Join me today for Episode 950 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- MetaPlanet Buys More BTC Using Debt
- BTC ETFs Recover Some Loses
- Fud.B.I. is at it Again
- Vitor Pamplona: Tor Inside Amethyst
- Blitz Wallet Adds eCash
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/metaplanet-buys-additional-300-million-worth-of-bitcoin
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/09/10/bitcoin-etfs-post-287m-inflows-after-record-losing-streak/
https://decrypt.co/248688/crypto-was-involved-in-87-of-all-investment-fraud-in-2023-says-fbi
https://primal.net/e/note1m3f362tuqka60d56vegur37c8n5m6vxflqzmtk07d7aa3y56tmsqndr2x8
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
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https://primal.net/e/note1n82a3q2d7fvk8em6350v027092my90p6zahq8yx52zjmw9aghpfs9p7wwy
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/10101-to-wind-down-operations-by-november-3rd/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/robosats-v0-7-0-alpha/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/blitz-wallet-v0-2-7-beta/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/japans-largest-electricity-provider-explores-bitcoin-mining-with-surplus-renewable-energy/
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[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
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 8:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 10th day of 9th month, September 20 24.
And this is episode 950 of Bitcoin. And, man, that's wow. That's we're 50 shows away from going into 4 figures on, Bitcoin and it's kind of kind of exciting, honestly. I just every time I think about it, it's it's very much a surprise and I am very happy to have you guys along for the ride. Okay. Let's get right on into the news. It's probably gonna be a shorter show today. Meta Planet has bought yet more Bitcoin. Specifically, an additional 1 no. 300,000,000 yen worth of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin. Meta Planet, a publicly listed Japanese company, announced that it had purchased 38.6 Bitcoin for 300,000,000 yen, which is right around $2,200,000 bringing its total Bitcoin Treasury to almost 400 BTC.
Kind of amazing when you think about it. They they really they Meta Planet really didn't start buying Bitcoin until just a few months ago and they've already accumulated like 400 Bitcoin. Honestly, that's that's really impressive. Because I think oh, who is it? Fold has, like, a 1,000 Bitcoin in their treasury and they've been around for years. And here we have Meta Planet just taking a page from Saylor, man. Just going all in, it looks like. This latest Bitcoin acquisition comes after Meta Planet announced in August that it would raise 10,080,000,000 yen to purchase yet more Bitcoin, part of its broader corporate strategy to allocate funds to Bitcoin.
Meta Planet first adopted a pro Bitcoin investment policy earlier this year and has steadily accumulated Bitcoin and they now hold almost 400. Meta Planet's ongoing Bitcoin Treasury build mimics MicroStrategy's playbook, which has raised debt to buy Bitcoin. Public companies seem to have discovered a model. Oh my God, a model for acquiring Bitcoin. Yeah, selling worthless debt to acquire Bitcoin, which will appreciate and then they can pay back their debt and still have Bitcoin left over in their treasury. As long as the price of Bitcoin goes up, ladies and gentlemen, that shit works. But, man, I would be I would lose sleep. I would. I mean, it's not that I don't hate Bitcoin, you know me, I'm just saying that you're kind of depending on the market psychology and a whole bunch of other external factors to keep your price rising in a time horizon that you can service the debt on.
So I'm just saying I would be if it was me, dude, I'd be losing sleep. But whatever. Other firms are following the strategy. And it includes firms like Marathon Digital Holdings, which recently raised a $250,000,000 convertible note offering to buy more Bitcoin. And then we have Similar Scientific, which also announced plans to raise more money to buy more Bitcoin. Companies can capitalize on Bitcoin's appreciation potential by borrowing fiat currency at low interest rates to purchase Bitcoin. This allows public companies to gain Bitcoin exposure without liquidating existing assets. What this is is essentially a carry trade.
We remember, like, in August. I think it was August 5th. The yen US dollar carry trade collapsed because in a surprise move, the Bank of Japan decided to raise their rates, which caused all the borrowed yen to become more expensive to pay back in debt. And we saw collapses everywhere from the Dow Jones all the way through crypto up to actual real honest to God Bitcoin. Everything fell and there's talk on the street that that yen carry trade is still people are still trying to service that by selling hard and soft assets hard assets being like you know real estate and gold and whatnot and then we have the softer assets like equities and stocks and these kinds of things but they're needing to get the money to be able to service and or pay back the entirety of their yen or their their loans that were denominated in yen because they've always been at these historic low interest rates because they were borrowing in and then converting it and then buying actual assets with it or equities or something else.
And they always went to Japan to go do this because Japan's interest rates have historically been low for decades. Lower than anybody else for decades. And all of a sudden, Japan and Ueda, their, I guess, their chief minister for finance, sort of like our treasury secretary, decided to raise rates. Well, they announced that one, but then then they did the surprise raise, I think, of 25 basis points on August somewhere around August 5th. And then on August 5th, you saw everything shit the bad. Because everybody was selling, oh my God, we've got to get out of these we've got to get out of these things that we've bought with this borrowed yen enough so that we can either pay back the loans in their in their entirety or collect up enough cash and be liquid in the US dollar to be able to pay back these loans and service or or service the debt on these loans at least and there's a lot of people that are saying that that action has not yet completed that people are still trying to get out of positions so that they can either service or pay back these loans denominated in the Japanese yen so this is the same thing this selling of debt to buy bitcoin or this actually this printing of debt to buy Bitcoin either by issuing new shares of companies in MicroStrategy's case.
I mean, they did a 10 for 1 stock split not too long ago, like last month. Right? A 10 for 1 stock split. And there you I guarantee that Michael Saylor is using this new stock this new stock print to buy more Bitcoin. However, it's it's just a dicey dicey situation. And I'm not saying not do it. I'm just and I'm not saying that I don't like it. I'm just saying, again, I don't know if there's enough Lunesta in the world to keep me asleep if I was people like the guys over at Meta Planet, the guys over at Semler. Michael Saylor, he doesn't give a shit. He'll go sleep on his yacht. He's fine.
But the smaller companies like Semler and Meta Planet, that's a real gamble. And they're do it they're they're sitting at the same table playing the same game as Michael Saylor. It's a brave, you know, it's a bold move. Cotton, we'll have to see how it plays out. Meanwhile, over at CoinDesk, Bitcoin ETFs post a $28,700,000 inflow after a record losing streak. And that $28,700,000 is gonna look kinda small here in a second. Spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds listed in the United States posted just over $28,700,000 in net inflows on Monday, ending a record outflow streak worth $1,200,000,000 Right? 28.7 versus 1,200,000,000 or 28,700,000 versus 1,200,000,000 is one hell of a gap to fill. Anyway, the ETFs lost money since August 27th.
And Monday was the 1st day of net inflows in September, a month that traders have previously warned to be bearish for the leading cryptocurrency. Outflows from ETFs signal a lack of new demand among professional investors. And the outflows have taken net inflows since inception under the $17,000,000,000 mark back to levels last seen in July meanwhile BTC prices are down nearly 15% in the past 2 weeks or 25% below March's lifetime peak of 73,300. However, some traders remain bullish. Even with all the near term noise and volatile price action we remain structurally bullish, QCP Capital Trader said in a Telegram broadcast on Tuesday.
And it certainly looks like the market is also taking advantage of this leg lower to pile on more bullish trades. Quote, the bounce from 52,500 is encouraging. So did we see the bottom? Although we can't be certain, some institutions seems seems to think so as they take this opportunity to add to their bullish bets in December March traders added the coin desk 20 a measure of the largest and most liquid digital assets is up 2.3% trading at 1800 Meanwhile, BTC is trading above 56,500 slipping from 57,000 ahead of the next CPI and PPI releases.
