Join me today for Episode 1046 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- SEC v. Coinbase Has Been Dropped
- What Triggered The BTC Crash?
- Arizona, Texas Closer to BTC Reserve
- Bybit Hackers Still Buying BTC With ETH
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 09:01AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the February 2025. Damn. Two months in the bag already of 2025. This is episode ten forty six of Bitcoin, and we're gonna talk about the Coinbase case against the SEC or rather the SEC's case of v Coinbase because that's coming in. And then just so that we can assuage our inner trading analysis guy thingy when it comes to the Bitcoin price, we are going to read this Sam Borgie piece from Cointelegraph entitled the Bitcoin crash was triggered by the erosion of the ETF cash and carry trade. It doesn't mean that Sam's right. It also doesn't mean that I necessarily agree.
It's just I know that there are some people out there just I know you're itching to find out what was this. Why what was why was this week so terrible? And I know. I I I get it. You know? The like, the you know, I'm just hardcore and old school Bitcoiner as it comes, but it's okay to wonder why. It really is. More specifically, it's actually okay to wonder how something could have happened. Now remember, when we do that one, take it with a grain of salt because Sam and the analysts that are involved in this story, they may be wrong. It may not have been this particular thing that was the catalyst for the ongoing carnage that we've been seeing in Bitcoin. But, hey, I know that there are some of you out there that don't mind asking how or why something happened. And then we're gonna get into a couple of states that are doing their crypto reserve bills and where they are, namely Arizona and Texas. And then we've got the Bybit hackers, yet again moving the unmovable, spending the unspendable, laundering the unlanderable.
I I'm still aghast at just how how bad the lying from the Ethereum crew was over on Twitter when they were saying, oh, this it's it's all been burned or it's in a it's a in an address that cannot be touched or or we're gonna be able to track all that stuff to to the point that you you might as well not even be able to spend it. Well, that was a lie, and we'll talk about exactly what's going on there. European states continue to load rounds of ammunition into a six cylinder gun and point it to their head because they're continuously playing Russian roulette.
And then we're gonna talk a little bit about the Bitcoin educators unconference in Bitcoin Park over there in Nashville. And then Albie's got an update as well as Umbrel. And the Umbrel update is actually kinda cool, at least as far as for some of the things that I would want to use Umbrel for alongside having a full Bitcoin node and a full lightning node. But first, Coinbase case is dropped by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission as the agency reverses its crypto stance, Jesse Hamilton, writing this one for CoinDesk.
Coinbase has been freed from its protracted legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as the agency has agreed to drop the case that's been among the industry's core fights in federal court. Now I'm just pausing here to say this case against corn corn okay. Yeah. Fuck it. Corn base has been going on for years at this point. And it was really dragging a bunch of people down with it. I you but and I don't like Coinbase. I I'm not a fan, and I've always said that. And I'm not even, like, really that much of a fan of the fact that the SEC has dropped their their case against Coinbase. I think that they actually had a good case against Coinbase, but it looks like they're just going to tuck their tail between their legs and run away.
So but at least at least some questions have been answered insofar as they're not gonna pursue this case any longer. So Coinbase can get get on with listing shitcoins and and unregulated securities, and apparently, nobody's gonna get into any kind of trouble for fleecing the American and the world's public on the altcoin listing that Coinbase continuously does. Okay. So continuing on, though the SEC's intention to agree to shut down the legal dispute has already gone public, When The US Crypto Exchange announced the deal last week, the commissioners had to cast a formal vote to ask a federal judge to actually throw the switch and pull the trigger.
The dismissal was done in such a way that the regulator cannot change its mind later. So this case, ladies and gentlemen, has been dismissed with what is known as prejudice. They cannot file refile these charges again ever. And that's a huge deal. It it's not just like, okay. We're just gonna put this case away. We're gonna dismiss the case, but we're not gonna do it with prejudice. That means, like, next year, they could just it would always be hanging over Coinbase's head and therefore, for whatever reason, the the entire industry's head like a Damocles sword, but that's not going to happen. Coinbase can never be charged with this shit again.
For me, that doesn't bode well because the listing of shitcoins is going to go hyperbolic at this point, but we'll continue. Quote, it's time for the commission to rectify its approach and develop crypto policies in a more transparent manner, SEC acting chair Mark Ueda said in a statement that the SEC lawyers already filed a motion to dismiss the case. Dropping the main case doesn't free the SEC from other Coinbase legal matters, including the company's petition to force the agency to establish crypto rules and Coinbase's pursuit of internal documents in the exchange's ongoing work to reveal the regulators' private deliberations on how to approach digital assets.
But this enforcement case was the top legal concern for The US public company, and it sought to elevate the central legal questions of what makes a crypto security and when and how a digital asset exchange should register with the agency. Those fundamental questions still await answers that must now be provided by the United States Congress. Once the SEC's previous leadership departed, especially Gary Gensler, the temporary chair elevated by president Donald Trump, Mark Ueda, began overhauling the agency's legal officials and its stance on digital assets.
Ueda named fellow Republican commissioner Hester Peirce to run the agency's crypto task force, and both of them were vocal critics of the way Gensler approached the industry. The digital asset sector didn't have to wait for the confirmation of Paul Atkins, Trump's pick to permanently run the agency. Both Ueda and Pers served his as his counsels when he was a commissioner at the SEC, so they're widely expected to be on a course that he'll maintain. So far, that course has seen a wave of abandoned crypto investigations and dropped cases, including against Robinhood, Gemini, and ConsenSys' MetaMask, and pauses of matter involving Tron and Binance.
Wow. There's just talk about tucking your tail in between your legs and running away. Good god. Anyway, the regulator is no longer maintaining the interpretation of the US Supreme Court's so called Howey test that it said had indicated that many crypto projects qualified as securities. Quote, goodbye, chief legal officer Paul Grewal posted on social media site Twitter after the SEC's announcement on Thursday, and good riddance. Okay. These two paragraphs are really important. The regulator is no longer maintaining the interpretation of the US Supreme Court's Howey test that it said had indicated many crypto projects qualified as securities.
I read this as it's alt season. Again, we're gonna have to deal with the shitty they're all okay. None of them are scams, guys. Not a single one of them. They're all above board. They're they're they're fake ass board of directors whose pictures on their websites came from, you know, yearbooks and and college yearbooks and and probably, you know, I don't know, obituaries from the New York Times. It it's all above board. This is actually not good news. It's good news for Coinbase, and it's good news for the scammers. It is not good news for people who are actually trying to fix the broken ass, unethical, immoral system that we've been living under for decades and decades and decades. Continuing the SEC's changed view on CoinDesk, Which CoinDesk was first to report on last week will cause the exchange to shift its Washington focus towards congress and legislation, Gruel told CoinDesk.
The company is among the digital asset businesses that led the creation and the deployment of the Fair Shake political action committee in the two thousand and four elections, collectively devoting more than a hundred and 60,000,000 to an effort to elect crypto friendly candidates to office. And now Coinbase is seeking to get a return on that investment with regulations that it considers favorable. I don't believe that was in the February, guys. I I just don't. We didn't even have Bitcoin's white paper until, what, 02/2008, and it wasn't until 02/2009 that we first spun that thing up. So I think what they mean is February is when the fair shake pack came in. Anyway, the fair shake pack, which shook up the campaign finance world with its outsized corporate spending levels, is still at it dabbling in special elections as it prepares for the 2026 election cycle. Those would be the midterms.
For those of you who are not in The United States, we essentially have elections every two years. Every four years is a presidential presidential election, and then our congress or in in congress, the senators sit for six years in a term. And then the house of representatives, every two years, they have to go up for reelection, which means they do about one year worth of work for The United States people, if you can call it that, and they work on themselves for the other year and get paid for it on our dime. They're working on their own election. It's ridiculous. But we have elections every freaking two years in this country, and it's honestly just god is such a heavy lift to see the stupidity pile pile up and pile on.
Okay. So out of the Coinbase news and into the what the hell happened part of the show, Sam Borgie, as promised with the Cointelegraph article entitled Bitcoin crash triggered by erosion of ETF cash and carry trade according to an analyst. Since reaching all time highs on January, Bitcoin's price has been suppressed by hedge funds exploiting a low risk yield trade involving spot exchange traded funds and CME futures, signaling once again that institutional adoption of crypto assets is not a one way street. This is the general takeaway of analyst Kyle Chasse, who dissected the latest Bitcoin price crash in a thread on Twitter, quote, for months.
Hedge funds were exploiting a low risk yield trade using BTC spot ETFs and CME futures. Now this cash and carry trade is imploding. And he's and here's here's the tweet. Hold on for a second. I wanna make sure that they don't repeat the tweet in the text of the and they don't. Okay. So here's Kyle Chasse or however you pronounce his last name. He says, Bitcoin is crashing. Are you wondering why? The cash and carry trade that's been suppressing BTC's price is now unwinding. Here's how it worked and why its collapse is sending shock waves through the market. For months, hedge funds were exploiting a low risk yield trade using spot ETFs and CME futures, and this is how it worked.
Number one, buy Bitcoin spot ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity. Number two, short BTC futures on the CME. Three, farm the spread for approximately 5.68% annualized returns. Some were even using leverage to juice their returns into the double digits. But now it's imploding. Right? That's the that's the the bulk of his tweet. The cash and carry trade involve involved buying spot Bitcoin ETFs and shorting the Bitcoin futures on CME, as we heard, which allowed the traders to earn up to 5.68% in annualized returns. Well, the success of this trade depended mainly on Bitcoin futures trading at a premium to the cryptocurrency's spot price.
