Episode 1139 of Bitcoin And . . . is LIVE!
Topics for today:
Artisan pecan butter, date bars and chocolates
Website: https://www.oshigood.us/products
nostr Profile: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqswp94gnm4epqsgjkndl4lnd8krzdj5u4mzuppdtxksdymkty63g7gdurlfc
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-independence-bitcoin-history
https://x.com/christiancalgie/status/1950458199280095579
https://cointelegraph.com/news/rassemblement-national-bitcoin-mining-nuclear-power
https://decrypt.co/333368/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-statue-vandalized
https://bitcoinnews.com/press-release/alpen-launches-public-testnet-bitcoin/
https://www.theblock.co/post/365418/sec-project-crypto-rewrite-rules-of-wall-street-onchain-bernstein
https://atlas21.com/127426-btc-stolen-from-chinese-mining-pool-lubian-in-2020-uncovered/
https://atlas21.com/el-salvador-constitutional-reforms-approved-for-unlimited-presidential-re-election/
Topics for today:
- Satoshi Disappears . . . Again
- BTC Independence Day Forgotten
- Biggest BTC Hack Ever Happened in 2020
- French Politicians Go Nuclear for Bitcoin
Circle P:
OshiArtisan pecan butter, date bars and chocolates
Website: https://www.oshigood.us/products
nostr Profile: https://primal.net/p/nprofile1qqswp94gnm4epqsgjkndl4lnd8krzdj5u4mzuppdtxksdymkty63g7gdurlfc
Today's Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/the-first-amendment-bitcoin-shall-nothttps://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-independence-bitcoin-history
https://x.com/christiancalgie/status/1950458199280095579
https://cointelegraph.com/news/rassemblement-national-bitcoin-mining-nuclear-power
https://decrypt.co/333368/bitcoin-creator-satoshi-nakamoto-statue-vandalized
https://bitcoinnews.com/press-release/alpen-launches-public-testnet-bitcoin/
https://www.theblock.co/post/365418/sec-project-crypto-rewrite-rules-of-wall-street-onchain-bernstein
https://atlas21.com/127426-btc-stolen-from-chinese-mining-pool-lubian-in-2020-uncovered/
https://atlas21.com/el-salvador-constitutional-reforms-approved-for-unlimited-presidential-re-election/
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Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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[00:00:02]
David Bennett:
It is 09:59AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the August 2025, and this is episode eleven thirty eight of Bitcoin and never before have we had a substrate of immutable information permanently immune to entropy. I don't think we even understand what value is, let alone Bitcoin. All things intersect in the quantum ledger. Now, that is the last part of a note written by a gentleman by the name of Jack K, also known as Jack Kluz, and that's k l u z. And this is a a a nostril note. And it's in response to to something, and I'm not gonna read any more of it because, honestly, that's one of the most based definitions of Bitcoin I've ever heard.
What what the hell does it mean? Permanently immune to entropy? Well, first of all, nothing is permanently immune to enter to entropy. Alright? At one point or another, one of two things is gonna happen. The universe is going to expand and experience heat death, which means it just keeps on going and going and suns burn out and and the the amount of of material is so widespread that gravity can't collapse something into a new star and all the stars go out, which is a really sad, sad way to look at the future of the universe. I prefer the other way to look at the universe where we get the giant or the big crunch. You've heard of the big bang.
There's a theory that maybe the universe at one point or another reaches a limit and then starts to come back and then collapses on itself and then boom, you've got another big bang. I I prefer that one. It it just seems a little bit more cheery, you know? That's what I'm talking about. But either way, eventually, even Bitcoin dies. Okay? Let's let's not be so hubristic or hubristic that we think that Bitcoin is literally going to outlive the universe. It's not. Why? Because it's part of the universe, and as the universe goes, so will Bitcoin.
However, for the short to medium to even fairly long term, never before have we had a substrate of immutable information permanently immune to entropy. I love that sentence. It means talking about the ability to keep the information, in this case, all the Bitcoin transactions, the immutable nature of money that is Bitcoin, to keep it intact, to not have it degrade over time. It's part of the way that the system works. But again, just so that we don't get off on the wrong foot, nothing survives the fate of the universe. Nothing. Not you, not me, not Bitcoin, certainly not any of the shit coins. But, Jack, that was one of the best sentences I've ever read. So congratulations, brother.
Let's see. There's some there was something else that I wanted to say about that, but you know what? Let's just get this thing going on. We're gonna start right here with Bitcoin Magazine. The first amendment, Bitcoin shall not be abridged. This is a short one from Shinobi. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is the first amendment.
This is the supreme law of the land. If this does not stand as such without first explicitly amending The United States Constitution, then the law of the land is completely and utterly illegitimate. Software is speech. Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin shall not be abridged. Everything, literally everything about how Bitcoin works and functions is facilitating speech between people through the use of software. That is what a block is. That is what a transaction is. It's all just messages being recorded. Nodes broadcast messages. Miners receive and notarize messages to rebroadcast in collections as blocks.
Nodes verify the authenticity and ordering of these messages. They archive these messages so that they can be provided to all new nodes for download and verification. That is all Bitcoin is on a technical level. Software people use to craft messages to sign them for authenticity to broadcast them to everyone else to verify. All we are doing is passing around signed digital messages, verifying their authenticity, and then choosing to act in the real world based on the contents of those messages. Bitcoin is speech, full stop. The software we use to operate and interact with is speech, full stop. Quote, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
I don't care what a judge in a courtroom says or what an illegal piece of legislation says or what some government stooge says or argues in the court of public opinion. I am an American citizen, and under the authority of the founding document of this country itself, I have the right to speak freely and without restraint. If I do not have that right, then the legitimacy of any system in this country that tells me what rights I do have or do not have is entirely non existent. Either way, I will continue interacting with Bitcoin however I choose to. It's time to stop pretending that politicians will give you permission to exercise your rights if you beg hard enough.
Assert your rights aggressively and take them. Whether that is outright defiance or proactively taking them to court to hold them accountable under the existing rules that they are supposed to be bound by, don't ask, take them. Rights aren't granted. They're taken and defended. Satoshi didn't ask for permission to create Bitcoin. He just did it. That's the end of that take. But it leads us right into another take again, Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine. Bitcoin Independence Day. Is Bitcoin history being forgotten? The user activated soft fork or UASF to activate Segregated Witness in 2017 was one of the most pivotal events and in general time periods in the Bitcoin history.
There is a long, long history before the culmination or rather culmination of outright conflict that year, but 2017 was when everything boiled over. What started as long standing disagreements over technical approaches to scale Bitcoin to a larger user base culminated in a standoff between a majority of the large corporations in the space and developers and a large group of active users and market participants. This was how it played out. Regardless of the fact that there were users who supported the direction of a hard fork block size increase, the actual attempt to do so was spearheaded by massive corporations who felt that, because they were the big professional players, they decided how Bitcoin would evolve.
In response, a large grassroots web of users, developers, owners of smaller businesses in the space and even traders and market makers on large exchanges began organizing and lobbying their peers to not go along with the hard fork. It was these large corporations holding the activation of segregated witness hostage and demanding an additional hard fork block size increase in exchange and this network of users running a client that would cause a chain split while activating Segregated Witness if everyone else didn't cave and go along with the activation. That activation date was 08/01/2017.
It was a defining moment in Bitcoin's history. One that seems to have been mostly forgotten now. This year, there is almost no mention or discussion or celebration of this historic event. Has Bitcoin really grown so much that these pivotal moments in its history are just being forgotten? The lesson learned from the fading away into the past? This year, it really seems like it to me. Many people are not even aware of these events. Others who learned of them secondhand are already distorting and twisting the lessons taught. And rather than being cognizant of the lessons of past corporate behavior, many actively encourage repeating the mistakes of the past.
Rather than remembering that Bitcoin is at its strongest when it is widely distributed when people directly interact with the network itself peer to peer in large numbers and encouraging growth in that direction, people blindly cheer on growing corporate influence and control. In light of that, I'm posting a video that I recorded six years ago summarizing the deeper motivating history as well as the overall dynamics and rationale behind the UASF. I recommend watching it at at least 1.25 x speed. Happy independence day for those who still remember it. This is rather an important day. And, of course, that was three days ago, August 1.
You know why it's being forgotten? Because it was fucking trauma. That's why. And for those of you who weren't around at that time and you think, well, I don't know, man. Dave just it just sounds like maybe he's a little maybe he's being a little hyperbolic. No. I'm not. It was really bad. I mean, it was like it was literally like getting kicked in the crotch and then punched in the gut and then body slammed. Because the very people that we thought were fighting for Bitcoin were clearly just fighting for themselves. We lost a lot of trust in a lot of people, a lot of people that we really liked.
And they really, at this point, they're just in the background now. Roger Ver is one of those people. Brian Armstrong was one of those people too, but he's rich as snot and he's always in the news because he's always saying, you know, things and reaching for stuff and he's he's listed on the Nasdaq or whatever it is with Coinbase stock. It that's not the point. The point is that there was a whole group of people that signed this New York agreement. And the minute that they did that, they basically showed us who they really were. And all the time before that, we thought we really did think that they were acting in the best interest of Bitcoin.
They weren't. And it was an embarrassing and torturous path to walk to get to the other side of that thing. It's not that we're forgetting August 1 as Bitcoin's Independence Day. I think and I don't think we're actively trying to forget it. I I don't. I think that like any traumatic event in your life, you're lucky if you kind of forget about it. But Shinobi makes a good point. We should not forget about August 1. It should be like Bitcoin pizza day. It should be like the the the dropping of the white paper on October 31. It should be like January 3.
I'm just I'm just saying. He has a very, very, very good point. Because if we forget if we forget things like that, then we can't defend ourselves against things like this. And this is Kaldi. Yes, it's from x.com, but he's got a screenshot of Spotify. I want to say a few words about this. There's there's two frequently asked questions in this Spotify document that he screenshotted. One is, my age check shows I'm not old enough to use Spotify. Okay. Well, then you cannot use Spotify if you don't meet the minimum age requirements for the market you're in. If you cannot confirm you're old enough to use Spotify, your account will be deactivated and eventually deleted.
