Join me today for Episode 1095 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/jack-mallers-twenty-one-capital-and-tether-bought-4812-bitcoin-for-458700000
https://cointelegraph.com/news/south-korean-presidential-candidates-support-bitcoin-etfs
https://atlas21.com/thailand-to-tokenize-government-bonds-worth-150-million/
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/14/bitcoin-boom-likely-as-bond-yields-harden-yes-you-read-that-correctly
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/semler-scientific-has-purchased-1510-bitcoin-this-year-now-holds-3808-btc
https://www.theblock.co/post/354281/doj-indicts-alleged-sinaloa-cartel-leaders-as-blockchain-firms-trace-crypto-links-to-fentanyl-trade
https://decrypt.co/319612/paris-kidnapping-attempt-highlights-growing-threat-to-crypto-figures
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Topics for today:
- Samourai's Moot Response
- 21Capital Buys 4,812 BTC
- S. Korean Presidential Hopefuls All in BTC
- Thai Government to Put Bonds on the B-Chain
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Articles:
https://www.therage.co/samourai-wallet-responds-to-sdny-moot-request/https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/jack-mallers-twenty-one-capital-and-tether-bought-4812-bitcoin-for-458700000
https://cointelegraph.com/news/south-korean-presidential-candidates-support-bitcoin-etfs
https://atlas21.com/thailand-to-tokenize-government-bonds-worth-150-million/
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/05/14/bitcoin-boom-likely-as-bond-yields-harden-yes-you-read-that-correctly
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://www.bitcoinandshow.com/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/semler-scientific-has-purchased-1510-bitcoin-this-year-now-holds-3808-btc
https://www.theblock.co/post/354281/doj-indicts-alleged-sinaloa-cartel-leaders-as-blockchain-firms-trace-crypto-links-to-fentanyl-trade
https://decrypt.co/319612/paris-kidnapping-attempt-highlights-growing-threat-to-crypto-figures
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 10:43AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the May 2025. This is episode ten ninety five of Bitcoin, and we've got some more samurai stuff going on. It's this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting things in the world. Thankfully, we're going to talk about it, but we're also going to talk about a switch that I'm seeing in attitudes as to what people think are going to kill Bitcoin next because apparently nobody gives a shit about opportune anymore. That seems to have died. And we're now on to corporate Bitcoin treasury companies being the death knell of Bitcoin, it seems the people that I don't know. What do you wanna call them? The the pontificators, the pundits. That's it. That's what I'm try trying to say. The pundits of Bitcoin are out in force, and they've completely changed the narrative on at least Twitter. I'm not seeing it as much on Nostr because Nostr is my safe haven from, well, stupid. But we're gonna get into all that. Jack Mallers company has made a move, and it seems that there are some people that are running wanting to run for president in South Korea, and they're all jumping on the Trump we love Bitcoin bandwagon. I don't know if it's going to help them or not, but then we'll move over to Thailand where their government is, well, gonna be stupid.
I'm sorry, but it that's just the way that is. It just and then we've got some we'll have some, economic news as normal. There is some, news about well, actually, it's not really news as much as we're gonna talk a little bit about bond yields and what's been going on with them. Some people seem to think in opposition to what other people think because most people think it's like, oh, the bond yields are rising. And I'm one of these people. Right? Bond yields are rising. Therefore, money is not cheap to borrow. So therefore, risk assets slide. Well, we've got a counterargument to that that we will get into.
And then strategy, well, strategy is told the Financial Times some news. Apparently, this, interview that Saylor gave to, I don't know, one of these Financial Times guys, there it's making the rounds. And not just because of what Sailor said, it's because of the person that was interviewing Sailor from the Financial Times. There are several clips of her just not getting it, but we are going to stick to just the strategy side of that particular thing. I just thought it was noteworthy that we just have so many people in mainstream media that they're just gonna die on the hill. There's nothing you can do for them.
There's just nothing we can do. Simler's back in the news. The DOJ has indicted some Sinaloa cartel leaders, and it has clearly something to do with Bitcoin. And I will end today's show with yet another final word of warning about being in public and having it known that you either own bitcoin or you are connected to somebody who themselves owns bitcoin. Please, please, please, when you're going to the new this bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, consider not wearing swag. Just wear cargo pants and a fucking t shirt or something like that. You don't need to advertise this stuff. Okay? You just don't. It's bad enough being at a conference as it is because everybody there is a target. But it's the people that wear the swag. I swear to God. Because they get separated from the crowd.
And they're they're like they're single targets. They've got no protection whatsoever. But we're gonna move over to the samurai wallet issue. Lola Leads has written yet another, article about samurai wallet. And their their response to the Southern District Of New York's moot request. Yeah. We're we're doing it. The Southern District of New York has claimed that it did not fail to disclose Brady material to the defense following revelations that the prosecutor's office had been informed by FinCEN that Samurai Wallet likely did not need to register as a money service business prior six months prior, I might add, to bringing its indictment of the developers.
Now I okay. I'm gonna pause here just to say, it sounds like I've read this to you before. I this is different. Okay. We'll get into it. Just trust me. Alright? Hang with me. According to SDNY, the court should moot the defense's request for a hearing to remedy SDNY's actions as the material revealed was merely the informal opinion of senior FinCEN staff who did not act on behalf of the agency, thereby not constituting what's known as Brady material. Quote, the information the government suppressed for almost a year is classic Brady, argues the samurai wallet defense in its latest filing to support the hearing request. FinCEN's response to SDNY, quote, precisely echoes the public statement samurai wallet made about why its business did not run afoul of the licensing and money laundering requirement for money transmitters, the defense writes, providing powerful corroboration of mister Hill and mister Rodriguez's good faith belief that they were not violating any laws.
Quote, prosecutors produced many, many terabytes of discovery, carefully avoiding disclosure of what they had to know would be a bombshell, the defense continues, describing SDNY's conduct as, quote, proof of the very regulation by prosecution that two US senators protested at the time of the charges that the cryptocurrency industry has decried in letters to congress and the president, and that is now the subject of the Blanche memo, end quote. Debunking SDNY's claims that the opinions expressed by FinCEN were merely formal opinions of senior FinCEN employees, the defense states that, quote, the fact that they expressed the identical interpretation of the FinCEN guidance as the defendants did in their public statements while they were supposedly knowingly engaged in criminal conspiracy, end quote, further quote, that FinCEN employees included the one responsible for enforcing FinCEN rules against companies like Samurai Wallet had the same opinion as mister Hill and mister Rodriguez is, in fact, evidence that they reasonably believed that they did not require a FinCEN license or anti money laundering controls, the defense concludes.
Well, noting that SDNY refers to money service business registration requirements as ambiguous statutes to argue that prosecutors are not required to follow FinCEN's interpretation of the law according to the overturning of the Chevron deference or, well, the Chevron case, and we'll, say a few things about that here in a sec. The defense notes that prosecutors are not allowed to criminally prosecute individuals for violations of ambiguous statutes. I'm gonna read that one again. Noting that SDNY refers to money service business registration requirements as, quote, ambiguous statutes, end quote, to argue that prosecutors are not required to follow FinCEN's interpretation of the law according to the overturning of Chevron, the defense notes that prosecutors are not allowed, not allowed to criminally prosecute individuals for violations of ambiguous statutes.
Ambiguity concerning the ambit, a m b I t, the ambit of criminal statutes should be resolved in favor of lenity the defense cites, highlighting that violations of ambiguous criminal law must be interpreted in favor of the defendants, quote, for this reason. The government's continued failure to dismiss this prosecution under the Blanche memo only delays what should be inevitable, the dismissal of the charges as a matter of law, end quote, and that was the defense. The court should set a hearing to discuss the appropriate remedies and not dismiss the defense's request as moot. Okay. So the Chevron deference. It had been the case that courts could defer deference. That's where the deference come could defer to a something like the EPA or FinCEN or the SEC for guidance on how they should proceed because it is the case that just because you're a judge on a federal court or even at a state court level, but still just judge with supreme court, federal court, it doesn't doesn't really matter. You can't know everything about everything.
At one point or another, you're going to actually want to collect information up about a certain thing so that you can understand it better so that you as a judge can make a good judgment or at least a just and according to law kind of judgment. Right? But this deference over the years had gotten a little too well, it got to the point where the courts were like, not only are we going to defer defer to your expertise to help us rule, we're actually just going to defer to your expertise and let you basically call the shots. Right? That was the case. That was the Chevron case.
Right? And the Chevron deference got overturned, I believe, last year by the Supreme Court, and it was a milestone for us moving into the future so that we wouldn't have to have courts say, you know what? We're just gonna let FinCEN decide this. We're just gonna let these other people decide this. Right? So the ambiguity here is what the court in my opinion, is what the court when they're talking about ambiguity, they're like, well, for us, it's ambiguous. We're just gonna let FinCEN do this. Right? We're gonna let we're we're just gonna let them say it. Well, then when they said it, even though it was an employee, right, even though it was, like, a couple of employees, it's still your this is the the guidance that you're seeking. Right? So everything matched what mister Hill and mister Rodriguez said as to why it is that they believed that they didn't need a money laundering or not money laundering license. That that's the government. A money transmitting license or have to comply with AML KYC stuff. Right?
What they said about it is exactly what FinCEN said about it. Right? So now the court can just, like, get the guidance from people like FinCEN or whatever agency that would have been deferred to 100% to help make the ruling. Now they're just providing some kind of guidance, which is kind of as it should be. Right? But SDNY is just 100% refusing. Absolutely refusing. What they're saying is that, well, it was just an employee, so we really don't have to listen to this stuff. Yeah. It was just an opinion. Well, it was the opinion of of employees of FinCEN. Why did you ask in the first place?
What you know, at what point do do you do things that don't make any or or rather at what point do you figure out that what you're doing is a waste of time? Because that's if the defense is or if the prosecution is correct and the the prosecution said, hey. You know, we're we're gonna ask Benson what they think about this. Oh, but we we really don't give a shit because it was just an employee. Well, then that wasn't a colossal waste of time. Everything about this case is bad. And what I brought to you yesterday is exact is exactly the the the one of the ways that you can proceed.
Yeah. There are people like Bitcoin Policy Institute that can write, you know, help write amicus briefs as friends of the court to try to help, but, really, it's gonna kinda boil down to us, you know, I don't know, pestering. God forbid. Yes. I know.
[00:13:36] Unknown:
It won't do anything. Maybe it will.