And also the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Poly market traders are pretty certain that crypto isn't going to be mentioned during the debate giving only an 11% chance of Harris mentioning the term or Bitcoin and a 13% chance of Trump saying it. Traders are also expecting the debate to run into overtime with only a 30% chance of it ending on schedule at 10:30 pm. Jeez, you guys well, the freaking d gens will bet on anything. I mean, the the time of the end of the debate is a bet. What I mean, what kind of degeneracy are we in, ladies and gentlemen? Elsewhere, several prominent AI tokens. You know what? Uh-uh. Because they go into a whole bunch of shit coinery. I'm not gonna do it. Wish CoinDesk would stop doing it as well. Decrypt, crypto was involved in 87% of all investment fraud in 2023 according to your friends at the FBI.
A Mirazza Merchant is writing this one. Investment fraud in the US hit an all time high in 2023 with losses skyrocketing to $4,500,000,000 with cryptocurrency related scams emerging as the primary driver. According to US Federal Bureau of Investigation's latest annual report, crypto was involved in a record 87% of all losses and totaled 3,960,000,000 that represents a dramatic increase from 3,300,000,000 in 2022 and a staggering 18 times increase from the $253,000,000 lost back in 2018, according to the FBI. The law enforcement agency compiles data from reports submitted to its Internet Crime Complaint Center, often abbreviated as the IC3.
The new report reveals that the number of investment fraud victims in 2023 was 11 times higher than 5 years ago with complaints rising from 3,693 in 2018 to 39,500 last year. The average loss per victim? $115,500 which is up from $68,496 in 2018. Millennials were the most frequently targeted age group for investment fraud, followed closely by Gen X. About 2 thirds of investment fraud victims were between the ages of 30 50 years old, while 13% were in their 20s or younger. And 22 percent were 60 and older. But already this year, the FBI has flagged that North Korean hackers appear to be targeting Bitcoin ETF issuers in the United States. And the agency said just last week that the would be hackers are employing quote difficult to detect social engineering campaigns against those working inside the crypto sector, including those in the decentralized finance as well as the ETF space.
The 2023 report also put the spotlight on a particularly deceptive form of crypto fraud commonly referred to as pig butchering. Pig butchering. In these scams, fraudsters establish fake romantic relationships with targets, usually through online dating platforms or social media. Once they've won their target's trust, the scammer convinces them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes. Quote, crypto scams are particularly appealing to fraudsters because transfers are irreversible, payments are not protected by the government, and there is no central authority or bank to flag such suspicious activity, the FBI wrote.
The geographic distribution of investment fraud varies across the United States. California residents suffered the highest collective losses of $984,000,000 in 2023, while Maryland had the highest rate of investment fraud at 14.4 victims per 100,000 residents. To protect against crypto and other investment scams, the report recommends thorough research, skepticism through high pressure tactics and consultation with licensed financial advisors. It also advises verifying investment opportunities with official sources and understanding the associated risks before committing funds.
Okay. So the FBI, after scaring the bejesus out of everybody with their North Korea hackers are targeting Bitcoin ETFs, now they've released their 2023 report. How's it not coordinated? It's all this entire thing. This entire this entire narrative that the FBI is running is it's reprehensible, honestly, because it's it's straight up market manipulation. Now I'm not saying that the data in their report isn't true. I have no evidence to think otherwise. In fact, I think that this data is probably pretty accurate. So how is it a fraud? Because of the timing of the release of the report on the North Korean hackers. This report was always going to come out today.
Listen, I mean, it's not I don't think it's fabricated. I think this report is probably fairly truthful insofar that it's almost inside the range of me trusting the FBI as far as I can throw them, which ain't very far. But, honestly, this report probably is true. Right? But the timing of the release of the North Korean report and then on its heels, you know, as the dust settled from that and we start seeing a little bit of recovery in in some of these markets, all of a sudden the FBI drops what they were always going to drop on this day. So it's it's almost as if they primed the pump for this report. Hey, man. Remember we were talking about North Korean hackers? Well, look how much money all these people lost. You need to stay away from this. And you do need to stay away from crypto. But I'm not I am not convinced whatsoever that North Korean hackers are going to be able to infiltrate to the depth that the FBI thinks they're going to be able to infiltrate into with the companies behind these ETFs because they're not stupid.
They're not. Sure, maybe some of the lowest hanging fruit on those 11 ETFs might get scammed. But BlackRock's not getting scammed. Fidelity is not gonna get scammed. It's not gonna happen through some kind of social engineering. Guarantee you, they have internal locks and switches and protocols that they gotta jump through before any Bitcoin is allocated anywhere outside of that those companies. Guaranteed. So, honestly, be careful with what the narrative that the FBI is pushing as of late. Okay. Now, over to Noster. BTC pins is well, they're they're a good they're a good Bitcoin company, and they make, like, Bitcoin paraphernalia, like pins and all all kinds of neat stuff. And it's I've been following them forever. I was following them on Twitter. When they finally came over to Nostra, I immediately started following BTC pins over there.
And one of the guys and I can't remember what what the guy's name is but the guy or one of the guys behind BTC pins has this nostril note. And it says, trying to make NPUBs into affiliate links and sending payments to the lightning address on a Nostra profile automatically next. Adding web socket support into a WordPress plugin is challenging. It will pay the affiliate link automatically or rather it will pay the affiliate automatically to their lightning address. It's not exactly a zap since it won't have a corresponding nostril event. Just trying to use the NPUB to pull a Lightning address to facilitate payments.
So what does this mean? Okay. Let's say that BTC Pens decides in their in their foresight that they want to, throw me an affiliate link. Alright? So that I can advertise for them on the show. So that maybe they can, you know, get some of their rather nice looking pins that, you know, like a pin. Like, you wear it on your shirt or you put it on your hat. And they got all kinds of other stuff too. If they were throw me an affiliate link but that affiliate link is built on my inpub, then, honestly, anybody, if this works and and it's it's difficult that what he's saying is that he's at he's trying to add a WebSocket support into a WordPress plugin because I presume that that's their storefront, probably powered by BTCPay.
But let's say that I just like like this show. Right? Like this particular episode, I'm mentioning BTC pins a lot. Maybe you go over there. You know? Maybe you go over there and say, I bought this pin and then you drop my end pub into, like, a note field. I don't know exactly how they run their stuff because I haven't actually gotten anything from BTC pins because I got me myself, I have rules about wearing bitcoin swag. The rule is I don't. I don't need the target. Okay? But, you know, it's not like I wouldn't buy pins and put them on something that I'm not gonna wear out in public. Just for me. Just for me. Okay? That that I would do. That I mean, I I have a bitcoin hat. I just don't wear it out in public. All that to say, if you were to note to them that, hey, you know, I heard about y'all you guys, from, the bitcoin and podcast, and it's this guy's in here's the in pub for, either, you know, for none you business, which is my moniker on on Noster.
They could actually use that automatically to say well, they didn't even, honestly, you could actually not even build an affiliate link. You can just use the in pub or BTC pins could just use the in pub and and say, well, we we made this $100 sale to this guy and this is the in pub that they dropped us. They could just use that to pull my lightning address and pay me whatever it is the the affiliate link would have been worth on that particular purchase without me entering into any kind of solid agreement with BTC pins with also without them having to construct a full, like, affiliate link that they then have to keep track of.
