Join me today for Episode 1019 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- US Gov to Give Binance Back its BTC?
- Tether Sues Swan
- Syria Considers Bitcoin
- Digital Subpoenas Right to Your Wallet
- Iran Central Bank Blocks Exchanges
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 10:20 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 15th day of January. We are already one half of the way through the 1st month of 2025. This is episode 1019 of bitcoin and the US government might actually do the right thing. Might actually do the right thing. I know. I know you're freaking out, but the United States government might actually give something back to somebody. It's amazing. That's not the only thing that's in the news. Syria is exploring possible Bitcoin. Tether, Tether's kind of kind of PO'd at another Bitcoin company in the space. And Hong Kong is doing, well, they're shit coining in a way that you would not expect.
In a place, in a sector of their government that you would not you would not really expect either. We'll get into that one. Nostra's in the news. AI agents are in the news. Iran is coming at you. We got all kinds of stuff today. And I apologize for being a little bit late this morning. You know, stuff happens. It really does. So, yeah, I'm a little late today. So let's just let's just dive right in. From the block, Sarah Wynne, writing this one, United States government says that the stolen Bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack should be returned to the exchange in kind.
We'll find out more. Right now, the US government says that over 94,000 Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack of Bitfinex by Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan should go back to the exchange in a court document filed this week. And if you don't remember, Heather Morgan is Rosalcon. And at one time, she was the richest rapper in the history of the world. Quote, for the foregoing reasons, there is no victim for the specified offenses of conviction in this proceeding, the government said in a filing posted on Tuesday to the United States District for the District of Columbia.
However, the court has the authority to order voluntary restitution pursuant to the defendant's plea agreements. Such voluntary restitution should include all of the assets seized from the Bitfinex hacked wallet and that pursuant to the plea agreements, those assets should be returned to Bitfinex as in kind restitution, end quote. The latest filing is in line with an October court filing that said both Liechtenstein and Morgan, as well as Bitfinex parent company, Ifinex, believe that the crypto exchange is the sole victim. The pair, Liechtenstein and Morgan, who also goes by her rapper name, Rosalcon, pleaded guilty in August of 2023 to money laundering conspiracy in connection with the hacking of Bitfinex in 2016.
The 2 allegedly conspired to launder a 119,754 Bitcoin in August of 2016, which at the time was valued at close to $71,000,000 according to the government. The 2022 Bitcoin seizure from Liechtenstein and Morgan's devices was valued at nearly $4,000,000,000 at the time, which remains the DOJ's largest asset seizure to date. In 2022, Bitfinex said that if it receives a recovery of the stolen bitcoin, it would sell 80% of the recovered net funds to repurchase and burn outstanding UNUS SED Leo tokens, the debt token, the exchange issued following the hack to help make up for customer losses.
These sales would occur over an 18 month period. The goal is to eventually remove all LEO tokens from circulation. LEO was up nearly 4% in the past 24 hours because people just can't be degenerate enough. Morgan was arrested along with Lichtenstein last year and charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Notably, prior to her arrest, Morgan also gave advice on how to protect businesses from cyber criminals and how to more effectively socially or socially engineer a hacking term your way into anything. Lichtenstein was sentenced to 5 years in prison for his role and Morgan was sentenced to 18 months in November.
So let's go back here and, let's look at this paragraph. Bitfinex said that if it receives a recovery of the stolen Bitcoin it would sell 80% of the recovered net funds to repurchase and burn outstanding UNUSED LEO tokens. It's really weird. I only ever heard of LEO tokens. I don't know what UNUS or SED actually means, but here it's written unussedle0 tokens. So they're going to sell the Bitcoin. That's their first their the very first thing they want to do is sell 80% of the shit that was stolen from them. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever unless unless Bitfinex has a deal with the United States government to further scuttle the price of Bitcoin.
And that's that's my gut feeling. Because no dipshit out of Bitfinex worth their salt would even consider doing this. The the guys at Bitfinex, they they said on at least more than one occasion that they've just written that Bitcoin off, that they would figure that they're never gonna get it back from the government. They're gonna try, but they just kinda wrote it off. And now there's a chance that they're gonna get it back and their first response is to sell 80% of it so that they can buy back these bullshit Leo tokens, which from what we were all led to believe had already made all of the Bitcoin holders who were affected by the hack whole. Well, one thing is true or not.
Did it did the LEO tokens actually make the holders, the the the Bitfinex creditors, whole? Because if it did, then there's no need to sell the Bitcoin, is there? Again, ladies and gentlemen, I smell a rat. Maybe that rat will move to Syria, where they are exploring their own embrace of Bitcoin. Yes. Even Syria is looking seriously into Bitcoin. We'll find out more. Bitcoin Magazine, Ghafar Hussein is writing, Syria's economy is in a bad state, to put it mildly. Not only has the Middle Eastern nation been battered by over a decade of war, the Assad regime, which had been in power since 1971. Oh, wow.
WTF happened in 1971. It has now been overthrown by a jihadist group. The conflict, which began in 2011, had devastated or had devastated infrastructure, displaced millions, and led to economic sanctions from western nations. These factors have crippled the local economy and trade, leading to severe inflation. The Syrian pound, which was once relatively stable, has lost 99% of its value since the war began, whilst hyperinflation has turned basic goods like bread and fuel into luxuries for ordinary citizens. In the face of these challenges, Syria has struggled to maintain monetary stability with dwindling foreign currency reserves and limited access to global financial systems.
However, hope may now be on the horizon since it has announced that the Middle Eastern nation is planning to legalize Bitcoin, explore using it to back its national currency and use its energy reserves to mine it. This groundbreaking policy could transform not only Syria's economy but serve as a potential model for other nations in the region that are also grappling with inflation and economic stability. Bitcoin's decentralized nature makes it immune to geopolitical pressures and the monetary policies of individual nations. This independence offers Syria a way to circumvent traditional financial systems dominated by Western powers and sanctions, legalizing Bitcoin and potentially backing the Syrian pound with it will not only facilitate monetary stability, but will do so in a manner that allows the struggling nation to become somewhat immune from regional economic shocks.
Bitcoin could also allow citizens and businesses to transact with greater confidence and open up trade channels with countries around the world this does make one wonder localized fiat systems were never a good way to cultivate trade and commerce in the Middle East, where many nations are heavily reliant on each other for basic goods and services, and where borders can be porous. Many of these systems are also pegged to the US dollar, which does offer a degree of stability, but it also allows the US to export its inflation. Yay. The region has a long history of trade that relied on gold since it was widely accepted and recognized as a sound store of value.
Bitcoin can now play that role as it is increasingly recognized as the best store of value and medium of exchange in the world. Like gold, bitcoin is also much more in tune with Islamic monetary principles, as I wrote about here. And, of course, here is a link to another article. And let's see what's what is the name of that article? Why bitcoin is the most Islamic money, also from Bitcoin Magazine. Furthermore, Syria possesses significant energy reserves, particularly in oil and natural gas. However, due to the war, much of this potential has been untapped or disrupted.
In recent years, global energy intensive Bitcoin mining has demonstrated that regions with surplus energy resources can transform their assets into significant revenue streams. Syria's plan to use its energy reserves to mine Bitcoin is both practical and innovative. By converting its natural resources into digital assets, Syria can generate wealth independent of traditional export markets. I think it meant generate wealth independence. Oh, yeah. Wealth independent of traditional export markets. This revenue could then be used to bolster its economy, fund reconstruction projects, and stabilize the Syrian pound by creating Bitcoin backed reserves. It also gives an incentive for small businesses to explore and invest in mining technology, which can lead to innovation in sustainable energy production and bolster the local economy.
One of the core objectives of Syria's Bitcoin strategy is to restore trust in its national currency. By partially backing the Syrian pound with bitcoin, the government can offer its citizens a tangible reason to hold and use the local currency. A bitcoin backed pound could also attract foreign investment, particularly from tech savvy individuals and organizations intrigued by the country's adoption of the digital currency. El Salvador, for instance, adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 and saw an increase in tourism and investment despite skepticism.
While Syria's situation is much more complex due to an ongoing conflict and questions around the ideological inclinations of its new leaders, a similar strategy could yield long term benefits once the country stabilizes. Syria is not alone in facing inflation and currency devaluation. Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa are grappling with similar issues. Lebanon, for example, has experienced a catastrophic financial collapse with its own currency losing over 95% of its value since 2019. Inflation across the region has eroded purchasing power, undermined trust in local currencies, and hindered economic growth.
Governments reliant on imports have found it increasingly difficult to stabilize their own economies as global commodity prices soar, and Syria's legalization of Bitcoin and its plan to integrate it into its economy marks a significant turning point in global financial policy. The decentralized nature of Bitcoin gives nations the option to pursue financial empowerment in spite of the wider international context in which they find themselves. It gives them a form of national self custody which can act as a hedge against external power seeking to influence domestic policy in their favor. Whilst challenges remain, such as the need for a better digital infrastructure and wider awareness of Bitcoin in neighboring countries, it is certainly a bold step in the right direction.
If successful, Syria's experiment could serve as a blueprint for other nations in the MENA region and facing economic instability. By adopting Bitcoin, these nations can protect their citizens from the devastating effects of inflation, restore confidence in their currencies, and unlock new economic opportunities. Countries like Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, which all face similar challenges, could benefit tremendously from integrating bitcoin into their own financial systems. As the global financial landscape continues to evolve, Syria's bold move into bitcoin highlights the potential of bitcoin to address some of the most pressing economic challenges of our time.
Okay. That's the end of the article. If the Middle East if a great guts and feathers of Middle Eastern countries have a real shot at dictating their own path forward, it's going to be with their own sound currencies. Let's forget about Bitcoin for just a moment. Right? We've been able to devastate entire regions containing multiple countries because we sold the entire world in 1971 and beyond on the petrodollar, which is the United States dollar. Right? So we were able to export all of our inflation to all these other countries. Did we feel it at home? We sure as shit did. Did they feel it even worse in other countries? They sure as shit did, and we never talk about it. We talk about domestic inflation.
We don't talk about the absolute thermonuclear devastation that the United States dollar has wrought upon the Middle East, North Africa, Central Africa for that matter, although that's more about the French franc, but they're all part of the same cabal. It's the West. Right? And I'm not siding with Islam. Alright? I'm not saying, oh, it's we need to start studying Eastern philosophy because that's all a bunch of hooey, you know, as well. Everybody's got dogs in a hunt. Alright? It just so happens that the dogs of the West are some pretty mean beasts, and they're pretty effective at killing shit. Right? It doesn't make it bad or good. I'm trying to be neutral on it. I'm just it's like the weather. I'm just telling you that it's raining.
