Topics for today:
- Dems Mad at Trump's CZ Pardon
- Fedi Unleashes Multi-Sig "Guardians"
- AI Backlash Mirrors DotCom Bubble
- LN For AI
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Today's Articles:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/senate-democrats-demand-answers-on-trump-cz-pardonhttps://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/from-stealth-to-scale-fedi-unveils-multi-sig-guardians-for-federated-bitcoin-e-cash-mints
https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1983218676967817406
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/10/29/terawulf-dips-5-on-usd500m-capital-raise-to-fund-ai-data-center-expansion
https://decrypt.co/346554/microsoft-135-billion-stake-openai-legal-pressure
https://lightning.news/a-lightning-network-for-ai/
https://decrypt.co/346170/ai-backlash-sophisticated-users-getting-sick-techs-latest-obsession
https://atlas21.com/canaan-launches-avalon-a16-miner-series-with-12-8-j-th-efficiency/
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It is 12:29PM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the October 2025, and this is episode 1,200 of Bitcoin. And I can't believe I made it to twelve hundred. Whoop dee doo. But we're not here to celebrate me. We're here to celebrate you and all the news that you can use and more about Bitcoin and the rest of the crap that's going on around the world. We're gonna talk about a demand made by the senate Democrats about Trump's pardon of c z's. This is gonna be fun, man. This is gonna be great. Feddy has unveiled multisig guardians. You know, we're talking about Fediment. Right? So multisig guardians have been unveiled. We'll we'll see what they do.
And then, well, we've got some more NVIDIA circle jerk, you know, rafts of money floating around, and it seems to be all the same money. This time, we've got a new entrant into all of that. Oh, my god. Hold on for a sec. Sorry about that. One of my web pages decided to go, to hey. You've got to sign up. And I'm like, no. I've already signed up. So I had to sign in again. I don't know, man. This is something the web is so broke. This is where, you know, nostr nostr I'm just gonna say nostr. Let's get back into it. Tera Wolf will also be in the news. And then we're gonna head over and Microsoft.
Yeah. Microsoft and OpenAI. Again, yes. It's like it's this monetary circle jerk that's going on in the artificial intelligence and, what do they call them? FAANG? The FAANG companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook. I mean, it is it is incestuous the way this money is being treated. It's it's oh, god. It we'll get all into it. Then the lightning network for AI, maybe there will be a beam of light at the end of that particular tunnel. And then we're yes. We're gonna stay with the whole AI thing, because there's some backlash. I can't imagine why.
But it's good at this point where we are in all this to understand that, yes, there are enough people that are saying, we've we're done. We've had enough. This is and that usually, for me, that usually is your first big clue that the fad is over. So I'm I'm actually expecting some fairly serious crashes in the AI space, and then and you might say, well, that means it's going away. We don't have to deal with it anymore. Yeah. You'd be wrong. That's that's that's not the way this works. When the dot com bubble blew in February 2001, did, did it go away?
No. No. It didn't. There everybody everybody uses the web. So AI stays with us, but the people that are backing this first the these first adopters, especially these incestuous monetary weirdos, they're they're gonna take it on the chin. Believe me. But first, senate Democrats demand answers on Trump's pardon of Binance's c z, Adrian Zmunksy from Cointelegraph, takes us away, Democratic Party senators have requested The US attorney general Pam Bondi and the US Department of Justice provide additional information regarding the pardon of Binance cofounder, Changpeng Zhao, by Donald Trump. In an open letter on Tuesday, seven Democratic senators wrote that the pardon, quote, signals to cryptocurrency executives and other white collar criminals that they can commit crime with impunity, end quote. The lawmakers accuse Trump of encouraging criminal activity so long as they enrich him, end quote.
The letter follows similar criticisms from US representative Maxine Waters, the top democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, earlier this week who said that, quote, Trump is doing massive favors for crypto criminals who have helped line his pockets, end quote. The signatories include, of course, your favorite, Elizabeth Warren, and then Chris Van Hollen. Bur Bernie Sanders is in there. Maisie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Jack Reed, and Jeffrey Merkley. And they wrote that, quote, this pardon will make it harder for federal law enforcement to fight and deter crime, end quote.
In the letter, the senators highlight several alleged ties between Zhao, Trump, and Binance. First, Trump's family launched their decentralized finance platform, World Liberty Financial, last year, which has been linked to Binance's operations. The launch was followed by accusations that Zhao facilitated introductions and meetings for WLF leaders, which CZ denied in late May. And then other reports suggest Binance played a role in developing the code behind USD 1, which is the stable coin issued by World Liberty What is what's called, World Liberty Financial. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Quote, after mister Zhao's company provided president Trump and his family with a revenue stream worth millions of dollars, president Trump then pardoned him for criminal activity that he admitted to conducting, end quote. Oh. Reports from earlier this month also claimed that Zao's pardon followed a lobbying push by Binance, which included half a million dollars to Trump linked lobbyists and over a quarter million to former Securities and Exchange Commission chair candidate and lawyer for c z, Teresa Goody Gulian. The senators argued that Trump's pardon could publicly and flagrantly undermine the work of federal law enforcement and send a message to cryptocurrency executives and other white, collar corporate criminals that the law doesn't matter, end quote.
They then asked that the Department of Justice and Pam Bondi explain the expected effect of the pardon on people and companies involved in crime, especially in the crypto industry. They also requested clarification on whether Trump's alleged financial ties to c z influenced his decision to issue the pardon. Trump pardoned c z last week saying people told him, quote, what he did was not even a crime, end quote. Hey, man. I'm the president. Some people told me that this guy's okay. So I said, fuck it. And I cut his ass to the old pardon.
Sal had plead guilty in 2024 to violating the US Bank Secrecy Act by failing to maintain an effective anti money laundering program at Binance. So the the general accusation that's being made here reminds me very much of BIP four four four. I know it's the the it it's gonna be a little weird, but the these senators that are saying and, again, Trump's got his he's got more thumbs and more pies than you can possibly imagine, and ain't all of them clean. Let's be very clear about that shit. I've made several several accusations on this show that Trump is indeed, at this point, in some serious ethical dilemmas.
