Join me today for Episode 977 of Bitcoin And . . .
Topics for today:
- ECB's Propaganda Paper Demonizes Bitcoiners
- Olympian Uses Tether for Murder and Drugs
- Staggering European Outflows of Capital to US ETFs
- Algos for nostr are here
#Bitcoin #BitcoinAnd
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Fully Built Lightning Piggy:
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Articles:
ECB Calls Bitcoiners Parasites: https://primal.net/e/note1ryq95x6uye0a6fwvk3h4gp99nyypm6rkpfyy5a4gfcxf2352sv3qfd09rj
https://decrypt.co/287204/olympic-snowboarder-tether-cocaine-murders
https://cointelegraph.com/news/european-investors-record-105b-us-bitcoin-etfs
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/takes/el-salvador-survey-shows-bitcoins-lindy-effect-in-action
- https://www.cnbc.com/futures-and-commodities/
- https://dashboard.clarkmoody.com/
- https://mempool.space/
- https://fountain.fm/show/eK5XaSb3UaLRavU3lYrI
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https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2024/10/18/nyse-cboe-win-sec-approval-for-bitcoin-etf-options/
https://highlighter.com/a/naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzphzv6zrv6l89kxpj4h60m5fpz2ycsrfv0c54hjcwdpxqrt8wwlqxqyw8wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtngd9nksmrfva58getj9e3k7mf0qqxnzdej8yerzvejx5urxdp4dw87sq
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/hodl-hodl-discontinues-support-for-most-altcoins-as-payment-method/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/algorelay-nostr-algorithmic-relay/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/joinstr-app-v0-1-1/
https://www.nobsbitcoin.com/sigit-beta-doc-signing-nostr/
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[00:00:00]
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Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. Oh, it's 9:41 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 21st day of October 2024.
This is episode 977 of Bitcoin and the Circle P is open for business. And today I'm gonna bring back lightning piggy because I just think it's cool. It's just a cool project. You can either buy one fully built or you can use the lightningpiggy.com website and build your own. That is lightningpiggy, you know, like a bolt of lightning and piggy like, you know, piggy pigs lightningpiggy.com. Go there and you'll figure it out. If you want to buy one fully built, go to the market tab. If you want to build one yourself, go to the build tab. But if you want to know what it is, I think they've actually got a stupendous one sentence description of what the lightning piggy is.
It is an electronic cash piggy bank for children that accepts Bitcoin sent over lightning while displaying the amounts saved in satoshis. So, there's several different ways that the flavors that this kind of thing comes in. If you get one fully built, you're gonna get a 3 d printed case with the electronic board that has the screen on it and everything placed in it. If you want to build it yourself, you'll get the electronic board that's got the screen. I mean, the electronic board is you've got to have some kind of electronics to be able to, you know, be a functional lightning wallet and be able to do the things and display the satoshis. But you can, like, get the plans and build a piggy out of cardboard or construction paper and put it in there. It depends on how you want to go. And it's a great way to get kids not only to build these things, work with their hands, work with a little bit of electronics without it being so freakishly overwhelming.
And on the opposite end, or at the end of that particular day, they get a piggy bank that you can give them. You can, like, send them lightning payments to their directly to their piggy bank for baby chores that they did or, they had a birthday and you're gonna give them $50 or $25 in Bitcoin. And when you do that, it shows immediately on the screen that they've got that they received the satoshis via lightning payment. It's a great way to talk about Bitcoin. It's a great way to talk about the tech. It's a great way to get your kids used to a different way of thinking about what money is and how money works and we are building the new rails of the entire new financial system for the next 500 years right you might as well if you've got kids right now this is this is how we extend the life of Bitcoin into the futures projects like lightningpiggy dot com that's lightningpiggy dot com again lightningpiggy dot com. Go there. If you buy anything from them, I don't know how you might do it, but mention that you heard it from me, David Bennett, host of the Bitcoin and podcast, and mention that they were in the circle p. And I don't know if they're gonna figure out what to do, but maybe maybe maybe they'll give me some satoshis on the backside for doing a free advertisement form because this is the circle p. It is where I bring plebs like you to plebs like you that are selling their services and or goods in Bitcoin. Because if you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p. Let's move on to the news.
First up, well, the name of this episode is it's raining FUD. And there's a reason for that. We've got multiple issues going on. People are bitching about sailor. They're he's out saying some, apparently, just some, I don't know, insane crap. But one of the things that I heard over the weekend is that there's this new paper by the European Central Bank. And if it is a huge paper. It's like 25 pages long. No. I'm not going to read you this paper because it is an academic white paper. Talk about a snooze fest? Yeah. Read a freaking white paper. I don't care what white paper it is. They're all snooze fest. Honestly, even the Bitcoin white paper is a boring it's a boring read. You have to get excited about it by using Bitcoin itself.
But this is a financial slash banking slash hit piece white paper from the European Central Bank. I'm not going to read it. I'm just not. I mean, I'm gonna read it, but I'm not gonna read it to you live on the air. What we're gonna do is we're going to get this take by Tur de Meester. He's got a fairly well thought out, well reasoned explanation on Noster in this particular note. And I don't think it's too it's cypherpunk on Noster is actually putting this out. I think he grabbed all this from somebody else. I don't think this is actually Tour de Meister on Noster posting it. I'd like to see Tour de Meister on Noster, but let's just get into this right now.
This new paper is a true declaration of war. The ECB, the European Central Bank, claims that early Bitcoin adopters steal economic value from latecomers. I strongly believe authorities will use this Luddite argument to enact harsh taxes or bans. Okay. Rather than praising Bitcoin as a tech paradigm shift, a la petroleum and, you know, the Internet, the authors introduced the blatantly Luddite argument that, quote, early adopters increase their real wealth and consumption at the expense of latecomers. He's got a couple of lines underlined from the white paper in this screenshot.
Underline number 1. In absolute terms, early adopters exactly increase their real wealth and consumption at the expense of the real wealth and consumption of those who do not hold Bitcoin or who invest in it at a later stage. I need to pause because if you're not pumping my bag with your fiat currency, then how the hell am I consuming or somehow or another increasing my real wealth and consumption at your expense? Only I mean, honestly, if you're late if nobody's really late to Bitcoin yet. You won't be late to Bitcoin until after 21.40 when the last block that has a block subsidy for mining is actually mined.
When there's no more bitcoin just given away for free just because you mined a block and everything has to be on just bitcoin fees, it's only after that that I think that you would be quote unquote a latecomer. And those people haven't even been born yet. So I don't know where they get where they get off with telling me that I'm somehow or another extracting wealth from somebody who is not even in bitcoin or calling people that are alive today latecomers. Because if you're alive today and you buy Bitcoin today for the very first time, you were still not late. 2nd underlined passage in this paper. The new Lamborghini, Rolex, Villa, and equity portfolios by early Bitcoin investors are financed by diminishing consumption and wealth of those who initially do not hold Bitcoin. I still call BS.
3rd, this redistribution of wealth and purchasing power is unlikely to occur without detrimental consequences for society. Even if the latecomers cannot attribute their loss of purchasing power, they will feel a malaise and frustration that will contribute further to an ever more split society. They're pitting. This is classism. This is exactly how classism starts is papers like this from people that write like this. They're pitting 1 group of people against another group of people. They divide so they have an easier time of conquering. Okay, back to Turbemistern and what he says.
Then, then they go on to brazenly advocate for legislation quote to prevent Bitcoin prices from rising or to see Bitcoin disappear altogether in order to prevent quote this division of society end quote. Here is another underlined passage. In any case, current non holders should realize that they have compelling reasons to oppose Bitcoin and advocate for legislation against it aiming to prevent Bitcoin prices from rising or to see bitcoin disappear altogether. Latecomers and non holders and their political representatives should emphasize that the idea of bitcoin as an investment relies on redistribution at their expense failing to do so could skew election results in favor of politicians who advocate pro bitcoin policies Trump implying wealth redistribution and fueling here it is again the division of society they are spinning people up they're now they have no they here it is this is this is why this paper exists They've exhausted every possible means of political legislation in many of the countries. And there's just not a lot of people that are going to bite in the political class saying we're going to make this illegal. There's no precedent.
There's just I sure. You could say, well, the confiscation of gold. Yeah. But that didn't make gold illegal. Yes. It made it technically illegal for Americans to hold, but they still held it. Don't don't think for a second that 99.999 percent of Americans willingly turned in their gold because they were told to. They didn't. Some did. Those were the dumb ones. But the smart ones kept a hold of their gold. As far as I know, not very many people actually went to prison. It doesn't matter. The whole point is they've exhausted what they have at their disposal that is easily deployable. So, what do they do next?
They rely on mass media to spin 1 group of people up against another. But the only way they can do that is through labeling. You either hold Bitcoin and you are evil, or you do not hold Bitcoin and you are the fucking oppressed. That's how these people work. They are altogether evil. Back to Tour de Mister's words. The authors also model some projections to illustrate the paltry amount of BTC that will remain available for latecomers. Woah is me. Conspicuously left out is the reason that has driven 15 years of Bitcoin adoption and development. It's simply better technology.
In all the years I've been monitoring this space. This is by far the most aggressive paper to come from authorities. The gloves are off. It's clear that these central bank economists now see Bitcoin as an existential threat to be attacked with any means possible. Many of us have warned that this was coming. Bitcoin as a major political fault line both in national and international elections. Well, here it is. It means that us hodlers must take action to ensure that governments respect our basic right to hold property. And no, this won't be a war between have and have nots.
Rather, this will be a historic clash between those who stand for the natural rights of the individual and those who clutch at the failed ideologies of collectivism and central planning. Here's the link to the paper entitled the distributional consequences of bitcoin. Oh my god. Okay. So that that is Tour de Miester. And and I think he's given a very good reflection on this 25 page white paper from these ECB communists. Okay. With that said, notice back up here when it said this is back to the white paper and what the white paper actually says. It says failing to do so and means that you really need to get rid of Bitcoin and if you don't failing to do so could skew election results in favor of politicians who advocate pro Bitcoin policies What they are literally talking about Trump.
Even though I don't believe for a second that Trump cares about Bitcoin as much as many people think he cares about Bitcoin. It's just pandering. But let's let's not even worry about that part. Let's not worry about the pandering part. All politicians pander. We know this. This isn't freaking new. Yet, the European Central Bank authors are directly targeting the election in the United States, specifically trying to get people to vote against Donald Trump. You're a little late. You're a little late. This paper, if that was you know, which is why I think this that's just an aside here, this whole Trump thing. But still, the fact that they're going after him is of note. Again, they're they're a little late. If they really wanted that part of the paper to be as effective as possible, they would have released this paper, I don't know, back, you know, mid September at least, maybe the beginning of September.
I'm just saying, there's several things in here that are very evil. 1 is labeling a group of people and telling them that they are in misery and that they are going to have their wealth stolen by the other group of people which they have labeled as Bitcoin holders. There's no third option. There's no third group of people. It is a clear divide and conquer mentality. It's a clear divide and conquer tactic. This is as old as time. Do not think that they've come up with something new. But if you have been wondering about this ECB paper and you just don't maybe you went to the link and you're like, no way dude, I'm not reading it. Again, Tuur Demeester gives a very nice synopsis of what this is and what it means.
I, however, do not feel the exact same way as Tour de Miester does. I do think the gloves are off. I do think many of us have, you know, many of us have warned that this was coming. But when he says, you know, that Bitcoin is a political fault line in national and international elections as the end game of what we said was coming, we're not even close to what I think is coming. We're I mean, we we we just got the the the monster backed into the corner and it's acting exactly the way that some wild animal would act. It's starting to lash out because its back is against not only one wall, they're in a corner their backs against 2 walls and they're facing a crowd of people that is tired of their shit now do I think this will work I think it will have limited effect but it will have effect I do not think that Bitcoin is going to be illegal.
