Shownotes
There is a new standard that is being implemented for cross-payment borders and bank interoperability. This standard is the ISO 20022 standard and there are two tokens that are certified for the standard. Are these tokens worth investing in? Let's break it down.
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Transcripts
Hey, Sat Stackers. It's January the 9th. This is Episode 90 of Generational Wealth with
Speaker:Cryptocurrency. I'm your host, McIntosh. Today's episode is about XRP, Stellar, and
Speaker:the ISO 20022 standard.
Speaker:Of course, no one on this podcast is a financial advisor, and all information presented on
Speaker:this podcast is for informational purposes only. Now that we have the legal stuff out
Speaker:of the way, let's jump on in. All right, everybody. It is a Sunday night as I record this. It
Speaker:is January the 8th. When it gets released, of course, it will be January the 9th. We
Speaker:are off to a new year. I hope everyone had a good New Year's celebration. The Earl Grey
Speaker:is hot. The market is a little warm, to be honest. Let's jump right on into that market
Speaker:update, and then we'll talk about our topic for the week.
Speaker:This week, we had our weekly close with Bitcoin at $17,118.86. That is up roughly $500. So
Speaker:that's good news. Ethereum, $1,288.12, which is up $88. So for Ethereum, that's quite good
Speaker:actually. And then ADA closed at .297207. So it was up quite a bit. It probably actually
Speaker:was the highest percent increase for the week. I did not do any market analysis this week.
Speaker:I believe we are sitting right at a resistance level at $17,171. If it breaks up this week,
Speaker:then that could be the start of at least a small bull run, if you want to call it that,
Speaker:a divergence, a whatever before it continues on down, or maybe that actually is the start
Speaker:of climbing upwards. We will see, and time will tell.
Speaker:Of course, as always, my advice is you should be DCAing. You should be buying Bitcoin every
Speaker:week. You should be stacking those Sats, as I say, right up at the start of the podcast.
Speaker:One good app for that, I haven't talked about this in a long time, but one good app for
Speaker:that, of course, is Strike. If you're here in the U.S., the Cash app, I believe, also
Speaker:has that Bitcoin functionality to buy your Bitcoin. In fact, I know it does. I've done
Speaker:that, but with Strike, the nice thing is, of course, you can do the DCA. You can have
Speaker:it buy every day, even if it's a cent, literally. I wouldn't recommend that. You need to be
Speaker:buying more than that, but you can buy very minimal amounts of Bitcoin on a daily, weekly,
Speaker:hourly basis, however you choose to DCA that in.
Speaker:All right. I'm going to try and keep this episode short tonight, so we are going to
Speaker:roll right into our weekly topic. This is a little bit different. Of course, I have
Speaker:essentially stopped talking about different cryptocurrencies. The first 50 plus episodes
Speaker:of this podcast, I talked about every different crypto under the sun. Of course, we did center
Speaker:on Ethereum and ADA and Bitcoin, but I spent a lot of time talking about a lot of different
Speaker:coins and their utility uses, history, that kind of thing. Of course, I've stopped doing
Speaker:that in large part. I've done a lot of economic talk lately, macroeconomics,
Speaker:Austrian versus Keynesian economics. With the series that we just finished, of course,
Speaker:I'm going to be talking about debt in general at the request of Kyrin at Mere Mortals here
Speaker:very soon, if not next week, probably the week after. Another economic, in my opinion,
Speaker:topic. But anyways, I haven't been talking about different coins outside of Bitcoin lately,
Speaker:and I've explained that. You can go back and listen to that. I don't know that episode off
Speaker:hand, but I have narrowed my focus, so to speak. I believe that Bitcoin has the longest
Speaker:best chance. It's certainly got the longest running history of crypto. It actually today
Speaker:just celebrated 14 years of being online, but I do believe it has the best chance in the long run
Speaker:of being a sound investment, of potentially being a global currency reserve, to be honest,
Speaker:and to actually do some things that we're fixed to talk about. That will make sense for you
Speaker:in just a few minutes when we get through this part of the discussion. However, one of our best
Speaker:supporters, Jenny Jams, asked for my input on this ISO standard that we will be discussing and these
Speaker:two tokens, because these two tokens, Ripple and Stellar, or XLM is often Stellar Lumens or XLM,
Speaker:and then the Ripple token, XRP. They are both what they call ISO 20022 compliant. So, this is
Speaker:simply a standard. It's a very recent standard. It actually was brought online in the EU in November
Speaker:of this year. It will be brought online in the US in November of 2022, so now last year, and then
Speaker:in November of 2023 here in the United States in a few months. We need to understand, first of all,
Speaker:what is this standard, right? This standard, and there's actually, if you go to swift.com,
Speaker:which SWIFT is the banking standard, if you want to call it that, that's how banks communicate
Speaker:electronically with each other and send payments back and forth, this kind of thing. It's called
Speaker:the SWIFT standard, but I guess they're the one behind this, it seems to be, but you can go to
Speaker:their standards page. This is listed right there, and I will include this in the show notes,
Speaker:but it says it's an open global standard for financial information. It provides consistent,
Speaker:rich, and structured data that can be used for every kind of financial business transaction.
Speaker:It goes on to explain that this is going to be used for cross-border payments, so it will
Speaker:operate between different currencies, is essentially what that means. So, the United
Speaker:States has the US dollar, the Mexican peso, if I'm not mistaken, is used down in Mexico.