I'm not saying that I think that it's good that it's raining or that it's bad that it's raining. I'm just saying it's raining. And in this case, the raining of the US dollar, both in its glory as well as its dispersion like a rainstorm, has been causing problems. So let's say that the Middle East without Bitcoin just says we're getting off the dollar. Of course, it won't work. Of course, it won't work just because the way the world is now and how endemic the US dollar is. But the only way that these countries will be able to write their own ships is to get off of the US dollar.
And the only way that that's even remotely possible is going to be with Bitcoin. And there's still some problems with that because of the nature of the United States bond market, the issuance of stablecoin like Tether, and the fact that we may very well start seeing an interlinking between Bitcoin, Tether, and the United States Treasury bonds in a way that we never really thought was going to happen before. But I see it getting closer and closer and closer. Now, here's one of the things that I wanted to go back to in this article. Let's read this.
One of the objectives of Syria's Bitcoin strategy is to restore trust in its national currency. By partially backing the Syrian pound with Bitcoin, the government can offer citizens a tangible reason to hold and use the local currency Think about that If you're backing your local currency in Bitcoin then why not just use Bitcoin? Why have a local currency at all? What what does Syria hope to gain by saying, look, we're we want people to use the Syrian pound. We're gonna we want you to use it so much that we're gonna stop printing it and we're going to back it by Bitcoin.
Okay. Well, in that particular case, then there's no reason to have the Syrian pound just just trade satoshis with each other. Some people might say, well, there's that whole issue of not everybody in the world can have UTXOs. Okay. Okay. At that point, that starts to make a little bit more sense because the the holding of paper money has all one of the whole reasons for paper money is that it's very portable, it's very light, it it's automatically you can automatically recognize it, and it's a unit of account. If I give you a $10 Syrian pound note, I don't have it anymore and you do. That's a unit of account. It makes a lot of sense that way. However, I don't think that that's actually the reason why Syrian people or the Syrian government or the people of the Syrian government are saying we really want you to use the Syrian pound.
I think that there's still chicanery afoot to be had in the future whether or not any currency is backed by Bitcoin either directly or indirectly. Because degenerates are going to degenerate. They're going to continue to print money and they're going to try to hide it. They're gonna say, look. It's All of our money is backed by bitcoin. It's like, oh, yeah. Let's do a full accounting of the amount of Syrian dollars or Syrian pounds that are in circulation against how much of that is actually backed in bitcoin. And that's when they'll say, we are not going to allow an audit. And that's exactly when the whole thing falls down again. I'm just saying.
Alright. Bitcoin companies pissed off about other Bitcoin companies. Tether has filed a lawsuit against Swan Bitcoin over a joint venture dispute. Cointelegraph Mihab Kishari has it. Stablecoin issuer Tether has filed a lawsuit against Bitcoin Financial Services Company, Swan Bitcoin, accusing the firm of significant breaches in their agreements. Swan just can't get out of trouble, man. I swear. In a statement to Cointelegraph on January 15th, Tether, along with co claimant 2040 Energy, confirmed the legal action against Swan Bitcoin and they stated, quote, throughout our relationship with Swan, Tether has consistently acted in good faith, supported mutual business objectives, and adhered to all relevant agreements, Tether said. Quote, conversely, Swan has acted recklessly, and their actions have resulted in significant breaches by them of the agreements between us.
Consequently, we have been compelled to take necessary measures to protect our investment, end quote. The case, filed in the High Court of England and Wales, escalates an ongoing legal battle between the two companies. Swan and Tether established 2040 Energy in 2022 as a joint Bitcoin mining venture. And under the partnership, Tether provided funding while Swan handled operations according to filings by Swan Bitcoin. Now Swan alleges that former employees from its mining arms stole proprietary information, including software code and business strategies, to form a rival company called Proton Management.
Swan described the employee's actions as part of a scheme labeled rain and hellfire designed to sabotage Swan's role in the joint venture. The company claimed that key personnel carried out this plan, including Michael Holmes, its former head of business development, and Rafael Zaghuri, its ex chief investment officer and mining head who now serves as Proton CEO. Swan accused Proton of misusing its confidential trade secrets to establish itself as a direct competitor which it argued had irreparably harmed Swan's ability to compete in the market. According to court filings, Proton Management allegedly convinced Tether to cut ties with Swan and back Proton in the mining ventures instead.
And on August 12, 2024, Swan CEO, Corey Clipson, was removed as the CEO of 2040 Energy and Proton officially took over the operational and administrative functions of operations per the complaint. Swan Bitcoin also accused Tether of facilitating what it described as a hostile takeover of its mining operations. Tether denied any wrongdoing, asserting that it acted by its contractual rights under the joint venture agreement. In a statement to Cointelegraph on September 27, 2024, Tether said, we are aware of recent allegations made in a lawsuit that mentions a subsidiary of Tether dedicated to proprietary mining and other investments. While Tether is not named as a defendant in the case, we have taken note of the claims and deny any implement implications of wrongdoing, end quote.
Swan Bitcoin also launched legal action against its law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in November of 2024 accusing it of malpractice. The company claims the firm abandoned its case against Proton after taking on Tether as a client, violating attorney ethics rules prohibiting dropping a client to avoid conflicts of interest. Clipston described Gibson's move as a betrayal. Swan was blindsided, Clipston said, arguing that the firm's decision caused significant damage to Swan's mining business. Swan Bitcoin did not respond for a request for comment. Oh my god. This is just this just gets worse and worse and worse.
I don't know why Swan is constantly in, like, the sewer. I I still believe that Corey is generally acting in good faith, but it just becomes harder to defend it because it's just it's I mean, oh my god, dude. It's like I wasn't my family companies weren't able to purchase Bitcoin through Swan for a year because they had in Texas, they had an injunction put up against them that said, no. You're you're a cuss your custody guy. We don't like them. You got to get somebody else if you ever wanna do business in Texas again. It took them a year to get somebody else so that Texas would say, okay. You're good. And then we, you know, we started buying from them again, you know, for for our Bitcoin purchases.
And now this, like, this pointing of fingers, it's it's I really hate seeing this. It doesn't look good. And, honestly, at this point, I'm not sure Swan's gonna survive. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't know. I don't know, Corey. I've never talked to anybody in Swan. But gut feeling, I don't know, man. I I just need to be looking for I think I'm gonna be looking for somebody else to start buying Bitcoin again, for our companies. Anyway, Cointelegraph. And this one, wow, I'm not sure exactly what the hell we're gonna read here, but it just it's in it seems insane. K? So let me just preface it with that.
Yohan Yoon is writing this one, Hong Kong court serves tokenized legal notice to illicit Tron wallets. Yeah. Tokenized legal notices. Hong Kong courts can now serve tokenized legal notices on the blockchain against anonymous owners of illicit wallet addresses. Guys, I'm pausing to say, this I want you to be aware not about the illicit wallet addresses. That's beside the point. It's the tokenized legal notices. Alright? Just keep it keep that shit in mind. Though previous cases in jurisdictions like the US and UK have showcased court's adaptability to novel methods, Hong Kong's latest tokenized notices differentiated by preventing ignorance as a defense.
Quote, it will be in violation of criminal law if a transaction follows through. And if centralized exchanges are involved, they would likely be hesitant to engage with these wallets due to their statutory or anti money laundering and know your blockchain obligations, Joshua Chew, cybersecurity consultant at Macrosystems, the tech provider for the tokenized legal notices, told Cointelegraph. Traditionally, the most common method of serving legal documents is in person sorry. Excuse me. Is in person service, where documents are physically handed to the recipient. Some jurisdictions also allow documents to be sent via registered email, email or fax under certain conditions. In instances where recipients cannot be located, notices have been published in newspapers or online.
Prior to this, serving court documents on wallet holders has been challenging, if not impossible under existing procedural requirements, Moses Park, counsel for the plaintiff in the Hong Kong case told Cointelegraph. The court injunction allowed for the placement of a digital police tape around the 2,650,000 USDT that the victim lost in an online scam. Still, by the time the tokenized court orders landed on the suspicious wallets, the suspects had already moved a chunk of the assets, eventually transferring them to exchanges. At the time of writing, there was about 1,000,000 USDT left in the wallets.
Chu said the remainder was being dealt with separately and declined any further comment. Tron is among the most used change chains among illicit actors. It accounted for almost half of the illicit transactions in 2023. Macrosystems has also tested its technology on other networks outside of Tron, including Ethereum and Polygon. Chu said, c h u, that's the guy's name, Chu said that it's also theoretically possible with Bitcoin and intends to continue developing the technology to expand into other networks in 2025. Still, awareness among victims lags, as they're usually unfamiliar with the opportunities presented by novel technologies.
Thousands of victims in Hong Kong's largest crypto scam, the JPEX case, has yet to pursue legal action for their losses. Since 2023, there have been 4 court orders against blockchain addresses in Hong Kong according to records of DLaw, an online archive of legal proceedings. Quote, Blockchain's application in legal contexts is still niche. Many legal practitioners, judges and institutions are unfamiliar with its mechanics, benefits or practical implementation, slowing adoption. Lorentz Alba, business development lead at Rome Protocol and legal consultant, told CoinTelegraph.
Quote, air dropping non fungible tokens or tokenized documents requires technical expertise and investment. For many cases, this complexity may not seem justified unless anonymity or cross border challenges make traditional methods impractical. Wow. Airdropping gotta come back to this. Airdropping non fungible or tokenized documents. What if those are contracts? We'll come back to that. Hong Kong's legal system is similar to that of the UK due to over 150 years of British colonial rule that ended in 1997. The UK has also embraced innovative legal practices involving blockchain technology. For instance, in the 2023 case of Osborne v Pearson's unknowns and oars, Fintech consultant Lavinia Osborne fell victim to a cyber theft when 2 of her NFTs from the Boss Beauties collection were unlawfully transferred from her crypto wallet.
Seeking legal recourse, Osborne turned to the High Court of England and Wales which recognized NFTs as property under English law. The court granted an injunction to freeze the assets and prevent further unauthorized transactions. It then permitted legal documents to be served to the unidentified defendants via NFTs. This innovative approach followed a precedent set in the 2022 case of d aola versus Pearsons unknown or sorry, Pearsons, Pearsons unknown and others. In this case, online gambling firm founder Fabrizio de Aiola was deceived by individuals operating a fraudulent online brokerage, and the high court approved the serving of legal documents via an NFT airdropped directly into the defendant's wallets and recognized the potential liability of cryptocurrency exchanges as constructive trustees of the misappropriated assets.
Like Hong Kong and the UK, the US also operates under common law legal systems inherited from England. However, there are notable differences due to its federal structure and the constitutional framework. The world's largest economy has also witnessed cases where blockchain technology has served legal documents. One notable example is LCX AG versus John Doe numbers 1-twenty 5. The New York Supreme Court allowed the plaintiff to serve legal papers on anonymous defendants by airdropping a unique NFT into the defendants' cryptocurrency wallets.
