Join me today for Episode 1018 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Forest Walker Article Read in Full
- Trump: Day One
- Italians Love the Coin
- SEC Found to be Capricious
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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The Forest Walker Articles:
Medium: https://medium.com/@bennd77/forest-walker-bitcoin-mining-and-forest-management-081c6f286283
Yakihonne: https://yakihonne.com/article/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqcufhejfreakj05lx68vaz8u69zlqlqx35kphwhyy3aekhh588fjqq24q6z4tp395c6ggau8x7t3g9hrgknff9j5cngtj5g
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://cointelegraph.com/news/italy-largest-bank-buys-11-bitcoin-intesa-sanpaolo-1m-btc-investment
https://cointelegraph.com/news/trump-first-day-crypto-executive-orders-report
https://decrypt.co/300734/coinbase-arbitrary-capricious-sec-order
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 8:48 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 14th day of January 2025, and this is episode 1018 of Bitcoin, and Happy Lightning Network White Paper Day. It is. It is. On this day, January 14, 2016, Joseph Poon and Taj Dreyja. They they they they each released, like, a a paper about the lightning network. Okay? So these two guys, which I haven't heard their names in a very, very long time, Joseph Poon and Taj Dreyja, They are the progenitors of the modern day lightning network. And back in 2016, I mean, it took 2 years after that white paper dropped before we even came close to getting a workable product. And then and then if anybody remembers, we were all told we were all told that it was reckless to put any money into the Lightning Network. And of course, that's the very first thing that we started doing was opening channels with each other.
And the Lightning Network has come a long long way since that time. So I just wanted to make sure that we all understood what the hell was going on with, the Lightning Network white paper anniversary day that is today, January 14th. And that was back in 2016. Yesterday, I released what I had been working on for a long time. And it's not that I was working on it for a long time, it just took me like well over a year to release an article about something that I call the Forest Walker. Now I've done an article or not an article, I did an entire episode on Forest Walker, and that was in fact, it was gonna be hold on there. It's gonna be episode well, if it'll actually give it to me. No. You're not gonna give it to me, are you? Good lord. Hold on.
Yeah. That was episode 849 entitled The Forest Walker part 1. And I just did a general overview at that time on on this podcast of what I was thinking about when it came to something that that I call the Force Walker. Well, I had since then written a, an article, and it kept I kept it in draft form for a long time. And I wrote the majority of it, I think it was well over a year ago. And then it just kind of floated around and I didn't do anything with it. And I finally, yesterday, decided, to go ahead and release it. I've been working on it for the last couple of weeks to try to get it into a format that, you know, would be, you know, readable and and palpable for everybody. And and so yesterday, I released it both on Yakehanni, if that's the name, if that's the way I pronounce it that that is pronounced. I'm not exactly sure.
Yakehanni is a, a law is a Noster client that is a long format. It also does short format too. But if you wanna post articles like you're posting on Substack or Medium or something like that, yakih0ne, which is a y a k I h o n n e, You can just search that in Google or whatever and you'll find it. And you can use your, your Nostra Inpub or Insec to log in if you if you want to use it. And honestly, it's it's a great for it's a great platform. It really is. It allows inline pictures. It does all kinds of neat stuff. But today, what I wanted to do was read you the article.
Now I'm going to be reading it. I also posted this to Medium, so I'm gonna read it off off of medium simply because the scrolling is a little bit better than Yaki Han. And since I'm doing this live, I kinda don't need glitches in my in my scrolling. And sometimes Nostril clients get a little big, get a little fuzzy when it comes to that. But let's I wanna do the first half of this show just reading you this article which I titled Forest Walker Bitcoin Mining and Forest Management. Bitcoin is more than money, more than an asset, and more than a store of value.
Bitcoin is a prime mover, an enabler, and it ignites imaginations. It certainly fueled an idea in my mind. The idea integrates sensors, computational prowess, actuated machinery, power conversion, and electronic communications to form an autonomous, machined creature, roaming forests, and harvesting the most widespread and least energy dense fuel source available. I call it the forest walker. And it eats wood and mines bitcoin. I know what you're thinking. Why not just put Bitcoin mining rigs where they belong? In a host of facilities sporting electricity from energy dense fuels like natural gas. Climate controlled with excellent data piping in and out.
Why go to all the trouble building a robot that digests wood, creating flammable gases fueling an engine to run a generator powering Bitcoin miners? It's all about synergy. Bitcoin mining enables the realization of multiple seemingly unrelated yet useful activities. Activities considered unprofitable if not for Bitcoin as the prime mover. This is much more than simply mining the greatest asset ever conceived by humankind. It's about the power of synergy, which Bitcoin plays only one of many roles. The synergy created by this system can stabilize forests, fire ecology while generating multiple income streams.
That's the realistic goal here, and it requires a brief history of American forest management before continuing. Smokey the Bear. In 1944, the Smokey Bear Wildlife Prevention Campaign began in the United States. Only you can prevent forest fires remains the refrain of the Ad Council's longest running campaign. The Ad Council is a United States non profit set up by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers in 1942. It would seem that the US Department of the Interior was concerned about pesky forest fires and wanted them to stop.
So alongside a national policy of extreme fire suppression, they enlisted the entire United States population to get on board via the ad campaigns, and it worked. Forest fires were almost obliterated, and everyone was happy. Right? Wrong. Smokey is a fantastically successful bear. So forest fires became so few for so long that the fuel load, deadwood, in forests has become very heavy. So heavy that when a fire happens and they always happen it destroys everything in its path because the more fuel there is the hotter that fire becomes trees bushes shrubs and all other plant life cannot escape destruction not to mention homes and businesses the soil microbiology doesn't escape either as it is burned away even in deeper soils to add insult to injury hydrophobic waxy residues condense on the soil surface forcing water to travel over the ground rather than through it eroding forest soils.
Good job, Smokey. Well done, sir. Most terrestrial ecologies are fire ecologies. Fire is part of these systems' fuel load and pest management. Before we pretended to manage millions of acres of forest fires raged all over the world rarely damaging forests the fuel load was always too light to generate fires hot enough to moonscape mountainsides. Fires simply burned off the minor amounts of fuel that accumulated since the fire before. The lighter heat, smoke, and other combustion gases suppressed pest, keeping them in check and the smoke condensed into a plant growth accelerant called wood vinegar, not a waxy cap on the soil.
These fires also cleared out weak undergrowth, cycled minerals, and thinned the forest canopy allowing sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor. Without a fire's heat, many pine tree species can't sow their seeds. The heat is required to open the cones, the seed bearing structures, of spruce, cypress, sequoia, jack pine, lodgepole pine, and many more. Without fire, forests can't have babies. The idea was to protect the forests, and it isn't working. So in a world of fire, what does an ally look like and what does it do meet the forest walker for the forest walker to work as a mobile autonomous unit a solid platform that can carry several 100 pounds of equipment is required.
It so happens this chassis already exists but shelved. Introducing the Legged Squad Support System, the LS3, a joint project between Boston Dynamics, DARPA and the United States Marine Corps, the quadrupedal robot is the size of a cow, can carry £400 of equipment, negotiate challenging terrain, and operate for 24 hours before needing to refuel. Yes. It had an engine. Abandoned in 2015, the thing was too noisy for military deployment, and maintenance under fire is never a high quality idea. However, we can rebuild it to act as a platform for the Forest Walker, albeit with serious alterations.
It would need to be bigger, probably. Carry more weight? Definitely. Maybe replace structural metal with carbon fiber and redesign much as 3 d printable parts for more effective maintenance. The original system has a top operational speed of 8 miles per hour. For our purposes, it only needs to move about as fast as a grazing ruminant. Without the hammering vibrations of galloping into battle, shocks of exploding mortars, and drunken soldiers playing wrangler of steel machines, time between failures should be much longer, and the overall energy consumption much lower.
The LS3 is a solid platform to build upon now it just needs to be pulled out of the mothballs and completely refitted without board equipment the small branch chipper when I say forest fuel load I mean the dead carbon containing litter on the forest floor duff or leaves fine woody debris like small branches and coarse woody debris like logs are the fuel that feeds forest fires. Walk through any forest in the United States today and you will see quite a lot of these materials too much as I have described. Some of these fuel loads can be 8 tons per acre in pine and hardwood forests and up to 16 tons per acre at active logging sites.
That's some big wood. And the more that collects, the more combustible danger to the forest it represents. It also provides a technically unlimited fuel supply for the Forest Walker system. The problem is that this detritus has to be chewed into pieces that are easily ingestible by the system for the gasification process. We'll get to that step in a minute what we need is a wood chipper attached to the chassis you know the LS3 its its mouth a small wood chipper handling material up to 2.5 to 3 inches in diameter would eliminate a substantial amount of fuel. There's no reason for the Forest Walker to remove fallen trees.
It wouldn't have to in order to make a real difference. It need only identify appropriately sized branches and grab them. Once loaded into the chipper's intake hopper for further processing, the beast can immediately look for more food. This is essentially kindling that would help ignite larger logs. If it's all consumed by Forest Walker, then it's not present to promote an aggravated conflagration. I have glossed over an obvious question. How does Forest Walker see and identify branches and such? LIDAR, light detection and ranging, attached to Forest Walker images the local area and feeds those data to onboard computers for processing.
Maybe AI plays a role. Maybe simple machine learning can do the trick. One thing is for certain, being able to identify a stick and cause robotic appendages to pick it up is not impossible. Great. We now have a quadrupedal robot autonomously identifying and eating dead branches and other light combustible materials. Whilst strolling through the forest depleting future fires of combustibles, Forest Walker has already performed a major function of this system, making the forest safer. It's time to convert this low density fuel into a high density fuel that the Forest Walker can leverage. Enter the gasification process.
