Join me today for Episode 1073 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
nostr: https://primal.net/BenJustman
Twitter: https://x.com/BenJustman
Website: https://www.peonylanewine.com/bitcoin
https://decrypt.co/314682/harvard-led-study-reveals-bitcoin-mining-spreads-air-pollution-interstate
https://bitcoinnews.com/legal/clean-cloud-act-target-bitcoin-mining/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/bitcoin-miners-are-doubling-down
https://atlas21.com/mining-tether-directs-its-hashrate-to-ocean/
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/04/14/metaplanet-becomes-ninth-largest-public-bitcoin-holder-with-latest-btc-buy
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/trump-signs-resolution-blocking-irs-reporting-rule-for-defi-brokers/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/btcpay-server-v2-1-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/lnbits-v1-0-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/liana-wallet-v10-0/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Topics for today:
- Bots Killing Socials
- So Much Mining FUD Today
- Tether Directs Miners to Ocean
- MANTRA Rug Pull
Circle P:
Winenostr: https://primal.net/BenJustman
Twitter: https://x.com/BenJustman
Website: https://www.peonylanewine.com/bitcoin
Articles:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bots-are-killing-social-mediahttps://decrypt.co/314682/harvard-led-study-reveals-bitcoin-mining-spreads-air-pollution-interstate
https://bitcoinnews.com/legal/clean-cloud-act-target-bitcoin-mining/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/markets/bitcoin-miners-are-doubling-down
https://atlas21.com/mining-tether-directs-its-hashrate-to-ocean/
- 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://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/04/14/metaplanet-becomes-ninth-largest-public-bitcoin-holder-with-latest-btc-buy
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/trump-signs-resolution-blocking-irs-reporting-rule-for-defi-brokers/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/btcpay-server-v2-1-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/lnbits-v1-0-0/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/liana-wallet-v10-0/
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here:
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 09:27AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the April. Wow. Tomorrow is tax day twenty twenty five. And this is episode ten seventy three of Bitcoin. And today is basically a mining day. There's lots of stuff going on with mining that's in the news and I just couldn't get away from it. So, the first half of this show is basically going to be mining and then we'll do some other news in the back half. And that's why you're here. This is Bitcoin and because other stuff is going on in the world other than the price of Bitcoin. And even that, even that, the first thing that we're going to start off with is gonna lead us into mining and it doesn't have that damn thing to do with mining, but it did steam my beans because Nostr was not mentioned a single time in this Cointelegraph article that is titled bots are killing social media, but decentralization can save it. And this is Leroy Hoefer writing for Cointelegraph.
As the old wisdom goes, nobody knows you're a dog on the Internet. Often enough, nobody knows if you're a bot either to the point where the dead Internet theory sometimes feels disturbingly tangible. Bot traffic shares hit its highest level in 2024, up 2% from the year before according to a 2024 Imperva Badbot report. The bot pandemic is ravaging the web, and people are taking notice. People like Changpeng Zhao, for example, who recently urged Elon butt Musk to ban bots on Twitter. He's not the only one in the web three community to call for such measures, and rightly so. From artificially inflating engagement metrics to orchestrating scams, bots are quickly drowning out real human interactions, and it's at a time when our lives drift more and more into the online world.
While platform owners continue to roll out AI driven moderation and paywalls to curb bot activity, these solutions fail to address the root problem. Moderation tools also regularly operate with minimal transparency incorrectly flagging legitimate content without users ever knowing why users also often have to surrender personal data to prove that they are not bots raising privacy concerns and creating barriers to participation, and more problems are being made. And a decentralized approach is the only viable path forward. If left to fester, the rise of bots will create repercussions that go way beyond social media.
Companies pouring money into digital marketing will see their budgets wasted on fake engagement. It's even possible to imagine a dirty trick where a rival would use bots to waste the competitors' money by feeding them fake impressions. This already happens in the digital advertising space. People are and will continue to become more suspicious of online interactions, making it harder for authentic creators and businesses to earn trust. The user experience also suffers. As automated noise drowns out meaningful discussions, users may eventually abandon social media for good.
We need to deal with the bot problem for all these and other reasons once and for all. Social media giants have been using centralized moderation strategies to tackle the bot issue for quite some time. AI driven detection systems serve as the first line of defense. They're far from perfect. Bots are getting smarter, often slipping through the cracks by mimicking human behavior and bypassing safeguards. On top of that, false positives can lead to unfair restrictions on genuine users. Oh, the mighty ban hammer, a weapon from a more civilized age. Another common tactic is the implementation of paywalls like Twitter's verification fees, which, you know, requires users to pay for authentication.
This method raises the financial hurdle for bot operators, but it also creates a two tiered system that disadvantages users who can't or won't pay. Paywalls do little to defer to deter well funded bot farms that could easily overlook these costs. While these measures are well meaning, they often miss the mark when balancing security with user accessibility. A decentralized model hands the reins back to the users and offers an alternative to having centralized entities decide what's real and what's not. Using blockchain based decentralization identity or DID and reputation systems, platforms can verify real users without compromising their privacy.
Decentralized solutions reduce the need for unclear moderation policies that empower people to control their own digital reputations across different platforms. DID solutions enable users to verify their authenticity through cryptographic attestations so intrusive know your customer processes are unnecessary And reputation based systems can help strengthen bot resistance by rewarding verified users with more social credibility while shrinking the impact of suspicious accounts. The real advantage here is that these systems operate transparently, preventing centralized authorities from imposing rules that may prioritize corporate interests over user rights.
The bot problem isn't just a hassle. It's a fundamental threat to the integrity of social media. The challenge is finding a solution that gets rid of bots without getting rid of free speech and user control. Centralized solutions are failing. Even worse, centralized systems introduce new problems under the guise of security. A decentralized, data driven approach enables people to authenticate themselves on their own terms, making bot driven manipulation much harder. We urgently need to move beyond the current system and push for decentralized solutions that protect users and bring authenticity back to social media.
If social media is to be a space for genuine human in interaction, it has to go decentralized before the bots make it useless. Alright. So there's there's two things about this article that I wanna hit on. One is, is it possible that we are seeing a general death of social media? Is it? I mean, I know that sounds ludicrous, but follow me along here. I've been booted off of Twitter three times. I mean, like like permanent lifetime bans on three accounts. Right? And I ain't the only one. If I was the only one, I'd probably feel like like a heel for having been booted off of Twitter for saying stupid things, but I'm not the only one. What I mean? Shit. Labra Huddle, you know, is is an account on Twitter that I think he's up to 15 accounts that has been banned.
You know, and American HODL is another account on Twitter that's been banned multiple times. I think he's on his eighth one. You know? So when when I finally got booted off that third time, that was right around the time that Nostr, which is a one of the things that it can do is function like a decentralized social media platform. It's so much more than that that I don't like calling Nostr social media. It is a decentralized communications network that is capable of expanding to every form of media you can possibly imagine. That's beyond social media, but for right now, the discussion is about social media.
When I found Nostra, I was like, okay. Well, I I guess this is where I'm gonna live, and then I really started to like it. And I've talked about those reasons on several occasions here, and I'm not gonna rehash them all. But I've I've found a a sincere, genuine place that I was never gonna be able to be deleted from and everything everything is I get much more authentic interactions with actual people. Are there bots on Nostra? You betcha. I'm subscribed to quite a few bots. You know, some of them are news bots. Some of them are like chart bots, but we haven't really seen a a complete and total inundation of active bot flooding into Nostra. Not yet. We will.
But everything that this article is saying, Nostra already safeguards against this stuff. We have web of trust. We have the ability to authenticate ourselves in in many manners that we see fit. Most reliably is the public private key pair, the in sec and the in pub key pair specifically for Nostra. But the web of trust stuff, you know, some people just completely poo poo it. I think it's it's a brilliant addition, and you can use it how you want. So what I'm weird about here is that this article said absolutely nothing about Nostr, but it also said nothing about any other platform either. It never mentioned the Fediverse or Mastodon, ostensibly Blue Sky is somehow or another kind of open source, kinda. I'm not exactly sure, but we already have these decentralized solutions, and the person that's writing this is is listing the problems but not giving a solution. The solution to all this is to go over to Nostr.
Now let's get back to the original question. Is social media dying? Every time I go back to Twitter, it is not the same Twitter that I got booted off from. It's not fun anymore. It's it it's just garbage. It's just complete crap. And I'm no longer addicted to it. Thank god. Because I found Noster, but here's the rub. I find myself not posting to Noster as much as I used to post to Noster, and I certainly do not post to Noster as much as I used to post to Twitter. And then I started thinking, oh, shit. Does that mean Nostr's gonna die? No. I think Nostr was the savior for social media because it did break the addiction.
It broke the addiction of the algorithm. And I don't think that we give Fiat Joffe and the protocol of Noster that he created enough credit for saving a lot of our skins. I mean, it didn't save our lives, but, basically, I bet you there's a lot of people out there who are, like, going, yeah. I kinda spend way too much time on Twitter or whatever. I I barely even touch Facebook or or Instagram or anything else. I'm basically Nostra only, but I'm not posting all that much, not like I used to. And I'm thinking that the addiction has been broken. That that's what I'm saying, but I don't think that social media is going to die. I do think centralized social media is going to die, but I don't I don't see humans just giving up on interacting with other humans in a digital space.
That, I don't think, is ever going to happen. So if you have not tried Nostra, if you're getting your fill with the rest of this stuff, you really do. It's it's not hard. It really is not hard at all to get on Nostra. In fact, I've got, let's see here. I'm gonna go over here. It's n as in Nancy, start Me. N start Me. Just go to nstart.me, and it will just walk you through it. It it's like a four or five I don't I can't remember how many steps it is, but it takes you step by step. And and, honestly, from end to end, you should be done inside of the, like, a minute or two minutes and understand what it is that's happened, what it is that you need to save, where it is that you need to save it, and then how to use it. And then it's all done. You've got you you're you're signed up to Noster, for lack of a better phrase. Right? So give it a shot because while I'm a little weirded out that the that the article didn't once once mention Nostr, the the the conclusions are correct. What we're we're seeing the absolute evisceration of the old school centralized social media platforms.