This method included a link to a website containing the legal documents, ensuring the defendants were notified despite their anonymity. While previous examples in major economies like the US and UK demonstrate the court's adaptability to modern methods, Chu said that their use of NFTs presented unique challenges of their own such as the ability of defendants to simply send them away. The records remain as blockchains are immutable, but it does add another layer of complexity to the case. Quote, additionally, enforcing legal actions on sued anonymous parties or frozen assets requires a more cohesive legal framework, Alba said. And she added, quote, global jurisdictional complexities and the lack of standardized protocols make enforcement difficult, highlighting the need for collaboration between legal systems and blockchain technology.
Alba also said that the absence of clear, uniform guidelines on using blockchain for legal notifications may create hesitation among courts and lawmakers in the United States. Despite this, Chu noted that macro systems technology isn't bound to Hong Kong and sees the regulatory trend in the US heading toward consumer protections pointing to a Consumer Financial We've shown that injunctions can be issued and enforced. If you didn't get that, it means that they're gonna make they're making NFTs, dropping them into your wallet, except it's it's it's service of a subpoena or service of a cease and desist order or service of whatever else a legal court needs to tell you.
What? You're being sued, you're being arrested, you're be your your your chattel is being, like, you know, like your civil asset forfeiture, whatever. It's being drop directed to your wallet, and what they're suggesting is that you're going to see it. That there's no way that you can't see it. And, therefore, simply by dropping this NFT that is, let's say, a subpoena into your wallet, that you're going to automatically know that you've been subpoenaed by the court and you've gotta do what they said. Oh, bullshit. That's number 1.
2, this is really scary shit. Everything about this just sends the hackles on the back of my neck up. Why? Well, because what if one of these I've got air quotes. What if these NFTs turn out to be let's just conjecture. Okay. Before you say, well, that's not possible, I'm just saying this is what people are going to start trying to do, whether it's possible or not. The subpoena will not just be a notice that you're being subpoenaed. The subpoena will also do something like lock your wallet. Again, right now, that's not possible with Bitcoin.
But for Ethereum? I'll bet you they play ball. I'll bet you Ethereum Foundation and Consensus gets on their knees and services the United States government and says we will drop whatever code you want into our structure. And when you send one of these NFTs to lock a wallet, it'll lock that wallet. That's what's coming. And if you are not on Bitcoin, you are going to lose your shit one of these days. Literally. They're gonna drop a contract in the form of an NFT slash subpoena, cease it slash cease and desist, and it's gonna lock your wallet. And there's no recourse.
Because if it's not your keys, it's not your coin. And that goes for Ethereum. Stop messing around with shitcoins sell them all buy bitcoin and hold bitcoin yourself with your own private keys let's run the numbers CNBC Futures and Commodities, everything is green and all of everyone in the world is happy because United States inflation came in a little softer. A little the numbers were a little softer than what was expected. What does this mean for West Texas Intermediate? Well, that spiked 2.79 percent to the upside. It's just under $80 a barrel. Brent Norsee up over 2 points to $81.64 a barrel.
Natural gas swinging in the right direction, 1.64 percent to the upside. It now tops $4 per 1,000 cubic feet. Haven't seen that in months. Gasoline up 2 and a third percent to $2.15 a gallon. Gold is happy and so is Peter Schiff, 1 and a quarter percent to the upside, now back over $2700. Silver is up 3 and 3 quarters of a point to 3150, but platinum is down a third while copper is up 1.17%. And palladium swinging for the fences, almost 3 full points to the upside. Ag is pretty much fully mixed today. Biggest winner is coffee, 2.64% to the upside.
Biggest loser is sugar, one point 47 to the downside. And live cattle is up a half. Lean hogs are up 2 thirds of a point while feeder cattle are following suit, 2 thirds of a point to the upside. Everything in legacy equity markets are green. 1.71% rise in the Dow. S and P is up 1.7%. The Nasdaq is up 2.2, and the S and P Mini is up 1 and a third percentage points. Bitcoin, well, we had a little bit of a spike today. 99 $1,470 per coin. That is a $1,970,000,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 37 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,810,401.32 of.
Average fees per block are still low at 0.05 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. And there are a mere 36 blocks carrying 126,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priorities of 6 satoshis per v byte, low priority fees are 4 satoshis per v byte, and the hash rate approaching 800 exahashes per second, 799.8 to be exact, on a 1 week rolling average. From reading Forest Walker, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Pies with 5,000 satoshis. Dude, thank you my friend, Pies. He says, this is for being late for the last show and to help make up for the boost count from that episode, l f g. I appreciate that, Pies. Mark with 1210 says, great article.
And he's pointing to the, Forest Walker article. Pies with another 1,000 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Xplbzx404, satoshi says enjoyed the article. Couldn't zap the text on yakhihani. So boosting here, thanks. No. Thank you. Anonymous with 404 says, enjoy oh, it's the same person. It's just another it's it's another one. Enjoyed the article, couldn't zap on Yaki Hani, so boosting here, thanks. Wartime with 333 says, ITM. And for those that don't know, that means in the morning. And is that it? Yep. That is it for the day. Not so sad puppy eyes, but you know, I'll give you some little little sad kitty eyes because, you know, hey, if you find what I do valuable, then be like Pies and Mark, and another Pies, and throw me some satoshis.
And if you don't have the satoshis to throw or you don't have the ability to do it on podcasting 2.0, then tell your family and friends about the show and say, hey, if you need daily news on what the hell is going on with Bitcoin, then go see my friend David Bennett over there at the Bitcoin and podcast, and that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Nostr is the world's biggest Bitcoin circular economy. Join us. Frank Korva from Bitcoin Magazine starts us out. While many of you may have heard of the Bitcoin circular economy like El Salvador's Bitcoin Beach or South Africa's Bitcoin ekasi, but haven't been able to go and spend your sats in such a place, please know that in just a few clicks, you can join the world's biggest Bitcoin circular economy, Nostr.
Yeah. I know that a virtual Bitcoin circular economy is different from a physical one, and I tip my hat to all those who are working to establish such economies in the real world. But, Noster is a place where Bitcoin is exchanged for value provided nonetheless. For those new to Noster, it's an open source protocol on top of which different types of applications which are technically called clients can be deployed and used when you join Nostr, which you can do through any Nostr app you're issued a public private key pair like a bitcoin wallet the first of which helps people find you on Nostr apps and the second of which lets you log in to the apps Nostra currently has about 42,000 active weekly users who use apps ranging from Domus, comparable to X or Twitter to YakiHoney, comparable to SubStack or Medium to Wave Lake, comparable to Spotify or Apple Music whose mobile app is a Nostr client.
What's particularly cool about Nostr is that your followers on one Nostr app follow you across every single one of its applications. To better picture this, imagine having the same followers on Instagram as you do on x. Over the course of 2024, I earned over 350,000 satoshis, now valued at approximately 350 US dollars, for posting my thoughts and sharing links to the articles I write and the music I create. Nostra is a particularly cool place for musicians to share their work. And I had less than 1,000 followers for most of the year. Just last night, I simply shared my thoughts on how cool Nostr is on Primal, one of my favorite Nostr apps and the one I recommend that you use to get started with Nostr. And I earned 2,165 satoshis for it.
I've also zapped, Nostr's slang for sentsats to, my fair share of creators since joining Nostr, and plan to continue showing love in the form of satoshis in 2025. So, if you're a proponent of bitcoin being used as a currency, and you want to start taking part in the world's biggest bitcoin circular economy, download a nostril app today. Connect it to a lightning wallet. Mobile apps like Prime will have a lightning wallet built in and join us in accepting and sending bitcoin in exchange for valuable content today. Now, here's what I'm really gonna, in start.
Hold on. Woah. That's bizarre. I should have I thought I would have had that in okay. Hold on for a sec. I gotta find this. Alright. Sorry about that. I I what I was surprised was and I had to go find it. It only took me a second, but I had to go find it. What surprised me about Frank Korva is that he didn't mention this really cool onboarding website to Nostr. It's called start.njump.me. That's start.njump.njump. Me. Start. Njump. Me. And it will onboard grandmas and grandpas and small children to nostr because it takes you through a step by step guided tour of how to get this done. And while you're doing it, it's not just instructions.
It actually gets you physically onboarded. It will construct the keys, but the way it does it is it's sort of like like you know, the first part that you buy a video game and the very first, I don't know, 15 minutes of the video game is the video game using the video game to teach you how to play, how to squat, how to crawl, how to jump, how to run, how to move side to side, all that kind of stuff. It's sort of like that. It's sort of like a little digital training manual and it's beautifully done. It's got great graphics. It has easy to read and not long verbiage of why things are being done the way they're being done. It's got buttons that you press and you when you go through when if you go take it all the way through the end and, guys, it takes it doesn't take any more than you should not take any more than 5 minutes.
It should not take anybody more than 5 minutes, and you will have your first experience in getting onto Nostra, and I highly recommend it. Again, I'm just kinda surprised that Frank didn't drop that into this particular article, but, hey, we can't watch everything all the time. That's why you have people like me who backstop all the rest of the great people in this space that are trying to carefully guide you away from shit like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, of which an influencer was crying today about the TikTok ban because she's got $2,000 rent and then she just bought a Mercedes SUV that cost her $1,000 a month.
That's her car payment. And she's an influencer, she's in her twenties, and she bought a Mercedes SUV. Just her apartment and her car alone is draining her of $3,000 a month. That doesn't include food or clothes or nothing. And she's being shut down because this TikTok ban thing. At least that's what she's worried about. We'll have to see if it actually happens. But what I'm saying is there are no more excuses. You gotta get on Noster. Not just because Frank tells you to, and not just because I told you to, but because this little girl, who has way more monthly expenditures than she should even remotely imagine, has a real possibility of losing everything because that's what she's been doing for years. She's an influencer on TikTok.
That's how she makes her money. And it's being taken away from her because some other people who don't even know that she exists is like, we don't like TikTok. That's how fragile the system that everybody is dealing with actually is. If you don't want to deal with that kind of fragility, you gotta get on Nostr and I highly recommend start.njump.me to get on there. That's start.njump.me. Now, you thought the courts handing down tokenized subpoenas to your wallet was bad. Maybe this is even worse, maybe not. Let's find out. Matt DeSalvo, decrypt. Artificial intelligent agent tokens skyrocket as Franklin Templeton highlights quote, significant promise.
I know. It's shit coinery, but this is coming. This this is what you're going to have to guide your friends and your family away from because it's just it's just more shit coinery, and we've all seen what that can do to people's livelihoods. Artificial intelligent nope. Let's start again. Artificial intelligence cryptocurrencies are still making sizable gains. Just ask asset manager Franklin Templeton, who apparently has not been able to pull their head out of their collective asses because they highlight just how big AI and crypto could be together.