Second question. My account was deactivated. What should I do? If your account was deactivated due to an inaccurate age estimation, you can look for the email in your inbox which allows you to reactivate your account within ninety days of deactivation and then go through ID verification. If we still can't confirm that you're old enough to use Spotify or if no action is taken within seven days of reactivation, your account will be permanently deleted. Now on top of that, so we've been it's it's clear that this is going on. YouTube is about to do something with age verification. It's age verification. It's age verification all over the place. It's like it was like an age verification bomb got dropped on the world.
I mean, we've always kind of in certain cases, we've had a lot of, you know, websites where you have to verify your age. You got to do it for, you know, like a bank account, you know, you got to do it for, like, if you're gonna watch porn or something like that. There's a whole bunch of other stuff like Amazon. If you're gonna buy something, you I mean, there's there's gonna be verifications. We're used to it. But this is now pan pan social media across the entire thing, the entire ecosystem that you consider social media, all of them. Especially now this is all starting in the European Union because those guys are well, they're essentially toast, and Australia is right behind them. But it's not like it's not gonna come to everywhere else. It's it'll probably go to Canada next if they're not already doing it.
However, you might be saying, I already know about all this. Yeah. But let's add let's add something to this. Let's add this from Andrei Aropov, and this is a note from Noster. EU orders all private chats to be scanned from October 2025. Let me repeat that. European Union is ordering that all private chats, not chat g p t, you chatting with somebody on an app in private. No. They want all private chats to be scanned from October 2025. Under Denmark's EU presidency, a revised proposal mandates client side scanning of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, even before encryption locks kick in.
It's backed by 19 European countries, including France and Belgium, and it targets adoption by October 14. I would like to read that to you again, but I'm not going to because it's terrifying. Signal is in trouble. Now, Telegram and WhatsApp, we I know that I knew that shit was going to happen, but signal and if signal doesn't comply, signal's going going to be probably booted out of the European Union. And if you are a heavy signal user and you live in the European Union, what you gonna do? Right? What are you gonna do? Cali is a developer on Nostr.
He's he's got something to say about all this. He says, remember when we said we must be ready for when people need Nostr? It's happening faster than expected. Boom. That's it. That's it. I wrote a note the other day on Nostr because that is my primary that's my primary social media. I I honestly I guess I go to to Twitter every once in a while. I do post on Twitter every once in a while, but I never feel good being there. It's just a hate machine. It's a it's it's a rage generator. Right? I spend most of my time on Nostra. I have this. A I I I have almost no audience on Twitter because I don't spend any time there. But I see people that come to Nostr, and then they leave and go back to Twitter, and then they make fun of Nostr because there's just they just don't get any engagement.
Well, I'm here to tell you, most people that think they're getting engagement on Twitter aren't. The bots are rampant, and that's for a reason. And everybody keeps thinking they're gonna ask and and whine and cry loud enough that Elon Musk will do something about the bots. Dude, Elon is why the bots are propagating the way that they are. He has no intention. No intention whatsoever of throttling or somehow governing the bots. Why? Because they automatically give the dopamine hit that keeps the people addicted to Twitter. They keep thinking they're getting engagement. I will see I will open up somebody's you know, like like, Twitter thread, and they've got, like, let's say I don't know. Let let's say it's like a a a a very a modest account, and they get 200 likes on saying good morning.
Like 85% of the replies and the likes are from bots. It's disgusting. When I go when I'm on Nostr, it's all organic. I mean, yes, there's there's some bots on Nostr and there some of them are kind of annoying, but for the great guts and feathers, I post something on Nostr. I get actual real organic engagement. I have no intention of leaving Nostr. And all the people that are saying all the time, oh my god. This is this thing is terrible, it is never going to compete. I honestly don't give a shit because this thing is alive. Nostra is alive. You're not just gonna shut it off. Right? And for all the people that think it sucks, you're about to get hosed.
And if you're not claiming your name space on Nasr, and I mean doing it right now, you are really, really in a dangerous area. That most of the people in the EU won't be able to functionally use signal, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. If it even breathes a breath of social media and the ability to communicate somewhat peer to peer, even though these are all centralized behemoths. Right? The where do you turn? Well, you gotta go to Noster. Okay. We'll go to Mastodon. What? So that the particular server that you're on, you can get booted off by because you said something that the server master doesn't like. I don't care that Macedon and the Fediverse is made up by several 100 or if not, you know, a a couple of thousand different servers, maybe even more than that.
If I'm on one server, the other servers don't really know who my identity is. I gotta go re register out on another server with hold I gotta rebuild my profile if I get booted off of one server if I get booted off of what is like the the no agenda show for like let's say I I pissed John seed of work off or something like that and he just shit cans my account, which they can, because that's what the server master can do, then I gotta go I won't be able to interact with that server and that's what when I'm logged into Mastodon it's like that's one of the that's the thing that I use. That's how I'm getting into Mastodon.
Now I got to go somewhere else. Come on, man. Give me a break. It's time to actually start taking Nostra seriously. I mean, seriously. It's it's it's within you. You know, you're the one that makes the decision as to whether or not you're going to try something. And you've got a whole bunch of people in your ear basically telling you that Nostra sucks and you'll never get the engagement. And that's reinforced when you go say good morning on Twitter and 57,000 bots start replying to you and it makes you think you're being engaged with. You're not. It's fake engagement, and it's going to remain fake engagement.
He is Elon is never going to shut that down. It's an automatic it's like an automated drug dealer, and he works for free, and he brings his own drugs along with him. Why the fuck would you fire that guy? You don't. He's not gonna be fired. And with the amount of crap that we're seeing going on in the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, it's gonna come to Canada, and it's gonna start infiltrating into The United States. They're gonna want your picture of your driver's license every time that you make a tweet. Well, not every time you make a tweet, but you understand what I'm saying.
It is time to leave the walled gardens and and legacy infrastructure not only behind, but to run so far away from it that by the time you catch a breath and turn around you can't even see it anymore. The only way out of this is Noster. It's not FEDIMENT. It's not Blue Sky. It's not Twitter. It's not kowtowing and and and giving every single one of these platforms your identity. It's none of their business. Now speaking of business, Circle p is open for business. Circle p is where I bring plebs that have goods and services for sale to other plebs like you who might actually want to buy huddle butter from 0shig00d.us/products.
Go check it out because Huddle butter is made from it's well, it's like peanut butter except it's made with pecans. It's glorious. He's got some in stock. He made a batch, and the products are as such. Pecans, maple sugar, sea salt flakes, cinnamon, and black pepper. It's simple and borders on the edge of savory. I've seen people smother this stuff over their steaks. Yeah. Yeah. Over their steaks. They love it. They love it. Now the product that I have had, I have not had this with Huddle butter yet, is one of his Oshi bars. Now check out this banana chocolate chip Huddle bar. It has dates, the aforementioned Huddle butter, dark chocolate chips, banana powder, peanut flour, cacao powder, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and sea salt. And by the way, he sells it all for Satoshis. Because if you're not selling your goods and services for Satoshis, you're not in the circle p. No. You are not.
Please do me a favor. Go to oshigood.us. Just buy something. Support a pleb. He's a pleb just like you. Right? And when you support him, Oshi can support me because if you buy from him and use the code Bitcoin and you won't get a discount, but you will be telling Oshii who made the sale for him, then Oshii can determine what that sale was worth, and he will get me in satoshis on the other side. That's the way that the circle p works. Go to 0shig00d.us. Now out of The US, we go to France. France with the Frenchy frogs. France's Ras Emboldment National Party backs Bitcoin mining with nuclear energy.
Ezra Raguera has got this one from Cointelegraph. Rassemblement, it's a weird word, Rassemblement National or RN is a French political party and is reportedly pushing to mine Bitcoin using surplus energy from nuclear power plants signaling a shift from its leader's previous anti crypto stance. French newspaper outlet, Le Monde, reported last week that RN leader and three time presidential candidate, you guessed it, Marine Le Pen, now backs using idle nuclear energy for Bitcoin mining. She reportedly promoted the plan during a visit to the Flamanville nuclear plant on March 11. The party said the initiative will turn wasted electricity into secure and extremely profitable digital assets.
According to LeMond, RN lawmaker Ariel Lopez Liguori has spearheaded the proposal in the French parliament drafting a bill to install mining infrastructure at sites operated by the energy giant, Electricite de France. France. Well, the shift reflects broader momentum within the political party to embrace Bitcoin as a tool for economic sovereignty. Lopez Liguri said that the party wants to use every bit of energy produced to eliminate waste. Cointelegraph reached out. I haven't had a word back yet. But the pro crypto position marks a major reversal from our end stance in 2016 when Le Pen called for a ban on cryptocurrency, well, the whole of cryptocurrencies in France. In a press release at the time, Le Pen said that the more money is dematerialized and digitized, the more people will lose ownership of their money. She described making cash disappear in favor of digital currencies as an alienation of man to benefit the global banking system.
You're so close, Le Pen. Le Pen said currency is a national good entrusted to the people, and because of this, she promised to prevent the use of cryptocurrency in France. Within the party, ideologies contradicting Bitcoin's ethos of decentralization persist. RN finance lead, Juan Philippe Tangay, said that the party should not embrace currency independence and reaffirm its belief in centralized monetary policy. Oh, wow. This sounds like you got a mole, man. Sounds like somebody placed a mole among you. Anyway, despite the ideological rift, the right wing RN remains France's most active political force in advancing crypto legislation, while left leaning parties continue to focus on the environmental impact of mining and its association with illicit finance.
RN has attracted crypto lobbyists and entrepreneurs who see the party as pro business according to Le Monde. An interesting flip. Now here's the thing. Le Pen actually had the right idea. She was just ignorant as to how Bitcoin works because all I guarantee the only thing she was being fed was this garbage about CBDCs and how they work. And it horrifies me, it horrifies you, and it horrified her, but somebody got into her ear. And thank God that they did. Let's run the numbers. Good mercy. West Texas Intermediate Oil is down one and a half points to $66.33 a barrel. Brent Norsee is down one and a quarter to $68.82.
