Join me today for Episode 1067 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Musk Leaving Trump?
- US Bitcoin Audit on April 5th
- Fidelity's New Bitcoin IRAs
- FROSTR Solves nostr's Problem
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Articles:
https://decrypt.co/312877/bitcoin-stocks-surge-doge-boss-elon-musk-leaving
https://bitcoinnews.com/legal/strategic-bitcoin-reserve-audit/
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/04/02/gamestop-bitcoin-reserve-private-offering/
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/04/02/fidelity-lets-investors-directly-invest-in-crypto-through-new-retirement-plan
https://cointelegraph.com/news/grayscale-launches-bitcoin-covered-call-and-premium-income-etfs
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://value4value.info/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/no-password-reset-how-frostr-saves-your-nostr-identity
https://www.theblock.co/post/349289/tron-justin-sun-trueusd-fiduciary-insolvent-techteryx-tusd-first-digital-aria
https://atlas21.com/breez-launches-misty-breez-the-new-lightning-wallet-on-liquid/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/bisq-v2-1-7/
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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 10:37AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the day after April Fools' Day. Thank God 2025. And this is episode ten sixty seven of Bitcoin. And we're going to do some news here, man. It looks like Musk, Elon Musk, might actually be leaving the Trump orbit according to decrypt. And on that news, we seem to have gotten a spike in the Bitcoin price, which we got all the way up to like 87,000 and now we're down to $86.05. But, hey, what the hell? Why would Elon Musk leaving the Trump orbit impact the Bitcoin price? Well, maybe Andrew Hayward can help us out with this. Bitcoin and stocks, not just Bitcoin, but stocks too. They both surge after a report that the Doge boss, Elon Musk, will leave the Trump orbit.
Crypto and stock markets alike saw a jump on Wednesday morning following a report that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will depart his current role as a close ally to president Donald Trump. It's an interesting way to term it, honestly, because it's like, are you just leaving Doge? Or are you just I mean, did you and Trump have a falling out? What the hell? Anyway, Bitcoin rapidly spiked all the way to 87,300 for the first time since March, while major stock market indices like the S and P five hundred and Nasdaq both bounced into the green for the day following the publication of Politico's report, which sites three sources close to Trump who asked not to be named.
Tesla saw a surge following the report, rebounding following Wednesday's release of a brutal quarterly report showing falling demand and production for Musk's electric car maker. Tesla jumped above $280 following the report, but has settled back down to $2.75 as of this writing, up nearly 3% on the day. But the stock had been battered in recent months, falling from a peak of above $480 set in December as Musk's political moves have proven controversial. Yeah. You think? Bitcoin has since cooled to about $86,770 as of this writing, but remains up nearly two full percent on the day. According to the report, Trump has told his inner circle and members of his cabinet that Musk, quote, will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his prominent role as a close Trump advisor.
Musk is unlikely to disappear entirely from Trump's administration, the report claims, but his departure may be timed with the end of his status as a, quote, special government employee in the coming weeks. Per the report, there's concern among Trump advisers that Musk is starting to become a political liability for Donald Trump. The report comes following a Republican loss in Wisconsin Supreme Court judge election on Tuesday, a race in which Musk personally spent $20,000,000, wow, to support Trump's favored candidate, Brad Schimmel. But Schimmel was handily defeated by the Democrat backed Susan Crawford, who won by a full 10%.
Both Musk and Trump have publicly hinted in recent days that the Tesla heads time in government could be ending. Musk is the figurehead of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, a government cost cutting initiative that had led to mass layoffs at various agencies and plenty of court challenges about Doge's authority. While Musk was announced to head Doge, the White House has since clarified that is officially called a senior adviser to the president. Doge is indeed apparently inspired by Dogecoin, Musk's longtime favorite cryptocurrency, with the meme logo briefly appearing on the government website in January.
Shit. I didn't know that. Wow. Trump also sells a t shirt featuring himself, Musk, and the coin's familiar Shiba Inu meme mascot. So interesting because I hadn't really heard any murmurings about Musk actually making a departure. But I'll tell you what, I don't think this is what the Wisconsin judge's loss that has prompted this. I'm getting the feeling that Musk was what would be known to those of you who are old enough to remember the first Iraq war where we use the term shock and awe, where the bombing was so intense and so relentless that nobody in Iraq could actually mount any kind of defense at all.
It wasn't just that we were knocking out, you know, air batteries and and and whatever military that they had. It wasn't just that. It was just so it was just such a bombardment of such massive quantities that even the stuff that wasn't hit in their primary bombing run that was still active, nobody knew there was no orders being given. Everybody's running around with their like a chicken with their head cut off. I'll bet you that Trump brought Musk in to do exactly that, to have that kind of shock and awe to where nobody could mount a proper defense. Everybody was just, you know, run into the mattresses. And now that Trump has done that, and this is one of his Trump's MOs, it this is the way he makes deal. He keeps everybody on the edge of their seats until just they're they're just about to break. They're just about to crack open like an egg. And then he comes back to save the day by either settling on a deal and saying, okay. We'll do this. And then everybody's, like, breathing a sigh of relief that they don't have to fret anymore because Trump's settling down and he's gonna actually do the thing. He's gonna sign the paper. He's gonna make the deal. He's gonna cut the check. He's gonna pull the trigger. And they don't have to it it doesn't even matter if if the way that it goes is not the way that they want it to go as long as they're not living in confusion.
That's the way Trump that's the way he works. So I'll bet you that this isn't like Musk going, oh, well, we've I've done some damage here. And it's not like Trump going, well, you've done some damage here, and I didn't think it was gonna go this way. No. No. No. No. Trump knew exactly the way this shit was gonna go, and now it's Musk's time to leave. He's got I guess he's gonna go back and try to sell some more electric cars. I don't who knows? I don't really care. But it's gonna be interesting to see, a, if Musk actually leaves and becomes not the head of Doge, and two, just how close he remains in Trump's orbit.
But Trump's gonna trump. And, apparently, The United States or some United States agencies are going to reveal Bitcoin holdings as per Donald Trump's directive. This one, Alex Larry from Bitcoin News is writing, the United States government will finally reveal its bitcoin and digital asset holdings on April, so three days from now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump. On March, Trump signed an order requiring federal agencies to report their digital asset holdings to the Treasury Secretary within thirty days. That's aimed at establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve in a digital asset stockpile.
Bitcoin will be treated similarly to gold as a long term national asset. That move follows years of speculations about just how much Bitcoin the United States government actually holds. The audit will reveal exactly how many Bitcoin are in federal possession and whether there are any altcoins as well. One of the most significant aspects of this announcement is the government's no sell policy for the Bitcoin held in said strategic Bitcoin reserve. That means the Bitcoin acquired through civil and criminal asset forfeitures will be stored there instead of being sold at auctions.
That shift in policy positions Bitcoin as a long term store of value, creating a financial stronghold referred to as the digital Fort Knox. David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin Inc, thinks that the upcoming audit could have a big impact on Bitcoin's price volatility saying, quote, depending on what we learn, this audit might answer many of the open questions about the recent price action. According to reports, the United States government currently holds around 200,000 Bitcoin valued at around $16,000,000,000 Over the past decade, it has seized around 400,000 Bitcoin from civil and criminal asset forfeitures Had those assets been held instead of sold, they'd now be worth over $34,000,000,000 The government may also hold altcoins, stablecoins, and even some meme coins.
The full audit will confirm just how extensive those holdings are. The April 5 disclosure is going to have big implications for the entire digital asset market and future regulations. Experts think that the disclosure will, one, clarify how the US government manages those digital assets, two, confirm if altcoins are in the national reserve, three, impact Bitcoin's price by shedding light on recent market volatility, And four, set a precedent for global government adoption of Bitcoin. Pausing here to go back to three. I don't know exactly what they're thinking, but I'm not certain that it's going to impact Bitcoin's price by shedding light on recent market volatility.
All we're gonna know, unless unless we find out that the United States government would had been selling coins even after the executive order, but I don't think that that's going to occur because anybody who does that is acting outside of a presidential elect a presidential executive order and therefore probably be subject to some kind of prison time, at least I would suspect. So I I'm not clear on why this is going to shed light on the price action of Bitcoin. It'll be interesting to see what they say. But in addition to holding Bitcoin in reserve, there's now talk of Bitcoin bonds or Bitcoin backed treasury bonds.
According to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, these Bitcoin backed treasury bonds could help reduce national debt and allow the government to buy more Bitcoin without using taxpayer money. There's also the bitcoin act, which would require the US government to buy up to 1,000,000 bitcoin over the next five years and prevent future administrations from selling those holdings. As the April 5 deadline approaches, investors, analysts, and the community are waiting to see the results. The findings will reshape the role of digital assets in The US economy and set the stage for more structured Bitcoin regulation.
I think there's a little bit more hyperbole there than than we need to worry about. I'm not sure if it's going to shape anything more than than has already been shaped by the strategic Bitcoin reserve executive order. What would shape something is if they enact that into law via the Bitcoin act, which is being championed by senator Cynthia Lummis out of Wyoming. If that gets turned into law, that does shape the future of the relationship of Bitcoin with the United States government, and that will absolutely have market impact, most likely to the positive side.
But what we find out on April, I don't think is gonna be all that earth shattering. Not as earth shattering as what we learned yesterday. At the close of business, well after I produced and and and and got the episode yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and out, GameStop announced that it had now $1,500,000,000 to splurge on a Bitcoin reserve after after their private offering was clearly a resounding success. And this is out of fortune.com. Who's writing this one? Oh, Catherine McGrath is the author. After announcing a new strategy to invest in Bitcoin just last week, Video game retailer, GameStop, now has the money to make it happen. Well, it it did before, honestly, guys, but whatever. GameStop announced on Tuesday that it had successfully raised $1,500,000,000 in a private offering of convertible notes according to a recent filing with the SEC.
A convertible note is a type of debt that lets investors convert loans into equity at some point in the future. The offering was restricted to qualified institutional buyers only, and investors will be unable to convert the notes into equity until the year 02/1930. Quote, the company expects to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of Bitcoin, the filing stated. GameStop did not respond to a request for comment. The offering comes one week after GameStop announced plans to purchase $1,300,000,000 in Bitcoin.