And if it is, then you will watch what's called intellectual arbitrage absolutely crush countries that were once great. You will have people who say I don't need this. They are the builders. They are the smart people. They are the intellectual class the intellectual class that are not political because that's not really intellectualism. That's just people faking it. Politics is homecoming queen and king and queen for the ugly people. That's what that is. It's Hollywood for the ugly people. True intellectuals, true thought leaders, true thinkers, true engineers, true code developers, true UX and UI developers, they will fucking flee.
They will just go away. They will go to other countries, and those other countries will benefit greatly just like the United States benefited greatly after World War 2 when we had so many of the of the Jewish and German scientists rounded up. I believe it was called Operation Paperclip. I'm not sure. We rounded them up and that's how we built NASA. That's how we built Los Alamos National Laboratories. It was with all a bunch of foreign people that were high quality thinkers. Many of the Jewish thinkers left pre World War 2. That's how we got Einstein. He's like, I am not staying in Germany. I'm not staying anywhere around Europe. This is gonna get bad. Where did he go? He came to the United States. We got Einstein.
If you don't think that that might not happen again just because it's the United States, you're wrong. You would be wrong. This paper is evil in ways that even the authors don't understand. They don't understand what they're playing with. They think they do, but they do not. The absolute destruction that could befall entire countries and economies because people just get fed to the teeth of bullshit and we are we are right there on the line. Did they just move to El Salvador and all of a sudden, El Salvador gets all of the tech, gets all of the thinkers?
Do I know they're gonna go to El Salvador? I don't know. I mean, it could be Costa Rica, maybe South America, maybe not Central America. I don't know. I just know people are going to start using intellectual arbitrage to get out and they're going to go somewhere else that doesn't have this communist ideal about them. But, here we've got another story. This is a different story altogether, yet it's part of the reigning of FUD. Now this one's written by Matt D'Salvo. This is written by or, in in the publication decrypt.co. And it says that an Olympic snowboarder used Tether in a cocaine smuggling murder scheme according to federal authorities.
The feds have hit an Olympic snowboarder with criminal charges for his alleged role in the in a cocaine trafficking gang which used the stablecoin Tether as a key part of its $1,000,000,000 operation. Do we wanna wrap this present in terrorism, child trafficking, or war on drugs? Let's let's pick the war on drugs. A United States Department of Justice indictment filed on Thursday alleged that former pro snowboarder Ryan James Wedding and 15 other defendants ran a drug trafficking syndicate shipping cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States and Canada.
The crime gang committed multiple murders. Read that again. The crime gang committed murder as part of their operations. US authorities alleged anyway and used crypto to try and evade the cops. Quote, defendant Bonilla would tender payment to defendants Wedding and Clark via a Tether cryptocurrency payment service for 2 kilograms of cocaine. Yeah. Hardly a fucking flood of drugs, the indictment reads. It added that QR codes were sent to drug runners in order to receive payment in USDT. The DOJ said that it seized over $3,200,000 in cryptocurrency along with more than 1 ton of cocaine, 3 firearms, dozens there are dozens of rounds of ammunition, and $255,000 as part of their investigation. Pausing to remind you this is not exactly a flood of drugs.
3 guns, dozens of of ammunition. Wow. And 1 ton of cocaine. Dude, that's the trunk of some dude's car. Okay. Maybe not the ton. A ton of cocaine. The back of a Ford 250. Right? The the payload that a Ford 250 pickup truck could handle. Yeah. Not exactly not exactly what I would expect from a syndicate of 15 people. I'm calling BS, guys. Anyway, his Olympic biography says that the sportsman was convicted of attempting to buy cocaine from a US government agent back in 2008 and given 4 years of jail time as a result. As alleged in the indictment, an Olympic athlete turned drug lord is now charged with leading a transnational organized crime group that engaged in cocaine trafficking and murder, including of innocent civilians, United States Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement. USDT is the 3rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap and one of the most traded digital assets.
The token is important for the crypto ecosystem because it's used by traders to enter and exit trades quickly and to convert crypto to fiat via traditional bank. But the cryptocurrency and the company that issues it are controversial. Tether has been slow to provide documentation to prove that US dollars back USDT. Yes. That's a tale as old as Tether is. In 2021, Tether agreed to no longer do business in New York after a 2 year state attorney general investigation found that it made false statements about the backing of a stable coin. However, the company routinely points to quarterly attestations and transparency reports as proof of its compliance. We really didn't need those last, honestly, those last three paragraphs.
But I I give you this because I think it's part of a new push. Along with this ECB bullshit, I really do think that there's a whole new front of attack going on on Bitcoin and, God forbid, the the wider crypto ecosystem, if that's what you wanna call it. But I just I only care about Bitcoin. So when we have a story that's being real would actually not even a story. When we have the federal department of justice, the department of justice, the DOJ, actually go after a guy. See, I have I have yet to see anything about the actual murders. Who got murdered? How many people were murdered? We know that there was 1 ton of cocaine, 3 firearms, and dozens of rounds of ammunition, but we haven't heard jack squat about who got killed. Where did they get killed? Under what circumstances were they killed? And how were they actually killed? What was the murder weapon? Was it a gun? Was it a knife? Were they hung from a bridge? Nobody knows because it's all bullshit.
It's I and and he was an Olympic snowboard medalist. Oh my god. He's an athlete. See, anyone can fall from grace and get, you know, sucked into the vile black underworld of cryptocurrency, cocaine, and murder. Even though we're talking about a ton of cocaine, 3 firearms, dozens of ammunitions, and not a single piece of evidence that anybody actually got killed. Does this sound like a transnational gang of 15 people? It doesn't. It does not sound anything like that. But but but let's go back over to Europe for this next one by Zoltan Vardy out of Cointelegraph.
Now the ECB is getting pissed. We just went through that through the opening of the show. I wonder why. Could it be because European investors poured a record $105,000,000,000 into United States Bitcoin ETFs? I was unaware that it was that easy for people of another country to buy investments in a different country. I mean, I know it's done, but wow, $105,000,000,000 of European money has now flowed into United States Bitcoin ETFs. I wonder if that might have some kind of, you know, lasting impression on the ECB. Let's see if Zoltan has anything to say about that. European investors have allocated a record amount of capital into spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds in the United States.
Europeans have invested over $105,000,000,000 in the spot Bitcoin ETFs year to date, marking an all time high. The record European ETF flows were shared by Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg who wrote, quote, flows into US focused ETFs by locals in Europe is now at a record $105,000,000,000 year to date. And why not? The SPY is up 24% versus 10% for Europe. Asia also funneling record flows. End quote. Growing ETF inflows could push Bitcoin to an all time high from its current crawl block crawl what crab walk. Sorry. That was a that's a hard weird looking word. Crab walk. Inflows into the US Bitcoin ETFs accounted for about 75% of the new capital that helped Bitcoin surpass $50,000 in February of 2024.
Despite the record European inflows, bitstamp data shows that Bitcoin has been unable to recover above those psychological levels of 70,000 to 73,000, which was last visited on July 29th. Right days. Day like a 2, 3 days before Japan Central Bank surprisingly increased their interest rate, which caused the yen carry trade to basically fall apart. I've talked about that before. I won't get into it here. Is it possible? Yeah. He hasn't said anything about it that I can see. There's pretty much just it's just a bunch of market talk after that in in this particular article. So I didn't actually see this guy, Zoltan, suggest that maybe, just maybe, the ECB is worried about capital outflows to the United States because bitcoin.
Now, Eric Balchunas, if you caught that when he said, flows into US focused ETFs by locals in Europe is now at a record $105,000,000,000 year to date. Why not? SPY is up 24% versus 10% for Europe. See, there's the difference. There's a little bit of a difference there. Eric Balchunis is saying $105,000,000,000 year to date in US focused ETFs. But Zoltan makes it sound like it's all into the Bitcoin spot ETFs. And that's not true. Because the SPY is the S and P 500. It has nothing to do at all with Bitcoin. So there's clearly discrepancy in this particular story. But it I kinda can't stop thinking of wondering it that the ECB may be terrified not of Bitcoin itself, but because Bitcoin ETFs in the United States as well as other ETFs in the United States are sucking Europe dry of money. Now how much money total? May like, what how what's it been looking like in the last 10 years? I don't know. If there's an economist out there that likes to listen to my show because they wanna point at me and laugh, please let me know.
What's going on? Is there something more? Is there something that Europe is worried about specifically with United States and the outflow of European capital into the United States? Has it been going on longer than this? Is it really bad? I mean, I haven't heard anything about it until kind of just now, But I have this sneaky suspicion that it's probably been going on for a while. Let's go south to El Salvador, where an El Salvador survey is showing that Bitcoin's Lindy effect is in action. Nicholas Hoffman, Bitcoin Magazine, El Salvador's misguided critics got some new ammunition this week.
A recent survey revealed just 7.5% of Salvadorans use Bitcoin for transactions and that 92% of Salvadorans do not. But while some, you know, like Steve Hankey, may look at these numbers and think, oh, well, that experiment failed. I disagree. Even putting inside the increased tourism, business activity, and international notoriety, El Salvador's Bitcoin legal tender laws have been a success. El Salvador currently has a population of around 6,300,000, meaning that 475,000 people are now using Bitcoin for transactions. That's that 7.5%.
The fact that almost half a 1000000 citizens now use BTC in their daily life for transactions is actually pretty impressive. But the Linde effect means we can expect this figure to increase with time. Considering the history of El Salvador, it was obvious from the beginning that the entire country was not going to start using this new payments technology from day 1. El Salvador has a history of failed currency regimes. It takes time for any new system to build trust. As I pointed out 3 years ago, I believe Bitcoin needs to become a store of value first before it can become a medium of exchange.
Bitcoin today, even with it being a $1,400,000,000,000 asset, is still just a drop in the ocean compared to vast global wealth. There is still a common consensus in the general public that Bitcoin is risky to get into, and that will need to change before more people in more countries start using it on the daily. Bitcoin is still a new asset class that is growing up. The more it grows up, the more credibility it earns. The more price increase, the more innovation happens that sprouts new transactional and custody solutions to meet non technical people where they're at.
This is going to take a long time, but the process is underway. I see many Bitcoiners online who are so bullish that they believe that adoption as an everyday transaction method will happen suddenly over the next few years. But this discounts real world data like this survey which shows the process is much slower. All this is to say that if Bitcoin is going to see worldwide merchant adoption and use by everyday individuals, we're going to need to see a much higher price. Bitcoin will need to be easier to use and more trusted than it is even today. Exactly how long will that take?
I don't know for certain. But if you think of it as a loading bar, we're already 7.5% complete on our way to 100% of Salvadorans transacting in Bitcoin. Remember, this is progress. Nothing happens overnight. So that piece stands in stark contrast to what the ECB is saying. Naive Bukele, lovemer hate them, has told the IMF repeatedly that they're not as interested in their loans today as they were, oh, I don't know, over the last 40 years. The International Monetary Fund is not happy about that. Neither is the World Bank, neither is the UN, neither is the Council of Foreign Relations.
And now, the ECB has opened, you know, basically unzipped their fly and hauled their honking okay, well, whatever. To show the world just how scared they really are. That 25 page paper is basically, not only is it fear mongering, it is an expression of the fear the ECB sees themselves. Keep that in mind as we move forward because this is not gonna be the last time that you see this kind of attack fronted. And I do believe that over the next few days, we're going to see probably more central banks join the fray, release either either whole white papers or go on to CNBC and talk how about how bad bitcoin is and point to the ECB report and then possibly point to an Australian Central Bank report that comes out in a few days. And I don't I'm not saying that I know that that's going to happen. I'm just saying that I could definitely see the Australian Central Bank and a couple of other central banks around the world, like like the Mexico Central Bank, start releasing papers. And then the BIS is probably gonna release a paper, and it's all gonna be coordinated.