So now we get into this situation where it becomes very evident why having Nostr presence creating your Nostr namespace starting to interact with the people that are on Nostr you start seeing why I think that this is important Because of the aspects of Nostr and the digital identity that it allows us to have and allows that digital identity identity to be very portable across all manner of not only clients but people like BTC pins who are going, well, how else can I use this in pub? Oh, I know. I'll just build an affiliate link for none of your business and the and the Bitcoin and podcast. And then if we ever figure out that he actually sold or somehow or another we get noted that somebody bought something because David Bennett or none your business said it on the show, then we already know how to get him his money. Not through his app but just by pulling my lightning address if that happens if these guys over at BTC pins is able to knock that out or even if they don't but somebody else does figure it out because this is a good idea this isn't a complete game changer.
It changes everything. Right? Because now there's not almost anybody can be an affiliate for anybody else. Anybody can recommend like, what I try to do with the circle p, like, if btc pins was in the circle p, which I don't know why why they're not. I I need I it's because I haven't really reached out to them. But in either event, if they were, then invoicing would be a breeze. Right? Now let's think about things like Zaprite where you can do b t or Bitcoin and lightning invoices through Zaprite, which is I believe Parker Lewis' new outfit after he left unchained.
And he him and a couple of other people have started this invoicing service. And it's also like an accounting an accounting software. Right? It does everything. It's sort of like QuickBooks, only Bitcoin centered through either the Bitcoin main chain or the Lightning Network. If they can integrate in pubs and right now Parker Lewis doesn't seem to like noster, so don't hold your breath. But if he did, all of a sudden BTC Pens and BTC Pay and people like Zaprock or Zaprite would be able to invoice my NPUB directly that they paid me. And then I could have ZapRight accounting software that intakes that in those invoices and keeps them separate and says, this is what Zaprite paid you to this in pub. This is what I don't know somebody else paid you and here's your invoices from these other guys over here, but they're all centered around your inpub.
Right? So, now the inpub becomes almost like an an a contractor ID number. That's what this is. That's what BTC Pins is really doing. They're using the inpub as a contractor ID number. And with that ID number, they'll be able to keep track of their accounting part of it. How much they sent that contractor? Under what circumstances they sent it? On what days they sent it? What was the price of Bitcoin at the time they sent it? All of these things can now be kept track of through these in pubs which is one of the reasons why you really do need to keep your insect safe. Your your secure key, your private key, that you need to hold on to with with dear life.
Right? So that nobody absconds with it because that in this type of system this type of contractor ID situation could, well, will cause all kinds of problems and and straight up theft. But we're entering into a new way of doing business with each other. That's what this all boils down to. And even if BTC pins is unsuccessful at getting this WebSocket WordPress plugin to work. Somebody, somewhere needs to make it work. Because having my same NPUD as my contractor ID number for all these companies in the Bitcoin space is worth a lot to me.
Let's run the numbers. Oil is just getting trashed today because China's economic output seems to be contracting. And rather heavily too because West Texas Intermediate posted a 4 and a half point drop to $65.59 Brent Norsee is down almost 4 points to 68.99. I haven't seen Brent Norsee underneath $70 a barrel since, like, 2021. Right? That's how bad China's contracting. This is also in conjunction with the fact that you got a you got a pretty big storm in the Gulf of Mexico that's disrupting production. You've got OPEC that said, wait a minute. Hold on. You know, maybe we're not gonna open up the pipes in a couple of months like we said. Maybe we're gonna wait on that. And yet, we still have further price suppression in oil. And here's what I kinda really think is going on is that Kamala Harris and the Biden administration are so desperately needing to get back into the White House that they are using market suppression and their friends at these desks to keep the price of oil down so that the price of gasoline will go down. Say hello to a dollar 87 a gallon, by the way, after a 2 and a half point drop.
So that Kamala looks good. She's doing right for the economy. She's a complete communist and doesn't need to be sitting anywhere near other intelligent people because she'll suck their brains right out of their ears and and, I don't know, roast it on a spit and drool while she's doing it because that woman has no business anywhere close to this thing. But she's going to look good. And when she goes to or I don't know if it's happened yet is I can't remember when the, debate is. Maybe it is tonight, maybe I've already missed it, but I get the feeling that it's tonight because or at least you know it hasn't already happened yet because she's going to pounce on low oil prices and the Biden administration and how they work together to make sure that that middle America, right, just your your your midline, your average Joe is now only gonna be paying a buck 87 for gas at the pump. Again, good luck finding that price. Natural gas is up 2 points to $2.21, by the way. Shiny metal rocks are mostly red, but gold is green. 0.36 percent to the upside, still above $25100 an ounce. Silver is down a third. Platinum is down a quarter. Copper is up 1 in a third. Palladium up almost 2 points.
Agriculture is mostly in the red today. Biggest winner, cotton, 0.6 percent to the upside. Biggest loser today is chocolate, 2 point 7% to the downside. Live cattle getting hammered 0.41 down. Lean hogs 0.25 down. Feeder cattle, 0.13% to the downside. And all the indices are getting slaughtered today after their recovery yesterday. Dow is down almost a point. S and P is down a third. Nasdaq is down a third. And the S and P mini is down the exact same number as the Dow is. So there you go. Now on to real money, which is priced at 56,000 good Lord, y'all. Stop fucking around.
$56,690 $1,120,000,000,000 market cap allows us to purchase 22.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,752,192.99 of. And average fees per block remain low at 0.05 BTC. A 114 blocks carrying 235,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 3 sats per vbyte. Low priorities are the same. Now from leaving lost Twitter, episode, what, 949 of Bitcoin, and we've got, slow slow with 21 100 sats says not sure about the nuts and bolts of Aqua Wallet. I'm not sure either slow slow. I don't use Aqua Wallet, so I can't say anything intelligent about that at all. Nostergang with a 100 says I deleted my Twitter in January. No regrets. I can't believe not a single person said, thank you, sir. Because honestly, that's one of my favorite things to do. Okay. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Vitor Pamplona with an Oster note says, if you can see this, Tor is now inside of Amethyst. No more Orbot. What does this mean? Okay. This is very important. If you don't know what Tor is, it's just a way to route your essentially your computer traffic as you reach out into the internet it's always broadcasting your IP. Because if you make your request for data the data's gotta be sent somewhere. So it's basically sent to your computer's mailing address, also known as your Internet protocol address or IP address. It's specific to you. And the people that provide your ISP service like mine what used to be AT and T, right?
AT and T knew they they they knew my IP address my new provider knows my IP address. They know what data that I'm getting because of that IP address. However, with Tor, you can kind of mask that a lot. Right? And it just basically sends it through a whole it routes these messages and these requests and these sends through a whole bunch of Tor nodes that sort of, well, obfuscate where it's coming from and where data is going to. So what Vitor did, and he's the guy that is behind Amethyst, which is the Android mobile, client for Nostr.
Now he's got it to where you can write a note and that note before it leaves the client that you're using, which is Amethyst at this time, is routed through the onion network and not out in what's called clear net, which means it just goes from my IP address to wherever the hell this thing is gonna go. And it's out in the open. It's not encrypted. It's completely clear. And everybody knows it's me that sent the note. Okay? All the relays know it's me. Everybody knows it's me. But what Viator did was allow a situation where if I write a note in Amethyst and I've got this particular feature turned on, that note immediately goes into Tor. And it completely, mostly, at least at least mostly, if not completely, obfuscates to the network where that note came from. Now when you get that note, you're going to know even though you got it through Tor that I sent it.
