The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #155 (Bitcoin News) - Mining Excise Tax, Convertible Notes, CSW Loses

Episode Date: March 19, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. This week: -Biden going after Bitcoin miners?-More news on the Portal Wallet-The CBP rebrand to the Salvadoran Bitcoiners Podcast-MSTR and COIN notes -Ocean Mining & Lightning-CSW is not Satoshi?-CPI-Sheltering the homeless-Leave your car keys by the front door And much more From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord: ⁠https://discord.gg/ESRCZWpb A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. With their new kyc-free options, there's never been a quicker, simpler, more private and (most importantly) cheaper way to acquire private Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost. The show is meant for entertainment purposes only, and we hope you enjoy the program. Friends and enemies, welcome back to another episode of the Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast, the mighty CBP Media Network, bringing this to you as always. My name is Joey. In the other panel is my co-host Len.

Buddy, what's going on over there? How the heck are you? I'm okay, Joey. You know what? It's a good day. It's a good day to talk about bitcoin and bitcoin related stories and that's what we thought will we die notable other notable stories stories as well yeah but absolutely that um but it's going to be a fun day today but yeah everything is good cold outside and you know what's interesting joey i put something out yesterday tomorrow's garbage day i put something out yesterday. Tomorrow's garbage day. I put something out. I'm going to just vent right now because every two weeks we have big garbage

day. They call it over here in the region of Halton where we put out big stuff and it gets picked up. I put out a coffee table for free. I put it in Kijiji. Nobody wanted it. I put it outside. Nobody's taking it. It's pretty good coffee table. Glass top comes with ottomans. Can't believe nobody's taking it. It's going to go to the dump instead of somebody's house.

Why, man? It's too bad bad would you take a free cut like what are a lot of people like in need of coffee tables that you find to have no value in your home anymore like i would say that's an expected outcome for coffee table perhaps given the state of this coffee table it's in good condition there's no rips, cracks, tears, nothing. And maybe one could probably sell this down the line. But considering there's a lot of people that are hard up, right? Like if they're struggling to make ends meet, get something for free. Now, what can I say?

It's just too bad this is going to go to the dump instead of going. Well, I prefer it. I'd rather this go to good use than a dump, but Hey man, it's going to go there. And yeah. How are things over there, Joey? I'm great. I'm recovering from my cold here. You can probably hear him a lot better.

I haven't taken any meds in a few days. I gotta be honest with you, man. At the end of last week, Len, Thursday, Friday, I was considering going to the doctor thinking to myself, like, this is not a cold, something is going on here. Like I I'm never sick for this long. And when I do get sick, you know, for that long, usually it's kind of waning after a week or so I was coming, I was going on two and a half weeks with that illness. Uh, almost unbelievable for someone, you know, like, I don't want to say someone like like me but like i i still think of myself as 25 i'm 36 but in pretty good health in good shape and uh bit weird also my wife never got sick i got sick uh pretty good and my wife did and i was talking to a few of the guys on my football

team i got a couple of you know other guys who were in pretty good shape around my age a cop among them saying like he had it for about a month a month ago and it still bugs him he's still getting the cough still getting the sniffle still getting all that stuff so i was lucky i had a little bit of an episode like stomach flu ish it felt like on the weekend and i thought to myself like this can't still be the same thing but uh then sunday yesterday basically felt okay all of a sudden and then uh yesterday or today felt great too i just want to give a shout out to um my beer league team who stuck with me while i was figuring out the quarterback position last week finally saturday i threw five touchdowns no picks absolutely

throwing ropes all over the field so i'm happy about that it's been a good couple of days clip when he did the it was i saw it this past week i don't know who posted but it was a clip of dan marino throwing a football at this moving target that must have been 30, 40, 50 yards downfield. Just drilling it. And it was just a single throw he did, and he almost got the bullseye. And the way it was framed,

it must have been the 70s sports Twitter account. The way he framed it, he said, this guy threw for 5,000 yards in 1985, I think it was. If you adjust it for inflation today, that's about 5,000 yards in 1985. I think it was, if you adjusted for inflation today, that's about 55,000 yards. He was throwing to off duty security yards in, in a time where, you know, they were running for three yards,

30 times. No, but it was different. It was, it was a run first type league, right? Oh, big time.

Big time. Yeah. So it was just a different type. People don't realize then how long the run first stuff went for. even in the early 2000s i'm a big clinton portis fan and i remember you know he had two really good seasons in denver his first two years he carried for 1500 yards his first two years in the league i think he's the only back ever to do that uh in his first two seasons and he went to the skins which is a team i follow the year after in a trade for all pro cornerback

Champ Bailey. The Redskins ran him into the ground. I think he carried it 350 times as a 23-year-old back. Can you imagine doing that to a running back now? You never see guys taking more than 250 totes in a season. Certainly, they're not just running into 1,200 pounds of offensive and defensive line. They're usually running to the outside now sweeps and short toss plays short pass like screenplays stuff like that it's a completely different game people think it ended in the 70s and 80s it was going to like 2007 probably well maybe even longer than that defense are they now smaller and more athletic or are they oh yeah there's hardly ever any safeties above like 220. I think Cameron Chancellor, Cam Chancellor for the Seahawks, probably the last really notable roaming big safety.

So there's no Steve Atwater's out there just coming in and just fucking plowing into somebody. So, yeah, it's a different game, right? It's a totally different game. But look at the equipment. And every time I see – I don't watch NFL at all. It's been maybe 15 20 years since i've watched 15 years and i look at if i see any picture it shows my timeline it's incredible

how small the equipment is in comparison to yesterday like you look at mike allstott for instance beast by the way he's a very big guy but his equipment was also big too right just made up a period of neck rolls we got to bring neck rolls back i need yeah yeah brian cox let's bring him back with that we got to get those back uh so that's one shout out the other shout out madex finally i got my new madex hoodies i'm gonna get up and show you the back because the back is really the coolest shit i don't know if you guys i'll probably keep it on the camera it's hard to see it but yeah we could get a glimpse of it pretty soon i've been a huge huge fan of his stuff and uh so i bought two of these hoodies i'm glad to support an artist like him and that man

like him let's not overlook and of course yeah mark on the other side speaking of bomb throw let's get to the sponsors easy dns best place for you to host your content the friendly neighborhood registrars marco he says he's on vacation now. He is still talking to me and Len about how to improve his business. And you may see something new from him coming in the not too distant future. We're still working on it, still in the lab, okay? But you got to know that no matter where Mark is on the planet, he's thinking of you. He's thinking of the business and he's thinking of how you can make things easier for you. We've been using EasyDNS to do our website, thecanadianbitcoiners.com for some time now. And it's been great. I got to tell you, we post stuff there. We write stuff there. Whenever I get itchy fingers, I go there and write some stuff that nobody reads and we

post it. And Mark also has a lot of other stuff going on. If you want to do virtual private server stuff, VPS stuff, for example, Bitcoin nodes, node list implementations, Nostra relays, BTC pay servers, whatever. You got a little shop, you want to sell hoodies? Mark will help you. He'll help you take Bitcoin. Mark's been taking Bitcoin for his services for close to 11 years now, I think, right? Is that the number? 2012 or 2013, I think he said, right?

