Join me today for Episode 940 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Ark Labs Gets $2.5 Million From Tim Draper
- Babylon is a Scam
- Gryphon Digital Lands $0.01 KWh Electricity Costs
- Fountain v1.1 Released and it's Awesome
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:10 am Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 22nd day of August 2024, and this is episode 9:40 of Bitcoin. And remember how I was talking about Ark yesterday?
This layer 2 situation that came up I don't know like sometime earlier or later last year or very early this year it's not lightning network it's something different I explained a little bit about it. The version 2 ks or version 0.2 came out yesterday. Well, Ark is back in the news again today. We're gonna get into that one. There's also another story that I thought about talking about yesterday but it's this I don't know what is it polygon or babylon that's it. I was gonna do it yesterday but decided better, for it because it's about Bitcoin staking.
However, it looks like there might be some, there's like enough activity of these people buying Bitcoin to stake this Babylon platform thing that it could have affected the Bitcoin price to shoot up to the 61 k handle. I am not a fan of staking. However, if there is another group out there that is buying a substantial amount of Bitcoin, I remember when FTX started the amount of Bitcoin that they were buying and we all saw where that shit went. So I think we should probably talk about that. Griffin Digital is in the news as well as Fountain. Fountain has made a release. If you don't know what Fountain is, it is my daily driver. It is a modern podcast app. It's not a legacy app because it has actual features, you know, like chapters and transcripts and chapter art as well as whole album art and all manner of podcasting 2.0. Goodness. They have made a massive release yesterday.
There is also some funky stuff going on in Germany and ATMs. But let's start with Arc Labs. Bitcoin Magazine Alex Bergeron is writing this one. Tim Draper of Draper fame this is the Tim Draper has now invested in Ark Labs to make Bitcoin payments easier. Bitcoin scaling proposal Ark, which I talked about yesterday, is getting closer to reality after a year of research focused on refining the reference implementation. Arc Labs announced today the completion of a $2,500,000 pre seed funding round led by Tim Draper and his firm Draper Associates. While the technically fees or the technical feasibility of Ark's approach was initially debated, today's announcement is a strong show of confidence for the future of the protocol and the builders behind it.
Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, Arc Labs co founder Marco Argentieri expressed excitement about the road ahead suggesting Arc is ready to provide a significant lift to scaling efforts The funding will accelerate our efforts to make Bitcoin transactions as simple and user friendly as possible making fast, low cost, user friendly transactions powered by Bitcoin a reality for potentially billions of people worldwide initially conceived as an alternative to the Lightning Network. Argin Thierry emphasizes that his company's immediate focus is on supporting the adoption of Bitcoin's popular Layer 2 solution. Lightning has made tremendous strides recently, he said. We believe that we can leverage this network effect to bring Ark to market and enhance the self custodial experience for existing Lightning users Arc addresses these challenges by utilizing trustless servers allowing Lightning users to migrate or mitigate the difficulties typically encountered with operating Lightning infrastructure A recent trend in reducing the cost of on chain operations related to liquidity management has been to rely on custodial or federated options such as the liquid side chain. Unfortunately, this approach introduces solid custodial trade offs that conflict with Bitcoin's original vision.
Ark has the potential to overcome these challenges at scale without compromising trust. Asked about his motivation behind the investment lead investor Tim Draper echo the sentiment soon many people around the world will live on the bitcoin standard today we have to focus not only on how to buy and store bitcoin but how to use it as a medium of exchange for everyday purposes. ARK's architecture allows for seamless bitcoin payments in a way that stays true to its core principles of decentralization and self custody. One of Arc Lab's early challenges was to transform the Arc Protocol from a raw concept into a fully realized solution According to Argentieri the initial documentation and parameters proposed by its creator were not fully fleshed out and sometimes hindered a broader understanding of the technology many of the concepts lacked full development and the arbitrary numbers being discussed failed to capture the protocol's flexibility particularly in addressing liquidity issues, he explained.
Perhaps the most notable confusion has been around the need for covenants. Bitcoin covenants are smart contract restrictions that limit how and where future transactions can be spent, enhancing security and control over funds. While covenants can significantly contribute to the user experience around ARC as well as potentially improve capital efficiency, Argentieri insists that a good number of use cases can already benefit from a covenantless version quote different types of users can leverage Arc's features while mobile clients are more challenging right now using pre signed transactions is a viable alternative to covenants for online servers end quote He believes his company is well positioned to deliver the 1st production service that can validate the potential of the technology.
When ARC is operational with actual capital deployed and large number of users are benefiting from the infrastructure it should help make a strong case for covenants. The team recently released an alpha version of the covenant list implementation now available on Github. Soon to follow will be the Arc node an ARC enabled wallet allowing users to send, receive and swap Bitcoin over the Lightning Network all within a user friendly dashboard. Interested users should sign up on the website to receive updates for the closed beta testing in early September, with a broader rollout expected later this year.
Joining this funding round, our Bitcoin focused funds Acxiom and Folger Ventures along with prominent angel investors Stephen Cole, Alan Farrington, general partner at Acxiom shared his enthusiasm for the project. Quote, we are excited to support what appears to be a substantial breakthrough in broadening Bitcoin's utility as a means of payment and bringing increased sophistication to the financial infrastructure of the network. Arc Labs invites developers, top talent, and potential partners to contribute to its efforts. Alright. So the website, if you want to go and sign up for the well, for the closed beta is arclabs.
To. That's arclabs. To. See if you can get into that because I am definitely gonna try to get into that one myself. Bitcoin staking platform, Babylon, to start phased main net main net launch this week. CoinDesk, Jamie Crawley. Before we all start gagging our guts out, let's just figure out what the hell is going on here. Bitcoin staking platform Babylon, led by a Stanford University professor and tipped to be one of the more promising new scaling projects the oldest and largest blockchain is moving to the next stage of its development, which with plans to launch the first phase of its main network on August 22nd Babylon raised a $70,000,000 funding round led by Paradigm earlier this year.
The project is led by Stanford engineering professor David See, that's spelled t s e, known for his prior research on information theory while working at the University of California in Berkeley during the first phase BTC holders will be able to lock their tokens on the Bitcoin network according to an email release on Monday For security purposes, Babylon is imposing a cap of 1,000 BTC that users can stake in total. Staking refers to the process of crypto holders offering their tokens to a network in order to finance its ongoing operation with the expectation of getting rewards in return. How is this not a security?
Whatever. Similar to putting money in a savings account to acquire interest. This system is fundamental to most blockchains, but Bitcoin is not one of them. Therefore staking is largely absent from the world's largest cryptocurrency network Babylon is attempting to address this difference in the coming months which will add greater utility to Bitcoin the project is being supported by over 200 quote finality providers whatever the hell that is who will approve transactions to maintain the network's protocol operation similar to the role of validators and proof of stake ecosystems.
Allnodes, Figment and Galaxy Digital are among the finality providers according to the release. This is a scam. Straight up scam. Do not get suckered into staking your coins on this bullshit Babylon platform because what'll happen? You will lose your coins. You will lose your coins. You will not make any money from this. Even if you didn't lose your coins you'll probably never give them back it's just solid it's going to be a 100% IOU and you're not going to get any money from this thing this is a way for people to abscond with your bitcoin So when over the next few months you are going to want to watch out for what Babylon is doing. If they are indeed buying massive amounts of Bitcoin to stake on this protocol then I fear another FTX type debacle will happen. Now, I don't think Babylon will get anywhere close to as big of the britches as FTX was when it collapsed but this is in my opinion is not good for Bitcoin.