The the the World Liberty Foundation or whatever, World Liberty Financial is just one. Alright? Trump Coin and Melania Coin, that's a that's another one all by itself, even though that's part of World Liberty Financial. All of this is is very problematic for Trump. But to assert, like these senators are asserting, that the FBI and the Department of Justice won't be able to actually prosecute crime anymore because of it is ludicrous. They can still do exactly what they're doing without any interruptions whatsoever. And they and they prosecute hundreds of people a year, probably thousands.
And most of them, they end up in jail, stay that way. Alright? So I'm I'm looking at that statement that because Trump pardoned c z, that now all white collar corporate criminals are gonna have a free pass by the FBI and DOJ as pure hyperbolic. It's just hyperbolic. It's ridiculous. It is a ridiculous claim. Again, orange man's got his pies in a bun or his thumbs in a bunch of pies and ain't all of them clean. But that statement is freaking ludicrous. It's just as bad as Luke Dasher and the rest of the BIP four four four crew saying, if you don't use our fork, you're going to be arrested by the FBI because they're going to find CSAM on your node's hard drive.
It's utter nonsense. And the noise everywhere, political on in Washington DC, these these politics being played at, between knots and and Bitcoin Core. It's just the noise is so thick, you can't get any signal out of it. I highly recommend that you stop giving any weight whatsoever to these hyperbolic statements and anything that looks like them. Now let's go from stealth to scale. FETI unveils multisig guardians for Federated Bit Bitcoin eCash Mints, Juan Gault Bitcoin Magazine. FETI, the Bitcoin company building on top of the open source Fedimint protocol, a privacy centric Bitcoin payments method using Chaumian eCash, is emerging from a period of quiet development to announce new groundbreaking features set for release today.
This new capability within the Fetti app aims to make the creation of multi signature e cash mints easy, private, and secure for communities worldwide with just a few clicks aligning with Cypherpunk principles of decentralization and user sovereignty. Built into their increasingly popular Android and iOS apps, this new release allows users to easily create a new Fedimint federation with the help of g bot, a friendly chatbot interface. Mint founders need to pay a basic service fee, add some basic information within minutes for the mint, and wait just a few hours.
The GBOT then finds trusted anonymous guardians to help form the users' mint federation. This process decentralizes the custody of the mint's Bitcoin reserves needed to operate an eCash Mint. It's required, in fact. It also helps prevent collusion as Mint operators are anonymous from each other and would need to reveal themselves publicly to be able to find other key holders to collude. This Fediment protocol is fundamentally built on privacy, a cornerstone of Bitcoin in the cypherpunk movement. Quote, the first line of the cypherpunk manifesto itself is that privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
It's not nice to have. It's not convenient. It is necessary, end quote, Obinuosu, CEO of Fedi, told Bitcoin magazine in an exclusive interview. He added a cautionary warning about the future, which the world would be wise to avoid. Quote, Bitcoin without privacy is our worst nightmare. It's $19.84 coin. It's the Panopticon, end quote. Founded in 2022, Feddy has been quietly quietly working to deliver the promises of digital private cash to the world based on one of the most promising technologies designed for that purpose, David Chaum's 1980 2 Chomian eCash.
This form of digital money almost made it into every copy of Windows 1995. Proof of its scalability and efficiency, but ironically failed due to its centralization as Cham and Gates reportedly could not reach a final agreement on the deal. Fast forward thirty years and the Bitcoin community has taken on the challenge of bringing private digital cash to the world, leveraging new possibilities unlocked by the Bitcoin network, which may solve the fundamental trade off of Chaumny and eCash. The need to trust one single counterparty meant that issues and redeems the eCash bills for the underlying currency.
It's interesting to note that Bitcoin was designed as a solution to the fundamental trade offs of eCash. While eCash relies on a trusted server to approve transactions that are properly funded, it can do so without knowing any personal user information since the system is fundamentally built on cryptography and not that on identity. It nevertheless requires a trusted server, which can in theory emit more e cash bills than it has reserves for, a form of a double spending problem Satoshi Nakamoto sought to address in his Bitcoin white paper. Centralized e cash mints can also be more easily harassed by hostile governments as the pre Bitcoin history of digital cash shows.
Bitcoin decentralization or Bitcoin decentralized the Mint by distributing the account process that the Mint does with the invention of the Bitcoin node. Anyone that runs a node has a copy of all Bitcoin transactions and can independently verify the accounting integrity of the system, thus solving the double spending problem. The downside of Bitcoin's approach is that it leaves public of all transactions, which is not great for privacy and has hard theoretical limits in terms of how many transactions it can process per second. It's not very scalable.
Yeah. Yeah. No shit. Two limits, which the eCash systems do not have. The downsides of decent or centralized cryptocurrency platforms are something that Nwosu has deep professional experience with. He was the founder and CEO of Coinfloor, a centralized cryptocurrency exchange founded back in 2014. The exchange was the first publicly auditable Bitcoin exchange according to a 2014 CoinDesk article through an innovative innovative auditing process called proof of reserves. Recalling back on his experience with the matter, Nwosu said, quote, being solvent is a very big thing for me as well as being able to prove that cryptographically, if possible, end quote.
That experience and his concern over the future without private digital cash or clear motivations for why he cofounded FETI. Creating scalable, decentralized, private digital cash, however, is not very easy, neither technically nor politically. To solve the fundamental problem of finance and computer science, many in the Bitcoin community have been looking for ways to combine the benefits of Bitcoin and Chaumny and eCash in order to solve or at least mitigate the downsides of both systems. The Fedimint protocol's most important innovation in this field is the development of federated eCash mints, leveraging the security of Bitcoin's native smart contract capabilities, especially multi signature transactions.