It wouldn't be much longer than that, given the fact that Bitcoin's only been up for 20 years. He's been doing it for a long time. If you want to start doing it, he can help you do it. And on top of that, it's cheap. So you get the best product, one of the lowest do it and on top of that it's cheap so you get the best product one of the lowest prices and you get the added bonus working with mark you can't beat that trust me we know go to the website easy dns.com cbp media is the code you get 50 off your first round of buys or just tell him we sent you or message him on twitter

and uh let him know he loves getting messages on twitter i'm sure from people he doesn't know thanks to the show so keep doing it keep doing a message from somebody hey i heard of you from the canadian bitcoiners podcast yeah well we do also have bull bitcoin sponsoring us and look at the price of bitcoin i can see it now because it's showing on my block clock 67 700 and change might be a good time to buy it might be a good time to sell depending on how you look at it bull bitcoin has you covered depending on which way you want to lean but not just on chain look at the fees they're slowly creeping up right now we're looking at the 30 sats per v byte area it's still kind of low but it will be creeping up given what's going on next month and so they also give you the option where you could buy with lightning so with buying your

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No questions asked. We love to see it. Let's do some housekeeping. I'm going to just go to our calendar here to let people know what we have going on. Because I do like telling people what interviews and stuff we have coming up. It's only fair since you guys keep coming back every week on wednesday i have the gentleman he's the engineer behind and the brains behind the bidax gosh i forget his name i'm gonna try to pull it right now scott yeah i i don't know what his real name is i think i could check it out

on the invite but either way it's scott 9000 s-k-o-t 9000 on twitter and he is the instigator of the bidax bitcoin asic miner talked about this bidax last week i think it was or two weeks yeah anyways a lot of people hadn't they liked it we'll get to dive deep into this and if you have any questions to do specifically that he's the man to ask and you can send it through us we'll be happy to ask for you yeah very excited to hear that podcast i still do want to bid x i want to get one from them maybe he'll just give us one for free i don't know you can ask him scott please hi my garcia coming on the week after that i think i'll sit in for that one or do it myself unless you really want to do it i'm not really up on the el salvador stuff but i do want to talk to him about a few things i've

heard over the last little while terrys kulik on the 20 on the 3rd of april who is that talk to me about this person it's a mining guy boomer he's the one who recommended him sunny side mining i think right is that the uh yeah i think so so if boom recommends to me that's good enough it's good as gold boomer you're not in a chat unfortunately hopefully you'll be listening or watching this later on i just uh salutations to you buddy hope you're not in a chat. Unfortunately, hopefully you'll be listening or watching this later on. I just, uh, salutations to you, buddy. Hope you're hopefully everything's okay because normally you're in a chat.

Hopefully there's nothing wrong. Or maybe you haven't beat up today. I don't know. Either way on a date, a date. Maybe he does like to go on the date. Sometimes, uh, he did send us a message of one time he was going on a date and he said,

either we go to the range or we watch CBP at seven o'clock. Gotta love that. We're on, we're on dates with people then. How's that? That's a good date. If my wife finds out that we're on dates with people then how's that that's a good date if my wife finds out i'm going on dates with other people and not with her she might be upset there's a reason why i gotta say one thing too i didn't say at the very beginning the new league in nhl 94 i finished tied for first hey guys in the quarterfinals i'm now in

the semifinals i'm one win away oh well best of seven if i win this series then i'm gonna make it into i got a free draw into the king of 94 i don't have to pay my way so yeah man i'm gonna just go go against the seed number four and then they'll they're playing the black hawks i beat them before i should beat them again i'm hyped on that i'm hyped so we got taraurus on the third. Then we got a couple of in-persons. I'm going to be talking to, actually not in person. Ryan McLeod is going to come on the 9th of April, Nuclear Bitcoiner.

The 16th, Plate Liquor is going to come to my house. We'll do that in person. The 23rd, the Karadzos will come to my house for an in-person interview. I'm going there this Wednesday. You're also going there this Wednesday. So keep an eye out for that, everybody. Lots of interviews. And then, Len, today I booked April 30th. Did you see David Bailey and Mark Goodwin coming to the CBP for a power hour, April 30th?

Yeah. Hang on, hang on. Strap in. Strap in. It's a Tuesday. It's a Tuesday. Joey, I may just hop in if you don't mind. Definitely if I'm free. The weather starts to mind. I have, if I definitely,

if I'm free, you know, the weather starts to get warmer over there. So I tend to be less free, but I may make a point April 30th, whatever time it is. I don't give a shit. If it's even during work time,

I'll take that, take that time off. I got some vacation time that I have earned. I may jump in because I have some questions I may want to ask. And I like to ask, sometimes you ask the horse's head. Other times you have to ask the horse's ass. And we'll just decide which one it is I'll be asking.

I plan on keeping it civil with Dave and Mark. I like Dave and Mark. I know you disagree with a lot of stuff they do. I think I've given them the benefit of the doubt over the years. I don't necessarily love ordinals. Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this before. But I do want to get their opinion on a lot of things. And especially if I think about some of the stuff that's going on in the cbdc world

now um they're pretty good on their coverage of cbdcs and the lines between certain people of note and eventual cbdc regimes so i'm looking forward to talking to them i know i mean you have some questions i think on the side of the magazine which is good too i mean those are important questions as well for everybody but i got many questions that need to be asked i'd love to know what their answers are to that and maybe there could be some dialogue it's so wide is that it's the direction they're going and it's a good chance good chance to ask and uh find out why yeah so yeah i mean april 30 yeah i may jump on again it's a fuck it's that's your show too i mean you're more than welcome as you know um so yeah let's uh let's hop into the stories

we gotta start with the bitcoin stories here where are we going to uh i have one boost the boost yeah yeah sure there's a problem with the boost i can't get them all for whatever reason i i could check normally i could check them through the web and i can't it's giving me an error then i alternatively i could check with my phone i't. It's giving me an error. Then, alternatively, I could check with my phone. I can't. It's giving me an error. I only get one boost that I see here. We got many, many boosts.

I'm sorry if you sent in a boost. This is a technical issue. You've been giving people so much shit about not streaming and boosting instead, and now you can't read them. Well, anyways, so we have Hodler's Official boosted us 5,277 sats. I don't know what's the significance of that but he says teams are filling up for the canadian bitcoin conferences canada versus us bitcoiners hockey game yeah sign up now if you want to play will be a fun kickoff event for all with games prizes

and more check out hodler's official on twitter for more info and he says love the pod thanks boys i like cory a lot i i um i was talking a bit in the dms because i think brandon from green candle is going to do play by play for that i might actually also do play by play i haven't been on skates in a long time i know not a good canadian but if i get some ice skate oh man that's even worse if i can get some ice time before uh the the, I might try and play. I used to play pretty decent hockey. Like I was always, as my dad used to say, you were the best player in the sort of B tier of players.

So whatever, that's like the best compliment you can get, I think, from someone who's watched you play hockey. Anyway, so I'm looking forward to that. Okay, Bitcoin stories. Where do you want to start to start yeah we'll talk with the 2025 budget and i know that this is like why are we talking about this for bitcoin related stories because there's some nuggets in there that could impact bitcoin mining on u.s soil as well as a few other items in there too and first off there's a tax there's a tax that's being bantied around. It's going to be a tax equal to 30% of the cost of electricity used in digital asset mining, a.k.a. Bitcoin mining.

