Join me today for Episode 1025 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Printing Golden Tickets
- China Scares the World
- Plebian.Market
- Elon, Lopp Pig Wrestle
- Russia Uses BTC Mining for Grid
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[00:00:03]
David Bennett:
My my my, it is 10:17 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 27th day, January. Yes. It is. 2025, And this this is actually episode 1025 of Bitcoin and not not the Friday show. That was episode 1024. Apologies for that particular mistake. As usual, it's Monday. It's micro strategy Monday. So micro strategy is in the news, but for more than just what you think. Yes. Yes. Yes. They are. There's some, some weird well, nah. It's not chicanery, nor is it weirdness. It's just Michael Saylor being Michael Saylor. So, I I I'm gonna try to break it down for you in the words of chat g p t. Yeah. I know. I know.
Trust me. We'll we'll get to it. And then, it clearly clearly all manner of blood just the dam broke. The shining elevator doors opened. And if you get that reference points to you, blood is flowing. And it's not just in Bitcoin. It's all over the markets. And it seems that China may have something to do with that. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about Brian Armstrong because he said something that is the most stupid thing I've ever heard him say. And ladies and gentlemen, that's saying a lot. PlebeChain. We got a write up for, plebeian.market. Not Plebechain. Sorry. Plebeian.market.
We got a full write up on that, and I wanna bring, plebeian.market back to you. I talked about it either Thursday or Friday. I'm pretty sure it was on Thursday. And, some people have have looked at it since since I was able to bring it to you. But, you know, on on the fly, descriptions of something don't really, they're not always effective. So we got a write up here from nobsbitcoin.com and then Elon Musk well said things. And this one, he should not be excused in any way, shape, or form for it. In fact, this this one is rather disgusting. And no, I don't care if he made it. All the people that are losing their minds over this weird Hitler salute, the seagull, the Roman salute, or whatever the hell you wanna call it. That, dude, that is nothing.
It's that's bullshit. I I see people, like, when I see people wave on the street, they just put their hand out and go, like that. It's just like They're not giving the Hitler salute. Okay? I this that is complete garbage. But this one, dude, this one, I when you hear it, you'll understand why I'm a little little on the, on the offense about it. Russia is in the news and Zaprite is in the news, but let's start with a good friend, Michael Saylor. He's such a good friend to all of us. And I guess he's gonna be a better friend to the people that he's gonna sell stuff to. Because Sam Borge from Cointelegraph is telling us and what it sounds to me like is that he's just fabricated a brand new kind of stock for MicroStrategy that he wants to sell to you so that he can buy himself some more Bitcoin, which he did also by the way. Again, like I said, it's MicroStrategy Monday. So, but here's the headline.
MicroStrategy proposes a 2,500,000 share offering to fund Bitcoin purchases. Now, on the surface, okay, that's to be expected. We knew he was gonna do that. But something about this one, I mean, like I said, is like my question becomes, is this new? Is this a new thing that he's doing? I don't know, we'll find out. Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has proposed a stock offering, to raise cash for general corporate purposes, including acquiring more Bitcoin and signaling its intent to continue accumulating that digital asset. Now here's the rub.
According to a January 27th announcement, MicroStrategy intends to offer 2,500,000 units of its perpetual strike preferred stock, which is a type of stock that has a liquidation preference and pays dividends at a fixed rate. Holders also have the option of converting it into common stock. And according to MicroStrategy, its offering will have a per share liquidation preference of $100 Dividends are payable quarterly beginning on March 31st. Quote, MicroStrategy intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of Bitcoin and for working capital, the company said.
In the announcement, MicroStrategy described itself as the world's first and largest Bitcoin Treasury company, signaling that its business intelligence software is no longer its primary business. Well, hell, I've been telling you that shit for 6 months that they were going to back out of the of the whole software issue, and they were going to go right into essentially finance. Just finance whether it's financial products, financial services, financing. I I expect them to start bankrolling other companies in a very VC type fashion anytime soon. But it is it was clear to me 6 months ago, if if not longer than that, that Michael Saylor is basically just he's done.
He's he's done his bit for software's king and country. He's written all the software that he wants to write. He's he's funded all of the software developers that he wants to fund. He's he's built the business around software and he's just bored. He wants something new and shiny and Bitcoin is it, man. And it's gonna be about finance. It's not gonna be about writing software. Will software be involved? Well, of course software is going to be involved, ladies and gentlemen. But that's not going to be the the main push anymore. And I've been telling you that. I've been saying that for a long time. But in its fiscal Q3, the company's revenues declined 10.3% year over year to a measly pittance of $116,100,000.
Its gross profit margin fell to 70.4% from 79.4% for the Q3 of 2023. But nevertheless, MicroStrategy said it achieved a 5.1% Bitcoin yield, a new performance metric for its crypto holdings. And as you might expect, MicroStrategy has intensified its Bitcoin purchases after announcing plans to raise $42,000,000,000 for its digital asset war chest, the so called 21/21 plan, is comprised of $21,000,000,000 in equity and $21,000,000,000 of fixed income securities. The company made one of its largest ever purchases in the lead up to the United States President Donald Trump's inauguration, snatching up 11,000 Bitcoin at an average price of roughly $1,001 per coin.
MicroStrategy's biggest BTC buy occurred in November when it acquired 55,000 coin for roughly $5,400,000,000 Elsewhere, Bitcoin miners appear to be taking a page out of Bitcoin strategies playbook wait. Bitcoin strategies out of the micro strategy playbook by building up their own digital asset stockpile. What is not mentioned in this story is this morning's announcement by MicroStrategy that they have purchased another $1,100,000,000 worth of Bitcoin over the last week at an average price of about $105,000 a coin. And talk about losing your ass on that trade as of this morning because we're at 99,547.
We're going to become extremely efficient at crossing the $100,000 mark per coin. But now now MicroStrategy holds 471,000 BTC. Actually, 471,107. It's almost a palindrome. Michael Sailor, you missed the opportunity. You could have bought enough Bitcoin to have 471,174 Bitcoin. Man, that would have been a hell of a thing, right? Well, this preferred stock thing, they're calling it preferred strike or something like that. In fact, it's got it like, from what I saw, it has its own ticker like STRK, which is not MSTR. So my question becomes because this is what it looks like with a a different ticker symbol altogether is that this is a brand new thing.
It's not MicroStrategy preferred stock class a because that's just MSTR a or or it's not it's not like any kind of other MSTR stock. This is this looks to me like it's brand new. He's just rolling it out and it's completely different. And I asked chatgpt to just read the Tysons Corner Company's, press release and just I literally said, explain this to me like I am 5 years old. And it did. Let's see if you agree with this breakdown. ChatGPT answers me and says, okay. Let's make this really simple. MicroStrategy is like a company selling special tickets called preferred stock to people.
These tickets let people invest in the company and in return, the company promises to pay those people some money later, kind of like, you know, earning an allowance. Here's how it works. Number 1, they're selling 2,500,000 special tickets. Each ticket is worth $100 and will let people earn some extra money over time. Those are called dividends. 2, they want to use the money that they get from selling these special tickets to do really important things like buy more Bitcoin, which is a type of digital money, and run their business. Number 3, the people who buy these tickets can get paid every few months like a small reward for holding the ticket or they can exchange their ticket later for other regular stock in the company.
4, if the company wants to take the tickets back, yes, they can if certain things happen. The company can decide to buy back those tickets from people and give them their money back. Number 5, if something really important happens to the company, the ticket holders can ask the company to buy their tickets back and give them their money plus any rewards they've earned so far. You know, like their allowance. Basically, MicroStrategy is saying, quote, hey, if you give us money now by buying these tickets, we'll make sure you get paid later. And maybe even let you switch those tickets for other cool stuff in the future. I I'm sorry, but I gotta hand it to chatgpt for explaining it like I'm 5. In fact, this I could I could literally use this to explain what micro strategy is doing to a freaking adult.
He's selling special tickets. He's just printing the tickets and selling them. You might you might think that the tone of my voice suggests that I'm angry at Michael Saylor. I'm not. I'm actually kind of bewildered that this guy's got the the cojones, the stones, along with the spine to go along with it to just say, I'm just gonna print golden tickets like freaking Willy Wonka out here. And if you happen to find 1 in your bar of chocolate, I'm gonna give you an allowance, plus a little bit of money on the side. And bam. Next thing you know, all the chocolate bars are sold out.
Because everybody's trying to go find out how Willy Wonka makes his damn chocolate. It's amazing. It's all it's like PT Barnum. You know, like he PT Barnum was so successful. Wait. And and this is before the whole circus thing. Alright? He was always PT Barnum was always a showman. And he had, like, basically, a giant sideshow before sideshows were a thing because the circus really didn't exist in in in the modern format until PT Barnum teamed up with a guy named Bailey. Right? PT Barnum and bay or Barnum and Bailey's flying circuit. They whatever.
But he had this show with oddities, like, you know, the mustached woman. It was a sideshow. It was essentially the sideshow. But nobody would leave because they were captivated by what they were watching. They couldn't tear themselves away. That's how successful PT Barnum was. And he was so successful that he had to get these people out of his damn show so that he could sell tickets to the other people that hadn't seen the show yet, that he said, at the very last, he put up a sign that says, see the egress. Well, nobody apparently knew what the hell egress meant back in those days because it meant exit. And once they were out, there was no doorknob on the other side where they could get back in, not without buying another ticket.
That man was brilliant. And honestly, I'm I'm captivated by what Michael Saylor's doing here. And if you're not, or if you're angry at him or whatever, I I get it, but honestly, you you gotta have you gotta stay it back and just have a little bit of awe. Just look, he's just doing what all the rest of these jokers do, except he's almost it's almost as if he's like, I'm just going to bear it all. All we're doing is printing stock that mean nothing. We're selling it to you because we think we're going to be more valuable in the future. It is gambling.
And that's all it ever was. And the people that really got hung out to dry in their gambling addiction, boy, they saw that shit happen on Friday and definitely, definitely in pre market and after the market opened today on Wall Street. Why? Because China jumped out of the closet and said, boom. US stock markets tumble as investors worry about deep seek. This is from nationalpublicradio.org. Yeah. No. It's NPR, but let's see what these clown this clown show has to say about the other clown show. China may be about to burst Silicon Valley's AI bubble and Wall Street is freaking out. US tech stocks plunged on Monday amid a wider market sell off. And the culprit?