Bitcoin's multi signature script enables something new in finance, a transaction that can only be executed if more than one party agrees to sign. Banks may have shared accounts across multiple parties, but those rules enforced by lawyers who need to comply with local laws, ultimately giving final say to the local government. Bitcoin, by contrast, defends the integrity of the multisignature with the full weight of its international proof of work network, making these agreements as good as gold and unlocking a new kind of federated financial institution. The liquid network, as well as Bitcoin's lightning network, exist only thanks to this particular multisignature technology.
Feda Mint takes multisignature to the next level, making the members unknown to each other through the g bot, protecting users of that mint from the collusion of the guardians while also adding redundancy to the custody of mint Bitcoin reserves, which makes hacks more difficult. Fedimint also protects guardians from accidental loss of keys as a threshold of guardians can restore the stability of an entire federation, say, three out of four signers, in case one loses their keys or gets compromised. On the topic, Ngo Su said, quote, the bigger risk isn't collusion, but users forgetting passwords, which federations mitigate since the system continues if one guardian fails, end quote.
Ultimately, Nuo Su expects that there are are to be tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of federations each with a different set of users using it. These mints connect to each other using the Bitcoin standard and its various payment rails such as on chain Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, quote, offering cryptographic privacy within each and every federation. Even when sending between federations via Lightning, privacy remains high because users are interchangeable within pools. No single point of trust or failure, end quote. One common critique of eCash systems, even post Bitcoin, is regarding self custody.
Critics argue that eCash, even in a federated network, is nevertheless a custodial trusted system of money. And on this topic, Mosu had a particularly powerful insight. Quote, if you have self custody and no privacy, you don't have self sovereignty because someone knows exactly what you're doing and can confiscate your money at any point. Because eCash does not leave an on chain footprint, it can be fundamentally more private than any blockchain. So the the big the big reveal here is being able to spin up Efeti Mint. Alright?
Have a fully functional federation and not know a single person that's in that federation except yourself. You know you're part of this particular federation. You got five other people. You have no idea who they are. None of them have any idea who you are, and all of you have no idea who each of the other people are as well. Nobody knows anybody. It completely freaking anonymous. Now you you might say, okay. Well, what if all five of those people get together back channel and collude? Yes. That is a possibility. How are you gonna find them?
You don't have their email address. You don't know who they are. There's no identity whatsoever. I guess you could hold up a sign or or or rather put, like, you know, an advertisement on the radio or television or in a podcast that says, hey. My name is exactly this, and here's my email address, and I'm part of this federated mint. I wanna collude with you guys. You see, this doesn't work. That that is not going to work. Being able to do this means that very soon here's what I expect. Very soon, start nine, somebody, if not Start nine themselves, is going to drop the ability for me to build a Fediment or a Federated Mint directly on my Start nine server.
Along with my Bitcoin node, along with my lightning node, along with my Electrum server, along with everything else that I've got on my node, and I will be able to say, hey, does you know, like, I I I don't have to ask anybody if they want to go in on a mint. I can just literally throw my mint address into a pool, and somebody somewhere will just go, I'm this will be reckless. Right? People will just go, shit. I'll be part of a mint. Some of them will try to steal the funds. None of that shit's gonna work. You know? And we we'll know who's we'll even if we don't know who the identity is, we'll know the address, and we'll just literally kick that that particular part of the, federated node off. It would just be I won't communicate with it. I'll put it on a blacklist.
I'm not exactly sure how that the software works insofar as what I would see as a user. I don't know what my user experience would be yet because I haven't seen it. But I can very I can guarantee you this. The second that I'm able to run one of these things on my start nine, I'm going to be running these one of these things on my start nine. This means that any of us can literally spin up a bank and nobody knows who the other bankers are of that bank. We know how much money we've got. We know how much money we're responsible for. We know how much money is backing the money that we're printing, and we can't print anymore. And if one of the bankers tries to do it, they get basically blacklisted.
This is going to be a huge deal for, like, things like the Human Rights Foundation and the people that they represent. This is gonna be a huge deal for places like Bitcoin Beach. It's gonna be a huge deal for, like, a a a Brooklyn neighborhood, you know, set of five bodegas where the the store owners are all part of an eCash Federated Mint. And they may of course, they they may at that point, they probably know each other, but you you get what I'm saying. Corner store banks for not only running the business, but for helping people out that need money that isn't necessarily coming into the store to buy cigarillos. You see what I'm saying?
This puts a bank in anybody's phone. Not only I mean, it's not a bank in your phone that you can use that you don't have to count of. You're literally now a banker on your phone along with a network of other bankers. You're literally building Citibank with 12 other people or however many people are in the fed the Federated Mint. It's much more important than we're giving it credit for. Thank god for people like this, because otherwise, we'd only have to deal with people like Nokia. Just to get us into the AI thing, Nokia stock surges nearly 30% after announcing what?
A $1,000,000,000 investment from guess who? NVIDIA. The circle jerk continues. Let's get into this one, about Terawolf, and you'll understand why I'm I'm switching. Terawolf dips 5% on a $500,000,000 capital raise to fund the AI data center expansion. Oh, we've got a dip. They're not gonna buy Bitcoin with the $500,000,000. They're not gonna expand their Bitcoin mining. In fact, they're getting out of Bitcoin mining and going full AI. They announced this $500,000,000 capital raise to build a new AI data center, and guess what? Oh, stock drops five percent. I wonder if we're all tired of the bullshit. Francisco Rodriguez is writing this one for CoinDesk.
Excuse me. Terra Wolf is planning to raise up to $575,000,000 through the private sale of convertible senior notes as it continues shifting focus from Bitcoin mining to powering AI. And the company on Wednesday announced that it plans to sell 500,000,000 in convertible senior notes due 2032 with an option for buyers to tack on an additional $75,000,000. The offering is limited, of course, to qualified institutional investors only, which means plebs like you, yeah, you're not gonna see that deal. Shares are lower by 5% in premarket trading following yesterday's 17% surge. The proceeds will help fund the construction of a data center in Abernathy, Texas.