The shift in strategy from selling video games to also investing in crypto in hopes that it rises in value is an attempt to, quote, provide sufficient liquidity to meet day to day financial obligations of the company and to optimize investment returns, the company said. The news was initially met with a 14% spike in GameStop's stock price, but the bump was short lived. The following day, GameStop shares fell 23%, erasing all of the gains the company made following the following the announcement, signaling that investors may be skeptical of the Bitcoin investment plan. Over the last decade, GameStop has struggled to keep up with a shift in customer interest from brick and mortar video games to digital ones.
The company reported a 28% decline in sales last year from 5,300,000,000.0 in 2023 to a mere 3,800,000,000.0 the next year 2024 according to SEC filings. Because of this, GameStop has shuttered a full 25% of its stores in 2024. Alongside its Bitcoin investment plan, the company also announced plans to close a significant number of additional stores in the coming months. The video game retailer seems to be following in the footsteps of Strategy, Michael Saylor's company. Led by Bitcoin advocate, Michael Saylor, Strategy has amassed nearly 530,000 Bitcoin. Yes. We're aware.
We don't need to know this one more time. Okay. So a few words about GameStop. And I I wrote this, in a note on Nostra yesterday. But it seems to me that all the guys that were in on you know, the whole, the whole Reddit craze that that went on in 2022 and 2021 and probably into 2023 with oh, who's that, who's that guy? Oh, god. Hold on. Yeah. Here it is. Keith Gill, also known as Deep Fucking Value and Roaring Kitty as two of his other names. He's a dude with the red bandana that made chicken tendies really famous because he was doing his stock stuff, his stock videos while he was feeding his child, chicken tendies, apparently. Anyway, that whole craze where they were trying to kill the short sellers of GameStop stock, They were buying the stock in mass, and they were coordinating these buys.
These are just plebs on the street, like retail guys, the guys that, you know, like, that are working at McDonald's. They were all following Keith Gill and a couple of other people too. And it wasn't just GameStop. I think it was, like, AMC movie theaters and and, like, at least one other one. But they were the all these companies had, like, these massive guys that were short selling their stock because they're trying to crash the company and make a whole boatload of money by doing it. Right? And these guys came in and said, you know what? Enough. And they started buying the GameStop stock, and it really screwed up the plans of all these short sellers.
They had some of them had to cover their losses with loans from other companies. They even depended on Robinhood to turn off the buy button on stock because it was getting so out of hand. These guys were gonna lose billions of dollars if the plebs on the street kept buying GameStop. So here's the here's what I think is gonna what could happen. If they're not if the guys at GameStop are not messing around and they actually do the deed and actually buy Bitcoin, then all the people at the retail level that want to see GameStop succeed because they're still short sellers that are trying to kill this company.
Right? What they can do at this point, instead of buying the actual stock of GameStop, could in turn just buy Bitcoin and hold it for themselves. Some of many of them won't. They can also buy ETFs. My I'm just saying my suggestion and my hope is that they actually buy Bitcoin and hold it in their own private keys. But either way, by them flooding their money into Bitcoin instead of GameStop's stock, then the next quarterly report that comes out from GameStop and they and Bitcoin rises in a tremendous way in value because all these guys that had thrown a whole bunch of money at GameStop start throwing it at at at Bitcoin, then all of a sudden, it doesn't matter if GameStop stock is being actually purchased because what they'll be able to put on their books is a massive income, a massive income.
And the people that buy the Bitcoin are actually supporting both Bitcoin and GameStop. They're screwing the short seller at the same time, but they're not actually exposed to the volatility of the short sellers power on GameStop stock because they're holding an underlying asset that happens to be the same asset that GameStop themselves own. And now that they can put that assets rise in price as income on their books where they weren't able to do that before, then GameStop still looks really good. It's it's like a triple win. It's it it could be really cool, but it all boils down to whether or not GameStop actually does the thing that they said that they were going to do and buys Bitcoin.
Now, onto other things, Fidelity Investments is in the news. Fidelity lets investors directly invest in crypto through a new IRA plan or independent retirement account, if you didn't know what that meant. Helene Braun is writing it for CoinDesk. Fidelity Investments rolled out an IRA plan that invests directly in crypto on Wednesday. That happened today. This morning, they announced this crypto friendly individual retirement account plan, and it gives investors yet one more method for tapping this asset class. The brokerage firm offers Bitcoin and shitcoin number one and Litecoin.
I didn't really have that much problems with Litecoin back in the day, so I don't feel sick to my stomach saying that one. Anyway, it offers all the all three of those to any US citizen over the age of 18. The digital assets are custody by find Fidelity's digital assets and held in a cold wallet. The crypto IRA product has no fees, and customers can invest in a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, or a rollover IRA according to Fidelity's website. So they released three products on this. The new product comes as a as financial advisors are increasingly offering crypto to their clients. A survey by TMX Vetify recently showed that 57% of advisors plan on increasing their allocations into crypto ETFs, although their biggest focus is on or in crypto equity ETFs, quote, Fidelity is committed to offering investment products and solutions to meet the changing needs and interest of our customers accompanied by education and support, a spokesperson told CoinDesk.
Clients of the brokerage firm have increasingly voiced interest in tax free advantaged ways to trade and hold crypto, a person familiar with the matter said. And Fidelity already offers a number of crypto exchange traded funds, which let investors track the prices of digital assets without directly investing in them. The company recently filed to list a, god forbid, Solana ETF on the CBOE exchange. Alright. So that said, a Roth IRA, from what I understand, is probably the very best one. The fact that they have a traditional IRA and a rollover IRA is amazing, except here's the more amazing part.
You'll notice that nowhere in this story, unless it's been left out, are the words qualified investor. This looks to me like a full blown retail street level play. You know, Fidelity is all about retail, but they also have a lot of products that are qualified investor only, which means that you kinda have to have to have a phone call with one of the guys at Fidelity, and your balance sheet better have north of a million dollars in it. Otherwise, you're not gonna be called a qualified investor, and you won't be able to partake of several types of investment products. But this one this one looks like it's built for the dude on the street.
So if you're a pleb and you're thinking about a crypto based IRA, you might wanna call Fidelity and see what they have to say to you. Meanwhile, Grayscale has launched two new Bitcoin outcome oriented products, Adrian Zemunsky, Cointelegraph. Major cryptocurrency asset manager, Grayscale Investments, announced not one, but two new Bitcoin outcome oriented exchange traded funds. According to an April 2 announcement, the new products are the Grayscale Bitcoin covered call ETF and the grayscale Bitcoin premium income ETF.
And according to an email sent to CoinTelegraph, the two new Bitcoin funds are meant to generate revenue by harnessing Bitcoin volatility. Quote, both strategies may be considered as an alternative income stream that's less correlated to traditional income oriented investments. So let me pause just to get this straight. This sounds a lot like fixed income on something that's very, very volatile no matter how you slice it. I'm I'm already cautioning people now. Be wary of this simply because when they when they say income or yield, generally speaking, yield equals income and income equals yield. So where does the income come from?
Where does the yield come from? Those questions need to be answered before anybody even considers these two products. But they are complex derivative products. The Bitcoin covered call product seeks to capture the highest premiums and maximize potential income. Grayscale suggests that it may serve as a complement to full blown Bitcoin exposure. The fund's strategy involves systematically writing calls very close to spot prices. The hope is that due to Bitcoin's historically high volatility, it would generate income through paid call generation.
On the other hand, the Bitcoin premium income product seeks to balance upside participation with a degree of income generation. This is meant to act as an alternative to direct Bitcoin ownership and seeks a balance between growth and income generation. This fund systematically writes calls targeting strike prices well out of the money on Bitcoin ETFs, including Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and Grayscale Bitcoin Minitrust, the announcement reads, quote, by focusing on this type of call writing strategy, BPI allows investors to participate in much of Bitcoin's upside potential while possibly benefiting from some dividend income.
Oh, man. This gets worse and worse. Maybe it's great. I don't know. But I gotta go I got a bad feeling about this. Grayscale Investments promises that both the new products will allow for a differentiated source of revenue that delivers an uncorrelated source of income for investors. And furthermore, the new derivatives will feature monthly distributions and systematic options management. Earlier this week, Grayscale also filed to list an exchange traded fund holding a diverse basket of spot cryptocurrencies, and the new product includes a whole bunch of shitcoins.
In late March, the US stock exchange, Nasdaq, also filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission seeking permission to list Grayscale Investments' spot avalanche ETF, and Grayscale's website lists 28 separate crypto products of which 25 are single asset derivatives and three are diversified. Oh, man. I don't know. This just doesn't sound good to me. This just this this sounds like DeFi promises in the wind. So, you know, invest at your own risk, ladies and gentlemen, but something about this doesn't sit right with me. Screw it. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. We got oil. West Texas Intermediate up almost another point today to $71.87.
Brent Norsee is up point 8% to $75.00 9. Natural gas up 2.73 to just over $4 per thousand cubic feet. And gasoline up another one and a quarter percent, hitting $2.33 a gallon. Gold looks like it might have set another all time high, $3,000 no, $3,167.90 after a three quarter percent increase. Silver is up just over 1%. Platinum is down 1%. Copper is up point 15%, and palladium falling through the floor one and a half to the downside. Most of ag is in the red today. Biggest winner, however, is chocolate. 8.8% to the upside for the sweetness.
And the biggest loser today looks like it's gonna be rough rice, point 64% to the downside. Live cattle is up a full point. Lean hogs are up point one seven and feeder cattle are up a third. The Dow and the rest of the equities like in that Elon Musk news, point 43% up for the Dow. S and P is up over a half. Nasdaq is up point 72%. And the S and P mini swinging for the fences 1.15% to the upside. And we got some down pressure back on Bitcoin. We are well under the 87,000 mark, $86,460, but it does put us at a $1,700,000,000,000 market cap. We can still get 27.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,845,382.17 of.
Fees are very low, 0.03 BTC taking fees on a per block basis for the single block that are in mempools around the world. One block carrying a measly, a scant, a detrimental, a destructive 1,900 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 1 satoshi per v byte. Low priority, one satoshi per v byte. At Bitcoin, it's we're all gonna die. We're all it's it's dead. It's a dead chain. It's coming. It's coming. If it isn't already here, you will start hearing about it forever and ever and ever again. I'm here to tell you, we've been here before.