However, with recent market weakness, that premium has collapsed, said Chassis. With the trade no longer profitable, hedge funds are exiting the market, which is evidenced by the record outflows from US spot Bitcoin ETFs this week. The same trade that kept Bitcoin stable on the way up is accelerating the crash now. This is happening because, quote, hedge funds don't care about Bitcoin. They weren't betting on BTC mooning. They were farming low risk yield. Bitcoin sell off accelerated on February as the cryptocurrency retraced all the way back to sub $79,000 regions for the first time in more than three months. However, a closer look at on chain data reveals that the losses are mainly concentrated among Bitcoin tourists or brand new traders who only entered the market recently, yeah, at all time highs.
As is tradition in our tribe, but, you know, it is what it is. Data from Glassnode shows that 74% of the realized losses came from holders who bought within the last month. Oh, man. That has gotta freaking hurt. Nevertheless, unrealized losses from the recent sell off exceeded crypto exchange FTX's capitulation event according to analyst Milky Bull Crypto. Milk Jesus. Milky Bull crypto. That, honestly, dude, that's a terrible handle. But a drop of this magnitude is a strong sign of a bottom formation in Bitcoin's price. Yeah. Don't listen to that to that, that last part because god only knows what can happen at this point. Just just hold on. Just just chill out. Hold on. Everything's gonna be fine.
However, it I do I even I am looking for reasons why particular events occur when, you know, this week was pretty brutal. So I don't think anybody could actually be counted as being, I don't know, not a not a Bitcoin maximalist or a purist or or, you know, basically, like, they're you know, like, somebody like me is devolving into the fiat mindset. I don't think that that is a quality argument when you're just going, what the hell was that? Because, honestly, if you were alive or at least barely awake at any point this week, starting from last Friday, you were asking that question. You're like, what the hell is this? Did something happen?
Was it just tariffs? Was it just Trump opening his mouth and and saying stuff and blurting stuff out? Because that didn't really add up. This one kinda adds up, and I'm not saying that I completely agree with it, but I am basically not wholesale rejecting it either because it does make sense. You got a lot of money chasing a particular kind of trade, and that particular kind of trade kind of petered out. And I have been wondering for quite a while how these people are still trading futures when I keep seeing everybody getting wrecked AF on these trades.
Like, you you I I see shorts liquidated in the regions of $15,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. I see longs liquidated in the region of 8 to $20,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. I've seen some huge, huge liquidations. And I keep asking myself, why do you people continue to do this? Well, maybe that was it. Maybe it didn't matter. They weren't really losing money because they were gaining it on the other end with the ETFs. And now maybe they're just like they're tired of that trade, and it's it's lost its luster. And therefore, we're settling back down into what is possibly could be considered an appropriate price given the actual interest around the world from real institutions that wanna hold and retail investors that wanna hold and get out of the fiat trap.
And maybe Arizona will do the same. From Martin Young, Cointelegraph, Arizona crypto reserve bills inch closer to law after passing the senate. The Arizona senate has advanced a Bitcoin reserve bill, bringing it to second place behind Utah in a race between US states to get a crypto investment bill approved. The Arizona senate passed the strategic digital assets reserve bill thirteen seventy three on its third reading February 27 with a vote of seventeen four and twelve against, and it now advances to the state's house of representatives. The bill, sponsored by Republican senator Mark Finchem, would create a digital asset strategic reserve fund administered by the state treasurer that would consist of money appropriated by the legislature and crypto seized by the state.
The treasurer cannot invest more than 10% of the total funds deposited in any fiscal year, but may loan digital assets from the fund to generate returns if it doesn't increase financial risk to the state. Quote, whether you like it or not, legislation will happen at the federal level in this order. Stablecoins, market structure, and strategic Bitcoin reserve, Satoshi Action Fund founder, Dennis Porter, said in a February 28 Twitter post. Wow. Okay. I guess he's got some inside information there. Anyway, another Bitcoin reserve bill is also making its way through Arizona senate. The strategic Bitcoin reserve act, which is number ten twenty five, cosponsored by Republican senator Wendy Rogers and representative Jeff Whittinger, also passed the senate's third reading on February 27 with a vote of seventeen four and eleven against.
The Rogers and Whininger sponsored bill focuses on investment authority for public funds to invest in crypto assets, while the Finsham sponsored bill establishes a specialized fund for seized digital assets and appropriated funds. There are currently 18 states that have crypto reserve bills pending senate votes, while two, Arizona and Utah, are both in the final stages of the approval process. And Texas is hot on Arizona's heels. From Atlas21.com, I got this one. Texas moves towards a strategic Bitcoin reserve, bill approved in committee.
On February, the Texas Senate and Business Commerce Committee approved the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve s b 21 bill with a unanimous nine to zero vote. Legislation introduced by senator Charles Schwartner will now proceed to the senate for further review and evaluation. And during this phase, lawmakers will assess the potential benefits and risks of a state held Bitcoin reserve. The proposal aims to establish a special fund separate from the state's general revenue fund, allowing Texas to hold Bitcoin as a financial asset with an investment cap of 1% of general revenue for purchases.
And for Texas' general well, not the general fund, but in general, Texas has a lot of money. We always have. The state has always been really good about having lots of cash in reserve, lots of assets in reserve. That Texas is is good. It doesn't matter. I we could suffer, like, a global worldwide electromagnetic pulse strike, and Texas is probably gonna be okay even though it would suck. But let's run the numbers. CNBC futures and commodities, oil taking it on the chin again. Point 9% to the downside for West Texas Intermediate brings it to $69.72 a barrel. Brent Norsee down 1.2 to $73.15.
Natural gas down close to two full points to $3.85 per thousand cubic feet. That's getting down there, man. We we were at, like, four I don't know, $4.10 not too long ago. Gasoline down a row sticks, 1.11 to a bucks 90 7 a gallon, and all of the shiny metal rocks, wow, they are getting pummeled today. Gold down one and a quarter below 2,900 to $28.59 and 20¢. Silver down one and a half. Platinum down 1.74. Copper is down one and a half. Palladium essentially moving sideways in comparison, a mere 0.14% to the downside for palladium.
Did I say platinum first? No. No. Palladium. Okay. Okay. I was just making sure. And everything in ag except for lumber is in the red as well. Lumber is up 1.11%, again, in a row of sticks. And looks like chocolate, no. No. No. Sugar is down as the biggest loser, two and a third percent. Live cattle is down a full point. Lean hogs are up point 18%. Feeder cattle are up a third. The Dow is up a half, and S and P is up a third. Nasdaq is up a half, and the S and P Mini is up a half as well. Bitcoin recovering from its well, yesterday's freaking dive bombing.
$83,920 brings us to a $1,660,000,000,000 market cap that is going to allow us to purchase 29.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,830,235.41. Fees are low. 0.04 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis on average. There are, 50 blocks carrying 13,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 3 Satoshis per vByte. Low priority is gonna get you in 3 Satoshis per v byte. And mining has oh my god. The hash rate has actually risen. 796.2 x hashes per second. That's actually quite a bit of hash rate added, since yesterday.
And I'm I'm baffled, but I don't care. From hard of hearing yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Geek Toshi with a row of sticks. Thank you, Geek. 01/2011 says Tether FUD has and always will exist because Tether, d g a f. Yeah. Probably. Justin with a thousand, congress would make cash illegal if they could. Yes. They've been trying to do that forever. Bitcoin for president with a thousand says, fucking legend. Psyduck with 5 50 7 says, Psyduck Psyduck, Mark with 2 10. Bank of Ameri coin, That which we call a CBDC by any other name would smell just as shitty. Pies with a hundred says value for value, hashtag 40 h b w. Thank you, sir. No thank you.
And that's the weather report. It's part two of the news you can use. Bybit hackers have moved over half of the stolen ETH onto Bitcoin largely using Thorchain. So the hackers are actually not only are they able to spend, move, touch, vector, re vector? The heretofore spoken of as immovable ETH that was stolen from Bybit, they are converting it directly into Bitcoin, which makes sense. Anyway, this is from Daniel Coon, out of the block. Let's see what we got here. MetaMask. Head of security Taylor Monahan said the Bybit hackers have moved at least 209,000 ETH, which is worth roughly 480,000,000 onto Bitcoin in a message to the block.
That represents more than half half of the approximately 400,000 ETH tokens taken from the exchange, not including the other drained tokens. At least 240,000,000 of this amount was laundered using Thorchain according to Arkham Intelligence, which is tracking digital wallets linked to the hacker group. The stolen crypto has mainly been swapped for native BTC. Let me reiterate that. The stolen crypto has mainly been swapped for actual Bitcoin, Arkham said in a post on Twitter. Last Friday, Arkham Intelligence said North Korea's Lazarus Group had hacked Bybit for over 1,500,000,000.0, citing information provided by online sleuth, Zac xBT.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations has since confirmed the hack was perpetrated by North Korea's malicious traitor traitor actors, which by term includes the Lazarus Group. Traitor traitor actors are proceeding rapidly and have converted some of the stolen assets to Bitcoin and other virtual assets dispersed across thousands of addresses on multiple blockchains, the FBI said. It is expected that these assets will be further laundered and eventually converted to fiat currencies. According to Ethereum security experts, the $1,500,000,000 hack has been harder to track than usual.
Lazarus is known for splitting up funds and using multiple protocols to move funds, but this this particular exploit involves thousands thousands of separate transactions. Sounds to me like they've got an automated system to do this. Quote, this is how Bybit hacks tracking looks, sued anonymous researcher Soma xBT said on Twitter, venting about the complicated nature of the split funds. Quote, this is just a track of two hops of 10 ETH each. MyMac Air is literally burning to load these transactions. That's how many how how much power it's actually going to take to visualize and map out what's going on giving on chain data.