The move is likely part of a recently announced $9,500,000,000 joint venture with cloud compute firm, FluidStack, for both firms to build out a 168 megawatt data center at Terawolf's Texas campus. And then we they talk about Google and a couple of other things, but here's my point. It's the same playbook as these guys buying Bitcoin. Convertible note, we'll just print this dead instrument. We'll we'll find some rubes on the street to buy this shit. We'll raise $500,000,000. We're gonna stack up on AI, and our stock price is gonna go through the roof. And, no. It didn't work this time. Now, just to be fair, this is like a snapshot.
Right? But when we get to, like, one of the one of the later stories, this AI backlash story, I want you to think about what just happened. We're I mean, usually, this would have been good news, and people would have been clamoring to buy shares of Terra Wolfe. Not today. Not today. Is it because that we're getting a little bit tired of this crap? Probably. And that always makes me hungry, which is why I'm bringing you sats4snacks.com. That's sats4snacks.com. Sats, the numberfour,snacks,all1word,.com. That's where you're gonna get just peachy. That's where you're gonna get dried mangoes.
That's where you're gonna get the pleb pack. That's where you're gonna get peel to peel organic freeze dried bananas and more. It's all freeze dried, baby. Freeze dried bananas, freeze dried peaches, freeze dried mixes of things like strawberries, pineapple, and other peaches. More peaches. There can't have enough dried peaches. I've had these things myself. These are delicious. They're not dehydrated. They're freeze dried, so there is a difference. There's almost no water left in this stuff, like, at all. It's just it's like eating, remember that old, astronaut ice cream stuff? Yeah. Yeah. Sorta like that.
But the fruit that this guy begins with and by the way, this is PermaNerd. Sats for snacks is his company. Perma Nerd is the guy that does it. He either grows or sources some really delicious fruit to go freeze dry. And he also offers comfrey salve. If you got cat scratches, you know, if you got cats, you probably get, you know, some good scratches every once in a while. If you work out the garden, get bee stings, wasp stings, minor cuts, bruises, abrasions. Comfrey is going to heal it much quicker than it would normally heal all by its lonesome. I love this stuff. It's proof of healing comfrey salve, and you can get it at Sats four snacks along with everything else that Perma Nerd sells. And he sells it for Bitcoin because if you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p. It's where I bring plebs with goods and services for sale to plebs just like you who want to buy those goods and services with Bitcoin. Because if you ain't selling into Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p.
Let's run the numbers. Yippee ki. Hey. I got oil. West Texas Intermediate is up a third to $60.35. Brent Norsee is up half a point to $64.78. Natural gas swinging for the other team, quarter percent to the downside. Gasoline is wow. Gasoline rose two and a half points back to a buck 97 a gallon, and Murbon crude is up a point to $66.43 a barrel. Shiny metal rocks are doing okay today except for gold. That is down point 6%, hanging under $4,000, $39.58 and 8 dimes. Palladium is up point 14%. Platinum is up point one three. Silver is up point one six. And copper shooting the moon, point six eight in the green. Ag is mostly in the green itself today. Biggest winner looks to be dude, what is it now? Oh my god. Oh my god. Coffee, 1.06% to the upside.
Oh, no. It just switched. Cotton. Cotton's the winner. Cotton is king. 1.38% to the upside. Biggest loser is rough rice. 2.3% to the downside. Live cattle, erasing losses from yesterday, 2% to the upside. Lean hogs down, but scant. Feeder cattle up three full percent from yesterday. The S and P is moving sideways. The Nasdaq is up a third of a point. The Dow is down a quarter of a point, and the S and P Mini is down point seven, which is surprising. Why? Well, because two things happened. One, Jerome Powell came out today and said, hey. We're cutting interest rates by point 25%. But then he said then he said later because, like, yeah, I mean, he he doesn't get to the meat and potatoes until later when he's talking. So he's probably going for a good ten minutes after he announces that they've done this cut. Next thing you know, Bitcoin price starts rising again because it been dropping. And I told you it was gonna drop. It always does right before the Fed announcement.
But then it started rising again. And then I looked at it and I said, why are you back down at at $111,000 a coin? I thought we cut 25, bips. Well, because at the end of Jerome Powell's talk today when he was making the announcements or whatever however they make these announcements, he basically said that the Fed may not cut it again this year. People were expecting another cut come December. They were expecting a half point cut this year or, well, not just this year, but this this last quarter. And it looks like we're only gonna get point two five. And that, my friends, is enough to send everything tail spinning down to hell where we can hang out with bills above. And we're gonna be doing it with a $110,700 coin. Yeah. I know. It sucks. But 2,210,000,000,000 of market cap can get us 28.1 ounces of shiny metal rock with our one Bitcoin of which there are 19,941,526.16 of. Average fees are low, 0.02, taking the fees on a per block basis. It's about 32 blocks carrying a 104,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of two sats per v byte. Low priorities get you in at one.
Hash rate dipped only a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit. 1.12 zeta hashes per second, but that's still more, you know, security than you would ever need or honestly want. From Graca Wikipedia, which was yesterday's episode of Bitcoin and I got Ed with twenty one twenty one. Sat says, hello from London, England. Love the show. I love you, Ed. In a platonic way. Not not not not, you know, no. Okay. Well, whatever. Jay with twenty one hundred says, I can't wait to hear the funny stories of grokipedia. Like that time grok got put in time out on Twitter. It's gonna be hilarious.
