Join me today for Episode 1028 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Lagarde is Freaking Out
- Norway's Sovereign Fund Crushing it with BTC
- Grayscale Launches BTC Miner ETF
- Illinois On Deck
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Pirate Treasure Adventure https://plebeian.market/products/[email protected]/pirate-treasure-adventure-g3irmp5hf1
From: https://primal.net/bass
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Articles:
https://atlas21.com/czech-central-bank-approves-proposal-to-assess-bitcoin-investment/
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ecb-president-christine-lagarde-bitcoin-central-bank-reserves
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/01/30/world-s-largest-sovereign-wealth-fund-has-indirect-bitcoin-exposure-of-more-than-usd355m
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/grayscale-investments-launches-bitcoin-miners-etf
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://decrypt.co/303528/illinois-introduces-bitcoin-reserve-bill-joining-growing-list-of-states
https://www.theblock.co/post/337979/cme-group-to-introduce-options-on-bitcoin-friday-futures-which-are-priced-at-1-50th-of-a-bitcoin
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/opensats-9th-wave-of-bitcoin-grants-kibo-el-tor-nustash-rust-bitcoin/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/lightning-dev-kit-v0-1-1/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/iris-wallet-desktop-v0-1-0/
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 9:23 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the next to last day of the 1st month of 2025. Tick tock. Tick tock. This is episode 1028 of Bitcoin, and my God, Christine Lagarde's a little, she's just beside beside herself. She can't stand what's happening over in the Czech Republic. And probably, she's not all that pleased to find out news out of Norway and the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Yeah. We'll get into that one too. And Grayscale is launching a new product. Seems like everybody's launching new products. I mean, the whole micro strategy playbook is it's almost as if for, like, over a year, after Michael Saylor had brought all these COOs and CEOs and c chief financial officers to the table to tell them how to do the play and gave them playbook that that thing just sat on shelves after shelves after shelves for months months months collecting dust. And now now it's like all the dust is getting blown off of this thing and people are actually starting to read it. So just because you release a thing, don't think that it means that even if it's brilliant, everybody's going to see it right when you release it. We'll get into a bunch of that stuff. Illinois, in the news.
CME Group is in the news. OpenSats is making more grants. Lightning Development Kit has an update as does the Iris Wallet. We'll get into those at the end of the show. But first, the Circle P is open for business and today's featured vendor from plebeian.market is Bass, b a s s. He has something called the pirate treasure adventure. Details, the children are brave pirates on a quest to find the hidden treasure of captain Bluebeard. To find the treasure, they must solve puzzles left by captain Bluebeard himself. Each clue will guide them closer to the final treasure chest.
That's all I'm getting from Bass. I don't know if he made the game. It it it looks like he did because this is, like, on the the little placard or the little media card for plebian.market for this particular product, it says, Bass Games. So, BAS, if I'm I'm assuming that you've built this game yourself and it is for children, and it doesn't mention Bitcoin at all. And this is what I like to see. For those of you who think I all of a sudden hate Bitcoin, you're wrong. I'm just saying that the whole name of this podcast is Bitcoin and ellipses or otherwise known as because other things exist.
There's a whole world out there. Like, in in fact, Bass Games is bringing us one of those things that has seemingly nothing at all to do with Bitcoin. It's just a kid's game. You can play with your kids, and it only cost a 1,000 satoshis. Now, I'm not exactly sure what this game entails. I don't know what comes with the game. I don't know anything about this thing. I'm just trying to give Bass a leg up here in the Circle P and to get plebs like you buying stuff from plebs like you, so that we can not only support each other, but we can support a Bitcoin circular economy. It's okay to spend some of your Bitcoin every once in a while.
If you don't want to spend it, then don't. It's fine. But I'm also saying that it's just fine if you wanna throw some satoshis Bass's way. So the link directly to this product on plebian.market will be in the show notes under the circle p. And then I've linked directly to Bass's inpub over on primal, dot net so that if you want to go talk to Bass or ask him any other questions there, you may do so. Okay. Let's get into the news of the Czech Republic and their central bank. Yeah. You're going, dude, you did this yesterday. Yeah. I did. Except at the time, they were going to look into buying Bitcoin and putting it on their central bank balance sheet according to the governor, whose name I have no hope of being able to pronounce correctly.
But today, that was yesterday. Things change. Here's what's going on now. Czech Central Bank approves the proposal to assess the Bitcoin investment, unlike Microsoft who said, no. We were not going to even assess this. Anyway, so here from atlas21.com. The Czech National Bank has approved a proposal to evaluate the inclusion of Bitcoin in its monetary reserves. The decision was announced January 30th, that's today, by governor Ailes Michael. I I don't know how to pronounce these Eastern European names. I'm sorry. I'm not a racist. I promise you. I just don't know how to pronounce these things. The proposal calls for an in-depth analysis to assess the potential diversification of the bank's reserves, which amount to approximately $146,000,000,000 US with a possible allocation of up to 5% into Bitcoin.
According to CNB estimates such a strategy applied over the past decade would have increased annual returns by 3.5%, though would have also doubled the portfolio volatility. The official statement reads, quote, over the past 2 years, our reserve management strategy has shifted towards greater investment diversification, end quote. I don't put a tie on the suits, Pete. Not much of a statement there. But Governor Michael, who comes from an investment banking background, has expressed an alternative approach calling himself a pioneer compared to his counterparts at the other central banks.
The bank clarified that no changes will be implemented until the analysis is complete and any new allocation will be appropriately documented in quarterly and annual reports. I would expect nothing less from a central bank if the plan materializes. The Czech Republic would become the 1st country in the world whose central bank officially holds Bitcoin in its reserves. Michael himself predicts that in the next 5 years, other central banks may follow this example. So, the Czech Republic, man, that's that's really close to home for somebody like Christine Lagarde, who is losing her ever loving mind. Let's check it out. Brothers and sisters, Turner Wright, Cointelegraph, European Central Bank President is confident that Bitcoin will not enter Central Bank reserves.
You could yell at clouds all day long, you old cow. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde suggested that the Czech National Bank, like named them by name, not just like some kind of amorphous thing, said the Czech National Bank was unlikely to approve the adoption of Bitcoin as a reserve asset following a conversation with its governor. Speaking to members of the press on January 30th, again, today, Lagarde said. The European Council held the view that reserves of central banks have to be liquid, secure, and safe, implying that they would not include Bitcoin.
She added she added hold on for a sec. I got a call coming in. Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen. My child was calling in from school to instruct me that his after school club was canceled, and I need to pick him up at the right time. Anyway, let's get back to this Christine Lagarde who's losing her ever loving mind. She added that she was confident that BTC would not enter the reserves of banks under the council. Okay. Well, Lagarde was addressing concerns following the Czech National Bank governor, Elise Michael's suggestion that the central bank invest in Bitcoin as part of its diversification strategy.
The Czech Central Bank's board voted to explore, quote, other asset classes, end quote, on January 30th for its reserves, but did not specifically mention Bitcoin. Pausing. Hold on. We just read a story that said that they said that they were gonna put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. This one from Cointelegraph is not saying that. They're saying that just other digital assets or other asset classes. Who knows what the hell is going on? I smell a rat. Continuing on, the ECB president's comments marked one of the very first times the bank addressed potential BTC reserves after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a working group in the United States to explore regulations around a national digital asset stockpile.
At least one ECB member has suggested that the bank continue exploring the development of a digital euro in response to the Trump administration's seeming abrasive of the crypto industry. The number of proposals for countries to establish crypto reserves has been on the increase following Trump's election win in November. Lawmakers in several US states, including Texas, Utah, Arizona and such, have introduced bills or have otherwise suggested plans for a Bitcoin Stockpile modeled after legislation proposed by the advocacy group Satoshi Action Fund.
Ahead of his appearance at the World Economic Forum, Coinbase CEO Brian Mulratt Armstrong suggested in a blog post that global policy makers create BTC reserves as hedges against inflation. As of January, El Salvador remains one of the few countries whose government openly announced its intention to stockpile BTC for a national reserve. At the time of publication, the price of Bitcoin was 105,731, having risen by roughly 3.8% in the last 24 hours. Why did it rise? Because the FOMAC finally said what they were gonna go do. Alright? So the Federal Reserve kept rates at whatever it was, 4.5%, I think. Didn't go down, didn't go up. They just kept it the same. Everybody was expecting that. It was a 95% chance that they were going to do exactly what they did according to Polymarket, and that's exactly what they did. They kept them the same. It doesn't matter that it got kept the same or if it went down or if it went up.
The pressure was on the traders to try to get out of whatever trades they had in case they were betting the wrong direction. And now that that question has been answered, the the paper handed traders came back in force, and Bitcoin is still slightly above $105,000. We are seeing some sell pressure after, the after things kinda blew up yesterday afternoon. Alright. So, Christine Lagarde is really pissed off. And now she's saying that she had a direct conversation with the governor, the very governor that introduced the question to the Czech Republic Central Bank that they should assess the possibility of putting bitcoin on the balance sheet.
