Join me today for Episode 1088 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
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Discount code: Use "BITCOINAND" in the Cart's Coupon Code box for 10% off total purchase
https://cointelegraph.com/news/tether-ai-support-bitcoin-usdt-payments-paolo-ardoino
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/05/free-bitcoin-faucet-from-2010-is-all-set-for-a-comeback
https://decrypt.co/317830/indonesia-suspends-sam-altmans-eye-scanning-world-project
https://bitcoinnews.com/legal/uk-ban-buy-bitcoin-with-credit-card/
https://atlas21.com/arizona-veto-on-bitcoin-reserve-triggers-reactions-from-the-community/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/brown-university-bought-and-owns-4-9-million-of-blackrocks-bitcoin-etf
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/05/semler-scientific-adds-167-bitcoin-bringing-holdings-to-3-634-btc
https://www.theblock.co/post/353095/strategy-buys-more-bitcoin-may-5
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Topics for today:
- Tether's AI to Accept BTC, USDT
- Bitcoin Faucet's Return
- UK to Ban Buying BTC With Credit
- R.I.P. Arizona
Circle P:
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Articles:
https://dgt10011.substack.com/p/from-stagnation-to-sovereigntyhttps://cointelegraph.com/news/tether-ai-support-bitcoin-usdt-payments-paolo-ardoino
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/05/free-bitcoin-faucet-from-2010-is-all-set-for-a-comeback
https://decrypt.co/317830/indonesia-suspends-sam-altmans-eye-scanning-world-project
https://bitcoinnews.com/legal/uk-ban-buy-bitcoin-with-credit-card/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://atlas21.com/arizona-veto-on-bitcoin-reserve-triggers-reactions-from-the-community/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/brown-university-bought-and-owns-4-9-million-of-blackrocks-bitcoin-etf
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/05/05/semler-scientific-adds-167-bitcoin-bringing-holdings-to-3-634-btc
https://www.theblock.co/post/353095/strategy-buys-more-bitcoin-may-5
Find the Bitcoin And Podcast on every podcast app here
https://episodes.fm/1438789088
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[00:00:02]
Unknown:
It is 09:31AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the May. Cinco de Mayo '20 '20 '5. This is episode ten eighty eight of Bitcoin and got quite a bit to cover today. We're all we're we've got some Tether news. And it's a little it's interesting. It's it's like these guys are some kind of, I don't know, shadow Silicon Valley, the way that they're getting into all kinds of stuff. We're we'll I promise you, we will we will get into it. And then, it looks like a Bitcoin faucet may be coming back from our good friend Charlie Shrem. We'll we'll talk about it. Indonesia has basically slapped the hands of Sam Altman, and then, well, The UK is deciding to shoot themselves in the head yet again.
You can't imagine what's going on. Atomic payments through Cashew is apparently alive and well. And, yes, I am going to talk about Arizona and their governors being a dipshit. I can't there's just no other way to put it. She has gotten herself on the wrong side of, pretty much everything. And then there is some purchasing news of Bitcoin from the big three. I will tell you what they are. But first, Jeff Park has written something about this whole Tether, SoftBank, Cantor Fitzgerald, Binance merger to create this company that's gonna be headed up by Jack Mallers named 21. I don't know if it's gonna be, renamed after that. Right now, all I know of it as is twenty one.
And Jeff published something to his substack, and again, this is Jeff Park. He wrote or published it this morning. It is entitled From Stagnation to Sovereignty. For four decades, since the nineteen nineties, Japan has struggled to escape the gravity of economic stagnation. In response, policymakers engineered one of the most aggressive ultra low interest rate regimes in modern history, which was intended to catalyze domestic investment and rejuvenate growth. But instead of sparking a renaissance at home, this policy gave rise to one of the most powerful engines in financial distortion, quote, the global carry trade, end quote.
For context, this global carry system operates as a form of financial repression where structurally suppressed interest rates in developed economies like Japan push capital elsewhere in search of higher yields. Cheap yen flowed into US Treasuries, emerging markets, and speculative speculative tech ventures, creating the illusion of global liquidity while quietly inflating systemic risk. In this setup, Japan became less an organic growth engine and more an inorganic global financier relying on external asset inflation while its domestic productivity atrophied and its currency weakened.
To understand SoftBank's emergence, therefore, is to understand it as a neutral byproduct of the system. Drawing capital from repressed monetary conditions as a financial arbitrage, it deployed funds with extreme leverage into global high growth, high risk sectors with a hint of desperation. While technically a publicly traded company, SoftBank functions more like a de facto sovereign wealth fund backed by state aligned entities such as Saudi Arabia's PIF and Abu Dhabi's Mud hold on. Mubadala with a strategic industrial role. Masayoshi's son's quasi nationalist undertone historically shows this isn't just about returns. It's about reigniting Japan and their partners competitive spirit in the age of exponential technology while fighting against financial repression.
Because on the other side of the global system sits The United States enjoying what has long been called the exorbitant privilege. As the issuer of the world's reserve currency, The US can borrow at lower rates while controlling access to dollars through tools like swift and sanctions. It's financial repression for everyone else, but privilege for the issuer. However, the abuse of the exorbitant privilege has not gone unnoticed by the international community most severely when The United States froze Russia's central bank reserves back in 02/2022. Now enter Tether, the unofficial eurodollar machine of the crypto age operating outside the traditional banking system. Tether acts as a shadow central bank, exporting digital dollars to meet global demand without US regulatory entanglement.
Like the post World War two euro dark dollar markets in London, Tether allows offshore actors to access dollars while quietly capturing the interest spread. If financial repression is the public burden, Tether is the private loophole that the international community demands. In this context, the emerging alignment between SoftBank and Tether via Cantor Fitzgerald marks a critical geopolitical financial inflection point. These two entities are mirror images shaped by dollar hegemony. One, a beneficiary of dollar weaponization, minting synthetic dollars in regulatory gray zones.
The other, a byproduct of that weaponization forced into compliant but excessive leverage to escape domestic stagnation. As the trade war jolted Japan awake from its long slumber, this transformative partnership is now converging. If SoftBank can tap into Tether's ability to move dollars outside censorship control with the lowest global financing cost on Earth, it could help redesign the global financial system from within as the largest United States sovereign creditor. This will not merely be capital deployment, but a total system design with Bitcoin at the center that only Japan can do. With Tether as a partner, SoftBank may finally flip the script as Michael Saylor might put it, the most hopeless is often the most courageous.
And for Japan, long caught in the inertia of external dependence, this is the rarest moment of opportunity to make its most strategic crypto play yet. And then it says, here's a link to the Unchained show I had the pleasure to join with the great Laura Shin, and he gives a link to this this YouTube video. Okay. So that's that's that's his spiel right there. If you listened to any of last week or the week before show of Bitcoin in, does this sound familiar? Does this sound familiar? Because it certainly sounds familiar to me, especially this paragraph.
Now enter Tether, the unofficial eurodollar machine of the crypto age operating outside the traditional banking system, Tether acts as a shadow central bank exporting digital dollars to meet global demand without US regulatory entanglement. This is what I've been saying. I've been saying this for a long time, in fact. Tether is going to be how The United States prints an enormous amount of debt. That debt is going to be immediately monetized. There's there's there will be no waiting for it because the company Tether will buy bond after bond after bond after bond. They will immediately print Tether, the token, USDT, and they will export that Tether, I e United States freshly minted debt, as an instrument to the rest of the world.
Now he says euro dollar, but what, what I think he might be missing is the fact that the one of the first targets that is in sight for the weaponization of US debt via Tether is going to be Europe. It is actually already being kind of pummeled, and it's gonna get worse. I I wish I could tell you why because, you know, generally speaking, most people view the relationship between Europe and The United States as relatively cordial, but this is not in fact the case. We saw an almost complete collapse of the European bond market, especially over in The UK when we had some, well, we we just decided to raise interest rates really, really quick, and Europe got caught in the crosshairs, and they had a generalized liquidity crunch that damn near bankrupted that entire region.
What did they do? Well, they printed money to get out of it. But still, the damage is already done. It's just been band aided, you know, or or bandaged. That's what I'm trying to say. It's just been bandaged. But Jeff Park is pretty much saying what I've been telling you. So you really gotta watch out for what's going on with Tether. Right? The company, its relationship with the United States Treasury's ability to print debt, the fact that it is a major holder of an agricultural company and it's starting to branch out into other areas. And now they've hooked up with SoftBank.
We've got this thing coming out called '21 with Jack Mallers being the CEO. I things are gonna change. But Tether's not they're not just gonna stick to this. They're they're continuously branching out into other areas. Like, for instance, Helen Parts from Cointelegraph is writing this one, Tether artificial intelligence platform to support Bitcoin and, of course, USDT payments according to the CEO. Tether AI, the forthcoming artificial intelligence platform from stablecoin giant Tether, will feature payments in major cryptocurrencies including USDT and Bitcoin.
Tether CEO, Paolo Ardoino, took to Twitter on May to tease the imminent launch of Tether AI, the company's new AI platform designed to offer, quote, personal infinite intelligence. According to Ardoina, Tether's AI platform will be integrated with USDT and Bitcoin payments, allowing users to make transactions directly through a peer to peer network. The initiative builds on Tether's December twenty twenty four announcement that it was developing a website for the AI tool targeting a launch by the end of the first quarter of this year, '20 '20 '5. Arduino emphasized that Tether AI will not use application programming interface keys and will not depend on centralization control points. Instead, Tether AI will offer a fully open source AI runtime that will run on an unstoppable peer to peer network and be fully modular and composable, whatever the hell composable actually means here. But additionally, Tether AI will be capable of adapting and evolving on any hardware and device according to Palo.
