Join me today for Episode 1016 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Jobs Report Sinks Bitcoin: Bitcoin Recovers
- "Running Bitcoin", BTC ETF Anniversary day
- Sen. Lummis to Chair Crypto Sub-committee
- Fuzzing Lightning With Shinobi
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/01/10/u-s-added-256-k-jobs-in-december-blowing-past-160-k-estimate
https://cointelegraph.com/news/first-us-spot-bitcoin-etf-anniversary
https://decrypt.co/300387/cynthia-lummis-senate-crypto-subcommittee
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https://atlas21.com/russia-set-to-sell-over-1000-confiscated-bitcoins-in-a-corruption-case/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/coinswap-v0-1-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/tails-v6-11/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/mi-primer-bitcoin-launches-updated-bitcoin-diploma-2025/
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 9:17 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 10th day of January 2025. Happy Hal Finney running Bitcoin day. This is the anniversary of that tweet. This is episode 1016 of Bitcoin and bringing you all the news that you can use brothers and sisters. We got what do we have on deck? Well, it looks like the guys over at BitX are at it again with home mining. They've notched it up just a little bit. We've got oh, good lord. The employment numbers came out and is causing a bloodbath. Everybody is, like, taking their own lives. They're jumping out of windows, ladies and gentlemen. We can't stop it. It's an apocalypse. It's it's devastating. We're all gonna die. No. We're not. Come on. Guys, chill. Although the Dow Jones is definitely having some problems this morning, given the same news, that Bitcoin got which is the employment report. We'll talk about it.
It is the anniversary of the United States Bitcoin ETFs. However, trading anniversary, the beginning of actual physical trading of those Bitcoin ETFs don't actually celebrate their anniversary until tomorrow, which is a Saturday, which means the markets are closed. But the 10th January, not only not only is it Hal Finney's running Bitcoin tweet anniversary, it is the anniversary of the installation of the Bitcoin ETFs that happened 1 year ago today. Cynthia Lummis is being tapped on the shoulder for something. We'll figure out what, The lightning network privacy?
Well let's get the big picture from shinobi and then coinbase is going to be in the news. Rush is in the news. Coinswap is in the news. Tails and Mee Premier Bitcoin is launching something new. Well, actually, it's not new. It's an update to something old. But the first thing is first, I was reminded today that well over a year ago, in fact when was this that I did March 9, 2023 Jack Spearko of the Survival Podcast dropped the interview that he did with me on Noster for his Bitcoin Breakout, podcast which is an extension of the survival podcast again that is March 9, 2023.
I hooked up with Jack and we did it looks to be at just over 2 hours of what nostr is, what nostr does, why nostr is important, and it was a really really good interview, and I am going to be linking to that in the show notes today. But it is, you know, even though it's old, it's still I believe that it's pretty evergreen because it's talking about the basis of what Noster is. And this was well before we got all kinds of stuff like shipyard and highlighter from Pablo f seven z, not to mention Olas, also from Pablo f seven z because the guy just ships and ships and ships and ships and ships. This was before a great many new clients came out.
This is before a great many new note kinds or rather event kinds for noster came out. So this really is going back and if you want to use it as a, you know, as a purple pill for your family and friends as to what what is noster, you can just send them over here, man, because me and Jack had a really good, really good discussion about it. Like I said, it's 2 hours long. It will be linked in the show notes, and if you don't want to get to the show notes, it was the survival podcast episode number 3265. That is episode 3265 and that was back in March 9, 2023.
Now, home mining. Well, the future of home mining is bright. It is. Frank Korvaz is gonna be talking about the new stuff that Bitax has going on. I believe I've mentioned it before, but let's see what Frank has to say about it. Perhaps the best way to decentralize the bitcoin network is through home mining. And things are trending in the right direction. Yesterday, Sola Satoshi announced the BitAxe Touch, the latest device in the world of home bitcoin mining. This new device will utilize the BM1370 ASIC chip from the bitmain S21 Pro and will be able to reach a sustained hashrate of 1.4 terahashes per second and reach to a hashrate up to 1.6 terahashes per second. It will also feature a touchscreen that displays Bitcoin network stats including the total network hash rate overall, network difficulty, as well as the block height.
And it's a nice looking unit. There's a picture of it right here. It's just like a self contained unit. It's got a built in fan. It's the whole thing is in a case and on the face of that case is a nice beautiful pretty screen that shows you all kinds of data about what's going on inside. Well, part of what's fueling innovations like the bit axe aXe touch is the work of open source miners united, a discord group started by Scott from Bittaxe with over 5,500 members where home mining enthusiasts share ideas and blueprints for new devices. The group had been set up so that anyone who wants to contribute to the development of the can do so and it even offers grants to certain contributors.
The work of such contributors will likely be made easier when Block releases its own ASIC chip, which mining devices developers will be able to use in their very own machines. And for those of you who aren't so technically inclined, but who still want to get into the home mining space and who live in colder climates, you can always purchase a heat sorry, a heat bit. Yes, a heat bit, which is essentially a plug and play home mining device that also serves as a space heater and an air purifier. Even with all these new devices coming to market, I still believe that we're in the early innings of the home bitcoin mining movement and that this space will continue to blossom as more developers and everyday people enter into it. Indeed, the future of home mining is looking bright.
Okay. Again, I had mentioned this Bitax, stuff, the home you know, there's a couple of units that really about home heating as well as home mining. It's it's all about this heat recovery thing. And I had I had put a note out, on Nostr, because I'm I think I'm not banned from Twitter, but I've lost my login credentials to my last, account. And, honestly, that just shows you how much I give a shit about Twitter at this point. I just don't care. It's getting worse over there, and I just don't care. But I put out a note about this whole home mining thing on and none other than Jack Sperico said, hey, look, man. This shit isn't gonna happen unless there's a mining pool that allows these little tiny miners to get something, even if it's just pennies.
Well, he's not exactly wrong, but I do believe that, you know, switching your BitX over to ocean might actually do something. I have not switched my my BitX over to ocean. It's still I can't remember where it's mining to. I just haven't had time to look at it because, like, a few day you know, a few weeks after I got my miner, we ended up in Colorado for Christmas and we're now we're home, So things are a little, you know, up in the air about, you know, doing stuff, and I I just haven't had the time to switch it over. But, a, I think that if I switch over to Ocean that, you know, even my pissant hash rate, you know, is is only gonna get, you know, a few pennies and and whatever.
My again, my point for getting a small BitX miner was simply to have an entry point into home mining. Something that I could hold, something I could look at, something I could interact with, something that I could read. What is a hash rate? Now, where is it mining to? How do I access that wallet? And there's all kinds of questions that I have yet to be able to answer because I haven't really torn into the thing. But the whole point of me saying all this is that this isn't going to stop. And there will be more and more miners that come up for home use that we can somehow harvest heat off of. You know, what would be really cool is to be able to detach the mining segment and the heating element which is also the heating element of a home heater you know for this air purifier thing that we were just talking that frank corva was just talking about detach it from that air purifier and plug it into a food dehydrator Have have the miner be modular so that it like where do you need heat?
Okay. Space heaters. Alright. You modular plug it into there and then you know plug it into that and then all of a sudden that's just a space heater. But if you need to dehydrate some food, pull it out, plug it into your food dehydrator, and all of a sudden, it's the same mining thing without any adjustments whatsoever is now dehydrating food. What else could it do? I don't know. You you come out. You have imaginations too. But we get a chance to start thinking about things in a completely different way. How many of you have ever thought about capturing heat?
Waste heat from anything. You know, there used to be a time when when the out like air conditioners. Like, let's say, West Texas. You got an inside condenser unit or expander unit and then you've got an outside condenser. Alright? So the the the condenser or the compressor, also condenser, I guess. I'm I'm not an AC expert. Roy, you know, on Noster really knows more about this than I do. But there's the the thing on the outside of your house and then there's the thing on the inside of your house and the thing on the inside of your house is cold and air blows through it and it cools your house down. The the captured heat from that goes to the outside unit where the heat is dumped outside.
Generally speaking, there's always a fan attached to it that that sucks outside air through a grill, which is where all the heated gas is coming through, and then the gas or the the heat is expelled from the gas and the fan blows it away. Well, if I put an evaporative cooling tube on top of that fan and it's big enough that it doesn't restrict the airflow so I'm not screwing up the efficiency of the actual unit then now I'm using that heat to evaporate the water like an evaporative cooler except it's outside but it would cool a small space around the the the unit.
That was one of the earliest things that I thought of. I've never done it. I still want to do it just to see if that shit works, but I've I started thinking about that 20 years ago how do we use this heat from everything how do you like in the wintertime you're capturing heat from your engine in your car if you actually drive a real car you know with a gas engine instead electrical engine and that heat is used to heat the cab of the car in the wintertime but in the in the summertime it's just dumped straight out how what can we do with this wasted energy in other words what's called high entropy energy. That's what waste is.
This entire universe is all about entropy. Your low entropy energy is the purest the lower the entropy of your energy is the purer the form of the energy. The higher the entropy, the more wasteful and hard to use or hard to apply energy that that is. And heat is a high entropy waste output from motor vehicles, from electrical engines, you name it, it's out there. But in this case we're starting to think about how we harvest heat. How can we put that to work for us and the home mining landscape looks like one of the best proving grounds for not only mining the best asset in the world, but also to for us to figure out new and improved ways to capture and utilize heat.
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That's 10% off of everything you buy with coupon code bitcoinandtheleathermint.com. And you can find the Leathermint on Twitter at the Leathermint. That's the Leathermint. On Noster, which is everybody's preferred way of actually talking to each other, it's at leathermint. And if you do buy goods and services from him and you do or not services, but you know, if you buy his wallets and stuff, He used a coupon Bitcoin and he is going to get me back on the other side as with a portion of the sales that I was able to sell for him. He's not paying me.