But she's saying that after that discussion that there's no way that's going to happen. Again, I smell a rat, and what I'm really smelling is not as much of a rat as much as this woman who is a convicted felon in France. Make no mistake. She was convicted of, well, very inappropriate movements about a loan to the then French president Macron or I don't know who the hell maybe he's still president. But in either event, there was a loan that was made, Lagarde knew about it, it was completely inappropriate, and a French court found her guilty.
Guilty. She is a guilty person as far and she's the head of the ECB. And here she is telling the world to be calm. There's no way Bitcoin's gonna end up on the Czech Republic Central Bank balance sheet because she had a discussion with the governor that is the same guy that wanted the central bank to examine this. So either she's lying through her teeth or that was a very one-sided discussion from Christine Lagarde to the governor telling him how it was gonna be. And here's what I think is actually going to happen. I think the Czech Republic is going to tell Christine Lagarde to shove it straight up her ass and they're going to do exactly what they want to do, European Union and ECB and Brussels be damned.
Because all you have to do is look at Norway to find out what's actually happening with countries that decide to get even indirect exposure to Bitcoin, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, which is in Norway, has indirect Bitcoin exposure of more than 3 $55,000,000 Okay, let's go. The world's largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway's Norges Bank Investment Management has amassed $356,700,000 in indirect exposure to bitcoin according to k33 research. At the end of 2024, the fund indirectly held 3,821 bitcoin reflecting a 153% year over year increase from the 1507 BTC according to k33.
The data highlight the these data highlight the fund's evolving indirect bitcoin exposure growing from just 796 BTC in 2020. The NBIM, the sovereign wealth fund, also maintains stakes in a number of crypto related public companies as of year end 2024. Its holdings included a 0.72% stake in MicroStrategy equivalent to $500,000,000 1.1 percent of Tesla and investments in Coinbase, Meta Planet, and Mara Holdings. That would be that mining company, and I'm not a fan of them, but let's move on. NBIM, which invests revenue from Norway's oil and gas resources and is officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global, reported a record annual profit of $222,400,000,000 driven primarily by the artificial intelligence boom.
K33 analyst Vettel Lund makes the point that NBIM's indirect Bitcoin exposure is likely a result of sector weighted portfolios. As crypto proxies appreciate in value, their portfolio weighting increases. The NBIM declined to comment. Okay. Wow. So hold on. I just gotta look at something here. Because my geography is is is is really scratchy. Okay. So just just wanted to make sure that Norway, as of this moment, does not seem to be part of the European Union. Okay. Well, that that that's just great. But in a very real way, I mean, even though they're way north, I guarantee you that there's European travel to and from Norway. And that doesn't mean it makes them European. I'm just saying that they're neighbors.
So all their neighbors have to do in the EU is look at Norway and go, wow, you don't even hold Bitcoin directly. You're you're just tangentially exposed to this asset, and you guys are kicking ass. Because they don't. Norway doesn't actually hold the BTC that the like, when it when that news story said, like, hey. It increased from well, here. I'll I'll give I'll give you the numbers again. Hold on. Yeah. This 153% increase to of indirectly holding 3,821 BTC, which was up from 1,507, they don't actually hold the Bitcoin. This is k33 basically saying, okay. What does the Norway Sovereign Fund actually own? Now what percentage of that is companies that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet? And I'm pretty sure that k33 went, you know, further and said, okay, let's take all the rest of the stuff that's on these companies balance sheet off and just look at what is the exposure given the holdings of these companies and these companies exposure to bitcoin alone that allows Norway to indirectly hold 3,821 BTC. That it's not really the Bitcoin that they that they actually own because they don't own any Bitcoin in Norway.
And that's the important part. Nobody understands this trade. They are just tangentially exposed to Bitcoin and they are kicking ass. Now, yes, a lot of that came from artificial intelligence, but they're still kicking ass. If you actually look at that number, A 153% increase year over year from 1500 BTC to 38100. Do the math. Do the math. It's no wonder Christine Lagarde is losing her ever loving mind. Personally, I'm all here for it. But let's come back over to the United States where Grayscale is releasing an investment project or product for Bitcoin Mining ETF.
Yep. That's right. Bitcoin Magazine, Mark Mason, gonna tell us all about Grayscale Investments, LLC's official launch of the Grayscale Bitcoin Miners ETF, ticker symbol is MNRS. It provides investors with a unique opportunity to gain exposure to the Bitcoin mining industry. This ETF is designed for those who want to invest in Bitcoin miners without, of course, directly purchasing Bitcoin itself, making it an attractive option for traditional investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Czech Republic, I'm looking at you. So the key takeaways are this.
Grayscale's Bitcoin Miners ETF targets companies involved in Bitcoin mining and its related services. The ETF is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, ARCA, and tracks the index, INDXX, bitcoin miners index. And third, investors can gain exposure to the bitcoin mining ecosystem without direct investment in BTC itself. So the overview is this the grayscale bitcoin miners ETF aims to provide targeted exposure to companies that derive significant portions of their revenue from bitcoin mining activities. This includes firms that offer mining infrastructure, hardware, and software.
The ETF is particularly appealing to investors who may not be ready to invest directly in Bitcoin but still want to participate in the growing market. Yeah. Indirect exposure. That's all this is. It's just like Norway. So the investment strategy is this. The ETF will not invest directly into bitcoin or any other digital asset. Instead, it focuses on the companies that support the bitcoin network's operations. The index, INDXX, Bitcoin Miners Index, which the ETF tracks, includes major players in the mining sector such as Mara Holdings at 16.65%.
Riot Platforms at 11.92%, Core Scientific at 9.2%, CleanSpark is such a low weight that they don't even mention it, as is Iron. And these companies are crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of the Bitcoin network. In market context, the launch of the grayscale Bitcoin miners ETF comes at a time when the market is experiencing significant fluctuations. Despite Bitcoin's impressive performance in 2024 with a return of 113%, many publicly traded mining companies have struggled to keep pace. Some have reported declines of up to 84% in their stock prices, highlighting the volatility and risks associated with the mining sector.
Grayscale's global head of ETFs, David Laval, emphasized the importance of Bitcoin mining, stating Bitcoin miners, the backbone of the network, are well positioned for significant growth as Bitcoin adoption and usage increases. This sentiment reflects the broader trend of institutional interest in Bitcoin related investments as more traditional investors seek to diversify their portfolios with innovative financial products. I love that. Innovative financial products. Man, that is so weighted to evil at this point. It's gonna take a monster to be able to pull that shit out of the cow pad that it's been centered in. Because, honestly, every time I hear innovative financial product, all I hear is derivative and gambling. That is literally it.
And maybe MicroStrategy, maybe Norway, maybe Czech Republic, maybe insurance companies and reinsurance companies and the products that they're starting to produce, maybe that's maybe that starts tipping the tide. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. But in conclusion, the Grayscale Bitcoin miners' ETF represents a significant step forward in making bitcoin investments more accessible to wider audiences. By focusing on the mining sector, Grayscale is tapping into a critical component of the Bitcoin ecosystem offering investors a way to engage with the market without the complexities of direct Bitcoin ownership. As the demand for Bitcoin continues to grow, the ETF could serve as a valuable tool for investors.
Well, yeah. It's just a again, while it's just another product, this is the thing that surprises me. I'm surprised that it hasn't been done yet. And I'm surprised that grayscale is the one that's putting their shovel head into this particular fertile ground first and not Blackrock. You see what I'm getting at here? It's I'm I'm seeing all these new products that are coming online. I'm seeing ancient ancient financial market sectors reinvigorated. Like insurance. How boring? How boring is insurance? Well, it's not boring anymore. I mean, back in, what was it, 2024?
I think it was like, was it November? I can't remember when it was. But the largest insurance company in Germany bought 25 or 24% of all of the $600,000,000 convertible note sale from MicroStrategy. Now as we all know, that was not the only convertible note sale that Micro Strategy did. But back in back in the day, like, what, all of, like, 6 months ago, and if it was November, then it was clearly not even that long ago. But I think it was a little a little earlier than that for the, 2024, $600,000,000 convertible note thing. They bought a quarter of them.
They bought a quarter of them, like, $170,000,000 worth. It's the largest insurance company in Germany. And now you've got I'm listening to podcasts that are talking about reinsurance companies. The guy the insurance companies that insure the insurance companies, and they're getting into it. And now it's become clear to me that insurance is a hell I mean, this is the thing that I love about Bitcoin. You never think of these things. I certainly did. Maybe you have, but I never really thought about insurance as anything other than my house burnt down my insurance company is going to cover whatever. My car is totaled I'm going to get a check from my insurance company.
I had to go to the hospital. My health insurance is you know, is gonna pay part of whatever the caregivers want to charge. Right? To me, I I was only viewing insurance and insurance companies as, like, at I was looking at it from its final act. Not what goes on before. I'm not looking at what what does insurance what do insurance companies have to do to be able to pay those claims? They have to invest. All they are is just another financial house. It's just that their product is insurance. Although they probably have a bond desk, they probably have an equities desk, they probably have the same kind of desks that you'd find in any financial company. Yet we really don't ever think about insurance companies that way, do we? I know I didn't. And now I'm looking at a completely different landscape.
