Join me today for Episode 1006 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- MSTR to be Added to NASDAQ 100
- MARA Buys $1.1 Billion BTC
- FED Will Cut Rates; Canada Did
- Man of God Smites Congregation to Steal Money
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2024/12/fad-press-release-2024-12-11/
https://thehill.com/business/5034211-inflation-pickup-november-fed/
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It's 10:30 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 11th day of December 2024.
And this is episode 1,006 of Bitcoin. And this is probably gonna be a shorter show. I gotta pick my daughter up from the doctor, so we'll see how far we get. But stuff is happening today. MicroStrategy is expected to be added to the Nasdaq 100 according to Bloomberg, at least. And Nicholas Hoffman takes us through it from Bitcoin Magazine. Today, Bloomberg ETF analyst, Eric Bartunis and James Seifert announced that MicroStrategy is expected to enter into the Nasdaq 100, ticker symbol Qqq, later this month on December 23rd. Holy shit. MicroStrategy, this is a quote, will likely enter the Nasdaq 100 index on December 23rd, and we expect net buying of at least $2,100,000,000 in shares by ETFs to follow equal to about 20% of daily volume, Seifert explained.
Quote, joining the s and p five hundred is gonna be tougher because of a lack of profit. Though an accounting rule change surrounding bitcoin valuations could make micro strategy eligible in 2025. Net buying of $2,100,000,000 would be an added boost to micro strategy, which has already outperformed most major stocks and Bitcoin itself this year. It's up 450% year to date at the time of writing. Microsoft or Microsoft MicroStrategy, powered by its relentless Bitcoin acquisition strategy, has seen its stock skyrocket to a new all time high this year for the first time since March 10th of 2000.
Yeah. Way back in 2000 where it almost immediately collapsed because of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, if you were if you were alive to remember that. MicroStrategy has already acquired over a 170,000 Bitcoin since announcing its plans to raise $42,000,000,000 to purchase more BTC in late October. Balchunas stated that the official announcement of MicroStrategy getting added to qqq is expected to come this Friday, December 13th. Quote, again, this is our best estimate of what will go down, Balchunas concluded, we don't work at Nasdaq, for your information.
So it sounds like it's a pretty solid rumor to me. That that's what that's what this looks like. There has been no announcement actually made by Nasdaq to list MicroStrategy. There's been no official announcement by MicroStrategy itself that it's going to be listed on Nasdaq. So you've gotta take it with a grain of salt, but, honestly, this sounds like it's a pretty solid, this is probably going to happen. It's pretty solid play in my book. But, you know, we'll we'll find out if MicroStrategy, announces and if they actually do get listed on December 23rd. So let's move on over to Goldman Sachs. That's right. Goldman Sachs seems to be opening up to Bitcoin because the bank is ready to enter the digital asset market according to Atlas 21. I have no idea who wrote it. It just says buy newsroom.
Who is newsroom anyway? No. That's just atlas21.com. Oh oh, well. CEO David Solomon signaled interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum as the bank increased, ETF investments by 71%. So I guess Goldman Sachs is gearing up to enter the cryptocurrency market because CEO David Solomon has expressed a tangible interest in Bitcoin and shitcoin numero uno, though any move remains contingent on regulatory approval. At the Reuters next event, Solomon stated that the firm's ability to participate in spot trading for Bitcoin and shitcoin number 1 was extremely limited from a regulatory standpoint. Now the CEO remarked, quote, you have to ask regulators because at the moment, as a regulated banking institution, and I think that you know this, we're not allowed to own a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as a principle.
If, from a regulatory perspective, we were allowed to interact with these assets, we have a pretty big infrastructure, end quote. The investment bank has increased its Bitcoin ETFs holdings by 71%, reaching $718,000,000 with 461,000,000 of those invested in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF. In an interview with CNBC last July, Solomon expressed optimism about Bitcoin's future, comparing it to gold as a store of value. Goldman Sachs has already distinguished itself as a pioneer in the crypto sector. It was the 1st major US bank to offer over the counter services for digital assets. And and in 2021, it launched Bitcoin futures trading products via the CME Group. Now that's the end of the article. I wanna go back to this, to this quote directly from the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You have to ask regulators because at the moment as a regulated banking institution and I think that you know this we are not allowed to own a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as a principle.
If from a regulatory perspective we were allowed to interact inside these assets, we have a pretty big infrastructure. Okay. What what did he say? He's a bank. What do you mean you can't own it as a principal? It means he's gotta have a third party own it for him. That's the banking regulations. Now I can't remember where those regulations came from or why, but he cannot physically touch the Bitcoin. He has to buy ETFs for them for Goldman Sachs to get exposure to Bitcoin. It sounds to me like he's saying, if the regulatory landscape changes, Goldman Sachs is gonna go all in, at least in being able to offer and all their own custody stuff all around Bitcoin. It's too bad that they use the word Ethereum in this piece, but whatever. You're gonna have to take the bad with the good, I suppose.
But, again, institutions aren't coming, ladies and gentlemen. They are here, and they continue to come. Right? So Goldman Sachs is kinda there. The it's trickling in. The entire large institution that is Goldman Sachs is kinda squeezing itself, this fat ass, through this little itty bitty mouse hole. And right now, it looks like it's got its hand and maybe 5 fingers all the way through that mouse hole. But if they cut that hole open a little bit wider and the rest of Goldman Sachs trundles on through, holy shit. Even Mara Digital or Mara Holdings might have a problem in acquiring more Bitcoin, which they are doing.