So there will be a 30% tax on the cost of electricity used. That's the idea. And this new tax, they're saying, is going to rake in about $10 billion in 2025. And another notable item in the documents here is an item that's going to update wash trading rules. Bless you, Joey. Thank you. So it's going to be updating wash trading rules. And they're going to try to stop people

from selling something at a loss and buying it back immediately afterwards. So this is really taking aim, I think at the NFT market. And they say that this is going to create an additional $1 billion in taxes. Now on the surface, I look at this seems like a lot of money $1 billion that they're going to be getting from NFT taxes, maybe overstating this whole idea. But what the heck do I know? Again, I'm not into this marketplace. I don't know how much money is being washed in there. So maybe they're right. Maybe 1 billion is accurate, but I think it's rather high. Anyways, so I can't speak too much about the

wash trading stuff. I don't, I'm not sure how impactful that will be to Bitcoiners as a whole. I think it's going to be minimal at best. But the mining tax is something of note that we should definitely be looking at because we can look at this through the lens of a bitcoin miner if theoretically if you had you're a bitcoin miner you had the opportunity to set up shop somewhere anywhere and based on track record what country or countries would you prefer to do business in u.s canada maybe a few others for me why are they the top of my list stability political and economic stability that comes along with these countries so there's far far worse places in this world to do business think about setting up shop and say venezuela you don't know what's going to

happen next year heck you probably don't even know what's gonna happen next month but in canada united states you have a pretty good idea if you set something up the government's not going to take it from you so that's why there's stability here and also as a here in canada and the united states but what's the result of all this this idea about putting a tax on miners because as miners become less profitable in the u.s they're less likely going to want to expand any further. Maybe they'll start looking elsewhere to provide cheaper power, but there may be the hidden cost, namely stability, which I referenced. But I guess one could say, is this an attack on Bitcoin? Perhaps maybe an indirect attack. But we also need to look at this through the eyes of the Treasury Department.

They need to squeeze everything out of this. There's so much money that they have to get. So through taxation, they have to somehow fund all the things they're trying to fund. So they're trying to get as much revenue as possible. So this lemon is going to be squeezed as much as possible. And Bitcoin mining, it's a low-hanging fruit, right? Like, let's be honest. How much is it going to impact the general population as a whole?

Probably minimal. So the question remains, I mean, come on. It depends. It depends how you frame it. Anyway, what's the question? Tell me what the question is. So if they're going to tax Bitcoin miners that generate their own electricities, their own stranded electricity, are they going to tax them as well? Like it's, I can understand if they're plugging into the grid, but if they're generating electricity from a stranded source of energy, are they going to be taxed as well?

Are they going to be impacted by a 30% tax for electricity consumed? If so, why? And if so, if they do that, that could also then have a negative impact on the environment because methane will then continue to be either flared or vented i don't think it's vented very much these days but it's most likely it's flared but combusting it to generate electricity has a positive impact on the environment it's arguably far better than just flaring it so if you're going to be stopping

people from combusting it then well there you go there you go. There's a negative impact of this. Now, even further, is Canada going to do the same thing? If the United States imposes this type of nationwide taxation on Bitcoin miners, why wouldn't Canada do the same? Or better yet, will these jurisdictions even ask Bitcoin miners to potentially pay taxes in Bitcoin? This is something you suggested a while back, Joey. I'm not sure if you remember, but this might be a way for the governments to accumulate Bitcoin rather than seizing it.

This is what they could just slowly start accumulating a small amount of Bitcoin doing this way. I don't think it's possible, but I look at this. It does seem like an indirect attack on Bitcoin. But why would they just do it on Bitcoin miners? There's so many under industries out there that are energy intensive. Are they taxing dryers, the manufacturers of dryers or the dryers, how much electricity they use? No, this is all political. And they're all they're just focusing their energy on something, like I say, is a low hanging fruit,

they could do it, they have every right to do it. That's fine. But these businesses, they'll just set up shop potentially somewhere else. There could be a cost for this, not just the cost of few jobs, but as I mentioned, an environmental cost here. If you're not going to be combusting this methane, well, let's continue to flare it. Okay. Let's talk about this excise tax on miners first. I just want to read you something from the Democrats-budget.house.gov, okay? In terms of the 2025 budget and why they're implementing these taxes. There's other taxes too, by the way.

There's taxes on buybacks. They want to reduce write-offs for people who are compensated more than a million dollars per year, stuff like this. So there's a lot of avenues through which they're trying to increase tax revenue. Whether that matters or not, I don't know. Honestly, we've talked before about how tax receipts don't come close to covering the budget, obviously, anymore, and also really don't make a dent in things like entitlements or road maintenance or education, all this stuff. Here's the text. Here's a quote. These proposals are part of a broader effort to raise revenue in a responsible way that maintains economic growth while allowing for policies to support families, all while reducing the deficit.

Is any of that true? No, because that $10 billion will be spent within a matter of seconds. So it's not going to be directed specifically for feeding or helping out the poor. It's going to be put in a general coffers and then spent in whatever they want to spend it on. Right. So we have to look at that and think right away that there's obviously some spin here. In terms of framing the excise tax on miners, look, the Bitcoin network is resilient now. It's not downable vis-a-vis an excise tax. And there's too many other nation states that will take those miners on because they bring

with them economic growth and they bring with them a lot of brainpower. Bitcoiners are a smart group. I'm a little biased in that opinion, of course, but I think it's fair to say that we're pretty bright and we've done a lot of things right over the last seven or eight years. So I think that that's another sort of benefit for countries who are willing to do the opposite of what the US is proposing here with the tax. The other piece of framing we have to remember, and we talked about this a little while ago, maybe two or three weeks, so it should be fresh in people's minds. We revisited the White House's directive on crypto mining and crypto assets from, I think, 2021, when Elizabeth Warren and the energy, what

does the EIA stand for? Something energy, something agency asked miners in that survey, which was deemed illegal by the courts or vexatious by the courts. I think maybe even in some cases, I don't know what the exact terminology was, but when we talk about why this is an attack on Bitcoin, direct or otherwise, look at that framing. They want to turf mining and crypto asset development in the United States. I mean, period.

End of story there. There's no doubt about that. There's no gray area, nothing like that. We know this to be true. It's right in the text that they've released over the years. So yeah, this is an attack on mining. The question then is always one of what's going to happen afterward. And I mentioned network resilience, but when it comes to stuff like environmental action, the places that mining would go are almost in all cases worse in terms of environmental regulations than the US or Canada or European nations. The first world, in the sort of strictest modern day definition of the term, although I will admit that that's a liquid definition these days.