This is the circle p. It's open for business and the circle p is where I bring plebs, like the Leatherman, to plebs just like you that selling their goods and services in Bitcoin. Because if they're not selling in Bitcoin, they ain't in the circle p. Now, let's move on to this next one out of CoinDesk entitled US added 256,000 jobs in December, blowing past the 160,000 job estimate. This is Christian Sandor writing for CoinDesk. The employment market in the United States picked up steam in December with job growth topping economist forecast by a mile and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dipping.
The economy added 256,000 jobs last month according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, topping forecast for 160,000 and up from 212,000 in November revised from an originally reported 220 7,000 I'm going to pause, because this is important. November job numbers were 212,000 That was revised down from 227,000 which was originally reported in November. And then we go on a month and then everybody forgets all about the numbers after the dust clears and then the Bureau of Labor Statistics does what? They make their lie, which it is a lie, a little bit less of a lie by actually getting closer to the numbers. I still think 2,000 or 212,000 is still high.
This this 256,000 jobs report for December, it's a lie. And what will happen? It will be revised down after the dust clears and after the Dow finishes shitting the bed and after Bitcoin finishes shitting the bed and a month goes by, yep, those numbers are not 256,000. But it scared the piss out of risk assets this morning and we just came off of getting the piss scared out of us for other economic numbers that we got either yesterday or the day before. But in either event, the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.1% in December versus the expected 4.2% and November's 4.2%.
Attempting to rally from sizable declines earlier this week, bitcoin fell more than 2% again in the immediate aftermath of the report to $92,800 And today's job market readings come after a number of recent economic reports triggering a broader market pullback across several asset classes as investors quickly scaled back the idea of a continued series of federal reserve rate cuts in 2025. They last year, they told us they were gonna do 4. We were gonna get a full point reduction over 4.25 percent reductions in 2025. We're gonna be lucky to get 1 now, and that causes risk asset guys to wanna go into the dollar.
Anyway, previously high flying crypto markets bore the brunt of the sell off with Bitcoin tumbling from nearly $103,000 on Monday to below 92,000 at one point on Thursday. And major altcoins suffered even larger declines because they're shitcoins. Not altcoins, they're shitcoins. A check of traditional markets finds US stock index futures down roughly 1% following the same jobs print. The strongest reaction is in the bond market, and here we go, with the 10 year treasury yield popping 9 basis points higher to 4.78%. Now the market is not buying the Fed rate cuts already.
It's a mess out there in the, fixed income market if you are a bond trader. Get out. Anyway, the dollar index is also surging. It's up 0.6%. Gold has moved modestly lower to just below $2,700 per ounce. Traders are quickly scaling back bets on further Fed rate cuts in 2025, with the odds of a March move falling to a mere 28%. That's down from 41% just ahead of the report according to CME FedWatch. The odds of a May rate cut have declined to 34%, and that's down from 44% prior. In other closely watched report details, average hourly earnings rose bullshit. Rose 0.3% in December compared with forecast for 0.3% and November 0.4%.
On a year over year basis, average hourly earnings were higher by 3.9%. Did you get paid more? Did anybody in the sound of my voice get paid almost 4% more last year? No. You didn't, did you? It's all bullshit. Anyway, this is written by looks like it's written by well, actually, that's weird. It said this says it's written by Steven Alford down at the bottom, but up here at the top, it says it's written by Christian Sandor, so maybe they co wrote it. My CoinDesk, coindesk.com, the the way that the webpage is displaying for me is all kinds of messed up.
I don't know what the hell is going on, but I don't care. Helen Parts has the next one. Cointelegraph says, US Bitcoin ETF's first anniversary. A surge. Far above expectations. We're celebrating the birthday of Bitcoin ETFs. And for those of you who don't like them, I don't blame you. But the 1st year of spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds in the US exceeded all manner of expectations, marking a historic debut that reshaped both the bitcoin market and traditional finance. Following approval from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on January 10, 2024, US spot Bitcoin ETFs began trading the following day.
And in less than a year, they have contributed 100% of the $44,200,000,000 in inflows to crypto investment products globally as of the end of 2024. And to mark the year since the launch, Cointelegraph reached out to several ETF providers and analysts for their insights. The pace of inflows to US spot Bitcoin ETFs have been strong since they launched, with industry leaders taken by surprise at the pace of adoption. Our estimates were a much more modest $14,000,000,000 for the year, far surpassing our expectations obviously and far above pretty much every other prediction, said Coinshares head of research James Butterfield.
BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF hit $61,000,000,000 in assets under management in less than 1 year. Its gold ETF took 20 years to reach half that, $33,000,000,000 Quote, I was extremely bullish on the spot Bitcoin ETFs as the crypto community had been discussing them for well over a decade, Matt Mina, crypto research strategist at 21 Shares said, quote, I expected $15,000,000,000 in net flows, but what we've seen has completely blown my expectations out of the water. We expected a successful Spot Bitcoin ETF launch, but 1 year later the impact is much greater than we expected, said VEDAFY's head of sector and industry research Roxana Islam One reason for the massive success of US spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024 was long running anticipation and demand from institutions to gain exposure to Bitcoin without the complexities of self custody or direct crypto ownership, Mina said.
Mina also mentioned interest cuts by the US Federal Reserve and promising crypto policies under the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump. Bitcoin's price appreciation coupled with longtime demand made US spot Bitcoin ETFs the best performing ETF launch of all time. Bitwise chief investment officer, Matt Hugan, said, quote, Bitcoin is the best performing asset in history, end quote. Shit. Enough said, bro. Hogan said that broader events like Bitcoin's 4th having in April and concerns about the rising US debt were also contributing factors. Another reason contributing to the success of the ETFs was that they were introduced when Bitcoin's price was historically low, CoinShares' Butterfield said.
The SEC's approval itself was also a big factor, as it eased investors fears that regulators might ban Bitcoin entirely after breaking all expectations in 2024 US spot Bitcoin ETFs are well set for another strong year industry executives and analysts agree quote ETFs are multi year stories, Bitwise's Hogan said, adding that the 2nd year inflows tend to exceed 1st year results in nearly every case with more investors gaining access to the products in the coming year. Quote, the reality is that most professional investors still are prohibited from accessing bitcoin ETFs and that will change in 2025. So I expect 2025 flows to significantly exceed that of 2024s.
Further quote, we expect momentum to continue into 2025 and for the crypto ETF ecosystem to expand alongside growth in the broader crypto industry, Vetafys Islam stated. As BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF dominated bitcoin ETFs with $37,000,000,000 of inflows which accounts for 83% of all crypto ETF inflows from the United States in 2024, some might question whether smaller Bitcoin ETFs can even survive. However, a scenario where issuers like BlackRock gradually displace demand for other Bitcoin ETFs, yeah, it's it's not happening according to Bitwise's Hugin.
Quote, if you look at any area of the market where multiple ETFs are providing similar exposure, you find that assets are distributed among those ETFs. Some are bigger, and some are smaller. And there are often 1 or 2 really large ETFs. But there's no market where one ETF gathers 100% of the assets. And in markets that attract tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars in assets, there are consistently multiple very successful ETFs, Houghton said. Coinshares Butterfield also suggested that US Bitcoin ETFs will continue to dominate dominate the global crypto ETF industry with no other market potentially eclipsing them in the coming years.
Yeah. I know. I get it, guys. Some of you hate the ETFs. We don't need the ETFs. I I I'm with you. We Bitcoin doesn't need the ETFs. The ETFs need Bitcoin, though. But the ETFs are here, and the ETFs are not going away, and they're probably never going away. It's a done deal. You we have to we we're going to have to sleep with the wolves on this one, so you might as well figure out a way to cuddle up to them and steal some of their warmth. But, that said, it's kind of impressive that it took 20 years for gold ETF to hit $33,000,000,000 in assets under management We did twice that in a single year I don't even wanna do the math on what that actually means if we normalize it to what what does that mean if we compress this all to the same time scale?
Now what stretch what is it if we stretched this 1 year of Bitcoin out to 20 years? That doesn't make sense. But if we compare if we look at the average of how much investment was going in year over year to the gold ETF and we do that we average that for 20 years so that we can get a good number of what the average is for 1 year and then compare that number to to bitcoin we might be looking at the difference between $1,500,000,000 what maybe 1.6 or $1,700,000,000 in 1 year of the gold ETF versus $61,000,000,000 in the same year for bitcoin.
Whether you love, hate, are completely indifferent to the Bitcoin ETFs, you can't unsee that, ladies and gentlemen. And Cynthia Lummis probably can't unsee it either, and she's been tapped to lead the 1st ever senate crypto subcommittee. And you're gonna love what what the subcommittee is subcommittee of. This is out of decrypt. Connor Sefton is writing. Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis is reportedly being tapped to lead a new subcommittee focusing on digital assets and according to Fox Business, this would be an offshoot of the Senate Banking Committee which you know you know who heads that up. Right?
Let me let me just make sure so that I don't don't blow smoke straight out of my ass. But, who chairs that? Who's who's who's chairing that? Let me just make sure that I make absolute oh, look. It's it is. It's it's Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is the chairman of the senate banking committee. And this subcommittee of crypto assets, and you know you know Elizabeth Warren hates crypto, is going to be a subcommittee of that very same banking committee, and Cynthia Lummis is being tapped to be the head of it. I would love to be a fly on those walls. I'm telling you. Anyway, Scott recently held a meeting. This is Tim Scott, by the way, who previously said crypto has the potential to democratize the financial world. He he held a meeting with Donald Trump and the incoming crypto czar, David Sachs, and appeared with Lummis at a panel of the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium last September. And at the time, he had said, quote, wouldn't it be kinda cool if we had a subcommittee on the banking committee that focuses on the industry so that we bring more light to the conversation, more hearings on the industry, so we get things done faster?
Yeah. Good luck with a civic subcommittee. Anyway, such a subcommittee already exists in the larger house of representatives, which is also undergoing a leadership change. On Thursday, it was announced that Wisconsin's Brian Steele will chair the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence with jurisdiction over crypto, stablecoins, and CBDCs. He succeeds Arkansas Congressman French Hill who in turn becomes chairman of the overarching House Financial Services Committee. Oh, boy. The stand with crypto campaign group has given Steele an a rating, indicating he strongly supports the digital asset sector, with the congressman previously warning that a lack of regulation, risks pushing opportunities overseas.