Mara has bought another $1,100,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. This is out of Decrypt, Matt DeSalvo, writing public companies are continuing to buy large stashes of Bitcoin near the top. Top Bitcoin miner, Mara, formerly known as Marathon Digital, announced Tuesday that it had snapped up $11,774 worth of Bitcoin for $1,100,000,000 at an average price of $96,000 per coin. Last yesterday, when I was talking about it, I think they were about to buy it, and it looks like they have actually gone ahead and bought it. MARA, which trades under the Nasdaq symbol, MARA, said in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it now holds 40,435 Bitcoin. And at the current price, it's worth roughly $3,900,000,000.
Mara's stock is down by almost 4% so far today because, of course, trading hands for about $23. Over a 6 month period, however, it has risen by 18%. The miner is following in the footsteps of, you guessed it, MicroStrategy, and is the 2nd biggest publicly trader or traded holder of bitcoin after micro strategy, which holds more than 10 times the amount of bitcoin for a total of 423,650 coins worth just, well, $40,000,000,000 with a b. The company is in the business of minting new coins. Bitcoin miners work to process the transactions. Yes. We know.
Miners, which are typically huge industrial operations that uses lots of electricity, are rewarded with Bitcoin for their work. Now that just seems like a throwaway couple of sentences down in the back. We don't really need to know. However, there's a guy on Noster that was and I can't remember who you are. If you're listening to me, you are more than welcome to beat me about the head and shoulders over on Noster, or you can send me a boostagram with some stats attached. But either way, I will definitely respond. And he had said that he's he'd made mention something like Mara using these convertible, note what was it? Convert convertible debt instruments. Let's just call them that.
To buy bitcoin is sort of it he's was suggesting that this is a harbinger of the death of centralized mining and I was going what are you talking about I think the man has a point I think he may have a point. Because I started thinking about it as I was waking up this morning, the thought occurred to me that we're seeing more of these Bitcoin miners that just started out as Bitcoin miners and rapidly, very rapidly have grown to industrial not only industrial size, but industrial sized competence of the teams that are running these miners. And the reason I say that is because now now they're getting into, well, we're gonna diversify. We're gonna get into AI and we're gonna get into cloud computing and we're gonna get into high performance computing. We're gonna do all of these things and now they're actually going on the finance side and taking a page from Michael Saylor's playbook and selling debt in order to actually buy more bitcoin.
And if I put it all together, I see massive diversification And that may be what this gentleman was pointing at, that it's going to cause these miners to sort of kind of ghost Bitcoin because they're gonna be having they don't have to mine it anymore. Well, they do right now. But I'm just saying that if if we take it to its logical conclusion, we might start seeing Riot and Iron and Marathon and some of the older, heavy duty industrial sized miners diverse diversify them way themselves so far out that their Bitcoin exposure I mean, to mining to the Bitcoin mining exposure becomes so so much as just maybe 10% of what they actually do. And that this will be the this will herald in actually truthfully decentralized Bitcoin mining through things such as BitX.
Sure. 1 is not going to do anything. But if, for whatever reason, BitX's sell to the tune of, like, a 100,000,000 units and a whole bunch of people around the world have just 1 or 2 of these things running, you could replace the hash rate pretty damn quick. Couple of 100,000,000, maybe 300,000,000. I don't know what the number is. I haven't figured it out. But it seems to be that whoever it was that was suggesting this on Noster, he may not he may not be out of his mind crazy. Alright? So it could be that we're seeing the busting apart of centralized mining and that there will be an era where there will be centralized miners and a shitload more of decentralized miners coming online and that eventually it will only be the decentralized miners that are actually securing the majority of the hash rate for Bitcoin. And, honestly, that shit for me cannot come fast enough. Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north, Canada, their bank has reduced the policy rate by 50 basis points to 3.25%.
The Bank of Canada today reduced its target for the overnight rate to 3 point 25% with the bank rate at 3 a half percent. Is that what it says? I got a line through my screen. Yeah. 3 a half percent and the deposit rate at 3 a quarter percent. The bank is continuing its policy of balance sheet normalization. And they say, and this is directly out of the bank of Canada dot ca, bank of Canada dot ca. This is their their press release. The global economy is evolving largely as expected in the bank's October monetary policy report. In the United States, the economy continues to show broad based strength with robust consumption and a solid labor market.
I don't think so, but whatever. US inflation has been holding steady with some price pressure persisting. And in Europe, the or the euro area, recent indicators point to weaker growth. In China, recent policy actions combined with strong exports are supporting growth, but household spending remains subdued. Global financial conditions have eased, and the Canadian dollar has depreciated in the face of broad based strength in the United States dollar. Dollar milkshake theory at play here. So the Bank of Canada has reduced their rates. How are how how is the Federal Reserve doing this morning? Let's find out because numbers the inflation numbers did come out, and The Hill by written by Sylvan Lane has this story. Inflation ticks higher as the Federal Reserve eyes another rate cut. It's probably coming. They're probably gonna cut this time. Inflation picked up slightly in November, according to data released Wednesday by the labor market, but likely not by enough to derail the Federal Reserve's plan for another rate cut. Let's see if we have any percentage as to whether or not it's going to happen or not. But it does look like they're looking at a at a 0.25% cut in, in in the Federal Reserve rate. So who knows what the hell's going on? Right? I mean, inflation went up. And I don't know who's taking the numbers of of labor, but I don't think it's as strong of a labor market as as we're being led to believe.