And it's everything that we've already seen before. But the language this time is starting to directly target the citizenry of the world. They're playing with a fire that they don't know how hot it gets. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is up probably because Israel did a whole released a whole bunch of missiles into, Beirut to destroy their the financial arm of Hezbollah, which I found to be a rather a rather descriptive view of the target. They want to destroy their financing arm. So I'm guessing that that meant that a whole bunch of banks in, Lebanon were targeted.
Not exactly sure. But that always every every time somebody sneezes in the Middle East, West Texas Intermediate gains some percentage points. And in this case, 2.12 percent to the upside brings us back to $70.69. Brent Norcea up 1.6 to 74.24. Natural gas up 2.3 to $2.31, a 1000 cubic feet. And gasoline is up a half to $2.1 per gallon. Gold is doing relatively well, but not not as good as silver is, which is up 2 a half percent for silver, up to $34, and gold is up a third of a point to $27.39.10. I'm sure Peter Schiff is dancing on Bitcoin's grave. Ag, Our biggest winner today is woah. Cotton, 1.9 percent to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee, 2% to the downside. Live cattle is down 0.17%.
Lean hogs are up a quarter. Feeder cattle are down a quarter. All of the indices are down today as far as equities are concerned. The Dow is down 0.65%. S and P is down a third. NASDAQ is down, well, 0.07, so kinda moving sideways for tech. And S and P Mini is down just under a full point to the downside. Why, you may ask? Because big corporate earnings are coming out this week, and everybody's worried about what they'll say. So they've all gone back into cash, and that includes Bitcoin, which we'll get to here in a second. Actually, we're gonna get to it right now. $67,390, which is a damn shame that we lost almost $2,000 from our highs of this weekend. I was really surprised by the upward movement over the majority of the weekend, but wasn't surprised at all when I woke up to a whole bunch of red candles.
$1,330,000,000,000 of market cap will get you 24.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,770,827.36 of. And average fees per block have fallen off a cliff. They're back down to 0.09 BTC on average on a per block basis. There are a 108 blocks carrying 209,000 transactions waiting to clear at high priorities of 9 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 8. Hash rate, which peaked like a m f this weekend. I saw 846 exahashes per second yesterday. Early, I think, or it might have been late on Saturday. Can't remember, but we have fallen back down still at 727.7 exahashes per second.
That's a lot of security. From gold plunging, which was Friday's show of Bitcoin. And I got Golf Winch giving me 6,777 satoshis and says, please support the show. I'm doing my part with a small amount of treasure. What happened to the dad jokes? Those were great. Oh, you want some dad jokes, Golf wench? Alright, fine. My friends got a new house and I paid for them to get underfloor heating. It was a housewarming present. Try this one. I try to say mucho when I'm around my Hispanic friends. It means a lot to them.
When I moved into my new igloo, my own friends threw me my very own surprise housewarming party and now I'm homeless. Rev Hoddle with 500 says, If you're in Michigan or Michiana, head out to a meetup near you. There are meetups all over the state. You can find them at michiganbitcoiner.com. That's michiganbitcoiner.com. Michiganbitcoiner, all one word, dot com. Go over there and, do, do Rev Huddle a favor, man. He's one of my favorite people. God's Death with 537 says thank you, sir. No thank you. Pies De Pleb with 420 says thank you, sir. No thank you. Hugh Janice with a 100 says cheers.
And, let's see. Anonymous with a 100 says fear is the mind killer. I will huddle. A few words here about Pies De Pleb. He, gave me a a DM and I'm not gonna read it because that would, you know, that's completely unfreaking cool. But I did want to, kinda say a few things here. So Pies in his direct message to me on Noster said, you know, basically he was saying, thanking me for advocating for BitX, you know, the little solo miners. And he said that he had really not heard me talk about, you know, like the process of learning about mining before he had already had one. But he's saying that he learned a hell of a lot more about mining with a small bitaxe than he did with having a couple of other units, like a couple of bigger units before the, you know, bid acts went out. Like, I don't know. He doesn't say it. Well, I'm just gonna assume, like, he's got, like, a a couple of s nineteens or something in the back, and he just really never got around to playing with them. And it wasn't until the bid acts that he got a hold of 1 and he started figuring out how all this stuff really works that now he's pumped to get these units in action because now he kind of knows what he's doing.
So it's kind of I wanted to bring that to you because it's kind of and it's not that I love being right. It's just that when I get confirmation that I am right about something, especially when it's something that about education, it's really important for me to reiterate why the hell I think this stuff in the first place. And it's literally because when I saw a bit axe came out come out, I knew that it was going to be an opportunity for me and many other people to just simply learn about mining in a way that doesn't break the bank. And that if you just hate it, you're not you're not out that much. Like, again, you're not breaking the bank. But if you do start learning it and you go, hey, this is kind of interesting.
And then you get comfortable with it. Well, all of a sudden, possibly buying a couple of old s nines and pointing them to a pool to heat a greenhouse in winter, depending well, depends on where you are latitude, how cold your winters are, and how many, you know, like, of these heat units that you got and how big of a space. All of that is taken into consideration. But for whatever reason, like, since you already know how to do all this stuff with mining at this point, now it's just setting up the s nineteens. And because you already know how to set those up, now you can actually do stuff with it, like heat a hot tub or heat a greenhouse or make a dehydrator out of one of them. I I don't know. There's all kinds of stuff that you can do with excess waste heat. And essentially, the human race has been one of our one of the worst things about the human race as far as our we're continuously looking for efficiency.
And we're we've gotten really good at engineering. And yet somehow or another, we are notorious for not understanding how to utilize waste heat. I find that odd. And I that's one of the reasons why I really really like the idea of these old miners as because as efficiency goes up, heat output of these miners is going to fall. And those old miners that would normally be junked, actually at this point, they have a commodity piece to them because not only do they mine bitcoin, they also produce a lot of heat. And if you use that in an appropriate way to do a particular thing, like dehydrate like run a food dehydrator or heat a greenhouse or something like that, then you want both.
You want to be able to use the Bitcoin mine to subsidize the heat being produced so that you at least come out with zero cost and maybe even a potential profit. I'm telling you, man. And I think a lot of this starts the being able to be comfortable doing that starts with being comfortable mining and that can be done using the BitX. And if you do buy a BitX for whatever reason, please tell the guys at BitX that you heard about it here on the Bitcoin and podcast, and maybe I can get them to, I don't know, be a sponsor for me. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news. You can use the NYSE and the CBOE, New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Exchange, win the SEC approval for Bitcoin ETF options.
Alright. So it did happen. Last time I talked to you about this, they were, you know, it was basically up for judgment. It's now a thing. As of Friday afternoon, it happened right after I finished the show. So let's get into this one from Cheyenne Ligon or Cheyenne Ligon from CoinDesk. The US SEC approved stock exchange rule changes that now permit the listing of options. This is important. Listing of options tied to the spot Bitcoin ETFs, otherwise known as a derivative. Broadening the investment ecosystem around products that received 1,000,000,000 of dollars of inflows this year. According to 2 memos from the SEC published Friday, NYSE will be allowed to list and trade options on the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the Bitcoin Minitrust from Grayscale, and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF.
CBOE Global Markets got approval to list and trade options on the Fidelity wise Origin Bitcoin Fund and the Arc 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF. I'm surprised that BlackRock isn't included in this. Oh, wait a minute. Here we go. The approval comes several weeks after the SEC approved Nasdaq's rule proposal to allow the listing of trading options on BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust. Here's the important part for those of you who are going, what the hell is an option? Options are derivatives that allow the purchase or sale of an underlying asset, in this case, the Bitcoin ETFs, not Bitcoin itself, but the spot Bitcoin ETFs at a predetermined price on or before an agreed upon date. Many market participants believe that options trading on Bitcoin ETFs will increase institutional and crypto and increase overall liquidity.
In its NYSE approval, the SEC wrote that it believes options on the Bitcoin ETFs would permit hedging and allow for more liquidity, better price efficiency, and less volatility with respect to the underlying funds, as well as enhance the transparency and efficiency of markets in these and correlated products. So the SEC wants I mean, they want to permit hedging. They want to allow for more liquidity in the Bitcoin markets. This is specifically about Bitcoin not ETFs in general. This is specifically about the spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States. They want better price efficiency.
They want less volatility with respect to the underlying funds. There's 2 things that I'm thinking about that that why I'm reiterating what I just said. One, how does this wash with this European Central Bank paper that just dropped over the weekend basically telling the world that there are 2 classes of people, the haves and the have nots of Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin should be heavily taxed and or outright banned. And here, we've got the SEC saying, shit, man. We want hedging. We want better liquidity. We've got we need price efficiency. We want less volatility. That sounds to me like the SEC is, like, a completely opposite take of what the ECB is saying, which, again, makes me wonder.
Is it possible that the ECB is defending simply trying to defend against capital outflows out of the whole of Europe because Europe is dying in general for it's just some of the lunacy that they've committed over the last 10 years, and it's gotten really bad since COVID. Alright? That's what see, I can't help but think that that's what's going on with the ECB thing, is that the European Central Bank is seeing outflows of capital outside I mean, not just, you know, capital outflows out of, you know, Spain or capital outflows out of Portugal or out of Italy. No. The the European Union as a whole are increasingly sending their money to the United States financial markets.
And a lot of that is going to the bit Bitcoin spot ETFs. And this go and this is going to accelerate, and I think they know that. And I think that that's exactly why that paper came out. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It has everything to do with the fact that Europe is dying, and they're scared. And capital outflows are just going to accelerate. And that's not good for a dying European Union. It's like running out of morphine when you have terminals in stage cancer. It's gonna be very, very painful. Now I had 2 things and I can't really remember. And honestly, the second thing, even if I had a second thing, which I probably I I definitely forgot about, it's not as important as that. The SEC is saying something completely different than the than the ECB.
They are not on the same page. I think the ECB is just simply terrified. I think that's what's going on. Now for those of you in the AI space, I've got a little update from my friend, Liminal, over there working on the Alexandria project, along with, oh, God, Lazarus and a couple of other people. Had them on the show a few weeks ago. Actually, hold on. Let me see if I can't let me see if I can't find that. That is episode 937. Again, I interviewed Liminal, about the Project Alexandria on episode 937. It's entitled Liminal and Project Alexandria.
Not exactly the best title in the world, but I struggle I struggle with tiles. If you want to hear all about that, then go listen to episode 937 where I interview Liminal. But he's got something new. He's got something new that he's coming out with. He says he's got a tool to make navigating videos and audio easier. And this is out of Pablo f seven z's highlighter.com. If you haven't visited highlighter.com, it's a different kind of nostril client. I highly recommend that you go take a look at it. So here's what Liminal has to say. Have you ever wanted to learn from lengthy educational videos but found it challenging to navigate through hours of content?
Our new tool addresses this problem by transforming long form video lectures into easily digestible, searchable content. And of course, it's using AI. So key features are this. There's there's, let's see, 3 of them. Video processing. So, this thing automatically downloads YouTube videos, transcripts, and chapter information. It then splits transcripts into sections based on video chapters. 2. Content summarization. It utilizes large language models to transform spoken content into clear, readable text. Formats outputs in ASCII Doc for improved readability and navigation. And highlights key terms and concepts with bracket bracket term end bracket bracket notation for potential cross referencing.