The announcement also said that Tether AI's p two p crypto payments will be infused with its open source wallet development kit, which was launched November 2024. That toolkit enables developers to build mobile, desktop, and web wallet applications enabling self custodial or non custodial holding of both USDT and Bitcoin unlike custodial wallets, self custodial wallet solutions allows users to control assets completely eliminating reliance on third party custody solutions for competing transactions. Tether AI is part of a broader strategy to expand the company's footprint in artificial intelligence. Back in April of twenty twenty four, Tether announced company restructuring to, well, introduce new divisions beyond stablecoin development, launching Tether Data, a dedicated unit focused on AI and p two p development.
In February, Ardoino announced that its AI division was working on a series of AI apps, including AI translate, voice assistant, and Bitcoin wallet assistant. Pausing just to say, what the hell AI for a wallet assistant? And think about that. Probably a a a combination of coin control, so you're always able to figure out with where you are drawing your coins from if you're going to trade or buy something or whatever. But what else? I mean, what what what would an AI be doing in my wallet that would assist me in making a payment? I don't need assistance right now. I use Specter Wallet. I have coin control. I can control my, I I my fees. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe AI will be able to reach out and give a sensible, you know, consensus of what the fee rate should actually be on your transaction. But I just I I feel a little twitchy about having an AI assistant in my wallet. I'm just I'm just saying. But continuing, according to Ardoino, Tether AI has one key goal of providing the ideal technological foundation to achieve the vision of AI described by Isaac Asimov, one of the most influential science fiction authors about AI known for works such as I, Robot, the Robot series, and more, quote, AI will, in the coming decades, become part of the very fabric of the universe, Ardoino said in another Twitter post, but was written in Italian for whatever reason.
Okay. So te now we're we're getting into Tether AI. We we're getting into to Bitcoin wallet assistance. We're getting into payments for this new service in Bitcoin and Tether. This pretty much is yet another point of evidence that suggests that I think that I'm right. I think that in the short to medium term, Tether is going to buy as much US debt as the United States Treasury is willing to print as we move forward. That doesn't mean just that that doesn't mean today. They're not doing that right now. They're not buying every single thing that the Treasury can actually print as far as a debt instrument is concerned.
I think that happens in the future. That and and not too terribly far out future either. Like, five to seven years, you're going to start seeing Tether being buying just oodles and oodles of treasury bonds as they and bills as they get printed. But because I've been I was told to say, well, yeah, but it's only a hundred and $48,000,000,000 of Tether right now. Yeah. Right now. You do understand that tomorrow is actually on the way. Right? Winter is coming. Well, tomorrow is coming too, and tomorrow, they're gonna buy a shit ton more debt than they did today, and the day after that is going to be a whole lot more debt that Tether purchases from the United States Treasury after that.
And then I think they're gonna switch, and they're gonna back all existing Tether that had ever been printed by Bitcoin and probably gold and maybe a couple of other things. Yeah. They'll still have some Treasury stuff, but they're going I think they're going to pivot. Because the thing that every I know everybody hates Tether. Not well, not everybody hates Tether. Lots of people love Tether, but, like, hardcore Bitcoiners, and I include myself amongst them, I've never had a use for Tether. Right? I used to regard it as a complete shitcoin, and then I realized that stablecoins kinda they're not altcoins. They're not shitcoins. They're certainly not Bitcoin. There's some they're something altogether different.
Whether it's bad or good, that that's beside that's not in the scope of this conversation. I'm just saying they're completely different, so I can't really regard them as an altcoin or a shitcoin or whatever. Right? But Paulo's always been on the side of Bitcoin. Not whatever you wanna say about him. He's always been on the side of Bitcoin. And you'll go, well, clearly, he wasn't because he created Tether. But, again, I conclude that Tether is a completely different beast. I think what he did is he fashioned or the company together it wasn't just Palos, him and a team of his.
I think they fashioned an instrument the likes of which no financial market has ever seen. Bitcoin is also one of these types of instruments, but it it exists to do a wholly different function. At one point or another, because of the history of Palo with Bitcoin and the fact that they continuously say we're gonna accept Bitcoin for payment alongside our own dog food, which is USDT, That tells me that they're completely Bitcoin centric, and they have remained so for the years and years and years, and they've never wavered. And this is what I find interesting.
Generally speaking, you'll find people that say, oh, we're Bitcoin only, and then they're not. They turn out to be shitcoiners. I think something I think I think I'm going to end up being proven correct. It may take ten years, but I think I'm gonna end up being proven correct. The short to medium term is Tether buying every single dime that The United States can print as a debt instrument, converting it instantly, thereby monetizing it instantly and shipping it, the debt, to the rest of the world. Europe is in the crosshairs. I don't think China really is, but I guarantee there's other countries that are in the crosshairs of this particular weaponization of the United States dollar denominated debt.
But we've got other things to talk about here because a relic of the early days of Bitcoin may be coming back Free Bitcoin faucet from the 02/2010 era is all set all set for a comeback, and this is Sharra Malwa writing for CoinDesk. A relic of Bitcoin's earliest days is making a comeback, potentially reviving a tradition that once handed out Bitcoin for free to anyone who could solve a simple captcha. Charlie Shrim, an early Bitcoin developer and entrepreneur, tested the relaunch of the Bitcoin faucet earlier Monday, posting a link to the page that mimicked the one built by Gavin Andresen in 02/2010. The Fawcett Lee famously distributed 5 whole Bitcoin per user to their Bitcoin wallets for free back when the token was worth less than 1p.
Each one of those transfers is worth nearly $500,000 at current prices. The website is not yet live with rewards and holds 0 BTC as of early US hours on Monday. The original faucet was designed to help onboard new users to the Bitcoin network at a time when buying or mining Bitcoin was cumbersome and often required technical know how. At the time of launch, Andreessen funded the faucet with 1,100 BTC and saw it as a way to grow the network organically. The idea worked. Thousands of early users got their first exposure to Bitcoin through that faucet, which, in hindsight, distributed small fortunes for free.
By the time the faucet shut down, its payouts had dwindled to fractions of a BTC, but its cultural impact remained legendary, especially as BTC prices surged over the next decade. So the faucet looks like it's on its way back, and a screenshot of it makes it look seems to look exactly like it did in the old days. And, no, I was not early enough to take part of those faucets. I wish I had been, but I wasn't. It's okay. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna cry about it. It'll be interesting to see what the, quote, unquote, free payout is and whether or not it's as widely adopted as those early faucets were because those early faucets were, in fact, pretty widely adopted. I mean, people oh, man. It was just like it was just a dirty free for all of getting 5 Bitcoin for solving a simple captcha.
Do you feel dirty? Because Soap Miner's got you back, brother. [email protected]. That's Soap Miner dot com. Circle p is open for business. Circle p is where I bring plebs with goods and services. They're just like you. And maybe you want to buy their goods and services, but unless it's somebody like me who's willing to, I don't know, put up or shut up and get these guys on the air and put them in front of you so that you know that they have goods and services, then you could be just buying your crappy ass soap from Walmart from, like, I don't know, lever, a huge massive multinational company. How about supporting a Bitcoiner like SoapMiner and buy his handmade tallow soap? It's 100% beef tallow, lye, distilled water, and that's just as rough cut tallow. It's only three ingredients. It is as clean of a soap as you're going to get. But if you like cedarwood, peppermint, lavender, pine tar, what else? He's also got, fresh breeze, lemongrass, and orange slash clove tallow soap. So he added, like, three new flavors to his lineup.
All of these soaps are awesome, and all of them all of them are sold for Bitcoin. If you're not selling your good or service for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p. That's the way it works. You get 10% off of your entire entire purchase if you use the code Bitcoin and in the cart's coupon code box. So you select what you want. You go to your cart. There is a coupon code on that page. Put in Bitcoin and because, otherwise, he won't know that I was able to make a sale for him because the deal with the circle p is this. I advertise you for free because most of the plebs do not have advertising budgets out there.
I may not have a massive audience, but I do have an audience. And you guys have already been buying soap. You've got guys have been buying maple syrup from Mapletrade. The vendors, if they find value in a sale that I made, it is up to them to determine how many Satoshis they send my way. That's the way it works. It's probably the dumbest model on the face of the planet when it comes to advertising, but plebs need help getting the word out. And I'm more than happy to be that that guinea pig. Right? So if you're interested in being in Circle p, get a hold of me. You can, you can just DM me on Noster. My my, end pub is in the show notes as always. It's there every single day. And you can get a hold of me on Twitter at David Bennett n b. David Bennett n b. N b stands for none you business, but it's David Bennett n b over there on Twitter. I'm not there all that often, but I do check-in on a daily basis just to see what people are crying about. If you DM me over there, I'll see what I can I'll see what I can do. Or just mention me in a note on Nostr, and that's probably the best way because I'm always always have my Noster client up. Alright. Moving on to Indonesia, who is slapping Sam Altman around by the head and shoulders because they've suspended Sam Altman's eye scanning world project.
Do you remember this? Do you remember Worldcoin? It's still alive. Will McCurdy from Decrypt tell us more. World, formerly known as Worldcoin, has been hit with a suspension by Indonesian regulators who alleged the blockchain startup may have committed a serious violation of its regulations. Led by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, World offers users small payments of its shitcoin, WLD, in exchange for scanning their biometric data via one of its orb devices. It's getting your retinal scan as well as your corneal scan. I guarantee they're getting both of that both those information. Because corneas, the color of your eye, it's like a fingerprint just like your retina.
And your cornea is easier to scan by outside cameras than your retina. Okay? So you're giving over way too much to Sam Altman. Anyway, Alexander Sabar, director general of digital space supervision, said the suspension was due to reports of suspicious activity by the project. Sabar called the move, quote, a preventative measure to prevent potential risks to the community, end quote. The official announcement alleged that the Indonesian subsidiary operating world in the country, PT Tarang Bulan Abadi, has not been properly registered as an electronic system organizer and did not have the electronic system organizer registration certificate required by Indonesian law as a result.