Okay? So I don't know what the Bank of Canada, I don't know where they're getting their numbers. We keep getting lied to every single month that the labor numbers come out. I do believe that the labor numbers or PMI is supposed to come out let's see. Yeah. The PPI month over month is, set to be released tomorrow. And if if TradingView would work for me, and it's just it's frozen this morning. It's just being awfully weird. Oh, well. I don't think the labor statistics are actually telling us what the true labor rate is. I have a sneaky suspicion that nobody knows what the hell's going on and that the wheels are completely off this truck. But you know what? Hey. We got Bitcoin, and we don't really have to worry about it. Let's run the numbers.
Yes. Indeedy. This is gonna be a short show. Oil is up 2.13%, back over $70 a barrel. Brent Norsey is up 1.61% to 73.35 a barrel. Natural gas swinging like Babe Ruth for the fences, 6.7% to the upside, back up to $3.37 cents per 1,000 cubic feet. I guess that means that it's colder in Europe than we were led to believe. And gasoline is up 1 a quarter to a buck 98 a gallon. Gold up 1 and a third point to $2,756 and a dime. Silver is up a half point. Platinum is up point 1 2%. But copper, the only loser today in the red by a quarter, and palladium is up 2 and 2 thirds points.
Most of agricultural future prices are in the green today. Biggest winner is gonna be sugar at 1.33% to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee. 4 and a third to the downside. I got a live cattle up 1.19%. Lean hogs are down a 3rd, but feeder cattle are up 0.69%. The Dow is moving sideways. However, the S and P is up almost a full point. The Nasdaq is up almost 2 full points, and the S and P mini is basically up 3 quarters of a point. What's Bitcoin doing? Oh my god. It's a $100,000 again. Yeehaw. I'm gonna throw some confetti like lieutenant Dan. $100,780 per coin is just under $2,000,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 37.2 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are.
19,000,000 794,426.97 of, and average fees per block is point 12 BTC. So the fees have gone up a little bit. Let's find out what's going on. 113 blocks carrying 290,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear, and, woo doggy, 25 satoshis per vbyte on high priority. And if you wanna get in at low priority, is it still gonna cost you 18 satoshis per vbyte? Just just understand that when I tell you that, that is those numbers, the 24 for the high and 18 for the low, that shit changes minute by minute. You have I mean, if you're gonna do a transaction for any reason whatsoever, you gotta go over to mempool.space and actually look at the fees.
And every time that I've done this and I needed a transaction to go through, I set it at the highest priority rate that I can. In this case, I would if I was doing a transaction today, I would set it for 25 satoshis per vbyte. And you know what happens exactly 30 seconds after I send the transaction? It would go to 27 satoshis per v byte on high priorities and 25 for low priority, which means that my shit would be pushed to the next block. So you you gotta front run this shit sometimes, man. I mean, it's gonna cost you $3.53 at 25 satoshis per vbyte for a standard transaction. So just, you know, understand.
If how how how just do you need to get it in that fast? And if you do, well, then you better like, if it's at 25, you better figure on 30 Satoshis per v byte. Otherwise, you're gonna be waiting. Alright. So Microsoft said no. And that was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin. And Evan, with 10,000 sats, brother, he says no nonsense news on a regular basis. Keep up the good work. Yeah. Well, Evan, I was gonna lay off doing a show today until you paid me 10,000 sats, and I knew that I couldn't do it. So I've made other plans. Something that I had to get done myself. I'm going to wait to do it because I've got Cas Piland who's giving me 21100 sats, and I thank Cas Piland.
And then let's see, stacking with a 100 says, appreciate your proof of work. I appreciate giving it to you. And Graham, with nothing, says, thank you, sir, for the Bitcoin news. Absolutely, brother. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. CFTC accuses pastor of shilling a $6,000,000 crypto Ponzi to his congregants. Oh my god. You're going straight to hell, dude. Cointelegraph's Steven Cate is writing it. The United States CFTC or Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued a pastor, accusing him of promoting a $6,000,000 crypto Ponzi scheme to 1500 people, including some who attended his church in Washington state. Shit, brother. This is my neck of the woods. The CFTC said on December 10th that it filed a complaint against Francicier Abando Penaio, I think, for fraud and misappropriation as part of what it claimed was a multilevel marketing scheme in a December 9th complaint to a Spokane federal court. The CFTC alleged that Panillo, a pastor at a Spanish church in Pasco, Washington, yep, that is definitely my neck of the woods, claimed to his congregants and others through, social media that he operated a trading platform that rewarded users through high performance crypto trading.