That bracket bracket term in bracket bracket is sort of a way to add links into notes. I'm not gonna get into that. Not noster notes. Talking stuff like Obsidian and Rome and essentially, zettelkasten kind of thing. Liminal and I get into zettelkasten and and all what I just talked about just then, we get into that in episode 937. So if you're interested in in a little bit more about that, there's a whole episode on what we talk about in Zettlekasten is quite a bit of it. Finally, number 3, diagram extraction. Now this one analyzes video entropy to identify static diagram or slide sections.
It provides a user friendly GUI for manual selection of relevant time ranges and allows users to pick representative frames from selected frame ranges. Going forward, currently undergoing a rewrite to improve organization and functionality, but you are welcome to try the current version. And then he gets into a little bit of other he's got a couple of screenshots here. Here's a screenshot of the frame selection interface. You'll see a signal that represents frame entropy over time. The vertical line indicates the start and end of a chapter. Within these chapters, you can then select the frames by clicking and dragging the mouse over the desired range where you think a diagram is in that chapter.
At the bottom is an option that tells the program to start a specific number of frames from that selection. And let's see. Is there anything else of note here? No. No. I mean, there there is, but I it's it's it's easier to read this. I will have the link to this highlighter.com article that Liminal wrote. It's not long. It's just basically there's not much more left to it. It will be in the show notes. Highly recommend it. So what does it mean? I can go to YouTube and I can say, you know what? I wanna I wanna see like this, these 4 4 hour long YouTube videos about permaculture.
And then I can take them each and download them. I use YouTube downloader. It still works for me. And run them through this thing and be able to have searchable text content that's built out of the video. I'm assuming that it will actually build a transcript from the audio if somebody's talking. I need to get with Liminal about this, but let's say that it it doesn't do that, then you're kinda I guess you'd be shit out of luck unless the video actually came with its own transcript, which many of them do now because it's so easier it's so much easier to get transcripts done. But let's say that it did. Now I can go through all 4 of those and just search into the text not even in YouTube in like a completely different context and say I want to know everywhere he talked about swales.
And then I can just go there. And if there's and what I love about this is this this being able to look at video entropy. Like, all of a sudden like, the way that I view entropy is if a whole bunch of things are moving on the screen then an entropy analysis would have a bunch of wavy lines. Now, I don't know if this is actually correct because I've never done video entropy myself. But when things are changing on the screen and are not static, that looks to me like that might actually indicate a lot of volatility, a lot of entropy maybe.
And that if a static, slide comes up and stays there for any length of time whatsoever that is not 24.9 frames per second or 60 frames per second or whatever is just on the screen and never really changes, then there's really not any entropy. It's static. And that seems to me to be a discovery mechanism for being able to say, I just wanna know where all the slides in this presentation are so that I can pull those slides and look at them because maybe it was your maybe you're going to college and your teacher posted a YouTube video And you don't really want to listen to the lecture, you just need to get to extract the slides because maybe your teacher forgot to give you the slides or is trying to force you to watch the video so that you can get the slides.
In this particular case, analyzing the analysis of that video entropy would be able to determine, hey, this is a slide, the next 5 minutes are not a slide. Here's another slide. Next 5 minutes are not a slide. Here's here's 3 slides in a row. And then you would be able to go directly to those. This is a great tool because it's analyzing video. When I do my transcripts from pothome.fm, all it's doing is just transcribing my audio. But if I have a full blown video presentation, well, it can't transcribe that I put up a slide. This tool actually seems to give that kind of functionality.
Again, go to the show notes. This will be this this link to this highlighter will be in the show notes. And let's see. Here's the there's a repo and there's a there's a GitHub repo for it. And there's also a youtube.com. There's there he's also posted a, nostr apps 101, I guess to exactly on how this works. So when you go to the link of this article in the show note, those two links will be embedded. So you'll be able to go directly to their GitHub and directly to that YouTube channel and check it out even further. So now, oh, HODL HODL has finally discontinued support for most shitcoins as a payment method.
Quote, stable coins and Bitcoin's second layer solutions are fully supported, said the exchange. If you don't know what HODL HODL is, it is a decentralized way to buy Bitcoin. And I've never used it myself because I've never really had to, but it's been around forever. And starting today, quote, we're discontinuing support for most cryptocurrencies as payment methods announce the platform. HODL HODL has always facilitated Bitcoin only p two p trades while also allowing trades to be settled with other altcoins for a period of time. Quote, stablecoins and Bitcoin second layer solutions are fully supported. Thank you for your continued support.
So I love seeing shit coins be buried like the corpses that they are. Thank you, huddle huddle for bearing those yourself. Now, Algo Relay. Here's another one. By the way, this is no bsbit coin.com. That's no bs bitcoin.com. Go throw them some satoshis over there at no bullshit Bitcoin. I love those guys. Algo Relay is a Nostril native first algorithmic relay, enabling operators to build relays using a preset waiting algorithm. Okay. Just hold your horses for any of you guys that are like, I don't want algorithms on my on my noster. I do. But I want to be able to either select that I have one even on.
And if I do have one turned on, I want to be able to select through different algorithms to find which one may be best for me. Or again, to have the choice not to have one at all. That's the only way that we're moving forward with Nostra into the future, so do not fret. Algo Relay is the first Nostra native relay capable of serving personalized algorithmic feeds without the use of external or proprietary APIs or digital or rather data vending machines or DVMs. It prioritizes surfacing content from the people you care about based on your personal interactions, announced the developer UTXO.
The algorithm delivers personalized, engaging experience by balancing posts from authors that you interact with in viral network content. Users get a mix of familiar and trending content ensuring that their feed is always engaging and relevant. It could also be customized based on personal preferences. Coreacle, that's coreacle.social, is the first client to implement Algo Relay and you can see it in action here and then there's clearly a link where it says here. Key components. Users can easily adjust the weighting of each component on their own instance by simply changing a few numbers, like interactions with authors.
Weights posts from authors you frequently engage with via comments, reactions, and zaps. Global comments on posts weights the total number of comments on each post across the protocol indicating potentially meaningful engagement or discussions. Global reactions on posts weights likes and emojis on posts. Global zaps on post boosts posts with a higher number of zaps. Recency clearly weights the fresh and latest content. Viral posts adjust weight of viral posts that exceed a certain threshold of engagement. And the decay rate for recency controls how quickly older posts lose relevance for your particular algorithm that you choose.
I look forward to seeing a blossoming market of algorithmic relays putting choice back into the users hands. It's a big step forward for Nostr giving the masses what they want using open source transparent algorithms, added the developer. And Rabble on, Nostr says in a note, this is a really interesting idea and an alternative to the way we could do custom algorithms with data vending machines. And I have tried it on, Corekl but I have not adjusted any of the numbers. Corekl dot social is the only place that is supporting this right now, and that is the, Nostra the Nostra client that was developed and is being maintained by my good friend, Hoddlebod.
Haven't heard from you, hodl bod. If you, get a chance, why don't you drop me a drop me a text or something like that? I'd like to talk to you again. Okay. Moving on to Joinster app version 0.1.1, UI improvements, testnet, mainnet support. Joinster is a free and open source CoinJoin implementation using Nostra relays for coordinating CoinJoin transactions. Version 0.1.1 has been released for Android. It comes with UI improvements, ability to select wallets and settings, rise up VPN implementation, testnet, mainnet support, and more. Quote, review the code, verify APK, test it, and share your feedback. Join Simplex chat group if you need signet coins and other peers for testing, said the developer.
There's an improved UI. They've removed the BIP32 derivation paths from signed PSBTs. Wallet selection is now in settings. There is a rise up VPN implementation. I guess rise up is a brand of VPN. I've never heard of it before. Support testnet and mainnet and there is a fixed fee rate estimate oh, no. It fixed the fee rate estimate estimation. Fee rate estimations are always really really bad. And now on to the last of the day sigit. Io or sigit. Sigit. S I g I t dot I o document signing and verification over you guessed it, nostr. Sigit.
Io or sigit. Io is an open source and self hostable solution for secure document signing and verification. It's a secure and private document signing service where you can create, sign, and verify any document from any device with a browser. The project is still under active development, unlike centralized document signing solutions. SIGINT uses Nostra for identity and key management and encrypts files at every step of the process. Quote, of course, being built on the Nostra Relay network, you can sign documents and build business relationships even in the most adversarial of regulatory environments, said the project developers. I love that one. Key features, it's open source. The code is agpl licensed and available here. And of course, here is git.nosterdev.com, which is, git.nosterdev.com, I think is the GitHub replacement on Nostr for code repository and all the stuff that you you that you do with GitHub.
It's multi device. So you can create, sign, and verify documents and files from any device that has a browser. It's secure and private. All the documents are encrypted locally and can be accessed only by named recipients. And I guess that means that you've gotta be able to give them their, give the document their pub key and they have to sign that with their insect. That's the way that I'm assuming. It's verifiable. SIGINT agreements can be directly verified, unlike traditional server based offerings. It works offline. It is possible to complete a SIGINT round without an internet connection.
Multi party signing is available. You can choose any number of signers and viewers, track status, get notifications on completion. This is kind of amazing because, like, think of contracts. And what and, like, what they said like, what the this guy said. You can sign documents and build business relationships even in the most adversarial of regulatory environments. Let's say I'm in a war torn, you know, corner of Ukraine or something like that, and I've gotta work out a contract with my buddy who's Russian. I I'm not sure how much more adversarial we can get as far as regulatory environments are concerned.
Yet with this tool, I'd be able to sign legal documents, have it verified, have the other party that is quote unquote my enemy and sanctioned by everybody all over the world, and have their signature on the contracts and the documents all also verified. So it ends up being a functional legal document even in the most adversarial of regulatory environments. And like I said, if I want to build a business, an online business with and I'm a Ukrainian and my buddy is a Russian, I don't know how much more adversarial that gets unless we're talking I'm an Israeli and my best friend is in Lebanon or Palestine or something like that. Or, God forbid, the unite like, I'm a citizen in the United States and I wanna do business with somebody in Iran and we want to build a company together. We need an agreement to be able to get this thing off the ground with each other.
This is this is what I would be able to use. You would not be able to use DocuSign for Iran or between Russia and Ukrainian citizens. It's not going to work. They're not going to allow it. This is permissionless and yet I can still do the same thing that I can do with DocuSign. I used DocuSign to sign my tax forms the other day. That's the way that it's done. I used DocuSign when I needed to finalize the sale of the house in Canyon, Texas. I used DocuSign. This replaces DocuSign with your Nostr insect in pub. The future looks very very bright.
It really does. Even with the ECB nonsense. Even with them saying that this, you know, Olympic guys using Tether and cryptocurrency to commit murder and run drugs even though they found all of 3 guns and dozens of rounds of ammunition. There are dozens of us. Even in the face of all of that. It's stuff like this. Sigit.io. I think they should have just put the n in and said sign it, but whatever. Sigit. Io. These kinds of things make me happy. Algorithms on Nostr make me happy as long as I have the choice to use it or not. And if I have the choice to use it, I have the choice or I have a choice of algorithms to use. This makes me happy.
Clients that that proceed to put in an algorithm and don't let you choose what algorithm you can use, or that you can turn the algorithm off altogether, stay away from. It's that simple. We've got 50 freaking, you know, clients for Nostr. We don't need to be pinned down to anyone. And the first one that says we're using this algorithm and that's what you get, that's the that's the day that I stopped using that particular client. This makes me happy. So, even though the ECB is, you know, flapping their gums again, and they're doing it in a way that is it's it's very frightening insofar as what they're trying to leverage. They're trying to to pit the public against groups of people and they're now they're having to label hey you if you don't own Bitcoin you're definitely in this group and if you own Bitcoin you're definitely the enemy and you're over there in this group. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're playing with. They think they have it under control, but none of these people ever have shit like this under control.