Speaker:There are a number of different pesos that are actually used down in South America. The Colombian
Speaker:peso, I believe Argentina actually uses the peso as well, or what they call a peso. I do not think
Speaker:they are exactly the same. That's certainly not in terms of value. Anyways, this exchange,
Speaker:this standard is a way for a bank in Argentina to interact better with a bank in the United States,
Speaker:and a bank in the United States to interact with a bank in the EU who operates with euros,
Speaker:and so on and so forth. So, that is why they're implementing the standard. The Earl Grey really
Speaker:is hot tonight. Quite tasty. Both of these tokens, XLM, Stellar, Lumen, and XRP, are both certified,
Speaker:or whatever, to be ISO 2002 compliant. Why is that? Because they are both competing to be used
Speaker:on this network, plain and simple. They want to be the intermediary between these banks,
Speaker:both of them. They compete for the same thing. Understand that first. That's important.
Speaker:And to understand, essentially, that's the only thing that they want to do.
Speaker:As far as I can tell, I've actually owned both of these tokens. I currently own neither of them,
Speaker:and I will not be buying them anymore. I have no use for them, but they have always operated
Speaker:under this idea. I remember when XRP came out. I don't remember specifically about Stellar Lumen,
Speaker:but when XRP came out, there was a very big push. Oh, this is going to be used by the banks,
Speaker:and it looks like it is possible that they may do that. Now, any governmental organization,
Speaker:they love standards. That's fine. That's understandable. But just understand, and so,
Speaker:I guess you could say, well, this opens up the market for them. That's true. But that's the only
Speaker:reason that XRP and Stellar have been created. They were not created for you to go on Amazon
Speaker:and buy something in XRP. They were not. They were not created for you to, oh, I want to rent this
Speaker:house or I want to buy this house, so here's some XRP. And in turn, you can give me that house for
Speaker:the month or for forever. So they do have a narrow focus. Now, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's
Speaker:a bad thing. That is certainly a difference between these two tokens and basically anything else. I
Speaker:think almost without exception, I cannot think of another currency, of another cryptocurrency
Speaker:that was developed around such a specific purpose. Now, I'm sure if we sat here and thought long
Speaker:enough, we could come up with some. But what's Bitcoin, for example? It's currency and it's a
Speaker:store of value. That's its two things. Through the Lightning Network, we can use it as a form
Speaker:of micro payments currency. I can also, through Lightning or through the regular Bitcoin
Speaker:blockchain, I can go and use it for large scale purchases. I can use it as a store of value.
Speaker:I can buy it now and say, well, in 10 years, I hope that it's going to be worth more than it is now.
Speaker:A little more general purpose, you could say. Ethereum, as another example, what do they do?
Speaker:They develop the EVM, the Ethereum Virtual Machine, I think is what that stands for. But regardless,
Speaker:it is the smart contract platform that powers Ethereum. It is what allows smart contracts.
Speaker:It is what allows me to create a program that does actions to specified results.
Speaker:And it's general purpose, and all kinds of things have sprung out of that.
Speaker:Ethereum wasn't created for one specific thing. So there is a difference. Let's talk about actually
Speaker:the way that these two were founded. I actually found out something I did not know while I was
Speaker:digging through all of this. And we'll get to that in just a minute. We will start with XRP,
Speaker:because XRP was actually the first of these. So I will try to include these links in show notes.
Speaker:This comes right out of Wikipedia. And you'll find slightly differing stories depending on where you
Speaker:look. So keep that in mind. There's a lot of this that, of course, is incontrovertible.
Speaker:And I think the major facts here are certainly incontrovertible.
Speaker:All right. Ripple Labs. It's important to understand that Ripple Labs is the people behind
Speaker:XRP. Ripple Labs, American technology company that developed the Ripple payment protocol
Speaker:and exchange network. It was originally called OpenCoin. It was renamed in 2015. The company
Speaker:was founded in 2012, and they're based in San Francisco. So they're in Silicon Valley. They
Speaker:started up in 2012. They changed their name. I actually understood that they changed their
Speaker:name twice. They were OpenCoin. They were something else. And then they were Ripple Labs with the XRP
Speaker:token. Ryan Fugger, F-U-G-G-E-R, conceived Ripple in 2004. So that was quite a while ago. After
Speaker:working on a local exchange trading system in Vancouver, the intent was to create a monetary
Speaker:system that was decentralized. I'm going to highlight that word decentralized and could
Speaker:effectively empower individuals and communities to create their own money. Fugger later built the
Speaker:first iteration of this system, RipplePay.com. Concurrently, in May of 2011, Jed McCallib
Speaker:began developing a digital currency system in which transactions were verified by consensus
Speaker:among the members of the network than by the mining process used by Bitcoin. Now understand
Speaker:Bitcoin proof of work. Obviously, XRP and XLM Stellar are both not proof of work. They are
Speaker:a consensus model. They're not a proof of stake either, like Ethereum is. They use what's called
Speaker:a consensus, which means you have validators on your network, somewhat like your stakers in Ethereum.
Speaker:They are called validators and they validate transactions on the network. But that's all
Speaker:these do. They don't stake XRP. They just run validation. And one interesting thing I found
Speaker:out about both of these is that in neither case, and by the way, both of these work under basically
Speaker:the same model, and you'll understand why in a few minutes. I'll get to that part. That's the part
Speaker:that I didn't know until I dug into this. But there's very few validators on the network.