We've been here before several times. We've been on the other side of this fence where we've had hundreds of blocks and full men pools everywhere that you can't swing a dead cat without, you know, 50 satoshi per v byte, hundred and 50 satoshi per v byte transaction cost, hundreds of blocks in the mempool waiting to clear. And Bitcoin was gonna dive in too because it was too many transactions. You can't make these people happy. Don't even try. Just listen to the Battle of Hashings, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and where somebody with no name gave me 1,500 sats and says boost.
Axelrod with 1,021 says eighties flick. They live. I wholeheartedly agree. Go watch that movie. If you have never seen the movie They Live, You got it it is it is meme worthy. You have I know you've seen memes from it even if you haven't seen the movie. You got Roddy Rod Piper. It's awesome movie, and it's got a lot of truth in it too. Oak Grove with 1,066 says, in your episode Game Stopped, you partook in one of the great American pastimes' bastardizing colloquial phrases. Quote, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has them, so shit or get off the pot.
Again, one of the funnier bastardizations I've heard in the wild. I have some other examples of me with Mia phrases in their bastardized forms. Quote, the proof is in the pudding. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. A few bad apples. Blood is thicker than water. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. Money is the root of all evil. No publicity is bad publicity. The customer is always right. Dig yourself myself out of this hole, raising children, a jack of all trades as a master of none. In all of these instances, the actual lesson that is supposed to be taught is either oversimplified or in many cases, the opposite of what people understand it to be.
These are great examples of why our owners consider themselves worthy of controlling our lives. The new catchphrase for The United States should be kavat emptor. I would wear that shirt of a flowing flag with kavat on top and emptor on the bottom of the screen printed part. Well, Oak Grove, that's the most you've written me in a while. I appreciate that, pal. Anonymous with a 21 says, oh, eighties flick, they live, so it came in twice. Psyduck five seventy four says Psyduck. Chill now with 555 sets. Mirror veil.
Mirror dot veil. Now it makes perfect sense nonsense. The blockchain will become the Akashic record of the digital age. Digital cosmic secret service worshiping all seeing eye of God for constant digital and spectral surveillance. Who's running the mission? Long overdue for a metric no. Nope. Long overdue for a memetic meltdown. System error terminate. And then he gives me he gives me oh, his, or somebody's. Let's see what it is. It's a URL to ditto.pub. Oh, and it's a picture. Observation is a dying art, and it basically shows a chick's head, what looks like it's made made out of tile, and it's also the frame of a telescope, except going in the other direction. It's actually a very look good looking piece of art right there for being what possibly might be, but not sure, AI generated.
Anyway, progressive progressively worse with five fifty five says chop and dropping. This is the way. Paul Cernai in 500. Thanks again, sir. Greatly appreciated. By the way, the acceleration of the derivative of the velocity, not the integral. Thank you. It's really impressive to see how fast Tether has risen on the buyer list of The United States government bonds. US debt will soon be all over the world, and USD will gain strength. It's all part of the plan, my friend. Paul, you and I are in 100% agreement on that.
Yodle four forty four says, if Tether is so smart, why did they partner with Swan? Oh, snap. Perma nerd two thirty four. Because of Bitcoin and I listened to the block size war book. Now I'm off down the BTC rabbit hole. Thanks, David. No. Thank you, Perma nerd. Enjoy the run down the rabbit hole because you'll never come out again. Pies with a hundred says thank you, sir. No thank you. And that is the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. So you got your Nostra identity. You're using Nostra clients.
Some of you might be worried about putting your private key into various clients, and you should be. Others are worried about putting your private key into, like, a browser extension, and rightly so. I use git albi, but something new has occurred. Something new, and Juan Gault from Bitcoin Magazine is gonna tell us all about it. No password reset? How Froster saves your Gnoster identity, Born out of a hackathon at tabconf twenty twenty four, Froster, f r o s t r, may have just solved Nostr's most pernicious issue. The inability to reset your password if your private key gets compromised.
Started in October of twenty twenty four, Froster just announced the als alpha release of igloo and forced two x, a desktop and accompanying browser extension key signers for the Nostr ecosystem. The project was founded by Topher, who made his name as a Bitcoin engineer for developing Tapscript, a popular library for managing Taproot, store signatures, and Bitcoin transactions. And Austin, who is a Lightning developer for Voltage and founder of Plebdevs, a Lightning powered developer education platform with over 500 enrolled students. While resetting a password may seem innocuous or like a simple UI feature, it's not that easy.
Let me take you on a journey of the complexity of the issue it solves and the magnitude of what is at stake if we fail to solve this apparently simple problem. Social media has changed the world, and yet we find ourselves in a strange place with our digital identities. Who we are online and how we assert ownership of our online profiles often depends upon trusted third parties like Facebook that are too big to care about any individual customer and fundamentally have the power to change the rules at any time or even cancel your account altogether.
The deep platforming of controversial influencers and even politicians in recent years serve as examples of how this centralized power can be wielded. Perhaps the best known illustration of this is the removal of president Donald Trump from both Facebook and Twitter shortly after the January at The US Capitol just days before the end of his term. Still, much of the world continues to operate on this digital neo feudalism structure. It seems there's a fundamental problem with the decentralization of identity that is yet to be solved.
Identity systems are a critical layer of society. Whether you're a citizen of Rome Two Thousand Years ago or of The United States today, doors open and close based on what ID you hold. Today's systems, as advanced as they may seem, rely on a pre digital conception of identity and security. They depend on authenticating your face. The ID card itself, whether your driver's license or passport, helps government employees, bank tellers, and bar bouncers all over the world do a very simple thing. Decide if you look like the person on the official card and then sort out if you are allowed access or not.
But the world is changing fast. Neither the obscurity of your physical appearance nor the secret nature of your Social Security number are what they were in the pre Internet world. Many people have published their full names and pictures on Facebook and a series of hacks which leaked tons of Social Security number data to the dark web. For example, the Equifax data breach in 2017 affected a 47,900,000 Americans. Then there was the national public data breach of twenty twenty four with over 200,000,000 Americans compromised.
In the analog pre Internet days when a robber burst through the doors of their local bank, they would do so to take the cash, gold, and tradable value stored in the vaults. But that's no longer how things work. In the digital age, money is no longer cash. Fiat payments are often reversible. So if you hack into a bank and move money to your account somehow, not only can that be reversed, but you just exposed a link to your identity. Today, the online equivalent of a robber is not looking to steal cash, gold, or other valuables, but rather your personal identity data. That data can, in turn, be used to defraud those same banks as well as businesses of all sizes.
Indeed, identity fraud costs more than all other forms of theft combined, totaling over $56,000,000,000 in 2020. Not only have many of these centralized platforms had their data vaults hacked and their content sold on the dark web for pennies on the dollar, but AI isn't well, it's improving quickly and has already passed the Turing test of image generation. We are at the point where rogue actors can create fake selfies holding fake IDs with leaked user data and fool the gatekeepers to your digital wealth. This threat is likely to incentivize change, and you can see the new efforts by tech companies and government institutions to upgrade identity systems.
Take California's mobile driver's license app for an example called the MDL, and it was developed in partnership with both Google and Apple. It's initially integrated with airports for identity verification, but the app also invites developers to integrate it as a form of authentication for websites in general. ID.me takes a similar approach and is already fully integrated with the IRS, boasting 136,000,000 members. Many of these apps require face or fingerprint authentication and ask for increasingly complex KYC selfies from their users who must hold up IDs and recent newspapers to be authenticated. Despite the obvious weakness of using your face to authenticate your identity in the age of Facebook, tech giants continue to rely on biometric data combining it with mass surveillance tools seen in the social credit score systems being built up in China.
To have a chance at curbing what seems like fate in the digital age, before it comes to the West, we need an identity authentication system that is both secure and agnostic to biometric data. We need an identity system that does not rely on your face. Enter Nostr, a Bitcoin era identity and social media protocol. Born out of the Bitcoin developer ecosystem, Nostr has quickly grown into a social media network in its own right. An abbreviation of notes and other stuff transmitted by relays, Nostra empowers users to authenticate themselves into social media pseudonyms or nims and sign their post with a Bitcoin style private key.
As a self custody system that fundamentally democratizes the Internet away from its current structure, it opens up a whole new set of possibilities for social media. Proponents of Nostr argue that users can finally own their own data and no longer need to depend on the charity nor benevolence of the Silicon Valley giants when they decide to move platforms or pick the wrong political party. Nostr works via a distributed client server network topology, which allows you to access content across various servers called relays. If one goes down or starts censoring users unfairly, chances are there's another window into the Nostra content feed that will grant you access and allow you to publish your thoughts.
The dream of Nostra is to unlock a new generation of social media technology that does not turn users into products by mining their data, that does not force biometric authentication compromising their privacy, and that allows developers to build in an open network whose cryptography and specs are already open source and which is natively integrated with Bitcoin, the Internet's money. Celebrities and users who wish to protect their Nostra brands from fake accounts trying to impersonate them can follow the standard similar to the one developed by Keybase, which asked users to publicly attest to their Keybase identity with their other social media accounts consolidating markers of reputation into one cryptographically controlled identity.
Though that is not currently a practice on Nostr, it is a problem reasonably well solved in a decentralized way by Keybase. However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Pushing identity ownership to the edges comes with a whole new set of problems that up until now have not really been solved and which have personally held me back from investing in building up my brand on Nostr. There's currently no real way to reset your password for a Nosternim or identity. Built on a simple public key pair system, if your private key gets hacked or leaked, your identity is essentially now under the control of whoever has it.
You both have the secret, so no one has exclusive control over it. This is a huge issue. Although the examples of such hacks are not too common, they are a significant deterrent for brands that might consider putting serious capital into building on this new social network protocol. This particular risk is made even worse by the intended design of Nostr, which invites many different interfaces to be created to access content of various kinds with the same user identities and means that users give their private keys to multiple clients, thus multiplying the risk of compromise.
One layer of defense that has been built up and become particularly popular as a result of this idea of an external signer, often a browser extension like Alby, that helps manage your private key as a kind of password manager, facilitating signing of content for you on the various Nostra platforms. While this works well enough today, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. One mistake, and the NIM is effectively compromised. The value of that built up brand or reputation not just harmed, but potentially exploitable by scammers wearing your identity to harass your friends or customers.
This is similar to the very common impersonation scams on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which clone your profile and direct message your known associates with phishing scams, but even worse. In Nostr, such an attack would be done with your actual identity, not a fake profile, significantly harming confidence in the authenticity of all content for those who are aware of the issue. The solution should be simple. Just create a password reset feature, right? Well, it turns out some very creative engineering is needed here because password resets are basically only possible by giving up your control over your identity to a third party who could update a central database and give you a new key set.
