Join me today for Episode 956 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- River Launches Proof of Reserve
- THE FED CUTS RATES BY 50 BPS
- Could Keychat Replace nostr DMs Inside nostr?
- Bhutan Smokes El Salvador's BTC Holdings
- The "BTC Metric"
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/samourai-developers-appear-together-in-court-for-first-time-at-status-conference
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/09/18/fed-rate-cut-could-crash-crypto-markets-but-era-of-central-banks-is-over-arthur-hayes/
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https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/cathedra-bitcoin-shifts-focus-from-mining-to-bitcoin-acquisition-strategy-2/
https://www.tftc.io/new-metric-for-valuing-public-companies/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/hrf-bitcoin-development-fund-grants-10-btc-to-20-projects-worldwide/
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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. Yes, sirree. It is 10:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 18th day of September 2024.
And this is episode 956 of Bitcoin. And, well, let's just honestly and let's just get on with the show because I got a lot of stuff to cover today. News item number 1: River has secured over $800,000,000 worth of Bitcoin and launches its proof of reserve. Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin writing this one, River, a leading US Bitcoin exchange has launched River Proof of Reserves to provide clients with verifiable proof that their, well, that their Bitcoin holdings are fully reserved. This sets a new transparency standard for the industry after recent failures of exchanges like FTX, shook consumers' trust.
River CEO Alex Leishman stated River proof of reserves is about more than verifying our balances. It's about reinforcing River's commitment to integrity and long term client trust. Our goal is to build unshakable trust with our clients. Proof of reserves is the gold standard for Bitcoin custody. He stated that would be Alex Leichmann. I'm just pausing to say that thank God it's not suit speak. It's a little flowery. That's okay. I don't mind flowery. But it's not suitspeak. So thank you, thank you to Alex Leishman for not putting a tie on that suitspeak. The new feature allows clients to independently confirm that River does indeed hold their Bitcoin in full reserve multi sig cold storage.
River currently secures over $800,000,000 worth of Bitcoin for its clients. And according to Leishman, quote, we're leading by example by proving every month that your Bitcoin is exactly where we say it is, end quote. After recent failures, he encouraged the industry to adopt similar transparency standards to rebuild trust. I got a problem with that statement. We'll come to it. The added transparency also prevents fractional reserve practices from destabilizing fiat currencies and leading to bank failures. If more Bitcoin exchanges prove full reserves, it could restore faith in intermediaries while stopping dangerous leverage in the system. Okay. I got the same problem with that statement too.
Don't get me wrong. I like Alex. I think he's a good Joe. I like River. They're a good company. I don't think that it is up to the companies to restore trust in Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin lost no trust. Sure, you'll say, well, yeah, it did. Because FTX and all these guys made it look bad. Okay. I'll give you that. I will. I'll concede that that that there is a how to say it a credibility problem that is surface view only. Remember, this has nothing the FTX, and, who was it BlockFi or whoever it was that was all these other people in Alameda Research and all the rest of that raft of bullshit that was headed up by people who were unwilling to go the extra mile to be the barest minimum of ethical.
Alright. That's their problem. That is the human problem behind technology. It doesn't matter that the Internet is the Internet. The Internet lost trust in a lot of people in the very, you know, 1990 to 1995 through 1997 because there was a lot of scams on the Internet. Are we still using the Internet today? Yes. Was it up to anyone to restore the trust in the Internet? No. Nobody actually came to the foreword and said, we're going to do X so that we can restore trust. It is not up to us. It is not up to Alex Fleishman. It is not up to Arthur Hayes, who we'll hear from later in the show. It's not up to these people. These people have just the I mean, sure, they have the ability to restore trust, because they have the innate ability to detract from trust.
But this is Bitcoin. It needs no trust other than minting a block roughly every 10 minutes and ordering the transactions in said block and giving out the subsidy and fees for that block to whoever mined it. There has never been a breach of trust in the actual system itself. See, that that's what I'm saying. We're, you know, it's it's like where where does he say, let's see. Do do do do do where where I wanna say our goal is to build unshakable trust. Proof of reserves is a gold standard for Bitcoin, custody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're it was something else. He's there's something else he said. I can't remember. It's not that long of an article. Oh, yeah. He encouraged the industry to adopt similar transparency standards to rebuild trust.
No. You just need to adopt similar transparency standards so that you can act and morally in the space. It is not anything more than that. Alright? It's building on Bitcoin means building upon trust. Not obfuscating Bitcoin is up to you as a CEO or somebody who wants to build on Bitcoin, whatever. If you obfuscate any part of the ability for Bitcoin to be as transparent as it is and it is about as transparent as can be, that's that's a human decision right and has nothing to do with Bitcoin rebuild the trust in yourselves that's the that's the only thing that that that can be done here Calling into question, even accidentally, which I'm, you know, I'm I'm sure that that Alex Fleishman understands that there is no loss of trust in Bitcoin itself.
We're talking about the view of the public. This is an important factor to understand. The people that will do well in this space will take their lessons from Bitcoin itself and move those lessons forward to their customers without changing the meaning of a thing. Those will be the people like River that have already done it and Unchained Capital that have already done it and the guys at CoinKite that have already done it. They're already taking the lessons of Bitcoin and just moving them forward and putting a face behind it. These people have lost no trust.
And it is not up to them for the other people in the world to regain trust in yet another company that may end up being another FTX. Those people need to burn. I'm sorry, but there's there's no reason to worry about it. So, Bitcoin is going to Bitcoin. It doesn't need anybody to help them. But, some developers do need help. And in particular, these 2 developers from Samurais, who have appeared together in court for the first time at status conference, Bitcoin Magazine Frank Korva is writing. Today, samurai wallet developers, Kean Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill is it Lonnergan. Sorry. Lonnergan Hill appeared together in court in the southern district of New York for a status conference. I've never heard of that before.
This was the first time that the 2 made a public appearance together since the United States Department of Justice charged the 2 developers with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business in April of 2024. It is also the first time either of them have appeared in court since Hill appeared ahead of his bail release in July, and Rodriguez first attended a court hearing in May. The prosecution addressed the court first, stating that it had produced, quote, vol voluminous voluminous batches of discovery, end quote.
It made the 1st batch available to the defense in mid June of 2024. The batch featured business records, emails, social media account information, amongst other data. The second batch, which it made available to the defense in mid August of 2024, featured data extractions from the devices that the Department of Justice seized from these 2 developers. The DOJ has extracted information from 15 of the 44 devices, Jesus, seized from Rodriguez and 25 of the 27 devices seized from Hill. The prosecution notes or rather, the prosecution also stated that it would produce a 3rd batch of discovery containing a relatively modest amount of data soon, TM, and that it was prepared to proceed with trial.
Rodriguez's attorney made the case that it was premature to set a trial date as the defense has yet to review all of the discovery made available in mid August 2024. The defense also said that it has yet to come across any evidence showing that Rodriguez or Hill operated an unlicensed money transmitting business. Hill's attorney stated that they've received 8 terabytes worth of discovery. That's that's 8 terabytes you know, 8 terabytes contains the amount of information that's in the Library of Congress. I don't know that for sure, but prove me wrong. Because I'll bet you I'll bet you that there's not 8 terabytes of data in the Library of Congress. I'm just saying. I just this is a little ridiculous.
To put this amount of data in context, he explained that this was the equivalent, oh, of 75% of the amount of information in the Library of Congress. I guess we're thinking the same way. And that if one printed this information, one could stack the paper it was printed on to the moon and back 22 times, making the point that it would be hard to sort through and review. Now that's impossible, dude. Hill's attorney also referenced the letter from Senator Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden in which the lawmakers stated that the DOJ's unprecedented interpretation of the US Department of Treasury's Financial Crime Enforcement Network statute regarding operating an unlicensed money transmitting business contradicts the very intent of the rule itself.
For this reason, he proposed a motion to dismiss the charge. The judge denied this request and scheduled a follow-up hearing for December 17, 2024 at 10 AM Eastern. In the second portion of the conference, Rodriguez's lawyer requested 2 modifications to his bail conditions. He requested that the court remove Rodriguez's home detention mandate and that the court modify restrictions on his ability to transact with currency, some of which was proceeds from Samura. Zach Shapiro, legal fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, later explained to me that the second modification was requested in part so that Rodriguez could use Bitcoin proceeds from samurai to pay his legal fees.
Yeah. No shit, dude. Rodriguez's attorney argued that home detention was unduly restrictive and unnecessary and that Rodriguez is not a flight risk. The defense also cited 2 instances in which Rodriguez had the opportunity to flee, but didn't, in its efforts to make the case that he no longer needed to wear a location monitoring device. The prosecution pushed back, arguing that Rodriguez' home detention was necessary to ensure that Rodriguez continued to appear for trial. It also stated that the charges being levied against Rodriguez for running a cryptocurrency money laundering business were severe. And that Rodriguez was potentially facing a sentence of up to 25 years. Well, the prosecution went on to cite evidence from handwritten pages handwritten pages that it had obtained from Rodriguez' home containing details about how he would flee the country to a jurisdiction from which it would be difficult to extradite him. This information included a list of different passports as well as having $10,000 in cash, a burner phone, an unused sim card, and various mnemonic phrases for crypto assets amongst other items. Oh, no. That does not look good. Rodriguez's lawyer argued that his plan applied to what Rodriguez would do in the case of a more general emergency, while the prosecution argued that this was Rodriguez's current escape plan.
The prosecution stated that it was a pretty good plan. And that it doesn't feel that it's appropriate to stop monitoring Rodriguez at this time. However, the prosecution did say that it would consider allowing Rodriguez certain freedoms if petitioned without including any specifics. The judge did not allow for the modification of the bail conditions and asked both the prosecution and the defense to get moving on the case. So Rodriguez had, according to the to the prosecution, they found handwritten evidence that he was going to flee the country and had extra passports and a burner phone and unused SIM card and $10 in cash and mnemonic phrases.
I honestly wow. I mean, wow. If true, then Rodriguez wasn't really thinking outside the box in how he was going to hide that information when if and when well, actually not if. Basically, it's just a when. They the feds came knocking on the door and got everything from his house. So this begs the question, if it was you, where would you hide your escape plan? Because if it's anywhere in your house, it's not safe. Even if it's within a safe. Because they'll take they will rip the safe out of the wall or they will jackhammer it out of a concrete floor. And they will take that son of a bitch to a lot to one of their, you know, many many people that can open safes for them and, believe me, the feds have them and they will open that safe.
