Join me today for Episode 1040 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- USDT On Bitcoin Cause For Concern?
- SEC Runs Away From Dealer-Broker Fight
- Nigeria's Economy Gets Binanced
- BTC Price Manipulation
- Stop Memecoining
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 08:57AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the February 2025, and this is episode ten forty e z of Bitcoin, and it's tax season. It is. That's why I named today's show ten forty e z because we're all gonna have to be going and doing all of our BS for the tax authorized, which I hear tell, 6,000 IRS agents are getting laid off today. So we'll we'll have to see because that doesn't seem to be more than a little bit of a ding inside of that, you know, that 80,000 people that they hired. And then they said that they weren't gonna hire, and then they hired them anyway. And then I don't know, man. The whole the whole thing is just all it's all theft. It's all grift. We've we're clearly have been funding every other country in the world except for our own with our tax dollars, and it's pretty much time for that BS to end.
But we got other things to talk about today. Tether is in the news. Strategy is in the news. The SEC is, well, kinda scuttling one of their own court cases. Nigeria is really not all that happy with Binance, so they've got their panties in a little twist about things. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Fed minutes that came out yesterday. There's a write up from Bloomberg, so we'll see what the implications of Jerome Powell opening his mouth were exactly. I'm gonna talk a little bit about Samson Moe because he's got well, he's gonna be talking about something that a lot of Bitcoiners have been conjecturing about the price of Bitcoin. And, no, it's not a price prediction either up or down. That's not what we're gonna be talking about there.
And then a little bit more about Libra. We got a decent write up, about the history of what actually did occur, and it's got some more details in it because this is an unfolding story. This is gonna be one of those things where that rabbit hole is probably a lot deeper than anybody anybody could possibly imagine, and then we'll end with the great state of Montana. But first, Michael Saylor. Strategy has announced a $2,000,000,000 in convertible notes to buy more Bitcoin according to Vince Quill out of Cointelegraph Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, has announced the pricing of its $2,000,000,000 senior convertible notes tranche to purchase yet more Bitcoin and, of course, fund operating expenses because they sure as shit aren't getting any revenue.
God, did you see their revenue numbers from this last quarter? Pathetic. They are literally not selling anything, and their expenses has just shot through the roof. Of course, their expenses are are, you know, well, they're they're buying a lot of Bitcoin. So, yes, they have expenses. Anyway, the notes. Oh my god. The notes will feature a 0% coupon, and they will mature on March 2030. Each $1,000 block of notes is convertible to 2.3 shares of Strategies class a common stock at $433.43 per share, which is a 35% premium over its current market price.
Because what the hell is the market price today of MicroStrategy or strategy? Yeah. $320.63 per share as of right freaking now. Yeah. $320, and it looks like they want $433.43 per share. Wow. That is one hell of a premium, ladies and gentlemen. But both the conversion rate and the conversion price are subject to change over time. According to strategy, the offering will be made to qualified institutional investors because plebs like you suck who can collectively purchase $300,000,000 in additional notes within five business days after the initial notes are issued. The company's corporate Bitcoin acquisition plan continues to attract investor attention, drawing both praise and criticism from market participants, which is clearly not plebs like you because we suck.
Anyway, he they're getting criticized for the levered approach to building the balance sheet. So $2,000,000,000 more, and this does appear to be part of its 2121 plan. Now I have not seen that, MicroStrategy purchased any Bitcoin this week. So who knows what the hell is going on over there, but we got Tether in the news. Actually, Tether is not in the news as much as I I brought you a an interview, from Frank Korva out of Bitcoin Magazine yesterday. Well, he's apparently had time to digest what he thinks about all this tether on lightning and Bitcoin and stuff, and he doesn't like it.
And you know how I know because he titled this one, I still don't like tether on Bitcoin and lightning. That's what I love about Frank. He doesn't bullshit with his headlines. This is out of Bitcoin magazine. The news of USDT coming to Bitcoin and Lightning via Taproot assets has been met with various reactions. Some believe it's good for Bitcoin. Most, actually, based on a small survey I conducted on Twitter. Yes. I know the sample size isn't large enough for the results to be significant. I'm sharing it anyway, and that's in all bold letters there. Or upper capital. Sorry. Not bold. Cap. Caps. All caps. He's he's all cap in that one. Anyway, others are not so enthused about it.
Others includes me. I'm I'm not so enthused about it. That said, I've tried to be open minded. I even recently profiled Jesse Schrader, the cofounder and CEO and Amboss, a company that provides intelligent payment infrastructure for payments made over lightning, who is a proponent of USDT on Bitcoin and Lightning, in efforts to see what I might be missing about the benefits of being able to transact with digital United States dollars over Lightning. In my interview with Shader, he made the following points. The proliferation of USDT has proven that there is demand for US dollars globally.
Two, USDT is a massive payment mechanism. It processed over $10,000,000,000,000 in payments in 2024, and that's more than Mastercard, and some percentage of those payments will now be made over Lightning. And three, and finally, USDT will bring more liquidity to the Lightning Network, which will help the network grow and handle bigger payments. From a business perspective, it's hard to argue with the above that the above aren't good reasons to bring USDT to Lightning. And as someone who believes that people should be free to use whatever money they want, I can't argue with them looking through a practical lens. However, I do believe that bringing USDT to Bitcoin and Lightning comes at a price.
One dimension of that price is technical, while the other is philosophical. On the technical level, running USDT over Bitcoin and Lightning potentially puts Bitcoin's security at risk. If we see another Bitcoin hard fork comparable to the one we saw during the block size war, larger economic nodes on the Bitcoin network, like the one operated by Coinbase which manages much of the Bitcoin that backs The US spot Bitcoin ETFs, may opt to support the Tether fork of the network, which could also include other changes to the network that could jeopardize Bitcoin's security in the long run. In other words, if the likes of Coinbase, Tether, and some other major players in the Bitcoin space support and push for the Tether fork, other major economic nodes will likely follow suit.
What's more, everyone using Tether on Bitcoin and Lightning would also likely support that side of the fork because the USDT that remains on the chain of the non Tether fork will likely be nullified. Lynn Alden wrote about this in her essay, Proof of Stake in A Blockchain Centralization Dilemma. In the piece, she stated, Custodians can nullify the value of all stablecoins on whichever side of the fork they do not view as the correct one. Granted, Alden was referring to smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana that rely heavily on DeFi, which stablecoins are a major component of, when she wrote this. But the same would apply to Bitcoin.
Alden was correct in this claim as we saw when Ethereum shifted from proof of work to proof of stake consensus mechanisms during the twenty twenty twos, the merge. Post Merge, stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether, excuse me, only continued to back the tokenized US dollar on Ethereum and not Ethereum PoW, the older chain that continued running the proof of work consensus algorithm. The same type of scenario could play out with Bitcoin in the event of a chain split giving Tether an inordinate amount of power over Bitcoin. My other reason for not liking USDT on Bitcoin is a philosophical one.
Bitcoin, which was released into the world in the wake of the great financial crisis of the twenty twenty seven, twenty twenty nine. Sorry. Twenty o seven to twenty o nine timeline was created as an alternative to the US dollar. At the time, the dollar was being printed en masse to bail out the same banks that caused the crisis in the first place. Bitcoin, money that can't be printed at the whim of a government or central bank, was created to compete with the US dollar, not to help buoy it. Bringing USDT, a mechanism the US government uses to prop up US dollar hegemony around the world, to Bitcoin feels morally wrong to me, and I'm not here for it.
So on a practical level, I get why some are in favor of USDT coming to Bitcoin and lightning. I just think that many are missing the bigger picture in that Bitcoin has potentially both been put in a vulnerable position and has had part of its value proposition overshadowed, albeit maybe just temporarily as a result. Okay. So that's the end of the article. That's that is Frank Korva's opinion. So here's here's my opinion. We don't have any say about it. Well, we do, but we don't. Let let me clarify what I mean by that. In the back in in 2017, the 2016, '20 '17, '20 '18 timeline, right, from 2016, essentially, it was the year 2016 to 2017 was the block size wars.
And it kinda went it spilled over a little bit after 2017, and, you know, clearly, they were everybody was bitching about mid twenty fifteen about it. But, really, the great guts and feathers of the block size wars happened between 2016 and 2017. So what happened? A whole group of people got into a room in New York, and they signed their names to a letter called the New York agreement. And what that letter essentially said is that we don't give a shit. We've got all the power. We're going to fork Bitcoin. We're gonna have four gigabyte size blocks or whatever megabyte yeah. Four megabyte size blocks, and we're gonna put SegWit in.
But they were also going to increase the the actual block size. And what they the the language of the letter specifically called out all of us Bitcoiners that didn't want that. And they said, well, screw you. We're gonna do it anyway. And they still did. It didn't work. It was a miserable failure and a complete embarrassment to all involved, yet all those people that were involved are have made out like bandits, and only one of them, a guy named Bruce Fenton, was the only one who signed his name that actually apologized and said that that that he was wrong in doing that. But Barry Silbert is, like, I'm probably teetering on being a billionaire.
We know that, oh, the guy for, Brian Armstrong, he assigned it. He is definitely a billionaire. They don't care. It didn't hurt them one bit the fact that the day that the the the new blockchain was to create its first block, it failed because of a flaw in the coding of when they recoded the the Bitcoin core software. They the guy that coded it made a mistake. It's called an off by one mistake. But that chain was never able to actually create its first block. It failed immediately. It failed immediately. But we still it could what happens if it had worked? It wouldn't have mattered. None of us gave a shit.