Until now, that is. Let's dive into Froster. Froster, a breakthrough in sovereign key management. Recent breakthroughs in cryptography have opened new doors for self custody in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry. One specific innovation that is quickly entering the market is Frost, a Schnorr based key management and key rotation scheme that achieves similar functionality as Bitcoin multi signature addresses and transactions, but without the on chain transaction cost or privacy trade offs. Schnorr is a form of cryptography invented in nineteen nineties. A few years after the expiration of its European and US patents, Schnorr started being discussed as a possible future upgrade to Bitcoin and was ultimately introduced in the Taproot soft fork upgrade of 2020.
That same year, Chelsea Komlo and Ian Goldberg published Frost, flexible round optimized Schnorr threshold signatures, a technical spec that set the foundation for its use in the lightning network infrastructure as well as new multi signature schemes for self custody known as frost. While the cryptography is complex in explaining it well beyond the scope of this article, it resembles schemes like Shamir's secret sharing. The cryptographic principles involved allow users to create a 24 word seed with Trezor's hardware wallet, split up into three shares of 12 words each.
Any two shares combined can be assembled into the master private key of the wallet, while any one share alone is insufficient to compromise or recover access to the account and then there's a small video that you can watch the URL for this story will be in the show notes if you want to watch the video just hit go to the show notes, hit the URL for this Bitcoin Magazine article, scroll down to the bottom, and you'll find the video. Continuing. This same principle is used in Frost, a scheme which is designed to enable multi party, multi signature wallets like those used by exchanges, potentially replacing multi signature Bitcoin scripts, benefiting users with more privacy at lower costs.
Froster extends Frost by integrating it with Nostr's Relay protocol, hence the added r in the name. It also adapts the technology to single user wallets rather than industrial grade, multi user schema, allowing simpler setups and unlocking key rotation, also known as password resets, for individual users with single key pairs like those used in Nostr. Froster enables three new features in particular. One, threshold key signing, so that if one key gets compromised, it can be rotated out and a fresh set of sub keys generated, which generate the Nostr private key pair no need to change your Nostr public and private keys similar to, for example, of a two of three multi signature Bitcoin wallet where if any one key is lost or compromised the other two can be used to move the coins to a new stable structure and regain control of three fresh keys, but off chain.
It's a magical thing. Two. No need for application layer solutions to nostr key rotation. Only the key signers, like Alby, would have to integrate Froster. Nostr apps like Primal and Domus would not even know that Froster is being used for key rotation by its users. Number three. Users who already have Nostra accounts, whose insects may not have been compromised, do not need to migrate to new key pairs and identities, but simply remove their insects from current key signers and start using Froster as a more secure key management system instead. The result?
A major piece of the decentralized social media puzzle is unlocked. Trustless identities with password resets that do not depend on centralized gatekeepers for authentication. The consequences of this innovation, if fruitful, are fundamental. The Nostra ecosystem would be wise to take a look at Froster. It might just be enough of a security and UI improvement that a whole new generation of non biometric, trustless digital identities and sovereign data ownership use cases are unlocked for the Bitcoin age. Wow. Okay.
Yeah. I'm, like, I'm hooked, man. I'm I'm I'm interested. So I will definitely be checking Froster out. I will certainly be taking a deep dive on this one. Again, read this article for yourself. The URL for it will be in the show notes. This is a game changer. Not just for Nostr, but for a whole raft of stuff. There are other people that are working on digital identities. They're probably not gonna be all that happy about this stuff. But we need more than one solution. And I really like the way these guys are going with this one. So buckle up. It's gonna be it's gonna be an interesting time here in the future.
Alright. Let's get to this one. Breeze launches Misty Breeze, the new lightning wallet on Liquid. This is out of Atlas21.com. Breeze has officially announced its new wallet, Misty Breeze, which integrates lightning network functionality with the features of the liquid side chain. At the heart of the application is Breeze SDK, a framework designed to simplify the integration of lightning network into consumer applications. The toolkit has already been incorporated into various projects and companies operating in the lightning space. The SDK offers two approaches for integrating the Lightning Network.
The first is called Native, allowing developers to implement Lightning Wallet functionalities using Blockstream's Greenlight service, which enables wallet providers to host a lightning network node on the cloud while keeping the private keys under the exclusive control of the users. The second approach, nodeless, integrates support for Liquid with an interface to the Lightning Network. Misty Breeze stands out by using the nodeless approach, allowing users to keep their Bitcoin in self custody on the Liquid side chain. This provides full control over the funds, although it does require the trust compromises typical of using Federated Liquid Network.
So here's the features of Misty Breeze in a nice little bullet point list. Bolt 11 and Bolt 12 invoices. UN or sorry. L n URL pay. Support for lightning addresses. On chain BTC addresses. Matt Corallo's BIP three fifty three for retrieving payment details via DNS and offline payments through mobile operating system notifications. The open source nature of the application allows developers to directly integrate desired features into Misty Breeze, customizing it according to their needs. Complete documentation for the nodelist setup used by Misty Breeze is available online, along with the GitHub repository for the implementation for users interested in testing the application. Early access is available for both Android and iOS with the option to directly download the APK.
Breeze has been going absolutely apeshit crazy in their development. For a long time, I didn't hear a whole bunch out of Breeze and then yet all of a sudden, they are doing all kinds of neat stuff. And Breeze is one of the one of the OGs in the space when it comes to the to the Lightning Network. I've I've used their wallet for years, and then they integrated podcasting directly into their wallet. So you started with a the Breeze wallet, and then you ended up with podcasting inside. Usually, it's you develop a podcast app and you put a wallet inside nowadays. But, man, they were the guys over at Breeze really, they've really got my attention now.
And Bisk, b I s q, is somebody else who's always had my attention ever since, I believe, twenty fourteen 2015. Yeah. Twenty fifteen. I've known about BISK, but at the time, they were called another name, which I I can't remember. But BISK version two point one point seven is out. If you're unaware, BISK is a secure, private, and decentralized Bitcoin person to person exchange network. It is set to be the successor to BISK version one and will support multiple trade protocols, multiple privacy networks, and multiple identities as well.
This version introduces a protection mechanism against triangular scams, more reliable message delivery, bug fixes in the trade process, as well as mediation improvements. Please upgrade as soon as possible to benefit from enhanced resiliency and stability, said the project. And they are also oh, by the way, Bisc is currently hiring a senior Java developer. Oh, no. Developers. So if you are a senior Java developer, there are multiple positions that you can contribute to building a censorship resistant financial infrastructure over at BISK. And last but not least, the first ever Bisc hackathon is scheduled for April through the thirteenth.
Participants will have the opportunity to engage with various challenges and ideas designed to innovate and improve the Bisc platform. So there you go. That's the end of the show, ladies and gentlemen. But a few words here at the end just to say, I cannot recommend going back and looking at that froster thing enough. I've heard about it on the grapevine for a few months now, and this was the best article that I've seen written about it. I think that this is going to solve a huge problem. And like the author said, many people are staying away from Nostril because they're scared that if they screw up just once, then all of the time investment that they put in to building up their Nostril presence, their profile, maybe they've been talk you know, maybe they've got websites out there that's linked to it. Who knows? Right? That they don't wanna spend the time doing all that if one mistake cost them everything.
And honestly, I can't blame them. And you will ask, well, you're on Nostr. That's your main outlet. Isn't is it not? Well, other than this podcast, you're correct. Nostr is absolutely my main output mechanism. If I wanna release any ideas or if I just wanna shit post or do whatever, you can be sure that I'm doing it on Nostr first. And I pretty much spend 80% of the time that I spend on social media, I will be using Nostr. But even I'm like going, man, if I screw this up, I've got well over two years, if not coming up on. Yeah. Well over two full years building up my Nostra profile.
And if I lose it now, I mean, it and I don't lose it. What happens is that somebody else gets my private key, I'm still able to write notes to my profile. I'm still able to sign messages, like, I can type in, like, I don't know, I like Trump, and then sign that as a message as a kind one, and boom, it's it's out. And the people that like Trump are gonna go, oh, man. He's one of us. We love this guy. And then fifteen minutes later, the guy that stole my private key can also post from the very same identity that says, I think Trump is an orange skunk. And then all the people that liked me because I like Trump now hate me because apparently I now hate Trump.
And if anybody actually ever listened to what I said, I don't care about Trump. I'm completely neutral on orange man. I don't care. But the point is is that somebody who's got my private key has just as much access to everything that I have access to on my Nostra account, and that really rankles the shit out of some larger names to come over to Nasr. I mean, we all know that Twitter has a massive bot problem, and it looks like it's not getting any better on Blue Sky. It looks like it it looks like their bot problem is really accelerating. I've been getting follows after follows after follows, and all I'm doing, guys, is just I'm not even interacting on Blue Sky.
I just post up the the the show release with the fountain URL so people can go listen to the show. And I'm more doing that just to have that URL on more web based platforms so that Google will see it more. Because if if I can get Google to see the same URL on several different platforms, I don't know. Maybe along with the keywords that I use in those notices that I've released another show that it will somehow do a little bit of minor search engine optimization for me and put my show in front of more eyeballs. And all so all I'm not even really interacting with anybody on Blue Sky. And I've got, like, 1,100 followers. If if if I am actually thinking that those are all legit, I'm gonna probably buy a bridge in Arizona because I'm pretty dumb.
You know? You know, don't buy bridges in Arizona. There's there's not a lot of water to cross. So what would be holding people back? Well, this this is a major issue, and nobody is real. None of the developers of Nostr and a lot of the power users, and I consider myself one of Nostr, none of us are saying that this is not a problem. We know it's a problem. It's okay that there are problems. It's a brand new protocol. If anybody out there believes that the early Internet did not have protocol layer problems, Well, I'm here to tell you it still does.
There are still several problems at the protocol level in the Internet, which we all know and love. And we we'll put in our credit card account, and we'll we've put in the last four of our Social Security number. I guarantee you've done it. And if you haven't, then you're like like Jamieson lop level security action. Most people have done it. And that's what that's what the the hackers need is just for most people to do it. If the if Jameson Lop doesn't have any of his identity online, then they don't know to hit him and he's safe. That's cool. They don't need him. They got everybody else. There are holes at every protocol.