Franklin Templeton said in Tuesday notes that how AI agents interact on blockchains is very exciting. And it noted the current buzz surrounding ai16z and the virtual protocol, 2 tokens that have made some of the biggest gains over the past 24 hours among the top 100 coins ranked by market cap. Ai16z is an investment DAO run by AI agents. If you didn't get that, let me read it again. Ai16z from the your good friends at a16z who would never wish to cause you any harm. It's an investment DAO, and it's run by artificial intelligence agents.
CoinGecko data shows that over the past day, it's native token has risen by over 18% after slowing down last week and is now trading hands for a buck 30. It fell briefly out of the top 100 on Monday but has since recovered and bounced back into such a valuable company. The world's biggest crypto exchange, Binance, announced earlier this month that it would launch perpetual futures contracts trading for ai16z. And even with today's surge, ai16z is down 32% over the last week and is 47% off of its all time high price of $2.47 set less less than 2 weeks ago.
And virtual's protocol, virtual, a token launched on the Ethereum layer 2 network base last year is up by 15%. Oh, my god. Let's mortgage the house again. It's now priced at $2.98. We're gonna get rich. Virtuals is used to launch a variety of AI agents, including AIXBT, a token that nearly matched its own all time high price on Tuesday. Both tokens had slowed their rallies down in recent days after a white hot start to the year but are making a comeback as the broader crypto market recovers on Tuesday. AI agent software programs are designed to help humans by completing tasks on their own.
I'm not sure how that helps. As the hype around AI has grown, many in the field have made big promises on how such agents will help humans complete tasks. And some of these agents have their own tokens, adding potential utility and speculation into the equation as if it wasn't bad enough. Franklin Templeton even added that even if AI agents have some way to or some way to go to be as refined and useful as envision, the sector holds substantial promise. Quote, although these agents are not yet fully autonomous and have little utility in their current state, this emerging sector may hold significant promise and is worth watching closely closely as it evolves and matures, the note said. Alright. There are 2 kinds of people that are reading or listening to this article.
There are those that say, oh my god, AI tokens. We're gonna get rich. The other half understand that there's not a single thing in this article that tells you what they actually do. What does does the AI token trade itself on Binance? Does it put in AI generated puts and calls on itself? Does it does it construct derivative instruments for itself that somehow or another after being traded decay into nothingness? No. We don't know. See, that's the thing. I can't say whether it does do that or doesn't do that because we don't know what the hell an AI token does. All this thing says is that designed to help humans by completing tasks on their own. What tasks? You if you thought that the white papers of yore, of every shit coin under the sun, and we're talking about the 2015 to 2018 era, If you thought those were bad because half of them were plagiarized and, like, the the oh, here's our board of directors and none of the people were actually real people. They were just, like, headshots taken out of a college yearbook.
Because that happened. Here here's our blockchain. It's going to replace Bitcoin by our token. Here's a picture of 10 fake people that we have no idea who they are, but here's their fake names, and they're our board of directors. And, by the way, our white paper was cobbled together and completely plagiarized from 7 different white papers. Word for word, this happened. It happened a lot. Not just once, not just twice, not not just a couple of handfuls of times, 100 100 of times. And people lost their houses, they lost their cars, they lost their life savings because they bought into the bullshit.
AI is the next level bullshit crap that's on the market and it's specifically designed to do the exact same thing what I just told you about was designed to do. Steal your money. And possibly take it over to Iran where central banks of Iran have blocked cryptocurrency exchanges amid their own currency crisis. So Iran is in the middle of the shit according to atlas21.com. The Central Bank of Iran has imposed a block on payment gateways to digital asset exchange platforms during a particularly critical moment for the country's economy.
The decision, implemented without prior notice, might I might I add, comes amid a deep currency crisis with the Iranian real having devalued by 37% against the US dollar since the beginning of 2024. This situation has led many citizens to seek refuge in digital assets like bitcoin. The new restrictions follow a series of measures adopted last November when the central bank froze the accounts of exchanges and suspended payment processing services. In response to these restrictive measures, some industry players published an open letter to president Masad Pescekian, I guess that's how you pronounce it, highlighting how quote, such destructive decisions and technological policy not only eliminate Iran's already limited economic growth opportunities through new technologies, but also drive away qualified human capital, the country's most valuable resource. Yes, because humans are a resource.
We're chattel, we're cattle, we're we're owned, right? No, man. See, this is this is the kind we gotta get away from saying shit like human resources. Payroll office. It's the freaking payroll office. Anyway, according to informed sources, the government is developing a centralized system for cryptocurrency management which would allow greater state control over the market through centralized channels. Kiss Iran goodbye. Additionally, the government has imposed a ban on advertising Bitcoin mining machines following a severe energy crisis that led to widespread blackouts in Tehran.
Authoritize have identified over 92100 minuteing farms with more than 265,000 machines in the past 3 years. Holy shit. In a recent report, the Human Rights Foundation commented on the country's situation. Quote, for Iranians enduring severe inflation, financial repression, and an isolated economy, Bitcoin represents one of the few remaining paths to financial freedom, a path the regime is not it was now working to block. So Iran hates their own people. This is like every other country on the face of the planet with a government. The government cannot stand its own citizenry.
The government continuously looks at people like human resources and chattel instead of actual people. And every time that you have that happen, you're going to find poverty. That's why Jesus said the poor will always be with you. Why? Because the fucking government will always be with you too. That's what Jesus should have said. I'm sorry y'all probably burned in hell for being a blast fever, but I think Jesus should have said the following. The reason the poor will always be with you, my children, is because you keep allowing the government to always be with you as well.
Just saying, man. Bitcoin Core version 28.1 is now available for all of you node runners out there. Be aware. Bitcoin Core is the predominant implementation of the Bitcoin protocol featuring a full node and a wallet. It connects to the Bitcoin peer to peer network to download and fully validate network blocks and transactions. I highly recommend that you guys learn how to run a full node. It's not that hard. You can do it on a Raspberry Pi. And at this point, you probably need a 2 terabyte, SSD or a hard drive of some kind. I've got a 1 terabyte, hard drive on my old node, and it's 94% full.
So just be aware. But I think it's I think it should it would behoove us to learn how to run and why we run full nodes. Anyway, version 28.1 has been released and is now available for download from the bitcoincore.org website. It's the this first maintenance release for version 28 includes several bug fixes, performance improvements, and updated translations. Users are encouraged to report any bugs using the issue tracker on GitHub. Quote, thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release. Fanquake, Hinaday, Stepanov, Marco Falke, Martin Zamsande, Marnix, Sebastian Falbisoner, as well as to everyone that helped with translations on Trans FX as was stated on the release notes. And there's, like, basically it's got this huge long list of all the shit that they did. And unless you want me to read stuff like depends, thick CXX flags on NetBSD, well then, too bad I'm not gonna do it.
Let's move on. Last thing of the day, Maastro version 0.13.0 keys management implementation. Maastro, m o s t r o, is a lightning network based peer to peer exchange protocol over the Nostr protocol. Yay. I love how people are starting to recognize that Nostr is more than social media. It always has been. It's just the social media aspect was the lowest hanging fruit, although that's not done us very well because people are going, oh, Nostra's just another social media. No. It's not. It's a full blown communications protocol. And the new Maestro version 0.13.0 delivers a major step forward in improving privacy for users through key management implementations.
We have a lot of improvements. And probably one of the most important is the final design of keys management. Keys management is a way clients rotate keys for every trade adding another privacy layer to gift wrap previous implementation. However oh, sorry. Not however. Today, we've merged our main pull request for implementing it on master d. Yeah. Ma no. Sorry. Maestro d. We also implemented it on Maestro Core and Maestro CLI, said the developers. Let's see if there's anything here. Add lightning node data to info event. Yeah. It's just a bunch just a bunch of stuff that we don't really need to read. So if you are in the mood to, I don't know, get do do some stuff with lightning, like, over peer to peer exchanges, might wanna look at Maestro. They've just updated to 0.13.0.
Alright. So that's it for the day, ladies and gentlemen. Episode 1,019 is in the bag. We're chilling out at $99,375 per coin. There's really not much else to say except pay special attention to air dropped anything into your wallet. Not because you need to know if whether or not you've been subpoenaed, but I'm what I'm saying is that keep an eye on this legal these legal steps. These guys are starting to say, you know what? We're not going to respect the privacy nor the property of individual citizenry. We're just going to airdrop this crap directly to you. I suggest that we start looking at ways to sue whoever drops that into our wallets for trespassing.
Because it's my my wallet is my property. Nobody has the right to put anything in there that I don't want. Okay. So somebody Air drops me like a kitty cat picture. I don't care. Somebody drops me a subpoena. I want to sue. That one, I want somebody to go to jail for trespassing. I'm not going I'm not going to yell at the 4 year old child from the neighbor's house who walks across my lawn. That is trespassing. But I don't care. The kid's 4 years old. He's not gonna do anything. It's kinda cute, and I'm not gonna sit there on my porch waving my cane saying, get off my lawn. However, if a thug that I don't know that doesn't even live in the block starts pissing on my lawn, I'm going to have a problem with that.
There is a difference. I get to select who I want to fuck with when it comes to jacking with my property. And my bitcoin wallet, that's my property. I hold the private keys. If somebody has a wallet, that wallet address, and decides to send me something that I don't think should be in my wallet, I wanna be able to go after them. And that's what I'm saying here is that you'll you'll say, well, good luck doing that. Well, if it comes from, like, I don't know, District Court of Washington State or something like that, I wanna be able to have recourse and say, you trespassed. If it's an agency, not even a legal aid well, legal agency and so let's say, I don't know, the DMV says, hey, here, we're we're we're dropping you your new ID and you've gotta use it. I wanna be able to call that place and say, I'm taking you to court because I I know who gave it to me. Now if you are just a listener and you drop me like a little kitty cat into my wallet, I will never know who you are.
I'll never be able to call you up on the phone and say I want recourse, but I never would. That's like the 4 year old walking across the lawn. But a supreme court or, you know, like a state court or something like that wanting to say, hey, you gotta cease and desist with, you know, x, y, and z, and you can't tell us that you don't know that we, gave you the cease and desist order because it's sitting in your wallet. I wanna be able to take that judge to task. I know that sounds that sounds stupid. Yes. I know it'll never happen. But we at one point or another, we we really do have to start fighting for our property no matter what format it takes my house my car my gun my ammunition my gold my Bitcoin my Bitcoin wallet this is all owned by me It is my property, and you don't get to just do with it what you want because you think communism is cool, and socialism rocks, and marxism is the way to go because all that ever did was get people killed.
I'm just saying you gotta watch out for this shit. 2nd thing, AI tokenized or AI tokens stay as far away from them as possible. Nobody knows what they do. Nobody knows what they are. There's no good description for them. All I see is another way to steal your money. Don't give them your money, and I will see you on the other side.