I can't wait either. Axelrod with nine hundred says, siduck. Sean with nothing says, I like this guy's style and delivery on a podcast. And he was floating around my episode of fear fear chain, which was what Friday's episode of Bitcoin in? So I have much thanks to Sean for circulating the show. If you can circulate the show for me. I'm one guy here. I don't have a marketing crew. I'm not married to an OnlyFans star. And I don't I'm like, you know, I'm I I don't have time to go down to the gym and just get nothing but cut by working four hour you know, working out four hours every day and then slathering myself up with oil. And I don't have any of that shit. I'm one guy. I'm one guy. I need help, man. I need help. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part two of the news you can use where Microsoft values a $135,000,000,000 stake in OpenAI as firms face legal pressure. Oh, somebody's smelling a rat. Vismayev from decrypt.co. On Tuesday, Microsoft and OpenAI announced a restructured partnership that values the Redmond giant stake at a $135,000,000,000. That's roughly 27% of OpenAI's new public benefit company even as both firms navigate antitrust scrutiny and a federal lawsuit alleging compute monopolization. I I doubt that's actually gonna end up doing anything, but the reworked pact supports OpenAI's conversion into OpenAI Group PBC under the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation and positions Microsoft as the company's, quote, frontier model partner through 2032, according to a Tuesday statement.
Board chair, Brett Taylor, and CEO, Sam Altman, can now control appointments and removal powers over the PBC's board consolidating Altman's authority. So let's pause and figure out what what just happened here. OpenAI is being converted into something called OpenAI Group PBC, and that is placed under the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. Now let's stop right there. When OpenAI first came out, everything was gonna be free. It was for humanity. It was for this. It was it was Sam Altman being magnanimous and I don't know, philanthropy or some kind of shit. Whatever.
Right? And then he quickly, you know, said, you know, you're gonna need to pay for ChatGPT. Okay. So that's where we were yesterday or the day before. Well, not anymore. Now OpenAI has been converted back into something called OpenAI Group PBC and has been placed under a nonprofit OpenAI Foundation. And Foundation with is is with an f, capital f. So it's the OpenAI Foundation. That's the entity. And OpenAI, as we know it today, is now back underneath that. Confused yet? Yeah. It's probably for a reason. So now let's let's go back here where where where was it? Where is right. Oh, yeah.
So board chair, Brett Taylor, and CEO can now control appointments and have complete removal powers, and I'm talking about the board and everything else, over OpenAI was OpenAI group PBC. Yeah. Over their board. Just yeah. Over their board. Which means Altman can do whatever the hell he wants. This just feels rotten at the core. Something is up. Something is going on. And I highly suspect that it revolves around all this incestuous money that all of these groups of companies are claiming to be giving each other. Personally, I think it's the exact same pool of money.
That's the way that I look at it. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars, and they're all basically claiming that they're giving that money to each other. And and so now it's it's in my mind, it is a form of printing money, and it's legal. Because all these people are just essentially saying, hey. I gave this money to NVIDIA. And NVIDIA says, hey. I gave the the, you know, almost the exact same amount of money to this other company. And then that and it comes back around, and it's all a great big circle. It's the same money, but they're all claiming it on their balance sheets.
It's this is ridiculous. Anyway, OpenAI will continue channeling roughly 20% of its revenue to Microsoft. Though both parties expect that flow to end once an independent panel certifies that artificial general intelligence has been achieved. Microsoft retains exclusive a sorry, IP licenses over OpenAI's models and products through 2032, including post AGI systems, but holds no rights to any consumer hardware OpenAI produces according to the statement. The AI giant can collaborate with third party developers on joint products, deploy open weight models that meet safety thresholds, serve US national security agencies on any cloud infrastructure, and independently pursue its own AGI research capabilities previously blocked by Microsoft's exclusivity provisions.
API products developed with third parties will be exclusive to Azure, while non API products may be served on any cloud provider. Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to comment. Yeah. Duh. The announcement arrives amid mounting legal pressure as a class action suit filed two weeks earlier alleged Microsoft weaponized its 2019 Azure exclusivity agreement to throttle computational capacity for chat g p t, artificially maintaining subscription rates at 100 to 200 times that of competitors levels during February's AI pricing conflict.
Quote, the AI we built today will shape our tomorrow. The path we are currently on dominated by centralized AI is fraught with peril, Xiaozhaoshen, CEO of flock.io, told the crypt. Quote, with a few powerful entities or when a few powerful entities control AI, we risk creating systems that reflect a narrow world view, perpetuating biases and eroding trust. OpenAI has also committed to purchasing $250,000,000,000 in additional Azure services, though Microsoft surrendered first refusal rights as compute provider. The requirement that OpenAI source all computational resources exclusively from Microsoft had become a major friction point as ChatGPT's 800,000,000 weekly users and research demands drove up infrastructure costs.
The partnership began in July 2019 with a $1,000,000,000 investment that made Microsoft OpenAI's exclusive cloud provider and deepened in January 2023 with a multibillion dollar expansion that positioned Microsoft as OpenAI's primary backer. The latest announcement also lands as OpenAI disclosed concerning mental health signals among its user base. About 1,200,000 weekly users or roughly 0.15% of actives showed explicit indicators of suicidal planning or intent. Usually, I have something to say about, you know, ending an article with such a almost non sequitur when we were talking about what we were talking about that article, but holy smokes.
One point two million weekly users are contemplating suicide and telling chat g p t about it. They're either asking how to do it, what's the best way to do it, you know, what what causes the least amount of pain. Hopefully, they're asking what causes the least amount of mess because if you've ever known anybody who used a gun to their head, what you don't realize is that their family member has to go clean that shit up. And you that's something that a human will never be able to unsee. I think it's crappy of committing suicide. I understand that there are people that are hurting out there and that this looks like the only resort left.
But, man, blowing your brains out and having to have your mom come scrape that shit off the fucking wall, dude, you should be ashamed of yourself. Go find a different kind of hole to drop yourself in. Don't force your mom to do shit like that. I know I sound really like, I'm not being generous and I I get that. But I've have one actually I had not one but two friends whose mothers had to clean that shit up. So just just keep that shit in mind. If you got if you got to do it, if you got to do it, keep it clean. Okay? Sorry about that. But Lightning Network for AI. Oh, okay.
