Watch this episode on Twitter/X, Rumble or YouTube.

Listen to this episode on Fountain or wherever you get your podcasts.

*****

Greetings and salutations my fellow plebs. My name is Walker and this is THE Bitcoin Podcast. 

It’s Friday, November 3rd, 2023. The Bitcoin block height is 815,145 and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin. 

Today’s episode is the Bitcoin News Roundup. I’m going to go over the big stories, run through a few rapid fire news, then zoom out and give you some perspective…

You can find all the links and accounts mentioned in this episode via the article version of this show, linked in the show notes, or by going to bitcoinpodcast.net/words

And of course you can always watch THE Bitcoin Podcast on Rumble, YouTube, or X by searching @WalkerAmerica, or listen on Fountain.fm or wherever you get your podcasts by searching for “THE Bitcoin Podcast.”

If you listen to THE Bitcoin Podcast on Fountain, consider giving this show a boost or creating a clip of something you found interesting. For those that have boosted this show already or zapped me on Nostr, THANK YOU. 

If you haven’t checked out Fountain yet, I highly recommend it. You can send Bitcoin to your favorite podcasters, and earn Bitcoin just for listening to this show. 

Also, some big news here: I’m pleased to announce that THE Bitcoin Podcast has its first official sponsor: BitBox and the BitBox02 Bitcoin-only hardware wallet. 

Head to bitbox.swiss/walker and use the promo code “WALKER” for 5% off. 

I just set mine up and honestly I can’t believe I hadn’t used the BitBox02 until now… It’s easy as hell to use, Bitcoin-only, and it’s FULLY open-source, so you can see the firmware on the BitBox02, the BitBoxApp, and even x-rays of the hardware and other schematics. Just go to their GitHub and see for yourself. Hell, build one yourself if you feel like it. Or, you know, go to bitbox.swiss/walker and use promo code WALKER for 5% off – it’s up to you.

Thanks to BitBox for sponsoring Another Fucking Bitcoin Podcast. 

Without further ado, let’s get into the Bitcoin News Roundup.

*****

Bitcoin Turns Trash to Treasure

Yesterday, Bitcoin mining company Marathon Digital Holdings announced the energization of its first Bitcoin mining pilot project powered by renewable, off-grid energy from a landfill. 

Marathon, also known by the stock ticker MARA, has entered into an agreement with Nodal Power, a company that develops and operates renewable energy assets, specifically in the biogas space, to launch a 280 kW Bitcoin mining pilot project in Utah that is exclusively powered by landfill methane gas. The pilot project is currently fully energized and operational.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), methane is “80 times more harmful than CO2 for 20 years after it is released.” According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), municipal solid waste emissions, which accounted for approximately 14.3% of all methane emissions in the United States in 2021, “represent a lost opportunity to capture and use a significant energy resource.”

I love seeing announcements like this, because it completely destroys the already flimsy arguments made by propagandists like Greenpeace or Elizabeth Warren who say that “Bitcoin is bad for the environment.”

Here you have a company that is literally turning rotting trash into energy, and turning that energy into the hardest money that humans have ever discovered, which is Bitcoin.

Find me another industry that is using methane from landfills to generate off-grid power… You won’t, because it’s too expensive to get these projects off the ground, and no other industry has the unique characteristics of Bitcoin miners, which serve as both a buyer of first and last resort. Bitcoin miners just want cheap energy. It doesn’t matter if that energy is from a hydroelectric dam that’s producing more than the grid needs, or from an off-grid pile of literal garbage that is now turned into pristine, cryptographically secured digital property, all while stopping that harmful methane from escaping into the atmosphere. 

At this point, anyone who claims that Bitcoin is “bad for the environment” is either uneducated, and needs to study more, or purposefully lying because they have other interests at play and Bitcoin is a threat to the existing power structure. I’m looking at you, Elizabeth Warren…

Bitcoin Halving Countdown & 93% of Bitcoin Mined

Yesterday, the Bitcoin timechain passed block number 815,000. The Bitcoin Halving, where the issuance of new Bitcoin per block is cut in half, happens at block 840,000.

That means there are less than 25,000 blocks to go until the Halving, which will happen in April 2024.

Additionally, yesterday Wicked (@w_s_bitcoin on Twitter) informed us all that we have officially mined 93% of the total supply of 21 million Bitcoin, leaving just 7% left…

If you’re new to Bitcoin and don’t know what the Halving is, I did a whole episode covering it, but here’s the basic idea: 

The Bitcoin halving cycle is a mechanism inherent in the Bitcoin protocol which, as the name suggests, cuts the reward for mining Bitcoin in half every 210,000 blocks, which is approximately every four years. Put another way, the Bitcoin’s monetary inflation rate exponentially decreases every four years until all 21 million Bitcoin have been mined, around the year 2140. 

How do we know the Halving will occur every four years? Because of the Bitcoin Difficulty Adjustment. 

Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment, which happens every 2016 blocks or roughly two weeks, is a mechanism that ensures the time taken to mine a block remains approximately 10 minutes, regardless of the total computational power, or hashrate, of the network. If blocks were mined faster than every 10 minutes on average during this period, the difficulty increases. If blocks were mined slower, the difficulty decreases.

Here’s an interesting fun fact about the mathematical structure of the Halving cycles you can use to impress a fellow Bitcoiner: the design of Bitcoin's issuance model is such that after each halving cycle, approximately 50% of the remaining Bitcoin to ever be mined is issued in that cycle. 

So at the end of each cycle, the percentage of total Bitcoin left to be mined corresponds roughly to the block reward from the previous cycle, expressed as a percentage of the total supply of 21 million Bitcoin.

For instance, at the end of the first halving cycle (when the block reward went from 50 to 25), about 50% of the total Bitcoin were left to be mined. At the end of the second halving cycle (when the block reward went from 25 to 12.5), about 25% were left. At the end of the third halving cycle (when the block reward went from 12.5 to 6.25), about 12.5% were left.

In the current cycle, the block reward is 6.25 Bitcoin. At the beginning of this cycle, there were about 18.375 million Bitcoin in existence (87.5% of the total supply), leaving 12.5% (or 2.625 million Bitcoin) yet to be mined.

At the end of this cycle, which is less than 25,000 blocks away, the block reward will halve to 3.125 Bitcoin. By this time, we'll have about 19.6875 million Bitcoin in existence (93.75% of the total supply), leaving 6.25% (or 1.3125 million Bitcoin) yet to be mined, which matches the block reward from this cycle.

Isn’t Bitcoin math fun?

Now, you guys know I don’t like to talk about price too much on this show, but it’s safe to say that after this next halving and in the coming years, the fiat price of Bitcoin will be much higher than it is today. When that happens, you don’t want your hard-earned Bitcoin sitting in a hot wallet that someone else controls, or even worse in an exchange that may or may not have your Bitcoin when you want to withdraw.

So now is a good time to figure out how to self-custody your Bitcoin using a hardware wallet so you’re prepared when things inevitably get a little crazy. Head to bitbox.swiss/walker and use the promo code “WALKER” for 5% off the BitBox02 hardware wallet. The user experience is great, and I recommend it for new Bitcoiners and seasoned psychopaths alike.

Take the time to secure your Bitcoin now so you can sleep soundly at night in the years to come. Go to bitbox.swiss/walker and use the promo code “WALKER” for 5% off

Fighting Inflation with Inflation

Two days ago, news dropped that Japan was set to approve a $110 BILLION stimulus package to fight inflation… When I first read this headline I honestly thought it was satire. 

As my lovely wife Carla put it “that’s like an overweight person saying they’re gonna eat 1000 donuts to fight obesity.”

Then yesterday, I read the updated article which said “Japan's cabinet approved on Thursday a package of economic measures worth about 17 trillion yen ( or $112 billion) including income tax cuts, as Prime Minister Fumio Kishida grapples with persistent inflation and falling approval ratings.” … and it all made sense. 

Obviously, a $112 billion dollar stimulus package isn’t going to “fight inflation.” That would be fucking stupid. That would be about as stupid as giving out tax breaks to people and subsidies to companies to “tackle climate change” and calling it the “Inflation Reduction Act”... but then again, we live in stupid times…

Take Argentina, where the current Minister of Finance and presidential candidate, Sergio Massa, promised to get rid of all income tax ahead of the election, after realizing he was far behind pro-Bitcoin and anti-central bank candidate Javier Milei in the polls. 

These sorts of measures, whether they’re in Japan, the USA, Argentina or elsewhere, show the desperation of government leaders to kick the can down the road just long enough to stay in power a little longer. It’s honestly disgusting, because the longer they kick the can down the road, mortgaging the future at the expense of the present, the worse it’s going to be for the younger generations who will have to suffer the greatest consequences from the foolish and selfish policies of the older generations.

Here’s the thing: giving people a “tax cut” doesn’t mean a damn thing when the government and central bank just print money out of thin air. Inflating the amount of money in a system is inflation. You don’t reduce the amount of money in the system by creating more money out of thin air… Or, as Preston Pysh put it: “Because we need more made-up money to have less money.”

Ultimately, politicians in power who see their popularity dropping and fear losing their power will do anything they can to trick their constituents into believing they’re giving them a helping hand. And their tricks almost invariably involve giving out money to people and companies under the guise of misguided equity, climate change, or whatever the buzzword du jour happens to be. 

If you think the average citizen is getting the better end of the deal in any of these countries, I have an NFT of a bridge in Brooklyn to sell  you…

FinCEN’s Folly

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few weeks, you probably saw that FinCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, published a totalitarian rule proposal that expands the already-totalitarian Patriot Act to cover CVC (convertible virtual currency) mixing. 

Here’s the timeline of what happened:

On October 10th, the Wall Street Journal article published an article which falsely claimed that “Hamas Militants Behind Israel Attack Raised Millions in Crypto.”