We were like, fine. You you we told them. We said, you go do you. If you want to increase the the the the block size, you go do that. Have our blessing. That's what Bitcoin was all about. I remember those arguments. I was part of I was part of I was one of the people that said that argument. I was like, oh, look. If you want to go do it, go go do it. Fine. Because I'm not going to run your software. Now, what Frank's saying, we're we're kind of right back here. We're we're kinda circling right back around to where we were at the 2016, '20 '17 level. It's different, but it rhymes.
And that he's correct, it could be possible, very much could be possible that we got a problem on our hands at Sabruin. And it's very possible that a whole bunch of people, Brian Armstrong is definitely gonna be one of them, who opts to fork Bitcoin off, and they might do it. And maybe this time, their blockchain might actually spin up and and mine an actual block. And that's the problem is we actually, it's not even the problem. We don't know what will happen. First of all, we have to assume that they're going to try, and that's probably a good assumption. But once they do it, two things can happen. One, the thing fails miserably, or two, it actually works.
If it actually works, there's two scenarios. It is massively adopted by the world, which in this particular case, because of Tether, that's a possibility. Or nobody gives a shit, and it just runs and maybe some people that that like Tether use it, but they won't what what happens is they won't be able to tell people on the main chain, the actual Bitcoin chain, that they cannot use Tether because that functionality is already here, ladies and gentlemen. And I will bet you my bottom dollar that there are still enough dyed in the wool die hard Bitcoiners that and I'm going to be one of them. I will not run the new software.
I will only run Bitcoin Core, actual Bitcoin from GitHub forward slash Bitcoin forward slash Bitcoin. And I and if if I find out and we and people will know if Bitcoin forward slash Bitcoin actually becomes the fork software, then we won't run that. A new repository will be spun up that will literally be the original flavor, like Coca Cola back in the eighties or whenever they tried to foist that new Coke on us. And I'm going to run that software, and I'm not going to be the only one that runs the software. And second, in the big big picture, if this if if this happens, the next thing that happens is that I get I get territory on the new chain. They're gonna have to take a snapshot.
They're gonna have to take a snapshot of who owns what. What what wallets hold what amount of Bitcoin on this particular day I'm going to get that. So from my standpoint, I'm sort of in a I'm I'm in agreeance with Frank here. But we've been here before. All of this has happened before, and I goddamn guarantee you all of this will happen again. But losing our minds and I'm not accusing Frank. He's not losing his mind. He's bringing up very good points. But I guarantee you, there will be a whole host of people that will lose their shit if and when, and most likely, it's gonna be a win situation, people start getting into a room and start talking about a hard fork of Bitcoin with replay action in place or what's called replay protection, which means the all of the wallet addresses are created in a different manner, and they don't like, there won't be a b c one address on the new chain. Right? Any any one of the legacy wallet addresses that with the first three or four characters of that wallet that describes what kind of wallet it is, they'll they will they might have the same functionality, but you won't be able the old chain will not be able to talk and send tokens to or receive tokens from the new chain. That's called replay protection. That was waived that was we talked about that shit way back in the day in the block size wars because Roger Ver was talking about we're gonna split the chain, and we're not gonna have replay protection.
And we were like, if you do that and that chain works, we're going to be able to destroy your chain. And they finally, at the very last minute, finally decided to actually say, yeah. We'll we'll we'll get replay protection in. So it I'm just I'm just like I'm watching it all happen again. And so is it a flaw in the design of Bitcoin that allows this? No. Is it a flaw in a forest that I can cut down a tree? No. It's it's the it's the forest and the trees themselves that make it valuable enough for me to wanna go cut down trees and build shit with it. Is it is it a flaw in a in a pool of water that water collects in that pool of water? No.
You might be going, what the hell are you talking about? I'm just saying this is the nature of things that are created in the universe. Whether by human hands or by nature itself, we all create the same way because we are all governed by the rules of the universe, which was laid down in the first femtosecond of the big bang, and that would be the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. In those four rules of the universe, everything you see has come about. And it doesn't matter if a bird built the nest or a human built the nest. What got built was a nest. In our case, what got built was money. We're always going to be looking for a way to build money. And as long as this is an issue, there's always gonna be somebody else who wants to destroy the value of an old system of money in favor of a new system of money if and only if that destruction enriches themselves. That's greed.
That's all this is, and that's all it's ever gonna be. We either fight it or we lay down and let it roll over us. Personally, the way that I'm going to fight it is I'm never going to run that code. Let's move on to Jesse Coughlin, Cointelegraph. The SEC pulls its own appeal in the case over crypto broker dealer rules. Yesterday, I talked about senator Ted Cruz and the Bitcoin was it the Bitcoin Policy Institute or Bitcoin advocacy group? We're basically saying, hey. We need to everybody needs to get behind senator Ted Cruz's bill and pass the bill because it's gonna change the way this whole broker dealer thing is described.
And that was done by the SEC. Right? So Ted Cruz wants to rescind that entire definition, and now the SEC seems to be already saying, okay. We're done. We're not gonna do this because they've pulled their own appeal. Cointelegraph tells us more. The US Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its efforts to undo a court ruling blocking a controversial broker dealer rule that would have given the agency jurisdiction over decentralized crypto protocols. It sounds to me this sounds to me like they're front running Ted Cruz. They don't wanna be embarrassed anymore than they already are. I think they're done. Anyway, in a brief on February to the fifth circuit appeals court, the SEC said it moved to voluntarily dismiss the appeal.
Last month, just days before former SEC chair Gary Gensler was due to step down, the agency appealed a November ruling from a Texas federal court judge in a lawsuit brought by Crypto Trade Groups, the Blockchain Association, and the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas. The ruling blocked the SEC's proposed change to the definition of a dealer, which would have required all crypto liquidity providers and automated market makers with more than $50,000,000 in capital to register with the agency. Now that's exactly what the bill that senator Ted Cruz is seeking to do.
So the SEC, I guess, heard about it yesterday, got into a little meeting room and had some coffee and maybe a stack of donuts, you know, you know, the little little pancreas destruction there, and said, you know what? We're done. Let's just we're gonna end it here. So now what's in question is, does does Ted Cruz continue his crusade to do the thing that the SEC themselves has basically shaken you just, like, taken their hands off of? I honestly think he should. Just so that it's instantiated that you can't do this shit anymore in the in the future. But there so that's good news.
It it it I mean, it yeah. Will it enable more scams? Yeah. But, again, greed is part of human nature. You're never gonna get rid of it. The only way that we get rid of greed is if somehow or another we continue to keep our consciousness, but but leave our physical bodies and we are unimpacted by any physical things in the universe. That's the only way I see of greed being squelched out of the human spirit. But Nigeria is kinda greedy. Why? Because they're suing Binance for 81,500,000,000.0, that's billion with a b, following the hostage crisis according to Reuters.
Liz Napolitano from Decrypt, Nigeria is suing Binance for $81,500,000,000 alleging that the firm's operations have hobbled its struggling economy, Reuters reported. The Nigerian government's lawyers are seeking to compel Binance to pay 79,500,000,000.0 for allegedly kneecapping their country's economy and tanking its official currency, the naira, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. Oh my god. Talk about, oh, put some diapers on Nigeria. My god. Jesus. They are also aiming to secure $2,000,000,000 in back taxes, blah blah blah.
The lawsuit is the latest in several legal tussles between Nigerian authorities and Binance, most notably including the imprisonment of a Binance executive for much of 2024 in a headline grabbing hostage crisis. The crypto exchange has emerged as a popular alternative to Nigeria's deeply, deeply troubled financial system over the past few years. However, Nigerian officials have blamed Binance for their country's economic woes. Oh, we're we're gonna call you a waveulets hurling money laundering and tax evasion charges at the firm.
Binance operated as an unregistered business in Nigeria since at least 2019 according to the authorities, serving locals who are often looking to exchange their naira for stablecoins and, you know, anything that has value. However, the company halted all naira denominated trading last year following a crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry in that country. Nigerian authorities allege the services offered by the exchange and others like it have led to the devaluation of the naira. The naira tumbled more than 70% against the US dollar since 2023.
Wow. Meanwhile, naira or Nigeria's annual inflation rate stood at 24.48% in January according to the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics. Wow. So okay. That's all we need. There's a couple more paragraphs, but that's all we need from this. Because now when whole countries how to how to how to put this? When whole countries sue a singular company and the charge is crashing your national currency, how weak is your currency? You're not suing your next door neighbor country for crashing your local economy and your currency and, you know, whatever.
No. No. No. Binance. Buy it's Binance's fault. I'm not really all that much of a fan of Binance, but come on. And not only is it a weak, weak argument because you have essentially, you had a a currency that was so weak that a singular company might have affected it. What's more important here is that a country is claiming damages on a national economy as cause against a company. And what does my gut feeling say? Good? Hey, good. What'd you say? This is gonna happen a lot more. Yeah. It's gonna happen a lot more. It's going it I even if Nigeria loses their ass on this one, and they they probably will, I would be prepared to see all manner of countries as their as their economies finally fail, like the pieces of dog crap that they are.