After his new position was announced, Steele said, quote, innovation in the financial services sector provides an exciting opportunity for consumers and entrepreneurs as technologies like financial applications, digital assets, and machine learning revolutionize our economy. The selection of Cynthia Lummis in Steele to lead these 2 crypto focused subcommittees is a sign that Donald Trump looks to capitalize on the Republican's complete control of government, especially when it comes to pushing through his pro Bitcoin promises. Yeah. Well, we'll see. A regular on the crypto conference circuit, Lummis was an early adopter of BTC and has led calls for the United States to create a strategic bitcoin reserve through her proposed bills in the senate.
Last July, she unveiled the boosting innovation technology and competitiveness through optimized investment act. That's the bitcoin act. That's a man, it's a terrible name, but it would require the government to purchase 1,000,000 BTC over a 5 year period. Lummis has stressed this $95,000,000,000 investment would not be taxpayer funded and instead use existing funds across the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. That goes further than what Trump himself has proposed with the president-elect suggesting that about 200,000 BTC seized from criminals with a current market valuation of 19,200,000,000 could be converted into such a reserve. Well, not if the DOJ is gonna sell it, Trump. You better make some phone calls.
You better get some judges or some lawyers to, I don't know, get some judges to throw some some injunctions or whatever it is, some some stays, some what any legal, you know, words that you want to use that stops the United States government from selling the Bitcoin, the 69,000 Bitcoin that was seized from Silk Road. Yes. The FUD is ongoing today. It's not going to end until the very first court case that blocks the federal government sale of those assets. And all it's going to take is almost 1 or 2 different blocks to get Trump over the January 20th target so that he can sit in the chair and just flat ass say, no, that's not gonna happen. But if they sell it beforehand, if these guys aren't Johnny on the stick, stopping the federal government from selling that Bitcoin, they could sell that Bitcoin.
However, I have yet to see any sales actually occurring, but enough of that. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is up 3 points today, ladies and gentlemen. West Texas Intermediate up to 60 no. Just 60. $76.14. Brent Norcia is up just over 3 points to 79.25. Natural gas hitting 6 and a half percent to the upside, just a hair under 4 dollars per 1,000 cubic feet, and gasoline up a full two points and then some to $2.7 a gallon. Hey, we got breaking news from cnbc.com. Trump Organization to limit president elects involvement under new ethics plan. Oh, no.
Anyway, metal futures. Gold is up 1.4 percent to 27, 28.60¢. Silver is up 1 and a third. Platinum is up 1 and a quarter, but copper is down a quarter. Palladium. Palladium is up 3.9%. Used to be a club in dance club in Lubbock called Palladium. It was one of the, actinide lanthanide series, and if you're not a chemist, you won't get that one. Ag is, pretty much mixed today. Biggest winner is coffee? No. It's soybean. No. It's corn. Corn. Corn. Corn. 2 and a half percent to the upside. Biggest loser is chocolate. 3 and a half to the downside. But live cattle up a quarter, but lean hogs are up more than that to a full point.
Feeder cattle are moving sideways. Bloodbath in legacy fiat markets. Dow down 1.5%. It shaved off 662 points to land somewhere around the 42,216 point range. S and P also down 1.5%. Nasdaq down 1.6. S and P Mini down 1.6. Blood is in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. It's gonna be ugly because the lie of the job report did its function. I'm pausing to pause it. What happens? It's clear that the majority of the world's population looks at Bitcoin as a risk asset. How long does it take for governments of the world to keep lying about their awesome economies so that there's no possible way cheap money would ever ever come back into the fold again? Therefore, using a straight up lie, not regulations, not enforcement actions, not knocking on your door telling you that if you don't turn over your 24 word key you're gonna die. No. No. No. Just lying about the labor market.
Just lying about the CPI. That's all it takes, ladies and gentlemen, to crash the price of Bitcoin to they could keep this shit suppressed forever simply by continuing to lie, but targeting the economy being great. Everybody's working, everybody's getting paid more, everybody's got money. None of which is actually true, but hey, as long as it keeps the price of Bitcoin suppressed, fuck them. Right? Right. Now, $95,080 is the price of Bitcoin right now. That is a $1,880,000,000,000 market cap and you can get 35.3 ounces of the shiny metal rock with your 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,080,098.22 of and average fees per block have softened even further to 0.04btc on average on a per block basis.
And there are sub 50 blocks in MIMPLs around the world carrying a 181,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear high priority rates of 8. Count them, 8 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 7. Hash rate is 774.9 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. That hash rate is the number we use to define just how secure the bitcoin protocol is, and at this point, pretty damn secure. Now, California needs Forest Walker. It certainly does. That was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Hearn 88 with 47 100 sat says, I can vouch for Leathermint.
Excellent belts built to last. I'm done buying fake fiat crap. Thanks for the podcast, sir. No. Thank you, Hearn. Go visit my buddies over at the Leatherman. Pies with a 1,000. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Joey Doo Dee with Joey Doo Dee with a 1,000 says, always loaded with great info. How do you do this nearly every day? Thanks, DB. How do I do it? I sit my ass down in a chair and I fucking do it. Lupin with 500 sat says, thank you for keeping us informed in a charming way. Keep rocking. You got it bro. Wartime with 333, looks like cheers. And Mark with 210 says Noster is galt's gulch on the internet.
This I definitely agree with. Nick Dose with a 101 says, cheers. And that is the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Shinobi writing for Bitcoin Magazine, the Lightning Network privacy big picture. Don't forget the NSA. One of the secondary benefits of how the Lightning Network works as a scaling solution is privacy. It's by no means perfect or undefeatable privacy, but it is better than the naive use of the base layer blockchain itself. It's also not perfectly balanced. The sender learns a great many details about the receiver, but the receiver learns nothing about the sender.
For casual payments, it is a big improvement for consumers over on chain payments. It does have one big problem, though. Something not unique to lightning, but a problem for all onion routed systems. Global passive adversaries. That means an actor who is able to passively monitor all the internet connections between everyone involved in the network like lightning or tor. When a message crosses the network, the adversary can see a message move from 1 node to a second node and also see that a message went from the 2nd node to a third right after it received 1 from the first. If a global adversary exists, then while they cannot see the specific details of a message across the network, they can see where it originated from and where it arrived.
That is plenty enough information to de anonymize a payment system like lightning where the chief matter of importance is, after all, who's paying who? This is the true fundamental shortcoming. Lightning can be very private for senders from their merchants and soon with coming improvements for receivers for the person paying them. But it's very weak against a truly powerful global adversary. This can be mitigated, however. Payments stand out to a global adversary because that is the majority of traffic nodes will send. In the timing relationship from a to b to c to d, etcetera, these heuristics can be broken by nodes sending fake traffic to each other regularly that's what we call introduction of noise ladies and gentlemen. Shinobi's talking about introducing noise and I couldn't be more happy to hear about it. Fake traffic could take the form of a constant barrage of fake packets, simply replacing fake ones with real messages when payments are actually routed.
This would make it impossible to correlate anything. Other options would be to add decoy messages that continue on after the completion of a payment or opportunistically make payments when such decoy messages reach you. Different strategies would have different degrees of success in creating privacy, but something needs to be done multiple improvements have been made or are coming down the pipe in the form of BOLT 12 and blinded path invoices, but the larger picture is still the same as it always was totally transparent to a powerful adversary given the scale of importance bitcoin has rapidly grown to maybe it's time to reconsider the larger picture of privacy and not just incremental local improvements.
Alright, so he's talking about fuzz fuzzing everything and I cannot agree with Shinobi more there now, there's always a drawback what is it? Increased network traffic? If you're sending fake messages, it's an actual message the the fact that it contains pure gibberish doesn't matter to the network It's still a data transmission. So we're at the cost of clogging up the network a little bit, we introduce much better privacy. I think it's I think it's a payoff or a, what do they call it? I can't think anymore. My last brain cell has decided to go to bed. Trade off. I think it's a good trade off to make. It's I think it's okay.
Can it get out of hand? Yeah, probably. And also could a global adversary use that very same technique to completely screw the lightning network? Yeah, it's possible. Yeah, does that mean that we'd pack it up and go home? No. Humans are one of the most incredibly innovative creatures on this planet. Every problem has a solution. I do believe that is the Linux kernel of every human mind. Love is the Linux kernel of every human heart. Let's move on. The block, Daniel Kyun is writing this one. Coinbase has apparently been subpoenaed by the CFTC in the poly market investigation and it alerted users via email.
Let's see what this shit is about. So Coinbase has received yet another subpoena from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission seeking information related to Polymarket. The US Exchange has reportedly been sending emails to clients alerting them of an ongoing investigation according to several screenshots posted on social media. Decrypt was the first to report on the news. Quote, we write to inform you that us, we, Coinbase, have been served with a subpoena in the above referenced matter seeking general customer information that includes information related to your accounts.
The email, the subject line anyway, reads, CFTC subpoena to Coinbase in the matter Polymarket customer notice C9453. It was sent from the [email protected] address and notes that action is not required from users and that Coinbase may not be required to send customer information, quote, in some cases, we may be required by law to share necessary data lawfully sought after by government. Where necessary, we will seek to narrow requests that are overly broad or vague in order to provide a more appropriately tailored response. And in some cases, we object to producing any information at all, a Coinbase spokesperson told the block.
Polymarket emerged as the standout blockchain based app during the lead up to the US presidential election in November. Despite being geo fenced to prevent US users from placing bets, the platform recorded a cumulative trading volume exceeding 9,000,000,000 dollars, holy shit, in 2024 according to data from the block research. In 2022, Polymarket settled with the CFTC for allegedly offering illicit binary options contracts. That's called gambling, y'all. In return, it agreed to pay a $1,400,000 fine, wind down its non compliant markets, and take preventative steps to block US users because we suck.