Natural gas plummeting 5.68% under $3 down to $2.90 per thousand cubic feet. And gasoline is down almost a full point to just over $2 a gallon. Gold is up, well, three quarters of a point to $34.26. Woo hoo for Peter Schiff. Silver is also up a row of sticks to $37.34 an ounce. Platinum is up 2.17%. Copper is up point one eight. Palladium is losing ground. It is 1% to the downside. Meanwhile, most of ag is in the green today. Biggest winner is coffee. Two points to the upside. Biggest loser is lumber, one and a half to the downside. Meanwhile, live cattle is down a quarter of a point. Lean hogs are up point 86%, and feeder cattle are down a half. And it looks to me like, wow, the legacy markets, man, your equities, they're all in the green. And by a wide margin because the Dow is up one and a third percent to $44.02 79.
S and P is up one and a third. Nasdaq is up 1.7%, and the S and P Mini is ripping to the upside. 1.12% in the green, baby. A 115,520. That is a $2,300,000,000,000 market cap. That's trillion with a t, by the way. And we can only get 34.1 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,901,638.32 of an average fees per block have been extraordinarily low. You thought I was gonna say high, didn't you? 2 Satoshis per vbyte is gonna get the 31,818 unconfirmed transactions into the blockchain. 1 Satoshis per vbyte is going to also get you in, but at a slower rate.
900 exahashes per second. So we are recovering again from a slight dip in hash rate. Then, well, that's that's it for that's it for the mining stuff. Now from president for life, I got user 11556842 with a thousand SAT says, it is what it is, calling late cycle behavior blasphemy. Accurate? Psyduck with 738 says nothing. No. Actually, he does say Psyduck. 500 from progressively worse says thank you, no thank you. Turkey says nothing, 5 100. God's death 2 '37 says thank you sir, no thank you. And bit BTC on board with a 100, and I can't read the, I can't read the the emojis because my operating system is, yes, it's that old. Give me a break. Pieds with a 100 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Dude, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared not once, but twice. Yep. The statue in Lugano was vandalized. It was stolen. It was taken away. But it's been recovered from Lake Lugano after the vandalism. So sad. I just, I guess somebody well, we'll save it. Vismaya v is writing this one from decrypt. Municipal workers in Lugano, Switzerland retrieved the pieces of the city's famous Satoshi Nakamoto statue from Lake Lugano on Monday after Bitcoin's most recognizable public monument was stolen and then vandalized over the weekend.
The optical illusion artwork, which appears to fade into digital code when viewed from certain angles, was discovered on Monday, broken into several pieces both in the lake and along its banks. And the statue had been ripped from its mounting points in Parco Ciani, a popular lakefront park park by unknown vandals who then threw the remnants into the water. Created by Italian artist and Bitcoin advocate, Valentina Piccozzi, the statue has become a symbol of Bitcoin's decentralized philosophy and the mystery surrounding its pseudonymous creator.
Picozzi, who has been working as an activist artist since discovering Bitcoin in 2012, operates under Satoshi Gallery, a copyrighted artistic project aimed at connecting people to Bitcoin culture through art and iconography. The The theft was first reported Saturday by social media users who noticed the empty base where the faceless figure once sat. Satoshi Gallery immediately offered a reward of 0.1 BTC for information leading to the statue's recovery. Quote, you can steal our symbol, but you will never be able to steal our souls, Satoshi Gallery said in their response to the vandalism, declaring their commitment to install similar statues in 21 locations worldwide.
This is the Streisand effect. It didn't really do what I guess the vandals thought it was gonna do. Who who knows? There could I could go tinfoil hat on this shit all day long. But first, some observers, including pseudonymous Bitcoin advocate, Goritto, theorized that intoxicated revelers celebrating Swiss National Day may have been responsible. A change.org petition urges city officials to restore the statue with organizing organizers pledging to cover the cost. The statue crafted from three zero four stainless steel in court and blocks was unveiled in October 2024 during the plan b forum, a blockchain conference hosted by Lugano and stablecoin issuer, Tether.
The artwork took twenty one months to plan and construct according to Pecosse. The Lugano installation is part of the growing global movement to create physical tributes to Bitcoin and its mysterious founder. Other notable monuments also include a mirrored face bust in Budapest Graphisoft Park, where viewers see themselves reflected as Satoshi. Okay. So, yes, it's the statue itself, the recovered pieces is there's just I mean, it's it's there, but it's like it's like literally in, like, three different pieces. And if you count the, two feet or parts of the feet left behind on the pedestal, this thing's been broken into five pieces, and it's been it's been mutilated.
There's not there's no repairing this particular statue. They're just he's literate or the artist, I don't know if it's a he or she, is literally going to have to rebuild the thing from scratch. I I conjectured that maybe somebody got liquidated because, you know, get it. They found it in the in the lake, water liquid. So I got liquidate, whatever. There's no reason for this kind of vandalism. There's no reason for any vandalism. It's not worth your time. Plus, by the way, from what we understand, there is a camera and the Satoshi statue is in the field of that particular camera. We'll see if somebody's face shows up. And if they do, I honestly, they really need to yeah, okay. I I don't I don't wanna say lose their freedom forever, but they should be at least made to do some work to restore the statue, you know, like, whatever.
Let's move on to Alpen Public Testnet, a l p e n, Alpen as in, like, Alpen slopes, whatever. But they're offering a peek at Bitcoin's own financial system. Hold hold the jeers until I'm done reading the article. New York and New York, 08/04/2025, Bitcoin's market cap sits well above 2,000,000,000,000. But its participation in finance remains limited to opaque centralized services that require owners to give up custody. Alpin's public testnet is now live, a major step toward bringing Bitcoin's own financial system online. This milestone brings major financial apps like trading, borrowing, earnings, stablecoins, and more.
Just one step closer to Bitcoin. Quote, Bitcoin is not just for holding anymore, said Samantha Gautam, CEO and cofounder of Alpin Labs, Alpin is enabling Bitcoin holders to securely participate in Bitcoin finance in all the ways that they've wanted without the middlemen. We're bringing together some of the best teams in the space to create a vibrant financial ecosystem for BTC, end quote. The Alpin test hold on. I know. You're probably going, stop it. Stop it. Just chill. Let me finish. The ALPEN test net allows developers to experiment, build, and test BTC applications that were once confined to centralized exchanges, custodians, or wrapped tokens outside of Bitcoin.
Products such as the Bitcoin dollar will demonstrate what's possible on a Bitcoin secure financial system. The Bitcoin dollar or BTD being developed in partnership with the Liquidity team is a BTC backed dollar stablecoin. Yay. Another one. That also enables holders to borrow against their Bitcoin, which I do not recommend. This is an aside. I don't recommend that. But Alpin is the distillation of years of research by the AlpinLab team into secure programmability on Bitcoin. Alpin's EVM compatibility enables crypto's largest developer base to use familiar tools to build a financial ecosystem on Bitcoin.
Alpin's z k roll up architecture enables faster, lower cost transactions while inheriting Bitcoin's unmatched security quote. I believe this represents one of the most important breakthroughs in blockchain history. There's the catchphrase. That's what I was waiting for. Uniting Bitcoin's unmatched security with the programmability we've waited fifteen years for, said Nick car oh god. Nick Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures, and he added, quote, Alpin is a game changer for Bitcoin, and we're proud to back a team that's pushing the ecosystem to new heights, end quote. Founded in 2022 by four MIT alumni and backed by Ribbit Capital Ribbit Capital, Stillmark doing business as cyber fund along with individuals like Wences Sisares and Ben Davenport, Alpin Labs is reshaping Bitcoin's ecosystem into one where many more users can securely participate in finance.
This testnet paves the way for an upcoming mainnet launch that seeks to redefine Bitcoin's future. Are you ready to explore? Well, check it out at alpinlabs.io and read the launch post. No. I I don't think that I will. Everything about this feels bad. Alright? But it's nothing that can be stopped. Right? Because if I could stop it, then Bitcoin fails. And I would rather see Nick Carter and his little band of merry men try to build finance on Bitcoin for whatever the fuck reason we need that shit. We already have finance on Bitcoin. It's called, like, I don't know every other company that's out there. I don't know what's being redefined. It sounds like a bunch of hooey to me, but watch it because it could be one of those danger signals. And when somebody like Nick Carter says the word blockchain, it just makes my skin crawl. Let's move on to Bernstein.
He says, the SEC's project crypto could rewrite the rules of Wall Street James Hunt writing for the block in a sweeping endorsement of regulatory reform under the more crypto friendly Securities and Exchange Commission now led by Paul Atkins, analyst at research and brokerage firm Bernstein said that the agency's new project crypto initiative marks the boldest and the most transformative crypto vision ever laid out by a sitting SEC chair, one that could reignite domestic innovation and turn The United States into the global epicenter of blockchain finance.
Woo. Blockchain. Oh, for god's sakes, these people. Announced in a landmark speech on Thursday titled American Leadership in the Digital Financial Revolution, colon, Evolution of Capital Markets from Buttonwood to Blockchain. That is a horrible title. It's too long. Stop it. Anyway, Atkins' project crypto seeks to modernize US securities regulation for the digital age continuing the Trump administration's mission to make America the crypto capital of the world. Bernstein analyst led by Gautam Shungani explained in a Monday note to clients, drawing hysteric hysterical, although it might be, drawing historical parallels from the 1792 stockbrokers agreement beneath the buttonwood tree, which laid the groundwork for the NYSE, to the creation of the modern clearing system in the nineteen sixties and the electronic trading reforms of the nineteen eighties, Atkins argued that American financial regulation must evolve or risk being left behind.
The analyst suggested that the dropped SEC case against Coinbase marked a regulatory shift from analog rigidity to digital pragmatism, with Atkins insisting that The US framework need not be anchored to a past unkind to new frontiers. Quote, the future is arriving at full speed, and the world is not waiting. America must do more than just keep pace with the digital asset revolution. We must drive it, end quote, Atkins said in the speech. That suitspeak dude says nothing means nothing. Outlining some of the most impactful aspects of project crypto in their view, the Bernstein analyst said that the initiative will bring crypto innovation back to The US by easing outdated regulations that previously drove firms offshore and stifled entrepreneurship.