How decentralized micropayments could unbloat intelligence. This is Andy Savage from lightning dot news. Current AI models are bloated. They're centralized, and they're energy hungry. Okay. Well, that's a good way to start this off. Artificial intelligence today is everywhere, but there's a hidden story behind that code. Much of it is bloated and resource hungry and dependent on infrastructure that only giant corporations can afford. In other words, AI isn't just a technical tool, it's a mirror of the industrial and social structures that built it. Consider this.
Training some of the largest AI models requires clusters of GPUs consuming megawatts of power compared to a small nuclear plant. Wow. Holy shit. Even inference, the process of generating a response, requires specialized hardware and vast data center bandwidth. This isn't an accident. AI was designed in an environment of abundance. Corporations have massive data, compute budgets, and global infrastructure. When your hardware budget is measured in millions of dollars, optimization for lean, efficient, locally runnable code suddenly feels, well, unnecessary. Why produce AI that works on a normal laptop when your data center can solve it much more cheaply than humans can?
The result is what many developers experience daily. Code that works, but is verbose, duplicated, and hard to maintain. It's a symptom not only of technical limits, but also of a societal and economic structure that rewards centralization, abundance, and control. This tendency towards complexity is not coincidental. Large tech corporations naturally produce tools that rely on their enormous resources. Small decentralized systems simply do not survive in the current market contrast this with the idea of distributed user empowering tools In a truly decentralized system, efficiency is critical.
Scarcity forces designers to create tools that are lightweight, understandable, and maintainable. Abundance, by contrast, encourages complexity. If you can throw hardware at a problem, why optimize? This explains why AI models today are effectively locked behind central infrastructures. Their very survival depends on being difficult to reproduce on small scale independent hardware. Complexity in AI is not merely a technical issue. It's political. Overly overly verbose code, redundant computations, and massive models reinforce corporate control keeping AI out of the hands of individuals or small organizations.
Studies show that AI generated code often requires refactoring, with developers noting that it introduces technical debt through duplication and unnecessary abstraction. This, quote, bloat is a reflection of both the economic incentives and the training environment, which values scale and data over efficiency and autonomy. Bitcoin offers a striking contrast. Of course, it does. It emerged as a decentralized verifiable system where anyone can run an ode, validate transactions, and verify the truth of the blockchain. Its design rewards scarcity, transparency, and individual sovereignty, yet Bitcoin is criticized for being energy intensive, especially with proof of work mining.
Ironically, the same voices rarely critique AI where energy consumption and centralization is far greater and far less transparent. Bitcoin's challenges led to innovation. The Lightning Network scales the system without undermining decentralization. Microtransactions can happen off chain. Nodes remain lightweight and sovereignty is preserved. AI today has no equivalent. Scalability is achieved by centralizing compute, not by creating a system that scales while remaining widely accessible. So imagine an AI network that runs on ordinary devices around the world rather than centralized data centers.
Users contribute spare CPU or GPU cycles, and a distributed orchestration layer assigns AI tasks, like training subtasks or inference requests, securely across the network. Every node has a Lightning Wallet, so payments are streamed in real time. Compute providers earn as they work, while users consuming AI services pay only for what they use every second, per second, per task. This creates a fully decentralized, fully incentivized AI ecosystem scaling naturally as more devices join without relying on industrial scale infrastructure. In other words, it's a lightning network for intelligence, scalable, efficient, and sovereignty preserving.
Workflow overview. Number one, users and nodes, ordinary devices volunteering spare compute cycles. Number two, distributed AI network, tasks assigned securely with redundancy for accuracy. Three, lightning wallets, real time streaming payments for computation performed. Four, task marketplace, A transparent ledger tracks work. Consumers pay per task or per second. And five, and finally, AI consumers. Submitting tasks or queries without requiring central data center infrastructure. Note that this is using lightning network, not tokens. Tokens enable re centralization because they are centrally controlled themselves.
They also enable lock in where users can't go to another network because their tokens don't work there. But with Lightning payments, buyers and sellers are both free to buy and sell where they please and to earn and spend using a currency that doesn't need an exchange and all the nonsense that goes with that. This vision aligns incentives contributors earn while idle cycles are used efficiently and consumers pay for exactly the resources that they need. More importantly, it avoids centralization, bloat, and hidden energy costs. Such a system could bring AI sovereignty to the masses just as Bitcoin and Lightning bring financial sovereignty.
By leveraging streaming micropayments, we can imagine a future where intelligence is distributed, scalable, and financially sustainable without massive data centers dominating the landscape. AI today is remarkable, but it is also a monument to centralization. Its bloated, resource intensive nature is a symptom of both design choices and the economic incentives behind them. Bitcoin and the Lightning Network remind us that scalability, efficiency, and sovereignty can coexist. The challenge and the opportunity lies in imagining intelligent systems that are lean, distributable, and self incentivized rather than dependent on nuclear power station scale infrastructure.
Our tools will reflect the structures of power that create them. To democratize intelligence, we must design networks that are lightweight distributed and economically aligned just like lightning. This vision of a truly decentralized protocol based bandwidth marketplace free from corporate middlemen and speculative tokens is not just a pipe dream. It's a logical and powerful evolution of the principles that underpin Bitcoin and the lightning network. However, bringing such a system to life forces us to confront the deepest structural challenges in the tech world today. The good news is that the foundational pieces of this vision are already being built by a dedicated global community.
One, the Lightning Network is a payment rail. The core of this idea relies on a neutral global and censorship resistant payment system, and the Lightning Network is exactly that. It enables instant, tiny, feeless payments from data consumer to bandwidth provider without a central processor making a peer to peer marketplace technically feasible. Two, protocols over platforms. Enter the Nostr example. We are seeing a powerful shift towards protocols, not platforms. Look at Nostr, a decentralized social network with no company, no token, no central server.