The CFTC has taken a strict line in regulating betting markets. For instance, Kalshi, one of the few platforms approved to operate in the United States, fought a long court battle for the right to list contracts related to US elections due to CFTC concerns that it may unfairly sway outcomes so called electioneering prediction markets long the purview of academic economics offer a way for users to bet on the likelihood of future events and therefore help aggregate the quote wisdom of the crowd In theory, because users have skin in the game, their predictions will be less likely to suffer from bias. This is not the first inquiry PolyMarket has received from the US government in November.
The FBI sees Polymarket CEO Shane Kopplin's phone and electronics in a raid of his New York City apartment. Kopplin is reportedly facing a Department of Justice probe over alleged US users which Kopplin has suggested is politically motivated. Polymarket also voluntarily blocked users in France after that country's gaming regulator began examining its operations and compliance initiatives. Anecdotal reports of US users bypassing the platform using VPNs have long plagued polymarket, which surged to popularity during the election season. In all, polymarket gamblers spent more than $3,700,000,000 placing bets solely on the presidential election.
3.7 is 2 thirds of its entire was 2 thirds? No. No. It's no. They took in $9,000,000,000 and almost 4,000,000,000 of that was done just on the president. Okay. So 40%, 35%, well over a third of all of PolyMarkets revenue was the Donald Trump election. It's kind of amazing. Anyway, active PolyMarket traders reached a new peak of 314,500 in December. So there you go. Now the question becomes why is Coinbase being subpoenaed about Polymarket? The only thing that I can figure is that the Coinbase wallets or the Coinbase well, yeah, wallets. The Coinbase wallets that is used to custody user funds, that those users were going directly out of Coinbase and into Polymarket instead of taking their Bitcoin off of the exchange and then into self custody and then going to Poly Market. Not that that would completely, you know, shield them from from all of you. But this is what I suspect.
And I suspect that there's probably going to be similar action against Kraken, Bitfinex, BitMex I think is out of the game now except for their research arm. Whoever else trading, if you're if you're sending, if you've got Bitcoin on an exchange and you shouldn't do that and you used your exchanges wallet to send directly to Polymarket, yeah. Yeah. See, this is why we self custody and it's also why we don't freaking gamble, ladies and gentlemen. Russia Russia's gonna be stupid according to Atlas 21 dotcom. Russia set to sell over 1,000 confiscated Bitcoin in a corruption case.
According to the TASS news agency, Russian authorities have begun already begun liquidating 1,032.1 Bitcoin, which was confiscated from a guy named Murat Tamblev, a former chief investigator for the Russian Investigative Committee. Corruption. Initially, Moscow will sell nearly $10,000,000 worth of BTC. The case unveils an elaborate corruption scheme, ladies and gentlemen, that compromised Russia's investigative institutions, Tamblif, who served as the chief investigator in Moscow's Tivir district, was found guilty of accepting a Bitcoin bribe from the InfraUD hacker group, which he was supposedly investigating.
Tamblev helped divert police investigations to, the into the group and allowed the hackers to hide cryptocurrency funds. The investigation revealed that the former investigator had made a deal with members of the criminal organization accepting Bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to seize their ill gotten gains. The funds were discovered during a search of Tamblev's apartment or Tambeev, I think. Is it an I or an l? I can't tell what Tambeev's apartment where investigators found a Ledger Nano X hardware wallet containing the incriminating Bitcoin.
In 2023, the Nikolinsky court in Moscow sentenced Tambev to 16 years in prison and fined him $5,000,000 US or 500,000,000 rubles. Along with being stripped of his rank, he was barred from holding public office for 12 years after his release. Wow. 16 years. 28 years. He is not going to be able to have a job in the public sector. Wow, dude. Whatever. The case also implicated other officials, Christiana Lyonchuck blah blah blah blah blah blah. His former subordinate was sentenced to 9 years in a penal colony for corruption, while Dmitry Gubin, a former deputy head of the Chikovsky, District investigative department remains at large. The prosecutor general's office has also filed an additional lawsuit to seize yet more of Tamyeev's assets including a Honda motorcycle, some real estate, and additional Bitcoin, asserting that they were acquired through illicit means. Man, somebody wants that Honda.
They want that Honda. They're gonna get that Honda. Civil asset forfeiture exists all over the place. It's just now coming to the United States in full force. Yeah. Russia has been taking people's shit for decades, and now the United States is probably on its 2nd decade of just flat out stealing people's shit. But that's another story. Coinswap version 0.1.0. It's the first public beta release of Coinswap and that Coinswap indeed is a functioning minimal viable binary library to perform form trustless peer to peer Maxwell Belcher Coinswap protocol.
With this new release, Coinswap marketplace is now live, but only on testnet 4. So understand that. Coinswap is a decentralized atomic swap protocol. It facilitates trustless swaps of Bitcoin UTXOs through a decentralized civil resistant marketplace. The release represents a major milestone featuring a fully functional implementation of the protocol, along with crucial tools and documentation tailored for developers, testers and early adopters. It was originally designed as a privacy protocol, and Coinswap offers significant potential for Bitcoin's scalability by facilitating decentralized, cross chain swap bridges.
Coinswap is now live on testnet4 with swap servers providing services instructions on how to run the app is available here at this link and contribution guidelines can be found here at this other link Okay. Remember, this is testnet. It's early early early beta. This is Coinswap version 0.1.0. It is a baby. It's wearing diapers. It's probably going to shit those diapers several times. So be prepared and wear gloves. Tails version 6.11 carries critical security fixes. Tails, if you did not know, is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship. This release fixes several critical security vulnerabilities that were identified during an external audit by Radical Open Security, and users are urged to update to the latest version ASAP.
So what's new? The update fixes the following vulnerabilities. It prevents an attacker from installing malicious software permanently. So apparently, that was that was able to be done, and that's that's scary. It prevents an attacker from monitoring online activity. Other changes detection of partitioning errors, let's see. Tails USB partitions can corrupt causing errors with persistent storage or upgrades due to faulty hardware software issues or improper removal. The software now warns earlier about these errors. If detected without persistent storage, it recommends installing or using a brand spanking new USB stick.
It updated the Tor browser to 14.0.4. It updated Thunderbird to a 128.5.0 ESR. It removes support for hardware wallets in Electrum. Trezor wallets stopped working in Debian 12, and so entails 6.0 or 6.0 or later. That's a shame. It disables the gnome text editor from reopening on the last file. It adds a link to the TOR connection assistant from the menu of the TOR status icon on the desktop. It makes it easier for their team to find useful information in whisper back reports. So there you go. If you're a tails user, you might wanna get your shit updated ASAP.
And me, premier Bitcoin, finishes us out for the week. They have launched an updated Bitcoin diploma for 2025. Bitcoin diploma 2025 by me premier bitcoin is a flagship, free, and open source 10 week program implemented worldwide, offering a deep dive into bitcoin's history, technology, and global impact. Quote, we're very proud to launch our updated Bitcoin 2025 diploma today, announced me premiere bitcoin. The diploma covers various topics including the history of money, the emergence of fiat currencies, societal issues caused by government money. It also explores solutions to these problems, introduces Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, explains their use in daily life, and discusses the technical workings and necessity of Bitcoin.
The 176 page diploma book, consisting of 10 chapters for a 10 week learning program, aims to promote open source Bitcoin education globally with only minor changes from the 20 24 edition quote Out of 150 pages we've updated less than 3% of the content for the new diploma including minor grammar corrections improved visuals like the infographic on page 37 and enhancements to the Bitcoin Diploma story. The workbook now also features a page listing sponsors who contributed to the Geyser campaign or in person at the adopting Bitcoin conference. All educational materials are publicly accessible on GitHub and there is a link right here so you can go get it yourself.
Check out the show notes to get to this nobsbitcoin.com me premierebitcoin story and you will be able to hit that link and go directly to it And everyone is invited and encouraged to participate in translating this flagship project to other languages. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it is Friday Friday Friday. It is 10:18 am on this the anniversary of Hal Finney's famous running bitcoin tweet as well as the anniversary of well the bitcoin ETFs. Take it however you want it. I do hope that you all have a good weekend and for any of those people out in California, my prayers are with you.
I this is a bad deal. My heart goes out to you and and now I'm hearing about dry fire hydrants. I'm not sure what if that's true. And if it is true, WTF, mate. I mean, what the hell? For any of you people that have lost property, loved ones, my prayers are with you. And I I don't know why this is as bad as it is, but it just I don't know. The the whole thing is the whole thing is awful. And I just learned yesterday that it was either State Farm or Allstate back in July, not not right now, but back in July, pulled like all of like if they were, providing homeowners insurance to any of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, those guys got their house insurance pulled in July of last year.
And while you might go, oh, it's a conspiracy theory. Well, July's a long time before this particular fire happened. I don't think it's that way. But just understand that State Farm isn't the only company that started pulling some homeowners insurance. And now some of the people that have lost their homes lost their homes before they were able to secure a new insurance company. So they lost everything. There was a lot of people out there that were looking at their houses as their store of value. This is not what a house is for. Please stop doing this.
Please advise your friends and family members who look at their house as their store of value who keep looking at their house's value on something like, you know, like Zillow. And there's people that are addicted. They look at their house value more times a day than Bitcoiners look at the price. Tell them that this and and tell them about Pacific Palisades and all the people in LA who've lost their houses. Multi $1,000,000 houses. Some of them $39,000,000 The average price for a house in Pacific Palisades is $39,000,000 And some of those people were actually looking at that money as their store of value.