And they're they're really more failing because of the US dollar. Let's be let's be honest. The United States Dollar is a wrecking ball to every country on the face of the planet except our own. That doesn't mean I'm happy about it, and it doesn't mean that I'm like, oh, well, we're all evil. I'm not saying that shit either. I'm just saying it is what it is. And what the US dollar is is a wrecking ball. And it's destroying economies exactly the way we planned it. Not I didn't plan it, but I guarantee you that I mean, when I hear, like, Gloria Nuland or whatever her name is, the old secretary of state say fuck the EU, that pretty much tells me that, you know, that we really are not really all that concerned with our friends over there at the EU. So I guarantee you, we don't give a shit one about Nigeria.
And we knew, Jerome Powell knew that by raising interest rates when he did, it was going to cause the EU and The UK bond market to essentially catch on fire. Did it anyway, and it caught on fire. It was a major issue, a major issue. Didn't care. In fact, it looked like it was constructed to do exactly that. I mean, he what he gave you know, not the only reason he did that, but, hey, that was a you know, like, that was a little happy accident. You know, Bob Ross, happy little tree, happy accident kind of thing. I we've got all of that, and then we've got the entire milkshake theory, the dollar milkshake theory where all fiat currencies collapse into the United States dollar. And now we got Tether on lightning and Bitcoin.
And we've got the company Tether as a major a major buyer of United States debt. Not only does this train continue to roll, ladies and gentlemen, it just got refueled. Now we go back to what Frank was saying. He doesn't like this. He doesn't like Tether on Bitcoin and and and Lightning. In my opinion, what I just said is why I don't like it, but I don't have anything to say about it now, do I? If it can happen on Bitcoin, it will happen on Bitcoin. And something else happened yesterday. The Fed minutes were released and apparently, they signal that officials are on hold until inflation improves. The beatings will commence until morale improves. This is out of Bloomberg written by who? I don't know. I can't maybe it's at the bottom. If I find it, I'll I'll let you know.
It appears that the minutes released Wednesday in Washington said many participants noted that the committee could hold the policy rate at a restrictive level if the economy remains strong and inflation remained elevated. Officials held the Fed's benchmark policy rate in the range of 4.25 to 4.5 at that gathering. We knew that. Okay? We knew that. The record of the meeting underscored the cautious approach Fed policymakers are taking after lowering interest rates by a percentage point in the closing months of last year, and several officials have said that they'd like to see inflation cool further toward the Fed's two percent target before backing another cut.
Investors are currently pricing in one rate cut in 2025 with the possibility of a second according to futures markets. Yeah. Good luck, dude. Some officials also expressed concern over the risks posed by the potential for another debt ceiling showdown in Washington. Regarding the potential for significant swings in reserves over coming months related to debt ceiling dynamics, various participants noted that it may be appropriate to consider pausing or slowing balance sheet runoff until the resolution of this event. The Fed is currently allowing up to $25,000,000,000 in treasuries and $35,000,000,000 in mortgage backed securities to mature every month without reinvesting the return principal.
The US government reached its statutory limit for outstanding debt in January. The Treasury Department has since been using so called extraordinary measures to extend its ability to pay the federal government's expenses. Donald Trump has backed a plan from house republicans that would raise the debt ceiling by $4,000,000,000,000, but that would likely take months to negotiate. And then they basically talk a lot about Trump. So the minutes are are relatively hawkish. And in fact, I would not unless something changes drastically, we're not gonna see rate cuts in 2025.
What's the possibility of something changing drastically? I don't know. Probably $50.50. That's again, that's That's my gut feeling. So take it for what it's worth. Let's run the numbers. CNBC, futures and commodities. They got oil, West Texas Intermediate, up 1.4%. No. 1.04% to $73 flat. Brent Norsey up one and a quarter to $77.00 2. Natural gas is down five and a half percent, just over $4 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is up a half point to $2.10 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing well today because the Dow is not doing well today. We'll get into that. Gold up three quarters of a point to $29.57 and a dime.
Silver is up one and a fifth point. Platinum is up a full point. Copper is up just over a point, and palladium is up over one and a half percent. Ag. What's ag doing today? Ag is pretty much well mixed. The biggest loser today is coffee. Four and a quarter to the downside. Sugar is up 1.8%. Live cattle is down, god, three quarters of a point. Lean hogs are down one and a third, and feeder cattle are down just over a full point. Now here's your your legacy equity markets. They are all bleeding. The Dow is down down one and a quarter. S and P down, point 69%.
Nasdaq is down a full three quarters of a point, and the S and P Mini is down $1.27. So what the hell is going on? Retail sales are not looking good, guys. Walmart has a forecast that is, quote, unquote, raising concerns. Why is Walmart important? Because after they've gutted the country, the United States government gutting the country and gutting our paychecks and basically, you know, printing our value out into, I don't know, into the sewage swamps. All we can afford to do is go to Walmart. We can't shop at that fancy chafe way anymore. Most people go to Walmart to go buy their groceries, clothes, you know, cheap ass home goods that break within a year.
And so when when Walmart gets nervous about their revenue for the year, their projections, that means people they're they we they just don't have the money. They don't have the money. The money is held by all the banks and all the corporations and all the everybody that you would possibly possibly possibly be a that could, you know, contain money because it's not in our pockets. And Walmart is the canary in the coal mine on this one. And when that canary starts to breathe a little heavy, you get a little worried that maybe the atmosphere is poisoned. That's why they took them down to the coal mines because the canaries were the first one to keel over and die. And when your canary died, that was your cue that carbon monoxide or some other noxious gas was building up, and you got the f out.
And that's what Walmart is. That's why you're seeing the Dow tank, like, damn near, like, what it's down 556 points today, down a point and a quarter. That is a big move to the downside, And it's really because nobody's got any money. That's a problem. Unless you got Bitcoin, which is at $97,980, that puts us back above $1,900,000,000,000 of market cap, and we can now purchase 33 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,826,654.23 of. And average fees per block are low 0.04 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis. And ladies and gentlemen, mempools around the world are filling up again. Thank God.
At least it'll get the idiots off our back. There are just under 40 blocks in mempools around the world carrying a total of 59,000 unconfirmed transaction yeah. Unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 5 Satoshis per vBuy. Low priority's gonna get you in at four. And hash rate has come down a little bit, but we're still 803.9 exahashes per second is still pretty damn powerful. So there you go. Take it with the grain of salt that you will from checkout Lagarde. See what I did there? Yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and, perma nerd with $3.33 say, I'd rather live under a bridge and have real friends. Yes. Like, that's what I said yesterday.
Saints and Sass with 500 says, boost. Psyduck with $4.20 says, pay duck. Oh. Damn shit, pay duck. Pies with four twenty says, hashtag four zero HPW. I still don't know what that means other than that it's a split bolt that people use to tie off electrical connections. I've just seen a lot of 40 HPW lately and I'm like, I don't know what it means. Pies, please tell me what it means. God's death with two thirty seven says thank you, sir. No thank you. Wartime with three thirty three gives me an emoji I can't read because my operating system is so old. Nick underscore dose with a hundred and one sats says, cheers.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Samson Moe says that Bitcoin's price movement looks very manufactured. Now before I get into this from Zoltan Vardai out of Cointelegraph, I need to say a couple of things here. I have had that feeling myself. Nobody likes this. Nobody likes this. And I understand why, because it means, well, then Bitcoin isn't as powerful as you thought it was. Well, yeah. But the human human nature, you got a whole bunch of greedy assholes out there that hold Bitcoin. Guess what? You're gonna get market manipulation.
Shit. Gold's been going through market manipulation for centuries. Right? I mean, everything gets manipulated. Right? But there's a lot of people that just they won't believe it. And that's okay. It it I mean, I can't prove it. Neither can Sampson Moe. He can't prove it neither. This is just, again, gut feelings. Because I keep seeing I keep seeing these patterns forming on, like, on the chart, and I'm like, wow. They are, like, right on this line, or, wow. They're just keeping it just over $96,000, and then it will rise to $97,000 and then plummet right back down to just over $96,000.
You know, these kinds of things makes me go, Well, let's see what Samson Moe's reaction is. Bitcoin's price action is raising concerns about possible market manipulation as the cryptocurrency continues trading in a tight range despite billions of dollars in institutional inflow. Again, that's one of the data points that I myself use to go, what the hell is going on? Everybody's buying this thing. I'm not seeing the price movement that reflects it. Right? That's that's sort of where I'm at. Bitcoin has been range bound over two months trading between 92,400 support and a hundred and $6,500 resistance since December.
Bitcoin managed to briefly escape this range after US President Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20 when it briefly rose to a hundred and 9,000 all time high before dropping back down into the previous range. Bitcoin's range bound price action may be manufactured based on the trajectory of the past months according to Samson Moe, CEO of Jan three and founder of Pixelmatic. Quote, it seems like it's some sort of price suppression, said Moe during a panel discussion at Consensus Hong Kong twenty twenty five adding, quote, if you look at the price movement, we peak, and then we stay steady and chop sideways.
And it's good. You you can say it's consolidation, but it just looks very manufactured. The very tight range in which you're trading just doesn't look natural at all, Mao added. Despite Bitcoin's temporary lack of upside, industry watchers remain optimistic about Bitcoin's trajectory, and then they give all manner of prices that are much higher than they are today, and I don't wanna get into that shit. And then we start talking about Michael Saylor. So we don't need that. We already know what Michael Saylor's doing. I'm sort of in the Sampson mo camp when it comes to manufactured price or at least some kind of manipulation.