There's no reason for staking. We've already been through this argument. We told the people at Ethereum to not do staking that they needed to continue the security model of using electricity to convert into physical security for their blockchain they didn't listen to us and now everything on that chain is has to have permission that is not the ethos of Bitcoin so whatever it is that babylon says that they're trying to do I disagree that it is not only is it not correct I disagree with the fact that they're being truthful at all I think they're lying to you to try to get your bitcoin on their stupid ass chain don't do it don't do it don't do it but here's something that was done Griffin digital mining has acquired a low cost bitcoin mining operation at $0.01 per kilowatt hour that is 1p per kilowatt hour I live in Washington where there's a whole bunch of God was a hydro hydropower like you know water flowing over you know through dams and turning turbines and the cost around here I think is somewhere between like 6.5¢ per kilowatt hour.
Griffin Digital Mining has just secured 1p per kilowatt hour. Griffin Digital Mining has taken a big step in lowering its power cost by acquiring Bitcoin mining operations in Louisiana that leverage ultra low cost electricity at approximately 1¢ per kilowatt hour. This $1,500,000 acquisition which includes up to 2.9 megawatts of operational capacity and 59 petahashes per second of bitcoin mining equipment comes fully equipped with assets including gas powered generators and containers and is expected to generate around $1,000,000 in annual revenue according to the announcement quote.
We believe that this acquisition of ultra low cost power is our first step along an identified path of over 500 megawatts of similar low cost power generation opportunities, said Griffin CEO Rob Chang. The current post halving world is requiring Bitcoin miners to secure low cost power in order to thrive in an increasing global hash rate environment. With the acquisition of this $0.01 power asset and future power generation assets with similar costs we believe that Griffon will enhance its position as a leading low cost operator with a competitive advantage in a key cost aspect of the Bitcoin mining business end quote Griffin reinforced that it is committed to reducing carbon emissions by utilizing flare gas in its operations flare gas a byproduct of oil extraction that is often burned off and released into the atmosphere as CO2 is repurposed by Griffin as an energy source for Bitcoin mining by converting this otherwise wasted gas into productive energy Griffin not only powers its mining operations but also mitigates environmental impact by lowering the carbon emissions that would have been generated through flaring We are particularly excited about the opportunities of ultra low cost power that is being afforded us further stated Chang quote we expect that low cost power will allow for the possibility of greater margins using state of the art mining equipment or enabling return on investment on cheaper machines that are not economically viable at higher cost operations Other possibilities include hosting services or providing high performance compute operations. Okay. So Louisiana is a high gas when you drill in Louisiana and I know this because my dad drilled a lot of wells in Louisiana, there's a lot of natural gas down there. Who knows why? It's just it just so happens that around Louisiana you're always gonna get a whole bunch of natural gas along with your extracted oil. And you gotta do something with it. And if you don't have infrastructure to compress and pipe that, that natural gas to where it can be sold on the open market and then used by, you know, municipalities, then you gotta do something with it. And and even though that I am not one of these guys that are constantly beating the we're all gonna die because of climate change people, I will say this.
I would rather have a shit ton of c02 in the air than a whole bunch of methane in the air. But there's kind of a problem with that. I'll get to it here in a second. Methane itself if you just look at the chemistry can trap a lot more atmospheric heat than co2 can. And I've heard anywhere between 75 times to almost a 100 times worse than co2. That's what methane will do in the atmosphere. However there's there's something that we should probably look at here. Methane is a rather heavy molecule heavier than oxygen and it's heavier than carbon dioxide and it's heavier than heavier than nitrogen so it has this tendency not to get up into the upper atmosphere which is where people are really concerned about the we're all gonna die because of global warming shit it just so happens it just so happens that ruminants cows and deer and whatnot when they're eating grass they burp methane but when they do burp methane they burp it and while their heads are you know under 7 foot you know like at least under 7 foot in altitude.
So the methane has a tendency to settle to the ground. What does that do? Well it feeds a whole group of bacteria and other critters in the soil called methanophores. And that just means methane eaters. Exactly. The soil already contains the ability to eradicate methane as it settles into the soil because there's a whole bunch of critters down there that are hungry for that carbon skeleton. Because it's a single c with a single carbon atom with 4 hydrogen atoms around it. That's what methane is. Right? So the the little critters that are in the soil want the carbon because that carbon, they can do all kinds of stuff with the carbon. Alright? And I won't get into it.
Just understand that the soil is already prepped with a methane filter. So the people that are constantly screaming that we're all gonna die because of flare gas or we're all gonna die because of cows and ruminants, they're all crazy because they haven't probably ever taken an ecology class in their life or a biology class in their life probably never a cell biology or god forbid a molecular biology where you figure out how all this stuff actually works Be that as it may, 1¢ per kilowatt hour is nothing to sneeze at. Let's run the numbers. West Texas Intermediate Oil getting a bump today. It's over 2 points to the upside. $73.42 Brent Norsey also up over 2 points to 77.64.
Natural gas down almost a full 6 points to $2.04 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is up 1.47% back up to $2.23 a gallon even though I've never seen that price at a pump. All your shiny metal rocks are doing piss poor today including gold which has lost a full point to $2,521. Silver is down a point. Platinum is down 2. Copper is down 1. Palladium is down 2.5. Ag is fully mixed today. The biggest winner is lumber. 1.66 percent to the upside. Biggest loser today is wheat. A full two points to the downside. Live cattle up 0.73%. Lean hogs up 2.79%, and feeder cattle are up a full point. Legacy indices are down today. They're all in the red. I guess everybody's waiting on Powell or something.
The Dow is down, 5th of a point. The S and P is down a third. Nasdaq is down 2 thirds, and the S and P Mini is down 1 5th of a point. On to Clark Moody's Bitcoin, the price that we only give a shit about anymore is $60,530. That is a $1,200,000,000,000 market cap. And with gold's, losing streak today, we can now purchase 24.3 ounces of the shiny metal rock with your 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,000,000 743,003,162 of. And average fees per block shot the hell up. Yesterday it was at 0.06btc fees on average per block. Today it's point 6 BTC per block. What the hell happened?
It looks like there might have been a glitch in fee averaging on on Bitcoin Core. I don't know yet. We're, we'll probably find out more about what happened this morning. But fees have have gone back down. We'll we'll get to that here in a second. Actually, we're gonna get to it right damn now. There are a 143 blocks carrying 319,000 unconfirmed transactions. And high priorities are only gonna cost you 4 satoshis per vbyte like it was yesterday. Low priority is also 4 satoshis per vbyte. Again, I don't know what happened. However, what I can say is that for about 7 or 8 blocks there were blocks were getting excessive fees like 567 satoshis per vbyte.