These countries all have really tight rags on what you can do in terms of mining, in the traditional sense, in terms of energy expenditure, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, carbon pricing, things like that. Now, you may agree or disagree with those policies, but they do force selective emissions in almost all cases, right? You can't just pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere if you're one of these big companies. Same way if you're a miner, you can't do it. They want to tax that fine. The problem I have on top of this whole other countries are worse is miners, like you mentioned, are just using energy the same as anybody else. This is a targeted tax on people who choose to use energy for Bitcoin mining. I've not seen a tax on people who

build these goon caves and spend all day playing the skin flute or whatever they do in their basements. I've not seen any taxes on people who play video games too much. If I look at the rig we use for CBP video rendering, that machine's got to take a lot of power. The lights in here take power. All these different things take energy and they're not being taxed, not being attacked. You mentioned dryers. I think Pierre Rochard and others have talked about things like Christmas lights. Christmas light, quote unquote, emissions, energy use, are very high in the modern world. And so for that month or six weeks, or in my case, four months, the Christmas lights are up, you're using a lot of power. And that power is the same power that crypto miners want to use. At the end of the day, this is a question of, do I have the

freedom to choose what I use my energy for? And the only reason you wouldn't is if the energy use was deemed to be illegal. And I have to think, Glenn, that this is one step towards making this whole thing illegal in the eyes of the law, don't you? It seems like this is the natural next step here because it's very difficult to make the case, especially in the United States where law does rule the day more often than not. It's very difficult to make the case that you just don't like something someone's doing with their power and so they can't do it. If they're paying, they're paying. But this is sort of a punitive attempt to disincentivize people from spending energy on something that maybe threatens the hegemony of the dollar, maybe threatens the stock market, maybe threatens the whatever, pick your lever of power that the United States has using the dollar.

I think it's fair to say that this is the first step toward it becoming illegal. And people should be paying attention to this stuff. That's why guys like Dennis Porter get a lot of shit. And I've given him a little bit of shit on the show before. And even when he was on, I asked him, why do you think it's a good idea to spend your time? This has become your life's work now. This Toshi Action Fund who engages with lawmakers, this has become your life's work to do this stuff. Brian Morgenstern from Riot, who I do want to have on the show at some point. You've made a career of engaging with political entities that don't really care what you think about whether or not you should be allowed to use the power because at the end of the day, they just want to make it illegal. As much shit as I've given them, now it's important

that even if they're not going to win the battle in the legislature, they need to win it in the court of public opinion and they need to win it in the court of law when the time comes. And as much as the judiciary is supposed to be independent from all these other arms of government and all these other facets of life, I don't think there's any way, shape or form that, you know, public opinion doesn't help shape what the expected outcomes are in these situations. And so I'm grateful for the work they're doing. I hope they continue doing it. And it's important with stuff like this going on that the work continues in earnest. So, you know, all that said, do you care about this from like a hashrate point of view? I don't. Do you care about it from a price point of view? Maybe short term. But for me, it's like, you know, other countries have tried this and it didn't do anything to the network. I realized the United States is maybe the biggest fish in the pond, but it just doesn't, it doesn't worry me long term, short, medium term. I mean, a bit, but, you know, this is, I think this still only ends one way for fiat currencies and for Bitcoin.

Agreed. And in terms of is this going to impact Bitcoin at all? Yeah, maybe if anything short or medium term, and I don't even think it is going to impact it at all at that point. They'd have to do something more drastic than this to really impact Bitcoin on any scale, short, medium, or long-term. But long-term, I don't think there's any way that they could stop it. No.

Before you continue, one other thing I should have mentioned, Narwhal brought up in the chat, data centers are never included in this either. And that, I think, another set of worries here, and Nick Carter's talked about this among other people, is this a wedge to regulate AI use at some point you know you don't want everyone having access to the strongest or most potent ai tools and so you say any ai is also excise tax you know blah blah

blah it's a i don't think it's a sane activity now or whatever i don't know i don't think it's that it's gonna go that bad but maybe i'm wrong maybe i am wrong i don't think it's it's going to be that bad now in terms of is this the first step to potentially banning bitcoin i don't think they'll ever get to the point just not banning bitcoin just mining just mining bitcoin bitcoin is done now it's not doable i don't think they'll ban bitcoin mining i think they could disincentivize bitcoin mining by putting on as many taxes as they want maybe 100 maybe 200 they can put whatever they want just to make it so hard to do business here but by doing that they're saying look you can still set up shop you can still do it it's just more difficult more challenging to make ends meet so i don't think they'll ever ban it it just doesn't make sense because like

like you said it's just there's other industries other things that just take up so much more energy or equal amount of energy like christmas lights as you said christmas lights now it does make some people feel good but in terms of productivity it delivers zilch to the overall economy absolutely nothing bitcoin mining at least there is something you get out of it you know you every 10 minutes there's the buck war that comes along with it and least there is something you get out of it. You know, you every 10 minutes, there's the Bach war that comes along with it. And so there's something that you could say Bitcoin mining at least can generate money. Christmas lights, hell no. So I don't know, I think this is just funny the way they're framing this. And in terms of galvanizing support, and having the court of public opinion, bitcoin miners i don't

think you'll ever get to the point where you have a lot of people saying you know the majority of people saying yeah let's you know this is wrong we should turn this around is there's so few bitcoiners out there and there's even fewer bitcoin miners out there there's other things people have other challenges people are dealing with and something like this if you propose them would you rather us tackle inflation lower that lower your gas bills lower your food cost or do you want us to deal with taxing these guys which will help lower and inflate they'll say fucking go ahead and do that they don't give a shit because there's stuff that's in front of them that they see that's impacting their lives immediately that they want to have fixed right away than just dealing with it so this is something that's may have to do it have to be dealt with in the courts but i don't

even know if this is even something that could be dealt with in the courts is there anything illegal or wrong about this it's not like that volunteer volunteer telling them to submit information which apparently that was wrong because they didn't go through all the processes first and i think they're going to go ahead and still do that they're going to dot their i's and cross their t's and still do that so they're going to but anyways it just it just seems very it seems fucked up i don't think there's any way to stop what's going on they want to do it that's great they could do it but there may be a change in administration that could be the only thing that can stop this we're gonna see um because they're

almost certainly is going to be a change in administration and you know whether it's just a uh oh my god we gotta get bought that's in rumble by the way okay um it's on twitch yeah the um the thing i would say the thing i would say is that there's going to be a change in administration either vis-a-vis a vote in november soon enough via attrition. All these old people are going to eventually retire and die. In the next 10 years or so, they'll become ineffective and probably be voted out or removed by the party. So it's a shame it comes to this, honestly. That's the thing I get down about, that these politicians, they have such a chance to be sort of on the leading edge of innovation when it comes to stuff like Bitcoin.

And instead, they choose to hold on to power any way they can and put punitive taxes on stuff. Elizabeth Warren tweets out often about Bitcoin mining now and Bitcoin energy use and does these sort of choreographed tangos with different representatives from big banking about Bitcoin and crypto. And it's just, it's, it's, you know, so theatrical, but not, it's not sensible to do this. It sort of demonstrates that they've not done the work on how resilient the network is and not looked at the other times where someone has tried to remove Bitcoin from existence vis-a-vis disincentives or legal

action or whatever, it just doesn't work. If it didn't work three years ago, it's not going to work now. And if it doesn't work now, you have to think about, well, how am I going to embrace this? How am I going to leverage this to my benefit? That's the natural next step. Not we have to crack down more and more and more. Although, again, I feel like I say this every week, the sovereign individual predicts exactly this, that the taxes and incentives will come hard and fast in ways that a common knowledge would almost disallow. But we're getting closer and closer to that. So let's keep an eye on this. It's the usual suspects here. I don't think it's going to impact anything. Yeah.

