Join me today for Episode 976 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- Craig Wright Sues Core . . . Again!
- An Unethical Use-case of AI
- Crypto Loans Are Back
- Worldcoin Rebranding
- Buy Bitcoin on Venmo
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
Circle P:
Website: https://www.lightningpiggy.com/
nostr: https://primal.net/p/npub1y2qcaseaspuwvjtyk4suswdhgselydc42ttlt0t2kzhnykne7s5swvaffq
Fully Built Lightning Piggy:
- https://robotechy.com/collections/frontpage/products/lightning-piggy?variant=41204276396118
- https://www.bitcoinstuffstore.com/nl_nl/product/lightningpiggy/
The King Ranch Donation Pages:
https://www.ruralamericainaction.com/fundraising/save-king-ranch-and-agriculture-in-washington
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Articles:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/the-bitcoin-mempool-drama-was-all-too-predictable
https://decrypt.co/287138/craig-wright-bitcoin-new-lawsuit
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ai-bot-replaces-candidate-virginia-debate
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/10/18/high-risk-crypto-loans-surge-to-a-two-year-high-of-55m/
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
- https://geyser.fund/project/thebitcoinandpodcast
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2024/10/18/global-bitcoin-etps-register-biggest-seven-day-inflow-since-july/
https://decrypt.co/286983/world-chain-launches-mainnet-world-coin
https://btctimes.com/venmo-users-can-now-purchase-bitcoin-through-moonpay-integration/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/gm-2024-10-18/
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[00:00:00]
David Bennett:
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 8:46 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 18th day of October 2024.
This is episode 976 of Bitcoin, and the circle p is open for business and I'm going to be talking about lightning piggy but first what do we have on the chopping block today? Mempool.space apparently did something that pissed a whole bunch of people on Twitter off. I've got an article about it. I promise. But the next article that we're gonna be covering is this Craig Wright business. He's back. Yes, he is. I mentioned it, I think a while back like a couple of weeks ago, but I never really could find a substantial story that was talking about the details of Craig Wright's latest escapade. I honestly don't know where he's getting his money this time. It cannot be Calvin Ayer.
I I guess it could be Calvin Ayer, but I don't know. I just don't see how Calvin wants to have anything to do with this. He's lost so much money on all of the, you know, court cases that Craig Wright apparently was going to win and didn't. But, yes, he's back again. And AI is entering politics in a way that is really bad. It's it is not a good it's it's just not good moving forward. I think this is a terrible idea. I think this candidate that has done what we're gonna talk about is really doing a disservice to everybody in the United States. But the worst disservice are people taking high risk crypto loans. Yes. It's coming back. It's coming back again.
Maybe with a vengeance. I don't know. We'll find out, but that's not a good situation at all. We've already been through this. Does anybody remember BlockFi? Let's not get into this crap again, but it looks like people are. The inflows for the, exchange traded products for Bitcoin are having a hell of a time, man. I mean, in a good way. And then Worldcoin is rebranding. We will talk about that as well as Venmo users purchasing Bitcoin. We'll talk about that as well. And then we've got a couple of things from nobsbitcoin.com. That's nobsbitcoin.com.
But first, let's introduce lightning piggy. This is the circle p. The circle p is where I bring plebs like you to plebs like you that have goods and services for sale in Bitcoin. If you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you ain't in the circle p. Lightning piggy is not technically in the circle p, not because they don't take bitcoin. They do. It's because as is tradition, when I find something that I think is really cool and that I think you'd really like and is for sale by a vendor in Bitcoin, I'm just going to put it into the circle p, and I'm going to ask forgiveness later. Okay?
If they don't like me doing this, they will tell me, and they will tell me to close my trap and never talk about lightning piggy again. But I don't see why. It's free advertising. And hopefully, they will get the gist that if I do make a sale for Lightning Piggy, which you can find at lightningpiggy.com. Lightningpiggy is all one word, piggylightningpiggy.com. Then maybe they'll float me some satoshis on the backside. Hell, I've even got a a recurring invoice ready to go for them. That's gonna be provided by Zaprite too, who, is not in the circle p. But let's just get to this lightning piggy. What the hell is it? Well, generally speaking, it's for kids. Many of you might remember this thing that was called Bitpiggy back in the day.
It was sort of a a Bitcoin piggy bank. I don't think these people behind lightning piggy are is the same person because if I remember right, bit piggy was provided by fartface 2,000. That was his that that is his handle. I actually don't see him around that much because I think he's still over on dead bird. But lightning piggy is sort of the same concept except it's wrapped around lightning network rather than the Bitcoin main chain network. Let me read you the the the what they're writing about Bitpiggy or, lightning piggy. It is an electronic cash piggy bank for kids that accepts Bitcoin sent over lightning while displaying the amount saved in satoshis.
Our vision is to make SATS the saving standard for every child. We plan to use this educational platform to inspire future generations not only to save with sound money, but to also learn to create in a free and open source way. From an early age, we're programmed to think in fiat terms. Depending on our respective cultural upbringing, in many parts of the world, our first encounter with money is when the tooth fairy visits, followed by being gifted a piggy bank that gets filled with coins for doing good deeds. Well, this money is rapidly losing its purchasing power as we know and therefore it is useless as a value storage device.
To accelerate global adoption, we need to have the tools and resources available for Bitcoiners of all ages. Lightning Piggy is bringing the adoption of Bitcoin to young people in a real and meaningful way, as well as learning about sound money from the earliest possible opportunity. It is opening the door to STEM learning opportunities via affordable homeschoolcommunity development kits. Later on in life, bitcoin will be the obvious first choice of money. Anything else will simply not make sense. Okay. So that's that's their blurb about it. But if I go in I'm over here at lightning piggy.com.
That's lightningpiggy.com. If I go to that's their about page. They have a market button up here at the top of their page. There's an about. There's in the wild. There's build. There's cases. There's bounties. There's market. If you go to market, you can purchase from at least 2 vendors a fully built, fully assembled, ready to go lightning piggy. Both of the URLs to that to the places where you can purchase that is in the show notes. I guarantee it. They're in the show notes. It's a URL. Thank god for podhome.fm that allows most people in most podcast apps to simply be able to click on those links in the show notes on your mobile phone. And you can go directly to lightningpiggy.comforward/market.
There's a company called Robo Techy and there's a place called Bitcoin Stuff Store. Now, here's the thing. Robo Techy is in the UK. They say they have global shipping. But understand global shipping from the UK to the United States it's probably not going to be cheap and I don't know what that costs bitcoin stuff store which is the other place that you can get one of these is in the Netherlands they also offer global shipping Just be aware that, global shipping, like I said, is expensive. But you don't have you don't have to actually purchase the full thing already assembled because they have all the plans for building the thing, whether out of cardboard. I think they like, literally, they've got these plans that you can build a small little bit piggy out of cardboard for kids to do as a craft and then slide in the little electronic paper and all the rest of the stuff that goes with it to make it a fully functional lightning network.
They include that. Right? So you're gonna have to buy something, but you don't have to buy the whole thing. And I think that this is a really good way to go. And as far as I can actually tell, they also have the plans for the 3 d print of a plastic bit piggy that act you know, that is the whole rounded shape and it's all you know, if you've got the pink filament, you can make it look like a little pink piggy. It's this is a really cool way to go. I I really enjoyed what they're doing over here. The first I'd even heard about lightning piggy was yesterday. That's why I'm featuring them today. So if you want to go buy something with your bitcoin from a vendor that sells you something in bitcoin that I think might have value go to lightningpiggy.com.
Lightningpiggy is all one word.com. Lightningpiggy.com. Pick one up. And I don't know how you're gonna be able to tell them that you heard it here on the Bitcoin and podcast in the Circle P. But if there's any possible way that you can let them know that that's where you heard it, please let them know. Okay. Now on to the news. The bitcoin mempool drama was all too predictable. Yeah. This is Vivek Sin. It's out of bitcoin magazine. So mempool.space recently added features to spot runes and ordinals transactions, and Bitcoin monetary maximalist totally lost it.
As a Bitcoiner and an observer of Bitcoin culture, this whole drama felt completely normal, as well as predictable. Over time, an ideological split has emerged between Bitcoin monetary maximalists who see Bitcoin as only money and those open to building things on Bitcoin such as innovative crypto esque like or tech like ordinals, runes, and tokens. Oh, god. Vivek, you're going down the wrong road. With this split mindset now entrenched, the mempool.space black backlash was inevitable from the purest viewpoint anything beyond the Bitcoin protocol is heresy so even just the neutral action of mempool. Space displaying runes and ordinals data for their users to see provoked outrage Never mind if it made one of the best open source Bitcoin explorers more useful and data rich. It touched the forbidden topic and all rationality went out the window.
This reaction perfectly follows the playbook. The monetary maximalist responded to perceived apo apostasy with fury, as they always do on Twitter. And they've got a tweet up here from, Knut Swanholm, who says these clowns have managed to bribe one of the longest standing and highest quality open source projects in the space into labeling transactions that contain ordinals, inscriptions, and runes as such. It is a shame, to say the least, None of these scams are Bitcoin. They all. And then it asked me to show more. And I I think you get Kanut's point here. And what he's doing is he's responding or replying in or quote quote quote tweeting from, god forbid, Taproot Wizards who says, breaking. Make mempool magical again. Mempool space has been providing amazing value to Bitcoiners for years, and we are very grateful to be able to give back. Taproot Wizards will be providing ongoing sponsorship for mempool at the highest available tier.
And I can see why Cannut kinda lost his mind a little bit because that's just paying. That the way that they're making it sound and I don't this may very well be true. It sounds to me that Taproot Wizards is just paying mempool.space to provide this particular functionality. Don't know. I I I don't care that much about it, but apparently people do. Anyway, continuing. The season 2 crowd, however, put their money where their mouth is and donated to the helpful platform, doubling the number of individual sponsors and approximately tripling the project's yearly revenue from individual contributors.
They financially backed a tool they found useful rather than just complaining, actions over words. Bitcoin purists should also put their money where their mouths are and support the Bitcoin explorers who do not spot ruins and ordinals transactions I have yet to see them do this instead of just screaming on Twitter which says a lot about them Both sides acted true to form. This type of drama is inevitable when you have 2 factions with fundamentally different perspectives. While certain views may go too far ethically, this is ultimately human nature. We'll keep seeing this purest versus pragmatic conflict as Bitcoin evolves and divides into diverging philosophies.
Rationality gives way to belief and identity, but understanding these dynamics helps contextualize the mempool reaction. So what's my take that's all bullshit? Who cares? Who cares? Man, I mean, honestly, I've been able to spot ordinals with just the data button on mempool.space's goggles feature for, I don't know, 6 months, 7 months, 8 months. I don't care. I I I was looking at mempool.space earlier today and I can't actually see a button that says show me runes. And I I, like, I f5 ed my browser. And I'm thinking that maybe I didn't catch the the update. I I don't see anything that just lets me select ordinals, runes, or inscriptions that is in my face.
I looked, and I'm going to be looking later on today, but I don't I don't know what's going on here mostly because I don't spend any time at all on Twitter. I'm personally thankful for Noster, and this is why I'm bringing you this story. Noster is the filter of the bullshit. The people that want to engage in this kind of activity that think that this kind of thing is important, they're not on Noster. And we keep saying, the people on noster we keep saying well we need to get these these people you know to for these Bitcoin maxes from to stop using Twitter and start using noster do you really want that Do you really want that?