[01:07:56] Unknown:
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 10:20 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 15th day of January. We are already one half of the way through the 1st month of 2025. This is episode 1019 of bitcoin and the US government might actually do the right thing. Might actually do the right thing. I know. I know you're freaking out, but the United States government might actually give something back to somebody. It's amazing. That's not the only thing that's in the news. Syria is exploring possible Bitcoin. Tether, Tether's kind of kind of PO'd at another Bitcoin company in the space. And Hong Kong is doing, well, they're shit coining in a way that you would not expect.
In a place, in a sector of their government that you would not you would not really expect either. We'll get into that one. Nostra's in the news. AI agents are in the news. Iran is coming at you. We got all kinds of stuff today. And I apologize for being a little bit late this morning. You know, stuff happens. It really does. So, yeah, I'm a little late today. So let's just let's just dive right in. From the block, Sarah Wynne, writing this one, United States government says that the stolen Bitcoin from the 2016 Bitfinex hack should be returned to the exchange in kind.
We'll find out more. Right now, the US government says that over 94,000 Bitcoin stolen in the 2016 hack of Bitfinex by Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan should go back to the exchange in a court document filed this week. And if you don't remember, Heather Morgan is Rosalcon. And at one time, she was the richest rapper in the history of the world. Quote, for the foregoing reasons, there is no victim for the specified offenses of conviction in this proceeding, the government said in a filing posted on Tuesday to the United States District for the District of Columbia.
However, the court has the authority to order voluntary restitution pursuant to the defendant's plea agreements. Such voluntary restitution should include all of the assets seized from the Bitfinex hacked wallet and that pursuant to the plea agreements, those assets should be returned to Bitfinex as in kind restitution, end quote. The latest filing is in line with an October court filing that said both Liechtenstein and Morgan, as well as Bitfinex parent company, Ifinex, believe that the crypto exchange is the sole victim. The pair, Liechtenstein and Morgan, who also goes by her rapper name, Rosalcon, pleaded guilty in August of 2023 to money laundering conspiracy in connection with the hacking of Bitfinex in 2016.
The 2 allegedly conspired to launder a 119,754 Bitcoin in August of 2016, which at the time was valued at close to $71,000,000 according to the government. The 2022 Bitcoin seizure from Liechtenstein and Morgan's devices was valued at nearly $4,000,000,000 at the time, which remains the DOJ's largest asset seizure to date. In 2022, Bitfinex said that if it receives a recovery of the stolen bitcoin, it would sell 80% of the recovered net funds to repurchase and burn outstanding UNUS SED Leo tokens, the debt token, the exchange issued following the hack to help make up for customer losses.
These sales would occur over an 18 month period. The goal is to eventually remove all LEO tokens from circulation. LEO was up nearly 4% in the past 24 hours because people just can't be degenerate enough. Morgan was arrested along with Lichtenstein last year and charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States. Notably, prior to her arrest, Morgan also gave advice on how to protect businesses from cyber criminals and how to more effectively socially or socially engineer a hacking term your way into anything. Lichtenstein was sentenced to 5 years in prison for his role and Morgan was sentenced to 18 months in November.
So let's go back here and, let's look at this paragraph. Bitfinex said that if it receives a recovery of the stolen Bitcoin it would sell 80% of the recovered net funds to repurchase and burn outstanding UNUSED LEO tokens. It's really weird. I only ever heard of LEO tokens. I don't know what UNUS or SED actually means, but here it's written unussedle0 tokens. So they're going to sell the Bitcoin. That's their first their the very first thing they want to do is sell 80% of the shit that was stolen from them. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever unless unless Bitfinex has a deal with the United States government to further scuttle the price of Bitcoin.
And that's that's my gut feeling. Because no dipshit out of Bitfinex worth their salt would even consider doing this. The the guys at Bitfinex, they they said on at least more than one occasion that they've just written that Bitcoin off, that they would figure that they're never gonna get it back from the government. They're gonna try, but they just kinda wrote it off. And now there's a chance that they're gonna get it back and their first response is to sell 80% of it so that they can buy back these bullshit Leo tokens, which from what we were all led to believe had already made all of the Bitcoin holders who were affected by the hack whole. Well, one thing is true or not.
Did it did the LEO tokens actually make the holders, the the the Bitfinex creditors, whole? Because if it did, then there's no need to sell the Bitcoin, is there? Again, ladies and gentlemen, I smell a rat. Maybe that rat will move to Syria, where they are exploring their own embrace of Bitcoin. Yes. Even Syria is looking seriously into Bitcoin. We'll find out more. Bitcoin Magazine, Ghafar Hussein is writing, Syria's economy is in a bad state, to put it mildly. Not only has the Middle Eastern nation been battered by over a decade of war, the Assad regime, which had been in power since 1971. Oh, wow.
WTF happened in 1971. It has now been overthrown by a jihadist group. The conflict, which began in 2011, had devastated or had devastated infrastructure, displaced millions, and led to economic sanctions from western nations. These factors have crippled the local economy and trade, leading to severe inflation. The Syrian pound, which was once relatively stable, has lost 99% of its value since the war began, whilst hyperinflation has turned basic goods like bread and fuel into luxuries for ordinary citizens. In the face of these challenges, Syria has struggled to maintain monetary stability with dwindling foreign currency reserves and limited access to global financial systems.
However, hope may now be on the horizon since it has announced that the Middle Eastern nation is planning to legalize Bitcoin, explore using it to back its national currency and use its energy reserves to mine it. This groundbreaking policy could transform not only Syria's economy but serve as a potential model for other nations in the region that are also grappling with inflation and economic stability. Bitcoin's decentralized nature makes it immune to geopolitical pressures and the monetary policies of individual nations. This independence offers Syria a way to circumvent traditional financial systems dominated by Western powers and sanctions, legalizing Bitcoin and potentially backing the Syrian pound with it will not only facilitate monetary stability, but will do so in a manner that allows the struggling nation to become somewhat immune from regional economic shocks.
Bitcoin could also allow citizens and businesses to transact with greater confidence and open up trade channels with countries around the world this does make one wonder localized fiat systems were never a good way to cultivate trade and commerce in the Middle East, where many nations are heavily reliant on each other for basic goods and services, and where borders can be porous. Many of these systems are also pegged to the US dollar, which does offer a degree of stability, but it also allows the US to export its inflation. Yay. The region has a long history of trade that relied on gold since it was widely accepted and recognized as a sound store of value.
Bitcoin can now play that role as it is increasingly recognized as the best store of value and medium of exchange in the world. Like gold, bitcoin is also much more in tune with Islamic monetary principles, as I wrote about here. And, of course, here is a link to another article. And let's see what's what is the name of that article? Why bitcoin is the most Islamic money, also from Bitcoin Magazine. Furthermore, Syria possesses significant energy reserves, particularly in oil and natural gas. However, due to the war, much of this potential has been untapped or disrupted.
In recent years, global energy intensive Bitcoin mining has demonstrated that regions with surplus energy resources can transform their assets into significant revenue streams. Syria's plan to use its energy reserves to mine Bitcoin is both practical and innovative. By converting its natural resources into digital assets, Syria can generate wealth independent of traditional export markets. I think it meant generate wealth independence. Oh, yeah. Wealth independent of traditional export markets. This revenue could then be used to bolster its economy, fund reconstruction projects, and stabilize the Syrian pound by creating Bitcoin backed reserves. It also gives an incentive for small businesses to explore and invest in mining technology, which can lead to innovation in sustainable energy production and bolster the local economy.
One of the core objectives of Syria's Bitcoin strategy is to restore trust in its national currency. By partially backing the Syrian pound with bitcoin, the government can offer its citizens a tangible reason to hold and use the local currency. A bitcoin backed pound could also attract foreign investment, particularly from tech savvy individuals and organizations intrigued by the country's adoption of the digital currency. El Salvador, for instance, adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021 and saw an increase in tourism and investment despite skepticism.
While Syria's situation is much more complex due to an ongoing conflict and questions around the ideological inclinations of its new leaders, a similar strategy could yield long term benefits once the country stabilizes. Syria is not alone in facing inflation and currency devaluation. Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa are grappling with similar issues. Lebanon, for example, has experienced a catastrophic financial collapse with its own currency losing over 95% of its value since 2019. Inflation across the region has eroded purchasing power, undermined trust in local currencies, and hindered economic growth.
Governments reliant on imports have found it increasingly difficult to stabilize their own economies as global commodity prices soar, and Syria's legalization of Bitcoin and its plan to integrate it into its economy marks a significant turning point in global financial policy. The decentralized nature of Bitcoin gives nations the option to pursue financial empowerment in spite of the wider international context in which they find themselves. It gives them a form of national self custody which can act as a hedge against external power seeking to influence domestic policy in their favor. Whilst challenges remain, such as the need for a better digital infrastructure and wider awareness of Bitcoin in neighboring countries, it is certainly a bold step in the right direction.
If successful, Syria's experiment could serve as a blueprint for other nations in the MENA region and facing economic instability. By adopting Bitcoin, these nations can protect their citizens from the devastating effects of inflation, restore confidence in their currencies, and unlock new economic opportunities. Countries like Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran, which all face similar challenges, could benefit tremendously from integrating bitcoin into their own financial systems. As the global financial landscape continues to evolve, Syria's bold move into bitcoin highlights the potential of bitcoin to address some of the most pressing economic challenges of our time.
Okay. That's the end of the article. If the Middle East if a great guts and feathers of Middle Eastern countries have a real shot at dictating their own path forward, it's going to be with their own sound currencies. Let's forget about Bitcoin for just a moment. Right? We've been able to devastate entire regions containing multiple countries because we sold the entire world in 1971 and beyond on the petrodollar, which is the United States dollar. Right? So we were able to export all of our inflation to all these other countries. Did we feel it at home? We sure as shit did. Did they feel it even worse in other countries? They sure as shit did, and we never talk about it. We talk about domestic inflation.
We don't talk about the absolute thermonuclear devastation that the United States dollar has wrought upon the Middle East, North Africa, Central Africa for that matter, although that's more about the French franc, but they're all part of the same cabal. It's the West. Right? And I'm not siding with Islam. Alright? I'm not saying, oh, it's we need to start studying Eastern philosophy because that's all a bunch of hooey, you know, as well. Everybody's got dogs in a hunt. Alright? It just so happens that the dogs of the West are some pretty mean beasts, and they're pretty effective at killing shit. Right? It doesn't make it bad or good. I'm trying to be neutral on it. I'm just it's like the weather. I'm just telling you that it's raining.
I'm not saying that I think that it's good that it's raining or that it's bad that it's raining. I'm just saying it's raining. And in this case, the raining of the US dollar, both in its glory as well as its dispersion like a rainstorm, has been causing problems. So let's say that the Middle East without Bitcoin just says we're getting off the dollar. Of course, it won't work. Of course, it won't work just because the way the world is now and how endemic the US dollar is. But the only way that these countries will be able to write their own ships is to get off of the US dollar.
