Join me today for Episode 1015 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Oklahoma Plays for Bitcoin
- U.S. Bitcoin Sale FUD Wreaking Havoc
- More Companies Add BTC
- Goodbye Gary Gensler
- Flushing Mr. Hanke
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://fountain.fm/episode/ARLVIzakb2peaiUtNkiy
https://cointelegraph.com/news/oklahoma-senator-introduces-bitcoin-freedom-act
https://decrypt.co/300133/us-court-greenlights-sale-of-6-5b-in-seized-silk-road-bitcoin
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/01/09/market-fears-of-potential-selling-pressure-from-possible-silk-road-sale-is-overblown-van-straten
https://decrypt.co/300089/public-companies-add-bitcoin-balance-sheets
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/steve-hanke-is-wrong-about-the-strategic-bitcoin-reserve-
https://www.theblock.co/post/333800/thai-police-seize-bitcoin-mining-machines
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 9:15 AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 9th day of January 2025, and California is burning. It is burning down. The whole damn south West portion of California, LA area seems to just be, giant tinder box. And, you know, there's probably a good reason for that, but before we even talk about it, I wanna talk about the Midwest and Oklahoma. The Russell Briggs Silk Road and everybody's losing their ever loving mind. We've been we've been here before, ladies and gentlemen. We've been here before quite a bit. I'm not exactly sure why we continuously think that this is all new.
It's not. Just I don't I I don't get it, but, hey. You know, it's another day in Bitcoin. Also, let's see. What is this one? Let's see. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna have some pushback on the whole, Silk Road coin sale or upcoming coin sale if they even do sell the coin. So there's at least a balanced notion about this entire Silk Road thing. A couple of more companies have added Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Gary Gensler takes some parting shots as he gives his exit interview, parting shots, of course, about Bitcoin. Steve Hanke, well, mister Hanke is just always mad about bitcoin, but, he's, he's got some things to say. And the, Thailand police have seized, like, a 1000 Bitcoin miners because reasons.
But first up, I wanna get into this California business. I'm and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna spend too long on it. Okay? It's just that I ran across this note on Nostr. And if you're not on Nostr, you get you gotta get on Nostr. Otherwise, you're going to be censored at one point or another on your social media. Now, Nostr is more than just a Twitter clone. And it's more than Instagram, and it's more than Facebook, and it's more than all of them put together. But if you just want a way or some kind of, you know, assurances that maybe, just maybe, you're not going to be censored on Twitter, you might wanna consider getting on Nostr. Same thing if you're on Facebook, same thing if you're on Instagram, because that that is gonna get worse no matter what these people say.
Anyway, so without getting into Nostra too much, I just wanna say that this is where I found this note, and it's from a gentleman named Keith. And he says, and this is about the California fires again, To anyone wondering about the cause of the California fires, here are some pictures that I took while hiking in the Sequoia National Forest a few years ago, a national forest managed by the state of California. I was so shocked at the irresponsible forestry practices that I had to take pictures. All of the wood in these pictures was cut down and left on the ground by state agencies.
This hike covered about 5 miles everything the government touches turns to shit that's why I live in the woods with my wife and dog and try to be as self reliant as possible Okay. So that's the text. Now he's got, as he promised, he has 4 pictures of the Sequoia National Forest that he took pictures of when he was on this 5 mile hike. And the entire ground is littered with detritus. And I'm not talking about dead leaves and pine needles. I'm talking about branches the size of your forearm, all the way up to sawn logs. You know, the size of a tree.
Big logs, small logs. But it's just piles of it, everywhere. And I'm looking at the second picture, and it's even worse it's just massive amounts of dead wood on the ground in the forest and it's dry as a bone and it's been there for years and the reason I can tell is that all the bark for all the on all the small branches the size that are about as big as your wrist it's all gone and the wood is ashen gray that means it's been sunbleached and that happens over a period of time this wood has been left on the ground and we're talking piles of it guys well not piles because it's not even raked up into piles it's spread everywhere on the ground but it's thick. It is a thick layer of dead wood all over the place.
And anybody who's been following what I've been saying for the last, probably, year knows that I've come up with an idea called the Forest Walker system. Now, the Forest Walker system let me get back to I need to, look at something. In episode 849, I laid out the entire Forest Walker situation. What it is, what it does, what it's supposed to do, how it's supposed to function, and and the benefits of having a system like this autonomously taking out the trash of the forest detritus. The dead wood, the dead branches. I highly recommend anybody who is wondering why I'm going through this right now at the start of episode 1015 of Bitcoin and go listen to episode 849 it will be linked in the show notes. In fact, let me, make damn certain that it is going to be linked in the show notes. I'm going to put it right here. There we go. Now it is linked in the show notes and will be there forever. Okay. So I'm not gonna get into it because I've got this that that entire episode is all about the system. But think about a 1,000 autonomous robots all equipped with a small chipper shredder, and all it does is look for the small branches.
It's not going after the big logs. It's just going to grind down the small branches because that's the kindling. It's very, very rare for a big ass log the size of a Volkswagen, let's say, to just catch on fire because it gets hit by lightning. But if there's a pile of small branches next to it and it's dry as shit, and that gets hit by lightning and that catches on fire, then you've got a real good chance of a massive spread of that fire to that log. And if and the pictures that I'm looking at from Keith, this shit is everywhere. It's just everywhere. And I've talked about this before, but not in the forest of California.
In the forest of Colorado, southwestern Colorado specifically, which has seen multiple burns. And it's because of the same thing. These dead branches pile up because we never let forest fires burn anymore because of Smokey the Bear and the ad council and again all of that is in the Forest Walker episode. That would be episode what was it? 849? Yeah, 849, which is linked in the show notes so go listen to what I'm talking about there this is more this is important anyway it got a 1,500 autonomous robots walking around that convert this dead wood into biochar, wood vinegar, electricity and bitcoin because each one of them is equipped with enough bitcoin mining on board to make the whole thing actually work And since then I've come up with more things. I've got an article in the works. I've been working on it for over a year. I know it's kinda sad that I haven't put it out yet, but it's one of these things where it's it it sounds like science fiction, but nothing in the article or nothing in episode 849 is impossible.
The only true question is, is it financially viable enough to make money, to continuously have positive inflows of cash that offset its maintenance and all the rest of this this deployment, all the stuff. Right? So, just understand that these brutal fires if we had just lit fires burn continuously every year without stopping the forest fires, then the fuel would just simply burn off without catching the trees on fire. And that's that's a big difference. When you see forest fire conflagrations like what's going on in Southern California right now or South Western Colorado when those fires happen or basically anywhere else. It's not natural.
It's because humans had the freaking hubris to think that we could manage forest fires better than the earth had been doing it for, oh, I don't know, 1000000 of years? Anyway, just saying, go back, listen to episode 849 of Bitcoin and podcast. It's an entire podcast that outlines this entire Forest Walker system. It's not science fiction. Everything that I talk about is possible right now. The only question is financial viability. That's it. And I haven't been able to answer that question just yet. Alright. Let's go over to the Midwest to Oklahoma, where an Oklahoma senator has introduced Bitcoin Freedom Act for BTC payments.
Martin Young writing it excuse me, 4 coin telegraph. Alright. A Republican state senator in Oklahoma, Dusty Devers, I love that name, filed legislation allowing employees and residents in the state to opt to receive salaries in Bitcoin and enable vendors to accept BTC payments, quote, in a time when inflation is eroding eroding the purchasing power of hardworking Oklahomans, Bitcoin provides a unique opportunity to protect earnings and investments, Deaver said after introducing the Bitcoin Freedom Act on January 8th, quote, as Bitcoin continues to rise and the value of the dollar continues to be printed away in Washington DC, Oklahoma must act to protect our people, he added.
The bill, called SB 325, ensures that participation is entirely voluntary, and that's important. Quote, respecting free market principles and empowering employers, employees, and businesses to choose their own payment options, he said. According to the filing, one of the purposes of the act is to establish a framework for the secure use of Bitcoin by the state of Oklahoma, private businesses, and individual Oklahomans. And another is to authorize Bitcoin as an accessible sorry, acceptable medium for transactions, salaries, and investments.
Senator Devers praised president-elect Donald Trump's pro Bitcoin campaigning, adding, quote, Bitcoin has arrived into the mainstream of our economy and is unquestionably a significant part of the financial future. The legislation puts Oklahoma in a leadership role nationally while ensuring that the state embraces the future of financial technology while providing our citizens with more financial options. The Bitcoin Freedom Act will be eligible for consideration in the 60th legislative session beginning on February 3rd in the great state of Oklahoma.
Devers is among those criticizing high inflation in the United States. Quote, if Washington DC can ruin something, it likely will. And it is certainly ruining the United States dollar, he said on Twitter. Quote, one of my biggest campaign promises was to fight for the financial well-being of those I represent and do what I could to offset the damage caused by inflation, end quote. Devers, who is also a pastor, also criticized central bank digital currencies stating on Twitter that they enable government overreach and surveillance. Quote, they give central authorities the power to track, control, and restrict individual transactions undermining financial privacy and freedom. He said before extolling the virtues of Bitcoin, quote, Bitcoin promotes financial sovereignty.
It's decentralized. Censorship resistant design allows individuals to retain full control over their money, free from government interference, or inflationary manipulation, end quote. Inflation in the United States has been climbing again since September 2024 and is currently 2.7%, according to trading economics. Yeah. 2.7 is kind of a load of crap. It's way higher than that, ladies and gentlemen. That's a CPI number, which is heavily manipulated and has been for the last 3 decades. During the pandemic and the lockdown, it surged to a 4 decade high of over 9% mid 2022.