The gasifier. The gasifier is the heart of the entire system. It's where low density fuel becomes high density fuel that powers the entire system biochar and wood vinegar are processed wastes and I'll discuss why both are powerful soil amendments in a moment but first what's gasification? Reacting shredded carbonaceous materials at high temperatures in a low or no oxygen environment converts the biomass into biochar, wood vinegar, heat, and synthesis gas, also known as syngas. Syngas consists primarily of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane, all of which are extremely useful fuels in a gaseous state.
Part of this gas is used to heat the input biomass and keep the reaction temperature constant while the internal combustion engine that drives the generator to produce electrical power consumes the rest. Critically, this gasification process is continuous feed. Forst Walker must intake biomass from the chipper, process it to fuel, and dump the waste the CO2, heat, biochar, and wood vinegar continuously. It cannot stop. Everything about this system depends upon this continual grazing, digestion, and excretion of waste just as a ruminal does. And like a ruminant, all waste products enhance the local environment.
When I first heard of gasification, I didn't believe it was real. Running an electric generator from burning wood seemed more akin to conspiracy fantasy than science. Not only is gasification real, it's ancient technology. A man named Dean Clayton first started experiments on gasification in 16/99. And in 1901, gasification was used to power a vehicle. By the end of World War 2, there were 500,000 syngas powered vehicles in Germany alone because of the fossil fuel rationing during the war. The global gasification market was $480,000,000,000 in 2022 and projected to be as much as $700,000,000,000 by 2,030 according to Vantage Market Research.
Gasification technology is the best choice to power the forest walker because it's self contained and we want its waste products. Biochar. The waste. Biochar, AKA agricultural charcoal, is fairly simple. It's almost pure, solid carbon that resembles charcoal. Its porous nature packs large surface areas into small, three-dimensional nuggets. Devoid of most other chemistry like hydrocarbons and ash biochar is extremely lightweight. Do not confuse it with the charcoal you buy for your grill. Biochar doesn't make good grilling charcoal because it would burn too rapidly, as it does not contain the multitude of flammable components that charcoal does.
Biochar has several other good use cases. Water filtration, water retention, nutrient retention, providing habitat for microscopic soil organisms, and carbon sequestration are the main ones that we are concerned with here. Carbon has an amazing ability to adsorb substances stick to and accumulate on the surface of an object. Adsorb. Manifold chemistries. Water, nutrients and pollutants tightly bind to carbon in this format. So biochar makes a respectable filter and acts as a battery of water and nutrients in soils. Biochar absorbs and holds onto 7 times its weight in water.
Soil containing biochar is more drought resilient than soils without it. Adsorbed nutrients, tightly sequestered alongside water, get released only as plants need them plants must excrete protons from their roots to disgorge water or positively charged nutrients from the biochar surface it's an active process biochar surface area where the absorption happens can be 500 square meters per gram or more that is 10% larger than an official NBA basketball court for every gram of biochar Biochar's abundant surface area builds protective habitats for soil microbes like fungi and bacteria, and many of are critical for the health and productivity of the soil itself.
The carbon sequestration component of biochar comes into play where carbon credits are concerned. There is a financial market for carbon. Not leveraging that market for revenue is foolish. I am climate agnostic. All I care about is that once solid carbon is inside the soil, it will stay there for 1000 of years, imparting drought resiliency, fertility collection nutrient buffering and release for that time span I simply want as much solid carbon in the soil because of the undeniably positive effects it has regardless of any climatic considerations. Wood vinegar.
More waste. Another byproduct of the gasification process is wood vinegar, or pyroligneous acid. If you have ever seen liquid smoke in the grocery store, then you have seen wood vinegar. Principally composed of acetic acid, acetone, and methanol, wood vinegar also contains around 200 other organic compounds. It would seem intuitive that condensed liquefied wood smoke would at least be bad for the health of all living things, if not downright carcinogenic. The counter intuition wins the day, however. Wood vinegar has been used by humans for a very long time to promote digestion, bowel, and liver health, combat diarrhea and vomiting, calm peptic ulcers and regulate cholesterol levels, and a host of other benefits.
For centuries, humans have annually burned off 100 of thousands of square miles of pasture, grassland, forest, and every other conceivable terrestrial ecosystem. Why is this done? After every burn, one thing becomes obvious, the almost supernatural growth these ecosystems exhibit after the burn. How? Wood vinegar is a component of this growth. Even in open burns, smoke condenses and infiltrates the soil. That is when wood vinegar shows its quality. This stuff beefs up not only general plant growth, but seed germination as well and possesses many other qualities that are beneficial to plants. It's a pesticide, fungicide, promotes beneficial soil microorganisms, enhances nutrient uptake, and imparts disease resistance.
I am barely touching a long list of attributes here. But you want wood vinegar in your soil alongside biochar because it absorbs wood vinegar as well the internal combustion engine conversion of grazed forage to chemical then mechanical and then electrical energy completes the cycle The ICE converts the gaseous fuel output from the gasifier to mechanical energy, heat, water vapor and CO2. It's the mechanical energy of a rotating driveshaft that we want. That rotation drives the electric generator which is the heartbeat we need to bring this monster to life. Luckily for us, combined internal combustion engine and generator packages are ubiquitous, delivering a defined energy output given a constant fuel input.
It's the simplest part of the system. The obvious question here is whether the amount of syngas provided by the gasification process will provide enough energy to generate enough electrons to run the entire system or not. While I have no doubt the energy produced will run Forest Walker's main systems, the question is really about the electrons left over. Will it be enough to run the Bitcoin mining aspect of the system? Everything is a budget. C 02 production for growth. Plants are lollipops. No matter if it's a tree or a bush or a shrubbery, the entire thing is mostly sugar in various formats, but mostly long chain carbohydrates like lignin and cellulose.
Plants need three things to make sugar, c o two, water, and light. In a forest, where tree densities can be quite high, c02 availability becomes a limiting growth factor. It'd be in the forest's interest to have more available c02 providing for various sugar formation providing the organism with food and structure. An odd thing about tree leaves the openings that allow gases like the ever searched for CO2 to come into the organism are on the bottom of the leaf. These are called stomata. Not many stomata are topside. This suggests that trees and bushes have evolved to find gases like CO2 from below not above.
And this further suggests CO2 might be in higher concentrations nearer the soil the soil life bacteria fungietc is constantly producing enormous amounts of c02 and it would stay in the soil forever eventually killing the very soil life that produces it if not for tidal forces you see water is everywhere and whether in pools lakes oceans or distributed in moist soil water moves towards the moon the water in the soil and also in the water tables below the soil rise toward the surface every day when the water rises it expels the accumulated gases in the soil into the atmosphere and it's mostly co2 it's a good bet on how leaves developed high populations of stomata on the underside of leaves as the water relaxes the tide goes out it sucks oxygenated air back into the soil to continue the functions of soil life respiration.
The soil breathes, albeit slowly. The gases produced by the Forest Walker's internal combustion engine consist primarily of CO2 and water. Combusting sugars produces the same gases that are needed to construct the sugars because the universe is funny like that. The forest walker is constantly laying down these critical construction elements right where the trees need them close to the ground to be gobbled up by the trees. The branch drones. During the last ice age, giant mammals populated North America, forests and otherwise. Mastodons, wooly mammoths, rhinos, short faced bears, step bison, caribou, muskox, giant beavers, camels, gigantic ground dwelling sloths, glyptodons, and dire wolves were everywhere.
Many were 10 to 15 feet tall. As they crashed through forests, they would effectively cleave off dead side branches of trees, halting the spread of ground based fires migrating into the tree crown or laddering which is a death knell for a forest. These animals are all extinct now and forests no longer have any manner of pruning services. But if we build drones fitted with cutting implements like saws and loppers, optical cameras, and AI trained to discern dead branches from living ones, these drones could effectively take over pruning services by identifying, cutting and dropping to the forest floor dead branches.
The dropped branches simply get collected by the Forest Walker as part of its continual mission. The drones dock on the back of the Forest Walker to recharge their batteries when low. The whole scene would look like a grazing cow with some flies bothering it. This activity breaks the link between a relatively cool ground based fire and the tree crowns and is a vital element in forest fire control. The Bitcoin miner. Mining is one of 4 monetary incentive models making this system a possibility for development. The other 3 are US Department of the Interior, Township, County, and Electrical Utility Company easement contracts for fuel load management, global carbon credits trading, and dataset sales.
All of the above depends on obvious questions getting answered. I will list some obvious ones here, but this is not an engineering document and is not the place for spreadsheets. How much bitcoin one forest walker can mine depends on everything else. What amount of biomass can we process? Will the biomass flow enough syngas to keep the lights on? Can the chassis support enough mining ASICs and supporting infrastructure? What does that weigh? And will it affect field performance? How much power can the generator produce? Other questions that are more philosophical persist.
Even if a single forest walker can only mine scant amounts of BTC per day, that pales to how much fuel material it can process into biochar. We're we're talking about 1,000,000 upon 1,000,000 of forested acres in need of fuel load management. What can a single forest walker do? I'm not thinking in singular terms. The Forrest Walker must operate as a fleet. What could 50 do? 500? What is it worth providing a service to the world by managing forest fuel loads, providing proof of work to the global monetary system seeding soil with drought and nutrient resilience by the excretion over time of carbon by the ton what did the last forest fire cost?
The mesh network. What could be better than 1 Bitcoin mining, carbon sequestering, forest fire squelching, soil amending behemoth? 1000 of them. But then they would need to be able to talk to each other to coordinate position, data handling, etcetera. Fitted with a mesh networking device like Gotenna or Meshtastic LoRa equipment enables each Forest Walker to communicate with each other. Now we have an interconnected fleet of Forest Walkers relaying data to each other and more importantly, aggregating all of that the last link in the chain for uplink. Well, at least the Bitcoin mining data.