Now as I promised, we're gonna get into mining, and we're gonna start it off with mining FUD. And we're talking about Bitcoin mining, of course. And Harvard is leading the way this time. Vince De Aquino is writing this one for decrypt. Harvard led study reveals Bitcoin mining spreads air pollution interstate. It's interstate air pollution this time, guys. They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, but a new study has found that Bitcoin mining produces harmful air pollutants with fine particles from the facilities crossing state borders affecting areas far from the mines themselves.
Between August 2022 and July 2023, '1 point '9 million Americans were exposed to significant levels of these fine particles according to researchers behind a groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications. I'm pausing right here because I need to tell you, if this is Nature Communications that is part of the umbrella of the scientific journal Nature, that's one of the top actually, that's one of the top two. There's there's the two main scientific journals in the world, not just The United States, but in the scientific community, which spans all manner of countries, is the journal named Science and the journal named Nature.
You get into either one of these magazines at for, like, your, like, you know, your first time that you published to either one of these, journals, your career is basically made. And if you have to retract an article, your your, reputation takes a really big hit. So if this is Nature Communications as part of the Nature family of publications, then a lot of people are reading this. So be aware, this isn't Bob's backyard biochemistry journal, guys. This has got a lot of eyeballs on it. So buckle up. Communities affected include New York City, the Houston Austin Metropolitan area, Northeast Texas, and areas along the Illinois Kentucky border.
The research team led by doctor Francisca Domenici at Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health found that Bitcoin mines frequently cause increased electricity production from fossil fuel power plants. Compiling data from the 34 largest Bitcoin mines operating in The United States, the researchers claim that a Bitcoin mine in one state can trigger a power plant in another to burn more coal or gas, sending pollution to another state entirely. This creates a frustrating situation for those affected. For example, electricity consumed by a mine in North Carolina induced operations at a coal fired plant in Kentucky, which then affected air quality in Illinois.
With residents having no immediate recourse against either the mine or the power plant. But because affected areas are not from the same state where the pollutants originate, the situation produces a regulatory gap. A number of possible policy mechanisms could help ease the challenge of cross state pollution, doctor Scott Delaney, one of the authors, told Decrypt in an email interview, quote, but these policies require federal action, end quote. Delaney specifically suggested the United States Environmental Protection Agency could issue a good neighbor rule for PM 2.5, also known as fine particle air pollution.
Such a rule would require upwind states to control power plant emissions more aggressively. Programs that incentivize responsible siting of mining facilities and data centers could also be launched to lessen negative health effects Delaney suggested. The study's findings could also apply beyond crypto. Last month, Decrypt reported a decline in earnings among publicly traded bitcoin mining firms. This trend has led some of those miners to pivot from crypto to artificial intelligence bitcoin mines and AI infrastructure both require large data centers and much of the equipment used to mine bitcoin tokens can be repurposed for other applications.
What? No. No. No. See. No. This is Delaney talking. No. It can't. Bitcoin mine Bitcoin mining equipment solves one thing, SHA two fifty six. That's it. That's all it does. That's all it will ever be able to do. And there's not a whole lot of call for AI using SHA two fifty six unless you're just going to continuously reauthenticate your login credentials to chat g p t, but come on. That's not gonna happen. There's no reason for it. See, this is a Harvard guy, and he doesn't understand a fundamental issue of Bitcoin mining. This is freaking amazing.
The study comes as US president Donald Trump has spurred momentum in support of the crypto industry. On the campaign trail to a second term, Trump met with Bitcoin miners, and he sent said he wants all Bitcoin to be made in America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we've heard that one before. This is just yet one more issue of FUD that is designed to cause Bitcoin infrastructure problems. But this is I I have no idea where they're getting their information from. There there's no way you can track this shit. So at this point see and and here's the issue. You know, my taxpayer dollars, because it's Harvard led, that's a United States institution, They were funded by some type of grant. They didn't pull the money out of their own pocket. And I guarantee you, Harvard also themselves, like, from their endowment fund or whatever, they didn't pay for these researchers to do this work either.
This money, it came from my taxes. And if you live in The United States, it came from your taxes. And guess what? Unless you've got a $1,500 subscription a year to Nature, you're not reading this article. And that's why what was it? Schwartz, Aaron Schwartz. That's why he was arrested ostensibly because he was he was scraping, I believe, the MIT computers for, like, every well, actually, I I think he was using m I the MIT, point into the Internet to run a bot that or something, like, some kind of a program that he had built to scrape these papers, like, the the whole paper, not just the abstract, but, like, the whole body, all of the graphics, everything from paper from Elsevier and, like, which I think is a publisher of both Nature and Science.
But there's, like, three or four publishing houses, and they do all the scientific publishing. And he was scraping them all. And they said that they arrested him for that. But his his defense was the American people and the in in a real way, the the people of the world, the citizenry in one form or another has has paid for this research, and it is their right to be able to review this research. I'm not gonna be able to read this paper. I have no idea how they've come to determine that a Bitcoin mine in one state kicked on a coal fired plant in another state, which then polluted a third state.
But this the the FUD is it's like the poor in Jesus, what Jesus told us. The poor will always be with you, and so will the FUD. But now we've got a new bill by two US senators that are targeting Bitcoin mining as well as artificial intelligence. And this is Alex Larry writing for Bitcoin news. A new bill has been introduced by in the United States Senate to address the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence data centers. Dubbed the Clean Cloud Act, the legislation is being led by senators Sheldon White house and John Fetterman. If passed, the bill would set carbon emission standards for energy guzzling compute facilities across the country, and the Clean Cloud Act is aimed at reducing pollution caused by the increasing power demands of Bitcoin miners and AI data centers, which the senators believe are putting more and more strain on the nation's power grid.
This is despite numerous studies and reports that show Bitcoin mining actually helps stabilize power grids and drive the development of green energy facilities. The bill would require the United States Environmental Protection Agency to set regional carbon emissions caps for data centers and Bitcoin mining operations with more than 100 kilowatts of capacity. Pausing right there. A hundred kilowatts is nothing. That's every miner. That's that's like every miner. Like, you're you're getting up into, like, a small the the amount of energy that a small retail shop, you know, air conditioning in the summer might actually use.
I mean, a hundred kilowatts is nothing. Maybe they meant megawatts. I'd I but but I doubt it. I think they actually mean a hundred kilowatts, but that is a tiny, tiny mine. But these caps would be based on local electricity sources and would decrease by 11% every year until 2035, and facilities that go over the limit would face, fines starting at $20 per ton of c o two emissions increasing by $10 plus inflation every year. The fines cannot be passed on to consumers a move to protect elect electricity rate payers. Companies would also have to submit annual reports on their electricity use and energy sources so the EPA can track their emissions.
Don't no. No. That that that that's on the meter. Jesus. That what I'm saying is that they don't need a report by the facility. They can they can just subpoena the bill. They can just subpoena the bill. How much energy was flowing through the transformer at that location? They don't need a report. The announcement on the Senate's website says, quote, energy hungry data centers and crypto mining facilities are overloading our already strained power grid, driving up consumer electricity cost and making it harder for Americans to power their homes and businesses as well as spiking fossil fuel emissions, end quote.
It's interesting to note that a similar event in Norway resulted in very different outcomes than the senator said. The shutdown there of a Bitcoin mining farm in Norway last year caused a steep hike in electricity prices for the town's residents. Fetterman added, quote, fighting to keep The United States at the cutting edge of AI technology and protecting our natural resources for our kids and grandkids are not mutually exclusive goals. The bill looks to help the public, 25 of the fine revenue would go to low income families in energy for energy costs, and the rest would go to clean energy projects like long duration storage and clean power generation firms. And not everyone is happy with the bill, though. Matthew Sigel, head of research at VanEck, calls it a blame the server racks in a Twitter post.
There's also concern that the bill will clash with current political priorities because Trump wants The United States to be the world's most significant Bitcoin mining power, and his sons are reportedly launching their own Bitcoin mining company. And they did, in fact. The Clean Cloud Act has only democratic support so far and may face opposition from Republicans who support the AI in Bitcoin industries. Yeah. There's gonna be a huge clash there, but this is a ridiculous bill in and of itself. It's just as ridiculous as the amount of FUD that I just read you in the last article. It's not going to stop. It's not going to stop, which is probably why you're gonna need a bottle of wine from Peony Lane Vineyards, today's Circle p vendor. The Circle p is open for business. It is where I bring plebs with goods and services like you to plebs like you who might wanna, you know, actually buy those goods and services.
And PNE Lane Vineyards takes Bitcoin for their wine. Yes. They do. If you actual there's a button up at the top. If you go to pandelanewine.com, p e 0 n y lane wine Com. Sorry. I messed up. Pnelanewine.com. At the right hand side at the top, you see a button that says buy with Bitcoin. Yes. You can buy your wine with Bitcoin. And as if if you happen to have, like, a subscription to nature, you can kick back with a bottle or maybe five of these things to read through the absolute lunacy that has been published in nature communications. And then you might actually want to, you know, in your drunken stupor after that, read through the bill that I just talked about.