And contrary to the SEC's position under prior chair Gary Gensler, Atkins said, most crypto assets aren't securities and confusion over the Howey test has hindered US capital formation. The SEC now plans to offer clearer rules to classify crypto assets into categories such as digital commodities, stablecoins, and digital collectibles. The initiative would also support the creation of tokenized securities under US jurisdiction with strong interest already emerging from major Wall Street and tech firms, the analyst said, removing the need for offshore workarounds. This project crypto thing just seems like a distraction or like a head fake.
I I need to see actual real things done, not suit speak. But a lot of people are are literally looking at project crypto like it's some kinda is gonna be like the end all be all. Like, oh my god. The SEC is all in on on Bitcoin. I don't know. I doubt it. I honestly doubt it. I think they're just playing along and they're they've got some nice catchy phrases there. But in the end ladies and gentlemen it's all just suit speak. Until you come to this one, this is not bullshit. How I never saw this and now how nobody else ever saw this is beyond my comprehension. This is it's not exciting. It's really sad, but the fact that it was hidden for so long is really kind of bizarre. Atlas 21, 127,500 stolen from Chinese mining pool Lubian in 2020 uncovered.
What? Blockchain analytics firm, Arkham Intelligence, has uncovered one of the largest Bitcoin thefts in the history of Bitcoin. The cyber attack carried out in December 2020 against the Chinese mining pool, Lubayan, resulted in the theft of a 127,500 BTC worth approximately $14,500,000,000 at current prices. The theft positions the unknown attacker as the thirteenth largest Bitcoin holder according to Arkham's ratings or rankings. And at the time of the theft in December 2020, the stolen Bitcoin was worth around $3,500,000,000. Lubian or Lubian, the mining company, which at the time ranked among the world's top 10 mining pools controlling 66% of the hash rate suffered the attack without ever disclosing it publicly The mining firm eventually ceased operations in early two thousand twenty one So how did this happen?
According to Arcum Intelligence's analysis, the theft was made possible by a vulnerability in the generation of private keys which proved susceptible to brute force attacks. The hacker managed to steal over 90% of Lubyin's holdings during the initial attack in December 2020. And later that same month, a second attack resulted in the theft of an additional $6,000,000 worth of Bitcoin and USDT, Tether's stablecoin, from a Lubian address active on the Bitcoin omnilayer. In response, Lubian transferred the remaining funds to a recovery wallet at the December. In a desperate effort to recover the stolen funds, Lubian sent over 1,500 very small transactions totaling 1.4 Bitcoin and each of those transactions contained a message pleading with the hacker to return the stolen Bitcoin.
However, these appeals went unanswered, and the theft was never reimbursed. Currently, Lubian still holds 11,886 Bitcoin from its original holdings worth around $1,350,000,000. And meanwhile, the hacker continues to control the stolen Bitcoin with the last movement recorded in July 2024 during a wallet consolidation. Holy shit. Thirteenth largest Bitcoin holder was created from a theft that was never publicly disclosed of, what was it, a 127,500 Bitcoin. They tried to recover. They begged. They pleaded. No dice, and they folded within a year.
Oh, man. It's just a really sad story. But there's a silver lining. A silver lining here. They still have, what, 11,886 Bitcoin. You know what they should do? Start a Bitcoin Treasury company. Now, on to El Salvador where the dictator in chief yeah, I know. Look. I like Bukele, but this is bullshit. And anybody who thinks that what I'm about to tell you isn't bullshit, it's bullshit. Okay? This is also Atlas 21, and it is the last story of the day. In El Salvador, constitutional reforms have been approved for unlimited presidential reelection.
Sounds like a president for life to me. According to the Associated Press, El Salvador's parliament has approved constitutional amendments enabling unlimited presidential reelection paving the way for president Nayib Bukele to remain in power without time restrictions. The decision, passed with 57 votes in favor of and only three against by Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party and its allies, marks a turning point in the political history of the Central American country. The package of five reforms reshapes El Salvador's institutional framework.
The presidential team is extended from or term, the presidential term is extended from five years. It is now six years, and the electoral runoff is now abolished. The political opposition has condemned, did you think, has condemned these reforms as the end of democracy in the country. Deputy Marcela Villa Villatoro from the Nationalist Republican Alliance Party voiced strong concerns, quote, you don't realize what indefinite reelection brings. It brings an accumulation of power and weakens democracy. There's corruption and clientelism because nepotism grows and and halts democracy and political participation, end quote.
Government lawmaker Anna Figueroa proposed shortening Bukele's current term by two years, making it end on 06/01/2027 instead of 2029 so as to synchronize presidential and congressional elections. Figueroa justified the change or the changes by arguing that eliminating the runoff will save about 50,000,000 per election. El Salvador's stance remains under international scrutiny according to the, of course, International Monetary Fund who has to weigh in on everything. Following a $1,400,000,000 loan agreement signed in December, El Salvador has halted its Bitcoin purchases. I I don't know. I don't know if that last thing is true.
The IMF has been saying that, like, forever that they've halted their Bitcoin, that El Salvador is no longer buying Bitcoin. I don't know. I I I honestly haven't seen El Salvador in the news in in in a little while. I mean, every well, I mean, the last time I reported on on El Salvador was when they were taking or or, oh, discussing with the IMF this $1,400,000,000 loan, but I I don't know if they've actually stopped buying Bitcoin or not. But then again, I have to say the following. I don't really know if they ever were buying Bitcoin as far as, like, the whole 1 Bitcoin every day or whatever it was. I saw evidence that a there was a wallet that had 1 Bitcoin being dumped into it every day, but I I don't know if that's true. I'm not there.
I'm not sitting next to Bukele or whoever his finance guy is and making the actual purchase and understanding exactly who has control of those particular keys of the wallet. So I can't say either way. However, given that it's the International Monetary Fund, I immediately call bullshit because they are nothing but scum sucking whores and liars. I oh, did that I'm sorry. Did that offend you? At one point or another, we're gonna have to start realizing that the people that are in control of this planet are batshit crazy.
They don't care about you. And I'm not even sure if they even care about themselves at this point. The debauchery that is unfolding in the ruling class of all the countries of the world is so profound, so stupendous. And then, like, all the the the left leaning guys that are listening to me are going, yeah, That Trump. And I'm like, no, man. It ain't it's all of them. It's all of them. It's it's your fave boy, Biden. It's your fave boy, Barack Obama. And if you like George w Bush, he's probably in that shit too. And it ain't just The United States, man. It's all of them. It's just nothing but corruption from poll to poll all the way around starting from Greenwich Mean Time all the way around the globe all the way back again. The whole globe is covered with people that don't give a shit about you. And judging what we're learning, they don't give a shit about themselves either because nobody would do that to their own soul.
K. Enough of that. Let's get back to this Boo Kelly thing. I just wanna say a few words here. No. This should not be happening. It it shouldn't. And here's the thing. I was actually worried. I was worried. And I and, honestly, let's say that this didn't happen. I would still be worried to this day. What happens to Bitcoin when Bukele leaps? I may not have to wait. If the IMF is actually speaking the truth, which I don't trust them, and I never will, then I don't have to wait for Bukele to leave office to have a major change in in the path of El Salvador concerning his Bitcoin policy. Because if IMF is actually correct, he's already making that policy change. He's getting on his knees and he's pleasuring the IMF for $1,400,000,000.
That is a high priced horror. I mean, $1,400,000,000, that's a pretty high priced whore. Now I'm not really calling him a whore because I don't know. I'm not there. I'm not sitting next to him. I don't know what these discussions entail. I don't know what's said. I don't know what they had for dinner when they were wooing El Salvador and begging them to take a 1,400,000,000 loan because I actually think that's what the IMF does. I don't think as many people actually go to the IMF to ask for a loan as the IMF goes to countries to give them a loan and attach all the strings that the IMF attaches to it, which basically means that they control your ass from now on.
I don't agree with this extension indefinitely of a presidential run. We had to put we in The United States, we I think was it Woodrow? Who was it? I can't wasn't Wilson. We had one was it oh, god. Who was it? This guy right before Ike, I think. I I think it was right before Eisenhower. I can't remember. Whatever. He had three terms as president. People get shocked. They're like, no. You can't. Like, no. We did not have whatever number amendment to the constitution of The United States that limited the president to only two terms. And after that, you were ineligible.
Honestly, why would you want the job for a third term? Have you seen what the being the president does to somebody in four years? Look at their hair color when they start being president versus their hair color when they stop being president. Look at the lines in their face. See the before and after shots of all the presidents of The United States and then ask yourself, do you if you were a kid that said, one of these days, I gotta be president. Do you really want to? I don't think so. You wanna be if you wanna, like, have real power, you don't wanna be the president anyway. The president's honestly just a fall guy. But we used to have it in The United States where if you kept winning elections, you could keep getting reelected.
And it was after I'm just gonna say Wilson. It was after whoever Wilson or whatever Wilson was. He had written three terms. After that, they said, no. We we really don't wanna do that. We're we're really we're we're not gonna be doing that. And we put it in place to safeguard against it. And here we have El Salvador that's actually reversing direction. They used to have it, now they don't. Now if Bukele gets elected again and again and again and again, this, Marcela Viatoro who says you don't realize what indefinite election reelection brings, she's not wrong.
And as much as I really do like Bukele, I really do like what he did for his country. I I I he's done some very questionable shit. But, I mean, the results kinda speak for themselves. And I know what you're saying. Ends don't justify the means. I I do understand that, and I keep it in the back of my head. I was looking at El Salvador before this guy, and now I'm looking at El Salvador now, and I'm seeing a lot more people smiling. I'm not saying what he's doing is right morally or ethically. I am saying that there is an effect on the people's lives in a positive manner that live in El Salvador. It was a third world shithole and it's actually getting better.