Since block data is lightweight, transmission of these data via mesh networking in fairly close quartered environments is more than doable. So how does data transmit to the Bitcoin network? How do the forced walkers get the previous block data necessary to execute on mining? Back to the chain. Getting Bitcoin block data to and from the network is the last puzzle piece. The standing presumption here is that wherever a Forest Walker fleet is operating, it is not within cell tower range. We further presume that the nearest Walmart WiFi is hours away.
Enter the Blockstream satellite or something like it. A separate ground based drone will have 2 jobs To stay as close to the nearest for forest walker as it can and to provide an antenna for either terrestrial or orbital data uplink. Bitcoin centric data is transmitted to the uplink drone via the mesh network transmitters and then sent onto the uplink and the whole flow goes in the opposite direction as well. Many to 1. 1 to many. We cannot transmit data to the Blockstream satellite, and it will be up to Blockstream and companies like it to provide uplink capabilities in the future. And I don't doubt that they will.
Starlink, you say? What's stopping that company from filtering out block data? Nothing. Because it's Starlink's system, and they could decide to censor these data. It seems we may have a problem sending and receiving Bitcoin data in backcountry environs. But then again, the utility of this system in staunching the fuel load that creates forest fires is extremely useful around forested communities. And many have fiber, WiFi, and cell towers. These communities could be a welcoming ground 0 for first deployments of the Forest Walker system by the home and business owners seeking fire repression. In the best way, Bitcoin subsidizes the safety of communities.
Sensor packages, lidar. The benefit of having a Forest Walker fleet strolling through the forest is a never ending opportunity for data gathering. A plethora of deployable sensors gathering hyper accurate data on everything from temperature to topography is yet another revenue generator. Data is valuable. And the Forest Walker could generate data sales to various government entities and private concerns. LiDAR, light detection and ranging, can map topography, perform biomass assessment, comparative soil erosion analysis, etcetera. It so happens that the ForestWalker's ability to see, to navigate about its surroundings is LiDAR driven. And since it's already being used, we can get double duty by harvesting that data for later use.
By using a laser to send out light pulses and measuring the time it takes for the reflection of those pulses to return, very detailed datasets incrementally build up. Eventually, as enough data about a certain area becomes available, the data becomes useful and valuable. Forestry concerns, both private and public, often use lidar to build 3 d models of tree stands to assess the amount of harvestable lumber in entire sections of forest. Consulting companies offering these services charge anywhere from several 100 to several $1,000 per square kilometer for such services.
A forest walker generating such assessments on the fly while performing its other functions is a multidisciplinary approach to revenue generation. PH, soil moisture, and cation exchange sensing. The Forest Walker is quadrupedal, so there are 4 contact points to the soil. Why not get a pH data point for every step it takes? We can also gather soil moisture data and cation exchange capacities at unheard of densities because of sampling occurring on the fly during commission of the system's other duties. No one is going to build a machine to do pH testing of vast tracks of forest soils, but that doesn't make the data collected from such an endeavor valueless.
Since the Forest Walker serves many functions at once, a multitude of data products can add to the return on investment component. Weather data. Temperature, humidity, pressure, and even data like evapotranspiration gathered at high densities on broadacre scales have untold value. And because the sensors are lightweight and don't require large power budgets, they come along for the ride at little cost. But just like the old mantra, gas, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free, these sensors provide potential revenue benefits just by them being present.
I've touched on just a few data genres here. In fact, the question for universities, governmental bodies, and other institutions becomes, how much will you pay us to attach your sensor payload to the Forest Walker? Noise suppression. Only you can prevent Metallica filling the surrounds with 120 decibels of sound. Easy enough. Just turn the car stereo off. But what if a fleet of 50 Forest Walkers operating in the backcountry or near a township? 500. 5000. Each one has a woodchipper, an internal combustion engine, hydraulic pumps, actuators, and more cooling fans than you can shake a stick at.
It's a walking, screaming, fire breathing dragon operating continuously day and night, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The sound will negatively affect all living things, and that impacts behaviors. Serious engineering considerations and prowess must deliver a silencing blow to the major issue of noise. It would be foolish to think that a fleet of forest walkers could be silent. But if not a major design consideration, then the entire idea is dead on arrival. Townships would not allow them to operate even if they solve the problem of widespread fuel load and neither would government entities, and rightly so. Nothing, not man nor beast, would want to be subjected to an eternal infernal scream even if it were to end within days as the fleet moved further away after consuming what it could.
Noise and heat are the only real pollutants of this system. Taking noise seriously from the beginning is paramount. Fire safety. A fire breathing dragon is not the worst description of the forest walker. It eats wood, combusted at very high temperatures, and excretes carbon. And it does so in an extremely flammable environment. Bad mix for 1 forest walker, worse for many. One must take extreme pains to ensure that during normal operation, a forest walker could fall over, walk through tender dry brush, or get pounded into the ground by a meteorite from Krypton, and it wouldn't destroy epic swaths of trees and baby deer.
I envision an ultimate test of the prototype to include dousing it in grain alcohol while it's wrapped up in toilet paper like a pledge at a fraternity party. If it runs for 72 hours and doesn't set everything on fire, then maybe outside entities won't be fearful of something that walks around forest with a constant fire in its belly. The wrap. How we think about what can be done with and adjacent to Bitcoin is at least as important as Bitcoin's economic standing itself. For those who tell me that this entire idea is without merit, I say, okay. Fine. You can come up with something too.
What can we plug Bitcoin into that, like a battery, make something that does not work, work? That's the lesson I get from this entire exercise. No one was ever going to hire teams of humans to go out and clean the forest. There's no money in that. The data collection and sales from such an endeavor might provide revenues over the break even point, but investment demands alpha in this day and age but plug bitcoin into an almost viable system and voila we tip the scales to achieve liftoff let's face it we haven't scratched the surface of Bitcoin's forcing function on our minds not because it's Bitcoin but because of what that invention means The question that pushes me to approach things this way is what can we create that one system's waste is another system's feedback?
The Forest Walker's system's only real waste is the conversion of low entropy energy into high entropy energy All other output is beneficial to humanity. Bitcoin, I believe, is the first product of a new mode of human imagination. An imagination newly forged over the past millennia of being lied to, stolen from, distracted, and otherwise misallocated to a black hole of the nonsensical. We are waking up. What I have presented is not science fiction. Everything I have described here is well within the realm of possibility. The question is one of viability, at least in terms of the detritus of the old world we find ourselves departing from.
This system would take a nontrivial amount of time and resources to develop. I think the system would garner extensive long term contracts from those who have the most to lose from wildfires, the most to gain from hyper hyper accurate datasets, and, of course, securing the most precious asset in the world. Many may not see it that way for they seek alpha and are therefore blind to other possibilities. Others will see only the possibilities of thinking in a new way of looking at things differently and dreaming of what comes next.
That's the end of the article, and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. Yes. There are issues. But, of course, there's issues. But there's issues with any idea. Could you imagine, like, you know, I don't know, something that we use every day being first introduced? Car, plane, cell phone, you name it, man, microphone. Yeah. I'm gonna invent this thing where you speak into it, and it's gonna record your voice. You that is, I mean, that is, like, ubiquitous today. But back then back then in Edison's time, man, you're that I thought that was a hard that was a hard sell for anybody to believe that that would even be possible.
Right? So like I said at the end of this, none of this is impossible. Now there's there is, like, a a clear issue. What about snow? No. You're not gonna operate this thing in the snow. The fleet has to actually go somewhere else. Right? It has to go, you know, down south or something like that. This this can be a migratory fleet. You could put them on you could put them on cattle trucks and move them around the country. So if it's, like, too snowy up in Colorado, screw it. You take them down to West Texas and use the whole damn fleet to pull and cut, you know, mesquite trees out of the ground. And mesquite trees, by the way, are an invasive species. They were never supposed to be there in the first place. We brought them in to West Texas for to stabilize soil, and they just went apeshit.
And they're everywhere. And they cause problems. You know? I mean, it's like it's it's it's not it's a it's a product that we could easily chop down and burn as, you know, fuel for the Forest Walker system, and then the damn thing grows back from its roots. It's like an an unending continuous stream of low density fuel. It's I think that this is a good system. Right? Can this thing operate in the rain? Well, no. Not really. Not because it'll fry its electrical systems, but because the wood is moist. So, yes, there are going to be seasons that this thing actually can operate in certain climates.
And when that region or when that climate is no longer conducive for Forest Walker, you bring in the trucks and you ship them to somewhere where it's dry. And you just you just migrate these things. I mean, ruminants migrated. The great, you know, huge herds of bison migrated to and fro, up and down, south and north and west and east, and they they did it all year round. And they necessarily perform their function while they did it over vast tracks of multiple different climates because they were able to move. So, yes, while there are some some clear issues with this, there's no way that I could have addressed everything.
I still think the core idea is viable. But I'll let that leave that up to you to decide. Let's run the numbers. The CNBC Futures and Commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil is down almost a point, but still chilling out at $78.8 per barrel. Brent Norcey down 2 thirds of a point to 8047. Natural gas is up point 2% to $3.94 a 1000 cubic feet. Gasoline is up almost a full point to $2.12 a gallon. Gold is up a quarter of a point. Silver is up a half. Platinum is down 2 and a half, copper is up 0.16%, while palladium is up 0.7%.
Let's see about Ag. What's Ag doing? Mostly in the red this morning or this afternoon, depending on when you get this. Lumber is the biggest loser of the day. 2.57 percent of the downside. Biggest winner is wheat, half a point to the upside. But live cattle is up a half as well. Lean hogs are up 1.34 percent and feeder cattle are up a half of percent. The Dow is down point 13. S and P is down a third. Nasdaq is down almost a full half point. And the S and P mini is down a third of a point. And Bitcoin, well, it looks like it's kinda recovering a little bit. $95,600 no. $960, that gives it a $1,900,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 36 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,809,932 and a half of.