Yeah. That means that at that time, that 9% guys actually was probably about 22%. Again, that 9% number is a CPI number, and it's fake. It's fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. In May of 2024, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt enacted a law creating a legal framework for blockchain firms and safeguarding crypto mining activities. The bill, which came into effect in November, makes it easier for Bitcoin miners to operate in the state. So the Oklahoma governor, and I didn't even see this. If if I did, I probably just forgot about it. I did not realize that the Oklahoma governor created a legal framework for blockchain firms and to safeguard crypto mining activities. I had no idea that that occurred. And now we have an Oklahoma senator who wants people in Oklahoma to be able to, if they so choose, use, get paid in, and otherwise invest in Bitcoin.
Yeah. It's gonna take the Midwest to lead the way. Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, maybe Nebraska. I hope Colorado, even though I'm not a lot of people don't know this, but a third of the state of Colorado is actually the Midwest. It's part of the Great Plains. I'm just just saying. So and then you up all the way through, like, you know, North Dakota. All of all everything east of the Rockies and west of the Mississippi, we're going to need to lead the way. And it looks like we're doing so. So thank God, yay for us. Now the circle p is open for business, and if you'd like to elevate your style, then find sovereignty in style over at the Leathermint at the leathermint dot com. They got wallets.
They've got, what else they got? They got belts. Do they have shoes? No. They don't have shoes. They have belts. But and oh, and they've got a nice looking leather bracelet. And it's all leather. It's all genuine leather and it's all hand built. Hand stitched, hand cut, all the designs are are done by the Leatherman guy, and I don't know his name, but he is part of the Circle P. Why? Because he accepts Bitcoin for his goods, for his wallets, for his thing called the cold clutch. These are gorgeous pieces of leather and if you want to spend your Bitcoin with this gentleman, he takes it directly. That's right. That's that's exactly why he's in the circle p. Because a) he's got a good product, and b, he takes Bitcoin. If you're not taking Bitcoin for your goods and services, you're not in the circle p. So if you choose to go buy a wallet, please please please, make sure that you use the coupon code Bitcoin and and you will get 10% off of all your purchases.
On Twitter, he's at the leather mint, m I n t. You know, like he's minting leather, you know, the leather mint. On Noster, which is my preferred place, at leathermint. Make sure that you use the coupon code Bitcoin and because not only will you get 10% off, the guy at the Leatherman will cut me some satoshis for giving him some airtime, bringing his ultra high quality products to you listeners of the Bitcoin and podcast. Now back to the news, US court green lights the sale of $6,500,000,000 and sees Silk Road Bitcoin. Oh, no. We're all gonna die. We're just all gonna die. This is added to crypt and written written by Vince DeOquito.
The United States government, in their ultimate wisdom, has secured final approval in the Northern District Court of California while it burns to liquidate crypto's largest ever federal seizure, signaling the closure of a complex 4 year legal battle over 1,000,000,000 of dollars in Bitcoin tied to the infamous Silk Road marketplace. Excuse me excuse me excuse me. Chief US district judge Richard or Dick Seaborg that's an interesting name. Resistance is futile, mister Seaborg. He denied a motion to block the forfeiture of 69,370 Bitcoin, clearing the Department of Justice to sell the 6,500,000,000 in assets according to a court document filed December 30th.
Yes. That's right. This came out a week ago, a week and a half ago, and we're just now talking about it. We knew this was hap we knew it. We knew it on December 30th. And yet, as of yesterday, everybody's freaking out because a Twitter account named DB decided to start the engine running again. Turned the key, and now it's idling and everybody's losing their mind. But Justice Seaborg is known for high profile cases. He recently rejected arguments that Google, under Alphabet, adequately disclosed to outtrack user activity. The tech giant now faces a possible trial in August.
It's unclear why the document relating to the seized Bitcoin has surfaced this week. The DOJ has declined a request for comment. No. We knew this. We knew this was coming. We knew this was in the court. We knew it was probably going to go this way. Guys, there was nothing new about this. There's nothing new about this. It you're we're we're we're being propagandized with FUD, man. So everybody calm down. The development confirms prior reporting in October, well, last year, when it appeared the US government was free to sell the seized Bitcoin from a Silk Road affiliated wallet. Decrypt reviewed the court document following an initial report late Wednesday evening by DB News, the aforementioned DB News, which cited officials confirming the ruling. Well, the ruling alone does not guarantee immediate liquidation since federal asset forfeiture involves multiple administrative steps and potential appeals windows, portions of the seized Bitcoin have already been sold by the DOJ in recent months. Like on December 3rd last year, 2024, the US government moved nearly $2,000,000,000 in Silk Road Bitcoin to Coinbase.
I hate this. I hate this. This is exactly the kind of bullshit I'm talking about. Listen carefully to the way this is written. Portions of the seized Bitcoin have already been sold. On December 3rd, the government moved nearly $2,000,000,000 in Silk Road Bitcoin to Coinbase. We don't know if they sold it. All we can confirm is that they moved it there, and yet the guy from decrypt is saying that they sold it. Do you have proof that they sold it? No. You do not. This is the kind this it's this kind of shitty reporting that pisses me off but continuing. The government maintains a custody arrangement with Coinbase Prime through the US Marshals Service, a division of the DOJ.
The justice department's path to finally checking out Satoshi era Bitcoin stash has weathered several legal storms, including appeals in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as well as the Supreme Court of the United States. Or actually well, actually, maybe it just says Supreme Court. So I don't know if that's the Supreme Court of California, which is part of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, or the United States Supreme Court. Please, again, get your reporting correct. It marks a decisive end to challenges from multiple claimants, including Battle Born Investments, which had argued ownership rights through bankruptcy proceedings involving an individual that they believed was the original owner.
The final draw hinged on a Freedom of Information Act requesting seeking to unmask, quote, individual x, the mysterious figure who surrendered the Bitcoin to authorities in 2020. Court documents from the case timeline indicated that the seized crypto originated from Silk Road, the dark web marketplace shuttered by federal authorities back in 2013. The Bitcoin Cash represents what remains of the platform's illegal transactions in what could become one of the largest government crypto liquidations in history, which means that we're more stupid than Germany if we were to do this.
The resolution arrives at a politically charged moment for the government crypto holdings. President-elect Donald Trump, who told hodlers never sell your Bitcoin at a Nashville crypto conference in July last year, also pledged to build what has become known as the strategic Bitcoin reserve. The newly revealed documents also raise concerns about the handling of these assets with Trump set to be sworn into office in less than 2 weeks. Should be a trademark, man. 2 weeks. 2 weeks. Alright. Hold on for a second. So you're telling me there's 2 things going on here.
Trump is about to sit down in that chair January 21st or 20th. I can't remember. I think the inauguration date this year is on the on 20th. And and and all of a sudden, we get this we get this news. Right? With this news gets back into the get starts getting cycled back in. Well, one thing that this news story did not really cover all that well is that the this federal court that said, hey. You know what? We're just gonna go ahead I'm just gonna go ahead and clear it for y'all. You guys can go ahead and sell if you want to. Yeah. That's over major objections.
They just don't seem to care. The court doesn't seem to care that there's still a question of ownership. There is still a huge question of ownership. And that's an important deal because what was said in this article is this, this federal asset is, federal asset seizure has many more steps and hoops that it has to jump through, which is true. Because this federal I mean, the appeals the appeals alone on this are probably going to tie this 69,000 bitcoin up for months. Guys, this is all bullshit. Whatever is going on in this next 2 weeks, like or, we'll see. When is it that it comes up? About a week and a half.
Trump is supposed to sit down in that chair, and there's all kinds of weird stuff going on. So just be prepared for the weirdest week and a half. Actually, probably more like 2 weeks because god only knows what happens on on on January 20th. If they hold the inauguration, the proceedings of of inauguration, that by itself could be a weird 3 and a half hours. After which, it could be a weird 2 weeks. And that's if they hold it because the week and a half leading up to it is being fraught with all kinds of things that could potentially turn into, oh my god. It's an emergency.
We can't do this just yet. We gotta wait. Now, do I expect that to happen? Well, anything's game. I actually don't think it will happen, but you never know. All these people are insane, and somehow or another, we haven't trucked them all to the guillotine yet. Now market fears of potential selling pressure from the possible Silk Road sale is overblown according to Van Straten. And this is written by James Van Straten. Okay. Let's see what mister Van Straten has to say about his take on this potential sale of all this Bitcoin. For the outside world, Bitcoin dropping $10,000 to $92 in a matter of days could signal the end of the bull run. Oh my god. A caveat to this could be that Bitcoin continues to consolidate below a key psychological $100,000 threshold.
Unconfirmed reports from DB News suggest that the Department of Justice has been given the authority to liquidate 69,000 Bitcoin seized from Silk Road. The report comes just 11 days from president-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. Trump has vowed not to sell any of the 187,000 BTC that is still in possession by the United States government, according to Glassnode. The majority of the tokens in the government's possession comes from the seizures on Bitfinex as well as Silk Road. There's a few reasons that the fears of a sell off may be overblown. The reports of 69,000 BTC being liquidated seems like a lot. And if sold, they will most likely be sold in an orderly fashion as they are requested to get the best possible price. And at the same time, the market already knew that this was a possibility.
So this could have already been bay baked into the market expectations. Secondly, the market has absorbed over 1,000,000 Bitcoins since just last September. This can be shown by the decrease in holdings by long term hodlers who are defined by Glassnode as investors who have held bitcoin for longer than 155 days. As a cohort, they now hold 13,100,000 BTC. However, since September, the price has gone from approximately $60,000 to over 100. The last reason is that we have previous data on another government selling a similar amount of Bitcoin, which is the German government, who sold approximately 50,000 Bitcoin from mid June to mid July of 2023.
The total value of the coins was around 3,500,000,000 back then, which is about half the value of now. However, the market effectively front ran the selling and the price bottomed out around July 7th at around $55,000 while the German government still had possession of at least 25,000 BTC, which shows that this amount of Bitcoin does not dictate the market. There you go. So there's Van Straten's, take on it. So I hope you get a balanced view of what's going on with this stupid ass Silk Road money. Personally, it I don't think they're gonna be able to pull the trigger on this like everybody thinks that they're gonna be able to. What I am surprised about is that Trump isn't all over the media saying that he will sue the living crap out of anybody who touches this stash.