And insurance companies are probably going to start buying Bitcoin or or start heavily investing into companies that are using the the micro strategy playbook and selling debt to get real money, to buy Bitcoin, to put it in their treasury. And as that treasury grows, and I'm not talking in the number of coins. I'm talking about relative to fiat currency as those assets grow, insurance companies don't have to worry as much. Because that's what they were supposed to do in the 1st place. But they got all hosed in the 2000s by having, like, extremely low insurance rates. And now that, as we've seen in California, is not the case to the point that State Farm pulled out a year or actually, last summer.
And they didn't have to go through any of this fire bullshit because they were already saying, we can't afford this. If this place goes up in flames or whatever happens, we can't afford. It's like a run on the bank. We can't afford to make all of our policyholders whole. Well, now they're going to be looking at these different instruments. They're going to be looking at the Bitcoin miner ETF from Grayscale. They're going to be looking at convertible note sales from MicroStrategy. They're definitely gonna be looking at MicroStrategy's brand new product that, in my opinion, looks like a freaking treasury bill, the strike preferred stock.
You don't get to vote as a stockholder, but you do get you do get a stock certificate and it does have a dividend that pays 8%. And if for whatever reason the value of that stock plummets, the interest rate that you get the dividend the interest rate of the dividend goes up. In in a it it looks exactly like a treasury bill, except it's a preferred stock that you don't get voting rights with from a private company from the US and is being backed by Bitcoin. If you think insurance companies aren't gonna start looking at any place that they can go so that they can make their policy holders whole in case of disaster, then we're all fooling ourselves because they are going to start looking at it.
It's an exciting time not only to be an insurance but to just be looking at this landscape. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities Oil is up a quarter of a point to $72.80 Brent Norsee is up 0.4 percent to 76.89. Natural Gas taking a dive 2 and a half to the downside, just over $3 per 1,000 cubic feet now. And gasoline is up a quarter of a point to $2.4 a gallon. Gold making a run for it, brothers and sisters. Almost 2 points to the upside. 1.84 percent to be exact, puts it at a price of $2,844.9 an ounce.
Silver is killing gold. 3.43 percent to the upside. Platinum is killing silver, 4.54% to the upside. Copper is up a half and palladium is up just over 3 points. Over in ag land, lots of red I see in the futures market. Biggest winner today is coffee, 2 a quarter percent to the upside. Biggest loser is chocolate, 5% to the downside. But live cattle is also down 1.73%, but lean hogs are up 0.68%, while feeder cattle are down 3 quarters of a point. Dow, not really the the equities, legacy markets just are, kinda, boring today. Point 18% to the upside for the Dow. S and P, 0.14% to the upside. Nasdaq moving sideways, and the S and P Mini is up just over one full point.
We're looking at $105,100 Bitcoin. We are seeing some sell pressure. We are down from about a 105,000. I think I saw it this morning. It clocked in at a 105,990 or something like that. We almost clipped a 106,000. We're still at a $2,080,000,000,000 market cap, though. However, with the rise of gold's price, we can only purchase a paltry 37.7 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,817,038 point 75 of and average fees per block are really, really low. 0.03 BTC taking fees on a per block basis. There are only 11 blocks.
Holy shit. 11 blocks carrying under 50,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is going to get you in at 3. Mining mining hash rate is at 768.4 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. And that's probably, we're probably losing some hash rate because we're not as high as we used to be, because of these ultra low rates. Why you may ask? Because a lot of Bitcoin is being soaked up by ETFs and micro strategy and god only knows what and it is forever asset. It is a forever asset for these guys. They don't seem to be interested at all in releasing it once they have it. The less Bitcoin there is on the market and people are able to trade paper Bitcoin around, then the less actual on train chain transactions you have. But it also demonstrates the fact that, like, good girls and boys, there's a lot of Bitcoiners out there who are not trading Bitcoin. They've taken their Bitcoin off of exchanges.
Maybe they learned their lesson. I don't know. Maybe they got tired of being wrecked with leverage and Arthur Hayes haunting them with his smile in a dream. But, regardless, exchanges are really low on Bitcoin. So there's no real reason to like to have the kind of volume that we used to have. And for those of you who says this is evidence that Bitcoin is going to die, I'm sorry, but we've been here so many times I can't even I can't even count how many times we've had low fees and everybody said Bitcoin is going to die. And then I can't even count probably the same amount of times that Bitcoin has had extremely high fees. And guess what? It was the same argument. Bitcoin is going to die because we got high fees.
Stop it. Everything is going to be fine. You'll be fine. Let's move over to how to spell incompetence. Yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Bitcoin for president with 6,777. Satoshi says, keep crushing it, my friend. I appreciate that. God's death 537. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Blazar with a 500 sats sends me an emoji I can't read because my operating system is literally that old. Seriously. Doctor black or d k black sheep, 500 sats. Doesn't say a damn thing, but Pye's does with a 100. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Martin comes back with a 100, says your show and style is awesome. Oh, nice. I like this plebeian market stuff. I will definitely check this, and I hope it will be in Europe. Love from Germany.
I think, Martin, if you're in Germany or anywhere in in so it doesn't matter where you are. I think it's really going to depend on each individual seller that is represented in the plebeian market as to whether or not they will or will not consider international shipping. I just shipped, oh my god, I just shipped a bag of Jolly Rancher candy for my daughter from the United States to frickin' New Zealand. A bag of Jolly Ranchers, which is like under 6 ounces, is going to cost me $41 to ship around to the other side of the planet. Alright? So that's really the structure that we're we're dealing with here. Plebeian market, in case you know, in case I'm not clear, Plebeian market is just a marketplace that plebs like you or full blown companies can open a stall and start selling their stuff. They've got all the back end in place to be able to have you put in whatever your you know, how much quantity of the item you have, a picture of your item, and they, you know, supply the ability to pay and all that. But it's really gonna be up to the vendor themselves as to whether or not they ship to, the United States or a United States company ships to Europe.
I do know that, Iso Labelle Art shipped me a painting from from near as I can tell, he says he's centered in Italy. So I'm guessing he shipped it from Italy, and I got it just fine. So he's definitely somebody who considers international shipping. Just wanted to make sure that that was clear. Richard Dick Whitman with a 100 says, Dick Whitman sats. Oh, those are the best kind of SATs. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Hey. You know what else makes Christine Lagarde really mad? When individual states of the United States start talking about a Bitcoin strategic reserve, like Illinois.
Yeah. They've introduced a Bitcoin reserve bill joining a growing list of states. Wow. This is out of decrypt, and it's written by Vismayev v. Illinois has joined a growing list of United States states exploring the possibility of crypto reserves. State representative John Cabello has introduced house bill 1844, which would establish a strategic Bitcoin Reserve Fund under the state's treasury. If passed, the Illinois state treasurer would manage the fund with all Bitcoin deposits held for a minimum of 5 years before the state could transfer, sell, appropriate, or convert to another cryptocurrency any Bitcoin in that fund, end quote.
The surge in state level Bitcoin reserve proposals has accelerated since Trump's return to the White House, with at least half a dozen states advancing or introducing similar bills in January alone. House bill 1844 allows Illinois to accept gifts, grants, and donations of bitcoin from the state residents and governmental entities, pausing to say do not give the state of Illinois your personal Bitcoin. Look, if you're listening to me and you're in Illinois, you're an Illinoisan or whatever you call yourselves up there in Illinois. If you were born there and raised there and lived your whole life there and raised your own children there and intend to freaking die there, do not give Illinois your Bitcoin. And the same advice I give to Texans.
I love Texas. You can take the man out of Texas, but you will never take the Texan out of the man. I am I want to go home so bad to Texas. I am homesick beyond comprehension. And yet, I would never consider, not for a second, giving Texas my Bitcoin. They need to go out and buy their own damn Bitcoin, and so does Illinois and Arizona and whatever. But this growing list of states is not going to stop. Everybody's going to be doing this. And in fact, by the time we get word on whether or not Trump's going to actually do a Bitcoin strategic reserve for the United States and not be complete bullshit about it, we because as far as I know, we still we're still waiting to see if he actually does it. I thought there was an executive order that ordered it, but it was all about shitcoins.
I I guess not. I have no idea what these guys are doing over there. And that's why I'm keep saying this stuff about the states. It doesn't matter. Yeah. There will be a short term price dip and a good one if Trump says, you know what? We decided not to do it. It won't matter because by the time we get word, there's gonna be so many states of the United States that just say, fuck it. I'm gonna do it ourselves or we're gonna do it ourselves, then it won't matter. The United States will have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It will just be decentralized the way it should be.