And the only way that that's even remotely possible is going to be with Bitcoin. And there's still some problems with that because of the nature of the United States bond market, the issuance of stablecoin like Tether, and the fact that we may very well start seeing an interlinking between Bitcoin, Tether, and the United States Treasury bonds in a way that we never really thought was going to happen before. But I see it getting closer and closer and closer. Now, here's one of the things that I wanted to go back to in this article. Let's read this.
One of the objectives of Syria's Bitcoin strategy is to restore trust in its national currency. By partially backing the Syrian pound with Bitcoin, the government can offer citizens a tangible reason to hold and use the local currency Think about that If you're backing your local currency in Bitcoin then why not just use Bitcoin? Why have a local currency at all? What what does Syria hope to gain by saying, look, we're we want people to use the Syrian pound. We're gonna we want you to use it so much that we're gonna stop printing it and we're going to back it by Bitcoin.
Okay. Well, in that particular case, then there's no reason to have the Syrian pound just just trade satoshis with each other. Some people might say, well, there's that whole issue of not everybody in the world can have UTXOs. Okay. Okay. At that point, that starts to make a little bit more sense because the the holding of paper money has all one of the whole reasons for paper money is that it's very portable, it's very light, it it's automatically you can automatically recognize it, and it's a unit of account. If I give you a $10 Syrian pound note, I don't have it anymore and you do. That's a unit of account. It makes a lot of sense that way. However, I don't think that that's actually the reason why Syrian people or the Syrian government or the people of the Syrian government are saying we really want you to use the Syrian pound.
I think that there's still chicanery afoot to be had in the future whether or not any currency is backed by Bitcoin either directly or indirectly. Because degenerates are going to degenerate. They're going to continue to print money and they're going to try to hide it. They're gonna say, look. It's All of our money is backed by bitcoin. It's like, oh, yeah. Let's do a full accounting of the amount of Syrian dollars or Syrian pounds that are in circulation against how much of that is actually backed in bitcoin. And that's when they'll say, we are not going to allow an audit. And that's exactly when the whole thing falls down again. I'm just saying.
Alright. Bitcoin companies pissed off about other Bitcoin companies. Tether has filed a lawsuit against Swan Bitcoin over a joint venture dispute. Cointelegraph Mihab Kishari has it. Stablecoin issuer Tether has filed a lawsuit against Bitcoin Financial Services Company, Swan Bitcoin, accusing the firm of significant breaches in their agreements. Swan just can't get out of trouble, man. I swear. In a statement to Cointelegraph on January 15th, Tether, along with co claimant 2040 Energy, confirmed the legal action against Swan Bitcoin and they stated, quote, throughout our relationship with Swan, Tether has consistently acted in good faith, supported mutual business objectives, and adhered to all relevant agreements, Tether said. Quote, conversely, Swan has acted recklessly, and their actions have resulted in significant breaches by them of the agreements between us.
Consequently, we have been compelled to take necessary measures to protect our investment, end quote. The case, filed in the High Court of England and Wales, escalates an ongoing legal battle between the two companies. Swan and Tether established 2040 Energy in 2022 as a joint Bitcoin mining venture. And under the partnership, Tether provided funding while Swan handled operations according to filings by Swan Bitcoin. Now Swan alleges that former employees from its mining arms stole proprietary information, including software code and business strategies, to form a rival company called Proton Management.
Swan described the employee's actions as part of a scheme labeled rain and hellfire designed to sabotage Swan's role in the joint venture. The company claimed that key personnel carried out this plan, including Michael Holmes, its former head of business development, and Rafael Zaghuri, its ex chief investment officer and mining head who now serves as Proton CEO. Swan accused Proton of misusing its confidential trade secrets to establish itself as a direct competitor which it argued had irreparably harmed Swan's ability to compete in the market. According to court filings, Proton Management allegedly convinced Tether to cut ties with Swan and back Proton in the mining ventures instead.
And on August 12, 2024, Swan CEO, Corey Clipson, was removed as the CEO of 2040 Energy and Proton officially took over the operational and administrative functions of operations per the complaint. Swan Bitcoin also accused Tether of facilitating what it described as a hostile takeover of its mining operations. Tether denied any wrongdoing, asserting that it acted by its contractual rights under the joint venture agreement. In a statement to Cointelegraph on September 27, 2024, Tether said, we are aware of recent allegations made in a lawsuit that mentions a subsidiary of Tether dedicated to proprietary mining and other investments. While Tether is not named as a defendant in the case, we have taken note of the claims and deny any implement implications of wrongdoing, end quote.
Swan Bitcoin also launched legal action against its law firm Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher in November of 2024 accusing it of malpractice. The company claims the firm abandoned its case against Proton after taking on Tether as a client, violating attorney ethics rules prohibiting dropping a client to avoid conflicts of interest. Clipston described Gibson's move as a betrayal. Swan was blindsided, Clipston said, arguing that the firm's decision caused significant damage to Swan's mining business. Swan Bitcoin did not respond for a request for comment. Oh my god. This is just this just gets worse and worse and worse.
I don't know why Swan is constantly in, like, the sewer. I I still believe that Corey is generally acting in good faith, but it just becomes harder to defend it because it's just it's I mean, oh my god, dude. It's like I wasn't my family companies weren't able to purchase Bitcoin through Swan for a year because they had in Texas, they had an injunction put up against them that said, no. You're you're a cuss your custody guy. We don't like them. You got to get somebody else if you ever wanna do business in Texas again. It took them a year to get somebody else so that Texas would say, okay. You're good. And then we, you know, we started buying from them again, you know, for for our Bitcoin purchases.
And now this, like, this pointing of fingers, it's it's I really hate seeing this. It doesn't look good. And, honestly, at this point, I'm not sure Swan's gonna survive. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't know. I don't know, Corey. I've never talked to anybody in Swan. But gut feeling, I don't know, man. I I just need to be looking for I think I'm gonna be looking for somebody else to start buying Bitcoin again, for our companies. Anyway, Cointelegraph. And this one, wow, I'm not sure exactly what the hell we're gonna read here, but it just it's in it seems insane. K? So let me just preface it with that.
Yohan Yoon is writing this one, Hong Kong court serves tokenized legal notice to illicit Tron wallets. Yeah. Tokenized legal notices. Hong Kong courts can now serve tokenized legal notices on the blockchain against anonymous owners of illicit wallet addresses. Guys, I'm pausing to say, this I want you to be aware not about the illicit wallet addresses. That's beside the point. It's the tokenized legal notices. Alright? Just keep it keep that shit in mind. Though previous cases in jurisdictions like the US and UK have showcased court's adaptability to novel methods, Hong Kong's latest tokenized notices differentiated by preventing ignorance as a defense.
Quote, it will be in violation of criminal law if a transaction follows through. And if centralized exchanges are involved, they would likely be hesitant to engage with these wallets due to their statutory or anti money laundering and know your blockchain obligations, Joshua Chew, cybersecurity consultant at Macrosystems, the tech provider for the tokenized legal notices, told Cointelegraph. Traditionally, the most common method of serving legal documents is in person sorry. Excuse me. Is in person service, where documents are physically handed to the recipient. Some jurisdictions also allow documents to be sent via registered email, email or fax under certain conditions. In instances where recipients cannot be located, notices have been published in newspapers or online.
Prior to this, serving court documents on wallet holders has been challenging, if not impossible under existing procedural requirements, Moses Park, counsel for the plaintiff in the Hong Kong case told Cointelegraph. The court injunction allowed for the placement of a digital police tape around the 2,650,000 USDT that the victim lost in an online scam. Still, by the time the tokenized court orders landed on the suspicious wallets, the suspects had already moved a chunk of the assets, eventually transferring them to exchanges. At the time of writing, there was about 1,000,000 USDT left in the wallets.
Chu said the remainder was being dealt with separately and declined any further comment. Tron is among the most used change chains among illicit actors. It accounted for almost half of the illicit transactions in 2023. Macrosystems has also tested its technology on other networks outside of Tron, including Ethereum and Polygon. Chu said, c h u, that's the guy's name, Chu said that it's also theoretically possible with Bitcoin and intends to continue developing the technology to expand into other networks in 2025. Still, awareness among victims lags, as they're usually unfamiliar with the opportunities presented by novel technologies.
Thousands of victims in Hong Kong's largest crypto scam, the JPEX case, has yet to pursue legal action for their losses. Since 2023, there have been 4 court orders against blockchain addresses in Hong Kong according to records of DLaw, an online archive of legal proceedings. Quote, Blockchain's application in legal contexts is still niche. Many legal practitioners, judges and institutions are unfamiliar with its mechanics, benefits or practical implementation, slowing adoption. Lorentz Alba, business development lead at Rome Protocol and legal consultant, told CoinTelegraph.
Quote, air dropping non fungible tokens or tokenized documents requires technical expertise and investment. For many cases, this complexity may not seem justified unless anonymity or cross border challenges make traditional methods impractical. Wow. Airdropping gotta come back to this. Airdropping non fungible or tokenized documents. What if those are contracts? We'll come back to that. Hong Kong's legal system is similar to that of the UK due to over 150 years of British colonial rule that ended in 1997. The UK has also embraced innovative legal practices involving blockchain technology. For instance, in the 2023 case of Osborne v Pearson's unknowns and oars, Fintech consultant Lavinia Osborne fell victim to a cyber theft when 2 of her NFTs from the Boss Beauties collection were unlawfully transferred from her crypto wallet.
Seeking legal recourse, Osborne turned to the High Court of England and Wales which recognized NFTs as property under English law. The court granted an injunction to freeze the assets and prevent further unauthorized transactions. It then permitted legal documents to be served to the unidentified defendants via NFTs. This innovative approach followed a precedent set in the 2022 case of d aola versus Pearsons unknown or sorry, Pearsons, Pearsons unknown and others. In this case, online gambling firm founder Fabrizio de Aiola was deceived by individuals operating a fraudulent online brokerage, and the high court approved the serving of legal documents via an NFT airdropped directly into the defendant's wallets and recognized the potential liability of cryptocurrency exchanges as constructive trustees of the misappropriated assets.
Like Hong Kong and the UK, the US also operates under common law legal systems inherited from England. However, there are notable differences due to its federal structure and the constitutional framework. The world's largest economy has also witnessed cases where blockchain technology has served legal documents. One notable example is LCX AG versus John Doe numbers 1-twenty 5. The New York Supreme Court allowed the plaintiff to serve legal papers on anonymous defendants by airdropping a unique NFT into the defendants' cryptocurrency wallets.