Are you sure you actually want that? Because right now we've got a major algorithm working in our favor and it is a signal to noise algorithm. And that's a ratio, signal to noise ratio. On Nostra, I get way more signal than I do noise. On Twitter, I can't even see the signal. It's all noise because, a, because of crap like this, and, b, because it's just the stream is polluted with all manner of stuff I don't want to see. Even even when I'm just looking at this the smaller Bitcoin list that I put together on Twitter I still just it's like the amount of politics people talking about straight politics without any mention whatsoever about Bitcoin in my Bitcoin list of just people that I know to be good or new to be really hardcore Bitcoiners is immense it's huge it's like 50% of everything that I see in my Bitcoin list is about Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
It's noise. I don't wanna see it. If you want to get rid of the noise, then you need to get over to Noster, where I never saw anything about mempool.space, Knut, Sponholm bitching about it, all the you know, any of the rest of the people bitching about or, you know, the fact that ordinals suck and and also the people that think that ordinals are the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't care. Bitcoin is gonna be used by enemies. It's gonna be used in ways that you don't want it to be used. I'm sorry for you, but there's nothing you can do about it. Sure. You can use certain Bitcoin things on your Bitcoin node to filter ordinals, but honestly is it really worth it?
Just let it die all on its own. Runes, ordinals, inscriptions. They have no inherent value and things that don't have inherent value have this really neat ability to just dissolve and go away. Unlike some people, like Craig Wright, who says that Bitcoin developers misled the public in a in a new, get this, one $1,000,000,000 lawsuit, that's billion with a b, Ryan s Gladwin from decrypt, Craig Wright launched a new legal battle claiming that Bitcoin developers have deviated from the original vision of the project and insisting that Bitcoin SV is the real Bitcoin pausing how the hell is this even a legal case this is all open source How is this even a case? How is a judge even going to look at this? Why is it even on a docket?
Why are lawyers who get paid real money to do real things even entertaining this fucking clown? I'm sorry. The claim is sinking, seeking that the defendants or hold hold on. Let me start that again. The claim is seeking from the defendants the difference in market valuation between the two coins, which is over $1,180,000,000. If Wright's name sounds familiar, that's because he previously claimed to be the, creator of Bitcoin. We know that story. We don't need to get into that. But let's see here. Yep. The recently filed this is important. The recently filed UK high court claim states that the defendants have altered the original Bitcoin protocol through the introduction of the SegWit and Taproot upgrades.
And that fundamentally deviates from the original vision set out by Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. As a result, Craig believes that the defendants created confusion within the market and misled the public into believing that BTC retains the attributes of the original Bitcoin. Named in the lawsuit is Bitcoin Core. The developers of Bitcoin Node Software and Jack Dorsey Square Up Europe Limited, a payment services or service that funded a Bitcoin Lightning Network company. Wright is seeking the difference in market value between Bitcoin and SV, claiming that the latter is the real Bitcoin. When the form was filed, Bitcoin was trading at roughly $62,000 while BSV sat at just $65.
In turn, the claim seeks a total of $1,180,000,000 or £911 or £911,000,000 from the defendants. This reflects the financial impact of misrepresentation and resulting market loss, the claim states. It is true that SegWit and Taproot fundamentally changed Bitcoin. When Segwit launched in 2017 to fix a host of bugs and increase the network's efficiency, it was highly contentious. So much so that it led to the hard fork that gave rise to Bitcoin SV short for Bitcoin satoshi's vision. I need to actually make a correction on that. It didn't automatically give rise to Bitcoin SV.
What it did was give rise to a fork that we know is Bitcoin Cash about 6 months or a little bit maybe somewhere around there maybe a little bit longer that's when Bitcoin Cash forked off into Bitcoin Satoshi's vision so you had Bitcoin You had the 2017 block size war. That resulted in Roger Ver, you know, loading his diapers and getting them full and getting pissed off about it. And then all of a sudden, he splits and forks off Bitcoin Cash from the original Bitcoin. Then, not too long after that, Roger Ver makes friends with Calvin Ayer and Craig Wright.
And what he didn't realize is that Craig Wright and Calvin Ayer were playing Roger Ver. And they got in. They hung out with Roger Ver. They entrenched themselves into Bitcoin Cash, and then they started a riot within that community. And that caused their own split, and that turned into Ironically, Bitcoin Cash has way more value than Bitcoin SV. And, clearly, Calvin Ayer is nowhere to be seen. He seems to have disappeared. And Craig Wright has been told that he is a fraud by courts, not just regular people. K. Continuing on. Then in 2021, Taproot improved privacy and data while reducing transaction cost on the network, again, leading to a hard fork. This time, the result of that fork was Bitcoin Cash. No. That's wrong. That's not what happened.
That is not what Bitcoin Cash came first. I'm sorry. I I don't know what's going on with this particular author, but they've got this whole thing backwards. Whatever. Wright maintains that changes alter Bitcoin enough that it's now misleading to still call it Bitcoin. Instead, he argues that Bitcoin SV deserves the mononym Bitcoin. He's done this before, by the way. Quote, the claim shows a complete misunderstanding of the decentralized ethos lying at the heart of Bitcoin. Lanny Tuckmeier, lawyer and director of operations at Bergl Magence LLP, told Decrypt, quote, any changes to the protocol are considered through community consensus, while his notion of exclusive intellectual property rights is in complete conflict with the open source nature of the project itself, end quote.
This isn't the first lawsuit that Wright has brought forward regarding bitcoin. Up until recently, Wright has been embroiled in a legal battle with Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a Jack Dorsey backed organization, as well as a group of bitcoin core developers. The point of contention in that case was Wright's claim to be the creator of Bitcoin and therefore the holder of the copyright of the Bitcoin white paper. Well, that's the logical that's there's 2 things there, and one doesn't follow from the other. He he did both. It it doesn't matter. Earlier this year, a UK court ruled that Wright did not invent Bitcoin and is not Satoshi.
He was then ordered to publicly declare he did not create Bitcoin. Quote, considering the previous court decisions and growing skepticism over the legitimacy of his claims, Tuckmeyer added, I very much doubt he can succeed this time. Well, he's never succeeded. He's never he's he's won one court case and that was against Peter McCormick and he was entitled to receive £1,000,000, not £10,000,000, not £100,000, not £100,000, not £1,000, but £1,000,000. So he while he is on paper in the court system in the UK as act or in the EU, honestly, as actually winning a single court case, he was only awarded £1.31 and everything else he has lost.
How he is able to muster the kind of cash that it takes to mount this kind of attack against Square as well as Bitcoin Core is beyond my understanding. I don't get it. But then again, I've never understood this gentleman in the first place. He seems like a completely unhinged sociopath. But, you know, this space is littered with unhinged sociopaths. Let's take a little break, talk about politics, but not in the way you think. We're gonna do this one from Savannah Fortis out of Cointelegraph. AI powered bot stands in for an absent candidate in the Virginia debate.
This is bad. Artificial intelligence can't hide from politics. Or rather, politics can't hide from AI. In an unusual political move, Bentley Hensel, an independent candidate running for the United States Congress in Virginia's 8th District, used an AI powered bot to participate in a debate after incumbent representative Don Bayer declined an invitation to the debate. On October 17th, the debate was held between Hansel, another independent candidate, David Kennedy, and a virtual stand in, Donbot, that's what they're calling this AI bot, leading up to the November elections. Hansel, a software engineer by trade, said he turned to AI as a response to what he described as Bayer's unwillingness to engage in a public debate.
The bot was given a crash course on Bayer's policy views and trained to represent his policy positions by drawing on available data sources, including his publicly available statements, press releases, and campaign material. DonBot was initially built by Hensel using OpenAI's technology. However, before the debate, Hensel said he migrated the bot to open source models via Cloudflare Workers. OpenAI has banned Hensel's account due to political use. Hensel said, in the future, he plans to create a Trump and Harris bot debate where anyone can ask both candidates their opinion on any issue. The debate between the independent Virginia congressional candidates was streamed online and had multiple hiccups, including the Donbot not being audible during some answers.
Both Hensel and the AI represented, Bayer, have been vocal about their views on technology and innovation, a trend among politicians that are up for election. Hensel's campaign websites highlights his goal to bring technological innovation and transparency to the federal government to make it more effective for all citizens. During his time in office, Bayer has already proposed legislation to regulate AI security for risk incident mitigation. In his proposal, he urged congress to establish clear boundaries around its deployment, particularly in political and governance spheres.
With the 2024 elections approaching, candidates are under pressure to take positions on tech related issues, including cryptocurrencies, blockchain, as well as AI. These positions are being closely watched by both big tech and political action committees, which have gained influence over the past year. This is insane. Everything about this is bad juju, and it's not going to end very well. But the thing here's the thing is that it's not going to end. It's just gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. I actually I hate to say this, but it does not surprise me at all that OpenAI suspended Bentley Hensel's account for doing this.
This, honestly, it's kinda reprehensible. I don't know either one of these dudes. I don't give a shit about the Virginia debates. I don't care about Virginia's elections. It's not my state, not my circus, not my monkeys. However, you cannot in any conscience good or bad have an AI read a whole bunch of stuff from your opponent and then seek to debate that AI version of your opponent in open public spheres. Everything about that is unethical. It's immoral. There's there is it's reprehensible. I don't know what Bentley Hensel was thinking other than he was showing off maybe his technological prowess.
But what really is freaking me out here is, like, I that there's no response from, from representative Bayer. Considering that representative Bayer was already aligned to regulate AI, do you think that this particular action by his opponent, Bentley Hensel, is going to strengthen or weaken his position on further regulations that we don't really need because I'm perfectly able to understand that it is reprehensible to do what Bentley Hensel did. It's going to strengthen his position, if you're wondering. It's going to make it even more evident to people that just don't think for themselves that we need yet more regulation.
The only way out and and here's the thing is that I I've said it before. I actually think that AI has its uses. It's not going to solve what people think it's going to solve. It's going to open up a whole new can of worms, But there are things that it actually does well and is going to get better at. But what it's never going to be able to do is ingest the collective writings of Charles Dickens and be able to figure out how to act like Charles Dickens? Do I mean, honestly, do do you think that if you were to read all of Stephen King's writings, that you would understand the mind of Stephen King, that you would be able to predict how he would answer if somebody asked him for, you know, asked him if he wanted his coffee black with sugar or cream or both.
I mean, unless you know the man, unless you sat down with Stephen King at some kind of diner and watched him order coffee, you can't predict what he'd do. That that single thing right there, if you expand that to everything else, you realize that what Bentley Hensel did is unethical everything about this is bad it's just this is a horrible state of affairs and I'm not calling for regulations that AI can engage in politics because that's just stupid the amount of the amount of open source ai models that are out there that that genie is never getting put back in its bottle open ai will probably die That entire thing is spending way too much money way too fast. They're gonna crash and burn. It's gonna be spectacular. And you know what's not going to happen? AI is not going to die.
It's and and Facebook, OpenAI, the entire well, Meta, OpenAI, Google, all of them could go away tomorrow. Any company that generated any LLM could disappear tomorrow. And you know what will not disappear? AI. The models are too spread out. They're in the hands of too many people to be able to put that genie back in the bottle. So even though Bitly Hensel has gotten banned or had his account suspended from OpenAI, if he has the technical prowess and he's got enough money to build a, you know, a big machine, he'd be able to do this anyway, and somebody else will. If not Bentley Hensel, somebody else will.