DeepSeek. A Chinese artificial intelligence company that last week, which would have been Friday, introduced a new and low cost model into the red hot AI tech market. DeepSeek on Monday morning became the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store, dethroning OpenAI's Chat GPT. Shares of NVIDIA, the chipmaker whose AI technology has made it into one of the most valuable companies in the world dropped more than 13% by late morning on Monday. Rival chip companies including ARM and Broadcom also plunged, dragging down the major indices along with them. The tech heavy Nasdaq fell almost 600 points. Oh my god. We're all gonna die. Or nearly 3%.
3%. Come talk to me when you have to do it 20%, like 4 times a year. Alright? You can come talk to me then. Anyway, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and other big tech companies have poured 1,000,000,000 of dollars into building up their AI capabilities fueling a Silicon Valley arms race. But now, investors are shitting the bed and calling these pricey investments into question. Now they they didn't actually say shitting the bed on NPR, but that's what happened. DeepSeq says it cost less. Now, here's the rub. They say, DeepSeq says this Chinese company is telling us that it cost less to train its models and its open source AI assistant uses less advanced chips than rivals models do.
At least investors will soon get to the grill big tech or let me do that one again. At least investors will soon get to grill big tech companies about deep seek and their overall AI strategies. 4 of the so called magnificent seven tech stocks, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla, are all due to report quarterly results this week. Oh, joy. And I if I if I'm correct, I think, futures options on Bitcoin expire on Friday. And that's not helping the Bitcoin price. It's always the end of the month. If I remember right, it's always the last Friday of the month. So even if the the if even if the month ends on a Tuesday, then that means the Friday before is when these futures options expiry come up. So that's not helping. It's never helped. I don't like derivatives because of this kind of crap. It's where everybody's, like, just want they just wanna cash in and go get some hookers and some blow and go have fun, and they do it at our expense by, you know, having lettuce hands. In either event, here's the thing.
Everything shit the bed today. Altcoins got wiped out. If you're an altcoin holder, dude, you you need to stop doing that because this is just going to continue to happen to you. So cash out for Bitcoin and just ride that wave because at least you've only got one wave to ride. But everything, everything is in free was in free fall this morning. I mean, every I'm looking at future CNBC Futures and Commodities, which we'll get to here in a little bit, and everything is red except for sugar and coffee. That's it. Oh oh, wait. No. I'm sorry. Oh, the USD Japan trading pair futures are basically up about a point. It's about the only time I ever see it in the green. Everything else is shitting the bed because we're trusting that a company from another company country that we're rivals with is telling the truth. There's no proof.
Nobody knows what the hell deep seek is. Nobody's ever heard of deep seek before. There's not been a white paper presented on the tech as far as I know about this thing we call deep seek. No. No. No. No no. Western investors are losing their minds, they're setting their hair on fire, they're lowering their britches without getting into bed, and they're crapping all over it simply because some people said a thing. They didn't prove it. They didn't show it. They didn't do nothing. They just said it. That's how weak these markets are. That's how weak this is.
Because we just took it at face value that it's cheaper to train deep seek. Have you even used it? I first of all, I ain't gonna download it because I don't want that Chinese crap on my phone, but even if I did, I mean, it's it. I don't like well, actually that that's not that's a non sequitur. It just doesn't even make sense because I'm never gonna get it, so I'm probably never gonna be able to find out if DeepSeq is actually a good AI, much less an AI assistant because that's what they're saying that it is. Like, it will schedule reservations for you or something like that. But because it's cheaper to train, quote unquote, and uses, quote unquote, cheaper technology, everybody's sold.
I mean, the paper hands out there are the it is a house of cards that's holding up all financial markets whether it's AI, whether it's futures commodities. It doesn't matter what it is. This is all paper. And the paper hands have been ruling the roost for 70 years. And it's all gonna come crashing down at one point or another. All somebody has to do is say the right sentence about the right thing from the right place and you can kiss all that goodbye. It's just going to go south. So what is the response from shitcoiners? Well, to make a fake deep seek token, of course.
Because they do have one. And it hit a $48,000,000 market cap amid the Chinese AI app hype. This is Yohan Yun from Cointelegraph. A Solana based token named after the Chinese app, DeepSeek, briefly surged past a $48,000,000 market capitalization on January 27th fueled by $150,000,000 in trading according to Solana token data aggregator, Birdeye. Blockchain records show the token was created on January 4th, weeks before DeepSeek's app made headlines by topping the US Apple App Store rankings. Did you did did you did you hear hear what I said, right? Deep seek, the token, was created on January 4th.
What do you wanna bet that the people that made this announcement about deep seek are really just shitcoiners, but this time they're actually marketing their shitcoin from a different direction, from a different vector, in a completely different sector of the world so as not to bring attention on the fact that they have yet just one more shit coin. Well, I don't know what the chances of that are. Maybe Polymarket will have rankings on it, but I'm not gonna check. Let's continue. A second fake token was also capitalized upon the deep seek hype briefly reaching $13,000,000 of market cap with a mere 28,500,000 in trading volume. It has fallen to 8,600,000 since.
DeepSeek has denied involvement with any crypto tokens warning users about potential scams. Oh, so let's see. I spin up a coin. I get a whole bunch of marketing stuff in place so that I can release a press release on a particular day. Then I release that. All world western markets shit the bed all at once. And then I start making statements that I had nothing to do with it even though the token was created on January 4th, almost two and a half weeks ago, but I had nothing bullshit. Sorry. The AI app's rise has dominated crypto chatter with analysts suggesting its success contributed to sending Bitcoin below a $100,000 for the first time since US President Donald Trump took office. What? A week ago?
Are you serious? This is the crap I have to put up with, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, the abscessant has been viewed as a challenge to US dominance in AI shaking financial markets. Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order on January 23rd aimed at preserving US leadership in AI and calling for systems, quote, free from ideological bias or engineering social agendas, end quote. Ironically, Trump's own official Trump coin launched on January 18th and the subsequent debut of another token named after first lady Melania Trump triggered a surge in fraudulent copycats.
Yeah. Well, that's what we do. That that that's what that's what the cryptocurrency industry does, Is it lies, it cheats, it steals people's hard earned money right out of their pockets by promising them nothing. And that's again, I got to go back to Michael Saylor. And I wanna make it clear, I'm not angry at Michael Saylor. I I kinda stand in awe because so far, he's actually been able to deliver on most of his promises. He has literally created quite a bit of investor value simply by doing what he's doing, and that's selling nothing and converting it into Bitcoin. And it's amazing to watch.
And I and I I I hope it I hope it continues to work, but it's the same thing here. And for this Chinese company to preemptively say, oh, we had nothing to do with it. We it's not us. Yeah, right. I call it bullshit on this entire thing. First, because the the the mere issuance of or utterance of these particular sets of sentences did this kind of financial damage to the West is frightening. It's almost as if let's say we were going to war with a country, and we thought that we had the baddest ass army, navy, air force, and marines, and coast guard, and you name it. We have the kick most kick butt weapons. They could hit anything from miles away, completely automated.
We got drones going everywhere, and and and the whole thing brought to its knees because some dude stands out there on the front lines and pushes a button and causes some kind of massive EMP pulse to not only propagate across the battlefield and hit near term targets, but somehow propagate a message through the unified communication systems of the United States military and drops everything right to its knees with the push of a button. How would how would you feel if you were a bystander on that battlefield and watch that happen? Would you have confidence, you being a United States citizen, just watching this crippling ass action from no more than a push of a button, would you have confidence that you're going to be able to retain your property when the Chinese march over the hill? Because that would be that would be next. Right?
Now I'm not a fan of China in case you haven't been listening to the show. I'm I I don't hate them. I mean, the Chinese people are just fine. It's their government that that sucks, and I'd say the same thing about our own federal government. But you wouldn't have any confidence at all. And yet I guarantee you 3 days from now, before the end of this trading session is over, in western markets, this will all be forgotten. Unless it gets worse, in which case, of course, it won't get forgotten. I don't actually think it will. I think it'll be a blip and I think everything will keep on riding just as high as it has been. And that should scare the piss out of everybody.
Being able to make a statement and bring Western markets to its knees because we just say, hey, it's cheaper. Hey, ours is better. Without any proof whatsoever, that that's ugly. And it's not going to get better anytime soon with people like Brian Armstrong walking around. Why? Because you thought the way Coinbase listed shitcoins was bad before. Oh, Nelly. You ain't seen nothing yet. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong urges a rethink of exchange listings. Connor Sefton, decrypt, writing this one. Brian Armstrong is calling for regulatory flexibility as his exchange battles to keep up with the deluge of new altcoins.
What did I tell you? This is gonna make 2017 look like a cakewalk. On x, formerly Twitter, the CEO of Coinbase said 1,000,000 tokens are now launching every week, meaning evaluating each one by 1 is no longer feasible. What could he have in mind? Armstrong confirmed that the platform is reviewing its listing process, which sees digital assets undergo rigorous vetting before being made available. And I call BS on that too. At present, he said, a dedicated group is responsible for assessing altcoins against legal, compliance, and technical security standards. But in the future, Armstrong wants to adopt a different approach, meaning all tokens would be allowed by default.
Pausing to let it sink in. Because that last sentence, if you didn't hear it yeah, let me repeat it. In the future, Brian Armstrong wants to adopt a different approach to listing tokens, meaning that all tokens would be allowed to be listed by default. By default, I can just come up with scary China AI coin and it will automatically be listed. No vetting. No nothing. I told you. You thought 2017 was bad? Man, that was just that was practice. That was training day. That was nothing. Nothing. This is the rumble in the jungle. This is Ollie versus Foreman. This right here is going to wipe people's wealth out.
What do Bitcoiners have to do as usual? Wait until it's all fucking over. Quote, regulators need to understand that applying for approval for each one of these coins is totally infeasible at this point as well. Not all crypto executives agree with Armstrong's stance. Danny Scott, CEO of the British Bitcoin only exchange, CoinCorner, replied to ask, quote, at what point do you guys need a gambling license? Well, because Danny Scott knows what he's talking about. Expanding upon what he meant, Scott told Decrypt, quote, it's Coinbase admitting they just want to list anything and everything, no care for the quality, no care for their customers, getting rugged, knowing that alts all trend down against Bitcoin over the years.