When you force 2 groups of people to look at each other and view each other as the enemy, you are playing with fire. And the ECB is playing with fire. But remember, I think that they're doing it because they're absolutely terrified watching the amount of money, European money, drain into the United States. And again, the SEC is taking a completely different stance than the ECB is. So as far as I'm concerned, this is a nothing burger, but it's not something I'm going to turn my back on and not watch anymore. And I don't think you should either. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
Good morning. This is David Bennett, and this is Bitcoin and, a podcast where I try to find the edge effect between the worlds of Bitcoin, gaming, permaculture, podcasting, and education to gain a better understanding of all. Edge effect is a concept from ecology describing a greater diversity of life where the edges of 2 systems overlap. While species from either system can be found at the edge, it is important to note there are species in the overlap that exist in neither system, and that is what I seek to uncover. So join me in discovering the variety of things being created as Bitcoin rubs up against other systems. Oh, it's 9:41 AM Pacific Daylight Time. It's the 21st day of October 2024.
This is episode 977 of Bitcoin and the Circle P is open for business. And today I'm gonna bring back lightning piggy because I just think it's cool. It's just a cool project. You can either buy one fully built or you can use the lightningpiggy.com website and build your own. That is lightningpiggy, you know, like a bolt of lightning and piggy like, you know, piggy pigs lightningpiggy.com. Go there and you'll figure it out. If you want to buy one fully built, go to the market tab. If you want to build one yourself, go to the build tab. But if you want to know what it is, I think they've actually got a stupendous one sentence description of what the lightning piggy is.
It is an electronic cash piggy bank for children that accepts Bitcoin sent over lightning while displaying the amounts saved in satoshis. So, there's several different ways that the flavors that this kind of thing comes in. If you get one fully built, you're gonna get a 3 d printed case with the electronic board that has the screen on it and everything placed in it. If you want to build it yourself, you'll get the electronic board that's got the screen. I mean, the electronic board is you've got to have some kind of electronics to be able to, you know, be a functional lightning wallet and be able to do the things and display the satoshis. But you can, like, get the plans and build a piggy out of cardboard or construction paper and put it in there. It depends on how you want to go. And it's a great way to get kids not only to build these things, work with their hands, work with a little bit of electronics without it being so freakishly overwhelming.
And on the opposite end, or at the end of that particular day, they get a piggy bank that you can give them. You can, like, send them lightning payments to their directly to their piggy bank for baby chores that they did or, they had a birthday and you're gonna give them $50 or $25 in Bitcoin. And when you do that, it shows immediately on the screen that they've got that they received the satoshis via lightning payment. It's a great way to talk about Bitcoin. It's a great way to talk about the tech. It's a great way to get your kids used to a different way of thinking about what money is and how money works and we are building the new rails of the entire new financial system for the next 500 years right you might as well if you've got kids right now this is this is how we extend the life of Bitcoin into the futures projects like lightningpiggy dot com that's lightningpiggy dot com again lightningpiggy dot com. Go there. If you buy anything from them, I don't know how you might do it, but mention that you heard it from me, David Bennett, host of the Bitcoin and podcast, and mention that they were in the circle p. And I don't know if they're gonna figure out what to do, but maybe maybe maybe they'll give me some satoshis on the backside for doing a free advertisement form because this is the circle p. It is where I bring plebs like you to plebs like you that are selling their services and or goods in Bitcoin. Because if you're not selling it for Bitcoin, you're not in the circle p. Let's move on to the news.
First up, well, the name of this episode is it's raining FUD. And there's a reason for that. We've got multiple issues going on. People are bitching about sailor. They're he's out saying some, apparently, just some, I don't know, insane crap. But one of the things that I heard over the weekend is that there's this new paper by the European Central Bank. And if it is a huge paper. It's like 25 pages long. No. I'm not going to read you this paper because it is an academic white paper. Talk about a snooze fest? Yeah. Read a freaking white paper. I don't care what white paper it is. They're all snooze fest. Honestly, even the Bitcoin white paper is a boring it's a boring read. You have to get excited about it by using Bitcoin itself.
But this is a financial slash banking slash hit piece white paper from the European Central Bank. I'm not going to read it. I'm just not. I mean, I'm gonna read it, but I'm not gonna read it to you live on the air. What we're gonna do is we're going to get this take by Tur de Meester. He's got a fairly well thought out, well reasoned explanation on Noster in this particular note. And I don't think it's too it's cypherpunk on Noster is actually putting this out. I think he grabbed all this from somebody else. I don't think this is actually Tour de Meister on Noster posting it. I'd like to see Tour de Meister on Noster, but let's just get into this right now.
This new paper is a true declaration of war. The ECB, the European Central Bank, claims that early Bitcoin adopters steal economic value from latecomers. I strongly believe authorities will use this Luddite argument to enact harsh taxes or bans. Okay. Rather than praising Bitcoin as a tech paradigm shift, a la petroleum and, you know, the Internet, the authors introduced the blatantly Luddite argument that, quote, early adopters increase their real wealth and consumption at the expense of latecomers. He's got a couple of lines underlined from the white paper in this screenshot.
Underline number 1. In absolute terms, early adopters exactly increase their real wealth and consumption at the expense of the real wealth and consumption of those who do not hold Bitcoin or who invest in it at a later stage. I need to pause because if you're not pumping my bag with your fiat currency, then how the hell am I consuming or somehow or another increasing my real wealth and consumption at your expense? Only I mean, honestly, if you're late if nobody's really late to Bitcoin yet. You won't be late to Bitcoin until after 21.40 when the last block that has a block subsidy for mining is actually mined.
When there's no more bitcoin just given away for free just because you mined a block and everything has to be on just bitcoin fees, it's only after that that I think that you would be quote unquote a latecomer. And those people haven't even been born yet. So I don't know where they get where they get off with telling me that I'm somehow or another extracting wealth from somebody who is not even in bitcoin or calling people that are alive today latecomers. Because if you're alive today and you buy Bitcoin today for the very first time, you were still not late. 2nd underlined passage in this paper. The new Lamborghini, Rolex, Villa, and equity portfolios by early Bitcoin investors are financed by diminishing consumption and wealth of those who initially do not hold Bitcoin. I still call BS.
3rd, this redistribution of wealth and purchasing power is unlikely to occur without detrimental consequences for society. Even if the latecomers cannot attribute their loss of purchasing power, they will feel a malaise and frustration that will contribute further to an ever more split society. They're pitting. This is classism. This is exactly how classism starts is papers like this from people that write like this. They're pitting 1 group of people against another group of people. They divide so they have an easier time of conquering. Okay, back to Turbemistern and what he says.
Then, then they go on to brazenly advocate for legislation quote to prevent Bitcoin prices from rising or to see Bitcoin disappear altogether in order to prevent quote this division of society end quote. Here is another underlined passage. In any case, current non holders should realize that they have compelling reasons to oppose Bitcoin and advocate for legislation against it aiming to prevent Bitcoin prices from rising or to see bitcoin disappear altogether. Latecomers and non holders and their political representatives should emphasize that the idea of bitcoin as an investment relies on redistribution at their expense failing to do so could skew election results in favor of politicians who advocate pro bitcoin policies Trump implying wealth redistribution and fueling here it is again the division of society they are spinning people up they're now they have no they here it is this is this is why this paper exists They've exhausted every possible means of political legislation in many of the countries. And there's just not a lot of people that are going to bite in the political class saying we're going to make this illegal. There's no precedent.
There's just I sure. You could say, well, the confiscation of gold. Yeah. But that didn't make gold illegal. Yes. It made it technically illegal for Americans to hold, but they still held it. Don't don't think for a second that 99.999 percent of Americans willingly turned in their gold because they were told to. They didn't. Some did. Those were the dumb ones. But the smart ones kept a hold of their gold. As far as I know, not very many people actually went to prison. It doesn't matter. The whole point is they've exhausted what they have at their disposal that is easily deployable. So, what do they do next?
They rely on mass media to spin 1 group of people up against another. But the only way they can do that is through labeling. You either hold Bitcoin and you are evil, or you do not hold Bitcoin and you are the fucking oppressed. That's how these people work. They are altogether evil. Back to Tour de Mister's words. The authors also model some projections to illustrate the paltry amount of BTC that will remain available for latecomers. Woah is me. Conspicuously left out is the reason that has driven 15 years of Bitcoin adoption and development. It's simply better technology.
In all the years I've been monitoring this space. This is by far the most aggressive paper to come from authorities. The gloves are off. It's clear that these central bank economists now see Bitcoin as an existential threat to be attacked with any means possible. Many of us have warned that this was coming. Bitcoin as a major political fault line both in national and international elections. Well, here it is. It means that us hodlers must take action to ensure that governments respect our basic right to hold property. And no, this won't be a war between have and have nots.
Rather, this will be a historic clash between those who stand for the natural rights of the individual and those who clutch at the failed ideologies of collectivism and central planning. Here's the link to the paper entitled the distributional consequences of bitcoin. Oh my god. Okay. So that that is Tour de Miester. And and I think he's given a very good reflection on this 25 page white paper from these ECB communists. Okay. With that said, notice back up here when it said this is back to the white paper and what the white paper actually says. It says failing to do so and means that you really need to get rid of Bitcoin and if you don't failing to do so could skew election results in favor of politicians who advocate pro Bitcoin policies What they are literally talking about Trump.
Even though I don't believe for a second that Trump cares about Bitcoin as much as many people think he cares about Bitcoin. It's just pandering. But let's let's not even worry about that part. Let's not worry about the pandering part. All politicians pander. We know this. This isn't freaking new. Yet, the European Central Bank authors are directly targeting the election in the United States, specifically trying to get people to vote against Donald Trump. You're a little late. You're a little late. This paper, if that was you know, which is why I think this that's just an aside here, this whole Trump thing. But still, the fact that they're going after him is of note. Again, they're they're a little late. If they really wanted that part of the paper to be as effective as possible, they would have released this paper, I don't know, back, you know, mid September at least, maybe the beginning of September.
I'm just saying, there's several things in here that are very evil. 1 is labeling a group of people and telling them that they are in misery and that they are going to have their wealth stolen by the other group of people which they have labeled as Bitcoin holders. There's no third option. There's no third group of people. It is a clear divide and conquer mentality. It's a clear divide and conquer tactic. This is as old as time. Do not think that they've come up with something new. But if you have been wondering about this ECB paper and you just don't maybe you went to the link and you're like, no way dude, I'm not reading it. Again, Tuur Demeester gives a very nice synopsis of what this is and what it means.
I, however, do not feel the exact same way as Tour de Miester does. I do think the gloves are off. I do think many of us have, you know, many of us have warned that this was coming. But when he says, you know, that Bitcoin is a political fault line in national and international elections as the end game of what we said was coming, we're not even close to what I think is coming. We're I mean, we we we just got the the the monster backed into the corner and it's acting exactly the way that some wild animal would act. It's starting to lash out because its back is against not only one wall, they're in a corner their backs against 2 walls and they're facing a crowd of people that is tired of their shit now do I think this will work I think it will have limited effect but it will have effect I do not think that Bitcoin is going to be illegal.
And if it is, then you will watch what's called intellectual arbitrage absolutely crush countries that were once great. You will have people who say I don't need this. They are the builders. They are the smart people. They are the intellectual class the intellectual class that are not political because that's not really intellectualism. That's just people faking it. Politics is homecoming queen and king and queen for the ugly people. That's what that is. It's Hollywood for the ugly people. True intellectuals, true thought leaders, true thinkers, true engineers, true code developers, true UX and UI developers, they will fucking flee.
They will just go away. They will go to other countries, and those other countries will benefit greatly just like the United States benefited greatly after World War 2 when we had so many of the of the Jewish and German scientists rounded up. I believe it was called Operation Paperclip. I'm not sure. We rounded them up and that's how we built NASA. That's how we built Los Alamos National Laboratories. It was with all a bunch of foreign people that were high quality thinkers. Many of the Jewish thinkers left pre World War 2. That's how we got Einstein. He's like, I am not staying in Germany. I'm not staying anywhere around Europe. This is gonna get bad. Where did he go? He came to the United States. We got Einstein.