We're getting into a stage where you're not gonna be able to trust a single thing. Now, first of all, I I love the fact that I can't trust politicians on their own merit given the given actual reality. I'm not looking forward to expanding that me not trusting any politician for any reason whatsoever because now there's the injection of, well, unreliability of any information that you see or hear from now until yawn. If we we've entered into a new world, you can't trust anything. So don't. Please don't. And for the love of god, don't do the following. Do not take crypto loans.
High risk crypto loans are surging to a 2 year high of $55,000,000 Omkar Godbold, CoinDesk. The decentralized lending market is booming. Remember decentralized lending markets? Yeah. Yeah. It's coming back. High risk loans are surging to over 2 year highs. They're sparking concerns of liquidation cascades and volatility. Does anybody want to go back to FTX, BlockFi, Alameda, and all that crap? No. We don't. Yet the degenerates are out there in force. Why? Because nobody learns nothing. The total amount of high risk loans defined as those within 5% of their liquidation price rose to $55,000,000 on Wednesday, reaching the highest since June of 2022 according to data tracked by analytics firms IntoTheBlock.
Crypto traders often draw loans from decentralized lending platforms by locking in collateral in the form of digital assets. The risk here is that if the value of the collateral falls too much, the protocol liquidates the debt by selling off that collateral. A loan within 5% of that liquidation price means if the collateral's price falls by 5%, it will no longer cover the loan, trigger triggering automatic liquidation. Thus, the surge in these risky loans is noteworthy as it can lead to a liquidation cascade. In this self reinforced process, a series of liquidations happens quickly, lowering crypto prices. And that, in turn, causes further liquidations and increased market turbulence. Quote, large liquidations can impact the collateral value, putting more loans at risk of liquidation creating a downward press price spiral.
Rapid market drops may result in insufficient collateral to cover loans resulting in bad depth and losses to lenders, end quote. And that was who said that? Oh, that was into the block in their market update. Into the Block added that bad debt can negatively impact market liquidity, making it difficult to trade large orders at stable prices. Quote, bad debt can keep lenders from adding new liquidity to prevent potential losses, the firm noted. Okay. That's the end of that article. Do not take loans against your crypto. If you do, if you're in need of a loan, you might wanna go visit Unchained Capital.
But here's the thing like let's say you got one bitcoin and you go yay I can get a loan from Unchained Capital and get is let's say the price of bitcoin right now is 68500 That you're gonna say, I'm gonna get a loan for 68,500 on my bitcoin. No, you're not. You're not gonna get anywhere close to that. Now, these buffoons over here, you know, like what into the block is talking about are the complete degenerates that are loaning you know, 95% of the value of 1 bitcoin. Let's just for let's just for math to make it easy. Let's say bitcoin is cost let's say 1 bitcoin is $100.
Dollars and you go up to these degenerate lending places and you say, I want a $100 loan. They say, well, what? You got a Bitcoin? Because that's $100. You say, yes. I have one Bitcoin. And they go, okay. We'll take your Bitcoin, but you're not getting $100. We're gonna give you 95. And here's your interest rates, and here's your payment replan. Yeah. Blah blah blah. And then the next day, the bitcoin price is standing at $95 They're automatically going to liquidate your bitcoin you've lost your bitcoin you've paid back the loan you know depending but most let's just say that you've paid back the loan or they paid basically forced you to pay back the loan by by liquidating your collateral So now you're free and clear, but you've lost Bitcoin.
Now expand that to when it's a $100,000, a $1,000,000. You see where I'm going with this? If you go to Unchained, they're gonna say, do you got one Bitcoin? Yeah. I got one Bitcoin. Hey, unchained. Would you give me a loan? They'll say, sure. We'll give you a loan. And here's your interest rate, and here's your payment plan, and and everything is great. But you're not getting $100. We we might loan you $45. The the that gives them so much headroom that they don't have to actually liquidate your bitcoin as collateral you don't get anywhere close to the value of your bitcoin in the loan but they're actually protecting you and they're protecting themselves they're actually also protecting the market as a whole because this liquidation cascade at business that's what happened well that's one of the one of the mechanics that was going on that caused ftx and all the rest of that shit to crash as fast as it did because like let's say that like let's say there's 3 loans for 3 bitcoin and they're worth a $100 and 2 of them are or all 3 of them are within 5% of their liquidation price. Right? So I get, like, you know, a loan for, like, $95, you know, on my one bitcoin so that's 90, you know, like a 5% premium. Let's say somebody else said, okay. Well, I don't want 5.
Let me do I'll only take, $93 and give me and give me a 7% headroom. And the 3rd guy says, I'll tell you what, man. I only need $90 on my one Bitcoin. So that's a 10% pre that's a 10% difference. Right? So we all have these loans where everything's fine, and then, I don't know, some something happens. I don't know. Jerome Powell decides to sneeze to the left instead of the right, and economists freak out and the market start crashing. And the price of Bitcoin now goes below $95. So I'm liquidated because I got that 5%. So I'm done. However, now that that's been sold on the on the market, that's added to the selling pressure. So now the price dips to set to $93.
Well, that liquidated the guy that's at 7%, and then that adds more selling pressure. And then all of a sudden, the dude that thinks he's safe at 10% is not safe at 10%. He gets his shit liquidated too. All 3 of all 3 of these guys are all wiped out. It's this is you don't wanna have anything to do with loans. I was saying it when Block 5 was at its peak on this podcast. Do not do not even consider doing that unless you're going to go to somebody who is at least looking out for not only yourself and not only themselves, but for the Bitcoin market as a whole. And that was the only people I know that do that is Unchained. That's in Austin, Texas. Go to Unchained. I think they're called Unchained now, but they used to be Unchained Capital.
Just go check them out. If for whatever reason, you have to get a loan, do it with somebody who's ethical, who's watching out for all three parties. Alright? Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities, oil taking a beating today. 1.32% of the downside for West Texas Intermediate, 69.74 or $69.74. Brent Norcey, yeah, same beating. 1 a quarter percent to the downside, 73.51. Natural gas is down a full 3 points, and gasoline itself is down 1 and a half all the way down to $2.1 per gallon. Gold and the rest of its kin are doing very well today. It looks like gold has posted an all time high of $27.31.70 after a 0.89% gain.
Silver is up. Whoop dee doo. Check this shit out. 3.64% to 32.93. I remember when it was, like, $17 an ounce. Platinum is up 1a half. Copper is up 1 a third. Palladium is up 3 a half percent. Ag is fully mixed. The biggest loser today is chocolate down almost 4 points, and the biggest winner today is gonna be coffee. It's only up 2 thirds of a point, though. We got live cattle up 0.59%. Lean hogs are up a third. Feeder cattle are up a full point. The Dow is moving sideways, but it's still in the red 0.05%. S and P is up a quarter. Nasdaq is up a half, and the S and P also moving sideways, 0.02%.
Bitcoin is having a decent morning today. $68,660. That is a 1.3 $6,000,000,000,000 market cap, and we can now get 25.1 ounces of shiny metal rock with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,000,000, 769,205 and a half of. And thank god average fees per block have dropped to point 21 BTC. Yesterday was well over a half. There are a 111 blocks carrying 235,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 11. Satoshis per vbyte, low priority is gonna get you in at 9. 600 is the dumber shit. It's the number of the beast on hash rate, guys. 666.1 x the hashes per second.
The devil is with us. God almighty. Healthcare, Nostr, Bitcoin, and Bull Runs was yesterday's show, and Avi Burra was good enough to throw me 10,000 satoshis, says this is our factory. And he did that on Noster. I can tell by the way that fountain was working. I'm not gonna get into it. Thank you, Avi. I appreciate that. And I hope I didn't butcher exactly what it was that you guys were doing. I I think I got it right. If for whatever reason any of my assumptions were wrong, Avi, please let me know. I wanna get one of you guys, either you or Vitor or John on the show. I've been talking to John over on LinkedIn, and I think, I'm gonna ask him if he'll if he'll come on.
Agi Cho with 7777. Oh, thank god. It's the god number to offset the devil number over there on the hash rate. It says everything is noster. I agree. God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Pies to play before 20. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Global Bitcoin ETPs, that's exchange traded products, registered the biggest 7 day inflow since July. Let's take the temperature of what's going on here out of CoinDesk and written by James Van Stratton. Bitcoin's ongoing price resurgence has investors worldwide scrambling to take exposure.
Global ETPs have registered a cumulative inflow of 25,765 Bitcoin worth $1,740,000,000 in 7 days. That's the biggest 7 day tally since July according to bold.report. Bitcoin ETPs now hold 1,100,000 BTC, the same amount that Satoshi's wallet holds. And what they're referring to there is Satoshi Nakamoto's original wallet that he was mining with when the network first launched. It holds right around 1,100,000 BTC. So now another 1,100,000 BTC is technically kind of or at least, well, kind of frozen up. Right? That's there's only 21,000,000 BTC ever, and we're at, like, 19,000,000 860,000, somewhere around there.
Do the math. That's a hell of a percentage that's held in these ETPs. Better buy your Bitcoin now, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, ETPs, the exchange traded products, is a collective term, and it describes other funds such as exchange traded funds, the, you know, the ETFs, and exchange traded notes, and I'm sure there's some other things too. Bitcoin has surged by 15% since October 10th lows and is just 8% away from an all time high set in March. CoinDesk data shows, anyway. The rally is led by several factors, including expectations for fed rate cuts and rising odds of pro crypto Donald Trump winning the November 5th presidential election in the United States.
The US listed spot ETFs have also seen a strong uptake, pulling pulling in nearly $1,900,000,000 in investment money since October 14th, according to data from Farside Investors. In Bitcoin terms, that's 21,450 Bitcoin. To put this into perspective, the Bitcoin ETF investors have purchased 48 days of mining supply. That's roughly 450 BTC get mined daily. 48 days worth. I've just gotta pause to yeah. Because that's a good perspective to understand. There's only so much Bitcoin being generated. And right now, it's about 450 Bitcoin a day.
These guys in just the US listed spot ETFs have gobbled up 48 days worth of mining supply. That's at and the question becomes it's probably forming in your mind right now. At what point at what point does the market sense the fact that the supply is just not there? It's, I mean, it's like it's depending right now. It's depending on retail and other weak hands just selling the hell out. Selling out weak hands, the lettuce hands that we've all heard and and we know and love because of the, you know, the whole meme meme stock stuff. At what point does the market sense that we're coming to the edge of a cliff?
And that should spark the notion in your mind to be wary of the following possibility. There's possible rehypothecation going on in the market. Yes. There's no way that we can print more Bitcoin. That doesn't mean that people that are investment houses that are trading that Bitcoin on behalf of retail is telling the truth when they say how much Bitcoin that they have. We don't know. That's the long and the short of it. We don't know. And if it is true that that's what's going on, that's a bad deal. Nobody wants to hear that. But as far as what's going on with right now what we can understand today, that these guys since like October, since October 14th that's dude that was 4 days that was 4 days ago they pulled in 48 days worth of mine supply Do the math.