And then he doubled down on the gambling comparison. He said, quote, there is now more skill in picking a horse at the races than picking which meme token will pump next. It's literally gambling at this point and Coinbase wanting to list more is only heightening the problem, Scott added. Prominent crypto critic, Peter Schiff. Oh, this will be good because I'm probably going to agree 100% with Peter Schiff telling Armstrong quote, so much for the idea of limited supply. The inflation rate of digital tokens is off the charts. Almost all these tokens are virtually identical to Bitcoin in all the ways that really matter including a hard cap on their individual supply. Yeah. Well, that's where me and me and Peter drift apart. He he's got that last part wrong.
But I understand where he's coming from. The ground swell of tokens hitting the market has raised fears that alt season, which sees smaller cryptocurrencies outperform Bitcoin, may fail to materialize. On chain analysis analyst, Ali Martinez, pointed out that there are now more than holy shit. There's more than 36,400,000 altcoins compared with fewer than 3,000 during the Fane Bull Run-in the late 2017 and early 2018 period. Oh my god. With such massive supply, the market has changed significantly, he wrote. Well, no. Not really. It's just more stupid.
A lot more stupid. 3000 altcoins. I remember that number. I remember that number. 3 it was like 3,867. I remember that being like the total number of listings on the aforementioned Coinbase. And we were given we were given Brian Armstrong, you know, mega amounts of shit back then. 36,400,000 altcoins. Brian's saying there's a 1000000 altcoins wanting to be listed per week, and he just wants to list them by default. How about this, Brian? How about nobody's listed by default? How about nobody's listed by default? How about that?
And that and that you just get your people to do their job. And if you can only list 1 shit coin per week, then by all means, so be it. But this notion of allowing anybody to list anything is going to end badly. Let's run the numbers and see just how bad it does end. CNBC, Fetch and Commodities, p d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d. Everybody's gonna die. Oil. West Texas Intermediate is down 2.4%. See? Even the commodities are getting hosed. 2.4% of the downside pushes West Texas Intermediate down to $72.87 a barrel. Brent Norci is also down over 2 points to 76.79. Natural gas, dude, digging for hell. 9.88% in the red. That brings it to $3 62¢ per 1,000 cubic feet. And gasoline is down 1 a quarter, but still just a hair over $2 per gallon.
Gold down 1 a half percent. Silver down 2.2. Platinum is down over 1%. Copper is down almost 2%. And palladium making sure everybody goes to hell in a hand basket at 3.73% to the downside. It's futures in ag is still looking pretty much red. Only coffee is the winner. 1.01% to the upside. Biggest loser is cocoa. Chocolate is down 1 a third. I got live cattle, however, it's actually up a half. And lean hogs saving the day. There's a ray of sunshine at 1.79% in the green for the for the swine, but feeder cattle are down almost a half. And here it comes, legacy or leg legacy equity indices.
Dow is up a quarter, but the S and P is down 1.76%. Nasdaq says, Sayonara, baby. It's down 3.2%, and the S and P mini is down 1 a third. Dude, retirees just getting wiped out. And the Bitcoiners getting wiped out too. We are down to $99,000 even a coin. That is $1,960,000,000,000 of market cap, and we can only get 36.2 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,815,691.88 of. And average fees per block are low. Like, really low. 0.04 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis of which there are only 29 blocks of.
And they are carrying under 100,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 3. Hash rate on 1 week rolling average is still pretty good. 778.5 x the hashes per second. And from Kafir, the civil asset forfeiture reserve episode of Bitcoin and I got anonymous. 3,333 sat says you're talking about the movie purge, homeboy. Yeah. That that's exactly what I was thinking of. I still have actually yet to watch that movie though. Lupin with a thousand says, thank you, sir. CAF is unworthy of civilized society. Any thoughts on whether this is constitutional at all? What? Civil asset forfeiture? No. It's not constitutional.
There's nothing in the constitution that says the government can take my shit. In fact, there's an entire page that was attached to the constitution called the bill of rights that specifically outlined what the government cannot do. And take my shit is actually in there. They can't take my guns. They can't take my right to free speech. They can't take my papers. They can't quarter people in my house, which basically means taking my house. They can't do any of this. Civil asset forfeiture is unconstitutional, and yet here we all are, basically, with our thumbs up our asses watching the government go to wonder what they're gonna do next.
Assholes. God's death with 537 sat says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And he does it again with 537, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Then BTC master coming out of the woodwork with a 121 says, all [email protected]. And Pai's finishing finishing us out at a 100. Satoshi says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Plebeon App launches MVP of Plebeon dot market platform. Alright. So Friday or Thursday, I brought to you plebian.market. And I also brought to you Isabella Art.
Iso Labelle sorry. Iso Labelle Art. That's, an Italian artist who or well, he's in Italy anyway. That's where he says he's based. He's very very good and he sells his art on plebian.market. He also you can also get it at isolabel.art, I believe. I think that's his actual website. Anyway, let's get into the what this plebian.market thing is. Where does it come from? Who's doing it? Let's find out more. A hell of a lot more than what I gave you on Friday. Plebian.market is the first instance of the Plebian app dedicated to goods and services catering to the Bitcoin and Nostra communities.
Users are invited to explore the platform, add products, create stalls, buy presents, and you can do it all for the Satoshis. Plebeon dot market is an open source decentralized marketplace for selling goods and services for Sats. It allows merchants to dedicate a percentage of their sales to specific communities. Oh. And offers the option to run the platform on their own node, website, and mobile devices, which is coming soon. TM. It actually says soon, TM. But if you don't if you don't get the joke, look up Butterfly Labs. Quote, the Plebeian app is proud to announce the launch of its minimum viable product, that's the MVP, a decentralized marketplace and community builder that empowers individuals to sell their value in a peer to peer open marketplace.
After 4 years of development and multiple pivots, the Plebeian app has settled on Nostr to demonstrate a proof of concept that is poised to disrupt traditional commerce, announced the project. In a press release shared with no bullshit bitcoin, the Plebeian app outlined its vision to become more than a traditional marketplace by creating a circular economic community builder, empowering individuals to contribute to their communities both online and offline. The project is set to deliver infrastructure for merchants to dedicate a portion of sales to communities like open sats, local farms, schools, or builders, buyers to support both merchants and communities in fostering connections and cooperation.
Quote, the team behind Plebeian would like to extend their gratitude to Mohammed, Schlauskwab, sorry, hold on. Gazooz, I guess. Zaza Wow Wow. Bitcoin, Becca, and Bitco who worked tirelessly to bring this project to life. For for for for further information or inquiries about Plebeon, please contact chief monkey or join the projects telegram group. And if you guys wanna do that, this article will be linked in the show notes. So all you have to do is look for the nobsbitcoindot comforward/plebianapparticle that will that link, it'll be a URL. It will be in the show. When you open that link, you'll get this story. And if you scroll down, you will be able to contact chiefmonkey directly or get into their Telegram group directly.
Okay. So here's the key features. Listen up. Nostr native. Publish your items directly to millions of customers on the Nostr protocol. Sell your products in time. You could upload photos, give them a price, sell locally or globally based on your choice. Also suitable for professional services, coders, electricians, advisors, trainers, etcetera. And etcetera should mean, do you got a gooder service? Then get on plebian.market, please. You can customize the design with your brand. You can promote anything worldwide. You can have multiple product type options, secure p two p auctions without any intermediary. So they apparently have auctions too. This is cool. Sell online or in your meat store, and they don't mean buying ribs. They mean, like, your actual physical place of business. We used to call it brick and mortar, but now it's meat space.
Integrate your point of sale and shipping methods directly in. Wow. Integrate your point of sale and shipping methods. What if your point of sale isn't integratable like you take Visa? You're not I don't know. That's gonna be interesting to find out. Providing a Bitcoin on chain address, you can connect your lightning wallet, well, better, generate and redeem eCash tokens so they've integrated eCash. That's a big deal. They didn't even wait to be asked. They said, you know what? The so this is the first instance that I've seen of something like this that just went ahead and said, eCash is already there. You ain't gotta ask us. You don't have to, you know, call up chief monkey and whine and cry and moan about the fact that eCash isn't there. ECash is already there.
You can receive noster zaps for your products and notes. Future plans for plebian.market include a plugin marketplace, a theme marketplace, so if you want like a circus theme, and the ability to push your content to every Nostr client. Do you want more? Subscribe and get no bullshit good morning report straight to your mailbox and no bullshit bitcoin on noster. That's one of the best ways that I get news on noster and bitcoin is by subscribing to the no bullshit bitcoin newsletter. So plebeian.market is a lot more than what I was able to bring to you on Friday. Again, if you have a good or a service, go to plebian.market.
Go to plebian.market. In fact, I just had a thought that maybe what I'll start doing is start selecting, like, one of the vendors on plebian.market as the circle p vendor of the day or possibly showcase the whole thing for a week. And that way, I get the word about plebian.marketout out as well as the actual artist or person that has a good or service for sale on that website. Because the circle p is also about trying to do what it can to generate a Bitcoin circular economy. Have you heard of Doge? Have you heard the good word of Doge? The Department of Governmental Efficiency. Well, the head of Doge, Elon Musk says that Trump should not pardon Roger Verr because he's not a US citizen.
What do you think about that? Now if I was a left handed lunatic liberal, I'd automatically rip into the fact that this dude is obviously a complete asshole. He is a complete asshole. But he's a complete dick just honestly, on this one point. Okay. On he's a dick on a lot of things. But I only care about this one thing. And I don't even like Roger Ver. I don't think he's a very nice person. I think he's kind of slimy. And I think he's always been a really slimy salesman. And just because he did a lot for Bitcoin in the past, doesn't mean that we owe him anything other than this. Elon Musk shouldn't be saying shit about whether or not the president of the United States pardons somebody or not.
This is ridiculous. Considering that in case you did not know, Elon Musk is not a native United States citizen. He was not born in the United States. He's South African. He got his citizenship later. So do I do I get to start telling miss mister Musk what he should do or how he should be treated because I don't think he's an actual true American? Is that what I get to do now? Because he's actually South African by birth. See see how this works? Dude, people in glass houses should not throw rocks. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla SpaceX and The Boring Company, as well as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency among other things, argued that Bitcoin Cash proponent and early Bitcoin investor, Roger Ver, should not be given a presidential pardon.