But minors are doubling down. They're doubling down. I have seen almost no capitulation at all, which has more to do with the price than these idiots out there with their legislation and their FUD. But according to Matt Crosby, Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin miners are in fact doubling down. With all the current bearish sentiment and macroeconomic uncertainty swirling around both Bitcoin and the broader global community, it might come as a surprise to see miners as bullish as ever. For a more in-depth look at this talk topic, you can check out the recent YouTube video here, and they give a link. And all of the things that I read have URLs in the show notes. And if you want to go see the video that they're talking about, just find the URL in the show notes for this show, and it will be right there at the top. But despite Bitcoin's recent price underperformance, the Bitcoin hash rate has been going absolutely vertical, breaking all time highs with seemingly no regard for macro headwinds or sluggish price action. Typically, hash rate is tightly correlated with BTC price. And when the price drops sharply or remains relatively stagnant, hash rate tends to plateau or decline due to the economic pressure.
Yet, now, in the face of heightened global tariffs, economic slowdowns, and a consolidating BTC price, hash rate is accelerating. Historically, this level of divergence between hash rate and price has been rare and often significant. Bitcoin miner difficulty, a close cousin to hash rate, just saw one of the largest single adjustments upward in history. This metric, which auto adjusts to keep Bitcoin's block timing consistent, only increases when more computational power floods the network. A difficulty spike of this magnitude, especially when paired with poor price performance, is nearly unprecedented.
Again, this suggests that miners are investing heavily in infrastructure and resources even when BTC price does not appear to support the decision in the long term. Adding further entry, the hash ribbons indicator, which is a blend of short and long term hash rate moving averages, recently flashed a classic Bitcoin buy signal. When the thirty day moving average crosses above the sixty day line, it signals the end of miner capitulation and the beginning of renewed miner strength. Visually, the background of the chart shifts from red to white when the crossover occurs. This has often marked powerful inflection points for BTC price, and they give a graph here that shows, in fact, exactly what was just described.
What's striking this time around is just how aggressively the thirty day moving average is survey surging away from the sixty day. This is not just a modest recovery. It's a statement from miners that they are betting heavily on the future. So what's fueling the miner frenzy? Well, one plausible explanation is that miners, especially United States based ones, are trying to front run the impact of looming tariffs. Bitmain, the dominant producer of mining equipment, is now in the crosshairs of trade policy. Yay. Trade policy.
That could see equipment prices surge by 30 to 50%, potentially even to a %. And given that over 40% of Bitcoin's hash rate is controlled by US based pools like Foundry USA, Marapool, and Luxor, any cost increase would drastically reduce profit margins. Miners may be aggressively scaling now while hardware is still relatively cheap and available. Hash price, the b BTC denominated revenue per terahash of computational power is at historical lows. In other words, it's never been less profitable in Bitcoin terms to operate as a Bitcoin miner on a per terahash basis. Typically, we see hash price increase towards the tail end of bear markets as competition fades and weaker players exit the space, but that's not happening here.
Despite terrible, and I mean terrible profitability, miners are not only staying online, they're deploying more hash power. This could imply one of two things. Either miners are racing against deteriorating margins to front load BTC accumulation, or, more optimistically, they have strong conviction in Bitcoin's future profitability and are buying the dip aggressively. Well, they're not really buying the dip, are they? They're they're mining the dip, but I I don't know. I guess it could go either way. Whatever. So what's really happening?
Either wait a minute. Wait. That's really weird. My oh, now now I know why. My page jumped on me while I was making that statement. We'll continue tracking these metrics in future updates to see whether this minor conviction is proven right. So this is what I've been wondering about because I I when I run the numbers, one of the things that I tell you about is, like, what, you know, what's the hash rate? And I have not seen any hash rate come offline, like, at all. It's bizarre. And here's what's even more bizarre. Tether, you know, USDT, the stablecoin Tether, well, they've been mining.
And, apparently, they've directed their mining hash rate to the mining pool known as Ocean. Yeah. If you don't know what Ocean is, you probably will find out here in the next few minutes, Atlas twenty one, writing this one. Tether has announced its decision to direct both existing and future hash rate to the Ocean mining pool. Launched in 2023 by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dash junior, Ocean aims to make mining more distributed. The pool is also known for DATEM, an open source software that allows miners to independently build their own block templates. Tether will leverage the DATEM gateway software designed to ensure high performance operations even in bandwidth constrained environments and in addition to building its own block template, Datum allows the aggregation of thousands of connections with low latency ensuring global competitiveness and promoting geographic and operational diversity.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether said, quote, as a company committed to financial freedom and open access, we see supporting decentralization in Bitcoin mining as essential to the network's long term integrity, deploying Hashrate to Ocean aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces, end quote. This comp this commitment builds on Tether's growing presence in Africa, where the company is investing in infrastructure and education with the goal of providing millions of people with the tools needed to access and benefit from digital assets. Give Zangene, VP of mining and energy at Tether, highlighted that the decision to use Ocean is the result of months of in-depth technical evaluations, quote, we believe the datum protocol is the software stack most aligned with Bitcoin's decentralization ethos. If architecture allows us to achieve reliable connectivity even in low bandwidth regions, expanding the reach and resilience of our infrastructure, end quote.
Luke Dash junior said, quote, Tether's involvement is a strong signal that decentralization remains a core priority for Bitcoin's future, and their participation underscores the value of open, censorship resistant mining protocols, end quote. This is much larger deal than than than I think many people think it is. I've seen almost nothing about this on Nostred this morning. Of course, I haven't, you know, spent all that much time because I was prepping the show, but still, I I took a good long scroll through Nostr two times today.
I've I've seen absolutely nothing about Tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer, the seventh largest purchaser of United States Treasury bonds, go into ocean as a mining pool. And by the way, it's not just Luke Dash junior. Oh god. No. What's his name? The the guy that created Tether or, Twitter. Oh my god. I can't believe I'm I'm totally Dorsey. God. Thank you. Jack Dorsey. Block. If I if I remember right, Jack Dorsey's Block company is also invested in Ocean. And people were laughing when Ocean opened up. They were like, you're never gonna get any you're never gonna get any traction. It's gonna be a dead mining pool. Yeah. Datum is great, but, man, you're just gonna get your ass handed to you by Foundry and Mara and whoever else.
And all of a sudden, here comes Tether. This is a big, big, big development. So take it seriously. Meanwhile, let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities, oil, West Texas Intermediate down by point 86% to $60.98. Brent Norsey is down two thirds of a point to $64.37. Natural gas down two and three quarters to $3.43 per thousand cubic feet, but gasoline is up, half a point to just over $2 a gallon. Gold is down two thirds of a point to 20 no. 20. Sorry. $32.23 and a dime. Silver is up a third. Platinum is up one and a half. Copper is up two and a quarter. Palladium is up five and a half percent. And biggest winner today in agricultural futures looks to be lumber no. Coffee, 1.78 to the upside. Biggest loser today is cotton, 2.6% to the downside.
Live cattle is up point 7%. Lean hogs up almost two full points, and feeder cattle is up a full point. The Dow is up half a point, and that was on some some turmoil this morning that looked like it could've it looked like the markets were gonna break either way. And it looks like for now, they're still in the green. S and P is up a half a point. Nasdaq is up point one eight percent, and the S and P Mini is up a half point as well. We are at $84,450 on a, price of Bitcoin. That is a $1,680,000,000,000 market cap. You can purchase 26 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,851,054.02 of an average fees per block remain low at 0.04 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis. There are three blocks carrying 5,400 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear high priority rates, three satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at one. And the hash rate has dipped below 900, but it's still at 893 exahashes per second.
Let's see. What was the, what was that? Okay. So the last difficulty change did occur nine days ago, and it was a huge upwards adjustment of 6.8%. That's that's a big one. I mean, it's still single digit, but that that's huge adjustment. And generally speaking, after adjustments, we tend to see the, hash rate kinda fall a little bit so that there's nothing unusual here. Now from the or or however you pronounce it, which was, oh, Thursdays? Yeah. Because I don't think I did a show on Friday. Thursday's Bitcoin and Mike Clear tried to give me 33,333 sats, but it didn't go through.
Sorry, Mike. I didn't get your sats. I would have loved to have had them, but, you know, hey. You tried, so you still get what you said said on here on the show. He says, make it up for lost boosts. Keep it up, brother. Well, this one got lost too there, Mike, but I still appreciate it. Axelrod with one thousand twenty one says, great show. Thank you for sifting through the turd fields of news to sift out the diamonds in the dust storm. Could you recommend your short list of media outlets that you trust? I know no bullshit Bitcoin, CoinDesk, etcetera. So much value you bring from separations separating the signal from the noise. Viva La Bitcoin revolution.
Thank you, Axelrod. Bitcoin Magazine, Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Decrypt, The Block, Atlas twenty one, Bitcoin News, Lightning News, and no bullshit Bitcoin are my go tos, but that doesn't mean that I won't read something from somebody else like Fortune or, you know, CNBC if if I need to. Turkey with 500 says nothing. Yodle with 444 says, Psyduck. Thank you, sir, from Pies. Four twenty. No. Thank you. Perma Nerd says Fiat equity markets are a casino. However, if you're looking for high quality hand produced maple syrup, maple trade is not a gamble, and he's correct. I love maple trade stuff.
Good morning, team. Matt f r l. Hundred sats. Thank you there. And I think that's it. Yep. That that's that is the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Yeah. We're gonna talk a little bit about, some Shitcoin debacle that occurred, I I guess, over the weekend. Let let's find out. Layer one mantras token falls 90% in a sudden crash. The team blames reckless liquidations. Well, I imagine people got rug pulled. And this is why I bring you stories like this to remind you it's Bitcoin only. Because this this thing that we're gonna talk about has been around since 02/2020.
It's a five year old shitcoin. It took them five years to rug everybody because they were playing the long con. I can't prove it. Don't sue me. Zach Abrams writing this one for the block. The token of real world asset focused layer one blockchain mantra, and that's the OM token. If you have probably seen something called OM lately, it's down 91.23% right now. It dramatically collapsed in price on Sunday, crashing over 90% in a matter of hours and leaving investors scrambling to access or to assess the fallout. The OM token, which began trading in August of twenty twenty, dipped about 10% between 5PM UTC and 06:20 UTC according to the block's mantra price page, then suddenly crashed from its then value of $5.21 down to its current value of 50¢.