Divide 4 by 48 to get that ratio. And you'll start if you start playing around with that number. Or you could go the other way. You could divide 48 by 4 and you get the multiple of how much Bitcoin was being drained in the last 4 days. I like ratio metrics a hell of a lot better than, you know, just straight up numbers, but let's move on. World coin is rebranding. And Decrypt's headline is why Worldcoin built an Ethereum network specifically for humans. Don't let the headline fool you because there's the subtext here. And I'm not sure if Liz Napolitano understands what she's writing about or understands this particular story, but let's see what she says first.
World coin, newly rebranded world. The crypto fueled eyeball scanning identity platform cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched the main net for its own Ethereum layer 2 network called World Chain on Thursday. That's yesterday. World Chain is rolling out with the goal of bringing millions of verifiable human users onto the blockchain in addition to promoting the development of digital identity tools and applications that promote financial freedom, its core team told Decrypt. Many blockchains are denominated or sorry, dominated by bots, world advisor Liam Horne told Decrypt. But Worldchain, oh my god, they hope to serve the kinds of users who the project believes stands to benefit the most from blockchain technology and that would be humans.
Quote, on a lot of chains, there's more algorithmic trading bots that are kind of moving money around on chains than there are people, Horn said. World chain is about expanding out the set of use cases for humans and also building a blockchain in a kind of way that is more designed for them. Oh my god. This just it's just gibberish. Worldchain is part of Optimism's superchain. That is a network of interoperable layer twos that share security and other infrastructure. Oh my god. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway, as such, it is interoperable with more than 2 dozen chains such as base and blast, which should help, sorry, should help it bring in users from all across the crypto ecosystem, Horn said. It's also faster and cheaper than Ethereum's main net with gas subsidies also available for verified human users. Oh, subsidies on gas prices. Yay. By using Optimism's open source development framework, the opstack, world chain also aims to attract a wide range of developers encouraging the building of decentralized apps with real world use cases on its network.
Well, this development will help attract even more humans onto the blockchain. Optimism's Unlimited, chief growth officer Ryan Wyatt told Decrypt, quote, what the world king team does sorry, world coin team does, what the base team does, what the Uniswap team does, they are all contributing to and advancing OP stack. Why it said so? It's the engineering efforts of the best protocol engineers in the entire industry across these many teams that are pushing development and advancing, which benefits World Chain. World coin, founded in 2019, made waves when it launched its Orb, a futuristic looking spherical device that scans users' irises and ties them to a virtual key on the blockchain.
Humans who got scanned were eligible for an allotment of Worldcoin subject to regional sanctions. Worldchain will natively integrate world ID, granting Services that can be used by people who are shut out of the traditional finance system are exactly what will help drive the chain's adoption, Horne told Decrypt, quote, it places it's places that genuinely need access to stablecoins for financial access, for moving money across borders, for just getting a hedge against inflation of the local currencies. That will use Worldcoin. Horn said, those are people that need crypto.
So this rebranding, this is what I wanna touch on here. It's the rebranding. It's not anything that was said. This isn't for humans. They don't give a shit about bots on the blockchain. They don't care. They want to link your identity, your human identity, to your financial activity because that type of data is weaponizable in a way that that we can't even think of. Yeah. Sure. Oh, well, of course, David, of course, it's weaponizable to shut down your bank account. We don't know to what extent that data can actually provide.
Sure. That's one thing to me. Shutting down somebody's bank account because they saw that I bought a gun at some kind of gun store on my Visa card, that is the lowest hanging fruit there is. What's the high hanging fruit? What's the one that you gotta reach for? What does that data entail? What does that data say about you? That's I'm talking about pre crime shit. You know, you you got somebody you got some idiot who decided to be unethical and force his opponent who didn't want to have a debate to have a debate by using AI. What do you think is gonna happen here?
Now why the rebranding? This is, again, this is the whole point. World coin wasn't doing well. It really wasn't. They were they were getting sanctioned. They were getting all kinds of stuff. It was bad for the brand. So, the brand, in my opinion, World coin as a brand got beat up so badly that they've now had to rebrand into a new name. All the rest of the stuff that's in this story is just a load of gibberish that is suit speak and is going to get people into real financial and political and economic and trouble with their families, trouble with their everybody. It's just going to be trouble for these people. If you are one of these people that are even considering looking into a silver sphere that they call the orb, don't do it.
Because it's bad enough that Venmo users can now purchase Bitcoin through MoonPay integration. I don't like this. I like it and I don't like it. Because, again, this is tying your financial activity, to your identity, and we need to figure out ways to stop doing that. These the payments company announced that US customers can now use their Venmo accounts to buy digital assets, like Bitcoin through MoonPay. Now I'm gonna pause because I'm gonna bring up my very own Venmo. Yes. I use Venmo to do things like pay rent. And I'm not, you know, excited about it. But I noticed the other day that if I open up Venmo, there's a button on the bottom right that says crypto.
Seriously, it actually says crypto. I can buy bitcoin. I can buy shitcoin number 1, number 2, and number 3. Well, I'll say them. I can buy, pay I can buy PayPal USD coin. I can buy bitcoin. I can buy Ethereum. I can buy of all things Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is on here. And I can use my Venmo account to actually buy them. Yes, I use Cash App to buy Bitcoin. Yes, I use Strike to buy Bitcoin. My, what the family companies still use Swan to buy Bitcoin because even though that they've laid off all of their, you know, they're not sponsoring anybody anymore and they laid off a whole bunch of people, that company is still actually doing what it said it's going to do. It's going it it still takes money from the company's bank our company's bank account and buys Bitcoin, and it does it every week because that's the way I set it up.
I don't like it, but this is the way that it is right now. And we do need to move away from it, and that's where the circular economy comes in. That's why that's that's why I've got the circle p. I mean, that that it's it's, you know, it's it's a the circle p that I brought to you at the head of the show is sort of supposed to be an experimental marketplace that not only tries to get a circular economy or or does its bid for king and country to get some kind of semblance of a circular economy going, But, you know, it is also trying to enable people that may not have the money to advertise on a platform that has more than 10 listeners.
And I've got more than 10. I don't have a lot of listeners, but I've got more than 10. It gives them space to be able to get their product out there in into other people's ears. Because, you know, maybe the product I try to get good products in there. Maybe the product is so good that it takes off. And and we all I don't know. We all get rich together. Who knows? That that's not that's not the real point. The point is the circular economy. Because, like, for every time that you guys boost this show or you stream satoshis to this show or you zap me on Noster, it all goes directly into my lightning node.
It doesn't go to albie anymore. That that's bypassed because of albie go and and albie hub and all that kind of stuff. It goes it just goes all to to my lightning node. So every single satoshi that I get from this podcast or from my activities on an Oster, it's all k y c free. Nobody knows where the hell that came from. Hell, most of the time, even I don't know where that shit came from unless somebody specifically tells me. Right? That's what we're working for. And even though that, yes, it's good for Bitcoin, that Venmo is allowing people to actually buy Bitcoin directly through the Venmo app, and they even give it a button. Hell, even Strike got took the bitcoin button away. And I don't know if they ever put it back, but I know that Jack Mallers caught a lot of shit from that that you actually had to go search inside of strike for the bitcoin functionality.
But that's another story. Here we got Venvo Venmo PayPal is has been doing it for a while it's just not going to stop it's just not going to stop all right this is the last of for the day Spiral renews its grant to Will Clark. Will Clark is a Bitcoin core developer who focuses on issue and PR triage contributing fixes, user report, PR review or user support PR reviews and production of associated developer onboarding initiatives such as the Bitcoin Core Academy. So when you're looking at somebody like Will Clark, you're looking at somebody who is really needed but they don't ever really get notoriety because they're kind of god, I don't wanna say it, but I'm gonna say it because it's just the best word, janitor.
Somebody who cleans up messes. Somebody who figures out how to like a mechanic like like the, the maintenance man, the groundskeeper, and the janitor of a school all rolled into 1. That's the kind of thing that Will Clark does. And if it's not if it wasn't for those people, you'd have a yard full of weeds, you'd have no heat in the wintertime, and all the floors would be covered with puke. Alright. So I thank God people like Spiral are there to grant, Will Clark money for doing the cleanup job that he has to do. Next up is Bitcoin is now the 6th largest monetary asset in the world. Matthew Mesinskas Mesinskas, I cannot pronounce that name, of Porkopolis Economics shared the latest ranking of top monetary assets worldwide.
And, again, bitcoin has now come in at number 6, right above number 7, which is United Kingdom's pound sterling. Yes. Bitcoin is now worth more than the great I mean, the the market cap is worth more than the great British or the British pound sterling. It's just it's kinda sick, man. Be aware that new Bitcoin sextortion scams, use pictures of victims' homes. Alright. So photos or sorry. Protos reports that fraudsters are increasingly using publicly available information such as passwords, addresses, phone numbers, and social media accounts, along with other sensitive details from third party data breaches to appear legitimate. The latest scams even include Google Maps Street View pictures to trick victims into believing that scammers are outside their homes.
It is a pure psychological play. Do not do not get suckered into this. In fact, I recommend everybody do the following when it comes to, scams. Prepare yourself to get scammed. Prepare yourself mentally to say, I'm getting scammed and I'm not going to act. That's the thing. That's the that's what they want you to do. They want you to pull the trigger on something. They want you to call a phone number. They want you to click a link. They want to rope you into the the the notion of acting because once they get you to start acting, you basically are a self propelled machine, and they don't really have to direct you much further.
All they have to do is put some barricades on either side of you, and you will eventually, under your own motor power, end up where they want you to end up. So I want you to do this. Go get either go go to, like, Netflix. I think it's actually on HBO Max. Wherever it is that you can find it, go watch the movie Dune. Specifically, either the new movie or David Lynch's version way back in the eighties. It doesn't matter. There's a particular scene that you need to watch. And that is when Paul Atreides is called into the mother superior's chambers for a presence, and he is told to put his hand in a box.
When he does so, he first he asks, what's in the box? And she tells him, pain. And he's like, well, shit. So he puts his hand in the box and the second that he does, the mother superior of the Bene Gesserit order puts a gom jabbar to his neck. If he moves the wrong way or if he attempts to pull his hand out of the box, she will stab him with a gum jabbar it's instant poison and he dies and what she tells him is that this test is a test as to whether or not you are human or animal Because an animal will chew its own leg off to get from pain. It will do everything that it can, even the destruction of its own body, to get away from that which is causing it pain even though it will also induce pain in doing so. It doesn't matter. That's an animal reaction.
And that's exactly what these people want you to do. They want you to act like an animal. They want you to go to your brain stem and have your brain stem your old lizard brain that is basically the flight or fight mechanism. They want it to do all its thinking. If they can get you scared enough that your cognitive abilities as a human cease to function and you fall back to your lizard brain and let it start doing the thinking for you, you're going to get scammed. So when you're watching the scene and you're watching him endure mentally induced pain, it's not real pain. It's like I think I think it's described in the David Lynch film as his hand burning to a crisp. Like, 3rd degree burns all the way to the bone and then the bone burns away. And they'll think about that kind of pain. I mean, this is like that's like he really is really feeling it. Yet if he if he removes his hand from the box because he's told that it's just he's like this you're gonna be fine.
You know, there's no, like, there's no way that he's gonna, you know, have permanent damage yet that pain is so strong that he wants to get his hand away from the box. But if he does, he's dead. And that's what this is. So take a lesson from Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, and understand that you have 2 modes of thinking. You have higher order thinking or cognition, and you have lower order primitive, prehistoric thinking. And that's the brain stem, the old lizard brain, and that's where fight or flight lies. Let's see. Is there anything else in this particular thing? No. And this was all, this last part was all from no bs, bitcoin.com.