Quote, Roger Vir gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Vir. Membership has its privileges, he posted on Twitter. Musk's view carries weight on the issue due to his close relationship with Trump. Last week, Trump pardoned Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht. Following Ulbricht's release, some members of the crypto community called for other individuals to be pardoned such as the the developers of Tornado Cash, like Virgil Griffith, who gave a talk about blockchain to North Korea, and Vir over his tax issues. In April of 2024, Vir was arrested in Spain and charged with alleged mail fraud, tax evasion, and filing false tax returns.
Vir allegedly concealed Bitcoin ownership from the United States Internal Revenue Service and caused the purported loss of $48,000,000 according to the Department of Justice. Vir claims he has been terrorized by rogue US government agents who hate American freedom, and he's been terrorized for decades. After what he described as clashes with the US government following a political run at the start of the millennium, he left the US in 2006 and renounced his citizenship in 2014. Since then, the US government has relentlessly pursued him with baseless charges of bail fraud, tax evasion, and false filings, retaliation for his outspoken criticism, he claims, arguing that he followed legal advice in filing his exit taxes.
While Ulbricht was quite widely supported across the crypto community, Vir is more of a controversial figure. Having strongly backed the push for Bitcoin Cash, he fell out of favor with many in the Bitcoin community. Quote, you aren't an American anymore. Remember when you renounced your citizenship? Wrote Casa CSO Jameson Lop on Twitter, echoing Musk's comment. Oh, man. I gotta pause there and, I gotta pour one out for Jameson Jameson Lop's ethics. I'd completely disagree with mister Lop. I think mister Lop is being shortsighted. Is mister Lop a better programmer than I am? Yeah. Is he a better thinker? Yeah. Probably.
Is he, been done more for Bitcoin than I ever probably will in my entire life? Yeah. Most definitely. Does that make him right on Roger Ver? Fuck no. I don't care if Roger Ver denounced his citizenship. I don't care. We under what planet are we living on where Jameson Lop enters the fray on what or what not should be afforded to mister Vir. The dude is being the dude is being persecuted for not giving the United States its money, And yet, the guy one of the guys that is close to Trump and one of the guys that's closest to the fire of Bitcoin, Jameson Lop, are both saying, well, you're not a United States citizen. Okay. Well, which is it?
If he's not a United States citizen, then these charges should be dropped and all of his money should be given back to him. Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. That's not the case? Well, then is I mean, is he a citizen or is he not a citizen? This is not only confusing, it demonstrates the absolute liquidity of just how rigged this system is against all United States citizens. In fact, if you're a French citizen and you bail out, you probably get treated the same way from France even though you haven't been a French citizen for 25 years. Because we all treat everybody like crap.
Nobody has any willingness to go out on a limb for somebody like Roger Ver. I don't even like the guy. I think he's slimy. I think he is ethically challenged. I think he's got the morality of an ant. But that does not mean that we in the United States can sit here saying, well, you either are a United States citizen, you all owe us all this money, or you are not a United States citizen, and all charges are dropped because we can't pursue you. You're not a United States citizen. Do you see the dilemma? Continuing.
Then there are those who have come out strongly in favor of him. Vir, quote, is the victim of a long and reprehensible lawfare campaign going back decades, said Blockchain dotcom cofounder and CEO Peter Smith. Mister president, please bring him home and let this legendary pioneer and investor help make the USA the global leader in crypto whatever, dude. Quote, whatever you think about Roger, you cannot ignore his contributions to early Bitcoin. And you cannot support unjust abuses of power by the United States whether the target is a US citizen or not, said Kraken cofounder and chairman, Jesse Powell, adding, quote, the no citizenship, no pardon rhetoric is disgusting.
Yes. And it's disgusting just on its own merit. Not that it has anything to do with Roger Ver. This could be done to anybody and it would be just as disgusting because it is completely circular illogic. You either are a United States citizen or you are not a United States citizen. You cannot say, hey. You're not a United States citizen, except remember that time when you were? Yeah. We want the money for that. Well, is he a United States citizen right now or not? Because this is when the thing is being done. If you're taking if you're trying to take his money from him right now and put him in jail right now and he's not a United States citizen, then you're going after a foreign national on what charges? Terrorism?
Jesse Powell's 100% correct. This is disgusting. I'm really saddened that Jameson Lop decided to throw his hat in this particular ring Because this is a pig fight in mud. And the only thing that happens when you wrestle with a pig is the pig enjoys getting dirty and you don't. Russia. An energy giant named Rosetti has focused on Bitcoin mining because they're not idiots. Atlas21.com has the story in Russia. Rosetti, which is the country's main electricity grid operator, has announced plans to explore new opportunities in the digital asset sector.
Quote, the Rosetti Group is the largest grid company in Russia and can act as an operator for coordinating the placement of mining infrastructure, end quote. This initiative is part of a broader effort to help Russia's mining sector regulate, regulated by a law signed by Vladimir Putin last August, which authorizes only registered entities and individual entrepreneurs to conduct large scale mining operations. The state sorry. The state owned company's plan includes optimizing existing energy facilities that operate below their maximum capacity while also significantly increasing both tariff revenues and tax contributions.
Rosetti confirmed that it already possesses the necessary technical infrastructure, including switching equipment to managing mining facility loads. The company is currently assessing various aspects of its strategy, including the introduction of a specific tariff structure for miners. However, the project will face some limitations due to the electricity shortage. The Russian government has banned mining in several regions from January 1, 2025 until March 15th 2031. Yeah. Well, I don't think they're gonna go that long. Alright. So Rossetti, Russia's largest grid operator.
And maybe they're not the, you know, the the producers of the electricity, but they certainly get it to where it needs to go. At least I that's that's the whole point anyway as to whether or not they do it well. I don't know. I've never lived in Russia. We'll have to ask Snowden about that. But here's the thing. It's this one sentence right here. The state owned company's plan includes optimizing existing energy facilities that operate below their maximum capacity. That is a rebuild. So in Russia, the mere existence of Bitcoin and what Bitcoin has been able to achieve is forcing one of the top 3 most populated countries in the world.
Well, top we'll say top 4. I'll give them top 4. United States, China, India, Russia. Let's go that way. Are going to refit, rebuild, or retroactively refurbish parts of their infrastructure to bring them up to snuff. It's sort of like it's it like we keep talking about how the existence of Bitcoin causes hydroelectric dams to be built. Or the existence of Bitcoin causes stranded energy from already built hydroelectric dams to help get enough money to build out the power infrastructure to build the high tension lines to go from the dam to an actual city where people live because most people don't live by hydroelectric dams.
This is the same thing, only now they're going back and they're looking at their already existing grid infrastructure and saying, with Bitcoin, we can rebuild this. That's what Russia's doing. They're not stupid, and neither is Zap Right. I'm sorry. That's probably really bad. For all the guys in Zap Right that I may have, you know, unintentionally insulted by comparing or or bringing you right next to Russia. I just didn't have any other place to put it. Let's finish out the show with Zaprite launching BTC pay server integration.
Do I need to say it again? Zaprite. There it's I view I I took the 30 day free trial of Zaprite and was able to, like, you know, make invoices. It does your in you know, like, if you have a business and you have to send out invoices, either like you're selling something or you're like I don't know if if, like if I had, sponsors for this show and I was sending them an invoice saying, hey, here's here's how many ads I did for y'all this month. This is what we agreed on. Here's the bill. Zaprite does all that. And it keeps tabs on on all the stuff that you did. So your accounting is like a breeze, man. And it's slick. It works. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. And now they've integrated BTC pay server directly into Zaprite.
Quote, BTC pay integration is now available. Connect your BTC pay server to Zaprite and accept Bitcoin and lightning payments side by side with fiat using your own self hosted Bitcoin infrastructure. Learn how to connect a BTC pay store to Zaprite to receive Bitcoin and lightning payments alongside fiat payments through Zaprite invoices, payment links, proof of sale, ecommerce connections, or the Zaprite API here and here is clearly a link. So what's new? Well, you can connect a BTC pay store and receive payments directly into your BTC pay server wallet and node. They've added notifications.
They've done oh, bank wire transfer connection has been made to be more flexible to cater for wire transfers. The design and layout of the bank wire transfer payment screen has also been updated. There's invitation emails and now has some additional information to the invitation accepted admin email. Removed x authentication for sign ups and logins. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Fucking a. Excellent. That makes me happy that they told Twitter to go pound sand. Removed x authentication for sign ups and login. That is the selling point ladies and gentlemen. Okay. So Zapparite's got BTC paid server.
Russia is not an idiot. They're going to rebuild some of their grid infrastructure because bitcoin. You got Jameson Lop wading into a pig fight in a mud stall over Roger Ver, which I wouldn't waste like I said, I don't like the guy. I wouldn't even waste my breath on the guy. But no. I can't believe Jameson Lop ventured there. And then all the rest of the crap that's happening. The the main takeaway for today is just how weak the western financial markets really are, especially the equities market. I mean, the markets in general is a catch all phrase to me. What do you mean? The bond market? You mean stocks? What do you what what do you mean? Well, it's they're all related to each other. But in this particular case, it's the investors.
Not the markets themselves. Well, actually, it is the markets themselves because the investors are the market. And when when I can just release a press release and say, hey, man, we've, I'm a Chinese company and and ours is faster, better, and cheaper, and have the kind of dumping that we see on the S and P and Nasdaq, that is not a good sign. That means people are nervous. You see it in Bitcoin too. The people that have been buying Bitcoin, they are not the hardcore Bitcoiners. We are already here. It takes years to forge in the fires of God a true dyed in the wool Bitcoiner.