Because it's it's like what what they're doing is, like, it's showing I can't show you the picture, but he's got a picture of all of these, like, different wallets where these two transactions have been split and split, and that's just 20 Ethereum between these two particular transactions being split and split and split and split and recombined and moved at other wallets. Like I said, somebody has developed a automated tool. Now I don't know if they say that in here, but humans would have to do this. And it without it being automated, which means that they've got an automated tool that splits and recombines and does all this in an automated fashion, probably under a preprogrammed algorithm to say, like, just you know, like like the probably the the thing comes up and says, how do you wanna steal these funds? I was like, well, use these addresses and then go to Thorchain and then go buy some Sol and then buy some Bitcoin and then come back and do all this, and then you just execute and let the computer just roll. This dude is having problems with his Mac Air, which is a fairly powerful computer, just trying to track down two two transactions as it's going through this algorithm.
Holy smokes, man. Good luck. Good luck trying to find this stuff. Oh, and by the way, might I iterate that I was told by several ethereans that there was no way this stuff could be moved. No way. Not at all. Anyway, in total, the hackers drained over 400,000 worth of ETH or 1,100,000,000.0 at the time, $90,000 or 90,000 s t ETH and 15,000 s or Centimeters ETH and 8,000 c ETH in the attack. However, it's unclear how much actual ETH the hacker community or currently hold as some of the assets including $43,000,000 in m ETH have been frozen. Oh, yeah. Right. Good luck. MetaMask Monaghan estimates that the, hackers have moved at least a hundred and 61,500 ETH, using 3,934 distinct bridge transactions to Thorchain over the past one hundred and fifteen hours since the hack occurred.
That represents a majority of the 2,009 or, oh, sorry, 209,000 ETH total she reckons has moved on to Bitcoin, she told the block. That's 3,200,000 every hour. Lazarus appears to be using two primary noncustodial bridges for the attack, the aforementioned Thorchain and Exchach, e x c h. However, Exchach, known primarily for its lax KYC controls, appears to have disabled ETH and ERC 20 token swaps, limiting the hacker's ability to move funds into Bitcoin. On Wednesday, Bybit CEO announced that the exchange would offer a 5% bounty to exchanges, bridges, and mixers who helped freeze those funds associated with the attack.
This is an extension of the 10% bounty Bybit initially offered to anyone who could return the funds. Of the 161,000 ETH confirmed to have gone through cross chain exchange platform Thorchain, The hackers have used a plethora. A plethora. Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas? A plethora of blockchain tools to hop their way over including Asgardex, DeFi Swap, Fortuna Swap, Gem Wallet, LiFi, ShapeShift, Trust Wallet, among others, according to blockchain data. Thorchain saw its single largest day of trading volumes on Wednesday with over $737,000,000 worth of token swaps.
Quote, it's all coming from Lazarus hackers, Thorchain user Diplo said on Twitter. But who really cares? It's a win for TC for Thorchain. Only concern is what happens to price once these swaps stop. BTC is bleeding at the moment. If we didn't have this, I don't think we'd be above $1 right now. Oh, for fuck. Thorchain's native token, Rune, has traded at a peak price above a oh, he's talking about this thing being a dollar. Above $1.60 since the hack, a local high recently, but a ways off from the high above $10 they saw in 02/2024 and its all time high of $19.30.
Quote, Thorchain is not doing anything to stop the movement of stolen ETH through their platform, and it isn't going to end well, AirDrop Glide app said on Twitter. Quote, funny how one person could shut down Thorfy in two minutes, but when it comes to stopping North Korea laundering billions of dollars of Ethereum through Thorchain, it's suddenly impossible to do anything about it. Anyway, according to several posts on Twitter, there has been internal division regarding Lazarus connected flows. Earlier on Thursday, three validators voted to refuse transactions connected to the Bybit hack, which apparently temporarily stopped the flows. However, the vote was reverted within minutes due to the extremely decentralized consensus mechanism behind Thorchain that preserves validator optionality, one user explained. And notably, Thorchain's pseudonym core dev Pluto advocated for addressing this on chain money laundering before announcing his resignation from the project.
TCB, one of the three validators that voted to stop THORChain's ETH trading, also said he has been struggling to find ways to prevent North Korean money laundering, quote, with the huge majority of your flows are stolen funds from North Korea for the biggest money heist in human history, it will become a national security issue. This isn't a game anymore, TCB said on Twitter, adding that Thorchain is not decentralized enough to survive a regulatory attack. Quote, the TC community has strong beliefs based on what they learn from a messaging that is disconnected from the reality of the people who have been executing on the front lines.
Immediately after draining the Bybit cold wallet, Lazarus moved the stolen funds into three separate distribution addresses and then broke them down into dozens of newly created addresses. The group also swapped ETH derivatives like stETH, cETH for ETH using decentralized exchanges Uniswap, Paraswap, and KyberSwap. So so much for these funds not being able to be touched, moved, spent, or anything. If you were one of the people that heard that bullshit on Twitter, they lied. The Ethereum straight up lied to you. They lied to all of us. There's no way that those funds were not going to move. What is surprising for me is that we seem to not be dealing with a bunch of shitcoiners, and here's why that worries me.
This actually smells like it might have been a regulatory attack, but just in the black ops sort of way. And what what do I mean by that? North Korea, oh my god, they're involved. Okay. So automatically, all these flags go up for national security. Second thing, the insecurity of blockchain. And what do they target? The Ethereum blockchain. Well, I mean, clearly, they did the the whole cold wallet hack on on Bybit, but still, nobody's really gonna be able to separate that in normie land. They're just gonna say a blockchain's unsecure.
Alright. Those narratives are being spun up right now. I guarantee it. Third, I told you that criminals use Bitcoin. They're they're laundering it into Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself is the biggest money. You can hear the narratives start spinning and spinning and spinning. So I still reserve the right to think that this might have actually been I don't know. The entire thing was planned probably. And I'm just gonna say it. It's probably not North Korean Lazarus Group. Or if it is, it makes me wonder if the North Korean Lazarus Group actually is what we think it is. Alright. Let's get into the next one.
But first, man, Zelensky got his ass handed to him by an orange man and his and his buddy, JD Vance. Man, I I took a break because I had to go take my wife to the to the dentist office. So So I'm sitting there. I'm on Noster. Everything's fun. And then all of a sudden, I start seeing all these pop ups of Zelensky in the in the Oval Office. And I listened to a couple of these exchanges, and you have to I'm in Eastern Washington. You know? There is a lot of liberal shit out here, so there is no way I can listen to this straight up off my phone without the potential of of getting a whole bunch of really left leading people all hot and bothered, so I put in my earplugs.
I could only listen to one of these exchanges between Zelensky, Vance, and Trump. And, oh my god, you wanna talk about getting your ass handed to you. Now here's the thing. I know there are still people that believe that truly believe that Ukraine is only a country and not a money laundering front for The United States and has been that way since before Bill Clinton. And it became very evident under Bill Clinton that Ukraine is simply just a way for us to wash money at the government level. And then they find this four foot, four and a half foot guy to essentially front this bogus corporation that is Ukraine. And I know I'm pissing a whole bunch of people off, but this is the way I feel.
From what I've seen, I've just seen nothing but chicanery out of this country. And I am not saying that Putin was good for invading it. This war is always bad. And when you lose that many young men and women and children in the complete onslaught and wholesale destruction of city after city after city, I'm not happy about that. But it seems clear that the Trump administration has had their fill with this little man, and people are losing their minds. I got people saying that when was the last time, US president debased himself? I don't think he debased himself. I think he's done. I think he's speaking plainly for the first time we've actually ever seen anybody in the president in the president's office actually be a human instead of some dooded up, you know, pancake makeup all over the place, three piece suits and shit, and being as stoic as hell, and not saying anything because you can't piss off the right, and you don't wanna piss off the left. Everybody in the centrist is gonna be mad no matter what the hell you do, So you just essentially say absolutely what? Freaking nothing. You say nothing.
And if you do say any actual English words, they mean nothing. Nobody can actually be able to pull what you meant out of it. It's been this way for so long that it's actually kind of refreshing to see somebody lose their shit in a situation that the shit needs to be lost on because this Ukraine thing has to end. The billions of dollars of United States pat taxpayer dollars going to this money pit is all it is. It's just a money pit, and it's always been the most extensive money laundering operation the United States government has had. And it's over.
It's freaking over. And it looks like everybody saw that today. In fact, it's from what I can tell, Trump actually kicked Zelensky out of the White House. I've never seen that happen before. And, again, it's actually just a little bit refreshing. Now you can hate orange man. You can love orange man. You can be like me and try to figure out what the hell is going on on both sides of the fence. But one thing that I have to say, it's interesting to actually see this shit occur. Now, over the next few days, just be prepared for every single person you know at one point or another to show true colors, completely break down, and lose their ever loving mind about this. And it's gonna be actually a little bit more dangerous than I think people think.
So if we're gonna let orange man lose his ever loving shit on a four and a half foot tall would be dictator, then we have to be the stoic ones and literally not say shit because you never know who is closeted in their complete and utter contempt for one side of the fence or the other side of the fence. And if you want to maintain friends, the best thing to do is say, just shut the fuck up and have another beer. Now, let's get on with this one. Speaking of Europe, European states continue their race for encryption backdoors. This is no b s bitcoin.com.
European policy makers continue to push forward various proposals and regulations that would severely compromise the privacy and security of European citizens. Alrighty then. In France, a proposed narco traffic law amendment would require encrypted communication services to create backdoors for law enforcement access within seventy two hours. And noncompliance could lead to fines like €1,500,000 for individuals and 2% of global turnover for companies. So if you're just a regular French dude, where are you gonna come up with 1 and a half million euros? Man, Europe is done, guys.