And I always look at it. It's not really good or bad as much as why would somebody want to do that. Well, there's two camps, I believe. One camp is government, by and large, even if Trump says he loves Bitcoin, hates Bitcoin because it really screws up the US dollar, which they can print ad infinitum, and it's the world reserve currency. And other governments don't like it either even if they don't have the world's reserve currency because it fucks with their shit. And they wanna be able to they and don't get me wrong. They can print money, and they do. They print all kinds of money. Just because it's not the world reserve currency doesn't mean that they won't print it. They do. Just look at just look at Zimbabwe with their $1,000,000,000,000 notes.
The other camp are people that want to buy Bitcoin sub $100,000. I believe it's camp two. Because in the former, The United States is going to roll into bed with Tether. Probably a little bit of circle, but mostly it's gonna be Tether. Because Tether buys the treasury bonds, which is the debt that we print. So we're a we're going to be able to continue to print as much money as we want in the form of debt instrumentation that we call the treasury bill or treasury bond, the ten year, the thirty year, all that kind. That that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Five year, two year, one year. It doesn't matter. Print them all, bitches. As long as Tether buys it, they can print the Tether to reflect that they've bought this stuff. And they make $20,000,000,000 or $13,000,000,000 last year. They got, like, a crew of 20 people. They can afford to buy all kinds of treasury bonds. As to the mechanism, exactly how they get that money, that's something I think we really need to start looking into on the Tether side is like, where does this money come from? I don't wanna go there right now. Because I'm saying that for the moment, and honestly not just the short term, but probably the medium term for quite a while, the United States government is going to love Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin is the Trojan horse that brings all these other people into the Tether US dollar debt instrumentation printing circus. Bitcoin is the ticket. It's the ticket for the show, man. And they're going to be nice to Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong. They're definitely gonna be nice to Bitcoin until it doesn't serve a purpose, in which case they will probably try to burn it to the ground, and then we're gonna win anyway. So that I'm not worried about. But still, for those people that have the money like Michael Saylor and Meta Planet and Similar Scientific and all the other all the other people that want to get into this, like, we've got 38 states or 32 states that want some form of cryptocurrency in their coffers at the state level, and most of them actually want Bitcoin. A few of them don't actually say that. But be that as it may, they wanna get in.
I think that there is price manipulation going on. I think it's to keep it under a hundred thousand dollars for as long as humanly possible before it's just impossible to do. And how would they be able to do that? Sure. Paper Bitcoin. I'm sure it's happening. And then you'll say, but David, that means Bitcoin failed. No. It doesn't. It doesn't mean anything of the sort. It means human morality and ethics have failed. And I'm not surprised. Have you seen the history book in the last, I don't know, like, since you were born? Yeah. It's replete with the failings, the ethical failings, the moral failings, the failings of all kinds from humanity. So I'm not surprised.
Will it kill Bitcoin? No. It will kill those that find out that they never owned Bitcoin in the first place, which is why you need to hold your own coins on your own heart well with your own signing device that you spun up, that you take care of, and not let anybody else custody your Bitcoin. Only those people will survive. If you're somebody that's got your shit on Coinbase, until you get your coin off Coinbase into your own wallet, consider yourself host. Consider yourself poor. Consider yourself going to be in manic depressive states for the rest of your life until you commit suicide because you didn't take care of what you could have had. Because that's what paper Bitcoin is going to do to people, but it's not going to do it to the people that hold actual Bitcoin.
Anyway, I agree with Samson. I think there's some kind of chicanery going on, and Bitcoin is going to survive all of it. Even Libra, which destroyed $251,000,000 worth of investor wealth according to research. So the numbers are starting to actually be crunched. Let's find out what idiots lost their life savings. The Libra meme coin scandal that rocked Argentina over the weekend destroyed millions of dollars in investor wealth according to research by Nansen. On chain data tracked by Nansen shows 86 of traders lost a total of $251,000,000 while the winners secured just 180,000,000 in profits.
In other words, this whole thing was a net negative wealth generation event that potentially sucked out liquidity from the market. Not potentially my ass. It did. The episode is a stark reminder that tokens associated with political figures can be just as risky as random meme coins and celebrity cryptocurrencies in making or breaking fortunes within minutes. Oh, bullshit. This doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether it's a celebrity, a random person, or a political figure. It's not them. It's the meme coin. You stay away from them. Take my advice.
Stay away from meme coins. You're going to get hurt. You're not I guarantee you, you are not on the side of the people who are going to make out on meme coins. It's not because you're stupid. It's because you're not part of the class that generated the meme coin. Only those people actually get money. You give them your money. Anyway, Libra debuted on Meteora, a Solana based decentralized exchange, surged, blah blah blah. Let's see. Okay. Here we go. Over 40,000 crypto addresses piled into the token. 40,000 crypto addresses fueling a surge in the price.
The bullish excitement I almost read that as excrement. But the bullish excitement, however, was short lived. The balloon popped as insiders, again, insiders, offloaded massive numbers of tokens, tanking the market cap by 90%. And then they talk about Malay getting embarrassed. 70% of wallets trading Libra from February to the eighteenth ended with realized losses as many likely attempted to profit off the additional retweet from Javier Malay, Nansen said in a report shared with CoinDesk. And he's talking about how, I wasn't aware of anything. I didn't know anything about this project. That that's the the the second tweet that they're talking about. Anyway, the number of unique holds of the token fell to 35,770 on February from over 50,000 on February.
Meanwhile, two wallets that bought the token at two particular times made just over $5,400,000 in total profit. Oh, they made out like bandits because they were the insiders. That that's how meme coins work. Again, it doesn't like, if if you were to say, well, I I only deal in meme coins that are about animals. Because those are because statistically, I've run the numbers. Statistically, they're safer than the ones that are that are run by political figures. It doesn't matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's the meme coins existence that will literally put you living under a bridge.
Not if it's a Trump meme coin or a Melania meme coin or a Argentinian meme coin or a fucking Boris and, you know, Natasha's Goose and Squirrel coin. It doesn't matter. It's a meme coin. It has no functional value. It these are expressly made for idiots. Don't be one of them. Be somebody like Japan's Meta Planet. They bought the right thing. Meta Planet buys 68 Bitcoin to expand their holdings to 2,100 BTC. That's a nice number, bro. Nice. Nice. Timmy Shin, the Block dot CEO, Japanese investment firm, Meta Planet, acquired an additional 68 BTC to expand its total Bitcoin holdings to 2,100 BTC worth about $203,000,000 right now as the company remains bullish on the world's largest cryptocurrency and not meme coins.
Meta Planet disclosed on Thursday that it purchased an additional 68.59 BTC at an average price of 96,335 per coin, boosting its holdings to 2,100 compared to the 141 BTC that it had at the June. This means Meta Planet currently holds about 0.01% of the total Bitcoin supply. The Tokyo listed firm announced its Bitcoin strategy in April of twenty twenty four and has since been buying Bitcoin. In the Thursday statement, the company reiterated that it remains committed to accumulating Bitcoin and aims to hold 10,000 BTC by the end of twenty twenty five and twenty 1,000 BTC by the end of twenty twenty six. Meta Planet Meta Planet stock closed upwards 2.78% at 6,290 yen on Thursday in Japan according to Yahoo Finance.
So Meta Planet not playing around with meme coins. You might wanna look into that. Just just saying. Now lastly, Montana, which as everybody knows is sort of like Biden sniffing Idaho. But Montana has approved the Bitcoin strategic reserve bill in committee according to atlas21.com. Here we go. The Montana business and labor committee has approved a bill to invest a portion of public funds in bitcoin. The proposal, known as house bill number four twenty nine, passed the committee with a 12 to eight vote with all republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed.
Now heading to the statehouse, the initiative proposes creating a special investment fund for precious metals, stablecoins, and digital assets with an average market capitalization exceeding $750,000,000,000 Currently, Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency eligible under this criterion. If fully approved, the law would take effect on July granting the state treasurer the authority to allocate up to $50,000,000 into the special fund by July. A recent amendment removed the requirement to hold funds with a qualified custodian or through a spot ETF.
Montana thusly becomes the fourth United States state to advance a Bitcoin reserve bill to the house following Utah, Arizona, and surprisingly, Oklahoma. Okay. So that's the article. What I'm surprised about is the full blown split between Republicans and Democrats. Not a single Republican opposed it and not a single Democrat approved it. It was completely down party lines, which in my view is rather interesting. I mean, you would think that there would at least be a couple of Republicans that would not want this and a couple of Democrats that would. It it I mean, it was going to pass anyway. It's just the the the demarcation line is so clear between left and right that I'm surprised. I'm I'm not shocked, but I am fundamentally surprised.
But it really doesn't matter because Bitcoin in Montana is gonna be well, looks like it's gonna happen or at least get down to a vote. Four states have their strategic Bitcoin reserve bills on the floor. They're out of committee. They're gonna be voted on by the majority of the people that that, you know, come to come to session. Some people actually don't, but they're on the floor right now. And I find that amazing. If you had told me this two years ago, I would have said you were crazy. I I really didn't think this would happen for another five, seven years, and it wouldn't have surprised me if it had been ten.
I never expected it to be this fast to have any kind of Bitcoin bill on any congress floor. You know? And I never saw states. I never saw that. I I mean, that's like I said, I got four brain cells left, guys. I'm I'm not exactly like a spring chicken over here. But I never saw the potentiality of state level purchasing of Bitcoin. I was I was fully focused on The United States at the national, at the federal level. I was not expecting state level stuff, and I certainly wasn't expecting things to get advanced this fast.
So booyah, and I'll see you on the other side.