Yeah. Buzzword. That's how you get all the stupid people to give you their hard earned money. Because they were smart enough to earn it, but they are definitely not smart enough to keep it. Stop falling for this shit. The regulator alleged that from November 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023, Panayo claimed to be the CEO of Solanify, Solano Partners Limited, and Solano Capital Investments, which he said had developed a Solano ecosystem in which he traded Bitcoin, ether, Tether, and other cryptocurrencies on behalf of his clients. The CFTC said Penyo promised customers that they'd get monthly profits of up to, get this, 35% through Solanify, which they were told used a bot and other software for crypto trading, A staking service for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, USDT, and Dogecoin was also offered through a service known as Solanify 2.0 that guaranteed profits to customers according to the complaint.
Oh, yeah, buddy. That is definitely, that is definitely something that's gonna get you in jail. As part of the scheme alleged alleged by the CFTC, users were shown an online dashboard that displayed purported account statements and offered a 15% referral fee to encourage others to join. That is straight up a multilevel marketing scheme. Quote, these representations and account statements were false, said the CFTC. There was no automated computer trading program. There were no customer accounts. There was no trading taking place nor profits generated. And the defendant was misappropriating all digital and fiat assets that customers transferred.
The CFTC alleged that unsophisticated customers with little or no experience in digital asset transactions, commodity interest trading, or staking digital assets were targeted. Quote, defendant solicitations were almost exclusively in Spanish, which permitted him to abuse his position of trust as a pastor. He abuses trust as a fucking human, guys. Come on. The regulator seeks restitution to defrauded customers, forfeiture of all funds generated through the scheme, a trading ban, and a permanent injunction. Information on Panillo's lawyers were not immediately available. Okay. So this dude was basically telling his Spanish speaking congregation to invest in his company, which was going to generate them 35% in profits.
And, apparently, there was enough people in that congregation that were that was like, sure, dude. Take my money and never give it back because these people are probably never going to be made whole. They might get something back, but it is probably going to going to be a pittance. Now on to some software updates, Zeus Wallet version 0.9.3 has been released with improved channels, UI, and more. Zeus is a mobile Bitcoin and Lightning wallet and remote node manager for LND and Core Lightning. It's available on Android and iOS. So what's new?
Improved channels UI, including reserves. User interface, that's UI. The channels list interface now lets you toggle between your open, pending, and closed channels, displaying the count for each category instantly. Additionally, the individual channel view has been enhanced to better emphasize the channel reserve. Invoice settings have been added or added the ability to display requested amount on the invoice itself. There's embedded LND node. It now has a troubleshooting menu. Bitcoin denominated amounts are now displayed with spaces. Wow. Really? You didn't have spaces in there?
Must have been made for some hard ass reading. Zeus pay, user experience improvements. And then there's a whole list of bug fixes and enhancements. So if you're using Zeus, you might wanna consider updating to the new one. If you are a BTC pay server, version 2.0.4 has been released. It is a free and open source Bitcoin payment processor and allows you to accept Bitcoin without extra fees or intermediaries. So what's new? Add QR code with link to invitation email. Add rate providers for Norwegian exchanges. Greenfield improves, store users API.
And there in the store API store users API, it adds an endpoint to update store users. It checks for the existence of a user and responds with 404. In that case, it allows retrieval of a user by user ID or email. It improves the API documents for the store users endpoint and adds details to store user data or data. There's some improvements here. Move apps invoice link to the top. There's sign in users after accepting an invitation or resetting a password. There is an improved display for the point of sale editor. There's truncate center c s s for icons. I guess that's cascading style sheets. Do not throttle authenticated users on POS application.
There is a plugin, add I I global checkout mode extension allows the plugin to customize checkout experience regardless of the payment method. There's another plugin, I extended lightning client allows the plugin to better validate a lightning connection string and customize display strings. And then there's a whole list of bug fixes. And then lastly, label base version 2.2.3 has also UI improvements and now test net support. So Labelbase is a label management service for bitcoin transactions and addresses. It supports bip or bip 329, a format for unifying label data. The goal of the project, this is important, is to offer a convenient solution for managing labels associated with bitcoin transactions and addresses across wallets and other tools.
So it has been released and the version introduces UI improvements. It has testnet support, adds ability to import samurai wallet backups and other improvements. There is a new user interface. It's a card based label list view optimized for smaller screens such as mobile devices. There's improved UI and UX enhanced status and error message for smoother user experience. There's test net support, as we've mentioned. And then there's samurai backup import. There's a front end code based cleanup for better performance, reworked operations, updated dependencies, and minor bug fixes. So if you are using label base, I and I don't have to use label base because I use Specter.
It's one of my main wallets. And Specter in inside of it allows me to label my Bitcoin wallets or transactions and UTXOs and all that. And labeling your shit, I cannot tell you. You've you've got if you are using a wallet that does not allow you to label, you've got to start labeling your stuff. Where did this Bitcoin come from? Is it is am I about to accidentally mix this Bitcoin with this other Bitcoin? And I don't know where that Bitcoin came from, and it may be dangerous to actually mix those UTXOs. You'll never know that. You you will never know that unless you actually start labeling your UTXOs.
So please consider doing that however it is you're going to do it. If you don't know how to do it, maybe start with label based version 2.2.3, as I said, has just been released. Alright. So we are at 30 minutes and 55 seconds. Probably one of the shortest shows that I've ever done, but I got nothing else to give you except that tomorrow, I'm gonna try to bring you Cank Unger and his ridiculous rant against Bitcoin. I was gonna do it today, but I just didn't have the time. So look forward to that tomorrow, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It's 10:30 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 11th day of December 2024.