[00:13:39] David Bennett:
Maybe it will because the the the ramifications of this go well beyond just custody of Bitcoin. It goes well beyond that. This kind of precedent is is a cancer is what I what I'm trying to say. If this passes, if they're able to prosecute mister Hill and mister Rodriguez after they asked a guiding star their opinion, in this case, Finson, and then disregarded it because it just didn't matter, it was just an employee,
[00:14:14] Unknown:
then all of a sudden,
[00:14:17] David Bennett:
we're way on the other side of Chevron deference. Here, it's like, you were on the left side with Chevron deference where you where the court just said, you know what? If then send you do it, you you figure out the ruling because we don't know what the hell we're doing. Now we're on the other side where it's like it's just open sky for prosecutors Because now there's now they can just say, oh, well, it doesn't matter. They were just employees. There there's no guidance there whatsoever even though we asked. That's why this case is important, and that's why even if you think it doesn't matter, just call.
Call your rep. Take you five minutes. Just log your complaint with the person on the phone. Be respectful. You know? Be upbeat too. You know? Have them, like, say, hey. Look. This is kind of really important to me. Because, you know, and you figure it out for yourself. If if I if let's try to look at this a different way. Just pick some scenario that you know about that you would you might be able to get in trouble on and go to court, be prosecuted by federal prosecutors. What guiding star might they look at given what you know about the thing that you think you could be prosecuted for if you didn't follow some kind of rule or you didn't think there was a rule, but there really was.
Who is that and what might they say? And then figure out that in the end, the prosecutor just says, well, it doesn't really matter what they said. They were just employees of the guiding star. They were just employees of EPA if for whatever reason the Environmental Protection Agency is going to be your guiding star on what it is that you do. How how will that how would that affect you? See that that that's what I'm saying. So, yes. This is important. It's it's gonna take a lot of us to actually call and write letters and do all the things that I talked about in yesterday's episode. Because Frank Korv has got he's got an entire template of a letter that you can write.
You can call. You can call your senator and you can call your representatives, but don't stop there. That's at the federal level. Go to your state senator and then find your state rep, and then call them. Call their office and pester them Because chances are good think about it this way. If a whole bunch of people called their state rep and their state rep kinda got a bug up their ass and the state rep starts making phone calls to the federal level, do you think it might be possible that they actually get an audience with the actual federal representative or the federal senator at that level? Because we never get to talk to those people. Right? They're too busy. But maybe your state guy does. So hit all of them. We really gotta help the samurai guys out.
And I hope Jack Mallers decides to help them out too because twenty one Capital and Tether just bought 4,812 Bitcoin for half a million no. I'm sorry. Yeah. Half a million dollars. Yep. Half a million dollars. This is Oscar Perez from Bitcoin Magazine. Today, Kantor Equity Partners Incorporated revealed in a new filing with the SEC that Tether bought 4,812 Bitcoin for a total of $458,000,000 on behalf of Jack Mallers recently launched Bitcoin treasury company, Twenty One Capital, which plans to eventually go public under the ticker ticker Quote, pursuant to the business combination agreement, Tether agreed that within ten business days thereof, it would purchase a number of Bitcoin equal to an aggregate purchase price of $458,700,000, Cantor stated in the filing, with the convertible notes PIPE, that's the ticker, entered into on 04/22/2025 by Pubco and the company with certain investors less a holdback amount of 52,000,000 and places such Bitcoin in a digital wallet held or operated on or behalf of Tether.
And, well, Tether is holding the Bitcoin in a digital wallet, which anyone can view the holdings online here. And, of course, they are giving a Blockchain.com address to that particular wallet. And it showcases further transparency into their holdings similar to how some spot Bitcoin ETF issuers and other public operations such as Bitwise and Meta Planet have done with their holdings. The initial pipe Bitcoin will be sold by Tether to Pubco at the closing of the transactions contemplated by the business combination agreement upon the funding of the PIPE pipe investments by the PIPE investors for a purchase price of 458,700,000.
Cantor Equity Partners Incorporated, currently trading under the ticker CEP, is now live in the markets as it works toward completing its merger with twenty one Capital. CEO Jack Mallers recently emphasized the firm's aggressive Bitcoin acquisition strategy stating, quote, we do intend to raise as much capital as we possibly can to acquire Bitcoin. We will never have Bitcoin per share negative. At least that is our intent. Our intent is to make sure that when you are a shareholder of twenty one that you are getting wealthier in Bitcoin terms.
At launch, the company will hold over 42,000 Bitcoin instantly making it one of the largest corporate holders of BTC worldwide only behind industry giants like strategy. In a recent interview, Jack Mallers described twenty one Capital's mission clearly, quote, we want to be the ultimate vehicle for the capital markets to participate in Bitcoin building on top of Bitcoin, So we are a Bitcoin business at our core. It's our founding. It's in our name. It's in our board. It's at our leadership, end quote. This is going to lead us later on into the second half of the show of this switch between op return is gonna kill us all to capital Bitcoin treasury companies are going to kill us all.
I'm just gonna say this right now. No. It's not. Could it end up in a bear market? Sure. It could be another FTX, but, no, it's not gonna freaking kill Bitcoin. Oh my god. It's just it just never ends with these people. It was like a dog with a bone on Bitcoin knots versus Bitcoin core, and now it's gonna it's gonna be capital Bitcoin treasury companies. It's just fucking ridiculous. But that said, what what does Jack Mallers mean that we are a Bitcoin business at our core? Do you develop Bitcoin? I don't I I I haven't seen that. I mean, Strike does. Strike develops on Bitcoin, but I haven't seen anything about what twenty one Capital is doing.
What are you doing? Are you building something? What's the product line? I there's just there's nothing here. And that is kind of that kinda makes me wanna pull my hair out. But we're gonna go over to South Korea, where the top South Korean presidential hopefuls support legalizing Bitcoin ETFs. So be clear about that. Zolton Vardai, Cointelegraph, South Korea could soon follow Hong Kong in legalizing spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds as the country's top presidential candidates have expressed pro crypto positions. Still, some industry observers remain cautious.
Quote, all three all three major South Korean presidential candidates support Bitcoin ETFs and institutional investment, Kai Yong Joo, the founder and CEO of on chain data platform, CryptoQuant, wrote in a May 14 Twitter post. Currently, Bitcoin ETFs and institutional crypto investments are banned in South Korea, meaning that 100% of the volume comes from retail according to Ju. On May, South Korea's Democratic Party leader, Lee Jae Myung, promised to legalize spot crypto ETFs, lower transaction fees, and create a safe investment environment so that young people can build assets and plan for the future.
The Democratic Party made similar promises in its 2024 campaign, including the legalization of spot crypto ETFs, but progress has been, you know, delayed according to an outfit called KED. While the crypto friendly perspective of the leading candidate suggest a promising future for digital asset legislation in South Korea, Regulation Experts remain skeptical. Quote, the candidate's pro crypto pledges to push to legalize spot Bitcoin ETFs and reduce fees signal a potential shift, but history tempers optimism. Andy Lian, author and an intergovernmental blockchain adviser, whatever the hell that means, told CoinTelegraph adding, quote, they will take on similar stances as Hong Kong.
Whether the ETFs can perform or not depends on various other factors. So so there you go. All three all three of the top, not all of them, but the top three presidential candidates in South Korea right now are all wanting to legalize Bitcoin spot ETFs or at least Bitcoin ETFs, maybe not spot. What does this mean? It just means they're doing what Trump did. They they now even South Korean leaders understand that the voting block of Bitcoiners is an important political force. So first, they laughed at us, and then they well, actually, first, they ignored us, and then they laughed at us. And then and they're still fighting us at this point. But at that at one point or another, that's gonna fall by the wayside.
It's become too big. Once you're a political force, whether you like it or not, once you're a political force to the point that you get down to South Korea and their present top presidential candidacies are all talking about Bitcoin ETFs being legalized, then you know it's not as much about Bitcoin as it as it is about the people who are supporting Bitcoin and their potential votes. And if that makes you feel dirty, why don't you go on over to soapminer.com. That's soapminer.com where you can buy handmade tallow soap. There's cedarwood. There's peppermint. There's lavender. There's pine tar. There's a couple of other ones too. And when I get to it, I'll tell you about Earl Grey. He has got a new flavor. Earl Grey tallow soap. There's Fresh Breeze. There's Lemongrass.
There's orange and clove tallow soaps. They're all handmade. They're all made with 100% beef tallow. They have minimal ingredients and nothing artificial. I mean, in fact, my favorite soap is the rough cut tallow soap. It's just it's three ingredients, guys. It's like tallow, lye, and distilled water. But all of the soaps are absolutely fabulous. I I use the rough cut tallow soap. Actually, I use any of his soaps to shave with in the shower instead of using shaving cream. It's actually better on my skin. It feels better. I don't get I don't get razor burn as much. Actually, I don't get any razor burn after using using this guy's soap. So not only can you use it to get the grime off of your political hands, you can get all the crap off of your chin for the low low price of $16 and you get three four to four and a half ounce bars of rough cut tallow soap for that. And he accepts Bitcoin because if you don't accept Bitcoin for your goods and services, you're not in the circle p.
And that's what we're trying to do here is we're trying to get people to or plebs to support other plebs with goods and services by buying their goods and services in Bitcoin. And, yes, soapminer.com, that soapminer.com accepts Bitcoin directly. Throw in a, in their, the place where on their cart where you can, put in a coupon code. Just type in Bitcoin and you get 10% off of your entire order. Me and Soap have been talking about not doing the 10%. I I need to talk to him about more more about that because what he's saying is like, look, man, he's like, you know, I could support you more when you make sales for me if I wasn't doing 10% off.
And I just wanna be transparent about what, you know, what me and our vendors are doing. Because these are real discussions that we're trying to have so that we can make it feasible for people like me to advertise for people like SoapMiner who's got a good product. So we'll have to see how that goes. But for right now, as far as I know, you still get 10% off. I need to talk to SoapMiner about this in-depth, little bit of business on air, but, you know, transparency in these trying times is critical. Now, on to Thailand where the government is going to tokenize government bonds worth a hundred and $50,000,000.
Yes. Thailand. Government bonds. All governments print bonds, but these guys wanna put it on the blockchain. According to the Bangkok post, the Thai Ministry of Finance has unveiled a plan to issue a hundred and $50,000,000 worth of digital investment tokens, opening up the government bond market to small investors. What could possibly go wrong? Finance minister Pichai, no way I could pronounce his last name, presented the initiative during a briefing after a government approved the plan or the government approved the plan, specifying that these tokens would be launched within the next two months the so called g tokens god when I was a kid I used to watch an anime cartoon called g force and now it's g tokens will be used to raise funds from the public as part of the current budget loan plan because they don't have enough money themselves.