[00:58:42] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 08:57AM Pacific Standard Time. It's the February 2025, and this is episode ten forty e z of Bitcoin, and it's tax season. It is. That's why I named today's show ten forty e z because we're all gonna have to be going and doing all of our BS for the tax authorized, which I hear tell, 6,000 IRS agents are getting laid off today. So we'll we'll have to see because that doesn't seem to be more than a little bit of a ding inside of that, you know, that 80,000 people that they hired. And then they said that they weren't gonna hire, and then they hired them anyway. And then I don't know, man. The whole the whole thing is just all it's all theft. It's all grift. We've we're clearly have been funding every other country in the world except for our own with our tax dollars, and it's pretty much time for that BS to end.
But we got other things to talk about today. Tether is in the news. Strategy is in the news. The SEC is, well, kinda scuttling one of their own court cases. Nigeria is really not all that happy with Binance, so they've got their panties in a little twist about things. And I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Fed minutes that came out yesterday. There's a write up from Bloomberg, so we'll see what the implications of Jerome Powell opening his mouth were exactly. I'm gonna talk a little bit about Samson Moe because he's got well, he's gonna be talking about something that a lot of Bitcoiners have been conjecturing about the price of Bitcoin. And, no, it's not a price prediction either up or down. That's not what we're gonna be talking about there.
And then a little bit more about Libra. We got a decent write up, about the history of what actually did occur, and it's got some more details in it because this is an unfolding story. This is gonna be one of those things where that rabbit hole is probably a lot deeper than anybody anybody could possibly imagine, and then we'll end with the great state of Montana. But first, Michael Saylor. Strategy has announced a $2,000,000,000 in convertible notes to buy more Bitcoin according to Vince Quill out of Cointelegraph Strategy, formerly known as MicroStrategy, has announced the pricing of its $2,000,000,000 senior convertible notes tranche to purchase yet more Bitcoin and, of course, fund operating expenses because they sure as shit aren't getting any revenue.
God, did you see their revenue numbers from this last quarter? Pathetic. They are literally not selling anything, and their expenses has just shot through the roof. Of course, their expenses are are, you know, well, they're they're buying a lot of Bitcoin. So, yes, they have expenses. Anyway, the notes. Oh my god. The notes will feature a 0% coupon, and they will mature on March 2030. Each $1,000 block of notes is convertible to 2.3 shares of Strategies class a common stock at $433.43 per share, which is a 35% premium over its current market price.
Because what the hell is the market price today of MicroStrategy or strategy? Yeah. $320.63 per share as of right freaking now. Yeah. $320, and it looks like they want $433.43 per share. Wow. That is one hell of a premium, ladies and gentlemen. But both the conversion rate and the conversion price are subject to change over time. According to strategy, the offering will be made to qualified institutional investors because plebs like you suck who can collectively purchase $300,000,000 in additional notes within five business days after the initial notes are issued. The company's corporate Bitcoin acquisition plan continues to attract investor attention, drawing both praise and criticism from market participants, which is clearly not plebs like you because we suck.
Anyway, he they're getting criticized for the levered approach to building the balance sheet. So $2,000,000,000 more, and this does appear to be part of its 2121 plan. Now I have not seen that, MicroStrategy purchased any Bitcoin this week. So who knows what the hell is going on over there, but we got Tether in the news. Actually, Tether is not in the news as much as I I brought you a an interview, from Frank Korva out of Bitcoin Magazine yesterday. Well, he's apparently had time to digest what he thinks about all this tether on lightning and Bitcoin and stuff, and he doesn't like it.
And you know how I know because he titled this one, I still don't like tether on Bitcoin and lightning. That's what I love about Frank. He doesn't bullshit with his headlines. This is out of Bitcoin magazine. The news of USDT coming to Bitcoin and Lightning via Taproot assets has been met with various reactions. Some believe it's good for Bitcoin. Most, actually, based on a small survey I conducted on Twitter. Yes. I know the sample size isn't large enough for the results to be significant. I'm sharing it anyway, and that's in all bold letters there. Or upper capital. Sorry. Not bold. Cap. Caps. All caps. He's he's all cap in that one. Anyway, others are not so enthused about it.
Others includes me. I'm I'm not so enthused about it. That said, I've tried to be open minded. I even recently profiled Jesse Schrader, the cofounder and CEO and Amboss, a company that provides intelligent payment infrastructure for payments made over lightning, who is a proponent of USDT on Bitcoin and Lightning, in efforts to see what I might be missing about the benefits of being able to transact with digital United States dollars over Lightning. In my interview with Shader, he made the following points. The proliferation of USDT has proven that there is demand for US dollars globally.
Two, USDT is a massive payment mechanism. It processed over $10,000,000,000,000 in payments in 2024, and that's more than Mastercard, and some percentage of those payments will now be made over Lightning. And three, and finally, USDT will bring more liquidity to the Lightning Network, which will help the network grow and handle bigger payments. From a business perspective, it's hard to argue with the above that the above aren't good reasons to bring USDT to Lightning. And as someone who believes that people should be free to use whatever money they want, I can't argue with them looking through a practical lens. However, I do believe that bringing USDT to Bitcoin and Lightning comes at a price.
One dimension of that price is technical, while the other is philosophical. On the technical level, running USDT over Bitcoin and Lightning potentially puts Bitcoin's security at risk. If we see another Bitcoin hard fork comparable to the one we saw during the block size war, larger economic nodes on the Bitcoin network, like the one operated by Coinbase which manages much of the Bitcoin that backs The US spot Bitcoin ETFs, may opt to support the Tether fork of the network, which could also include other changes to the network that could jeopardize Bitcoin's security in the long run. In other words, if the likes of Coinbase, Tether, and some other major players in the Bitcoin space support and push for the Tether fork, other major economic nodes will likely follow suit.
What's more, everyone using Tether on Bitcoin and Lightning would also likely support that side of the fork because the USDT that remains on the chain of the non Tether fork will likely be nullified. Lynn Alden wrote about this in her essay, Proof of Stake in A Blockchain Centralization Dilemma. In the piece, she stated, Custodians can nullify the value of all stablecoins on whichever side of the fork they do not view as the correct one. Granted, Alden was referring to smart contract blockchains like Ethereum and Solana that rely heavily on DeFi, which stablecoins are a major component of, when she wrote this. But the same would apply to Bitcoin.
Alden was correct in this claim as we saw when Ethereum shifted from proof of work to proof of stake consensus mechanisms during the twenty twenty twos, the merge. Post Merge, stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether, excuse me, only continued to back the tokenized US dollar on Ethereum and not Ethereum PoW, the older chain that continued running the proof of work consensus algorithm. The same type of scenario could play out with Bitcoin in the event of a chain split giving Tether an inordinate amount of power over Bitcoin. My other reason for not liking USDT on Bitcoin is a philosophical one.
Bitcoin, which was released into the world in the wake of the great financial crisis of the twenty twenty seven, twenty twenty nine. Sorry. Twenty o seven to twenty o nine timeline was created as an alternative to the US dollar. At the time, the dollar was being printed en masse to bail out the same banks that caused the crisis in the first place. Bitcoin, money that can't be printed at the whim of a government or central bank, was created to compete with the US dollar, not to help buoy it. Bringing USDT, a mechanism the US government uses to prop up US dollar hegemony around the world, to Bitcoin feels morally wrong to me, and I'm not here for it.
So on a practical level, I get why some are in favor of USDT coming to Bitcoin and lightning. I just think that many are missing the bigger picture in that Bitcoin has potentially both been put in a vulnerable position and has had part of its value proposition overshadowed, albeit maybe just temporarily as a result. Okay. So that's the end of the article. That's that is Frank Korva's opinion. So here's here's my opinion. We don't have any say about it. Well, we do, but we don't. Let let me clarify what I mean by that. In the back in in 2017, the 2016, '20 '17, '20 '18 timeline, right, from 2016, essentially, it was the year 2016 to 2017 was the block size wars.
And it kinda went it spilled over a little bit after 2017, and, you know, clearly, they were everybody was bitching about mid twenty fifteen about it. But, really, the great guts and feathers of the block size wars happened between 2016 and 2017. So what happened? A whole group of people got into a room in New York, and they signed their names to a letter called the New York agreement. And what that letter essentially said is that we don't give a shit. We've got all the power. We're going to fork Bitcoin. We're gonna have four gigabyte size blocks or whatever megabyte yeah. Four megabyte size blocks, and we're gonna put SegWit in.
But they were also going to increase the the actual block size. And what they the the language of the letter specifically called out all of us Bitcoiners that didn't want that. And they said, well, screw you. We're gonna do it anyway. And they still did. It didn't work. It was a miserable failure and a complete embarrassment to all involved, yet all those people that were involved are have made out like bandits, and only one of them, a guy named Bruce Fenton, was the only one who signed his name that actually apologized and said that that that he was wrong in doing that. But Barry Silbert is, like, I'm probably teetering on being a billionaire.
We know that, oh, the guy for, Brian Armstrong, he assigned it. He is definitely a billionaire. They don't care. It didn't hurt them one bit the fact that the day that the the the new blockchain was to create its first block, it failed because of a flaw in the coding of when they recoded the the Bitcoin core software. They the guy that coded it made a mistake. It's called an off by one mistake. But that chain was never able to actually create its first block. It failed immediately. It failed immediately. But we still it could what happens if it had worked? It wouldn't have mattered. None of us gave a shit.