That has calmed down. But we're gonna have to just kind of take a wait and see attitude on it. Mining is at 645.7 exahashes per second. So we've gained quite a bit. From Professor Mel Salvador, which was Bitcoin and episode 939, mini pigeon boosted me 5,000 sat says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. The wild hustle with a 1,000 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Yeager with a 121 says playing with the new fountain update. So far loving it. Thank you, sir. No thank you. Pies to pleb, 420. Thank you, sir. No thank you. And Svoboda with a 100 says, test boost after Nostra Connect to see how this song bitch works.
I hear you, man. We're all talking about the fountain update. Don't worry. We'll get to it. God's death with 237 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Hugh Janus with a 100 says tidy. Nice. And then there's a couple of more, but these are not boost. They are fountainous scraping from nostril a whole bunch more people. And every single time that somebody drops the URL for this particular episode or any of my particular episodes on Nostr it somehow or another fountain is able to scrape that information like I was telling you about yesterday and put it here in my activity of fountain for these particular episodes So you got like a well I can't pronounce it because it's like I don't know 0 underscore 0 around parentheses it looks like some eyeballs I can't pronounce that and then pies to pleb puts in the URL for this episode and says nothing and there's no boost. So we're gonna have to get used to some things going on and I'm gonna talk about what what in fact that this stuff is here in a second but before I do that let me finish up by saying that my geyser project is up and running it's geyser.fundgeyser.fundforward/project forward slash the Bitcoin and podcast all one word the Bitcoin and podcast all one word go if you if you want to go try out geyser dot fund and see how it works you can use that URL to throw me some satoshis over on geyser if for whatever reason you don't want to do it on fountain or you don't want to zap me on nostr. I'm trying to get like a whole bunch of different places where if you want to support this show then you can support the show. Okay. That's it for the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use fountain version 1.1 open social podcasting powered by nostr has been released fountain a lightning powered value for value podcasting app is now a Nostr client. That's right. It's a full blown Nostr client. Your fountain profile syncs with your Nostr profile, making your activity visible across the Nostr ecosystem. Quote, today, we are excited to announce a massive update to Fountain that solves these problems with Nostr a simple decentralized messaging protocol that allows social activity to be shared across different apps announced the project The Nostra protocol is evolving rapidly and Fountain 1.1 is only scratching the surface of what's possible In the coming months we will be fine tuning Fountain's social features and adding new ones too added the project So here's what's new.
This just dropped yesterday. This is they Oscar, Mary, and crew over at Fountain. They just announced this yesterday. And since yesterday, I have seen an explosion in my activity, that's being shown to me inside my fountain app. And that's because I was part of the beta. I signed up. I asked Oscar, can I please please please be part of the beta and find out how this shit works? And I was able to see a whole bunch of stuff being done before the or how it works before the rest of everybody on nostr got to see it. And I gotta tell you when you release something like this to 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000 of people it just flipped my lid on the amount of activity that I was getting over on fountain and if I'm getting this kind of activity I know the other podcasters are like going what the hell's going on because we're seeing stuff in our fountain feeds that is coming directly off of Nostra. Now I've explained this before but this is now solidly connected to all Nostr users that are also using Fountain.
So, you can connect or you can create a Nostr profile inside of Fountain. Create or import a Nostr account in the Fountain app to provide or to find previous follows tap the icon in the top right on the home screen. You can share your boost and comments on Nostr. When you boost or comment on Fountain, your message will be shared on Nostr with a fountain link. Other Nostr clients can see, interact, and follow you. You can choose to share your activity on Nostr each time you boost or comment. If not it remains visible only on fountain so they give you a switch a little toggle there that's nice a new and improved home feed the fountain home feed is now nostr's audio layer Wow, that's an interesting way to put it. You can switch between following and global feeds, or filter by podcast or music content.
Audio posts from Nostr clients now appear in fountain. Audio links posted on Nostr clients like Primal will appear in the fountain home feed. Indexed podcasts or music rendered as playable content cards with comments. Zaps. Of course, listeners on fountain and other Nostril clients can zap your post to send payments replacing the earlier likes. Likes are still available and are now free. Mention. Mention others and comments by typing at followed by their username to send recommendations or tag them in conversations. So, this may not sound on the surface this may not sound like it's earth shattering but it is and the reason I say that is that there was an entire network that was basically self contained inside a fountain a network of people a network of podcasts a network of people making clips from other people's podcasts there were people commenting I mean it was it was a completely self contained not terribly large but large enough that it was an actual network effect and remember what I keep saying when you have 2 networks that have different DNA and they connect together and somehow or another they have something in common that they can share between networks then you might as well have just formed a great big network literally 2x ing a network simply by 2 strands of these networks touching each other and trading something of value in this case it's satoshis because zaps exist and because zaps are present on nostril and because zaps were present on fountain that was a common what I don't want to say a common piece of DNA because it wasn't the DNA of Fountain is podcasting the DNA of nostrils notes these are different organisms and yet somehow through the notion of Zaps lightning network and a couple of other things those two networks are now it's intrinsically tied together and they will never come apart unless you know Oscar Mayer decides to detach this entire experiment but I don't think he will because this is just too good and now the amount of people that were talking about Fountain yesterday on Noster was immense if you're if you have never tried Fountain app as your daily driver for a podcast whether you're already using podcasting 2.0 or not, right? If you're using a legacy app, please don't do that. Please use a modern podcasting app like Podcast Guru or fountain app. If you haven't tried Fountain app at least try it. It's not going to kill you and now you can simply log in with your nostril credentials and I was able to do that on Fountain on my web app not on my phone on my desktop because I have the get albie extension.
And it handles putting in my private and and my private and public key pair but it does it in a much more secure way than just copying and pasting your insect. Please don't do that. Please use an extension of some kind. But congratulations to Oscar Mayer and the crew over at Fountain App. I cannot wait to see what comes next. And I've already said it yesterday on Nostr. I don't even think the developers Oscar Mayer and his crew I don't even think they fully understand what they just unleashed. I know I don't, but I do know that it's going to have ramifications well beyond what we think.
It may not lock in tomorrow or the next day but soon you're going to see some serious shit. Now, from Cointelegraph, Ciaran Lyons has this one: Bitcoin open interest jumps 1 point $3,000,000,000 following the Federal Reserve's dovish minutes. Let's find out what Jerome Powell actually said yesterday. Bitcoin future traders added over a1000000000 to Bitcoin open interest in the hours after the United States Federal Reserve released its July meeting minutes which some say further confirms a September interest rate cut. On August 22nd Bitcoin futures OI climbed to $31,920,000,000 an increase of $1,260,000,000 compared to the previous 12 hours.
However, the data shows that the cohort is fairly split on whether Bitcoin's price will rise or fall. Over the 12 hour period, long traders held a slight advantage with 50.63% of total future positions compared to 49.37 for shorts. But Bitcoin's price is trading at roughly 60,600 and $3 give or take, a level that has been hovering around since August 9th according to coin market cap data. 10x Research head of research wow. 10x Research head of research, Marcus Thielen, commented that the Fed's minutes quote makes a rate cut in September almost a certainty quote a vast majority of FOMAC members supported a rate cut in September with several members even considering a July cut as a plausible option Thielen stated. Bitcoin looks like it's ready to break higher. The Fed minutes were released a few hours ago with a very dovish tone said pseudonymous cryptic trader Sky O'Dellic.