But if you are one of these guys that uses things like, I don't know, like Wireshark to sniff packets and figure out where Internet traffic is coming from, you won't be able to see what IP it came from. You'll know it's me because it says none you business and my note says good morning. You'll know I sent it. You just don't know where I sent it from. So the int what Vytor has done is he's essentially integrated Tor inside of the Amethyst client. I cannot tell you how important this is for privacy going into the future. And you'll say, David, I don't need privacy. You will.
If you don't need it today, you will need it. And you will need it probably sooner than later. And maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but again, probably sooner than later. I think that this is going to be something that propagates through the Nostra ecosystem. I think other developers are going to take this GitHub repository or this particular pull request on it's basically the quote how I did it to, pull request from Vitor Pamplona and he's because he tweeted out that that particular pull request. So now all the other developers can look and say, okay, here's how he did it. How can we implement it? And how can we either have it on or off by default for clients?
And how can we surface that so that users who maybe don't care about Tor or don't know what any of this shit is can just turn it on or off. And having that having that surface, that switch surfaced is going to be important. I think there should be I think it should be readily evident some kind of notation in your client that just tells you the status. Tor is off or Tor is on. But I really, really like the fact that Vytor is not keeping this to himself. He just told the world he unzipped his fly and showed his butt to everybody in the world and said this is how I did it. Please take it and let's make this better.
That way the other developers can put it into other clients. Now, 10101 is winding down operations and will be done by November 3rd. 10101 is a self custodial Bitcoin wallet and trading application powered by discrete log contracts or DLCs to ensure trustless trade execution. We've done a lot of reflecting and we know what we have built is not receiving the traction and growth we wanted it to have. We also know it won't scale easily to the masses either due to technical limitations, wrote founder Philip Hoennisch in a blog post, quote, for these reasons, we have made the tough decision to wind down 10101.
Wait, 10101. Yeah. The platform will remain operational until the end of October. Afterwards, we will stop accepting new positions and open positions will expire November 3, 2024 at 1500 UTC after which we will cease all services. 10101 users are encouraged to complete in any ongoing positions, close your channels, and withdraw your funds. Quote building a company is hard building a Bitcoin company is even harder and building self custodial services is insanely difficult as we close this chapter we do so with mixed emotions While this marks the end of 10101, it also opens the door to new opportunities and challenges.
The team and I will continue to challenge the status quo in Bitcoin and build safer and more private financial tools for a better world to come. Okay. I am sad to see this company go. I never used them. In fact, I've only heard of them one other time. One other time. Right? I haven't didn't really know about this, but I can I think what's going on here is when they say that they didn't see the traction that they wanted they're fighting 2 fronts? One is we've there's a lot of applications for trading and whatnot on Bitcoin in the ecosystem. There's a lot of people that are completely fine with just using Bitcoin on, you know, on the blockchain and not touching lightning.
And then furthermore there's a lot of people DLCs are this discrete log contract. That's a whole other ecosystem on Bitcoin that is brand new. I mean, it's yeah, it's okay. It's been active for like maybe a year. Okay. So maybe it's for some people in technology that's old. No, it's I don't think so. I think that that's just about as new as it gets. And I think between those two situations, you have a situation where we've got a company that was just too early. Alright. So if you're out there and you wanna build a Bitcoin company, you wanna build a lightning company, you wanna build a self custodial company, you wanna build it with DLC, you might wanna consider waiting until DLCs catch more fire, until some of the dust settles on this, you know, latest downturn in the market.
I'm just saying because if starting too early is just as dangerous as being too late. You gotta time it. And I think that that's what happened is that they were very excited about pushing all this stuff into an app. They were able to do it, but nobody's using it. That's okay. It happens. Sorry. I'd hate to see them go. Robosats version 0.7.0 alpha desktop app, Nostra order book, and more. Robosats is a simple and private way to exchange bitcoin. It simplifies the peer to peer user experience and uses lightning hold invoices to minimize custody and trust requirements while helping users stick to privacy best practices.
This version comes out with Android built in, torrefied notifications, robo sats desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and a nostr enabled order book. And I don't know what the hell that means. The only other thing it says about that is that the order book is now Noster enabled and shared with Moster, m o s t r, by atkoalasat k o a l a s a t. So I don't know if that means that their order book as making trades is now a new event type in Nostr or if that you can just use your Nostr, NPUB, Nsec, and like things like Albie extension to log in to Robosats.
Not sure about that. If any of you guys have any extra intelligence on that, I'd be happy to hear it. Blitz Wallet version 0.2.7 beta. Now they have e cash integration. I think it was just Friday that I said something about Blitz or maybe it was even yesterday. I don't know, but these guys are quick on the gun. Blitz Wallet self custodial Bitcoin lightning wallet powered by Breeze SDK, Bolts and Blockstream Greenlight. It aims to create a seamless yet simple payment experience for its users built with React Native. Quote, the 1st blitz beta to include eCash. Including e cash it's now available we only have the bare basics down no swapping between layers with e cash yet but the basics are there an e cash liquid and lightning wallet all in one announced the project's UXUI developer, Oliver Kabliszak.
To activate ecash navigation to settings or go to settings and go to experimental features, choose a ecash mint from the list provided. Quote, every payment under 1,000 sats will be e cash above its liquid. Bad sentence. After 1,000,000 sats total in the wallet, you get your own lightning channel and e cash gets switched off. Oh, I see what they're doing. Feel free to just check out the rest of the wallet and join the Telegram group and they give a, a link. And, of course, the link to this particular story will be in the show notes. So just open this, blitz wallet story and then you can go and get to that Telegram group yourself. Okay. So here is the a little bit more about the eCash integration, which is in beta.
They added support for eCash currently in very very beta. Expect further improvement. Okay. So we don't know anything more about it. But here's here's the thing. Every payment under 1,000 satoshis will be e cash above its liquid. Above its liquid, I don't know what it means. But every payment under 1,000 sats will be e cash. After you get a 1,000,000 sats in your wallet, you will automatically get your own lightning channel and then e cash gets switched off. You know what this is. This is a workaround for something like Arc. This is using e cash to build up enough sat reserve in a wallet so that it makes sense for the wallet provider to possibly go ahead and say, you know what? You're cool. You got a million sats. That's worth the channel. We'll open the light a full lightning channel up to you. So, e cash is being used as an as an onboarding experience and then past a certain point the experience then switches to full Lightning Network.
I love this idea and I hope they do well with it. Bravo, Blitz Wallet. Japan's largest electricity provider is now exploring Bitcoin mining with surplus renewable energy. I think I possibly had yeah. I've I've I've gone over this before. This is just a couple of more details about it. What we are doing has few parallels in Japan. Success of our framework would prompt more green energy to be introduced, said Kenji Tatuana I can't pronounce it. President of the company. And this is how why is TEPCO being to utilize this excess energy, Agile Energy EnergyX has installed TEPCO serves over 27,000,000 residential and business customers.
Okay, so Agile Energy X is a subsidiary of TEPCO. Oh, holy shit. I didn't know that. Okay, that changes the game. Because at 27,000,000 residential and business customers, TEPCO, that's a big deal for Japan. In 2023, about 1920 1920 gigawatt hours of energy were introduced. The government aims for carbon neutrality by 2,050. Yeah. Whatever, dude. Targeting green energy to supply 50 to 60 percent of the total country's power. The company estimates that if renewables met 50% of Japan's energy needs, up to 240,000 gigawatt hours could be wasted annually.