This is a hole that we have a chance to be able to fix, and it looks like Froster is a good bet. And I'm hoping that I'll be the guys over at I'll be will start considering looking at Froster to see if it might be implementatable in their Alby extension, which is what I use to handle my public private key pair on Nostr now. So go back, read the article. If you find something in it that you think is shady or won't work, let me know. And do so by giving me a boostagram, and I will read it on the show when I see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
It is 10:37AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the day after April Fools' Day. Thank God 2025. And this is episode ten sixty seven of Bitcoin. And we're going to do some news here, man. It looks like Musk, Elon Musk, might actually be leaving the Trump orbit according to decrypt. And on that news, we seem to have gotten a spike in the Bitcoin price, which we got all the way up to like 87,000 and now we're down to $86.05. But, hey, what the hell? Why would Elon Musk leaving the Trump orbit impact the Bitcoin price? Well, maybe Andrew Hayward can help us out with this. Bitcoin and stocks, not just Bitcoin, but stocks too. They both surge after a report that the Doge boss, Elon Musk, will leave the Trump orbit.
Crypto and stock markets alike saw a jump on Wednesday morning following a report that Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will depart his current role as a close ally to president Donald Trump. It's an interesting way to term it, honestly, because it's like, are you just leaving Doge? Or are you just I mean, did you and Trump have a falling out? What the hell? Anyway, Bitcoin rapidly spiked all the way to 87,300 for the first time since March, while major stock market indices like the S and P five hundred and Nasdaq both bounced into the green for the day following the publication of Politico's report, which sites three sources close to Trump who asked not to be named.
Tesla saw a surge following the report, rebounding following Wednesday's release of a brutal quarterly report showing falling demand and production for Musk's electric car maker. Tesla jumped above $280 following the report, but has settled back down to $2.75 as of this writing, up nearly 3% on the day. But the stock had been battered in recent months, falling from a peak of above $480 set in December as Musk's political moves have proven controversial. Yeah. You think? Bitcoin has since cooled to about $86,770 as of this writing, but remains up nearly two full percent on the day. According to the report, Trump has told his inner circle and members of his cabinet that Musk, quote, will be stepping back in the coming weeks from his prominent role as a close Trump advisor.
Musk is unlikely to disappear entirely from Trump's administration, the report claims, but his departure may be timed with the end of his status as a, quote, special government employee in the coming weeks. Per the report, there's concern among Trump advisers that Musk is starting to become a political liability for Donald Trump. The report comes following a Republican loss in Wisconsin Supreme Court judge election on Tuesday, a race in which Musk personally spent $20,000,000, wow, to support Trump's favored candidate, Brad Schimmel. But Schimmel was handily defeated by the Democrat backed Susan Crawford, who won by a full 10%.
Both Musk and Trump have publicly hinted in recent days that the Tesla heads time in government could be ending. Musk is the figurehead of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, a government cost cutting initiative that had led to mass layoffs at various agencies and plenty of court challenges about Doge's authority. While Musk was announced to head Doge, the White House has since clarified that is officially called a senior adviser to the president. Doge is indeed apparently inspired by Dogecoin, Musk's longtime favorite cryptocurrency, with the meme logo briefly appearing on the government website in January.
Shit. I didn't know that. Wow. Trump also sells a t shirt featuring himself, Musk, and the coin's familiar Shiba Inu meme mascot. So interesting because I hadn't really heard any murmurings about Musk actually making a departure. But I'll tell you what, I don't think this is what the Wisconsin judge's loss that has prompted this. I'm getting the feeling that Musk was what would be known to those of you who are old enough to remember the first Iraq war where we use the term shock and awe, where the bombing was so intense and so relentless that nobody in Iraq could actually mount any kind of defense at all.
It wasn't just that we were knocking out, you know, air batteries and and and whatever military that they had. It wasn't just that. It was just so it was just such a bombardment of such massive quantities that even the stuff that wasn't hit in their primary bombing run that was still active, nobody knew there was no orders being given. Everybody's running around with their like a chicken with their head cut off. I'll bet you that Trump brought Musk in to do exactly that, to have that kind of shock and awe to where nobody could mount a proper defense. Everybody was just, you know, run into the mattresses. And now that Trump has done that, and this is one of his Trump's MOs, it this is the way he makes deal. He keeps everybody on the edge of their seats until just they're they're just about to break. They're just about to crack open like an egg. And then he comes back to save the day by either settling on a deal and saying, okay. We'll do this. And then everybody's, like, breathing a sigh of relief that they don't have to fret anymore because Trump's settling down and he's gonna actually do the thing. He's gonna sign the paper. He's gonna make the deal. He's gonna cut the check. He's gonna pull the trigger. And they don't have to it it doesn't even matter if if the way that it goes is not the way that they want it to go as long as they're not living in confusion.
That's the way Trump that's the way he works. So I'll bet you that this isn't like Musk going, oh, well, we've I've done some damage here. And it's not like Trump going, well, you've done some damage here, and I didn't think it was gonna go this way. No. No. No. No. Trump knew exactly the way this shit was gonna go, and now it's Musk's time to leave. He's got I guess he's gonna go back and try to sell some more electric cars. I don't who knows? I don't really care. But it's gonna be interesting to see, a, if Musk actually leaves and becomes not the head of Doge, and two, just how close he remains in Trump's orbit.
But Trump's gonna trump. And, apparently, The United States or some United States agencies are going to reveal Bitcoin holdings as per Donald Trump's directive. This one, Alex Larry from Bitcoin News is writing, the United States government will finally reveal its bitcoin and digital asset holdings on April, so three days from now, thanks to an executive order from President Donald Trump. On March, Trump signed an order requiring federal agencies to report their digital asset holdings to the Treasury Secretary within thirty days. That's aimed at establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve in a digital asset stockpile.
Bitcoin will be treated similarly to gold as a long term national asset. That move follows years of speculations about just how much Bitcoin the United States government actually holds. The audit will reveal exactly how many Bitcoin are in federal possession and whether there are any altcoins as well. One of the most significant aspects of this announcement is the government's no sell policy for the Bitcoin held in said strategic Bitcoin reserve. That means the Bitcoin acquired through civil and criminal asset forfeitures will be stored there instead of being sold at auctions.
That shift in policy positions Bitcoin as a long term store of value, creating a financial stronghold referred to as the digital Fort Knox. David Bailey, CEO of Bitcoin Inc, thinks that the upcoming audit could have a big impact on Bitcoin's price volatility saying, quote, depending on what we learn, this audit might answer many of the open questions about the recent price action. According to reports, the United States government currently holds around 200,000 Bitcoin valued at around $16,000,000,000 Over the past decade, it has seized around 400,000 Bitcoin from civil and criminal asset forfeitures Had those assets been held instead of sold, they'd now be worth over $34,000,000,000 The government may also hold altcoins, stablecoins, and even some meme coins.
The full audit will confirm just how extensive those holdings are. The April 5 disclosure is going to have big implications for the entire digital asset market and future regulations. Experts think that the disclosure will, one, clarify how the US government manages those digital assets, two, confirm if altcoins are in the national reserve, three, impact Bitcoin's price by shedding light on recent market volatility, And four, set a precedent for global government adoption of Bitcoin. Pausing here to go back to three. I don't know exactly what they're thinking, but I'm not certain that it's going to impact Bitcoin's price by shedding light on recent market volatility.
All we're gonna know, unless unless we find out that the United States government would had been selling coins even after the executive order, but I don't think that that's going to occur because anybody who does that is acting outside of a presidential elect a presidential executive order and therefore probably be subject to some kind of prison time, at least I would suspect. So I I'm not clear on why this is going to shed light on the price action of Bitcoin. It'll be interesting to see what they say. But in addition to holding Bitcoin in reserve, there's now talk of Bitcoin bonds or Bitcoin backed treasury bonds.
According to the Bitcoin Policy Institute, these Bitcoin backed treasury bonds could help reduce national debt and allow the government to buy more Bitcoin without using taxpayer money. There's also the bitcoin act, which would require the US government to buy up to 1,000,000 bitcoin over the next five years and prevent future administrations from selling those holdings. As the April 5 deadline approaches, investors, analysts, and the community are waiting to see the results. The findings will reshape the role of digital assets in The US economy and set the stage for more structured Bitcoin regulation.
I think there's a little bit more hyperbole there than than we need to worry about. I'm not sure if it's going to shape anything more than than has already been shaped by the strategic Bitcoin reserve executive order. What would shape something is if they enact that into law via the Bitcoin act, which is being championed by senator Cynthia Lummis out of Wyoming. If that gets turned into law, that does shape the future of the relationship of Bitcoin with the United States government, and that will absolutely have market impact, most likely to the positive side.
But what we find out on April, I don't think is gonna be all that earth shattering. Not as earth shattering as what we learned yesterday. At the close of business, well after I produced and and and and got the episode yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and out, GameStop announced that it had now $1,500,000,000 to splurge on a Bitcoin reserve after after their private offering was clearly a resounding success. And this is out of fortune.com. Who's writing this one? Oh, Catherine McGrath is the author. After announcing a new strategy to invest in Bitcoin just last week, Video game retailer, GameStop, now has the money to make it happen. Well, it it did before, honestly, guys, but whatever. GameStop announced on Tuesday that it had successfully raised $1,500,000,000 in a private offering of convertible notes according to a recent filing with the SEC.
A convertible note is a type of debt that lets investors convert loans into equity at some point in the future. The offering was restricted to qualified institutional buyers only, and investors will be unable to convert the notes into equity until the year 02/1930. Quote, the company expects to use the net proceeds from the offering for general corporate purposes, including the acquisition of Bitcoin, the filing stated. GameStop did not respond to a request for comment. The offering comes one week after GameStop announced plans to purchase $1,300,000,000 in Bitcoin.
The shift in strategy from selling video games to also investing in crypto in hopes that it rises in value is an attempt to, quote, provide sufficient liquidity to meet day to day financial obligations of the company and to optimize investment returns, the company said. The news was initially met with a 14% spike in GameStop's stock price, but the bump was short lived. The following day, GameStop shares fell 23%, erasing all of the gains the company made following the following the announcement, signaling that investors may be skeptical of the Bitcoin investment plan. Over the last decade, GameStop has struggled to keep up with a shift in customer interest from brick and mortar video games to digital ones.