And this is episode 1,006 of Bitcoin. And this is probably gonna be a shorter show. I gotta pick my daughter up from the doctor, so we'll see how far we get. But stuff is happening today. MicroStrategy is expected to be added to the Nasdaq 100 according to Bloomberg, at least. And Nicholas Hoffman takes us through it from Bitcoin Magazine. Today, Bloomberg ETF analyst, Eric Bartunis and James Seifert announced that MicroStrategy is expected to enter into the Nasdaq 100, ticker symbol Qqq, later this month on December 23rd. Holy shit. MicroStrategy, this is a quote, will likely enter the Nasdaq 100 index on December 23rd, and we expect net buying of at least $2,100,000,000 in shares by ETFs to follow equal to about 20% of daily volume, Seifert explained.
Quote, joining the s and p five hundred is gonna be tougher because of a lack of profit. Though an accounting rule change surrounding bitcoin valuations could make micro strategy eligible in 2025. Net buying of $2,100,000,000 would be an added boost to micro strategy, which has already outperformed most major stocks and Bitcoin itself this year. It's up 450% year to date at the time of writing. Microsoft or Microsoft MicroStrategy, powered by its relentless Bitcoin acquisition strategy, has seen its stock skyrocket to a new all time high this year for the first time since March 10th of 2000.
Yeah. Way back in 2000 where it almost immediately collapsed because of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, if you were if you were alive to remember that. MicroStrategy has already acquired over a 170,000 Bitcoin since announcing its plans to raise $42,000,000,000 to purchase more BTC in late October. Balchunas stated that the official announcement of MicroStrategy getting added to qqq is expected to come this Friday, December 13th. Quote, again, this is our best estimate of what will go down, Balchunas concluded, we don't work at Nasdaq, for your information.
So it sounds like it's a pretty solid rumor to me. That that's what that's what this looks like. There has been no announcement actually made by Nasdaq to list MicroStrategy. There's been no official announcement by MicroStrategy itself that it's going to be listed on Nasdaq. So you've gotta take it with a grain of salt, but, honestly, this sounds like it's a pretty solid, this is probably going to happen. It's pretty solid play in my book. But, you know, we'll we'll find out if MicroStrategy, announces and if they actually do get listed on December 23rd. So let's move on over to Goldman Sachs. That's right. Goldman Sachs seems to be opening up to Bitcoin because the bank is ready to enter the digital asset market according to Atlas 21. I have no idea who wrote it. It just says buy newsroom.
Who is newsroom anyway? No. That's just atlas21.com. Oh oh, well. CEO David Solomon signaled interest in Bitcoin and Ethereum as the bank increased, ETF investments by 71%. So I guess Goldman Sachs is gearing up to enter the cryptocurrency market because CEO David Solomon has expressed a tangible interest in Bitcoin and shitcoin numero uno, though any move remains contingent on regulatory approval. At the Reuters next event, Solomon stated that the firm's ability to participate in spot trading for Bitcoin and shitcoin number 1 was extremely limited from a regulatory standpoint. Now the CEO remarked, quote, you have to ask regulators because at the moment, as a regulated banking institution, and I think that you know this, we're not allowed to own a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as a principle.
If, from a regulatory perspective, we were allowed to interact with these assets, we have a pretty big infrastructure, end quote. The investment bank has increased its Bitcoin ETFs holdings by 71%, reaching $718,000,000 with 461,000,000 of those invested in BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF. In an interview with CNBC last July, Solomon expressed optimism about Bitcoin's future, comparing it to gold as a store of value. Goldman Sachs has already distinguished itself as a pioneer in the crypto sector. It was the 1st major US bank to offer over the counter services for digital assets. And and in 2021, it launched Bitcoin futures trading products via the CME Group. Now that's the end of the article. I wanna go back to this, to this quote directly from the CEO of Goldman Sachs. You have to ask regulators because at the moment as a regulated banking institution and I think that you know this we are not allowed to own a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin as a principle.
If from a regulatory perspective we were allowed to interact inside these assets, we have a pretty big infrastructure. Okay. What what did he say? He's a bank. What do you mean you can't own it as a principal? It means he's gotta have a third party own it for him. That's the banking regulations. Now I can't remember where those regulations came from or why, but he cannot physically touch the Bitcoin. He has to buy ETFs for them for Goldman Sachs to get exposure to Bitcoin. It sounds to me like he's saying, if the regulatory landscape changes, Goldman Sachs is gonna go all in, at least in being able to offer and all their own custody stuff all around Bitcoin. It's too bad that they use the word Ethereum in this piece, but whatever. You're gonna have to take the bad with the good, I suppose.
But, again, institutions aren't coming, ladies and gentlemen. They are here, and they continue to come. Right? So Goldman Sachs is kinda there. The it's trickling in. The entire large institution that is Goldman Sachs is kinda squeezing itself, this fat ass, through this little itty bitty mouse hole. And right now, it looks like it's got its hand and maybe 5 fingers all the way through that mouse hole. But if they cut that hole open a little bit wider and the rest of Goldman Sachs trundles on through, holy shit. Even Mara Digital or Mara Holdings might have a problem in acquiring more Bitcoin, which they are doing.