I'm surprised that there is not non governmental entities who are threatening on the news to sue anybody who touches this. This the ownership of these coins, of this particular 69,000 Bitcoin stash is not known. It is this federal judge is just what he's done is he simply overrode the issue of there's a question of who owns it. He doesn't seem to care because, Seaborg, for Seaborg, resistance is futile. He's a federal judge and he will do whatever the hell he wants to do. But there's questions of ownership that are still lingering, which means appeals are going to come down the pipe.
Now, could I be wrong and the United States Marshals Service just cuts and runs and just sells it as a great big old wad and we dive down to 75,000? Sure. That could happen, but whoever actually picks up the phone and pulls that trigger is probably going to lose their job. I'm just saying. Okay. One last one before we get into numbers. 2 more public companies have just added Bitcoin to their balance sheets because they know what's up. Decrypt, Liz Napolitano says that 2 publicly traded companies announced great big Bitcoin buys this week. Los Angeles based social media marketing company, Thumbs Up Media, said on Tuesday that it purchased $1,000,000 in Bitcoin, and that's its first foray into the token. Meanwhile, KULR Technology Group, a San Diego based firm that provides energy storage solutions for the aerospace and defense complex bought $21,000,000 worth of the digital assets bring or asset bringing its Bitcoin treasuries balance to $42,000,000 according to the firm's announcement on Sunday.
The firm made its first purchase less than 2 weeks ago. The companies are each aiming to hold up to 90% of their liquid assets in Bitcoin with thumbs up, also planning to begin paying contractors in Bitcoin in the coming weeks. Thumbs up stock remained largely flat at around $4 in the fall hours following the Bitcoin announcement, and its shares were trading 7% lower in the 24 hour period ending writing time. KULR's stock price is at $2.78, and that's down 27 percent percent since it said it was adding more Bitcoin to its balance sheet. The businesses are the latest companies to take inspiration from who?
Our good friend, Michael Saylor at Micah Strategy. And is there anything else that's about this? Yeah. There's a couple more companies that they talk about, but I've already given you that that, that information over the last few weeks as to who else has been been buying Bitcoin. So chalk up 2 more. Domino's fall, man. They do fall, and now it is time to run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities, West Texas Intermediate is up almost a full point to $74 a barrel. Brent North Sea, likewise, up 1.12 percent to 77 dollars 1p per barrel. Why? Because inventories suspiciously fell. It's bizarre. I don't who knows, man? It's just I'm tired of the EIA saying that they know how much oil we have all the time. Like, every single day they do an inventory, and I'm still going, really?
I I really? Sure, you're collecting up numbers from the oil companies that are saying what inventories they have, and you're doing simple addition. But I just I just don't think something like a daily census on what our oil inventories are is actually a credible thing. I think it's more like witchcraft than anything else. But natural gas following suit, it's up 4 full points to back up to $3.79 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is up over a point to, $2.3 a gallon. Gold is up 0.4 percent to $26.83.20. Silver is up 0.73. Platinum is down a third. Copper is up just over a point. And palladium is basically moving sideways.
Agricultural futures, the biggest mover today is to the upside. Chocolate, almost 5 full points to the upside. The biggest loser is sugar, 3 quarters of a point to the downside. Live cattle is up 2 points, lean hogs up 2 and a third, and feeder cattle are up 1 and a third. The Dow is down 0.13%. S and P is down a quarter as is the Nasdaq, as is the S and P Mini. So these guys are not doing well today. And we are back at $92,340, which is prices we haven't seen since, I think, a week and a half ago. That is a $1,830,000,000,000 market cap.
Bitcoin, you can purchase 34.6 ounces of your shiny metal rock with your 1 bitcoin, of which there are 19,807,623,230 of. And average fees per block are still low, same as yesterday, point 0 six BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. There are 54 blocks carrying a 184,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at single digit high priority rates of 5 satoshis per v byte, low priority is gonna get you in at 4. Hash rate sitting at 769 and a half exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. And from the UN, enemy within, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got Nick Dos with 6,169 sat says, cheers.
Pye's with 420 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. Wartime with 333 says, fire cheers. And then Mark with 210 finishes us off, I hope that dude doesn't give up his keys and pleads the 5th. Dude, I don't know, Mark. I I I honestly don't know what that dude's gonna I mean, I his his lawyer says he's going to comply. So I guess that's it. The real question is, could he take the 5th? Except that the 5th is part of the constitution of the United States, one of the amendments in the bill of rights that make sure that we cannot incriminate ourselves.
So taking the 5th here, I don't know if that I don't know, man. I don't know. I'm not a legal expert. I'm just gonna step off and say that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. How about a parting shot from our favorite guy Gary Gensler, outgoing chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Yeah. He takes some parting shots at the entire crypto industry. Excuse me. As he's being shown the door and given his hat, Sander Lutz from Decrypt. SEC chair Gary Gensler continued to take shots at crypto on his way out of the door on Wednesday, echoing previous comments as he again characterized the industry as, quote, rife with bad actors.
He's not wrong. Right? There's a lot of stuff about what Gary Gensler says in this that I totally agree with, by the way, because most of this entire industry is bull crap. Just saying. When asked in a televised interview with Bloomberg whether criminal cases against the likes of FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, Binance founder, Shengping Zhao, and Terra Ecosystem creator, Do Kwon, deterred unethical behavior in the crypto industry. Gensler appeared to imply that the very premise of blockchain technology could be inherently illegal, which is odd considering he taught an entire blockchain class at some hoity toity Ivy League College for, you know, a few years.
No. Seriously, he did, if you didn't know that. So now he's saying, oh, all this time that I I was prepping this class and I was putting all this research together so that I could teach these children about blockchain, and I'm just now finding out that it could all be inherently illegal. Oh, that side's something I totally disagree with. There's nothing about blockchain itself that is illegal. It's code. It's protected by the first amendment in the United States. Anyway, quote, it's a field that was built up around noncompliance, the outgoing SEC chief said while he was smiling, I might add.
Gensler went on to state that whereas most financial products he's worked with in his 4 decade career have always traded on a mixture of fundamentals and sentiment, crypto still appears to him to be an asset class uniquely lacking in substance. Well, then why were you teaching everybody about it? And in a good way, he wasn't teaching that class to tell people that it was all evil. He was teaching that class because he thought it was awesome. And now, apparently, he's changed his mind. Quote, I've never seen a field that's so much wrapped up in sentiment and not so much about fundamentals.
That I agree with. This entire industry is 99.99 percent fraud, emotion, sentiment, and just honest to god b s. But Gensler is set to leave office on January 20th, which is the same day Donald Trump will sit down in the chair and become president of the United States. During his tenure, the SEC chair led an aggressive crusade against all manner of crypto related firms and projects. Trump's pick for Gensler's replacement, the former SEC commissioner, Paul Adkins. He's widely expected to reverse the current SEC's crypto hostile stance. Yeah. Well, we'll see.
During Wednesday's interview, Gensler made a point to try to color his SEC's current crypto skepticism as nonpartisan and generally unremarkable by invoking the fact that his republican predecessor, Jay Clayton, went after almost as many crypto projects as Gensler did. Oh, the whataboutism. It's all over the place. When Jay was trying to address it, he brought 80 enforcement actions into the area. We've brought about a 100 in our 4 years, which is consistent, Gensler said. Gensler, though, has attracted a particularly intensive amount of vitriol from the crypto community over the last 4 years due to his aggressive positions on the legality and merit of blockchain technology. When asked today how he felt about the intensity of those attacks during his tenure, Gensler appeared indifferent, saying that it came with the territory, quote, if you're not willing to be attacked, you can't go into the public square and debate policy, he said, which is a direct quote from his former boss, Hillary Clinton.
The outgoing regulator added that he's not too worried about the crypto sector given he thinks its appeal remains marginal. Quote, I think the public is probably aware of this, and less than 10% of the public invest in this field. Dude, 10% is one out of every 10 people on the street. That's a lot of people. We I mean, the the the American revolution only had 4 to 6 percent of the population of the new world well, not the new world, but the American colonies at the time. Only 4 to 6%, and they overthrew the world's superpower, which was Britain and King George at the time. And they did it with 4 to 6, saying that a 10% population interest in Bitcoin is marginal is escapism at the very least.
Good riddance, Gensler. Even though I do agree with you on many aspects of what you say, I I don't think that you're playing ball the right way. Okay. Over to Bhutan, where Bhutan's Galefu Mindfulness City pioneers the adoption of Bitcoin and other digital assets in the city's strategic reserves. So we're talking city level at this point, not the whole country of Bhutan. This is Galefu Mindfulness City. Kelefu Mindfulness City or the GMC, Bhutan's new special administration region, today announced its intention to recognize digital assets such as Bitcoin and a couple of shitcoins as part of its strategic reserves making the special administrative region, or SAR, one of the first jurisdictions to officially hold digital assets as part of a strategic reserve The inclusion of digital assets in the GMC's strategic reserves will enhance the SAR's economic resilience and is an evolution of the jurisdiction's involvement in Bitcoin mining.
By the way, this is directly from GMC.bt. This is this is I'm reading the press release from the actual city fathers themselves, not a news story that's reporting on it. This is directly from the horse's mouth. For its strategic reserves, Galefu Mindfulness City intends to recognize digital assets that have large market capitalizations and deep liquidity to ensure that they can be easily bought and sold with minimal price impact. In addition, GMC will look to recognize digital assets that are issued on more mature, secure blockchains that support monitoring of on chain transactions, oh joy.
Located on the land bridge connecting the rapidly growing economies of South Asia, GMC is uniquely positioned to serve the more than 2,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, people in the region. And one of its key economic focuses is on promoting and supporting the use of blockchain technology in line with the SAR's emphasis on innovation and pioneering of new technologies. This announcement follows the enactment of GMC law number 1 of 2024 or, quote, application of laws act 2024, which was announced on the 26th December 2024. The enacted set of laws for GMC included establishing the legal and regulatory framework in GMC for companies seeking to offer financial services involving digital assets.