If you had a $39,000,000 mansion in Pacific Palisades and you had State Farm and they pulled your insurance and you didn't have homeowners insurance and your house got burned down, you lost $39,000,000 I don't know how else to put it. Take your fucking money, put it into Bitcoin, hold your own keys, do not keep it on exchanges. Have a great weekend and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 9:17 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 10th day of January 2025. Happy Hal Finney running Bitcoin day. This is the anniversary of that tweet. This is episode 1016 of Bitcoin and bringing you all the news that you can use brothers and sisters. We got what do we have on deck? Well, it looks like the guys over at BitX are at it again with home mining. They've notched it up just a little bit. We've got oh, good lord. The employment numbers came out and is causing a bloodbath. Everybody is, like, taking their own lives. They're jumping out of windows, ladies and gentlemen. We can't stop it. It's an apocalypse. It's it's devastating. We're all gonna die. No. We're not. Come on. Guys, chill. Although the Dow Jones is definitely having some problems this morning, given the same news, that Bitcoin got which is the employment report. We'll talk about it.
It is the anniversary of the United States Bitcoin ETFs. However, trading anniversary, the beginning of actual physical trading of those Bitcoin ETFs don't actually celebrate their anniversary until tomorrow, which is a Saturday, which means the markets are closed. But the 10th January, not only not only is it Hal Finney's running Bitcoin tweet anniversary, it is the anniversary of the installation of the Bitcoin ETFs that happened 1 year ago today. Cynthia Lummis is being tapped on the shoulder for something. We'll figure out what, The lightning network privacy?
Well let's get the big picture from shinobi and then coinbase is going to be in the news. Rush is in the news. Coinswap is in the news. Tails and Mee Premier Bitcoin is launching something new. Well, actually, it's not new. It's an update to something old. But the first thing is first, I was reminded today that well over a year ago, in fact when was this that I did March 9, 2023 Jack Spearko of the Survival Podcast dropped the interview that he did with me on Noster for his Bitcoin Breakout, podcast which is an extension of the survival podcast again that is March 9, 2023.
I hooked up with Jack and we did it looks to be at just over 2 hours of what nostr is, what nostr does, why nostr is important, and it was a really really good interview, and I am going to be linking to that in the show notes today. But it is, you know, even though it's old, it's still I believe that it's pretty evergreen because it's talking about the basis of what Noster is. And this was well before we got all kinds of stuff like shipyard and highlighter from Pablo f seven z, not to mention Olas, also from Pablo f seven z because the guy just ships and ships and ships and ships and ships. This was before a great many new clients came out.
This is before a great many new note kinds or rather event kinds for noster came out. So this really is going back and if you want to use it as a, you know, as a purple pill for your family and friends as to what what is noster, you can just send them over here, man, because me and Jack had a really good, really good discussion about it. Like I said, it's 2 hours long. It will be linked in the show notes, and if you don't want to get to the show notes, it was the survival podcast episode number 3265. That is episode 3265 and that was back in March 9, 2023.
Now, home mining. Well, the future of home mining is bright. It is. Frank Korvaz is gonna be talking about the new stuff that Bitax has going on. I believe I've mentioned it before, but let's see what Frank has to say about it. Perhaps the best way to decentralize the bitcoin network is through home mining. And things are trending in the right direction. Yesterday, Sola Satoshi announced the BitAxe Touch, the latest device in the world of home bitcoin mining. This new device will utilize the BM1370 ASIC chip from the bitmain S21 Pro and will be able to reach a sustained hashrate of 1.4 terahashes per second and reach to a hashrate up to 1.6 terahashes per second. It will also feature a touchscreen that displays Bitcoin network stats including the total network hash rate overall, network difficulty, as well as the block height.
And it's a nice looking unit. There's a picture of it right here. It's just like a self contained unit. It's got a built in fan. It's the whole thing is in a case and on the face of that case is a nice beautiful pretty screen that shows you all kinds of data about what's going on inside. Well, part of what's fueling innovations like the bit axe aXe touch is the work of open source miners united, a discord group started by Scott from Bittaxe with over 5,500 members where home mining enthusiasts share ideas and blueprints for new devices. The group had been set up so that anyone who wants to contribute to the development of the can do so and it even offers grants to certain contributors.
The work of such contributors will likely be made easier when Block releases its own ASIC chip, which mining devices developers will be able to use in their very own machines. And for those of you who aren't so technically inclined, but who still want to get into the home mining space and who live in colder climates, you can always purchase a heat sorry, a heat bit. Yes, a heat bit, which is essentially a plug and play home mining device that also serves as a space heater and an air purifier. Even with all these new devices coming to market, I still believe that we're in the early innings of the home bitcoin mining movement and that this space will continue to blossom as more developers and everyday people enter into it. Indeed, the future of home mining is looking bright.
Okay. Again, I had mentioned this Bitax, stuff, the home you know, there's a couple of units that really about home heating as well as home mining. It's it's all about this heat recovery thing. And I had I had put a note out, on Nostr, because I'm I think I'm not banned from Twitter, but I've lost my login credentials to my last, account. And, honestly, that just shows you how much I give a shit about Twitter at this point. I just don't care. It's getting worse over there, and I just don't care. But I put out a note about this whole home mining thing on and none other than Jack Sperico said, hey, look, man. This shit isn't gonna happen unless there's a mining pool that allows these little tiny miners to get something, even if it's just pennies.
Well, he's not exactly wrong, but I do believe that, you know, switching your BitX over to ocean might actually do something. I have not switched my my BitX over to ocean. It's still I can't remember where it's mining to. I just haven't had time to look at it because, like, a few day you know, a few weeks after I got my miner, we ended up in Colorado for Christmas and we're now we're home, So things are a little, you know, up in the air about, you know, doing stuff, and I I just haven't had the time to switch it over. But, a, I think that if I switch over to Ocean that, you know, even my pissant hash rate, you know, is is only gonna get, you know, a few pennies and and whatever.
My again, my point for getting a small BitX miner was simply to have an entry point into home mining. Something that I could hold, something I could look at, something I could interact with, something that I could read. What is a hash rate? Now, where is it mining to? How do I access that wallet? And there's all kinds of questions that I have yet to be able to answer because I haven't really torn into the thing. But the whole point of me saying all this is that this isn't going to stop. And there will be more and more miners that come up for home use that we can somehow harvest heat off of. You know, what would be really cool is to be able to detach the mining segment and the heating element which is also the heating element of a home heater you know for this air purifier thing that we were just talking that frank corva was just talking about detach it from that air purifier and plug it into a food dehydrator Have have the miner be modular so that it like where do you need heat?
Okay. Space heaters. Alright. You modular plug it into there and then you know plug it into that and then all of a sudden that's just a space heater. But if you need to dehydrate some food, pull it out, plug it into your food dehydrator, and all of a sudden, it's the same mining thing without any adjustments whatsoever is now dehydrating food. What else could it do? I don't know. You you come out. You have imaginations too. But we get a chance to start thinking about things in a completely different way. How many of you have ever thought about capturing heat?
Waste heat from anything. You know, there used to be a time when when the out like air conditioners. Like, let's say, West Texas. You got an inside condenser unit or expander unit and then you've got an outside condenser. Alright? So the the the condenser or the compressor, also condenser, I guess. I'm I'm not an AC expert. Roy, you know, on Noster really knows more about this than I do. But there's the the thing on the outside of your house and then there's the thing on the inside of your house and the thing on the inside of your house is cold and air blows through it and it cools your house down. The the captured heat from that goes to the outside unit where the heat is dumped outside.
Generally speaking, there's always a fan attached to it that that sucks outside air through a grill, which is where all the heated gas is coming through, and then the gas or the the heat is expelled from the gas and the fan blows it away. Well, if I put an evaporative cooling tube on top of that fan and it's big enough that it doesn't restrict the airflow so I'm not screwing up the efficiency of the actual unit then now I'm using that heat to evaporate the water like an evaporative cooler except it's outside but it would cool a small space around the the the unit.
That was one of the earliest things that I thought of. I've never done it. I still want to do it just to see if that shit works, but I've I started thinking about that 20 years ago how do we use this heat from everything how do you like in the wintertime you're capturing heat from your engine in your car if you actually drive a real car you know with a gas engine instead electrical engine and that heat is used to heat the cab of the car in the wintertime but in the in the summertime it's just dumped straight out how what can we do with this wasted energy in other words what's called high entropy energy. That's what waste is.
This entire universe is all about entropy. Your low entropy energy is the purest the lower the entropy of your energy is the purer the form of the energy. The higher the entropy, the more wasteful and hard to use or hard to apply energy that that is. And heat is a high entropy waste output from motor vehicles, from electrical engines, you name it, it's out there. But in this case we're starting to think about how we harvest heat. How can we put that to work for us and the home mining landscape looks like one of the best proving grounds for not only mining the best asset in the world, but also to for us to figure out new and improved ways to capture and utilize heat.
Hey, you need a belt? You need a wallet? Go over to my friends at the Leather Mint. That's right. That's the leathermint.com. If you need a stylish belt, if you need to take sovereignty in your style with a brand new wallet that's hand stitched, hand built, using genuine leather not that fake crap no no no no no! And also, not this thin, icky leather. No no no no. This is high quality leather. It's high quality stitching and if you don't know anything about how leather works if it's not stitched right you might as well not have the leather to begin with because it just falls apart well if you need something like that you need to go over to the leathermint.com. That's right. That's the leathermint.com where you will get a 10% discount on everything in the store if you use the coupon code bitcoinand.
That's 10% off of everything you buy with coupon code bitcoinandtheleathermint.com. And you can find the Leathermint on Twitter at the Leathermint. That's the Leathermint. On Noster, which is everybody's preferred way of actually talking to each other, it's at leathermint. And if you do buy goods and services from him and you do or not services, but you know, if you buy his wallets and stuff, He used a coupon Bitcoin and he is going to get me back on the other side as with a portion of the sales that I was able to sell for him. He's not paying me.
This is the circle p. It's open for business and the circle p is where I bring plebs, like the Leatherman, to plebs just like you that selling their goods and services in Bitcoin. Because if they're not selling in Bitcoin, they ain't in the circle p. Now, let's move on to this next one out of CoinDesk entitled US added 256,000 jobs in December, blowing past the 160,000 job estimate. This is Christian Sandor writing for CoinDesk. The employment market in the United States picked up steam in December with job growth topping economist forecast by a mile and the unemployment rate unexpectedly dipping.