Now let's move on over to the CME Group and see what these guys are doing. Oh, look. It's a brand new product from The Block written by Brian McGlynnan, CME Group to introduce options on Bitcoin Friday Futures, which are priced at 1 50th of a Bitcoin. The CME Group plans to introduce options on its Bitcoin Friday Futures contracts in late February, pending regulatory approval. Scheduled for launch on February 24th, these will be the 1st financially settled cryptocurrency options offered by CME Group, featuring expiries available every business day from Monday to Friday. Quote, we are pleased to offer these new options that provide traders with even greater precision to manage short term Bitcoin price risk.
CME Group Global Head of Cryptocurrency Products, Giovanni Vicascio, said in a press release on Thursday. Whew, that's a mouthful. Quote, Building on the success of our Bitcoin Friday Futures, the smaller size of these particular contracts along with daily expiries offer market participants a capital efficient toolset to effectively adjust their Bitcoin exposure. End quote. Bitcoin Friday Futures, CME's smallest Bitcoin based contract, is designed to address affordability and accessibility challenges posed by Bitcoin's increasing notional value. Priced at a mere 1 50th of a Bitcoin, the BFF contracts cater to both institutional investors and active retail traders.
Since their September 30th debut, they have become CME's most successful crypto futures launch ever. Since launch, more than 775,000 contracts have traded with an average daily volume of 9,700 contracts. Notably, 44% of trading activity has occurred during non US hours, highlighting potentially global demand. Yeah. I'd I'd say that not it's not potential. If if 44% of the trading activity is occurring while US markets are closed, then, yeah, that's global demand, dude. Whatever. In total, BFF contracts have generated $1,630,000,000 in trading volume, according to a press release.
Financially settled options on Bitcoin Friday Futures will complement CME Group's existing suite of physically settled options on Bitcoin, Ether, micro Bitcoin, and micro Ether futures, providing additional risk management flexibility to investors. So a new product, a brand new product coming online to join the rest of the financial fray. Oh, boy. Do you want my advice? Can you guess what it's gonna be? Just buy Bitcoin on Cash App or River or Swan or whatever, and hold it yourself. Don't let them hold it. Hold it yourself. Just go get a cold card.
Spin up a wallet. Learn how to do it. It's not that damn hard. You can you can practice spinning up a wallet without actually putting any bitcoin into it. You can spin up a wallet and then you can wipe the wallet and see if you can recover the exact same wallet with the seed phrase. And the pathway. We won't even get into that part. Just saying you can practice and you won't lose any bitcoin if you don't have any bitcoin in the wallet. Just because you spin up a wallet doesn't necessarily mean you got to put bitcoin in the wallet. There are all manner of things that you can do, but you need to learn how to do the self custody thing. It's really important coming into the future. Okay? It's gonna be more important than I think anybody actually suspects.
Okay. Open sats, not 1, not 5, not 7, not 8, but 9th wave of Bitcoin grants has been released. Kibo, Eltor, Nutstash, and Rust Bitcoin. Open Sats is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Bitcoin and Freedom Tech developers, and they have announced its 9th wave of what? 4 Bitcoin or for 4 Bitcoin projects. Quote, we're pleased to announce the 9th wave of grants from our general fund supporting a new selection of projects that enhance open source innovation. Kibo. Money. Okay. So this is the first of the 4 that got a grant. Kibo.
Money is a free open source self hostable bitcoin data generator and visualizer. It offers a global network view, a real time API, and a robust interface enhancing transparency and trust for researchers, developers, and enthusiasts. L Tor is number 2 on the list. L Tor is a high bandwidth Tor Fork using Bitcoin Lightning Network Incentives. Users earn Sats by hosting relays and sharing bandwidth, addressing Tor's limitations, and supporting anonymous communications. Oh, I am checking that one out right now. Hold on. Control click that song, bitch, because I wanna see that. Okay. It's going right to the GitHub repository.
So if, you're like me and you're like GitHub challenged because you don't really know what it means when they say Docker version and shit. Yeah. That I'm sorry. There's only so much I can ingest and and I'm just not good at the software side of things. But I can still run my own node and I can still self custody and I can do lightning network. I'm good. But I'm going to be looking at l Tor because Tor is constantly under attack. It needs help, and we are in a position to help. And if we can make some satoshis by helping, well, hell yeah.
That just incentivizes me all the more. Number 3 is Nutstash. It's a multiplatform Cashew e cash wallet with integrated lightning and nostril functionality. It supports secure private bitcoin transactions with features such as full wallet encryption, mint discovery, and that's very important. You gotta be able to find a mint to actually work with otherwise e cash does not really, you know, work. Nostra Wallet Connect is involved and seed based recovery is there. 4 and final is Rust Bitcoin is low level Bitcoin library in Rust for interacting with the Bitcoin network. It is foundational for projects like the Bitcoin DevKit or BDK, the Lightning DevKit or LDK, it provides reliability and correctness.
It also supports language bindings allowing developers from various ecosystems to use its features. Nice. So congratulations to kibo. Money, ltor, nut stash, and rust bitcoin. And thank you to open sats for funding those developers. Onto LDK, which was mentioned. Duplicate HTLC force closing, griefing, vulnerability fix in version 0.1.1. Lightning or LDK is the lightning development kit if you're a lightning user and you're making stuff for lightning, you probably use the LDK. So there's an important denial of service vulnerability that's been floating around that apparently has been fixed in version 0.1.1.
And that has been apparently allowing channel counterparties to cause force closure of unrelated channels. The vulnerability was discovered during an audit of LDK's chain module by Bitcoin developer and security researcher, Matt Moorhouse, who named it duplicate HTLC force close griefing. The attacker must broadcast a revoked commitment transaction, thereby forfeiting their channel balance but the size of the channel can be minimal and the attacker can spend their balance down to the 1% reserve before executing the attack as a result the cost of the attack can be negligible compared to the damage caused said the developer from version 0.1.1 LDK proactively fails HTLC is nearing their deadlines if the downstream channel is or is not being forced wait.
Hold on. Deadline if the downstream channel is or is being forced closed. That's a bad sentence y'all. This prevents cascading force closures during fee spikes and ensures duplicate HTLCs are failed back after a revoked transaction confirms avoiding upstream channel force closures. So it's while obviously above my pay grade, what it sounds like to me is that somebody can close one of my channels that is not related to the channel that I have with that person. I haven't heard about this attack being, you know, done in the wild, but that sounds like a pretty bad attack. Thank God the guys over at LDK are on top of everything. The Iris Wallet desktop version 0.1.0 has been released. Interface for RGB on top of the lightning network.
Iris Wallet is a simple desktop interface for managing RGB assets on the lightning network through a user friendly interface. Iris Wallet desktop version 0.1.0 is the first experimental release of a wallet that integrates the RGB protocol on the lightning network. Hold on. I gotta make sure that we, talk about that for a second. The initial release is available for Linux and Mac OS offering support for both testnet and reg test environments. Quote, attached, you can find 2 versions running on different Bitcoin networks, testnet and a shared public reg test.
For the latter, you can use our Telegram bot to get some funds to play around with, said the developers. Please note that the app may be buggy since it is very early stages. Reporting problems as GitHub issues is highly appreciated as was stated in the release notes. Okay. So what the hell is RGB smart contracts? RGB can scale in terms of transaction throughput, data size, and network size. It doesn't keep any on chain data. It is sharded from day 1 and is fully operable with layer 2 scalability solutions. Privacy says no chain analysis is possible due to the absence of a transaction graph in blockchain.
RGB uses 0 knowledge. Oh, wow. To protect the history of a fungible state. With r g b, the user is always in charge of when and what parts of the history and state to disclose if needed. And then finally, r g b is a native member of bitcoin and the lightning network ecosystem bringing rich smart contracts in a scalable whale way to the world's most secure and censorship resistant cryptocurrency. Interesting. Before everybody starts screaming that I'm talking about a shitcoin, I don't know. I've heard of RGB, but I really haven't dug all the way into it. If you have proof that it is a shitcoin, please let me know. Please do it via a boostogram.
And, honestly, use if you're not using a podcasting 2.0 app, please go get one. Go to podcastapps.com. Is it wait a minute. Hold on. Let me make sure. Podcastapps.com. Let's see what this brings up. Yeah. You go right to, you essentially end up going to podcastindex.org. But podcastapp.com will take you there, and you can look at whatever it is you need to look at to get a podcasting 2.0 enabled app. It's a brand new way to podcast. It's a brand new way to help people like me that bring you the news every single day with the ability to support me. Like throw me satoshis, you can throw me a boostagram, you can stream me satoshis while you're listening to it, but you can't do that with Apple Podcasts. You can't do that with what what else, like SoundCloud or, not there's another there's another one that I'm thinking of.
I used to use like 3 or 4 different podcast apps over the last, you know, 10 years And none of them have the ability to actually stream satoshis or zap people or give boostergrams or do all the other neat stuff. There's some that offer things like chapters and and transcripts, but podcasting 2.0 is an entire ecosystem in and of itself. And if you use something like fountain.fm, which is one of my favorite daily driver podcasting apps, it integrates directly with an Austro network. And I would do the math for you on being you know what it means to connect 2 completely different fully formed networks but I don't want to get into math okay just go get a modern podcasting app from podcastapps.com or you just go to podcasting or podcast index.org/apps and you'll have a whole list of them there and that way you can support me and the other bitcoiners that have podcasts in this space that try to keep you informed either every day or a couple times a week or once a week of what the hell's going on.