The enactment of this law, coupled with recognizing digital assets such as Bitcoin, as part of GMC's strategic reserves, is intended to bolster the growth of the digital asset ecosystem in GMC within a technologically progressive yet well regulated environment. In March of 2025, GMC plans to convene a high level meeting in the kingdom of Bhutan of senior government officials and industry leaders from across the world to discuss the recognition of digital assets as part of a jurisdiction's strategic reserve, and the setting up of an international advisory panel on digital assets for the Galefu Mindfulness City.
They made no bones about this announcement. This is probably one of the most well written and intentionally narrow things that I've read in quite a while when it comes to Bitcoin and a city or county or state or country's intention to custody Bitcoin as a direct reserve. So, what does it tell me about Bhutan? It tells me that Bhutan, all this time, has been a sleeper country. It seems to me that these guys have known what they've been doing for quite a long time and have been maybe Bhutan all this time has been the Galt's Gulch that we all know about from from Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged. Maybe Bhutan all this time was like, yeah, we don't care if anybody knows about us. In fact, stay away.
We're too smart for you. We don't want to get you guys are screwing everything up. We're gonna be over here and we're gonna have great fun in our kingdom of Bhutan, and we're going to be rich beyond anybody's wildest dreams because we're not going to engage with the rest of you idiots outside of our borders. Maybe this is the Galt's Gulch that we all deserve. I'm not saying go to baton, I'm just saying maybe they're the ones that did it right. Nobody I guarantee you. And I mean, I I've heard the word Bhutan used throughout my life every once in a while, but not like I've now not I don't I have never known anything about Bhutan more than I know about Bhutan today, which still isn't isn't much.
But everybody's discovering this very small kingdom and starting to realize the the wealth that they have and the beauty that they exist in. And nobody knew about them before except for probably of well, for for the Bhutanese, clearly, but also for the rest of the world. They're probably just very few people and they were probably all in government that actually not only knew what Bhutan was, but had an in-depth view of how they govern themselves, what their economy was like, what they did. I'm telling you, man. I'm thinking that Bhutan is probably the Galt's Gulch that we all know and deserve. Anyway, mister Hankey is more than a character on, South Park playing a, you know, a log of shit.
Steve Hanke is wrong about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Let me break down why his outdated arguments just don't add up, and this is Vivek Sin writing for Bitcoin Magazine. Mister Hanke is wrong about something Bitcoin related once again. He's recently taken aim at the idea of creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. In a video embedded in the Twitter post below, Hankey claimed that converting government savings into bitcoin would be a drag on the economy because those savings wouldn't be invested in real capital assets that produce things. He even doubled down saying bitcoin doesn't build factories, create jobs, or drive innovation. Yeah. Well, you know, ask people like River if they, built a company on bitcoin, which is for this this idiot is just these people need to be put in a fresh pair of diapers and wheeled into an old folks home, and these are the people that literally should be forgotten.
Because I hate old folks homes. I mean, I hate I hate just putting our elderly in old folks homes and having their children just forget that their fathers and mothers exist. I think it's one of the most ugly aspects of humanity I've ever seen yet for Steve Hankey. Yeah. I'm good with it. Let's get honest about what what an SBR is supposed to do. It's it's it's not it's not about building factories or creating jobs directly. It's about protecting a country's economy, hedging against risk, and ensuring long term economic stability. Does mister Hankey think the US should sell its gold and oil reserves or food and weapon stockpiles because they aren't driving innovation?
Of course not. Those reserves exist to provide security and stability, not to act like some venture capital investment. An SBR would work in the same way. It wouldn't directly create jobs, but it would provide the US with a hedge against inflation inflation, dollar debasement, and geopolitical risks. By the way, I'm gonna pause to say that when when people say there's 2 ways to say the same thing. One is inflation, the word inflation. The other is dollar debasement when we're talking about the United States dollar. It's both the same thing.
It's the same thing. Dollar debasement is inflation. Inflation is dollar debasement when we're talking about the United States dollar. Well, let's face it. The dollar isn't as strong as it used to be, and holding Bitcoin would give the US a safety net as the world shifts towards decentralized money. It's about preparing for the future, not clinging to outdated economic models. Mr. Hankey also forgets how reserves can provide leverage. If bitcoin becomes the world's most valuable asset and the United States has indeed established a strategic Bitcoin reserve, it'll be ahead of the game.
That's not just a hedge. It's a massive geopolitical advantage. It would strengthen confidence in the United States financial system. Mr. Hankey's take shows that he doesn't understand what reserves are for. They're about risk management and long term strategy, not short term job creation. A strategic Bitcoin reserve isn't a drag on the economy. It's an innovative, forward thinking move. The idea of an SBR isn't stupid. What's stupid is dismissing it with outdated arguments. Alright. Well, okay. I agree with Vivek's sin, but I think we should probably pause and try to understand what's really happening globally here.
What I see is 4 things. I see Bitcoin. I see stable coins. I see the United States dollar along with its own treasury markets. That's one thing. And then I see the rest of the global fiat currencies. I'm going to umbrella all 4 of those with something called the dollar milkshake theory. Which basically suggests that all fiat currencies are going to dissolve and become the United States dollar. The theory is is that everybody gets dollarized, All the different fiat currencies basically go to 0 in value against the dollar and everybody is forced to use dollars. I have a I have a theory and I don't want anybody to, you know, you can get mad at me if you want, but I don't want anybody to think that I believe this wholeheartedly.
I'm not married to this idea, but I see I see this as a directionally functional possibility. I believe in the dollar milkshake theory. I believe that most countries are screwing up their currencies faster than the United States is. And we are screwing us screwing ours over at a blinding pace. Right? So all fiat currencies fall into the dollar. Now we are left with 3 things. We're left with Bitcoin, stablecoins, the US dollar and its associated treasury markets. The stablecoins are buying United States treasuries to back their stablecoins which can be directly converted into bitcoin and vice versa. Bitcoin can be converted into Tether, Tether converted back into bitcoin, and Tether is completely backed by United States treasuries.
So I think what happens here is that it's not that fiat currencies lose their value against the United States dollar directly, that somehow or another they're gonna lose their value against things like Tether. And, honestly, understand, there's going to be a 1,000 stablecoins that come up, and the only 2 that are credible at this point is Tether and USDC. That doesn't mean that I'm saying go buy them. Unless you actually need them, stay away. There's no reason to have them. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to be around. And it also means that the thousands of, stablecoins that are gonna come out, 99.9% of those are going to be rug pulls. Don't buy them. Right? Now that that's established, we've got a situation where all fiat currencies collapse into tether or circle or both or whatever.
Those companies buy United States Treasury bonds and instead of China, Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, UK, whatever, instead of those people buying our treasury bonds, it's going to be these 2 companies, maybe 3. Right? Now I'm not saying that they won't buy some, but they're I get the feeling that Tether is going to be the largest buyer of United States treasuries on the face of the planet within, like, 5 years. Okay. I'll give you 10. So now we've got we've got a buyer for United States Treasury, which means that we can just sell debt after debt after debt after debt, and it won't matter because it's all going to collapse in to Tether and Circle, which is already fed upon the dying corpses of fiat currencies around the world.
So now we're kind of down to 2 things. Right? We're kind of down to the United States dollar being interchangeable with Tether and Circle, and we're down to Bitcoin being interchanged with Tether and Circle. So since the United States dollar and Bitcoin both have a common denominator, which would be Tether and Circle let and and Tether and Circle basically envelops the treasury market. Let's take that out of the equation. What are we left with? The United States dollar and Bitcoin. Bitcoin ends up being the backer of last resort the reserve asset of last resort and the dollar is pegged directly to Bitcoin through the mechanisms of Tether and Circle.
I kinda think that that's where this is going, which is why I'm going to make the statement that nobody wants to hear the United States dollar isn't going anywhere. Bitcoin is actually going to end up saving the United States dollar. Now, after a few decades of that, I don't know. Even after a decade, I don't know what that looks like. But one thing is for certain, the United States dollar needs Bitcoin a hell of a lot more than Bitcoin needs the United States dollar. But I think that this is where everything is going to go. I think that there's a law in the universe that somehow suggests that gravity just pulls shit together and builds centralized things like planets, moons, suns, solar systems, galaxies, universes.
I think there's some rule that was born out of the big bang that just somehow or another things just centralize. And we try to decentralize them, but the lowest entropy you can get to is a centralized system, which is the most pure form of energy, which doesn't mean that it's good for us. I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying there may be forces at work that we need to truly understand before we start crying into our cheerios about why decentralization is so freaking hard. Now let's move over to Thailand where the Thai police have seized nearly 1,000 Bitcoin Mining Machines amid energy theft allegations. Oh my God, they're stealing the electrons! And this is out of The Block written by James Hunt.
Thai authorities have seized a 1,000 miners during a raid on a company based in the east of the country amid allegations of energy theft. Mining and related devices were impounded following a raid of JIT Company's premises in the Phanat Nikhorm district of Chonburi on Wednesday, the Bangkok Post reported. The firm is registered to conduct digital asset trading activities, but suspicions arose over its power consumption patterns. Thai Police Crime Suppression Division commander Paul Ma Major General Montri Thakshan said man, this is some hard names here, man.
The raid was part of a joint operation between the CSD and the Provincial Electricity Authority after discovering the firm had allegedly tampered with its power meter to mine Bitcoin while avoiding paying electricity costs associated with the operation, according to another local outlet, called The Nation. PEA officials estimated that the operation had illegally consumed electricity worth 100 of 1,000,000 of baht. But that's actually 1,000,000 of dollars in United States dollars, so that's a lot of money, man. Through the but but the exact amount is yet to be determined.