The economy added 256,000 jobs last month according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, topping forecast for 160,000 and up from 212,000 in November revised from an originally reported 220 7,000 I'm going to pause, because this is important. November job numbers were 212,000 That was revised down from 227,000 which was originally reported in November. And then we go on a month and then everybody forgets all about the numbers after the dust clears and then the Bureau of Labor Statistics does what? They make their lie, which it is a lie, a little bit less of a lie by actually getting closer to the numbers. I still think 2,000 or 212,000 is still high.
This this 256,000 jobs report for December, it's a lie. And what will happen? It will be revised down after the dust clears and after the Dow finishes shitting the bed and after Bitcoin finishes shitting the bed and a month goes by, yep, those numbers are not 256,000. But it scared the piss out of risk assets this morning and we just came off of getting the piss scared out of us for other economic numbers that we got either yesterday or the day before. But in either event, the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.1% in December versus the expected 4.2% and November's 4.2%.
Attempting to rally from sizable declines earlier this week, bitcoin fell more than 2% again in the immediate aftermath of the report to $92,800 And today's job market readings come after a number of recent economic reports triggering a broader market pullback across several asset classes as investors quickly scaled back the idea of a continued series of federal reserve rate cuts in 2025. They last year, they told us they were gonna do 4. We were gonna get a full point reduction over 4.25 percent reductions in 2025. We're gonna be lucky to get 1 now, and that causes risk asset guys to wanna go into the dollar.
Anyway, previously high flying crypto markets bore the brunt of the sell off with Bitcoin tumbling from nearly $103,000 on Monday to below 92,000 at one point on Thursday. And major altcoins suffered even larger declines because they're shitcoins. Not altcoins, they're shitcoins. A check of traditional markets finds US stock index futures down roughly 1% following the same jobs print. The strongest reaction is in the bond market, and here we go, with the 10 year treasury yield popping 9 basis points higher to 4.78%. Now the market is not buying the Fed rate cuts already.
It's a mess out there in the, fixed income market if you are a bond trader. Get out. Anyway, the dollar index is also surging. It's up 0.6%. Gold has moved modestly lower to just below $2,700 per ounce. Traders are quickly scaling back bets on further Fed rate cuts in 2025, with the odds of a March move falling to a mere 28%. That's down from 41% just ahead of the report according to CME FedWatch. The odds of a May rate cut have declined to 34%, and that's down from 44% prior. In other closely watched report details, average hourly earnings rose bullshit. Rose 0.3% in December compared with forecast for 0.3% and November 0.4%.
On a year over year basis, average hourly earnings were higher by 3.9%. Did you get paid more? Did anybody in the sound of my voice get paid almost 4% more last year? No. You didn't, did you? It's all bullshit. Anyway, this is written by looks like it's written by well, actually, that's weird. It said this says it's written by Steven Alford down at the bottom, but up here at the top, it says it's written by Christian Sandor, so maybe they co wrote it. My CoinDesk, coindesk.com, the the way that the webpage is displaying for me is all kinds of messed up.
I don't know what the hell is going on, but I don't care. Helen Parts has the next one. Cointelegraph says, US Bitcoin ETF's first anniversary. A surge. Far above expectations. We're celebrating the birthday of Bitcoin ETFs. And for those of you who don't like them, I don't blame you. But the 1st year of spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds in the US exceeded all manner of expectations, marking a historic debut that reshaped both the bitcoin market and traditional finance. Following approval from the United States Securities and Exchange Commission on January 10, 2024, US spot Bitcoin ETFs began trading the following day.
And in less than a year, they have contributed 100% of the $44,200,000,000 in inflows to crypto investment products globally as of the end of 2024. And to mark the year since the launch, Cointelegraph reached out to several ETF providers and analysts for their insights. The pace of inflows to US spot Bitcoin ETFs have been strong since they launched, with industry leaders taken by surprise at the pace of adoption. Our estimates were a much more modest $14,000,000,000 for the year, far surpassing our expectations obviously and far above pretty much every other prediction, said Coinshares head of research James Butterfield.
BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF hit $61,000,000,000 in assets under management in less than 1 year. Its gold ETF took 20 years to reach half that, $33,000,000,000 Quote, I was extremely bullish on the spot Bitcoin ETFs as the crypto community had been discussing them for well over a decade, Matt Mina, crypto research strategist at 21 Shares said, quote, I expected $15,000,000,000 in net flows, but what we've seen has completely blown my expectations out of the water. We expected a successful Spot Bitcoin ETF launch, but 1 year later the impact is much greater than we expected, said VEDAFY's head of sector and industry research Roxana Islam One reason for the massive success of US spot Bitcoin ETFs in 2024 was long running anticipation and demand from institutions to gain exposure to Bitcoin without the complexities of self custody or direct crypto ownership, Mina said.
Mina also mentioned interest cuts by the US Federal Reserve and promising crypto policies under the incoming administration of US President-elect Donald Trump. Bitcoin's price appreciation coupled with longtime demand made US spot Bitcoin ETFs the best performing ETF launch of all time. Bitwise chief investment officer, Matt Hugan, said, quote, Bitcoin is the best performing asset in history, end quote. Shit. Enough said, bro. Hogan said that broader events like Bitcoin's 4th having in April and concerns about the rising US debt were also contributing factors. Another reason contributing to the success of the ETFs was that they were introduced when Bitcoin's price was historically low, CoinShares' Butterfield said.
The SEC's approval itself was also a big factor, as it eased investors fears that regulators might ban Bitcoin entirely after breaking all expectations in 2024 US spot Bitcoin ETFs are well set for another strong year industry executives and analysts agree quote ETFs are multi year stories, Bitwise's Hogan said, adding that the 2nd year inflows tend to exceed 1st year results in nearly every case with more investors gaining access to the products in the coming year. Quote, the reality is that most professional investors still are prohibited from accessing bitcoin ETFs and that will change in 2025. So I expect 2025 flows to significantly exceed that of 2024s.
Further quote, we expect momentum to continue into 2025 and for the crypto ETF ecosystem to expand alongside growth in the broader crypto industry, Vetafys Islam stated. As BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF dominated bitcoin ETFs with $37,000,000,000 of inflows which accounts for 83% of all crypto ETF inflows from the United States in 2024, some might question whether smaller Bitcoin ETFs can even survive. However, a scenario where issuers like BlackRock gradually displace demand for other Bitcoin ETFs, yeah, it's it's not happening according to Bitwise's Hugin.
Quote, if you look at any area of the market where multiple ETFs are providing similar exposure, you find that assets are distributed among those ETFs. Some are bigger, and some are smaller. And there are often 1 or 2 really large ETFs. But there's no market where one ETF gathers 100% of the assets. And in markets that attract tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars in assets, there are consistently multiple very successful ETFs, Houghton said. Coinshares Butterfield also suggested that US Bitcoin ETFs will continue to dominate dominate the global crypto ETF industry with no other market potentially eclipsing them in the coming years.
Yeah. I know. I get it, guys. Some of you hate the ETFs. We don't need the ETFs. I I I'm with you. We Bitcoin doesn't need the ETFs. The ETFs need Bitcoin, though. But the ETFs are here, and the ETFs are not going away, and they're probably never going away. It's a done deal. You we have to we we're going to have to sleep with the wolves on this one, so you might as well figure out a way to cuddle up to them and steal some of their warmth. But, that said, it's kind of impressive that it took 20 years for gold ETF to hit $33,000,000,000 in assets under management We did twice that in a single year I don't even wanna do the math on what that actually means if we normalize it to what what does that mean if we compress this all to the same time scale?
Now what stretch what is it if we stretched this 1 year of Bitcoin out to 20 years? That doesn't make sense. But if we compare if we look at the average of how much investment was going in year over year to the gold ETF and we do that we average that for 20 years so that we can get a good number of what the average is for 1 year and then compare that number to to bitcoin we might be looking at the difference between $1,500,000,000 what maybe 1.6 or $1,700,000,000 in 1 year of the gold ETF versus $61,000,000,000 in the same year for bitcoin.
Whether you love, hate, are completely indifferent to the Bitcoin ETFs, you can't unsee that, ladies and gentlemen. And Cynthia Lummis probably can't unsee it either, and she's been tapped to lead the 1st ever senate crypto subcommittee. And you're gonna love what what the subcommittee is subcommittee of. This is out of decrypt. Connor Sefton is writing. Wyoming senator Cynthia Lummis is reportedly being tapped to lead a new subcommittee focusing on digital assets and according to Fox Business, this would be an offshoot of the Senate Banking Committee which you know you know who heads that up. Right?
Let me let me just make sure so that I don't don't blow smoke straight out of my ass. But, who chairs that? Who's who's who's chairing that? Let me just make sure that I make absolute oh, look. It's it is. It's it's Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is the chairman of the senate banking committee. And this subcommittee of crypto assets, and you know you know Elizabeth Warren hates crypto, is going to be a subcommittee of that very same banking committee, and Cynthia Lummis is being tapped to be the head of it. I would love to be a fly on those walls. I'm telling you. Anyway, Scott recently held a meeting. This is Tim Scott, by the way, who previously said crypto has the potential to democratize the financial world. He he held a meeting with Donald Trump and the incoming crypto czar, David Sachs, and appeared with Lummis at a panel of the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium last September. And at the time, he had said, quote, wouldn't it be kinda cool if we had a subcommittee on the banking committee that focuses on the industry so that we bring more light to the conversation, more hearings on the industry, so we get things done faster?
Yeah. Good luck with a civic subcommittee. Anyway, such a subcommittee already exists in the larger house of representatives, which is also undergoing a leadership change. On Thursday, it was announced that Wisconsin's Brian Steele will chair the House Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence with jurisdiction over crypto, stablecoins, and CBDCs. He succeeds Arkansas Congressman French Hill who in turn becomes chairman of the overarching House Financial Services Committee. Oh, boy. The stand with crypto campaign group has given Steele an a rating, indicating he strongly supports the digital asset sector, with the congressman previously warning that a lack of regulation, risks pushing opportunities overseas.