I don't know who the hell that is. When interest rates drop investors typically move away from safe assets like bonds and term deposits turning instead to perceived riskier assets like Bitcoin quote prepare yourself for one of the most explosive 4th quarters in history For US markets and Indian markets, crypto commentator Nishant Barawad Daj stated, citing the Fed being on the verge of cutting interest rates. Another quote says Powell's upcoming Friday speech is expected to reinforce this dovish outlook likely boosting risk assets like stocks and bitcoin as monetary policy provides a favorable backdrop, Thielen stated. Meanwhile, on August 15th Caldwell Investment Management Portfolio Manager Justin Elliott opined that there is nothing to support the level of aggression expected by the Fed to cut its rates. Yeah. Who knows?
Although, here's here's my gut that they're going to cut in September. There's too many people in the in in there's too many Fed guys that are screaming for interest rate cuts. And and if they get an interest rate cut before the November elections, guess who looks good? Kamala Harris and the Biden administration. That's right. At every single God every single talking head is going to be saying see what a good job they're doing what a good job Harris is doing when Harris and Biden has nothing to do with it. The administration of the United States at the executive level has jack shit to say about what the Fed does other than other than appoint the chairman. And maybe a couple of other directors. I'm not exactly sure about the the sub guys, but the chairman of the Fed, that is appointed by the president of the United States. And who appointed Jerome Powell?
But that's what you're going to see. You're going to see a rate cut in September. You're already seeing somehow or another much reduced energy prices as far as the price of oil is concerned because it's up off of its highs. West Texas Intermediate was trading like last month at like $84 and now it's down to $73. That also makes the administration look good. I think that this is all synthesized it's not actually representative of what's going on out in the world but then again what did I say yesterday I told you if of 5 5 reductions in numbers on off of payrolls different 5 different sectors of the world's economy or at least the United States economy like non farm payrolls reduced 818,000 that hasn't been there hasn't been a adjustment a readjustment made like that for 15 years.
All of them all 5 of those were the some of the largest reductions or the largest reassessments of what actually happened in March which was months ago March April May June July August already like so 5 months ago so 5 months ago the federal government lied directly to your face not once not twice not thrice but 5 times and I guess they expected that they could move these numbers down to actually tell us what really happened back in March like 6 months later or 5 months later and that we would just not notice. Everyone noticed. And guess what's going to happen to this administration?
Nothing. They're not going to be blamed for a single thing because all the talking heads are owned by the same companies and when I think about what companies are really driving the mainstream media it's shit like pharmaceutical companies are at the top of that heap. And yet you got Harris out there talking about how she's gonna screw the pharmaceutical companies. Yet, the pharmaceutical companies are basically saying it's okay to make these people look good. We're gonna continue to pay the rates for your for our advertising to keep CNBC afloat because without Pfizer, CNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, all the rest of them, they all go away without Pfizer. And yet we got an an administration that's running for reelection. And one of the main pieces of the platform is to crush the pharmaceutical industries and make them pay.
Make them not get as much money as they've been getting because they're evil and dirty. Do you see a problem? I see a problem. I think everybody's being lied to at every stage. If it's coming out of mainstream media, even the backdrop of what's driving mainstream media's continued zombie dom is a fucking lie. Pfizer should be telling CNBC to shut the hell up and not put Harris on because Harris wants to destroy them why aren't they doing that they certainly don't they certainly have made it evident that they are in control of what is actually said Right? We saw the whole COVID thing.
Oh, the vaccine is good for you. Yeah. Vaccine is good for you. Go get the vaccine. Oh, it's this is the most deadly pandemic ever. It's a flu. And yet Pfizer was definitely in the driver's seat of making sure that mainstream media told you about this. So why is it that they are not having CNBC and the rest of the mainstream media? Shut the hell up when Harris starts talking about how they're going to punish Pfizer and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry. You ask yourself that question. I've already come to my conclusion. Now German the Germans.
The the authorities have seized a mere $279,000 in Bitcoin ATM crackdown. Well, it's I think they only have the cash, but we're gonna find out more from decrypt and Adrian Zmudzinski. In a sweeping operation across Germany, financial regulators and law enforcement agencies have confiscated nearly $279,000 in cash, not Bitcoin, in cash, And shut down 13 cryptocurrency ATMs operating without proper authorization. The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority known as Boffin announced the results of this coordinated effort on Tuesday. In a statement that highlighted concerns over, of course, money laundering risks associated with unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges.
The operation, which involved collaboration between Bafin local law enforcement and the German Bundesbank, targeted 35 locations throughout the country. They seized a t m or the seized ATMs were primarily used for trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies operating outside the regulatory framework designed to prevent financial crimes. The crackdown reflects the growing tensions between cryptocurrency advocates and regulatory bodies. While cryptocurrencies offer potential benefits such as financial inclusion and technological innovation, they also present challenges for regulators attempting to maintain oversight and prevent illicit activities.
The action in Germany forms part of a broader trend of increased scrutiny on cryptocurrency operations worldwide. Some Bitcoin ATM operators are ideologically opposed to compliance with the regulation of Bitcoin arguing that it was introduced as an individualistic anti control technology An anonymous Bitcoin ATM operator who previously chose to deactivate their machine rather than comply with Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering regulations told Decrypt that the response to increased regulation should be to create new technologies and enhance existing ones so that peer to peer use of bitcoin is as simple and untraceable as possible, making attempts to control difficult and ineffective.
The operator further that state control is only feasible when entry points such as commercial activities are limited and identifiable. However, they posited that the widespread adoption of peer to peer transactions among users could render such control ineffective. Quote, if you work on a technology that excuse me takes power away from the state the latter will put obstacles in your way, they argued. If it didn't, it would mean we're doing something wrong. Yeah you only take flack if you're over the damn target and we are certainly over the target and we've been taking flack for well years now years all right that's it for the morning roundup Dad says, jokes, my 6 year old daughter has lined up all of her dolls towards the outdoor grill.
Looks like she's preparing for some kind of barbecue. Yeah. Alright. So everybody's lying to you. It's okay. We can at least make the decision to tell each other the truth. Support the show. Use a podcasting, or well, a modern podcasting app like Fountain. Go check out the new, how Fountain is integrated with Nostr. It's pretty slick. It really is. It's it's it's almost as if it's magic. Things like things from from fountain that you do over on fountain just magically appear on Nostr on all the clients and under certain circumstances like, dropping the URL of, like, when I release this show. Like, for instance, when I release this show, if if you take the URL that's going to be included in the announcement that I do on Nostra every morning, you scrape that you get that URL and you just post it, your post and your Nostra identity is gonna end up in my activity feed. I don't have to set that or nothing.
It's I swear to God this is magic. It's gonna get better. If you haven't tried fountain app You need to go try Fountain App. Because as far as I know, Fountain App is the only Nostr integrated modern podcasting and podcasting 2.0 that features value for value podcasting app that there is. If somebody knows of another modern podcasting app that features value for value and all the podcasting 2.0 goodies that is fully integrated with Nostr, you let me know because I will definitely want to highlight them on any of the upcoming shows.
But as far as I know, Fountain is the only one that's taken the leadership role of looking at Nostra and saying we need to integrate with that. And they've done so as of yesterday. So go check it out, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 9:10 am Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 22nd day of August 2024, and this is episode 9:40 of Bitcoin. And remember how I was talking about Ark yesterday?