One unidentified staff member admitted to the police that electricity theft was carried out at night while the power meter was used as normal during the day to avoid detection. That's a pretty good idea. The CSD is still investigating the individuals behind the operation, and then it goes into a small description of Bitcoin mining and what it is. So we don't need that. But that's it. That's it, man. 61 minutes and 17 seconds. Almost nailed it to the hour exactly. You guys go and have a good day, and I'll see you on the other side.
It is 9:15 AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the 9th day of January 2025, and California is burning. It is burning down. The whole damn south West portion of California, LA area seems to just be, giant tinder box. And, you know, there's probably a good reason for that, but before we even talk about it, I wanna talk about the Midwest and Oklahoma. The Russell Briggs Silk Road and everybody's losing their ever loving mind. We've been we've been here before, ladies and gentlemen. We've been here before quite a bit. I'm not exactly sure why we continuously think that this is all new.
It's not. Just I don't I I don't get it, but, hey. You know, it's another day in Bitcoin. Also, let's see. What is this one? Let's see. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna have some pushback on the whole, Silk Road coin sale or upcoming coin sale if they even do sell the coin. So there's at least a balanced notion about this entire Silk Road thing. A couple of more companies have added Bitcoin to their balance sheet. Gary Gensler takes some parting shots as he gives his exit interview, parting shots, of course, about Bitcoin. Steve Hanke, well, mister Hanke is just always mad about bitcoin, but, he's, he's got some things to say. And the, Thailand police have seized, like, a 1000 Bitcoin miners because reasons.
But first up, I wanna get into this California business. I'm and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna spend too long on it. Okay? It's just that I ran across this note on Nostr. And if you're not on Nostr, you get you gotta get on Nostr. Otherwise, you're going to be censored at one point or another on your social media. Now, Nostr is more than just a Twitter clone. And it's more than Instagram, and it's more than Facebook, and it's more than all of them put together. But if you just want a way or some kind of, you know, assurances that maybe, just maybe, you're not going to be censored on Twitter, you might wanna consider getting on Nostr. Same thing if you're on Facebook, same thing if you're on Instagram, because that that is gonna get worse no matter what these people say.
Anyway, so without getting into Nostra too much, I just wanna say that this is where I found this note, and it's from a gentleman named Keith. And he says, and this is about the California fires again, To anyone wondering about the cause of the California fires, here are some pictures that I took while hiking in the Sequoia National Forest a few years ago, a national forest managed by the state of California. I was so shocked at the irresponsible forestry practices that I had to take pictures. All of the wood in these pictures was cut down and left on the ground by state agencies.
This hike covered about 5 miles everything the government touches turns to shit that's why I live in the woods with my wife and dog and try to be as self reliant as possible Okay. So that's the text. Now he's got, as he promised, he has 4 pictures of the Sequoia National Forest that he took pictures of when he was on this 5 mile hike. And the entire ground is littered with detritus. And I'm not talking about dead leaves and pine needles. I'm talking about branches the size of your forearm, all the way up to sawn logs. You know, the size of a tree.
Big logs, small logs. But it's just piles of it, everywhere. And I'm looking at the second picture, and it's even worse it's just massive amounts of dead wood on the ground in the forest and it's dry as a bone and it's been there for years and the reason I can tell is that all the bark for all the on all the small branches the size that are about as big as your wrist it's all gone and the wood is ashen gray that means it's been sunbleached and that happens over a period of time this wood has been left on the ground and we're talking piles of it guys well not piles because it's not even raked up into piles it's spread everywhere on the ground but it's thick. It is a thick layer of dead wood all over the place.
And anybody who's been following what I've been saying for the last, probably, year knows that I've come up with an idea called the Forest Walker system. Now, the Forest Walker system let me get back to I need to, look at something. In episode 849, I laid out the entire Forest Walker situation. What it is, what it does, what it's supposed to do, how it's supposed to function, and and the benefits of having a system like this autonomously taking out the trash of the forest detritus. The dead wood, the dead branches. I highly recommend anybody who is wondering why I'm going through this right now at the start of episode 1015 of Bitcoin and go listen to episode 849 it will be linked in the show notes. In fact, let me, make damn certain that it is going to be linked in the show notes. I'm going to put it right here. There we go. Now it is linked in the show notes and will be there forever. Okay. So I'm not gonna get into it because I've got this that that entire episode is all about the system. But think about a 1,000 autonomous robots all equipped with a small chipper shredder, and all it does is look for the small branches.
It's not going after the big logs. It's just going to grind down the small branches because that's the kindling. It's very, very rare for a big ass log the size of a Volkswagen, let's say, to just catch on fire because it gets hit by lightning. But if there's a pile of small branches next to it and it's dry as shit, and that gets hit by lightning and that catches on fire, then you've got a real good chance of a massive spread of that fire to that log. And if and the pictures that I'm looking at from Keith, this shit is everywhere. It's just everywhere. And I've talked about this before, but not in the forest of California.
In the forest of Colorado, southwestern Colorado specifically, which has seen multiple burns. And it's because of the same thing. These dead branches pile up because we never let forest fires burn anymore because of Smokey the Bear and the ad council and again all of that is in the Forest Walker episode. That would be episode what was it? 849? Yeah, 849, which is linked in the show notes so go listen to what I'm talking about there this is more this is important anyway it got a 1,500 autonomous robots walking around that convert this dead wood into biochar, wood vinegar, electricity and bitcoin because each one of them is equipped with enough bitcoin mining on board to make the whole thing actually work And since then I've come up with more things. I've got an article in the works. I've been working on it for over a year. I know it's kinda sad that I haven't put it out yet, but it's one of these things where it's it it sounds like science fiction, but nothing in the article or nothing in episode 849 is impossible.
The only true question is, is it financially viable enough to make money, to continuously have positive inflows of cash that offset its maintenance and all the rest of this this deployment, all the stuff. Right? So, just understand that these brutal fires if we had just lit fires burn continuously every year without stopping the forest fires, then the fuel would just simply burn off without catching the trees on fire. And that's that's a big difference. When you see forest fire conflagrations like what's going on in Southern California right now or South Western Colorado when those fires happen or basically anywhere else. It's not natural.
It's because humans had the freaking hubris to think that we could manage forest fires better than the earth had been doing it for, oh, I don't know, 1000000 of years? Anyway, just saying, go back, listen to episode 849 of Bitcoin and podcast. It's an entire podcast that outlines this entire Forest Walker system. It's not science fiction. Everything that I talk about is possible right now. The only question is financial viability. That's it. And I haven't been able to answer that question just yet. Alright. Let's go over to the Midwest to Oklahoma, where an Oklahoma senator has introduced Bitcoin Freedom Act for BTC payments.
Martin Young writing it excuse me, 4 coin telegraph. Alright. A Republican state senator in Oklahoma, Dusty Devers, I love that name, filed legislation allowing employees and residents in the state to opt to receive salaries in Bitcoin and enable vendors to accept BTC payments, quote, in a time when inflation is eroding eroding the purchasing power of hardworking Oklahomans, Bitcoin provides a unique opportunity to protect earnings and investments, Deaver said after introducing the Bitcoin Freedom Act on January 8th, quote, as Bitcoin continues to rise and the value of the dollar continues to be printed away in Washington DC, Oklahoma must act to protect our people, he added.
The bill, called SB 325, ensures that participation is entirely voluntary, and that's important. Quote, respecting free market principles and empowering employers, employees, and businesses to choose their own payment options, he said. According to the filing, one of the purposes of the act is to establish a framework for the secure use of Bitcoin by the state of Oklahoma, private businesses, and individual Oklahomans. And another is to authorize Bitcoin as an accessible sorry, acceptable medium for transactions, salaries, and investments.
Senator Devers praised president-elect Donald Trump's pro Bitcoin campaigning, adding, quote, Bitcoin has arrived into the mainstream of our economy and is unquestionably a significant part of the financial future. The legislation puts Oklahoma in a leadership role nationally while ensuring that the state embraces the future of financial technology while providing our citizens with more financial options. The Bitcoin Freedom Act will be eligible for consideration in the 60th legislative session beginning on February 3rd in the great state of Oklahoma.
Devers is among those criticizing high inflation in the United States. Quote, if Washington DC can ruin something, it likely will. And it is certainly ruining the United States dollar, he said on Twitter. Quote, one of my biggest campaign promises was to fight for the financial well-being of those I represent and do what I could to offset the damage caused by inflation, end quote. Devers, who is also a pastor, also criticized central bank digital currencies stating on Twitter that they enable government overreach and surveillance. Quote, they give central authorities the power to track, control, and restrict individual transactions undermining financial privacy and freedom. He said before extolling the virtues of Bitcoin, quote, Bitcoin promotes financial sovereignty.
It's decentralized. Censorship resistant design allows individuals to retain full control over their money, free from government interference, or inflationary manipulation, end quote. Inflation in the United States has been climbing again since September 2024 and is currently 2.7%, according to trading economics. Yeah. 2.7 is kind of a load of crap. It's way higher than that, ladies and gentlemen. That's a CPI number, which is heavily manipulated and has been for the last 3 decades. During the pandemic and the lockdown, it surged to a 4 decade high of over 9% mid 2022.
Yeah. That means that at that time, that 9% guys actually was probably about 22%. Again, that 9% number is a CPI number, and it's fake. It's fake, fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. In May of 2024, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt enacted a law creating a legal framework for blockchain firms and safeguarding crypto mining activities. The bill, which came into effect in November, makes it easier for Bitcoin miners to operate in the state. So the Oklahoma governor, and I didn't even see this. If if I did, I probably just forgot about it. I did not realize that the Oklahoma governor created a legal framework for blockchain firms and to safeguard crypto mining activities. I had no idea that that occurred. And now we have an Oklahoma senator who wants people in Oklahoma to be able to, if they so choose, use, get paid in, and otherwise invest in Bitcoin.