And average fees per block are still low at 0.05 BTC on a per block basis. And there are a mere 33 blocks carrying a 133 unconfirmed 133,000, excuse me, unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priorities of 5. Count them, 5 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority gonna get you in at 3. And the hash rate is 777.5 exahashes per second, and that is over a 1 week rolling average from Economies of Lies. You sit upon a throne of lies. Anyway, I got, at gave me 500 sats. Says, great show as always. Also, I just noticed that your intro and outro music sounds way cooler when played at 1.7x speed. See for yourself.
Wartime with 333 says fire and cheers. And Mark with 210 says thank you sir, no thank you. And that was it. That's that's all I got for Economies of Lies. Oh, man. Sad puppy eyes. I'm giving y'all sad puppy eyes. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Italy's largest bank enters crypto market with a $1,000,000 Bitcoin investment. Oh, for god's sakes. It's barely worth even talking about. But Zoltan Vardai, maybe he's got more of a point here in Cointelegraph. Italy's largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, became the first Italian bank to make a Bitcoin investment, purchasing all of a whopping 11 BTC for about €1,000,000 or $1,020,000 yesterday, January 13th.
The investment comes just over a month after Bitcoin hit the 1,000 or sorry. $108,000 mark in December. The news emerged from a leaked internal email by Niccolo Bardisocia, head of digital assets trading at Intesa Sanpaolo. And in the email, he wrote, as of today, 13th day of January 2025, Intesa owns 11 Bitcoin. Thank you to everyone for the teamwork. This result would not have been possible without each and every one of you. While Intesa Sanpaolo has not responded to a request for comment, the bank confirmed the Bitcoin acquisition with the media outlet Wired.
The Italian bank's investment comes during a period of increasing institutional interest in BTC, which saw Bitcoin exchange reserve sink to a near 7 year low on January 13th as crypto hedge funds bought the dip, reinforcing expectations of a supply shock, which occurs when strong buyer demand meets a decreasing amount of BTC leading to price appreciation. And then they go on to talk more about institutions buying the dip. So two things here. The the largest bank in Italy has bought 11 BTC. The second thing is, that's not a lot of Bitcoin for a bank the size of Intesa Sanpaolo.
So my presumption here, they're just testing the waters. I wouldn't put too much stock in it. I mean, they did buy it, but we'll have to see if they immediately don't punch out of it, you know, get lettuce hands and figure out that this is just too scary of a situation for them. But the third thing is is the 7 year low of institutionally held or or rather exchange held Bitcoin reserves on January 13th. That was just yesterday. 7 year low. And we are just counting the days away from when orange man sits in the chair so that we can figure out what the hell he's gonna do. Jesse Coughlin is gonna tell us about what he might do from Cointelegraph with this one entitled Donald Trump could issue crypto executive orders on 1st day according to a report.
US president-elect Donald Trump's 1st day back in the White House on January 20th could see him sign a flurry of executive orders, some of which could impact the crypto industry. The Washington Post reported on January 13th that Trump is expected to sign executive orders after taking office next week covering crypto de banking and repealing a bank accounting policy that requires banks holding crypto to list the digital assets as a liability. Quote, the Trump team has made it very clear that this is a priority a person involved with the conversations told The Post.
Crypto executives have long accused president Joe Biden's administration of using financial regulators to pressure banks to cut off the industry from financial services under operation choke point 2.0. Meanwhile, the industry has been pushing back against the policy to report crypto as a liability, which came about through a March 2022 Securities and Exchange Commission staff accounting bulletin called SAB 121. Reuters also reported on December 23rd that crypto industry officials were pushing Trump to issue crypto related executive orders within his first 100 days of office, and some expected at least one would come by on day 1. Well, the post also reported that Trump's crypto and artificial intelligence czar, David Sack, posted a luncheon for tech execs and government officials on December 20th, where he said Trump would revoke Biden's sweeping 2023 AI executive order, which was described among conservatives as language saying AI must operate in a manner that advances equity, whatever the hell that means.
You wanna talk talk about a very broad and widely worded possible sentence there? I mean, what the hell as long as it it it can operate in a manner that advances equity. The hell does that even mean? Whatever. VC Marc Andreessen, known for backing tech and crypto companies, has also reportedly been helping build Trump's incoming administration behind the scenes. The post reported that since Trump's election, he frequently visited the president elect's base of operations at his Florida Mar a Lago club and has been recruiting and screening candidates for spots in the administration. Andreessen's sway isn't just overpicks for government tech leaders, but also for defense and intelligence roles.
During his campaign, Trump quoted the crypto industry with promises of making a country or the country a crypto capital and promising a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Yes. We all know. So day 1, let's not forget what his actual promise for day 1 really was. Ross. Free Ross day 1. Free Ross day 1. On day 1, you free Ross. That's the first thing that you do. You don't do any of this other bullshit first. Your first act as president, mister orange man, is to free Ross Ulbricht from prison. Get him out of there. Then you can play with your Bitcoin or do whatever it is that you do there, mister Trump. Now, from this next thing, well, Coinbase scores another win against arbitrary and capricious SEC order.
Sander Lutz is writing this one for decrypt. It looks like Coinbase has won another one. A panel of federal appeals court judges in Philadelphia dealt yet another blow to the SEC's crypto regime Monday, emerging as the latest prominent court to question how the federal agency has navigated its regulation of digital assets. The US court of appeals and the 3rd circuit court ruled today in favor of Coinbase, which sued the SEC last year over the agency's refusal to explicitly explicitly lay out its crypto policy. Instead of putting forth crypto specific rules, the SEC has instead sporadically sued crypto firms. And today, a 3 judge panel comprised of 2 Democrats and 1 Republican ruled that the SEC's dismissive response to Coinbase's request for crypto specific rulemaking was unacceptable.
Quote, because we believe the SEC's order was conclusory and insufficiently reasoned and thus arbitrary and capricious, we grant Coinbase's petition in part and remand to the SEC for a more complete explanation, today's order reads. The judges added that they declined, however, to force the SEC to create crypto specific rules as Coinbase had requested. According to judge Thomas Ambrose, a Clinton era democrat who wrote Monday's opinion, previous case law established that an agency like the SEC could only be forced to create rules against its will if an extreme delay in creating those rules quote endangered human lives, a requirement clearly not met by crypto regulated or or related regulations.
So the SEC doesn't have to issue new crypto rules now, but it must explain to Coinbase in much greater detail why it has, thus far, refused to do so. Rather than force the agency to make a rule, we order it to explain its decision not to. Judge Stefanos Bibas, a Republican appointed by the court or to the court by Donald Trump, wrote Monday in a concurring opinion, quote, indeed, a rule may not prove necessary to solve the problem here. The agency could just state its position on crypto assets unequivocally. Bemis warned the SEC that its explanation should tackle the question head on and not avoid it. Quote, it should not give another poor explanation in an already long line of them, he said of the agency.
Coinbase chief legal officer, Paul Gruel, celebrated the posting or the ruling in a post on Twitter, taking no apparent issue with the court's refusal to force the SEC to create new crypto rules. And it's very sad that Paul Gruel's, Twitter account has a dot eth name on it. It's really sick sickening to see an adult play that stupid ass game. But, quote, we appreciate the court's careful consideration, he wrote, when asked when the SEC plans to release an explanation of its crypto policies or what such an ex explanation might look like, an agency spokesperson told Decrypt that those matters are currently being considered internally. Quote, we're reviewing the decision and will determine next steps as appropriate, the spokesperson said.
For years, SEC chair Gary Gensler has insisted that his agency's crypto policy needs no explanation given their supposedly self evident compliance with existing securities laws. And that stance has made him plenty of enemies in the sector. Further, a recent string of federal court rulings appear to have begun to take issue with the chair's narrative, coloring the SEC's treatment of crypto firms as unusual and worthy of legal review. Uh-oh. Those potential legal cracks in the SEC's crypto regime have come just days before it is likely to collapse from the shift in political tides. Gensler is going to resign on January 20th, the same day as Donald Trump's inauguration.
The chair's likely replacement, former SEC comissioner Paul Atkins, is a crypto enthusiast who is almost certain to reverse the agency's aggressive treatment of digital assets. Which means what, ladies and gentlemen? You get to see a lot more posting about XRP. That's right. Ripple is gonna be probably the largest winner of this entire debacle. I'm not saying that Ginzer is a good guy. He clearly screwed this up. But now, I mean, if if it's if this guy's like a, you know, a complete crypto enthusiast and he's a shit coiner, then it's it's no hold bars at the feeding trough of all the scammers that are wishing, just hoping and waiting to separate you from your Bitcoin.
Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Okay. So, that is all the news that I think is fit to bring you this morning. We are at exactly dead on 60 minutes right now, and that is the target time that I like for the Bitcoin and podcast. I really hope you enjoyed the article, Forrest Walker. Please do me a favor. Go to my, Noster profile if you follow me and look for that. I'll I'll be reposting those, the medium and the Yaki Hani, URLs to that article throughout the week. Please grab them and please send them to your family and friends and so they can read it. And I will also put those, URLs in today's show notes because it's going to you know, it's clearly I I read the article, so I should probably link to the article today.
Send that around the horn and get your family and friends and anybody else to send it to your social media and try to get them to listen to the Bitcoin and podcast so that, you know, I can grow the show, grow the audience, and possibly get into a better position to bring you more stuff in the future because I really wanna do that. It's just, you know, without steady income from this show, it's very hard to do a whole lot of anything other than what I'm already doing, and I really wanna do that. And I I don't think it's right to just ask my longtime listeners to give me more.