They will open that safe and they will get that shit. So putting your shit in a safe isn't safe. It has to be away from you. Where would you be able to put that particular kind of information and money and unused where would you put it? You can't put it into a safe deposit box because that's attached to your name. So they're gonna they're gonna abscond with that. If you put it at, like, let's say your sister's house, they're probably going to search your sister's house. Or your sister's gonna go, uh-uh. Uh-uh. I'm not getting anywhere close to this shit. This is your cat. You feed it. I'm not doing that shit. So you can probably just understand that your your your your family members aren't going to want to keep your, escape the fed you know, the escape the feds plan. Plus, it's not really right to put that shit on them in the 1st place. Do you dig a hole in your background or in your backyard in the ground?
They're probably gonna find that if it's on your property. So, again, I'm just saying after this show, think about it. Where would you keep an escape plan, extra cash, a burner phone? Where would you put it in a way that you would feel very, very safe that the feds would not find it if they come knocking on your door? I I think it's an interesting question. But Arthur Hayes has a different kind of question altogether. From CoinDesk, Omkar Godbold, Fed rate cut, which should be coming in about 9 minutes, could crash crypto markets, but the era of central banks is over. Again, according to Arthur Hayes, who was, by the way, the chief investment officer of maelstrom and co founder of BitNex, he's made this bold statement that risk assets, including cryptocurrencies, could crash a few days after the first Fed rate cut which is expected to be announced very, very shortly.
The Fed is expected to announce its first rate cut since 2020 later today, kicking off the so called liquidity easing cycle that has historically boded well for Bitcoin. The impending rate cut, however, would add to the inflation problems and lead to yen strength, causing broad based risk aversion, Hayes explained in an exclusive interview with CoinDesk. Quote, the rate cut is a bad idea because inflation is still an issue inside the United States, with the government being the biggest contributor to the sticky price pressures. If you make borrowing cheaper, it's going to add to inflation, Hayes said.
Quote, the second reason is that the interest rate differential between the United States and Japan narrows with rate cuts. That could lead to a sharp appreciation in the yen and trigger an unwinding of the yen carry trades yet one more time, Hayes added. Markets got a taste of the destabilizing effect of the yen's strength and the resulting unwinding of the yen carry trades in early August after the Bank of Japan raised its benchmark borrowing cost to 0.25 percent from 0. Bitcoin fell from 64,000 to $50,000 within a single week.
The USDJPY pair is the only thing that matters in the short term, Hayes said. Most analysts expect the BOJ to increase rates further in the coming months as the Fed takes the other route. The divergent policy paths mean that the yen could rally further, thereby forcing investors to square off long positions and risk assets financed by those JPY denominated loans. Hayes sees interest rates in the US following falling all the way back to near zero levels from the current range of 5.5 to 5.25%. Quote, the initial reaction is going to be negative, and the central bank's response will be to do even more cuts to stem that crisis. So I think the cutting rates is a bad idea, but they're going to do it anyway, and so they're going to go to 0 very, very quickly, Hayes explained.
Now there's a whole 2 4 paragraphs about Ethereum and ether. I'm not reading them because it's a shit coin. But Hayes admits that the era of central banking is over. Yeah. Well, when one could hope. Over the past couple of years, Scottish market strategist Russell Napier has repeatedly said that advanced nation governments focusing on bringing down debt to GDP ratios have taken control of the money supply and central banks are fast becoming irrelevant. Per Napier, governments will resort to targeted liquidity creations in sectors like manufacturing and reindustrialization while keeping inflation elevated.
Hayes believes the same and sees it as a positive development for the crypto market. Quote, I 100% agree with that prognosis. The era of central banks is over. The politicians are going to take over and tell banks to create liquidity in specific sectors of the economy, Hayes quipped. Quote, so you're going to see soft and hard capital controls in different locations, which means that crypto is the only asset that you can own that's globally portable and gets you out of that system, Hayes added. Okay. I it's not that I disagree. However, declawing the central banks of the world, you could get yourself assassinated for doing shit like that.
Ask Kennedy. Ask ask a lot of, United States presidents that have had their mitts into fiddling around with the central bank after 1913. Right? Even before that, when we had, like, like, the one of the first two central banks that were very, very short lived entities in the United States before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, there were, you know, there was, like, there was Thomas Jefferson. He didn't want a central bank. He argued with, Hamilton time and time and time and time again about central banking being bad, and he did his level best and succeeded in scuttling the very first central bank. And guess what? An assassination attempt was made on his life.
Kennedy was gonna introduce hard money again. They killed him very quickly after that. So don't I wouldn't I wouldn't so blithely think that, you know, central banking is over. But here's the other thing that I was thinking about while reading this. Think of Ukraine and think of the forever wars in Iraq, Afghanistan. Then we had the whole thing. I mean, the Middle East has basically just been a shit storm forever, but it really got bad after 911. But it wasn't exactly a stable situation when Bush the first was in power and we did that whole desert storm thing or what a desert shield where we were doing like Saddam Hussein and had invaded, what, Kuwait and all that kind of stuff. Because that was before the twin towers fell. So here's what I wonder.
You got the people that came in to rebuild those countries or that were, you know, basically, like, contractors for the United States government military during those conflicts are the same people. Halliburton, BlackRock, Brown and Root, all these guys get these contracts. There has been talk about how it is that we're going to rebuild Ukraine even though that conflict is nowhere close to being over. It's going to be Brown and Root and BlackRock and Halliburton, Schlumberger. I don't even know if they exist anymore. But but I mean so here's what I'm wondering. I'm I'm starting to think about this this thing about governments taking control of the currencies.
Right? Say, say, resort to targeted liquidity creations in sectors like manufacturing and reindustrialization. What does reindustrialization actually mean? Well, it could definitely mean rebuilding from a rebelized state, rubble. Like, think of, you know, rubble, like a whole bunch of torn up and blown apart concrete. Rebelized countries like Ukraine because they're not exactly doing well. Right? To reindustrialize it. So now maybe these forever wars have just simply been and you're gonna say, well, duh. I know. But when you put it into words, it's sort of like casting a spell. It makes it real. It brings the thing to life. So this entire set of wars, these forever wars have nothing to do with an actual conflict.
It is finding a reason to destroy as much shit as you can so that you can create money to rebuild it, so that you have a reason to create money to rebuild it. What's that reason? That's the marketing arm of the United States government which is Madison Avenue in New York. It's the advertisers. It's CNN. It's it's all the marketing guys. It's all your media guys. It's it's the guy saying they were throwing babies from the incubators, we have to do this and it was a fucking lie. But it was done to create money, it was done to have a reason to create money, and we bought into the reason to create all this money.
That's all this is. These wars, they're not wars. These are conflict based credit creations. That's what this shit is. Now, it is 11 o'clock PM straight up. Maybe by the time I get to, read running the numbers, we'll know what the Fed has done. So, let's run those numbers. And the Fed has slashed interest rates by 50 bips. They went they went aggressive. They they didn't take the 0.25 percent slash. They didn't do it. They went for the whole hog. They're doing it. They're doing it. They're doing it. Let's see if there's any effects in the markets as of yet because this just dropped. Oil is down 0.65 percent to $70.73 a barrel. Brenton, North Sea is down a half to 70 3.38. Natural gas is down 2 thirds of a point to $2.30 per 1,000. And gasoline is moving sideways just a hair above $2 a gallon.
Gold, moving well, it's a tenth of a point. It just flipped over. It's a tenth of a point to the upside, but below 26100 to 2595. Silver is down over a point. Platinum is down just at a point. And copper is up almost a half, while palladium is sucking swamp water at 3.15% to the downside. Let's see. Ag is fully mixed today. The biggest winner is sugar. It's up. Oh, well. Wow. 6% to the upside. Holy smokes, man. We like we got the sweet tooth. Cotton is down 1.66%. Live cattle is moving sideways. Lean hogs up 0.14%. Feeder cattle also moving sideways.
Let's see what the equities are doing. Nothing. They're not budging. All of them moving sideways. The Dow is down point 06. The S and P is down point 04. The Nasdaq is up point03. See, it's just moving sideways. There's absolutely no action. Not yet, anyway. We'll have to let the markets figure this shit out. Okay. $60,700 is the price of 1 Bitcoin. That is a $1,200,000,000,000 market cap, and we can purchase 23 point 4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,755,632 of. Average fees per block have risen a tad 0.06 BTC in fees on average on a per block basis, and there are a 101 blocks carrying a measly 183,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 7 sats per vbyte. Low priorities are 6 sats per vbyte.
Mining hash rate is at 661.7 x of hashes per second. From my interview with Tomek from Albi, that was Bitcoin and episode 955, I've got the following boosts. Satoshi Land with 12/21. Oh, it's a palindrome boost. Dude, this was such an interesting and important episode. Appreciate it a lot. You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Nostra Gang with a 100 says, I am a super gigantic fan of Alby. If anyone listening is in need of an invite, please do reach out. I'd be happy to help. The wild hustle with a 1,000. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. Paul Allen with a 1,000 says, quote, every time I show someone something, it doesn't work.
Tomac must be my brother from another mother. Yeah. I think we all have that issue, man. Let's see here. Doo doo doo, Jamousie. Oh, sorry. Jam Aussie with 500 says, my first listen on the fountain app. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. Had a hard time hearing you on this one. Yeah. I ran it through compression and the the when I was monitoring it before I actually rendered it down, it sounded fine. But when I went to the actual rendered show, my voice is definitely down in the background. So I'm not sure what occurred. I'm gonna try I've saved that episode. I'm gonna try to re render that thing and put the new audio up, but it may not work. I'm not exactly sure what the hell happened there, but god's death, my apologies, my brother. Bitcoin Sandy with 500 says can finally send you sorry.
Can finally send a boost to you. Slowly does it. Yeah. Wartime with 333 sends a fire emoji, and that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use KeyChat app version 1.19.7, insect login and medium groups. KeyChat is a private chat app. It's built on eCash, specifically Cashew, the nostr protocol, and signal protocol. It's available only on Android. Oh, bummer, dude. Quote: KeyChat is inspired by the postal system, stamps, post offices, letters. You know, that kind of thing. KeyChat uses Bitcoin e cash as stamps and Nostra relays as post offices.
Key chat uses signal protocol to ensure message encryption security and meta data privacy, states the project description, quote, key chat is currently not stable enough, so early testers can only download it through the Android apk. We are working on making it stable, and then we will add it to the iOS and Android app stores, added the developers. So what's new? You can log in with your Nostr insect. You can add medium groups based on the signal protocol and modify the notification system to use Google FCM. Here is the blurb directly from KeyChat. When we started conceptualizing KeyChat, we aimed to design a chat application that surpasses signal.