The announcement claims World used t d p s e in the name of another legal entity, PT Sandina Abadi Nusundatra. Both legal entities have been summoned by the regulator to provide clarification on the alleged violations. Quote, noncompliance with registration obligations and the use of the identity of another legal entity to carry out digital services is a serious violation, said Sabar. He added, we invite the public to help maintain a safe and trusted digital space for all citizens, end quote. This wasn't the first time that regulators have clamped down on world's activities. German regulators ordered the firm to implement a GDPR compliant data deletion protocol while a month later, Brazil's National Data Protection Authority levied a ban on the company from operating inside the country claiming its payouts could influence consumer behavior in unfair ways.
The startup was banned for just under a year in Kenya with local politicians criticizing its business practices and even calling the company a gang of criminals before it resumed operations in June of twenty twenty four. However, though world may have lost access to the 280,000,000 strong Indonesian market, at least temporarily, its potential user base is expanding. God forbid. World rolled out its service in six, count them, six major American cities earlier this week. Atlanta, Austin, Texas. Oh my god. Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco.
Until recently, Americans were not allowed to receive their WLD tokens as payment. The firm has also rolled out a number of integrations in recent days, including Tinder owner Match Group and prediction market Kalshi along with Visa card and charges for applications using WorldID services. Do not use this service. Do not let your eyes get scanned by an orb. Don't do it. Stay away from anybody with that wants to do this. Do not let them take your biometric data. Not for a pissant shitcoin like WLD token and not for somebody like Sam Altman.
Do I use ChatGPT? Yes. I do. I also use a couple of other different things. But, yes, I use ChatGPT. And why would you use it if you think Sam's because ChatGPT is a good product. It just is. But I'm not letting it scan my eyeball. I'm not letting it get a hold of my corneal fingerprint. It's just not something I'm going to do, and neither should you. Okay. Last up for the first half of the show, UK, The United Kingdom, is going to ban Bitcoin purchases with credit cards. So in another motion of trying to shoot themselves in the foot, UK Regulators are looking to ban the use of borrowed funds to buy digital assets as part of a wider effort to regulate the fast growing digital assets market and protect consumers for what they consider debt and financial harm.
As a result, UK citizens might lose their ability to buy Bitcoin with credit cards. The Financial Conduct Authority, the UK's top financial regulator, has proposed a new rule that would stop people from using any kind of credit cards, personal loans, or lender financing to buy digital assets like Bitcoin. The proposal is open for comment until 06/13/2025. The reason for the move is growing concern that people are going into debt to buy digital assets, which are considered risky. And the FCA said in its paper, quote, we are concerned that consumers buying crypto assets with credit cards may take on unsustainable debt, particularly if the value of their crypto assets drop and they were relying on its value to repay, end quote.
According to a recent FCA survey, 14% of UK Digital Asset Investors use credit to buy Bitcoin and other digital assets in 2024, more than double the 6% who did just two years before. Debt based Bitcoin investing is getting the regulators worried. Gee, I wonder I wonder who could have possibly started this trend. Who is it that that basically just issues debt to buy Bitcoin with? I don't know. I can't remember. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities, West Texas Intermediate as well as Brenton, North Sea are getting pummeled as of opening of the markets in oil trading yesterday, 06:00PM eastern daylight time.
Why OPEC plus, specifically Saudi Arabia, has increased their oil output, and it shows because immediately, West Texas Intermediate lost almost a four or a a full four points. That was that was last night. It since regained some of that, but it's still down to $56.99. We're showing a 2.23% downturn in the price of West Texas Intermediate. Brent is down almost two points to $60.12. Natural gas down as well 1.82% to $3.56 per thousand. Gasoline barely budging. You know, if I were to go back and look at the onset of summertime, I'll bet you I'd see the exact same pattern. Prices of crude dropped precipitously, yet gasoline suspiciously just kinda still hovering, like in this instance at $2.01 a gallon, which is better than, you know, 3 and a half or 4. I get that, but I don't know, man. I and, yes, you'll say, oh, what's going on? Because half the refineries are offline.
Dude, half the refineries have been offline for, like, what seems like eight years now. I think that the renovations have probably been completed by now, so I think there's something else going on. But whatever, gold is up 2 and a third to $33.19 and a dime. Silver is up point 71%. Platinum is down a half. Copper is up a half. Palladium down three quarters of a point. Ag is mostly in the red today. The only real winner is sugar, 1.4% to the upside. Biggest loser, as usual, is chocolate, 4.36 to the downside. Live cattle is up one and a third, though. Lean hogs down a tenth. Feeder cattle up point 69%.
Dow is up a quarter of a point, but the S and P has lost a quarter. Nasdaq has also lost a quarter, and the S and P Mini is up a third. Bitcoin also been kinda been kind of eroding, its $97,000 price that we had going into the weekend. It is now at $94,150. That is a $1,870,000,000,000 market cap, and we can now only get 28.3 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,860,375.86 of, and average fees per block are really low. 0.02 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis. Why? Because the mempools are, like, fairly empty yet again, and everybody thinks we're gonna die.
I don't know how many times I've been here, And I also don't know how many times I've been on the other side of the equation where mempools have so many transactions waiting to clear that you can't see straight. And both of those issues are apparently going to kill Bitcoin, and I'm sick of the argument. No. It's not. We've been here before. We will be here again. And guess what? Every ten minutes, if there's transactions in a block, they're going to clear. Right now, we have 7,800 of them waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 Satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at three. Hash rate, however, is also recovering.
We are now above 900 exahashes. We are at 906.8 exahashes per second. So miners seem to be putting their machines back online. Go figure. Why? Because we're not gonna die. I just I'm this between this crap and the op return, I can I can barely even look at Twitter right now? I I did that this morning to see if there was any any trend I could see because, generally, I I don't even have to look at the news. I can just go to Twitter, find you know, see what most people are bitching about, and I kinda get a flavor for the day. And I went over there this morning, and I was like, you've gotta be shitting me. So I immediately went back over to Noster where everybody is not thinking that everything is going to die.
It is the most negative place on the Internet that I've ever seen has been Twitter for the last year that I've been back on it. It's sad. It's sickening. And you'll go, what what do you keep going over there? It's got a it's it's a good place to get a flavor of what people are bitching about. And right now, it's as of this morning, it's the op return mess, which I really I almost waded into it with Peter Todd and said something I probably shouldn't have. And I yes. I ended up deleting that tweet because I'm like, had to listen to my mom's voice. If you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. And I just didn't have anything nice to say with about what Peter he had a tweet talking about tail emissions on Bitcoin.
How how many times have I heard that argument? I heard and I saw somebody else, but this was on Noster saying something about, like, what if and it was clearly a newbie. And it was like, what if maybe we put, you know, tail emissions on where we continuously generate? I'm like, dude, I had to write back going. We've already talked about this 17,000 times since I've been in this space, and people were talking about it way longer than that. The opportune issue, is it going to kill Bitcoin? Yes. It's annoying. No. I don't like the direction that it's taking.
I can't stop it. But you know what? I'm not I'm not terrified that it's going to kill Bitcoin. It's not going to kill Bitcoin, and neither are lightly filled mempools and neither are heavily filled mempools. Please just stop and go to bitcoinandshow.com. That's bitcoinandshow, all one word, bitcoinandshow.com. Sign up. I need your I need your email. I need people looking at this website. I need a little bit of traffic on this. It's brand new website and well, it's where I put all the shows. Anything that I've ever, you know, anything that I've ever or have written or or going to write is all going to be in this nice little spot. It's it doesn't have a lot of lights, whistles, and bells just yet.
But I am going to be putting in my circle p vendors. It's got all the shows. It's got all the stuff that I've written. It will have all of that and more as time goes on. Bitcoin and show.com, if you wanna support the show, sign up, give me your email. I don't sell it. I don't give it away. I promise you, I'm never going to do that. Why would I? It's not worth it to me. But that way, at least when the show comes out, you'll on the website, you'll know about it. You'll get an email. Generally, I'm only going to publish once a day. So, no, I'm not going to flood your inbox with all kinds of stuff. Although I do wish that you guys would flood my boostograms with all kinds of stuff for me to read. This is all from Spookcoin, which was Friday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Turkey with a thousand says nothing.
Psyduck with 594 says nothing. Now here's Paul Cernine with 500, and he does say, thanks for yet another nice episode. Keep up the good work. And, yes, the European Union is a Titanic steering directly into the iceberg. 444 Sats from Dot says, thank you, sir. As a European, I appreciate your perspective. Yeah. Mica has potential to end up in a clusterfuck of disturbance driven by incompetence and ignorance. Anyway, it may cause a stringent adoption of self custody and a more public awareness of Bitcoin's properties beyond currency. Let's continue to orange pill.
Stay humble, and stack sats about it. Yes. Absolutely. 100%. It very well may activate the very thing that the European doesn't wanna see or the European Union doesn't wanna see, and that is European citizenry becoming monetarily sovereign without their permission. Good point, Skye. Yodle Yodle with 444 says have a great weekend. I did, And that's it. That that's it for the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Cali wrote a note on Nostra today, and he says, holy shit, it's working. I paid a hundred thousand Satoshi lightning invoice from two different Cashew Mints at the same time.
Enter atomic multi nut payments. And then he's got a little a brief little video that that he's posted, you know, in this note that shows what he's doing, but he's got a description here that I can read to you. All Cashew wallets let you use multiple mints. To reduce rug risk, we encourage users to leave only small amounts on each mint. This introduces a big user experience challenge, which forces users to distribute funds on different mints in a smart way. It's particularly problematic when you're trying to pay a bigger lightning invoice from your small balances. Who has time for that? The Lightning Protocol allows nodes to split a single payment HTLC, otherwise known as a hash time lock contract, into multiple parts to increase the chance of reaching the destination called multipath payments.