Mara has bought another $1,100,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. This is out of Decrypt, Matt DeSalvo, writing public companies are continuing to buy large stashes of Bitcoin near the top. Top Bitcoin miner, Mara, formerly known as Marathon Digital, announced Tuesday that it had snapped up $11,774 worth of Bitcoin for $1,100,000,000 at an average price of $96,000 per coin. Last yesterday, when I was talking about it, I think they were about to buy it, and it looks like they have actually gone ahead and bought it. MARA, which trades under the Nasdaq symbol, MARA, said in the Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it now holds 40,435 Bitcoin. And at the current price, it's worth roughly $3,900,000,000.
Mara's stock is down by almost 4% so far today because, of course, trading hands for about $23. Over a 6 month period, however, it has risen by 18%. The miner is following in the footsteps of, you guessed it, MicroStrategy, and is the 2nd biggest publicly trader or traded holder of bitcoin after micro strategy, which holds more than 10 times the amount of bitcoin for a total of 423,650 coins worth just, well, $40,000,000,000 with a b. The company is in the business of minting new coins. Bitcoin miners work to process the transactions. Yes. We know.
Miners, which are typically huge industrial operations that uses lots of electricity, are rewarded with Bitcoin for their work. Now that just seems like a throwaway couple of sentences down in the back. We don't really need to know. However, there's a guy on Noster that was and I can't remember who you are. If you're listening to me, you are more than welcome to beat me about the head and shoulders over on Noster, or you can send me a boostagram with some stats attached. But either way, I will definitely respond. And he had said that he's he'd made mention something like Mara using these convertible, note what was it? Convert convertible debt instruments. Let's just call them that.
To buy bitcoin is sort of it he's was suggesting that this is a harbinger of the death of centralized mining and I was going what are you talking about I think the man has a point I think he may have a point. Because I started thinking about it as I was waking up this morning, the thought occurred to me that we're seeing more of these Bitcoin miners that just started out as Bitcoin miners and rapidly, very rapidly have grown to industrial not only industrial size, but industrial sized competence of the teams that are running these miners. And the reason I say that is because now now they're getting into, well, we're gonna diversify. We're gonna get into AI and we're gonna get into cloud computing and we're gonna get into high performance computing. We're gonna do all of these things and now they're actually going on the finance side and taking a page from Michael Saylor's playbook and selling debt in order to actually buy more bitcoin.
And if I put it all together, I see massive diversification And that may be what this gentleman was pointing at, that it's going to cause these miners to sort of kind of ghost Bitcoin because they're gonna be having they don't have to mine it anymore. Well, they do right now. But I'm just saying that if if we take it to its logical conclusion, we might start seeing Riot and Iron and Marathon and some of the older, heavy duty industrial sized miners diverse diversify them way themselves so far out that their Bitcoin exposure I mean, to mining to the Bitcoin mining exposure becomes so so much as just maybe 10% of what they actually do. And that this will be the this will herald in actually truthfully decentralized Bitcoin mining through things such as BitX.
Sure. 1 is not going to do anything. But if, for whatever reason, BitX's sell to the tune of, like, a 100,000,000 units and a whole bunch of people around the world have just 1 or 2 of these things running, you could replace the hash rate pretty damn quick. Couple of 100,000,000, maybe 300,000,000. I don't know what the number is. I haven't figured it out. But it seems to be that whoever it was that was suggesting this on Noster, he may not he may not be out of his mind crazy. Alright? So it could be that we're seeing the busting apart of centralized mining and that there will be an era where there will be centralized miners and a shitload more of decentralized miners coming online and that eventually it will only be the decentralized miners that are actually securing the majority of the hash rate for Bitcoin. And, honestly, that shit for me cannot come fast enough. Meanwhile, our neighbors to the north, Canada, their bank has reduced the policy rate by 50 basis points to 3.25%.
The Bank of Canada today reduced its target for the overnight rate to 3 point 25% with the bank rate at 3 a half percent. Is that what it says? I got a line through my screen. Yeah. 3 a half percent and the deposit rate at 3 a quarter percent. The bank is continuing its policy of balance sheet normalization. And they say, and this is directly out of the bank of Canada dot ca, bank of Canada dot ca. This is their their press release. The global economy is evolving largely as expected in the bank's October monetary policy report. In the United States, the economy continues to show broad based strength with robust consumption and a solid labor market.
I don't think so, but whatever. US inflation has been holding steady with some price pressure persisting. And in Europe, the or the euro area, recent indicators point to weaker growth. In China, recent policy actions combined with strong exports are supporting growth, but household spending remains subdued. Global financial conditions have eased, and the Canadian dollar has depreciated in the face of broad based strength in the United States dollar. Dollar milkshake theory at play here. So the Bank of Canada has reduced their rates. How are how how is the Federal Reserve doing this morning? Let's find out because numbers the inflation numbers did come out, and The Hill by written by Sylvan Lane has this story. Inflation ticks higher as the Federal Reserve eyes another rate cut. It's probably coming. They're probably gonna cut this time. Inflation picked up slightly in November, according to data released Wednesday by the labor market, but likely not by enough to derail the Federal Reserve's plan for another rate cut. Let's see if we have any percentage as to whether or not it's going to happen or not. But it does look like they're looking at a at a 0.25% cut in, in in the Federal Reserve rate. So who knows what the hell's going on? Right? I mean, inflation went up. And I don't know who's taking the numbers of of labor, but I don't think it's as strong of a labor market as as we're being led to believe.