The company reported a 28% decline in sales last year from 5,300,000,000.0 in 2023 to a mere 3,800,000,000.0 the next year 2024 according to SEC filings. Because of this, GameStop has shuttered a full 25% of its stores in 2024. Alongside its Bitcoin investment plan, the company also announced plans to close a significant number of additional stores in the coming months. The video game retailer seems to be following in the footsteps of Strategy, Michael Saylor's company. Led by Bitcoin advocate, Michael Saylor, Strategy has amassed nearly 530,000 Bitcoin. Yes. We're aware.
We don't need to know this one more time. Okay. So a few words about GameStop. And I I wrote this, in a note on Nostra yesterday. But it seems to me that all the guys that were in on you know, the whole, the whole Reddit craze that that went on in 2022 and 2021 and probably into 2023 with oh, who's that, who's that guy? Oh, god. Hold on. Yeah. Here it is. Keith Gill, also known as Deep Fucking Value and Roaring Kitty as two of his other names. He's a dude with the red bandana that made chicken tendies really famous because he was doing his stock stuff, his stock videos while he was feeding his child, chicken tendies, apparently. Anyway, that whole craze where they were trying to kill the short sellers of GameStop stock, They were buying the stock in mass, and they were coordinating these buys.
These are just plebs on the street, like retail guys, the guys that, you know, like, that are working at McDonald's. They were all following Keith Gill and a couple of other people too. And it wasn't just GameStop. I think it was, like, AMC movie theaters and and, like, at least one other one. But they were the all these companies had, like, these massive guys that were short selling their stock because they're trying to crash the company and make a whole boatload of money by doing it. Right? And these guys came in and said, you know what? Enough. And they started buying the GameStop stock, and it really screwed up the plans of all these short sellers.
They had some of them had to cover their losses with loans from other companies. They even depended on Robinhood to turn off the buy button on stock because it was getting so out of hand. These guys were gonna lose billions of dollars if the plebs on the street kept buying GameStop. So here's the here's what I think is gonna what could happen. If they're not if the guys at GameStop are not messing around and they actually do the deed and actually buy Bitcoin, then all the people at the retail level that want to see GameStop succeed because they're still short sellers that are trying to kill this company.
Right? What they can do at this point, instead of buying the actual stock of GameStop, could in turn just buy Bitcoin and hold it for themselves. Some of many of them won't. They can also buy ETFs. My I'm just saying my suggestion and my hope is that they actually buy Bitcoin and hold it in their own private keys. But either way, by them flooding their money into Bitcoin instead of GameStop's stock, then the next quarterly report that comes out from GameStop and they and Bitcoin rises in a tremendous way in value because all these guys that had thrown a whole bunch of money at GameStop start throwing it at at at Bitcoin, then all of a sudden, it doesn't matter if GameStop stock is being actually purchased because what they'll be able to put on their books is a massive income, a massive income.
And the people that buy the Bitcoin are actually supporting both Bitcoin and GameStop. They're screwing the short seller at the same time, but they're not actually exposed to the volatility of the short sellers power on GameStop stock because they're holding an underlying asset that happens to be the same asset that GameStop themselves own. And now that they can put that assets rise in price as income on their books where they weren't able to do that before, then GameStop still looks really good. It's it's like a triple win. It's it it could be really cool, but it all boils down to whether or not GameStop actually does the thing that they said that they were going to do and buys Bitcoin.
Now, onto other things, Fidelity Investments is in the news. Fidelity lets investors directly invest in crypto through a new IRA plan or independent retirement account, if you didn't know what that meant. Helene Braun is writing it for CoinDesk. Fidelity Investments rolled out an IRA plan that invests directly in crypto on Wednesday. That happened today. This morning, they announced this crypto friendly individual retirement account plan, and it gives investors yet one more method for tapping this asset class. The brokerage firm offers Bitcoin and shitcoin number one and Litecoin.
I didn't really have that much problems with Litecoin back in the day, so I don't feel sick to my stomach saying that one. Anyway, it offers all the all three of those to any US citizen over the age of 18. The digital assets are custody by find Fidelity's digital assets and held in a cold wallet. The crypto IRA product has no fees, and customers can invest in a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, or a rollover IRA according to Fidelity's website. So they released three products on this. The new product comes as a as financial advisors are increasingly offering crypto to their clients. A survey by TMX Vetify recently showed that 57% of advisors plan on increasing their allocations into crypto ETFs, although their biggest focus is on or in crypto equity ETFs, quote, Fidelity is committed to offering investment products and solutions to meet the changing needs and interest of our customers accompanied by education and support, a spokesperson told CoinDesk.
Clients of the brokerage firm have increasingly voiced interest in tax free advantaged ways to trade and hold crypto, a person familiar with the matter said. And Fidelity already offers a number of crypto exchange traded funds, which let investors track the prices of digital assets without directly investing in them. The company recently filed to list a, god forbid, Solana ETF on the CBOE exchange. Alright. So that said, a Roth IRA, from what I understand, is probably the very best one. The fact that they have a traditional IRA and a rollover IRA is amazing, except here's the more amazing part.
You'll notice that nowhere in this story, unless it's been left out, are the words qualified investor. This looks to me like a full blown retail street level play. You know, Fidelity is all about retail, but they also have a lot of products that are qualified investor only, which means that you kinda have to have to have a phone call with one of the guys at Fidelity, and your balance sheet better have north of a million dollars in it. Otherwise, you're not gonna be called a qualified investor, and you won't be able to partake of several types of investment products. But this one this one looks like it's built for the dude on the street.
So if you're a pleb and you're thinking about a crypto based IRA, you might wanna call Fidelity and see what they have to say to you. Meanwhile, Grayscale has launched two new Bitcoin outcome oriented products, Adrian Zemunsky, Cointelegraph. Major cryptocurrency asset manager, Grayscale Investments, announced not one, but two new Bitcoin outcome oriented exchange traded funds. According to an April 2 announcement, the new products are the Grayscale Bitcoin covered call ETF and the grayscale Bitcoin premium income ETF.
And according to an email sent to CoinTelegraph, the two new Bitcoin funds are meant to generate revenue by harnessing Bitcoin volatility. Quote, both strategies may be considered as an alternative income stream that's less correlated to traditional income oriented investments. So let me pause just to get this straight. This sounds a lot like fixed income on something that's very, very volatile no matter how you slice it. I'm I'm already cautioning people now. Be wary of this simply because when they when they say income or yield, generally speaking, yield equals income and income equals yield. So where does the income come from?
Where does the yield come from? Those questions need to be answered before anybody even considers these two products. But they are complex derivative products. The Bitcoin covered call product seeks to capture the highest premiums and maximize potential income. Grayscale suggests that it may serve as a complement to full blown Bitcoin exposure. The fund's strategy involves systematically writing calls very close to spot prices. The hope is that due to Bitcoin's historically high volatility, it would generate income through paid call generation.
On the other hand, the Bitcoin premium income product seeks to balance upside participation with a degree of income generation. This is meant to act as an alternative to direct Bitcoin ownership and seeks a balance between growth and income generation. This fund systematically writes calls targeting strike prices well out of the money on Bitcoin ETFs, including Grayscale Bitcoin Trust and Grayscale Bitcoin Minitrust, the announcement reads, quote, by focusing on this type of call writing strategy, BPI allows investors to participate in much of Bitcoin's upside potential while possibly benefiting from some dividend income.
Oh, man. This gets worse and worse. Maybe it's great. I don't know. But I gotta go I got a bad feeling about this. Grayscale Investments promises that both the new products will allow for a differentiated source of revenue that delivers an uncorrelated source of income for investors. And furthermore, the new derivatives will feature monthly distributions and systematic options management. Earlier this week, Grayscale also filed to list an exchange traded fund holding a diverse basket of spot cryptocurrencies, and the new product includes a whole bunch of shitcoins.
In late March, the US stock exchange, Nasdaq, also filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission seeking permission to list Grayscale Investments' spot avalanche ETF, and Grayscale's website lists 28 separate crypto products of which 25 are single asset derivatives and three are diversified. Oh, man. I don't know. This just doesn't sound good to me. This just this this sounds like DeFi promises in the wind. So, you know, invest at your own risk, ladies and gentlemen, but something about this doesn't sit right with me. Screw it. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities. We got oil. West Texas Intermediate up almost another point today to $71.87.
Brent Norsee is up point 8% to $75.00 9. Natural gas up 2.73 to just over $4 per thousand cubic feet. And gasoline up another one and a quarter percent, hitting $2.33 a gallon. Gold looks like it might have set another all time high, $3,000 no, $3,167.90 after a three quarter percent increase. Silver is up just over 1%. Platinum is down 1%. Copper is up point 15%, and palladium falling through the floor one and a half to the downside. Most of ag is in the red today. Biggest winner, however, is chocolate. 8.8% to the upside for the sweetness.
And the biggest loser today looks like it's gonna be rough rice, point 64% to the downside. Live cattle is up a full point. Lean hogs are up point one seven and feeder cattle are up a third. The Dow and the rest of the equities like in that Elon Musk news, point 43% up for the Dow. S and P is up over a half. Nasdaq is up point 72%. And the S and P mini swinging for the fences 1.15% to the upside. And we got some down pressure back on Bitcoin. We are well under the 87,000 mark, $86,460, but it does put us at a $1,700,000,000,000 market cap. We can still get 27.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,845,382.17 of.
Fees are very low, 0.03 BTC taking fees on a per block basis for the single block that are in mempools around the world. One block carrying a measly, a scant, a detrimental, a destructive 1,900 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 1 satoshi per v byte. Low priority, one satoshi per v byte. At Bitcoin, it's we're all gonna die. We're all it's it's dead. It's a dead chain. It's coming. It's coming. If it isn't already here, you will start hearing about it forever and ever and ever again. I'm here to tell you, we've been here before.
We've been here before several times. We've been on the other side of this fence where we've had hundreds of blocks and full men pools everywhere that you can't swing a dead cat without, you know, 50 satoshi per v byte, hundred and 50 satoshi per v byte transaction cost, hundreds of blocks in the mempool waiting to clear. And Bitcoin was gonna dive in too because it was too many transactions. You can't make these people happy. Don't even try. Just listen to the Battle of Hashings, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and where somebody with no name gave me 1,500 sats and says boost.