It takes forever. It takes it it literally takes neurons in your head dying. You know, the neurons that are sensitive to a 20% drop. You see it so many times that those neurons stop firing. It takes that and a lot more to forge an actual dyed in the wool Bitcoiner. And the guys that have been coming in over the last 2, maybe 3 years, the guys that were 3 that are 3 years in are almost there. You're almost there. Just hang on a little longer, but the guys that bought 6 months ago, nowhere close. And they're going to cause problems like they're causing, you know, last night and this morning. I don't know what to tell you, but buy the dip, and I'll see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
My my my, it is 10:17 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the 27th day, January. Yes. It is. 2025, And this this is actually episode 1025 of Bitcoin and not not the Friday show. That was episode 1024. Apologies for that particular mistake. As usual, it's Monday. It's micro strategy Monday. So micro strategy is in the news, but for more than just what you think. Yes. Yes. Yes. They are. There's some, some weird well, nah. It's not chicanery, nor is it weirdness. It's just Michael Saylor being Michael Saylor. So, I I I'm gonna try to break it down for you in the words of chat g p t. Yeah. I know. I know.
Trust me. We'll we'll get to it. And then, it clearly clearly all manner of blood just the dam broke. The shining elevator doors opened. And if you get that reference points to you, blood is flowing. And it's not just in Bitcoin. It's all over the markets. And it seems that China may have something to do with that. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about Brian Armstrong because he said something that is the most stupid thing I've ever heard him say. And ladies and gentlemen, that's saying a lot. PlebeChain. We got a write up for, plebeian.market. Not Plebechain. Sorry. Plebeian.market.
We got a full write up on that, and I wanna bring, plebeian.market back to you. I talked about it either Thursday or Friday. I'm pretty sure it was on Thursday. And, some people have have looked at it since since I was able to bring it to you. But, you know, on on the fly, descriptions of something don't really, they're not always effective. So we got a write up here from nobsbitcoin.com and then Elon Musk well said things. And this one, he should not be excused in any way, shape, or form for it. In fact, this this one is rather disgusting. And no, I don't care if he made it. All the people that are losing their minds over this weird Hitler salute, the seagull, the Roman salute, or whatever the hell you wanna call it. That, dude, that is nothing.
It's that's bullshit. I I see people, like, when I see people wave on the street, they just put their hand out and go, like that. It's just like They're not giving the Hitler salute. Okay? I this that is complete garbage. But this one, dude, this one, I when you hear it, you'll understand why I'm a little little on the, on the offense about it. Russia is in the news and Zaprite is in the news, but let's start with a good friend, Michael Saylor. He's such a good friend to all of us. And I guess he's gonna be a better friend to the people that he's gonna sell stuff to. Because Sam Borge from Cointelegraph is telling us and what it sounds to me like is that he's just fabricated a brand new kind of stock for MicroStrategy that he wants to sell to you so that he can buy himself some more Bitcoin, which he did also by the way. Again, like I said, it's MicroStrategy Monday. So, but here's the headline.
MicroStrategy proposes a 2,500,000 share offering to fund Bitcoin purchases. Now, on the surface, okay, that's to be expected. We knew he was gonna do that. But something about this one, I mean, like I said, is like my question becomes, is this new? Is this a new thing that he's doing? I don't know, we'll find out. Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy has proposed a stock offering, to raise cash for general corporate purposes, including acquiring more Bitcoin and signaling its intent to continue accumulating that digital asset. Now here's the rub.
According to a January 27th announcement, MicroStrategy intends to offer 2,500,000 units of its perpetual strike preferred stock, which is a type of stock that has a liquidation preference and pays dividends at a fixed rate. Holders also have the option of converting it into common stock. And according to MicroStrategy, its offering will have a per share liquidation preference of $100 Dividends are payable quarterly beginning on March 31st. Quote, MicroStrategy intends to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of Bitcoin and for working capital, the company said.
In the announcement, MicroStrategy described itself as the world's first and largest Bitcoin Treasury company, signaling that its business intelligence software is no longer its primary business. Well, hell, I've been telling you that shit for 6 months that they were going to back out of the of the whole software issue, and they were going to go right into essentially finance. Just finance whether it's financial products, financial services, financing. I I expect them to start bankrolling other companies in a very VC type fashion anytime soon. But it is it was clear to me 6 months ago, if if not longer than that, that Michael Saylor is basically just he's done.
He's he's done his bit for software's king and country. He's written all the software that he wants to write. He's he's funded all of the software developers that he wants to fund. He's he's built the business around software and he's just bored. He wants something new and shiny and Bitcoin is it, man. And it's gonna be about finance. It's not gonna be about writing software. Will software be involved? Well, of course software is going to be involved, ladies and gentlemen. But that's not going to be the the main push anymore. And I've been telling you that. I've been saying that for a long time. But in its fiscal Q3, the company's revenues declined 10.3% year over year to a measly pittance of $116,100,000.
Its gross profit margin fell to 70.4% from 79.4% for the Q3 of 2023. But nevertheless, MicroStrategy said it achieved a 5.1% Bitcoin yield, a new performance metric for its crypto holdings. And as you might expect, MicroStrategy has intensified its Bitcoin purchases after announcing plans to raise $42,000,000,000 for its digital asset war chest, the so called 21/21 plan, is comprised of $21,000,000,000 in equity and $21,000,000,000 of fixed income securities. The company made one of its largest ever purchases in the lead up to the United States President Donald Trump's inauguration, snatching up 11,000 Bitcoin at an average price of roughly $1,001 per coin.
MicroStrategy's biggest BTC buy occurred in November when it acquired 55,000 coin for roughly $5,400,000,000 Elsewhere, Bitcoin miners appear to be taking a page out of Bitcoin strategies playbook wait. Bitcoin strategies out of the micro strategy playbook by building up their own digital asset stockpile. What is not mentioned in this story is this morning's announcement by MicroStrategy that they have purchased another $1,100,000,000 worth of Bitcoin over the last week at an average price of about $105,000 a coin. And talk about losing your ass on that trade as of this morning because we're at 99,547.
We're going to become extremely efficient at crossing the $100,000 mark per coin. But now now MicroStrategy holds 471,000 BTC. Actually, 471,107. It's almost a palindrome. Michael Sailor, you missed the opportunity. You could have bought enough Bitcoin to have 471,174 Bitcoin. Man, that would have been a hell of a thing, right? Well, this preferred stock thing, they're calling it preferred strike or something like that. In fact, it's got it like, from what I saw, it has its own ticker like STRK, which is not MSTR. So my question becomes because this is what it looks like with a a different ticker symbol altogether is that this is a brand new thing.
It's not MicroStrategy preferred stock class a because that's just MSTR a or or it's not it's not like any kind of other MSTR stock. This is this looks to me like it's brand new. He's just rolling it out and it's completely different. And I asked chatgpt to just read the Tysons Corner Company's, press release and just I literally said, explain this to me like I am 5 years old. And it did. Let's see if you agree with this breakdown. ChatGPT answers me and says, okay. Let's make this really simple. MicroStrategy is like a company selling special tickets called preferred stock to people.
These tickets let people invest in the company and in return, the company promises to pay those people some money later, kind of like, you know, earning an allowance. Here's how it works. Number 1, they're selling 2,500,000 special tickets. Each ticket is worth $100 and will let people earn some extra money over time. Those are called dividends. 2, they want to use the money that they get from selling these special tickets to do really important things like buy more Bitcoin, which is a type of digital money, and run their business. Number 3, the people who buy these tickets can get paid every few months like a small reward for holding the ticket or they can exchange their ticket later for other regular stock in the company.
4, if the company wants to take the tickets back, yes, they can if certain things happen. The company can decide to buy back those tickets from people and give them their money back. Number 5, if something really important happens to the company, the ticket holders can ask the company to buy their tickets back and give them their money plus any rewards they've earned so far. You know, like their allowance. Basically, MicroStrategy is saying, quote, hey, if you give us money now by buying these tickets, we'll make sure you get paid later. And maybe even let you switch those tickets for other cool stuff in the future. I I'm sorry, but I gotta hand it to chatgpt for explaining it like I'm 5. In fact, this I could I could literally use this to explain what micro strategy is doing to a freaking adult.
He's selling special tickets. He's just printing the tickets and selling them. You might you might think that the tone of my voice suggests that I'm angry at Michael Saylor. I'm not. I'm actually kind of bewildered that this guy's got the the cojones, the stones, along with the spine to go along with it to just say, I'm just gonna print golden tickets like freaking Willy Wonka out here. And if you happen to find 1 in your bar of chocolate, I'm gonna give you an allowance, plus a little bit of money on the side. And bam. Next thing you know, all the chocolate bars are sold out.
Because everybody's trying to go find out how Willy Wonka makes his damn chocolate. It's amazing. It's all it's like PT Barnum. You know, like he PT Barnum was so successful. Wait. And and this is before the whole circus thing. Alright? He was always PT Barnum was always a showman. And he had, like, basically, a giant sideshow before sideshows were a thing because the circus really didn't exist in in in the modern format until PT Barnum teamed up with a guy named Bailey. Right? PT Barnum and bay or Barnum and Bailey's flying circuit. They whatever.
But he had this show with oddities, like, you know, the mustached woman. It was a sideshow. It was essentially the sideshow. But nobody would leave because they were captivated by what they were watching. They couldn't tear themselves away. That's how successful PT Barnum was. And he was so successful that he had to get these people out of his damn show so that he could sell tickets to the other people that hadn't seen the show yet, that he said, at the very last, he put up a sign that says, see the egress. Well, nobody apparently knew what the hell egress meant back in those days because it meant exit. And once they were out, there was no doorknob on the other side where they could get back in, not without buying another ticket.
That man was brilliant. And honestly, I'm I'm captivated by what Michael Saylor's doing here. And if you're not, or if you're angry at him or whatever, I I get it, but honestly, you you gotta have you gotta stay it back and just have a little bit of awe. Just look, he's just doing what all the rest of these jokers do, except he's almost it's almost as if he's like, I'm just going to bear it all. All we're doing is printing stock that mean nothing. We're selling it to you because we think we're going to be more valuable in the future. It is gambling.
And that's all it ever was. And the people that really got hung out to dry in their gambling addiction, boy, they saw that shit happen on Friday and definitely, definitely in pre market and after the market opened today on Wall Street. Why? Because China jumped out of the closet and said, boom. US stock markets tumble as investors worry about deep seek. This is from nationalpublicradio.org. Yeah. No. It's NPR, but let's see what these clown this clown show has to say about the other clown show. China may be about to burst Silicon Valley's AI bubble and Wall Street is freaking out. US tech stocks plunged on Monday amid a wider market sell off. And the culprit?