After his new position was announced, Steele said, quote, innovation in the financial services sector provides an exciting opportunity for consumers and entrepreneurs as technologies like financial applications, digital assets, and machine learning revolutionize our economy. The selection of Cynthia Lummis in Steele to lead these 2 crypto focused subcommittees is a sign that Donald Trump looks to capitalize on the Republican's complete control of government, especially when it comes to pushing through his pro Bitcoin promises. Yeah. Well, we'll see. A regular on the crypto conference circuit, Lummis was an early adopter of BTC and has led calls for the United States to create a strategic bitcoin reserve through her proposed bills in the senate.
Last July, she unveiled the boosting innovation technology and competitiveness through optimized investment act. That's the bitcoin act. That's a man, it's a terrible name, but it would require the government to purchase 1,000,000 BTC over a 5 year period. Lummis has stressed this $95,000,000,000 investment would not be taxpayer funded and instead use existing funds across the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. That goes further than what Trump himself has proposed with the president-elect suggesting that about 200,000 BTC seized from criminals with a current market valuation of 19,200,000,000 could be converted into such a reserve. Well, not if the DOJ is gonna sell it, Trump. You better make some phone calls.
You better get some judges or some lawyers to, I don't know, get some judges to throw some some injunctions or whatever it is, some some stays, some what any legal, you know, words that you want to use that stops the United States government from selling the Bitcoin, the 69,000 Bitcoin that was seized from Silk Road. Yes. The FUD is ongoing today. It's not going to end until the very first court case that blocks the federal government sale of those assets. And all it's going to take is almost 1 or 2 different blocks to get Trump over the January 20th target so that he can sit in the chair and just flat ass say, no, that's not gonna happen. But if they sell it beforehand, if these guys aren't Johnny on the stick, stopping the federal government from selling that Bitcoin, they could sell that Bitcoin.
However, I have yet to see any sales actually occurring, but enough of that. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is up 3 points today, ladies and gentlemen. West Texas Intermediate up to 60 no. Just 60. $76.14. Brent Norcia is up just over 3 points to 79.25. Natural gas hitting 6 and a half percent to the upside, just a hair under 4 dollars per 1,000 cubic feet, and gasoline up a full two points and then some to $2.7 a gallon. Hey, we got breaking news from cnbc.com. Trump Organization to limit president elects involvement under new ethics plan. Oh, no.
Anyway, metal futures. Gold is up 1.4 percent to 27, 28.60¢. Silver is up 1 and a third. Platinum is up 1 and a quarter, but copper is down a quarter. Palladium. Palladium is up 3.9%. Used to be a club in dance club in Lubbock called Palladium. It was one of the, actinide lanthanide series, and if you're not a chemist, you won't get that one. Ag is, pretty much mixed today. Biggest winner is coffee? No. It's soybean. No. It's corn. Corn. Corn. Corn. 2 and a half percent to the upside. Biggest loser is chocolate. 3 and a half to the downside. But live cattle up a quarter, but lean hogs are up more than that to a full point.
Feeder cattle are moving sideways. Bloodbath in legacy fiat markets. Dow down 1.5%. It shaved off 662 points to land somewhere around the 42,216 point range. S and P also down 1.5%. Nasdaq down 1.6. S and P Mini down 1.6. Blood is in the streets, ladies and gentlemen. It's gonna be ugly because the lie of the job report did its function. I'm pausing to pause it. What happens? It's clear that the majority of the world's population looks at Bitcoin as a risk asset. How long does it take for governments of the world to keep lying about their awesome economies so that there's no possible way cheap money would ever ever come back into the fold again? Therefore, using a straight up lie, not regulations, not enforcement actions, not knocking on your door telling you that if you don't turn over your 24 word key you're gonna die. No. No. No. Just lying about the labor market.
Just lying about the CPI. That's all it takes, ladies and gentlemen, to crash the price of Bitcoin to they could keep this shit suppressed forever simply by continuing to lie, but targeting the economy being great. Everybody's working, everybody's getting paid more, everybody's got money. None of which is actually true, but hey, as long as it keeps the price of Bitcoin suppressed, fuck them. Right? Right. Now, $95,080 is the price of Bitcoin right now. That is a $1,880,000,000,000 market cap and you can get 35.3 ounces of the shiny metal rock with your 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,080,098.22 of and average fees per block have softened even further to 0.04btc on average on a per block basis.
And there are sub 50 blocks in MIMPLs around the world carrying a 181,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear high priority rates of 8. Count them, 8 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 7. Hash rate is 774.9 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. That hash rate is the number we use to define just how secure the bitcoin protocol is, and at this point, pretty damn secure. Now, California needs Forest Walker. It certainly does. That was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Hearn 88 with 47 100 sat says, I can vouch for Leathermint.
Excellent belts built to last. I'm done buying fake fiat crap. Thanks for the podcast, sir. No. Thank you, Hearn. Go visit my buddies over at the Leatherman. Pies with a 1,000. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Joey Doo Dee with Joey Doo Dee with a 1,000 says, always loaded with great info. How do you do this nearly every day? Thanks, DB. How do I do it? I sit my ass down in a chair and I fucking do it. Lupin with 500 sat says, thank you for keeping us informed in a charming way. Keep rocking. You got it bro. Wartime with 333, looks like cheers. And Mark with 210 says Noster is galt's gulch on the internet.
This I definitely agree with. Nick Dose with a 101 says, cheers. And that is the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Shinobi writing for Bitcoin Magazine, the Lightning Network privacy big picture. Don't forget the NSA. One of the secondary benefits of how the Lightning Network works as a scaling solution is privacy. It's by no means perfect or undefeatable privacy, but it is better than the naive use of the base layer blockchain itself. It's also not perfectly balanced. The sender learns a great many details about the receiver, but the receiver learns nothing about the sender.
For casual payments, it is a big improvement for consumers over on chain payments. It does have one big problem, though. Something not unique to lightning, but a problem for all onion routed systems. Global passive adversaries. That means an actor who is able to passively monitor all the internet connections between everyone involved in the network like lightning or tor. When a message crosses the network, the adversary can see a message move from 1 node to a second node and also see that a message went from the 2nd node to a third right after it received 1 from the first. If a global adversary exists, then while they cannot see the specific details of a message across the network, they can see where it originated from and where it arrived.
That is plenty enough information to de anonymize a payment system like lightning where the chief matter of importance is, after all, who's paying who? This is the true fundamental shortcoming. Lightning can be very private for senders from their merchants and soon with coming improvements for receivers for the person paying them. But it's very weak against a truly powerful global adversary. This can be mitigated, however. Payments stand out to a global adversary because that is the majority of traffic nodes will send. In the timing relationship from a to b to c to d, etcetera, these heuristics can be broken by nodes sending fake traffic to each other regularly that's what we call introduction of noise ladies and gentlemen. Shinobi's talking about introducing noise and I couldn't be more happy to hear about it. Fake traffic could take the form of a constant barrage of fake packets, simply replacing fake ones with real messages when payments are actually routed.
This would make it impossible to correlate anything. Other options would be to add decoy messages that continue on after the completion of a payment or opportunistically make payments when such decoy messages reach you. Different strategies would have different degrees of success in creating privacy, but something needs to be done multiple improvements have been made or are coming down the pipe in the form of BOLT 12 and blinded path invoices, but the larger picture is still the same as it always was totally transparent to a powerful adversary given the scale of importance bitcoin has rapidly grown to maybe it's time to reconsider the larger picture of privacy and not just incremental local improvements.
Alright, so he's talking about fuzz fuzzing everything and I cannot agree with Shinobi more there now, there's always a drawback what is it? Increased network traffic? If you're sending fake messages, it's an actual message the the fact that it contains pure gibberish doesn't matter to the network It's still a data transmission. So we're at the cost of clogging up the network a little bit, we introduce much better privacy. I think it's I think it's a payoff or a, what do they call it? I can't think anymore. My last brain cell has decided to go to bed. Trade off. I think it's a good trade off to make. It's I think it's okay.
Can it get out of hand? Yeah, probably. And also could a global adversary use that very same technique to completely screw the lightning network? Yeah, it's possible. Yeah, does that mean that we'd pack it up and go home? No. Humans are one of the most incredibly innovative creatures on this planet. Every problem has a solution. I do believe that is the Linux kernel of every human mind. Love is the Linux kernel of every human heart. Let's move on. The block, Daniel Kyun is writing this one. Coinbase has apparently been subpoenaed by the CFTC in the poly market investigation and it alerted users via email.
Let's see what this shit is about. So Coinbase has received yet another subpoena from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission seeking information related to Polymarket. The US Exchange has reportedly been sending emails to clients alerting them of an ongoing investigation according to several screenshots posted on social media. Decrypt was the first to report on the news. Quote, we write to inform you that us, we, Coinbase, have been served with a subpoena in the above referenced matter seeking general customer information that includes information related to your accounts.
The email, the subject line anyway, reads, CFTC subpoena to Coinbase in the matter Polymarket customer notice C9453. It was sent from the [email protected] address and notes that action is not required from users and that Coinbase may not be required to send customer information, quote, in some cases, we may be required by law to share necessary data lawfully sought after by government. Where necessary, we will seek to narrow requests that are overly broad or vague in order to provide a more appropriately tailored response. And in some cases, we object to producing any information at all, a Coinbase spokesperson told the block.
Polymarket emerged as the standout blockchain based app during the lead up to the US presidential election in November. Despite being geo fenced to prevent US users from placing bets, the platform recorded a cumulative trading volume exceeding 9,000,000,000 dollars, holy shit, in 2024 according to data from the block research. In 2022, Polymarket settled with the CFTC for allegedly offering illicit binary options contracts. That's called gambling, y'all. In return, it agreed to pay a $1,400,000 fine, wind down its non compliant markets, and take preventative steps to block US users because we suck.