Typically, that's done from one sender to one receiver. What if you can just break the rules? A multi net payment originates from multiple Lightning nodes to pay a single invoice automatically or sorry. No. Atomically. And I'll get to that in a second. Even if none of your mint balances can cover an invoice, as long as your total balance is large enough, you can pay that invoice. I don't think anyone was crazy enough to do this before. Pretty sure what you see here is the first invoice being paid using a CLN and an LND node at the same time.
Amazing work by the team. Special thanks to Lawler first. Okay. So there's several things in here. First, the atomic, atomically. When he says atomically, it means that if I set up, like and this is, like, just using let's just say I'm I'm in lightning. When multipath payments first came out, the idea was that I could pay an invoice. But at the time multipath payments came about. One of the reasons it came about was because at the time, liquidity on the Lightning Network wasn't big enough to handle larger payments. So somebody said, well, what if we were able to split the payments up? Like, you know, a a million Satoshi invoice was never going to be able to be paid over the lightning network, like, two, you know, two years ago?
It was it was destined to fail. So I and I can't remember who, and I'm remiss for that, but it is what it is. Somebody comes up with the idea, what if we split that into $10,100,000 Satoshi payments and paid that same invoice? And it was it worked. And but people were saying, well, what happens if one of those payment routes fails? 900,000 Satoshis goes to the payment invoice or it to the user, but that last 100,000 didn't, so you didn't actually pay the invoice. Did you just lose 900,000 Satoshis? The answer is no because of the word atomic.
All of them have to get there. All of them have to get there. It has to be a whole. That's what atomic actually means. I think that's from Greece or or Greek or something like that, where Adam is like the single thing, and that's the payment of the invoice. If any part of the multipath payment fails, the whole thing fails, and all of your Satoshis come back to you. K. So that's that's the one thing. This is using eCash, and it looks like it's using lightning on the back end to take the place of providing liquidity to multiple cashew mints so that you would be able to use two, three, four e cash mints to be able to do this multipath payment over e cash instead of Lightning. So it looks like it's a mishmash because he says, and this is the third point, that it's this payment that he shows in this video is actually an invoice being paid by a CLN lightning node and a LND lightning node. Those are two completely different lightning, daemons.
Right? One's written in a completely different language. It does things a completely different way, but it interoperates with the Lightning Network protocol. So that's really all you need, but this is the very first time I've ever seen two completely, and for lack of a better term, architecturally different Lightning nodes working in conjunction to pay a single invoice. This is actually way more important than people think, so keep your eye on multipath payments over e cash. Just saying. Okay. So we all got triggered over the weekend when Arizona was the first to get both of their Bitcoin strategic reserve bills onto the governor's desk. It passed senate. It passed house. It passed committee after committee after committee after committee. It had widespread respect and support in the Arizona state legislature. And what did the governor do?
She vetoed it. And that has triggered quite the reaction from the community. Atlas twenty one writes about it. Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, who hobbled Arizona, recent decision to veto a bill that would have enabled the state to hold Bitcoin as part of its official reserves has sparked, guess what, a wave of criticism from the Bitcoin community. Quote, this decision will age poorly, commented Jameson Lop in a May 3 Twitter post. Entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano added, quote, imagine the ignorance of a politician who believes they can make better investment decisions than the market, end quote.
Attorney and digital asset specialist, Andrew Gordon, highlighted the importance of having more elected officials who understand that Bitcoin and crypto represent the future. Pompliano also remarked that, quote, if Hobbs can outperform Bitcoin, she must buy it. State senator Wendy Rogers, cosponsor of one of the bills alongside representative Jeff Wenninger, publicly voiced her disappointment stating, quote, politicians don't realize that Bitcoin doesn't need Arizona. It's Arizona that needs Bitcoin. On May, Hobbs vetoed the Arizona Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act, a law that would have allowed Arizona to invest confiscated funds in Bitcoin and create a reserve managed by state officials.
In a letter addressed to senate president Warren Peterson, Hobbs justified her decision by emphasizing that the Arizona State Retirement System must continue to prioritize prioritize stable, well vetted investments. She described digital assets as untested and unsuitable for the retirement savings of Arizona residents. Quote, the Arizona State Retirement System is one of the strongest in the country because it makes sound and informed investments. Arizona's retirement funds are not the place to experiment with untested investments like virtual currencies, the governor stated.
Rogers has already announced her intention to reintroduce the bill in the next legislative session. The senator also pointed out an apparent contradiction. Arizona's pension system already holds shares in strategy, Michael Saylor's company, which Rogers describes as basically a leveraged Bitcoin ETF. Arizona's strategic Bitcoin reserve bill will be back. HODL. That's a direct quote. Had the law passed, Arizona would have become the very first United States state to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The state now joins others including Oklahoma, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming where similar initiatives have either stalled or been withdrawn.
So the fight goes on. All the way to Brown University's doorstep, except they're on the other side of the fight. They have bought and own $4,900,000 of not Bitcoin, but BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. Yes. When the news first hit over the weekend, it said that they had bought Bitcoin, but apparently, they have not. And Brown University, in case you're wondering, is one of the original, quote, unquote, Ivy League colleges in The United States. It's not a small school. It's one of the oldest schools in the nation. It is considered Ivy League. They have shit tons of money. And instead of buying the actual corn itself, they decided to go with, well, the iBit ETF.
According to a filing today, Brown University, a private university based in Providence, Rhode Island, revealed a large position in BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, iBit, as first reported by market analyst, Macroscope. The position showed Brown holding $4,915,050 worth of iBit as of 03/31/2025, which sees the school become the third United States university to publicly announce a Bitcoin purchase after Emory and Austin or University of Austin in tax u a t x. And that's not to be confused with the University of Texas in Austin. Okay? That is University of Austin is a private institution and it's small.
University of Texas in Austin is a public institution, a state institution, and it's freaking massive. Anyway, in a 13 f filing this morning, Brown University reported 105,000 shares that they own of the iBit Bitcoin ETF as of March 31. Is there anything else here? The total value of all 14 oh, wait a second. This is a new position, which means it was acquired in January, February, or March. The total value of all 14 positions in the filing is $216,000,000. This is an important one. And it looks like they're talking about, I don't know. It it this is a con this is confusing me.
Because it's like comparing it's comparing a whole bunch of stuff that's like, I don't know. This is bizarre because it's like they I don't know. The there there are other positions don't have anything to do with Bitcoin, Bitcoin trust, or anything like that. And so I don't know. Just it it's weird. A growing number of US universities are signaling confidence in the long term Bitcoin potential by adding the digital asset to their endowment portfolios. Emory University and the University of Austin have each disclosed Bitcoin related initiatives further validating the cryptocurrency's institutional appeal. And I'm not I'm not shitting on University of Austin. It's just that they're very new.
They just opened up, like, two or three years ago or something like that, and they're very, very small. Right? Their their position, I'm just gonna say it, is is like a a gnat on the fly's ass of humanity. Okay? I mean, it's really, really small. So that that we keep saying University of Austin, I I I don't think we're really doing ourselves a service. Brown University is massive. Right? They're they're they're huge. They're and they're private. They've got a shitload of money. They've been around forever. Right? So that's important.
Emory University's medium size. It's not all that huge, but it ain't all that small either. So we've only got really one university system of any size of any note whatsoever that is actually into Bitcoin. So I think we have to be fair to ourselves and not get ourselves all, oh my god, Brand University, all these co you all these schools are buying Bitcoin. Nah. Really, there's only one there that actually makes a whole shit ton of sense, but they're not the only ones buying. Similar Scientific has added more Bitcoin. Steven Alpher's got it for CoinDesk.
The company has acquired a hundred and 67 Bitcoin for 16,200,000.0 or an average price of about $97,000 each according to a Monday morning SEC filing. The purchase appears to mostly or totally be funded via sales of their common stock with the company disclosing it sold 1,160,000.00 shares for $39,800,000 under its April 15 at the market offering. Similar now holds 3,634 Bitcoin acquired for $322,300,000 or an average price of $88,668 each. And their holdings are worth more than $340,000,000 at the current price, which is around $94,000. And then, of course, who else bought Bitcoin but strategy? They've bought another 1,895 for a hundred and 80,000,000, and they now own 555,450 BTC. And you might be asking yourself, with all this Bitcoin being bought, why did we see the price plummet on Sunday? Because we always see the price plummet on Sunday.
It's a this has been going on for a while, and there was somebody there was a couple of people on Nostar, not just one person, but there was a couple people that was like, you you could feel it when you read their notes, that they're exasperated. They're exhausted. Buckle up, man. This shit goes on for a while. And here's the thing is that the Sunday dip has now become kind of endemic to Bitcoin and it's been because it's been going on for months. In fact, it's been going on because it's always Sunday, sometime around Sunday afternoon or, you know, early Sunday evening into the late evening hours, that Sailor will basically telegraph that MicroStrategy has bought more Bitcoin. And then Monday morning, they announced that buy.
And the same was the it was the same thing yesterday. We I I I looked I looked I was looking at the price. I'm like, yep. There there it is, a Sunday dip. And then it's, like, looked down at my sidebar in TradingView where I've got the news up, and it's like, oh, Michael Saylor has announced yet again that their that strategy has probably bought more Bitcoin. It's like clockwork. It just happens. And if you're going to live on the hour price chart on Bitcoin, you're gonna have a bad time. Do I look at the hour chart? Absolutely, I do. Does it make me feel bad every once in a while? Yeah. I'm human. I I get it.