Our design process was divided into 4 steps. 1st, KeyChat addresses issues of user sovereignty. It opts to use Nostra public keys as IDs and Nostra relays for message transmission. Users fully own their ID's, which are not registered on any server. They can choose which relays to use. Secondly, KeyChat aims to solve the security issue of message encryption by implementing end to end encryption that ensures both forward secrecy and backward secrecy. KeyChat implements the signal protocol, on the client side without the need for a coordinated server. Existing Nostra relays only need to handle the transmission of encrypted messages.
3rd, KeyChat tackles the problem of metadata privacy. A major issue with the original Nostra DMs is that metadata is not only exposed to relay operators, but also to other users. Key chat separates the sending address and receiving addresses from the ID updating these addresses for almost every message. Almost isn't quite there, is it? Thus, each key chat message is nearly independent. Okay. They're getting close. They're they're closing in on it. And lastly, key chat addresses the issue or sorry. Key chat addresses the issue of user payments and relay charges.
Since each message is not linked to an ID, traditional payment models are not feasible. Initially, we thought of having relays issue one time anonymous access tokens that users could purchase and use for anonymous pay per use. Later, we realized that using Bitcoin e cash as postage for messages would be a better solution. Yeah, I agree. Ultimately, we designed a chat application where users maintain sovereignty messages are securely encrypted metadata privacy is preserved, and the economic model is straightforward and reliable. So there you go. Now, here's what I wanna see.
Instead, for all you guys that are developing clients, instead of trying to figure out how to make sure that DMs work on Nostr because they kinda don't. Instead, how can you have a sidebar of, like, and I mean when I mean sidebar, I mean I'm looking at a website, the graphic user interface of a website. Have, like, the ability to click a button that says DMs or messages or whatever it is and when it takes me over there I'm not interacting with your clients interaction with the Nostra protocol instead you're leveraging key chat Just just drop it in there. Is it possible that key chat is modular enough that you can just have it like you're calling up a library?
Something like that. I know I'm not a programmer so when I say things and you are a programmer and you go you don't know what the hell you're talking about, I will be the first to admit that. Okay. So take what it is that I'm saying and figure out a way to retell that story so that the following happens. I'm using Corel. I send a kind one note. I say, good morning. And somebody writes back and says, oh, hey. Good morning. I sent you a DM. And then I go click DMs or messages or whatever and no longer am I actually looking. I'm still in CoreCall, but I'm not leveraging the way that I'm not leveraging CoreCall's leverage of the Nostra protocol.
Inside of CoreCall, I'm now leveraging key chat directly. That's what I'm trying to get because there's no reason to rebuild this wheel. There's just no reason to. If the guys over at key chat can figure this shit out, then how does every single client just drop that shit into their client so that the DM situation is just solved and we can use DMs on whatever client that we want? That would be nice. That would be really nice. Okay? So let's I mean, if I'm wrong and it's impossible, let me know in the boostograms. Tell me how I suck, whatever it is. But I honestly don't think that I'm wrong. I think that what I just suggested very much could be done. And as key chat gets better and better and better, then maybe nobody else really needs to rebuild the whole DM part of Nostr, and we can start building other things because God knows we need them.
Now over to Bhutan, which I never really talk about, but the kingdom of Bhutan holds 13,029 BTC that has been made from Bitcoin mining operations. They didn't just buy it, they mined it. Now, I did talk about Bhutan last week or maybe possibly Monday. But all I said was that they had I think I mentioned that they had twice as much Bitcoin as El Salvador given the number that I saw, which was somewhere around that Bhutan Bhutan held 7,000, Bitcoin and change. Something like that. Well, now it's up to 13,000 bitcoin, which is a hell of a lot more than twice as much as El Salvador.
What the hell is going on in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan? Well, let's find out. These 13,000 Bitcoin holdings come from Bhutan Mining operations carried out by the Kingdom of Bhutan's investment arm, Druk Holdings. Bhutan is the 4th largest government with Bitcoin holdings on our platform with over $750,000,000 in BTC. Unlike most governments, Bhutan's BTC does not come from law enforcement based asset seizures, but from actual Bitcoin mining operations which have ramped up dramatically since early 2023, said the surveillance firm.
In May of 2023, Dreck Holding and Investments partnered with BitDeer to develop a carbon free Bitcoin mining operation in the country. In April, the parties revealed plans to expand their mining capacity to 600 megawatts. Bhutan's abundant hydropower resources makes it perfectly suited for Bitcoin mining operations. And you can track Bhutan's Bitcoin Holdings here, and they send you directly over to Arcam Intelligence. And I need to bookmark that so that I don't lose it because I was, I was looking for it yesterday and I never could actually find it on archimintelligence.com. And let's see what their balance history looks like. I'm just kinda gonna go for the last month, last 3 months, and we'll go all. So, yeah, they actually had a sizable they had a $150,000,000 worth in their balance history back in 2021, yo.
Damn. Let's see how far back when was it when did they have 0? Man, all the way back in in in March of 2021, the kingdom of Bhutan had $150,000 worth of Bitcoin. And now, they had a they had a peak of $936,000,000 in Bitcoin. But since the price has come back down as of late, they are sitting at a price, where where they got 700 and Royal government of Bhutan and BTC alone has $790,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. Wow. That is that is impressive. What's not impressive is that they also hold a handful of shit coins like MATIC and INS and, for god, I don't know why, but Sandcoin.
Why do you have Sandcoin? Oh, for whatever. Anyway, so the point is, kingdom of Bhutan has been mining the living shit out of Bitcoin all on their own with their own operations. They haven't bought Bitcoin. They haven't seized any Bitcoin. El Salvador, they had to buy Bitcoin. They didn't mine that Bitcoin. They also didn't seize it as far as I know. So they were just converting fiat currency into Bitcoin, but the royal government of Bhutan, they actually mined this Bitcoin. They didn't seize it and they didn't buy it. That means that their mining operations is impressive, and you're talking about a Himalayan kingdom.
We're gonna we need to watch Bhutan a lot more carefully than we have been watching Bhutan. Now, Cathedral Bitcoin. These guys are doing the opposite of Bhutan. They're shifting their focus away from Bitcoin mining to Bitcoin acquisition strategies. Interesting. After 7 years in the mining business, Canadian Bitcoin miner, Cathedra, is altering its focus. The company is now shifting to develop data centers and plans to use the profits to purchase Bitcoin instead of mining it. They're going for the AI angle, I'll bet. The publicly traded company cited unpredictable profit margins as the main cause behind the change in strategy. Quote, the last 3 years have demonstrated to us that Bitcoin mining is not not not not not a reliable way to grow shareholders Bitcoins per share.
Indeed, 9 of the 10 largest by market capitalization publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies hold less Bitcoin per share today than they did 3 years ago, the company stated in a memo. Cathedra plans to shift towards developing data centers to generate predictable cash flow for purchasing more Bitcoin. Other tactics may include borrowing against balance sheet assets using Bitcoin linked derivatives to generate income, developing new assets from proceeds of financing, and issuing debt in hybrid securities for acquiring yet more BTC. The company will also continue its existing mining operations and retain the Bitcoin it it produces, indicating that mining will not be completely abandoned. Quote, going forward, we will make all capital allocation decisions with the intention of maximizing our shareholders per share Bitcoin holdings.
This is a philosophy we have always held in our minds, now formalized as our explicit policy and primary objective in stewarding shareholder capital, reads the memo. Cathedra currently holds a mere 43 BTC or a paltry 5 satoshis per share. Quote, we look forward to reporting our progress to shareholders over the coming quarters years as was stated in the announcement. Read more about the rationale behind the quote sats per share metric for valuing public companies in a recent issue of Marty's Bent. And I'm gonna be a I'm gonna be a good little, good little person.
And even though you're not supposed to, what am I saying? You're not supposed to good lord. You're not supposed to toot the horn of people that could be considered your competitors in the space. I love Marty and all the your competitors in the space. I love Marty and all the other guys that are in this space. And when something important like this comes out, I have no problem at all making sure that you guys have access to what he wrote about. Because what he wrote about, I have no problem at all making sure that you guys have access to what he wrote about because what he wrote about is this this issue of sats per share.
And Michael Sailor a couple of days ago, I think, kind of prompted some of this, writing from Marty. So I I anyway, I'm including the link to Marty's bent that he talks about this in. But in that Marty's bent, let me go do it now, there is this hold on. Yeah. TFTC, put this note out on x. Get rid of your blue check, bro. MicroStrategy announces a $700,000,000 private offering of convertible senior notes with plans to use the proceeds to acquire more Bitcoin. This offering includes an option for an additional $105,000,000. And then he go but basically, he's going on to say that somewhere somewhere I saw Michael Saylor make a quote about sats per share or Bitcoin per share as a metric for shareholder value, this actually makes a lot of sense.
Right? Because now we're we're looking at what's on your books as a publicly traded company that has outstanding shares that are owned by John Q Public? What does John Q Public actually get when John Q Public buys a share of your company? Well, John Q Public doesn't give a shit about caring and human resources. What he does give a shit about is that your company is well managed, is actually making a profit, and that that profit is realized through either dividends per share on a per share basis to John Q Public or that John Q Public's value of the share is backed up by actual assets on the company's balance sheet. And as, well, let's say, back in the old days when people were just stacking US dollars, that made John Q Public very happy.
But now as we all know, stacking dollars is not necessarily a very unvolatile way to save money because of the way that we devalue money hand over fist here in the western countries of the world. So now we need another asset to hold. And in this case, it's bitcoin. And it's being denominated either in bitcoin per share or, and it makes more sense this way, satoshis per share. Now, Cathedral only has 5 satoshis per share. Now let's say they start saying in their next quarterly report that they release, if that's what they do, I'm not sure, they say that they've increased from 5 satoshis a share to 11 satoshis per share well all of a sudden we've got a pretty solid metric that we can go by is bitcoin volatile sure is it as volatile as the United States dollar I think an argument could be made that it is so.
But Bitcoin itself is not actually volatile itself. It's volatile as compared to fiat currencies, and it is most compared to the US dollar which has, in my opinion, the most volatility because we keep devaluing it. However, we can project that volatility as always going down. It's losing value, and it's been consistently losing value since 1913. In that case, if you just mentally decouple the value of the satoshi being reflected by a u at a certain amount of United States dollars or percentages thereof, then all of a sudden you have one of the most nonvolatile and stable assets of value that you can book on a balance sheet. It's kind of an interesting way to think about this. So, Cathedra, we're gonna have to watch out for that one and see what they actually do.