If you don't think that that might not happen again just because it's the United States, you're wrong. You would be wrong. This paper is evil in ways that even the authors don't understand. They don't understand what they're playing with. They think they do, but they do not. The absolute destruction that could befall entire countries and economies because people just get fed to the teeth of bullshit and we are we are right there on the line. Did they just move to El Salvador and all of a sudden, El Salvador gets all of the tech, gets all of the thinkers?
Do I know they're gonna go to El Salvador? I don't know. I mean, it could be Costa Rica, maybe South America, maybe not Central America. I don't know. I just know people are going to start using intellectual arbitrage to get out and they're going to go somewhere else that doesn't have this communist ideal about them. But, here we've got another story. This is a different story altogether, yet it's part of the reigning of FUD. Now this one's written by Matt D'Salvo. This is written by or, in in the publication decrypt.co. And it says that an Olympic snowboarder used Tether in a cocaine smuggling murder scheme according to federal authorities.
The feds have hit an Olympic snowboarder with criminal charges for his alleged role in the in a cocaine trafficking gang which used the stablecoin Tether as a key part of its $1,000,000,000 operation. Do we wanna wrap this present in terrorism, child trafficking, or war on drugs? Let's let's pick the war on drugs. A United States Department of Justice indictment filed on Thursday alleged that former pro snowboarder Ryan James Wedding and 15 other defendants ran a drug trafficking syndicate shipping cocaine from Colombia through Mexico and into the United States and Canada.
The crime gang committed multiple murders. Read that again. The crime gang committed murder as part of their operations. US authorities alleged anyway and used crypto to try and evade the cops. Quote, defendant Bonilla would tender payment to defendants Wedding and Clark via a Tether cryptocurrency payment service for 2 kilograms of cocaine. Yeah. Hardly a fucking flood of drugs, the indictment reads. It added that QR codes were sent to drug runners in order to receive payment in USDT. The DOJ said that it seized over $3,200,000 in cryptocurrency along with more than 1 ton of cocaine, 3 firearms, dozens there are dozens of rounds of ammunition, and $255,000 as part of their investigation. Pausing to remind you this is not exactly a flood of drugs.
3 guns, dozens of of ammunition. Wow. And 1 ton of cocaine. Dude, that's the trunk of some dude's car. Okay. Maybe not the ton. A ton of cocaine. The back of a Ford 250. Right? The the payload that a Ford 250 pickup truck could handle. Yeah. Not exactly not exactly what I would expect from a syndicate of 15 people. I'm calling BS, guys. Anyway, his Olympic biography says that the sportsman was convicted of attempting to buy cocaine from a US government agent back in 2008 and given 4 years of jail time as a result. As alleged in the indictment, an Olympic athlete turned drug lord is now charged with leading a transnational organized crime group that engaged in cocaine trafficking and murder, including of innocent civilians, United States Attorney Martin Estrada said in a statement. USDT is the 3rd largest cryptocurrency by market cap and one of the most traded digital assets.
The token is important for the crypto ecosystem because it's used by traders to enter and exit trades quickly and to convert crypto to fiat via traditional bank. But the cryptocurrency and the company that issues it are controversial. Tether has been slow to provide documentation to prove that US dollars back USDT. Yes. That's a tale as old as Tether is. In 2021, Tether agreed to no longer do business in New York after a 2 year state attorney general investigation found that it made false statements about the backing of a stable coin. However, the company routinely points to quarterly attestations and transparency reports as proof of its compliance. We really didn't need those last, honestly, those last three paragraphs.
But I I give you this because I think it's part of a new push. Along with this ECB bullshit, I really do think that there's a whole new front of attack going on on Bitcoin and, God forbid, the the wider crypto ecosystem, if that's what you wanna call it. But I just I only care about Bitcoin. So when we have a story that's being real would actually not even a story. When we have the federal department of justice, the department of justice, the DOJ, actually go after a guy. See, I have I have yet to see anything about the actual murders. Who got murdered? How many people were murdered? We know that there was 1 ton of cocaine, 3 firearms, and dozens of rounds of ammunition, but we haven't heard jack squat about who got killed. Where did they get killed? Under what circumstances were they killed? And how were they actually killed? What was the murder weapon? Was it a gun? Was it a knife? Were they hung from a bridge? Nobody knows because it's all bullshit.
It's I and and he was an Olympic snowboard medalist. Oh my god. He's an athlete. See, anyone can fall from grace and get, you know, sucked into the vile black underworld of cryptocurrency, cocaine, and murder. Even though we're talking about a ton of cocaine, 3 firearms, dozens of ammunitions, and not a single piece of evidence that anybody actually got killed. Does this sound like a transnational gang of 15 people? It doesn't. It does not sound anything like that. But but but let's go back over to Europe for this next one by Zoltan Vardy out of Cointelegraph.
Now the ECB is getting pissed. We just went through that through the opening of the show. I wonder why. Could it be because European investors poured a record $105,000,000,000 into United States Bitcoin ETFs? I was unaware that it was that easy for people of another country to buy investments in a different country. I mean, I know it's done, but wow, $105,000,000,000 of European money has now flowed into United States Bitcoin ETFs. I wonder if that might have some kind of, you know, lasting impression on the ECB. Let's see if Zoltan has anything to say about that. European investors have allocated a record amount of capital into spot Bitcoin exchange traded funds in the United States.
Europeans have invested over $105,000,000,000 in the spot Bitcoin ETFs year to date, marking an all time high. The record European ETF flows were shared by Eric Balchunas, a senior ETF analyst at Bloomberg who wrote, quote, flows into US focused ETFs by locals in Europe is now at a record $105,000,000,000 year to date. And why not? The SPY is up 24% versus 10% for Europe. Asia also funneling record flows. End quote. Growing ETF inflows could push Bitcoin to an all time high from its current crawl block crawl what crab walk. Sorry. That was a that's a hard weird looking word. Crab walk. Inflows into the US Bitcoin ETFs accounted for about 75% of the new capital that helped Bitcoin surpass $50,000 in February of 2024.
Despite the record European inflows, bitstamp data shows that Bitcoin has been unable to recover above those psychological levels of 70,000 to 73,000, which was last visited on July 29th. Right days. Day like a 2, 3 days before Japan Central Bank surprisingly increased their interest rate, which caused the yen carry trade to basically fall apart. I've talked about that before. I won't get into it here. Is it possible? Yeah. He hasn't said anything about it that I can see. There's pretty much just it's just a bunch of market talk after that in in this particular article. So I didn't actually see this guy, Zoltan, suggest that maybe, just maybe, the ECB is worried about capital outflows to the United States because bitcoin.
Now, Eric Balchunas, if you caught that when he said, flows into US focused ETFs by locals in Europe is now at a record $105,000,000,000 year to date. Why not? SPY is up 24% versus 10% for Europe. See, there's the difference. There's a little bit of a difference there. Eric Balchunis is saying $105,000,000,000 year to date in US focused ETFs. But Zoltan makes it sound like it's all into the Bitcoin spot ETFs. And that's not true. Because the SPY is the S and P 500. It has nothing to do at all with Bitcoin. So there's clearly discrepancy in this particular story. But it I kinda can't stop thinking of wondering it that the ECB may be terrified not of Bitcoin itself, but because Bitcoin ETFs in the United States as well as other ETFs in the United States are sucking Europe dry of money. Now how much money total? May like, what how what's it been looking like in the last 10 years? I don't know. If there's an economist out there that likes to listen to my show because they wanna point at me and laugh, please let me know.
What's going on? Is there something more? Is there something that Europe is worried about specifically with United States and the outflow of European capital into the United States? Has it been going on longer than this? Is it really bad? I mean, I haven't heard anything about it until kind of just now, But I have this sneaky suspicion that it's probably been going on for a while. Let's go south to El Salvador, where an El Salvador survey is showing that Bitcoin's Lindy effect is in action. Nicholas Hoffman, Bitcoin Magazine, El Salvador's misguided critics got some new ammunition this week.
A recent survey revealed just 7.5% of Salvadorans use Bitcoin for transactions and that 92% of Salvadorans do not. But while some, you know, like Steve Hankey, may look at these numbers and think, oh, well, that experiment failed. I disagree. Even putting inside the increased tourism, business activity, and international notoriety, El Salvador's Bitcoin legal tender laws have been a success. El Salvador currently has a population of around 6,300,000, meaning that 475,000 people are now using Bitcoin for transactions. That's that 7.5%.
The fact that almost half a 1000000 citizens now use BTC in their daily life for transactions is actually pretty impressive. But the Linde effect means we can expect this figure to increase with time. Considering the history of El Salvador, it was obvious from the beginning that the entire country was not going to start using this new payments technology from day 1. El Salvador has a history of failed currency regimes. It takes time for any new system to build trust. As I pointed out 3 years ago, I believe Bitcoin needs to become a store of value first before it can become a medium of exchange.
Bitcoin today, even with it being a $1,400,000,000,000 asset, is still just a drop in the ocean compared to vast global wealth. There is still a common consensus in the general public that Bitcoin is risky to get into, and that will need to change before more people in more countries start using it on the daily. Bitcoin is still a new asset class that is growing up. The more it grows up, the more credibility it earns. The more price increase, the more innovation happens that sprouts new transactional and custody solutions to meet non technical people where they're at.
This is going to take a long time, but the process is underway. I see many Bitcoiners online who are so bullish that they believe that adoption as an everyday transaction method will happen suddenly over the next few years. But this discounts real world data like this survey which shows the process is much slower. All this is to say that if Bitcoin is going to see worldwide merchant adoption and use by everyday individuals, we're going to need to see a much higher price. Bitcoin will need to be easier to use and more trusted than it is even today. Exactly how long will that take?
I don't know for certain. But if you think of it as a loading bar, we're already 7.5% complete on our way to 100% of Salvadorans transacting in Bitcoin. Remember, this is progress. Nothing happens overnight. So that piece stands in stark contrast to what the ECB is saying. Naive Bukele, lovemer hate them, has told the IMF repeatedly that they're not as interested in their loans today as they were, oh, I don't know, over the last 40 years. The International Monetary Fund is not happy about that. Neither is the World Bank, neither is the UN, neither is the Council of Foreign Relations.
And now, the ECB has opened, you know, basically unzipped their fly and hauled their honking okay, well, whatever. To show the world just how scared they really are. That 25 page paper is basically, not only is it fear mongering, it is an expression of the fear the ECB sees themselves. Keep that in mind as we move forward because this is not gonna be the last time that you see this kind of attack fronted. And I do believe that over the next few days, we're going to see probably more central banks join the fray, release either either whole white papers or go on to CNBC and talk how about how bad bitcoin is and point to the ECB report and then possibly point to an Australian Central Bank report that comes out in a few days. And I don't I'm not saying that I know that that's going to happen. I'm just saying that I could definitely see the Australian Central Bank and a couple of other central banks around the world, like like the Mexico Central Bank, start releasing papers. And then the BIS is probably gonna release a paper, and it's all gonna be coordinated.
And it's everything that we've already seen before. But the language this time is starting to directly target the citizenry of the world. They're playing with a fire that they don't know how hot it gets. Let's run the numbers. CNBC Futures and Commodities. Oil is up probably because Israel did a whole released a whole bunch of missiles into, Beirut to destroy their the financial arm of Hezbollah, which I found to be a rather a rather descriptive view of the target. They want to destroy their financing arm. So I'm guessing that that meant that a whole bunch of banks in, Lebanon were targeted.