Because without people like us you're forced to read all this shit yourself. Otherwise, you can just listen to my dulcet tones while you drive your happy ass to work or back home from work or wherever the hell it is that you're going, and I do the reading for you. So show me some support, use a podcasting 2.0 app, Send me satoshis, 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.
It is 9:23 AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the next to last day of the 1st month of 2025. Tick tock. Tick tock. This is episode 1028 of Bitcoin, and my God, Christine Lagarde's a little, she's just beside beside herself. She can't stand what's happening over in the Czech Republic. And probably, she's not all that pleased to find out news out of Norway and the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. Yeah. We'll get into that one too. And Grayscale is launching a new product. Seems like everybody's launching new products. I mean, the whole micro strategy playbook is it's almost as if for, like, over a year, after Michael Saylor had brought all these COOs and CEOs and c chief financial officers to the table to tell them how to do the play and gave them playbook that that thing just sat on shelves after shelves after shelves for months months months collecting dust. And now now it's like all the dust is getting blown off of this thing and people are actually starting to read it. So just because you release a thing, don't think that it means that even if it's brilliant, everybody's going to see it right when you release it. We'll get into a bunch of that stuff. Illinois, in the news.
CME Group is in the news. OpenSats is making more grants. Lightning Development Kit has an update as does the Iris Wallet. We'll get into those at the end of the show. But first, the Circle P is open for business and today's featured vendor from plebeian.market is Bass, b a s s. He has something called the pirate treasure adventure. Details, the children are brave pirates on a quest to find the hidden treasure of captain Bluebeard. To find the treasure, they must solve puzzles left by captain Bluebeard himself. Each clue will guide them closer to the final treasure chest.
That's all I'm getting from Bass. I don't know if he made the game. It it it looks like he did because this is, like, on the the little placard or the little media card for plebian.market for this particular product, it says, Bass Games. So, BAS, if I'm I'm assuming that you've built this game yourself and it is for children, and it doesn't mention Bitcoin at all. And this is what I like to see. For those of you who think I all of a sudden hate Bitcoin, you're wrong. I'm just saying that the whole name of this podcast is Bitcoin and ellipses or otherwise known as because other things exist.
There's a whole world out there. Like, in in fact, Bass Games is bringing us one of those things that has seemingly nothing at all to do with Bitcoin. It's just a kid's game. You can play with your kids, and it only cost a 1,000 satoshis. Now, I'm not exactly sure what this game entails. I don't know what comes with the game. I don't know anything about this thing. I'm just trying to give Bass a leg up here in the Circle P and to get plebs like you buying stuff from plebs like you, so that we can not only support each other, but we can support a Bitcoin circular economy. It's okay to spend some of your Bitcoin every once in a while.
If you don't want to spend it, then don't. It's fine. But I'm also saying that it's just fine if you wanna throw some satoshis Bass's way. So the link directly to this product on plebian.market will be in the show notes under the circle p. And then I've linked directly to Bass's inpub over on primal, dot net so that if you want to go talk to Bass or ask him any other questions there, you may do so. Okay. Let's get into the news of the Czech Republic and their central bank. Yeah. You're going, dude, you did this yesterday. Yeah. I did. Except at the time, they were going to look into buying Bitcoin and putting it on their central bank balance sheet according to the governor, whose name I have no hope of being able to pronounce correctly.
But today, that was yesterday. Things change. Here's what's going on now. Czech Central Bank approves the proposal to assess the Bitcoin investment, unlike Microsoft who said, no. We were not going to even assess this. Anyway, so here from atlas21.com. The Czech National Bank has approved a proposal to evaluate the inclusion of Bitcoin in its monetary reserves. The decision was announced January 30th, that's today, by governor Ailes Michael. I I don't know how to pronounce these Eastern European names. I'm sorry. I'm not a racist. I promise you. I just don't know how to pronounce these things. The proposal calls for an in-depth analysis to assess the potential diversification of the bank's reserves, which amount to approximately $146,000,000,000 US with a possible allocation of up to 5% into Bitcoin.
According to CNB estimates such a strategy applied over the past decade would have increased annual returns by 3.5%, though would have also doubled the portfolio volatility. The official statement reads, quote, over the past 2 years, our reserve management strategy has shifted towards greater investment diversification, end quote. I don't put a tie on the suits, Pete. Not much of a statement there. But Governor Michael, who comes from an investment banking background, has expressed an alternative approach calling himself a pioneer compared to his counterparts at the other central banks.
The bank clarified that no changes will be implemented until the analysis is complete and any new allocation will be appropriately documented in quarterly and annual reports. I would expect nothing less from a central bank if the plan materializes. The Czech Republic would become the 1st country in the world whose central bank officially holds Bitcoin in its reserves. Michael himself predicts that in the next 5 years, other central banks may follow this example. So, the Czech Republic, man, that's that's really close to home for somebody like Christine Lagarde, who is losing her ever loving mind. Let's check it out. Brothers and sisters, Turner Wright, Cointelegraph, European Central Bank President is confident that Bitcoin will not enter Central Bank reserves.
You could yell at clouds all day long, you old cow. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde suggested that the Czech National Bank, like named them by name, not just like some kind of amorphous thing, said the Czech National Bank was unlikely to approve the adoption of Bitcoin as a reserve asset following a conversation with its governor. Speaking to members of the press on January 30th, again, today, Lagarde said. The European Council held the view that reserves of central banks have to be liquid, secure, and safe, implying that they would not include Bitcoin.
She added she added hold on for a sec. I got a call coming in. Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen. My child was calling in from school to instruct me that his after school club was canceled, and I need to pick him up at the right time. Anyway, let's get back to this Christine Lagarde who's losing her ever loving mind. She added that she was confident that BTC would not enter the reserves of banks under the council. Okay. Well, Lagarde was addressing concerns following the Czech National Bank governor, Elise Michael's suggestion that the central bank invest in Bitcoin as part of its diversification strategy.
The Czech Central Bank's board voted to explore, quote, other asset classes, end quote, on January 30th for its reserves, but did not specifically mention Bitcoin. Pausing. Hold on. We just read a story that said that they said that they were gonna put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. This one from Cointelegraph is not saying that. They're saying that just other digital assets or other asset classes. Who knows what the hell is going on? I smell a rat. Continuing on, the ECB president's comments marked one of the very first times the bank addressed potential BTC reserves after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a working group in the United States to explore regulations around a national digital asset stockpile.
At least one ECB member has suggested that the bank continue exploring the development of a digital euro in response to the Trump administration's seeming abrasive of the crypto industry. The number of proposals for countries to establish crypto reserves has been on the increase following Trump's election win in November. Lawmakers in several US states, including Texas, Utah, Arizona and such, have introduced bills or have otherwise suggested plans for a Bitcoin Stockpile modeled after legislation proposed by the advocacy group Satoshi Action Fund.
Ahead of his appearance at the World Economic Forum, Coinbase CEO Brian Mulratt Armstrong suggested in a blog post that global policy makers create BTC reserves as hedges against inflation. As of January, El Salvador remains one of the few countries whose government openly announced its intention to stockpile BTC for a national reserve. At the time of publication, the price of Bitcoin was 105,731, having risen by roughly 3.8% in the last 24 hours. Why did it rise? Because the FOMAC finally said what they were gonna go do. Alright? So the Federal Reserve kept rates at whatever it was, 4.5%, I think. Didn't go down, didn't go up. They just kept it the same. Everybody was expecting that. It was a 95% chance that they were going to do exactly what they did according to Polymarket, and that's exactly what they did. They kept them the same. It doesn't matter that it got kept the same or if it went down or if it went up.
The pressure was on the traders to try to get out of whatever trades they had in case they were betting the wrong direction. And now that that question has been answered, the the paper handed traders came back in force, and Bitcoin is still slightly above $105,000. We are seeing some sell pressure after, the after things kinda blew up yesterday afternoon. Alright. So, Christine Lagarde is really pissed off. And now she's saying that she had a direct conversation with the governor, the very governor that introduced the question to the Czech Republic Central Bank that they should assess the possibility of putting bitcoin on the balance sheet.
But she's saying that after that discussion that there's no way that's going to happen. Again, I smell a rat, and what I'm really smelling is not as much of a rat as much as this woman who is a convicted felon in France. Make no mistake. She was convicted of, well, very inappropriate movements about a loan to the then French president Macron or I don't know who the hell maybe he's still president. But in either event, there was a loan that was made, Lagarde knew about it, it was completely inappropriate, and a French court found her guilty.
Guilty. She is a guilty person as far and she's the head of the ECB. And here she is telling the world to be calm. There's no way Bitcoin's gonna end up on the Czech Republic Central Bank balance sheet because she had a discussion with the governor that is the same guy that wanted the central bank to examine this. So either she's lying through her teeth or that was a very one-sided discussion from Christine Lagarde to the governor telling him how it was gonna be. And here's what I think is actually going to happen. I think the Czech Republic is going to tell Christine Lagarde to shove it straight up her ass and they're going to do exactly what they want to do, European Union and ECB and Brussels be damned.