But the one thing that I remember from a couple of investors basically saying, you've gotta look four to five to seven years out. If you're look some people have even said, and I agree with this too, if you're looking at hours, four hours, day, week, and even in depending on what you're holding, even months, you're gonna have a bad time. You've gotta look at the trend. Alright? So the people that are getting pissed off on a Sunday afternoon because they see a thousand point drop in the price of Bitcoin, you're gonna have a bad time if you continue doing that. You've gotta shut off TradingView.
You gotta do it, man. You know, it's like you you you will you will run across the price of Bitcoin in in either Twitter or Nasr, and you can feel bad then. Alright? Or you can feel euphoric then. But if you're just your eyes are glazed over and you're just staring at a screen waiting for something to happen, like you're going to will into existence a 10,000 candle, you're gonna have a bad time. Go outside, touch some grass, and I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 09:31AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the May. Cinco de Mayo '20 '20 '5. This is episode ten eighty eight of Bitcoin and got quite a bit to cover today. We're all we're we've got some Tether news. And it's a little it's interesting. It's it's like these guys are some kind of, I don't know, shadow Silicon Valley, the way that they're getting into all kinds of stuff. We're we'll I promise you, we will we will get into it. And then, it looks like a Bitcoin faucet may be coming back from our good friend Charlie Shrem. We'll we'll talk about it. Indonesia has basically slapped the hands of Sam Altman, and then, well, The UK is deciding to shoot themselves in the head yet again.
You can't imagine what's going on. Atomic payments through Cashew is apparently alive and well. And, yes, I am going to talk about Arizona and their governors being a dipshit. I can't there's just no other way to put it. She has gotten herself on the wrong side of, pretty much everything. And then there is some purchasing news of Bitcoin from the big three. I will tell you what they are. But first, Jeff Park has written something about this whole Tether, SoftBank, Cantor Fitzgerald, Binance merger to create this company that's gonna be headed up by Jack Mallers named 21. I don't know if it's gonna be, renamed after that. Right now, all I know of it as is twenty one.
And Jeff published something to his substack, and again, this is Jeff Park. He wrote or published it this morning. It is entitled From Stagnation to Sovereignty. For four decades, since the nineteen nineties, Japan has struggled to escape the gravity of economic stagnation. In response, policymakers engineered one of the most aggressive ultra low interest rate regimes in modern history, which was intended to catalyze domestic investment and rejuvenate growth. But instead of sparking a renaissance at home, this policy gave rise to one of the most powerful engines in financial distortion, quote, the global carry trade, end quote.
For context, this global carry system operates as a form of financial repression where structurally suppressed interest rates in developed economies like Japan push capital elsewhere in search of higher yields. Cheap yen flowed into US Treasuries, emerging markets, and speculative speculative tech ventures, creating the illusion of global liquidity while quietly inflating systemic risk. In this setup, Japan became less an organic growth engine and more an inorganic global financier relying on external asset inflation while its domestic productivity atrophied and its currency weakened.
To understand SoftBank's emergence, therefore, is to understand it as a neutral byproduct of the system. Drawing capital from repressed monetary conditions as a financial arbitrage, it deployed funds with extreme leverage into global high growth, high risk sectors with a hint of desperation. While technically a publicly traded company, SoftBank functions more like a de facto sovereign wealth fund backed by state aligned entities such as Saudi Arabia's PIF and Abu Dhabi's Mud hold on. Mubadala with a strategic industrial role. Masayoshi's son's quasi nationalist undertone historically shows this isn't just about returns. It's about reigniting Japan and their partners competitive spirit in the age of exponential technology while fighting against financial repression.
Because on the other side of the global system sits The United States enjoying what has long been called the exorbitant privilege. As the issuer of the world's reserve currency, The US can borrow at lower rates while controlling access to dollars through tools like swift and sanctions. It's financial repression for everyone else, but privilege for the issuer. However, the abuse of the exorbitant privilege has not gone unnoticed by the international community most severely when The United States froze Russia's central bank reserves back in 02/2022. Now enter Tether, the unofficial eurodollar machine of the crypto age operating outside the traditional banking system. Tether acts as a shadow central bank, exporting digital dollars to meet global demand without US regulatory entanglement.
Like the post World War two euro dark dollar markets in London, Tether allows offshore actors to access dollars while quietly capturing the interest spread. If financial repression is the public burden, Tether is the private loophole that the international community demands. In this context, the emerging alignment between SoftBank and Tether via Cantor Fitzgerald marks a critical geopolitical financial inflection point. These two entities are mirror images shaped by dollar hegemony. One, a beneficiary of dollar weaponization, minting synthetic dollars in regulatory gray zones.
The other, a byproduct of that weaponization forced into compliant but excessive leverage to escape domestic stagnation. As the trade war jolted Japan awake from its long slumber, this transformative partnership is now converging. If SoftBank can tap into Tether's ability to move dollars outside censorship control with the lowest global financing cost on Earth, it could help redesign the global financial system from within as the largest United States sovereign creditor. This will not merely be capital deployment, but a total system design with Bitcoin at the center that only Japan can do. With Tether as a partner, SoftBank may finally flip the script as Michael Saylor might put it, the most hopeless is often the most courageous.
And for Japan, long caught in the inertia of external dependence, this is the rarest moment of opportunity to make its most strategic crypto play yet. And then it says, here's a link to the Unchained show I had the pleasure to join with the great Laura Shin, and he gives a link to this this YouTube video. Okay. So that's that's that's his spiel right there. If you listened to any of last week or the week before show of Bitcoin in, does this sound familiar? Does this sound familiar? Because it certainly sounds familiar to me, especially this paragraph.
Now enter Tether, the unofficial eurodollar machine of the crypto age operating outside the traditional banking system, Tether acts as a shadow central bank exporting digital dollars to meet global demand without US regulatory entanglement. This is what I've been saying. I've been saying this for a long time, in fact. Tether is going to be how The United States prints an enormous amount of debt. That debt is going to be immediately monetized. There's there's there will be no waiting for it because the company Tether will buy bond after bond after bond after bond. They will immediately print Tether, the token, USDT, and they will export that Tether, I e United States freshly minted debt, as an instrument to the rest of the world.
Now he says euro dollar, but what, what I think he might be missing is the fact that the one of the first targets that is in sight for the weaponization of US debt via Tether is going to be Europe. It is actually already being kind of pummeled, and it's gonna get worse. I I wish I could tell you why because, you know, generally speaking, most people view the relationship between Europe and The United States as relatively cordial, but this is not in fact the case. We saw an almost complete collapse of the European bond market, especially over in The UK when we had some, well, we we just decided to raise interest rates really, really quick, and Europe got caught in the crosshairs, and they had a generalized liquidity crunch that damn near bankrupted that entire region.
What did they do? Well, they printed money to get out of it. But still, the damage is already done. It's just been band aided, you know, or or bandaged. That's what I'm trying to say. It's just been bandaged. But Jeff Park is pretty much saying what I've been telling you. So you really gotta watch out for what's going on with Tether. Right? The company, its relationship with the United States Treasury's ability to print debt, the fact that it is a major holder of an agricultural company and it's starting to branch out into other areas. And now they've hooked up with SoftBank.
We've got this thing coming out called '21 with Jack Mallers being the CEO. I things are gonna change. But Tether's not they're not just gonna stick to this. They're they're continuously branching out into other areas. Like, for instance, Helen Parts from Cointelegraph is writing this one, Tether artificial intelligence platform to support Bitcoin and, of course, USDT payments according to the CEO. Tether AI, the forthcoming artificial intelligence platform from stablecoin giant Tether, will feature payments in major cryptocurrencies including USDT and Bitcoin.
Tether CEO, Paolo Ardoino, took to Twitter on May to tease the imminent launch of Tether AI, the company's new AI platform designed to offer, quote, personal infinite intelligence. According to Ardoina, Tether's AI platform will be integrated with USDT and Bitcoin payments, allowing users to make transactions directly through a peer to peer network. The initiative builds on Tether's December twenty twenty four announcement that it was developing a website for the AI tool targeting a launch by the end of the first quarter of this year, '20 '20 '5. Arduino emphasized that Tether AI will not use application programming interface keys and will not depend on centralization control points. Instead, Tether AI will offer a fully open source AI runtime that will run on an unstoppable peer to peer network and be fully modular and composable, whatever the hell composable actually means here. But additionally, Tether AI will be capable of adapting and evolving on any hardware and device according to Palo.
The announcement also said that Tether AI's p two p crypto payments will be infused with its open source wallet development kit, which was launched November 2024. That toolkit enables developers to build mobile, desktop, and web wallet applications enabling self custodial or non custodial holding of both USDT and Bitcoin unlike custodial wallets, self custodial wallet solutions allows users to control assets completely eliminating reliance on third party custody solutions for competing transactions. Tether AI is part of a broader strategy to expand the company's footprint in artificial intelligence. Back in April of twenty twenty four, Tether announced company restructuring to, well, introduce new divisions beyond stablecoin development, launching Tether Data, a dedicated unit focused on AI and p two p development.
In February, Ardoino announced that its AI division was working on a series of AI apps, including AI translate, voice assistant, and Bitcoin wallet assistant. Pausing just to say, what the hell AI for a wallet assistant? And think about that. Probably a a a combination of coin control, so you're always able to figure out with where you are drawing your coins from if you're going to trade or buy something or whatever. But what else? I mean, what what what would an AI be doing in my wallet that would assist me in making a payment? I don't need assistance right now. I use Specter Wallet. I have coin control. I can control my, I I my fees. Maybe that's what it is. Maybe AI will be able to reach out and give a sensible, you know, consensus of what the fee rate should actually be on your transaction. But I just I I feel a little twitchy about having an AI assistant in my wallet. I'm just I'm just saying. But continuing, according to Ardoino, Tether AI has one key goal of providing the ideal technological foundation to achieve the vision of AI described by Isaac Asimov, one of the most influential science fiction authors about AI known for works such as I, Robot, the Robot series, and more, quote, AI will, in the coming decades, become part of the very fabric of the universe, Ardoino said in another Twitter post, but was written in Italian for whatever reason.