Not exactly sure. But that always every every time somebody sneezes in the Middle East, West Texas Intermediate gains some percentage points. And in this case, 2.12 percent to the upside brings us back to $70.69. Brent Norcea up 1.6 to 74.24. Natural gas up 2.3 to $2.31, a 1000 cubic feet. And gasoline is up a half to $2.1 per gallon. Gold is doing relatively well, but not not as good as silver is, which is up 2 a half percent for silver, up to $34, and gold is up a third of a point to $27.39.10. I'm sure Peter Schiff is dancing on Bitcoin's grave. Ag, Our biggest winner today is woah. Cotton, 1.9 percent to the upside. Biggest loser is coffee, 2% to the downside. Live cattle is down 0.17%.
Lean hogs are up a quarter. Feeder cattle are down a quarter. All of the indices are down today as far as equities are concerned. The Dow is down 0.65%. S and P is down a third. NASDAQ is down, well, 0.07, so kinda moving sideways for tech. And S and P Mini is down just under a full point to the downside. Why, you may ask? Because big corporate earnings are coming out this week, and everybody's worried about what they'll say. So they've all gone back into cash, and that includes Bitcoin, which we'll get to here in a second. Actually, we're gonna get to it right now. $67,390, which is a damn shame that we lost almost $2,000 from our highs of this weekend. I was really surprised by the upward movement over the majority of the weekend, but wasn't surprised at all when I woke up to a whole bunch of red candles.
$1,330,000,000,000 of market cap will get you 24.5 ounces of shiny metal rocks with your one Bitcoin, of which there are 19,770,827.36 of. And average fees per block have fallen off a cliff. They're back down to 0.09 BTC on average on a per block basis. There are a 108 blocks carrying 209,000 transactions waiting to clear at high priorities of 9 satoshis per vbyte. Low priority is gonna get you in at 8. Hash rate, which peaked like a m f this weekend. I saw 846 exahashes per second yesterday. Early, I think, or it might have been late on Saturday. Can't remember, but we have fallen back down still at 727.7 exahashes per second.
That's a lot of security. From gold plunging, which was Friday's show of Bitcoin. And I got Golf Winch giving me 6,777 satoshis and says, please support the show. I'm doing my part with a small amount of treasure. What happened to the dad jokes? Those were great. Oh, you want some dad jokes, Golf wench? Alright, fine. My friends got a new house and I paid for them to get underfloor heating. It was a housewarming present. Try this one. I try to say mucho when I'm around my Hispanic friends. It means a lot to them.
When I moved into my new igloo, my own friends threw me my very own surprise housewarming party and now I'm homeless. Rev Hoddle with 500 says, If you're in Michigan or Michiana, head out to a meetup near you. There are meetups all over the state. You can find them at michiganbitcoiner.com. That's michiganbitcoiner.com. Michiganbitcoiner, all one word, dot com. Go over there and, do, do Rev Huddle a favor, man. He's one of my favorite people. God's Death with 537 says thank you, sir. No thank you. Pies De Pleb with 420 says thank you, sir. No thank you. Hugh Janice with a 100 says cheers.
And, let's see. Anonymous with a 100 says fear is the mind killer. I will huddle. A few words here about Pies De Pleb. He, gave me a a DM and I'm not gonna read it because that would, you know, that's completely unfreaking cool. But I did want to, kinda say a few things here. So Pies in his direct message to me on Noster said, you know, basically he was saying, thanking me for advocating for BitX, you know, the little solo miners. And he said that he had really not heard me talk about, you know, like the process of learning about mining before he had already had one. But he's saying that he learned a hell of a lot more about mining with a small bitaxe than he did with having a couple of other units, like a couple of bigger units before the, you know, bid acts went out. Like, I don't know. He doesn't say it. Well, I'm just gonna assume, like, he's got, like, a a couple of s nineteens or something in the back, and he just really never got around to playing with them. And it wasn't until the bid acts that he got a hold of 1 and he started figuring out how all this stuff really works that now he's pumped to get these units in action because now he kind of knows what he's doing.
So it's kind of I wanted to bring that to you because it's kind of and it's not that I love being right. It's just that when I get confirmation that I am right about something, especially when it's something that about education, it's really important for me to reiterate why the hell I think this stuff in the first place. And it's literally because when I saw a bit axe came out come out, I knew that it was going to be an opportunity for me and many other people to just simply learn about mining in a way that doesn't break the bank. And that if you just hate it, you're not you're not out that much. Like, again, you're not breaking the bank. But if you do start learning it and you go, hey, this is kind of interesting.
And then you get comfortable with it. Well, all of a sudden, possibly buying a couple of old s nines and pointing them to a pool to heat a greenhouse in winter, depending well, depends on where you are latitude, how cold your winters are, and how many, you know, like, of these heat units that you got and how big of a space. All of that is taken into consideration. But for whatever reason, like, since you already know how to do all this stuff with mining at this point, now it's just setting up the s nineteens. And because you already know how to set those up, now you can actually do stuff with it, like heat a hot tub or heat a greenhouse or make a dehydrator out of one of them. I I don't know. There's all kinds of stuff that you can do with excess waste heat. And essentially, the human race has been one of our one of the worst things about the human race as far as our we're continuously looking for efficiency.
And we're we've gotten really good at engineering. And yet somehow or another, we are notorious for not understanding how to utilize waste heat. I find that odd. And I that's one of the reasons why I really really like the idea of these old miners as because as efficiency goes up, heat output of these miners is going to fall. And those old miners that would normally be junked, actually at this point, they have a commodity piece to them because not only do they mine bitcoin, they also produce a lot of heat. And if you use that in an appropriate way to do a particular thing, like dehydrate like run a food dehydrator or heat a greenhouse or something like that, then you want both.
You want to be able to use the Bitcoin mine to subsidize the heat being produced so that you at least come out with zero cost and maybe even a potential profit. I'm telling you, man. And I think a lot of this starts the being able to be comfortable doing that starts with being comfortable mining and that can be done using the BitX. And if you do buy a BitX for whatever reason, please tell the guys at BitX that you heard about it here on the Bitcoin and podcast, and maybe I can get them to, I don't know, be a sponsor for me. That's the weather report. Welcome to part 2 of the news. You can use the NYSE and the CBOE, New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Board of Exchange, win the SEC approval for Bitcoin ETF options.
Alright. So it did happen. Last time I talked to you about this, they were, you know, it was basically up for judgment. It's now a thing. As of Friday afternoon, it happened right after I finished the show. So let's get into this one from Cheyenne Ligon or Cheyenne Ligon from CoinDesk. The US SEC approved stock exchange rule changes that now permit the listing of options. This is important. Listing of options tied to the spot Bitcoin ETFs, otherwise known as a derivative. Broadening the investment ecosystem around products that received 1,000,000,000 of dollars of inflows this year. According to 2 memos from the SEC published Friday, NYSE will be allowed to list and trade options on the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, the Bitcoin Minitrust from Grayscale, and the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF.
CBOE Global Markets got approval to list and trade options on the Fidelity wise Origin Bitcoin Fund and the Arc 21 Shares Bitcoin ETF. I'm surprised that BlackRock isn't included in this. Oh, wait a minute. Here we go. The approval comes several weeks after the SEC approved Nasdaq's rule proposal to allow the listing of trading options on BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust. Here's the important part for those of you who are going, what the hell is an option? Options are derivatives that allow the purchase or sale of an underlying asset, in this case, the Bitcoin ETFs, not Bitcoin itself, but the spot Bitcoin ETFs at a predetermined price on or before an agreed upon date. Many market participants believe that options trading on Bitcoin ETFs will increase institutional and crypto and increase overall liquidity.
In its NYSE approval, the SEC wrote that it believes options on the Bitcoin ETFs would permit hedging and allow for more liquidity, better price efficiency, and less volatility with respect to the underlying funds, as well as enhance the transparency and efficiency of markets in these and correlated products. So the SEC wants I mean, they want to permit hedging. They want to allow for more liquidity in the Bitcoin markets. This is specifically about Bitcoin not ETFs in general. This is specifically about the spot Bitcoin ETFs in the United States. They want better price efficiency.
They want less volatility with respect to the underlying funds. There's 2 things that I'm thinking about that that why I'm reiterating what I just said. One, how does this wash with this European Central Bank paper that just dropped over the weekend basically telling the world that there are 2 classes of people, the haves and the have nots of Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin should be heavily taxed and or outright banned. And here, we've got the SEC saying, shit, man. We want hedging. We want better liquidity. We've got we need price efficiency. We want less volatility. That sounds to me like the SEC is, like, a completely opposite take of what the ECB is saying, which, again, makes me wonder.
Is it possible that the ECB is defending simply trying to defend against capital outflows out of the whole of Europe because Europe is dying in general for it's just some of the lunacy that they've committed over the last 10 years, and it's gotten really bad since COVID. Alright? That's what see, I can't help but think that that's what's going on with the ECB thing, is that the European Central Bank is seeing outflows of capital outside I mean, not just, you know, capital outflows out of, you know, Spain or capital outflows out of Portugal or out of Italy. No. The the European Union as a whole are increasingly sending their money to the United States financial markets.
And a lot of that is going to the bit Bitcoin spot ETFs. And this go and this is going to accelerate, and I think they know that. And I think that that's exactly why that paper came out. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin. It has everything to do with the fact that Europe is dying, and they're scared. And capital outflows are just going to accelerate. And that's not good for a dying European Union. It's like running out of morphine when you have terminals in stage cancer. It's gonna be very, very painful. Now I had 2 things and I can't really remember. And honestly, the second thing, even if I had a second thing, which I probably I I definitely forgot about, it's not as important as that. The SEC is saying something completely different than the than the ECB.
They are not on the same page. I think the ECB is just simply terrified. I think that's what's going on. Now for those of you in the AI space, I've got a little update from my friend, Liminal, over there working on the Alexandria project, along with, oh, God, Lazarus and a couple of other people. Had them on the show a few weeks ago. Actually, hold on. Let me see if I can't let me see if I can't find that. That is episode 937. Again, I interviewed Liminal, about the Project Alexandria on episode 937. It's entitled Liminal and Project Alexandria.
Not exactly the best title in the world, but I struggle I struggle with tiles. If you want to hear all about that, then go listen to episode 937 where I interview Liminal. But he's got something new. He's got something new that he's coming out with. He says he's got a tool to make navigating videos and audio easier. And this is out of Pablo f seven z's highlighter.com. If you haven't visited highlighter.com, it's a different kind of nostril client. I highly recommend that you go take a look at it. So here's what Liminal has to say. Have you ever wanted to learn from lengthy educational videos but found it challenging to navigate through hours of content?
Our new tool addresses this problem by transforming long form video lectures into easily digestible, searchable content. And of course, it's using AI. So key features are this. There's there's, let's see, 3 of them. Video processing. So, this thing automatically downloads YouTube videos, transcripts, and chapter information. It then splits transcripts into sections based on video chapters. 2. Content summarization. It utilizes large language models to transform spoken content into clear, readable text. Formats outputs in ASCII Doc for improved readability and navigation. And highlights key terms and concepts with bracket bracket term end bracket bracket notation for potential cross referencing.
That bracket bracket term in bracket bracket is sort of a way to add links into notes. I'm not gonna get into that. Not noster notes. Talking stuff like Obsidian and Rome and essentially, zettelkasten kind of thing. Liminal and I get into zettelkasten and and all what I just talked about just then, we get into that in episode 937. So if you're interested in in a little bit more about that, there's a whole episode on what we talk about in Zettlekasten is quite a bit of it. Finally, number 3, diagram extraction. Now this one analyzes video entropy to identify static diagram or slide sections.