It proves that passionate developers and users will congregate around a well designed open source protocol that serves the community, not shareholders our bandwidth marketplace should aspire to be the quote noster of decentralized infrastructure, end quote. So if the technology is within reach, what's stopping it? Primary barrier isn't technical. It's human and economic. Our current system for funding innovation runs on specific fuel, the promise of asymmetric venture scale financial returns. A project like a corporate backed node pay can attract millions in funding because investors see a path to a 100 x return via a token or an acquisition.
A pure open source protocol based solution, however, offers a different value proposition. Robustness, neutrality, and long term utility. It's a public good. And public goods are notoriously difficult to fund because it's hard to capture their full financial value. Why would a brilliant developer spend years on this for free when they could get a massive salary at a tech giant or chase the next meme coin moonshot? This is the frustrating paradox. Humanity has the technical capacity to solve many of its problems through decentralization and collaboration, but we lack the economic and motivational structure to consistently direct that capacity towards the public good rather than private riches.
A call to builders. This is not a reason to despair, but a clarion call for a different kind of builder. The future of a truly open web won't be written solely by venture backed startups, but also by open source collectives funded by mechanisms like Gitcoin grants, philanthropic capital from individuals who understand the long term strategic importance of decentralized infrastructure, Passionate individuals who, like the early Bitcoin and Nostra developers, contribute simply because they believe in the mission. The outline for a better system is right here.
The challenge ahead is to find new ways to value and reward the work that builds for everyone, not just shareholders. The fact that this idea exists is the first step. Let's hope the builders are listening. That's the end of the article, and it's a good article. There's one thing that I I'm not sure about this. I'm not an AI engineer, so I may be blowing smoke out of my ass. But it does seem to me that there needs to be one, at least some lip service page to something called synchronicity or synchrony. Syncing. You've got I I don't think that that asymmetric AI nodes that somehow or another okay. Look. I I can put a GPU box here in the corner of my house and and and use it like a Bitcoin miner, heat my house while I'm actually providing AI infrastructure.
Okay. That's that's easy to think think of and that's one of the things that that's talked about here. But then, I got another box that's in, I don't know, a house in Colorado or something like that, and it's on and it's providing compute for AI, and it's heating the house, and it's it's great. Right? Great. Except when those two boxes are used in a way that makes it look like they're right next to each other in spatial time, which which is going to guide how long does it take for these things to talk to each other. I think that that presents I think that that's going to present a problem. If you are an AI engineer and you know that Synchrony does not matter, that it's completely fine. Please, for the love of God, let me know.
But one thing that that I've kinda learned when I was doing a lot of three d animation and using a software package called Houdini from SideFX Software. They had a really great system to do fluid dynamic simulations, which you would want to do if you want to make a smoke effect or a fire effect or ocean water, it's to make it look real, then you actually have to calculate it for real. And that count those calculations are fluid dynamics. It's a bunch of math, and you gotta do a lot of it. Right? They found out a way that you could, in fact, divvy those jobs up. So if you had a scene that showed, like, a bunch of water moving, like like a scene of the top of like, the surface of the ocean in a storm, that scene would be divided up. You could divide it up into, like, 16 different sections.
And each one of the sections that would show in the scene when you render it, the calculations done for section like the first section, say let's call it section, you know, section a, goes to a GPU. Or, in this case, it was actually a CPU. Section two or b goes to another CPU. And on and on and on. Like, all 16 of the sections animation for the render is all done on 16 different processors. And even these are in the same machine. But when you render these things out, if you if you don't take dire care about a few certain things, you will actually see the seam lines in this in the scene. And I'm talking the visual shot after it's all rendered and prettied up and lighted and lit and all that shit, you will actually see the grid lines where server or the compute like the CPU one was trying to talk to CPU two and say, hey. Here's the here's the calculation I've got for the very edge of this.
And then here at CPU is, like, sharing that edge at that same pixel, and it says, I'm getting a different one. And when you put those two pixels together, you end up with noise. And when you when you look at the whole scene, you can see all the edges. You can see where one compute or one, processor was doing one job and the other processor was doing another job. That's why I think that there's some synchrony that needs to be respected when it comes to AI. Other than that, I love this idea, and it makes complete sense. It's not hard to grasp. Hopefully, I'm wrong about AI and synchrony, and we'll be able to do this because this needs to be done. Moving on to AI backlash.
Finally, we've been talking about AI. It's almost like an AI podcast today, and while I apologize for that, we're not escaping it. And as we just saw, it we're gonna be using both Bitcoin, lightning, eCash, Vetements, and AI altogether. It's gonna be great until you're these guys who well, let's just let's just read it. AI backlash is here. Even sophisticated users are getting sick of tech's latest obsession, Josh Quitner from Decrypt. If you've ever grumbled at an uninvited AI pop up hijacking your screen or wondered why your once reliable app now prioritizes flashy generative summaries over simple functionality, rejoice.
You're part of a swelling revolt. A fiery hacker news thread, quote, I'm downsiding in downsize or no. I'm drowning in AI features I never asked for and I hate it, end quote, has become a digital bonfire for tech savvy users venting their spleen, amassing over 300 points and 200 comments in a collective cry against relentless, often bungled infusion of AI into everyday tools. What started as gripes about make use of article quickly ballooned into a manifesto of resentment, exposing how Silicon Valley's AI gold rush is breeding alienation rather than adoration. The core grievance, forced integration that's more intrusion than innovation.
Users decried Google's swap of its trusty assistant for Gemini, which fumbles basics like alarms or smart home controls while bloating interfaces with verbose overviews that bury organic results. In Google Sheets, AI suggestions obscure edits mid flow. Atlassian's confluence sports an obtrusive button that lags workflows. Firefox's AI context menu triggers infuriating user interface shifts and whoever thought that having Siri summarize your alerts on an iPhone was a good idea Even niche software isn't spared with updates, shoehorning AI where a clean search or intuitive design would have sufficed.