This method included a link to a website containing the legal documents, ensuring the defendants were notified despite their anonymity. While previous examples in major economies like the US and UK demonstrate the court's adaptability to modern methods, Chu said that their use of NFTs presented unique challenges of their own such as the ability of defendants to simply send them away. The records remain as blockchains are immutable, but it does add another layer of complexity to the case. Quote, additionally, enforcing legal actions on sued anonymous parties or frozen assets requires a more cohesive legal framework, Alba said. And she added, quote, global jurisdictional complexities and the lack of standardized protocols make enforcement difficult, highlighting the need for collaboration between legal systems and blockchain technology.
Alba also said that the absence of clear, uniform guidelines on using blockchain for legal notifications may create hesitation among courts and lawmakers in the United States. Despite this, Chu noted that macro systems technology isn't bound to Hong Kong and sees the regulatory trend in the US heading toward consumer protections pointing to a Consumer Financial We've shown that injunctions can be issued and enforced. If you didn't get that, it means that they're gonna make they're making NFTs, dropping them into your wallet, except it's it's it's service of a subpoena or service of a cease and desist order or service of whatever else a legal court needs to tell you.
What? You're being sued, you're being arrested, you're be your your your chattel is being, like, you know, like your civil asset forfeiture, whatever. It's being drop directed to your wallet, and what they're suggesting is that you're going to see it. That there's no way that you can't see it. And, therefore, simply by dropping this NFT that is, let's say, a subpoena into your wallet, that you're going to automatically know that you've been subpoenaed by the court and you've gotta do what they said. Oh, bullshit. That's number 1.
2, this is really scary shit. Everything about this just sends the hackles on the back of my neck up. Why? Well, because what if one of these I've got air quotes. What if these NFTs turn out to be let's just conjecture. Okay. Before you say, well, that's not possible, I'm just saying this is what people are going to start trying to do, whether it's possible or not. The subpoena will not just be a notice that you're being subpoenaed. The subpoena will also do something like lock your wallet. Again, right now, that's not possible with Bitcoin.
But for Ethereum? I'll bet you they play ball. I'll bet you Ethereum Foundation and Consensus gets on their knees and services the United States government and says we will drop whatever code you want into our structure. And when you send one of these NFTs to lock a wallet, it'll lock that wallet. That's what's coming. And if you are not on Bitcoin, you are going to lose your shit one of these days. Literally. They're gonna drop a contract in the form of an NFT slash subpoena, cease it slash cease and desist, and it's gonna lock your wallet. And there's no recourse.
Because if it's not your keys, it's not your coin. And that goes for Ethereum. Stop messing around with shitcoins sell them all buy bitcoin and hold bitcoin yourself with your own private keys let's run the numbers CNBC Futures and Commodities, everything is green and all of everyone in the world is happy because United States inflation came in a little softer. A little the numbers were a little softer than what was expected. What does this mean for West Texas Intermediate? Well, that spiked 2.79 percent to the upside. It's just under $80 a barrel. Brent Norsee up over 2 points to $81.64 a barrel.
Natural gas swinging in the right direction, 1.64 percent to the upside. It now tops $4 per 1,000 cubic feet. Haven't seen that in months. Gasoline up 2 and a third percent to $2.15 a gallon. Gold is happy and so is Peter Schiff, 1 and a quarter percent to the upside, now back over $2700. Silver is up 3 and 3 quarters of a point to 3150, but platinum is down a third while copper is up 1.17%. And palladium swinging for the fences, almost 3 full points to the upside. Ag is pretty much fully mixed today. Biggest winner is coffee, 2.64% to the upside.
Biggest loser is sugar, one point 47 to the downside. And live cattle is up a half. Lean hogs are up 2 thirds of a point while feeder cattle are following suit, 2 thirds of a point to the upside. Everything in legacy equity markets are green. 1.71% rise in the Dow. S and P is up 1.7%. The Nasdaq is up 2.2, and the S and P Mini is up 1 and a third percentage points. Bitcoin, well, we had a little bit of a spike today. 99 $1,470 per coin. That is a $1,970,000,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 37 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,810,401.32 of.
Average fees per block are still low at 0.05 BTC taken in fees on a per block basis. And there are a mere 36 blocks carrying 126,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priorities of 6 satoshis per v byte, low priority fees are 4 satoshis per v byte, and the hash rate approaching 800 exahashes per second, 799.8 to be exact, on a 1 week rolling average. From reading Forest Walker, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Pies with 5,000 satoshis. Dude, thank you my friend, Pies. He says, this is for being late for the last show and to help make up for the boost count from that episode, l f g. I appreciate that, Pies. Mark with 1210 says, great article.
And he's pointing to the, Forest Walker article. Pies with another 1,000 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Xplbzx404, satoshi says enjoyed the article. Couldn't zap the text on yakhihani. So boosting here, thanks. No. Thank you. Anonymous with 404 says, enjoy oh, it's the same person. It's just another it's it's another one. Enjoyed the article, couldn't zap on Yaki Hani, so boosting here, thanks. Wartime with 333 says, ITM. And for those that don't know, that means in the morning. And is that it? Yep. That is it for the day. Not so sad puppy eyes, but you know, I'll give you some little little sad kitty eyes because, you know, hey, if you find what I do valuable, then be like Pies and Mark, and another Pies, and throw me some satoshis.
And if you don't have the satoshis to throw or you don't have the ability to do it on podcasting 2.0, then tell your family and friends about the show and say, hey, if you need daily news on what the hell is going on with Bitcoin, then go see my friend David Bennett over there at the Bitcoin and podcast, and that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Nostr is the world's biggest Bitcoin circular economy. Join us. Frank Korva from Bitcoin Magazine starts us out. While many of you may have heard of the Bitcoin circular economy like El Salvador's Bitcoin Beach or South Africa's Bitcoin ekasi, but haven't been able to go and spend your sats in such a place, please know that in just a few clicks, you can join the world's biggest Bitcoin circular economy, Nostr.
Yeah. I know that a virtual Bitcoin circular economy is different from a physical one, and I tip my hat to all those who are working to establish such economies in the real world. But, Noster is a place where Bitcoin is exchanged for value provided nonetheless. For those new to Noster, it's an open source protocol on top of which different types of applications which are technically called clients can be deployed and used when you join Nostr, which you can do through any Nostr app you're issued a public private key pair like a bitcoin wallet the first of which helps people find you on Nostr apps and the second of which lets you log in to the apps Nostra currently has about 42,000 active weekly users who use apps ranging from Domus, comparable to X or Twitter to YakiHoney, comparable to SubStack or Medium to Wave Lake, comparable to Spotify or Apple Music whose mobile app is a Nostr client.
What's particularly cool about Nostr is that your followers on one Nostr app follow you across every single one of its applications. To better picture this, imagine having the same followers on Instagram as you do on x. Over the course of 2024, I earned over 350,000 satoshis, now valued at approximately 350 US dollars, for posting my thoughts and sharing links to the articles I write and the music I create. Nostra is a particularly cool place for musicians to share their work. And I had less than 1,000 followers for most of the year. Just last night, I simply shared my thoughts on how cool Nostr is on Primal, one of my favorite Nostr apps and the one I recommend that you use to get started with Nostr. And I earned 2,165 satoshis for it.
I've also zapped, Nostr's slang for sentsats to, my fair share of creators since joining Nostr, and plan to continue showing love in the form of satoshis in 2025. So, if you're a proponent of bitcoin being used as a currency, and you want to start taking part in the world's biggest bitcoin circular economy, download a nostril app today. Connect it to a lightning wallet. Mobile apps like Prime will have a lightning wallet built in and join us in accepting and sending bitcoin in exchange for valuable content today. Now, here's what I'm really gonna, in start.
Hold on. Woah. That's bizarre. I should have I thought I would have had that in okay. Hold on for a sec. I gotta find this. Alright. Sorry about that. I I what I was surprised was and I had to go find it. It only took me a second, but I had to go find it. What surprised me about Frank Korva is that he didn't mention this really cool onboarding website to Nostr. It's called start.njump.me. That's start.njump.njump. Me. Start. Njump. Me. And it will onboard grandmas and grandpas and small children to nostr because it takes you through a step by step guided tour of how to get this done. And while you're doing it, it's not just instructions.
It actually gets you physically onboarded. It will construct the keys, but the way it does it is it's sort of like like you know, the first part that you buy a video game and the very first, I don't know, 15 minutes of the video game is the video game using the video game to teach you how to play, how to squat, how to crawl, how to jump, how to run, how to move side to side, all that kind of stuff. It's sort of like that. It's sort of like a little digital training manual and it's beautifully done. It's got great graphics. It has easy to read and not long verbiage of why things are being done the way they're being done. It's got buttons that you press and you when you go through when if you go take it all the way through the end and, guys, it takes it doesn't take any more than you should not take any more than 5 minutes.
It should not take anybody more than 5 minutes, and you will have your first experience in getting onto Nostra, and I highly recommend it. Again, I'm just kinda surprised that Frank didn't drop that into this particular article, but, hey, we can't watch everything all the time. That's why you have people like me who backstop all the rest of the great people in this space that are trying to carefully guide you away from shit like Twitter and Instagram and TikTok, of which an influencer was crying today about the TikTok ban because she's got $2,000 rent and then she just bought a Mercedes SUV that cost her $1,000 a month.
That's her car payment. And she's an influencer, she's in her twenties, and she bought a Mercedes SUV. Just her apartment and her car alone is draining her of $3,000 a month. That doesn't include food or clothes or nothing. And she's being shut down because this TikTok ban thing. At least that's what she's worried about. We'll have to see if it actually happens. But what I'm saying is there are no more excuses. You gotta get on Noster. Not just because Frank tells you to, and not just because I told you to, but because this little girl, who has way more monthly expenditures than she should even remotely imagine, has a real possibility of losing everything because that's what she's been doing for years. She's an influencer on TikTok.
That's how she makes her money. And it's being taken away from her because some other people who don't even know that she exists is like, we don't like TikTok. That's how fragile the system that everybody is dealing with actually is. If you don't want to deal with that kind of fragility, you gotta get on Nostr and I highly recommend start.njump.me to get on there. That's start.njump.me. Now, you thought the courts handing down tokenized subpoenas to your wallet was bad. Maybe this is even worse, maybe not. Let's find out. Matt DeSalvo, decrypt. Artificial intelligent agent tokens skyrocket as Franklin Templeton highlights quote, significant promise.
I know. It's shit coinery, but this is coming. This this is what you're going to have to guide your friends and your family away from because it's just it's just more shit coinery, and we've all seen what that can do to people's livelihoods. Artificial intelligent nope. Let's start again. Artificial intelligence cryptocurrencies are still making sizable gains. Just ask asset manager Franklin Templeton, who apparently has not been able to pull their head out of their collective asses because they highlight just how big AI and crypto could be together.