Using even 10% of this excess energy for Bitcoin mining could generate up to $2,500,000,000 per year. Quote, green energy producers have operate their business on the assumption that part of the power they generate is wasted. If Bitcoin were to provide a new source of income for similar power producers who are being exposed to over investments that would prompt more green energy to be introduced. Okay. So I had no idea that Agilex, which was part of the story that I brought you a few days ago, was part of TEPCO. And since TEPCO is a major energy provider to Japan, this is a much bigger story than I originally thought it was.
Okay. That is it. We're 46 minutes in. I think that that's enough for the day. 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 8:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 10th day of 9th month, September 20 24.
And this is episode 950 of Bitcoin. And, man, that's wow. That's we're 50 shows away from going into 4 figures on, Bitcoin and it's kind of kind of exciting, honestly. I just every time I think about it, it's it's very much a surprise and I am very happy to have you guys along for the ride. Okay. Let's get right on into the news. It's probably gonna be a shorter show today. Meta Planet has bought yet more Bitcoin. Specifically, an additional 1 no. 300,000,000 yen worth of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin. Meta Planet, a publicly listed Japanese company, announced that it had purchased 38.6 Bitcoin for 300,000,000 yen, which is right around $2,200,000 bringing its total Bitcoin Treasury to almost 400 BTC.
Kind of amazing when you think about it. They they really they Meta Planet really didn't start buying Bitcoin until just a few months ago and they've already accumulated like 400 Bitcoin. Honestly, that's that's really impressive. Because I think oh, who is it? Fold has, like, a 1,000 Bitcoin in their treasury and they've been around for years. And here we have Meta Planet just taking a page from Saylor, man. Just going all in, it looks like. This latest Bitcoin acquisition comes after Meta Planet announced in August that it would raise 10,080,000,000 yen to purchase yet more Bitcoin, part of its broader corporate strategy to allocate funds to Bitcoin.
Meta Planet first adopted a pro Bitcoin investment policy earlier this year and has steadily accumulated Bitcoin and they now hold almost 400. Meta Planet's ongoing Bitcoin Treasury build mimics MicroStrategy's playbook, which has raised debt to buy Bitcoin. Public companies seem to have discovered a model. Oh my God, a model for acquiring Bitcoin. Yeah, selling worthless debt to acquire Bitcoin, which will appreciate and then they can pay back their debt and still have Bitcoin left over in their treasury. As long as the price of Bitcoin goes up, ladies and gentlemen, that shit works. But, man, I would be I would lose sleep. I would. I mean, it's not that I don't hate Bitcoin, you know me, I'm just saying that you're kind of depending on the market psychology and a whole bunch of other external factors to keep your price rising in a time horizon that you can service the debt on.
So I'm just saying I would be if it was me, dude, I'd be losing sleep. But whatever. Other firms are following the strategy. And it includes firms like Marathon Digital Holdings, which recently raised a $250,000,000 convertible note offering to buy more Bitcoin. And then we have Similar Scientific, which also announced plans to raise more money to buy more Bitcoin. Companies can capitalize on Bitcoin's appreciation potential by borrowing fiat currency at low interest rates to purchase Bitcoin. This allows public companies to gain Bitcoin exposure without liquidating existing assets. What this is is essentially a carry trade.
We remember, like, in August. I think it was August 5th. The yen US dollar carry trade collapsed because in a surprise move, the Bank of Japan decided to raise their rates, which caused all the borrowed yen to become more expensive to pay back in debt. And we saw collapses everywhere from the Dow Jones all the way through crypto up to actual real honest to God Bitcoin. Everything fell and there's talk on the street that that yen carry trade is still people are still trying to service that by selling hard and soft assets hard assets being like you know real estate and gold and whatnot and then we have the softer assets like equities and stocks and these kinds of things but they're needing to get the money to be able to service and or pay back the entirety of their yen or their their loans that were denominated in yen because they've always been at these historic low interest rates because they were borrowing in and then converting it and then buying actual assets with it or equities or something else.
And they always went to Japan to go do this because Japan's interest rates have historically been low for decades. Lower than anybody else for decades. And all of a sudden, Japan and Ueda, their, I guess, their chief minister for finance, sort of like our treasury secretary, decided to raise rates. Well, they announced that one, but then then they did the surprise raise, I think, of 25 basis points on August somewhere around August 5th. And then on August 5th, you saw everything shit the bad. Because everybody was selling, oh my God, we've got to get out of these we've got to get out of these things that we've bought with this borrowed yen enough so that we can either pay back the loans in their in their entirety or collect up enough cash and be liquid in the US dollar to be able to pay back these loans and service or or service the debt on these loans at least and there's a lot of people that are saying that that action has not yet completed that people are still trying to get out of positions so that they can either service or pay back these loans denominated in the Japanese yen so this is the same thing this selling of debt to buy bitcoin or this actually this printing of debt to buy Bitcoin either by issuing new shares of companies in MicroStrategy's case.
I mean, they did a 10 for 1 stock split not too long ago, like last month. Right? A 10 for 1 stock split. And there you I guarantee that Michael Saylor is using this new stock this new stock print to buy more Bitcoin. However, it's it's just a dicey dicey situation. And I'm not saying not do it. I'm just and I'm not saying that I don't like it. I'm just saying, again, I don't know if there's enough Lunesta in the world to keep me asleep if I was people like the guys over at Meta Planet, the guys over at Semler. Michael Saylor, he doesn't give a shit. He'll go sleep on his yacht. He's fine.
But the smaller companies like Semler and Meta Planet, that's a real gamble. And they're do it they're they're sitting at the same table playing the same game as Michael Saylor. It's a brave, you know, it's a bold move. Cotton, we'll have to see how it plays out. Meanwhile, over at CoinDesk, Bitcoin ETFs post a $28,700,000 inflow after a record losing streak. And that $28,700,000 is gonna look kinda small here in a second. Spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds listed in the United States posted just over $28,700,000 in net inflows on Monday, ending a record outflow streak worth $1,200,000,000 Right? 28.7 versus 1,200,000,000 or 28,700,000 versus 1,200,000,000 is one hell of a gap to fill. Anyway, the ETFs lost money since August 27th.
And Monday was the 1st day of net inflows in September, a month that traders have previously warned to be bearish for the leading cryptocurrency. Outflows from ETFs signal a lack of new demand among professional investors. And the outflows have taken net inflows since inception under the $17,000,000,000 mark back to levels last seen in July meanwhile BTC prices are down nearly 15% in the past 2 weeks or 25% below March's lifetime peak of 73,300. However, some traders remain bullish. Even with all the near term noise and volatile price action we remain structurally bullish, QCP Capital Trader said in a Telegram broadcast on Tuesday.
And it certainly looks like the market is also taking advantage of this leg lower to pile on more bullish trades. Quote, the bounce from 52,500 is encouraging. So did we see the bottom? Although we can't be certain, some institutions seems seems to think so as they take this opportunity to add to their bullish bets in December March traders added the coin desk 20 a measure of the largest and most liquid digital assets is up 2.3% trading at 1800 Meanwhile, BTC is trading above 56,500 slipping from 57,000 ahead of the next CPI and PPI releases.
And also the first debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Poly market traders are pretty certain that crypto isn't going to be mentioned during the debate giving only an 11% chance of Harris mentioning the term or Bitcoin and a 13% chance of Trump saying it. Traders are also expecting the debate to run into overtime with only a 30% chance of it ending on schedule at 10:30 pm. Jeez, you guys well, the freaking d gens will bet on anything. I mean, the the time of the end of the debate is a bet. What I mean, what kind of degeneracy are we in, ladies and gentlemen? Elsewhere, several prominent AI tokens. You know what? Uh-uh. Because they go into a whole bunch of shit coinery. I'm not gonna do it. Wish CoinDesk would stop doing it as well. Decrypt, crypto was involved in 87% of all investment fraud in 2023 according to your friends at the FBI.