Okay. So te now we're we're getting into Tether AI. We we're getting into to Bitcoin wallet assistance. We're getting into payments for this new service in Bitcoin and Tether. This pretty much is yet another point of evidence that suggests that I think that I'm right. I think that in the short to medium term, Tether is going to buy as much US debt as the United States Treasury is willing to print as we move forward. That doesn't mean just that that doesn't mean today. They're not doing that right now. They're not buying every single thing that the Treasury can actually print as far as a debt instrument is concerned.
I think that happens in the future. That and and not too terribly far out future either. Like, five to seven years, you're going to start seeing Tether being buying just oodles and oodles of treasury bonds as they and bills as they get printed. But because I've been I was told to say, well, yeah, but it's only a hundred and $48,000,000,000 of Tether right now. Yeah. Right now. You do understand that tomorrow is actually on the way. Right? Winter is coming. Well, tomorrow is coming too, and tomorrow, they're gonna buy a shit ton more debt than they did today, and the day after that is going to be a whole lot more debt that Tether purchases from the United States Treasury after that.
And then I think they're gonna switch, and they're gonna back all existing Tether that had ever been printed by Bitcoin and probably gold and maybe a couple of other things. Yeah. They'll still have some Treasury stuff, but they're going I think they're going to pivot. Because the thing that every I know everybody hates Tether. Not well, not everybody hates Tether. Lots of people love Tether, but, like, hardcore Bitcoiners, and I include myself amongst them, I've never had a use for Tether. Right? I used to regard it as a complete shitcoin, and then I realized that stablecoins kinda they're not altcoins. They're not shitcoins. They're certainly not Bitcoin. There's some they're something altogether different.
Whether it's bad or good, that that's beside that's not in the scope of this conversation. I'm just saying they're completely different, so I can't really regard them as an altcoin or a shitcoin or whatever. Right? But Paulo's always been on the side of Bitcoin. Not whatever you wanna say about him. He's always been on the side of Bitcoin. And you'll go, well, clearly, he wasn't because he created Tether. But, again, I conclude that Tether is a completely different beast. I think what he did is he fashioned or the company together it wasn't just Palos, him and a team of his.
I think they fashioned an instrument the likes of which no financial market has ever seen. Bitcoin is also one of these types of instruments, but it it exists to do a wholly different function. At one point or another, because of the history of Palo with Bitcoin and the fact that they continuously say we're gonna accept Bitcoin for payment alongside our own dog food, which is USDT, That tells me that they're completely Bitcoin centric, and they have remained so for the years and years and years, and they've never wavered. And this is what I find interesting.
Generally speaking, you'll find people that say, oh, we're Bitcoin only, and then they're not. They turn out to be shitcoiners. I think something I think I think I'm going to end up being proven correct. It may take ten years, but I think I'm gonna end up being proven correct. The short to medium term is Tether buying every single dime that The United States can print as a debt instrument, converting it instantly, thereby monetizing it instantly and shipping it, the debt, to the rest of the world. Europe is in the crosshairs. I don't think China really is, but I guarantee there's other countries that are in the crosshairs of this particular weaponization of the United States dollar denominated debt.
But we've got other things to talk about here because a relic of the early days of Bitcoin may be coming back Free Bitcoin faucet from the 02/2010 era is all set all set for a comeback, and this is Sharra Malwa writing for CoinDesk. A relic of Bitcoin's earliest days is making a comeback, potentially reviving a tradition that once handed out Bitcoin for free to anyone who could solve a simple captcha. Charlie Shrim, an early Bitcoin developer and entrepreneur, tested the relaunch of the Bitcoin faucet earlier Monday, posting a link to the page that mimicked the one built by Gavin Andresen in 02/2010. The Fawcett Lee famously distributed 5 whole Bitcoin per user to their Bitcoin wallets for free back when the token was worth less than 1p.
Each one of those transfers is worth nearly $500,000 at current prices. The website is not yet live with rewards and holds 0 BTC as of early US hours on Monday. The original faucet was designed to help onboard new users to the Bitcoin network at a time when buying or mining Bitcoin was cumbersome and often required technical know how. At the time of launch, Andreessen funded the faucet with 1,100 BTC and saw it as a way to grow the network organically. The idea worked. Thousands of early users got their first exposure to Bitcoin through that faucet, which, in hindsight, distributed small fortunes for free.
By the time the faucet shut down, its payouts had dwindled to fractions of a BTC, but its cultural impact remained legendary, especially as BTC prices surged over the next decade. So the faucet looks like it's on its way back, and a screenshot of it makes it look seems to look exactly like it did in the old days. And, no, I was not early enough to take part of those faucets. I wish I had been, but I wasn't. It's okay. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna cry about it. It'll be interesting to see what the, quote, unquote, free payout is and whether or not it's as widely adopted as those early faucets were because those early faucets were, in fact, pretty widely adopted. I mean, people oh, man. It was just like it was just a dirty free for all of getting 5 Bitcoin for solving a simple captcha.
Do you feel dirty? Because Soap Miner's got you back, brother. [email protected]. That's Soap Miner dot com. Circle p is open for business. Circle p is where I bring plebs with goods and services. They're just like you. And maybe you want to buy their goods and services, but unless it's somebody like me who's willing to, I don't know, put up or shut up and get these guys on the air and put them in front of you so that you know that they have goods and services, then you could be just buying your crappy ass soap from Walmart from, like, I don't know, lever, a huge massive multinational company. How about supporting a Bitcoiner like SoapMiner and buy his handmade tallow soap? It's 100% beef tallow, lye, distilled water, and that's just as rough cut tallow. It's only three ingredients. It is as clean of a soap as you're going to get. But if you like cedarwood, peppermint, lavender, pine tar, what else? He's also got, fresh breeze, lemongrass, and orange slash clove tallow soap. So he added, like, three new flavors to his lineup.
All of these soaps are awesome, and all of them all of them are sold for Bitcoin. If you're not selling your good or service for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p. That's the way it works. You get 10% off of your entire entire purchase if you use the code Bitcoin and in the cart's coupon code box. So you select what you want. You go to your cart. There is a coupon code on that page. Put in Bitcoin and because, otherwise, he won't know that I was able to make a sale for him because the deal with the circle p is this. I advertise you for free because most of the plebs do not have advertising budgets out there.
I may not have a massive audience, but I do have an audience. And you guys have already been buying soap. You've got guys have been buying maple syrup from Mapletrade. The vendors, if they find value in a sale that I made, it is up to them to determine how many Satoshis they send my way. That's the way it works. It's probably the dumbest model on the face of the planet when it comes to advertising, but plebs need help getting the word out. And I'm more than happy to be that that guinea pig. Right? So if you're interested in being in Circle p, get a hold of me. You can, you can just DM me on Noster. My my, end pub is in the show notes as always. It's there every single day. And you can get a hold of me on Twitter at David Bennett n b. David Bennett n b. N b stands for none you business, but it's David Bennett n b over there on Twitter. I'm not there all that often, but I do check-in on a daily basis just to see what people are crying about. If you DM me over there, I'll see what I can I'll see what I can do. Or just mention me in a note on Nostr, and that's probably the best way because I'm always always have my Noster client up. Alright. Moving on to Indonesia, who is slapping Sam Altman around by the head and shoulders because they've suspended Sam Altman's eye scanning world project.
Do you remember this? Do you remember Worldcoin? It's still alive. Will McCurdy from Decrypt tell us more. World, formerly known as Worldcoin, has been hit with a suspension by Indonesian regulators who alleged the blockchain startup may have committed a serious violation of its regulations. Led by Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, World offers users small payments of its shitcoin, WLD, in exchange for scanning their biometric data via one of its orb devices. It's getting your retinal scan as well as your corneal scan. I guarantee they're getting both of that both those information. Because corneas, the color of your eye, it's like a fingerprint just like your retina.
And your cornea is easier to scan by outside cameras than your retina. Okay? So you're giving over way too much to Sam Altman. Anyway, Alexander Sabar, director general of digital space supervision, said the suspension was due to reports of suspicious activity by the project. Sabar called the move, quote, a preventative measure to prevent potential risks to the community, end quote. The official announcement alleged that the Indonesian subsidiary operating world in the country, PT Tarang Bulan Abadi, has not been properly registered as an electronic system organizer and did not have the electronic system organizer registration certificate required by Indonesian law as a result.
The announcement claims World used t d p s e in the name of another legal entity, PT Sandina Abadi Nusundatra. Both legal entities have been summoned by the regulator to provide clarification on the alleged violations. Quote, noncompliance with registration obligations and the use of the identity of another legal entity to carry out digital services is a serious violation, said Sabar. He added, we invite the public to help maintain a safe and trusted digital space for all citizens, end quote. This wasn't the first time that regulators have clamped down on world's activities. German regulators ordered the firm to implement a GDPR compliant data deletion protocol while a month later, Brazil's National Data Protection Authority levied a ban on the company from operating inside the country claiming its payouts could influence consumer behavior in unfair ways.
The startup was banned for just under a year in Kenya with local politicians criticizing its business practices and even calling the company a gang of criminals before it resumed operations in June of twenty twenty four. However, though world may have lost access to the 280,000,000 strong Indonesian market, at least temporarily, its potential user base is expanding. God forbid. World rolled out its service in six, count them, six major American cities earlier this week. Atlanta, Austin, Texas. Oh my god. Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco.