Pachara Anupasias, the only way I can pronounce it, director general of the public debt management office, clarified that these are not traditional debt instruments, but rather an innovation in the country's financial landscape. Jesus. Everybody's marketing their crap. Quote, one big selling point of the token is that it allows more retail investors to become part of the digital economy. They can invest in government bonds. Again, what could possibly go wrong? Until recently, small Thai investors were limited or excluded from large investment offerings, which were primarily targeted at institutional and wealthy investors only.
Minister Pichai stated that this initial token issuance is designed to, quote, test the market and that investors will receive higher returns than those from bank deposits, although, you know, he didn't really specify the exact rates. Commercial banks in Thailand offer low interest rates to savers. Currently, 1.25% for a twelve month fixed deposit lower than the rates set by the central bank, which had kept rates high until recently despite growing economic challenges. The tokens will be tradable on licensed digital asset platforms, which will not be accessible to non Thai residents. In last February, the Thai securities regulator revealed plans to launch a trading system for tokenized securities aimed at institutional investors.
According to the asset tokenization analytics platform, rwa.xyz, whatever whatever, the value of tokenized bonds globally has recently increased, currently amounting to $222,500,000. That's the end of the article. But so, globally, there are already tokenized government bonds, but only amount to $222,500,000. Thai or the Thai government wants to do a hundred and 50,000,000, like, just by themselves. So that demonstrates the acceleration that we're starting to see in well, yes. You you all I can think of is cats on the blockchain. It's government bonds on the block. G tokens. G tokens.
Oh my god. Everybody's getting into this, and it's a lot of this stuff is not going to end well.
[00:31:56] Unknown:
It's just not. I
[00:32:00] David Bennett:
I wish it would, but it's it's just it's it's not going to end well. I don't like I don't like the whole thought of government bonds being, you know, investments at the retail level in places like Thailand because these are while they are government bonds, you know what comes next is gonna be municipal bonds like M tokens. There'll be M tokens. And and you'll be able to invest in bonds that are specifically designed to raise money from the public to fix streets, put up stop signs, fix the sewer system. I just I'm, like, looking at that going, how is this even an investment?
Just because it has an interest rate attached to it doesn't make it an investment. Where does that yield come from? I don't know, man. This is not gonna end well. Let's run the numbers. Alright. CNBC futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil is down point 6% to $63.27. Brent North Sea is also down point 6% to $66.22. Natural gas down four and a quarter back down to $3.50 per thousand, and gasoline is up a third. Summer driving season about to hit $2.17 per gallon. Gold is taking it on the chin along with its, well, all of its other brethren in the shiny metal rock realm. Two points to the downside for gold puts it at $31.80 and 4 dimes.
Silver is down 2.15%. Platinum is down 1.1. Copper down 1.7 and palladium essentially moving sideways. Ag is fully mixed today. Biggest winner is rough rice, three and a half to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee, 2.7% to the downside. Meanwhile, livestock, live cattle is down a point. Lean hogs are down point 7%, and feeder cattle are down a full point and a half. The Dow skating down a quarter of a point. S and P, however, is up a tenth while the Nasdaq is up almost a full half point, and the S and P Mini is down point 18%. Bitcoin is chilling out at $103,080.
That is a $2,050,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 32.2 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,864,482.10. And average fees per block are slightly elevated, 0.06 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis. There are,
[00:34:46] Unknown:
I don't know, twelve,
[00:34:48] David Bennett:
eleven blocks carrying almost 10,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 3 Satoshis per vByte. Low priorities are also 3 Satoshis per vByte. Hash rate has dropped a little bit again. 859.6 exahashes per second is what we are currently at. And we've got a now two percent difficulty, increase coming up in two days. And let's see. Where are we at? Okay. From Free Samurai, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got Axelrod with 1,021 sat says Psyduck. And Turkey with a thousand says nothing. Thank you, Turkey, though. I appreciate it. As well as you, Axelrod double lot. And Psyduck with $5.98 says, Psyduck.
And thank you, sir, with 500 sat says, no thank you. Oh, he turned it around on me. Yodel with 444 says another solid episode. Thanks. Pies with four twenty says thank you, sir, no thank you. Perma nerd with three thirty three says, Oshie is a good dude. Oshie makes good food. None of you business is a good dude. None of you business makes good podcast. My suggestion is that you eat good food and listen to good podcast. God's Death with 237 says thank you. No, thank you, sir. Oshie says, fairly concerning happening behind the scenes. It's worth a listen. And he basically is talking about the samurai stuff going on because he is referencing this particular episode, and that is the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Helen Parks gets us going out of the gates from Cointelegraph's strategy will beat all public equities with Bitcoin, at least according to an analyst. Michael Saylor's strategy, the world's largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, may become the top publicly traded equity one day according to a strategy analysis analyst. So, yeah, no bias there. Strategy will be the, quote, number one publicly traded equity in the entire market because of its future financial strength enabled with Bitcoin strategy analyst, Jeff Walton, predicted in the new Financial Times documentary, Michael Saylor's forty billion dollar Bitcoin bet.
Well, well, well, well. Company currently holds about 568,840 Bitcoin worth roughly $59,000,000,000, and Walton said that advantage that that advantage could push it past all other publicly listed firms in the future. It's easy to say shit in the future, dude. It just quote, strategy holds more of the best assets and the most pristine collateral on the entire planet more than any other company by multiples, Walton said. The analyst pointed to the firm's ability to rapidly raise capital as another indicator of its strength. In November in 2024, strategy raised $12,000,000,000 in fifty days.
Let's do that again. Strategy raised $12,000,000,000 in just fifty days. It's kind of incredible. And Walton thinks the same thing. Quote, it's incredible. It's incredibly hard to raise a hundred million dollars of capital, and they just raised a hundred million in of capital a 20 times in fifty days, and they were able to buy Bitcoin with that capital. That's insane. In the documentary, Saylor also paints a bullish picture of the future due to Bitcoin adoption by strategy, formerly MicroStrategy. Quote, I think that MicroStrategy is in a position where we can grow from a hundred billion dollar enterprise to a trillion dollar enterprise to a $10,000,000,000,000 enterprise, predicted Saylor. He also predicted that Bitcoin would one day reach a price of $13,000,000 per coin.
Quote, my forecast for 2045 is 13,000,000 a coin. I would think in the four to eight year time frame. Certainly, in ten years, we should be at a million. So 1,000,000 in ten years, you know, 10 x that or more in twenty years. Wow. What ups? The hell of a sentence there there, pal. Walton, and Saylor's prediction on strategy potentially beating all publicly traded equities in the future come as the company ranks as the one hundred and fifty first largest company in the world with a market capitalization of $117,000,000,000 according to company's market cap.
To become the largest, strategy would need to surpass Microsoft, whose current market cap exceeds $3,300,000,000,000. Despite his bullish stance on the future of both strategy and Bitcoin, Saylor has not ignored the possibility that BTC could suffer major losses. Reiterating his previous claims, Saylor emphasized that strategy's capital structure is constructed so that it would still be stable even if Bitcoin falls 90% and stays there for four or five years. Quote, it would not be a good outcome for the equity holders. The people at the top of the capital structure would suffer because they're levered, but everybody else in the capital structure would get paid out, he said.
Okay. So gonna have to go watch this Financial Times documentary. Apparently, it's making waves all over the place. Yeah. I it's easy to talk about what could happen. It's easy to talk about forecasts when you're not actually backing it up with, you know, actual analysis. There's there's nothing here that Walton said nothing about what mechanics he used to analyze to come up with these particular, you know, scenarios. Doesn't really matter because it's this is one of the things that's feeding into the frenzy over there on Bitcoin Twitter. But before we do that, let's talk about Similar Scientific they have purchased $15.10 Bitcoin this year alone and they now hold 3,808 BTC Similar Scientific now holds 3,808 BTC after purchasing 1,510 coins since the start of this year according to their quarter one earnings report.
Their growing Bitcoin reserve helped generate a 22.2 percent BTC yield year to date through May 12 despite a net loss, here we go, of $64,700,000. They lost $64,700,000 in their first quarter alone. Quote, we continue to accretively grow our Bitcoin arsenal using operating cash flow and proceeds from debt and equity financing, said Eric Simler, chairman of Simler Scientific, quote. And we are excited to launch the Simler Scientific dashboard today on our website. Similar has introduced a public facing Bitcoin dashboard on its website to provide real time updates on BTC holdings and key performance indicators like BTC yield, BTC gain, and BTC gain in terms of dollars.
In quarter one twenty twenty five, the company added 894 BTC for $90,700,000 followed by another 616 BTC acquired through May 12 for 59,600,000.0. The total fair value of the Bitcoin holding now stands at 387,900,000.0 based on prices on May. The quarter was marked by substantial non operating charges. These included a $41,800,000 unrealized loss from changes in Bitcoin valuation and a $29,700,000 loss contingent liability related to an agreement in principle with the United States Department of Justice. Revenue for the first quarter of twenty twenty five was a meager $8,800,000, which was down 44% year over year.
Operating expenses, on the other hand, surged to $39,900,000 driven by litigation provisions and audit related costs. As a result, the company reported a pretax loss of $74,900,000. MD and CEO of similar scientific, Doug Murphy Chatorian, said the company's health care business is showing early promise from its cardiovascular product line, quote, we are expecting growth and cash generation from these FDA cleared products and services, which will add to our Bitcoin treasury strategy. Similar also detailed several financing initiatives including 100,000,000 in, guess what, a convertible notes offering and a new at the market equity program, which has already raised $61,000,000 to date under the latest agreement.
So this brings us to the flippening. For weeks, we have had to endure. And eve even for me, who spends most of his time on Nostra rather than Twitter, and I do spend, the preponderance of my time. If I'm gonna go to something like, you know, social media, I'm spending it on Nostra.
[00:45:15] Unknown:
But both on Nostr and especially on Twitter.
[00:45:18] David Bennett:
Right? Twitter is now just is is just been a cesspool. It is 100% still the cesspool. It's probably never going to end, but the sentiment has shifted. For the last few weeks, we have been dealing with Luke Dash junior or Luke Dasher, however you wanna pronounce it, Jameson Lop, Shinobi, all these people have been every pundit under the sun has been kicking around opp return, and the lifting of the op return 80 kilobyte or 80 byte limit. And it's gonna kill us all. It's gonna kill Bitcoin. It's gonna destroy transactions, blah blah blah blah blah. And you're either, and I heard it earlier today, you're either a core munist or you're a Nazi.