Okay? So I don't know what the Bank of Canada, I don't know where they're getting their numbers. We keep getting lied to every single month that the labor numbers come out. I do believe that the labor numbers or PMI is supposed to come out let's see. Yeah. The PPI month over month is, set to be released tomorrow. And if if TradingView would work for me, and it's just it's frozen this morning. It's just being awfully weird. Oh, well. I don't think the labor statistics are actually telling us what the true labor rate is. I have a sneaky suspicion that nobody knows what the hell's going on and that the wheels are completely off this truck. But you know what? Hey. We got Bitcoin, and we don't really have to worry about it. Let's run the numbers.
Yes. Indeedy. This is gonna be a short show. Oil is up 2.13%, back over $70 a barrel. Brent Norsey is up 1.61% to 73.35 a barrel. Natural gas swinging like Babe Ruth for the fences, 6.7% to the upside, back up to $3.37 cents per 1,000 cubic feet. I guess that means that it's colder in Europe than we were led to believe. And gasoline is up 1 a quarter to a buck 98 a gallon. Gold up 1 and a third point to $2,756 and a dime. Silver is up a half point. Platinum is up point 1 2%. But copper, the only loser today in the red by a quarter, and palladium is up 2 and 2 thirds points.
Most of agricultural future prices are in the green today. Biggest winner is gonna be sugar at 1.33% to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee. 4 and a third to the downside. I got a live cattle up 1.19%. Lean hogs are down a 3rd, but feeder cattle are up 0.69%. The Dow is moving sideways. However, the S and P is up almost a full point. The Nasdaq is up almost 2 full points, and the S and P mini is basically up 3 quarters of a point. What's Bitcoin doing? Oh my god. It's a $100,000 again. Yeehaw. I'm gonna throw some confetti like lieutenant Dan. $100,780 per coin is just under $2,000,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 37.2 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are.
19,000,000 794,426.97 of, and average fees per block is point 12 BTC. So the fees have gone up a little bit. Let's find out what's going on. 113 blocks carrying 290,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear, and, woo doggy, 25 satoshis per vbyte on high priority. And if you wanna get in at low priority, is it still gonna cost you 18 satoshis per vbyte? Just just understand that when I tell you that, that is those numbers, the 24 for the high and 18 for the low, that shit changes minute by minute. You have I mean, if you're gonna do a transaction for any reason whatsoever, you gotta go over to mempool.space and actually look at the fees.
And every time that I've done this and I needed a transaction to go through, I set it at the highest priority rate that I can. In this case, I would if I was doing a transaction today, I would set it for 25 satoshis per vbyte. And you know what happens exactly 30 seconds after I send the transaction? It would go to 27 satoshis per v byte on high priorities and 25 for low priority, which means that my shit would be pushed to the next block. So you you gotta front run this shit sometimes, man. I mean, it's gonna cost you $3.53 at 25 satoshis per vbyte for a standard transaction. So just, you know, understand.
If how how how just do you need to get it in that fast? And if you do, well, then you better like, if it's at 25, you better figure on 30 Satoshis per v byte. Otherwise, you're gonna be waiting. Alright. So Microsoft said no. And that was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin. And Evan, with 10,000 sats, brother, he says no nonsense news on a regular basis. Keep up the good work. Yeah. Well, Evan, I was gonna lay off doing a show today until you paid me 10,000 sats, and I knew that I couldn't do it. So I've made other plans. Something that I had to get done myself. I'm going to wait to do it because I've got Cas Piland who's giving me 21100 sats, and I thank Cas Piland.
And then let's see, stacking with a 100 says, appreciate your proof of work. I appreciate giving it to you. And Graham, with nothing, says, thank you, sir, for the Bitcoin news. Absolutely, brother. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. CFTC accuses pastor of shilling a $6,000,000 crypto Ponzi to his congregants. Oh my god. You're going straight to hell, dude. Cointelegraph's Steven Cate is writing it. The United States CFTC or Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued a pastor, accusing him of promoting a $6,000,000 crypto Ponzi scheme to 1500 people, including some who attended his church in Washington state. Shit, brother. This is my neck of the woods. The CFTC said on December 10th that it filed a complaint against Francicier Abando Penaio, I think, for fraud and misappropriation as part of what it claimed was a multilevel marketing scheme in a December 9th complaint to a Spokane federal court. The CFTC alleged that Panillo, a pastor at a Spanish church in Pasco, Washington, yep, that is definitely my neck of the woods, claimed to his congregants and others through, social media that he operated a trading platform that rewarded users through high performance crypto trading.
Yeah. Buzzword. That's how you get all the stupid people to give you their hard earned money. Because they were smart enough to earn it, but they are definitely not smart enough to keep it. Stop falling for this shit. The regulator alleged that from November 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023, Panayo claimed to be the CEO of Solanify, Solano Partners Limited, and Solano Capital Investments, which he said had developed a Solano ecosystem in which he traded Bitcoin, ether, Tether, and other cryptocurrencies on behalf of his clients. The CFTC said Penyo promised customers that they'd get monthly profits of up to, get this, 35% through Solanify, which they were told used a bot and other software for crypto trading, A staking service for Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, USDT, and Dogecoin was also offered through a service known as Solanify 2.0 that guaranteed profits to customers according to the complaint.