We were like, fine. You you we told them. We said, you go do you. If you want to increase the the the the block size, you go do that. Have our blessing. That's what Bitcoin was all about. I remember those arguments. I was part of I was part of I was one of the people that said that argument. I was like, oh, look. If you want to go do it, go go do it. Fine. Because I'm not going to run your software. Now, what Frank's saying, we're we're kind of right back here. We're we're kinda circling right back around to where we were at the 2016, '20 '17 level. It's different, but it rhymes.
And that he's correct, it could be possible, very much could be possible that we got a problem on our hands at Sabruin. And it's very possible that a whole bunch of people, Brian Armstrong is definitely gonna be one of them, who opts to fork Bitcoin off, and they might do it. And maybe this time, their blockchain might actually spin up and and mine an actual block. And that's the problem is we actually, it's not even the problem. We don't know what will happen. First of all, we have to assume that they're going to try, and that's probably a good assumption. But once they do it, two things can happen. One, the thing fails miserably, or two, it actually works.
If it actually works, there's two scenarios. It is massively adopted by the world, which in this particular case, because of Tether, that's a possibility. Or nobody gives a shit, and it just runs and maybe some people that that like Tether use it, but they won't what what happens is they won't be able to tell people on the main chain, the actual Bitcoin chain, that they cannot use Tether because that functionality is already here, ladies and gentlemen. And I will bet you my bottom dollar that there are still enough dyed in the wool die hard Bitcoiners that and I'm going to be one of them. I will not run the new software.
I will only run Bitcoin Core, actual Bitcoin from GitHub forward slash Bitcoin forward slash Bitcoin. And I and if if I find out and we and people will know if Bitcoin forward slash Bitcoin actually becomes the fork software, then we won't run that. A new repository will be spun up that will literally be the original flavor, like Coca Cola back in the eighties or whenever they tried to foist that new Coke on us. And I'm going to run that software, and I'm not going to be the only one that runs the software. And second, in the big big picture, if this if if this happens, the next thing that happens is that I get I get territory on the new chain. They're gonna have to take a snapshot.
They're gonna have to take a snapshot of who owns what. What what wallets hold what amount of Bitcoin on this particular day I'm going to get that. So from my standpoint, I'm sort of in a I'm I'm in agreeance with Frank here. But we've been here before. All of this has happened before, and I goddamn guarantee you all of this will happen again. But losing our minds and I'm not accusing Frank. He's not losing his mind. He's bringing up very good points. But I guarantee you, there will be a whole host of people that will lose their shit if and when, and most likely, it's gonna be a win situation, people start getting into a room and start talking about a hard fork of Bitcoin with replay action in place or what's called replay protection, which means the all of the wallet addresses are created in a different manner, and they don't like, there won't be a b c one address on the new chain. Right? Any any one of the legacy wallet addresses that with the first three or four characters of that wallet that describes what kind of wallet it is, they'll they will they might have the same functionality, but you won't be able the old chain will not be able to talk and send tokens to or receive tokens from the new chain. That's called replay protection. That was waived that was we talked about that shit way back in the day in the block size wars because Roger Ver was talking about we're gonna split the chain, and we're not gonna have replay protection.
And we were like, if you do that and that chain works, we're going to be able to destroy your chain. And they finally, at the very last minute, finally decided to actually say, yeah. We'll we'll we'll get replay protection in. So it I'm just I'm just like I'm watching it all happen again. And so is it a flaw in the design of Bitcoin that allows this? No. Is it a flaw in a forest that I can cut down a tree? No. It's it's the it's the forest and the trees themselves that make it valuable enough for me to wanna go cut down trees and build shit with it. Is it is it a flaw in a in a pool of water that water collects in that pool of water? No.
You might be going, what the hell are you talking about? I'm just saying this is the nature of things that are created in the universe. Whether by human hands or by nature itself, we all create the same way because we are all governed by the rules of the universe, which was laid down in the first femtosecond of the big bang, and that would be the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force, and gravity. In those four rules of the universe, everything you see has come about. And it doesn't matter if a bird built the nest or a human built the nest. What got built was a nest. In our case, what got built was money. We're always going to be looking for a way to build money. And as long as this is an issue, there's always gonna be somebody else who wants to destroy the value of an old system of money in favor of a new system of money if and only if that destruction enriches themselves. That's greed.
That's all this is, and that's all it's ever gonna be. We either fight it or we lay down and let it roll over us. Personally, the way that I'm going to fight it is I'm never going to run that code. Let's move on to Jesse Coughlin, Cointelegraph. The SEC pulls its own appeal in the case over crypto broker dealer rules. Yesterday, I talked about senator Ted Cruz and the Bitcoin was it the Bitcoin Policy Institute or Bitcoin advocacy group? We're basically saying, hey. We need to everybody needs to get behind senator Ted Cruz's bill and pass the bill because it's gonna change the way this whole broker dealer thing is described.
And that was done by the SEC. Right? So Ted Cruz wants to rescind that entire definition, and now the SEC seems to be already saying, okay. We're done. We're not gonna do this because they've pulled their own appeal. Cointelegraph tells us more. The US Securities and Exchange Commission dropped its efforts to undo a court ruling blocking a controversial broker dealer rule that would have given the agency jurisdiction over decentralized crypto protocols. It sounds to me this sounds to me like they're front running Ted Cruz. They don't wanna be embarrassed anymore than they already are. I think they're done. Anyway, in a brief on February to the fifth circuit appeals court, the SEC said it moved to voluntarily dismiss the appeal.
Last month, just days before former SEC chair Gary Gensler was due to step down, the agency appealed a November ruling from a Texas federal court judge in a lawsuit brought by Crypto Trade Groups, the Blockchain Association, and the Crypto Freedom Alliance of Texas. The ruling blocked the SEC's proposed change to the definition of a dealer, which would have required all crypto liquidity providers and automated market makers with more than $50,000,000 in capital to register with the agency. Now that's exactly what the bill that senator Ted Cruz is seeking to do.
So the SEC, I guess, heard about it yesterday, got into a little meeting room and had some coffee and maybe a stack of donuts, you know, you know, the little little pancreas destruction there, and said, you know what? We're done. Let's just we're gonna end it here. So now what's in question is, does does Ted Cruz continue his crusade to do the thing that the SEC themselves has basically shaken you just, like, taken their hands off of? I honestly think he should. Just so that it's instantiated that you can't do this shit anymore in the in the future. But there so that's good news.
It it it I mean, it yeah. Will it enable more scams? Yeah. But, again, greed is part of human nature. You're never gonna get rid of it. The only way that we get rid of greed is if somehow or another we continue to keep our consciousness, but but leave our physical bodies and we are unimpacted by any physical things in the universe. That's the only way I see of greed being squelched out of the human spirit. But Nigeria is kinda greedy. Why? Because they're suing Binance for 81,500,000,000.0, that's billion with a b, following the hostage crisis according to Reuters.
Liz Napolitano from Decrypt, Nigeria is suing Binance for $81,500,000,000 alleging that the firm's operations have hobbled its struggling economy, Reuters reported. The Nigerian government's lawyers are seeking to compel Binance to pay 79,500,000,000.0 for allegedly kneecapping their country's economy and tanking its official currency, the naira, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. Oh my god. Talk about, oh, put some diapers on Nigeria. My god. Jesus. They are also aiming to secure $2,000,000,000 in back taxes, blah blah blah.
The lawsuit is the latest in several legal tussles between Nigerian authorities and Binance, most notably including the imprisonment of a Binance executive for much of 2024 in a headline grabbing hostage crisis. The crypto exchange has emerged as a popular alternative to Nigeria's deeply, deeply troubled financial system over the past few years. However, Nigerian officials have blamed Binance for their country's economic woes. Oh, we're we're gonna call you a waveulets hurling money laundering and tax evasion charges at the firm.
Binance operated as an unregistered business in Nigeria since at least 2019 according to the authorities, serving locals who are often looking to exchange their naira for stablecoins and, you know, anything that has value. However, the company halted all naira denominated trading last year following a crackdown on the cryptocurrency industry in that country. Nigerian authorities allege the services offered by the exchange and others like it have led to the devaluation of the naira. The naira tumbled more than 70% against the US dollar since 2023.
Wow. Meanwhile, naira or Nigeria's annual inflation rate stood at 24.48% in January according to the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics. Wow. So okay. That's all we need. There's a couple more paragraphs, but that's all we need from this. Because now when whole countries how to how to how to put this? When whole countries sue a singular company and the charge is crashing your national currency, how weak is your currency? You're not suing your next door neighbor country for crashing your local economy and your currency and, you know, whatever.
No. No. No. Binance. Buy it's Binance's fault. I'm not really all that much of a fan of Binance, but come on. And not only is it a weak, weak argument because you have essentially, you had a a currency that was so weak that a singular company might have affected it. What's more important here is that a country is claiming damages on a national economy as cause against a company. And what does my gut feeling say? Good? Hey, good. What'd you say? This is gonna happen a lot more. Yeah. It's gonna happen a lot more. It's going it I even if Nigeria loses their ass on this one, and they they probably will, I would be prepared to see all manner of countries as their as their economies finally fail, like the pieces of dog crap that they are.
And they're they're really more failing because of the US dollar. Let's be let's be honest. The United States Dollar is a wrecking ball to every country on the face of the planet except our own. That doesn't mean I'm happy about it, and it doesn't mean that I'm like, oh, well, we're all evil. I'm not saying that shit either. I'm just saying it is what it is. And what the US dollar is is a wrecking ball. And it's destroying economies exactly the way we planned it. Not I didn't plan it, but I guarantee you that I mean, when I hear, like, Gloria Nuland or whatever her name is, the old secretary of state say fuck the EU, that pretty much tells me that, you know, that we really are not really all that concerned with our friends over there at the EU. So I guarantee you, we don't give a shit one about Nigeria.