Speaker:XLM has like 66. I can't come up with a concrete number for Ripple. It's fairly low. And a decent
Speaker:amount of those are run by RippleLab. In my opinion, the reason why is because there's
Speaker:no financial incentive to run a validator. There's not. They don't receive anything
Speaker:on the Ethereum network. The validators do receive about a 4% return for their stake.
Speaker:So, if you're staking 32 ETH, it's something like, I want to say it's like a quarter of an
Speaker:ETH a year. I may be off on that number, but it's fairly small. But if ETH were worth a good amount
Speaker:of money, it would be fairly significant. It's worth doing, or at least people think that it is.
Speaker:In this case, the validators don't have any incentive. And I think that's very important,
Speaker:actually. I think that's a problem in both of these systems.
Speaker:All right. In August of 2012, McCaleb hired Chris Larson and they approached Ryan Fugger with their
Speaker:digital currency idea. After discussions with McCaleb and the longstanding members of the
Speaker:Ripple community, Fugger handed over the reins. That's part of the part I don't really understand.
Speaker:I find different things about that, whatever. In September of 2012, Larson and Jeb McCaleb
Speaker:co-founded the corporation OpenCoin. So, you could argue that they started Ripple.
Speaker:They began development of the protocol. In 2013, they announced they closed an angel round of
Speaker:funding with several venture capital firms. In 2013, in September, they officially changed
Speaker:their name to Ripple Labs. They received a grant. I'm sorry. So, they received an angel round.
Speaker:They also acquired Simple Honey. I don't know why. It doesn't matter. But back to 2015.
Speaker:So, part of what I read, apparently not on this page, is that Stripe had invested like $3 million
Speaker:in exchange for a number of XRP token. They were using that for some of their initial funding.
Speaker:I believe that's what they're referring to with this angel round of funding from several
Speaker:venture capital firms. Apparently, Stripe was one of those. Now, in May of 2015, they received a
Speaker:$700,000 civil money penalty from the United States Treasury Financial Crimes Enforcement Network,
Speaker:FinCEN, for a willful violation of the Bank Secrecy Act by acting as a money services business
Speaker:without registering with FinCEN. So, I'm going to say at this point that that is the start of a
Speaker:history with the US government of coming to loggerheads. So, they were doing something
Speaker:they shouldn't have been. FinCEN came in and said, you're not supposed to be doing that.
Speaker:You are supposed to register, and here's your $700,000 fee. They did obtain a currency license
Speaker:from the New York State Department of Financial Services in 2016, making it the fourth company
Speaker:with a BIT license. All right. I'm going to skip a bit of this. In December of 2020,
Speaker:the US SEC Commission, so the Securities and Exchange Commission, charged Ripple and two
Speaker:of its executives with violating investor protection laws. They alleged that co-founder
Speaker:Christian Larsen and CEO Bradley Garlinghouse raised more than $1.3 billion, and I will emphasize
Speaker:$1.3 billion, through an unregistered security exchange. That lawsuit has been going on for a
Speaker:long time. Now, I'm going to wax poetic here for just a minute. I do believe that lawsuit will be
Speaker:resolved this year. In my mind, there's something called the Howey Test, and I don't want to get
Speaker:into all this, but basically outside of Bitcoin, no crypto passes the Howey Test, as I understand
Speaker:it. They're all securities. Bitcoin is a commodity. It has been branded as such by the SEC. They also
Speaker:call Ethereum a commodity. Now, that was during its proof of work days. So far, that's not been
Speaker:challenged since the merge. But I believe that every other crypto outside of those two certainly
Speaker:is a security. That is what the SEC is alleging in this lawsuit. Now, whether XRP wins or loses,
Speaker:if they win, it literally could kick off the next bull run. If they lose, it will continue to hurt
Speaker:the crypto industry. But I'm going to point out... Oh, and one thing that this does not... Oh, let me...
Speaker:Actually, it does right here. The primary source of funding of Ripple have been... So you may
Speaker:rightly question, well, where does Ripple get its money? Ripple Labs pre-mined. They call it pre-mined,
Speaker:which means they were not actually mined. I do not know why they call it pre-mined.
Speaker:But regardless, 100 billion XRP. I believe that's the number. And they don't mine those. They
Speaker:own them all, essentially. Now, they put a number of them, I think it's like 55 billion, in escrow.
Speaker:But then periodically, they sell off other chunks of XRP. And those sales are what fund Ripple,
Speaker:and all the salaries, and supposedly all the development, and so on and so forth.
Speaker:Now, I don't think XRP, I don't think Ripple Labs. Well, I need to correct what I was just going to
Speaker:say. I said, I don't think Ripple Labs has very many employees. They have 548, according to this,
Speaker:in 2020. Employees are expensive, let's be honest. But still, 550 employees, they have sold 1.254
Speaker:billion dollars worth of XRP between Q4 of 2016 and Q2 of 2020.
Speaker:That's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. So understand that the biggest beneficiaries
Speaker:in any XRP system will always be Ripple Labs. It is a centralized protocol. The validators,
Speaker:there's not enough validators, in my opinion. There's no financial incentive for those
Speaker:validators. It would be very easy for this XRP system to be co-opted by the state,
Speaker:whether that's the United States or another foreign government.