DeepSeek. A Chinese artificial intelligence company that last week, which would have been Friday, introduced a new and low cost model into the red hot AI tech market. DeepSeek on Monday morning became the most downloaded free app on Apple's US App Store, dethroning OpenAI's Chat GPT. Shares of NVIDIA, the chipmaker whose AI technology has made it into one of the most valuable companies in the world dropped more than 13% by late morning on Monday. Rival chip companies including ARM and Broadcom also plunged, dragging down the major indices along with them. The tech heavy Nasdaq fell almost 600 points. Oh my god. We're all gonna die. Or nearly 3%.
3%. Come talk to me when you have to do it 20%, like 4 times a year. Alright? You can come talk to me then. Anyway, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, and other big tech companies have poured 1,000,000,000 of dollars into building up their AI capabilities fueling a Silicon Valley arms race. But now, investors are shitting the bed and calling these pricey investments into question. Now they they didn't actually say shitting the bed on NPR, but that's what happened. DeepSeq says it cost less. Now, here's the rub. They say, DeepSeq says this Chinese company is telling us that it cost less to train its models and its open source AI assistant uses less advanced chips than rivals models do.
At least investors will soon get to the grill big tech or let me do that one again. At least investors will soon get to grill big tech companies about deep seek and their overall AI strategies. 4 of the so called magnificent seven tech stocks, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla, are all due to report quarterly results this week. Oh, joy. And I if I if I'm correct, I think, futures options on Bitcoin expire on Friday. And that's not helping the Bitcoin price. It's always the end of the month. If I remember right, it's always the last Friday of the month. So even if the the if even if the month ends on a Tuesday, then that means the Friday before is when these futures options expiry come up. So that's not helping. It's never helped. I don't like derivatives because of this kind of crap. It's where everybody's, like, just want they just wanna cash in and go get some hookers and some blow and go have fun, and they do it at our expense by, you know, having lettuce hands. In either event, here's the thing.
Everything shit the bed today. Altcoins got wiped out. If you're an altcoin holder, dude, you you need to stop doing that because this is just going to continue to happen to you. So cash out for Bitcoin and just ride that wave because at least you've only got one wave to ride. But everything, everything is in free was in free fall this morning. I mean, every I'm looking at future CNBC Futures and Commodities, which we'll get to here in a little bit, and everything is red except for sugar and coffee. That's it. Oh oh, wait. No. I'm sorry. Oh, the USD Japan trading pair futures are basically up about a point. It's about the only time I ever see it in the green. Everything else is shitting the bed because we're trusting that a company from another company country that we're rivals with is telling the truth. There's no proof.
Nobody knows what the hell deep seek is. Nobody's ever heard of deep seek before. There's not been a white paper presented on the tech as far as I know about this thing we call deep seek. No. No. No. No no. Western investors are losing their minds, they're setting their hair on fire, they're lowering their britches without getting into bed, and they're crapping all over it simply because some people said a thing. They didn't prove it. They didn't show it. They didn't do nothing. They just said it. That's how weak these markets are. That's how weak this is.
Because we just took it at face value that it's cheaper to train deep seek. Have you even used it? I first of all, I ain't gonna download it because I don't want that Chinese crap on my phone, but even if I did, I mean, it's it. I don't like well, actually that that's not that's a non sequitur. It just doesn't even make sense because I'm never gonna get it, so I'm probably never gonna be able to find out if DeepSeq is actually a good AI, much less an AI assistant because that's what they're saying that it is. Like, it will schedule reservations for you or something like that. But because it's cheaper to train, quote unquote, and uses, quote unquote, cheaper technology, everybody's sold.
I mean, the paper hands out there are the it is a house of cards that's holding up all financial markets whether it's AI, whether it's futures commodities. It doesn't matter what it is. This is all paper. And the paper hands have been ruling the roost for 70 years. And it's all gonna come crashing down at one point or another. All somebody has to do is say the right sentence about the right thing from the right place and you can kiss all that goodbye. It's just going to go south. So what is the response from shitcoiners? Well, to make a fake deep seek token, of course.
Because they do have one. And it hit a $48,000,000 market cap amid the Chinese AI app hype. This is Yohan Yun from Cointelegraph. A Solana based token named after the Chinese app, DeepSeek, briefly surged past a $48,000,000 market capitalization on January 27th fueled by $150,000,000 in trading according to Solana token data aggregator, Birdeye. Blockchain records show the token was created on January 4th, weeks before DeepSeek's app made headlines by topping the US Apple App Store rankings. Did you did did you did you hear hear what I said, right? Deep seek, the token, was created on January 4th.
What do you wanna bet that the people that made this announcement about deep seek are really just shitcoiners, but this time they're actually marketing their shitcoin from a different direction, from a different vector, in a completely different sector of the world so as not to bring attention on the fact that they have yet just one more shit coin. Well, I don't know what the chances of that are. Maybe Polymarket will have rankings on it, but I'm not gonna check. Let's continue. A second fake token was also capitalized upon the deep seek hype briefly reaching $13,000,000 of market cap with a mere 28,500,000 in trading volume. It has fallen to 8,600,000 since.
DeepSeek has denied involvement with any crypto tokens warning users about potential scams. Oh, so let's see. I spin up a coin. I get a whole bunch of marketing stuff in place so that I can release a press release on a particular day. Then I release that. All world western markets shit the bed all at once. And then I start making statements that I had nothing to do with it even though the token was created on January 4th, almost two and a half weeks ago, but I had nothing bullshit. Sorry. The AI app's rise has dominated crypto chatter with analysts suggesting its success contributed to sending Bitcoin below a $100,000 for the first time since US President Donald Trump took office. What? A week ago?
Are you serious? This is the crap I have to put up with, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, the abscessant has been viewed as a challenge to US dominance in AI shaking financial markets. Meanwhile, Trump signed an executive order on January 23rd aimed at preserving US leadership in AI and calling for systems, quote, free from ideological bias or engineering social agendas, end quote. Ironically, Trump's own official Trump coin launched on January 18th and the subsequent debut of another token named after first lady Melania Trump triggered a surge in fraudulent copycats.
Yeah. Well, that's what we do. That that that's what that's what the cryptocurrency industry does, Is it lies, it cheats, it steals people's hard earned money right out of their pockets by promising them nothing. And that's again, I got to go back to Michael Saylor. And I wanna make it clear, I'm not angry at Michael Saylor. I I kinda stand in awe because so far, he's actually been able to deliver on most of his promises. He has literally created quite a bit of investor value simply by doing what he's doing, and that's selling nothing and converting it into Bitcoin. And it's amazing to watch.
And I and I I I hope it I hope it continues to work, but it's the same thing here. And for this Chinese company to preemptively say, oh, we had nothing to do with it. We it's not us. Yeah, right. I call it bullshit on this entire thing. First, because the the the mere issuance of or utterance of these particular sets of sentences did this kind of financial damage to the West is frightening. It's almost as if let's say we were going to war with a country, and we thought that we had the baddest ass army, navy, air force, and marines, and coast guard, and you name it. We have the kick most kick butt weapons. They could hit anything from miles away, completely automated.
We got drones going everywhere, and and and the whole thing brought to its knees because some dude stands out there on the front lines and pushes a button and causes some kind of massive EMP pulse to not only propagate across the battlefield and hit near term targets, but somehow propagate a message through the unified communication systems of the United States military and drops everything right to its knees with the push of a button. How would how would you feel if you were a bystander on that battlefield and watch that happen? Would you have confidence, you being a United States citizen, just watching this crippling ass action from no more than a push of a button, would you have confidence that you're going to be able to retain your property when the Chinese march over the hill? Because that would be that would be next. Right?
Now I'm not a fan of China in case you haven't been listening to the show. I'm I I don't hate them. I mean, the Chinese people are just fine. It's their government that that sucks, and I'd say the same thing about our own federal government. But you wouldn't have any confidence at all. And yet I guarantee you 3 days from now, before the end of this trading session is over, in western markets, this will all be forgotten. Unless it gets worse, in which case, of course, it won't get forgotten. I don't actually think it will. I think it'll be a blip and I think everything will keep on riding just as high as it has been. And that should scare the piss out of everybody.
Being able to make a statement and bring Western markets to its knees because we just say, hey, it's cheaper. Hey, ours is better. Without any proof whatsoever, that that's ugly. And it's not going to get better anytime soon with people like Brian Armstrong walking around. Why? Because you thought the way Coinbase listed shitcoins was bad before. Oh, Nelly. You ain't seen nothing yet. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong urges a rethink of exchange listings. Connor Sefton, decrypt, writing this one. Brian Armstrong is calling for regulatory flexibility as his exchange battles to keep up with the deluge of new altcoins.
What did I tell you? This is gonna make 2017 look like a cakewalk. On x, formerly Twitter, the CEO of Coinbase said 1,000,000 tokens are now launching every week, meaning evaluating each one by 1 is no longer feasible. What could he have in mind? Armstrong confirmed that the platform is reviewing its listing process, which sees digital assets undergo rigorous vetting before being made available. And I call BS on that too. At present, he said, a dedicated group is responsible for assessing altcoins against legal, compliance, and technical security standards. But in the future, Armstrong wants to adopt a different approach, meaning all tokens would be allowed by default.
Pausing to let it sink in. Because that last sentence, if you didn't hear it yeah, let me repeat it. In the future, Brian Armstrong wants to adopt a different approach to listing tokens, meaning that all tokens would be allowed to be listed by default. By default, I can just come up with scary China AI coin and it will automatically be listed. No vetting. No nothing. I told you. You thought 2017 was bad? Man, that was just that was practice. That was training day. That was nothing. Nothing. This is the rumble in the jungle. This is Ollie versus Foreman. This right here is going to wipe people's wealth out.
What do Bitcoiners have to do as usual? Wait until it's all fucking over. Quote, regulators need to understand that applying for approval for each one of these coins is totally infeasible at this point as well. Not all crypto executives agree with Armstrong's stance. Danny Scott, CEO of the British Bitcoin only exchange, CoinCorner, replied to ask, quote, at what point do you guys need a gambling license? Well, because Danny Scott knows what he's talking about. Expanding upon what he meant, Scott told Decrypt, quote, it's Coinbase admitting they just want to list anything and everything, no care for the quality, no care for their customers, getting rugged, knowing that alts all trend down against Bitcoin over the years.