And we knew, Jerome Powell knew that by raising interest rates when he did, it was going to cause the EU and The UK bond market to essentially catch on fire. Did it anyway, and it caught on fire. It was a major issue, a major issue. Didn't care. In fact, it looked like it was constructed to do exactly that. I mean, he what he gave you know, not the only reason he did that, but, hey, that was a you know, like, that was a little happy accident. You know, Bob Ross, happy little tree, happy accident kind of thing. I we've got all of that, and then we've got the entire milkshake theory, the dollar milkshake theory where all fiat currencies collapse into the United States dollar. And now we got Tether on lightning and Bitcoin.
And we've got the company Tether as a major a major buyer of United States debt. Not only does this train continue to roll, ladies and gentlemen, it just got refueled. Now we go back to what Frank was saying. He doesn't like this. He doesn't like Tether on Bitcoin and and and Lightning. In my opinion, what I just said is why I don't like it, but I don't have anything to say about it now, do I? If it can happen on Bitcoin, it will happen on Bitcoin. And something else happened yesterday. The Fed minutes were released and apparently, they signal that officials are on hold until inflation improves. The beatings will commence until morale improves. This is out of Bloomberg written by who? I don't know. I can't maybe it's at the bottom. If I find it, I'll I'll let you know.
It appears that the minutes released Wednesday in Washington said many participants noted that the committee could hold the policy rate at a restrictive level if the economy remains strong and inflation remained elevated. Officials held the Fed's benchmark policy rate in the range of 4.25 to 4.5 at that gathering. We knew that. Okay? We knew that. The record of the meeting underscored the cautious approach Fed policymakers are taking after lowering interest rates by a percentage point in the closing months of last year, and several officials have said that they'd like to see inflation cool further toward the Fed's two percent target before backing another cut.
Investors are currently pricing in one rate cut in 2025 with the possibility of a second according to futures markets. Yeah. Good luck, dude. Some officials also expressed concern over the risks posed by the potential for another debt ceiling showdown in Washington. Regarding the potential for significant swings in reserves over coming months related to debt ceiling dynamics, various participants noted that it may be appropriate to consider pausing or slowing balance sheet runoff until the resolution of this event. The Fed is currently allowing up to $25,000,000,000 in treasuries and $35,000,000,000 in mortgage backed securities to mature every month without reinvesting the return principal.
The US government reached its statutory limit for outstanding debt in January. The Treasury Department has since been using so called extraordinary measures to extend its ability to pay the federal government's expenses. Donald Trump has backed a plan from house republicans that would raise the debt ceiling by $4,000,000,000,000, but that would likely take months to negotiate. And then they basically talk a lot about Trump. So the minutes are are relatively hawkish. And in fact, I would not unless something changes drastically, we're not gonna see rate cuts in 2025.
What's the possibility of something changing drastically? I don't know. Probably $50.50. That's again, that's That's my gut feeling. So take it for what it's worth. Let's run the numbers. CNBC, futures and commodities. They got oil, West Texas Intermediate, up 1.4%. No. 1.04% to $73 flat. Brent Norsey up one and a quarter to $77.00 2. Natural gas is down five and a half percent, just over $4 per thousand cubic feet. Gasoline is up a half point to $2.10 a gallon. Shiny metal rocks doing well today because the Dow is not doing well today. We'll get into that. Gold up three quarters of a point to $29.57 and a dime.
Silver is up one and a fifth point. Platinum is up a full point. Copper is up just over a point, and palladium is up over one and a half percent. Ag. What's ag doing today? Ag is pretty much well mixed. The biggest loser today is coffee. Four and a quarter to the downside. Sugar is up 1.8%. Live cattle is down, god, three quarters of a point. Lean hogs are down one and a third, and feeder cattle are down just over a full point. Now here's your your legacy equity markets. They are all bleeding. The Dow is down down one and a quarter. S and P down, point 69%.
Nasdaq is down a full three quarters of a point, and the S and P Mini is down $1.27. So what the hell is going on? Retail sales are not looking good, guys. Walmart has a forecast that is, quote, unquote, raising concerns. Why is Walmart important? Because after they've gutted the country, the United States government gutting the country and gutting our paychecks and basically, you know, printing our value out into, I don't know, into the sewage swamps. All we can afford to do is go to Walmart. We can't shop at that fancy chafe way anymore. Most people go to Walmart to go buy their groceries, clothes, you know, cheap ass home goods that break within a year.
And so when when Walmart gets nervous about their revenue for the year, their projections, that means people they're they we they just don't have the money. They don't have the money. The money is held by all the banks and all the corporations and all the everybody that you would possibly possibly possibly be a that could, you know, contain money because it's not in our pockets. And Walmart is the canary in the coal mine on this one. And when that canary starts to breathe a little heavy, you get a little worried that maybe the atmosphere is poisoned. That's why they took them down to the coal mines because the canaries were the first one to keel over and die. And when your canary died, that was your cue that carbon monoxide or some other noxious gas was building up, and you got the f out.
And that's what Walmart is. That's why you're seeing the Dow tank, like, damn near, like, what it's down 556 points today, down a point and a quarter. That is a big move to the downside, And it's really because nobody's got any money. That's a problem. Unless you got Bitcoin, which is at $97,980, that puts us back above $1,900,000,000,000 of market cap, and we can now purchase 33 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,826,654.23 of. And average fees per block are low 0.04 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis. And ladies and gentlemen, mempools around the world are filling up again. Thank God.
At least it'll get the idiots off our back. There are just under 40 blocks in mempools around the world carrying a total of 59,000 unconfirmed transaction yeah. Unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 5 Satoshis per vBuy. Low priority's gonna get you in at four. And hash rate has come down a little bit, but we're still 803.9 exahashes per second is still pretty damn powerful. So there you go. Take it with the grain of salt that you will from checkout Lagarde. See what I did there? Yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and, perma nerd with $3.33 say, I'd rather live under a bridge and have real friends. Yes. Like, that's what I said yesterday.
Saints and Sass with 500 says, boost. Psyduck with $4.20 says, pay duck. Oh. Damn shit, pay duck. Pies with four twenty says, hashtag four zero HPW. I still don't know what that means other than that it's a split bolt that people use to tie off electrical connections. I've just seen a lot of 40 HPW lately and I'm like, I don't know what it means. Pies, please tell me what it means. God's death with two thirty seven says thank you, sir. No thank you. Wartime with three thirty three gives me an emoji I can't read because my operating system is so old. Nick underscore dose with a hundred and one sats says, cheers.
That's the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Samson Moe says that Bitcoin's price movement looks very manufactured. Now before I get into this from Zoltan Vardai out of Cointelegraph, I need to say a couple of things here. I have had that feeling myself. Nobody likes this. Nobody likes this. And I understand why, because it means, well, then Bitcoin isn't as powerful as you thought it was. Well, yeah. But the human human nature, you got a whole bunch of greedy assholes out there that hold Bitcoin. Guess what? You're gonna get market manipulation.
Shit. Gold's been going through market manipulation for centuries. Right? I mean, everything gets manipulated. Right? But there's a lot of people that just they won't believe it. And that's okay. It it I mean, I can't prove it. Neither can Sampson Moe. He can't prove it neither. This is just, again, gut feelings. Because I keep seeing I keep seeing these patterns forming on, like, on the chart, and I'm like, wow. They are, like, right on this line, or, wow. They're just keeping it just over $96,000, and then it will rise to $97,000 and then plummet right back down to just over $96,000.
You know, these kinds of things makes me go, Well, let's see what Samson Moe's reaction is. Bitcoin's price action is raising concerns about possible market manipulation as the cryptocurrency continues trading in a tight range despite billions of dollars in institutional inflow. Again, that's one of the data points that I myself use to go, what the hell is going on? Everybody's buying this thing. I'm not seeing the price movement that reflects it. Right? That's that's sort of where I'm at. Bitcoin has been range bound over two months trading between 92,400 support and a hundred and $6,500 resistance since December.
Bitcoin managed to briefly escape this range after US President Donald Trump's inauguration on January 20 when it briefly rose to a hundred and 9,000 all time high before dropping back down into the previous range. Bitcoin's range bound price action may be manufactured based on the trajectory of the past months according to Samson Moe, CEO of Jan three and founder of Pixelmatic. Quote, it seems like it's some sort of price suppression, said Moe during a panel discussion at Consensus Hong Kong twenty twenty five adding, quote, if you look at the price movement, we peak, and then we stay steady and chop sideways.
And it's good. You you can say it's consolidation, but it just looks very manufactured. The very tight range in which you're trading just doesn't look natural at all, Mao added. Despite Bitcoin's temporary lack of upside, industry watchers remain optimistic about Bitcoin's trajectory, and then they give all manner of prices that are much higher than they are today, and I don't wanna get into that shit. And then we start talking about Michael Saylor. So we don't need that. We already know what Michael Saylor's doing. I'm sort of in the Sampson mo camp when it comes to manufactured price or at least some kind of manipulation.
And I always look at it. It's not really good or bad as much as why would somebody want to do that. Well, there's two camps, I believe. One camp is government, by and large, even if Trump says he loves Bitcoin, hates Bitcoin because it really screws up the US dollar, which they can print ad infinitum, and it's the world reserve currency. And other governments don't like it either even if they don't have the world's reserve currency because it fucks with their shit. And they wanna be able to they and don't get me wrong. They can print money, and they do. They print all kinds of money. Just because it's not the world reserve currency doesn't mean that they won't print it. They do. Just look at just look at Zimbabwe with their $1,000,000,000,000 notes.