Now, moving on to the Human Rights Foundation. Bitcoin Development Fund has granted 10 Bitcoin to 20 projects worldwide. That is interesting. So who got it? African Bitcoiners got some. Stratosopher, which is a Bitcoin core developer working on P2P network privacy. Korekle. Alright. My buddy, huddlebod, got funded from a different source other than OpenSats. This is good news. Congratulations, huddlebod. I'm gonna take you out for a beer. Harbor got some. The 256 Foundation is an organization working to advance free and open source mining ecosystems in Bitcoin. Clive Claire, Jeff Gardner, Selenium, BTC Schuhl, Edawallet, Richto I can't pronounce that name, the last name. Yes Bitcoin Haiti, a grassroots Bitcoin education organization in Haiti got some.
Bitcoin in Indonesia got one. Bitcoin plus plus the Tab Conf, Baltic Honey Badger, thank you. And LebitConf and Decentralizer are also at other annual Bitcoin conferences, but those occur in Argentina. So that's good. And then the SATSConf, which is South America's largest Bitcoin conference, and it is held in Sao Paulo. Solidarity Summit is the last on the list. It's a Vienna based event by Hagar Issa for political prisoners and human rights advocates. Thank you to the Human Rights Foundation for moving outside of human rights. Because I think the Human Rights Foundation understands that, you know, people like Huddlbot, who's developing Coracle, while while they're actually working on a Nostra client and not directly working on human rights, Huddlebot is indirectly working on human rights because he's allowing by building Choracle, allowing people that may need to communicate with each other, that may, at this time in in place, not be able to communicate with each other, he's making it possible.
And therefore, he's working for human rights as a side effect of working on Noster. So again, thank you, Alex Gladstein, who's the, I think, the CTO or, wait a minute. No. He's chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation, I believe. And if anybody is behind making this happen, it's definitely gonna be Alex Gladstein. So thank you, Alex, for doing that. Let's see. Do do do. We did that one. Ah, radio. This is the last one up. This is interesting. This is about wave lake. Do you not know what wave lake is? If you want to go directly support people that make music, you're not going to do it on SoundCloud.
You're not going to do it on Spotify. You're gonna have to go to value for value enabled things like Wavlaake, wavlaake. Now they've added a value time split block generator directly to the Wave Lake site to hopefully make things a bit easier for music podcast makers Just click on the share button on any track page to get the template. Hope that saves you some hair pulling. Bitpunk. Fm. Okay. So what does this mean for me? It was the case that if I wanted to give value to an artist and I put their song on my podcast, I had to jump through quite a bit of hoops. I had to ask you to boost only during that section of the song or to go and click the link and go directly boost them. And that's a lot of friction.
Now, I have not tried this out, so I may be talking out of my ass. But if I take this value time split template and I drop it into my podhome.fm pod, like, that's that's the people that host my podcast. So when I after I record this, I'm gonna upload it to Pod Home. I'm gonna put all the show notes in. I'm gonna set the chapters. I can do the transcript. I do it all in Pod Home, Right? For the one low low price of I can't remember, but it's definitely comparable with what I was paying for SoundCloud which didn't have any features. In either event, I have a value for value tab in Pod Home that lets me do where I set how many, Satoshis I get versus, like, Tomac. Like, yesterday, I put Tomac in, as a 49% split. So any for anybody that's listening to the Tomac interview, when you boost that show, 49% of all your stats are going directly to Tomec's wallet because I was able to drop his get Albi wallet address directly into Pod Home, the value for value tab.
It's so easy. It's so easy. And I never touch those sats. They go directly to him. They don't pass through me. They go directly to Tomac. Now, but down there in that same tab is something that says time split. So I'm thinking, here's what this is what I want. I want to be able to put drop the value time split that I get from wave late for the song, drop it into the value time split, and be able to set the start time and the end time directly in podhome.fm. And then I take the actual WAV file of the song and drop it into my editor at between those two time splits or between those times.
And that way whenever you're listening to the song without doing anything, all you gotta do is hit the zap button and I get none of the zaps. It goes all I well, I mean, I could set it to where I could get a percentage if I wanted to, but I wouldn't do that. They 100% go to the artist. So if I put, like, Manlike Quex, one of the artists right now, the the super hot artist on on Wavelake, if I drop one of his songs, go grab the value time split template for that song, and drop it into pothome.fm and set the beginning and ending time. Then when you're listening to that song and you zap or you boost or you do anything, it doesn't come to me. It goes directly to manlikequex. This entire value for value ecosystem is going to trash almost all legacy media.
Books, encyclopedias, record producers, like RCA and Sony and all those guys, if RCA is still even around as a as a record label, they're all gone. They're all dead. They just don't know it yet. They were actually dead before Lars Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica, got up, put on a fucking suit, and went and bitched and moaned and cried in front of fucking congress. The very quote man that Metallica had been writing about as evil for years, here we have this guy tucking his tail between his legs and saying, we need fuel for our Learjet. We're losing money because of Limewire or Napster.
That was in the nineties. They thought they won by closing down Napster. And all it did was 2 things. 1 is it put everybody in the music industry and by extension the media in general industry on life support. And all those people that were put on life support don't know that they're on life support. They have not been told by the doctor that they're dying and that they need to go get their affairs in order. They have not been told this. Right? So second second let's just for seconds. Oh, I where's my thing for seconds Well, I lost my train of thought I'm just saying they're on life support They're already dead the doctor hasn't told them to get their shit in order And that was in the nineties.
When they closed down Napster and everybody thought everything was okay, or at least in that industry. But now now once Bitcoin came around, it completely threw a protective wall up. And what we're building behind the wall that is Bitcoin is the value for value podcasting 2.0 and all the other new media that's going to basically be that's what our children are going to be watching for their news. How they're going to read their books. How they're going to listen to music. Spotify SoundCloud Sony Music CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times bestseller list.
No, I'm serious. The New York Times bestseller list is one of those stalwart things. Kiss it goodbye. It's been on life support since Lars Ulrich stood up and whined to congress. If you want to see the the demarcation the mark of where everything changed, it wasn't 9 11. It was Lars Ulrich. When he bitched about Napster, that was it for mail. That was it for music, for movies, for books, for bestseller lists, for reviews, for online stores, for all the news media that you could possibly ever want, for all the magazines that you could possibly ever think of. Everything got put on life support when Lars Ulrich put on a tie.
What we're building behind the wall that is Bitcoin is so profound and so large that I don't think any of us can actually get the full picture. It would be like the guy working like, your job is to work on this one hose on this landing strut on this vehicle that we're building. And so that person's all that person's attention is focused on how do we connect make sure that this hose connects to this connector and we get it over this connector and make sure that it doesn't kink while the land like, the landing gear is lifting up and all that. And what he doesn't see is that a mile and a half away on the other end of this mile and a half long ship, somebody's working on a heat shield on the jet engine.
There's no way you can see that far. A mile and a half down the road, I'm talking about an immense project. We are all engaged in this immense project and none of us can see. We're too busy building. We don't have time to walk so far away from it and get on a high enough mountaintop so that we can take an entire overview of the project that we're all working on. But we are all working on it. If you're listening to my voice, I guarantee you're working on it. If you're using Nostr, you're working on it. If you use Wavelake, you're working on this project. If you use Bitcoin and eCash and Lightning Network, Infediments and any of that shit, you've completely gutted central banking. They're dead. They just don't know it yet because they're on fucking life support and the doctor hasn't told them to get their shit together.
That's why I smile sometimes. Nothing can stop what's coming. There's not an there's not an amount of wars that you can engage in. The only thing you could do is launch all nuclear weapons on the face of the planet all at once and make sure that they're spread out enough to kill the maximum amount of humanity that you possibly can kill and you won't kill all of us. Life will find a way and humans are the best at that shit. Humans will survive that. You think I'm crazy, but no. I'm a biologist at heart. I know the power of life. I certainly know the power of human beings.
There's no way that you can strip that away. There is no way that you can tell me that there's no way that a whole bunch of people that has enough genetics to be able to rebuild the the human infrastructure, the the actual biological infrastructure of humanity, can't live in a cave for a 150 fucking years and figure out how to generate electricity, how to grow plants, how to make light. There's no way you can tell me that that's that it's not possible. I will laugh at you and you can come up with anything that you want to come up with to prove me wrong and you will have no evidence to the contrary of what I say right now. All that would do is hold us back for a 1000 years.
And we'll have to contend with the same bankers that also have underground bunkers and, you know, 150 years worth of food if that's what they do. I don't know. We conjecture about that shit all the time, but I don't know. I've never met any of these guys. I don't know if they've got, like, some kind of, you know, a trillion year plan in the, you know, in the belly of the beast when if shit hits the fan. I don't know. I do know that they'll survive and will survive. The plebs and the elite will all survive. It'd be better if that shit didn't happen, because if it doesn't happen, then the elite, they're all on life support.
Again, the doctor hasn't told them to get their affairs in order. We already won. They don't know it. We don't know it. Because the immensity of what I'm describing here is too large for any one person to see. About the only thing that we have right now is to be able to go to somebody else and have a lunch break with them that's working on some part of the project and have them describe what it is that they're doing. And then you'd have to visualize what those two pieces of information mean and then try to extrapolate and visualize the entirety of the project. Good luck.
You won't do it. And we start adding stuff like, you know, like permaculture in and people who are figuring out that the food system is jacked and that we've been we're being fed poison all this time. And all of a sudden we start going back to our roots and we start thinking about maybe I do have time to learn how to garden. And there's other things that are coming up. Maybe there's somebody who's like, I'll tell you what, I'll turn your front yard into a garden. I'll do that, as like a lawn service. You pay me $50 every time I come out. I'll harvest some of your food for you. I'll leave it on a straw thing. I'll take $50.10 percent of the of the harvest and maybe I'll use that for my own food or maybe I'll sell it at a farmers market. There's that idea. I'm just saying this in the the project isn't just Nostra. It's not just Bitcoin. Bitcoin is providing us a huge shield like the wall of China to be able to get our shit together behind this wall. And that way, if they ever break through the wall or we decide to take the wall down ourselves, it won't matter.
We'll be too strong. And, yeah, sure, this came this entire thing that I'm just talking about right now simply came out of the fact that radio on Nostr drops a note about the value time split template being added to Waverlake, which is a very very small infinitesimally tiny music place that that artists can put their music up without BMI and ASCAP and Sony getting in their way. And in comparison to BMI ASCAP and Sony, it's so minuscule as to be a flea on a gnat's ass. It doesn't matter. I see the growth. I see what it was versus what it is now and given that I can extrapolate where it's going.
Nothing stops this train. So you're either on the train and can't be stopped or you're off the train and watch what that train will do yet get left behind or, god forbid, you're a Lars Ulrich bastard wearing a suit and tie standing on the tracks in front of the train, and you know what's going to happen to Lars. I even like Metallica. Right? I kinda do. But after that scene of Lars Ulrich in congress, I kinda lost all my respect for him. I still like the music, but I can't really respect Metallica anymore, not since the nineties. Okay. So, rant over, but be happy.