I don't know if there's anybody left that would be a, quote, unquote, drug gang member on the streets. How he got rid of him is obviously questionable, but honestly, it's not as questionable as, like, you know, if you've been in The United States, like, in the seventies, this, like, I think this 10 year old girl got abducted, raped, and then murdered. And the father was hanging out by the the public phones at the courthouse while they were leading the defendant to the courthouse, right when the guy that that assaulted his daughter and then murdered her right when he walked by, motherfucker pulled a gun and blew his brains out. Okay.
That's that's vigilantism. Would you rather have that one? I mean, I honestly don't give a shit. Just get these motherfuckers off the street is all I really care about. But going back to saying I can be president for life as long as you keep reelecting me, who do you think he's gonna put in power? People that are going to get him reelected. It is now is not going to be about as much about El Salvadoran policy for their people as much as a marketing machine for Bukele to get him reelected again and again and again and again. I don't like it. I don't think this is a good look. I think it's actually kind of embarrassing, but I have nothing at all to say about it. I don't live in El in El Salvador.
And if this is what El Salvadorans want, they have every right to pursue that. But that's just not gonna be me. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
It is 09:59AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the August 2025, and this is episode eleven thirty eight of Bitcoin and never before have we had a substrate of immutable information permanently immune to entropy. I don't think we even understand what value is, let alone Bitcoin. All things intersect in the quantum ledger. Now, that is the last part of a note written by a gentleman by the name of Jack K, also known as Jack Kluz, and that's k l u z. And this is a a a nostril note. And it's in response to to something, and I'm not gonna read any more of it because, honestly, that's one of the most based definitions of Bitcoin I've ever heard.
What what the hell does it mean? Permanently immune to entropy? Well, first of all, nothing is permanently immune to enter to entropy. Alright? At one point or another, one of two things is gonna happen. The universe is going to expand and experience heat death, which means it just keeps on going and going and suns burn out and and the the amount of of material is so widespread that gravity can't collapse something into a new star and all the stars go out, which is a really sad, sad way to look at the future of the universe. I prefer the other way to look at the universe where we get the giant or the big crunch. You've heard of the big bang.
There's a theory that maybe the universe at one point or another reaches a limit and then starts to come back and then collapses on itself and then boom, you've got another big bang. I I prefer that one. It it just seems a little bit more cheery, you know? That's what I'm talking about. But either way, eventually, even Bitcoin dies. Okay? Let's let's not be so hubristic or hubristic that we think that Bitcoin is literally going to outlive the universe. It's not. Why? Because it's part of the universe, and as the universe goes, so will Bitcoin.
However, for the short to medium to even fairly long term, never before have we had a substrate of immutable information permanently immune to entropy. I love that sentence. It means talking about the ability to keep the information, in this case, all the Bitcoin transactions, the immutable nature of money that is Bitcoin, to keep it intact, to not have it degrade over time. It's part of the way that the system works. But again, just so that we don't get off on the wrong foot, nothing survives the fate of the universe. Nothing. Not you, not me, not Bitcoin, certainly not any of the shit coins. But, Jack, that was one of the best sentences I've ever read. So congratulations, brother.
Let's see. There's some there was something else that I wanted to say about that, but you know what? Let's just get this thing going on. We're gonna start right here with Bitcoin Magazine. The first amendment, Bitcoin shall not be abridged. This is a short one from Shinobi. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of the people to peaceably assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. This is the first amendment.
This is the supreme law of the land. If this does not stand as such without first explicitly amending The United States Constitution, then the law of the land is completely and utterly illegitimate. Software is speech. Bitcoin is speech. Bitcoin shall not be abridged. Everything, literally everything about how Bitcoin works and functions is facilitating speech between people through the use of software. That is what a block is. That is what a transaction is. It's all just messages being recorded. Nodes broadcast messages. Miners receive and notarize messages to rebroadcast in collections as blocks.
Nodes verify the authenticity and ordering of these messages. They archive these messages so that they can be provided to all new nodes for download and verification. That is all Bitcoin is on a technical level. Software people use to craft messages to sign them for authenticity to broadcast them to everyone else to verify. All we are doing is passing around signed digital messages, verifying their authenticity, and then choosing to act in the real world based on the contents of those messages. Bitcoin is speech, full stop. The software we use to operate and interact with is speech, full stop. Quote, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.
I don't care what a judge in a courtroom says or what an illegal piece of legislation says or what some government stooge says or argues in the court of public opinion. I am an American citizen, and under the authority of the founding document of this country itself, I have the right to speak freely and without restraint. If I do not have that right, then the legitimacy of any system in this country that tells me what rights I do have or do not have is entirely non existent. Either way, I will continue interacting with Bitcoin however I choose to. It's time to stop pretending that politicians will give you permission to exercise your rights if you beg hard enough.
Assert your rights aggressively and take them. Whether that is outright defiance or proactively taking them to court to hold them accountable under the existing rules that they are supposed to be bound by, don't ask, take them. Rights aren't granted. They're taken and defended. Satoshi didn't ask for permission to create Bitcoin. He just did it. That's the end of that take. But it leads us right into another take again, Shinobi, Bitcoin Magazine. Bitcoin Independence Day. Is Bitcoin history being forgotten? The user activated soft fork or UASF to activate Segregated Witness in 2017 was one of the most pivotal events and in general time periods in the Bitcoin history.
There is a long, long history before the culmination or rather culmination of outright conflict that year, but 2017 was when everything boiled over. What started as long standing disagreements over technical approaches to scale Bitcoin to a larger user base culminated in a standoff between a majority of the large corporations in the space and developers and a large group of active users and market participants. This was how it played out. Regardless of the fact that there were users who supported the direction of a hard fork block size increase, the actual attempt to do so was spearheaded by massive corporations who felt that, because they were the big professional players, they decided how Bitcoin would evolve.
In response, a large grassroots web of users, developers, owners of smaller businesses in the space and even traders and market makers on large exchanges began organizing and lobbying their peers to not go along with the hard fork. It was these large corporations holding the activation of segregated witness hostage and demanding an additional hard fork block size increase in exchange and this network of users running a client that would cause a chain split while activating Segregated Witness if everyone else didn't cave and go along with the activation. That activation date was 08/01/2017.
It was a defining moment in Bitcoin's history. One that seems to have been mostly forgotten now. This year, there is almost no mention or discussion or celebration of this historic event. Has Bitcoin really grown so much that these pivotal moments in its history are just being forgotten? The lesson learned from the fading away into the past? This year, it really seems like it to me. Many people are not even aware of these events. Others who learned of them secondhand are already distorting and twisting the lessons taught. And rather than being cognizant of the lessons of past corporate behavior, many actively encourage repeating the mistakes of the past.
Rather than remembering that Bitcoin is at its strongest when it is widely distributed when people directly interact with the network itself peer to peer in large numbers and encouraging growth in that direction, people blindly cheer on growing corporate influence and control. In light of that, I'm posting a video that I recorded six years ago summarizing the deeper motivating history as well as the overall dynamics and rationale behind the UASF. I recommend watching it at at least 1.25 x speed. Happy independence day for those who still remember it. This is rather an important day. And, of course, that was three days ago, August 1.
You know why it's being forgotten? Because it was fucking trauma. That's why. And for those of you who weren't around at that time and you think, well, I don't know, man. Dave just it just sounds like maybe he's a little maybe he's being a little hyperbolic. No. I'm not. It was really bad. I mean, it was like it was literally like getting kicked in the crotch and then punched in the gut and then body slammed. Because the very people that we thought were fighting for Bitcoin were clearly just fighting for themselves. We lost a lot of trust in a lot of people, a lot of people that we really liked.
And they really, at this point, they're just in the background now. Roger Ver is one of those people. Brian Armstrong was one of those people too, but he's rich as snot and he's always in the news because he's always saying, you know, things and reaching for stuff and he's he's listed on the Nasdaq or whatever it is with Coinbase stock. It that's not the point. The point is that there was a whole group of people that signed this New York agreement. And the minute that they did that, they basically showed us who they really were. And all the time before that, we thought we really did think that they were acting in the best interest of Bitcoin.
They weren't. And it was an embarrassing and torturous path to walk to get to the other side of that thing. It's not that we're forgetting August 1 as Bitcoin's Independence Day. I think and I don't think we're actively trying to forget it. I I don't. I think that like any traumatic event in your life, you're lucky if you kind of forget about it. But Shinobi makes a good point. We should not forget about August 1. It should be like Bitcoin pizza day. It should be like the the the dropping of the white paper on October 31. It should be like January 3.
I'm just I'm just saying. He has a very, very, very good point. Because if we forget if we forget things like that, then we can't defend ourselves against things like this. And this is Kaldi. Yes, it's from x.com, but he's got a screenshot of Spotify. I want to say a few words about this. There's there's two frequently asked questions in this Spotify document that he screenshotted. One is, my age check shows I'm not old enough to use Spotify. Okay. Well, then you cannot use Spotify if you don't meet the minimum age requirements for the market you're in. If you cannot confirm you're old enough to use Spotify, your account will be deactivated and eventually deleted.
Second question. My account was deactivated. What should I do? If your account was deactivated due to an inaccurate age estimation, you can look for the email in your inbox which allows you to reactivate your account within ninety days of deactivation and then go through ID verification. If we still can't confirm that you're old enough to use Spotify or if no action is taken within seven days of reactivation, your account will be permanently deleted. Now on top of that, so we've been it's it's clear that this is going on. YouTube is about to do something with age verification. It's age verification. It's age verification all over the place. It's like it was like an age verification bomb got dropped on the world.
I mean, we've always kind of in certain cases, we've had a lot of, you know, websites where you have to verify your age. You got to do it for, you know, like a bank account, you know, you got to do it for, like, if you're gonna watch porn or something like that. There's a whole bunch of other stuff like Amazon. If you're gonna buy something, you I mean, there's there's gonna be verifications. We're used to it. But this is now pan pan social media across the entire thing, the entire ecosystem that you consider social media, all of them. Especially now this is all starting in the European Union because those guys are well, they're essentially toast, and Australia is right behind them. But it's not like it's not gonna come to everywhere else. It's it'll probably go to Canada next if they're not already doing it.