A stunning 90% plummet over the course of just ninety minutes. A message posted by community lead, Dustin McDaniel, downplayed allegations that the Mantra team sold shortly before the project's public facing telegram group became inaccessible. Quote, I do not know anything until team has had time to look into the price drop, end quote, McDaniel acknowledged in a Telegram message to the block. Mantra's ex account posted an update at 08:51PM UTC on Sunday night. Quote, today's activity was triggered by wreck reckless liquidations, not anything to do with the project, Mantra wrote.
The project's cofounder, John Mullen, cited a, quote, massive forced liquidation from a large o m investor on a centralized exchange. Still working on the details, but we are here and we're fixing this. Mantra had previously faced allegations of controlling large portions of the token circulating supply or float in an attempt to manipulate the token's price. Mullen rebuffed the allegations in a response post on Twitter, quote, OM has been in circulation since August of twenty twenty, longer than most of these people have even been in crypto, end quote. Mullen recently touted the project's strategic partnership with Dubai based property development company, DAMAC, in an interview with Crypto.News.
Quote, beyond compliance, we're driving real world adoption through strategic partnerships, most notably with Dimak Group recently committing to tokenize more than $1,000,000,000 in Dubai real estate, Mullen told the publication. Well, some investors pointed to Mantra's total value locked of only around $13,000,000 compared to its token's fully diluted value of 9,500,000,000.0 according to Defi Llama data as a possible warning sign. Yeah. You think? Well, Twitter user Insomniac governance lead for growth firm, Castle Labs, identified three wallets that have sent millions of dollars worth of 0 m tokens to the exchange, OKX, and Binance in recent days indicating possible sales.
One wallet received around $36,000,000 worth of OM tokens from a Binance address on March when transferred, the when which then transferred around 4,300,000.0 tokens to OKX across eight transactions on Saturday, which was the day before all this shit broke free. Right? So six members of the Mantra DAO had been previously ordered by a Hong Kong court to disclose financial records related to the project after having been accused of misappropriating Dow assets in a lawsuit. Yeah. You got rugged, man. Mullen and the Mantra team did not immediately respond for a request for comment. Yeah. Probably because they're packing their bags and stuffing all the money that they stole from all the idiots out there thinking that o m was gonna be the next Bitcoin.
No. Everything but Bitcoin is the next way you're going to lose your money. That's the only next about it. It's ridiculous that people keep falling for this, and they're going to continue to fall for it. Just, dude, just buy the Bitcoin and and stay humble and stack Sats or whatever. But, you know, take take Meta Planet's lead here, in fact, because Meta Planet becomes the tenth largest public Bitcoin holder with their latest Bitcoin buy, James Van Stratten, writing this one from CoinDesk. Meta Planet added 319 Bitcoin to its treasury. The Japanese firm made its latest buy at an average price of 83,147 per coin.
The latest purchase puts the company's total holdings to 4,525 Bitcoin with an aggregate cost of $408,100,000 and an average acquisition price of $90,194 per coin. So they're they're underwater on this one. Not on this particular buy, but on their aggregate aggregate average, price per coin, Meta Planet's underwater. But the move is part of Meta Planet's broader Bitcoin treasury operation strategy, which was launched in December of twenty twenty four. So now Meta Planet has moved into the number 10 spot. Interesting. They're not gonna slow down, I don't think.
Okay. So I got this one from no bullshit Bitcoin. Trump signs a resolution blocking the Internal Revenue Service reporting rule for DeFi brokers. Talked about this on the show before. It looks like he's gonna block this thing. On December twenty seventh of twenty twenty four, the Department of Treasury issued last minute regulations establishing reporting requirements for, quote, trading front end service providers involved in digital asset transactions. Now these regulations were created under the Biden administration's infrastructure investment and jobs act and aimed to crack down on cryptocurrency users who may have been failing to pay their taxes.
The reporting requirements were set to take effect in 2026 and required non custodial services to file a form ten ninety nine and follow the same reporting rules as securities brokers and custodial digit digital asset trading platform operators even though they differ from traditional businesses and do not collect the user information needed to comply with those new rules. Earlier in the year, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas and representative Mike Casey of Ohio introduced joint resolution, h j 25 to overturn the new IRS reporting requirements. Then on February 26, resolution 25 passed out of ways and means committee with a vote of 26 to 16 with every committee democrat present voting no.
On March, the house passed resolution 25 with a vote of 292 to a 32. On March, the senate passed resolution 25 with a vote of 70 to 28. And on Thursday, president Trump has signed the resolution repealing the controversial rule making, quote, the defi broker rule needlessly hindered American innovation, infringed on the privacy of everyday Americans, and was set to overwhelm the IRS with an overflow of new filings that it does not have the infrastructure to handle during tax season. And by repealing this misguided rule. President Trump and Congress have given the IRS an opportunity to return its focus to the duties and obligations it already owes to American taxpayers instead of creating a new series of hurdles. I thank president Trump for signing this important bill into law and crypto czar, Zacks, for his leadership in supporting America's continued place as the global leader in the emerging crypto industry according to what representative Mike Carey said.
The move marks the first cryptocurrency bill ever signed into law through congress as well as the very first tax related congressional review act of disapproval enacted in The United States. So this is a big one. I mean, they just completely repealed that whole rule, and people were very, very concerned about that, and rightly so. Now if they can just repeal this whole real ID thing that if you don't have if you're not a holder of a real ID come May, then you ain't flying. I think it's bullshit. I I I expected more from this administration than to have that idiot from Homeland Security come out and do a little dance and tell me that it was my duty to do this for the American public safety.
I call bullshit. I don't want a real ID. I mean, essentially, it looks the exact same as a regular driver's license, I guess, other than it's got probably got a stamp that says real ID, and I've gotta provide, like, I think, two more pieces of information alongside what I've already given them. Otherwise, I can't fly on a plane, which is kinda fine by me because I hate flying. They destroyed flying post 09:11. It's no fun anymore. There's no adventure. It's just I don't know. It's like being at a bus station now. Anyway, BTCPay Server version 2.1 is out with new multisig.
It's got integrations. It's got fee accelerations and more. So if you didn't know, BTCPay Server is a free and open source Bitcoin payment processor that comes with a variety of useful plugins and integrations. It allows you to accept Bitcoin without extra fees or intermediaries. This is an old project, and I've been in love with it ever since it came out. This update includes a redesigned interface for multisig wallets. It removes Zcash and Monero from the core code base by turning them into plug ins and enhances fee acceleration capabilities. Oh, so they majorly cleaned up their code by taking out those 2 shit coins, which at the time, I I know people get they get really upset when I talk badly about Zcash and Monero.
Okay. Look. I'm going to admit one thing. While I've never held either of them, if I had to go to a different cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, it would probably be one of those two. And the reason is this. They have basically fair launches. They really weren't marketed. I mean, not not to the degree that something like OM Coin was marketed where they're doing deals with Visa and, like, Dubai, shit like that. Generally speaking, the people that started those or that were part of the development team of those things, they were pretty good Bitcoiners. They just wanted a little bit more privacy.
So I don't hate them. I still think they're shit coins, but not to the degree that I think Ethereum is actually the mother of all shit coins. But Zcash and Monero, if I had to, if I had to use something else, it would probably be one of those two. I ain't never, under any circumstances, will I ever even consider using Ethereum. You can be damn sure of that one. Okay. On to LNbits version one point zero point zero. So they have gotten to version one now. Stable, it's hardened, and it's production ready, y'all. L n bits is a free and open source Python server that functions as a lightning wallet and account system.
It is compatible with nearly all lightning funding sources and offers a powerful suite of Bitcoin tools. By the way, this is both this story and the previous story are coming out of no b sbitcoin.com. That's no b s bitcoin as in no bullshit. It's because it's no bullshit Bitcoin, but it the website is no bsbitcoin.com. Please go there and donate to their site so they keep it up and running so I can get my news to give to you. So after five years and over 6,000 commits, LNbits has reached a momentous milestone. Version one is here.
LNbits is officially out of beta. Yeehaw, y'all. Congratulations, man. This version of LNbits includes a complete front end overhaul for enhanced performance and long term maintainability. It also features back end refactors, improved database handling, type hinting, and extension logic. Additionally, it offers WebSocket payments. Oh, sweet. Support for Nostr Wallet Connect, the option for Nostr or OAuth login, improved admin and developer tools, and much more. Quote, we want to offer a heartfelt thank you to every contributor, developer, tester, and user from those running l m bits for personal use to the communities of business who rely on it every day.
Your feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and support have made l n bits what it is today as was stated in the blog post. So what's new? Well, it reaches it's out of beta. That's new. View three migration, a complete front end overhaul for performance and long term maintainability, the aforementioned WebSocket payments, new l n bits install script, control access list, Nostra Wallet Connect, login with Nostra or OAuth, a whole fleet of admin tools, fiat and exchange upgrades, u x and u I improvements, developer tools and internal enhancements, maintenance, and fixes, and you can get the full chain log change log if you go to the show notes and you, hit the URL for the story. It'll take you right to no bullshit bitcoin.com, and you can read the change log for yourself. I cannot wait to get into this.
Okay. Last up for today, Liana wallet has reached version 10. Wallet backups and dependencies update. It is a Bitcoin wallet that uses mini script output descriptors with extensive use of relative time locks. It features a time locked recovery path for coins and can be used for inheritance, decaying, and expanding multisigs, and safer backups. It's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Thank god. It introduces backup functionality for the entire wallet, including descriptors, the aliases, and labels allowing for allowing for easy wallet backup migration and synchronization with new devices. It updates the Rust and ICE dependencies for the GUI and Leonad.