It provides a user friendly GUI for manual selection of relevant time ranges and allows users to pick representative frames from selected frame ranges. Going forward, currently undergoing a rewrite to improve organization and functionality, but you are welcome to try the current version. And then he gets into a little bit of other he's got a couple of screenshots here. Here's a screenshot of the frame selection interface. You'll see a signal that represents frame entropy over time. The vertical line indicates the start and end of a chapter. Within these chapters, you can then select the frames by clicking and dragging the mouse over the desired range where you think a diagram is in that chapter.
At the bottom is an option that tells the program to start a specific number of frames from that selection. And let's see. Is there anything else of note here? No. No. I mean, there there is, but I it's it's it's easier to read this. I will have the link to this highlighter.com article that Liminal wrote. It's not long. It's just basically there's not much more left to it. It will be in the show notes. Highly recommend it. So what does it mean? I can go to YouTube and I can say, you know what? I wanna I wanna see like this, these 4 4 hour long YouTube videos about permaculture.
And then I can take them each and download them. I use YouTube downloader. It still works for me. And run them through this thing and be able to have searchable text content that's built out of the video. I'm assuming that it will actually build a transcript from the audio if somebody's talking. I need to get with Liminal about this, but let's say that it it doesn't do that, then you're kinda I guess you'd be shit out of luck unless the video actually came with its own transcript, which many of them do now because it's so easier it's so much easier to get transcripts done. But let's say that it did. Now I can go through all 4 of those and just search into the text not even in YouTube in like a completely different context and say I want to know everywhere he talked about swales.
And then I can just go there. And if there's and what I love about this is this this being able to look at video entropy. Like, all of a sudden like, the way that I view entropy is if a whole bunch of things are moving on the screen then an entropy analysis would have a bunch of wavy lines. Now, I don't know if this is actually correct because I've never done video entropy myself. But when things are changing on the screen and are not static, that looks to me like that might actually indicate a lot of volatility, a lot of entropy maybe.
And that if a static, slide comes up and stays there for any length of time whatsoever that is not 24.9 frames per second or 60 frames per second or whatever is just on the screen and never really changes, then there's really not any entropy. It's static. And that seems to me to be a discovery mechanism for being able to say, I just wanna know where all the slides in this presentation are so that I can pull those slides and look at them because maybe it was your maybe you're going to college and your teacher posted a YouTube video And you don't really want to listen to the lecture, you just need to get to extract the slides because maybe your teacher forgot to give you the slides or is trying to force you to watch the video so that you can get the slides.
In this particular case, analyzing the analysis of that video entropy would be able to determine, hey, this is a slide, the next 5 minutes are not a slide. Here's another slide. Next 5 minutes are not a slide. Here's here's 3 slides in a row. And then you would be able to go directly to those. This is a great tool because it's analyzing video. When I do my transcripts from pothome.fm, all it's doing is just transcribing my audio. But if I have a full blown video presentation, well, it can't transcribe that I put up a slide. This tool actually seems to give that kind of functionality.
Again, go to the show notes. This will be this this link to this highlighter will be in the show notes. And let's see. Here's the there's a repo and there's a there's a GitHub repo for it. And there's also a youtube.com. There's there he's also posted a, nostr apps 101, I guess to exactly on how this works. So when you go to the link of this article in the show note, those two links will be embedded. So you'll be able to go directly to their GitHub and directly to that YouTube channel and check it out even further. So now, oh, HODL HODL has finally discontinued support for most shitcoins as a payment method.
Quote, stable coins and Bitcoin's second layer solutions are fully supported, said the exchange. If you don't know what HODL HODL is, it is a decentralized way to buy Bitcoin. And I've never used it myself because I've never really had to, but it's been around forever. And starting today, quote, we're discontinuing support for most cryptocurrencies as payment methods announce the platform. HODL HODL has always facilitated Bitcoin only p two p trades while also allowing trades to be settled with other altcoins for a period of time. Quote, stablecoins and Bitcoin second layer solutions are fully supported. Thank you for your continued support.
So I love seeing shit coins be buried like the corpses that they are. Thank you, huddle huddle for bearing those yourself. Now, Algo Relay. Here's another one. By the way, this is no bsbit coin.com. That's no bs bitcoin.com. Go throw them some satoshis over there at no bullshit Bitcoin. I love those guys. Algo Relay is a Nostril native first algorithmic relay, enabling operators to build relays using a preset waiting algorithm. Okay. Just hold your horses for any of you guys that are like, I don't want algorithms on my on my noster. I do. But I want to be able to either select that I have one even on.
And if I do have one turned on, I want to be able to select through different algorithms to find which one may be best for me. Or again, to have the choice not to have one at all. That's the only way that we're moving forward with Nostra into the future, so do not fret. Algo Relay is the first Nostra native relay capable of serving personalized algorithmic feeds without the use of external or proprietary APIs or digital or rather data vending machines or DVMs. It prioritizes surfacing content from the people you care about based on your personal interactions, announced the developer UTXO.
The algorithm delivers personalized, engaging experience by balancing posts from authors that you interact with in viral network content. Users get a mix of familiar and trending content ensuring that their feed is always engaging and relevant. It could also be customized based on personal preferences. Coreacle, that's coreacle.social, is the first client to implement Algo Relay and you can see it in action here and then there's clearly a link where it says here. Key components. Users can easily adjust the weighting of each component on their own instance by simply changing a few numbers, like interactions with authors.
Weights posts from authors you frequently engage with via comments, reactions, and zaps. Global comments on posts weights the total number of comments on each post across the protocol indicating potentially meaningful engagement or discussions. Global reactions on posts weights likes and emojis on posts. Global zaps on post boosts posts with a higher number of zaps. Recency clearly weights the fresh and latest content. Viral posts adjust weight of viral posts that exceed a certain threshold of engagement. And the decay rate for recency controls how quickly older posts lose relevance for your particular algorithm that you choose.
I look forward to seeing a blossoming market of algorithmic relays putting choice back into the users hands. It's a big step forward for Nostr giving the masses what they want using open source transparent algorithms, added the developer. And Rabble on, Nostr says in a note, this is a really interesting idea and an alternative to the way we could do custom algorithms with data vending machines. And I have tried it on, Corekl but I have not adjusted any of the numbers. Corekl dot social is the only place that is supporting this right now, and that is the, Nostra the Nostra client that was developed and is being maintained by my good friend, Hoddlebod.
Haven't heard from you, hodl bod. If you, get a chance, why don't you drop me a drop me a text or something like that? I'd like to talk to you again. Okay. Moving on to Joinster app version 0.1.1, UI improvements, testnet, mainnet support. Joinster is a free and open source CoinJoin implementation using Nostra relays for coordinating CoinJoin transactions. Version 0.1.1 has been released for Android. It comes with UI improvements, ability to select wallets and settings, rise up VPN implementation, testnet, mainnet support, and more. Quote, review the code, verify APK, test it, and share your feedback. Join Simplex chat group if you need signet coins and other peers for testing, said the developer.
There's an improved UI. They've removed the BIP32 derivation paths from signed PSBTs. Wallet selection is now in settings. There is a rise up VPN implementation. I guess rise up is a brand of VPN. I've never heard of it before. Support testnet and mainnet and there is a fixed fee rate estimate oh, no. It fixed the fee rate estimate estimation. Fee rate estimations are always really really bad. And now on to the last of the day sigit. Io or sigit. Sigit. S I g I t dot I o document signing and verification over you guessed it, nostr. Sigit.
Io or sigit. Io is an open source and self hostable solution for secure document signing and verification. It's a secure and private document signing service where you can create, sign, and verify any document from any device with a browser. The project is still under active development, unlike centralized document signing solutions. SIGINT uses Nostra for identity and key management and encrypts files at every step of the process. Quote, of course, being built on the Nostra Relay network, you can sign documents and build business relationships even in the most adversarial of regulatory environments, said the project developers. I love that one. Key features, it's open source. The code is agpl licensed and available here. And of course, here is git.nosterdev.com, which is, git.nosterdev.com, I think is the GitHub replacement on Nostr for code repository and all the stuff that you you that you do with GitHub.
It's multi device. So you can create, sign, and verify documents and files from any device that has a browser. It's secure and private. All the documents are encrypted locally and can be accessed only by named recipients. And I guess that means that you've gotta be able to give them their, give the document their pub key and they have to sign that with their insect. That's the way that I'm assuming. It's verifiable. SIGINT agreements can be directly verified, unlike traditional server based offerings. It works offline. It is possible to complete a SIGINT round without an internet connection.
Multi party signing is available. You can choose any number of signers and viewers, track status, get notifications on completion. This is kind of amazing because, like, think of contracts. And what and, like, what they said like, what the this guy said. You can sign documents and build business relationships even in the most adversarial of regulatory environments. Let's say I'm in a war torn, you know, corner of Ukraine or something like that, and I've gotta work out a contract with my buddy who's Russian. I I'm not sure how much more adversarial we can get as far as regulatory environments are concerned.
Yet with this tool, I'd be able to sign legal documents, have it verified, have the other party that is quote unquote my enemy and sanctioned by everybody all over the world, and have their signature on the contracts and the documents all also verified. So it ends up being a functional legal document even in the most adversarial of regulatory environments. And like I said, if I want to build a business, an online business with and I'm a Ukrainian and my buddy is a Russian, I don't know how much more adversarial that gets unless we're talking I'm an Israeli and my best friend is in Lebanon or Palestine or something like that. Or, God forbid, the unite like, I'm a citizen in the United States and I wanna do business with somebody in Iran and we want to build a company together. We need an agreement to be able to get this thing off the ground with each other.
This is this is what I would be able to use. You would not be able to use DocuSign for Iran or between Russia and Ukrainian citizens. It's not going to work. They're not going to allow it. This is permissionless and yet I can still do the same thing that I can do with DocuSign. I used DocuSign to sign my tax forms the other day. That's the way that it's done. I used DocuSign when I needed to finalize the sale of the house in Canyon, Texas. I used DocuSign. This replaces DocuSign with your Nostr insect in pub. The future looks very very bright.
It really does. Even with the ECB nonsense. Even with them saying that this, you know, Olympic guys using Tether and cryptocurrency to commit murder and run drugs even though they found all of 3 guns and dozens of rounds of ammunition. There are dozens of us. Even in the face of all of that. It's stuff like this. Sigit.io. I think they should have just put the n in and said sign it, but whatever. Sigit. Io. These kinds of things make me happy. Algorithms on Nostr make me happy as long as I have the choice to use it or not. And if I have the choice to use it, I have the choice or I have a choice of algorithms to use. This makes me happy.
Clients that that proceed to put in an algorithm and don't let you choose what algorithm you can use, or that you can turn the algorithm off altogether, stay away from. It's that simple. We've got 50 freaking, you know, clients for Nostr. We don't need to be pinned down to anyone. And the first one that says we're using this algorithm and that's what you get, that's the that's the day that I stopped using that particular client. This makes me happy. So, even though the ECB is, you know, flapping their gums again, and they're doing it in a way that is it's it's very frightening insofar as what they're trying to leverage. They're trying to to pit the public against groups of people and they're now they're having to label hey you if you don't own Bitcoin you're definitely in this group and if you own Bitcoin you're definitely the enemy and you're over there in this group. They don't know what they're doing. They don't know what they're playing with. They think they have it under control, but none of these people ever have shit like this under control.
When you force 2 groups of people to look at each other and view each other as the enemy, you are playing with fire. And the ECB is playing with fire. But remember, I think that they're doing it because they're absolutely terrified watching the amount of money, European money, drain into the United States. And again, the SEC is taking a completely different stance than the ECB is. So as far as I'm concerned, this is a nothing burger, but it's not something I'm going to turn my back on and not watch anymore. And I don't think you should either. I will see you on the other side. This has been Bitcoin and and I'm your host, David Bennett. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and hope to see you again real soon.
Have a great day.