However, you might be saying, I already know about all this. Yeah. But let's add let's add something to this. Let's add this from Andrei Aropov, and this is a note from Noster. EU orders all private chats to be scanned from October 2025. Let me repeat that. European Union is ordering that all private chats, not chat g p t, you chatting with somebody on an app in private. No. They want all private chats to be scanned from October 2025. Under Denmark's EU presidency, a revised proposal mandates client side scanning of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, even before encryption locks kick in.
It's backed by 19 European countries, including France and Belgium, and it targets adoption by October 14. I would like to read that to you again, but I'm not going to because it's terrifying. Signal is in trouble. Now, Telegram and WhatsApp, we I know that I knew that shit was going to happen, but signal and if signal doesn't comply, signal's going going to be probably booted out of the European Union. And if you are a heavy signal user and you live in the European Union, what you gonna do? Right? What are you gonna do? Cali is a developer on Nostr.
He's he's got something to say about all this. He says, remember when we said we must be ready for when people need Nostr? It's happening faster than expected. Boom. That's it. That's it. I wrote a note the other day on Nostr because that is my primary that's my primary social media. I I honestly I guess I go to to Twitter every once in a while. I do post on Twitter every once in a while, but I never feel good being there. It's just a hate machine. It's a it's it's a rage generator. Right? I spend most of my time on Nostra. I have this. A I I I have almost no audience on Twitter because I don't spend any time there. But I see people that come to Nostr, and then they leave and go back to Twitter, and then they make fun of Nostr because there's just they just don't get any engagement.
Well, I'm here to tell you, most people that think they're getting engagement on Twitter aren't. The bots are rampant, and that's for a reason. And everybody keeps thinking they're gonna ask and and whine and cry loud enough that Elon Musk will do something about the bots. Dude, Elon is why the bots are propagating the way that they are. He has no intention. No intention whatsoever of throttling or somehow governing the bots. Why? Because they automatically give the dopamine hit that keeps the people addicted to Twitter. They keep thinking they're getting engagement. I will see I will open up somebody's you know, like like, Twitter thread, and they've got, like, let's say I don't know. Let let's say it's like a a a a very a modest account, and they get 200 likes on saying good morning.
Like 85% of the replies and the likes are from bots. It's disgusting. When I go when I'm on Nostr, it's all organic. I mean, yes, there's there's some bots on Nostr and there some of them are kind of annoying, but for the great guts and feathers, I post something on Nostr. I get actual real organic engagement. I have no intention of leaving Nostr. And all the people that are saying all the time, oh my god. This is this thing is terrible, it is never going to compete. I honestly don't give a shit because this thing is alive. Nostra is alive. You're not just gonna shut it off. Right? And for all the people that think it sucks, you're about to get hosed.
And if you're not claiming your name space on Nasr, and I mean doing it right now, you are really, really in a dangerous area. That most of the people in the EU won't be able to functionally use signal, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. If it even breathes a breath of social media and the ability to communicate somewhat peer to peer, even though these are all centralized behemoths. Right? The where do you turn? Well, you gotta go to Noster. Okay. We'll go to Mastodon. What? So that the particular server that you're on, you can get booted off by because you said something that the server master doesn't like. I don't care that Macedon and the Fediverse is made up by several 100 or if not, you know, a a couple of thousand different servers, maybe even more than that.
If I'm on one server, the other servers don't really know who my identity is. I gotta go re register out on another server with hold I gotta rebuild my profile if I get booted off of one server if I get booted off of what is like the the no agenda show for like let's say I I pissed John seed of work off or something like that and he just shit cans my account, which they can, because that's what the server master can do, then I gotta go I won't be able to interact with that server and that's what when I'm logged into Mastodon it's like that's one of the that's the thing that I use. That's how I'm getting into Mastodon.
Now I got to go somewhere else. Come on, man. Give me a break. It's time to actually start taking Nostra seriously. I mean, seriously. It's it's it's within you. You know, you're the one that makes the decision as to whether or not you're going to try something. And you've got a whole bunch of people in your ear basically telling you that Nostra sucks and you'll never get the engagement. And that's reinforced when you go say good morning on Twitter and 57,000 bots start replying to you and it makes you think you're being engaged with. You're not. It's fake engagement, and it's going to remain fake engagement.
He is Elon is never going to shut that down. It's an automatic it's like an automated drug dealer, and he works for free, and he brings his own drugs along with him. Why the fuck would you fire that guy? You don't. He's not gonna be fired. And with the amount of crap that we're seeing going on in the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, it's gonna come to Canada, and it's gonna start infiltrating into The United States. They're gonna want your picture of your driver's license every time that you make a tweet. Well, not every time you make a tweet, but you understand what I'm saying.
It is time to leave the walled gardens and and legacy infrastructure not only behind, but to run so far away from it that by the time you catch a breath and turn around you can't even see it anymore. The only way out of this is Noster. It's not FEDIMENT. It's not Blue Sky. It's not Twitter. It's not kowtowing and and and giving every single one of these platforms your identity. It's none of their business. Now speaking of business, Circle p is open for business. Circle p is where I bring plebs that have goods and services for sale to other plebs like you who might actually want to buy huddle butter from 0shig00d.us/products.
Go check it out because Huddle butter is made from it's well, it's like peanut butter except it's made with pecans. It's glorious. He's got some in stock. He made a batch, and the products are as such. Pecans, maple sugar, sea salt flakes, cinnamon, and black pepper. It's simple and borders on the edge of savory. I've seen people smother this stuff over their steaks. Yeah. Yeah. Over their steaks. They love it. They love it. Now the product that I have had, I have not had this with Huddle butter yet, is one of his Oshi bars. Now check out this banana chocolate chip Huddle bar. It has dates, the aforementioned Huddle butter, dark chocolate chips, banana powder, peanut flour, cacao powder, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and sea salt. And by the way, he sells it all for Satoshis. Because if you're not selling your goods and services for Satoshis, you're not in the circle p. No. You are not.
Please do me a favor. Go to oshigood.us. Just buy something. Support a pleb. He's a pleb just like you. Right? And when you support him, Oshi can support me because if you buy from him and use the code Bitcoin and you won't get a discount, but you will be telling Oshii who made the sale for him, then Oshii can determine what that sale was worth, and he will get me in satoshis on the other side. That's the way that the circle p works. Go to 0shig00d.us. Now out of The US, we go to France. France with the Frenchy frogs. France's Ras Emboldment National Party backs Bitcoin mining with nuclear energy.
Ezra Raguera has got this one from Cointelegraph. Rassemblement, it's a weird word, Rassemblement National or RN is a French political party and is reportedly pushing to mine Bitcoin using surplus energy from nuclear power plants signaling a shift from its leader's previous anti crypto stance. French newspaper outlet, Le Monde, reported last week that RN leader and three time presidential candidate, you guessed it, Marine Le Pen, now backs using idle nuclear energy for Bitcoin mining. She reportedly promoted the plan during a visit to the Flamanville nuclear plant on March 11. The party said the initiative will turn wasted electricity into secure and extremely profitable digital assets.
According to LeMond, RN lawmaker Ariel Lopez Liguori has spearheaded the proposal in the French parliament drafting a bill to install mining infrastructure at sites operated by the energy giant, Electricite de France. France. Well, the shift reflects broader momentum within the political party to embrace Bitcoin as a tool for economic sovereignty. Lopez Liguri said that the party wants to use every bit of energy produced to eliminate waste. Cointelegraph reached out. I haven't had a word back yet. But the pro crypto position marks a major reversal from our end stance in 2016 when Le Pen called for a ban on cryptocurrency, well, the whole of cryptocurrencies in France. In a press release at the time, Le Pen said that the more money is dematerialized and digitized, the more people will lose ownership of their money. She described making cash disappear in favor of digital currencies as an alienation of man to benefit the global banking system.
You're so close, Le Pen. Le Pen said currency is a national good entrusted to the people, and because of this, she promised to prevent the use of cryptocurrency in France. Within the party, ideologies contradicting Bitcoin's ethos of decentralization persist. RN finance lead, Juan Philippe Tangay, said that the party should not embrace currency independence and reaffirm its belief in centralized monetary policy. Oh, wow. This sounds like you got a mole, man. Sounds like somebody placed a mole among you. Anyway, despite the ideological rift, the right wing RN remains France's most active political force in advancing crypto legislation, while left leaning parties continue to focus on the environmental impact of mining and its association with illicit finance.
RN has attracted crypto lobbyists and entrepreneurs who see the party as pro business according to Le Monde. An interesting flip. Now here's the thing. Le Pen actually had the right idea. She was just ignorant as to how Bitcoin works because all I guarantee the only thing she was being fed was this garbage about CBDCs and how they work. And it horrifies me, it horrifies you, and it horrified her, but somebody got into her ear. And thank God that they did. Let's run the numbers. Good mercy. West Texas Intermediate Oil is down one and a half points to $66.33 a barrel. Brent Norsee is down one and a quarter to $68.82.
Natural gas plummeting 5.68% under $3 down to $2.90 per thousand cubic feet. And gasoline is down almost a full point to just over $2 a gallon. Gold is up, well, three quarters of a point to $34.26. Woo hoo for Peter Schiff. Silver is also up a row of sticks to $37.34 an ounce. Platinum is up 2.17%. Copper is up point one eight. Palladium is losing ground. It is 1% to the downside. Meanwhile, most of ag is in the green today. Biggest winner is coffee. Two points to the upside. Biggest loser is lumber, one and a half to the downside. Meanwhile, live cattle is down a quarter of a point. Lean hogs are up point 86%, and feeder cattle are down a half. And it looks to me like, wow, the legacy markets, man, your equities, they're all in the green. And by a wide margin because the Dow is up one and a third percent to $44.02 79.
S and P is up one and a third. Nasdaq is up 1.7%, and the S and P Mini is ripping to the upside. 1.12% in the green, baby. A 115,520. That is a $2,300,000,000,000 market cap. That's trillion with a t, by the way. And we can only get 34.1 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,901,638.32 of an average fees per block have been extraordinarily low. You thought I was gonna say high, didn't you? 2 Satoshis per vbyte is gonna get the 31,818 unconfirmed transactions into the blockchain. 1 Satoshis per vbyte is going to also get you in, but at a slower rate.