If you wanna give me more, then give me more listeners. And then they will maybe a portion of them will possibly be able to throw me some satoshis for the work that I do here at Bitcoin and for the 1,000 and 18th time, I say 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 8:48 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 14th day of January 2025, and this is episode 1018 of Bitcoin, and Happy Lightning Network White Paper Day. It is. It is. On this day, January 14, 2016, Joseph Poon and Taj Dreyja. They they they they each released, like, a a paper about the lightning network. Okay? So these two guys, which I haven't heard their names in a very, very long time, Joseph Poon and Taj Dreyja, They are the progenitors of the modern day lightning network. And back in 2016, I mean, it took 2 years after that white paper dropped before we even came close to getting a workable product. And then and then if anybody remembers, we were all told we were all told that it was reckless to put any money into the Lightning Network. And of course, that's the very first thing that we started doing was opening channels with each other.
And the Lightning Network has come a long long way since that time. So I just wanted to make sure that we all understood what the hell was going on with, the Lightning Network white paper anniversary day that is today, January 14th. And that was back in 2016. Yesterday, I released what I had been working on for a long time. And it's not that I was working on it for a long time, it just took me like well over a year to release an article about something that I call the Forest Walker. Now I've done an article or not an article, I did an entire episode on Forest Walker, and that was in fact, it was gonna be hold on there. It's gonna be episode well, if it'll actually give it to me. No. You're not gonna give it to me, are you? Good lord. Hold on.
Yeah. That was episode 849 entitled The Forest Walker part 1. And I just did a general overview at that time on on this podcast of what I was thinking about when it came to something that that I call the Force Walker. Well, I had since then written a, an article, and it kept I kept it in draft form for a long time. And I wrote the majority of it, I think it was well over a year ago. And then it just kind of floated around and I didn't do anything with it. And I finally, yesterday, decided, to go ahead and release it. I've been working on it for the last couple of weeks to try to get it into a format that, you know, would be, you know, readable and and palpable for everybody. And and so yesterday, I released it both on Yakehanni, if that's the name, if that's the way I pronounce it that that is pronounced. I'm not exactly sure.
Yakehanni is a, a law is a Noster client that is a long format. It also does short format too. But if you wanna post articles like you're posting on Substack or Medium or something like that, yakih0ne, which is a y a k I h o n n e, You can just search that in Google or whatever and you'll find it. And you can use your, your Nostra Inpub or Insec to log in if you if you want to use it. And honestly, it's it's a great for it's a great platform. It really is. It allows inline pictures. It does all kinds of neat stuff. But today, what I wanted to do was read you the article.
Now I'm going to be reading it. I also posted this to Medium, so I'm gonna read it off off of medium simply because the scrolling is a little bit better than Yaki Han. And since I'm doing this live, I kinda don't need glitches in my in my scrolling. And sometimes Nostril clients get a little big, get a little fuzzy when it comes to that. But let's I wanna do the first half of this show just reading you this article which I titled Forest Walker Bitcoin Mining and Forest Management. Bitcoin is more than money, more than an asset, and more than a store of value.
Bitcoin is a prime mover, an enabler, and it ignites imaginations. It certainly fueled an idea in my mind. The idea integrates sensors, computational prowess, actuated machinery, power conversion, and electronic communications to form an autonomous, machined creature, roaming forests, and harvesting the most widespread and least energy dense fuel source available. I call it the forest walker. And it eats wood and mines bitcoin. I know what you're thinking. Why not just put Bitcoin mining rigs where they belong? In a host of facilities sporting electricity from energy dense fuels like natural gas. Climate controlled with excellent data piping in and out.
Why go to all the trouble building a robot that digests wood, creating flammable gases fueling an engine to run a generator powering Bitcoin miners? It's all about synergy. Bitcoin mining enables the realization of multiple seemingly unrelated yet useful activities. Activities considered unprofitable if not for Bitcoin as the prime mover. This is much more than simply mining the greatest asset ever conceived by humankind. It's about the power of synergy, which Bitcoin plays only one of many roles. The synergy created by this system can stabilize forests, fire ecology while generating multiple income streams.
That's the realistic goal here, and it requires a brief history of American forest management before continuing. Smokey the Bear. In 1944, the Smokey Bear Wildlife Prevention Campaign began in the United States. Only you can prevent forest fires remains the refrain of the Ad Council's longest running campaign. The Ad Council is a United States non profit set up by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers in 1942. It would seem that the US Department of the Interior was concerned about pesky forest fires and wanted them to stop.
So alongside a national policy of extreme fire suppression, they enlisted the entire United States population to get on board via the ad campaigns, and it worked. Forest fires were almost obliterated, and everyone was happy. Right? Wrong. Smokey is a fantastically successful bear. So forest fires became so few for so long that the fuel load, deadwood, in forests has become very heavy. So heavy that when a fire happens and they always happen it destroys everything in its path because the more fuel there is the hotter that fire becomes trees bushes shrubs and all other plant life cannot escape destruction not to mention homes and businesses the soil microbiology doesn't escape either as it is burned away even in deeper soils to add insult to injury hydrophobic waxy residues condense on the soil surface forcing water to travel over the ground rather than through it eroding forest soils.
Good job, Smokey. Well done, sir. Most terrestrial ecologies are fire ecologies. Fire is part of these systems' fuel load and pest management. Before we pretended to manage millions of acres of forest fires raged all over the world rarely damaging forests the fuel load was always too light to generate fires hot enough to moonscape mountainsides. Fires simply burned off the minor amounts of fuel that accumulated since the fire before. The lighter heat, smoke, and other combustion gases suppressed pest, keeping them in check and the smoke condensed into a plant growth accelerant called wood vinegar, not a waxy cap on the soil.
These fires also cleared out weak undergrowth, cycled minerals, and thinned the forest canopy allowing sunlight to penetrate to the forest floor. Without a fire's heat, many pine tree species can't sow their seeds. The heat is required to open the cones, the seed bearing structures, of spruce, cypress, sequoia, jack pine, lodgepole pine, and many more. Without fire, forests can't have babies. The idea was to protect the forests, and it isn't working. So in a world of fire, what does an ally look like and what does it do meet the forest walker for the forest walker to work as a mobile autonomous unit a solid platform that can carry several 100 pounds of equipment is required.
It so happens this chassis already exists but shelved. Introducing the Legged Squad Support System, the LS3, a joint project between Boston Dynamics, DARPA and the United States Marine Corps, the quadrupedal robot is the size of a cow, can carry £400 of equipment, negotiate challenging terrain, and operate for 24 hours before needing to refuel. Yes. It had an engine. Abandoned in 2015, the thing was too noisy for military deployment, and maintenance under fire is never a high quality idea. However, we can rebuild it to act as a platform for the Forest Walker, albeit with serious alterations.
It would need to be bigger, probably. Carry more weight? Definitely. Maybe replace structural metal with carbon fiber and redesign much as 3 d printable parts for more effective maintenance. The original system has a top operational speed of 8 miles per hour. For our purposes, it only needs to move about as fast as a grazing ruminant. Without the hammering vibrations of galloping into battle, shocks of exploding mortars, and drunken soldiers playing wrangler of steel machines, time between failures should be much longer, and the overall energy consumption much lower.
The LS3 is a solid platform to build upon now it just needs to be pulled out of the mothballs and completely refitted without board equipment the small branch chipper when I say forest fuel load I mean the dead carbon containing litter on the forest floor duff or leaves fine woody debris like small branches and coarse woody debris like logs are the fuel that feeds forest fires. Walk through any forest in the United States today and you will see quite a lot of these materials too much as I have described. Some of these fuel loads can be 8 tons per acre in pine and hardwood forests and up to 16 tons per acre at active logging sites.
That's some big wood. And the more that collects, the more combustible danger to the forest it represents. It also provides a technically unlimited fuel supply for the Forest Walker system. The problem is that this detritus has to be chewed into pieces that are easily ingestible by the system for the gasification process. We'll get to that step in a minute what we need is a wood chipper attached to the chassis you know the LS3 its its mouth a small wood chipper handling material up to 2.5 to 3 inches in diameter would eliminate a substantial amount of fuel. There's no reason for the Forest Walker to remove fallen trees.
It wouldn't have to in order to make a real difference. It need only identify appropriately sized branches and grab them. Once loaded into the chipper's intake hopper for further processing, the beast can immediately look for more food. This is essentially kindling that would help ignite larger logs. If it's all consumed by Forest Walker, then it's not present to promote an aggravated conflagration. I have glossed over an obvious question. How does Forest Walker see and identify branches and such? LIDAR, light detection and ranging, attached to Forest Walker images the local area and feeds those data to onboard computers for processing.
Maybe AI plays a role. Maybe simple machine learning can do the trick. One thing is for certain, being able to identify a stick and cause robotic appendages to pick it up is not impossible. Great. We now have a quadrupedal robot autonomously identifying and eating dead branches and other light combustible materials. Whilst strolling through the forest depleting future fires of combustibles, Forest Walker has already performed a major function of this system, making the forest safer. It's time to convert this low density fuel into a high density fuel that the Forest Walker can leverage. Enter the gasification process.
The gasifier. The gasifier is the heart of the entire system. It's where low density fuel becomes high density fuel that powers the entire system biochar and wood vinegar are processed wastes and I'll discuss why both are powerful soil amendments in a moment but first what's gasification? Reacting shredded carbonaceous materials at high temperatures in a low or no oxygen environment converts the biomass into biochar, wood vinegar, heat, and synthesis gas, also known as syngas. Syngas consists primarily of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane, all of which are extremely useful fuels in a gaseous state.