Europe is over, which is probably why I just saw a news flash that Canada says that they need to get closer to Europe, and it's very clear to me that The United States is trying to distance our way out of Europe, out of NATO because all Europe has ever wanted to do was go to war with each other. I say, let them have at it because this kind of crap, this needs to be over as well. Quote, weakening encryption for law enforcement inevitably creates vulnerabilities that can and will be exploited by cyber criminals and hostile foreign actors. This law would not just target criminals, it would destroy security for everyone, Matthias Pfau, CEO at Tutamail, told BleepingComputer.
Yeah. He's right. Major French copyright holders are also taking legal action to force large VPN providers to participate in their pirate site blocking program. And as a result, some VPN providers are contemplating exiting France if the legal pressure continues. Meanwhile, not to be outdone in Sweden, the government is pushing for encrypted messaging apps like Signal to implement similar e two e e, backdoors, which could become law as soon as March 2026, and Signal has threatened to leave the country if the proposal becomes law. Quote, if you create a vulnerability based on Swedish wishes, it would create a way to undermine our entire network. Therefore, we would never introduce these backdoors, said Signal CEO Meredith Whitaker. Good on you, Meredith.
Recently, again, not to be outdone, we have the UK government demanding that Apple create a backdoor for law enforcement to access all of its users encrypted cloud data. And in response, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service from Britain as it uses end to end encryption that prevents even Apple from accessing the data. Quote, I share your grave concern about the serious implications of The United Kingdom or any foreign country requiring Apple or any company to create a backdoor that would allow access to Americans' personal encrypted data. This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans' privacy and civil liberties and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors, said United States National Intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, in a letter to senator Ron Wyden.
Well, The UK already passed its online safety bill in 2023, which includes a controversial clause for breaking encryption. However, this clause can only be applied when it is, quote, technically feasible. Lastly, member countries of the European Union are still attempting to discover a viable way to implement chat control, a mass surveillance initiative by well funded international non governmental organizations, also known as NGOs, and tech affiliated surveillance advocacy groups that have been proposed or that has been proposed and endorsed by the European Commission. The latest half good proposal by the Polish council presidency wants to make chat control voluntary rather than compulsory, yet 16 out of 27 EU states led by Spain still reject it using dramatic language.
Quote, the proposal is likely to go too far already for the hardliner majority of EU governments and the EU Commission whose positions are so extreme that they will rather let down victims altogether than accept a proportionate, court proof, and politically viable approach rights privacy advocate, Patrick Beyer. This means that there is still no chat control agreement for now. The EU working group will continue to negotiate the issue in March. So EU is done. People are leaving. Companies will leave. Money is flowing out. All they wanna do is fight each other. There's this semblance of cohesion given by the EU or the European, quote, unquote, union experiment that is a clear and utter failure.
And if I if you wanna be Spain, just be Spain. If you wanna be Britain, be Britain. If you wanna be France, go be France. Asking all these disparate cultures to somehow or another bind themselves under the euro and the European Union is and always was doomed to failure. And it's showing right now. Trump kicking Zelensky out of the Oval Office after him and JD Vance basically was beating a six year old child for misbehavior, which is essentially what I saw. They're the back end of Europe. They're the canary in the coal mine for Europe. Europe is not just scared of Russia. I guarantee you, Europeans are scared of other Europeans.
France is scared of Spain. Spain is scared of Britain. Britain is scared of god only Germany. You know, none of these people actually really get along all that well. NATO wasn't as much designed to make sure that Russia keeps itself at bay. It that was one of the parts of it. But it was essentially to guarantee that the European countries don't go to war with each other all the time because they've been doing it for, like, three thousand years. It's just like I mean, I mean, even when they were tribes in France, when they were called the Gauls, and the Germans, when they were in tribal nature, they were constantly at war. And it continued and continued and continued until the end of World War two.
And all of a sudden, everything got better. Right? Well, wrong. This shit is not working. It's just not working. All they wanna do is either spy on their people and fleece their people and somehow or another kiss each other's ass while all the time under the carpet saying how much they wanna kill each other. I know that sounds extreme, but I guarantee you that's exactly what's going on. I don't actually think the European Union will be in place by the time that I die unless I get hit by a truck tomorrow. Now fifth Bitcoin educators unconference with Bitcoin Park in Nashville is up and coming.
Me premier Bitcoin announces its fifth, count them, one, two, three, four, five, Bitcoin educators unconference in collaboration with Bitcoin Park. Following the highly successful events in San Salvador and Madeira, we are heading back to the beautiful city of Nashville. The unconference embodies the vision and mission of the organization to educate and empower the world with Bitcoin knowledge. Me, Premier Bitcoin aims to bring passionate Bitcoin enthusiasts together fostering collaboration and networking. The event is rooted in the principles of an impartial, independent, decentralized, and community led organization.
Attendance is limited. And contrary to regular conferences, an unconference is a place where every attendee is or could be a potential speaker. Everyone has the chance to pitch their own ideas at the start of the event, which will subsequently be grouped in separate breakout rooms. Previous unconferences have been attended by industry thought leaders like Jeff Booth and Preston Pysh, but also by grassroots educational projects like Bitcoin eCasi from South Africa, Amity Age from Honduras, and Motive from Peru. It attracts builders and educators from all around the world. If you're interested in becoming a speaker, you can apply by submitting your ideas here. We will open the stage for everyone to pitch his or her own idea at the start of the day.
The sessions and activities are designed to reflect the Bitcoin ethos, decentralized and collaborative events. This means that we will be creating this event together. With input from all attendees, past additions brought fruitful discussions about global education networks, grassroots adoption, Bitcoin communities, gamification of educational resources, tools for the youth, and more. So the location, the fifth unconference will be held at Bitcoin Park on April during the grassroots Bitcoin week. Complimentary drinks, snacks, and lunch will be served on location and are included in the ticket price.
Please note that My First Bitcoin is a nonprofit and aims to run breakeven with this event. And the practical information is as follows. Bitcoin Park is the location. It is at 191020 First Avenue, South Nashville in Tennessee. The date is April 2025. Doors open at 10AM. Event starts at eleven. Closing time is at 06:00. And they do not list the ticket price. So I don't know what to tell you about that. But I do know what to tell you about AlbiGo version 1.1 has been released and it has support for pick and pay QR's and BTC map.
Again, AlbiGo is a simple lightning mobile wallet interface for Bitcoin payments over the lightning network. It works well with AlbiHub or any other Nasr Wallet Connect wallet. It's available for iOS and Android. And let's see what they got here. What's new? Support for pick and pay QR's. I don't know what the hell a pick and pay QR is, and they're not really giving me much information here. There is a BTC map to find places to go spend your sats. There's improved skeleton and animations across the app, fixed transactional page crashes, layout shifts in Android, and other bug fixes. So there you go. I'll have to update my albigo on my phone and look for the skeleton animations because I don't know what the hell that is. Umbrel OS version 1.4 has a file manager.
Yes, sirree. It's a file manager. Finally, Umbrel OS is a home server OS for self hosting with built in app store. Umbrel OS 1.4 brings files. Our brand new file manager that turns your Umbrill into a full blown home cloud along with Korean language support and various bug fixes. Files manager allows Umbrill node runners to easily create, upload, and organize their files on their home server, as well as share folders over a local network and add them as network drives on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. The release also includes support for external storage devices, like, like oh, that will work from USB, like like like little like handheld SSD drives.
That's nice. That's gonna be that's gonna be really, really cool. Join the official Umbrel community discord blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. So file service on Umbrel. Why is that shit important? Because you don't need Google Cloud. Okay. The first thing that you're gonna say is, yeah. You do. What if what if you're depending on files that are on your Umbrel in the file server and you're at, I don't know, the fifth Bitcoin Unconference in Nashville, Tennessee on April, and you need file service from your Umbrel, but, oh my god, a meteorite has hit your home, and it's all freaking gone. What are you gonna do? Well, you're hosed.
Okay? I mean, it's if you have a file that is so important that if you lose it in one spot that you're completely hosed, then you probably need to have your file in a different spot as well, like, maybe even on Google Cloud or or Amazon Web Services. Who knows? That's up to you. But under the assumption that everything is fine and a meteorite or flight one thirty seven from Dallas Fort Worth didn't, like, crash land on top of your pad, then you'd be able to serve whatever files you want from your home server, and you don't have to depend on anybody else. And I'll bet you my ass that one of these days, we see a situation where different Umbrel users would be able to connect with each other and kind of share the load.
In in other words, where if your house did get set on fire by an arsonist because they were pissed off that you got the girl from high school and they didn't, then other Umbrel users in the future, not now, but in the future, I'll bet that they'd be able to say, well, I've kinda got a copy of part of your file, and this other dude's got a copy of the other part of your file. And between the two of us, we can stitch them both together like the way Napster used to work, where you had different seeders. And there was, like, sometimes a seeder would go offline while you were midway downloading. Well, it didn't matter. You'd find another seeder, and it would figure out where the hell you left off on that song and it would upload the other part and like it would stitch the file together and you'd be fine.
But having the ability to serve files of your own that is encrypted to yourself without the reliance on any third party is the way we're going to remain sovereign. And that ladies and gentlemen finishes us off for Bitcoin and this week. And this week has been hard. It's been really hard. Nobody wanted to see what we all had to watch, and it may continue. We don't know. But in the in the language of my ancestors, I give you our standard greeting to all the new people in Bitcoin. Welcome to Bitcoin, motherfucker, and I'll see you on the other side.