Franklin Templeton said in Tuesday notes that how AI agents interact on blockchains is very exciting. And it noted the current buzz surrounding ai16z and the virtual protocol, 2 tokens that have made some of the biggest gains over the past 24 hours among the top 100 coins ranked by market cap. Ai16z is an investment DAO run by AI agents. If you didn't get that, let me read it again. Ai16z from the your good friends at a16z who would never wish to cause you any harm. It's an investment DAO, and it's run by artificial intelligence agents.
CoinGecko data shows that over the past day, it's native token has risen by over 18% after slowing down last week and is now trading hands for a buck 30. It fell briefly out of the top 100 on Monday but has since recovered and bounced back into such a valuable company. The world's biggest crypto exchange, Binance, announced earlier this month that it would launch perpetual futures contracts trading for ai16z. And even with today's surge, ai16z is down 32% over the last week and is 47% off of its all time high price of $2.47 set less less than 2 weeks ago.
And virtual's protocol, virtual, a token launched on the Ethereum layer 2 network base last year is up by 15%. Oh, my god. Let's mortgage the house again. It's now priced at $2.98. We're gonna get rich. Virtuals is used to launch a variety of AI agents, including AIXBT, a token that nearly matched its own all time high price on Tuesday. Both tokens had slowed their rallies down in recent days after a white hot start to the year but are making a comeback as the broader crypto market recovers on Tuesday. AI agent software programs are designed to help humans by completing tasks on their own.
I'm not sure how that helps. As the hype around AI has grown, many in the field have made big promises on how such agents will help humans complete tasks. And some of these agents have their own tokens, adding potential utility and speculation into the equation as if it wasn't bad enough. Franklin Templeton even added that even if AI agents have some way to or some way to go to be as refined and useful as envision, the sector holds substantial promise. Quote, although these agents are not yet fully autonomous and have little utility in their current state, this emerging sector may hold significant promise and is worth watching closely closely as it evolves and matures, the note said. Alright. There are 2 kinds of people that are reading or listening to this article.
There are those that say, oh my god, AI tokens. We're gonna get rich. The other half understand that there's not a single thing in this article that tells you what they actually do. What does does the AI token trade itself on Binance? Does it put in AI generated puts and calls on itself? Does it does it construct derivative instruments for itself that somehow or another after being traded decay into nothingness? No. We don't know. See, that's the thing. I can't say whether it does do that or doesn't do that because we don't know what the hell an AI token does. All this thing says is that designed to help humans by completing tasks on their own. What tasks? You if you thought that the white papers of yore, of every shit coin under the sun, and we're talking about the 2015 to 2018 era, If you thought those were bad because half of them were plagiarized and, like, the the oh, here's our board of directors and none of the people were actually real people. They were just, like, headshots taken out of a college yearbook.
Because that happened. Here here's our blockchain. It's going to replace Bitcoin by our token. Here's a picture of 10 fake people that we have no idea who they are, but here's their fake names, and they're our board of directors. And, by the way, our white paper was cobbled together and completely plagiarized from 7 different white papers. Word for word, this happened. It happened a lot. Not just once, not just twice, not not just a couple of handfuls of times, 100 100 of times. And people lost their houses, they lost their cars, they lost their life savings because they bought into the bullshit.
AI is the next level bullshit crap that's on the market and it's specifically designed to do the exact same thing what I just told you about was designed to do. Steal your money. And possibly take it over to Iran where central banks of Iran have blocked cryptocurrency exchanges amid their own currency crisis. So Iran is in the middle of the shit according to atlas21.com. The Central Bank of Iran has imposed a block on payment gateways to digital asset exchange platforms during a particularly critical moment for the country's economy.
The decision, implemented without prior notice, might I might I add, comes amid a deep currency crisis with the Iranian real having devalued by 37% against the US dollar since the beginning of 2024. This situation has led many citizens to seek refuge in digital assets like bitcoin. The new restrictions follow a series of measures adopted last November when the central bank froze the accounts of exchanges and suspended payment processing services. In response to these restrictive measures, some industry players published an open letter to president Masad Pescekian, I guess that's how you pronounce it, highlighting how quote, such destructive decisions and technological policy not only eliminate Iran's already limited economic growth opportunities through new technologies, but also drive away qualified human capital, the country's most valuable resource. Yes, because humans are a resource.
We're chattel, we're cattle, we're we're owned, right? No, man. See, this is this is the kind we gotta get away from saying shit like human resources. Payroll office. It's the freaking payroll office. Anyway, according to informed sources, the government is developing a centralized system for cryptocurrency management which would allow greater state control over the market through centralized channels. Kiss Iran goodbye. Additionally, the government has imposed a ban on advertising Bitcoin mining machines following a severe energy crisis that led to widespread blackouts in Tehran.
Authoritize have identified over 92100 minuteing farms with more than 265,000 machines in the past 3 years. Holy shit. In a recent report, the Human Rights Foundation commented on the country's situation. Quote, for Iranians enduring severe inflation, financial repression, and an isolated economy, Bitcoin represents one of the few remaining paths to financial freedom, a path the regime is not it was now working to block. So Iran hates their own people. This is like every other country on the face of the planet with a government. The government cannot stand its own citizenry.
The government continuously looks at people like human resources and chattel instead of actual people. And every time that you have that happen, you're going to find poverty. That's why Jesus said the poor will always be with you. Why? Because the fucking government will always be with you too. That's what Jesus should have said. I'm sorry y'all probably burned in hell for being a blast fever, but I think Jesus should have said the following. The reason the poor will always be with you, my children, is because you keep allowing the government to always be with you as well.
Just saying, man. Bitcoin Core version 28.1 is now available for all of you node runners out there. Be aware. Bitcoin Core is the predominant implementation of the Bitcoin protocol featuring a full node and a wallet. It connects to the Bitcoin peer to peer network to download and fully validate network blocks and transactions. I highly recommend that you guys learn how to run a full node. It's not that hard. You can do it on a Raspberry Pi. And at this point, you probably need a 2 terabyte, SSD or a hard drive of some kind. I've got a 1 terabyte, hard drive on my old node, and it's 94% full.
So just be aware. But I think it's I think it should it would behoove us to learn how to run and why we run full nodes. Anyway, version 28.1 has been released and is now available for download from the bitcoincore.org website. It's the this first maintenance release for version 28 includes several bug fixes, performance improvements, and updated translations. Users are encouraged to report any bugs using the issue tracker on GitHub. Quote, thanks to everyone who directly contributed to this release. Fanquake, Hinaday, Stepanov, Marco Falke, Martin Zamsande, Marnix, Sebastian Falbisoner, as well as to everyone that helped with translations on Trans FX as was stated on the release notes. And there's, like, basically it's got this huge long list of all the shit that they did. And unless you want me to read stuff like depends, thick CXX flags on NetBSD, well then, too bad I'm not gonna do it.
Let's move on. Last thing of the day, Maastro version 0.13.0 keys management implementation. Maastro, m o s t r o, is a lightning network based peer to peer exchange protocol over the Nostr protocol. Yay. I love how people are starting to recognize that Nostr is more than social media. It always has been. It's just the social media aspect was the lowest hanging fruit, although that's not done us very well because people are going, oh, Nostra's just another social media. No. It's not. It's a full blown communications protocol. And the new Maestro version 0.13.0 delivers a major step forward in improving privacy for users through key management implementations.
We have a lot of improvements. And probably one of the most important is the final design of keys management. Keys management is a way clients rotate keys for every trade adding another privacy layer to gift wrap previous implementation. However oh, sorry. Not however. Today, we've merged our main pull request for implementing it on master d. Yeah. Ma no. Sorry. Maestro d. We also implemented it on Maestro Core and Maestro CLI, said the developers. Let's see if there's anything here. Add lightning node data to info event. Yeah. It's just a bunch just a bunch of stuff that we don't really need to read. So if you are in the mood to, I don't know, get do do some stuff with lightning, like, over peer to peer exchanges, might wanna look at Maestro. They've just updated to 0.13.0.
Alright. So that's it for the day, ladies and gentlemen. Episode 1,019 is in the bag. We're chilling out at $99,375 per coin. There's really not much else to say except pay special attention to air dropped anything into your wallet. Not because you need to know if whether or not you've been subpoenaed, but I'm what I'm saying is that keep an eye on this legal these legal steps. These guys are starting to say, you know what? We're not going to respect the privacy nor the property of individual citizenry. We're just going to airdrop this crap directly to you. I suggest that we start looking at ways to sue whoever drops that into our wallets for trespassing.
Because it's my my wallet is my property. Nobody has the right to put anything in there that I don't want. Okay. So somebody Air drops me like a kitty cat picture. I don't care. Somebody drops me a subpoena. I want to sue. That one, I want somebody to go to jail for trespassing. I'm not going I'm not going to yell at the 4 year old child from the neighbor's house who walks across my lawn. That is trespassing. But I don't care. The kid's 4 years old. He's not gonna do anything. It's kinda cute, and I'm not gonna sit there on my porch waving my cane saying, get off my lawn. However, if a thug that I don't know that doesn't even live in the block starts pissing on my lawn, I'm going to have a problem with that.
There is a difference. I get to select who I want to fuck with when it comes to jacking with my property. And my bitcoin wallet, that's my property. I hold the private keys. If somebody has a wallet, that wallet address, and decides to send me something that I don't think should be in my wallet, I wanna be able to go after them. And that's what I'm saying here is that you'll you'll say, well, good luck doing that. Well, if it comes from, like, I don't know, District Court of Washington State or something like that, I wanna be able to have recourse and say, you trespassed. If it's an agency, not even a legal aid well, legal agency and so let's say, I don't know, the DMV says, hey, here, we're we're we're dropping you your new ID and you've gotta use it. I wanna be able to call that place and say, I'm taking you to court because I I know who gave it to me. Now if you are just a listener and you drop me like a little kitty cat into my wallet, I will never know who you are.
I'll never be able to call you up on the phone and say I want recourse, but I never would. That's like the 4 year old walking across the lawn. But a supreme court or, you know, like a state court or something like that wanting to say, hey, you gotta cease and desist with, you know, x, y, and z, and you can't tell us that you don't know that we, gave you the cease and desist order because it's sitting in your wallet. I wanna be able to take that judge to task. I know that sounds that sounds stupid. Yes. I know it'll never happen. But we at one point or another, we we really do have to start fighting for our property no matter what format it takes my house my car my gun my ammunition my gold my Bitcoin my Bitcoin wallet this is all owned by me It is my property, and you don't get to just do with it what you want because you think communism is cool, and socialism rocks, and marxism is the way to go because all that ever did was get people killed.
I'm just saying you gotta watch out for this shit. 2nd thing, AI tokenized or AI tokens stay as far away from them as possible. Nobody knows what they do. Nobody knows what they are. There's no good description for them. All I see is another way to steal your money. Don't give them your money, and I will see you on the other side.
[01:07:56] Unknown:
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 Episode Overview