Part of this gas is used to heat the input biomass and keep the reaction temperature constant while the internal combustion engine that drives the generator to produce electrical power consumes the rest. Critically, this gasification process is continuous feed. Forst Walker must intake biomass from the chipper, process it to fuel, and dump the waste the CO2, heat, biochar, and wood vinegar continuously. It cannot stop. Everything about this system depends upon this continual grazing, digestion, and excretion of waste just as a ruminal does. And like a ruminant, all waste products enhance the local environment.
When I first heard of gasification, I didn't believe it was real. Running an electric generator from burning wood seemed more akin to conspiracy fantasy than science. Not only is gasification real, it's ancient technology. A man named Dean Clayton first started experiments on gasification in 16/99. And in 1901, gasification was used to power a vehicle. By the end of World War 2, there were 500,000 syngas powered vehicles in Germany alone because of the fossil fuel rationing during the war. The global gasification market was $480,000,000,000 in 2022 and projected to be as much as $700,000,000,000 by 2,030 according to Vantage Market Research.
Gasification technology is the best choice to power the forest walker because it's self contained and we want its waste products. Biochar. The waste. Biochar, AKA agricultural charcoal, is fairly simple. It's almost pure, solid carbon that resembles charcoal. Its porous nature packs large surface areas into small, three-dimensional nuggets. Devoid of most other chemistry like hydrocarbons and ash biochar is extremely lightweight. Do not confuse it with the charcoal you buy for your grill. Biochar doesn't make good grilling charcoal because it would burn too rapidly, as it does not contain the multitude of flammable components that charcoal does.
Biochar has several other good use cases. Water filtration, water retention, nutrient retention, providing habitat for microscopic soil organisms, and carbon sequestration are the main ones that we are concerned with here. Carbon has an amazing ability to adsorb substances stick to and accumulate on the surface of an object. Adsorb. Manifold chemistries. Water, nutrients and pollutants tightly bind to carbon in this format. So biochar makes a respectable filter and acts as a battery of water and nutrients in soils. Biochar absorbs and holds onto 7 times its weight in water.
Soil containing biochar is more drought resilient than soils without it. Adsorbed nutrients, tightly sequestered alongside water, get released only as plants need them plants must excrete protons from their roots to disgorge water or positively charged nutrients from the biochar surface it's an active process biochar surface area where the absorption happens can be 500 square meters per gram or more that is 10% larger than an official NBA basketball court for every gram of biochar Biochar's abundant surface area builds protective habitats for soil microbes like fungi and bacteria, and many of are critical for the health and productivity of the soil itself.
The carbon sequestration component of biochar comes into play where carbon credits are concerned. There is a financial market for carbon. Not leveraging that market for revenue is foolish. I am climate agnostic. All I care about is that once solid carbon is inside the soil, it will stay there for 1000 of years, imparting drought resiliency, fertility collection nutrient buffering and release for that time span I simply want as much solid carbon in the soil because of the undeniably positive effects it has regardless of any climatic considerations. Wood vinegar.
More waste. Another byproduct of the gasification process is wood vinegar, or pyroligneous acid. If you have ever seen liquid smoke in the grocery store, then you have seen wood vinegar. Principally composed of acetic acid, acetone, and methanol, wood vinegar also contains around 200 other organic compounds. It would seem intuitive that condensed liquefied wood smoke would at least be bad for the health of all living things, if not downright carcinogenic. The counter intuition wins the day, however. Wood vinegar has been used by humans for a very long time to promote digestion, bowel, and liver health, combat diarrhea and vomiting, calm peptic ulcers and regulate cholesterol levels, and a host of other benefits.
For centuries, humans have annually burned off 100 of thousands of square miles of pasture, grassland, forest, and every other conceivable terrestrial ecosystem. Why is this done? After every burn, one thing becomes obvious, the almost supernatural growth these ecosystems exhibit after the burn. How? Wood vinegar is a component of this growth. Even in open burns, smoke condenses and infiltrates the soil. That is when wood vinegar shows its quality. This stuff beefs up not only general plant growth, but seed germination as well and possesses many other qualities that are beneficial to plants. It's a pesticide, fungicide, promotes beneficial soil microorganisms, enhances nutrient uptake, and imparts disease resistance.
I am barely touching a long list of attributes here. But you want wood vinegar in your soil alongside biochar because it absorbs wood vinegar as well the internal combustion engine conversion of grazed forage to chemical then mechanical and then electrical energy completes the cycle The ICE converts the gaseous fuel output from the gasifier to mechanical energy, heat, water vapor and CO2. It's the mechanical energy of a rotating driveshaft that we want. That rotation drives the electric generator which is the heartbeat we need to bring this monster to life. Luckily for us, combined internal combustion engine and generator packages are ubiquitous, delivering a defined energy output given a constant fuel input.
It's the simplest part of the system. The obvious question here is whether the amount of syngas provided by the gasification process will provide enough energy to generate enough electrons to run the entire system or not. While I have no doubt the energy produced will run Forest Walker's main systems, the question is really about the electrons left over. Will it be enough to run the Bitcoin mining aspect of the system? Everything is a budget. C 02 production for growth. Plants are lollipops. No matter if it's a tree or a bush or a shrubbery, the entire thing is mostly sugar in various formats, but mostly long chain carbohydrates like lignin and cellulose.
Plants need three things to make sugar, c o two, water, and light. In a forest, where tree densities can be quite high, c02 availability becomes a limiting growth factor. It'd be in the forest's interest to have more available c02 providing for various sugar formation providing the organism with food and structure. An odd thing about tree leaves the openings that allow gases like the ever searched for CO2 to come into the organism are on the bottom of the leaf. These are called stomata. Not many stomata are topside. This suggests that trees and bushes have evolved to find gases like CO2 from below not above.
And this further suggests CO2 might be in higher concentrations nearer the soil the soil life bacteria fungietc is constantly producing enormous amounts of c02 and it would stay in the soil forever eventually killing the very soil life that produces it if not for tidal forces you see water is everywhere and whether in pools lakes oceans or distributed in moist soil water moves towards the moon the water in the soil and also in the water tables below the soil rise toward the surface every day when the water rises it expels the accumulated gases in the soil into the atmosphere and it's mostly co2 it's a good bet on how leaves developed high populations of stomata on the underside of leaves as the water relaxes the tide goes out it sucks oxygenated air back into the soil to continue the functions of soil life respiration.
The soil breathes, albeit slowly. The gases produced by the Forest Walker's internal combustion engine consist primarily of CO2 and water. Combusting sugars produces the same gases that are needed to construct the sugars because the universe is funny like that. The forest walker is constantly laying down these critical construction elements right where the trees need them close to the ground to be gobbled up by the trees. The branch drones. During the last ice age, giant mammals populated North America, forests and otherwise. Mastodons, wooly mammoths, rhinos, short faced bears, step bison, caribou, muskox, giant beavers, camels, gigantic ground dwelling sloths, glyptodons, and dire wolves were everywhere.
Many were 10 to 15 feet tall. As they crashed through forests, they would effectively cleave off dead side branches of trees, halting the spread of ground based fires migrating into the tree crown or laddering which is a death knell for a forest. These animals are all extinct now and forests no longer have any manner of pruning services. But if we build drones fitted with cutting implements like saws and loppers, optical cameras, and AI trained to discern dead branches from living ones, these drones could effectively take over pruning services by identifying, cutting and dropping to the forest floor dead branches.
The dropped branches simply get collected by the Forest Walker as part of its continual mission. The drones dock on the back of the Forest Walker to recharge their batteries when low. The whole scene would look like a grazing cow with some flies bothering it. This activity breaks the link between a relatively cool ground based fire and the tree crowns and is a vital element in forest fire control. The Bitcoin miner. Mining is one of 4 monetary incentive models making this system a possibility for development. The other 3 are US Department of the Interior, Township, County, and Electrical Utility Company easement contracts for fuel load management, global carbon credits trading, and dataset sales.
All of the above depends on obvious questions getting answered. I will list some obvious ones here, but this is not an engineering document and is not the place for spreadsheets. How much bitcoin one forest walker can mine depends on everything else. What amount of biomass can we process? Will the biomass flow enough syngas to keep the lights on? Can the chassis support enough mining ASICs and supporting infrastructure? What does that weigh? And will it affect field performance? How much power can the generator produce? Other questions that are more philosophical persist.
Even if a single forest walker can only mine scant amounts of BTC per day, that pales to how much fuel material it can process into biochar. We're we're talking about 1,000,000 upon 1,000,000 of forested acres in need of fuel load management. What can a single forest walker do? I'm not thinking in singular terms. The Forrest Walker must operate as a fleet. What could 50 do? 500? What is it worth providing a service to the world by managing forest fuel loads, providing proof of work to the global monetary system seeding soil with drought and nutrient resilience by the excretion over time of carbon by the ton what did the last forest fire cost?
The mesh network. What could be better than 1 Bitcoin mining, carbon sequestering, forest fire squelching, soil amending behemoth? 1000 of them. But then they would need to be able to talk to each other to coordinate position, data handling, etcetera. Fitted with a mesh networking device like Gotenna or Meshtastic LoRa equipment enables each Forest Walker to communicate with each other. Now we have an interconnected fleet of Forest Walkers relaying data to each other and more importantly, aggregating all of that the last link in the chain for uplink. Well, at least the Bitcoin mining data.
Since block data is lightweight, transmission of these data via mesh networking in fairly close quartered environments is more than doable. So how does data transmit to the Bitcoin network? How do the forced walkers get the previous block data necessary to execute on mining? Back to the chain. Getting Bitcoin block data to and from the network is the last puzzle piece. The standing presumption here is that wherever a Forest Walker fleet is operating, it is not within cell tower range. We further presume that the nearest Walmart WiFi is hours away.