This layer 2 situation that came up I don't know like sometime earlier or later last year or very early this year it's not lightning network it's something different I explained a little bit about it. The version 2 ks or version 0.2 came out yesterday. Well, Ark is back in the news again today. We're gonna get into that one. There's also another story that I thought about talking about yesterday but it's this I don't know what is it polygon or babylon that's it. I was gonna do it yesterday but decided better, for it because it's about Bitcoin staking.
However, it looks like there might be some, there's like enough activity of these people buying Bitcoin to stake this Babylon platform thing that it could have affected the Bitcoin price to shoot up to the 61 k handle. I am not a fan of staking. However, if there is another group out there that is buying a substantial amount of Bitcoin, I remember when FTX started the amount of Bitcoin that they were buying and we all saw where that shit went. So I think we should probably talk about that. Griffin Digital is in the news as well as Fountain. Fountain has made a release. If you don't know what Fountain is, it is my daily driver. It is a modern podcast app. It's not a legacy app because it has actual features, you know, like chapters and transcripts and chapter art as well as whole album art and all manner of podcasting 2.0. Goodness. They have made a massive release yesterday.
There is also some funky stuff going on in Germany and ATMs. But let's start with Arc Labs. Bitcoin Magazine Alex Bergeron is writing this one. Tim Draper of Draper fame this is the Tim Draper has now invested in Ark Labs to make Bitcoin payments easier. Bitcoin scaling proposal Ark, which I talked about yesterday, is getting closer to reality after a year of research focused on refining the reference implementation. Arc Labs announced today the completion of a $2,500,000 pre seed funding round led by Tim Draper and his firm Draper Associates. While the technically fees or the technical feasibility of Ark's approach was initially debated, today's announcement is a strong show of confidence for the future of the protocol and the builders behind it.
Speaking with Bitcoin Magazine, Arc Labs co founder Marco Argentieri expressed excitement about the road ahead suggesting Arc is ready to provide a significant lift to scaling efforts The funding will accelerate our efforts to make Bitcoin transactions as simple and user friendly as possible making fast, low cost, user friendly transactions powered by Bitcoin a reality for potentially billions of people worldwide initially conceived as an alternative to the Lightning Network. Argin Thierry emphasizes that his company's immediate focus is on supporting the adoption of Bitcoin's popular Layer 2 solution. Lightning has made tremendous strides recently, he said. We believe that we can leverage this network effect to bring Ark to market and enhance the self custodial experience for existing Lightning users Arc addresses these challenges by utilizing trustless servers allowing Lightning users to migrate or mitigate the difficulties typically encountered with operating Lightning infrastructure A recent trend in reducing the cost of on chain operations related to liquidity management has been to rely on custodial or federated options such as the liquid side chain. Unfortunately, this approach introduces solid custodial trade offs that conflict with Bitcoin's original vision.
Ark has the potential to overcome these challenges at scale without compromising trust. Asked about his motivation behind the investment lead investor Tim Draper echo the sentiment soon many people around the world will live on the bitcoin standard today we have to focus not only on how to buy and store bitcoin but how to use it as a medium of exchange for everyday purposes. ARK's architecture allows for seamless bitcoin payments in a way that stays true to its core principles of decentralization and self custody. One of Arc Lab's early challenges was to transform the Arc Protocol from a raw concept into a fully realized solution According to Argentieri the initial documentation and parameters proposed by its creator were not fully fleshed out and sometimes hindered a broader understanding of the technology many of the concepts lacked full development and the arbitrary numbers being discussed failed to capture the protocol's flexibility particularly in addressing liquidity issues, he explained.
Perhaps the most notable confusion has been around the need for covenants. Bitcoin covenants are smart contract restrictions that limit how and where future transactions can be spent, enhancing security and control over funds. While covenants can significantly contribute to the user experience around ARC as well as potentially improve capital efficiency, Argentieri insists that a good number of use cases can already benefit from a covenantless version quote different types of users can leverage Arc's features while mobile clients are more challenging right now using pre signed transactions is a viable alternative to covenants for online servers end quote He believes his company is well positioned to deliver the 1st production service that can validate the potential of the technology.
When ARC is operational with actual capital deployed and large number of users are benefiting from the infrastructure it should help make a strong case for covenants. The team recently released an alpha version of the covenant list implementation now available on Github. Soon to follow will be the Arc node an ARC enabled wallet allowing users to send, receive and swap Bitcoin over the Lightning Network all within a user friendly dashboard. Interested users should sign up on the website to receive updates for the closed beta testing in early September, with a broader rollout expected later this year.
Joining this funding round, our Bitcoin focused funds Acxiom and Folger Ventures along with prominent angel investors Stephen Cole, Alan Farrington, general partner at Acxiom shared his enthusiasm for the project. Quote, we are excited to support what appears to be a substantial breakthrough in broadening Bitcoin's utility as a means of payment and bringing increased sophistication to the financial infrastructure of the network. Arc Labs invites developers, top talent, and potential partners to contribute to its efforts. Alright. So the website, if you want to go and sign up for the well, for the closed beta is arclabs.
To. That's arclabs. To. See if you can get into that because I am definitely gonna try to get into that one myself. Bitcoin staking platform, Babylon, to start phased main net main net launch this week. CoinDesk, Jamie Crawley. Before we all start gagging our guts out, let's just figure out what the hell is going on here. Bitcoin staking platform Babylon, led by a Stanford University professor and tipped to be one of the more promising new scaling projects the oldest and largest blockchain is moving to the next stage of its development, which with plans to launch the first phase of its main network on August 22nd Babylon raised a $70,000,000 funding round led by Paradigm earlier this year.
The project is led by Stanford engineering professor David See, that's spelled t s e, known for his prior research on information theory while working at the University of California in Berkeley during the first phase BTC holders will be able to lock their tokens on the Bitcoin network according to an email release on Monday For security purposes, Babylon is imposing a cap of 1,000 BTC that users can stake in total. Staking refers to the process of crypto holders offering their tokens to a network in order to finance its ongoing operation with the expectation of getting rewards in return. How is this not a security?
Whatever. Similar to putting money in a savings account to acquire interest. This system is fundamental to most blockchains, but Bitcoin is not one of them. Therefore staking is largely absent from the world's largest cryptocurrency network Babylon is attempting to address this difference in the coming months which will add greater utility to Bitcoin the project is being supported by over 200 quote finality providers whatever the hell that is who will approve transactions to maintain the network's protocol operation similar to the role of validators and proof of stake ecosystems.
Allnodes, Figment and Galaxy Digital are among the finality providers according to the release. This is a scam. Straight up scam. Do not get suckered into staking your coins on this bullshit Babylon platform because what'll happen? You will lose your coins. You will lose your coins. You will not make any money from this. Even if you didn't lose your coins you'll probably never give them back it's just solid it's going to be a 100% IOU and you're not going to get any money from this thing this is a way for people to abscond with your bitcoin So when over the next few months you are going to want to watch out for what Babylon is doing. If they are indeed buying massive amounts of Bitcoin to stake on this protocol then I fear another FTX type debacle will happen. Now, I don't think Babylon will get anywhere close to as big of the britches as FTX was when it collapsed but this is in my opinion is not good for Bitcoin.