Yeah. It's gonna take the Midwest to lead the way. Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, maybe Nebraska. I hope Colorado, even though I'm not a lot of people don't know this, but a third of the state of Colorado is actually the Midwest. It's part of the Great Plains. I'm just just saying. So and then you up all the way through, like, you know, North Dakota. All of all everything east of the Rockies and west of the Mississippi, we're going to need to lead the way. And it looks like we're doing so. So thank God, yay for us. Now the circle p is open for business, and if you'd like to elevate your style, then find sovereignty in style over at the Leathermint at the leathermint dot com. They got wallets.
They've got, what else they got? They got belts. Do they have shoes? No. They don't have shoes. They have belts. But and oh, and they've got a nice looking leather bracelet. And it's all leather. It's all genuine leather and it's all hand built. Hand stitched, hand cut, all the designs are are done by the Leatherman guy, and I don't know his name, but he is part of the Circle P. Why? Because he accepts Bitcoin for his goods, for his wallets, for his thing called the cold clutch. These are gorgeous pieces of leather and if you want to spend your Bitcoin with this gentleman, he takes it directly. That's right. That's that's exactly why he's in the circle p. Because a) he's got a good product, and b, he takes Bitcoin. If you're not taking Bitcoin for your goods and services, you're not in the circle p. So if you choose to go buy a wallet, please please please, make sure that you use the coupon code Bitcoin and and you will get 10% off of all your purchases.
On Twitter, he's at the leather mint, m I n t. You know, like he's minting leather, you know, the leather mint. On Noster, which is my preferred place, at leathermint. Make sure that you use the coupon code Bitcoin and because not only will you get 10% off, the guy at the Leatherman will cut me some satoshis for giving him some airtime, bringing his ultra high quality products to you listeners of the Bitcoin and podcast. Now back to the news, US court green lights the sale of $6,500,000,000 and sees Silk Road Bitcoin. Oh, no. We're all gonna die. We're just all gonna die. This is added to crypt and written written by Vince DeOquito.
The United States government, in their ultimate wisdom, has secured final approval in the Northern District Court of California while it burns to liquidate crypto's largest ever federal seizure, signaling the closure of a complex 4 year legal battle over 1,000,000,000 of dollars in Bitcoin tied to the infamous Silk Road marketplace. Excuse me excuse me excuse me. Chief US district judge Richard or Dick Seaborg that's an interesting name. Resistance is futile, mister Seaborg. He denied a motion to block the forfeiture of 69,370 Bitcoin, clearing the Department of Justice to sell the 6,500,000,000 in assets according to a court document filed December 30th.
Yes. That's right. This came out a week ago, a week and a half ago, and we're just now talking about it. We knew this was hap we knew it. We knew it on December 30th. And yet, as of yesterday, everybody's freaking out because a Twitter account named DB decided to start the engine running again. Turned the key, and now it's idling and everybody's losing their mind. But Justice Seaborg is known for high profile cases. He recently rejected arguments that Google, under Alphabet, adequately disclosed to outtrack user activity. The tech giant now faces a possible trial in August.
It's unclear why the document relating to the seized Bitcoin has surfaced this week. The DOJ has declined a request for comment. No. We knew this. We knew this was coming. We knew this was in the court. We knew it was probably going to go this way. Guys, there was nothing new about this. There's nothing new about this. It you're we're we're we're being propagandized with FUD, man. So everybody calm down. The development confirms prior reporting in October, well, last year, when it appeared the US government was free to sell the seized Bitcoin from a Silk Road affiliated wallet. Decrypt reviewed the court document following an initial report late Wednesday evening by DB News, the aforementioned DB News, which cited officials confirming the ruling. Well, the ruling alone does not guarantee immediate liquidation since federal asset forfeiture involves multiple administrative steps and potential appeals windows, portions of the seized Bitcoin have already been sold by the DOJ in recent months. Like on December 3rd last year, 2024, the US government moved nearly $2,000,000,000 in Silk Road Bitcoin to Coinbase.
I hate this. I hate this. This is exactly the kind of bullshit I'm talking about. Listen carefully to the way this is written. Portions of the seized Bitcoin have already been sold. On December 3rd, the government moved nearly $2,000,000,000 in Silk Road Bitcoin to Coinbase. We don't know if they sold it. All we can confirm is that they moved it there, and yet the guy from decrypt is saying that they sold it. Do you have proof that they sold it? No. You do not. This is the kind this it's this kind of shitty reporting that pisses me off but continuing. The government maintains a custody arrangement with Coinbase Prime through the US Marshals Service, a division of the DOJ.
The justice department's path to finally checking out Satoshi era Bitcoin stash has weathered several legal storms, including appeals in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals as well as the Supreme Court of the United States. Or actually well, actually, maybe it just says Supreme Court. So I don't know if that's the Supreme Court of California, which is part of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, or the United States Supreme Court. Please, again, get your reporting correct. It marks a decisive end to challenges from multiple claimants, including Battle Born Investments, which had argued ownership rights through bankruptcy proceedings involving an individual that they believed was the original owner.
The final draw hinged on a Freedom of Information Act requesting seeking to unmask, quote, individual x, the mysterious figure who surrendered the Bitcoin to authorities in 2020. Court documents from the case timeline indicated that the seized crypto originated from Silk Road, the dark web marketplace shuttered by federal authorities back in 2013. The Bitcoin Cash represents what remains of the platform's illegal transactions in what could become one of the largest government crypto liquidations in history, which means that we're more stupid than Germany if we were to do this.
The resolution arrives at a politically charged moment for the government crypto holdings. President-elect Donald Trump, who told hodlers never sell your Bitcoin at a Nashville crypto conference in July last year, also pledged to build what has become known as the strategic Bitcoin reserve. The newly revealed documents also raise concerns about the handling of these assets with Trump set to be sworn into office in less than 2 weeks. Should be a trademark, man. 2 weeks. 2 weeks. Alright. Hold on for a second. So you're telling me there's 2 things going on here.
Trump is about to sit down in that chair January 21st or 20th. I can't remember. I think the inauguration date this year is on the on 20th. And and and all of a sudden, we get this we get this news. Right? With this news gets back into the get starts getting cycled back in. Well, one thing that this news story did not really cover all that well is that the this federal court that said, hey. You know what? We're just gonna go ahead I'm just gonna go ahead and clear it for y'all. You guys can go ahead and sell if you want to. Yeah. That's over major objections.
They just don't seem to care. The court doesn't seem to care that there's still a question of ownership. There is still a huge question of ownership. And that's an important deal because what was said in this article is this, this federal asset is, federal asset seizure has many more steps and hoops that it has to jump through, which is true. Because this federal I mean, the appeals the appeals alone on this are probably going to tie this 69,000 bitcoin up for months. Guys, this is all bullshit. Whatever is going on in this next 2 weeks, like or, we'll see. When is it that it comes up? About a week and a half.
Trump is supposed to sit down in that chair, and there's all kinds of weird stuff going on. So just be prepared for the weirdest week and a half. Actually, probably more like 2 weeks because god only knows what happens on on on January 20th. If they hold the inauguration, the proceedings of of inauguration, that by itself could be a weird 3 and a half hours. After which, it could be a weird 2 weeks. And that's if they hold it because the week and a half leading up to it is being fraught with all kinds of things that could potentially turn into, oh my god. It's an emergency.
We can't do this just yet. We gotta wait. Now, do I expect that to happen? Well, anything's game. I actually don't think it will happen, but you never know. All these people are insane, and somehow or another, we haven't trucked them all to the guillotine yet. Now market fears of potential selling pressure from the possible Silk Road sale is overblown according to Van Straten. And this is written by James Van Straten. Okay. Let's see what mister Van Straten has to say about his take on this potential sale of all this Bitcoin. For the outside world, Bitcoin dropping $10,000 to $92 in a matter of days could signal the end of the bull run. Oh my god. A caveat to this could be that Bitcoin continues to consolidate below a key psychological $100,000 threshold.
Unconfirmed reports from DB News suggest that the Department of Justice has been given the authority to liquidate 69,000 Bitcoin seized from Silk Road. The report comes just 11 days from president-elect Donald Trump's inauguration. Trump has vowed not to sell any of the 187,000 BTC that is still in possession by the United States government, according to Glassnode. The majority of the tokens in the government's possession comes from the seizures on Bitfinex as well as Silk Road. There's a few reasons that the fears of a sell off may be overblown. The reports of 69,000 BTC being liquidated seems like a lot. And if sold, they will most likely be sold in an orderly fashion as they are requested to get the best possible price. And at the same time, the market already knew that this was a possibility.
So this could have already been bay baked into the market expectations. Secondly, the market has absorbed over 1,000,000 Bitcoins since just last September. This can be shown by the decrease in holdings by long term hodlers who are defined by Glassnode as investors who have held bitcoin for longer than 155 days. As a cohort, they now hold 13,100,000 BTC. However, since September, the price has gone from approximately $60,000 to over 100. The last reason is that we have previous data on another government selling a similar amount of Bitcoin, which is the German government, who sold approximately 50,000 Bitcoin from mid June to mid July of 2023.
The total value of the coins was around 3,500,000,000 back then, which is about half the value of now. However, the market effectively front ran the selling and the price bottomed out around July 7th at around $55,000 while the German government still had possession of at least 25,000 BTC, which shows that this amount of Bitcoin does not dictate the market. There you go. So there's Van Straten's, take on it. So I hope you get a balanced view of what's going on with this stupid ass Silk Road money. Personally, it I don't think they're gonna be able to pull the trigger on this like everybody thinks that they're gonna be able to. What I am surprised about is that Trump isn't all over the media saying that he will sue the living crap out of anybody who touches this stash.
I'm surprised that there is not non governmental entities who are threatening on the news to sue anybody who touches this. This the ownership of these coins, of this particular 69,000 Bitcoin stash is not known. It is this federal judge is just what he's done is he simply overrode the issue of there's a question of who owns it. He doesn't seem to care because, Seaborg, for Seaborg, resistance is futile. He's a federal judge and he will do whatever the hell he wants to do. But there's questions of ownership that are still lingering, which means appeals are going to come down the pipe.