We're building the spaceship that's gonna get us away away from this thing, and we never have to leave the planet. And even if we did, I'd 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. Yes, sirree. It is 10:34 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It is the 18th day of September 2024.
And this is episode 956 of Bitcoin. And, well, let's just honestly and let's just get on with the show because I got a lot of stuff to cover today. News item number 1: River has secured over $800,000,000 worth of Bitcoin and launches its proof of reserve. Bitcoin Magazine Vivek Sin writing this one, River, a leading US Bitcoin exchange has launched River Proof of Reserves to provide clients with verifiable proof that their, well, that their Bitcoin holdings are fully reserved. This sets a new transparency standard for the industry after recent failures of exchanges like FTX, shook consumers' trust.
River CEO Alex Leishman stated River proof of reserves is about more than verifying our balances. It's about reinforcing River's commitment to integrity and long term client trust. Our goal is to build unshakable trust with our clients. Proof of reserves is the gold standard for Bitcoin custody. He stated that would be Alex Leichmann. I'm just pausing to say that thank God it's not suit speak. It's a little flowery. That's okay. I don't mind flowery. But it's not suitspeak. So thank you, thank you to Alex Leishman for not putting a tie on that suitspeak. The new feature allows clients to independently confirm that River does indeed hold their Bitcoin in full reserve multi sig cold storage.
River currently secures over $800,000,000 worth of Bitcoin for its clients. And according to Leishman, quote, we're leading by example by proving every month that your Bitcoin is exactly where we say it is, end quote. After recent failures, he encouraged the industry to adopt similar transparency standards to rebuild trust. I got a problem with that statement. We'll come to it. The added transparency also prevents fractional reserve practices from destabilizing fiat currencies and leading to bank failures. If more Bitcoin exchanges prove full reserves, it could restore faith in intermediaries while stopping dangerous leverage in the system. Okay. I got the same problem with that statement too.
Don't get me wrong. I like Alex. I think he's a good Joe. I like River. They're a good company. I don't think that it is up to the companies to restore trust in Bitcoin. Because Bitcoin lost no trust. Sure, you'll say, well, yeah, it did. Because FTX and all these guys made it look bad. Okay. I'll give you that. I will. I'll concede that that that there is a how to say it a credibility problem that is surface view only. Remember, this has nothing the FTX, and, who was it BlockFi or whoever it was that was all these other people in Alameda Research and all the rest of that raft of bullshit that was headed up by people who were unwilling to go the extra mile to be the barest minimum of ethical.
Alright. That's their problem. That is the human problem behind technology. It doesn't matter that the Internet is the Internet. The Internet lost trust in a lot of people in the very, you know, 1990 to 1995 through 1997 because there was a lot of scams on the Internet. Are we still using the Internet today? Yes. Was it up to anyone to restore the trust in the Internet? No. Nobody actually came to the foreword and said, we're going to do X so that we can restore trust. It is not up to us. It is not up to Alex Fleishman. It is not up to Arthur Hayes, who we'll hear from later in the show. It's not up to these people. These people have just the I mean, sure, they have the ability to restore trust, because they have the innate ability to detract from trust.
But this is Bitcoin. It needs no trust other than minting a block roughly every 10 minutes and ordering the transactions in said block and giving out the subsidy and fees for that block to whoever mined it. There has never been a breach of trust in the actual system itself. See, that that's what I'm saying. We're, you know, it's it's like where where does he say, let's see. Do do do do do where where I wanna say our goal is to build unshakable trust. Proof of reserves is a gold standard for Bitcoin, custody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're it was something else. He's there's something else he said. I can't remember. It's not that long of an article. Oh, yeah. He encouraged the industry to adopt similar transparency standards to rebuild trust.
No. You just need to adopt similar transparency standards so that you can act and morally in the space. It is not anything more than that. Alright? It's building on Bitcoin means building upon trust. Not obfuscating Bitcoin is up to you as a CEO or somebody who wants to build on Bitcoin, whatever. If you obfuscate any part of the ability for Bitcoin to be as transparent as it is and it is about as transparent as can be, that's that's a human decision right and has nothing to do with Bitcoin rebuild the trust in yourselves that's the that's the only thing that that that can be done here Calling into question, even accidentally, which I'm, you know, I'm I'm sure that that Alex Fleishman understands that there is no loss of trust in Bitcoin itself.
We're talking about the view of the public. This is an important factor to understand. The people that will do well in this space will take their lessons from Bitcoin itself and move those lessons forward to their customers without changing the meaning of a thing. Those will be the people like River that have already done it and Unchained Capital that have already done it and the guys at CoinKite that have already done it. They're already taking the lessons of Bitcoin and just moving them forward and putting a face behind it. These people have lost no trust.
And it is not up to them for the other people in the world to regain trust in yet another company that may end up being another FTX. Those people need to burn. I'm sorry, but there's there's no reason to worry about it. So, Bitcoin is going to Bitcoin. It doesn't need anybody to help them. But, some developers do need help. And in particular, these 2 developers from Samurais, who have appeared together in court for the first time at status conference, Bitcoin Magazine Frank Korva is writing. Today, samurai wallet developers, Kean Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill is it Lonnergan. Sorry. Lonnergan Hill appeared together in court in the southern district of New York for a status conference. I've never heard of that before.
This was the first time that the 2 made a public appearance together since the United States Department of Justice charged the 2 developers with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business in April of 2024. It is also the first time either of them have appeared in court since Hill appeared ahead of his bail release in July, and Rodriguez first attended a court hearing in May. The prosecution addressed the court first, stating that it had produced, quote, vol voluminous voluminous batches of discovery, end quote.
It made the 1st batch available to the defense in mid June of 2024. The batch featured business records, emails, social media account information, amongst other data. The second batch, which it made available to the defense in mid August of 2024, featured data extractions from the devices that the Department of Justice seized from these 2 developers. The DOJ has extracted information from 15 of the 44 devices, Jesus, seized from Rodriguez and 25 of the 27 devices seized from Hill. The prosecution notes or rather, the prosecution also stated that it would produce a 3rd batch of discovery containing a relatively modest amount of data soon, TM, and that it was prepared to proceed with trial.
Rodriguez's attorney made the case that it was premature to set a trial date as the defense has yet to review all of the discovery made available in mid August 2024. The defense also said that it has yet to come across any evidence showing that Rodriguez or Hill operated an unlicensed money transmitting business. Hill's attorney stated that they've received 8 terabytes worth of discovery. That's that's 8 terabytes you know, 8 terabytes contains the amount of information that's in the Library of Congress. I don't know that for sure, but prove me wrong. Because I'll bet you I'll bet you that there's not 8 terabytes of data in the Library of Congress. I'm just saying. I just this is a little ridiculous.
To put this amount of data in context, he explained that this was the equivalent, oh, of 75% of the amount of information in the Library of Congress. I guess we're thinking the same way. And that if one printed this information, one could stack the paper it was printed on to the moon and back 22 times, making the point that it would be hard to sort through and review. Now that's impossible, dude. Hill's attorney also referenced the letter from Senator Cynthia Lummis and Ron Wyden in which the lawmakers stated that the DOJ's unprecedented interpretation of the US Department of Treasury's Financial Crime Enforcement Network statute regarding operating an unlicensed money transmitting business contradicts the very intent of the rule itself.
For this reason, he proposed a motion to dismiss the charge. The judge denied this request and scheduled a follow-up hearing for December 17, 2024 at 10 AM Eastern. In the second portion of the conference, Rodriguez's lawyer requested 2 modifications to his bail conditions. He requested that the court remove Rodriguez's home detention mandate and that the court modify restrictions on his ability to transact with currency, some of which was proceeds from Samura. Zach Shapiro, legal fellow at the Bitcoin Policy Institute, later explained to me that the second modification was requested in part so that Rodriguez could use Bitcoin proceeds from samurai to pay his legal fees.
Yeah. No shit, dude. Rodriguez's attorney argued that home detention was unduly restrictive and unnecessary and that Rodriguez is not a flight risk. The defense also cited 2 instances in which Rodriguez had the opportunity to flee, but didn't, in its efforts to make the case that he no longer needed to wear a location monitoring device. The prosecution pushed back, arguing that Rodriguez' home detention was necessary to ensure that Rodriguez continued to appear for trial. It also stated that the charges being levied against Rodriguez for running a cryptocurrency money laundering business were severe. And that Rodriguez was potentially facing a sentence of up to 25 years. Well, the prosecution went on to cite evidence from handwritten pages handwritten pages that it had obtained from Rodriguez' home containing details about how he would flee the country to a jurisdiction from which it would be difficult to extradite him. This information included a list of different passports as well as having $10,000 in cash, a burner phone, an unused sim card, and various mnemonic phrases for crypto assets amongst other items. Oh, no. That does not look good. Rodriguez's lawyer argued that his plan applied to what Rodriguez would do in the case of a more general emergency, while the prosecution argued that this was Rodriguez's current escape plan.
The prosecution stated that it was a pretty good plan. And that it doesn't feel that it's appropriate to stop monitoring Rodriguez at this time. However, the prosecution did say that it would consider allowing Rodriguez certain freedoms if petitioned without including any specifics. The judge did not allow for the modification of the bail conditions and asked both the prosecution and the defense to get moving on the case. So Rodriguez had, according to the to the prosecution, they found handwritten evidence that he was going to flee the country and had extra passports and a burner phone and unused SIM card and $10 in cash and mnemonic phrases.
I honestly wow. I mean, wow. If true, then Rodriguez wasn't really thinking outside the box in how he was going to hide that information when if and when well, actually not if. Basically, it's just a when. They the feds came knocking on the door and got everything from his house. So this begs the question, if it was you, where would you hide your escape plan? Because if it's anywhere in your house, it's not safe. Even if it's within a safe. Because they'll take they will rip the safe out of the wall or they will jackhammer it out of a concrete floor. And they will take that son of a bitch to a lot to one of their, you know, many many people that can open safes for them and, believe me, the feds have them and they will open that safe.
They will open that safe and they will get that shit. So putting your shit in a safe isn't safe. It has to be away from you. Where would you be able to put that particular kind of information and money and unused where would you put it? You can't put it into a safe deposit box because that's attached to your name. So they're gonna they're gonna abscond with that. If you put it at, like, let's say your sister's house, they're probably going to search your sister's house. Or your sister's gonna go, uh-uh. Uh-uh. I'm not getting anywhere close to this shit. This is your cat. You feed it. I'm not doing that shit. So you can probably just understand that your your your your family members aren't going to want to keep your, escape the fed you know, the escape the feds plan. Plus, it's not really right to put that shit on them in the 1st place. Do you dig a hole in your background or in your backyard in the ground?