Speaker:I don't think it's censor-proof. I don't think – their whole goal, understand their whole goal
Speaker:is to become these intermediaries between the banks as part of this SWIFT system. They're not
Speaker:going to be fighting the government. They're going to be joining the government. And in fact,
Speaker:they will want to power the central bank digital currency. They're not going to be
Speaker:the central bank digital currencies that are going to be developed by each country. The United
Speaker:States is working on it. There'll be EU countries and so on and so forth. They're popping up all
Speaker:over the world. These are prime targets, if you want to call it that, for Ripple Labs. Hey,
Speaker:we'll partner with you and we'll develop your technology for your central bank. Oh, and you want
Speaker:to know everything that your citizens are doing and buying and touching and whatever. Yeah, we'll
Speaker:give you all that information as part of this system because we want your money, because that's
Speaker:what they want. They want more money because those people who started the company and those people
Speaker:who are – they want money. So, don't be naive about that, first of all. That's what's going on.
Speaker:All right. Now, all of that being said, there's $100 billion XRP that have been quote pre-mined.
Speaker:Now, that doesn't mean that XRP couldn't go out and create another $100 billion. They say they
Speaker:won't, but there's really no reason why they couldn't. And they own most of them,
Speaker:which strikes me as a rather odd situation. And in fact, that's what we saw with the FTX token,
Speaker:FTT, I think is what it's called, but the token of the FTX exchange that right now is sitting at
Speaker:some ridiculously low amount when it was really, really high just a few months ago before the crash
Speaker:and before we found out that FTX owned most of those tokens and it was being used on their
Speaker:balance sheets as collateral. So, to me, that's an extremely dangerous position. I would not be
Speaker:putting large amounts of my money in XRP. So, if we want to look at the test of is it secure,
Speaker:is it secure? Well, it doesn't really have a whole lot of validators and those validators
Speaker:have no financial incentive to run those validators. And it would be very easy for, in fact,
Speaker:a foreign government to come along and say, hey, validators, well, why not just start building
Speaker:validators themselves? Because there's no cost, basically. And just add validators until they
Speaker:control more than half the network and then start running their code on it. We could do that.
Speaker:Doesn't seem very secure to me. Is it sensor-proof? Probably not. They'll just go lean on the
Speaker:executive committee of Ripple Labs. If the United States, and yes, they've fought the SEC,
Speaker:but really if the United States came and said, look, we're just going to shut you all down
Speaker:unless you give us access to whatever information that you wanted, I promise you that those people
Speaker:will do that. Now, they'll cash out their tokens as they do it and they'll be billionaires.
Speaker:And then everybody in XRP will be broke, but whatever. Is it speed? Well, yes, actually.
Speaker:Both of these tokens, XRP and Stellar, are extremely fast and they have very low transaction
Speaker:costs. That's their two big proponents. They've leaned very heavily on that in favor of that
Speaker:versus the other legs of the blockchain trilemma. That's concerning to me. Let's talk about XLM,
Speaker:because I've already been going for 30 minutes. XLM, I got involved in XLM before the announcement
Speaker:of the IBM project, which is listed on here somewhere, but it was a really big deal and
Speaker:popped the price right up. Now, it's come back down since, but anyways, in 2014, Jeb McCaleb,
Speaker:hey, I've heard that name before, the founder of Mt. Gox. Now, as someone who lost money in Mt. Gox,
Speaker:ironically in 2014, that rubs me the wrong way. Now, I never knew this. I did not.
Speaker:If I would have known this, I never would have invested in either one of these companies,
Speaker:actually. Anyways, Mt. Gox, for those of you who don't know, it was one of the very early
Speaker:crypto exchanges. In 2013, it was hacked. The hack was discovered some months later.
Speaker:I want to say it was 2013. Anyways, lots of people lost lots of money and it's still tied
Speaker:up in litigation to this day. All right, founder of Mt. Gox and co-founder of Ripple. Oh, that's
Speaker:where I've heard that name before. Launched the network system stellar with former lawyer, Joyce
Speaker:Kim. All right, so this doesn't go into it, but basically he got mad with the other people at
Speaker:XRP, took his toys and left. Now, that's happened a number of times, basically with the entire
Speaker:Ethereum ecosystem blowing apart and you have people like Cardano came from Ethereum,
Speaker:Polkadot came from Ethereum. There's another very fairly famous one that came from Ethereum now.
Speaker:I'm not saying that those people were yelling and screaming at each other. Maybe they were,
Speaker:maybe they weren't, but I don't think there's a whole lot of love lost between Vitalik and
Speaker:and those other people. Anyways, so they created a nonprofit stellar development foundation.
Speaker:Oh, I'm sorry. Stellar was the one that received the funding from Stripe,
Speaker:$3 million in seed funding. I looked at both of these at the same time and that is something
Speaker:I got mixed up. And I also got the number for XRP wrong. The total supply is $1 billion. I think
Speaker:I said $100 billion. The $100 billion comes from Stellar, which had $100 billion. Again, pre-mined,
Speaker:again, many of those are owned by that foundation. 25% would be given to other nonprofits working
Speaker:towards financial inclusion. Stripe receives 2% or $2 billion of the initial Stellar in return
Speaker:for its seed investment. So they got 2% of the network right off the top. Okay, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker:So very similar setup. They have validators. They only have 66, kind of crazy, but very,
Speaker:very similar goals, everything, because basically in my opinion, and this is my opinion only,
Speaker:but Jed got mad with the other guys or vice versa. Like I said, he left, but he had done a
Speaker:lot of the work on XRP. It seems very obvious to me that a lot of the major ideas came from him.
Speaker:And so he's just recreating it over here on Stellar. So you'll find a lot of the same things,
Speaker:same exact issues, same exact use case. Hey, we want to be the transfer token between these
Speaker:financial institutions. And then we arrive back at ISO 20022.