[00:58:41] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 09:01AM Pacific Standard Time. It is the February 2025. Damn. Two months in the bag already of 2025. This is episode ten forty six of Bitcoin, and we're gonna talk about the Coinbase case against the SEC or rather the SEC's case of v Coinbase because that's coming in. And then just so that we can assuage our inner trading analysis guy thingy when it comes to the Bitcoin price, we are going to read this Sam Borgie piece from Cointelegraph entitled the Bitcoin crash was triggered by the erosion of the ETF cash and carry trade. It doesn't mean that Sam's right. It also doesn't mean that I necessarily agree.
It's just I know that there are some people out there just I know you're itching to find out what was this. Why what was why was this week so terrible? And I know. I I I get it. You know? The like, the you know, I'm just hardcore and old school Bitcoiner as it comes, but it's okay to wonder why. It really is. More specifically, it's actually okay to wonder how something could have happened. Now remember, when we do that one, take it with a grain of salt because Sam and the analysts that are involved in this story, they may be wrong. It may not have been this particular thing that was the catalyst for the ongoing carnage that we've been seeing in Bitcoin. But, hey, I know that there are some of you out there that don't mind asking how or why something happened. And then we're gonna get into a couple of states that are doing their crypto reserve bills and where they are, namely Arizona and Texas. And then we've got the Bybit hackers, yet again moving the unmovable, spending the unspendable, laundering the unlanderable.
I I'm still aghast at just how how bad the lying from the Ethereum crew was over on Twitter when they were saying, oh, this it's it's all been burned or it's in a it's a in an address that cannot be touched or or we're gonna be able to track all that stuff to to the point that you you might as well not even be able to spend it. Well, that was a lie, and we'll talk about exactly what's going on there. European states continue to load rounds of ammunition into a six cylinder gun and point it to their head because they're continuously playing Russian roulette.
And then we're gonna talk a little bit about the Bitcoin educators unconference in Bitcoin Park over there in Nashville. And then Albie's got an update as well as Umbrel. And the Umbrel update is actually kinda cool, at least as far as for some of the things that I would want to use Umbrel for alongside having a full Bitcoin node and a full lightning node. But first, Coinbase case is dropped by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission as the agency reverses its crypto stance, Jesse Hamilton, writing this one for CoinDesk.
Coinbase has been freed from its protracted legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission as the agency has agreed to drop the case that's been among the industry's core fights in federal court. Now I'm just pausing here to say this case against corn corn okay. Yeah. Fuck it. Corn base has been going on for years at this point. And it was really dragging a bunch of people down with it. I you but and I don't like Coinbase. I I'm not a fan, and I've always said that. And I'm not even, like, really that much of a fan of the fact that the SEC has dropped their their case against Coinbase. I think that they actually had a good case against Coinbase, but it looks like they're just going to tuck their tail between their legs and run away.
So but at least at least some questions have been answered insofar as they're not gonna pursue this case any longer. So Coinbase can get get on with listing shitcoins and and unregulated securities, and apparently, nobody's gonna get into any kind of trouble for fleecing the American and the world's public on the altcoin listing that Coinbase continuously does. Okay. So continuing on, though the SEC's intention to agree to shut down the legal dispute has already gone public, When The US Crypto Exchange announced the deal last week, the commissioners had to cast a formal vote to ask a federal judge to actually throw the switch and pull the trigger.
The dismissal was done in such a way that the regulator cannot change its mind later. So this case, ladies and gentlemen, has been dismissed with what is known as prejudice. They cannot file refile these charges again ever. And that's a huge deal. It it's not just like, okay. We're just gonna put this case away. We're gonna dismiss the case, but we're not gonna do it with prejudice. That means, like, next year, they could just it would always be hanging over Coinbase's head and therefore, for whatever reason, the the entire industry's head like a Damocles sword, but that's not going to happen. Coinbase can never be charged with this shit again.
For me, that doesn't bode well because the listing of shitcoins is going to go hyperbolic at this point, but we'll continue. Quote, it's time for the commission to rectify its approach and develop crypto policies in a more transparent manner, SEC acting chair Mark Ueda said in a statement that the SEC lawyers already filed a motion to dismiss the case. Dropping the main case doesn't free the SEC from other Coinbase legal matters, including the company's petition to force the agency to establish crypto rules and Coinbase's pursuit of internal documents in the exchange's ongoing work to reveal the regulators' private deliberations on how to approach digital assets.
But this enforcement case was the top legal concern for The US public company, and it sought to elevate the central legal questions of what makes a crypto security and when and how a digital asset exchange should register with the agency. Those fundamental questions still await answers that must now be provided by the United States Congress. Once the SEC's previous leadership departed, especially Gary Gensler, the temporary chair elevated by president Donald Trump, Mark Ueda, began overhauling the agency's legal officials and its stance on digital assets.
Ueda named fellow Republican commissioner Hester Peirce to run the agency's crypto task force, and both of them were vocal critics of the way Gensler approached the industry. The digital asset sector didn't have to wait for the confirmation of Paul Atkins, Trump's pick to permanently run the agency. Both Ueda and Pers served his as his counsels when he was a commissioner at the SEC, so they're widely expected to be on a course that he'll maintain. So far, that course has seen a wave of abandoned crypto investigations and dropped cases, including against Robinhood, Gemini, and ConsenSys' MetaMask, and pauses of matter involving Tron and Binance.
Wow. There's just talk about tucking your tail in between your legs and running away. Good god. Anyway, the regulator is no longer maintaining the interpretation of the US Supreme Court's so called Howey test that it said had indicated that many crypto projects qualified as securities. Quote, goodbye, chief legal officer Paul Grewal posted on social media site Twitter after the SEC's announcement on Thursday, and good riddance. Okay. These two paragraphs are really important. The regulator is no longer maintaining the interpretation of the US Supreme Court's Howey test that it said had indicated many crypto projects qualified as securities.
I read this as it's alt season. Again, we're gonna have to deal with the shitty they're all okay. None of them are scams, guys. Not a single one of them. They're all above board. They're they're they're fake ass board of directors whose pictures on their websites came from, you know, yearbooks and and college yearbooks and and probably, you know, I don't know, obituaries from the New York Times. It it's all above board. This is actually not good news. It's good news for Coinbase, and it's good news for the scammers. It is not good news for people who are actually trying to fix the broken ass, unethical, immoral system that we've been living under for decades and decades and decades. Continuing the SEC's changed view on CoinDesk, Which CoinDesk was first to report on last week will cause the exchange to shift its Washington focus towards congress and legislation, Gruel told CoinDesk.
The company is among the digital asset businesses that led the creation and the deployment of the Fair Shake political action committee in the two thousand and four elections, collectively devoting more than a hundred and 60,000,000 to an effort to elect crypto friendly candidates to office. And now Coinbase is seeking to get a return on that investment with regulations that it considers favorable. I don't believe that was in the February, guys. I I just don't. We didn't even have Bitcoin's white paper until, what, 02/2008, and it wasn't until 02/2009 that we first spun that thing up. So I think what they mean is February is when the fair shake pack came in. Anyway, the fair shake pack, which shook up the campaign finance world with its outsized corporate spending levels, is still at it dabbling in special elections as it prepares for the 2026 election cycle. Those would be the midterms.
For those of you who are not in The United States, we essentially have elections every two years. Every four years is a presidential presidential election, and then our congress or in in congress, the senators sit for six years in a term. And then the house of representatives, every two years, they have to go up for reelection, which means they do about one year worth of work for The United States people, if you can call it that, and they work on themselves for the other year and get paid for it on our dime. They're working on their own election. It's ridiculous. But we have elections every freaking two years in this country, and it's honestly just god is such a heavy lift to see the stupidity pile pile up and pile on.
Okay. So out of the Coinbase news and into the what the hell happened part of the show, Sam Borgie, as promised with the Cointelegraph article entitled Bitcoin crash triggered by erosion of ETF cash and carry trade according to an analyst. Since reaching all time highs on January, Bitcoin's price has been suppressed by hedge funds exploiting a low risk yield trade involving spot exchange traded funds and CME futures, signaling once again that institutional adoption of crypto assets is not a one way street. This is the general takeaway of analyst Kyle Chasse, who dissected the latest Bitcoin price crash in a thread on Twitter, quote, for months.
Hedge funds were exploiting a low risk yield trade using BTC spot ETFs and CME futures. Now this cash and carry trade is imploding. And he's and here's here's the tweet. Hold on for a second. I wanna make sure that they don't repeat the tweet in the text of the and they don't. Okay. So here's Kyle Chasse or however you pronounce his last name. He says, Bitcoin is crashing. Are you wondering why? The cash and carry trade that's been suppressing BTC's price is now unwinding. Here's how it worked and why its collapse is sending shock waves through the market. For months, hedge funds were exploiting a low risk yield trade using spot ETFs and CME futures, and this is how it worked.
Number one, buy Bitcoin spot ETFs from BlackRock and Fidelity. Number two, short BTC futures on the CME. Three, farm the spread for approximately 5.68% annualized returns. Some were even using leverage to juice their returns into the double digits. But now it's imploding. Right? That's the that's the the bulk of his tweet. The cash and carry trade involve involved buying spot Bitcoin ETFs and shorting the Bitcoin futures on CME, as we heard, which allowed the traders to earn up to 5.68% in annualized returns. Well, the success of this trade depended mainly on Bitcoin futures trading at a premium to the cryptocurrency's spot price.