Until recently, Americans were not allowed to receive their WLD tokens as payment. The firm has also rolled out a number of integrations in recent days, including Tinder owner Match Group and prediction market Kalshi along with Visa card and charges for applications using WorldID services. Do not use this service. Do not let your eyes get scanned by an orb. Don't do it. Stay away from anybody with that wants to do this. Do not let them take your biometric data. Not for a pissant shitcoin like WLD token and not for somebody like Sam Altman.
Do I use ChatGPT? Yes. I do. I also use a couple of other different things. But, yes, I use ChatGPT. And why would you use it if you think Sam's because ChatGPT is a good product. It just is. But I'm not letting it scan my eyeball. I'm not letting it get a hold of my corneal fingerprint. It's just not something I'm going to do, and neither should you. Okay. Last up for the first half of the show, UK, The United Kingdom, is going to ban Bitcoin purchases with credit cards. So in another motion of trying to shoot themselves in the foot, UK Regulators are looking to ban the use of borrowed funds to buy digital assets as part of a wider effort to regulate the fast growing digital assets market and protect consumers for what they consider debt and financial harm.
As a result, UK citizens might lose their ability to buy Bitcoin with credit cards. The Financial Conduct Authority, the UK's top financial regulator, has proposed a new rule that would stop people from using any kind of credit cards, personal loans, or lender financing to buy digital assets like Bitcoin. The proposal is open for comment until 06/13/2025. The reason for the move is growing concern that people are going into debt to buy digital assets, which are considered risky. And the FCA said in its paper, quote, we are concerned that consumers buying crypto assets with credit cards may take on unsustainable debt, particularly if the value of their crypto assets drop and they were relying on its value to repay, end quote.
According to a recent FCA survey, 14% of UK Digital Asset Investors use credit to buy Bitcoin and other digital assets in 2024, more than double the 6% who did just two years before. Debt based Bitcoin investing is getting the regulators worried. Gee, I wonder I wonder who could have possibly started this trend. Who is it that that basically just issues debt to buy Bitcoin with? I don't know. I can't remember. Let's run the numbers. Futures and commodities, West Texas Intermediate as well as Brenton, North Sea are getting pummeled as of opening of the markets in oil trading yesterday, 06:00PM eastern daylight time.
Why OPEC plus, specifically Saudi Arabia, has increased their oil output, and it shows because immediately, West Texas Intermediate lost almost a four or a a full four points. That was that was last night. It since regained some of that, but it's still down to $56.99. We're showing a 2.23% downturn in the price of West Texas Intermediate. Brent is down almost two points to $60.12. Natural gas down as well 1.82% to $3.56 per thousand. Gasoline barely budging. You know, if I were to go back and look at the onset of summertime, I'll bet you I'd see the exact same pattern. Prices of crude dropped precipitously, yet gasoline suspiciously just kinda still hovering, like in this instance at $2.01 a gallon, which is better than, you know, 3 and a half or 4. I get that, but I don't know, man. I and, yes, you'll say, oh, what's going on? Because half the refineries are offline.
Dude, half the refineries have been offline for, like, what seems like eight years now. I think that the renovations have probably been completed by now, so I think there's something else going on. But whatever, gold is up 2 and a third to $33.19 and a dime. Silver is up point 71%. Platinum is down a half. Copper is up a half. Palladium down three quarters of a point. Ag is mostly in the red today. The only real winner is sugar, 1.4% to the upside. Biggest loser, as usual, is chocolate, 4.36 to the downside. Live cattle is up one and a third, though. Lean hogs down a tenth. Feeder cattle up point 69%.
Dow is up a quarter of a point, but the S and P has lost a quarter. Nasdaq has also lost a quarter, and the S and P Mini is up a third. Bitcoin also been kinda been kind of eroding, its $97,000 price that we had going into the weekend. It is now at $94,150. That is a $1,870,000,000,000 market cap, and we can now only get 28.3 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,860,375.86 of, and average fees per block are really low. 0.02 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis. Why? Because the mempools are, like, fairly empty yet again, and everybody thinks we're gonna die.
I don't know how many times I've been here, And I also don't know how many times I've been on the other side of the equation where mempools have so many transactions waiting to clear that you can't see straight. And both of those issues are apparently going to kill Bitcoin, and I'm sick of the argument. No. It's not. We've been here before. We will be here again. And guess what? Every ten minutes, if there's transactions in a block, they're going to clear. Right now, we have 7,800 of them waiting to clear at high priority rates of 4 Satoshis per v byte. Low priority is gonna get you in at three. Hash rate, however, is also recovering.
We are now above 900 exahashes. We are at 906.8 exahashes per second. So miners seem to be putting their machines back online. Go figure. Why? Because we're not gonna die. I just I'm this between this crap and the op return, I can I can barely even look at Twitter right now? I I did that this morning to see if there was any any trend I could see because, generally, I I don't even have to look at the news. I can just go to Twitter, find you know, see what most people are bitching about, and I kinda get a flavor for the day. And I went over there this morning, and I was like, you've gotta be shitting me. So I immediately went back over to Noster where everybody is not thinking that everything is going to die.
It is the most negative place on the Internet that I've ever seen has been Twitter for the last year that I've been back on it. It's sad. It's sickening. And you'll go, what what do you keep going over there? It's got a it's it's a good place to get a flavor of what people are bitching about. And right now, it's as of this morning, it's the op return mess, which I really I almost waded into it with Peter Todd and said something I probably shouldn't have. And I yes. I ended up deleting that tweet because I'm like, had to listen to my mom's voice. If you don't have anything nice to say, you shouldn't say anything at all. And I just didn't have anything nice to say with about what Peter he had a tweet talking about tail emissions on Bitcoin.
How how many times have I heard that argument? I heard and I saw somebody else, but this was on Noster saying something about, like, what if and it was clearly a newbie. And it was like, what if maybe we put, you know, tail emissions on where we continuously generate? I'm like, dude, I had to write back going. We've already talked about this 17,000 times since I've been in this space, and people were talking about it way longer than that. The opportune issue, is it going to kill Bitcoin? Yes. It's annoying. No. I don't like the direction that it's taking.
I can't stop it. But you know what? I'm not I'm not terrified that it's going to kill Bitcoin. It's not going to kill Bitcoin, and neither are lightly filled mempools and neither are heavily filled mempools. Please just stop and go to bitcoinandshow.com. That's bitcoinandshow, all one word, bitcoinandshow.com. Sign up. I need your I need your email. I need people looking at this website. I need a little bit of traffic on this. It's brand new website and well, it's where I put all the shows. Anything that I've ever, you know, anything that I've ever or have written or or going to write is all going to be in this nice little spot. It's it doesn't have a lot of lights, whistles, and bells just yet.
But I am going to be putting in my circle p vendors. It's got all the shows. It's got all the stuff that I've written. It will have all of that and more as time goes on. Bitcoin and show.com, if you wanna support the show, sign up, give me your email. I don't sell it. I don't give it away. I promise you, I'm never going to do that. Why would I? It's not worth it to me. But that way, at least when the show comes out, you'll on the website, you'll know about it. You'll get an email. Generally, I'm only going to publish once a day. So, no, I'm not going to flood your inbox with all kinds of stuff. Although I do wish that you guys would flood my boostograms with all kinds of stuff for me to read. This is all from Spookcoin, which was Friday's episode of Bitcoin, and I got Turkey with a thousand says nothing.
Psyduck with 594 says nothing. Now here's Paul Cernine with 500, and he does say, thanks for yet another nice episode. Keep up the good work. And, yes, the European Union is a Titanic steering directly into the iceberg. 444 Sats from Dot says, thank you, sir. As a European, I appreciate your perspective. Yeah. Mica has potential to end up in a clusterfuck of disturbance driven by incompetence and ignorance. Anyway, it may cause a stringent adoption of self custody and a more public awareness of Bitcoin's properties beyond currency. Let's continue to orange pill.
Stay humble, and stack sats about it. Yes. Absolutely. 100%. It very well may activate the very thing that the European doesn't wanna see or the European Union doesn't wanna see, and that is European citizenry becoming monetarily sovereign without their permission. Good point, Skye. Yodle Yodle with 444 says have a great weekend. I did, And that's it. That that's it for the weather report. Welcome to part two of the news you can use. Cali wrote a note on Nostra today, and he says, holy shit, it's working. I paid a hundred thousand Satoshi lightning invoice from two different Cashew Mints at the same time.
Enter atomic multi nut payments. And then he's got a little a brief little video that that he's posted, you know, in this note that shows what he's doing, but he's got a description here that I can read to you. All Cashew wallets let you use multiple mints. To reduce rug risk, we encourage users to leave only small amounts on each mint. This introduces a big user experience challenge, which forces users to distribute funds on different mints in a smart way. It's particularly problematic when you're trying to pay a bigger lightning invoice from your small balances. Who has time for that? The Lightning Protocol allows nodes to split a single payment HTLC, otherwise known as a hash time lock contract, into multiple parts to increase the chance of reaching the destination called multipath payments.
Typically, that's done from one sender to one receiver. What if you can just break the rules? A multi net payment originates from multiple Lightning nodes to pay a single invoice automatically or sorry. No. Atomically. And I'll get to that in a second. Even if none of your mint balances can cover an invoice, as long as your total balance is large enough, you can pay that invoice. I don't think anyone was crazy enough to do this before. Pretty sure what you see here is the first invoice being paid using a CLN and an LND node at the same time.
Amazing work by the team. Special thanks to Lawler first. Okay. So there's several things in here. First, the atomic, atomically. When he says atomically, it means that if I set up, like and this is, like, just using let's just say I'm I'm in lightning. When multipath payments first came out, the idea was that I could pay an invoice. But at the time multipath payments came about. One of the reasons it came about was because at the time, liquidity on the Lightning Network wasn't big enough to handle larger payments. So somebody said, well, what if we were able to split the payments up? Like, you know, a a million Satoshi invoice was never going to be able to be paid over the lightning network, like, two, you know, two years ago?