They're probably gonna find that if it's on your property. So, again, I'm just saying after this show, think about it. Where would you keep an escape plan, extra cash, a burner phone? Where would you put it in a way that you would feel very, very safe that the feds would not find it if they come knocking on your door? I I think it's an interesting question. But Arthur Hayes has a different kind of question altogether. From CoinDesk, Omkar Godbold, Fed rate cut, which should be coming in about 9 minutes, could crash crypto markets, but the era of central banks is over. Again, according to Arthur Hayes, who was, by the way, the chief investment officer of maelstrom and co founder of BitNex, he's made this bold statement that risk assets, including cryptocurrencies, could crash a few days after the first Fed rate cut which is expected to be announced very, very shortly.
The Fed is expected to announce its first rate cut since 2020 later today, kicking off the so called liquidity easing cycle that has historically boded well for Bitcoin. The impending rate cut, however, would add to the inflation problems and lead to yen strength, causing broad based risk aversion, Hayes explained in an exclusive interview with CoinDesk. Quote, the rate cut is a bad idea because inflation is still an issue inside the United States, with the government being the biggest contributor to the sticky price pressures. If you make borrowing cheaper, it's going to add to inflation, Hayes said.
Quote, the second reason is that the interest rate differential between the United States and Japan narrows with rate cuts. That could lead to a sharp appreciation in the yen and trigger an unwinding of the yen carry trades yet one more time, Hayes added. Markets got a taste of the destabilizing effect of the yen's strength and the resulting unwinding of the yen carry trades in early August after the Bank of Japan raised its benchmark borrowing cost to 0.25 percent from 0. Bitcoin fell from 64,000 to $50,000 within a single week.
The USDJPY pair is the only thing that matters in the short term, Hayes said. Most analysts expect the BOJ to increase rates further in the coming months as the Fed takes the other route. The divergent policy paths mean that the yen could rally further, thereby forcing investors to square off long positions and risk assets financed by those JPY denominated loans. Hayes sees interest rates in the US following falling all the way back to near zero levels from the current range of 5.5 to 5.25%. Quote, the initial reaction is going to be negative, and the central bank's response will be to do even more cuts to stem that crisis. So I think the cutting rates is a bad idea, but they're going to do it anyway, and so they're going to go to 0 very, very quickly, Hayes explained.
Now there's a whole 2 4 paragraphs about Ethereum and ether. I'm not reading them because it's a shit coin. But Hayes admits that the era of central banking is over. Yeah. Well, when one could hope. Over the past couple of years, Scottish market strategist Russell Napier has repeatedly said that advanced nation governments focusing on bringing down debt to GDP ratios have taken control of the money supply and central banks are fast becoming irrelevant. Per Napier, governments will resort to targeted liquidity creations in sectors like manufacturing and reindustrialization while keeping inflation elevated.
Hayes believes the same and sees it as a positive development for the crypto market. Quote, I 100% agree with that prognosis. The era of central banks is over. The politicians are going to take over and tell banks to create liquidity in specific sectors of the economy, Hayes quipped. Quote, so you're going to see soft and hard capital controls in different locations, which means that crypto is the only asset that you can own that's globally portable and gets you out of that system, Hayes added. Okay. I it's not that I disagree. However, declawing the central banks of the world, you could get yourself assassinated for doing shit like that.
Ask Kennedy. Ask ask a lot of, United States presidents that have had their mitts into fiddling around with the central bank after 1913. Right? Even before that, when we had, like, like, the one of the first two central banks that were very, very short lived entities in the United States before the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, there were, you know, there was, like, there was Thomas Jefferson. He didn't want a central bank. He argued with, Hamilton time and time and time and time again about central banking being bad, and he did his level best and succeeded in scuttling the very first central bank. And guess what? An assassination attempt was made on his life.
Kennedy was gonna introduce hard money again. They killed him very quickly after that. So don't I wouldn't I wouldn't so blithely think that, you know, central banking is over. But here's the other thing that I was thinking about while reading this. Think of Ukraine and think of the forever wars in Iraq, Afghanistan. Then we had the whole thing. I mean, the Middle East has basically just been a shit storm forever, but it really got bad after 911. But it wasn't exactly a stable situation when Bush the first was in power and we did that whole desert storm thing or what a desert shield where we were doing like Saddam Hussein and had invaded, what, Kuwait and all that kind of stuff. Because that was before the twin towers fell. So here's what I wonder.
You got the people that came in to rebuild those countries or that were, you know, basically, like, contractors for the United States government military during those conflicts are the same people. Halliburton, BlackRock, Brown and Root, all these guys get these contracts. There has been talk about how it is that we're going to rebuild Ukraine even though that conflict is nowhere close to being over. It's going to be Brown and Root and BlackRock and Halliburton, Schlumberger. I don't even know if they exist anymore. But but I mean so here's what I'm wondering. I'm I'm starting to think about this this thing about governments taking control of the currencies.
Right? Say, say, resort to targeted liquidity creations in sectors like manufacturing and reindustrialization. What does reindustrialization actually mean? Well, it could definitely mean rebuilding from a rebelized state, rubble. Like, think of, you know, rubble, like a whole bunch of torn up and blown apart concrete. Rebelized countries like Ukraine because they're not exactly doing well. Right? To reindustrialize it. So now maybe these forever wars have just simply been and you're gonna say, well, duh. I know. But when you put it into words, it's sort of like casting a spell. It makes it real. It brings the thing to life. So this entire set of wars, these forever wars have nothing to do with an actual conflict.
It is finding a reason to destroy as much shit as you can so that you can create money to rebuild it, so that you have a reason to create money to rebuild it. What's that reason? That's the marketing arm of the United States government which is Madison Avenue in New York. It's the advertisers. It's CNN. It's it's all the marketing guys. It's all your media guys. It's it's the guy saying they were throwing babies from the incubators, we have to do this and it was a fucking lie. But it was done to create money, it was done to have a reason to create money, and we bought into the reason to create all this money.
That's all this is. These wars, they're not wars. These are conflict based credit creations. That's what this shit is. Now, it is 11 o'clock PM straight up. Maybe by the time I get to, read running the numbers, we'll know what the Fed has done. So, let's run those numbers. And the Fed has slashed interest rates by 50 bips. They went they went aggressive. They they didn't take the 0.25 percent slash. They didn't do it. They went for the whole hog. They're doing it. They're doing it. They're doing it. Let's see if there's any effects in the markets as of yet because this just dropped. Oil is down 0.65 percent to $70.73 a barrel. Brenton, North Sea is down a half to 70 3.38. Natural gas is down 2 thirds of a point to $2.30 per 1,000. And gasoline is moving sideways just a hair above $2 a gallon.
Gold, moving well, it's a tenth of a point. It just flipped over. It's a tenth of a point to the upside, but below 26100 to 2595. Silver is down over a point. Platinum is down just at a point. And copper is up almost a half, while palladium is sucking swamp water at 3.15% to the downside. Let's see. Ag is fully mixed today. The biggest winner is sugar. It's up. Oh, well. Wow. 6% to the upside. Holy smokes, man. We like we got the sweet tooth. Cotton is down 1.66%. Live cattle is moving sideways. Lean hogs up 0.14%. Feeder cattle also moving sideways.
Let's see what the equities are doing. Nothing. They're not budging. All of them moving sideways. The Dow is down point 06. The S and P is down point 04. The Nasdaq is up point03. See, it's just moving sideways. There's absolutely no action. Not yet, anyway. We'll have to let the markets figure this shit out. Okay. $60,700 is the price of 1 Bitcoin. That is a $1,200,000,000,000 market cap, and we can purchase 23 point 4 ounces of shiny metal rocks with our 1 Bitcoin, of which there are 19,755,632 of. Average fees per block have risen a tad 0.06 BTC in fees on average on a per block basis, and there are a 101 blocks carrying a measly 183,000 unconfirmed transactions, waiting to clear at high priority rates of 7 sats per vbyte. Low priorities are 6 sats per vbyte.
Mining hash rate is at 661.7 x of hashes per second. From my interview with Tomek from Albi, that was Bitcoin and episode 955, I've got the following boosts. Satoshi Land with 12/21. Oh, it's a palindrome boost. Dude, this was such an interesting and important episode. Appreciate it a lot. You're welcome. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Nostra Gang with a 100 says, I am a super gigantic fan of Alby. If anyone listening is in need of an invite, please do reach out. I'd be happy to help. The wild hustle with a 1,000. Thank you, sir. No, thank you. Paul Allen with a 1,000 says, quote, every time I show someone something, it doesn't work.
Tomac must be my brother from another mother. Yeah. I think we all have that issue, man. Let's see here. Doo doo doo, Jamousie. Oh, sorry. Jam Aussie with 500 says, my first listen on the fountain app. God's death with 537 says, thank you, sir. Had a hard time hearing you on this one. Yeah. I ran it through compression and the the when I was monitoring it before I actually rendered it down, it sounded fine. But when I went to the actual rendered show, my voice is definitely down in the background. So I'm not sure what occurred. I'm gonna try I've saved that episode. I'm gonna try to re render that thing and put the new audio up, but it may not work. I'm not exactly sure what the hell happened there, but god's death, my apologies, my brother. Bitcoin Sandy with 500 says can finally send you sorry.
Can finally send a boost to you. Slowly does it. Yeah. Wartime with 333 sends a fire emoji, and that's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news that you can use KeyChat app version 1.19.7, insect login and medium groups. KeyChat is a private chat app. It's built on eCash, specifically Cashew, the nostr protocol, and signal protocol. It's available only on Android. Oh, bummer, dude. Quote: KeyChat is inspired by the postal system, stamps, post offices, letters. You know, that kind of thing. KeyChat uses Bitcoin e cash as stamps and Nostra relays as post offices.
Key chat uses signal protocol to ensure message encryption security and meta data privacy, states the project description, quote, key chat is currently not stable enough, so early testers can only download it through the Android apk. We are working on making it stable, and then we will add it to the iOS and Android app stores, added the developers. So what's new? You can log in with your Nostr insect. You can add medium groups based on the signal protocol and modify the notification system to use Google FCM. Here is the blurb directly from KeyChat. When we started conceptualizing KeyChat, we aimed to design a chat application that surpasses signal.
Our design process was divided into 4 steps. 1st, KeyChat addresses issues of user sovereignty. It opts to use Nostra public keys as IDs and Nostra relays for message transmission. Users fully own their ID's, which are not registered on any server. They can choose which relays to use. Secondly, KeyChat aims to solve the security issue of message encryption by implementing end to end encryption that ensures both forward secrecy and backward secrecy. KeyChat implements the signal protocol, on the client side without the need for a coordinated server. Existing Nostra relays only need to handle the transmission of encrypted messages.