However, with recent market weakness, that premium has collapsed, said Chassis. With the trade no longer profitable, hedge funds are exiting the market, which is evidenced by the record outflows from US spot Bitcoin ETFs this week. The same trade that kept Bitcoin stable on the way up is accelerating the crash now. This is happening because, quote, hedge funds don't care about Bitcoin. They weren't betting on BTC mooning. They were farming low risk yield. Bitcoin sell off accelerated on February as the cryptocurrency retraced all the way back to sub $79,000 regions for the first time in more than three months. However, a closer look at on chain data reveals that the losses are mainly concentrated among Bitcoin tourists or brand new traders who only entered the market recently, yeah, at all time highs.
As is tradition in our tribe, but, you know, it is what it is. Data from Glassnode shows that 74% of the realized losses came from holders who bought within the last month. Oh, man. That has gotta freaking hurt. Nevertheless, unrealized losses from the recent sell off exceeded crypto exchange FTX's capitulation event according to analyst Milky Bull Crypto. Milk Jesus. Milky Bull crypto. That, honestly, dude, that's a terrible handle. But a drop of this magnitude is a strong sign of a bottom formation in Bitcoin's price. Yeah. Don't listen to that to that, that last part because god only knows what can happen at this point. Just just hold on. Just just chill out. Hold on. Everything's gonna be fine.
However, it I do I even I am looking for reasons why particular events occur when, you know, this week was pretty brutal. So I don't think anybody could actually be counted as being, I don't know, not a not a Bitcoin maximalist or a purist or or, you know, basically, like, they're you know, like, somebody like me is devolving into the fiat mindset. I don't think that that is a quality argument when you're just going, what the hell was that? Because, honestly, if you were alive or at least barely awake at any point this week, starting from last Friday, you were asking that question. You're like, what the hell is this? Did something happen?
Was it just tariffs? Was it just Trump opening his mouth and and saying stuff and blurting stuff out? Because that didn't really add up. This one kinda adds up, and I'm not saying that I completely agree with it, but I am basically not wholesale rejecting it either because it does make sense. You got a lot of money chasing a particular kind of trade, and that particular kind of trade kind of petered out. And I have been wondering for quite a while how these people are still trading futures when I keep seeing everybody getting wrecked AF on these trades.
Like, you you I I see shorts liquidated in the regions of $15,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. I see longs liquidated in the region of 8 to $20,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. I've seen some huge, huge liquidations. And I keep asking myself, why do you people continue to do this? Well, maybe that was it. Maybe it didn't matter. They weren't really losing money because they were gaining it on the other end with the ETFs. And now maybe they're just like they're tired of that trade, and it's it's lost its luster. And therefore, we're settling back down into what is possibly could be considered an appropriate price given the actual interest around the world from real institutions that wanna hold and retail investors that wanna hold and get out of the fiat trap.
And maybe Arizona will do the same. From Martin Young, Cointelegraph, Arizona crypto reserve bills inch closer to law after passing the senate. The Arizona senate has advanced a Bitcoin reserve bill, bringing it to second place behind Utah in a race between US states to get a crypto investment bill approved. The Arizona senate passed the strategic digital assets reserve bill thirteen seventy three on its third reading February 27 with a vote of seventeen four and twelve against, and it now advances to the state's house of representatives. The bill, sponsored by Republican senator Mark Finchem, would create a digital asset strategic reserve fund administered by the state treasurer that would consist of money appropriated by the legislature and crypto seized by the state.
The treasurer cannot invest more than 10% of the total funds deposited in any fiscal year, but may loan digital assets from the fund to generate returns if it doesn't increase financial risk to the state. Quote, whether you like it or not, legislation will happen at the federal level in this order. Stablecoins, market structure, and strategic Bitcoin reserve, Satoshi Action Fund founder, Dennis Porter, said in a February 28 Twitter post. Wow. Okay. I guess he's got some inside information there. Anyway, another Bitcoin reserve bill is also making its way through Arizona senate. The strategic Bitcoin reserve act, which is number ten twenty five, cosponsored by Republican senator Wendy Rogers and representative Jeff Whittinger, also passed the senate's third reading on February 27 with a vote of seventeen four and eleven against.
The Rogers and Whininger sponsored bill focuses on investment authority for public funds to invest in crypto assets, while the Finsham sponsored bill establishes a specialized fund for seized digital assets and appropriated funds. There are currently 18 states that have crypto reserve bills pending senate votes, while two, Arizona and Utah, are both in the final stages of the approval process. And Texas is hot on Arizona's heels. From Atlas21.com, I got this one. Texas moves towards a strategic Bitcoin reserve, bill approved in committee.
On February, the Texas Senate and Business Commerce Committee approved the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve s b 21 bill with a unanimous nine to zero vote. Legislation introduced by senator Charles Schwartner will now proceed to the senate for further review and evaluation. And during this phase, lawmakers will assess the potential benefits and risks of a state held Bitcoin reserve. The proposal aims to establish a special fund separate from the state's general revenue fund, allowing Texas to hold Bitcoin as a financial asset with an investment cap of 1% of general revenue for purchases.
And for Texas' general well, not the general fund, but in general, Texas has a lot of money. We always have. The state has always been really good about having lots of cash in reserve, lots of assets in reserve. That Texas is is good. It doesn't matter. I we could suffer, like, a global worldwide electromagnetic pulse strike, and Texas is probably gonna be okay even though it would suck. But let's run the numbers. CNBC futures and commodities, oil taking it on the chin again. Point 9% to the downside for West Texas Intermediate brings it to $69.72 a barrel. Brent Norsee down 1.2 to $73.15.
Natural gas down close to two full points to $3.85 per thousand cubic feet. That's getting down there, man. We we were at, like, four I don't know, $4.10 not too long ago. Gasoline down a row sticks, 1.11 to a bucks 90 7 a gallon, and all of the shiny metal rocks, wow, they are getting pummeled today. Gold down one and a quarter below 2,900 to $28.59 and 20¢. Silver down one and a half. Platinum down 1.74. Copper is down one and a half. Palladium essentially moving sideways in comparison, a mere 0.14% to the downside for palladium.
Did I say platinum first? No. No. Palladium. Okay. Okay. I was just making sure. And everything in ag except for lumber is in the red as well. Lumber is up 1.11%, again, in a row of sticks. And looks like chocolate, no. No. No. Sugar is down as the biggest loser, two and a third percent. Live cattle is down a full point. Lean hogs are up point 18%. Feeder cattle are up a third. The Dow is up a half, and S and P is up a third. Nasdaq is up a half, and the S and P Mini is up a half as well. Bitcoin recovering from its well, yesterday's freaking dive bombing.
$83,920 brings us to a $1,660,000,000,000 market cap that is going to allow us to purchase 29.4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,830,235.41. Fees are low. 0.04 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis on average. There are, 50 blocks carrying 13,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 3 Satoshis per vByte. Low priority is gonna get you in 3 Satoshis per v byte. And mining has oh my god. The hash rate has actually risen. 796.2 x hashes per second. That's actually quite a bit of hash rate added, since yesterday.
And I'm I'm baffled, but I don't care. From hard of hearing yesterday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Geek Toshi with a row of sticks. Thank you, Geek. 01/2011 says Tether FUD has and always will exist because Tether, d g a f. Yeah. Probably. Justin with a thousand, congress would make cash illegal if they could. Yes. They've been trying to do that forever. Bitcoin for president with a thousand says, fucking legend. Psyduck with 5 50 7 says, Psyduck Psyduck, Mark with 2 10. Bank of Ameri coin, That which we call a CBDC by any other name would smell just as shitty. Pies with a hundred says value for value, hashtag 40 h b w. Thank you, sir. No thank you.
And that's the weather report. It's part two of the news you can use. Bybit hackers have moved over half of the stolen ETH onto Bitcoin largely using Thorchain. So the hackers are actually not only are they able to spend, move, touch, vector, re vector? The heretofore spoken of as immovable ETH that was stolen from Bybit, they are converting it directly into Bitcoin, which makes sense. Anyway, this is from Daniel Coon, out of the block. Let's see what we got here. MetaMask. Head of security Taylor Monahan said the Bybit hackers have moved at least 209,000 ETH, which is worth roughly 480,000,000 onto Bitcoin in a message to the block.
That represents more than half half of the approximately 400,000 ETH tokens taken from the exchange, not including the other drained tokens. At least 240,000,000 of this amount was laundered using Thorchain according to Arkham Intelligence, which is tracking digital wallets linked to the hacker group. The stolen crypto has mainly been swapped for native BTC. Let me reiterate that. The stolen crypto has mainly been swapped for actual Bitcoin, Arkham said in a post on Twitter. Last Friday, Arkham Intelligence said North Korea's Lazarus Group had hacked Bybit for over 1,500,000,000.0, citing information provided by online sleuth, Zac xBT.
The Federal Bureau of Investigations has since confirmed the hack was perpetrated by North Korea's malicious traitor traitor actors, which by term includes the Lazarus Group. Traitor traitor actors are proceeding rapidly and have converted some of the stolen assets to Bitcoin and other virtual assets dispersed across thousands of addresses on multiple blockchains, the FBI said. It is expected that these assets will be further laundered and eventually converted to fiat currencies. According to Ethereum security experts, the $1,500,000,000 hack has been harder to track than usual.
Lazarus is known for splitting up funds and using multiple protocols to move funds, but this this particular exploit involves thousands thousands of separate transactions. Sounds to me like they've got an automated system to do this. Quote, this is how Bybit hacks tracking looks, sued anonymous researcher Soma xBT said on Twitter, venting about the complicated nature of the split funds. Quote, this is just a track of two hops of 10 ETH each. MyMac Air is literally burning to load these transactions. That's how many how how much power it's actually going to take to visualize and map out what's going on giving on chain data.