What are we going to do until it comes into play, right? If it comes into play, then yes. If it doesn't, then we wasted 15 minutes talking about nothing. Well, Bitcoin mining is my opinion that is going to be something that's going to be adopted by oil and natural gas companies and also energy producers that have excess energy so if you set up a hydroelectric dam and you're you have x amount of excess electricity that you're generating it makes sense like they're doing in ethiopia for

instance so those are the ones that are going to be doing it so you could kind of understand what countries are going to be heavily involved moving forward. And if they're not going to be doing it in Canada or the United States, they'll move over to the Middle East. They'll move over to Russia, where there's an abundance of energy. And instead of flaring or venting some of the methane they have over there or stranded sources of energy, other stranded sources of energy, monetize it. It only makes sense. If you're a company that owns it, if you can monetize something that's not being monetized,

totally makes sense. Or a country, the same thing. So that's where it's going to be moving towards, oil and natural. They're going to be the next big one before we get to the nuclear, the SMRs. That's going to be the last thing on the list that's going to impact Bitcoin miners.

But that's my guess. Let's move on. Portal. We talked about Portal Wallet just last week. And it's the device that uses the NFC to talk to your phone for signing transactions. And one thing I overlooked, I just wanted to bring it up this week, and one listener who would like to remain anonymous clued me in on this one is that the portal device, the portal wallet, does not have a secure element associated with it.

So that means that if the device ends up in the hands of someone else, it's easier to break into it without the secure element. It also makes it easier to tamper with so that's another negative and even the guy behind the project wrote that the security model of this should be comparable to a trezor with a strong passphrase and we haven't talked very fondly of trezor in the past so that's one way to put it yeah we trashed it, but I admit. So it's definitely a device to consider avoiding given everything that's been said here because there are better options with dealing with your on-chain transactions.

And that's what essentially this is for dealing with on-chain transactions. I would always suggest use a cold card. It's maybe a little more challenging to use initially, but once you understand and get the hang of it, it's a breeze and it's far safer as long as you set it up safely so um just wanted to say that the portal thing and thank you to that you to that listener to point out that this does not use a secure element and that's a strike against it do you okay so i tweeted this last week and i thought

i would get a few more responses but i i didn. Someone's got to explain to me why we're moving toward convenience and mobile phone partnerships in hardware wallets that presumably have some significant amount of your cold storage Bitcoin on them. Shouldn't it be actually getting harder to access your cold storage Bitcoin as time goes on? As as the security as the security needs for bitcoiners increase shouldn't these wallets actually be moving more toward cold card and further from stuff like portal and what is blocks product called i forget um the pedal whatever what's it called i forget i know what you're talking about whatever it is whatever it is doesn't matter the block wallet trezor ledger all these things you know you can say what you're talking about. Whatever it is. It doesn't matter. The Block Wallet, Trezor,

Ledger, all these things. You can say what you want about Coldcard, but even Coldcard, I think once you get the hang of it, in my opinion, it's pretty easy to use. Maybe too easy. There's no need for you to have a wallet, a hardware signing device, to be

specific here. A signing device is what we're talking about. There's no need. Yeah, Jade Narwhal Tacos is saying in the chat too. Exactly. Blockstream's Jade is another good example. You know, these wallets that are like specifically designed to work with your mobile device. I don't get this. I don't understand why we're going in this direction.

I realize that there's something to be said about like, you know, casting a wide net for people who don't know how to use a cold card or don't want to do cold storage in a difficult manner or don't want to spin up their own Sparrow wallet, whatever. They don't want to do that stuff. Fine. I get that. But as the price of Bitcoin increases, what you really want is something that's really hard and very rarely accessed in terms of security. And none of these things are going that direction. I would honestly prefer that CoinKite produce a cold card like, you know, a signing device and a matching piece of like dedicated hardware that you would store somewhere else in your home or keep in your home somewhere.

That's also very difficult to access that also has a secure element, something even harder to access than a laptop, for example. I would prefer that to going the other direction and saying, yeah, this is blah, blah, blah. What you're looking at here is just the NFC, tap it, no secure element. Or Jack's thing is, I think, even storing your password or your seed phrase, whatever, in the cloud. To me, it doesn't make a lot of sense. The companies that are the longest

on Bitcoin price seem to me to be the shortest on long-term security. How is that possible? We're headed in the wrong direction here, I think. Are we not? If you're going to use your mobile phone, just use a Lightning wallet. That's really the answer. Use Moon or Wallet

of Satoshi, I guess, until recently if you're in America. But that's where- It's custodial. Yeah. But Len, the point is that you would use a custodial Lightning wallet with 300 bucks on your phone and not worry about it. Anything else that's tied to your device that has all your stash on it or some significant part of your stash on it, why would you use it? The security model doesn't match the convenience, doesn't match the size of your corn stash. It doesn't align. And yet we just keep on going this direction of convenience. I personally don't understand this.

Yeah, I don't get it at all. I'm not sure why they're doing this. I don't know who the market is for this other than new participants. And to be honest with you, there's better options for new participants. Blue wallet's a better option than any of this stuff. Green wallet's a better option than any of this stuff. Just if you're going to do it on your phone, do it on your phone. The NFC thing is just really a novelty at that point, right? You're just carrying around this other thing in your pocket or on your key chain because you have to have it on you.

If you want to use the wallet anyway, it's on your phone. So what, like, this is why I don't understand, like, what are we talking about here? This,

none of this stuff makes sense. It does not align. I am so far away from agreeing with this. It's, you know, it's really, it's really baffling to me that these guys are going this direction. Yeah,

it definitely is. And when I initially were talking about last week, I was thinking that maybe this is going to be something that's going to be used on the go for spending your your bitcoin for everyday purchases but it doesn't make sense i was wrong in my assessment because that's using on chain and it's too slow and it just you're right lightning is would be at least right now i know there's scaling issues with lightning but right now lightning is the best option for spending on a day-to-day basis just for, and I just want to say about lightning, a better option,

I know it's more challenging to set this up, but if you set up your own lightning node, if you have a Bitcoin node, setting up a lightning node is actually not that hard to do. You're 90% of the way there. And then if you use Zeus on your phone to connect through tor to your lightning

node that's the best because you have custody of your bitcoin and so it may be you know the 300 that you have on it but it's still your 300 you have control over it yeah you could for sure yeah you're right you're right that's that's what i just like from like the hardware side it doesn't make sense you know this is for people like like freddy krueger whatever the guy's name yeah i don't know what he's a couple you know testing some loan products not only testing the loan like talk about somebody that just does not get it he was also mentioning that one of the issues with bitcoin is like a cold card for instance is you could get sim swapped and lose your bitcoin like i don't understand how like the connection between getting sim swapped and losing

your bitcoin leaving leaving your keys on the cloud is not the way to do things nobody's going to be doing that it's not just not the way to do things so this guy is fucking totally lost i don't want to talk about him too much but man oh man he's gotten so much press and he doesn't deserve a fucking ounce of it thinking eth is the fucking biggest uh biggest thing that's going to impact bitcoin or the biggest threat to bitcoin get the fuck out of here i don't get it whatever what's next what else you got el salvador let's talk about some developments going on over there because el salvador is trying to attract foreign investment into the country. And their Congress passed a vote to reform tax laws. And they've moved to eliminate income tax on international investment and money transfers.