Now, could I be wrong and the United States Marshals Service just cuts and runs and just sells it as a great big old wad and we dive down to 75,000? Sure. That could happen, but whoever actually picks up the phone and pulls that trigger is probably going to lose their job. I'm just saying. Okay. One last one before we get into numbers. 2 more public companies have just added Bitcoin to their balance sheets because they know what's up. Decrypt, Liz Napolitano says that 2 publicly traded companies announced great big Bitcoin buys this week. Los Angeles based social media marketing company, Thumbs Up Media, said on Tuesday that it purchased $1,000,000 in Bitcoin, and that's its first foray into the token. Meanwhile, KULR Technology Group, a San Diego based firm that provides energy storage solutions for the aerospace and defense complex bought $21,000,000 worth of the digital assets bring or asset bringing its Bitcoin treasuries balance to $42,000,000 according to the firm's announcement on Sunday.
The firm made its first purchase less than 2 weeks ago. The companies are each aiming to hold up to 90% of their liquid assets in Bitcoin with thumbs up, also planning to begin paying contractors in Bitcoin in the coming weeks. Thumbs up stock remained largely flat at around $4 in the fall hours following the Bitcoin announcement, and its shares were trading 7% lower in the 24 hour period ending writing time. KULR's stock price is at $2.78, and that's down 27 percent percent since it said it was adding more Bitcoin to its balance sheet. The businesses are the latest companies to take inspiration from who?
Our good friend, Michael Saylor at Micah Strategy. And is there anything else that's about this? Yeah. There's a couple more companies that they talk about, but I've already given you that that, that information over the last few weeks as to who else has been been buying Bitcoin. So chalk up 2 more. Domino's fall, man. They do fall, and now it is time to run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities, West Texas Intermediate is up almost a full point to $74 a barrel. Brent North Sea, likewise, up 1.12 percent to 77 dollars 1p per barrel. Why? Because inventories suspiciously fell. It's bizarre. I don't who knows, man? It's just I'm tired of the EIA saying that they know how much oil we have all the time. Like, every single day they do an inventory, and I'm still going, really?
I I really? Sure, you're collecting up numbers from the oil companies that are saying what inventories they have, and you're doing simple addition. But I just I just don't think something like a daily census on what our oil inventories are is actually a credible thing. I think it's more like witchcraft than anything else. But natural gas following suit, it's up 4 full points to back up to $3.79 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is up over a point to, $2.3 a gallon. Gold is up 0.4 percent to $26.83.20. Silver is up 0.73. Platinum is down a third. Copper is up just over a point. And palladium is basically moving sideways.
Agricultural futures, the biggest mover today is to the upside. Chocolate, almost 5 full points to the upside. The biggest loser is sugar, 3 quarters of a point to the downside. Live cattle is up 2 points, lean hogs up 2 and a third, and feeder cattle are up 1 and a third. The Dow is down 0.13%. S and P is down a quarter as is the Nasdaq, as is the S and P Mini. So these guys are not doing well today. And we are back at $92,340, which is prices we haven't seen since, I think, a week and a half ago. That is a $1,830,000,000,000 market cap.
Bitcoin, you can purchase 34.6 ounces of your shiny metal rock with your 1 bitcoin, of which there are 19,807,623,230 of. And average fees per block are still low, same as yesterday, point 0 six BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. There are 54 blocks carrying a 184,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at single digit high priority rates of 5 satoshis per v byte, low priority is gonna get you in at 4. Hash rate sitting at 769 and a half exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. And from the UN, enemy within, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got Nick Dos with 6,169 sat says, cheers.
Pye's with 420 says, thank you, sir. No, thank you. Wartime with 333 says, fire cheers. And then Mark with 210 finishes us off, I hope that dude doesn't give up his keys and pleads the 5th. Dude, I don't know, Mark. I I I honestly don't know what that dude's gonna I mean, I his his lawyer says he's going to comply. So I guess that's it. The real question is, could he take the 5th? Except that the 5th is part of the constitution of the United States, one of the amendments in the bill of rights that make sure that we cannot incriminate ourselves.
So taking the 5th here, I don't know if that I don't know, man. I don't know. I'm not a legal expert. I'm just gonna step off and say that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. How about a parting shot from our favorite guy Gary Gensler, outgoing chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission? Yeah. He takes some parting shots at the entire crypto industry. Excuse me. As he's being shown the door and given his hat, Sander Lutz from Decrypt. SEC chair Gary Gensler continued to take shots at crypto on his way out of the door on Wednesday, echoing previous comments as he again characterized the industry as, quote, rife with bad actors.
He's not wrong. Right? There's a lot of stuff about what Gary Gensler says in this that I totally agree with, by the way, because most of this entire industry is bull crap. Just saying. When asked in a televised interview with Bloomberg whether criminal cases against the likes of FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried, Binance founder, Shengping Zhao, and Terra Ecosystem creator, Do Kwon, deterred unethical behavior in the crypto industry. Gensler appeared to imply that the very premise of blockchain technology could be inherently illegal, which is odd considering he taught an entire blockchain class at some hoity toity Ivy League College for, you know, a few years.
No. Seriously, he did, if you didn't know that. So now he's saying, oh, all this time that I I was prepping this class and I was putting all this research together so that I could teach these children about blockchain, and I'm just now finding out that it could all be inherently illegal. Oh, that side's something I totally disagree with. There's nothing about blockchain itself that is illegal. It's code. It's protected by the first amendment in the United States. Anyway, quote, it's a field that was built up around noncompliance, the outgoing SEC chief said while he was smiling, I might add.
Gensler went on to state that whereas most financial products he's worked with in his 4 decade career have always traded on a mixture of fundamentals and sentiment, crypto still appears to him to be an asset class uniquely lacking in substance. Well, then why were you teaching everybody about it? And in a good way, he wasn't teaching that class to tell people that it was all evil. He was teaching that class because he thought it was awesome. And now, apparently, he's changed his mind. Quote, I've never seen a field that's so much wrapped up in sentiment and not so much about fundamentals.
That I agree with. This entire industry is 99.99 percent fraud, emotion, sentiment, and just honest to god b s. But Gensler is set to leave office on January 20th, which is the same day Donald Trump will sit down in the chair and become president of the United States. During his tenure, the SEC chair led an aggressive crusade against all manner of crypto related firms and projects. Trump's pick for Gensler's replacement, the former SEC commissioner, Paul Adkins. He's widely expected to reverse the current SEC's crypto hostile stance. Yeah. Well, we'll see.
During Wednesday's interview, Gensler made a point to try to color his SEC's current crypto skepticism as nonpartisan and generally unremarkable by invoking the fact that his republican predecessor, Jay Clayton, went after almost as many crypto projects as Gensler did. Oh, the whataboutism. It's all over the place. When Jay was trying to address it, he brought 80 enforcement actions into the area. We've brought about a 100 in our 4 years, which is consistent, Gensler said. Gensler, though, has attracted a particularly intensive amount of vitriol from the crypto community over the last 4 years due to his aggressive positions on the legality and merit of blockchain technology. When asked today how he felt about the intensity of those attacks during his tenure, Gensler appeared indifferent, saying that it came with the territory, quote, if you're not willing to be attacked, you can't go into the public square and debate policy, he said, which is a direct quote from his former boss, Hillary Clinton.
The outgoing regulator added that he's not too worried about the crypto sector given he thinks its appeal remains marginal. Quote, I think the public is probably aware of this, and less than 10% of the public invest in this field. Dude, 10% is one out of every 10 people on the street. That's a lot of people. We I mean, the the the American revolution only had 4 to 6 percent of the population of the new world well, not the new world, but the American colonies at the time. Only 4 to 6%, and they overthrew the world's superpower, which was Britain and King George at the time. And they did it with 4 to 6, saying that a 10% population interest in Bitcoin is marginal is escapism at the very least.
Good riddance, Gensler. Even though I do agree with you on many aspects of what you say, I I don't think that you're playing ball the right way. Okay. Over to Bhutan, where Bhutan's Galefu Mindfulness City pioneers the adoption of Bitcoin and other digital assets in the city's strategic reserves. So we're talking city level at this point, not the whole country of Bhutan. This is Galefu Mindfulness City. Kelefu Mindfulness City or the GMC, Bhutan's new special administration region, today announced its intention to recognize digital assets such as Bitcoin and a couple of shitcoins as part of its strategic reserves making the special administrative region, or SAR, one of the first jurisdictions to officially hold digital assets as part of a strategic reserve The inclusion of digital assets in the GMC's strategic reserves will enhance the SAR's economic resilience and is an evolution of the jurisdiction's involvement in Bitcoin mining.
By the way, this is directly from GMC.bt. This is this is I'm reading the press release from the actual city fathers themselves, not a news story that's reporting on it. This is directly from the horse's mouth. For its strategic reserves, Galefu Mindfulness City intends to recognize digital assets that have large market capitalizations and deep liquidity to ensure that they can be easily bought and sold with minimal price impact. In addition, GMC will look to recognize digital assets that are issued on more mature, secure blockchains that support monitoring of on chain transactions, oh joy.
Located on the land bridge connecting the rapidly growing economies of South Asia, GMC is uniquely positioned to serve the more than 2,000,000,000, that's billion with a b, people in the region. And one of its key economic focuses is on promoting and supporting the use of blockchain technology in line with the SAR's emphasis on innovation and pioneering of new technologies. This announcement follows the enactment of GMC law number 1 of 2024 or, quote, application of laws act 2024, which was announced on the 26th December 2024. The enacted set of laws for GMC included establishing the legal and regulatory framework in GMC for companies seeking to offer financial services involving digital assets.
The enactment of this law, coupled with recognizing digital assets such as Bitcoin, as part of GMC's strategic reserves, is intended to bolster the growth of the digital asset ecosystem in GMC within a technologically progressive yet well regulated environment. In March of 2025, GMC plans to convene a high level meeting in the kingdom of Bhutan of senior government officials and industry leaders from across the world to discuss the recognition of digital assets as part of a jurisdiction's strategic reserve, and the setting up of an international advisory panel on digital assets for the Galefu Mindfulness City.