Enter the Blockstream satellite or something like it. A separate ground based drone will have 2 jobs To stay as close to the nearest for forest walker as it can and to provide an antenna for either terrestrial or orbital data uplink. Bitcoin centric data is transmitted to the uplink drone via the mesh network transmitters and then sent onto the uplink and the whole flow goes in the opposite direction as well. Many to 1. 1 to many. We cannot transmit data to the Blockstream satellite, and it will be up to Blockstream and companies like it to provide uplink capabilities in the future. And I don't doubt that they will.
Starlink, you say? What's stopping that company from filtering out block data? Nothing. Because it's Starlink's system, and they could decide to censor these data. It seems we may have a problem sending and receiving Bitcoin data in backcountry environs. But then again, the utility of this system in staunching the fuel load that creates forest fires is extremely useful around forested communities. And many have fiber, WiFi, and cell towers. These communities could be a welcoming ground 0 for first deployments of the Forest Walker system by the home and business owners seeking fire repression. In the best way, Bitcoin subsidizes the safety of communities.
Sensor packages, lidar. The benefit of having a Forest Walker fleet strolling through the forest is a never ending opportunity for data gathering. A plethora of deployable sensors gathering hyper accurate data on everything from temperature to topography is yet another revenue generator. Data is valuable. And the Forest Walker could generate data sales to various government entities and private concerns. LiDAR, light detection and ranging, can map topography, perform biomass assessment, comparative soil erosion analysis, etcetera. It so happens that the ForestWalker's ability to see, to navigate about its surroundings is LiDAR driven. And since it's already being used, we can get double duty by harvesting that data for later use.
By using a laser to send out light pulses and measuring the time it takes for the reflection of those pulses to return, very detailed datasets incrementally build up. Eventually, as enough data about a certain area becomes available, the data becomes useful and valuable. Forestry concerns, both private and public, often use lidar to build 3 d models of tree stands to assess the amount of harvestable lumber in entire sections of forest. Consulting companies offering these services charge anywhere from several 100 to several $1,000 per square kilometer for such services.
A forest walker generating such assessments on the fly while performing its other functions is a multidisciplinary approach to revenue generation. PH, soil moisture, and cation exchange sensing. The Forest Walker is quadrupedal, so there are 4 contact points to the soil. Why not get a pH data point for every step it takes? We can also gather soil moisture data and cation exchange capacities at unheard of densities because of sampling occurring on the fly during commission of the system's other duties. No one is going to build a machine to do pH testing of vast tracks of forest soils, but that doesn't make the data collected from such an endeavor valueless.
Since the Forest Walker serves many functions at once, a multitude of data products can add to the return on investment component. Weather data. Temperature, humidity, pressure, and even data like evapotranspiration gathered at high densities on broadacre scales have untold value. And because the sensors are lightweight and don't require large power budgets, they come along for the ride at little cost. But just like the old mantra, gas, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free, these sensors provide potential revenue benefits just by them being present.
I've touched on just a few data genres here. In fact, the question for universities, governmental bodies, and other institutions becomes, how much will you pay us to attach your sensor payload to the Forest Walker? Noise suppression. Only you can prevent Metallica filling the surrounds with 120 decibels of sound. Easy enough. Just turn the car stereo off. But what if a fleet of 50 Forest Walkers operating in the backcountry or near a township? 500. 5000. Each one has a woodchipper, an internal combustion engine, hydraulic pumps, actuators, and more cooling fans than you can shake a stick at.
It's a walking, screaming, fire breathing dragon operating continuously day and night, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The sound will negatively affect all living things, and that impacts behaviors. Serious engineering considerations and prowess must deliver a silencing blow to the major issue of noise. It would be foolish to think that a fleet of forest walkers could be silent. But if not a major design consideration, then the entire idea is dead on arrival. Townships would not allow them to operate even if they solve the problem of widespread fuel load and neither would government entities, and rightly so. Nothing, not man nor beast, would want to be subjected to an eternal infernal scream even if it were to end within days as the fleet moved further away after consuming what it could.
Noise and heat are the only real pollutants of this system. Taking noise seriously from the beginning is paramount. Fire safety. A fire breathing dragon is not the worst description of the forest walker. It eats wood, combusted at very high temperatures, and excretes carbon. And it does so in an extremely flammable environment. Bad mix for 1 forest walker, worse for many. One must take extreme pains to ensure that during normal operation, a forest walker could fall over, walk through tender dry brush, or get pounded into the ground by a meteorite from Krypton, and it wouldn't destroy epic swaths of trees and baby deer.
I envision an ultimate test of the prototype to include dousing it in grain alcohol while it's wrapped up in toilet paper like a pledge at a fraternity party. If it runs for 72 hours and doesn't set everything on fire, then maybe outside entities won't be fearful of something that walks around forest with a constant fire in its belly. The wrap. How we think about what can be done with and adjacent to Bitcoin is at least as important as Bitcoin's economic standing itself. For those who tell me that this entire idea is without merit, I say, okay. Fine. You can come up with something too.
What can we plug Bitcoin into that, like a battery, make something that does not work, work? That's the lesson I get from this entire exercise. No one was ever going to hire teams of humans to go out and clean the forest. There's no money in that. The data collection and sales from such an endeavor might provide revenues over the break even point, but investment demands alpha in this day and age but plug bitcoin into an almost viable system and voila we tip the scales to achieve liftoff let's face it we haven't scratched the surface of Bitcoin's forcing function on our minds not because it's Bitcoin but because of what that invention means The question that pushes me to approach things this way is what can we create that one system's waste is another system's feedback?
The Forest Walker's system's only real waste is the conversion of low entropy energy into high entropy energy All other output is beneficial to humanity. Bitcoin, I believe, is the first product of a new mode of human imagination. An imagination newly forged over the past millennia of being lied to, stolen from, distracted, and otherwise misallocated to a black hole of the nonsensical. We are waking up. What I have presented is not science fiction. Everything I have described here is well within the realm of possibility. The question is one of viability, at least in terms of the detritus of the old world we find ourselves departing from.
This system would take a nontrivial amount of time and resources to develop. I think the system would garner extensive long term contracts from those who have the most to lose from wildfires, the most to gain from hyper hyper accurate datasets, and, of course, securing the most precious asset in the world. Many may not see it that way for they seek alpha and are therefore blind to other possibilities. Others will see only the possibilities of thinking in a new way of looking at things differently and dreaming of what comes next.
That's the end of the article, and I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something out of it. Yes. There are issues. But, of course, there's issues. But there's issues with any idea. Could you imagine, like, you know, I don't know, something that we use every day being first introduced? Car, plane, cell phone, you name it, man, microphone. Yeah. I'm gonna invent this thing where you speak into it, and it's gonna record your voice. You that is, I mean, that is, like, ubiquitous today. But back then back then in Edison's time, man, you're that I thought that was a hard that was a hard sell for anybody to believe that that would even be possible.
Right? So like I said at the end of this, none of this is impossible. Now there's there is, like, a a clear issue. What about snow? No. You're not gonna operate this thing in the snow. The fleet has to actually go somewhere else. Right? It has to go, you know, down south or something like that. This this can be a migratory fleet. You could put them on you could put them on cattle trucks and move them around the country. So if it's, like, too snowy up in Colorado, screw it. You take them down to West Texas and use the whole damn fleet to pull and cut, you know, mesquite trees out of the ground. And mesquite trees, by the way, are an invasive species. They were never supposed to be there in the first place. We brought them in to West Texas for to stabilize soil, and they just went apeshit.
And they're everywhere. And they cause problems. You know? I mean, it's like it's it's it's not it's a it's a product that we could easily chop down and burn as, you know, fuel for the Forest Walker system, and then the damn thing grows back from its roots. It's like an an unending continuous stream of low density fuel. It's I think that this is a good system. Right? Can this thing operate in the rain? Well, no. Not really. Not because it'll fry its electrical systems, but because the wood is moist. So, yes, there are going to be seasons that this thing actually can operate in certain climates.
And when that region or when that climate is no longer conducive for Forest Walker, you bring in the trucks and you ship them to somewhere where it's dry. And you just you just migrate these things. I mean, ruminants migrated. The great, you know, huge herds of bison migrated to and fro, up and down, south and north and west and east, and they they did it all year round. And they necessarily perform their function while they did it over vast tracks of multiple different climates because they were able to move. So, yes, while there are some some clear issues with this, there's no way that I could have addressed everything.
I still think the core idea is viable. But I'll let that leave that up to you to decide. Let's run the numbers. The CNBC Futures and Commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil is down almost a point, but still chilling out at $78.8 per barrel. Brent Norcey down 2 thirds of a point to 8047. Natural gas is up point 2% to $3.94 a 1000 cubic feet. Gasoline is up almost a full point to $2.12 a gallon. Gold is up a quarter of a point. Silver is up a half. Platinum is down 2 and a half, copper is up 0.16%, while palladium is up 0.7%.
Let's see about Ag. What's Ag doing? Mostly in the red this morning or this afternoon, depending on when you get this. Lumber is the biggest loser of the day. 2.57 percent of the downside. Biggest winner is wheat, half a point to the upside. But live cattle is up a half as well. Lean hogs are up 1.34 percent and feeder cattle are up a half of percent. The Dow is down point 13. S and P is down a third. Nasdaq is down almost a full half point. And the S and P mini is down a third of a point. And Bitcoin, well, it looks like it's kinda recovering a little bit. $95,600 no. $960, that gives it a $1,900,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 36 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,809,932 and a half of.