On October 17th, big banking’s best friend Senator Elizabeth Warren and 104 other members of congress wrote a letter to the President about their concerns that cryptocurrencies were being used to finance terrorism, specifically Hamas. Their arguments were based on this Wall Street Journal article. 

On October 23rd, FinCEN published their “Proposal of Special Measure Regarding Convertible Virtual Currency Mixing, as a Class of Transactions of Primary Money Laundering Concern.”

It’s important to note that they’re not trying to change the law here; they’re proposing a “rule change” which means they will change the way an existing law is applied or enforced. 

As usual, politicians and regulators are opportunistically using real world tragedy to invent fake problems with Bitcoin. After all, if they really cared about cracking down on money laundering they would send the leadership at every major bank to prison for the rest of their lives, because 99.7% of money laundered globally is done via the traditional fiat currency system using traditional banks run by traditional bankers.

I’m not going to take up too much of your time on this today, as it’s already been covered extensively by others. 

What I will say is that you should go to https://www.regulations.gov and submit a comment to this proposal. You have until January 22nd, 2024 to do so.

Refer to Docket Number FINCEN–2023–0016 in the submission.

Yan (@skwp on twitter) put together a nice response template for this – it’s linked in the article version of this episode at BitcoinPodcast.net/words

Preston Pysh wrote a great response to this for Bitcoin Magazine titled Bitcoin = Anti-Totalitarianism, which I read out loud for the last Bitcoin Out Loud episode. 

Here’s a quick quote from it:

“Delving deeper into the facts revealed by Chainalysis, it becomes increasingly evident how Senator Warren’s letter dramatically skewed the situation. The detailed analysis zeroes in on a specific address that conducted over 1,300 deposits and 1,200 withdrawals within a mere 7.5 months, with a total inflow of roughly $82 million in cryptocurrency. However, a mere fraction of this amount, approximately $450,000, can be linked back to a wallet associated with terrorist activities (source). This represents a mere 0.3461% of the purported $130 million claimed in the letter—a staggering discrepancy that lays bare the deceptive nature of the narrative being pushed to the White House.”

Thank you to Preston and all the others who have used their voices and their platforms to shed light on the lies and hypocrisy of the legacy media, politicians, and regulators.

RAPID FIRE NEWS

 

ZOOM OUT

To wrap up today’s show, let’s zoom out and talk about truth.

In the fiat clown world, lies and deception are the norm, because the system itself is based on a lie: that you can print money out of thin air with zero consequences, and 2% inflation is good for the economy. 

Money is the base layer of everything. It’s how we save the value of our time and energy. It’s how we exchange value. It’s how we coordinate to make the most productive use of value. 

When the base layer is corrupted by lies, everything built on top of those lies are also a lie. You cannot build a tower of truth on a foundation of falsehoods. 

You see the lies from the base layer permeate and infect everything built on top of them. You see the lies in academia, where a PhD is used as a shield to protect its owner from criticism, and a sword to cut down any who would dare question the wisdom of the Annointed. 

You see the lies in politics, where politicians promise anything and everything to get themselves elected, only to deliver nothing and do exactly what the other guy would have done; maintain the status quo.

You see the lies used to convince the populace that we must fight war after war after war, sending the flower of our youth to die on the battlefield while the Military Industrial Complex rakes in the profits and politicians insider trade on the information. 

Money is our base layer, and our base layer is broken. When the money breaks, everything else breaks with it. 

Bitcoin represents a new monetary base layer built on truth. Bitcoin represents a solid foundation upon which we can build a better world. Bitcoin cannot be manipulated, it can’t be printed out of thin air–there will only ever be 21 million, and the rules are the same for everyone. Bitcoin is true, and Bitcoin is fair.

This is why those in power hate Bitcoin; because it holds a mirror up to the lie of the fiat world. It shatters the illusions they’ve spent so many years carefully building to keep you in the dark. It lays bare the corruption, grift, and deceit which run rampant in our world today.

Bitcoin is a challenge to the status quo because it is truthful in a world built on lies.

So keep speaking the truth. Keep fighting fallacies with facts. Keep helping people find the signal of truth through the noise of lies. 

All they can do is lie about Bitcoin.

All we must do is tell the truth.

Bitcoin is the truth, and the truth will set us free. 

*****

And that’s a wrap on this Bitcoin News Roundup episode of THE Bitcoin Podcast.

If you’re a Bitcoin-only company interested in sponsoring Another Fucking Bitcoin Podcast, head to bitcoinpodcast.net

You can find me on nostr by going to primal.net/walker

If you want to follow THE Bitcoin Podcast on Twitter, go to @titcoinpodcast and @WalkerAmerica. 

You can also find the video version of this podcast at youtube.com/@WalkerAmerica and @WalkerAmerica on Rumble. 

Bitcoin is scarce – there will only ever be 21 million–but Bitcoin podcasts are abundant. So thank you for spending your scarce time to listen to another fucking Bitcoin podcast. 

Until next time, stay free.

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