The CFTC has taken a strict line in regulating betting markets. For instance, Kalshi, one of the few platforms approved to operate in the United States, fought a long court battle for the right to list contracts related to US elections due to CFTC concerns that it may unfairly sway outcomes so called electioneering prediction markets long the purview of academic economics offer a way for users to bet on the likelihood of future events and therefore help aggregate the quote wisdom of the crowd In theory, because users have skin in the game, their predictions will be less likely to suffer from bias. This is not the first inquiry PolyMarket has received from the US government in November.
The FBI sees Polymarket CEO Shane Kopplin's phone and electronics in a raid of his New York City apartment. Kopplin is reportedly facing a Department of Justice probe over alleged US users which Kopplin has suggested is politically motivated. Polymarket also voluntarily blocked users in France after that country's gaming regulator began examining its operations and compliance initiatives. Anecdotal reports of US users bypassing the platform using VPNs have long plagued polymarket, which surged to popularity during the election season. In all, polymarket gamblers spent more than $3,700,000,000 placing bets solely on the presidential election.
3.7 is 2 thirds of its entire was 2 thirds? No. No. It's no. They took in $9,000,000,000 and almost 4,000,000,000 of that was done just on the president. Okay. So 40%, 35%, well over a third of all of PolyMarkets revenue was the Donald Trump election. It's kind of amazing. Anyway, active PolyMarket traders reached a new peak of 314,500 in December. So there you go. Now the question becomes why is Coinbase being subpoenaed about Polymarket? The only thing that I can figure is that the Coinbase wallets or the Coinbase well, yeah, wallets. The Coinbase wallets that is used to custody user funds, that those users were going directly out of Coinbase and into Polymarket instead of taking their Bitcoin off of the exchange and then into self custody and then going to Poly Market. Not that that would completely, you know, shield them from from all of you. But this is what I suspect.
And I suspect that there's probably going to be similar action against Kraken, Bitfinex, BitMex I think is out of the game now except for their research arm. Whoever else trading, if you're if you're sending, if you've got Bitcoin on an exchange and you shouldn't do that and you used your exchanges wallet to send directly to Polymarket, yeah. Yeah. See, this is why we self custody and it's also why we don't freaking gamble, ladies and gentlemen. Russia Russia's gonna be stupid according to Atlas 21 dotcom. Russia set to sell over 1,000 confiscated Bitcoin in a corruption case.
According to the TASS news agency, Russian authorities have begun already begun liquidating 1,032.1 Bitcoin, which was confiscated from a guy named Murat Tamblev, a former chief investigator for the Russian Investigative Committee. Corruption. Initially, Moscow will sell nearly $10,000,000 worth of BTC. The case unveils an elaborate corruption scheme, ladies and gentlemen, that compromised Russia's investigative institutions, Tamblif, who served as the chief investigator in Moscow's Tivir district, was found guilty of accepting a Bitcoin bribe from the InfraUD hacker group, which he was supposedly investigating.
Tamblev helped divert police investigations to, the into the group and allowed the hackers to hide cryptocurrency funds. The investigation revealed that the former investigator had made a deal with members of the criminal organization accepting Bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to seize their ill gotten gains. The funds were discovered during a search of Tamblev's apartment or Tambeev, I think. Is it an I or an l? I can't tell what Tambeev's apartment where investigators found a Ledger Nano X hardware wallet containing the incriminating Bitcoin.
In 2023, the Nikolinsky court in Moscow sentenced Tambev to 16 years in prison and fined him $5,000,000 US or 500,000,000 rubles. Along with being stripped of his rank, he was barred from holding public office for 12 years after his release. Wow. 16 years. 28 years. He is not going to be able to have a job in the public sector. Wow, dude. Whatever. The case also implicated other officials, Christiana Lyonchuck blah blah blah blah blah blah. His former subordinate was sentenced to 9 years in a penal colony for corruption, while Dmitry Gubin, a former deputy head of the Chikovsky, District investigative department remains at large. The prosecutor general's office has also filed an additional lawsuit to seize yet more of Tamyeev's assets including a Honda motorcycle, some real estate, and additional Bitcoin, asserting that they were acquired through illicit means. Man, somebody wants that Honda.
They want that Honda. They're gonna get that Honda. Civil asset forfeiture exists all over the place. It's just now coming to the United States in full force. Yeah. Russia has been taking people's shit for decades, and now the United States is probably on its 2nd decade of just flat out stealing people's shit. But that's another story. Coinswap version 0.1.0. It's the first public beta release of Coinswap and that Coinswap indeed is a functioning minimal viable binary library to perform form trustless peer to peer Maxwell Belcher Coinswap protocol.
With this new release, Coinswap marketplace is now live, but only on testnet 4. So understand that. Coinswap is a decentralized atomic swap protocol. It facilitates trustless swaps of Bitcoin UTXOs through a decentralized civil resistant marketplace. The release represents a major milestone featuring a fully functional implementation of the protocol, along with crucial tools and documentation tailored for developers, testers and early adopters. It was originally designed as a privacy protocol, and Coinswap offers significant potential for Bitcoin's scalability by facilitating decentralized, cross chain swap bridges.
Coinswap is now live on testnet4 with swap servers providing services instructions on how to run the app is available here at this link and contribution guidelines can be found here at this other link Okay. Remember, this is testnet. It's early early early beta. This is Coinswap version 0.1.0. It is a baby. It's wearing diapers. It's probably going to shit those diapers several times. So be prepared and wear gloves. Tails version 6.11 carries critical security fixes. Tails, if you did not know, is a portable operating system that protects against surveillance and censorship. This release fixes several critical security vulnerabilities that were identified during an external audit by Radical Open Security, and users are urged to update to the latest version ASAP.
So what's new? The update fixes the following vulnerabilities. It prevents an attacker from installing malicious software permanently. So apparently, that was that was able to be done, and that's that's scary. It prevents an attacker from monitoring online activity. Other changes detection of partitioning errors, let's see. Tails USB partitions can corrupt causing errors with persistent storage or upgrades due to faulty hardware software issues or improper removal. The software now warns earlier about these errors. If detected without persistent storage, it recommends installing or using a brand spanking new USB stick.
It updated the Tor browser to 14.0.4. It updated Thunderbird to a 128.5.0 ESR. It removes support for hardware wallets in Electrum. Trezor wallets stopped working in Debian 12, and so entails 6.0 or 6.0 or later. That's a shame. It disables the gnome text editor from reopening on the last file. It adds a link to the TOR connection assistant from the menu of the TOR status icon on the desktop. It makes it easier for their team to find useful information in whisper back reports. So there you go. If you're a tails user, you might wanna get your shit updated ASAP.
And me, premier Bitcoin, finishes us out for the week. They have launched an updated Bitcoin diploma for 2025. Bitcoin diploma 2025 by me premier bitcoin is a flagship, free, and open source 10 week program implemented worldwide, offering a deep dive into bitcoin's history, technology, and global impact. Quote, we're very proud to launch our updated Bitcoin 2025 diploma today, announced me premiere bitcoin. The diploma covers various topics including the history of money, the emergence of fiat currencies, societal issues caused by government money. It also explores solutions to these problems, introduces Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, explains their use in daily life, and discusses the technical workings and necessity of Bitcoin.
The 176 page diploma book, consisting of 10 chapters for a 10 week learning program, aims to promote open source Bitcoin education globally with only minor changes from the 20 24 edition quote Out of 150 pages we've updated less than 3% of the content for the new diploma including minor grammar corrections improved visuals like the infographic on page 37 and enhancements to the Bitcoin Diploma story. The workbook now also features a page listing sponsors who contributed to the Geyser campaign or in person at the adopting Bitcoin conference. All educational materials are publicly accessible on GitHub and there is a link right here so you can go get it yourself.
Check out the show notes to get to this nobsbitcoin.com me premierebitcoin story and you will be able to hit that link and go directly to it And everyone is invited and encouraged to participate in translating this flagship project to other languages. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it is Friday Friday Friday. It is 10:18 am on this the anniversary of Hal Finney's famous running bitcoin tweet as well as the anniversary of well the bitcoin ETFs. Take it however you want it. I do hope that you all have a good weekend and for any of those people out in California, my prayers are with you.
I this is a bad deal. My heart goes out to you and and now I'm hearing about dry fire hydrants. I'm not sure what if that's true. And if it is true, WTF, mate. I mean, what the hell? For any of you people that have lost property, loved ones, my prayers are with you. And I I don't know why this is as bad as it is, but it just I don't know. The the whole thing is the whole thing is awful. And I just learned yesterday that it was either State Farm or Allstate back in July, not not right now, but back in July, pulled like all of like if they were, providing homeowners insurance to any of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, those guys got their house insurance pulled in July of last year.
And while you might go, oh, it's a conspiracy theory. Well, July's a long time before this particular fire happened. I don't think it's that way. But just understand that State Farm isn't the only company that started pulling some homeowners insurance. And now some of the people that have lost their homes lost their homes before they were able to secure a new insurance company. So they lost everything. There was a lot of people out there that were looking at their houses as their store of value. This is not what a house is for. Please stop doing this.
Please advise your friends and family members who look at their house as their store of value who keep looking at their house's value on something like, you know, like Zillow. And there's people that are addicted. They look at their house value more times a day than Bitcoiners look at the price. Tell them that this and and tell them about Pacific Palisades and all the people in LA who've lost their houses. Multi $1,000,000 houses. Some of them $39,000,000 The average price for a house in Pacific Palisades is $39,000,000 And some of those people were actually looking at that money as their store of value.
If you had a $39,000,000 mansion in Pacific Palisades and you had State Farm and they pulled your insurance and you didn't have homeowners insurance and your house got burned down, you lost $39,000,000 I don't know how else to put it. Take your fucking money, put it into Bitcoin, hold your own keys, do not keep it on exchanges. Have a great weekend and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Announcements
Bitcoin and Employment Numbers
Closing Remarks and Reflections