The other camp are people that want to buy Bitcoin sub $100,000. I believe it's camp two. Because in the former, The United States is going to roll into bed with Tether. Probably a little bit of circle, but mostly it's gonna be Tether. Because Tether buys the treasury bonds, which is the debt that we print. So we're a we're going to be able to continue to print as much money as we want in the form of debt instrumentation that we call the treasury bill or treasury bond, the ten year, the thirty year, all that kind. That that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Five year, two year, one year. It doesn't matter. Print them all, bitches. As long as Tether buys it, they can print the Tether to reflect that they've bought this stuff. And they make $20,000,000,000 or $13,000,000,000 last year. They got, like, a crew of 20 people. They can afford to buy all kinds of treasury bonds. As to the mechanism, exactly how they get that money, that's something I think we really need to start looking into on the Tether side is like, where does this money come from? I don't wanna go there right now. Because I'm saying that for the moment, and honestly not just the short term, but probably the medium term for quite a while, the United States government is going to love Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin is the Trojan horse that brings all these other people into the Tether US dollar debt instrumentation printing circus. Bitcoin is the ticket. It's the ticket for the show, man. And they're going to be nice to Bitcoin. Don't get me wrong. They're definitely gonna be nice to Bitcoin until it doesn't serve a purpose, in which case they will probably try to burn it to the ground, and then we're gonna win anyway. So that I'm not worried about. But still, for those people that have the money like Michael Saylor and Meta Planet and Similar Scientific and all the other all the other people that want to get into this, like, we've got 38 states or 32 states that want some form of cryptocurrency in their coffers at the state level, and most of them actually want Bitcoin. A few of them don't actually say that. But be that as it may, they wanna get in.
I think that there is price manipulation going on. I think it's to keep it under a hundred thousand dollars for as long as humanly possible before it's just impossible to do. And how would they be able to do that? Sure. Paper Bitcoin. I'm sure it's happening. And then you'll say, but David, that means Bitcoin failed. No. It doesn't. It doesn't mean anything of the sort. It means human morality and ethics have failed. And I'm not surprised. Have you seen the history book in the last, I don't know, like, since you were born? Yeah. It's replete with the failings, the ethical failings, the moral failings, the failings of all kinds from humanity. So I'm not surprised.
Will it kill Bitcoin? No. It will kill those that find out that they never owned Bitcoin in the first place, which is why you need to hold your own coins on your own heart well with your own signing device that you spun up, that you take care of, and not let anybody else custody your Bitcoin. Only those people will survive. If you're somebody that's got your shit on Coinbase, until you get your coin off Coinbase into your own wallet, consider yourself host. Consider yourself poor. Consider yourself going to be in manic depressive states for the rest of your life until you commit suicide because you didn't take care of what you could have had. Because that's what paper Bitcoin is going to do to people, but it's not going to do it to the people that hold actual Bitcoin.
Anyway, I agree with Samson. I think there's some kind of chicanery going on, and Bitcoin is going to survive all of it. Even Libra, which destroyed $251,000,000 worth of investor wealth according to research. So the numbers are starting to actually be crunched. Let's find out what idiots lost their life savings. The Libra meme coin scandal that rocked Argentina over the weekend destroyed millions of dollars in investor wealth according to research by Nansen. On chain data tracked by Nansen shows 86 of traders lost a total of $251,000,000 while the winners secured just 180,000,000 in profits.
In other words, this whole thing was a net negative wealth generation event that potentially sucked out liquidity from the market. Not potentially my ass. It did. The episode is a stark reminder that tokens associated with political figures can be just as risky as random meme coins and celebrity cryptocurrencies in making or breaking fortunes within minutes. Oh, bullshit. This doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether it's a celebrity, a random person, or a political figure. It's not them. It's the meme coin. You stay away from them. Take my advice.
Stay away from meme coins. You're going to get hurt. You're not I guarantee you, you are not on the side of the people who are going to make out on meme coins. It's not because you're stupid. It's because you're not part of the class that generated the meme coin. Only those people actually get money. You give them your money. Anyway, Libra debuted on Meteora, a Solana based decentralized exchange, surged, blah blah blah. Let's see. Okay. Here we go. Over 40,000 crypto addresses piled into the token. 40,000 crypto addresses fueling a surge in the price.
The bullish excitement I almost read that as excrement. But the bullish excitement, however, was short lived. The balloon popped as insiders, again, insiders, offloaded massive numbers of tokens, tanking the market cap by 90%. And then they talk about Malay getting embarrassed. 70% of wallets trading Libra from February to the eighteenth ended with realized losses as many likely attempted to profit off the additional retweet from Javier Malay, Nansen said in a report shared with CoinDesk. And he's talking about how, I wasn't aware of anything. I didn't know anything about this project. That that's the the the second tweet that they're talking about. Anyway, the number of unique holds of the token fell to 35,770 on February from over 50,000 on February.
Meanwhile, two wallets that bought the token at two particular times made just over $5,400,000 in total profit. Oh, they made out like bandits because they were the insiders. That that's how meme coins work. Again, it doesn't like, if if you were to say, well, I I only deal in meme coins that are about animals. Because those are because statistically, I've run the numbers. Statistically, they're safer than the ones that are that are run by political figures. It doesn't matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's the meme coins existence that will literally put you living under a bridge.
Not if it's a Trump meme coin or a Melania meme coin or a Argentinian meme coin or a fucking Boris and, you know, Natasha's Goose and Squirrel coin. It doesn't matter. It's a meme coin. It has no functional value. It these are expressly made for idiots. Don't be one of them. Be somebody like Japan's Meta Planet. They bought the right thing. Meta Planet buys 68 Bitcoin to expand their holdings to 2,100 BTC. That's a nice number, bro. Nice. Nice. Timmy Shin, the Block dot CEO, Japanese investment firm, Meta Planet, acquired an additional 68 BTC to expand its total Bitcoin holdings to 2,100 BTC worth about $203,000,000 right now as the company remains bullish on the world's largest cryptocurrency and not meme coins.
Meta Planet disclosed on Thursday that it purchased an additional 68.59 BTC at an average price of 96,335 per coin, boosting its holdings to 2,100 compared to the 141 BTC that it had at the June. This means Meta Planet currently holds about 0.01% of the total Bitcoin supply. The Tokyo listed firm announced its Bitcoin strategy in April of twenty twenty four and has since been buying Bitcoin. In the Thursday statement, the company reiterated that it remains committed to accumulating Bitcoin and aims to hold 10,000 BTC by the end of twenty twenty five and twenty 1,000 BTC by the end of twenty twenty six. Meta Planet Meta Planet stock closed upwards 2.78% at 6,290 yen on Thursday in Japan according to Yahoo Finance.
So Meta Planet not playing around with meme coins. You might wanna look into that. Just just saying. Now lastly, Montana, which as everybody knows is sort of like Biden sniffing Idaho. But Montana has approved the Bitcoin strategic reserve bill in committee according to atlas21.com. Here we go. The Montana business and labor committee has approved a bill to invest a portion of public funds in bitcoin. The proposal, known as house bill number four twenty nine, passed the committee with a 12 to eight vote with all republicans in favor and all Democrats opposed.
Now heading to the statehouse, the initiative proposes creating a special investment fund for precious metals, stablecoins, and digital assets with an average market capitalization exceeding $750,000,000,000 Currently, Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency eligible under this criterion. If fully approved, the law would take effect on July granting the state treasurer the authority to allocate up to $50,000,000 into the special fund by July. A recent amendment removed the requirement to hold funds with a qualified custodian or through a spot ETF.
Montana thusly becomes the fourth United States state to advance a Bitcoin reserve bill to the house following Utah, Arizona, and surprisingly, Oklahoma. Okay. So that's the article. What I'm surprised about is the full blown split between Republicans and Democrats. Not a single Republican opposed it and not a single Democrat approved it. It was completely down party lines, which in my view is rather interesting. I mean, you would think that there would at least be a couple of Republicans that would not want this and a couple of Democrats that would. It it I mean, it was going to pass anyway. It's just the the the demarcation line is so clear between left and right that I'm surprised. I'm I'm not shocked, but I am fundamentally surprised.
But it really doesn't matter because Bitcoin in Montana is gonna be well, looks like it's gonna happen or at least get down to a vote. Four states have their strategic Bitcoin reserve bills on the floor. They're out of committee. They're gonna be voted on by the majority of the people that that, you know, come to come to session. Some people actually don't, but they're on the floor right now. And I find that amazing. If you had told me this two years ago, I would have said you were crazy. I I really didn't think this would happen for another five, seven years, and it wouldn't have surprised me if it had been ten.
I never expected it to be this fast to have any kind of Bitcoin bill on any congress floor. You know? And I never saw states. I never saw that. I I mean, that's like I said, I got four brain cells left, guys. I'm I'm not exactly like a spring chicken over here. But I never saw the potentiality of state level purchasing of Bitcoin. I was I was fully focused on The United States at the national, at the federal level. I was not expecting state level stuff, and I certainly wasn't expecting things to get advanced this fast.
So booyah, and I'll see you on the other side.
[00:58:42] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Tax Season Overview
Current News Highlights
Bitcoin Forks and Historical Context