A Mirazza Merchant is writing this one. Investment fraud in the US hit an all time high in 2023 with losses skyrocketing to $4,500,000,000 with cryptocurrency related scams emerging as the primary driver. According to US Federal Bureau of Investigation's latest annual report, crypto was involved in a record 87% of all losses and totaled 3,960,000,000 that represents a dramatic increase from 3,300,000,000 in 2022 and a staggering 18 times increase from the $253,000,000 lost back in 2018, according to the FBI. The law enforcement agency compiles data from reports submitted to its Internet Crime Complaint Center, often abbreviated as the IC3.
The new report reveals that the number of investment fraud victims in 2023 was 11 times higher than 5 years ago with complaints rising from 3,693 in 2018 to 39,500 last year. The average loss per victim? $115,500 which is up from $68,496 in 2018. Millennials were the most frequently targeted age group for investment fraud, followed closely by Gen X. About 2 thirds of investment fraud victims were between the ages of 30 50 years old, while 13% were in their 20s or younger. And 22 percent were 60 and older. But already this year, the FBI has flagged that North Korean hackers appear to be targeting Bitcoin ETF issuers in the United States. And the agency said just last week that the would be hackers are employing quote difficult to detect social engineering campaigns against those working inside the crypto sector, including those in the decentralized finance as well as the ETF space.
The 2023 report also put the spotlight on a particularly deceptive form of crypto fraud commonly referred to as pig butchering. Pig butchering. In these scams, fraudsters establish fake romantic relationships with targets, usually through online dating platforms or social media. Once they've won their target's trust, the scammer convinces them to invest in fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes. Quote, crypto scams are particularly appealing to fraudsters because transfers are irreversible, payments are not protected by the government, and there is no central authority or bank to flag such suspicious activity, the FBI wrote.
The geographic distribution of investment fraud varies across the United States. California residents suffered the highest collective losses of $984,000,000 in 2023, while Maryland had the highest rate of investment fraud at 14.4 victims per 100,000 residents. To protect against crypto and other investment scams, the report recommends thorough research, skepticism through high pressure tactics and consultation with licensed financial advisors. It also advises verifying investment opportunities with official sources and understanding the associated risks before committing funds.
Okay. So the FBI, after scaring the bejesus out of everybody with their North Korea hackers are targeting Bitcoin ETFs, now they've released their 2023 report. How's it not coordinated? It's all this entire thing. This entire this entire narrative that the FBI is running is it's reprehensible, honestly, because it's it's straight up market manipulation. Now I'm not saying that the data in their report isn't true. I have no evidence to think otherwise. In fact, I think that this data is probably pretty accurate. So how is it a fraud? Because of the timing of the release of the report on the North Korean hackers. This report was always going to come out today.
Listen, I mean, it's not I don't think it's fabricated. I think this report is probably fairly truthful insofar that it's almost inside the range of me trusting the FBI as far as I can throw them, which ain't very far. But, honestly, this report probably is true. Right? But the timing of the release of the North Korean report and then on its heels, you know, as the dust settled from that and we start seeing a little bit of recovery in in some of these markets, all of a sudden the FBI drops what they were always going to drop on this day. So it's it's almost as if they primed the pump for this report. Hey, man. Remember we were talking about North Korean hackers? Well, look how much money all these people lost. You need to stay away from this. And you do need to stay away from crypto. But I'm not I am not convinced whatsoever that North Korean hackers are going to be able to infiltrate to the depth that the FBI thinks they're going to be able to infiltrate into with the companies behind these ETFs because they're not stupid.
They're not. Sure, maybe some of the lowest hanging fruit on those 11 ETFs might get scammed. But BlackRock's not getting scammed. Fidelity is not gonna get scammed. It's not gonna happen through some kind of social engineering. Guarantee you, they have internal locks and switches and protocols that they gotta jump through before any Bitcoin is allocated anywhere outside of that those companies. Guaranteed. So, honestly, be careful with what the narrative that the FBI is pushing as of late. Okay. Now, over to Noster. BTC pins is well, they're they're a good they're a good Bitcoin company, and they make, like, Bitcoin paraphernalia, like pins and all all kinds of neat stuff. And it's I've been following them forever. I was following them on Twitter. When they finally came over to Nostra, I immediately started following BTC pins over there.
And one of the guys and I can't remember what what the guy's name is but the guy or one of the guys behind BTC pins has this nostril note. And it says, trying to make NPUBs into affiliate links and sending payments to the lightning address on a Nostra profile automatically next. Adding web socket support into a WordPress plugin is challenging. It will pay the affiliate link automatically or rather it will pay the affiliate automatically to their lightning address. It's not exactly a zap since it won't have a corresponding nostril event. Just trying to use the NPUB to pull a Lightning address to facilitate payments.
So what does this mean? Okay. Let's say that BTC Pens decides in their in their foresight that they want to, throw me an affiliate link. Alright? So that I can advertise for them on the show. So that maybe they can, you know, get some of their rather nice looking pins that, you know, like a pin. Like, you wear it on your shirt or you put it on your hat. And they got all kinds of other stuff too. If they were throw me an affiliate link but that affiliate link is built on my inpub, then, honestly, anybody, if this works and and it's it's difficult that what he's saying is that he's at he's trying to add a WebSocket support into a WordPress plugin because I presume that that's their storefront, probably powered by BTCPay.
But let's say that I just like like this show. Right? Like this particular episode, I'm mentioning BTC pins a lot. Maybe you go over there. You know? Maybe you go over there and say, I bought this pin and then you drop my end pub into, like, a note field. I don't know exactly how they run their stuff because I haven't actually gotten anything from BTC pins because I got me myself, I have rules about wearing bitcoin swag. The rule is I don't. I don't need the target. Okay? But, you know, it's not like I wouldn't buy pins and put them on something that I'm not gonna wear out in public. Just for me. Just for me. Okay? That that I would do. That I mean, I I have a bitcoin hat. I just don't wear it out in public. All that to say, if you were to note to them that, hey, you know, I heard about y'all you guys, from, the bitcoin and podcast, and it's this guy's in here's the in pub for, either, you know, for none you business, which is my moniker on on Noster.
They could actually use that automatically to say well, they didn't even, honestly, you could actually not even build an affiliate link. You can just use the in pub or BTC pins could just use the in pub and and say, well, we we made this $100 sale to this guy and this is the in pub that they dropped us. They could just use that to pull my lightning address and pay me whatever it is the the affiliate link would have been worth on that particular purchase without me entering into any kind of solid agreement with BTC pins with also without them having to construct a full, like, affiliate link that they then have to keep track of.
So now we get into this situation where it becomes very evident why having Nostr presence creating your Nostr namespace starting to interact with the people that are on Nostr you start seeing why I think that this is important Because of the aspects of Nostr and the digital identity that it allows us to have and allows that digital identity identity to be very portable across all manner of not only clients but people like BTC pins who are going, well, how else can I use this in pub? Oh, I know. I'll just build an affiliate link for none of your business and the and the Bitcoin and podcast. And then if we ever figure out that he actually sold or somehow or another we get noted that somebody bought something because David Bennett or none your business said it on the show, then we already know how to get him his money. Not through his app but just by pulling my lightning address if that happens if these guys over at BTC pins is able to knock that out or even if they don't but somebody else does figure it out because this is a good idea this isn't a complete game changer.