That's no bs bitcoin.com. I'm super happy that they are around to help us understand what the hell is going on in the world. Now, it is Friday. It is the weekend. I hope you have a good one. We'll have to see what Bitcoin does over the weekend because, generally speaking, it's a long, slow bleed into the opening of markets on Monday. Can't we all just go up together? I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. It is 8:46 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 18th day of October 2024.
This is episode 976 of Bitcoin, and the circle p is open for business and I'm going to be talking about lightning piggy but first what do we have on the chopping block today? Mempool.space apparently did something that pissed a whole bunch of people on Twitter off. I've got an article about it. I promise. But the next article that we're gonna be covering is this Craig Wright business. He's back. Yes, he is. I mentioned it, I think a while back like a couple of weeks ago, but I never really could find a substantial story that was talking about the details of Craig Wright's latest escapade. I honestly don't know where he's getting his money this time. It cannot be Calvin Ayer.
I I guess it could be Calvin Ayer, but I don't know. I just don't see how Calvin wants to have anything to do with this. He's lost so much money on all of the, you know, court cases that Craig Wright apparently was going to win and didn't. But, yes, he's back again. And AI is entering politics in a way that is really bad. It's it is not a good it's it's just not good moving forward. I think this is a terrible idea. I think this candidate that has done what we're gonna talk about is really doing a disservice to everybody in the United States. But the worst disservice are people taking high risk crypto loans. Yes. It's coming back. It's coming back again.
Maybe with a vengeance. I don't know. We'll find out, but that's not a good situation at all. We've already been through this. Does anybody remember BlockFi? Let's not get into this crap again, but it looks like people are. The inflows for the, exchange traded products for Bitcoin are having a hell of a time, man. I mean, in a good way. And then Worldcoin is rebranding. We will talk about that as well as Venmo users purchasing Bitcoin. We'll talk about that as well. And then we've got a couple of things from nobsbitcoin.com. That's nobsbitcoin.com.
But first, let's introduce lightning piggy. This is the circle p. The circle p is where I bring plebs like you to plebs like you that have goods and services for sale in Bitcoin. If you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you ain't in the circle p. Lightning piggy is not technically in the circle p, not because they don't take bitcoin. They do. It's because as is tradition, when I find something that I think is really cool and that I think you'd really like and is for sale by a vendor in Bitcoin, I'm just going to put it into the circle p, and I'm going to ask forgiveness later. Okay?
If they don't like me doing this, they will tell me, and they will tell me to close my trap and never talk about lightning piggy again. But I don't see why. It's free advertising. And hopefully, they will get the gist that if I do make a sale for Lightning Piggy, which you can find at lightningpiggy.com. Lightningpiggy is all one word, piggylightningpiggy.com. Then maybe they'll float me some satoshis on the backside. Hell, I've even got a a recurring invoice ready to go for them. That's gonna be provided by Zaprite too, who, is not in the circle p. But let's just get to this lightning piggy. What the hell is it? Well, generally speaking, it's for kids. Many of you might remember this thing that was called Bitpiggy back in the day.
It was sort of a a Bitcoin piggy bank. I don't think these people behind lightning piggy are is the same person because if I remember right, bit piggy was provided by fartface 2,000. That was his that that is his handle. I actually don't see him around that much because I think he's still over on dead bird. But lightning piggy is sort of the same concept except it's wrapped around lightning network rather than the Bitcoin main chain network. Let me read you the the the what they're writing about Bitpiggy or, lightning piggy. It is an electronic cash piggy bank for kids that accepts Bitcoin sent over lightning while displaying the amount saved in satoshis.
Our vision is to make SATS the saving standard for every child. We plan to use this educational platform to inspire future generations not only to save with sound money, but to also learn to create in a free and open source way. From an early age, we're programmed to think in fiat terms. Depending on our respective cultural upbringing, in many parts of the world, our first encounter with money is when the tooth fairy visits, followed by being gifted a piggy bank that gets filled with coins for doing good deeds. Well, this money is rapidly losing its purchasing power as we know and therefore it is useless as a value storage device.
To accelerate global adoption, we need to have the tools and resources available for Bitcoiners of all ages. Lightning Piggy is bringing the adoption of Bitcoin to young people in a real and meaningful way, as well as learning about sound money from the earliest possible opportunity. It is opening the door to STEM learning opportunities via affordable homeschoolcommunity development kits. Later on in life, bitcoin will be the obvious first choice of money. Anything else will simply not make sense. Okay. So that's that's their blurb about it. But if I go in I'm over here at lightning piggy.com.
That's lightningpiggy.com. If I go to that's their about page. They have a market button up here at the top of their page. There's an about. There's in the wild. There's build. There's cases. There's bounties. There's market. If you go to market, you can purchase from at least 2 vendors a fully built, fully assembled, ready to go lightning piggy. Both of the URLs to that to the places where you can purchase that is in the show notes. I guarantee it. They're in the show notes. It's a URL. Thank god for podhome.fm that allows most people in most podcast apps to simply be able to click on those links in the show notes on your mobile phone. And you can go directly to lightningpiggy.comforward/market.
There's a company called Robo Techy and there's a place called Bitcoin Stuff Store. Now, here's the thing. Robo Techy is in the UK. They say they have global shipping. But understand global shipping from the UK to the United States it's probably not going to be cheap and I don't know what that costs bitcoin stuff store which is the other place that you can get one of these is in the Netherlands they also offer global shipping Just be aware that, global shipping, like I said, is expensive. But you don't have you don't have to actually purchase the full thing already assembled because they have all the plans for building the thing, whether out of cardboard. I think they like, literally, they've got these plans that you can build a small little bit piggy out of cardboard for kids to do as a craft and then slide in the little electronic paper and all the rest of the stuff that goes with it to make it a fully functional lightning network.
They include that. Right? So you're gonna have to buy something, but you don't have to buy the whole thing. And I think that this is a really good way to go. And as far as I can actually tell, they also have the plans for the 3 d print of a plastic bit piggy that act you know, that is the whole rounded shape and it's all you know, if you've got the pink filament, you can make it look like a little pink piggy. It's this is a really cool way to go. I I really enjoyed what they're doing over here. The first I'd even heard about lightning piggy was yesterday. That's why I'm featuring them today. So if you want to go buy something with your bitcoin from a vendor that sells you something in bitcoin that I think might have value go to lightningpiggy.com.
Lightningpiggy is all one word.com. Lightningpiggy.com. Pick one up. And I don't know how you're gonna be able to tell them that you heard it here on the Bitcoin and podcast in the Circle P. But if there's any possible way that you can let them know that that's where you heard it, please let them know. Okay. Now on to the news. The bitcoin mempool drama was all too predictable. Yeah. This is Vivek Sin. It's out of bitcoin magazine. So mempool.space recently added features to spot runes and ordinals transactions, and Bitcoin monetary maximalist totally lost it.
As a Bitcoiner and an observer of Bitcoin culture, this whole drama felt completely normal, as well as predictable. Over time, an ideological split has emerged between Bitcoin monetary maximalists who see Bitcoin as only money and those open to building things on Bitcoin such as innovative crypto esque like or tech like ordinals, runes, and tokens. Oh, god. Vivek, you're going down the wrong road. With this split mindset now entrenched, the mempool.space black backlash was inevitable from the purest viewpoint anything beyond the Bitcoin protocol is heresy so even just the neutral action of mempool. Space displaying runes and ordinals data for their users to see provoked outrage Never mind if it made one of the best open source Bitcoin explorers more useful and data rich. It touched the forbidden topic and all rationality went out the window.
This reaction perfectly follows the playbook. The monetary maximalist responded to perceived apo apostasy with fury, as they always do on Twitter. And they've got a tweet up here from, Knut Swanholm, who says these clowns have managed to bribe one of the longest standing and highest quality open source projects in the space into labeling transactions that contain ordinals, inscriptions, and runes as such. It is a shame, to say the least, None of these scams are Bitcoin. They all. And then it asked me to show more. And I I think you get Kanut's point here. And what he's doing is he's responding or replying in or quote quote quote tweeting from, god forbid, Taproot Wizards who says, breaking. Make mempool magical again. Mempool space has been providing amazing value to Bitcoiners for years, and we are very grateful to be able to give back. Taproot Wizards will be providing ongoing sponsorship for mempool at the highest available tier.
And I can see why Cannut kinda lost his mind a little bit because that's just paying. That the way that they're making it sound and I don't this may very well be true. It sounds to me that Taproot Wizards is just paying mempool.space to provide this particular functionality. Don't know. I I I don't care that much about it, but apparently people do. Anyway, continuing. The season 2 crowd, however, put their money where their mouth is and donated to the helpful platform, doubling the number of individual sponsors and approximately tripling the project's yearly revenue from individual contributors.
They financially backed a tool they found useful rather than just complaining, actions over words. Bitcoin purists should also put their money where their mouths are and support the Bitcoin explorers who do not spot ruins and ordinals transactions I have yet to see them do this instead of just screaming on Twitter which says a lot about them Both sides acted true to form. This type of drama is inevitable when you have 2 factions with fundamentally different perspectives. While certain views may go too far ethically, this is ultimately human nature. We'll keep seeing this purest versus pragmatic conflict as Bitcoin evolves and divides into diverging philosophies.
Rationality gives way to belief and identity, but understanding these dynamics helps contextualize the mempool reaction. So what's my take that's all bullshit? Who cares? Who cares? Man, I mean, honestly, I've been able to spot ordinals with just the data button on mempool.space's goggles feature for, I don't know, 6 months, 7 months, 8 months. I don't care. I I I was looking at mempool.space earlier today and I can't actually see a button that says show me runes. And I I, like, I f5 ed my browser. And I'm thinking that maybe I didn't catch the the update. I I don't see anything that just lets me select ordinals, runes, or inscriptions that is in my face.
I looked, and I'm going to be looking later on today, but I don't I don't know what's going on here mostly because I don't spend any time at all on Twitter. I'm personally thankful for Noster, and this is why I'm bringing you this story. Noster is the filter of the bullshit. The people that want to engage in this kind of activity that think that this kind of thing is important, they're not on Noster. And we keep saying, the people on noster we keep saying well we need to get these these people you know to for these Bitcoin maxes from to stop using Twitter and start using noster do you really want that Do you really want that?
Are you sure you actually want that? Because right now we've got a major algorithm working in our favor and it is a signal to noise algorithm. And that's a ratio, signal to noise ratio. On Nostra, I get way more signal than I do noise. On Twitter, I can't even see the signal. It's all noise because, a, because of crap like this, and, b, because it's just the stream is polluted with all manner of stuff I don't want to see. Even even when I'm just looking at this the smaller Bitcoin list that I put together on Twitter I still just it's like the amount of politics people talking about straight politics without any mention whatsoever about Bitcoin in my Bitcoin list of just people that I know to be good or new to be really hardcore Bitcoiners is immense it's huge it's like 50% of everything that I see in my Bitcoin list is about Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
It's noise. I don't wanna see it. If you want to get rid of the noise, then you need to get over to Noster, where I never saw anything about mempool.space, Knut, Sponholm bitching about it, all the you know, any of the rest of the people bitching about or, you know, the fact that ordinals suck and and also the people that think that ordinals are the greatest thing since sliced bread. I don't care. Bitcoin is gonna be used by enemies. It's gonna be used in ways that you don't want it to be used. I'm sorry for you, but there's nothing you can do about it. Sure. You can use certain Bitcoin things on your Bitcoin node to filter ordinals, but honestly is it really worth it?