900 exahashes per second. So we are recovering again from a slight dip in hash rate. Then, well, that's that's it for that's it for the mining stuff. Now from president for life, I got user 11556842 with a thousand SAT says, it is what it is, calling late cycle behavior blasphemy. Accurate? Psyduck with 738 says nothing. No. Actually, he does say Psyduck. 500 from progressively worse says thank you, no thank you. Turkey says nothing, 5 100. God's death 2 '37 says thank you sir, no thank you. And bit BTC on board with a 100, and I can't read the, I can't read the the emojis because my operating system is, yes, it's that old. Give me a break. Pieds with a 100 says, thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news that you can use. Dude, Satoshi Nakamoto disappeared not once, but twice. Yep. The statue in Lugano was vandalized. It was stolen. It was taken away. But it's been recovered from Lake Lugano after the vandalism. So sad. I just, I guess somebody well, we'll save it. Vismaya v is writing this one from decrypt. Municipal workers in Lugano, Switzerland retrieved the pieces of the city's famous Satoshi Nakamoto statue from Lake Lugano on Monday after Bitcoin's most recognizable public monument was stolen and then vandalized over the weekend.
The optical illusion artwork, which appears to fade into digital code when viewed from certain angles, was discovered on Monday, broken into several pieces both in the lake and along its banks. And the statue had been ripped from its mounting points in Parco Ciani, a popular lakefront park park by unknown vandals who then threw the remnants into the water. Created by Italian artist and Bitcoin advocate, Valentina Piccozzi, the statue has become a symbol of Bitcoin's decentralized philosophy and the mystery surrounding its pseudonymous creator.
Picozzi, who has been working as an activist artist since discovering Bitcoin in 2012, operates under Satoshi Gallery, a copyrighted artistic project aimed at connecting people to Bitcoin culture through art and iconography. The The theft was first reported Saturday by social media users who noticed the empty base where the faceless figure once sat. Satoshi Gallery immediately offered a reward of 0.1 BTC for information leading to the statue's recovery. Quote, you can steal our symbol, but you will never be able to steal our souls, Satoshi Gallery said in their response to the vandalism, declaring their commitment to install similar statues in 21 locations worldwide.
This is the Streisand effect. It didn't really do what I guess the vandals thought it was gonna do. Who who knows? There could I could go tinfoil hat on this shit all day long. But first, some observers, including pseudonymous Bitcoin advocate, Goritto, theorized that intoxicated revelers celebrating Swiss National Day may have been responsible. A change.org petition urges city officials to restore the statue with organizing organizers pledging to cover the cost. The statue crafted from three zero four stainless steel in court and blocks was unveiled in October 2024 during the plan b forum, a blockchain conference hosted by Lugano and stablecoin issuer, Tether.
The artwork took twenty one months to plan and construct according to Pecosse. The Lugano installation is part of the growing global movement to create physical tributes to Bitcoin and its mysterious founder. Other notable monuments also include a mirrored face bust in Budapest Graphisoft Park, where viewers see themselves reflected as Satoshi. Okay. So, yes, it's the statue itself, the recovered pieces is there's just I mean, it's it's there, but it's like it's like literally in, like, three different pieces. And if you count the, two feet or parts of the feet left behind on the pedestal, this thing's been broken into five pieces, and it's been it's been mutilated.
There's not there's no repairing this particular statue. They're just he's literate or the artist, I don't know if it's a he or she, is literally going to have to rebuild the thing from scratch. I I conjectured that maybe somebody got liquidated because, you know, get it. They found it in the in the lake, water liquid. So I got liquidate, whatever. There's no reason for this kind of vandalism. There's no reason for any vandalism. It's not worth your time. Plus, by the way, from what we understand, there is a camera and the Satoshi statue is in the field of that particular camera. We'll see if somebody's face shows up. And if they do, I honestly, they really need to yeah, okay. I I don't I don't wanna say lose their freedom forever, but they should be at least made to do some work to restore the statue, you know, like, whatever.
Let's move on to Alpen Public Testnet, a l p e n, Alpen as in, like, Alpen slopes, whatever. But they're offering a peek at Bitcoin's own financial system. Hold hold the jeers until I'm done reading the article. New York and New York, 08/04/2025, Bitcoin's market cap sits well above 2,000,000,000,000. But its participation in finance remains limited to opaque centralized services that require owners to give up custody. Alpin's public testnet is now live, a major step toward bringing Bitcoin's own financial system online. This milestone brings major financial apps like trading, borrowing, earnings, stablecoins, and more.
Just one step closer to Bitcoin. Quote, Bitcoin is not just for holding anymore, said Samantha Gautam, CEO and cofounder of Alpin Labs, Alpin is enabling Bitcoin holders to securely participate in Bitcoin finance in all the ways that they've wanted without the middlemen. We're bringing together some of the best teams in the space to create a vibrant financial ecosystem for BTC, end quote. The Alpin test hold on. I know. You're probably going, stop it. Stop it. Just chill. Let me finish. The ALPEN test net allows developers to experiment, build, and test BTC applications that were once confined to centralized exchanges, custodians, or wrapped tokens outside of Bitcoin.
Products such as the Bitcoin dollar will demonstrate what's possible on a Bitcoin secure financial system. The Bitcoin dollar or BTD being developed in partnership with the Liquidity team is a BTC backed dollar stablecoin. Yay. Another one. That also enables holders to borrow against their Bitcoin, which I do not recommend. This is an aside. I don't recommend that. But Alpin is the distillation of years of research by the AlpinLab team into secure programmability on Bitcoin. Alpin's EVM compatibility enables crypto's largest developer base to use familiar tools to build a financial ecosystem on Bitcoin.
Alpin's z k roll up architecture enables faster, lower cost transactions while inheriting Bitcoin's unmatched security quote. I believe this represents one of the most important breakthroughs in blockchain history. There's the catchphrase. That's what I was waiting for. Uniting Bitcoin's unmatched security with the programmability we've waited fifteen years for, said Nick car oh god. Nick Carter, partner at Castle Island Ventures, and he added, quote, Alpin is a game changer for Bitcoin, and we're proud to back a team that's pushing the ecosystem to new heights, end quote. Founded in 2022 by four MIT alumni and backed by Ribbit Capital Ribbit Capital, Stillmark doing business as cyber fund along with individuals like Wences Sisares and Ben Davenport, Alpin Labs is reshaping Bitcoin's ecosystem into one where many more users can securely participate in finance.
This testnet paves the way for an upcoming mainnet launch that seeks to redefine Bitcoin's future. Are you ready to explore? Well, check it out at alpinlabs.io and read the launch post. No. I I don't think that I will. Everything about this feels bad. Alright? But it's nothing that can be stopped. Right? Because if I could stop it, then Bitcoin fails. And I would rather see Nick Carter and his little band of merry men try to build finance on Bitcoin for whatever the fuck reason we need that shit. We already have finance on Bitcoin. It's called, like, I don't know every other company that's out there. I don't know what's being redefined. It sounds like a bunch of hooey to me, but watch it because it could be one of those danger signals. And when somebody like Nick Carter says the word blockchain, it just makes my skin crawl. Let's move on to Bernstein.
He says, the SEC's project crypto could rewrite the rules of Wall Street James Hunt writing for the block in a sweeping endorsement of regulatory reform under the more crypto friendly Securities and Exchange Commission now led by Paul Atkins, analyst at research and brokerage firm Bernstein said that the agency's new project crypto initiative marks the boldest and the most transformative crypto vision ever laid out by a sitting SEC chair, one that could reignite domestic innovation and turn The United States into the global epicenter of blockchain finance.
Woo. Blockchain. Oh, for god's sakes, these people. Announced in a landmark speech on Thursday titled American Leadership in the Digital Financial Revolution, colon, Evolution of Capital Markets from Buttonwood to Blockchain. That is a horrible title. It's too long. Stop it. Anyway, Atkins' project crypto seeks to modernize US securities regulation for the digital age continuing the Trump administration's mission to make America the crypto capital of the world. Bernstein analyst led by Gautam Shungani explained in a Monday note to clients, drawing hysteric hysterical, although it might be, drawing historical parallels from the 1792 stockbrokers agreement beneath the buttonwood tree, which laid the groundwork for the NYSE, to the creation of the modern clearing system in the nineteen sixties and the electronic trading reforms of the nineteen eighties, Atkins argued that American financial regulation must evolve or risk being left behind.
The analyst suggested that the dropped SEC case against Coinbase marked a regulatory shift from analog rigidity to digital pragmatism, with Atkins insisting that The US framework need not be anchored to a past unkind to new frontiers. Quote, the future is arriving at full speed, and the world is not waiting. America must do more than just keep pace with the digital asset revolution. We must drive it, end quote, Atkins said in the speech. That suitspeak dude says nothing means nothing. Outlining some of the most impactful aspects of project crypto in their view, the Bernstein analyst said that the initiative will bring crypto innovation back to The US by easing outdated regulations that previously drove firms offshore and stifled entrepreneurship.
And contrary to the SEC's position under prior chair Gary Gensler, Atkins said, most crypto assets aren't securities and confusion over the Howey test has hindered US capital formation. The SEC now plans to offer clearer rules to classify crypto assets into categories such as digital commodities, stablecoins, and digital collectibles. The initiative would also support the creation of tokenized securities under US jurisdiction with strong interest already emerging from major Wall Street and tech firms, the analyst said, removing the need for offshore workarounds. This project crypto thing just seems like a distraction or like a head fake.
I I need to see actual real things done, not suit speak. But a lot of people are are literally looking at project crypto like it's some kinda is gonna be like the end all be all. Like, oh my god. The SEC is all in on on Bitcoin. I don't know. I doubt it. I honestly doubt it. I think they're just playing along and they're they've got some nice catchy phrases there. But in the end ladies and gentlemen it's all just suit speak. Until you come to this one, this is not bullshit. How I never saw this and now how nobody else ever saw this is beyond my comprehension. This is it's not exciting. It's really sad, but the fact that it was hidden for so long is really kind of bizarre. Atlas 21, 127,500 stolen from Chinese mining pool Lubian in 2020 uncovered.