Because it's it's like what what they're doing is, like, it's showing I can't show you the picture, but he's got a picture of all of these, like, different wallets where these two transactions have been split and split, and that's just 20 Ethereum between these two particular transactions being split and split and split and split and recombined and moved at other wallets. Like I said, somebody has developed a automated tool. Now I don't know if they say that in here, but humans would have to do this. And it without it being automated, which means that they've got an automated tool that splits and recombines and does all this in an automated fashion, probably under a preprogrammed algorithm to say, like, just you know, like like the probably the the thing comes up and says, how do you wanna steal these funds? I was like, well, use these addresses and then go to Thorchain and then go buy some Sol and then buy some Bitcoin and then come back and do all this, and then you just execute and let the computer just roll. This dude is having problems with his Mac Air, which is a fairly powerful computer, just trying to track down two two transactions as it's going through this algorithm.
Holy smokes, man. Good luck. Good luck trying to find this stuff. Oh, and by the way, might I iterate that I was told by several ethereans that there was no way this stuff could be moved. No way. Not at all. Anyway, in total, the hackers drained over 400,000 worth of ETH or 1,100,000,000.0 at the time, $90,000 or 90,000 s t ETH and 15,000 s or Centimeters ETH and 8,000 c ETH in the attack. However, it's unclear how much actual ETH the hacker community or currently hold as some of the assets including $43,000,000 in m ETH have been frozen. Oh, yeah. Right. Good luck. MetaMask Monaghan estimates that the, hackers have moved at least a hundred and 61,500 ETH, using 3,934 distinct bridge transactions to Thorchain over the past one hundred and fifteen hours since the hack occurred.
That represents a majority of the 2,009 or, oh, sorry, 209,000 ETH total she reckons has moved on to Bitcoin, she told the block. That's 3,200,000 every hour. Lazarus appears to be using two primary noncustodial bridges for the attack, the aforementioned Thorchain and Exchach, e x c h. However, Exchach, known primarily for its lax KYC controls, appears to have disabled ETH and ERC 20 token swaps, limiting the hacker's ability to move funds into Bitcoin. On Wednesday, Bybit CEO announced that the exchange would offer a 5% bounty to exchanges, bridges, and mixers who helped freeze those funds associated with the attack.
This is an extension of the 10% bounty Bybit initially offered to anyone who could return the funds. Of the 161,000 ETH confirmed to have gone through cross chain exchange platform Thorchain, The hackers have used a plethora. A plethora. Would you say I have a plethora of pinatas? A plethora of blockchain tools to hop their way over including Asgardex, DeFi Swap, Fortuna Swap, Gem Wallet, LiFi, ShapeShift, Trust Wallet, among others, according to blockchain data. Thorchain saw its single largest day of trading volumes on Wednesday with over $737,000,000 worth of token swaps.
Quote, it's all coming from Lazarus hackers, Thorchain user Diplo said on Twitter. But who really cares? It's a win for TC for Thorchain. Only concern is what happens to price once these swaps stop. BTC is bleeding at the moment. If we didn't have this, I don't think we'd be above $1 right now. Oh, for fuck. Thorchain's native token, Rune, has traded at a peak price above a oh, he's talking about this thing being a dollar. Above $1.60 since the hack, a local high recently, but a ways off from the high above $10 they saw in 02/2024 and its all time high of $19.30.
Quote, Thorchain is not doing anything to stop the movement of stolen ETH through their platform, and it isn't going to end well, AirDrop Glide app said on Twitter. Quote, funny how one person could shut down Thorfy in two minutes, but when it comes to stopping North Korea laundering billions of dollars of Ethereum through Thorchain, it's suddenly impossible to do anything about it. Anyway, according to several posts on Twitter, there has been internal division regarding Lazarus connected flows. Earlier on Thursday, three validators voted to refuse transactions connected to the Bybit hack, which apparently temporarily stopped the flows. However, the vote was reverted within minutes due to the extremely decentralized consensus mechanism behind Thorchain that preserves validator optionality, one user explained. And notably, Thorchain's pseudonym core dev Pluto advocated for addressing this on chain money laundering before announcing his resignation from the project.
TCB, one of the three validators that voted to stop THORChain's ETH trading, also said he has been struggling to find ways to prevent North Korean money laundering, quote, with the huge majority of your flows are stolen funds from North Korea for the biggest money heist in human history, it will become a national security issue. This isn't a game anymore, TCB said on Twitter, adding that Thorchain is not decentralized enough to survive a regulatory attack. Quote, the TC community has strong beliefs based on what they learn from a messaging that is disconnected from the reality of the people who have been executing on the front lines.
Immediately after draining the Bybit cold wallet, Lazarus moved the stolen funds into three separate distribution addresses and then broke them down into dozens of newly created addresses. The group also swapped ETH derivatives like stETH, cETH for ETH using decentralized exchanges Uniswap, Paraswap, and KyberSwap. So so much for these funds not being able to be touched, moved, spent, or anything. If you were one of the people that heard that bullshit on Twitter, they lied. The Ethereum straight up lied to you. They lied to all of us. There's no way that those funds were not going to move. What is surprising for me is that we seem to not be dealing with a bunch of shitcoiners, and here's why that worries me.
This actually smells like it might have been a regulatory attack, but just in the black ops sort of way. And what what do I mean by that? North Korea, oh my god, they're involved. Okay. So automatically, all these flags go up for national security. Second thing, the insecurity of blockchain. And what do they target? The Ethereum blockchain. Well, I mean, clearly, they did the the whole cold wallet hack on on Bybit, but still, nobody's really gonna be able to separate that in normie land. They're just gonna say a blockchain's unsecure.
Alright. Those narratives are being spun up right now. I guarantee it. Third, I told you that criminals use Bitcoin. They're they're laundering it into Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself is the biggest money. You can hear the narratives start spinning and spinning and spinning. So I still reserve the right to think that this might have actually been I don't know. The entire thing was planned probably. And I'm just gonna say it. It's probably not North Korean Lazarus Group. Or if it is, it makes me wonder if the North Korean Lazarus Group actually is what we think it is. Alright. Let's get into the next one.
But first, man, Zelensky got his ass handed to him by an orange man and his and his buddy, JD Vance. Man, I I took a break because I had to go take my wife to the to the dentist office. So So I'm sitting there. I'm on Noster. Everything's fun. And then all of a sudden, I start seeing all these pop ups of Zelensky in the in the Oval Office. And I listened to a couple of these exchanges, and you have to I'm in Eastern Washington. You know? There is a lot of liberal shit out here, so there is no way I can listen to this straight up off my phone without the potential of of getting a whole bunch of really left leading people all hot and bothered, so I put in my earplugs.
I could only listen to one of these exchanges between Zelensky, Vance, and Trump. And, oh my god, you wanna talk about getting your ass handed to you. Now here's the thing. I know there are still people that believe that truly believe that Ukraine is only a country and not a money laundering front for The United States and has been that way since before Bill Clinton. And it became very evident under Bill Clinton that Ukraine is simply just a way for us to wash money at the government level. And then they find this four foot, four and a half foot guy to essentially front this bogus corporation that is Ukraine. And I know I'm pissing a whole bunch of people off, but this is the way I feel.
From what I've seen, I've just seen nothing but chicanery out of this country. And I am not saying that Putin was good for invading it. This war is always bad. And when you lose that many young men and women and children in the complete onslaught and wholesale destruction of city after city after city, I'm not happy about that. But it seems clear that the Trump administration has had their fill with this little man, and people are losing their minds. I got people saying that when was the last time, US president debased himself? I don't think he debased himself. I think he's done. I think he's speaking plainly for the first time we've actually ever seen anybody in the president in the president's office actually be a human instead of some dooded up, you know, pancake makeup all over the place, three piece suits and shit, and being as stoic as hell, and not saying anything because you can't piss off the right, and you don't wanna piss off the left. Everybody in the centrist is gonna be mad no matter what the hell you do, So you just essentially say absolutely what? Freaking nothing. You say nothing.
And if you do say any actual English words, they mean nothing. Nobody can actually be able to pull what you meant out of it. It's been this way for so long that it's actually kind of refreshing to see somebody lose their shit in a situation that the shit needs to be lost on because this Ukraine thing has to end. The billions of dollars of United States pat taxpayer dollars going to this money pit is all it is. It's just a money pit, and it's always been the most extensive money laundering operation the United States government has had. And it's over.
It's freaking over. And it looks like everybody saw that today. In fact, it's from what I can tell, Trump actually kicked Zelensky out of the White House. I've never seen that happen before. And, again, it's actually just a little bit refreshing. Now you can hate orange man. You can love orange man. You can be like me and try to figure out what the hell is going on on both sides of the fence. But one thing that I have to say, it's interesting to actually see this shit occur. Now, over the next few days, just be prepared for every single person you know at one point or another to show true colors, completely break down, and lose their ever loving mind about this. And it's gonna be actually a little bit more dangerous than I think people think.
So if we're gonna let orange man lose his ever loving shit on a four and a half foot tall would be dictator, then we have to be the stoic ones and literally not say shit because you never know who is closeted in their complete and utter contempt for one side of the fence or the other side of the fence. And if you want to maintain friends, the best thing to do is say, just shut the fuck up and have another beer. Now, let's get on with this one. Speaking of Europe, European states continue their race for encryption backdoors. This is no b s bitcoin.com.
European policy makers continue to push forward various proposals and regulations that would severely compromise the privacy and security of European citizens. Alrighty then. In France, a proposed narco traffic law amendment would require encrypted communication services to create backdoors for law enforcement access within seventy two hours. And noncompliance could lead to fines like €1,500,000 for individuals and 2% of global turnover for companies. So if you're just a regular French dude, where are you gonna come up with 1 and a half million euros? Man, Europe is done, guys.