Speaker:So I say all this and I'm not going to talk about Stellar a whole lot, because it really is very
Speaker:similar. It did have a huge partnership with IBM that was announced, Deloitte, some big names.
Speaker:And yeah, there it is, the IBM partnership. Oh, October 2017. They have actually got their name
Speaker:out there. I actually think of these two, to be honest, because of Ripple's governmental issues,
Speaker:if you want to say that. I think if I had to look at this, aside from all the issues that I've
Speaker:outlined about why these don't make good decentralized sensor-proof currencies and that
Speaker:kind of thing, as an investment, if I were looking at these as an investment, I think XLM probably
Speaker:has a better chance of success. But I think because they know exactly what they're looking for
Speaker:and what they're trying to do, I think they probably both will do okay. So if you want to look at
Speaker:investment from that sense, I think they will do okay. But understand in both cases, the founders
Speaker:and these foundations and the companies that are behind these, they have massive amounts
Speaker:of that pre-mine. So I don't see how that benefits, frankly. Stellar, probably not so much.
Speaker:I think XRP probably has more of that. No, XRP was 100 billion. I did read that correctly the first
Speaker:time. I'm not sure where that other figure came from. So both were the same, 100 billion tokens
Speaker:pre-mined. I apologize. I know I've kind of been all over the place on that, but right. Very, very
Speaker:similar. Very, very similar goals. I do not recommend these as an investment simply because
Speaker:I think that over the long term, I think there's risk there. And frankly, I don't believe in what
Speaker:they're doing. You know, I don't smoke and I don't really have a problem with people who do. That's
Speaker:their choice. But I'm not going to invest in a tobacco company. Does that make sense? From a
Speaker:moral perspective, if you want to put it that way. I'm not going to invest in a token that is doing
Speaker:the exact thing that I don't believe in. I do not believe. I think central bank digital
Speaker:currencies are going to be a very bad idea. I initially thought that could work out pretty good,
Speaker:but I'm realizing that at least in a lot of cases, at least in the major countries,
Speaker:they're doing this as a way to control things. And I do not want any part of that. I do not,
Speaker:I believe in a right to privacy. It is right there in my bill of rights and tracking every
Speaker:transaction that I do, not part of that privacy. Okay. I'll just, that's as simple as I can make
Speaker:it. So I'm not going to invest in these tokens, but I have laid out the cases. If you so choose,
Speaker:that's your choice. I do believe if XRP wins this case, which a lot of people think that they will,
Speaker:then I believe that you will see the price on that puppy jump. It may double in less than a
Speaker:week. It may do more than that, but that doesn't make it a good long-term investment. That just
Speaker:means that they won their case and people think that they're free and clear. That's my opinion.
Speaker:All right. Hey, I think it's time to thank some supporters
Speaker:while I'm bringing up the spreadsheet. I have got some good work done on my very own umbral
Speaker:node this week. So I did get my server up and running finally. And the first thing I started
Speaker:installing was the Bitcoin node, of course. And I just brought it up. I actually tried to do a
Speaker:full node and ran out of disk space. Apparently the full node now takes over 500 gigs. I think
Speaker:I was pretty close though when it ran out of disk space. But regardless, actually, if you've ever
Speaker:used umbral, most of you probably haven't. But with the newest version of the Bitcoin core node,
Speaker:they actually have the option now so that you can run a pruned version. So what that means is
Speaker:I told it that I want to keep 100 gigs basically of blockchain on my node. So the max block size,
Speaker:it says, is 105. I'm keeping 95 right now. And so the last 95 gigs of blockchain data
Speaker:is what I have on that node. Right now, 14 minutes ago, we had some block. It was actually block
Speaker:771064. For those who are curious, there was 811 transactions. Looks busy tonight. Interesting.
Speaker:100% synchronized. So now that I have this running, one of the next things I will be doing is
Speaker:setting up a lightning node. And what that means is I will be moving off of Satoshi.stream. It is
Speaker:possible maybe even before next week's episode. So if we have a brief interruption, I apologize.
Speaker:I'm going to have to do it at some point and I will have to update things and things will go
Speaker:bump in the night if you've ever heard that expression. But it will mean more Satoshis in
Speaker:my pocket, so to speak, because I won't have the 1% fee or whatever it is. Maybe more than that.
Speaker:I'm not sure. But regardless, I will have more control. I'll be running that. I'll be running
Speaker:Helipad, which is a program that will let me see the boost and things as they come in.
Speaker:So we'll have some fun. And when you guys say, hey, I didn't get that boost or whatever,
Speaker:I'll have a lot more control over that and be able to see it. All right.
Speaker:All right. So to kick things off this week with the What About Gold episode,
Speaker:we got a boost from our friend Hypersensitive Osaurus. There we go. Just your brave attempt
Speaker:at pronouncing my account name was worth it and made me smile. And yes, I'm Osaurus. Keep up the
Speaker:good work. Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. And that was a, how much was that? 121 Sats. I don't
Speaker:know what the original one was. I'm sorry. That's also what this will fix. I'll be able to see the
Speaker:exact amount. Our next one came from Sir Michael, who must be a No Agenda fan most likely. What
Speaker:about gold? 1485. Thank you, sir. And he said, enjoyed your perspective on currencies. Thanks
Speaker:for promoting your podcast on Fountain to give me the opportunity to listen. So he is one of our,
Speaker:sounds like he's a new listener that we picked up from the promotions that I run on Fountain.