A feature, has been added to Liana's safety net for retail partners, allowing them to offer a paid service where they keep a recovery key for Liana users in case of lost access to funds. Quote, as always, we welcome your feedback. You can reach out to them on both their GitHub repository, Telegram, and Discord groups. And that's yeah. That's it. I have not I have not used Liana wallet, so I'm not gonna say much more about it, but it is out there, and I have liked the fact that people have described it being used or the potential use for inheritance. I think that that's a neat feature.
But other than that, what I'm really excited about out of this list is the new LNbits. Congratulations to the LNbits team for getting to version one and officially getting out of beta. You guys have a wonderful week, and I will 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 09:27AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the April. Wow. Tomorrow is tax day twenty twenty five. And this is episode ten seventy three of Bitcoin. And today is basically a mining day. There's lots of stuff going on with mining that's in the news and I just couldn't get away from it. So, the first half of this show is basically going to be mining and then we'll do some other news in the back half. And that's why you're here. This is Bitcoin and because other stuff is going on in the world other than the price of Bitcoin. And even that, even that, the first thing that we're going to start off with is gonna lead us into mining and it doesn't have that damn thing to do with mining, but it did steam my beans because Nostr was not mentioned a single time in this Cointelegraph article that is titled bots are killing social media, but decentralization can save it. And this is Leroy Hoefer writing for Cointelegraph.
As the old wisdom goes, nobody knows you're a dog on the Internet. Often enough, nobody knows if you're a bot either to the point where the dead Internet theory sometimes feels disturbingly tangible. Bot traffic shares hit its highest level in 2024, up 2% from the year before according to a 2024 Imperva Badbot report. The bot pandemic is ravaging the web, and people are taking notice. People like Changpeng Zhao, for example, who recently urged Elon butt Musk to ban bots on Twitter. He's not the only one in the web three community to call for such measures, and rightly so. From artificially inflating engagement metrics to orchestrating scams, bots are quickly drowning out real human interactions, and it's at a time when our lives drift more and more into the online world.
While platform owners continue to roll out AI driven moderation and paywalls to curb bot activity, these solutions fail to address the root problem. Moderation tools also regularly operate with minimal transparency incorrectly flagging legitimate content without users ever knowing why users also often have to surrender personal data to prove that they are not bots raising privacy concerns and creating barriers to participation, and more problems are being made. And a decentralized approach is the only viable path forward. If left to fester, the rise of bots will create repercussions that go way beyond social media.
Companies pouring money into digital marketing will see their budgets wasted on fake engagement. It's even possible to imagine a dirty trick where a rival would use bots to waste the competitors' money by feeding them fake impressions. This already happens in the digital advertising space. People are and will continue to become more suspicious of online interactions, making it harder for authentic creators and businesses to earn trust. The user experience also suffers. As automated noise drowns out meaningful discussions, users may eventually abandon social media for good.
We need to deal with the bot problem for all these and other reasons once and for all. Social media giants have been using centralized moderation strategies to tackle the bot issue for quite some time. AI driven detection systems serve as the first line of defense. They're far from perfect. Bots are getting smarter, often slipping through the cracks by mimicking human behavior and bypassing safeguards. On top of that, false positives can lead to unfair restrictions on genuine users. Oh, the mighty ban hammer, a weapon from a more civilized age. Another common tactic is the implementation of paywalls like Twitter's verification fees, which, you know, requires users to pay for authentication.
This method raises the financial hurdle for bot operators, but it also creates a two tiered system that disadvantages users who can't or won't pay. Paywalls do little to defer to deter well funded bot farms that could easily overlook these costs. While these measures are well meaning, they often miss the mark when balancing security with user accessibility. A decentralized model hands the reins back to the users and offers an alternative to having centralized entities decide what's real and what's not. Using blockchain based decentralization identity or DID and reputation systems, platforms can verify real users without compromising their privacy.
Decentralized solutions reduce the need for unclear moderation policies that empower people to control their own digital reputations across different platforms. DID solutions enable users to verify their authenticity through cryptographic attestations so intrusive know your customer processes are unnecessary And reputation based systems can help strengthen bot resistance by rewarding verified users with more social credibility while shrinking the impact of suspicious accounts. The real advantage here is that these systems operate transparently, preventing centralized authorities from imposing rules that may prioritize corporate interests over user rights.
The bot problem isn't just a hassle. It's a fundamental threat to the integrity of social media. The challenge is finding a solution that gets rid of bots without getting rid of free speech and user control. Centralized solutions are failing. Even worse, centralized systems introduce new problems under the guise of security. A decentralized, data driven approach enables people to authenticate themselves on their own terms, making bot driven manipulation much harder. We urgently need to move beyond the current system and push for decentralized solutions that protect users and bring authenticity back to social media.
If social media is to be a space for genuine human in interaction, it has to go decentralized before the bots make it useless. Alright. So there's there's two things about this article that I wanna hit on. One is, is it possible that we are seeing a general death of social media? Is it? I mean, I know that sounds ludicrous, but follow me along here. I've been booted off of Twitter three times. I mean, like like permanent lifetime bans on three accounts. Right? And I ain't the only one. If I was the only one, I'd probably feel like like a heel for having been booted off of Twitter for saying stupid things, but I'm not the only one. What I mean? Shit. Labra Huddle, you know, is is an account on Twitter that I think he's up to 15 accounts that has been banned.
You know, and American HODL is another account on Twitter that's been banned multiple times. I think he's on his eighth one. You know? So when when I finally got booted off that third time, that was right around the time that Nostr, which is a one of the things that it can do is function like a decentralized social media platform. It's so much more than that that I don't like calling Nostr social media. It is a decentralized communications network that is capable of expanding to every form of media you can possibly imagine. That's beyond social media, but for right now, the discussion is about social media.
When I found Nostra, I was like, okay. Well, I I guess this is where I'm gonna live, and then I really started to like it. And I've talked about those reasons on several occasions here, and I'm not gonna rehash them all. But I've I've found a a sincere, genuine place that I was never gonna be able to be deleted from and everything everything is I get much more authentic interactions with actual people. Are there bots on Nostra? You betcha. I'm subscribed to quite a few bots. You know, some of them are news bots. Some of them are like chart bots, but we haven't really seen a a complete and total inundation of active bot flooding into Nostra. Not yet. We will.
But everything that this article is saying, Nostra already safeguards against this stuff. We have web of trust. We have the ability to authenticate ourselves in in many manners that we see fit. Most reliably is the public private key pair, the in sec and the in pub key pair specifically for Nostra. But the web of trust stuff, you know, some people just completely poo poo it. I think it's it's a brilliant addition, and you can use it how you want. So what I'm weird about here is that this article said absolutely nothing about Nostr, but it also said nothing about any other platform either. It never mentioned the Fediverse or Mastodon, ostensibly Blue Sky is somehow or another kind of open source, kinda. I'm not exactly sure, but we already have these decentralized solutions, and the person that's writing this is is listing the problems but not giving a solution. The solution to all this is to go over to Nostr.
Now let's get back to the original question. Is social media dying? Every time I go back to Twitter, it is not the same Twitter that I got booted off from. It's not fun anymore. It's it it's just garbage. It's just complete crap. And I'm no longer addicted to it. Thank god. Because I found Noster, but here's the rub. I find myself not posting to Noster as much as I used to post to Noster, and I certainly do not post to Noster as much as I used to post to Twitter. And then I started thinking, oh, shit. Does that mean Nostr's gonna die? No. I think Nostr was the savior for social media because it did break the addiction.
It broke the addiction of the algorithm. And I don't think that we give Fiat Joffe and the protocol of Noster that he created enough credit for saving a lot of our skins. I mean, it didn't save our lives, but, basically, I bet you there's a lot of people out there who are, like, going, yeah. I kinda spend way too much time on Twitter or whatever. I I barely even touch Facebook or or Instagram or anything else. I'm basically Nostra only, but I'm not posting all that much, not like I used to. And I'm thinking that the addiction has been broken. That that's what I'm saying, but I don't think that social media is going to die. I do think centralized social media is going to die, but I don't I don't see humans just giving up on interacting with other humans in a digital space.
That, I don't think, is ever going to happen. So if you have not tried Nostra, if you're getting your fill with the rest of this stuff, you really do. It's it's not hard. It really is not hard at all to get on Nostra. In fact, I've got, let's see here. I'm gonna go over here. It's n as in Nancy, start Me. N start Me. Just go to nstart.me, and it will just walk you through it. It it's like a four or five I don't I can't remember how many steps it is, but it takes you step by step. And and, honestly, from end to end, you should be done inside of the, like, a minute or two minutes and understand what it is that's happened, what it is that you need to save, where it is that you need to save it, and then how to use it. And then it's all done. You've got you you're you're signed up to Noster, for lack of a better phrase. Right? So give it a shot because while I'm a little weirded out that the that the article didn't once once mention Nostr, the the the conclusions are correct. What we're we're seeing the absolute evisceration of the old school centralized social media platforms.
Now as I promised, we're gonna get into mining, and we're gonna start it off with mining FUD. And we're talking about Bitcoin mining, of course. And Harvard is leading the way this time. Vince De Aquino is writing this one for decrypt. Harvard led study reveals Bitcoin mining spreads air pollution interstate. It's interstate air pollution this time, guys. They're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, but a new study has found that Bitcoin mining produces harmful air pollutants with fine particles from the facilities crossing state borders affecting areas far from the mines themselves.
Between August 2022 and July 2023, '1 point '9 million Americans were exposed to significant levels of these fine particles according to researchers behind a groundbreaking study published in Nature Communications. I'm pausing right here because I need to tell you, if this is Nature Communications that is part of the umbrella of the scientific journal Nature, that's one of the top actually, that's one of the top two. There's there's the two main scientific journals in the world, not just The United States, but in the scientific community, which spans all manner of countries, is the journal named Science and the journal named Nature.