Get it? Do you see how bad this is becoming? And Twitter is especially bad and has been especially bad with the core versus knots thing. I've I described it yesterday, the sniping actually, last week, the sniping that I've seen, the people that I thought, you know, were cordial with each other, the shit they're saying to each other publicly is reprehensible. And now it all stopped because they've got a new bone to chew on, and that bone is corporate Bitcoin treasuries like what similar scientific is turning into, what strategy is turning into. And with the birth of twenty one Capital, a full blown pure play crypto company.
Coinbase has been determined to be a pure play crypto company, but I don't I don't actually see it as that because they have a service. Their service is to sell you shit coin, make you poor, and take your money in the process from fees with the trading fees. Right? So there's at least a service there. I don't know what the fuck 21 does. I I just don't. They've said a couple of things. I I presume loans or something like that is gonna be part of it, but I don't know what twenty one Capital does. All we really know about that company is that they're gonna hold a shit ton of Bitcoin. And up until last week when I reported that strategy had a business intelligence based on artificial intelligence project or product that they are going to, at one point or another, release, they had basically, as far as I could tell, shut down all of their operations as it pertained to writing software or updating their business intelligence code that they had been
[00:47:59] Unknown:
selling for decades.
[00:48:01] David Bennett:
Right? So there's just nothing there. There's no there's no sales. Right? It's a pure at this point, until they release their AI business intelligence thing, they are a pure play biz Bitcoin treasury company, And now Bitcoin's gonna die because of these guys. And and be before the op return before op right before op return, do you remember what it was? There was no transactions in the mempool. I still hear that a couple of times. Nobody's using Bitcoin, but not it's not like dog with a bone kind of thing. It's not like everybody dog piling in.
And I can't tell if it's just because this is what gets engagement on Twitter or if it's an actual organic propagation of this new idea of what's going to kill Bitcoin. But through it all, whether it's no transactions in the mempool, whether it's the op return and core, you know, core munis versus Nazi is gonna kill us all, and now we're at corporate Bitcoin treasury is gonna kill us all. All of these things represent one thing, fear. It's just fear. It doesn't matter what flavor the fear is. It's like going to Baskin Robbins. They have 31 flavors. All of them are ice cream, except they do have a sorbet.
Whatever. I don't give a shit. Chocolate chip flavored fear is still ice cream. It's just like rocky road flavored fear. I what I don't understand is that we are at, we're not even at all time highs again. And we've had to wait to get to cross back over the hundred thousand dollar mark for quite a while. And yet we're right back into the stink of like it was in 2017, except this time it's actually worse. In the twenty seventeen block size wars, it was one thing. It was Segwit. It was Segwit two x. It was we need more transactions to to be able to be put into blocks, so therefore, we need to raise the block size limit.
That was it. And then we had forks. We had BSV or the, Bitcoin Cash Fork, and then that forked into BSV. All that was basically essentially the same theme. Now we have three different and and that although that theme was based on the mempool thing. Mempools were too full. At the time, they wanted to change the entire architecture of this entire system simply because for a short period of time, a a piece of the system that is Bitcoin was experiencing a thing. In this case, it was the mempool, and it was too full for a little while. You know, for a few months, it was just really, really full.
And yet transactions were, you know, were probably not anymore as expensive as they have been lately back then because the price of Bitcoin was, like, under $20,000. And now it's at a hundred and 2 or a hundred and 3 or whatever it is right now.
[00:51:09] Unknown:
But at least there was that single theme.
[00:51:13] David Bennett:
But now we're jumping from theme to theme because the opera turn theme is completely different. It's a completely different flavor. At the time of the block size wars, it was like walking into Baskin Robbins and they had vanilla. That was it. You wanted ice cream, you went to Baskin Robbins, you got a scoop of vanilla. That was all that was offered. Here, no. No. No. Here, the fear is represented multiple in multiple different flavors. It's the underlying tone that is the only thing that concerns me here. What's going on that these people are trying to latch on to anything that scares the living piss out of anybody else? Because this is this is not healthy for them. It's certainly not healthy for people that, you know, that rely on these people for information.
It just seems like it just seems like mass hysteria, and I don't understand it. If you have an idea of what this is, by all means, let me know. Meanwhile, the DOJ indicts alleged Sinaloa cartel leaders as blockchain firms trace crypto links to the fentanyl trade. Yay. Naga Ivan Namayo is writing this one for the block. Pedro Inzunza Noriega and his son, Pedro Inzunza Coronel, are accused of leading a massive drug trafficking network for the Beltran Leyva Organization, a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, according to US Department of Justice indictment unsealed this week. While the charges focus on trafficking tens of thousands of kilograms of fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin into The United States, whatever happened to just plain weed?
I guess because we legalized it in a lot of states. Anyway, blockchain analysis firms are separately tracing millions of dollars in crypto tied to fentanyl production and cartel linked payments. The charges follow president Donald Trump's Foreign Terrorist Organization designation order signed in January. The FTO allows the government to seize crypto and other assets connected to cartel agents. Although the DOJ's case against the supposed cartel bosses is based on illegal drugs and trafficking, blockchain analytics providers like Chainalysis, TRM Labs, and Ecliptic or Elliptic have recently found links between stablecoins and fentanyl proceeds.
Pausing to say this, do you want this package wrapped in it's for the children, terrorism, or drug trade? This is what I'm smelling right now. Chainalysis traced $5,500,000,000 worth of stablecoin used by Latin American drug cartels to pay Chinese based fentanyl manufacturers. US authorities in the Eastern District Of Wisconsin eventually seized the funds according to a Chainalysis March crime report. Some cases have involved official sanctions from the US Treasury Department's often Office of Foreign Assets Control or OFAC. In September 2023, OFAC blast blacklisted Ethereum wallets associated with alleged Sinaloa cartel member Jimenez Castro.
Elsewhere, TRM Labs released a study that revealed that most Chinese fentanyl precursor vendors in 26 cities accepted crypto payments. According to Elliptic, illicit drug producers received millions of dollars in digital currencies amid the US fentanyl epidemic. A separate chain analysis report released in 2024 said chemical shops suspected of brewing narcotics have received 220 no. $250,000,000 in crypto since 2015. Alright. So this is this is a potential exit strategy for the United States government. There's always they're always going to do stuff like this. What am I talking about?
[00:55:29] Unknown:
Drug trafficking, and it's related to crypto. Now at one point or another,
[00:55:35] David Bennett:
you can think of it like this. It's like a parachute that you just keep on the wall of the airplane you're flying in. As long as everything is good, that parachute stays on the wall. But if something goes south, all of a sudden, the hatch opens and you pull the parachute off of its rack, you put it on, you jump for dear life, and you pull the ripcord. That's what these things are. Who knows if this is actually true? Is it actually true that Sinaloa drug cartel has taken stablecoin even if it's not going to stop the trend? It's just not. Alright. Last up, Paris kidnapping attempt highlights growing threat to crypto figures. This is your final word of warning. Decrypt, Cal and Quinn is writing this one.
A woman and her child, Both relatives of a leading figure in France's crypto industry were targeted in an attempt kidnapping or an attempted kidnapping in Paris on Tuesday. Four masked individuals ambushed the family near the Eleventh and the Thaisement according to police sources cited by France twenty four and the AFP. Three of the assailants reportedly sprang from a van and tried to force the woman and her child into the vehicle. Her partner was assaulted as he tried to intervene. The woman managed to disarm one of the attackers and toss the weapon away, triggering a commotion that attracted bystanders.
The group then fled and the van was later recovered by authorities nearby. All three victims sustained minor injuries and were taken to the hospital. Authorities have confirmed that the woman is the daughter of the pay Paymium cofounder and CEO, one of the earliest crypto exchanges in France. The latest incident adds to a string of violent crimes targeting crypto affiliated individuals or their families, even those not involved in crypto and held for ransom have found abductors demanding payment in crypto. The public tracker run by security firm Casa CTO, Jameson Lop, has recorded 22 physical crypto related attacks so far in 2025 occurring in France, Spain, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.
France alone has seen six such incidents this year. In January, Ledger cofounder David Ballant and his partner were abducted in France, with Ballant's finger reportedly severed as kidnappers demanded crypto as ransom. Nine suspects, including the alleged ringleader, have since been apprehended. A separate case in early May involved seven arrests after a man was kidnapped to extort cryptocurrency from his wealthy son. That victim also lost a finger. On New Year's Eve last year, the father of a crypto influencer was held hostage in Saint Jean's Paoli, I can't pronounce French stuff, in a ransom attempt.
Then we go beyond France because the trend is global. In March, a Chinese Filipino steel magnate named Anson Kyu was killed. Killed after kidnappers demanded 20,000,000 in crypto and authorities had already provided 3,500,000.0. An investigation is currently ongoing. On to Hong Kong where a Turkish man was ambushed during a multimillion euro crypto deal, the latest in several examples of cash for crypto trades gone wrong. And in Brazil, a Spanish businessman was drugged and abducted by criminals posing as law enforcement. They demanded $50,000,000 in crypto and held him for five days before he was able to escape.
Please
[00:59:33] Unknown:
be careful because it just gets worse from here. As the price of all these things go up,
[00:59:44] David Bennett:
well, it's just gonna get worse. Do yourself and all of your loved ones a favor because it's not just about you, man. It's about anybody you're connected with, anybody who would feel your loss as a negative in their life because they're still alive. You have to consider them. You have to. It's your commitment to being part of the human race, to be responsible to those who love you. And it goes well at this point, it goes well beyond making sure that you don't have heart disease by not doing bad shit shit for you. Maybe you should go work out more or take walks, you know, keep yourself healthy. It goes way beyond that at this point, especially if you're in this kind of industry where the hype just makes everybody freak out.
Though we demand 50,000,000 in crypto, what kind of crypto? Like, do you think everybody walking around has every kind of crypto? It's a lot of this, a lot of the the criminal side of this is driven by the same kind of hype. It's it's sort of like the black mirror image of fear of missing out. You don't have any money to get any for your self, but this crypto thing is gonna go bonkers. So you gotta get some somehow. So you just gonna pull some dude off the street wearing a Bitcoin shirt because clearly they own Bitcoin. Don't let yourself be a target. Stop wearing the swag.