Oh, yeah, buddy. That is definitely, that is definitely something that's gonna get you in jail. As part of the scheme alleged alleged by the CFTC, users were shown an online dashboard that displayed purported account statements and offered a 15% referral fee to encourage others to join. That is straight up a multilevel marketing scheme. Quote, these representations and account statements were false, said the CFTC. There was no automated computer trading program. There were no customer accounts. There was no trading taking place nor profits generated. And the defendant was misappropriating all digital and fiat assets that customers transferred.
The CFTC alleged that unsophisticated customers with little or no experience in digital asset transactions, commodity interest trading, or staking digital assets were targeted. Quote, defendant solicitations were almost exclusively in Spanish, which permitted him to abuse his position of trust as a pastor. He abuses trust as a fucking human, guys. Come on. The regulator seeks restitution to defrauded customers, forfeiture of all funds generated through the scheme, a trading ban, and a permanent injunction. Information on Panillo's lawyers were not immediately available. Okay. So this dude was basically telling his Spanish speaking congregation to invest in his company, which was going to generate them 35% in profits.
And, apparently, there was enough people in that congregation that were that was like, sure, dude. Take my money and never give it back because these people are probably never going to be made whole. They might get something back, but it is probably going to going to be a pittance. Now on to some software updates, Zeus Wallet version 0.9.3 has been released with improved channels, UI, and more. Zeus is a mobile Bitcoin and Lightning wallet and remote node manager for LND and Core Lightning. It's available on Android and iOS. So what's new?
Improved channels UI, including reserves. User interface, that's UI. The channels list interface now lets you toggle between your open, pending, and closed channels, displaying the count for each category instantly. Additionally, the individual channel view has been enhanced to better emphasize the channel reserve. Invoice settings have been added or added the ability to display requested amount on the invoice itself. There's embedded LND node. It now has a troubleshooting menu. Bitcoin denominated amounts are now displayed with spaces. Wow. Really? You didn't have spaces in there?
Must have been made for some hard ass reading. Zeus pay, user experience improvements. And then there's a whole list of bug fixes and enhancements. So if you're using Zeus, you might wanna consider updating to the new one. If you are a BTC pay server, version 2.0.4 has been released. It is a free and open source Bitcoin payment processor and allows you to accept Bitcoin without extra fees or intermediaries. So what's new? Add QR code with link to invitation email. Add rate providers for Norwegian exchanges. Greenfield improves, store users API.
And there in the store API store users API, it adds an endpoint to update store users. It checks for the existence of a user and responds with 404. In that case, it allows retrieval of a user by user ID or email. It improves the API documents for the store users endpoint and adds details to store user data or data. There's some improvements here. Move apps invoice link to the top. There's sign in users after accepting an invitation or resetting a password. There is an improved display for the point of sale editor. There's truncate center c s s for icons. I guess that's cascading style sheets. Do not throttle authenticated users on POS application.
There is a plugin, add I I global checkout mode extension allows the plugin to customize checkout experience regardless of the payment method. There's another plugin, I extended lightning client allows the plugin to better validate a lightning connection string and customize display strings. And then there's a whole list of bug fixes. And then lastly, label base version 2.2.3 has also UI improvements and now test net support. So Labelbase is a label management service for bitcoin transactions and addresses. It supports bip or bip 329, a format for unifying label data. The goal of the project, this is important, is to offer a convenient solution for managing labels associated with bitcoin transactions and addresses across wallets and other tools.
So it has been released and the version introduces UI improvements. It has testnet support, adds ability to import samurai wallet backups and other improvements. There is a new user interface. It's a card based label list view optimized for smaller screens such as mobile devices. There's improved UI and UX enhanced status and error message for smoother user experience. There's test net support, as we've mentioned. And then there's samurai backup import. There's a front end code based cleanup for better performance, reworked operations, updated dependencies, and minor bug fixes. So if you are using label base, I and I don't have to use label base because I use Specter.
It's one of my main wallets. And Specter in inside of it allows me to label my Bitcoin wallets or transactions and UTXOs and all that. And labeling your shit, I cannot tell you. You've you've got if you are using a wallet that does not allow you to label, you've got to start labeling your stuff. Where did this Bitcoin come from? Is it is am I about to accidentally mix this Bitcoin with this other Bitcoin? And I don't know where that Bitcoin came from, and it may be dangerous to actually mix those UTXOs. You'll never know that. You you will never know that unless you actually start labeling your UTXOs.
So please consider doing that however it is you're going to do it. If you don't know how to do it, maybe start with label based version 2.2.3, as I said, has just been released. Alright. So we are at 30 minutes and 55 seconds. Probably one of the shortest shows that I've ever done, but I got nothing else to give you except that tomorrow, I'm gonna try to bring you Cank Unger and his ridiculous rant against Bitcoin. I was gonna do it today, but I just didn't have the time. So look forward to that tomorrow, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Market Updates and Bitcoin Price Analysis
Conclusion and Upcoming Content Teaser