What? Blockchain analytics firm, Arkham Intelligence, has uncovered one of the largest Bitcoin thefts in the history of Bitcoin. The cyber attack carried out in December 2020 against the Chinese mining pool, Lubayan, resulted in the theft of a 127,500 BTC worth approximately $14,500,000,000 at current prices. The theft positions the unknown attacker as the thirteenth largest Bitcoin holder according to Arkham's ratings or rankings. And at the time of the theft in December 2020, the stolen Bitcoin was worth around $3,500,000,000. Lubian or Lubian, the mining company, which at the time ranked among the world's top 10 mining pools controlling 66% of the hash rate suffered the attack without ever disclosing it publicly The mining firm eventually ceased operations in early two thousand twenty one So how did this happen?
According to Arcum Intelligence's analysis, the theft was made possible by a vulnerability in the generation of private keys which proved susceptible to brute force attacks. The hacker managed to steal over 90% of Lubyin's holdings during the initial attack in December 2020. And later that same month, a second attack resulted in the theft of an additional $6,000,000 worth of Bitcoin and USDT, Tether's stablecoin, from a Lubian address active on the Bitcoin omnilayer. In response, Lubian transferred the remaining funds to a recovery wallet at the December. In a desperate effort to recover the stolen funds, Lubian sent over 1,500 very small transactions totaling 1.4 Bitcoin and each of those transactions contained a message pleading with the hacker to return the stolen Bitcoin.
However, these appeals went unanswered, and the theft was never reimbursed. Currently, Lubian still holds 11,886 Bitcoin from its original holdings worth around $1,350,000,000. And meanwhile, the hacker continues to control the stolen Bitcoin with the last movement recorded in July 2024 during a wallet consolidation. Holy shit. Thirteenth largest Bitcoin holder was created from a theft that was never publicly disclosed of, what was it, a 127,500 Bitcoin. They tried to recover. They begged. They pleaded. No dice, and they folded within a year.
Oh, man. It's just a really sad story. But there's a silver lining. A silver lining here. They still have, what, 11,886 Bitcoin. You know what they should do? Start a Bitcoin Treasury company. Now, on to El Salvador where the dictator in chief yeah, I know. Look. I like Bukele, but this is bullshit. And anybody who thinks that what I'm about to tell you isn't bullshit, it's bullshit. Okay? This is also Atlas 21, and it is the last story of the day. In El Salvador, constitutional reforms have been approved for unlimited presidential reelection.
Sounds like a president for life to me. According to the Associated Press, El Salvador's parliament has approved constitutional amendments enabling unlimited presidential reelection paving the way for president Nayib Bukele to remain in power without time restrictions. The decision, passed with 57 votes in favor of and only three against by Bukele's Nuevas Ideas party and its allies, marks a turning point in the political history of the Central American country. The package of five reforms reshapes El Salvador's institutional framework.
The presidential team is extended from or term, the presidential term is extended from five years. It is now six years, and the electoral runoff is now abolished. The political opposition has condemned, did you think, has condemned these reforms as the end of democracy in the country. Deputy Marcela Villa Villatoro from the Nationalist Republican Alliance Party voiced strong concerns, quote, you don't realize what indefinite reelection brings. It brings an accumulation of power and weakens democracy. There's corruption and clientelism because nepotism grows and and halts democracy and political participation, end quote.
Government lawmaker Anna Figueroa proposed shortening Bukele's current term by two years, making it end on 06/01/2027 instead of 2029 so as to synchronize presidential and congressional elections. Figueroa justified the change or the changes by arguing that eliminating the runoff will save about 50,000,000 per election. El Salvador's stance remains under international scrutiny according to the, of course, International Monetary Fund who has to weigh in on everything. Following a $1,400,000,000 loan agreement signed in December, El Salvador has halted its Bitcoin purchases. I I don't know. I don't know if that last thing is true.
The IMF has been saying that, like, forever that they've halted their Bitcoin, that El Salvador is no longer buying Bitcoin. I don't know. I I I honestly haven't seen El Salvador in the news in in in a little while. I mean, every well, I mean, the last time I reported on on El Salvador was when they were taking or or, oh, discussing with the IMF this $1,400,000,000 loan, but I I don't know if they've actually stopped buying Bitcoin or not. But then again, I have to say the following. I don't really know if they ever were buying Bitcoin as far as, like, the whole 1 Bitcoin every day or whatever it was. I saw evidence that a there was a wallet that had 1 Bitcoin being dumped into it every day, but I I don't know if that's true. I'm not there.
I'm not sitting next to Bukele or whoever his finance guy is and making the actual purchase and understanding exactly who has control of those particular keys of the wallet. So I can't say either way. However, given that it's the International Monetary Fund, I immediately call bullshit because they are nothing but scum sucking whores and liars. I oh, did that I'm sorry. Did that offend you? At one point or another, we're gonna have to start realizing that the people that are in control of this planet are batshit crazy.
They don't care about you. And I'm not even sure if they even care about themselves at this point. The debauchery that is unfolding in the ruling class of all the countries of the world is so profound, so stupendous. And then, like, all the the the left leaning guys that are listening to me are going, yeah, That Trump. And I'm like, no, man. It ain't it's all of them. It's all of them. It's it's your fave boy, Biden. It's your fave boy, Barack Obama. And if you like George w Bush, he's probably in that shit too. And it ain't just The United States, man. It's all of them. It's just nothing but corruption from poll to poll all the way around starting from Greenwich Mean Time all the way around the globe all the way back again. The whole globe is covered with people that don't give a shit about you. And judging what we're learning, they don't give a shit about themselves either because nobody would do that to their own soul.
K. Enough of that. Let's get back to this Boo Kelly thing. I just wanna say a few words here. No. This should not be happening. It it shouldn't. And here's the thing. I was actually worried. I was worried. And I and, honestly, let's say that this didn't happen. I would still be worried to this day. What happens to Bitcoin when Bukele leaps? I may not have to wait. If the IMF is actually speaking the truth, which I don't trust them, and I never will, then I don't have to wait for Bukele to leave office to have a major change in in the path of El Salvador concerning his Bitcoin policy. Because if IMF is actually correct, he's already making that policy change. He's getting on his knees and he's pleasuring the IMF for $1,400,000,000.
That is a high priced horror. I mean, $1,400,000,000, that's a pretty high priced whore. Now I'm not really calling him a whore because I don't know. I'm not there. I'm not sitting next to him. I don't know what these discussions entail. I don't know what's said. I don't know what they had for dinner when they were wooing El Salvador and begging them to take a 1,400,000,000 loan because I actually think that's what the IMF does. I don't think as many people actually go to the IMF to ask for a loan as the IMF goes to countries to give them a loan and attach all the strings that the IMF attaches to it, which basically means that they control your ass from now on.
I don't agree with this extension indefinitely of a presidential run. We had to put we in The United States, we I think was it Woodrow? Who was it? I can't wasn't Wilson. We had one was it oh, god. Who was it? This guy right before Ike, I think. I I think it was right before Eisenhower. I can't remember. Whatever. He had three terms as president. People get shocked. They're like, no. You can't. Like, no. We did not have whatever number amendment to the constitution of The United States that limited the president to only two terms. And after that, you were ineligible.
Honestly, why would you want the job for a third term? Have you seen what the being the president does to somebody in four years? Look at their hair color when they start being president versus their hair color when they stop being president. Look at the lines in their face. See the before and after shots of all the presidents of The United States and then ask yourself, do you if you were a kid that said, one of these days, I gotta be president. Do you really want to? I don't think so. You wanna be if you wanna, like, have real power, you don't wanna be the president anyway. The president's honestly just a fall guy. But we used to have it in The United States where if you kept winning elections, you could keep getting reelected.
And it was after I'm just gonna say Wilson. It was after whoever Wilson or whatever Wilson was. He had written three terms. After that, they said, no. We we really don't wanna do that. We're we're really we're we're not gonna be doing that. And we put it in place to safeguard against it. And here we have El Salvador that's actually reversing direction. They used to have it, now they don't. Now if Bukele gets elected again and again and again and again, this, Marcela Viatoro who says you don't realize what indefinite election reelection brings, she's not wrong.
And as much as I really do like Bukele, I really do like what he did for his country. I I I he's done some very questionable shit. But, I mean, the results kinda speak for themselves. And I know what you're saying. Ends don't justify the means. I I do understand that, and I keep it in the back of my head. I was looking at El Salvador before this guy, and now I'm looking at El Salvador now, and I'm seeing a lot more people smiling. I'm not saying what he's doing is right morally or ethically. I am saying that there is an effect on the people's lives in a positive manner that live in El Salvador. It was a third world shithole and it's actually getting better.
I don't know if there's anybody left that would be a, quote, unquote, drug gang member on the streets. How he got rid of him is obviously questionable, but honestly, it's not as questionable as, like, you know, if you've been in The United States, like, in the seventies, this, like, I think this 10 year old girl got abducted, raped, and then murdered. And the father was hanging out by the the public phones at the courthouse while they were leading the defendant to the courthouse, right when the guy that that assaulted his daughter and then murdered her right when he walked by, motherfucker pulled a gun and blew his brains out. Okay.
That's that's vigilantism. Would you rather have that one? I mean, I honestly don't give a shit. Just get these motherfuckers off the street is all I really care about. But going back to saying I can be president for life as long as you keep reelecting me, who do you think he's gonna put in power? People that are going to get him reelected. It is now is not going to be about as much about El Salvadoran policy for their people as much as a marketing machine for Bukele to get him reelected again and again and again and again. I don't like it. I don't think this is a good look. I think it's actually kind of embarrassing, but I have nothing at all to say about it. I don't live in El in El Salvador.
And if this is what El Salvadorans want, they have every right to pursue that. But that's just not gonna be me. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin, and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Introduction and Philosophical Musings on Bitcoin
Nostr and the Future of Social Media