Axelrod with 1,021 says eighties flick. They live. I wholeheartedly agree. Go watch that movie. If you have never seen the movie They Live, You got it it is it is meme worthy. You have I know you've seen memes from it even if you haven't seen the movie. You got Roddy Rod Piper. It's awesome movie, and it's got a lot of truth in it too. Oak Grove with 1,066 says, in your episode Game Stopped, you partook in one of the great American pastimes' bastardizing colloquial phrases. Quote, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has them, so shit or get off the pot.
Again, one of the funnier bastardizations I've heard in the wild. I have some other examples of me with Mia phrases in their bastardized forms. Quote, the proof is in the pudding. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. A few bad apples. Blood is thicker than water. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into heaven. Money is the root of all evil. No publicity is bad publicity. The customer is always right. Dig yourself myself out of this hole, raising children, a jack of all trades as a master of none. In all of these instances, the actual lesson that is supposed to be taught is either oversimplified or in many cases, the opposite of what people understand it to be.
These are great examples of why our owners consider themselves worthy of controlling our lives. The new catchphrase for The United States should be kavat emptor. I would wear that shirt of a flowing flag with kavat on top and emptor on the bottom of the screen printed part. Well, Oak Grove, that's the most you've written me in a while. I appreciate that, pal. Anonymous with a 21 says, oh, eighties flick, they live, so it came in twice. Psyduck five seventy four says Psyduck. Chill now with 555 sets. Mirror veil.
Mirror dot veil. Now it makes perfect sense nonsense. The blockchain will become the Akashic record of the digital age. Digital cosmic secret service worshiping all seeing eye of God for constant digital and spectral surveillance. Who's running the mission? Long overdue for a metric no. Nope. Long overdue for a memetic meltdown. System error terminate. And then he gives me he gives me oh, his, or somebody's. Let's see what it is. It's a URL to ditto.pub. Oh, and it's a picture. Observation is a dying art, and it basically shows a chick's head, what looks like it's made made out of tile, and it's also the frame of a telescope, except going in the other direction. It's actually a very look good looking piece of art right there for being what possibly might be, but not sure, AI generated.
Anyway, progressive progressively worse with five fifty five says chop and dropping. This is the way. Paul Cernai in 500. Thanks again, sir. Greatly appreciated. By the way, the acceleration of the derivative of the velocity, not the integral. Thank you. It's really impressive to see how fast Tether has risen on the buyer list of The United States government bonds. US debt will soon be all over the world, and USD will gain strength. It's all part of the plan, my friend. Paul, you and I are in 100% agreement on that.
Yodle four forty four says, if Tether is so smart, why did they partner with Swan? Oh, snap. Perma nerd two thirty four. Because of Bitcoin and I listened to the block size war book. Now I'm off down the BTC rabbit hole. Thanks, David. No. Thank you, Perma nerd. Enjoy the run down the rabbit hole because you'll never come out again. Pies with a hundred says thank you, sir. No thank you. And that is the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. So you got your Nostra identity. You're using Nostra clients.
Some of you might be worried about putting your private key into various clients, and you should be. Others are worried about putting your private key into, like, a browser extension, and rightly so. I use git albi, but something new has occurred. Something new, and Juan Gault from Bitcoin Magazine is gonna tell us all about it. No password reset? How Froster saves your Gnoster identity, Born out of a hackathon at tabconf twenty twenty four, Froster, f r o s t r, may have just solved Nostr's most pernicious issue. The inability to reset your password if your private key gets compromised.
Started in October of twenty twenty four, Froster just announced the als alpha release of igloo and forced two x, a desktop and accompanying browser extension key signers for the Nostr ecosystem. The project was founded by Topher, who made his name as a Bitcoin engineer for developing Tapscript, a popular library for managing Taproot, store signatures, and Bitcoin transactions. And Austin, who is a Lightning developer for Voltage and founder of Plebdevs, a Lightning powered developer education platform with over 500 enrolled students. While resetting a password may seem innocuous or like a simple UI feature, it's not that easy.
Let me take you on a journey of the complexity of the issue it solves and the magnitude of what is at stake if we fail to solve this apparently simple problem. Social media has changed the world, and yet we find ourselves in a strange place with our digital identities. Who we are online and how we assert ownership of our online profiles often depends upon trusted third parties like Facebook that are too big to care about any individual customer and fundamentally have the power to change the rules at any time or even cancel your account altogether.
The deep platforming of controversial influencers and even politicians in recent years serve as examples of how this centralized power can be wielded. Perhaps the best known illustration of this is the removal of president Donald Trump from both Facebook and Twitter shortly after the January at The US Capitol just days before the end of his term. Still, much of the world continues to operate on this digital neo feudalism structure. It seems there's a fundamental problem with the decentralization of identity that is yet to be solved.
Identity systems are a critical layer of society. Whether you're a citizen of Rome Two Thousand Years ago or of The United States today, doors open and close based on what ID you hold. Today's systems, as advanced as they may seem, rely on a pre digital conception of identity and security. They depend on authenticating your face. The ID card itself, whether your driver's license or passport, helps government employees, bank tellers, and bar bouncers all over the world do a very simple thing. Decide if you look like the person on the official card and then sort out if you are allowed access or not.
But the world is changing fast. Neither the obscurity of your physical appearance nor the secret nature of your Social Security number are what they were in the pre Internet world. Many people have published their full names and pictures on Facebook and a series of hacks which leaked tons of Social Security number data to the dark web. For example, the Equifax data breach in 2017 affected a 47,900,000 Americans. Then there was the national public data breach of twenty twenty four with over 200,000,000 Americans compromised.
In the analog pre Internet days when a robber burst through the doors of their local bank, they would do so to take the cash, gold, and tradable value stored in the vaults. But that's no longer how things work. In the digital age, money is no longer cash. Fiat payments are often reversible. So if you hack into a bank and move money to your account somehow, not only can that be reversed, but you just exposed a link to your identity. Today, the online equivalent of a robber is not looking to steal cash, gold, or other valuables, but rather your personal identity data. That data can, in turn, be used to defraud those same banks as well as businesses of all sizes.
Indeed, identity fraud costs more than all other forms of theft combined, totaling over $56,000,000,000 in 2020. Not only have many of these centralized platforms had their data vaults hacked and their content sold on the dark web for pennies on the dollar, but AI isn't well, it's improving quickly and has already passed the Turing test of image generation. We are at the point where rogue actors can create fake selfies holding fake IDs with leaked user data and fool the gatekeepers to your digital wealth. This threat is likely to incentivize change, and you can see the new efforts by tech companies and government institutions to upgrade identity systems.
Take California's mobile driver's license app for an example called the MDL, and it was developed in partnership with both Google and Apple. It's initially integrated with airports for identity verification, but the app also invites developers to integrate it as a form of authentication for websites in general. ID.me takes a similar approach and is already fully integrated with the IRS, boasting 136,000,000 members. Many of these apps require face or fingerprint authentication and ask for increasingly complex KYC selfies from their users who must hold up IDs and recent newspapers to be authenticated. Despite the obvious weakness of using your face to authenticate your identity in the age of Facebook, tech giants continue to rely on biometric data combining it with mass surveillance tools seen in the social credit score systems being built up in China.
To have a chance at curbing what seems like fate in the digital age, before it comes to the West, we need an identity authentication system that is both secure and agnostic to biometric data. We need an identity system that does not rely on your face. Enter Nostr, a Bitcoin era identity and social media protocol. Born out of the Bitcoin developer ecosystem, Nostr has quickly grown into a social media network in its own right. An abbreviation of notes and other stuff transmitted by relays, Nostra empowers users to authenticate themselves into social media pseudonyms or nims and sign their post with a Bitcoin style private key.
As a self custody system that fundamentally democratizes the Internet away from its current structure, it opens up a whole new set of possibilities for social media. Proponents of Nostr argue that users can finally own their own data and no longer need to depend on the charity nor benevolence of the Silicon Valley giants when they decide to move platforms or pick the wrong political party. Nostr works via a distributed client server network topology, which allows you to access content across various servers called relays. If one goes down or starts censoring users unfairly, chances are there's another window into the Nostra content feed that will grant you access and allow you to publish your thoughts.
The dream of Nostra is to unlock a new generation of social media technology that does not turn users into products by mining their data, that does not force biometric authentication compromising their privacy, and that allows developers to build in an open network whose cryptography and specs are already open source and which is natively integrated with Bitcoin, the Internet's money. Celebrities and users who wish to protect their Nostra brands from fake accounts trying to impersonate them can follow the standard similar to the one developed by Keybase, which asked users to publicly attest to their Keybase identity with their other social media accounts consolidating markers of reputation into one cryptographically controlled identity.
Though that is not currently a practice on Nostr, it is a problem reasonably well solved in a decentralized way by Keybase. However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Pushing identity ownership to the edges comes with a whole new set of problems that up until now have not really been solved and which have personally held me back from investing in building up my brand on Nostr. There's currently no real way to reset your password for a Nosternim or identity. Built on a simple public key pair system, if your private key gets hacked or leaked, your identity is essentially now under the control of whoever has it.
You both have the secret, so no one has exclusive control over it. This is a huge issue. Although the examples of such hacks are not too common, they are a significant deterrent for brands that might consider putting serious capital into building on this new social network protocol. This particular risk is made even worse by the intended design of Nostr, which invites many different interfaces to be created to access content of various kinds with the same user identities and means that users give their private keys to multiple clients, thus multiplying the risk of compromise.
One layer of defense that has been built up and become particularly popular as a result of this idea of an external signer, often a browser extension like Alby, that helps manage your private key as a kind of password manager, facilitating signing of content for you on the various Nostra platforms. While this works well enough today, it doesn't solve the fundamental problem. One mistake, and the NIM is effectively compromised. The value of that built up brand or reputation not just harmed, but potentially exploitable by scammers wearing your identity to harass your friends or customers.
This is similar to the very common impersonation scams on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, which clone your profile and direct message your known associates with phishing scams, but even worse. In Nostr, such an attack would be done with your actual identity, not a fake profile, significantly harming confidence in the authenticity of all content for those who are aware of the issue. The solution should be simple. Just create a password reset feature, right? Well, it turns out some very creative engineering is needed here because password resets are basically only possible by giving up your control over your identity to a third party who could update a central database and give you a new key set.