Previously, the tax was 30%. And a new tax on those two things are going to be zero. So it's going to be a 0% tax on international investment and money transfers. And given the way crime has been dealt with in El Salvador, and insecurity has improved drastically, but this is at least from my vantage point. It may not be the reality, but from my vantage point, it shows things are getting much, much better over over there this makes it that the improved security plus the removal of the taxes on what i've

mentioned makes it more attractive for businesses to enter and to set up shop in el salvador so i like that and maybe we could be the canadian salvadorian podcast sorry the salvador salvadorian bitcoin podcast because it's time to relocate their joy and take advantage of the 0% income tax. But not only that, did Team Bukhali do that? Team Bukhali did something else. They also mentioned that they had $400 million in their Bitcoin transaction, in their Bitcoin balance. Sorry, that's what 57... One of their wallet account.

One of their wallets had that, yeah. It's one of them. And it's a little bit less than 5,700. We'll call it 5,700 BTC it's very very close to that they've moved that to a cold wallet in a physical vault within their country now initially looking at that made me wonder how were they storing their bitcoin up until that point according to arkham research or arkham intelligence sorry they it's mentioned that the wallet where the wallet address where this came from, belong to Bitfinex. So it looks like Bitfinex was costing their Bitcoin up until now. One of the things I always wondered is that if you're using another outside entity to custody of Bitcoin is potential rug pull it that could happen. I think the rug pull would be even greater if the company that was holding onto Bitcoin was in the United States, like a Coinbase.

Let's be honest, you know, Bukili hasn't made a lot of friends over there. But Bitfinex, I took a look, they're actually based in Taipei, Taiwan. So there is connections to the United States, but at least it's not the United States. So with respect of the number of Bitcoin they moved, and, you know, this is based off the transaction information that Bukele provided in his tweet, they've accumulated far more Bitcoin than initially thought. The number of Bitcoin that El Salvador had was thought to have up until now was somewhere in the vicinity of 3000 Bitcoin. This number far exceeds that number. Plus they have other Bitcoin.

And so how did they get this Bitcoin? Because they can only buy so much given how much, how much dry powder they have, right? They're selling citizenship or residency through Bitcoin. They're mining Bitcoin. There's other endeavors too, that they're using to accumulate Bitcoin.

They're very resourceful to accumulate thousands upon thousands of Bitcoin that they previously thought to have had way more than that. I like this. I like what's going on here. And the fact now they're going to be holding this within their country. This is the way to go. If you're going to have Bitcoin, don't let somebody else take ownership of it don't let somebody else custody make sure it's done within your own house you control the keys you control the bitcoin and man they're accumulating a crap load joy it's i honestly it's time we the salvador bitcoin podcast let's fucking move over there let's do it enough with the cbp stuff sbp all the way so here's a fun list for you do you know what the list of countries looks like that have the lowest income taxes on foreign investment uh around the world you know what

that list looks like i can't even fathom what it would be bali islands cayman islands okay okay yeah you know what they're famous for? United Arab Emirates, 0%. Bermuda, Bahrain, St. Kitts and Nevis, Andorra, Montenegro, Hungary, and Macedonia. I don't know how many people are going to Macedonia, but some of those countries, you recognize those because they've become, over the last little while,

places where people want to park their money, want to grow their wealth, and want to shelter from what they consider to be oppressive tax regimes. El Salvador is making the right move here. You can agree or disagree with a lot of the stuff Bukele does when it comes to gang violence and Bitcoin and all this stuff. But this is how you build an economy that's based on foreign investment as of way to bootstrap growth. You take away the taxes on foreign investment. This is a great opportunity for people who have faith in this guy and his ruling style, and they want to be a part of what he's doing over there. And even better if you have a Bitcoin slant, because he'll help you with that too. This is good stuff, man. It's great

to see that these countries like El Salvador and hopefully some others are starting to really take seriously not only Bitcoin as a form of wealth preservation and this kind of digital gold slash means of exchange slash all these things. That's good. But then when you add to it that they're taking other action to bring in not only intellectual firepower, but resources in this fashion, you can't beat this, man. This is really, really strong. And I ate a lot of crow on my prediction that El Salvador would crash and burn with the whole Bitcoin thing.

They did anything but. And I look forward to seeing the pieces from the IMF talking about how it's actually not a good idea to lower taxes on foreign investment. And this is going to be bad for El Salvador long-term. Those will probably come out in the next three, four weeks if I had to guess. And they'll be eating crow just like I was a few months back over my prediction. So I'm happy to see this, man. I wish the best for those people. I've seen so much in the last few weeks. I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after watching Julian's recent documentary on Costa Rica on Bitcoin Beach and all this stuff in El Salvador. These are people who just want a fair shake and I think haven't gotten it thanks to the global monetary regime, let's call it. Those are kind words. I think they're close to getting it now or a lot closer to getting it now, that fair shake, than they were before that. And Bitcoin is a huge part of that.

And Buckele is a big part of it. And I think policies like this are going to be a big part of it, too. It's great to see. How long before they, I'm talking about El Salvador, starts lending out wealth to countries of lesser means? They're accumulating their own, right? It's going to be a matter of time before they out imf the imf and started issuing the salvadoran um drawing rights the sdrs to lesser countries versus the special drawing rights salvadorian drawing rights wow gee why not print the shirts that's great great. Do it. Let's do it. Craig Wright. Let's talk about him.

You want to? Is he in the news? Is he in the news? Yeah, this past week. The verdict is in for the Copa versus Wright trial. Judge Mellor is... Well, I'm going to quote what Judge Mellor said. This is straight from the CoinGeek website.

I know Craig Wright is litigious. If he wants to come after me, I'm just reading what's on the CoinGeek what judge meller said and this is straight from the coin geek website so i know craig wright is litigious and if he wants to come after me i'm just reading what's on the coin geek website so if he wants to go after anybody go after the coin geek people which is owned by calvin air by the way so dr craig wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper dr craig knight right is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym satoshi nakamoto dr Dr. Craig Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system. And Dr. Craig Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin software. That's pretty damning. A more lengthy verdict is going to be coming very, very soon.

But that brief synopsis basically says he's not Satoshi. This is what basically this is what's saying. Can't come after me. I'm just reading what's on the CoinGeek website yeah man that's pretty fucked up all the bullshit that he has put through people looking at hodlnod looking at peter mccormack for instance there's probably several others as well for sure it's i i don't want to say like you know to turn about it's fair play but it's interesting to see that you know that there is some harmony in university that'd be do bad bad sometimes comes to you you and all shit evens out in the end.

So this is interesting to see the verdict by Judge Miller. I'm happy to see this. One thing to keep an eye on. I know that a lot of the core devs were victim of the chilling effect when he started coming for core developers on Bitcoin. Do you expect to see a bit of a surge in Bitcoin core development? It'll be the same thing, let's be honest. I don't think he was deterring people from coming in with their real name

or even a super name. I think he was. You think so? Yeah, Hodlnot seems to think that too. So I think it's something to keep an eye on. Like, are we going to get a lot more traffic on the core dev side? Maybe we do, maybe we don't.

