own this, they tend to follow. So this is, I'm going to give you, here's an example. Here is his introduction on CNBC. And just listen to sort of the fawning and the attention he gets.

And of course, he's a funny guy. We've got a huge lot, a lot of things to cover, a lot of ground to cover with our next guest. We're very excited about it. The markets, the Fed, why he's excited about private markets, AI, some very provocative views about Alphabet, which, by the way, didn't make his fantastic 40 list, and so much more. An exclusive with famed tech investor, Philippe Lafont. He's the founder and

portfolio manager of Cotu. It's a tech hedge fund, a private markets investor, $55 billion under

management. Some people think of him as a venture capitalist to some degree these days. What do you think of yourself as actually what are you anymore the winner of the at&t pro am is what that's what we just heard is what he thinks of himself that's true but i don't think that's what my investors would care about yeah they might not like that you're too good your name is on the wall on the it is it is the first team on the wall right there next to rory mccleroy so for me to have me on there

i'd have to change my name to philippe lafont there you go me yeah congratulations what are you these days because you're doing a lot of things when the market goes up then i'm definitely a public investor but then when the market doesn't do well i switch to you know venture and growth so he this funny guy not always been bitcoin's biggest fan said it's you know companies shouldn't own it all of that but he's had quite the change in tune not only does he think companies should

own it but he thinks it's one of the top 100 companies in existence if you look at it from revenue and he regrets not buying it sooner. Imagine the messaging this is sending right here and his willingness to admit he was wrong. So we looked at the, let's say, top 25 companies and what happens to them every five years. And some of them just drop out. They run fast, but they don't run as fast as the others. Then you've got some new IPOs that come in. Is OpenAI going to be part

of the Mac 7 of the future? Is SpaceX going to be part of the Mac 7? And so we try to recombine the index and imagine what's, we're here today, NASDAQ 100. What's a NASDAQ 100 five years out? And who's on it then? Okay. I knew, I thought you were going to ask me who's not on it. Well, we can do who's not on it. By the way, Alphabet's not on it. Tell us why. You know what I did? I just thought some of the big companies are going to be amazingly positioned. Microsoft is going to stay on it.

And maybe today it's a $3 billion company, but let's say it doubles in five years. It could be five or six billion. Oh, trillion. Trillion, yeah. Sorry, of course, trillion. Then we added Bitcoin. We thought of Bitcoin as a company. Today, I think Bitcoin is $2 trillion. We're like, well, could it get to also $4 or $5 trillion? Obviously, Bitcoin is not a company. It'd be like saying if gold's a company, but I thought it was interesting as a new asset. Market cap. Market cap.

$2 trillion is so big. You've been involved in Bitcoin. You know, I've not gotten involved with Bitcoin. And I wake up every day at three in the morning and I'm like, why am I such an idiot? What have I been waiting for not being involved in it? And it just goes up and up. In the past, I think this is interesting, the retail investors, they were much faster at getting involved with Bitcoin than the institutional ones.

And I always thought Bitcoin is amazing, but it's double or triple the volatility of the Nasdaq. Nasdaq is already pretty volatile. Why do I need to deal with this added volatility?

recently bitcoin when it went down during the tariff only went down as much as nasdaq so it seems the volatility as an asset class is coming down which i thought okay so but giving your your your sort of thesis do you say yourself even at this point in the ball game if you think it's going to double or triple and going to be part of the nasdaq 100 if you would think of it as a company yes i have to think about that you should own it now yes i have to think about it now do i

own it now? Do I own it tomorrow? In a few days. But every day I do think, why do I not own it? And I think to be a good investor, it's not just like owning the obvious stock, but sometimes you have to change your mind and you have to just say, well, I made a mistake and I'm changing my mind and maybe Bitcoin will be that. Let's wrap up with the state of the network. Everybody this

week has been watching the Bitcoin knots number. We'll get there. The block height as I wrap up, 902,687. Getting close to the difficulty change, less than a thousand blocks away.

all right bitcoin knots clocking in at 12.7 i saw it getting close to 13 it's fluctuating a little bit but it is now the third largest node out there in software version type how about that how about that so we also so 28.1 is the number one and 29.0 of core is the second largest 481 blocks until the difficulty retarget. There's 22,000 nodes on the network right now, 22,217. 65% of them are behind Tor. There is 3.95 gigabytes of Operaturn data in the blockchain right now.

The overall chain size is 760.2 gigabytes. The Bitcoin network continues to go and take care of itself regardless of world events. With the U.S. price to one Bitcoin right now, on the nose, $107,000. Well, if you made it this far, I want to remind you, links are at thisweekinbitcoin.show. I'm going to be off either next week and the week after, or just one. I'm not quite sure how the road trip goes. Sort of depends on, well, the road. But I hope you enjoyed this episode.

My goal is to create something that doesn't get distracted by emotions around what's happening, but focuses on the signal so you get the best information possible. Let me know how I did with a boost. Also, if you're thinking maybe, hey, Chris, you could have covered this. Why didn't you cover this, man? Let me know what I missed. Send me a boost that way or any thoughts. And we talked about, remember, I want your inflation predictions. Lock it in before Halloween.

What do you think it's going to be at? right now it's at 2.18% according to the Truflation year over year dashboard. So in 128 days, is inflation going to be higher than 2.18% or lower? And tell me why. I got to know. I think we're going to get locked in. We'll see how we all did. All right. We're going to leave with a value for value track as I do. This one's a banger. So if you support the artist while the music's

playing by a boost, 95% of those sats go to the audience. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope You get to have a great summer vacation at some point. And I'm leaving you with Inside Out by Middle Season. This world has set me up, but I run away. Escape from it. Already made up my mind. I ain't looking back. Just keep on moving on and moving on. Don't know what the future holds. I'm still fighting for control.

Giving it my word on this falling apart You're by my side, I'll make a bone You hold me alone All my shame is gone You're holding back, there's no other name You break chains, my soul arrives You set me free and changed me from the inside out This world has blinded me up Made me look away But I've run away Already made up my mind I ain't turning back I'm just seeing Everything is rumbling down I don't know what the future holds I'm still fighting for control Even if my world is falling apart

You're by my side, I'm breakable You hold me up All my shame is gone No holding back, there's no other name You break chains, my soul not lies You set me free and changed me from the inside out We'll be right back.

Even if my world is falling apart You're by my side and breakable You're holding me up All my shame is gone No holding back, there's no other name Even if my world is falling apart You're by my side and breakable You hold me up All my shame is gone You're holding back, there's no other name You break chains, my soul arrives You set me free and changed me from the inside out