It was it was destined to fail. So I and I can't remember who, and I'm remiss for that, but it is what it is. Somebody comes up with the idea, what if we split that into $10,100,000 Satoshi payments and paid that same invoice? And it was it worked. And but people were saying, well, what happens if one of those payment routes fails? 900,000 Satoshis goes to the payment invoice or it to the user, but that last 100,000 didn't, so you didn't actually pay the invoice. Did you just lose 900,000 Satoshis? The answer is no because of the word atomic.
All of them have to get there. All of them have to get there. It has to be a whole. That's what atomic actually means. I think that's from Greece or or Greek or something like that, where Adam is like the single thing, and that's the payment of the invoice. If any part of the multipath payment fails, the whole thing fails, and all of your Satoshis come back to you. K. So that's that's the one thing. This is using eCash, and it looks like it's using lightning on the back end to take the place of providing liquidity to multiple cashew mints so that you would be able to use two, three, four e cash mints to be able to do this multipath payment over e cash instead of Lightning. So it looks like it's a mishmash because he says, and this is the third point, that it's this payment that he shows in this video is actually an invoice being paid by a CLN lightning node and a LND lightning node. Those are two completely different lightning, daemons.
Right? One's written in a completely different language. It does things a completely different way, but it interoperates with the Lightning Network protocol. So that's really all you need, but this is the very first time I've ever seen two completely, and for lack of a better term, architecturally different Lightning nodes working in conjunction to pay a single invoice. This is actually way more important than people think, so keep your eye on multipath payments over e cash. Just saying. Okay. So we all got triggered over the weekend when Arizona was the first to get both of their Bitcoin strategic reserve bills onto the governor's desk. It passed senate. It passed house. It passed committee after committee after committee after committee. It had widespread respect and support in the Arizona state legislature. And what did the governor do?
She vetoed it. And that has triggered quite the reaction from the community. Atlas twenty one writes about it. Arizona governor Katie Hobbs, who hobbled Arizona, recent decision to veto a bill that would have enabled the state to hold Bitcoin as part of its official reserves has sparked, guess what, a wave of criticism from the Bitcoin community. Quote, this decision will age poorly, commented Jameson Lop in a May 3 Twitter post. Entrepreneur Anthony Pompliano added, quote, imagine the ignorance of a politician who believes they can make better investment decisions than the market, end quote.
Attorney and digital asset specialist, Andrew Gordon, highlighted the importance of having more elected officials who understand that Bitcoin and crypto represent the future. Pompliano also remarked that, quote, if Hobbs can outperform Bitcoin, she must buy it. State senator Wendy Rogers, cosponsor of one of the bills alongside representative Jeff Wenninger, publicly voiced her disappointment stating, quote, politicians don't realize that Bitcoin doesn't need Arizona. It's Arizona that needs Bitcoin. On May, Hobbs vetoed the Arizona Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act, a law that would have allowed Arizona to invest confiscated funds in Bitcoin and create a reserve managed by state officials.
In a letter addressed to senate president Warren Peterson, Hobbs justified her decision by emphasizing that the Arizona State Retirement System must continue to prioritize prioritize stable, well vetted investments. She described digital assets as untested and unsuitable for the retirement savings of Arizona residents. Quote, the Arizona State Retirement System is one of the strongest in the country because it makes sound and informed investments. Arizona's retirement funds are not the place to experiment with untested investments like virtual currencies, the governor stated.
Rogers has already announced her intention to reintroduce the bill in the next legislative session. The senator also pointed out an apparent contradiction. Arizona's pension system already holds shares in strategy, Michael Saylor's company, which Rogers describes as basically a leveraged Bitcoin ETF. Arizona's strategic Bitcoin reserve bill will be back. HODL. That's a direct quote. Had the law passed, Arizona would have become the very first United States state to establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. The state now joins others including Oklahoma, Montana, South Dakota, and Wyoming where similar initiatives have either stalled or been withdrawn.
So the fight goes on. All the way to Brown University's doorstep, except they're on the other side of the fight. They have bought and own $4,900,000 of not Bitcoin, but BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF. Yes. When the news first hit over the weekend, it said that they had bought Bitcoin, but apparently, they have not. And Brown University, in case you're wondering, is one of the original, quote, unquote, Ivy League colleges in The United States. It's not a small school. It's one of the oldest schools in the nation. It is considered Ivy League. They have shit tons of money. And instead of buying the actual corn itself, they decided to go with, well, the iBit ETF.
According to a filing today, Brown University, a private university based in Providence, Rhode Island, revealed a large position in BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF, iBit, as first reported by market analyst, Macroscope. The position showed Brown holding $4,915,050 worth of iBit as of 03/31/2025, which sees the school become the third United States university to publicly announce a Bitcoin purchase after Emory and Austin or University of Austin in tax u a t x. And that's not to be confused with the University of Texas in Austin. Okay? That is University of Austin is a private institution and it's small.
University of Texas in Austin is a public institution, a state institution, and it's freaking massive. Anyway, in a 13 f filing this morning, Brown University reported 105,000 shares that they own of the iBit Bitcoin ETF as of March 31. Is there anything else here? The total value of all 14 oh, wait a second. This is a new position, which means it was acquired in January, February, or March. The total value of all 14 positions in the filing is $216,000,000. This is an important one. And it looks like they're talking about, I don't know. It it this is a con this is confusing me.
Because it's like comparing it's comparing a whole bunch of stuff that's like, I don't know. This is bizarre because it's like they I don't know. The there there are other positions don't have anything to do with Bitcoin, Bitcoin trust, or anything like that. And so I don't know. Just it it's weird. A growing number of US universities are signaling confidence in the long term Bitcoin potential by adding the digital asset to their endowment portfolios. Emory University and the University of Austin have each disclosed Bitcoin related initiatives further validating the cryptocurrency's institutional appeal. And I'm not I'm not shitting on University of Austin. It's just that they're very new.
They just opened up, like, two or three years ago or something like that, and they're very, very small. Right? Their their position, I'm just gonna say it, is is like a a gnat on the fly's ass of humanity. Okay? I mean, it's really, really small. So that that we keep saying University of Austin, I I I don't think we're really doing ourselves a service. Brown University is massive. Right? They're they're they're huge. They're and they're private. They've got a shitload of money. They've been around forever. Right? So that's important.
Emory University's medium size. It's not all that huge, but it ain't all that small either. So we've only got really one university system of any size of any note whatsoever that is actually into Bitcoin. So I think we have to be fair to ourselves and not get ourselves all, oh my god, Brand University, all these co you all these schools are buying Bitcoin. Nah. Really, there's only one there that actually makes a whole shit ton of sense, but they're not the only ones buying. Similar Scientific has added more Bitcoin. Steven Alpher's got it for CoinDesk.
The company has acquired a hundred and 67 Bitcoin for 16,200,000.0 or an average price of about $97,000 each according to a Monday morning SEC filing. The purchase appears to mostly or totally be funded via sales of their common stock with the company disclosing it sold 1,160,000.00 shares for $39,800,000 under its April 15 at the market offering. Similar now holds 3,634 Bitcoin acquired for $322,300,000 or an average price of $88,668 each. And their holdings are worth more than $340,000,000 at the current price, which is around $94,000. And then, of course, who else bought Bitcoin but strategy? They've bought another 1,895 for a hundred and 80,000,000, and they now own 555,450 BTC. And you might be asking yourself, with all this Bitcoin being bought, why did we see the price plummet on Sunday? Because we always see the price plummet on Sunday.
It's a this has been going on for a while, and there was somebody there was a couple of people on Nostar, not just one person, but there was a couple people that was like, you you could feel it when you read their notes, that they're exasperated. They're exhausted. Buckle up, man. This shit goes on for a while. And here's the thing is that the Sunday dip has now become kind of endemic to Bitcoin and it's been because it's been going on for months. In fact, it's been going on because it's always Sunday, sometime around Sunday afternoon or, you know, early Sunday evening into the late evening hours, that Sailor will basically telegraph that MicroStrategy has bought more Bitcoin. And then Monday morning, they announced that buy.
And the same was the it was the same thing yesterday. We I I I looked I looked I was looking at the price. I'm like, yep. There there it is, a Sunday dip. And then it's, like, looked down at my sidebar in TradingView where I've got the news up, and it's like, oh, Michael Saylor has announced yet again that their that strategy has probably bought more Bitcoin. It's like clockwork. It just happens. And if you're going to live on the hour price chart on Bitcoin, you're gonna have a bad time. Do I look at the hour chart? Absolutely, I do. Does it make me feel bad every once in a while? Yeah. I'm human. I I get it.
But the one thing that I remember from a couple of investors basically saying, you've gotta look four to five to seven years out. If you're look some people have even said, and I agree with this too, if you're looking at hours, four hours, day, week, and even in depending on what you're holding, even months, you're gonna have a bad time. You've gotta look at the trend. Alright? So the people that are getting pissed off on a Sunday afternoon because they see a thousand point drop in the price of Bitcoin, you're gonna have a bad time if you continue doing that. You've gotta shut off TradingView.
You gotta do it, man. You know, it's like you you you will you will run across the price of Bitcoin in in either Twitter or Nasr, and you can feel bad then. Alright? Or you can feel euphoric then. But if you're just your eyes are glazed over and you're just staring at a screen waiting for something to happen, like you're going to will into existence a 10,000 candle, you're gonna have a bad time. Go outside, touch some grass, and I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Tether's Role in Global Finance
Bitcoin Market Updates and Analysis