Just let it die all on its own. Runes, ordinals, inscriptions. They have no inherent value and things that don't have inherent value have this really neat ability to just dissolve and go away. Unlike some people, like Craig Wright, who says that Bitcoin developers misled the public in a in a new, get this, one $1,000,000,000 lawsuit, that's billion with a b, Ryan s Gladwin from decrypt, Craig Wright launched a new legal battle claiming that Bitcoin developers have deviated from the original vision of the project and insisting that Bitcoin SV is the real Bitcoin pausing how the hell is this even a legal case this is all open source How is this even a case? How is a judge even going to look at this? Why is it even on a docket?
Why are lawyers who get paid real money to do real things even entertaining this fucking clown? I'm sorry. The claim is sinking, seeking that the defendants or hold hold on. Let me start that again. The claim is seeking from the defendants the difference in market valuation between the two coins, which is over $1,180,000,000. If Wright's name sounds familiar, that's because he previously claimed to be the, creator of Bitcoin. We know that story. We don't need to get into that. But let's see here. Yep. The recently filed this is important. The recently filed UK high court claim states that the defendants have altered the original Bitcoin protocol through the introduction of the SegWit and Taproot upgrades.
And that fundamentally deviates from the original vision set out by Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. As a result, Craig believes that the defendants created confusion within the market and misled the public into believing that BTC retains the attributes of the original Bitcoin. Named in the lawsuit is Bitcoin Core. The developers of Bitcoin Node Software and Jack Dorsey Square Up Europe Limited, a payment services or service that funded a Bitcoin Lightning Network company. Wright is seeking the difference in market value between Bitcoin and SV, claiming that the latter is the real Bitcoin. When the form was filed, Bitcoin was trading at roughly $62,000 while BSV sat at just $65.
In turn, the claim seeks a total of $1,180,000,000 or £911 or £911,000,000 from the defendants. This reflects the financial impact of misrepresentation and resulting market loss, the claim states. It is true that SegWit and Taproot fundamentally changed Bitcoin. When Segwit launched in 2017 to fix a host of bugs and increase the network's efficiency, it was highly contentious. So much so that it led to the hard fork that gave rise to Bitcoin SV short for Bitcoin satoshi's vision. I need to actually make a correction on that. It didn't automatically give rise to Bitcoin SV.
What it did was give rise to a fork that we know is Bitcoin Cash about 6 months or a little bit maybe somewhere around there maybe a little bit longer that's when Bitcoin Cash forked off into Bitcoin Satoshi's vision so you had Bitcoin You had the 2017 block size war. That resulted in Roger Ver, you know, loading his diapers and getting them full and getting pissed off about it. And then all of a sudden, he splits and forks off Bitcoin Cash from the original Bitcoin. Then, not too long after that, Roger Ver makes friends with Calvin Ayer and Craig Wright.
And what he didn't realize is that Craig Wright and Calvin Ayer were playing Roger Ver. And they got in. They hung out with Roger Ver. They entrenched themselves into Bitcoin Cash, and then they started a riot within that community. And that caused their own split, and that turned into Ironically, Bitcoin Cash has way more value than Bitcoin SV. And, clearly, Calvin Ayer is nowhere to be seen. He seems to have disappeared. And Craig Wright has been told that he is a fraud by courts, not just regular people. K. Continuing on. Then in 2021, Taproot improved privacy and data while reducing transaction cost on the network, again, leading to a hard fork. This time, the result of that fork was Bitcoin Cash. No. That's wrong. That's not what happened.
That is not what Bitcoin Cash came first. I'm sorry. I I don't know what's going on with this particular author, but they've got this whole thing backwards. Whatever. Wright maintains that changes alter Bitcoin enough that it's now misleading to still call it Bitcoin. Instead, he argues that Bitcoin SV deserves the mononym Bitcoin. He's done this before, by the way. Quote, the claim shows a complete misunderstanding of the decentralized ethos lying at the heart of Bitcoin. Lanny Tuckmeier, lawyer and director of operations at Bergl Magence LLP, told Decrypt, quote, any changes to the protocol are considered through community consensus, while his notion of exclusive intellectual property rights is in complete conflict with the open source nature of the project itself, end quote.
This isn't the first lawsuit that Wright has brought forward regarding bitcoin. Up until recently, Wright has been embroiled in a legal battle with Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a Jack Dorsey backed organization, as well as a group of bitcoin core developers. The point of contention in that case was Wright's claim to be the creator of Bitcoin and therefore the holder of the copyright of the Bitcoin white paper. Well, that's the logical that's there's 2 things there, and one doesn't follow from the other. He he did both. It it doesn't matter. Earlier this year, a UK court ruled that Wright did not invent Bitcoin and is not Satoshi.
He was then ordered to publicly declare he did not create Bitcoin. Quote, considering the previous court decisions and growing skepticism over the legitimacy of his claims, Tuckmeyer added, I very much doubt he can succeed this time. Well, he's never succeeded. He's never he's he's won one court case and that was against Peter McCormick and he was entitled to receive £1,000,000, not £10,000,000, not £100,000, not £100,000, not £1,000, but £1,000,000. So he while he is on paper in the court system in the UK as act or in the EU, honestly, as actually winning a single court case, he was only awarded £1.31 and everything else he has lost.
How he is able to muster the kind of cash that it takes to mount this kind of attack against Square as well as Bitcoin Core is beyond my understanding. I don't get it. But then again, I've never understood this gentleman in the first place. He seems like a completely unhinged sociopath. But, you know, this space is littered with unhinged sociopaths. Let's take a little break, talk about politics, but not in the way you think. We're gonna do this one from Savannah Fortis out of Cointelegraph. AI powered bot stands in for an absent candidate in the Virginia debate.
This is bad. Artificial intelligence can't hide from politics. Or rather, politics can't hide from AI. In an unusual political move, Bentley Hensel, an independent candidate running for the United States Congress in Virginia's 8th District, used an AI powered bot to participate in a debate after incumbent representative Don Bayer declined an invitation to the debate. On October 17th, the debate was held between Hansel, another independent candidate, David Kennedy, and a virtual stand in, Donbot, that's what they're calling this AI bot, leading up to the November elections. Hansel, a software engineer by trade, said he turned to AI as a response to what he described as Bayer's unwillingness to engage in a public debate.
The bot was given a crash course on Bayer's policy views and trained to represent his policy positions by drawing on available data sources, including his publicly available statements, press releases, and campaign material. DonBot was initially built by Hensel using OpenAI's technology. However, before the debate, Hensel said he migrated the bot to open source models via Cloudflare Workers. OpenAI has banned Hensel's account due to political use. Hensel said, in the future, he plans to create a Trump and Harris bot debate where anyone can ask both candidates their opinion on any issue. The debate between the independent Virginia congressional candidates was streamed online and had multiple hiccups, including the Donbot not being audible during some answers.
Both Hensel and the AI represented, Bayer, have been vocal about their views on technology and innovation, a trend among politicians that are up for election. Hensel's campaign websites highlights his goal to bring technological innovation and transparency to the federal government to make it more effective for all citizens. During his time in office, Bayer has already proposed legislation to regulate AI security for risk incident mitigation. In his proposal, he urged congress to establish clear boundaries around its deployment, particularly in political and governance spheres.
With the 2024 elections approaching, candidates are under pressure to take positions on tech related issues, including cryptocurrencies, blockchain, as well as AI. These positions are being closely watched by both big tech and political action committees, which have gained influence over the past year. This is insane. Everything about this is bad juju, and it's not going to end very well. But the thing here's the thing is that it's not going to end. It's just gonna get worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. I actually I hate to say this, but it does not surprise me at all that OpenAI suspended Bentley Hensel's account for doing this.
This, honestly, it's kinda reprehensible. I don't know either one of these dudes. I don't give a shit about the Virginia debates. I don't care about Virginia's elections. It's not my state, not my circus, not my monkeys. However, you cannot in any conscience good or bad have an AI read a whole bunch of stuff from your opponent and then seek to debate that AI version of your opponent in open public spheres. Everything about that is unethical. It's immoral. There's there is it's reprehensible. I don't know what Bentley Hensel was thinking other than he was showing off maybe his technological prowess.
But what really is freaking me out here is, like, I that there's no response from, from representative Bayer. Considering that representative Bayer was already aligned to regulate AI, do you think that this particular action by his opponent, Bentley Hensel, is going to strengthen or weaken his position on further regulations that we don't really need because I'm perfectly able to understand that it is reprehensible to do what Bentley Hensel did. It's going to strengthen his position, if you're wondering. It's going to make it even more evident to people that just don't think for themselves that we need yet more regulation.
The only way out and and here's the thing is that I I've said it before. I actually think that AI has its uses. It's not going to solve what people think it's going to solve. It's going to open up a whole new can of worms, But there are things that it actually does well and is going to get better at. But what it's never going to be able to do is ingest the collective writings of Charles Dickens and be able to figure out how to act like Charles Dickens? Do I mean, honestly, do do you think that if you were to read all of Stephen King's writings, that you would understand the mind of Stephen King, that you would be able to predict how he would answer if somebody asked him for, you know, asked him if he wanted his coffee black with sugar or cream or both.
I mean, unless you know the man, unless you sat down with Stephen King at some kind of diner and watched him order coffee, you can't predict what he'd do. That that single thing right there, if you expand that to everything else, you realize that what Bentley Hensel did is unethical everything about this is bad it's just this is a horrible state of affairs and I'm not calling for regulations that AI can engage in politics because that's just stupid the amount of the amount of open source ai models that are out there that that genie is never getting put back in its bottle open ai will probably die That entire thing is spending way too much money way too fast. They're gonna crash and burn. It's gonna be spectacular. And you know what's not going to happen? AI is not going to die.
It's and and Facebook, OpenAI, the entire well, Meta, OpenAI, Google, all of them could go away tomorrow. Any company that generated any LLM could disappear tomorrow. And you know what will not disappear? AI. The models are too spread out. They're in the hands of too many people to be able to put that genie back in the bottle. So even though Bitly Hensel has gotten banned or had his account suspended from OpenAI, if he has the technical prowess and he's got enough money to build a, you know, a big machine, he'd be able to do this anyway, and somebody else will. If not Bentley Hensel, somebody else will.
We're getting into a stage where you're not gonna be able to trust a single thing. Now, first of all, I I love the fact that I can't trust politicians on their own merit given the given actual reality. I'm not looking forward to expanding that me not trusting any politician for any reason whatsoever because now there's the injection of, well, unreliability of any information that you see or hear from now until yawn. If we we've entered into a new world, you can't trust anything. So don't. Please don't. And for the love of god, don't do the following. Do not take crypto loans.
High risk crypto loans are surging to a 2 year high of $55,000,000 Omkar Godbold, CoinDesk. The decentralized lending market is booming. Remember decentralized lending markets? Yeah. Yeah. It's coming back. High risk loans are surging to over 2 year highs. They're sparking concerns of liquidation cascades and volatility. Does anybody want to go back to FTX, BlockFi, Alameda, and all that crap? No. We don't. Yet the degenerates are out there in force. Why? Because nobody learns nothing. The total amount of high risk loans defined as those within 5% of their liquidation price rose to $55,000,000 on Wednesday, reaching the highest since June of 2022 according to data tracked by analytics firms IntoTheBlock.