You get into either one of these magazines at for, like, your, like, you know, your first time that you published to either one of these, journals, your career is basically made. And if you have to retract an article, your your, reputation takes a really big hit. So if this is Nature Communications as part of the Nature family of publications, then a lot of people are reading this. So be aware, this isn't Bob's backyard biochemistry journal, guys. This has got a lot of eyeballs on it. So buckle up. Communities affected include New York City, the Houston Austin Metropolitan area, Northeast Texas, and areas along the Illinois Kentucky border.
The research team led by doctor Francisca Domenici at Harvard's T. H. Chan School of Public Health found that Bitcoin mines frequently cause increased electricity production from fossil fuel power plants. Compiling data from the 34 largest Bitcoin mines operating in The United States, the researchers claim that a Bitcoin mine in one state can trigger a power plant in another to burn more coal or gas, sending pollution to another state entirely. This creates a frustrating situation for those affected. For example, electricity consumed by a mine in North Carolina induced operations at a coal fired plant in Kentucky, which then affected air quality in Illinois.
With residents having no immediate recourse against either the mine or the power plant. But because affected areas are not from the same state where the pollutants originate, the situation produces a regulatory gap. A number of possible policy mechanisms could help ease the challenge of cross state pollution, doctor Scott Delaney, one of the authors, told Decrypt in an email interview, quote, but these policies require federal action, end quote. Delaney specifically suggested the United States Environmental Protection Agency could issue a good neighbor rule for PM 2.5, also known as fine particle air pollution.
Such a rule would require upwind states to control power plant emissions more aggressively. Programs that incentivize responsible siting of mining facilities and data centers could also be launched to lessen negative health effects Delaney suggested. The study's findings could also apply beyond crypto. Last month, Decrypt reported a decline in earnings among publicly traded bitcoin mining firms. This trend has led some of those miners to pivot from crypto to artificial intelligence bitcoin mines and AI infrastructure both require large data centers and much of the equipment used to mine bitcoin tokens can be repurposed for other applications.
What? No. No. No. See. No. This is Delaney talking. No. It can't. Bitcoin mine Bitcoin mining equipment solves one thing, SHA two fifty six. That's it. That's all it does. That's all it will ever be able to do. And there's not a whole lot of call for AI using SHA two fifty six unless you're just going to continuously reauthenticate your login credentials to chat g p t, but come on. That's not gonna happen. There's no reason for it. See, this is a Harvard guy, and he doesn't understand a fundamental issue of Bitcoin mining. This is freaking amazing.
The study comes as US president Donald Trump has spurred momentum in support of the crypto industry. On the campaign trail to a second term, Trump met with Bitcoin miners, and he sent said he wants all Bitcoin to be made in America. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we've heard that one before. This is just yet one more issue of FUD that is designed to cause Bitcoin infrastructure problems. But this is I I have no idea where they're getting their information from. There there's no way you can track this shit. So at this point see and and here's the issue. You know, my taxpayer dollars, because it's Harvard led, that's a United States institution, They were funded by some type of grant. They didn't pull the money out of their own pocket. And I guarantee you, Harvard also themselves, like, from their endowment fund or whatever, they didn't pay for these researchers to do this work either.
This money, it came from my taxes. And if you live in The United States, it came from your taxes. And guess what? Unless you've got a $1,500 subscription a year to Nature, you're not reading this article. And that's why what was it? Schwartz, Aaron Schwartz. That's why he was arrested ostensibly because he was he was scraping, I believe, the MIT computers for, like, every well, actually, I I think he was using m I the MIT, point into the Internet to run a bot that or something, like, some kind of a program that he had built to scrape these papers, like, the the whole paper, not just the abstract, but, like, the whole body, all of the graphics, everything from paper from Elsevier and, like, which I think is a publisher of both Nature and Science.
But there's, like, three or four publishing houses, and they do all the scientific publishing. And he was scraping them all. And they said that they arrested him for that. But his his defense was the American people and the in in a real way, the the people of the world, the citizenry in one form or another has has paid for this research, and it is their right to be able to review this research. I'm not gonna be able to read this paper. I have no idea how they've come to determine that a Bitcoin mine in one state kicked on a coal fired plant in another state, which then polluted a third state.
But this the the FUD is it's like the poor in Jesus, what Jesus told us. The poor will always be with you, and so will the FUD. But now we've got a new bill by two US senators that are targeting Bitcoin mining as well as artificial intelligence. And this is Alex Larry writing for Bitcoin news. A new bill has been introduced by in the United States Senate to address the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining and artificial intelligence data centers. Dubbed the Clean Cloud Act, the legislation is being led by senators Sheldon White house and John Fetterman. If passed, the bill would set carbon emission standards for energy guzzling compute facilities across the country, and the Clean Cloud Act is aimed at reducing pollution caused by the increasing power demands of Bitcoin miners and AI data centers, which the senators believe are putting more and more strain on the nation's power grid.
This is despite numerous studies and reports that show Bitcoin mining actually helps stabilize power grids and drive the development of green energy facilities. The bill would require the United States Environmental Protection Agency to set regional carbon emissions caps for data centers and Bitcoin mining operations with more than 100 kilowatts of capacity. Pausing right there. A hundred kilowatts is nothing. That's every miner. That's that's like every miner. Like, you're you're getting up into, like, a small the the amount of energy that a small retail shop, you know, air conditioning in the summer might actually use.
I mean, a hundred kilowatts is nothing. Maybe they meant megawatts. I'd I but but I doubt it. I think they actually mean a hundred kilowatts, but that is a tiny, tiny mine. But these caps would be based on local electricity sources and would decrease by 11% every year until 2035, and facilities that go over the limit would face, fines starting at $20 per ton of c o two emissions increasing by $10 plus inflation every year. The fines cannot be passed on to consumers a move to protect elect electricity rate payers. Companies would also have to submit annual reports on their electricity use and energy sources so the EPA can track their emissions.
Don't no. No. That that that that's on the meter. Jesus. That what I'm saying is that they don't need a report by the facility. They can they can just subpoena the bill. They can just subpoena the bill. How much energy was flowing through the transformer at that location? They don't need a report. The announcement on the Senate's website says, quote, energy hungry data centers and crypto mining facilities are overloading our already strained power grid, driving up consumer electricity cost and making it harder for Americans to power their homes and businesses as well as spiking fossil fuel emissions, end quote.
It's interesting to note that a similar event in Norway resulted in very different outcomes than the senator said. The shutdown there of a Bitcoin mining farm in Norway last year caused a steep hike in electricity prices for the town's residents. Fetterman added, quote, fighting to keep The United States at the cutting edge of AI technology and protecting our natural resources for our kids and grandkids are not mutually exclusive goals. The bill looks to help the public, 25 of the fine revenue would go to low income families in energy for energy costs, and the rest would go to clean energy projects like long duration storage and clean power generation firms. And not everyone is happy with the bill, though. Matthew Sigel, head of research at VanEck, calls it a blame the server racks in a Twitter post.
There's also concern that the bill will clash with current political priorities because Trump wants The United States to be the world's most significant Bitcoin mining power, and his sons are reportedly launching their own Bitcoin mining company. And they did, in fact. The Clean Cloud Act has only democratic support so far and may face opposition from Republicans who support the AI in Bitcoin industries. Yeah. There's gonna be a huge clash there, but this is a ridiculous bill in and of itself. It's just as ridiculous as the amount of FUD that I just read you in the last article. It's not going to stop. It's not going to stop, which is probably why you're gonna need a bottle of wine from Peony Lane Vineyards, today's Circle p vendor. The Circle p is open for business. It is where I bring plebs with goods and services like you to plebs like you who might wanna, you know, actually buy those goods and services.
And PNE Lane Vineyards takes Bitcoin for their wine. Yes. They do. If you actual there's a button up at the top. If you go to pandelanewine.com, p e 0 n y lane wine Com. Sorry. I messed up. Pnelanewine.com. At the right hand side at the top, you see a button that says buy with Bitcoin. Yes. You can buy your wine with Bitcoin. And as if if you happen to have, like, a subscription to nature, you can kick back with a bottle or maybe five of these things to read through the absolute lunacy that has been published in nature communications. And then you might actually want to, you know, in your drunken stupor after that, read through the bill that I just talked about.
But minors are doubling down. They're doubling down. I have seen almost no capitulation at all, which has more to do with the price than these idiots out there with their legislation and their FUD. But according to Matt Crosby, Bitcoin Magazine, Bitcoin miners are in fact doubling down. With all the current bearish sentiment and macroeconomic uncertainty swirling around both Bitcoin and the broader global community, it might come as a surprise to see miners as bullish as ever. For a more in-depth look at this talk topic, you can check out the recent YouTube video here, and they give a link. And all of the things that I read have URLs in the show notes. And if you want to go see the video that they're talking about, just find the URL in the show notes for this show, and it will be right there at the top. But despite Bitcoin's recent price underperformance, the Bitcoin hash rate has been going absolutely vertical, breaking all time highs with seemingly no regard for macro headwinds or sluggish price action. Typically, hash rate is tightly correlated with BTC price. And when the price drops sharply or remains relatively stagnant, hash rate tends to plateau or decline due to the economic pressure.
Yet, now, in the face of heightened global tariffs, economic slowdowns, and a consolidating BTC price, hash rate is accelerating. Historically, this level of divergence between hash rate and price has been rare and often significant. Bitcoin miner difficulty, a close cousin to hash rate, just saw one of the largest single adjustments upward in history. This metric, which auto adjusts to keep Bitcoin's block timing consistent, only increases when more computational power floods the network. A difficulty spike of this magnitude, especially when paired with poor price performance, is nearly unprecedented.