It changes everything. Right? Because now there's not almost anybody can be an affiliate for anybody else. Anybody can recommend like, what I try to do with the circle p, like, if btc pins was in the circle p, which I don't know why why they're not. I I need I it's because I haven't really reached out to them. But in either event, if they were, then invoicing would be a breeze. Right? Now let's think about things like Zaprite where you can do b t or Bitcoin and lightning invoices through Zaprite, which is I believe Parker Lewis' new outfit after he left unchained.
And he him and a couple of other people have started this invoicing service. And it's also like an accounting an accounting software. Right? It does everything. It's sort of like QuickBooks, only Bitcoin centered through either the Bitcoin main chain or the Lightning Network. If they can integrate in pubs and right now Parker Lewis doesn't seem to like noster, so don't hold your breath. But if he did, all of a sudden BTC Pens and BTC Pay and people like Zaprock or Zaprite would be able to invoice my NPUB directly that they paid me. And then I could have ZapRight accounting software that intakes that in those invoices and keeps them separate and says, this is what Zaprite paid you to this in pub. This is what I don't know somebody else paid you and here's your invoices from these other guys over here, but they're all centered around your inpub.
Right? So, now the inpub becomes almost like an an a contractor ID number. That's what this is. That's what BTC Pins is really doing. They're using the inpub as a contractor ID number. And with that ID number, they'll be able to keep track of their accounting part of it. How much they sent that contractor? Under what circumstances they sent it? On what days they sent it? What was the price of Bitcoin at the time they sent it? All of these things can now be kept track of through these in pubs which is one of the reasons why you really do need to keep your insect safe. Your your secure key, your private key, that you need to hold on to with with dear life.
Right? So that nobody absconds with it because that in this type of system this type of contractor ID situation could, well, will cause all kinds of problems and and straight up theft. But we're entering into a new way of doing business with each other. That's what this all boils down to. And even if BTC pins is unsuccessful at getting this WebSocket WordPress plugin to work. Somebody, somewhere needs to make it work. Because having my same NPUD as my contractor ID number for all these companies in the Bitcoin space is worth a lot to me.
Let's run the numbers. Oil is just getting trashed today because China's economic output seems to be contracting. And rather heavily too because West Texas Intermediate posted a 4 and a half point drop to $65.59 Brent Norsee is down almost 4 points to 68.99. I haven't seen Brent Norsee underneath $70 a barrel since, like, 2021. Right? That's how bad China's contracting. This is also in conjunction with the fact that you got a you got a pretty big storm in the Gulf of Mexico that's disrupting production. You've got OPEC that said, wait a minute. Hold on. You know, maybe we're not gonna open up the pipes in a couple of months like we said. Maybe we're gonna wait on that. And yet, we still have further price suppression in oil. And here's what I kinda really think is going on is that Kamala Harris and the Biden administration are so desperately needing to get back into the White House that they are using market suppression and their friends at these desks to keep the price of oil down so that the price of gasoline will go down. Say hello to a dollar 87 a gallon, by the way, after a 2 and a half point drop.
So that Kamala looks good. She's doing right for the economy. She's a complete communist and doesn't need to be sitting anywhere near other intelligent people because she'll suck their brains right out of their ears and and, I don't know, roast it on a spit and drool while she's doing it because that woman has no business anywhere close to this thing. But she's going to look good. And when she goes to or I don't know if it's happened yet is I can't remember when the, debate is. Maybe it is tonight, maybe I've already missed it, but I get the feeling that it's tonight because or at least you know it hasn't already happened yet because she's going to pounce on low oil prices and the Biden administration and how they work together to make sure that that middle America, right, just your your your midline, your average Joe is now only gonna be paying a buck 87 for gas at the pump. Again, good luck finding that price. Natural gas is up 2 points to $2.21, by the way. Shiny metal rocks are mostly red, but gold is green. 0.36 percent to the upside, still above $25100 an ounce. Silver is down a third. Platinum is down a quarter. Copper is up 1 in a third. Palladium up almost 2 points.
Agriculture is mostly in the red today. Biggest winner, cotton, 0.6 percent to the upside. Biggest loser today is chocolate, 2 point 7% to the downside. Live cattle getting hammered 0.41 down. Lean hogs 0.25 down. Feeder cattle, 0.13% to the downside. And all the indices are getting slaughtered today after their recovery yesterday. Dow is down almost a point. S and P is down a third. Nasdaq is down a third. And the S and P mini is down the exact same number as the Dow is. So there you go. Now on to real money, which is priced at 56,000 good Lord, y'all. Stop fucking around.
$56,690 $1,120,000,000,000 market cap allows us to purchase 22.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,752,192.99 of. And average fees per block remain low at 0.05 BTC. A 114 blocks carrying 235,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 3 sats per vbyte. Low priorities are the same. Now from leaving lost Twitter, episode, what, 949 of Bitcoin, and we've got, slow slow with 21 100 sats says not sure about the nuts and bolts of Aqua Wallet. I'm not sure either slow slow. I don't use Aqua Wallet, so I can't say anything intelligent about that at all. Nostergang with a 100 says I deleted my Twitter in January. No regrets. I can't believe not a single person said, thank you, sir. Because honestly, that's one of my favorite things to do. Okay. That's the weather report.
Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use Vitor Pamplona with an Oster note says, if you can see this, Tor is now inside of Amethyst. No more Orbot. What does this mean? Okay. This is very important. If you don't know what Tor is, it's just a way to route your essentially your computer traffic as you reach out into the internet it's always broadcasting your IP. Because if you make your request for data the data's gotta be sent somewhere. So it's basically sent to your computer's mailing address, also known as your Internet protocol address or IP address. It's specific to you. And the people that provide your ISP service like mine what used to be AT and T, right?
AT and T knew they they they knew my IP address my new provider knows my IP address. They know what data that I'm getting because of that IP address. However, with Tor, you can kind of mask that a lot. Right? And it just basically sends it through a whole it routes these messages and these requests and these sends through a whole bunch of Tor nodes that sort of, well, obfuscate where it's coming from and where data is going to. So what Vitor did, and he's the guy that is behind Amethyst, which is the Android mobile, client for Nostr.
Now he's got it to where you can write a note and that note before it leaves the client that you're using, which is Amethyst at this time, is routed through the onion network and not out in what's called clear net, which means it just goes from my IP address to wherever the hell this thing is gonna go. And it's out in the open. It's not encrypted. It's completely clear. And everybody knows it's me that sent the note. Okay? All the relays know it's me. Everybody knows it's me. But what Viator did was allow a situation where if I write a note in Amethyst and I've got this particular feature turned on, that note immediately goes into Tor. And it completely, mostly, at least at least mostly, if not completely, obfuscates to the network where that note came from. Now when you get that note, you're going to know even though you got it through Tor that I sent it.
But if you are one of these guys that uses things like, I don't know, like Wireshark to sniff packets and figure out where Internet traffic is coming from, you won't be able to see what IP it came from. You'll know it's me because it says none you business and my note says good morning. You'll know I sent it. You just don't know where I sent it from. So the int what Vytor has done is he's essentially integrated Tor inside of the Amethyst client. I cannot tell you how important this is for privacy going into the future. And you'll say, David, I don't need privacy. You will.