Because all you have to do is look at Norway to find out what's actually happening with countries that decide to get even indirect exposure to Bitcoin, the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, which is in Norway, has indirect Bitcoin exposure of more than 3 $55,000,000 Okay, let's go. The world's largest sovereign wealth fund, Norway's Norges Bank Investment Management has amassed $356,700,000 in indirect exposure to bitcoin according to k33 research. At the end of 2024, the fund indirectly held 3,821 bitcoin reflecting a 153% year over year increase from the 1507 BTC according to k33.
The data highlight the these data highlight the fund's evolving indirect bitcoin exposure growing from just 796 BTC in 2020. The NBIM, the sovereign wealth fund, also maintains stakes in a number of crypto related public companies as of year end 2024. Its holdings included a 0.72% stake in MicroStrategy equivalent to $500,000,000 1.1 percent of Tesla and investments in Coinbase, Meta Planet, and Mara Holdings. That would be that mining company, and I'm not a fan of them, but let's move on. NBIM, which invests revenue from Norway's oil and gas resources and is officially known as the Government Pension Fund Global, reported a record annual profit of $222,400,000,000 driven primarily by the artificial intelligence boom.
K33 analyst Vettel Lund makes the point that NBIM's indirect Bitcoin exposure is likely a result of sector weighted portfolios. As crypto proxies appreciate in value, their portfolio weighting increases. The NBIM declined to comment. Okay. Wow. So hold on. I just gotta look at something here. Because my geography is is is is really scratchy. Okay. So just just wanted to make sure that Norway, as of this moment, does not seem to be part of the European Union. Okay. Well, that that that's just great. But in a very real way, I mean, even though they're way north, I guarantee you that there's European travel to and from Norway. And that doesn't mean it makes them European. I'm just saying that they're neighbors.
So all their neighbors have to do in the EU is look at Norway and go, wow, you don't even hold Bitcoin directly. You're you're just tangentially exposed to this asset, and you guys are kicking ass. Because they don't. Norway doesn't actually hold the BTC that the like, when it when that news story said, like, hey. It increased from well, here. I'll I'll give I'll give you the numbers again. Hold on. Yeah. This 153% increase to of indirectly holding 3,821 BTC, which was up from 1,507, they don't actually hold the Bitcoin. This is k33 basically saying, okay. What does the Norway Sovereign Fund actually own? Now what percentage of that is companies that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet? And I'm pretty sure that k33 went, you know, further and said, okay, let's take all the rest of the stuff that's on these companies balance sheet off and just look at what is the exposure given the holdings of these companies and these companies exposure to bitcoin alone that allows Norway to indirectly hold 3,821 BTC. That it's not really the Bitcoin that they that they actually own because they don't own any Bitcoin in Norway.
And that's the important part. Nobody understands this trade. They are just tangentially exposed to Bitcoin and they are kicking ass. Now, yes, a lot of that came from artificial intelligence, but they're still kicking ass. If you actually look at that number, A 153% increase year over year from 1500 BTC to 38100. Do the math. Do the math. It's no wonder Christine Lagarde is losing her ever loving mind. Personally, I'm all here for it. But let's come back over to the United States where Grayscale is releasing an investment project or product for Bitcoin Mining ETF.
Yep. That's right. Bitcoin Magazine, Mark Mason, gonna tell us all about Grayscale Investments, LLC's official launch of the Grayscale Bitcoin Miners ETF, ticker symbol is MNRS. It provides investors with a unique opportunity to gain exposure to the Bitcoin mining industry. This ETF is designed for those who want to invest in Bitcoin miners without, of course, directly purchasing Bitcoin itself, making it an attractive option for traditional investors looking to diversify their portfolios. Czech Republic, I'm looking at you. So the key takeaways are this.
Grayscale's Bitcoin Miners ETF targets companies involved in Bitcoin mining and its related services. The ETF is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, ARCA, and tracks the index, INDXX, bitcoin miners index. And third, investors can gain exposure to the bitcoin mining ecosystem without direct investment in BTC itself. So the overview is this the grayscale bitcoin miners ETF aims to provide targeted exposure to companies that derive significant portions of their revenue from bitcoin mining activities. This includes firms that offer mining infrastructure, hardware, and software.
The ETF is particularly appealing to investors who may not be ready to invest directly in Bitcoin but still want to participate in the growing market. Yeah. Indirect exposure. That's all this is. It's just like Norway. So the investment strategy is this. The ETF will not invest directly into bitcoin or any other digital asset. Instead, it focuses on the companies that support the bitcoin network's operations. The index, INDXX, Bitcoin Miners Index, which the ETF tracks, includes major players in the mining sector such as Mara Holdings at 16.65%.
Riot Platforms at 11.92%, Core Scientific at 9.2%, CleanSpark is such a low weight that they don't even mention it, as is Iron. And these companies are crucial for maintaining the security and integrity of the Bitcoin network. In market context, the launch of the grayscale Bitcoin miners ETF comes at a time when the market is experiencing significant fluctuations. Despite Bitcoin's impressive performance in 2024 with a return of 113%, many publicly traded mining companies have struggled to keep pace. Some have reported declines of up to 84% in their stock prices, highlighting the volatility and risks associated with the mining sector.
Grayscale's global head of ETFs, David Laval, emphasized the importance of Bitcoin mining, stating Bitcoin miners, the backbone of the network, are well positioned for significant growth as Bitcoin adoption and usage increases. This sentiment reflects the broader trend of institutional interest in Bitcoin related investments as more traditional investors seek to diversify their portfolios with innovative financial products. I love that. Innovative financial products. Man, that is so weighted to evil at this point. It's gonna take a monster to be able to pull that shit out of the cow pad that it's been centered in. Because, honestly, every time I hear innovative financial product, all I hear is derivative and gambling. That is literally it.
And maybe MicroStrategy, maybe Norway, maybe Czech Republic, maybe insurance companies and reinsurance companies and the products that they're starting to produce, maybe that's maybe that starts tipping the tide. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. But in conclusion, the Grayscale Bitcoin miners' ETF represents a significant step forward in making bitcoin investments more accessible to wider audiences. By focusing on the mining sector, Grayscale is tapping into a critical component of the Bitcoin ecosystem offering investors a way to engage with the market without the complexities of direct Bitcoin ownership. As the demand for Bitcoin continues to grow, the ETF could serve as a valuable tool for investors.
Well, yeah. It's just a again, while it's just another product, this is the thing that surprises me. I'm surprised that it hasn't been done yet. And I'm surprised that grayscale is the one that's putting their shovel head into this particular fertile ground first and not Blackrock. You see what I'm getting at here? It's I'm I'm seeing all these new products that are coming online. I'm seeing ancient ancient financial market sectors reinvigorated. Like insurance. How boring? How boring is insurance? Well, it's not boring anymore. I mean, back in, what was it, 2024?
I think it was like, was it November? I can't remember when it was. But the largest insurance company in Germany bought 25 or 24% of all of the $600,000,000 convertible note sale from MicroStrategy. Now as we all know, that was not the only convertible note sale that Micro Strategy did. But back in back in the day, like, what, all of, like, 6 months ago, and if it was November, then it was clearly not even that long ago. But I think it was a little a little earlier than that for the, 2024, $600,000,000 convertible note thing. They bought a quarter of them.
They bought a quarter of them, like, $170,000,000 worth. It's the largest insurance company in Germany. And now you've got I'm listening to podcasts that are talking about reinsurance companies. The guy the insurance companies that insure the insurance companies, and they're getting into it. And now it's become clear to me that insurance is a hell I mean, this is the thing that I love about Bitcoin. You never think of these things. I certainly did. Maybe you have, but I never really thought about insurance as anything other than my house burnt down my insurance company is going to cover whatever. My car is totaled I'm going to get a check from my insurance company.
I had to go to the hospital. My health insurance is you know, is gonna pay part of whatever the caregivers want to charge. Right? To me, I I was only viewing insurance and insurance companies as, like, at I was looking at it from its final act. Not what goes on before. I'm not looking at what what does insurance what do insurance companies have to do to be able to pay those claims? They have to invest. All they are is just another financial house. It's just that their product is insurance. Although they probably have a bond desk, they probably have an equities desk, they probably have the same kind of desks that you'd find in any financial company. Yet we really don't ever think about insurance companies that way, do we? I know I didn't. And now I'm looking at a completely different landscape.
And insurance companies are probably going to start buying Bitcoin or or start heavily investing into companies that are using the the micro strategy playbook and selling debt to get real money, to buy Bitcoin, to put it in their treasury. And as that treasury grows, and I'm not talking in the number of coins. I'm talking about relative to fiat currency as those assets grow, insurance companies don't have to worry as much. Because that's what they were supposed to do in the 1st place. But they got all hosed in the 2000s by having, like, extremely low insurance rates. And now that, as we've seen in California, is not the case to the point that State Farm pulled out a year or actually, last summer.