There's no reason for staking. We've already been through this argument. We told the people at Ethereum to not do staking that they needed to continue the security model of using electricity to convert into physical security for their blockchain they didn't listen to us and now everything on that chain is has to have permission that is not the ethos of Bitcoin so whatever it is that babylon says that they're trying to do I disagree that it is not only is it not correct I disagree with the fact that they're being truthful at all I think they're lying to you to try to get your bitcoin on their stupid ass chain don't do it don't do it don't do it but here's something that was done Griffin digital mining has acquired a low cost bitcoin mining operation at $0.01 per kilowatt hour that is 1p per kilowatt hour I live in Washington where there's a whole bunch of God was a hydro hydropower like you know water flowing over you know through dams and turning turbines and the cost around here I think is somewhere between like 6.5¢ per kilowatt hour.
Griffin Digital Mining has just secured 1p per kilowatt hour. Griffin Digital Mining has taken a big step in lowering its power cost by acquiring Bitcoin mining operations in Louisiana that leverage ultra low cost electricity at approximately 1¢ per kilowatt hour. This $1,500,000 acquisition which includes up to 2.9 megawatts of operational capacity and 59 petahashes per second of bitcoin mining equipment comes fully equipped with assets including gas powered generators and containers and is expected to generate around $1,000,000 in annual revenue according to the announcement quote.
We believe that this acquisition of ultra low cost power is our first step along an identified path of over 500 megawatts of similar low cost power generation opportunities, said Griffin CEO Rob Chang. The current post halving world is requiring Bitcoin miners to secure low cost power in order to thrive in an increasing global hash rate environment. With the acquisition of this $0.01 power asset and future power generation assets with similar costs we believe that Griffon will enhance its position as a leading low cost operator with a competitive advantage in a key cost aspect of the Bitcoin mining business end quote Griffin reinforced that it is committed to reducing carbon emissions by utilizing flare gas in its operations flare gas a byproduct of oil extraction that is often burned off and released into the atmosphere as CO2 is repurposed by Griffin as an energy source for Bitcoin mining by converting this otherwise wasted gas into productive energy Griffin not only powers its mining operations but also mitigates environmental impact by lowering the carbon emissions that would have been generated through flaring We are particularly excited about the opportunities of ultra low cost power that is being afforded us further stated Chang quote we expect that low cost power will allow for the possibility of greater margins using state of the art mining equipment or enabling return on investment on cheaper machines that are not economically viable at higher cost operations Other possibilities include hosting services or providing high performance compute operations. Okay. So Louisiana is a high gas when you drill in Louisiana and I know this because my dad drilled a lot of wells in Louisiana, there's a lot of natural gas down there. Who knows why? It's just it just so happens that around Louisiana you're always gonna get a whole bunch of natural gas along with your extracted oil. And you gotta do something with it. And if you don't have infrastructure to compress and pipe that, that natural gas to where it can be sold on the open market and then used by, you know, municipalities, then you gotta do something with it. And and even though that I am not one of these guys that are constantly beating the we're all gonna die because of climate change people, I will say this.
I would rather have a shit ton of c02 in the air than a whole bunch of methane in the air. But there's kind of a problem with that. I'll get to it here in a second. Methane itself if you just look at the chemistry can trap a lot more atmospheric heat than co2 can. And I've heard anywhere between 75 times to almost a 100 times worse than co2. That's what methane will do in the atmosphere. However there's there's something that we should probably look at here. Methane is a rather heavy molecule heavier than oxygen and it's heavier than carbon dioxide and it's heavier than heavier than nitrogen so it has this tendency not to get up into the upper atmosphere which is where people are really concerned about the we're all gonna die because of global warming shit it just so happens it just so happens that ruminants cows and deer and whatnot when they're eating grass they burp methane but when they do burp methane they burp it and while their heads are you know under 7 foot you know like at least under 7 foot in altitude.
So the methane has a tendency to settle to the ground. What does that do? Well it feeds a whole group of bacteria and other critters in the soil called methanophores. And that just means methane eaters. Exactly. The soil already contains the ability to eradicate methane as it settles into the soil because there's a whole bunch of critters down there that are hungry for that carbon skeleton. Because it's a single c with a single carbon atom with 4 hydrogen atoms around it. That's what methane is. Right? So the the little critters that are in the soil want the carbon because that carbon, they can do all kinds of stuff with the carbon. Alright? And I won't get into it.
Just understand that the soil is already prepped with a methane filter. So the people that are constantly screaming that we're all gonna die because of flare gas or we're all gonna die because of cows and ruminants, they're all crazy because they haven't probably ever taken an ecology class in their life or a biology class in their life probably never a cell biology or god forbid a molecular biology where you figure out how all this stuff actually works Be that as it may, 1¢ per kilowatt hour is nothing to sneeze at. Let's run the numbers. West Texas Intermediate Oil getting a bump today. It's over 2 points to the upside. $73.42 Brent Norsey also up over 2 points to 77.64.
Natural gas down almost a full 6 points to $2.04 per 1,000 cubic feet. Gasoline is up 1.47% back up to $2.23 a gallon even though I've never seen that price at a pump. All your shiny metal rocks are doing piss poor today including gold which has lost a full point to $2,521. Silver is down a point. Platinum is down 2. Copper is down 1. Palladium is down 2.5. Ag is fully mixed today. The biggest winner is lumber. 1.66 percent to the upside. Biggest loser today is wheat. A full two points to the downside. Live cattle up 0.73%. Lean hogs up 2.79%, and feeder cattle are up a full point. Legacy indices are down today. They're all in the red. I guess everybody's waiting on Powell or something.
The Dow is down, 5th of a point. The S and P is down a third. Nasdaq is down 2 thirds, and the S and P Mini is down 1 5th of a point. On to Clark Moody's Bitcoin, the price that we only give a shit about anymore is $60,530. That is a $1,200,000,000,000 market cap. And with gold's, losing streak today, we can now purchase 24.3 ounces of the shiny metal rock with your 1 bitcoin of which there are 19,000,000 743,003,162 of. And average fees per block shot the hell up. Yesterday it was at 0.06btc fees on average per block. Today it's point 6 BTC per block. What the hell happened?
It looks like there might have been a glitch in fee averaging on on Bitcoin Core. I don't know yet. We're, we'll probably find out more about what happened this morning. But fees have have gone back down. We'll we'll get to that here in a second. Actually, we're gonna get to it right damn now. There are a 143 blocks carrying 319,000 unconfirmed transactions. And high priorities are only gonna cost you 4 satoshis per vbyte like it was yesterday. Low priority is also 4 satoshis per vbyte. Again, I don't know what happened. However, what I can say is that for about 7 or 8 blocks there were blocks were getting excessive fees like 567 satoshis per vbyte.
That has calmed down. But we're gonna have to just kind of take a wait and see attitude on it. Mining is at 645.7 exahashes per second. So we've gained quite a bit. From Professor Mel Salvador, which was Bitcoin and episode 939, mini pigeon boosted me 5,000 sat says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. The wild hustle with a 1,000 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Yeager with a 121 says playing with the new fountain update. So far loving it. Thank you, sir. No thank you. Pies to pleb, 420. Thank you, sir. No thank you. And Svoboda with a 100 says, test boost after Nostra Connect to see how this song bitch works.