And average fees per block are still low at 0.05 BTC on a per block basis. And there are a mere 33 blocks carrying a 133 unconfirmed 133,000, excuse me, unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priorities of 5. Count them, 5 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority gonna get you in at 3. And the hash rate is 777.5 exahashes per second, and that is over a 1 week rolling average from Economies of Lies. You sit upon a throne of lies. Anyway, I got, at gave me 500 sats. Says, great show as always. Also, I just noticed that your intro and outro music sounds way cooler when played at 1.7x speed. See for yourself.
Wartime with 333 says fire and cheers. And Mark with 210 says thank you sir, no thank you. And that was it. That's that's all I got for Economies of Lies. Oh, man. Sad puppy eyes. I'm giving y'all sad puppy eyes. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Italy's largest bank enters crypto market with a $1,000,000 Bitcoin investment. Oh, for god's sakes. It's barely worth even talking about. But Zoltan Vardai, maybe he's got more of a point here in Cointelegraph. Italy's largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, became the first Italian bank to make a Bitcoin investment, purchasing all of a whopping 11 BTC for about €1,000,000 or $1,020,000 yesterday, January 13th.
The investment comes just over a month after Bitcoin hit the 1,000 or sorry. $108,000 mark in December. The news emerged from a leaked internal email by Niccolo Bardisocia, head of digital assets trading at Intesa Sanpaolo. And in the email, he wrote, as of today, 13th day of January 2025, Intesa owns 11 Bitcoin. Thank you to everyone for the teamwork. This result would not have been possible without each and every one of you. While Intesa Sanpaolo has not responded to a request for comment, the bank confirmed the Bitcoin acquisition with the media outlet Wired.
The Italian bank's investment comes during a period of increasing institutional interest in BTC, which saw Bitcoin exchange reserve sink to a near 7 year low on January 13th as crypto hedge funds bought the dip, reinforcing expectations of a supply shock, which occurs when strong buyer demand meets a decreasing amount of BTC leading to price appreciation. And then they go on to talk more about institutions buying the dip. So two things here. The the largest bank in Italy has bought 11 BTC. The second thing is, that's not a lot of Bitcoin for a bank the size of Intesa Sanpaolo.
So my presumption here, they're just testing the waters. I wouldn't put too much stock in it. I mean, they did buy it, but we'll have to see if they immediately don't punch out of it, you know, get lettuce hands and figure out that this is just too scary of a situation for them. But the third thing is is the 7 year low of institutionally held or or rather exchange held Bitcoin reserves on January 13th. That was just yesterday. 7 year low. And we are just counting the days away from when orange man sits in the chair so that we can figure out what the hell he's gonna do. Jesse Coughlin is gonna tell us about what he might do from Cointelegraph with this one entitled Donald Trump could issue crypto executive orders on 1st day according to a report.
US president-elect Donald Trump's 1st day back in the White House on January 20th could see him sign a flurry of executive orders, some of which could impact the crypto industry. The Washington Post reported on January 13th that Trump is expected to sign executive orders after taking office next week covering crypto de banking and repealing a bank accounting policy that requires banks holding crypto to list the digital assets as a liability. Quote, the Trump team has made it very clear that this is a priority a person involved with the conversations told The Post.
Crypto executives have long accused president Joe Biden's administration of using financial regulators to pressure banks to cut off the industry from financial services under operation choke point 2.0. Meanwhile, the industry has been pushing back against the policy to report crypto as a liability, which came about through a March 2022 Securities and Exchange Commission staff accounting bulletin called SAB 121. Reuters also reported on December 23rd that crypto industry officials were pushing Trump to issue crypto related executive orders within his first 100 days of office, and some expected at least one would come by on day 1. Well, the post also reported that Trump's crypto and artificial intelligence czar, David Sack, posted a luncheon for tech execs and government officials on December 20th, where he said Trump would revoke Biden's sweeping 2023 AI executive order, which was described among conservatives as language saying AI must operate in a manner that advances equity, whatever the hell that means.
You wanna talk talk about a very broad and widely worded possible sentence there? I mean, what the hell as long as it it it can operate in a manner that advances equity. The hell does that even mean? Whatever. VC Marc Andreessen, known for backing tech and crypto companies, has also reportedly been helping build Trump's incoming administration behind the scenes. The post reported that since Trump's election, he frequently visited the president elect's base of operations at his Florida Mar a Lago club and has been recruiting and screening candidates for spots in the administration. Andreessen's sway isn't just overpicks for government tech leaders, but also for defense and intelligence roles.
During his campaign, Trump quoted the crypto industry with promises of making a country or the country a crypto capital and promising a Bitcoin strategic reserve. Yes. We all know. So day 1, let's not forget what his actual promise for day 1 really was. Ross. Free Ross day 1. Free Ross day 1. On day 1, you free Ross. That's the first thing that you do. You don't do any of this other bullshit first. Your first act as president, mister orange man, is to free Ross Ulbricht from prison. Get him out of there. Then you can play with your Bitcoin or do whatever it is that you do there, mister Trump. Now, from this next thing, well, Coinbase scores another win against arbitrary and capricious SEC order.
Sander Lutz is writing this one for decrypt. It looks like Coinbase has won another one. A panel of federal appeals court judges in Philadelphia dealt yet another blow to the SEC's crypto regime Monday, emerging as the latest prominent court to question how the federal agency has navigated its regulation of digital assets. The US court of appeals and the 3rd circuit court ruled today in favor of Coinbase, which sued the SEC last year over the agency's refusal to explicitly explicitly lay out its crypto policy. Instead of putting forth crypto specific rules, the SEC has instead sporadically sued crypto firms. And today, a 3 judge panel comprised of 2 Democrats and 1 Republican ruled that the SEC's dismissive response to Coinbase's request for crypto specific rulemaking was unacceptable.
Quote, because we believe the SEC's order was conclusory and insufficiently reasoned and thus arbitrary and capricious, we grant Coinbase's petition in part and remand to the SEC for a more complete explanation, today's order reads. The judges added that they declined, however, to force the SEC to create crypto specific rules as Coinbase had requested. According to judge Thomas Ambrose, a Clinton era democrat who wrote Monday's opinion, previous case law established that an agency like the SEC could only be forced to create rules against its will if an extreme delay in creating those rules quote endangered human lives, a requirement clearly not met by crypto regulated or or related regulations.
So the SEC doesn't have to issue new crypto rules now, but it must explain to Coinbase in much greater detail why it has, thus far, refused to do so. Rather than force the agency to make a rule, we order it to explain its decision not to. Judge Stefanos Bibas, a Republican appointed by the court or to the court by Donald Trump, wrote Monday in a concurring opinion, quote, indeed, a rule may not prove necessary to solve the problem here. The agency could just state its position on crypto assets unequivocally. Bemis warned the SEC that its explanation should tackle the question head on and not avoid it. Quote, it should not give another poor explanation in an already long line of them, he said of the agency.
Coinbase chief legal officer, Paul Gruel, celebrated the posting or the ruling in a post on Twitter, taking no apparent issue with the court's refusal to force the SEC to create new crypto rules. And it's very sad that Paul Gruel's, Twitter account has a dot eth name on it. It's really sick sickening to see an adult play that stupid ass game. But, quote, we appreciate the court's careful consideration, he wrote, when asked when the SEC plans to release an explanation of its crypto policies or what such an ex explanation might look like, an agency spokesperson told Decrypt that those matters are currently being considered internally. Quote, we're reviewing the decision and will determine next steps as appropriate, the spokesperson said.
For years, SEC chair Gary Gensler has insisted that his agency's crypto policy needs no explanation given their supposedly self evident compliance with existing securities laws. And that stance has made him plenty of enemies in the sector. Further, a recent string of federal court rulings appear to have begun to take issue with the chair's narrative, coloring the SEC's treatment of crypto firms as unusual and worthy of legal review. Uh-oh. Those potential legal cracks in the SEC's crypto regime have come just days before it is likely to collapse from the shift in political tides. Gensler is going to resign on January 20th, the same day as Donald Trump's inauguration.
The chair's likely replacement, former SEC comissioner Paul Atkins, is a crypto enthusiast who is almost certain to reverse the agency's aggressive treatment of digital assets. Which means what, ladies and gentlemen? You get to see a lot more posting about XRP. That's right. Ripple is gonna be probably the largest winner of this entire debacle. I'm not saying that Ginzer is a good guy. He clearly screwed this up. But now, I mean, if if it's if this guy's like a, you know, a complete crypto enthusiast and he's a shit coiner, then it's it's no hold bars at the feeding trough of all the scammers that are wishing, just hoping and waiting to separate you from your Bitcoin.
Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Okay. So, that is all the news that I think is fit to bring you this morning. We are at exactly dead on 60 minutes right now, and that is the target time that I like for the Bitcoin and podcast. I really hope you enjoyed the article, Forrest Walker. Please do me a favor. Go to my, Noster profile if you follow me and look for that. I'll I'll be reposting those, the medium and the Yaki Hani, URLs to that article throughout the week. Please grab them and please send them to your family and friends and so they can read it. And I will also put those, URLs in today's show notes because it's going to you know, it's clearly I I read the article, so I should probably link to the article today.
Send that around the horn and get your family and friends and anybody else to send it to your social media and try to get them to listen to the Bitcoin and podcast so that, you know, I can grow the show, grow the audience, and possibly get into a better position to bring you more stuff in the future because I really wanna do that. It's just, you know, without steady income from this show, it's very hard to do a whole lot of anything other than what I'm already doing, and I really wanna do that. And I I don't think it's right to just ask my longtime listeners to give me more.
If you wanna give me more, then give me more listeners. And then they will maybe a portion of them will possibly be able to throw me some satoshis for the work that I do here at Bitcoin and for the 1,000 and 18th time, I say 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 Lightning Network Anniversary
The Forest Walker Concept
Biochar and Wood Vinegar Benefits
Bitcoin Mining and Forest Management
Market Updates and Economic Insights
Conclusion and Call to Action