And they didn't have to go through any of this fire bullshit because they were already saying, we can't afford this. If this place goes up in flames or whatever happens, we can't afford. It's like a run on the bank. We can't afford to make all of our policyholders whole. Well, now they're going to be looking at these different instruments. They're going to be looking at the Bitcoin miner ETF from Grayscale. They're going to be looking at convertible note sales from MicroStrategy. They're definitely gonna be looking at MicroStrategy's brand new product that, in my opinion, looks like a freaking treasury bill, the strike preferred stock.
You don't get to vote as a stockholder, but you do get you do get a stock certificate and it does have a dividend that pays 8%. And if for whatever reason the value of that stock plummets, the interest rate that you get the dividend the interest rate of the dividend goes up. In in a it it looks exactly like a treasury bill, except it's a preferred stock that you don't get voting rights with from a private company from the US and is being backed by Bitcoin. If you think insurance companies aren't gonna start looking at any place that they can go so that they can make their policy holders whole in case of disaster, then we're all fooling ourselves because they are going to start looking at it.
It's an exciting time not only to be an insurance but to just be looking at this landscape. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities Oil is up a quarter of a point to $72.80 Brent Norsee is up 0.4 percent to 76.89. Natural Gas taking a dive 2 and a half to the downside, just over $3 per 1,000 cubic feet now. And gasoline is up a quarter of a point to $2.4 a gallon. Gold making a run for it, brothers and sisters. Almost 2 points to the upside. 1.84 percent to be exact, puts it at a price of $2,844.9 an ounce.
Silver is killing gold. 3.43 percent to the upside. Platinum is killing silver, 4.54% to the upside. Copper is up a half and palladium is up just over 3 points. Over in ag land, lots of red I see in the futures market. Biggest winner today is coffee, 2 a quarter percent to the upside. Biggest loser is chocolate, 5% to the downside. But live cattle is also down 1.73%, but lean hogs are up 0.68%, while feeder cattle are down 3 quarters of a point. Dow, not really the the equities, legacy markets just are, kinda, boring today. Point 18% to the upside for the Dow. S and P, 0.14% to the upside. Nasdaq moving sideways, and the S and P Mini is up just over one full point.
We're looking at $105,100 Bitcoin. We are seeing some sell pressure. We are down from about a 105,000. I think I saw it this morning. It clocked in at a 105,990 or something like that. We almost clipped a 106,000. We're still at a $2,080,000,000,000 market cap, though. However, with the rise of gold's price, we can only purchase a paltry 37.7 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,817,038 point 75 of and average fees per block are really, really low. 0.03 BTC taking fees on a per block basis. There are only 11 blocks.
Holy shit. 11 blocks carrying under 50,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is going to get you in at 3. Mining mining hash rate is at 768.4 exahashes per second on a 1 week rolling average. And that's probably, we're probably losing some hash rate because we're not as high as we used to be, because of these ultra low rates. Why you may ask? Because a lot of Bitcoin is being soaked up by ETFs and micro strategy and god only knows what and it is forever asset. It is a forever asset for these guys. They don't seem to be interested at all in releasing it once they have it. The less Bitcoin there is on the market and people are able to trade paper Bitcoin around, then the less actual on train chain transactions you have. But it also demonstrates the fact that, like, good girls and boys, there's a lot of Bitcoiners out there who are not trading Bitcoin. They've taken their Bitcoin off of exchanges.
Maybe they learned their lesson. I don't know. Maybe they got tired of being wrecked with leverage and Arthur Hayes haunting them with his smile in a dream. But, regardless, exchanges are really low on Bitcoin. So there's no real reason to like to have the kind of volume that we used to have. And for those of you who says this is evidence that Bitcoin is going to die, I'm sorry, but we've been here so many times I can't even I can't even count how many times we've had low fees and everybody said Bitcoin is going to die. And then I can't even count probably the same amount of times that Bitcoin has had extremely high fees. And guess what? It was the same argument. Bitcoin is going to die because we got high fees.
Stop it. Everything is going to be fine. You'll be fine. Let's move over to how to spell incompetence. Yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and Bitcoin for president with 6,777. Satoshi says, keep crushing it, my friend. I appreciate that. God's death 537. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Blazar with a 500 sats sends me an emoji I can't read because my operating system is literally that old. Seriously. Doctor black or d k black sheep, 500 sats. Doesn't say a damn thing, but Pye's does with a 100. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Martin comes back with a 100, says your show and style is awesome. Oh, nice. I like this plebeian market stuff. I will definitely check this, and I hope it will be in Europe. Love from Germany.
I think, Martin, if you're in Germany or anywhere in in so it doesn't matter where you are. I think it's really going to depend on each individual seller that is represented in the plebeian market as to whether or not they will or will not consider international shipping. I just shipped, oh my god, I just shipped a bag of Jolly Rancher candy for my daughter from the United States to frickin' New Zealand. A bag of Jolly Ranchers, which is like under 6 ounces, is going to cost me $41 to ship around to the other side of the planet. Alright? So that's really the structure that we're we're dealing with here. Plebeian market, in case you know, in case I'm not clear, Plebeian market is just a marketplace that plebs like you or full blown companies can open a stall and start selling their stuff. They've got all the back end in place to be able to have you put in whatever your you know, how much quantity of the item you have, a picture of your item, and they, you know, supply the ability to pay and all that. But it's really gonna be up to the vendor themselves as to whether or not they ship to, the United States or a United States company ships to Europe.
I do know that, Iso Labelle Art shipped me a painting from from near as I can tell, he says he's centered in Italy. So I'm guessing he shipped it from Italy, and I got it just fine. So he's definitely somebody who considers international shipping. Just wanted to make sure that that was clear. Richard Dick Whitman with a 100 says, Dick Whitman sats. Oh, those are the best kind of SATs. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use. Hey. You know what else makes Christine Lagarde really mad? When individual states of the United States start talking about a Bitcoin strategic reserve, like Illinois.
Yeah. They've introduced a Bitcoin reserve bill joining a growing list of states. Wow. This is out of decrypt, and it's written by Vismayev v. Illinois has joined a growing list of United States states exploring the possibility of crypto reserves. State representative John Cabello has introduced house bill 1844, which would establish a strategic Bitcoin Reserve Fund under the state's treasury. If passed, the Illinois state treasurer would manage the fund with all Bitcoin deposits held for a minimum of 5 years before the state could transfer, sell, appropriate, or convert to another cryptocurrency any Bitcoin in that fund, end quote.
The surge in state level Bitcoin reserve proposals has accelerated since Trump's return to the White House, with at least half a dozen states advancing or introducing similar bills in January alone. House bill 1844 allows Illinois to accept gifts, grants, and donations of bitcoin from the state residents and governmental entities, pausing to say do not give the state of Illinois your personal Bitcoin. Look, if you're listening to me and you're in Illinois, you're an Illinoisan or whatever you call yourselves up there in Illinois. If you were born there and raised there and lived your whole life there and raised your own children there and intend to freaking die there, do not give Illinois your Bitcoin. And the same advice I give to Texans.
I love Texas. You can take the man out of Texas, but you will never take the Texan out of the man. I am I want to go home so bad to Texas. I am homesick beyond comprehension. And yet, I would never consider, not for a second, giving Texas my Bitcoin. They need to go out and buy their own damn Bitcoin, and so does Illinois and Arizona and whatever. But this growing list of states is not going to stop. Everybody's going to be doing this. And in fact, by the time we get word on whether or not Trump's going to actually do a Bitcoin strategic reserve for the United States and not be complete bullshit about it, we because as far as I know, we still we're still waiting to see if he actually does it. I thought there was an executive order that ordered it, but it was all about shitcoins.
I I guess not. I have no idea what these guys are doing over there. And that's why I'm keep saying this stuff about the states. It doesn't matter. Yeah. There will be a short term price dip and a good one if Trump says, you know what? We decided not to do it. It won't matter because by the time we get word, there's gonna be so many states of the United States that just say, fuck it. I'm gonna do it ourselves or we're gonna do it ourselves, then it won't matter. The United States will have a strategic Bitcoin reserve. It will just be decentralized the way it should be.
Now let's move on over to the CME Group and see what these guys are doing. Oh, look. It's a brand new product from The Block written by Brian McGlynnan, CME Group to introduce options on Bitcoin Friday Futures, which are priced at 1 50th of a Bitcoin. The CME Group plans to introduce options on its Bitcoin Friday Futures contracts in late February, pending regulatory approval. Scheduled for launch on February 24th, these will be the 1st financially settled cryptocurrency options offered by CME Group, featuring expiries available every business day from Monday to Friday. Quote, we are pleased to offer these new options that provide traders with even greater precision to manage short term Bitcoin price risk.