Speaker:Fountain, by the way, released version six or 0.6, I should say, of the app today. That's
Speaker:actually the one that we've been testing in beta for gracious a month or more. And I think you're
Speaker:really going to enjoy it. A lot of good stuff there. If you're using app, actually, if you're
Speaker:using app, you need to upgrade because if you don't, you, the streaming, they had to make a
Speaker:major change in the streaming. So they bumped the system basically earlier this afternoon,
Speaker:you have to upgrade so that you can continue to receive payments. So there you go. All right.
Speaker:Cyber Max on, again, on November the 3rd, 99 Sats and said, news Bogat. I looked that up. I'm not
Speaker:quite clear on what Bogat means, but we'll hope it, it seemed to be something good.
Speaker:I'm sorry, cyber max. I'm, I'm not young and hip. I'm just not, let's be honest.
Speaker:My children don't think I'm young and hip. I don't think I'm young and hip. I'm okay with that though.
Speaker:I don't mind being around young people though. I do appreciate the perspective that they,
Speaker:they bring and I'll tell you something interesting. Maybe it is interesting to me. One of the things
Speaker:really over the last five or six years, as I've been growing older, so to speak, and I'm not old,
Speaker:but I'm older, I have been spending time around people who are actually a lot older than I am,
Speaker:people in their seventies and eighties. I have a friend of mine who's 85 that I visit quite
Speaker:regularly every couple of weeks and I get an amazing perspective from them. Now they don't
Speaker:know diddly squat about crypto or anything like that, but about life and about the changes that
Speaker:are going on, they give me a good perspective. So it, you know, whatever your age, you should
Speaker:don't be afraid of interacting and being friends with people who are both older and younger than
Speaker:you. All right. That's all I'm saying. All right. So, and we had a final, oh, let's see. All of
Speaker:those were for what about gold? I think. Well, shoot, I messed this all up. No. The very last
Speaker:one, Cybermax. So this was definitely a promoter podcast. It was the, it's a dilemma, security,
Speaker:speed and decentralization episode. So again, I appreciate that Cybermax. Sorry, I'm a little,
Speaker:I'm trying to do this on the fly. I normally have this kind of filled out beforehand,
Speaker:but anyways, what about gold boost? 99 sats of Orion 007. Thank you very much, Orion.
Speaker:I appreciate that. And the, it's a dilemma podcast. So security, speed and decentralization,
Speaker:99 sats. And I have seen this name before, so I don't know if he's just listening over and over.
Speaker:I don't know, but Will M Valenzuela. So I appreciate that. No message.
Speaker:And then a final 99 sat boost from user 2 0 1 5 4 9 3 8 8 6 0 4 0 6 2 0. I appreciate that as well.
Speaker:That came from the, it's a dilemma episode. And that's it. I do appreciate the support.
Speaker:Of course, as I move on to this new system, I told y'all last week, basically in total last year,
Speaker:I collected roughly a hundred and a little over a hundred thousand sats, 20 bucks or whatever that
Speaker:comes out to. I am going to use that as the liquidity to kickstart this lightning node. Now,
Speaker:lightning node. Now I talked about lightning and running lightning nodes and that kind of thing
Speaker:on a couple of episodes in the past. I don't know, at some point I may talk about it some more, but
Speaker:for this streaming to work for the podcasting 2.0 stuff to work, essentially you have to have
Speaker:a lightning node to receive those payments. You don't have to have it to send it. And so
Speaker:I've been using the Satoshi stream as an intermediary. Now I'm going to actually do that
Speaker:on my own. I tried this one time with voltage, but the reality was I would spend in $20 a month
Speaker:to not make $20 a month. So I was just spending money with voltage. So now I'm just running this
Speaker:old server and it sits over in the corner underneath the router and I can access it
Speaker:actually through a web interface or through SSH and everything is kosher. And I have a lot of
Speaker:experience actually running the operating system that Umbral runs on. So supporting this thing is
Speaker:not a big deal for me. And to be honest, I wouldn't discourage people from doing this with small
Speaker:amounts of money anyways. I wouldn't put hundreds or thousands of dollars on this if you really
Speaker:don't know what you're doing, but you know, you can experiment with small amounts. Anyways,
Speaker:we need to move on to our news for the week. So let me bring up my notes. Of course you can follow
Speaker:me on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech. All right. I post a lot of this stuff beforehand. I'm going to
Speaker:include a couple more. I'm going to throw this out there while I'm bringing all this up. I saw a
Speaker:great article in Bloomberg actually, Germany revives coal as energy security trumps climate
Speaker:goals. So you guys, if y'all remember early in the fall, maybe even late in the summer, I don't
Speaker:remember, they were talking about shutting down all the coal and shutting down the nuclear.
Speaker:And I predicted, to be honest, that, and I said that on here and I meant it, if they continued
Speaker:down this path that people were going to freeze to death this winter. And I was not exaggerating.
Speaker:And I believe that that's true. Fortunately, they've done two things. They've extended the
Speaker:life of their nuclear plants, and now they're reviving coal, basically kind of rolling back
Speaker:their changes. Their energy is out of control and inflation in the EU is 10%. I believe it's
Speaker:actually slightly higher in Germany as it sits, but there you go. So at least they're making steps
Speaker:in the right direction. I'll have that link in the show note, of course.