I hear you, man. We're all talking about the fountain update. Don't worry. We'll get to it. God's death with 237 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Hugh Janus with a 100 says tidy. Nice. And then there's a couple of more, but these are not boost. They are fountainous scraping from nostril a whole bunch more people. And every single time that somebody drops the URL for this particular episode or any of my particular episodes on Nostr it somehow or another fountain is able to scrape that information like I was telling you about yesterday and put it here in my activity of fountain for these particular episodes So you got like a well I can't pronounce it because it's like I don't know 0 underscore 0 around parentheses it looks like some eyeballs I can't pronounce that and then pies to pleb puts in the URL for this episode and says nothing and there's no boost. So we're gonna have to get used to some things going on and I'm gonna talk about what what in fact that this stuff is here in a second but before I do that let me finish up by saying that my geyser project is up and running it's geyser.fundgeyser.fundforward/project forward slash the Bitcoin and podcast all one word the Bitcoin and podcast all one word go if you if you want to go try out geyser dot fund and see how it works you can use that URL to throw me some satoshis over on geyser if for whatever reason you don't want to do it on fountain or you don't want to zap me on nostr. I'm trying to get like a whole bunch of different places where if you want to support this show then you can support the show. Okay. That's it for the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use fountain version 1.1 open social podcasting powered by nostr has been released fountain a lightning powered value for value podcasting app is now a Nostr client. That's right. It's a full blown Nostr client. Your fountain profile syncs with your Nostr profile, making your activity visible across the Nostr ecosystem. Quote, today, we are excited to announce a massive update to Fountain that solves these problems with Nostr a simple decentralized messaging protocol that allows social activity to be shared across different apps announced the project The Nostra protocol is evolving rapidly and Fountain 1.1 is only scratching the surface of what's possible In the coming months we will be fine tuning Fountain's social features and adding new ones too added the project So here's what's new.
This just dropped yesterday. This is they Oscar, Mary, and crew over at Fountain. They just announced this yesterday. And since yesterday, I have seen an explosion in my activity, that's being shown to me inside my fountain app. And that's because I was part of the beta. I signed up. I asked Oscar, can I please please please be part of the beta and find out how this shit works? And I was able to see a whole bunch of stuff being done before the or how it works before the rest of everybody on nostr got to see it. And I gotta tell you when you release something like this to 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000 of people it just flipped my lid on the amount of activity that I was getting over on fountain and if I'm getting this kind of activity I know the other podcasters are like going what the hell's going on because we're seeing stuff in our fountain feeds that is coming directly off of Nostra. Now I've explained this before but this is now solidly connected to all Nostr users that are also using Fountain.
So, you can connect or you can create a Nostr profile inside of Fountain. Create or import a Nostr account in the Fountain app to provide or to find previous follows tap the icon in the top right on the home screen. You can share your boost and comments on Nostr. When you boost or comment on Fountain, your message will be shared on Nostr with a fountain link. Other Nostr clients can see, interact, and follow you. You can choose to share your activity on Nostr each time you boost or comment. If not it remains visible only on fountain so they give you a switch a little toggle there that's nice a new and improved home feed the fountain home feed is now nostr's audio layer Wow, that's an interesting way to put it. You can switch between following and global feeds, or filter by podcast or music content.
Audio posts from Nostr clients now appear in fountain. Audio links posted on Nostr clients like Primal will appear in the fountain home feed. Indexed podcasts or music rendered as playable content cards with comments. Zaps. Of course, listeners on fountain and other Nostril clients can zap your post to send payments replacing the earlier likes. Likes are still available and are now free. Mention. Mention others and comments by typing at followed by their username to send recommendations or tag them in conversations. So, this may not sound on the surface this may not sound like it's earth shattering but it is and the reason I say that is that there was an entire network that was basically self contained inside a fountain a network of people a network of podcasts a network of people making clips from other people's podcasts there were people commenting I mean it was it was a completely self contained not terribly large but large enough that it was an actual network effect and remember what I keep saying when you have 2 networks that have different DNA and they connect together and somehow or another they have something in common that they can share between networks then you might as well have just formed a great big network literally 2x ing a network simply by 2 strands of these networks touching each other and trading something of value in this case it's satoshis because zaps exist and because zaps are present on nostril and because zaps were present on fountain that was a common what I don't want to say a common piece of DNA because it wasn't the DNA of Fountain is podcasting the DNA of nostrils notes these are different organisms and yet somehow through the notion of Zaps lightning network and a couple of other things those two networks are now it's intrinsically tied together and they will never come apart unless you know Oscar Mayer decides to detach this entire experiment but I don't think he will because this is just too good and now the amount of people that were talking about Fountain yesterday on Noster was immense if you're if you have never tried Fountain app as your daily driver for a podcast whether you're already using podcasting 2.0 or not, right? If you're using a legacy app, please don't do that. Please use a modern podcasting app like Podcast Guru or fountain app. If you haven't tried Fountain app at least try it. It's not going to kill you and now you can simply log in with your nostril credentials and I was able to do that on Fountain on my web app not on my phone on my desktop because I have the get albie extension.
And it handles putting in my private and and my private and public key pair but it does it in a much more secure way than just copying and pasting your insect. Please don't do that. Please use an extension of some kind. But congratulations to Oscar Mayer and the crew over at Fountain App. I cannot wait to see what comes next. And I've already said it yesterday on Nostr. I don't even think the developers Oscar Mayer and his crew I don't even think they fully understand what they just unleashed. I know I don't, but I do know that it's going to have ramifications well beyond what we think.
It may not lock in tomorrow or the next day but soon you're going to see some serious shit. Now, from Cointelegraph, Ciaran Lyons has this one: Bitcoin open interest jumps 1 point $3,000,000,000 following the Federal Reserve's dovish minutes. Let's find out what Jerome Powell actually said yesterday. Bitcoin future traders added over a1000000000 to Bitcoin open interest in the hours after the United States Federal Reserve released its July meeting minutes which some say further confirms a September interest rate cut. On August 22nd Bitcoin futures OI climbed to $31,920,000,000 an increase of $1,260,000,000 compared to the previous 12 hours.
However, the data shows that the cohort is fairly split on whether Bitcoin's price will rise or fall. Over the 12 hour period, long traders held a slight advantage with 50.63% of total future positions compared to 49.37 for shorts. But Bitcoin's price is trading at roughly 60,600 and $3 give or take, a level that has been hovering around since August 9th according to coin market cap data. 10x Research head of research wow. 10x Research head of research, Marcus Thielen, commented that the Fed's minutes quote makes a rate cut in September almost a certainty quote a vast majority of FOMAC members supported a rate cut in September with several members even considering a July cut as a plausible option Thielen stated. Bitcoin looks like it's ready to break higher. The Fed minutes were released a few hours ago with a very dovish tone said pseudonymous cryptic trader Sky O'Dellic.