I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing but um i i in any case i'm happy to see the people are not going to be worried about this kind of you know looming um or lurking litigious individual it sounds like anymore when it comes to bitcoin i think the deal is done right it's pretty close to done if not done already so it just got some information from a previous story we just talked about the el salvador story i know we talked about it just a few minutes ago jaime told us that bitco was their custodian so there you go okay just uh some yeah so i don't want to say anything more about craig right just in case he might come after us but again i just i'm just reading what's on the website from coin geek and

yeah if he doesn't like it go after calvin air yeah and by the way he disappeared i'm not sure yeah he did i'm glad to see this man i am i i really think this is like so long overdue it's been dragging on for many many years at this point many many dollars and sleepless nights and sanity you know given up by a lot of good people over this. So let's hope this is the end of it. Ocean Mining, they are about to start payments using the Lightning Network. And this is a screenshot that was posted on Twitter

that shows now there's Lightning rewards that could be, that's how you're going to be earning your Bitcoin if you mine through them. And you could change your threshold. I'm not sure what the minimum threshold is there's a slide bar over there that you could do for lower or higher but it does say that lower thresholds receive on-chain payments faster so it makes sense but i'm not sure how this works with lightning if there's going to be very very low fees i'm not sure exactly how it's going to be done here, but this is the third company we've talked about, Bitcoin mining company, or pools to be specific,

that has included lightning payouts in the past two months. I know we talked about Brainspool, another one. I forget the name of them. I'm sorry. And now we're talking about ocean mining. So this seems to be a growing trend in the Bitcoin mining community that they're going to be allowing their users to receive payments through lightning rather than on chain. So it's going to fees are going to be lower. The minimums are going to be lower.

And it's just going to be a steady stream of Satoshi's coming to you. Like I mentioned with last week with Brains OS, the same thing applies to this. As long as there's going to be lower fees and lower minimums it makes sense then to start heating an area of your home or more areas with s9s because right now an s9 doesn't do very much but if you're going to heat an area of your home with electricity you might as well look into using an s9 to do that because by doing that at least you're going to get some satoshis kyc free might i add with certain pools through mining like that so it just makes it more economical to start mining at home and to heat areas of the home with an s9 but now we're

approaching the middle of spring and it's not going to be worthwhile to do anything these days but you may want to start setting up shop just in case for the winter time because who knows what's going to happen s9s are probably going to be still readily available but they're older equipment if you do order one it could be trash you might have to reorder so if you're going to start doing it start heating an area of your home with an s9 start the process now start learning how to do it now because once it gets cold then you can take advantage some free sats if you learning how to do it now because once it gets cold, then you can take advantage of some free stats. If you're going to heat it anyways, electricity, you might as well do it with an S9. Yeah, exactly. I like this a lot. I don't know how much hash rate Ocean will end up with.

I think they're 1.7x hash right now or something like that. So they're kind of small fish for the moment. But the thing about mining, and this ties back into the story we led with the excise tax on miners in the States. The thing about mining is that you need it to be both strong and decentralized. So by strong, I mean the hash rate. And by decentralized, I mean you need a lot of the hash rate to come from non-industrial miners or maybe even industrial miners who are mining overseas predominantly as opposed to in the United States or in these less friendly jurisdictions, let's say. Ocean, for all the things I think it's doing wrong in

terms of market forces and product market fit, and there are some, this is inarguably good, right? Because you can get your rewards faster and that will drive people onto your, um, you know, into your pool that will bring people into your pool. I think this is a huge thing for them. I'm, I'm surprised that, uh, I'm surprised that more home miners haven't been asking for this. And it's either that home miners are more interested in like sort of the hobby aspect and don't care much about the rewards, or the home miners may be disengaged from this whole thing, or the home miners don't need the Bitcoin right away. But I think this is going to become the standard for a lot of places, right? two maybe. I'm not sure who the other pool is. But if you're not getting lightning, if you're not able to pull your Bitcoin via a lightning payment channel, aren't you going to go to a place that allows you to do that? I think you probably will at least think about it, right?

This is for sure something that was on the fringes for a lot of people, but now has become an option. And for someone who's got you know one or ten or whatever miners sitting in their basement or heating your house like you mentioned maybe with an s9 or an area of your house with an s9 i think this is probably your best fit now is it not yeah but everybody else is going to be offering this as well sorry i think most authors are offering this what is ocean mining doing wrong in terms of your opinion about well we talked we talked before about like the transaction stuff and you know, what do they,

do they have an ordinal view? Yeah, they do. But they offer three different options. I know they give a few different, a few different choices. Yeah. So you can,

you can right now, ultimately the user is going to have whatever option they want. They could, they could use whatever template they could generate for themselves. So right now there's three different options. If you're pro ordinal, antiordinal, they got you covered. So I can't see what they're doing in terms of pissing people off. They're doing the right thing.

I hope they succeed. Yeah, I hope. No, don't get me wrong. I hope they succeed too. We need more outfits like this to succeed. And for Bitcoin ultimately to become this, you know, uncensorable network of financial freedom, you can't be relying on HUT and Marathon, you know, you just cannot. I don't want to, you know, dunk on HUT too much, but man, I see like, I see in the HUT subreddit, the like whimpering and crying and whining about shareholder value

related to what Hutt's doing. And all these guys who own publicly traded miners now, they're all clamoring for data centers and AI and gamifying and all this stuff. These miners are subject to the whims of retail investors who just don't understand how Bitcoin mining works and how important it is to the network. They just don't get it. They're looking at bottom lines and Ocean and other mining pools, Brains, whatever, these guys who are running arguably for the right reasons, let's say, you got to support

them even if you disagree with some of the stuff they're doing, even if you disagree with whatever about them. You need stuff like this for bitcoin to succeed long term and uh i hope they succeed of course i do yeah and they're the fringe comparing to like the foundries of the world yeah they're they're like bottom feeders right now they may eventually grow to be something bigger but even as they grow like something like ocean if they're going to be offering the individual user their own their own templates that they could use, then it's not really just a collective pool.

Then it's individuals mining. I don't know. It's mind-boggling how decentralized Bitcoin mining can be, especially when you have a mining pool that has decentralized as their focus. I love what Ocean ocean mining is doing. I hope they succeed. They're far, far better than marathon.

If I have to choose Maripool, for instance, if I have to choose between one or the other for succeeding, I wish all the success towards marathon, sorry, towards ocean mining, none of the success towards marathon in the Maripool. Those guys are bad actors,

but we'll do one last story, I guess, before I have too too much on uh i i'll leave it up to you if you want to talk anything about it because mstr they just said they're going to be a proposed private offering of another 500 yeah dollars yeah uh they're they're let's let's talk about okay so let's let's talk about debt issuance here we'll do that that is just last story because You know who else issued convertible notes? No.

Coinbase. Oh yes, you're right. So there's some, there's some discussion about is Coinbase going to start mirroring the MSTR strategy? Are they finally taking a page out of Saylor's book? Saylor obviously has done everything.