Again, my apologies for all the people that that create the swag. I'm not after you. But we're we're not doing ourselves any favors when we wear orange shoes, orange socks, orange pants, orange shirt with a b on it, and a big orange hat also with a b on it. You are essentially saying, please kidnap me. And unless you are prepared to arm yourself and take personal defense training, and even then, you're you're not gonna personally defend yourself against 15 people who wanna throw you in a van. If 15 people wanna throw you in a van, you're getting thrown in the van. I mean, I don't even think Jawed Cobb Van Dammit could even do anything about that shit.
So please, when you go to the Las Vegas Conference or any Bitcoin conference for that matter, please at least reconsider wearing Bitcoin or any kind of crypto swag. Just look like your ordinary guy. Practice good operational security, be safe, and I will see you on the other side.
[01:02:24] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 10:43AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the May 2025. This is episode ten ninety five of Bitcoin, and we've got some more samurai stuff going on. It's this is shaping up to be one of the most interesting things in the world. Thankfully, we're going to talk about it, but we're also going to talk about a switch that I'm seeing in attitudes as to what people think are going to kill Bitcoin next because apparently nobody gives a shit about opportune anymore. That seems to have died. And we're now on to corporate Bitcoin treasury companies being the death knell of Bitcoin, it seems the people that I don't know. What do you wanna call them? The the pontificators, the pundits. That's it. That's what I'm try trying to say. The pundits of Bitcoin are out in force, and they've completely changed the narrative on at least Twitter. I'm not seeing it as much on Nostr because Nostr is my safe haven from, well, stupid. But we're gonna get into all that. Jack Mallers company has made a move, and it seems that there are some people that are running wanting to run for president in South Korea, and they're all jumping on the Trump we love Bitcoin bandwagon. I don't know if it's going to help them or not, but then we'll move over to Thailand where their government is, well, gonna be stupid.
I'm sorry, but it that's just the way that is. It just and then we've got some we'll have some, economic news as normal. There is some, news about well, actually, it's not really news as much as we're gonna talk a little bit about bond yields and what's been going on with them. Some people seem to think in opposition to what other people think because most people think it's like, oh, the bond yields are rising. And I'm one of these people. Right? Bond yields are rising. Therefore, money is not cheap to borrow. So therefore, risk assets slide. Well, we've got a counterargument to that that we will get into.
And then strategy, well, strategy is told the Financial Times some news. Apparently, this, interview that Saylor gave to, I don't know, one of these Financial Times guys, there it's making the rounds. And not just because of what Sailor said, it's because of the person that was interviewing Sailor from the Financial Times. There are several clips of her just not getting it, but we are going to stick to just the strategy side of that particular thing. I just thought it was noteworthy that we just have so many people in mainstream media that they're just gonna die on the hill. There's nothing you can do for them.
There's just nothing we can do. Simler's back in the news. The DOJ has indicted some Sinaloa cartel leaders, and it has clearly something to do with Bitcoin. And I will end today's show with yet another final word of warning about being in public and having it known that you either own bitcoin or you are connected to somebody who themselves owns bitcoin. Please, please, please, when you're going to the new this bitcoin conference in Las Vegas, consider not wearing swag. Just wear cargo pants and a fucking t shirt or something like that. You don't need to advertise this stuff. Okay? You just don't. It's bad enough being at a conference as it is because everybody there is a target. But it's the people that wear the swag. I swear to God. Because they get separated from the crowd.
And they're they're like they're single targets. They've got no protection whatsoever. But we're gonna move over to the samurai wallet issue. Lola Leads has written yet another, article about samurai wallet. And their their response to the Southern District Of New York's moot request. Yeah. We're we're doing it. The Southern District of New York has claimed that it did not fail to disclose Brady material to the defense following revelations that the prosecutor's office had been informed by FinCEN that Samurai Wallet likely did not need to register as a money service business prior six months prior, I might add, to bringing its indictment of the developers.
Now I okay. I'm gonna pause here just to say, it sounds like I've read this to you before. I this is different. Okay. We'll get into it. Just trust me. Alright? Hang with me. According to SDNY, the court should moot the defense's request for a hearing to remedy SDNY's actions as the material revealed was merely the informal opinion of senior FinCEN staff who did not act on behalf of the agency, thereby not constituting what's known as Brady material. Quote, the information the government suppressed for almost a year is classic Brady, argues the samurai wallet defense in its latest filing to support the hearing request. FinCEN's response to SDNY, quote, precisely echoes the public statement samurai wallet made about why its business did not run afoul of the licensing and money laundering requirement for money transmitters, the defense writes, providing powerful corroboration of mister Hill and mister Rodriguez's good faith belief that they were not violating any laws.
Quote, prosecutors produced many, many terabytes of discovery, carefully avoiding disclosure of what they had to know would be a bombshell, the defense continues, describing SDNY's conduct as, quote, proof of the very regulation by prosecution that two US senators protested at the time of the charges that the cryptocurrency industry has decried in letters to congress and the president, and that is now the subject of the Blanche memo, end quote. Debunking SDNY's claims that the opinions expressed by FinCEN were merely formal opinions of senior FinCEN employees, the defense states that, quote, the fact that they expressed the identical interpretation of the FinCEN guidance as the defendants did in their public statements while they were supposedly knowingly engaged in criminal conspiracy, end quote, further quote, that FinCEN employees included the one responsible for enforcing FinCEN rules against companies like Samurai Wallet had the same opinion as mister Hill and mister Rodriguez is, in fact, evidence that they reasonably believed that they did not require a FinCEN license or anti money laundering controls, the defense concludes.
Well, noting that SDNY refers to money service business registration requirements as ambiguous statutes to argue that prosecutors are not required to follow FinCEN's interpretation of the law according to the overturning of the Chevron deference or, well, the Chevron case, and we'll, say a few things about that here in a sec. The defense notes that prosecutors are not allowed to criminally prosecute individuals for violations of ambiguous statutes. I'm gonna read that one again. Noting that SDNY refers to money service business registration requirements as, quote, ambiguous statutes, end quote, to argue that prosecutors are not required to follow FinCEN's interpretation of the law according to the overturning of Chevron, the defense notes that prosecutors are not allowed, not allowed to criminally prosecute individuals for violations of ambiguous statutes.
Ambiguity concerning the ambit, a m b I t, the ambit of criminal statutes should be resolved in favor of lenity the defense cites, highlighting that violations of ambiguous criminal law must be interpreted in favor of the defendants, quote, for this reason. The government's continued failure to dismiss this prosecution under the Blanche memo only delays what should be inevitable, the dismissal of the charges as a matter of law, end quote, and that was the defense. The court should set a hearing to discuss the appropriate remedies and not dismiss the defense's request as moot. Okay. So the Chevron deference. It had been the case that courts could defer deference. That's where the deference come could defer to a something like the EPA or FinCEN or the SEC for guidance on how they should proceed because it is the case that just because you're a judge on a federal court or even at a state court level, but still just judge with supreme court, federal court, it doesn't doesn't really matter. You can't know everything about everything.
At one point or another, you're going to actually want to collect information up about a certain thing so that you can understand it better so that you as a judge can make a good judgment or at least a just and according to law kind of judgment. Right? But this deference over the years had gotten a little too well, it got to the point where the courts were like, not only are we going to defer defer to your expertise to help us rule, we're actually just going to defer to your expertise and let you basically call the shots. Right? That was the case. That was the Chevron case.
Right? And the Chevron deference got overturned, I believe, last year by the Supreme Court, and it was a milestone for us moving into the future so that we wouldn't have to have courts say, you know what? We're just gonna let FinCEN decide this. We're just gonna let these other people decide this. Right? So the ambiguity here is what the court in my opinion, is what the court when they're talking about ambiguity, they're like, well, for us, it's ambiguous. We're just gonna let FinCEN do this. Right? We're gonna let we're we're just gonna let them say it. Well, then when they said it, even though it was an employee, right, even though it was, like, a couple of employees, it's still your this is the the guidance that you're seeking. Right? So everything matched what mister Hill and mister Rodriguez said as to why it is that they believed that they didn't need a money laundering or not money laundering license. That that's the government. A money transmitting license or have to comply with AML KYC stuff. Right?
What they said about it is exactly what FinCEN said about it. Right? So now the court can just, like, get the guidance from people like FinCEN or whatever agency that would have been deferred to 100% to help make the ruling. Now they're just providing some kind of guidance, which is kind of as it should be. Right? But SDNY is just 100% refusing. Absolutely refusing. What they're saying is that, well, it was just an employee, so we really don't have to listen to this stuff. Yeah. It was just an opinion. Well, it was the opinion of of employees of FinCEN. Why did you ask in the first place?
What you know, at what point do do you do things that don't make any or or rather at what point do you figure out that what you're doing is a waste of time? Because that's if the defense is or if the prosecution is correct and the the prosecution said, hey. You know, we're we're gonna ask Benson what they think about this. Oh, but we we really don't give a shit because it was just an employee. Well, then that wasn't a colossal waste of time. Everything about this case is bad. And what I brought to you yesterday is exact is exactly the the the one of the ways that you can proceed.
Yeah. There are people like Bitcoin Policy Institute that can write, you know, help write amicus briefs as friends of the court to try to help, but, really, it's gonna kinda boil down to us, you know, I don't know, pestering. God forbid. Yes. I know.
[00:13:36] Unknown:
It won't do anything. Maybe it will.
[00:13:39] David Bennett:
Maybe it will because the the the ramifications of this go well beyond just custody of Bitcoin. It goes well beyond that. This kind of precedent is is a cancer is what I what I'm trying to say. If this passes, if they're able to prosecute mister Hill and mister Rodriguez after they asked a guiding star their opinion, in this case, Finson, and then disregarded it because it just didn't matter, it was just an employee,
[00:14:14] Unknown:
then all of a sudden,
[00:14:17] David Bennett:
we're way on the other side of Chevron deference. Here, it's like, you were on the left side with Chevron deference where you where the court just said, you know what? If then send you do it, you you figure out the ruling because we don't know what the hell we're doing. Now we're on the other side where it's like it's just open sky for prosecutors Because now there's now they can just say, oh, well, it doesn't matter. They were just employees. There there's no guidance there whatsoever even though we asked. That's why this case is important, and that's why even if you think it doesn't matter, just call.