I don't know who the hell that is. When interest rates drop investors typically move away from safe assets like bonds and term deposits turning instead to perceived riskier assets like Bitcoin quote prepare yourself for one of the most explosive 4th quarters in history For US markets and Indian markets, crypto commentator Nishant Barawad Daj stated, citing the Fed being on the verge of cutting interest rates. Another quote says Powell's upcoming Friday speech is expected to reinforce this dovish outlook likely boosting risk assets like stocks and bitcoin as monetary policy provides a favorable backdrop, Thielen stated. Meanwhile, on August 15th Caldwell Investment Management Portfolio Manager Justin Elliott opined that there is nothing to support the level of aggression expected by the Fed to cut its rates. Yeah. Who knows?
Although, here's here's my gut that they're going to cut in September. There's too many people in the in in there's too many Fed guys that are screaming for interest rate cuts. And and if they get an interest rate cut before the November elections, guess who looks good? Kamala Harris and the Biden administration. That's right. At every single God every single talking head is going to be saying see what a good job they're doing what a good job Harris is doing when Harris and Biden has nothing to do with it. The administration of the United States at the executive level has jack shit to say about what the Fed does other than other than appoint the chairman. And maybe a couple of other directors. I'm not exactly sure about the the sub guys, but the chairman of the Fed, that is appointed by the president of the United States. And who appointed Jerome Powell?
But that's what you're going to see. You're going to see a rate cut in September. You're already seeing somehow or another much reduced energy prices as far as the price of oil is concerned because it's up off of its highs. West Texas Intermediate was trading like last month at like $84 and now it's down to $73. That also makes the administration look good. I think that this is all synthesized it's not actually representative of what's going on out in the world but then again what did I say yesterday I told you if of 5 5 reductions in numbers on off of payrolls different 5 different sectors of the world's economy or at least the United States economy like non farm payrolls reduced 818,000 that hasn't been there hasn't been a adjustment a readjustment made like that for 15 years.
All of them all 5 of those were the some of the largest reductions or the largest reassessments of what actually happened in March which was months ago March April May June July August already like so 5 months ago so 5 months ago the federal government lied directly to your face not once not twice not thrice but 5 times and I guess they expected that they could move these numbers down to actually tell us what really happened back in March like 6 months later or 5 months later and that we would just not notice. Everyone noticed. And guess what's going to happen to this administration?
Nothing. They're not going to be blamed for a single thing because all the talking heads are owned by the same companies and when I think about what companies are really driving the mainstream media it's shit like pharmaceutical companies are at the top of that heap. And yet you got Harris out there talking about how she's gonna screw the pharmaceutical companies. Yet, the pharmaceutical companies are basically saying it's okay to make these people look good. We're gonna continue to pay the rates for your for our advertising to keep CNBC afloat because without Pfizer, CNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, all the rest of them, they all go away without Pfizer. And yet we got an an administration that's running for reelection. And one of the main pieces of the platform is to crush the pharmaceutical industries and make them pay.
Make them not get as much money as they've been getting because they're evil and dirty. Do you see a problem? I see a problem. I think everybody's being lied to at every stage. If it's coming out of mainstream media, even the backdrop of what's driving mainstream media's continued zombie dom is a fucking lie. Pfizer should be telling CNBC to shut the hell up and not put Harris on because Harris wants to destroy them why aren't they doing that they certainly don't they certainly have made it evident that they are in control of what is actually said Right? We saw the whole COVID thing.
Oh, the vaccine is good for you. Yeah. Vaccine is good for you. Go get the vaccine. Oh, it's this is the most deadly pandemic ever. It's a flu. And yet Pfizer was definitely in the driver's seat of making sure that mainstream media told you about this. So why is it that they are not having CNBC and the rest of the mainstream media? Shut the hell up when Harris starts talking about how they're going to punish Pfizer and the rest of the pharmaceutical industry. You ask yourself that question. I've already come to my conclusion. Now German the Germans.
The the authorities have seized a mere $279,000 in Bitcoin ATM crackdown. Well, it's I think they only have the cash, but we're gonna find out more from decrypt and Adrian Zmudzinski. In a sweeping operation across Germany, financial regulators and law enforcement agencies have confiscated nearly $279,000 in cash, not Bitcoin, in cash, And shut down 13 cryptocurrency ATMs operating without proper authorization. The German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority known as Boffin announced the results of this coordinated effort on Tuesday. In a statement that highlighted concerns over, of course, money laundering risks associated with unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges.
The operation, which involved collaboration between Bafin local law enforcement and the German Bundesbank, targeted 35 locations throughout the country. They seized a t m or the seized ATMs were primarily used for trading Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies operating outside the regulatory framework designed to prevent financial crimes. The crackdown reflects the growing tensions between cryptocurrency advocates and regulatory bodies. While cryptocurrencies offer potential benefits such as financial inclusion and technological innovation, they also present challenges for regulators attempting to maintain oversight and prevent illicit activities.
The action in Germany forms part of a broader trend of increased scrutiny on cryptocurrency operations worldwide. Some Bitcoin ATM operators are ideologically opposed to compliance with the regulation of Bitcoin arguing that it was introduced as an individualistic anti control technology An anonymous Bitcoin ATM operator who previously chose to deactivate their machine rather than comply with Know Your Customer and Anti Money Laundering regulations told Decrypt that the response to increased regulation should be to create new technologies and enhance existing ones so that peer to peer use of bitcoin is as simple and untraceable as possible, making attempts to control difficult and ineffective.
The operator further that state control is only feasible when entry points such as commercial activities are limited and identifiable. However, they posited that the widespread adoption of peer to peer transactions among users could render such control ineffective. Quote, if you work on a technology that excuse me takes power away from the state the latter will put obstacles in your way, they argued. If it didn't, it would mean we're doing something wrong. Yeah you only take flack if you're over the damn target and we are certainly over the target and we've been taking flack for well years now years all right that's it for the morning roundup Dad says, jokes, my 6 year old daughter has lined up all of her dolls towards the outdoor grill.
Looks like she's preparing for some kind of barbecue. Yeah. Alright. So everybody's lying to you. It's okay. We can at least make the decision to tell each other the truth. Support the show. Use a podcasting, or well, a modern podcasting app like Fountain. Go check out the new, how Fountain is integrated with Nostr. It's pretty slick. It really is. It's it's it's almost as if it's magic. Things like things from from fountain that you do over on fountain just magically appear on Nostr on all the clients and under certain circumstances like, dropping the URL of, like, when I release this show. Like, for instance, when I release this show, if if you take the URL that's going to be included in the announcement that I do on Nostra every morning, you scrape that you get that URL and you just post it, your post and your Nostra identity is gonna end up in my activity feed. I don't have to set that or nothing.
It's I swear to God this is magic. It's gonna get better. If you haven't tried fountain app You need to go try Fountain App. Because as far as I know, Fountain App is the only Nostr integrated modern podcasting and podcasting 2.0 that features value for value podcasting app that there is. If somebody knows of another modern podcasting app that features value for value and all the podcasting 2.0 goodies that is fully integrated with Nostr, you let me know because I will definitely want to highlight them on any of the upcoming shows.
But as far as I know, Fountain is the only one that's taken the leadership role of looking at Nostra and saying we need to integrate with that. And they've done so as of yesterday. So go check it out, and I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Market Updates and Analysis
Closing Remarks and Call to Action