Crypto traders often draw loans from decentralized lending platforms by locking in collateral in the form of digital assets. The risk here is that if the value of the collateral falls too much, the protocol liquidates the debt by selling off that collateral. A loan within 5% of that liquidation price means if the collateral's price falls by 5%, it will no longer cover the loan, trigger triggering automatic liquidation. Thus, the surge in these risky loans is noteworthy as it can lead to a liquidation cascade. In this self reinforced process, a series of liquidations happens quickly, lowering crypto prices. And that, in turn, causes further liquidations and increased market turbulence. Quote, large liquidations can impact the collateral value, putting more loans at risk of liquidation creating a downward press price spiral.
Rapid market drops may result in insufficient collateral to cover loans resulting in bad depth and losses to lenders, end quote. And that was who said that? Oh, that was into the block in their market update. Into the Block added that bad debt can negatively impact market liquidity, making it difficult to trade large orders at stable prices. Quote, bad debt can keep lenders from adding new liquidity to prevent potential losses, the firm noted. Okay. That's the end of that article. Do not take loans against your crypto. If you do, if you're in need of a loan, you might wanna go visit Unchained Capital.
But here's the thing like let's say you got one bitcoin and you go yay I can get a loan from Unchained Capital and get is let's say the price of bitcoin right now is 68500 That you're gonna say, I'm gonna get a loan for 68,500 on my bitcoin. No, you're not. You're not gonna get anywhere close to that. Now, these buffoons over here, you know, like what into the block is talking about are the complete degenerates that are loaning you know, 95% of the value of 1 bitcoin. Let's just for let's just for math to make it easy. Let's say bitcoin is cost let's say 1 bitcoin is $100.
Dollars and you go up to these degenerate lending places and you say, I want a $100 loan. They say, well, what? You got a Bitcoin? Because that's $100. You say, yes. I have one Bitcoin. And they go, okay. We'll take your Bitcoin, but you're not getting $100. We're gonna give you 95. And here's your interest rates, and here's your payment replan. Yeah. Blah blah blah. And then the next day, the bitcoin price is standing at $95 They're automatically going to liquidate your bitcoin you've lost your bitcoin you've paid back the loan you know depending but most let's just say that you've paid back the loan or they paid basically forced you to pay back the loan by by liquidating your collateral So now you're free and clear, but you've lost Bitcoin.
Now expand that to when it's a $100,000, a $1,000,000. You see where I'm going with this? If you go to Unchained, they're gonna say, do you got one Bitcoin? Yeah. I got one Bitcoin. Hey, unchained. Would you give me a loan? They'll say, sure. We'll give you a loan. And here's your interest rate, and here's your payment plan, and and everything is great. But you're not getting $100. We we might loan you $45. The the that gives them so much headroom that they don't have to actually liquidate your bitcoin as collateral you don't get anywhere close to the value of your bitcoin in the loan but they're actually protecting you and they're protecting themselves they're actually also protecting the market as a whole because this liquidation cascade at business that's what happened well that's one of the one of the mechanics that was going on that caused ftx and all the rest of that shit to crash as fast as it did because like let's say that like let's say there's 3 loans for 3 bitcoin and they're worth a $100 and 2 of them are or all 3 of them are within 5% of their liquidation price. Right? So I get, like, you know, a loan for, like, $95, you know, on my one bitcoin so that's 90, you know, like a 5% premium. Let's say somebody else said, okay. Well, I don't want 5.
Let me do I'll only take, $93 and give me and give me a 7% headroom. And the 3rd guy says, I'll tell you what, man. I only need $90 on my one Bitcoin. So that's a 10% pre that's a 10% difference. Right? So we all have these loans where everything's fine, and then, I don't know, some something happens. I don't know. Jerome Powell decides to sneeze to the left instead of the right, and economists freak out and the market start crashing. And the price of Bitcoin now goes below $95. So I'm liquidated because I got that 5%. So I'm done. However, now that that's been sold on the on the market, that's added to the selling pressure. So now the price dips to set to $93.
Well, that liquidated the guy that's at 7%, and then that adds more selling pressure. And then all of a sudden, the dude that thinks he's safe at 10% is not safe at 10%. He gets his shit liquidated too. All 3 of all 3 of these guys are all wiped out. It's this is you don't wanna have anything to do with loans. I was saying it when Block 5 was at its peak on this podcast. Do not do not even consider doing that unless you're going to go to somebody who is at least looking out for not only yourself and not only themselves, but for the Bitcoin market as a whole. And that was the only people I know that do that is Unchained. That's in Austin, Texas. Go to Unchained. I think they're called Unchained now, but they used to be Unchained Capital.
Just go check them out. If for whatever reason, you have to get a loan, do it with somebody who's ethical, who's watching out for all three parties. Alright? Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities, oil taking a beating today. 1.32% of the downside for West Texas Intermediate, 69.74 or $69.74. Brent Norcey, yeah, same beating. 1 a quarter percent to the downside, 73.51. Natural gas is down a full 3 points, and gasoline itself is down 1 and a half all the way down to $2.1 per gallon. Gold and the rest of its kin are doing very well today. It looks like gold has posted an all time high of $27.31.70 after a 0.89% gain.
Silver is up. Whoop dee doo. Check this shit out. 3.64% to 32.93. I remember when it was, like, $17 an ounce. Platinum is up 1a half. Copper is up 1 a third. Palladium is up 3 a half percent. Ag is fully mixed. The biggest loser today is chocolate down almost 4 points, and the biggest winner today is gonna be coffee. It's only up 2 thirds of a point, though. We got live cattle up 0.59%. Lean hogs are up a third. Feeder cattle are up a full point. The Dow is moving sideways, but it's still in the red 0.05%. S and P is up a quarter. Nasdaq is up a half, and the S and P also moving sideways, 0.02%.
Bitcoin is having a decent morning today. $68,660. That is a 1.3 $6,000,000,000,000 market cap, and we can now get 25.1 ounces of shiny metal rock with our 1 Bitcoin of which there are 19,000,000, 769,205 and a half of. And thank god average fees per block have dropped to point 21 BTC. Yesterday was well over a half. There are a 111 blocks carrying 235,000 unconfirmed transactions waiting to clear at high priority rates of 11. Satoshis per vbyte, low priority is gonna get you in at 9. 600 is the dumber shit. It's the number of the beast on hash rate, guys. 666.1 x the hashes per second.
The devil is with us. God almighty. Healthcare, Nostr, Bitcoin, and Bull Runs was yesterday's show, and Avi Burra was good enough to throw me 10,000 satoshis, says this is our factory. And he did that on Noster. I can tell by the way that fountain was working. I'm not gonna get into it. Thank you, Avi. I appreciate that. And I hope I didn't butcher exactly what it was that you guys were doing. I I think I got it right. If for whatever reason any of my assumptions were wrong, Avi, please let me know. I wanna get one of you guys, either you or Vitor or John on the show. I've been talking to John over on LinkedIn, and I think, I'm gonna ask him if he'll if he'll come on.
Agi Cho with 7777. Oh, thank god. It's the god number to offset the devil number over there on the hash rate. It says everything is noster. I agree. God's death with 537 says thank you, sir. No. Thank you. Pies to play before 20. Thank you, sir. No. Thank you. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news you can use. Global Bitcoin ETPs, that's exchange traded products, registered the biggest 7 day inflow since July. Let's take the temperature of what's going on here out of CoinDesk and written by James Van Stratton. Bitcoin's ongoing price resurgence has investors worldwide scrambling to take exposure.
Global ETPs have registered a cumulative inflow of 25,765 Bitcoin worth $1,740,000,000 in 7 days. That's the biggest 7 day tally since July according to bold.report. Bitcoin ETPs now hold 1,100,000 BTC, the same amount that Satoshi's wallet holds. And what they're referring to there is Satoshi Nakamoto's original wallet that he was mining with when the network first launched. It holds right around 1,100,000 BTC. So now another 1,100,000 BTC is technically kind of or at least, well, kind of frozen up. Right? That's there's only 21,000,000 BTC ever, and we're at, like, 19,000,000 860,000, somewhere around there.
Do the math. That's a hell of a percentage that's held in these ETPs. Better buy your Bitcoin now, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, ETPs, the exchange traded products, is a collective term, and it describes other funds such as exchange traded funds, the, you know, the ETFs, and exchange traded notes, and I'm sure there's some other things too. Bitcoin has surged by 15% since October 10th lows and is just 8% away from an all time high set in March. CoinDesk data shows, anyway. The rally is led by several factors, including expectations for fed rate cuts and rising odds of pro crypto Donald Trump winning the November 5th presidential election in the United States.
The US listed spot ETFs have also seen a strong uptake, pulling pulling in nearly $1,900,000,000 in investment money since October 14th, according to data from Farside Investors. In Bitcoin terms, that's 21,450 Bitcoin. To put this into perspective, the Bitcoin ETF investors have purchased 48 days of mining supply. That's roughly 450 BTC get mined daily. 48 days worth. I've just gotta pause to yeah. Because that's a good perspective to understand. There's only so much Bitcoin being generated. And right now, it's about 450 Bitcoin a day.
These guys in just the US listed spot ETFs have gobbled up 48 days worth of mining supply. That's at and the question becomes it's probably forming in your mind right now. At what point at what point does the market sense the fact that the supply is just not there? It's, I mean, it's like it's depending right now. It's depending on retail and other weak hands just selling the hell out. Selling out weak hands, the lettuce hands that we've all heard and and we know and love because of the, you know, the whole meme meme stock stuff. At what point does the market sense that we're coming to the edge of a cliff?
And that should spark the notion in your mind to be wary of the following possibility. There's possible rehypothecation going on in the market. Yes. There's no way that we can print more Bitcoin. That doesn't mean that people that are investment houses that are trading that Bitcoin on behalf of retail is telling the truth when they say how much Bitcoin that they have. We don't know. That's the long and the short of it. We don't know. And if it is true that that's what's going on, that's a bad deal. Nobody wants to hear that. But as far as what's going on with right now what we can understand today, that these guys since like October, since October 14th that's dude that was 4 days that was 4 days ago they pulled in 48 days worth of mine supply Do the math.
Divide 4 by 48 to get that ratio. And you'll start if you start playing around with that number. Or you could go the other way. You could divide 48 by 4 and you get the multiple of how much Bitcoin was being drained in the last 4 days. I like ratio metrics a hell of a lot better than, you know, just straight up numbers, but let's move on. World coin is rebranding. And Decrypt's headline is why Worldcoin built an Ethereum network specifically for humans. Don't let the headline fool you because there's the subtext here. And I'm not sure if Liz Napolitano understands what she's writing about or understands this particular story, but let's see what she says first.
World coin, newly rebranded world. The crypto fueled eyeball scanning identity platform cofounded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched the main net for its own Ethereum layer 2 network called World Chain on Thursday. That's yesterday. World Chain is rolling out with the goal of bringing millions of verifiable human users onto the blockchain in addition to promoting the development of digital identity tools and applications that promote financial freedom, its core team told Decrypt. Many blockchains are denominated or sorry, dominated by bots, world advisor Liam Horne told Decrypt. But Worldchain, oh my god, they hope to serve the kinds of users who the project believes stands to benefit the most from blockchain technology and that would be humans.