And then he doubled down on the gambling comparison. He said, quote, there is now more skill in picking a horse at the races than picking which meme token will pump next. It's literally gambling at this point and Coinbase wanting to list more is only heightening the problem, Scott added. Prominent crypto critic, Peter Schiff. Oh, this will be good because I'm probably going to agree 100% with Peter Schiff telling Armstrong quote, so much for the idea of limited supply. The inflation rate of digital tokens is off the charts. Almost all these tokens are virtually identical to Bitcoin in all the ways that really matter including a hard cap on their individual supply. Yeah. Well, that's where me and me and Peter drift apart. He he's got that last part wrong.
But I understand where he's coming from. The ground swell of tokens hitting the market has raised fears that alt season, which sees smaller cryptocurrencies outperform Bitcoin, may fail to materialize. On chain analysis analyst, Ali Martinez, pointed out that there are now more than holy shit. There's more than 36,400,000 altcoins compared with fewer than 3,000 during the Fane Bull Run-in the late 2017 and early 2018 period. Oh my god. With such massive supply, the market has changed significantly, he wrote. Well, no. Not really. It's just more stupid.
A lot more stupid. 3000 altcoins. I remember that number. I remember that number. 3 it was like 3,867. I remember that being like the total number of listings on the aforementioned Coinbase. And we were given we were given Brian Armstrong, you know, mega amounts of shit back then. 36,400,000 altcoins. Brian's saying there's a 1000000 altcoins wanting to be listed per week, and he just wants to list them by default. How about this, Brian? How about nobody's listed by default? How about nobody's listed by default? How about that?
And that and that you just get your people to do their job. And if you can only list 1 shit coin per week, then by all means, so be it. But this notion of allowing anybody to list anything is going to end badly. Let's run the numbers and see just how bad it does end. CNBC, Fetch and Commodities, p d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d. Everybody's gonna die. Oil. West Texas Intermediate is down 2.4%. See? Even the commodities are getting hosed. 2.4% of the downside pushes West Texas Intermediate down to $72.87 a barrel. Brent Norci is also down over 2 points to 76.79. Natural gas, dude, digging for hell. 9.88% in the red. That brings it to $3 62¢ per 1,000 cubic feet. And gasoline is down 1 a quarter, but still just a hair over $2 per gallon.
Gold down 1 a half percent. Silver down 2.2. Platinum is down over 1%. Copper is down almost 2%. And palladium making sure everybody goes to hell in a hand basket at 3.73% to the downside. It's futures in ag is still looking pretty much red. Only coffee is the winner. 1.01% to the upside. Biggest loser is cocoa. Chocolate is down 1 a third. I got live cattle, however, it's actually up a half. And lean hogs saving the day. There's a ray of sunshine at 1.79% in the green for the for the swine, but feeder cattle are down almost a half. And here it comes, legacy or leg legacy equity indices.
Dow is up a quarter, but the S and P is down 1.76%. Nasdaq says, Sayonara, baby. It's down 3.2%, and the S and P mini is down 1 a third. Dude, retirees just getting wiped out. And the Bitcoiners getting wiped out too. We are down to $99,000 even a coin. That is $1,960,000,000,000 of market cap, and we can only get 36.2 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,815,691.88 of. And average fees per block are low. Like, really low. 0.04 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis of which there are only 29 blocks of.
And they are carrying under 100,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 3. Hash rate on 1 week rolling average is still pretty good. 778.5 x the hashes per second. And from Kafir, the civil asset forfeiture reserve episode of Bitcoin and I got anonymous. 3,333 sat says you're talking about the movie purge, homeboy. Yeah. That that's exactly what I was thinking of. I still have actually yet to watch that movie though. Lupin with a thousand says, thank you, sir. CAF is unworthy of civilized society. Any thoughts on whether this is constitutional at all? What? Civil asset forfeiture? No. It's not constitutional.
There's nothing in the constitution that says the government can take my shit. In fact, there's an entire page that was attached to the constitution called the bill of rights that specifically outlined what the government cannot do. And take my shit is actually in there. They can't take my guns. They can't take my right to free speech. They can't take my papers. They can't quarter people in my house, which basically means taking my house. They can't do any of this. Civil asset forfeiture is unconstitutional, and yet here we all are, basically, with our thumbs up our asses watching the government go to wonder what they're gonna do next.
Assholes. God's death with 537 sat says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And he does it again with 537, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Then BTC master coming out of the woodwork with a 121 says, all [email protected]. And Pai's finishing finishing us out at a 100. Satoshi says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. And that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Plebeon App launches MVP of Plebeon dot market platform. Alright. So Friday or Thursday, I brought to you plebian.market. And I also brought to you Isabella Art.
Iso Labelle sorry. Iso Labelle Art. That's, an Italian artist who or well, he's in Italy anyway. That's where he says he's based. He's very very good and he sells his art on plebian.market. He also you can also get it at isolabel.art, I believe. I think that's his actual website. Anyway, let's get into the what this plebian.market thing is. Where does it come from? Who's doing it? Let's find out more. A hell of a lot more than what I gave you on Friday. Plebian.market is the first instance of the Plebian app dedicated to goods and services catering to the Bitcoin and Nostra communities.
Users are invited to explore the platform, add products, create stalls, buy presents, and you can do it all for the Satoshis. Plebeon dot market is an open source decentralized marketplace for selling goods and services for Sats. It allows merchants to dedicate a percentage of their sales to specific communities. Oh. And offers the option to run the platform on their own node, website, and mobile devices, which is coming soon. TM. It actually says soon, TM. But if you don't if you don't get the joke, look up Butterfly Labs. Quote, the Plebeian app is proud to announce the launch of its minimum viable product, that's the MVP, a decentralized marketplace and community builder that empowers individuals to sell their value in a peer to peer open marketplace.
After 4 years of development and multiple pivots, the Plebeian app has settled on Nostr to demonstrate a proof of concept that is poised to disrupt traditional commerce, announced the project. In a press release shared with no bullshit bitcoin, the Plebeian app outlined its vision to become more than a traditional marketplace by creating a circular economic community builder, empowering individuals to contribute to their communities both online and offline. The project is set to deliver infrastructure for merchants to dedicate a portion of sales to communities like open sats, local farms, schools, or builders, buyers to support both merchants and communities in fostering connections and cooperation.
Quote, the team behind Plebeian would like to extend their gratitude to Mohammed, Schlauskwab, sorry, hold on. Gazooz, I guess. Zaza Wow Wow. Bitcoin, Becca, and Bitco who worked tirelessly to bring this project to life. For for for for further information or inquiries about Plebeon, please contact chief monkey or join the projects telegram group. And if you guys wanna do that, this article will be linked in the show notes. So all you have to do is look for the nobsbitcoindot comforward/plebianapparticle that will that link, it'll be a URL. It will be in the show. When you open that link, you'll get this story. And if you scroll down, you will be able to contact chiefmonkey directly or get into their Telegram group directly.
Okay. So here's the key features. Listen up. Nostr native. Publish your items directly to millions of customers on the Nostr protocol. Sell your products in time. You could upload photos, give them a price, sell locally or globally based on your choice. Also suitable for professional services, coders, electricians, advisors, trainers, etcetera. And etcetera should mean, do you got a gooder service? Then get on plebian.market, please. You can customize the design with your brand. You can promote anything worldwide. You can have multiple product type options, secure p two p auctions without any intermediary. So they apparently have auctions too. This is cool. Sell online or in your meat store, and they don't mean buying ribs. They mean, like, your actual physical place of business. We used to call it brick and mortar, but now it's meat space.
Integrate your point of sale and shipping methods directly in. Wow. Integrate your point of sale and shipping methods. What if your point of sale isn't integratable like you take Visa? You're not I don't know. That's gonna be interesting to find out. Providing a Bitcoin on chain address, you can connect your lightning wallet, well, better, generate and redeem eCash tokens so they've integrated eCash. That's a big deal. They didn't even wait to be asked. They said, you know what? The so this is the first instance that I've seen of something like this that just went ahead and said, eCash is already there. You ain't gotta ask us. You don't have to, you know, call up chief monkey and whine and cry and moan about the fact that eCash isn't there. ECash is already there.
You can receive noster zaps for your products and notes. Future plans for plebian.market include a plugin marketplace, a theme marketplace, so if you want like a circus theme, and the ability to push your content to every Nostr client. Do you want more? Subscribe and get no bullshit good morning report straight to your mailbox and no bullshit bitcoin on noster. That's one of the best ways that I get news on noster and bitcoin is by subscribing to the no bullshit bitcoin newsletter. So plebeian.market is a lot more than what I was able to bring to you on Friday. Again, if you have a good or a service, go to plebian.market.
Go to plebian.market. In fact, I just had a thought that maybe what I'll start doing is start selecting, like, one of the vendors on plebian.market as the circle p vendor of the day or possibly showcase the whole thing for a week. And that way, I get the word about plebian.marketout out as well as the actual artist or person that has a good or service for sale on that website. Because the circle p is also about trying to do what it can to generate a Bitcoin circular economy. Have you heard of Doge? Have you heard the good word of Doge? The Department of Governmental Efficiency. Well, the head of Doge, Elon Musk says that Trump should not pardon Roger Verr because he's not a US citizen.
What do you think about that? Now if I was a left handed lunatic liberal, I'd automatically rip into the fact that this dude is obviously a complete asshole. He is a complete asshole. But he's a complete dick just honestly, on this one point. Okay. On he's a dick on a lot of things. But I only care about this one thing. And I don't even like Roger Ver. I don't think he's a very nice person. I think he's kind of slimy. And I think he's always been a really slimy salesman. And just because he did a lot for Bitcoin in the past, doesn't mean that we owe him anything other than this. Elon Musk shouldn't be saying shit about whether or not the president of the United States pardons somebody or not.
This is ridiculous. Considering that in case you did not know, Elon Musk is not a native United States citizen. He was not born in the United States. He's South African. He got his citizenship later. So do I do I get to start telling miss mister Musk what he should do or how he should be treated because I don't think he's an actual true American? Is that what I get to do now? Because he's actually South African by birth. See see how this works? Dude, people in glass houses should not throw rocks. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla SpaceX and The Boring Company, as well as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency among other things, argued that Bitcoin Cash proponent and early Bitcoin investor, Roger Ver, should not be given a presidential pardon.