Call your rep. Take you five minutes. Just log your complaint with the person on the phone. Be respectful. You know? Be upbeat too. You know? Have them, like, say, hey. Look. This is kind of really important to me. Because, you know, and you figure it out for yourself. If if I if let's try to look at this a different way. Just pick some scenario that you know about that you would you might be able to get in trouble on and go to court, be prosecuted by federal prosecutors. What guiding star might they look at given what you know about the thing that you think you could be prosecuted for if you didn't follow some kind of rule or you didn't think there was a rule, but there really was.
Who is that and what might they say? And then figure out that in the end, the prosecutor just says, well, it doesn't really matter what they said. They were just employees of the guiding star. They were just employees of EPA if for whatever reason the Environmental Protection Agency is going to be your guiding star on what it is that you do. How how will that how would that affect you? See that that that's what I'm saying. So, yes. This is important. It's it's gonna take a lot of us to actually call and write letters and do all the things that I talked about in yesterday's episode. Because Frank Korv has got he's got an entire template of a letter that you can write.
You can call. You can call your senator and you can call your representatives, but don't stop there. That's at the federal level. Go to your state senator and then find your state rep, and then call them. Call their office and pester them Because chances are good think about it this way. If a whole bunch of people called their state rep and their state rep kinda got a bug up their ass and the state rep starts making phone calls to the federal level, do you think it might be possible that they actually get an audience with the actual federal representative or the federal senator at that level? Because we never get to talk to those people. Right? They're too busy. But maybe your state guy does. So hit all of them. We really gotta help the samurai guys out.
And I hope Jack Mallers decides to help them out too because twenty one Capital and Tether just bought 4,812 Bitcoin for half a million no. I'm sorry. Yeah. Half a million dollars. Yep. Half a million dollars. This is Oscar Perez from Bitcoin Magazine. Today, Kantor Equity Partners Incorporated revealed in a new filing with the SEC that Tether bought 4,812 Bitcoin for a total of $458,000,000 on behalf of Jack Mallers recently launched Bitcoin treasury company, Twenty One Capital, which plans to eventually go public under the ticker ticker Quote, pursuant to the business combination agreement, Tether agreed that within ten business days thereof, it would purchase a number of Bitcoin equal to an aggregate purchase price of $458,700,000, Cantor stated in the filing, with the convertible notes PIPE, that's the ticker, entered into on 04/22/2025 by Pubco and the company with certain investors less a holdback amount of 52,000,000 and places such Bitcoin in a digital wallet held or operated on or behalf of Tether.
And, well, Tether is holding the Bitcoin in a digital wallet, which anyone can view the holdings online here. And, of course, they are giving a Blockchain.com address to that particular wallet. And it showcases further transparency into their holdings similar to how some spot Bitcoin ETF issuers and other public operations such as Bitwise and Meta Planet have done with their holdings. The initial pipe Bitcoin will be sold by Tether to Pubco at the closing of the transactions contemplated by the business combination agreement upon the funding of the PIPE pipe investments by the PIPE investors for a purchase price of 458,700,000.
Cantor Equity Partners Incorporated, currently trading under the ticker CEP, is now live in the markets as it works toward completing its merger with twenty one Capital. CEO Jack Mallers recently emphasized the firm's aggressive Bitcoin acquisition strategy stating, quote, we do intend to raise as much capital as we possibly can to acquire Bitcoin. We will never have Bitcoin per share negative. At least that is our intent. Our intent is to make sure that when you are a shareholder of twenty one that you are getting wealthier in Bitcoin terms.
At launch, the company will hold over 42,000 Bitcoin instantly making it one of the largest corporate holders of BTC worldwide only behind industry giants like strategy. In a recent interview, Jack Mallers described twenty one Capital's mission clearly, quote, we want to be the ultimate vehicle for the capital markets to participate in Bitcoin building on top of Bitcoin, So we are a Bitcoin business at our core. It's our founding. It's in our name. It's in our board. It's at our leadership, end quote. This is going to lead us later on into the second half of the show of this switch between op return is gonna kill us all to capital Bitcoin treasury companies are going to kill us all.
I'm just gonna say this right now. No. It's not. Could it end up in a bear market? Sure. It could be another FTX, but, no, it's not gonna freaking kill Bitcoin. Oh my god. It's just it just never ends with these people. It was like a dog with a bone on Bitcoin knots versus Bitcoin core, and now it's gonna it's gonna be capital Bitcoin treasury companies. It's just fucking ridiculous. But that said, what what does Jack Mallers mean that we are a Bitcoin business at our core? Do you develop Bitcoin? I don't I I I haven't seen that. I mean, Strike does. Strike develops on Bitcoin, but I haven't seen anything about what twenty one Capital is doing.
What are you doing? Are you building something? What's the product line? I there's just there's nothing here. And that is kind of that kinda makes me wanna pull my hair out. But we're gonna go over to South Korea, where the top South Korean presidential hopefuls support legalizing Bitcoin ETFs. So be clear about that. Zolton Vardai, Cointelegraph, South Korea could soon follow Hong Kong in legalizing spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds as the country's top presidential candidates have expressed pro crypto positions. Still, some industry observers remain cautious.
Quote, all three all three major South Korean presidential candidates support Bitcoin ETFs and institutional investment, Kai Yong Joo, the founder and CEO of on chain data platform, CryptoQuant, wrote in a May 14 Twitter post. Currently, Bitcoin ETFs and institutional crypto investments are banned in South Korea, meaning that 100% of the volume comes from retail according to Ju. On May, South Korea's Democratic Party leader, Lee Jae Myung, promised to legalize spot crypto ETFs, lower transaction fees, and create a safe investment environment so that young people can build assets and plan for the future.
The Democratic Party made similar promises in its 2024 campaign, including the legalization of spot crypto ETFs, but progress has been, you know, delayed according to an outfit called KED. While the crypto friendly perspective of the leading candidate suggest a promising future for digital asset legislation in South Korea, Regulation Experts remain skeptical. Quote, the candidate's pro crypto pledges to push to legalize spot Bitcoin ETFs and reduce fees signal a potential shift, but history tempers optimism. Andy Lian, author and an intergovernmental blockchain adviser, whatever the hell that means, told CoinTelegraph adding, quote, they will take on similar stances as Hong Kong.
Whether the ETFs can perform or not depends on various other factors. So so there you go. All three all three of the top, not all of them, but the top three presidential candidates in South Korea right now are all wanting to legalize Bitcoin spot ETFs or at least Bitcoin ETFs, maybe not spot. What does this mean? It just means they're doing what Trump did. They they now even South Korean leaders understand that the voting block of Bitcoiners is an important political force. So first, they laughed at us, and then they well, actually, first, they ignored us, and then they laughed at us. And then and they're still fighting us at this point. But at that at one point or another, that's gonna fall by the wayside.
It's become too big. Once you're a political force, whether you like it or not, once you're a political force to the point that you get down to South Korea and their present top presidential candidacies are all talking about Bitcoin ETFs being legalized, then you know it's not as much about Bitcoin as it as it is about the people who are supporting Bitcoin and their potential votes. And if that makes you feel dirty, why don't you go on over to soapminer.com. That's soapminer.com where you can buy handmade tallow soap. There's cedarwood. There's peppermint. There's lavender. There's pine tar. There's a couple of other ones too. And when I get to it, I'll tell you about Earl Grey. He has got a new flavor. Earl Grey tallow soap. There's Fresh Breeze. There's Lemongrass.
There's orange and clove tallow soaps. They're all handmade. They're all made with 100% beef tallow. They have minimal ingredients and nothing artificial. I mean, in fact, my favorite soap is the rough cut tallow soap. It's just it's three ingredients, guys. It's like tallow, lye, and distilled water. But all of the soaps are absolutely fabulous. I I use the rough cut tallow soap. Actually, I use any of his soaps to shave with in the shower instead of using shaving cream. It's actually better on my skin. It feels better. I don't get I don't get razor burn as much. Actually, I don't get any razor burn after using using this guy's soap. So not only can you use it to get the grime off of your political hands, you can get all the crap off of your chin for the low low price of $16 and you get three four to four and a half ounce bars of rough cut tallow soap for that. And he accepts Bitcoin because if you don't accept Bitcoin for your goods and services, you're not in the circle p.
And that's what we're trying to do here is we're trying to get people to or plebs to support other plebs with goods and services by buying their goods and services in Bitcoin. And, yes, soapminer.com, that soapminer.com accepts Bitcoin directly. Throw in a, in their, the place where on their cart where you can, put in a coupon code. Just type in Bitcoin and you get 10% off of your entire order. Me and Soap have been talking about not doing the 10%. I I need to talk to him about more more about that because what he's saying is like, look, man, he's like, you know, I could support you more when you make sales for me if I wasn't doing 10% off.
And I just wanna be transparent about what, you know, what me and our vendors are doing. Because these are real discussions that we're trying to have so that we can make it feasible for people like me to advertise for people like SoapMiner who's got a good product. So we'll have to see how that goes. But for right now, as far as I know, you still get 10% off. I need to talk to SoapMiner about this in-depth, little bit of business on air, but, you know, transparency in these trying times is critical. Now, on to Thailand where the government is going to tokenize government bonds worth a hundred and $50,000,000.
Yes. Thailand. Government bonds. All governments print bonds, but these guys wanna put it on the blockchain. According to the Bangkok post, the Thai Ministry of Finance has unveiled a plan to issue a hundred and $50,000,000 worth of digital investment tokens, opening up the government bond market to small investors. What could possibly go wrong? Finance minister Pichai, no way I could pronounce his last name, presented the initiative during a briefing after a government approved the plan or the government approved the plan, specifying that these tokens would be launched within the next two months the so called g tokens god when I was a kid I used to watch an anime cartoon called g force and now it's g tokens will be used to raise funds from the public as part of the current budget loan plan because they don't have enough money themselves.
Pachara Anupasias, the only way I can pronounce it, director general of the public debt management office, clarified that these are not traditional debt instruments, but rather an innovation in the country's financial landscape. Jesus. Everybody's marketing their crap. Quote, one big selling point of the token is that it allows more retail investors to become part of the digital economy. They can invest in government bonds. Again, what could possibly go wrong? Until recently, small Thai investors were limited or excluded from large investment offerings, which were primarily targeted at institutional and wealthy investors only.
Minister Pichai stated that this initial token issuance is designed to, quote, test the market and that investors will receive higher returns than those from bank deposits, although, you know, he didn't really specify the exact rates. Commercial banks in Thailand offer low interest rates to savers. Currently, 1.25% for a twelve month fixed deposit lower than the rates set by the central bank, which had kept rates high until recently despite growing economic challenges. The tokens will be tradable on licensed digital asset platforms, which will not be accessible to non Thai residents. In last February, the Thai securities regulator revealed plans to launch a trading system for tokenized securities aimed at institutional investors.