Until now, that is. Let's dive into Froster. Froster, a breakthrough in sovereign key management. Recent breakthroughs in cryptography have opened new doors for self custody in the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency industry. One specific innovation that is quickly entering the market is Frost, a Schnorr based key management and key rotation scheme that achieves similar functionality as Bitcoin multi signature addresses and transactions, but without the on chain transaction cost or privacy trade offs. Schnorr is a form of cryptography invented in nineteen nineties. A few years after the expiration of its European and US patents, Schnorr started being discussed as a possible future upgrade to Bitcoin and was ultimately introduced in the Taproot soft fork upgrade of 2020.
That same year, Chelsea Komlo and Ian Goldberg published Frost, flexible round optimized Schnorr threshold signatures, a technical spec that set the foundation for its use in the lightning network infrastructure as well as new multi signature schemes for self custody known as frost. While the cryptography is complex in explaining it well beyond the scope of this article, it resembles schemes like Shamir's secret sharing. The cryptographic principles involved allow users to create a 24 word seed with Trezor's hardware wallet, split up into three shares of 12 words each.
Any two shares combined can be assembled into the master private key of the wallet, while any one share alone is insufficient to compromise or recover access to the account and then there's a small video that you can watch the URL for this story will be in the show notes if you want to watch the video just hit go to the show notes, hit the URL for this Bitcoin Magazine article, scroll down to the bottom, and you'll find the video. Continuing. This same principle is used in Frost, a scheme which is designed to enable multi party, multi signature wallets like those used by exchanges, potentially replacing multi signature Bitcoin scripts, benefiting users with more privacy at lower costs.
Froster extends Frost by integrating it with Nostr's Relay protocol, hence the added r in the name. It also adapts the technology to single user wallets rather than industrial grade, multi user schema, allowing simpler setups and unlocking key rotation, also known as password resets, for individual users with single key pairs like those used in Nostr. Froster enables three new features in particular. One, threshold key signing, so that if one key gets compromised, it can be rotated out and a fresh set of sub keys generated, which generate the Nostr private key pair no need to change your Nostr public and private keys similar to, for example, of a two of three multi signature Bitcoin wallet where if any one key is lost or compromised the other two can be used to move the coins to a new stable structure and regain control of three fresh keys, but off chain.
It's a magical thing. Two. No need for application layer solutions to nostr key rotation. Only the key signers, like Alby, would have to integrate Froster. Nostr apps like Primal and Domus would not even know that Froster is being used for key rotation by its users. Number three. Users who already have Nostra accounts, whose insects may not have been compromised, do not need to migrate to new key pairs and identities, but simply remove their insects from current key signers and start using Froster as a more secure key management system instead. The result?
A major piece of the decentralized social media puzzle is unlocked. Trustless identities with password resets that do not depend on centralized gatekeepers for authentication. The consequences of this innovation, if fruitful, are fundamental. The Nostra ecosystem would be wise to take a look at Froster. It might just be enough of a security and UI improvement that a whole new generation of non biometric, trustless digital identities and sovereign data ownership use cases are unlocked for the Bitcoin age. Wow. Okay.
Yeah. I'm, like, I'm hooked, man. I'm I'm I'm interested. So I will definitely be checking Froster out. I will certainly be taking a deep dive on this one. Again, read this article for yourself. The URL for it will be in the show notes. This is a game changer. Not just for Nostr, but for a whole raft of stuff. There are other people that are working on digital identities. They're probably not gonna be all that happy about this stuff. But we need more than one solution. And I really like the way these guys are going with this one. So buckle up. It's gonna be it's gonna be an interesting time here in the future.
Alright. Let's get to this one. Breeze launches Misty Breeze, the new lightning wallet on Liquid. This is out of Atlas21.com. Breeze has officially announced its new wallet, Misty Breeze, which integrates lightning network functionality with the features of the liquid side chain. At the heart of the application is Breeze SDK, a framework designed to simplify the integration of lightning network into consumer applications. The toolkit has already been incorporated into various projects and companies operating in the lightning space. The SDK offers two approaches for integrating the Lightning Network.
The first is called Native, allowing developers to implement Lightning Wallet functionalities using Blockstream's Greenlight service, which enables wallet providers to host a lightning network node on the cloud while keeping the private keys under the exclusive control of the users. The second approach, nodeless, integrates support for Liquid with an interface to the Lightning Network. Misty Breeze stands out by using the nodeless approach, allowing users to keep their Bitcoin in self custody on the Liquid side chain. This provides full control over the funds, although it does require the trust compromises typical of using Federated Liquid Network.
So here's the features of Misty Breeze in a nice little bullet point list. Bolt 11 and Bolt 12 invoices. UN or sorry. L n URL pay. Support for lightning addresses. On chain BTC addresses. Matt Corallo's BIP three fifty three for retrieving payment details via DNS and offline payments through mobile operating system notifications. The open source nature of the application allows developers to directly integrate desired features into Misty Breeze, customizing it according to their needs. Complete documentation for the nodelist setup used by Misty Breeze is available online, along with the GitHub repository for the implementation for users interested in testing the application. Early access is available for both Android and iOS with the option to directly download the APK.
Breeze has been going absolutely apeshit crazy in their development. For a long time, I didn't hear a whole bunch out of Breeze and then yet all of a sudden, they are doing all kinds of neat stuff. And Breeze is one of the one of the OGs in the space when it comes to the to the Lightning Network. I've I've used their wallet for years, and then they integrated podcasting directly into their wallet. So you started with a the Breeze wallet, and then you ended up with podcasting inside. Usually, it's you develop a podcast app and you put a wallet inside nowadays. But, man, they were the guys over at Breeze really, they've really got my attention now.
And Bisk, b I s q, is somebody else who's always had my attention ever since, I believe, twenty fourteen 2015. Yeah. Twenty fifteen. I've known about BISK, but at the time, they were called another name, which I I can't remember. But BISK version two point one point seven is out. If you're unaware, BISK is a secure, private, and decentralized Bitcoin person to person exchange network. It is set to be the successor to BISK version one and will support multiple trade protocols, multiple privacy networks, and multiple identities as well.
This version introduces a protection mechanism against triangular scams, more reliable message delivery, bug fixes in the trade process, as well as mediation improvements. Please upgrade as soon as possible to benefit from enhanced resiliency and stability, said the project. And they are also oh, by the way, Bisc is currently hiring a senior Java developer. Oh, no. Developers. So if you are a senior Java developer, there are multiple positions that you can contribute to building a censorship resistant financial infrastructure over at BISK. And last but not least, the first ever Bisc hackathon is scheduled for April through the thirteenth.
Participants will have the opportunity to engage with various challenges and ideas designed to innovate and improve the Bisc platform. So there you go. That's the end of the show, ladies and gentlemen. But a few words here at the end just to say, I cannot recommend going back and looking at that froster thing enough. I've heard about it on the grapevine for a few months now, and this was the best article that I've seen written about it. I think that this is going to solve a huge problem. And like the author said, many people are staying away from Nostril because they're scared that if they screw up just once, then all of the time investment that they put in to building up their Nostril presence, their profile, maybe they've been talk you know, maybe they've got websites out there that's linked to it. Who knows? Right? That they don't wanna spend the time doing all that if one mistake cost them everything.
And honestly, I can't blame them. And you will ask, well, you're on Nostr. That's your main outlet. Isn't is it not? Well, other than this podcast, you're correct. Nostr is absolutely my main output mechanism. If I wanna release any ideas or if I just wanna shit post or do whatever, you can be sure that I'm doing it on Nostr first. And I pretty much spend 80% of the time that I spend on social media, I will be using Nostr. But even I'm like going, man, if I screw this up, I've got well over two years, if not coming up on. Yeah. Well over two full years building up my Nostra profile.
And if I lose it now, I mean, it and I don't lose it. What happens is that somebody else gets my private key, I'm still able to write notes to my profile. I'm still able to sign messages, like, I can type in, like, I don't know, I like Trump, and then sign that as a message as a kind one, and boom, it's it's out. And the people that like Trump are gonna go, oh, man. He's one of us. We love this guy. And then fifteen minutes later, the guy that stole my private key can also post from the very same identity that says, I think Trump is an orange skunk. And then all the people that liked me because I like Trump now hate me because apparently I now hate Trump.
And if anybody actually ever listened to what I said, I don't care about Trump. I'm completely neutral on orange man. I don't care. But the point is is that somebody who's got my private key has just as much access to everything that I have access to on my Nostra account, and that really rankles the shit out of some larger names to come over to Nasr. I mean, we all know that Twitter has a massive bot problem, and it looks like it's not getting any better on Blue Sky. It looks like it it looks like their bot problem is really accelerating. I've been getting follows after follows after follows, and all I'm doing, guys, is just I'm not even interacting on Blue Sky.
I just post up the the the show release with the fountain URL so people can go listen to the show. And I'm more doing that just to have that URL on more web based platforms so that Google will see it more. Because if if I can get Google to see the same URL on several different platforms, I don't know. Maybe along with the keywords that I use in those notices that I've released another show that it will somehow do a little bit of minor search engine optimization for me and put my show in front of more eyeballs. And all so all I'm not even really interacting with anybody on Blue Sky. And I've got, like, 1,100 followers. If if if I am actually thinking that those are all legit, I'm gonna probably buy a bridge in Arizona because I'm pretty dumb.
You know? You know, don't buy bridges in Arizona. There's there's not a lot of water to cross. So what would be holding people back? Well, this this is a major issue, and nobody is real. None of the developers of Nostr and a lot of the power users, and I consider myself one of Nostr, none of us are saying that this is not a problem. We know it's a problem. It's okay that there are problems. It's a brand new protocol. If anybody out there believes that the early Internet did not have protocol layer problems, Well, I'm here to tell you it still does.
There are still several problems at the protocol level in the Internet, which we all know and love. And we we'll put in our credit card account, and we'll we've put in the last four of our Social Security number. I guarantee you've done it. And if you haven't, then you're like like Jamieson lop level security action. Most people have done it. And that's what that's what the the hackers need is just for most people to do it. If the if Jameson Lop doesn't have any of his identity online, then they don't know to hit him and he's safe. That's cool. They don't need him. They got everybody else. There are holes at every protocol.
This is a hole that we have a chance to be able to fix, and it looks like Froster is a good bet. And I'm hoping that I'll be the guys over at I'll be will start considering looking at Froster to see if it might be implementatable in their Alby extension, which is what I use to handle my public private key pair on Nostr now. So go back, read the article. If you find something in it that you think is shady or won't work, let me know. And do so by giving me a boostagram, and I will read it on the show when I see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