Quote, Roger Vir gave up his US citizenship. No pardon for Vir. Membership has its privileges, he posted on Twitter. Musk's view carries weight on the issue due to his close relationship with Trump. Last week, Trump pardoned Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht. Following Ulbricht's release, some members of the crypto community called for other individuals to be pardoned such as the the developers of Tornado Cash, like Virgil Griffith, who gave a talk about blockchain to North Korea, and Vir over his tax issues. In April of 2024, Vir was arrested in Spain and charged with alleged mail fraud, tax evasion, and filing false tax returns.
Vir allegedly concealed Bitcoin ownership from the United States Internal Revenue Service and caused the purported loss of $48,000,000 according to the Department of Justice. Vir claims he has been terrorized by rogue US government agents who hate American freedom, and he's been terrorized for decades. After what he described as clashes with the US government following a political run at the start of the millennium, he left the US in 2006 and renounced his citizenship in 2014. Since then, the US government has relentlessly pursued him with baseless charges of bail fraud, tax evasion, and false filings, retaliation for his outspoken criticism, he claims, arguing that he followed legal advice in filing his exit taxes.
While Ulbricht was quite widely supported across the crypto community, Vir is more of a controversial figure. Having strongly backed the push for Bitcoin Cash, he fell out of favor with many in the Bitcoin community. Quote, you aren't an American anymore. Remember when you renounced your citizenship? Wrote Casa CSO Jameson Lop on Twitter, echoing Musk's comment. Oh, man. I gotta pause there and, I gotta pour one out for Jameson Jameson Lop's ethics. I'd completely disagree with mister Lop. I think mister Lop is being shortsighted. Is mister Lop a better programmer than I am? Yeah. Is he a better thinker? Yeah. Probably.
Is he, been done more for Bitcoin than I ever probably will in my entire life? Yeah. Most definitely. Does that make him right on Roger Ver? Fuck no. I don't care if Roger Ver denounced his citizenship. I don't care. We under what planet are we living on where Jameson Lop enters the fray on what or what not should be afforded to mister Vir. The dude is being the dude is being persecuted for not giving the United States its money, And yet, the guy one of the guys that is close to Trump and one of the guys that's closest to the fire of Bitcoin, Jameson Lop, are both saying, well, you're not a United States citizen. Okay. Well, which is it?
If he's not a United States citizen, then these charges should be dropped and all of his money should be given back to him. Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. That's not the case? Well, then is I mean, is he a citizen or is he not a citizen? This is not only confusing, it demonstrates the absolute liquidity of just how rigged this system is against all United States citizens. In fact, if you're a French citizen and you bail out, you probably get treated the same way from France even though you haven't been a French citizen for 25 years. Because we all treat everybody like crap.
Nobody has any willingness to go out on a limb for somebody like Roger Ver. I don't even like the guy. I think he's slimy. I think he is ethically challenged. I think he's got the morality of an ant. But that does not mean that we in the United States can sit here saying, well, you either are a United States citizen, you all owe us all this money, or you are not a United States citizen, and all charges are dropped because we can't pursue you. You're not a United States citizen. Do you see the dilemma? Continuing.
Then there are those who have come out strongly in favor of him. Vir, quote, is the victim of a long and reprehensible lawfare campaign going back decades, said Blockchain dotcom cofounder and CEO Peter Smith. Mister president, please bring him home and let this legendary pioneer and investor help make the USA the global leader in crypto whatever, dude. Quote, whatever you think about Roger, you cannot ignore his contributions to early Bitcoin. And you cannot support unjust abuses of power by the United States whether the target is a US citizen or not, said Kraken cofounder and chairman, Jesse Powell, adding, quote, the no citizenship, no pardon rhetoric is disgusting.
Yes. And it's disgusting just on its own merit. Not that it has anything to do with Roger Ver. This could be done to anybody and it would be just as disgusting because it is completely circular illogic. You either are a United States citizen or you are not a United States citizen. You cannot say, hey. You're not a United States citizen, except remember that time when you were? Yeah. We want the money for that. Well, is he a United States citizen right now or not? Because this is when the thing is being done. If you're taking if you're trying to take his money from him right now and put him in jail right now and he's not a United States citizen, then you're going after a foreign national on what charges? Terrorism?
Jesse Powell's 100% correct. This is disgusting. I'm really saddened that Jameson Lop decided to throw his hat in this particular ring Because this is a pig fight in mud. And the only thing that happens when you wrestle with a pig is the pig enjoys getting dirty and you don't. Russia. An energy giant named Rosetti has focused on Bitcoin mining because they're not idiots. Atlas21.com has the story in Russia. Rosetti, which is the country's main electricity grid operator, has announced plans to explore new opportunities in the digital asset sector.
Quote, the Rosetti Group is the largest grid company in Russia and can act as an operator for coordinating the placement of mining infrastructure, end quote. This initiative is part of a broader effort to help Russia's mining sector regulate, regulated by a law signed by Vladimir Putin last August, which authorizes only registered entities and individual entrepreneurs to conduct large scale mining operations. The state sorry. The state owned company's plan includes optimizing existing energy facilities that operate below their maximum capacity while also significantly increasing both tariff revenues and tax contributions.
Rosetti confirmed that it already possesses the necessary technical infrastructure, including switching equipment to managing mining facility loads. The company is currently assessing various aspects of its strategy, including the introduction of a specific tariff structure for miners. However, the project will face some limitations due to the electricity shortage. The Russian government has banned mining in several regions from January 1, 2025 until March 15th 2031. Yeah. Well, I don't think they're gonna go that long. Alright. So Rossetti, Russia's largest grid operator.
And maybe they're not the, you know, the the producers of the electricity, but they certainly get it to where it needs to go. At least I that's that's the whole point anyway as to whether or not they do it well. I don't know. I've never lived in Russia. We'll have to ask Snowden about that. But here's the thing. It's this one sentence right here. The state owned company's plan includes optimizing existing energy facilities that operate below their maximum capacity. That is a rebuild. So in Russia, the mere existence of Bitcoin and what Bitcoin has been able to achieve is forcing one of the top 3 most populated countries in the world.
Well, top we'll say top 4. I'll give them top 4. United States, China, India, Russia. Let's go that way. Are going to refit, rebuild, or retroactively refurbish parts of their infrastructure to bring them up to snuff. It's sort of like it's it like we keep talking about how the existence of Bitcoin causes hydroelectric dams to be built. Or the existence of Bitcoin causes stranded energy from already built hydroelectric dams to help get enough money to build out the power infrastructure to build the high tension lines to go from the dam to an actual city where people live because most people don't live by hydroelectric dams.
This is the same thing, only now they're going back and they're looking at their already existing grid infrastructure and saying, with Bitcoin, we can rebuild this. That's what Russia's doing. They're not stupid, and neither is Zap Right. I'm sorry. That's probably really bad. For all the guys in Zap Right that I may have, you know, unintentionally insulted by comparing or or bringing you right next to Russia. I just didn't have any other place to put it. Let's finish out the show with Zaprite launching BTC pay server integration.
Do I need to say it again? Zaprite. There it's I view I I took the 30 day free trial of Zaprite and was able to, like, you know, make invoices. It does your in you know, like, if you have a business and you have to send out invoices, either like you're selling something or you're like I don't know if if, like if I had, sponsors for this show and I was sending them an invoice saying, hey, here's here's how many ads I did for y'all this month. This is what we agreed on. Here's the bill. Zaprite does all that. And it keeps tabs on on all the stuff that you did. So your accounting is like a breeze, man. And it's slick. It works. It's wonderful. It's beautiful. And now they've integrated BTC pay server directly into Zaprite.
Quote, BTC pay integration is now available. Connect your BTC pay server to Zaprite and accept Bitcoin and lightning payments side by side with fiat using your own self hosted Bitcoin infrastructure. Learn how to connect a BTC pay store to Zaprite to receive Bitcoin and lightning payments alongside fiat payments through Zaprite invoices, payment links, proof of sale, ecommerce connections, or the Zaprite API here and here is clearly a link. So what's new? Well, you can connect a BTC pay store and receive payments directly into your BTC pay server wallet and node. They've added notifications.
They've done oh, bank wire transfer connection has been made to be more flexible to cater for wire transfers. The design and layout of the bank wire transfer payment screen has also been updated. There's invitation emails and now has some additional information to the invitation accepted admin email. Removed x authentication for sign ups and logins. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Fucking a. Excellent. That makes me happy that they told Twitter to go pound sand. Removed x authentication for sign ups and login. That is the selling point ladies and gentlemen. Okay. So Zapparite's got BTC paid server.
Russia is not an idiot. They're going to rebuild some of their grid infrastructure because bitcoin. You got Jameson Lop wading into a pig fight in a mud stall over Roger Ver, which I wouldn't waste like I said, I don't like the guy. I wouldn't even waste my breath on the guy. But no. I can't believe Jameson Lop ventured there. And then all the rest of the crap that's happening. The the main takeaway for today is just how weak the western financial markets really are, especially the equities market. I mean, the markets in general is a catch all phrase to me. What do you mean? The bond market? You mean stocks? What do you what what do you mean? Well, it's they're all related to each other. But in this particular case, it's the investors.
Not the markets themselves. Well, actually, it is the markets themselves because the investors are the market. And when when I can just release a press release and say, hey, man, we've, I'm a Chinese company and and ours is faster, better, and cheaper, and have the kind of dumping that we see on the S and P and Nasdaq, that is not a good sign. That means people are nervous. You see it in Bitcoin too. The people that have been buying Bitcoin, they are not the hardcore Bitcoiners. We are already here. It takes years to forge in the fires of God a true dyed in the wool Bitcoiner.
It takes forever. It takes it it literally takes neurons in your head dying. You know, the neurons that are sensitive to a 20% drop. You see it so many times that those neurons stop firing. It takes that and a lot more to forge an actual dyed in the wool Bitcoiner. And the guys that have been coming in over the last 2, maybe 3 years, the guys that were 3 that are 3 years in are almost there. You're almost there. Just hang on a little longer, but the guys that bought 6 months ago, nowhere close. And they're going to cause problems like they're causing, you know, last night and this morning. I don't know what to tell you, but buy the dip, and I'll see you on the other side.
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Correction
Altcoin Explosion and Market Implications