According to the asset tokenization analytics platform, rwa.xyz, whatever whatever, the value of tokenized bonds globally has recently increased, currently amounting to $222,500,000. That's the end of the article. But so, globally, there are already tokenized government bonds, but only amount to $222,500,000. Thai or the Thai government wants to do a hundred and 50,000,000, like, just by themselves. So that demonstrates the acceleration that we're starting to see in well, yes. You you all I can think of is cats on the blockchain. It's government bonds on the block. G tokens. G tokens.
Oh my god. Everybody's getting into this, and it's a lot of this stuff is not going to end well.
[00:31:56] Unknown:
It's just not. I
[00:32:00] David Bennett:
I wish it would, but it's it's just it's it's not going to end well. I don't like I don't like the whole thought of government bonds being, you know, investments at the retail level in places like Thailand because these are while they are government bonds, you know what comes next is gonna be municipal bonds like M tokens. There'll be M tokens. And and you'll be able to invest in bonds that are specifically designed to raise money from the public to fix streets, put up stop signs, fix the sewer system. I just I'm, like, looking at that going, how is this even an investment?
Just because it has an interest rate attached to it doesn't make it an investment. Where does that yield come from? I don't know, man. This is not gonna end well. Let's run the numbers. Alright. CNBC futures and commodities. West Texas Intermediate Oil is down point 6% to $63.27. Brent North Sea is also down point 6% to $66.22. Natural gas down four and a quarter back down to $3.50 per thousand, and gasoline is up a third. Summer driving season about to hit $2.17 per gallon. Gold is taking it on the chin along with its, well, all of its other brethren in the shiny metal rock realm. Two points to the downside for gold puts it at $31.80 and 4 dimes.
Silver is down 2.15%. Platinum is down 1.1. Copper down 1.7 and palladium essentially moving sideways. Ag is fully mixed today. Biggest winner is rough rice, three and a half to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee, 2.7% to the downside. Meanwhile, livestock, live cattle is down a point. Lean hogs are down point 7%, and feeder cattle are down a full point and a half. The Dow skating down a quarter of a point. S and P, however, is up a tenth while the Nasdaq is up almost a full half point, and the S and P Mini is down point 18%. Bitcoin is chilling out at $103,080.
That is a $2,050,000,000,000 market cap, and we can get 32.2 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,864,482.10. And average fees per block are slightly elevated, 0.06 BTC taking the fees on a per block basis. There are,
[00:34:46] Unknown:
I don't know, twelve,
[00:34:48] David Bennett:
eleven blocks carrying almost 10,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 3 Satoshis per vByte. Low priorities are also 3 Satoshis per vByte. Hash rate has dropped a little bit again. 859.6 exahashes per second is what we are currently at. And we've got a now two percent difficulty, increase coming up in two days. And let's see. Where are we at? Okay. From Free Samurai, yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got Axelrod with 1,021 sat says Psyduck. And Turkey with a thousand says nothing. Thank you, Turkey, though. I appreciate it. As well as you, Axelrod double lot. And Psyduck with $5.98 says, Psyduck.
And thank you, sir, with 500 sat says, no thank you. Oh, he turned it around on me. Yodel with 444 says another solid episode. Thanks. Pies with four twenty says thank you, sir, no thank you. Perma nerd with three thirty three says, Oshie is a good dude. Oshie makes good food. None of you business is a good dude. None of you business makes good podcast. My suggestion is that you eat good food and listen to good podcast. God's Death with 237 says thank you. No, thank you, sir. Oshie says, fairly concerning happening behind the scenes. It's worth a listen. And he basically is talking about the samurai stuff going on because he is referencing this particular episode, and that is the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Helen Parks gets us going out of the gates from Cointelegraph's strategy will beat all public equities with Bitcoin, at least according to an analyst. Michael Saylor's strategy, the world's largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, may become the top publicly traded equity one day according to a strategy analysis analyst. So, yeah, no bias there. Strategy will be the, quote, number one publicly traded equity in the entire market because of its future financial strength enabled with Bitcoin strategy analyst, Jeff Walton, predicted in the new Financial Times documentary, Michael Saylor's forty billion dollar Bitcoin bet.
Well, well, well, well. Company currently holds about 568,840 Bitcoin worth roughly $59,000,000,000, and Walton said that advantage that that advantage could push it past all other publicly listed firms in the future. It's easy to say shit in the future, dude. It just quote, strategy holds more of the best assets and the most pristine collateral on the entire planet more than any other company by multiples, Walton said. The analyst pointed to the firm's ability to rapidly raise capital as another indicator of its strength. In November in 2024, strategy raised $12,000,000,000 in fifty days.
Let's do that again. Strategy raised $12,000,000,000 in just fifty days. It's kind of incredible. And Walton thinks the same thing. Quote, it's incredible. It's incredibly hard to raise a hundred million dollars of capital, and they just raised a hundred million in of capital a 20 times in fifty days, and they were able to buy Bitcoin with that capital. That's insane. In the documentary, Saylor also paints a bullish picture of the future due to Bitcoin adoption by strategy, formerly MicroStrategy. Quote, I think that MicroStrategy is in a position where we can grow from a hundred billion dollar enterprise to a trillion dollar enterprise to a $10,000,000,000,000 enterprise, predicted Saylor. He also predicted that Bitcoin would one day reach a price of $13,000,000 per coin.
Quote, my forecast for 2045 is 13,000,000 a coin. I would think in the four to eight year time frame. Certainly, in ten years, we should be at a million. So 1,000,000 in ten years, you know, 10 x that or more in twenty years. Wow. What ups? The hell of a sentence there there, pal. Walton, and Saylor's prediction on strategy potentially beating all publicly traded equities in the future come as the company ranks as the one hundred and fifty first largest company in the world with a market capitalization of $117,000,000,000 according to company's market cap.
To become the largest, strategy would need to surpass Microsoft, whose current market cap exceeds $3,300,000,000,000. Despite his bullish stance on the future of both strategy and Bitcoin, Saylor has not ignored the possibility that BTC could suffer major losses. Reiterating his previous claims, Saylor emphasized that strategy's capital structure is constructed so that it would still be stable even if Bitcoin falls 90% and stays there for four or five years. Quote, it would not be a good outcome for the equity holders. The people at the top of the capital structure would suffer because they're levered, but everybody else in the capital structure would get paid out, he said.
Okay. So gonna have to go watch this Financial Times documentary. Apparently, it's making waves all over the place. Yeah. I it's easy to talk about what could happen. It's easy to talk about forecasts when you're not actually backing it up with, you know, actual analysis. There's there's nothing here that Walton said nothing about what mechanics he used to analyze to come up with these particular, you know, scenarios. Doesn't really matter because it's this is one of the things that's feeding into the frenzy over there on Bitcoin Twitter. But before we do that, let's talk about Similar Scientific they have purchased $15.10 Bitcoin this year alone and they now hold 3,808 BTC Similar Scientific now holds 3,808 BTC after purchasing 1,510 coins since the start of this year according to their quarter one earnings report.
Their growing Bitcoin reserve helped generate a 22.2 percent BTC yield year to date through May 12 despite a net loss, here we go, of $64,700,000. They lost $64,700,000 in their first quarter alone. Quote, we continue to accretively grow our Bitcoin arsenal using operating cash flow and proceeds from debt and equity financing, said Eric Simler, chairman of Simler Scientific, quote. And we are excited to launch the Simler Scientific dashboard today on our website. Similar has introduced a public facing Bitcoin dashboard on its website to provide real time updates on BTC holdings and key performance indicators like BTC yield, BTC gain, and BTC gain in terms of dollars.
In quarter one twenty twenty five, the company added 894 BTC for $90,700,000 followed by another 616 BTC acquired through May 12 for 59,600,000.0. The total fair value of the Bitcoin holding now stands at 387,900,000.0 based on prices on May. The quarter was marked by substantial non operating charges. These included a $41,800,000 unrealized loss from changes in Bitcoin valuation and a $29,700,000 loss contingent liability related to an agreement in principle with the United States Department of Justice. Revenue for the first quarter of twenty twenty five was a meager $8,800,000, which was down 44% year over year.
Operating expenses, on the other hand, surged to $39,900,000 driven by litigation provisions and audit related costs. As a result, the company reported a pretax loss of $74,900,000. MD and CEO of similar scientific, Doug Murphy Chatorian, said the company's health care business is showing early promise from its cardiovascular product line, quote, we are expecting growth and cash generation from these FDA cleared products and services, which will add to our Bitcoin treasury strategy. Similar also detailed several financing initiatives including 100,000,000 in, guess what, a convertible notes offering and a new at the market equity program, which has already raised $61,000,000 to date under the latest agreement.
So this brings us to the flippening. For weeks, we have had to endure. And eve even for me, who spends most of his time on Nostra rather than Twitter, and I do spend, the preponderance of my time. If I'm gonna go to something like, you know, social media, I'm spending it on Nostra.
[00:45:15] Unknown:
But both on Nostr and especially on Twitter.
[00:45:18] David Bennett:
Right? Twitter is now just is is just been a cesspool. It is 100% still the cesspool. It's probably never going to end, but the sentiment has shifted. For the last few weeks, we have been dealing with Luke Dash junior or Luke Dasher, however you wanna pronounce it, Jameson Lop, Shinobi, all these people have been every pundit under the sun has been kicking around opp return, and the lifting of the op return 80 kilobyte or 80 byte limit. And it's gonna kill us all. It's gonna kill Bitcoin. It's gonna destroy transactions, blah blah blah blah blah. And you're either, and I heard it earlier today, you're either a core munist or you're a Nazi.
Get it? Do you see how bad this is becoming? And Twitter is especially bad and has been especially bad with the core versus knots thing. I've I described it yesterday, the sniping actually, last week, the sniping that I've seen, the people that I thought, you know, were cordial with each other, the shit they're saying to each other publicly is reprehensible. And now it all stopped because they've got a new bone to chew on, and that bone is corporate Bitcoin treasuries like what similar scientific is turning into, what strategy is turning into. And with the birth of twenty one Capital, a full blown pure play crypto company.