Speaker:All right. Here we go. Well, now I tweeted on January the third that tomorrow, so, or January
Speaker:the second, that January the third was the 14th anniversary of the first block mine, the Genesis
Speaker:block. Now I'm confused, but it certainly was within the last week. So happy birthday, Bitcoin.
Speaker:I love that. So apparently the UK has released a report saying that the government is expected to
Speaker:issue at least 250 or 240, I should say billion in guilt. No, I don't know exactly what a guilt is.
Speaker:I've heard that term before. It's one of their monetary units. I don't know if that's a, it's
Speaker:not a pound. Oh, so a guilt is a UK governmental liability in sterling. So a pound issued by the
Speaker:treasury, the royal treasury or whatever. So I believe what that basically means is they're
Speaker:going to release 240 billion more pounds in treasuries, treasury notes. So they're
Speaker:going to print more money for the next half decade to finance spending.
Speaker:India to move past China as the world's most populous country in 2023. China has reached
Speaker:its peak. And I don't mean that certainly in terms of population. They have made some decisions
Speaker:over the last, well, certainly over my lifetime, over the last 50 years or so, that are directly
Speaker:impacting their birth rate. And I think that's incontrovertible. So there you go, their birth
Speaker:rate is going down. India's is going up. So while China is the most populous country,
Speaker:they will soon be taken over next year or later this year. I'm still acting like it's 2022, sorry.
Speaker:And I don't think China's going to have the young demographic to support their population very soon.
Speaker:Okay. I thought this was very interesting. Pentoshi posted this. He is Pentoshi One
Speaker:on Twitter. This actually has a hundred percent hit rate when Coinbase becomes the number one
Speaker:app in the world. You have about one to two weeks to sell everything before doom begins.
Speaker:So that's the top. Call the top right there when Coinbase becomes the number one app.
Speaker:It happened in January of 2018, in May of 2021, and in November of 2021. So there you go.
Speaker:Crazy. Bank of Japan announced a fourth day of unscheduled bond buying.
Speaker:Japan is out of control. They are printing bonds. They're printing money, I should say,
Speaker:trying to sell bonds or buy bonds in this case. They're going off the rails. And I have said for
Speaker:a while, in my opinion, Japan is the canary in the coal mine. They will fall first. I believe
Speaker:they have too much debt to be able to continue to operate as they have. This guy, this is more of a
Speaker:human interest story, but I thought this was very interesting. He is running for the president of
Speaker:Argentina. Argentina right now has 90% inflation. His name is Javier Mele. His nickname is El Peluca,
Speaker:the wig, which if you've seen his picture, he very obviously wears a hairpiece. He seems to be quite
Speaker:proud of it. And that's fine to each their own. But he is campaigning on things like legal tender
Speaker:allows politicians to scam you with an inflationary tax. That is absolutely true. Bitcoin is a natural
Speaker:reaction against the central bank scammers. And he is very much operating on a Bitcoin platform.
Speaker:I'm very interested to see how that goes. I think Argentina is hurting as many South American
Speaker:countries are. They have extremely high inflation and that is hurting their poorest. Absolutely,
Speaker:no doubt. All right. This I thought was very interesting. Of course, we've talked off and on
Speaker:about Celsius. I say this because this is directly relevant to any other exchange. A judge has ruled
Speaker:that Celsius users gave up their legal rights to their Bitcoin by using the platform. And all of
Speaker:the $4.2 billion of crypto deposits are now the property of Celsius. Just get your money off the
Speaker:exchanges unless you're trading. Do not keep it on there. Buy a hardware wallet. Do whatever you need
Speaker:to do. Get your money off of those things. Nigeria spent 80% of its revenue to pay debt in the first
Speaker:11 months of last year. I'll be posting that link. It's in Bloomberg directly related to the IMF.
Speaker:It's very sad. Amazon announced 18,000 job cuts. I post these because I see these and then I read
Speaker:the data that says that the US unemployment rate is not going up, which is really what the central
Speaker:bankers are looking for. They need the unemployment rate to go up. I know that sounds weird, but that's
Speaker:what they're looking for. I wonder because there's a lot of job cuts going on. I don't know.
Speaker:Nigeria is banning cash withdrawals from the government accounts to push towards a cashless
Speaker:economy. Hey, Bitcoin fixes that. Fountain got their update. I mentioned what I just said,
Speaker:and I don't know who this guy is. Apparently, he's semi-famous or whatever. He's some economist or
Speaker:Keynesian or whatever. Larry Summers reclining. I mean, literally, you can see the beach in the
Speaker:background. There's people walking by. It's nice palm trees. Lovely day. Of course, he's nicely
Speaker:dressed. Larry Summers reclining on a tropical island and instructing the Prawls. Now, I don't
Speaker:know what Prawls are. Again, sorry. There's going to need to be an increase in unemployment to
Speaker:contain inflation. That is a direct Keynesian thought. Now, I don't get involved in politics
Speaker:very much on this podcast. Whatever. The House of Representatives was won or retained, I can't even
Speaker:remember which, by the Republicans in the US. The new House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, who it took,
Speaker:I think, 15 votes to get, says that their first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS
Speaker:agents. We were actually discussing this last night. I apparently need to go back and take civics.
Speaker:I'm like, well, that's never going to pass the Senate. I forgot or didn't remember or never knew
Speaker:that the Senate doesn't do funding. The House does. So, this bill would not actually go to the Senate.
Speaker:So, the House could fund a bill to repeal the funding for all those new IRS agents that were
Speaker:recently approved, which I think we have no need for. So, in my camp, that's yay. I don't know.