They made no bones about this announcement. This is probably one of the most well written and intentionally narrow things that I've read in quite a while when it comes to Bitcoin and a city or county or state or country's intention to custody Bitcoin as a direct reserve. So, what does it tell me about Bhutan? It tells me that Bhutan, all this time, has been a sleeper country. It seems to me that these guys have known what they've been doing for quite a long time and have been maybe Bhutan all this time has been the Galt's Gulch that we all know about from from Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged. Maybe Bhutan all this time was like, yeah, we don't care if anybody knows about us. In fact, stay away.
We're too smart for you. We don't want to get you guys are screwing everything up. We're gonna be over here and we're gonna have great fun in our kingdom of Bhutan, and we're going to be rich beyond anybody's wildest dreams because we're not going to engage with the rest of you idiots outside of our borders. Maybe this is the Galt's Gulch that we all deserve. I'm not saying go to baton, I'm just saying maybe they're the ones that did it right. Nobody I guarantee you. And I mean, I I've heard the word Bhutan used throughout my life every once in a while, but not like I've now not I don't I have never known anything about Bhutan more than I know about Bhutan today, which still isn't isn't much.
But everybody's discovering this very small kingdom and starting to realize the the wealth that they have and the beauty that they exist in. And nobody knew about them before except for probably of well, for for the Bhutanese, clearly, but also for the rest of the world. They're probably just very few people and they were probably all in government that actually not only knew what Bhutan was, but had an in-depth view of how they govern themselves, what their economy was like, what they did. I'm telling you, man. I'm thinking that Bhutan is probably the Galt's Gulch that we all know and deserve. Anyway, mister Hankey is more than a character on, South Park playing a, you know, a log of shit.
Steve Hanke is wrong about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Let me break down why his outdated arguments just don't add up, and this is Vivek Sin writing for Bitcoin Magazine. Mister Hanke is wrong about something Bitcoin related once again. He's recently taken aim at the idea of creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve. In a video embedded in the Twitter post below, Hankey claimed that converting government savings into bitcoin would be a drag on the economy because those savings wouldn't be invested in real capital assets that produce things. He even doubled down saying bitcoin doesn't build factories, create jobs, or drive innovation. Yeah. Well, you know, ask people like River if they, built a company on bitcoin, which is for this this idiot is just these people need to be put in a fresh pair of diapers and wheeled into an old folks home, and these are the people that literally should be forgotten.
Because I hate old folks homes. I mean, I hate I hate just putting our elderly in old folks homes and having their children just forget that their fathers and mothers exist. I think it's one of the most ugly aspects of humanity I've ever seen yet for Steve Hankey. Yeah. I'm good with it. Let's get honest about what what an SBR is supposed to do. It's it's it's not it's not about building factories or creating jobs directly. It's about protecting a country's economy, hedging against risk, and ensuring long term economic stability. Does mister Hankey think the US should sell its gold and oil reserves or food and weapon stockpiles because they aren't driving innovation?
Of course not. Those reserves exist to provide security and stability, not to act like some venture capital investment. An SBR would work in the same way. It wouldn't directly create jobs, but it would provide the US with a hedge against inflation inflation, dollar debasement, and geopolitical risks. By the way, I'm gonna pause to say that when when people say there's 2 ways to say the same thing. One is inflation, the word inflation. The other is dollar debasement when we're talking about the United States dollar. It's both the same thing.
It's the same thing. Dollar debasement is inflation. Inflation is dollar debasement when we're talking about the United States dollar. Well, let's face it. The dollar isn't as strong as it used to be, and holding Bitcoin would give the US a safety net as the world shifts towards decentralized money. It's about preparing for the future, not clinging to outdated economic models. Mr. Hankey also forgets how reserves can provide leverage. If bitcoin becomes the world's most valuable asset and the United States has indeed established a strategic Bitcoin reserve, it'll be ahead of the game.
That's not just a hedge. It's a massive geopolitical advantage. It would strengthen confidence in the United States financial system. Mr. Hankey's take shows that he doesn't understand what reserves are for. They're about risk management and long term strategy, not short term job creation. A strategic Bitcoin reserve isn't a drag on the economy. It's an innovative, forward thinking move. The idea of an SBR isn't stupid. What's stupid is dismissing it with outdated arguments. Alright. Well, okay. I agree with Vivek's sin, but I think we should probably pause and try to understand what's really happening globally here.
What I see is 4 things. I see Bitcoin. I see stable coins. I see the United States dollar along with its own treasury markets. That's one thing. And then I see the rest of the global fiat currencies. I'm going to umbrella all 4 of those with something called the dollar milkshake theory. Which basically suggests that all fiat currencies are going to dissolve and become the United States dollar. The theory is is that everybody gets dollarized, All the different fiat currencies basically go to 0 in value against the dollar and everybody is forced to use dollars. I have a I have a theory and I don't want anybody to, you know, you can get mad at me if you want, but I don't want anybody to think that I believe this wholeheartedly.
I'm not married to this idea, but I see I see this as a directionally functional possibility. I believe in the dollar milkshake theory. I believe that most countries are screwing up their currencies faster than the United States is. And we are screwing us screwing ours over at a blinding pace. Right? So all fiat currencies fall into the dollar. Now we are left with 3 things. We're left with Bitcoin, stablecoins, the US dollar and its associated treasury markets. The stablecoins are buying United States treasuries to back their stablecoins which can be directly converted into bitcoin and vice versa. Bitcoin can be converted into Tether, Tether converted back into bitcoin, and Tether is completely backed by United States treasuries.
So I think what happens here is that it's not that fiat currencies lose their value against the United States dollar directly, that somehow or another they're gonna lose their value against things like Tether. And, honestly, understand, there's going to be a 1,000 stablecoins that come up, and the only 2 that are credible at this point is Tether and USDC. That doesn't mean that I'm saying go buy them. Unless you actually need them, stay away. There's no reason to have them. But that doesn't mean that they're not going to be around. And it also means that the thousands of, stablecoins that are gonna come out, 99.9% of those are going to be rug pulls. Don't buy them. Right? Now that that's established, we've got a situation where all fiat currencies collapse into tether or circle or both or whatever.
Those companies buy United States Treasury bonds and instead of China, Russia, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, UK, whatever, instead of those people buying our treasury bonds, it's going to be these 2 companies, maybe 3. Right? Now I'm not saying that they won't buy some, but they're I get the feeling that Tether is going to be the largest buyer of United States treasuries on the face of the planet within, like, 5 years. Okay. I'll give you 10. So now we've got we've got a buyer for United States Treasury, which means that we can just sell debt after debt after debt after debt, and it won't matter because it's all going to collapse in to Tether and Circle, which is already fed upon the dying corpses of fiat currencies around the world.
So now we're kind of down to 2 things. Right? We're kind of down to the United States dollar being interchangeable with Tether and Circle, and we're down to Bitcoin being interchanged with Tether and Circle. So since the United States dollar and Bitcoin both have a common denominator, which would be Tether and Circle let and and Tether and Circle basically envelops the treasury market. Let's take that out of the equation. What are we left with? The United States dollar and Bitcoin. Bitcoin ends up being the backer of last resort the reserve asset of last resort and the dollar is pegged directly to Bitcoin through the mechanisms of Tether and Circle.
I kinda think that that's where this is going, which is why I'm going to make the statement that nobody wants to hear the United States dollar isn't going anywhere. Bitcoin is actually going to end up saving the United States dollar. Now, after a few decades of that, I don't know. Even after a decade, I don't know what that looks like. But one thing is for certain, the United States dollar needs Bitcoin a hell of a lot more than Bitcoin needs the United States dollar. But I think that this is where everything is going to go. I think that there's a law in the universe that somehow suggests that gravity just pulls shit together and builds centralized things like planets, moons, suns, solar systems, galaxies, universes.
I think there's some rule that was born out of the big bang that just somehow or another things just centralize. And we try to decentralize them, but the lowest entropy you can get to is a centralized system, which is the most pure form of energy, which doesn't mean that it's good for us. I'm not suggesting that. I'm just saying there may be forces at work that we need to truly understand before we start crying into our cheerios about why decentralization is so freaking hard. Now let's move over to Thailand where the Thai police have seized nearly 1,000 Bitcoin Mining Machines amid energy theft allegations. Oh my God, they're stealing the electrons! And this is out of The Block written by James Hunt.
Thai authorities have seized a 1,000 miners during a raid on a company based in the east of the country amid allegations of energy theft. Mining and related devices were impounded following a raid of JIT Company's premises in the Phanat Nikhorm district of Chonburi on Wednesday, the Bangkok Post reported. The firm is registered to conduct digital asset trading activities, but suspicions arose over its power consumption patterns. Thai Police Crime Suppression Division commander Paul Ma Major General Montri Thakshan said man, this is some hard names here, man.
The raid was part of a joint operation between the CSD and the Provincial Electricity Authority after discovering the firm had allegedly tampered with its power meter to mine Bitcoin while avoiding paying electricity costs associated with the operation, according to another local outlet, called The Nation. PEA officials estimated that the operation had illegally consumed electricity worth 100 of 1,000,000 of baht. But that's actually 1,000,000 of dollars in United States dollars, so that's a lot of money, man. Through the but but the exact amount is yet to be determined.
One unidentified staff member admitted to the police that electricity theft was carried out at night while the power meter was used as normal during the day to avoid detection. That's a pretty good idea. The CSD is still investigating the individuals behind the operation, and then it goes into a small description of Bitcoin mining and what it is. So we don't need that. But that's it. That's it, man. 61 minutes and 17 seconds. Almost nailed it to the hour exactly. You guys go and have a good day, and I'll see you on the other side.
The Future of Bitcoin and the US Dollar