If you don't need it today, you will need it. And you will need it probably sooner than later. And maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but again, probably sooner than later. I think that this is going to be something that propagates through the Nostra ecosystem. I think other developers are going to take this GitHub repository or this particular pull request on it's basically the quote how I did it to, pull request from Vitor Pamplona and he's because he tweeted out that that particular pull request. So now all the other developers can look and say, okay, here's how he did it. How can we implement it? And how can we either have it on or off by default for clients?
And how can we surface that so that users who maybe don't care about Tor or don't know what any of this shit is can just turn it on or off. And having that having that surface, that switch surfaced is going to be important. I think there should be I think it should be readily evident some kind of notation in your client that just tells you the status. Tor is off or Tor is on. But I really, really like the fact that Vytor is not keeping this to himself. He just told the world he unzipped his fly and showed his butt to everybody in the world and said this is how I did it. Please take it and let's make this better.
That way the other developers can put it into other clients. Now, 10101 is winding down operations and will be done by November 3rd. 10101 is a self custodial Bitcoin wallet and trading application powered by discrete log contracts or DLCs to ensure trustless trade execution. We've done a lot of reflecting and we know what we have built is not receiving the traction and growth we wanted it to have. We also know it won't scale easily to the masses either due to technical limitations, wrote founder Philip Hoennisch in a blog post, quote, for these reasons, we have made the tough decision to wind down 10101.
Wait, 10101. Yeah. The platform will remain operational until the end of October. Afterwards, we will stop accepting new positions and open positions will expire November 3, 2024 at 1500 UTC after which we will cease all services. 10101 users are encouraged to complete in any ongoing positions, close your channels, and withdraw your funds. Quote building a company is hard building a Bitcoin company is even harder and building self custodial services is insanely difficult as we close this chapter we do so with mixed emotions While this marks the end of 10101, it also opens the door to new opportunities and challenges.
The team and I will continue to challenge the status quo in Bitcoin and build safer and more private financial tools for a better world to come. Okay. I am sad to see this company go. I never used them. In fact, I've only heard of them one other time. One other time. Right? I haven't didn't really know about this, but I can I think what's going on here is when they say that they didn't see the traction that they wanted they're fighting 2 fronts? One is we've there's a lot of applications for trading and whatnot on Bitcoin in the ecosystem. There's a lot of people that are completely fine with just using Bitcoin on, you know, on the blockchain and not touching lightning.
And then furthermore there's a lot of people DLCs are this discrete log contract. That's a whole other ecosystem on Bitcoin that is brand new. I mean, it's yeah, it's okay. It's been active for like maybe a year. Okay. So maybe it's for some people in technology that's old. No, it's I don't think so. I think that that's just about as new as it gets. And I think between those two situations, you have a situation where we've got a company that was just too early. Alright. So if you're out there and you wanna build a Bitcoin company, you wanna build a lightning company, you wanna build a self custodial company, you wanna build it with DLC, you might wanna consider waiting until DLCs catch more fire, until some of the dust settles on this, you know, latest downturn in the market.
I'm just saying because if starting too early is just as dangerous as being too late. You gotta time it. And I think that that's what happened is that they were very excited about pushing all this stuff into an app. They were able to do it, but nobody's using it. That's okay. It happens. Sorry. I'd hate to see them go. Robosats version 0.7.0 alpha desktop app, Nostra order book, and more. Robosats is a simple and private way to exchange bitcoin. It simplifies the peer to peer user experience and uses lightning hold invoices to minimize custody and trust requirements while helping users stick to privacy best practices.
This version comes out with Android built in, torrefied notifications, robo sats desktop app for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and a nostr enabled order book. And I don't know what the hell that means. The only other thing it says about that is that the order book is now Noster enabled and shared with Moster, m o s t r, by atkoalasat k o a l a s a t. So I don't know if that means that their order book as making trades is now a new event type in Nostr or if that you can just use your Nostr, NPUB, Nsec, and like things like Albie extension to log in to Robosats.
Not sure about that. If any of you guys have any extra intelligence on that, I'd be happy to hear it. Blitz Wallet version 0.2.7 beta. Now they have e cash integration. I think it was just Friday that I said something about Blitz or maybe it was even yesterday. I don't know, but these guys are quick on the gun. Blitz Wallet self custodial Bitcoin lightning wallet powered by Breeze SDK, Bolts and Blockstream Greenlight. It aims to create a seamless yet simple payment experience for its users built with React Native. Quote, the 1st blitz beta to include eCash. Including e cash it's now available we only have the bare basics down no swapping between layers with e cash yet but the basics are there an e cash liquid and lightning wallet all in one announced the project's UXUI developer, Oliver Kabliszak.
To activate ecash navigation to settings or go to settings and go to experimental features, choose a ecash mint from the list provided. Quote, every payment under 1,000 sats will be e cash above its liquid. Bad sentence. After 1,000,000 sats total in the wallet, you get your own lightning channel and e cash gets switched off. Oh, I see what they're doing. Feel free to just check out the rest of the wallet and join the Telegram group and they give a, a link. And, of course, the link to this particular story will be in the show notes. So just open this, blitz wallet story and then you can go and get to that Telegram group yourself. Okay. So here is the a little bit more about the eCash integration, which is in beta.
They added support for eCash currently in very very beta. Expect further improvement. Okay. So we don't know anything more about it. But here's here's the thing. Every payment under 1,000 satoshis will be e cash above its liquid. Above its liquid, I don't know what it means. But every payment under 1,000 sats will be e cash. After you get a 1,000,000 sats in your wallet, you will automatically get your own lightning channel and then e cash gets switched off. You know what this is. This is a workaround for something like Arc. This is using e cash to build up enough sat reserve in a wallet so that it makes sense for the wallet provider to possibly go ahead and say, you know what? You're cool. You got a million sats. That's worth the channel. We'll open the light a full lightning channel up to you. So, e cash is being used as an as an onboarding experience and then past a certain point the experience then switches to full Lightning Network.
I love this idea and I hope they do well with it. Bravo, Blitz Wallet. Japan's largest electricity provider is now exploring Bitcoin mining with surplus renewable energy. I think I possibly had yeah. I've I've I've gone over this before. This is just a couple of more details about it. What we are doing has few parallels in Japan. Success of our framework would prompt more green energy to be introduced, said Kenji Tatuana I can't pronounce it. President of the company. And this is how why is TEPCO being to utilize this excess energy, Agile Energy EnergyX has installed TEPCO serves over 27,000,000 residential and business customers.
Okay, so Agile Energy X is a subsidiary of TEPCO. Oh, holy shit. I didn't know that. Okay, that changes the game. Because at 27,000,000 residential and business customers, TEPCO, that's a big deal for Japan. In 2023, about 1920 1920 gigawatt hours of energy were introduced. The government aims for carbon neutrality by 2,050. Yeah. Whatever, dude. Targeting green energy to supply 50 to 60 percent of the total country's power. The company estimates that if renewables met 50% of Japan's energy needs, up to 240,000 gigawatt hours could be wasted annually.
Using even 10% of this excess energy for Bitcoin mining could generate up to $2,500,000,000 per year. Quote, green energy producers have operate their business on the assumption that part of the power they generate is wasted. If Bitcoin were to provide a new source of income for similar power producers who are being exposed to over investments that would prompt more green energy to be introduced. Okay. So I had no idea that Agilex, which was part of the story that I brought you a few days ago, was part of TEPCO. And since TEPCO is a major energy provider to Japan, this is a much bigger story than I originally thought it was.
Okay. That is it. We're 46 minutes in. I think that that's enough for the day. 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.
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