3rd, KeyChat tackles the problem of metadata privacy. A major issue with the original Nostra DMs is that metadata is not only exposed to relay operators, but also to other users. Key chat separates the sending address and receiving addresses from the ID updating these addresses for almost every message. Almost isn't quite there, is it? Thus, each key chat message is nearly independent. Okay. They're getting close. They're they're closing in on it. And lastly, key chat addresses the issue or sorry. Key chat addresses the issue of user payments and relay charges.
Since each message is not linked to an ID, traditional payment models are not feasible. Initially, we thought of having relays issue one time anonymous access tokens that users could purchase and use for anonymous pay per use. Later, we realized that using Bitcoin e cash as postage for messages would be a better solution. Yeah, I agree. Ultimately, we designed a chat application where users maintain sovereignty messages are securely encrypted metadata privacy is preserved, and the economic model is straightforward and reliable. So there you go. Now, here's what I wanna see.
Instead, for all you guys that are developing clients, instead of trying to figure out how to make sure that DMs work on Nostr because they kinda don't. Instead, how can you have a sidebar of, like, and I mean when I mean sidebar, I mean I'm looking at a website, the graphic user interface of a website. Have, like, the ability to click a button that says DMs or messages or whatever it is and when it takes me over there I'm not interacting with your clients interaction with the Nostra protocol instead you're leveraging key chat Just just drop it in there. Is it possible that key chat is modular enough that you can just have it like you're calling up a library?
Something like that. I know I'm not a programmer so when I say things and you are a programmer and you go you don't know what the hell you're talking about, I will be the first to admit that. Okay. So take what it is that I'm saying and figure out a way to retell that story so that the following happens. I'm using Corel. I send a kind one note. I say, good morning. And somebody writes back and says, oh, hey. Good morning. I sent you a DM. And then I go click DMs or messages or whatever and no longer am I actually looking. I'm still in CoreCall, but I'm not leveraging the way that I'm not leveraging CoreCall's leverage of the Nostra protocol.
Inside of CoreCall, I'm now leveraging key chat directly. That's what I'm trying to get because there's no reason to rebuild this wheel. There's just no reason to. If the guys over at key chat can figure this shit out, then how does every single client just drop that shit into their client so that the DM situation is just solved and we can use DMs on whatever client that we want? That would be nice. That would be really nice. Okay? So let's I mean, if I'm wrong and it's impossible, let me know in the boostograms. Tell me how I suck, whatever it is. But I honestly don't think that I'm wrong. I think that what I just suggested very much could be done. And as key chat gets better and better and better, then maybe nobody else really needs to rebuild the whole DM part of Nostr, and we can start building other things because God knows we need them.
Now over to Bhutan, which I never really talk about, but the kingdom of Bhutan holds 13,029 BTC that has been made from Bitcoin mining operations. They didn't just buy it, they mined it. Now, I did talk about Bhutan last week or maybe possibly Monday. But all I said was that they had I think I mentioned that they had twice as much Bitcoin as El Salvador given the number that I saw, which was somewhere around that Bhutan Bhutan held 7,000, Bitcoin and change. Something like that. Well, now it's up to 13,000 bitcoin, which is a hell of a lot more than twice as much as El Salvador.
What the hell is going on in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan? Well, let's find out. These 13,000 Bitcoin holdings come from Bhutan Mining operations carried out by the Kingdom of Bhutan's investment arm, Druk Holdings. Bhutan is the 4th largest government with Bitcoin holdings on our platform with over $750,000,000 in BTC. Unlike most governments, Bhutan's BTC does not come from law enforcement based asset seizures, but from actual Bitcoin mining operations which have ramped up dramatically since early 2023, said the surveillance firm.
In May of 2023, Dreck Holding and Investments partnered with BitDeer to develop a carbon free Bitcoin mining operation in the country. In April, the parties revealed plans to expand their mining capacity to 600 megawatts. Bhutan's abundant hydropower resources makes it perfectly suited for Bitcoin mining operations. And you can track Bhutan's Bitcoin Holdings here, and they send you directly over to Arcam Intelligence. And I need to bookmark that so that I don't lose it because I was, I was looking for it yesterday and I never could actually find it on archimintelligence.com. And let's see what their balance history looks like. I'm just kinda gonna go for the last month, last 3 months, and we'll go all. So, yeah, they actually had a sizable they had a $150,000,000 worth in their balance history back in 2021, yo.
Damn. Let's see how far back when was it when did they have 0? Man, all the way back in in in March of 2021, the kingdom of Bhutan had $150,000 worth of Bitcoin. And now, they had a they had a peak of $936,000,000 in Bitcoin. But since the price has come back down as of late, they are sitting at a price, where where they got 700 and Royal government of Bhutan and BTC alone has $790,000,000 worth of Bitcoin. Wow. That is that is impressive. What's not impressive is that they also hold a handful of shit coins like MATIC and INS and, for god, I don't know why, but Sandcoin.
Why do you have Sandcoin? Oh, for whatever. Anyway, so the point is, kingdom of Bhutan has been mining the living shit out of Bitcoin all on their own with their own operations. They haven't bought Bitcoin. They haven't seized any Bitcoin. El Salvador, they had to buy Bitcoin. They didn't mine that Bitcoin. They also didn't seize it as far as I know. So they were just converting fiat currency into Bitcoin, but the royal government of Bhutan, they actually mined this Bitcoin. They didn't seize it and they didn't buy it. That means that their mining operations is impressive, and you're talking about a Himalayan kingdom.
We're gonna we need to watch Bhutan a lot more carefully than we have been watching Bhutan. Now, Cathedral Bitcoin. These guys are doing the opposite of Bhutan. They're shifting their focus away from Bitcoin mining to Bitcoin acquisition strategies. Interesting. After 7 years in the mining business, Canadian Bitcoin miner, Cathedra, is altering its focus. The company is now shifting to develop data centers and plans to use the profits to purchase Bitcoin instead of mining it. They're going for the AI angle, I'll bet. The publicly traded company cited unpredictable profit margins as the main cause behind the change in strategy. Quote, the last 3 years have demonstrated to us that Bitcoin mining is not not not not not a reliable way to grow shareholders Bitcoins per share.
Indeed, 9 of the 10 largest by market capitalization publicly listed Bitcoin mining companies hold less Bitcoin per share today than they did 3 years ago, the company stated in a memo. Cathedra plans to shift towards developing data centers to generate predictable cash flow for purchasing more Bitcoin. Other tactics may include borrowing against balance sheet assets using Bitcoin linked derivatives to generate income, developing new assets from proceeds of financing, and issuing debt in hybrid securities for acquiring yet more BTC. The company will also continue its existing mining operations and retain the Bitcoin it it produces, indicating that mining will not be completely abandoned. Quote, going forward, we will make all capital allocation decisions with the intention of maximizing our shareholders per share Bitcoin holdings.
This is a philosophy we have always held in our minds, now formalized as our explicit policy and primary objective in stewarding shareholder capital, reads the memo. Cathedra currently holds a mere 43 BTC or a paltry 5 satoshis per share. Quote, we look forward to reporting our progress to shareholders over the coming quarters years as was stated in the announcement. Read more about the rationale behind the quote sats per share metric for valuing public companies in a recent issue of Marty's Bent. And I'm gonna be a I'm gonna be a good little, good little person.
And even though you're not supposed to, what am I saying? You're not supposed to good lord. You're not supposed to toot the horn of people that could be considered your competitors in the space. I love Marty and all the your competitors in the space. I love Marty and all the other guys that are in this space. And when something important like this comes out, I have no problem at all making sure that you guys have access to what he wrote about. Because what he wrote about, I have no problem at all making sure that you guys have access to what he wrote about because what he wrote about is this this issue of sats per share.
And Michael Sailor a couple of days ago, I think, kind of prompted some of this, writing from Marty. So I I anyway, I'm including the link to Marty's bent that he talks about this in. But in that Marty's bent, let me go do it now, there is this hold on. Yeah. TFTC, put this note out on x. Get rid of your blue check, bro. MicroStrategy announces a $700,000,000 private offering of convertible senior notes with plans to use the proceeds to acquire more Bitcoin. This offering includes an option for an additional $105,000,000. And then he go but basically, he's going on to say that somewhere somewhere I saw Michael Saylor make a quote about sats per share or Bitcoin per share as a metric for shareholder value, this actually makes a lot of sense.
Right? Because now we're we're looking at what's on your books as a publicly traded company that has outstanding shares that are owned by John Q Public? What does John Q Public actually get when John Q Public buys a share of your company? Well, John Q Public doesn't give a shit about caring and human resources. What he does give a shit about is that your company is well managed, is actually making a profit, and that that profit is realized through either dividends per share on a per share basis to John Q Public or that John Q Public's value of the share is backed up by actual assets on the company's balance sheet. And as, well, let's say, back in the old days when people were just stacking US dollars, that made John Q Public very happy.
But now as we all know, stacking dollars is not necessarily a very unvolatile way to save money because of the way that we devalue money hand over fist here in the western countries of the world. So now we need another asset to hold. And in this case, it's bitcoin. And it's being denominated either in bitcoin per share or, and it makes more sense this way, satoshis per share. Now, Cathedral only has 5 satoshis per share. Now let's say they start saying in their next quarterly report that they release, if that's what they do, I'm not sure, they say that they've increased from 5 satoshis a share to 11 satoshis per share well all of a sudden we've got a pretty solid metric that we can go by is bitcoin volatile sure is it as volatile as the United States dollar I think an argument could be made that it is so.
But Bitcoin itself is not actually volatile itself. It's volatile as compared to fiat currencies, and it is most compared to the US dollar which has, in my opinion, the most volatility because we keep devaluing it. However, we can project that volatility as always going down. It's losing value, and it's been consistently losing value since 1913. In that case, if you just mentally decouple the value of the satoshi being reflected by a u at a certain amount of United States dollars or percentages thereof, then all of a sudden you have one of the most nonvolatile and stable assets of value that you can book on a balance sheet. It's kind of an interesting way to think about this. So, Cathedra, we're gonna have to watch out for that one and see what they actually do.
Now, moving on to the Human Rights Foundation. Bitcoin Development Fund has granted 10 Bitcoin to 20 projects worldwide. That is interesting. So who got it? African Bitcoiners got some. Stratosopher, which is a Bitcoin core developer working on P2P network privacy. Korekle. Alright. My buddy, huddlebod, got funded from a different source other than OpenSats. This is good news. Congratulations, huddlebod. I'm gonna take you out for a beer. Harbor got some. The 256 Foundation is an organization working to advance free and open source mining ecosystems in Bitcoin. Clive Claire, Jeff Gardner, Selenium, BTC Schuhl, Edawallet, Richto I can't pronounce that name, the last name. Yes Bitcoin Haiti, a grassroots Bitcoin education organization in Haiti got some.