Again, this suggests that miners are investing heavily in infrastructure and resources even when BTC price does not appear to support the decision in the long term. Adding further entry, the hash ribbons indicator, which is a blend of short and long term hash rate moving averages, recently flashed a classic Bitcoin buy signal. When the thirty day moving average crosses above the sixty day line, it signals the end of miner capitulation and the beginning of renewed miner strength. Visually, the background of the chart shifts from red to white when the crossover occurs. This has often marked powerful inflection points for BTC price, and they give a graph here that shows, in fact, exactly what was just described.
What's striking this time around is just how aggressively the thirty day moving average is survey surging away from the sixty day. This is not just a modest recovery. It's a statement from miners that they are betting heavily on the future. So what's fueling the miner frenzy? Well, one plausible explanation is that miners, especially United States based ones, are trying to front run the impact of looming tariffs. Bitmain, the dominant producer of mining equipment, is now in the crosshairs of trade policy. Yay. Trade policy.
That could see equipment prices surge by 30 to 50%, potentially even to a %. And given that over 40% of Bitcoin's hash rate is controlled by US based pools like Foundry USA, Marapool, and Luxor, any cost increase would drastically reduce profit margins. Miners may be aggressively scaling now while hardware is still relatively cheap and available. Hash price, the b BTC denominated revenue per terahash of computational power is at historical lows. In other words, it's never been less profitable in Bitcoin terms to operate as a Bitcoin miner on a per terahash basis. Typically, we see hash price increase towards the tail end of bear markets as competition fades and weaker players exit the space, but that's not happening here.
Despite terrible, and I mean terrible profitability, miners are not only staying online, they're deploying more hash power. This could imply one of two things. Either miners are racing against deteriorating margins to front load BTC accumulation, or, more optimistically, they have strong conviction in Bitcoin's future profitability and are buying the dip aggressively. Well, they're not really buying the dip, are they? They're they're mining the dip, but I I don't know. I guess it could go either way. Whatever. So what's really happening?
Either wait a minute. Wait. That's really weird. My oh, now now I know why. My page jumped on me while I was making that statement. We'll continue tracking these metrics in future updates to see whether this minor conviction is proven right. So this is what I've been wondering about because I I when I run the numbers, one of the things that I tell you about is, like, what, you know, what's the hash rate? And I have not seen any hash rate come offline, like, at all. It's bizarre. And here's what's even more bizarre. Tether, you know, USDT, the stablecoin Tether, well, they've been mining.
And, apparently, they've directed their mining hash rate to the mining pool known as Ocean. Yeah. If you don't know what Ocean is, you probably will find out here in the next few minutes, Atlas twenty one, writing this one. Tether has announced its decision to direct both existing and future hash rate to the Ocean mining pool. Launched in 2023 by Bitcoin core developer Luke Dash junior, Ocean aims to make mining more distributed. The pool is also known for DATEM, an open source software that allows miners to independently build their own block templates. Tether will leverage the DATEM gateway software designed to ensure high performance operations even in bandwidth constrained environments and in addition to building its own block template, Datum allows the aggregation of thousands of connections with low latency ensuring global competitiveness and promoting geographic and operational diversity.
Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether said, quote, as a company committed to financial freedom and open access, we see supporting decentralization in Bitcoin mining as essential to the network's long term integrity, deploying Hashrate to Ocean aligns with both our mining investments and our broader mission to fortify Bitcoin against centralizing forces, end quote. This comp this commitment builds on Tether's growing presence in Africa, where the company is investing in infrastructure and education with the goal of providing millions of people with the tools needed to access and benefit from digital assets. Give Zangene, VP of mining and energy at Tether, highlighted that the decision to use Ocean is the result of months of in-depth technical evaluations, quote, we believe the datum protocol is the software stack most aligned with Bitcoin's decentralization ethos. If architecture allows us to achieve reliable connectivity even in low bandwidth regions, expanding the reach and resilience of our infrastructure, end quote.
Luke Dash junior said, quote, Tether's involvement is a strong signal that decentralization remains a core priority for Bitcoin's future, and their participation underscores the value of open, censorship resistant mining protocols, end quote. This is much larger deal than than than I think many people think it is. I've seen almost nothing about this on Nostred this morning. Of course, I haven't, you know, spent all that much time because I was prepping the show, but still, I I took a good long scroll through Nostr two times today.
I've I've seen absolutely nothing about Tether, the world's largest stablecoin issuer, the seventh largest purchaser of United States Treasury bonds, go into ocean as a mining pool. And by the way, it's not just Luke Dash junior. Oh god. No. What's his name? The the guy that created Tether or, Twitter. Oh my god. I can't believe I'm I'm totally Dorsey. God. Thank you. Jack Dorsey. Block. If I if I remember right, Jack Dorsey's Block company is also invested in Ocean. And people were laughing when Ocean opened up. They were like, you're never gonna get any you're never gonna get any traction. It's gonna be a dead mining pool. Yeah. Datum is great, but, man, you're just gonna get your ass handed to you by Foundry and Mara and whoever else.
And all of a sudden, here comes Tether. This is a big, big, big development. So take it seriously. Meanwhile, let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities, oil, West Texas Intermediate down by point 86% to $60.98. Brent Norsey is down two thirds of a point to $64.37. Natural gas down two and three quarters to $3.43 per thousand cubic feet, but gasoline is up, half a point to just over $2 a gallon. Gold is down two thirds of a point to 20 no. 20. Sorry. $32.23 and a dime. Silver is up a third. Platinum is up one and a half. Copper is up two and a quarter. Palladium is up five and a half percent. And biggest winner today in agricultural futures looks to be lumber no. Coffee, 1.78 to the upside. Biggest loser today is cotton, 2.6% to the downside.
Live cattle is up point 7%. Lean hogs up almost two full points, and feeder cattle is up a full point. The Dow is up half a point, and that was on some some turmoil this morning that looked like it could've it looked like the markets were gonna break either way. And it looks like for now, they're still in the green. S and P is up a half a point. Nasdaq is up point one eight percent, and the S and P Mini is up a half point as well. We are at $84,450 on a, price of Bitcoin. That is a $1,680,000,000,000 market cap. You can purchase 26 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,851,054.02 of an average fees per block remain low at 0.04 BTC taking in fees on a per block basis. There are three blocks carrying 5,400 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear high priority rates, three satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at one. And the hash rate has dipped below 900, but it's still at 893 exahashes per second.
Let's see. What was the, what was that? Okay. So the last difficulty change did occur nine days ago, and it was a huge upwards adjustment of 6.8%. That's that's a big one. I mean, it's still single digit, but that that's huge adjustment. And generally speaking, after adjustments, we tend to see the, hash rate kinda fall a little bit so that there's nothing unusual here. Now from the or or however you pronounce it, which was, oh, Thursdays? Yeah. Because I don't think I did a show on Friday. Thursday's Bitcoin and Mike Clear tried to give me 33,333 sats, but it didn't go through.
Sorry, Mike. I didn't get your sats. I would have loved to have had them, but, you know, hey. You tried, so you still get what you said said on here on the show. He says, make it up for lost boosts. Keep it up, brother. Well, this one got lost too there, Mike, but I still appreciate it. Axelrod with one thousand twenty one says, great show. Thank you for sifting through the turd fields of news to sift out the diamonds in the dust storm. Could you recommend your short list of media outlets that you trust? I know no bullshit Bitcoin, CoinDesk, etcetera. So much value you bring from separations separating the signal from the noise. Viva La Bitcoin revolution.
Thank you, Axelrod. Bitcoin Magazine, Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, Decrypt, The Block, Atlas twenty one, Bitcoin News, Lightning News, and no bullshit Bitcoin are my go tos, but that doesn't mean that I won't read something from somebody else like Fortune or, you know, CNBC if if I need to. Turkey with 500 says nothing. Yodle with 444 says, Psyduck. Thank you, sir, from Pies. Four twenty. No. Thank you. Perma Nerd says Fiat equity markets are a casino. However, if you're looking for high quality hand produced maple syrup, maple trade is not a gamble, and he's correct. I love maple trade stuff.
Good morning, team. Matt f r l. Hundred sats. Thank you there. And I think that's it. Yep. That that's that is the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Yeah. We're gonna talk a little bit about, some Shitcoin debacle that occurred, I I guess, over the weekend. Let let's find out. Layer one mantras token falls 90% in a sudden crash. The team blames reckless liquidations. Well, I imagine people got rug pulled. And this is why I bring you stories like this to remind you it's Bitcoin only. Because this this thing that we're gonna talk about has been around since 02/2020.
It's a five year old shitcoin. It took them five years to rug everybody because they were playing the long con. I can't prove it. Don't sue me. Zach Abrams writing this one for the block. The token of real world asset focused layer one blockchain mantra, and that's the OM token. If you have probably seen something called OM lately, it's down 91.23% right now. It dramatically collapsed in price on Sunday, crashing over 90% in a matter of hours and leaving investors scrambling to access or to assess the fallout. The OM token, which began trading in August of twenty twenty, dipped about 10% between 5PM UTC and 06:20 UTC according to the block's mantra price page, then suddenly crashed from its then value of $5.21 down to its current value of 50¢.
A stunning 90% plummet over the course of just ninety minutes. A message posted by community lead, Dustin McDaniel, downplayed allegations that the Mantra team sold shortly before the project's public facing telegram group became inaccessible. Quote, I do not know anything until team has had time to look into the price drop, end quote, McDaniel acknowledged in a Telegram message to the block. Mantra's ex account posted an update at 08:51PM UTC on Sunday night. Quote, today's activity was triggered by wreck reckless liquidations, not anything to do with the project, Mantra wrote.