Quote, it feels like we've gone from don't be evil to you will use our AI and you will like it, one commenter quipped, encapsulating the mood of betrayal. The Hacker News Uprising isn't an outlier. AI burnout is backed by mounting evidence. A 2025 Asana study pegs digital exhaustion at eighty four percent among employees with seventy seven percent overwhelmed by AI scaling. The AI paradox shows frequent users hit forty five percent burnout rates as tools meant to streamline instead of amplify stress. Polls paint an equally grim picture. Sixty six percent workplace burnout overall with eighty two percent at risk from rapid changes like return to office mandates and AI overhauls.
Pew, p e w, Pew found fifty two percent of US workers were anxious about AI's job threats, while KPMG noted a pivot from fear factor to cognitive fatigue as agent deployments quadrupled. Wow. An academic and rather academic papers only underscore the insight. AI collaboration can spike counterproductive behaviors via loneliness and emotional drain. Supervisor AI emails heighten burnout for the anxious, though well integrated tools might boost self efficiency. Wiley warns of change fatigue from cascading implementations, risking crises.
On x, users debate AI's dual role, easing burnout in cybersecurity of sports yet fueling it for creators via poor rollouts. Naturally, since it was hacker news, the thread offered plenty of survival tactics such as using u block origin filters to nuke AI elements or ditching Windows for Linux distributions like Fedora or Ubuntu to evade ads and other notifications. Quote, my gaming PC was a nightmare until I went Linux, said one user, praising its snappiness sans distractions. Apple got a partial password slower AI rollout, though series machine learning regressions drew ire.
Some conceded AI's occasional wins, such as confluence's time saving searches, but warned of seas of slop from overreliance. But while Optimus envisioned controversial or sorry, envisioned conversational interfaces, obsolete and clunky web designs, skeptics dismissed it all as profit driven hype. Users weren't necessarily anti AI. They're just anti bad product, craving options to opt out in tools that just work without the cognitive tax. Obviously, AI is already proving to be transformative, but as the tools multiply faster than the reasons to use them, even the true believers are starting to tune out.
This happened in 2000. Or the events leading up to 2000. And that's the end of the article, by the way. What am I talking about? Pets.com had the most hilarious television ad I've ever seen. It was hilarious. The guy's wearing a dog puppet. Like, literally, it's a sock puppet that looks like a dog on his hand. And he's got his wristwatch on, which made it look like the wristwatch was the collar of the dog. And the dog was, like, you know, interview like, interviewing people, had a microphone and everything. He'd go up to a door and the guy with whose hand that the puppet is would bang on the door with the dog puppet. So it looked like the dog was slamming its face into the door. It was fucking hilarious.
And it completely failed. Pets.com was part of the entire explosion of the well, it was the .com boom. Everybody had a .com, and none of them could take money over the Internet, and that's what killed it all. The entire structure of the Internet did not have one simple thing, and it generated what's known as the four zero two error, payment required. We solved that with Bitcoin. If Bitcoin had already been born before the .com bubble collapsed, we would not have had a .com bubble collapse because pets.com, you would still be able to pay directly through the Internet. It took fucking years for PayPal to be invented.
And that, honestly, that's what did it. That's what kinda, like, you know, kit re kick started the Internet was being able to pay for things, goods and services online. We take that shit for granted every day now. But back then, you would go to pets.com and say, oh, that is just the cutest looking little doggy sweater. I want that thing. And then you'd have to still write a check, put it in the mail, send it to pets.com, and then wait six to eight weeks for the package to arrive in the mail. Because guess what? We had UPS, but they weren't as lickety split as they are now. So I see the exact same thing happening in AI.
Everybody's gonna put out a bot. Everybody is going to put this tool in. Every you'll be able to pick up the phone and say, we need AI on our website, and the company you're talking to is like, dude, I got I got a catalog of of AI shit that I can hang off your website. What do you want? We got them in pink. We got them in blue. We got buttons. We got scripts. What do you want, man? What do you want? You know? Or we'll pick something for you. You know, that's I mean, it it was it was like that in the 2000 or in the, you know, in the nineteen nineties leading up to 2000, and it's the exact same shit right here. And it's not going to quit until you see a massive decline in the companies that are all about AI just like the bubble bursting in 2000 on the.com.
Alright. Just to finish this off, we are ten minutes over. I just wanna let you know that Canaan, the Bitcoin mining company, they've launched the Avalon a 16 miner series, and it has a 12.8 joules per tera hash of fist efficiency. And it's pretty small. It's pretty small. Let's see here. Who's writing this one? Okay. It's Atlas twenty one, so there's no author. Canaan Incorporated has unveiled its next generation of Bitcoin mining devices with the introduction of the Avalon a 16 series. It has an efficiency of 12.8 joules per terahash.
The announcement took place October 28 during the Blockchain Life twenty twenty five summit in Dubai. So the first model in the lineup called the a 16 x p delivers 300 terahashes per second using an air cooling system. The ant the performance of Canon's a 16 stands on par with Bitmain's flagship Antminer s 21, the company's main competitor in the sector. So this is this is Avalon's latest introduction of miners. It if this if we're to believe what we just heard, it is the exact same performance that you're getting out of an Antminer s 21. So it looks to me like Canaan is holding their own in the Bitcoin mining industry. Alright. That's all I've got for you today.
I'm gonna go ahead and let you go. Don't worry about AI. Don't worry about the fact that Bitcoin isn't rising to a $125,000 because Jerome Powell said shit. It's all bullshit. It always has been. It always will be. The only thing that matters is you, me, and family. I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Opening, episode milestone, and rundown of topics
AI hype, bubbles, and why fads crash but tech remains
Why anonymous federations matter and grassroots banking use cases
Markets segment: energy, metals, ags, livestock, and indexes
Mental health signals around AI usage and social impacts
Practical challenges: synchronization, distributed workloads, and realism
Closing thoughts and sign-off