Speaker:You may think differently, and that's okay. Some inflation data. We seem to be on a downtrend. The
Speaker:high for the US was in June. 9.1% in November. It was in 7.1%, so 2% less, and it was just
Speaker:ratcheting down the entire time. They're expecting 6.6%. The new numbers come out on Thursday.
Speaker:I'm not convinced inflation is going down yet, but hopefully it is. We'll see.
Speaker:And so, that's kind of it for the news this week. We will wrap things up. Bitcoin is actually up to
Speaker:$17,226. Everybody get out there. Party favors. The bull run is on. No, I'm just kidding. Maybe
Speaker:it is possible I could be sitting here and we could be at the start of a new bull run.
Speaker:I don't know. All right. Of course, the generational wealth of cryptocurrency. Oh,
Speaker:before I jump into this, just a couple of notes about upcoming episodes. I do kind of know where
Speaker:we're going over the next few weeks. I had a very interesting conversation with a family member,
Speaker:somebody who's very close to me. I had a conversation with them. They actually came to
Speaker:me about, I think it was about XRP, if I remember actually. And I was not really expecting the
Speaker:conversation. And basically somebody had come in and said, well, XRP is better than Bitcoin,
Speaker:and you should invest in XRP. And he came to me knowing that I know a fair amount about these
Speaker:things. And he's like, well, why did this person say this? And they're saying that I should invest
Speaker:in XRP instead of Bitcoin. And I'm actually on this podcast going to relay the conversation,
Speaker:so to speak, that I should have had. Because we get these conversations all the time. People find
Speaker:out we're in crypto, and then they'll come up and they'll be like, hey, what about Dogecoin? What
Speaker:about this? What about that? I have a response. I should have had a better response then,
Speaker:but I'm going to think this through. And then next time somebody comes up and says that,
Speaker:I'm going to be like, hey, I've been doing a podcast for like two years now.
Speaker:Has it been two years? Maybe it has been. It's been a while for those of us who've been along
Speaker:for the entire time. And I got this episode you can take a listen to and it will answer that.
Speaker:So we're going to do that in the next few weeks. I'm going to be talking about debt,
Speaker:because a debt is a very important component of any modern economy, if you want to call it that.
Speaker:And it's also a very important thing as we talked about in the Austrian economic view.
Speaker:So I want to look at that very closely. So that's definitely coming up. And I think I've got one
Speaker:more. Hang on. I actually have a few more, but I'll leave it at those two. We'll probably be
Speaker:doing those over the next few weeks. So that's just a little tip of the hat for what we've got
Speaker:upcoming. All right. So of course the GWC podcast supports podcasting 2.0. It's a value for value
Speaker:podcast as I talk about time and again on here. I don't have ads. I don't have sponsorships. I
Speaker:don't have anything like that. You can support the podcast. And I do that very specifically.
Speaker:I do that because I believe that even if it's a company that I really believe in, let's say
Speaker:Swan Bitcoin came to me and said, Hey, McIntosh, we want to sponsor your show. We'll give you five
Speaker:grand a week and you just shill away our product. I'm not going to do that because it changes my
Speaker:perception. Now I may think Swan Bitcoin is a great product. I've never used it. I don't know
Speaker:that, but let's say I did and I had a lot of experience with it, but what happens if something
Speaker:happens with Swan? And then because I'm getting that money, I may hesitate to tell my users about
Speaker:that. So that's why I choose not to do that kind of thing. Anyways, the way that I do this so that
Speaker:I can continue to grow and I got all kinds of plans and I've outlined some of those recently is
Speaker:I ask my listeners, Hey, are you receiving value from this podcast? If you are, would you please
Speaker:support it? And there are three ways you could do that through time, through talent and through
Speaker:treasure time and talent. As I move into these new projects, there's going to be lots of things to
Speaker:do. I want to do chapters. If I can get my podcast off its current hosting platform as one thing,
Speaker:for example, I also will be setting up a chat room down the road. I hope stuff like that. Okay.
Speaker:Oh, transcripts. I, it takes me a week to get to the transcripts. It just does because there's
Speaker:editing that has to be done there even after the transcript has processed. But if you can't do any
Speaker:of that, you can support me with treasure. You can stream me sats. You can boost send me a message.
Speaker:That's a great way to get ahold of me. And it doesn't have to be a huge amount. Send me a hundred
Speaker:sats and say, Hey, McIntosh, great show. Hey, Macintosh, you're so sucks. I don't care. I've
Speaker:received a boost like that, which I read on the air and that's fine. So anyways,
Speaker:just use a podcasting 2.0 app. There's some great apps out there. You can go to new podcast apps.com.
Speaker:There's a whole list. I love the fountain podcast app. They, like I said, they just got an upgrade.
Speaker:I think you'll like it. If you like the content, I would love it. If you would tell your friends
Speaker:about the podcast, that is the best way for us to grow. Don't go post it on Apple. I don't care. I
Speaker:don't want you using the Apple podcast player because they don't support podcasting 2.0.
Speaker:They do not support people like me. So don't go post there. That's fine. I can live without Apple.
Speaker:Thanks for being here. I hope this has been helpful. I sure would love to hear from you.
Speaker:I'm on Twitter at McIntosh Fintech. I'm on Mastodon at Macintosh at podcastindex.social.
Speaker:You can reach me by email at macintosh at jenwaltzcrypto.com. And of course there's
Speaker:a website there at jenwaltzcrypto.com. Stay humble friends, go out and make it a great week.