The project's cofounder, John Mullen, cited a, quote, massive forced liquidation from a large o m investor on a centralized exchange. Still working on the details, but we are here and we're fixing this. Mantra had previously faced allegations of controlling large portions of the token circulating supply or float in an attempt to manipulate the token's price. Mullen rebuffed the allegations in a response post on Twitter, quote, OM has been in circulation since August of twenty twenty, longer than most of these people have even been in crypto, end quote. Mullen recently touted the project's strategic partnership with Dubai based property development company, DAMAC, in an interview with Crypto.News.
Quote, beyond compliance, we're driving real world adoption through strategic partnerships, most notably with Dimak Group recently committing to tokenize more than $1,000,000,000 in Dubai real estate, Mullen told the publication. Well, some investors pointed to Mantra's total value locked of only around $13,000,000 compared to its token's fully diluted value of 9,500,000,000.0 according to Defi Llama data as a possible warning sign. Yeah. You think? Well, Twitter user Insomniac governance lead for growth firm, Castle Labs, identified three wallets that have sent millions of dollars worth of 0 m tokens to the exchange, OKX, and Binance in recent days indicating possible sales.
One wallet received around $36,000,000 worth of OM tokens from a Binance address on March when transferred, the when which then transferred around 4,300,000.0 tokens to OKX across eight transactions on Saturday, which was the day before all this shit broke free. Right? So six members of the Mantra DAO had been previously ordered by a Hong Kong court to disclose financial records related to the project after having been accused of misappropriating Dow assets in a lawsuit. Yeah. You got rugged, man. Mullen and the Mantra team did not immediately respond for a request for comment. Yeah. Probably because they're packing their bags and stuffing all the money that they stole from all the idiots out there thinking that o m was gonna be the next Bitcoin.
No. Everything but Bitcoin is the next way you're going to lose your money. That's the only next about it. It's ridiculous that people keep falling for this, and they're going to continue to fall for it. Just, dude, just buy the Bitcoin and and stay humble and stack Sats or whatever. But, you know, take take Meta Planet's lead here, in fact, because Meta Planet becomes the tenth largest public Bitcoin holder with their latest Bitcoin buy, James Van Stratten, writing this one from CoinDesk. Meta Planet added 319 Bitcoin to its treasury. The Japanese firm made its latest buy at an average price of 83,147 per coin.
The latest purchase puts the company's total holdings to 4,525 Bitcoin with an aggregate cost of $408,100,000 and an average acquisition price of $90,194 per coin. So they're they're underwater on this one. Not on this particular buy, but on their aggregate aggregate average, price per coin, Meta Planet's underwater. But the move is part of Meta Planet's broader Bitcoin treasury operation strategy, which was launched in December of twenty twenty four. So now Meta Planet has moved into the number 10 spot. Interesting. They're not gonna slow down, I don't think.
Okay. So I got this one from no bullshit Bitcoin. Trump signs a resolution blocking the Internal Revenue Service reporting rule for DeFi brokers. Talked about this on the show before. It looks like he's gonna block this thing. On December twenty seventh of twenty twenty four, the Department of Treasury issued last minute regulations establishing reporting requirements for, quote, trading front end service providers involved in digital asset transactions. Now these regulations were created under the Biden administration's infrastructure investment and jobs act and aimed to crack down on cryptocurrency users who may have been failing to pay their taxes.
The reporting requirements were set to take effect in 2026 and required non custodial services to file a form ten ninety nine and follow the same reporting rules as securities brokers and custodial digit digital asset trading platform operators even though they differ from traditional businesses and do not collect the user information needed to comply with those new rules. Earlier in the year, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas and representative Mike Casey of Ohio introduced joint resolution, h j 25 to overturn the new IRS reporting requirements. Then on February 26, resolution 25 passed out of ways and means committee with a vote of 26 to 16 with every committee democrat present voting no.
On March, the house passed resolution 25 with a vote of 292 to a 32. On March, the senate passed resolution 25 with a vote of 70 to 28. And on Thursday, president Trump has signed the resolution repealing the controversial rule making, quote, the defi broker rule needlessly hindered American innovation, infringed on the privacy of everyday Americans, and was set to overwhelm the IRS with an overflow of new filings that it does not have the infrastructure to handle during tax season. And by repealing this misguided rule. President Trump and Congress have given the IRS an opportunity to return its focus to the duties and obligations it already owes to American taxpayers instead of creating a new series of hurdles. I thank president Trump for signing this important bill into law and crypto czar, Zacks, for his leadership in supporting America's continued place as the global leader in the emerging crypto industry according to what representative Mike Carey said.
The move marks the first cryptocurrency bill ever signed into law through congress as well as the very first tax related congressional review act of disapproval enacted in The United States. So this is a big one. I mean, they just completely repealed that whole rule, and people were very, very concerned about that, and rightly so. Now if they can just repeal this whole real ID thing that if you don't have if you're not a holder of a real ID come May, then you ain't flying. I think it's bullshit. I I I expected more from this administration than to have that idiot from Homeland Security come out and do a little dance and tell me that it was my duty to do this for the American public safety.
I call bullshit. I don't want a real ID. I mean, essentially, it looks the exact same as a regular driver's license, I guess, other than it's got probably got a stamp that says real ID, and I've gotta provide, like, I think, two more pieces of information alongside what I've already given them. Otherwise, I can't fly on a plane, which is kinda fine by me because I hate flying. They destroyed flying post 09:11. It's no fun anymore. There's no adventure. It's just I don't know. It's like being at a bus station now. Anyway, BTCPay Server version 2.1 is out with new multisig.
It's got integrations. It's got fee accelerations and more. So if you didn't know, BTCPay Server is a free and open source Bitcoin payment processor that comes with a variety of useful plugins and integrations. It allows you to accept Bitcoin without extra fees or intermediaries. This is an old project, and I've been in love with it ever since it came out. This update includes a redesigned interface for multisig wallets. It removes Zcash and Monero from the core code base by turning them into plug ins and enhances fee acceleration capabilities. Oh, so they majorly cleaned up their code by taking out those 2 shit coins, which at the time, I I know people get they get really upset when I talk badly about Zcash and Monero.
Okay. Look. I'm going to admit one thing. While I've never held either of them, if I had to go to a different cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, it would probably be one of those two. And the reason is this. They have basically fair launches. They really weren't marketed. I mean, not not to the degree that something like OM Coin was marketed where they're doing deals with Visa and, like, Dubai, shit like that. Generally speaking, the people that started those or that were part of the development team of those things, they were pretty good Bitcoiners. They just wanted a little bit more privacy.
So I don't hate them. I still think they're shit coins, but not to the degree that I think Ethereum is actually the mother of all shit coins. But Zcash and Monero, if I had to, if I had to use something else, it would probably be one of those two. I ain't never, under any circumstances, will I ever even consider using Ethereum. You can be damn sure of that one. Okay. On to LNbits version one point zero point zero. So they have gotten to version one now. Stable, it's hardened, and it's production ready, y'all. L n bits is a free and open source Python server that functions as a lightning wallet and account system.
It is compatible with nearly all lightning funding sources and offers a powerful suite of Bitcoin tools. By the way, this is both this story and the previous story are coming out of no b sbitcoin.com. That's no b s bitcoin as in no bullshit. It's because it's no bullshit Bitcoin, but it the website is no bsbitcoin.com. Please go there and donate to their site so they keep it up and running so I can get my news to give to you. So after five years and over 6,000 commits, LNbits has reached a momentous milestone. Version one is here.
LNbits is officially out of beta. Yeehaw, y'all. Congratulations, man. This version of LNbits includes a complete front end overhaul for enhanced performance and long term maintainability. It also features back end refactors, improved database handling, type hinting, and extension logic. Additionally, it offers WebSocket payments. Oh, sweet. Support for Nostr Wallet Connect, the option for Nostr or OAuth login, improved admin and developer tools, and much more. Quote, we want to offer a heartfelt thank you to every contributor, developer, tester, and user from those running l m bits for personal use to the communities of business who rely on it every day.
Your feedback, bug reports, feature requests, and support have made l n bits what it is today as was stated in the blog post. So what's new? Well, it reaches it's out of beta. That's new. View three migration, a complete front end overhaul for performance and long term maintainability, the aforementioned WebSocket payments, new l n bits install script, control access list, Nostra Wallet Connect, login with Nostra or OAuth, a whole fleet of admin tools, fiat and exchange upgrades, u x and u I improvements, developer tools and internal enhancements, maintenance, and fixes, and you can get the full chain log change log if you go to the show notes and you, hit the URL for the story. It'll take you right to no bullshit bitcoin.com, and you can read the change log for yourself. I cannot wait to get into this.
Okay. Last up for today, Liana wallet has reached version 10. Wallet backups and dependencies update. It is a Bitcoin wallet that uses mini script output descriptors with extensive use of relative time locks. It features a time locked recovery path for coins and can be used for inheritance, decaying, and expanding multisigs, and safer backups. It's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Thank god. It introduces backup functionality for the entire wallet, including descriptors, the aliases, and labels allowing for allowing for easy wallet backup migration and synchronization with new devices. It updates the Rust and ICE dependencies for the GUI and Leonad.
A feature, has been added to Liana's safety net for retail partners, allowing them to offer a paid service where they keep a recovery key for Liana users in case of lost access to funds. Quote, as always, we welcome your feedback. You can reach out to them on both their GitHub repository, Telegram, and Discord groups. And that's yeah. That's it. I have not I have not used Liana wallet, so I'm not gonna say much more about it, but it is out there, and I have liked the fact that people have described it being used or the potential use for inheritance. I think that that's a neat feature.
But other than that, what I'm really excited about out of this list is the new LNbits. Congratulations to the LNbits team for getting to version one and officially getting out of beta. You guys have a wonderful week, and I will 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
The Death of Social Media?
Nostr: A Decentralized Solution