CME Group Global Head of Cryptocurrency Products, Giovanni Vicascio, said in a press release on Thursday. Whew, that's a mouthful. Quote, Building on the success of our Bitcoin Friday Futures, the smaller size of these particular contracts along with daily expiries offer market participants a capital efficient toolset to effectively adjust their Bitcoin exposure. End quote. Bitcoin Friday Futures, CME's smallest Bitcoin based contract, is designed to address affordability and accessibility challenges posed by Bitcoin's increasing notional value. Priced at a mere 1 50th of a Bitcoin, the BFF contracts cater to both institutional investors and active retail traders.
Since their September 30th debut, they have become CME's most successful crypto futures launch ever. Since launch, more than 775,000 contracts have traded with an average daily volume of 9,700 contracts. Notably, 44% of trading activity has occurred during non US hours, highlighting potentially global demand. Yeah. I'd I'd say that not it's not potential. If if 44% of the trading activity is occurring while US markets are closed, then, yeah, that's global demand, dude. Whatever. In total, BFF contracts have generated $1,630,000,000 in trading volume, according to a press release.
Financially settled options on Bitcoin Friday Futures will complement CME Group's existing suite of physically settled options on Bitcoin, Ether, micro Bitcoin, and micro Ether futures, providing additional risk management flexibility to investors. So a new product, a brand new product coming online to join the rest of the financial fray. Oh, boy. Do you want my advice? Can you guess what it's gonna be? Just buy Bitcoin on Cash App or River or Swan or whatever, and hold it yourself. Don't let them hold it. Hold it yourself. Just go get a cold card.
Spin up a wallet. Learn how to do it. It's not that damn hard. You can you can practice spinning up a wallet without actually putting any bitcoin into it. You can spin up a wallet and then you can wipe the wallet and see if you can recover the exact same wallet with the seed phrase. And the pathway. We won't even get into that part. Just saying you can practice and you won't lose any bitcoin if you don't have any bitcoin in the wallet. Just because you spin up a wallet doesn't necessarily mean you got to put bitcoin in the wallet. There are all manner of things that you can do, but you need to learn how to do the self custody thing. It's really important coming into the future. Okay? It's gonna be more important than I think anybody actually suspects.
Okay. Open sats, not 1, not 5, not 7, not 8, but 9th wave of Bitcoin grants has been released. Kibo, Eltor, Nutstash, and Rust Bitcoin. Open Sats is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Bitcoin and Freedom Tech developers, and they have announced its 9th wave of what? 4 Bitcoin or for 4 Bitcoin projects. Quote, we're pleased to announce the 9th wave of grants from our general fund supporting a new selection of projects that enhance open source innovation. Kibo. Money. Okay. So this is the first of the 4 that got a grant. Kibo.
Money is a free open source self hostable bitcoin data generator and visualizer. It offers a global network view, a real time API, and a robust interface enhancing transparency and trust for researchers, developers, and enthusiasts. L Tor is number 2 on the list. L Tor is a high bandwidth Tor Fork using Bitcoin Lightning Network Incentives. Users earn Sats by hosting relays and sharing bandwidth, addressing Tor's limitations, and supporting anonymous communications. Oh, I am checking that one out right now. Hold on. Control click that song, bitch, because I wanna see that. Okay. It's going right to the GitHub repository.
So if, you're like me and you're like GitHub challenged because you don't really know what it means when they say Docker version and shit. Yeah. That I'm sorry. There's only so much I can ingest and and I'm just not good at the software side of things. But I can still run my own node and I can still self custody and I can do lightning network. I'm good. But I'm going to be looking at l Tor because Tor is constantly under attack. It needs help, and we are in a position to help. And if we can make some satoshis by helping, well, hell yeah.
That just incentivizes me all the more. Number 3 is Nutstash. It's a multiplatform Cashew e cash wallet with integrated lightning and nostril functionality. It supports secure private bitcoin transactions with features such as full wallet encryption, mint discovery, and that's very important. You gotta be able to find a mint to actually work with otherwise e cash does not really, you know, work. Nostra Wallet Connect is involved and seed based recovery is there. 4 and final is Rust Bitcoin is low level Bitcoin library in Rust for interacting with the Bitcoin network. It is foundational for projects like the Bitcoin DevKit or BDK, the Lightning DevKit or LDK, it provides reliability and correctness.
It also supports language bindings allowing developers from various ecosystems to use its features. Nice. So congratulations to kibo. Money, ltor, nut stash, and rust bitcoin. And thank you to open sats for funding those developers. Onto LDK, which was mentioned. Duplicate HTLC force closing, griefing, vulnerability fix in version 0.1.1. Lightning or LDK is the lightning development kit if you're a lightning user and you're making stuff for lightning, you probably use the LDK. So there's an important denial of service vulnerability that's been floating around that apparently has been fixed in version 0.1.1.
And that has been apparently allowing channel counterparties to cause force closure of unrelated channels. The vulnerability was discovered during an audit of LDK's chain module by Bitcoin developer and security researcher, Matt Moorhouse, who named it duplicate HTLC force close griefing. The attacker must broadcast a revoked commitment transaction, thereby forfeiting their channel balance but the size of the channel can be minimal and the attacker can spend their balance down to the 1% reserve before executing the attack as a result the cost of the attack can be negligible compared to the damage caused said the developer from version 0.1.1 LDK proactively fails HTLC is nearing their deadlines if the downstream channel is or is not being forced wait.
Hold on. Deadline if the downstream channel is or is being forced closed. That's a bad sentence y'all. This prevents cascading force closures during fee spikes and ensures duplicate HTLCs are failed back after a revoked transaction confirms avoiding upstream channel force closures. So it's while obviously above my pay grade, what it sounds like to me is that somebody can close one of my channels that is not related to the channel that I have with that person. I haven't heard about this attack being, you know, done in the wild, but that sounds like a pretty bad attack. Thank God the guys over at LDK are on top of everything. The Iris Wallet desktop version 0.1.0 has been released. Interface for RGB on top of the lightning network.
Iris Wallet is a simple desktop interface for managing RGB assets on the lightning network through a user friendly interface. Iris Wallet desktop version 0.1.0 is the first experimental release of a wallet that integrates the RGB protocol on the lightning network. Hold on. I gotta make sure that we, talk about that for a second. The initial release is available for Linux and Mac OS offering support for both testnet and reg test environments. Quote, attached, you can find 2 versions running on different Bitcoin networks, testnet and a shared public reg test.
For the latter, you can use our Telegram bot to get some funds to play around with, said the developers. Please note that the app may be buggy since it is very early stages. Reporting problems as GitHub issues is highly appreciated as was stated in the release notes. Okay. So what the hell is RGB smart contracts? RGB can scale in terms of transaction throughput, data size, and network size. It doesn't keep any on chain data. It is sharded from day 1 and is fully operable with layer 2 scalability solutions. Privacy says no chain analysis is possible due to the absence of a transaction graph in blockchain.
RGB uses 0 knowledge. Oh, wow. To protect the history of a fungible state. With r g b, the user is always in charge of when and what parts of the history and state to disclose if needed. And then finally, r g b is a native member of bitcoin and the lightning network ecosystem bringing rich smart contracts in a scalable whale way to the world's most secure and censorship resistant cryptocurrency. Interesting. Before everybody starts screaming that I'm talking about a shitcoin, I don't know. I've heard of RGB, but I really haven't dug all the way into it. If you have proof that it is a shitcoin, please let me know. Please do it via a boostogram.
And, honestly, use if you're not using a podcasting 2.0 app, please go get one. Go to podcastapps.com. Is it wait a minute. Hold on. Let me make sure. Podcastapps.com. Let's see what this brings up. Yeah. You go right to, you essentially end up going to podcastindex.org. But podcastapp.com will take you there, and you can look at whatever it is you need to look at to get a podcasting 2.0 enabled app. It's a brand new way to podcast. It's a brand new way to help people like me that bring you the news every single day with the ability to support me. Like throw me satoshis, you can throw me a boostagram, you can stream me satoshis while you're listening to it, but you can't do that with Apple Podcasts. You can't do that with what what else, like SoundCloud or, not there's another there's another one that I'm thinking of.
I used to use like 3 or 4 different podcast apps over the last, you know, 10 years And none of them have the ability to actually stream satoshis or zap people or give boostergrams or do all the other neat stuff. There's some that offer things like chapters and and transcripts, but podcasting 2.0 is an entire ecosystem in and of itself. And if you use something like fountain.fm, which is one of my favorite daily driver podcasting apps, it integrates directly with an Austro network. And I would do the math for you on being you know what it means to connect 2 completely different fully formed networks but I don't want to get into math okay just go get a modern podcasting app from podcastapps.com or you just go to podcasting or podcast index.org/apps and you'll have a whole list of them there and that way you can support me and the other bitcoiners that have podcasts in this space that try to keep you informed either every day or a couple times a week or once a week of what the hell's going on.
Because without people like us you're forced to read all this shit yourself. Otherwise, you can just listen to my dulcet tones while you drive your happy ass to work or back home from work or wherever the hell it is that you're going, and I do the reading for you. So show me some support, use a podcasting 2.0 app, Send me satoshis, 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.
Christine Lagarde's Concerns and Global Bitcoin Developments
Insurance Companies and Bitcoin Investments