Coinbase has been determined to be a pure play crypto company, but I don't I don't actually see it as that because they have a service. Their service is to sell you shit coin, make you poor, and take your money in the process from fees with the trading fees. Right? So there's at least a service there. I don't know what the fuck 21 does. I I just don't. They've said a couple of things. I I presume loans or something like that is gonna be part of it, but I don't know what twenty one Capital does. All we really know about that company is that they're gonna hold a shit ton of Bitcoin. And up until last week when I reported that strategy had a business intelligence based on artificial intelligence project or product that they are going to, at one point or another, release, they had basically, as far as I could tell, shut down all of their operations as it pertained to writing software or updating their business intelligence code that they had been
[00:47:59] Unknown:
selling for decades.
[00:48:01] David Bennett:
Right? So there's just nothing there. There's no there's no sales. Right? It's a pure at this point, until they release their AI business intelligence thing, they are a pure play biz Bitcoin treasury company, And now Bitcoin's gonna die because of these guys. And and be before the op return before op right before op return, do you remember what it was? There was no transactions in the mempool. I still hear that a couple of times. Nobody's using Bitcoin, but not it's not like dog with a bone kind of thing. It's not like everybody dog piling in.
And I can't tell if it's just because this is what gets engagement on Twitter or if it's an actual organic propagation of this new idea of what's going to kill Bitcoin. But through it all, whether it's no transactions in the mempool, whether it's the op return and core, you know, core munis versus Nazi is gonna kill us all, and now we're at corporate Bitcoin treasury is gonna kill us all. All of these things represent one thing, fear. It's just fear. It doesn't matter what flavor the fear is. It's like going to Baskin Robbins. They have 31 flavors. All of them are ice cream, except they do have a sorbet.
Whatever. I don't give a shit. Chocolate chip flavored fear is still ice cream. It's just like rocky road flavored fear. I what I don't understand is that we are at, we're not even at all time highs again. And we've had to wait to get to cross back over the hundred thousand dollar mark for quite a while. And yet we're right back into the stink of like it was in 2017, except this time it's actually worse. In the twenty seventeen block size wars, it was one thing. It was Segwit. It was Segwit two x. It was we need more transactions to to be able to be put into blocks, so therefore, we need to raise the block size limit.
That was it. And then we had forks. We had BSV or the, Bitcoin Cash Fork, and then that forked into BSV. All that was basically essentially the same theme. Now we have three different and and that although that theme was based on the mempool thing. Mempools were too full. At the time, they wanted to change the entire architecture of this entire system simply because for a short period of time, a a piece of the system that is Bitcoin was experiencing a thing. In this case, it was the mempool, and it was too full for a little while. You know, for a few months, it was just really, really full.
And yet transactions were, you know, were probably not anymore as expensive as they have been lately back then because the price of Bitcoin was, like, under $20,000. And now it's at a hundred and 2 or a hundred and 3 or whatever it is right now.
[00:51:09] Unknown:
But at least there was that single theme.
[00:51:13] David Bennett:
But now we're jumping from theme to theme because the opera turn theme is completely different. It's a completely different flavor. At the time of the block size wars, it was like walking into Baskin Robbins and they had vanilla. That was it. You wanted ice cream, you went to Baskin Robbins, you got a scoop of vanilla. That was all that was offered. Here, no. No. No. Here, the fear is represented multiple in multiple different flavors. It's the underlying tone that is the only thing that concerns me here. What's going on that these people are trying to latch on to anything that scares the living piss out of anybody else? Because this is this is not healthy for them. It's certainly not healthy for people that, you know, that rely on these people for information.
It just seems like it just seems like mass hysteria, and I don't understand it. If you have an idea of what this is, by all means, let me know. Meanwhile, the DOJ indicts alleged Sinaloa cartel leaders as blockchain firms trace crypto links to the fentanyl trade. Yay. Naga Ivan Namayo is writing this one for the block. Pedro Inzunza Noriega and his son, Pedro Inzunza Coronel, are accused of leading a massive drug trafficking network for the Beltran Leyva Organization, a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, according to US Department of Justice indictment unsealed this week. While the charges focus on trafficking tens of thousands of kilograms of fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin into The United States, whatever happened to just plain weed?
I guess because we legalized it in a lot of states. Anyway, blockchain analysis firms are separately tracing millions of dollars in crypto tied to fentanyl production and cartel linked payments. The charges follow president Donald Trump's Foreign Terrorist Organization designation order signed in January. The FTO allows the government to seize crypto and other assets connected to cartel agents. Although the DOJ's case against the supposed cartel bosses is based on illegal drugs and trafficking, blockchain analytics providers like Chainalysis, TRM Labs, and Ecliptic or Elliptic have recently found links between stablecoins and fentanyl proceeds.
Pausing to say this, do you want this package wrapped in it's for the children, terrorism, or drug trade? This is what I'm smelling right now. Chainalysis traced $5,500,000,000 worth of stablecoin used by Latin American drug cartels to pay Chinese based fentanyl manufacturers. US authorities in the Eastern District Of Wisconsin eventually seized the funds according to a Chainalysis March crime report. Some cases have involved official sanctions from the US Treasury Department's often Office of Foreign Assets Control or OFAC. In September 2023, OFAC blast blacklisted Ethereum wallets associated with alleged Sinaloa cartel member Jimenez Castro.
Elsewhere, TRM Labs released a study that revealed that most Chinese fentanyl precursor vendors in 26 cities accepted crypto payments. According to Elliptic, illicit drug producers received millions of dollars in digital currencies amid the US fentanyl epidemic. A separate chain analysis report released in 2024 said chemical shops suspected of brewing narcotics have received 220 no. $250,000,000 in crypto since 2015. Alright. So this is this is a potential exit strategy for the United States government. There's always they're always going to do stuff like this. What am I talking about?
[00:55:29] Unknown:
Drug trafficking, and it's related to crypto. Now at one point or another,
[00:55:35] David Bennett:
you can think of it like this. It's like a parachute that you just keep on the wall of the airplane you're flying in. As long as everything is good, that parachute stays on the wall. But if something goes south, all of a sudden, the hatch opens and you pull the parachute off of its rack, you put it on, you jump for dear life, and you pull the ripcord. That's what these things are. Who knows if this is actually true? Is it actually true that Sinaloa drug cartel has taken stablecoin even if it's not going to stop the trend? It's just not. Alright. Last up, Paris kidnapping attempt highlights growing threat to crypto figures. This is your final word of warning. Decrypt, Cal and Quinn is writing this one.
A woman and her child, Both relatives of a leading figure in France's crypto industry were targeted in an attempt kidnapping or an attempted kidnapping in Paris on Tuesday. Four masked individuals ambushed the family near the Eleventh and the Thaisement according to police sources cited by France twenty four and the AFP. Three of the assailants reportedly sprang from a van and tried to force the woman and her child into the vehicle. Her partner was assaulted as he tried to intervene. The woman managed to disarm one of the attackers and toss the weapon away, triggering a commotion that attracted bystanders.
The group then fled and the van was later recovered by authorities nearby. All three victims sustained minor injuries and were taken to the hospital. Authorities have confirmed that the woman is the daughter of the pay Paymium cofounder and CEO, one of the earliest crypto exchanges in France. The latest incident adds to a string of violent crimes targeting crypto affiliated individuals or their families, even those not involved in crypto and held for ransom have found abductors demanding payment in crypto. The public tracker run by security firm Casa CTO, Jameson Lop, has recorded 22 physical crypto related attacks so far in 2025 occurring in France, Spain, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.
France alone has seen six such incidents this year. In January, Ledger cofounder David Ballant and his partner were abducted in France, with Ballant's finger reportedly severed as kidnappers demanded crypto as ransom. Nine suspects, including the alleged ringleader, have since been apprehended. A separate case in early May involved seven arrests after a man was kidnapped to extort cryptocurrency from his wealthy son. That victim also lost a finger. On New Year's Eve last year, the father of a crypto influencer was held hostage in Saint Jean's Paoli, I can't pronounce French stuff, in a ransom attempt.
Then we go beyond France because the trend is global. In March, a Chinese Filipino steel magnate named Anson Kyu was killed. Killed after kidnappers demanded 20,000,000 in crypto and authorities had already provided 3,500,000.0. An investigation is currently ongoing. On to Hong Kong where a Turkish man was ambushed during a multimillion euro crypto deal, the latest in several examples of cash for crypto trades gone wrong. And in Brazil, a Spanish businessman was drugged and abducted by criminals posing as law enforcement. They demanded $50,000,000 in crypto and held him for five days before he was able to escape.
Please
[00:59:33] Unknown:
be careful because it just gets worse from here. As the price of all these things go up,
[00:59:44] David Bennett:
well, it's just gonna get worse. Do yourself and all of your loved ones a favor because it's not just about you, man. It's about anybody you're connected with, anybody who would feel your loss as a negative in their life because they're still alive. You have to consider them. You have to. It's your commitment to being part of the human race, to be responsible to those who love you. And it goes well at this point, it goes well beyond making sure that you don't have heart disease by not doing bad shit shit for you. Maybe you should go work out more or take walks, you know, keep yourself healthy. It goes way beyond that at this point, especially if you're in this kind of industry where the hype just makes everybody freak out.
Though we demand 50,000,000 in crypto, what kind of crypto? Like, do you think everybody walking around has every kind of crypto? It's a lot of this, a lot of the the criminal side of this is driven by the same kind of hype. It's it's sort of like the black mirror image of fear of missing out. You don't have any money to get any for your self, but this crypto thing is gonna go bonkers. So you gotta get some somehow. So you just gonna pull some dude off the street wearing a Bitcoin shirt because clearly they own Bitcoin. Don't let yourself be a target. Stop wearing the swag.
Again, my apologies for all the people that that create the swag. I'm not after you. But we're we're not doing ourselves any favors when we wear orange shoes, orange socks, orange pants, orange shirt with a b on it, and a big orange hat also with a b on it. You are essentially saying, please kidnap me. And unless you are prepared to arm yourself and take personal defense training, and even then, you're you're not gonna personally defend yourself against 15 people who wanna throw you in a van. If 15 people wanna throw you in a van, you're getting thrown in the van. I mean, I don't even think Jawed Cobb Van Dammit could even do anything about that shit.
So please, when you go to the Las Vegas Conference or any Bitcoin conference for that matter, please at least reconsider wearing Bitcoin or any kind of crypto swag. Just look like your ordinary guy. Practice good operational security, be safe, and I will see you on the other side.
[01:02:24] Unknown:
This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Episode Overview
Changing Narratives in Bitcoin's Future
Market Updates and Economic Indicators