Bitcoin in Indonesia got one. Bitcoin plus plus the Tab Conf, Baltic Honey Badger, thank you. And LebitConf and Decentralizer are also at other annual Bitcoin conferences, but those occur in Argentina. So that's good. And then the SATSConf, which is South America's largest Bitcoin conference, and it is held in Sao Paulo. Solidarity Summit is the last on the list. It's a Vienna based event by Hagar Issa for political prisoners and human rights advocates. Thank you to the Human Rights Foundation for moving outside of human rights. Because I think the Human Rights Foundation understands that, you know, people like Huddlbot, who's developing Coracle, while while they're actually working on a Nostra client and not directly working on human rights, Huddlebot is indirectly working on human rights because he's allowing by building Choracle, allowing people that may need to communicate with each other, that may, at this time in in place, not be able to communicate with each other, he's making it possible.
And therefore, he's working for human rights as a side effect of working on Noster. So again, thank you, Alex Gladstein, who's the, I think, the CTO or, wait a minute. No. He's chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation, I believe. And if anybody is behind making this happen, it's definitely gonna be Alex Gladstein. So thank you, Alex, for doing that. Let's see. Do do do. We did that one. Ah, radio. This is the last one up. This is interesting. This is about wave lake. Do you not know what wave lake is? If you want to go directly support people that make music, you're not going to do it on SoundCloud.
You're not going to do it on Spotify. You're gonna have to go to value for value enabled things like Wavlaake, wavlaake. Now they've added a value time split block generator directly to the Wave Lake site to hopefully make things a bit easier for music podcast makers Just click on the share button on any track page to get the template. Hope that saves you some hair pulling. Bitpunk. Fm. Okay. So what does this mean for me? It was the case that if I wanted to give value to an artist and I put their song on my podcast, I had to jump through quite a bit of hoops. I had to ask you to boost only during that section of the song or to go and click the link and go directly boost them. And that's a lot of friction.
Now, I have not tried this out, so I may be talking out of my ass. But if I take this value time split template and I drop it into my podhome.fm pod, like, that's that's the people that host my podcast. So when I after I record this, I'm gonna upload it to Pod Home. I'm gonna put all the show notes in. I'm gonna set the chapters. I can do the transcript. I do it all in Pod Home, Right? For the one low low price of I can't remember, but it's definitely comparable with what I was paying for SoundCloud which didn't have any features. In either event, I have a value for value tab in Pod Home that lets me do where I set how many, Satoshis I get versus, like, Tomac. Like, yesterday, I put Tomac in, as a 49% split. So any for anybody that's listening to the Tomac interview, when you boost that show, 49% of all your stats are going directly to Tomec's wallet because I was able to drop his get Albi wallet address directly into Pod Home, the value for value tab.
It's so easy. It's so easy. And I never touch those sats. They go directly to him. They don't pass through me. They go directly to Tomac. Now, but down there in that same tab is something that says time split. So I'm thinking, here's what this is what I want. I want to be able to put drop the value time split that I get from wave late for the song, drop it into the value time split, and be able to set the start time and the end time directly in podhome.fm. And then I take the actual WAV file of the song and drop it into my editor at between those two time splits or between those times.
And that way whenever you're listening to the song without doing anything, all you gotta do is hit the zap button and I get none of the zaps. It goes all I well, I mean, I could set it to where I could get a percentage if I wanted to, but I wouldn't do that. They 100% go to the artist. So if I put, like, Manlike Quex, one of the artists right now, the the super hot artist on on Wavelake, if I drop one of his songs, go grab the value time split template for that song, and drop it into pothome.fm and set the beginning and ending time. Then when you're listening to that song and you zap or you boost or you do anything, it doesn't come to me. It goes directly to manlikequex. This entire value for value ecosystem is going to trash almost all legacy media.
Books, encyclopedias, record producers, like RCA and Sony and all those guys, if RCA is still even around as a as a record label, they're all gone. They're all dead. They just don't know it yet. They were actually dead before Lars Ulrich, the drummer from Metallica, got up, put on a fucking suit, and went and bitched and moaned and cried in front of fucking congress. The very quote man that Metallica had been writing about as evil for years, here we have this guy tucking his tail between his legs and saying, we need fuel for our Learjet. We're losing money because of Limewire or Napster.
That was in the nineties. They thought they won by closing down Napster. And all it did was 2 things. 1 is it put everybody in the music industry and by extension the media in general industry on life support. And all those people that were put on life support don't know that they're on life support. They have not been told by the doctor that they're dying and that they need to go get their affairs in order. They have not been told this. Right? So second second let's just for seconds. Oh, I where's my thing for seconds Well, I lost my train of thought I'm just saying they're on life support They're already dead the doctor hasn't told them to get their shit in order And that was in the nineties.
When they closed down Napster and everybody thought everything was okay, or at least in that industry. But now now once Bitcoin came around, it completely threw a protective wall up. And what we're building behind the wall that is Bitcoin is the value for value podcasting 2.0 and all the other new media that's going to basically be that's what our children are going to be watching for their news. How they're going to read their books. How they're going to listen to music. Spotify SoundCloud Sony Music CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times bestseller list.
No, I'm serious. The New York Times bestseller list is one of those stalwart things. Kiss it goodbye. It's been on life support since Lars Ulrich stood up and whined to congress. If you want to see the the demarcation the mark of where everything changed, it wasn't 9 11. It was Lars Ulrich. When he bitched about Napster, that was it for mail. That was it for music, for movies, for books, for bestseller lists, for reviews, for online stores, for all the news media that you could possibly ever want, for all the magazines that you could possibly ever think of. Everything got put on life support when Lars Ulrich put on a tie.
What we're building behind the wall that is Bitcoin is so profound and so large that I don't think any of us can actually get the full picture. It would be like the guy working like, your job is to work on this one hose on this landing strut on this vehicle that we're building. And so that person's all that person's attention is focused on how do we connect make sure that this hose connects to this connector and we get it over this connector and make sure that it doesn't kink while the land like, the landing gear is lifting up and all that. And what he doesn't see is that a mile and a half away on the other end of this mile and a half long ship, somebody's working on a heat shield on the jet engine.
There's no way you can see that far. A mile and a half down the road, I'm talking about an immense project. We are all engaged in this immense project and none of us can see. We're too busy building. We don't have time to walk so far away from it and get on a high enough mountaintop so that we can take an entire overview of the project that we're all working on. But we are all working on it. If you're listening to my voice, I guarantee you're working on it. If you're using Nostr, you're working on it. If you use Wavelake, you're working on this project. If you use Bitcoin and eCash and Lightning Network, Infediments and any of that shit, you've completely gutted central banking. They're dead. They just don't know it yet because they're on fucking life support and the doctor hasn't told them to get their shit together.
That's why I smile sometimes. Nothing can stop what's coming. There's not an there's not an amount of wars that you can engage in. The only thing you could do is launch all nuclear weapons on the face of the planet all at once and make sure that they're spread out enough to kill the maximum amount of humanity that you possibly can kill and you won't kill all of us. Life will find a way and humans are the best at that shit. Humans will survive that. You think I'm crazy, but no. I'm a biologist at heart. I know the power of life. I certainly know the power of human beings.
There's no way that you can strip that away. There is no way that you can tell me that there's no way that a whole bunch of people that has enough genetics to be able to rebuild the the human infrastructure, the the actual biological infrastructure of humanity, can't live in a cave for a 150 fucking years and figure out how to generate electricity, how to grow plants, how to make light. There's no way you can tell me that that's that it's not possible. I will laugh at you and you can come up with anything that you want to come up with to prove me wrong and you will have no evidence to the contrary of what I say right now. All that would do is hold us back for a 1000 years.
And we'll have to contend with the same bankers that also have underground bunkers and, you know, 150 years worth of food if that's what they do. I don't know. We conjecture about that shit all the time, but I don't know. I've never met any of these guys. I don't know if they've got, like, some kind of, you know, a trillion year plan in the, you know, in the belly of the beast when if shit hits the fan. I don't know. I do know that they'll survive and will survive. The plebs and the elite will all survive. It'd be better if that shit didn't happen, because if it doesn't happen, then the elite, they're all on life support.
Again, the doctor hasn't told them to get their affairs in order. We already won. They don't know it. We don't know it. Because the immensity of what I'm describing here is too large for any one person to see. About the only thing that we have right now is to be able to go to somebody else and have a lunch break with them that's working on some part of the project and have them describe what it is that they're doing. And then you'd have to visualize what those two pieces of information mean and then try to extrapolate and visualize the entirety of the project. Good luck.
You won't do it. And we start adding stuff like, you know, like permaculture in and people who are figuring out that the food system is jacked and that we've been we're being fed poison all this time. And all of a sudden we start going back to our roots and we start thinking about maybe I do have time to learn how to garden. And there's other things that are coming up. Maybe there's somebody who's like, I'll tell you what, I'll turn your front yard into a garden. I'll do that, as like a lawn service. You pay me $50 every time I come out. I'll harvest some of your food for you. I'll leave it on a straw thing. I'll take $50.10 percent of the of the harvest and maybe I'll use that for my own food or maybe I'll sell it at a farmers market. There's that idea. I'm just saying this in the the project isn't just Nostra. It's not just Bitcoin. Bitcoin is providing us a huge shield like the wall of China to be able to get our shit together behind this wall. And that way, if they ever break through the wall or we decide to take the wall down ourselves, it won't matter.
We'll be too strong. And, yeah, sure, this came this entire thing that I'm just talking about right now simply came out of the fact that radio on Nostr drops a note about the value time split template being added to Waverlake, which is a very very small infinitesimally tiny music place that that artists can put their music up without BMI and ASCAP and Sony getting in their way. And in comparison to BMI ASCAP and Sony, it's so minuscule as to be a flea on a gnat's ass. It doesn't matter. I see the growth. I see what it was versus what it is now and given that I can extrapolate where it's going.
Nothing stops this train. So you're either on the train and can't be stopped or you're off the train and watch what that train will do yet get left behind or, god forbid, you're a Lars Ulrich bastard wearing a suit and tie standing on the tracks in front of the train, and you know what's going to happen to Lars. I even like Metallica. Right? I kinda do. But after that scene of Lars Ulrich in congress, I kinda lost all my respect for him. I still like the music, but I can't really respect Metallica anymore, not since the nineties. Okay. So, rant over, but be happy.
We're building the spaceship that's gonna get us away away from this thing, and we never have to leave the planet. And even if we did, I'd 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.