Quote, on a lot of chains, there's more algorithmic trading bots that are kind of moving money around on chains than there are people, Horn said. World chain is about expanding out the set of use cases for humans and also building a blockchain in a kind of way that is more designed for them. Oh my god. This just it's just gibberish. Worldchain is part of Optimism's superchain. That is a network of interoperable layer twos that share security and other infrastructure. Oh my god. What could possibly go wrong? Anyway, as such, it is interoperable with more than 2 dozen chains such as base and blast, which should help, sorry, should help it bring in users from all across the crypto ecosystem, Horn said. It's also faster and cheaper than Ethereum's main net with gas subsidies also available for verified human users. Oh, subsidies on gas prices. Yay. By using Optimism's open source development framework, the opstack, world chain also aims to attract a wide range of developers encouraging the building of decentralized apps with real world use cases on its network.
Well, this development will help attract even more humans onto the blockchain. Optimism's Unlimited, chief growth officer Ryan Wyatt told Decrypt, quote, what the world king team does sorry, world coin team does, what the base team does, what the Uniswap team does, they are all contributing to and advancing OP stack. Why it said so? It's the engineering efforts of the best protocol engineers in the entire industry across these many teams that are pushing development and advancing, which benefits World Chain. World coin, founded in 2019, made waves when it launched its Orb, a futuristic looking spherical device that scans users' irises and ties them to a virtual key on the blockchain.
Humans who got scanned were eligible for an allotment of Worldcoin subject to regional sanctions. Worldchain will natively integrate world ID, granting Services that can be used by people who are shut out of the traditional finance system are exactly what will help drive the chain's adoption, Horne told Decrypt, quote, it places it's places that genuinely need access to stablecoins for financial access, for moving money across borders, for just getting a hedge against inflation of the local currencies. That will use Worldcoin. Horn said, those are people that need crypto.
So this rebranding, this is what I wanna touch on here. It's the rebranding. It's not anything that was said. This isn't for humans. They don't give a shit about bots on the blockchain. They don't care. They want to link your identity, your human identity, to your financial activity because that type of data is weaponizable in a way that that we can't even think of. Yeah. Sure. Oh, well, of course, David, of course, it's weaponizable to shut down your bank account. We don't know to what extent that data can actually provide.
Sure. That's one thing to me. Shutting down somebody's bank account because they saw that I bought a gun at some kind of gun store on my Visa card, that is the lowest hanging fruit there is. What's the high hanging fruit? What's the one that you gotta reach for? What does that data entail? What does that data say about you? That's I'm talking about pre crime shit. You know, you you got somebody you got some idiot who decided to be unethical and force his opponent who didn't want to have a debate to have a debate by using AI. What do you think is gonna happen here?
Now why the rebranding? This is, again, this is the whole point. World coin wasn't doing well. It really wasn't. They were they were getting sanctioned. They were getting all kinds of stuff. It was bad for the brand. So, the brand, in my opinion, World coin as a brand got beat up so badly that they've now had to rebrand into a new name. All the rest of the stuff that's in this story is just a load of gibberish that is suit speak and is going to get people into real financial and political and economic and trouble with their families, trouble with their everybody. It's just going to be trouble for these people. If you are one of these people that are even considering looking into a silver sphere that they call the orb, don't do it.
Because it's bad enough that Venmo users can now purchase Bitcoin through MoonPay integration. I don't like this. I like it and I don't like it. Because, again, this is tying your financial activity, to your identity, and we need to figure out ways to stop doing that. These the payments company announced that US customers can now use their Venmo accounts to buy digital assets, like Bitcoin through MoonPay. Now I'm gonna pause because I'm gonna bring up my very own Venmo. Yes. I use Venmo to do things like pay rent. And I'm not, you know, excited about it. But I noticed the other day that if I open up Venmo, there's a button on the bottom right that says crypto.
Seriously, it actually says crypto. I can buy bitcoin. I can buy shitcoin number 1, number 2, and number 3. Well, I'll say them. I can buy, pay I can buy PayPal USD coin. I can buy bitcoin. I can buy Ethereum. I can buy of all things Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Cash is on here. And I can use my Venmo account to actually buy them. Yes, I use Cash App to buy Bitcoin. Yes, I use Strike to buy Bitcoin. My, what the family companies still use Swan to buy Bitcoin because even though that they've laid off all of their, you know, they're not sponsoring anybody anymore and they laid off a whole bunch of people, that company is still actually doing what it said it's going to do. It's going it it still takes money from the company's bank our company's bank account and buys Bitcoin, and it does it every week because that's the way I set it up.
I don't like it, but this is the way that it is right now. And we do need to move away from it, and that's where the circular economy comes in. That's why that's that's why I've got the circle p. I mean, that that it's it's, you know, it's it's a the circle p that I brought to you at the head of the show is sort of supposed to be an experimental marketplace that not only tries to get a circular economy or or does its bid for king and country to get some kind of semblance of a circular economy going, But, you know, it is also trying to enable people that may not have the money to advertise on a platform that has more than 10 listeners.
And I've got more than 10. I don't have a lot of listeners, but I've got more than 10. It gives them space to be able to get their product out there in into other people's ears. Because, you know, maybe the product I try to get good products in there. Maybe the product is so good that it takes off. And and we all I don't know. We all get rich together. Who knows? That that's not that's not the real point. The point is the circular economy. Because, like, for every time that you guys boost this show or you stream satoshis to this show or you zap me on Noster, it all goes directly into my lightning node.
It doesn't go to albie anymore. That that's bypassed because of albie go and and albie hub and all that kind of stuff. It goes it just goes all to to my lightning node. So every single satoshi that I get from this podcast or from my activities on an Oster, it's all k y c free. Nobody knows where the hell that came from. Hell, most of the time, even I don't know where that shit came from unless somebody specifically tells me. Right? That's what we're working for. And even though that, yes, it's good for Bitcoin, that Venmo is allowing people to actually buy Bitcoin directly through the Venmo app, and they even give it a button. Hell, even Strike got took the bitcoin button away. And I don't know if they ever put it back, but I know that Jack Mallers caught a lot of shit from that that you actually had to go search inside of strike for the bitcoin functionality.
But that's another story. Here we got Venvo Venmo PayPal is has been doing it for a while it's just not going to stop it's just not going to stop all right this is the last of for the day Spiral renews its grant to Will Clark. Will Clark is a Bitcoin core developer who focuses on issue and PR triage contributing fixes, user report, PR review or user support PR reviews and production of associated developer onboarding initiatives such as the Bitcoin Core Academy. So when you're looking at somebody like Will Clark, you're looking at somebody who is really needed but they don't ever really get notoriety because they're kind of god, I don't wanna say it, but I'm gonna say it because it's just the best word, janitor.
Somebody who cleans up messes. Somebody who figures out how to like a mechanic like like the, the maintenance man, the groundskeeper, and the janitor of a school all rolled into 1. That's the kind of thing that Will Clark does. And if it's not if it wasn't for those people, you'd have a yard full of weeds, you'd have no heat in the wintertime, and all the floors would be covered with puke. Alright. So I thank God people like Spiral are there to grant, Will Clark money for doing the cleanup job that he has to do. Next up is Bitcoin is now the 6th largest monetary asset in the world. Matthew Mesinskas Mesinskas, I cannot pronounce that name, of Porkopolis Economics shared the latest ranking of top monetary assets worldwide.
And, again, bitcoin has now come in at number 6, right above number 7, which is United Kingdom's pound sterling. Yes. Bitcoin is now worth more than the great I mean, the the market cap is worth more than the great British or the British pound sterling. It's just it's kinda sick, man. Be aware that new Bitcoin sextortion scams, use pictures of victims' homes. Alright. So photos or sorry. Protos reports that fraudsters are increasingly using publicly available information such as passwords, addresses, phone numbers, and social media accounts, along with other sensitive details from third party data breaches to appear legitimate. The latest scams even include Google Maps Street View pictures to trick victims into believing that scammers are outside their homes.
It is a pure psychological play. Do not do not get suckered into this. In fact, I recommend everybody do the following when it comes to, scams. Prepare yourself to get scammed. Prepare yourself mentally to say, I'm getting scammed and I'm not going to act. That's the thing. That's the that's what they want you to do. They want you to pull the trigger on something. They want you to call a phone number. They want you to click a link. They want to rope you into the the the notion of acting because once they get you to start acting, you basically are a self propelled machine, and they don't really have to direct you much further.
All they have to do is put some barricades on either side of you, and you will eventually, under your own motor power, end up where they want you to end up. So I want you to do this. Go get either go go to, like, Netflix. I think it's actually on HBO Max. Wherever it is that you can find it, go watch the movie Dune. Specifically, either the new movie or David Lynch's version way back in the eighties. It doesn't matter. There's a particular scene that you need to watch. And that is when Paul Atreides is called into the mother superior's chambers for a presence, and he is told to put his hand in a box.
When he does so, he first he asks, what's in the box? And she tells him, pain. And he's like, well, shit. So he puts his hand in the box and the second that he does, the mother superior of the Bene Gesserit order puts a gom jabbar to his neck. If he moves the wrong way or if he attempts to pull his hand out of the box, she will stab him with a gum jabbar it's instant poison and he dies and what she tells him is that this test is a test as to whether or not you are human or animal Because an animal will chew its own leg off to get from pain. It will do everything that it can, even the destruction of its own body, to get away from that which is causing it pain even though it will also induce pain in doing so. It doesn't matter. That's an animal reaction.
And that's exactly what these people want you to do. They want you to act like an animal. They want you to go to your brain stem and have your brain stem your old lizard brain that is basically the flight or fight mechanism. They want it to do all its thinking. If they can get you scared enough that your cognitive abilities as a human cease to function and you fall back to your lizard brain and let it start doing the thinking for you, you're going to get scammed. So when you're watching the scene and you're watching him endure mentally induced pain, it's not real pain. It's like I think I think it's described in the David Lynch film as his hand burning to a crisp. Like, 3rd degree burns all the way to the bone and then the bone burns away. And they'll think about that kind of pain. I mean, this is like that's like he really is really feeling it. Yet if he if he removes his hand from the box because he's told that it's just he's like this you're gonna be fine.
You know, there's no, like, there's no way that he's gonna, you know, have permanent damage yet that pain is so strong that he wants to get his hand away from the box. But if he does, he's dead. And that's what this is. So take a lesson from Frank Herbert, the author of Dune, and understand that you have 2 modes of thinking. You have higher order thinking or cognition, and you have lower order primitive, prehistoric thinking. And that's the brain stem, the old lizard brain, and that's where fight or flight lies. Let's see. Is there anything else in this particular thing? No. And this was all, this last part was all from no bs, bitcoin.com.
That's no bs bitcoin.com. I'm super happy that they are around to help us understand what the hell is going on in the world. Now, it is Friday. It is the weekend. I hope you have a good one. We'll have to see what Bitcoin does over the weekend because, generally speaking, it's a long, slow bleed into the opening of markets on Monday. Can't we all just go up together? I'll see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon. Have a great day.
Mempool.space Controversy
Craig Wright's Billion-Dollar Lawsuit
Market Updates and Bitcoin's Position
Spiral's Grant to Bitcoin Developer
Bitcoin as a Major Monetary Asset
New Bitcoin Sextortion Scams