Europe is over, which is probably why I just saw a news flash that Canada says that they need to get closer to Europe, and it's very clear to me that The United States is trying to distance our way out of Europe, out of NATO because all Europe has ever wanted to do was go to war with each other. I say, let them have at it because this kind of crap, this needs to be over as well. Quote, weakening encryption for law enforcement inevitably creates vulnerabilities that can and will be exploited by cyber criminals and hostile foreign actors. This law would not just target criminals, it would destroy security for everyone, Matthias Pfau, CEO at Tutamail, told BleepingComputer.
Yeah. He's right. Major French copyright holders are also taking legal action to force large VPN providers to participate in their pirate site blocking program. And as a result, some VPN providers are contemplating exiting France if the legal pressure continues. Meanwhile, not to be outdone in Sweden, the government is pushing for encrypted messaging apps like Signal to implement similar e two e e, backdoors, which could become law as soon as March 2026, and Signal has threatened to leave the country if the proposal becomes law. Quote, if you create a vulnerability based on Swedish wishes, it would create a way to undermine our entire network. Therefore, we would never introduce these backdoors, said Signal CEO Meredith Whitaker. Good on you, Meredith.
Recently, again, not to be outdone, we have the UK government demanding that Apple create a backdoor for law enforcement to access all of its users encrypted cloud data. And in response, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service from Britain as it uses end to end encryption that prevents even Apple from accessing the data. Quote, I share your grave concern about the serious implications of The United Kingdom or any foreign country requiring Apple or any company to create a backdoor that would allow access to Americans' personal encrypted data. This would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans' privacy and civil liberties and open up a serious vulnerability for cyber exploitation by adversarial actors, said United States National Intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, in a letter to senator Ron Wyden.
Well, The UK already passed its online safety bill in 2023, which includes a controversial clause for breaking encryption. However, this clause can only be applied when it is, quote, technically feasible. Lastly, member countries of the European Union are still attempting to discover a viable way to implement chat control, a mass surveillance initiative by well funded international non governmental organizations, also known as NGOs, and tech affiliated surveillance advocacy groups that have been proposed or that has been proposed and endorsed by the European Commission. The latest half good proposal by the Polish council presidency wants to make chat control voluntary rather than compulsory, yet 16 out of 27 EU states led by Spain still reject it using dramatic language.
Quote, the proposal is likely to go too far already for the hardliner majority of EU governments and the EU Commission whose positions are so extreme that they will rather let down victims altogether than accept a proportionate, court proof, and politically viable approach rights privacy advocate, Patrick Beyer. This means that there is still no chat control agreement for now. The EU working group will continue to negotiate the issue in March. So EU is done. People are leaving. Companies will leave. Money is flowing out. All they wanna do is fight each other. There's this semblance of cohesion given by the EU or the European, quote, unquote, union experiment that is a clear and utter failure.
And if I if you wanna be Spain, just be Spain. If you wanna be Britain, be Britain. If you wanna be France, go be France. Asking all these disparate cultures to somehow or another bind themselves under the euro and the European Union is and always was doomed to failure. And it's showing right now. Trump kicking Zelensky out of the Oval Office after him and JD Vance basically was beating a six year old child for misbehavior, which is essentially what I saw. They're the back end of Europe. They're the canary in the coal mine for Europe. Europe is not just scared of Russia. I guarantee you, Europeans are scared of other Europeans.
France is scared of Spain. Spain is scared of Britain. Britain is scared of god only Germany. You know, none of these people actually really get along all that well. NATO wasn't as much designed to make sure that Russia keeps itself at bay. It that was one of the parts of it. But it was essentially to guarantee that the European countries don't go to war with each other all the time because they've been doing it for, like, three thousand years. It's just like I mean, I mean, even when they were tribes in France, when they were called the Gauls, and the Germans, when they were in tribal nature, they were constantly at war. And it continued and continued and continued until the end of World War two.
And all of a sudden, everything got better. Right? Well, wrong. This shit is not working. It's just not working. All they wanna do is either spy on their people and fleece their people and somehow or another kiss each other's ass while all the time under the carpet saying how much they wanna kill each other. I know that sounds extreme, but I guarantee you that's exactly what's going on. I don't actually think the European Union will be in place by the time that I die unless I get hit by a truck tomorrow. Now fifth Bitcoin educators unconference with Bitcoin Park in Nashville is up and coming.
Me premier Bitcoin announces its fifth, count them, one, two, three, four, five, Bitcoin educators unconference in collaboration with Bitcoin Park. Following the highly successful events in San Salvador and Madeira, we are heading back to the beautiful city of Nashville. The unconference embodies the vision and mission of the organization to educate and empower the world with Bitcoin knowledge. Me, Premier Bitcoin aims to bring passionate Bitcoin enthusiasts together fostering collaboration and networking. The event is rooted in the principles of an impartial, independent, decentralized, and community led organization.
Attendance is limited. And contrary to regular conferences, an unconference is a place where every attendee is or could be a potential speaker. Everyone has the chance to pitch their own ideas at the start of the event, which will subsequently be grouped in separate breakout rooms. Previous unconferences have been attended by industry thought leaders like Jeff Booth and Preston Pysh, but also by grassroots educational projects like Bitcoin eCasi from South Africa, Amity Age from Honduras, and Motive from Peru. It attracts builders and educators from all around the world. If you're interested in becoming a speaker, you can apply by submitting your ideas here. We will open the stage for everyone to pitch his or her own idea at the start of the day.
The sessions and activities are designed to reflect the Bitcoin ethos, decentralized and collaborative events. This means that we will be creating this event together. With input from all attendees, past additions brought fruitful discussions about global education networks, grassroots adoption, Bitcoin communities, gamification of educational resources, tools for the youth, and more. So the location, the fifth unconference will be held at Bitcoin Park on April during the grassroots Bitcoin week. Complimentary drinks, snacks, and lunch will be served on location and are included in the ticket price.
Please note that My First Bitcoin is a nonprofit and aims to run breakeven with this event. And the practical information is as follows. Bitcoin Park is the location. It is at 191020 First Avenue, South Nashville in Tennessee. The date is April 2025. Doors open at 10AM. Event starts at eleven. Closing time is at 06:00. And they do not list the ticket price. So I don't know what to tell you about that. But I do know what to tell you about AlbiGo version 1.1 has been released and it has support for pick and pay QR's and BTC map.
Again, AlbiGo is a simple lightning mobile wallet interface for Bitcoin payments over the lightning network. It works well with AlbiHub or any other Nasr Wallet Connect wallet. It's available for iOS and Android. And let's see what they got here. What's new? Support for pick and pay QR's. I don't know what the hell a pick and pay QR is, and they're not really giving me much information here. There is a BTC map to find places to go spend your sats. There's improved skeleton and animations across the app, fixed transactional page crashes, layout shifts in Android, and other bug fixes. So there you go. I'll have to update my albigo on my phone and look for the skeleton animations because I don't know what the hell that is. Umbrel OS version 1.4 has a file manager.
Yes, sirree. It's a file manager. Finally, Umbrel OS is a home server OS for self hosting with built in app store. Umbrel OS 1.4 brings files. Our brand new file manager that turns your Umbrill into a full blown home cloud along with Korean language support and various bug fixes. Files manager allows Umbrill node runners to easily create, upload, and organize their files on their home server, as well as share folders over a local network and add them as network drives on macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android. The release also includes support for external storage devices, like, like oh, that will work from USB, like like like little like handheld SSD drives.
That's nice. That's gonna be that's gonna be really, really cool. Join the official Umbrel community discord blah blah blah blah blah. Okay. So file service on Umbrel. Why is that shit important? Because you don't need Google Cloud. Okay. The first thing that you're gonna say is, yeah. You do. What if what if you're depending on files that are on your Umbrel in the file server and you're at, I don't know, the fifth Bitcoin Unconference in Nashville, Tennessee on April, and you need file service from your Umbrel, but, oh my god, a meteorite has hit your home, and it's all freaking gone. What are you gonna do? Well, you're hosed.
Okay? I mean, it's if you have a file that is so important that if you lose it in one spot that you're completely hosed, then you probably need to have your file in a different spot as well, like, maybe even on Google Cloud or or Amazon Web Services. Who knows? That's up to you. But under the assumption that everything is fine and a meteorite or flight one thirty seven from Dallas Fort Worth didn't, like, crash land on top of your pad, then you'd be able to serve whatever files you want from your home server, and you don't have to depend on anybody else. And I'll bet you my ass that one of these days, we see a situation where different Umbrel users would be able to connect with each other and kind of share the load.
In in other words, where if your house did get set on fire by an arsonist because they were pissed off that you got the girl from high school and they didn't, then other Umbrel users in the future, not now, but in the future, I'll bet that they'd be able to say, well, I've kinda got a copy of part of your file, and this other dude's got a copy of the other part of your file. And between the two of us, we can stitch them both together like the way Napster used to work, where you had different seeders. And there was, like, sometimes a seeder would go offline while you were midway downloading. Well, it didn't matter. You'd find another seeder, and it would figure out where the hell you left off on that song and it would upload the other part and like it would stitch the file together and you'd be fine.
But having the ability to serve files of your own that is encrypted to yourself without the reliance on any third party is the way we're going to remain sovereign. And that ladies and gentlemen finishes us off for Bitcoin and this week. And this week has been hard. It's been really hard. Nobody wanted to see what we all had to watch, and it may continue. We don't know. But in the in the language of my ancestors, I give you our standard greeting to all the new people in Bitcoin. Welcome to Bitcoin, motherfucker, and I'll see you on the other side.
[00:58:41] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Implications of SEC's Changed Stance
Conclusion and Weekly Wrap-Up