He's issued stock. He's diluted shareholders. He's done convertible notes. He's done all kinds of stuff. And he's done it to the tune of about 1% of the Bitcoin, available Bitcoin, let's say, or total Bitcoin. I don't know how much of it is actually available these days. People are not selling. So it's going to be 1% of the overall that's ever going to be mined. That's what I mean. The total. Yeah. The total, not just the available. So Saylor's doing convertible notes. The expectation on Saylor's part and the part of his board

and clearly the part of his shareholders, I mean, say for today, I think MSTR dropped almost 20% today. But the general feeling on MSTR is like, look, I want more Bitcoin per share. I don't care about dilution in terms of my ownership of the company. I don't care about dilution in terms of risk. I don't care about risk as far as convertible notes or debt issuance. I don't care. I just want the Bitcoin and I want to have some claim to it. What that claim is remains a little nebulous. I got to be honest. Mike is not giving a great explanation for that,

in my opinion. You're a Bitcoin development company. You're going to have capital to deploy, blah, blah, blah. I get all that. But at the end of the day, MSTR, I don't think is the best vehicle for Bitcoin exposure. That's my view. Now, Coinbase, on the other hand, issued their debt last week. And as far as I can tell, like the investor reports, there's nothing there about buying Bitcoin. It's to refinance old debt. It's to do mergers and acquisitions and it's to cover operational expenses and prevent share dilution. They don't want to do share dilution yet. And so they're

going to do this first. I don't think they have to buy Bitcoin yet. Coinbase is a company that has incredible cash flows, even in down markets in terms of crypto trading, crypto asset prices, excluding Bitcoin, of course, when I say that. These guys are still crushing. People are still willing to degen and just about anything. And they even launched that layer two thing, Base, that allows people to do whatever, spin up other bullshit on their platform. I don't think they need to buy Bitcoin yet.

But what I don't get they need to buy Bitcoin yet. But what I don't get, Len, is why this day and age, the Coinbase investors, and I want to include myself in this, even though I don't have tons of Coinbase stock, the Coinbase investors have to be asking themselves at this point, you're issuing convertible notes, you have good cash flows. Why aren't you adding Bitcoin to your balance sheet? As the FASB rules loosen up, as the fair value accounting rules loosen up, presumably as custody rules are going to start loosening up soon too in terms of what you can report as an asset and liability on your balance sheet.

Banks are having trouble with this, obviously. You want to have Bitcoin on your balance sheet and you're just not doing it. You are otherwise, whether your CEO tweets about it or not, you are otherwise long Bitcoin in a way that almost no other company is. All the other stuff on your platform relies on Bitcoin remaining a stalwart, a flagship, and a feasible asset for the world over. But you won't put it on your balance sheet. Even now in the debt offering, you still won't do it.

I think they're going to have to answer this question on the next quarterly call, I would imagine. Why? Why are you not doing it? What is the holdup when you've seen how successful not only the MSTR strategy has been in terms of price, appreciation, and corporate value but i mean the share price man like what the mstr is like what 1500 bucks 1600 bucks something like that or it was last week i i don't know what armstrong's answer for that is going to be he doesn't have a better price when you're looking at the shares of look at market cap i know i know i know but i'm just saying like the okay we could talk about price or we could talk about performance. MSTR is not performing. Coinbase is big time.

I can't tell what Coinbase is doing. I haven't followed them. Are they getting close to their all-time high? MSTR is nowhere near. Coinbase is like, I'll tell you right now, because I got to beg because people in the chat are saying. Coinbase is $239 right now. I think it IPO'd at $400.

Slightly less. I think it was like $350-ish. Whatever. It's within the same ballpark, I'll say. I would say you're down bad compared to MSTR. Coinbase, I'm going to try and say this in as dispassionate a way as I can. Because truly, I don't have enough Coinbase to move the needle. You know what MSTR's all-time high was? Before this? Yeah. I don't have enough Coinbase to move the needle. You know what MSTR's all-time high was? Before this?

Yeah. I don't know. What? It was the dot-com. Yeah. Over 3,000. It was probably pre-split too, right? That's probably the pre-split.

Well, according to this chart, it's less than half. Unless this deals with the split. I don't know. But if it does, it's less than 50% of the all-time high where they are right now. Coinbase is closer to that so yeah but and coinbase it's a much more narrow what i want to defend coinbase well no i and i'm not either like clearly the management of coinbase is i think suboptimal and the thing i would say to coinbase and i can't imagine this guy is not hearing this from people in his life or his board. We should be the vehicle for Bitcoin exposure in the S&P 500, not fucking Saylor.

And we're not because you refuse to talk about Bitcoin, mistake. Refuse to put on your balance sheet, mistake. Continue to propose all these dumb fucking ideas about shitcoin tokens and making it easier to list, mistake. Continuing to try and pull the legislative ladder up behind you so no one else can compete. Mistake. Saylor has done all the right things.

Armstrong has completely dropped the ball. And to be honest with you, as a Bitcoiner and as a shareholder, I think the guy should be fired. I think he should be fired. Like, what is his excuse at this point? The Bitcoin price just hit an all-time high. You're still half of what you fucking IPO'd at? Three-fifths of what you IPO'd at?

What's your excuse? What is it? They're a shitcoin casino. No, for sure. It's a garbage company. It's a garbage company, but they should be able to figure out that we can still be stupid with all our product

offerings and put Bitcoin on the balance sheet and grow the stock, like grow the performance of the stock. Millions of dollars setting up an NFT marketplace. I know. Remember that? And then it traded like a million dollars in the first like month or something like no one cared about it. They put their horses,

their money in the wrong horses. Yeah. If they stuck to Bitcoin and just dealt with with that they would have been a far better position but they wanted to grow they wanted to have mass appeal they know they've done so but it's there's a cost to it in terms and i'm not just uh coinbase raising capital in this case debt micro strategy doing the same and but you're using it for two different things it's dangerous proposition to do that because you never know what's going to happen now one can make an argument mstr makes sense you know leverage as much debt as you can especially cheap debt because you're getting very favorable rates and buy as much bitcoin there's still a risk to that there is some risk to that as for how much it's debatable yeah as long as the price

of bitcoin is above their buying price i think they're averaged at 33 000 dollars they're way yeah way above now so they're way but then on the flip side if things go like really really bad and bitcoin's stuck in the 15s or 20s again for a long period of time what does that look like to mstr we're a long way from getting there we may never get there again so i'm just trying to say like when you take on debt to buy something there's there's an element of risk and they've done the math they figure this is there's worthwhile it's worthwhile to do this good for them but i you know personally i i like using profits i like using money on hand that you generated outside of debt to buy stuff. That's the way I look at things.

Then again, that's why I'm sitting in the basement still working 9 to 5 doing my thing and I'm not living like the high-life sailor is. Maybe I'm doing it all wrong. Who the fuck knows? Let's transition over to Notable Stories. If you're with us on video, hang in.

We got about half an hour to go here. Notable Stories, lots of them. If you're with us on video, hang in, we got about half an hour to go here. Notable stories, lots of them. If you're hanging with us on audio, wait till tomorrow and we'll drop the other half the episode until then. Take care of yourself. Don't be a cock. Are you a fan of the old school NHL 94 game on the Genesis or SNES?

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